A hard act to follow ... Rocco Siffredi in Anatomy of Hell   more »

Believing time is money to lose, we perceive our shortage of time as stressful.

Thus, our fight-or-flight instinct is engaged, and the regions of the brain we use to calmly and sensibly plan our time get switched off. We become fidgety, erratic and rash.

Tasks take longer. We make mistakes — which take still more time to iron out. Who among us has not been locked out of an apartment or lost a wallet when in a great hurry?

The perceived lack of time becomes real: We are not stressed because we have no time, but rather, we have no time because we are stressed.   more »

Politicians, academics, the media, and job seekers focus on downsizing, offshoring, and outsourcing as the main causes of unemployment and declining opportunities, even for college graduates.

They neglect, however, the impact of self-sourcing, a term I apply to the complex and relatively unnoticed effects of the radical reorganization of our working and non-working time due to the widespread use of information technologies.

In this essay, I will explore the significance of self-sourcing, which I define as the intensification of the process of transferring work from the sphere of production, where it is visible and paid, to the sphere of consumption, where it is invisible and unpaid.

This process is not new and it is commonly understood as self-service. It is my contention that self-sourcing signals a qualitative change in the forces and the relations of production, consumption, and circulation, which merits theoretical and empirical investigation.   more »

Social justice, as expounded by the left, usually involves a great deal of anti-capitalism and virulent opposition to American foreign policy, much like that voiced by the Rev. Wright.

Given that the last 20 years takes us back three Republican administrations, through a period of considerable public debate over U.S. foreign policy, it seems a stretch to claim the subject never came up in an activist’s church in Obama’s presence.

But fine. The offending social justice practitioner is silenced. In fact, the offending social justice practitioner has been taken out and, figuratively, shot. Obama’s pastor is no longer part of the campaign.

We are not to think the spiritual counselor of this candidate had anything substantive to do with the formation of the candidate’s thoughts, aside from informing him about God, AIDS, and social justice — whatever the definition of the latter might be. Stating actual beliefs in strong terms … forbidden.   more »

Bush is to meet the chairman of the Federal Reserve Paul Bernanke and the US treasury secretary Henry Paulson today. Paulson said: "The government is prepared to do what it takes to maintain the stability of our financial system. That's our priority."

To Democrats, though, Bush is not doing enough to help. "We're in the most serious economic problem we've been in in a very long time. The president's hands-off attitude is reminiscent of Herbert Hoover in 1929, in 1930," said Senator Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat.

The Bear Stearns chief executive, Alan Schwarz, said: "The past week has been an incredibly difficult time. This transaction represents the best outcome for all of our constituencies based upon the current circumstances."

Before the credit crunch set in, the 85-year-old bank had a market capitalisation of more than $140bn. But an evaporation in confidence culminated in a bank run by clients last week.   more »