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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
I’m not advocating as a guest columnist here on Stopreproducing.com that we should all hide under our umbrellas and zinc our entire bodies. And no, I’m not saying that one unprotected day trip to the Jersey shore will damage your body’s largest organ for the rest of your life. (Editors note: One unprotected day trip at the Jersey shore will for sure cause damage to another major organ, so remember “no glove, no love.”).
I’m here to address the Serial Sun Bakers. The Crisco covered, Panama Jack slathered, pina colada smelling bronzers who strategically place aluminum foil around their faces to catch the ultimate rays.
Tanning is an art. One quick look in the dictionary proves that it’s the art of turning animal skin into leather. Over the history of mankind, tanning has been prevalent in society. Humans have baked animal skins in the sun for everything from loin clothes to designer handbags.*
The Serial Sun Bakers, however, have shown advancement in the human evolutionary chain. Rather than relying on animal skins to provide humans with leather coats, Serial Sun Bakers have perfected the art of growing their own one-of-a-kind protective sheaths. This remarkable surge in human intelligence and ingenuity would surely leave Darwin perplexed.
Key Serial Sun Baker evolutionary milestones include:
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.
As you can see, Serial Sun Bakers prove that with complete negligence for their body’s well-being, coats are the next big thing in DIY. Should the Serial Sun Baker be permitted to pass along these self-servicing genes? Will store-bought coats become the next extinct fashion accessory, like slap bracelets and mood rings?
Here at Stopreproducing.com, we sure hope not. Unless you are growing your own to save a few bucks during this economic crisis (by all means save where you can) it is not fashionably forward to convert your own hide into a one of a kind coat for winter.
*StopReproducing is not in anyway promoting animal skins for fashion. Love every creature, great and small!
Eco-yuppies generally have one common denominator: they have all seen “An Inconvenient Truth”. Upon finding themselves cathartically inspired by Al’s revelations, the preachy ones who happenchance upon you doing yard work on a hot summer day will not hesitate to tell you about the environmental impact of tossing your paper cup in the regular trash bin and the increase in your carbon footprint caused by using a gasoline powered lawnmower instead of a Great Depression Era push mower. And they will lecture you while rolling by with their custom grip BOB Revolution Duallie AW 12′ Stroller – 2008 from REI and their silicon-free saline implants.
Like moths spiraling toward a flame, eco-yuppies pour through the latest gossip rags (i.e. People, Us, Star, OK!) to become one with Hollywood. Your neighbor with the baby carriage may volunteer, “Paris Hilton just pledged to donate 5000 compact fluorescent light bulbs to AIDS victims in Africa, so I’m going to outfit Johnny and Susie’s stroller with CFLs too!” After all, green is as trendy right now as wearing scarves in the summertime!
BraveNewLeaf.com observes: “They are eager to go green when it’s most convenient for them. You’ll often find them toting around their ‘I am not a plastic bag’ while barreling down on you in a Cadillac Escalade. They would never understand the irony of entering an environmental contest with a grand prize featuring an eight-hour flight to Hawaii.”
Preachy eco-yuppies embrace the latest trends to combat global warming and environmental decay, but they fail to realize that the environmental impact of an extra child far surpasses the offset created by eating local produce, biking to work once a week and installing solar panels. They are likely to instill the same superficial, “what’s hot” values on their children, promulgating the Hollywood copycat culture that produces one dimensional lemmings.
Until they have their tubes tied (or a vasectomy), preachy eco-yuppies should stop the lectures and accept that they are doing more damage to the environment by rearing children than we could do with a lifetime’s worth of tossing our bottles in the trash.*
*Stopreproducing.com does not endorse disregarding efforts to mitigate the environmental impact of humans. There’s only one planet; you shouldn’t shit where you eat.
Today, July 11th, is World Population Day! The mostly ignored reminder of our species’ ruthless dominance was established in 1989 by the UN. It was inspired by 5 Billion Day back on July 11th 1987, when fertile males the world over joined their wives and children to celebrate what can be accomplished with a high sperm count, a relentless sex drive, and a big brain.
