Central Perk

luni, 11 august 2014

Update on the Situation in Iraq

Monday, August 11, 2014

Update on the Situation in Iraq

On Saturday morning, President Obama delivered an update on the situation in Iraq from the South Lawn of the White House. The President detailed the progress of current American operations in Iraq, and spoke about what the operations mean for our country.

Last week, U.S. forces began conducting targeted airstrikes against terrorist forces who were advancing on the city of Erbil, in addition to conducting humanitarian airdrops to Iraqi men, women, and children stranded in northern Iraq. Our forces have already delivered thousands of meals and gallons of water, and will continue to protect American personnel in Iraq.

Watch President Obama's full statement.

Learn more about the current situation in Iraq:

Stay Connected

This email was sent to e0nstar1.blog@gmail.com
Sign Up for Updates from the White House
Unsubscribe | Privacy Policy
Please do not reply to this email. Contact the White House

The White House • 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW • Washington, DC 20500 • 202-456-1111

An Update on the Iraq Crisis

Featured

An Update on the Iraq Crisis

President Obama gave an update Saturday morning about the situation in Iraq, detailing the progress of current American operations in the country:

First, American forces have conducted targeted airstrikes against terrorist forces outside the city of Erbil to prevent them from advancing on the city and to protect our American diplomats and military personnel. So far, these strikes have successfully destroyed arms and equipment that ISIL terrorists could have used against Erbil. Meanwhile, Kurdish forces on the ground continue to defend the city, and the United States and the Iraqi government have stepped up our military assistance to Kurdish forces as they wage their fight.

Second, our humanitarian effort continues to help the men, women and children stranded on Mount Sinjar. American forces have so far conducted two successful airdrops -- delivering thousands of meals and gallons of water to these desperate men, women and children. And American aircraft are positioned to strike ISIL terrorists around the mountain to help forces in Iraq break the siege and rescue those who are trapped there.

"Ultimately, only Iraqis can ensure the security and stability of Iraq," the President said. "The United States can't do it for them, but we can and will be partners in that effort."

Watch President Obama's full statement here:

Beyond Search: Unifying PPC and SEO on the Display Network

Posted: 10 Aug 2014 05:15 PM PDT

Posted by anthonycoraggio

PPC and SEO go better together. By playing both sides of the coin, it's possible to make more connections and achieve greater success in your online marketing than with either alone.

That the data found in search query reporting within AdWords can be a valuable source of information in keyword research is well known. Managing the interaction effects of sharing the SERPs and capturing reinforcing real estate on the page is of course important. Smart marketers will use paid search to test landing pages and drive traffic to support experiments on the site itself. Harmony between paid and organic search is a defining feature of well executed search engine marketing.

Unfortunately, that's where the game all too often stops, leaving a world of possibilities for research and synergy waiting beyond the SERPs on the Google Display Network. Today I want to give you a couple techniques to kick your paid/organic collaboration back into gear and get more mileage from combining efforts across the disciplines.

Using the display network

If you're not familiar with it already, the GDN is essentially the other side of AdSense, offering the ability to run banner, rich media, and even video ads across the network from AdWords or Doubleclick. There are two overarching methods of targeting these ads: by context/content, and by using remarketing lists. Regardless of your chosen method, ads here are about as cheap as you can find (often under a $1 CPC), making them a prime tool for exploratory research and supporting actions.

Contextual and content-based targeting offers some simple and intuitive ways to extend existing methods of PPC and SEO interaction. By selecting relevant topics, key phrases, or even particular sites, you can place ads in the wild to test the real world resonance of taglines and imagery with people consuming content relevant to yours.

You can also take a more coordinated approach during a content marketing campaign using the same type of targeting. Enter a unique phrase from any placements you earn on pages using AdSense as a keyword target, and you can back up any article or blog post with a powerful piece of screen real estate and a call to action that is fully under your control. This approach mirrors the tactic of using paid search ads to better control organic results, and offers a direct route to conversion that usually would not otherwise exist in this environment.

Research with remarketing

Remarketing on AdWords is a powerful tool to drive conversions, but it also produces some very interesting and frequently neglected data in the proces: Your reports will tell you which other sites and pages your targeted audience visits once your ads display there. You will, of course, be restricted here to sites running AdSense or DoubleClick inventory, but this still adds up to over 2 million potential pages!

If your firm is already running remarketing, you'll be able to draw some insights from your existing data, but if you have a specific audience in mind, you may want to create a new list anyway. While it is possible to create basic remarketing lists natively in AdWords, I recommend using Google Analytics to take advantage of the advanced segmentation capabilities of the platform. Before beginning, you'll need to ensure that your AdWords account is linked and your tracking code is updated.

Creating your remarketing list

First, define who exactly the users you're interested in are. You're going to have to operationalize this definition based on the information available in GA/UA, so be concrete about it. We might, for example, want to look after users who have made multiple visits within the past two weeks to peruse our resources without completing any transactions. Where else are they bouncing off to instead of closing the deal with us?

If you've never built a remarketing list before, pop into the creation interface in GA through Admin > Remarketing > Audiences. Hit the big red '+ Audience' button to get started. You're first presented with a selection of list types:

The first three options are the simplest and least customizable, so they won't be able to parse out our theoretical non-transactors, but can be handy for this application nonetheless. The Smart List option is a relatively new and interesting option. Essentially, this will create a list based on Google's best algorithmic guess at which of your users are most likely to convert upon return to your site. The 'black box' element to Smart Lists makes it less precise as a tool here, but it's simple to test and see what it turns up.

The next three are relatively self explanatory; you can gather all users, all users to a given page, or all that have completed a conversion goal. Where it gets truly interesting is when you create your own list using segments. All the might of GA opens up here for you to apply criteria for demographics, technology/source, behavior, and even advanced conditions and sequences. Very handily, you can also import any existing segments you've created for other purposes.

In this figure, we're simply translating the example from above into some criteria that should fairly accurately pick out the individuals in which we are interested.

Setting up and going live

When you've put your list together, simply save it and hop back over to AdWords. Once it counts at least 100 users in its target audience, Google will let you show ads using it as targeting criteria. To set up the ad group, there are a few key considerations to bear in mind:

You can further narrow your sample using AdWords' other targeting options, which can be very handy. For example, want to know only what sites your users visit within a certain subject category? Plug in topic targeting. I won't jump down the rabbit hole of possibilities here, but I encourage you to think creatively in using this capability.
You'll of course need fill the group with some actual ads for it to work. If you can't get some applicable banner ads, you can create some simple text ads. We might be focusing on the research data to be had in this particular group, but remember that users are still going to see and potentially click these ads, so make sure you use relevant copy and direct them to an appropriate landing page.
To hone down on unique and useful discoveries, consider setting some of the big generic inventory sources like YouTube as negative targets.
Finally, set a reasonable CPC bid to ensure your ads show. $0.75 to $1.00 should be sufficient; if your ads aren't turning up many impressions with a decent sized list, push the number up a bit.

To check on the list size and status, you can find it in Shared Library > Audiences or back in GA. Once everything is in place, set your ads live and start pulling in some data!

Getting the data

You won't get your numbers back overnight, but over time you will collect a list of the websites your remarketed ads show on: all the pages across the vast Google Display Network that your users visit. To find it, enter AdWords and select the ad group you set up. Click the "Display Network" and "Placements" tabs:

You'll see a grid showing the domain level placements your remarketing lists have shown on, with the opportunity to customize the columns of data included. You can sift through the data on a more granular level by clicking "see details;" this will provide you with page level data for the listed domains. You're likely to see a chunk of anonymized visits; there is a workaround to track down the pages in here, but be advised it will take a fair amount of extra effort.

Tada! There you are—a lovely cross section of your target segment's online activities. Bear in mind you can use this approach with contextual, topic, or interest targeting that produces automatic placements as well.

Depending on your needs, there are of course myriad ways to make use of display advertising tools in sync with organic marketing. Have you come up with any creative methods or intriguing results? Let us know in the comments!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Seth's Blog : Understanding substitutes

Understanding substitutes

This is a pretty long post, and I know that you could easily substitute another round of Angry Birds instead of reading it. I hope you’ll find it useful.

One of the key elements of pricing is realizing that people have choices, and that substitutes are available. This is more nuanced than it sounds, though, and I want to highlight key things to keep in mind when you think about how much to charge and how people might react.

Marketers make two mistakes over and over. They create average, commodity products and expect that people will pay extra for them. Or, in the other direction, they lose their nerve and don't charge a fair price for the extraordinary work they're doing, afraid that people will find a substitute.

"Why should I buy this from you, that guy over there sells something just like it?"

"Why should I buy anything from any of you guys? I'll just watch TV/eat in/skip it..."

The highlights:

There are two kinds of substitutes--between markets and between competitors
Commodity goods and services have easy substitutes between competitors
Some goods are difficult to understand before purchase and use, and most consumers undervalue them and treat them like commodities
Industry norms are an important signalling device, part of the way price tells a story, and a way that substitutes across categories often come into play. Norms make us think something is fair and safe
Network effects make substitution difficult and need to be amplified in many markets in order to create more value
In commodity markets, price often drops to marginal cost, and in digital markets, that’s often zero
Luxury goods, for many of the reasons stated above, have few substitutes for those that value them

Consider the market for a dozen eggs, sold at the supermarket.

There are commodity eggs, normal, regular, use-these-eggs-in-your-cake-or-your-omelet sort of eggs. When you have a choice of two brands of normal eggs, you buy the cheap ones, because, of course, all eggs are the same. One is a perfect substitute for the other.

Right next to those eggs, though, are eggs with a story. Eggs that are free range or organic or cruelty-free or high in this or low in that. And these eggs cost more. Some people happily buy these eggs, substituting them for normal eggs, because to them, they’re worth more.

If you want to charge extra for eggs, then, you need people to believe that they are worth more than the substitutes. This sounds obvious, but it is the key wisdom that gets us started. How much it costs you to make an egg is completely irrelevant to this discussion (or even how much it costs the chicken, but that's a whole different discussion). People will switch to a similar good any time you haven't given them a good reason to pay extra.

When the price of all eggs goes up, because of an egg truckers strike or because of increasing costs, very few people stop buying eggs and start buying cream cheese instead. That’s because if you want to make a cake, you need an egg. And because if you sell tamago, you need eggs. Eventually, if the price goes really high or the high price sticks around for a long time, some people will find a substitute in a different market, eating Cheerios instead of eggs for breakfast, for example. (This is called elasticity, and we could talk about it forever, but one thing that's worth noting is that elasticity varies wildly across and within categories).

This leads to opportunity and challenge of marketers who choose to sell something that we don't buy very often and that we can't tell if it's better (or if the story is true) until after we buy it. In situations like this, our instinct is to assume that the thing is generic, a commodity, not worth extra.

Paradoxically, pricing itself also tells a story. If we're picking a surgeon or a restaurant or yes, even a dozen eggs, sometimes we intentionally don't buy the cheapest one. It has to do with the story we tell ourselves about money, certainly, but it's also based on an awareness of how markets work. When we don't want to make a mistake, we seek information, and expensive successful items in the market carry with them the information that other people like me have bought this more than once, that it's probably worth it.

Industry norms become critical when we try to understand substitutes. Take the seventy-year run that paperback books had as a dominant form of spreading a certain kind of idea. At the beginning, they were just a dime, a throwaway item featuring detective stories and romances. As established publishers started putting their books out in paperback, the industry set norms as to what price people should expect to pay for a book. It was a price that was considerably higher than the cost of making a book, but it was also seen as fair, particularly when compared to the price of a hardcover book (the only sensible substitute).

Because the industry established a price range as a norm, the story of appropriate value was established—not the other way around.

Norms are especially important in markets where the marginal cost of delivering the good or service is really low. How much should image processing software cost? What about a movie ticket? In commodity markets with no marginal cost and many competitors, rational economics would predict that the price would go to zero. But of course, in many markets, it doesn't. That's because industry leaders set a standard and deliver goods that feel fairly priced, so people don't seek inferior substitutes in other markets.

If you're unknown and making a digital good, it makes a lot of sense to charge zero, because it's free marketing, a powerful way to spread your reputation. But the second digital good you make, presuming it's worth paying for, ought to have no substitute, and thus your pricing strategy is very different.

And every marketer must consider network effects. What really creates a lack of substitution is the fact that, due to connections made and stories told, there are no substitutes. If you want to send a fax to someone with a fax machine, you can't buy a typewriter. If you want to share files in Photoshop format, well, then, you're going to have to pay for Photoshop. Money well spent to create the value a network provides.

And for anyone who seeks to offer a good or a service that costs more than the good-enough commodity substitute, we have to understand and embrace the fact that we are in the business of making luxury goods.

Bottled water is an example. A luxury good doesn't have to be for the wealthy--in this case, it's a product with an historically available (and largely free) substitute, and yet many people buy it. And it's worth noting that in most places, a norm for the price of bottled water exists, a norm that's high enough for everyone in the chain to make a profit and to lead to ubiquitous distribution.

Consider the market for ebooks. David Streitfeld, writing in the Times, quotes George Orwell:

“It is of course a great mistake to imagine that cheap books are good for the book trade,” he wrote. “Actually it is just the other way about … The cheaper books become, the less money is spent on books.”

“If our book consumption remains as low as it has been,” he wrote, “at least let us admit that it is because reading is a less exciting pastime than going to the dogs, the pictures or the pub, and not because books, whether bought or borrowed, are too expensive.”

It's surprising but true that now, books and ebooks are a luxury good, something that (if we're considering all the ways we have to spend time) has many substitutes, costs more than it should, is better than it needs to be and most of all, has a network effect that allows us to tell ourselves and other people a story about what kind of person we are.

Lowering the price of ebooks won't increase the number of people who read them much, as evidenced by how many free ebooks aren't read by everyone (a viral video might be seen by five hundred to a thousand times as many people as a viral ebook). Increasing the urgency, the network effect and the quality (and setting a new, higher norm that allows that) will serve the people who love books in the long run and the short urn.

Booksellers will only be able to do their best work (and enable their industry) when they acknowledge and embrace that this is a luxury good, not something for everyone (most people in the US buy one book a year) but something for people who realize that for the right book, there is no substitute.

Email and web surfing are a free substitute for reading, even when it comes to reading books that are priced at zero. This blog and many others compete with books every day. There is no price at which everyone will start reading books. Instead, we have to set a norm, figure out a price that (having nothing to do with the cost of delivering one more unit) enables the creation of a powerful stream of goods worth talking about.

That norm elevates a platform for great work.

• Email to a friend •

duminică, 10 august 2014

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

US Produces Evidence Rebels Shot Down MH17
Obama Calls Iraq "Long Term Project"; US Bombs Its Own Weapons; "These People Are Coming Here" Says Senator Graham
Weekend Entertainment: Dr. Strangelove vs. Mario Draghi

US Produces Evidence Rebels Shot Down MH17

Posted: 10 Aug 2014 11:36 PM PDT

At long last, the US produced evidence the rebels shot down MH17. Here is the damning proof.

Excuse me. I meant to say German TV Ridicules US "Evidence" In Ukraine

The tenacity of Western attempts to give the Ukrainian crisis an explicitly anti-Russian slant has been noted by a German political satire show, which ridiculed the apparent manner the United States presents its evidence.

The host of Extra 3, the comedy show, got the program going with a few pieces of 'evidence': a US-photographed satellite image that supposedly depicts Russian complicity in cross-border fire with Ukraine, then a picture that appeared to be drawn by a child with color crayons.

Christian Ehring pulled no punches when sharing his frank belief that the coverage of the Ukrainian crisis by the Western media has been full of holes since its start in February.

"Mr. President!" he said, impersonating a White House staffer rushing to bring evidence to President Obama – "I'm pleased to inform you that we finally have evidence! …I apologize, this is a picture my daughter drew… oh, here it is: I drew this one myself!" Ehring proclaimed.

"Really, that's their only proof? This picture? The American and the West have hundreds of agents in eastern Ukraine. What are they doing there? Keeping an eye on those who violate parking rules in the center of Donetsk?" he added.

Extra 3 Video Proof

Unless you can understand German, please forward to about the 1:20 mark then laugh.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Obama Calls Iraq "Long Term Project"; US Bombs Its Own Weapons; "These People Are Coming Here" Says Senator Graham

Posted: 10 Aug 2014 01:18 PM PDT

Total Failure

Senator McCain and others want to send more weapons to Iraq, as we bomb US weapons already there (but now in hands of Isis).

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton blames Obama for not sending weapons to Syrian moderates, even though we did train Syrian rebels in Jordan.

Intervention, past and present, has been a total failure.

US Bombs Its Own Weapons

Let's tie the above thoughts together starting with The US Bombing Its Own Guns Perfectly Sums Up America's Total failure in Iraq.

In the decade since the 2003 US-led Iraq invasion, the US has spent a fortune training and arming the Iraqi army in the hopes of readying it to secure the country once America left. That meant arming the Iraqi army with high-tech and extremely expensive American-made guns, tanks, jeeps, artillery, and more.

But the Iraqi army has been largely a failure. When ISIS invaded northern Iraq from Syria in June, the Iraqi forces deserted or retreated en masse. Many of them abandoned their American equipment. ISIS scooped it up themselves and are now using it to rampage across Iraq, seizing whole cities, terrorizing minorities, and finally pushing into even once-secure Kurdish territory. All with shiny American military equipment.

So the US air strikes against ISIS are in part to destroy US military equipment, such as the artillery ISIS has been using against Kurdish forces. The absurdity runs deep: America is using American military equipment to bomb other pieces of American military equipment halfway around the world.

