The Story of Evil Marketing - A Conspiracy Theory for 2020

Ok folks, it's Conspiracy theory time.  

Long ago, Soros, The Koch Brothers, Davos, Qanon, the Knights Templar, whoever.... hired a company

EVILMARKETING .COM

This group was very very good at marketing. They had a process, evolved over time, that worked well, delivering quality product with a minimum of work on the client's part.  They made the person who hired them look good.

The process is simple... the customer supplies a few pieces of very important information, and then they go to work, show a version for approval, and then the product is given to the client for use.

Item #1 - Who do you want to listen to your message  - The Target Market
  Client:  The 99%, those who want to take our wealth and power

Item #2 - What are the top 3 messages you want them to remember
  Client:

Their neighbors are not like them

Their neighbors are stupid

Their neighbors are evil

Item #3 - What are signs we did our job so you can prove it to your boss? - Metrics
  Client:

Increased division

Increased violence

Ignoring us completely

Item #4 - What are your goals for this campaign? - Goals
  Client:

Divide the 99%
Divert attention from us
Social Media Profit

The team went away... and came up with a brilliant strategy to accomplish the goal.

They came up with a few simple phrases that sounded a bit odd, but contained different meanings, depending on the audience. Turns out, you can test this.... tell the phrase to a sample from each target market, and see how they interpret it. If the answers diverge, you're on the right track.... if the answers oppose, you've hit the mother load.

But that wasn't enough for Evil Marketing... they had a better idea, and had to explain it to the client.

In this campaign there are 2 phases, in phase 1 we'll spread specially crafted phrases. "Received Words" - These are phrases that have an obviously evil meaning, and a plausible good meaning. To help explain it, we'll use Alice, Bob, Carol, and Dave as examples.

Alice is a well meaning person who will first use the phrase when talking with her friend Bob, who has heard it before and agrees. Alice and Bob now recognize each other as allies.

Alice them talks to Carol, who is unfamiliar with the phrase, and asks a few questions because it sounds a bit strange. Alice and Carol invest time so that Carol now understands the phrase in the same way as Alice.

Carol later talks to Dave, who also asks questions, but rejects the phrase because the evil meaning is too much for him to swallow. The seeds of resentment are sewn between Carol ad Dave.

Dave later talks to Elaine, who decides she agrees with the Good meaning.

Later Dave is talking to Fred, who agrees with Dave on the Evil Meaning

The client understood how little effort it would take to spread, and nodded in understanding

Phase 2 begins when a critical mass of people are reliably using the phrases we supplied.

Now that Alice, Bob, Carol, and Elaine have invested energy in the phrase, they are strongly oppose to changing it. The phrase practically defends itself from change and dilution.  Dave and Fred also share an understanding that the others are allies, with an easy to recognize flag.

You, and your associates now begin to use the Evil intent of the phrase to accomplish your goals.  Alice, Bob, Carol and Elaine now feel forced to support this new (to them) meaning. They are trapped.

Dave and Fred now think that the others support the Evil intent of the phrase. They are fooled.

So, as you can see... this campaign will be highly effective, dividing and distracting your target market with almost no cost.

The clients loved it, and would be happy to use Evil Marketing again. The Metrics are off the chart!

So that's the story, and here we are... in an country about to rip itself apart, where nobody at the top dares actually lead because admitting mistakes is political suicide, throwing these phrases at each other over and over and over, and expecting that eventually we'll get different results if we try hard enough.

It's as if the phrases all have a good message in them, trapped in an evil spell... if you change the words, you break the spell.

We all have to admit our mistakes because our leaders wont.

I'm just a cranky old white guy with both liberal and conservative views.... actually their neither... they are MY views of the world.
I am more than ready to change my views and admit fault while doing so, publicly. Our "leaders" can't do that.

Please stop using the phrases as given... change a word or two, eliminate the double meaning. Please also be willing to lead us out of this mess by admitting the mistakes of our side as you see them.

Let's all be adults, and snuff this conflict out before it destroys our country.

E Pluribus Unum - One of Many - United We Stand, Divided We Fall.

