A Place To Call Home

I'm watching "Get It Sold", which is one of those dumbass real estate shows on HGTV.  These realty experts keep telling various home-sellers that there's not enough closet space in the master bedrooms.  These are all walk-in closets, but apparently they need to have to have enough room for your cato kaelin.

As a society, where have we been storing this guy for the last 15 years?

I suppose it makes sense though, because the precise demographic that overpays for high-sheen polished-turd real estate is the exact same group of superficial, materialistic doucherags that blow half their money on clothes.  It's interesting when the demographic for one phenomenon almost perfectly overlaps with that of another.  You often hear warnings that you can get crabs from tanning beds; fortunately, most of the people who use tanning beds already have crabs anyway.

I Want My Money Back

If some sheister was selling people a product by claiming it would give them infinite happiness and eternal life, wouldn't the FDA or some sort of consumer protection agency step in and shut those fuckers down? 

Yet you never see this happen to religion.  Maybe that's because those particular con-men also claim they don't want to get laid, which is somehow supposed to make them more believable and trustworthy.

Why the fuck is this thing made out of gold?  If there was some homeless guy shaking an extravegant pimp cup encrusted with diamonds, I'd ask him to buy me lunch.

Fuck Iowa

Christopher Hitchens has an interesting article in Slate about how a lot of ethnic hatred is between groups that are very similar to each other, and that it's the tiny discrepancies between the groups that spark the bigotry.  He says that Sigmund Freud called this "the narcissism of the small difference".

If this is narcissism, it's probably of the self-loathing variety.  As a Wisconsinite, I gotta say I fucking hate those dumb Iowa hicks.  Every time the Badgers lose to the Hawkeyes, it's a disgrace to the entire state, because as far as I'm concerned, Iowa shouldn't even have college.  Instead, someone from the government should just go in and tell them not to fuck the livestock.  Being good at football and basketball is sort of a proxy for "urban-ness", so it's pathetic to lose to them.  I don't know how those fucking racists convince black guys to play for their teams, it makes less sense than Alan Keyes. 

One thing that really pisses me off though is that our football coach is a former Hawkeye; knowing that fact, it's impossible to look at the guy without noticing what a redneck moron he is.  Of course, I forget he's from Iowa whenever the team is winning.

He's not one of us, at the moment.

To someone from the coasts, hearing a Wisconsinite call all Iowans dumb hicks is probably like when the average (white) American finds out that Peurto Ricans hate Mexicans:  "What!?  You mean there's a difference?  We treat them all like shit!"  Maybe I should feel solidarity with the Iowans, maybe we should band together and overthrow the condescending coastal elite, but that will never happen, because I can't stand being lumped in with those fucking hayseeds.  As the GZA once said, "you break the mirror that reminds you of the ugliness."

Our state motto is forward, unfortunately our idea of progress is a cow, a cheese wheel, and an ear of corn.

The Right to do Wrong

Conservatives love to advocate for "states' rights".  Of course, you probably know that "states' rights" is just a half-clever, Big Brother-style rhetorical trick they use to front as champions of freedom, when if fact they're trying to restrict civil liberties.  For example, when they defend a state's right to ban gay marriage or to ban abortion; they're saying they believe in the freedom to be oppressive.  Back in the olden days, the "states' rights" argument was used to defend the Southern states' liberty to enslave the Blacks; later, it was used in support of Jim Crow. 

Today, the Supreme Court ruled against states' rights, and you might assume that it was the liberals who were responsible.  Oh wait, I forgot to mention, this case was about gun control, specifically, the right of Chicago to ban the ownership of handguns; predictably, all five conservative justices voted to prohibit gun control by states and cities, with the four liberal justices dissenting.  Yeah, so I guess states' rights don't extend to blue states and Democratic cities.  Oh well, we already knew it was bullshit.

I'm ambivalent about banning handguns.  Some say they their sole purpose is to kill human beings, I say their sole purpose is to be awesome and bad-ass.  This means they should probably be outlawed, because being illegal makes just about anything cooler.  After all, if drugs were legal, drug dealers would be middle-aged dorks wearing smocks at Walgreen's, and the only bad-asses left would be guys who say "cunt" in public.

Could it be...

