Conservative Boot Camp

I don’t pay much attention to advertising, especially TV adverts.  Years of resenting the intrusion of advertising into the shows I watch have conditioned me to pay very little attention.  Whenever I select a show to watch, I simultaneously select a second show to have as an alternate.  By using the ‘previous channel’ button on the remote, I bounce between the shows.  Unless I’m unlucky, that way I miss most of the adverts.  Anyway, for me to putting even a few minutes into writing this comment, you know that this one particular company’s adverts must royally piss me off to have intruded into my world of intentional ignorance.

I’m not going to mention the product name, because I really don’t want to further their aims of getting their name out in front of the public.  But I’m sure you’ll know who I’m talking about if you watch much TV.  They produce a line of zit care products, which according to them and their celebrity spokesgoons, are the greatest thing in the history of zit care products.  I see their adverts on the soccer channel more than anywhere else and I’m still a bit in the dark about why they think that soccer fans are such a good target demographic, but I’m not here to criticise that part of their ad campaign.  For those of you in the know, football is presented without commercials because the game is continuous action with no regular breaks.  Of course when the halftime break rolls about, that means that 12 minutes of the 15 minute intermission is commercials.  This company buys at least a third of that, sometimes it seems like they buy half of that.

The ads themselves are material from their half-hour infomercials, cut down to 30 and 60 seconds.  Since the base footage comes from the infomercial format, they have loads and loads of testimonials.  Since zits are a malady of the young, the testimonials are all from twenty-somethings whose wraparound narcissism literally shines through their shiny clear skin.  I’ve seen these adverts often enough that I’ve developed a particular loathing for a few of the people offering testimonials.

There’s the young woman who talks a mile a minute and with the attitude that since she said it, it’s not only true, it’s gospel.  The way she approaches the camera is just so self-absorbed that I can’t help but think that after talking about herself on a date for two hours, she might well turn to her companion and announce, “I’ve been talking about me all night.  Enough of that.  Why don’t you talk about me for a while.”  Yeah, she’s that girl.

There’s another young woman who in her gushing about her clear skin (thanks to the products, of course) says “not only did it clear up my acne, but made my skin, my actual skin, better.”, or something to that effect.  I’m sure she really meant to say that the products ‘actually made the quality of her skin improve’, but what she says is closer to implying that she has two skins, one actual and the other not-actual.  Whether that means that it’s artificial or virtual, I’m not sure, but I understand my mother tongue well enough to understand that she got the ‘actual’ in the wrong spot in her statement.

Then there’s my favourite - the young man who’s enthusiastically describing how he uses the product at night before he goes to bed and by the time he wakes in the morning, his skin is clear.  Except in his excitement to get his story out, he gets horribly muddled in the person of his tale.  “I put it on in the evening before I go to bed, and when I get up in the morning, you don’t have acne.  Well, that’s a good feeling.”  So I put it on and I get up in the morning, but it’s you whose zits have disappeared.  The stuff must really be magic if it cures other people’s acne if you use it.  I can’t fault the young man.  He’s just a typical young, ignorant self-absorbed twerp who really isn’t ever going to add much value to our society.  But the company is on the hook, in my mind anyway, for using such muddled content to represent their products.

Then there’s the celebutard vocalist who instructs potential users on how to use the product.  “Just a little dab, that’s all you need…”  Innocuous words, but they’re inflected as though she was speaking to a class of second grade students.  Arrrgh!  Get that woman off my TV.

The final person on their averts who grabs my attention is the young man who appears in the centre of the screen with a young woman, presumably his love interest reaching her arms around his neck to embrace him.  As the shot tightens on the young man, he slowly breaks into a beaming smile to reveal the whitest teeth in the world.  Not just white, but white enough to read a newspaper by on a dark night outdoors.  Those teeth would really stand out if they were the only thing about him that are ‘too pretty’, but his skin is so clear and pure that if you saw a closeup of his cheek, you’d be hard pressed to tell whether it’s a man or a woman.  Since when were our young adult men so interested in being so pretty that they look fragile?  Is that a good thing for our society?

Yikes.

If I saw one of these ads once a day, I suppose I wouldn’t have such strong feelings about them.  But when I watch a couple of football matches on a Saturday and see these ads perhaps a dozen times or more, they get to me.  I know I shouldn’t let them get to me.  But the do.  They seem like a chapter on the death of culture in America condensed into 15, 30 or 60 seconds.

