Junk Activism

According to this post on New York Daily News, a protest of Rent-A-Center was staged last Saturday for renting computers and appliances at ridiciulously high prices.

From the article:

Activists feel the Texas-based corporation takes advantage of inner-city residents who can’t afford to pay outright for new appliances. Rent-A-Center offers seemingly cheap deals, but the numbers quickly add up, activists and some shoppers say.

Strangely enough, this protest is led by Al Sharpton, who has found a new niche in protesting with lousy consumers who victimize their bad spending habits.  Or maybe he just loves being loud.

Brooklyn, please.  Here’s a few tips from “Junk Activism’s Responsible Consumerism 101“:

1) Stop renting your toys and appliances.  It’s cheesy, it’s wasteful, and of course you’re going to pay a shitload more than something is worth.  For a business, that’s the point of renting instead of selling.

2) Read the fine print before you sign anything.

3) Do the math before you sign anything.

4) Relax.  You don’t need a 1,000,000″ HDTV ultra high-res Samsung plasma TV right away, anyway.  Idiot.

So, put your signs down.  Just go shop somewhere else.

Oh, yeesh.  The Westboro Church will once again dish out their hatred and homophobia, this time aiming at a Detroit high school for performing “The Laramie Project”.

If you’re not sure who Westboro Church is, they’re arguably the most perfect example of “Junk Activism”.  In fact, if “Junk Activism” ever makes it into the dictionary, it should have a picture of a Westboro Church protest. Expect me to write about them frequently…

The message is this: God hates us all (but especially Jews, Muslims, gays, and soldiers) and he’s wrecking his vengeance on the world for all of the evil in it by allowing/causing every mortal reality for humanity.

They go to the funerals of dead soldiers to tell their parents that their kids went to hell.  They pray and thank god publicly when someone dies of AIDS or gets a gay beatdown.  God gets credit for it all and they’re spreading His Word in the loudest, most offensive way possible.  Sort of like the KKK of Christianity.

From UPI.com: “‘The Laramie Project’ has a function — it’s to teach rebellion,” Phelps-Roper said.

Sort of like how a fringe hate group will drive hundreds of miles to protest homosexuality outside of a high school.  Other churches won’t even associate with you, dude.  Aren’t you teaching rebellion?

Inmates in Greece are refusing to eat in droves, due to overcrowded prison conditions.   Greece’s 12,192 inmates are crowded into jail spaces meant for 8,243.

Greece, you can’t handle a measly 12,192 inmates?  You need to take a lesson from the champs of incarceration.

You see, in America, and apparently in the UK, we believe in things called rights and freedoms.  And those rights are that every inmate has a right to Cable TV, libraries, 3 meals a day, a gym, basketball court, a job, a movie theater, the Bible, toilet wine, …….but only ONE prison bitch.

Let’s approach this protest as a business venture.  You know, by using solid metrics.

12,192 inmates – 8243 inmate capacity = 3,949 overflow
Overflow is est. 32% over the current capacity.

Since we’re talking about size and capacity, we need a better way to measure the success of a food protest to help increase capacity.  So, you shouldn’t be counting the PEOPLE incarcerated, you need to be counting the WEIGHT.  In America we do this in pounds.  Because the whole world is still in the dark ages (except America, of course), you will have to use the evil Kilometer.

So, as far as I can see your protest can go one of two ways:

1) Starve yourselves until the weight limit drops 32% as a whole.  Science tells us that the less people weigh, the less space you will all take up.  Find the average size of each inmate and calculate the average number of pounds that each inmate should lose to accommodate.  For help, I will refer you to this guy.

2) This requires a real fight for the long haul – eat as much as possible.  Estimate weight increase to force the desired outcome (increased number of prisons.)  You need to cut out the Gyro and Lamb diet to make this happen.  I would suggest a diet of McDonalds, Starbucks, Pizza Hut, and Ben N Jerry’s over the next several months and STOP MOVING AROUND SO MUCH.  Eventually, Greece will be forced to support the increased weight capcaity. You can also argue that you’re too fat for execution.

HEY GREECE:  Have you thought maybe there is a reason that your prisoners are not hungry enough for your meals?  It’s because they’re full from eating holes through the walls.

Protests against Regis Philbin by the Dominican communities are up in arms against Regis today after Kelly Ripa told a story about a student of hers saying elephants represented Republicans and donkies represented Dominicans.

Regis responds: “She’s pretty close.”

A Dominican-American group is demanding an apology from the show, claiming “host Regis Philbin practically agreed with laughter over what the two thought was a joke.”

Um.  It was a joke. It was a slightly clever morning baner about children using the wrong words.  Game shows have been made from this amusing phenomenon.

So listen up, because this is pure semantics, people.  He was not calling you an ass.  Regis is aware of your activist nature and he was defending you and in fact threatening the perputrator of such ignorant comments on the behalf of children worldwide.  What he was really doing was giving a warning to all little girls about the sensitivity of Dominicans: “She’s pretty close to getting her ass kicked by a large group of pissed-off Dominicans who do NOT like to be mistakenly compared to donkies by children.”

So Dominicans, throw Regis a Lifeline this time. We must STOP THE CHILDREN.