Magnetic Soap

The introduction of the worlds first magnetic soap caught my eye during my daily search for interesting technology. It wasn’t until after reading the conservative rebuttals to Obama’s state of the union speech that I realized oil wasn’t what this soap needs to remove. It’s bullshit.

Yes, we need a bullshit removing soap, or maybe just a bullshit filter. This is where scientists and software engineers should focus their endeavors. Wouldn’t you love a web plugin that quickly identifies bullshit as fast as a word processor identifies misspelled words? Bullshit should show up in underlined brown on the screen. And if you have one of those wonderful olfactory peripherals, it should blow the odor into your face.

I read Faux News to see what kind of shit they might be spewing after the SOTU speech. After all, if anyone’s going to call Obama on some bullshit it would be his opposition. I was highly disappointed. Faux News failed to identify anything that was truly bullshit in the speech, instead focusing on the whining of the conservatives who (of course) weren’t going to agree with anything coming from their hated arch-rival. The best they could to was point out that Obama can’t get anything done post election. What elections? The Congressional Elections, of course. You know, when Congress was pumped full of Republicans after the passage of health care reform. Ever since then, the US government has been ineffectual and anemic, not that it was robust before, but now it’s got the power of a zombie raised up by a first year necromancy student. Their arguments are valid, but point out their own lack of power as well. Instead of wanting taxes raised on the wealthy, they’d rather see tax reform as a whole. No shit. So would everyone else in America. But that’s not going to happen for the same reason on both ends – divisions between how to do it stop either side from wholesale tax reform. It just ain’t gonna happen, not with the current idiots we’ve got in power, therefore working to change the existing code to remove loopholes and increase taxes on millionaires is the only valid solution. It’s middle ground, just like healthcare reform.

And about healthcare reform. Some people seem to think it’s wrong to force them to purchase insurance. Unfortunately, the bottom line is that insurance works by spreading the cost over a large number of people. The more people in the pool, the better the cost is spread and the more effective the system is. Voluntary insurance guarantees that those who don’t need healthcare won’t volunteer to pay for it. The true solution is to force everyone to have health care, but no one can do that but the federal government, and that’s where conservatives say no. That would be, by its very nature, a socialistic healthcare system run by the government bureaucracy. OMG, we can’t have that now can we? It would be inefficient. So instead we’ll seek the middle ground using proposals from previous republican administrations, but since they’re coming from a Democrat, the conservatives will run it down and bitch about it. Once again, middle ground is getting us nowhere.

The more I watch, the more I become convinced that the solution is to annihilate the Republican party and their Tea Party lackeys.  I dislike the idea of giving the Democrats free-reign to operate unopposed, but the Republicans have become so radicalized and ridiculous that they’ve reached the point of being ineffectual. So the worm turns. It would be far better if both parties could migrate to the center, but there’s no motive for them to do so.

Doesn’t it seem like Independents should be able to thrive in this environment? I wonder if it’s all about lack of money for them, and lack of media coverage. Everyone wants to be a radical these days. We’re being forced to embrace one radical side over the other. And with the conservative radical viewpoints being utterly ludicrous, I’m left with little choice.

Political Viewpoints 2011 – still stands pretty much as is. I can’t help but thinking our government might work better if they were all on psilocybin.