…or not so venerable!

thanks Nick Gaetano

…or not so venerable!

thanks Nick Gaetano

Corporate-Sponsored “Slacktivism”: Bigger and More Dangerous than the Urban Dictionary Realizes
by Anne Landman
The Weekly Spin, PRWatch.org
June 2, 2008

Recently while browsing the Web I came across UrbanDictionary.com, which is sort of a wiki of contemporary slang. I found some of the newer words listed there amusing, like “hobosexual” (the opposite of metrosexual; someone who cares little about their looks), “consumerican,” (”a particularly American brand of consumerism”), and “wikidemia” (”an academic work passed off as scholarly yet researched entirely on Wikipedia”).

Then I came across a word that put me into a more thoughtful zone: “slacktivism.”

“Slacktivism” (alternative spelling “slactivism”) is a fusion of the words “slacker” and “activism,” and UrbanDicationary.com defines it as “the act of participating in obviously pointless activities as an expedient alternative to actually expending effort to fix a problem.” It refers to ersatz acts that people perform that they have somehow come to believe are full of meaning, like slapping a magnetic ribbon on your car to “support the troops,” wearing a colored rubber wristband to “fight cancer,” or refusing to buy gasoline on a certain day to protest high gas prices, instead of, say, actually changing your lifestyle to use less gas. (more…)

…or not so venerable!

thanks Nick Gaetano

…or not so venerable! As reported by reader, Mathew, on June 5, 2008, this is a fake ad from Viz comic. It can be found on page 39 of the Viz annual “The Pan Handle”.

thanks Nick Gaetano

Starting today and running for a week, we’ll be featuring ads from the 30’s (maybe), submitted by Nick Gaetano.

MacClellan and His Media Collaborators
by Jeff Cohen
The Huffington Post
May 30, 2008

No sooner had Bush’s ex-press secretary (now author) Scott McClellan accused President Bush and his former collaborators of misleading our country into Iraq than the squeals of protest turned into a mighty roar.

I’m not talking about the vitriol directed at him by former White House colleagues like Karl Rove and Ari Fleischer. I’m talking about McClellan’s other war collaborators: the movers and shakers in corporate media. The people McClellan refers to in his book as “deferential, complicit enablers” of Bush administration war propaganda.

One after another, news stars defended themselves with the tired old myth that no one doubted the Iraq WMD claims at the time. The yarn about hindsight being 20/20 was served up more times than a Rev. Wright clip on Fox News.

Katie Couric, whose coverage on CBS of the Iraq troop surge has been almost fawning, was one of the few stars to be candid about pre-invasion coverage, saying days ago, “I think it’s one of the most embarrassing chapters in American journalism.” She spoke of “pressure” from corporate management, not just Team Bush, to “really squash any dissent.” Then a co-host of NBC Today, she says network brass criticized her for challenging the administration. (more…)

From Kate McCamy: ABOUT TIME!!!!! I’ll do my part of the strike, by doing nothing!! No really, isn’t that what a strike is?? This would be a great day…

As seen on http://www.votestrike.org/:

General Strike! No school, no work, no shopping, no life as usual… Not for today. Not for this week. Not until we’ve won!

Submitted by Angstrom at Timeshard:

California schemin’
May 10, 2008
The Guardian

Your dreams of rapping superstardom are stymied by your Scottish sound, so what do you do? Simple: reinvent yourself as a West Coast wild boy, with American accent and history to match. But, Gavin Bain tells Decca Aitkenhead, keeping it up for two years is murder

Silibil’n'Brains commandeered the stage with the swagger of Americans who considered the audition beneath them. It was 2003 and the rappers were making their London debut at an industry showcase for unsigned talent. Freestyling in rhyme, the pair tore through their routine - part Eminem, part skater-boy punk - ripping off T-shirts to reveal lacy bras before leaping into the crowd. In a line-up stiff with tepid R&B acts, the Californians couldn’t fail to steal the show. An A&R man in the audience from Island Records wanted to see them the very next day.

Brains - aka Gavin Bain - still feels his heart race when he describes Island’s office full of A&R men the following day. “We go round everyone in the room, taking the piss, and they’re all like, uh-oh, what are these crazy American kids going to do now?” The pair tease an overweight executive about his girth, and when a member of the boy band Busted walks by, they mock his songs and advise him to shave his monobrow. “And everyone laughs! We’re rapping to the point where we don’t even know what the fuck’s coming out of our mouths, but people are just, like, laughing, loving everything we do.” (more…)

From Robert Greenwald and Brave New Films:

There’s no question John McCain is getting a free ride from the mainstream press. But with the power of YouTube and the blogosphere, we can provide an accurate portrayal of the so-called Maverick. We can put the brakes on his free ride!

Since we first released The Real McCain a year ago, our REAL McCain series has garnered close to 2 million views, with over 13,000 comments and tens of thousands more in petition signatures! Clearly, John McCain’s record is something the public wants to discuss, and yet the corporate media is doing NOTHING to present the truth. We feel obliged to continue countering the mainstream media’s love of McCain. And so we thought it was high time for a sequel: The Real McCain 2:

thanks Abe

In case you missed the first The REAL McCain, posted a year ago by Brave New Films here it is: (more…)

Thanks to Scott Beale of Laughing Squid for submitting this story from Blogoscoped.com:

Search Engine Optimization Through Hoax News
by Philipp Lenssen
May 22, 2008

Over at Search Engine Land’s Sphinn, people are discussing a search engine optimization tactic which tries to assemble backlink juice by posting a fake news article. Jonathan Crossfield wraps it up: “Online marketer Lyndon Antcliff recently helped a client achieve over 1500 inbound links in under a week with a story designed to grab attention.” The article, titled “13 Year Old Steals Dad’s Credit Card to Buy Hookers,” was and still is hosted at the authoritative looking domain Money.co.uk, which is a financial advisor and Lyndon’s client, apparently. The hoax news explains that “Ralph Hardy, a 13 year old from Newark, Texas confessed to ordering an extra credit card from his father’s existing credit card company,” taking his friends on a $30,000 spending spree “culminating in playing ’Halo’ on an Xbox with a couple of hookers in a Texas motel.”

Jonathan continues to explain that the page received 2,452 votes at social news site Digg.com (it’s currently at 2,489 diggs, and not marked as incorrect, attracting comments like “Ballsy kid.”). Then, mainstream news made it into the mix. The hoax item was covered in Australia News.com.au, The Daily Telegraph, Fox News and many others, Jonathan says, and even reached the print version of UK’s Sun newspaper.

Google’s Matt Cutts makes a statement (more…)

From Andrew Boyd and John Sellers of Agit-Pop, May 21, 2008:

Bush & Cheney & McCain & Fox News & the whole neo-con cabal have been rattling their sabers about bombing Iran for nigh on a few years now. Yesterday, the Jerusalem Post confirmed it :

“US President George W. Bush intends to attack Iran in the upcoming months, before the end of his term,” Army Radio quoted a senior official in Jerusalem as saying Tuesday.

And now the entire Bush team is denying it in The New York Times. We think they doth protest too much. And so, we’ve launched our latest, ass-kicking mini-video:

Don’t Bomb Iran 

It’s currently being featured on YouTube Politics. And our partners at True Majority are using it to build rapid support for Senate Resolution 356: “Any offensive military action taken against Iran must be explicitly approved by Congress before such action may be initiated.” 

P.S.  A new trans-partisan coaltion - The Campaign for a New American Policy on Iran - is following the lead of Republican Senator Chuck Hagel and others in calling for “immediate, unconditional, and comprehensive talks” with Iran. Many of their member groups will be using our video soon.

Support them here: http://www.newiranpolicy.org

This post is a follow-up to an article by Andrew Adam Newman that appeared in Adweek on May 5, 2008 called The True Story of a Bogus Blog, via PRWatch.org

Report: Hunter College Probe Slams Coach-Sponsored PR Class
Adweek
by Andrew Adam Newman
May 9, 2008

The course was funded by a $10,000 grant from Coach as part of a college outreach effort by the IACC.

New York: A Hunter College Senate Committee’s investigation of a Coach-sponsored PR class slams the college’s administration on numerous academic freedom grounds and says that the PR practices taught in the class were “deeply troubling.”

As detailed Monday in Adweek, the course taught last spring at Hunter in New York was funded by a $10,000 grant from Coach and was part of a college outreach campaign by the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition (IACC), a trade group that includes Coach and other brands like Apple, Levi Strauss & Co., Louis Vuitton and Rolex. A class, acting as an idea-pitching and campaign-executing agency for Coach and the trade group, invented a blogging student named Heidi Cee whose posts on Facebook and MySpace try to dissuade students from buying counterfeit goods. PR observers and bloggers faulted the campaign for being deceptive.

The findings in the below report, which was leaked to Adweek and is scheduled to be presented on May 21 to the full college senate, largely echo the concerns of Stuart Ewen, one of two Hunter professors who made the complaint that led to the investigation, namely that the professor who taught the course was “coerced” to do so, that the trade group’s and Coach’s hands-on involvement with the course “was clearly a violation of academic freedom,” and that that the course was initiated at the behest of the administration rather than the faculty. (more…)

Submitted by Jon Truskey, from Robert Greenwald and the Brave New Team:

You may have heard of Rev. John Hagee, the McCain supporter who said God created Hurricane Katrina to punish New Orleans for its homosexual “sins.” Well now meet Rev. Rod Parsley, the televangelist megachurch pastor from Ohio who hates Islam. According to David Corn of Mother Jones, Parsley has called on Christians to wage war against Islam, which he considers to be a “false religion.” In the past, Parsley has also railed against the separation of church and state, homosexuals, and abortion rights, comparing Planned Parenthood to Nazis.

John McCain actively sought and received Parsley’s endorsement in the presidential race. McCain has called Parsley “a spiritual guide,” and he hasn’t said whether he shares Parsley’s vicious anti-Islam views. That’s because the mainstream media refuses to ask. And so, we’ve taken matters into our own hands, joining Mother Jones to present the truth about McCain’s pastor.

(more…)

Fabled absinthe all a hoax, German scientists say
The Earth Times
May 6, 2008

Karlsruhe, Germany - Absinthe, the green liqueur flavoured with aniseed which reputedly used to drive artists mad, was a hoax, a team of scientists said Tuesday, adding that it was only the strong alcohol in the drink that was damaging to health.

Absinthe was banned in Europe for much of the 20th century because of fears it contained large amounts of thujon, which is toxic to the nerves. Not so, said scientists at the CVUA laboratory in Karlsruhe, Germany, who did the study with US and British colleagues.

They tested old bottles of the beverage nearly 100 years old.

“Its psycho-active effect is just a fairy tale,” said scientist Dirk Lachenmeier. The liqueur had contained only minimal thujon.

Users claimed the wormwood liqueur could trigger hallucinations or epileptic fits. The Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh is supposed to have cut off his own ear under its influence. (more…)