chuck kottke

Pet Shop Boys

There are more forces afoot in any nation than what one sees visibly or otherwise. Often the things one does not see on TV tell a story with a much richer tapestry, unmasked from the veneer of superficial media productions, and may present a truer tale of the real swath of humanity and ideas present in that country, at that time. Oversimplifications and stereotypes while amusing, define a narrow set of personae and can lead to false assumptions about how people think or how deep their nature truly is.

@21% unemployment, one can expect a lot of unrest, even the Spanish Revolution! ;) Something has got to change - no nation can experience that kind of unemployment without a great deal of unrest, and hence there will be a day of reckoning.

Nazarath

..Juxtapose this with the old Apple TV ad showing a sledge hammer wielding runner dashing down the isle of a packed theater where Orwellian images are being show to a mesmerized audience; that runner then tossing the sledge' into the big screen to break the spell and awaken the audience! So the mold-breaker becomes the mold now? Yes, quite interesting! I still like Apple though, but yes, that's not a good development. The church of Apple? Yikes, what's next?!:stunned:

I dunno.. One too large a corporation, with addictive food products, a sales and promotion department heavy on the cheese, light on the real mustard... I like the fact that they offer a veggie burger (but in India? Why not here?:cry:). It's prolly GMO veggie stuff anyhow, processed to death and with all sorts of unhealthy additives I am guessing, but this is wackdoogles, so who knows. As long as the burger doesn't hop like a kangaroo. What would Ray Crock think? All Ray really wanted was to offer some fun for people, good simple burgers, and a way to spread his idea - grow the formula, so-to-speak.. I suppose McDonald's can evolve - phasing out Ronald is probably a good idea, but the whole thing was to make it fun an attractive to kids mainly... Hope they can re-invent themselves into a healthier place to eat at. I think if public sentiment puts more and more emphasis on fairness, health, and overall wellness, even McDonald's can change - one would hope.

To quote one protester, "We have a right to regular jobs, a future and a descent salary, to more opportunities in life, the chance to get a house, to pay for that house without being enslaved, but especially a better quality of life." These are natural rights: the right to work, the right to fair compensation for that work, and the right to have access to affordable, descent housing. If we allow the power elites to dictate how our world shall be run, we surely will face ruin from their exuberant follies, cruel schemes, and crushing inequities. I am with you Bart - The movement for reform and justice is in Spain and around the globe. It will spread, and we here in the U.S. must be the change we wish to see as well.

Put faith in the power of citizens to change the world - chance favors those with the will to move forward against all odds when righteousness is on their side. Never underestimate what a small group of dedicated individuals can accomplish.

I'll give it a listen! :ears:

Greetings !!!!!! If Viva La Vida weren't your #1 song, then which one would you choose?

It was a dark and stormy night.. :cool: Just spring rain, kinda warmish, a good day for things to green up on. Sounds tropical in the Philippines!

Welcome Aboard Blue Nails:) The Netherlands Rock:drummer:

:stunned:I support this Spanish Revolution Bart! And I believe you when you say you had a dictatorship of the banks - much the same here when our financial crisis hit! Onward with the Revolution! Root out the injustices and re-establish justice in the economic sphere.

If you've lived in Kamchatka, you'll see it feels so much like another country!:P (the bears & volcanoes control it ;)) Lapland, a country unto itself! :laugh3: ok, ok, how about Lesotho

Fireland right now! :laugh3: Jamaica :cool:

Life's little bumps - nothing to worry about. Spring is sprung, summer is soo nice and is right around the corner!:sunny::sunny::sunny:

Fiji

:rolleyes::laugh3: Too easy! Estonia, where they have E stones. :P

Pretty Cool!:cool::cool::cool: Thanks Jony! I think it makes good sense - more power on a sunny day than the current Prius batteries can hold from a recharge! >.75 KWh would certainly be worth it, even if that's just a quarter of the car's daily energy needs. ..Seems to me the missing ingredient is bringing disparate fields together. Parking lot engineers could install solar canopies to both help shade the vehicles (hence a lot less air-conditioning requirements), and at the same time provide a significant amount of electricity to charge the autos parked beneath. Then instead of using the solar to cool the interior, it could mainly be used to power the cars down the road.

