Chubby Nickel Audio Vlog

So, gas is getting expensive. more than even in the 80s. we’ve never seen gas prices this high and through all the pissing and moaning we still buy it… because we “need” it. well let me put it this way — people for thousands of years lived without it why not us?

We’re addicts, could you imagine the jones’ that some people would get for their corvette? if i asked you to give up your ‘08 ford mustang gt500 you’d just laugh at me. I don’t blame you but here’s the thing, we need competition, we need some other energy source that’s NOT being used by giant oil companies. Like Solar or Hydrogen so that gas isn’t monopolizing our energy needs.

Here’s something you can do, get a scooter that gets like 100 mpg, or a smartcar around 50mpg. or ride a bike to work (you could use the exercise  probably anyway).

Until we start DEMANDING it we’re not going to get it, so if you don’t like it, then sell your dodge ram 2 ton truck that guzzles about 15 gallons to the mile and trade it in for (not a hybrid those don’t get much better than normal cars) a scooter or a bycicle.

People… our dealer is jumping up the prices, so i say we quit our addiction ( i know it’s painful) and use something else that has the possibility of costing much much less.

I get a magazine from my employer, the USPS, and from my union, the NALC (national association of letter carriers). And both are trying to persuade me to vote for one person or the other. Am I a sheep? are we all sheep too dumb to listen to what we ourselves want? Do you really know so little or care so little to not know who you want running the country you live in? Is this country so stuck on listening to the news that we don’t even read between the lines and we just listen to everything media men and women tell us? If the people in this country don’t wise up then we’re doomed. Just doomed, we’ve got an arrogance that is pungent enough to sour milk in the far east. We may think we’re the best right now but look to history (yes that subject that you slept through in school) to see that the biggest empires ever are taken over and some completely disappear within a relatively short time. Have you lost your self esteem? do you need someone else to tell you that this person is better than the other?

This world is in an information age, everything you could ever care to know about anything worth knowing can be found on the internet so long as you know how to use the magic Google. Some people still don’t know how to use a computer… yeah, thats scary right? But it’s not that all of them are dumb (though some are) they just don’t care to learn and would rather have someone do it for them. just like researching presidential candidates.

But hey as long as we get a rebate check in the mail we forget that we’re being unfairly taxed, and will continue to be until we fix the federal budget to something more realistic (stop making up new money Mr. Bernanke! otherwise it might as well be monopoly money) . We’re going to be paying for the war in Iraq for years (or possibly decades if J.”Sharpshooter” McCain gets the office).

In closing, can we afford another president who likes war? who wants to put the middle and lower class down? who says it’s impossible to get out of a war that he walked right into casual as strolling through the park? we’ve lost more American men and women than we lost in the world trades. So instead of getting even it sounds like we played double or nothing, and lost.

Are we going to let this go on, are we that dumb?

Why is not why, because is why. had why been because then there wouldn’t be a question about it. but there is a question, why? and it is because I ask this that I am posting this answer. So the cause may never become the question, had questions been the cause then we’d be the inquisition right? Or at least we’d be inquisitive, but the inquiries’ will rarely lead to the crazy Spanish inquisition level.  At least i hope not, but if they did I’d sure as hell be asking why.

Make sense?

We all see elitism around us; at work, on the road, in our neighborhoods and in our own government. Like other things, elitism is just a word. This idea that people have, to hate words and not meanings, is my greatest irritation. So what is elitism and what are its good and bad points? Well this post will be short so it will not be covering everything, just the big points.

Elitism is when a few people have more power than the majority. Basically, that is it. The idea is that people with an extraordinary attribute (intelligence, wealth, physical prowess, special training, etc.), have opinions about the society as a whole that should hold more weight than the society’s ideas.

So what is good about elitism? Well we all have felt that there are a lot of idiots in the world and would like them to stay away from making policies. If the majority tries to decide something by a majority vote, then it still leaves out the minority. So the difference is kind of small. Elitism makes things easy for the mass population by allowing some one else to make their decisions for them.

Elitism saves time and effort at the cost of relinquishing control over to a few people that might know what is best for the society. They may not know, but instead decide what is better for themselves and not care about the society, but that is leading into my next point.

My biggest issue with elitism is its natural ability to try and make every one the same as the elitists, but without the power. Every one is supposed have the same “moral compass,” attitude and practices as the elitists want them to have. This is destructive to the progress of humanity. What if the elitists are only in the position of control just because they have money. As far as I know, having money doesn’t make some one more responsible (Paris Hilton, Enron, M.C. Hammer, etc…) or wiser. It just means they have more money, they could be one of the idiots we don’t want making decisions for us.

Sure, most of the elitists want to help humanity, but their actions hinder it. Several of humanities greatest achievements came from people who opposed the elitists, whose ideas conflicted with the elitists ideas. Socrates was put to death for his ideas that opposed his government, but his ideas still moved forward to help out humanity. So why do the select few feel that they are helping humanity by trying to stop progress? Because they feel they are the parents of society and the society should just do what they say because they said so.

