Anders Jacobson: George Carlin- On Some Cultural Issues

Source: Anders Jacobson– George Carlin in 1996 

Source: The New Democrat

I like George Carlin’s point about motivation because it would be one thing if you had someone advising to do the right thing because of these reasons and they know what they’re talking about because they work in that field and you’re a narcissistic, egotistical, arrogant asshole, who believes the planet evolves around you and you’re so damn smart you see things in the future that no one else does. ( Take Donald Trump to use as one example )

Source: I Am Awake– The Great George Carlin 

And let’s say you’re being sued or are under criminal investigation and your lawyer is telling you, “you know what Joe, I really don’t think it would be a good idea if you testify and go under oath. Sometimes I’m not sure if you’re telling me the truth and I’m your damn lawyer, for God sake! Hell, I’m not even sure if you’re being honest with me.” And your lawyer motivates you to do the right thing and not take the stand. But it’s another thing if you’re a pro athlete lets say and you’re in a big game perhaps even playing for the championship and you know exactly what the consequences are if your team wins lose. Someone in that position will either play their best game or play very well or not. It depends if they’re good enough to win the game or not and how badly they want to win that game.

As far as religion

I’m an Agnostic, so don’t even think about thinking that you can blame me for either the religious fundamentalism in America from the Christian-Right or Islamic fundamentalism from the Middle East and other places around the world, because I’m Agnostic and I simply don’t give a damn about religion.

As a Liberal I believe free choice, free will, free speech, free thinking, individuality, individualism, personal responsibility, the opposites of what even a moderate or social democratic religion would believe in, because religion almost by definition is very collectivist. “This is what’s right and wrong, this is how you should live your life, and this is what you should believe.” I’m just not down with that ( to use a 1990s expression ) and my idea of morality is about how people treat each other, not about how people treat themselves and live their own personal lives. Those are my moral values which is about treating people the way you want them to treat you.

Stupidity

I just wish this George Carlin performance was ten years later instead of coming out in 1996 and we could see what Carlin thinks about our reality TV and celebrity culture, well culture and seeing reality TV and celebrity culture not just dominate American culture, but now have invaded our politics and government. I believe a lot of stupidity in America comes from faddism and the need to feel like you’re cool ( I’m sorry, I mean awesome ) that need to be popular and hip consumes practically everything else even our morality. My point earlier about morality being about how we treat each other, instead of what we do personally. Sometimes its considered cool to bully people that you believe are inferior. We see that in high school everyday.

Thanks to celebrity TV which is what reality TV really is, or perhaps nasty TV is a better term being nasty and stupid is considered cool and is rewarded everyday. The only smart people that are rewarded are business executives who run companies that produce the products that are considered cool in America. Fashion, new technology, coffee house coffee, to use as examples. But if you’re simply just trying to make the world better or at least your small part of it better and you’re a very intelligent person, unless you’re considered hip and communicate with young people very well, you’ll be looked down upon as a nerd who reads too much, spent too much time in school. Love to know what George Carlin would bet saying about our over consuming reality TV culture today.

Baby Boomers

Not a boomer obviously being born in the mid 1970s and I’m not even a son of one. Both of my parents were born in the 1930s and had kids relatively late in life, so I don’t have much personal experience with at least who I would call Baby Boomers ( people born in the 1940s and 1950s ) but I’ve worked with people from this generation and most of my teachers were Boomers. I like to look at them as the entitled generation.

Being born during or just after World War II ( depending on how you define the generation ) and growing up in the 1950s and 60s, as a generation they’re like your typical Connecticut Anglo-Saxon Protestant family who’ve been in this country since the 1700s, who live in the suburbs and started out in life with a million dollars thanks to their father’s. They’re the spoiled brat generation would be a way to look at them. Growing up during the economic booms of the 50s and 60s and not having to worry about how they were going to pay for college or if they were even going to be able to get into college. But I’ll give them credit for taking advantage of every opportunity ever given them and becoming one of if not our most productive American generation’s.

Politicians

If you order a cheeseburger and are served a cheeseburger, do you really have any right to expect your cheeseburger to taste like a tunafish sandwich? With politicians it’s the same thing you get what you voted for or at least elected. You vote for and elect crooks and liars, don’t expect to get Saints instead. And this whole deal about not knowing how crooked and lazy the politician was before you voted for that person, is like someone complaining about the apples or oranges that they bought at the store not being ripe enough and being old. If you bothered to look at the fruit that you were buying before you bought that, you would’ve seen that it wasn’t fresh fruit and maybe you should buy something else. You don’t do your homework when it comes to voting, you end up voting for people you don’t know very well and get screwed by them in the process.

