From the Financial Times:

For three years after the invasion of Iraq, it was difficult to drive more than a few miles through middle America without seeing a car displaying a magnetic yellow ribbon.

The magnets, bearing the slogan “Support Our Troops”, became a symbol of patriotism for millions of US motorists.

But as support for the war fades, demand for yellow ribbons has collapsed.

Magnet America, the largest manufacturer of the product, has seen sales fall from a peak of 1.2m in August 2004 to about 4,000 a month and now has an unsold stockpile of about 1m magnets.
[..]
Some critics have condemned the magnets as a cheap and superficial way to honour the armed forces and highlighted the irony of placing them on gas-guzzling vehicles that deepen the US’s dependence on Middle Eastern oil.

I’m sure by some critics they meant the Spankers. As an aside, the wife and I had a chance to go see the Asylum Street Spankers in St. Louis a few weeks ago and they were greatness live.

Deciding between the spicy peanut stew and the pesto chicken, or the squash soup and the avocado, chicken, lime soup, are not the only decisions tempting patrons at the One World Café in Salt Lake City and the SAME (So All Might Eat) Café in Denver. They must also decide what the meal is worth.

These pay-as-you-can cafes have missions that are unapologetically altruistic—call it serving up fare Robin Hood style. “Our philosophy is that everyone, regardless of economic status, deserves the chance to eat healthy, organic food while being treated with dignity,” explains Brad Birky, who opened SAME with his wife, Libby, in October. Customers who have no money are encouraged to exchange an hour of service — sweep, wash the dishes, weed the organic garden — for a meal. Likewise, guests who have money are encouraged to leave a little extra to offset the meals of those who have less to give. “We’re a hand up, not a hand out,” says One World owner Denise Cerreta, who prides herself on the fact that everyone can afford a meal at her café.

This isn’t obviously without some risk. The article mentions that a similar restaurant in NYC had to shut down because people were abusing it. I don’t think it is a model that could work everywhere, but in certain cultures this is a great idea.

And speaking of Time magazine, let me be the latest to state that their choice for Person of the Year was a total cop out.

Their big advertising slogan is “Be Bright!”. Sounds pretty innocuous, right? That is, unless you know who The Brights are.

This is what their website says under the heading “What is a bright?”:

• A bright is a person who has a naturalistic worldview
• A bright’s worldview is free of supernatural and mystical elements
• The ethics and actions of a bright are based on a naturalistic worldview

As I understand it, it’s very similar to the Gay Pride movement only for Atheists and Agnostics (and much less effective). Some of its members are James Randi, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett.

I think someone in the War is being a little subversive. (BTW, be sure to read the first article I linked to. It’s a Christian woman’s opinion on the whole “War” and I found it refreshingly sensible.)

Yesterday afternoon I stopped at a Wal-Mart on my way home for work and found a stack of the same shirts still for sale in the men’s department. My wife also stopped at a different Wal-Mart on her way home from work yesterday. She too found a stack of these Nazi shirts still for sale.

In my opinion, quickly taking care of a problem involves actually taking care of the problem.

Instead of having someone from a PR firm contact bloggers, Wal-Mart should have concentrated on simply removing the shirts from their stores. They could have worried about contacting bloggers after their stores were free of Nazi clothing.

Marshall Manson claimed that because of the size of Wal-Mart, removing the shirts from all the stores might take a day or two. I don’t think so. Wal-Mart could have removed these shirts from every store in a matter of minutes if they actually wanted to. Would they be this lethargically slow if they found out they were selling child porn? I don’t think so.

I was at Wal-Mart a few hours ago but I didn’t think to look for them. Has anyone else seen them still in the store? Maybe Marty is right. There is no reason for it to have taken this long.

James,

Good morning. My name is Marshall Manson. I work for Edelman doing online public affairs for Wal-Mart. I noticed your post about the t-shirts that Wal-Mart is selling. I wanted to make sure you saw the company’s statement about this and knew that Wal-Mart is now removing the t-shirts from its stores. Obviously, with a company as big as Wal-Mart, that may take a day or two.

