A Real American Badass!

Sgt. Henry Lincoln Johnson

Now this isn't exactly what I'd had planned for an update, but I'm not finished with the other piece I'm working on and I stumbled across this and just had to share it. This guy is what movies like Rambo are modeled after. He's a beast! I'd never heard this story before, and I'm somewhat of a history buff!

Anyway, let this hold you over until I finish my latest rant about what I'm pissed off about most recently and I'll try to get that update up soon!

In early 1918, Henry Lincoln Johnson was working as a humble redcap porter in the New York City Subway system, which basically means that his job revolved around picking incredibly heavy things up and putting them wherever The Man told him to. As you can probably imagine, this type of work sucks balls. Well when the United States decided it was sick of Germany's bullshit and joined in the 24-Hour All-Night European Booze-and-Babes Fiesta known as World War I, Johnson knew that this was a perfect opportunity to go to France and beat the shit out of some stupid jackasses. He enlisted into the New York National Guard and was shipped out with the all-black 369th Infantry Division, better known as "The Harlem Hellfighters".

Unfortunately, early on in the campaign the Hellfighters really didn't have the opportunity to dole out these much-needed assbeatings, because as you can probably imagine the cracker-ass American High Command decided to give the all-black regiment every single bullshit job on the Western Front. They unloaded cargo vessels, dug ditches and did all sorts of fucking menial shit, the extent of which fell somewhere between janitorial work and dishwashing on the Badassery Scale. Finally, after weeks of this bullcrap with no end in sight, the French Command was like, "well if you jerks won't let these guys get in there and start busting heads than we will", and decided to see if "Harlem Hellfighters" was more than just a clever name. The 369th and Johnson were tranferred to the French Command and immediately pressed into service in the Argonne Forest.

Well like a week after they were transferred, Sergeant Henry Johnson and his buddy, Private Needham Roberts, were put on guard duty one night and told to keep an eye out for any Kraut bastard desperately in need of having a bullet jammed into his ocular cavity. So Johnson and Needham were just out there minding their own business when all of a sudden an entire platoon of German Infantry (between twenty-five and thirty men) came running out of nowhere and started kicking the crap out of the two Americans. Johnson was hit with a grenade and shot in the chest with a motherfucking shotgun, while Roberts was shot twice with a pistol and knocked to the floor like a sack of potatoes that had just been shot twice at close range with a fucking handgun. The Germans rushed in, gave Johnson the finger, grabbed Roberts, and hauled him off as a prisoner.

Well Henry Lincoln Johnson wasn't about to sit around and let that shit fly. As the Germans headed back to their secret lair deep below the Earth's crust, Johnson managed to somehow stagger back to his feet and start firing his rifle like a madman. The Germans continued to make their escape however, so Johson harnessed his immense powers of Getting Super Fucking Pissed and started charging after them, gun blazing. When his weapon jammed, he started chucking grenades at them. When he finally caught the poor bastards, he started wailing on them with his rifle butt. When he broke his rifle over some jerk's head he reached over and whipped out his bolo knife.

Now try and picture this for a minute. You've got one dude who's already been shot twenty-one motherfucking times with everything from shotguns to rifles, armed only with a fucking machete, in the midst of about twenty German soldiers and he's going off like Miyamoto Musashi, hacking these bastards to pieces while they stand around like Black Ninjas from a bad 70's Kung Fu flick. Despite massive injuries, Johnson samurai-slashed, weaved and hacked at anything that moved. He killed four men, wounded an additional twenty-four, strode over the a huge steaming pile of dismembered corpses and dragged Pvt. Roberts back to his foxhole. The next morning when reinforcements arrived they found the two wounded men sitting together singing some sweet-ass jazz songs around a raging campfire.

Johnson was the first American to ever receive the Croix de Guerre, the highest award for bravery offered by the French Government. Just in case you think that "the highest award for bravery offered by the French Government" is an oxymoron, note that he also received the United States' Distinguished Service Cross as well. He returned home as a hero, got a ticker-tape parade in New York City, had a son who went on to be a Tuskeegee Airman (no small feat of badassery in and of itself) and is now remembered as one of the most badass American heroes of World War I.

http://www.badassoftheweek.com/henryjohnson.html

Be sure to check that link out too. Lots of kickass stories like this one there. The guy who writes that does an excellent job!

