Really? That's The Image You Want to Go With, Huh?

If there was any discussion, it might have gone something like this:

Are you sure this is the look you want for your training program? I realize that the on-line market for students is - well ... distinct from shall we say traditional avenues of appeal, but --

No, no. I don't mean to suggest that there's anything necessarily wrong with this young woman's appearance ... it's just ... the leopard print seems a bit suggestive ... on at least a few levels. Along with the hoop earrings and the general exotic and fairly erotic over-the-shoulder come-hither ...

Yes, of course I realize advertising is all about seduction but ... my problem?

Well, sir. I'm not sure if we're targeting young, middle-eastern women or sexually adventurous western males ... no. Of course there's no reason we can't market to a variety of potential demographics at the same time. I see your point, sir. Yes. Of course.

We'll have it on-line in our next ad-buy. Thank you, sir.

Political Scientology

Election Coverage

Dictatorship of the Consumendoriat

Consumendoriat?

Wealth of Nation

Beltway Circle-Jerking

For The Financially Malfeasant

The Social Justice “Clean Room”

& Self Imposed Exile

∇

And that, I think, is the problem with pretty much every mainstream model: they are not intellectual constructions that promote thought; they are more akin to cages built out of the remnants of long dead assumptions that are used to entrap the minds of those they are handed to. It is only those of highly independent mind that can wrench themselves from such conceptions once taught them.

Philip Pilkington:
Policing the Economists
from Within Their Own Minds
- ISLM as a Model of Intellectual Control

Throughout, Gessen paints a bleak picture of the “hijacked state media” and the gradual though systematic erosion of freedom of speech. The elimination of those courageous enough to speak or write about injustice reminds us that although the KGB may now operate under a new moniker, its practices remain the same.

How Vladimir Putin Came to Power

Most Profitable “Industry” In America

It's not that I have anything against Humana, per se, but leveraging the profit motive off of health care seems antithetical to the implied mission. Do people become doctors, or hospital administrators, or insurance company executives because they want to help

Columbia Journalism
Review:
Rocket Internet,
Gas Taxes,
The Price of Health Care

those who find themselves in physical distress or because it's an obscenely lucrative and captive market?

CJR's The Audit starts with industrial strength German intellectual-property Internet thieves, rolls by the gasoline tax, and falls into health care spending. A chain of disparate items I would never have assembled, but enjoy entertaining now that they've pointed it out.

Ye shall know them by their fruits. Perhaps, but I'm an avowed agnostic, so ... what do I know?

Data is not information and wisdom is something yet further refined and derived. How much does this "American Way Of Life" actually cost, anyway?

Cui bono?

Weimar Couture

& Capital (Offense) Accounting

Google searches here, photo credits after the break*

“The Corporate
Psychopaths Theory of the
Global Financial Crisis”
- Clive R. Boddy

Lest anyone mistake an association of RT's Capital Account and its stunningly perspicacious and intrepid host Lauren Lyster with this rogue's gallery due to their proximity herewith, DON'T.

As the embedded clip demonstrates from its edit point (24+ minutes into the video) I could not be in broader agreement with Ms. Lyster and company's appraisal of the current state of financial and political malfeasance and corruption at play in our benighted land.

Watch the whole video. Watch Capital Account every weekday night. It's a brilliant brick of reason and reportage tossed at the heads of those shown (above) here. The paper linked below the video is, also, more than a little apropos.

frebaYse economy journalism

The greater the Occupy resistence grows, and it will in direct proportion to an early spring thaw and continued marathon of the meretricious Republican primary pretenders, the harder is the top down sales invective from our corporate overlords.

No longer subjecting myself to the horrors of American broadcast/cable media, I'm thankfully ignorant of it's current state. There's a framework in play and if you're working for the crony capitalists that own the prole feeding news outlets, you know how to keep your job.

Just don't report on anything too substantively critical of the paymasters.

I weighed the options. And hesitated. It is one thing to be arrested as an independent journalist in a centrally located public square, where mainstream news cameras and spectators function as Klieg lights. They increase the likelihood that police officers involved will be held accountable. But it is another to get arrested in more distant outposts. Working journalists, after all, have been corralled and arrested, and occasionally punched, at demonstrations around the country, some on videotape. I often wonder about other independent journalists who have tried to cover Occupy events in out-of-the-limelight spaces. I also wonder about the communities who rely on them, and on student journalists, for news coverage that speaks to their particular concerns. “The news landscape has changed to the point where grassroots media is more important” than ever, argues Susan Mernit, editor-in-chief of the Oakland Local, a three-year-old startup that uses freelance and citizen journalists.

“How to Chill the Independent Journalist ”

Infantilizing Gadget Tree

Yeah, I use my spell-checker, but seriously...

