A Wisconsin Thanksgiving and Other Crap
I have been MIA and I apologize. I owe you a blog post, but I am busy as hell and not feeling very funny. I am busy because, in my little corner of the world in fabulous in New York City, the global financial crisis has hit home. See, in the daylight, I am a fish in an incredible creative pond where wonderful imaginative creatures do fabulously inspired things. In about a month, the shit is going to hit the proverbial fan here. I can’t talk a lot about that, but it’s one of those movie-lot wind-generating turbo fans. And a lot of people are going to lose their jobs.
I’m not worried about losing my job. If I lose my job, I will post more regularly and dress less frequently. But a lot of good people I work with who have pink hair and nose rings and who smoke crack during their lunch breaks are going to lose their jobs, and then who the fuck will hire them?
So, this global financial crisis we’re in is on my mind a lot lately. And I’ve wanted to write about the global financial crisis, but it’s pretty fucking complicated. I mean differential equations complicated. So, instead, I will ramble about my Thanksgiving and Wisconsin.
See, a lot of people like me don’t think they are personally impacted by this whole financial mess. That’s because a lot of people like me don’t live in the real world. We live in this fantasy world where we wake up and say, “Where the fuck am I today? And who the fuck are these bitches?”
My Thanksgiving was spent with my mother at her house. Every Thanksgiving we share a feast, with a whole turkey and a whole ham and all the fixings, between just the two of us. Mum does not exactly live in the real world, either.
But I have always thought that she lived in the real world much less than I did, because I do things that are real that she does not. Like, I fuck and watch porn and snort cocaine and go to work at noon every day. My mom does not do those things, as far as I know. I have asked her and, though I never get a straight answer, I think that’s because the answer is “no, I do not fuck and watch porn and snort cocaine and go to work at noon every day.”
But I was wrong, as I found out this Thanksgiving. Not about the fucking maybe, but my mum lives more in the real world than I do. I discovered this because this year’s Thanksgiving revelation was that many of the friends I had as a child were, in fact, not imaginary at all. They were real people.
I have checked around since then and realized that many of my childhood friends were real people. In fact, I was an imaginary friend outcast.
So, I don’t really live in the real world. In fact, I am realizing more and more that the things that I do that I thought made my world real actually make it more unreal. For instance, a couple of years ago I took a trip to the Sonoran Desert to shoot at fruit. It was just for kicks and relaxation, you know? It’s a dude thing. I brought the guns and fruit with me in an SUV, along with some recreational drugs. You are probably wondering what could possibly be more real than using fancy guns in the stifling, dry heat just outside of Maricopa to shoot exotic fruit I personally imported while stoned out of my mind. I used to wonder the same thing. And I will tell you. Worrying about how you will buy crayons for kids and where your retirement money will come from.
That’s where Wisconsin comes in.
A couple of years ago, five Wisconsin school boards worried about how they would continue to pay for services to retired teachers amid escalating medical costs. A trusted St. Louis investment bank advised them that the best return on their money would come from something called a collateralized debt obligation, or CDO. Now, maybe you’ve heard a lot about credit-default swaps and CDOs. But just in case you haven’t, a credit-default swap is sort of like insurance. It’s a private contract where you pay a premium just like with insurance. The difference is that it is insurance for credit: if a loan goes into default, the insurer owes you money. You don’t need to have anything to do with the lender or borrower to buy a credit-default swap on their loan. We won’t talk about credit-default swaps at all because they bore me. They’re pretty easy to understand.
Let’s talk about the CDOs the Wisconsin School Boards bought instead. With a CDO, somebody starts a company that buys a credit portfolio. It buys debt or maybe debt derivatives. The company funds these purchases by selling equity in itself and selling bonds it must pay back. Under this scheme, if you invest in a CDO, you never own any of the underlying assets or debt. It already sounds complicated, right? Well, there is a thing called a synthetic CDO that is even more complicated. It creates CDOs from other CDOs. And it’s a complex way for corporations to move bad debt off their books. It is in synthetic CDOs that the Wisconsin School Board unwittingly invested.
