A Christmas toy intended to spread the peace and love of the holiday apparently spews hatred.
As first reported by The Columbian, a Vancouver, Wash., family discovered that the toy they unsuspectingly attached to their son's crib utters the words "I hate you" amid the rhythmic ocean sounds designed to lull the baby asleep.
Blanche Skelton told WorldNetDaily she was giving her 6-month-old, Alex, his medicine the other night when she heard the soft voice of a woman or little kid repeating the nasty message over and over.
"The voice has a softness to it. It sounds hypnotizing. ... I think it's creepy," Skelton said. "My husband thought I was crazy until he heard it." Skelton's in-laws and everyone who has visited the house since have heard it.
Skelton describes the toy as being shaped like a boat, blue and white with a big red anchor on the side where you push a button to make it play either music or the ocean sounds. The front has pictures of fish and water.
Blanche does not remember the name of the toy, but said the box bears the Wal-Mart brand label Kid Connection.
She said the toy appears to be a Wal-Mart version of a similar "Ocean Wonders Aquarium" toy made by Fisher-Price and sold by Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart's website ranks the Fisher-Price toy as its third best-selling product among toys for infants age 0 to 6 months.
The box indicates Wal-Mart's Kid Connection toy was made in China.
"You know China is not friends with us," Skelton said, speculating about the explanation for what she fears is a subliminal message hidden in the toy. "They're trying to get back at us. What's the best way? Teach kids when they're young to hate. It's scary."
"How many kids are lying in their crib listening to that?" Skelton's father-in-law, Gary Skelton, posed to The Columbian.
Blanche Skelton said she and her husband went to the local Wal-Mart in Hazel Dell the next day to report the bizarre phenomenon. Finding four or five identical toys on a clearance shelf, Blanche said she played the toy for an assistant manager who, she says, "could hear something," but wasn't sure the phrase was "I hate you."
Still, he pledged the toys would be removed from the shelf and said if the couple would bring in their toy, they could receive a full refund.
The store manager declined to comment for WorldNetDaily.
The Columbian reports the toys were gone from the shelves the next day, but Wal-Mart spokeswoman Karen Burk said no toys were pulled from the shelves in Hazel Dell.
Burk said this was the first time she'd heard complaints about the toy and said she was having difficulty investigating the Skeltons' claim due to lack of information.
"I have relayed this information to our merchandise team," Burk told WorldNetDaily. "We're looking into it to the best of our ability. This is an important situation. Any product that is not performing properly is important."
"We are always sorry that a customer is not happy with a product they purchased at our stores, and we encourage the customer to come back for a full refund," she added.
The Skeltons don't plan on taking Wal-Mart up on the refund offer.
"It still plays music," said Blanche, "and if we take it back we lose our proof."
Just in time for America's latest murderous war for oil, just in time to be reminded of exactly why our foreign policy is so horribly mangled and debilitating and Saudi enslaved and terrorist ready ...
Just in time to crush a few thousand smaller cars and kill a bunch of pedestrians and poison the environment and still be able to traverse six feet of standing floodwater in order to make it in time for Timmy's soccer game, it's the rollout of the new Hummer H2, the biggest joke of the entire SUV world, representing, well, just exactly everything that's wrong with America's view of the world.
Oh come now. You know it's true. You've seen the magazine ads and you've ogled the billboards and maybe sat there sort of benumbed and sad as you witnessed the noxious TV commercials that show the Hummer proudly spanking the soul of humanity and necessity and subtle intelligence. Grunt and drive, baby.
Perhaps you have felt, like millions of others, your very anima spasm in pain when one of these absurd tanks rumbled by you in the street, making children cry and beautiful women roll their eyes in disgust and most everyone else realize, Jesus with a Mini Cooper, hasn't the inane SUV thing gone far enough?
Isn't there enough evidence of these land tanks' utter uselessness and danger and cultural detriment? How much proof do we need? And aren't we ready for some sort of momentous change?
Think about it. The past few decades have seen dramatic revolutions in every other technological realm, from PCs to the Internet to medicine, from DVDs to cell phones to deep-space telescopes, from "smart" refrigerators and PDAs and MP3 players to glow-in-the-dark vibrators that can run off the power in your phone line during those particularly naughty blackouts.
So why not the car? Why, then, has there been absolutely zero significant revolution in automobile-engine technology in the past 50 years? And can this be connected to the ridiculous upsurge in sales of the false-macho, faux-rugged, increasingly deadly SUV? Shall we tender a guess?
