J.D. Rhoades's Blog, page 23
July 20, 2013
This is Outreach?
Latest Newspaper Column: The Pilot Newspaper
It’s pretty much accepted wisdom at this point that, in order to succeed on a national level, the Republican Party is going to have to broaden its appeal.
As South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham put it, “The demographics race we’re losing badly. We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.”
So what are conservative Republicans doing to expand their appeal on the national level?
Well, you have Phyllis Schlafly of the right-wing Eagle Forum going on conservative radio and explaining that it’s useless to try to reach out to Latinos because they don’t “have any Republican inclinations at all,” and “they’re running an illegitimacy rate that’s just about the same as the blacks are.”
Further, she said, Latinos “come from a country where they have no experience with limited government. And the types of rights we have in the Bill of Rights, they don’t understand that at all. You can’t even talk to them about what the Republican principle is.”
Perhaps someone can explain to Mrs. Schlafly, first off, that Latinos don’t come from “a country.” There is no country called Latinostan. Also, they can explain to her that insulting, en masse, the fastest-growing voting group in the U.S. is the path to political extinction.
Meanwhile, Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert (R-Off His Meds) defended his opposition to immigration reform and asserted that Latinos won’t punish the GOP at the ballot box with this gem: “I think you will see people start waking up and go, ‘Wow, I’m Hispanic and these Republicans really like me. … Wow, this Republican really does want me to do well. That’s the party I ought to be in!”
Yeah, Louie, let me know how that condescending and paternalistic attitude works out for you. Of course, this is the guy who once berated the attorney general for casting “aspersions on his asparagus,” much to the confusion of all in the hearing room, so maybe he’s jockeying for Michele Bachmann’s soon-to-be-vacant position as Head Loony of the Republican Caucus.
Don’t worry, ladies — the Republican Party hasn’t forgotten you! Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz., of course) recently demonstrated, once again, the GOP’s ignorance of female anatomy by confidently asserting that exceptions from abortion restrictions in case of rape are unnecessary because such pregnancies are “rare.” He apparently forgot that ignorant BS like that cost the GOP a Senate seat less than a year ago.
During the recent debacle in Texas, where the legislature came back especially to pass a restrictive abortion law, Republican legislator Jodie Lautenberg struck a blow for gender equality in the area of ignorance by claiming that emergency rooms have “rape kits” that “clean women out” (for the record, the rape kits are for collecting criminal evidence). Scottie Nell Hughes, director of the Tea Party News Network, went on TV saying that rape victims who end resulting pregnancies should serve the same jail time as their rapists. And the beat goes on.
Of course, there are some who say that there’s no need for outreach, that “angry white guys” are enough to carry them to the White House and control of the Senate. I invite those people to compare and contrast a pair of events that happened right here this past week in North Carolina. They are the latest “Moral Monday” protest on the Halifax Mall behind the General Assembly building and the “Thankful Tuesday” counter-demonstration the next evening.According to The News & Observer, the police estimated 2,000 attendees at the Moral Monday protest. Organizers pegged the number at closer to 5,000. The Tuesday protest, on the other hand, drew a mere 200 people, holding signs that said, “Stop Abortion Now,” and “Thank you [Gov. Pat] McCrory.”
So, even using the lowest estimate, 10 times as many people turned out to protest the General Assembly’s current path as turned out to support it. And the pictures from the event really tell the tale: The Moral Monday folks are a strikingly diverse group, of all ages and races. The TT’s … not so much. They are, shall we say, ethnically homogenous, and not one of them looks younger than 60.
Of course, the generally low turnout for TT may be because right now even a lot of sane Republicans are getting disgusted with the General Assembly’s full-steam-ahead efforts to enact a radical right-wing social agenda at the expense of little details like a state budget.
Maybe they’d get better turnout if they called for a “Stop Futzing Around and Pass a Budget Already Tuesday.” Granted, it doesn’t roll as trippingly off the tongue, but I think it accurately sums up the frustration I’m hearing from Republican friends of the non-insane variety. I know the GOP isn’t listening to me, but maybe it could listen to them.
It’s pretty much accepted wisdom at this point that, in order to succeed on a national level, the Republican Party is going to have to broaden its appeal.
As South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham put it, “The demographics race we’re losing badly. We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.”
So what are conservative Republicans doing to expand their appeal on the national level?
Well, you have Phyllis Schlafly of the right-wing Eagle Forum going on conservative radio and explaining that it’s useless to try to reach out to Latinos because they don’t “have any Republican inclinations at all,” and “they’re running an illegitimacy rate that’s just about the same as the blacks are.”
Further, she said, Latinos “come from a country where they have no experience with limited government. And the types of rights we have in the Bill of Rights, they don’t understand that at all. You can’t even talk to them about what the Republican principle is.”
Perhaps someone can explain to Mrs. Schlafly, first off, that Latinos don’t come from “a country.” There is no country called Latinostan. Also, they can explain to her that insulting, en masse, the fastest-growing voting group in the U.S. is the path to political extinction.
Meanwhile, Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert (R-Off His Meds) defended his opposition to immigration reform and asserted that Latinos won’t punish the GOP at the ballot box with this gem: “I think you will see people start waking up and go, ‘Wow, I’m Hispanic and these Republicans really like me. … Wow, this Republican really does want me to do well. That’s the party I ought to be in!”
