We’ve started naming our kids like products—and our products like kids. Parents approach baby naming a lot like product branding. Whereas in the past, names were typically chosen with an eye toward personal significance (a baby was named after a grandparent, say), today’s parents increasingly focus on the public image projected by the name.

Now, as companies introduce technologies that function like people—Siri being the most extreme example to date—they suddenly find themselves with the same kinds of naming challenges as today’s parents-to-be. They have to consider the complex web of cultural meanings that each name carries. They have to ask, as parents do, “What kind of person are we creating, and what name represents that?”

It’s no coincidence, then, that brand names and baby names have begun to converge, as in the case of the Sienna minivan and baby Siennas. Both corporate parents and real parents are trying to launch their offspring with the best possible positioning.

The idea of a talking machine with a human-sounding name isn’t new, of course, but Siri’s predecessors were mostly fictional. Think of the arch KITT, the silicon brain of a Pontiac Trans Am in the TV series Knight Rider; Joshua, the troubled NORAD computer in the film War Games; and most famously, the eerily calm HAL of 2001: A Space Odyssey. These were mere characters, but they also reflected a universal human impulse: When we talk to something, or when it talks to us, we want to call it by a name. Have you noticed how many drivers give names to their GPS devices?

Using a human-style name reflects our relationship with the thing being named, and shapes it, too. Indoor pets, for instance, tend to be given more human names than outdoor animals. Assigning a name to a car or other possession is both a sign of growing affection and a spur to further bonding. Around my house, I’ve found that it’s nearly impossible to throw out any object that my kids have named. Names give objects emotional life. You say, “the iPhone” and “my iPhone,” but not “the Siri.” It—she—is simply Siri. The name makes the act of conversing with a metal slab feel natural. And that emotional connection seems to invite a powerful kind of consumer loyalty.

UPDATE: NBC has removed this ad off the internet because Disinformation is talking about it …

Photo courtesy of American Apparel

It’s taken over twenty years, but American Apparel has finally finally begun offering clothes in size XL. Up until just recently, anything over a “Large” was just plain “not our demographic,” according to American Apparel reps.  It may seem strange that the popular clothing outlet has never provided anything over a size 11, but who here is truly surprised to hear that Don “I’m A Sleazeball And I’m Okay With That” Charney’s company caters exclusively to slender women?

New sizes apparently mean new models to display them, so American Apparel has started a plus-sized model search/contest looking for “booty-ful” women to fill out the new XLs. Women submit photos to American Apparel’s website, where they are then numerically ranked by readers based on their perceived attractiveness.

Anyone who has ever been to a model search can tell you that, despite the abundance of beautiful people, it’s a horribly ugly affair. Hundreds of women dying to be the next Kathy Ireland (remember her?) line up while bored and disinterested judges pour over their features and pick out whatever minute flaws they can find.  Out of hundreds, fewer than ten will get a callback. Sometimes no one does. Dreams are shattered, hearts are broken and sexual favors are offered.

Not surprisingly, the feminist website Jezebel has taken issue with the plus sized model contest. It’s not difficult to see why; while claiming that women of all shapes and sizes are beautiful, the contest literature nevertheless takes every opportunity to remind everyone that the contestants are, in a word, fat. Cutesy puns abound. One reader, though, has decided to play along so that she may subtly (or not so subtly) mock the whole contest. Nancy Upton explains in an email to Jezebel:

I immediately thought, based on the way it was written, “Wow, they really have zero respect for plus-sized women. They’re going to line them up like cattle and make puns about them until they’re blue in the face.” And then, as corny as it sounds, it just occurred to me that based on their “Hey, come on, fatties, we want you to play, too” tone, wouldn’t it be kind of brilliant to respond in a, “Thanks for letting me play, just let me try put down the pizza, first” similar mocking tone. From there, I realized I knew a great photographer, I had a free couple of hours on Sunday and a little extra money in my pocket to drop on some ranch dressing and a chicken

With this in mind, Upton “had her friend, Shannon Skloss, take pictures of her — bathing in ranch dressing, pouring chocolate sauce directly into her mouth, gorging on chicken.”

As the article points out, Nancy Upton doesn’t really look “fat”.  She looks fairly average for an American woman.  I realize that compared with the rest of the world that’s actually quite a bit heavier than average, but nevertheless let’s hope her pictures, some of which can be found on the Jezebel article, take her to the top.

For the past few years, networks have been digitally inserting ads and product placements for new products into old reruns. Shannon just noticed one in a rerun of a 2007 episode of “How I Met Your Mother.” In the background on the shelf is a magazine with an ad on the back for the new “Zookeeper” starring Kevin James.

Photo: Hendrike (CC)

Cigarettes seem like the last thing a doctor would prescribe, but Iceland may be moving to outlaw the sale of cigarettes in stores and only allowing pharmacists to dispense them. The proposal was written in hopes of reducing the amount of smokers and emphasizing the health concerns rather than the marketing tactics. Those with a prescription for cigarettes will be considered addicts getting the chemicals their bodies have become accustomed to. The Guardian reports:

Iceland is considering banning the sale of cigarettes and making them a prescription-only product.

The parliament in Reykjavik is to debate a proposal that would outlaw the sale of cigarettes in normal shops. Only pharmacies would be allowed to dispense them – initially to those aged 20 and up, and eventually only to those with a valid medical certificate.

The radical initiative is part of a 10-year plan that also aims to ban smoking in all public places, including pavements and parks, and in cars where children are present. Iceland also wants to follow Australia’s lead by forcing tobacco manufacturers to sell cigarettes in plain, brown packaging plastered with health warnings rather than branding.

[Continues at The Guardian]

Writing for n+1, Rob Horning concocts a frightening, fantastic, and thought-provoking essay on how we live today, connecting the reign of “fast fashion” companies such as Forever 21, social media such as Facebook, and 21st century capitalism’s demand that workers market and reinvent themselves endlessly:

I’ve always thought that Forever 21 was a brilliant name for a fast-fashion retailer. These two words succinctly encapsulate consumerism’s mission statement: to evoke the dream of perpetual youth through constant shopping. Yet it also conjures the suffocating shabbiness of that fantasy, the permanent desperation involved in trying to achieve fashion’s impossible ideals.

Despite apparently democratizing style and empowering consumers, fast fashion in some ways constitutes a dream sector for those eager to condemn contemporary capitalism, as the companies almost systematically heighten some of its current contradictions: the exhaustion of innovative possibilities, the limits of the legal system in guaranteeing property rights, the increasing immiseration of the world workforce.

Just as fast fashion seeks to pressure shoppers with the urgency of now or never, social media hope to convince us that we always have something new and important to say—as long as we say it right away. And they are designed to make us feel anxious and left out if we don’t say it, as their interfaces favor the users who update frequently and tend to make less engaged users disappear.

How did this happen? By seeming to mitigate the problems that neoliberalism creates by shifting economic risk onto workers, social media has been able to colonize the collective consciousness. Facebook, fast fashion, and the like provide new mechanisms of solace, quantifying our connections and influence (and thereby making them more economically useful to us) while enhancing the compensations of consumerism by making it seem more productive, more self-revelatory. Though we may be only one of a thousand friends in everyone else’s networks, that never seems especially important when we’re in the midst of posting new pictures.

In turning to social media for comfort, we’ve become happily dependent on digital devices, as we have come to rely on the accelerated rate of communication and exchange they facilitate. They offer us chances to articulate, evaluate, and augment who we are while archiving our identity-making gestures as a collection we can later fawn over and curate. The archiving makes the self seem richer and more substantial even as it makes it more tenuous. Our identity can never be so strong as to render any particular gesture negligible; it is cumulative at the same time that it is totally discontinuous. This has the effect of allowing everything we do to seem either significant or irrelevant, depending on which view suits our needs. The online repository has gradually become the privileged site of the self, the authorized version that redeems the frustration and desperation incipient with the provisionality of work life, that corrects the errors and discourtesies we commit in our confrontations with the physical world.

Read the full essay at n+1

I honestly didn’t believe this one was for real at first. No way even KFC, purveyors of a sandwich that uses fried meat as a delivery mechanism for fried meat, would seriously market a soda size called the “mega jug.” And even if they did, they’d never have the chutzpah to donate “mega jug” dollars to juvenile diabetes research.

Sadly, I had totally underestimated KFC’s capacity for irony. The mega jug is a half gallon of soda, and this is a real local promotion. The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation defends it thus: “JDRF supports research for type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune disease that results when the immune system attacks the cells in the pancreas that produce insulin, therefore requiring a child or adult with the disease to depend on insulin treatment for the rest of their lives. It is a common misconception that type 1 diabetes is caused by obesity or eating too much junk food or sweets.”