The statement is just below. If you would like to discuss anything, feel free to respond to this e-mail.

Statement from Wal-Mart:

We were not aware of the origins of the image until this morning when we learned about it through the blog Bent Corner.

We are deeply sorry that this happened, and we are in the process of pulling all of these t-shirts from our stores.

Respect for the individual is a core value of our company and we would never have placed this t-shirt on our shelves had we known the origin and significance of this emblem.

We are reviewing our product review process in an effort to ensure this never happens again.

Sincerely,

Marshall Manson
Edelman
email removed

Wal-Mart Shirt

Nazi Death Head

I stopped in at Wal-Mart today after I got off work. I had to pick up a few things. As I was walking past the men’s clothing area, something caught my eye. I noticed something weird over at a wall of t-shirts. One of the t-shirts had a design on it that looked remarkably like something related to Nazis. Specifically, the Totenkopf or “Death’s Head”.

I took a picture of it with my camera phone.

The Death’s Head symbol was worn by the members of the German Nazi SS. The Totenkopf on the Wal-Mart t-shirt looks very similar to the divisional insignia of the 3rd SS Division Totenkopf. As you can see, It’s almost an exact copy.

As Bent Corner points out, this is almost definitely an honest mistake on Wal-Mart’s part.

Update: Wal-Mart has acknowledged the problem and is removing the shirts from their store.

Under the Bush administration, the federal government has doled out $ 781 million to programs that discourage teenagers from having premarital sex. The steadily increasing grants, many of them to faith-based charities, are making virginity a growth industry and creating a boom for abstinence promoters like Cindy Crawford of Fort Smith.

$781 million to programs that according the Washington Post have taught, “that abortion can lead to sterility and suicide, that half the gay male teenagers in the United States have tested positive for the AIDS virus, and that touching a person’s genitals can result in pregnancy.”

Crawford, 48, also administers Hannah House, a faithbased haven for pregnant girls. Federal dollars awarded for the abstinence program are paying for an apartment house that Tree of Life bought with the idea to expand Hannah House.

She also co-owns a Christian employment agency called Go Ye that supplies workers to carry the abstinence program’s message into classrooms.

What a lovely racket. Your faith-based charity gets to rent a house to you Christian pregnancy crisis center and its workers are supplied by your Christian employment agency.

While Tree of Life’s abstinence program is bringing in seven-figure grants, Hannah House doesn’t draw any federal support, and isn’t likely to qualify for any. Although President Bush’s faith-based initiatives opened the door for religious charities to compete for federal grants, funded programs cannot use tax dollars to proselytize. Hannah House requires its residents to attend church services twice a week at a church of Crawford’s choosing. The girls’ daily schedule includes biblical counseling and Bible studies.

On admission applications, girls must circle any occult activities in which they have been involved — including horoscopes, Ouija boards and yoga — and explain any involvement in eastern religions or groups such as Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Gotta love the fundies. These girls have much bigger problems than reading horoscopes. “Instead of teaching these girls how to have safe sex, let’s hope we can scare the sex out of them.” This despite the fact that less than half of the people who sign those virginity pledges will even admit that they ever signed them one year later. And the fact that those who take a virginity pledge and those who don’t have the same rate of STDs. People are going to have sex whether you tell them not to or not. If we taught them to do it safely we’d have a heck of a lot less AIDS infected pregnant 15 year olds.

In a report delivered to Tree of Life earlier this month, the Institute for Research and Evaluation in Salt Lake City found that the charity has “a highly effective program” that is delivering “strong short-term effects.” Tree of Life paid $ 48,913 for the 10-page evaluation.

CLASSROOM LESSONS In a sixth-grade class in Scranton, Reality Check presenter Demetri Mendoza, 19, went over the homework and then clicked on a video: soundbites from a hip-looking teenage boy and teenage girl discussing the boundaries they had set on dating and strategies for avoiding the temptations to have sex.

