While Yes Man Andy Bichlbaum was in Seattle presenting his latest film, The Yes Men Save the World (which plays at NWFF through Thursday), he helped plan some lively antics in honor of the 10th anniversary of the WTO protests.

Here’s a video and some more info from the press release:

Bank of America Reaffirms Commitment to Greener Climate
Uploaded by BofA_WestlakeSeattle. – Watch the latest news videos.

November 30, 2009
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Bank of America Reaffirms Commitment to Greener Climate

In the face of an illegal “lockdown”-style protest at the Bank of America’s Westlake Seattle branch, Assistant Regional Vice President Sam Gibson outlined the Bank’s green policies to a crowd of mostly well-behaved protesters. (Watch video here.)

“We agree with you that climate change is a problem, and there is concern with mountaintop removal and other extractive industries being ‘dirty,’” said Gibson, speaking in front of the bank after requesting access to the protesters’ sound stage. “But we must let the market take its course and create a vigorous clean solution, hopefully sooner rather than later.”

Mr. Gibson noted that Bank of America is invested in new carbon sequestration technologies which will, when developed, take carbon out of the atmosphere and put it deeply underground. “Clean Green Coal is a part of the plan to make America energy-secure, and Bank of America is proud to be a part of that plan,” said Mr. Gibson.

“He has some good points,” said Chet Johnson, a Bank of America account holder who was withdrawing money when the “lockdown” occurred. “I wouldn’t want my investments affected.”

Mr. Gibson offered sympathy to the two protesters who were arrested after chaining themselves to the doors of the branch.

“Our diverse portfolio of investments does include alternative-extraction industries, and some folks object to that,” said Gibson. “We must protect the profits of our shareholders, with faith that the market will create a solution to the problems that sometimes gives rise to.”

“We agree that climate change is a problem, and we’re definitely ‘going green,’” said Harlan Borland, a Public Relations manager at the branch. “Green technology is the key way to address climate change. By removing mountaintops we can get to the coal, clean it, and make it green.”

Gran Fury, The New York Crimes, March 28, 1989

The Yes Men, The New York Times, November 12, 2008

On the 20th anniversary of the Bhopal Disaster, one of the largest and deadliest industrial accidents in human history, a representative from Dow Chemical gave an interview on the BBC stating that Dow—which had since acquired Union Carbide, the company responsible for the incident—would finally be compensating the victims of the spill.

Except, of course, the man giving the interview was not a representative of Dow, and Jude Finisterra was not his real name.  He was Andy Bichlbaum, one of the Yes Men, a pair of guerrilla performance artist/activists known for playing high profile stunts on corporate America.

The Yes Men’s strategy is simple. First they set up a fake website intended to mirror that of the company they wish to dupe (in this case they used dowethics.com).  Then they wait until someone mistakenly invites them to deliver a high profile speech, present at a corporate conference, or be interviewed by the BBC on live television in front of 300 million viewers.

The strategy works surprisingly well.  As outlined in the new documentary The Yes Men Fix the World, Bichlbaum and his partner Mike Bonanno have been invited to deliver presentations on behalf of Exxon, Halliburton, and even the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The movie has its slow spots.  (I can’t be the only one who thought the Survivaball thing dragged on longer than it needed to.) But all in all, The Yes Men Fix the World packs the charismatic punch that Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story wishes it had.  Unlike Moore, who too often finds himself shouting at the inhuman exteriors of locked buildings with a bullhorn, Bichlbaum and Bonanno ingeniously infiltrate their targets with audacious precision.  Not only do they get to bring their cameras inside corporate HQ, they get to represent the corporation to the rest of the world.  Pretty slick stuff.  What’s more, their website features a tutorial to help aspiring pranksters follow in their footsteps.

The Yes Men Fix the World is showing through December 3 at Northwest Film Forum in conjunction with The People’s Summit, a series of events commemorating the 10-year anniversary of the WTO protests in Seattle.  I recommend it for anyone with a sense of humor and unsinkable optimism.

Heard of the Yes Men? They’re an awesome group of anti-corporate, anti-globalization tricksters headed up by Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno. In their own words, they engage in “identity correction”: “Impersonating big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them. Targets are leaders and big corporations who put profits ahead of everything else.” Exposing the greed and dehumanization of corporate culture, they set up fake websites, get invited to speak at conferences and on television, and—in outrageous fashion—point out the seriously misguided, destructive, irresponsible actions of some of the largest corporations in the world. They also print spoof issues of major newspapers that highlight the realities of the world we live in and visions for a better one.

The Yes Men Fix the World

This past Friday, they screened their new movie, The Yes Men Fix the World, at the Mahaiwe in Great Barrington, followed by a Q&A (Andy appeared in person, Mike appeared virtually via a laptop Skype hookup)—all to benefit WBCR (Berkshire Community Radio). While I find watching their movies a little stressful, I think they’re innovative, entertaining, and important. Whether they’re impersonating Dow Chemical and highlighting their refusal to do the right thing and take responsibility for the Union Carbide disaster in Bhophal or taking on Halliburton with fake Survivaball pitches (side note: a WBCR board member appeared in a Survivaball at the beginning of the Q&A), they’re exposing the cult of consumerism and capitalism. As they say in the movie, what looks normal to those on the inside of it looks crazy to those on the outside. They provide the much-needed view from outside of the cult, offering up the craziness for all to see.

Check out their latest stunt—announcing that the Chamber of Commerce has reversed their stance on climate-change legislation (which the CoC is strictly opposed to):

Last month, as Andy was telling us in the Q&A after the screening, the Yes Men were sued for the very first time, by the Chamber of Commerce. Surprised that they haven’t been sued more often? The way Andy explained it, engaging in a lawsuit that would give the activists more opportunity to state their case and point out to the world why the corporations they target are the ones that deserve to be on trial usually isn’t in the best interests of said corporations, who spend millions of dollars trying to present a clean, shiny image to the public at large.

Next they’re screening their film in DC, and then they’re off to Copenhagen. Be sure to see the new movie, check out what they’re up to, and find out how you can get involved.

Other gems from the Q&A:

• “We’re not actually great actors at all, we just play them in front of corporate audiences.”
• “There are progressive people in government, they just don’t act that way because we’re not taking to the streets and carrying pitchforks and setting cars on fire.” (One of them noted how hard it is to find a pitchfork nowadays.)
• They’re starting to organize educational workshops for people interested in anti-corporate pransktering, “the Yes League for Something Something” (they’re still working on the name). “We give away our secrets and you can do it yourself!”

Seen either of their movies? What did you think?

We’re showing the first Yes Men movie at the Henry Thursday, December 17.
See the new one this week at NWFF!