The Internet of Garbage

As an old white guy, I keep having my worldview shifted by people who tell me things that I hadn't noticed because my world was primarily engineered by old white guys... this is yet another example of some wisdom from a non-old, non-white, non-guy

Here's Sarah Jeong on The Internet of Garbage. She's smart, and has several good points to make.

The end of the internet as we knew it.

Cloud computing suddenly has a dark future, taking what may be a mortal blow thanks to the Wikileaks censorship by Amazon.

Yahoo is killing off delicious, a seriously good social bookmarking site.

Yahoo may next kill off Flickr, if their track record is any guide, they have no clue how to create value on the internet.

Facebook is just one big flytrap for personal information.

There was a big migration to hosted services on the internet.... and this was allowing everyone to ignore the asymmetric model of access being slide under our noses... but no longer.

If you want your kids and future generations to have a voice at all in the future... here are some things you need to learn about.

• Net neutrality means that everyone should be able to host their own stuff, create new services, and have them equally accessible from anywhere on the net. It is not a communist plot to deprive ISPs from profit.
• If you can't run your own servers, you don't have free speech... its worth a few bucks to have freedom.
• Computing Security can be fixed... it requires a new model of security called Capability Based Security, or also known as the "principle of least privilege".  If you have this model in place, you'll never need a virus scanner ever again.
• Wikileaks is not evil... they didn't break any laws... those who denounce them are the ones you have to worry about if you value your liberty.
• If you want to share photos with your family... you should be able to do it with your own hardware and an internet connection.... nobody else should be required as middlemen.

Things are changing... power is being re-distributed back to the people who chose to take it back, one small piece at a time.

On the need for real internet connections

Most of us don't have a real internet connection, and it limits our freedom in a subtle, but increasingly important way. We are NOT free to use the internet as it was originally intended... to allow anyone to make a program on their server freely available to others. We've slowly been migrated into a "consumer" version, where we are merely free to choose from selections handed down to us by others who know what's good for us.

This makes itself firmly felt when someone wants to tell the truth, and finds themselves unable to offer them hosting because one Senator (or any other "Elite") makes a subtle threat in a phone call to Amazon. Isn't technology great, you don't have to burn books any more, you can just cut off internet connections! Goebbles would drool at the power exercised by Mr Lieberman in the past week.

Free speech is an important check on the abuse of power by those in Government and other positions of authority. It has now been shown that freedom of speech on the Internet is fundamentally non-existent for most of us.

Net neutrality is important... if you don't understand what it means, find out.

"In Germany they first came for the Communists, 

and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. 

Then they came for the Jews, 

and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. 

Then they came for the trade unionists, 

and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. 

Then they came for the Catholics, 

and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. 

Then they came for me — 

and by that time no one was left to speak up."

Pastor Martin Niemöller

Please don't let history repeat itself.

Crossing the wikileaks Rubicon.

It seems that Representative Pete King wants to have Wikileaks.org declared a Terrorist Organization. I can see how this might be a very appealing idea to someone who wants to wrap himself up in the flag, and doesn't believe we'll think too hard about it.

However, things are not as simple as King would like. Wikileaks has not committed any crimes, nor are they attempting to terrorize anyone. They exist because the mainstream media has been rendered useless by their corporate masters in the consolidation of the "news business" over the last 50 years. Had journalists been doing their jobs, the things being leaked might have been uncovered years ago, instead of being allowed to fester in the dark alleys of power in Washington.

If King gets his wish, the line in the sand couldn't be clearer... the State Department would in effect be declaring itself to be above the law, above reproach or redress from the citizens of this or any other nation. Wikileaks is a free association of people who are effectively The Press. The FREEDOM of the PRESS should never be violated.

Declaring Wikileaks to be an enemy of the state is a line over which the administration would be foolish to cross. Once this rubicon is crossed, it is obvious that no peaceful reforms can be accomplished within the existing framework handed down by our forefathers for peaceful change... leaving the other means of change they used so effectively against the previous administrations that ruled without regard to the citizens from distant shores.

We, the people, have a right to assemble, to speak and publish our views and facts as we find them. We will not stand for the destruction of our 1st amendment right of free speech.

To declare the majority of citizens as terrorists is to give up the consent of the governed.

To ban Wikileaks is the path of fools... lets hope calmer voices prevail.

