Mad Friends

There's a lot to potentially write about the latest South Park episode in which Stan, despite all his best efforts, literally gets sucked into Facebook (watch here) but I just want to focus quickly on a small segment of the show where Cartman imitates Jim Cramer, of CNBC's "Mad Money."

Cartman released a video podcast on Facebook that was a take off on Cramer's show, except instead of stocks, Cartman was giving advice about Facebook friends. Cartman urges everyone to drop Kyle as a Facebook friend because he recently added a "loser" who previously had no friends at all. Cartman has a great graph that shows Kyle's friend stock plummeting 500 percent.

As much as the entire episode was an attack on people putting too much "stock" in Facebook "friends" instead of real relationships and America's recent obsession with social networking, I think there was something secondary here about Cramer as well. Basically, Cartman was telling everyone to stop being Kyle's friend because everyone else stopped being his friend. It wasn't that Kyle was a bad friend, or that there was something wrong with him - it was simply that his popularity was going down.

I think we can make a direct comparison here with Cramer's style of investing. The value of the company really isn't that important - it's all about the trend of the market, who's exciting, who's dull, and riding the roller coaster. Real investing should be about evaluating a company and its prospects for long term growth and earnings, which will eventually be reflected in the price of the stock. To Cramer/Cartman, the only thing that's important is the quick buck or the quick popularity boost.

The Search for Pajama On Llama Continues!

The Onion ran a great story this week about the U.S. government's failure to make sure that capturing Osama Bin Laden in a priority. The article, "U.S. Government: We Have Not Forgotten About Osaka Bin Rogen" jibes the military for forgetting about Bin Laden. Indeed, each U.S. leader has a different name for him: Osaka Binn Rogen, Owanda Bun Luvin, Pajama On Llama, Okenny Ben Loggens and Oggie Ring Quabben. They also refer to the Taliban as the "Tallywhacker" and al Qaeda as "La Tostada" among other names.

The satire here is pretty clear: Osama has fallen so far off the radar that no one can even remember his name anymore. Whether the writer is calling for a greater focus to be placed on finding Osama, pointing out the futility in trying to catch him, or simply showing the incompetence of American leaders is irrelevant. The point is that we are certainly not going about this the right way.

The article ends on a potshot at Afghan president Hamid Karzai, who says he hasn't seen Osama in a while, but he'll let him now we're looking for him next time he does. It's definitely significant that Karzai is the only person in the article who gets Osama's name right. You have to be in Bin Laden's inner circle to know where he is, and knowing the name of a place or a person is equivalent to knowing that place or person in this article. For example, Afghanistan is listed as "Afbanardstan" on a map. If Karzai knows Osama's real name, we know who he's really working for.