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Other People

Once, when I was twenty-two and working in a liquor store, an old white woman came in and told me her son had died in the Vietnam war, and his body been flown home. She wanted badly to see him one last time, but though she begged and begged for a viewing she was told by military personnel that his face had mostly been destroyed, and she was not allowed to look. “They were trying to spare me,” she said, “against my will.” So during the service she tore down the aisle and ripped off the flag and pushed open the lid of his coffin, and inside was a dead Vietnamese child, not her son, his small corpse wrapped in a green wool blanket and his face perfectly intact. “They sent us hundreds of dead children,” she told me, “and none of them were ours.”

She was an alcoholic, one of many regulars who stood waiting outside our doors before we opened at nine a.m., their backs to the blood-freezing cold of the Minnesota wind, breathing into their hands and peering through the window at me as I counted the register. I’d started working at the liquor store as a direct result of being fired from a different job, a café in Uptown where I’d been late every single day of the three months I worked there. I’d caused a terrible scene in the office in front of my embarrassed managers; not an impressive you-can’t-fire-me-I-quit scene, but the kind with guttural sobs and mucus pooling first in my palms, then running silver down the cuffs of my sleeves. That evening my friend took me to the liquor store and I broke down again in the whiskey aisle. She led me to the counter by the wrist and presented me, deflated and soggy, to the guy at the register. “Do you have any specials for people who’ve just been fired?” she asked.

He gave me an airline serving of Jagermeister and a job application. Soon thereafter I began. My co-workers were all dark beards beneath woolen beanies, and one other woman who was twenty-eight and had recently lost her virginity. “Now I’m really trying to slut it up,” she said. Sometimes certain Somali men would ask us, “What do your husbands think of you working in a place like this?” and we would say, “Who’d be crazy enough to marry us?”

The store had recently been stung by undercover underagers and hit with a sixty thousand dollar fine, so we were now required to enter a birthday for each patron in order to unlock the computer and process the order. These men who asked about our husbands were often the same men who, when I said, “Date of birth?” would answer, “9/11,” and stare set-faced at me as if waiting for hysteria. I might have been nervous, except often enough their hijab’d wives came in with them and stood a pace behind their husbands’ shoulders and mouthed sorry to me, smiling, shrugging, rolling their eyes; what can you do?

“I thought Muslims didn’t drink,” I said to my co-worker.

“When has God ever stopped anyone from being an asshole?” she said, having her own conversation.

What can you do? My boss was miserable, and slunk into the basement to smoke weed when things were slow. He was the son of the owner, destined to inherit the beer dynasty, and when I had a headache he advised me to duck behind the counter and take a shot of sour-apple Pucker. “Go on,” he said, “I won’t tell.” He reported only to his sister, who came in every few weeks to walk the aisles with her lumpy long-haired dachshund, trailing judgmental fingers over dusty bottles of Boone’s Farm and telling my boss he was worthless; meanwhile the dachshund hunkered down to take a shit by the Captain Morgan’s. He’d glance at me mid-business, and then turn deliberately away, his little doggy face shamed but determined. This was how I felt the whole year.

by Emma Törzs, Okey Panky |  Read more:

Image: John Humble

The Death of Awe in the Age of Awesome

Travel writers like me spend a lot of time contemplating why people venture abroad. Not just the obvious enticements — relaxation, winter sun, cheap pilsner — but the emotional, soul-stirring stuff: the sustenance of the new. The awe. It has, I think, become one of the main incentives of our travelling lives. As spirituality wanes experience is the new faith, and we are refugees from the mundane.

But behind this quest for the big, beautiful and baffling is a disconcerting sense that wonder in the age of the bucket-list is under attack. From technology, from information overload, from the anti-spiritual cynicism of the post-hippy world. In an era where a child has only to hold a five-inch screen in front of their face to gorge themselves on the apparent miracle of a one-inch Dora the Explorer hatching from a two-tone chocolate shell, awe has started to feel increasingly elusive.

