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The Word Naked Is Hot in Advertising; Synergy With Sunscreens, Natural Foods?

The American Association for Nude Recreation is on a bare hunt.

The nation’s largest nudist association is looking for corporate sponsors, and leaders think this might be their moment in the sun. Now that the organic food movement has given the word naked a wholesome new meaning—suggesting natural and free of preservatives—the word is popping up in all kinds of product names: Naked Pizza, Bear Naked granola, the Naked Grape Chardonnay and more than one naked lager.

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American Association for Nude Recreation

Executive Director Jim Smock says the group has targeted natural products.

Since October, the group has sent about 100 query letters. They have written to the makers of “naked” products and to companies selling items their members use a lot, such as Hawaiian Tropic and BullFrog sunscreens. And they have also targeted companies they think should be interested because their advertising has gone au naturel in a fun or artful way. Those include Geico, Nike, NKE +1.05% Reebok, Dove and Delta Faucet.

“We’re hoping we’ll give the association greater exposure,” says the association’s Executive Director Jim Smock, adding a difficult to believe, “no pun intended.”

The response has been skimpy. So far, he has received three letters of regret, and a case of E. & J. Gallo Winery’s Naked Grape wine.

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Jim Smock

The nudists remain hopeful. The group has commissioned a demographic analysis of its members and is offering potential sponsors a peek at the markets they could reach. “We know we have something to offer,” says Susan Weaver, president of the Kissimmee, Fla., group.

The pitch: The typical member is a college-educated empty-nester who has disposable income and likes to travel. The nonprofit group has an annual budget of about $1.5 million, 34,000 dues-paying members in the U.S. and Canada, and 266 affiliated Nakation spots (clubs, resorts, bed-and-breakfasts and RV campgrounds).

But the association, which lobbies for better enforcement of anti-lewdness laws rather than the creation of anti-nudity laws, is trying to cast a wider net. Consider, the group’s leaders say, the popularity of skinny-dipping. About 15% of American leisure travelers say they are interested in a resort that offers clothing-optional recreation, according to a survey by the travel marketing firm MMGY Global. And 12% say they would like to go to a nude beach.

Nevertheless, the group faces a significant hurdle. Though the 82-year-old organization has made strides in gaining social acceptance and legal protections, many people still find nudism off-putting.

Wooing major brands could be a heavy lift, given the risk of backlash and the association’s relatively small membership, branding experts say.

Their advice: The association should first give itself a face-lift, a sleeker website, a revamped logo and maybe a stripped-down name.

Karen Post, author of “Brand Turnaround: How Brands Gone Bad Returned to Glory and the 7 Game Changers that Made the Difference,” says the association’s tagline—”The credible voice of reason for nude recreation since 1931″—has got to go.

Ms. Weaver says she is proud of that tagline, developed with the help of a focus group seven years ago, but conceded that the group’s brand and website could use some spiffing up. She says it is one of the things she hopes to do with any money the association raises from corporate sponsors, along with expanding its education campaign.

Hers isn’t the first group to try to turn a negative image on its head.

The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws has helped shift public opinion enough to win legalization of medical marijuana in 18 states and recreational use in two. Condom makers reinvented the product’s image as a symbol of public health. And the American Association for Justice, formerly known as the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, launched a campaign in November to change negative perceptions about filing lawsuits.

Tom Mulhall is an association member and owner of the Terra Cotta Inn, a nudist resort in Palm Springs, Calif. If he were making the appeal to corporate executives, he says, he would speak to their bottom line. “Nudists are where the gay community was back in the ’60s. A lot of people are still in the closet,” he says. “It’s a much bigger market than people really realize.”

The association already has several sponsors, among them Toronto’s Tilley Endurables, whose sun-shielding hats are popular among members.

“We jokingly call ourselves the official uniform,” says Tilley spokeswoman Susan Laspa. “It’s a natural fit for us.”

Tilley sponsors the association’s annual convention, takes out ads in its publications and sends the group more than 50 hats a year. In 10 years, Tilley has never experienced a backlash for supporting the nudist group, Ms. Laspa says.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324374004578219640180937224.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion The intelligence service made famous by James Bond used to be ruthless in pursuit of British interests. These days, it seems to have succumbed to political correctness. Easily the most pervasive and dangerous of all the modern conspiracy theories is the one claiming that President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair […]

http://pjmedia.com/blog/leftism-and-the-dangers-of-modernity/ Humans have been inventing things that save and improve lives for a while, but we now realize these items of modernity can also hurt and kill us, and they therefore need to be controlled. Stuff like guns, subways, large sodas, and supermodels. Two people were murdered by subway trains in New York City recently, […]

http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-boxthorn-tree/

THE PERFECT LITERARY STORM….A BRILLIANT ISRAELI WRITER AND COMMENTATOR REVIEWS A BOOK BY A BRILLIANT CANADIA ESSAYIST AND COMMENTATOR……RSK