Yeah, Louie, let me know how that condescending and paternalistic attitude works out for you. Of course, this is the guy who once berated the attorney general for casting “aspersions on his asparagus,” much to the confusion of all in the hearing room, so maybe he’s jockeying for Michele Bachmann’s soon-to-be-vacant position as Head Loony of the Republican Caucus.
Don’t worry, ladies — the Republican Party hasn’t forgotten you! Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz., of course) recently demonstrated, once again, the GOP’s ignorance of female anatomy by confidently asserting that exceptions from abortion restrictions in case of rape are unnecessary because such pregnancies are “rare.” He apparently forgot that ignorant BS like that cost the GOP a Senate seat less than a year ago.
During the recent debacle in Texas, where the legislature came back especially to pass a restrictive abortion law, Republican legislator Jodie Lautenberg struck a blow for gender equality in the area of ignorance by claiming that emergency rooms have “rape kits” that “clean women out” (for the record, the rape kits are for collecting criminal evidence). Scottie Nell Hughes, director of the Tea Party News Network, went on TV saying that rape victims who end resulting pregnancies should serve the same jail time as their rapists. And the beat goes on.
Of course, there are some who say that there’s no need for outreach, that “angry white guys” are enough to carry them to the White House and control of the Senate. I invite those people to compare and contrast a pair of events that happened right here this past week in North Carolina. They are the latest “Moral Monday” protest on the Halifax Mall behind the General Assembly building and the “Thankful Tuesday” counter-demonstration the next evening.According to The News & Observer, the police estimated 2,000 attendees at the Moral Monday protest. Organizers pegged the number at closer to 5,000. The Tuesday protest, on the other hand, drew a mere 200 people, holding signs that said, “Stop Abortion Now,” and “Thank you [Gov. Pat] McCrory.”
So, even using the lowest estimate, 10 times as many people turned out to protest the General Assembly’s current path as turned out to support it. And the pictures from the event really tell the tale: The Moral Monday folks are a strikingly diverse group, of all ages and races. The TT’s … not so much. They are, shall we say, ethnically homogenous, and not one of them looks younger than 60.
Of course, the generally low turnout for TT may be because right now even a lot of sane Republicans are getting disgusted with the General Assembly’s full-steam-ahead efforts to enact a radical right-wing social agenda at the expense of little details like a state budget.
Maybe they’d get better turnout if they called for a “Stop Futzing Around and Pass a Budget Already Tuesday.” Granted, it doesn’t roll as trippingly off the tongue, but I think it accurately sums up the frustration I’m hearing from Republican friends of the non-insane variety. I know the GOP isn’t listening to me, but maybe it could listen to them.
July 17, 2013
The Pictures Tell The Tale Here In NC
"A crowd of about 200 hollered and cheered. They waved signs that bore messages Halifax Mall isn’t used to seeing on Mondays: “Stop abortion now,” and “Thank you McCrory.”
The turnout for the last Moral Monday?
Police estimate 2,000, organizers say 5,000, even the most conservative estimates put the Moral Monday crowd at 10 times the size of the tiny, ethnically homogenous, aging supporters of our ridiculous General Assembly.You are seeing the future, right here.
Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/07/1...
July 15, 2013
July 14, 2013
The Brilliant Bigot
Latest Column-The Pilot Newspaper: Dusty Rhoades
Those of you who aren’t science fiction geeks have probably never heard of Orson Scott Card. But those of us who love stories of possible futures and pasts that never were, he’s one of the legends. He’s won the Hugo, the Nebula, the Locus and a slew of other awards.
One of his best-known novels is the classic “Ender’s Game,” the story of a young boy being turned into a killer in a brutal orbital boot camp set up to train child soldiers to fight an alien enemy. It’s a great book, a real-page turner. It’s complex and dark and shocking and thought-provoking, with an ending that makes you go “Whoa. I did not see that coming.” Card is a truly gifted writer. A master of the craft.
He’s also an irrational anti-gay bigot.
Card has written extensively against homosexuality and same-sex marriage, even going so far as to suggest that legalization of same-sex marriage would be sufficient justification for armed overthrow of the government.
“Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy,” he wrote. “I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage, and help me raise my children in a society where they will expect to marry in their turn.”
He’s claimed that “the dark secret of homosexual society — the one that dares not speak its name — is how many homosexuals first entered into that world through a disturbing seduction or rape or molestation or abuse, and how many of them yearn to get out of the homosexual community and live normally.”
One wonders how Mr. Card knows the “dark secret of homosexual society,” but we’ll leave that aside for the moment. Lately, however, there was some evidence that Mr. Card has come around — or has he?
He wrote a piece that appeared in Entertainment Weekly, in which he stated that the recent Supreme Court decision on the Defense of Marriage Act has rendered the gay-marriage issue “moot.” He said, “The Full Faith and Credit clause of the Constitution will, sooner or later, give legal force in every state to any marriage contract recognized by any other state.”
So far, so good, and probably legally correct. But he went on to say: “Now it will be interesting to see whether the victorious proponents of gay marriage will show tolerance toward those who disagreed with them when the issue was still in dispute.”
Well, I have good news for you, Mr. Card. I’m reasonably sure that there won’t be a French Revolution style Reign of Terror against you and people who think like you. No guillotines, no tribunals.
I’m even willing to bet that there won’t be any kind of movement to deny you and your beloved the things you’d deny to same-sex couples — everyday things such as being able to cover your spouse on your health plan, pay hospital visits as a matter of right, be considered next of kin for health care decisions, inherit without a will, etc.
You get to keep doing all that stuff. You don’t have to get divorced and gay married now, and your children can still “expect to marry in their turn.” And you can still write whatever you want. Feel better?
As it turns out, though, that’s really not what Mr. Card means when he talks about “tolerance.”
See, “Ender’s Game” is being released as a movie, and there are some pro-marriage-equality groups who have put forth the proposition that since this Card fellow has spent a great deal of time, creative energy, and money supporting causes that directly oppose interests vital to their well-being, maybe they shouldn’t help support him with their own hard-earned shekels by paying for tickets to see the movie.
I can see their point, although I personally have always been of the opinion that the artist’s work should be judged on its own. Let’s face it — there have been some artists who have done great works despite being generally awful people.
The brilliant poet Ezra Pound was a Fascist and a Nazi collaborator. Jackson Pollock was a wife-beating drunk. And so on. But I don’t boycott them. Of course, those artists have the advantage of being dead, so I don’t have to worry about the money I spend enjoying their art being used against the interests of people I care about.
So will I go see “Ender’s Game: The Movie”? I don’t know. I still haven’t made up my mind. But I certainly won’t blame those who make the choice not to help the career of someone who’s worked, written, and spent money to deny them the things they hold dear.
“Tolerance” doesn’t require people to help pay for the shine on the boot that’s been kicking them.
Those of you who aren’t science fiction geeks have probably never heard of Orson Scott Card. But those of us who love stories of possible futures and pasts that never were, he’s one of the legends. He’s won the Hugo, the Nebula, the Locus and a slew of other awards.
One of his best-known novels is the classic “Ender’s Game,” the story of a young boy being turned into a killer in a brutal orbital boot camp set up to train child soldiers to fight an alien enemy. It’s a great book, a real-page turner. It’s complex and dark and shocking and thought-provoking, with an ending that makes you go “Whoa. I did not see that coming.” Card is a truly gifted writer. A master of the craft.
He’s also an irrational anti-gay bigot.
Card has written extensively against homosexuality and same-sex marriage, even going so far as to suggest that legalization of same-sex marriage would be sufficient justification for armed overthrow of the government.
“Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy,” he wrote. “I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage, and help me raise my children in a society where they will expect to marry in their turn.”
He’s claimed that “the dark secret of homosexual society — the one that dares not speak its name — is how many homosexuals first entered into that world through a disturbing seduction or rape or molestation or abuse, and how many of them yearn to get out of the homosexual community and live normally.”
One wonders how Mr. Card knows the “dark secret of homosexual society,” but we’ll leave that aside for the moment. Lately, however, there was some evidence that Mr. Card has come around — or has he?
He wrote a piece that appeared in Entertainment Weekly, in which he stated that the recent Supreme Court decision on the Defense of Marriage Act has rendered the gay-marriage issue “moot.” He said, “The Full Faith and Credit clause of the Constitution will, sooner or later, give legal force in every state to any marriage contract recognized by any other state.”
So far, so good, and probably legally correct. But he went on to say: “Now it will be interesting to see whether the victorious proponents of gay marriage will show tolerance toward those who disagreed with them when the issue was still in dispute.”
Well, I have good news for you, Mr. Card. I’m reasonably sure that there won’t be a French Revolution style Reign of Terror against you and people who think like you. No guillotines, no tribunals.
I’m even willing to bet that there won’t be any kind of movement to deny you and your beloved the things you’d deny to same-sex couples — everyday things such as being able to cover your spouse on your health plan, pay hospital visits as a matter of right, be considered next of kin for health care decisions, inherit without a will, etc.
You get to keep doing all that stuff. You don’t have to get divorced and gay married now, and your children can still “expect to marry in their turn.” And you can still write whatever you want. Feel better?
As it turns out, though, that’s really not what Mr. Card means when he talks about “tolerance.”
See, “Ender’s Game” is being released as a movie, and there are some pro-marriage-equality groups who have put forth the proposition that since this Card fellow has spent a great deal of time, creative energy, and money supporting causes that directly oppose interests vital to their well-being, maybe they shouldn’t help support him with their own hard-earned shekels by paying for tickets to see the movie.
I can see their point, although I personally have always been of the opinion that the artist’s work should be judged on its own. Let’s face it — there have been some artists who have done great works despite being generally awful people.
The brilliant poet Ezra Pound was a Fascist and a Nazi collaborator. Jackson Pollock was a wife-beating drunk. And so on. But I don’t boycott them. Of course, those artists have the advantage of being dead, so I don’t have to worry about the money I spend enjoying their art being used against the interests of people I care about.
So will I go see “Ender’s Game: The Movie”? I don’t know. I still haven’t made up my mind. But I certainly won’t blame those who make the choice not to help the career of someone who’s worked, written, and spent money to deny them the things they hold dear.
