Friday, May 16, 2008
Xenophobic South Africans Attack Zimbabweans
Violence spreads as South Africans turn on their neighbours
GET OUT OR BE DRIVEN OUT. It was this message, delivered by a group of some 200 residents to 'foreigners' (mostly Zimbabweans) that sparked a few isolated incidents late Sunday night in the Johannesburg township of Alexandra.
A few days later, against a backdrop of violent mobs facing off against each other and the armed contingents of the South African Police, four people had died, and dozens had been injured, while scores of Zimbabwean and South Africans alike, fled to nearby police stations to escape the growing tyranny against them. Recent estimates put the number seeking security in police shelters at about 1000.
The brushfire violence spread so rapidly and apparently randomly, that some of the local inhabitants in Alexandra began to identify their nationalities by painting messages across the fronts of their shacks, or standing at their front doors with identifying documents. Groups combed one area of Alexandra (known as Extension 7) house-to-house infuriated by runors that some houses had been given to foreign nationals at the expensive of locals living in nearby shacks.
Rumor mill
The mob decided to take matters into their own hands fired up by the belief that the Zimbabweans were to blame for widespread criminality and the afflictions of unemployment. They were operating to some extent on behalf of local communities that have become crippled by poverty.
Meanwhile, a large group of Zimbabweans armed with sticks mobilised, prepared and ready to face their attackers. Some reports put this mob at about 500 strong.
Violence is spreading
Now that violence has spread to another area, Diepsloot (literally: 'Deep Drain'), and Metro police have indicated the horrifying nature of those attacks: men in several pick-up trucks driving in the night and firing a hail of bullets on Diepsloot residents.
Some South African voices have condemned the attacks, including Blade Nzimande (from South Africa's Communist party) and even Winnie Mandela. Nelson Mandela himself made a rare statement, reminding South Africans of their hard-won freedoms, and cautioning against acts of 'divisiveness'. Other leaders called the xenophobia 'shameful' and 'disgraceful'. South Africa's President (Thabo Mbeki) and President-in-waiting (Jacob Zuma) have remained eerily silent on the issue.
Back to the bad old days
The front pages of newspapers this week have harked back to the bad old days of Apartheid, with headlines like ALEX DOOR-TO-DOOR PURGE, FEAR AND LOATHING IN ALEX and POLITICIANS DITHER AS VIOLENCE SPREADS. Pictures of black faces covered in shining red blood, and policemen captured with guns blazing were eerily remininicent of South Africa's racist past. In a recent television bulletin, a police superintendant warned that if the police were targetted, 'real bullets' would be used to defend themselves.
The local MEC for safety and Security, Firoz Cachalia, has described the incidents as 'not just xenophobia', citing a criminal element that is taking advantage of the hysteria. Other reports suggest a 'third force' has been behind the attacks. The South African Human Rights commission cited the government's lack of response to illegal immigrants, poverty and emergent xenophobia as contributing to these elevated levels of civil strife.
So far 66 people in Alexandra have been arrested for their part in the violence.
Some see oil bubble; others see trouble
Many expect prices to head lower, but suppliers have little margin
The recent trajectory of oil prices — a fairly steady increase followed by a much more vertical rise — has a familiar look to it. Remember those charts of tech stocks and housing prices? It's hard not to wonder: Are oil prices forming the next big “bubble?"
Those who see a bubble forming say you need look no further than the recent run-up in the cost of a barrel of crude to the current level of about $124.
“We were only trading at $86 about three months ago and not a whole lot has changed to move us to where we are now,” said Addison Armstrong, Director of Market Research for Tradition Energy. “There's no doubt in my mind — and most other people I speak to — we are in a bubble. And it's going to deflate at some point.”
Bubble proponents argue that if demand for oil continues to ease and supplies hold up, the speculative fever driving up prices could quickly evaporate, and prices could fall sharply.
It wouldn’t be the first time prices have crashed. In 1986, oil prices began the year at $26 a barrel. By March, crude was selling for $10.25. In 1997, prices peaked in October at nearly $23 a barrel only to fall below $11 a little more than a year later.