We here at stopreproducing.com were still prepubescent back in ’87, but we imagine 5 Billion Day must have inspired people to keep up the prophylactic-free humping because here we are a little over twenty years later fast approaching 7 billion. It took over a million years for our population to reach 1 billion back in 1800, but only another 210 years to septuple that number.
Daily Kos has a great post about the willful ignorance surrounding the issue of over population:
“There is widespread agreement among scientists that we are in overshoot. According to Global Footprint Network, 1.3 planet Earths would be required to sustainably meet the needs of our current population at present levels of consumption and waste. If we continue current upward trends in consumption and population, by 2035 we’ll need 2 Earths. This means we are not acting sustainably. We are using up stuff that we, and/or future generations, are going to need.”
Although the flat-out rejection of birth control is pretty much the antithesis of what we stand for here at stopreproducing.com, there was a time when we would be willing to let you eschew birth control in all its forms and be swallowed up in the ever growing pile of dirty diapers and other waste that the overly large number of your completely unnecessary progeny were producing. We are big believers in personal choice here, but with the increased population putting a strain on natural resources and basically threatening our ability to continue to function effectively as a species, we must politely ask you to stop rejecting the benefits of birth control.
We, not so politely, would also like to ask you to stop pushing your baby manufacturing propaganda on the rest of us. Seriously, cease and desist, it is absurd. Hey pharmacist that refuses to supply birth control pills to people requesting them on the basis that “they are not in the bible, and therefore wrong”: guess what else wasn’t in the bible: pharmacies… and pharmacists. Most forms of modern medicine were not in the bible, so we guess god does not want us to have those either; they obviously are evil and should not be used. You better stop giving out insulin to diabetics and heart medicines to old people. And cough drops? They are probably Satan’s tears sent here on earth to lead us astray. Yeah, you should probably just pack up shop and find a new job, because I have read the bible and do not remember any pharmacists: if you want to go to the big party in the clouds you should probably be a farmer or a shepherd. We hope you were not planning on driving to your new profession, because god does not want us to have cars either, otherwise Adam would have named all the beasts of land and air from the front seat of his Escalade. You sure as shit, should not be reading this on a computer, as those are also not in the bible. I guess you got the parchment scroll we put out.
For the rest of you, we hope you are cool with the fact that about half, if not more of the babies you decide to have will probably die in childbirth when you are forced to have a midwife come deliver your babies in your ever-so-sterile hut or manger. When the kids that do survive get sick, I hope that frankincense and myrrh swiftly cure whatever ails them. And ladies, lets see how gung-ho you are about not using contraception when the number of women who die in childbirth skyrockets due to us collectively deciding to go back to the medical standards of ancient Mesopotamia.
The “it’s not in the bible” defense is so insanely hypocritical, we do not understand how the brains of these birth control deniers do not just shut down from that sort of logic-defying thought. It’s revealing to highlight the fact that the bible, while omitting any mention of birth control, explicitly denounces each of:
Banking (Deuteronomy 23:19)
Wearing mixed-fiber fabrics (Deuteronomy 22:11)
Eating anything from the sea that lacks fins or scales, i.e. lobster (Leviticus 11:9)
Strangely, society does not receive the same righteous objections from the alleged biblical scholars in regards to these evils. Is it that God clarifies what sections of the bible to recognize, or more likely, that these quacks arbitrarily choose to ignore or enforce the bible’s declarations and OMISSIONS to meet their own selfish, questionable agendas?
To the titular readers of this entry, do us all a favor: discontinue the moral lecturing, admit you are mindless, misguided hypocrites and stop reproducing.