“Tolerance” doesn’t require people to help pay for the shine on the boot that’s been kicking them.
July 9, 2013
Strange Priorities
Latest Newspaper Column:
So our Glorious Republican Overlords, despite having taken control of the state House, Senate and governorship, have been unable, as of this writing, to come up with a budget in time for the new fiscal year. And I see the House decided to celebrate its failure by taking the last week off while the rest of us had to work.
So let’s see what the party that promised to bring fiscal responsibility and jobs to North Carolina has been doing since the beginning of the year:
— A bill passed by the House and currently under consideration by the Senate would ban the use of “Shariah law” in proceedings in North Carolina courts.
Well, thanks be to God for that. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had to contend with some bearded mullah coming into our courthouse and trying to argue that some defendant needs to have his hand cut off for stealing DVDs at Walmart. I’m certainly glad solving that non-problem was a bigger priority for the House than working on a budget.
It’s not just Shariah, however. That might show bigotry, not to mention ignorance. The use of any foreign law can be challenged, even if its use is provided for by contract. I’m sure that foreign companies will be even more eager to do business in our fair state after finding that out. Just as well. I never trusted the Dutch, anyway.
— Then, when the bill came to the Senate, they suddenly tried to tack on new restrictions on abortion clinics.
“Sometimes these things come together at the last minute,” Sen. Buck Newton, R-Wilson, told WRAL-TV. Because “the last minute” is when you want to start adding restrictions on what the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld as a constitutional right.
When asked point-blank during debate if he could “cite a health issue related to abortion” at a clinic compliant with current regulations, Republican Sen. Chad Barefoot had to admit, “I cannot.” But I guess they thought we needed to rush this through the day before the holiday anyway (while, let me repeat, we still don’t have a budget). I guess we don’t want to get shown up by Texas.
— A new bill mandates that all students in North Carolina public schools be taught cursive writing.
According to The Winston-Salem Journal, Rep. Pat Hurley of neighboring Randolph County became perturbed when thank-you notes she received from a class that visited her office were all printed. “After some research,” the story says, Rep. Hurley discovered that “many schools were leaving the decision to teach cursive up to individual teachers.” The horror!
Rep. Hurley, you look like a nice lady, but really? This is what you set your staff to researching in a time of fiscal crisis? Are CEOs of businesses who are thinking of bringing jobs to North Carolina going to turn to their minions and say, “Well, we were going to put the corporate headquarters in Randleman, but we found out the schools aren’t teaching cursive. That’s a deal breaker, people. Looks like we’re headed to Massachusetts”? We think not.
— A bill expands the state’s indecent exposure law to prohibit the exposure of “the nipple, or any portion of the areola, or the female breast.”
Rep. Rayne Brown, R-Davidson, said that her concerns were raised not by strip clubs or nudie magazines, but by topless protests for women’s equality in Asheville, a good hundred miles from her district. Still, Rep. Brown says, “some of her constituents were concerned” about the Ashevillian Feministas showing their naughty bits. I’ve always thought Davidson County was kind of pretty, but must be a paradise on Earth if that’s what all they’ve got to worry about.
And, of course, I’ve already written about the cockeyed proposal to require couples to wait two years instead of one to get a divorce and get hours of counseling in the meantime (without saying how it’s to be paid for). And the resolution to allow North Carolina to declare itself exempt from the First Amendment and establish a state religion.And the law that would allow people to carry concealed guns in bars (no way THAT could go wrong). The list goes on and on.
Congratulations, Republicans! You’ve managed to prove yourselves as feckless and ineffective as the Democrats you replaced. You’d think that a one-party state could manage to get at least some budget passed. But not, apparently, if that party is the GOP, who can’t seem to concentrate on what they claim is their core competency: fiscal responsibility.
They choose instead to fritter away time and energy (and taxpayer money) on a radical social agenda to push us resolutely back into the 19th century. The old bait-and-switch continues.
So our Glorious Republican Overlords, despite having taken control of the state House, Senate and governorship, have been unable, as of this writing, to come up with a budget in time for the new fiscal year. And I see the House decided to celebrate its failure by taking the last week off while the rest of us had to work.
So let’s see what the party that promised to bring fiscal responsibility and jobs to North Carolina has been doing since the beginning of the year:
— A bill passed by the House and currently under consideration by the Senate would ban the use of “Shariah law” in proceedings in North Carolina courts.
Well, thanks be to God for that. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had to contend with some bearded mullah coming into our courthouse and trying to argue that some defendant needs to have his hand cut off for stealing DVDs at Walmart. I’m certainly glad solving that non-problem was a bigger priority for the House than working on a budget.
It’s not just Shariah, however. That might show bigotry, not to mention ignorance. The use of any foreign law can be challenged, even if its use is provided for by contract. I’m sure that foreign companies will be even more eager to do business in our fair state after finding that out. Just as well. I never trusted the Dutch, anyway.
— Then, when the bill came to the Senate, they suddenly tried to tack on new restrictions on abortion clinics.
“Sometimes these things come together at the last minute,” Sen. Buck Newton, R-Wilson, told WRAL-TV. Because “the last minute” is when you want to start adding restrictions on what the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld as a constitutional right.
