Conservative Media Says Liberal Media Quoted Jeb Bush Out Of Context: Invents Fake Context To Prove it.

(This particular post is not satire)

July 14, 2015

So Jeb Bush made a Romney-esque comment that people need to work "longer hours."

Here's what he said: 

Bush: “My aspiration for the country and I believe we can achieve it, is 4% growth as far as the eye can see. Which means we have to be a lot more productive, workforce participation has to rise from its all-time modern lows. It means that people need to work longer hours and, through their productivity, gain more income for their families. That's the only way we're going to get out of this rut that we're in.”

The media ran with the “longer hours” bit as proof of Jeb being out of touch.

However, in the conservative media, they tell the story much differently.

Business Insider ran this story, insisting that Jeb was being taken out of context:

Democrats say they've found adevastating Jeb Bush gaffe, but he's mostly right

On Wednesday, Democrats seized on Bush's comment in an interview with the editorial board of New Hampshire's Union Leader. He said growing the economy would require people to 'work longer hours.'

But there's much more context to that statement, something Bush's campaign tried to explain when it spent Thursday morning clarifying that he was talking about part-time jobs.

Here's the full exchange:

BUSH: My aspiration for the country and I believe we can achieve it, is 4% growth as far as the eye can see. Which means we have to be a lot more productive, workforce participation has to rise from its all-time modern lows. It means that people need to work longer hours and, through their productivity, gain more income for their families. That's the only way we're going to get out of this rut that we're in.

QUESTION: To keep us from taking it out of context, what you meant to say — when you say more hours you mean full-time work.

BUSH: Given the opportunity to work. Yeah, absolutely.

QUESTION: Not that a full-time guy or somebody working two jobs needs to be working even more time.

BUSH: Absolutely not. Their incomes need to grow. It's not going to grow in an environment where the costs of doing business are so extraordinarily high here. Healthcare costs are rising. In many places the cost of doing business is extraordinarily high, and the net result of that is that business start up rates are at an all-time low. Work-force participation rates are low. If anyone is celebrating this anemic recovery, then they are totally out of touch. The simple fact is people are really struggling. So giving people a chance to work longer hours has got to be part of the answer. If not, you are going to see people lose hope. And that's where we are today.

Okay, wow, so Jeb immediately clarified that he was talking about people who are working part time being given the opportunity to work full-time. He didn't mean we should all be working longer hours.

That damn liberal media is just trying to quote him out of context!

The conservative media seized on this transcript from Business Insider and has generated plenty of articles about the liberal media and how they lie and quote Republicans out of context.

The Washington Examiner ran this story:

“Mind the gaffe: Jeb Bush'scautionary tale”

As made plain during the interview, the last thing Bush meant was that struggling poor and middle class Americans already toiling full time must work longer hours if they want to get ahead.

But plug 'People need to work longer hours' into an Internet search engine and what comes up are pages of headlines similar to this one: 'Jeb Bush: People need to work longer hours.' Democrats moved swiftly to undercut Bush, scion of a wealthy, politically-connected family, with attacks...

Yes, they actually used the phrase “but plug” in the Washington Examiner.

After crying foul, they then reproduce the same transcript as Business Insider. Except they make one change. Rather than saying “Bush:” and “Question:” in the trasnscript, it alternates between “Bush:” and “U-L:” meaning the New Hampshire Union Leader.

Something called “Front Page Mag” Subtitled: “A Project of the David Horowitz Freedom Center” ran the story as:

WHY CAN'T PAUL KRUGMAN STOP LYING?

It's a question as to whether Krugman is ridiculously sloppy or ridiculously dishonest.

They say Krugman “tried to clumsily jump on the Jeb Bush 'more hours' bandwagon.” Then they reproduce the transcript from Business Insider. Then they sum it up as Paul Krugman either not reading the full quote or he did read it and chose to lie about it. Then they call him either “ridiculously sloppy” or “ridiculously dishonest.”

Here's the thing. 

You see that full-context exchange? 

It didn't happen. 

The Union Leader put the video of that interview online, you can watch the whole thing here:   http://www.c-span.org/video/?327013-1/new-hampshire-union-leader-interview-jeb-bush

Go to 16:15 and press play for the relevant section.

Follow along with the Business Insider transcript and see if you can spot the problem...

If you can't access the video, here's a transcript of what's said

Jeb: My aspiration for the country and I believe we can achieve it, is 4 percent growth as far as the eye can see. Which means we have to be a lot more productive, workforce participation has to rise from its all-time modern lows. It means that people need to work longer hours and, through their productivity, gain more income for their families. That's the only way we're going to get out of this rut that we're in. And you can't grow at 4% unless you do a whole series of things, one of which, maybe the most important of which is tax reform. So simplifying the code as dramatically as you can. Lowering--eliminating as many of the tax expenditures that exist, and lowering rates, and shifting power away from Washington, and all of the protectors of the protected class. I mean go from Dulles to Washington... in every building is full of people who are making a lot of money...or trying to create another sanctuary or fighting to tear down another one. It's all about something that shouldn't exist. We should be shifting power away from Washington, and one of the most dramatic ways you can do it is by simplifying the tax code.

He goes on to talk about the Estonian model of taxation, shrinking the federal government, then sanctuary cities, illegal immigration, marijuana legalization, and many other things. 

Everything that follows Bush's first quote in the Business Insider transcript is not from this interview.

So when they say this is a transcript:

BUSH: My aspiration for the country … people need to work longer hours ... That's the only way we're going to get out of this rut that we're in.

QUESTION: To keep us from taking it out of context, what you meant to say — when you say more hours you mean full-time work.

They're neglecting to mention that between Jeb saying “this rut that we're in” and someone asking him “To keep us from taking it out of context...”  he had traveled to a different city, attended another event, and then addressed totally different reporters. In fact, between those two quotes being said, the first quote had become a gaffe, been spread on twitter, and the next quote is actually in response to the gaffe already being a PR problem for Jeb!

At 3:47 pm, ABC News had already tweeted the “longer hours” quote:

By 4:32 pm, the 21 second video was on twitter.

At 6:30 pm, Jeb attended an event at the VFW in Hudson, NH. After that event ended, he spoke to reporters and that is when the rest of the “transcript” is from, which you can see at The Guardian 

Bush was asked about the comment by reporters after a town hall event in Hudson. He said the US economy needs to grow far faster than currently to allow people to move from part-time work to full-time so they can better provide for their families.

...

