If you haven’t heard of Toms Shoes, they are viral marketing to the young. At Squidoo.com is this article on their “One Day Without Shoes” campaign.
One thing they do is to publicize when customers customize the plain canvas versions of the $40 canvas casual shoe with their own artwork. They post pictures of custom shoes on their web site. It is now a genuine phenomena that can be seen on campuses around the country. There is such interest that third parties will customize your Toms Shoes for you.

This interview withToms Shoes founder, Blake …

At the conclusion of the Mock the Spending marathon there were surprises on both sides of the computer screen. Some folks were surprised to see young people recognize waste, inefficiency, and muddled thinking when they see it.

Believe it or not, almost all of the “Mock the Spending” videos are our attempt to explain some of the simple realities of free markets that have made the U.S. the envy of the world. These are summarized below. Also, see the table below for links to the references shown at the end of each video. You or your students can read from the original sources what makes a free economy so successful.
Competition and nothing else is what should run the economy. The economy has to be based on something. …

Take a look at the skillful arguments against central planning in the first two minutes of the clip below. Why don’t we see any Republican officeholder taking on such fundamental issues, like the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, with such clarity?

Film made in the Truman era explains what Republicans don’t.
Progressives will call the rest of this video over-the-top anti-communist scare tactics.  They may call those who made it intolerant sexist jingoists. This means that their arguments need not be answered with reasoned responses. There’s a name for responding to …

There are many time lapse videos that show the stars moving across the sky and I always wondered what it would look like if you were to see the stars stationary and the earth moving. Here’s a video that uses the stars as the anchor point and the result is the earth spinning wonderously beneath them.
This was created from the excellent video by Stephane Guisard and Jose Francisco Salgado, posted by Nicolas Bustos on YouTube. See their links for more information. There are more pictures from the European Southern Observatory’s …

Would you rather design rocket ships or waste treatment facilities? Don’t ask your adviser.
As a 30-something cubicle dweller at a large east-coast chemical manufacturer I once car-pooled with 4 chemical engineers in their 50s and 60s. Between them they had logged 100 man-years in “the golden handcuffs” at high-paying but not particularly satisfying jobs.
Listening to these guys who had financially rewarding but mind-numbingly tedious jobs during the commute was an unvarnished and frightening education. One morning the conversation steered toward

Do you know that historically it has taken 300 hours to develop one hour of computer based training content? Some of the best in the industry have brought this down to 30-60 hours. And with all this effort the “killer application” in computer based training never emerged.
But that was before Sal Khan recorded a few dozen YouTube videos on high school math for his cousins and his efforts grew into the single most successful implementation of computer-based training on the planet. Better than what MIT did 10 years ago.  Better …

I love C.S. Lewis’ masterful putdown of Sigmund Freud.
I have found that when he is talking off his own subject and on a subject I do know something about (namely, languages) he is very ignorant.
I’d like to extend that putdown to Robert Gibbs’ opinion of the threat level of one guy with a laptop.  When he talks about threat levels and laptops he is far outside of his area of expertise. If he had any experience in this area he would never make such an ill-advised public statement.

Not Afraid in …

I’d like to establish early on that you ignore what the Walt Disney Company has to say about crowd control at your peril. For example, in bidding to provide the event management for the U.S. Bicentennial celebration in 1976 Disney proposed to stage an evening that featured first fireworks, then a free concert, then a second free concert. They knew from experience in their theme parks that everyone would stay for the fireworks, but far fewer would stay for the first concert, and fewer still for …

Can you think of a TV or Movie clip that tells the folks in Washington what they can do with their
condescending arrogance? Contact us at BulletPeople.com
with your idea and we will:
- work with you on the message
- produce and distribute the video
- give you full credit
- promote and link any site or-channel you choose
Is the clip copyrighted? No problem.  If this isn’t fair use, we don’t know what is.
It’s simple:  if they’ve never held a real job, they are unable to represent us. Let’s send these professional politicians home.
And …

Mr. Moriyama worked with these guys for 30 years, but why listen to him?
Vignette from a diversity training class held in a 90 year old  industrial manufacturing facility:
Japanese-American chemical engineer Kichirou Moriyama (name changed) spent the last 30 years becoming a successful project manager and supervisor. His work requires him to direct the efforts of process operators who are typically high school graduates and union members who are between 30 to 60 years old. The operators are the ones who actually open the valves, add the catalysts, take the samples …

If you read in bed to quiet the random worries, recriminations, get rich quick schemes, and other idiocies that would otherwise keep you up for hours, it probably bothers your spouse who doesn’t. Try this: get a cheapie .mp3 player (8GB Sandisk refurb for $40, free shipping) then go to LibriVox.org and download some free books on tape. Kiss you spouse good night, set your player for 20 minute auto shutdown, and turn the light off. I hope it works for you.

The Korean girl group After School had a dance contest and so naturally it would make sense to set the dozens of entries to dance to the beat of The SOS Band’s “Take Your Time (Do It Right).” Throw in an Italian American soldier dancing to Thriller, quotes from Hugh Hewitt and Dick Morris and congressional phone numbers and here is the result:

It takes nerve to post dance videos to YouTube. You risk someone doing this with them.

C.S. Lewis was even cooler than I thought or so I concluded when I ran across this masterful put-down that I had never read before:

[Responding to a critic.] The Professor has his own explanation … he thinks that I am unconsciously motivated by the fact that I ‘stand to lose by social change’. And indeed it would be hard for me to welcome a change which might well consign me to a concentration camp. I might add that it would likewise be easy for the Professor to welcome a change …

I like using Google’s goog-411 info lookup number (800 466-4411) to find the local office of elected representatives. For example, call 800 466-4411 and say “Senator Blanche Lincoln” and “Little Rock, Arkansas” and they’ll connect you directly to the local office, not the office in D.C. I assume these guys hear from the local office so the more points of contact you can make with them the better. Many senators have offices in different large cities, so if you’ve got a long morning commute entertain yourself by using goog-411 to …