Pr Quotes

The purpose of influence is to "speak up for those who have no influence." (Pr.31:8) It's not about you.

A martyr's just a casualty with really good PR.

No amount of expertly choreographed PR could prevail, in the end, against Armageddon. It strolled over the barricades and took its pleasure.

Do you know what the difference is between PR and advertising? Advertising is when you say how great you are. PR is when other people say how great you are. PR is better.

Do you really think you'd win a PR war against a bunch of committed librarians?' He thought about this, but he knew I was right. The libraries were a treasured institution and so central to everyday life that government and commerce rarely did anything that might upset them.Some say they were more powerful than the military, or, if not, they were certainly quieter. As they say: Don't mess with librarians. Only they use a stronger word than 'mess'...

The world's Redeemer was treated as we deserve to be treated, in order that we might be treated as he deserved to be treated. He came to our world and took our sins upon his own divine soul that we might receive his imputed righteousness. He was condemned for our sins, in which he had no share, that we might be justified by his righteousness, in which we had no share. The world's Redeemer gave himself for us. Who was he? The Majesty of heaven, pouring out his blood upon the altar of justice for the sins of guilty man. We should know our relationship to Christ and his relationship to us. The Review and Harold 3-21-91 PR-06

Please always see the bright side of everything.

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some hire good PR.

o pr 　gress verily thou art m 　mentous superc 　lossal hyperpr 　digious etc i kn 　w

Yet for some reason, we as a society have collectively decided it’s better to have millions of human beings spending years of their lives pretending to type into spreadsheets or preparing mind maps for PR meetings than freeing them to knit sweaters, play with their dogs, start a garage band, experiment with new recipes, or sit in cafés arguing about politics, and gossiping about their friends’ complex polyamorous love affairs.

If you've taken a photo with your camera's pop-up flash, you're probably wondering how camera manufacturers list pop-up flash as a feature and keep a straight face. It's probably because the term "pop-up flash" is actually a marketing phrase dreamed up by a high-powered PR agency, because its original, more descriptive, and more accurate name is actually "the ugly-maker.

Networking isn't how many people you know, it's how many people know you.

Advertising, Marketing, PR can get more people to buy your book. Only great writing can get more people to love it.

Just as ceremonial fasting was a legitimate means for getting God's attention (Mt 6:16-18; Ac 13:2-3; 14:23), the casting of lots was a legitimate means for inviting God to intercede on a matter. (Pr 18:18) It was not expected that God should intervene every time (1Sam 28:6), but the ceremonial casting of lots was an invitation for God to participate in the final decision.

The Shulamite lives by a different set of values. One of the most horrible frauds perpetrated on western couples is 'trust your feelings' or 'follow your heart.' Solomon's family must never be left to whims. A wise Shulamite does not make life decisions based on feelings, alone. She takes God's point-of-view: 'He that trusteth in his own heart is a fool; But whoso walketh wisely, he shall be delivered.' --Pr 28:26 For young couples, a hard lesson to learn is: Their hearts will lie to them. pg 3

Media was once about protecting a name; on the web it is about building one.

No controversy, no PR.

A martyr's just a casualty with really good PR. I'd rather be a living coward any day.

Someone has broken your heart. I knew there was something about you. That's it, isn't it?' A little," Sara said, suddenly self-conscious. I'm sorry.' It happens." She shrugged, straining for nonchalance. Maybe,' he said. 'But if it's your destiny, what can you do but accept it.

If no one had an army, armies would not be needed. But the same can be said of most lobbyists, PR specialists, telemarketers, and corporate lawyers. Also, like literal goons, they have a largely negative impact on society. I think almost anyone would concur that, were all telemarketers to disappear, the world would be a better place.

Go ahead,” I told him. “Go see your admirers. Sign some autographs. It’s good PR for the House.” He slid me a glance, smiled. “Not concerned one of the fans will try to sweep me away with words of love?” “Oh, they’ll try to sweep,” I said. “But I have no worries you’ll come back to me.” His smile was meltingly handsome. “Because I love you without measure?” “Of course,” I said. Also, I had the car keys.

Circles were traditionally vicious. Catherine suspected other shapes had teeth too, but better PR.

The idealized market was supposed to deliver ‘friction free’ exchanges, in which the desires of consumers would be met directly, without the need for intervention or mediation by regulatory agencies. Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labor which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy. What we have is not a direct comparison of workers’ performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short-circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself. Indeed, an anthropological study of local government in Britain argues that ‘More effort goes into ensuring that a local authority’s services are represented correctly than goes into actually improving those services’. This reversal of priorities is one of the hallmarks of a system which can be characterized without hyperbole as ‘market Stalinism’. What late capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement. […] It would be a mistake to regard this market Stalinism as some deviation from the ‘true spirit’ of capitalism. On the contrary, it would be better to say that an essential dimension of Stalinism was inhibited by its association with a social project like socialism and can only emerge in a late capitalist culture in which images acquire an autonomous force. The way value is generated on the stock exchange depends of course less on what a company ‘really does’, and more on perceptions of, and beliefs about, its (future) performance. In capitalism, that is to say, all that is solid melts into PR, and late capitalism is defined at least as much by this ubiquitous tendency towards PR-production as it is by the imposition of market mechanisms.

