New Rant: Chicago Alderman Wants to Ban Energy Drinks

It's been a while, but hopefully I'm back (at least for the time being). Hopefully getting back into the swing of writing in general will open up some new creativity channels and lead to some of my other artistic pursuits that... also aren't going so well.

So what better way to get back into my Blogger-posting than with a classic topic:

Chicago Aldermen Trying To Ban More Things

The proposed-ban du jour is Energy Drinks, but only those that are "a canned or bottled beverage which contains an amount of caffeine exceeding or equal to 180 milligrams-per-container and containing Taurine or Guarana."
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Call Your Alderman re: Massage Parlors

I'm not sure how many of you have heard, but on Monday's committees meeting for City Council, the Zoning Committee has approved an ordinance that would ban massage businesses from opening in residential areas (and neighborhood business strips) and only allow them to open in commercial zone areas.

Why would the Aldermen want to pass such an ordinance/ban on massage parlors?

Because they think it's going to help fight prostitution.

And we need some help calling up the Aldermen to remind them this this is a ridiculous idea and to vote NO in tomorrow's meeting when it's scheduled to be brought up for a vote!

"Okay, Aaron. So what's really going on here? Isn't it possible that they've got a good reason to do this and you just want to rile us up?"

No, loyal reader. This is your standard City Council bullshit looking to do something ridiculous that will not fight the problem that they're looking to solve.

The beginning: Ald. Ray Suarez (31st) went to court to revoke the license of an illegal sex parlor in the 2200 block of North Cicero that he said was masquerading as a massage parlor.

So the underlying problem is that a massage parlor was also selling sexual acts.

Ald. Suarez: "The community is upset, and I don't blame them. There was prostitution going on. More of these places are popping up, and it's hard to get rid of [them]. It's becoming too easy. They're pretending to be something they're not."

Here's where I'm running into my first problems with this scenario: How did the community become upset? What happened that made them upset?

Obviously if there's a massage parlor that is selling sexual acts - it's happening IN the parlor. It's not streetwalkers selling themselves for sex in public view. Which means that unless you were BUYING a sexual act or TOLD that you could buy a sexual act - how did the community find out?

Or did they find out when, during the course of standard policework, it was revealed that there was prostitution going on in the parlor?

In which case this whole hubbub is ridiculous, since the community did NOT have a problem until they FOUND OUT there was prostitution going on!

In the meantime, what would have upsetted them about a massage parlor in their neighborhood that happened to be selling sexual acts without them knowing?

A boom in clientele as a result of the sex-selling that caused parking problems? In that case, one can argue that no popular business should operate in a residential area. And then no business would be able to survive without getting kicked out.

Was there an influx of "people who would be likely to purchase sex acts" and the socioeconomic differences of people in their residential area were upsetting the people? That's rather rude/racist/elitist of them, wouldn't you think? I'm pretty sure you can't ban "creepy-looking people" from a residential zone unless they're doing something creepy in public or where the public can see it.

But I digress. Let's assume that there's a validity to the neighborhood being upset by having a secret sex-selling massage parlor in their neighborhood.

What about the massage parlors NOT selling sex? Why should they have to suffer and be forced to only open in "areas with commercial zoning designations, like car dealers, gas stations and other heavy business uses"?

In a quick side note, I believe prostitution should be legalized. If that were the case, it wouldn't have to be done in secrecy. Sex workers could get health benefits, the industry could be regulated, and having a sex worker licensing program would help to curb underage prostitution.

Anyway, Suarez has support from 26 other aldermen who have co-signed the ordinance that passed, but there are luckily some members of City Council who can see the light.

Unfortunately, they're too afraid to speak out unless it's anonymously...

"He's probably got one place that's a front for a sex operation, and instead of going after it with law enforcement, he's trying to kill a whole industry," said one alderman, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of embarrassing Suarez.

"Just clean up the ones that need to be cleaned up and let the legitimate places operate. I have a large hairdresser that's trying to come to my area. Something like this would kill it."

Yes, and I'd believe more that your anonymity was to protect Suarez's embarrassment - if it weren't for the fact that you then follow it up with a mention of personal gain for your ward if it doesn't pass.

How about gain for society in general and for businesses in general? Isn't THAT enough to be able to speak freely and openly about how stupid of an idea it is to ban an entire industry from being located in certain zones just because random ones happen to be doing something illegal that has nothing to do with their location?

Seriously, do these 26 other aldermen think that if a massage parlor is forced to open someone more commercial where there's better parking and more businesses that are open and catering to additional potential clients that the changes of them selling sexual acts is going to be reduced?

That's like saying that because most shootings at convenience stores happen at night, all convenience stores are banned from being open after sunset and cannot open a new convenience store in a location where other businesses are open at night in order to fight illegal gun violence.

If I were Alderman (and hopefully I will be in 2011), I would be speaking out just like I am now about a dumb ban that should not be passed and I would vote NO.

But since I'm not Alderman, I need your help to make sure the current aldermen in City Council vote NO on this ordinance. Please look up the office information for your City Council representative and tell them to vote no on this ordinance that hurts small business owners who want to sell massages and don't plan on selling the "happy endings".

Maybe with some help, we'll see a real happy ending to this story tomorrow when the City Council does not pass this ordinance.

Digg this article - and spread the word!

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Fact of the Day - February 7, 2010

100207, originally uploaded by AaronBSam.

Well technically they're not "banned", but a bill signed by President George W. Bush back in 2008 set energy-efficiency standards to take effect in 2012 and 2014 that our current standard light bulbs just can't stand up to.

So in 2012, our 100W-bulb as we know it will no longer be energy-efficient enough to be allowed for manufacture.

I was reminded of that boring piece of news from this website dated 2008 - just a few weeks after I purchased a bunch of 100-watt bulbs to brighten the hell out of our living room.

I may want to stash one of those 4-packs for profit on the black market when 2012 hits...

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Fast-Food Moratorium in South L.A. (Part 2)

For those of you just joining, I highly recommend a visit to Part 1 of this article just to catch up: Fast-Food Moratorium in South L.A. (Part 1)

In this piece, I want to break down the law's language in traditional George Carlin format, pointing out that this law pretty much would ban ALL new restaurants and not just fast-food restaurants - except for a few choice words and I'll explain how any fast-food franchise can easily duck under the law because of them.

Just as a reminder, here what the law considers to be fast-food restaurants:

"any establishment which dispenses food for consumption on or off the premises, and which has the following characteristics: a limited menu, items prepared in advance or prepared or heated quickly, no table orders and food served in disposable wrapping or containers."

Well, let's start at the beginning...

"which dispenses food for consumption on or off the premises": Those are the only two places you CAN consume food! AT the place and NOT AT the place! I mean ANY food location nowadays, no matter how fancy and sit-down or greasy and take-it-and-leave, gives you the option to place an order for take-out. They understand you might not have the time to eat it THERE. Or you may just prefer to eat it NOT THERE, like at HOME. Also, you might as well just say "which dispenses food" - since food is generally dispensed for consumption. That's the general idea of food - that you consume it. I suppose this means a business that dispenses food for you to WEAR would be allowed to move in? So far, this ban applies to ALL FOOD BUSINESSES (except the food-as-clothing industry).

"and which has the following characteristics: a limited menu": ALL MENUS ARE LIMITED! You're not allowed to walk into a Burger King or a P.F. Chang's or a Fogo De Chao and order up a yak salad with ostrich chutney garnish. All menus are finite, limited by the abilities of the chef, the availability of ingredients, and the personal desire of the restaurant. They don't want to include endangered animals for you to eat - that's their prerogative. The McDonald's fry cook isn't skilled enough to POACH your eggs that go on your McMuffin - tough luck, pal. It's illegal to obtain and cook human flesh for consumption - don't expect to see the phone book as an addendum to your table's menu. So far, this ban still applies to ALL FOOD BUSINESSES (except for hypothetical hypno-restaurants that can put patrons in hypnotic trances and convince them they've eaten anything on an unlimited menu while serving them Kraft Mac & Cheese).

"items prepared in advance": Well of course they're prepared in advance - when did you plan on preparing it? In the guy's stomach? All restaurants have to prepare food before they serve it to you. If you wanted to add the stipulation "prepared in advance of ordering", there's still prep work. Any good restaurant has to save time by pre-assembling items, or even marinating meats in anticipation that someone will order it that night, or using bread that has already been baked or pre-mixed dough even. I'm incredibly skeptical that there exists a single restaurant that can make every item on its menu FROM SCRATCH and not until the order is placed and it can still be served fast enough that the customer doesn't leave, possibly mumbling, "if I wanted incredibly slow food made from scratch, I'd be at home with my wife instead of at a fancy restaurant with my mistress..." Fact of the matter is, this ban still applies to ALL FOOD BUSINESSES (unless all they do is raw, uncooked, unprocessed food, and at that point you might as well be foraging in the woods for sustenance and saving yourself $20 per person).

"prepared or heated quickly": I don't think there's much to say about this. If you're not preparing or heating your food at a decent pace, you shouldn't qualify as a business. It's called "the danger zone" and it's a temperature range at which bacteria can grow and multiply and infect your food. The longer food goes from storage to preparation to your mouth, the more likely you are to get sick and sue for food poisoning. ALL FOOD BUSINESSES know that and do those things in a timely fashion. Also, "quickly" is too subjective of a term - any cooking that takes shorter time to cook than "leaving it in the sun, possibly on a metal pan" can be deemed to have been cooked "quickly" by the Amish. This ban still applies to ALL FOOD BUSINESSES (except Brother Jebediah's Sun-Cooked Meat Emporium)

Now, we finally come to "no table orders and food served in disposable wrapping or containers", which technically seem to separate the actual restaurants from the "fast-food joints" that the law is trying to stop from opening new locations. But don't worry, McDonald's and Burger Kings, they're both easy to step around.

"no table orders": Okay, so you have to be able to take orders at a table in order to qualify as a true "restaurant"? Note that the law doesn't even say anyone has to be SITTING at a table. The table area is just the place where all orders have to be taken in order to qualify. Rather, at least ONE order has to be taken from a table to simply NOT fall into the category of "no table orders". So how do you side-step this one?

Put a table over the counters. It doesn't matter if there's one long table placed over the entire counter, or a cheap IKEA table draped right on top of each counter segment with the cash register placed on top and your McJob cashier/waitstaff standing at the "table". You can even place a small table in front of the drive-thru speaker and one in front of the pay window and pick-up window. "Thank you, please drive to the next TABLE." Voila - you're taking table orders and you can move right in with a new location!