More on Grist

A newly published study by two marketing professors suggests that advertising can create memories of experiences that never happened, simply by including sufficiently evocative imagery and descriptions in the ad:

Exposure to an imagery-evoking ad can increase the likelihood that consumer mistakenly believes that s/he has experience with the advertised product when in fact s/he does not. Moreover such a false belief produces attitudes that are as strong as attitudes based on true beliefs based on previous product experience, an effect that we label the false experience effect.

Advertising has always been an appeal to a fantasy, and this study seems to suggest that if the ad is created just right, that fantasy can be in the form of a desire to return to a previous wonderful experience (even if the previous experience never actually happened.) But this finding suggests something a bit more insidious. If you can fool people into thinking they once experienced something that they never did with just an elaborate text description, imagine what you can do with a whole newspaper and 24-7 cable news.

Let’s face it, if Baudrillard was right and our postmodern existence is little more than a simulation, it should not surprise us that our memories have become re-writable and random access.

How To Be A Retronaut has a nice collection of early to mid-twentieth century consumer brands that tapped into a general public enthusiasm for anything related to atomic bombs and radiation. Those were simpler times, when happiness meant an “atomic meal” on every kitchen table and (usually faux-) radioactive products in every medicine cabinet.

Despite current prohibitions on the words ‘light’ and ‘mild’, smokers in Western countries continue falsely to believe that some cigarette brands may be less harmful than others. In fact, all conventional brands of cigarette present the same level of risk to smokers, including ‘mild’ and ‘low-tar’ brands.A study published in the journal Addiction polled over 8000 smokers from Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the USA. Approximately one-fifth of those smokers incorrectly believed that “some cigarette brands could be less harmful than others.” False beliefs were highest among US smokers.

Current research shows that smokers base their perceptions of risk on pack colour, believing that ’silver’, ‘gold’ and ‘white’ brands are less harmful to smoke than ‘black’ or ‘red’ brands. The reason for those beliefs may lie in the history of cigarette branding. Cigarettes used to carry labels like ‘light’, ‘mild’, and ‘low tar’, and in some places they still do. But in over fifty countries cigarette manufacturers are no longer allowed to use those labels because they are misleading. In some cases, cigarette manufacturers simply changed their ‘light’ cigarettes to ’silver’ and ‘gold’ brands — for example, Marlboro Lights has become Marlboro Gold. A significant percentage of smokers now seem to equate those colours with low-risk cigarettes.

Smokers in the study also revealed false beliefs that slim cigarettes are less harmful, cigarettes with harsh taste are riskier to smoke than smooth-tasking cigarettes, filters reduce risk, and nicotine is responsible for most of the cancer caused by cigarettes…

So much for smoking being sophisticated.  Read more here.

Photo: Jessica Tam (CC)

I recently had a chance to attend a showing of the documentary The Economics of Happiness. It has a very strong message about the fiscal and social problems of globalization, especially its impact beyond the western world. As a solution, the film suggests a movement towards focusing on communities and localization. Here’s the trailer and a plot synopsis:

Economic globalization has led to a massive expansion in the scale and power of big business and banking. It has also worsened nearly every problem we face: fundamentalism and ethnic conflict; climate chaos and species extinction; financial instability and unemployment. There are personal costs too. For the majority of people on the planet, life is becoming increasingly stressful. We have less time for friends and family and we face mounting pressures at work.

The Economics of Happiness describes a world moving simultaneously in two opposing directions. On the one hand, an unholy alliance of governments and big business continues to promote globalization and the consolidation of corporate power. At the same time, people all over the world are resisting those policies, demanding a re-regulation of trade and finance—and, far from the old institutions of power, they’re starting to forge a very different future. Communities are coming together to re-build more human scale, ecological economies based on a new paradigm – an economics of localization.

The film shows how globalization breeds cultural self-rejection, competition and divisiveness; how it structurally promotes the growth of slums and urban sprawl; how it is decimating democracy. We learn about the obscene waste that results from trade for the sake of trade: apples sent from the UK to South Africa to be washed and waxed, then shipped back to British supermarkets; tuna caught off the coast of America, flown to Japan to be processed, then flown back to the US. We hear about the suicides of Indian farmers; about the demise of land-based cultures in every corner of the world.

For more information, see this website for The Economics of Happiness. To get involved with the message through activism or setting up a screening, click here.

It’s a two-fer: Get your animal companion fixed, and get yourself fixed too! Human overpopulation is crowding out animal life on the planet, and dog and cat overpopulation is creating a euthanasia crisis that is a crying shame. Disappearing wilderness, vanishing water resources, and pollution is the price that future generations will pay for more human births, while losing their lives is the price that millions of homeless dogs and cats pay when guardians neglect to “fix” their companion animals.

Every year in the U.S., an estimated 6 to 8 million lost, abandoned, or unwanted dogs and cats enter animal shelters. The best way to combat the companion-animal overpopulation crisis is to have your cat or dog neutered. And with a global population of almost 7 billion humans, more of our species could use a (voluntary) snip too.

Now, one lucky man can be reproduction-free, free of charge, just like his pooch or feline friend. In honor of National Infertility Awareness Week (April 24 to 30), PETA will give one free vasectomy to a man who has recently had his companion cat or dog neutered. Don’t worry boys—you’ll still be able to enjoy sex. But your neutered dog will be less likely to face the health and behavioral problems that unneutered dogs experience.

For more information, see original article.

The new Commodore 64, which will begin shipping at the end of the month, has been souped-up for the modern age. It comes with 1.8 gigahertz dual processors, an optional Blu-ray player and built-in ethernet and HDMI ports. The new Commodore is priced between $250 to $900.

The company’s Web site says that the new Commodore 64 is “a modern functional PC,” and that although the guts of the device have greatly improved, the exterior is “as close to the original in design as humanly possible.” Most people would not be able to visibly tell the old or new versions apart, it says.

“The response has been completely dramatic,” Mr. Altman said. “We’ve been averaging about five registrations per second on our Web site. This is from people giving us their name and e-mail address to be kept abreast of updates on the new Commodore.”

Some may wonder why someone would want to purchase this type of computer when a world of iPads and laptops exist.

Mr. Altman says he sees two types of customers for the new computer.

“There are a lot of really young computer users who want to own a retro-looking computer,” he said. ”And of course there are those 30- to 40-year-olds who owned the original Commodore 64 and want the nostalgia of their first machine.”…

[continues in the New York Times]

An ad agency for a law firm specializing in 9/11 lawsuits said today it is pulling the controversial posters after it was revealed that the somber, soot-smeared FDNY firefighter holding an image of the charred remains of the World Trade Center was not actually at Ground Zero.

“We issue a sincere and deep apology to Firefighter [Robert] Keiley and this ad will not run again,” said John Barker, president of the Barker/DZP ad agency.

The Post reported today that Keiley — who joined New York’s Bravest only in 2004 — was working as a model when he posed for what he thought would be used for a run-of-the-mill fire-prevention ad.

He appeared in generic firefighter gear and gripped a helmet for the shot — not the photo of the destroyed Twin Towers that was “put” into his hands with Photoshop software for the Worby Groner Edelman & Napoli Bern ad.

“It’s an insult to the Fire Department. It’s an insult to all the families who lost people that day,” said Keiley, 34, an ex-cop who now works out of an engine company in Flatbush, Brooklyn.

Keily had threatened to sue. “It makes me look like I’m cashing in on 9/11, saying I was there even though I was never there, and that I’m sick and possibly suing, trying to get a chunk of money.”

For more information, see original article.

But, the problem, of course, is that this stuff isn’t “free” to produce. In fact, the number of hidden costs involved with producing media are pretty amazing, especially when you consider time and effort as the primary resources that humans represent, when viewed within the capitalist myth. As a producer of independent media in quite a few formats – not to mention working inside companies that have been burdened and seriously threatened by this change of paradigm – I think I can say I’m pretty well acquainted with the terror that drives labels to do idiotic things like suing potential customers.

Though there  have been some recent signs of sanity in this ongoing battle, it continues to wage onward. For instance:

“Over 40,000 Does Dismissed In Copyright Troll Cases

These have been some eventful weeks in the world of copyright trolling. Thousands of unnamed “John Does” in P2P file sharing lawsuits filed in California, Washington DC, Texas, and West Virginia have been severed, effectively dismissing over 40,000 defendants. The plaintiffs in these cases must now re-file against almost all of the Does individually rather than suing them en masse.”

They want to frame piracy as criminal in the way that punching an old lady in the face and stealing her purse is criminal. But the sad fact is, it isn’t. Instead, it is the painful reality of what could be an amazing paradigm shift.

Oftentimes, growth hurts. And so many of these companies (and artists) want to curl into a ball into pretend nothing changed.

What I want to ponder – what I want all of us to ponder – is the conundrum facing both the producers of media and the companies that “support” them. We’ll also look at some of the ways that these companies have failed to sufficiently understand the problem they’re facing. (Full Article)

Sarah Palin is attempting to trademark her name ahead of a possible 2012 presidential run.

The former Alaska governor and 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate filed paperwork with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in November to register the trademark.

The federal office is seeking more information and examples of usage. The office is also seeking additional details for the application submitted in September by Palin’s daughter, Bristol, a contestant on ABC’s “Dancing with the Stars” last year.

Palin’s attorney, John J. Tiemessen, said Friday that he has six months to provide the information. “We are preparing to respond to all their questions for both,” he told The Associated Press by telephone from his office in Fairbanks. He said he couldn’t disclose the reasons why both applied for trademarks because of attorney-client privilege.

But Seattle lawyer Marshall J. Nelson, with the firm Davis Wright Tremaine LLP, says it’s not that unusual for entertainers to trademark their names.

“Everybody’s name is sort of their brand, and once it gets associated with goods or services, then it functions as a trademark,” Nelson said. Once a name is trademarked, he said, it gives the holder additional remedies to recover profits and damages if someone uses the name inappropriately.

For more information, see original article.

Mass Deprogramming

This Sunday, CompactConspiracy.com will conduct a Mass Deprogramming of unprecedented scale. With more than 100 million U.S. viewers simultaneously watching the same game, it is the perfect chance to help people all over the country snap out of their stupor and see the truth about compact cars.

The Deprogramming will take place during the third quarter, following a halftime littered with more car propaganda (advertisements) than ever before. In only 30 seconds, it could erase the 30 years of conditioning Americans have been subjected to, and open their eyes to what a compact car truly can be.

The Wrap: The thing that I found most fascinating was the neuromarketing stuff.

Spurlock: Amazing, right?

Yes, it was very interesting. Do you feel like that’s the future of marketing, and if so, does that worry you?

You have to think that if you can get to the point where you know that a mass of people, if you do X, Y and Z in a trailer, will want to go see that movie, or in a commercial, will make them want to go buy that thing or make them crave it in some way … it’s a crazy thing to think about. It’s a pretty insane, “Brave New World”-ish, futuristic way to look [at things]. I’m basically going to be able to know what you want. It’s like pre-cog advertising.

What do you think will be the next evolution in product placement? Where is it going?

I think the evolution is going to be a de-evolution. I think what will happen is, you’ll see things get flipped back to almost how it was in the glory days, the early days of radio and TV. I think you’re going to see brands who are going to be giving money to artists and creative people, saying ‘I love what you do. Here’s money. Go do what you do and just let us be associated with it.’

I think you’ll still have ‘hold on a second, let me get out my AT&T Blackberry.’ I think stuff like that will still happen, but I think it’s going to start to diminish because I think that the brands that empower artists and empower creative people are going to be the ones that really look great.

In the film, you bring up “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle” as an example of product placement in movies. Having done “Super Size Me,” do you think we’re going to eventually see a McDonald’s movie where Ronald McDonald and Grimace and the others go on a big screen adventure?

Well, did you ever see “Mac and Me?” Years ago, there was this film paid for by McDonald’s, about an alien that loved to eat there. It was one of the worst things you’ll ever see.

Again, what these companies need to do is they need to let the creative people be creative. The thing that’s interesting to me is, it also makes you wonder … as you see artists like OK Go who make all these amazing music videos that are brought to you by brands — you saw the stuff that we created in this film just by working with those companies — I think there will be some companies that question the need for agencies.

Going down the road, when you start to understand what your brand personality is, as they say in the movie … once you understand what your brand identity is and what you want to do to market that, couldn’t we go right to artists without having an agency do that?…

[continues at The Wrap]

If there’s anyone who doesn’t think the world — and particularly the United States — desperately needs WikiLeaks, I offer you “Exhibit A” of why this is the case: the star-studded official trailer for the “Call of Duty: Black Ops” first person shooter video game. Regular readers of this column might recall my November 16 article, “Nowhere Left to Run,” where I discussed the cultural implications of “Black Ops” after spotting a poster for the game in a Berlin subway around the time of its release.

Since then I have seen the trailer, whose slogan is “There’s a soldier in all of us” and features both ordinary people — a secretary, fry cook, hotel concierge, and the like — along with celebrities like Los Angeles Lakers guard Kobe Bryant, and late night American talk show host Jimmy Kimmel.

After watching the trailer I was so exasperated I emailed a colleague at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies here at Lund and asked him, “Where is Ice Cube when you need him?” His reply stunned me: “LoL you don’t know where Ice Cube is? He’s doing the voice of Bowman in ‘Black Ops’…”

In case you’re not a hiphop fan, once upon a time Ice Cube was the terror of law abiding white citizens across America as a member of the highly political gangsta rap group NWA. In fact, their song “F*** Da Police” almost got them into as much trouble with the US government as is Julian Assange today.