Yes Men Fix the World at NWFF – Nov 27 – Dec 03 (Tickets HERE)
(Andy Bichlbaum, Mike Bonanno, 2008, USA, 35mm, 89 min)

I kept writing but haven’t posted in a while, so I just wanted to fling a link your way before I hopped a bus to Columbus, Ohio to see the fam. (Look for more posts to come soon, however.)

The Yes Men, a group of nationally-known pranksters, did some protesting of the Fisk power plant here in Chicago while they were here for a premiere of their new movie. The Yes Men’s most recent was here: http://www.democracynow.org/2009/10/20/yes_men_pull_off_prank_claiming

Convenience. Our lives have become circled around the idea that everything should be fast and easy.

Because we’ve been conditioned into thinking in such a way, we often don’t look too deeply to find a sense of legitimacy. The beauty and the downfall of the web is that anyone can make a site and have their voice heard and their messages relayed.
The “Yes Men” are responsible for conducting one of the greatest online hoaxes. They set up a site, called DowEthics.com and represented themselves as Dow Chemical Company executives. The website looks quite similar to Dow’s actual homepage, and many people believed the Dow Ethics site was legitimate.
Through the Ethics site, the Yes Men, pretending to work for Dow, claimed full responsibility for the tragedy in Bhopal.

Their scheme scored them a live interview with the BBC, where they claimed on air that Dow was responsible and will be working to pay off those in Bhopal who were affected by the Union Carbide plant explosion. The BBC aired the interview, without doing any legitimate background research to verify the Dow Ethic’s site. The BBC has since learned their lesson, and have remained humbled about the incident.

The main idea to pull away from this is that despite the fact that you can represent yourself however you want online, people often don’t fact check.

Realistically, I could register a domain, and pretend to be whomever I wanted. Most people wouldn’t second-guess me, and few would even bother to do light Google research. The web has opened Pandora’s Box, but where do we draw the line? Can who we present ourselves to be online transfer over to real life?

When, a year ago, I first proclaimed the Yes Men capitalists who sought to hijack culture for their own sake—and not, as they claimed, for the sake of culture—it was because I had laid solid groundwork for the argument in my 2007 book Unmarketable.

Comparing their antics to those of the local hardcore label HeWhoCorrupts, I wrote:

The label’s blatant money-grubbing, unabashed phallocentrism, and scorn for audience, however, aren’t exactly parody. They are also true. HeWhoCorrupts, Inc. is a struggling label in a rough environment, competing directly with companies like Sony for survival. Forced to compete, they are also forced to engage in and emulate the corporate model. . . .

Like the Yes Men, who occasionally present themselves not as the independent artists, hackers, and pranksters they are but as business professionals and members of the World Trade Organization, the label HWC, Inc. is as difficult to digest as the model they emulate. Their hypermasculine posturing . . . is offensive in every conceivable way. On purpose. . . .

It’s an unfortunate truth that HWC, Inc.—their blatantly ridiculous procorporate stance, their silly merch, their obsessive penis worship, and their genuine desire to make a living in this culture—may become the new edgy. Their semiparody could be co-opted, sold, parceled out, and marketed in support of some other corporate product. Eventually it will be. Or, in a few years, Ryan and Andy’s youthful desire to participate in this overarching joke may fade, and HeWhoCorrupts, Inc. will become at last nothing more than what it pretends to be. Which makes HWC, Inc. a better symbol of corporate culture than model for anti-corporate resistance.

In fact, they present no resistance whatsoever. As for embracing the profit-minded ethic of his major-label foes, Durkin is sort of joking when he says, “I’d like to think I was born with the corporate ethos,” but at the same time he acknowledges the central truth . . . hammered home for us in recent years: that we have, in fact, been sold out since birth.

But that doesn’t mean we have to buy in.

Now, however, popular tide has begun to turn against activism of the Michael Moores and the Yes Mens—key (white, male) figures who concern themselves primarily with branding a movement over engaging in it, losing integrity of message in the process.

The problem is that these methods of culture jamming—remixing facts with staged events, taking credit where credit is not due, ignoring in particular the contributions of women, youth, and people of color—they don’t “jam” anything. They represent our culture in exactly the same dissatisfactory manner we’re rebelling against in the first place. And they do so in a way that jibes perfectly with our post-economic crisis acceptance of neoliberalist principles: they continue to allow key (white, male) figures to make a buck from it. Because the unassailable logics here are twofold: 1) branding works and 2) capitalism is unavoidable.

Because guess what? In the end, branding doesn’t work for anyone but the brand owner. And once we figure this out, capitalism might, eventually, end.

1. Super-psyched the Chamber of Commerce reads my blog tho. H/t to the C of C! Please check back regularly, because I’ll have a lot more tips for you coming up.

2. For example, blog commentators the whole internet over have pronounced the sad demise of visual stunts as valid strategies for the Left, overlooking their original use—yeah, that’s right we stole it in the first place—by the New Right in, say, Operation Rescue’s highly visual and performative early methodologies. Maybe methods borrowed from the GOP were never all that well thought through to begin with?

Here in Canada it’s Remembrance Day, marking the anniversary of the Armistice signing, which ended WWI, on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month;  so, to all of those people who have served our country, past and present, thank you for your dedication and sacrifice.

As today is a federal statutory holiday, you might have time to check out the video of latest political performance prank pulled off by the Yes Men.   Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno are best known for posing as corporate executives to demonstrate how corporate greed is harming people and the environment. Or as their website puts it, Mike and Andy impersonate  “big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them. Targets are leaders and big corporations who put profits ahead of everything else.”

This video shows them impersonating U.S. Chamber of Commerce officials holding a press conference reversing their position on climate change, and committing to stop lobbying against the Kerry-Boxer Climate Bill. It gets more interesting when an actual Chamber spokesman shows up and moves to break up the press conference.  Check out the video on the Huffington Post or go right to the Yes Men website for more info on their pranks.  Their movie, “The Yes Men Fix The World” was released in October in the U.S.  I can’t find any information about any Canadian showings, so we might have to wait until the DVD comes out in spring.

Fun video by Polidoc featuring the Yes Men’s Halliburton Survivaballs Escorted down Market Street by “Chevron Minions” during this San Francisco action on November 1, 2009.

Serving up the message of corporate responsibility to San Ramon, CA based Chevron Oil, the YES Men marched down San Francisco streets after the premiere of their activist movie “The Yes Men Fix the World” on November 1, 2009. In conjunction with Global Exchange and other Bay Area environmental and human rights groups, the Yes Men hope to link Chevron’s plan to expand its refinery in the East Bay to human and environmental rights abuses in other countries and part of the United States.

