Phelps

Finally! I can’t believe it, but the Phelps show is finally over. Don’t get me wrong, what he did is unbelievable and his skill should be recognized, but the coverage of the event has been getting on my nerve.s The things that annoyed me the most was the coverage right after the incredible 4by100 freestyle, where Lezak pulled off an incredible split in order to shutdown the French, one of the most exciting ends to a race that I have ever seen. The next day all reporters were talking about is how this helped continued Phelps dream and one reporter even had the nerve to ask Lezak if that is what gave him the energy to win the race. Lezak’s reply was perfect. He said that at that point it was not about a single member of the team and that every member worked their hardest in order to win the medal and they weren’t thinking at tall about Phelps’s chance at history. When Phelps celebrated with his teams, NBC would always taint the moment saying that he was only happy because it helped him on his journey to beat Spitz. They completely disregarded the idea that he was happy for the team and was cheering on friends…
I also hate those McDonalds Chicken Sandwich commercials with a passion.

Antitechnological and anticapitalist propaganda?

Raking in around 300 million worldwide, Wall-E was one of the few animated movies seen in this summer of superhero blockbusters. Though many think that the movie is not of the same quality as the other Pixar movies, Wall-E is still a hit and a great love story for the family. I do know a couple people who did not really enjoy the film, but I was surprised when I read an article by Gennady Stolyarov II, who actually seems to have a deep hatred for the movie and the ideas behind it.

In WALL-E: Economic Ignorance and the War on Modernity, Stolyarov describes Wall-E as blatant "environmentalist, anticapitalist, and antitechnological propaganda. The author feels that the film presents several situations that are not only impossible in reality, but they also present disturbingly incorrect ideas about our society. Click the following link for the article http://mises.org/story/3037.

I do have to admit that while I was watching Wall-E I was a bit surprised about how apparent and in your face several of the movies underlying messages were. It is not hard to see that there is a definite environmentalist message and it is hard not to relate the BnL company with WalMart, but for some reason I was not nearly as disturbed by any of this because most of it worked so well in the story. Though there is a point to some of what the author says, I feel that he/she is reading way too much into the movie. It is obvious that he went into the movie with their own notions of the world and when the movie presented another view, the author took it upon himself to take some scenes of the movie and jump to drastic conclusions about intent. I also find it hard to call a movie where the main heroes are robots completely antitechnological, but oh well. The article is still an interesting read and though some parts of the article seem to contradict the others, it is definitely worth reading.