The American weapons the US gave the Iraqi army totally failed at making Iraq secure and have become tools of terror used by an offshoot of al-Qaeda to terrorize the Iraqis that the US supposedly liberated a decade ago. And so now the US has to use American weaponry to destroy the American weaponry it gave Iraqis to make Iraqis safer, in order to make Iraqis safer.

It keeps going: the US is intervening on behalf of Iraqi Kurds, our ally, because their military has old Russian-made weapons, whereas ISIS, which is America's enemy, has higher-quality American weapons. "[Kurdish forces] are literally outgunned by an ISIS that is fighting with hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. military equipment seized from the Iraqi Army who abandoned it," Ali Khedery, a former American official in Iraq, told the New York Times.

Hillary Blames Obama

Hillary Clinton is in a desperate attempt to distance herself from president Obama in 2016 presidential bid. Her strategy has been to side with McCain regarding Obama's failure to send more weapons to "moderates" in Syria attempting to overthrow Syrian president Bashar Hafez al-Assad.

The Financial Times reports Clinton Takes Swipe at Obama Over Syria

Washington's failure to arm the Syrian rebels contributed directly to the rapid rise of the Islamic militants now taking over large swaths of northern Iraq, according to Hillary Clinton, the former US secretary of state.

"I know that the failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against (Syrian President Bashar al-Assad) – there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle – left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled," Mrs Clinton said.

Civil War Hypocrisy

Apparently it's OK for the US to get involved in a civil war half-way around the world but it's not OK for Russia to get involved in a civil war on it's own doorstep.

And contrary to stated opinion of Clinton, one can make a case we got too involved in Syria, with a secret training base in Jordan.

Syria Blowback

Please consider Blowback! U.S. trained Islamists who joined Isis

Syrian rebels who would later join the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or Isis, were trained in 2012 by U.S. instructors working at a secret base in Jordan, according to informed Jordanian officials.

The officials said dozens of future Isis members were trained at the time as part of covert aid to the insurgents targeting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. The officials said the training was not meant to be used for any future campaign in Iraq.

In February 2012, WND was first to report the U.S., Turkey and Jordan were running a training base for the Syrian rebels in the Jordanian town of Safawi in the country's northern desert region.

Last March, the German weekly Der Spiegel reported Americans were training Syrian rebels in Jordan.

According to Hillary (and senator McCain) things would have turned out better if only we trained more rebels and gave them more military equipment as well.

Don't worry, those weapons never would have gotten into Isis hands, even though it happened. These clowns claim to predict the future when they cannot even predict the past.

Long-Term Mission

Today president Obama said The strikes against militants will be a "long-term project."

The administration's actions drew stepped-up criticism from Republican lawmakers today, who on the Sunday network talk shows accused the president of doing too little, too late against a widening terrorist threat.

"Mr. President, if you don't adjust your strategy, these people are coming here," said Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican on the Armed Services Committee.

"If you don't hit them in Syria, you'll never solve the problem in Iraq," Graham said.

Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, said the strikes are "clearly very, very ineffective to say the least," as Islamic State "continues to make gains everywhere." McCain urged airstrikes against Islamic State in Syria, sending aid to the Free Syrian Army, better training for the Kurds in Iraq and sending more military equipment to Erbil.

"This is turning into, as we had predicted for a long time, a regional conflict which does pose a threat to the security of the United States of America," McCain said on CNN's "State of the Union" program.

Regional Conflict

Note the irony in McCain's "prediction" about a regional crisis.

Yes it has, and McCain, Clinton, and all the idiots who supported the war in Iraq are to blame.

"These People Are Coming Here"

Senator Graham stepped up the warmonger plate and smashed a home run straight away center field with his comment "These people are coming here".

That's always a popular slogan to ignite fear and support for war. And it works every time too.

Goering at the Nuremberg Trials

Please recall what Reichsmarschall Hermann Wilhelm Göring (in English his name is also spelled as Hermann Goering) Nazi founder of the Gestapo, Head of the Luftwaffe, said at the Nuremberg Trials.

Here is a clip of the interview in Goering's cell in prison, after the war.

Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.

Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.

Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

Follow the Money

Raúl Ilargi says Follow The Money All The Way To The Next War

Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism had some pertinent comments in her reply Ilargi: Follow The Money All The Way To The Next War.

What is the evidence behind US claims of Russian responsibility for the downing of MH17? After Colin Powell's Iraq WMD canard, it's remarkable that anyone accepts "trust me" from American officials, but remarkably, that's where things stand.

