Mainstream Awareness: Dilbert Insight

#17 Oppositionists to a Mosque at Ground Zero

On 9/11/2001, a band of radical Muslims took over planes and turned them into missiles taking down both WTC towers, and inflicting damage to the Pentagon.  Thousands of American lives were lost.

In the late 19^th century, a band of radical Christians took over entire towns in the southern US, burning crosses and lynching black people and other minorities. Countless American lives were lost.

But the act of terrorism by a Christian group has not prevented Christian churches from taking root at the sites of lynchings and other injustices against Americans.  Good luck finding evidence of protests against the building of Christian places of worship on these former sites of terrorism.  In fact, many people accredit the building of more churches as having helped heal the wounds inflicted in the southern states by the “Christ-anointed” KKK.  Even victims of racism at the hands of this fringe Christian group were over-time declaring to the masses, “ya’ll motherfuckas need Jesus!”

Yet, here we are as a country over a hundred years later faced with a similar situation. A fringe religious group has preemptively attacked citizens of our country on the premise that we are infidels out to destroy them and their way of life.

Rather than showing the world that we are tolerant of all religions and that we do not hold ALL Muslims responsible for the events of 9/11, a handful (the most trusted source for news –Fox News — would have you believe the majority) of the country has expressed opposition to the building of a mosque (actually it’s a community center – semantics aside) near ground zero.

As Michael Hughes observed in the Huffington Post:

These abhorrent reactionaries have also smeared Muslim Americans, making all of them responsible for a heinous act of terrorism they had nothing to do with and one most rightly condemn. And, yes Virginia, people of the Muslim faith were in the Twin Towers on September 11th, and yes, there are Muslims, as hard as it is for neocons to fathom – who are patriots.

America was founded with a few basic freedoms, one of those being freedom of religion.  Rather than behaving like Osama Bin Laden himself is applying for a permit to install his own personal latrine at ground zero, Americans should start acting like Americans.  Nothing would show the world that al-Qaeda misjudged our country’s outlook toward Islam more than planting a Muslim place of worship at the site of one of the worst terrorist attacks in our nation’s history.

Unfortunately, these hardheaded bigots who hide behind the veil of Christianity to justify their hateful xenophobia are frequently the same people who denounce birth control, professing every child to be a gift from God Almighty.  The level of brainwashing, ignorance, and indoctrination that children of the Mosque Oppositionists would be required to overcome to lead beneficial lives is daunting.  It is more likely that children of passive-xenophobes could have their prejudices bloom into the second coming of the KKK.

Bigots unable to grasp the hypocrisy in their opposition to the mosque should avoid the challenges that come with raising a child to be a good person and stop reproducing.

Xenophobic Bigots in Action

#16 People Who Say “Drill Baby Drill”

We here at stopreproducing have said from the outset that our main goal is to make life on Earth more livable.  Well, idiots who want to drill for oil everywhere and anywhere seem to be working towards the antithesis of that idea, and for that, they have made our list. So “Drill Baby Drill”-ers (DBDs), when it comes to making babies we must urge you “Don’t, Baby, Don’t.”

The DBD mentality is one that is diametrically opposed to ours here at stopreproducing.  We want to lower the population to lessen the strain on our natural resources and ensure that a high quality of life will be attainable for all societies across the globe now, and in the future.  DBDs on the other hand want to exploit our natural resources now to satiate the ever growing demands of society.  DBDs feel it would be downright “un’merican” to change our lifestyles even slightly to alleviate our dependence on oil.  Instead DBDs say let’s just rape that bitch Mother Earth till she screams bloody murder.

This approach is unsustainable.  The Earth has limited natural resources and they will run out.  We need to change our ways now, or we are screwed*.  The idea that more drilling will somehow help us to rid our dependence on oil is so mind-boggling stupid I gave myself a headache just writing that sentence.

This approach is unfair.  The United States consumes more oil than the entire European Union, we consume more oil than China, we consume more oil than anyone.  DBDs seem to think that we somehow have the God given right to all of the oil the Earth has to offer.  Whether we have to drill for it, buy it, or pretend there are WMD’s in a country that has it so we can invade it and generally fuck up an entire region, we are gonna get that oil.  After we get that oil, we are going to put it in our giant, gas guzzling cars, and enjoy the high quality of life that an affluent nation has while we ignore the rest of the world’s poverty.  We not only are screwing over the rest of the world now, we are screwing over future generations all over the globe, as they will be the ones who have to fix this mess we are putting ourselves into.

