1. Ridiculous inflation
2. President has giant birthday party

You probably see what’s wrong with this picture. People are struggling, really struggling, to buy simple food staples in that country. Hell if it happened here, there would be investigations. On that note, something is finally happening on executive compensation, a few CEO’s and compensation committee heads from some bank companies are being called to testify before congress. Maybe it’ll be like the Clemens hearings, and we’ll have it turn into a partisan issue.

Whee!

Why do humans continually tolerate this type of behavior? Why do we form groups in which the leader is granted perks above the rest of the group? Why is it that these perks are often disproportionately extravagant compared to the perks the rest of the group enjoys? A few examples:

Our President can fuck up royally, making poor decisions. The only consequence is losing the re-election. In the second term, there are no consequences. While some presidents have received intense scrutiny for more personal activities (Watergate, Lewinsky, Andrew Johnson for being southern) no president has been subject to oversight or post-presidential criminal charges. Of course this brings up the separate issue of: What are the penalties for a poor decision made in good faith? Further, is it even possible for a leader to continually make good decisions? Is it possible that you could take a monkey, lay the reasonable options on a table, and have the monkey pick one, and you either do or do not get quick FEMA aid to New Orleans?

Our business executives receive ridiculous compensation for arguably little more than shaking hands and attending meetings, and either diversifying or consolidating things. Buy another company, divest it a year later. Have layoffs followed by hiring. Embark on a new strategy of “cost-cutting” in which you shave employees salaries, plummeting morale but saving $1 million. Post signs that there will no longer be free coffee in the break room, to save money. Silly, stupid things, for which these people get large salaries. I’m not talking just CEO’s, I’m talking Presidents, Chairs, VP’s… and yet we envy these people. We want to be them. We all want to be the leader guy.

What would you do as leader? Could you resist the perks of the office? If they offered you a large salary, would you say no? What if a friend needed help? What if a brother/sister/son/daughter needed help or money? Would you say, no, I can’t give you money or hire you, that would be improper? Would you take your job seriously, take responsibility for being leader of the company/county/state/country? What if you were a senator? Would you spend Monday through Friday stressing over how to serve the people better? Or would you be at a nice restaurant having lunch with a lobbyist?

If you think that being made leader would also make you immune to your human failings you are very very wrong. Perhaps this is why we tolerate our leaders.

Or perhaps its something more primal. When one animal is dominant in a herd, do the other males fall in line? Or do they continue to wrestle for power? I believe the answer is that the usually accept the dominance of their leader. So perhaps its something we’re programmed to do, like eating. Don’t fight the leader.

Or perhaps we recognize that we need a leader, and… we like being oppressed. We accept and know that we are a lower class/caste, and we prefer to remain there. Perhaps amidst our grumbling and ranting, we know… I’m glad it isn’t me up there.

I’ll leave you with this last question: Take a respected leader. Probably its someone historical, right? Why is that? In the time that person was a leader, how many people really respected them? Find out, the answer might surprise you.

Yes, I was actually asked if I have dreams. Today. By an old guy who’s working in the same lumbering corporation as me. I hate to point out the obvious, but if this were such a great opportunity, wouldn’t he be long gone?

I’ll save you 15 minutes. The idea is that when you work for a typical company, you are a factory that merely turns your time into money. When you work passively, you do something now that pays you forever. In essence, you generate money from nothing. It’s like a money tree. Just pick the money off the branches! The money generates itself without any work, so you retire in a few years and still have income. Who wouldn’t like that?

Where, you might ask, does the free money come from? Well, all you have to do is buy beauty products from yourself and convince your friends and family to do the same. You get a portion of every sale. Next, you convince people to enter the same scam that you were suckered into, and you earn a portion of their sales, including the sales of the people they sucker.

Here’s a diagram:

That doesn’t look like any recognizable shape to me…

In fact, they do most of the work for you – set up a gorgeous HTML 3.0 webpage, the works. (The company is always called something like iCommerce, eSolutions, etc.) Everyone and their brother starts shopping at your amazing site. By this point, your friends have all referred their friends, ad infinitum, and you take a percentage of the whole chain. Sound a bit too easy?

