FrankenMarketing

Management. Man if there was ever a science that dealt with pure common sense it would be management. I mean you go for years of classes and slave through exams only to come up with what a five year old would say is the the most obviously logical solution to a problem and three years down the line you don't really feel like you've learned anything. You just feel like a coconut. Husk removed, oil extracted, and distributed across several locations ranging from five star hotels to slums to the Everest of garbage that is sitting in Maligawatte; the same coconut, but 'diversified'.

Ok that analogy looks and sounds a bit off doesnt it? No matter. The blunders that big firms make is what actually brought me to write this random one. The story of McDonalds entering India with a beefburgher is probably a folk tale by now to any person who sat through a marketing or management course at any point in their lives over the last fifteen years. I mean here you have a global firm, very experienced, entering a massive market famed for their reverence of cows and how do they go about making their entry? by making a big hullaballoo about how great their beefburgher is. im sick of it.

Im sick of hearing about this chicken entrepreneur who translated their slogan 'it takes a tough man to make a tender chicken' into spanish and ended up with 'it takes a virile man to make a chicken affectionate' or something along those lines. im sick of hearing of this airline who went into Hong Kong and decided to be all innovative and give out free flowers to first time passengers. Great idea right? Wrong. They chose carnations and guess what, Hong Kongese or however you may call them associate carnations with death; the big D word, the one that everyone tries to ignore. How would you feel if someone handed you a miniature coffin or a free voucher to a funeral parlour when you board a plane? Dumbasses.

So what management students and lecturers all over the world do is, they look at these chaps who made these blunders and they snigger at them in a superior manner. They laugh over them during drinks. They use them as examples to describe common everyday events, leaving those not in the loop contemplating dialing the sanatorium. it makes these chaps feel good to think that even global corporate giants can make stupid mistakes like these. it helps counter the constant sense of inferiority that drives them to take up jobs in the world of corporate bum slavery. for evey guy who climbs the corporate ladder, there is another one fumbling and falling down to the endless depths of no return, or simply retiring.

And then we have countries like China that are driving the rest of them up the wall. How can you beat a place where there is enough labor to fill several factories that costs you only about 2 dollars a month to maintain? and that is per-factory. Salaries all over the world are being cut because of the inexhaustible rate at which people seem to be crawling out to work out of the nooks and crannies of China. I think they've got some kinda people producing plant hidden in there somewhere. Either that or they've been planning this for centuries. And perfecting their own brand of top secret Kama Sutra, with modifications designed to focus on the end result and not the actual process of the thing. So if Bill Gates starts driving a Toyota and that hotshot fast rising executive at your Rotaract club pulls into the next meeting on a BMX, you know who to blame. Or thank.

And its all about money. Oh no, don't be fooled by the altruistic overtones. Even CSR is simply alturism furnished with a pair of binoculars (to modify a Helvetius quote). Its all about driving profit. I was initially disillusioned with the whole concept of marketing because i simply saw it as a way of bullshitting, tricking, manipulating and convincing some poor chap to forego six months of his mortgage payments to buy a pair of Pradas to finally feel like a man. Now i know that if that chap was stupid enough to actually gobble it up, he deserves the cardboard box he is living in and he deserved to be tricked and bullshitted and brainwashed. You're just dealing out justice. 'No worries mate, it's all good down under' says the eskimo who just bought the latest LG 'ice machine' three door 'super door cooling' Made in Australia freezer cum kitchenette, and who sold his father's only whaling boat to afford it; plunging his family into a doomed state of polar bear fodder.

It teaches you dog eat dog ness. It teaches you to kill or be killed. If the corporate world is the jungle, then management is the art of survival. Quick on your feet, running before you even leap out of bed, running in your sleep. Stalking your prey day and night. You call him a customer and claim he's always right. But when it comes to the most important things in life, he's only right if he agrees with you. You can hear the thunder before the storm but you can't hear the marketer as he stalks you while you innocently watch Prison Break, or foolishly read hit-ad while sitting on an empty wallet and a soon to be declined credit card.

