new blog thing

Well folks, I haven't updated my blog in a while for a few reasons. I am writing on a blog that is attempting to create the new business model for the information age. Its named, www.blogfundy.com
Check it out. Its a collection of funny people writing about everything and anything. Yes, we would like you to become a paid subscriber. For the price of a cup of coffee you could read insightful, funny and unique perspectives on things. Check it out=)
The other reason, I've been publishing blogs to my facebook page. You can read whats what there and eventually they will just publish to both sites.
www.facebook.com/standupjoe

San Francisco Blabity Bleh! at The Purple Onion this Thursday!

www.brownpapertickets.com/event/62136

Upset Over the Little Stuff?

Swine flu.
By now you have heard about it. The cable news networks seemed to take a delight in telling us how dangerous the swine flu could be. I got the feeling watching some of the coverage that not since the days following 9/11 has CNN had something so juicy to scare people with!
So far, only one person has died in America from the swine flu while 13,000 people have already died this year from the regular flu.
In other words, salmonella tainted spinach has killed more people. Hell, bad peanuts have killed more people than spinach this year. In fact, America has killed as many pirates this year as the swine flu has.
Yesterday, the acting head of the health department announced that the swine flu is no more deadly than the regular flu.
How about that? We closed schools and diverted flights, wore masks and ran out of hand sanitizer for a virus that is no worse than a really bad cold.
What is it about us? Why do we constantly get upset at the wrong things while the more dangerous things in society are regarded as business as usual situations and not problems?
Example-
Gun shops across the country are reporting a run on ammunition, a phenomenon apparently driven by fear that the Obama administration will increase taxes on bullets or enact new gun-control measures.
When Bush got elected a second time, liberals stocked up on sugar free snacks and poster boards for protests.
Almost four months into a new presidents term and the right is stockpiling arms.
Great. How can this go bad?
If the gun lobby had its way, guns would be sold in vending machines outside school cafeterias.
Thats the only way I would agree to school prayer in public schools.
By the way, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission said there were 37 known vending machine fatalities between 1978 and 1995. Every year about two Americans die when they shake a machine trying to get a stuck snack out. Thats why we have warning labels on the side of Coke machines telling you not to shake them.
Vending machines killed more people last year than swine flu so I guess there pretty dangerous. If thats so, why don't guns at least have a warning label? I don't know exactly what it would say, maybe something as simple as WARNING: the U.S. Surgeon general has determined that guns can create big fucking holes in people!
If vending machines killed 10,000 people on average every year do you think there would be a strong lobby in Washington D.C. busy keeping them legal and on the streets?
Vending machines don't kill people. People kill people!
"You will have to pry this can of Coke from my cold dead hand!"
Squirt guns that look too much like real guns are against the law.
Law darts were made illegal after a kid was killed by one.
Vending machines, killing two people on average every year have more precautions built into them than guns do and guns were designed specifically for killing. Yet the idea of making them less available to society at large is seen as an attack on peoples personal liberties.
I can't think of a greater way to deprive someone of their personal liberty than shooting them, yet suggesting we do something about this uniquely American problem gets people crawling out of the wood work and screaming, "Second Amendment rights!"
The only way to remove a gun from the streets is apparently to announce that it was held by a Mexican with the flu.
Course, the people with guns will only say, we need to strengthen immigration laws!