When Benedict dies, he will have the pleasure of standing before whatever furious God he believes in, to answer for how it was that he knew for undeniable fact that one -- if not dozens -- of his priests repeatedly molested, abused and/or raped young children for decades, and he did nothing to stop it. How much does God believe the pope's argument that Vatican PR trumps pedophilia? Joe Ratzinger, 82, will soon find out.

On the day I turn seventeen, there is a meeting to decide whether I should have the baby or if sneaking me to a clinic for an abortion is worth the PR risk. I am not invited, which is just as well, since my being there might imply that I have some choice in the matter and I know that I have none.

Is Jacob paying you for all the P.R., or are you a volunteer?

They need to get a good PR guy.” “What’s a PR guy?” “They’re kind of like the old Greek sophists who played with words until you believed up was down. PR guys get paid to make people believe that a pile of shit is an investment in soil fertility. Professional liars.” “Ah!” Manannan’s expression lit with comprehension. “They are politicians?” “No, they’re smarter and less pretty. They advise politicians.

Kita kan bukan PR mereka! Lagi pula ini era kapitalis, pujian dan promosi ada harganya

Back in the Aerie she popped her lips percussively as she examined her booty. 'P-ilfering P-adgett's P-ockets Pr-oduces P-ossible P-ath to... to—' Well, clues and shit.

Beauty is the PR campaign of the soul.

There is a time and a place for nice, but there’s a time and a place for ‘fuck you’ as well.  And in this movement we need both.  Nice is good for outreach.  Nice is good for PR.  Nice is good for winning converts and softening our image.  But ‘fuck you’ has its uses, too.  ‘Fuck you’ is good for rallying the troops.  ‘Fuck you’ is good for boiling the blood.  ‘Fuck you’ is good for reminding people why they got active about atheism in the first place.  And what’s more, when people are trying to shove their religion into your schools, your government and your life, ‘fuck you’ is not only useful, it’s the only correct response.

O livro é um mudo que fala, um surdo que responde, um cego que guia, um morto que vive.

To understand the cautious respect for the dead that pervades the modern anatomy lab, it helps to understand the extreme lack of it that pervades the field’s history. Few sciences are as rooted in shame, infamy, and bad PR as human anatomy.

Some PR is about getting information about a great product or thingy out to the people who would enjoy it, while other PR is about creating a web of lies that conceals the fact that your company harnesses the energy produced by rape and uses it to make a chemical that kills forests for fun. Either way, you're going to need it.

Serás feliz si amas y perdonas, porque también tú serás amado y perdonado. No puedes perdonar sin amar, porque tu perdón nunca superará la medida de tu amor. Y por último, es imposible amar y perdonar a otros sin amarte y perdonarte a ti mismo primero.

And when we get arrested, and Leah has to deal with the PR nightmare, it will make this night of hell worthwhile," Ryan offered, rolling his eyes.

Mandy (lentil eating, lesbian, long socks) in PR

people [who are] thinking about things other than making the best product, never make the best product.

wE'rE aLL DePrEsSeD aNd sUiCiDaL, wE'rE jUsT aLL iNdENiAL

War of words. We are influenced by the western media. But is what we hear the truth or just PR campaigns for governments?

An entrepreneur with strong network makes money even when he is asleep.

Old Testament, New Testament, it was just words with a little w, written by zealots as PR for their new cult founded in the memory of a dead carpenter.

Just because someone sees or hears pr feels something other folks can't, doesn't mean they're crazy. A bling man don't call us crazy for seeing.

Few sciences are as rooted in shame, infamy, and bad PR as human anatomy. The troubles began in Alexandrian Egypt, circa 300 B.C. King Ptolemy I was the first leader to deem it a-okay for medical types to cut open the dead for the purpose of figuring out how bodies work.

Once upon a time, there was a beautiful PR princess named Giana,” he said, showing the stick figure with glasses and curly hair with a headpiece on. He licked his thumb and flipped the page. “And a dumb safety named Clay.” The crowd laughed at the next drawing, which was a

PR guys get paid to make people believe that a pile of shit is an investment in soil fertility. Professional liars.” “Ah!” Manannan’s expression lit with comprehension. “They are politicians?

We fly to beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature. — Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: The conduct of life. (Ams Pr Inc June 2004) Originally published 1841.

It’s super-important to have a strong social media presence, and Jane’s always going, When interviewers ask you about your Twitter, say you love reaching out directly to your fans, and I’m like, I don’t even know how to use Twitter or what the password is because you disabled my laptop’s wireless and only let me go on the Internet to do homework research or email Nadine assignments, and she says, I’m doing you a big favor, it’s for nobodies who want to pretend like they’re famous and for self-promoting hacks without PR machines, and adults act like teenagers passing notes and everyone’s IQ drops thirty points on it.

It’s like you said, it’s all about P.R. these days. Brand management. Social networking. The corporatization of our own experience. We’re all our very own communications directors. But what a load of bollocks it all is when you’re faced by something like this.

