The 5%

Just mere moments ago I had a brief exchange with an individual on another blog… and it brought something to mind.

The person was another commenter who described themselves as a ‘lesbian stripper’.  Fair enough…  from this point forward we will refer to her as ‘LS’.

So LS said she was afraid of Strange Men.  A sentiment I happen to share with her.  Although I also fear Strange Women, Dogs, Cats, Carneys, Clowns, etc.

LS explained that she stripped “for the control” it gave her over men.

That statement alone demonstrates a level of introspection rarely found anywhere in humanity.  And because of that, I have complete faith LS will be just fine in the long run… or at least whatever she decides to define as fine.

But the point here is what I have referred to in the past as The 5%.

I am convinced that 5% of the population totally sucks.

Bare in mind, it’s not always the same 5%… it’s The 5% at any given moment.

The downside of a small number of Completely Crappy People is their amazing ability to cause the rest of us lasting grief.

Think about it.

Most of the laws we find ridiculous are a result of this 5%.

The lengthy disclaimers associated with products including, but not limited to, bleach, seat belts and cheese are a result of this 5%.

Our Political Landscape is determined by The 5%.

Scary… right?

Unfortunately, our behaviors are also shaped by The 5%.

I can personally attest that my driving habits are a result of consistently avoiding The 5%.

I happen to live in the State that patented Turning Right out of the farthest Left lane and Left out of the farthest Right lane… always, as required by patent, with no warning.

Stop signs are optional… and to be held in Disdain.

The State also requires a Minimum Blood Alcohol Content before it’s legal to operate any machinery weighing more than 500 lbs. on shared roads.

So I have adopted the tactic of speeding up, or slowing down, allowing as much space as possible between me and EVERYONE ELSE on the road.

Did you catch that?

I HOLD EVERYONE SUSPECT of being The 5% when I’m driving.

While this is sad, it has worked for me so far.

So back to LS…

At some point in her life LS has had reason to fear ‘Strange Men’.  And as a result of that experience, she has decided to utilize an unearned power to make money as well as, and according to her more importantly, exercise ‘control’ over men.  (I should clarify that ‘unearned power’ is not a slight on LS.  I have come to refer to youth and sexual/reproductive viability as a ‘unearned power’ because… it is.  It’s not a power developed through skill and is ultimately perishable due to the passage of time.  Frankly, I have nothing against strippers.  Additionally, I have nothing against naked lesbians…. well, some naked lesbians.  Anyway, I digress…)

Here’s the rub, LS has now firmly placed herself in a target rich environment overloaded with the 5%.  She will continue to experience an overwhelming level of confirmation that Men are indeed ‘Strange’.  She has found the perfect job for Confirmation Bias.  (I suggested she consider becoming an Attorney… basically the same job… Pays about the same, but you can do it well past your late twenties.)

In other words, LS’ chosen line of work would be tantamount to my deciding to become an Over-the-Road Trucker…

I simply don’t need any more proof the 5% suck.  Professional Driving on anything other than a closed course is OUT.

In the end… I prefer to spend as much time as possible with the 95%.

The ‘Strange’ 5% should be left to deal with eachother.

Not that the 95% doesn’t have it’s hefty helping of Strange… we do.

But most of us makeaneffort to stay out of, and away from, the Professionally Strange 5% if we can.

It’s a minute by minute battle.

Alcohol helps.

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You Should be Free to be a Crappy Bigot.

And I Should be Free to Point it Out.

Like a never-ending election season treadmill, out come the issues that divide us but never get solved…

Discrimination is a Big One.

Look Folks, In a Free World we must all have a right to Discriminate. And with that comes our Protected Right to Point Out those Crappy A-Holes so devoid of accomplishment that they must find Personal Characteristics none of us are Responsible for and Discriminate against us on that basis… so they can feel better about themselves.

Frankly, I want to know who these people are.

I Do Not want them hiding in the Shadows.  Do You?

I want to be able to craft my decision-making with full knowledge of Who these people are, and expose where these people work. This way I can avoid them… while suggesting to my friends that they might consider doing the same.

I would also promote News organizations doing their jobs again, and applying scrutiny to these people, and their businesses as well.

