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the North Americans

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Tokyo, 2008.10.22

It's funny. In Canada there is socialized medicine and there are private banks. In the US, where they vilify socialized medicine, it's the opposite.

I wonder if there will come a time when "banksters" will somehow shake the image of greedy incompetence that they're now coming to endure. Who knows.

At least this mess we're in will stop the North American cycle of consuming plastic crap. It's happening already: I read that so little container traffic is crossing the Pacific right now that the price of shipping a container is now 1/4 what it was only a year ago. And with less plastic crap being consumed, it would mean less is being produced, and that would mean a considerably smaller amount of our natural resources going into the great maw of the North American consumer.

rand()m quote

In one of history's more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnation without government permission.

Newsweek, Aug 20 2007