This approach is unsafe.  If anyone had any remaining doubts that offshore drilling was dangerous to the Earth, the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico should remind us just what can happen.  Ecosystems are being destroyed and the whole Louisiana fishing industry is in danger of going under**.  Oil consumption also leads to pollution.  So oil drilling is an environmental double whammy: we cause mass damage in the short term while drilling, and manage to perpetuate a system that is slowly poisoning our planet and potentially could have catastrophic consequences down the line.  Awesome.

Guess what? We can see how stupid this is from space.

So, DBDs, when we add together your selfish/egotistical/ethnocentric behavior with the inability to see how absurd/illogical/dangerous your position is, we come to a simple conclusion: stop reproducing (and maybe go down to Louisiana to volunteer with that whole oil cleanup thing).

*Actually we should have changed our ways about 30 years ago.  This is probably not a sentence that gets typed very often but: We should have listened to Jimmy Carter.

**I was listening to a right wing talk radio host who claimed that the oil spill was all the “environmental extremists” fault, that if they had let companies drill on land, this would not have happened.  I’m sorry, what?  I am pretty sure that an oil rig blowing up on land is going to be as dangerous to the surrounding ecosystem as an oil rig blowing up offshore.  It just highlights the complete lack of logic on the part of some of these people.

Mainstream Awareness: 400 Million People Is SO Wrong

Train in India or DC Metro in 50 years?

Last week’s Newsweek article by Joel Kotkin, 400 Million People Can’t Be Wrong: Why America’s new baby boom bodes well for our future, praised America’s startlingly massive growth trajectory:

With a fertility rate 50 percent higher than Russia, Germany, or Japan, and well above that of China, Italy, Singapore, South Korea, and virtually all of Eastern Europe, the United States has become an outlier among its traditional competitors, all of whose populations are stagnant and seem destined to eventually decline.

Evidently if there are more of US than THEM, it must be a fantastic outlook for us.  Now that we have moved beyond an arms race with the former USSR, it seems we have filled the void with — a baby race.  This new drive to out-populate our global frienemies is not comforting.

While over-populated countries like India and China are finally curbing their unsustainable growth in an effort to clean up their polluted, carcinogenic environments, here we come with a solution that does little more than delay bankruptcy to that All-American ponzi scheme Social Security:

Between 2000 and 2050 the U.S. population aged 15 to 64—the key working and school-age group—will grow 42 percent, while the same group will decline by 10 percent in China, nearly 25 percent in Europe, and 44 percent in Japan. Unlike its rivals, America’s economic imperative will lie not in meeting the needs of the aging, but in providing job and income growth for our expanding workforce.

Oh, right, we currently have nearly 10% unemployment.  The job climate is the worst for graduating seniors in decades.  Aging infrastructure in major cities is crumbling as population growth in urban centers outpaces the ability to adapt.  And Kotkin’s solution is MORE BABIES!

Long ago, a group of settlers had many offspring to help them tend to their land and maximize their crop.  Eventually the settlement reached a critical mass.  All the arable land was sewn, maximum crop yields were realized, and natural resources were abundant.  Everyone worked.  Everyone ate.  Statues were even built in gratitude to the gods.  Life was good.  But then the settlement growth continued unchecked.  More land and resources were unavailable, so competition for resources became fierce.  The over-exploited land stopped providing, children starved, and the population plummeted until hardly anyone was left.  All that remained were barren grasslands and giant stone heads.

Hopefully our country and the planet will avoid the same fate as Easter Island.

#15 Narcissistic Jackasses Who Wear Hands-Free Headsets Constantly

Through the 18^th century, women donned decorative fans.  In the 19^th century men had their fanciful time pieces.  And by the mid-late 20^th century, men were augmenting their trophy women with gravity-defying silicone chest pillows.  But few status symbols carry the same invasive, self-absorbed symbolism as the increasingly prevalent Bluetooth headset.

"Ever been pleasured by a man wearing his Bluetooth?"

There’s nothing like standing in line at the grocery store, when some gesticulating philistine pulls his cart up behind you, exclaiming, “I couldn’t find a soft avocado in the whole bin, what do you think I should do!?” while maintaining eye contact with you.  After you give an incredulous double-take, and start to muster an awkward response, the stranger abruptly jars his head sideways revealing a shiny black parasite with a glowing blue eye latched to his ear.  Cyborg?  No, just some self-flagellating dork who has no consideration for those around him.

To be fair, one might think this behavior justified.  How else does one pick fruit, push the cart, and consult the wife?  But similar situations occur on main street, at the movie theater, and in the adjacent bathroom stall at the office.  Is it really necessary to have 24/7 access to your cell via an earworm?  Doubtful.

There is no justifiable reason for a person to have that plastic mass attached to his face while having his teeth drilled in the dentist chair.  Most likely, folks like this just like the perceived adoration received from peers for their technological savvy, wherewithal and popularity.  Realistically, these clip-on accessories look completely ridiculous and superfluous symbolizing self-absorption and obnoxiousness.

The same misguided people who constantly don Bluetooth headsets are the ones who would consider having children just for the “status symbol” effect.  Instead of getting off the phone to read to their children, they’re more likely to tune-in the Bluetooth for some hands-free action while just flipping through Cat in the Hat. Until these individuals remove the light-emitting ear prostheses, rejoin society, and give some real consideration to the responsibilities and consequences that come with children – these jackasses need to stop reproducing.

#14 Nerds Who Lack Intelligence

Let me say upfront: I like nerds. It is common knowledge that this world is run by nerds. For example, Microsoft has the market capitalization of 182 billion dollars which exceeds the GDP of all but 43 countries. Microsoft’s co-founder, Bill Gates, is the world’s richest man, valued at 40 billion dollars. He could at any point buy Latvia, as well as the towing service company that currently employs the bullies that used to torment him during his youth. I imagine that, sometimes, when Bill thinks on those sad days of his adolescence, he sheds a tear, because even money cannot heal the painful memories of the past. After this moment of weakness, he probably wipes away the tears with 100-hundred bills, and takes a ride in his Bugatti or some other car that is worth more than you will ever be.

There are a million other examples. Google’s co-founders, Sergei Brin and Larry Page, run one the “coolest” companies in the world, while Mark Zuckerberg went from not being able to get a date to being one constitutional amendment away from having a harem with a little thing called Facebook.

My point is this long and windy introduction is that I love and respect nerds. However, we commonly make the routine mistake of bestowing intelligence on people just because they have acne, glasses with the focus of the Hubble telescope, and the social skills of an underdeveloped lemur. This social profiling naturally assumes that people of nerdy disposition make up for the astounding lack of athletic ability with an uncanny proficiency in math and computer science.

What you may be surprised to discover is that there are plenty of nerds who are no smarter than your average Joe Six-Pack. I discovered this while I was in college. While there were plenty of people who followed the well-known path of binge-drinking and partying their way out of school, there were just as many kids who accomplished the same result in a completely opposite and much less glorious manner. As their peers socialized, napped, and occasionally went to class, these ultra-nerds stayed glued to their computer screens day and night, alternating between Counterstrike, hacker chat rooms, and Russian porn sites. They inevitably congregated in one corner of the hall forming a dark, dreary sub-world that smelled of dirty socks and was entirely devoid of any female presence. As these fringe creatures failed exam after exam, their numbers quietly dwindled, each ghoulish presence disappearing into oblivion (the smell of socks lingered for several months).

One may ask why I am picking on these poor souls who already have a minimal chance of procreating. The reason is simple: they happen to be American citizens. This stroke of luck makes the uber-nerds an attractive option for less-fortunate, yet stunningly gorgeous foreign women, at least until these women can get green cards and move to Hollywood to seek fame and fortune. The advent of the Internet facilitates the consummation of this romantic partnership, thus ensuring that more useless genes are propagated into our already diluted genetic pool.

Dreadful social skills paired with a hard-on for chicks with Princess Leah hair buns do not predispose intelligence and potential. We know these simple-minded dweebs are not as knowledgeable as your average pocket-protected, pleated khaki wearing, duct-taped horn-rim bespectacled nerd, but hopefully they have the common sense required to apply a jimmy hat.

#13 People Who Do Not Eat Leftovers

Like so many of you out there, we here at stopreproducing.com spent last Thursday with our loved ones celebrating Thanksgiving. For our non-American readers, Thanksgiving is a holiday where you gather with friends and family to sit around table completely covered in food and give thanks for all of your blessings*. Most Americans give thanks for all of their blessings by eating too much food and spending the rest of the night talking about how stuffed they are. Granted, eating massive amounts of food for the sheer sake of gluttony is not something we support here at stopreproducing.com, but that is not what really hit us about that day.

Inspiration for this post struck while we were helping to clean up. While placing all of the leftover turkey, stuffing and mashed potatoes in Tupperware containers and in the fridge to eat over the next couple of days, we realized that saving all of this food was an anomaly for most people. The other 364 days of the year most leftovers in the United States go right in the trash. This is something that we have noticed in the past, and whenever we asked someone throwing away perfectly good food after a meal why they did not just keep it for later the response was invariably Well… I just don’t really eat leftovers. Well… we just don’t think you should have any kids.

It is bad enough that we already eat enough food to make us the fattest nation on Earth, but we have to add insult to injury by wasting even more food, because we don’t feel like eating it after it’s been re-heated. Imagine the awkwardness of some over-weight couple trying to explain to a starving African family their decision to throw out the rest of their Chicken Carbonara and Fettucini Alfredo at the Cheesecake Factory because they needed to save room for the Chocolate Tower Truffle Cake and do not really enjoy pasta when it has to be nuked. That family would stare at that couple like they had two heads each (for a grand total of eight chins). The idea of “leftovers” themselves would probably be hard enough to grasp, let alone the decision to willfully throw them away.

According to a 1995 survey conducted by the Economic Research Service/U.S. Department of Agriculture, over 90 million pounds of edible food were wasted in foodservice and consumer food loss, which was 26% of the total edible food supply. Food losses at restaurants are exacerbated by the trend towards “upsizing” the portions that customers are served. As restaurants put more and more food on our plate we not only eat more and get even fatter, but we end up wasting more food as well.

This sort of willful wasting is not in the best interest of the species. The level of selfishness needed that would allow you to throw away perfectly good food because you “do not like leftovers” while there are millions of starving people, not only in the world but in our own streets, is not a trait that we wish to see passed down to future generations. We understand that eating your leftovers is not going to completely solve the world’s food crises, but it at least shows that you are conscious of the problem, that you realize that there are those that are starving. Until you can show this bare minimum of consideration for the rest of your species we must ask that you please stop reproducing, there are already plenty of mouths to feed.

*Unless of course you are a Native American, in which case I am sure it is a bitter reminder of how a group of foreigners took advantage of the fact that you did not understand the concept of property law and stole your land and decimated your population.

#12 People Who Overreact to Swine Flu

As it is flu season, we here at stopreproducing.com thought we would take the time to discuss a trend that we find somewhat disturbing, people absolutely flipping shit about swine flu. Granted, you might be wondering isn’t the instinct for self-preservation a positive genetic trait? one that should be passed on to future generations? The short answer is yes, but only up to a point. The problem comes when people are no longer able to differentiate real threats to survival from fake threats to survival.

Once the line between real and un-real threats to survival gets blurred for people, they tend to get in a tizzy every time they are in a crowd and start feeling the need to wear a surgical mask to work every time their cubicle neighbor gets a case of the sniffles. As a species, we were only allowed to survive due to our strong group instincts. The natural inclination to come together into communities saved us from being individual animal snacks, like pudding cups for saber-tooth tigers. So this sort of anti-communal, anti-social is not beneficial for the race and should be snuffed out.

The other issue for us here at stopreproducing.com is that if you freaked out about swine flu, then you clearly have no capacity to think for yourself. The dangers of swine flu were completely blown out of proportion by the media. If you had actually looked at the facts and made an independent decision, you would have noticed that the only people in real danger were people in rural areas with no hospital access, infants and the elderly. In other words, THE SAME EXACT PEOPLE SUSCEPTIBLE TO THE REGULAR FLU. We would not blame you for worrying about your infants or elderly in this situation, but the majority of people avoiding human contact and treating Purell like liquid gold were healthy people in their 30’s and 40’s. We agree, getting the swine flu would be pretty miserable, but the media had all of you thinking that it was an automatic death sentence.

Also, people should have recognized that this “global pandemic that was going to kill us all” thing was familiar. Has everyone forgotten avian flu already? Remember how that was going to wipe us all out? And before that it was SARS, and MRSA, and Ebola, and flesh eating bacteria. Since the inception of 24 hour news networks we have be barraged with everything that is going to kill us and/or end society as we know it. We managed to get through Y2K just fine, and we will get through swine flu just the same.

There is also some altruism in stopreproducing.com’s advice in this matter. Think about it, if you get this worked up just worried about yourself and any of your brood that have already emerged from the birth canal, imagine how much more stressed you would be if you added any more to your litter. Honestly, just save yourself that trouble. For your sanity and those who have to be around you…please, stop reproducing.

This should not be happening.

#11 Subscribers to Celebrity Tweets

• Fred Durst doesn’t know where his Sunday is going to take him, but he’s making eggs and bacon for breakfast this morning.

• Courtney Love wants to blow a wad on a “recession” slashed couch that’s sort of pinkish but a dude could hang on it.

