Bad Arguments

Give give it a little bit of thought.
Now, I'm no scientist, but I did complete high school. Isn't methane flammable? And for that matter, isn't butane? I mean, that's what makes it so good for lighting on fire.

See if you can follow this reaction.
CH4 (methane) + 2 O2 -> 2 H20 + CO2 + energy
Or, hell, this one:
2 C4H10 (butane) + 13 O2 -> 10 H2O + 8 CO2 + energy
We can even go crazy and say,
2 CH3OH (methanol) + 3 O2 -> 4 H2O + 2 CO2 + energy

It seems to me that we exhale CO2, so we breathe it in naturally from our atmosphere. And inhaling water vapour never really hurt anyone. Seems to me you put three incredibly clean burning fuels on your list. Bad argument.

After all, we're not afraid of inhaling the fumes from our lighter, sewer gas (you inhale methane when you're in the shitter, get over yourself), or from a candle! How dumb do you have to be to not understand that when you burn a candle, the stearic acid they claim is in it burns into the atmosphere you breathe!

It seems to me that cigarettes are most dangerous when eaten. I know these people aren't smokers, but ignition is a vital part of the smoking process.

And finally, if you think all those "chemicals" are bad for you, you're not quite getting it. Chemicals aren't bad. Everything is made of chemicals (acetic acid is vinegar. You put it on your fries). Some chemicals are in other weird shit, but if that puts you off smoking, check this out.

I'm not pro-smoking, or anti-smoking. Do what you want. If it's not affecting other people, whose business is it? And if you want to talk about the smell, let me know and I'll prepare a lecture on perfumes.

I'm no expert...

So, I'm reading this article on legalizing marijuana and I don't think people have thought this one through very much.

First of all, I wouldn't consider Mexicans that sell weed a "cartel." Sure, you might seize a million pounds a year in a single state. If that's what you seized, how much pot do you think the Mexicans are bringing over? They'd have to be driving semi-trucks across the border full of marijuana. And for that kind of transportation, you'd have to be making a lot of trips to make it profitable. We're talking weekly deliveries. We're talking similar to large grocery stores. If this is the case, then sure, I can see one needing a cartel to keep that connected and running smoothly. But why not then do something radical like don't let the trucks full of drugs into the country! I know that you can't stop and search every truck that drives up from Mexico, but you can! How many truckfuls of Mexican produce come up every day? Can you really not tell whose camper is full of weed? It's the one with the leaves sticking out from under the big canvas tarp! As a guy who knows nothing about obtaining drugs, I still understand that weed is cheap. Kids buy it. I also understand that gasoline is not. So you have to transport a shit-ton of weed from Mexico to the US to make the distribution of it profitable. You have to have a warehouse to store it and distribute it to the dealers and the dealers have to travel from the warehouse (unless you make your truck make multiple deliveries which can generate suspicion and cost a lot in fuel). Then the warehouse takes and cut and the dealers take their cuts and the drivers take cuts... This isn't a lucrative sale. This is a promotional sale. This is the product that gets people to shop with you until they find the big ticket items. But being in a cartel is about not being known by the consumer (lest you be known by the police). However, if th cartel does use inexpensive weed as a segue into the harder, more profitable drugs a) don't lie to us and say that marijuana trafficking is a lucrative cartel-worthy business, and b) oh wait, you have to lie because if you said it was a way of getting kids started then legalizing it wouldn't be a solution and if you legalized one drug you would have to legalize them all.

The other thing no one considers is that illegality is the alure of drugs. It is an act of rebellion, and if the government says, "toke away, kids!" the kids would not oblige.

I gotta roll on out, but think about it.

Kids These Goddamn Days.

Normally when I use the phrase, "Kids these days," I'm talking about rap music, weeaboos, lack of respect, and the new demographic of Hollywood. But today I saw something just plain unacceptable.

I was on the Facebooks keeping tabs on a fictional person (I'm not sure whether he/she creeps me out, or intrigues me) and I come across one of his/her "friends." Her profile picture looked suspect, so I creeped around- er, I followed an investigatory lead.

This girl's a mom. She's barely 18 and is married with a kid. Married to a kid, in my opinion, too. This puts me ill at ease, but it's really not that bad. Thirty years ago this sort of thing was commonplace. A hundred years ago and her parents might have been saying, "Finally!" And it's not that I think they're too young to be having kids. If God didn't want kids to be having sex, he wouldn't fire up the baby-makin' factories when you're thirteen.

Obviously I don't endorse kids to be having sex. They were less capable of raising a child ten thousand years ago. In modern society, kids are completely incapable of raising children of their own. There's too much to know and prepare for. You'll always have to spend approximately 25% of your life expectancy learning how to survive the last 75% of your life. And, maybe not so obviously (I only came to this conclusion earlier this year), if you're not done growing up, who are you to coach someone else in growing up?

Okay, a few tangents there, but I felt they were helpful groundwork for what I find appalling. Are you ready? This girl's latest profile picture is her at what I hope is a party with a pill on her tongue flipping off the camera.

She has a nine month old child*!

It's worse that she is married. If it was a single 18 year old mom who was so strung out that she had to go out and party and do drugs and the baby wound up starved in a crib, drowned in a sink, or eaten by stray dogs, it would be horrible! But I think we could all file that away in the "Disdain" folders in our brains. But the fact that she had something going. Yeah, she got pregnant, but she also got married. And he stuck around. And they sound like the kind of couple that could make it work. It sounds like the setup for meeting these people seventeen years from now when their kid is graduating with yours and they're almost ten years younger than you, but their kid is on the honour roll because they knew a thing or two about working hard even when times are tough. But instead, she's at parties taking chemically manufactured drugs and acting like a lady-douchebag (is douchebag a unisex term in this context? Most female specific derogatory names are too aggressive. Douche is a much more passive term. Anyway...).

So, I say again, "Kids these days..."


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