Maybe I’m out of touch, but I wouldn’t think it would be that hard to have “strong short-term effects” convincing sixth graders not to have sex.

Henrietta Johnston, the school nurse, said the abstinence training, which takes up a week of one-hour classes in the lower grades and two weeks in high school, is needed in the district, where one 10th-grader recently delivered a baby.

And obviously abstinence is the only thing that could have possibly prevented that. Do I overestimate the average Arkansas-ian’s intelligence or is it gross waste of time to spend two weeks telling people that not having sex will keep them from getting pregnant? What’s next, two weeks on not drinking antifreeze as a way to avoid death or how not to shoot yourself in the foot with a nail gun? Two weeks isn’t too long for an actual sex education message, but abstinence-only isn’t sex education. It is sex ignorance. Abstinence is to birth control as not eating is to weight control.

With the abstinence staff fast outgrowing its rent-free temporary quarters in Hannah House, Tree of Life requested federal funding for bigger offices. In its successful grant application, Tree of Life said that an office suite had recently become available that offered “an ideal configuration of space” for the abstinence program.

Tree of Life did not disclose that it owned the 3, 200-squarefoot apartment house itself or that it intends to use it to expand the pregnancy center. The rent, covered by the abstinence grant, was $ 900 a month until this month, when the abstinence staff expanded to a second apartment and the rent rose to $ 1, 300, Crawford said. The mortgage payments on the house, which Tree of Life bought with no money down for $ 103, 000, are $ 830.

Though Tree of Life is both the landlord and the tenant of its new property, Crawford insisted that it is not paying itself the rent in a circular arrangement to buy a building, which government regulations prohibit.

Instead, she said, Tree of Life pays the rent to a separate entity with a separate taxpayer number, the Tree of Life Foundation. The foundation, created by Crawford, collects the rent because it manages the building, Crawford said.

Whatever you say, liar. “I don’t collect the money. It goes to this foundation I created and am probably the head of.” But, hey, your doing God’s work so the ends justify the means, right? What’s fudging the details on a grant application when eternal souls are in jeopardy? And if you can make a little money off the deal that’s just more funds you use to glorify God!

I’m all for educating kids about abstinence. It is still the only 100% effective way to prevent STDs and pregnancy (assuming you don’t get raped). But for the vast majority of us, it just isn’t a realistic option. And when you aren’t educating the vast majority of sexually active people as to the risks and preventative measures you can use, it is evil. Risking peoples lives and health just to fulfill your personal moral code is evil. There is no other word for it. It is the same selfish arrogance that the religious have used repeatedly through-out history. And time and time again, it creates the evil it is supposedly fighting against. Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg said, ” with or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil; – that takes religion.” And that is exactly what abstinence-only education is. In the absence of religion it has no logical reason to exist. No one would think that this is a reasonable position to take without some ulterior motive. It’s the equivalent of telling someone who doesn’t want to get gray hair their only option is to shave their head everyday.

A) You can’t call yourself a think tank if all your ideas are stupid. And B), if you’re someone from one of the think tanks that dreamed up the Iraq War, and who predicted that we’d be greeted as liberators, and that we wouldn’t need a lot of troops, and that Iraqi oil would pay for the war, that the WMD’s would be found, that the looting wasn’t problematic, and the mission was accomplished, that the insurgency was in its last throes, that things would get better after the people voted, after the government was formed, after we got Saddam, after we got his kids, after we got Zarqawi, and that the whole bloody mess wouldn’t turn into a civil war…you have to stop making predictions!

But I like his new rule for all of us about the Mark Foley scandal better:

New Rule: If you think the worst thing Congress doesn’t protect young people from is Mark Foley, then wake up and smell the burning planet. The – the ice caps are cracking, the coral reefs are bleaching, and our poisoned groundwater has turned spinach into a “side dish of mass destruction.” Read the labels on your food. It turns out the healthiest thing you can put in your body is Mark Foley’s penis.

But that’s America for you: a red herring culture, always scared by the wrong things. The fact is, there are a lot of creepy, middle-aged men out there lusting for your kids. They work for MTV, the pharmaceutical industry, McDonald’s, Marlboro, and K Street.

