Author: Jonathan Schwarz

If I were Viacom, it would be worth a lot of money to me to get them to stop making fun of me this effectively:

…and not to get all political on you, but there’s a sense in which “paying them a lot of money to stop making fun of Viacom” is exactly what the Daily Show is. It brings a ton of very talented people together, and pays them to produce something which—while extremely insightful about the media—really can’t deal with something even deeper and more important: corporate power and commercial culture. Once the show’s back on the air, it won’t be featuring anything like this.

MORE: Steve Bodow, the Daily Show’s head writer, on the strike. And since he mentions Clifford Odets, here’s S.J. Perelman’s parody of Odets’ play “Waiting for Lefty,” “Waiting for Santy.”

Today kicks off IslamoHorowitzism Awareness Week, during which myself and other speakers from the Jon Schwarz Freedom Center will be speaking at college campuses to heighten awareness of the terrible dangers posed by IslamoHorowitzism.

I LOVE THE 80S: If you look closely, Horowitz seems to have a tin of chewing tobacco in his front pocket to go along with the boots and tshirt tucked into his jeans.

Everyone’s always said we’d eventually live in a nightmarish world of privatized corporate armies. But who will do the necessary management consulting in our hideous dystopia? Laura Rozen has the answer, here.

The name of the company is particularly hilarious. These are funny, funny people.

TITLE SWIPED: From “I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus”.

Scott Horton of Harper’s takes a look at recent events, including the rise in oil prices, pushback from the military, and shifting Israeli analysis, and concludes the Cheney roll-out on Iran may be sputtering.

This is from The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, in a chapter about the 1976-83 dirty war in Argentina.

I always knew there was something terrifying about shopping malls:

In 1987, a film crew was shooting in the basement of the Galerias Pacifico, one of Buenos Aires’ plushest downtown malls, and to their horror they stumbled on an abandoned torture center. It turned out that during the dictatorship, the First Army Corp hid some of its disappeared in the bowels of the mall; the dungeon walls still bore the desperate markings made by its long-dead prisoners: names, dates, pleas for help.

Today, Galerias Pacifico is the crown jewel of Buenos Aires’ shopping district, evidence of its arrival as a globalized consumer capital. Vaulted ceilings and lushly painted frescoes frame the vast array of brand-name stores, from Christian Dior to Ralph Lauren to Nike…

For Argentines who know their history, the mall stands as a chilling reminder that just as an older form of capitalist conquest was built on the mass graves of the country’s indigenous peoples, the Chicago School Project in Latin America was quite literally built on the secret torture camps where thousands of people who believed in a different country disappeared.

The Galerias Pacifico website is here. Who wants to be in charge of adding this to its wikipedia page?