This would allow LOTS of folks to make informed decisions.

Instead, this problem suffers from ridiculous attempts to Legislate Behavior and results in an erosion of our individual rights as a whole, drip by drip.

Once you accept the premise that only ‘some’ freedoms are ‘allowable’, you’ve lost the Inalienable Right to All of Your Freedoms. And by default, control over you is gradually handed over to those in Power.

Once you have conceded your ‘rights’ come from Man and thus can be taken away by Man, then the race begins to become the Man in charge of handing them out and more importantly… taking them away.

This is our Reality, and it is how we are all Manipulated to do the bidding of, and send money to, People Who have No Business Running Things, let alone telling us what to do.  We promote our own march to Slavery, whether we realize it or not.  I’m guessing most of us fall into the ‘not’ category.

So…

Let’s A-Holes be A-Holes.

But Shine the Cleansing Light of the Sun upon Them…

And do yourself a favor, Stop looking to Government to solve this problem, because it can’t… and truth be told, the Fine Folks up there Don’t Really Want To Solve It anyway.

There is Power in Division.

Crappy People

Let’s have an open, honest, discussion about Crappy People.

I’m not talking about kinda crappy. We all have moments that we look back and think, wow was I crappy just then.  So slipping in and out of crappiness once in a while is OK.  I want to talk about the hard-core crappy.  These are the best of the best at crappiness… the 1% that the occupy types should be protesting.  These include but are not limited to Racists, Homophobes, Thieves, People who park their cart right in the middle of the aisle at Costco… the REAL crappy ones.

The reality associated with Crappy People is that they are being born right now as I tap this out.  Crappy will never go away.  They have always been with us and always will be… regardless of some law we pass or how much we teach our kids to “love” one another instead of math and science in our government schools.  But let me ask a question…

But… Who do these craptastic asshats really hurt?

My experience is they typically remove themselves from the rest of us except during the holidays when they celebrate the ritual of walking very slowly, arm-in-arm, four across at the mall.  (They also scream when they see their compatriots and immediately stop to exchange… pleasantries? recipes? STD’s? while they make sure to block as much of the walk-way as possible.)  If we are on our game we can usually spot these folks (look for the universe revolving around them) and steer clear.  If we’re off our game, we must hope that we remembered to take our sedative prior to venturing out that day.  Personally, I keep a 1.75 liter of Bourbon inside my coat.  I’ve only run out twice.

In the end however, these are not the worst of the worst…

It’s the sneaky ones like the racists, or nationalists and elitists that catch us by surprise.  This has been such a problem to get our minds around we have created laws to “prevent” some of these people from bothering us.  (We haven’t got around to the Elitists yet but I’m working on it just out of “fairness”.) I’ve never understood how you can make a law that changes the way people think, but I’m not the sharpest bowling ball in the deck.  The question remains as to how much damage can these clowns do?

Let’s say, that a really Crappy Race Hater refuses to hire a…  Insert race, religion, sex etc. of your choice.  My choice is, Canadian…  (they’re the worst don’t ya know?).  Our Crappy Race Hater doesn’t speak Canadian and hates all things not quite French and not quite English.  So… this poor chap from Canada is an extremely talented engineer, brilliant even, but doesn’t get the job.  Our race hater instead hires, say, someone like me.  I happened to be sober the day of the interview and I’m not Canadian.  (You can tell by the way I look.) I also couldn’t engineer my way out of a paper bag, but he never asked me.  What more could you want, right?  So who has our CRH hurt?  Only Himself.

My point is that the genuinely Crappy People out there make their own lives terribly difficult without any effort on our part.  These people think the entire world sucks and is out to get them… and they are right but not for the reasons they think.  The truth is the entire world is awesome and we are all out to avoid them.  So.. If you suck you will lose out on the best opportunities and ultimately be avoided by those who don’t suck.  You’ll be resigned to speeding up when I turn on my turn signal because that’s all the power you have left.  You’ll use the word “fair” a lot and talk about how everything is rigged by the “rich” which really means everyone who has something you want.

I advocate giving these idiots a platform for their ideas and musings.  Once they are actually heard, and see the response, they almost always pick up and move to remote areas of Idaho.  Perfect.  I rarely drive, shop or look for work in Idaho.