Carrie Prejean is back in the spotlight again. She is better known as anti-gay marriage Miss California. She is now a spokesperson for traditional marriage and in trouble over topless photos of herself. Little miss traditional values posed for some racy photos back in the day! The photo—showing a topless, pink-underpants-wearing Prejean with her arm strategically placed—first appeared on TheDirty.com before making its way around the web.
I could care less. What makes this truly hilarious is her sanctimonious defense. If the traditional marriage people think a model who is already notoriously bad with words is a good spokesperson then you might have just proved you are dumber than her.
And that is saying something!
She called the release of the photos, "attacks on me and my integrity as a woman."
Lets stop right there for a moment, shall we? Think what you like about nudity or values or whatever. Its none of my business what you do. But the argument can be made that a woman of integrity might not pose topless in her underwear for money. I don't think that way but I am guessing the people who hired her as a spokesperson do.
Oh but its gets better!
"I am a Christian, and I am a model. Models pose for pictures, including lingerie and swimwear photos. Recently, photos taken of me as a teenager have been released surreptitiously to a tabloid website that openly mocks me for my Christian faith."
Your being mocked, bubble head because you posed nude and still want to claim you're a Christian.
How do you reconcile this in your own head? Jesus, hung almost naked on the cross so its alright for me to pose naked? Even if it is a sin, he died for those already, right?
Can't you almost see her incredulously stomping a single pump wearing foot down when she says, "I am a Christian and I am a model!"
"I am not perfect, and I will never claim to be. But these attacks on me and others who speak in defense of traditional marriage are intolerant and offensive. While we may not agree on every issue, we should show respect for others' opinions and not try to silence them through vicious and mean-spirited attacks."
If you're a model people will use your photos to make the most amount of money they can. Now that you are shilling for family values, anyone who ever snapped a photo of you is going to release them for profit and in the process irony laden statements like this one will erode your credibility while it drives the price on your old photos up.
Also, you're defending traditional marriage? Whose attacking it? Far as I can tell, its the straight married people who are attacking gay peoples self evident right to ruin their lives as they see fit. If anyone is attacking the sanctity of marriage its married people. It ends in divorce 50% of the time. In fact, I bet at least one married man jacked-off to her photo. If anything, this model Christian has created more situations that put traditional marriages in jeopardy than a gay couple wanting the same rights society gives other married couples.
Unless your husband in jacking-off to gay guys posing in their underwear. If thats the case you might be married to the leader of a church.
What everyone is missing and what seems to be lacking in any intelligent debate about gay marriage is the fact that marriage fails half the time. Why defend anything with a 50% failure rate?
It would add an extra sense of adventure if guns only went off half the time. Might give animals being hunted a sporting chance too. I doubt anyone from the gun lobby would defend a product that only worked half of the time.
I say, get that statistic up to at least 80% before you go claiming another group is going to ruin it. Maybe one way for people to take the whole traditional marriage thing seriously is not hire a spokesperson who can be found nude on the internet. I'm just saying.

Aren't we suppose to be the good guys?

I was on a radio show talking about torture in the course of discussing the weeks news. A guest called in. Conservative, Bob, the host said.
Apparently they knew him.
He summed up the conservative point of view on the entire torture scandal with the official position from Bizzaro world.
Where is it written down that torture is illegal? He asked. Because if it was, his reasoning went, then Dick Cheney would be in jail by now.
Reasonable men can agree to disagree. But what do you do when faced with this?
All I had to do was Google, laws on torture.
The geneva conventions are pretty clear on what torture is. This is only the first section of many many that spell it out in detail:

-CONVENTION AGAINST TORTURE
and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading
Treatment or Punishment
Part I
Article 1

1. For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

This seems pretty clear to me. Torture is illegal.
Shortly after 9/11, Vice President Dick Cheney appeared on a Sunday news show and told the American people that we would deal with our enemies by working on the "dark side."
We now know what he meant.
What the Bush administration did was not only illegal, but profoundly stupid for reasons that will become clear soon.

To find some kind of a blue print for how to torture, the White House turned to a military program ironically designed to train our servicemen how to cope with torture if they were ever captured. Not just captured, but captured by countries who didn't sign the Geneva Conventions. That means, countries that still use such practices as water boarding.
They reverse engineered programs and techniques to help withstand torture into a seriously flawed program designed to torture.

The name of the program is SERE; Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape.
During the Korean War, the Communist Chinese used it on P.O.W.'s to get false confessions for propaganda purposes.
A lot of research has been done on torture. Turns out, when people are being subjected to extreme pain, they will say what they think the interrogator wants to hear to make it stop.
This is the method they picked. Its bad enough that it was morally repugnant and against the law, but they chose a technique known for false confessions.
The White House was not only cruel, but stupid as well.

