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Evan Burton

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Posts posted by Evan Burton

    Censoring the internet

    in Political Conspiracies

    Posted

    John,

    Labor is on its way out. State Labor has suffered a backlash as well, with a 25% swing against them in the Penrith by-election. Penrith was a Labor stronghold and this is only the second time in 37 years that a Lib has gained the seat.

    The backlash against Federal Labor will be much the same, having shown themselves incapable of governing and with a hidden agenda. Comrade Rudd won't survive the next election; he might not even be the Party Leader next week if rumours of a leadership spill are correct!

    I suspect the result of the next federal election will be a coalition government but with far more powerful Greens.

    How the anti-vaxers lie to you

    in Political Conspiracies

    Posted

    r_meryladvertising.png

    Yet again, a post about one of Meryl Dorey's regularly scheduled SocialOomph tweets. And guess what? Meryl is lying again. Oh, sure, she's probably just repeating something she's heard somewhere else. Sad thing is, though, she's been told she's wrong repeatedly and she's still carrying on, so it's crossed from merely repeating a rumour without checking into the territory of outright lie. She's repeating this on the "official" twitter channel of the Australian Vaccination Network, which claims to be an independent watchdog. It's not a watchdog. It's a half-blind junkyard mutt with three legs.

    So, are pharma companies the biggest buyers of advertising?

    Well, no.

    Dave The Happy Singer sent me this link from Advertising Age, summarising the top 100 ad spends from companies worldwide in 2009.

    In at number one? Procter & Gamble. Do they have any pharma products? Well no, unless you count tampons and razors as pharma, which I don't. Yes, I know you can buy them at the pharmacy. They're not pharma.

    Number two in the list? Unilever. A direct competitor to the #1 company, Unilever are also conspicuously short of pharma brands, but they're nevertheless pervasive. I'm drinking Lipton's tea right now, a Unilever brand.

    Third in the top 100 is L'oreal, the world's largest cosmetics firm. Wait a minute! doesn't Meryl Dorey run a company called "Fountain Of Beauty"? Why yes! Cosmetics firms are the third largest buyers of advertising. Think about that next time you see

    .

    Fourth - and don't worry, I'm not going to do all 100 of them - is General Motors, owners of the Holden, Opel and Vauxhall brands. Oh, those evil Holdens and Vauxhalls! But do they manufacture any drugs? Not unless you count pure adrenaline!

    Coming in at number five, The Toyota Motor Corporation. I think we all know who Toyota are. They make cars that just don't stop. No drugs here. NEXT!

    Sixth in the list: Coca-Cola. Now, despite schoolyard rumours, Coca-Cola no longer contains cocaine. Therefore, I don't think it's fair to call Coca Cola a pharma or chemical company, even if they do market Monster Energy.

    Now, at seven with a global spend of $2.6bn, Johnson & Johnson. Finally, a pharmaceutical company. Possibly best known for their sanitation products like gauzes, cotton tips and dressings (they got started in surgical dressings), J&J do actually have a stake in the vaccine business. That's right. They got into vaccines in 2009 when they bought a european research biotech company.

    OK, so we find a pharma brand at number 7, though admittedly it's a brand more well known for cotton tips and tylenol than "proper" clinical products. Where are the others?

    8. Ford. Not pharma, though their cars are known to put me to sleep

    9. Reckit Benckiser (chemicals and 'health' products including Gaviscon, Nurofen and Clearasil). Only vaguely pharma. We'll give it half a point, if only for products like Suboxone.

    10. Nestlé. A food company. Not very ethical, but also not "pharma". Also, a verb meaning "to move or arrange oneself in a comfortable and cozy position", if you leave off the accent.

    11. Volkswagen. Nobody mention Hitler.

    12. Honda. Any drugs here? Just the ones being taken by the designers of this thing.

    13. Mars. Formerly Masterfoods. Vegetarians don't like them much any more, but not because they manufacture evil drugs. It's because they started using veal byproducts in their chocolate bars. Mmmmm. Veal.

    14. McDonalds - I've often joked that their food is addictive, but it ain't no drug, Meryl.

    15. Sony - don't get me started on Sony. They put rootkits on their music CDs, but they don't manufacture pharma.

    Damn, this is a struggle. Up to fifteen and only one and a half pharma companies

    16. GlaxoSmithKline. Yay! Another pharma company with an ad spend of $1.83bn. Fourth largest pharma company in the world, seemingly the second (maybe third) largest ad spend of the pharma segment. And they definitely make vaccines. But at number 16, they're clearly not pulling their weight for Meryl. Pick up your game, GSK.