“If anyone is celebrating this anemic recovery, then they are totally out of touch,” Bush said. “The simple fact is people are really struggling. So giving people a chance to work longer hours has got to be part of the answer. If not, you are going to see people lose hope. And that’s where we are today.”

See that second quote, that's what's in the Business Insider article. At least 4 hours or so had transpired between the quote being spread as a gaffe on twitter and Jeb!s “clarification.”

Business Insider and others have mashed two interviews together into a phony transcript and then attacked the media, liberals, Hillary, Paul Krugman, et al. For quoting Bush out of context and proving it by creating fake context.

Maybe Jeb did mean that people working part-time should be given the opportunity to work full-time when he said that original quote. In any case, Business Insider and others have created fake context and reported it as proof that he was taken out of context, and that should be a story.

So let's give Jeb a chance to explain what he really meant:

Jeb: If we’re going to grow the economy people need to be—stop being part-time workers. They need to be having access to greater opportunities to work. Look under this administration they have created rules that make it harder for people to work. This overtime rule is going to end up creating not more opportunities and higher income for people—people are going to end up working less. Obamacare has forced people, businesses to hire people for 30 hours rather than 40 hours. Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton think now that’s great because they are free to pursue their dreams that they might want to do. Well I think people want to work harder to be able to have more money in their own pockets, not to be dependent on government. You can take it out of context all you want, but high sustained growth means that people work 40 hours rather than 30 hours and by our success they have money and disposable income for their families to decide how they want to spend it rather than getting in line and being dependent upon government.

So what he's really saying is that businesses trying to avoid Obamacare and save money by cutting people's hours to keep them technically part-time and thus screwing them out of health care...shouldn't be doing that. So is he saying businesses should stop screwing their employees? Or is he saying we should get rid of Obamacare?

It seems that Jeb thinks it's not the businesses fault that they screwing their employees by denying them healthcare. Instead it's Obama and Pelosi's fault for forcing businesses to do this to their workers. It would be one thing if he attacked Obama for not envisioning the unintended consequences, but he doesn't say that, instead apparently Obama likes that employers did this because his goal was to get people more free time and be more dependent on the government.

So he wasn't saying you should work longer hours because you're lazy. He's saying we should get rid of Obamacare so you can work longer hours and still not have healthcare.

After watching the whole interview with the Union Leader, I have to say that there's a certain section in which Jeb! Seems to be doing a great impersonation of his brother.

It's worth a watch, trust me: http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4543699/jeb-w-bush

Adjunct - Gesundheit

Me pretending to be a writer for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.

And finally tonight: College. We've previously covered the monumental problem of student loan debt and predatory for-profit colleges, oh and also collegiate athletics and how they're bullshit, but we've still barely scratched the congealed surface of the pile of bullshit that is college education.

We all know that a college education is now very expensive, in fact over the last 30 years the price has tripled. College is supposed to be an investment in your future, which is perhaps why we don't look all that closely at where the money goes. After all, it's probably going to your professors so that they can buy Priuses and humus and corduroy pants.

But a study done last year found that 76% of instructors across all colleges and universities in America are adjuncts and not professors. Unlike professors, adjuncts are part-time employees with little to no benefits who are employed on a per-course basis.

In the 1960s, about 4 out of 5 college instructors were full-time professors, and only 1 in 5 was an adjunct. Today, 3 out of 4 college instructors are adjuncts, and 40% of adjuncts claim to work more than 40 hours per week despite their part-time classification. You might be thinking, “get to your thesis already John, this is a very muddled introduction lacking in action verbs.”

So here's the point: these so-called “part-time” adjunct professors are drastically under-paid. Just how under-paid? 31% of adjunct faculty in the United States are near or below the federal poverty level. 16% are paid less than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, and 43% are paid less than $15/hour, which is the minimum wage in Seattle.

The result of this low-pay is that many adjuncts work multiple jobs, often at more than one college, with no benefits, but it actually gets much worse than that, as one adjunct professor explains:

Interview 1: “I have a Phd, I teach four courses a semester, plus two in the summer, that's ten courses a year. A full-time professor usually doesn't teach more than 7 or 8 courses a year. Yet last year I made $16,000 before taxes. At this rate, I won't pay off my student loans until I'm 185 years old. The worst part is that they can fire me at any moment, for any reason, and I will get no benefits, I wouldn't even qualify for unemployment.”

That's right, adjuncts are contract employees, just like the seasonal workers at Wal-Mart. So when the semester ends, so does their contract, therefore they aren't eligible for unemployment benefits, and the university can terminate them for any reason they please because they aren't firing them, merely allowing their contract to expire. It's a lot like how John Travolta doesn't date, instead he uses month long sex-contracts that he allows to expire.

But in most cases, adjuncts aren't short-term employees:

Interview 1: “I've been doing this for eleven years, and I have no hope of ever being promoted to a full-time position. This is my reward for getting a bachelors, a masters, and a PhD, and then working full time as a college professor: I make $10/hour.”

And the problems go further than just the low wages. Because they are paid per course, there is no clock to punch, which leads to something that many fast food workers will find familiar: wage theft.

Interview 2: “Since the colleges want to keep you technically part-time, they'll have 4 part-timers instead of 2 full-timers, and that means that I work part-time at three different universities. Not only do I have to commute to multiple jobs and all the time that takes, but it also means I have to go to three-times as many meetings and training sessions and seminars, usually on Saturdays, that are mandatory, and un-paid. The most insulting part is that these administrators stand up there and mumble while standing in front of a poorly constructed power-point. It just shows how little they appreciate teaching when they incompetently do it at you.”

If you work at an office job and you have to sit through a three-hour meeting, you at least are getting paid your salary to be there. If you work at Wal-Mart and they want to put you through training, they have to pay you minimum wage. Adjuncts are just paid a flat fee per course, and anything else like meetings or advising students is considered part of that fee. Which makes perfect sense, because professors would go to meetings anyway if they weren't paid, that's basically what they do for fun.

Adjunct pay has gotten so bad, well, just listen to this:

Interview 2: “I honestly don't know why I'm doing this anymore. The other day I was looking at starting salaries at other jobs and I discovered that I would make more money as a janitor at the high school just up the street. And I would get benefits. About 100 students a year call me professor, and yet none of them would suspect that the high school janitor down the street makes more and gets more benefits than I do.”

