I'm Not Green

That's not to say I'm not an environmentalist, it's just that the above picture from a NYT article on the Occupy protest cracks me up. It really underscores what should be an obvious lesson from the last fifty or sixty years of civil rights and environmental legislation, which is that you can have anything you want as long as that desire can be reconciled with our current economic structure.

I've Read the New Houllebecq...

... and it is good. For those who have been turned off by his unsubtle mixture of porn and polemic, those aspects are muted, even almost absent from The Map and the Territory. While this certainly makes the novel appear more mature, and a quick browsing of critical reviews confirms that the novel is being read in this way, this impression exists only in the context of a world where maturity is seen as resignation to a life where all that a human can achieve is all that can be achieved by a human. The novel is not so much anti-political as it is despairing of a society where politics is impossible as long as this vision of maturity persists.

For Nobody and Everybody...

... just a nice record.