The illusion that elitism works is this: the leader says they need something done. The workers work their asses off and get it done while the leader sits and watches to make sure no one stops working. The work gets done and the leader gets credit because he is the leader. If the work doesn’t get done the workers get blamed and leader moves on. So the leader is in a safe position to take the credit for good work and avoid the credit of bad work. So the illusion is that the leader never does anything wrong, only the workers do.

When you have time, you waste it. When you don’t… well you still waste it. A lot of us have lots of time, some like me, don’t have any time. I still waste time, some of the ways I waste time is thinking about stuff that is not very important. Like time. What is time, and why is it so important?

In ancient Egypt they had 2 hour days, from sun up to noon was one hour and from noon to sundown was the second hour. This apparently was not useful enough so humans divided the day into 4 hours, then 6 then 12 hours. Well what about night? I believe the romans had the first division of of night into 4 watches. With time technology advancing (very slowly, but still advancing) they found ways to make measurements more standard than the sun, so an hour in the summer was equal to an hour in the winter. Eventually we (humanity) decided on 24 hours for one day, then 60 minutes in one hour… still not good enough though so we divided minutes into 60 seconds. As if we haven’t gone far enough we said “what the hell, why not divide a second into thousandths?” So we did. So time is not some that has any meaning any more, it is just something humans made up to standardize time measurements.

What we decided to divide time into still doesn’t explain what time is. What time is, is your life wasting away. Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades… they all are just little ticks like in a ruler, tracking how much time has passed since something and how long until something starts/ends. I know it seems like I am a little depressed, but this is my week: I start with 168 hours like every one else, job one takes about 55 of those hours, job two takes about 20 hours, job three takes pretty much all my free time at about 30 hours, driving and grocery shopping take another 20 hours a week and then I sleep about 32 hours of my week. So I have 11 hours of free time for myself, but instead, about 8 hours of it is spent cleaning my home and helping my wife. 3 hours of personal free time. Not much and I try to spend it making my cheesy little web pages and posting to this blog and trying to write and draw comics.

So now let me try to explain why time is important. From an outside perspective, people need time for themselves to have what little bit of freedom they have left after all their responsibilities. Don’t lie to yourself and try to be unselfish, you need this time to yourself just like you need time with other people. You need to have a decent block of time where no one asks you to do anything and you don’t have to do anything or else you will eventually blow up however it is that your personality type blows up.

I don’t have a degree in psychology and have no studies to site. So disagree all you want on the grounds that I am not a professional in this area, I won’t mind… I won’t even care.

Before I begin, let me site that I have no research and no professional opinion. This is just me and my experiences.

Stress is good for you… but like everything else it is also bad for you. First I will describe what I believe stress is: Stress is your mind and body trying to adjust to abnormal, strenuous or extreme situations. Now this can be good for you in doses, but the long runs will be bad for you.

Think of stressful situations like working out. Working out is when you do strenuous physical activities to make your muscles stronger and to give yourself more stamina. If you work out all day long for weeks with no breaks, your muscles will tear. If you give yourself a break from working out, then your muscles get a chance to heal and build up stronger than they were before. So giving yourself a break from working out will make you more efficient at physical activities while constantly working out will keep you at the same level or make you worse off.

This is the same for mental stress. Eight hours a day of stress is fine, but you need to have time to let your brain heal so that it can adapt and become stronger than it was before. Pushing yourself to make yourself better is good, but pushing all the time is a recipe for wearing yourself down.

You don’t like my thoughts on this? Then deal. I might wish that I could care, but I don’t.

I am tired of all you weenies that hate other people so much you want them to be like you. Who wants to be like you? Your insecure, boring and hateful. Not some one I want to be, so back off. Leave me alone and deal with people’s differences.

Being politically correct is like trying to live life inside of “Leave it to Beaver,” sure it looks like its a nice place to live and there is no crime, but it is boring. Where are the ideas that changed the world? No where, because every one was where they were supposed to be (at least according to the times back then). If life continued with it being socially acceptable for whites and blacks to be treated as separate, women only allowed to be home makers, secretaries, prostitutes or nurses and every one wanting that same damned thing out of life, then this world would be stale and dead.

People are different, and that is what makes humanity strong. Trying to make every one the same by limiting speech, where people work, how they live or anything else is what makes humanity weak. The people that caused the greatest good in our history on this rock, were people that produced change. The people that produced the greatest evils in this world were people that tried to make every one the same.

I know this is cliché, but here it is any way: Hitler and his cronies thought that every one should be the “perfect” race, and that every one different should die, be slaves or both. Christians for centuries murdered, tortured and destroyed cultures because they believed something different than they believed. The KKK and other racist groups think that Africans, Jews, Mexicans, Orientals or just any one different than them should just “go back to where they came from,” or back to where they were violently abducted from.

I can’t think of one example where people wanted other people to be like them that was good. So here it is: being different is good, trying to make other people like you is bad. That is it. Pretty simple, but the reasoning behind it is pretty complex. If every one were the same, then there would be no new revolutionary ideas. That is bad. Because every one is different, then we do have revolutionary ideas that help out every one. That is good.

That is my opinion, deal with it.