• Tila Tequila is off to catch some zzz’s and snuggle and lay in bed all day and watch movies tomorrow!

Who gives a rat’s ass about what these people do in their spare time, let alone in 1 sentence formats that are continually updated throughout the day?

But Econ 101 tells us that for a market to thrive, there must be some demand for the product being peddled. Amazingly, there are people who ask for these sterling updates from washed-up, narcissistic celebrities to be sent directly to their phones and emails.

The mechanism that enabled these remarkable gains in communication, Twitter, became popular back in 2007. Podcasting company Odeo introduced the technology as a “micro-blog” for people to keep tabs on each other with brief messages, “tweets”, of 140 characters or less wherein one party can subscribe to messages from another party. The website celebritytweet.com provides consolidation of a pool of celebrities to simplify subscription for adoring fans.

Benefits of the free service are revealed in emergency situations for coordinating groups of people efficiently and for knowledgeable consumers who wish to receive instant updates on local strip club recession specials. But by and large, the majority of tweets are merely pointless babble and to a lesser degree, shameless self-promotion from washed up celebrities.

As if TMZ, Enquirer, Perez Hilton, and Biggest Loser: Celebrity Edition don’t already invite us to fill our days living vicariously through Hollywood, now Twitter enables us to receive live feeds directly from the horses’ mouths — further feeding these mammoth, yet fragile egos! TMZ and the aforementioned traditional media sources, while stultifying our lives, do not have nearly the potency of Twitter with regards to invasive celebrity nonsense.

A celeb-culture junkie must actively turn on the TV, or actively purchase a gossip mag, and even then the mundane dirt has at least been filtered down to something marginally worthwhile. But with Twitter, one innocent subscription to a celebrity’s Twitter feed results in an incessant, passive onslaught of obnoxious tweets that crush productivity and deprive individuals of meaningful growth in their own lives. Does the world really want the next generation to slide into a delusional psychosis from having one-way virtual friendships with the likes of Paris Hilton and Tila Tequila?

Celebrity gossip obsessors, and those receiving celebrity tweets in particular, should not be raising children. For it is these very people whose lives are so devoid of meaning, that superficial contact with the “cool, popular kids” of Hollywood gives them purpose. Seeing the priority allotted to celebrities by their parents, progeny will come to idolize celebrities, placing them on a pedestal that overshadows their own lives.

It is not uncommon for celebrity tweet subscribers to seek out relationships with over-zealous sports fans creating a power-couple that adopts each others’ passions and zest for living vicariously.

Imagine, a man’s wife is in labor on what should be one of the happiest days of his life, and at that moment he receives a text message. Excitedly, he opens the message expecting a note from his wife’s parents asking which room, but no… “Terrell Owens: Blasted my pecs today, I can totally put up 300 on the bench aint no thing, protein shake time!” Then another incoming text rattles the phone, and as he hurriedly tries to navigate away from the message the phone is dropped. In a desperate attempt to salvage the moment and direct the parents, he dives beneath the stirrups to recover the phone. As he anxiously flails, a beautiful 7 lb. 10 oz. baby boy is born overhead, placental juices pouring over the father’s head.

At that moment he should realize something… stop reproducing!

#10 Serial Sun Bakers

Summer time is here and the beaches are adorned with different genetic elitists – the shouldn’t be in that bikini-wearers, the splash in the facers, the big hole diggers and the ever-so-highly skilled professional tanners.

• Hide Moisturizing: In the past, tanners basted skins with a solution of water and animal dung. Serial Sun Bakers prefer a more pleasantly scented method of lubrication, such as coconut infused balms reminiscent of tropical holidays –wouldn’t want to smell like shit after all!

• Hair removal: Our ancestors mainly used knives for this task, but Serial Sun Bakers have made significant advancements in this field. More humane ways of hair removal, such as hot wax and electrical impulse needles are more commonplace.

• Sun Positioning: While our ancestors used wooden racks, Serial Sun Bakers have adopted plastic chairs and cotton towels into their regime. Some even use light-reflecting surfaces, such as metal objects or water to “bounce” the suns rays onto their hides. A roof top is also an ideal location so that the skin is ‘closer to the sun’.

• Hide Rotation: In the past, skins had to be flipped by various artisans. Serial Sun Bakers have cut out the middle man and do the flipping themselves. Timing sun exposure by songs on the radio or setting a alarm on a cell phone easily alerts the modern-day coat designers when its time to tan the other side.

*StopReproducing is not in anyway promoting animal skins for fashion. Love every creature, great and small!