Don't know if you've noticed

But sometimes, I am a self-righteous, sanctimonious pig.

Joe Bageant wrote two pieces concerning smokers and fat people worth your time (and mine):

Shoot the fat guys; hang the smokers in response to a letter he received.

And then the followup from this morning:

Buddy, can you spare me a Lek?

an excerpt:

This morning's mailbox was the usual wonderful variety of letters, mostly responding to the current post, "Shoot the fat guys, hang the smokers." Many offered heartfelt smoking cessation advice, all of it from personal experience, honest and eminently more sensible than anything I've read elsewhere.

As to the strange new politicizing of behaviors such as smoking and overeating, some brilliant insights came in, along with the prescient observation from Spain that "the fat gays will be the first to go." We should all watch out for that particular canary in the coal mine in which we all toil.

A couple of emails objected, though not meanly or with excessive vehemence, to my calling the Democratic leadership a bunch of fickle, sleazy, traitorous "cunts." I'm not gonna defend such language. Heavens no! It's downright loathsome and detestable. This is why I use it. Then too, I have called the Democratic leadership dicks and dickheads and pussies scores of times, and there were few options left. In passing I will add that I do not believe that any words or terms whatsoever should be beyond the reach of a writer or anyone else for reasons of political correctness. The masses are controlled through controlling their language, which in turn controls the concepts they are capable of grasping.

I try to remember that it was during the most brutally repressive period of communist China that the Communist Party came up with the concept of "political correctness of language." I have always been amazed that Americans could bring themselves to even use the term "politically correct," given the murdering bastards who coined it and perfected its implementation as a social control tool. As we have seen here in America with the exclusion or purposeful demonization of words such as liberalism, socialism, welfare state, controlled economy, once words are demonized or made off limits something is lost, no matter what the word. And once the people are sufficiently indoctrinated to ideology, they will police the language among themselves in the name of political correctness. If the language used by writers such as Mark Twain or Hunter S. Thompson were stripped of politically correct words such as nigger, faggot, etc. -- their chronicles of their times would not convey the full mood and ambiance of the world they saw around them. But enough of that.

My point exactly. Sometimes a nigger is a nigger. A cracker, a cracker, and a queer a faggot. Sometimes an arrogant son-of-a-bitch like myself is an arrogant son-of-a-bitch like myself. And I need to be able to use those words to best convey what I'm trying to say.

Hence, this site.