Archive for the 'Hall of Shame' Category
Wednesday, December 7th, 2011
Another Reason to Tax the Rich, and Hard
There is, of course, no such thing as a $6,200 cell phone. Except, of course, that there is. It’s called the Vertu Constellation. It’s made by Nokia, and has apparently sold more than 300,000 copies.
Mental illness is obviously as epidemic as ever within the overclass.
It’s also something of an IQ test, this Vertu geegaw. See if you can spot the pseudo-intellectualisms, flatteries, and effete product differentiations in this promo blurb:
Constellation is the first handset with a full touch screen from Vertu. Designed with simple elegance at its core, each Constellation is handmade using state-of the art technologies and manufacturing techniques including 8 megapixel camera with ruby surround, hard worked leather and our unique high fidelity sounds system. With one delicate touch you can navigate effortlessly and intuitive [sic] to explore the exclusive services available and a range of carefully curated apps providing bespoke services and information at your fingertips.
Lulz and barfz.
Friday, June 10th, 2011
Market Totalitarianism Update
The usual news, per Advertising Age:
Bluefin Labs is exploring the relationships between listener and speaker, orator and audience, marketer and audience, and mass media and audience by looking at about 3 billion social-media comments a month and, from that, filtering and mapping about 13.7 million comments that pertained to TV and/or commercials.
That mapping of social-media conversations to TV shows and commercials is called the TV genome; Bluefin was founded at MIT as a result of language-acquisition research MIT Researcher Deb Roy did on how his child had learned to talk.
“Mass media has a tremendous benefit in that it reaches many people at the same time, but one of the drawbacks is the feedback loop from audience back to speaker and communicator is essentially broken, or at least you lose much of it,” said Tom Thai, VP-marketing and business development at Bluefin. The idea behind Bluefin is to offer a deeper look at the audience feedback, beyond numbers of viewers and demography. Put simply: It is focused on taking the conversations and chatter that happen in social media and tying them back to the stimulus that caused that conversation on TV — either shows or ads.
The challenge in all of this: help machines understand the semantic layer, or the what the conversation is about. As he describes it, the first input is TV, the second input is social media. The space in the middle is the semantic barrier.
Bluefin itself:
Today, the Bluefin technology platform has a view into over 3 billion public-facing social media comments each month, tied to a continuously growing video fingerprint archive of over 200,000 distinct airings of TV shows and commercials. Bluefin currently ingests and performs video fingerprinting of close to 50 U.S. TV broadcast and cable networks, with plans to achieve full coverage of the national TV market.
Thus, for marketers and TV content producers, Bluefin’s technology solves a problem that has eluded the TV industry for more than 60 years: how to close the audience feedback loop of TV mass media.
Bluefin is currently running exclusive private pilots with several Fortune 100 global brands, leading ad agencies, and TV networks.
Such was the publicly subsidized cutting edge of social science in the United States in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Your grandchildren, should any ever come to exist, will be amazed, and furious.
Friday, April 15th, 2011
They Can’t Use Those Bombs…
One of the great problems with letting advertising be the foundation of mass media is that even the supposed non-fiction in the sponsored media declines to the same level as the ads.
Today, The New York Times howls that “Military forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, who have surrounded this city and vowed to crush its anti-Qaddafi rebellion, have been firing into residential neighborhoods with heavy weapons, including cluster bombs that have been banned by much of the world.”
Is the United States, one might wonder, a part of that “much of the world?”
Nope, though you’d never know that from the NYT article that raises the issue, because it doesn’t say.
2003-2006 Iraq
The US and UK use nearly 13,000 cluster munitions containing an estimated 1.8 to 2 million submunitions in the three weeks of major combat. A total of 63 CBU-87 bombs were dropped by US aircraft between May 1, 2003 and August 1, 2006.
Wednesday, June 30th, 2010
ROFLMFAO of the Day
The New York Times today features a book review of Denial: A Memoir of Terror, by Jessica Stern, pictured at left, a faculty affiliate of the Belfer Center’s International Security Program and a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Kennedy School at Harvard University.
It isn’t directly related to big business marketing, but in this review, Ms. Stein utters one of the most remarkable lines I’ve read in a long time, a line that speaks volumes about the totalitarian, Big Brotherian nature of this society and its elite-training institutions.
After attributing terrorism against “us” to a string of psychological and cultural factors she apparently doesn’t connect to politics or history or the distribution of world power (such are the requirements of maintaining Harvard and NSC connections), here is Stern’s epic howler:
“Harvard is a humiliation factory, and yet we don’t produce a lot of terrorists.”
OMFG. I mean, really? WOW! I almost fell out of my chair. Seriously.
