Akkam’s Razor

• Reflecting on the Mirror - Marketing & Strategy Innovation Blog - It seems that seeing one’s image causes one to think about one’s behavior and ultimately behave in a more socially desirable way. According to Cialdini, other actions can have a similar effect. Asking people their names can have a similar effect, and one experiment showed that a picture of eyes dramatically reduced “theft” in a break area where employees were supposed to drop money in a jar when they were supposed to pay for coffee or tea.

It’s a damn shame, the things that we’re left to wonder.  Can you safely assume there was no shooter on the grassy knoll?  That ‘DC Madam’ Palfrey committed suicide?  Or that alleged anthrax-attacker Bruce Ivins worked alone?  Or that the heroic passengers of Flight 93 brought the plane down, and not a US missile?

Did you see this story in the Post (and reprinted today on page 2 in the Inky)?

Via Corrente:

Rightwing pundits and Bushbots love to mock liberals in their "crazy" No-Blood-for-Oil rants, dismissing them as baseless lunacy. The facts, however, tell a much different tale…

Via America For Sale:

The neo-conservatives’ plan involved selling-off Iraq’s oil fields in an attempt to use Iraq’s oil to destroy the Opec cartel through massive increases in production above Opec quotas. However, Philip Carroll, the former CEO of Shell Oil USA who took control of Iraq’s oil production for the U.S. Government a month after the invasion, stalled the sell-off scheme. …The former Shell oil boss [Phillip Carroll] agrees. In Houston, he told Newsnight: "Many neo conservatives are people who have certain ideological beliefs about markets, about democracy, about this, that and the other. International oil companies, without exception, are very pragmatic commercial organizations. They don’t have a theology."