Australian Woman Killed By Amorous Camel

(AP) An Australian woman was killed by a pet camel given to her as a 60th birthday present after the animal apparently tried to have sex, police said Sunday.

The woman, whose name was not released, was killed Saturday at her family's sheep and cattle ranch near Mitchell, 350 miles west of the Queensland state capital Brisbane, state police Detective Senior Constable Craig Gregory said.

The 10-month-old male camel — weighing about 330 pounds — knocked the woman to the ground, lay on top of her, then exhibited what police suspect was mating behavior, Gregory said.

"I'd say it's probably been playing, or it may be even a sexual sort of thing," Gregory said, adding the camel almost suffocated the family's pet goat by straddling it on several occasions.

Camel expert Chris Hill said he had no doubt the camel's behavior was sexual.

Hill, who has offered camel rides to tourists for 20 years, said young camels are not aggressive, but can be dangerous if treated as pets without discipline.

The fate of the camel was not known.

The woman was given the camel in March as a birthday present from her husband and daughter. "She had a love of exotic pets," Gregory said.

This is what happens when you lie a lot.

Poll: Majority mistrustful of upcoming Iraq report

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A majority of Americans don't trust the upcoming report by the Army's top commander in Iraq on the progress of the war and even if they did, it wouldn't change their mind, according to a new poll.

President Bush frequently has asked Congress -- and the American people -- to withhold judgment on his so-called troop surge in Iraq until Gen. David Petraeus, the commander in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, U.S. ambassador to Iraq, issue their progress report in September.

But according to a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll released Thursday, 53 percent of people polled said they suspect that the military assessment of the situation will try to make it sound better than it actually is. Forty-three percent said they do trust the report.

CNN Polling Director Keating Holland said he doesn't think the mistrust is directed at Petreaus as much as it is what he represents.

Holland said, "I suspect most people are hearing the words 'general' and 'Iraq' and that's what they're basing their opinion on."

He added, "It does seem to indicate that anyone associated with the Bush administration may be a less than credible messenger for the message that there is progress being made in Iraq."

Another interesting thing about the poll, Holland said, is that it indicates that about half of those surveyed -- 47 percent -- feel that the military is making progress in Iraq, although slightly more -- 49 percent -- do not.

White House press secretary Tony Snow reacted to the poll, saying that he hoped that "people do not try to engage in personal attacks on Gen. Petraeus or Ambassador Crocker."

"David Patraeus is basically the guy who's written the manual on counterinsurgency, and the one thing that you see with returning Democratic and Republican congressman is that something very significant has taken place," Snow said.

How the report is phrased also might determine how it is received, Holland said. If the report details military progress, that might be better received than what political progress the Iraqi government is making.

Twenty-six percent of those polled feel that the Iraqi government is making progress, while 69 percent said that it wasn't.

"We haven't done a lot of polling about the Iraqi government," Holland said, "but the numbers we have seem to indicate that people are pretty skeptical of any government official in Iraq."

The poll indicates that most of America's mind is made up about the war -- 72 percent said the report will have no effect on their view of the war.

Of those opposed to the war, 47 percent said Petreaus' report could not change their mind while 17 percent said it could.

Thirty-three percent said they support the war.

The poll was based on interviews of 1,029 Americans by telephone between August 6 and 8. The sampling error was plus or minus 4.5 percentage points, except for the questions based on the respondents' support or lack of support of the war, which was plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

Innocent Man Sentenced to Death Under Cruel Texas Law

By Liliana Segura, The Brooklyn Rail
Posted on August 14, 2007, Printed on August 15, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/59484/

Kenneth Foster's time is running out.

On Tuesday, August 7, in a six-to-three decision, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals denied his final writ of habeas corpus, giving the legal green light for his execution. Foster, who is scheduled to die by lethal injection on August 30, is now at the mercy of the merciless Board of Pardons and Paroles. The odds are bad. Five out of seven board members must recommend clemency before Governor Rick Perry will consider it -- and in a state that has executed nearly 400 people in thirty years, clemency has only been granted twice. But Foster's supporters, who are spearheading a letter-writing campaign to the board and governor, are relying on one particularly salient detail to move their minds, if not their hearts: Foster didn't kill anyone.