But the forces that caused those oil “crashes” aren’t evident today. The 1986 slide was the result of heavy overproduction by OPEC, when Saudi Arabia opened the spigots after fellow cartel members cheated on their quotas. The 1998 pullback also resulted from a huge oversupply after the Asian economy unexpectedly slowed sharply as a currency crisis swept through the region.
Today, the world’s oil producers have little extra capacity, and the Asian economy is booming. Bubble skeptics say that while oil prices may be due for a pullback, the longer-term trend is clearly higher.
“When I hear bubble, I'm thinking of a technology bubble where we spike up and we just never come back to it again,” said Chris Jarvis, an energy analyst at Caprock Risk Management. “I don't think that’s the case. I think if anything you’re talking about more of a short-term pullback. What is short term? I don't know, nine months to a year. But the trend higher is still intact. I would definitely not call it bubble.”
More.
NVDL: What a great article from MSNBC, and actually written by the Senior Producer there, John W. Schoen. It's insightful because it clearly addresses the schism in our psychology. At one end of the spectrum the optimistics are saying - this bad news stuff has got to end soon (very unscientific, but one could argue there is some basic common sense there), and at the other end, reality. Unfortunately the oil phenomenon is quite a complicated problem to wade through in order to get to the simple facts. Not many people are prepared to do that, and those who do start getting confused when they're ankle deep, and tend to throw up their hands and say - well no one knows the answer, so I'll just believe and be positive. Ironically, this explains the belief systems of about 95% of the world's population (who believe there is a God). Never mind that the most intelligent people in the world - our scientists and intellectuals - are pretty clear that God is a fairy tale, a brave enough in their reasoning and their intellectual capacity to say this.
Anyhoo...what do I predict? I predict prices will fall back a teeny bit right now, perhaps going to as low as $110-$115, maybe slightly lower. And just when we are starting to sigh with relief, inearly July, prices will ratchet up again to over $130. They might go higher. They'll simmer lower again as we approach America's winter, and then it's fasten your seatbelts time...I'm predicting $140-$150 by Christmas, but you can start saying your goodbye's to two digit oil prices. That's over. We won't be spending very long periods in any particular zone, we'll see incredible volatility overnight as the system chokes and swims and chokes again.
I hate to burst your bubble, but the only bubble that is out there now is the US housing bubble. Other bubbles will follow, and there will be carnage. Yes, in South Africa as well. And it is deflating everywhere like a wobbly balloon. Can you hear that infernal flubbery shriek. And with each notch the oil price steps up, you'll hear an outward belch of air in property prices. Energy prices (this includes coal and ordinary food) will continue to gain momentum as our global efficiencies start to back-fire, and the financial system starts to eat itself.
Radical Cyclists Take to L.A. Freeways to Say Bikes Are Better (VIDEO)
For the second time in two months, a bunch of Los Angeles bike advocates calling themselves Crimanimalz took to one of the busiest freeways in the world to make the case that, when your freeways are gridlocked, bikes are better.
About 30 cyclists rode onto the Santa Monica Freeway (I-10) at the height of Friday's rush-hour commute and went east to the San Diego Freeway (I-405), where they rode north to the Santa Monica Boulevard exit, moving easily through traffic. In all, they rode more than two miles.
"There's thousands of cars and you're just flying by," said one of the group, called RichToTheIE, by phone on Wednesday. "It's an amazing feeling."
The renegade rides are a radical off-shoot of the popular - and often controversial - Critical Mass rides held each month in cities around the world as cyclists grow increasingly vocal in asserting their rights to the road and extolling the environmental and societal benefits of ditching your car in favor of a bike.
Such rides are usually limited to downtown areas, but Crimanimalz are taking them to the freeways of Los Angeles to prove that riding a bike is faster than creeping through bumper-to-bumper traffic.
By Chuck Squatriglia
NVDL: I really want to start this sort of thing in JHB. Put the same banner RIDE A BIKE - YOU'D BE HOME BY NOW on the M1 at the Glenhove bridge.
