Category Archives: Haterade Series

Valentine’s Day, the Extra Credit Holiday

Oh yes, one of these blogs again. Some hater hating their haterade on poor, defenseless Valentine’s Day.

Naw. I don’t actually hate Valentine’s day. But it’s become like so many other holidays where it started small and pure and manageable, and eventually bloated into this competition to see who can out V-Day the next.

I’m not going to pretend to know what the origin of Valentine’s day is, because I don’t care. And I’m actually too lazy to look it up on Wikipedia and regurgitate it in my owns words to pass it off like I always knew, just for the sake of this post.

We know the gist of it. Show affection for the one you love by making a nice gesture. If you’re a guy this means buying flowers. And if you’re a girl, this means….receiving flowers? And if your kid’s in elementary school this means going to the grocery store the day before and spending $20 on those pink, chalk flavored hearts and Disney, Batman or Barbie themed valentine’s day cards so they can give it to every other kid in the classroom, half of whom they don’t even like.

“Happy Valentine’s Day!….. you.”

But Valentine’s day likens itself a lot to one specific aspect of our childhood schooling days, which I will get in to.

Valentine’s day is the equivalent of the extra credit assignment your teacher would pull out of her ass in the last few weeks of the semester. The sole point of the exercise was to give the students who dicked around the whole semester a chance to get their grades up ever so slightly.

The assignment was always of ‘bullshit’ difficulty level, meaning that all you had to do was bullshit your way through the assignment, and voila, 10 extra points. Now little Billy has a C- instead of a D+. His parents will be so proud. The kids with good grades never needed to do the extra credit assignment, it wouldn’t make or break their grades, but they still felt compelled to do it because ‘it’s what everyone does’. In turn, everyone would sort of reluctantly drag their feet and do the damn assignment because of the chronic under-performers.

Sound familiar?

R.I.P. Gene Wilder

I never treated Valentine’s Day differently than any other day. If you’ve been a good romantic partner you shouldn’t need to celebrate Valentine’s day. If you’re already scoring a B+ or better, then you can sit this one out. But you can’t. Because of assholes. Those assholes who rarely buy their women flowers. Those assholes who rarely take them out anywhere nice for dinner. Who rarely compliment them. Who rarely help around the house. Who avoid their in-laws like the plague. Well this is the one day of the year those fuckers band together and act like semi decent human beings and do something ‘romantic’ and make their women hate their lives just a little bit less.

And men, your wife goes to work with the women of these assholes and see their flowers and ridiculous heart shaped balloons and she starts to feel bad if she didn’t get anything even if you’re already scoring a 98% in the good partner department. Because reasons. So just like in the 3rd grade, we good graders must cater to the lowest common denominator and do the extra credit assignment for fear of looking like a slouch. Never mind that you got her flowers just the week before.

“The only people who seemingly enjoy Valentine’s Day are those sad women in horrible relationships”

Do I hate Valentine’s day? No. Hate is a strong word, but I dislike it because of what it’s become, the beacon of under performers to give the under performance of their life time. I think most people dislike Valentine’s Day. Couples (in otherwise healthy relationships) dislike it because there’s this expectation to be unusually cheesy. Singles dislike it because they spend the entire holiday, holiday eve, and post holiday on suicide watch gaining 10 pounds feeling alone and miserable. The only people who seemingly enjoy Valentine’s Day are those sad women in horrible relationships that hope “Please God, Please, give me this one small sliver of hope! My man is such a fucking dick hole that his idea of dinner night is $2 taco Tuesday at that shitty dive bar we used to go to back in college.”

And for those women, I hope you get your consolation prize this, and every Valentine’s Day. You need it more than the rest of us.

My girl broke our tradition this year and got me a bad ass Valentine’s Day present, one of those free standing pull-up, chin-up, dip bar contraptions so I can get prison ripped. I get the message 😉 So baby, thank you so much! I love my present! Happy Valentine’s Day!

Guys, continue to do what we do. Take it on the chin and do something nice. We must continue to make the dick holes among us look horrible by comparison. It is your manly duty!

The US Postal Service Sucks

People talk shit about everything. Go on yelp and there is usually no shortage of bad reviews about every business under the sun. Well for most of my life the USPS has actually done a pretty decent job. I’ve very rarely ever had problems with sending or receiving mail.

However in the past three weeks I’ve experienced quite a few problems with the USPS. I don’t know if this is a temporary set back because of internal changes, or if it’s always been shitty and I somehow managed to skate by without any problems all this time.

Returned Mail

In the past week alone, I have had five separate people tell me that mail they sent to me was returned back to them. In each case the the sender emailed me a photo of the returned mail and I was able to verify that they had my name/business name correct, and my mailing address correct, along with proper postage.  FIVE times.

Black Hole Mail

About two weeks ago I placed two orders from the same online vendor within 3 days of each other. The vendor confirmed both orders had been shipped out.

I got one delivered on Monday, September 19.

It has now been a week, and the second package is not yet here. It is entered the USPS black hole of mail.

Torn Open Mail

In the past month, I have had three separate pieces of mail that were torn open. Not open, like as if my the hands of another person rifling through my mail. I mean TORN open as if by a machine, maybe one of their processing machines.

One of them looks like the envelop was run through a paper shredder and then saved at the last minute. The envelop and the contents of the envelop were torn in half. The USPS had to repackage the envelop and contents within a plastic pouch. One of the ‘packages’ had shreds of the document mailed to me, as well as pieces of a personal check that was not intended for me – meaning someone else’ mail also got torn in half, and not knowing which documents/pieces of documents went to who, the USPS gave me someone  else’ check.

The check was unreadable so I cannot ascertain who was supposed to have received it, but someone else out there got half a check they won’t be able to deposit.

Employees that barely speak English

The icing on the cake today was that I came to the office and had three voicemails/emails from over the weekend from various people concerned about the undelivered mail they got bounced back to them.

1 times a fluke, and maybe even 2, but 5 times in about a week is a fucking epidemic. So I called the USPS to bring the issue up. I requested the call back service as opposed to waiting on hold for 45 minutes like the queue said it would be.

To their credit I did get a call back within about an hour, but the laughable aspect of it was that the employee clearly didn’t speak English very well. We are a country of immigrants and English is understandably not everyone’s first language. But it does seem prudent to me that the USPS and other government agencies would hire people who speak the de facto official language of the country.

Go home USPS, you’re drunk.

LinkedIn is Stupid

I’ll probably end up careening off course and trashing the rest of social media but my goal here is to tell you how fucking stupid LinkedIn is.

So a million years ago when I graduated college I made a LinkedIn account because “well gee whiz it’s what everyone’s doing and apparently you HAVE to have one to get a job so duurrrrrr” And here I am a million years later and I’ve updated and maintained it and filled in all those stupid little fields, and have like 18,000 contacts or connections or whatever the fuck it’s called and honestly I’ve never gained anything from it.

Yeah I know what you’re thinking. You have a LinkedIn account and you don’t want to face the fact it’s never helped improve your life or your career and then of course admit you’ve wasted dozens of hours of your life maintaining it, so rather than nodding your head in agreement you’re probably doubling down on its usefulness and hate me for saying it’s shit.

But shit is shit no matter how useful everyone says it is. LinkedIn is about as useful as Drano is for your home’s plumbing or as useful as Emergen-C is for your immune system.  Meaning it’s not. Or maybe at the very best sorta maaaaarginally useful.

But really though, think about it. If you’re like me you also have your LinkedIn profile. You have a couple hundred connections, 90% of whom you have no fucking idea who they are. You probably get your weekly LinkedIn email notifications that some random ass person you’ve never met wants to connect with you, and maybe you accept their invite… but only if they’re hot.

LinkedIn Profil Busty Girl
Make sure your LinkedIn profile really shows off your best… eh hem…. qualities.

