Fresh Dribblings From Ted Byfield

This week, Ted "Old Skool" Byfield takes on the forces that would corrupt our precious bodily fluids... the pushers of bottled water.

Ted's pissed off about all the people he sees roaming the streets drinking bottled water and is of the opinion that it's all a scam based on one of the most treacherous handmaidens of the Liberal Media... science. Or is it marketing? He can't seem to make up his mind entirely. Nah, it must be science. Marketing makes money; science is just the seductive siren song of Satan, wrapped in a slinky lab coat. Unless we're talking about a global warming skeptic. Now that's the kind of science you want to take on The Ark with you!

Byfield presents this snippet from an imaginary marketer about 25 years ago, which (to his thinking) must have unleashed this trend:

"'Tell 'em it prevents cancer. Tell 'em it protects against AIDS. Tell 'em it's a means to safe sex. Tell 'em if they aren't drinking five or six bottles of water a day, they're taking their life in their hands. Tell 'em that every bottle of water they drink adds another day to their life. Tell 'em anything. They'll believe it. Don't you know? We're the most scientifically knowledgeable generation in human history'"

Personally, I always thought the ubiquitous water bottles were more a sign of people's mistrust of a quarter-century of civic infrastructure neglect and increasing pollution, but maybe that's just me.

At first this sounds like the same ham-fisted anti-everything stance that appears to be lodged in the Byfield DNA. But then I went over Ted's body of work the last few years -- and what a terrifying, wrinkled body of work it is! -- and realized to my horror that Ted is right about something. I guess the old saying about "even a broken clock is right twice a day" has some truth to it. So many of us are suckers, Ted. But not because we drink bottled water.

The same kind of imaginary fear-mongering and sucker-baiting that lead to The Bottled Water Invasion can easily be used to explain why people remain hypnotised by such bastard children of The Liberal Media like evolution or promiscuity or foreigners or uppity womenfolk. After all, bullshit fear-mongering moved a lot of copies of Ted's Alberta Report in its time.

In a previous entry I wrote about how Ted could now be replaced with a simple algorithm. Add a few guiding principles like that and I could resurrect Alberta Report myself.

See? More proof Ted is losing it. He's given away his playbook!