Good night, and good luck.

Bait?

We had functionally obsolete battleships as bait in Pearl Harbor, while most of the fleet was out.

Now we're parking functionally obsolete aircraft carriers as bait in the Straight of Hormuz.. meanwhile the drones and cruise missile launch capability is likely to remain out of range.

Who says history doesn't rhyme?

"Pole Shift Theory" to reality in a few easy steps...

I was sent a link to this story which is being used as evidence on a site which promotes the theory of an upcoming pole shift. It doesn't say anything about where it happened.

So I found the original story, using Google. It happened in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Then I found this story from Milwaukee, from last year.. apparently it's not extraordinary after all. Note the cause:

”Thawing and traffic vibrations likely busted a sewer main. The void left by the broken pipe caused this slow underground erosion over days, possibly weeks. To repair the section of Locust, a road crew must bring down the street and build it up again. That means at least one noisy night for people who live in nearby apartment and condo towers. “I live right in the front, too,” said Katie Hobson. 

Either we can worry about an imaginary "Pole Shift" which is just an unsupported fairy tail, or we could spend that same emotional energy worrying about something that actually matters... how to make sure that our infrastructure is maintained. I strongly suggest we worry about keeping our infrastructure up to date... or civilization will literally collapse around us.

Google and open WiFi... political action

Here's what I wrote to my State Attorney General today in response to the news that there is a Witch-hunt in progress. You should write yours as well.


TO:

Office of the Indiana Attorney General
Indiana Government Center South
302 W. Washington St., 5th Floor
Indianapolis, IN 46204
Phone: 317.232.6201
Fax: 317.232.7979

E-mail: Constituent@atg.in.gov

FROM: Mike Warot

Hi
I'm Mike Warot, from Hammond. I'm a network administrator working in Chicago.


I've recently learned that 37 states are joining in an investigation of Google's collection of WiFi data, as typified in this story from the LA Times

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2010/07/google-street-view.html



The issue at hand seems to be quite simple. They were trying to make a list of open (unencrypted) WiFi access points as a supplement to GPS to help in navigation. Because the software used to collect this data (Kismet) defaults to collecting entire packets instead of just the names of the access points, there is now an uproar that "passwords were stolen" and other Bull Shit. It was a simple technical oversight, not an evil plot.



Please DO NOT WASTE MY TAX DOLLARS on this wild goose chase. I'm sure you have plenty of other more important work to do.

Thanks for your time and attention.

Tearing down fences

I was recently given a list of things as a guide to help chose which side of the Democrat/Republican fence I want to sit on. Here is my response:

Tear down the fence

Those are false choices... I refuse to pick a side... as the parties on both sides of it are corrupt and they work together to keep us down. The fence is a sheep pen, and we're expected to pay for it. I refuse to be a sheep.

As for Guns - 

Guns are meant to protect us from all enemies, Foreign and Domestic. They probably won't help you if you are being carjacked... but they will help you defend yourself and your family at home. Criminals and people with diminished mental capacity shouldn't have them.  Everyone should be licensed to use them, and have to prove they can safely operate their particular choice of weapon. (Just like cars).   People with kids, or guests with kids should keep them locked up when they are not carrying them.

As for Food -

Cows shouldn't be fed cow parts. Testing for mad cow should be done on a wide scale probe to see if it's really an issue or not. Proper regulation of our food supply is a good and just purpose of the US Department of Agriculture and the FDA.  Paying large corporations to consolidate megafarms and drive people off the land... is not.

As for Gays -

Some people think gays are born that way, others think its a sin. Either way, we're not God, we shouldn't judge them. Instead we should be on the lookout for abusive parents and others who do evil things to our children... and those people are usually straight.

As for Welfare - 

As for the down and out, they are trying to figure out how to get by...  they want work, honest work. It's the corrupt that spoil it for everyone... The corrupt at the bottom, and especially the corrupt at the top... who start wars for profit, who call the rest of us "little people", who will spend trillions to invade countries unrelated to the 9/11 attack... but don't want to pay unemployment benefits to those whose jobs have been shipped to China due to corporate greed.

