Flim-flam artists, captains of industry, Wall Street piranhas, impatient mobsters, spinmeisters and assorted mountebanks abound in Ultimate Severance, a highly satirical and imaginative novel that provides a public relations guidebook to the reality of spin and humbuggery in the 21st Century. With the end of the War on Terror through the accidental launch of new liten kleen nukes, a culture of euphoria, ethical and social impairment and calls for numerous peace dividends is again in fashion. This is clearly an environment of business opportunity for financially-bleeding Trotter Pugg Mitchell, a world PR giant, and its clients such as Old Masters Originals, a maker of limited edition reproduction art. And when the agency teams up with Mob Boss Joey Lasagna to abet dicey corporate megamergers, they provide Wall Street raiders with a new quick-fix ultimate severance package: an innovative Corporate Governance Program powered by Trotters new language of happiness. Cash flow gushes. Money is well laundered. Trotter President Marvin Runnymede sets up a European multi-use facility in a 500-year old chateau in Provence; plans to sell Instant PR Agency franchises to Third World countries, and hires has-been Greats to promote dubious products and ventures. But fortunes smile becomes a sardonic grin. So many stubborn CEOs undergo fatal retirements in colorful circumstances around the world that a powerful US Senator decides to advance his presidential ambitions with the usual TV-circus hearings. Well-cooked dishes of suspicion, buncombe and open doubt are served to the media. In the ensuing rush for strategic exits, winners and losers fake out, promote and wound each other in surprising ways; the faux rond wheels of justice grind and clank, and the language of happiness covers all.
But Wait! There's More! (maybe) is the story of how the great and glamorous American Advertising Magic Show became a $500 billion global business, doomed itself in an ocean of corporate funny money and now struggles amid mounting chaos to be born anew in the Internet-driven media revolution of the 21st Century. The authors, both veterans of Adland's Golden Age, describe and illuminate this important business evolution through the colorful history of the creation, growth and destruction of the world's seventh largest advertising agency from its amusing on-the-cuff founding through the mega-agency pig-out of the last 20 years. But Wait!, populated with a wide swath of habitués of the advertising and corporate world, tells through a fast moving narrative and a series of contemporary Conversations in famous and not-so famous Adland watering holes about what went well (great advertising), what went wrong (business judgment), and what went (advertising competence); addresses a major business upheaval that is profoundly affecting business, government and the core nature of mass communication; makes clear the need for a new business model, and explores eight possibilities (some good, some not). There are also "Lessons for the Model Ad Agency CEO" should any survive. Conclusion: Madison Avenue can be great again. (maybe)
News from historic Newport, RI: it is well known in some circles that high on the walls of the Redwood Library and Athenaeum--the oldest standing lending library in what became the United States--hang more than 75 portraits of notable early Americans painted by notable early American artists. What is not so well known is that occupants of the portraits in the hours before dawn often meet to talk with each other on topics of mutual interest such as war, aristocracy, patriotism, dynasty, second place and unforeseen circumstances. Each of the conversations involves two to four of 60 conversationalists. They include Presidents and would-be Presidents, colonial governors, merchant princes, Indian chiefs, doctors, lawyers, writers, military heroes and aristocrats among others. Fortunately for the curious, 21 of the conversations have been recorded. Transcripts of the recordings are published here for the first time"--Back cover.
If you believe that no matter how much lipstick you put on a pig, it is still a pig, then this book is for you. . Spinmeisters today are everywhere. They seek to befuddle you by polluting our language, gussying up and diddling down our everyday words, moving familiar signposts, changing the maps in our heads. Our words – the gold standard coins of rational thinking -- are being debased. Spin rots the mind. Continuing growth of spinspeak pushes us daily toward an Orwellian catastrophe: a mentally benumbed America; a manipulated society trying hopelessly to communicate using words with totally corrupted meanings. Spinspeak II: The Dictionary of Language Pollution is designed to help you fight this slimy tide of fog. The book contains: a history of spin; more than 1,100 current definitions of spinspeak in politics, business, government, academia, health care, the arts and everyday life; a technical glossary describing more than 80 infectious varieties of wordspin, lookspin and soundspin. Skeptical exposure is the solution wherever the fog of spinspeak roils communication. The mind you save could be your own.