"food served in disposable wrapping or containers": Okay, I have to start off with the obvious jab that everything used to serve food is disposable (in the definition that everything is "able to be disposed of"). A restaurant can give you your burger on a plate, but a plate is just as disposable as a paper lining you'd find wrapped around a McDonald's cheeseburger. For the sake of argument, I will admit that one definition of "disposable" means "INTENDED to be disposed of". I guess McDonald's could just print pictures on all wrappers and containers and call them "collectible" and you can complete the set - that would insinuate that they should NOT be disposed of, but rather collected for some reason. You'd think that the real clencher here is that McDonald's food is wrapped or put into containers (while a restaurant will not wrap food it's serving to you), which means it's just fast-food that this clause affects. To be fair, any legit restaurant will let you place a to-go order and all of that food will be in disposable wrapping or containers! It doesn't say that food is ONLY served in disposable wrapping/containers, right? Which means that any restaurant willing to place a to-go order or let you take food home in a doggy-bag is going to be banned. Once more, this clause of the ban would apply to ALL FOOD BUSINESSES (except those snooty enough to deny you eating their food anywhere other than their restaurant).

So really, all it comes down to is whether or not you'll ever take a food order from a table. All other pieces of this "law" boil down to no food businesses at all being allowed to set up shop in South L.A. (other than those wacky/insane exceptions). Any fast-food place would be able to open up shop as long as they stick a table somewhere and let someone order from it, as I've suggested above. Frankly, the law suggests that you must hit ALL of those marks to qualify not being able to open a new location - which means that once you miss the mark on ANY (like taking orders from a table), you've got free reign in South L.A.!

Take that, Los Angeles City Council! Your law is useless and a waste of taxpayer money for all the debate and insanity that must have transpired before you foolishly signed this moratorium into effect.

Don't you agree? Have I missed anything? Can you understand how each piece of this law is vague and moronic? Was my homage to George Carlin acceptable?

Please Digg this article and join me in mocking the L.A. City Council!

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Plastic Bag Bans

This has got to be one of the most horrid trends contributing to the combined laziness and incompetent nature of our current legal system: a ban on plastic bags. That's right, ever since Hippie Central (AKA San Francisco) decided in 2007 to place a ban on the use of plastic bags by supermarkets and chain pharmacies, other locations have been balancing their brains between the notion that it might be an environmentally-friendly idea and the warnings of sane people that it's a moronic idea and following suit would be sheer lunacy.

This week, the Los Angeles City Council teetered over the precipice of lunacy and has voted to ban all plastic bags in the city's supermarkets and stores by 2010.

I'll start this off by actually agreeing that some of the bleeding-heart liberals almost have a valid point when they talk about the evils of the plastic bags. They normally take between 100 and 1,000 years to biodegrade. (More on that later.) And yes, they tend to get caught in trees because of their lightweight nature and they wind up in streams and such and marine animals can eat them and die. While it's easy to say that "the kid who swallows too many marbles shouldn't grow up to have kids of his own" - I'll agree that it's a stretch to apply that logic to the turtles. I don't know how easy it is for a turtle to tell the difference between a fish and a freakin' plastic bag, but let's just pretend that somehow they look the same and it's not very nice to be killing off those poor confused sea creatures. And perhaps we use too many of them - we produce an estimated 500 billion of them a year, worldwide.

Okay, back to calling San Francisco and Los Angeles a bunch of idiots for imposing such ridiculous laws.

First of all, plastic bags were what we'd like to call a scientific and technological breakthrough. The ability to mass-produce a strong yet lightweight product that allows consumers to carry their items while also letting producers/manufacturers package their items was a proud day, in my opinion. Paper bags are often ineffective and unreliable, not to mention bulky and THEY CUT DOWN TREES. That was like one of the best reasons to make an alternative to paper bags in the first place! Doesn't anyone recall that little tree-hugging mantra? I mean there's no reason in arguing over the plastic bags that don't decompose fast enough to create mulch so new trees can grow and prosper is the alternative is just destroying the trees in the first place, right? The only alternative alternative is reusable material bags, which are costly, even bulkier, and require too much forethought to be effective. The likelihood of someone saying "it's time to make a grocery run - I'd better collect up my reusable bags so that I may use them once more at the grocery store" is minimal when compared to "oh dang I need milk right now and I'm passing by a store with milk so let me go and get milk and oh darn I don't have my reusable bag with me so just gimme something for free to carry it in so I'm not paying for another reusable bag that I'll never remember to use."

Secondly, we need to stop creating laws to claim things as obsolete. Remember when cassette tapes were popular and it was the most advanced way to listen to your favorite songs before this new-fangled "compact disc" came into existence? Well once we created the CD, it's not like we decided to ban the use/production of cassette tapes because we have better things now and cassettes are flooding the landfills and don't biodegrade and we need to pass laws to hold the recording industry responsible for this garbage and ban their production of cassettes! If you want to really call the plastic bag obsolete, you need to create something BETTER to REPLACE it. Once we came out with the CD and they were priced competitively and made available in mass amounts - we stopped using cassettes (for the most part). Just like the creation of cheap and effective plastic bags made the paper ones practically obsolete (there were very few paper-bag-choosers during the heyday of plastic baggery), if you want the plastic bag to be gone - a better choice has to come out. It has to fill the SAME NICHE (lightweight, strong, disposable, cheap) though. Reusable bags aren't meant to be cheap or disposable, so it's not a replacement. It's merely an alternative.

Thirdly, this is a freakin' non-issue! Remember how we mentioned that plastic bags normally take between 100 and 1,000 years to biodegrade? Well the point is that they DO BIODEGRADE. There must exist living organisms that can biodegrade plastic bags into compost. Ergo, there must be a way to identify those living organisms and culture them and use them to speed up the process by increasing the amount of those organisms and figuring out optimum conditions necessary to speed the process up exponentially. Oh wait, some 16-year-old kid in Canada already figured that out!

