culture, politics, commentary, criticism

Friday, August 30, 2002
Why do employers demand that employees pee for them before being hired? The argument is that drug users are unreliable and therefore risks to business. But really how much reliability does it take to be a janitor at Wal-Mart? Why shouldn't Wal-Mart janitors be stoned night and day? How could they bring down the company -- by not immediately attending to a wet clean-up on Aisle 3?

The truly upsetting thing about urine drug testing in the workplace is the lack of reciprocity. Shouldn't Enron employees have had Lay and Skilling and Fastow, et al., tested for reliability? Even if the entire Enron board of directors had provided urine specimens in the privacy of their executive restrooms, how would employees have known in advance how spectacularly unreliable they would turn out to be -- by destroying employees' life savings, their careers, and their reputations? What good do drug tests do anyone?

Colleagues who gets high now and then are far less risky to business than those who lie and steal hundreds of millions of dollars from employees and shareholders, even if their urine is so clean the SEC could swill it. Unless the positions involve public safety, drug screening in the workplace is nothing more than class warfare in a cup.
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Thursday, August 29, 2002
Welcome to Chibloggo. There are some nice Chicago photographs on the blog of
Matt Maldre, whom I do not know. But I like his photo:

whoops!
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Glimmers of hope in the war against Ashcroftism. Occasionally there are signs that the Bush administration's rush to destroy American civil liberties can be thwarted. Ashcroft, who lost a Missouri election to a dead man, also deserves to start losing to some live ones in increasing numbers. Here, the US Court of Appeals of the Sixth Circuit sides with the Detroit Free Press in their arguments against
John Ashcroft, et al.
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Wednesday, August 28, 2002
The Fast Runner is an extraordinary cinematic narrative that takes us where Hollywood refuses to go: to society. No film in recent memory has so carefully presented life in a social context, with all the joys and troubles that accompany the simple fact of living with other people. I have no idea what it's like to be an Inuit a thousand years ago, but from The Fast Runner I got more of a sense of life actually lived than from any other non-documentary film in years.

Decades of screenwriting seminars have drilled the formula into American writers' heads: the protagonist has to want something and there has to be a conflict. This message has been received not only by screenwriters but by studio executives, with the result that Ben Affleck wants the girl and, oh yes, there's a thing called Pearl Harbor in the background. The world is just the background for the hero, in spite of the fact that the world is infinitely more interesting and dramatic than the hero. Still, the formula occasionally works, especially with fantasy and romance stories, and not every film needs to represent life as it's actually lived. But the media juggernaut is becoming increasingly jaded, with ever more simplistic iterations that are less about human life and more about emotional manipulation and product placement. "Branded content," as it being called when you see a strategically placed Diet Coke in a movie scene, is one step away from "no content."

To watch The Fast Runner is to look at life in a time before media, when news was immediate and personal and no one you didn't know told you what to think. The act of persuasion was performed on a one-to-one and not corporation-to-customer or politician-to-constituency scale. In a leap of logic, this leads me to the popularity of blogs: we feel lied to and manipulated, and we need to share our responses to the unbelievably pervasive but shallow media universe that blankets us.

When I see a movie, I like knowing as little as possible about it other than that it's good. So that's about all I want to say: it's really, really good, and you should see it. The movie has an official website, called
Atanarjuat, its Inuit title. Go.
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Tuesday, August 27, 2002
The war on meaning. Rationality vanishes when words cease to have meaning. In just a couple of years, our American culture is being stripped of ideas, contexts and even the most basic meanings as power maneuvers driven by empty imagemaking pass for national discourse. Read more at the
Boston Globe.
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Corporatism finds a new mistress. Is it just natural evolution that leads corporate interests to start new
religions? This is not a serious story by any means, but it does raise the question of whether people's need to believe can be consciously harnessed in an overtly religious way by the corporate elite. You could certainly make the case that human spiritual impulse is already manipulated on an enormous scale, but let's look at the question from another angle. Will corporations soon create and brand and market new religions the way they do other products?
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Monday, August 26, 2002
Q: If Martha Stewart makes two or three calls to an executive before dumping $200,000 worth of his company's stock and Secretary of the Army Thomas White (a former Enron executive) makes 77 calls to Enron executives while dumping tens of millions in stock, why is the SEC only investigating Stewart?

A: Guess which one is a Democrat.

Courtesy of
Too Stupid to Be President.
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Friday, August 23, 2002
Who should we get to control forest fires?
The timber industry! And while we're at it, how about sex offenders for day care centers? Or disgraced energy company executives to dictate national energy policy!
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Tuesday, August 20, 2002
Unforgettable Texas cuisine. Here is a thorough list of actual menu selections that demonstrate the bounty of
Texas hospitality.
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Thursday, August 15, 2002
Media Whores Online is a good thing. The laxity of the USA's hyperexpensive media personalities and their slavish devotion to an increasingly narrow set of corporate owners deserves the kind of outrage that Media Whores Online is alone in dispensing. Without any analytical or critical instincts of their own, the rightfully named media whores dish out press releases as reportage and undigested spin as documentation. Compared to the desert of mainstream media, MWO is moisture.

If We the People aren't going to get facts, we have a right to get angry -- even (or especially) anonymously.
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Wednesday, August 14, 2002
What does "skimble" mean? Alas, I thought I made it up. To name this little venture, I wanted to use a word that didn't mean anything, so it could mean whatever I -- or you -- wanted it to mean. Having finally Googled it after the fact, I am horrified to learn that Skimble is the name of one of the supporting roles in the execrable musical Cats. But I was pleasantly surprised to learn that it has an older, more appropriate meaning according to something called the Hutchinson Encyclopaedia:
skimble-scamble (a. archaic): rambling; jumbled.
Which is about as complimentary a description as I should expect.
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I know theatre, and this is no theatre. The multiplying descriptions of the Bush adminstration as a series of stage-managed theatrical events fall short of the mark. If this is theatre, it is bad theatre, as you might expect from a bunch of privileged Republican hacks without a speck of art in their souls.

The latest example, the Waco economic forum, might be Theatre of the Absurd, stripped of any civic, economic or even entertainment value. The lies, contradictions and nonsequiturs compound, as reported by the
New York Times:
The president offered no new programs or ideas to repair the economy, although he did choose the literal center stage of the forum to announce that he would not release $5.1 billion in emergency spending requested by Congress to fight terrorism, saying he wanted to move toward a balanced budget as soon as possible. "We'll spend none of it," Mr. Bush said.
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Tuesday, August 13, 2002
Tribute to a witness. The photographer Bill Biggart was killed when the second World Trade Tower collapsed above him. Taken at Ground Zero, these
final photographs chronicle the last hour of his life.
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Is Hatfill a patsy or a perp? The case against him as the anthrax mail-murderer may rest only on circumstantial evidence, but it sure is fascinating evidence. An unpublished 1998 novel about a bioattack on Congress. A hoax anthrax letter sent to Tom Daschle in mid-November from England, where Hatfill just happened to be. All this (and more!) in a single article in today's
New York Times, as reported by Nicholas D. Kristof.

What is it about Tom Daschle, anyway?
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Monday, August 12, 2002
Who needs a conspiracy? I just found an email I never sent in response to an
ABC News report about those wacky conspiracy theorists, God bless 'em. Anyway, here it is (from April 2002)...

Another scenario, discounting the alleged alien voices on the cockpit recorder, is that the Bush administration knew nothing of the 9/11 attack per se in spite of having been one of its causes, directly or indirectly.

After an improvisational period the administration realized that the attacks represented one of the greatest image-enhacing bonanzas a president could receive. (Hence Clinton's chagrin, and Bush's giddy "trifecta" remarks.) Foreknowledge is an interesting theory worth pursuing, because one could argue that the only worldwide beneficiary of the attacks was the Bush II administration and its closest circle of friends and family (e.g., the Carlyle Group).

Couple this with an all-oil all-the-time policy (supported by the former CEOs of Halliburton and Enron who set US energy policy) and within days the administration set its sights on... Alaska! Within the week, however, it was clear that the oil opportunity was not in a domestic wildlife preserve after all, but in central Asia.

