We are all just prisoners here, of our own device.

If you don't recognise the words in the title, here's the classic song from which they came.


An increasing number of people are becoming like birds in gilded cages. See The perfect crime.
"What's fascinating is this: the marketing is so powerful that some of the people being hurt actually are eager for it to continue. This creates a cultural feedback loop, where some aspire to have these respected marketing jobs, to do more marketing of similar items. It creates a society where the owners and leaders of these companies are celebrated as risk-taking, brave businesspeople, not as the modern robber barons that they've become."

Did I ever mention?...

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.

Who, these guys?

No. I'm referring to Manufacturers of Crap-in-a-Bag/Box/Bottle (CIAB), or MOCIAB for short.

In Obesity is multi-factorial, spectra and other stuff, I mentioned Mayor of NYC Michael Bloomberg's ban on the use of cups larger than 16oz for the sale of sugary sodas. Note that Mayor Bloomberg is not trying to ban sugary sodas or tax anything. People are still free to buy as many cups of sugary soda as they want. However, the whining from people is deafening!

Surprise, surprise! MOCIAB have retaliated with the usual dirty tricks.

1) Lies, damned lies and MOCIAB statistics.

Cherry-picked studies, much?

2) Have a number of MOCIAB/pro-MOCIAB groups/sites drown-out good advice with bad. This is a standard marketing trick pioneered by Edward Bernays. Some examples of MOCIAB/pro-MOCIAB groups are:- Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, http://www.ameribev.org/, http://www.consumerfreedom.com/, http://www.letsclearitup.org/ and http://www.livepositively.com/.


In Psychological manipulation, there was a link to a story about a hypnotist who used his freedom of speech to influence women into "freely" handing him cash. So, why is he not allowed to use his freedom of speech to influence people (Italian police were hunting him) whereas MOCIAB are?

EDIT: I'll repeat it here, in case you missed it in the other post. Confessions of a former Dirty Rotten Scoundrel.

Research shows.....

....that people who eat a low-fat breakfast like Special K are more likely to be slimmer than those who don't.

So states the Special K advert. I wonder whether the researchers used a control group who ate a high-fat breakfast? Somehow, I doubt it. I eat a high-fat breakfast, if you look at the Blog post immediately below this one and I am slimmer than when I didn't eat breakfast. Skipping breakfast causes low blood glucose, which encourages over-eating later-on. Therefore, people who eat breakfast are more likely to be slimmer than those who don't.

That's the problem with "Research". It usually shows what people want it to show. By omitting control groups, such research is utterly worthless. While I'm on a mini-rant, "Clinically proven" is another phrase often bandied about in advertisements. I have news for you. Clinical studies can only disprove something. The best that a clinical study can do is provide evidence that something is beneficial to some or most of the people in the study only. It cannot be extrapolated to the rest of the population.