MattMaroon.com

I was looking in my spam box today and here is the spam breakdown: 10 porno sites, 7 emails trying to sell me some generic non-adult-oriented crap (diet pills being the most common), and 22 attempting to sell me some generic adult-oriented crap.

Of the 22 adult-oriented ones 11 were pills or devices to enlarge my penis. Why on earth would anyone want to do that? I know longer shotgun barrels make the bullet fly straighter so maybe it would improve my accuracy at the urinal, but I rarely miss anyway, and when I do I am usually drunk and in a public place where someone else will have to clean it up. So I don’t see any real benefit to outweigh the annoyance of carrying an extra three inches around.

The ads seem to think a couple extra inches would boost a man’s confidence and enable him to bag more women. I’m not sure how other guys attract women, but in my experience usually by the time the woman sees what size my penis is she’s already been hooked. And I’ve never even heard of a woman running away from a man because he turned out to be too small. Perhaps that does happen and explains why men feel the need to buy these things, but I have no credible evidence of it.

What I find most curious about penis enhancement is that some of these devices look like electric tubes that you plug into the wall. They then appear to use suction to stretch your manhood. Personally I’d be too worried about power surges and the like, but I guess anyone willing to stick their John Thomas in an electric device bought from an anonymous emailer probably isn’t thinking that far ahead.

That did give me an idea for a great way to get rid of spam though. It’s a long term approach but in the end I feel it will be much more effective than any legislation or filtering technology. Here’s what we do. First we spam people with these penis pumps but ours will be designed to castrate the users. It will use a hidden double-bladed guillotine and function much like a cigar cutter. Of course, given our target audience, we’ll have to be sure to put the blade near the top.

Then we sit back and wait. Eventually all of the idiots who buy these things are made into eunuchs and are unable to have slack-jawed children, which anyone who buys a penis pump likely would. In a few generations genetics will ensure that we have no more idiots buying genitalia enlargers found in unsolicited bulk emails. Therefore the penis pump spammers will lose their market and go out of business. We should also put cyanide in Viagra pills, anti-freeze in weight loss drinks, and small bombs inside generic Rolexes.

True, it’s a slow method, but it will work. And wouldn’t you like to leave a spam-free world for your grandchildren? Also, as a special bonus side effect, this approach would eventually get rid of Reality TV shows, pop music, and Applebee’s.

I’m a little grouchy right now. I’m extremely tired but I can’t sleep because five illegal immigrants are jackhammering in my basement. I actually did manage to nod off once anyway, but then the foreman (the one Anglophone on the crew) woke me up asking me where my plunger was. That’s never a good sign, especially since I don’t have one.

Thank God for Mexicans though. This basement repair is costing me an assload as it is. Imagine if they had to actually pay the employees well. It seems like it’s going to add up to roughly 200 man hours of labor, if they had to pay American laborers $5/hr more that’s an extra dime out of my pocket. Plus with American workers you don’t get the pleasure of eavesdropping on their conversation while trying to translate it on Babel Fish. It’s pretty hard to do that when you don’t know much Spanish, but I was able to figure out that the one guy really hates his father-in-law and the other got his girlfriend pregnant.

So now I’m in favor of illegal immigration again. Screw logic, I’m voting with my pocketbook from this point forward. Sign me up for the Republican Party. Now all I need is a gun collection and a dangerously solipsistic view of foreign policy and I’ll be set.

Every time I turn on the radio or television lately I hear some woeful tale about a destitute Mexican woman who snuck across the border in order to make $6/hr picking strawberries or cleaning fish to feed her six children that she hasn’t seen in three years who live in a cardboard box in Tijuana with their ailing grandmother and have eaten nothing but beans their entire lives. It’s an emotional tale for sure, and one that seems to have completely destroyed what little capacity for logic most Americans formerly possessed. Just when you think the average American can’t get any dumber something like this comes along and proves you wrong.

Usually I find myself on the “liberal” side of most socially-oriented political debates. Not all by any means, but most. I’m all for gay marriage rights, reproductive freedom of choice, removing references to God from our pledge, dollar bills, etc., abolishing the PATRIOT Act and the death penalty, granting detainees basic human rights such as due process, and all sorts of other things generally considered liberal ideology, despite being either explicitly or implicitly stated in the Constitution. But as far as this recent immigration controversy goes I’m left scratching my head wondering what the left is thinking. How can anyone be against HR4437?

HR 4437 does a number of things such as provide for a border fence, make being an illegal immigrant a felony (allowing us to deport them and discourage them from returning), and making aiding illegal immigration a crime as well. The entire idea is to end decades of lax border control. What about this isn’t simple common sense? How can anyone be opposed to a law that is simply meant to help enforce our immigration policy?

Now I can understand people who think our immigration policy should be changed. I’ve read a decent amount on the economic impacts of illegal immigration and they seem mostly positive, largely because there are more jobs in the U.S. than there are Americans to fill them. There are only about 7 million unemployed Americans (roughly 4.8% of the workforce) and analysts estimate the number of working illegal immigrants to be anywhere from 10-20 million, meaning that there are between 3 and 13 million more jobs in the U.S. than there are citizens to fill them. And those statistics were for February 2006, imagine how many more agricultural jobs there must be in the spring and summer. It seems we need Mexicans to work here. It’s just a question of how many of them we should let in, how they get here, and what rights they have while in our country.

So if someone argued that we should allow for millions of legally sanctioned Mexican guest workers, that would be a valid point. If people protested because they feel that we should make it much easier for Mexicans to obtain U.S. citizenship that too would make sense. I don’t know enough about the social and economic impact of such things to have an informed opinion about them (and I doubt that more than 0.1% of the rest of America does either), but I’ll grant that it is a valid, well thought-out viewpoint and one that bears consideration. Arguing that we should change our immigration policy makes sense, but arguing that we shouldn’t enforce the policy that we do have by whatever means necessary is just plain stupid.

Honestly I don’t see HR 4437 as a partisan issue. It’s just common sense. I can see some partisan bickering over what our immigration policy should be, but as to whether or not we should enforce the policy we do have I see no room for argument, especially in a culture so frightened of terrorism. We’re willing to let logic like “we’ll fight the terrorists there so we don’t have to fight them here” lead us into war against countries that don’t even have terrorists, but we wont put up a fence keeping potential Al-Qaeda operatives from flying a nuclear weapon to Mexico and then walking into Texas with it.

If a government policy is unjust then protest that. But when it comes to laws meant only to help the proper people enforce the policies we do have the only debate should be over exactly what tools we grant the enforcers and what sort of oversight there should be. Arguing over whether or not we should enforce policies at all is just plain stupid.