My Top 10 Rants At Present

Quite a number of things have been chapping my hide lately and a few of them feel like a flaming stick up my ass. I've been planning on posting such a list for some time but tonight I feel pissy enough to actually get around to doing it. Below is my current list in no particular order of significance.

1. Highly ideological people who lack the chops to face me in debate directly with facts but feel compelled to resort to straw man arguments, ad hominem attacks, false causality fallacies, Parthian shots, and other such rhetorical devices (not limited to full-bug-out retreats) of those who know they can't win in a stand-up fight with the facts. I have experienced all these of late and dispatched them without mercy. The exceptions are one of my Parthian shooters got in his car at my yard sale before I could set fire to his dogmatic assertion that Wal-Mart has NOT effectively sent American jobs to China. The other Parthian Shooter unfriended me on Facebook and blocked me there and on Twitter but not before making trite and condescending remarks of a most vapid and candy-assed and self-righteously indignant nature. 
2. I hate tweekers, as in "hate-hate." As a Christian I love the sinner but hate the tweeker. I am certain they can be cured for the cost of a bullet cross-hemisphere to the brain. They are starting to become a problem in my life and the lives of my loved ones by way of being scary and disruptive and unpredictable neighbors who attract an unsavory and ill-tempered element into the neighborhood. In the good old days neighborhoods and communities took care of such problems sans the need for the constabulary and other legal avenues.
3. Liberal hypocrisy gets worse year after year. I realize Conservatives are no better but of late their hypocritical excesses have not been on display to the extent it has for Liberals. From the Liberal (and to some extent black) bias of the Zimmerman saga/non-story story to the water carrying for a Liberal President who has one-upped his Conservative predecessor's "extraordinary renditions" of non-citizens (to which I never objected unlike my Liberal friends who feigned outrage) with now the assassination of American citizens abroad sans trial (to which I don't object personally but my Liberal friends also don't seem to in a convenient turn of inconsistency) by way of drone strikes on foreign soil. Add to that our President using the I.R.S. to help him win a very narrow reelection last year by way of using the I.R.S. to disproportionately go after Tea Party and Patriot Groups in a turn of malfeasance reminiscent of Richard Nixon. Liberals to this day love to excoriate Nixon for doing the very same thing but outrageously call Obama's sins of the same sort a "false scandal". Add to that his being responsible for having a then-defense secretary (Leon Panetta) whom outed the Pakistani doctor whom helped finger Osama bin Ladin which doctor is now in prison for the rest of his life on treason charges in Pakistan. Top that off with the same Liberal President possessing a Vice President who outed the SEAL Team (Six) which killed Osama bin Ladin leading to that unit being targeted by Al Qaeda. Then predictably Al Qaeda got to them and wiped out 15 members of Seal Team Six along with 23 other personnel in the shootdown of a Chinook helicopter with a rocket-propelled grenade two years ago. This makes another Bush-era Liberal cause celebre, to wit, the Natalie Plame Affair pale by comparison as no Americans died and yet Liberals at the time went ape shit about that one. 
4. Speaking of the Zimmerman Trial that sure did expose a whole lot of racism in America... within segments of the black community whom tend to come from an arch-Liberal political persuasion of ethnocentric race-baiting, guilt-mongering, blame-gaming, shit-stirring, responsibility-dodging, fact-obfuscating apologetics-for-bad-behavior-purveying on a scale that boggles the mind. This receives little notice given how long and gradual it has been worsening and how bullied into acquiescent quietude White America has been since the 1970's or thereabouts. That time frame is not a coincidence as it is around the time the civil rights movement for black Americans lost it's moral superiority and purity once and for all following a decline that began around the time that more angry elements poisoned the movement. This was symbolically capped off with Martin Luther King, Jr.'s mistakenly tying the civil rights movement to opposition to the Vietnam War in 1967, which ought to have remained a separate issue. Of course, then there is the fact the Liberal newsmedia (they hate that label claiming it does not exist the way the Italian mafia has for years denied the existence of the Italian mafia). Methinks they protest too much! Anywho, the aforementioned Fifth Column Fourth Estate generated an artificial narrative of what happened in this case that played upon the reverse racist propensities and proclivities of those susceptible to such hackneyed and morally-bankrupt impulses and perceptions. By the end of the trial an entire segment of society that was disproportionately Left-leaning and more melanin-rich was convinced of the injustice of an incident which never actually happened as they falsely perceive it to be up to the present. Thank you MSNBC, et al, for your excellent job of informing a large populace of voters and encouraging ethnic harmony and national unity!
5. Speaking of race: I'm tired of that word being abused and misused. When most people use the word "race" or one of its variants they ought to use "ethnicity" or one of its variants. There is no racism anymore given that the Neanderthals and Denisovans are now extinct... perhaps in part as a result of "racism" by early modern Homo Sapiens. However, there is nowadays most certainly ethnicism and ethnocentrism which can be ethnically-exclusive and promote ideas of ethnocentric superiority of the sort that is often misnamed "racism". There is also a myth that blacks continue to systematically and regularly suffer from white racism and white advantage as opposed to what the facts suggest which is that community's own shortcomings and subcultural proclivities and self-indulgence and indeed multiculturalistic ethnocentrism has harmed it and alienated it and separated it from the rest of society to which many of its members seem inclined to blame upon white Americans. This latter subculture and ethnicity of America as a group has quite some time ago gotten over the "black thing" and yet Black America seems stuck in the past and unaware of the changes in the rest of America. For good measure look at the fact that White America helped elect a self-identified black man as President. It has even reelected him in spite of the fact he is no good at his job by just about any measure.
