Came across some data in an article in the current Weekly Standard. It was written by Noemie Emery, a columnist at the Washington Examiner.

According to Michael Barone: (LL.B., Yale; B.A., Harvard)
- The 8 states with no income tax grew 18% in the past decade; the other states grew just 8%.
- The 22 states with right-to-work laws grew 15% in the past decade; the other states grew 6%.
- The 16 states that don’t require collective bargaining with state employees grew 17%; the others grew 7%.
- The most rapid growth was in the Rocky Mountain states and Texas which have low taxes, weak unions and light regulation.

This is the kind of info we toss around at direct marketing meetings where everyone in the room knows that trackable results from real world experiences generate usable, valuable knowledge.

We learn what works and what doesn’t work and we act accordingly. If only our governments(s) did that.

Sadly, our federal government continues to lead us down the what-doesn’t-work path. Why would they do that?

There are only four possible reasons: 1) most of our leaders are idiots; 2) most of our leaders are ignoramuses; 3) most of our leaders are more interested in a kleptocracy of special interest groups than in the country as a whole; 4) many of our most aggressive leaders truly want to destroy the USA.

Hang, on. There is one more potential reason: 5) all of the above.

In a commercial designed to show the smooth, smooth shave of its new Fusion/Proglide razor, Gillette takes us out in the ocean and provides us with a fascinating possibility: “If it’s true that …” sharks can smell a drop of blood from a long way away. Gillette Commercial

We see a lot of sharks, Great Whites, I think, and two scuba dudes in underwater anti-shark cages. For some odd reason, they’re shaving, one guy with a Fusion razor and the other guy with a “leading Gillette disposable.” The sharks circle for a while (yawn) and up comes the question: “Which razor would you use?”

The guy with the disposable seems to be having some trouble and the sharks concentrate on his cage. One even cruises by, close. The guy thrashes about in his cage. Ooooh.

This is just one in the current flurry of men-are-idiots commercials, best exemplified by the horrifyingly bogus “Man up!” Miller Lite spots.

Which razor would I use? Not the disposable, not even in the safety of my own bathroom. The question is like asking if you’d rather drive a 2012 Corvette or a 1985 Lada.

It’s even dumber than that because the proposition is irrelevant. Bleeding hasn’t been much of a shaving problem for at least 20 years.

The Fusion Proglide is pretty good but it costs a hell of a lot of money, over $3 a blade at Costco. I’ve tried it and it’s okay but doesn’t seem to be worth the extra bucks.

Perhaps a better claim would be that the new Fusion blade lasts long enough to offset the cost. I’m not sure it even does that.

And why would Gillette try to kill its disposable sales, anyway?

This ad was on the outside back cover of The Weekly Standard. It is as unreadable as any ad I have ever seen from a major corporation.

According to The Standard’s rate card, it costs $16,400 for a black and white cover, $20,380 for 4 color process. This is a 4 color ad and that makes no sense at all since everything but the tiny Sprint symbol is black and white.

It took more money to “create” and approve this ad and what an ad it is.

The body copy is set in a light sans serif font. That makes it hard to read.

It is all in italics. That makes it even harder to read.

The copy jumps all over the page making it still harder to read.

If you force yourself to slog through this monster, you will quickly realize that its words make no sense at all. Well, wait, that’s not quite fair. Some of it makes a little sense. The theme seems to be that competition is good in theory but Sprint’s actual competitors are copy cats. And Sprint is an overall terrific organization.

A 5-line, 35-word sentence-paragraph takes us along this dizzying continuum: competition → inspire → think → future →inspire again → think some more → world →inspire → think → planet →inspire → the greenest company among wireless carriers, whatever that means. (It probably means nothing since the mice type tells us it’s based on green rankings from Newsweek. Newsweek?!)

The National Organization of Women might get on the company’s case for references to “fraternal twin of innovation” and “father of rapid progress”. And the estate of some copywriter who died in 1911 might get upset about lifting his oleaginous phrases.

On second thought, perhaps the design is brilliant. Maybe a sharp art director had read the copy and, after muttering “what the hell?”, decided to do Sprint a favor by making it as unreadable as possible. Whoever that might have been forgot about the obscurant power of reverse type.

Mr. Gold Buyer is a man named Michael Kaplan who operates a single store business in a small mall on Biscayne Boulevard in Dade County, FL.

He runs a lot of commercials on local cable. They’re awful but they must be effective because he keeps running them. Until recently, his pitch has been pretty simple: bring in the gold trinkets you don’t want and he’ll give you cash, more cash than his competitors will.

Then he added an offer. In addition to cash, he’ll give you a card for free gasoline, the amount to be determined by the size of the deal.

His cohort in the commercials is his son who sums up the offer with a proud as a peacock grin: “We’ll give you gas!”

Who knows? Might work. It’s certainly memorable.

They’re simple and that’s what makes them so dangerous.

Progressivism is a euphemism for a super-precious variety of Communism. What makes Progressives so precious is their childish core belief in a distorted concept of “equality” for all, with an important qualification we’ll get to in a minute.

