It must be McDonald’s fault you weigh 500 pounds

The lawsuit alleges that tens of thousands of children have suffered obesity, diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, elevated cholesterol and other health problems after being misled about McDonald’s products.

The mentally diseased whiners are at it again. Now that class action lawyers have become rich from smoking lawsuits, a new crop of these parasitic creatures is beginning what I’m sure will be a slew of lawsuits against fast food companies.

I have nothing but contempt for a) class action lawyers and b) the parents of obese children (who are often obese themselves). People who try to blame cause and effect on others make me sick.

Let me explain things simply here, for those of you who are in danger of succumbing to the creeping disease of itsyourfaultitis that has been spreading like cancer throughout this country. Cause and effect is simple. You are hungry, so you eat. You choose bad food and eat too much of it, so you get fat. This is your fault. Shut the f**k up and go on a diet. Eat less, and read books about nutrition. Exercise.

Do not go to court and whine. Do not raise the cost of eating for the rest of us just because you are a human ball of lard. That is your fault and you do not deserve to be paid for making bad choices.

The sneaky part of this is that the soul sucking lawyers involved are predicating the lawsuits on the idea that McDonald’s is somehow responsible for the health of America’s children. I know that parents used to hold the primary responsibility for the health of their own children but in the new, improved socialist United States of Obesity, the responsibility is apparently on your state’s child services, the Amber alert system, class action lawyers and McDonald’s will pay to raise your little fatty, buy him or her an XBox and pay for the liposuction every American child needs. It will also raise the price of my occasional Big Mac to $40.

Next time you see a rolling ball of child blubber wolfing down a giant vat of fries at your local McDonald’s remember that you’ll be paying for every extra ounce of food he or she is lustily consuming. You’ll be doing so because the nation you live in is a place that increasingly teaches a philosophy that nothing is ever your fault and that all your problems should be paid for by someone else.

Company firing employees who smoke

A nation of whiners and welfare babies is a weak nation destined to mediocrity.

A health care company in Michigan is firing employees who smoke or are suspected of smoking. It fired employees who refused to take a drug test.

I have mixed feelings about this one. I think employers should be able to fire people who are actively pursuing unhealthy lifestyles, since they are forced by their employees choices to assume additional costs and liability. This would include big fat losers, chain smoking fools and self-important shits who do cocaine. Hell, I think you should be able to fire an employee for any reason at any time.

The whole key in not getting fired should be to make yourself important enough to the employer that you are indispensable or at least expensive to fire. Employers care about their bottom line and that’s the way it should be. I speak as someone who has been laid off in the last year from a job I held six years.

Your rights as an employee should only go as far as the contract you signed when you started with any given firm. Read the employee manual and hold your company to it. If they say everyone has to wear pink dildo suits on Fridays, then plan on wearing them every Friday. If the manual says you can be fired for any reason at any time, then count on that as a possibility and make sure you have savings.

Employers who cannot discriminate cannot run a business efficiently. Government should not have the power to artificially limit a company by telling it who it can and cannot hire. Companies that make bad decisions about which employees to hire will fail without hand holding from the government. It makes me sad to see the poll results showing that only 22% (at least when I last looked) of voters think companies should be free to fire unhealthy employees who are unhealthy by choice. Each passing year, it becomes harder and harder to survive as a company in this nation. That’s because choices that a business owner could once make that would add to the bottom line and ensure the financial health and survival of the firm are now being made by government regulators who are supported by ignorant, uninformed couch potatoes with no real world business experience.

A nation of whiners and welfare babies is a weak nation destined to mediocrity. We are destroying ourselves with political correctness and the idea that everyone should be treated equally even when they aren’t.

UPDATE: Boortz has some thoughts on being fired for smoking today as well. His are probably more cogent than mine, and his daily notes are always worth reading.

Winter Nantahala camping trip ends in no deaths, no lost toes

The crew was out at Nantahala again, a few miles outside of Highlands, North Carolina, and this was a cold trip. While Stan did not fall into the fire pit this go round, he did manage to attract more smoke than anyone else, with Steve coming in a close second.

It snowed, we froze and good times were had by all. I arrived late as usual and my portion of the trip after setting up camp started with a climb up the side of the mountain by our camp site to a hidden waterfall. The pics are, of course, included in the gallery link below. I almost destroyed my camera in a slip n’ slide on the mountainside. The weather at the time of our ascent was hovering around 38°F.