I won’t go into any more detail about how a synthetic CDO works, but if you’re really interested in the mechanics of it all, here is a mathematical formula you can ponder that may help to explain it all.
Anyways, these five Wisconsin school boards were convinced by their investment banker that CDOs were a really safe investment with a great return. In a meeting with their investment banker, he told them that, in order to lose money on their investment, “There would need to be fifteen Enrons.” That’s a direct quote from their tape-recorded meeting. So, the school boards invested $35 million dollars and borrowed another $165 million from a Irish bank to buy three CDOs from the Royal Bank of Canada. CDOs are deliciously global and awfully fucking expensive.
So, here we are fifteen Enrons — Lehman Brothers, AIG, Bear Sterns, Citigroup, to name a few — later. The Irish bank they borrowed the money from — Depfa — was bailed out by the German government to the tune of $85 billion. And their synthetic CDOs are pretty much worthless.
So, to pay back their debt, the Wisconsin school boards need to take money from their budgets. That means cutbacks for teachers and retirees. And it means fewer books and fewer crayons for children. As one first-grade teacher put it, “what happens to my retirement? Or the construction paper and pencils and supplies we need to teach?”
Well, Mr. or Ms. First-Grade Teacher, please see the formula above.
That’s the real world.
Here is something you should expect by now: the dude who was head of the Irish bank that got into that financial mess and had to be bailed out for $85 billion, Gerhard Bruckermann, got $150 million when he left the bank. Does this remind you of AIG, where the CEO of the company when it posted record losses and had to be bailed out, Martin Sullivan, was paid $47 million after he was fired? He also got an office and an assistant until the end of this year. That’s not the real world.
But in the real world, many people like you and me will lose their jobs and their pensions and their homes. Probably not me personally, at least not right away. But a lot of people I work with everyday.
A little while ago, we fired one of the bigshots where I work. This dude really had it coming. He made one big mistake each and every month he was with us, and each of those mistakes was at least as disastrous that the mistakes I make daily. He had been making like half a mil a year. After he got fired, I talked to him and he told me that his severance package sucked and he was on the verge of losing his house. He told a lot of people that. And I was discussing this with one of the pink-haired, chronically pierced women with whom I work and this is what she said.
Maybe you find it hard to feel sorry for Lehman Brothers or AIG or Citigroup. Maybe you think it’s wrong to bail those companies out. But let’s look at how a world financial collapse occurs. Credit-default swaps are a wonderful thing. Let’s say you have a business and you need to expand, but your credit is not so great. You had a rough year last year but, this year, your biggest competitor went out of business so business is booming. Still, your credit sucks and banks aren’t sure they want to lend you money. The answer is a credit-default swap: credit insurance. The bank will lend you money but buy a credit-default swap. You’ll pay a little more for the credit because the bank needs to pay for the swap. But your business can expand now, keeping the economy healthy and creating jobs. Everyone is happy and buying coke and whores. Lube flows like tap water.
Then the economy goes sour. It’s actually been going south for much of President Bush’s tenure in office, but he and Congress don’t do shit about it. Finally, the real estate market tanks and businesses start to default on their loans. Now, all those credit-default swaps are coming due. Just like any insurance business, the credit-default swap business plays the law of averages. But when an economic bubble just bursts as happened in real estate, a lot of swaps are all of a sudden due at the same time. This is what pushes Lehman Brothers into bankruptcy. The government does nothing to help Lehman and, in fact, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has stated that a bailout of Lehman was never an option. But when Lehman files for bankruptcy, the global credit markets freeze. That’s because, all of a sudden, a lot of debt is uninsured and creditors are afraid to extend themselves any further. When the credit markets choke, businesses can’t buy inventory or finish projects and acquisitions to which they are already committed, leading to more defaults. This is what pushes AIG to the verge of bankruptcy. Then, because it is one of the few ways of raising capital left, variable-rate bond interest shoots through the roof, pushing more businesses into insolvency. There was a domino effect. There is already lots of evidence that a different sort of global domino effect will occur if we don’t bail out the US automakers. And we haven’t even talked about how many whores are now walking the streets with nothing to do.
