Category Archives: Organizations

We’re going to go there.  Unfortunately, there also has to be translations for our non-Canadian readers.  If you do remember your Canadian civics class, you can skip through the first few ‘graphs.

Canada has a Senate, a chamber of sober second thought that reviews what is passed by the House of Commons and votes for or against it, with the resulting mess being given Royal Assent and whatever madness that results, later becomes Law.  With a few exceptions, the Senate is a rubber stamp operation up here, as compared to the US.  Other exceptions are also notable:  Our Senators are appointed by the Governor-General on behalf of the Queen, on the recommendation of the Prime Minister.  They’re not elected.  Use that yellow highlighter marker you have there and highlight not elected.  Ooops, sorry about that.  

It used to be that a Senate appointment was for life, but that’s been scaled back to 75 years of age with a pension that is freakin’ amazing.  About all they don’t get is a lotion boy.  Technically the 105 Senators are appointed from each of the territories and provinces to provide a cross-Canada representation of seats, as well as experiences, backgrounds and expertise.  In reality, a Senate appointment is a payback for party hacks, flacks and clingons who have kissed so much ass that their noses aren’t merely discoloured; they’ve got a brown ring around their necks that show their Depth of Commitment.   

Canadian Readers can pick up here:

Three Senators, Mike Duffy, Pamela Wallin and Patrick Brazeau have been in the news with revelations that they have been playing either fast and loose with the expenses or have been victims of rules that are at best confusing.  Rumour has it, retired Senator Dr. Wilburt Keon, an internationally renown heart surgeon and medical researcher, with degrees out the wazoo (Harvard, McGill) and brains from here to Moncton took one look at the expense rules and said “Fooked if I know!”  We suspect the story is apocryphal.  (Disclosure:  I’ve met Duffy several times (he’s an ex-television reporter) and have shared breakfast more than once with Wallin when she hosted Canada AM at CJOH in Ottawa, in that toxic cafeteria at 1500 Merivale, 800 years ago.  Brazeau, we wouldn’t know from a knothole in a fence board).

Senators are allowed a housing and travel allowance if their residence is more than 100 kilometers from Ottawa, but here’s where it gets murky.  Is it your full-time residence or a residence of convenience to say you are representing a particular region or province?  Duffy said he lived in PEI and did in fact have property there, but didn’t have a PEI Driver’s License or health card, the presence of which would suppose actual residency.  Wallin said Wadena, Saskatchewan was home and she does own a joint there.  Brazeau lives up past Maniwaki, PQ and that meets the 100 km rule.

Being Senators and clever, they made sure they also have digs in Ottawa for when they’re in town, as nobody wants to live on borrowed sofas or shady guest rooms on an Ikea futon.  Four Senators, (let us not forget Mac Harb claiming a garden shed up in Eganville, ON as his permanent residence) got rousted by the Board of Internal Economy for fascinating travel and housing claims.  Duffy was on the hook for $90,000 worth and a few months ago paid it back, thanks to a timely loan from the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff at the time, Nigel Wright who bucked up the $90,000 as Duffy didn’t have the coin immediately to hand.  Wallin has paid back most of what she got dinged for out of her own pocket.

Except the story doesn’t end there. Wallin and Duffy were both journalists of long standing with many friends and acquaintances in the Fourth Estate as well as the Opposition party.  Many hundreds of very pointed questions were asked of Stephen “Call Me The Right Honourable Prime Minister Stephen Harper” Harper to the point that Harper prorogued Parliament this summer in the hopes that no media coverage and the black flies would make the very pointed questions go away.  The questions are really only three:

1) Did the PMO give the $90,000 to Duffy to shut up the Board of Internal Economy and the investigation of just how fast and loose everyone plays with the expenses?  The RCMP is already looking into just how sloppy everyone there plays with the rules and a real RCMP investigation would reveal so much mud that the Conservatives would be doomed politically for an eternity up in the nosebleeds on the wrong side of the House.

2) Did the Prime Minister broker the deal, holding a figurative gun to Duffy’s head (and by implication Wallin and Brazeau) with a simple, “Pay it all back, sit down, shut the fcuk up, play the way we say and don’t ever contradict the PMO again” ultimatum.  Considering how hard the PMO bullies the House members, it takes about four milliseconds to assume that they do the same to anyone on the Hill and that includes Senators appointed by Harper.  You play by the PMO rules, or you’re dead to the PMO, forever. 

3) Is our Prime Minister a lying sack of ordure who will do anything short of actually gunning people down, to get the uncomfortable questions to stop?  Well, the Opposition won’t let up now that the House is back on the job and the PMO has demanded that Wallin, Duffy and Brazeau be suspended without pay or privileges right now.  That means being booted out of the Senate.

Monday, Duffy stood up in the Senate and essentially said he was jobbed by the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) and the PM was in the room with Duffy and his Chief of Staff when Duffy was read the riot act.  Harper has always said that the loan was on his Chief of Staff’s own bat and he didn’t know about it.  (See Question 3) 

Wallin, yesterday. demanded to know why she was being railroaded with the PMO acting as judge, jury and executioner before any charges have been laid, or any proof of malfeasance has been brought forward and proven.  There was also an interesting sidelight about another Senator, Marjory LeBreton essentially being Harper’s consigliore in the Senate, who lead the charge to have Wallin s-canned.  LeBreton is the Leader of Government in the Senate which means she is the PMO’s enforcer: She packs serious heat and if she says so, then be assured Stephen says so.  LeBreton  is the Senator who brought the motion to the Senate.  (Disclosure:  We have dined with Senator LeBreton a couple of times back in the mid-90’s)

On the face of it, knowing some of the players at least a little bit, the PMO is doing everything short of producing a private porno of the Senators rolling naked in a pile of money, to make Duffy and Wallin go away, to stop the embarrassing questions from the Opposition in the House. 

The PMO wants the questions to stop because it is coming to light that what was only whispered about for the last nine years:  The PMO and the Prime Minster are desperate to gain and keep power as long as possible.  If that means being the biggest and baddest bullies on the Hill, then so be it: Grandma is going to get her hip broken.  They’re terrified that it will come out that the PMO couldn’t run a vending machine without their business buddies telling them how to stick a quarter in it. 

And they’re terrified that it will come out that the Conservative party is little more than an unelected oligarchy running the PMO, determined to manipulate our country into some kind of Reform Party masturbatory fantasy from 1953 where the “proper” people rule by fiat, the women wear slips, hats, white gloves and makeup while the children are all required to go to Sunday school every week.  And the rest of you had best shut up and be thankful we let you exist.

A dozen years after 9/11 and it is still weird seeing that date on the calendar.  There is a smaller psychic wobble now as we’ve moved on from 2001, not really healed, but at least being able to cope with how we feel about things.

Like most, we remember where we were when it happened, in our case on a flight to San Francisco from Ottawa, to start building out some Hands-On Labs for that little company called Microsoft.  The flight got as far as Lake Ontario, when it was told to turn around, go back to YOW, land, get the pax off and shut it down to await further instructions.  That’s all the flight crew knew.  I called home to a tearful spouse who told me the rest of the story:  A plane had crashed into the WTC in New York.  I passed that data to the other passengers and the flight attendant nearby, who passed it on to the crew.

Landing and disembarking, we were confronted with 3,000 deadly quiet others in the Ottawa Airport, staring open-mouthed at the TV screens, not making a sound, not comprehending what they were seeing as the second plane had just punched a hole in our collective innocence.  I got the bags and met Marylou at the curb.  We hustled home and parked on the sofa for the next two days, unbelieving, uncomprehending and confused.

To this day those scenes are burned into our minds as they should be.  They caused a ripple of hurt, anger and confusion as there was no valid reason for this to happen to us.  Or so we thought. 

We haven’t fixed any of it.  Some would say that the military-industrial-security complex that suddenly popped up made sure we would never feel safe again.  A fearful populace is a compliant populace who will pay for and demand every possible protection and agree to every possible intrusion on our privacy as long as the government promises to never let that happen again.  As long as we didn’t have to see a tower turn into powder and fall to the ground, we bent over.

A dozen years on now, we should revisit how we reacted and what has been done in our name to ‘protect’ us from that hurt. I’m not saying it was all good, nor all bad:  Like all humans making decisions on the fly we may have made mistakes that we should go back and look at again.

And at the same time, remember those who lost so much on September 11, 2001.

We knew he wanted to…

Thanks lad for the chance to wrap up the Olys, so here’s givin ‘er.

Canada went through her Bronze Age this time with a whack of Bronzes, ‘cept for the Trampoline, what we won outright.  I didn’t know the trampoline was an Oly sport, as the only time else you see it is on America’s Funniest Home Videos when someone misses and jambs their nutsack on the springs.  Rowin and Soccer we did good at too.