It is not brains or intelligence that is needed to cope with the problems with Plato and Aristotle and all of their successors to the present have failed to confront. What is needed is a readiness to undervalue the world altogether. This is only possible for a Christian... All technologies and all cultures, ancient and modern, are part of our immediate expanse. There is hope in this diversity since it creates vast new possibilities of detachment and amusement at human gullibility and self-deception. There is no harm in reminding ourselves from time to time that the "Prince of this World" is a great P.R. man, a great salesman of new hardware and software, a great electric engineer, and a great master of the media. It is his master stroke to be not only environmental but invisible for the environmental is invincibly persuasive when ignored.

Jeffco had a problem. Before Eric and Dylan shot themselves, officers had discovered files on the boys. The cops had twelve pages from Eric’s Web site, spewing hate and threatening to kill. For detectives, a written confession, discovered before the killers were captured, was a big break. It certainly simplified the search warrant. But for commanders, a public confession, which they had sat on since 1997—that could be a PR disaster.

We’re the blue line, sir, and that will resonate on-screen. But Peabody is the face, the very human element. And she would symbolize who we are, contrast sharply against what Renee Oberman is.” He rubbed his chin, and his lips curved a little above his fingers. “You can carve out an angle like that, an excellent angle, and believe the idea of your ass in the chair someday down the road is terrifying?” He waved off her response before she could make it. “I should have thought of it myself, should have thought it through exactly that way. I’ll contact Furst.” Something inside her unknotted. “Thank you, sir.” “Don’t thank me. I’m wondering why I haven’t assigned you to Media and PR.” “Because, sir, I hope I’ve done nothing to deserve that kind of punishment.

Memory must have a good PR agent, because in reality, as an instrument of optical precision, it seems to me little better than a fairground kaleidoscope. To reconstruct an experience on the basis of images stored in our brains at times borders on hallucination. We do not recover the past, we re-create it: an act of dramaturgy if ever there was one. Memory edits things, colors them, mixes cement with the rainbow, does whatever’s needed to make the story work.

[Beware of] the fallacy of misplaced concreteness [mistaking an abstraction for concrete reality, for actuality] In the inescapable flux, there is something that abides; in the overwhelming permanence, there is an element that escapes into flux. Permanence can be snatched only out of flux; and the passing moment can find its adequate intensity only by its submission to permanence. Error is the price we pay for progress. In the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is that it adds to interest. Creativity is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact. It is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity. The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, "Seek simplicity and distrust it." It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious. [From various of Whitehead's books, not only PR]

Sor-ry,” said Cassie, rolling her eyes and grinning at Damien. He grinned back, bonding away. I was taking a vague, unjustifiable dislike to Damien. I could see exactly why Hunt had assigned him to give the site tours—he was a PR dream, all blue eyes and diffidence—but I have never liked adorable, helpless men. I suppose it’s the same reaction Cassie has to those baby-voiced, easily impressed girls whom men always want to protect: a mixture of distaste, cynicism and envy.

how do you get, maintain, and multiply attention in a scalable and efficient way?

Well, that's just what I'm talking about. All Maslow would need to do is rub against your legs and start purring, and you'd immediately forget all this Hitler/Card nonsense. No one does PR like a cat. Why do you think I'm so desperate to hire him?

You only ever have three things: 1) your self, wellbeing and mindset 2) Your life network, resources and resourcefulness 3) Your reputation and goodwill. Treasure and tend the first. Value, support and build the second. And mindfully, wisely ensure that the third (your life current and savings account) is always in credit.

It is a testament to the success of cartels in laundering their images that millions of consumers buy drugs each year without giving a moment’s thought to the fact that they are funding unimaginable suffering

Приех трептенето на миглите ти като конституция. Диханието ти като доктрина. Това беше важно за мен. Като първа необходимост. Като петия сезон. Като прозорец в стая. Като бял лебед в лебедово езеро. Като естетика, на която мога да остана верен. Като единствената възможност да покажа среден пръст на света. Ексклузивна възможност да се усмихна. Никога не съм се смял така. С пълно гърло. С всички зъби. Аз– един на последно раздаване. Аз – PR на аутизма и Цветаева. Аз – дистрибутор на винилово щастие. Аз – юпи от XVIII век... За какво ти бях изобщо.

Truth-telling is difficult because the varieties of untruth are so many and so well disguised. Lies are hard to identify when they come in the form of apparently innocuous imprecision, socially acceptable slippage, hyperbole masquerading as enthusiasm, or well-placed propaganda. These forms of falsehood are so common, and even so normal, in media-saturated, corporately controlled culture that truth often looks pale, understated, alarmist, rude, or indecisive by comparison. Flannery O’Connor’s much-quoted line ‘You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd’ has a certain prophetic force in the face of more and more commonly accepted facsimiles of truth - from PR to advertising claims to propaganda masquerading as news.

First Google built a superior product. Then it built excitement by making it invite-only. And by steadily increasing the number of invites allowed to its existing user base, Gmail spread from person to person until it became the most popular, and in many ways the best, free e-mail service. Enormous

The explosion of paperwork, in turn, is a direct result of the introduction of corporate management techniques, which are always justified as ways of increasing efficiency, by introducing competition at every level. What these management techniques invariably end up meaning in practice is that everyone winds up spending most of their time trying to sell each other things: grant proposals; book proposals; assessments of our students’ job and grant applications; assessments of our colleagues; prospectuses for new interdisciplinary majors, institutes, conference workshops, and universities themselves, which have now become brands to be marketed to prospective students or contributors. Marketing and PR thus come to engulf every aspect of university life.

The goal - at least the way I think about entrepreneurship - is you realize one day that you can't really work anyone else. You have to start your own thing. It almost doesn't matter what the thing is. We had six different business plan changes, and then the last one was PayPal. If that one didn't work out, if we still had the money and the people, obviously we would not have given up. We would have iterated on the business model and done something else. I don't think there was ever clarity as to who we were until we knew it was working. By then, we'd figured out our PR pitch and told everyone what we do and who we are. But between the founding and the actual PayPal, it was just like this tug-of-war where it was like, "We're trying this, this week." Every week you go to investors and say, "We're doing this, exactly this. We're really focused. We're going to be huge." The next week you're like, "That was a lie.

The closest that most of us come to a direct experience of the centerlessness of capitalism is an encounter with the call center. As a consumer in late capitalism, you increasingly exist in two, distinct realities: the one in which the services are provided without hitch, and another reality entirely, the crazed Kafkaesque labyrinth of call centers, a world without memory, where cause and effect connect together in mysterious, unfathomable ways, where it is a miracle that anything ever happens, and you lose hope of ever passing back over to the other side, where things seem to function smoothly. What exemplifies the failure of the neoliberal world to live up to its own PR better than the call center? Even so, the universality of bad experiences with call centers does nothing to unsettle the operating assumption that capitalism is inherently efficient, as if the problems with call centers weren’t the systemic consequences of a logic of Capital which means organizations are so fixated on making profits that they can’t actually sell you anything. The call center experience distils the political phenomenology of late capitalism: the boredom and frustration punctuated by cheerily piped PR, the repeating of the same dreary details many times to different poorly trained and badly informed operatives, the building rage that must remain impotent because it can have no legitimate object, since – as is very quickly clear to the caller –there is no-one who knows, and no-one who could do anything even if they could. Anger can only be a matter of venting; it is aggression in a vacuum, directed at someone who is a fellow victim of the system but with whom there is no possibility of communality. Just as the anger has no proper object, it will have no effect. In this experience of a system that is unresponsive, impersonal, centerless, abstract and fragmentary, you are as close as you can be to confronting the artificial stupidity of Capital in itself. Call center angst is one more illustration of the way that Kafka is poorly understood as exclusively a writer on totalitarianism; a decentralized, market Stalinist bureaucracy is far more Kafkaesque than one in which there is a central authority. Read, for instance, the bleak farce of K’s encounter with the telephone system in the Castle, and it is hard not to see it as uncannily prophetic of the call center experience.

As 1968 began to ebb into 1969, however, and as "anticlimax" began to become a real word in my lexicon, another term began to obtrude itself. People began to intone the words "The Personal is The Political." At the instant I first heard this deadly expression, I knew as one does from the utterance of any sinister bullshit that it was - cliché is arguably forgiven here - very bad news. From now on it would be enough to be a member of a sex or gender, or epidermal subdivision, or even erotic "preference," to qualify as a revolutionary. In order to begin a speech or ask a question from the floor, all that would be necessary by way of preface would be the words: "Speaking as a..." The could follow any self-loving description. I will have to say this much for the old "hard" Left: we earned our claim to speak and intervene by right of experience and sacrifice and work. It would never have done for any of us to stand up and say that our sex or sexuality pr pigmentation or disability were qualifications in themselves. There are many ways of dating the moment when The Left lost - or I would prefer to say, discarded its moral advantage, but this was the first time that I was to see the sellout conducted so cheaply.

You are Younique! Build your unicity, live your uniquity and unleash your uniqueness.

Barack Obama is the most successful new marketer in history. Study his campaign so that you can adapt the ideas for your business.

... coding and technical chops are now an essential part of being a great marketer. Growth hackers are a hybrid of marketer and coder...

The end goal of every growth hacker is to build a self-perpetuating marketing machine that reaches millions by itself.

When people come to you online, they are not looking for TV commercials. They are looking for information to help them make a decision.

Only if we understand our past, can we move forward to a brighter future.

Ámate a ti mismo y de esa forma podrás amar a otros. Ama tus sueños, para poder construir con ellos un mundo cálido y hermoso, lleno de sonrisas y abrazos.

«Tanto si piensas que vas a triunfar como si crees que te espera el fracaso, acertarás».

There is happiness when you are with your best friend no matter whether your friend belongs to another sect, or region; your souls are from one place.

pr.1.7 The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge: but fools despise wisdom and instruction.†

Who hath woe? who hath sorrow? who hath contentions? who hath babbling? who hath wounds without cause? who hath redness of eyes? pr.23.30 They that tarry long at the wine; they that go to seek mixed wine. pr.23.31 Look not thou upon the wine when it is red, when it giveth his colour in the cup, when it moveth itself aright. pr.23.32 At the last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder.† pr.23.33 Thine eyes shall behold strange women, and thine heart shall utter perverse things. pr.23.34 Yea, thou shalt be as he that lieth down in the midst of the sea, or as he that lieth upon the top of a mast.† pr.23.35 They have stricken me, shalt thou say, and I was not sick; they have beaten me, and I felt it not: when shall I awake? I will seek it yet again.

