Since, as every patriotic and right-thinking American knows, life is like a movie, our pundits would have the unbelievable luck of playing the role of a lifetime: war hero and leader of men, just like John Wayne in The Sands of Iwo Jima or Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan, only better - for this time, the bullets and the blood would be real, mere talk would be translated into action.

[...]

The man best equipped to lead this swaggering band of heros is Bill Kristol, the hands-down champion of martial virtue who never eschewed a chance to send U.S. forces into combat, be it in the sun-drenched wastes of Iraq or the gloomy crags of the Hindu Kush. With only a modest subsidy from Rupert Murdoch, he has singlehandedly made The Weekly Standard into the foremost journal of militarism since the Wehrmacht ceased publishing Signal. And needless to say, he would lead his company from the front, even on suicide missions.

As the company's executive officer in charge of security, the natural choice would be William Safire. His curriculum vitae fairly brims with excellence: principal champion of the link between Saddam and the attack on the World Trade Center, he should be given the opportunity to get in on the fun when the bullets fly. His career in intelligence is legendary: tasked by his Mossad handlers to torpedo the career of Admiral Bobby Inman (another do-nothing professional officer who had the bad taste to know what happened to the U.S.S. Liberty), Safire succeeded brilliantly. He was also the man in charge of fingering Wen Ho Lee as a Chinese spy; was it his fault the FBI was too incompetent to beat the truth out of an obviously guilty man? And, of course, as the confidant of Ariel Sharon, Safire has much of "the Bulldozer's" manly bravado.

India had won the war, but quickly lost the peace as international reaction to the tragedy that had befallen the subcontinent gave way to environmental concern. Obscuring smoke in the troposphere, dust in the stratosphere, the fallout of radio-active debris and the partial destruction of the ozone layer all threatened to affect northern hemispheric climate. Throughout the Middle East, the daytime light levels fell to less than 30 per cent of normal - comparable to thick cloud cover - and temperatures declined. In Pakistan, for more than a week after the holocaust, it was too dark to see very much, even at midday. Meanwhile, weather systems transported fine dust particles to other, more distant locales and the world began to contemplate the biological impact of the war on the global environment.

His deal with Sony is a short-term one while he gets his label started and watches the Internet's effect on careers. "I don't even know why I would want to be on a label in a few years, because I don't think it's going to work by labels and by distribution systems in the same way," he said. "The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it's not going to happen. I'm fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing."

"Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity," he added. "So it's like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You'd better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that's really the only unique situation that's going to be left. It's terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn't matter if you think it's exciting or not; it's what's going to happen." [link] [NYT username: aflakete password: europhilia] [aberrant news]

My estimate of David Lynch is that he never really allowed anything that he wanted to be cut. He's far too clever, and far too capable of assuming a mask of innocence. The censors we possess always have trouble with that kind of person. If you come on childlike, they find it hard to think the worst of you, no matter that their nerve endings are screaming "PANIC!"

Something like that happened when "Blue Velvet" opened in 1986. This really was a film that some otherwise sane people felt bound to attack as "indecent," "improper" and "dangerous." And in this case, I have to say, every promise in those grim warnings was rewarded. "Blue Velvet" was and is an outrage. And a masterpiece. It is one of the few films in the last 20 years that has kept alive the capacity of the movies to deliver beautiful offense, to dig so deep into the psyche that you feel you've been operated on without anesthetic.

Besides, Dubya has proven again and again and you read it just about everywhere and the man has it tattooed on his thigh and it veritably oozes from the pores of his happily myopic followers, he is indeed a Very Nice Man with a Very Swell Disposition and Good Christian Manners and gosh darn it, people like him so please quit being so mean.

Ashcroft has scowled about it and Rumsfeld has squinted angrily about it and Cheney has shown twitching signs of life about it and it's been made very clear again and again: You are not allowed to openly abhor the president or his decisions because doing so clearly indicates traitorous inclinations and this is wartime which is a Very Difficult Time for Us All.

If you insist on calling it wartime, that is. Which of course it's not, given how we've killed untold thousands of barely armed Taliban and untold numbers of innocent Afghan civilians and over a dozen of our own soldiers and even some Canadian troops (whoops) and we have suffered exactly two combat casualties. This is not a war. But you can't really say that either.

