The Rant Institute

Much of the power of corporations comes from their ability to convince us we cannot live without the products or services they provide.   As if the disappearance of any one of them might immediately result in humanity being transported back to the dark ages (which, by the way, may be where we are all headed in the not too distant future, thanks to corporations).   Through the magical wonder of advertising, the pixie dust of corporate propaganda is used to sell us everything from sports cars to sunglasses.     By exploiting the inner void that a consumer driven society helps to create in each of us - what Victor Frankl referred to as the “existential vacuum” - the billion dollar marketing industry pours into our longings the promise that they, through a dazzling array of the most fashionable products available, can give us a life of love, meaning, fulfillment, and happiness.   None of this is true, of course, because advertising is designed to play us all like a flute. It is as eas

While the play write David Mamet has shifted his political perspective from liberal to conservative, his article, “Why I Am No Longer a Brain Dead Liberal” shows that he is redoubling his efforts to remain as "brain dead" as he ever was . Rather than explaining his recent conversion to the cult of Conservatism, Mamet's article only demonstrates that he understood Liberalism about as much as a Christmas Tree understands Christmas. In his article, Mamet writes about his latest play in which a "conservative president... holds that people are each out to make a living, and the best way for government to facilitate that is to stay out of the way , as the inevitable abuses and failures of this system (free-market economics) are less than those of government intervention." Mamet should share his recent epiphany about economics with the former employees of Enron, the families of the BP   rig explosion in 2005,   or the survivors of the 1984 Union Carbide disaster.

Some people of different religious faiths see homosexuality as a sin.  The Catholic Church in particular claims that being a homosexual is not a sin but that engaging in homosexual sex, like engaging in adultery and premarital sex, is a sin. Not all Catholics agree with their Church's views about homosexuality, mind you, but when I was a Catholic, I certainly did.  One reason I believed the Church's view that homosexuality was a sin was because I thought the Church, through the doctrine of infallibility, could never be wrong about moral issues. But the Catholic Church has proven itself fallible indeed, and it's views about sexuality in general,  and homosexuality in particular, are as flawed today as its views about the universe and slavery were in the past. Consider the Church's historical view of the heavens, what Hamlet called "this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof