Welcome to The Faster Times update. In today's edition, we bring you lessons from 1989, the Facebook vs Google privacy campaign, sexual fantasies about Hillary Clinton, the downside of hand sanitizer, and POM Wonderful Presents (Morgan Spurlock’s) The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. Enjoy!

It is difficult not to think of 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down and Communist regimes throughout Eastern Europe collapsed, when watching the events in North Africa in 2011. Countries such as Egypt and Tunisia still have a long way to go before they complete successful democratic transitions like those in Poland, the Czech Republic or Hungary, but those Eastern European countries can be good models, and 1989 a good touchstone.

So we’ve learned that Facebook contracted with a prominent PR firm to pitch anti-Google stories to the media. OMG. Their defense centered around the privacy issues with a Google service, Social Circles, which apparently uses Facebook data. Although this is the duh statement of the century, I still feel the need to point out that this scandal, it’s not about privacy. Of course it’s about competition and control of information.

Dear Ultra-Orthodox Jewish editors,
I want to send along my sincere thanks for removing the images of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Director for Counterterrorism Audrey Tomason from the now famous Situation Room photo.

“What is the downside?” you might ask as you rub a dollop of Purell into your hands before you touch your dirty keyboard, “Are hand sanitizers bad for you?”

Morgan Spurlock’s new movie, a documentary about product placement, was paid for by and therefore is partially about its own 22 official sponsors. That number is telling if only because Spurlock says he tried for more than 600 sponsors altogether. These 22 were the ones whose brand personalities proved mutually compatible, and compatible with Spurlock’s own brand personality, here assessed as “mindful/playful.”