Start a home business, get rich quick, win financial freedom! If you watch late-night TV, you've heard it all before. But what's the story behind these slick pitchmen and their dubious schemes? Enter The Salty Droid, your ornery metal guide to the corrupt underworld of scam-marketing scum. This charmingly acerbic bot (owned and operated by mild-mannered Chicago dog-lover Jason Michael Jones [inter-view, long talk + transcript]) is a valiant crusader against the vile con-men who bankrupt the elderly and the desperate with beautiful lies. Exposed so far: A shadowy "Syndicate" of frauduct-pushing personality cults polluting the media with blogspam and woo-woo talking points. Boiler rooms in the Utah desert where telemarketers farm credit from easy targets with cunning, probing scripts [PDF]. Powerful politicians bought wholesale. Believers left to die in fraudulent new-age vision quests. It's a soul-crushing beat, enough to make one feel like a regular catcher-bot in the digital rye. But somebody's got to do it -- preferably someone with plasma nunchucks and titanium skin.
posted by Rhaomi on Aug 31, 2011 - 47 comments

Telephoneme: Even if your Alphabet Conspiracy succeeds and you destroy the books, machines have no minds of their own. They are easily confused by different voices and different accents. It is the brain of man that tells them what to do. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief on Aug 20, 2010 - 10 comments

To call Pat Fish the best British songwriter of the past twenty-five years is an invitation for some awfully suspicious stares. Pat who? But he might be just that. Known since the early 1980s as the Jazz Butcher (Or The Jazz Butcher Conspiracy, or JBC, and at times later as Sumosonic, The Black Eg, and Wilson), Fish remained detached enough to avoid the indie-rock vortex of the last decade, dooming himself to obscurity while leaving behind one of the most valuable buried treasures in all of alternative music.
posted by carsonb on Aug 20, 2007 - 21 comments

Stanley Kubrick's involvement in the space program. Did we go to the moon? Donald Rumsfeld,Alexander Haig and Henry Kissinger tell all. via
posted by hortense on Feb 2, 2007 - 21 comments