You’ve all heard this story already, right? Kid falls into the gorilla enclosure at the Cincinnati zoo. Big silverback named Harambe ends up dead, shot by zoo employees to save the boy.

This story, deserving no more than a “Wow that’s wild, glad the kid is OK” type response, is instead currently blowing up the internet and the 24 hour news cycle, because of course it is. So of course, I have decided to come out of my long self imposed exile in order to add my voice to the fray.

And what my voice is saying is, fuck you all. Seriously, just fuck you all. Where shall I begin?

To everybody whining that the gorilla shouldn’t have been shot: 

Fuck you.

As soon as you come up with a better method of assuring the safety of that child and the zoo staff that works faster and more effectively than a 30.06 round, you can go ahead, invent a time machine, go back in time, train the zoo staff with it, and save Harambe. But shit, if you’re going to do that, you might as well just grab the kid before he falls in the damn enclosure in the first place, asshole.

The gorilla wasn’t doing anything wrong!

Fuck you.

Objectively, this is true, but completely irrelevant. The gorilla was being a gorilla.  Unfortunately, he happened to be going about his business of being a gorilla while a human child was too close. So yeah, it’s absolutely not his fault he got shot. But he got shot just the same, and it was still the right decision.

Harambe was protecting the child/just playing!

Fuck you.

First of all, stop projecting. When you bare your teeth, it’s called a smile. When literally any other animal on the planet does it, it means “look what I’m about to eat you with.” You don’t fucking know what that gorilla was “thinking.”  Nobody does. And even if the best primate researcher on the planet happened to be standing there to interpret his actions for us, a bullet was still the proper response. It does not matter if he was “only playing” or “protecting” the child. He could have easily “protected” him to death in an eye blink. He could have crushed the kid without even realizing it. What do you propose the zoo staff do? Even if you’re somehow completely sure Harambe was “playing” what is your game plan here? See if he’ll play catch with you and throw you the kid? Think about it for half a second and you’ll realize how much it doesn’t matter.

But it was a rare mountain gorilla, there’s only 95,000 of them left!

Fuck you.

That is the dumbest argument I’ve heard in my life. So now there’s only 94,999.  I’m sorry, a human child was in danger. Here’s a simple chart I made showing the relative importance of human lives vs other animals lives:

You can’t see the dot for the other animals because it’s off the bottom of the chart like a mile.  Ain’t nobody got time to draw a mile long line in Paint.

I don’t care if Harambe was the last of his species.  Bullet in the brain pan, and it’s not even a close decision.

It’s the mother’s fault, she wasn’t watching the kid!

Fuck you.

Oh, and also, irrelevant. It literally does not matter how the kid ended up there, the gorilla ends up dead in every scenario. Kids do stupid shit. That’s why they’re called kids. When I was a kid I fell out of a tree and caught my ankle in the crook of a branch on the way down and hung there screaming until my neighbor (who happened to be the closest) came running over and got me down. Was it my mom’s fault for not watching me more closely?  Shit no. What’s she supposed to do, stare at me 24/7? Screw that.

Stop judging the mom. It’s not like she was dangling the kid over the edge or something. The kid did what kids do, which, as you may remember me saying a paragraph ago, is STUPID SHIT. He crawled through a fence and fell down a bank. This is only news because there happened to be a gorilla at the bottom of the bank.

The zoo should have higher fences, it’s dumb how easy it is for a kid to get in with the gorillas!

Fuck yo– oh hang on. You actually do have a point here.

It IS pretty silly how easy it apparently is for a four year old to get into an enclosure with a 450 pound mountain gorilla. Somebody should probably fix that. But unless you steal the time machine from the people building it to take their fool proof instant gorilla sedation system back to train the zoo staff, fixing the fences isn’t going to save Harambe.

That’s all I got time for today kids, consider yourselves chastised.

Dear internet: Please stop worrying about how those poor Steubenville shitheads just had their “lives ruined.” Oh jeez, I’m so sorry that when you do something incredibly illegal and wrong, you go to jail and have that as a black mark on your record forever! That’s just too bad how that works, huh?

