Democratizing China? Or China-izing the World?

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Tonight I wrote up this little essay up at MacDailyNews, of all places. It was in response to what has to be the single most bizarro event of 2012 so far:

Apple iPhone-branded gas stove pulled from Chinese store shelves

My initial response to this event was this bit of satire:

I nominate this article for The Surreal World Award of 2012.
Can it get more weird in 2012? Well, there is that ‘end of the world’ thing on December 21st. That’s going to be a contender! 

For those interested, the award for 2011 went to Reverend Campling for his two failed predictions of ‘the end of the world,’ in both May and October. No Rapture for you Reverend. 

Then I typed:

Thinking about this further, it struck me that maybe something is happening in the world that we had not expected. Let’s review some history: 

1) Nixon visits China in 1972, shakes hands with Mao. The Slave Wage Labor Movement becomes a glint in they eye of The Corporate Oligarchy. 

2) In 1998 China was given ‘Most Favored Nation’ status by the Clinton Administration. The ball was rolling. The Corporate Oligarchy began to abandon the USA and move their manufacturing to China. The public spin statements explained this situation as an opportunity to transform China into a democracy via capitalism. 

3) Later in 1998, China’s government began the consolidation and employment of what became the Red Hacker Alliance for the purpose of hacking all world government computers, especially those of the USA. China’s motto became “The Rest Of The World Are Suckers.” 

4) In 2007 the effects of The Corporate Oligarchy treating everyone as suckers resulted in The Subprime Mortgage Crisis, erupting worldwide into ‘The Great Recession’ of 2008. Capitalism effectively died, transformed by the Corporate Oligarchy into socialist Corporate Welfare. 

So, here we are today with the attitude of China, not the USA, having transformed the world. China has not moved any closer to democracy. It remains the hub of crime, abuse of human rights and totalitarian dictatorship it has consistently been since ‘The Great Cultural Revolution’ occurred. Meanwhile, the rest of the world has been transformed into China where everyone is abused by their government, the world has increasingly become a totalitarian police state, human rights have been consistently curtailed and removed, and everyone is treated as a sucker begging to be sucked dry by the parasitic party leaders. 

IOW: The tables were turned. Oops. No democracy for China, just mutant bastard communization for the rest of the world. The Chinese win. 

Just a thought! :-D

After I posted this little diatribe, I read through it and wondered if I was just having a bipolar moment. It certainly has my usual sarcastic persona embedded in its expression. But I think I've actually hit on a valid point, albeit a bit clunky in presentation at this point. Because of the USA getting all pals with China, the world really has changed. But it has clearly been in the opposite direction than was stated or expected. The Spirit of the Age is abuse of customers and citizens by 'the powers that be.' Define them as you like. Call them the 1%, The Corporate Oligarchy, RIAA, MPAA, Chamber of Commerce, EvangeLoons, ConservaTards, Neo-Con-Jobs, TardParty, DemoCraps, LibTards, whatever. The abuse against anyone in a perceived weaker position in the world has been consistently ratcheting up year after year. 

I have to wonder if this is the early phase of what I expect to be an era of desperation as we head into what I call 'The Late Dark Age', or 'Last Dark Age'. I see this as an era where all the people who play the finance / money / mammon game are scouring out every last source of opportunistic cash they can find while they watch their end game approaching them. They scoured out the real estate market after everything else had disappeared. Their scour job left real estate in ruins with the recession of property values continuing on into 2012. Now they're cleaning up the crumbs as they can find them, squeezing the 'sucker's ever harder for what real value is left in the world.

Then there's the question of what will be of 'real value' once the financial game has died the death and all the playtime papers, the money bills, the bank and promissory notes  are worthless. Check out what has happened to the price of rare metals and gems over the past 20+ years of sucker exploitation. What is of lasting value when there is no longer a working financial game system and we have to fall back on good old human system of SHARING? 

What of value to you have to share with someone else? What will they share back with you? There's what's left of value when the games have all ended and the fake stuff has been stripped away.

Then the real bottom line question: Knowing that sharing is required for human survival, (it really is!), is what we have to share enough for us, as a social group, culture or species, to survive?

What do we all require to survive?

That question is beyond the scope of my little blog. There are books on the subject to check out.

Meanwhile, I suggest learning about desperation behavior. Learn about fear and its resulting effects upon our physiology and thinking. Learn how to be, what I call 'Offensively Positive' despite the inflicted garbage. I've been working on this concept and behavior for a few years now and will hopefully be writing a bit about it with time. But I can tell you that when I use it, it's transcendental to both me and those upon whom I use it. I love it as a concept and a practice. It lets me SEE the worthless FUD in the world (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) that people use to manipulate one another and that they throw out in to the world as an expression of panic as well as of course desperation. It lets me LAUGH at all the human foolishness that consistently abounds within human behavior. It lets me APPRECIATE those kind and caring people who are always there, quietly behind the scenes, doing that wonderful do gooder stuff that keeps the world going around in spite of the negative anarchists, the berzerkers, the psychopathic and the lost. They are the heart and soul of the brilliant aspects of mankind. They are the sharers of what is 'god' in all of us. I love them and they love me. (Well usually. I can be a mean and snarky old snot head when I get lost). No wonder I love the Friends (aka Quakers)!

Enough of that manic expressive rant. 

May you live with an offensively positive spirit during interesting times!

;-Derek

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One Future of MankindIntroduction:The Curse, Rape and Murder of Cassandra

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Seeing the future.

Why bother?

If the seer sees the future, why bother telling anyone? What's to change? If all is fated, all happened before and we just get to live through the pattern. Why talk about it?

No one wants to listen anyway. Everyone is off chasing aliens, Armageddons, money, power, wars, more mysterious menaces and mayhem.

What do you get for thanks telling anyone anyway? What did Cassandra get? Cursed, raped, murdered, her family killed, her children killed. Nobody believes Cassandra. It's a waste of time, wasting insight on the wasted, making one's self into an abuse magnet. Fun times not.

And then there's that nagging fact that We Never Know Everything About Anything. And that Vagueness Factor, all generalized and unfocused, easily open for interpretation. "Tell us something solid we can do something about!" cry the few who care to listen. "At least give us a date, dammit!" "Just another lunatic" tossed over the back at departure. Find another future.

Toss the topping on top of 'The Madman Across the Water' or 'The Fool on the Hill' clichés I already get to enjoy every day of my life in required exile from the stress of other people's craziness. "We humans are crazy!" I cry. "Oh, that's something to recommend your insight. Well, we think you're crazy too!" "Yeah, I just said that."

To get listened to, you have to be extra strange, metaphysical, profound in some way that engages the imagination. Ooo. Reincarnated spiritual leader! We like that. ESP is way kewl! Anything we can't empirically prove. That's more like it! Yawns and abuse otherwise. How about those Mayans! That Book of Revelation! So trippy it's gotta be true.

Yes, got the picture. It's a waste of time having insight. Prophets are a dime dozen. Last week's end of the world gives way to this week's end of the world. Yet another return of Jesus. Whose apostle am I supposed to be this time? Been there. Seen that. Totally agree. Well worth ignoring.

Seeing the future.

Why bother?

I didn't ask to see the future anyway!
Oops.
I did actually.
Apparently it's only for my benefit.
So I should shut up.

"And yet..." contemplates the foolish seer.
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The Age Of Marketing - Truth Decay

I've been wrestling with myself for months about how to start off the guts of this blog. One subject kept pinning me to the floor: Marketing Abuse. So here goes.

What is marketing? It is an extension of the fundamental human behavior of sharing. Marketing is a sub-game, part of the overall game we call 'business.' It's goal is to sell shared items or services, trading them from the people who have them to those who want or need them. How this is done is a subject of ethical dispute.

