Submitted by Diane Farsetta on
Bottled water is a $10 billion industry, but companies are "determined to push ... into new demographics," by "distilling products aimed at children," reports Bo Emerson. "The multimillion-dollar marketing campaign includes animated ads on Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network and broadcast TV that features kids triumphing over boring parents with the help of the bulbous (Nestle-brand) bottle. ... Karen Bennett of Atlanta, who tested the product for word-of-mouth public relations firm BzzAgent, thought the idea was dumb. 'I'm not going to buy water bottles that don't fit in my cup holders,' was her initial reaction. Then her 10-year-old took to it like a duck to" ... well, you know. Another example of "water as an innovation platform" -- as Beverage Marketing Corp.'s Gary Hemphill described it -- is "a pre-sealed disposable ice tray filled with purified water." The expanding market for bottled water products is mystifying, since a four-year study by Natural Resources Defense Council "resolved that bottled water was no purer than tap."
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jupiter replied on Permalink
I heard somewhere that
I heard somewhere that bottled water often has traces of unhealthy pollutants and therefore can be worse than tap water.
As with anything taken internally, this would be particularly true as an accumulation over time, for instance if bottled water (or perhaps particularly only one certain type of it) was all one ever drank. This would create an overload of the certain pollutant in one's body.
Also it is interesting how industry will theorize that only large amounts of pollutants can be harmful to the human body, when much evidence points otherwise --- that minute trace amounts have great detrimental effect on human health.
Anyway lately it is occurring to me how very "sociopathic" (of a sort) p.r. has become, and this seems to have become trend setter, or precedent setter for the rest of society, particularly younger people, to be sociopathic, or to think that bullying or sociopathy is cool or desirable, or even a virtue.
The Amish schoolhouse slayings would be an extreme example, and I do not unequivically know that p.r. agencies or their Tom-foolery can be traced to the recent slayings at the Amish school house. Or anyhow that is not what I mean to imply, necessarily.
BUT THE ATTITUDE OF PICKING OUT TOTALLY INNOCENT VICTIMS, or "by-stander" type people to serve as "enemies" or symbols of "the enemy" is very similar.
Often it is puzzling how the "fully matured" (so to speak, and there must be a better term) p.r., or fully jaded p.r., picks out totally innocent people as "enemies": people who simply are not in lock-step with their own agenda/s.
It does make me wonder, when I observe this sociopathic attitude of the school house murderer --- totally illogical: picking out CHILDREN (under age 20) to bear the brunt of something someone did to him twenty years ago. The children could have had nothing to do with this. This attitude is totally sociopathic. His actions seem to justify whatever was done to himself.
As a human, I can very much understand the "eye for an eye" type of vengeance. But the sociopathic attitude (perhaps like its opposite, love) is totally illogical. The guy (murderer) is doing essentially just exactly what was done to him --- victimizing the innocent, as he presumably was, once upon a time --- and in doing so, does he not essentially justify his own victimization?
Sometimes these sorts of murders or suicides are committed because of an attitude that the death preserves the innocence of a child, whereas life only continues to corrupt a person further. (I understand that this was Andrea Yates' delusion.) But this attitude is also of a very narrow perspective because it does not take into account the families and all other life that is affected by the senseless death, that is beyond being a freak accident, or caused by negligence even, but was deliberate.
Okay the sociopathic attitude is to victimize the innocent, thereby continuing the ripple effect of evil and trajedy, and knowing that the harm done was deliberate, all at the same time. All at the same time, the mourners must grapple with these known facts. A freak acccident is much easier to grapple with than either deliberate sociopathy or negligence. (Incidentally, the word "sociopathy" might just be a euphemism --- I wonder how that word originated.)
Okay in the world there are ripple effects of both evil (or bad will), and also ripple effects of good will.
Perhaps next time there is some kind of senseless death, or any kind of senseless evil (perhaps even only that one individual secretly knows about), instead of continuing the evil ripple effect by doing yet another sociopathic act, people can choose to decide to do something spreading good will in the name of the victim instead, like just some small secret thing, creating a good ripple effect in the world. (Incidentally, the ripple effect analogy is something I first read about in Betty Eadie's first book, of which I now forget the name.)
Then again, p.r. agencies will of course be "chomping at the bit" to be the benefactors of this good will.
Anyway in the midst of all said here, the main comment is that the attitude of sociopathy is too eerily similar --- picking out innocent people to serve as victims. The p.r. agencies do it simply when someone is not in lock-step with their particular agenda. The sociopath at the school house did it for whatever reasons justified it in his small universe of a world known as him.
It alarms me that maybe the trend or precedent setter for his illogical stance could have been the "Almighty" and prevalent illogic of p.r. agencies that abounds in our world today, which also picks out the totally innocent as victims, for only slightly more "logical" (albeit lewd and narcissistic) reasonings.