Big Blogger Is Watching You
For some time there has seemed (and I use the word 'seemed' quite consciously) to be a skewing of power away from blogs, in that someone who makes a stray offending comment might, say, be summarily dismissed from their jobs. In this misperception it is easy to assume that a blog is actually an achilles heel, it's a useful device to sabotage someone you don't like. And we're all aware of those unfortunate names in the Hall Of Fired Bloggers. This sort of thing has happened here and there, with a lot of bloggers tucking their tails between their legs, making silent oaths to behave. When I say a lot, I mean a lockeroom at your average gym. Meanwhile, outside these groups of civilised cyberspecimens, the blog lynchmob has just begun to congregate and flex their muscles. Can you hear them baying for blood? It's a loud, but silent internet sizzle bursting invisibly and across broders to planetwide PC's.
Like money, sex and any other powerful...let's call it 'mechanism', blogging can be used for good or ill. But make no mistake, a megaphone that can broadcast a citizen's manifesto to the far reaches of the planet has astounding power at his or her fingertips. It can be used to turn yourself into a famous scriptwriter (a la Diablo Cody), or it can be harnessed into activism (this blog ventures into that area quite often), or it can simply be a device for mischief. Of course when you're blogging about your poodle's puppy's poofy hairdo, people in Poland aren't going to turn off the 9 'o clock news to care... Actually, even that is changing. But, I digress.
Increasingly it is becoming far more risky to antagonise a blogger and thereby risk a deluge of bad publicity. I suppose one has to weigh up the blogger's salt, if you're going to mess with him or her. So if it's a random once a monther you're talking about, or someone who can't really string too many sentences together, you might as well take a swing. But you've also got to know which communities these netizens are part of. And do they have any support from the big blogospheres like Korea's Daum, and American networks. Chances are, it's a risk either way. There's no knowing who these people are connected to...as Dan Rather's call centre nemesis - Edward Morrissey - can attest. And of course, there is no knowing what they know that you do not.
Bloggers Can Get You Fired
Resignation at CNN Shows the Growing Influence of Blogs
With the resignation Friday of a top news executive from CNN, bloggers have laid claim to a prominent media career for the second time in five months.
In September, conservative bloggers exposed flaws in a report by Dan Rather; he subsequently announced that on March 9 he would step down as anchor of the "CBS Evening News." On Friday, after nearly two weeks of intensifying pressure on the Internet, Eason Jordan, the chief news executive at CNN, abruptly resigned after being besieged by the online community. Morever, last week liberal bloggers forced a sketchily credentialed White House reporter to quit his post.
For some bloggers - people who publish the sites known as Web logs - it was a declaration that this was just the beginning. Edward Morrissey, a call center manager who lives near Minneapolis and has written extensively about the Jordan controversy, wrote on his blog, Captain's Quarters (captainsquartersblog.com): "The moral of the story: the media can't just cover up the truth and expect to get away with it - and journalists can't just toss around allegations without substantiation and expect people to believe them anymore."
Mr. Jordan, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in late January, apparently said, according to various witnesses, that he believed the United States military had aimed at journalists and killed 12 of them. There is some uncertainty over his precise language and the forum, which videotaped the conference, has not released the tape. When he quit Friday night, Mr. Jordan said in a statement that, "I never meant to imply U.S. forces acted with ill intent when U.S. forces accidentally killed journalists."
Some of those most familiar with Mr. Jordan's situation emphasized, in interviews over the weekend, that his resignation should not be read solely as a function of the heat that CNN had been receiving on the Internet, where thousands of messages, many of them from conservatives, had been posted.
Nonetheless, within days of his purported statement, many blog sites were swamped with outraged assertions that he was slandering American troops. In an e-mail message yesterday, Mr. Jordan declined to be interviewed.
But while the bloggers are feeling empowered, some in their ranks are openly questioning where they are headed. One was Jeff Jarvis, the head of the Internet arm of Advance Publications, who publishes a blog at buzzmachine.com. Mr. Jarvis said bloggers should keep their real target in mind. "I wish our goal were not taking off heads but digging up truth," he cautioned.
By KATHERINE Q. SEELYE
More.
Heinberg: Saying Goodbye to Air Travel
The airline industry has no future.
The same is true for airfreight. No air carrier has a viable plan to make a profit with oil at current prices—much less in years to come as the petroleum available to world markets dwindles rapidly.
