The Huffington Post recently published a series of articles I wrote on fear and the media, written as a form of penance for the years I spent in advertising doing exactly what The Next Osama warns us about–using fear as a motivator.
Read more on Confessions of an Ex-Ad Woman: How the Media Uses Fear…
Filed under Uncategorized by on Jan 27th, 2011. Comment. 
THE NEXT OSAMA
Review and interview by Donna Olmstead, freelance writer and reporter for The Albuquerque Journal (October 2010)
Placitas psychotherapist and writer Judith Acosta recently talked about her new novel, The Next Osama (2010). Judith says she wrote the psychological thriller to explore what happens to individuals in a culture dominated by fear. The book is set after Osama bin Laden has been eliminated, in the muck of a media-induced fear frenzy that still courses through major cities and rural towns.
Filed under Uncategorized by on Nov 17th, 2010. 4 Comments.
A Commentary on State of Stuff in America
by Lawson Meadows, Guest Blogger.
The Seriousness of Stuff
The American consumer pattern is to seek the next new thing, not just for the stuff, but for the status.
Filed under Uncategorized by on Nov 17th, 2010. Comment.
Again, Huffington Post brings on a battery of comments and interest in the rampant narcissism in our culture. While most of the comments were tales of personal woe and frustration, many commentators saw the much larger picture–how the narcissistic character is not only prevalent but promoted and nourished in the Age of Celebrity.
Read more on Narcissism and NO! Self-Defense in The Age of Celebrity….
Filed under Uncategorized by on Nov 11th, 2010. Comment.
It’s always encouraging to see a lot of people respond to an article posted on a site known for good thinking and smart readers.
This one seems to have created quite a ruckus. Some of the folks got it. Some of the folks demonstrated it. The article is about fear, how it’s marketed, how we are swimming in suggestion, the threat of the mediocracy we live in and what we might be able to do about it. Interestingly, the part that upset so many people was when I mentioned the “G” word (God). Go figure. And that’s on a conservative think tank!
Read more on The Great American Trance and The Next Osama Syndrome…
Filed under Uncategorized by on Oct 20th, 2010. Comment.
According to a report by NPR last year (April 19, 2009), a torrent of money was being released into the American economy as if into irrigation ditches. 
Nearly a trillion dollars, to be precise.
Read more on Overstimulated Economies and Understimulated Performance….
Filed under The Next Osama, Uncategorized, Viral Fear, marketing by on Oct 11th, 2010. Comment.
This article appeared in 2009 on Opednews.com
Fear moves us faster than anything else. Mothers lift 4,000 pound cars off their babies as if they were made of paper. We jump out of the way of an oncoming car as if we were grasshoppers. We run for the last cab as if we were Olympians. Now, also in record time—and in the true spirit of viral fear—the Massachusetts legislature passed a bill that would for the first time in American history effectively end our right to choose our health care.
Filed under The Next Osama, Uncategorized, Viral Fear by on Aug 17th, 2010. Comment.
This blog is a reprint of one I had written some time ago, but I thought as we entered yet another “shopping season”, that it was appropriate to print it again. The message, at least for me is critical enough.
Filed under The Next Osama, Uncategorized, Viral Fear, marketing by on Aug 14th, 2010. Comment.
Today, once again the news media focused on Lindsay Lohan and some other celebrity just minutes after I discovered that my house value had dropped nearly 20%.
I wondered about priorities. This is not to say that poor Ms. Lohan isn’t important to the people who love her and that her public self-destruct is not tragic. In fact, our obsession with her (and a whole host of other banalities) is not only a reflection of her personal pathos, but a statement about a pervasive cultural tragedy.
Filed under The Next Osama, Uncategorized, Viral Fear, marketing by on Aug 14th, 2010. Comment.
Today a colleague of mine sent me a one-page article by a fellow named Paul E. Marek, a second-generation Canadian, whose grandparents fled Czechoslovakia just prior to the Nazi takeover. The article, entitled Why The Peaceful Majority is Irrelevant, made the disturbing argument that good people and good intentions get run over by forces bigger and badder than they dare or wish to imagine.
Filed under The Next Osama, Uncategorized, Viral Fear, marketing by on Aug 14th, 2010. 1 Comment.