I got me a whole bunch of pent up snarky rage (snage? Rark?) so I’ma just do a list of the most bullshit things I’m seeing people say over and over again on the ‘tubes today.

They only fingerbanged her

Oh jeez, I guess that makes it OK then! No dicks were inserted into unwilling vaginas, so nothing bad happened, huh? Oh sure, go ahead and whine about how Ohio is one of the few places in the country where “unwilling fingerbangs” are considered rape. You know what? I don’t care. Even if it’s not considered rape in many places, it’s still sexual assault, and still horribly wrong and awful and shitty and INSANELY ILLEGAL and should still result in prosecution.

Now they have to register as sex offenders for the rest of their lives

Let me be clear on this: I’m not sure I understand the point of sex offender registries at all. It seems to me like once you do your time in jail, that should be it. Do we make murderers register on lists and tell everybody else they killed a dude once? Pretty sure we don’t. So I’m kind of unclear on why sex offender registries exist at all.

BUT. I hate to be one of those “now is not the time” people, because usually that’s bullshit. But seriously. Now is not the fucking time. These shits haven’t even done a day in jail yet for what they did. Let’s not worry about how having to continually register as a sex offender will affect them after they do their time until after they’ve at least started to do their fucking time, I say. How about we worry about any injustice done to them AFTER they pay for the injustice they inflicted on that girl they raped, OK?  I dunno, seems reasonable to me.

You can be forced to register as a sex offender for peeing in public

Uh, OK. So? I mean, sure, that sounds dumb to me. It also sounds dubious and urban legend-y. But whatever, so what? I already said I’m pretty dubious about the concept of sex offender registries in the first place, but granted that they exist and granted that the purpose of them is to warn others that potential sex offenders are nearby, surely RAPISTS are justifiably going to be on those lists, right? So what does it fucking matter that peeing in public can also land you on those lists? Yes that seems wrong, but what the fuck does it have to do with this case? Why are you bringing this up at all? This isn’t even a case of “Now is not the time.”  It’s a case of “Why are you even fucking bringing this up, it has nothing to do with anything we’re talking about asshole.” I believe in the kinder parts of the internet they call this “derailing.”  I’ma just call it what it is, though: Stupid nonsensical douchebaggery.

These poor boys, they had such promising and bright futures, now it’s all ruined!

Yeah. BECAUSE THEY RAPED A GIRL, THAT’S WHY. Stop talking like they were walking down the street and got hit by a bus and now they can never play football again. That would be a sad situation worthy of sympathy. That’s not at all what happened. They raped somebody, now they’re going to jail for it. If their football careers are over because of that, OH FUCKING WELL. Don’t give me that “one mistake” bullshit either. It’s not like their “one mistake” was being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or trusting the wrong person, or even doing something they didn’t understand the consequences of. They assaulted a passed out girl at a party, knowing full well the entire time what they were doing and how fucking wrong it was. Then they tried to cover it up afterwards. They are not victims. Stop pretending they are.

She got blackout drunk at a party and–

SHUT UP. Seriously, you can just shut the fuck up right now. If you think that sentence is going anywhere other than to the shitsville of victim blaming, you’re an idiot. It literally does not matter how drunk she was, what she was wearing, or how many partners she’s willingly had in her young life. 100% of the blame for this situation goes to the boys who chose to stick things in her vagina without her permission. End. Of. Fucking. Story.

Fucking hell. This is awful. I’m done.

If you haven’t heard about this new “Copyright Alert System” better known as the Six Strikes program, you better educate yourself right now. The gist of it is, the usual suspects (you know, all those people with failed business models) got together and cooked up a scheme whereby they’re going to monitor your internet traffic, decide if you’re infringing their copyrights, and then send you threatening pop-up messages trying to shake you down for some cash.

No really.  This is actually happening already.  Comcast and Verizon are already starting the shake-downs, under the guise of “educating” you about copyright infringement. Yeah right, they educate you to the tune of $35 a pop for the right to argue with them about whether you did anything wrong.

