Miracle Amish Heater!

I was in Boston the other night on some work-related travel, and after a busy day and a nice dinner I went back to my hotel room to decompress a little before retiring. I usually don't read the USA Today, but since it had been delivered free of charge to the room, I thought I would just flip through and see what I had missed all day (if anything). Anyway, I came upon this full page ad in the sports section (shown here in these two images). The more I read through it the funnier it got. If you were not looking at the fine print you might at first think it was a story, right, it looks like a story, but the finer print indicates it is an ad. The title just really caught my attention, "Amish man's new miracle idea..." From the headline and picture you might think that this righteous Amish gentleman had just invented some new heater technology, and now he's bringing it to the rest of the world. Note the well dressed gent with the "coveted" Underwriters Laboratory sign (it actually says coveted in the caption)! However, if you guessed that you would be wrong! For one thing, it's incongruous, the Amish are famous for shunning technology, so how could he come up with some new heater concept if he wouldn't even turn a light bulb on in his lab! Heck, for that matter what lab, about the only thing he could have in there without violating half a dozen tenets of his faith would be a bunsen burner.

Well, if you read the fine print, and look at the rest of the ad (pictured below), you will see that they are in fact hawking heaters, the "Heat Surge" fireless flame (whatever that means) in fact, and from the China coast to boot (wherever that is)! But, the wacky thing is that you don't buy the heaters, you get the heaters for "free" if you just purchase a genuine Amish mantle! According to the ad, the Heat Surge is a $249 value, but if you purchase the genuine Amish mantles, then you get the heaters for free, and it just so happens that the mantles cost $249 too! You have to act fast though, because they are imposing a strict limit of only two per household, wouldn't want someone to get too warm I guess. Apparently "entire communities of Amish craftsmen are straining to keep up with winter demands..."

If we go back to the headline, one wonders what the Amish man's miracle idea was to begin with, teaming up with the UL suit in the main photo perhaps? I like the photo on the right showing a pair of heaters being shipped out by horse and buggy! Also note the US map with the Frigid, Cold and Frost zones, with the Frost zone extending all the way down to balmy Miami.

I don't know if it's funny or sad the way that these advertisers try to "sell" using the Amish "brand." Also, the ad is so over-the-top in almost every respect that one wonders if it's all just a scam and the Amish are not really making the mantles. There is a web-site, but if you look you will see that "mantels" is mispelled, and the English usage is poor in spots, so that suggests to me that they may just be trying to scam on the good reputation of the Amish as excellent craftsmen.

Drive-by Spam

Since a few months ago, this is what my driveway looks like after only a few days! Suddenly, and I do mean suddenly, we have become the target for every flier, news-daily, pamphlet, you name it! I don't subscribe to any of these periodicals, and in general I don't even look at them, but I do have to pick them up and recycle them, or throw them in the trash because they have gotten soaking wet (which is at least 50% of the time). Although it may seem trivial, there is literally something there everyday, so it becomes a pain to have to deal with it.

I guess I first noticed the increase in these pamplets just prior to the end of daylight savings time. I'm not sure what triggered the onslaught, because prior to then I can only remember getting two such fliers in a week, both local Laurel community newspapers. I didn't read those regularly either, but at least it wasn't a major effort keeping the driveway clear. I've only seen the deliverers of this "driveway spam" on several occasions, but never when they were gracing my driveway with their wares. One time was further up my block, I was driving the other way, and the guy was just hurling them over the roof of his car. Apparently the acceptable "drop zone" is anywhere within about 20 feet of the end of the driveway. Perhaps there's a way to get the deliveries stopped, but I haven't quite reached the level of frustration required to get it sorted. Anyway, if you happen to be driving by my house or pulling into the driveway, watch yourself as you get out, you just might have to duck an incoming pamphlet!

Don't get fooled again...

