Photo via The Smoking Gun. Click to see the source.
On July 26, 1991, Paul Reubens — better known to the world as Pee-Wee Herman, and at the time, host of a popular (and surreal) Saturday morning children’s show — was arrested for partaking in a form of onanism in a pornographic cinema in Sarasota County, Florida, a 90-minute drive south of my place.
For you younger readers: in the days before home internet, never mind home broadband internet and wifi, there were generally two ways to watch porn in 1991:
By renting or buying a videotape (DVDs were still 4 years away in 1991) from an adult video store
Going to a movie theatre that showed porn
That’s right, kids, once upon a time, the only way you could watch porn — and perform any ancillary activity — was in a public place. This started to change in the 1980s with the rise of video playback devices (first VCRs, then DVD players) and speciality cable TV channels, but even in 1991, XXX theatres were still a viable option for porn consumption.
The incident provided comedians of all stripes with lots of material. David Letterman remarked “Hey, Pee-Wee, have you never heard of a VCR?” and I remember the alt-rock station in Toronto dedicated this song to Pee-Wee every time they played it:
I also remember his appearance on the 1991 MTV video music awards after the incident, where he asked a very forgiving audience “Heard any good jokes lately?”
The Smoking Gun has commemorated this event today. In an age when all the porn you can eat is available on a device that fits in your free hand, the Pee-Wee Herman incident wouldn’t even have happened, and my 2016 sensibility is leading me to wonder why the cops would even bother looking for a non-crime like masturbating in an adults-only legal business that showed films specifically made for that sort of thing.
The ad then switches to all caps: “WHY ARE WE GETTING OUR OIL FROM COUNTRIES THAT DON’T THINK LESBIANS ARE HOT?!“
You may be surprised to learn that this ad is not the creation of a horny, heterosexual 13 year-old boy, but a purported adult named Robbie Picard, who also happens to be gay.
Most of Canada’s oil is in the Canadian province of Alberta, which sometimes gets called “the Texas of Canada”. The oil is contained in the Oil Sands, one of the world’s largest deposits of bitumen, a molasses-like form of petroleum, which is stuck in a lot of sandstone that’s been broken up to varying degrees.
Like Levant, Robbie Picard is also a promoter of the Oil Sands who uses the ideas behind “ethical oil”. Picard is an openly gay, Métis (having both European and First Nations ancestry) man who’s considered to be the unofficial ambassador for Fort McMurray, a city located in the heart of the Oil Sands (it’s also been recently devastated by an incredibly huge forest fire). Like many people who live there, he came seeking his fortune in the oil industry. He was profiled just earlier this month in Alberta Oil.
Picard used to be associated with the I Love Oilsands campaign, but split off from that group to become independent, and now promotes the Oil Sands in the Canada Oil Sands Community Facebook group, which has about 14,000 followers.
“When I say lesbians are hot, I don’t think there is anything wrong about saying that,” he said.
“I think all lesbians are hot and I’m not opposed to putting a picture of two guys up there. It was just to strike up a conversation. I find anybody is hot. I think two women kissing is hot. I think that something that is part of the fabric of our city — that we can do whatever we want in our country — that is hot.”
Geez, not even Paris Hilton uses the word “hot” that much:
“Some people really love it, some people are very upset. A lot of middle-aged white guys are the most upset, girls are laughing. It had a bigger response than I anticipated, but my intention was never to offend or objectify anyone. I’m going to have to think about what I’m going to do next.”
Yeah, you might just want to do that, Robbie. There’s an argument to be made for spending oil money that enriches a place like Canada rather than Saudi Arabia, but the horny frat-bro man-child approach isn’t the right way to go about it.
In a mere 41 seconds, Florida woman Michelle Van Etten’s gave us the heart of her speech at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, which was such a rambling mess that the ABC affiliate station that posted the video gave it a title that starts with “Yikes”:
Here’s a transcript:
Fast-forward 26 years…going to my high school reunion (my 20th, of course). I decided to scope out the competition, and what I realized — they were driving BMWs and they looked like Barbie.
I was 30 pounds overweight, a stay-at-home mom, and driving a minivan. I decided at that point I needed a change. And I began to dream again.
Note both her body and verbal language: the agitation, the clenched fists, the BMW/minivan comparison, and the use of competition rather than classmates.
She is telling a story that will resonate with a number of voters in these fearful times: a story of envy, perceived failure, and the encroachment of undeserving “others” who somehow took away the success promised to her.
If you’ve got have 7 minutes and 8 seconds to watch the entire thing — a shambles from start to finish — here it is:
Michelle Van Etten is a small business owner who was recently featured in “The Greatest Networkers in the World” second edition. Michelle employs over 100,000 people and is a strong supporter of Donald Trump, knowing his policies will support businesses all across America.
Michelle Van Etten is a small business owner who was recently featured in The Greatest Networkers in the World second edition. Michelle runs an international multi-million dollar network marketing business with an organization of customers and distributors of over 100,000 people and is a strong supporter of Donald Trump, knowing his policies will support businesses all across America.
Van Etten had to “clarify” matters and in an interview with The Guardian, she said: “I don’t employ. Nobody works for me, because we are all individual contractors, and we all have our own individual businesses.”