    17. Deutsche Telecom. I think we can discount these guys. I'm pretty sure that DTAG's product line fails to constitute a pharmacopeia. I just wanted to use the word pharmacopeia. Move along.[/font][/font]

    18. Kraft Foods. Vegemite is not a drug! I'm not addicted. I can quit any time I want.

    19. Nissan. Boring cars are not pharmaceutical products.

    20. Walt Disney Company. Pure unmitigated evil, but again they don't count as pharma. Not even for fantasia.

    So there we have it. Only two and a half pharma companies in the top 20 Ad spenders worldwide, and none above seventh-placed J&J, which is there by virtue of a massively diverse product base. That's 12.5% of the list. Even if we expand the domain to include "chemical companies" we only really add half a point for Reckit Benckiser, notwithstanding that all matter is composed of chemicals and therefore any company with a physical product is therefore a chemical company.

    Here's the lowdown: Meryl is lying. Again.

    Hang on, I'll put that in big, so the message is clear

    Meryl is lying. Again.

    Got that?

    http://www.mycolleag.../06/03/491.aspx

    Censoring the internet

    in Political Conspiracies

    Posted

    Internet freedom in 2010 looks like 1984

    Any Australian government of any persuasion that attempted to construct in secret a surveillance scheme for monitoring the day-to-day activities of its citizens would almost certainly be destroyed the next time its citizens were allowed near a ballot box. Assuming, of course, it planned to allow them near the ballot box ever again.

    The Hawke government got a small taste of what could happen when it tried to push through its risibly-named Australia Card early in its term of office. That national ID scheme – which has been quite effectively replicated by subsequent governments' data-matching programs – fell apart on a legal technicality. But before that happened Hawke and his inexperienced ministers managed to unite against them a mass campaign which covered the full spectrum of political belief from left to right. People just do not like Big Brother.

    The fate of that scheme, and the much more successful subsequent introduction of a de facto surveillance regime based on the regular, systemic, but largely invisible matching of vast amounts of personal data held on each and every one of us by the federal bureaucracy, probably explains the Rudd government's decision to construct in secret a similarly vast domestic intelligence gathering machine targeting every single internet user in Australia. While communications minister Stephen Conroy has suffered (and rightfully so) continuous and scarifying attacks on his competence and integrity because of his desire to filter the web, he hasn't had to endure much in the way of criticism for the government's plans to monitor every aspect of our online lives.

    Do you have any idea what I'm talking about yet? Long story short, the Rudd government is crafting an Orwellian scheme that may well require Australian ISPs to log and retain details of all your online communications and Web browsing activity. The Attorney-General Robert McClelland – not one of the brightest stars in the firmament of federal cabinet – denied this week that ''browsing histories would be stored'', saying the government was only seeking to identify ''parties to a communication'', such as senders and receivers of emails and VoIP calls.

    Even this limited scheme would be considered by most Australians to be entirely unacceptable, but because the government has imposed secrecy provisions on all the parties with which it is negotiating in this matter, the process remains completely opaque and we are being asked to agree to the imposition of a generalised surveillance regime with nothing but the vaguest reassurances about its scope, intent and the potential hazards of abuse, misuse, maladministration and outright oppression. (Well, actually, we're not being asked at all. It's just happening).

    There is an excellent article by Fairfax's tech writer Asher Moses here, which you should read.

    It makes clear the very real fears of the real people in the real telecommunications sector that something quite profoundly wrong and loathsome is being planned. It is a scheme on par with any number of other Rudd government initiatives - obsessed with image management and controlling activities over which it should rightly have no control.

    It is more serious by an order of magnitude than Conroy's amateur hour efforts with the net filter and arguably more aggressive in its collection activities than the huge, but little known datamatching programs which run, day in, day out, without most people's knowledge.

    Indeed, today's revelation that Rudd intends to link the information gathered from monitoring your internet activities to identifiers such as your passport number open up the real possibility of mashing together all of the personal information available in your data matching matrix to (your income, your tax history, you bank account details, your medical records for starters) to your online life - your tweets, your Facebook account, your email, your Chatroueltte history, your 4square tracking data, your blog entries, the link you clicked not realising it was taking you to a snuff porn site, the link you clicked knowing it was taking you to a celebrity porn site, the comments you leave here today, all of it.

    That's why today's column is written without jokes or even sarcasm.

    This is not about having fun. This is not a joke.

    This is about a government which needs to be taken apart.

    http://www.smh.com.a...00618-ykr9.html

    Chemtrails are back!

    in Political Conspiracies

    Posted

    Jack has been shown how to go about gathering evidence in this matter, but instead he simply makes a subjective visual assessment which fails to provide any real data. I don't see how you will change his mind, Matthew - Jack just has to do what he has to do. He is compelled and has little choice in the matter.

    MOST IMPORTANT - PLEASE READ

    in JFK Assassination Debate

    Posted

    With the change to the board version 3.1.0, a bug is present.

    Although we have enabled the board to accept 5 images / media per posting, it will only allow two external links (such as to your own Photobucket site).

    The bug is fixed in the next release and we'll advise you when we upgrade.

    Apologies for the problems.

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