Do you understand how messed up this is now? That instead of pumping a minimal amount of money into a research grant to allow REAL scientists to build upon what some Canadian kid managed to accomplish, thereby creating efficient ways to completely biodegrade TONS of plastic bag material in LITTLE TIME - California cities are working to abolish plastic bags? That doesn't solve the PROBLEM, morons! The PROBLEM is millions of tons of plastic bags that we'd like to biodegrade, not the flow of the plastic bags!

That's as ridiculous as people becoming vegetarians because cows producing methane are causing global warming. The problem is the COWS and the METHANE, not people EATING the cows! If you convince everyone to stop eating cows, then the cows get ignored and continue to screw up the planet with global warming flatulence and WE ALL DIE.

Eat a Steak - Save the World! Remember?

In conclusion, it's just plain and simple stupidity to ban something that's completely legal to purchase or sell. It was insane when Chicago banned foie gras and luckily that's over now. If the following scenario is true, then something has gone horribly wrong and needs to be fixed:

In 2010, you can walk into a Los Angeles supermarket and purchase a container of plastic bags, but you can't have that container of plastic bags put into a plastic bag because that would be against the law.

This is horribly wrong and it needs to be fixed.

What are your thoughts? Do you agree that scientists and entrepreneurs should be investing in the process that we know exists to speed up the biodegrading process of plastic bags? Or would you rather ban a legal product in an effort to ignore the real problem and boast that "at least WE'RE not making the problem worse" rather than work to solve the problem?

(Again, the article about the Canadian teenager who's apparently smarter than the Los Angeles City Council)
(The article about San Francisco being the first in the idiot-city parade)
(The article about Los Angeles joining the idiot-city parade)

Please Digg this article and spread the word that we need science and not insane laws!

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Chicago vs. PETA: Chicago Wins!

Before reading this, you might want to catch up by reading the previous parts of this Chicago vs. PETA series:

PART 1: Chicago Bans Food and PETA is to Blame
PART 2: Chicago vs. PETA: The Foie Gras Debate!
PART 3: Chicago vs. PETA: The Lawsuit!
PART 4: Chicago vs. PETA: The Uprising!
PART 5: Chicago vs. PETA: The First Offense!
PART 6: Chicago vs. PETA: A Step In The Right Direction?
PART 7: Chicago vs. PETA: Offenders on the Offense!

And join us in the eighth and hopefully final installment of a series of posts that (in the opinion of the writer) should never have come to be. And PETA is to blame; they shock-videoed the Chicago City Council into agreeing to sign a law banning foie gras from the city. In the second part, I discussed the studies and FACTS proving that the reasons BEHIND the law are unfounded and not based on any facts at all. In the third part I got to speak of the Illinois Restaurant Association (IRA) who believes so strongly in this cause that it's practically paying for both sides of the legal battle, based on the fact that it's unconstitutional to make a city law overturning something the federal government approves, let alone deciding what people can/cannot eat. In the fourth part I got to talk about the restaurants fighting back and how more were serving foie gras than ever once the law took effect. In the fifth part, we learned about the first victim of the law and how little the city even cared, other than the media. In part six, the mayor decided to reconsider his stance on the issue. Part seven revisits the restaurants, several months after the ban went into effect. In part eight, the ban has finally been repealed!

With Mayor Richard Daley running the vote, the Chicago City Council repealed its controversial ban on foie gras today, May 14th, 2008.

It's been a grueling two years that Chicago has been a laughingstock for enacting the "silliest law" (according to Mayor Daley) that banned the sale of foie gras here in Chicago. The council used a parliamentary procedure to call to vote a repeal of the ban.

Alderman Joe Moore was strongly against the vote, having sponsored the ban in the first place. The call to vote was started by Alderman Thomas Tunney, who actually owns a restaurant.

The vote was a clear 37-6 in favor of repealing the ban, more than enough to officially make it so.

(The official article from the Chicago Tribune who was on the scene of today's City Council meeting)

Hopefully this is the last of the Chicago vs. PETA series - a series we wouldn't have had in the first place if it weren't for PETA sticking its nose in YOUR dinner plate.


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Smoking Ban Closes Bars

Exactly one year ago (from May 1st), Northern Ireland was the victim of the wave of smoking bans as theirs took effect. And the effect has been great - but not in a positive way at all. It's led to the closing of 100 bars. That's 7% of Northern Ireland's pub count, according to the Federation of Retail Licensed Trade, which represents about 1,100 pubs, hotels and restaurants in Northern Ireland.

The whole reasoning behind the smoking ban was so that non-smokers would be rushing to these locations now that they contained a smoke-free environment. That is obviously not the case, as 100 locations have gone out of business and Steve Kelly, the chief executive of the Federation of Retail Licensed Trade "expects another 100 to close next year."

Isn't this proof-positive that the smoking ban is USELESS, especially in bars?

I mean the whole "argument" (if you can call it that, since there are scientific studies that support it and scientific studies that counter it) was that non-smokers wanted to cease the attack of secondhand smoke on them while they were trying to get a pint. So now that they got their wish and the smoke is gone, they're not drumming up enough business for the pubs to keep them even afloat!

This is just an obvious example of people who shouldn't have a say in the OPERATION of a business because they aren't CUSTOMERS of that business. If there were a bar with 100 regular customers and 50 of them were planning to stop coming because of an establishment policy (or lack thereof), the business can decide to do what it must in order to maximize their customer satisfaction or their profits (maybe the other 50 are twice the profit as the complaining 50). It's when people who are NOT customers start raising a fuss that problems occur. Changing the business' practices and policies won't mean a thing unless the result is more patronage or more profitability!

Sure, you can argue all you want that the protesters who caused the smoking bans to come into play were "thinking about the greater good" and "wanting to protect your lungs" or something. I still don't understand why it's a "libertarian" view to take away the business's liberty of choosing policies in favor of the potential customer's liberty of not breathing secondhand smoke. If you ask me (and you didn't, but I'm telling you anyway), the REAL libertarian view should be that the potential customer DOES have the liberty of not breathing potentially-harmful secondhand smoke - and that businesses should have the liberty to say that those potential customers have every right to find somewhere else to enjoy that liberty, because that business has chosen to protect the liberty of those who want to smoke.

Northern Ireland bar owners lost that liberty to choose their own smoking policy. And the result was that 100 of them also lost their businesses. And 100 more are probably going to lose their businesses next year.

If we can't even get enough IRISH people into PUBS to keep them in business with this smoking ban, what chance do any bars have in general to survive this idiotic smoking ban?

Once again, I am NOT a smoker. And yes, I find smoking to be a disgusting habit and I hate the smell of secondhand smoke. But I also think that smokers have the right to EXIST and to SMOKE - especially in bars.

What do you think?

(The sad story about the pub closings)


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Balloon Ban?

Every now and then, one of the news stories I read about just catches my attention for multiple reasons at once. The headline of the article was about a ban on metallic balloons. My first thought was about the recent Mythbusters episode about the lead balloon and how they busted the saying by actually constructing a lighter-than-air lead balloon. Eventually, once I clicked on the article, I realized that they were talking about Mylar balloons. But a BAN on them??

Apparently the Pacific Gas and Electric Co. of Northern California is complaining that Mylar balloons that come into contact with power lines have caused more than 200 blackouts in the past year in their service area. So a California senator proposed a bill that makes it illegal to sell metallic balloons that are filled with a lighter-than-air gas which could allow the balloon to rise high enough to hit a power line.

Believe it or not, there already ARE laws regarding the sale of metallic balloons. California law already requires that helium-filled metallic balloons must be sold with weights to hold them down. But Senator Scott said those weights are often candies or action figures designed to be removed by children.

This bill, if passed, would make California the first state to ban the sale of these balloons filled with helium.

Barry Broad, a lobbyist for The Balloon Council, objects to what he calls a "wacky" attempt to criminalize a party toy.

In other news...

THERE'S A BALLOON COUNCIL?? WITH LOBBYISTS???

Apparently so. They even have a website:
http://www.balloonhq.com/BalloonCouncil/index.html

Meanwhile, the bill has already cleared the Senate Public Safety Committee, sets a $100 fine for selling the helium-filled balloons starting in 2010. Repeat offenders could be charged with misdemeanors.

I've actually READ the bill. I hunted it down and looked at the wording and such.

Apparently it would be a crime to sell or distribute metallic balloons that are filled with helium (and any balloon that has a metallic or conductive string or is tied to a metallic balloon). The law says nothing about selling or distributing non-inflated metallic balloons or about selling or distributing helium as seperate entities. Which means that the law doesn't care if you fill that balloon up yourself.

Also, the law "shall not apply to manned hot air balloons, or to
balloons used in governmental or scientific research projects." Which means that all you'd have to do is claim it's for your science fair project and you and your distributor are off the hook?? I suppose you could also tie a basket to the balloon and place a small creature in the basket - but I don't know if hamster balloons would count as "manned" for the sake of this law.

I'm a little irked that official government parties could probably have helium-filled Mylar balloons but my birthday party would require two separate purchases and having to fill the balloons myself.

Anyway, it's a stupid law. And The Balloon Council agrees.

Really, are you going to disagree with The Balloon Council? How could you??

(The news article about the ban)
(Once more, a link to The Balloon Council, in all its official-type glory)
(The ACTUAL BILL, in all its balloon-popping pomposity)


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Smoking and Other Bans

Hopefully by now you've gotten the message that I'm against the smoking ban. If you don't regularly read my blog, let this be your introduction to my hatred for this ban. I'm not as against it as the ban on the sale of foie gras, which is the most ridiculous ban I think I've heard of in the past few years, but I'm still very much against it. Maybe this will help illustrate why.

I'm not a smoker. This isn't about me wanting the ban to go away so I can smoke in places that aren't subzero in temperature. This is about civil liberties being taken away under the false pretenses of "benefitting the many over the benefits of the few" or some nonsense like that. You know, bleeding-heart liberal slogans designed to tug at heart-strings (possibly how the term 'bleeding-heart' came to be?) and basically saying under its breath "we pander to stupid people because stupid people vote in higher numbers and we want it to be for us." Here's a quote from the article I read this morning:

For health advocates, the ban represents a simple idea: The rights of an individual should not come before the health of all.

This is the biggest pile of nonsense I've heard in a while - thank goodness they put it so succinctly, because that makes it all the easier for me to mock it and illustrate a point. Several points, actually. Because it's horrible thinking like THAT which is going to be the end of us all. Forgive me if some of my arguments border on the "conspiracy theory" line, but I'm just following that "simple idea" as my mind takes me. Let's see what the future holds if this precedence holds and indeed dooms us all.

