Friday, October 29, 2010

"So much about today’s adult industry seems like an undeft parody of Hollywood and the nation writ large. The top performers are comic-book caricatures of sexual allure. The prosthetic breasts and lifted buttocks and (no kidding) artificial cheekbones are nothing more than accentuations of a mentality that yields huge liposuction and collagen industries. The gynecologically explicit sexuality of Jenna, Jasmin, et al. seems more than anything like a Mad magazine spoof of the “smoldering” sexuality of Sharon Stone and Madonna and so many other mainstream iconettes.25 Not to mention the fact that the adult industry takes many of the psychological deformities that Hollywood is famous for—the vanity, the vulgarity, the rank commercialism—and not only makes them overt and grotesque but seems then to revel in that grotesquerie."

Skepticism

Be skeptical, or rather be joyful though you have considered all the facts.
Police brutality: "Here in Los Angeles, blacks are arrested for marijuana possession at seven times the rate whites are, according to a study by the Drug Policy Alliance, which favors legalization. Yet surveys consistently find that young whites use marijuana at higher rates than young blacks."

Friday, October 1, 2010

"But both protagonists are, finally, allegorical figures, and the films work most powerfully as morality tales. As such, they dispense both comfort and cautionary wisdom, and enact a symbolic revenge against the powerful and the very rich, who, F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “are not like you and me.” They are sadder, lonelier, experiencing the very success that makes them the objects of our envy as a kind of exile. What they really want is to be like everyone else. So who is excluding whom?"

Friday, September 10, 2010

Souter

"For the tensions that are the stuff of judging in so many hard constitutional cases are, after all, the products of our aspirations to value liberty, as well as order, and fairness and equality, as well as liberty. And the very opportunity for conflict between the good and the good reflects our confidence that a way must be found to resolve it when a conflict arises." - Souter (on the conflict that's missing in Copenhagen?)

Thursday, August 19, 2010

The future is now

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/18/business/global/18bus.html?src=me&ref=business

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Being ethical and doing good are not the same thing.