Propaganda backfire

I got a flier in the mail today from Food City warning me not to listen to the United Food and Commercial Workers Union's criticisms of Food City. The first backfire is that I was not aware the UFCW was criticizing Food City.

The second backfire comes from the obvious hypocrisy of the few actual arguments in between the vacuous corporate "values" boilerplate. The flier says UFCW has two goals: to get more union dues, and to destroy Food City. It's not clear how a union would collect any dues from workers at a company that has been destroyed. And for a for-profit corporation to make dire warnings about how other organizations are motivated by the desire to make money was ridiculous enough -- then I noticed that the flier contains a $5 coupon!

Inside, the flier tells us that UFCW paid $200,000 to a consulting firm to help spread its message. So I can only presume that this glossy flier was hand-made by Food City executives, rather than farmed out to *gasp* a consulting company that does PR campaigns.

I have yet to investigate the particulars of this dispute, but I think I can say I'm much more sympathetic to UFCW than I was before I checked my mail.

They All Look The Same

I've been assigned to teach World Regional Geography next year, so I'm looking through textbooks to decide what to assign. The first book I opened up was Michael Bradshaw et al's Contemporary World Regional Geography. Among the many sidebars and pullout boxes in the "Africa South of the Sahara" chapter is one giving a "personal view" about Yaa Boadi, a woman in Ghana who overcame poverty to become a world-class engineer. The box's text -- an excerpt of a Financial Times article that includes not a single quote from the woman whose "personal view" this supposedly is -- is questionable enough. But what boggles my mind is the picture, a mug shot captioned "A Ghanaian woman similar to Yaa Boadi."

"Similar to?"

UPDATE: An interesting twist emerged when I realized I was looking at the previous edition of the book (I had the publisher send me the previous edition, because I wanted to factor into my decision whether students would be able to get by using an older edition, since that would be cheaper for them to buy). The newer edition had the same "personal view" box, with the same photo -- but this time the photo was captioned "Yaa Boadi." The photo credit also changed -- the newer edition credited to Todd Shapera, who wrote the article, but the older edition credits it to Reuters/Corbis.

The Chalice Projection

For my UU readers, I suggest projection #3 on this page for anytime the UUA decides they need to incorporate a map into their graphics to show their global consciousness or whatever -- how many other religions have their own projection?

(After I wrote that I went searching around and realized Christianity and Judaism (scroll down to Maurer's S233) do, and presumably it wouldn't be too hard to do a nine-point version of one of the ones on the Judaism page for the Baha'is. It might be a little harder to do a map projection that looks like, say, an Om and have it still be recognizable as a map.)