Foster was convicted for the 1996 murder of Michael LaHood Jr., who was shot following a string of robberies, by a man named Mauriceo Brown. Brown admitted to the shooting and was executed by lethal injection last year. Now Foster faces the same fate. So, if Brown was the shooter, what did the 19-year-old Foster do to get a death sentence? He sat in his car, 80 feet away, unaware that a murder was taking place.

Foster was convicted under Texas's "law of parties," a twist on a felony murder statute that enables a jury to convict a defendant who was not the primary actor in a crime. This can mean sentencing someone to death even if he or she had no proven role in a murder. Texas's law states that "if, in the attempt to carry out a conspiracy to commit one felony, another felony is committed by one of the conspirators, all conspirators are guilty of the felony actually committed, though having no intent to commit it." Defendants, the Texas courts say, can be held responsible for "failing to anticipate" that the "conspiracy" -- in Foster's case, the robberies, for which he was the getaway driver -- would lead to a murder. Foster's sentence, death row prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal recently commented, "criminalizes presence, not actions."

In theory, the law of parties is "a well-recognized legal document," says Houston defense attorney Clifford Gunter, and most states with the death penalty on the books include a similar provision for "non-triggermen." Nevertheless, critics of the Texas law say it's an aberration -- a slippery legal statute that stands in direct violation of the 1982 Supreme Court decision in Enmund v. Florida. Still the "prevailing view," according to Gunter, Enmund held that the death penalty was unconstitutional for a defendant "who aids and abets a felony in the course of which a murder is committed by others but who does not himself kill, attempt to kill, or intend that a killing take place or that lethal force will be employed." In Texas today, the law or parties says exactly the opposite.

Even more troubling is the law in practice. When Justice Byron White wrote the Enmund decision in 1982, he observed that the Court was not aware of a single execution of someone who did not kill or intend to kill. What a difference another quarter-century makes. Months after Enmund was decided, Texas executed its first prisoner since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976. In the tidal wave of capital cases that followed, numerous defendants would be sentenced to die under the law of parties.

One was Norman Green. Green was charged for a murder during a botched robbery in an electronics store in 1985. He got death. His accomplice, the man who actually pulled the trigger, got life. The arbitrary result exemplifies what Green's appellate lawyer, Verna Langham -- who also handled Kenneth Foster's first appeal -- sees as the danger of the law of parties. "[It] is subject to such loose interpretation," she told the Austin Chronicle in 2005. "A kid in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people can end up being sentenced to death." Green was executed in 1999.

No formal study has been done on the number of defendants subjected to the law of parties in Texas. Anti-death penalty activists estimate that Texas death row has 80 to 100. This number seems high to David Dow, founder and director of the Texas Innocence Network and author of Executed on a Technicality (2005). But he says that it could be an accurate measure of the number of prisoners whose juries were given the choice of applying the law of parties, even if their conviction did not hinge on it. "In a lot of cases, you have a [law of parties] instruction, but jurors have to find one or the other: Either the person was responsible for killing the victim or they are responsible for participating in a crime where it should have been anticipated that a murder would take place." For a defendant facing lethal injection, it's a distinction without a difference. Regardless of the number of times the law of parties has been used, its clear effect has been to broaden the pool of defendants eligible for death. By inviting a jury to speculate whether a defendant "should have known" a murder could happen, it drastically lowers the burden of proof for a punishment supposedly reserved for "the worst of the worst."

From the zeal of prosecutors to the legal machinery that supports them, "the structure of the Texas's legal system makes it easier to sentence people to death," says Dow. Between the Polunsky Unit in Livingston and the women's death row in Gatesville, nearly 400 prisoners are awaiting execution. By the end of the summer, Texas will have killed its 400th prisoner since the death penalty was brought back. The state that famously carried out 152 executions under Governor George W. Bush has seen Gov. Rick Perry surpass his record. Since taking office in December 2000, Perry has signed off on over 158 executions -- a number that will be dated when this piece goes to press (and which would be higher still were it not for the Supreme Court's 2005 decision in Roper v. Simmons, which forced Perry to commute the death sentences of 28 prisoners who were younger than 18 at the time of their crime). In this context, it's hard not to see the law of parties as an irresistible tool in a legal system designed to summarily execute people. Especially if the defendant is black and the victim is white.

