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Fairly diverse collection of essays this time around but of course not as many as I would have done without all those damn record reviews.

Work Hard, Play Hard

This essay is about the good old American work ethic and how we buy into a system that work success equals life success. Of course we all know the way to exceed at work is to put in extra hours, kiss your bosses ass and volunteer for extra work which doesn’t leave much time for an actual life outside of work. But thanks to our Puritan work ethic we welcome it. It’s no coincidence that America has the least number of vacation days (by a long shot) and amongst the highest legally mandated hours of work per week. Sadly it looks like a lot of Europe is following our lead rather than us learning from their culture.

Wedge: True American Hero
This is about the behind the scenes people that make change happen but never get the limelight the more charismatic leaders do, all wrapped in a Star Wars analogy. Sweet.

We Are What We See

This essay is about how many of us live our lives vicariously through sports and celebrities. We devote countless hours to watching games, creating fantasy versions of the game and talking about the games with our friends. Our lives become dominated by what is quite literally a game, leaving less and less time for actual human experience/interaction but this is a good thing because if we actually looked around us and saw how empty our work/consume life actually was we might just have to find a way to fill it with meaningless entertainment to keep our mind off it…oh wait.

Aliens: Friend Or Foe?
Prior to the movies Independence Day and Signs, the common thinking was that if aliens did in fact visit us, they would be doing so in a passive/educational role. It was assumed that, with a higher level of technological advancement, they would have surely cured their need for violence and war but if you look at our civilization we’ve just become better and more efficient at killing people. Not to mention the main reason we would ever leave Earth is in we trash it and need a new place to live, by force if necessary. Who’s to say aliens would be any different?

Fashion!

This is about how a cause becomes the "it" thing for a brief, shining moment and then is dropped for another, trendier cause just around the corner. The list of causes that have dominated the social conscience but are now hardly mentioned are too many to list but this essay states we should actually stick with one and actually solve the problem for once.

Kill Your Television

This essay is about how originally television was going to be used as an educational tool but got quickly subverted by money and greed. Now we have a handful of companies controlling every single image and thought we see on a for profit basis with educational programming forced to subsist on hand outs. Basically they could not have designed a better tool for both controlling access to information, doling out propaganda and making sure they wash it down with a nice half hour sitcom to ease your mind. Thankfully the internet has come on in a big way as an alternate information source but with examples like China, even it can be controlled by the government.

War = Money
This is probably even more relevant today than when I first wrote it. It's basically about how war is used as a tool to both control resources and provide stimulus to the economy. At least the first Gulf War was under the pretenses of helping out Kuwait, now we’ve just brazenly gone in and said "this is our oil". All so we can keep driving our cars to work and keep making money for other people.