Archive for the 'Lies' Category
Tuesday, May 4th, 2010
Cato is Clown Central
The mighty journalistic flagship USA Today carries a story about yet another preposterous effort by medical experts to pretend that the people who run the United States are going to consider making the nation’s built environment friendly to exercise. The delusional proposal in question is, in the credulous description of USA Today, a “comprehensive, wide-ranging strategies outlined in the new U.S. National Physical Activity Plan, which is being released today by an expert panel representing influential health organizations. Among groups involved are the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American College of Sports Medicine, the American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society.”
The “comprehensive” plan is, as always, a melange of quarter-measures and rote incantations, none of which, puny as they are, stands a ghost of a chance of getting funded:
• Make sure roadway spending includes money for “complete streets,” accommodating cars, bikes and pedestrians.
• Have doctors assess patients’ physical activity levels at appointments and discuss ways they can meet the activity guidelines.
• Encourage early childhood education programs to have little ones as physically active as possible.
• Provide access to and opportunities for physical activity before and after school.
• Encourage school officials to find ways for children to walk and bike safely to school.
• Provide tax breaks for building owners or employers who provide amenities in workplaces that support active commuting, such as showers in buildings, secure bicycle parking, free bicycles or transit subsidies.
• Increase funding and resources for parks, recreation, fitness and sports programs and facilities in areas of high need.
Of course, for “balance” in its reporting on this piece of hopeless liberal special pleading, USA Today must turn to “conservatives,” who, of course, refuse to admit that any environmental discouragement of health exists in corporate capitalist America.
Cue the blithering clowns of the unintentionally hilarious Cato Institute:
“Most people are overweight not because there isn’t a sidewalk in their neighborhood but because we like to eat and we don’t like to exercise,” says David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, D.C.
And the price of the changes could be high. “Everything costs something,” Boaz says. “Every action has a cost, and when it’s government-involved, whether it’s federal or local, they are generally less efficient with money. This is the elite planning for how the masses should live.”
Only in America, folks, only in America: Choices exist independently of environments. Government is always less efficient than mega-corporations, no evidence mentioned or required. And, despite the fact that big business marketing is the largest and most sophisticated program of behavioral control in human history and something that receives twice as much funding as all forms and levels of schooling combined, “elite planning for how the masses should live” can only come from the government or their evil dupes and shills, worried public health researchers.
Monday, May 3rd, 2010
Why Know Your Credit Score?
If you watch TV, you’ve probably seen Nixon speech-writer and militant irrationalist Ben Stein pitching freescore.com, with the proposition that “knowing your credit score” is somehow a step to improving one’s economic circumstances.
What deceptive crapola. Knowing your credit score is analogous to balancing your checkbook. If you need to do it, you are already fucked.
Except, of course, that there’s actually one rational reason to balance one’s checkbook. Doing so might keep you from incurring your bank’s super-usurious “NSF” fee-rape.
Credit scores, meanwhile, are credit scores. They are portraits of one’s wealth level, and purely ex post facto. Knowing your score is utterly irrelevant to changing your score, which requires increased income, not knowledge of what has already happened. For the vast majority of struggling citizens, the only conceivable reason for trying to know your score I can think of is to avoid the minor embarrassment of being denied a car loan or a cell phone contract. But, even then, if you’re worried about that happening, you almost certainly are right to be worried, and don’t need to throw salt on your own wounds by ensnaring yourself in exploitative dirtball schemes like freescore.com.
By the way, Ben Stein, surely drawing on his exquisite, religion-informed sensitivity to the plight of the common household, says “The economy is still very strong.”
Thursday, March 25th, 2010
F-R-A-U-D
Mandated offers of coverage, but no cap on the price of the policies offered, in other words. So, actually, in practice, no insurance for sick or previously sick children until at least 2014. “Good news! We hereby offer you a policy for Tiny Tim! Your monthly premium will be $2,789 a month, with 20% co-pays for in-network services,up to a maximum of $25,000 a year.”
Meanwhile, can you recognize the pattern here?:
NAFTA
WTO/Conclusion of Uruguay Round
AFDC —> TANF
Glass-Steagall repeal
Expiration of Independent Counsel statute
Romney-Ca…oops, Obama-Care
P.S. In case you’ve forgotten, during his award winning, massively fraudulent electoral campaign, Barack Obama promised his version of “health care” (largely an oxymoron in a capitalist medical system) reform would not include a personal mandate requiring all U.S. residents to purchase private medical insurance. As CBS News reported, this promise was presented by Obama as “the biggest difference between” himself and Hillary Clinton on the topic.
We now know that the only difference between Clinton and Obama is that the former was substantially more honest with the public about her actual plans for governance. Now, there’s a depressing thought…
Tuesday, December 8th, 2009
The “Up To” Claim
In a book presciently titled Business Civilization in Decline, the late Robert L. Heilbroner made this rather crucial point:
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?
Under corporate capitalist normalcy, the lies multiply at a rate that would make a rabbit blush.
One noteworthy lie is the now-rampant use of the phrase “up to” in advertising claims. Once you stop to notice it, you’ll see and hear this howler everywhere.
One particularly egregious case of the “up to” claim is here:
Not only has Michelin extended from humans to animals its long-running reliance on using death threats as a sales tactic (this extension to critters probably being done after a focus group suggested Michelin could get kids to ask their parents to buy Michelins to save the bunnies), but the “up to” claim in this ad is a double-whammy. Not only is it an “up to” claim, but it also doesn’t tell you the context for the “up to” claim!
As Ad Freak explains:
The Psyop-animated [dig that name!] spot says Michelin tires stop up to 14 feet shorter than those of the competition. (“At what speed?” you might ask, but get no answer.)
So, Michelin takes two scoops at once from the barrel of statistical deceptions.
Michelin’s products are definitely worth up to a certain price…
Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009
Tony Horwitz: Civil War an “Overreaction”
God, The New York Times sucks! It just published an op-ed that equates John Brown’s raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry with 9-11.
Here is the author, Tony Horwitz’ conclusion:
If anything, given the North’s half-hearted, soon-sold attempts at Reconstruction, the Civil War was an UNDER-REACTION.
Jesus!
Saturday, November 14th, 2009
Annals of Commodification: Lotion for Men
As the world careens toward ecocide and social collapse, the corporate capitalists are hard at work thinking of (wait for it…) ways to sell lotion to men:
http://www.strongerskin.com/strongerskin/
It’s all there — all the standard marketing tactics — in this one. Lies, flattery, “aspirational” promises, and, of course, a bedrock of carefully-researched intentional fraud.
“Weak skin” is not a real medical problem. To the extent skin health is a real issue, it is 99 percent determined by diet, water-intake, and lifestyle habits. Rubbing on lotion does little or nothing to make human skin “strong.” At most, it makes skin temporarily smooth and greasy feeling.
Of course, you can’t sell lotion to men based on a desire to have soft-feeling skin for a few hours. Hence, this stunning piece of tendentious diarrhea.
Brought to you by Unilever, the same assholes who also peddle perfume (Axe Body Spray) to teenage boys…