The conspiracy theories flourish not because of an innate American paranoia, but because so many signal aspects of the administration simply don't add up. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers carry Saudi passports, but the "axis of evil" revolves around Iraq. Cheney's June 1998 speech to the Cato Institute refers to operating in "places where, all things considered, one would not normally choose to go. But, we go where the business is [i.e., central Asia]." There are dozens more easily cited facts like these that reveal, if not a hidden conpiracy's agenda, at least an ability to rationalize self-serving behavior ex post facto. The administration's repeated denunciation of any criticism as "unpatriotic" is, well, un-American.

The scent of oil mixed with defense contracting hangs over the administration's every move. If we "follow the money," the profiteers of 9/11 will turn out to be none other than those directly connected to the Bush dynasty and its grudge match against Saddam Hussein. An administration's conflicts of interest have never been quite so flagrant (let's not even talk about Michael Powell, today's poster child of self-interest in a public position).

What's the mainstream media's responsibility in all this? Profit concerns force you to look away from the real causes and real effects of the machinery of power, because they're far less photogenic. Besides, you're owned by the same people you're supposedly reporting on. That's why it's important for you to marginalize people who think in ways that conflict with what you broadcast. We don't all believe in "alien voices"; there are plenty of unintelligible remarks already emanating from the White House that you seem to ignore.
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Hurry slowly. From Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium, a wonderful book about the qualities he values in literature, comes this Chinese story:
Among Chuang-Tzu's many skills, he was an expert draftsman. The king asked him to draw a crab. Chuang-tzu replied that he needed five years, a country house, and twelve servants. Five years later the drawing was still not begun. "I need another five years," said Chuang-tzu. The king granted them. At the end of these ten years, Chuang-tzu took up his brush and, in an instant, with a single stroke, he drew a crab, the most perfect crab ever seen.
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Thursday, August 08, 2002
Picturing satire. Supposedly the web is a visual medium but I'm not an artist so I can only bring your attention to two outstanding collections of art satirizing the funk our nation has fallen into.

whoops!Get Your War On consists of 13 pages (as of today) of brilliantly written comics created out of clip art by David Rees. Unbelievably hilarious and tragic. The link begins with page 13 -- work your way backwards. It's worth it.




Know Your Place! Shut Your Face! is a series of early twentieth century war propaganda posters ingeniously updated for our already sick and tired twenty-first century.

You must visit both.
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Wednesday, August 07, 2002
For those of you keeping score. Just how evil is the Axis of Pennsylvania Avenue? Check out the
Scorecard of Evil. It's all here -- from refusing to fund the UN Population Fund to the Stasi-like citizen spy corps Operation TIPS -- more than fifty acts of evil in the last five months alone (the list only covers 2002, the second year of Bush's dismantling of the American experiment).

We would be worried about these extraordinary acts of evil if the guy weren't so gosh-darned compassionate. Thanks to Media Whores Online for the link.
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Tuesday, August 06, 2002
Is no one sacred anymore? The den mother of lifestyle porn, Martha Stewart, is back in the
limelight because of her relatively trivial insider trade (story by the New York Times) executed by Merrill Lynch. The interest should be not in Martha but in Merrill Lynch, whose shadowy presence behind the Enron debacle is the bigger story, albeit without the celebrity bitch angle.
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Friday, August 02, 2002
The skinny on Cheney. Here's an excellent overview of the Cheney problem, as told by the UK's
Guardian. Nothing new, just a solid summary and context for Cheney's participation in the Bush administration's disintegration of the American dream.
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Thursday, August 01, 2002
The contract to build al-Qaeda cells at Guantanamo Bay was landed by... Halliburton? Don't know how I missed this one. Reported in the UK's excellent
Guardian Observer and elsewhere, Cheney's Halliburton cronies got the contract to build the cells at Guantanamo Bay.

