When they express fear and anger at the regressive, protectionist and quite frankly ridiculous policies of Barack Obama, I giggle.
But when they criticise the capitalist system, I get angry.
In a nutshell, I’ll say it: the capitalist system is a system of profit AND LOSS.
When you win, you win. When the likes of the “Wall Street Pirates” make trillions of dollars, I’m the first to stand and cheer. But when they lose? They LOSE!
They should lose - if they are are not being careful, if they’re not wise, if they’re not responsible. They will lose. Capitalism giveth, Capitalism taketh away. Why are we having such losses at the moment? It’s simply because people are choosing to move their money elsewhere. People are rewarding those who are currently seen as more risk averse, more responsible, more prudent. They are moving their money away from the “cowboys”.
That’s the fundamental difference between an open-market system (like Australia), and the system the US has (which you definitely would NOT call a free market system).
The financial system in the US was built on a deck of cards, subsidised by cheap Fed money and the lack of proper regulation in some ways, overregulation in others, and shielded from analysis and criticism by the US Government, who felt that the complex financial instruments peddled by these companies were “too sensitive” to be adequately scrutinised by the public or Government.
Don’t blame capitalism. Blame the US Government. Legislators in that country are too stupid to be in charge of something as important as the financial markets.
“Virals” don’t usually work. Ad agencies are trying to cling onto their business model by eschewing unpopular TV ads (that nobody watches) in favour of “doing a viral”, where they produce the same boring, expensive ad, and convincing gullible marketers that, by putting it online, it will “become viral”.
Most of the time, actually about 99.999% of the time, the only people who watch them are the marketers and staff of the firm. They then get sucked in by the ad agencies insights department or digital arm, who in the post campaign report, tell them that a 0.00001% viewer rate “exceeds industry benchmarks”.
Seth Godin, author of books like “The Ideavirus” and “Purple Cow”, describes the factors that make ideas “viral” here. Rare as these factors are, people are still convinced daily to spend hundreds of thousands out of their marketing budget on what usually amounts to a boring as hell corporate video.
That being said, this viral works. It’s for Diesel’s XXX SFW “Dirty 30″ party invite. It’s GREAT. Pass it on.
This guy is offering tours of Schapelle Corby’s “cage”, with extra special tours including an ability to “feed” Schapelle, a la feeding an monkey. Here’s the site: Schapelle Corby Tour
I checked the ownership of the URL, it seems legit, owned by:
Hutauruk, Eddie eddie.hutauruk@hotmail.com
63 A Teuku Umar
Denpasar, — 80362
+62 36178495
For those of you who aren’t Aussies, or Aussies who have been living under a rock, Schapelle Corby is an Australian woman was convicted to 20 years prison after attempting to smuggle 4.2kg of marijuana into Indonesia in a boogie board bag.
Typically, much of the parochial and narrow minded media in Australia chose to follow the line that Schapelle was innocent, despite all of the evidence being against her - and not only the conviction of the District Court of Denpasar, but an unsuccessful appeal to the Supreme Court of Indonesia. Much of the media and many Australian maintain this assertion of innocence against all logic, mainly playing to underlying racism - that somehow, we in Australia have a superior prosecution and legal system, and that Indonesians are incapable of running a court system.
It’s a shame that someone spends 20 years in an Indonesian jail. But then again, it’s a shame that someone would be so stupid and irresponsible to import 4.2kg of marijuana. It’s a greater shame that many Australians don’t see the simplicity of the prima facie case and just acknowledge that maybe, just maybe, the Indos got it right; she did the crime, she should do the time.
Anyway, above all, I think this site is piss funny.
Who brought down the Soviet Union? According to liberals [lefties], it collapsed of its own, with an assist from the reform-minded Mikhail Gorbachev. But this explanation not only scants the role of Western anti-communists - it implies they had exaggerated its dangers all along. Now, John O’Sullivan gives credit where it’s due. The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister is a sweeping, dramatic account of how President Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher together took on the most powerful and aggressive foe that liberty has ever known — and won.
O’Sullivan begins by reminding us that when these three figures entered the world stage, Communism — far from imploding — was on the march around the globe. Jimmy Carter and other Western leaders had pursued a defeatist policy of “dialogue” and appeasement. But Reagan, Thatcher, and the Pope (who, as a Pole, knew Communist tyranny first-hand), would have none of it - and thus began one of the great moral-political battles of will that history has ever known.
The founders of the United States of America distrusted democracy so much they designed a whole government to prevent it. Not once does the word ‘democracy’ appear in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, or the Bill of Rights. The Constitution is basically an elaborate restriction on what the voters can do. There are different branches of the federal government, expected to offset each other’s power. And there’s the Bill of Rights itself, limiting the power of the central government – no matter how many people vote.
Picture this: a young student gets offered a top management job in a large multinational at the end of second year uni (a remarkable stroke of luck. He takes it, deferring uni and taking a leave of absence for a total of two years away. At the end of the second year, with his career in full swing, he has to decide whether to go back to uni or to quit. Thankfully, at that time, the Howard Government introduced fee paying domestic students, which allowed me to go back and finish off uni in my own time (within eight years). Eventually, some two years later, I went back and finished uni, paying for the final subjects on a per-subject basis. The Government funded me at the beginning, I funded myself after life took me on a journey, something I’d suggest is pretty common.
But now, Rudd wants to scrap these places. Strangely, he’d prefer to allow overseas studnets more flexibility and opportunity in Australia, than Australian students. The guy is a pimp. I keep saying it, stop flying overseas every 20 minutes and hanging around with Cate Blanchett like some sort of starfucker, and make some decisions, KRudd, you useless shit of a trumped up mid-ranking diplomat.
Only months after the Melbourne Model was introduced, the Rudd Government announced that “from 2009, full fee paying undergraduate places will be phased out in public universities for domestic students.”
Kikkoman rocks. I just bought a bottle of their plum wine, and I’m reminded of their cool ad from years ago.
The bit that freaks me out is when the cat hangs in the corner? Weird. If anyone speaks Japanese, please translate the lyrics in the comments, I’m mightily intrigued.
What positives could you possibly bring up about Senator Stephen Parry’s letter re: Bill Henson?
a) That it is spelt correctly?
b) That it contains relatively good punctuation?
c) That he has included a mobile phone number, which may allow you to call him and tell him how stupid this letter is?