When asked point-blank during debate if he could “cite a health issue related to abortion” at a clinic compliant with current regulations, Republican Sen. Chad Barefoot had to admit, “I cannot.” But I guess they thought we needed to rush this through the day before the holiday anyway (while, let me repeat, we still don’t have a budget). I guess we don’t want to get shown up by Texas.
— A new bill mandates that all students in North Carolina public schools be taught cursive writing.
According to The Winston-Salem Journal, Rep. Pat Hurley of neighboring Randolph County became perturbed when thank-you notes she received from a class that visited her office were all printed. “After some research,” the story says, Rep. Hurley discovered that “many schools were leaving the decision to teach cursive up to individual teachers.” The horror!
Rep. Hurley, you look like a nice lady, but really? This is what you set your staff to researching in a time of fiscal crisis? Are CEOs of businesses who are thinking of bringing jobs to North Carolina going to turn to their minions and say, “Well, we were going to put the corporate headquarters in Randleman, but we found out the schools aren’t teaching cursive. That’s a deal breaker, people. Looks like we’re headed to Massachusetts”? We think not.
— A bill expands the state’s indecent exposure law to prohibit the exposure of “the nipple, or any portion of the areola, or the female breast.”
Rep. Rayne Brown, R-Davidson, said that her concerns were raised not by strip clubs or nudie magazines, but by topless protests for women’s equality in Asheville, a good hundred miles from her district. Still, Rep. Brown says, “some of her constituents were concerned” about the Ashevillian Feministas showing their naughty bits. I’ve always thought Davidson County was kind of pretty, but must be a paradise on Earth if that’s what all they’ve got to worry about.
And, of course, I’ve already written about the cockeyed proposal to require couples to wait two years instead of one to get a divorce and get hours of counseling in the meantime (without saying how it’s to be paid for). And the resolution to allow North Carolina to declare itself exempt from the First Amendment and establish a state religion.And the law that would allow people to carry concealed guns in bars (no way THAT could go wrong). The list goes on and on.
Congratulations, Republicans! You’ve managed to prove yourselves as feckless and ineffective as the Democrats you replaced. You’d think that a one-party state could manage to get at least some budget passed. But not, apparently, if that party is the GOP, who can’t seem to concentrate on what they claim is their core competency: fiscal responsibility.
They choose instead to fritter away time and energy (and taxpayer money) on a radical social agenda to push us resolutely back into the 19th century. The old bait-and-switch continues.
June 30, 2013
Today's "Mad Men": What Planet Are They From?
Latest Newspaper Column
One of the shows I really like right now is AMC’s “Mad Men,” the story of dissolution, intrigue, betrayal, and general degeneracy in a New York advertising agency in the 1960s.
It takes me back to a different time. A time of great turmoil to be sure, but also a time of great style and sophistication. It’s also a time when I actually understood advertising. I know I’ve mentioned this before, but a lot of the ads I see these days leave me scratching my head, and not because I need Head and Shoulders.
Take, for example, those ads for Cialis. You know the ones I mean: the ones where an affectionate and attractive couple is engaging in various everyday activities, when the woman does something that makes the guy gaze at his significant other with a look that says, “Once my little pill kicks in, you and me are gonna get BUSY, girl.”
That part I get. What I don’t get is the activities that spark that sudden flash of interest. I mean, I know different people have different turn-ons, but having my sweetie wipe a crumb of food off my face has, to the best of my knowledge, never caused either of us to want to tear each other’s clothing off.
Nor has watching a woman, even a cute one, hop on one foot while trying to get a shoe on. You know what happens to a guy who starts laughing at his lady trying to get dressed? I’ll give you a hint: It’s probably not sweet, sweet lovin’.
Then there are the ads for Miller 64, which I assume is a low-calorie beer. I assume this, because the ads consist of various young (and of course attractive) people engaging in a variety of healthy and strenuous activities, like going to the gym or playing beach volleyball, all the time singing a rousing chorus of what sounds like a pirate sea chantey. Because if there’s two things that you associate with healthy athleticism, it’s beer and pirates, right?
Sorry, you’re never going to convince me that beer — any beer — is a sports drink like Gatorade. And light beer? Pheh. You may as well be drinking water, which if you’ve been working out or playing beach volleyball, you should have been doing in the first place anyway.
By the way, have you seen the new Apple ad? The one where the narrator praises Apple as if they’d just created the Mona Lisa while finding the cure for cancer? “We spend a lot of time on a few great things, until every idea we touch enhances each life it touches,” the narrator intones. “You may rarely look at it, but you’ll always feel it. ... This is our signature, and it means everything.”
This, I suppose, is supposed to make me think “Wow, Apple is so awesome! I need to go out and buy all their stuff right this second.” What it really makes me think is, “Jeez ,Apple, get over yourself.”
The “signature” referred to, by the way, can be found engraved on many Apple products: “Designed by Apple in California.” What it leaves out is “…and built by workers in China living in near-slavery and driven to suicidal despair by their conditions.” I guess they figured that wouldn’t fit.
But the weirdest ads of all are the one for Velveeta Shells and Cheese that feature guys like the one who sells remote-control helicopters in the mall, or the one who has a ham radio in his basement and can talk to “Mongolia and all the Koreas.” (Wow. I didn’t know people still do ham radio.)