I of course focus on the element of what I call 'Truth Decay.' This term came to my attention through T-Bone Burnett, a master musician, composer and recording producer. I've followed his work since 1976. Among other things, he won a Grammy Award for his soundtrack to the film 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?", an adaptation of Homer's Odyssey by the Coen Brothers. Mr. Burnett looks and thinks remarkably like me. I believe he must be one of my long lost big cousins, so to speak. His 1980 solo album was entitled 'Truth Decay', an apt pun for the subject at hand.

We are living in The Age Of Marketing, or The Marketing Era, whichever you prefer. I use the phrases interchangably. The artifice of marketing is centuries old. But it became a subject of urgent study after corporations were erroneously given the status of 'personhood' at the end of the 19th century. This abomination was heralded into existence, I am told, but the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:

"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

Odd much? I'll be covering this travesty of truth in a future post. Now that The Age Of Corporate Ascension had begun, so had The Age Of Marketing. One of the pinnacle achievements of this artifice was propaganda. To quote a quote from Wikipedia:

"Propaganda is neutrally defined as a systematic form of purposeful persuasion that attempts to influence the emotions, attitudes, opinions, and actions of specified target audiences for ideological, political or commercial porposes through the controlled transmission of one-sided messages (which may or may not be factual) via mass and direct media channels. A propaganda organization employs propagandists who engage in propagandism—the applied creation and distribution of such forms of persuasion."
—Richard Alan Nelson, A Chronology and Glossary of Propaganda in the United States, 1996

An excellent example of current propaganda today in the USA is the network of pseudo-political pundits in the pseudo-news media. One of the most famous pseudo-conservative political pundits was Jerry Falwell, inventor of the divisive term "The Moral Majority". Taken at face value, this term can vaguely make sense regarding human ethical beliefs. But it was used as nothing more than a political tire iron by a group of pseudo-Christian politicians. Jerry Falwell was one of the most successful propagandists in US history, pulling the wool over indeed the majority of citizens. His political movement culminated in the successful election, twice, of pseudo-conservative George W. Bush, who brought along with him the pseudo-conservative dumdum tank known as the 'Project For The New American Century', aka PNAC, infamously lead by publisher and political analyst William Krystol. The ruination of the concept of 'truth' that followed is only now being realized and understood.

In the future I'll undoubtedly post a diatribe about the history of propaganda, as well as a rant regarding what I call the 'Neo-Con-Job' movement in the USA. Please note that I have no respect for either of the political parties in the USA. If I'm biased, it is toward making sense, and neither party qualifies. It just happens that the tribe, oops I mean party, that has done the most damage recently has been the Repubicans, or Repubicraps as I sarcastically call them, as opposed to the Democrats or Democraps. In the future I will also cover the use of humor and linguistic invention in the pursuit of satire, a form of truth exhumation and zunipus humiliation.

The Age Of Marketing has created a wide variety of concepts. The best of these is the phrase "The customer is always right." This is what marketing should be: A positive service to the customer. Provide to the customer what they need and want. I consider the aberration of convincing or persuading a customer to buy something to be an art of deception, aka zunipus. It brings into the natural human sharing system all the human vices. The business game becomes an act of harming people, of harming truth.

Over time I've been categorizing ways in which bad marketing abuses customers through zunipus. Ahead is a series of short articles describing some of my concepts. I enjoy writing with a sense of irony and satire, and these articles will be no exception. I've been reluctant to post them here because they have an emotional component. They are in response to my sense of repulsion and annoyance with the acts of people I call 'Marketing Morons', those who use abusive marketing, as opposed to 'Marketing Mavens', those who use supportive marketing. Clearing away my rage regarding bad marketing, this entire issue is one of truth decay, or perpetrating zunipus for the purpose of personal gain at the expense of the welfare of others.

Share and Enjoy,

:-Derek
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