After the Apocalypse, there will be cake.

Christian conservatives are way, way better with metaphors than you ever thought they were. Either that or they're totally insane. I'll warn you right from the start, this post is written entirely from an outsider's perspective, about a phenomenon that has never made much sense to me, not even when I was growing up in a conservative Christian church myself. I am describing something that seems profoundly weird to me, about how Christian conservatives look at Jesus, and hope for his Second Coming.

When outsiders think of Christian conservatives, they generally picture a bunch of angry haters, scary nutballs like the mother in Carrie, who like nothing better than to envision the day when Jesus is going to return and start kicking some serious ass on all the nonbelievers and sinners in the world.

Corporations don't give a sh**, and the government slacks off before the job's done: A short history of America's public safety laws

America's history for the past 150 or years or so, can be summarized with the words "growing urbanization". More and more of the population started living closer and closer together; fewer and fewer people were living the Little House on the Prairie lifestyle of growing your own food, and building your own house, and relying only on yourself and a couple of close neighbors. In other words, people were starting to have to rely on the kindness of strangers. When I say "strangers", I mean Armour Meatpacking (made famous in the 1890's, when they sold the Army 500,000 pounds of beef, that had had already been returned as inedible, when they tried to sell them in England), and Dr. R.V. Pierce (who sold patent medicines that were mostly opiates and lead, for disorders ranging from ovarian tumors to masturbation), and by "kindness", I mean that aside from a few state laws regulating local products, and a regulation against impure tea, there were no laws in this country to restrict companies from selling whatever they wanted, and calling it whatever they wanted.

Ten Strikes You're Out

   Little Jimmy is going away for a long time. Five years to be precise. Why? He linked to a Youtube video that streamed copyrighted content. When the media companies found out about this and the fact that it had received 15 views they wanted Jimmy's head. Poor little Jimmy. He was only ten when they sent him away to prison. He's going to have a hard time there.
   Do you want this to happen to your child? Do you want this to happen to you? It might. Senator Amy Klobuchar has recently proposed a new "ten strikes" bill that adds public performance to copyright laws. Seems harmless enough right? Movies have been warning against that kind of thing for years when they say not to host public performances of the movie. Right? Right? Wrong! Public performance is defined loosely enough that Youtube could be considered public performance. If your sweet little girl decides that she wants to sing along to her favorite Glee song and post it Youtube, she might just be shoved in a jail cell for the next five years. Nice. If she's lucky she'll only be raped repeatedly and not killed. That's outrageous. The bill has not been voted on yet and you better hope that it doesn't get passed.
Demand Progress
Check out Demand Progress' extensive coverage of the new bill and make sure that you send a letter to your congress man. Otherwise you might end up in a prison for nothing more than lip-syncing to your favorite Lady Gaga song. Oh and get this, you get a longer jail cell for breaking the copyright laws then you do for molesting a child. If I had to choose a crime, I think I'd hump a kid before I posted a lip-sync. Lord knows I want to get out of prison sooner.





HyperSmash

Fat Clothes

I've talked before about how my mom made me go to Diet Watchers meetings (not Weight Watchers, Diet Watchers; I think the copyright police caught up with them shortly after my mom and I reached goal weight). I went. And I quite enjoyed the meetings, which were led by a nice Jewish grandmother with a sense of humor, who wore embroidered bell-bottoms and tight tops, to show off her slim figure.  I wanted to be just like her when I grew up.

Who I didn't want to be like, was all the other ones: Flabby middle-aged ladies, like Divine without the attitude, they wore short-sleeved muumuus, and their upper arm flab used to hang out from the sleeves and wave around whenever they moved their hands. I was scarred for life by those ladies. I didn't want to be fat like them. And I didn't want to own a muumuu.

And I wasn't fat. In fact I weighed practically the same thing, from the time I was 14 to the time I was 20: 155 pounds, of which most of it was muscle, because I used to walk everywhere, miles and miles, and for hours and hours, however far I needed to go, to get where I was going. I used to drop about 10 pounds every year or so, when my mom's guilting started to get to me, and then put it back on again as soon as I started eating normally again. I lived in a perpetual state of tight waistbands, and was constantly cycling blouses in and out of my wardrobe, depending on if I could get the buttons to close down the front or not. -- I had this one size twelve red print dress that I never wore, because I could never get down to wearing a size twelve for long enough, and it finally went out of style at the back of my wardrobe. -- Here's me when I was 18:

I remember being very impressed with the fluffy blue thing they made us wear for the picture, because I didn't have to worry about whether it would fit over my ass.  I never got so fat that I had to shop in the fat ladies' section at the department store though. And I never visited a Lane Bryant.