"It's everywhere in the Arab world - this anti-American feeling," says Saleh Khathlan, a political scientist at King Saud University. "If there is a single factor behind the [Sept. 11] attacks, it is that US policy is perceived to be anti-Muslim. The hijackers were brought up to believe the world is divided into Muslims and nonbelievers. What's missing is a view of the whole world, something broader that is connecting all humans." [link]

After Perot Systems Corp. helped develop the computer systems used to track California electricity trading, it peddled a detailed presentation to energy companies on ways to "game" the state's power market, newly released documents show. The blueprint outlined schemes similar to "Death Star" and others later used by Enron Corp. to inflate profits.

[...]

An industry consultant testifying before the Senate committee Wednesday likened it to "handing grade-school children loaded revolvers," and concluded that power traders armed with such information would clearly have put the schemes to use.

"This is corporate behavior at its despicable worst," said Sen. Joseph Dunn, a Democrat from Orange County's Santa Ana, the state lawmaker leading the inquiry, adding that it appeared that Perot's firm might have played a role in the "economic rape of California."

Gov. Gray Davis quickly entered the fray, calling for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to investigate Perot Systems' actions.

"If true, this is an ethical violation of the highest order and quite possibly a criminal offense," Davis said.

Instead of a reflective look at the past 50 years of Britain's most dysfunctional family, which might have uestioned its existence, Gawd bless you, Ma'am, was suddenly an acceptable thing to shout in public. I wanted to shake people by the shoulders. What were we celebrating? Was the Queen giving back half a century's worth of taxpayers' money so the trains could run on time? Was the Queen to give all her palaces to the homeless? Were her superannuated sons and daughters and all the other Royal hangers on to become self-financing in line with Labor's plans to reduce the number of families living off the state? Were they going to pay inheritance tax like the rest of us - and ring fence the money for the NHS? No, we were to carry on living in a feudal hangover, ruled by a ragbag of pompous unelected inbreds.

It's looking more and more as though the feds have only a rhetorical case against John Walker Lindh, but given the state of the American judiciary - especially in spook and military inundated northern Virginia - that may be more than enough. Still, applying conspiracy theory to military combat is imaginative even if a bit against international law.

Pollster John Zogby had a problem: Too many political conservatives and not enough lefties were signing up to participate in his online surveys of public opinion.

Rob Kampia of the Marijuana Policy Project also had a problem: He didn't know what Americans really thought about legalizing the five-leafed devil weed.

But both problems went up in smoke recently when Zogby's polling firm approached Kampia's Marijuana Policy Project with a novel proposition: Help us recruit smokers and their pals to participate in our cyber-surveys, and we'll let you add a few dope questions to our national polls.

Kampia jumped at the chance for free market research. And suddenly, Zogby International, a high-profile polling firm that has worked for some of the biggest names in the media, politics and corporate America, became a player in the pot lobby's ongoing war on the war on drugs.

[...]

Word of the deal instantly sent pot opponents eight miles high.

"The insidious inroads that the small but heavily financed drug culture continues to make into the fabric of society is truly frightening," said Charles Perkins, president of Drug Watch International, in a prepared statement. "It is time for the media to expose these lobbyists, just as they would expose pedophiles who try to influence child abuse laws and enforcement." [my emphasis]

Laura Duguid, 73, the god-daughter of author J.M. Barrie, said he would have been appalled.

"It is a shame the play is being treated in this way. My father and Mr. Barrie would have been horrified. Mr. Barrie just was not interested in that sort of obvious sexuality and romance, and it certainly is not in the original story."

She said her father "always said Barrie was asexual. He didn't see women as sexual beings, he put them on a pedestal."

[...]

The casting notes describe Wendy as a girl "imbued with rebellion," "an English rose out for adventure; an angelic girl paradoxically born to wield the sword. Adventure unleashes the animal within her, making her ever more appealing.

"But womanhood has a hold of her -- she wants to both kiss Peter and mother him, for his boy-man quality stirs both within her."

[...]

"The background is that, like Wendy, Barrie's own mother had to bring up her siblings when she was still a teenager. Later, when her favourite son, David, died in a skating accident, she confined herself to bed in grief."

Ms. Phil[i]p said Mr. Barrie, who was only six at the time, was traumatized by the events and desperately tried to win his mother's approval. "He dressed in the dead boy's clothes and tried to stunt his own growth, believing this would please his mother. In the play, Peter Pan is the boy who does not want to grow up."

