To counter all this negative information I’ve been feeding on lately, I’ve just decided to alternate ranty entries with goofy/wacky/uplifting entries. The first one is an “eccentric menu”:http://www.kottke.org/04/08/shopsins-menu courtesy of “Boing Boing”:http://www.boingboing.net/2004/08/09/eccentric_dinermenu_.html. (I wonder if Ben counts as a fifth person?)
Yearly Archives: 2004
Journalism, San Diego style
I don’t know what makes me angrier about “this Union-Tribune article”:http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/health/20040808-9999-1n8pill.html, the topic or the amazingly transparent bias.
_(Note: I just watched “Outfoxed”:http://www.outfoxed.org/ today, so I’m in that kind of mood.)_
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Brilliant
“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we,” “Bush said”:http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-08-05-bushism_x.htm. “They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.”
That’s why they call it ‘hazardous’
It may sound obvious to anyone who knows me, but “hazardous, tricky clean-up of nuclear sites”:http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996199 is for me the single compelling reason to avoid nuclear power as a major energy source. I don’t worry nearly so much about Chernobyl-style accidents as I do about subtle, continuous contamination of an ecosystem due to nuclear byproducts.
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Training young capitalist pigs?
Help me here.
It is an odd thing to have one of your favorite mythical worlds spun in an unpleasant way. I came across a mind-twisting article on Harry Potter, the capitalist pig. Nevermind that J.K. Rowling is richer than God now; the fantastical world she created was a lift to my spirit every time I entered it. Maybe it is because I have been raised in a competitive, capitalist environment all my life, and furthermore find competitiveness and also greed to be intrinsic to human nature in all but, as we would say, the most “saintly” among us (when thinking of the greed aspect), but I can’t fathom how the competitive drive could be conquered on a large scale within the real world, and how that would even be healthy. Competition causes us to rise to greater challenges, and without the constant battle, we would be complacent and jaded.
Not that I don’t tire of the battle to survive many days… especially when paying rent and other bills. In the U.S. the balance is probably shifted too much toward a “lord of the flies” mentality. And the consumerist aspect of our culture truly is poisonous. The latter and former things are somehow conflated, though, to make wholly “evil” the very process by which evil is battled in Harry Potter’s world.
I welcome comments that address the mindset of the essay’s author. (Does this explain the lukewarm reception of Lance Armstrong by the French and other Europeans? This year he has certainly approached Le Tour with the mindset of dominance.)