There’s been a lot of controversy surrounding the 2010 US Census. Christians, Republicans, and libertarians are all suspicious of the census and whether it is constitutional.
So I’ve thrown in my own opinion about the census with a little webpage. Enjoy.
OH NOES!!! I TOUCHED IT LAST NIGHT!!!
(the census, not….ya know…)
I guess I am even more evil then before since I filled mine out and mailed it already.
I probably shouldn’t say this, but my census form is in the bathroom right now. I left it there after I read it a few days ago. I didn’t “use” it, but it is still in the bathroom.
What, no spinning crosses?! :) Are you implying that you are not a Libertarian anymore Daniel?
I am, but it seems I’m not a very good one.
You’ve been hanging out with lefties too much, Dan.
You won’t even defend capitalism against the stupidest arguments. (Capitalism isn’t viable because economy can’t grow forever; remember that one?)
I’m doomed……my census is already in the mail.
Hilarious :D
(Embarrassed blush) Okay. Ummmm… Where do I send my $500? Do you take IOUs?
I give it 3 days before the story of evil invisible socialist census virus is reported by Fox noise.
I give it five days before someone sees this…and takes it seriously.
You FOOL!
You forgot to put the headers in bold and use the blink tag.
Now the page looks boring :(
Blink tag doesn’t work on modern browsers (thank God). I didn’t have the time to mess with a JS solution.
may not work, but CSS text-decoration: blink does :)
I tried that too and it didn’t work for me either.
It works as long as you’re using something else than IE (btw, a Preview button would be nice).
Also, the text in this form is very hard to read – it’s set to black, and background is left on system default, which doesn’t work too well when
Oh, and you could always use <marquee> – that one should work everywhere (including Chromium, which seems to ignore text-decoration: blink).
Yeah I was in Chrome. I don’t remember if I tried marquee but I did try blink & css blink and at that point figured it wasn’t worth the trouble. ;)
I’m sending it in, but ignoring all the questions except one: how many people live in my household.
I’m answering everything *except* how many people live in my household. Take that, Obama!
When I read your Twitter last night, I was hoping that you were up to something good. Well done.
The Vulcan ears are a nice touch, but what really got me was the Google ad below offering to teach me “Real Biblical Hebrew”.
Sensus. LOL!
Ow, my eyes!
Excellent. You’ll be rich.
That’s Awesome!! Love the pic
What are the odds that the people complaining about the census are the same people who clutter up twitter with where they are right now, what they just bought at Wal-Mart, etc.
Seriously.
Srsly, thanks for the laugh.
:D
Tina
Dude. Have you been taking artistic inspiration away from Carly Fiorina’s Demon Sheep Ad?
I give it 1 day before someone posts this to a fundieblog and gets 10/10 troll points.
Epic.
And by that I mean epically EVIL!!!!
I’m going to claim to be an Israeli. That way I can steal my neighbor’s land and still get a big fat check from the government.
Please let us know how much money you end up making… I’m honestly kinda curious.
Why should I believe anything I read on that page when it has no midi music?
Crap, I knew I forgot something!
It really needs O Fortuna, 8-bit style.
All those annoying personal questions are clearly intended to identify us for being rounded up in concentration camps once the United Nations at the behest of our Islamofascistnegro President takes over our nation for the New World Order. We should all be afraid, because as I point out on my own blog today, these personal questions date back to… err… *1850!* Yes, 160 years ago! How far-seeing and secretive this conspiracy has been, to start on their project 160 years ago and only now, with the election of an Islamofascistnegro President, is it finally coming to culimination!
- Badtux the Tongue-in-cheek Penguin
Mitochondria levels?!? That’s evil Darwin talk. I think you mean: midichlorian levels.
how come evil guys alway have that “funny” eye?
Wait a minute, Daniel! You forgot to lay any of the responsibility for this Census on those EVIL Freemasons. Surely they are still out to control the world.
No, we’re not.
How much more proof do you need!?
I knoq that. I am a Freemason as well. Just making the point of how utterly idiotic and gullible some people are.
I have my census form on my kitchen table, right next to my marriage license.
you know, tea baggers hate the census because it reminds them of 1st grade…yeah, they have to count!
