If anyone here is in marketing or advertising

New Fig Newtons Ad Preys On Inherent Human Weakness

"NEW YORK—Flattery, pride, self-aggrandizement, fear of rejection: This latest Fig Newtons ad campaign hits on all cylinders, a delighted advertising executive said."

from a performance of the best comedian ever - "By the way, if anyone here is in marketing or advertising...kill yourself. Thank you. Just planting seeds, planting seeds is all I'm doing. No joke here, really. Seriously, kill yourself, you have no rationalization for what you do, you are Satan's little helpers. Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself now. Now, back to the show. Seriously, I know the marketing people: 'There's gonna be a joke comin' up.' There's no fuckin' joke. Suck a tail pipe, hang yourself...borrow a pistol from an NRA buddy, do something...rid the world of your evil fuckin' presence, OK, back to the show.

You know what bugs me though, everyone here in marketing is now thinking the same thing, 'Oh, cool, Bill's going for that anti-marketing dollar, that's a huge market.'" - Bill Hicks

All eyes on OJ

(Link)

read it and find out

Saudi Religious Police Attacked by Girls

"According to the head of the commission in Khobar, two girls pepper sprayed members of the commission after they had tried to offer them advice."

I'm starting to like Saudi women... they feisty! Damn I want to be there when they have their sexual revolution.

"...one of the girls pepper-spraying them in the face as the other girl filmed the incident on her mobile phone, while continuing to hurl insults at them."

The blind leading the Japanese

Japanese Deregulation: Big Corporations are Destroying People's Lives - Uchihashi Katsuto interviewed by Okamoto Atsushi

"[Uchihashi Katsuto, born in 1932, is a prominent economic, political and social commentator and the author of seventy books including his eight volume collected works. He was interviewed by Okamoto Atsushi, the editor of Sekai (World). ..."

The ideas that "caused Latin America to go completely bankrupt" are being implemented in Japan. When the US business community was getting its collective panties in a bunch in the 80s at the thought of Japan overtaking the US economically, it ironically would probably have scared them further to think that Japanese economists were being trained in American economic ideas. Goes to show that fear can be misplaced at times.
...
Looks like Japan is ditching the state-led economic model that made it rich, and moving its way towards the United Statesian, Friedmanite model of extreme wealth disparities, insecure workforces, underfunded public services and a slow choking of demand in the domestic market as incomes for the majority stagnate or fall. What a path to recovery it is likely to be!

Fascinating book on how the world economy works

Super Imperialism by Michael Hudson

This (non-Marxist, don't let the title fool you) book describes how the dollar became the world's key currency; why the rest of the world's people work hard and save their hard-earned money - and manufacture little plastic figures of children's movies with a 6 month self life, among a whole lot of other things - so that fat United Statesians can buy resort vacations for their chihuahuas on their credit cards.

(Michael Hudson is an independent Wall Street financial economist and professor and has been an economic adviser to the Canadian, Cuban, Mexican, Russian and US governments, and to the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR).)

A "Handy" Guide to the Housing Market

(Link)

What makes ideas fit

SOCIALISM: A LIFE-CYCLE by RÉGIS DEBRAY

"The ecosystem of socialism, seen through the material forms in which its principles were transmitted—books, newspapers, manifestos—and the parties, movements, schools and men who were its bearers. From Babeuf to Marx to Mao, the passage of printed ideas, and their inundation by images..."

The relative success of different ideas today may have something to do with a 'survival of the fittest'-sort battle of ideas - where the best ideas win. But one can't ignore is the environment in which ideas "compete" - and how the means of production and dissemination of ideas help determine which ideas prevail. In the age of television, the only ideas that have a chance of competing are those likely to win over the owners of a production studio and television station. Ain't no printing press gonna cut it no more.

Contra Debray, it's not something magical - an essence - in television that inevitably leads to the result of dumb, functionally illiterate populations. Socialists just need to amass a boatload of cash, win a hostile takeover of News Corp, radically restructure it, and use another boatload of cash to run a company that'll probably hemorrhage money; it's expensive to use television to educate, and the returns don't appear on any but a metaphorical balance sheet.

Review: The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto

The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto by Mario Vargas Llosa

Fucking brilliant. Here's some quotes:

On sex: "All human activity that does not contribute, even indirectly, to testicular and ovarian arousal, to the meeting of sperm and egg, is contemptible... as well as everything that distracts us from the truly essential purpose of human life, which, in my opinion, is to satisfy desires. I see no other reason for our being here, spinning like slow tops in a gratuitous universe."

On the nation: "'Nation', that ridiculous politico-administrative contrivance manufactured by statists greedy for power and intellectuals in search of a master, that is, a Maecenas, that is, a pair of prebendal tits to suck on - is a dangerous but effective excuse for the countless wars that have devastated the planet, for despotic impulses that have sanctified the domination of the weak by the strong, and for an egalitarian smoke screen whose noxious fumes, indifferent to human beings, clone them and impose on them, under the guise of something essential and irremediable, the most accidental of common denominators: one's place of birth."

On law: "How could I avoid being the most ingenious tangler or disentangler of juridicial arguments when I discovered in my first law class that so-called legality is, in great measure, an intricate jungle in which technicians of obfuscations, intrigues, formalisms, and casuistries would always come out ahead? And that the profession has nothing to do with truth and justice but deals exclusively with the fabrication of incontrovertible appearances, with sophistries and deceptions impossible to clarify."

And sex again: "It is also true that without their prohibitions, sins, and moral fulminations, desires - especially sexual desire - would not have achieved the refinement they have reached at certain times. Consequently - and this is not theoretical but practical - as the result of a modest personal survey of limited scope, I affirm that people make love much better in religious countries than in secular ones (better in Ireland than in England, in Poland than in Denmark), better in Catholic countries than in Protestant ones (better in Spain or Italy than in Germany or Sweden), and that women who have been educated in nuns' academies are a thousand times more imaginative, bold, and delicate than those who have studied at secular schools."