Beck Loses Yet More Advertizers----And I Helped

A few week back, I used one of my main skills-----writing mean spirited screeds-----to help the campaign against Glenn Beck's show. An organization (ColorOfChange.org) provided me with addresses, and I sent off my missives detailing how Beck was a loathsome, fear-mongering huckster whom they could not possibly wish to be associated with their products. After receiving a huge volume of such letters and e-mails, Beck lost about half his advertisers.

Of course that left half.

Then, just last week I got phone numbers for five of the communication departments of companies still advertising on Beck's show. I placed five calls and left recorded messages explaining why their companies could not possibly want to be associated with a such a phony "news" show, and how Beck maliciously made outrageous claims about the President, and invented "facts" to suit his fancy. I pointed out that Beck's credibility depended on advertisers being willing to back him; too many viewers falsely assume that he must be telling the truth, or they would not have put him on TV.

Only in one case did I get through to an actual person. Interestingly, the fellow who took my message lives in New Delhi, India. It seems Target outsources their customer service. He seemed very interested though in American efforts to dislodge such corruption from the media.

Apparently the phone blitz has paid off! Glenn has lost 19 more advertisers. I think that is almost all of them.

If he is kicked off the air, no doubt he will grouse about free speech; but he can say whatever he wants. He cannot, however, insist that people pay him to speak when they don't like what he says.

Of course, I do have qualms about this line of attack and reasoning. After all, Bill Maher was kicked off the air because advertisers were afraid to be associated with his impolitic remarks. But the people who complained about his show were idiots!

Jesus, straight as an arrow?

To set the stage, Jesus is at the Garden of Gethsemane with his apostles Peter, James, and John, the apostles asleep. Roman soldiers led by Judas (suddenly former apostle) come and take Jesus away after that famous kiss. All of Jesus' apostles flee. Then there are these two verses:

Mark 14:51 And there followed him a certain young man, having a linen cloth cast about his naked body; and the young men laid hold on him:
Mark 14:52 And he left the linen cloth, and fled from them naked.

What is going on? Naked boy, apostles asleep? The only one to try to save him from the guards? Hmmmm........... Hmmmmmmm............. How often did Jesus preach against Homosexuality? Let's see. That would be ZERO.

I'm Shocked, Shocked To Find That Incivility Is Going On In Here

Longtime conservative columnist, Kathleen Parker wrote last week asking Sarah Palin to bow out from the ticket. She has since received a mountain of hate mail and now professes to understand the Dixie Chicks' frustration at being targeted for expressing personal convictions. (She also lost a profitable conservative speaking gig, so now she really appreciates the power of right wing enforcement.)

In fact she now proclaims :

…when we decide that a person is a traitor and should die for having an opinion different from one’s own, we cross into territory that puts all freedoms at risk.

So maybe she does get it. AT LONG LAST!

Conservatives have accused liberals of figurative viciousness, but conservatives seem to have the edge in that as well as the literal variety. Kathleen Parker is now receiving actual threats from Conservatives in addition to the expressed wish that Parker herself had been aborted all those years ago. ( How do you like that for sticking with one's principles?)

From Blue Texan at firedoglake (source for the great pic above too) we have the following:

So let's review: Parker flings two decades worth of poo at liberals, including the suggestion that the entire field of Democratic presidential nominees [2004] be assassinated, and never reports getting hateful vicious threats. She then writes a single column suggesting Sarah Palin should step down and receives a box full' o' hate.

The big surprise in all of this is that Parker is surprised by the hate, after all those years spent mongering, herself. And I thought all conservatives knew about that sewing and reaping thing.

The virtue of the vicious - Oscar Wilde's def. of Patriotism

I've always found the idea of patriotism terrifically distasteful.

Patriotism writ small --
I remember thundering student football assemblies in High School designed to whip up what can only be described as "hate" against the opponent high school. Chance geographical location = required disdain. I persuaded a handful of friends (preen, preen) that they were the equivalent of Nuremberg rallies; we all ditched, in the name of international peace.

Patriotism writ large --

Freedom fries? Remember? Why did we invade Iraq? My country right or wrong? How many Iraqis dead (1M+) or displaced (5M+)? If this is patriotism, not for me.


Quoting a vet I heard on the radio, Chance Cox; "I look at my American flag and think: "Not that good, not that bad." Kudos.

Brigham Young, mah peeps.

Long story short.

B. Young, to various , 1855. "will no one rid me of this troublesome lawyer?"

Turns out, someone would.

B. Young, to various, 1857. "Will no one rid me of this troublesome wagon train?"

Surprise! Turns out, someone would. Mountain Meadows Massacre.


Troublesome Lawyer:

My GGGma's (Mary Ann Polly Bullock) second husband. Jesse Hartley.


He wasn't Mormon. Brigham Young denounced him publicly; said that he should have his throat cut; Jesse lit off for the territories; he ended up dead. Bill Hickman confessed to the killing. He was never punished.