It doesn’t take a bona fide philosopher to understand that this diminution of the human experience is an inevitable price of social progress. Awe, after all, used to be much easier to come by. Imagine you’re a Stone-age hunter witnessing a solar eclipse (not like last month’s anticlimactic, cloud-snuffed eclipse. A proper one.). Suddenly, the sun is extinguished. You don’t know it’s a temporary phenomenon, an orbital idiosyncrasy. So you tremble, piss your mammoth-skin pants, invent Gods! That’s a great big uppercut of awe.

Travel, for many of us, has become a means of trying to resuscitate that sense of humbling incomprehension. Awesome places, whether natural or man-made — the sort that are endlessly catalogued in a thousand ‘things to do before you die’ books — have become lodestars for the restless mind, places to light out for. But it’s harder to feel awe when your eclipse is preceded by a 24-hour news preamble sucking every last grain of mystery out of the process.

The result is a uniquely modern malaise in which awe has become fugitive: desperately sought yet ever harder to wrest from the claustrophobic clamour of our overcrowded little planet. Our culture is all grown-up. And like the adult who realises that the illusionist is a con-man, not a conjurer, we’re becoming dulled by over-discovery and over-supply.

Real-life awe barely cuts it anymore; we have Photoshop and CGI outdoing the actual. In 1896, when the Lumière brothers premiered their 50-second movie in a Parisian theatre — of a flickering locomotive chugging towards the camera — people fled the auditorium. Now we watch The Hobbit, where 3D armies of orcs, trolls and warmongering dwarves appear utterly, compellingly alive, and shuffle out of the multiplex feeling lobotomized.

The city-dweller’s connection with nature — the most prolific wellspring of earthly wonder — is eroded, near-severed. Romanticising landscape is barely tolerated. Wordsworth would never get away with that lonely cloud shit now. People would just call him a self-regarding hipster wanker. Familiarity breeds contempt. Cynicism withers all. When was the last time you witnessed something special without seeing a photo of it first?

Perhaps the greatest problem, though, lies in the paradox that genuine wonder becomes more slippery the more you pursue it. You can have a bucket-list as long as your arm, but any inveterate awe-chaser will tell you that the carefully planned event, loaded with its adherent expectations, is too open to disappointment.

Say your great travelling aspiration is to witness the Northern Lights (and, let’s be honest, if you subscribe to bucket-lists, there’s an 80% chance it is). You’ve made it to the Arctic Circle, journeyed out to some gloaming Nordic fastness. And there! The ethereal vision of electric green ripples oscillating across space — curling, coalescing, painting great glyphs in the sky. Your imagination unfurls: one moment you see a charging horse, the next a crashing wave. What could it mean, this incandescent tumult, these billion motes of cosmic dust carried on the solar wind? You reach for your camera, then pause. No. You just want to breath this in (there are good photos available on Google images). Hair on end, eyes agog, soul vaulting, you shiver. But wait! What’s this? The couple from your group-tour have marched into your field of view. Backs turned to the light, they hold the phone aloft. Pout, snap; pout, snap. “This is so awesome,” the man breathes, returning to your side. And — POP! — your reverie is gone.

by Henry Wismayer, Medium | Read more:
Image: © Trond Kristiansen

N. Scott Trimble, Greenpeace - Kayaktivists
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Shawn Colvin

[ed. Talking Heads cover]

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The Insults of Age

I had known for years, of course, that beyond a certain age women become invisible in public spaces. The famous erotic gaze is withdrawn. You are no longer, in the eyes of the world, a sexual being. In my experience, though, this forlornness is a passing phase. The sadness of the loss fades and fades. You pass through loneliness and out into a balmy freedom from the heavy labour of self-presentation. Oh, the relief! You have nothing to prove. You can saunter about the world in overalls. Because a lifetime as a woman has taught you to listen, you know how to strike up long, meaty conversations with strangers on trams and trains.

But there is a downside, which, from my convalescent sofa, I dwelt upon with growing irritation. Hard-chargers in a hurry begin to patronise you. Your face is lined and your hair is grey, so they think you are weak, deaf, helpless, ignorant and stupid. When they address you they tilt their heads and bare their teeth and adopt a tuneful intonation. It is assumed that you have no opinions and no standards of behaviour, that nothing that happens in your vicinity is any of your business. By the time I had got bored with resting and returned to ordinary life, I found that the shield of feminine passivity I had been holding up against this routine peppering of affronts had splintered into shards.

One warm December evening, a friend and I were strolling along Swanston Street on our way out to dinner. The pavement was packed and our progress was slow. Ahead of us in the crowd we observed with nostalgic pleasure a trio of teenagers striding along, lanky white Australian schoolgirls in gingham dresses and blazers, their ponytails tied high with white ribbons.

One of the girls kept dropping behind her companions to dash about in the moving crowd, causing mysterious jolts and flurries. Parallel with my friend and me, an Asian woman of our age was walking by herself, composed and thoughtful. The revved-up schoolgirl came romping back against the flow of pedestrians and with a manic grimace thrust her face right into the older woman’s. The woman reared back in shock. The girl skipped nimbly across the stream of people and bounded towards her next mark, a woman sitting on a bench – also Asian, also alone and minding her own business. The schoolgirl stopped in front of her and did a little dance of derision, flapping both hands in mocking parody of greeting. I saw the Asian woman look up in fear, and something in me went berserk.

In two strides I was behind the schoolgirl. I reached up, seized her ponytail at the roots and gave it a sharp downward yank. Her head snapped back. In a voice I didn’t recognise I snarled, “Give it a rest, darling.” She twisted to look behind her. Her eyes were bulging, her mouth agape. I let go and she bolted away to her friends. The three of them set off at a run. Their white ribbons went bobbing through the crowd all the way along the City Square and up the steps of the Melbourne Town Hall, where a famous private school was holding its speech night. The whole thing happened so fast that when I fell into step beside my friend she hadn’t even noticed I was gone.

Everyone to whom I described the incident became convulsed with laughter, even lawyers, once they’d pointed out that technically I had assaulted the girl. Only my 14-year-old granddaughter was shocked. “Don’t you think you should have spoken to her? Explained why what she was doing was wrong?” As if. My only regret is that I couldn’t see the Asian woman’s face at the moment the schoolgirl’s head jerked back and her insolent grin turned into a rictus. Now that I would really, really like to have seen.

By now my blood was up. At Qantas I approached a check-in kiosk and examined the screen. A busybody in uniform barged up to me, one bossy forefinger extended. “Are you sure you’re flying Qantas and not Jetstar?” Once I would have bitten my lip and said politely, “Thanks. I’m OK, I think.” Now I turned and raked him with a glare. “Do I look like somebody who doesn’t know which airline they’re flying?”

A young publicist from a literary award phoned me to deliver tidings that her tragic tone indicated I would find devastating: alas, my book had not been short-listed. “Thanks for letting me know,” I said in the stoical voice writers have ready for these occasions. But to my astonishment she poured out a stream of the soft, tongue-clicking, cooing noises one makes to a howling toddler whose balloon has popped. I was obliged to cut across her: “And you can stop making those sounds.”

After these trivial but bracing exchanges, my pulse rate was normal, my cheeks were not red, I was not trembling. I hadn’t thought direct action would be so much fun. Habits of a lifetime peeled away. The world bristled with opportunities for a woman in her 70s to take a stand. I shouted on planes. I fought for my place in queues. I talked to myself out loud in public. I walked along the street singing a little song under my breath: “Back off. How dare you? Make my day.” I wouldn’t say I was on a hair-trigger. I was just primed for action.

by Helen Garner, The Monthly |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Jonathon Gardner, Zig Zag 2014
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photo: markk

Host

Mr. John Ziegler, thirty-seven, late of Louisville's WHAS, is now on the air, "Live and Local," from 10:00 P.M. to 1:00 A.M. every weeknight on southern California's KFI, a 50,000-watt megastation whose hourly ID and Sweeper, designed by the station's Imaging department and featuring a gravelly basso whisper against licks from Ratt's 1984 metal classic "Round and Round," is "KFI AM-640, Los Angeles—More Stimulating Talk Radio." This is either the eighth or ninth host job that Mr. Ziegler's had in his talk-radio career, and far and away the biggest. He moved out here to LA over Christmas—alone, towing a U-Haul—and found an apartment not far from KFI's studios, which are in an old part of the Koreatown district, near Wilshire Center.

The John Ziegler Show is the first local, nonsyndicated late-night program that KFI has aired in a long time. It's something of a gamble for everyone involved. Ten o'clock to one qualifies as late at night in southern California, where hardly anything reputable's open after nine.

It is currently right near the end of the program's second segment on the evening of May 11, 2004, shortly after Nicholas Berg's taped beheading by an al-Qaeda splinter in Iraq. Dressed, as is his custom, for golf, and wearing a white-billed cap w/ corporate logo, Mr. Ziegler is seated by himself in the on-air studio, surrounded by monitors and sheaves of Internet downloads. He is trim, clean-shaven, and handsome in the somewhat bland way that top golfers and local TV newsmen tend to be. His eyes, which off-air are usually flat and unhappy, are alight now with passionate conviction. Only some of the studio's monitors concern Mr. Z.'s own program; the ones up near the ceiling take muted, closed-caption feeds from Fox News, MSNBC, and what might be C-SPAN. To his big desk's upper left is a wall-mounted digital clock that counts down seconds. His computer monitors' displays also show the exact time.

Across the soundproof glass of the opposite wall, another monitor in the Airmix room is running an episode of The Simpsons, also muted, which both the board op and the call screener are watching with half an eye.

Pendent in front of John Ziegler's face, attached to the same type of hinged, flexible stand as certain student desk lamps, is a Shure-brand broadcast microphone that is sheathed in a gray foam filtration sock to soften popped p's and hissed sibilants. It is into this microphone that the host speaks:

"And I'll tell you why—it's because we're better than they are."

A Georgetown B.A. in government and philosophy, scratch golfer, former TV sportscaster, possible world-class authority on the O.J. Simpson trial, and sometime contributor to MSNBC's Scarborough Country, Mr. Ziegler is referring here to America versus what he terms "the Arab world." It's near the end of his "churn," which is the industry term for a host's opening monologue, whose purpose is both to introduce a show's nightly topics and to get listeners emotionally stimulated enough that they're drawn into the program and don't switch away. More than any other mass medium, radio enjoys a captive audience—if only because so many of the listeners are driving—but in a major market there are dozens of AM stations to listen to, plus of course FM and satellite radio, and even a very seductive and successful station rarely gets more than a five or six percent audience share.

"We're not perfect, we suck a lot of the time, but we are better as a people, as a culture, and as a society than they are, and we need to recognize that, so that we can possibly even begin to deal with the evil that we are facing."

When Mr. Z.'s impassioned, his voice rises and his arms wave around (which obviously only those in the Airmix room can see). He also fidgets, bobs slightly up and down in his executive desk chair, and weaves. Although he must stay seated and can't pace around the room, the host does not have to keep his mouth any set distance from the microphone, since the board op, 'Mondo Hernandez, can adjust his levels on the mixing board's channel 7 so that Mr. Z.'s volume always stays in range and never peaks or fades. 'Mondo, whose price for letting outside parties hang around Airmix is one large bag of cool-ranch Doritos per evening, is an immense twenty-one-year-old man with a ponytail, stony Mesoamerican features, and the placid, grandmotherly eyes common to giant mammals everywhere. Keeping the studio signal from peaking is one of 'Mondo's prime directives, along with making sure that each of the program's scheduled commercial spots is loaded into Prophet and run at just the right time, whereupon he must confirm that the ad has run as scheduled in the special Airmix log he signs each page of, so that the station can bill advertisers for their spots. 'Mondo, who started out two years ago as an unpaid intern and now earns ten dollars an hour, works 7:00—1:00 on weeknights and also board-ops KFI's special cooking show on Sundays. As long as he's kept under forty hours a week, which he somehow always just barely is, the station is not obliged to provide 'Mondo with employee benefits.(...)

Whatever the social effects of talk radio or the partisan agendas of certain hosts, it is a fallacy that political talk radio is motivated by ideology. It is not. Political talk radio is a business, and it is motivated by revenue. The conservatism that dominates today's AM airwaves does so because it generates high Arbitron ratings, high ad rates, and maximum profits.