Let me tell you something – there is no easy money. The rich may have more of it, but they’re working four times harder on average. Imagine how much you work for your salary. Now imagine cramming four times as much into your average week. Not going to happen.

A lot of smart people have shown the faults of multi-level marketing in the last few years. Heck, Robert Kiyosaki, the guy who inspired a lot of this mess with Rich Dad, Poor Dad, is a liar. Scott Adams had a great spoof in the Dilbert series, as well.

Financial advice is plentiful these days, but if you believe anything you read, you’ll wind up the Poor Dad. Conventional wisdom is conventional for a reason.

1.  Hindu’s, Buddhists, Wiccans, and Atheists are all going to Hell.  We can all agree on this one, let’s move on.  ( Oh, and if you’re an atheist, stop smiling right now.  You do worship a God, his name is Science, and you believe in just as many lies as those who worship God, or a “god”.  You believe that one ape got wings, used them to fly to get more bananas, fed the bananas to girl apes, and thus bing!  Flying monkeys.  You ignorant liberal redneck.)

2.  Women are second class citizens (or things, pick one).  In Catholicism, women are closed to the holy spirit.  Why?  Because Jesus didn’t want to be one.  Also, he only picked males for disciples.  Mary magdalene was a tagalong.  In many christian religions, women are meant to obey their husbands and in some extremes, just stay at home and be moms (or breed armies of Christ, as I read recently).  Do I even need to say anything about Islam?  I wanna say their stance on women is morally reprehensible, but that’s not fair without criticizing Christianity and Judaism some more.  It’s just that Christianity and Judaism don’t go as far.  I mean Islam is all about covering women up or killing them because you accidentally saw their ankle and that makes them a worthless whore.  In Judaism in Christianity, religion encourages us to suppress women AND have sex with them.  The two do not conflict.  Of course that’s a generalization, there’s plenty of idiots preaching that sex is a sin.  This is why Catholic Church attendance is down to old people.  Poor old people haven’t realized that lubricant works :*(

Let’s face it, religion doesn’t do much more in this instance than act as a tool for suppressing women with lies and superstition.  God will cry if women try to work or forget to cover their heads.  Or vengeful wrath, blah blah blah.   Simplistically, this is creating God in our image, and I’m sure someone who’s given this more thought could explain it more eloquently.  God loves us and doesn’t love those who are different from us, and as long as we sacrifice a calf to him every tuesday he’ll smite our enemies and bring us financial success.  Hooray!

2.  If you ask questions, God hates you.  Did you learn from “The Wizard of Oz”?  There’s no one behind the curtain.  In fact, there is no curtain.  What’s wrong with you?  You’re sacriligeous/worship the devil/burka burka fatwa!  Or, if you’re a scientologist, you will die from pneumonia if you question how Lord Emperor Xenu gave all the space aliens the R6 implant.  Yep.  That’s what’ll happen.  It sounds ridiculous, but compare it to:  You’re moving away from God if you question him.

Don’t get me wrong, you shouldn’t go up to God and say, Hey, thanks for existance but…I coulda done better.  It’s arrogant as hell to believe you A: Understand existence and B: Could make an improvement.  You can improve humans, sure.  You go too far though, you’ve got a religion and before long you’re murdering the non-believers.   This brings us to the other side of “Don’t ask questions” which is: The consequences.

I’m sorry you have to die, but God (oh and when I say God, feel free to substitute Yahweh/Allah) hates you and won’t tolerate existence.  Go to hell.  Here’s my problem with this mindset:

Well first of all, the people doing it don’t recognize what they’re doing.  They’re doing the work of God, hooray, great, don’t ask questions, just coerce/subdue/kill the non-believers.  Use the word “heresy” liberally.  Oh heck, get some hors d’eourves and make an inquisition out of it!  Let’s string em up and ask them to confess!