I engage in debate with self-defined liberals on a regular basis, both in person and online.  One of the things that I often notice during these debates is the presence of a glaring contradiction in the thinking that my opponents apply to their arguments.  For instance, I was having a conversation with my more liberal daughter the other day, and we got to talking about urban sprawl.  She took off on that idea and started talking about how it would so much better if we, as a society, were to return to small - small communities, small spaces, small footprints.  Her major complaint was about people who wanted to live far out in the sticks but still wanted all the amenities of city life - city water, city streets with sidewalks, city services such as police, fire and garbage, city sewers, etc.  From that point she went off on a tangential rant against big business - you know, the whole “large corporations are bad because…” thing that you hear from a lot of the young people of today.  Corporations don’t care about anything but their profits; corporations are immoral; corporations rob the vitality from the people and communities in which they exist/do business.  I suppose I could elaborate on that theme, but I’d rather not do so - it’s hackneyed, trite and boring to me.  Plus, I’m sure you’ve probably heard it all before.

Waiting until she paused in her rant, I asked her a question which had the effect of stopping her in her tracks - it was a question she couldn’t answer because it spoke to the basic inherent contradiction in her thinking.  The question was: “Tell me, since you’re so opposed to big business and big corporations, why is that you support bigger government through government takeover of businesses, through increased government regulation and through increased government taxation to pay for it all?  Said another way, how do you justify attacking GM, Starbucks and AIG, while supporting cap and trade, mandatory volunteerism and “

This, for her, is one of the underlying defects in her thinking about the world.  Until I pointed it out to her, she didn’t see the inconsistency in her logic.  She supported this line of thinking magically, by which I mean illogically, in order to justify her feelings.  I could tell that she wasn’t happy about being confronted by my hard-line logic, but as the conversation proceeded, I think she calmed down about that.

Let me give you another example of what I’m addressing.  This past week, there was the whole Miss USA controversy.  Perez Hilton (Mario Armando Lavandeira, Jr.) attempted, in view of the entire world, to slam what he perceived as intolerance on the part of Carrie Prejean, the entrant from California in the contest, by being incredibly intolerant of her.  He called her ‘bitch’, and then let it be known that he really wanted to all her ‘the C-word’ but toned it down to ‘bitch’.  So, Mr. Lavandeira thought it best to fight intolerance with greater intolerance.  Does anyone elses see the contradiction there?  I’m sure lots of you do.

With virtually every liberal with whom I have a debate, I’m able to find at least one, usually more than one, glaring contradiction in logic on their part.  Personally, I think this is because more liberals than not are predominantly emotive personality types, while I am a predominantly rational personality type.  Other people have said it before, but it deserves to be repeated - liberals operate from their feelings, while conservatives operate from their thoughts.  Since thoughts are more rooted in logic, they’re less likely to contain grand contradictions.  Feelings, on the other hand, are by nature illogical and therefore full of contradictions.

You know what I’m getting tired of hearing?  It’s the phrase “times like these” in advertisements on radio and TV.  Here we are, in a big old nasty recession and the businesses who are in part responsible for creating the conditions in which many of us became overextended due to the raw commercialism in our society are still trying to hit us up for sales.  But they’re sensitive, you know.  They don’t want to offend us, you see.  So they ’soften’ their message by mouthing “times like these” to let us know that they know that things suck.

I am so freakin’ impressed by their sensitivity and caring that out of awe and reverence for them, I”m never buying any of their products or services.

Times like these call for drastic measures, don’t you think?

An opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal the other day was very interesting.  It’s written by a physician from New York, Dr. Marc Siegel.  The short version of the article is that increasing numbers of physicians are rejecting insurance coverages from the government because of the low pay they provide to the physicians for their services and also because of the labyrinthine billing and appeal procedures that come with government insurances.  Back in the day when I was a principal with a Medicaid HMO back in Michigan, I knew firsthand of the the number of physicians who chose not to have anything to do with us or Medicaid.  Well, that was ten years ago, and things have only gotten worse.  The numbers of physicians rejecting Medicare and Medicaid as payment sources are growing rapidly.  Many doctors are simply telling their patients, “I’m only accepting private pay arrangements after X date.”  In a free market, it’s hard to blame them.  They’re the ones who’ve taken the time and spent the money to become educated and licensed.  They’re the ones who’ve invested in the equipment and supplies needed to provide treatment to their patients.  They’re the ones who daily face the risks of practicing medicine in a litigious society.  And, no doubt, a lot of them are just tired of playing what they see as a game that they can’t win with the insurance carriers, especially the government ones.

Trust me, that trend toward rejection will fit neatly into the rationale of the government bureaucrats use as part of their justification for shoving a single-payer health care system down our throats.  They’ll tell the physicians that they’ll take the single-payer plan, or they won’t be allowed to practice medicine.  They’ll outlaw any competing insurance plans and they’ll outlaw private pay arrangements.  It’s inevitable that we’ll lose physicians from this move.  It’s also obvious that we’ll also see a decrease in the number of foreign-born physicians who want to move here.   Given that our insistence on insuring everyone is going cause an immediate shortage of providers somewhere in the neighbourhood of 210,000, this will have an instant and deleterious impact on the care all of us receive.

I’ve skipped over a host of articles about NHS failings over the past couple of months - I suppose that even I get tired of reporting the same old bad news all of the times.  But this story which appeared today in the Daily Mail is just so heart-rending that I thought it deserved some attention.  It’s over an investigation conducted into the deaths of a number of elderly pensioners who were admitted to Gosport War Memorial Hospital in Hampshire for a variety of ailments.  The common threads that tie these cases together is that each of them was medicated to death under the care of the hospital and one of it’s physicians.

Agreed, the physician is a beast who should be sanctioned and her licence taken from her.  Her practice of overmedicating her elderly patients with eventually lethal doses of diamorphine is clearly not something that should be tolerated.  For her part in this sad saga, she does deserve all of our scorn and ill-will.  But her employer, the NHS, is the real beast in the background of this tale.  Just as I was told last Friday that my 22 year-old cat was just ‘too old’, these families had to deal with a system which doesn’t care about the value of human life as much when that life belongs to an elderly person as it does when that life belongs to someone younger.  I’m sure that the NHS will do it’s level best to distance itself from this particular physician and paint her as a rogue who was operating outside of the established protocols and rules.  But lets not kid ourselves - this is the aim of the NHS - to ration health care to the elderly in order to provide health care for others. 

The stories all seem to go back to the point that socialised medicine has little use for the elderly, those who are no longer contributing much to the system through their taxes.  This is the nature of socialised medicine.  Get ready for it kiddies, if the Obama administration has it’s way, you’ll see the same happening here soon enough.

Kitty

1987-2009

Rest in peace dear friend

Well, it seems that nobody is particularly impressed by the actions taken by the leftist thugs who broke up the appearance on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus of Tom Tancredo the other night.  Quelle suprise.  You can get the facts about the event here, here or here.

What this post is about it the sudden realisation by otherwise liberal people that this event paints liberals out to be fascist thugs who throw a tantrum when something they don’t like happens.  It’s about children (can you really call them adults when they act like that?) attending an expensive school to get the advantages of an education that isn’t even available to most people in the rest of the world, who don’t understand the first thing about free speech.  It’s about the need of the left to suppress what it doesn’t want to hear in a societal version of the stereotyped person with fingers in ears chanting ‘la-la-la-la…” to avoid hearing.  It’s the behavioural version of the NYT refusing to cover the Tea Party movement.  Head in the sand; fingers in ears; don’t confuse me with any debate or discussion - my mind’s made up.

In this follow-up article, it’s clear that some otherwise liberal and very liberal heads which are a bit calmer and cooler have some problems with the actions of the leftist thugs in the harsh cold light of day.  Apparently they’re not very happy being cast in the same mould as other strong arm thugs throughout history who’ve suppressed free speech and prevented their opponents from having their say.  You know the list of people I’m speaking of; it’s every tyrant throughout history, from the first absolute ruler through Hugo Chavez.

The protest was organised by one Tyler Oakley, a grad student and teaching assistant, who apparently has made it to graduate school at a prestigious institution without understanding the plain meaning of the First Amendment, and, oh, about 200 years of legal tradition.  Way to go, Ty-Ty.  In the true spirit of free speech I should post your email addy, since it’s listed on a publicly available website for anyone to find.  But I’ll show some restraint and just post the URL of the page where it’s located:  Find Tyler Oakley’s Email Address Here.  I’ll make those who’d like to share with you what they think of the fascist streak in you do the old Crtl-F to find you.  Considering that page with your address came up sixth on my Google search for your email, I’d guess that many others have found you too.

Mr. Oakley, as full of self-justification as he seemed to be when interviewed about his actions, will undoubtedly do well as a toady, sucking up to his statist masters in the future, perhaps raising little Hitler’s of his own who can shout down their playmates in the neighbourhood when they say things that the demon-spawn of this monster think are wrong.

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Update: Though it wasn’t evident from the first wave of articles about this incident, the protest was the handiwork of our old friends in crime, the Students for a Democratic Society - yep, SDS.  You thought they died a natural death back in the 1970’s, but no, what’s old is new again.  The kids of today apparently don’t even have the creativity to come up with their own protest organisations.

Late post for me, but take a quick peek at this article from the Dallas News.  Texas governor Rick Perry, in a presser following his appearance at a Tea Party, suggested without saying that secession could possibly be one course of action taken by his state.  Finally, someone in a position of authority has sort of broken the ice.

Let me say that I don’t favour secession as an easy solution to our current divisiveness.  I think the union of states is important and worth preserving.  I also think that our founding fathers left us in a quandary.  They told us in our Declaration of Independence that:

“When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

But then they drafted a Constitution which failed to provide any means for the various parties of the union to dissolve what was created and start anew.  In today’s parlance, they failed to provide a reset button.  I understand all of the reasons why that might be, and yet, as brilliant and even prescient as they were in creating the documents which have guided this country well for over 200 years, they missed that one possibility - the need for a reset.

Anyway, my point in reporting this story is just to note that this is the first time in my memory in which a recognised, stable and respected public figure has broached the topic of secession in anything but an educational manner.

Susan Roesgen, who is apparently a reporter for CNN (I don’t watch CNN, so I can’t verify that one way or the other) was given the wisdom of hundreds of people who’re thoroughly fed up with her employer.  You can watch her here.  Susan, baby, I hope you learned what your bosses didn’t/wouldn’t/can’t tell you - millions of Americans have no respect for you because of where you work and the constant drone of bias that your organisation promotes.  You looked so surprised when it became obvious that the people didn’t love you.  Hope you know now that most of us hard-working people resent the holy hell out of what you and your ilk have done to this country.  Now, if you’ll get the &*@# out of our way, we’ve got a country to rebuild.

But take heart Susan.  Had you been at a left-wing rally, there would have been masked goons with truncheons ready to punch your lights out.  The right-wing folks let you off easy, sweet cheeks.  BTW, Susan “anti-CNN?”  WTF?  Is CNN really that important in the larger scheme of things that being anti-CNN is worthy of mention?

Get a grip.

Well, Ms Napolitano just got her first, maybe her second object lesson in national-level politics.  After the widespread publication of the DHS report in right-wing extremists which allegedly leaked out over the weekend from her department, she’s come under increasing fire from conservatives and veterans for the the broad-brush manner in which the report paints those who believe in right-wing causes as being potentially dangerous.  Now let’s start out this posting with a simple statement that it is Ms. Napolitano’s business to monitor extremist groups and individuals, and further to warn Federal, state and local law enforcement partners about those matters.  Nobody’s contesting that.  The issue has to do with the manner in which the right-wing extremist report does this in comparison to that covering the left-wing extremists.  Take the time to compare the left-wing report from the DHS with the right-wing report from the same agency.  They’re very different beasts.  The left-wing report focuses on actual credible threats posed by actual groups which are named in the report, while the right-wing report is short on actual threats and long on “could, might, maybe, etc.”  Also, in reading the left-wing report, the major emphasis is on cybercrime which might be committed by the groups as opposed to actual physical threats.  Which is odd, since severall of the groups mentioned have a history of violent attacks and crimes which have resulted in actual deaths.  The right-wing report treats all people who espouse a general point of view as being the same, while the left-wing report is careful to not smear all animal-rights groups with the same brush with which they smear the ALF, for example.  Curious.

But on to the main point I wanted to make.  The National Commander at The American Legion has sent a letter to Ms. Napolitano absolutely blasting her for her broad-brush smear on the potential of returning Iraqi War veterans to explode in an explosion of violence of which all God-fearing LEO’s should be frightened.  Here’s a link to the text of the letter.

Remember that this is the same man who met with Mr. Obama earlier this year when Mr. Obama announced that he was going to have vets paying for their treatment for medical issues they picked up while on active duty.  I’m really beginning to like and respect this man.  He’s doing his job of representing the veterans of this nation admirably and in the face of growing government hostitility, he’s standing his ground.

David K. Rehbein, I salute you.  Ms. Napolitano, you’re no longer just dealing with Arizonans.  You need to up your game a bit and I would suggest to you that your communications need to be a bit more polished so that you don’t just come across as a knuckle-dragging liberal thug ready to beat up whomever doesn’t agree with you.  Of course that puts you in distinuguished company with so many of your liberal ilk.