Its sick, its disgusting, yet i am almost triple qualified in it. Im a disgrace. But im out to get your money, I won't warn you again. Or i will if you buy these Pradas, go on treat yourself, you're a man that needs them. Your family deserves them. Your career depends on them. Your daughter's marriage prospects depend on them. Buy them! You're feeling sleepy, when i snap my fingers you will wake up and pay me and go home and ignore the repossessors and love the cardboard box that you end up in because you're a loser and im the king and the world is a moneymaking jungle. I'm too classy for an evil laugh.

Mordor

Frodo got it wrong.
Now the Ring of Truth is on it's way to Mordor.
The Nazgul sit and laugh.
While the dwarves die for a lost cause

The demons are encircling the fortress
to welcome him into their lands
to make him king
of the reign of lies he'll bring

Like a surface of a lake
the truth will seem unchanged
but the illusion will permeate.
A monster in its depths.

It will darken the waters
with the blood of its victims
all will be corrupt, save
for the surface that glistens

The truth that remains

will be a sliver of it's former self

the rest of the iceberg
will be bathed in a sea of blood

A higher purpose

The world is poetry it sings all around us, the nations sing to each other often in tones of utter hatred and people adopt these tones to sing these songs even louder at their homes, to their kids, talking of Irish pride and English dominance. Talking of American industry and and Indian commitment. Talking of Australian freedom and African triumph over hardship, but we, what do we talk about?

What do we tell our kids when the guns have come out and the war is on and people around us are falling and dying? What would i tell my kids if i were a father withering in fear waiting for who knows what on the northern frontier? Would i breed fear and thereby hope they stay away from all the dangerous places where i believe danger could happen? Would i breed anger and animosity in the hope that one day they will work towards taking down that nameless enemy that fate thrust upon them, they never asked for him.

They never claimed to have demanded a birthright of poverty in a war zone that would probably be the worst birthright claimed by anyone to this date unless you are born on the day of apocalypse and will take a short stock of the world and then go away forever. But then the sadness in life is in having to live it and if you were born on the day of apocalypse you would not have sadness for you would not live it.

We protect and serve the burden of life with sacrifice. We go through shit to survive but why? We may live maximum of hundred years or hundred and six like that lady in Obama’s speech of presidential acceptance. but yet what is the difference between Obama and that lady of a hundred and six years when they both will be mere corpses in the ground in few decades and few more years perhaps if they are lucky, well she may not be so lucky and Obama may yet survive a few years if he is not as idealistic as many claim him to be and if he sucks up a lot to corporate greed but i digress.

What difference does Obama bear to that baby born of wedlock discarded on the streets of Kilinochchi in the days of the roaring battles and left to struggle and fend for itself in some garbage bin in the eastern slums where Muslims Tamils and a few Sinhalese hang around at night for a little bit of kasiya and a joint if they are lucky? What difference does life bear to death in its perception they are both the same they are both meaningless and they are both insane.

We live a hundred years and then we die and it is like everything we did does not exist but even if it does what is the point of living itself don’t we wonder why do we live simply to do the things we just did? is there not a higher purpose of existence a reason behind all this i have tried to uncover it and God is why. Is there not a higher purpose you tell me why is it we are here is it why we drink day and night water for sustenance and food for the same? Is it why we breathe the air we breathe are we but a mechanical bit piece a cog in the wheel of the universe?

This ain’t absurd if you look at what science has learned on the nature of nature and the natural world. it adapts and discards as it sees fit and evolution may be a magic but it kills the ones that don’t serve it any purpose and do not help to maintain the balance of nature. man is often accused of destroying it but i say NO it is all just cause and effect and where there is cause and effect there is always a reason for which you are attached a reason beyond mere daily activities such as eating drinking working or jumping in the sack. we may live confused and think that this is what life is all about coming here and reading poetry at open mic. going there and working asses off going there studying behinds sore but NO i say there is greater purpose to life. If not greater a purpose more abstract and in touch with nature a purpose we have drifted away from as far as mere knowledge is concerned.