More importantly:  If God made evil humans that he didn’t love…wouldn’t he make it easier to identify them?  You would think they would have horns and wings and things.  Instead the evil humans look just like humans, except they hate God and he hates them.  Let’s kill them in his name.  (Note: I’m using capital G for reference, but not the capitol H since I’m talking about misconceptions of God, not the actual God himself.  Don’t wanna commit heresy).  Really though, they’d have some nice identifying feature, like a forked tongue.  That would be so much easier than a guessing game, where your left wondering if you’re supposed to get the Democrats out of office because that’s what Jesus wants.  That brings us to number 3:

3.  God  needs a starship.  But until we build one, he needs your money.  Lots and lots and lots of your money for um…his temple.  See, we can’t honor God if our cardinals drive around in anything less than a BMW…I called God and he said that’s heresy.  Now hand it over!

Dante (and I) believed that the Church went wrong in the 4th century when Constantine converted.  He gave the Church money and power, and it all went to hell.  If you ask me(surprisingly, no one does), God’s temple on earth should be a shack, and all the money should be spent on curing malaria/tuberculosis/what-have-you.  Why would the creator of the universe care about a temple made of stone?  Which is better, the toddler you brings you a clay sculpture and then smacks his sister, or the toddler who sits down and helps his sister  learn how to sculpt clay?  Well which do we do?  I’m pretty everyone’s doing plenty of helping, but still, there’s too much smacking, even if it’s not physical and blatant.  But we don’t hear this from the religious leaders who drive beemers.  Instead we hear, give to the church/mosque and well…you’ll be honoring God.  We’ll give some of it away.  The rest goes to my beemer.  I want a blue one.  I gotta say Islam has us beat in at least one respect: the 40% rule about charity, where you’re expected to give most of your money away.  That is respectable.

4.  God/Allah/Khali will someday destroy the world.  All the good believers will go to Heaven, and the enemies of the faithful will go to hell.  I gotta say this: My money’s on Khali getting the job done first, and I burn candles in front of a multi-armed elephant every week. (Haha, different cultures are funny!  Especially ones involving brown people!)  I have one argument against that:  Sex.  If we’re all spirits and stuff, there’s no body parts, hence no sex.  Unless it’s like weird glowing orb sex, and I don’t want none of that. ( Hooray for the written word!)  Why would the creator of the Universe…the creator of the female form, get rid of sex?  (as a side note, yes, the female form is the primary locus of sexuality, because women will appreciate a “sexy man” (double parantheses note: I feel gay saying that) but will fall for any sap with an ok face and is nice.  Men, on the other hand, are always picturing women naked.  Every single minute.  Don’t bother asking, because we’ll lie to you about it.  But we’re doing it.  Turn a little to the side.  Thanks)  Answer is: No God/Allah/Jacob who loves us would do that.  That’d be cruel. What would we even do without a physical existence?  Sit around singing God’s praise?  That party would be ok for about five minutes, then even God would be bored.  Yes, major religions, you are BORING God.  Good Job.

So what’s the answer?  Yes, I know I said it’s arrogant to believe any one of us understand it all…but I meant arrogant for everyone but me.  The answer is:

1.  God loves all created life.  Yes, you can still eat meat.  But stop killing in his name.

2.  If you want, you can say God’s a girl, whatever.  Enjoy Lilith Fair.

3.  God loves you, but YOU have to make the effort to reach out.  You have free will, and you have to make your choice known, explicitly.

4.  The devil does not have horns, nor cloven hooves, and he is not behind the gay pride festival.  He is however, gay as hell, loves the color pink, and currently exists on earth in the form of Paris Hilton.

5.  Hindus: Stop bathing in a river full of crap.

6.  Muslims: welcome to the modern era.  Stop sitting around in sand.

7.  Christians: wtf?  Honestly, what are you thinking?

8.  Jews: Keep making those tasty bagles.

9.  Atheists: You’re not all scientists just b/c you don’t believe in God.  And you can’t refute arguments against your theories by saying: You don’t understand the scientific method.  That is a crap argument.

