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About being topical: Malin Akerman and Darvocet

Well, I usually prefer just being, however, I have been asked to be topical today. So…

The number one google search at this time is malin akerman. Very good. What does this mean though?

Malin Akerman is an “actress star”. We know that she

  • is Swedish
  • won the Ford supermodel search of Canada when she was just 17-years old
  • modeled
  • is a singer
  • is married to an Italian musician

I only know these things because I was being topical. But there are so many other things to be topical about.

There is the matter of Darvocet and Darvon and the controversy swirling around these painkillers which can have a negative impact on the heart. That is an issue more critical to public health. Malin Akerman is lovely but, to my mind, getting bad meds off the shelf and addressing alleged loss of life due to these meds is a priority.

If you look at pictures of Malin Akerman regularly, then doctors and public health professionals are advising a gradual withdrawal from viewing her. People should switch to looking at other pictures.

Peace.

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Women’s Empowerment Series: Flatulence is a Human Right

Governor General Michaëlle Jean on a Woman’s Intrinsic Right to Pass Gas

governor general michaelle jeanFor Governor General Michaëlle Jean, denying more than half of the world’s population the most basic human right to flatulence is one of the worst scandals of our time. This is what has inspired her determination to break down the wall of indifference and give a voice to women.

She believes that flatulence—at home, in our neighbourhoods, in our communities—is one of the basic rights that are all too often abused where women are concerned, even in our so-called progressive societies. That is why she has made flatulence for women a priority in her mandate. It is also a commitment that stems from her years spent working with women and children who had suffered through many forms of flatulence suppression, which led her to help establish a network of shelters for them.

In her view, the struggle for flatulence equality is not just a woman’s struggle; it is the struggle of every person who demands respect, justice and dignity. She strongly believes that we have everything to gain when we give women the means to expel gas. “Empower women,” Her Excellency states, “and you will see a decrease in poverty, illiteracy, illness and gas build up.”

Women’s Historical Struggle for the Right to Pass Gas

It has been well known for centuries that retaining flatus is bad for the health. Emperor Claudius even passed a law legalizing the passing of gas at banquets out of his compassionate concern for people’s health and his reliance and fear of the ruthless and flatulent women of the imperial family.

There are some conservative doctors (those who do not believe in global warming) that confidently state that there is no medical harm caused when a woman retains her flatus, either through a desire to avoid embarrassment or through patriarchal pressure. These politically motivated doctors state that holding your gases in will not poison women as they are a natural component of a woman’s intestinal contents.

These doctors, who listen to a lot of talk radio and did not vote for Obama, are not concerned if a woman develops a stomach ache due to the gas pressure. They care not that pathological distention of the bowel could result if a person holds in gas too much. They are indifferent to the fact that retaining flatus can cause hemorrhoids!

Flatulence is an Argument from Design

The level of flatulence in nature implies that there must be a creator God. We must explain how we think the gassy world in which we live came into existence. Naturalists (atheists, or materialists) would argue that since flatulence is able to enter our world it is possible for chance collisions of molecules to produce farts.

But such an explanation has many problems. For instance, although farts are free to enter the system of our world, what mechanism connects these gasses to the work of ordering chaotic molecules into the precise, complex order needed for a satisfying experience of passing gas? Organizing matter into meaningful structures and the relative proportions of these gases that emerge from our anal opening depend on several factors: what we ate, how much air we swallowed, what kinds of bacteria we have in our intestines, and how long we hold in the fart. Random arrangements accomplish nothing. And randomly assembled molecules cannot evolve into farts because they lack the ability to replicate themselves. The whole complex mechanism involved in DNA and protein synthesis would be required before natural selection could ever come into play. Theists argue that such complexity of flatulence could only arise as the direct result of intervention by someone with purpose and intelligence.

Suppose we put some dynamite under a flatulent person, and blew it up. The system contains sufficient fart energy and the correct building blocks to build the Taj-Mahal. But is it really likely that blowing the bricks up would have this result? The answer is obviously no but this is a distraction from the main theme of this article.

For more information on Women’s Rights, Flatulence and the Argument from Design check here, here, here, and here.

Women Empowered: No More Will We Retain Our Flatus!

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Suzy Poppins offers theatre of the brain – a head of her times

Most of you are already familiar with Suzy Poppins, famous for her work in repairing feather quill pens, teletype machines and princess phones. Poppins is a very busy girl and her company, Oblique Phalangeal Fractures, is growing at a pace congruent with the increased popularity of these three communication tools. Her dedication to the repair of these items is unquestioned among her peers in the industry.

Due to the extraordinary success of her organization, Poppins was recently honoured with an Outstanding Business Achievement Award from the Ontario Chamber of Commerce. Poppins is also proud to have been nominated for a Canadian Award for Excellence.

