Advertising Becomes Even More Evil

There’s a scene in the original, 1960s version of Bedazzled in which Peter Cook (the devil) is complaining to Dudley Moore about what a slump he’s been in lately.

“Take the seven deadly sins,” he says. “I thought those up in one afternoon. The only thing I’ve come up with lately is advertising.”

How true!

Well, the devil seems to have been tweaking the concept of advertising lately to try to make it imitate the infectious properties of a virus.

The idea is to give you something neat bundled with advertising so that you’ll become “infected” and share the infection with your friends and loved ones, allowing the advertisers to exploit your personal social network and infect those you know and love.

Things like this have been going on throughout the history of advertising, and I don’t mind in principle advertisers providing you with something entertaining or valuable in exchange for the chance to pitch their product to you. Heck, that’s the principle on which commercial TV and radio work. So individual viral marketing tools may be fine in and of themselves.

What I am annoyed by is the dehumanizing attitude displayed by the ad executives who have framed “viral marketing” in this manner. Advertising frequently involves a dehumanizing manipulation of the masses, and consciously modelling your techniques off of viruses is an expression of this attitude.

LEARN ABOUT “VIRAL MARKETING.”

AND LEARN ABOUT ONE VIRAL MARKETING TOOL: “THE SUBSERVIENT CHICKEN.”

Oh yeah, ALSO LEARN ABOUT “ASTROTURFING.”

Pro-Abort Victory in 2004 = 24 MILLION DEAD BABIES

READER INVITE: I STRONGLY encourage fellow pro-life bloggers to link to this item! I also strongly encourage folks to e-mail a link to friends and post a link to this piece on web boards.

A while back I did a couple of posts pointing out the cost in babies lives every time a pro-abort president is elected.

HERE’S THE FIRST (AND LONGER) ONE.

HERE’S THE SECOND (AND SHORTER) ONE.

Those posts used numbers based on how many kids will be killed on average by electing a pro-abort president who will nominate pro-abort Supreme Court justices who will continue the abortion holocaust.

But all elections are not equal. Now I want to do the numbers on how many kids will get killed as a result of a pro-abort victory in this election.

With some help from Steve over at Southern Appeal, I did some number crunching and determined how many Supreme Court nominations the next president is likely to get. The answer is three or four.

Here’s how that works: The average age at retirement among SCOTUS justices of late (meaning, the generation of justices that just retired) is 78. The current batch of justices has three members (Rehnquist, Stevens, and O’Connor) that already are past that age or will be within the next four years. Two of these three (Rehnquist and O’Connor) have had significant health problems. In fact, Rehnquist will almost certainly retire at the end of this year’s term if he doesn’t do so before then.

In addition to these three, there is a fourth member likely to retire: Ruth Ginsburg, who won’t hit average retirement age until 2011 but who also has had health problems.

How will this affect the abortion holocaust?

Currently there are three votes on the Court to overturn Roe v. Wade: Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas. There need to be five votes to overturn and let the process of ending abortion in America to begin.

What will happen to that if a pro-life president is elected tomorrow?

Assuming the right replacement justices are picked, we would get five votes to overturn in the next president’s term: Rehnquist would bow out but get replaced with another vote to overturn. So that would still leave us with three. Then Stevens and O’Connor (both refuseniks on overturning Roe) and get replaced with votes to over turn. O’Connor would be expected to retire last, in 2008 unless health concerns intervene.

THAT’S FIVE.

If Ginsburg retires and is replaced with another anti-Roe justice, that would be six.

Add a year to let an appropriate case come before the Court, and we could have Roe overturned around 2009.

If a pro-life president is elected Tuesday then there is a good chance that the abortion holocaust can begin to be ended in the next four years by the removal of the chief legal impediment to ending it (i.e., Roe v. Wade).

But what if a pro-abort is elected?

Rehnquist goes and is replaced with a pro-Roe justice, reducing the number of votes to overturn. Stevens, O’Connor, and possibly Ginsburg also go and are replaced by pro-Roe justices, leaving the number at two.

The next batch of SCOTUS retirees wouldn’t be expected to retire until 2014 (that would be Scalia and Kennedy) with another in 2016 (Breyer), one in 2017 (Souter), and one in 2026 (Thomas).

All of these dates are after the 2008-2012 presidential term, so the president in that term likely won’t be able to make any adjustments to the SCOTUS lineup and the number of votes to overturn will be stuck at two. The abortion holocaust thus continues through 2012 if we have a pro-abort elected Tuesday.

When is the soonest it could end on this scenario? If President 2012 is pro-life then he could replace Scalia with an anti-Roe justice, preserving the number at two, then replace Kennedy with an anti-Roe justice, returning the number to three. He also might get a chance to replace Breyer with an anti-Roe justice, bringing the number to four. But President 2016 would have to be pro-life, too, before we could get the number up to five. That would be expected circa 2017. That’s the soonest it could be expected to happen if a pro-abort is elected Tuesday.

What’s the other possibility? What’s the worst case scenario? Assuming that Presidents 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016 are pro-aborts, what would happen to the number of votes to overturn? We’d lose one with the retirement of Rehnquist in 2004’s term. Then we’d lose another with the retirement of Scalia in 2012’s term. The final anti-Roe justice on the court would then be Thomas, who would be expected to retire in President 2024’s term.