Kenneth Foster's case is a good example. He's not just a black man accused of killing a white man; he was convicted for killing the son of an attorney highly esteemed by the legal community. As with so many other cases involving families of influence, the media was all over it, and the LaHood family's wish for an execution quickly became public knowledge. (LaHood's mother reaffirmed her support of Mauriceo Brown's execution last year.) In other particularly high-profile cases, the law of parties has come in similarly handy for the prosecution. In the trial of Patrick Murphy Jr. -- one of the notorious "Texas Seven," who in 2000 escaped from prison, killed a police officer on Christmas Eve, and were summarily sentenced to die -- prosecutors seeking death sentences across the board used the law of parties to circumvent the fact that Murphy was not at the scene of the crime. Prospective jurors were asked not just how they felt about capital punishment, but also about the law of parties specifically. (It worked. Murphy is now sitting on death row.)

The many excesses of Texas capital law offer a portrait of a brutal and broken system -- one that has long been protested by anti-death penalty activists. More recently, prisoners themselves have begun to organize from the inside. Kenneth Foster is among them. In 2005 he helped found D.R.I.V.E, a group of death row prisoners who protest the death penalty as well the abusive conditions of their incarceration. D.R.I.V.E, which stands for "Death Row Inner-Communalist Vanguard Engagement," is multi-racial, highly political, and, perhaps most important, thriving -- on one of the most repressive death rows in the country. Members encourage fellow prisoners to protest on execution days, and to protest their own executions (refusing to walk to the van that takes them to the executions chamber; refusing last meals). They also protest inhumane prison conditions. Last fall, a dozen death row prisoners at Polunsky went on a hunger strike to protest the inedible food and constantly overflowing toilets in their cells, among other abuses. Comparing themselves to the hunger strikers at Guantanamo Bay, they eventually caught the attention of the New York Times.

Some members of the group also invoke the legacy of Gary Graham -- a.k.a. Shaka Sankofa -- the Texas death row prisoner who was executed in 2000, despite overwhelming evidence that he could be innocent. Graham, who was put to death amidst widespread protests, maintained his innocence until the end, declaring in his last statement, "They are murdering me tonight." This era, which Dow considers the "heyday" of protest around executions, coincided with increased repression on Texas death row. Following an attempted prison break in the late 90s, the death row population was relocated. At their new home in the Polunsky Unit, prisoners are housed for 23 hours a day in cells that are 60 square feet (the American Correctional Association recommends a minimum of 80 feet). Work and recreation privileges are pretty much non-existent, and the few prisoners entitled to small luxuries can easily have them taken away. Such is the case of Stephen Moody, whose participation in last fall's hunger strike led to the confiscation of his radio. Texas death row prisoners are allowed no contact visits, and only a few phone calls a year.

Despite this, Kenneth Foster and D.R.I.V.E. have allies on the outside. In addition to his supporters and family in Texas, a New York-based political hip-hop group called the Welfare Poets is speaking out on behalf of Foster and other prisoners on Texas death row; grassroots groups like the Campaign to End the Death Penalty are working to protest Foster's execution, from Harlem to Austin. With Foster's legal recourses almost dried up, a letter campaign to members of the appeal board is underway. But it's a long shot. "Perry has never granted clemency in a capital case before, even when the Board recommended it," says Bryan McCann, a CEDP activist in Austin. In a state that will have executed 400 people by September, clemency has only been granted two times. "If Kenneth Foster has a good innocence claim, that would be great for him," Dow says, noting that innocence is what gets attention these days. But while Foster's supporters argue that Foster is innocent -- that nobody should be executed "for driving a car," in the slaughterhouse state of Texas, innocence can be harder to prove than guilt.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/59484/

How the hell is this even legal? By legal, I mean Constitutional. Texas seems to have some pretty retarded reasons for killing people. I wouldn't agree with it, but I could at least see the reasoning if they could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that this guy had any clue what was going on, but come on! This guy has already spent years on death row and now he's about to get the needle for sitting in a car at fairly decent distance with no evidence to support that he was in any way involved! Fuck Texas!

Disclamer: No offense was intended toward any of our audience who may inhabit the great State of Texas. Unless you're a politician that supports this kind of bullshit.