I won’t waste your electrons reciting the marathon list of torturers and war criminals trained and housed at Harvard. You can do that yourself with a bit of internetting.
But permit me two items, won’t you?
1) Neo-Harvard-Man poster-boy Barack Hussein Obama is presently commander-in-chief of two wars, both pointless, one patently illegal. He has substantially increased the rate of drone bombings and military assassinations in both these festivals of mass death.
2) From Wikipedia:
Henry Kissinger received his B.A. degree summa cum laude at Harvard College in 1950, where he studied under William Yandell Elliott. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at Harvard University in 1952 and 1954, respectively. In 1952, while still at Harvard, he served as a consultant to the Director of the Psychological Strategy Board. His doctoral dissertation was titled “Peace, Legitimacy, and the Equilibrium (A Study of the Statesmanship of Castlereagh and Metternich).”
Kissinger remained at Harvard as a member of the faculty in the Department of Government and at the Center for International Affairs. He became Associate Director of the latter in 1957.
Kissinger played a key role in a secret bombing campaign in Cambodia to disrupt PAVN and Viet Cong units launching raids into South Vietnam from within Cambodia’s borders and resupplying their forces by using the Ho Chi Minh trail and other routes, as well as the 1970 Cambodian Incursion and subsequent widespread bombing of Cambodia. The bombing campaign contributed to the chaos of the Cambodian Civil War, which saw the forces of dictator Lon Nol unable to retain foreign support to combat the growing Khmer Rouge insurgency that would overthrow him in 1975.
The CIA provided education for the military officers directly involved in the coup against Allende,[33] and funding for the mass anti-government strikes in 1972 and 1973; during this period, Kissinger made several controversial statements regarding Chile’s government, stating that “the issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves” and “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its people.”
On September 11, 1973, Allende [was overthrown in a US-backed coup led by] Army Commander-in-Chief Augusto Pinochet, who [appointed himself] President. A document released by the CIA in 2000 titled “CIA Activities in Chile” revealed that the CIA actively supported the military junta after the overthrow of Allende and that it made many of Pinochet’s officers into paid contacts of the CIA or US military, even though many were known to be involved in notorious human rights abuses.
On September 16, 1973, five days after Pinochet had assumed power, the following exchange about the coup took place between Kissinger and President Nixon:
Nixon: Nothing new of any importance or is there?
Kissinger: Nothing of very great consequence. The Chilean thing is getting consolidated and of course the newspapers are bleeding because a pro-Communist government has been overthrown.
Nixon: Isn’t that something. Isn’t that something.
Kissinger: I mean instead of celebrating – in the Eisenhower period we would be heroes.
Nixon: Well we didn’t – as you know – our hand doesn’t show on this one though.
Kissinger: We didn’t do it. I mean we helped them.
Kissinger took a similar line as he had toward Chile when the Argentine military, led by Jorge Videla, toppled the democratic government of Isabel Perón in 1976 and consolidated power, launching brutal reprisals and “disappearances” against political opponents.
During the Angolan Civil War (1975–2002). Kissinger supported FNLA, led by Holden Roberto, and UNITA, led by Jonas Savimbi, the Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO) insurgencies, as well as the CIA-supported invasion of Angola by South African troops.
The Portuguese decolonization process brought US attention to the former Portuguese colony of East Timor, which lies within the Indonesian archipelago and declared its independence in 1975. Indonesian president Suharto was a strong US ally in Southeast Asia and began to mobilize the Indonesian army, preparing to annex the nascent state, which had become increasingly dominated by the popular leftist FRETILIN party. In December 1975, Suharto discussed the invasion plans during a meeting with Kissinger and President Ford in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta. Both Ford and Kissinger made clear that US relations with Indonesia would remain strong and that it would not object to the proposed annexation. US arms sales to Indonesia continued, and Suharto went ahead with the annexation plan.
In an April 3, 2008 interview by Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution, Kissinger re-iterated that even though he supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq he thought that the Bush administration rested too much of the case for war on Saddam’s supposed weapons of mass destruction.
Insofar as it produces historic personages, Harvard produces almost nothing but terrorists.
Wednesday, June 16th, 2010
The Leadership Unit Known as OilBama
On the exceedingly remote chance that it might contain an iota of a useful policy alteration, I subjected myself last night to something I can rarely take — a Presidential speech, namely President Obama’s live Oval Office address on the Deepwater Horizon explosion.
Knowing it was, in the coached-up words of The New York Times, “designed to convey a sense” that Obama is not a prostrate do-nothing corporate shill who is incapable of questioning the power structure even when its murderous nature is comparatively unadulterated nightly news, I had very low expectations.