As for Health Care - 

Modern medicine is wonderful, and expensive as hell. We pay far more for it than every other modern country in the world, with far worse results. We need to get everyone's records in a database. We need to get rid of the insurance industry. They have proven to be a parasite that delivers NEGATIVE VALUE by sucking in vast amounts of money, and preventing health care. This should be done by the States, who already have infrastructure for dealing with it, not the Feds.  (However, the Veterans Administration is now a model of how health care SHOULD be done, I'm amazed at how well it works)

As for The List - 

I found the whole list interesting... but as I said at the start... it's a false choice. The "bipartisan" way is one of ignoring the real wishes of the people, and of dividing and conquering us. We need to end it, and get some real democracy going.

The Bailout and how we got there... actually explained.

Please spend an hour of your time listening to episode 365 of This American Life. 

They explain how the economy got to the dire straights it's currently in, and discuss the bailout.

If you have any desire to understand, you should listen.

Quote of the day

"We are now in the golden age of thieves. And where I come from we put thieves in jail, we don't bail them out." — Rep. Pete Visclosky, Democrat.

Thanks to Scott Olsen for the tip, and WSBT for the Quote, and to Pete for doing a hell of a job.

Bailing out the world?

If Karl Denninger is right, the bailout really is an attempt to bail out the World's banks... which explains why the people in Europe would care about our mess... watch the video, and decide for yourself.

I don't want to give away $700,000,000,000 of our money overseas, neither should you.

Learn from History

The depression became the Great Depression because Congress got stampeeded into passing the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and made things worse. From Wikipedia (emphasis MINE)

The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act (sometimes known as the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act)[1] was an act signed into law on June 17, 1930, that raised U.S. tariffs on over 20,000 imported goods to record levels. In the United States 1,028 economists signed a petition against this legislation, and after it was passed, many countries retaliated with their own increased tariffs on U.S. goods, and American exports and imports plunged by more than half. In the opinion of most economists, the Smoot-Hawley act was partially responsible for the severity of the Great Depression.[2][3]

Now we have the Bailout which is opposed by Economists... don't let them repeat the mistake again.

Trivia... it was the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act which was the dry boring history that Ben Stein was talking about as a Teacher in Ferris Bueller's day off, which is why I knew about it.

Here we go again.... damn thieves are trying to rip us off again!

Senator Bayh's voicemail was full, but I was able to call Senator Lugar's office... I suggest you do the same. We can't let this bailout pass... it'll be pissing away $700,000,000,000 of our money as a start, and won't fix anything.

The administration is trying to scare you into giving them money... normally this would be called Strong Armed Robbery in the state of Indiana, but in Washington DC it's called politics as usual.

Don't let the thieves get away with it.

My Congressman Rocks!

Here's the email I got from my Representative - Peter J. Visclosky... who I will continue to vote for in reply to my letter opposing the bailout. (Ephasis mine - all mine)

  

Dear Michael:

 

Thank you for contacting me to express your concerns regarding government assistance to distressed financial institutions. 

 

I absolutely agree with you. That is why today I opposed H.R. 3997, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, and the House rejected it by a vote of 205 to 228.

 

I do not believe that it is the responsibility of Congress to bail out financial firms experiencing loss because of a lack of regulation, a lack of oversight, the greed of financial executives who often make sums in excess of 250 times the income of the average American worker, and bad judgment. 

 

I have the gravest reservations over this proposal, and I am appalled at the President's arrogance to suggest that Congress act within ten days to undo a disaster that has crescendoed over the last ten years and enriched countless Wall Street executives and speculators while impoverishing multitudes. Enclosed, please find a copy of the remarks that I submitted for the Congressional Record during consideration of H.R. 3997.

 

The problems in our current financial system are not temporary aberrations in an otherwise healthy system, and may not be so easily addressed. As I write, it is not known whether similar proposals will be considered in the future. However, given the gravity and systematic nature of these problems, you can be assured that I will examine any future proposal with the same care and deliberation I exercised with H.R. 3997.

 

Thank you again for contacting me. Do not hesitate to let me know if you have any other questions or concerns.

Sincerely,

Peter J. Visclosky

Member of Congress

It's heartwarming to me to know I've got good representation.

The people have spoken... for now...

They voted the bailout down... the first good news all day.

Maybe now we can move forward, and purge this toxic debt from our markets, and get to work rebuilding our country.  Some transparency will certainly help if we can get it.

What the bailout really means

A friend noticed that the first vote on the bailout failed... and asked for my opinion....

If we do nothing, we'll have to watch some banks fail as the CDO mess along with the derivatives beast die... it won't be nice... but at least the Government would still be here, and could help out the little guy once the consequences of this bad debt are fully known. Folks like us could survive it.

 

If this bailout makes it through, regardless of the details, the bailout buys us a few months to a year of the status quo. It does this by hiding the "toxic" loans from the markets by eating them before anyone gets a chance to see how foul they truely are.  Of course, to do this we'll be spending somewhere around 0.7 Trillion dollars, and it will only take a small nibble out of the shitpile. There will be trillions more left, which still has to be dealt with.  The 0.7 Trillion has to come from somewhere, and for the first time, the Congress, Treasury, and Fed are considering just printing it up, with no "reserve" to back it.  Once they get a hit of truly free money, they'll be like a meth addict, and think they can just buy up all the bad loans...   that's when the result is totally debasing our currency, resulting in the devaluation of the dollar to nothing.

 

It's my opinion that passage of this bailout signals the end of the United States of America.

 

  --Mike--

Cluetrain urgently needed

As I think more about the bailout... the need for a copy of the ClueTrain to be used here is more apparent than ever.

The bailout and the process leading up to it is totally opaque to the general public. We're being rushed into this by the type of government by panic that Naomi Wolf warns us about in her latest book.

We need to stop, breathe, slow down and take a few moments to talk about this, discuss it, open up the conversation and shine some daylight into this mess.

We need radical transparency if we're to have any hope of doing this right... the fact that opposing candidates both agree with the bailout was to me a very strong sign that this is politics as usual... which we just can't survive.

The United States needs a clue... open up the books, find the real costs of the fiscal games of the past 30 years, and push the bad debt out into the light of day, where everyone can see the stinking corpses floating on Wall Street, and then give that debt a proper burial. 

Bush, Pelosi, McCain and Obama need to be together tonight on every channel if this thing gets done, and explain it all to us, exactly... or we need to vote each and every member of congress who swallows this out of office.

I'd write more, but I'm spending the day with my Father... and life is short.  I've said my piece, now please talk about it with your friends and family, and stop this bailout insanity, for our nation's sake.

May God bless the United States of America.

  --Mike--

Rebuilding the 4th estate

I firmly believe it's time for us to rebuild the 4th estate. It's obvious that we can't count on professional journalism to supply anything usefully approximating the truth any longer. A democracy requires informed citizens to survive. Thus the disappearance of credible journalism is an exisential threat to the United States, a matter of national security, of the first order.

Post 9/11 photography on the CTA - Entirely Reasonable

I was taking some photos on the Red Line of the Chicago Transit Authority today, and I was told politely that I would need to get permission. So I put the camera away... and decided to see what's involved in getting permission. The response was one which I'm quite happy with, as a photographer, passenger, and Citizen of the United States.

I rode the Green Line to the LindenClinton stop and walked over to CTA headquarters. Ms Kelley in customer service was very nice and polite in determining who should handle my inquiry. The lobby on the second floor features a nice Neon sculpture I hope to photograph some day.

After a short wait I was greeted by Ron Grazian Jr., who is the Planning Coordinator for Operations Oversight. He explained the situation to me, and gathered information from me about the nature and purpose of my photography. He gave me a copy of the policy document they use for their staff, which will probably prove helpfull at some point in the future. He also made the quite valid point that they have 11,000 employees who may or may not know the fine details of their policy.

The policy itself is quite reasonable, leaving things to the discretion of their employees, which is probably the most sane approach to things they could have possibly done. I'm very impressed with the professionalism and thoughfullness of the CTA.

In discussing why I take photos, and what I do with them, I was surprised that Ron had not heard of Flickr, so told him about the site, and gave him a link to my photostream. We both learned some things, time well spent.

All in all, a 5 Star experience. No hiding behind a set of rules, or anything of that nature, just real 1:1 conversation. 

Thanks Ron!