Holy shit. I told you college was bullshit, and now you see, it pays more, to literally clean up shit than it does to teach at many universities. And this is not an isolated incident. The average adjunct pay nationally is $3,000 per course. An adjunct teaching 10 courses a year, more than what's considered full-time, would make $30,000. The median salary for garbage collectors in the U.S. is $32,000 a year.

If the average adjunct college instructor with at least a master's degree is making less than the average garbage collector, what's the value of a masters degree? Why are students paying universities all that money for an education in the first place if even the universities themselves don't value that diploma?

At this point universities are in the same business as Hallmark. They sell extremely over-priced pieces of cardboard that you show to other people as proof that you are willing to waste your money to impress them.

Maybe universities don't have the money, after all there are frequent cuts to education. In just the last decade, the cost of college has gone up about 40%. However, during that same time, the cut of college revenue that actually ended up in the pockets of teachers has dropped 24%. In other words, the money is there, they are just choosing to give less of it to teachers.

Interview 3: “When I teach a full course, there are 16 students each paying around $4000. So the University is taking in about $64k. They turn around and pay me $4k. That's less than 7% of the revenue. In other words, each student is paying $4000, and only $250 goes to me. My students are required spend more than $150 on books for my class.”

So when it's all said and done, a student is paying almost as much to the textbook company as they are to their actual teacher, meanwhile this university is collecting 93% of the tuition to spend elsewhere. It's no wonder the universities have shifted so much of the teaching load to adjuncts, they are payed about as well as subway buskers.

Instead of picturing teachers with an apple on their desk, we should replace the apple with a fucking tip jar. If the adjunct we just showed had a tip jar and each student gave on average a 6% tip, that would double her pay.

A. Students shouldn't have to tip, because they're already paying triple for tuition as students a few decades ago, and B. Fuck you universities, what the fuck are you doing with that money?

Well, a lot of it is going to administrators, presidents, vice presidents, provosts, deans, and chancellors and whatever other bullshit job titles they can pull out of a thesaurus. You can call yourself a chancellor, but we all know you're just an over-paid principal that gives handjobs to donors.

Administrative bloat is a huge source of the increased expenses at universities. Twenty-five years ago, professors outnumbered administrators two-to-one. Now that's completely flipped. From 1975 to 2005, college administration staff grew by 135%, and spending on administrators has tripled. Yet during the same period the faculty-to-student ratio has remained constant. In fact, US schools have added more than 500,000 administration jobs in the last 25 years. Administrators constantly talk about improving efficiency and keeping down costs. But economist Richard Vedder is calling bullshit:

Interview: “It's a lie. It's a lie. It's a lie. . . They'll say we're making moves to cut costs, and mention something about energy-efficient lightbulbs, and ignore the new assistant to the assistant to the associate vice provost they just hired.”

At Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute, the president, Shirley Jackson, made over $7 million in 2012. And because it's so difficult to live on 7 million, the university also provides her with a mansion in the Adirondacks, a support staff of housekeepers and body guards, and a chauffered luxury car.

Well the free-market has spoken, she must be doing a great job if she earns that much. Under Jackson's leadership, RPI has seen its debt go up by more than 600%, and they have seen their credit rating downgraded twice. Meanwhile, an adjunct at RPI, Elizabeth Gordon, was making $4000 per course, which she calculated to be equal to $10/hour. In order for Gordon to make as much money as President Jackson makes in one year, she would have to teach 1,750 courses, which would take more than 200 years. In other words, RPI pays the president as though she is worth as much as 200 teachers. They only have 440 teachers. If you cut just Jackson's pay from 7 million to poverty wages of only 1 million per year, you could give every teacher at a RPI a $13,000-per-year raise. And that's without considering any other administrators and their bloated salaries.

So why does the board think Jackson is worth such a high salary? What has she done to make RPI a great university? Well, in 2006 the faculty senate nearly passed a vote of no-confidence in her. So she responded by dissolving the faculty senate, taking a page directly from Grand Moff Tarkin's textbook on business management. She has also been accused of using union-busting intimidation tactics, for example, firing a janitor who joined a union organizing committee.

But it gets worse. President Jackson has a set of rules, and these are all true:

-She is always to be introduced as “The Honorable Shirley Ann Jackson.” - because nothing says honorable like dictating to others that they call you honorable.

-Cabinet members must rise when she enters the room.

-Only she is allowed to set the temperature in conference rooms. - presumably because she's a cold-blooded velociraptor that's very sensitive to temperature.

-If food is served at a meeting, vice presidents must clear her plate.

Wow. That's some Saddam Hussein level shit. I bet George W. Bush is wishing he'd thought of that while he was president. Imagine Dick Cheney being forced to scrape half-eaten tuna salad off W's plate, or wiping off the desk in the oval office. It will warm your heart a little bit, if it doesn't, you're a robot and a jaded one at that.

While Darth Jackson is an extreme example, universities all over have seen both the size of the administration increase as well as administrator pay increase drastically, while teacher pay has stagnated or even fallen.

You've got to pay administrators a massive salary otherwise they'd go elsewhere, I mean who would be willing to do all the hard work of being chauffered to meetings where you get to piss on people for only a few hundred thousand dollars?

At the University of Alberta, four professors combined themselves Captain-Planet style into a single entity and applied for a single job as Vice-Chancellor that paid $400,000 per year. The four professors offered to each take a quarter of the pay and a quarter of the duties. You'd think that four professors could do the job better than one person, but the administration disagrees, and would rather pay one person all that money. That's because these four professors put together aren't qualified to do the job because they clearly don't understand the purpose of being an administrator is to make lots of money while shitting on teachers. Teachers shitting on themselves would be a clear conflict of interest.

And this brings us to an important point: college professors are smart people. So why do they work for such low wages? Well, adjunct positions are often seen as stepping stones to jobs as full-fledged professors. Most adjuncts are qualified to be professors and so they take these jobs in the hope that it will allow them to make connections, add to their resumes, and soon lead to a full-time job. But remember that now 3 out of 4 college teachers are adjuncts, and that trend is only getting worse. Basically adjuncts are full-time professors but university Grand Moffs are pretending they aren't really professors and they pay them like they're garbage collectors.

But college professors are smart, and so they are realizing that they are being exploited and that the adjunct job is a stepping stone that just ends at a cliff where there used to a bridge that took you to a now mythical professor-land.

Basically we can go one of two ways: the smart, talented, passionate teachers that are professors in all-but-title will quit and find work in other fields, leaving the universities to hire less and less skilled people to fill their McJobs, and like McDonald's food, it will cause higher-education itself to urgently need a toilet. OR, adjuncts can band together, unionize, and demand fair wages, which has been happening at some universities recently, so there's some hope.