It seriously looks like the MPAA and the RIAA have finally come up with a new business model! But unfortunately, it looks like this:

1. Accuse someone of doing something wrong.
2. Charge them $35 for the right to dispute this accusation.
3. PROFIT!

Yeah, I can’t see a single thing wrong with this, can you? Not to mention that in order to try to catch you doing something wrong, they’ve teamed up with your ISP to snoop your internet connections. And if they decide you’ve done something wrong, they inject a pop-up into your data stream to “educate you” on how you can now pay them $35 to clear your name.

What do the ISPs get out of this? Well, for one, Comcast isn’t just an ISP or cable provider anymore. They own NBC now, so they’re also content providers and have a vested interest in this as is. And besides that, if you get your six strikes, they can start throttling your bandwidth until you get EDUCATED. And there’s nothing ISPs like better than throttling bandwidth, since they already oversubscribe everything. This way, they can add MORE customers to that already saturated pipe!

Seriously, fuck this all right to fucking hell. Let me be clear here: I think people deserve to be paid for their creative works. However, we’re not really talking about the creators here. We’re talking about giant industry conglomerates who exist solely to extract money from all sides of the “creator/consumer” equation. The RIAA fucks over artists almost as hard as they fuck over consumers, and they need to die already.

Our current copyright system is severely broken. It is completely unworkable in a digital age, and this idea that we need to save the existing system is completely insane. No, we don’t. We need to reform the system so consumers and creators can both get what they want without giant assbag bureaucracies getting in the way. We need to stop this ludicrous idea that the MPAA and the RIAA somehow deserve to be “saved” because their business models are unworkable in the digital age. NO THEY DON’T. It is entirely incumbent upon them to FIND A NEW BUSINESS MODEL or perish. That’s how it’s supposed to work, anyway.

Unfortunately, the new business model they seem to have hit upon is fucking terrible. So complain to everybody who will listen about this. This needs to DIE.

So… still here, huh? Guess I jumped the gun on that whole world ending thing. Stupid Mayans were wrong.

Actually, as it turns out, the Mayans never predicted a thing anyway. December 21, 2012 was just the end of one cycle of their calendar, known as the long count. That’s all. Just a calendar period coming to an end, no different than what happens with our calendar every December 31st. Why did we think the world was going to end anyway? Answer: Because a lot of us are still stupid, frightened primitives who don’t get how freaking calendars work, apparently.

We also love to predict the end of the world. Here’s a nice, long list of untrue end-of-the-world predictions for your enjoyment. Notice the one common denominator they all share: They didn’t happen.

So here’s to another b’ak’tun, fresh with new promise! See you again on Mon, Mar 26, 2407, when the long count rolls over again. I’m sure we’ll all be wise and rational by then, and nobody will predict THE END OF THE WORLD ACCORDING TO THE MAYANS on that date.

…yeah right.

So, the world ends tomorrow. Finally! Now I can stop pretending like I like you people and care about anything or anybody other than myself and my own hedonistic wants and needs.

In short, screw you all, I never liked any of you anyway. DIE A HORRIBLE DEATH LOSERS!

We just had one of them elections here in the US, and the blue team won again. Now it wasn’t too long ago that the red team won all the time, so it’s not like team red is a bunch of gormless nitwits who can’t get anything right. I mean, I assume so, at least.

Anyhow, from my place on the sidelines, being neither affiliated with team donkey nor team elephant, I see some disturbing trends and repeated mistakes coming out of the red team’s camp and figured, hey, why not lend them a hand? Clearly they keep making these mistakes because they don’t realize how harmful they are to their cause, right? So maybe if I help them out by pointing out a few things, they’ll be like “Oh wow, we didn’t realize. Thanks!” Not that I’m particularly eager to see them start winning elections or anything, but I figure helping them out with these few things will only serve to make things better for everybody.

So here we go, in no particular order:

1) Stop being douchebags to latinos.

Latinos are the fastest growing ethnic minority in the country, and that’s not going to change any time soon. And unlike, say, blacks, who decided a long time ago that they’re never voting for your team based on how you continually fuck them over, they don’t tend to vote as a block. Many are in fact what you might call “natural” Republicans in many ways, being devout Catholics and big on traditional Republican issues such as family values.

