Fifty50 fall product rollout!

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As Andrew Card once said (i.e., unintentionally confessed) about the timing of the Bush administration's public push for (an unprovoked) war (of aggression) on Iraq:

From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August.

And right he was. So here's mine:

The Opt Out movement.

There---it's now "a thing." After rolling around the canyons of my mind for at least a year.

You don't get to learn much about it tonight because I'm tired and have already written my quota of text for the day. But it's a real thing, at least to me. Here are a few basic points.

First: it can only be a movement with a lower-case em. In my view, the era of the Upper-case Em movement has been over for over 40 years, except as an adjunct to a sales campaign or a political swindle.

Second: I am not the leader of it, nor is anyone else. I don't even qualify as the discoverer of it, although I do qualify as a discoverer of it. Maybe the first discoverer with an internationally renowned blog, though.

Third: "opt out" doesn't mean "drop out."

Fourth: anyone can participate at no cost and, as far as I can tell, at no personal risk. All you have to do is... nothing.

Fifth: the basis of the Opt Out movement is a set of concrete freedoms that cannot be denied. These are not to be confused with abstract rights that, while inalienable, can be denied by anyone who owns a gun or a bank or a company you may wish to work for.

I'll throw in two other un-numbered points to close: the Opt Out movement is related to my occasional recent references to the late Vaclav Havel and his magnum essay, The Power of the Powerless. And it's arguably beyond the comprehension of the people who felt it was acceptable to wage chemical warfare on participants in The Occupy Movement.

Sound interesting?

No? Then buzz off and go watch the complete second season of Sanford's Got Talent.