I was recently listening to someone on the radio who had worked with the Rwandan truth and reconciliation commission and she was saying how one of the things that surprised her was how the people who participated in and fomented the genocide were often the best educated. Priests, doctors, teachers. The heros she found were often simple people.

That got me thinking of one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite books (Journey to the End of the Night by Céline), also speaking of Africa:

“The natives, they don’t do anything without being beaten with clubs. They retain that dignity, whereas the whites, perfected by public education, they work on their own. The club ends up just making the one who wields it tired, while the hope of becoming rich and powerful force fed to the whites costs nothing, absolutely nothing.”

Or, in the original:

“Les indigènes eux, ne fonctionnent guère en somme qu’à coups de trique, ils gardent cette dignité, tandis que les blancs, perfectionnés par l’instruction publique, ils marchent tout seuls. La trique finit par fatiguer celui qui la manie, tandis que l’espoir de devenir puissants et riches dont les blancs sont gavés, ça ne coûte rien, absolument rien.”

Louis-Ferrand Céline, Voyage au bout de la nuit<, p. 175, Denoel et Steel, Paris, 1932.

Popularity: 7% [?]

…was trained in the in supermarkets and the farms of America. This is how your food is raised, and California Prop 2 aims to change that. As Shakespeare said: “All pity chok’d with custom of fell deed” (Jul. Caesar, Act III, scene I).

Just a sampling of the photos and video on the Yes on Prop 2 website.

Popularity: 13% [?]

How many times have we seen this?

I love this picture by Stephen de Sousa which has been going around to BlogTO and Treehugger (where I found it).

Popularity: 15% [?]

I am proud to announce that Taken For Ranted will soon be branching out from t-shirts into a line of all-natural products. I am working hard on a line of soups made with all-natural ingredients. Details are still in the making, but all of our products will boast only the finest ingredients:

• Organic, pesticide-free castor bean.We have sourced our wild castor bean from a Texas location that uses no pesticides or chemical fertilizers.
• Organically-grown, genuine Greek hemlock. The same stuff recommended by Socrates! Never grown with anything but all-natural pesticides.
• Pure Missouri lead. Our products will contain only the finest all-nautral lead from the Missouri Lead Belt. This product is ultra-purified to get rid of any contaminants.
• Genuine, pure arsenic from the High Sierra. The Sierra contain some of the highest concentrations of arsenic. Our products are filtered to remove organic materials to leave us with only the purest, highest-grade, all-natural arsenic, straight from the idyllic hills of California’s High Sierra.
• Hormone-free, free-range rattlesnake venom. We harvest our venom from nothing but rattlers grown in the fresh air of the Sonoran Desert.

So remember, these products are pesticide-free and are completely natural! They must be good for you, right? Yum yum. Be healthy! Live natural!

Popularity: 14% [?]

Oh God! Not another article about the evils of Internet Explorer? Actually, no. What interests me is not what brand someone prefers, but the gap between perceptions and realities, the gap that makes people afraid to hop in a commercial aircraft, but not afraid to hop into a car, even though the aircraft is much safer on a per-mile basis.
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Popularity: 6% [?]

Amazon is certainly dying to get your money, we all know that. Lately, however, I’ve been wondering if they are lying about sales data to make a given product seem more attractive and therefore entice you to buy. We know that for less-popular books it’s easy to game the Amazon reviews. If there are only five reviews, then of course the author could easily have her husband, mother, agent and grandmother supply four, while the author supplies the fifth. Or why go to all that trouble when you could just create five accounts? So nobody can pay too much attention to the reviews.

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Popularity: 12% [?]

Greenleaf, ID, asks all heads of households to own firearms

Yup, as the proposed ordinance says:

“In order to provide for the emergency management of the city, and further in order to provide for and protect the safety, security and general welfare of the city and its inhabitants,” the proposal says, “it is recommended that every head of household residing in the city limits maintain a firearm, together with ammunition”

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Popularity: 25% [?]

I often find Paul Graham, author of Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age, interesting to read. I just came across an older article of his on the breaking news that suits are back in corporate America, as reported in April 2005 in the New York Times. And as previously reported in February, March, June and September 2004 and September 2003 and February, April and November 2002. So who cares? Here at Taken For Ranted World Headquarters, our staff of one has shown up to work in a suit, let’s see, zero times in his life. He has shown up to work in a tee-shirt or bathrobe approximately… 2783 times. So who cares about suits? Well, PR firms for the garment industry, and that’s what Graham’s article is about. He runs down how it is that the PR firms drive mainstream media reporting and how that explains why there is so much inexplicable crap in most mainstream reporting, the New York Times included. (more…)

Popularity: 17% [?]

It never fails that when I talk about maybe buying an MP3 player, everyone starts to volunteer to transfer everything from their MP3 player to mine. Meanwhile, the record companies and movie studios would have you believe that “stealing” a song or a movie is the same as stealing a car. First off, there is a significant difference in that when I steal you car, I have it and you don’t. In other words, we can’t both have it. Stealing a song is more like stealing my idea. In effect, it is copyright infringement rather than larceny. Both acts fit the general dictionary meanings of the words “steal” and “theft”, but they are certainly different. Of course, if you don’t believe in private property, which is a morally defensible position, then there is no such thing as stealing. Of course, to be morally consistent, you need to give me access to anything of yours ours that I want. (more…)

Popularity: 8% [?]

Now that we’re looking at building a house, we’ve entered into the “per month zone”. This is the zone where nobody ever tells you how much something actually costs, but gives youthe price per month. So in Home Depot, you look around and see tags that say “Only 16.99 per month” on a dishwasher. Great. For how many months? At what interest rate? At what total cost? It can take some hunting to find the price. I was thinking that, given the huge credit card debt that most Americans carry, this practice should be illegal. It’s like reverse compoung interest. I buy something today that’s only $16.99 per month. That can’t hurt right? Then I buy one tomorrow. And the next day. And so on, once per week for two years. Now I owe $1700 per month. Ouch! By taking large numbers and making them small, they don’t seem so frightening.

But then it occurred to me that since Americans seem to think in terms of cost per month, maybe we could use this to encourage responsible government. When we have fully electronic voting, we can integrate some simple caclulators. Before voting, everyone inputs their income and how many deductions they have, and then it takes them to a ballot and they get to vote:

• Prescription drug benefit. Your cost: only $14.99 per month.
• War in Iraq. Your cost: only 49.73 per month
• Safe drinking water. Your cost: only $0.76 per month
• Corn subsidies. Your cost: only $2.23 per month. But wait! Rebate at the checkout on your food and fuel: $0.23 per month!

Congress and lately the courts have struck down a presidential line-item veto and perhaps rightly so. Perhaps with improved voting technology, however, we could create a line-item veto for the citizenry. The key would be to have all of the items tallied at the bottom. You want to help out those poor Iraqis and all those family farmers Archer Daniels Midlands, then go ahead and vote yes on all measures. Your cost: only $1543.29 per month!

Popularity: 12% [?]