Ban on junk food. Well, the hot-button issue is the "obesity epidemic", which means that if obesity is threatening to somehow spread like a disease, then they can enact laws that take away your rights as an individual to eat how you want for the sake of the health of all. They already started with trans fats, didn't they? How long before they press onward? That basically opened the door, along with this precedence, to allow them to declare a ban on anything deemed by a panel of idiots (like the FCC of food) to be "unhealthy". All the good fast food places shut down, Hershey's goes bankrupt, as well as the Mars corporation. And probably Frito-Lay as well, since their "healthy" chips are disgusting and I doubt anyone buys them, even if there were no alternative good-tasting chips.

Ban on fat people. You think I'm joking, right? Well they already have a study showing some kind of correlation between having overweight friends and becoming overweight yourself. Which means that idiots will assume causation, and then obesity will be not only a regular disease but also a social disease to them, and then fat people are banned. We won't be allowed to socialize indoors in public places or within 15 feet of building entrances, lest someone have to talk to us and catch a bad case of obesity or something.

Ban on meat. Think the Atkins diet would help you become skinny enough to be allowed back inside buildings? Well you'd be quite out of luck, because once we have no fat people allowed in buildings to talk sense into the retarded PETA skinny-people brigades, they'll have their run of the show. They'll use their studies showing that cows and other ruminants cause XX billion tons of pollutants and global warming - yadda yadda yadda - all meat is banned for sale because the rights of an individual to eat meat should not come before the health of people who live in the environment being destroyed. (Even if we all know that without the meat industry, the cows will just continue to produce pollution because they're not being slaughtered to become tasty steaks that people can eat in order to save the world.)

Ban on food. All it's going to take is a few idiots who happen to get a peanut-based allergic reaction from being on a train with someone who just had a PB&J or crumbs in a break room resulting in an epinephrin-injection to resume breathing and then we're all up a creek without a paddle. Lawsuits ensue and then we've got mandates about foods. We won't be able to EAT indoors in public places or within 15 feet of building entrances, lest the allergy-prone have to be trapped with a food they're allergic to. Or just food that smells in a way they don't like. Think I'm insane? Follow the logic, and you'll likely get there, even if you're not insane. The rights of an individual to eat what and where they want should not come before the health of the feeble who just don't want to take precautions and place that responsibility on everyone but themselves.

You know, there used to be a thing called "survival of the fittest" where the strong go on to live and breed and the idiotic dumbasses ate too many marbles as kids and died. It's time to stop banning games with marbles that idiot children can eat and start focusing on teaching children to not eat marbles or they don't get to grow up and have kids of their own. I'm sick and tired of watching stupid behavior and wanting to remove the gonads of everyone in that family unit as a way of saying "your bloodline stops here, and the world will praise me for doing it." But I digress - back to the bans.

Ban on profanity. I'm not talking about record labels and TV/radio airwaves. I'm talking about cursing in general, just in everyday conversation. Sooner or later we'll get a study linking a child hearing a curse word and some kind of new psychological mental illness or even the ever-widening umbrella of A.D.D. or something. And the mental health of all, segue to the individual rights to freedom of speech, ergo a ban on profanity everywhere but inside your home and beyond the 15-foot building entrance lines now drawn out like bubbles because of all the bans in effect.

Ban on defending ourselves. Now I'm certainly in the "conspiracy theory" zone, but if all the above has palyed out to the point where we're all starved, weak, repressed agorophobes - we'll have lost our "superpower" status completely. Even Canada could just decide to walk right in and take over. It's more likely to be all of those Middle-Eastern regions that we've had the pleasure of declaring war on in the past. And seriously, once they start their suicide-bombing runs here in the U.S.A., we'd still be banned from even fighting back. Someone would argue that fighting back would cause more Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder by fighting in a war to defend our country than the amount of PTSD generated by witnessing an ongoing stream of bombs going off and killing loved ones and other civilians. They'd argue it, and there would be no intelligent people like myself left to argue back due to a severe lack of steak. Our country would be doomed.

And that's how the smoking ban apparently kills us all. Remember that on January 1st, when the smoking ban takes effect. And horde your steak. For the good of the world, people.

EAT A STEAK - SAVE THE WORLD!

(An online version of the article I read in today's RedEye)







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Letter to RedEye: Smoking Ban

Still trying to get published again. I'll let you know if anything comes of this one.

(UPDATE: Got published! As usual, everything in bold is what they printed - you get to see the entire unedited version!)

I think that the smoking ban is a horrible idea. Banning the use of something that is approved for sale is a ridiculous notion, even if it's for the supposed "greater good" of preventing secondhand smoke. The product can be sold at any establishment and is regulated by the federal government, but with this ban anyone purchasing that product is like a pariah. That makes as much sense as saying, "Here is your cupcake - now go outside if you want to eat that because you're offending the other customers with your cupcake-eating. You're putting them all at risk of being killed by getting crushed by a fat person!"

While I'm not going to turn a deaf ear to all of the scientific research about secondhand smoke and its effects, my gut is telling me that most of the secondhand smoke damage is done either at home over a prolonged period of time, or working in a previously-smoke-friendly location - not having to be in the same area as a smoker during lunch a few times a week. My gut also tells me that I inhale more poisons into my body from crossing one traffic-filled street downtown than I would by spending an hour in the non-smoking section of a restaurant (even if the entire smoking section were filled with chain-smokers). And that's just one street-crossing. So unless the government plans on foolishly trying to remove all cars from the downtown area (oh wait, Alderman Burke proposed a downtown toll) or removing all the buses as well (oh wait, Doomsday in January's got that covered) - I'd prefer if lawmakers started focusing on real crimes and enforcing laws that keep real dangers from harming me. Stop taking away our liberties. Oh, and just for the record, I'm a non-smoker.