Apparently, the fact that these slightly offbeat fellows are fond of “Liquid Gold,” as the narrator calls it, is supposed to make us hunger for Kraft’s version of the classic comfort food. “Eat … like that guy you know!” the narrator commands in a drill-sergeant growl.
Look, I like mac ‘n’ cheese as much as the next guy, but it’s not because basement-dwelling radio enthusiast or some geeky mall rat selling toys out of a kiosk likes it.
I know it makes me sound like an old dude, but back in my day, we had ads that people could understand. Oh sure, they were annoying. Remember “Ring Around the Collar”?
It made you want to punch someone, but at least you could understand what they were trying to make you paranoid about, and it did draw much needed attention to the previously unsuspected problem of neck dirt.
But some of the things I see now make me wonder if the modern day “Mad Men” come from the same planet as I do.
One of the shows I really like right now is AMC’s “Mad Men,” the story of dissolution, intrigue, betrayal, and general degeneracy in a New York advertising agency in the 1960s.
It takes me back to a different time. A time of great turmoil to be sure, but also a time of great style and sophistication. It’s also a time when I actually understood advertising. I know I’ve mentioned this before, but a lot of the ads I see these days leave me scratching my head, and not because I need Head and Shoulders.
Take, for example, those ads for Cialis. You know the ones I mean: the ones where an affectionate and attractive couple is engaging in various everyday activities, when the woman does something that makes the guy gaze at his significant other with a look that says, “Once my little pill kicks in, you and me are gonna get BUSY, girl.”
That part I get. What I don’t get is the activities that spark that sudden flash of interest. I mean, I know different people have different turn-ons, but having my sweetie wipe a crumb of food off my face has, to the best of my knowledge, never caused either of us to want to tear each other’s clothing off.
Nor has watching a woman, even a cute one, hop on one foot while trying to get a shoe on. You know what happens to a guy who starts laughing at his lady trying to get dressed? I’ll give you a hint: It’s probably not sweet, sweet lovin’.
Then there are the ads for Miller 64, which I assume is a low-calorie beer. I assume this, because the ads consist of various young (and of course attractive) people engaging in a variety of healthy and strenuous activities, like going to the gym or playing beach volleyball, all the time singing a rousing chorus of what sounds like a pirate sea chantey. Because if there’s two things that you associate with healthy athleticism, it’s beer and pirates, right?
Sorry, you’re never going to convince me that beer — any beer — is a sports drink like Gatorade. And light beer? Pheh. You may as well be drinking water, which if you’ve been working out or playing beach volleyball, you should have been doing in the first place anyway.
By the way, have you seen the new Apple ad? The one where the narrator praises Apple as if they’d just created the Mona Lisa while finding the cure for cancer? “We spend a lot of time on a few great things, until every idea we touch enhances each life it touches,” the narrator intones. “You may rarely look at it, but you’ll always feel it. ... This is our signature, and it means everything.”
This, I suppose, is supposed to make me think “Wow, Apple is so awesome! I need to go out and buy all their stuff right this second.” What it really makes me think is, “Jeez ,Apple, get over yourself.”
The “signature” referred to, by the way, can be found engraved on many Apple products: “Designed by Apple in California.” What it leaves out is “…and built by workers in China living in near-slavery and driven to suicidal despair by their conditions.” I guess they figured that wouldn’t fit.
But the weirdest ads of all are the one for Velveeta Shells and Cheese that feature guys like the one who sells remote-control helicopters in the mall, or the one who has a ham radio in his basement and can talk to “Mongolia and all the Koreas.” (Wow. I didn’t know people still do ham radio.)
Apparently, the fact that these slightly offbeat fellows are fond of “Liquid Gold,” as the narrator calls it, is supposed to make us hunger for Kraft’s version of the classic comfort food. “Eat … like that guy you know!” the narrator commands in a drill-sergeant growl.
Look, I like mac ‘n’ cheese as much as the next guy, but it’s not because basement-dwelling radio enthusiast or some geeky mall rat selling toys out of a kiosk likes it.
I know it makes me sound like an old dude, but back in my day, we had ads that people could understand. Oh sure, they were annoying. Remember “Ring Around the Collar”?
It made you want to punch someone, but at least you could understand what they were trying to make you paranoid about, and it did draw much needed attention to the previously unsuspected problem of neck dirt.
But some of the things I see now make me wonder if the modern day “Mad Men” come from the same planet as I do.
June 23, 2013
Syria: Here Comes The Creep Again
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There’s a quote I heard somewhere — I can’t remember exactly where — that says, “Men tempt you with your vices; the devil tempts you with your virtues.” I think of that quote a lot when I think about the recent decision by President Obama to send military aid to Syria in addition to the humanitarian aid we’re already providing.
I know I said a couple of weeks ago that the Democrats were just doing their usual act, trying to prove they were all for another overseas military intervention just to keep the Republicans from calling them wimps.
After thinking about it, I’m willing to allow as how maybe, just maybe, both Republicans and Democrats really do think that some sort of intervention in Syria is the right thing to do because what’s going on there is horrible, Bashar el-Assad’s a brutal dictator, and helping the people of Syria out is a good and right and American act because we love to help the oppressed.
I still don’t think we should do it.
