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Filed under: Afternoon Dance Party

And I thought laws outlawing suicide were stupid:

The mayor of a Brazilian town is trying to bring in a law making it illegal for residents to die.

Mayor Roberto Pereira da Silva, of Biritiba-Mirim, came up with the idea because the town’s only cemetery is full.

He wants to bring in a law that would see relatives of people who die before their time face fines or even jail.

The law would make it an offence for the town’s 28,000 citizens to not look after their health properly.

Mayor Pereira da Silva said there was no way of expending the cemetery or building a new one, reports Agora Sao Paulo.

He said: “Eighty nine per cent of the town is rivers, the rest is protected because it is tropical jungle.”

The state government had promised to help build a new vertical cemetery - but nothing had been done.

Gym memberships have reportedly shot up since the mayor announced his plans, and more people are visiting doctors.

Nanny state health issues + environmental regulation = laws against death.

I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.

Via Daily Dish.

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Filed under: Behind Every Law..., Freedom Meets Darwin, Profiles in Governance

So, the Prez headed to the Boss’s home town this week — Freehold, N.J., that is, made famous in this particularly depressing tune from the mid-80s — to visit a debt counseling agency and give a “major economic speech.” If you were watching live, what you saw was the Commander-in-Chief standing amidst rows of cubicles filled with what looked like PBS pledge-drive volunteers on headsets, ready to take your calls:

INTENDED MESSAGE:  We’re so busy doing the good work of helping Americans in hard times that we don’t even take a break when the President drops by.

ACTUAL MESSAGE:  This lamest of lame duck leaders has been rendered so utterly irrelevant that he commands less attention than Bob from Accounting.

“Hey girl, what’d you do last night?…No shit. Aight, aight, cool…What’s that? Oh, I don’t know, they got the President or some shit talking here…Yeah, in my office. Bitch is being loud standing RIGHT next to my cubicle…I know! Like, why they got to be all up in my bidness? Anyway, we still going to Temptations tonight?”

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Filed under: Politics is Personal, Profiles in Governance, Mock the Vote

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Filed under: Afternoon Dance Party

As always, please stretch before conducting anything over level 3 dance moves. Freedom and Shit dot org and our parent company, the Sheinberg Wig Company, is not responsible for any injuries shaking that ass of yours during the Afternoon Dance Party.

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Filed under: Afternoon Dance Party

Shake your bass and pay homage to Timbaland, high priest in the church of dance.

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Filed under: Afternoon Dance Party

What is scarier than an atomic bomb? Keanu Reeves with a cause.

In the upcoming remake of the Day the Earth Stood Still, the actor will step into the role of Klaatu, delivering the message that if we as a species do not act now, global warming will destroy us–changing the original agent of our destruction from war and nuclear weapons.

“The first one was borne out of the cold war and nuclear détente. Klaatu came and was saying cease and desist with your violence. If you can’t do it yourselves we’re going to do it. That was the film of that day,” Reeves explained. “The version I was just working on, instead of being man against man, it’s more about man against nature. My Klaatu says that if the Earth dies, you die. If you die, the earth survives. I’m a friend to the earth.”

Though I kind of doubt he used the word detente, Keanu makes sense. After all, what’s more frightening, the skin-searing, city-leveling instant death of nuclear bombs, or the idea that in 500 years time we’ll be able to walk outside without jackets in early March? EARLY March! The horror! The horror!

The new version also, perhaps unwittingly, hits the environmentalist-nail on the head, highlighting their core belief– that nature is more important than the lives of men.

On review though, this switch-over to global warming doesn’t really seem as smooth as I first thought. I haven’t read the story, nor have I watched the original movie, but it seems that the aliens in the original version had some real cause to worry about humanity engaging in ever increasingly sophisticated warfare…I mean, it is conceivable that we would one day create weapons with a range that might endanger other planets.

But global warming? Not so much. Why would aliens feel the need to regulate us destroying our own planet? It just doesn’t jibe. Unless they try to claim that humans in the future will spread the effects of global warming to affect other planets (like the way Halliburton totally caused the mars ice caps to melt).

Then again, I am trying to make sense out of a Keanu Reeves movie, which can sometimes feel like working with an alien rubik’s cube.

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Filed under: Freedom on Film, Pop! Goes the Culture

Yes. It’s finally arrived! I now have 4000 unread messages in my Yahoo! inbox!

Oh, you thought I was going to write at length about the 4000th American fatal casualty in Iraq?

No.

Frankly, I’m disgusted that because we hit a round number that somehow the war is fundamentally more tragic, save for the families and loved ones of those just lost, than it was two days ago.

Get real.

End the fucking war.

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Filed under: Politics is Personal, Daily Rant

Bhutan.

TOKTOKHA, Bhutan, March 24 — Without revolution or bloodshed, this tiny Himalayan kingdom became the world’s newest democracy Monday, as wildflower farmers, traditional healers, Buddhist folk artists and computer engineers voted in their country’s first parliamentary elections, ending a century of royal rule.

In a historic event for the country of 700,000, entire families took to winding mountainous roads, traveling sometimes for days in minivans, on horseback and on foot to cast their ballots, marking Bhutan’s transition to a constitutional monarchy.

In a move more typical of American democracy, the former Bhutanese king made one statement just before doing something completely counter to it, all the while preserving a touch of happy-go-lucky quaintness:

Before abdicating the throne to his son in 2006, the country’s fourth king, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, had taken methodical steps to give power to the people, saying that he believed no leader should be “chosen by birth instead of merit.”

As part of his Gross National Happiness plan, he reformed the country’s feudal system, giving land and jobs to the poorest farmers and launching a free health and education system. He and his Harvard- and Oxford-educated son, King Jigme Khesar Namgyal Wangchuck, remain immensely popular. Many Bhutanese still refer to both father and son as “His Majesty.”

Granted, I’d lose my shit if our next president proposed a “Gross National Happiness” plan–and I’ll leave the judgments on the national agriculture, health and education systems alone–but congratulations to the Bhutanese people.

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Filed under: Profiles in Governance, Mock the Vote

In Martin County, Florida, if you have Africanized Honeybees (a.k.a. “Killer Bees“) on your property, the county can come onto your land to dispatch them:

Commissioners in Martin County have unanimously passed an ordinance allowing county employees to go onto private property without permission to kill Africanized bees and treat areas where mosquitoes are breeding.

I know that “killer bees” do, indeed, kill people. However, I don’t think that even dozens — let alone hundreds or thousands — of Americans die per annum from attacks from killer be…

Wait! What was that last part? Mosquitoes? In Florida? It isn’t as if the whole state is a swamp or anything…

Property rights, schmoperty rights. They gots to kill them bugs.

You can fully expect an up-tick of arrests and citations stemming from this decision.

Via Drudge.

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Filed under: Behind Every Law..., Profiles in Governance