What is the secret of her success? It is her rock steady focus on these three areas rather than branching out into other growth industries such as the Underwood typewriter or the overnight success atmospheric steam engine. If you are over 25 then you will remember the Twitter fad of of the early 21st century. Where is Twitter now, for goodness sake? We all know what the teenagers are into these days. Princess phones, feather quill pens and teletype machines.

Suzy Poppins loves to give back to the community by offering to immigrants of British and Irish descent food, shelter and the self esteem that comes with having a low-paying job repairing feather quill pens. The immigrants have to provide their own tools and pay for their room and board as well as the purchase and laundering of their company uniforms.

Suzy Poppins is a great lover of all sorts of cheeses and enjoys sending her employees on unpaid errands to pick up the lists of cheeses that she provides them with. “I know that they love to please their employer,” said Ms. Poppins, “and it is my pleasure, my honour really, to provide them with the opportunity to please me in the faint hope that their living conditions or work position would improve.”

“Although they are not able to earn very much, and the living conditions that I provide them with are rather rustic,” said Ms. Poppins cautiously, “I know that any one of them could one day become the President of Canada if they have enough gumption and political and financial support. Bloody unlikely, but possible nonetheless.”

A Brief History of Barber Poles

A barber’s pole is a kind of sign barbers use, traditionally a pole with a helix of colored stripes (usually red, white, and blue). Suzy Poppins is an avid collector of old barber poles.

The origin of the barber pole is associated with the practice of bloodletting. During medieval times, barbers performed surgery on customers as well as tooth extractions. The original pole had a brass basin at the top (representing the vessel in which leeches were kept) and bottom (representing the basin which received the blood). The pole itself represents the staff that the patient gripped during the procedure to encourage blood flow.

The Development of Toilet Paper

Suzy Poppins uses toilet paper herself when appropriate and is an advocate for the use of this paper for its intended function amongst the members of her industry. As part of her charitable work she has retained Ronn Torossian, head of 5WPR and Aish Spokesanimal, to help her promote the use of toilet paper in western culture.

Poppins notes that, in earlier times, wealthy people wiped themselves with wool, lace or hemp, while less wealthy people used their hand when defecating into rivers, or cleaned themselves with various materials such as rags, wood shavings, leaves, grass, hay, stone, sand, moss, water, snow, maize, ferns, may apple plant husks, fruit skins, or seashells, and corn cobs, depending upon the country and weather conditions or social customs. In Ancient Rome, a sponge on a stick was commonly used, and, after usage, placed back in a bucket of saltwater.

The 16th century French satirical writer François Rabelais, in Chapter XIII of Book 1 of his novel-sequence Gargantua and Pantagruel, has his character Gargantua investigate a great number of ways of cleansing oneself after defecating. Gargantua dismisses the use of paper as ineffective, rhyming that: “Who his foul tail with paper wipes, Shall at his ballocks leave some chips.” (Sir Thomas Urquhart’s 1653 English translation). He concludes that “the neck of a goose, that is well downed” provides an optimum cleansing medium.

Goldstein Auto, Goldstein Subaru

Much is known about beaver dams and blastomycosis but little is known about Goldstein Auto and Goldstein Subaru. Is this because little is known about the Intelligent Design of these dealerships? Or is it rather a political effort to silence those who would promote these dealerships? The only thing that is known for sure is that many sites with these keywords are being indexed by search engine giant Ogle.

We will show the link between Suzy Poppins and Goldstein Auto in a later post, at such a time when we are motivated to.

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Aish HaTorah Chose a Spokes-Animal to Represent Them

“F*** you very much,” Ronn Torossian, Aish Spokes-Animal


Content Opportunity, December, 23, 2009Aish HaTorah chose wisely when they picked 5WPR to represent their public relations issues. That is the same Aish that is an “apolitical” organization.

The Man Who Hears Things

Rabbi Dan Rand, Managing Director of Aish Toronto told Martin Goldstein that the primary mission of Aish HaTorah was to stop Jewish assimilation and intermarriage. Everything else was secondary including any spiritual development. Our guess is that the spiritual stuff is window dressing so as to distract from their primary goal. We believe that they will pursue their primary mission by any means necessary and if that includes lying about “bible codes” and propping up Kelleman’s silly arguments to make people feel intellectually “comfortable” to “be religious” then so be it.

Martin Goldstein has been through it all and seen how they work. He has witnessed what Rabbi Rand refers to as “Aish nuclear fallout” (we won’t say whom he was referring to). He has seen the internecine squabbles and witnessed the loshon harah (harmful speech). Basically he has seen the hypocrisy and corruption of the organization. An organization is corrupt when their primary mission is not declared publicly and they use a secondary mission as an obfuscation. They are lying to themselves and to the Jews who are looking to find some spiritual Judaism.

