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Tuesday, Jan 15, 2002

about the edges

"UNTIL very recently, ministers would not discuss reforming Britain's hard-line anti-drug policies. No matter that Britain's record was among the worst in Europe in terms of users of hard drugs and deaths from overdoses. To be seen to be tough was a political imperative. But things are changing."

friends in deed

"On the face of it, the sudden political storm over Enron is puzzling. After all, the Bush administration didn't save the company from bankruptcy. But then why did the administration dissemble so long about its contacts with Enron? Why did George W. Bush make the absurd claim that Enron's C.E.O., Kenneth Lay, opposed him in his first run for governor, and that the two men got to know each other only after that race? And why does the press act as if there may be a major scandal brewing?

Because the administration fears, and the press suspects, that the latest revelations in the Enron affair will raise the lid on crony capitalism, American style."

Monday, Jan 14, 2002

geek out

"The most notable characteristic of the One Ring is that it turns its wearer invisible. In scientific terms, this means one of two things: either the wearer's index of refraction is reduced to that of air�which is unlikely without major changes in atomic structure�or else light waves are simply diverted around him. (I would say "him or her," except that the historical record shows all bearers of the One Ring to be male.) In fact, NASA and the U.S. Air Force have already experimented with "video camouflage" which places cameras on one side of an object and video screens on the other side. The object "disappears" before our very eyes, like the alien trophy-hunter in Predator, and with the hoped-for advent of projective holography, this technology can only improve."

burns doubt

"With something like 70 hours worth of fantastically successful documentary film footage under his belt, Ken Burns is an industry onto himself. No matter the subject, we know that with Burns, we're in for hours of sleepy guitar noodling, smoothed-over narration, and slow pans over sepia-toned photographs. And no matter what the sepia tones show, we know the subject's bound to be America in all its epic grandeur�flush with the glory of a few Great Men (and, to a lesser extent, great women) and shamed by its treatment of black folk (and, to a lesser extent, Native Americans)."

five easy pieces

who wrote the bible in 1 2 3 4 5 easy lessons.

home plate

"The home media server will manage television programming, delivered by cable, satellite or the Internet; and music, delivered by the Net or transferred from CDs into the server's hard drive. The server also might handle more computer-like functions, such as electronic mail, instant messaging and Web browsing, as well as entertainment services such as online video games."

midrift

"In what follows I lay out a new alternative. It seeks to achieve a separation of the two peoples, but not through unilateral action. Rather, it proposes that the United States use the UN Security Council to achieve a kind of coordinated separation, but one in which the Council will not take no for an answer. In this, it represents a radical departure from previous US policies. But the proposal is far from radical in its objectives. It leaves for later the issues of Jerusalem and refugees; instead, it focuses on the issues of territory, statehood and settlements. Here it seeks to be decisive, to achieve an end to the territorial dimension of the conflict through the emergence of a Palestinian state living at peace with Israel. The territorial specifics are little different from what Clinton proposed and what is now an international consensus: the near complete withdrawal of Israel from the occupied territories."

phasers on stunted

"Enterprise, which debuted this fall on UPN as the newest entry in the Star Trek franchise, has a fundamentally different vision. Its crew copes with bleeding-edge technologies: they don�t trust the transporter not to scramble their molecular data, the torpedoes miss their targets, the shields are on the fritz and the computers make crappy food. Starfleet is now a paternalistic bureaucracy. In short, the message is, we have seen the future and it doesn�t work."

gasaholic

"The reason is both simple and complex: oil. Washington is determined to dominate the world's richest new source of oil, Central Asia's Caspian Basin, over which sit the former Soviet states of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgystan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan. Well before Sept. 11, the US already had special forces operating in Kyrgystan and Uzbekistan. Last spring, Osama bin Laden advised the unworldly Taliban regime to turn down a low bid from the US oil firm Unocal to build a pipeline to export Central Asian oil - awarding it instead to a rival Argentine firm. The US cut off discreet financial aid to Taliban and began updating contingency plans to invade Afghanistan and install a compliant regime. Events of Sept. 11 facilitated this decision."

presidential chew toy

"My mother always said, 'When you're eating pretzels, chew before you swallow,"' Bush said. "Always listen to your mother."

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