As a speaker, Mike Hukcabee is incredibly facile (in every sense of the word);  I can tell what he's saying is illogical and counterfactual, but at the same time, he's smart enough and slick enough that I can imagine, "Damn, if I were just a little bit stupider, I might actually fall for this shit." 

This raises the terrifying possibility that there might exist somewhere, some guy who might be able to trick me into becoming a Christian; however, I take solace in the idea that this guy might be The Devil himself.  This Devil fellow is supposed to be the greatest trickster of them all, and what greater trick than to create a whole sham religion and present it as benevolent force of good, when in fact it worships a vindictive tyrant who (supposedly) condemns dissenters to eternal suffering.

In the invention of Christianity, it was inevitable that The Devil, as a trickster, would ironically include in the mythology a trickster devil character; it's sort of like how Matt Groening always hides his initials in his drawings, or how Alfred Hitchcock always makes a cameo, but it's also a clever way of "demonizing" the actual forces of good, which doubles as a hilarious prank on the gullible followers.  Just to show how stupid these people are, he would brazenly call the great deceiver Lucifer, which is Latin for "Bringer of Light", and say he supposedly tricked some broad into eating from the "Tree of Knowledge".  The Devil would tell people that this light-bringing, knowledge-spreading guy (who tried to dissent from the doctrine of "God") was actually a huge liar, so, like, don't listen to him or you'll go to Hell.

Just something to think about while Mike Huckabee is talking about the evils of "enlightened thinking" and the dangers of science.

 Why does this guy so often have such a fiendish look in his eyes?

This Billboard Must Be a Sign

In his book, "I Drink For A Reason", David Cross talks about seeing a cop car with a bumper sticker that read "DON'T ABANDON YOUR BABY".  Crossy says how ridiculous and unnecessary this seems, and on one level, he's right.  However, this bumper sticker might be so absurd that it actually becomes effective.

Actual logo of babysafela.org.

If you were a pregnant teenager, thinking about dumping your baby in a trash can, and you just happened to see this message, you would almost have to assume it was a sign from God.  What else could possibly explain such a random, specific, and seemingly pointless bumper sticker?  If you also consider that the key baby-abandoning demo is precisely the type of stupid, self-centered audience that believes God would address them personally, you have to admit that perhaps more PSA's should take the specific approach to reach their idiotic, narcissistic targets. 

A billboard with the common-sense message of "Don't Drink And Drive" can be seen by a million drunks, and it'll be ignored by every one of them.  Meanwhile, you might actually get through to somebody if it says "Brian, you're too drunk to drive, you stupid Irish sack of shit".   If nothing else, he'll pull over long enough to wonder if he didn't take any acid.  Then again, that one might be a little too broad.

Held Responsible For Your Crimes

Utah recently executed a guy by firing squad, and they used that old technique where one of the five shooters was randomly loaded with a blank; that way, none of the shooters will know for sure if they fired a lethal bullet.  This underscores the moral evasiveness of the death penalty:  even the executioner gets to avoid the visceral guilt of having killed a man.  

If society were honest with itself, the executioners would know for a fact they'd killed someone, and those executioners would not be professionals, they'd be regular citizens randomly selected from the voting rolls (in the manner of jury duty).  That way, none of the voters will know for sure if they'll have to physically kill someone, reintroducing the visceral conscience into the voters' decision.  

According to the justice system, hiring a hit-man is just as bad as (or worse than) killing someone yourself, and not that legality always equates with morality, but most people agree that, in this case, the equivalency makes sense.  By that standard, sanctioning a man's execution by supporting the death penalty is morally equivalent to (or worse than) actually shooting the man yourself.  If your visceral conscience tells you that you can't pull the trigger, it should also tell you that you can't support the death penalty; if there's any discrepancy, it's because you're evading your conscience. 

This probably calls to mind the idea that meat-eaters should be willing to, at least once, kill the animal themselves.  When people object to this idea, they usually say "But I love bacon..."  Well at least they're admitting that they're full of shit.

In Utah, the sex dungeon is used for executions.

Professional Standards

Those last few months at my old job, right before I got fired, I was pretty much faking it, just going through the motions and hoping no one would notice.  I'd show up to work each morning, half in a daze, park my bicycle at the bike rack, and pretend to lock it.  Somehow, I'd managed to lose all five of the keys that came with the lock, and being that I'm incredibly lazy, I could see no better alternative than half-inserting the tip of the cable so it would look like the bike was secure.

