In Junior's democracy, your opinions will be restricted and/or disregarded.

Ironic release of this story on Thanksgiving, when we have so much to be distracted by and so little to be grateful for (as seen in The Washington Post):

The Bush administration announced plans today to loosen environmental safeguards for national forests by speeding up decisions that open public lands to logging and drilling.

The proposed regulations, which closely track recommendations by the timber industry, would reduce the scientific and environmental reviews required when 15-year master plans are developed for the nation's 155 national forests and grasslands.

Public input would be restricted, and form letters and pre-printed postcards would be disregarded. The proposal, which is now open for public comment, will not take effect for at least nine months.

Emphasis added. Shouting, actually.

{ 4:29 PM }

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The new film remake of Solaris, directed and written by Steven Soderbergh and based on the book by Stanislaw Lem, gets a very guardedly positive review in the New York Times:

Its insistence on remaining cerebral and somber to the end may be a sign of integrity, but it should cost it dearly at the box office.

Isn't it time to stop slamming Al Gore?

{ 10:30 AM }

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"Doctor, I keep hearing names from the 70s and 80s play over and over in my head..." Kissinger will head the 9/11 commission, via Yahoo/AP:

The 10-member commission will be evenly divided between Republican and Democratic appointees. As Bush demanded, the president will name the chairman [i.e., Kissinger] and it will take at least six members, in most cases, to approve subpoenas.

Kissinger falls right along the line on which Poindexter squats. Cambodia. Iran. And now a new set of international crimes du jour.

{ 10:05 AM }

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UggaBugga on terrorism insurance as a form of corporate welfare:

Let us say at this point that we think insurance is rational and worthwhile. It is, historically speaking, an idea that's been useful to society for about 400 years. However, for reasons unknown, some on the right howl that insurance for people (unemployment, retirement*) is a variant of socialism (which it isn't). Yet they cheer insurance for businesses.

*I would add medical insurance to this list.

{ 9:25 AM }

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Morons say this is an outlandish slur. "We're nice people," explained one. "We don't threaten other countries or use the courts to steal elections. George W. Bush may be a dangerous lunatic. But he's no moron."

[This and more from the Toronto Star.]

{ 4:11 PM }

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Get Your War On comes to the hometown:

Saturday, November 30
Chicago
Quimby's Bookstore
1854 West North Avenue
(773) 342-0910
7:00PM

{ 1:11 PM }

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Last night I attended Lyric Opera of Chicago's Die Walküre (The Valkyries), the second of the four operas that comprise Richard Wagner's Ring.

Impossibly epic in its ambition to depict a universal tale of money, love and power, the series is the ancestor of such current distant relatives as Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, and even (bear with me) The Sopranos.

Die Walküre, the individual opera, is the original source of the "Ride of the Valkyries," one of the most overused pieces of music in the history of media. Besides serving as the background for countless commercials, it is perhaps most famous as the score behind the helicopter attack sequence ("I love the smell of napalm in the morning") in Francis Ford Coppolla's Apocalypse Now.

Working without collaborators, Richard Wagner wrote every word and every note of music in the Ring operas. Despite his philosophical and egomaniacal shortcomings, he created a vast and pioneering work that will last for millennia. And the Lyric Opera production is as great as the ambition behind the opera. James Morris as the god Wotan and Jane Eaglen as his warrior daughter Brünnhilde radiated loyalty, affection and power both dramatically and musically. Sublime.

Much more than any other work of art I can recall, The Ring is an immersive experience, not unlike being lost in a foreign country or taking LSD. Even a wonderful book you can speed up or slow down. Not so here – Wagner controls the tempo. You have to let go and allow the opera to take you where it wants to, and if you do you might be rewarded. As an enormous meditation on money, power, family, lust, war, ambition, and finally love, The Ring is among the most mature entertainments the world has ever known. The only other contemporary entertainment that dissects love and power among the endomorphs quite so dramatically is, or course, The Sopranos.

The best recommendation I can give is that I've attended this particular production twice before (did I mention that the opera is five hours long?) and that I will see it again in a couple of years when Lyric Opera mounts the whole Ring series at once. Seventeen hours of opera in a single week. Seventeen glorious hours. Hojotoho!

{ 12:11 PM }

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Ordinarily I can't stand most writing about blogs because it tends to be so insular and narcissistic. But these notes by Jeff Jarvis from the Yale conference last week were concise, insightful and personal – just like the best blogs.

{ 9:12 AM }

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Memories... like the corners of John M. Poindexter's indictment. Today is the 16th anniversary of the revelations behind Iran-Contra (and Poindexter's concurrent resignation), documented in this flashback from The New York Times.

Postscript: On March 16, 1988, Poindexter was indicted on seven felony charges arising from his involvement in the Iran/contra affair, as part of a 23-count multi-defendant indictment. As of 2002, he is a Director of the DARPA Information Awareness Office, according to his resume, found in Google's cache. The resume also mentions "an attempt to begin rationalization of U.S. relationship with strategically important Iran."

{ 12:44 PM }

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The Rittenhouse Review presents a lengthy and thoughtful examination of how the nasty, back-stabbing character of high school cliques shapes the world of blogging, journalism and even the obsessions whirling around Al Gore.

Reliably brilliant. You can take the occasional day off from blogging, J.C., if there's more of this in your cupboard.

{ 12:05 PM }

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Moron is as moron does. Tonight HBO broadcasts one of the most subversive American films ever made: Forrest Gump. Expertly produced and directed, it seductively rewrites history by fetishizing stupidity. You can draw a direct line from the screenplay's vacuous anti-intellectual froth to the empty phrases that pass for public rhetoric in the USA today. Skimble rating: 2 out of 10.

For a dissenting view, here's Roger Ebert's original review from 1994.

{ 11:42 AM }

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Will your energy trade be one way or round trip? Today's Wall Street Journal (subscribers only) details the back story behind one-time Enron suitor Dynegy and its fall from grace, and the tribulations still being endured by its principal whistleblower, Ted Beatty. From the article:

All [plaintiffs' lawyers, regulators and short-sellers] hoped to take Mr. Beatty's information and benefit from it, in different ways. Some, he says, assured him his assistance would earn him big money. But no such payout has materialized, and now, unemployed and in financial stress, he is feeling betrayed. "They all said they wanted to help me," he says. "I was dumb. I fell for it." […]

Still unable to find a job, Mr. Beatty blames not so much the weak economy and energy-sector layoffs as his former employer. In August, the Beattys became so sure they were being watched and harassed that they loaded a rented van and moved to a small town in the Midwest. It's all far from the ending they expected when Mr. Beatty decided to take on the company.

"What did it accomplish?" asks his father, Jerry Beatty, an administrator at the Iowa Supreme Court in Des Moines. "I have a lot of reservations about what he did because I'm thinking about his family and security and employment. It wouldn't be so bad if it was just himself, but he's got three children and a wife." […] In September 2001, they filed for bankruptcy.

[...] One year ago, after Dynegy briefly moved to take over troubled Enron Corp., Dynegy publicly portrayed itself as above the kind of questionable deals that brought down its larger crosstown competitor. It also said energy trading on DynegyDirect, its small rival to EnronOnline, had risen 20% since Enron's crisis began, in a "flight to quality."

Mr. Beatty, who had rotated through DynegyDirect, was skeptical. He still had a password for the system, so he took a look. What he saw seemed odd: The volume increase was based on four huge trades. Even stranger, these were two pairs of simultaneous trades that canceled each other out. They provided no apparent economic benefit but made volume look much bigger.

He printed out the trading records and took them to his boss, Anthony Carrino, a divisional vice president. "Keep quiet," he says Mr. Carrino responded. Mr. Carrino, who has left Dynegy, didn't return a call seeking comment.

A few weeks later, Mr. Beatty was among management trainees invited to lunch with Dynegy's president, Stephen Bergstrom. The group chatted about the turmoil from Enron's failure, and then Mr. Bergstrom casually mentioned that Dynegy was beginning to restrict access to many of the internal files on its shared computer drive. He added that the process wasn't finished yet, according to Mr. Beatty. Mr. Bergstrom, who has left Dynegy, declined to comment.

Mr. Beatty, already suspicious because of the trades he'd discovered, was curious about what the files might contain. When he looked, he found nearly impenetrable descriptions of a highly complex arrangement involving special-purpose vehicles and bank financing. It was Project Alpha, a deal that exaggerated cash flow from operations and cut taxes but was all but impossible for outsiders to fathom from Dynegy's public reports.

Mr. Beatty says he went to Mr. Carrino and was again told to keep quiet. He did so, Mr. Beatty says, but grew queasy about Dynegy, beginning to feel that company posters extolling integrity were hypocritical.

The theme of this story (and many others of current import): Shut up and let us steal. Hypocritical is far too small a word to describe the geniuses who run the energy industry in Texas, and the morons* they support.

*It’s a Canadian word. Look it up.

{ 11:14 AM }

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A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of visiting and hiking around southeastern Utah, including Comb Ridge. An organization called Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance is working to protect Comb Ridge and areas like it from the Bush energy plan to accelerate oil and gas exploration in redrock wilderness areas, "a land of uncommon beauty, defined by world-renowned slickrock canyons, stunning cliffs, splendid mountains and startling rock formations":

The nine million acres of federally-owned lands covered by America’s Redrock Wilderness Act should be off-limits to oil and gas exploration—leaving over 14 million acres managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in Utah open for drilling or other extractive uses.

This extraordinary American landscape is more precious that the fuel inefficiency of the ordinary American SUV, and demands preservation by civilized society.

{ 10:45 AM }

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