Dying in a plane crash...

I have a recurring dream about dying in a plane crash. In fact, I had one last night. It's happened so much I feel that I'm as much an expert in dying in plane crashes as any living being can be. I'm not superstitious. I'm not afraid to fly. But on the off-hand chance this dream turns prophetic, I feel qualified enough to make a request for anyone unfortunate enough to be on that plane with me...

I don't mind the idea of dying in a plane crash. In my dreams, I've done it a thousand times under a thousand different conditions. In most instances, death is instantaneous and painless. The thing that does bother me is what happens during that final plummet. Yes it's terrifying. But please, for the love of God, what's with the screaming? I understand you're frightened. I understand you don't want to die. I'm coming to terms with that myself as is every other passenger on that plane. But while I'm facing my imminent demise looking out the window in absolute silence and stunned horror, you're ruining the last few moments of everyone else's existence with your incessant shrill chimpanzee-like shrieking.

You're going to die. Of what possible use is a last-minute vocal exercise going to serve other than to completely annoy everyone around you and make a terrible situation even more unbearable? We are all in shock. Our sense of time slows and our senses become sharper. Now is not the time to be yelling. I'm not a religious man; but I don't mind if you pray. I might even hold your hand. But please keep it within an acceptable decibel level. If your God is real, he isn't hard of hearing, and he's most certainly aware that the plane is going down. He apparently has a plan, and he's not going to change his mind on the basis of how loud you beg him to alter it. Besides, you have an eternal life to look forward to. Look at me... I'm an atheist, and I'm keeping my mouth shut. Superman doesn't exist, so I'm hoping you're not calling for him. Anyone who can help you is already busy trying.

All I'm asking for a bit of reverence so we may die in dignity. If you treat it like a fucking roller coaster, I swear I'm going to punch you in the fucking teeth for depriving me of this... and I'm pretty sure I'll get away with it.

New Feature Added!

I've added an RSS link to the blog. Now you can subscribe and get updates as soon as they are published. To subscribe, just click the RSS icon listed just below the archives on the right side of the screen. Enjoy!

The Truth About Scooby Doo

Everyone remembers the cartoon show Scooby-Doo from their early childhood, right? But something you may not remember is what the show was really all about. As I've gotten older, it has become more clear to me what Fred, Shaggy, Daphne, Velma, and Scooby were actually doing as they traversed the continent foiling crimes of all sorts in the Mystery Machine.

What We Remember:
Four teenagers and their trusted dog gallop across the country in their purple and green van solving mysteries of all sort--and in the process meet all kinds of interesting people.

The Truth:
Four high-school dropouts and their sentient dog ride around the country in their psychodelic love machine, earning their way by selling drugs. Oh, and they occasionally take some old guys mask off to solve a mystery.

It may be a little hard to swallow, but just take a look at the evidence...

Take Shaggy for example. Not only is he the inspiration for the current 'grunge' scene, with his sloppy dress and facial hair, but Shaggy is obviously a 'burner', i.e., he smokes marijuana. Why do you think he is constantly hungry? Shaggy can make a six foot hoagie and swallow it whole.

And then there is Scooby himself. While dogs do not generally smoke joints, Scooby gets his 'high' from Scooby-Snacks, which are in fact Hash-Brownies. Whenever Scooby, or Shaggy for that matter, eats a Scooby-Snack, they go ape! It just blows their mind and they do whatever they are told, because they are so lit! Scooby is also hungry all the time.

The other characters do not actively take part in the stoner-fest that Shaggy and Scooby do, but they do condone the selling of it because it helps support their jaunts across the country (and the world--they drove to China once). These other characters do have their own peculiarities however..

Fred and Daphne are always splintering off from the group to go 'solve the case' by themselves. It's no real mystery what these two are really doing--they're getting busy in the back of the Mystery Machine. Daphne with her pretty pink, well, legs and Fred are constantly bumping uglies. Fred is, by the way, pumped up on steroids. One thing that remains a mystery to me though, is why he always wore that stupid scarf around his neck.

And what about Velma? Everyone's least favorite of the cast, was of course, a lesbian. But, as it turned out in the later episodes, she was also into beastiality. Where do you thing Scrappy-Doo came from? Scrappy, who was a dog yet spoke perfect english, was obviously a product of Velma and Scooby.