Aaron Samuels, 24, Bridgeport Read more!

Smoking Ban vs Gay Marriage

Before I even get off into my usual slur of bad analogies, half-baked jokes and other things that prevent me from forming a coherent verbal (but not written) sentence before 8am - I have no idea what I'm talking about. You hear that? My opinions on these subjects really don't matter because neither of them really affect me directly. Just like men and abortion rights, we can have an opinion, but we'll be seen as wrong just for having one since it's not our issue and it apparently never will be. Now that this is out of the way, I'll say my peace.

Hopefully at least SOME of you read my last piece, about the new Illinois smoking ban that still allows people to smoke, just nowhere where they'd LIKE to smoke. Like in places where there's shelter from the environment other than their own home. What was GOING to follow was a piece about the new cigarette taxes coming into legislation.

I can't begin to think of a better analog for "adding insult to injury."

Instead, certain reader responses in the RedEye this morning just got me BACK onto this original rant, and I felt I had to add more on because people STILL just don't get it: there should NOT be laws being created to ostracize people just based on the theory that secondhand smoke is really that dangerous. Again, I haven't seen any scientific proof. And even if there were test subjects in controlled environments who got cancer from extreme doses of secondhand smoke, I highly doubt that those experiments would reflect the REAL world, where secondhand smoke isn't that concentrated (even indoors) and the hundreds or thousands of other factors that determine when a person gets which cancer.

But no! The liberals (who, might I remind you, are taking away liberties rather than protecting them) are trying to argue that they can tell you where you can't smoke because they're afraid of dying from secondhand smoke. Fine. If you want to make the argument that a hypothetical scary result that hasn't been factually proven yet can be stopped by one of the things that might trigger it in limited circumstances (a long way of saying "you MIGHT get cancer from POSSIBLY secondhand smoke IF this all happened INDOORS and you ignore everyone OUTDOORS")...

...then I say that you have to also agree with the arguments to ban gay marriage.

That's right, I went there. I went there, took some photos, bought a T-shirt, came back, and showed you boring slideshows of it all. Smoking ban? Gay marriage ban. But why, Aaron? Why would you equate something as silly as not being able to smoke indoors with the lifelong struggle of the gay community to commit to each other for life in a federally-recognized ceremony?

Because it's the same argument being made against gay marriage that was made against smoking indoors: something that could potentially harm in a non-proven way if conditions were met. I'm taking about the "gay marriage destroys families" argument here.

I'm arguing that there's an equal percentage of people trying to prove that this seemingly-unlikely event is what triggered their horrible problem. Trying to pin secondhand smoke as the culprit for lung cancer in non-smokers is just as improbable as pinning gay marriage as the culprit for the lack of value of the sacrament of marriage itself.

After all, while being gay is NOT a choice that can be turned on or off, deciding to couple and deciding to want to get married is TOTALLY a choice. You can be gay and do whatever you want to other gay people for as long as you'd like - but when you make the choice to invade the institution of marriage, that apparently affects OTHER people in the bond of marriage and some see it as possibly destructive.

Likewise, while nicotine addiction is not as much of a choice (at serious levels of addiction), it is TOTALLY a choice to start smoking. And you can smoke whatever kinds of cigars and cigarettes you want for as long as you'd like - but when you make the choice to invade the air space of other people indoors, that apparently affects OTHER people in the room and some see it as possibly destructive to their health.

Can you agree on the similarities in the arguments?? One is just as ridiculous as the other! And yet the insane one about SMOKING is easily thrown together as actual legislation by the liberals, while the insane one about GAY MARRIAGE is a rallying point liberals AGAINST the same argument!

Sorry, liberals, but you can't have it both ways. One fauly argument becoming law should equate to more laws backed by the same argument - whether it's something you believe in or not. Smokers believe they have the right to smoke. You argue it threatens the health of others and besides, "smoking is bad for you anyway so maybe this'll help people to quit." Gays believe they have the right to get married. Others argue it threatens the sanctity of marriage and besides, "being gay is morally wrong anyway so maybe this'll help people to get right with God."

Are you starting to see how absurd it all is?

You don't have the right to quash someone's liberties because you're afraid people could get hurt and die. If that were the case all around for everything, people shouldn't be allowed to play sports because there's a high risk of steroid use, and people shouldn't be allowed to drive cars because they can't be trusted to not crash and kill people, and farmers shouldn't be allowed to grow peanuts anymore because so many people are allergic to them and they kill so many people.

You have the right to defend yourself from imminent danger.

You don't have the right to legislate a ban on anything that could potentially be dangerous.

Because people have the right to do dangerous things - to themselves especially, and potentially to others. You can drink alcohol. You can own a gun. You can drive a car. You can bungee jump and parasail and skydive. You can also smoke a cigarette.

And if people are going to take away that liberty for such a stupid reason, I'm just saying that the things THEY believe they have the liberty to do should be taken away just as easily.

And please don't try to turn this into me being a homophobe or against gay marriage. I have several gay friends and I'm not against gay marriage. If you read this piece properly, you'd see that I'm trying to NOT ban gay marriage by trying to get this smoking ban lifted due to the ridiculous reasoning that brought it into existance. It just usually gets a hot-button topic to get people to actually notice the NOT-hot-button topics.