Estela Galinde would rather be spending her Sunday afternoon in more restful activity than selling sweet breads at a political rally of the enraged citizens who chased the first of Argentina's five recent presidents from office last December. In her careful coif, blouse and schoolmarm glasses, the 38-year-old Galinde looks more like a trained social worker, which she is, than a market mammy, but as she hasn't had a job in over two years, the bake sale is not volunteer work, but survival. Stepping carefully over the other declassed residents sprawled out in Buenos Aires' Centennial Park to listen to firebrands denounce the banks ("Thieves!"), the Congress ("Gangsters!"), the IMF ("Thugs!"), the unions ("Cutthroats!"), even the bishops ("Fascists!"), Galinde is a typical middle-class Argentine wondering where she'll get her next meal.

[...]

An estimated 2,000 people a day are being driven into the ranks of the poor. The gross domestic product, at $9,000 per head a few years ago, has plunged to $3,000. That means a capital that once thought of itself as the Paris of Latin America now subsists at the same level as San Salvador or Guatemala City.

[...]

Strolling around the boulevards and cozy neighborhoods of this capital, amid its stately apartment buildings with heavy glass doors, its fancy shops, endless cafés, the spectacular cuisine on every corner and the unmistakably European feel of the place, one can hardly imagine the institutional decay taking place just behind the façades. Weimar Germany must have had a similar aroma, although there are no Austrian psychopaths in evidence, and Argentines are far better inoculated against fascist adventurism than Americans would be under similar circumstances. (They've lived through it quite recently and are in no mood for seconds.)

[...]

But bureaucratic indifference isn't the whole story behind the paralysis caused by Señora Beatriz's head cold. The unblinking conviction that this domestic detail logically should and must interrupt all programmed activity reflects an unimaginably narrow mental universe simultaneously at work amid the cosmopolitan splendor of Buenos Aires. Throughout Latin America one can encounter this unattractive capacity to reduce the cosmos to the few square meters where one works, shops and takes a crap, and to refuse to admit any external data whatsoever, like Santiago's taxi drivers who don't know the streets of their own city and have zero interest in learning them. The phenomenon reflects a state of humanity in which few people take delight in doing a good job, because there are no rewards and considerable dangers in doing so. In this regard, Latin America approximates the former Soviet bloc, in which workers quickly grasped that survival required obedience but not competence. Excelling, or doing anything not explicitly ordered, implied standing out, thus opening yourself up for attack, either from the hierarchy or from your alert fellows. Argentina, despite its urbane pride at being a cut above, is deeply infected.

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) bills itself as "the nation's largest bipartisan, individual membership association of state legislators" with a mission of working for the public good. However, this hefty report put out by the Defenders of Wildlife and the Natural Resources Defense Council finds the organization is merely a tax-exempt front for major U.S. corporations like Phillip Morris, R. J. Reynolds, National Energy Group and the infamous Enron, who use it to influence state legislative activities. "The organization’s behind-the-scenes advocacy has been surprisingly effective," the report states, "leading, according to ALEC material, to the enactment of more than 450 state laws during the 1999 and 2000 state legislative sessions." [Utne Reader Webwatch Daily]

Yes the one that ended in '89.

While, in the past, companies have created fake citizens' groups to campaign in favor of trashing forests or polluting rivers, now they create fake citizens. Messages purporting to come from disinterested punters are planted on listserves at critical moments, disseminating misleading information in the hope of recruiting real people to the cause. Detective work by the campaigner Jonathan Matthews and the freelance journalist Andy Rowell shows how a PR firm contracted to the biotech company Monsanto appears to have played a crucial but invisible role in shaping scientific discourse.

[...]

On the day the paper was published, messages started to appear on a biotechnology listserve used by more than 3000 scientists called AgBioWorld. The first came from a correspondent named "Mary Murphy." Chapela is on the board of directors of the Pesticide Action Network, and therefore, she claimed, "not exactly what you'd call an unbiased writer." Her posting was followed by a message from an "Andura Smetacek" claiming, falsely, that Chapela's paper had not been peer-reviewed, that he was "first and foremost an activist" and that the research had been published in collusion with environmentalists. The next day, another email from "Smetacek" asked the list, "how much money does Chapela take in speaking fees, travel reimbursements and other donations... for his help in misleading fear-based marketing campaigns?"

Millions of Americans may be taking expensive new pain medications even though they do not need them, pharmaceutical researchers said on Tuesday. [link]