[Slate]: Timothy Noah notices something funny about Bayer. As part of the IG Farben German industrial conglomerate, the pharmaceutical giant was a key

player in the Final Solution (“it manufactured the Zyklon B used to

gas Jews in the death chambers; it designed ovens used to

incinerate the corpses; and it used as slave laborers those Jews

at Auschwitz who were still alive”) and has recently just barely, in a sense, acknowledged its role by conceding massive financial reparations to Holocaust survivors. Best known for Bayer aspirin, it has just decided that the next product for which it will create brand-name recognition is Bayer Advanced Home, a highly efficient poison to kill household pests. “Bayer, though dunderheaded enough to trumpet its valuable

brand name in a TV commercial that will remind people of this

history, was, sadly, just smart enough to deny Chatterbox’s

request to view the ad in question (and to instruct its ad firm to

do the same).”