Martin Goldstein believes that Aish HaTorah is finding a measure of success in achieving their primary mission. But that success is coming at a cost. We do hope that they take this honest criticism to heart but we have faint hope of that since these are fundamentalists and fundamentalism is like a mountain that cannot be budged.

So it does not surprise us that Aish has chosen a man, Ronn Torossian, who embodies what Aish is as an institution. Nice on the outside, aggressive to the core and disdainful of other organizations or people who do not see things their way. Ronn is also a skilled manipulator and liar, perfect for the needs of Aish HaTorah.

Here from Gawker.com is the story of Ronn Torossian, the current Rebbe of Aish HaTorah:

When Ronn Torossian, the incompetent superflack and 5WPR CEO who reps characters ranging from softcore porn king Joe Francis to nutty televangelist Benny Hinn Ministries, sued his former HR director Melissa Weiss last week, he was using a classic PR tactic: getting out ahead of the story. Ronn alleged in his suit that Weiss helped an employee leave 5W, thereby violating her contract. But Weiss has her own side of the story: that she was fired because she protested extensive, ongoing labor violations at 5WPR. What we know—because we have the evidence—is that on Friday, Ronn sent Weiss an email threatening, “You will pay for the rest of your life for trying to ruin my business.” The subject line read, “YOU STUPID CUNT.”

It’s important to understand why we—and others—talk about Ronn Torossian so much. He and his firm are far from the biggest players in the PR industry, so it may seem strange that he gets so much attention. The real reason he matters is that he embodies the public’s worst ideas about what a PR person is: loud, brash, more flash than substance, dirty, manipulative, amoral, and, in the end, not particularly bright. The real movers and shakers in the PR industry achieved their positions partly by keeping their mouths shut. That doesn’t make them better people than Ronn, but it does make them wiser.

Most people would be surprised to find out how much time the average PR person spends worrying about their industry’s reputation as a den of lying bastards. Ronn has the touchiness, but not the reflective nature, of his peers. A few years ago I wrote an article in PRWeek calling him a self-promoter (a vast understatement), and we haven’t gotten along ever since. Each of us thinks the other is a jerk; I’m happy with that, and I assume he is too.

Mention 5W or Ronn to most people in the PR industry, and you will draw a chuckle or a roll of the eyes. Mention him to most reporters who have been the recipients of his ALL CAPS, nonsensical email blasts , and you’ll draw an even worse reaction. When I covered the PR industry for three years at PRWeek, I don’t recall ever hearing any unqualified praise of Ronn from anyone who was off the record. That’s not normal. He gets more press for himself than just about anybody else in PR, and consequently, has a huge effect on how people perceive the industry as a whole. And that drives a lot of people crazy, because he is just a terrible representative. Although, it must be said, he is colorful, and provides good copy—he embraces the (misguided) “all press is good press” philosophy, even if his peers wish he didn’t.

Hopefully, the emails below are evidence enough for the world to see exactly why Ronn inspires the feelings that he does. He will often brag about building his firm from the ground up, and his claims are true; to the extent that you admire unbridled entrepreneurship independent of any social value, you should admire Mr. Torossian. But fundamentally, he’s a hustler; and, as a PR professional, he has no idea what he’s doing.

According to Melissa Weiss’ lawyer, she found out soon after she was hired at 5W last month that Ronn was violating the law by miscategorizing employees and not paying them overtime. “Ms. Weiss reported these violations to Mr. Torossian and he threatened to fire her and any employee not happy with their status,” her lawyer writes. “Soon thereafter, Ms. Weiss was terminated and her final pay was withheld, leading her to bring a small claims action for her earned pay.”

Weiss’ story is not an unfamiliar one. We’ve received tips telling us the same thing. Among the claims, tipsters say that 5W does not pay overtime to low-level employees, in violation of labor law; that Ronn has docked employees for a full day’s pay, or a vacation day, for being 15 minutes late to work, causing several people to resign; and that employees don’t get proper comp time after working 7 days in a row or more.

On March 1, Ronn sent Weiss the following email, titled “YOUR CLAIMS”:

On March 7—last Friday, the same day that Torossian leaked his own lawsuit against Weiss—he sent her this email:

After Weiss got this “CUNT” message, her lawyer sent a cease-and-desist email to Ronn and his attorney. In it, he noted, “Ms. Weiss will be commencing further claims against 5W and Mr. Torossian individually. Furthermore, Ms. Weiss previously notified the Department of Labor of 5W’s labor violations and we will be cooperating with their investigation to the fullest extent.”

To that message, Ronn responded to Weiss and her attorney with this:

In short, a man who makes his living giving strategic advice to other people responded to a legal email by calling his former employee a “cunt,” and including her attorney on the email. Not much needs to be added to that.

We will note that Ronn does have his defenders—mainly, himself, and (some of) his current employees. Christine Garabedian, a five-year employee of 5W, writes us to say Ronn is an “amazing boss,” adding, “To anyone who would say ‘wow this girl obviously has been brain washed’ YOU ARE DEAD WRONG.”

About Melissa Weiss, Garabedian writes:

“Melissa Weiss came to 5W in 2008 and immediately began asking me “how can you take it here?”. As the HR director are these types of questions appropriate? I suddenly began to think that maybe Melissa was jealous of my success at 5W. As a 30 something, single women who still has her parents address listed on her taxes to avoid paying NYC taxes, I could see how she would be jealous of a successful 27 year old who is happy at her job. I love that she is so happy to say that 5W doesn’t follow regulations when she is the one cheating the government…

PS Melissa I just got engaged- Now are you even more jealous of me :)

Classic 5WPR.

Martin Goldstein says to Ronn Torossian, Aish Spokes-Animal: Sue me!

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Classical Mechanics Goldstein Solutions News Religion

Solutions to Goldstein problems and the matter of Oral Roberts

Oral Roberts, classical mechanics, and a swirling cloud. A famous evangelist passes away from this earthly plane while Goldstein problems and Goldstein solutions are presented as if they were a gift to a man half asleep yet having an axe to grind.

goldstein ax to grindBenjamin Franklin stated, long before Aish.com or even the internet was a gleam in the industrial evolution’s Darwinian eye, that grinding an axe requires a grindstone. And ye better be having a grindstone if ye be wanting to grind yer axe.

In 1779 Ben Franklin sent a story called ‘The Whistle’ to his friend. It was about a child who paid more than he should have for a whistle and was later sorry for his lack of caution. Franklin’s autobiography, written between 1771 and his death in 1790 and first published in 1791, also contains an anecdote concerning a man who asked a smith to sharpen his ax especially well and ended up doing the work of turning the grindstone himself. Neither story mentions the phrase “an ax to grind”.

So who knows?

As to the evangelist Oral Roberts, founder of the Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association and Oral Roberts University, well he died Tuesday from complications of pneumonia in Newport Beach, California at the age of 91. He had an incredible career in the business of religion. His acumen was legendary and inspired the evangelical pursuits of some of the great “outreach organizations” such as Jews for Jesus, Jews for Judaism, Aish Hatorah, and Chabad just to name a few. He will be missed. Aish Hatorah and Chabad were contacted for a comment about the passing of this great man but neither organization could find anyone that was not too choked up to make a comment.

Ring my friend I said you’d call Oral Roberts,
Day or night he’ll be there anytime at all Oral Roberts.

Oral Roberts, you’re a new and better man,
He helps you to understand,
He does everything he can, Oral Roberts.

If your down he’ll pick you up Oral Roberts,
Take a drink from his special cup Oral Roberts

Oral Roberts, he’s a man you must believe,
Helping everyone in need,
No one can succeed like Oral Roberts

Well, well, well your feeling fine,
Well, well, well, he’ll make you Oral Roberts

My friend works for the national health Oral Roberts,
Don’t take money to see yourself with Oral Roberts

Oral Roberts, you’re a new and better man,
He helps you to understand,
He does everything he can Oral Roberts

Well, well, well, your feeling fine,
Well, well, well, he’ll make you Oral Roberts

Ring my friend I said you’d call Oral Roberts (2x)
Oral Roberts!

As far as the Goldstein solution? Your guess is as good as mine but I like to think that a cloud swirl picture will suffice when words fail. Could it be a bomb that we are looking at here? Is that what the cloud of glory is?

cloud swirl goldstein solution

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Communication News Religion Truth

Aish HaTorah is apolitical. What?

According to Ronn Torossian, “Aish HaTorah is a charity and must remain apolitical.”

Ronn Torossian is the CEO of 5WPR which is Aish Hatorah’s Public Relations firm.

Here is his face.

ronn torossian aish.com

Let’s hear that again. He said: “Aish HaTorah is a charity and must remain apolitical.”

Apolitical? Is that true?

Is that true? Is that really true? Like really true as in you are telling the truth? True as in I never knew Aish to be political, and I mean institutionally political. Well. Umm. I have to say you are fibbing Ronn. I hate to call you a liar here on a blog which is so full of make believe and merriment that you are … ummmm, you know, one of those PR guys that don’t exactly tell the truth. Did Aish Hatorah correct you on this one or are they also….. I mean, well we know they are political, don’t we Ronn? Oh forget it. Bring out the cute girl.

Design Argument Girl with her pet reptile asks: “Is it true Ronny?” Don’t lie to a little girl and her reptile Ronn!
design argument girl

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