1315 Needling the Baby

The “me” generation of rugged individualists has hit a new low.  Many of its members won’t let their kids be vaccinated. Invariably those children get sick.  Tough luck for the religious zealots and paranoid fearers of autism.  Often their kids die of diseases that were thought obliterated decades ago.

We’ll spare you the pictures of hideously deformed babies in otherwise normal middle class American homes, the limbless infants who have died or will die of meningitis or polio or scarlet fever or the bubonic plague.  Or even the common current edition of the flu, mumps or chicken pox.

Measles was declared dead more than a dozen years ago.  But the disease has resurfaced in Texas, California and New York.  Granted there were only about 200,000 cases reported in this country.  All of them were in unvaccinated children.  USA Today reports that as the number of unvaccinated are infected, the number could rise exponentially.  And of new cases, about one kid in 1,000 infected will die.

But an unvaccinated kid with the Dread Gonk or some other horrible affliction is still a person, a social person with a social-person mommy and or daddy who will take them to the park where they can infect other kids… kids who are not old enough to be vaccinated and are vulnerable to contagions of all sorts.

It’s a pretty well established fact that vaccines don’t cause autism.  Of course, that postulate comes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the largest, most advanced and most respected investigators of this stuff on the planet.

Some parents don’t trust it or any other government agency.  But they do trust uneducated but “spiritual” politicians and preachers who should be locked into padded cells so that when they hear voices the rest of us are protected.

Some vaccines do have side effects.  Skin rashes, a little swelling, a low key easy to kill version of whatever the vaccine is supposed to protect against.

Autism Spectrum Disorder is not one of them.  We don’t know the direct cause or causes.  Current thinking is leaning toward genetic factors compounded by environmental toxins like mercury.

Vaccination is a public health issue.  Like smoking or drug addiction or the misuse of firearms.

Parents who were vaccinated as children and shockingly don’t have autism ask themselves “how is this possible?”

Just because you hear voices, doesn't mean they speak truth.

Shrapnel:

--Crime remains down in New York City but the New York Times reports that car theft is on the rise and that thieves are targeting older and nearly worthless vehicles. A quirk in the state law makes them easy to sell for scrap. So the heavier, the better … and at 5,000 pounds, your ‘57 DeSoto Firedome 8 is a prime target even though it hasn’t run in 15 years.

--They’re making a big deal out of the low graduation rate among male basketball players at UConn, newly minted NCAA basketball champions and at eight per cent they should be.  That’s the poorest in the sport.  But the other teams in the “final four” aren’t great either with Wisconsin at 44%, Florida at 60 and Kentucky at 82.

--Chick-fil-A says it’s going to open stores in New York City.  They’ll be about as welcome as Wal-mart.  But they’ll do enough business to stay in business because the average New Yorker doesn’t care where he eats or about the politics or sexual repression of those who own the places he patronizes.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2014

1314 Madison Avenue on Life Support

The ad biz is sick.  And soon, it may die.  If it does, death will be self inflicted.  And it will take an awful lot with it.

A little background:  the newspaper industry is fighting for its life.  People aren’t buying the paper or many of the traditional magazines. You can get all that on the internet.

So print is putting up what they call “paywalls.”  You subscribe on line or you get nothing but a taste… kind of like when you read the headlines on the newsstand but have to buy the paper to get the whole story.

Print ad placements are in freefall.  Internet advertising is on the rise.  But it costs less and is more easily ignored.  So revenue is down across the board.

And it’s not just newspapers.  It’s radio and television.  TV programs are shrinking so the can put more ads in.  Ad marathons are annoying. So what are people doing?  They’re recording their favorite shows and when they play them back, they skip the ads.

No eyes, no business.

One day the makers of prescription and over the counter pharmaceuticals, personal injury lawyers, automobiles, cruises, fuels, and anything else are going to realize no one’s watching.  The same goes for retailers, window and siding installers, real estate brokers and the launchers of class action suits.