So the kids spent their teenage years driving around the world, slangin' dope, shooting steroids, eating hash brownies, and fucking their dog, while all the while looking for the perfect 'hit'.

O If we had only known these things when we watched this cartoon as children...

What the fuck is this doing on a government website???

his is from www.americasupportsyou.mil. Notice the .mil ending. This is on the motherfucking Pentagon's website:


Operation Straight Up Tour is working to help military children and families become stronger through faith-based entertainment, its founder said.

“OSU Tour is an organization dedicated to helping our armed forces with the common issues brave men and women face,” Jonathan Spinks said, referring to child rearing, troubled marriages, anger, depression, addiction, and post-traumatic stress disorder. “We’re addressing those things through entertainment.”

http://www.americasupportsyou.mil/americasupportsyou/Content.aspx?ID=44755552&SectionID=1


Okay, alarm bells should be going off in your head right now. What exactly is "faith-based entertainment"? The remainder of the article blabbers about high wire acts and comedians, but if you go to the Operation Straight Up founder's website, you get a very different story, under the headline "Military Crusade in Iraq":


We are most excited about this crusade and yes we are willing to go to the front lines with a very encouraging word straight from God, to our troops. We feel the forces of heaven have encouraged us to perform multiple crusades that will sweep through this war torn region. We’ll hold the only religious crusade of its size in the dangerous land of Iraq.

http://jspinks.org/iraq.html


And what kind of "faith-based entertainment" are they sending to Iraq?


Actor Stephen Baldwin, the youngest member of the famous Baldwin brothers, is no longer playing Pauly Shore's sidekick in comedy masterpieces like Biodome. He has a much more serious calling these days.

Baldwin became a right-wing, born-again Christian after the 9/11 attacks, and now is the star of Operation Straight Up (OSU), an evangelical entertainment troupe that actively proselytizes among active-duty members of the US military. As an official arm of the Defense Department's America Supports You program, OSU plans to mail copies of the controversial apocalyptic video game, Left Behind: Eternal Forces to soldiers serving in Iraq. OSU is also scheduled to embark on a "Military Crusade in Iraq" in the near future.


...


The Left Behind videogame is a real-time strategy game that makes players commanders of a virtual evangelical army in a post-apocalyptic landscape that looks strikingly like New York City after 9/11. With tanks, helicopters and a fearsome arsenal of automatic weapons at their disposal, Left Behind players wage a violent war against United Nations-like peacekeepers who, according to LaHaye's interpretation of Revelation, represent the armies of the Antichrist. Each time a Left Behind player kills a UN soldier, their virtual character exclaims, "Praise the Lord!" To win the game, players must kill or convert all the non-believers left behind after the rapture. They also have the option of reversing roles and commanding the forces of the Antichrist.

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion?bid=15&pid=220960


Oh, and that's not all:


This controversy has not deterred OSU from encouraging US troops to play virtual rounds of kill or convert after a hard day of house-to-house searches and counterinsurgency warfare against Iraqi insurgents. What's more, OSU's "Freedom Packages" include a copy of evangelical pastor Jonathan McDowell's More Than A Carpenter -- a book advertised as "one of the most powerful evangelism tools worldwide" -- that is double-published in Arabic. Considering that only a handful of American troops speak Arabic, the book is ostensibly intended for proselytizing efforts among Iraqi civilians.

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion?bid=15&pid=220960


All with the blessing of the fucking Pentagon.

Thank you, Supreme Court, for protecting Bush's "faith-based initiatives" so bullshit artists like Stephen Baldwin can go on a "crusade" in Iraq spreading "faith based entertainment" to our soldiers which encourages them to kill or convert the unfaithful, all of it funded by our tax dollars.

Fucking sickening.

10 Reasons You Should Never Get A Job

1. Income for dummies.

Getting a job and trading your time for money may seem like a good idea. There’s only one problem with it. It’s stupid! It’s the stupidest way you can possibly generate income! This is truly income for dummies.

Why is getting a job so dumb? Because you only get paid when you’re working. Don’t you see a problem with that, or have you been so thoroughly brainwashed into thinking it’s reasonable and intelligent to only earn income when you’re working? Have you never considered that it might be better to be paid even when you’re not working? Who taught you that you could only earn income while working? Some other brainwashed employee perhaps?