If only the American public didn't have the attention span and mental capacity of a gnat, the unseemly connection between the administration's business cabal and its military mandate would ignite an outrage. Instead, the lead story will always be Jennifer Lopez's diet/dress/divorce or botox or a scathing expose of the latest athlete to flunk a drug test. Remind me: who owns the media?
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It's August. Do you know what "work" is? According to
USA Today, "People who objected to his [month-long] hiatus 'don't understand the definition of work,' Bush said last summer." Both he and Cheney will take the month off again in 2002, which staffers like Ari Fleischer insist should be considered "work" because Cheney will make at least a half-dozen "fundraising appearances" and W will "travel" to 12 cities to "raise money" for Republican candidates. That counts as "work," doesn't it? Isn't that what we expect from our "elected" officials?
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Don't forget to try the links in the right column. The Media and Blogging links were lovingly hand-selected for your online pleasure. Many of them are rants (albeit far more informed and exhaustive than this one), and some are actually reputable writers and news sources.

All links in the right column pop up in a new window.
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"A government should not mobilize an army out of anger, military leaders should not provoke war out of wrath." In The Art of War, Sun Tzu argues over and over that an enlightened government is the key to successful military leadership. Though written over two thousand years ago, these words apply all too well to our present situation with Iraq, in that our president and his father have an ongoing personal vendetta against Saddam Hussein. There is no doubt that Hussein is unsavory, despicable, etc., but the unusually emotional focus of the Bush administration on Hussein to the exclusion of its many failures (the non-capture of bin Laden, the Enron debacle, the stock market crisis, the lack of confidence in corporate governance, Bush and Cheney's own shadowy resumés) betrays its irrationality and overall lack of enlightenment. What else but a grudge match could we expect from an unelected president and his one-term daddy?
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Greatest Hits · Alternatives to First Command Financial Planning · First Command, last resort, Part 3 · Part 2 · Part 1 · Stealing $50K from a widow: Wells Real Estate · Leo Wells, REITs and divine wealth · Sex-crazed Red State teenagers · What I hate: a manifesto · Spawn of Darleen Druyun · All-American high school sex party · Why is Ken Lay smiling? · Poppy's Enron birthday party · The Saudi money laundry and the president's uncle · The sentence of Enron's John Forney · The holiness of Neil Bush's marriage · The Silence of Cheney: a poem · South Park Christians · Capitalist against Bush: Warren Buffett · Fastow childen vs. Enron children · Give your prescription money to your old boss · Neil Bush, hard-working matchmaker · Republicans against fetuses and pregnant women · Emboldened Ken Lay · Faith-based jails · Please die for me so I can skip your funeral · A brief illustrated history of the Republican Party · Nancy Victory · Soldiers become accountants · Beware the Merrill Lynch mob · Darleen Druyun's $5.7 billion surprise · First responder funding · Hoovering the country · First Command fifty percent load · Ken Lay and the Atkins diet · Halliburton WMD · Leave no CEO behind · August in Crawford · Elaine Pagels · Profitable slave labor at Halliburton · Tom Hanks + Mujahideen · Sharon & Neilsie Bush · One weekend a month, or eternity · Is the US pumping Iraqi oil to Kuwait? · Cheney's war · Seth Glickenhaus: Capitalist against Bush · Martha's blow job · Mark Belnick: Tyco Catholic nut · Cheney's deferred Halliburton compensation · Jeb sucks sugar cane · Poindexter & LifeLog · American Family Association panic · Riley Bechtel and the crony economy · The Book of Sharon (Bush) · The Art of Enron · Plunder convention · Waiting in Kuwait: Jay Garner · What's an Army private worth? · Barbara Bodine, Queen of Baghdad · Sneaky bastards at Halliburton · Golf course and barbecue military strategy · Enron at large · Recent astroturf · Cracker Chic 2 · No business like war business · Big Brother · Martha Stewart vs. Thomas White · Roger Kimball, disappointed Republican poetry fan · Cheney, Lay, Afghanistan · Terry Lynn Barton, crimes of burning · Feasting at the Cheney trough · Who would Jesus indict? · Return of the Carlyle Group · Duct tape is for little people · GOP and bad medicine · Sears Tower vs Mt Rushmore · Scared Christians · Crooked playing field · John O'Neill: The man who knew · Back to the top






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