But in the mean-time, I have a solution. (Pull out a tip-jar and put it on the desk). Tip your teachers. They work way harder for you little shits than that barista did on your iced mochaspressachino vanilla bullshit you needed so you could stay up late to write that non-sense about how Buffy the Vampire Slayer is an example of formalism, and you tipped for that, remember? Meanwhile, that teacher has to read your bullshit paper for $7/hour and no tips.

(Enter an announcer): Presenting the Honorable Shirley Jackson.

(John stands at attention as a velociraptor enters)

That's our show for this week, thanks so much for watching.

(John feeds the velociraptor by hand, and wipes its mouth).

Interstellceptmento

May 27, 2015 .... or is it? BWAH

 Let me start by saying that I enjoyed Intersetllar quite a bit. I'd give it  4 thumbs on my 5 thumb-scale (don't ask where I got the other three thumbs). It was entertaining, I didn't hate it. But there were some issues... And of course SPOILERS:

1. The premise doesn't really make sense. Thanks to Coop, they figure out gravity manipulation, launch enormous city-sized spaceships that can traverse worm holes. BUT they can't figure out how to grow Okra on Earth? This flaw is present in every “find a new home” save-humanity movie. If you have the ability to move thousands or millions of people off world, if you can traverse worm-holes, if you can figure out how to survive on some new alien world that's different from Earth, if you can terraform another planet...then you can make it work on Earth. If you can make plants grow on Alien World 7, with different soil chemistry, different lightning conditions, different seasons, a complete lack of insects and all the intricacies of agriculture that are present on Earth...why can't you figure out how to grow wheat back on Earth? Interstellar only explains it by saying that there's a “blight.” Which doesn't really make sense because when they move off Earth, how are they going to make sure they don't take the blight with them? If it's infecting all plants everywhere, why do we assume it can't get into their escape colony? They don't seem super strict about contamination when they let random farmer Coop show up at NASA's Ark headquarters and they just let him waltz in with Blight all over him. It seems like it would be easier to stop a viral plant fungus than to figure out wormhole manipulation. Then again, a movie about a man inventing a vaccine for plants might not be all that exciting.
2. They have no MRI machines left on the planet. But they have wormhole-hopping super spaceships and joke-cracking AI robots. So why can't they make MRIs?

3. 

   Let's fucking walk everywhere...IN SPACE!

   They send Coop and the gang through a wormhole near Saturn and then they go visit a black-hole and three alien planets...yet when they get to a planet, they have to walk long distances with no other method of travel. They couldn't bring along a rover like they did on mythical Apollo missions. That would be too hard, wasn't enough room in their ship for a tiny rover. Hell, send a segway. Coop and Matt Damon end up treking across ice for long distances. Anne Hathaway causes everyone to age 23 years because she slowly trawdles through ankle deep water. Seriously people, you've got interstellar spaceships and walking and nothing in between? A plastic kayak weighing four pounds could have prevented half the problems in the movie.
   
   
   
4. NASA needs a random farmer to be their savior for this mission that's just about to launch? Why? They mention that they don't have any astronauts left that have left a simulator. But remember, they just sent a bunch of people to a whole host of alien planets just 10 years ago. They forgot how to go to space in the meantime. Don't have the budget? In any case, wouldn't you rather send someone that's been training for this for a decade instead of a farmer that wandered in covered in blight talking about ghosts? They could explain this away, maybe explain that humanity is down to such a low population that they've actually tapped out the talented pilots or something. But as it is, it seems totally absurd that Coop is suddenly the savior. And what happened to the guy who was going to be the savior pilot? He just gets bumped from the flight and sits on his ass for 50 years?

5. 

   See, big fucking rocket!

   Remember when they launch from Earth? There's a massive Saturn V-ish looking rocket, and it launches just this small shuttle like spacecraft into Earth orbit. From there, they dock to the bigger interstellar ship, they head off to Saturn, then wormhole. Then they take the small shuttle-like-ship down to a planet that has 130% of Earth's gravity. Then they do some surfing, then take off and fly away. Recall that getting from Earth to Earth Orbit required a Saturn V-ish massive rocket? Well now leaving a planet with 30% stronger gravity requires no such rocket, they just fly away. I'm sorry, what? This makes no fucking sense. If this spaceship is capable of just flying off a planet with stronger gravity than Earth, then it should be capable of just flying into space from Earth. And if you have the technology to build small ships that can just fly up to Earth orbit, then you don't need massive Saturn V rockets and you don't need gravity manipulation technology in order to put a lot of shit into space. You guys have the technology to easily get into space. Because remember, after they take-off from 130%-gravity world, which is a manuever that should be more difficult than launching to orbit from Earth, they then head off to another planet, then take off from that planet. They've got a ship that can launch into orbit from two planets one after another...but it can't get to Earth orbit without a Saturn V? This might sound like a nit-pick to you, but to someone that knows anything about rockets, this is like mind-numbingly stupid. They obviously tried to make the movie somewhat realistic when it comes to depicting black holes and relativity, but they wave a wand and hope you can't think about 1960s technology?

6. 

   Let's walks some more. 

   So you arrive through a wormhole, you have 3 planets to check out. It seems like they don't know shit about the planets other than knowing that the explorer has given them a thumbs up. Not sure why they can't just look at the planet now and do spectral analysis or even receive more detailed info from the explorers that could tell them that this planet is covered in a giant rolling tsunami. But whatever, assume they can't get more info and have to actually land on a planet and check it out (apparently just orbiting it and looking at it with their eyes isn't an option either?). Fine, so then which of the following planets do you pick? Two planets that are basically normal...or a third planet that's so close to a black hole that 1 hour on the surface is like 7 years on Earth? Let's go check out the crazy time-dilated world first! Remember that they sent explorers out a decade ago to check out the planets? Well the explorer that landed on Tsunami-World just landed there like 80 minutes ago. The explorers that landed at the other two planets are still broadcasting thumbs-ups after a decade. Which is more likely to be habitable, a planet that has supported a signal beacon for 10 years, or one that has supported such a beacon for 80 minutes? Why in the hell would you check out that crazy time-dilated planet first? Even if you get there and it's a great world and humans go settle there...they will always be dealing with crazy time dilation from being so near a black-hole. Does that sound like a nice stable place you want to make home? That'd be like deciding of all places to live on Earth, a trailer-park in Oklahoma is the best bet for survival.