Maybe you still don’t feel bad. Maybe you still think that AIG and other businesses should have been better prepared. AIG should have guessed years before that, if Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, the credit market would implode like a house of cards and AIG would be in serious trouble. Well, maybe. But AIG had 116,000 employees when the grips rolled out an industrial-strength fan and started throwing shit at it. The group that caused all of this trouble — the group responsible for AIG’s entire credit derivatives business and all of AIG’s heartache — always had fewer than 400 people. It’s true that the average salary of everyone in that tiny unit was more than a million bucks. So maybe you think that 116,000 people should lose their jobs and their health care and their pensions and not be able to buy crayons for their kids because 400 millionaires fucked up. If so, you will love the global depression that will occur if we don’t bail out these companies. There’s no guarantee that it’s not coming anyway. And those millionaires will still be able to buy all the porn and cake they want.
I could tell exactly the same story about Citibank. One tiny unit lost all of Citibank’s money. Pivotal in this collapse of Citibank was Robert E. Rubin. Rubin had been Treasury Secretary under Clinton, when he oversaw the removal of depression-era regulations that prevented banks from entering certain risky businesses. After Clinton, he went to Citibank and blessed their riskiest investments. Now, he’s on President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team as an economic advisor. So, he still has a job. Everyone is not so lucky. All of Citibank’s roughly 370,000 employees reaped the rewards of a boom in the financial markets, including the credit market with all its complicated derivatives. But in 2008, Citibank has shed about 70,000 of those 370,000 jobs. Most of those 70,000 people did not know what a credit-default swap or a CDO was before reading this post today. And now they can’t buy their kids construction paper or pencils. If they weren’t living in the real world, they are now. But if those people weren’t living in the real world, none of us were.
And maybe that’s the problem. Maybe it’s not fair to blame place all the blame on the backs of a few thousand millionaires for a delusion we all shared. We all snorted lots and lots of coke and fucked two different whores everyday and bought only the fanciest cake to go with the nastiest porn. Or something like that, right?
Oh, that reminds me: I never told you about all that I was thankful for this Thanksgiving. I have plenty for which to be thankful. The irony of this entire post is that, on January 20, 2009, this country will inaugurate a president I hope will do something about this stinking mess, in spite of Robert Rubin’s presence on the transition team. That’s about a month away, too.
So, even though the inauguration will happen too late to save a lot of people from a shitstorm of grief, one of the many things I am thankful for is that we do not have this to look forward to for the next eight years.
By the way, I wasn’t kidding about waking up and wondering where the fuck I am. After two weeks of traveling, I woke up this morning and wasn’t sure where in the world my sorry ass had landed. My bedroom was cold and foreign. It was raining outside so it was mostly dark, but some mucky light still pulsed into the room through cracks in the blinds. I could tell you stories about the last two weeks, about women with thigh-highs the color of coffee ice cream and others with eyelids that sparkled like bubblegum. About meetings and meetings and meatings. But I won’t. I will tell you that, after a few minutes of laying there, I realized that a passing siren had awakened me but I still didn’t know where I was or who I was. And I imagine now that this feeling is a lot like what all of you experience when you read a blog by some anonymous dude you know nothing about besides the fact that he likes cake and porn an awful lot and is sadly without as many imaginary friends as he had once imagined he had.
I wish I could help you out here, but I can’t save you. Sorry.
I am still working on my epic project for this blog. It truly is epic but it’s also not even half done. In part, that’s because I had an epiphany about it and restarted the whole thing from scratch after Thanksgiving. It’s also in part because I have just not had much time to work on the bajillion images. But hang tight. It’s coming.
In closing, I have spent a lot of time in airplanes lately, and I would like to address the final section of this blog to a special woman.
