An old college buddy and former roommate of mine sent a chain letter out to a bunch of his friends today. It was the same old BS... "if you pass this on to a bunch of people, you'll have good luck, but if you throw it away, bad luck will get you."

I've blogged on this, so I copied a few bits out of that blog post, edited it a bit, and replied to all with:

Amazing what you'll do for luck, [friend's name].

What kind of good magic threatens you with bad luck? Any magic that does harm is black magic... evil magic.

Basically, you're not sending people good luck. You're sending them bad luck that they must pass on to others to avoid. And if they do what the evil magic tells them, they will be rewarded.

If you pass on chain letters like this, you become a tool of evil. So by sending this to all of us, you proved you're a tool.

He didn't respond, but two people did. His sister e-mailed to agree with me. And the woman who sent the chain letter to him (a conservative whom I've chided in the past for some racist crap disguised as "humor", and who I added to the "reply all") wrote this:

How to tell Greg's a liberal:
Read his manifestations. If he's angry about stupid little chain letters, there's a good chance he's a liberal.
Lighten up, Dude.

Hire [her name] http://www.geocities.com/[rest of URL obscured so no one harrasses her]

So I responded...

Who's upset? Did my suggestion that sending on chain letters is evil make you feel defensive?

How to tell [her name]'s a conservative:

She'll talk conservative values and then engage in petty acts of black magic (i.e. chain letters).

That kind of hypocrisy can only be found among conservatives.

"What the heck" isn't a valid excuse. If you believe it can confer good luck, then you're giving credence to its claims, and the other claim is that it will confer bad luck. So in a selfish act, you send it to all your "friends" so you can get good luck, ignoring the bad luck you're potentially passing on to them, because you got what you wanted.

Also a typically conservative mindset: the "I got what I want, so screw everyone else" philosophy.

And her signature still sports a Geocities URL, despite the fact that Geocities will close in less than 2 months and she was told about it over 3 months ago (by a liberal who put his differences aside to help her).

Just like a conservative, she sees a problem and does nothing. Guess she's hoping magic chain letters will make her so lucky she doesn't need to do something about it.

Kisses,

Greg

P.S.: It's not just me who dislikes chain letters. You sent the chain letter to [friend's name] using your Yahoo! Mail account. Let me quote from the Yahoo! terms of service.

6. MEMBER CONDUCT

... You agree to not use the Yahoo! Services to:

...g. upload, post, email, transmit or otherwise make available any unsolicited or unauthorized advertising, promotional materials, "junk mail," "spam," "chain letters," "pyramid schemes," or any other form of solicitation, except in those areas (such as shopping) that are designated for such purpose (please read our complete Spam Policy);

You agreed not to send chain letters. But I guess calling someone on breaking their word is just another liberal trait, seeing as how we had to do it so often during the Bush administration.

While new tobacco taxes keep getting passed on a smaller and smaller base of smokers (due to people quitting and dying), smokers bring up a good point: why aren't we taxing other health hazards like fatty foods?

I decided to do some math on how much a french fry tax might raise. For a back-of-envelope calculation, I found an article from 2002 that put annual per-capita consumption of french fries in the United States at 28 pounds, with 90% of that being at fast food restaurants.

So that makes 25.2 pounds of french fries eaten at fast food restaurants per person per year. A large fries at McDonalds is approximately 1/3 of a pound. So that makes 75.6 orders of fries per person per year, or a little less than 1.5 per week. At a "quarter per order," that means $18.90 per person in taxes.

Now, that's a "per capita" figure which is an average among all people, from babies to senior citizens. So if the average person ate 75.6 orders of fries and paid $18.90 in "quarter per order" taxes on them, a population of 300 million would generate $5,670,000,000 in new taxes.

Now, $5.6 billion is just a drop in the bucket considering our national debt and all the other things we're facing, but it's a start. Consider California's budget crisis. They have 10% of the population. If they did "quarter an order" on french fries, they could conceivably generate over a half-billion in new tax revenues, and in a state that has been so welcoming of sin taxes on tobacco, when heart disease and obesity related illnesses are such huge health issues, why wouldn't the taxpayers welcome a sin tax on french fries?

I eat fries, though not nearly as much as I used to. But I'd welcome a quarter per order tax in Washington rather than a gasoline tax or a sales tax increase. If I don't want to pay the tax, I can have a salad or some fruit or sliced veggies.

'Course, if they try to tax bacon, there's gona be a revolt up in this motherf... but I digress. If we're going to tax cigarettes, we might as well tax french fries. It's only fair, and right now state governments need to find revenues where they can. "Quarter per order." It's an idea whose time has come.

Today a friend of mine sent out a joke to his mailing list about GM's new car, the Obama. It was typical Republican hype, like "This car runs on hot air and broken promises." I'm not going to reprint it in its entirety. You can get an idea of how not funny it was.

But for once I wasn't angry about this claptrap polluting my inbox. In fact, I want every Republican I know to keep circulating these jokes and I'll tell you why.

In November:

A month ago:

Since the election, a time when people tend to identify more strongly with a political party, the Democrats have lost 10% of their support. The Republicans have lost a whopping 34% of their support.

Time and time again, the credit for the huge losses in support has gone to the abrasive ideologues who have been taking control of the Republican party. Limbaugh, Cheney, and their ilk have been compared to GOP Neros fiddling while the Republican party burns.

And that's why I encourage the distribution of these unfunny jokes. These ideological rants, thinly disguised as humor, are helping liberals accomplish a lifelong dream: the marginalization of the Republican party. So please keep distributing them guys. Nothing better than watching a political party self-destruct.

I can already envision my Republican friends (you know who you are) responding by posting comments about some sin they believe the liberals have committed.

I'm going to cut you off right now. That doesn't matter. That's a deflection. Nancy Pelosi's statements about the CIA have nothing to do with why over 34% of the people who called themselves Republicans in November have defected from the party, why you're down 16% from just two months ago. Nancy Pelosi's mistakes, Obama's mistakes, and Harry Reid's mistakes can't explain why people don't want to call themselves Republicans.

If anything, mistakes by the liberal side should be increasing your numbers. The more convincing your arguments for why the liberals are screwing everything up, the worse you look. If all your rhetoric about the bad liberals is right, how freakin' lame are you that your numbers are dwindling at a time when potential converts should be flooding your way?

So please, keep sending out these jokes. Please keep drilling the talking points on Fox News. Please keep putting your feet in your mouths with veiled racial slurs. Please keep doing all the obstructionist stuff you accused Democrats of when you held majorities, but doing it more blatantly and obnoxiously so it's really easy for the media to show you doing one thing and then quote your condemnation of the very same thing from a few years ago.

Stay the course, guys. It's working so well for you.

While hiking with my wife and sons, my eldest boy's friend, and said friend's mother and aunt, the discussion turned to a "naughty barista" coffee shack that had opened near their home. If you're not familiar with the craze, this is where little drive-thru coffee shacks drum up business by hiring young women and dressing them in bikinis, lingerie, or even having them go topless and wear pasties to meet minimum public decency standards. We talked about how such places seemed to be multiplying, seemed to be trying to push the envelope of decency as competition increased, and what could be done.

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