Okay, so she doesn’t employ 100,000 people, but that “Senior Vice Chairman Marketing Director” is pretty impressive, right?
If you’ve worked in the corporate world even only a week — or just watch Suits — you’ve probably looked at the title Senior Vice Chairman Marketing Director and thought “Wow, that sounds like a job title that a thirteen year-old with delusions of grandeur made up by stringing a bunch of ‘business-y’ sounding words together,” and you’d be pretty close to the mark.
If you look just below that made-up title, you’ll see a more accurate one beneath it, in smaller letters: “Youngevity Distributer”. And before you ask, “Distributer” is an acceptable spelling in American English, but considered to be an error — or at least not so erudite-looking — in International English.
If her job title seems a little wonky, what appears below it is downright sketchy. Below any job in a resume, which is what a LinkedIn profile basically is, you’d expect to find a description of that job, including the responsibilities of the role, the tasks involved with fulfilling those responsibilities, and any achievements and accomplishments (go ahead and look at mine, for example). Van Etten doesn’t do this; she instead opted to copy and paste Youngevity’s recruiting spiel. You’d think that someone who “runs an international multi-million dollar network marketing business with an organization of customers and distributors of over 100,000 people” would have something impressive to say in their job description.
Okay, so she’s not good at describing her job. She still works at Youngevity, a successful “international multi-million dollar network marketing business”, right?
Your first warning should be what you see when you visit her website, which she lists just below her job title in her LinkedIn profile: challengeshop.my90forlife.com…
From appearances (along with the “Youngevity” name), it looks like Youngevity is in the business of selling health supplements. However, upon closer examination, you’ll notice that the “I want to join” button comes before the “I want to shop” button. It’s almost as if they’d rather you join the company rather than buy stuff from it.
The format of the web address “challengeshop.my90forlife.com” suggests that this Van Etten’s site is a small part of a larger site, which you can get to by deleting the first part of the web address and going straight to my90forlife.com. Here’s where the story gets better/worse:
On this page, there isn’t a single scrap of information about health supplements. It’s all about enticing you to join the company.
At this point, you should be asking this question: What kind of retail business puts more energy into getting customers to buy into the business than getting customers to buy their goods?
Charles Ponzi, patron saint of multi-level marketing.
Any time someone provides you with a business opportunity using phrases like “quick start to reaching your dreams” and “simple system”, alarm bells should go off in your head.
Here’s page 2, which features a checklist:
Note that the first four of the five items in the checklist involve placing an order for product or materials from the organization.Is your Amway sense tingling yet?
Not surprisingly, page 2 is the only page (out of 12) that shows the products that Youngevity purports to sell.
The heart of Youngevity’s business model becomes more apparent on page 4, which instructs you to create a list of prospects:
Again, note that prospects aren’t being sold health supplements, but an opportunity to work for Youngevity. This becomes more apparent on page 10, where they provide a “mathematical illustration” of how you could — in theory, if you work really hard — make $120K a year if you make 5 contacts a day, 5 days a week:
I suspect that the design for page 11 was created on a dare. They actually include a diagram of their pyramid scheme while doing their damnedest to make it not look like a pyramid. At this point, they might as well just print it as a headline in all-caps — YOUR GULLIBILITY IS OUR BUSINESS MODEL:
“Youngevity already has hundreds of million and multi-million dollar income earners,” the document says. I’m going to assume that a printing or editing error caused the end of the sentence to go missing: “…thanks to suckers like you.”
Okay, so Youngevity is a multi-level marketing company. That doesn’t mean that their business is based on duping gullible people, right?
Wallach’s big claim is that all diseases are caused by mineral deficiencies, and he says that 99% of Americans have a mineral deficiency, since we need 90 essential nutrients (this is where his products’ names come from), 60 of which are minerals. One document he cites as proof is actually a 1936 article from Cosmopolitan (back when it was a literary magazine) about a passing mineral fad written by a farmer in Florida (of course).
If that doesn’t settle matters for you, here’s Wallach talking with infamous conspiracy theorist Alex Jones (who sells Youngevity products and says their vitamins make him feel “crazy”) about why we don’t need vaccines:
Okay, so what have we learned?
For starters, we’ve learned that whoever organized the RNC didn’t worry too much about vetting speakers or reviewing their speeches, or even giving coaching to new speakers. We’ve also learned that:
Michelle Van Etten doesn’t employ 100,000 people.
She’s not really a marketing director of any sort, never mind a senior vice chairman one.
She’s not really an entrepreneur, but a sucker in a business that feeds on people’s gullibility and makes them think they’re entrepreneurs.
The business she works for was founded by a con artist and a quack.
Her business sense leads her to believe that the United States needs to be run by a businessman like Donald Trump, whose business track record is laid quite clear in this piece:
Van Etten’s speech points to an appalling mix of poor business acumen, misinformation, and misplaced anger over one’s own sub-optimal life choices, and it’s the perfect representation of many voters who are going to be casting their ballots for Trump come November.
If their motto is “Make America great again”, it stands to reason that there was a time when America was great. So The Daily Show sent out people to ask Republican National Convention-goers a simple question: When was that time? The answers are both illuminating, and unintentionally high-larious. Especially the last one — make sure you watch the video to the end:
