Brief Notices II

There is an excellent and detailed piece by Corine Hegland at National Journal about the global spores of the “smashed” Al-Qaeda organization.

The New Statesman has a well-written book review by Terry Eagleton that tackles the history and meaning of fascism, “an anti-political kind of politics, which elevates national unity over class distinctions, gut prejudice over ideological debate, and race over reason.”

In the Guardian Online, I found this fascinating piece about a hypothesis suggesting that each species has a physical basis in the chromosomes tending to extinction.

I love marketing. Marketing is the high art of industrialism. It is as full of creativity and bullshit as movies or fine art. The marketing of cosmetics in a very specific niche is discussed at length in this informative article by Dale Buss at brandchannel.com.

No marketing is benign, of course; it all serves a specific focus. Data-mining the information you give to a company (both consciously and unconsciously) so that the Corporation can serve you "one on one" is perhaps the scariest of modern marketing techniques. It may seem harmless when a racetrack is trying to get you to lay more bets, but exactly this kind of over-weening tracking system is what makes the Patriot Act so frightening.