They wandered in as elevator music on a radio show! :escaping:

Ulanga, Sudi

You have a great deal of interesting philosophical insights RedBalloon! The understanding of human nature, and priorities in values in a given context must be considered. Life's meaning is richer than anyone can fully comprehend and is interesting to ponder, and the pursuit of happiness and the attainment of happiness rank high in most of our lives. I agree, it is pessimistic to use law primarily as a punishing hand, but if the behavior of certain individuals becomes harmful to others, then the law must be there, and enforcement is as a final check on bad behavior. However, I think to encourage all that is good in human nature and social structure, provide a stronger incentive for socially redeeming structures which produce better outcomes, and provide more equity, harmony, and collective benefit, the promotion of healthy incentives is a good way to proceed with any social structure. But it seems to me that what has happened with the capitalistic system is that it requires a social system which takes priority over it, and needs great oversight and diligence to keep promoting the best benefits it can confer on society. When ownership is isolated from workers and their plight, it can become callous and unconcerned about their well being, and may look upon those who do the work as merely a cost, or a component in the assembly line. Hence, when companies become publicly traded, the care and respect towards workers often declines, since the family who owns no longer sees the workers as family, or with outside ownership in the hands of a few who simply want to maximize profits, there exists incentives to lower wages, ignore safety concerns, cut off benefits, and diminish product quality, if the profit motive exceeds their compassion towards their fellow man. Unions arose to check this narcissistic tendency, but the concentration of power and ownership today works to undermine the checks and balances, and undermine the promotion of good companies over bad. So government is the social referee, the promoter of good on our behalf, and the necessary component to add in all the missing ingredients for promoting the general well being as we understand them. No market in the modern sense can function well if human beings are not healthy, and it is the responsibility of governments to protect on our behalf the broader commons. I believe you are right, the baser instincts - greed, fear, ego, frustration / hatred, intolerance - these things unfortunately often trump reason and harmony, when manipulative individuals find ways to use these things to divide people and push us into conflict. But there again is the problem of profit over reason, when those who stand to gain the most have ultimate control over the media in the U.S., and will profit enormously from conflict, to the disaffection of most of the rest of us. I think what troubles me is the isolation and packaging into discrete areas of the mind that market thinking puts us into. It's a useful method, as a good created from all the human activity and ingenuity over time. It compartmentalizes everything, and must so to function well, but then ignores the context in which it operates, and has a poor way of interrelating to nature, to human beings, to the interconnectedness of all things. Also, this isolation from nature and from one-another allows for some in positions of power to make decisions that affect nature and human wellness in harmful or unhealthy ways. Pure market forces as ideal is a fantasy, an isolation and simplification which we must come to terms with if and deal with if we are to keep this planet a livable one, and make our world more harmonious and enlightening for all. If Charles Dickens lived today, he would be no doubt upset at seeing such inequity in the world. His world was not unlike ours; the remedies seem to happen out of movements for social equity, then languish in time, to be reborn again in the form of social movements propelled by a collective understanding of the need to restore fair arrangements in society. By using an -ism, I was trying to convey the sense that blind loyalty in any system, however good certain merits it may have, can lead us into some very unstable and unfair arrangements. Hence, pure market capitalism has some built-in flaws that make it unhealthy for societies, it is one facet of a much more complex subtle and diverse world of human and natural relations in which we live. Surely we must be learning, and adding to the wealth of human understanding, with hope not sliding back into some lesser mode of behavior. Human progress was once described to me as a spiral, which in 2 dimensions appears to be going nowhere with the up swings followed by down swings, but when seen in the 3rd dimension is spiraling forward. Perhaps this is so, as we deconstruct or leave one structure, to create a new structure with a better framework. Maybe a better analogy is to describe human progress as a lobster, molting it's old shell to grow, or as a caterpillar metamorphosing into a beautiful butterfly :flutterby:. It's a work in progress, but the stages at times have amazing form and grace.

Playful

Welcome Aboard Jake! :sunny:

tilt