The Syrian conflict is as much a sectarian war as a political one. Syria is about 10-14 percent Christian, 10-14 percent Shiite Muslim, with most of the remainder being Sunni Muslims. Except that Assad and most of the elite (including about 70 percent of the career military) are Alawites, which is a branch of the Shiites. Sort of. Even some Shiites are suspicious of the Alawites for some of their more unorthodox beliefs. (This sort of thing is the reason I routinely mock people who talk about “Muslims” as if they were some huge monolithic organization. These people make the Baptists look unified.)
The Alawites were oppressed by the majority Sunnis until Bashar’s father, Hafiz al-Assad, rose to the power that he held with an iron fist for nearly 30 years. One of the reasons the government is fighting so hard, according to some observers, is the fear that the Alawites will be massacred by resentful Sunnis if the regime falls.
It would be a grim and bitter irony if the “oppressed” we spend the time arming turn around and become the oppressors again. It would not, however, be a huge surprise. In 2011, the uprising in the city of Homs left dozens dead, mostly Allawites, after which pro-government forces engaged in a series of drive-by shootings of civilians in Sunni neighborhoods. I hope you’re beginning to see why we should avoid this whole mess.
Saudi Arabia (ruled by Sunnis) is backing the rebels, while Iran (ruled by Shiites) backs the government. Meanwhile, one of the most powerful and best-equipped rebel groups is an al-Qaida affiliate called the al-Nusra Front. On the government side, we’ve got fighters trained by and loyal to the Shiite terrorist group Hezbollah.
So we have militias, some of whom are associated with or loyal to al-Qaida, killing and being killed by troops of a government supported by Hezbollah. I’m tempted to say, “Where’s the downside?” — and would if it weren’t for all those poor civilians caught in the middle. Still, putting ourselves on one side or the other of a fight between Muslim sects is a recipe for disaster.
I’m somewhat comforted — but only somewhat — by President Obama’s statement in a televised interview with Charlie Rose that he’s not looking at sending in troops or Special Forces or even setting up the “no-fly” zones that people like Honorable John McCain are clamoring for. “If you set up a no-fly zone,” Obama noted, “you may not be actually solving the problem on the ground.” We’re “just” giving weapons to them, and apparently hoping that they don’t end up in the hands of people who’ll be happy to use them on us once the fighting in Syria is over (if indeed it ever is). And it’s nice to see that no one is (as yet) proposing to give man-portable anti-aircraft weapons to the rebels, since there’s a good chance that one or more of them could end up in the hands of some guy skulking at the end of an American runway, just waiting to bring down a 767 or an Airbus.
But limited assistance has a way of becoming less and less limited as time goes on and the demands of those we’re trying to help become greater. It’s called “mission creep,” and historical examples abound, from Vietnam to Somalia to Afghanistan.
“We know what it’s like to rush into a war in the Middle East without having thought it through,” Obama told Rose. But I’m not completely sure I like the idea of slowly creeping our way into another Middle Eastern war any better, even if we do it with the best of intentions.
June 17, 2013
Nailed it
This is why Pearls Before Swine is one of my favorite comics. June 16, 2013
Seems I've Heard All This Before
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The story is told in these parts of a local lawyer who, many years ago, was appointed to represent a man on a charge of indecent exposure.
Sadly, it wasn’t said defendant’s first such charge. In fact, it seems that the disturbed young man had a long record of flashing people. Thinking quickly, the lawyer argued that the law defined “indecent exposure” as the display of one’s “private parts.” This man, the lawyer argued, had displayed himself so many times that none of his parts could be considered “private” any more.
Case dismissed.
If the law ever catches up with Edward Snowden, the former “civilian contractor” who claims to be the inside source for a spate of recent news stories revealing the extent of government data collection of phone and Internet traffic, he could always use the defense my long-ago colleague used: This stuff’s so well-known and has been documented for so long, it’s not really secret.
See, I’m a little bemused (not to mention amused) by the people who are suddenly shocked — SHOCKED, I tell you — to find out that the government is (1) collecting the metadata (which number called which other number and for how long) from millions of phone conversations; and (2) collecting data regarding people’s interactions on the Internet, including “search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats,” as reported in the British newspaper The Guardian.
My bemusement (and amusement) are caused by the fact that I thought it was pretty much common knowledge that this was going on. I mean, if I knew and was writing about the phone thing as far back as 2006 (and I was), the knowledge must have been pretty doggone common.
I also recall a conversation I had with someone discussing the government’s collection of Internet data.
“What’s the matter?” the person smirked. “Is there something in your Google searches you don’t want someone to see?”
I answered that, since my online research for the book I was writing had recently included searches on child pornography distribution networks and Claymore mines, I did have concerns that someone might get the wrong idea. (The book, by the way, was my novel “Breaking Cover,” which first came out in 2005. Still available on Amazon. Just saying.)
Anyway, anyone who’s surprised to find out that the government has been using sophisticated computers to spy on phone and Internet traffic really hasn’t been paying a heck of a lot of attention the past few years. What some people claim to be upset about is the breathtaking amount of data trawled by the government’s electronic nets.
“We had no idea,” they claim, “that when we handed incredible amounts of authority to collect data to a government equipped with massive banks of supercomputers, they’d go after THIS much!”
