If Iraq was a school in the United States and failed on eight out of eighteen benchmarks that the Bush administration set for it, the school would lose it’s funding and be shut down, right?
Why not with Iraq?
Monthly Archives: July 2007
Breaking Up With The Klaxons?
Last night I saw the Klaxons for the second time.
The first show was fun but very short. I convinced two of my best friends to come with, and they were not very impressed. When the Klaxons rolled in to town again (last night) neither of them were interested in seeing them again.
Now I sort of wish I didn’t see them again, too.
The thing is, I absolutely love their album Myths of the Near Future and I love the remixes of their songs even more — and therein lies the problem, I think. My first experiences with the Klaxons were via the remixes that Van She (for “Gravity’s Rainbow”), Digitalism (for “Atlantis to Interzone”), and Simian Mobile Disco (for “Magick”) did for the Klaxons.
From the begining, for me, Klaxons were more of an electronic/dance band… but in reality, they are more of a pop/punk band. When you are expecting beeps and bleeps and glitches and loops, guitars and drums are somewhat jarring.
This really makes me sad since I’ve been saying since late 2006 that I thought the Klaxons were going to be The Best Band of 2007. They still might be, but probably not for me…
The Problem
“They are trying to make us more afraid of fixing the problem than the problem itself.”
Rachel Maddow said this tonight on Countdown about America’s health care problem. While it can certainly be applied to health care, I think this is basically the conservative position against almost anything progressive. It’s the best way to maintain the status quo. I think understanding this can make it a lot easier to achieve progress.
Darwin’s Nightmare
One of the ways in which Darwin’s work has been (mis?)interpreted is that the stonger/better species will evolve while the lesser/weaker species will go extinct (i.e. natural selection). This idea has been somewhat perverted and combined with economic theory to come up with the whole survival of the fittest justification that has been used to especially stigmatize and deny help for poor and oppressed people around the world throughout history. Basically, survival of the fittest says that one’s surroundings and external forces have little or no effect on one’s success in life and that one’s perservarane and hard work is what gets them ahead and out of trouble.
The documentary Darwin’s Nightmare takes an extreme case of Darwin’s theory of natrual selection and explores the way it affects not just the surviving species, but the entire world (in a way).
There are too many details for me to really go into the documentary in-depth, but what I really liked about it was that the documentary didn’t really place any “blame” for the current situation in Tanzania. Some might fault the documentary for this — what would the point be without telling us what we can do? But I usually feel that understanding the complexity of an issue is much more important than finding a quick, simple solution.