Of course it's because of the oil and auto industries. It is not even a question. Of course it's because of the titanic truckloads of cash to be made by continuing to exploit the world's oil reserves, brokering obscene deals and destroying land and earning our nation phenomenal levels of hatred, going so far as to prepare to kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to protect those reserves.
And the SUV, simply put, is the poster child for America's incessantly voracious oil appetite. This is why ShrubCo has aggressively thwarted the development of alternative fuels, killed legislation that would've mandated both tougher fuel requirements and the development of zero-emissions technology. Just ask Dubya Sr.: Oil does a rich, paranoid ruling class good.
It matters not, of course, that the piles of evidence stacking up against the SUV increasingly prove not only that it is the most abusive, oil-dependent, terrorist- supporting death beast on the road today (as Arianna's Detroit Project ad campaign so delightfully points out) but also that SUVs are owned, by and large (but not, of course, exclusively), by complete assholes.
You know it's true. SUV drivers tend, more than any others on the road, to be aggressive jerks. And New York Times reporter Keith Bradsher's new book, "High and Mighty: SUVs -- The World's Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way," proves it.
As reported in a superlative Washington Monthly article that quotes extensively from Bradsher's book, SUV owners tend to be, in part, more selfish, self- centered, narcissistic, insecure and vain than their car-driving brethren. Oh yes they do. And the research backs it up.
They are frequently "nervous about their marriages and uncomfortable about parenthood. They often lack confidence in their driving skills. Above all, they are apt to be self-centered and self-absorbed, with little interest in their neighbors and communities. They are more restless, more sybaritic and less social than most Americans are."
Oh but it doesn't stop there. Only a small fraction of SUVs are ever used for actual work, or for their off-road capabilities, or by people who actually need them for incliment weather or for their hauling utility. And SUVs are, as Bradsher points out, intentionally designed to appear more reptilian and threatening, in an attempt to instill a false sense of ruggedness and menace and a get-outta-my-way machismo. And, of course, they succeed. Sort of.
Furthermore, SUVs are marketed, and widely accepted, as more safe, more solid and protective, which is of course one of the industry's biggest and most contemptible lies.
In truth, SUVs kill a great many more passengers than they save. They crush other cars, and study after study proves they themselves have shockingly high fatal rollover rates and lethal side-impact dangers. And, given the horrible visibility from SUVs, their drivers have a rather unfortunate habit of running over their own children in the driveway. True.
This, combined with how their false sense of ruggedness encourages their owners to drive them like maniacs, makes for one of the biggest and most dangerous mass delusions in modern American culture.
In fact, the "kill rate" for SUVs is truly appalling. To paraphrase the Washington Monthly article, for every one life saved by driving an SUV, five others will be taken. And research has proved that a tank like the four-ton Chevy Tahoe kills 122 people for every 1 million models on the road; by comparison, the Honda Accord kills only 21 per 1 million such vehicles.
In other words, SUVs aren't the slightest bit safe for you, or your children or other drivers -- especially other drivers. And to own an SUV, Bradsher asserts, essentially places the driver's own ego above the health and safety of those around him, not to mention the health of the environment.
Oh hell, it's tempting to quote the entire article, and the book, and you should just go click it right now and read the whole piece, because it really is truly appalling and sad and horrifying and really does go a long way toward answering that age-old question, Why do so many SUV drivers seem to be such assholes?
Which brings us, naturally, right back to the Hummer. The King Kong of SUVs, the biggest, most thuggish, most gluttonous, most utterly useless, cartoonish, silly, ultimately deadly civilian vehicle on the road today. Exactly three people in the entire nation actually need one, and they're all running guns and delivering copies of Honcho to ultraparanoid militias in remote Montana.
Perhaps it is worth noting, in this time of imminent, useless war, when our country is being run by, essentially, a failed Texas oilman, that it might be about time to rethink our all-American, bigger-is-better, screw-the-environment, high-fivin', the-world-is-our-prison-bitch mentality.
Perhaps this is the ultimate reminder the Hummer makes so explicitly clear. Perhaps this is why the SUV itself is such the ideal ethical lightning rod in today's global climate.
For in truth, it is exactly the mentality that gave birth to the SUV and the Hummer in the first place -- the weak ego, the need to strut a phony toughness, the insecurity, the patriotic narcissism, the false sense that all is solid and protected and that we care for no one but ourselves -- that has turned us into what we are today.
Which is to say, the world's bully, the preemptive superpower aggressor, the Great Antagonist, the most openly reviled nation on the planet, equal parts loathed and bitterly envied and grudgingly feared and desperately in need of a long, deep sociopolitical colonic -- to say nothing of a nice bicycle.
