Smart ads that are not
Posted: July 28, 2012 Filed under: consumer, crass commercialism, douchebaggery, stupidity, weird 2 CommentsSo I was looking at an online story about that dude who threatened to shoot up his coworkers and had a bunch of guns at home this morning and check out the ‘smart ads’ that popped up:
Ads for bullet proof vests and armor plate embedded in a story about someone who apparently threatened to duplicate the Aurora theater shooting? I don’t know if the content server’s analytics are genius or shit… I mean, reading about someone shooting up the movie theater or workplace might make me want to buy body armor, on the other hand, if I were to be in the bullet proof vest business, do I really want customers associating me with people who go ballistic (oops a pun) and shoot their coworkers or fellow movie watchers? Probably not.
Artist removes halo, adds blue ribbon
Posted: July 15, 2012 Filed under: crime, douchebaggery, stupidity, weird 5 CommentsOK, there is this mural of all sorts of important people including Joe Paterno in downtown State College PA. The artist who painted the mural added a halo over Joe’s head after Paterno died earlier this year. Now that it has come out that Paterno was apparently aware that Sandusky was abusing kids and protected the molester (or, at very best, failed to act on the reports or allow others to intervene), the artist has painted the halo out again. He also added a blue ribbon to Paterno’s coat in the mural.* I was not aware of this, but apparently a blue ribbon means you support the victims of child sexual abuse.
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| Artist Michael Pilato working on the mural |
I don’t have a horse in this race, being uninterested in football, not a victim of sexual abuse** and not a Penn State fan, but, seriously, what the fuck? Isn’t adding a blue ribbon to the image of Paterno kind of adding insult to injury since he helped keep Sandusky in a position where Sandusky could keep molesting kids? Isn’t that “accessory to the crime” or “conspiracy to conceal a crime” territory?
The whole colored ribbon thing starts to make me suspicious anyway since it seems to be a way of looking like you are doing something without doing something. I mean, I guess I can stick a yellow ribbon on the back of my car and it means I want you to know I support the troops or pin a pink ribbon to my lapel and it means I want you to know I support breast cancer research — and maybe that’s helpful because it might spread awareness of the cause. But the cynical side of my nature thinks that it can also be a ‘heart on my sleeve’ gesture done primarily to show others that “I’m a swell person who cares about this cause so you should like me.”
I think there ought to be a special color of ribbon for people who knew someone else was doing something really fucked up and they had the power to stop it but decided not to do anything about it. And that’s the color of ribbon that ought to be painted on the portrait of Paterno (and a good portion of the Catholic clergy) and other people who look the other way.
It’s fine to have heroes, I guess, and if you love Penn State or “Paterno-ball,” then maybe you will want murals and statues and libraries named after him. But please don’t try to imply that he was ‘sympathetic to the cause’ of preventing child sex abuse by painting a blue ribbon on his lapel like some kind of a medal. He wasn’t. Paterno chose football and the school’s image and his friendship with Sandusky and the fact that he probably didn’t want to deal with a scandal over protecting the kids of people he didn’t know from sex abuse. He shouldn’t get to wear the blue ribbon.
* Apparently Sandusky used to be in the group portait and was painted out. Source.
**Yeah, I’m against it — who isn’t? I just can’t claim the cause has greater personal resonance for me than many of the other ways in which humans fuck one another over.
Pat Robertson is an idiot
Posted: January 7, 2012 Filed under: douchebaggery, politics, religion, stupidity Leave a commentOn January 3rd, Pat Robertson announced that God had told him who the next president would be and that the US was headed towards economic collapse.
I’d like to point out that if Pat Robertson needed God to tell him that the US economy would likely continue to be in trouble, then Pat Robertson is pretty damn stupid. Are his followers going to wake up tomorrow, turn on the news, hear the talking heads talk about layoffs, more unemployment, etc., and say, “Holy Cow, Pat was right!”?
I, too, have a method for divining the future:
I’m not big on bible stuff, but isn’t the good book pretty specific on telling the reader that people who claim to be prophets are liars? (2 Chronicles 18:22): “Now therefore, behold, the LORD hath put a lying spirit in the mouth of these thy prophets, and the LORD hath spoken evil against thee.”
I give up…
Posted: November 18, 2011 Filed under: crass commercialism, douchebaggery, politics, stupidity 8 Comments
Sometimes it is the little things that get you down. Like Congress trying to decide whether or not pizza should be considered a vegetable. “Vegetable,” in this case, means whether or not pizza can ‘count’ towards a serving of vegetables for the US school lunch food program.
A few years ago, Washington wanted us to believe that ketchup should be considered a vegetable. A few years before that, they wanted to reclassify salsa as a vegetable. I think that most sane people would agree that eating some salsa on some chips or eating some ketchup on a hamburger is not a substitute for a salad or carrots or an ear of corn.