This book is not a hipper-than-thou book like "Letter to a Christian Nation" - not exactly - although it can be said that this writer wrote for two University of Wisconsin student newspapers. He went to Woodstock (Illinois) and has been to Harvard (Illinois). He once held a very high position in Washington (Illinois, in a tree as a tree surgeon). This book is not designed to impress the left-wing nerds who now dominate "Education," but, first impressions aside, it is a scholarly work that has dug up some eye-opening facts about the roots of our culture of Americanism. The author is a semi-retired Yooper who writes a weekly column for www.RenewAmerica.us. "Qualifications?" While many pundits seem to think that "history" began with the Summer of Love, 1967, this author overheard more history in first grade in a one-roomed school in the 1940s than most people today hear in a lifetime. His main point is that "An attack on your ROOTS is an attack on YOU." Any old tree surgeon could tell you that, and one of the other main points of this book is that the "Youth Revolution" of the 1960s was a copy-cat image of the Nihilism movement in Russia in the 1860s (and "Generation XYZ" knows even less about the American Revolution than the Russian one). Books now take a back seat to the boob tube. Some people actually try to avoid the news like the plague, but as Francis Bacon once predicted. "Books will speak plain when counsellors blanche." This book is so "plain," so different, and so "definitive" that the author's long-range goal is to restore some balance to Big Education, or - whichever happens first - to get the ruler of Red China to swim across the Bering Strait with the Olympic torch between his teeth.
Fourteen nuclear submarines, the “boomers,” each armed with 24 Trident II missiles, each packing a total of more than 70 half-megaton nuclear warheads, cruise on rotation today somewhere beneath the surface of the world's oceans holding at bay America's most deadly enemies. The oceans where the Trident boomers are hidden surround the great World Island, homeland of Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and the countries that harbor the terrorist armies of Islam. The Trident Fleet Ballistic Missile System is the latest version of a powerful deterrent strategy evolved more than 50 years ago at the height of the Cold War to prevent a major nuclear exchange with the Communist Soviet Union. How that system was developed is the contemporary history told here of the difficult birth of the Polaris Fleet Ballistic Missile system in the 1950's. That development succeeded over enormous opposition, Byzantine bureaucracy, and much human stupidity. It provides many lessons for the 21st Century. Probably the most important: Deterrence, no matter how strong, works only when the enemy believes in its absolute credibility. As in the Old West, the bad guys are deterred only when they firmly believe that the sheriff not only is a very good shot but that he will not hesitate to pull the trigger. Many fear that in recent years that belief has increasingly eroded.
This book addresses the complex and multifaceted issues related to implementing Economic Development projects and revitalization projects in underserved and distressed communities in urban settings as well as in Secondary and Rural Markets. Understanding that economic development is crucial to the vitality of every community, this publication provides case studies across the Southeast where challenging development projects were successfully completed through cooperative partnerships between local units of government, residents, retailers, and the housing industry. Vision To Fulfillment is an educational tool that outlines a suggested formula as a sound approach to economic development efforts and serves as a guide for development projects. This publication includes a Model Operating and Procedures Manual for non profit development corporations and Public Private Partnerships. It also contains a glossary of finance, development, and real estate terms.
