Tom Morris

Meet Joe Lieberman.

He's a corporate sell-out whore.

Joe is the reason why your American friends lack healthcare. Well, not the only reason. The Democrats have been a bunch of losers and fretted endlessly over Joe's opinions, rather than over the opinions of the people at large. In return, Joe has made over nine hundred thousand dollars from the health insurance lobby.

It really is this simple: people like Joe are the reason all of our friends and colleagues in America get so worried about healthcare. Here, of course, you just register with a doctor and if you get sick, you go and get some medications. And we pay about a 1 or 2 percent extra in tax over what the Americans pay.

Do spread the meme. Joe is a cheap whore used by the big health insurance companies to deny all of our friends in America a healthcare system based on the principles of justice, fairness and equality, rather than corporate racketering.

If only the United States had elected the Democrats...

Jonathan Yardley: What the memoir boom has in fact given us is too many dull or forgettable memoirs, precious few of which have enriched our literature but most of which have simply encouraged the narcissism of their authors.

I think I may have only read three memoirs recently. I read Richard Branson's Losing My Virginity a while back, as well as the autobiography of the former Master of the Rolls, Lord Denning. More recently, I read Colin McGinn's autobiography Making of a Philosopher. I particularly enjoyed McGinn's autobiography as he described the very ordinary and mundane process that often leads one into academic philosophy - but obviously, once you've made that choice, you have to grow intellectually. It's interesting, of course, but there are no sordid confessional tales of drunken debauchery. No Freudian retellings of childhood trauma. All quite refreshing, if not personally empowering - but since when was that part of the requirements? Your life doesn't have to empower me.

The sordid and therapeutic part of autobiographies is extremely off-putting. Quite why people feel the need to share their personal shortcomings with the world in some sort of bizarre cleansing ritual, I do not know. This is one thing that religion gave people: at least they'd keep their confessions between themselves and God, or rather with the priest. Now they get shared with everyone for profit. It's really quite dull. Why do we never get to read, oh, a Big Brother contestant's intellectual autobiography? Where they go on and say that they were on the show then realised that it might be more fun to go and become a physicist or an art historian. Tell me what you think and how you see the world, not about your latest run-in with the paparazzi or your latest drug relapse.

Unfortunately, for that to happen, the subjects of the autobiographies may actually have to become famous for doing something rather than being famous for being famous (remember Beavis and Butthead's brilliant example of a circular argument: "Hey Butt-head, how come Tom Petty is famous?" "Because he's on TV, dumbass." "Yeah, but like... how did he get on TV?" "Uh... because he's famous." "Yeah, but, I mean, like, how did he get famous?" "He got famous because he's on TV." "YEAH, YEAH, BUT HOW DID HE GET ON TV?" "Because he's famous, Beavis! Now shut up before I smack the bejesus out of you!"). The tawdry tell-all autobiography is the grease that keeps the celebrity machine working. Quite how we solve this, I do not know.

Olivia Mitchell on ReadWriteWeb: Make your presentation social media-friendly by expressing each of your main points as a tweetbite. Ensure your tweetbites are easily retweetable by allowing space for your username.

So, that's 140 characters, minus 14 ('RT @tommorris '). That's the latest advice: make sure your main points can fit into about 135 characters or less (so the RT @someone RT @someoneelse RT @anotherperson chain can build up). That seems like dangerous advice. Why not encourage people to try and have more complicated thoughts, and not worry too much about whether or not it gets much attention on social media services? Excessive simplification is fine for goofy business seminars about empowering your buzzword compliance. But the rest of the world is rather more complicated than your groundbreaking productivity and business success system...

Instead of worrying about Twitter, worry about content. If your content sucks, all the Twittering won't make it better. And if your content is awesome, you don't need to engage in social media whoring to make it good, because it already is.