The SERE program's chief psychologist, Colonel Morgan Banks, issued guidance in early 2003 for the "behavioral science consultants" who helped to devise Guantánamo's interrogation strategy although he has emphatically denied that he had advocated the use of counter-resistance techniques used by SERE instructors to break down detainees. However, records show he was in Iraq as a consultant.
All of this is bad. Today, it got worse. Under oath, people are now coming out on the record to tell us that torture was being used on detainees to create a link between Iraq and Al-Qaeda.

If you think torture is the best way to capture terrorists and get intelligence you are wrong. Instead of pointing out studies I offer this fact as evidence. After the first attack on the World Trade Center, the Government treated it like a crime scene. Evidence was collected, leads followed and eventually with skilled interrogators and patient research, the people who planed it were found, tried and are now in jail.
No one was tortured to solve this. No country was invaded to solve this. No bombs were dropped on innocents civilians by mistake. No secret prisons were set up outside America to get a conviction. New law didn't need to be hastily written to give legal cover to unethical acts to get the information required to get convictions.
The White House made a clear and informed choice to use ineffective brutal methods that are defined as war crimes.
Aren't we suppose to be the good guys?

News That is Good!

Hello all!
If you have been a reader of my blog for awhile, thanks. I enjoy writing them and I hope you enjoy reading them. Times are changing. In a few years news papers will probably disappear from the street replaced by blogs and subscriptions to news websites. While blogs will remain free, I think you will also start to see a new trend. Subscription blogs for an inexpensive monthly fee.
I was recently contacted by a man who wants to do just this. Some larger recognizable names to draw people in and guys like me. Might just work. Who knows? But being paid to do what I have been doing free since I started this blog is cool! This blog will still exist. I hope to start using it more for video clips soon. I hope if you have been a loyal reader you will make the jump with me.
I will let you know the details once everything is signed on the dotted line.

Bigger news!
Every Friday afternoon I can now be heard on KSRO the Drive giving you a break down of the weekly events complete with punch lines! If you can't get them in your area, you can listen to it on line and eventually in podcast form here, Facebook and who knows where else.

Cross your fingers and stay tuned!
Check out my calendar on my website for Gig's. standupjoe.com

New Wrinkle.

Everything goes in cycles. Only these days I wonder if were going backwards with in the vast cycles that history repeats. President Lincoln freed the slaves in a war where states wanted to secede from the union. Why did the south want to leave the union? The south wanted to maintain slavery and the north thought it was barbaric.
With Americas first African-American President in the White House, the governor of Texas is now seriously talking about seceding from the rest of the country over what he calls the federal governments oppressive reach. Thats how he refers to the stimulus money.
This might be the clearest example of the difference between conservative thought and liberal thought. When the liberals are out of power they write blogs. If they are feeling really naughty they might have some meat instead of that veggie burger they normally get.
Three months out of power and the conservatives want to leave the country!
That would make them something they have been calling liberals for a long time now: Un-American!

Let them go.
This is the same action as an immature kid loosing his fifth game of checkers in a row. They basically want to flip the board over. Only the board is the country and its not a game.
Come on Texas. If you got real about this situation you would see that Texas needs America a lot more than America needs Texas.
This what Texas offers. More wool comes from Texas than any other state in the union. So we lose them. So what? What do we really lose, sweaters, ignorance and Chuck Norris?
Texas ranks #49 in verbal SAT scores and #46 in average math SAT scores.
That means if you wanted to confuse a Texan a sentence like this might do it:
If you're making less than 250,000 a year how much are your taxes going down under Obama?
I think I am starting to see the problem.
When Bush was governor of Texas they were 49th in education.
That means they could beat Mississippi, they just couldn't spell it.
Hell, let the entire south go if they want. Don't let the Mason Dixon line hit you on your ass on the way out.