Some of the most eloquent and impassioned pro-Israeli essays in existence are to be found in The Boxthorn Tree, David Solway’s new collection. Solway — who somehow also manages to write erudite essays on a wide variety of other topics, as well as poetry — shows a masterful conversance with Israel’s history and current dilemmas, along with a sweeping command of the issues facing the Jewish people in general in a world that retains much of its age-old inimicality toward them.
This collection, which along with polemical essays offers book reviews, accounts-settlings with individual intellectual opponents, parodies, and fables, is written throughout in a dazzlingly urbane, virtuosic, sparkling prose that harks back to earlier literary tradition while remaining firmly attuned to our own morally compromised era. Much of the book is, indeed, a searing indictment of the West’s often cynical and defamatory treatment of Israel, even as it stands on the “frontline…in the war against militant Islam” and “raises…the torch of both dignity and survival.”

One by one Solway takes on the standing calumnies that pervade most of today’s media coverage of the Jewish state: that it is an “occupier” building “illegal settlements” (handily demolished with a historical and juridical overview in “Occupied Israel”); that its security fence is a cruel monstrosity (playfully and brilliantly refuted in “Loving the Wall” and “A Short Meditation on Walls”); that it is the party responsible for derailing the peace process (summarily dispatched in “Is Peace Possible in the Middle East?”); and — most absurd of all — that it is the Middle Eastern country that mistreats Christians (a brazen inversion of the truth definitively trounced in “Israel’s Oppressive Treatment of Christians?”).

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/01/advice_on_the_second_amendment.html Pravda, Guns & America (AT, Jan. 11) quoted a Russian who advises: Americans: Never Give Up Your Guns, citing the bloody and tragic result of the Communists’ confiscation of arms after they came to power in 1917. The quotation has been echoing around the Internet, so here are more ringing defenses of the importance […]

—http://www.wnd.com/2013/01/your-tax-money-pays-to-expand-shariah-economies/ Rachel Ehrenfeld, director of the Economic Warfare Institute (EWI), is author of “Funding Evil- How Terrorism is financed – and How to Stop It.” Under Obama’s administration, the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, bears little resemblance to the international aid agency that President John F. Kennedy initiated on Nov. 3, 1961. USAID’s […]

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
After years of languishing under the duck boots of gun owners, gun control advocates are dusting off their iPads and heading into the fray. Their renewed excitement has as much to do with the dead kids of Newtown as it does with the prospect of four years of a lame duck leftist who asserts imperial executive authority and uses the Constitution to clean up coffee spills in the Oval Office.

Taking on the NRA with a gun ban, like taking on pro-Israel voters by nominating a Defense Secretary and CIA Director who prefer that Israel not exist, is part of a larger program of wiping out the political influence of the non-left. And the 2nd Amendment haters who were forced to sit at the back of the big government bus so that senators could get elected in the South are now feeling optimistic about their chances of killing another piece of the living Constitution.

The campaign is cheesily predictable. The designated victims are cutting commercials and making public appearances, led by Gabby Giffords, whose great achievement in life is being a famous woman who got shot in the head, making her the Chief of the Victims, for the moment. Sure a Republican judge was killed in that same shooting, but victimhood, like race, is an exclusive club. Just ask RGIII or all the mothers of dead soldiers who weren’t interested in hugging Hugo Chavez.

The designated victim, like the ancient saint, is a martyr to a cause. And with the left, the cause is invariably really big government. The suffering of the saintly victims is monetized by the cause as unquestionable moral authority. The victims are designated, made famous and milked for their victimhood, and then the victimhood is bottled into white jars and shipped to Washington D.C.

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2375/The-Fox-Effect-Pt-3.aspx

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2373/The-Fox-Effect-Pt-1.aspx

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2374/The-Fox-Effect-Pt-2.aspx

IS THE FOX GUARDING THE CHICKEN HOUSE?….RSK

Saudi journalist Hazma Kashgari (photo above) has spent almost the entire past year in a Saudi prison — the Islamic Gulag — for tweeting an imaginary conversation with Mohammed. King Abdullah — the man Barack Obama bowed to, the man George W. Bush kissed and held hands with, and the man whose nephew, Prince Talal bin Alwaleed, is a major stock-holder in Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. — put him there. Kashgari’s story, and treatment of his story at Fox and elsewhere, is below.

