…unless your goal is to make your own business fail.

See, there’s a moving company working under a particular name who was in my estimation dishonest and unprofessional with a customer. The customer’s family posted a review on Yelp, then the company — what’s the phrase? — lost its effing mind and threatened to sue the customer for libel.

A couple things I’d like to point out:

1) it’s not libel if it’s true
2) a bad review is good feedback: it shows you how you can improve
3) threatening customers is a poor way to improve your sales
4) having fake reviews written is generally unwise — the internet will find out
5) it’s a good idea to understand Wheaton’s Law

Read all about it here.

I first read at Gun Free Zone, Miguel’s remarks about the Wounded Warrior Project’s previously-unknown policy of not accepting proceeds from any firearms companies.

I thought for sure that not very long ago, that this wasn’t the case.

Weren’t there gun blogs stepping to the plate to help them out?

Wasn’t Federal donating a percentage of proceeds to WWP?

And wasn’t WWP itself aligning with and sponsoring hunts in many, many places?

This had to be a joke. The world must be going insane. Right?

Yes, yes… we all know that the world really is bat-shit, hanging-upside-down-while-sleeping insane… but it also turns out that this isn’t not a joke. They really do have that policy (see bottom of their page).

Right now, their site says, “WWP does not co-brand, create cause marketing campaigns or receive a percentage or a portion of proceeds from companies in which the product or message is sexual, political or religious in nature, or from alcohol or weapon companies.”*

That means, “We don’t want your money if you do any of these things.”

But now that the rest of the people who haven’t lost their minds have called them on it — it turns out that  they’ve hit the spin machine so hard that personal injury lawyers are drooling over the possibilities of whiplash.

Part of a statement from them reads, “We’re so sorry if it seemed that we didn’t appreciate that support with our confusing communication of a business decision.”

Hey, that’s your decision. And you’ve made it clear.

And the firearms industry will be happy to oblige by not giving you any if their evil money.

Curiously, the WWP page yesterday read, “WWP does not co-brand, create cause marketing campaigns or receive a percentage or a portion of proceeds from companies in which the product or message is sexual, political or religious in nature, or from alcohol or firearms companies.”

It went from saying “firearms” to “weapon”.

Seems to me that what they’re now saying is that they’ve narrowed their options even further. It’s not just firearms — it’s all weapons now. WWP has just done to its own business what the American voters did to the country: they’ve whipped out the sharp and stabby and slid it across their own carotid arteries.

No doubt that if there are sufficient quantity of zeros in a donation, they’d happily accept it even from liberal, nudist, drunken, gang members.