Too Venal for Words category archive
Doing It the Old Fashioned Way 0
I have learned that, as phone companies have increasingly yielded to customer pressure to become more vigilant in blocking car warranty scammers, the scammers have taken to the mails.
Yesterday, I received a letter from a company I’ve never heard of (“Endurance”) warning me that the “extended service plan” that I never purchased was about to expire . . . .
Be forewarned.
(Gramatikal error correxted.)
The Medicine Show 0
At The American Scholar, Colin Dickey reports on the fantastically lucrative patent medicine industry. It is a fascinating read. Here’s bit:
The dietary supplement industry, of which Moon Juice is just one small portion, sells (according to one estimate) some $35 billion in products per year to consumers in the United States alone. Brands with names like Nature’s Bounty and Purity Products advertise everything from squid oil to chromium to the monkey head mushroom, and all of it is made possible by those two sentences—repeated over and over again, printed on millions of labels in tiny fonts, ritually intoned until their meaning has been obliterated.
Barnum was wrong.
There’s more than one born every minute.
(Spellink erorrs correxted.)
“With Liberty and Justice for Some . . . .” 0
Bryan Clark finds the recent Supreme Court ruling in Shinn v. Martinez Ramirez troubling. Here’s a bit of his article; the rest is at the link.
And not because the court has weighed the evidence for and against guilt and come to the conclusion that the man is guilty. (The latest court to review the evidence in the case concluded he probably couldn’t be found guilty of anything.)
The court is pushing to execute him because it says the evidence showing he is innocent should not be considered at all.
A Cracked Shot 0
Mangy comments at his Youtube page:
Wayne LaPierre is held in high regard by many NRA members who supplied him with the money he used to help pay for the $300,000 worth of suits he bought himself at member expense. (a small portion of the millions he lavished on himself and his wife, courtesy of NRA dues and donations.)
One of Wayne’s more self-indulgent projects was to have a film crew document him as he roamed the African savannah in search of a trophy elephant to ‘bag’. One his guides had located an elderly, blind, slow elephant for Wayne to courageously blast, and Wayne’s poorly-placed shot downed the elephant, but didn’t kill it. From a distance of about 12 feet, Wayne pounded three more rounds into the elephant, missing the spot where the guides had helpfully pointed, saying, “Shoot it RIGHT here!”.
With the elephant still alive and well aerated, a guide finally took his gun, and properly put the pachyderm out of its misery, after which there was much congratulating of Wayne, since he’d paid their salaries, or more precisely, NRA rubes had paid their salary. The embarrassing “adventure film” of the expedition was ‘buried”, since slowly torturing an elderly elephant doesn’t really synch with LaPierre’s desire to portray himself as “A good guy with a gun”. Thank goodness, in Wayne’s hunting party there was one ‘good guy with a gun’, but that was the guide, not LaPierre. The only problem was, in the end, the guide shot the wrong dumb animal.
Dirty Laundering 0
Thom and his guest discuss Donald Trump’s history of organized criming.
Vaccine Nation 0
When I was a young ‘un, I had both types of measles (and chicken pox). The rubella wasn’t so bad, but the rubeola–oh, never mind.
Plus, one of the memories etched in my brain from when I was about three–when you don’t really have memories, they’re more like snapshots–is of my parents in bed with the mumps, an illness much more serious in adults than in children. It was the sickest I ever saw them.
I would not will those days to come back, but I seem to have become an unwilling member of a society of stupid in which facts and science and knowledge no longer matter.
We are a failing state.