7. 

   Hurr durr, I'm an astronaut. 

   I hate Anne Hathaway. Oh my god, shut up. You are so annoying. All you do is cry and screw things up, then blabber on about love.
8. You made a sort of believable story about worm-holes and warping space-time...and then you crammed in the idea that love is an actual super-natural force that transcends space-time, but not just any love, father-daughter love? A. It's corny as fuck. B. You don't need to tack on something super-natural like love being an undiscovered aspect of physics like it's the god damn Higgs Boson. It just makes people roll their eyes and try to ignore that Anne Hathaway was in the movie. Let their love speak for itself.
9. If you want to make a movie that's like 2001 A Space Odyssey, why do you edit it like it's a music video? 2001 is full of incredibly long shots of beautiful space things with no dialogue and sometimes no music. It gives the audience space and time to think about what's happening, to live inside their own heads for a moment and wrap their heads around what's going on. While I think 2001 does this too much and could have done with a good trim, it still stands that one of the reasons 2001 is good is that it is not in your face and it gives you time to think. This movie throws three times as much information at you, but before you can think about it, it then slams you with a plot twist followed by a bunch of crappy dialogue. For example, any space-travel sequence is filled with non-sense pilot chatter. “Full reverse thrusters” “On my mark, 3, 2, 1” “Match the spin now.” A. Pilots don't narrate what they are doing. B. It's not even necessary, it's not like the audience would be totally lost if Coop doesn't explain what he's doing. C. Imagine instead that these sequences don't involve rapid cuts and shitty fake-pilot dialogue, and instead consist of long shots and no dialogue that let you just appreciate the visuals and have some space to think. I think you get more tension from silence than you do from random fake pilot speak. Also, for all the pretty visuals, they sure like to cram in as many cuts as possible. No, stop looking at the wormhole, instead, look at Anne Hathaway passing out and then a close up of the ship exterior, now back to Coop, now back to Hathaway, now back to the exterior. How about an iconic long shot as they traverse a worm hole that doesn't cut away from the pretty visuals? And it's not just a problem with space travel. They also cram in random shit throughout the whole movie. Clips from the future of people talking about dust storms, let's just cram that in to the beginning. This movie is nearly 3 hours long, yet it can't ever find more than 15 seconds to let you think without hitting you over the head with corny dialogue about love or stupid fake pilot speak or a random plot twist. It's almost like Nolan is afraid that if a scene takes more than 40 seconds we'll get bored. You make so-called philosophical movies that make you think, but apparently the thinking is homework for when the movie is over.

10. 

    Astronauts cry a lot right?

    The ending sucks. So Coop makes it out of the black hole alive, is recovered floating in space, then meets Murph as a grandma, but just for about 30 seconds before she tells him to leave (cause the audience is bored already, it's been 30 whole seconds). Then he steals a spaceship and heads to Anne Hathaway because she was the only woman in the movie he's allowed to have sex with so he has to go to her now or something. So, they choose to have Cooper live through a black-hole only to have this not really pay off. Sure he meets Murph again, but she tells him to leave almost immediately and she dies. Was that worth it? Then he goes to Anne Hathaway...who is still alone on that planet for some reason? They've launched massive city-sized ships, but they couldn't send a single shuttle with like 4 people to go help Anne Hathaway? They even send for grandma Murph to come out to Saturn and meet Cooper, and they have a hangar full of ships...so they're heading to the new home for humanity, but haven't bothered to send anyone to help the single individual woman who is on the planet by herself getting it ready? Why? It's not even a plot hole because the fact that she's alone doesn't really matter for anything anyway. Why do we make such a leap, that Cooper lives through the black hole and is recovered, only to have such an unsatisfying ending?
    
    Here's how I would end the movie instead:
    
    Remember how Cooper could move her books on the bookshelf? Then at the climax, as she's figuring out that he's the ghost...she starts moving books. I thought she was going to communicate with him inside the black hole by writing something in morse code by moving her books. And he could respond, since he can see into that room. Right? They could have communicated back and forth. How's that for an ending? She can't see him, but he can see here, and they communicate with morse code by moving books around, they both cry tears of joy, he then gives her the data. Since he's inside the black-hole, time moves really slowly, almost a stand-still, so he doesn't' die, he's just left in the black hole forever living in that moment. Meanwhile outside the blackhole it just looks like the black hole disappears along with Cooper. He's gone. But to him, time was passing so slowly that he's in there basically for an infinite amount of time living in the moment where he talks to Murph. Then we glimpse her figuring out gravity manipulation and then we see the giant ships leaving earth. The end.   

Is Jennifer Lawrence Retarded?

In Arrested Development, Charlize Theron plays an English woman who seems quirky, down-to-earth, good with kids, with a strange sense of humor. Michael falls in love with her before he realizes that she is, in fact, retarded. That English accent really makes you sound smarter.

I have a theory that Jennifer Lawrence is secretly also an MRF like Rita Leeds. We're all so distracted by her good looks and her down-to-earthiness that we have been reduced to Michael Bluth levels of awareness.

So I now present...Jennifer Lawrence...retarded?

GOOP

Me impersonating Bill Maher:



I don't hate the Republican party, but I do think they are a party of baby-murdering demon-cyborgs.

Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that there was a party of demon-cyborgs that need stem cells from abortions in order to sustain themselves. What policies would you enact to create a surplus of stem cells?

First off, you'd do away with sex education. Tell the kids that condoms don't work, so don't bother, that they have to wait until they're 29 and married until they can have sex. Then make it hard and expensive to get birth control, oh and constantly insinuate that birth control is for sluts.

Now we've got a huge population of young people who don't think condoms work, so they don't bother using them, they don't know how to use birth control or can't get access to it, and they of course aren't waiting for marriage. Nobody waits for marriage.

Sarah Palin didn't wait until marriage and she married her high school sweetheart. Between high school and marrying her high school sweetheart, she had an affair with a future NBA player and got knocked up. So yeah, let's go to her for abstinence advice. Hows that working out for her kids?

So now we've got tons of unwanted pregnancies. But, if being a single mom isn't so bad, if you get help from the government, you might keep the kid. Oh wait, Republicans are constantly cutting benefits to poor single moms. Free school lunches, bullshit, use your bootstraps kid.

So you've got a nationwide campaign of disinformation where they say condoms don't work, birth control causes breast cancer, just ask conservapedia about that, tell young people who are known for self-control to not have sex for a decade, then you try to make access to contraception as difficult and expensive as possible, even taking it to the supreme court, then you make it really fucking hard to be a poor single mom.