6. This is not to say that I have not been a bit annoyed with Conservatives lately. They now are inclined to viciously attack our President for doing things like spying on the American people via NSA when that was going on under the Patriot Act throughout the Bush 43 Administration, but where was the Conservative outrage then? Note: those intelligence-gathering activities did not and do not bother me on a practical level but as someone concerned with the ever-growing size and power and expense of our federal government I doubt the constitutionality of where things have wandered to and where they are headed. I also fail to see the real need for much of this Homeland Security activity and internal intelligence-gathering (which has become lavishly lucrative for many firms which is the real driving force of it). When there were failures in following then-in-force methods and procedures in American counter-terrorism that directly led to the few successful terrorist attacks on our own soil such as 9/11 and the Boston Bombings. However, I digress. Where was the Conservative outrage on expanding government after 9/11 where there is now outrage in the expansion of government under Obamacare? Where was the Conservative outrage regarding our invasion of Iraq on a false premise while there is now constant Conservative consternation over much more minor involvements in Libya and Syria to which we are far less invested in blood and treasure?
7. On that Syria note I must confess that I am flabbergasted that the Obama Administration is sending monies to Sunni rebels in Syria of which some are Al Qaeda-affiliated formations whom are also receiving support from Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich Persian Gulf Sunni-majority nations. On the other side of the axis is the Syrian government which is Shiite-dominated just like their Hezbollah allies in Lebanon and both of which are supported by Iran, the world capital of Shia Islam. First off, why are we taking sides in a fight in which we don't have a dog? Second, why are we supporting rebels some of whom we are Al Qaeda-affilated, a terrorist network at vicious war with us and against whom we are fighting and killing and detaining people at Gitmo at great expense in blood and treasure?  Thirdly, why are we sending these people money twice since they are not only receiving direct payments from us but also indirect payments as their support from other parts of the Sunni Islamic world comes from money we paid those oil-rich nations for their oil?
8. I have experienced an odd and annoying work experience lately with an employer who shall go unnamed here as I don't wish to burn bridges: I'm technically still employed by them although I'm not getting called in to work for them. After passing my job interview with flying colors and having my hand shaken and being quite literally welcomed to the team and having attended all meetings and the one work shift to which I was called in I now find myself on the outside for not having ingratiated myself enough to the ruling caste and acting like an excited little puppy to be there for just above minimum wage. Now I'm hearing of dissatisfaction growing in the ranks with one employee quitting due to harassment by other hens and attendance is light thus far even for big events such as the recently half-filled big-name event. Perhaps if they called me I could help them out. 
9.  Something I have long noted since I started reading blogs but that has been violently shoved in my face to a far more intensely distasteful degree in recent weeks since I became fully-engaged on Twitter and have followed some popular bloggers is this: the perpetual, petty and pernicious pedantry and sniping and nitpicking by those on the Right at those on the Left (and the reverse as well) over mostly minor and irrelevant fluff and/or distorted and exaggerated cause celebres. The Tweets just keep coming until I unfollow various and assorted bloggers since they are fanatics of the sort Sir Winston Churchill described as "one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject". The content is sometimes very funny and clever after the tradition of famous wits but most of the time is monotonous and mundane, strident and shrill, not to mention belaboring a point and being prone to beating a dead horse. I have trimmed back the number of bloggers I follow to merely two and I'm contemplating cutting them loose, too.
10. I have many loved ones and acquaintances who are hooked on a variety of "reality television programs" which on some level most of us realize are as real as "professional wrestling". However, most people don't seem to appreciate how selectively and creatively edited these programs are and to what extent people in these programs are playing to the cameras and the degree to which the producers steer the narrative not to mention control the personnel lineup on each show. If these shows were reality then there would be no "casting" and nothing would need be planted or prearranged. In the past several months charges of planting items in storage units for the program Storage Wars went to court but were ultimately cast out. I have had a personal conversation with a guest of Cash & Treasures whom hosted on adventure and told me what I already guessed had to be the case: stuff is planted so the pretty host of the show can find it in a one-hour television show. While watching another program (Call of the Wildman) at my mother's house the other day I saw the characters in the show opening up cupboards in a kitchen in an abandoned house and like a game show some had raccoons and such animals while most did not. The whole scene seemed so staged and unlikely. How did a raccoon end up in a cupboard with no means of ingress and egress aside from the closed cabinet door? Why did it hardly seem to react to the sight of humans and cameras? How could such an abandoned home hold so many animals just wildly leaving there and so conveniently to be found by the "Turtleman" and his entourage? This kind of programming is simply a means to maintain network ratings while saving a lot of money not hiring actual unionized actors and writers and directors and such as one would in a program that is entirely "fictional". Thank God for The Walking Dead, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad.