Muppet Moocher?

And now we have a muppet moocher:

A “food insecure” Muppet is helping to promote a national “Food for Thought” campaign that teaches poor families to seek out nutritious food and to eat on the taxpayers’ tab.

At the National Press Club on Thursday, Lily the Muppet – who worries about her family not having enough money to feed her properly -- pitched free food at school:

“Sometimes we can't always afford to buy all the food that we need,” Lily said. “I mean, but we've been finding lots of ways that we can get help...Yeah, for example, at school I get a free breakfast and a lunch...part of the meal plan."

Lily’s message is being circulated through schools, hospitals and food assistance programs as part of Sesame Street’s “Food for Thought” multi-media campaign, which includes DVDs and a booklet listing “services that can assist your family” as well as “referrals to social service agencies.”

Organizers say they have produced a million of the kits.

At the National Press Club on Thursday, the Rev. Douglas Greenaway of the National WIC (Women, Infants and Children) Association lauded Sesame Street’s ‘Food For Thought’ campaign – even linking it to federal deficit-reduction.

“What ‘Food For Thought’ does is remind people that eating healthy now gives them a good health outcome in the long term. So the folks you’re looking at up here, the programs that they represent, what ‘Food For Thought’ does is really a deficit reduction strategy, and we hope policymakers will take notice of that,” Greenaway said.

Greenaway didn't elaborate further on how this would work towards deficit reduction.

What happened to Cookie Monster?  Apparently cookies are now a “sometimes” food.  All I can say in response to that is: what the fuck?!?

Seriously, the primary market for Sesame Street has always been children under the age of five.  And children that age should have zero control over what is put in front of them to eat because they are too stupid to get food for themselves, unless it is within reach.  It is the parents’ job to tell the children “No, you only get two cookies” despite all the barrages of hysterical abuse.  And if you are a parent and you have a toddler and you cannot endure their temper tantrums, you really need to take a class on spanking and time out.

Also, when dealing with children, why are we going to make their lives more complex by teaching them about poverty?  Kids get freaked out when they can’t have what they want enough as it is and now you’re going to tell them about poverty?  They are not developed enough to understand the very concept.

It gets better though as this was at the end of the article:

Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit educational organization behind the TV show, announced on Thursday that it plans to appoint a Poverty Advisory Board in 2012. The first meeting will be in Washington on Jan. 10.

I want PBS to be lose its Federal government money.  They are a looter organization seeking to empower the moochers on behalf of the professional pimps in Congress.

Maybe then Sesame Street can focus on important things like counting:

Spiders on the wall, huh?

The Fine Line of Politics

Politics is just another form of conflict.  The difference between politics and war is that politics is socialized conflict.  What this means is that primarily, politics involves words rather than violence.  The risk of politics is that there is a fine line between words and actions.  While words are innocuous and generally are used to convey ideas, there are cases where the conflict escalates and violence ensues.  This is where politics ends.

With the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords (D-Arizona) by the deranged Jared Loughner, we see the ugly side of politics.  I don’t know for certain what political persuasion Jared Loughner was, but that really doesn’t matter a whole lot.  Whatever his political ideology was, it was probably secondary to the terrible actions he took.  Given what has been found in the backyard of where he lived, it’s quite clear to me that he was a disturbed individual more so than a political ideologue.  How many people adhere to one political persuasion or another compared to how many actually shoot politicians?

This reminds me of the Columbine shooting incident where MTV hosts reported on the massacre as if they were going to take the blame for it.  When a couple of kids shoot up their peers in a school, MTV usually does get blamed by one loon or another.  And the sad fact is, those loons get more media airtime than rational analysts because it bring them ratings.

Right now, there are pundits on the Left blaming Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, the repeal of Obamacare, and just about everything else that is currently associated with the right-wing.  On the Right, they are largely pointing out the hypocrisy of the Left in their own calls for death and destruction of certain enemies and some are stating that Jared Loughner was a radical left-wing ideologue.  Frankly, I don’t care what this sick individual’s political ideology was.  He clearly targeted a political figure, but the reasons need not be political, especially if he is insane.

Currently, I’m looking at all the people who are trying to pigeonhole Loughner’s politics into a particular ideology as nothing more than deranged and sick individuals themselves.  For them, life is nothing more than a series of political gains and losses.  It doesn’t matter that a 9-year-old girl was killed by Jared Loughner’s indiscriminate shooting at the crowd.  It doesn’t matter that six random people are dead.  All that matters to these wackjobs is that they score political points against their political enemies.

Yes, words do mean things and words can inspire actions that are good or bad.  And while we all have the shared responsibility of taking responsibility for what we say and to say things with measured discipline, that doesn’t mean that our words can held responsible for the actions of others.  To do so means that people’s behavior can be controlled and induced based on certain stimuli, which is never the case most of the time.  In truth, between the stimulus and the response to said stimulus lies the choice.

And that is what this all comes down to: it is up to the individual to make the right choices for him or herself.  Don’t blame the people who spout hatred and violence, in whatever form, because the individual is still free to choose.  This is why I refuse to accept that Jared Loughner had any political ideology right now because what he did has nothing to do politics.  It had everything to do with an ideology of war.