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Social psychologists have known for decades that, if we reduce our sense of our own identity – a process called deindividuation – we are less likely to stick to social norms. For example, in the 1960s Leon Mann studied a nasty phenomenon called "suicide baiting" – when someone threatening to jump from a high building is encouraged to do so by bystanders. Mann found that people were more likely to do this if they were part of a large crowd, if the jumper was above the 7th floor, and if it was dark. These are all factors that allowed the observers to lose their own individuality.

"Such conditionality gives rise to a material uncertainty related to events or conditions, which may cast significant doubt on the group's ability to continue as a going concern," Paragon said. Scaling back Paragon's comments came as it reported record profits of £91m for the year to the end of September, up nearly 10% on the previous year.

His key finding: By thoroughly analysing the USA’s patriotic media coverage of the second War in Iraq (2003) and the contradicting Internet voices to be heard on the Mexican Zapatista revolt or the rise to fame of Arab news station Al Jazeera, Hafez illustrates how the media reinforces the process of globalisation – without itself becoming truly and fundamentally globalised.

Hafez’ intelligent and well-made book will be of interest to media or communication researchers, not least because the author manages to present his analysis in a highly readable way. After all, the recent scandal caused by the Mohammed caricatures published in Denmark and elsewhere in Europe would be a prime example for why the “dialogue between cultures” is ultimately bound to fail: for one thing, there are simply too many different notions of things such as the freedom of the press, or the freedom of speech and religion. According to Hafez, “What remains is, the attempt to demystify a great and grandiose idea by analysing it in a sober and unprejudiced way.”

Little of what we see on television, however, is quite what it seems. Williams had an incentive—the usual one in our republic, money—for overmastering his bashfulness on that occasion. The pharmaceutical corporation GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), through its public relations firm, Cohn & Wolfe, was paying him a still undisclosed sum, not to tout its antidepressant Paxil but simply to declare, to both Oprah and the press, "I've always been a shy person."

Thou Shalt Find It Impossible to Live Like the Bible Tells You to By Anneli Rufus, AlterNet. Posted November 17, 2007. Author A.J. Jacobs spent a year trying to follow the 600+ laws he found proscribed in the Bible, and concluded he's doomed to live in sin. Tools EMAIL PRINT 84 COMMENTS The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs (Simon & Schuster, 2007) Share and save this post: Also in Rights and Liberties Indicted! Barry Bonds Is a Perfect Distraction from Real Events Dave Zirin Striking Nurses in W. Va are Met With Intimidation, Harassment and Car Fires! Richard Negri Hillary Auditions to Be a Feminist John Wayne Susan Faludi Democracy Belongs in the Workplace, Not Just in the Voting Booth Omar Freilla Gay? U.S. House Says That's Okay Deb Price More stories by Anneli Rufus Rights and Liberties RSS Feed Main AlterNet RSS Feed Get AlterNet in your mailbox!   Advertisement border-style: solid; border-color: rgb(216, 216, 216); border-width: 0pt 1px 1px; p

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Goldman Sees Subprime Cutting $2 Trillion in Lending (Update5) By Kabir Chibber Nov. 16 (Bloomberg) -- The slump in global credit markets may force banks, brokerages and hedge funds to cut lending by $2 trillion and trigger a ``substantial recession'' in the U.S., according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

The big strategic questions concern energy security and the shift in the balance of power towards unattractive regimes, be they Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad’s Iran or the House of Saud’s Arabia.

The havoc on Wall Street following the collapse of the subprime-mortgage market boils down to a simple truth: for years, lots of very smart people took lots of very foolish risks, betting borrowed billions on dubious mortgage derivatives, and eventually the odds caught up with them. But behind that simple truth is a more surprising one: the financial whizzes made bad decisions in part because that’s what they were paid to do. Not literally, of course. The way that hedge-fund managers and investment-bank C.E.O.s get paid is supposed to make them perform better for the investors they serve. Hedge-fund managers, for instance, typically are paid “2 and 20”: they get two per cent of total assets as a management fee, and they keep twenty per cent of their investment gains (above some agreed-upon benchmark). Letting hedge-fund managers keep a chunk of their winnings gives them an incentive to do well for their clients: in theory, they get rich only if their clients do.

True, liberalism everywhere gestures towards the supposed horrors of an alternative political order in order to justify itself, but in the west these days it usually does so with power on its side. Muslim liberals, on the other hand, not only possess little power in their own right, they have also been unable thus far to stage the spectacular acts of sacrifice that mobilise people for a cause - acts of the kind that militants are so adept at performing. These sacrificial acts need not even be violent to be effective, as Gandhi and after him Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela demonstrated so well through the entire course of the 20th century. Perhaps liberals are incapable of staging such spectacles, given their devotion to protecting interests rather than sacrificing them, which is why liberalism has always come to power on the back of far more radical movements dedicated to religion, revolution or revenge.

Wow. Tony, thanks so much for taking the time to comment on my post!! I didn’t say so in the original posy but wanted to comment on the stones it took to pen an article that flies so much in the face of “revolutionary orthodoxy”. I agree with you that the situation of the republished articles is different from a straight up barter in as much as a barter arraignment is usually (always?) entered consciously. What you described in “Scarcity” is more of an “accidental” value transaction and so more difficult to quantify.

Morning Edition, July 15, 2004 · A British street artist known as Moose creates graffiti by cleaning dirt from sidewalks and tunnels -- sometimes for money when the images are used as advertising. But some authorities call it vandalism.

André Schiffrin How to pay for a free press In a media world with one eye on the bottom line and the other on the official line, it's getting harder to publish or broadcast anything that doesn't promise huge sales and attendant profits, and that doesn't say or show what is approved. But it's still possible.

Hushmail, a longtime provider of encrypted web-based email, markets itself by saying that "not even a Hushmail employee with access to our servers can read your encrypted e-mail, since each message is uniquely encoded before it leaves your computer." But it turns out that statement seems not to apply to individuals targeted by government agencies that are able to convince a Canadian court to serve a court order on the company.

In other words, we have come so far in the American postindustrial meritocracy that everyone has equal access to guilt-ridden feelings of fraudulence.

As the man who oversees about $20 billion of fixed-income investments at American Century Investments, we revisited with Keegan as part of today’s The Game column on the recurring foibles of Wall Street. Deal Journal: You were right back in April. You called it all. Why does Wall Street keep messing up? Jim Keegan: It’s too profitable to stop. It’s too profitable at the individual level, so the individuals interests are not necessarily aligned with the company’s interest. Pay me now and you pay for it later. There is no clawback. Employees can walk away with hundreds and tens of millions of dollars. And someone else will hire them to do it again.

US household assets are $54,000bn. Liquid net worth (cash, mutual funds, bonds etc) is $27,500bn. Household debt is $13,000bn. In other words, the US household balance sheet is looking great: $54,000bn in assets ($27,500bn liquid) to cover $13,000bn in debt. Heck, we're under-leveraged as a country right now and should probably take on more debt. …But what about the subprime mess? Isn't that going to bring the net worth of the US to $0 or even negative? Right now the entire subprime market is about $800bn and let's give full credit to the traders and media and say 50 per cent of that is at risk. So $400bn. Will $400bn worth of homes go into foreclosure? Of course not. Defaults are good for nobody. Things will and are getting restructured.

Prime Time for SubprimeWho is doing the best reporting on this scary story?

The foundation shelved the study, which it has not made public, after a group of local business people bought the paper, because it did not want to appear to be competing with the new owners, Ms. Rimel says. But she remains deeply concerned about the state of the nation's newspapers and has agreed to serve on the board of ProPublica, the new investigative-reporting project. "Everybody from the Founding Fathers on have said we need a free, robust press, and a market failure in journalism is a deep public-policy problem," she says.

Transformational Government, dressed in the language of consumerism, is what NO2ID calls “the database state” – management of citizens’ lives through centralised computer systems; pooling and cross-referencing information about people gathered on any pretext for any purpose, amounting to mass surveillance. Once your relations with the state preserved your privacy, being limited to relationships with bodies that were separate from each other. A single department was powerful, but it did not judge you on your whole life. Transformational Government changes that. You will have a single permanent record, and your identity managed (or determined) by the state. That will be held together by cross-referencing databases – which is what a National Identity Register is needed for. ‘ID cards’ are the concrete expression of this register, but strictly speaking are not necessary: numbering you and making constant reference to the central file will do.

Mixed Reviews for U.S. from Erdogan's Old Home

According to the accounts, the strategy for Telegraph Media Group is to make "news and comment under the Telegraph brand available to readers, listeners and viewers in the format most convenient to them". Those plans are "underpinned by the values of honesty, integrity and accuracy that are inherent in the Telegraph brand".