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Liberals Taking Away More Liberties!

You know, I always thought that the word "liberal" was supposed to be about liberty - about making sure we citizens had the liberties and rights to live our lives as we saw fit without having the government come in and trample those rights.

Turns out I was wrong. Because everyone else seems to be wrong. These people we call "Liberals" - the Democrats who blue up the blue states with their anti-Republican stances - aren't the ones who are protecting our liberties. They're the ones taking them away. And Gov. Blagojevich just pulled down his pants and made a bowel movement all over another liberty on Monday.

The liberty to smoke.

Thanks to the new law signed by the governor, on Jan 1st, 2008, smoking will be restricted to private homes and outside (more than 15 feet from a public building entrance). No more smoking in taverns or restaurants with bar areas. Can't smoke in a dormitory, either. Can't smoke in a PRIVATE home if there's a business open to the public operating out of the same space.

Face it - your liberties have just been written off.

You know what? I'm not even a smoker. I loathe the smell of cigarette smoke, it doesn't take much for me to start coughing, and I'm sure several branches of my family tree have been affected by smokers and the cancers they PROBABLY got from all of their smoking. (Yea, that's right - I'm still not totally convinced. I mean I'm convinced that smoking can cause cancer - but at the rate of other things scientists keep coming up with that ALSO cause cancer, I'm not as sure you can pin any of it directly on the smoking itself.) Even so, I am fully aware that they have every right to smoke and do whatever they want to themselves for themselves. You know what I have the right to do?

Go stand somewhere else.

Which is why I can understand why some places SHOULD be non-smoking, or rather that they should have designated non-smoking areas and designated smoking areas. Workplaces, because there you don't have the right to go somewhere else. Eateries, so you can have the CHOICE to be in one or the other section. Gas stations, so you don't make things explode.

Other than that (and probably some other places, but I'm not here to make a list of hypothetical exceptions to my own rule), smoke wherever and whenever! And if I've got a problem with that, I can stand somewhere else! This goes right along with the idiots who don't realize the have the option to change the channel or station when something they don't like is on the TV or radio. Stop taking away our freedom of speech and expression and go practice your freedom of choice and choose something else! These are our liberties, people! Stop letting those false advocates of liberty take them away!

The article I'm reading has a quote from a 70-year-old named Wally who says, "It's the General Assembly being our new nanny. After this they'll ban foods that are too fatty. You'll have to ask the state what you can eat and drink - they'll start regulating hamburgers." Oh, Wally... I guess you don't know/remember that they've already started with the trans fats... Your burgers ARE being regulated, Wally.

For those of you who want to argue "secondhand smoke", I'm going to refer you back to "go somewhere else" and leave it at that. These people are the ones arguing that since it affects them and endangers their health that they should be able to make it illegal. So here's one (or two) of my famously-crazy analogies:

I'm standing on the street with one leg placed out at an angle. I'm not trying to trip anyone at all - I'm just placing my leg out because I feel like it and I have every right to stand how I choose to. It's not MY fault if you don't have the wherewithall to, um, LOOK AROUND and notice it and trip over my leg that's been in the same position for the past three minutes. Lots of people didn't trip, because they walked somewhere else and paid attention and were vigilant about where their feet were walking. Just because you got hurt somehow doesn't mean what I did was illegal. I didn't do in in a malicious manner and I wasn't attacking someone. You just tripped. I am not at fault.

Let's try something even closer. I'm standing on the street with my dog, on a leash. Everything's legal with that. Dog's not even pooping on the sidewalk. And then you come along, with your horrible allergy to dogs, and maybe you didn't notice the dog or you didn't think you'd wind up that close to the dog, but you breathe in some dog hair from my dog and start having an allergic reaction. You're going to potentially die, even though the risk is low because it was just errant dog hair or something and worst case scenario we call 9-1-1 and they pump you full of epinephrine or something. Even so, I didn't do anything wrong - YOU did by not paying attention to your OWN problems. I'm allowed to have a dog and follow the laws. You shouldn't be allowed to blame me for your allergic reaction. See a dog - get the hell away from it.

You don't get to declare it illegal to have a dog out in public because people on the street might have an allergic reaction.

I don't have any advice as to how to fix this. My initial thought was a call to every smoker to follow every disgusted-look-giving non-smoker they encounter, blowing as much smoke at them as possible. Maybe if you could smoke inside, you wouldn't be out here, blowing smoke at people. Of course, that gives them argument to be extreme jackasses and try to ban smoking entirely.

My second thought was a smoking protest - lining up about fifty smokers in a ring 15 feet away from the entrance to an important building (like the Sears Tower where I work) and just smoking. As everyone outside tries to get in, say you can't move, because you can't get within 15 feet of the door. At first I threw out this idea because preventing entrance to a public building is probably an arrestable offense, but then I remembered - the place has two entrances! (Three, if you count the Skydeck, where the tourists are supposed to go to get up to the top but always wander into the office entrances instead.)

I just don't know what else to offer other than my condolences. I mean, I'm not a smoker, so this really doesn't affect me much more than my smoking friends getting a little grumpier over having nowhere nice to smoke. Let's face it, in the summer and the winter, the extreme temperatures are NOT helpful to smokers. This law is even LESS helpful.

And don't even get me started on "but maybe this will encourage them to quit." That's not for the government to decide. That's not for you to decide with a vote, either. That's for them and ONLY them to decide. They have that liberty to choose what to start and when to quit.

At least they used to. Until the "liberals" decided otherwise.

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