TVFP on Margaret Wente

 

 

From what we can tell Ms. Wente is pretty much what she says she is in her defence of Carol Wainio’s well documented blog Media Culpa revealing plagiarism and dodgy journalistic practices: ‘gee I’m sorry, but no way I’m falling on my sword because Carol Wainio is, you know, out to get me. Besides I’m right in the sense of the big picture. So go away.’

Well who knows and we don’t really care, the intelligent steadfast work of Carol Wainio notwithstanding. Carol Wainio and thoughtful, dispassionate, well intentioned people like her are pretty much irrelevant. That is, as they say, a cryin’ shame.

As we see it isn’t whether or not Margaret Wente disgraced the fifth estate, but whether or not you like her. That’s what we’ve gleaned from the Twitter stuff and other media comments. Margaret Wente suddenly and ironically to the commie pinko left is the new garbage.

(That is a reference to the 2009 Inside and Outside worker strike that pissed off the electorate and like the freaky meteor that gave us the cannibals in Night of the Living Dead, eventually brought Rob Ford to the mayor’s office.)

The public persona, whether you are a politician, a journalist, a bureaucrat, a tycoon, or whatever has been reduced to a popularity contest. So the idea is, you can survive anything if you are popular. For the most part the above have figured it out. You just have to have the right numbers, say 35 or 36 percent if you are Stephen Harper. Whether or not Margaret Wente's career goes up in smoke has nothing to do with integrity or intelligence. She has the numbers she stays. She doesn't she's gone.

As well our ur take on it at TVFP: for the most part JOURNALISM wakes up every morning and has a shower. It evacuates its bowels. It puts on a layer of deodorant and another layer of scent. It brushes its capped teeth, combs its coloured hair and puts on a clean pair of underwear.

Margaret Wente and, for that matter those two Titans of Journalism, Lorrie Goldstein and Sue Anne Levy, as well as so many others, the run of the mill  (there are some notable exceptions of course) smell so nice. They are people you’d be grateful to stand next to on an over crowded streetcar on a day when the humidex is off the chart.

www.jimread.ca

 

Canada's Dirtiest Companies

The Parkdale Liberation Front’s Bureau of Statistics is publishing a shocking expose on the leading filth producers in our country. These are Canadian businesses that have no downstream conscience.  In plain speak, CRIMINALS. You’ve probably seen them at a charity soiree, tanned, smiling, fashionable  .  .  .  .

TVFP was privileged to receive an advance copy of this damning report.

Damning Report

The PLF takes the position that any enterprise that creates a material product has a moral obligation to minimize the environmental impact of that product not only in the manufacturing process but also as the product makes its way downstream. For instance the Big Oil companies that are pillaging Northern Alberta are poisoning the downstream habitat. This is, in our view and in the view of the PLF, a criminal act, a kind of stealth genocide. Big Oil’s biggest toady is Stephen Harper.

Uncle Joe

As Uncle Joe once said, a hundred deaths is a tragedy, a million is just a statistic. The scale of habitat degradation in this country surpasses Stalin’s gulags. In fact it is too vast to believe. We revert to statistics. Well we would if Stephen Harper hadn’t cancelled the empirical based, scientific investigation that allows us to make informed, rational decisions. From now on your health and welfare will be guided by ideology. And God said let there be light.

Sub-Section

One of the sub-sections of the PLF expose deals with the fast food industry, specifically in Parkdale. Until this year our village was unblessed with the presence of that paragon of mediocrity Tim Horton’s. Now, at the corner of Jameson and Queen, the successful brand has built a flagship store. Not surprisingly Tim Horton’s coffee cups and other packaging began appearing in Parkdale streets, lanes and lawns.

Privatizing Garbage Pickup

The PLF in their ground breaking report on the Dirtiest Companies in Canada recommend further privatization of garbage pickup. As readers of TVFP may or may not know our porcine, flatulent, no show at Pride Days Mayor, has privatized garbage pickup west of Yonge Street. The PLF report recommends that garbage pickup should be further privatized across the city. Dirty Companies like Tim Horton’s should be required to police an area around their stores equal to one city block. The PLF estimates that, by requiring fast food chains to take responsibility for their downstream pollution, the city would save about 11 million dollars per year in solid waste costs.