Beyond that it gets too hard to see when the needed four votes could be put on the court, though the most likely window is the term of President 2028, when the appointees of President 2004 start to retire. That would be the soonest we could get to five votes if 2004-2016 are pro-aborts.

So if President 2004 is pro-abort then the best case scenario involves extending the abortion holocaust until around 2017. The worst case scenario has it extending until circa 2031. Add a year to each of those to let an appropriate case come before the Court, and we have 2018 and 2032. Average these since the likelihood is that history won’t go either best case or worse case, and we have the year 2025.

So, if a pro-life president is elected Tuesday, Roe could be overturned around 2009. If a pro-abort president is elected Tuesday, Roe can be estimated to be overturned around 2025. That’s a difference of sixteen years.

How many kids will die in those sixteen years? With 1.5 million kids being killed by abortion on average (including emerging forms of abortion that are usually hidden, like via in vitro fertilization, stem cell research, and cloning), that would be TWENTY FOUR MILLION KIDS KILLED.

A normal election only results in six million kids dying due to a single pro-abort presidential term.

This time, because of the current composition of the court, the election of a pro-abort president is likely to lead to it’s twenty-four million additional deaths.

These are only estimates, of course, based on average lengths of time on the Supreme Court, but one has to reply on the best estimates available in order to make an informed decision about the gravity that must be given to this issue and what kind of reasons could be proportionate to it.

You’ll have to decide for yourself whether there is something proportionate to that. Nothing short of a theromonuclear war between well-armed nation states would do it. Terrorism isn’t even close. Nor is the War in Iraq or the whole War on Terror.

Vote pro-abort on Tuesday, and TWENTY-FOUR MILLION KIDS DIE.

(Oh, yeah: What’s Mine Is Mine.)

Weekends Are Funny

You may not have noticed, but weekends are different from week days. For example, you aren’t at work on weekends (not if you’re like most normal wage-earners, anyway). You definitely go to church on the weekend (whereas you may or may not during the week–your choice). Your kids (if any) are home from school (if you don’t homeschool) and probably whining to have you take them places. There are also sporting events you may go to on the weekends. So, y’know, they’re different.

That’s why we have a special name for them.

I see the difference every week in my blog traffic. It goes way down on Saturday and Sunday and then snaps right back to its usual weekday traffic level on Monday.

This is a regular, normal, predictable cycle.

It also poses an interesting challenge for political pollsters. Everyone’s schedule is different on the weekends than it is on weekdays, with lots of people out of the house or otherwise busy doing something other than watching sitcoms when pollsters call. But does this tend to tip the direction of the polling more one way than another?

Think about it: Kids. Church. Sports.

Are the red state folks or the blue state folks more into those three things?

You got it: The red state folks are. As a result, the red state folks are less available on weekends to take pollsters questions and every weekend the polls tip blue state. Then, come Monday morning, the sampling snaps right back in place, just like my server traffic.

This is a story today because it’s Monday and the polls being released today are based on samplings taken over the weekend, when the polls get blue-shifted. Since today is the day before the election, though, that normal, predictable weekend tinting will get portrayed as Kerry “surging” and “closing the deal” and a lot of other similar-sounding thing among blue-ish pundits and spinmeisters.

That’s what I told a friend who called today who very much wants Bush rather than Kerry to win and who was concerned by Kerry’s apparent upward bump in the polls over the weekend.

I don’t claim to know who’s going to win tomorrow (or whenever), but I do know about the weekend polling effect that happens because red state folks are out with their kids, in church, and at sporting events. I’ve read the weekend blue-shift is as much as three percentage points.

Professional pollsters (as opposed to hungry blue pundits) therefore look askance at polls based on weekend data.

READ MORE ABOUT IT HERE.

Attending Mass Today Not Required

Today is All Saints Day (hence last night was Halloween–All Hallows’ Eve, a “hallow” being a saint).

Normally this means that one must go to Mass, as All Saints Day is a holy day of obligation.

But when it falls on a Saturday or a Monday, it isn’t.

Since today is Monday, you are not required to go to Mass (though doing so is still a great thing).

HERE’S THE RELEVANT LEGISLATION.

Political Party Potpourri

This weekend I went to the registrar of voters to pick up a ballot so I could vote early (or at least avoid filling it out at the polling place this Tuesday).

Turns out that here in California there are way more than Bush and Kerry on the ballot. In fact, there are six different pairs of candidates on the ballot representing different parties.

Had to confess that I hadn’t heard of all of the individual parties they represented.

And there’s way more minor political parties out there in America than just these six.

HERE’S A LIST OF HISTORICAL AND PRESENT U.S. POLITICAL PARTIES, LINKED TO INFO ABOUT THEM.

HERE’S A CONSICISE LIST OF PRESENT POLITICAL PARTIES AND BASIC INFO ON THEM.

I had no idea many of these folks existed.

Most of them are nuts.

A few actually sound good (that’s sound good, you’ll note; I’m suspicious of what every party says about itself).