That is clearly the strategy of a party of demon-cyborgs who need to feed on aborted fetuses.

BUT! BUT! You say, Republicans are for closing abortion clinics! They can't be trying to maximize the number of abortions if they're also trying to close abortion clinics.

What happens when you make something illegal? Does making it illegal make it go away? This country banned alcohol and then we stopped drinking forever, don't you guys remember that.

No, what happens is that this industry then goes black market. Instead of Anheuser Busch making money, it's the bootleggers and moonshiners. Instead of pharmaceutical companies making money, Colombian drug cartels make money. Instead of Planned Parenthood doing abortions, the Demon-Cyborgs with their fetus pincers perform abortions and then get to feed on the results.

BUT! BUT! Republicans are against stem cell research!

Yeah, they're against us researching what they're doing with all those stem cells (whisper: they're eating them).

The Republican platform when it comes to sex education, contraceptive access, childcare, and abortion access all come together in one clear strategy to create an enormous and delicious abortion black-market.

Now, I don't actually believe the republicans are demon-cyborgs. I haven't ruled it out either.

But I do believe that they are terrible parents. That's what defines them: Being a particular kind of shit parent.

The purpose of parenting is to help mold a child into a human being that can make decisions for themselves.

But they seem to think they can construct an elaborate set of rules, essentially become computer programmers and create an operating system that makes the decisions for the kids. Anybody who's done much computer programming knows about If-Then functions.

If you aren't married, then no sex. If he tries to put it in my butt, then say exit only. If someone offers you drugs, then just say no.

But you can't account for every possible situation. That's why computers suck at everything. We've got Google driverless cars that never get in accidents, they drive flawlessly because driving is pretty simple. But you know what they'll really suck at? Getaway drivers. You laugh now, but what happens when some murderer is after you and you get in your self-driving car and tell it to get you the fuck out of there, the murderer will just rear end you and the car will pull over so you can exchange insurance information and he can murder you.

That's why computer people are obsessed with AI. They want something that can learn on its own because you can't possibly account for every possible situation.

Republican parents are doing the exact opposite. They have things that learn, that have intelligence, but they're trying to beat the thinking out of them so they will just follow the rigid rules the parents create for them.

Republican parents have decided on their kids behalf, that they are A. Heterosexual, B. Not having sex until marriage, and C. Christian.

Go against any of those and they will flip their fucking shit. They don't want their kids to learn about evolution because they don't believe in it. They've made the decision, now the kid is just supposed to follow orders for their whole lives.

And if you stray, you get punished. If you're gay, you get AIDS, you get disowned, then you go to hell. If you're an atheist, you get disowned and then you go to hell. If you have pre-marital sex, then you get STDs and an unwanted pregancy, then you go to hell.

They see STDs and unwanted pregnancies as god punishing you for being bad. HIV kills gays because god hates gays. Sluts get STDs because they're dirty sluts.

But if you're a good girl, you won't need to worry about STDs or unwanted pregnancy. So you don't need any sex-ed!

Just know sex is super dangerous and then don't have it and you're fine.

It used to be true that sex was dangerous, that STDs and pregnancy were huge risks. But now we have technology. It's the future. The risks aren't the same anymore. You can use condoms and birth control and then spend a decade fucking whoever you want without having an AIDS baby. And then you can settle down and have kids when you find the right person and are ready to.

We can fuck safely now. As long as you know how to do it right.

But shitty Republican parents don't want their kids to know how to do it.

It's not just that they want to keep information from the kids. They actually want there to be STDs.

There's a vaccine for HPV, and so if all girls get it, we can basically wipe out one whole STD for future generations. Republicans are largely against it. Michelle Bachmann said the the HPV vaccine causes mental retardation. They want STDs to exist so that if their kids stray from the virginal path they set for them, they'll get spanked with the clap. They don't want abortion to be an option, that way their daughters will be so terrified of getting pregnant that they'll be afraid of having sex until they're ready to be a mom.

If it were the movie Jaws, Republican parents would be saying:

Don't catch the shark, because then my kids might go swimming.

But the shark is what makes it so dangerous.

Yeah but my kids don't know how to swim, and if they try, they might drown.

Well then teach your fucking kids to swim.

No. Swimming before you're 21 is a sin. The shark is god's way of punishing young people for sinning.

So you want the whole world to be actually more dangerous than it needs to be because you can't be bothered to teach your fucking children.

And then they complain constantly about our culture and its liberal values.

If my daughter's friends watch Sex and the City and they think it's okay to be a slut, then they'll be sluts, and then my daughter will be pressured to be like them. It's so hard to be a parent now.

No! It's not hard at all to be a parent now. It's hard to brain-wash your kids when they have Google and they can easily prove your bullshit wrong.

Morals aren't a list of do's and don'ts. Shitty lists don't impart morals. That's how you know religions are bullshit.

The Ten commandments, God's list of do's and don'ts, doesn't include rape or slavery. Those are fine. Hell, you can combine them into sex slavery and Moses will just look at his list and go, yeah, that checks out.

If we actually try to make a list of all things you shouldn't do, it won't work because in 50 years the world will be different. We'd need to constantly be adding amendments like, don't hack into people's phones and steal their nude pictures and then post them on 4chan. 

Making a list just turns us all into language-rapists who are trying to interpret laws and find loopholes. And if you can find a loop-hole then you should be fine. That's how we got the Missouri Compromise, where anal sex before marriage is fine because the hymen stays intact. That's also how it's somehow okay to murder abortion doctors.

You can't list every shitty thing. You can't possibly do it. That's why no list of commandments can ever work. Instead, you need a principle to follow.

And I've got it. This is my principal. My one commandment:

Thou Shalt Try Not To Be Epically Cunty.

You tell me, is sex slavery is a work of epic cuntyness?

Go ahead, find a loop hole in Thou Shalt Try Not To Be Epically Cunty.

“Try?” You're thinking, why is the try in there. What if I try just a little bit, and then give up?

If you aren't really trying, then you're just pretending that you're not a cunt. But actually, you're being cunty.

The try is there because sometimes you should act like a cunt. The ten Commandments fucked this one up too. Thou Shalt Not Kill? But God commands people to kill only about a thousand times in the bible. 

What about Hitler? Are we not supposed to kill Hitler? Of course sometimes you should kill. But you shouldn't just kill someone for no reason.