How much time, after this realization sank in and spread among consumers (mostly via phone, interestingly), would any micro-econometrist expect to need to pass before high-tech visual videophony was mostly abandoned, then, a return to good old telephoning not only dictated by common consumer sense but actually after a while culturally approved as a kind of chic integrity, not Ludditism but a kind of retrograde transcendence of sci-fi-ish high-tech for its own sake, a transcendence of the vanity and the slavery to high-tech fashion that people view as so unattractive in one another. In other words a return to aural-only telephony became, at the closed curve’s end, a kind of status-symbol of anti-vanity, such that only callers utterly lacking in self-awareness continued to use videophony and Tableaux, to say nothing of masks, and these tacky facsimile-using people became ironic cultural symbols of tacky vain slavery to corporate PR and high-tech novelty, became the Subsidized Era’s tacky equivalents of people with leisure suits, black velvet paintings, sweater-vests for their poodles, electric zirconium jewelry, NoCoat Lin-guaScrapers, and c.

From the many years he’d spent in the Omega Agency, the special agent understood there were no obvious good guys or bad guys on the world stage. Contrary to the PR spin generated within Congress and spoon-fed to the well-meaning American public by a gullible or at least malleable media, Kentbridge also knew there were no clear sides anymore. As he often told the orphans, patriotism was a useless emotion because the modern world was no longer shaped by countries or governments. In fact, nations had long since been superseded by the vast spider web of elite conspirators spanning the globe.

The Buddha’s signature pronouncement—“Life is suffering”—is the source of a major misunderstanding, and by extension, a major PR problem. It makes Buddhism seem supremely dour. Turns out, though, it’s all the result of a translation error. The Pali word dukkha doesn’t actually mean “suffering.” There’s no perfect word in English, but it’s closer to “unsatisfying” or “stressful.” When the Buddha coined his famous phrase, he wasn’t saying that all of life is like being chained to a rock and having crows peck out your innards. What he really meant was something like, “Everything in the world is ultimately unsatisfying and unreliable because it won’t last.

Good riddance, you might imagine. But the worries about operator-less elevators were quite similar to the concerns we hear today about driverless cars. In fact, I learned something surprising when I was invited to speak to the Otis Elevator Company in Connecticut in 2006. The technology for automatic elevators had existed since 1900, but people were too uncomfortable to ride in one without an operator. It took the 1945 strike and a huge industry PR push to change people’s minds,

Jonah Berger, a social scientist well-known for his studies of virality, explains that publicness is one of the most crucial factors in driving something’s spread. As he writes in his book Contagious, “Making things more observable makes them easier to imitate, which makes them more likely to become popular. . . . We need to design products and initiatives that advertise themselves and create behavioral residue that sticks around even after people have bought the product or espoused the idea.

--From "A Familiar Preface", 1912(PR,pp,19-20）： “At a time when nothing which is not revolutionary in some way or other can expect to attract much attention I have not been revolutionary in my writings. The revolutionary spirit is mighty convenient in this, that it frees one from all scruples as regards ideas. Its hard, absolute optimism is repulsive to my mind by the menace of fanaticism and intolerance it contains. No doubt one should smile at these things;but, imperfect Esthete, I am no better Philosopher.

Are individuals entitled to the truth as a basic human right? Or is it acceptable to disguise facts if they ultimately do more harm than good? In the modern day, where we’re exposed to government cover-ups and ingenuous PR campaigns from mega corporations, most people believe the truth to be an ultimate good. How can a lie be wholesome? How can deceit be kind? But I would posit this is one of the few instances where deception would have no victims. Perhaps you would not be in the wrong to protect others from this.

A growth hacker is someone who has thrown out the playbook of traditional marketing and replaced it with only what is testable, trackable, and scalable. Their tools are e-mails, pay-per-click ads, blogs, and platform APIs instead of commercials, publicity, and money.

As for the public, the PR man, like the advertising expert and others who deal with people in the lump, including a number of would-be-statesmen and redeemers-at-large, conceive of that body as composed of non-ideographic units which are to be regarded not as ourselves but as, ultimately, gadgets of electrochemical circuitry operated by a push-button system of remote control. In fact, in dealing with the public in a purely technological society, the very notion of self is bypassed by various appeals to an undifferentiated unconscious, such appeals often having little or no relation to the vendible object or idea; in this connection history gives us to contemplate the fact that the psychologist J.B. Watson, the founder of American behaviorism, wound up in the advertising business. So history may become parable.

Take this. When you’re ready, I want to put it on your finger. I want you to meet my son. I want you to let me bring you into my world – because I need you there. The media crap is just PR. Piece of cake for you, trust me. There are a hundred people ready to help us nail it. Let me help you rebuild your faith, because that’s who you are, and I love who you are. ‘Remember last fall, when you needed to be reckless, and I told you to use me? Well, now, it’s time to be fearless. I can’t promise that you won’t be hurt again, because life can suck. And, sometimes, it hurts like hell. I’m asking you to have faith in one thing, for now: the fact that when we’re alone, I’m just Reid, and you’re just Dori, and we’re going to love each other for the rest of our lives.’ She’s staring at me, the velvet-covered box clutched in her hand. I lean forward and kiss her, tasting her tears or my own, I don’t know which. ‘Come to me when you’re ready to be fearless. Unless you can look me in the eye right now and tell me you don’t love me.’ Lower lip trembling, she says nothing, and I kiss her again before I leave.