Glen Beck. Know the guy? He is the next generation Bill O'reilly and one of the chief architects of the tea bagging movement. I might be wrong about this but if one of the guys talking about your movement works on TV where he talks for a living, I don't think you can claim your movement is grass roots.
On Tax day, Glen Beck held a rally in Texas at the Alamo. If you know your history then you know the reason why Davy Croket was fighting the Mexican army. Mexico had outlawed slavery and the good people of the nation of Texas were fighting to keep slavery legal.
Texas lost the battle of the Alamo, but when you think about the current condition of Mexicans working for slave wages across America in jobs you or I wouldn't do, you might think Texas won the war.
Odd place to announce you are a "real American with old fashioned American values..." cause I gotta tell you, the kind of old fashioned American values a place like the Alamo represents is the reason we passed the 13th Amendment,
abolishing slavery in the United States. I'm just saying if you want to reboot a revolution you might want to choose a better backdrop for it than a fort that was defended by red necks who were fighting to keep humans like animals for labor.

The NSA announced that it reviewed the current program of wire taping communications in the United States. The NSA said it "over collected" information and had a hard time distinguishing between domestic and international communication.
Over collected? What a polite way to say you eavesdropped on everyone. Do you know that right now the Justice Department affirms its right to go into a citizens home, search their computer and personal papers and never tell you they were there! The United States government says it can go through my stuff and not tell me?
I don't remember dating the government.
Also, its pretty clear on my bill what is a domestic call and an international call. If these guys couldn't even figure that out why would we think they could interpret terrorists plots talked about in code over the Internet?
But here is the real kicker.
It also found evidence that the NSA attempted to wire tap a member of Congress. This is the NSA saying this in their own public report. This isn't some urban myth being passed around by bloggers strung out on red bull this is your government admitting that it not only spied on U.S. Citizens but it actually made an attempt to bug a member of congress.
People sometimes tell me I swear too much on stage. If you're watching the news and not swearing with a few choice expletives when you hear stuff like this, then you just don't get it.
This is bad people! This is really bad. I know, its depressing and stunningly unfunny so here is a dirty joke to take your mind off of it before we get into more hard to hear truths.

I told my brother something he had never heard before apparently, because he said, "New wrinkle."
I asked, "What does new wrinkle mean?"
He said "Every time you learn something new your brain gets a new wrinkle."
"Oh. I guess that makes my testicles a genius then."

Thats how I will get you to pay attention. I will tell you something you should know and then follow that bitter truth with a bipartisan dirty joke.

Obama released four memos from the justice department written at the request of the Bush White House on the subject of enhanced interrogation techniques. They are little more than disgusting verbal games written in legal prose to not say the word torture. Its clear that the authors, one of whom is now a sitting federal judge, knew they were being asked to invent law to make torture appear legal.
OK. Thats pretty scary stuff too. Here is another dirty joke.

My brother told me his girlfriend had tricked him into getting pregnant. How is that possible? You're a grown man. What did she do, cover her vagina with leaves and you tripped and fell in?
Then he asked, "Thats how women get pregnant?"
"yes!"
he said "New wrinkle."

Obama has said they will not prosecute anyone at the CIA who participated in these types of "enhanced" interrogations. We have to move forward not look backward. This is the Obama doctrine. As much as I believe in what the man has come to represent I think almost everyone can agree that a blanket forgiveness without even a formal confession of wrong doing is premature.
You might not have to go after the people who were "only following orders" but shouldn't we go after the people who gave those orders?
I think we should.
No dick joke here folks. There isn't one powerful enough.
The fact is were suppose to be the good guys. The ones who don't put aside their values even when it seems we would gain by doing so. People say, thats naive. America has to live in "the real world."
America was founded on the idea to change the real world. But there right. America doesn't live in the real world. It exists in a better world. Torture has no place here. Thats why we have laws against it. Thats why we don't recognize a king or allow our rulers to abuse religious belief to control people. Right?
We are a nation of laws not a nation of what ever those in charge want to do. The truly scary thing is that all the enhanced powers the Bush administration gave itself have not ben given back yet by Obama. One of the oldest laws of man states very clearly, power given is rarely returned. If we are willing to set aside the values that make us better than the terrorists this time, what will we set aside next time?
I just hope that someday I won't be talking to a 20 year old kid and after I tell him what freedom is, hear him reply, "new wrinkle."