I started poking around with a WiFi Kindle the other day for someone who's a generation or two removed from the Internet and was struck by how clunky and unresponsive it was to my “tapping.” Not only was it's general performance less than stellar, but entering text in search boxes and form fields was a gruesome adventure in learning, apparently, how much larger my fingers are compared to the demographic the Kindle's design team had in mind. I'm not a gadget-head, and so I can only judge the experience through my highly circumscribed interaction with the products I see walking (into me) down the street.

Season Of The Twits

Doll Steak

Test Meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeat !

Nothing Exceeds ...

... like

It is no accident that Americans cling to this dream. It involves American self-love on some deep, disastrously adolescent level. And Americans are very carefully and deliberately conditioned to believe this fantasy: by their politicians, by the news they get and the way they read it, by the movies and the television screen, and by every aspect of the popular culture. ... The brainwashing is so thorough that blunt, brutal reality stands not a chance against it...

James Baldwin - No Name In The Street p. 160

Disciples Of The Heart

Against this supercharged backdrop, the Anoka-Hennepin school district finds itself in the spotlight not only for the sheer number of suicides but because it is accused of having contributed to the death toll by cultivating an extreme anti-gay climate. “LGBTQ students don't feel safe at school,” says Anoka Middle School for the Arts teacher Jefferson Fietek, using the acronym for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Questioning. “They're made to feel ashamed of who they are. They're bullied. And there's no one to stand up for them, because teachers are afraid of being fired.”

“One Town's War on Gay Teens”

“l'enfer, c'est les autres”

The Rhyme Of The Ancient Historian

He is seeking to exorcise a history which is also a curse. He wants the old order, which came into existence through unchecked greed and wanton murder, to redeem itself without further bloodshed—without, that is, any further menacing itself—and without coercion. This, old orders never do, less because they would not than because they cannot. They cannot because they have always existed in the relation to a force which they have had to subdue. This subjugation is the key to their identity and the triumph and justification of their history, and it is also on this continued subjugation that their material well-being depends. One may see the history, which is now indivisible from oneself, has been full of errors and excesses; but this is not the same thing as seeing that, for millions of people, this history—oneself—has been nothing but an intolerable act, a stinking prison, a shrieking grave. It is not so easy to see that, for millions of people, life itself depends on the speediest possible demolition of this history, even if this means the leveling, or the destruction of its heirs. And whatever this history may have given to to the subjugated is of absolutely no value, since they have never been free to reject it; they will never even be able to assess it until they are free to take from it what they need, and to add to history the monumental fact of their presence. The South African coal miner, or the African digging for roots in the bush, or the Algerian mason working in Paris, not only to have no reason to bow down before Shakespeare, or Descartes, or Westminster Abbey, or the Cathedral at Chartres: they have, once these monuments intrude on their attention, no honorable access to them. Their apprehension of this history cannot fail to reveal to them that they have been robbed, maligned, and rejected: to bow down before that history is to accept that history's arrogant and unjust judgement.

This is why, ultimately, all attempts at dialogue between the subdued and subduer, between those placed within history and those dispersed outside, break down.

James Baldwin

How do you spend your time here?

Me? I do subversive re-writes of advertising.

WFKATGWOT

“... the war formerly known as the global war on terrorism ...”

Furthermore, acting on behalf of the United States, the president exercises this supposed right without warning, without regard to claims of national sovereignty, without Congressional authorization, and without consulting anyone other than Michael Vickers and a few other members of the national security apparatus. The role allotted to the American people is to applaud, if and when notified that a successful assassination has occurred. And applaud we do, for example, when a daring raid by members in SEAL Team Six secretly enter Pakistan to dispatch Osama bin Laden with two neatly placed kill shots. Vengeance long deferred making it unnecessary to consider what second-order political complications might ensue.

“Scoring the Global War on Terror”

But, it's all good, because there is a "bipartisan" group of senators who agree that Assad is a monster and because John McCain, World Leader, is in Cairo, using his well-known diplomatic talents to smooth over relations with another of our important allies in "the war on terror," a phrase that one day is going to send historians spiraling into fits of uncontrollable laughter.

“Waiting For A Friend”

Most Guys Are Stoopid

Yeah, I wanna be just like this tool.

It's not that I have anything against staying in shape ... apart from the fact that I still enjoy cigarettes and single malt. The problem I have is the overweening self regard that inevitably attaches to practitioners of extra-normal exercise. This is overcompensation writ extroverted and inflicted on every passing stranger, and I can spot these guys half a block away. There's a studied retardation to their stride that suggests a practiced need to avoid chafing.  It can't possibly be due to their large “package” (dream & enhance though they may) because I've seen women who – as far as I know – suffer from this same mental defect exhibiting what can only be described as their own “potato gait.”

Do what ever you want as long as it doesn't hurt anybody else, but looking at this dude makes my eyes ache. He's about to run out of skin.