They were too high.
The speech was historically terrible, in every imaginable way, even by the subterranean standards of this war-criminal nation-state. If I were to think in its terms, the question I would have would be this:
Can we get a commission to look into the failure of political courage and candor? Led by a Harvard entrepreneur? Until we have that, I’ll essentially have a wrenching anxiety that my way of life may be lost.
What a wipeout. If George W. Bush had been in office and delivered this rote and vacant verbiage, there would be a million green activists loading buses to go surround the White House. As it is, all’s quiet, and we’re getting a commission. A commission.
Thursday, June 3rd, 2010
Dawn of Death: The Apex of Shamelessness
Partly for intellectual/political reasons and partly because I grew up on the habit, I still watch some television. Last night, I nearly choked on my frozen yogurt when I saw this especially stunning mind-rape come on:
Now, I’m no greenhorn when it comes to the mega-chutzpah that goes into the planning and production of corporate marketing campaigns, which, with the possible exception of organized monotheism, are far and away the most carefully considered and lavishly funded form of dishonesty in human history.
But this just takes the fucking cake, here, folks.
What is the point of de-oiling animals after they have been exposed to petroleum leaks? The Procter and Gamble (Dawn is a P & G brand) ad above would have you believe that it is a simple rescue mission that yields lovely, happy-bunny outcomes. Wash the oil off the feathers or fur, and the critter goes home just fine and dandy. Maybe even cleaner and better!
Let’s leave aside the obvious question of going home to what — the same ecosystem in which they just got oiled, the one to which they were born and are adapted?
At the level of the animal itself, petroleum-soaked feathers or fur, serious as it is, is only the secondary problem. The primary problem is oral ingestion or dermal absorption of oil. Swallowing or soaking in petroleum is a catastrophe to the organism:
The impact on bird eggs and bird and animal babies is worse.
P & G HQ
So, what is the above advertisement for Dawn dish soap? It is a knowing lie, designed to get people to pay a premium for Procter and Gamble’s heavily advertised brand of liquid soap. As all marketing planners know, “a sure-fire way to get consumers to pay more for our products even in these difficult times is to make some ‘green’ claims.”
In reality, then, the above ad is nothing more and nothing less than this: the use of the gargantuan, heart-rending, only-just-begun biological destruction from the Deepwater Horizon blowout as a photo-op for raking in more profits for P & G shareholders, all while sowing Satanic disinformation about the very reality troubling the very victims of the scam.
And, of course, it gets worse. Serious studies of bird survival after petroleum exposure show that “rescuing” birds ranges from being somewhat helpful to being utterly futile and inhumane.
And guess which organization is working to sell the rosiest possible view? That’s right: The International Bird Rescue Research Center, the very group to which P & G sends money as part of this marketing scheme.
The very group whose executive director writes letters of praise to P & G.
The very group that says this on its FAQ page:
Q: What do you use to wash birds?
A: We use “Dawn” dish washing liquid. IBRRC has conducted research on most of the commonly available cleaning agents and “Dawn” meets all the criteria we have established for appropriate cleaning agents. Those criteria are the ability to remove most oils, effectiveness at low concentrations, non-irritating to the skin and eyes, rapid removal from feathers (rinsing), and is easily accessible. Procter and Gamble now donates all “Dawn” detergent to IBRRC and other rehabilitation organizations.
The very group that answers another key FAQ thus:
Q: What is your survival rate?
A: The survival rate will differ with each oil spill because of all the factors that effect it. Some of those factors are the toxicity of the oil, how rapidly the birds are collected and stabilized, what condition the bird was in before it was oiled, and the species involved. We have had release rates as high as 100% and as low as 25% in the early years. We now average about 50% to 80%. Again, it depends on many variables and cannot be predicted.
Did you catch that liar’s shift? What is your survival rate? We won’t say, but here are some statistics about our RELEASE rate.
In other words, the IBRRC is a Procter and Gamble front, a mere pimp for P & G’s “cherished strategy of introducing increasingly sophisticated — and increasingly costly — household staples.”
By the way, a regular 24.0z bottle of Dawn liquid dishwashing detergent presently sells for $5.49, or 22.9 cents per ounce on drugstore.com. I guarantee you that the dollar stores my grandmother frequents sell an indistinguishable product for one dollar.
I can only quote, once again, from the late Robert L. Heilbroner:
At a business forum, I was once brash enough to say that I thought the main cultural impact of television advertising was to teach children that grown-ups told lies for money. How strong, deep, or sustaining can be the values of a civilization that generates a ceaseless flow of half-truths and careful deceptions?