From the vault:

1) Blog post, February 14, 2012: “(Prince Talal’s) Fox News AWOL on (Prince Talal’s) Twitter Story”

Have you heard about Hazma Kashgari, the Saudi blogger who tweeted an imaginary conversation with Mohammed, drew so many (tens of thousands) angry comments from his co-religionists and co-kingdomists that he deleted his tweets, fled the country and made for New Zealand to seek asylum but was arrested in Malaysia and extradited back to Saudi A where he now faces charges on the capital crime of “blasphemy”?

Not if you watch fair and balanced Fox News, you haven’t. I have searched the site but cannot find any stories about Kashgari. (You try.)

You don’t suppose the fact that Saudi dictatorship-family-member Talal bin Alwaleed owns the largest non-Murdoch stake in Fox News (7 percent) and a new stake in Twitter (almost 4 percent) has anything to do with that, do you?

2) Syndicated column, February 16, 2012: “Did Saudi Prince Buy Fox’s Silence?”

Have you heard about the 23-year-old Saudi journalist who tweeted an imaginary conversation with Muhammad? It went something like this: He loved Muhammad, he hated Muhammad, he couldn’t understand Muhammad, he wasn’t going to pray for Muhammad. If this isn’t exactly a disquisition on faith and doubt a la “The Brothers Karamazov,” remember, we’re just talking Twitter.

If you haven’t heard of this young man, whose name is Hamza Kashgari, it could be because you’re watching too much Fox News. As of this writing, almost a week after the Kashgari story broke, I haven’t found a single story about it at the Fox News website. (You try: www.foxnews.com.) Meanwhile, CBS, NBC, ABC, MSNBC and CNN have all reported the Kashgari story, clueing in their viewers on how far totalitarian Islam, Saudi style, will go to exert its control over the human spirit. But not Fox.

Say — you don’t suppose the fact that Prince Alwaleed bin Talal owns the second-largest block of stock (7 percent) in News Corp., Fox News’ parent company, not to mention a new $300 million stake in Twitter (almost 4 percent), has anything to do with Fox’s silence on this Saudi black eye of a story? After all, it was Saudi dictator King Abdullah — Alwaleed’s uncle — whom press accounts credit with ordering the tweeting journalist’s hot pursuit and imprisonment. And it is Saudi Arabia’s adherence to Islamic limits on free speech that is driving Kashgari’s ordeal.

Maybe it has become institutional Fox thinking to let such news slide for fear of offending the Saudi prince — or for fear of risking the kind of exposure that might remind viewers of Fox’s connections to Saudi regime interests via Alwaleed. ….

3) Blog post, February 25, 2012: “The Kashgari Story from Right and Left”

Time and space: A decade after fatal mission, film covers Israeli astronaut’s legacy
Maxine Dovere/JNS.org
DR. ALEX GROBMAN IS THE HISTORICAL CONSULTANT FOR THE FILM…..
Caption: The late Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon. Credit: NASA. Dan Cohen describes Ilan Ramon, the first and only Israeli astronaut, as “a man used to rising to the occasion.”

On Jan. 31 at 9 p.m., Space Shuttle Columbia: Mission of Hope—a documentary directed by Cohen—will air on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) to coincide with the 10th anniversary of Ramon’s death.

Israel sent one of its best on NASA’s fatal Columbia mission: Israel Air Force (IAF) Colonel Ramon was 46, an engineer (electronics and computers), a pilot, married and the father of four. As a combat pilot, he was rumored to have been involved in the 1981 raid on the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak. He trained for Columbia at Houston’s Johnson Space Center. Officially designated as a payload specialist, Ramon was described by Commander Mike Anderson as “fully integrated with the crew.”

Ramon, one of the mission’s seven casualties, is the only non-American to receive the United States Congressional Space Medal of Honor (awarded posthumously). He was chosen to be a NASA astronaut in 1997. By 1998, he had begun a rigorous, five-year training program.

“From the moment he arrived in Houston until he lifted off, Ramon went through a transformational change. He came to understand who he was and what he represented,” Cohen told JNS.org.

Ramon considered himself a representative of all Jews and all Israelis. Although a secular Jew, as the first Israeli astronaut he recognized the importance of maintaining Jewish identity and unity.

“I am the son of a Holocaust survivor,” he once told Israel Radio. “I carry on the suffering of the Holocaust generation, proof that despite all the horror they went through, we’re going forward.” Ramon asked Mission Commander Rick Husband to provide kosher meals on board Columbia and received rabbinical guidance for Shabbat observance in space.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/01/21/130121fa_fact_remnick#ixzz2Hvb4hvQq At a makeshift theatre in the port of Tel Aviv, hundreds of young immigrants from Melbourne, the Five Towns, and other points in the Anglophone diaspora gathered recently to hear from the newest phenomenon in Israeli politics, Naftali Bennett. A forty-year-old settlement leader, software entrepreneur, and ex-Army commando, Bennett promises to build a sturdy […]