Politics As Advertising

No, this isn’t about political ads — may a pox be upon all of them.  This post by Aaron Clarey examines why Corporate America has turned into a collection of fucking scolds, despite all the marketing precepts that define marketing stupidity as injecting politics into your corporate ethos.  Here’s a brief excerpt:

But now corporations sermonizing the rest of the world about leftist politics has gone viral. And it behooves the question why. Why would corporations take such a risk? Why would corporations be so foolish? And you can call me an ole fuddy duddy, by why are corporations so arrogant and rude? How dare you assholes lecture me about anything outside the purchase of your product or service, you smug, cocky, arrogant assholes?

And then he answers all that in the rest of the post.  Read it all;  it’s worth it, despite its horrible conclusion.

Then go and smash your head against the wall, like I did.

Quote Of The Day

This from Jazz Shaw, talking about the recent spate of attacks on ICE offices:

The thing is, you can’t have it both ways. If you’re going to blame Donald Trump’s rhetoric on immigration for shootings targeting minorities, you can’t simply turn around and ignore this. We have Democratic presidential candidates, “squad” activists, cable news anchors and editorials from major newspapers constantly demonizing ICE, calling for it to be abolished and blaming all manner of human misery on immigration enforcement offices who are simply upholding the law.
How can you observe all of this in context and not blame their rhetoric for the fact that people are shooting up or trying to bomb ICE offices and last night came within inches of murdering someone? The answer is that you can’t, at least if you want to label yourself as an unbiased observer of events.

He’s quite right, of course, albeit woefully naïve.  As Glenn Reynolds so often notes, if the media didn’t have double standards, they wouldn’t have any standards at all.

Nobody Cares

If ever there’s a case of wealthy people playing by their own set of rules, it’s this one:

As supercars flood the streets of Kensington, Chelsea and Belgravia, the people who live in London’s most affluent corners are battling infuriating levels of noise and the ever-present threat of a deadly accident.
Driven by young, rich and largely Middle-Eastern men, the high-performance vehicles can be heard tearing around late into the night.
And last week, an Audi Q7 4×4 caused £1million of damage when it wiped out a £200,000 McLaren, £40,000 Porsche, £200,000 Bentley along with eight other cars when the driver ploughed into the vehicles in a shocking crash caught on CCTV.
It left the well-heeled occupants of Moore Street and the surrounding areas fearing that muscles cars will one day kill one of their neighbours after the Audi’s driver was taken to hospital with a serious head injury.

Ooooh the humanity!

Here’s the problem with all this.  If the local councils wanted to eliminate street racing completely, there’s a two-word solution:  speed bumps.

 

Let’s see how Abdul El-Speedah reacts when his Lambo hits one of these puppies at 50mph:

 

Now before the Anti-Speed Bump Brigade comes at me with pitchforks etc., please remember that what we’re talking about here is city  streets, not exurban ones (which local town councils seem to install just for spite, sometimes).

There is no excuse — none — for speeding in London’s narrow streets, and as I said, if the borough councils were willing, they could end it in a couple weeks.

Said councils would probably not follow my other suggestion (ambushes featuring local volunteers armed with AK-47s), so they might as well follow the Wussy Highway and pop in the bumps.

Problem is that the Ryche Pharts who live in Chelsea, Pimlico and Belgravia also  face damage to their own low-slung road rockets like Ferraris and Lambos  (although most seem to own Chelsea Tractors — Range Rovers — so maybe it wouldn’t be too bad on the locals).

Fact remains that there is a solution to Arab boy racers, and it’s effective, cheap and easy, so why don’t the councils just do it?  Oh wait… “effective, cheap and easy” and “government”:  I just answered my own question.

Tolerance

Let’s hear from the “tolerant” wing of Gun Control, Inc.:

And we’re  the extremists?  (More of the same stuff here.)

I suspect that many politicians of the gun-controlling persuasion would clutch their pearls and decry such actions… while secretly egging loons like this on.

I’m also curious as to how he intends to “kill ever NRA member” without using a gun himself.  Spear?  Crossbow?  Kitchen knife?

I know:  we shouldn’t respond to nonsense like this because he’s just blowing off steam — at least, I hope he is, or else someone (not me) might find this cockroach, cut his head off and stick it on a pike in his own front lawn.  In true revolutionary spirit (circa 1789), of course.

Oh, and Mr. Walker:  congratulations.  You just gave gun owners yet another reason to carry a gun.

Chinks In The Armor

As much as the ChiComs claim to be a global economic powerhouse, we should always be aware that much of the economic numbers that come out of China are either flat-out lies or at best, exaggerations.  Hence:

The most important thing to understand about Chinese statistics is not that they are necessarily manipulated from the top. Certainly that happens too, as it does in every country in the world. Look no further than Wang’s example for that. But much of the manipulation of Chinese data actually comes from the lower levels. China is a country of over a billion people, but it has no unified or centralized statistical reporting system. Data is gathered at the local level and passed up the chain until it reaches the central government. The bureaucrats in charge of that system enjoy professional success and advancement when their numbers conform to the expectations and directives of the party. As a result, the numbers can be inflated to give the impression of success or moderated in order to avoid attention.

An example of how this can lead to catastrophe comes out of China itself, in the not-so-distant past:

In the 1958-1961 Great Leap Forward, Chairman Mao’s disastrous attempt to shift a backward agrarian economy to a modern industrial powerhouse, the failure of the statistical system contributed to catastrophe on a grand scale. Mao’s plan, such as it was, required producing an agricultural surplus that could be sold to fund investment in a modern industrial base. Whipped into a patriotic frenzy, and knowing that their future depended on meeting unrealistic targets for the production of grain, local officials engaged in rampant exaggeration of output.
But reality was distorted at a cost. The higher the production figures, the greater the tax owed to the central government. In some areas, the exaggerated claims were so great that the entire harvest had to be handed over as tax, used to fund investments and extravagances that China could ill afford. In some parts of the country, the only crops left behind were grown by villagers in secret locations, away from the acquisitive eye of the local production teams. But such success stories were few and far between. Tens of millions died in history’s greatest man-made famine.

Communists are renowned, of course, for perverting the facts to suit their own ends.  Remember this over the coming political election season here in the U.S., as our own home-grown Marxists fabricate lies and misquote or otherwise falsify data, simply to advance their political agenda.

Like That

From Reader Paul W. comes this gem:

I see that the failure of the suicide watch is being blamed on (duh) a staff shortage in the federal prison system, and we’re supposed to believe that a guy with a 6″-thick black book containing several tons of dirt on famous people (like the Clintons) simply offed himself?