Somehow, that managed to get me through those few months, although perhaps that's more of a testament to the level of pussy-ass-nerd that works in Research Park, where my old job was located.  At the end of each work day, walking towards the rack, the first fear that came to mind was not that my bike might be stolen, but that some good Samaritan might notice the lock was loose and decide to do me a favor by clicking it shut.  I probably would have ended up getting arrested for trying to saw through the cable, and the charges might have stuck because I'm too lazy to buy a registration sticker for the bike.

A lot's changed since those days, I finally went out and bought myself a new lock, mostly since, without a job to keep me occupied, I had nothing better to do that day.  It's a good thing too, because a few mornings ago, I was sitting at my computer, dicking around while drinking some coffee, when just outside my window, some enterprising goon, busting an enormous sag, walks up and starts fussing around with my bike.  He must have been checking to see that it was locked securely, that it couldn't be easily stolen.  What an industrious young man, trying to make the most of every opportunity, much more diligent than I, and he was up and about at 7 am, out there trying to get ahead, while I'm still sitting in my underwear, doing exactly jack shit.

YTMND

 You know how calling another man a bitch or a punk comes from prison culture, and how those terms had much more specific meanings in their orignal contexts?  I wonder if "who's the man?" also originated in prison.

I can't even give this stuff away...

This Slate article talks about philanthropists buying naming rights to public buildings.  This reminds me of when I found out about UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine. 

David Geffen School of Medicine?  What a self-centered asshole...

To his credit, he did give them 200 million dollars.

Consider The Source

I believe yoga is good for you, and I believe eating organic is good for you.  I believe doing both of those things is the smart choice to make.

But anytime someone who's really into yoga or eating organic gives me health advice, I'll automatically tune them out, because I'll assume that person is a fucking yahoo.

I guess, in many ways, Christianity is also good for you, but I'll never listen to a word of advice from any of those nut-jobs, unless it's one of the ones who's a recovering drug addict, or maybe an ex-con.  Those guys seem like they've really got things figured out.

 Ah, sure thing, lady...I think I'm going to go listen to that heroin addict...

Either Way, You Pay For It

There's an oft-quoted statistic about how Utah has the highest rate of internet-porn purchases, and that, generally, states that were more religious and had "traditional-values" tended to buy more smut.  As the guy who did the study says, "One natural hypothesis is something like repression: if you're told you can't have this, then you want it more."

But maybe people in Utah are just incredibly unsophisticated about consuming internet-porn; after all, the only people who pay for it are people who don't know what they're doing.  You can assume that paying for porn correlates with consumption of porn, but then why not assume that paying for sex correlates with a guy's ability to get laid.

Or maybe guys in Utah, where they have polygamous Mormon traditions, pay for porn because they're so used to the idea of being made an honest man by your side-action.

Which state consumes the most MFFF?

Politics...Politics...

I keep doing these blog posts about politics, and part of me (figuratively) worries that (theoretical) people might be turned off by it, that they might find it pretentious.  Its like, "Who the fuck does this guy think he is, offering his ideas about how they should run the country.  It's like he thinks he should have some say in the matter."

I'd be willing to forfeit my claim to having a say, but only if it meant every ignorant-ass suburban-minded moron, who only reads about celebrities, and only talks in gossip and appropriated half-jokes, also sacrificed their right to vote.  But I guess they've mostly already done that.

You're going to delegate control of our government to people like this?

Fired Up!

This NYTimes posting discusses how the recession has impacted both employment and wages, saying "oddly, though, the weakness in employment hasn’t translated into anywhere near as much weakness for wages."  In fact, while jobs have gone down, wages have actually gone up; if you look at these graphs, you'll see that the two were pretty closely synchronized.  The NYTimes treats this as some sort of paradox or coincidence.

 

Job losses were at their highest rates in months nine through sixteen.

Wage growth was at its highest rate from months eight through thirteen.

This is no coincidence:  job loss was actually the cause of wage growth.  This paradox is easy to reconcile; as a response to the recession, lower-paid temp workers were the first to get axed, leaving behind a core of more well-paid permanent employees.

This idea makes a lot of sense in theory:  "Temp employment in the U.S. fluctuates wildly, by design. The whole purpose of bringing on workers who are employed by temporary staffing firms such as Manpower (MAN), Adecco (ADO), and Kelly Services is that they're easy to shuck off when unneeded. While the number of temps fell sharply during the recent recession..."  - Business Week, Jan 03, 2010.

It can also be supported empirically:  "During the 9-month course of the officially designated recession of 2001, temp agency workers - which as a group represented just 2.5% of the workforce - accounted for fully 23% of net job losses in the labor market" - "Temporary downturn? Temporary staffing in the recession and the jobless recovery", Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore.

Temps are easy to get rid of - they're 3/5ths of a person, meaning they expect to be mistreated; they go quietly, and no one bats an eye.  Firms don't even have to fire them, firms just can passively neglect to renew their employment, and if there's anything office-types excel at, it's passive-aggression.  Meanwhile, if a firm lays-off a full-fledged employee, its much more like an act of betrayal, and things get messy.  The firm has to worry about a wrongful-termination suit, workplace morale takes a hit among the survivors, and the betrayed has more ammunition if they choose to retaliate extra-legally - because they know where the bodies are buried.

After the temps are gone, the next to go are often the more junior long-term employees; by honoring seniority, firms maintain the illusion of fairness and therefore morale.  Then firms are left with the highly-paid senior staff members, typically these are more productive workers, which is part of the reason productivity has risen during this recession (up by 6.9% in Q4 of '09).  For firms, this lessens some of the pain of paying higher average wages, but you know for a fact that if firms could cut these workers' wages, they would. 

Unfortunately for the firms, it's hard to cut someone's pay, because then they'll become disgruntled.  Of course, they'll be even more disgruntled if you fire them, but that's why after they fire a guy, they make sure to escort the him out of the building, rather than letting him find his way out on his own.  The guy's worked there long enough, surely he knows how to find the exit, but he also knows how to throw a spanner in the works:

"6. Do not let the employee linger. Unless there's an urgent reason to keep the employee around for a few days, tell them that they're to leave the business premises immediately, after a short stop at their desk to pick up any personal items. Escort the employee to the door, so the employee doesn’t have the chance to steal any company files, trash any computer data or change any computer passwords without your knowledge. Better yet, have another employee change these while the other employee is in your office, so they can’t go back to their desk and wreak havoc with your computer system. Collect any office keys and company credit cards this employee might have." - "The Right Way To Fire Someone", entrepeneur.com.  

If you cut someone's pay and keep them on staff, you might be creating a saboteur - one who has the run of the place.  Of course, for firms, the long term solution to all of this is to replace all permanent workers with lower-wage temps; from that point on, you can "let them go" at your leisure, then hire replacements at even lower wages than the previous dupes.

This picture is from iStockphoto, under the keyword category of "Human Resources".  You don't have to read an HR manual to know what goes through the minds of these assholes - it's all pretty plain to see.

Hatemail Vol. 1: Publicity Stuntsmen

Reason.com, that bastion of libertarian bullshit, published an editorial on free speech and the importance of insulting Islam.  The writer of the article relates an anecdote in which poet Alan Ginsburg asked a Muslim cabbie if the fatwa death sentence against Salman Rushdie was justified.  When the cabbie said yes, that an insult to Islam warrants an execution, Ginsburg yelled "Then I shit on your religion!"  

In light of the failed Times Square bombing, which may have been targeting Viacom (the parent company of anti-Muslim blasphemers South Park), the writer of the article asks "why won’t anyone say in public what Ginsberg said in the back seat of that cab? If Islam justifies, or is understood by millions of Muslims to justify, setting off a bomb in Times Square, then I shit on Islam."  

I thought I'd take this as an opportunity for Trivial Pursuit: The Blog to launch a new series, in which I post (selected works of) the (jealousy-fueled?) hate-mail I send to professional writers.  In this case, that writer is Mark Goldblatt, professor of Bible Studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology, a position that may be the academic form of a double negative (where two stupid things cancel each other out to make something smart), but in his case, it's more likely that it merely forms something doubly stupid.  This makes me regret sending him the following, which actually dignifies his editorial with a serious response:

Hi Mark Goldblatt,

I want to pick a fight with you.  I posted the following on the Reason comments thread, as well as on my own personal blog. 

http://trivialpursuittheblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/hatemail-vol-1-publicity-stuntsmen.html

What's the point of shitting on all of Islam when its only a small subsection who deserve it? That's the type of indiscriminate attack that characterizes terrorists like Shahzad.

Ginsburg was a poet, who understood how to choose his words. When he bitched out that cabbie, saying "I shit on Islam", he was targeting that cabbie specifically and that cabbie alone. He was saying to that one guy, if those are really your perverted beliefs, you've succeeded in turning me against the religion you hold so highly.

Now the writer of the article asks, "Why won’t anyone say in public what Ginsberg said in the back seat of that cab?" Because the writer is not the poet that Ginsburg was, because the writer is not even much of a writer, he doesn't understand that words need to be chosen carefully, they need to be suited for their specific context, and saying "I shit on Islam" is not appropriate for a public forum, unless you want to unnecessarily insult the majority of Muslims, who wince at the actions of bin Laden and Shahzad.

There's nothing brave about broadcasting "I shit on Islam", and there's nothing noble about depicting Mohammed and violating Muslim cultural norms just for the sake of insulting their religion. Those are indiscriminate attacks, and as many have pointed out, they provoke mostly indiscriminate responses. Theo van Gogh was a martyr, but so were the countless innocent bystanders who were collateral damage of other retaliations. A vast majority of these victims had nothing to do with the words or images that sparked the response; meanwhile, the instigators have escaped mostly unscathed, but not without benefits to their public profiles.

The writer asks why more people haven't taken a broadsword to Islam. Well South Park did, and unless you're autistic, Lawrence O'Donnell obviously did as well. There's nothing uniquely courageous about the writer of this article, who confuses a publicity a stunt with an act of bravery.  If anything distinguishes him its that he's a bit classless and his thinking is rather imprecise; God willing, the terrorists won't be as imprecise if, God forbid, they choose to retaliate.

I await your response,
Ken Drinkwater

 Reason's slogan is "Free Minds and Free Markets", which is a good summation of Libertarians:  too intellectually vain to be conservatives, too greedy to be liberals.  Of course, the Libertarians will say that this is an oversimplification, that liberals, in addition to being anti-corporate, can also be bad on civil liberties.  This is true to an extent, but it would be hard to base an entire magazine around smoking bans and the right to carry Uzis.

And as much as they believe in the power of the free market, this is the only magazine that has to adopt the NPR model and ask its readers for "tax-deductible" donations.  Perhaps though, this is a test-run of their theory that if you people think higher taxes will help society, you can go ahead and volunteer your own damn money.

Tops and Bottoms

I was thinking about "updating my wardrobe", which is always an intimidating prospect, but now, thanks to the internet, I can experiment in the safety and privacy of my own home.  I went to the Urban Outfitters website, and witnessed some shit that can only be described as flamboyantly metrosexual.

I wanted to check out their shorts, but I couldn't find any because they don't have a shorts category, they have a "Bottoms" category.   And rather than having a shirts category, they have a section for "Tops".  This is gay on at least two levels, and possibly several more that I'm not even aware of.  The theme of the site is "All The Young Dudes", which is a song, written by paragon of androgyny David Bowie, that has lyrics like "Now Lucy looks sweet cause he dresses like a queen, but he can kick like a mule it's a real mean team."

In the greater context of this website, the pink font doesn't even rate on the gay scale.

I wasn't really ready for any of this - it was too much too soon, but the website does have one attribute that makes me feel a little more comfortable.  They seem to be copying American Apparel, where the models are "unconventionally attractive/conventionally unattractive", but they take things one step further.  The next phase in the evolution is to use models with terrible posture and low self-esteem.  On one hand, this means my look is finally fashionable.  On the other,  instead of just being called a loser, maybe I'll also be called a poseur.

The computer science look is in.

Consider The Source

There was a White Power march in Los Angeles yesterday, which brings a smile to my face.  Even ignoring their racism, this is a group of people so trashy that, every single time they appear publicly and open their mouths, they immediately set their movement back a thousand pegs.  If I owned Coca-Cola, I would hire them to promote Pepsi.

This guy is so dumb he thinks the reason he can't get a job is the Mexicans.

Unbelievable Offer!

On the roadside near my house, there were a couple of handmade, spraypainted signs saying:

Free Massage

5 Minutes

This is a really shitty version of a Veblen good, where demand actually decreases as the price goes down.  Just out of curiosity, I was tempted to find out who was offering this deal; the sign didn't say who it belonged to, but the nearby area has the following establishments:

• A hair salon
• An autoshop
• A tailor
• Some weird place with indecipherable Greek writing on the window
• A butcher shop

The big mystery is whether this is just some garden variety pervert, or if its a raping-and-murdering variety pervert.