One excuse offered for the failure of the US to support its claims is that the military apparatus does not want to expose its information-gathering capabilities. But there's another, more obvious reason. The officialdom does not want to establish the precedent of being required to deliver the goods in order to foment war. That would mean they'd be expected to do so in the future, and the failure to be forthcoming would be seen as a sign that the officialdom was making stuff up. Needing to establish the legitimacy of their case would constrain their game.

Who Needs Evidence?

Evidence? Who needs evidence when you have the "Bush Doctrine" of preemptive strikes.

The phrase "Bush Doctrine" was rarely used by members of the Bush administration. The expression was used at least once, though, by Vice President Dick Cheney, in a June 2003 speech in which he said, "If there is anyone in the world today who doubts the seriousness of the Bush Doctrine, I would urge that person to consider the fate of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq."

Yes, Dick Cheney, let's all consider the fate of Iraq and the effectiveness of the "Bush Doctrine" of using trumped up evidence, lies, deceit, and torture, and preemptive warfare resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, and the formation of Isis in the wake of that failure.

Prepare for War

Prepare for war. Possibly on multiple fronts. But don't worry, war is a "small price to pay".

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Weekend Entertainment: Dr. Strangelove vs. Mario Draghi

Posted: 10 Aug 2014 10:37 AM PDT

For those needing a weekend humorous reprieve, I offer this email from Noel in Vancouver Canada.

Hi Mish

Couldn't resist this. Look at Mario Draghi's picture and tell me Peter Sellers couldn't have made a comedy out of that!

"Doctor Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bailout"

Keep up the great writing!

Noel
Vancouver, Canada

Peter Sellers vs. Mario Draghi

Slim Pickens Clip

If somehow you missed the movie, do yourself a favor and play this full video link or better yet, rent a copy.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Seth's Blog : Tribes and their perceived threats

Tribes and their perceived threats

Intermarriage has always been a problem, all the way back to Romeo and Juliet (and West Side Story, of course). Intermarriage de-demonizes the ‘other’, and the insecure tribe member sees this as an existential threat, the beginning of the end of tribal cohesion.

Gangs in LA view high school as a threat. A kid who graduates from high school has options, can see a way up, which decreases the power of the gang and its leaders. Public school is seen as a threat by some tribes, a secular indoctrination and an exposure to other cultures and points of view that might destabilize what has been built over generations. And digital audio is a threat to those in the vinyl tribe, because at some point, some members may decide they’ve had enough of the old school.

Lately, two significant threats seen by some tribes are the scientific method and the power of a government (secular, or worse, representing a majority tribe). One fear is that once someone understands the power of inquiry, theory, testing and informed criticism, they will be unwilling to embrace traditional top-down mythology. The other is that increased government power will enforce standards and rituals that undermine the otherness that makes each tribe distinct.

If a tribe requires its members to utter loyalty oaths to be welcomed [“the president is always right, carbon pollution is a myth, no ____ allowed (take your pick)”] they will bump into reality more and more often. I had a music teacher in elementary school who forbade students to listen to pop music, using a valiant but doomed-to-fail tactic of raising classical music lovers.

Tribes started as self-defending groups of wanderers. It didn't take long, though, for them to claim a special truth, for them to insulate themselves from an ever-changing world.

In a modern, connected era, successful tribes can’t thrive for long by cutting themselves off from the engines that drive our culture and economy. What they can do is engage with and attract members who aren’t there because the tribe is right and everyone else is wrong, but instead, the modern tribe quite simply says, “you are welcome here, we like you, people like us are part of a thing like this, we'll watch your back.” It turns out that this is enough.

• Email to a friend •

luni, 11 august 2014

Update on the Situation in Iraq

An Update on the Iraq Crisis

Beyond Search: Unifying PPC and SEO on the Display Network

Beyond Search: Unifying PPC and SEO on the Display Network

Using the display network

Research with remarketing

Creating your remarketing list

Setting up and going live

Getting the data

Seth's Blog : Understanding substitutes

Understanding substitutes

More Recent Articles

duminică, 10 august 2014

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Seth's Blog : Tribes and their perceived threats

Tribes and their perceived threats

More Recent Articles

Pagini

Persoane interesate

Arhivă blog

luni, 11 august 2014

Using the display network

Research with remarketing

Creating your remarketing list

Setting up and going live

Getting the data

duminică, 10 august 2014

Pagini

Persoane interesate

Arhivă blog

Subscribe to