Saturday Silliness: Rally to Restore Sanity

Everyone please watch the Rally to Restore Sanity!

By Darrell B. Nelson author of Invasive Thoughts

Rally to Restore Sanity VI

In the news we will have two experts debate if Cheney is a robot.

This is my last Rally to Restore Sanity post as the big event is coming up this Saturday so I thought I’d go for the jugular of the enemies of sanity, the new style “News” shows.

Back in the 80s their was such a thing as “Journalist Responsibility” basically reporters had a ethical obligation to check the facts of the story. So if they were interviewing someone who was saying things that were totally untrue it was their responsibility to call them out on it. So in the above story they would call Cheney's doctor who would confirm that he is not in fact a robot.

This was replaced by having two people take opposing views, and leave the fact checking out of it. The problem with this is the person that is pulling things out of their ass has a huge advantage over the one who wants to carefully state the correct facts. So the guy saying Cheney was a robot could blast out lies while the guy arguing that Cheney was in fact human would have to remember the doc's name, the charts and so on.

Here’s an idea for the new style of news, have a news analyst (I know they have them but they could actually use them). News programs could have someone watch the show and then at the end correct the totally untrue statements. So when Betsy McCaughey was on all the news shows last year talking about how the Healthcare law provided for liberal controlled time-machines and death panels the news analyst could come on at the end and mention the fact that she seems to have made those things up.

I know that in this day and age the idea of putting facts in news programs is radical, but hey it just might catch on.


By Darrell B. Nelson author of Invasive Thoughts

Rally to Restore Sanity V

On October 30, Jon Stewart is holding a Rally to Restore Sanity at the National Mall in Washington, DC. I’m doing my part to help by making motivational posters for sane people.

Death to Nobody:

It’s fine to be passionate about your ideals, but when your ideals lead to innocent people’s deaths it might be time to reexamine them.

Abstinence Only Education: The numbers of teenagers getting pregnant and STD’s had been dropping after schools started offering Sex-Ed, then the policy of Abstinence Only Education started making its way into schools and it started to rise again. Killing young people is not good policy.

Healthcare: At least 45,000 people die every year due to not having healthcare. Opponents to national healthcare say we must let these people die or we will turn into a socialist country like Sweden, Norway, and Germany with their robust economies and higher standards of living. No matter how opposed to Socialism you are, is it really worth 45,000 people’s lives a year to stop? Really?

Animal Testing: (You didn’t think I’d leave PETA out?) The only way to test new drugs is to try them on animals first. Naturally the test animals shouldn’t be abused or killed to test meaningless things like cosmetics, but animal testing is needed to save millions of humans.

So whatever your ideals look at the results and see if it will lead to innocent people’s deaths. If they do please reconsider your support for it.


By Darrell B. Nelson author of Invasive Thoughts

Rally to Restore Sanity IV: Alternative Energy

I am supporting the Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity by creating a series of motivational posters for other sane people.

We can’t continue to use an increasing amount of a finite substance indefinitely. Alternatives to Oil and Coal will help our nation grow stronger. 97% of climate scientists say that man-made carbon dioxide is causing global warming, very close to the amount of physicists that believe in gravity. It is about as certain as it can get.

Funding research into alternative energy is the safest bet out there, even if we had unlimited amounts of oil and burning it didn’t harm the environment having more sources of energy will make our economy more flexible.


By Darrell B. Nelson author of Invasive Thoughts

Rally to Restore Sanity III

On October 30 Jon Stewart is holding a Rally to Restore Sanity, or as President Obama recently called it, “Americans in Favor of a Return to Sanity”. I fully support this Rally no matter what name you call it.

So for all the people who stand behind the Rally to Restore Sanity or the Americans in Favor of a Return to Sanity Rally I’ve made a motivational poster for you.

For the last thirty years lobbyists have convinced politicians (by giving them huge amounts of money) that regulations were unnecessary as it is in the Fox’s own self interest to guard the henhouse and eat only his fair share.

While it is true that it is in the Fox’s best interest to do that, he’s a damn fox!

Industries do best with a level playing field, but individual companies can earn a quick buck by playing unethically in an unregulated market.

Magnetar Capital made billions by inflating the housing market then betting against it.

The Banks grabbed a huge amount of properties by using the foreclosure crisis to illegally foreclose on people in the midst of all the legal foreclosures.

Oil Companies are raking in billions that would be lost to alternative energy sources, even if those profits are unsustainable.

Sane people know that it is in the best interests of everyone to have the federal government act as a referee to insure companies are playing by the rules.

Recently the Republican Governor of California commented on the shear stupidity of having the fox guard the henhouse:

“Does anyone really believe that these companies, out of the goodness of their black, oil hearts and spending millions and millions of dollars to protect jobs? This is like Eva Braun writing a kosher cookbook... I want to talk about the corruption of the democratic process and about forces willing to sabotage the country's economic future for private gain. I want to talk about the Texas oil interests that have descended upon California to overturn a California environmental law, and then, as soon as they've done their dirty work thanks to millions of dollars of scare-tactic advertising, they intend, in the words of their own spokesperson, to fold up their tents and go home... Oil companies like Valero and Tesero and Frontier and Koch Industries are blatantly trying to manipulate the will of the people and the public good... The motivate is... self-serving greed.”

Yes even the Terminator says that this policy is insane.


By Darrell B. Nelson author of Invasive Thoughts

Rally to Restore Sanity II

This is the second motivational poster to help those of you that support Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity march on Oct 30.

If you prefer that disagreements are handled using your indoor voice.

If you think facts are helpful things to have BEFORE taking action.

If you think costumes are better for Halloween than Political Rallies.

Then this rally is for you.

The above motivational poster is for you.

Only two generations ago it wasn’t uncommon in industrial towns to see several armless men walking around the streets. That’s because there were few regulations on worker safety. So industrial accidents were commonplace and a few workers every year would lose an arm to the machinery. Companies would take out insurance on this and it was considered part of the cost of doing business.

Three generations ago those workers wouldn’t even be insured by the companies as working in a factory was considered an assumed risk and the worker was considered at fault for any industrial accidents.

Before the civil war the only recourse to unsafe work practices was if you were Irish you could contact the Molly Maguires and if a supervisor continually tried to have workers go into unsafe work conditions, the Mollies would kill that supervisor.

Most sane people agree that having safety engineers devise ways of reducing accidents so that workers can keep their limbs is a better business practice than having to kill your supervisor if the conditions are too unsafe.

Like always the rebuttal for this will be posted on Thursday in my “Keep Fear Alive” post.

By Darrell B. Nelson author of Invasive Thoughts

Rally to Restore Sanity

The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart is going to holding a Rally to Restore Sanity on Oct. 30, 2010 in Washington D.C. This rally is for the people he calls the busy majority, the 70% of Americans who would like national policy to be set by people who know about the issues at hand instead of whoever can yell the loudest.

Are you one of these people? Here is a simple quiz.

Have you ever disagreed with someone and didn’t call them Hitler?

Do you believe that roads, libraries, water and sewer lines, parks, street lights, and the internet are nice things to have around and aren’t a form of slavery?

Do you think that what your neighbors do in their bedroom, where you can’t see it, doesn’t inflict on your freedoms?

If you answered yes to these questions then you are a sane person and this rally is for you.

Knowing that the busy majority is well, busy, I am offering my support to Team Stewart by starting a weekly series of motivational posters for those people who agree with the cause of bringing sanity back into the discussion of national issues.

To start it off I’ll focus on a controversial issue between the sane people and the lunatics that get a lot of airtime: Roads.

A lot of sane people like roads and use them to go back and forth to work and when they are running errands. These sane people think that while we have a lot of unemployed people in the nation it is a good time to repair them after they have been ignored for so long.

If you agree with that I’ve made a motivational poster for you.

If you disagree I’ll be posting a motivational poster against the idea on Thursday as part of my support for Team Colbert’s “Keeping Fear Alive” Rally.

Update: I have posted a rebuttal to this sanity, with a motivational poster on my Keep Fear Alive post.


By Darrell B. Nelson author of Invasive Thoughts