Freethought Rantifesto

As I explained in the "About Me" section, I started these posts on FaceBook. I will re-post them here in the order they were originally posted to keep you up to speed as to where I've been and where I'm going. As new ideas form, I will post them here also.

This is the rant that started it all. I didn't know what I wanted to say, specifically, but I knew I had things to say. And it all came out in one, long blob. This is not the way my rants will play out in later posts. This one is unique. More of a potpourri of topics all mixed in one bowl. Later ones are more singularly focused. 

Some of the information may be out of date and you may not understand some of the references because this is a year and a half old.

I hope you enjoy it anyway...

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Rant. I am not typically this angry, but I’ve been holding this in for a while and it’s been trying really hard to get out. The problem was, the more I held it back, the more things kept getting added to it.

Warning: DO NOT READ: Nineteen hundred word, run-on, snow flurry of freestyle Freethinking ahead. But if you do want to read this, then make some popcorn and crack open a beer.

No, seriously. It’s really long.

And I rant like a crazy person. Through the whole thing.

And it’s probably wasteful and inappropriate to post on Facebook.

No. It’s definitely wasteful and inappropriate to post on Facebook.

OK. You asked for it. Put the safety bar down and keep your head and arms inside the car at all times…

I realize that only most scientists by a large margin say there is global warming and you want to think Gore made it up because he made a movie (and you only get your info about history and current events from movies {and conspiracy theory websites - scientists do make mistakes, they’re human - 22 pages total with incorrect info out of a 6,000 page document on the human impact on the climate does not constitute the BULK of the report, you friggin’ loony toon, no matter how many times you insist it does - it’s only 0.37% of the report - you eat chocolate bars with a higher percentage of roach parts in them}) and he's a Democrat and you're a Republican so that makes you bitter enemies and you right and him wrong and Republican POLITICIANS say there's no global warming so you believe them instead of SCIENTISTS (I love the conspiracy theory that scientists all over the world are falsifying the numbers so the government {apparently there’s some ‘world government’ I don’t know about} can charge you a carbon dioxide tax and they prove this by saying everyone exhales CO2 and the evil government is out to get you - which doesn’t explain anything at all but conspiracy nuts eat it up) and a day of harsh snow proves to you that there is no global warming just like every night when it gets dark proves irrefutably to you that there is no such thing as light and hey let's just for the sake of argument say that pumping tons and tons of carbon unnaturally into the atmosphere every HOUR isn't having ANY negative effect on the biosphere whatsoever - how is it that Republicans make it sound bad and stupid to try and be nice to the earth just for the sake of being nice to the earth - I'm sure it isn't for some sort of political and monetary gain that has anything to do with the fossil fuel industry and what will you say in the middle of July or August when the temperature hits 95 - oh, man Al Gore was right - no you won’t, you’ll just ignore it (one day of 95 degree weather also has no bearing on global warming - it’s an average taken over a period of years along with studying the effects of things like the clear cutting of forests and farting animals, and dumping chemicals in rivers and the square miles of tar and concrete covering giant patches of earth and strip mining and oil sands surface mining and a floating plastic island twice the size of Texas in the south pacific, etc - you know… Science) and won’t mention it like it didn’t happen because it doesn’t fit with your false political preconception because you don't base your opinions on real information, you base it on a constant stream of right-wing extremist Fox "News" misinformation (for ratings) and seriously, the Vatican saying Avatar is a threat to religion for depicting the worship of nature must be because the Pope’s flamboyant hut ist auf zu dicht - oop, sorry, I meant ‘hat is on too tight’ - just a little slip of the Third Reich there - maybe the Vatican should just stick to covering up cases of child rape instead of reviewing movies and while we’re at it, having a serious debate about the merits of Evolution vs. Intelligent Design would be exactly the same as a serious debate between which is better at stopping crime, the NYPD or Spider-Man and now the issue of gun control - after clearing a background check and waiting period, everyone should be allowed to own a gun (with mandatory proper-usage and handling classes) because if they’re made illegal, the criminals who have illegal guns now will still have illegal guns then - only responsible, law-abiding (sometimes stupid, can’t prepare for that) citizens will lose any rights (hey redneck, Obama hasn’t said a goddamn thing about guns so stop saying he’s trying to take them from you and for the record, he hasn’t taken a single right away from you no matter how loudly and frequently you say he has - except maybe the right to be governed by a rich, white, racist, southerner {by the way… ‘reverse racism’ is pee-in-your-pants hilarious: po’ white man bein’ kep’ down by middle-aged Puerto Rican ladies from the Bronx}) - and I know you’re fair and balanced, Fox "News," so I know it’s just that I’m not smart enough to figure this out, but why did you consider it treasonous to criticize the government under Bush, but a patriotic duty to criticize it under Obama and for the love