Of Powdered Wigs and Tea Baggers.

Here is the non-story everyone will be talking about this weekend. On Jamie Foxx’s satellite radio show, he recommended that Miley Cyrus make a sex tape. Lets not feel too bad for the 16-year-old millionaire. She is the new Olsen twins. In fact, since Miley has arrived on the scene you don’t see them too much anymore. I think the Olsen twins were somehow combined into one bratty child star known as, Miley Cyrus.

I can’t feel sorry for her in the least. She is living every 16-year-old girls dream. Her Dad works for her, she is star and she has a 20-year-old Italian underwear model as her boyfriend. By the way, why are people getting worked up over Jamie Foxx’s comment? I thought statutory rape was a little more important than talking about what is only a matter of time.

Between pirate attacks and tea party protests over taxes I am wondering if we are repeating the 1700’s again? I hope not. There is no way I am going to start wearing a powdered wig.

I have a question. When do the pirates get their own reality show? Each week you can watch as they take a ship. Who wouldn’t watch that?

I have to admit. I feel a little sorry for Mr. Bush. I don’t know if he has been watching the news lately but if he is you know he is sitting there going “My first test with the military was 9/11 and Obama gets pirates? Unfair!”

If ever there was a guy who wanted to fight pirates, it was Bush. If it had happened during his administration you would of seen press conferences where Bush tells the America public that Johnny Deep is living somewhere in France so we are going to invade to Iraq.

The tea baggers! I love the fact that apparently no one on the right thought to Google tea bagging before they pronounced themselves proud tea baggers. And what was the protest all about?

Paying too much in taxes.

It doesn’t exactly ring true when 95% of the people in this country are getting a decrease in taxes and the other 5% who are lucky enough to be among the wealthiest humans on the planet will get a 3% increase or what it was under Bill Clinton.

I saw some of the protests yesterday. I saw people with signs take public buses to public parks. I saw police officers directing traffic and doing security. I saw elected officials giving speeches trying to talk over work crews repairing public streets. In other words, all things taxes pay for. Now I know, no one likes the idea of taxes and I think the protest was more about the bail out of banks than anything else. Everyone hates the idea of handing billions of dollars to the people who screwed us all over but I also understand you can’t just let the entire system collapse before you do something about it. Do you know what you get if you do?

Pirates!

Why do you think Somalia has a pirate problem in the first place? They have no government, no public services and the means to collect taxes for those public services. So what did they turn to?

Piracy!

Pirates and tea bagging, folks. Sounds like a normal weekend in the Castro.

Tea bag all you want folks but the truth of the matter is Americans pay less in taxes than most of Europe. While we bitched about gas going up to five bucks a gallon last year, England was paying twelve bucks. Still are too. I also find it hysterical that most of the nut jobs on the right (FOX) defended the AIG bonuses. So I’m confused. The bail outs of the banks to maintain the level of society we have come to rely on was wrong but the million dollar bonuses paid with bail out money to the people who fucked the economy up was right?

You can’t have it both ways. You can’t keep screaming that Obama wants to change our way of life when our way of life was what got us all into this mess. You can’t be against the bail out but for executives getting their bonuses because, “that’s how capitalism works!”

I can’t think of a better example than this for why it might be time to take a very close and very long look at our finical system and change a few things.

Have you ever heard the term, Paradox of thrift? It’s the term given to this situation: As the economy goes down people start to save more and spend less. As they spend less, the economy goes down even more. What is good for the individual is bad for the system as a whole.

That’s crazy!

If we live inside a system where saving is bad for the system then the system might be the problem. Not people saving. The system we live in now depends upon it growing constantly. Our economy is like a shark. If it stops moving it dies.

That’s crazy too!

The only other model I can find that is similar to how our economy works is cancer. Cancer, you may know, is the sudden and unknown growth of cells in the body. Eventually, you die from it. And if you don’t die that means you survived one of the toughest treatments there is in medicine, chemotherapy.

I say it is time to apply chemotherapy to the economy. Don’t take my word on it. Check out this quote from a dude you may know.

Thomas Jefferson -"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."