Monday, October 29, 2012

March is Fraud Prevention Month


I don't make enough money from this blog so I do some work for the government on the side. I mean, technically it's full-time but it's pretty laid back there so I have lots of time to work on other stuff when I'm stuck at the office. (Bleech!)

Recently I finished the poster for Fraud Prevention Month (above). We drew heavily from a collage of clinical depression stock photos my colleague found on tumblr. Before we knew it the deadline was fast approaching so rather than stage our own shots, we just went to the Xanax website and grabbed a bunch of ‘before’ photos except for the one in the bottom right which we found on a post-partum depression website. With the photos in place we just needed to put the copy on, add some meaningless shapes at the top and we were home free. Not too shabby, if I do say so myself.

March is a good month for fraud prevention because March only has these other 14 causes already associated with it in Canada:

Priorities are important so we make a lot of them!

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Political Humour

I made this as a joke response to something else but then I realized what I was responding to was itself sort of a joke and I had missed it, so I'm putting it here because it is obviously too beautiful to throw away.

Click to read the small text

Friday, October 12, 2012

Not Cool Enough Story Bro

Yo, bro, we have *got* to do something about this global warming business; my balls are sweating like insane amounts right now. Seriously, broseph, I've trimmed my pubes down to nubs and I *still* got a waterfall happening below the treasure trail. Despite my voluminous lung capacity my bronchioles may not be up to the garganormous task of converting enough CO-dubs into oxygen to sufficiently mitigate anthropogenic climate change. I've been heaving and puffing like God's own Big Bad Wolf, bro-man, but the Earth Mother continues to warm and the beans to my pork continue to percolate, like, relentlessly. I've been doing cardio *balls-to-the-wall* but it seems like the fire in my shorts is still rising, Bane-styles. No, bro, now is not the time for gono jokes. Imma need you to cardi-bro with me until my sack can recalibrate 'cause it seems like I can't homeostate on my own (no homo). My testes have not been this hellaciously dehydrated since we slammed 'quila shots in Tijuana and passed out on the beach in the 1,000 degree sun the next day and then those Mexi-hos stole our board shorts. What I'm saying and conveying, lord bro-sir, is that your respiratory system might make a *vast* difference for my vas deferens, if you catch my drift. Speaking of drifts, I wish my balls could catch one right now, bromeister; I would drop my drawers tout de freakin' sweet if there was a cool breeze passing through--especially if it was from your Mom's mouth again like last night! Ha bro! Hey, I'm just yanking your joke stick, broski. Chill. No need to overheat 'cause there is enough of that happening betwixt my two plums, lemme tell you bro. Because of this heat my boys have dropped further than the employment rate now that President Obama has cooked the numbers. Like my balls are cooking. Bro: for realsies though, I need you to respirate until my scrotes can recuperate. Can you do that for me, bro? ... Bro?

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Saturday, October 6, 2012

Pajamas & Privacy Interests



In R. v. Cote, Ms. Cote called 911 to report that her spouse had been injured. When the police attended at Ms. Cote’s home around midnight the lights of the house were off and Ms. Cote answered the door in her pajamas. The police came by to see if they could collect some evidence but they told her they were there to find out what happened and to make sure the premises were safe. She confirmed the presence of two firearms but could only locate one. The police later obtained warrants to search Ms. Cote's residence: they recovered a rifle of the same calibre as the bullet recovered from the spouse’s skull who had since died. Ms. Cote was charged with second degree murder.

The matter wound its way all the way up to the Supreme Court of Canada where she was acquitted. The evidence strongly suggested her guilt but a lot of it was excluded because the court felt the police had seriously invaded Ms. Cote's privacy to obtain it. In the words of the court:

[85] ... the appellant’s right to privacy was serious: the unauthorized search occurred in her home, a place where citizens have a very high expectation of privacy. ... The appellant, dressed in her pyjamas, accompanied the police as they illegally searched the interior and exterior of her house in the middle of the night for not an insignificant amount of time during which she was detained without interruption.  The breach was thus not “transient or trivial in its impact” and implicated her liberty, her dignity as well as her privacy interests.  The appellant certainly had a reasonable expectation of not being subjected to such an intrusive search, without lawful authorization in the middle of the night, and several hours after her spouse had been transported to the hospital.

The lesson, as always, is that you should always answer the door in the most intimate and revealing clothing you have when you think the police might be investigating you for a second-degree murder you committed earlier in the afternoon. If they have a warrant then you can put regular clothes back on, but you should stay as naked as you can handle otherwise. Until you see a justice of the peace's signature you want to act tired, uncomfortable and intimidated. Turn off all the lights before they have a chance to come then act surprised when they answer the door. Throw your dignity in harm's way and do what you can to make searches take as long as possible. Then shut up.



