With tired eyes, tired minds, tired souls we slept

This post contains only one accusation. Reading the news recently has gotten me too tense for my own good. There is plenty more to say about the Occupy movement, which is still doing great things to raise consciousness and getting people to think critically, even if it is at great expense to the protestors. At the New York Times, Thomas Friedman oversimplifies serious issues. I've wanted to write something about H.R. 3261: the Stop Online Privacy Act. However, my good friend Carlos has it covered. Another writing resource has helped somewhat to ease the stress. But news and academics have left me exhausted.

In anticipation of the deficit panel's failure to come to a consensus tomorrow, I would like to offer a more heartening picture of interpersonal cooperation. Black, white, Democrat, Republican, serving in religious and secular capacities. This comes from President Barack Obama's remarks at the highly-contested 2009 Notre Dame Commencement:

After all, I stand here today, as President and as an African American, on the 55th anniversary of the day that the Supreme Court handed down the decision in Brown v. Board of Education.  Now, Brown was of course the first major step in dismantling the "separate but equal" doctrine, but it would take a number of years and a nationwide movement to fully realize the dream of civil rights for all of God’s children.  There were freedom rides and lunch counters and Billy clubs, and there was also a Civil Rights Commission appointed by President Eisenhower.  It was the 12 resolutions recommended by this commission that would ultimately become law in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

There were six members of this commission.  It included five whites and one African American; Democrats and Republicans; two Southern governors, the dean of a Southern law school, a Midwestern university president, and your own Father Ted Hesburgh, President of Notre Dame.  (Applause.)  So they worked for two years, and at times, President Eisenhower had to intervene personally since no hotel or restaurant in the South would serve the black and white members of the commission together.  And finally, when they reached an impasse in Louisiana, Father Ted flew them all to Notre Dame’s retreat in Land O’Lakes, Wisconsin -- (applause) -- where they eventually overcame their differences and hammered out a final deal.

And years later, President Eisenhower asked Father Ted how on Earth he was able to broker an agreement between men of such different backgrounds and beliefs.  And Father Ted simply said that during their first dinner in Wisconsin, they discovered they were all fishermen.  (Laughter.)  And so he quickly readied a boat for a twilight trip out on the lake.  They fished, and they talked, and they changed the course of history.

Amen.

Dark Marketplaces

You can buy and/or invest in virtually anything in the market economy...Creating an economy-based corollary to Rule 34. That's the last bit of fun we'll be having in this post.

"Investing in a Stranger's Retirement"

Looking to make some money off of someone in need? Buy someone's pension! From the article: "Several buyers of pension payments who were interviewed by The Wall Street Journal declined to be identified because they didn't want to be seen as profiting from anyone's financial desperation."

"What's Your Dead Body Worth"

When you're dead, you can donate your body to science. Or sell its organs on the market. What are you going to do with it anyway? While you're alive you can also sell an organ to pay off that loan...or to buy bread for your family...or because you're forced to by other means. The poor providing organs for the rich; I can hear Aldous Huxley's unsold bones rattling in his grave.

Tropical Islands!

While most of us can't afford a tropical island, the collective actions of western society ensure that someone else pays for our lifestyle. Rising seas, the direct result of climate change, stand to displace 70,000 people. The U.S. has already guaranteed Marshall Islanders strife and disease for years to come, and defined affected areas in a limited way so as to limit desperately-needed reparations.

The darkest marketplace of all is the one in which the full price of unchecked industrialization exacts payments from indigenous people around the world. This tribute is fully payable in suffering.

Alice in La La Land (Spoiler Below)

Pop-ups in a newspaper? Come on, that's just tacky. The Wall Street Journal has been doing nontraditional ads as well, ever since you-know-who became you-know-what. But.

Just yesterday I thought I got the end of a roll of paper in The Journal Report's coverage of the Environment. There was the front page, then in front of that, a half-front page with the same text and graphic, connected to a full page on the back. You could pull away the false front page to reveal a one-and-a-half page BMW ad. Now that's clever! But.

But the difference between the Wall Street Journal and the LA Times is that the LA Times made it so that the entire front page was an advertisement! You could still read everything you needed to in the Wall Street Journal without a painted Johnny Depp inviting you to see his latest movie (which, by the way, was formulaic, visually riveting but soulless, and not nearly odd enough to grab my attention).

End Transmission.

SPOILER:

As I see it, the ending can be interpreted one of two ways:
1. In support of Imperialism, Opium Trade/Opium Wars, and "RAPE OF CHINA!" as one friend put it.
2. An ironic rejection of this. After all, Alice is Crazy, and only crazy people could possibly come up with ideas like trading with China, D.A.R.E. [why yes, that is from the Surgeon General], and funding drug-producing contras and turning a blind eye when these drugs make their way into America. Among other things.

I sure hope it is the second. Otherwise it's a very cold and frightening move on Burton's part. But with my disappointment in the movie, I am inclined to believe Burton's message is the first option.