Life is what you make out of it. You get yourself a good education, you apply yourself, do the work, make learning and daily thing for yourself and always looking to do things better and make yourself as productive as possible, do your homework to go back to my point about politicians and life in America will be very good for you. At the very least doing these things for yourself and again treating people the way you want to be treated, taking responsibility for your actions to get to my point about morality and that will be your best offense and game plan for success in this country. But you don’t do these things and expect success and happiness to be given to you and you’ll spend a lot of your life waiting for success and happiness.

Anders Jacobson: George Carlin- On Some Cultural Issues

Read Full Post »

George Carlin: ‘Life is Worth Losing’- Dumb Americans

George Carlin

Source: This piece was originally posted at The New Democrat

Warning! This piece might contain language that may offend people who are still living in the 1950s and forgot to move with the times in America as the rest of country moved forward without them.

Just to say one thing about George Carlin: Goddammit George Carlin fuckin cussed a lot! What the fuck was his fuckin problem? What kind of asshole fuckin cusses that much? God dammit he must have been fuckin pissed off. Not that I would ever tell him to watch his fuckin language, because someone like that who is generally that angry not just at people, but basically an entire country, probably wouldn’t like that humor and perhaps not have even understood it. But he might have grasped the hypocrisy from a statement like that.

As far as stupid people in America, not saying we have a monopoly on that compared with the rest of the world. Especially with countries that don’t allow women to even drive cars or show themselves in public, who murder people simply for being gay through government force. As well as terrorists who murder people simply for not being Muslim, as well as gay. But we might have more than our share of stupid people especially with a region of the country that values their religion over education and knowledge. That alone can create a lot of problems there when people who simply don’t respect knowledge and think Jesus or whoever they pray to is all they need. That alone would qualify as stupid thinking, or lack of thinking.

See, people who don’t have knowledge tend to be stupid. Knowledgable people tend to be intelligent. The actual definition of intelligent is someone who is having or showing intelligence, especially at a high level. The actually definition of stupid, is having or showing a great lack of intelligence or common sense. Someone who takes America to war over bogus ( to be overly generous ) evidence that never existed in the first place, is the classic definition of s stupid decision. Making a decision on no real evidence and information.

Buying stuff ( or in many cases junk ) that you simply don’t need and are buying it perhaps only because it’s a status symbol for you like buying that latest smartphone simply because it’s the latest smartphone, even though you bought the latest smartphone last week, would qualify as a stupid decision. Even if it did allow you to be one of the first five people to share that latest purchase on Facebook, Twitter, or perhaps my favorite Google+. Sure! That decision made you look like totally awesome ( or whatever ) for an entire five minutes. But now you have two smartphones that you’re not using and still paying for both of them.

When you have a country that is as vast and diverse from all sorts of vantage points and not just racially and ethnically, a country that is also as free and individualistic as we are ( at least outside of pop culture,where most people look like a clone of the latest hot celebrity ) and then you have an entire population that values their religious and cultural beliefs over knowledge, reason, and science, you’re going to have a lot of stupid people. Because you’re going to have a lot of people who are literally free to do whatever they want short of hurting innocent people, including deciding to not be educated and not believe evidence and facts. This is why America at times at least can look like a national morons convention where everyone is late, because everyone went to the wrong place for the convention.

George Carlin: ‘Life is Worth Losing’- Dumb Americans

Read Full Post »

The Real Strategy: Opinion- Christopher Kemmett- Real Retards Vote- Why you Don’t Want to Stop Them: The Case For Educated Voters

Source: This piece was originally posted at The Daily Review

When I saw this post on The Real Strategy a blog I’ll admit I’m not that familiar with, it got me thinking about the title of a book from the great political humorist P.J. O’Rourke. Where he says, “don’t vote. It just encourages the bastards.” Which came out in 2009-10. What O’Rourke is implying there if not just flat-out saying is that when you vote for politicians, or their opponents, you’re endorsing them and what they do. When the fact is the problem is what American politicians do for us and in too many cases do for us. By making our lives more difficult by doing too much, or not what they’re constitutionally required to by law, which is to pass the budget that funds the government.

As a Democrat, I’m a big fan of democracy short of empowering the majority to rule over the minority. Big reason why I’m a Liberal Democrat and not a Social Democrat, which is more common in Europe. But the main problem with American politics is not our politicians and I mean our crooked and bought hyper-partisan politicians. The main problem with American politics are the voters who vote for those politicians. People say especially with the Left where I’m proud to be (Center-Left that is) that if we just have higher turnout we would get better politicians and people more representative of who they’re supposed to represent. The problem with that is again if you have more people voting, you’re going to have at least with the current state of the American voter, you’ll have more dumb people voting for people who they don’t know. Getting sucked in by an oil-slick politician or candidate. Who has no intention of doing what they campaigned on.

You can pass all the great campaign reform laws that you want, but if you still have the same dumb voters who are either too dumb to vote for the people who’ll best represent them and vote for the worst alternative possible instead, or don’t bother to research candidates and politicians they’re considering voting for and just go off of soundbites, or the person whose most up to date with pop culture references, or technology, or campaign commercials, or they think one candidate is not as bad as the other person, so for that very and only reason the lesser evil deserves their vote over the really evil person, we’re always going to have an American public complaining about how bad our political system and government is. Even though they are responsible for creating that very government and system themselves.

We don’t need more voters. We need better voters. We need people who actually take voting seriously and take it as seriously as they would when their buying a home, a car, deciding where to send their kid to college and everything else they value, their i-pad, or i-pod, what so-called reality TV show to watch, etc. And with a more educated public when it comes to voting, you’ll see better politicians and better government and with that you’ll not just to see more voters, but more educated voters. With politicians having fewer dopes they can rely on who’ll buy beach out in Cincinnati if you tell them that you have one there for sale simply because you told them that. And since they failed geography and social studies in high school, aren’t even aware that Cincinnati is nowhere near and ocean. And probably couldn’t even find it on a map if they were standing there.
RT America: American Voters Disaffected With Political Establishment

Read Full Post »

Jesse Taplin: ‘George Carlin On Roosters, Self- Help and Motivation’

Source:Jesse Taplin– comedian George Carlin on what pisses him off.

“George carlin clips from (2001) George Carlin – Complaints and Grievances”

From Jesse Taplin

As far as self-help: I’m always in favor of people who try to improve themselves (except when I have to compete with them) just as long as they’re doing it to improve themselves and not just to say: “Hey, I’m reading this book right now.” Just to say that they’re reading it and can claim that they’re in step with whatever the current hot, pop culture offer is. But I think the best self-help is always someone’s very own mirror and they bother to look at it. If you want to improve yourself, look at yourself first and do it honestly. And every honest and intelligent person, especially anyone who is honest and intelligent about themself, will figure out what works for them and what doesn’t. If you want outside help, hopefully you have honest, intelligent people in your life who give a damn about them and listen to them.

Brian Billick who use to coach the Baltimore Ravens had a theory of coaching about what to do when a player screws up and he said: “You can put it gently and say you know what that’s not what I was looking for on that play and hopefully you’ll do better in the future. Or you can tell them: “God dammit, you fucked up buddy”. Just put it on the line and let them know exactly how they messed up: “And this is not what I’m looking for and you’re going to have to be better in the future”. But then tell them how they screwed up and show them what you want done instead. And if they continue to screw up, find a replacement for them.

When you reward failure, you just get more of it. But if you teach and reward success, you get more of that as well. It’s the tough love approach to life that I prefer. Lay it out on the line so you know where you are and then you can adjust.

Self-esteem is only worth as much as its worth, if you have reason to have high self-esteem, then you should have that. But if you’re not doing very well, then you need to know that or have someone show you where you are lacking. So you can figure out what the problem is and improve yourself. And not get overconfident and think you are better than you are. Because that’s how we let ourselves down.

Read Full Post »

HBO: George Carlin on the Death Penalty

Source: This piece was originally posted at FRS Daily Times

You know who my favorite people in politics as a blogger to write about, not that I have any respect for them, political hypocrites, like Religious Conservatives who claim they are Pro-Life. And that life is sacred and so forth which is how they justify their anti-abortion positions. But then tend to be pro- death penalty, so I guess life isn’t that sacred, just some lives. I guess they could change their position on abortion to, pro-innocent life. But that doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it as pro-life.

Of course not all pro-life people are hypocrites on the abortion issue. Like Catholics who tend to be pro Life on abortion and the death penalty. If people who are pro-life on abortion, but pro-death on the death penalty aren’t hypocritical on the life issue, then they sure as hell at least have a flexible position on the life issue right. But hell we live in a liberal democracy right, as much as Religious Conservatives hate that. And rather live in Iran instead or a place like that and I say to them. “What’s keeping you in America, I’ll help you move”.

Just to be be fair there are people who are hypocritical on the life issue. But from the other side, people who are pro-choice on abortion (but not pro-choice on many other things) and Pro Life on the death penalty. People who have no problem with a women who decides to get an abortion in the 10th or 11th month. Because the women decides on her own or perhaps after consulting people including the father of her baby. That “you know what I change my mind, I’m not going to have this baby”. But then have a serious problem with a serial murderer getting the death penalty or even a life sentence in prison, because “they believe its cruel and unusual punishment.

Generally speaking for me I don’t have a problem with any position with what someone takes on Political issues. As long as their positions are factually based and not made of ignorance. It’s the hypocrisy that gets me, like being both pro-life and pro-death, the same person and another person being pro- choice and pro-life. Thats just to convenient for me, make up your mind what are you. If you’re pro-life, you’re pro-life, otherwise don’t call yourselves pro-life. And instead say you’re pro- life on abortion or the death penalty.

Me personally just to put my cards on the table, I’m pro-choice on abortion, well 98-99% pro- choice. I have an issue with partial birth abortion, when the baby is basically ready to be delivered. And just waiting for the mother to deliver the baby and pro-choice on a lot of other issues. But I’m also for protecting innocent life and preventing innocent people from being murdered. That makes me pro- death penalty for some murderers like serial murderers. Who represent a threat to murder again and have no remorse for their past murders. And are even proud of them and I’m also at times pro-war, when I believe innocent life is at stake and we can prevent those innocent lives from being taken. I have no remorse for serial murderers like Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy and how they were put to death.

Not all lives to me are worth saving, especially serial murderers like Charlie Manson. Who didn’t have the balls to murder anyone himself and instead had his crime family perform his evil for him. And then lies about his role in those murders and has been lying about them for over forty years now. If he was killed tomorrow, I wouldn’t celebrate it, I’m not evil or anything, but I would see it as justifiable homicide. And if the person who killed him got off for the killing, I wouldn’t have a problem with it. The man should’ve gotten the death penalty thirty years ago and finally got what he deserve. Not all Lives are worth saving but Innocent Lives sure as hell are.

HBO: George Carlin on The Death Penalty

Read Full Post »

Discerning History: Video: History of the Filibuster: The Right for Senators to Make Assholes Out of Themselves

This post was originally posted at The New Democrat on Blogger

You want to know why there’s so much hot air in Washington? For one its in an area that gets about five months of summer. Sometimes more, hot humid endless summers at times, where people pray for rain. Which only makes the area hotter and more humid but these summer showers all five- minutes of them do give us some temporary relief. Another reason for hot air is we are the seat of power for not only the United States but North America and the rest of the world.

We are an area of six-million people where people from all over the world come to express their five- minutes worth. And get to tell Congress exactly what they are thinking in order to get their help. And when they talk to senators, senators get to speak until they decide to shut up. Or there are sixty votes to tell Sen. Hot Air and their allies, to “shut the hell up! Or there’s a Blizzard in South Florida, you know whatever comes first, it used to be worst.

Up until 1975 it took 67 votes to kill a filibuster, which meant that 34 Senators could defeat 66. If you’re a sports fan that probably makes as much sense as the team with twenty-one points beating the team with forty-two in a football game. I don’t have a problem with the current sixty vote rule. I do believe in things like minority rights. So there’s some type of check and balance in Congress both in the House and Senate. And that the Minority Leader the Leader of the Minority Caucus and Ranking Members the Leaders of the minority memberships of Committees, should be more than just their caucus’s Chief Spokesperson’s but that they shouldn’t be able to rule the Senate like they are in charge.

Two problems with the Senate and there are problems with the House as well, but since this blog is about the filibuster, which only happens in the Senate (Thank God!) I’m just going to focus on the Senate. Can you imagine a filibuster in the House, with 435 Representatives being able to talk until they run out of breath, or 261 votes are gathered to get them to, shut the hell up! “You’re not the only one with nonsense to say!” You think there’s already too much hot air in Congress now, have a filibuster rule both in the Senate and House.

There would be so much hot air in the House, people could do their sun tanning on the House floor. No more weekend getaways to Florida or Southern California paid for by lobbyists because they could do that on the House floor. But the two main problems with the Senate have to do with two rules, one of them needs to be replaced. The other needs to be thrown away like the piece of trash that it is. The trash is the Motion to Proceed Rule, get this it currently takes 60 votes just to move to a bill in order to debate a bill.

Which makes the Leader of the Senate as weak as what the Vice President use to be, before the President gave them a real job. The Leader should just be able to call up any bill that they put on the Senate agenda. Thats passed out of committee or that the Leader and Minority Leader call up together under Emergency Rule. And this way the Senate would look more like a PTA meeting, or the United Nations. Because things would actually get accomplished in the Senate.

The Senate Rule that should be replaced is the is the Cloture Rule better known as the filibuster. I would replace that with a Motion to Table, that could only be made by the Leader or Minority Leader. After a Senate Debate has concluded, no more blocking amendments, just have those need 60 votes to pass anyway. So controversial amendments would have to pass an extra level to pass, as well as forcing them to be relevant to the legislation.

Reforms like this an establishing a real Rules Committee in the Senate and make that bipartisan. And then we would actually see something strange in the Senate, senators working and producing. Instead of just showing up and getting a great tan from all of their own Hot Air.

Right to Hot Air

Read Full Post »