slamboard

From Rueters…

More than 50 dissident Catholic groups published an unusually frank open letter to Pope Benedict on Friday saying the Church’s ban on contraception had been “catastrophic” and urging him to lift it.

The letter was published as a paid half-page advertisement in Corriere della Sera, Italy’s largest newspaper, on the 40th anniversary of the late Pope Paul VI’s controversial encyclical “Humanae Vitae,” which enshrined the ban.

I agree with the sentiment of the letter. Hopefully Pope Benedict will go for it. As an aside, Italy has become a much more secular society over the last 40 years and I would credit the inflexibility of church doctrine as a major factor.

Here are some condom ads that are entertaining and instructive…

Check out this link to a news item from a few years ago. The pope was adamant that condoms were not the answer to the AIDS epidemic in Africa. He suggested abstinence as a better alternative. Maybe he could have gone a bit further with that logic and offered the strategy of not peeing as a way to combat the detrimental effects of drought.

I don’t want to be accused of hypocrisy, hence my disclosure in the title of this post.

One McCain is a presidential candidate.

There is another McCain that is a multinational company that makes potato products, including these Smiles that are popular with the youngsters…

If you find a McCain Smile that doesn’t look exactly like John McCain, let me know. I am awarding a prize of one bag of McCain Smiles shipped by regular mail.

Multi-level Marketing is a perfectly legal business model. Pyramid schemes are illegal. The FTC and similar bodies around the work draw a clear distinction between the two. Some marketers use very inventive strategies to blur that line.

Both types of marketing can chug along making many people lots of money for an indeterminate period of time. They can both potentially fall apart when the limits of a finite market are reached or when people have their confidence shaken, leaving the vast majority of people in a losing situation. The illegal ones can come to a VERY abrupt end leaving the vast majority of people in a losing situation.

The FTC has a fact sheet advising people on how to identify and avoid Pyramid Schemes.

The information in my title is a statistic taken from AmeriPlan’s® own disclosure page. They use ‘text as image’ for anything discouraging that they are obligated to disclose. This means that they meet their obligation without having to worry about the facts showing up in any kind of diligent search by someone who is considering working with AmeriPlan® .

I was not considering Ameriplan® , I was weeding through work at home scams and I had to look very closely at their business model in order to figure it out. It was hard, because the company and its IBO’s do everything they can to obscure two things. First, the product being sold is designed to look like a viable alternative to medical insurance but it is not. Second, the whole thing is an MLM.

If you are not risk averse and if you don’t have a problem selling people on something that may not be of much use to them, you might want to consider AmeriPlan® . You will, of course have to convince several other people that it is a good idea in order to ever see any money for your efforts.

I am going to ignore the Olympics, with one small exception. I am going to try to find out who the major sponsors are so I can try to Boycott them too…

Human Rights Watch has a list of companies that they were pressuring ever since 2001 when Beijing was awarded the games. General Motors and Xerox, Heineken NV from the Netherlands, Fuji Photo Film from Japan, Australia’s Telstra, Coca Cola, Schlumberger/Sema, John Hancock, Kodak, McDonald’s, Panasonic, Samsung, TimeWarner, and Visa. I don’t think I can get away with Boycotting Visa. The rest should be easy.

Edit: It looks like quite a few big sponsors did opt out of this Olympic cycle. GM is the most notable.

Solar panels are not an eyesore. Wind turbines can sometimes obstruct views and make too much noise. I wouldn’t jump to the defense of a neighbor who decided to power his house with wind. I would happily put up with it, but I really think you have to be considerate of neighbors with something that makes noise. Solar panels don’t make noise and they can be installed flush with a roof. It is not unusual for an HOA to demand that homeowners remove solar panels that were put up without applying for permission first. In at least one case where state laws prevented the HOA from demanding removal, they opted to demand that the solar panels be painted over to match the color of the roof.

The man in the video installed his array without consulting the Home Owners Association. The old saying that it is easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission may not apply in this case. This particular HOA is HUGE, representing 30,000 residents. As a result of their approach and their size, this HOA has an organization standing in opposition, the VRVoice.

I want you to watch a bizarre interview that Dali gave to Mike Wallace. The most absurd part is Mike Wallace prefacing the interview with a straight faced and impassioned endorsement of a brand of cigarettes.

The cigarettes are said to filter out more tar and nicotine than any other cigarette on the market. The video is from 1958, long before Nixon would sign into law the The Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act that banned electronic advertising of cigarettes. Broadcasters were very much on the side of tobacco.

If you have a lot of time to kill, the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library is worth a look. There is copious documentation showing that the tobacco companies knew that their product was addictive and carcinogenic during much of the period when they were insisting to the public that they were neither. I don’t know if Mike Wallace was in on it.

Legal transcription jobs have been outsourced from the USA to India for a long time. A new trend is emerging with lawyers that live in India are carrying out litigation support for American firms. It is a good fit because both countries base their legal system on the British model and both countries carry out legal proceedings in the English language. This industry is growing by 60% per year. This doesn’t translate to a decline in business for American law firms. Laws passed in the US in 2006 created a huge demand for electronic recording of legal proceedings. It was not just a matter of getting the work done cheaply, firms in the US were swamped with work as a result of the “e-discovery laws.”

The Washington Post interviewed a recent graduate from an Indian law school who was much happier in an air conditioned office doing prep work for a US firm than he would have been working in the domestic court system. This has me wondering if you can add ‘virtual brain drain’ to the litany of other criticisms leveled against the institution of outsourcing. If India’s brightest and best can enjoy a better quality of life working remotely for Americans, that will leave those in the bottom of the graduating classes to fill the vacancies in the Indian legal system. One of the most important figures in modern history was a mediocre Indian lawyer.

If you are reading this post, you are a member of a very small group. I was somewhat surprised to see how quickly traffic dropped as soon as I stopped making posts that were relevant to my core readership.

My core readership for the last year has been been people with an interest in the Kimkins scam. I published Part I well over a year ago. I think I would be doing a service to those people by stating that it is very unlikely that I will have anything else to say on the subject.

I am fascinated by people who decide to become full time bloggers. Jimmy Moore is one example. He has a compelling personal story and an engaging personality, but I’m sure that he would tell anyone who asks that his blogging is HARD work. I like to think that I am smart enough and determined enough to become a professional blogger, but I am far too risk averse.

I can’t pinpoint when this happened, but these days advertisers use sex to sell things that have very little to do with sex and they no longer have the old veneer of subtly.