Accidental Racist

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_qbt1EVuw8

Brad Paisley's new song featuring LL Cool J has caused quite the stir on social media sites today.

The song is called Accidental Racist, and outlines how people may appear to be different than they are.

At least in my interpretation.

It starts as Paisley is in a coffee shop, wearing a Lynyrd Skynyrd shirt with the Confederate flag on it, and the man getting his coffee is LL Cool J, a black man. Paisley sings about how to him, it's just a Lynyrd Skynyrd shirt, and it's a part of the history of the south. They go on to sing how the past can't be re-written, and often times we're walking on eggshells to avoid accidentally offending someone we may not even know because of the history of our country and the different ways we all grow up.

Now, this won't be my new favorite song, but it honestly has a really good point. I don't know how many times I've accidentally offended people or felt like I've offended people after I have moved to the big city. Being from a small town, where you know everyone and there isn't anyone you'd offend, it can be a culture shock to learn the term "oriental" is no longer socially acceptable.

However, people on the Twittersphere and YouTubeland are saying how the Confederate flag is the equivalent of the swastika in America, and if you can't understand other people's point of view you're an ignorant racist, who doesn't deserve the time of day. Also, people think the song is about how hard it is to be a white man in America.

I don't agree with any of these points.

Yes, there were slaves under the Confederate flag. Yes, there was oppression. Yes, all of these things were terrible. However, that is not what the flag stood for. The Confederate flag stood for making a stand against the government that they believed to be tyrannical and oppressive. And in case you forgot, there were slaves and oppression under the United States flag that we see today. Now, we see slavery in the form of young girls sold at truck stops for sex trafficking. There's a lot less being said about that, isn't there?

Yes, people come from different backgrounds. Yes, people should be accepting. But this does not mean that you can know everything about a person, including what offends them before you talk to them for a long time. We all come from different places. I grew up around primarily white people, but not in a racist community by any means. Because of this, I don't get offended easily. I don't know what the politically correct terms are. I don't care if you call me a Kraut or a cracker. But that doesn't mean that I would call anybody else that, either. Especially if I knew that they thought it was offensive.

No, the song is not about how it's hard to be white. "Oh woe is the white man." Not even close. It's talking about how we have a past as a nation, and it's not pretty. But if we can't get over that past and quit getting offended by things that don't matter, we won't have a pretty future, either.

One point I would like to make, is that people think this song is offensive. Okay. Yeah, it's intense, but I don't think it's racist. You know what I do think is racist? All of these songs saying nigger this, and nigger that. It's now okay to make songs about Niggas in Paris and You A Stupid Hoe, but we can't make songs about how we're sorry if we accidentally offend someone? We can call girls bitch, hoe, cunt, twat, slampiece, what have you, but we can't display the Confederate flag? The inconsistency of our society maddens me. I refuse to accept that it is okay for me to be called a bitch, yet not for me to say something sounds Oriental. Or for you to say nigger, but not to display the Confederate flag.

This has been the latest from ChrissyJoy.

Life hacks for sneakily toning your body when you don't want to tone your body; A blog I decided to write today #longtitles

1) Take some time for yoga or stretching every day. Even if you can't get yourself to the gym, taking a study break and just stretching out will make your body feel better than sitting in your desk chair for 5 hours being all tense.

2) Do calf raises while you're standing under the hand dryer or in the shower.

3) Do standing crunches or side crunches while you shampoo/condition. But maybe not while you wash your face, because you don't want to poke yourself in the eye. (Standing crunches aren't that difficult. Stand with your feet about shoulder width apart, keep your legs straight, tighten your abs as hard as you can and lean back, then back up. Try to target your lower abs. You have to concentrate, but it's good. It works best when your hands are on your head. To do side ones, just lean to the side and concentrate on your obliques.)

4) Always take a water bottle to class. Firstly, that keeps you hydrated, which is good, but it also makes you less hungry.

5) Once you're on campus, don't take the bus. Walking is good happy yay.

6) Take the stairs as much as possible. And when you do, concentrate on the muscles working in your legs. Try to make it as hard as possible on those muscles. It sounds stupid, but it strangely works.

7) Get a work-out buddy. Studies show that when you don't have one, you do approximately 98% less. 60% of the time, work-out buddies work all the time.

8) Pay attention to when you're full. Really.

9) Pay attention to your cravings. If it's something like fish, or a banana, chances are your body needs those nutrients. If it's something like chocolate or chips, try a granola bar or wheat thins.

10) Don't beat yourself up for drinking a pop when you're tired or something like that. It happens, and it's lovely. But if you feel bad about it, remind yourself to make changes, like get sparkly water or something.

Things that I like to eat that I feel pretty good about:
-Fruit snacks. The kind I get have 100% of my daily vitamin C!
-Granola bars. Best quicker filler upper ever.
-Sparkly water. The Great American Water or whatever it's called at Wal-Mart is like 68¢ for a huge bottle. Supes lovely.

My favorite yoga poses:

                                            

Cat Pose

                                            

Cow Pose

Child's Pose/Hare Pose. Hare pose you stretch your arms out in front of you.

THIS ONE. Okay. Start slow. Put your hands on your calves, keep your knees kind of bent, and pull your torso as close to your knees as you can....

...then straighten your knees. Do this. Yes.

Erryday.

LOL JK

Pictures credit of my lovely yoga app. Thank you lovely yoga app people. <3 div="" nbsp="">

Have a nice day. 

:)

Letter From Congressman Steve King

Thank you for contacting me with your support for repealing ObamaCare. It is good to hear from you.

As you may know, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (more commonly known as "ObamaCare") was signed into law on March 23, 2010, after a long and drawn out process which saw Congressional rules bended and the will of the American people ignored. Since its passage, public opposition to ObamaCare has continued to grow, and the more that people learn about what was in it, the more they demand repeal. 

As a fiscal matter, ObamaCare is a disaster. While supporters of the bill cite a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) score stating the bill would reduce the federal deficit, they ignore the manipulation of facts and figures that was used to calculate that score, which hides the legislation's true cost. For example, the CBO was forced to double-count $521 billion from Social Security payroll taxes, CLASS Act premiums, and Medicare cuts. The CBO also didn't have time, due to the rushed nature of the bill's passage, to include in their estimate the cost of setting up and administering the massive new law. These ignored costs include the cost of hiring new health care bureaucrats to develop and enforce the new regulations and the thousands of new IRS agents needed to enforce the individual mandate. In the final equation, ObamaCare contains $2.6 trillion in new spending in its first ten full years of enactment, and it would add over $700 billion to the debt. For these reasons alone, the bill should be repealed.

ObamaCare is also devastating to Medicare. The bill contained $716 billion in front-end cuts to Medicare that will affect today's seniors. The President claims that these cuts extend the solvency of Medicare, but this is just one more budget gimmick, and perhaps the most cynical of them all. The fact is, and Medicare's own actuaries agree, that the money ObamaCare raided from Medicare will be used to pay for new ObamaCare programsand will not be reinvested into Medicare. Finally, and perhaps more importantly in the long run, ObamaCare puts in place the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), which is a 15-member board of unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats that will be empowered to slash Medicare spending further and in ways that will lead to denied care for current and future seniors. There is no question in my mind that the most important step Congress can take for Medicare beneficiaries is the full, 100% repeal of ObamaCare.

Even if the fiscal math of ObamaCare added up, the bill was pursued under the false pretense that the government can impose costly mandates on our nation's health care system and then suppress the increased costs with price controls. Instead, as opponents of the bill warned, ObamaCare and its mandates have resulted in skyrocketing health care premiums throughout the country and millions of Americans not being able to keep their health insurance. In order to stay in business despite ObamaCare's new costs and mandates, some insurance companies have been consolidating with one another, resulting in less choice for consumers. Others have simply stopped offering various health insurance policies. For those insurers who have not made such dramatic changes, many have simply passed on the new costs of complying with the law to consumers in the form of higher premiums. 

In order to hide the devastating effects of its own signature accomplishment, the Obama Administration has been offering hundreds of waivers to private sector companies, allowing them to more or less ignore some of the provisions of ObamaCare. While this is good for those companies and the consumers who rely on them, it proves that even supporters of the bill concede that it will have devastating consequences for Americans if implemented as written. Even worse, however, providing waivers for select businesses invites political favoritism and bullying. ObamaCare is only two years old, and many more harmful rules, regulations, and mandates are set to be handed down in the coming months and years. That is one more reason why this law needs to be repealed immediately.

Despite all the fiscal and policy problems surrounding ObamaCare, the most important reason for pursuing repeal is that ObamaCare is blatantly unconstitutional. If ObamaCare is implemented as planned, it will represent a devastating change in the relationship between the federal government and the citizens of this country. Its private sector rules and regulations and its expansion of the Medicaid burden on states represent a level of federal involvement in the lives of every day Americans and in the affairs of private companies and the sovereign states that would greatly concern our Founding Fathers. When looking at the Constitutional framework that they set up to govern this country, it is not difficult to argue that the individual mandate, which requires every American to purchase government-approved health insurance, is the most blatantly unconstitutional law to come out of Washington in very a long time. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court creatively, and I believe wrongly, interpreted the individual mandate to be a "tax," even though the law itself refers to the provision as a "mandate" no less than eighteen times, and never refers to the penalty as a "tax."

  

The Supreme Court did, undeniably, get one thing right in its decision. In the decision, the Court emphasized that its ruling "does not express any opinion on the wisdom of the Affordable Care Act." ObamaCare is clearly bad policy, which will result in higher health insurance premiums, government rationing of Medicare, less health care choices for consumers, and an exploding federal debt. I will continue to do all that I can to ensure that ObamaCare is ripped out by the roots and repealed as if it had never been enacted.

Thank you once again for contacting me. Please do not hesitate to do so again in the future.

Sincerely,

S 

Steve King

Member of Congress

Food for thought

I have a bunch of chemistry to do, but as we all know, if I have this huge idea that I want to debate with myself, I need to write it before I can concentrate on anything else.

I'm currently in this really interesting public relations class. We talk about news, commercials, advertising and how they affect the people that it's happening to. I like it. But today we started talking about the whole "Chick-Fil-A hates gays" uproar.

I'd just like to walk through my thought process.

Firstly, my thought was good for them. Good for the family who runs it to accept publicly what they believe, regardless of what might happen to them.

Secondly, I became frustrated. I do not see this as a valid reason to quit buying chicken. One, chicken is delicious, two, they're merely stating what they believe.

But then again, Catholics protest Planned Parenthood and other such agencies that make abortion accessible. Is that just as bad? Personally, I don't think so, because a fetus, zygote, etc., is a living person, and I think abortion happens to be murder and therefore acquires the right to be protested heavily. However, Chick-Fil-A did not say they won't serve gays, etc., they basically just said it was ran by a Christian family who upheld the Biblical definition of family and marriage.

After I thought about this, I started thinking about America as a whole and the anti-Christian/anti-conservative feelings in this generation. The first amendment grants us the freedom of religion, which we pretend is still upheld, but I'm really questioning whether or not it is.

Honestly, what is freedom?

Is freedom only granted by laws?

But too many laws generally have a way to contradict freedoms. As history shows.

I'm going to ignore the fact that our religious freedoms are legally infringed due to Obamacare for the time being to illustrate a point.

Legally, you can be what you want. Catholic, Jewish, Methodist, Lutheran, Agnostic, etc. Go for it.

Socially, you can't. It's not cool to tell people you're Christian. In fact, if you're good at being Christian, people generally hate you quite a lot, and call you intolerant, ignorant, what have you.

So the question I came up with is are we really free? Will we ever truly be free without instilling tolerance and love into every single person?

I happen to believe we won't.

I don't think we will ever truly be free.

As long as there are people who think you're crude, intolerant, prudent, or just plain wrong, you will be crushed. And that's not freedom.

I really find this interesting, and I would definitely be up to a civil discussion about this. Comment if you have something to add.


Back to chemistry now,
ChrissyJoy.