Radio has become a more lucrative business than most people know. Throughout most of the past decade, the industry's revenues have increased by more than 10 percent a year. The average cash-flow margin for major radio companies is 40 percent, compared with more like 15 percent for large TV networks; and the mean price paid for a radio station has gone from eight to more than thirteen times cash flow. Some of this extreme profitability, and thus the structure of the industry, is due to the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which allows radio companies to acquire up to eight stations in a given market and to control as much as 35 percent of a market's total ad revenues. The emergence of huge, dominant radio conglomerates like Clear Channel and Infinity is a direct consequence of the '96 Act (which the FCC, aided by the very conservative D.C. Court of Appeals, has lately tried to make even more permissive). And these radio conglomerates enjoy not just substantial economies of scale but almost unprecedented degrees of business integration.

by David Foster Wallace, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Taylor Callery

What is Medicine’s 5 Sigma?

“A lot of what is published is incorrect.” I’m not allowed to say who made this remark because we were asked to observe Chatham House rules. We were also asked not to take photographs of slides. Those who worked for government agencies pleaded that their comments especially remain unquoted, since the forthcoming UK election meant they were living in “purdah”—a chilling state where severe restrictions on freedom of speech are placed on anyone on the government’s payroll. Why the paranoid concern for secrecy and non-attribution? Because this symposium—on the reproducibility and reliability of biomedical research, held at the Wellcome Trust in London last week—touched on one of the most sensitive issues in science today: the idea that something has gone fundamentally wrong with one of our greatest human creations.

The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. As one participant put it, “poor methods get results”. The Academy of Medical Sciences, Medical Research Council, and Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council have now put their reputational weight behind an investigation into these questionable research practices. The apparent endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming. In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world. Or they retrofit hypotheses to fit their data. Journal editors deserve their fair share of criticism too. We aid and abet the worst behaviours. Our acquiescence to the impact factor fuels an unhealthy competition to win a place in a select few journals. Our love of “significance” pollutes the literature with many a statistical fairy-tale. We reject important confirmations. Journals are not the only miscreants. Universities are in a perpetual struggle for money and talent, endpoints that foster reductive metrics, such as high-impact publication. National assessment procedures, such as the Research Excellence Framework, incentivise bad practices. And individual scientists, including their most senior leaders, do little to alter a research culture that occasionally veers close to misconduct. 

Can bad scientific practices be fixed? Part of the problem is that no-one is incentivised to be right. Instead, scientists are incentivised to be productive and innovative.

by Richard Horton, The Lancet |  Read more (pdf):

Image: via:

Binkying Bunnies

Porsupah Ree

A binky is a playful and happy expression made by a rabbit in which it jumps in the air and twists its body around in a convulsive fashion. Also known as the "Happy Bunny Dance".

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[ed. Repost for Deb]

The Brothers Johnson

Louis Johnson, (April, 1955 - May, 2015)

玉山 / Jade Mountain, 台灣 / Taiwan.
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Little Dragon

Here Comes 'The World's Angriest Robot'

It's almost a religious question: in whose image are we making robots?

Will we only make clever, efficient robots who will do what they're told -- built, naturally, in the image of your average middle management functionary?

Or will we attempt to build monsters -- just because we like to put our fingers in the fire occasionally?

A New Zealand company called Touchpoint Group says it's building a robot that will be the worst of us.

It will be angry all the time. Angrier than a motorist trying to tolerate yet another cyclist who goes straight through a stop sign. Angrier than Kanye when he sees a paparazzo. And, yes, angrier than any Comcast customer that ever lived.

The idea, in fact, is to help organizations deal with angry customers. As the Australian Business Review reports, Touchpoint is working with a bank so that its machines can better understand why customers get angry.

Those who enjoy their Isaac Asimov might be amused (or appalled) that this project carries the name Radiant. In Asimov's work, Prime Radiant predicted how humans might behave in the future.

Some, though, might be concerned about Touchpoint's angry robot.