Q&A

Adam Carolla was cranky yesterday, which means he went on a twenty-three minute tirade about Mexican immigrants.  He says that the problems in the LA educational system aren't due to bad schools or bad teachers, they're due to bad parents - specifically, Mexican parents.  He makes a convincing argument that if the parents don't care how the kid does in school, the kid is probably going to fail, but its a whole other ball of wax, whether Mexicans are more likely to be "bad parents" with regards to schooling; at any rate, I'll tackle Carolla from another angle, just so he can't play the "don't play the race card" card.

 There's the thinking cap, then there's the "anti-immigration cap", which is not so much the hat itself as the angle at which its worn.

The thing about Carolla is that he's a professional complainer;  he's good at finding problems, but bad at finding solutions.  How exactly does he think the government can fix "bad parents"?  Here are a few ideas of my own:

• Post the kids' grades on a societal refridgerator, but replace the names of the kids with the names of the parents.  This will shame the parents into shaming the kids.
• If your kid doesn't get good grades, you can't go out on the weekend. 
• We're taking the car away.

Here are a few of the ideas that Carolla has proposed himself, on this specific podcast and others:

• No more free-lunches for school children.  He thinks giving the poor kids free food encourages the parents to be lazy, if we stopped giving handouts, it would somehow force the parents to care.  This is an idea he proposed on some older podcasts, but not this one.  There's a real hypocrisy:  in the present he says we need to save kids from "bad parents", but in the past he said "bad parents" will magically give a shit if we stop saving their kids.  The only thing consistent about The Aceman is that he doesn't want the government spending his money, not on schools and teachers, and not on free lunches.
• No more fucking in these ghettoes and having too many goddamn kids.  This is something he said on this podcast and also in the past; in the aftermath of the Haiti Earthquake, he said a big part of the problem was that there were too many people down there, and that we need to "thin the herd".  He says no one's allowed to talk about this because then you get accused of being a racist - listen, Aceman the reason you get accused of racism is because you use cattle metaphors while talking about  population control on a specific race, even Hitler would have found that impolitic.  The thing is, there are tons of people who not only talk about overpopulation, they take action to prevent it; these people are called liberals, and they want to provide sex education, condoms, and access to abortion, not just to minorities but to trash of all colors.  Politically correct liberals are not the problem, they're the answer; the people you need to cull from the herd are the conservative wackjobs who try to prevent sex education.  That would be called a "final solution".

At one point, he goes off on a tangent about how, if your kid needs an emergency appendectomy, or if you need your tonsils out, you don't go to Tijuana, you go to San Deigo.  Why he asks?  "Because America is the best."  Actually, the reason is because in America, we have government regulations that prevent bad doctors from opening up shop, Ace doesn't want to admit that fact because he'd look like a hypocrite for complaining about all the "bullshit building codes" that make it a hassle when he's trying to add the Nth addition onto his mansion.

Near the end, Donny asks "What is The Left's ultimate plan?"  Before he can even get the question out, Ace shouts "THEY DON'T HAVE AN ULTIMATE PLAN...Their plan is this....'I don't want to ask any tough questions, and I don't want to point any fingers.'"

Here's a tough question for you, Carolla:  as a libertarian, how do you propose that we control the individual, how do we force these parents to better raise their kids without creating a totalitarian state?  You'll spend half an hour complaining about a parking ticket, what would you do if they wrote you up for talking about farting in your daughter's face or getting a boner while wrestling with your son?

For whatever reason, I always end up forgiving the Aceman; the greater question is, how do I forgive myself?  I point the finger and place the blame squarely on my own sorry ass for continuing to listen to this guy.

Slingin' It

I was trying to find a picture of that new McDonald's rapper, so that I could describe his thought process: "OK, I can pay off my credit cards if I do this commercial, but then I have to give up my dream of becoming an actual artist".

Then I stumbled across this thing on the McDonald's website called "365black".

 "Like the mighty Baobab, McDonald's and I will not be moved."

It's no secret that McDonald's believes black people are easy marks, but the message on that tree seems to be saying "You were raised on McDonald's, you should die from McDonald's".