(Originally posted 012912)

The Prideful Pride Parade

I’ve decided I need another reason to drink all day.

My current list of all-day drinking is composed of 104 Saturday and Sundays, My Birthday, New Years Day, Martin Luther King Day, Ground Hog Day (w/mandatory sausage pizza), Valentines Day, Presidents Day, St. Patrick’s Day, April Fools Day, April 15th roughly – Tax Day, VE Day, May Day, Cinco de Mayo, Normandy Invasion, Summer Solstice, Canada Day (recently added), U.S. Independence Day, International Left-Handers Day, VJ Day, Labor Day, United Nations Day, Halloween (similar to United Nations Day, little beggers in funny outfits threatening you unless you give them something…), All Saints Day, Election Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving Day, Winter Solstice, Christmas Day, Boxing Day, New Years Eve, Any Single Day falling between a weekend and an above listed Holiday, Vacation Days, My Wedding Anniversary and My Wifes Birthday… in no particular order… sometimes all at once.

So I’ve only reached roughly 150 days a year… not even half!

And, no where is there a parade!

Well, we just had our local Gay Pride Parade and it occurred to me that I apparently have no pride.  Needless to say, I didn’t go.  Thus I’ve decided I want my own Pride Parade!  Perfect!

But… I’ve been thinking about this all day, and I have a simple question.  How can I have pride in something I didn’t choose to do?

Assuming the story is true and I was planned, my parents could throw themselves the “We chose to have Mike Pride Parade” for reasons all of us recognize.  Or, I could throw the “Capitalist Pride Parade” because of my chosen ideology and invite a bunch of people I probably wouldn’t like.  But how can someone be Proud of being Gay if it is not a choice?  For that matter, how can anyone be Proud of being Black, White, Gray, Green, Arian, Anglo, Hispanic etc?  How can you be Proud on anything you didn’t choose to do?  If you had nothing to do with it, what right do you have to be Proud?  I’m not sure I understand this.

(Read this paragraph twice…) Weak minds would imply that my assertion the above mentioned groups should not be Proud means they should be Ashamed.  Let me educate those poor thinkers that while there is no reason to be Proud, there is also equally no reason to be Ashamed.  In fact the above should be void of any special “feeling”, good or bad.  It should simply be.  This way we can all focus on our achievements or lack there of.

That being said, then may be I do understand…

These Parade’s are not about Pride, they’re meant to irritate.  I would actually appreciate this if all participating were honest about it.  Being obnoxious is a great way to get people talking… but words, like “Pride”, mean things and we should stop using them inappropriately.

So here’s a better idea, we could call it the Heterosexual Christian, Muslim and Jewish Irritation Parade. Or, the “I’m Not Ashamed to be Gay Parade”… but then that calls into question why you’re having it. (Or how about one I could get into, the Annoying Everyone who isn’t a Drunk Irishman Parade?  Wait, we already do that one in Mid-March.)

Point being if it’s not a choice, like race or sexuality, you can’t be proud or ashamed of it.  (Remember… for you Gay folks if it is a choice you can be Proud but you’ve lost your argument, if it isn’t a choice then stop the parading and join the rest of us.)

What I’m saying is not a failure to understand.  I know all of our unique groups have been discriminated against but, that will never end… ever.  Brand new Crappy People are being born as I tap this out.  These people will always be crappy and will certainly not experience any positive effect from you irritating them regardless of how good it makes you “feel”.  What has worked best in my life is walking around them without stopping.  Let them be Crappy by themselves.  Make their world very lonely.

So join my Parade instead!  I’m calling it the Prideful Pride Parade.

In the spirit imparted to me in public school I’m choosing to be proud based on nothing.  No achievements to speak of, no goals reached, no reason or rational what so ever.  Just me and my enormous un-earned sense of self-esteem.  All by my own choice!

It will be held the Last Day July every year.  (No need to watch the lunar cycle).  I have also designated July as “National Pride in No Achievement Month” which honors our U.S. Public School system and graduates like me.  So march around, Drink all Day and “Support the Potential“!

I’m up to 151!

See you on the 31st!