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AFLAC and Gilbert Gottfried Part Ways

Gilbert Gottfried got fired by AFLAC today. It was a case of having your head up your behind and not thinking. How could you be that stupid to make the comments that he did about the tragedy in Japan. Making a comment about “Why don’t the Japanese go to the beach?… Because the beach will come to you” is about as insensitive as you can be. He joins a long list of stupid celebrities who made monumental gaffes and ended up suffering some serious damage to their professional careers.

Now the one positive is that he did apologize but AFLAC is not having any parts of it. They fired him anyway. One interesting thing that did come out of this is a little known fact that a significant piece of AFLAC’s business comes from the Japanese. They got their start in the 1970s by my writing life insurance policies for Japanese families. The AFLAC management is stating that they don’t expect a significant impact to their earnings due to the earthquake and tsunami that occurred this week. That might be wishful thinking on their part because the market makers really downgraded their stock primarily because they think that they’re going to be paying lots of claims in Japan. They lost almost 7% of the stock’s value today.

Getting back to Gilbert Gottfried, ….he has his supporters. Howard Stern doesn’t think that he should have been fired. He thinks that AFLAC overreacted and that there was no reason for him to be fired. Now you really have to consider the source of this comment. Here’s a guy who was known for his tasteless viewpoints and jokes defending a guy who got fired for having a tasteless viewpoint by putting his stupid jokes on Twitter. If this is not the pot calling the kettle black I don’t know what is. He said they should of known what they were getting when they hired him he’s made a living on offensive jokes. They may have a point but you have to screw your head on sometimes and in this case he should’ve thought about it.



Have you ever heard of the website name Backstage.com? It is a clone of the website Craigslist and they’ve been in the news lately. It seems that these classified sites are very prone to being abused by people who want to make a quick buck including those that want to do illegal stuff.  Just the other day a prostitution ring was caught trafficking in underage girls. This was in Broome County, New York. It seems that the cops are also catching on the these ads shown places like Backstage.com. They set up the sting operations that catch these knuckleheads red-handed.

In Cobb County Georgia the police arrested a 25-year-old guy who had been robbing and sexually assaulting women that he contacted on Backstage.com. He would arrange for meeting in an occupied house or apartment and then rob and sexually assault them. In another instance Washington DC cops are setting up a sting operation for shutting down prostitution solicited through Backstage.com. The police arrested two women at the Embassy suites Hotel on 10th St. who had been contacted via the website.

Some website owners have challenged Backstage.com to clean up its act by being more proactive about selecting the list ads.  The owner of the site Geebo.com feels that you can make your site safer by screening manually and automatically before you list a ad. You can also go a long way in stopping this type of activity by refusing all adult and erotic ads. This is probably a good move because if you take those types of ads off the site it will be highly unlikely that human trafficking can be successful.

The guys that use these types of sites for this type of activity would probably not be so happy. The Internet has made it so easy to do things that in the past put a lot more effort to get accomplished. One of them is soliciting for sex. It is so easy today these websites make it much easier.