To the woman in seat 4D of Virgin Atlantic flight VS007 on December 2nd: I was the dude seated in 3A. We made eye contact a couple of times before takeoff and you smiled shyly. Many passengers were angry with you after you had some kind of crazy, very dramatic seizure right after we got into the air because we then had to turn around. We were delayed for hours after that. Others felt sorry for you. I felt neither anger nor pity. In fact, I found the whole thing very sexy. If you flop around and bite and snort and drool and tremble like that every time you have a seizure, I think we could have a really good time together. And I couldn’t help but notice that your skirt was soaking wet afterward. Because you were kind of out of it, I did not get your number. Please contact me if you read this.
To the flight crew on that same Virgin Atlantic flight: I am not really a doctor.
That’s all I have to say about all of that.
I will try to post every week or so, but I won’t make promises I can’t keep. Not because I’m opposed to that or anything. I just don’t feel like it right now.
Holy Shit! We Did It!
It’s hard for me to be very proud of the American people.
I know, that’s harsh, but let’s face it: a lot of Americans are morons.
You Canadians are nodding your heads right now.
In America today, 5% of voters believe they have actually, personally spoken with Satan. Seriously. Another 7% believe that Elvis is alive. A whopping 20% of American adults believe that the sun orbits around the earth. No fucking kidding.
And, really, that’s just the beginning. I could go on. We live in a genuinely stupid nation. The truly frightening part of it is that so many of these functional retards can be such mean-spirited fuckheads. I guess that makes sense. Members of lynch mobs have never made a name for themselves as the intellectual giants of the world.
Still, this country’s people can surprise you, as they did during World War II, as some did during the Civil Rights Era, and as some did again when they bought that Christmas CD that was supposed to feed starving kids somewhere or something. Or, you know, when people click on that animal rescue site.
America can make you proud. It can mobilize and do the right thing. It never wholly does the right thing but, like I said, America’s also got its fair share of despicable, dim-witted douchepuppets who have gripping conversations with Satan while keeping an eye out for the King.
Anyways, what I’m getting at is that, every now and then, this country can make you proud. Yesterday was such an occasion. Barack Obama was elected president after winning pretty much twice as many electoral votes as McCain. The popular vote wasn’t nearly as lopsided, but President-Elect Obama won soundly and will become the 44th President of the United States on January 20, 2009.
I’m choked up. Seriously. I caught a really bad cold last weekend and I haven’t been able to shake it yet. But I am also feeling very emotional. Right now, I wouldn’t want to live in any other country in the world, except maybe for very short periods lasting no longer than a few months and even then only if those nations’ police accept bribes as easily as American police.
So, what I’m saying is, thank you. Thank you, America.
This was an especially polarizing election. Now it’s time for us to come together as a nation, mend our differences, and fix what ails this country, even if it means dealing with those inbred imbeciles who live in trailer parks, watch four hours of Fox News every day, and have every reason to pray for an afterlife in Alabama and elsewhere in America’s unfinished basement.
Oh, I especially want to thank North Carolina, the only state with a compass direction in its name that Obama won. Fuck all the rest of you “South this” and “North that” states.
Also, thank you Massachusetts. You have restored my faith in states with two S’s in a row. The rest of you two S states can eat my shit.
Thank you again. Now let’s roll up our sleeves and work together because, in spite of how many loathsome fucktards there are in this country, yes, we can.
President Sarah Palin
I wrote a really long post about John McCain and Sarah Palin, but I’m not going to post it. I will be posting that in bits and pieces because it was way too fucking long to post in one sitting. A lot of the post has to do with Bristol Palin because I am in a really good position to write about fundamentalist redneck teens fucking and making new fundamentalist rednecks.
In this post, I will only cover the basics and not really go into Slutpuppy Bristol and her Redneck Baby Daddy.
On August 29, 2008, John McCain picked Sarah Palin to be his running mate in the race for president. Sarah Palin has been governor of Alaska for two years and, before that, was perhaps the worst mayor the tiny town of Wasilla had ever had. She was almost recalled as mayor but lasted until she ran for governor. When she became mayor, Wasilla had a budget of $3.9 million and zero debt. Sarah Palin, whom McCain calls a reformer, fiscal conservative, and “tough minded budget cutter,” left the tiny town six years later with a $5.8 million dollar budget and $20 million in debt—about $3,000 per resident—in spite of getting about $27 million in earmarks with the help of a hired Washington lobbyist. So, she’s a tough-minded budget cutter and fiscal conservative just like George W. Bush has been!
As for her being a reformer, well, yeah, as mayor of Wasilla she did fire the town librarian after asking the librarian to censor library books. At the same time, she fired the sheriff because he had supported her rival in the preceding election. And then there is TrooperGate. See, Sarah Palin’s sister had a pretty nasty divorce and her husband was a state trooper. So, naturally, as soon as she became governor, Palin told the top law enforcement official in the state, the Safety Commissioner, to fire her ex-brother-in-law. He refused, so Palin fired the Safety Commissioner instead.
In that investigation, Palin is refusing to turn over 1,100 emails, citing the Deliberative Process and Executive Privilege. Now, many of these emails can’t have anything at all to do with governing Alaska. For instance, a series of the emails have the subject heading “re Andrew Halcro.” Andrew Halcro is a blogger who ran against Palin as an independent in the 2006 governor’s race and his blog has since been pretty critical of Palin. What could emails about him have to do with governing Alaska? Before you come up with some excuse, Todd Palin is copied on a lot of these “privileged” emails. Here is a page from the privilege log. Todd Palin, Sarah’s husband, is not an elected official. He works for BP, the oil company. So, how can emails he is copied on ever be privileged? They can’t. But Palin only needs to keep them secret for two more months. Does Sarah Palin sound more and more like Dick Cheney to you?
The big problem is that, from an actuarial perspective, Sarah Palin is very likely to become president if McCain is elected president. First, McCain is 72 years old, so it’s anybody’s guess whether he will even survive until November. And he has survived multiple bouts with cancer in those 72 years. But let’s face it: it’s a miracle that McCain has survived this long, because we all know that government-controlled healthcare doesn’t work.
See, for all of McCain’s 72 years, McCain has had government-controlled health care. His father was an admiral so, as a child until he went to Vietnam, he had government-controlled health care. Then during Vietnam, he obviously had government-run healthcare. After Vietnam, he had veterans’ benefits when they still provided adequate health care. Then, once he became a congressman, he became entitled to the congressional health care package, which is, of course, run entirely by the government. And neither he nor his millionaire wife has ever complained about their “government-run health care system where a bureaucrat stands between you and your doctor,” but that doesn’t mean he isn’t right on the money. Why else would he so vehemently oppose giving you the same benefit he has enjoyed his entire life? McCain must know he is on the verge of death thanks to 72 years of government-run healthcare with a bureaucrat standing between him and his doctor.
So, before you vote for McCain, it’s a good thing to try to envision what a Palin presidency would look like. Unfortunately, besides the information I’ve already talked about, we don’t have much to go on. Well, there are the statements that both McCain and Palin have made but, as Paul Krugman of the New York Times said, “I can’t think of any precedent, at least in America, for the blizzard of lies since the Republican convention…. [T]he McCain campaign keeps making assertions that anyone with an Internet connection can disprove in a minute, and repeating these assertions over and over again.” We can’t trust a lot of what they say because, really, they have lied and lied and lied.
But we do know that Palin is a fundamentalist Christian who, like many fundamentalist Christians, is fine with telling demonstrable falsehoods. She believes “in a literal translation of the Bible.” That is, the bible is all true. That shit really happened exactly as it’s written.
So, I think Sarah Palin might have some radical ideas about how we should run this country. For instance, when it comes to national defense.
Palin also might be just the person to innovate when it comes to both social and environmental issues.
Palin also has an interesting take on global warming.
Since it looks like McCain stands a good chance of winning because the American people love lies almost as much as they love war, we should get to see soon enough how Palin governs as president.
That’s not all I have to say about Palin but that’s all I’ll say about her right now.
Coming soon, Mister Shorts. And even before that, my very first contest ever: the Nude MILF Contest! Check back, because I’ll be giving away some serious prizes worth more than $500! No shit!
My Brand New Computer
So, I spent a week building a computer from parts. My old computer just stopped working right so I bought, first, a screaming new graphics card and, second, a more powerful power supply to fuel the screaming graphics card. That didn’t help, so I said, “Fuck it. I’ll buy a motherboard, a microprocessor, some RAM, and assorted other expensive shit to make a brand new computer.” I was drunk when I said that.
And then I spent a whole week putting it together. A. Whole. Week! I did not go out to eat for that week. I did not go to any clubs or get laid for that week. I did watch some TV, but mostly out of frustration. Every day after work I would come home to the $2,000+ brick sitting on my desk in pieces. Then I would spend all night trying to get the fucking computer running by applying the new shit I had learned from the internet at my job while I had been pretending to work and to be a Good Noodle. Yes, I drank during this time, but it was not pleasant drinking. It was why-the-fuck-isn’t-this-piece-of-shit-working? drinking. And I also engaged in many of the other mind-altering activities I frequently undertake—among many others, these include drinking coffee, eating cake, and watching Sunday morning television. These did not help either.
It turned out finally that the motherboard was not sending enough power to the memory chips. Maybe that sounds like an easy thing to discover to you, but it took me a whole fucking week. While I readily admit that I am stoopider than you are, that does not mean that I have a week of my life to spare on shit like this without getting laid or, at least, a blowjob. I am getting old too quickly to waste a week of my life.
Here is how old I am getting: the other day, I went to the supermarket to buy sugar. Usually I do not buy sugar or anything else from the supermarket. I had not been to a supermarket in about a year. I go to bodegas to buy everything I really need, like toilet tissue. But hell, in a pinch I will wipe my ass with ATM receipts.
I go to Starbucks everyday to get coffee while I am at work, so why the fuck would I need sugar? Yes, I do make coffee every morning, but I steal Splenda from Starbucks for my morning coffee. Now, holed up in my fucking study putting together my goddamn computer, I could not go to Starbucks. I had to make coffee so I could stay up all night and work on the computer. So I ran out of stolen Splenda. And Splenda is too goddamn expensive for me to buy when I can just steal it for free, so I had to go out and buy some sugar to get me through a week or more of putting a computer together.
Now I know I live in the middle of the glorious island of Manhattan in New York City where everything is expensive. For instance, on Tuesday cigarettes went up to $9.00 a pack here. I am convinced that New York City wants for me to smoke more weed. I mean, think about it: many people who work at shitty mcjobs — like many jobs that I have had in the past, but that is a topic for a different entry — do not earn enough money during an hour of the precious time they have on this planet to buy a fucking pack of cigarettes! That’s an hour of their life gone, and they do not even make enough to buy fucking cigarettes in New York City.
But, still, at my local supermarket, the fucking sugar was six bucks for a five-pound bag. And that was only because it was on sale. It was regularly $7.50. $7.50! That just pissed me off.
That is the first sign that I am getting old. In my age-addled brain, I said to myself, “When I was a kid, you could buy twenty pounds of freshly ground sugar for a dime and there was a toy inside every bag!” See, when you think that the price of any food item is so fucking outrageous that it makes you angry, you are getting too fucking old.
The second sign that I am getting old: I was so pissed about the price that, for a moment, I actually considered complaining about the price of the fucking sugar. You are old when you will complain to someone about the price of food.
So I just bought the sugar without complaining. But from now on I am going to steal Splenda and sugar from Starbucks.
I wish I could have just stolen my computer.
Once I figured that shit out about the power to the memory, Windows Vista 64 installed just fine and the system is fucking screaming! Screaming! It is much faster than any prebuilt name-brand system I could have stolen.
That’s really all I have to say about my new computer.
Alabama Needs Dildos
I have discussed the ban on the sale of sex toys in Alabama before. I want Alabama to repeal this law. In September of 2007, a bill that would have repealed the ban on sex toys was killed in Alabama’s House of Representatives. The good news is that, at the same session, the Alabama House of Representatives also killed a bill, called the Alabama Academic Freedom Act, that would have made it okay for teachers in Alabama schools to teach children that Jesus served dinosaur steaks at the last supper.
