Michael B. Duff

Just awesome.

"Jesus, so simple. Nothing else needs to be said. For one brief bloody minute, advertising serves a purpose in the world."

Brilliant. I'm a sucker for this kind of "broad new category" stuff.

I try to avoid the Rosensphere in my daily links, but this bit is just too brilliant. Starts out with a discussion of media trust, makes some awesome points about Dan Rather and the National Guard memos and winds up with a devastating point about the power of Internet forwarding and distributed fact checking.

Yelvington thinks Facebook is going to release an Android phone with their brand name on it. How well would that actually sell? How much is the Facebook brand really worth? Most people I know view it as a necessary evil. I think it all comes down to how good the hardware is.

Last week we pointed out that Jefferies group, one of the last few remaining non-BHC broker-dealers, has just experienced its single most disastrous drop in trading volumes, as its principal trading revenues plunged by 80% QoQ. This is merely confirmation of what we have been warning ever since we started highlighting the series of 20 consecutive outflows from domestic equity funds: banks will soon be forced to lay off thousands of people as the primary revenue driver for the bulk of Wall Street firms – stock volumes – is now gone. BofA and RBS have already confirmed they are letting people go. Next up: the electronic trading giants such as ITG, Knight and Schwab. And it will only get worse. As the FT reports, September trading volumes are already 8% below August's, which in turn was the lowest in 3 years! Of course, the Fed is fully confident that if the DJIA ends September at 11,000, investor confidence in stocks will return. We have one word for that – LOL.

The article detailed the carpet's many uses – military, as a means of aerial attack; commercial, as a vehicle for the transport of goods; and cultural, as a device to help readers in the library at Alexandria reach the high books – and explained how they were finally wiped out during the Mongol invasion of Central Asia.

The plane crash killed 14 people (11 office workers and the three crewmen) plus injured 26 others. Though the integrity of the Empire State Building was not affected, the cost of the damage done by the crash was $1 million.