Well, No, Actually... Pt. 1

News is, at heart, a predictable beast. Whenever news stories follow the deranged, subnormal individuals of the deranged species known as humankind, there is a certain amount of inexplicable posturing and bristling. So a forty year old woman almost died eating a hamburger that weighed in at almost 10,000 calories, or enough food energy to feed two normal human beings for a week, or keep one, at minimum, alive for three weeks.

Excess is nothing new. Billions are spent on dumb, unwholesome, or dangerous things each day. Governments don't blink at billion dollar stealth fighters, million-inmate prisons, or corporate welfare. It only makes sense that governments such as spend money and run incredible deficits are propped up by fat, ungainly, mentally inadequate wasters who waste money in a similar manner.

The metaphor is clear: social arteries are hardening from lack of vigor and surfeit of fatty junk expenditure. We don't want to help the poor, at all, because it's their fault that society failed them and they're addicted to drugs or gambling or they're mentally ill. Meanwhile soft-hearted activists agitate for safe-injections sites for addicts. All of this means that the destitute and drug-addled are left to rot and roundly despised for being filthy, druggy pieces of shit with no redeeming features - mini politicians who would shank a much better individual for twenty dollars and change.

All these stories are seemingly designed to destroy my ability to sympathize. I can no longer approach many stories with pity or empathy or understanding. This woman should be burned for energy, or thrown into a diamond mine, or made to prepare her own food. The story cited here suggests that the problem is that people 'eat out' too often and that they should be encouraged to eat healthily and at home.

Fine. Or we can write these dumb pieces of shit off and stop supporting them at all. No hospitalization, no news stories, no free food for fat fucks. If we let some addicts rot, we should let them all rot. There is no obesity crisis: certain people are destroying themselves. Let them. They will not be missed.

Also, there is no obesity crisis. Some people are actually bound to be fat. Fat people exist outside of the caricature of fast-food swilling, eat-while-they-drive, cankle-waddling shits. It's similar to how thin people exist without bulimia, cigarettes, starvation, or the modelling industry.

Of course a sensationalist has to jump in and report the unreportable. This isn't news. It's social pathology that nobody pays attention to, because the reporters, when they can spell correctly, can hardly be expected to imagine that all of this might mean something.

Commericals Should be Taxed

Since they are a form of noise pollution, it is only reasonable to tax commercials unless advertisers stop cranking up the volume or begin to focus on quality and variety. And I mean television, here. Radio is as dependent or more on ad revenue than print media.

Maybe I sound like an old, embittered man for complaining about noise pollution, but the truth stands: television programming is pretty bad at times, but commercials are always worse by at least a factor of two. And they are loud, so they pollute with noise the very homes we live in. And people without televisions feel smug about it.

Television advertisements should be taxed because they are at least as bad for your health as cigarettes. Ads convince people to eat at greasy franchise restaurants, buy insidious deep-fried snack foods, participate in 'Cash 4 Gold' schemes, and pay to watch crappy movies in theaters. All of this drives the economy, sure, but also makes each and every person a compulsive and hollow shell. The bottom line has always been worth the common man, of course, but cannot the sham democratic system throw at least one bone to the very small percentage of people who watch TV and dislike being condescended to between their 22 minutes of show?

Smokers, used to the glares of passerby, now have to deal with being unable to smoke in places of business. Now this is somewhat of a twist unlogical, but why should normal people have to deal with business being brought into their place of living? And this analogy holds, because as smokers are addicted to tobacco (or the quest to look cool), so are TV addicts to their shows and dramas and sporting events and news. There are enough opportunities for untaxed product placements in television programming, so it's not like either taxing or abolishing televised commercials will really change everything.