george the painting for sale redux

All right. This is the piece that changed everything. When I initially wrote this post, I put up the uncensored photo of George’s painting, a 37″ x 40″ oil on canvas called “***** and Bourbon.” It’s a bit rowdy, has the F-word in it, shows ***** and **** and was frowned upon by the insurance industry. I posted it Sunday afternoon and that evening some bureaucrat paper pusher knocked on my door, flashing a plastic badge with a Captain Crunch image on it. He was all ****** off about government insurance regulations and my content (George’s art, specifically) was unacceptable. There were legal ramifications. He said the government, or whatever regulates the relationship between insurance and rowdy art, would sue.

Since I was never paid a dime to post for his insurance company, and was only doing it as a favor, I happily obliged and took down all posts and references to insurance from the old site, and put CENSORED blocks over George’s art.

The situation provided a perfect example of how the government and the lackeys that dwell within it’s comforting clutches have diluted our constitutional liberties with stifling corporate overlord bureaucracy. Franz Kafka and George Orwell had it right many generations ago. So did others and so does the Libertarian Party of today.

FREEDOM or DEATH! Accept nothing less. Fight for freedom of speech. Fight for the right to bear arms. Fight to move about our country freely. Fight for what our founders died for. Don’t let America slide into a corporate-managed safe zone where you are controlled by fear of terrorism, job loss, and the prevailing apathy toward our ever-deteriorating civil rights where corporations destroy our environment, take away our benefits, provide our “entertainment,” and cut our hours so we get nothing and are thankful for it. With puritanical political action committees they bribe our “representatives” into enforcing laws that take the risk of freedom away while making others rich. They make us wilfully ignorant. They make us *******. Not the good kind, either, but the dried-up, never open for a challenge, rotting on the sofa under 20-pound folds of fat kind of *******.

The kind that cry when an artistic rendering of a naked woman is in close proximity to an ad for insurance. Corporate bureaucrats? I couldn’t do it. This post is the f*** YOU that George intended it to be.

Studies have proven that “to the extent that risk taking behavior is governed by both the probable frequency and magnitude of possible adverse consequences, then something that reduces that magnitude is likely to increase the frequency, and vice-versa.” Simply put, forcing Americans to have auto insurance makes them drive more carelessly, because they feel safer, but that causes more accidents, which raises your insurance rates, which makes people feel safer because if it costs more, it’s gotta be better. It’s never-ending. It’s a scam.

Therefore, I said “thank you most sincerely” and resigned as editor of the metric division of Bikernet, and set out on my own here with bikerMetric.com. I will no longer advertise for insurance companies. Their foundational premise is profoundly un-American and I can no longer abide.

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” – Benjamin Franklin

Back to George’s art. It isn’t safe. Here is the raw and honest and to some, beautiful “***** and Bourbon.”

Art like this symbolizes everything I’ve tried to do here for over six months. Thanks for shaking sh*t up George. That’s what good art is supposed to do.

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