They chose the word “equality” because it sounds great. But equality doesn’t mean the same thing to them that it does to normal people. To Progressives, it means leveling, flattening. For a visual metaphor, pour a couple of quarts of kitty litter into your cat’s box then use the scooper to level it all off. That’s what Progressives mean by equality. Nothing sticks out or up.

Progressive in this context should probably appear between ironic quotation marks – “Progressive” – to signify that it really means Regressive.

Progressives believe we will be equal when we are all the same. They believe everyone (when they say everyone they really mean every group) has the right to share equally in the benefits of society, economically, socially and, especially, in terms of respect.

Equality of opportunity becomes equality of outcome.

Progressives know this can’t happen in an environment they don’t control. So the one thing they focus on is controlling behavior which, in the USA, means controlling the courts, the media and education. They’re still working on controlling government from top to bottom and they’re almost there.

One tiny euphemism, equality, means draconian control by a self-selected elite. It’s brilliant and it starts off innocuously.

Equality can’t happen in kids’ games so Progressives foist the no-score-keeping concept on the poor little buggers. (The kids keep track in their heads anyway.)

It can’t happen in relations between the sexes so the Egalia school in a Stockholm suburb bans sex-specific pronouns like him and her.

Women can’t be the same as men in all things so Progressives give us a) affirmative action and b) abortion on demand.

Equality is never going to happen in scientific achievement, so a female MIT professor has the vapors when (then) Harvard President Larry Summers suggests that “different availability of aptitude at the high end” might account for the fact that more men than women are at the top of the different science fields. Summers gets fired.

The drive for equality, the great flattening, trumps everything, especially common sense. All cultures are equal so we have multiculturalism. In a country that once welcomed immigrants from all over the world and encouraged them to become Americans, newcomers are now encouraged to hold on to their former cultures because they are as valid, perhaps even more valid, than American culture. Since this is patently ridiculous, it is necessary to denigrate America and Americans. The USA is just a plot of land where wealth and success happen by accident.

Sharia law? Sure, it’s just as good as our silly common law.

The flattening cannot happen naturally in local conflicts, so Progressives (including many Jews) excoriate Israel on behalf of the innocent and blameless Palestinians who are, according to Progressives, equal to Israelis in all respects. This is hard to believe if you have ever flown over Israel, green and bustling on one side of the border, brown and dead on the other. Must be a plot.

It cannot happen naturally in larger relationships among countries and competing ideologies – which is why Progressives supported (and support) people like Stalin, Hitler (until he turned against Stalin), Mao, Pol Pot, Che Guevera, Castro and the apparently now moribund Chavez.

Sixty million dead? Hey, no problem. You can’t make a flattening omelet without breaking some eggs.

The flattening cannot happen naturally among cultures – which is why NOW, the National Organization for (not of) Women, is nearly silent on Moslems’ treatment of women and on issues such as clitorectomies in West Africa. It’s also why the UN didn’t come to grips with the Rwanda genocide: 800,000 people massacred in 100 days! Both sides, being oppressed Africans and all, are the same to Progressives, never mind that most of the killing was of Tutsis by Hutus.

The United Nations has a Human Rights Commission. China, Pakistan, Cuba and Saudi Arabia are members of that body. All cultures are equally valid.

Judging by who still believes it, it’s hard not to conclude that the Global Warming scam is a Progressive measure. Western nations use energy to create jobs and wealth and to live in comfort. Therefore it must be a plot, a form of oppression, against nations that don’t enjoy jobs, wealth or comfort and the offenders must be brought down to the level of, say, the Congo in order for all to be equal.

Progressives know that their true equality – everyone and everything the same – cannot happen naturally anywhere. Progressives hate this reality so they blame the system, whatever it is, especially if it is infested with relatively well-to-do white males. Their proof of repression is that whites and/or males are more well-to-do than everyone else. Since we are all equal this could only have come about through repression.

Every single policy of the Progressives is based on the concept of a flattening equality which can happen only when white males stop oppressing other people.

They do not care about the consequences of the flattening as long as everyone winds up the same. They will do anything to make this happen.

Reality’s short version of the flattening is that all groups – literally everyone – will be oppressed equally and this is where we get to the important qualification. The flattening does not apply to members of the elite who dedicate themselves to forcing and maintaining the flattening.

Simple example. Obamacare is intended to flatten access to healthcare. We will all be the same, except for our elites who are exempt. They enjoy a private luxury clinic in Washington, DC. Orwell nailed it: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

If you watch any TV at all, you’ve seen commercials with idiot males and all-knowing, super confident females. Chevvy has a beaut.

A husband, so wimpy he may be a eunuch, stands in the driveway with his idiot male friend, a neighbor maybe. There’s a Chevrolet there, too, and it does tricks when prompted remotely. The tricks amuse the idiots and they would like to see another trick. They’re like 6-month-old babies discovering their toes. The wimp husband whips out his cell phone and calls his wife. The wife is, presumably, miles away in a commercial airplane jamming her bag into an overhead compartment. Being super competent, perhaps even a [BUZZWORD COMING] multi-tasker, she answers the call. “Do it again” says wimp boy. She presses a button to make the car do something and it works even though she’s miles away. The two feckless males giggle – look more toes! Apparently the husband cannot be trusted with access to the car’s bag of tricks.

A drug store. Idiot husband is dragged in by wonderful wife to get medicine he is apparently incapable of getting by himself.

Light beer commercial. Guy doesn’t care about flavor in his light beer. He’s told by one or more, sometimes a bevy, of gorgeous all-knowing females to “man up” – as if light beer had anything to do with being a man.

And on and on … and on.

The technique, glorifying the female while contrasting her power with a helpless doofus male, springs from a fact of life. In a consumer society, men are almost irrelevant when it comes to buying things and in the land of the commercial that makes them fair game.

I’m guessing that this will backfire because of another fact of life that will undoubtedly come as a surprise to the harridans of Madison Avenue: women like men and they won’t like companies that treat their men like cretins.

At this point in our history, it seems clear that we are no longer headed for an American-style future. What is unclear is whether our future will be fascist or communist.

What’s the difference?

For all practical purposes, the two systems are identical: extreme socialism with brutal government control of just about everything. The main product of both is a constant stream of bullshit. It’s government of the timorous by the shrivel-souled.

But there is a difference: fascism is national and communism is international.

Italian fascism was all about Italy; German Fascism was all about Germany (& Aryans). When Mussolini or Hitler invaded, the goal was to acquire territory and/or resources for their own countries.

Communists are more interested in establishing a new world order (and I do mean order).

What with multiculturalism, open borders, half the population owing no income tax at all, an ignored Constitution and the most un-American administration in history, my guess is that we’re headed for communism.

And we’re already halfway there.

I found this photo in the New York Post the other day and hand-scanned it because it’s a great shot for a great story.

This little guy, a one-year-old terrier mix, was sucked away by a wicked tornado on April 27. His owners’ house in North Smithfield was wrecked.

Three weeks later, when they went back to see what they could salvage, there was Mason on the front porch waiting for them. He’d crawled home with both front legs broken from wherever the tornado had dropped him. His Birmingham vet says he’s doing fine after surgery.

Good boy, Mason. Good dog.

Here’s the complete text of Section 1 of the Amendment that repealed the idiotic 18th (Prohibition):

Section 1: The eighteenth article of amendment to the
Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.

Simple, right?

The amazing thing about the 21st is that it took so long.

Prohibition was a social disaster from the get-go and it went on and on for almost 14 years! Among its many drawbacks was the creation of a gigantic criminal infrastructure that plagues us still, only now it smuggles heroin, sex slaves, terrorists, illegal immigrants and cigarettes.

The easiest things to smuggle are cigarettes. Most of the business involves buying cigarettes legally in low tax states and selling them in high tax states through simple networks. This is how Detroit’s Al Qaida Six raised their money.

Other product-sourcing tactics include: hijacked cigarettes, burgled cigarettes, ripped-off-at-gunpoint cigarettes and counterfeit cigarettes, most manufactured from crap in other countries, most notably China. (China is a smugglers’ paradise, by the way. Just one example among many: the current National Geographic magazine mentions a huge rare-earth smuggling operation in the southern part of the country.)

And, of course, profits from cigarette smuggling strengthen criminal networks and fund their ventures into the really bad stuff. Just ask an 8 year old sold into sex slavery.

This is what happens when a certain mindset gets control of government, a mindset incapable of “distinguishing” – which is the first thing they teach in law school. The mindset is also incapable of considering the consequences of actually enacting their dream legislation. The mindset does not understand the basic rule of life that the perfect is the enemy of the good.

Prohibition was actually two things, the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act. Their main effect was to create a market for bootleggers and smugglers who exploited it quickly. High taxes on cigarettes have the same effect.

The general idea is that high taxes will reduce smoking. And they do, a bit. But they cause a lot of bad things. Perhaps the worst is that high taxes on cigarettes punish the entire economy.

That’s because there seems to be a floor in the stop-people-smoking business. Something like 18% or 19% of adults will continue to smoke no matter what. Most of them are poor or lower middle class. Increasing their weekly cost of cigarettes from, say, $35 a week to $135 a week has no effect on the number of cigarettes they buy. It does, however, have an effect on other things they buy – or don’t buy. They skip Starbucks, the weekly night out, perhaps a cruise. Smokers just don’t have the money for things like that because the governments have extorted their money and, of course, the governments are pissing it away.

A permanent and adaptable 21st Amendment would make it easy for states and cities to opt out of genuinely idiotic laws and regulations just by passing something like this:

Section 1: Legislation increasing taxes on cigarettes in [NAME OF JURISDICTION] is hereby repealed.

Then we could move on to:

Section 1:The 16th article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States (Income Tax) is hereby repealed.

Section 1: All state [or city or county] laws, bylaws and regulations affecting rights under The 2nd Amendment are hereby repealed.

Sheesh, we could do this every day for the next ten years but maybe we could just …

Section 1: All government activity involving social engineering and/or meddling in people’s lives, personal relationships and businesses is hereby abrogated.