Hilarious… and unfortunately, it will fall on deaf ears for those who need satire the most. ><
I already sent mine – but – my neighbor threw hers away, so I guess it all evens out. LOL
Ah, but she’ll be getting the personal visit then
I filled mine out and sent it. However, where it asked for race, I filled in “human”. I don’t see how determining the national origin of my ancestors has anything to do with the counting of citizens.
Everybody has a certain degree of tribalism. In the case of the US census I believe it’s so they can determine how many senators there should be for each racial group. United States? Sometimes I do wonder.
Um, are you joking, Custador?
Well, as I understand it they draw boundaries geographically and move them as populations shift, however it’s also my understanding that populations, partcicularly in cities, tend to be racially clustered – the effect of which is that more black people = more black representatives.
I accept that I might well be wrong.
Well, partially right. Senators represent the whole state from which they are elected, and so there are no boundaries to re-draw. Representatives in the House, on the other hand, are a different matter.
For any given geographic area with a population, there are X number of ways to divide it into areas of equal population (such as would be required in a proportional representation system), with X being infinite. In the 1820s, an enterprising Governor of Massachusetts, Elbridge Gerry, realized that it was unnecessary to resort to malapportionment (that is, different numbers of people in different districts; the naughty districting practice inherited from England, but disallowed under the US Constitution) in order to guarantee favorable electoral outcomes so long as the political proclivities of different neighborhoods were known beforehand. If one were so inclined, one could draw the districts such that in as many districts as possible, a majority of people in that district agreed with your favored positions. Of course, such districts were of a convoluted shape; one famous one looked much like a salamander, hence the political term for the practice, to “gerrymander”, a portmanteau of its inventor’s name and the famous district shape.
Given this experience, the law caught up and laid down certain rules about district drawing so as to minimize gerrymandering. Some common ones were to establish that district lines had to be drawn so as to respect convenient physical barriers (such as highways or rivers) or drawn so as to minimize the maximum variance of distance between any point on the district line and the physical center of the district.
Then, some time later (about ten to fifteen years after the civil rights movement made its leaps and bounds in the ’60s), many people noticed in the United States realized that people of African descent were still massively underrepresented in Congress as a proportion of the population. So, attempts were made to reintroduce a controlled sort of gerrymandering, called majority-minority districting, to increase the relative population of minority groups in certain districts so as to give minority candidates a better shot at getting elected. In order to do this, race and ethnicity information needed to be collected through the census (which is the official data set upon which the redistricting process is based).
Needless to say, this practice was and still is quite controversial.
You know all this controversy could be avoided if the fed govt would point out EXACTLY why they need those 9 additional questions on there for each person in the household. Just a little flyer included with the census describing the need for each number. (They’ve already spent like a billion $ on this, what’s a few million more) Of course there would still be some dissenters, but last time I checked, asking ‘why’ is better than doing something just because you are told to without reason. Kind of like religion! Heh.
They probably didn’t anticipate the degree of the dissent, otherwise they would have done that. They’ve been doing detailed censuses (even more detailed) for 150 years.
Like all things Republican, it’s all good when they’re the ones doing it, but when an Evil Dem ™ is in the Whitehouse, suddenly it’s a tool of opression.
Yea, isn’t that the same way from both sides? I don’t know, I try to stay in the middle and just duck down to avoid the flying poo. Doesn’t anyone remember if it was like this is 2000? I guess I just didn’t pay as much attention back then. I just keep looking at it now and feel uneasy and giving out so much information about my family (especially my kids), not to mention my phone number. Plus my personality doesn’t help: if I don’t know why I am doing something, I will rebel and not do it unless I get answers. :)
Indeed, in 1850 you were not only asked your race, but you were asked the value of the real estate that you owned and asked, for each person in the household, whether they were a cretin, insane, blind, or deaf-mute, and whether the person could read and write. The notion that probably the least intrusive census in 160 years could be so controversial likely was not considered.
Well I can perfectly understand why the protesters would not want to answer THOSE questions…. ;-)
I believe earlier censuses also asked how many slaves you owned.