By the time we were cooking our steak dinner, the temperature had descended to 26°F. Snow flakes were coming down as we wolfed down our food to keep it from freezing. The wind was whipping all around us and quite a few tears were shed as the smoke attacked randomly.

I spent the night in my 0°F sleeping bag in one single position, face down with my body in a straight line to keep my face warm. The wind woke me up several times and caused strange dreams, one of which included being fired from my job for a reason I can’t remember although it was probably a stupid one.

We skipped breakfast at morning campfire because the temperature was 11°F. We speculated that it was probably several below zero with the wind chill factor included. Less educated men would have characterized the weather as “cold as hell,” which has never made sense to me since hell is supposed to be a place of fire and brimstone and several below zero isn’t part of the whole fire and brimstone environment.

Overall, the trip reminded me why I like indoor plumbing, hot water heaters, mattress beds and most of all, being reasonably warm. More importantly, and as always the reason for making the trip in the first place, it reminded me it’s good to get away from your own busy life for a little bit on a regular basis.

Here is the photo gallery.

The death penalty is very civilized

Why? Because murderers often don’t stop with victim number one.

If a jury convicts Johnny Lee Williams of killing Megan Leann Holden, then I think he should die for the crime. Not because it will deter other people, not because revenge is sweet and not because he happens to be black. No, because it will guarantee he won’t repeat himself.

After you abduct and kill another human being at random, you shouldn’t get another chance. Period. Based on what I’ve read, this one should be open and shut. If Williams is found guilty, put him to death. It won’t save Megan, but who knows how many more people’s lives it will improve. And whoever killed Holden has forfeited his or her right to live.

Ask yourself, which is more civilized – 1) Killing murderers or 2) Letting murderers go and hoping they won’t murder again. I know which one makes the most sense to me. So would Megan Leann Holden, but she can’t speak up because she’s not breathing anymore.

If you want to read more opinions relating to the murder of Megan Leann Holden, visit this link at Fark.

Some freedoms we need in Iraq and the U.S.

I’ve added a pro-American Iraqi’s blog to my list. I have an American unfriendly one there too. It’s possible I could end up in Iraq before this is over, and I’d rather hear it first hand than through the news media.

Ali, the blog’s author, lists Irish as his favorite type of music. Weird as that is, he is a cogent writer with an excellent command of English and positive opinions about the future of Iraq.

Of course, reading about Iraqi opinion polls both bothers and reassures me. I hate opinion polls, I hate pundits and I hate the attention whoring that goes on in the press. However, they are all indicators of a fair amount of freedom in a society. As much as I bitch about the state of the nation here in the U.S. the average American is still relatively free to opine in public forums.

However, there are a lot of things we’re increasingly less free to do.

Here’s a little list of things we should be working on in both countries:

No police checkpoints/military checkpoints inside the national borders – a free society does not restrict the movements of the population from point A to point B by using force.

No restrictions on weapons ownership – a free society holds the citizen up as the most basic unit on which everything else depends. If you cannot trust your own citizens with unrestricted weapons, your society is not truly free.

Reduction of tax burden – I have no idea what sort of taxes are being paid by Iraqi workers, but I know that the average worker in the United States is an economic slave. By most estimates I read a middle class American pays a total of 40-47% of their lifetime labor into the public coffers. The way I look at it, a free society does not steal the sweat off your back by force. The very fact that the IRS needs 120,000 employees to collect a “voluntary tax” and that they routinely use intimidation and massive force to collect indicates that there is a huge problem. Let’s work on the whole modern slavery issue.

Less centralized government – The federal government is a bloated behemoth that has grown into the mammoth beast the founders of this nation feared most. It tries to govern everything and anything, and ends up making most things it touches worse for the wear. I hope that the Iraqis do not repeat this mistake. Central government should provide for a strong military and that’s about it. A behemoth central government always results in less freedom due to the very nature of the bureaucrats that run that government.

I wonder what Ali from Free Iraqi would think if he knew that many Americans are worried about the decreasing amount of freedom in America? We’re over there claiming to be freeing a country when most of us have no idea what real freedom is.