It is, of course, marginally hilarious that a bank might need a robot to explain that bad or opaque customer service might get humans mad. What is there to understand? Or is this, perhaps, another step for financial organizations to remove, say, employees altogether?

by Chris Matyszczyk, CNET | Read more:
Image: DJAlienPhantom/YouTube screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk

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Some People Do More Than Text While Driving

[ed. I'm guilty of this, using Google Maps while driving. The app seems designed for that purpose.]

Phones are getting smarter, drivers seemingly less so.

A survey released this morning shows that many motorists have expanded their behind-the-wheel activities beyond texting to include using Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter, taking selfies and even shooting videos.

The survey was commissioned by AT&T, itself a phone company, but one that has invested heavily in discouraging distracted driving through its “It Can Wait” public service campaign. The telephone survey was conducted by Braun Research, which polled 2,067 people who own a smartphone and drive at least once a day.

The survey found that 27 percent of drivers age 16 to 65 report using Facebook, and 14 percent report using Twitter. Of those, a startling 30 percent who said they post to Twitter while driving do it “all the time.”

“One in 10 say they do video chat while driving. I don’t even have words for that,” said Lori Lee, AT&T’s senior executive vice president for global marketing.

The survey found, 17 percent take selfies, perhaps a fitting metaphor for ignoring everyone else on the road. The survey also found that texting remains the most prevalent activity, reported by 61 percent of drivers, followed by 33 percent who email and 28 percent who surf the Internet. More than 10 percent use Instagram and Snapchat. (...)

Curiously, more drivers are aware of the risks. In the 2014 AAA survey, 84.4 percent of those surveyed said it was “completely unacceptable” to text and drive.

What might explain the disconnect?

Over the years covering this issue, I’ve heard a handful of explanations from scientists and policy experts that get at potential reasons.

First, policy and safety efforts to discourage distracted driving are flying in the face of strong social pressure to stay connected. It’s also flying in the face of market forces and new technology that encourage constant connectedness. That’s summed up in the auto industry’s idea du jour: touch-screen Infotainment.

And our devices can feel irresistible. In the new AT&T survey, 22 percent of the respondents who access social media while driving said that they did so because they felt addicted. A growing body of evidence suggests that heavy use of phones is, if not actually addictive, at least extremely habit-forming.

Drivers also overestimate their abilities to multitask while driving even as they criticize others for doing it.

by Matt Richtel, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: LM Otero/Associated Press

Everyone I Know is Brokenhearted

All the genuinely smart, talented, funny people I know seem to be miserable these days. You feel it on Twitter more than Facebook, because Facebook is where you go to do your performance art where you pretend to be a hip, urbane person with the most awesomest friends and the best relationships and the very best lunches ever. Facebook is surface; Twitter is subtext, and judging by what I’ve seen, the subtext is aching sadness. (...)
 
It didn’t used to be like this when I was a kid. I’m not getting nostalgic here, or pretending that my adolescence and my twenties were some kind of soft-focused Golden Age. Life sucked when I was young. I was unhappy then too. But there was always the sense that it was just a temporary thing, that if I stuck it out eventually the world was going to get better — become awesome, in fact.

But the reality is that the three generations who ended the 20th century, the Boomers, their Generation X children, and Generation Y, have architected a Western civilization that’s kind of a shit show. Being born in 1978, I fall at either the tail end of Gen X or the beginning of Gen Y, depending on how you look at it. I became an adolescent at the time Nirvana was ushering in a decade of “slacker” ideology, as the pundits liked to put it. But the reality is that I didn’t know a whole lot of actual slackers in the 1990s. I did know a lot of people who found themselves disillusioned with the materialism of the 1980s and what we saw as the failed rhetoric of the Sixties generation, who were all about peace and love right until the time they put on suits and ties and figured out how to divide up the world. I knew a lot of people who weren’t very interested in that path.

The joke, of course, is that every generation kills the thing they love. The hippies became yuppies; Gen X talked a lot about the revolution, and then went and got themselves some venture capital and started laying into place the oversaturated, paranoid world we live in now. A lot of them tried to tell themselves they were still punk as fuck, but it’s hard to morally reconcile the thing where you listen to Fugazi on the way to your job where you help find new ways to trick people into giving up their data to advertisers. Most people don’t even bother. They just compartmentalize.