Early Monday morning in the Straits of Hormuz several Iranian Navy patrol boats approached or encountered US warships. The subsequent media accounts of the encounter are now well known, and, undoubtedly many Americans believe that the Iranian ships approached the US ships with aggressive intent. The standard media narrative perpetuated by CNN, Fox News, CBS News and others, is that the US ships were within seconds of opening fire on the Iranian boats, and that the Iranians had broadcast a message threatening the US vessels with explosives. Several high-ranking officials in the Bush administration commented on the Iranian "provocation," including Bush himself, and attempted to use the incident to further support the notion that Iran represents an imminent threat to peace in the region. Aside from the quoting of anonymous Pentagon and administration sources, the primary evidence supporting this narrative were rather unspecific video images of the Iranian boats as well as a partly garbled radio transmission suggesting some threatening action. However, nowhere in the video is there any direct evidence of the boats "running at" the US ships. And the audio "threat" is of such dubious quality that it is hard to take it very seriously. This is all beginning to sound like another fictitious naval "attack," that ostensibly occurred in the Gulf of Tonkin, and that was used to justify the bombing of North Vietnam, isn't it?

Now today we learn that the US version of events is indeed unraveling. Gareth Porter reported today several startling revelations concerning the incident:

1) It appears that US officials spliced the audio containing the alleged "threat" onto the video of the patrol boats, in an attempt to suggest that the threat came directly from the Iranian boats. It appears that such audio "chatter" among ships and boats in this war zone is rather common, perhaps not surprisingly so, given the nature of hostilities.

2) US naval commanders in the region confirm that none of the US ship commanders felt their ships to be threatened and felt no need to issue any warnings to the Iranian boats that they would be fired upon.

3) The Iranian government has released videotape (with audio) that suggests a much less confrontational encounter between the US ships and Iranian boats. Just for laughs, this is what one of the Iranian boats looks like. It really is a boat, and not a ship! While fast patrol boats can represent a real threat if armed with torpedoes or anti-ship missiles, these boats are not in that category, and it is difficult to believe that a seasoned US ship commander would regard such a craft as an imminent threat to the safety of his ship.

Based on these revelations it now appears rather likely that the episode was "engineered" by the administration for the purposes of attempting to escalate the rhetoric against Iran, perhaps to politically support Bush's weakened position with his Mideast allies in the advent of the release of the recent National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) indicating that Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program. It seems reasonable to presume that the Iranian boats did encounter or approach the Navy vessels, but that nothing particularly sinister happened. The event was then seized upon by the Bush administration for its own political purposes, and the servile US media were more than happy to run with the story and blow it completely out of proportion.

Indeed, it appears that it is easier to dupe the mainstream US media than it is to steal the proverbial candy from the baby. How many times has the Bush administration fed the media a pack of lies, and had those lies spread across the front pages? Let's just name a few, WMD in Iraq; Saddam in cahoots with Al Qaeda; and most recently, Iran on the verge of nuclear weapons! Based on these examples, one can safely conclude that the media consider it their duty to simply report whatever Government officials tell them to report, with essentially no independent verification. And the more confrontational and sensational the "story," then so much the better for their ratings. This is more like the behavior of a State-run press, rather than a free one. After the WMD fiasco a number of major media outlets expressed regrets for "missing" the story, and published their obligatory mea culpas, and then it was back to business as usual, "..let's get fooled again."

What other insights can we draw from this incident? Several worthy of deeper inspection are the deeply ingrained stereotypes and double standards exhibited by our media, but also by many of us with regard to other peoples and nations. Consider, for example, the response that would ensue if Iranian naval vessels were to take up patrolling positions in international waters off the coast of say, New York or Washington? We know what the response would be, it would be considered an act of war and it is not hard to imagine that hostilities would inevitably result. Nevertheless, we expect that when we send large Naval task forces into the territorial waters of another nation, a nation we have threatened and whose neighbor we have invaded, that they should show the utmost restraint and respect. The double standard, the arrogance of our position is truly astonishing. Only the brain-washed or willfully blind could fail to see it. Unless we can overcome such deep-seated prejudices, our future as a Nation will continue to be filled with war.