Monday, May 07 2001

Bruce K. Alexander : The Roots of Addiction in Free Market Society

"In order for "free markets" to be "free," the exchange of labour, land, currency, and consumer goods must not be encumbered by elements of psychosocial integration such as clan loyalties, village responsibilities, guild or union rights, charity, family obligations, social roles, or religious values. Cultural traditions "distort" the free play of the laws of supply and demand, and thus must be suppressed. In free market economies, for example, people are expected to move to where jobs can be found, and to adjust their work lives and cultural tastes to the demands of a global market. People who cannot achieve psychosocial integration develop "substitute" lifestyles. Substitute lifestyles entail excessive habits including-but not restricted to-drug use, and social relationships that are not sufficiently close, stable, or culturally acceptable to afford more than minimal psychosocial integration. People who can find no better way of achieving psychosocial integration cling to their substitute lifestyles with a tenacity that is properly called addiction." see also : The Big Mac Index

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Colin Muller : XML::XSLT::Wrapper.pm

"provides a wrapper for XML::LibXSLT, XML::Sablotron (works with 0.43 - I haven't been using it recently), and XT (as an external call to Java). It can accept a list of processors in an order specified by the calling script, otherwise it defaults to trying libxslt, then Sablotron, then XT, falling through from one to the next on failure. It also tries to work out, for libxslt and sablotron, whether it's been given a string or a filename. I intend to add filehandles to that, so one will eventually be able to pass the XML and XSL as file, filehandle, or string without having to tell the processor which." alpha

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Online visitation rights?

I have to tell you that having watched the evolution of marriage over the course of my life, it is an institution desperately in need of re-thinking. Notwithstanding the protests of linguists and philosophers who will argue that you can't simply change the meaning of a word, the idea is so completely out of touch with people's actions and the laws and norms governing our lives, that something has to give. On bad days it is hard not see the whole thing as either, at best, the picture of wishful thinking or, at worst, of hypocrisy.

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We took my friend's truck to the market yesterday.

There was a parking ticket on the front seat, a not uncommon sight. I guess mention was made of it later on because it turns out the ticket was written, shortly before the glow-worm one night, because the doors to the truck had been left unlocked. I am hardly an expert in municipal law but this one ranks up there with the law in Saint John's, only recently repealed I'm told, prohibiting persons from spitting against the wind.

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The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is apotheosis

| source : web1913 | Apotheosis \Ap`o*the"o*sis\ (?; 277), n. pl. {Apotheoses}. [L., fr. Gr. ?, fr. ? to deify; ? from + ? to deify, ? a god.] 1. The act of elevating a mortal to the rank of, and placing him among, ``the gods;'' deification. 2. Glorification; exaltation. ``The apotheosis of chivalry.'' --Prescott. ``The noisy apotheosis of liberty and machinery.'' --F. Harrison. | source : wn | apotheosis n 1: model of excellence or perfection of a kind; one having no equal [syn: {ideal}, {paragon}, {nonpareil}, {saint}, {nonesuch}, {nonsuch}] 2: the elevation of a person to the status of a god [syn: {deification}, {exaltation}]

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