In “The Yes Men Fix the World,” the infamous pranksters, amongst them Andy Bichlbaum, heaps doses of irony to shine a light on the negligence of companies that place profit over people. Clever vignettes, something that crosses between “Ocean’s Eleven” “Pink Panther” and “Get Smart” weave the documentary pieces of their actions together into a great piece of entertainment. This movie now showing across the nation serves up a hopeful and eviscerating commentary on the corporate players of our world.

Just posted on my Boing Boing guest blog–an essay that draws from one of my earliest posts on this blog (Death and the Internet) and the Balloon Boy and the Yes Men post I put up a few weeks ago. Click here.

“The promise held by video, that it could create ‘personal media,’ that normal people could control the production of video imagery and bypass the tightly controlled corporate structure of commercial media, seemed like a revolutionary and democratic advance. Video was seen as a potentially radical political tool that could subvert the relationship between dominant media structures and audience , eventually allowing artists and anyone else to directly address the public without the need of a support structure of broadcast television, museums, galleries, or other forms of distribution. -”Introduction: California Videos, Artists and Histories,” Glenn Phillips

While a certain strand of video art was made with the distinct purpose of reaching an audience so as to express opinions, ideas, analyses, images, or ways of being unexpressed through dominant media, it seems important to note that only a small portion of this has since been posted onto YouTube, making use of this newly available tool to expand audience, using video and YouTube as a “radically political tool…to directly address the public,”  by using this (new) tool to allow for expanded exposure to these (old) radical ideas and images.

Why?

As a “video artist” myself who has often used the medium to expand the reach of my voice (or my community’s: see my work on AIDS activist video, for example) in the name of a cause, I’ve only chosen to put one of my videos on YouTube (RELEASED: 5 Short Videos about Women and Prison; while SCALE, about my sister Antonia, was loaded by the corporation that distributes it against my better wishes). The reason(s) are clear: activist videos are made to be shown within organized settings, where context, dialogue, community, and continuing actions (see my sister Antonia Juhasz’s recent “Marching on Chevron” organized with the screening of the Yes Men’s new film) need to be as carefully engineered or constructed as is the video text itself. In fact, radical screenings are often understood to be as much a part of activist video (art) as is the video. Since this is impossible on YouTube, the lack of context and community trumps the power of access and old-school video activists choose to stay home (or march without help of YouTube).

No, Second Life is not overhyped

This article by David Kirkpatrick posted on CNNMoney.com on November 10th, 2006 deals with Second Life. Second Life is an online virtual world which registered members can enter and interact with one another, live. It was created by Linden Lab and launched in 2003. According to Kirkpatrick’s findings, this virtual world is extremely popular. At the time he wrote the article, the population in Second Life had reached 1.3 millions members. However, he states that this popularity comes with an importance. He views the interactivity and user-created content the vision for the future of the internet. He believes that very soon, Second Life will be as big as other internet giants like Google, Yahoo, or MySpace.

Second Life Learning Videos : eLearning Technology

This blog post by Tony Karrer posted on his blog, eLearning Technology, also deals with Second Life. Here, Karrer put up a group of videos that demonstrate how Second Life could not only be used as a learning tool but is probably more effective than traditional 2D forms of education. It shows how by immersing yourself in whatever you’re studying, and by being actively pursuing education, a better job of teaching is accomplished.

This is the official website of a group of unconventional activists known as the The Yes Men. This group tends to operate by impersonating representatives of large companies such as DOW or Halliburton and confessing to certain mistakes in the past or promise to do more to help. On this website, you can read up on their Hijinks, find out what the press has been saying about them, and catch up on news dealing with the soon to be released, Yes Men film entitled The Yes Men Fix the World.

Choose the future of interactive fiction

This article in the Books Blog section of the Guardian, posted by David Barnett, discusses the resurgent popularity in interactive fiction. Interactive fiction is a genre in which the reader chooses his or her steps across the novel, either by going to different pages according to what the desired next step is or giving feedback to the author on how the book should continue. Starting off a long time ago, there have recently been trends that are bringing it back and, according to Barnett, for three reasons. First off, pure nostalgia. Secondly, modern rehashings of previous popular plots. Thirdly, it can be called a true web 2.0 vision.

How are they not related?

Although all of the previous links deal with a trend that is emerging nowadays and is gaining a lot of popularity, they are each very different. The Yes Men are a topic on their own that can be better referred to as a political Punk’d. The first two links deal with Second Life in a positive manner, but from very different angles. The article by Kirkpatrick has to do with Second Life’s future role as a model of business and social networking operations. However, the blog post by Karrer, doesn’t have much words to it but is only a list of videos that explain how Second Life could be a helpful educational tool. As for the article on Interactive Fiction by Barnett, although it does relate to the immersive quality that Second Life has, it is a whole different medium and format.

In a move seemingly designed to keep its utter humiliation in the news for awhile longer, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has filed suit against the activist group the Yes Men, claiming “commercial identity theft” for the prankster group’s National Press Club press conference announcing that the Chamber had reversed its “troglodytic” stand against any action addressing climate change. As a result of the Chamber’s threat, the Yes Men’s website, and websites of 400 other organizations, were briefly shuttered.

In response, the Yes Men noted that they had prevailed in previous similar legal complaints after stunts targeting the New York Times, Exxon, DeBeers, Dow Chemical and even George W. Bush. Even the generally conservative St. Louis Post Dispatch opined that the Chamber’s suit against the Yes Men was “obtuse” and seemed hypocritical given the Chamber’s role as “an aggressive proponent of tort reform — and ferocious opponent of ‘lawsuit abuse.”

Interestingly, three days before the Yes Men’s press conference, Washington Post Business Columnist Steven Pearlstein ripped the veil off of even more of the Chamber’s “dirty little secrets.” Citing its “rabidly free-market agenda,” Pearlstein noted the Chamber’s awkward “$100 million propaganda campaign” to convince Americans that unregulated corporate greed will get us out of the financial mess created by, well, unregulated corporate greed. He also reveals that:

• While claiming to represent 3 million businesses, paid membership in the Chamber is in fact about 300,000.
• The Chamber’s undemocratic structure allows it to work under the radar on behalf of a few corporations with special interests to protect.
• The Chamber acts as a fundraiser for purportedly “independent” advocacy groups that are really no more than front groups that corporations can use to conduct hardball and dirty tricks campaigns without being directly associated with them.

Corporations that dominate the Chamber include “oil companies, pharmaceutical giants, automakers and other polluting industries,” according to James Carter of the Green Chamber of Commerce. In 2006, Public Citizen filed an IRS complaint against the Chamber and its affiliated Institute for Legal Reform, charging the groups with engaging in fraudulent accounting in order to hide income and flout nonprofit laws on electioneering. In “Bank-Rolling Congress,” a report Public Citizen released earlier this year, the group noted that banks receiving the most federal bailout money had scheduled 70 Congressional fundraisers since Election Day; Chamber PAC and Chamber financial services lobbyists were behind 35 of them.

