By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability

Safe energy vs. nuclear energy is something I know about. When I was a college student in the mid 1970s, I did a school paper on whether nuclear energy was safe. Though I came in with a more-or-less open mind, I was shocked and horrified by what I found. The more I researched, the worse it got.

Among the hundred or so good reasons NOT to use nukes:

  • Safe storage and disposal of deadly wastes must be maintained for approximately 250,000 years–in our disposable, throwaway society where most items don’t last ten years and almost no human-made objects exist from longer ago than 25,000 or 30,000 years. This is ten times as long!
    Safety of the plants themselves, both during normal operation (radiation releases) and during accidents or terrorist attacks
    Net consumption of energy: counting the entire fuel cycle of mining, milling, transporting, processing, transporting again, use, and waste handling, nukes actually consume more energy than they create–so all those other risks don’t even have a benefit
    Skewed laws such as the Price-Anderson Act, which insulates the nuclear industry from all but a tiny fraction of the potential liability, and massively subsidizes the premiums for even that minuscule level of insurance

    • True energy security involves renewable, nonpolluting, decentralized technologies such as solar wind, small-scale hydro, and geothermal–coupled with innovative engineering that slashes our energy consumption, of the sort Amory Lovins and his Rocky Mountain Institute have been proposing for 30 years. Even here in cloudy, cold New England, I have both solar hot water and solar electric (photovoltaic) systems on the room of my house, which was built in 1743. If we can do it here…

    So when I got a mailing from the respected environmental group Friends of the Earth saying that the Lieberman-Warner climate change bill is fatally flawed because it opens the door to new nukes, I wanted to share that message with you.

    Tell your Congressional representatives.

    Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

    By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies

    With advertising that you pay for, even more than other types of marketing, you want to be effective. Yet I see so many businesses who clearly don’t have a clue; they spend a fortune putting a non-offer in front of a non-targeted list, and what little interest they do generate is too often squandered when they get to Step 2.

    So it’s nice to see someone doing it right.

    I subscribe to several dozen e-newsletters, including the Organic Consumers Association (OCA). I was reading that one this morning, and came across this ad:

    EDEN FOODS OFFERS OCA CUSTOMERS 15% DISCOUNT

    Eden Foods is one of the few national organic food producers who goes beyond the USDA Organic Standards. Although Eden Foods is USDA certified, their products do not bear the USDA seal, because they say the USDA standard really represents a “minimum standard” that Eden Foods goes far beyond. As a subscriber to Organic Bytes, you can enjoy a discount rate on any Eden Foods products by When you follow the link, you come to this page, where you’re greeted by a headline that proclaims, “Welcome OCA Customers.”

    The copy on the page builds a relationship–and the discount offer is clearly visible at the top right, and the single instruction is easy for anyone to follow. The tone of the landing page is warm and friendly, utterly hype-free, clear and focused on the hot buttons that would speak directly to an OCA reader:

    Eden Foods are Free of:
    • Irradiation
    • Preservatives
    • Chemical Additives
    • Food Colorings
    • Refined Sugars
    • Genetically Engineered Ingredients

    That means our foods are safe, nutritious, and most are kosher and parve. Oh yeah, they taste good too! Family to Family, welcome us to your table as we give new meaning to “comfort” foods.

    So why does this ad work?

  • The market segmentation is an exact match. OCA already reaches people with an interest in natural and organic foods–the exact market that Eden wants to reach
  • Eden’s ad almost seems like part of the newsletter content, hooking in to the reader’s trust of the OCA brand
  • The link is tracked, so Eden and OCA both know how effective it is (presumably, Eden also tracks how many of those visitors actually buy something)
  • As soon as visitors reach the landing page, the headline tells them they’re in the right place
  • The discount offer is repeated, very visibly, and is easy to take advantage of, with no strings or conditions other than excluding full cases and sale items
    The ad and the landing page both use a tone that respects the reader and builds that relationship

    • If you’d like to learn more about effective marketing and advertising, my fifth book, Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World, would be a good place to start. A Finalist for Foreword Magazine’s Book of the Year Award, seven of its 39 chapters specifically cover lowering the cost and boosting the effectiveness of advertising; the other chapters focus on strategies that are for the most part much cheaper than paid ads.

    Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

    By Posted on Posted in Peace and War, Politics

    It’s about time! The House voted against war funding (because the Republicans, for their own reasons, sat out the vote)–and the Senate voted to block more media consolidation.

    Now, we’ve got to put enough pressure that these very positive actions are mirrored in the respective other chambers.

    My question: what happens if the Senate votes to continue funding the war while the House aintains its opposition? What happens in conference committee?

    Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies

    Watch out for these snakes! Some people have no ethics at all.

    I got an email this morning that purported to be from the IRS. The subject was “2008 Economic Stimulus Refund. [Scanned]”

    And it started like this:

    Over 130 million Americans will receive refunds as
    part of The White House program to jumpstart the economy.

    Our records indicate that you are qualified to receive the
    2008 Economic Stimulus Refund.

    The fastest and easiest way to receive your refund is by
    direct deposit to your checking/savings account.