Tuesday, October 2, 2012

October is Supranational Awarenesses Awareness Month

I'm not sure if you were already aware of this but this month is Vegetarian Awareness Month. It is also National Pork Month.


Back in 1977, Vegetarian Awareness Month started off as World Vegetarian Day but it expanded over the last 35 years to take up a whole month. During that period, meat consumption in the U.S. has gone up by about 44% and meat consumption in China has gone up almost tenfold.


Look at it this way: between them, those two countries ate 60.5 million metric tons of just pork last year (so excluding chicken and beef). If the average pig produces pork meat from 56% of its body weight then you would need to start off with more than 108 million metric tons of pig to end up with 60.5 million metric tons of meat. 108 million metric tons is equivalent to 108 billion kilograms. If each pig weighs 150 kilograms, then the math says China and America ate 720,000,000 pigs last year. If you killed a pig every six seconds and never slept it would still take you 1,200,000 hours (137 years) to match that output. So yeah, that's where bacon comes from.


Anyway, my point is that pigs are being killed at a ridiculously unprecedented rate despite vegetarians expanding their day into a full month and running raffles that pay people not to eat meat. National Pork Month is mopping the floor with World Vegetarian Day/Vegetarian Awareness Month, especially in China where National Pork Month doesn't even exist (since the National in the name refers to the nation of America).


You could interpret the numbers above to mean that vegetarian month needs to be expanded to the full year and I'm sure a lot of PETA activists would agree with that sentiment. Contrariwise, I think the real explanation is that months like Vegetarian Awareness Month are not as effective as their founders hoped and I think the biggest reason why is that there are so many causes out there competing against each other for awareness (read: donations). October alone has the following causes competing for attention in America: vegetarianism, pork, clergy, fetus/infant loss, domestic violence, Filipino history, LGBT history, German history, Hispanic history, Italian history, Polish history, cyber security, dwarfism, celiac, health literacy, lungs, teeth, down syndrome, infertility, lupus, physical therapy, spina bifida, Rett syndrome, SIDS, blindness, medical ultrasounds, 3D ultrasounds, mental illness (one week only), pharmacists, fair trade, the arts & humanities, auto battery safety, and breast cancer.


The whole awareness month thing is getting out of hand. My awarenesses of all these causes have swelled to the point that my emotional and mental connections to reality have been crowded out. I keep forgetting to eat because I'm so focused on societal concerns. My attention is spread thin like butter scraped over too much toast. Toast! I am literally starving to death while I write this. I tried to drive to the grocery store to get some food but I kept crashing because I'm constantly distracted in the car by all the causes I need to keep at the front of my mind. I desperately need April to roll back around so I can re-familiarize myself with the perils of distracted driving through the power of Distracted Driving Awareness Month.

It's clear we need an Awareness Ministry to impose some order and logic on all these attempts to raise awareness. There are only twelve months to go around and the number of "good causes" approaches infinity. Aspiring raisers-of-awareness should be forced to start settling for single days for their causes because there are at least 365 of those every year. If we only need one day to celebrate Jesus's birth then I'm pretty sure that auto battery safety doesn't need a full month.

When two diseases have already claimed the same month for awareness (like sickle cell anemia and prostate cancer have done with September) then the Awareness Ministry can encourage them to reach an equitable division of the month by threatening to arbitrate the issue if they fail to resolve it themselves.

Hey, remember when Earth Day was still a thing?
Aspiring raisers-of-awareness should also note that a lot of causes are not something that you should only care about a twelfth (or less) of the time. For these movements, the awareness month route might not be the most appropriate one. Only being aware of the scourge of sexual assault and its inherent badness for 1 month each year is never going to be good enough. Other ones, like Earth Months that promote recycling, are akin to only going to the gym for one month each year: you are not going to get the long-term results you are hoping for because over 90% of the time you are neglecting a process that is supposed to be ongoing year-round. A paternalistic Ministry of Awareness could help prevent these sorts of missteps by sharing its institutional experience with organizations through its Advisory Division. Its oversight could also help avoid situations like the one described above where two lobby groups (pro-pork and pro-pig) are going to head-to-head and cancelling each other out.


The Awareness Ministry is badly needed in public schools especially because children get a new cause thrown at them every day and they just don't even have the capacity to cope yet. There is a strong correlation between the increase in the number of causes that have started to demand awareness over the last 4 decades and the increase in the diagnosis of children's mental illness, autism and ADHD rates. Children being told to worry about eleven new problems every month on a recurring schedule might not be too much for their undeveloped brains to handle. Just saying.

