Hergest Ridge

What do WalMart, BestBuy, Procter & Gamble, and Travelocity have in common? Come to think of it, too much – forget I asked. But there is one thing I’d like for them and their likes to continue doing, and that’s pulling advertising money out from propaganda aired on FoxNews. (If this dream turns reality, FoxNews as a whole will go off air and the stupefied Under 50IQ Paranoiacs-R-Us will be left to wonder the streets, thus increasing their chances of getting killed by a speeding vehicle.)

Reports suggest that the list of companies requesting their advertisements not be part of Glenn Beck’s Duckspeak has now reached 20. (Source: The Huffington Post)

Even God is pleased; using angels’ blood He signed a self-imposed Cease to Kill Kittens, normally executed by the Almighty at a 1:1 ratio for each act of human masturbation. (Since the Reforms of ’79, acts of ape and chimp masturbation do not result in kitten executions. Ever since, humans have tried and failed to work out a similar deal with God, leaving many to feel shame and guilt over simply being human.)

The cease is valid on all days a new company pulls its advertising from FoxNews, a gesture which outraged the Mice Consortium, but to which the K9 Units responded with an enthusiastic wag of the tail.

 
 
… brought to you by Clean & Clear (R) and PhotoShop. And I suspect the first ingredient was PhotoShop.

Sometimes I can’t help but feel that certain people need to be reminded that commercials are not designed to inform the customer – that their purpose is to drive profit for the maker, to sell the product to as many people as possible, to push it to anyone with the money to buy it regardless of need.

While I’ve failed to keep abreast of the progression and the justifications given for it, my observation is that our city began with a single red light camera at an intersection with the highest accident rate, and since expanded the campaign approximately hundred fold.

According to a local newspaper’s February 11th story by Geoff Kirbyson, “46 dedicated traffic officers have been removed from the street” – plenty of room to make a counter claim against “photo-radar making the streets safer.” Unlike the original, cameras are now installed at intersections with low accident rates. The city and the firm which provides the photo service are both paid commission style, with no independent body overlooking their practice.

A “2006 City Audit of the Photo Enforcement Program shows that the city used misleading statistics in an attempt to cover-up the program’s failure to reduce accidents. Independent evidence cited in the report indicates that the number of insurance claims for accidents, injuries and property damage expenses went up significantly at sites using camera enforcement in the year following the introduction of the devices.” (Audit PDF)

But perhaps most frustrating about the whole situation is that few question the authorities when a claim about safety is made. When someone at an airport tells you to get rid of your water, few seem to realise that the ceased containers are stored inside the airport loaded with people. If it all really was a threat, should it not be removed immediately? And how many of all the “safety regulations” are a placebos to problems which have always existed, and will continue to exist until each and every citizen has all their liberties removed?

What I’m getting at is that in the name of safety, you’re likely getting ripped off financially while being stripped of your privacy – both often done by your own government.

If you live in the Winnipeg area, please review and consider signing the petition against current photo-radar practices, set to be presented in court in April.

Here is my challenge to anyone who thinks bleeping content allows everyone to enjoy a song, movie, or written piece:

Take your favourite piece, and replace with with a bleep every instance of the words silence, noise, devil, hate, god, music and movie. Now do that for everything you see on TV, hear on the radio, read in a magazine. This is what “cleaned up” material sounds like to me – an annoying stuttering as if a technical problem was breaking up the sound stream, or a broken printing machine was allowed to continue to print.

This is the problem with folks thinking they know what others will enjoy. Let’s call the practice what it is: satisfying the lowest common denominator with no consideration for anyone else, not “cleaning up” or “making it enjoyable to all.”

Google has a bad habit of nannying the user. SafeSearch keeps turning on regardless of how much vigour is used in pressing the mouse button over “I’m not a child, go take a hike and get lost in the forest” button. Well, actually, the caption is a lot less exciting – kind of like the search results with SafeSearch on.

Censorship of any kind makes me mad as a hatter.

I have a CD someone mistakingly bought for me at Wal-Mart – why the hell else would someone buy a CD at damn Wal-Mart? It censors out an instance of a “bad word.” (Shhh, between me and you, it’s bitch. Bitch, bitch, bitch. Bitch.) I can’t listen to it. It’s like someone cut the song’s throat mid-way through, a gashing wound bleeding into my ear, pouring down through to the throat, I start to gag. Well, you get the idea – forget the visual.

Thin as a dime, is what our morals are. Energy, time and money wasted on ideologies. You know what I hate more than censorship? Ideologies. I’ll tell you more – maybe another time.

We all start off with bad directions, and spend the rest of our lives unlearning that taught to us early on. It’s the only way I can explain just starting out, at the doorstep of my fourth decade.

$29.00 in my pocket, banging on the table with an old tin cup, cigarette down to the filter. Fell in love with a gun street girl, dancing in the Birmingham jail.

There ain’t no devil, there’s just god when he’s drunk.

Ce la vie.

All you ever really need to know is in a Tom Waits song.

Blue is back at the helm, with another minority government. It would be too easy to go on a rant – the average Conservative is an IdealismVille pickup truck at day’s end. Any Government preoccupied with its citizens’ sex life, fighting for ends rooted in dogma, and keen to please the bully next door should be relegated not just to the backbench but the bleachers.

My fellow countrymen have once again swallowed a sugarcoated pill of Ignorance, Idealism, and Idiocy (just to stay within the letter I.) Ignorance most common in children and social conservatives, Idealism the bastard child of Feelgood and Ignorant, Idiocy an endless substance attracted to the former two.

While my opinion – and it is just an opinion – will make me unpopular, I look at the crowd and ask myself “Why the hell would I want to be popular with that crowd?” When it comes to politics, most can’t tell an ass from a head. Is it any wonder that they can’t tell from which end a politician parleys?

Harper – an economist – knows damn well that elimination of the prison tattoo and Vancouver safe injection site programs will not save money, for both decrease the significantly higher expenses we’ll otherwise need suffer in Health Care. Did you know that? Or did you instead buy the facade of “saving tax payers’ money?”

I am aware that there are many basis for choosing a political party, but how’d 5.2 million of you swallow the idealism, yet alone the rest of the crap? (Cough, cough.) I’m still gagging and coughing, and that’s after spitting the whole out before it could really do some damage.

Daily, the 700 Club helps hundreds part with their money. Today’s focus was on those close to bankruptcy. Give god a tithe – 10% of your after tax income, preferably for the rest of your life – and he’ll bless you with a tax return to pay off your debt, with money left to pay the tithe. (The host went as far as he could with the insinuation, without making a firm claim. To his credit, he knows he would have got away with the latter, too.)

After the fool goes bankrupt in part due to the tithe, the family will fall to their knees, drag the children down to do the same, and thank god for his grace; thank him for the wisdom that the bankruptcy taught them. And when in the end they make it through financially, they will pay god double – once for the ‘wisdom’ they learned through failing the first time, and then for his grace to let them stand again.

If there is a hell, its gates will be shut for a thousand years after Pat Robinson drops dead, all its resources dedicated to torturing Mr. Robertson alone. Every vice will be clamped around his stretched body, the whole abomination kept in the burning bowels of every flame and spark that the dark pits can muster.

Should anyone pray for Pat while he’s paying for his crimes against his fellow men, he’ll be enlightened to the fact through divine revelation. And when the pain and suffering does not recede in the slightest, Pat will experience for himself what a time wasting and useless exercise prayer really is.