You won’t need directions.

Things not to say to a working parent.

“I always believed that those of us who were creating personal media online would win. I still hold out hope that when we do so, it’s not because we were willing to fight dirtier (or work cheaper) than the media that inspired us, but rather because we could do a better job of making media than the legacy media does today.”

“But whether it’s Gawker in NYC, Wonkette in DC, or Valleywag in the Bay Area, people who have loud mouths want to believe that news about them must truly be all the news that matters. Therefore, if the blog that talks about me and my friends is snarky, all blogs are snarky. Which is, you know, kinda obviously horseshit.“

Pre-Dusk Drive from brittney gilbert on Vimeo.

Our route.

See more at Flickr.

I removed some things and along with them more posts than I meant to take down. That is why your comment and the post on which you left it is gone. My bad.

File under “never at the alt-weekly in Nashville”: Every Tuesday morning, the SF Weekly news blog The Snitch profiles one of the Bay’s many cool blogs in a segment we call — BetterKnowanSFBlog.

San Fran OKs ID card for undocumented immigrants

If you can get your hands on a copy of this month’s Harper’s I readily recommend “Hot Air Gods” by Curtis White. It’s a fantastic piece about our belief systems in a capitalistic society. They don’t offer articles online, but I wanted to pull a short excerpt for my blog anyway. It’s a really good read.

Ultimately, our beliefs become just another form of what the media calls “content.” A book is a sales unit. What’s in the book is content, which is a matter of utter indifference to the people who are responsible for moving a product. Our religious content soon becomes indistinguishable from our financial content and our entertainment content and our sports content, just as the sections of your local paper can attest. In short, belief becomes a culture-commodity. We shop among competing options for belief.

Once reduced to the status of a commodity, our anything-goes, do-it-yourself spirituality cannot have very much to say about the more direct nihilistic conviction that we should all be free to do whatever we like as well, each of us pursuing our right to isolated happiness. Worse yet: for that form of legal individual known as the corporation, the pursuit of happiness can mean fishing with the factory trawlers, clear-cutting forests, and spreading toxins across the country-side with all the zeal of a child sprinkling candies on a cupcake.

In short, the best spiritual environment for free-market corporate malfeasance is one that is anarchic as its own form of economic reason. After all, we are not accustomed to saying “no” to anyone who proceeds in sincerity, and oh boy, is corporate capitalism ever sincere. So we are called upon to respect the business man’s right to pursue his company’s “happiness” just as we are called upon to respect all forms of personal belief. …

Capitalism as an ethical system has succeeded in convincing people living under it that it is not a system at all but a state of nature. In this way, it has managed to remain above the fray of culture war, and restricted those value systems that might compete with it to competing with each other. In short, culture war is a great comfort to capitalism.

Capitalism has been so successful in this orchestration of reality that it has even created the illusion that, in spite of every fact, the Market works for all of us, or will eventually. In spite of the fact that the poor are even greater in number, and that education, health care, and retirement are ever more inaccessible, the majority of Americans persist in believing (with all the obliviousness of Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss) that our economic system is “the best of all possible worlds.” This is a form of wishful and magical thinking no stranger than the belief that a statue of the Madonna can cry.

This is the problem I have with many free-market absolutists. A nation’s economy should not a person’s belief system make. Alas, too many throw all our societal questions, no matter how complicated or unrelated, at the Market God wall to see what sticks. They don’t evaluate what doesn’t. It’s simpler that way.

(I changed the title of this post because it was not good.)

Vancouver Olympic Mascots: Oh, I love them!

“Protests, it strikes me, are not the essence of Berkeley- they are its therapy. Only after months of immersion in this environment of pure and crushing personal failure can we fully appreciate how deeply and perfectly good it feels to catch our peers in the act of being so wrong.”