Copyright © The Economist Newspaper Limited 2009. All rights reserved.
Another brilliant cartoon from KAL. So true too. I wonder how much of the defense budget is spent on cyber warfare? This cartoon also reminded me of an article I read on how the soldiers who operate the man-less drones over Iraq and Afghanistan learned how to do so by playing Xbox!
Crazy shit.
Also, whatever happened to that Conficker worm that was supposed to bring down the internet on April Fools Day?
I just had a brilliant idea. In order to ensure that I get page hits from humans as well as crawling web-bots on a daily basis, I will post some of my favorite passages from Finnegans Wake and attempt to explain what the hell I think Joyce is trying to say. Please, as you read, don’t get turned off by the amount of links I provide throughout the post. I include them only for your curiosity and because I personally feel that this is what Joyce wanted us to do with this book: find as many connections as humanly possibly, even if Joyce didn’t intend for our later connections to be made. That is the concept of human evolution I believe.
Read more…
Have I really not written anything on here for almost two months? Well, to be fair, I’ve been busy with school and life, but the real reason for not updating is that I’ve really had nothing to say that I thought would be interesting to read. But since summer is coming up and unlike most people I hibernate when the temperture climbs past 75, I hope to be updating at a more steady pace.
Finals are almost done for the semester as well so I’ll have a little extra free time there.
So if you’re one of the five people who read this page, please keep coming back regularly. :)
–T.R.
I just received the latest Joseph Campbell Foundation newsletter–to which I’m a member of– and in it they had a great quote from Joseph Campbell that I thought was especially pertinent to the state of the world today (which is probably why it was included :) ).
Here it is:
“Shells are crystallizations of life: life fixed and brought to a halt, life left behind. Coins are concretizations of life energy, but they are not life. If one collects money for money’s sake, it’s like collecting shells for the shell’s sake, money being but a token for the possibility of spending it. Likewise, to hold on to one’s ego, ego-sentiments, ego-ideals, and ego-principles – even, indeed, on occasion, to one’s life – is to arrest the flow and become a shell.” – Joseph Campbell
As I read this quote, it immediately conjured in my mind the story of the German billionaire, Adolf Merckle, who took his own life after losing millions of dollars on volatile trading. It happened this year and you can read the story from this article on the New York Times website.
“The distress to his firms caused by the financial crisis and the related uncertainties of recent weeks, along with the helplessness of no longer being able to handle the situation, broke the passionate family businessman, and he ended his life,” the family said in a statement.
Last fall, Mr. Merckle lost hundreds of millions of euros when he was caught in a brief but ferocious speculative riptide linked to a campaign by Porsche, the sports car manufacturer, to seize control of Volkswagen. He was facing the dismantling of his empire and the sale of major holdings at the time of his death.
Read more…
Copyright © The Economist Newspaper Limited 2009. All rights reserved.
I’m just a huge fan of KAL’s work. And I really like how much information he conveys in every cartoon.
Click the picture to go to the Economist website.
Thoughts?