But Wait! There's More! (maybe) is the story of how the great and glamorous American Advertising Magic Show became a $500 billion global business, doomed itself in an ocean of corporate funny money and now struggles amid mounting chaos to be born anew in the Internet-driven media revolution of the 21st Century. The authors, both veterans of Adland's Golden Age, describe and illuminate this important business evolution through the colorful history of the creation, growth and destruction of the world's seventh largest advertising agency from its amusing on-the-cuff founding through the mega-agency pig-out of the last 20 years. But Wait!, populated with a wide swath of habitués of the advertising and corporate world, tells through a fast moving narrative and a series of contemporary Conversations in famous and not-so famous Adland watering holes about what went well (great advertising), what went wrong (business judgment), and what went (advertising competence); addresses a major business upheaval that is profoundly affecting business, government and the core nature of mass communication; makes clear the need for a new business model, and explores eight possibilities (some good, some not). There are also "Lessons for the Model Ad Agency CEO" should any survive. Conclusion: Madison Avenue can be great again. (maybe)
Music, Magazines & Mayhem Between 1994 and 1997, James Brown's loaded magazine became the the must-buy and must-be-in publication of the decade. It won every award going, year after year, and came to define not only its audience but also a generation. Bright, loud, funny, provocative, ambitious and careless, loaded was read from the barracks of Afghanistan to the England dressing room at Euro '96. It captured a hedonistic lifestyle of alcohol, cocaine and more. The last great hurrah before the end of the century. It was the biggest noise in the golden generation of magazine publishing, rocketing from zero to half a million sales in a matter of months. What MTV had been to the 80s, loaded was to the 90s. ANIMAL HOUSE follows James Brown's remarkable career from a high school drop-out fanzine writer with few qualifications to NME features editor aged 22, and loaded founder at 27. In between, his mother died in tragic circumstances and gradually his own drug and alcohol use began to take over. Loaded's unexpected success legitimised (and paid for) James's lifestyle, and it wasn't until he crashed and burned at GQ, and went through rehab, that any sense of perspective kicked in. Recuperating on the island of Mustique whilst plotting his return with Oz founder Felix Denis, James was asked by neighbour Lord Patrick Lichfield: "How on earth did you manage to sell so many magazines whilst taking so many drugs?" This book is his answer.
Juan de Solorzano Pereira (1575-1654) was a lawyer who spent eighteen years as a judge in Peru before returning to Spain to serve on the Councils of Castile and of the Indies. Considered one of the finest lawyers in Spain, his work, De Indiarum Jure, was the most sophisticated defense of the Spanish conquest of the Americas ever written, and he was widely cited in Europe and the Americas until the early nineteenth century. His work, and that of the Spanish School of international law theorists generally, is often seen as leading to Hugo Grotius and modern international law. However, as James Muldoon shows, the De Indiarum Jure represents the fullest development of a medieval Catholic theory of international order that provided an alternative to the Grotian theory.
Adaptive Stochastic Optimization Techniques with Applications provides a single, convenient source for state-of-the-art information on optimization techniques used to solve problems with adaptive, dynamic, and stochastic features. Presenting modern advances in static and dynamic optimization, decision analysis, intelligent systems, evolutionary pro
This publication makes a compelling case that in order to develop sustainable ecosystem policies, we must first understand the complexity and interdependency of species and habitats. Comparing forests in the Pacific Northwestern United States and Southeastern mainland of Australia, the authors show how easily observable species - trees and mammals - are part of an infrastructure that includes fungi, lichens and organisms invisible to the naked eye, such as microbes. This important book shows that forests are far more complicated than most of us might think, which means simplistic policies will not save them. Understanding the biophysical intricacies of our life support systems just might.
The famous German excavations between 1906 and 1908 of Elephantine Island in Egypt produced some of the most important Aramaic sources for understanding the history of Judeans and Arameans living in 5th century BCE Egypt under Persian occupation. Unknown to the world, many papyri fragments from those excavations remained uncatalogued in the Berlin Museum. In New Aramaic Papyri from Elephantine in Berlin James D. Moore edits the remaining legible Aramaic fragments, which belong to letters, contracts, and administrative texts. To view supplementary material from the volume go here.
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