Did anyone else not get the update that the press conference of the US Chamber of Commerce reversing climate change policy and causing Nike and Apple to resign their membership was a hoax put forth by the Yes Men?

And now they are being sued.

If you are looking for more Yes Men antics, don’t miss the upcoming documentary The Yes Men Fix the World (not yet posted on NWFF’s website), screening November 27-December 3.

We’re working on getting the Yes Men here to accompany the film – stay tuned!

Les Yes Men ce sont Jacques Servin et Igor Vamos, duo d’activistes qui sévissent depuis les années 1990 au sein du collectif d’artistes RTMark. On ne sait pratiquement rien sur les deux hommes qui sont d’ailleurs mieux connus sous leurs pseudonymes, respectivement Andy Bichlbaum et Mike Bonanno. Leur credo : tourner en dérision des multinationales, des hommes politiques et autres organisations en mettant en scène de faux événements, sites Web ou conférences de presse.

Leur dernier buzz a fait le tour des médias américains avant de se répandre sur le net. A quelques mois du sommet de Copenhague, le collectif a convoqué une fausse conférence de presse en se faisant passer cette fois-ci pour des membres de la Chambre de commerce américaine. Cette dernière qui regroupe près de 3 millions d’entreprises est opposée à la politique climatique américaine en passe d’instaurer une limitation des émissions de gaz à effet de serre, exerçant pour défendre son point de vue une vaste action de lobbying. – Source: Le Petit Journal

Voici comment leur dernier canular a frappé la salle de nouvelles de Fox News:

Okay my Kittens, let’s see how smart we are shall we? Who amongst us knows what The Spaghetti Incident is?

There is the overwhelming roar of “it’s a fucking Guns n Roses album you retard” that I expected.

Close Kittens. Yes of course you are partially correct. That is the name of a GnR album so you are not technically incorrect, but who here has heard of The Swiss Spaghetti Harvest?

No takers, I expected as much.

Well Kittens it’s like this. On April 1, 1957 the British news show Panorama broadcast a three-minute segment about a bumper spaghetti harvest in southern Switzerland. The success of the crop was attributed both to an unusually mild winter and to the “virtual disappearance of the spaghetti weevil.” The audience heard Richard Dimbleby, the show’s highly respected anchor, discussing the details of the spaghetti crop as they watched video footage of a Swiss family pulling pasta off spaghetti trees and placing it into baskets. The segment concluded with the assurance that, “For those who love this dish, there’s nothing like real, home-grown spaghetti.”

You don’t believe me do you Kittens? Well as usual I have gone the extra mile and have found that very footage…..so open your wide little eyes and take a good look at what is considered to be the greatest news hoax ever committed.

There you have it Kittens, I wasn’t kidding. It was very real and people took the bait, hook line and sinker. It is now and always have been my water line of just how gullible the human mammal is and remains to be to this very day? So what happened after the show was broadcast? Hundreds of people phoned the BBC wanting to know how they could grow their own spaghetti tree. To this query the BBC diplomatically replied, “Place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.”

The calls came in incessantly. Some were from viewers who had enjoyed the joke – including one from Bristol who complained that spaghetti didn’t grow vertically, it grew horizontally. But mainly the calls were requests for the BBC to settle family arguments: the husband knew it must be true that spaghetti grew on a bush because Richard Dimbleby had said so and the wife knew it was made with flour and water, but neither could convince the other.

Sure we can look back and laugh and say “ooooh those spazzy Brits, what the hell were they thinking? I mean everybody knows better than that and understands that spaghetti doesn’t grow on trees, it’s made by elves….or Italians or something.” The two are easily confused.

The thing is Kittens is in 1957 the British didn’t really know what spaghetti was. It was foreign and it wasn’t like today where we can have a taste of the world in a food court in a mall. It wasn’t an urban myth like Bigfoot or Jesus. People sort of knew what it was and a few had had some for dinner but not very many people actually knew where it came from, or if it was actually any good. Think of it as a bit like Coldplay. Even the people who claim to enjoy it can’t really tell you why, or even where it came from or why it is even here in the first place.

So what does a decades old media hoax have to do with today’s world which is filled with ultra smart informed fully wired HD highly educated smart phone iHumans? Simple. People are still falling for Swiss Spaghetti Harvests, but not once a year on April Fools day when your guard should be pegging in the red, but all day every day again thanks to the kind folks in the media.

This Kittens is something called the CNN “Magic Wall.” No shit. A global news station has a magic fucking wall, as if Anderson Cooper was fucking Prospero. As you can imagine the magic wall doesn’t actually perform any magic otherwise it would turn John Roberts into a real newsman again and not some talking head muppet. It’s actually a Multi-Touch Collaboration Wall made by New Yorks Perceptive Pixel, as if that really matters but I mention it just in case you really thought it was magic and thought I was kidding.

The one today bit of magic that the magic wall does perform however is it turns bullshit in to fact all day every day, and this isn’t just me being cynical either Kittens. That is no magic. Unlike what it and most other media outlets broadcast or write about, that is a hard cold fact.

The Pew Research Center for the People&the Press has reported that 63% of Americans believe news stories are often inaccurate, the worst report card it has ever seen. This means that 63% of the people who consume (and it is consumption) the daily news whether it is on television, the news papers or online feel that they are being cheated and are getting something other than what they ordered, and all they actually wanted were the facts.

Imagine going to your local pub or place to eat and 63% of the time you are given something other than what you ordered. Sure it may be close…kind of, but not what you wanted. Perhaps you got fries instead of salad with your burger 63% of the time or 63% of the time you didn’t get a Guinness but instead they bring you a Budweiser. Both are beer (yes I know…Guinness isn’t beer, it’s a stout but give me some elbow room to make a point) would you keep going back to either of those places? Most people can’t even continue to support a sports team that loses 63% of the time. Would you even stay with a spouse that was faithful to you 37% of the time but the other 63% was busy fucking the neighbor? I didn’t think so either.

(Oh Blitzer…..how could you? And with Anderson????? You whore!!!)

So what’s the deal with most of the American population thinking that most of what they see and read (the latter accounting for a very small portion of the American population) not believing what they are being told most of the time? The thirst to have the latest news handed to you right away without worrying about those pesky “facts.”

“Speed is always a threat to accuracy, and the faster we can go, the more jeopardy the truth is in,” said Deborah Potter, a former CBS News reporter and executive director of the News Lab think-tank .

In live broadcasts, anchors need to take care in emphasizing what is not known, said Frank Sesno, a former CNN Washington bureau chief who is now a professor at George Mason University.

“We’re not doing it enough,” he said, “because it’s too easy to seize on something that appears to be happening before our eyes and run with it.”

Social media seems to be increasing the opportunity for mischief. False reports that Britney Spears, George Clooney, Jeff Goldblum and Natalie Portman had died spread on Twitter and Facebook in recent months, compelling major news organizations to check them out. The latest unfounded death rumour, only this month, concerned Kanye West. There’s even a Web site devoted to creating fake news stories about celebrities.

Nowhere was the new landscape more vividly illustrated than this month when Nick Denton, chief of the irreverent Web site Gawker.com, issued a memo scolding his staff for a few cases “where we’ve thought WAY too much before publishing” a story.

Get something out fast with what we know, Denton wrote. We can always update.

“At some media organizations, you might get rapped for running a premature story,” he wrote. “At Gawker Media, you’ll lose way more points for being scooped on a story you had in your hands.”

Kittens I have to say I promised myself I would touch this one with a barge pole. I tried to drink the words away, I bashed my head on the corner of my stove for hours at a time and I even (shudder) watched THIS for 17 strait hours. However I am man enough to admit defeat when I must, and besides if anything truly illustrates a mind boggling hoax on the scale of the Swiss Spaghetti prank it is the Balloon Boy story.

As I am occasionally a man of mercy we won’t be going into why the family of that kid should be thrown into a large tank filled with ornery pirhanna. Or what terrifying whores they are who are in such desperate need to become the next Jon and Kate that they would exploit their 6 year old child for a shot at a reality show on TLC, the channel that used to be refereed to as The Learning Channel, we’re going to talk about how it was reported.

The idea of a 6 year old kid drifting away across Colorado was a big news story. The media jumped on it like a fat kid on cake. They followed the balloon all across the sky until it landed and when there was no kid inside, they looked everywhere for him thinking maybe he fell out. Nobody bothered to see if he was playing with his toy bulldozer somewhere and didn’t actually care about Dads balloon.

As we now know the family planned the hoax and they are hopefully going to receive the full measure of the law, and are hopefully shunned by society for life. At the very least the Dad should be made to serve as Nick Noltes personal assistant for the rest of his life.

For once we can’t really fault the end consumer for the Balloon Boy story. it was fairly gripping television for sure and in many ways you can’t really blame the media for jumping all over it. If we waited for all the facts to come in before the assassination of JFK was reported we’d still be waiting and Oliver Stone would have become a wipe down boy at a local peep show.

It was however vastly missing some skepticism and caution. In a rush to get the story to the world, nobody asked any hard questions.

Perhaps tinged by disgust at the hoax itself, the media has suffered a backlash among people who believe too much time was spent on the story, said Mark Jurkowitz, associate director of Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

A few days later in Washington, an official-looking press release from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce announced that the organization had reversed its position on climate change legislation.

Not so. It was an elaborate scam put on by members of the liberal activist group Yes Men, who were looking to draw attention to a policy stance with which it disagreed.

Reuters moved a story based on the false press release, and both CNBC and Fox Business Network reported it — with the anchors correcting themselves mid-story upon learning it was false.

In all the cases, a desire to push the story out fast took priority over a phone call to double-check.

“This is an example of how, when you get too careless and don’t really do your homework, there’s a price to pay,” said Eric Wohlschlegel, communications chief for the Chamber of Commerce, who broke into the Yes Men’s fake news conference to announce it was a hoax.

Mike Bonanno, a member of the Yes Men, said the group achieved its goal of spotlighting the policy. A day after its antics, a paper manufacturer in upstate New York resigned its membership in the chamber over the policy.

The frightening message: Hoaxes work.

As we all know, us human mammals tend to believe something if it written down or told to us by somebody we trust. We also know that we are easily distracted by flashing lights and pretty colours and for gaddamned sure if we are given too much information to process all at once then we become baffled and can only absorb bits of half truths here and there with very Little retention. If you take all of those thing and combine them while referring to them as “news” and by “news” we still naively like to think of it as fact then you have a perfect storm for misinformation.

This is a great example. Every city has one of these channels. A local cable 24 hr news channel that brings you live up to the minute news all at once from traffic, to current affairs to stock indexes to who was wearing what at last nights Blow Me awards.

Since we’ve all seen these (this channel is always on in our office and months later, I still have no idea what it says) then you probably haven’t broken down the fact that at any given time there are 8 separate screens going. At any time you have to weed through 8 different sources of information passing by in the blink of an eye that don’t really tell you all that much.

As we are all at least reasonably interested in the world at least a little bit (and only because we are forced to live in it until other options become possible) we tend to have a small passing interest in what is going on. If nothing else it gives us something to talk about and it gives even fewer of us a chance to look like smarty pants if we know something that bastard neighbor Johnson doesn’t know….fuck I hate Johnson.

With 63% of Americans accepting that their daily news landfill is at least a bit wrong, or at least bullshit I have to say my dear Kittens I am cautiously optimistic. At the very least they are questioning what they are being told, or finally understand that they aren’t getting the whole entire story and thus the actual truth.

It’s no great mystery that ever since mankind began swinging bats at each other that we have always wondered who controls our world, why it does what it does what it does and when if ever it is going to end.

Plenty of Kool Aid has been guzzled by people who believe who claim to know the answers to this question and there is certainly a large amount of blame to be placed on the people who claim to have the answers, I usually blame the people who ask them the questions in the first place while simultaneously opening their wallets.

The man with the answers always disappears with the days take before the world ends and the followers at best are left on top of a hill in the drizzle looking confused, or at worst, rather quite dead.

The same up to the minute fast as fast can get magic wall of mysteries and stories about kids in balloons and Yes Men scams plague our planet by people who claim to have the answers to the questions that we think we should be asking, but we didn’t even realize that we should be asking them until somebody told us we should.

(To this day, the funniest thing I have ever seen. Done by my good mate Simon E. Apt. 508 College St Toronto Canada n the eve of Italy vs. Brazil in the World Cup final)

Rather than presume something that is fed to us is true, or at least partially true our society has decided to take what we are given as if it was passed to us through a drive thu window and only when we get home and unwrap it and discover that 63% they fucked up our order but it’s too far to go back and bitch them out, we just settle and gobble it up. It’s too much work and it’s KIND of like what we asked for. The law of diminished returns. Not only that just like the drive thru or the magic wall we don’t really care who is giving it to us anymore, as long as what they have to say gives us something to look smarter than that smug prick Johnson the neighbor about then we really don’t care.

Would it have made a better story of there was a dog in the balloon? Or what if the kid was really in there and died? How about if the balloon wasn’t a balloon but a sleeper cell and it held a dirty bomb and we all got to watch a live action terrorist attack instead?

What would have happened if in the middle of it a trap door opened and a large banner unfolded a huge “Vote For Quimby” appeared?