So we are cog in nature and we are a purpose unto ourselves that we are not aware of. It may be God it may be philosophy but can it be both is that a question to be even asking in a mixed society? So we come to war when we ask that question and we breathe clearly our purpose in this world and what we are meant to be. And it’s hard when purposes that counteract exist simultaneously and therefore battles erupt and that baby in Kilinochchi may join one day forces of some armed military. Depending on which of the joint seekers pick him up will it be the Muslim the Tamils or the Majority? and there we are lobbed down to a purpose of life never knowing which purpose is right cos if each purpose drives a person to fight the very last fight then such a purpose should have at least a trace of nobility right?

Yes it should and yes it would but do we always fight for the purpose of life? How often do we fight for money wealth land even culture and the other traps of mundane existence? So if i was a father living that life, in a war zone slum dwelling fearing for my family’s life, I’d tell my son; son, only fight for a purpose you know is right. We are Sri Lankans and that’s alright, they may be Indians and they may be Americans but this earth has no distinction except humanity and the universe has no distinction but life.

Why should i give a damn for the world economy?

Is the problem I’m grappling with right now, having to write some 2000 words worth of assignment material on the stuff. Why should I? People talk about the death of capitalism but is capitalism really dead? Aren’t we all capitalists? even the communists are capitalists man. Capitalism is simply capitalizing on your power, market power, personality, position or any other power, we are all superheroes trying to use our powers to climb upwards the ladder.

Look at America, the self professed 'greatest nation of the world'. Many people just do not recognize the US for what it really is, an empire. Most talk about various aspects of the US; it's culture, people, habits, policies etc. Most even seem to be gullible enough to believe mainstream media and think that the US is just another nation among several other nations on a planet just trying to get by and help its fellow countries along, which is total bull.

Capitalism is good at one thing, creating an illusion. It is so good that you can't even figure out where it goes wrong. You talk about the widening gaps in income and the increasing percentage of people living on $2 a day (75-80% of the world's population) but how does it exactly transpire? How do policies of rich countries that seem, at face value, to be purely beneficial to these same rich countries alone while being totally harmless to anyone else, work in tandem with other such policies that create ripple effects that totally cripple whole sections of populations?

The victorious always write history. And contemporary history is no different. It is constantly being written as we speak, through CNN, BBC, Fox News, Bloomberg and a whole lot of other machines of the mainstream corporate controlled Big Media. They are so big that they have to be controlled by the powerful. FARC, the revolutionary Columbian rebels. some of the 'biggest terrorists of our times' were a bunch of farmers who lost their territory when the Columbian government together with the US built dams and various other infrastructure projects without giving a damn for them.

The US has always followed an economic pathway to world dominance. Don't look so shocked. Look at history; look at every single powerful nation that has ever risen. Haven't they always looked to test their skills against their counterparts and try to win their resources? History is littered with empires man. The world has always had some form of empire, but this empire you could say is different, because to most eyes and ears, it is underground.

After the world war, the prospect of a geographically expanded empire was deemed impossible due to the presence of nuclear weapons. Meaning that one too pissed off nation and boom half the world is reduced to radioactive trash. The prospect of an economic empire came about in the 1950s when the Shah of Iran was overthrown by Mohammed Mossadegh who then chased out all the British oil companies and nationalized the Iranian Oil industry. The US sent in Kermit Roosevelt (Theodore’s grandson) who paid off a lot of people, organized a coupé, overthrew Mossadegh, installed the Shah back into power, and brought the oil companies back. And that’s when they decided hey, this is not a bad idea. And they've been at it ever since.

Latin America has been a long standing victim. The basic format of empire building works like this. The US, through private corporations sends in economic teams who then convince the local governments to undertake massive infrastructure projects to 'develop' the country, This is of course just a way to get them to take vast amounts of debt from US banks which in turn are given over to US construction firms who build the dams, electrical grids etc. This infrastructure is often hugely extravagant and unnecessary but valid economic forecasts are provided to justify them and often, corrupt government officials are paid off to agree to the project. The countries subsequently find themselves unable to pay of these loans, get on the verge of defaulting and promptly become the US's puppet, which then gets free access to natural resources and UN votes and builds military bases on their soil, amongst other benefits.

If local governments try to resist, then the 'Jackals' go in and an assassination or a coupé is staged and someone more 'friendly' to US foreign policy is put into place.

The world isn’t a rosy place. It's far darker than we imagine. But its not a question of hating the US for what they are doing or getting paranoid about everything you read in the media. It is just enough if people try to understand and accept the truth. People are living in the illusion. The illusion cast by capitalism itself. And as long as the majority eats into the bullshit buffet that is broadcasted down and fed to all and sundry, the world has no chance of rising above itself.

Its stupid no? Capitalism in its essence, in its ideal, is a good concept. If everyone worked for himself collectively everyone will benefit. But it fails to foresee the potential for the failure of markets. It fails to realize that every action will have a thousand reactions in the greater economy and most of those reactions may not be good. It fails to realize that self interest without moral regulation can be an uncontrollable demon. And coupled with a messed up monetary system and open corruption and greed, we have a mallum of slow acting poison, a poison that will probably kill us all eventually, including the US

Fear of fear itself

As bloggers in Sri Lanka, do we really have the right (or the honor) to be scared of repression yet? Are we such a troublesome blip on the political radar that we warrant white van teams deployed on our doorsteps and the trouble of equipment of torture sharpened in our faces to make us piss in our pants?

The blogosphere is not without its spats and even death threats. I've seen enough hate comments on various political posts around the place to deduce that much. But how much of these comments are really backed up with the capability and willpower to be followed through with hardcore action, and how many of them are just empty mouth-offs by people who disagree strongly enough or are suitably offended to leave abusive comments behind?

It looks like Dinidu has gone and deleted his blog again. That's a pity 'cos there was a post on it that i wanted to link to, with a very interesting comment by David Blacker.

No matter. The gist of it was that Dinidu had written a post on a disturbing incident that had occurred that he postulated was a result of his journalistic mischeivousness, and a very moving poem elaborating his defiance in the face of such threats accompanied it.

David Blacker followed up with a dose of cynical reality (?) and stated in no uncertain terms that SL bloggers should not really flatter themselves with the notion that they are really that important and should realize that they are too insignificant for the powers that be to bother with them.

Also, Indi tells me that Open Mic is getting affected by the same vibe as well because certain individuals have announced fears of repercussions due to the potentially politically volatile, against-the-status-quo nature of the material being read out.

But all this talk and no evidence of actual harm done to any blogger gets me thinking. It first gets me thinking of the nature of the society we live in, about law and order and the fear that people have of exercising their fundamental rights.

We live in a city and a country where the fear of being a victim of thuggery (political or otherwise) takes precedence over the feeling of assurance of back up from the law. In other words people are basically saying; the law? Screw the effing law, the law won't help me here..

But all this fear could just be founded on empty air.

This article i found links to this MSN survey on the Asian blogosphere in general and one striking fact to me was that politicians across the region fared poorly with only 14% shown to be actually reading blogs. This is with countries like China, Korea, India and Burma in the loop mind you so that is a telling statistic.

Assuming it was the same in SL and only 14% of politicians read blogs and presumably 100% read newspapers, the proportion of violence against newspaper journalists that could be directed towards bloggers would be marginally insignificant.

That is however, merely a play on numbers i admit and speaks nothing of the volatility of the country in question or the conniving brutality of its political class. But here's another interesting statistic;

Research has shown that most blogger arrests have occurred 'In countries where the media is restrained from reporting adversarial news' and where 'blogs continued to be the only source of information'.

In other words, what research has shown is that serious repression against bloggers has only occurred when they are bringing something into the media that is heavily blocked from the public by the respective government in question. It's usually only when they are bringing something new into the sphere of public knowledge in terms of cold hard facts that they are taken seriously enough to warrant action against them.

Like Woeser for instance, 'Tibet's most famous writer and blogger' who was put behind bars for the crime of taking pictures of Chinese military installations. This may seem like a trivial thing maybe. But how many of us actually go to the extent of performing some real investigative journalism and going through dangerous shit to get some pics or information to put up on our blogs?