Now havin watches a goodly amount of the Citius Altius Fortius go down I’se got a few thoughts.  One, NBC should b ashamed to show their faces.  They can get pictures from Mars in 14 minutes, but take six effin hours to get any events over to the US of A.  Second, we don’t care if the next door neighbours cousin of the gal who molded the bathing cap for the US Water Polo team captain is an triple amputee Iraqi war veteran with an artificial anus what was shot away.  If ya gotta stretch that far for some kinda story line, then dollars to donuts, there’s no effin story.  By the way, note to NBC, there were other countries at the Olys:  ‘Bout a couple of hundred of them.

China:  You could tell that all their athletes were performin under duress as the legal beagles would say.  One lad got the Silver in the divin and you could tell what he was thinkin’  “Fook.  They’re going to shoot my mom and pop and cut the fingers off my grandma ‘cause I didn’t go Gold.”  (‘Ceptin he thought it in Chineeses)  He’s probably not far from right either.  I wish China would let their athletes know that you are allowed to smile once a month, especially if you do something good.  Sort of reminded me of the Olys Of Old when there was a Soviet Union around.  None of them smiled either as they knew that the KGB would send them to Siberia to collect polar bear manure on an ice floe if they didn’t get the Gold. 

Some sports we never knew were sports were BMX bikin, Mountain bikin and Bein a Consular Puke.  Some countries athletes were outnumbered by their Chefs Du Missions and general cling-ons suckin on the Oly Teat.  I’s willing to bet they don’t stay at some one star flophouse neither.  Hot and Cold runnin champagne plus more room service silvous plait, I’m a friggin Oly Official Representative from Elbonia! 

As for the BMX and the Moutain Bikin events, they’re so messed up that even the commentators were dumbfounded.  The mountain bikers go up and down some track that would make a goat give up halfway through, then puke on international television after they cross the finish line.  The BMX’ers should all the tested for drugs as the only way any sane boy or girl would take on that sport would be if they were seein square out of one eye and round out of the other and the coaches promised them a bag of Doritos at the end of ‘er.

U-Bolt.  Jeezus Mary and Joseph he’s fast!  Is he the greatest of all time?  Eff no.  All he does is run fast.  I’d vote for any of the Decatheletes, what can jump over stuff, throw stuff, toss stuff and run nearly as fast, plus run fast over fences too. That’s much more impressive than any sprinter.

Oly Sports I’d Like to See:  Ditch almost all the sports what requires five judges assessin the ascendancy of the lithe athleticisms and deteminations of how much you got your pinky pointed in sync with the musical interpretation.  That’s not a sport, but just an opinion.  None of the judges could do it, so how the hell do they know?  They don’t, so s-can it.  Opinions are like arseholes:  Everybody’s got at least one.

Real sports are things us folks can do, but done way much more better.  Javelin I understand.  I can chuck a spear farther than you can, measure it up, longest throw gets the medal.  Same with runnin.  Clock says I’m faster than you are, so gimme the medal.  However, I’d like to see some scrappin during it too.  No lanes to stay in and you can use the elbows if you want.  Just remember that puttin the elbow to someone does slow you down a piece, so’s it wouldn’t get completely out of control.  That’d make the relay races more fun as you’re givin’em a length of hardwood dowell that’s about the right size and heft to cause some ruckus.

Fer the jumpin sports, I’d ditch the soft pit they land in.  Either put down a cottage sofa bed, or a bale of billiard balls.  You can jump as high as you’re willing to risk landing, which is what kids do all the time.  If theyd a had them cushy air mattresses when I was a kid, we wouldn’t have minded jumpin off the Wentzell’s garage roof near as much and might have even jumped out the second floor windows too. 

Discus?  Replace that thing with a garbage can lid.

Hammer Throw?  An Estwing 30 oz framing hammer would do just fine.  None of this windy-winder up.  Grab a hold and heave like you’re trying to brain that retard first year apprentice journeyman with the snotty attitude.

Kayak, canoe and rowing?  Didn’t see any beer around, so new rule, you gotta carry at least a two-four for every person in the boat.

Shotput?  Replace with a big rock, or to go all Winter-Summer Oly Fusion here, have them heave a curling stone. You don’t need anyone sweepin tho.

Bike sports can be reduced to one.  You got 15 miles, but you’ve got a courier bag and you gotta go through traffic from here to there at rush hour and you pick your own route.  First one what gets the package signed for, wins the gold.

Boxing, Judo, Taekwando?  All three at the same time and all the competitors at the same time by weight class.  Out here in the real world it’s called Saturday Night at the Mackey House Tavern.  Beer Optional, except cans only, as we don’t want to see someone get brained with a quart bottle by ‘accident’ on purpose.  Last guy or gal standing wins.

Soccer/Football. Leave it be, except make sure the refs are like the professional refs and don’t call penalties for anything less than packing a shank on the field.

Fencing.  Drop the mask and padding.  The only protection you get is a ping pong ball on the end of your opponent’s sword.  First one to cry Uncle loses, or bleeds to death.

Pistol:  Seems good to me, same with air pistol, except I’d like to see it done on the run with the other competitors shooting back at you from the target line.

Gymnastics:  I’m goin out on a limb here but I say shitcan it all, even though I watched a lot of it for research purposes for my thesis on Olympic Camel Toe Of History.  Same with synchronized swimming, synchronized diving and diving in general.  I’d leave one diving sport in and that’d be Cannonball.  Biggest splash wins from either 3 meter or 10 meter, or both.  We gotta have some games for those who are dimensionally challenged and the Cannonball would be great for the fat kids to develop some self-esteem, bein all inclusive and politically correct don’tcha know.

Runnin, I’d add a 100 meter Stolen Goods Dash, where the runners’d have to pick from a big screen TV or a dozen wine bottles to run with.  The runners get a 10 meter start, then the local cops start after them with the billy stick out.

Tennis and Badminton:  OK, she can stay in as one for the pansyasses.  Volleyball has to be done on a beach while half cut on the rum, not in some gymnasium. 

Sailing.  I’d say OK, but the beer rule has to stand.  One two-four per occupant, but give the little boats an edge.  Everyone gets a flare gun and six rounds you can use at your discretion.  You gotta have flares in a boat don’tcha know?

Archery:  Same as pistol, the competitors can shoot back from the target line.

Show Jumpin:  I can live with that, but not dressage.  I’d say add harness racin too. 

Ultimate Frisbee:  Not on my watch.  No effin’ way.

I’d add a few other new events too: 

Olympic Suitcase Toss.  You bring a suitcase with your own stuff in it.  Competitors choose bags at random and have to toss it onto a ramp and load it.  Fastest one to do the front hold on a two-holer 737-300 wins.  You could get tricky by packing a set of matched anvils, but so could your competitors, so’s its in your interests to play square, but it has to be your own, personal, stuff that you wear and would pack for a trip.  Here’s hoping that don’t include Swardowski Crystal napkin rings and wine goblets.

Beer Pong:  Self Explanatory and more fun than Ping Pong.

Bare-knuckle boxing.  Also bare-assed boxing.  No headgear, no gitch, no mouthguard.  Buck naked, bare fisted, belly to belly beat-down.  The naked part is to honour the Ancient Olympics and to keep someone from bringin a roll of quarters to the match. 

Rock-Scissors-Paper-Shot.  Rock-Scissors-Paper and the loser has to take a full 2 oz shot, which is why Crown Royal would be the perfect sponsor.

Go Fish or Crazy Eights.  Gotta have something for the kids.

Wake the Neighbours:  Held after hours in the Oly Village.  Using only your voice, garbage cans or a stick, get as many lights on as you can in 30 seconds at 0300 without pulling the fire alarm.

Chub Toss:  You get a full three-foot long, unsliced, chub of Schneider’s Bologna.  One who tosses it furthest, wins.  Or you could do a watermelon.

Draft Carry:  Most 64 oz jugs of draft carried a distance of 20 feet, with the least spillage.  It’s a critical skill to hone up on.

Roll Yer Own:  How many smokes can you roll in 60 seconds?

Belorussian Dip.  Same as the dunk tank from the carnival, but you take it in turns to either throw the ball or sit on the dunk chair.  Round-robin best of five.

Queue waiting:  This is one of the more passive Oly sports I’ve come up with.  They set up them strap corral veal pens what you wait in at the Bank or the MoT.  There’s only one clerk and the last person to lose their cool is the Gold medal winner.  It be more of an endurance event and no, you’re not allowed Depends or a catheter.

Doping:  Daveys talked about this afore and I concurr with his concept.  No doping rules at all.  The only rule is that the winner has to walk, unaided, alive, to the podiums to accept the medal.  This might mean we see lads runnin’ the 100 in 3 seconds, like a Porsche at the Stoplight Grand Prix.  As long as they can walk, unaided to get their medal after a bit, then it’s all good.  Odds are you’d see some North Korean burst into flames at the 60 meter mark, or just his heart busting out of his chest across the tape, but we let’em go as fast as the science and their bravery will let’em.

Lawn Darts:  Bring’em back.  The real ones, not the sissy ones.

Black Powder Anvil Shooting.  They do this down south in the USofA and use black powder to shoot real anvils into the sky.  Highest wins, but the degree of difficulty counts, as some of the competitors might be missing a few fingers or toes from unfortunate training mishaps.

That’s my take on the Olys.  They’re going to Rio next?

(Ed. Note:  Sorry we haven’t written earlier, sometimes work intrudes on the spare time.  We’ll be better about that whole work-life balance thing.)

Around the world, various cities have seen the rising up of a new type of protest:  The Occupy Protest.  Generally peaceful, the Occupy movement is, as best we can tell, a loosely knit grouping of various groups with an aim of raising some ruckus regarding financial inequality globally.  Since these are loosely knit groups, there tends to be side protests regarding globalization, environmental issues, human rights, political restructuring, hockey violence, peanut allergies, democratization of Syria and the repeal of Daylight Savings Time.

This isn’t to say that the wider objectives are not sensible.  The rich are getting richer while the poor and middle-class are heading over the cliff to be dashed on the rocks below.  That is a given, in that we’re building a societal iceberg:  If you’re rich enough, economic woes don’t affect you much.  The rest of us can lose our incomes on the capricious whim of some investment arbitrageur in Belgium that decides our pensions are too expensive for the company, or that our national currency is overvalued. 

We’ve written before about the global economic system.  It’s pooched.  The whole investment industry is built on insider trading, which is technically illegal, but goes on every hour of the market day.  Simple proof?  What is a “whispered” number?  It is a stock analyst and/or corporate chieftain’s informal assessment of how well or how poorly a company will do this quarter, released before the actual legal reporting.  If a stock makes its whispered number (or street number or cred number), then the analyst looks like he or she has the inside track, or the CEO has already seen the books and wants to pump the stock price.

Research In Motion, the Blackberry folks, took a beating over the past week. Their email and messaging system took a Cleveland steamer because someone didn’t test a patch applied to their servers, which made the system puke, worldwide, for three days. What happened to their stock price? 

According to the capitalist theory, if a company does something dumb, their share price should go down to reflect their dumbness. In reality, what happens is that bottom feeder brokers see a company in trouble, (Their products suck today) they buy up a lot of shares in the hopes that when RIM fixes their little problem, the share price would jump a few bucks on good news and the ambulance chasers would make some money.

Simultaneously other folks look at RIM, see a network outage, figure the entire company is teetering on the verge of cratering and sell everything they’ve got in RIM to the ambulance chasers.

That causes “action” in the stock, while another subset of buyers come in to buy any busy stock, the thought being someone knows something, (why else would there be so much action?) and if they have a position in an active company, they might make some money either buying or selling. Then the folks who bet against any trend step in and sell off or buy up.  More action, more speculation on nothing more than graphs and a network outage.

To close the circle, RIM was trading around $22 a share before their network freckled the bowl. They’re now trading at $24 (and were at nearly $26 during the outage) give or take, meaning they were rewarded for being stupid. A complete abnegation of the theory, almost all attributable to stock churn for no good reason other than a perception that on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of last week, RIM sucked.

Essentially, the whole system is based on rumours, insider knowledge and speculation on speculation, with a fine mist of hedging sprayed on top.  The whole game isn’t set up to invest in businesses and countries:  It’s set up to churn stocks, trading as much as possible, as many times as possible, on the slightest tick of valuation change.  The only folks who make money on this kind of millisecond madness are the stock brokers.  They always get their commission, good news, bad news, rumours, fear-mongering, hemlines, or sun spots.  Funny that…

In the ancient days of a dozen years ago, one bought stocks because one wanted to invest in a company for the long term, knowing that over the expected ups and downs, the business you were investing in would improve, making you money.  Timelines were measured in months and years.  Buying HP, GM or GE meant that you had some reasonable assurance that over the long term you would make some reasonable coin and could retire in relative comfort.

Now, trading is almost fully algorithmically derived, automated and based on millisecond clock ticks.  This is not some pit man signalling he wants to buy 1000 futures on Frozen Concentrated Orange Juice (FCOJ) and another pit man taking the order.  Trading has become well-written sets of computerized trading rules that the Big Boys use to simultaneously buy, hedge and sell their holdings several times a second.      

We have a simple suggestion to reform a lot of the investment industry.  A 24-hour hold on any transaction:  You can’t buy or sell any instrument more than once in any given 24 hour span. 

This puts an instantaneous end to churning stocks by the millisecond, causing prices to wobble erratically.  A company can know, at least for 24 hours, what they’re worth in the opinion of ‘the stock market’ and plan accordingly. 

A second benefit of the 24-hour rule would be that stock brokers would have to actually have knowledge and business acumen making recommendations on tangible facts of a substantive nature.  They can’t churn their bouncing dead cats on whispers and rumours.

As for the Occupy folks?  Agreed, the system is rigged.  Now, put on your thinking toques and come up with an alternative to capitalism that works for the majority of humankind. 

Just remember that in Capitalism, Man exploits Man.  In Socialism, the Reverse is True.                  

Watch a few television commercials, especially for pharmaceuticals or automobile financing and you might see what is called mouse type.  Technically that blurry blotch in 3 point type is called a legal disclaimer.  Points are how type is measured:  72 points equal 1 inch.  RoadDave is set in 14 pt. Times New Roman TrueType.

Lawyers and governments at various levels have mandated what might be called ‘semi-full disclosure’ of the whole story.  For example, when it comes to automobile financing, there are too many variables to promise anyone who comes in the door will get the Zero percent financing.  Legitimately, if you have really good credit, you’ll get the best rate, while your dirtbag neighbour who has gone bankrupt five times, living off his uncle’s fake disability pension, won’t get that most excellent rate.

If you have a half a brain you likely recognize that a 30 second commercial cannot tell you the whole story about a particular offer, especially one that sounds really good.  Where the difficulty comes in is the ability for consumers to actually read and understand those nibbles of consumer disclosure. 

The same holds true for pharmaceuticals:  The FDA and Health Canada both mandate a type of disclosure for prescription medicine advertising.  Depending on the meds and the type of advertising, the disclosure is as simple as ’…ask your doctor about Snotica…’  Others have a longer subset of the product monograph, the legal disclosure document regarding the medicine:  “Snotica may cause headache, nausea, diarrhea, heartburn, itching eardrums, throbbing genitalia, runny eyes, spontaneous combustion, strokes, elevated cholesterol, thoughts of suicide, unsettling dreams, night sweats and death.  Be careful driving until you know how Snotica affects you.  You may drive more like a complete idiot on Snotica.  Do not use heavy equipment, except graders or gravel compactors when you starting taking Snotica.  Seeing flaming red dragons climbing up your leg with a knife in its’ teeth has been commonly reported by a small number of patients taking Snotica.  Snotica can cause incontinence, insomnia, enhanced intuition and the ability to levitate involuntarily.  Tell your doctor is you have uncontrollable urges regarding rough sex with penguins while on Snotica…”

Where the real problem is the tradeoff between the ability to actually fit all the type on the screen and not scaring the consumer half to death.  Which is why mouse type is used.  It keeps the legal beagles off your back as you have done at least a half-assed job of disclosing some of the pertinent details of the deal, but in a way that nobody can read it.  Caveat Emptor.

Some categories of advertising, specifically cosmetics, have no real reason to disclose the whole story as they are not making medical claims.  Most mascara commercials do have a miniscule disclaimer, “Filmed with lash inserts” that lasts about a second on the screen in the smallest possible type.  Other than that, they can claim just about anything else this side of a medical benefit, including ‘You will get laid if you buy our makeup:  Fabulously laid by a muscular, attractive, engaging, intelligent, internet millionaire who will take you away from your tedious life as an assistant associate customer service coordinator for a local aluminum siding installer, to live in his chateau in the south of France with a walk-in closet that will hold all the shoes you could possibly buy in three lifetimes.’

What we would really like to see is a simple disclaimer.  It reads like thus:  “This is not the whole story.  Consult the dealer/manufacturer for full details.  They could be shitting you just to take your money.  Don’t be a sucker.” 

Now, technically, this is implied by any advertising, but the legal monkeys and governments have done an incomplete job of illiterate, incomplete disclosure rules that semi-apply, sometimes, but not always, depending on the lawyers that are consulted by the ad agency, manufacturers, dealers and government regulatory agencies. 

We’re voting for simplicity.