Archive for the 'Other Tricks' Category
Friday, February 20th, 2009
What’s Leaving YOUR Wallet?
Click here to peruse the credit-card “change of terms” notice I got yesterday from Capital One.
“The rate will be determined by adding 26.15% to the Prime rate.”
This game is so over, folks…
Don’t hold your breath for help. Hit the shred button instead.
Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009
The Plug-In Drug
Here it comes, folks. They’re beginning the serious ramp-up for selling you “hybrid” automobiles.
This sales effort is going to rely on you remaining woefully under-informed about the basic physics of cars and cars-first transportation.
They want you thinking like this:
To keep you there, they have to hide many facts, including the fact that, in this universe, nothing comes from nowhere. Hence, having everybody frequently rolling around at high speeds in fragile metal boxes with up to 8,000 often complex parts in them is always going to be the quintessence of an unsustainable activity.
Making lithium-ion batteries, for instance, requires vast extraction of a finite natural resource, production of which starts like this:
As the corporate capitalist hybrid hype mounts, you are also going to continue to be denied access to knowledge of the fact that, even in the best-case scenario — complete fleet replacement, the cessation of aggressive driving habits, etc. — plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (a.k.a., PHEVs) would only reduce per-vehicle petroleum use by 45% in the USA.
In other words, who among us is going to be able to buy these rolling distractions-from-reality?
Tuesday, December 30th, 2008
“The reality is, what options do we have?”
Poor, pitiful, helpless United States of America. It really has no options in this latest terrible Israeli war crime, you see. So says the sponsored alibi manufacturer, Aaron David Miller, in a New York Times article explaining the roots of Barack Obama’s endorsement of the ongoing Israeli re-enactment of the Nazi bombing of Guernica. “The reality is, what options do we have?,” asks the “scholar” Miller.
Even in this market-totalitarian empire of untruths, you don’t often find more brazen deceptions than this.
See these tanks here?:
I’m no expert, but I’d wager very heavily they’re US-made M60s, given that the USA has gifted 700 of them to Israel. The above photo is from today’s New York Times. These M60s are lining up for an impending Israeli land invasion of Gaza.
And the warplanes dropping all those bombs and missiles, blowing up markets and schools? F-16s, of which Israel has received 226, gratis.
The United States provides Israel with not just free military hardware, but also $3 billion a year in military aid money. (Israel’s per capita GDP, by the way, is $23,578.)
“The reality is, what options do we have?”
With leadership like this, I’d say the answer is getting rather clearer every day…
Tuesday, October 14th, 2008
Hank Paulson Plays Elmer Fudd
In big business marketing, they call selling the system (a.k.a. lobbying, a.k.a. ideological training of the public) “macro-marketing.” It’s a distinctly minor part of the overall corporate marketing juggernaut, yet an important one. 
Sometimes, circumstances compel the politicians, those eager puppets of “the shadow cast on society by big business,” to perform the macro-marketing themselves, at no charge to the major corporations.
Witness, then, the latest thespian efforts of Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., as reported in today’s edition of The New York Times:
“The needs of our economy require that our financial institutions not take this new capital to hoard it, but to deploy it,” Mr. Paulson said.
Capitalist wabbits everywhere are rolling on the floor laughing their asses off at this one. As if you lecture the heroin addict about how to spend the $100 bill after you hand over the cash! “I just hope you won’t buy drugs with that money I gave you last week…” As if capitalists would or even could put something other than their shareholders’ short-term profitability at the top of any agenda!
“He don’t know me vewy well, do he?”
Friday, July 25th, 2008
Gaming the Greens
Here comes the next wave of the overclass’s assault on the public mind…
The Chevron Corporation, in partnership with the relentlessly dreadful British magazine The Economist, has promulgated “Energyville,” a cutesy online computer game that touts itself as
an interactive online game that challenges players to meet the energy needs of their own city. Energyville, developed using data and content provided by the Economist Intelligence Unit, The Economist Group’s research arm, examines the economic, environmental and security trade-offs and opportunities associated with different energy sources.
The “game” (it’s a game, indeed, but not the innocent type), wraps itself in the flag of education:
Energyville was designed to show the complexities and the tough choices that have to be made to meet the energy needs of a growing, modern city. Given the importance of energy in everyone’s lives, Energyville is an opportunity to stimulate and inform the debate and help create awareness around our energy choices.
Energyville represents an average industrialized global city of almost four million people. Population growth and energy demands, impacts and costs, are based on projected socio economic and energy usage data from the Economist Intelligence Unit and other organizations such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the Energy Information Administration.
As players move through the game’s phases, they learn about the characteristics of the different energy sources and understand how different events affect their choices. The economical, environmental and security impacts of their chosen energy portfolio are calculated using an energy-management points system. Players can compare their scores with other players, challenge a friend and debate the results on www.willyoujoinus.com.
But there’s one very huge unmentioned catch: In Energyville, all “your” city’s sources of energy demand (as opposed to energy supply) are fixed by Chevron and The Economist! You have no choices about transportation or urban layout or housing density or any other kind of commodity production!
That, of course, is because corporate capitalism has zero capacity to withstand any substantial alteration in those all-important factors. Shrinking demand to save humanity and the planet would spell doom for our overclass. Ergo, no demand-side choices will be tolerated or even mentioned.
The extra scary part of this little propaganda “game” is that the green activist-intelligentsia seems to be naively gobbliing the candy and bounding right into the witch’s house.
We are in very deep trouble…
Monday, May 19th, 2008
Empire of the Uninformed: Market Totalitarianism’s Real Basis
Under the dual assault of big business marketing and the pro-business psy-ops that have long passed for “politics” here, ordinary Americans are the most deeply, intensively propagandized people in human history.
The extremely long list of basic things we don’t know is mostly inscribed by the ever-expanding dominance of marketing-friendly televisual media and televisual mental habits over print media and print literacy skills.
But we also have our own very extensive “Black Book of Corporate Capitalism.” Unless we somehow overthrow our corporate overclass — which, despite the times, remains the richest and most powerful in human history — we will never get to see the full version of that book.
Nonetheless, if you keep your eyes peeled, every so often a page slips out.
One just has. For those disgusted by the huge gulf between reality and the continuing ability of the system’s overseers and mouthpieces to paint the United States as some exceptional angel of goodness, here’s the story:
AP IMPACT: At least 100,000 said executed by US’s Korean ally in 1950 summer of terror
CHARLES J. HANLEY and JAE-SOON CHANG
AP News May 18, 2008 12:17 EST
Grave by mass grave, South Korea is unearthing the skeletons and buried truths of a cold-blooded slaughter from early in the Korean War, when this nation’s U.S.-backed regime killed untold thousands of leftists and hapless peasants in a summer of terror in 1950.
With U.S. military officers sometimes present, and as North Korean invaders pushed down the peninsula, the southern army and police emptied South Korean prisons, lined up detainees and shot them in the head, dumping the bodies into hastily dug trenches. Others were thrown into abandoned mines or into the sea. Women and children were among those killed. Many victims never faced charges or trial.
The mass executions — intended to keep possible southern leftists from reinforcing the northerners — were carried out over mere weeks and were largely hidden from history for a half-century. They were “the most tragic and brutal chapter of the Korean War,” said historian Kim Dong-choon, a member of a 2-year-old government commission investigating the killings.
Hundreds of sets of remains have been uncovered so far, but researchers say they are only a tiny fraction of the deaths. The commission estimates at least 100,000 people were executed, in a South Korean population of 20 million.
That estimate is based on projections from local surveys and is “very conservative,” said Kim. The true toll may be twice that or more, he told The Associated Press.
Through the postwar decades of South Korean right-wing dictatorships, victims’ fearful families kept silent about that blood-soaked summer. American military reports of the South Korean slaughter were stamped “secret” and filed away in Washington. Communist accounts were dismissed as lies.
Only since the 1990s, and South Korea’s democratization, has the truth begun to seep out.
In 2002, a typhoon’s fury uncovered one mass grave. Another was found by a television news team that broke into a sealed mine. Further corroboration comes from a trickle of declassified U.S. military documents, including U.S. Army photographs of a mass killing outside this central South Korean city.
Now Kim’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has added government authority to the work of scattered researchers, family members and journalists trying to peel away the long-running cover-up. The commissioners have the help of a handful of remorseful old men.
“Even now, I feel guilty that I pulled the trigger,” said Lee Joon-young, 83, one of the executioners in a secluded valley near Daejeon in early July 1950.