If someone is being an epic cunt to you, and you bite your tongue and let it slide, and then they epically cunt on you again, and this time you say, hey cunt, quit cunting on me, and then they keep cunting on you, then you've tried enough and you can be a cunt back to them.

That's it. That's all you need to know about morality for the rest of your life.

So what do you do if you're 18 years old and you're waiting until marriage to have sex and you really want to have sex with your 18 year old boyfriend. Should you get married so you can start having sex? According to Republican parents. Yes. Yes you should. Get married, then have all the sex you want, and you'll live happily ever after.

But my one commandment says, for fuck's sake, NO! Being 18 and hormonal and horny as fuck and really badly wanting to fuck somebody is not a good reason to make your teenage courtship into a death-pact. That's a really good way to be already divorced when you're 22.

Confounding horniness and teenage lust with the reasoned, mature desire to spend the next 60 years with someone you will grow to hate and making all your friends and relatives gather together for a ceremony in which your father hands over his deed to your hymen to your boyfriend is pretty cunty.

This is a map of how ignorant your children are. 

You can't just give over a list of do's and don't to your children. They will be making decisions, and so the best you can do is give them the most accurate information you can. Just telling them to wait until marriage and then denying them information on birth control and condoms is clearly a recipe for teenage pregnancy and catching STDs, just look at this map of the prevalance of teenage pregnancy.

The actual sex ed that I got went something like this. We looked at pictures of herpes and syphilis. We watched a Lifetime movie about a girl who had sex one time and got AIDS. Then we got to feel a set of rubber testicles to see what cancer feels like.

I came away from that thinking that unprotected sex is fucking dangerous. I thought if I banged a girl with no condom and she had HIV, that I would of course get the HIV. So I thought one-night stands were like Russian Roulette with HIV bullets. That's fucking scary.

So I spent several years thinking that sex was dangerous as fuck. But do you know what the actual odds are of getting HIV?

If I bang a girl, no condom, she has HIV, what are the odds I get it? 1 in how many? One in five? One in ten?

It's actually 1 in 2,500. That means, if I had 25 one-night-stands, and every single time, I somehow managed to always hook up with an AIDS girls, I have some kind of AIDSDAR, and never used condoms, I would have a 1% chance of getting HIV.

The odds that you get AIDS from blowing an AIDS dick are less than the odds that you will be killed by a police officer.

That's how you know America is a fucked up country. Our police are more dangerous than blowing AIDS dicks. And that's based on a national average. Imagine what the figures look like if you're black. Being black in America is like blowing ten AIDS dicks, just all the time.

My impression of John Oliver.

Language Rape

I like to imagine the world as it would be seen by a Martian, an outsider, who doesn't have our culture and experiences. What would the world look like to that person. For example, laying down and spending a third of our time in some kind of hallucinogenic state seems odd.

From that perspective, I started to wonder...what are lawyers? What do they do? Laws are rules, basically we figure out what shitty things people shouldn't do, then we write down, don't be an asshole and do these things. And the job of a lawyer is to then work with these written rules and figure out what precisely they mean.

But it seems like what they really do is twist language and manipulate it and figure out how to take something and make it mean something else.

Basically, lawyers are language rapists.

A lawyer would say, it's not rape, we're just massaging the language – well it's a very deep massage that the language didn't want and afterward it feels violated. To me that's rape. .

For example: The First Amendment says “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.” Congress has gone on to make all kinds of laws that abridge the freedom of speech, and when challenged in the supreme court, several supreme courts have done a little tap dance and ruled that congress can make laws abridging the freedom of speech if they have a good reason. For example, you can't threaten to kill people, that's illegal, and we all go, yeah I guess that's kind of a good thing. Then they decided to make it illegal to print and sell pornography, oh and communist literature. And the supreme court said, yeah, I mean obviously when the founding father said you “shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech,” they meant you can make laws abridging freedom of speech when it comes to things you don't like such as titties and Marx.

According to these “lawyers” on the supreme court, the phrase “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech” somehow means you can make pornography and political speech you don't like illegal, but you can't limit how much money corporations spend on politics.

This is clearly language rape.

This brings me to my favorite case in the history of law.

A Panera opened in a mall. They had a contract with the mall that stipulated that they could not let in any other sandwich places. Then the mall allows another restaurant to open, and the guy who owns the Panera gets pissed and yells, “hey assholes, you weren't allowed to open another sandwich place.”

Now, does anyone want to guess what this second restaurant was? Subway? Planet Sub? Maybe McDonald’s?

No. It was a Qdoba.

Judging by your reactions, I can tell all of you people are too morally good to be lawyers.

Here's how you know that the job of a lawyer is to basically be a rapist of language. The judge didn't just throw the case out as being fucking stupid. Judges can do that. But this went to trial.

An actual trial, wherein the prosecution made the case that burritos are in fact sandwiches, and the defense had to prove that burritos are not sandwiches.

In a sane world, the mall owner could have showed up to court with burrito, eaten it, and said “wow, that was a delicious burrito, I rest my case,” and that would have been that. But we all know this isn't a sane world, and if he didn't get his own lawyer he wouldn't have known the right things to say and the judge would have made burritos and sandwiches into the same legal entity.

And what about this Panera owner? Here's a guy who runs a sandwich shop who can't tell the difference between a burrito and a sandwich. I think I know why his sandwich shop isn't doing so well. Does this guy think Taco Bell is a bakery? Does he think Waffle Tacos are just open-face breakfast sandwiches? This is a man who owns a sandwich shop, and yet he can't tell the difference between a grilled cheese and a quesadilla.

And here's another absurdity, this trial creates precedent. In essence, the decision in this case determines once-and-for-all-time whether a burrito is a sandwich. This judge by random chance is now the one member of the human race who has the power to decide if a burrito is a sandwich. I think anyone with that much power should be elected to the job. What if that judge hated mexican food, and now he is the one person on the planet tasked with deciding if a burrito is a sandwich.

In the arguments, both sides were quoting dictionaries as to how burritos and sandwiches are defined, and at some point this needs to be made into a dramatic courtroom film. They not only cited dictionaries at each other, but they both called expert witnesses. But expert witnesses are complete bullshit, because both sides will produce experts. We have a sandwich-expert who can't tell the difference between a reuben and an enchilada but he runs a sandwich shop, so trust him, he's an expert.