10.  God wants your money.  Send it to me, I’ll make sure he gets it.

11.  God doesn’t do most of the things you say he does.  He does however love us, and wants us to show it to each other.

12.  Feel free to add to the list.

Why did I do this? Why didn’t either party stop me and say “You’re being rude”? Why is it that when a cellphone rings and I’m out somewhere with someone, I pick it up and say, “I’m at the mall with so and so. Lemme call you back later?”. Why do I have this ringing buzzing constant-communication device which causes me to be rude to others, to sit in a car ignoring a passenger while carrying on a conversation on a cell phone? To make it more perplexing, I would argue that a cellphone is more likely to be answered than a home phone. If you’re entertaining a guest, wouldn’t you just let the machine get it? Yet a cellphone has voicemail and we answer it anyway. Hi, I can’t talk right now, I’ll call you back. Or, oh hey, yeah I’ve got just a minute (minute being defined as however long we feel comfortable ignoring the other person).

What is it that we so urgently discuss on cellphones?

1. Yes, I’m having a good day

2. I’m getting some gas

3. Oh you know, doing the grocery shopping

4. Yes I did hear that about so and so! Let’s talk about while I’m in this register line and I’ll ignore the cashier!

5. Hey I’m in the bathroom… yes, yes I’m busy

6. Hey I’m at the mall, do you need anything?

Why must these conversations take place? We did just fine before the invention of cell phones. I couldn’t get rid of mine now. It is an instant device through which I can ignore others to carry on meaningless conversations. Hooray!

Of course it ties in wonderfully with the internet. Where else could I rant like this, without careful editing and attention to detail? Where else could I blather on and on without constructing a reasonable argument? I propose that the combination of cell phones, especially text messaging, and the internet will dumb us all down, rot our brains like TV. In rapid communication we are less likely to spend time thinking about what we are saying, or conversing at a comfortable pace where give and take can occur. Instead, dinner parties will consist of couples, each with their own cell phone, carrying on conversations with people in other places, ignoring everyone else in the room. Then we’ll all go on the internet and blog about it. Dump the information in our brains while the written word goes down the tubes.

Save us, Al Gore. You’re our only hope.

Through me pass into Eternal Grief,

Through me pass along the Lost People.

-Commedia, Inferno, Canto III

I’ve probably lost some of you. Translation:

Tonight! At 11! Could YOU be the victim of a Terrorist attack! Also, is air travel safe enough for you and your family? Stay tuned!

The abundance of news has brought a terrible ill unto the world: Information. It’s entirely possible that ignorance is not only bliss, it is wise. I think of the interview Barbara Walters did with the Dalai Llama and asked him how in the world he can be happy with “all that’s going on”. I could say that we exist in a state of information paralysis, but that would be forcing a metaphor. I think more accurately I take umbrage at the intellectual dishonesty that is making an analysis of complex issues. You take umbrage at me using the word umbrage, I’m sure because I’m using it incorrectly.

I’m sure you’ve heard “The world is going to Hell” or one of its cousins, such as “I don’t know what the world is coming to” or, “Things are getting worse”. You may have heard these words coming out of your own mouth. I happen to believe that you’re right, its just your reasoning thats wrong.

See, the universe runs on chaos and order. The universe could not have been born without chaos, could not have progressed without chaos forcing energy and matter to disassociate and spread…however the universe could not have been born without the order dictating the interactions of quarks, or order dictating that scattered matter must coalesce if there is a center of gravity. Whether the effect is merely perception or not, we find microcosms of this in our common experiences. I’d argue that chaos and order interact in a wax and wane fashion throughout any given day, but I have no supporting evidence.