You don’t have a Digital Video Recorder and your VCR hasn’t worked in years? No problem.  Commercial breaks today are long enough for you to hit the refrigerator or the bathroom confident that you won’t miss a moment of “American Idol” or “Hannibal” or the droning of the oh-so-sincere Charlie Rose in the morning.

If by now you aren’t fed up with the length of these commercial breaks, you should probably see a mental health professional.

So we ignore TV ads, we ignore internet ads. We glance at billboards only as we speed past them at 65 miles an hour.  And this has injured the ad industry, maybe fatally.

This country’s economy is completely dependent on the movement of money.  Buying and selling keeps the whole thing afloat.  Advertising provides the impetus for both.

And the ad industry had better learn two things.  Thing one: if the ad is great and everyone remembers everything about it except what’s being sold, the ad is useless.

Two: If the ad is stupid or too loud or impossible to understand or executed amateurishly, no one will remember what’s being sold.

Maybe you think you’re Shakespeare.  Maybe you think you’re an award winning filmographer.

Chances are, you aren’t. Get over yourself.

Maybe you’re Honest Harry of Honest Harry’s Computer Emporium formerly Honest Harry Oldsmobile.

Chances are, you ARE. Get over yourself.

These death dealing conditions can be corrected. And they’d better be. And soon.

Is there an ad doctor in the house?

And if so, do you take Obamacare patients?

Grapeshot:

-When and where does Coffeemate?

-Is there also “low” fructose?

-If Dawn cleans, does Dusk dirty?

-Who is Ken More?

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2014

1313 Dancing in the Dark

Well, maybe not in the dark, but in the dark in a parallel universe. Talking here about the Supreme Court and its ruling removing spending caps for political campaigns.

The ruling doesn’t mean that you can give a million to this one and a million to that.  There still are limits on that, at least for now. It means you can expand the number of candidates to whom you give each of your millions.

Wait, you say, you don’t have millions, let alone millions to give?  Well, that’s a problem. But there are plenty of people who do. And the Good Justices say if they can’t use their money to buy whom they please, the law is restricting their right to free speech.

Free speech can be pretty expensive these days.

Of course in a normally comprised Supreme Court there would be counterbalancing principles.  Like equal protection under the law.  Like one person, one vote.

It would be wrong to infer from this that there is a Supreme Court “pad” as there were in many police precincts -- and may still be in some.  That’s where Leading Public Figures and Simple Businessmen would make contributions to the welfare of the officers by providing envelopes stuffed with cash.

The sad part about this court decision is that the five majority yokels didn’t need bribes.  They think that way.

So while money doesn’t directly take away your right to vote, it limits your choices to Tweedle Dee or Tweedle Dum who are chosen by party activists under the swoon of fake principles and restricted to candidates who have enough money to shove their message down your throat with such frequency and such vigor that you think you’re getting an actual say in who rules you.

Corporations are people.  People can give as much as they please.  Actual people can do the same.

So … here’s a brazen and blatant advance for the idea that this country is ruled not by ideas, but by cash.

And maybe it’s not the Supreme Court dancing in the dark after all.  

Maybe it’s us.

Meantime, spend on.  After all, you earned it.  

Well… didn’t you?

Shrapnel:

--Major backer Liberty Media has dumped all but a sliver of its investment in Barnes and Noble as the bookseller continues its long slow slide into the actual cellar. Got a Nook reader?  Think about a replacement.

--David Letterman is getting out while the getting’s good.  He’s announced he’ll retire when his contract ends in 2015.  Maybe he and Leno, who were once friends and may be again, can do a two man traveling show.  Maybe Fallon and Kimmel are just too much to deal with.

When Letterman jumped to CBS in 1993, he took long-time NBC staff announcer Bill Wendell with him.  Wendell retired in 1995 and was replaced by Alan Kalter.  Wendell was a coworker and so is Kalter and it’s sad to see the latter’s cushy gig vanish after a mere 20 years.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2014

1312 GM Circles the Wagons

Perhaps you remember that fellow, Richard M. Nixon, disgraced and resigned 37th President of the United States.  If you do, you may also remember the question opponents asked about him:  “Would you buy a used car from this man?”

The answer then was “no way!” The answer today might be “absolutely yes!”  Why?  Because chances are the car would run when you turned it on, accelerate when you stepped on the accelerator, stop when you stepped on the brake. Even if Nixon was on the lot.

First we had leaping Audis.  Then we had leaping Toyotas.  And now we have the Chevy Cobalt and a raft of other General Motors lemons, millions of them suddenly and belatedly recalled.  And we have a safety agency asleep at the ignition switch.

Buy a used car today, and chances are it will do all of what it should and little of what it shouldn't.

Meantime, GM is circling the wagons.  And the hatchbacks.  And the sedans.  

“Oh, those cars weren’t made by us.  They were made by the General Motors Corporation, and we are the General Motors Company.”  And that’s true.  The paper entity that was GM Corp. has been turned into the paper entity that is GM Co.

If you think the bankruptcy ended GM’s famous arrogance, think again. It’s true, of course, that the current CEO, Mary Barra is new to the job.  But she’s a GM veteran though apparently one who didn’t previously have enough clout to do something about the company’s death dealing rattle traps if she even knew of them.

But that’s not stopping the company’s Permanent Government from using the Old Time Playbook.  “We didn’t know.”  “There are no lemons.”  “It’s the drivers’ fault.”

We’re waiting to hear about how unionized workers caused the flaws that led to a multimillion car recall. They didn't. But someone will find a way to make it look like they did.

If you remember Nixon, you remember the Ford Edsel, the biggest joke ever played on the auto buying public.  But you know what?  The Edsels may have been foolishly ugly. But they ran.

The safety issues here go beyond the earlier infamous exploding Pintos and Fabulous Flipping Corvairs.  They go beyond the leaping Audis and Toyotas.

As for the federal agency that’s supposed to keep an eye on things like this:  Too much Lunesta or Sominex.  Not enough clout, not enough inspectors and a balky bureaucratic infrastructure … a speed bump where a wall is needed.

Eventually, this mess will get fixed.  Just like Nixon’s Watergate scandal.  But you can bet your extended warranty that like Watergate, lessons will be learned and then forgotten.

A year or five from now, all this will be water under the bridge and the 2018 model year will present its share of death traps.

Meantime CEO Barra and the head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration David Friedman -- toothless Dave to his friends -- testified on all this before congress.

Friedman promised to do better next time.  Barra said she was remorseful and announced she’s hired Kenneth Feinberg the lawyer. Feinberg helped sort out claims after 9/11, the BP oil spill and the Boston Marathon bombing.

So apparently some of the dead and injured can expect something of a pay day.  Far more than the 57 cents those bad ignition switches would have cost to replace.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2014

 

1311 April Fool

Hey! Your shoelace is untied.  April fool!  Oh, when will we stop this silliness?  It wasn’t funny. Not even in the beginning.  

Hey! When was the beginning?  Well, no one really knows.  But middle English historian Alistair Balthazar Newcastle Bolstridge III, professor emeritus at the University of St. Andrews says the holiday didn’t see print until Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the 1390s.

Others say it was based on the Roman festival of Hilaria.

Festival of Hilaria?  Maybe someone’s playing a prank.  

Hilaria, indeed.

Maybe Chaucer was playing a prank.

Maybe Alistair Balthazar Newcastle Bolstridge III is playing a prank, although he actually KNEW Chaucer and once borrowed his lawnmower.

There has to be a way to rid ourselves of this annoying holiday.

If Obama backs April Fool's Day, congress is sure to oppose it. Can’t you just see it now?  Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul, Lindsey Graham and the rest of that crowd could kill it as just another socialist program to control your behavior.

The clergy would be on board in no time.  Pat Robertson would step up and condemn it as a pagan throwback.  So could the current Bob Jones and Jerry Falwell’s kids.

Rev. Terry Jones dropped plans to burn copies of the Quran. But he probably could be induced to burn a stack of Johnson Smith  or Prank Place catalogs.

The world would be a better place without whoopee cushions.

