JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Treason! I have just discovered that friends who are supposed to be rooting for Roger Federer to win the US Open and his 12th Slam are secretly cheering for Novak Djokovic. That means you, Dorski. Oh the humanity! Just because he’s tall, cute, funny, does hilarious impressions of Nadal and Sharapova, and throws his T-shirt at the crowd to reveal spectacular torso, you abandon the quest for history?!

The Fed has to win because I don’t want to have another dream in which I’m berating him for my life.

Excerpts from The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, and a short film by Alfonso Cuaron and Naomi Klein outlining the book’s arguments.

“I started researching the free market’s dependence on the power of shock four years ago, during the early days of the occupation of Iraq. I reported from Baghdad on Washington’s failed attempts to follow “shock and awe” with shock therapy – mass privatisation, complete free trade, a 15% flat tax, a dramatically downsized government. Afterwards I travelled to Sri Lanka, several months after the devastating 2004 tsunami, and witnessed another version of the same manoeuvre: foreign investors and international lenders had teamed up to use the atmosphere of panic to hand the entire beautiful coastline over to entrepreneurs who quickly built large resorts, blocking hundreds of thousands of fishing people from rebuilding their villages. By the time Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, it was clear that this was now the preferred method of advancing corporate goals: using moments of collective trauma to engage in radical social and economic engineering.”

All you need to know about rugby: really brawny guys in really short shorts. That frequently get ripped.
Janine di Giovanni has an extremely informative guide to the Rugby World Cup in France, including rules (Apart from tackling above the shoulders, opposing players are allowed to do pretty much anything they want in order to get the ball off you – and they do. Crushing your face into the mud and belly-flopping on top of you are all encouraged.), useful phrases (Quelles cuisses! What thighs!), and the roundup of Rugby’s Fittest First XV (Sebastian Chabal, aka The Caveman or The Anaesthetist—because if he touches you, you’re out for the count).

Does anyone have a copy of the 1978 James Toback movie Fingers starring Harvey Keitel?

I just watched the French remake The Beat That My Heart Skipped and it killed me so now I need to see the source.

Rasheed has a report in The Christian Science Monitor on the case of the Indonesian maids abused by their employers in Saudi Arabia. I would say “shocking” except that we’ve heard so many terrible cases and Pinays still line up to be maids in Saudi. These horrors happen and will continue to happen because as long as we export humans out of poverty and need, we’re not going to have the balls to stand up to anyone. This is not covered by my world domination theory, which assumes that we hang on to pride and dignity.

“”We continue to hear of abuses being committed against migrant
domestic workers as employers do not change that much in terms of
negative attitudes toward domestic helpers,” says Ellene Sana, the
head of the Center for Migrant Advocacy in Manila. “Domestic workers
are considered virtual slaves by employers who feel that they can
ill-treat them as they please, without the slightest remorse.”

“The fate of abused workers in Saudi Arabia is further complicated by
the fact that labor-exporting countries in Asia, pressured by growing
populations, feel an obligation to send larger and larger numbers of
workers overseas in search of work. This has caused many of these
governments not to press to hard concerning abuses against their
workers out of fear that protesting too much could offend Saudi
Arabia and other Gulf countries.”

“On the question of pedophilia, The White Book was unequivocal: it formally advised against Thailand, which no longer had anything to recommend it, if indeed it ever had. It was much better to go to the Philippines or, better still, to Cambodia—the journey might be dangerous, but it was worth the effort.” – from Platform by Michel Houellebecq

The movie 8mm refers to the Philippines as a source of snuff movies.

Patis dissed: “The nuoc mam from Phu Quoc Island was the best of all, clear and with an astonishingly subtle taste. . .But the sauce in this restaurant is from the Philippines, very bad, not from Thailand, which at least is a pale second-best.” – from the story Love by Robert Olen Butler

In the movie Constantine, the possessed girl hisses at Keanu Reeves: “PapaTAYin natin siya!” So Hollywood has established that Tagalog is the language spoken in hell.