I would like to write about a lot of truly significant things...but I'm too tired. Instead, I'll cull little pieces from what I've stored up in my wiki or Ecco file

Tucked
Behind the Home Page, a Call to Worship:

Mr. Reese and his Web site, www.tothenextlevel.org, embody an
increasingly popular strategy for evangelism in the Internet age. In
the segmented realms of the Web, said Tony Whitaker, editor of a guide
for online evangelists, sites that use overtly Christian material will
reach only people who are already Christians, while everyone else can
click by. Unlike Christian radio or television, the new medium calls
not for powerful religious symbolism or rhetoric but for the absence of
them, he said.

In culling through my pile of old issues of The New Yorker, I came
across David Denby's review
of Matrix Revolutions. The ending the essay made me ponder my own misconstructed
sense of helplessness, about which Tokyo
Story actually has a lot to say:

In the first movie, the lifelessness of the humans’ speech made one
doubt that humanity was actually worth fighting for. But if one ignores
the wilder speculative meanings that have been drawn from the series
(we are all wired together in a simulated reality), there remains
something halfway palpable in these movies: in a period in which
gigantic corporations and entire governments devote themselves to
promoting made-up realities, people may genuinely wonder what world
they are living in. The fact that so many intellectuals in particular
found “The Matrix” fascinating suggests how impotent they feel to
change anything around them. Movie critics, however, are fascinated by
the aesthetic life or death in the object right before their eyes, and
they tend to fight one machine or pod at a time rather than recast
their helplessness as a theory of subjection. It’s better, perhaps, to
win or lose small battles than to never start fighting at all.

This
21st-Century Japan, More Contented Than Driven:

China, long the center of Asia, fell under foreign domination in
the last century and a half. Japan, long content in its relative
isolation or as a tributary nation to China, went out into the world,
competing against the West and dominating Asia.

But China never lost its sense of being a great power and appears comfortable now in reassuming its traditional role in Asia.

I had been using the word incentivize. Recently, I heard someone use the word
incent. Which one to use? Perhaps neither
to avoid
jargon.