But they’re not going to vote for you as long as you keep insisting that they don’t fucking belong here! As long as you continue to fan the flames of intolerance and insist on blocking any attempts at meaningful immigration reform, you’re going to continue to lose the latino vote. This is something the much maligned George W Bush actually had right–he tried to get the rest of you guys to accept immigration reform and embrace the latino vote and you told him to go pound sand. So he was the last member of team elephant to poll even moderately well among latinos. Good job, guys.

Listen, if you’re going to continue to insist on Reagan’s vision of American as the “shining city on a hill” you can’t fucking act surprised when people outside the city want in. And you can continue to make up reasons why letting them in is wrong, but in the end all you’re really doing is being douchebags. So find some form of immigration reform you can live with that doesn’t involve further douchebaggery and get behind it. You’ll probably never be ahead of the blue team on this subject, but you can at least stop being the party of “go to hell, brown person.”

2) Stop acting like women can’t make their own decisions.

We know you’re morally opposed to abortion. You know what? I am too! I think in almost every case it’s the wrong choice. But, I further recognize I’m a dude, and will never have to make this decision on my own, for myself. So I see no reason why my opinion should carry any weight here. There’s lots of things I’m opposed to that people do on a regular basis, and I don’t see any reason to stop them from doing it.

I know, I know, you’re going to start screaming about saving the lives of the innocent unborn. I get it. You know what? I think you’re right. At some point during a pregnancy, a fetus stops being a fetus and starts being a living human being. I too would personally consider abortion past that point to be murder.

But third trimester abortions are already illegal in almost every state, usually with a “life of the mother” exception in place. Even in states where it’s legal, third trimester abortion is very uncommon. The significance of this is that it is during the third trimester that the fetus becomes “viable,” as in, if it were to pop out today, it would be considered a baby and not a spontaneous abortion or miscarriage. Babies “born” in the second trimester or before aren’t babies.  They’re tragic miscarriages. So stop pretending like they’re anything else. Up until the point where they’re viable outside of the mother’s body they’re nobody’s business but hers, I figure. Is that such a bad compromise?

So please, stop trying to overturn Roe v Wade. You’ve lost that fight. You lost it years ago. Stop being dickbags about it now. Seriously, we’ve got an economy in the shitter, wars costing us billions, a debt the size of the moon, and you’re worried about women making decisions about shit growing inside them that’s none of your fucking business?

3) Stop being outright hostile to homosexuals.

This one is seriously getting old. You’ve lost this fight too, you just don’t know it yet. There’s literally no argument you can make against issues like marriage equality that don’t boil down to “I don’t like it because it’s icky” or “Jesus said it isn’t right.” Neither of which are valid reasons to withhold certain rights from an entire segment of the population. Seriously guys, you’ve got nothing here. So stop being assholes and just let it go already.

You may be tempted to think “Hey, gays only make up about 10% of the population, so how much can this really hurt us?” Well, that’s true, depending on which statistics you believe. But here’s the thing–the rest of us who aren’t gay aren’t neutral on this topic. We see you being douchebags to our friends and family and don’t think very well of you because of it.

So there you go! Three easy tips from your pal Dave to maybe get you back on track to electability. Take it from me, a guy who used to self-identify as a Republican–your ideas about how to solve the economic crisis, how to govern in general, and your foreign policy aren’t exactly popular either, but at least these are issues on which I think you actually have ideas. On the above stuff, you’re just being dicks for no good reason. So cut the shit already!

So, by now you’ve heard of Todd Akin, and what a colossal piece of shit he is and all that. I feel like I missed my chance to jump on that train as it was leaving the station because I was super busy not writing blog posts for a few weeks.

But today I discovered something else appalling. Todd Akin aint the only shitheel who actively believes women don’t get pregnant from being raped. Apparently, lots of people, people in positions of actual power, believe this.

Now, I’m no doctor or anything, and my public school health education was spotty at best, but I’m pretty sure I learned somewhere along the line how babies are made. It involves sperm, ova, and the two meeting up somewhere inside a woman’s lady parts. And, near as I can tell, rape involves all three of those things. So… why wouldn’t that tend to cause pregnancy, at least at a rate on par with consensual sex?

The answer appears to be equal parts magic and victim blaming. The magic comes in the form of made-up bullshit about female bodies having some here-to-fore unknown to science ability to prevent pregnancy in cases of rape. Hey, guess what? That’s not the case. There’s no magic “secretions,” and Jesus doesn’t appear to make any real effort to stop rape pregnancies as far as anybody can empirically discern. So that’s out.

So what you’re left with is the stomach-churning implication that “legitimate rape” doesn’t cause pregnancy, which of course means, hey bitch, if you got pregnant, you weren’t actually raped. You must not have fought hard enough! Or maybe you secretly enjoyed it, you whore! Couldn’t have been rape, though, because you got preggers.

That’s some straight-up terrible bullshit douchebaggery, right there. I’m not sure I can think of a worse thing to say to someone who just got raped and now found out she’s pregnant with the rapist’s child.

The fact that people actually believe this is painful, but unfortunately, not surprising. Who was it who said that thing about repeating a big lie so often people eventually come to believe it? Oh right, it was these Nazi fucksticks.

Go to hell, fuckers.

Thieves are never the smartest people around (if they were, they likely wouldn’t be thieves.) But some thieves defy all logic. Take this asshole as an example. Mr. Benjamin Sickles broke into a local Subway restaurant and stole nine bags of chips. And he dropped so many getting away, the police were able to track him by following the chip trail!

Really dude? Nine bags of chips? That’s the best you could do? The article says he failed to get into the cash register (which, BTW, never has any cash in it when nobody is in the store anyway, dumbass!) But even so, couldn’t he have stolen something more valuable than nine bags of chips? Maybe grab one of those tubs of mayonnaise or a vat of ranch dressing or something. That can’t be any harder to fence than bags of chips! Don’t the chips come in boxes? Wouldn’t it have made more sense to go out back and grab an entire case of chips rather than grabbing individual bags??

I know, I’m applying logic to a situation in which clearly logic was not part of the decision making process at any point. Shame on me.

Giant shitbag Jenny McCarthy recently decided to take some time off from her busy schedule of spreading misinformation about vaccines and autism in order to pose nude for Playboy again.

Apparently, this caused some kind of minor brouhaha in some circles. Likely, those circles were only to be found in the entertainment divisions of several 24 hour newsrooms, because nothing delights them more than ginning up some “controversy” nobody is actually concerned about in order to fill some air time talking about it. This resulted in this video being posted to CNN.com a few days ago.

As you can see, apparently people are worried that she’s “too old” to pose nude, or don’t think it’s right for her to pose nude because she’s a mom. This is all bullshit. I think Jenny McCarthy is a giant shitbag because of her continued activism against vaccines, based on the demonstrably false idea that vaccines cause autism. Anything else she may be (a 39 year old woman, a mom, an actress, a nude model) is entirely irrelevant and entirely her business. If Playboy thinks they can sell more issues if they put her on the cover and she shows her boobies inside, and she is cool with that, that’s between her and Playboy, and nobody else, and it’s stupid that I even have to waste time saying this.

But I didn’t really come here to talk about the rights and wrongs of booby-showing older moms. What I really wanted to rant about was the argument male talking head makes around the 40 second mark of the video. They put up a picture of the cover of Playboy, and he says something like “she looks great!” and “if you’ve got it, flaunt it!” They then put up a side-by-side comparison of her first Playboy cover alongside her most recent one, and Mr. talking head says something like “She still looks great!”

Taken at face value, there’s nothing really wrong with these statements. The problem, as I see it, is that she doesn’t really look like that. Those pictures, both of them, were photoshopped to hell. Don’t believe me? Here’s how I know:

1. She has no pores, in either picture. There isn’t a human being alive who doesn’t have pores.
2. She has no blemishes. No wrinkles, no spots, no lines, no skin folds, nothing. Again, there isn’t a human being alive who looks like that.
3. I can tell by the pixels, and having seen a few shops in my day.
4. It’s the cover photo of a fucking magazine.

In all honestly, the only evidence you really need is point number 4. All the others are supporting evidence, but point 4 is really the key. Take a look at any magazine rack, and you’ll see nothing but smiling, photoshopped faces staring back at you. Not just faces, but whole bodies as well. What you see on the cover of a magazine (any magazine, not just men’s magazines like Playboy) bears about as much resemblance to reality as a good pencil sketch does. So Mr. talking head using the argument “she looks great!” to defend anything is sort of like saying “This sphere is round!”  Well, fucking duh.

Even nearly “perfect” people get touched up. Check this out:

I mean, holy shit, right? Do you even see what they did? I mean, apart from de-poreing her skin? They removed two tiny shadows. Shadows that might have hinted at the fact that the woman has skin, and when she stands with her hips unnaturally cocked like that, her skin bunches up a bit around her hips.

Seriously. All you people out there lucky/hard working enough to have flat stomachs, go ahead and stand in front of a mirror, hike up your shirt a bit, and cock your hips like this lady is doing. Now fucking tell me you don’t see the same skin bunching going on. Unless you’re actually anorexic (in which case, eat a sammich please, and also seek help) I’m going to bet you fucking see them. You know why? Because you’re a fucking human and you have skin, and when you stand like that, it’s just about fucking impossible for it not to bunch just a bit in places.

Now check this out:

Without doing any research (and hey, I’m a blogger, not some kind of fucking scientist) I’m going to guess Madonna is at least ten years older than Jenny McCarthy. So think about this. In ten years or so, if Jenny McCarthy decides to pose for Playboy again, what do you think she’s going to look like? My guess is, she’s really going to look like that picture on the left, but when you open the magazine, what you’ll see will be more like the picture on the right. And some asshat talking head is going to crow about how great she looks, and how “gracefully” she’s aged.

It’s not just the skinny people they do this to. They even ‘shop the plus size models. WTF you say? Isn’t the point of “plus size” models to show, well, bigger women? Women who don’t look “perfect”, have bellies, cellulite, and require more than a postage stamp to cover themselves up?

Well, no, apparently.

Shit, does she even count as a “plus size model” any more?

So can we all fucking stop crowing about how great people look in heavily photoshopped pictures? Jesus jumped-up Christ on a pogo stick, you might as well claim George Washington was a sexy beast based on that one painting of him we’ve all seen. Or that Susan B. Anthony was a fox based on that dollar coin you got from the Post Office. They are about as close to reality as any picture in any magazine is. Jenny McCarthy may in fact be a hot older lady. But I damn sure can’t form an accurate opinion of that based on any of the photos of her I’ve ever seen, because every single one of them has been heavily edited.

So apparently, this isn’t something that only happens in the movies. An Arizona woman strapped her one-month-old baby securely in his car seat, then drove off with him still on the roof. Now, first of all, I don’t have children. Which is probably a good thing. But I have to ask–is it a common practise to put your baby on the roof of your car in the first place? I’m not sure why, if so, but I’m willing to entertain the notion that I just don’t “get it,” not being one of those breeder types myself.

What I’m fairly sure isn’t common is leaving the little rugrat sitting alone on the pinnacle of Orthanc, whilst you drive away high. Oh, did I mention she was high? Yeah. Totally high. I’m not one to argue that we should ban things because people do stupid things when they use them, but let’s not go crazy in the other direction, either, claiming being high had nothing to do with it–being high probably had a lot to do with this situation. Not saying people can’t be this stupid stone cold sober, but… it takes effort, usually.

The best (read: worst) part of this story is how the woman and her boyfriend were stopped a few hours earlier, and her boyfriend was arrested for “aggravated DUI” which is apparently something that means “driving drunk while there’s a kid in the car.”  I wonder what fancy term they have for “driving away high and dumping your kid off the roof of the car into an intersection?” If they don’t have one, I bet they make one up soon. I suggested “aggravated dumbosity.”

Oh, by the way: The kid was OK. Somehow!