The mendacity of the whole process by which Congress decides what children should eat is revealed by this quote from a pro-pizza-as-vegetable lobbyist from the American Frozen Food Institute: “If the USDA rule went forward as is, pizza would most certainly be all but impossible to serve in school lunch programs,” said Corey Henry, a spokesman for the American Frozen Food Institute. “Schools have to meet nutrition requirements at every meal to get reimbursed by the federal government. To get a vegetable credit using tomato paste under the USDA’s proposed rule, schools would have to drown pizza in tomato sauce to the point where kids would never want to eat a slice of pizza. If schools have to add so much sauce to get a vegetable credit that pizza becomes inedible, they simply won’t serve pizza any longer.”
In other words, Mr. Henry is saying that in order to get pizza paid for by the tax payer, they would have to add more actual vegetable matter to the pizza. But adding more vegetables to the pizza in order to make it qualify as a vegetable might make the kids like it less, therefore the solution is to just change the definition of what a vegetable is to include pizza so that the companies that sell pizza to schools can continue to make money off of the taxpayer.
Why stop there? I’m sure the candy manufacturers would love it if we redefined ‘jellybeans’ as a vegetable. Heck, it even has ‘bean’ in the name so it’s gotta be a vegetable, right? And who says something even needs to be edible in order to qualify as a vegetable? I’m sure the makers of paper clips would love to get some school lunch program money, so why not reclassify paperclips as a vegetable, too?
No wonder our education system is totally jacked up.
Frank Miller’s America
Posted: November 16, 2011 Filed under: douchebaggery, politics, stupidity 12 Comments
"Take that, you hippie scum!"
I haven’t kept up with the popular comics for decades and names like ‘Frank Miller’ don’t mean that much to me — I have vague notions of who he is based on movies like ‘The 300’ and I know he is credited with breathing new life into the Batman franchise. So I wasn’t in the loop when news broke of Frank Miller’s diatribe against the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement.
Miller had this to say: “The “Occupy” movement, whether displaying itself on Wall Street or in the streets of Oakland (which has, with unspeakable cowardice, embraced it) is anything but an exercise of our blessed First Amendment. “Occupy” is nothing but a pack of louts, thieves, and rapists, an unruly mob, fed by Woodstock-era nostalgia and putrid false righteousness. These clowns can do nothing but harm America.”
I want to ask Mr. Miller to explain why he thinks that citizens assembling and making their grievances known will result in harm to America. Isn’t the ‘right to assemble’ and all that other stuff really the central point of democracy? Our leaders certainly seem to like public demonstrations against the corruption of rulers when they occur in places like Egypt; why doesn’t Miller like them when they occur closer to home? If the Egyptians want to hold their rulers accountable for mismanagement, shouldn’t US citizens help the Egyptians on their steps to democracy by cleaning our own house, too? And, while there have been examples of vandalism, theft and other bad behavior at the Occupy protests, the number of ‘bad acts’ has been statistically insignificant. Some people misbehave whenever a hundred or a thousand folks gather in any place for any reason (including shopping on Black Friday). And, compared to the Penn State students who rioted when their favorite coach was fired, the Occupiers have been angels. Calling them “louts, thieves and rapists” is just inaccurate. There may be ‘louts, thieves and rapists‘ in the crowd at the Occupy assemblies, but they (we) did not assemble because they (we) wanted to behave badly. We assembled because our government and our economy has been broken by corruption and greed and neither the democrats nor the republicans are willing to try to fix it.
“Occupy’ is an effort to save democracy, not an attempt to tear it down. I’m surprised that Miller does not understand that.
(edited for sentence fragment)
Music and Salesmanship
Posted: June 30, 2011 Filed under: bitching, consumer, crass commercialism, debord, douchebaggery, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, music, politics, situationalism, stupidity, weird, wierd stuff 11 Comments
Anyone else remember those pictures of Boris Yeltsin doing ‘The Funky Chicken?’ I can’t decide whether I like Boris more or less after seeing them — sort of the same feeling I got when watching our former President, George W. Bush, funk out with African drummers on the Whitehouse lawn.
Michelle Bachmann recently got taken to task by musician Tom Petty because her crew used his song, “American Girl,’ at one of her rallies. I’m not that familiar with Petty’s “American Girl” pop anthem, but, if memory serves, it’s lyrics might be a bit at odds with Bachmann’s Bible Beater values (something about “making it last all night” makes me think Petty’s American Girl is a bit of a libertine). But I guess since the song has ‘American’ in it, her team feels this gives it relevance. Plus Petty is probably popular with a demographic that doesn’t find much traction in her bible-thumpin’ ways. Anything to appear hip, I guess. But this is apparently just one of a growing number of cases in which a pop star has said to a political candidate, “Hey, stop using my song!”