It’s an interesting event, that parallels, in a small way, the much larger horrors perpetrated at Mountain Meadows a few years later. Brigham Young expressed distress at non-Mormons traversing Utah; they ended up dead. Their killers, save but for a token soul, went unpunished. There's no proof that he directly ordered the killing, I suspect he didn't. But, in such an atmosphere, is a direct order necessary?

It's all in the cover up.

People are weird; or the more porn, the fewer sex crimes.

Pornography occupies some weird liminal position here in America. Somewhere around 90% of men view it (I've had trouble finding actual statistics), but it is widely seen as a horrific societal evil. Recent posts at feministmormonhousewives.com have docmented sad tales of men so "addicted."

I decided to do a review of the literature to see what science says about such sad stories. What did I find out? Human sexuality = paradox. Every "common sense" argument is not only wrong, but produces the opposite effect you would suppose.

Two countries, Denmark and Japan, greatly liberalized their pornography laws in the 1960s and 1990's respectively. Both countries had spectacular declines in the number of sex offenses. Denmark even allows "child pornography"--it saw a 50% drop in such crimes, after the liberalization of pornography. Astonishing. Please understand that I am not condoning raping the occasional child for the good of the whole here, I find the idea reprehensible. I'm just reporting on the data.

Japan, who dramatically liberalized its pornography laws in the mid 1990's (or at least reinterpreted its existing laws much more broadly) saw an even more astonishing decrease -- an 85% decrease in sex crimes against children . If such an easy fix is available for such a horrific crime, we should all follow suit--in some non-horrific fashion; and yes, I realise that ay, there's the rub. To sleep, perchance to dream....

The most dramatic decrease in sex crimes was seen when attention was focused on the number and age of rapists and victims among younger groups (Table 2). We hypothesized that the increase in pornography, without age restriction and in comics, if it had any detrimental effect, would most negatively influence younger individuals. Just the opposite occurred. The number of juvenile offenders dramatically dropped every period reviewed from 1,803 perpetrators in 1972 to a low of 264 in 1995; a drop of some 85% (Table 1). The number of victims also decreased particularly among the females younger than 13 (Table 2). In 1972, 8.3% of the victims were younger than 13. In 1995 the percentage of victims younger than 13 years of age dropped to 4.0%.

Most significantly, despite the wide increase in availability of pornography to children, not only was there a decrease in sex crimes with juveniles as victims but the number of juvenile offenders also decreased significantly.

Another quote

"Other researchers have found the same effect. In Denmark homosexual child molestation decreased more than 50 percent from 74 cases in 1966 to 20 cases in 1969 (Ben-Veniste, 1971; pp. 254). These decreases in sex crimes involving children are particularly noteworthy since in Japan, as in Denmark, for the time under review, there were no laws against the personal non-commercial possession or use of depictions of children involved in sexual activities; so-called "childporn" (Kutchinsky, 1985a; pp. 5). Considering the seriousness in how sex crimes against children are viewed in both cultures, this drop in cases reported represents a real reduction in the number of offenses committed rather than a reduced readiness to report such offenses."

I looked at rape statistics by nation to determine where Denmark and Japan fit in world-wide.


US is at #9. Denmark is at #23, while Japan is at #54.

In retrospect, at right around 1995 this portal into the Hellmouth (no, wait, that's Sunnyvale), into the demimonde, previously only available to the wealthy or those willing to venture into the skeevier parts of town, was now but a click away, and in the privacy of your own home. Here, there, and anywhere with a dial-up phone line. This increased availability of porn coincides (mostly) with a similar drop in rape cases in the United States, so even if the the events in Japan and Denmark are correlative, not causative, something's happening here, even if what it is ain't exactly clear.

Intelligence, not all it's cracked up to be.

The New York Times had an article this week about how smart fruit flies have shorter lives than their more Bevis and Butthead counterparts (heh heh). (My age showing any?)

Absolutely. Intelligence doesn't give much of an evolutionary advantage.

Proof 1: "Smarter people" (defined in terms of IQ, troubling, but we're not going there for this post) have fewer babies in the modern world. I can't find the cites right now; I'll keep looking. But, basically, you may recall that there was quite the brouhaha awhile back stating that birth order affected IQ--successively younger children were less intelligent than their earlier-born siblings. However, it turned out that the difference was not in birth order, but rather in the intelligence of the entire family; to wit, larger families were less intelligent than smaller ones. For the record, I'm the oldest of seven.

Proof 2: Ashkenazi Jews, who actually appear to be smarter (again, defined in terms of IQ) than the rest of us, seem to owe that intelligence to mutations that also cause them to have extremely higher rates (59% of the population heterozygous for at least one) of various troubling diseases, specifically, the sphingolipd storage diseases Tay-Sachs, Gaucher, Niemann-Pick, and mucolipidosis type IV. (Much more info here.)

Proof 3: There's lots of variability in IQ in human populations; traits that are beneficial propagate pretty evenly. Again, can't find cite--will keep looking. But this should be pretty obvious.

So, Oh Brave New World--American Idol, and whatever that show is that make people eat insects for, uh, cash prizes? here I come!