Anything to sell me some junk
Perusing the subject lines in my spam box turned up some interesting results. It seems spammers will try anything to get a person to open their e-mail, and maybe nothing more. It seems hard to believe that anyone actually feels compelled to buy anything through a spam ad.

Mostly, the subject lines seem to be designed to get past spam filters if they can. Thankfully, my spam filter works pretty well, even though I sometimes get a “false positive,” which makes it necessary to review the contents of my spam box before deleting the messages.

Some subject lines seem plausible enough to merit a look-see; it's a bit like the direct mail pieces that are made to look like checks. The rest are pretty obvious, even if a bit creative.

Take a look at some of the tactics used:

Use hot-button issues

• George Bush is a liar [this was an ad for meds]
• Refinance with Christian Lending Principles
• Jesus Loves You. Refinance now!
• The Christian way to eliminate debt

Appeal to self-esteem

• hey loser
• I always knew id be able to order online one day [this one seems targeted to a very narrow market]
• It's sunglasses that gives attitude-Not clothes
• WHAT ARE YOU AFRAID OF?

The sucker play

• Looking for 100 people to make Rich
• Please tell us where to ship your Dell Computer.

Sex sells?

• Supersize your banana with our formula
• Extend your penis 35% more
• SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT: All the Bond Girls Ex.posed [Isn't the Bond franchise pretty flaccid at this point?]

Scare 'em

• Caution! Audult Traces Detected [Too bad they can't spell 'adult.']
• Invoice 32229

Get poetic

• I Finished Carving Your Dog
• fruit cake 28 toothaches
• diskette 61 stalactites
• clutch sapiens auerbach paddock
• when you look down debugged bangor
• my nights are better bombastic cerberus

Be terse and a bit mysterious

• ePills
• anthropomorphism

Use the mother tongue

:::

Nearly a year later...
On 12/30/03, I posted an entry titled “Just Spell My Name Right,” about Melissa Harrington of Lincoln, NE. Melissa had gotten naked and taken some pics inside a place called the Marz Bar. She posted them on her web site (a pay porn site) and the owner of the bar somehow got wind of it. He called the cops to complain of public indecency (I guess the owner felt the stunt somehow diminished his establishment in the eyes of the family-oriented crowd). Interesting, considering that it seems one would have to have been a paying member of the site, to be able to view the offending pics. She faced the possibility of a $500 fine and up to 6 months in jail.

Somebody named J. Clive must have Googled my blog entry. He sent me an update on the story a few days ago: Melissa pleaded “no Contest” to public nudity charges in the Lancaster County Court this last Wednesday. She was fined $150.00.

The owner of the Marz Bar had spent a substantial amount of his own money in attorney's fees pursuing the case against her. I doubt that he found the effort to be a good return on investment. He's banned Melissa from his establishment, but he could have accomplished that with a whisper to his bouncers.

There's a strange parallel with Abu-Grahib here: Had there been no pictures, there would have been no issue.

:::

Rust Never Sleeps
The Brooklyn Rail has an interesting article in its October issue. It describes both the evolution and tenacity of the neocons as a political force, and discusses the book America Alone: Neo-conservatves and the Global Order. From the review:

...With their unrelenting attacks on progressive social policy, conservatives have controlled the policy debate and media perception: Calling someone a “liberal” is now tantamount to calling him a “red” or a “nigger-lover.”

...[The conservative movement] does tend to congeal around certain bedrock conservative principles: limited government, low taxes and strong national defense, and respect for the “natural order of things,” which kept labor repressed, blacks second-class citizens, women barefoot and pregnant, and gays invisible... social conservatism also had its requirements: hostility against “social engineering” (i.e., New Deal-Great Society programs benefitting blacks and the poor), abortion, and both pornography and the women's movement. In essence, it was a Christian fundamentalist view of the world. ...

What makes America Alone well worth reading is that it succinctly tells the story of how the neo-conservatives came into being and of their migration from left to right... When the Soviet Union fell, the older generation was left adrift, more or less, but the second generation, led by William Kristol, editor of the Rupert Murdoch journal Weekly Standard, [required reading in the Bush White House] began articulating something new: America's goal of global dominance, driven by “missionary imperialism and international confrontation.” ...

[A] preexisting ideological agenda was taken off the shelf, dusted off and relabeled as the response to terror... An ideology that highlights conventional state-against-state conflict as a one-size-fits-all policy option has been adapted for an era when threats are unconventional, transnational, and non-state-specific. Little wonder that no one feels safer.

Regardless of the outcome of this year's election, conservatism has triumphed in the realm of politics and perception in American society... Worse yet, the left neither produces ideas nor answers to compete in the marketplace of political reality, and it has no real communication apparatus to do so.

The piece highlights an important issue: The neocons are organized and well financed, and the “opposition” isn't even fully awake. Assuming that Kerry prevails in three weeks, there's a lot more to do. Unseating Bush is just the beginning, and you can bet that the neocons won't rest. After all, “They will be at their desks the next morning, plotting their strategy for 2006 and 2008. They are like rust, and rust never sleeps.”