That's not to say that jetliners will disappear overnight, but rather that the cheap flights we've seen in the past will soon be fading memories. In a few years jet service will be available only to the wealthy, or to the government and military.
Sir Richard Branson of Virgin Atlantic says he wants to use biofuels to power his fleet of 747's and Airbuses. There are still some bugs to be worked out in terms of basic chemistry, but it might be possible in principle—if only we could make enough biodiesel or ethanol without further driving up food prices and wrecking the soil. Even then it would be very costly fuel.
Are there other options for powered flight?
Hydrogen could be burned in jet engines, but doing so would require a complete redesign of our commercial aircraft fleet, and H2 would be expensive to make—unless the growing trend toward more costly electricity (as we phase out depleting, polluting coal and increasingly scarce natural gas) can somehow be reversed.
Last year I was invited to give the keynote address at the world's first Electric Aircraft Symposium. NASA and Boeing sent representatives, but all told there were only about 20 in attendance. The planes being discussed were ultralight two-seaters: that's the limit of current or foreseeable battery technology. These might come in handy in a future where they are the only option for emergency air travel (blimps need depleting helium or explosive hydrogen). But forget about 300-seat planes running on solar or wind power, ferrying middle-class vacationers to Bali or Venice.
There are good reasons to cut down on air travel voluntarily: flying not only swells our personal carbon emissions but spews CO2 and other pollutants into the stratosphere, where they do the most damage. However, the worsening scarcity of the stuff we use for making jet fuel takes the discussion out of the realm of optional moral action and into that of economic necessity and personal adaptation.
I fly to educate both general audiences and policy makers about fossil fuel depletion; in fact, I'm writing this article aboard a plane en route from Boston to San Francisco. I wince at my carbon footprint, but console myself with the hope that my message helps thousands of others to change their consumption patterns. This inner conflict is about to be resolved: the decline of affordable air travel is forcing me to rethink my work. I'm already starting to do much more by video teleconference, much less by jet.
Those who live far from family will be more than inconvenienced, as will the hundreds of thousands who work for the airline industry directly or indirectly, or the millions who depend on tourism or airfreight for an income. These folks will have few options: teleconferencing can accomplish only so much.
Our species' historically brief fling with flight has been fun, educational, and enriching on many levels to those fortunate enough to benefit from it. Saying goodbye will be difficult. But maybe as we do we can say hello to greater involvement in our local communities.
From here.For Movies, a Summer That’s Shy on Sequels
LOS ANGELES — Hollywood’s summer movies promise to be a little fresher, more original and funnier than usual. And that could be a problem for an industry that has done well lately by peddling the familiar.
“Iron Man” and “Speed Racer” — the first two entries in the big-ticket season of May through August — both point to the challenge facing a business obsessed with comparisons: last summer’s crop of films, driven by an unusual confluence of sure-shot sequels, was so big that this year’s more inventive pictures, whether they win or lose individually, may come up short as a group.
As hot as “Iron Man” is, with domestic ticket sales of about $180 million in its first week and a half, it still trails last year’s summer season kick-off movie, “Spider Man 3,” by about 25 percent in the same time. Meanwhile “Speed Racer” may have crashed at the box office last weekend with less than $20 million in ticket sales, but it looks great when compared with “Georgia Rule,” the Lindsay Lohan bomb that took in less than $7 million on an equivalent weekend last year.
By MICHAEL CIEPLY
More.
NVDL: Iron Man is a great movie. I'm looking forward to The Dark Knight and What Happens in vegas.
Back to 'Boleyn'
Revisiting the madness of Henry VIII
King Henry VIII: [to Anne] And what would you know of great men?
Anne Boleyn: I'd know one, if he were before me.
King Henry VIII: Do you see one here?
Anne Boleyn: [walks about the hall, surveying the men] Looking, my lord.
Anne Boleyn: [stops in front of the King and smiles] Ah, found one.
It is doubtful whether King Henry VIII or any of his wives ought to be considered "great," but for all their messy misadventures, Henry did produce red-haired Elizabeth, possibly England's greatest monarch.
Katherine of Aragon: [to Anne and Mary] I am Katherine, Queen of England, the King's one true wife and mother of the heir to the throne. Beloved of the people, and beloved of a King you have bewitched.
Ironically, when Katherine -- Henry VIII's first wife -- died, Henry and Anne Boleyn dressed in bright yellow and called on the nation to celebrate. "The Other Boleyn Girl" (2008) does reflect the angst that King Henry's wives must have endured immediately after giving birth, and the children in each case having turned out not to be boys.
The stress to give birth to sons was a burden to all of Henry's wives (failure meant the threat of being put to death), leading to the high rate of miscarriages. It is this more than anything else that makes "The Other Boleyn Girl" worth watching.
I confess, I went to watch this movie because Natalie Portman is one of America's prettiest stars, and so is Scarlett Johansson, and who wouldn't want to be in Eric Bana's position (as Henry VIII), with this pair, the lissome blonde and sultry brunette fighting for your affections? But that is exactly the problem with this flick. The characters seem to have invaded history, and Portman's Anne Boleyn -- possibly because we like Portman so much (and so did director Justin Chadwick) -- breaks away from history in this flick before departing entirely from it.
Anne Boleyn: What will the King say when he finds out that I cannot bear children?
It is less easy in the face of history to be sympathetic to Anne Boleyn when we remember that she became incredibly greedy as the new queen, spending extravagantly on jewels, ostrich-feather fans and palace decorations. Anne renovated entire palaces, and complimented her husband's tyrannical style, which did not endear her to the laity. In 1535 she was crucial in having her enemies (including Sir Thomas More) executed.
Naturally the film depicts none of this, and we come away to some extent pitying, admiring and loving Portman's Anne Boleyn. If there is an admirable character in this flick (and I'm not convinced there is), it might be Johansson as the loyal and sincere Mary Boleyn. The initial scenes between her and the king I found tender and touching, but no more resembling of history.
Lest we forget, King Henry's wife swapping started with a Papal Dispensation allowing him to marry his dead brother's wife (the Queen of Spain),and two days after both were crowned at Westminster Abbey, Henry VIII accused two unpopular ministers of treason and had them beheaded. At this stage Henry was just 17 years old, but it became a regular refrain during the remainder of his reign. Thus, he began his predatory ambitions as a result of his obsession to sire a male heir. In fact his first 'victim' Elizabeth Blount (a mistress), gave birth to a son, Henry Fitzroy, and some attempts were made to change the law to allow an illegitimate son to become king.
The movie also fails to mention that the king married and put to death an 18-year-old Mary Howard, Anne Boleyn's first cousin. While many of his marriages were null and void technically, and Henry committed adultery on numerous occasions, suspected transgressions made by his wives (who were in many cases betrothed to other men before Henry married them) were punished by beheadings.
In all Henry had six wives, two of whom were executed, and numerous mistresses. He died, some say of syphilis, at the age of 55, very obese (with a waist measuring 137 cm) and requiring at the end of his life, machinery to move him around.
Lady Elizabeth: Our daughters are being traded like cattle for the advancement of men.
For my part I emerged from the cinema thoroughly disgusted; not only by Bana as the gutless King Henry, but by the power hungry, gold digging wenches who found themselves ambitiously "making the most" of their situations, before being doomed by these selfsame ambitions.
And I found the hypocrisy sickening. The director does his audience a disservice by straying to the extent that he does from the basic but fascinating history that he used as his muse.
Problems with Blogger - Edit Compose Mode has disappeared, can't bold or italicise - here's help
I have just spent a huge amount of time trawling the net and blogger for solutions to a simple but infuriating problem. My edit/compose mode on the post editor disappeared, and so did the bar allowing for bold, italics etc. I tried everything to solve it, downloading and installing FLASH, Adobe this, Java that, deleting cookies and cache, checking if Compose Mode is on. How did I fix it?
Easy: press CTRL F5 and sit tight.
If this helps please let me know- leave a comment - because I searched high and low and it wasn't an easy problem to solve.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Juno Revisited (PHOTOGRAPHY)
I'm inspired by Diablo Cody who wrote the screenplay for Juno. She says someone encouraged her - based on her writing style on the internet (a blog I'm assuming) to write a screenplay, and then she did, she said, because she loves movies, and it 'just took a coupla months' to write a 91 minute movie. Easy innit?