In fairness, I should mention that, until very recently, Texas and Mississippi had also banned sales of sex toys. In February of this year, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the Texas law. Since Mississippi is also in the 5th Circuit, that decision renders the ban in Mississippi essentially unenforceable (though it is still on the books).
That leaves Alabama. Alabama, in the 11th Federal Circuit, is unaffected by decisions in the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Alabama is, of course, otherwise a thoroughly modern state. It even repealed its law against interracial marriages in 2000. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, only 42% of Alabama citizens voted against allowing white people to marry black people. How fucking progressive.
A little more than a year ago, the 11th Circuit, Alabama’s Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, found that a ban against sex toys was perfectly fine as far as the United States Constitution is concerned because “there was no ... right to sexual privacy” and “concerns over public morality” are a legitimate basis for any law. In the spirit of romance, they filed this opinion on Valentine’s Day, 2007.
Also about a year ago, the same 11th Circuit Court of Appeals found that mental retardation is not a disability. They wrote, “It is unclear whether thinking, communicating and social interaction are ‘major life activities….’” This explains a lot.
Anyway, I am not here to rag on Alabama. I want to celebrate Alabama. For your benefit, Alabama, I am here to show you that, with your silly ban on sex toys, you are missing out. There are sex toys out there that would especially appeal to the people of your fine state. This is really just a random sample of a few of my favorites, but it will convince you to repeal your ban on sex toys.
You have seen blow-up dolls, Alabama. You obviously don’t really think blow-up dolls are all that special or you would be screaming about this whole sex-toy ban. I can’t imagine why you don’t find blow-up dolls as attractive as the rest of the country.
But Alabama is also the third fattest state in the nation, narrowly (or not so narrowly) behind Mississippi’s and West Virginia’s fat asses. So, Alabama, have you seen this?
Come on. You know you want one.
Also, Alabama has the second highest rate of uninsured motorists in the nation. A whopping twenty-five percent — yes, 25% — of drivers on the road in Alabama are uninsured. (Again, Alabama was beat narrowly only by Mississippi.) And most of those uninsured motorists are fat.
Uninsured motorists are responsible for a disproportionate number of accidents that result in serious, life-changing injury. As a result, there are probably more than a few people in Alabama (and Mississippi) who look like this sex toy.
Sexy, huh? It’s like it was made with your state in mind.
Finally, as the 11th Circuit stated, Alabama passed this silly sex-toy ban because it is concerned with public morality. I suggest that, if that is truly Alabama’s concern, it could pass a law instead that says people shouldn’t play with their sex toys in public.
I suspect that there is also a religious motivation. Alabama is squarely in the bible belt with the bible belt’s higher-than-the-national-average rates of divorce, crime, alcoholism, and domestic violence. In addition, Alabama is the home of ex-Judge Roy Moore. Roy Moore was the Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court who refused to remove the ten commandments from the state courthouse in 2003. As a result, he had to be forcibly removed from his post as Chief Justice: he was violating the law by ignoring federal courts. While Alabama is concerned with public morality when it comes to sex toys, it stands steadfastly behind a Chief Justice of its Supreme Court who publicly defies the law.
Sex toys can offer Alabama the best of both worlds without any hypocrisy. Alabama can enjoy sex toys and religion in private. And sex toys can enhance the religious experience.
First, we have Baby Jesus buttplugs, which I have discussed in the past. The same company that makes the Baby Jesus buttplugs, Divine Interventions, also makes Moses dildos. If you buy both you can use them in the privacy of your own home or even under the cloak of your judicial robes, enjoying the old and the new testaments in ways you never before dreamed. You can bring Moses with you to the courthouse every day parting your sphincter just as he parted the Red Sea. How is that for sticking it to the Constitution and its Separation of Church and State?
So, come on Alabama. Get with the program. Sex toys are okay and you know it. Stop giving people reasons to write blogs about you.
You know, re-reading this entry, I think maybe I should write something about Mississippi some time.