I remember being a bit taken aback when I heard “London Calling” by the Clash being used to sell Jaguar cars on TV. The context in which I first heard that song seemed greatly at odds with the idea of a luxury automobile. As I recall, the ad just had a few strident guitar riffs and Joe Strummer barking out, “London Calling” and leaving out all those depressing lyrics about the end of the world… perhaps the admen thought that maybe the American ex-punker who had given up on revolution and gotten a career and was now rolling in it would feel the siren song of the half remembered dreams of his former self and head on down to the dealership and buy a really expensive car without really stopping to think about it. Devo as pitchmen for Honda scooters seemed a much better fit.
The world is just getting so fucking weird. Guy DeBord had no idea how right he was.
Blood Libel: Ignorance, stupidity or political doublespeak?
Posted: January 12, 2011 Filed under: politics, stupidity, weird 5 Comments
(image of a ‘Blood Libel’ at right courtesy of a circa 1939 German Nazi newspaper)
In response to criticisms over the gun related metaphors and imagery used by SarahPac and other politically right-leaning pundits, political candidates and media gadflys in light of the Arizon shootings, Sarah Palin has responded with a video in which she stated, “Journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible.”
Her statement is bizarre for so many reasons, and I’ll make no apologies for admitting to my dislike of Palin. For one thing, it seems strange (and ironic) that Palin, who poses as one of the great supporters of the doctrine of personal responsibility, should feel aggreived when someone else gets shot. My own view is that if you encourage someone else to shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre, people are going to be angry at you if they get injured in the stampede for the exit, whether or not you were one of the ones doing the stampedeing. Using terms like ‘reload’ and ‘second ammendment remedies’ and putting ‘surveyor symbols’ on ‘target’ state representatives is going to be viewed as ‘questionable’ when someone does go out and shoot people. That’s one of the risks of making public statements — they can (and will) come back to bite you in the ass.
But I’m also disturbed by Palin’s use of the term, “Blood Libel.” It apparently dates back to the gospel of Matthew where Matthew reports that the Jews who agitated for Jesus’ execution said, “Let the blood be on our heads.” In the middle ages, ‘Blood Libel’ was used to encourage hatred of Jews and to support the false claim that the Jews used the blood of Christians in secret ceremonies. This reasoning was later picked up by the Nazis and other anti-Semites. So “Blood Libel” has a long (and hideous) history.
Unfortunately, Palin didn’t present her remarks in a historical context, so we don’t really know what she intended to mean by the ‘blood libel’ claim. Was it just an accidental pairing of two words? Given Palin’s fundamentalist christian bent and the wording of the phrase, “manufacture a blood libel,” (rather than something more direct and less biblical in tone, like “commit libel”), that seems unlikely. Is Palin an anti-Semite? It wouldn’t surprise me. Or is the inclusion of the word intended as a double meaning to Palin’s supporters and foes alike? Is she tossing this offhand reference to ‘blood libel’ into the mix in order to stir up the obvious claim of anti-Semitism from her foes so she can once again turn that accusation around and say to her followers, “See? The lamestream media really IS against me! Now they are accusing me of anti-Semitism!”
I’m thinking the latter is a definite possibility.
Crazy people with guns
Posted: January 11, 2011 Filed under: politics, stupidity 3 CommentsI read today that in 2010 in Pima County, Arizona, about 45% of the mental health patients were forced out of public treatment programs because the tax payer didn’t want to pay for those services. I wonder if any of the voters who voted down public financing of mental health services last year will make the connection that having their state representatives and judges and children shot dead in a grocery store and not having sufficient mental health services might be in any way related.
Go figure.
Whose fault is it?
Posted: January 9, 2011 Filed under: politics, stupidity, wierd stuff Leave a comment
(BTW, the picture at right is not actually Sarah Palin, but instead is pornstar Lisa Ann who portrayed Palin in a porn film. Lisa Ann is as close as you will get to a picture of Sarah Palin in my blog… unless you have a picture of Sarah Palin killing a puppy or slapping a child; I’ll put that on my blog).
One of the Palin ‘SarahPac’ spokespersons, Rebecca Mansour, has claimed that Sarah Palin and her supporters have been unfairly targeted by the media and states that the symbols are not ‘gunsights’ but map surveyor symbols. Strange how someone else gets shot and Sarah Palin is suddenly the victim. Shortly after the controversey, the graphic disappeared from the SarahPac website (which begs the question of whether or not those ‘cross hairs’ were indeed ‘surveyor symbols’ rather than gun sights… if they were just innocent surveyor symbols, why suddenly decide to take the graphic down?). Back in March of 2010, even media personality Elizabeth Hasselbeck, a Palin supporter, said the ‘gunsights’ were in poor taste and no one from the Palin campaign contradicted Hasselbeck or corrected her by announcing that they were ‘surveyor’ symbols at that time. It’s pretty clear (to me at least) that if Sarah Palin and her followers claim that there was no ‘violence’ in the message they were giving out, that they are lying sacks of shit — but, then again, what else is new?
