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Friday, Feb 01, 2002

get your war on

"Geraldo had to go all the way to Afghanistan to get lost in the "fog of war," and look how much that little episode cost all of us. If the self-hating self-promoter had really wanted to learn about confusion, at a more reasonable cost, he could have just stayed home and read the war blogs."

on wax

download this -- bootylicious v. smells like teenspirit

disruption

"What can all companies take away from your study of the newspaper industry and its response to the Internet challenge?

Again, disruption creates net total growth. As I work with so many companies responding to disruptive technology, their overwhelming response is to focus on the potential losses created by disruption. In fact, the time from when a disruptive technology initially emerges to the time it eventually attacks an established market can be quite substantial. In the mainframe computer example, minicomputers were launched in 1967, and even though unit sales quickly passed mainframe unit sales, dollar sales did not eclipse mainframe sales until the late 1980s. Mainframe dollar sales did not have double year declines until the early 1990s. Thus, both markets continued to grow for some time after the initial emergence of the disruptive technology."

zooted

"Carcass feeding, like other forms of enrichment, represents a change of philosophy for zoos, requiring keepers to give up some control so their animals can have more. Some Folsom City Zoo animals refuse to go inside at night while feeding on a carcass. Cats sometimes scuffle over meat, so far without injury. After gorging, animals shun their zoo diet for a few days."

shine on

sparklehorse live from kcrw

sorosport

"The billionaire financier George Soros was host of a party with Klaus Schwab, the Swiss business professor who created and rules over the World Economic Forum, on Wednesday in honor of "social entrepreneurs" � that's philanthropists, not climbers. When told of the Elton John extravaganza � seated dinner and a serenade by Sir Elton � his eyes widened in disbelief.

"I wasn't invited," Mr. Soros said. "Then again, the traffic is so bad I don't want to go anywhere."

spy games

"WASHINGTON -- Salt Lake City, which will host the Olympics next week, was the target of "meticulous" surveillance by Osama bin Laden's spies, according to a top U.S. intelligence official."

layed out

"As the General Accounting Office prepares to go to court to force Vice President Cheney to turn over to Congress an account of his secret meetings with energy industry executives, an interview with FRONTLINE last May shows Lay acknowledging that he told Cheney about Enron's advice regarding the government's new energy program. In the interview by journalist Lowell Bergman to be broadcast on NOW WITH BILL MOYERS tonight at 9:00 on PBS, Lay claims that he was unaware that he was the only CEO of a major electric energy company to confer privately with the Vice President as he formulated his national energy strategy."

newsdumb

Big Names, Little News--This Is CNN?

waxing and waning

"BUZZFLASH: As a congressman, what do you think are the most important goals of the various Congressional investigations into Enron and the energy panel?

CONGRESSMAN WAXMAN: Our focus on the Enron issue has to be to evaluate how a small group of insiders, many of whom were well-connected politically, were able to loot the Enron Corporation and walk away with over a billion dollars, while at the same time, leaving employees and investors robbed of their financial security. I think Congress needs to know how it happened and why it happened, and who helped allow it to happen. And I don't think an investigation of the Enron debacle should only be on some narrow aspects of the Enron issue. I think it ought to be on the accounting practices at Enron, and their political ties. And nothing ought to be taken off the table. We ought to have a thorough and systematic examination of every aspect of this Enron scandal. I do believe it is a scandal because I believe that those who were the insiders in the Enron Corporation schemed to loot the company of over a billion dollars. And they hurt a lot of people in the process. I think that if you look at what happened at Enron, you have those who already had a lot, wanting a lot more. And they just took it at the expense of people who really didn't have much going for them. It's no different than somebody robbing thousands of houses and stealing people's life savings, when you look at what some of these people did in Enron, where they looted the corporation and stole the financial security out from under employees and investors."

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