In the event that you are a socially adjusted member of the general population that has never had the privilege of becoming a Level 42 Warlock leading a guild on a vision quest to the Shlomi Caves in order to attain the Elixir of Suffering while simultaneously attacking left over General Tso’s at 11 PM on a Saturday in your parents’ basement on your 34th birthday, let us clarify that MMORPG stands for Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. The most popular of the genre, World of Warcraft, has a following of over 11.5 million subscribers! Unlike regular video games, MMORPGs do not… ever… stop. Gamers who cease game play to participate in real life (i.e. sleeping, dating, face-to-face contacting) sacrifice precious opportunities to battle orks and gain virtual wealth, power and influence… in front of a computer screen… sitting in a chair!
MMORPGs provide an escape from reality. People who have trouble holding a steady job can climb the ranks from troll to guild master in the online fantasy world with a little dedication. Repulsive, socially awkward 40 year old virgins can consummate cyber-weddings with some creative double-clicking of the mouse. The MMORPG system rewards dedication to a virtual environment while promoting decay of a person’s life in the real world.
After a few years as intense gamer junkies, participants discover deteriorated health, decreased confidence in regular social settings, and dimmer career prospects. This does not bode well for their reproductive chances. In the event that MMORPG Addicts retrain their atrophied muscles, succeed in seeking out a mate, figure out how to procreate, and possess a high-enough sperm count to fertilize an egg, the descendants of these misfits have the odds stacked against them. They will be practically born into a virtua-land themselves; finding that the best way to connect with their parents is to get attached to the machine as well, feeding the addictive personalities they inherited.
MMORPG Addicts consume energy, food, and space while offering minimal returns to the society that supports them, but damn… they can really lead a guild and slay a one-eyed monster. Until these transfixed drones unplug, it’s best for the real world that they keep their own one-eyed monsters in their pants.
As we at stopreproducing.com look around at people enjoying the summer months and the warm weather that accompanies it, we find ourselves asking one question: Who the fuck are these people that find it necessary to wear a scarf in 90 degree weather? We’re not addressing the nomads in Saharan Africa donning thin linen scarves for protection in sandstorms. We’re talking about yuppie urbanites sitting pool side on rooftops in bikinis flipping the script on rednecks by making themselves tan with whitenecks. One might think, Oh, but that’s avant-garde, it’s a revolutionary fashion statement! Avant garde pushes the boundaries of the status quo in some innovative, thought provoking way. But wearing a summer scarf falls into the same category as wearing cleats to play basketball in the gymnasium. The concept lacks any brilliant insight or creativity. Not only is the summer scarf completely pointless, it is maladaptive. It goes against millions of years of evolutionary principal.
Perhaps a little anthropology lesson is in order. Humans have gone through thousands of years of adaptations to be able to survive in a variety of climates. The reason that Inuit are short and covered in layers of fat is not because their ancestors were chubby chasers, it is a carefully calculated evolutionary plan allowing them to survive in frigid temperatures. Being short allows blood to flow through the body more easily preventing lack of circulation to extremities which can be deadly in freezing temperatures, and having extra fat just provides people with a little more insulation. Conversely, people who have ancestors from extremely hot areas tend to be tall and lanky so that their long thin veins can keep internal body temperatures down. When a person with long, Dikembe Mutumbo-esque limbs perspires, it can cool down the blood more effectively, allowing people, to, you know, survive. What right do these d-bags wearing scarves in the scorching sun have to go against the collective genetic history of human kind? Wearing a scarf in the summertime is the equivalent of spitting on Darwin’s grave.
Deliberately inviting cases of heat stroke is not something that we at stopreproducing.com see as a valuable genetic trait. Willfully denying evolutionary logic is not something that we can let stand. And we have not even mentioned the fact that it makes you look like a giant tool. All we can hope is that the day you walk down the baking asphalt of a street in a heat wave wearing your Converse All-Stars, skinny jeans, cotton-poly vintage t-shirt, and thick wool scarf causing your blood to coagulate till you go into a heat stroke induced seizure comes before you actually get the chance to reproduce. Oh, and when you get to hell, I hope Satan has a nice scarf picked out for you to wear while wading in the lake of fire.
