Where the hell do people get off demanding others to turn over their Facebook user names and passwords?  This is a violation of privacy in one of the grossest forms.

I’m sorry, but if I apply for a job and they demand access to my private Facebook information, they can kiss my ass.  A company that willfully disregards the rights of its employees is not a company that I want to work for.

Facebook is part of your personal life.  I don’t see corporations following these people home to see how their home life is, or wanting to read the text messages on their phone.  Perhaps they would like to see how applicants’ sex lives are?  Because, really, should they be employing sado-masochists??  Is that really conducive to a teambuilding corporate atmosphere?

I’m all for criminal background checks.  If you’ve been charged with a crime, that is no longer your personal life, but public life.  I can understand credit checks (only for companies having to do with finance…otherwise it seems pointless).  But companies have no need or right to prod into your personal life.

(This is, of course, assuming you don’t already grant public access on your Facebook page.  If you do, stop that.  Also, I don’t want people trying to jump down my throat saying “if you put it on Facebook, you have no expectation of privacy.”  There is a big difference between an idiot leaving their embarrassing photos for all the world to see and someone demanding access to my account to view every last detail that I have kept from being public for a reason.)

Know your rights.  Giving others password information or allowing someone, other than yourself, to access your account is a violation of Facebook’s terms of use that you agreed to when you created your account.  Tell anyone who may want this information that they should be ashamed of themselves.

Then offer them a sex tape.

People are making a mountain out of a molehill with this contraception-being-provided-by-insurance issue.  Christian organizations do not want to be forced to include birth control in their insurance policies because it goes against their religion and people have freedom of religion in this country, by golly!

What about the person on their payroll who would like more affordable contraception options?  What about her freedom of religion?  Hey, Christian Organizations, by not giving someone the option to practice their religion as they choose (i.e. they have no religious objection to birth control), aren’t you doing exactly the same thing to them as what you are complaining the government is trying to do to you?

Here is an idea, and you will have to pardon its crazy extremism… if you have a moral objection to birth control then DO NOT TAKE IT.  That is your freedom of religion.  If I have no such objections, then I can take it.  No one has the right to force their personal beliefs or opinions on someone else.

By including birth control in insurance policies you are not condoning it, but simply allowing people who have no qualms an option to choose it.  After all, it is a free country right?  Or perhaps it is only a free country for those that agree with you.

I have to be honest and admit I do not understand why Catholics believe birth control is a sin in the first place.  I did a Google about it and found a page that explains that the Bible condemns birth control in the book of Genesis.  A man named Onan’s brother died and he was instructed to go to the brother’s wife and give her offspring in his brother’s name (this was the law back then).  “But Onan knew that the offspring would not be his; so when he went in to his brother’s wife he spilled the semen on the ground, lest he should give offspring to his brother. And what he did was displeasing in the sight of the Lord, and he slew him also.” (Gen.38:8-10).

Pulling out is a form of birth control and God killed a dude for it.  CASE CLOSED!  BIRTH CONTROL BAD!!

But here’s another radical, extremist thought… perhaps what God was mad about was not the fact that Onan pulled out, but that he disobeyed his instruction.  Perhaps God was mad that Onan willfully disobeyed this brotherly duty, but yet was still willing to fuck his brother’s widow (sorry for the coarseness, but that is what he did…it wasn’t making love or having sex).  That seems like a much better reason to kill someone than a little mess on the ground.  In fact, the New Living Translation of the Bible agrees with me, for their verse 10 states, “But the LORD considered it evil for Onan to deny a child to his dead brother. So the LORD took Onan’s life, too.”

So yeah… nothing to do with birth control.

I think having children you cannot provide for monetarily or emotionally is infinitely worse than birth control will ever be.

People who treat animals cruelly deserve a special place in Hell.  This morning as I was buying a bottle of water from the cafeteria, I heard a news story on the TV about a guy who “kicked his cat like a football.”