Maybe we don’t need up to the minute. Maybe we need to think and talk a bit more to debate and be a bit more skeptical and thoughtful. Maybe we should even do it over a nice plate of spaghetti. Spring will be here in a few months in Switzerland so we can enjoy a nice fresh crop next year.

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Okay my Kittens, let’s see how smart we are shall we? Who amongst us knows what The Spaghetti Incident is?

There is the overwhelming roar of “it’s a fucking Guns n Roses album you retard” that I expected.

Close Kittens. Yes of course you are partially correct. That is the name of a GnR album so you are not technically incorrect, but who here has heard of The Swiss Spaghetti Harvest?

No takers, I expected as much.

Well Kittens it’s like this. On April 1, 1957 the British news show Panorama broadcast a three-minute segment about a bumper spaghetti harvest in southern Switzerland. The success of the crop was attributed both to an unusually mild winter and to the “virtual disappearance of the spaghetti weevil.” The audience heard Richard Dimbleby, the show’s highly respected anchor, discussing the details of the spaghetti crop as they watched video footage of a Swiss family pulling pasta off spaghetti trees and placing it into baskets. The segment concluded with the assurance that, “For those who love this dish, there’s nothing like real, home-grown spaghetti.”

You don’t believe me do you Kittens? Well as usual I have gone the extra mile and have found that very footage…..so open your wide little eyes and take a good look at what is considered to be the greatest news hoax ever committed.

There you have it Kittens, I wasn’t kidding. It was very real and people took the bait, hook line and sinker. It is now and always have been my water line of just how gullible the human mammal is and remains to be to this very day? So what happened after the show was broadcast? Hundreds of people phoned the BBC wanting to know how they could grow their own spaghetti tree. To this query the BBC diplomatically replied, “Place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.”

The calls came in incessantly. Some were from viewers who had enjoyed the joke – including one from Bristol who complained that spaghetti didn’t grow vertically, it grew horizontally. But mainly the calls were requests for the BBC to settle family arguments: the husband knew it must be true that spaghetti grew on a bush because Richard Dimbleby had said so and the wife knew it was made with flour and water, but neither could convince the other.

Sure we can look back and laugh and say “ooooh those spazzy Brits, what the hell were they thinking? I mean everybody knows better than that and understands that spaghetti doesn’t grow on trees, it’s made by elves….or Italians or something.” The two are easily confused.

The thing is Kittens is in 1957 the British didn’t really know what spaghetti was. It was foreign and it wasn’t like today where we can have a taste of the world in a food court in a mall. It wasn’t an urban myth like Bigfoot or Jesus. People sort of knew what it was and a few had had some for dinner but not very many people actually knew where it came from, or if it was actually any good. Think of it as a bit like Coldplay. Even the people who claim to enjoy it can’t really tell you why, or even where it came from or why it is even here in the first place.

So what does a decades old media hoax have to do with today’s world which is filled with ultra smart informed fully wired HD highly educated smart phone iHumans? Simple. People are still falling for Swiss Spaghetti Harvests, but not once a year on April Fools day when your guard should be pegging in the red, but all day every day again thanks to the kind folks in the media.

This Kittens is something called the CNN “Magic Wall.” No shit. A global news station has a magic fucking wall, as if Anderson Cooper was fucking Prospero. As you can imagine the magic wall doesn’t actually perform any magic otherwise it would turn John Roberts into a real newsman again and not some talking head muppet. It’s actually a Multi-Touch Collaboration Wall made by New Yorks Perceptive Pixel, as if that really matters but I mention it just in case you really thought it was magic and thought I was kidding.

The one today bit of magic that the magic wall does perform however is it turns bullshit in to fact all day every day, and this isn’t just me being cynical either Kittens. That is no magic. Unlike what it and most other media outlets broadcast or write about, that is a hard cold fact.

The Pew Research Center for the People&the Press has reported that 63% of Americans believe news stories are often inaccurate, the worst report card it has ever seen. This means that 63% of the people who consume (and it is consumption) the daily news whether it is on television, the news papers or online feel that they are being cheated and are getting something other than what they ordered, and all they actually wanted were the facts.

Imagine going to your local pub or place to eat and 63% of the time you are given something other than what you ordered. Sure it may be close…kind of, but not what you wanted. Perhaps you got fries instead of salad with your burger 63% of the time or 63% of the time you didn’t get a Guinness but instead they bring you a Budweiser. Both are beer (yes I know…Guinness isn’t beer, it’s a stout but give me some elbow room to make a point) would you keep going back to either of those places? Most people can’t even continue to support a sports team that loses 63% of the time. Would you even stay with a spouse that was faithful to you 37% of the time but the other 63% was busy fucking the neighbor? I didn’t think so either.

(Oh Blitzer…..how could you? And with Anderson????? You whore!!!)

So what’s the deal with most of the American population thinking that most of what they see and read (the latter accounting for a very small portion of the American population) not believing what they are being told most of the time? The thirst to have the latest news handed to you right away without worrying about those pesky “facts.”

“Speed is always a threat to accuracy, and the faster we can go, the more jeopardy the truth is in,” said Deborah Potter, a former CBS News reporter and executive director of the News Lab think-tank .

In live broadcasts, anchors need to take care in emphasizing what is not known, said Frank Sesno, a former CNN Washington bureau chief who is now a professor at George Mason University.

“We’re not doing it enough,” he said, “because it’s too easy to seize on something that appears to be happening before our eyes and run with it.”

Social media seems to be increasing the opportunity for mischief. False reports that Britney Spears, George Clooney, Jeff Goldblum and Natalie Portman had died spread on Twitter and Facebook in recent months, compelling major news organizations to check them out. The latest unfounded death rumour, only this month, concerned Kanye West. There’s even a Web site devoted to creating fake news stories about celebrities.

Nowhere was the new landscape more vividly illustrated than this month when Nick Denton, chief of the irreverent Web site Gawker.com, issued a memo scolding his staff for a few cases “where we’ve thought WAY too much before publishing” a story.

Get something out fast with what we know, Denton wrote. We can always update.

“At some media organizations, you might get rapped for running a premature story,” he wrote. “At Gawker Media, you’ll lose way more points for being scooped on a story you had in your hands.”

Kittens I have to say I promised myself I would touch this one with a barge pole. I tried to drink the words away, I bashed my head on the corner of my stove for hours at a time and I even (shudder) watched THIS for 17 strait hours. However I am man enough to admit defeat when I must, and besides if anything truly illustrates a mind boggling hoax on the scale of the Swiss Spaghetti prank it is the Balloon Boy story.