Some children don't deal well with adult issues

An Awareness Ministry could regulate how many people you need to get to sign up in order to validly declare claim an awareness month for it. Right now, what is the quorum? How many likes do I need on my Facebook page before I can petition the government to declare Bieber Fever Day? How many more do I need to petition for Bieber Fever Week? What if I am only looking to name an hour? Can off-peak hours be obtained at discount rates?

The Awareness Ministry could easily fund itself by leasing different bits of the year to different causes. They could be auctioned off like wireless spectra have been in the past. Right now, different causes and movements are laying claim to pieces of the calendar without regulation and it is like the Wild West of community organizing. Those bits and pieces of the calendar should be the sole property of the Crown with no squatters rights. Once this is established, government can allocate such a scarce resource in a utilitarian fashion where the months, weeks, days, and hours are distributed to those who value them most, i.e. via auction. Then, once they are all distributed, the Awarness Ministry must regulate them to ensure that they are not being devalued through abuse and misuse.

We need bureaucrats to set down guidelines that will enable us to figure out which months best suit which organized movements and make sure they are evenly distributed across the calendar. We need more months, days, and weeks that exploit date/disease synergy like rare diseases being spotlighted on February 29, a rare day. For example, wouldn't it make more sense for Skin Cancer Awareness Month to be moved from May to July in the northern hemisphere so that it occurs when the UV Index has its highest average measurements? And is there a good reason why January has so few causes associated with it? Is it because no one much cares about the plight of others when they overextended their charitable muscles in December and the freezing weather is making everyone miserable? The Research Division of the Ministry of Awareness could provide an answer to this question so that causes can make decisions about which time periods they want to lease with full and equal information.

The Awareness Ministry must be able to penalize impostors that falsely lay claim to the right to spread awareness of their preferred movement during a certain time period that belongs to a different charitable foundation. Currently, if someone incorrectly and falsely proclaims that October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month in Ontario then they would be distracting from the Ontario legislature's unequivocal decree in the Brain Tumour Awareness Month Act, 2001 that October is for brain tumour awareness. The problem is that right now the Brain Tumour Awarness Month Act has no teeth; any breast cancer activist can contradict the will of the people as expressed by its democratically-elected parliamentary representatives by stating that the abstract concept of October should be linked to tumours located in the breast when we should only be cognizant of tumours in brains at the moment.

It is important that the pith and substance of the Awareness Ministry fall under the federal government's power pursuant to s. 91(2) to regulate trade and commerce because it would be self-defeating if the provinces could sell the same date to different causes within their jurisdiction. For example, Manitoba has already awarded April to sexual assault awareness. That's an important subject but is it really a top twelve option?* If other provinces start handing out April to causes that aren't sexual assault awareness then Canadian citizens traveling across this fine country are going to be confused when April is dedicated to a hodge-podge of different social movements. One day you are in Quebec and April might be a tribute to collective bargaining rights. Then the next day you are in Alberta and all the ribbons are for gout. Finally you arrive in Vancouver and you find everyone talking about the importance of seatbelts but when you call home to Nova Scotia and your Mom wants to make sure you've gotten the HPV vaccine. Then you read this article and find out that April is Distracted Driving Awareness Month in Ontario. (Don't tell me you forget already?!?)


If everything is an important cause then nothing is an important cause because importance is a question of relative degree. So what are you waiting for, Mr. Harper? Establish the Awareness Ministry already! Then, once that is done, Canada should endeavour to draft, sign and ratify an International Awarenesses Awareness Treaty so that our collective consciousness can be properly directed at the correct cause during the applicable month not just as a nation, but as a globe. Only then will we have achieved the pinnacle of awareness. Thank you and god bless.


*: In case you were wondering, the favourites to qualify as the top twelve causes that would secure a month for themselves in Canada are currently as follows: 1) Cancer (excluding lung); 2) Veterans; 3) Heart disease/stroke; 4) Diabetes; 5) Alzheimer's; 6) LBGT Pride (would synergize with HIV/AIDS awareness); 7) Women; 8) Suicide (camouflage for much broader mental health movement); 9) Aboriginals; 10) Environmentalism (mostly climate change with a few blurbs about the importance of recycling/waste reduction); 11) Children's welfare (would talk mostly about healthy eating, the right to play and early development but its aces in the hole would be the quiet-but-weighty anti-pedophilia and CAS wings of the movement); 12) Labour (obesity would take its place during the next 18- to 25-year lease period due to a continuing trend of declining size and stature for unions and an increasing trend of size and stature for bellies).