Every so often out of the blue one of your friends +1’s on of your abilities/skills/qualifications and then you think “Oh cool!” and then you begrudgingly reciprocate and +1 one of their skills out of guilt, whether or not they actually do know how to use Microsoft Excel.

No matter your occupation, you probably get the occasional sales pitch for a ‘Sales Leads Generating Opportunity’ for only the most highly qualified professionals in your market which naturally got blasted to a quarter of a million other people.

And after all these years of updating your resume, and sharing links to articles you’ve never read but sounded important, you realize LinkedIn has never actually got you a job. It’s probably never even got you an interview. Or a referral.

Ask your friends if they’ve ever been hired exclusively from LinkedIn. You’ll hear a resounding no. How something so useless is so prevalent is beyond me. Kind of like degrees in psychology or communications.

The fact is LinkedIn sucks because it like so many other social networking services tries to replace something that is irreplaceable: Face to face human interaction. Maybe because I’ve always had so much success getting a job I never understood the difficulties people faced with it. I’ve never applied for a job and not been offered the position. No shit. The key to getting hired isn’t in LinkedIn. It’s not even your resume. No one is going to hire your resume. No one is hiring your LinkedIn profile. They’re hiring YOU. If your resume rocks, and your LinkedIn profile is stellar but you kinda suck, you’re not getting hired.

People are hired in bars. People are hired on the golf course and the putting green. People are hired at backyard barbeques. People are hired in the waiting room of restaurants. People are hired in hotel lobbies. People are hired at the mall. People are hired on ski lifts. People are hired in elevators. People are hired at birthday parties and bar mitzvahs. People are hired where real life social interactions take place. Not online. Not on your phone. Not behind some screen.

So if you want to get a job, if you want to network, if you want leads, go out and get them. Just don’t expect to get them online because LinkedIn sucks. And no, I don’t want to join your e-marketing group.

The Thing about (White) Liberals

I can go on for days about how and why I disagree with democrats on a number of issues, but what frustrates me the most is one specific flavor of democrats, and that’s white liberals. So please enjoy my blog, The Thing about (White) Liberals. And to be balanced, and because I’m an equal opportunity smack talker, I will follow it up shortly with another blog The Thing about (uber Religious) Conservatives.

White liberals try so hard to help people of color and those they consider minorities, poor people and other unfortunate souls, but they fail miserably because their policies (and to a large extent even their mentality) actually serve to make things worse for the very people they are trying to help. I would actually argue that many white liberals are unknowingly, yet subtly racist.

That’s not to say that I believe in some paradigm shift where all racists are white liberals, and all white liberals are racist. However while I think racism is spread pretty uniformly across all groups, it’s worth pointing out the oblivious racism in that exists in certain parts of society, because a wolf dressed as a sheep is more dangerous than a wolf dressed as a wolf.

White Liberal Policies

White liberals propose legislation like rent control, minimum wage hikes, protected domain, and mandatory unions which they think will better peoples’ lives, but which actually make the lives of their constituents even tougher. We can have a 10 hour debate about the effects such policies have, but let’s instead defer to the 40 year case studies known as the real world, in which such social experiments were expected to flourish, but instead floundered.

Look at rent control in Los Angeles and New York where lower income people either can’t afford to live in a nice place, or live in a place that hasn’t been updated in 40 years because the owner can’t afford to make the needed repairs. Protected domain in places like Santa Barbara have essentially stopped the construction of new housing. As populations swell, and housing remains fixed, rents will rise. And minimum wage jobs would be a great foot in the door for high school seniors and recent high school grads, but why the hell would a business owner pay an unskilled pimply faced teenager $15 per hour when they can spend the same money and hire someone with years of experience and who needs the money. So laws that were intended to help the poor, the disenfranchised, the needy, people of color, minorities, whatever you want to call them – have backfired.

White Saviors

Another tenet of white liberalism is that only white people – specifically white liberals – can save the poor, poor colored people. White liberals have appointed themselves as the savior to who they consider to be their feeble minded, hapless, colored brethren. That’s not my opinion. That’s their opinion.

In a world where words like racist, fascist, ignorant, xenophobe, and literally are among the most frequently misused and misunderstood words, white liberals and their policies of contradistinguishing black people and other minorities, and then assigning themselves as messiah, is literally racist.

If I told you that black people are inherently so incompetent that white people need to make special laws to make it easier for black people to get jobs (and that, oh by the way, I’m a Republican) you would consider that racist.

However if I told you my name was Joe Liberal, and I had this grand idea called Affirmative Action that would undo the wrongs suffered upon the blacks by white people, (and did I mention my name was Joe Liberal, right?) you would hail it as a victory of racial equality.

White liberals get an orgasm watching Avatar.

When you boil it down, that is their belief. They say it, they act it, they legislate it.

White Washed Nomenclature and Politispeak

We can’t even have an honest discussion about the struggles of different people in the country because everything has become a buzz word.

  • Instead of black people, or predominantly black communities, politicians say ‘urban America’.
  • Instead of non-rich white people, politicians say ‘middle America’ or ‘the  middle class’.
  • Instead of rich white people, politicians say ‘top income earners’.

At various points in time the correct way to refer to people who aren’t white has changed from ‘colored’, to ‘minorities’, to ‘people of color’, and I’m sure some new term like ‘post racial individual’ is in the works as we speak. Let me consult my quack, white social psychologist first. Vernacular created by white liberals is like iPhones – new ones come out every two years, and if you’re caught using an old one you’re a piece of shit and to be ostracized from society.

Vernacular created by white liberals is like iPhones – new ones come out every two years, and if you’re caught using an old one you’re a piece of shit

Each time a new word is ushered in, it’s because white liberals decided the old word was racist, derogatory, and antiquated. Except the stupidity of it all is that it was white liberals who years earlier came up with those terms in the first place.

raptor

 

In my college computer programming class, I read a meme that went “If debugging is the process of removing bugs from code, does that mean that programming is the process of putting bugs into code?”

Put concisely, yes, it does. So if the role of a white liberals in society is removing derogatory words from common usage they coined, does that mean that the role of white liberals is to create new, acceptable, derogatory terms in the first place?

The Liberal Problem Solution Dilemma

Up to this point everything has in some way been tied to race, and I attribute that to white liberals being the constant race baiters of the nation. Well… them and Al Sharpton. I think the truth is the majority of people (white or not) wake up and go on about their day and don’t give race or ethnicity or religion a thought. It’s not that they are avoiding the issue, it’s that for constructive people who have a fucking job and real world obligations, worrying about shit like which word is the least offensive really doesn’t make the priority list.

It’s amazing how in the light of things that actually matter, liberal policies tend to be bleached out. That’s because liberal propositions are not solutions to problems, but rather solutions in search of problems – answers to questions no one ever asked. I’ll conclude with four things which haunt American liberals, and why people can’t stomach them.

  1. Liberals attempt to solve problems that aren’t problems
  2. Liberals attempt to solve problems that aren’t theirs to solve
  3. Liberals create problems, say Republicans created them, and then fail to solve them
  4. Liberals don’t have the backbone to solve tough problems

One – Liberals attempt to solve problems that aren’t problems

Example, California Governor Jerry Brown recently enacted legislation that would remove the word “alien” from all legislation, presumably because it was ‘too offensive’. This will probably cost a good deal of money to implement, and will have no tangible benefits to anyone, yet alone aliens.

Two – Liberals attempt to solve problems that aren’t theirs to solve

Again, circling back to things like unemployment and problems that plague certain communities. Other curiosities of white liberals is legislating what foods parents are allowed to pack in their kids school lunch, or mandating that McDonalds get rid of toys in Happy Meals in San Francisco, or not allowing fast food restaurants to serve soda beverages of certain sizes in New York. In short, liberals try to legislate culture.

Three – Liberals create problems, blame Republicans, and fail to solve them

Rent control is probably the largest contributor to unaffordable housing and poor living conditions in predominantly democrat run communities. Another is unsustainably high minimum wage which discourages employers from hiring inexperienced workers for entry level positions – the very positions that in large cities would be filled by the democrat constituency. Affirmative action is the most notorious of the liberal policies, lowering the bar so much as to discourage competitive behavior in previously discriminated demographics. Decades since all of these social experiments have been implemented and black Americans are still staggeringly unemployed, underemployed, renting as opposed to owning their homes, and living in poverty.

Four – Liberals don’t have the backbone to solve tough problems

Liberals have cornered the market on complaining and being slacktivists. The notion that if you bitch and moan and stomp your feet long and loud enough, you can make change. Oh, and using sarcasm in the absence of an intelligent answer.

When Boko Haram was headline news a couple years ago, we had a bunch of whiney white liberals calling for ‘justice’ – whatever the hell that means – and writing letters, and silk screening t-shirts, and changing their Facebook profile pic, and all around just being annoying. They accomplished absolutely nothing. This is because liberals have no resolve. They lack the spine to do what is necessary. We’re talking about some child kidnapping war lord in war torn Africa and these pansy ass white college kids are talking about ‘delivering justice’ and having some guy stand trial. Oh yeah sure. For fucks sake, just start a kick starter, raise a couple millions dollars and hire some mercenaries to kill the fucking guy if you really want to make some change.

Summary

Whereas liberals think conservatives are trying to destroy the world, I won’t feign such stupidity by reciprocating. I do legitimately believe that liberals want to help the world, end famine, disease, war, and poverty. However despite their good intentions I think many liberals lack real world experience. Experience that when had, lends itself to pragmatism and hard knocks methods more typical of conservatism. While living a life of principle is admirable, living a life of fantasy is detrimental. It leads to inflated and unrealistic expectations, like free college, the prospect of never being offended, and a guaranteed job waiting for you after college even if you got a degree in something like ‘Ethnic Studies’ with no realistic career prospects.

The thing with white liberals isn’t so much in their ideals, as it is their ideas.

Please stay tuned as I plan on following up this post soon with The Thing about (uber Religious) Conservatives.

Why Current YA Movies Suck

Oh yeah, I’m going there.

It is time to stir the pot. I’ve been doing reviews about specific movies, and the occasional TV show, and I’m usually pretty polite. What’s the saying again? If you ain’t got nothin’ nice to say then don’t say nothin’? As Eminem put it, fuck that shit.

This is going to be my first of many blog entries in my new Haterade Series. Look for the Haterade tag in future posts.

YA is short for young adult. Not teen, not tween, but young adult. Which at this point is pretty much a blanket term for teens and tweens… and people with poor taste in movies. Can you believe someone actually thought “young adult” – a whooping 11 characters – was so long that it needed to be turned it into an acronym? That’s lazier than condensing “do you know what I mean?” into “na’mean?”

But seriously, these YA movie suck. Balls. Big balls. Here we go.

Dystopian Futures that Make No Sense

Not no sense in the fact that they are fantastical, like Avengers or Harry Potter. No sense in how could such communities ever come to exist at all? Harry Potter, despite its magic actually seems plausible. We’re magical, we need a place to stay since humans are assholes, so let’s make a VIP magical land and oh, let’s put a boarding school there to teach kids about magic. Even Twilight for all of its Kristen Stewart shortcomings had a decent premise, just a horrible story… act acting… and staring.

Divergent Plot

But take a look at Divergent. Teens are categorized into factions based on personality traits, except for that one little caveat, oh yeah… they are ultimately allowed to choose which faction they join. So now it’s optionally compulsory? Who designed this system, the Obamacare team?

Despite the fact that you can be suited for one faction, but choose another, if you actually exhibit traits of multiple factions, they kill you. Oh, and if you don’t exhibit any traits of the five factions, you become a hobo and starve to death in the streets. They really got this perfect totalitarian utopia thing locked down tight, don’t they?

I mean seriously, I’m a libertarian and communism makes more sense than this system. I can see Stalin sitting down, mustache n’ all, and pitching communism. “Comrades, dees is our plan. Everyone gets equal pay. Agreed?” But I would love to sit in on the sales pitch for Divergatopia.

“So guys, check this shit out, we’re gonna like…. split everyone into like… five groups, one for every finger. Oh, and like, all the losers go farm and hand out blankets n’ stuff. And then like all the nerds go read sciency stuff. And like, maybe someone should make laws or something? Oh, and the rest of us will just run around and do parkour and jump off buildings. EXTREMMMMEEEEE!!!!”

Or as Leo Sun put it,

“In Divergent, dystopia is simply replaced by a bloodier version of high school drama.”

It’s basically the less racist version of public school where different cliques of kids are easily identifiable. Or was that just my high school?

Maze Runner Plot

I think the Honest Trailer sums it up about right. So a meteor crashes into Earth and turns people into zombies and the world becomes a desert, and in order to save humanity from the desert zombie apocalypse, evil adults maroon a bunch of teenage boys in what I can only imagine is a 300 foot tall booby-trapped maze the size of Australia, with a bunch of man-eating monster robot spiders that then kill the teenage boys. They built alllll this, instead of, ya know… trying to like find a cure for zombism, or maybe investing in drip irrigation?

Oh, and then they drop one girl in a group of like 20 horny guys to get gang raped. Sounds legit.

Hunger Games Plot

Okay, they can literally make fire, and weather, and trees, and killer animals out of thin air. And they can’t make food? And then Katniss goes to war with a recurve bow? Not even a fucking compound bow? And what’s up with the people in the Capitol dressing up like Johnny Depp knock offs?

idiots
Who wore it better????

Stupid Vernacular

You know what I’m talking about.

So in Divergent, the factions are called what now? Dauntless, Amity, Erudite, Candor… Abne-what now? Abnegation? 4 ½ words you never used or even heard of before this movie.

Where’d the author find these words? The deleted scenes of Mary Poppins? Supercandorfragilisticexpiabnegation! Come on, erudite sounds like a gem you’ll hear about on the jewelry channel at 3 a.m.

jewelry channel
And Becky here we have an astonishing 13 carat Erudite necklace adorned with matching blood diamonds.

Oh and Maze Runner. I’ll just rattle ‘em off:

  • griever,
  • glader,
  • med-jacks,
  • shank,
  • klunk,
  • schuck,
  • slim it,
  • slinthead,
  • good that,
  • jacked,
  • and like 10 more.

You’d think I bashed my head against the key board and made this up, but no joke. Look this up. It’s called glader slang.

Stupid Weapons and Gear

I can get reinventing systems of government or society. But if you’re going to have guns and body armor, why go through the trouble of reinventing the wheel?

You gotta love the Hunger Games sperm suits, complete with rib cage chest armor ribbed for her pleasure. This is almost as bad as putting nipples on the Batsuit.

bat-nipples

Remember that movie Host by the Twilight author, where aliens took over earth by inhabiting human’s bodies, and the aliens also randomly decided to hire Xzibit to paint all the cars silver?

Yo dawg! I heard you like silver helicopters while taking over the world!
Yo dawg! I heard you like silver helicopters while taking over the world!

And what’s up with Katniss going to war with a bow and arrow? She can carry about 30 arrows total, and that’s it. It’s not like anyone else is using them so once she’s out, she’s out for good. Bows and arrows are all fun n’ games… til’ someone Chris Kyle’s your ass from 1,900 yards away.

And then of course these YA movies always have to reinvent weapons, because we don’t have enough existing weapons to choose from apparently. Check out these guns from Divergent? It literally looks like someone superglued a super soaker to a pogo stick and spray painted it silver. What, the future doesn’t have Glocks and AR15s? Are those LEDs?

divergent-guns
Don’t make me shoot you with this flashlight!

God, I can’t wait for the next season of Game of Thrones.

Alright, I’m done for now, but I’ll be back with another episode of Haterade here shortly. Thanks for reading and letting me vent.