There’s a word for people like that. That word is “fools.”
See, the real scandal is, it’s all legal. In fact, the best thing said about this whole kerfluffle came from John Oliver on his first night as summer host of “The Daily Show.” “We’re not saying that you broke any laws,” he said to the president and the NSA. “It’s just a little weird that you didn’t have to.”
The entire PRISM program, which began in 2007, was a successor to the widely criticized “Terrorist Surveillance Program,” which began after 9/11 under the President Who Must Not Be Named. The TSP drew fire because it hadn’t been authorized by law or overseen by anyone, including the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
PRISM, on the other hand, was created under the umbrella of the Protect America Act of 2007 and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which were renewed by Congress under President Obama in 2012 (because once you give one president power, the next ones are unlikely to give it back). All of this happened without much comment by anyone, except a few liberal bloggers like Glenn Greenwald (who helped write the Guardian story), and libertarian conservatives like Ron Paul.
That’s another one of the weird things about this whole debate — it’s created some of the strangest bedfellows since Billy Bob Thornton took up with Angelina Jolie. Liberal California Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Republican House Speaker John Boehner both called Snowden a “traitor” and defended the surveillance program, while Glenn Beck and Michael Moore have hailed Snowden as a hero.
So, with the ideological walls crumbling, will some actual, nonpartisan scrutiny be given to the claim that “we need to invade your privacy, because of TERRORISM”? Will we finally get an honest, non-party-driven debate over what privacy actually means in an increasingly nonprivate, nonsecured, globally networked datasphere most of us barely understand?
Well, we live in hope.
The story is told in these parts of a local lawyer who, many years ago, was appointed to represent a man on a charge of indecent exposure.
Sadly, it wasn’t said defendant’s first such charge. In fact, it seems that the disturbed young man had a long record of flashing people. Thinking quickly, the lawyer argued that the law defined “indecent exposure” as the display of one’s “private parts.” This man, the lawyer argued, had displayed himself so many times that none of his parts could be considered “private” any more.
Case dismissed.
If the law ever catches up with Edward Snowden, the former “civilian contractor” who claims to be the inside source for a spate of recent news stories revealing the extent of government data collection of phone and Internet traffic, he could always use the defense my long-ago colleague used: This stuff’s so well-known and has been documented for so long, it’s not really secret.
See, I’m a little bemused (not to mention amused) by the people who are suddenly shocked — SHOCKED, I tell you — to find out that the government is (1) collecting the metadata (which number called which other number and for how long) from millions of phone conversations; and (2) collecting data regarding people’s interactions on the Internet, including “search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats,” as reported in the British newspaper The Guardian.
My bemusement (and amusement) are caused by the fact that I thought it was pretty much common knowledge that this was going on. I mean, if I knew and was writing about the phone thing as far back as 2006 (and I was), the knowledge must have been pretty doggone common.
I also recall a conversation I had with someone discussing the government’s collection of Internet data.
“What’s the matter?” the person smirked. “Is there something in your Google searches you don’t want someone to see?”
I answered that, since my online research for the book I was writing had recently included searches on child pornography distribution networks and Claymore mines, I did have concerns that someone might get the wrong idea. (The book, by the way, was my novel “Breaking Cover,” which first came out in 2005. Still available on Amazon. Just saying.)
Anyway, anyone who’s surprised to find out that the government has been using sophisticated computers to spy on phone and Internet traffic really hasn’t been paying a heck of a lot of attention the past few years. What some people claim to be upset about is the breathtaking amount of data trawled by the government’s electronic nets.
“We had no idea,” they claim, “that when we handed incredible amounts of authority to collect data to a government equipped with massive banks of supercomputers, they’d go after THIS much!”
There’s a word for people like that. That word is “fools.”
See, the real scandal is, it’s all legal. In fact, the best thing said about this whole kerfluffle came from John Oliver on his first night as summer host of “The Daily Show.” “We’re not saying that you broke any laws,” he said to the president and the NSA. “It’s just a little weird that you didn’t have to.”
The entire PRISM program, which began in 2007, was a successor to the widely criticized “Terrorist Surveillance Program,” which began after 9/11 under the President Who Must Not Be Named. The TSP drew fire because it hadn’t been authorized by law or overseen by anyone, including the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
PRISM, on the other hand, was created under the umbrella of the Protect America Act of 2007 and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which were renewed by Congress under President Obama in 2012 (because once you give one president power, the next ones are unlikely to give it back). All of this happened without much comment by anyone, except a few liberal bloggers like Glenn Greenwald (who helped write the Guardian story), and libertarian conservatives like Ron Paul.
That’s another one of the weird things about this whole debate — it’s created some of the strangest bedfellows since Billy Bob Thornton took up with Angelina Jolie. Liberal California Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Republican House Speaker John Boehner both called Snowden a “traitor” and defended the surveillance program, while Glenn Beck and Michael Moore have hailed Snowden as a hero.
So, with the ideological walls crumbling, will some actual, nonpartisan scrutiny be given to the claim that “we need to invade your privacy, because of TERRORISM”? Will we finally get an honest, non-party-driven debate over what privacy actually means in an increasingly nonprivate, nonsecured, globally networked datasphere most of us barely understand?
Well, we live in hope.