I’m being boring by using quarter sized words. Forgive me, and allow me to come to my point: I’m sick of the phrase “The world is going to Hell”. I’m also sick of cable news that overanalyzes information and attempts to draw trends. It’s not their fault, it all goes back to the stock market, and you can thank those idiots for driving up your gas price. The problem originates with the assumption that a human being is capable of complex analysis of processes which are driven by multiple factors. This is a demonstrably false assumption. Only a severely focused mind could attempt such a thing, such as mentally handicapped savant. Data collection is impossible for the processes which we love to discuss: politics, the economy, morality. How does one track morality? How does one track the economy? The job data? The closest one could come to a reasonable judgement of the economy is to have everyone call one person within the time span of a single hour. Everyone in the world, mind you, would have to call this single person. Could that single person handle the CEO giving him the revenue numbers along with the vice president calling to admit he fudged those numbers a little to meet his targets this quarter? The shop owner selling carpets in Kazhakstan and the owner of the pizzeria down the street? Obviously not. To solve this issue people earn salaries for tracking indicators. They cannot show that these indicators represent the actual population.

Here’s the real question: What does this mean to you? Really, the economy doing poorly or well doesn’t matter at all if it doesn’t matter to you. If it does matter, here’s how you find out how the economy is doing: Whether you’re happy with your financial status, present and future, what you’ve heard on the news, your stress level, anyone else’s financial status that would concern you emotionally, what you had for breakfast, whether you’re in a healthy relationship…the list of factors continues. Now let’s say you work on Wall Street and its your job to issue some sort of opinion based on the tracking data. Now take what you had for breakfast plus the rest of it, plus this tracking data. An opinion comes out the other end.

So the next time a reporter asks you whether you think World War III has started, tell them, there’s no way to get the information necessary to make that decision, and frankly, it doesn’t matter. The next time someone says the world is going to Hell, call them intellectually dishonest and walk away. You’ll know that what you meant is that they couldn’t possibly have the information to analyze whether the world is going to hell, that they don’t have a logical structure for processing that data, and that they’re opinion is heavily based on whether their toast was burnt this morning. It only matters that you know.

Oh, and yes you’re in extreme danger in your home. The flouride in the drinking water is slowly killing you. Panic. Tonight at 11.

1. Canada is its own country

2. Canadians deserve to eat big hamburgers like us Americans

3. Those drawings of embryos we saw in biology class were true and proof of evolution

4. That scientists were able to recreate early earth conditions in a laboratory and create precursors to life

5. That the fossil record supports evolution

6. Punctuated equilibrium, or: Circular logic (Since the fossil record doesn’t show intermediaries, they must appear quickly and then disappear. That proves evolution. Therefore these intermediaries show up quickly and then disappear and that’s why they’re not in the fossil record)

7. Survivial of the fittest (The eugenists had it right-if you eliminate the inferior genes from the human population, you will create a genetically superior race. A theory finding new support today as people tie abortion + early detection of genetic abnormalities in the womb. The status quo is that uneducated people reproduce more. I can’t wait for the flames.)

8. If you don’t support evolution you must believe in God, and that makes you a weirdo.

All of these things are false. How do I know? I was told. By Ann Coulter. BTW Ann, my offer’s still open. I will brush your cat any day.

Let’s examine the life of a fact. Information comes in, and one could make an argument over whether that information is more firmly entrenched if it enters as a child or in adult life, one would have to compose a study of just how it is that people accept things as true, I would speculate it has to do with the levels of various brain chemicals. That was a rambling sentence. Let’s start over. Information comes in. The brain compares it to existing information. Judgements are made based on the estimated truthfulness of the source, usually an emotionally based decision, and the information is either rejected wholesale, accepted wholesale, or put on the shelf for a later compromise. In my brain, anyway. I’d love to know others thoughts on how this occurs. Moving on, this information stays in there, and becomes reinforced over time. The information is called upon when a conflicting statement is made. The brain must compel the user (in this case, you) to refute said statement, either by silently fuming, crying, or yelling a lot. If you’re trained you can force yourself to switch off your emotions and enter into a rational comparison of supporting information, otherwise known as logic. I don’t think even the best arguers can pull that off too much. Most of us are left with the emotional side of refutation, where we pitch a hissy fit, or better, engage in righteous denial of the competing information and bask in the limelight. Enter the intelligent design discussion. Go on, post a comment here, get it out of your system. Oh my good gloriousness, you complete republican idiot, how can you possibly believe that God sort of waved a wand and made things and evolution is SO true, it’s like true 10 times over and how can you not possibly believe somethings that’s completely, 100% true.

