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Saturday, Mar 16, 2002

remaking artifice

"While some may be alarmed at the prospect of a director tampering with his original works, if Spielberg is determined to revisit his past films in this fashion, then it's clear that he has a tremendous amount of work cut out for him. Luckily, we're here to help him. Because if you can't provide free assistance to billionaire film directors, then who can you help?"

Friday, Mar 15, 2002

the good book

1911 encyclopedia britannica online

nimby

a recap from a century of american imperial excess

barbarians at the box office

am hollywood cheatsheet: whos more talented mary-kate or ashley? another conan movie? are you more conflicted than ben affleck?

ANWiRed

"About ANWR: The Times recently had an eye-opening article confirming something I had been hearing myself, that oil companies are not behind the push for drilling there � indeed, they are notably unexcited by the prospect. Studies by the U.S. Geological Survey suggest why: Arctic oil is so expensive to get at that it's barely worth extracting at current market prices. For energy companies it's the rest of the Bush energy plan, which would give them about $35 billion in tax breaks and subsidies, that really matters."

preoccupied territory

"But the fighting now, whether in Afghanistan or the occupied territories or in Iraq or elsewhere in the future, is or will be in distant parts. It is being prosecuted, as far as Americans are concerned, by a professional and not a conscript army. It is being directed, in Washington, by a secretive government, one which even neglected to properly inform its own party, let alone the opposition, about the setting up of a shadow administration in case a terrorist attack destroyed the real one. The strategy is being shaped by a small inner group who offer no logical connection, to take the prime example, between the campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaida and a possible invasion of Iraq, while denying all connection between American support for the Sharon government and the disaffection of the Arab world."

Thursday, Mar 14, 2002

tub of goo

google news adds a search option.

fried love

"He has Scotty Reston's sweeping wall map in his office in the Times' Washington bureau -- with the Soviet Union as still the most prominent piece of the map -- but he goes out of his way to disavow any similarities in their roles. Reston, whose column ran in the Times at the height of the Cold War, facilitated a conversation at the grandest levels; Reston was a Washington aristocrat. Whereas Tom Friedman, in his columnist job for seven years now, is, as he tells it, just your basic Everyman."

profusion cuisine

"It was Adam Smith who identified what turned out to be the central ethical fault line in Enron. The corporation, he wrote in The Wealth of Nations, was an inherently corrupting business form. The problem was the separation of ownership from control. In partnerships and sole proprietorships, the forms he preferred, the owners ran the business. In contrast, managers hired by the owner-stockholders ran the corporation. And the owners were too busy to monitor how their money was spent by the managers. So managers were institutionally liable to what Smith called "negligence" and "profusion." Negligence, because the business was not the consuming dedication of their lives, as it is for partners and sole proprietors; it was merely a job. Profusion, because they could reward themselves by lavishing other people's money, which spends so much easier than our own, on fine dinners, handsome equipages, and all manner of other frippery�and disguise their profusion as business expenses. Smith's distrust of the corporation had empirical backing in the disgraceful behavior of the East India Company, the Enron of his day, a monument to negligence and profusion."

the chronically aggrieved

"If you've ever given money to an environmental organization, if you support the movement's agenda, then you're probably part of a grand conspiracy that's degrading life in America. Worse yet, you might even be a terrorist, or at least an accomplice. At least that's what Nick Nichols seems to think."

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