“Police charged a South Side man with animal cruelty after officers say they watched him take a running start and kick a kitten 15-18 feet into the air before raising his arms to signal a successful field goal.”  Feel free to read more here.

The animal shelter that is currently giving this cat medical care commented that it is friendly and loving.  Even after being treated horribly by a human, this cat is still affectionate.  Pure, unconditional love is what pets are, and what makes mistreating them all the more terrible.

Sorry for the rant, but this really pissed me off.  I am by no means an animal rights activist.  I eat meat [I could never truly go vegetarian because I love Taco Bell just too damn much] and I certainly won’t chastise someone for wearing a fur coat.  We can kill animals for sustenance and warmth [or even sport, if hunting is your thing], but that doesn’t give us the right to treat any of them cruelly.

In lighter-but-still-cat-related news, apparently someone has given “my cat has the hiccups” as an excuse to be late for work.  I still don’t see why it would cause the person to be late, unless he followed it around trying to scare the hiccups out of it.  Good luck there, buddy.  It’s practically impossible to scare a cat–they can always hear you coming, unless they are asleep and then they simply don’t care what you are trying to do with that blanket.

Not that I have tried or anything.

As a chaotic-neutral, I have to approve with the Occupy Wall Street movement on the basis that it is a break from the status quo.  I love when things get shaken up, whether good or bad.  Most of the reason a zombapocalypse sounds so exciting to me is it would shake stuff up on a world-wide scale.

I know, I’m weird.

Generally speaking, of course, people are too lazy or apathetic or whatever other synonym you would like to use to get angry enough about a particular grievance to do something to change it.  Finally OWS appears. These people are angry.  They have been out there protesting for months.  Their passion has not dwindled despite the passing of time and the dropping temperatures [seriously OWSers, why didn’t you do start this in the summer?].  I think this is something to be commended.

But that is where I stop giving them credit.

OWS needs a statement of purpose.  They have the country’s attention, but they are not doing anything constructive with it, other than pointing out the woeful training of police officers in handling peaceful demonstrations.

Occupiers, we do not know what you want.  I understand that this started as a horizontal movement, but you really need to get some clear direction here.  No one is going to take you seriously, otherwise.

I’ve got a few ideas to start you off:

• Abolish lifetime appointments for Supreme Court justices
• Revoke corporations’ “rights” to be counted as people
• Change Congressional salaries so that the approval rating from their constituents coincides with the percentage of their pay they receive

That last one is especially important because there needs to be some serious repercussions for those idiots when they decide to declare pizza a vegetable.  I’m sorry.  I am exaggerating.  They want to declare the tomato sauce on pizza a vegetable.  Because that sounds so much better.

This is wrong on so many levels, not the least of which is tomatoes are a fruit.

Bank of America is going to start charging customers $5 a month to use a debit card.  In this article,  the BofA CEO defended the $5 charge claiming that Bank of America has a “right to make a profit.”

This made me wonder exactly how much they will be getting from this new charge.  According to Wikipedia, BofA has over 20 million customers.  So let’s just take the number 20 million.

$5 a month for 12 months = $60 a year
$60 from 20 million customers = $1,200,000,000

Which then got me wondering–just how much profit do they make now?  The $5 charge doesn’t go into effect until 2012.  So they must really be hurting financially right now if they have to put this charge into effect to make a profit, right?

Enter this article.  Bank of America’s profit for 3rd quarter alone was $6.2 BILLION dollars.  Not the entire year of 2011.  Just one quarter of it.

Guess six billion dollars just doesn’t go as far as it used to.

I’ve posted before about how Bank of America lied to its shareholders. I’ve mentioned articles about how Bank of America foreclosed on people without mortgages.  Try here or here or here. [Those are just the first few examples to come up in a Google search.]

And now, even though they are making a profit of $6 billion dollars in a single quarter, they are going to start charging their customers $5 a month to use a debit card.

How anyone continues to bank with this company is beyond me.  Worst. Bank. Ever.