And I’m not blaming them. The world came apart at the end of the 90s, when the World Trade Center did. My buddy Brent and I were talking about this one night last year — about how the end of the 90s looked like revolution. Everybody was talking about Naomi Klein and anti-consumerism and people in Seattle were rioting over the WTO. Hell, a major motion picture company put out Fight Club, which is about as unsubtle an attack on consumer corporate capitalism as you can get. We were poised on the brink of something. You could feel it.

And then the World Trade Center went down. And all of a sudden calling yourself an “anticapitalist terrorist” was no longer a cool posture to psych yourself up for protest. It became something you might go to jail for — or worse, to one of the Black Camps on some shithole island somewhere. Corporate capitalism became conflated somehow with patriotism. And the idea that the things you own end up defining you became quaint, as ridiculous spoken aloud as “tune in, turn on, drop out”. In fact, it became a positive: if you bought the right laptop, the right smartphone, the right backpack, exciting strangers would want to have sex with you!

It’s no wonder that Gen X began seeking the largely mythological stability of their forebearers; to stop fucking around and eating mushrooms at the Rage Against The Machine show, and to try and root yourself. Get a decent car — something you can pass off as utilitarian — and a solid career. Put your babies in Black Flag onesies, but make sure their stroller is more high tech than anything mankind ever took to the Moon, because that wolf is always at the door. And buy yourself a house, because property is always valuable. Even if you don’t have the credit, because there’s this thing called a “subprime mortgage” you can get now!

But the world changed again. And kept changing. So now you’ve got this degree that’s worth fuck-all, a house that’s worth more as scrap lumber than as a substantial investment, and you’re either going to lose your job or have to do the work of two people, because there’s a recession on. Except they keep saying the recession ended, so why are you still working twice as hard for the same amount of money? (...)

So you’re haunted, and you’re outraged, and you go on Twitter and you go on Facebook and you change your avatar or your profile picture to a slogan somebody thoughtfully made for you, so that you can show the world that you’re watching, that you care, that it matters. But if you’re at all observant, you begin to realize after a while that it doesn’t matter; that your opinion matters for very little in the world. You voted for Obama, because Obama was about hope and change; except he seems to be mostly about hope and change for rich people, and not about hope at all for the people who are killed by American drones or who are locked away without trial in American internment camps or who are prosecuted because they stand up and tell the truth about their employers. There does seem to be a lot of hope and change in Fort Meade and Langley, though, where the NSA and CIA are given more and more leeway to spy on everyone in the world, including American citizens, not for what they’ve done but what they might do.

And the rest of the world? They keep making more dead children. They slaughter each other in the streets of Baghdad and Libya and Gaza and Tel Aviv; they slaughter each other in the hills of Syria; and, increasingly, they slaughter each other in American schools and movie theaters and college campuses.

And when you speak up about that — when you write to your Congressperson to say that you believe in, say, stricter control on the purchase of assault weapons, or limiting the rights of corporations to do astonishing environmental damage, or not sending billions of dollars to the kind of people who think it’s funny to launch missiles filled with flechette rounds into the middle of schools where children huddle together — you’re told that, no, you’re the fascist: that people have the right to defend themselves and make money, and that those rights trump your right to not be killed by some fucking lunatic when you’re waiting in line at Chipotle to grab a chicken burrito, and your right to not be able to light your tapwater on fire with a Zippo because of the chemicals in it, or not to end up in a grainy YouTube video while some demented religious fanatic hacks your head off with a rusty bayonet because your country — not you, but who’s counting — is the Great Satan.

And the music sucks. Dear God, the music sucks. Witless, vapid bullshit that makes the worst airheaded wannabe profundities of the grunge era look like the collected works of Thomas Locke. Half the songs on the radio aren’t anything more than a looped 808 beat and some dude grunting and occasionally talking about how he likes to fuck bitches in the ass. The other half are grown-ass adults singing about their stunted, adolescent romantic ideals and playing a goddamn washtub while dressed like extras from The Waltons.

by Joshua Ellis, Zenarchery |  Read more:

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France makes it illegal for supermarkets to destroy edible food in effort to cut waste

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