    Please follow the link…

    And ended with *a numeric URL*!

    I don’t bother to report most phishing scams–I get a dozen or so every day) but this one, I forwarded to the IRS. Unfortunatley, it bounced.

    Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability, General Commentary, Other, People Helping People, Politics

    Fascinating and far-ranging interview with European philosopher Slavoj Zizek on Democracy Now this morning.

    He covered war, energy, US presidential politics, and much more. But the statement that really got to me was:

    A true act creates the conditions of its own possibility. That is to say, it appears impossible, you do it, and the whole field changes: it’s possible.

    He went on to cite President Nixon’s opening US relations with Maoist China, and postulated that if Obama becomes president, he will seize a similar window with Cuba.

    But this concept has reach far beyond international relations. In sports, the 4-minute mile was an unassailable barrier for decades; once Roger Bannister broke it, many people followed quickly. In science, it was unthinkable in 1955 that a human being would walk on the moon before 1970. In energy and the environment, the work of Amory Lovins and others show new ways of reinventing society as a more earth-friendly place (see my article here). And in business ethics, I like to hope that my Business Ethics Pledge campaign will make a similar difference in the consciousness that ethical business is actually more profitable.

    Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

    By Posted on Posted in Media Ethics, media-general

    By some weird coincidence, both Seth Godin and David Garfinkel (names well known to any student of modern marketing) went after the media for distorting the news to artificially create drama this week.

    Godin, posting today, looked at CNN’s report on yesterday’s Indiana and North Carolina primaries, and found the headline and focus only told one part of the story. While accurate on its face, the headline, “Clinton ‘full speed ahead’ After Indiana Nail-biter”, was misleading.

    A more appropriate but less dramatic rendition of the results, he says, would have conveyed a very different story.

    The page would have been more accurate if it had said things like, “Obama gains more than 200,000 votes over Clinton” or “Obama campaign further extends delegate lead, picking up 12 more delegates” or even “Obama pummels Clinton in the bigger state.”

    That’s not dramatic, though, and as William Randolph Hearst taught us a long time ago, the goal is to sell newspapers, not to report the news.

    A day earlier, Garfinkel attacked the San Francisco Chronicle for similar manipulation on a totally different topic: “Is Any Web Site Safe? No Way to be Sure.”

    First, Garfinkel points out that the paper is using a technique for which journalists often diss marketers:

    The headline is bad enough — but we all know that fear sells, and it certainly sells newspapers. (Don’t think I’m going to take it lightly though the next time I see or hear a journalist taking a swipe at an ad because it preys on people’s fears.)

    And then he points out the neurolinguistic programming (NLP) implications of a headline that could be read several different ways.

    This intersection of the journalist mind and the marketer mind is a stream where I swim regularly, and I think both of these guys are right. What do you think?

    Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, media-general, Peace and War

    More on the scandal I wrote about Sunday regarding the Pentagon’s shills infiltrating the media in the run-up to the Iraq war.

    This from Jim Lehrer’s Online News Report. Lehrer’s guest was John Stauber, founder/executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy and author of Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush’s War on Iraq and other books:

    What happened here was a psy-ops campaign, an incredible government propaganda campaign whereby Donald Rumsfeld and Torie Clark, the head of public relations for the Pentagon, designed a program to recruit 75, at least 75 former military officers, as your report said, most of them now lobbyists or consultants to military contractors, and insert them, beginning in 2002, before the attack on Iraq was even launched, into the major networks to manage the messages, to be surrogates.

    And that’s the words that are actually used, “message multipliers” for the secretary of defense and for the Pentagon. This program continues right up to now.

    JUDY WOODRUFF: And is the essence of this that what they did was — what the Pentagon did was illegal?

    JOHN STAUBER: Yes, what they did was illegal. Now, the Pentagon might contest that, but we’ve had various laws on the books in our country going back to the 1920s. It is illegal for the U.S. government to propagandize citizens in this way.

    In my opinion, this war could have never been sold if it were not for this sophisticated propaganda campaign. And what we need is congressional investigation of not just this Pentagon military analyst program, but all the rest of the deception and propaganda that came out of the Bush administration and out of the Pentagon that allowed them to sell and manage this war.

    Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

    By Posted on Posted in media-general

    Two related stories that I found in the Romensko news-about-newspapers newsletter. First, on Journalism.org, that the WSJ is shifting a lot of its front page coverage away from finance and toward politics and international news. and second, one columnist on the Recovering Journalist blog speculates, very cogently, that Rupert Murdoch is attempting to essentially surround the New York Times with its properties, fighting from below with the New York Post, from above with the Wall Street Journal, and laterally with a possible purchase and relaunch of a metro NYC edition) of Newsday.

    As a former New Yorker his growing media empire makes me nervous. I remember when the New York Post was a very decent newspaper, before he got his tabloid-sensationalist fingers into it. Of course, he doesn’t always kill a paper’s journalistic integrity; the London times still seems to be doing ok, and Murdoch has owned it since 1981. But I surely would not want to see him owning both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times–America’s only two national papers other than the USA Today.

    Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Media Ethics, media-general, Peace and War, Uncategorized

    A recent front-page story in the New York Times reveals that the Pentagon has gone far beyond paying Armstrong Williams. A whole gaggle of retired military leaders posing as neutral pundits turn out to have been under the sway of the Pentagon:

    Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They have been briefed by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department, including Mr. Cheney, Alberto R. Gonzales and Stephen J. Hadley.

    In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

    The Times stops short of accusing these military figures of taking money directly from the Pentagon. But they were, in a real sense, embedded, and these relationships were not disclosed to the electronic news outlets who hired them. Democracy Now reported two days later that the military flew some of these people to Iraq at its own expense and conducted one-sided briefings there.

    Peter Hart of Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, one of two commentators on the DN segment, says the media was completely lacking in due diligence, inviting these pundits without asking questions:

    I think the extent of the briefings was somewhat shocking and the blase attitude from the networks. They didn’t care what military contractors these guys were representing when they were out at the studio. They didn’t care that the Pentagon was flying them on their own dime to Iraq. Just basic journalistic judgment was completely lacking here. So I think the story is really about a media failure, more than a Pentagon failure. The Pentagon did exactly what you would expect to do, taking advantage of this media bias in favor of having more and more generals on the air when the country is at war.

    And when the commentators were in a position to refute the Pentagon, they stayed silent. Hart again:

    One of the most shocking things in the story is that in early 2003, these guys got a briefing about WMDs, and the government said, “We actually don’t have hard evidence right now that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.” Did any of them go on the air and say that? No. The Pentagon, I think, had total control and total faith that these guys would deliver the message that they intended to deliver to the public, and that’s exactly what they did, and the media did very little to counteract this overwhelming propaganda campaign from the Pentagon.

    And there were consequences to those who strayed from the party line:

    Still, even the mildest of criticism could draw a challenge. Several analysts told of fielding telephone calls from displeased defense officials only minutes after being on the air.

    On Aug. 3, 2005, 14 marines died in Iraq. That day, Mr. Cowan, who said he had grown increasingly uncomfortable with the ”twisted version of reality” being pushed on analysts in briefings, called the Pentagon to give ”a heads-up” that some of his comments on Fox ”may not all be friendly,” Pentagon records show. Mr. Rumsfeld’s senior aides quickly arranged a private briefing for him, yet when he told Bill O’Reilly that the United States was ”not on a good glide path right now” in Iraq, the repercussions were swift.

    Mr. Cowan said he was ”precipitously fired from the analysts group” for this appearance. The Pentagon, he wrote in an e-mail message, ”simply didn’t like the fact that I wasn’t carrying their water.” The next day James T. Conway, then director of operations for the Joint Chiefs, presided over another conference call with analysts. He urged them, a transcript shows, not to let the marines’ deaths further erode support for the war.

    And still, the Democrats won’t talk about impeachment. Considering the extremely bellicose noises this same government and its media allies are making about Iran, we had bloody well put that impeachment discussion “back on the table.”

    And still, as Arianna Huffington points out, most of the mainstream media not only ducks responsibility for its many failures leading up to and continuing through the war, but doesn’t even acknowledge there’s a problem.

    Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

    By Posted on Posted in People Helping People, Politics, Shel's Personal Life, Web 2.0/Social Media

    Last night was the twice-a-year Town Meeting in my town of Hadley, Massachusetts. We still have an old-style New England Town Meeting, where any registered voter can speak (about issues already on the agenda, anyway) and vote. And these votes really do shape the town; every zoning change, for instance, has to get a 2/3 supermajority at Town Meeting.

    During the Save the Mountain campaign several years ago, for instance, one of my neighbors submitted a citizen petition to restrict the altitude of a building lot. She gathered the requisite number of signatures,w e organized turnout at the meeting, and her new bylaw was overwhelmingly adopted, along with some others we’d put in.

    But some financial outlays are a two-step process. First, Town Meeting approves them, and then, a paper-ballot election is held at a later date, to appropriate the funding.

    Last night, a longtime citizen environmental activist raised the point that we
    d passed some of these improvements several times, but they kept getting voted down in the later election because most people didn’t know when that election would take place. She asked if the election date could be announced at Town Meeting, but the Selectmen (kind of like a Town council) hadn’t set the date yet.

    So I stepped to the microphone and offered to create an e-mail notification list. Then I went home and set up an announce-only newsletter on yahoogroups with this mission statement:

    An announce-only media channel to notify residents of Hadley, Massachusetts of upcoming votes and meetings of town boards, committees, and commissions. This non-partisan list will not take positions on any issues. It is solely to notify the public of upcoming votes and meetings. It will distribute information as received; the listowners make no promises or claims regarding the completeness or accuracy of information received. We just want to help get the word out.

    By phrasing it as a “media channel,” and by not stating opinions on the matters before us, I will be able to receive and forward the press releases from the town administrator, and hopefully over time several hundred people will be able to learn the dates of the elections in time to vote.

    Seems like this is a pretty good model for lots of communities. It costs nothing to set up, and I’m anticipating a whole year of administering the list will add under an hour to my workload. We’ll see how it works.

    Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail