Two hundred years ago, our forefathers hated, condemned, and swore off everything that the monarchy stood for. The rule by one person invariably leads to oppression, social classes, and the economic ruin of a nation. Kings ruled with iron fists, commanded their armies out to war, and taxed their citizens into poverty. The hostility of a king towards his rivals was matched only by his anger. The king used various ways to crush insurrection from his people.

Thankfully, future-king William will have none of these powers.

But our President does.

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock and dodging health insurance companies about getting a plan, you’ve probably heard of the passing of “Obamacare”, the gajillion dollar healthcare plan that increases federal funding to hospitals and doctors for abortions, c0ntrols what vital services people can and can’t have under the public option, and does everything in its power to increase actual insurance company premiums (gee golly, I thought it was supposed to do the opposite). In addition, it makes it downright illegal to *not* have insurance and you can be fined and prosecuted if you don’t.

I’ve railed against this many times on Facebook, so it might be getting old, but the fact is: this is an issue worth fighting for- and the Senate and House Republicans feel the same.

All night long last night, the republicans used every tool in their toolbox to stop and reverse the legislation voted on and approved by 50.3% of the house on Sunday. Eventually, two items were found to be in violation of Senate procedure. Republicans have launched a massive attempt to not only shut down, but amend the bill if the former doesn’t work. They’ve proposed 29 amendments that really don’t have much hope of succeeding, but each takes a really good shot at the legislation and would “unbalance” the legislation. Like it was balanced to begin with…

Now, most of this info is just regurgitated from the cnn.com website, but they had some … interesting …  quotes from Dem legislators. FTA:

“It’s unconscionable,” said [Sen. Carl] Levin, who as chair of the Armed Services Committee was supposed to conduct a hearing with a top U.S. military commander in Korea who had flown in for the hearing. “Our national security cannot be held hostage to disagreements over a health care policy.”

What about meeting with him on your own time? You know… maybe earn that pay raise you suddenly feel yourself deserving.

[Sen Claire] McCaskill had planned an oversight hearing on problems with contracts to train local police departments in Afghanistan. She said the Senate rule that allows the minority party to block committee action was “really dumb” and should be dropped.

“Disagree with us, debate us, vote no,” she said. “But to use a rule to stop us from working — that dog just doesn’t hunt from where I come from. That doesn’t even makes sense. That’s why people in American think we are clueless here.”

The only thing “dumb” about this is your apparent lack of vocabulary, odd idioms, and a disregard for the “rule”s which were put in place for situations exactly like this. If we must suffer under this law, lets make sure it conforms to the rules as all laws should (disregarding the fact that it doesn’t conform to the law, the Constitution).

Carl Levin continues, “It seems to me this is an example of how the obstructionism around here has gotten mindless.” Oh, yes, good sir. This is mindless. Please keep in mind that merely 39% of Americans polled were in favor of Obamacare and 59% opposed in a CNN poll this week (also setting aside the issue of representatives actually representing their constituents instead of the party line seems to be quite a thing of the past). The only mindless people are the 5% polled who have no opinion and the Dems who stop at nothing to make sure this succeeds: letters and phone campaigns, overwhelmingly negative polls, a clear breach of Constitutionality, etc.

With the recent surge in HSA-backed high deductible health care plans, health insurance can be affordable for just about everyone. That, my friends, is real reform- not adding a tax-payer backed insurance company into the mix that seeks to own everyone’s health.

This is a dangerous time, my friends. Know how your representatives voted and remember that in November.

The school that I go to is… odd. Things such as the one-man Karl Marx in modern culture play tend to pop up among the “free-thinkers”. You’ll also find various calls to communism, 57 original flavors of eastern religions, people who walk around in bare feet (yes, bathrooms are frequented by them..), and the largest population of adult males aged 17-24 who don’t shower. Ever.

So I wasn’t exactly surprised when I saw this at school: 

Click for larger

Now, keep in mind that I don’t mean to ostracize anyone in this post. I have several vegan/vegetarian friends who take their eating habits seriously and some of which get sick from eating meat (much in the same way some get sick from dairy).

I am, however, calling out PETA on another load of garbage. I’m going to dissect this flier a little, but first let me direct you to some of their other propoganda.

I’m all for the ethical treatment of animals and even have certain family members that take it upon themselves to go the extra mile and rescue stray and feral cats. Yet even these family members consider PETA to be crazy.

I’ll cite some of the “facts” and quotes mentioned here.

First off, at the top, we see a quote from Paul McCartney about how going Vegan is the single most important thing someone can do. Sorry Sir Paul, but thats fairly low on my list. Saving someone’s life, curing cancer, erasing the national debt, bring character and accountability back into politics are somewhere near the top. I could go on, but you get the point.