And recently, there’s been a rash of strangers making their way onto school campuses and targeting your children for death. They’re called military recruiters. More young Americans were crippled in Iraq last month than any month in the last two years. And the scandal is that Mark Foley wants to show them a good time before they go?

When will our closeted gay congressmen learn, our boys aren’t for pleasure, they’re for cannon fodder? Why aren’t Democrats and the media hammering away every day about who we’re supposed to be fighting for over there, and what the plan is? Yes, Mark Foley was wrong to ask teenagers how long their penis was. But at least someone on Capitol Hill was asking questions.

You know who else is grabbing your kids at too young an age? Merck, Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline. By convincing you that your kids are depressed, hyperactive or suffering from ADD. In the last decade, the number of children prescribed anti-psychotic drugs in America increased by over 400%. Which means either that our children are going insane-which we might look on as a problem-or more likely, we have, for profit, created a nation of little junkies.

So, stop with the righteous indignation about predators. This whole country is trying to get inside your kid’s pants, because that’s where he keeps his wallet.

I don’t care – I don’t care if Mark Foley had been asking boys to describe their penis because I have some sad news for you: your kid is so larded out on Cheetohs and YooHoo, he can’t even see his penis. So many of our kids are fat drug addicts nowadays, it’s almost as if Rush Limbaugh had puppies!

So we can pretend that the biggest threat to our children is some creep on the Internet, or we can admit it’s us. Because when your son can’t find France on a map, or touch his toes with his hands, or understand that the ads on TV are lying, including the one where the Marine turns into Lancelot-then the person fucking him…is you.

I’ve been trying for months to get reporters to cover is the free trade angle of the Internet gambling ban. Not only is the U.S. trying to impose its own laws and values on the rest of the world, (1) it’s doing so in a manner that protects a U.S. company — Paypal — from overseas competitors, and (2) the exemptions the bill allows for state lotteries, horse racing, and fantasy sports are a blatant violation of the WTO.

The WTO allows a country to ban some goods and services within its borders (Muslim countries with alcohol, for example), but you can’t ban a good or service from another country while allowing it to be sold from domestic providers. That’s sort of the whole point of “free trade.” The gambling ban does exactly that.

This has already been hashed out before. The tiny country of Antigua filed a WTO complaint against the U.S. last year, well before this latest law was passed. Antigua won its complaint in March. The Bush administration — free trade champion through and through — has chosen to simply ignore the ruling.

What’s interesting is that under WTO rules, Antigua is then permitted to retaliate. And what’s really interesting is just how the plucky little islanders might retaliate:

There’s no appetite for slapping trade sanctions on US goods; that would hurt Antiguan companies and consumers far more than Americans. Instead, the country may refuse to enforce American patents and trademarks. This would make it possible for Antiguan-based companies to produce knock-offs of American intellectual property, like video and music recordings or computer software. Such a tactic would get the attention of major US firms like Microsoft Corp. and entertainment titan Time Warner Inc. It would also put tiny Antigua’s trade war against the United States on front pages around the world.

I’m not a lawyer or anything, but if true this could cause some major clashes between copyright holders and the religious right.

So they go in (some how my wife manages to haul a trunk full of toys and the kid in the store by herself). The lady is going through the stuff and says to my wife “You getting rid of his little horsey?” Like she’s the worst mom in the world or something. Then as they’re walking out the door, she says to my son “I’m sorry you had to give up all your toys.” I mean, what the fuck? You don’t ever vilify somebody in front of their kids. She knows nothing about nothing anyways. Our kids have an entire bedroom full of toys. We’re supposed to just keep them all forever? It’s a great business plan, too. Unless you run a gym, making your customers feel like shit isn’t a very good way to bring in repeat customers. To top it all off, for an entire trunk full of toys (most of which were like new because the kids didn’t play with them) they gave her $10. Which, from the prices I’ve seen in that store, they’ll turn around and try to sell for 10x as much.