As I am occasionally a man of mercy we won’t be going into why the family of that kid should be thrown into a large tank filled with ornery pirhanna. Or what terrifying whores they are who are in such desperate need to become the next Jon and Kate that they would exploit their 6 year old child for a shot at a reality show on TLC, the channel that used to be refereed to as The Learning Channel, we’re going to talk about how it was reported.

The idea of a 6 year old kid drifting away across Colorado was a big news story. The media jumped on it like a fat kid on cake. They followed the balloon all across the sky until it landed and when there was no kid inside, they looked everywhere for him thinking maybe he fell out. Nobody bothered to see if he was playing with his toy bulldozer somewhere and didn’t actually care about Dads balloon.

As we now know the family planned the hoax and they are hopefully going to receive the full measure of the law, and are hopefully shunned by society for life. At the very least the Dad should be made to serve as Nick Noltes personal assistant for the rest of his life.

For once we can’t really fault the end consumer for the Balloon Boy story. it was fairly gripping television for sure and in many ways you can’t really blame the media for jumping all over it. If we waited for all the facts to come in before the assassination of JFK was reported we’d still be waiting and Oliver Stone would have become a wipe down boy at a local peep show.

It was however vastly missing some skepticism and caution. In a rush to get the story to the world, nobody asked any hard questions.

Perhaps tinged by disgust at the hoax itself, the media has suffered a backlash among people who believe too much time was spent on the story, said Mark Jurkowitz, associate director of Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

A few days later in Washington, an official-looking press release from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce announced that the organization had reversed its position on climate change legislation.

Not so. It was an elaborate scam put on by members of the liberal activist group Yes Men, who were looking to draw attention to a policy stance with which it disagreed.

Reuters moved a story based on the false press release, and both CNBC and Fox Business Network reported it — with the anchors correcting themselves mid-story upon learning it was false.

In all the cases, a desire to push the story out fast took priority over a phone call to double-check.

“This is an example of how, when you get too careless and don’t really do your homework, there’s a price to pay,” said Eric Wohlschlegel, communications chief for the Chamber of Commerce, who broke into the Yes Men’s fake news conference to announce it was a hoax.

Mike Bonanno, a member of the Yes Men, said the group achieved its goal of spotlighting the policy. A day after its antics, a paper manufacturer in upstate New York resigned its membership in the chamber over the policy.

The frightening message: Hoaxes work.

As we all know, us human mammals tend to believe something if it written down or told to us by somebody we trust. We also know that we are easily distracted by flashing lights and pretty colours and for gaddamned sure if we are given too much information to process all at once then we become baffled and can only absorb bits of half truths here and there with very Little retention. If you take all of those thing and combine them while referring to them as “news” and by “news” we still naively like to think of it as fact then you have a perfect storm for misinformation.

This is a great example. Every city has one of these channels. A local cable 24 hr news channel that brings you live up to the minute news all at once from traffic, to current affairs to stock indexes to who was wearing what at last nights Blow Me awards.

Since we’ve all seen these (this channel is always on in our office and months later, I still have no idea what it says) then you probably haven’t broken down the fact that at any given time there are 8 separate screens going. At any time you have to weed through 8 different sources of information passing by in the blink of an eye that don’t really tell you all that much.

As we are all at least reasonably interested in the world at least a little bit (and only because we are forced to live in it until other options become possible) we tend to have a small passing interest in what is going on. If nothing else it gives us something to talk about and it gives even fewer of us a chance to look like smarty pants if we know something that bastard neighbor Johnson doesn’t know….fuck I hate Johnson.

With 63% of Americans accepting that their daily news landfill is at least a bit wrong, or at least bullshit I have to say my dear Kittens I am cautiously optimistic. At the very least they are questioning what they are being told, or finally understand that they aren’t getting the whole entire story and thus the actual truth.

It’s no great mystery that ever since mankind began swinging bats at each other that we have always wondered who controls our world, why it does what it does what it does and when if ever it is going to end.

Plenty of Kool Aid has been guzzled by people who believe who claim to know the answers to this question and there is certainly a large amount of blame to be placed on the people who claim to have the answers, I usually blame the people who ask them the questions in the first place while simultaneously opening their wallets.

The man with the answers always disappears with the days take before the world ends and the followers at best are left on top of a hill in the drizzle looking confused, or at worst, rather quite dead.

The same up to the minute fast as fast can get magic wall of mysteries and stories about kids in balloons and Yes Men scams plague our planet by people who claim to have the answers to the questions that we think we should be asking, but we didn’t even realize that we should be asking them until somebody told us we should.

(To this day, the funniest thing I have ever seen. Done by my good mate Simon E. Apt. 508 College St Toronto Canada n the eve of Italy vs. Brazil in the World Cup final)

Rather than presume something that is fed to us is true, or at least partially true our society has decided to take what we are given as if it was passed to us through a drive thu window and only when we get home and unwrap it and discover that 63% they fucked up our order but it’s too far to go back and bitch them out, we just settle and gobble it up. It’s too much work and it’s KIND of like what we asked for. The law of diminished returns. Not only that just like the drive thru or the magic wall we don’t really care who is giving it to us anymore, as long as what they have to say gives us something to look smarter than that smug prick Johnson the neighbor about then we really don’t care.

Would it have made a better story of there was a dog in the balloon? Or what if the kid was really in there and died? How about if the balloon wasn’t a balloon but a sleeper cell and it held a dirty bomb and we all got to watch a live action terrorist attack instead?

What would have happened if in the middle of it a trap door opened and a large banner unfolded a huge “Vote For Quimby” appeared?

Maybe we don’t need up to the minute. Maybe we need to think and talk a bit more to debate and be a bit more skeptical and thoughtful. Maybe we should even do it over a nice plate of spaghetti. Spring will be here in a few months in Switzerland so we can enjoy a nice fresh crop next year.

Bookmark this on Delicious

Yes Men vs. U.S. Chamber of Commerce

Billionaires for Wealthcare vs. America’s Health Insurance Plan (AHIP)

As the author of a skeptically-minded book on cults, conspiracies, and secret societies, I feel that I should say something for the record about the balloon boy hoax. I figured it was a publicity stunt when I learned that the family had been featured on Wife Swap. When little Falcon’s tongue slipped on the Larry King Show (and what kind of parents would go on a talk show that soon after their ordeal, anway?), that sealed it for me and pretty much every other thinking person on the planet. I felt bad for the sheriff, who had been on an emotional roller coaster; until Sunday’s press conference, he seemed to be the only person in the world who believed that he hadn’t been had.

Balloon Boy demonstrates that we have a sensation-starved, bottomlessly credulous media, but that’s nothing new. Edgar Allan Poe pulled off his own balloon hoax in 1844, when he wrote a story in the New York Sun about a balloonist named Monck Mason who had inadvertently crossed the Atlantic; almost ten years before that, the Sun printed a series of stories about a scientist’s astonishing discovery that the moon was inhabited by man-sized bats (Matthew Goodman’s The Sun and the Moon tells the full story).

