Waste. Want.

To this day, my grandfather insists on eating every bit of food on his plate, no matter how terrible it may be, no matter how full he already is, "because there are children starving in China," and while I doubt any practical effect, as a minor matter of personal morality, I've always found it admirable, this rather frail old man tucking into the last two bites of chicken, though his stomach protests, because it is a sin for those blessed with plenty to waste it in a world where some have so much less. Anyway, here is a photograph from the New York Times of the Australian government destroying perfectly good shoes because they are "counterfeit".



If ever there were a demonstration of the inhuman fraud perpetrated by the defenders of so-called intellectual property, this is it. And while I do not harbor any illusion that the world's poor can be dressed entirely in fake Vuitton, the fact that truckloads of perfectly good shoes would be destroyed--destroyed!--because they violate some absurd copyright should sicken any decent human being. If ever there were an image defining a decadent, wasteful society on a self-imposed slide toward an orgy of gratuitous doom, this is it.