Racism 101
I see someone spent 28 minutes on this blog in the last couple of days studying up on everything I have written about racism. Intwisting. There's also a major investment in 'doom and gloom'. I wonder, did you find what you are looking for? Did you find some dirt, because I know there is someone who is definitely digging, and I know why they feel they have to do this. How it works is when you can't find anything in the real world, you start digging in someone's own personal archives, and that becomes your little court case. Hey, good luck with that.
I do have a question though. What do you call someone who accuses someone else of racism or discrimination (and they honestly believe their accusations are true) except they happen to be wrong? I'm thinking it's self-righteous arrogance, or purism or something. I'm not sure exactly what it is but I do know it disgusts me. It is actually worse than racism itself, because it is based once again on the belief that your standards (the way you treat and appraise people) is better, and thus the object of your disdain, is evaluated prejudicially. That is the point. This is very interesting, because it amounts to intellectual elitism. It might sound nice, a nice thing to be accused of. Think so? Well intellectual elitism begets Nazism, and it's based on the idea that you are - through your thinking, philosophy, whatever, you're essentially 'us', and they (who you don't agree with or can't understand) are 'them'. It is all based on the same ego-threatened idiocy that racism is based on. Except that it's based entirely on a fictionalised construct, a fantasy, that you the observer, the judge, is somehow more intellectually acceptable.
Frankly, it sickens me.
The US President's response to $126 Oil (here's a hint - it doesn't inspire confidence)
Q Mr. President, thank you very much for having us into the Roosevelt Room for the first online interview. In the spirit of the Internet, I wonder if we could ask a question from one of our users, Steve Bailey, of New York, who says: With oil at $126 a barrel, pushing up the price of everything -- even food -- what can your administration do to help people right now?
THE PRESIDENT: I appreciate Steven's concerns. With the price of gasoline going up, it's like a tax. I wish I could give Steven a quick answer. In other words, it took us a while to get to where we are -- very dependent on oil, and in a world in which demand is greater than oil. So my answer to Steven is that the best thing we can do is to increase supply, and to drill for oil and gas in environmentally friendly ways at home, and build more refineries. Steven probably doesn't know this, but we haven't built a new refinery since 1976, and if we're truly interested in relieving the pressure on our consumers, then we ought to have a very active domestic policy now.
NVDL: We live in a world 'in which demand is greater than oil'. Okayyy. And the advice is to 'increase supply'. I guess we just turn open the taps right. To the nougat centre of the Earth that is filled with oil. Just find somewhere else to drilland there'll like, be oil there? Is that the plan? The first thing we need to establish is if the President can speak English. Because most people, I don't know about you, most people who can't even spell or make grammatically correct statements might struggle with more complex things like economics, and the impact of fundamentals like energy on our living apparatus. So we might not even want to go to those sorts of people - who can't make statements that make sense grammatically - for advice on solving problem that is troubling people around the world.
But hey, everyone knows by now that the Prez was a loser on these issues to begin with.
By the way, the Prez is also wrong on refineries. Why aren't more refineries being built? Because no one is clearer on this than the oil companies themselves. They know NEW oil discovery peaked a long time ago, and as discovery declined so did the demand or need for new refineries. What do they say, for every 4 barrels of oil consumed one new barrel is discovered. It's an absurd investment - refineries - when you know you're not going to be needing them for very long. It's like buying summer clothes at a summer sale on the last day of autumn. Only stupid people - and stupid Presidents - do that.
Armstrong says Heartbreak Hill as tough as advertised
BOSTON (AP) — Lance Armstrong heard different stories about Heartbreak Hill during his training for the Boston Marathon. Some told him it was as tough as the name indicated.
But others said, no sweat, it's overrated.
"They were wrong," Armstrong said shortly after finishing his first Boston Marathon on Monday in 2 hours, 50 minutes, 58 seconds.
Heartbreak Hill, the last in a series of hills between miles 18 and 21, is a key test for runners nearing the end of the up and down course. The first of the hills was the worst, Armstrong said, and the heartbreaker lived up to its name.
"They are harder and they do come at a difficult time in the race," he said.