Sound familiar?

Testimonial

Famed Canadian Hockey legend Howie Morenz had this to say about Jim Read's stories: the first time I picked one up I couldn't put it down. It was hell trying to tape my stick.

www.jimread.ca

TVFP Report: Foreign Strippers Out

 

The abrogation of work permits for foreign exotic dancers must come as welcome news to the more impoverished areas of the country where jobs are hard to come by. Now your daughter, with her heart set on a university education, but no hope of affording one, can earn top dollar as a stripper in downtown Calgary. She’ll have her tuition paid in no time as well as achieving the daily physical activity requirements as recommend by Health Canada.

Jason Kenny, Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, a close Harper toady, sites health and safety concerns at the rationale behind the move. What the Harperites are really doing is targeting victims. It's a proven ineffective ploy and typical of governments with no progressive vision of reform. These unfortunate victims provide the illusion of effective action and moral superiority to the gullible minority (about 33%) necessary to win an election. The dirty business of exploitation goes on as per usual, with a slightly different cast, but the same directors, nothing much changes and hypocrites like Jason Kenny sneer at the rest of us soft on crime, hug-a-thug types who haven't confused the symptoms with the cause.

Apparently the adult entertainment industry is contemplating targeting high school students through recruiting initiatives. They’ll be in good company. Other greed driven, exploitative industries that attempt to lure students into questionable careers include: the petroleum industry, currently engaged in the systematic destruction of great expanses of Northern Alberta, including Native habitat; the mining industry, a world leader in systemic genocide, the forest industry whose clear cut harvesting practices and token reforestation threaten huge tracts of habit and the livelihood of innumerable species.

Go to Jim Read's Website to sample and purchase a terrific line-up of short stories.

The Limerick

In the opinion of no less an authority than George Bernard Shaw, a Limerick is innately obscene. A Limerick that isn’t properly rude isn’t really a Limerick.

The limerick packs laughs anatomical

In space that is quite economical.

But the good ones I've seen

So seldom are clean

And the clean ones so seldom are comical.

With that in mind TVFP has gathered together a few of our favourites for your enjoyment. Parental warning: you may want to ask the children to go and smoke their pot in the other room.

*

The limerick’s callous and crude

It’s morals distressingly lewd

It’s not worth the reading

By persons of breeding

It’s designed for us vulgar and rude

From what we can tell Limericks, with some notable exceptions, were written by the dispossessed. The writers were almost always men. Often as not the object of their deprecations were minorities, mostly women and homosexuals.  Most of these limericks are anything but funny, but rather reflect times of poverty and in some cases genocide by starvation, a soaring infant mortality rate, class and gender conflict, war and political frustration.

Having said that we find it difficult to dismiss the Limerick on grounds of political and social correctness. The Limerick would only laugh at us and would write a scathing five liner about the size of our penis or would endeavor to insert some article of commodity fetishism in our anus. The Limerick by its nature is defiant of any attempt to cleanse its anarchic soul. In truth that is why at we at TVFP are so fond of it.

Some of these limericks have been adapted by TVFP to reflect modern concerns. The rest are what they are.

*

Some time back there was a bombshell

Light Rail Transit might start to do well

Now that could cost loads

To the selfish who build the roads

So they brought in an exhaust hole from hell

*

Have the treasures of our land in thrall

Any chance of survival at all

With a dope like Kent to trust

It looks like a bust

And the Harper we know is a know-it-all

*

The thing about ‘Back to Basics’

And similar high moral tricks

Is they’re bound to backfire

When your Conservative choir

Have all got their brains in their dicks

*

A mathematician named Hall

Has a hexahedronical ball

And the cube of its weight

Times his pecker plus eight

Is his cell number – give him a call

*

There once was a young lady with such graces

That her curves cried out for embraces

You look, said McGee

Like a million to me

Invested in all the right places

*

An astronomer, pious but odd

To be honest a dirty old sod

Who’d searched for a sign

Of the presence divine

Cried, I’ve just found Uranus, dear God

*

Her husband is in the Hussars

A colonel all covered in scars

But it isn’t his weals

For which nightly she feels

But the privates he lost in the wars

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