People come up to me all the time and say "Granger, you seem to know so much about politics and the world in general, and I feel like an uneducated toolbox. I don't even know what my position is on a lot of the issues that you discuss. Hell, I don't even know if I am liberal or conservative. Can you help?" Normally I just tell these people to fuck off and leave me alone because I don't have time for their shit, but today I am here to help. Check out politicalcompass.org. It has a fairly intricate test you can take to see where you fall on the political map. It is a little long, but shouldn't take more than five minutes to complete if you have half a brain. It will also show you where many historical politcal figures fall on the same map, and where the current crop of candidates for the presidency fall on the map (suprisingly, all of the candidates fall on the conservative side of the spectrum). I won't say exactly where I fell on the spectrum, but I'll tell you that I'm not as liberal as Ghandi, not as conservative as George W. Bush, not as authoritarian as Hitler and not as libertarian as the Dalai Lama.
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So, I just got a cable modem and high speed internet access at home last night. I now feel like I am caught up with the year 2002, thank you. It is blindingly fast compared to our old dial up (that never connected faster than 40 kbps). So what will I do with all this speed? I don't know, but the first things that came to my mind were online gaming and porn (not necessarily in that order).
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The story has surfaced that national "hero" Jessica Lynch posed for some nude photos with some of the guys in the barracks before shipping off to Iraq. [Note: I put hero in quotes because I have yet to hear what she has done that was heroic] Larry Flynt bought the pictures (reportedly for $200,000) but will not publish them because he didn't think it was the right thing to do. What the fuck? Is this the same guy that brought us Hustler? I mean I thought the full name of Hustler magazine was "Hustler - We thought it was the wrong thing to do, so we did it." Maybe Flynt has gone soft in his old age. He said that Lynch was just a pawn of the government, which seems to be pretty accurate. The first reports the government released were that Lynch had fought bravely, emptying her ammunition into the enemy before being shot and captured. The truth was that she was injured in a jeep crash and never fired her weapon at the enemy, was captured and abandoned by her captors and then rescued in a made-for-CNN scene. It really seems that she was a government pawn, but that's no reason why the whole world shouldn't see her breasts.
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Playboy.com is running a 'Women of Wal-Mart' pictoral. There are so many jokes that could be made of this that I just don't know where to start. The subtitle of the pictoral should be "A Dream Come True for White Trash Minimum Wage Workers Everywhere." Maybe that's a bit harsh, I mean, I like naked women, so why should I make fun? Here is a quote from an article about the pictoral:
"This was a once in a lifetime opportunity," said Tesha Mullen, one of the feature's models. "When I heard about the pictorial, I knew right away that I wanted to send in photos. Some of the most beautiful women in the world have posed for Playboy and it is an honor to have been selected for this feature."
Well, at least they didn't pose for Hustler, I guess. Although apparently Larry Flynt has raised his standards a bit. Wal Mart women might not cut it for him anymore.