Another quote is on the left margin: “(The meat industry) is one of the top two or three [Dan: real precise I see...] most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems at every scale from local to global.” Really? With all those vaguisms can anything really be gleaned from that? Any citations? Any speciality in the field of agriculture, conservation, forestry, etc? or are we just getting an “in” celeb to help us make our message seem credible. I don’t really value highly the opinion of a man who sings about living on a yellow submarine.

Ok, so on to the “facts” (I should note that even though “reports” and “researchers” are mentioned, no direct citations are given here).

“…the meat industry is responsible for more greenhouse-gas emissions than all the cars, trucks, planes, and ships in the world combined.” So what exactly defines the “meat industry”? I’m guessing everything from the animal feed and the process to create it, animal excrement (I lol at that word), animal breathing (WOW look at all that exhaling those cows are doing!), transport, refrigeration, and consumption, right? A bit of an unfair comparison now that cars have to be like ULHZEV (uber leet haxor zero emissions vehicles) for the EPA to even consider allowing them to exist. Oh and yeah.. global warming is real too right?

“Animals raised for food in the U.S. produce 130 times more excrement [Dan: There it is again!] than the entire human population of the U.S.!” (The exclamation mark wasn’t added by me!) So.. cows are bigger than humans, right? And all they do is eat all day. US pop = ~300M. US # of cows alone: ~100M. Do cows poop 3x more than humans? probably. Why does this matter? Oh, wait, and poop is biodegradable too, right? And doesn’t it fertilize soil? Make your homemade tomatos bigger? Make that corn you buy in the summer taller? K.. just wondering.

“More than 260 million acres of U.S. forest have been cleared for grazing and for growing grain to feed farm animals.” Now.. that grain- does that go to feed humans as well? Does some of that go to fuel our new, shiny ethanol cars? 260M acres is approx 11% of the entire landmass belonging to the U.S., so I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the term “forest” means any sort of land where tree-like vegetation was growing on it as of 1500AD.

“A vegetarian uses only 300 gallons of water per day, while a meat-eater [Dan: Like from Land Before Time!!!] uses more than 4,000.” I absolutely love this statistic, and I can tell you why: Its because we “meat-eaters” take showers every day. You know, that time of day when you wash your hair, clean yourself, make yourself smell better than before… We also wash our clothes too. Also, it seems to me that the world is quite full of water and ways to purify it, so this is just as assinine as saying that since I have big lungs I should be excommunicated for breathing too much air. QQ

The list goes on and on, and, frankly, I’m bored and tired and have a final in a few hours, so I’ll just catch the last one: “Chickens, pigs, turkeys, fish, and cows are intelligent [Dan: SRSly.. I saw a cow solve a Rubiks Cube on youtube], social animals who feel pain, just as humans, dogs, and cats do. More than 27 billion [Dan: WOW thats a lot] animals are mutilated, confined [Dan: Like.. put in a cage?], and killed in horrible ways by the US meat industry every year.” Yes, animals can feel pain. If you flick a cow’s ear, it will moo at you and quite possibly kick you. Yes, they are social- they travel in herds, schools, etc.. but they don’t have PTA meetings, have Friday poker nights, or swim down to a southern state for 8 days of relaxation and gaming. Yes, death is a gruesome thing, but it can be and is done humanely. Animals do not have souls. They don’t have a divine spark or even come close to being on the same level as humans because, frankly, we aren’t animals. All this section does is appeal to the emo side in all of us, and it tends to work.

I don’t hunt. I never have and probably never will. I’m not callous towards the suffering of animals, but lets be realistic here. Humans are designed to eat meat. Those who don’t can have serious problems from a lack of protein. Besides.. meat is yummy.

My plan will start by upgrading any infrastructure concerns we may have. We must keep on top of the WordPress updates that may come out in the future as well as invest in dozens of new plugins. We will, over the next few months, spend resources on reorganizing the site and making sure that everything is easily accessible and readable. We will also spend time and money making sure our servers are as good as they possibly can be. If necessary we will upgrade service plans and switch companies and we will make sure that Zomgee loads as fast as any site out there.

My plan will also focus on the research and development needs of Zomgee. We will pour our dollars into the Mozilla Foundation and we will add a research position a year from now to seek out more knowledge about issues and to create ideas for the future. We will also spend money on various small projects that need not be listed here.

Finally we will seek to tweak our revenue stream by targeting only those readers who do a lot of reading. After All the little-guy readers need not be burdened exceedingly. We will therefore increase the ads for power users and while this will perhaps decrease your enjoyment of the site a bit you have plenty of enjoyment to go around. It will ensure that we spread the load among all our users and allow for more fairness to everyone.

We must create a better tomorrow for Zomgee and we need to start by taking action today. Without this stimulus package we will continue to post less and less and if we’re not carefully we may not even have a Zomgee left in the years to come. Please join me now in supporting what will be a monumental plan to increase posts in the year to come.