The US government actually has a definition of a sandwich. They need to have a definition because we have two agencies that inspect food and so they need to decide who inspects what. The Food and Drug Administration is the ones that make you label foods with nutrition facts and they inspect processed foods, soda, and things like that, while the US Department of Agriculture, or USDA, inspects farms and meat plants and the more agricultural side of things.

The USDA says a burrito is a “Mexican style sandwich-like product consisting of a flour tortilla, various fillings, and at least 15 percent meat or 10 percent cooked poultry meat.”

So that settles it right? It's a sandwich-like product. So it's...not a sandwich?

And apparently, according to the USDA there's no such thing as a vegetarian burrito?

Here's where it goes from weird to disgusting. If you package a sandwich and sell it, which agency inspects you, the USDA or the FDA?

If it's closed-face, i.e. it has two pieces of bread, then you are inspected by the FDA. The FDA does inspections daily. If however, you package an open-faced sandwich with just a single piece of bread, then you are inspected by the USDA. And the USDA inspects open-face sandwiches sold in interstate commerce an average of once every 5 years.

So don't ever eat a packaged open-faced sandwich. That's what I've learned out of all of this. Because it's legally distinct from a closed-face sandwich and it turns out that legal distinction might actually kill you.

It's not negligent homicide, it's just an advanced case of inside-out syndrome where the intestines decide to leave the body.

So it's all settled then. A burrito is not a sandwich. Fuck you Panera guy's lawyer, because you just got paid thousands of dollars because you convinced an idiotic sandwich shop owner that burritos are sandwiches and then put us all through this ordeal of language rape.

And here's the worst part. If tomorrow a Qdoba opens up in a mall, and the Qdoba makes a deal that says the mall can't bring in any other burrito places, and then the mall lets a Panera move in, the Qdoba owner could sue, because we have only legally settled that a burrito is not a sandwich. Whether or not a sandwich is a burrito is legally unsettled ground. And I bet you that somewhere there's a lawyer who is trying to date-rape the word burrito so he can make tens of thousands of dollars on a stupid lawsuit. And if the Panera guy shows up with just a sandwich and common sense and no language-rapist on his side, then the judge will rule that sandwiches are burritos.

Then we'll live in a world where a sandwich is legally a burrito, but a burrito is not legally a sandwich.

Here's some more language rape for you. Subway Footlongs. People started measuring them and many weren't a foot long. Some were right at 11 inches. What Subway should have said was, bread rises and expands when you cook it, so it's not always going to come out exactly at precisely 12 inches, but we do our best and you'll find that many come out longer than 12 inches and we're not systematically trying to screw you over.

Instead, what they said was: 'SUBWAY FOOTLONG' is a registered trademark as a descriptive name for the sub sold in Subway® Restaurants and not intended to be a measurement of length.

Not intended to be a measurement? That'd be like if the McDonald's quarter pounder weighed way less than a quarter pound and McDonald's said, “the name just describes how heavy it looks.”

Here's another example of language rape. The 2nd amendment. Hopefully I won't be shot by the time I finish this. 

The 2^nd amendment is a single sentence. “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

Now, a lot of people like to forget the first half of the sentence. In fact, in the Lobby of the NRA headquarters, they have the text of the 2^nd amendment on the wall. Or, they have the second half of it. They conveniently leave off the first half that talks about militias, because they couldn't be bothered to put the whole sentence.

I'm no language rape expert, but when you spend the first half of a sentence saying that a militia is good, I think that is relevant to the meaning of the second half of the sentence. That's what punctuation is for. If these are unconnected thoughts, you would use a period.

The modern interpretation of this, by the Republican Supreme Court is, and I quote, “The second amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia.”

What they're saying, these brilliant language-rapists of the highest caliber, is that the 2^nd amendment means “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,” and that the first half of the sentence is meaningless and is just there because the founders felt like saying that militias are nice, especially well-regulated ones.

That would be like if I wrote a law that went like this:

“Farting being one of life's simple pleasures and also a necessity for comfort, the right of the people to pass gas shall not be infringed.”

And then the supreme court decided that this meant that companies could release all the toxic pollutant gases they felt like because they have an unlimited right to pass gas.

And when somebody says, isn't that sentence about farting? Antonin Scalia says, “oh no, the founders were just saying that they liked farting, but unconnected to that, and in the same sentence for some reason, they also think unlimited pollution is a fundamental right. They're unconnected thoughts, that's why they're separated by a whole comma.”

If the founders wanted to give us all the right to bear arms unconnected to anything to do with militias, then the second amendment would have said: “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” But they didn't just say that!

There's an earlier draft that said:

“A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, being the best security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; but no one religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person.”

Let's break that down:

A militia, what is a militia, why militias are good, therefore militias should be able to exist, and you can't make Quakers join the militia.

Every bit about this is about militias, not rednecks with AR-15s. And if it's all about the militia, it also says “well regulated militia.”

So it seems to me that the amendment is saying “you have a right to form a militia, as long as it's well regulated.”

A few years ago, the city of D.C. Passed a law that banned handguns and it was challenged and went to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court struck it down because the Republicans on the court ruled that the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, therefore you can't ban handguns.

If you interpret the second amendment this way, then doesn't that mean you can't make laws banning any kind of arms? Tanks, Napalm? Can I own a tomahawk cruise missile? Can I own an ICBM and a missile silo? You know, for self-defense.

Well. . . Actually, you can own a flamethrower if you want. We have no regulations on flamethrowers. You don't even need to pass a background check. You can buy a flamethrower online.

According to genius language rapist Antonin Scalia:

“Obviously the amendment does not apply to arms that cannot be hand-carried, it's 'to keep and bear,' so it doesn’t apply to cannons,”

Okay, so I have to be able to hold it. I've seen Arnold Schwarzanegger hold an 8-barrel Gatling gun. So according to Scalia, what guns you can own depends on how strong you are.

He goes on to say:

Scalia: “but I suppose there are hand-held rocket launchers that can take down airplanes, so that'll have to be decided.”

Fox News Person: “How do you decide that if you're a textualist?”

Scalia: “Very carefully. My starting point and ending point will be what limitations are within the understood limitations that the society had at the time.”

So Scalia is saying that it might be unconstitutional to ban heat-seeking shoulder-fired missiles if his gut feeling is that people in the 1780s would have been cool with it.

Which do you think is more likely: that the founding fathers wanted to give everyone the right to own any weapon, no matter how powerful, just as long as they could physically carry it, OR that they wanted to make it so that we had a right to form a well regulated militia?

Which of those two options seems like something that was thought up by complete fucktards?