Not many of us. Most of us (including me) merely harp about what we see and hear in the news, receive in e-mails etc . As a community of bloggers we are mainly reactive, and not very proactive.

The big fish are the guys who actually go out there and get the kind of information that gets people worried. And they are the ones that we usually talk about. So it makes sense to repress them first and cut off the sources of information we usually use to blog. Any old fool can voice dissent in terms of opinion, but it takes a real crazy sonofabitch to actually go out looking for the facts in order to bring them to light.

And i may not be all that political in my blogs (you can hardly call posts about tea ladies and peeping toms political) but i'v got eyes and ears. So what do you think? is there any real danger? or are we just flattering ourselves a wee little bit more than we should be?

Not another religion post

The monetary system of the world is its unofficial religion. Everyone works for money that’s agreed? Everyone also builds their lives around money. yeah you can deny it. What? Me? a slave to money? are you crazy? I’m just doing this cos i like the job and the perks are not bad either. A bowl of free basmathi rice everyday and a piece of fried fish is no laughing matter.

Not if you're not Shanthiram, a hermit in Uyankelle, it isn’t.

The money is created through the fractional reserve banking system. Where its supply is expanded by ongoing lending. Basically money is printed. And that's how it’s created right? We all know that. So wtf is this moron talking about you may be asking. Yes money is created through printing. The government prints the money. Then they deposit it in the banking system. The commercial banking system. And now the magic starts.

See what happens is banks operate on a Fractional Reserve system. Meaning that they just have to have a given fraction (or a part say, 20%) of the total amount of money they have lent out. Which also means that, once, say you or me, deposit 1000 bucks in the bank, the bank can keep 200 rupees and lend out 800 without creating new money, OR, they can keep the 1000 bucks with them and give out an additional 800 rupees cash on top of that as new money. So theres 800 rupees in the system that didn’t exist before. And that’s how banks increase the quantity of money.

So the chap who borrows the 800 rupees goes and deposits it in another bank, or buys a pizza from Dominoes and Dominoes deposits that in their bank account. This bank then repeats that procedure and creates 640 rupees on top of the 800 rupees in its reserves and lends that out. Typically after some complex mathematics it is possible to deduce that the eventual amount of money created by that initial 1000 rupees is somewhere closer to nine times as much.

So how is the money printed? I mean you and me know that only Central Banks can print money right? Most money is actually electronic (its the new plastic apparently) There need only be that initial amount of actual cash physically present in the system.

This is why a bank run is potentially so disastrous. If all of us wanted to cash all our funds at the same time; CRASH!.

So anyway, what does all this have to do with us being slaves to money? About money being religion and about worship at the altars of cashier counters? Ah, one word; Interest.

See the banks control money. They make it and they distribute it. And they charge interest for lending money. Every single dollar or rupee that goes out of a bank needs to be returned with more money. So where does this money for interest come from?

Nowhere. It doesn’t exist.

So where does it come from? I mean, how do people pay their loans if the money for interest doesn't exist? How can the banks demand more money than they have lent out? They are the ones who create the money. All the money in the system/ economy has been created by the banks. The system outside the banks cannot create money. So how can the system essentially pay the bank back with more money than the banks have given it in the first place? They can't. There’s only a limited supply of money. So the system or an economy as a whole cannot pay all its debts.

Therefore foreclosures, bankruptcies etc, are inevitable where the system as a whole is concerned.

But where individuals are concerned, paying back their debts becomes their primary concern. They start businesses, work 8 hours a day, grow crops etc so that they can support their lives and pay back their debts. Basically they have to slave to earn money in order to feed and clothe themselves. This drives greed and need. it turns into the law of the jungle out there. If the system as a whole owes more money than the actual quantity of money available, then the people in that system will have to fight each other to get that money. And there is born what we refer to as the rat race.

The weak get left behind, as the strong fight them for the amount of the limited resource that is money. For money is always limited, because the requirement for it is always greater than its actual availability.

So the marginalized, the poor, the oppressed grow in numbers as they get pushed out of the race. The world plunges into more despair while being embroiled in a 'system' of money so sacred that all its citizens want, is more of it.