But those days are long forgotten. Today Mr. Cube spends his time, when not playing secret service agents in movies, providing the voice for one of the lead characters in “Black Ops.”

But it’s not just hiphop that’s prostituted itself to violence and big corporations. The rock n’ roll establishment has equally shamed itself, as none other than the Rolling Stones allowed their song “Gimme Shelter,” one of the most important anti-war songs of the Vietnam era, to be used as the soundtrack for the trailer, which shows Kobe Bryant smiling widely as he and innumerable other “ordinary” people blast away an unseen enemy in a clearly Middle Eastern landscape (not surprisingly, digital sales of the song and other Stones hits spiked in the wake of the trailer’s release).

Read more here.

The Celebritocrats lean over us from their polished pedestals, purporting to be our salvation, overseeing the next chosen one’s ascent into their domain, casting aside all those deemed unworthy to be stood before their vapid (pay no heed to the man behond the mirror) visage. How easily the discomforting pornography of schadenfreude that parades in the initial stages of these shows, seems forgotten; contestants disposed of, ‘deleted’, mercilessly and without recourse, culturally guillotined whilst the baying hoardes jeer and mock.

The first myth that these events promulgate is that of audience (electorate) participation in outcome, that is bolstered by the temporary feeling of belonging that comes from a large (in this case discomfortingly vicarious) social event. When the babblers return to their workstations in the morning, in thrall to the egregore of the collective experience; the party; the club; the rally, the social rewards of collective experience manifest; jokes, taunts, desires, communications, only now ironically combined with the sense of strength and self determined identity that comes from taking sides.

The truth however is that such limited participation detracts from genuine choice and opinion, and undermines the value of the thought and effort that are required to make such, and much like our stately ‘democratic’ politics, one is voting between what has already been chosen/given.

The second myth which has become deeply pernicious in our post-boomer age of financial clemency is that of meritocracy, and its cousin aspirationalism; the jovial notion that you get what you are ‘entitled’ to, that your talent will be recognised despite any impediments, that you can rise to the ‘top’. On the surface it seems a madness to argue with such concepts, what could be more reasonable than wanting to do well in your life and being rewarded for gumptive observance, but when analysised we discover a deeply selfish, pathological philosophy, mascarading as fairness under reason and even morality. It is in fact much closer to the lottery; that other manipulator of social and aquisitional hope; taxing dreams.

Merit is always awarded and administered by a subjective higher agency in this paradigm, conferred onto a candidate by an ‘expert’ adjudicator, and as such merit is determined by an adherent promiximity to the predetermined notion of excellence, a conformity to a limited ‘usefulness’. In this highly managed heirarchical caste/clique system that we are indentured to, the ladders are few and greasy, the waiting lists are long, and the parameters demanding; the adjudicating experts being more often than not venal, self-serving and dogmatically ossified.

The Celebritocrats themselves are lifted into their guilded positions and held there only so long as they are useful/beautiful/interesting, by thems lurking higher up the media pyramid than they, even though their own fevered egos would decry it. Half-wittingly they are using these shows as a platform to substantiate the carosel of their own image, but more importantly the very notion of the validiy of the Celebritocratic class itself. At least Strictly doesn’t piss about and removes the public from the performance altogether, literally feeding off their fantasies without shame. They are a small caste but they saturate the mediasphere with their tales of woe, abs, petty wants and rags to riches fantasies, distracting the eager, drooling, expectant from anything of import, nevermind concern, whilst undermining the real achievements that people can and have made.

Let them ingest saccharine.

More at www.decontaminated-continuum.blogspot.com>

Talk about a bad analogy: Appearing on television recently, former Hillary Clinton campaign adviser and current public relations executive Mark Penn suggested that President Obama needs a moment “similar” to the tragic terrorist attack on the Oklahoma City federal building, in order to “reconnect” with voters.

He didn’t even seem to flinch in making the comment.

Penn is currently president and CEO of Burson-Marsteller, a multi-national public relations firm. He also served in 2008 as chief strategist for then-Senator Hillary Clinton’s run for the White House. Before that, Penn advised former British Prime Minister Tony Blair in his third run for the UK leadership post, and served clients such as AT&T, Texaco, Ford, Merck, Verizon, BP, McDonald’s and Microsoft.

Read More on Stephen C. Webster writes on RAW Story