In this age of extremes, it’s funny that those handshake buzzers are still around.  You’d think by now someone would have invented a Taser version.

On the other hand, someone seems to have formed a club to promote the holiday, the NAS, the national Aprilfool Society.  And they have already declared that some amendment or other gives everyone the right to bear practical joke toys.

We respect your right to own such things as self-tipping hats, Groucho glasses, toilet paper with pictures of barbed wire printed on it, dribble glasses and even lifelike rubber or plastic ants and roaches.

But we draw the line at exploding cigars, fake parking tickets, rubber animal droppings and fake blood.

Our founding fathers may have guaranteed our right to carry concealed pranks.  But they never thought of gum packages that squirt water or pregnancy tests that always show positive.

Shrapnel:

--Earth to Hobby Lobby:  the morning after pill does not attack a fetus. It temporarily restricts the ovaries from manufacturing eggs for long enough to deprive an errant sperm of a target.  Even if you believe that life begins at conception, it’s not abortion because there has been no conception.

--Craft stores are creepy.  You want to eliminate waterboarding and have terrorists begging to tell you all they know?  Lock ‘em up in a craft store for four or five hours while they wander around the artificial flowers, the build-your own jewelry stones and findings and supplies for making bad art. They’ll do anything to get out.

--With things heating up in Europe, can Asia be far behind?  Maybe it’s time to revive SEATO which, had it lived, would turn 60 this year. And this time, it could do its own funding.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2014

1310 The Secret Service Goes Shopping

The Presidential limo is a 2009 Cadillac.  Sort of.  And it’s time for a new car, a little something for use in 2017 and thereafter.

So, the secret service is going shopping.  But unlike most of us, it doesn’t go through all the usual baloney car buying requires.

Instead of reading Consumer Reports or Edmunds, it takes bids.  And there are laws about that.  The bids have to come from carmakers which both will build it and which have headquarters in this country.  That limits bidders to GM, Ford, Chrysler and Tesla.

The buyer doesn’t go to a neighborhood dealer and start haggling about the price of options.  Slick Spike the salesman in the checkered polyester coat can’t tell them “armor plating only comes with the Deluxe Presidential package which also contains undercoating, windshield VIN engraving, run-on-flat tires and the 10-thousand watt Bose audio system.”

There’s something you have to know about presidential limos.  They're not really cars anymore… though the first dozen or so were.

They are combinations of trucks and tanks with car-like cosmetics… things like grilles and taillights. They weigh between 10-thousand and 20-thousand pounds.  They have windows that are inches thick that laugh at bullets and explosives. They have armor, and seals that repel chemical weapons and fires.  They have windshield wipers better than anything you can get for your car.  They have steering systems that can work a slalom course with ease but without giving up that living room ride.

The New York Times reported that President Obama wanted a hybrid. The Secret Service said no.  Too slow on acceleration.  The Toyota Prius takes about 11 seconds from zero to 60.  An armor plated version would probably take about a day and a half.

So security and speed trump politics and economy.  And should.  Putin may ride a bicycle, but Obama is not going to.

The law raises a question about Chrysler, which is owned by Fiat which is headquartered in Italy but which is run like it were independent, which it isn’t.

Cadillac has been the brand of choice for about 20 years.  Before that, most were Lincolns.  Lincolns have reliability problems. But surely there are people at Ford who know how to build a luxury tank, though not one YOU can buy.

GM is a logical choice because it was recipient of a government bailout. And while that probably won’t factor into the decision, someone is going to make that the cases both for and against Cadillac.

Some questions, now, on the car itself:

Does it have to be black?  Or can the next President have red or yellow or cobalt blue?

How many do they actually build?  There isn’t just one of these cars, they are part of a fleet of identical siblings.

Does it have to have leather seats?  Leather can be slippery.  You wouldn’t want Hillary or Mitt sliding all around that big back seat, now would you?  But cloth is so… cheesy in a car like that.  And fur is out of the question.  That’s only for pimps and ponzi schemers.

And what do they do with the old ones?

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2014