of peanut butter and banana sandwiches, Obama did not fix the Super Bowl (because your team lost) as part of some socialist agenda you halfwit, (and believe me, halfwit is a compliment) conservative Republican, but if he did, that would mean your boy Manning took a bribe to throw an interception, brainiac and by the way, we all know you call Obama things like ‘socialist’ and ‘secret Muslim’ only because you can’t call him what you really, really, REALLY want to call him in public and the ‘Birther Movement’ is just a slightly more subtle form of the Ku Klux Klan for people too embarrassed to wear the pointy hoods AND if you think President Barack Hussein Obama was NOT born in America then yes, aliens did actually land in Roswell in 1947 and it’s true, the Kennedy assassination was a conspiracy between the CIA, VP Johnson, Castro and the Mafia - and Bush masterminded both Katrina & 9/11 (Bush is a ‘secret genius’ - and hey, when he bailed out the banks with our money, why didn’t anyone call him a socialist? {federal and state taxes are socialism, [as is SOCIAL security, unemployment and Medicare] so we’ve ALWAYS been partly a socialist country - we just don’t receive any of the benefits from that system as all the other socialist countries do - in case anyone was wondering}) and yes, the health care reform is far from perfect, but it cracks me up how conspiracy nuts are taking the actual medical practices of Nazi Germany and claiming Obama and his crew are the ones who want to implement these type of things into the health care reform (mandatory abortions, euthanasia of the elderly and handicapped, etc - of course not mentioning it was really the Nazi’s plan) and they think people will actually believe them - oh, wait - they do because they are stupid - apparently not as stupid as the person who started the conspiracy who at least has enough knowledge of history to use it to attack what he doesn’t agree with and make it sound… ~SINISTER~ Mwa hahahahaha! - and… and… and… and… and… I forgot what I was going to say, hold on a sec while I check my hand… oh, yeah - if you think “What do you read?” is a trick question, then you’re a fucking dipshit, and also no matter what your bullshit holier-than-thou excuses are, gay marriage - just like women’s suffrage and abolition and the equal rights movement - is a civil and moral and human right and if you oppose it, you are the lowest form of cowardly scum, you piece of maggot-infested hyena shit and you will eventually lose your battle all the while prolonging other people’s anguish and speaking of anguish - abortion… it’s a personal decision that has absolutely nothing to do with politics - at least it didn’t until the medieval-minded Christian uber-right infiltrated the Republican party and made it political (also the gay marriage issue is religious and not at all political) and for the record, I am not a do-nothing Democrat or a know-nothing Republican (or a member of any other political party - I told you where I was coming from right at the start - I come to my own conclusions based on as many facts I can gather, not blindly follow some group I’ve joined that tells me what I’m supposed to think) and I don't know proof positive if there is global warming, but I do know this issue has absolutely nothing to do with politics so try taking Al Gore and the Democrat and Republican parties and Fox "News" propaganda out of the equation and just base your opinion on facts, and perhaps a little common sense -  as with the health care issue too, because politics shouldn’t have anything to do with that, either, but you ignore the fact that steadily over the past several years your premiums have skyrocketed and your coverage basically bottomed out (except in states that have extremely well-working GOVERNMENT MANDATED HEALTH CARE such as in MA, TX & HI - what, Fox "News" didn’t tell you about those? that’s weird) because those pseudo-patriots Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck tell you America has the best health care in the world and since you are on the same team as them, you believe their lies contrary to what’s actually happening to you in real life and if you think we’re all safe because a god (Zeus, Apollo, Horus, Jesus, Loki, Osiris, Allah, Shiva, Baal, Krishna, Odin, Neptune, Re, Quetzalcoatl, Thor, Dionysus, Venus, Hades, Pan, Kukulcan, Isis, etc, ad infinitum - whichever one happens to be in vogue {did you get what I just did?}) controls everything and will protect us from harm, then don’t read this because, well, this rant is one of free thought - something you’re not used to, as your mind is firmly shackled to the mental-growth retardation of religious dogma. I did warn you not to read this. And if I’ve offended you in any way, then please just let me say that you should apologize to me for being so stupid that you caused me to go on this rant that offended you. At the very least, apologize to yourself.

Whereas intelligent people try to seek out knowledge and truth regardless of where it takes them, ignorant people only seek out and surround themselves with like-minded people in order to back up their preconceived ideology regardless of truth. Mob mentality. Or, I guess these days it would be called “tea bag mentality.”

I’m hungry.

-Bill Mancuso - February 2010

P.S. - There’s more I haven’t even touched on but the pressure in my head is back down to a manageable level and I think that’s probably enough for now, anyway. Don’t you?

P.S.P.S. - Here’s an article from the NY Times about Tea Party-type groups. It’s a scary article.
 Tea Party Lights Fuse for Rebellion on Right

If you don’t think they’re psycho, then you are psycho. Here’s my favorite quote from the article: Gazing out at his overwhelmingly white audience, Mr. Mack felt the need to say, “This meeting is not racist.” Nor, he said, was it a call to insurrection.