An aside: Whenever two positives are used to modify a statement, your “falsehood” flags should be thrown down.

Let’s go back to my original statement: I know these things because I have been TOLD them by someone else who affirms it is true. I know nothing personally about global warming, evolution. I do not have the job of compiling hundreds of research papers from academia on the subjects. I don’t think anyone does have that job. So let me ask you: What do you know? The answer to the world’s problems becomes perfectly clear once you see the light:

Put all the geeks in a room and get them arguing about who knows more digits of pi. By the end, only one will have his or her glasses intact. This geek will emerge victorious and tell us all what to believe about these complicated issues.

Instead we have politicians and the media with their righteous laughter and indignation. Oh logic, to what lofty heights you have flown. Your home is now academia, where hippies control the content and anyone caught publishing conflicting works is ostracized. Sent to guantanomo, they are, just like Alec Baldwin and anyone else who criticized Bush (oh he’s a raging liberal, except for the Iraq thing).

I read this report today about a University denying high school course credit because the course included intelligent design. Here’s my problem. Let’s say you’re walking down a street and some guy comes up to you and offers you peace, love and happiness. Sounds good, right? Now let’s say he offers you peace, love and happiness and God. If you are most of us who’ve lived in a city you keep on walking and try to ignore him. If he throws in an offer to die for your sins and you’re in the south, you fall to your knees and wash his feet. If you’re a liberal you run away crying that there are limits to free speech, and didn’t anyone tell him that there’s separation of church and state, the damn hobo is on the steps of the municipal courts building, for crying out loud. This fear of God has got to go. You don’t like him? Fine. Slap him in the face. Believe in God, don’t believe in God, you’re still an American. He offers to die for your sins, kick him in the balls and say, not in these parts, pal. Don’t run away crying like a worthless maple syrup loving Canuckistani. No more triple beef patty burgers for you!

PS-Just kidding, Canada. I love your maple candy.

That’s all over now.  We’re back, but there must be rules. 

1.  There will be no name calling.

2.  As Patrick Swayze says in Road House, “Be nice.”

3.  No hijacking.  In the internet world, if you take someone’s post and derail it to talk about your agenda, it’s called hijacking and it’s considered extremely rude.  Create a new post and talk about whatever is on your mind; don’t steal someone else’s thread.

4.  There is a misnomer that this site is for ranting and fighting and arguing and serious topics.  Not everyone is a ranter or someone who likes to argue.  A lot of it is meant to be humor or general expression. Please don’t read everyone’s posts with a chip on your shoulder.

5.  Everyone is welcome at halffull, except jackasses.

If you’re an old timer who left the site due to inactivity, welcome back to a kinder, gentler halffull… with a side of rant.

Here at Halffull, we don’t have a section for other websites that you can link to. Of course, any time I ask redshift to add something to the menu bar, it is met with a steely-eyed glare that says, “You want to make this site look particularly ugly, don’t you?” Of course I don’t but it’s up to our site Nazi to make sure this website looks as clean as possible, in the same way that it’s up to me to ask for eighty million changes. (Speaking of which, what happened to previewing a comment before posting? Huh?) But what can I say? Redshift is an internet-snob and wants to make us as un-blog-like as possible. Besides, most of my posts (especially the news updates) are filled with links anyway.

Due to the barrage of spam we usually get, it’s really hard for me to look through the logs and figure out if we’re being linked or not, since 95% of what is listed is pr0n spam. Either that, or redshift and hulk are lying to me when they say they haven’t been signing halffull up at wwwdotbig-boobs-cheerleaders-kinkymidget-pr0ndotcom. I think they’re lying. You see, I’m addicted to the site stats. I analyze them critically. I make excel charts and bring them to Halffull meetings. And when we dip below 250 visits a day, I freak out. For the past week, our viewings have dipped a bit. I’m not sure where everyone’s gone, but you’re freaking me out, dudes. Is it me? Do I smell? Maybe it’s hulk – I swear that we take him out back and hose him down once in a while. It helps keep the rabid foam around his mouth down to a minimum. Plus, it keeps him going with fresh rants. Never stale, that’s our motto.

Anyway. I have recently discovered another regular halffull reader, Tigerblade, who commented last week on the Catholicism article. (If you’ve commented before and I didn’t catch it until now, sorry.) I went to his site and realized that he’s got us linked off on his sidebar of regular blogs. So, let it be known now that Tigerblade is associating with us of his own volition. Insanity? I think so. I wanted to reciprocate by linking him back, and I was waiting for something really cool to be posted on his site that I should share with everyone. Sure enough, it came. On a weekend, no less — hence the penalty, because my brain isn’t working that well on a weekend. I think I tried reading it three or four times, but that fuzzy-brain feeling I got from reading it every time told me to wait until Monday. So I did.

Great article by Tigerblade on something that has been a topic of much ranting in the halffull camp: the devolution of the American education system – go and read it. As Fez would say, “I say go!” The comments are also a fantastic read. I love opinion articles on education because I find that, nine times out of ten, the conversation devolves into republican vs. democrat and then on to my favorite “Bush sux, Clinton r0x0rz” argument. I don’t know why it happens, but it does. Unfortunately the comments seem to be bugged, or I’m just too retarded to figure out how to use them. Go and read it – right now.

If the comments section starts to work again and you want to post a comment, just in case you’re an internet noob I want to remind everyone: You can say anything you want on the halffull website. You’re at home here; it’s expected that you just let it all out and you know that we don’t care. But when you visit someone else’s website, please be nice. Be polite. Be professional. If you want to say something sarcastic that will only degrade the topic over there, then come back and post it here. I’m not worried about any of the halffull authors or some of our usuals, but in case you’re kind of an internet noob and are really not sure how this works – when you go to another site and sit down to make comments, be courteous. No one has done it yet, but just in case, it never hurts to mention it.

And now, “I say good day!”

So, to you who have cut and pasted entire articles onto your site, I have written you a song. Actually, in your honor I have plagiarized the song, but re-written the lyrics for you.

To the tune of “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” by Bobby McFerrin:

Here’s a little blog we wrote
Some noobs want to copy it note for note
Don’t worry… They’re crappy.
Their sites are ugly and have no style
I guess that’s why they copy our files
But don’t worry… They’re crappy.

Don’t worry. They’re crappy!
Don’t worry. They’re crappy!

Can’t think of anything original to say
Just cut and paste because you’re totally ghey
Don’t worry… Be crappy!
This should be corrected in all good time
You’ll learn not to plagiarize in Junior High
Don’t worry… Be crappy!

Don’t worry. They’re crappy!
Ooh! Ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh…
Don’t worry.
Ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh…
They’re crappy.
Ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh…
Seriously, their sites have no good content!
Ooh! Ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh…
So don’t worry.
Ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh…
Their sites are crappy.
Ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh…

At any rate, we’re truly flattered that you enjoy the site and like our articles, but it’s a slap in the face to those of us who have worked really hard on maintaining new material for this website. The contributors of halffull.org all have full-time jobs as well as other adult-type commitments, and it takes a great deal of time to write this stuff up. We think about the topics for a while – sometimes it takes weeks to let these ideas simmer, and then we sit down to write, and rewrite, and rewrite some more, and then redshift always reads over everyone’s submissions and edits grammar where he feels necessary. All this work goes into every article – yes, even though we’re an amateur site that generates zero revenue. It’s not like we just pull these things out of our asses and slap them onto the site in no time flat. In the real world, you can’t just print up someone else’s work, cite it, and turn it in – it’s plagiarizing. Please do not do it. If you enjoy the article, use snippets and link the site.

Thanks.