Balloon Boy shows us that the line between real and fake celebrity (whatever that means–famous is as famous does) has been blurred beyond recognition and that the coin of renown has been devalued. First we had Brad and Angie; then we had Kate and Jon; now reality wannabes can get famous too. Didn’t Andy Warhol tell us that this was coming?

Of course Brangelina is a lot wealthier than the Gosselins, and the Gosselins are richer than the Heenes. But should real celebrities worry that cheap celebrities will make them less bankable over time? William Shatner, a real celebrity, swiftly moved to distance himself from Heene, stating, “He’s inflated the amount of contact we’ve had.” Inflation is very much to the point. In economics, Gresham’s Law states that bad money drives out good. It goes back to Queen Elizabeth’s England. Because England’s gold coins were clipped or shaved or adulterated, people either melted down the best coins or used them to buy foreign goods, with the result, in Sir Thomas Gresham’s words to the Queen, that “all your ffine goold was convayd ought of this your realm.”

The balloon boy hoax served no one but the Heenes’ and the talk show bookers’ interests, and as it turned out, it won’t even serve the Heenes all that well if they go to prison or have to pay fines. The Yes Men, on the other hand, are professional hoaxers with a genuine political agenda. This week’s stunt, in which they impersonated officials from the US Chamber of Commerce and announced that they had reversed their policies on global warming, raised the pressure on the Chamber of Commerce (which was already reeling from Apple’s and Nike’s high-profile resignations), forcing them to at least acknowledge the importance of climate change in a genuine press release of their own: “Public relations hoaxes undermine the genuine effort to find solutions on the challenge of climate change….The U.S. Chamber believes that strong climate legislation is compatible with the goals of improving our economy and creating jobs.”

I mentioned the Yes Men in CULTS, CONSPIRACIES, AND SECRET SOCIETIES in the context of the bizarre nineteenth century hoaxer Leo Taxil. Taxil was the pen name of Marie Joseph Gabriel Antoine Jogand-Pages (1854-1907), an ex-free thinker and highly public convert to Catholicism who, in a number of sensational books, claimed to have discovered Palladism, a devil-worshipping Masonic sect associated with Albert Pike and the Scottish Rite. In 1897, he held a press conference and admitted that he had made the whole thing up. Not just Palladism, everything–starting with his conversion. For more than a decade, he had been telling the Catholic Church exactly what it wanted to hear, feeding “the most colossal hoax of modern times,” and setting them up for a stupendous fall when he exposed it. He had begun his career as a hoaxer as a nineteen year old, when he created a panic about fictitious shark attacks in Marseilles (shark attacks remain a staple of the sensationalistic media to this day); a few years later he fed Swiss newspapers a bogus story about a sunken city beneath Lake Geneva.

Are there wider lessons to be gleaned from any of this, besides not believing everything you read in the newspaper (or hear on the radio, watch on TV, or read on the Web)? Carolyn Plocher at the right wing Media Research Center compares the wide-spread exposure of the balloon boy hoax with the widely-uncorrected liberal smears against Rush Limbaugh, who was falsely tarred with charges of racism when he tried to buy the Rams.

Rush Limbaugh a racist? Where do people get these crazy ideas?

Punked: Chamber of Commerce Says It Was Victim of Climate-Policy Hoax – Environmental Capital – WSJ.

Someone else is finding it amusing to have some fun on the US Chamber of Commerce. Really, I was beginning to think it was just me:

The business lobby says it was the victim of an elaborate hoax this morning, when a group passing itself off as the Chamber announced at a press conference in Washington that it dropped its earlier opposition to the pending climate bill and was now “throwing its weight behind strong climate legislation.”

The fake announcement included prepared remarks by a “Tom Donahue”—the Chamber is led by Tom Donohue—and used a website similar to the business lobby’s. One news outlet, Reuters, briefly ran a story on the Chamber’s “about face” before correcting it.

The Chamber suggests the “Yes Men” could be behind the hoax, citing similarities behind the domain registration used for the fake website and prior Yes Men hoaxes.

And here it is! Punchline, this time, is courtesy of the US Chamber of Commerce. Whoever in that Press Conference is from the US CoC!

We’ve put together a sort of “gallery of activists” for discussion with our clients at Amnesty – to see who inspires us and why. The presentation is embedded below. Here are a few themes that emerge:

To be really disruptive, you need to be really creative
In a world of stunts, it takes something special to get noticed. The ingenuity of The Yes Men hoax on BBC World is a great example, wiping $2 billion dollars from Dow Chemical’s stock – pretty disruptive. Love or loathe him, some of Michael Moore’s set-ups are bold and inventive, such as interview with Charlton Heston in Bowling For Columbine.

To have influence, plug in to mainstream culture
Plane Stupid are a great example of an organisation with the ability to get noticed through direct action, and then to engage with the mainstream press with articulate, media-friendly spokespeople. Ad Busters may feel a bit dated now, but they played an important part in fermenting the “No Logo” backlash, plugging into mainstream brand culture and subverting it beautifully.

To create change, be bold
Finally, there is sheer boldness. For example, who can argue with the bravery and brilliance of attempting to place Robert Mugabe under citizen’s arrest? Peter Tatchell is really the archetype activist, along with people like Robert Hunter from Greenpeace and Keith Mann from the ALF.

These are a some of the activist types we’ve pulled out for discussion with Amnesty next week. Any other examples?

Usually, I’m not one to advocate cheap PR stunts, but the Yes Men impressed me with their fake news conference and what has become a public kick up the backside for the US Chamber of Commerce who support clean coal as the only viable energy solution.

The Yes Men step way outside the boundaries of conventional PR. They consider themselves activists who practice identity correction by posing as spokespeople for target organizations. Setting up fake websites to resemble their targets as part of their strategy, they lure interested parties in and receive invitations to speak at conferences, symposia and on TV. This most recent PR stunt drove the point home that climate change policy lays hostage to corporate greed.

Rightly or wrongly, these strategists target the bad guys by employing the same dirty tactics that they use. It’s like karma or justice.

As a side note, if coal was so good, why would Santa give it to naughty children at Christmastime?

Apparently, Congress is too busy with other matters on the Hill to deal with a problem the entire globe is facing. Well, now that healthcare is out of the way…

Capitol Hill at its finest.

After creating quite the spectacle at the Press Club yesterday, the Yes Men were on Capitol Hill on Tuesday showing off their Survivaball suits to unsuspecting senators and passersby.

The Survivaball, as they describe it, is “the stupidest costume known to humankind,” intended to “highlight the absurdity of the Senate’s slow pace in responding to climate change.

Via Mother Jones