Target Marketeers take advantage of Atonement Cult
In today’s age of the apology proliferating atonements are encouraging another fast-growth fashion in which commercial interests seek opportunities to publicly demonstrate cohesion with diversity and equality.
Advertisers are now on the look-out for mainstream media transgressions that allow them to mass signal their own virtue by withdrawing their patronage from selective broadcast programmes and even from print titles.
Their target demographic is composed of a university-catchment in its later teens and on the verge of entering middle age, the advertising agency prime target sector.
In order to reach this cherished segment the Wellington daily the Dominion Post for example devoted an issue to apologising for itself
It ardently excoriated itself for its value judgements throughout its history that transgressed contemporary diversity/equality criteria.
This contrived atonement edition was ridiculed at the time by the demographic that it was not in fact aimed at.
But it struck a spectacular chord with its intended target market, the graduate one, the cultural elite, the segment with disposable income, money to spare.
In media terms an apology until a few years ago was a quasi-legal device used to stave off a legal action or to mitigate, soften one.
The old please-forgive-us apologies were handled gingerly because they were deemed to call into question the reliability, integrity, of the media operation as a whole.
Now, and in their promotional manifestation the apology is embraced with the same enthusiasm with which in its legal context it had once been shunned.
The now-routine institutional apology trend technique blinds editorialists to the danger that it poses for them.
This is because advertisers now use it to reach the impressionable much-desired younger graduate segment of the purchasing population.
Advertisers actively seek programmes where someone is likely to put their foot in it, just so they are seen to withdraw from backing this same programme and in doing so acquire the resulting plaudits from this same high-minded premium purchasing segment.
In the official and governmental realm meanwhile the apology proclamation has become the standard public relations marketing tool allowing politicians and their departments to quit something from the past and thus unencumbered to market the new replacement policy and approach.
Brisk and perfunctory it nonetheless has the effect of conveying the required level of hand-wringing to those who hitherto had troublesomely and noisily believed themselves to have been wronged.
The mainstream media collectively and uncritically supports the officially approved diversity and equality doctrines
The demonstrable enthusiasm of this community of interest fuels the fervour which now marketing agencies take advantage of.
Now and in its politico-media usage the apology means to “cave-in” on something, the opposite of its original Latin meaning in which it meant quite the opposite, to “defend” this or that.
Thus the slogan Apologia Pro Vita Sua once meant defending ones past actions, and certainly not regretting them, the current interpretation.
Target marketeers grasped the ecclesiastical implications of the word as a technique of signalling to the high-earning and younger impressionable buying classes the corresponding righteous intentions of their clients, and thus of their products.
The journalistic community is only now waking up to the distant rumbling of the apology avalanche which threatens practitioners who go off-piste, off the beaten path of conformity either accidentally or deliberately.
Orchestrated Litany of Half-Truths Gags Watchdogs
Eliminating natural gas will cripple a hospitality industry already reeling from the absence of foreign tourists.
Restaurants and hotels rely on natural gas to provide low cost power. Especially in kitchens.
But the value to the hospitality industry of natural gas is being tossed aside as the New Zealand Labour government sacrifices small businesses in the rush to accelerate man-made climate anxiety.
The Labour government is determined to be Best In Show internationally in the climate alarmism stakes.
The ACT party in Parliament has been silenced, and even bends a climate knee because it wants to be persuaded that unless New Zealand conforms to climatism it will somehow become a trade “pariah.”
The National Party Opposition is effectively gagged because it believes that it will lose a large slice of its high end professional vote if it is viewed as being overtly hostile to the climate beliefs that have filled the vacuum left by the established churches.
The energy industry lobby has allowed itself to be treated like dirt by the Labour government which at the outset announced to a group of students its ban on energy exploration.
Federated Farmers the agricultural lobby sits on its hands while unknown interests blot out immense swathes of grazing country with trees.
Nobody dare warn, even whisper, that if the globe is in fact heating up that these same quick growing and thus volatile resinous forest plantations present a colossal fire risk.
Nobody dare say that the clamp down on domestic oil and gas can only result in imports and from countries not exactly aligned with the government’s oft-stated human rights imperatives. Saudi Arabia is one example here.
The government’s one-word call sign is “kindness.”
How “kind” is it for a government to deliberately propagate the notion that in Taranaki there is no need to worry about the departure of the energy industry when enterprises like bakeries will take up the employment slack.
This when the same government knows that these same bakeries will not be able to use their ovens because there will be no gas to fire them.
The Labour government and its side kick Green Party promote “green” industries replacing the primary sector while knowing that these green industries are mobile in that they can readily be located offshore and to countries not too fussy about their workforce conditions.
The government and the Greens know too that words such as net zero, carbon, and renewables along with acronyms such as IPCC exercise a curiously paralysing effect on institutions such as ACT, Federated Farmers, and the National Party.
These loaded words leads them if not to “pivot” a knee then to go weak at the knees when they should be stridently indicating the dangers to jobs of the orchestrated litany of half-truths that drives the climate political project.
From the government’s climate bureaucracy we learn that farming is the “whaling” industry of today.
Farming was last proclaimed a relic from a bygone industrial era quite recently, 30 or so years ago.
The financial services sector supposed to fill this farming gap then promptly utterly disappeared leaving New Zealand without even its own trading bank, and with the resulting torrential outpouring of funds that should have stayed in New Zealand.
The New Zealand-based global insurance sector similarly and simultaneously disappeared as a direct result of this “whaling” fallacy syndrome about farming.
The National Party lets the Labour government glibly proclaim unchallenged its climate political project as its overriding priority. Labour routinely trumpets it as a far greater cause than the economy or even the housing crisis, a real crisis this time instead of a rallying one that keeps its faithful from straying
Mysterious Balkan War operative traced to renowned private school in England
A soldier who in three armies participated in at least four wars and changed the face of United Nations has been identified as a pupil of Hill Brow Preparatory School in Somerset recognised as epitomising the high noon of private schools in the 1950s when Bill Foxton was there.
The bizarre disclosure came when the young Foxton was identified in a school photo as the near-mythical soldier of fortune by the mother of his daughter Billie. The mother is Sally Becker aka the Angel of Mostar who teamed up with Foxton in the Balkans during Europe’s biggest conflict since World War 2.
The pair effectively forced attention on the inability of United Nations as a bureaucracy to deal with the fratricidal conflict and Sally Becker also identified the way in which United Nations holds in its thrall media elements, notably the BBC.
The photograph of Bill (see below) featured in the official history of the school compiled by Christopher Newman who was there at the same time as Foxton.
The Hill Brow History shows that Bill Foxton won the school shooting cup two years running and also a swimming cup.
Exactly why Major Bill Foxton was so determined to disguise this background remains unexplained.
His contemporaries included grandees such as jurist Sir Richard Gibbs, educationalist Sir John Dunford and applied ecology pioneer Sir John Lister-Kaye the Laird of Aigas.
Another fellow pupil of the young Foxton was Gordon Strong the authority on the pre-history of England’s West Country.
He believes that Foxton fell under the Influence of the school’s deputy head George Rory O’Brien Newbery who was also the history teacher.
Major Newbery’s great regret was being too young for the First World War. But he caught up in World War 2.
Another fellow pupil at the boarding school at the time recalls Foxton as being exceptionally neat and tidy, of quiet manner and displaying none of the Stalky & Co daring identifying him as the future frontier swashbuckler. A curious observation was that masters and boys alike always referred to him as Bill Foxton instead of just Foxton, the custom.
Still, the real mystery about Foxton remains why he wove a mystery around a schooling that would hardly have been a disadvantage in his transition from the ranks into becoming a commissioned officer. He was similarly obscure about other origins.
His father appears to have come from New Zealand and served with the RNZN, posted to Southampton. Bill was born in 1943. Thus Bill would have qualified for a New Zealand passport, as well as the French one to which he was entitled after his tour in the Foreign Legion.
In the event Foxton’s Buchanesque career took a Hemingway turn in the Balkans when as European monitor he encountered Sally Becker (pictured with Bill above) to whom he soon after applied his paramedic training after a would be assassin shot her through the leg.
The episode is recounted in her book Sunflowers and Snipers – Saving Children in the Balkan War (The History Press.)
United Nations after Africa and then after the Balkans exchanged peace keeping for preaching.
It now substituted for engagement in risky interventions the projection of high-mindedness in issues cherished by the Anglosphere’s politico media sector.
Major Bill Foxton late of Hill Brow Preparatory School for Boys at Brent Knoll personified in operational peacekeeping the end of one era, the soldierly one, in which undertakings were backed up by deeds, and the following era in which covenants are backed by exalted diversions and diplomatic stroking and evasions.
Meanwhile school contemporary Gordon Strong insists that Major Newbery was Bill Foxton’s guiding light inspiring the boy with the shock of red hair to become a participant over the ensuing half century in commotions in Africa, the Middle East, Europe and Asia.
“Rory Newbery taught Bill and did so by example that words always had to be followed through by actions; that contemplation by itself was never enough, and that it was what you caused to happen that counted.”
Palace of the Alhambra, Spain
By: Charles Nathaniel Worsley (1862-1923)
From the collection of Sir Heaton Rhodes
Oil on canvas - 118cm x 162cm
Valued $12,000 - $18,000
Offers invited over $9,000
Contact: Henry Newrick – (+64 ) 27 471 2242
Mount Egmont with Lake
By: John Philemon Backhouse (1845-1908)
Oil on Sea Shell - 13cm x 14cm
Valued $2,000-$3,000
Offers invited over $1,500
Contact: Henry Newrick – (+64 ) 27 471 2242