We are all trapped. The world is a hamster wheel and we are all running as hard as we can to get as much money as we can, for we need money to survive. We are slaves, yet we believe we are free. But even Mr. Bill Gates isn’t free, he's only got someone else to carry him.

Apologies for the long post. It was inspired by Zeitgeist: Addendum which i watched recently, but information on the fractional reserve system can be found on wiki. Information on the whole monetary system and its evil influence may be less hard to come by, i haven't checked. But its nowhere that logical reasoning cant get you. So is religion money? Is money religion? Are any of us actually free from religion? Are we not all hypocrites?

Btw, listen to the tracks from Slumdog Millionaire, good stuff for a Monday morning!

Pax.

Trippin

a swarm of locusts

a sexy beast
transpired into a mirror

a feast of dead goats

the return of the black
in the bored aftermath

what do we do
when there is nothing left to be done

why do we wait
for fate?

Terror, is it racial?

Okay you dopey morons. I’m gonna tell you about some insight that attacked my brilliant mind last Sunday while we were smoking up some good greens on the beach. where does terror originate?

The talk starts with the ultimate blight of the depraved System. None of us want to be a part of it. Yet we all ride it. None of us actually want to go to work. yet we do,. we are all in it for the money. A few lucky ones prefer to self actualize and choose a path of life that is apart from the mainstream. A few brave ones. But is not very much fun doing it if you don't have the money to support a house in Colombo, great food, and hangouts in all the artsy places around town. So the apparently altruistic, at least the ones we could identify, were all rich kids with big inheritances ditching the system cos their spoilt enough to afford it. The rest are all 'struggling artists' Which doesn’t really count right?

We have all go a set of needs to fulfill. And rarely will you find a bugger self actualizing without a shit given to basic necessities like food, shelter, security etc. So most of us on a default basis basically 'ride the system'. Which of course is, the economy as we know it. The system fakes everything up and tells you that you are making an honest living. and, little knowing the greed that is driving imbalance and oppression across the world, you gladly work for it. Hell i do too.

The system is a network of capitalization. The powerful always stay on top. It is driven by power and money. Any external benefits that happen because of it are purely there to help it grow. because the system knows its a give and take ball game. but it is essentially exploitative. That’s why you don’t see most companies take steps against pollution unless there is enormous public pressure for it to do so. It knows if doesn't comply, it's gonna destroy its income. So then we have 'green' sucker uppers.

The System has been running the world for a long time. Ever wondered why the British empire was never criticized for its sudden and disgraceful loss of power (After WW2 it went from owning almost half the worlds land mass to owning practically nothing.) Yet they still command oodles of respect in the world’s hierarchy of powerbrokers. Ever looked closely at the regions that the Brits pulled out of? Ever noticed what a fucked up state they were left in? look at Africa. They were doing really well in the days of the Empire. Now their hitting the dust again and again. Look at India. They were united in power against the occupier. Muslims, Hindus alike, the Brits left and somehow massive racial violence breaks out and what was once India is now several nations. Their power broken down. There's no telling really, what they might have achieved as a country if they had stayed united and never waged all these destructive internal wars that tore them apart.

The Brits had a strategic withdrawal plan alright; They were in cahoots with the Americans when they were doing it. Consolidating their power even in retreat. One can almost say the Empire never died. Just closed in on itself.

Just look at SL. Even India. We were divided before being colonized, then we finally united against a common enemy, who somehow made sure we divided again after we finally won over them.

Fine. Now leave all that aside and look at us people again. We are working for a system that runs the world. That’s fine. we don’t think a lot beyond our own needs, and essentially we don’t need to. The system works on the basis that everyone has a need for it to survive. But how about the crushed? how about its vast inefficiencies and the destruction that is waged by the system? How about the web of lies we continue to believe in because it gives us comfort and allows to pretend that what we are doing is actually the best thing we could be doing. That we are not contributing to the dastardly effects the system has on the world.

How about those few who stand up against it? Are they the terrorists? Or are they just one form of terrorists?

What do yall think? If you've managed to follow my reasoning so far. If not, I'm gonna tell you anyways what I think.