Call Hannah Arendt! Evil was never more banal!

Two political quotes, the first scary and the second hilarious:

"The cost to General Motors of ensuring that fuel tanks did not explode in crashes, estimated by the company to be $8.59 per automobile, meant the company could save $6.19 ($8.59 minus $2.40 [estimated cost in legal damages paid to families of victims of these explosions]) per automobile if it allowed people to die in fuel-fed fires rather than alter the design of vehicles to avoid such fires."
-----------Joel Bakan, The Corporation

You know, one of the things I really hate about postmodernism is its moral relativism. If you take away the word for "evil," you have no way of describing evil when it appears. GM, after this report, avoided putting adequate protection from fuel-fed fires, and people suffered and died as a result. That's evil. No other word adequately describes it.

On a lighter note, Rick Mercer on the rules in Canada for lowering a flag to half-mast, which happens, among other things, when a Member of the Privy Council dies:

"Membership [in the Privy Council] is also open to anyone who is a good friend of the Prime Minister. For example a previous Conservative government made Conrad Black a Member of the Privy Council. It is somehow fitting that if Conrad goes down in a nasty prison brawl over a carton of cigarettes, the flag over the Peace Tower will fly at half mast.