The Peristaltic Testator

Co-worker VeloBusDriver turned me on to yet another boner popped by our nation's nemesis General Motors: GM ads that mock bicyclists and pedestrians.


Embiggenate the shame of cycling.

It gets worse. As if this ad (which ran in UCLA's student paper) weren't enough, GM tried to apologize in a very, very ham-fisted and obviously untruthful way. Mark Degnan, Director of Local Advertising and Marketing, actually wrote, "It was not our intent to make light of a healthy lifestyle and cycling." I ask you, people, if that ad doesn't "make light of a healthy lifestyle and cycling," what exactly does it do?

A little digging in the comments revealed that, at least a day after Mark published his official "apology," GM was still running banner ads which I think are even worse. This little number to the left was, according to a commenter, an intro to a feature that allowed people to toggle between different GM pedestrian-splashers currently on the market . . . at the GM College Discount web site. Showing cyclists to be shamefully un-date-able is one tactic; showing pedestrians to be worthy targets of driver derision borders on goading hate speech.

I got the title for this entry after I described it to The Wife. She has admittedly far more experience dealing with corporate culture. She notes that this kind of "taking the lead" in "making a difference" talk is pretty common in meetings everywhere. I countered that all of us differ on what steps can be considered forward leading and which just carry the walker backward. Why? Each of us has in our heads different definitions of utopia and hell. Your utopia might very well be my idea of hell.

People who gather together every day and interact with each other every day form a society of their own. They can reinforce each other in ways that might very well seem alien to those outside the culture, even contrary to devices designed to catch errors and correct them. General Motors, formed of people, is no exception. Are we in agreeance?

When someone in a board meeting suggests an ad campaign mocking cyclists because focus groups show that cycle riders (especially in LA, where the paper ad ran) would rather drive, someone else in that group (probably in Detroit, one of the least pedestrian and cyclist-friendly cities in our nation) thought that was a fine idea and green-lighted the campaign. After all, whatever sells more cars the better, no matter how despicable the idea might seem to non-auto industry people.

Why, I bet these ads were run by some of the same people who thought those kooks over at the electric car division were tilting at windmills with their wacky wiz-bang battery cars. Those EV-1s, some of the most advanced modern electric cars every produced commercially, got exactly what GM corporate culture thought should come to them.



Crushed, just like the naive hope of every pedestrian and cyclist that General Motors will ever, ever change.

solarbird just posted a video of an MSNBC host lashing out at the political Usual Suspects from the huckster brigade (you know, the familiar faces doling out the usual sound bites).

What surprises me the most? I'm used to this invective and honesty from the blogosphere, but from a paid member of the Lamestream Media? They usually represent the same views as the buyers of Congress Rattigan indicts.

I wonder how long he'll keep his job after this goes viral.

For the past six days I've been trying to post something. Six days. I just tried yet again a few seconds ago and got the error message the folks at the Known Problems Desk tell me apply to "long posts."

I know, I know, I shouldn't blame LJ for a DDos attack. Those people are just like terrorists, we are told. They are vandals that strike indiscriminately.

But is this true?

I was in (as a bystander who knew nothing of the issues) the 1999 World Trade Organization Seattle protests, the so-called Battle in Seattle. I can assure everyone that the targets of the vandalism were far from random, at least at first.

The targets were the kind of multi-national corporations that most infuriated the protesters. The protesters, it seemed, were being very discriminate about the targets of their anger.

Which brings me back to LJ.

I honestly don't know what would drive this particular collective of hackers to target LJ for a week straight, but it suggests some real motivation. Maybe payola was the objective. Maybe SUP pissed off the Russian or Belarusian or Ukranian equivalent of a mob.

Or maybe, just maybe, the hackers were pissed about what has been eroding my own confidence in LJ of late:

The constant barrage of unwanted
ADVERTISING.

nasu_dengaku has already bolted, disgusted not just by the Cyrillic spam comments he must delete but by the fact that — though he is a paid member — people viewing his site must put up with video pre-ads and other sales clutter. This bears repeating: Matt pays for his membership, yet SUP feels it necessary to try to raise additional money from those who want to read Matt's work. One truly must wonder then exactly what additional services Matt and any other paid members are paying for.

If so, I feel like paraphrasing the old Sam Kinneson (sp?) routine. No, I don't support hackers attacking web sites. . . but I understand it!!!

I case you haven't noticed, I've been tearing along in the past few months on a rant against excessive advertising and the obvious effects it has been having on our nation's media. (Click on my Culture of Whores tag for a primer.) Things just reached a tipping point for me on the podcast front, so it's time to unveil my next cunning plan.

( Behold! The Cunning Plan in all its glory! )

Well, I've gone and done it. My local public radio station, KUOW, sent me a nice pre-addressed mailing envelope and a request for a nice donation. ( Here's the letter they will get instead. ) Essentially, it's a "we're done" letter with a caveat that things could be rosy once again if they shape up.

---

Advertisers and public radio stations suffer an asymmetry when it comes to their knowing the results of their actions. In the business world, people respond positively to "good" or effective ads that draw in a marked increase in sales. Therefore it can be pretty easy to tell which ad campaigns should be continued or expanded. Bad ads, though, can be attributed to downturns in the economy, a competitor's new product, everyone out drinking the day the ad ran, phases of the moon, whatever. By the same token, NPR stations that run these "enhanced sponsorship" spots see the cash they bring but can write off the cash they lose from now-disgruntled listeners who fail to make their contributions to any number of circumstance, related or not. That's why I felt a letter of explanation necessary. I want them to know why contributions might be down this year.

( I also remembered an anecdote regarding bugs that might, if better known, highlight the dangers to increasing advertising presence. )

---

Bugs and ads share quite a bit in common. Both attempt to brand media content just as flaming or freezing metal rods with shaped appendages brand cattle. And just as in the cattle analogy, both hurt those on the receiving end. My example and -- to a much greater extent -- the threatening letter writer's both show how some people feel so much more much psychological pain from this branding than others.

Maybe we are too thin-skinned, I don't know. By the same logic, perhaps people suffering from malnutrition can supplement their diets with the same stuff that helps pigs in factory CAFOs get fat with less food, trench liquor. Just dilute their own shit and piss in their drinking water and serve. Most will survive, and those will get fat. Or perhaps, just as I noted in the first Culture of Whores post from over 3 years ago, dates should expect to put out for those buying their dinners rather than just coyly reserving the "option" of sex.

Such speculation is quite beside the point. We can -- indeed we must -- understand that the increasing amount of advertising to which we are all subjected has to have some psychological effect on us. We must become either overtly inured to this bombardment, or suffer from it in ways we may only be beginning to understand.

On that note, I'm saying No More! with a note. Maybe someone will take heed. I doubt it, but a guy adverse to adverts can hope. Even so, at least it doesn't threaten grievous bodily harm.

I admit I've been shunning NPR lately, mostly due to my disgust at their glaringly overt political conflicts of interest marring their reporting. My trust in them at an ebb, a friend then forwards me the transcript of a recent piece noting the organizations behind right-wing campaign funding:

With these advertisers and others, the same words come up again and again: Grass-roots. Nonpartisan. Independent.

Their ads seem to imply the groups are homegrown. But every single one mentioned here is based within 20 minutes of Capitol Hill. Most of them, in fact, are in just two office suites.

As for their independence: It would be illegal for them to coordinate their attacks with the candidates they're helping, or with Republican Party committees. But among themselves, they're proud of the way they synchronize their efforts. (Emphasis mine.)

Even better, NPR has coordinated various reports on these astro-turf organizations and created an interactive flow chart outlining the connections between them. There are three interactive guided tours available in the box to the upper left of the chart, and info on individual players in the chart can be had by clicking "Explore the Network."

This is the kind of reporting NPR national probably couldn't do under the W administration, given appointee Ken Tomlinson's reign of terror. If they continue to do it, they will probably lose lots of those advertisers like The Public Notice, The Koch Foundation, Ally Bank, and all the other political pressure groups masquerading as philanthropists . . . which would be fine by me.

I'm mulling an idea for a true grass-roots effort to root out the corrupting influence these corporate contributors have on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but for now I'll give them this small and happy plug, and conditionally think about once again listening and donating. Good job, guys. Keep it up.

In my very early twenties -- the first year, in fact -- I was (as they say in the vernacular) shooting the shit with a friend over cheap beers. (Muscles, if you're curious, bleaknemesis, and near the Sprinker Rock.) My friend had made a tired joke. Though I try to avoid tired jokes myself, it was giddy enough or late enough or I had consumed beers enough to respond with a tired reply to a tired joke. I said, "That's as old as my grandma, and she farts dust." Wracking my brains, it might have been the second or third time in my life I used that line. For reasons that should become clear, it was definitely the last.

My friend responded with some correction. "Parts the dust," he said.

"What?"

"My grandma parts the dust. That's the saying."

This was getting a bit bizarre, even for me. I repeated with greater emphasis, "What?!?"

My friend explained, as if to a child, "That's as old as my grandma, and she parts the dust."

If I recall correctly, I just stared. If grandma is dead, he reasoned, her body would lie in the ground, thus separating, or parting, the dust. The comeback was therefore a poetic reference to age as represented by death and burial.

I sincerely expressed my reservations about the veracity of his correction. The expression refers to a woman so old that she passes not gas but, well, dust. I asked him where he got his version.

Now less sure of himself, he explained that he had heard that rejoinder when he was about six from a slightly older kid, probably nine years of age. As a quirky six-year-old, he completely debunked his later nickname of Muscles by trying to reconstruct a mis-heard juvenile rejoinder with one fraught with poetic and philosophical imagery.

I was by this time more than a bit incredulous. Using again the vernacular, I called bullshit. While possibly true, I explained, how many nine-year-olds reflect on the cycles of life and death with enough mental reflection and depth to poetically remember, let alone create, such a non-childish return? I then imitated said juvenile, intoning with a sniveling whine the first "That's as old as my grandma," then deepening my voice into a Shakespearean basso profundo and raising a Yoric-skull-holding claw for the final "and she . . . parts . . . the dust."

Muscles had to accept the likelihood of my explanation. In fact, I think my explanation caused him to briefly and sharply snort Rainier through his nose.

( So what does Muscle's brainy reconstruction of a witticism have to do with reality? )

NPR, you've done it again.

Just this morning, Morning Edition ran two stories back to back. The first examined Democrats in the electoral cross hairs because the President wants to roll let Bush's tax cut expire only for the richest payers:

A full-blown congressional debate on the expiring 2001 and 2003 tax cuts is expected this fall, but some lawmakers have already weighed in on the most controversial issue: whether it makes sense, at a time of huge budget deficits, to extend those tax cuts for household income that exceeds $250,000.

Excuse me, "makes sense"? Here we are facing an unprecedented deficit, a crushing and growing debt, and turning down revenue from the only Americans who can afford it doesn't make sense?!? Oh, and just to top off the craptastic reporting with a cherry and a heaping dollop of Fuck You, they follow that bit of pandering treacle by adding up exactly how much in taxes a wealthy couple spends. "Milkove is one of those people who carefully tracks just about every dollar spent, so we're able to get a good picture of how much sales tax they pay in a year." Well, la-de-fucking-da. Then the story leaves the yuppies for a moment to get a quote from one of those think tank flunkies, this one from something called The Tax Foundation:

"People get very frustrated at taxes that are relatively small compared to big taxes," says Gerald Prante, an economist at the Tax Foundation, a Washington-based tax-tracking think tank.

"I mean, if you look at this list," he says, looking at the tax tally that Milkove came up with, "everything is chump change compared to the federal income tax.

I decided after something happened to look into this foundation. Look what I found on their "About Us" page:

The year was 1937, the heart of the Great Depression. During the previous decade, first under Herbert Hoover, then under Franklin Roosevelt, federal spending had climbed 170 percent; over the previous five years internal revenue collections had risen 198 percent.

Concerned about the effect such expansion might have on private sector growth, a small group of business executives gathered in New York City to discuss how they could monitor fiscal activities at all levels of government and convey the information to the general public. They decided to launch an organization which, through research and analysis, could inform and educate Americans using objective, reliable data on government finance.

In the subsequent seven decades, the Tax Foundation has been a national leader in promoting a sense of "tax consciousness" in the public.

(Yeah, I emphasized.)

On the surface, this dissemination of "tax consciousness" seems laudable, right? Who could argue about that? Ah, but let's remember what happens when the news is too one-sided. If the only news about taxes comes from those with a direct financial interest in lower taxes, no one gets the whole story. Furthermore, this kind of foundation is one of those whose funding could fuel itself. The more they prove able to lower taxes through "education," the more they will undoubtedly receive from people who, well, saved when taxes were lowered.

I digress, though. What was it that prompted my trip into Rage Town? After these stories, two of those "enhanced sponsorships" popped up near the 6:30 mark, just before the 5 minute national and local news recaps. One (IIRC) was for Progressive Insurance . . . and the other . . . (drum roll, please) . . . was for The Tax Foundation!!!* Here, they described themselves as a group dedicated to lowering the size of government.

Motherfuckers. No, not you, Tax Foundation. You're only doing what everyone would expect from a scorpion. It's your nature, after all, to lie, lie, lie. I'm looking right at the turtle carrying you across this pond, those Nice Polite Republicans who have hijacked what used to be Public Radio.

Hey, NPR: Somewhere in your reporting, why don't you mention that income taxes today are lower than they have been in eighty years?!? Really. And don't just take my word for it. Look it up. It used to be that the top tax rate was 91%. I remember those times. They were pretty okay. Now, there's debate in raising the top tax to less than half of its historic high, and people can only talk on the radio about how high taxes are? How about a little historical perspective?

For shame. Really, for shame. NPR could report on taxes fairly. Their Planet Money thing noted that most people in Denmark believed taxes are a good thing. Don't bother following the link to the podcast, though. Only the first minute seems to be there. I shouldn't be surprised, I suppose. It seems the entire NPR agency is bent on squelching any data that would support increased taxes, as per apparent marching orders from their supporters like The Tax Foundation and their Koch overlords.

Haven't heard about the Koch brothers, have you? Well, do some reading. That Charles especially has his paws in everything, including NPR and PBS. In fact, quoted in the article is a man who knows the brothers Koch personally, a Bruce Bartlett, an economist . . . who has been featured on Planet Money. More and more, my letter to Adam Davidson reveals not how much he needs to learn about finance and monetary policy, but how much he knows about these topics, but is probably paid to obfuscate them.

I am simultaneously enraged and deflated. Enraged, because of the obvious shenanigans someone is playing at NPR headquarters. Deflated, because I feel I can do nothing about it. I am watching fascism in its literal form, and know that crying out about it, if only to warn others, will do nothing. It's like watching an oncoming train while tied to the tracks.

No, that's not it. More accurately, it's like watching a beautiful house burn, and noting that a group dressed as firefighters are squirting the flames with a hose charged with gasoline. NPR is part of that process, but instead of delivering the propellant through a hose, they are merely part of the gasoline bucket brigade. They don't fuel the fire as much as Fox and others, since they aren't heard by nearly as many and their spin isn't nearly as obvious; but fuel the fire of lies they do.

I can't do this anymore. I can't in good conscious give money to an organization seemingly bent not only on infusing commercial advertising into supposedly public radio, but furthermore does so while being nakedly brazen about the editorial control this advertising has on its news content. This has to stop, but I fear the edifice of our constitutional democracy will burn beyond recognition before it does.

*Oops. It was another group, not The Tax Foundation, but still one whose motives I would question. See addenda after the cut for more details, or this post for even more. Even though I got the name of the organization wrong, I kept the Tax Foundation rant in simply because both organizations, I'm quite sure, exist for the same reason. There are many different subspecies of scorpion.

( This is turning out to be an ongoing investigation. Click here for continuing updates! )

In Part I of this series, I noted that our stories, the conversations we have with ourselves and use to frame the world around us in a fashion we can understand, are being hijacked. Yes, I said "hijacked," as in forced to go where they would not otherwise go. While this should be no surprise to any longer term readers out there, allow me to explain once again what I mean and provide some recent examples to back my argument.

I first quickly mentioned the Overton Window over three years ago. To review, Overton is a political strategist who during campaigns floods the airwaves and print media with opinions far to the right of the conservative position he supports. This way, people reading and listening are given the mistaken impression that the views being expressed have some how become more mainstream, and adjust their own views accordingly. Overton's media blitzes get people talking about issues; thanks to Source Amnesia and the Repetition Effect (aspects of the Overton Window effect I covered more carefully in The Whispers and the Early Screams), the mean average political opinion shifts closer to the one desired by Overton's team.



To interpret the image, the opinion pieces and bias inserted by Overton's team during an election shifts the actual political center marked by the 0 (as determined by a survey of opinion before the campaigning begins) a couple of points to the right of that center simply by dint of repetition and paying for some to espouse far-right beliefs for the record in ways that fail to question how wide-spread those beliefs really are.

Got that?

Once you're aware that this is happening, it's really quite easy to find examples. All you have to do is follow the Long Green (to use my favorite euphemism for money from the movie Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!). I'll give you just a few examples you might not have heard about for illustration, but which may in the very near future affect us all. Let's start with the media with which we're all familiar, ( the news. )

I got a lesson in life last night. Weirdly, I got it from playing with the Nintendo Wii.

The Wii has wireless networking and a few games that take advantage. One is Everybody Votes. It's simple. People submit questions and answers. Nintendo sifts through the submissions and finds about one a day to put to the people. Players at home then have the option of voting on which answer they think is right (What is a rhino's horn made of, bone or hair?) or sharing their personal habits (When do you usually shower or bath, at night or in the morning?).

There's another feature. After you've given your vote, you get to guess how the majority of voters responded. I find this feature far more interesting than the actual voting. First, it forces you to guess the demographic makeup of the voters. Next, you have to put yourself in their demographic shoes. I like it for the same twisted reason I liked this ill-fated game show.

Last night, we got the answers from an old question, "Which was invented first, shampoo or the telephone?" Shampoo won. That is, more people guessed shampoo was older on the first round of polling. Ah, but I guessed they would say that in the polling's second round. I originally guessed the telephone.

So I won twice.

You see, this question has an answer. An answer that does not rely upon the whims of those that accept an answer, but rather the answer that exists outside of public opinion. A quick Google search finds that "the first successful bi-directional transmission of clear speech by Bell and Watson was made on March 10, 1876", while "shampoo originated in England in 1877".

The telephone wins. I win. I doubly win because I correctly suspected that most people would not suspect or know this. My Mii jumps for joy.

But my wife pointed out a problem. Her Mii was also jumping for joy, even though she originally guessed "shampoo." Wasn't she right, too?

And that was a problem. In answers testable in the real, physical world, opinion doesn't matter. Opinion may in fact be so very wrong that it clouds one's judgment, interferes with one's ability to see the answer staring them in the face. There are so, so, so very many issues that can be simply or painstakingly tested (depending upon how subtle the science of detection in the specific arena has become) that are being obfuscated because people have already determined the "truth" of the issue and do not wish to confront the hard physical realities that bitch-slap their opinions into submission.

Ah, but the Telly News does not work that way. If you don't agree in the science of anthropomorphic climate change, natural selection as the originator of species diversity, or coming shortages in primary energy supplies, you get just as much air time as experts in their fields. Never mind that there are ten, twenty, perhaps a thousand experts who would disagree with you -- you get just as much time to present your case (or more likely, to try and obfuscate, belittle and dismiss theirs).

The Telly News is wrong to do this. They have probably been cowed by vested interests (which keep funding them through advertising and therefore can yank their leash and chokechain). Their news budget dedicated to actual investigative reporting has been slashed and burned, even though their revenue expectations continue to rise. They are being punked (and I mean that in the proper prison meaning, not as a more recent synonym for "practical joke") by their owners, corporations and individuals who have a very meaty vested interest in seeing public opinion kept ill-informed simply because that ignorance means dollars in their pockets.

Life is not fair. Reality is not balanced. It doesn't matter how many people agree with you: If you hold an opinion on a topic that attempts to directly contradict demonstrable physical evidence, you are very simply just wrong.