However, despite my active dislike of Sarah Palin and everything she stands for, I can’t honestly say that I think she is responsible for the shooting. The things she says and tweets and posts on Facebook are stupid and reprehensible and I wish she wouldn’t say them… but they are also just words, and, unfortunately, given her right of free speech she has as much a right to say those words as I do to criticize what she says.
From my recollection, in 1995 when Timothy McVeigh detonated his bomb at the Alfred Murrah Building in Oklahoma, there was a period of stunned silence afterwards. The Limbaughs and the O’Reilleys and the others (whomever the lefty equivalents of Limbaugh might be — Rachel Maddow?) didn’t immediately chime in to offer blame (although, let’s be honest, then President Clinton did benefit, politically, from the unfortunate event — and his opponents like Newt Gingrich were forced to step back a bit from their anti-federalist rhetoric). Today it seemed like the politicals and pundits couldn’t wait to start blaming each other — the blood and brains were not yet cleaned up off the floor of the Safeway before the finger pointing began.
Thoughtcrime 1.0
Posted: December 21, 2010 Filed under: philosophy, politics, sexuality, stupidity, wierd stuff 2 Comments
Philip Greaves, the man who wrote a ‘how to’ book on pedophilia that was briefly for sale on Amazon, has been arrested in Florida even though he lives in Colorado. Greaves wrote and self-published the book, “The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure: A Child-Lover’s Code of Conduct,” in Pueblo, Colorado. It was briefly carried on Amazon.com, but, after considerable protest, removed from Amazon’s list of products for sale. Detectives in Polk County, Florida, apparently purchased the book from Greaves through the mail, had him arrested by the Pueblo police and are now seeking to have him extradited to Florida where he will be charged. Sheriff Grady Judd said, “The message is very clear: If you write a book, if you sell that book, if you transmit that book to anyone in our jurisdiction, then we will investigate you and arrest, because our goal is protect the children.“
I would never say that I like the idea of someone writing a book like Greave’s book. There is no doubt in my mind that pedophilia is wrong. But I’m extraordinarily disturbed that a Sheriff in Florida would first ask someone in another state to send him a book and then seek to arrest that person for having sent them the book. The arrest hinges on the fact that such a book is illegal in Florida (Mr. Greaves may have been ignorant of that fact), but Mr. Greaves did not violate the Florida law until detectives in Florida wrote to him and asked him to send them the book. The Sheriff is arresting Mr. Greaves for a crime that law enforcement officers encouraged Mr. Greaves to commit. Aren’t there any actual criminals in Florida in need or arrest?
The other part of the story that disturbs me is that Mr. Greaves isn’t being arrested for commiting acts of pedophila. He is being arrested for writing about pedophila. I think that’s an important distinction. I’m certain that rape is wrong and I think rape should be illegal, but I don’t recall anyone having suggested that it would be right to arrest Ayn Rand for the rape scene she wrote about in “The Fountainhead.” On a practical level, I am very uncomforable with laws that don’t limit themselves to what the criminal does, but instead extend into what the criminal might think or write about. Reading books about murder or fantasizing about murdering someone or even writing a book about killing someone is not murder. And yet, Sheriff Judd claims that he wants to protect the children by arresting someone in another state who wrote a book. Should the authors of ‘Lolita’ and ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ also be arrested since those works of fiction contain references to pedophilia?
The entire story worries me because it makes me wonder what the next logical progression of this event might be. If Greaves can be arrested for writing a book in Colorado that is illegal in Florida, where does Florida’s juristdiction end? If writing the book is illegal, how about owning or reading it? (and, honestly, I don’t know how anyone could judge the legality of the contents of the book without reading it) If writing or reading about certain matters is illegal, then shouldn’t thinking about them be wrong as well? And, if so, how do you enforce that law?
In the end, the issue isn’t pedophilia because, as far as I know, the author is not going to be charged with physical sexual misconduct. The author wrote a book in which he apparently described how one might go about seducing children… which, no matter how distasteful we might find that, is much different than actually doing it. If anyone deserves to be arrested on the basis of the Florida law that makes it illegal to import ‘pedophilia instruction manuals’ across the state line, shouldn’t it be the detectives who caused the book to be shipped to Florida by ordering it?