This is a man who has shown a complete disregard for human life, cynicism and hypocrisy, and a willingness to use war and the deaths of thousands of Russian soldiers and innocent civilians as a PR instrument in his election campaign. This is a man who raised a toast on the anniversary of Stalin’s birth, had the plaque commemorating former KGB head Yury Andropov restored to its place on the wall of the Lubyanka—Federal Security Service headquarters—and dreams of seeing the statue of butcher Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police, stand once again in the center of Moscow.

He blamed television, movies, and books for his love of ghosts. It was a fascination that’s been with him since his youth. He always loved watching or reading anything that had to do with ghosts and haunted locations, especially historic sites like New Orleans, Salem, Tombstone, Gettysburg, and Old San Juan.

We must sober up and admit that too many of the Republicans and the Democrats have played us, lied to us and stolen from us, while the getaway car was driven by the media. A media that can no longer claim with a straight face the role of journalist. Journalists print the things the powerful don’t want printed. What they do is public relations. Those PR firms will not print the truth about the average American who finds himself concerned with the direction of our country today. So we must. We are not violent. We are not racist. We are not anti immigrant. We are not anti-government. And we will not be silent anymore.

It is an act of love to listen to a sad story someone is telling about themselves and then help them spin it so it’s maybe a little less sad and a little more meaningful. It can be both simple and profound to step up and be someone’s emotional PR rep. As much as you might want to, you can’t fix someone else’s problems for them and it doesn’t make anyone feel better to hear that their situation isn’t as bad as it seems, so resist the misguided impulse to recast their reality for them that way. But just listening without judgment and reframing their narrative with compassion is one of the kindest things you can do for your children, your spouse, and especially yourself.

We do need these two words, “public” and “relations”—and, of course, those words are still extremely important. However, those 3 billion people who are social media users are all dealing with “relations,” and everything has become “public”! With social media, everything has been “public” for quite a while now; there is nothing “nonpublic” anymore.

You returned,” the prince whispered. “Does the offer still stand, Pr—Merrick? Do you still want me?” His voice quivered as he waited, hoped. “So much, I do not feel comfortable in my own skin. It is as if you lit a fire within me that I cannot control…and I don’t want to, Cassius.” Cassius yearned to fall to his knees in gratitude. He stepped farther inside as Merrick stood. Cassius closed the door, clicking the lock into place behind him. When the prince reached him, his arm rose and he fingered Cas’s hair, which was loose around his face. He never allowed himself to wear his hair down outside his chamber, and he couldn’t believe he had forgotten. “Forgive me… I…” “There is nothing to forgive. You are…breathtaking, Cassius.” “Cas. If I am to call you Merrick when we are alone, you can call me Cas if you’d like

I don’t fecking believe it,” Uncle Coilin grumbled. “I could put up with the French, the Italians, the Americans, the Chinese, the Russians.” He continued a list that seemed to take several minutes to complete before concluding: “but I never thought you’d end up with a fecking Englishman.” Hayden stared at Karla open-mouthed. “Is there any nationality you haven’t slept with?” She mused for a few moments. “No-one from Tibet.” “You have some prejudice against Tibetans?” She shook her head. “No. I’ve just never met the right one. Yet.” A grin slowly spread across her face. “Mind you, I bet the Dalai Lama would be awesome.” “I don’t think he has sex.” Waving her hand, she looked at Hayden with mild contempt as Coilin sank his head into his hand. “That’s just marketing and PR bullshit,” she explained breezily. “I bet you, he’d be fantastic in the sack. I mean, it wouldn’t be like shagging the Pope - you know, all kinky shit and getting me to dress up as a young girl. No, he’d be a Tantric master. He’d keep me in a state of orgasm for hours.” Hayden sighed. “I don’t know which is worse: your perverse grasp of theology or the fact you fantasise about sex with the world’s religious leaders.” “It’s the only way to bring us together in peace and harmony,” she replied, smiling sweetly.

CHEESE Cheese is the result of microbes such as bacteria or fungi competing for a food source. Each microbe attempts to use chemicals to convince other forms of life not to eat that food source. Sometimes we call those chemicals antibiotics or mold toxins; other times we call them “delicious.” As your liver works to process cheese toxins, your Labrador brain demands energy, and you are likely to experience food cravings as a result. This is why so many people simply love cheese—they eat it, and then they crave more. Mold toxins in cheese and dairy come from two places. The first is indirect contamination, which happens when dairy cows eat feed containing mycotoxins that pass into the milk. The more contaminated animal feed is, the cheaper it is, so producers don’t normally strive to eliminate toxins from animal food. The second source of toxins in cheese comes from direct contamination, which occurs when we accidentally or intentionally introduce molds to cheese. The most common mycotoxins that are stable in cheese are citrinin, penitrem A, roquefortine C, sterigmatocystin, and aflatoxin. Some others, like patulin, penicillic acid, and PR toxin, are naturally eliminated from cheese. Sterigmatocystin is carcinogenic.22 I’m not trying to be alarmist. Unless you have severe allergies, cheese is not going to kill you today. But it may cause inflammation in your skin and joints and brain, and it may make you fat. You choose whether or not to eat it.