Other notables who ran Boston were astronaut Suni Williams, who finished in 4:20:42 and Jane Swift, former acting Governor of Massachusetts, who finished in 4:57:21.
Boston was Armstrong's third marathon after running New York twice. Boston was a harder course, and a much different experience because of the closeness of the spectators, Armstrong said.
"It's just much tighter," he said. "It's louder and more intense and I think it plays well for all the runners, not just the leaders. ... Everybody feels that."
Armstrong said there's no comparison between running a marathon and cycling, either physically or mentally.
"You can't compare the pounding or running with the efficiency of a bicycle," he said. "Nothing even comes close to comparing the pain, especially it seems like this course, with a significant amount of downhills ... that really take their toll on the muscles."
Armstrong said he planned to run Boston again, though he added he's too busy with other things to get more serious about running.
"It is a hobby, it keeps me fit on a daily basis, it keeps me inspired and motivates me to go out and run," he said.
Armstrong added he regrets not training harder when he's suffering in the middle of a race.
"Every time I come out here, I swear to myself I'm going to train harder for the next one," he said. "But I never do."
By JAY LINDSAY
NVDL: Looks like he improved his previous time by like 10 minutes. My best marathon time - and I'm quite proud of it - is 3:50, a full hour slower than Armstrong's time. This guy is incredible.
The Retail Scam
So there's an advertisement on television, Old Mutual I think, and the premise is these people (supposedly you and me and the guys next door) on a rollercoaster ride. They (we) are being taken upward, meanwhile down below some officious looking folks are preparing billboard sized posters to be raised to the top most spot of the rollercoaster (where it peaks and drops off). So what you see is this illusion/delusion/dream/metaphor of pictures being raised to basically frame over the rollercoaster to allow it to rise, then more pictures are added to the upward slanting ride, so that it climbs higher and higher.
Whoever conceived this ad either needs to be sent to next year's academy awards for rendering perfectly how stupid our wishful thinking has become, or should be shot on the spot for being a perpetrator of delusional thinking.
The rollercoaster-with-framed-postcards-taking-the-real-world-rollercoaster-car-into
magic-happy-happy-land ends up doing one thing - disconnecting itself from the machinery, the mechanical apparatus of the actual rollercoaster, and we're left with a fantasy. If this isn't the perfect analogy for our collective delusion and self-congratulatory arrogance and hubris, I don't know what is.
In a very real sense, if you drive a car each day, you basically endorse a world food program that says food for (biofuel) and too bad the other 6th 7ths of the world population who must go without. They're expendable. Because in a very real way, each day you make that choice to carry on driving to work, to go shopping at the mall, to watch advertising and pretend this is all normal - well, you are a perpetrator.
By the way, I was at a mall this evening, Killarney Mall. I treated my landlady with my two free movie tickets. We found, let's see, at least half a dozen shops with the windows wrapped up. This is a stone's throw from suburbs like Houghton and Melville, and 6 shops are already out of business. Incidentally, in Rosebank, there's a mall that is mostly underground, and I'm guessing that 70% of it doesn't even operate. The shops are shells. Nevertheless, from what I understand a third mall is under construction in the area. This is called 'throwaway culture'. When something doesn't work we abandon it, and move on to the next thing. We do the same to people when they're not quite thin, sexy or interesting enough.
My job on NVDL is just to remind you that what you are doing has an impact, and you are culpable for your habits. It's to ingratiate a collective sense of conscience. You know that thing where you realise you might be doing something wrong and start to consider changing, making amends...yes, that. See, culpability has consequences. I'd like to avoid a mass gritting of teeth, where we collectively groan: "How did this happen?" Don't wail, don't whine. It's our everyday habits that propel us towards our future, and don't pretend you don't know where that future takes you. It's a place where everyone gets ripped off, and nobody wins. But I'm guessing you already knew that. You just haven't asked yourself: "Since I know what I am doing has no future, why am I still doing it?" The reason we don't do this is not only because we have lost the ability to think, we are also too afraid of what the answers might be. That is The Retail Scam. We hide from the true costs imbedded inside, hidden behind and within all our habits. And we are so far gone we wouldn't know where to start living any other way.
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