Almsgiving is a major tenet of Islam. It's also a kick in the pants of the highest order. Nothing is as cool as skimming off a couple of hundred thousand from some multinational corporation and handing it out to random strangers. Or writing a harmles...
Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded wi...
Make no mistake. The greatest destroyer of ecology. The greatest source of waste, depletion and pollution. The greatest purveyor of violence, war, crime, poverty, animal abuse and inhumanity. The greatest generator of personal and social neurosis, me...
One, just one, but definitely one of the great benefits of private prayer is that you can’t hide from your motives. In corporate prayer, we can sound like “all that”. We can blow Jesus smoke like nobody’s bizness in a crowd but, get alone wit...
It is eminently possible to have a market-based economy that requires no such brutality and demands no such ideological purity. A free market in consumer products can coexist with free public health care, with public schools, with a large segment of ...
Either greed belongs in a war zone, or it doesn't. You can't unleash it in the name of sparking an economic boom and then be shocked when Halliburton overcharges for everything from towels to gas, when Parsons' sub, sub, sub-contractor builds a polic...
Joanna: I dunno, it just seems wrong. Peter Gibbons: It's NOT wrong. INITECH is wrong. INITECH is an evil corporation, all right? Chochkies is wrong. Doesn't it bother you that you have to get up in the morning and you have to put on a bunch of piece...
Corporal Upham: [Wade lying down, shivering with pain and anguish, after being shot through the stomach] Tell us what to do... tell us how to fix you. Captain Miller: What can we do Wade? Tell us what to do. Medic Wade: [Wade still shivering] I could...
[talking about Capt. Miller] Corporal Upham: Reiben, so you even know where he went to school? Private Reiben: Cap'n didn't go to school, they assembled him at OSC outta spare body parts of dead GIs. Private Caparzo: You gotta pay attention to detail...
When it comes down to it, government is simply an abandonment of responsibility on the assumption that there are people, other than ourselves, who really know how to manage things. But the government, run ostensibly for the good of the people, become...
Can we actually suppose that we are wasting, polluting, and making ugly this beautiful land for the sake of patriotism and the love of God? Perhaps some of us would like to think so, but in fact this destruction is taking place because we have allowe...
Would it really be so bad if you slowed your life down even a teensy bit? If you took charge of the ingredients of your food instead of letting corporations stuff you and your family, like baby birds, full of sugar, corn products, chemicals, and meat...
Excuse me, Ben," Bowen said. "Am I wrong, or aren't you the corporate treasurer?" Glisan bristled. "Yes." "What do you mean, you think you can get one?" Bowen shot back. "This is the current fucking maturities schedule! Go get it. You have to have a ...
The self-esteem of western women is founded on physical being (body mass index, youth, beauty). This creates a tricky emphasis on image, but the internalized locus of self-worth saves lives. Western men are very different. In externalizing the source...
Why is it we don’t intervene in the bureaucracy?” asks Chris Bobel, the gender studies scholar, who has noted that many young activists prefer “DIY activism” – making art, changing their own consumer habits, making their own products rather...
I expected, as I approached the corporate world, to enter a brisk, logical, nonsense-free zone, almost like the military - or a disciplined, up-to-date military anyway - in its focus on concrete results. How else would companies survive fierce compet...
Whatever happened in those more than one hundred years, from the time my great-great-great grandfather studied law to the time when my own father took his bar exam in 1989, I may never know. Perhaps it was just greed and the good, old-fashion corrupt...
The modern world is filled with men who hold dogmas so strongly that they do not even know that they are dogmas. It may be said even that the modern world, as a corporate body, holds certain dogmas so strongly that it does not know that they are dogm...
As the social matrix becomes increasingly subject to rapid fluctuations, throwing out anchors into a collectivised past becomes more prominent than movement into a future. The desire to establish a core identity within the profusion of styles has led...
There, in the unconscious, we sleep upon the psyche's oceanic floor, together like some vast bed of kelp, each wavering strand an individual American, swaying in the currents of national suggestion. In the form of a giant Portuguese man-of-war, our g...
It was getting harder, however. American magazines still looked shiny and lively, but by the early 1960s, writers like Flora were sensing trouble. With television's exploding popularity, more and more people were staring at screens instead of turning...