2. Limited experience.

You might think it’s important to get a job to gain experience. But that’s like saying you should play golf to get experience playing golf. You gain experience from living, regardless of whether you have a job or not. A job only gives you experience at that job, but you gain ”experience” doing just about anything, so that’s no real benefit at all. Sit around doing nothing for a couple years, and you can call yourself an experienced meditator, philosopher, or politician.

3. Lifelong domestication.

Getting a job is like enrolling in a human domestication program. You learn how to be a good pet.

Look around you. Really look. What do you see? Are these the surroundings of a free human being? Or are you living in a cage for unconscious animals? Have you fallen in love with the color beige?

How’s your obedience training coming along? Does your master reward your good behavior? Do you get disciplined if you fail to obey your master’s commands?

Is there any spark of free will left inside you? Or has your conditioning made you a pet for life?

Humans are not meant to be raised in cages. You poor thing…

4. Too many mouths to feed.

Employee income is the most heavily taxed there is. In the USA you can expect that about half your salary will go to taxes. The tax system is designed to disguise how much you’re really giving up because some of those taxes are paid by your employer, and some are deducted from your paycheck. But you can bet that from your employer’s perspective, all of those taxes are considered part of your pay, as well as any other compensation you receive such as benefits. Even the rent for the office space you consume is considered, so you must generate that much more value to cover it. You might feel supported by your corporate environment, but keep in mind that you’re the one paying for it.

You only get paid a fraction of the real value you generate. Your real salary may be more than triple what you’re paid, but most of that money you’ll never see. It goes straight into other people’s pockets.

What a generous person you are!

5. Way too risky.

Many employees believe getting a job is the safest and most secure way to support themselves.

Morons.

Social conditioning is amazing. It’s so good it can even make people believe the exact opposite of the truth.

Does putting yourself in a position where someone else can turn off all your income just by saying two words (”You’re fired”) sound like a safe and secure situation to you? Does having only one income stream honestly sound more secure than having 10?

6. Having an evil bovine master.

When you run into an idiot in the entrepreneurial world, you can turn around and head the other way. When you run into an idiot in the corporate world, you have to turn around and say, “Sorry, boss.”

Did you know that the word boss comes from the Dutch word baas, which historically means master? Another meaning of the word boss is “a cow or bovine.” And in many video games, the boss is the evil dude that you have to kill at the end of a level.

So if your boss is really your evil bovine master, then what does that make you? Nothing but a turd in the herd.

Who’s your daddy?

7. Begging for money.

When you want to increase your income, do you have to sit up and beg your master for more money? Does it feel good to be thrown some extra Scooby Snacks now and then?

Or are you free to decide how much you get paid without needing anyone’s permission but your own?

If you have a business and one customer says “no” to you, you simply say “next.”


8. An inbred social life.

Many people treat their jobs as their primary social outlet. They hang out with the same people working in the same field. Such incestuous relations are social dead ends. An exciting day includes deep conversations about the company’s switch from Sparkletts to Arrowhead, the delay of Microsoft’s latest operating system, and the unexpected delivery of more Bic pens. Consider what it would be like to go outside and talk to strangers. Ooooh… scary! Better stay inside where it’s safe.

9. Loss of freedom.

It takes a lot of effort to tame a human being into an employee. The first thing you have to do is break the human’s independent will. A good way to do this is to give them a weighty policy manual filled with nonsensical rules and regulations. This leads the new employee to become more obedient, fearing that s/he could be disciplined at any minute for something incomprehensible. Thus, the employee will likely conclude it’s safest to simply obey the master’s commands without question. Stir in some office politics for good measure, and we’ve got a freshly minted mind slave.

10. Becoming a coward.

Have you noticed that employed people have an almost endless capacity to whine about problems at their companies? But they don’t really want solutions – they just want to vent and make excuses why it’s all someone else’s fault. It’s as if getting a job somehow drains all the free will out of people and turns them into spineless cowards. If you can’t call your boss a jerk now and then without fear of getting fired, you’re no longer free. You’ve become your master’s property.

This Is Where I Say I've Had Enough...