Your government is lying to you...

No this is not another "curse that Obama and his lousy healthcare plan" post... though I could certainly throw one of those together in about four-and-a-half seconds if asked to do so.

No this is a story about something that happened to me last Saturday... it's a story of a casual lie told by a local government that I think has huge implications in a world where our current government seems intent on controlling more and more aspects of our daily lives. It was a relatively small thing to be sure, but as they say, the devil is in the details, and once you tell the first little lie, it almost always gets easier to tell the next bigger one. Especially if you have a government title and access to tax dollars to back you up.

I've been living in Los Angeles for 16 years, having come (as many of us do) from some other part of the country. As a result, I tend to get a lot of visitors who come to see L.A. for the first time. In all those years I have perfected a four hour driving tour of all the major sites in L.A. It's a pretty great tour, if I do say so myself.

So last Saturday, I had some folks in from a southern state, which shall remain nameless, and we were headed up to the Hollywood Sign, which is the third stop on my tour.

There's really only one way to get up there... you take a little turn off a main road and wind your way up through a pretty ritzy neighborhood called Beachwood Canyon. So on this day as I made my turn onto the steep road that makes its way up to the sign, I noticed that someone had installed a road sign at the turn that read "no access to Hollywood sign."

Now I'm here to tell you, that sign is 100% pure weapons-grade horseshit. Not only is there access to the sign from that road... it's the ONLY access road that takes you up to the sign.

Here's what I think happened. Some rich asshole, or collection of rich assholes got together and decided, you know what, we don't like it when people drive up our pretty little private street on their way to the Hollywood sign. Let's go to our city councilman with a petition, and possibly some thinly veiled threats of lawyers in Armani suits and ask them to install a sign that tells people a blatant lie... that they can't get to the Hollywood sign by using this street.

And just as it is with all the lies that are being told about how great Obamacare will be, it doesn't really matter that we're sort of breaking a cardinal rule... that government should always try to be as truthful as possible to the people it serves... because a larger good is being served by the lie.

And the infuriating thing is some dickweed government bureaucrat actually acquiesced to this nonsense. In order to get these squeaky wheels (aka rich assholes) out of his or her office, they agreed to put up a flagrantly false official city street sign on a public road.

Think about the implications of that for a moment. Because some jerkweed doesn't like tourists driving down "his" road, a sign meant to provide drivers with up-to-date information about road conditions and other important information, but which in this case features 100% false information, was placed on a city street.

I cannot tell you how pissed off this made me. I mean for one thing, it's just flat-out dangerous. Forget for a minute that if there's ever a serious emergency and people are looking for specific ways to drive here or there to get to safety, in this case they are receiving inccorect information from at least one official city sign... think about the slippery slope implications for a minute.

At least one bureaucrat has decided to move his own moral compass to "it's OK to put up a sign that is a lie in order to protect the peacefulness of a rich douchebag's quiet little street." But now that the compass has been moved, who is to say it can't be moved again? What else might this bureacrat, or one of his coworkers upon hearing about this, be willing to do if only the right (read: rich or influential) people "ask" him or her to do it.

Maybe I'm the only sane person left in this godforsaken city, but I think the implications are absolutely terrifying.