Once, we were artists. Pure! But we, all of us, we became a distraction, compromised for the sake of fame, comfort, the approval of strangers. We spend our lives pursuing something as empty as `relevance' and they use our fear of losing it to corral us. Dirty Malaysian money. Saudi money. We'll take it all. What went wrong? We sing and dance not to entertain but to distract people from the crushing gears of a capitalist machine that has no ideals save for greed and violence. And let's not kid ourselves, Hollywood is the best PR firm the gunmakers ever had. What a sick culture." "But what about artistic beauty?" asked Cameron Diaz. "When you can perceive beauty there's no excuse for serving ugliness. For aiding cons, inflaming desires, promising everything and delivering nothing. It doesn't matter what you put on TV because people are so frightened and lonely they'll watch it just to hear human voices and feel like they're not alone. They're so beaten down all they need is a soccer tournament every four years and they stay in their place. This is not a society. This is a system of soul-murder. And history will not be kind to us for our complicity, because we know better. The executives"—he nodded Maoishly to the Disney team —"they can say they were serving their god Mammon, but we artists can't. We're all East German playwrights now, complicit with the regime! And there will come a time of judgment. We're destroying the planet. This cannot last.

All the recent marketing successes have been PR successes, not advertising successes. To name a few: Starbucks, The Body Shop, Amazon.com, Yahoo!, eBay, Palm, Google, Linus, PlayStation, Harry Potter, Botox, Red Bull, Microsoft, Intel, and BlackBerry. A closer look at the history of most major brands shows this to be true. As a matter of fact, an astonishing number of well-known brands have been built with virtually no advertising at all. Anita Roddick built The Body Shop into a worldwide brand without any advertising. Instead she traveled the world looking for ingredients for her natural cosmetics, a quest that resulted in endless publicity. Until recently Starbucks didn’t spend a hill of beans on advertising either. In its first ten years, the company spent less that $10 million (total) on advertising in the United States, a trivial amount for a brand that delivers annual sales of $1.3 billion today. Wal-Mart became the world’s largest retailer, ringing up sales approaching $200 billion, with little advertising. Sam’s Club, a Wal-Mart sibling, averages $56 million per store with almost no advertising. In the pharmaceutical field, Viagra, Prozac, and Vioxx became worldwide brands with almost no advertising. In the toy field, Beanie Babies, Tickle Me Elmo, and Pokémon became highly successful brands with almost no advertising. In the high-technology field, Oracle, Cisco, and SAP became multibillion-dollar companies (and multibillion-dollar brands) with almost no advertising.

Darwin’s Bestiary PROLOGUE Animals tame and animals feral prowled the Dark Ages in search of a moral: the canine was Loyal, the lion was Virile, rabbits were Potent and gryphons were Sterile. Sloth, Envy, Gluttony, Pride—every peril was fleshed into something phantasmic and rural, while Courage, Devotion, Thrift—every bright laurel crowned a creature in some mythological mural. Scientists think there is something immoral in singular brutes having meat that is plural: beasts are mere beasts, just as flowers are floral. Yet between the lines there’s an implicit demurral; the habit stays with us, albeit it’s puerile: when Darwin saw squirrels, he saw more than Squirrel. 1. THE ANT The ant, Darwin reminded us, defies all simple-mindedness: Take nothing (says the ant) on faith, and never trust a simple truth. The PR men of bestiaries eulogized for centuries this busy little paragon, nature’s proletarian— but look here, Darwin said: some ants make slaves of smaller ants, and end exploiting in their peonages the sweating brows of their tiny drudges. Thus the ant speaks out of both sides of its mealy little mouth: its example is extolled to the workers of the world, but its habits also preach the virtues of the idle rich. 2. THE WORM Eyeless in Gaza, earless in Britain, lower than a rattlesnake’s belly-button, deaf as a judge and dumb as an audit: nobody gave the worm much credit till Darwin looked a little closer at this spaghetti-torsoed loser. Look, he said, a worm can feel and taste and touch and learn and smell; and ounce for ounce, they’re tough as wrestlers, and love can turn them into hustlers, and as to work, their labors are mythic, small devotees of the Protestant Ethic: they’ll go anywhere, to mountains or grassland, south to the rain forests, north to Iceland, fifty thousand to every acre guzzling earth like a drunk on liquor, churning the soil and making it fertile, earning the thanks of every mortal: proud Homo sapiens, with legs and arms— his whole existence depends on worms. So, History, no longer let the worm’s be an ignoble lot unwept, unhonored, and unsung. Moral: even a worm can turn. 3. THE RABBIT a. Except in distress, the rabbit is silent, but social as teacups: no hare is an island. (Moral: silence is golden—or anyway harmless; rabbits may run, but never for Congress.) b. When a rabbit gets miffed, he bounds in an orbit, kicking and scratching like—well, like a rabbit. (Moral: to thine own self be true—or as true as you can; a wolf in sheep’s clothing fleeces his skin.) c. He populates prairies and mountains and moors, but in Sweden the rabbit can’t live out of doors. (Moral: to know your own strength, take a tug at your shackles; to understand purity, ponder your freckles.) d. Survival developed these small furry tutors; the morals of rabbits outnumber their litters. (Conclusion: you needn’t be brainy, benign, or bizarre to be thought a great prophet. Endure. Just endure.) 4. THE GOSSAMER Sixty miles from land the gentle trades that silk the Yankee clippers to Cathay sift a million gossamers, like tides of fluff above the menace of the sea. These tiny spiders spin their bits of webbing and ride the air as schooners ride the ocean; the Beagle trapped a thousand in its rigging, small aeronauts on some elusive mission. The Megatherium, done to extinction by its own bigness, makes a counterpoint to gossamers, who breathe us this small lesson: for survival, it’s the little things that count.

I encounter forms of this attitude every day. The producers who work at the Ostankino channels might all be liberals in their private lives, holiday in Tuscany, and be completely European in their tastes. When I ask how they marry their professional and personal lives, they look at me as if I were a fool and answer: “Over the last twenty years we’ve lived through a communism we never believed in, democracy and defaults and mafia state and oligarchy, and we’ve realized they are illusions, that everything is PR.” “Everything is PR” has become the favorite phrase of the new Russia; my Moscow peers are filled with a sense that they are both cynical and enlightened. When I ask them about Soviet-era dissidents, like my parents, who fought against communism, they dismiss them as naïve dreamers and my own Western attachment to such vague notions as “human rights” and “freedom” as a blunder. “Can’t you see your own governments are just as bad as ours?” they ask me. I try to protest—but they just smile and pity me. To believe in something and stand by it in this world is derided, the ability to be a shape-shifter celebrated. Vladimir Nabokov once described a species of butterfly that at an early stage in its development had to learn how to change colors to hide from predators. The butterfly’s predators had long died off, but still it changed its colors from the sheer pleasure of transformation. Something similar has happened to the Russian elites: during the Soviet period they learned to dissimulate in order to survive; now there is no need to constantly change their colors, but they continue to do so out of a sort of dark joy, conformism raised to the level of aesthetic act. Surkov himself is the ultimate expression of this psychology. As I watch him give his speech to the students and journalists, he seems to change and transform like mercury, from cherubic smile to demonic stare, from a woolly liberal preaching “modernization” to a finger-wagging nationalist, spitting out willfully contradictory ideas: “managed democracy,” “conservative modernization.” Then he steps back, smiling, and says: “We need a new political party, and we should help it happen, no need to wait and make it form by itself.” And when you look closely at the party men in the political reality show Surkov directs, the spitting nationalists and beetroot-faced communists, you notice how they all seem to perform their roles with a little ironic twinkle.

Keep a clear conscience. Contentment is the manna that is laid up in the ark of a good conscience: O take heed of indulging any sin! it is as natural for guilt to breed disquiet, as for putrid matter to breed vermin. Sin lies as Jonah in the ship, it raiseth a tempest. If dust or motes be gotten into the eye, they make the eye water, and cause a soreness in it; if the eye be clear, then it is free from that soreness; if sin be gotten into the conscience, which is as the eye of the soul, then grief and disquiet breed there; but keep the eye of conscience clear, and all is well. What Solomon saith of a good stomach, I may say of a good conscience, "to the hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet:"Pr. 27. 7 so to a good conscience every bitter thing is sweet; it can pick contentment out of the cross. A good conscience turns the waters of Marah into wine. Would you have a quiet heart? Get a smiling conscience. I wonder not to hear Paul say he was in every state content, when he could make that triumph, "I have lived in all good conscience to this day." When once a man's reckonings are clear, it must needs let in abundance of contentment into the heart. Good conscience can suck contentment out of the bitterest drug, under slanders; "our rejoicing is this, the testimony of our conscience."2 Cor. 1. 12 In case of imprisonment, Paul had his prison songs, and could play the sweet lessons of contentment, when his feet were in the stocks.Ac. 16. 25 Augustine calls it "the paradise of a good conscience;" and if it be so, then in prison we may be in paradise. When the times are troublesome, a good conscience makes a calm. If conscience be clear, what though the days be cloudy? is it not a contentment to have a friend always by to speak a good word for us? Such a friend is conscience. A good conscience, as David's harp, drives away the evil spirit of discontent. When thoughts begin to arise, and the heart is disquieted, conscience saith to a man, as the king did to Nehemiah, "why is thy countenance sad?" so saith conscience, hast not thou the seed of God in thee? art not thou an heir of the promise? hast not thou a treasure that thou canst never be plundered of? why is thy countenance sad? O keep conscience clear, and you shall never want contentment! For a man to keep the pipes of his body, the veins and arteries, free from colds and obstructions, is the best way to maintain health: so, to keep conscience clear, and to preserve it from the obstructions of guilt, is the best way to maintain contentment. First, conscience is pure, and then peaceable.