Damien Cave’s Salon cover story today is a must-read. “Companies like Atlas Tack, and its parent company, Great Northern Industries, are the happy beneficiaries of the Bush administration’s new Superfund policy. By refusing to clean up the sites and then collect costs from the responsible parties, Bush and the EPA have essentially given the nation’s biggest corporate polluters a multimillion-dollar reprieve — at a huge personal cost to less influential citizens.”
Archives for July 2002
Salon Blog watch
We’re getting some interesting subject-specific blogs underway: | |
David Harris is posting on Science News. | |
Tor Andre is reviewing TV shows like “Monk” and “Witchblade.” | |
And Jennifer B. Powell is blogging environmental news. |
Mine rescue
Those miners in Pennsylvania have been rescued. Sometimes these slow-news-week disaster stories have happy endings.
Salon Blog watch
Albert Delgado is posting Teacher Stories. | |
Matt the Heckler finds Tom Delay’s anti-corporate rhetoric ringing a bit hollow. | |
What would Salon Blogs be without a Bush Impeachment Countdown? — only the blog, which sports plenty of dirt on the president, does not seem to have an actual countdown. I guess that can only begins after the special prosecutor is appointed. | |
John Farr blogs in from Taos, New Mexico, with comments on the end of “open computing” — and a feed of photos that will make you want to hop on the nearest mode of transport and visit his state (I do). | |
Diego Doval is unrolling Plan B — a “blognovel” from cubicleland. |
Ferry ‘cross the Lethe
A new album from Bryan Ferry? in 2002? On “Frantic,” the sheen on Ferry’s croon has cracked a bit — with age, or disuse, or pain, I don’t know. But it’s becoming. The perfection of his “Avalon”-style gloss was seductive but barren — a sort of vocal embalming had taken place. Here he sounds battered, but alive and kicking back, with a mixture of Dylan covers, dance numbers and old Roxy Music-style extravaganzas. I think it’s his best work since “Siren.”
Twilight of “open computing”?
This little sentence was in John Markoff’s Thursday N.Y. Times piece covering Microsoft’s .NET summit:
Microsoft also warned today that the era of “open computing,” the free exchange of digital information that has defined the personal computer industry, is ending. |
It had folks on Slashdot scratching their heads, wondering whether this was a trumpet blast against open-source software development (which would have been odd at the same time Microsoft was sealing a deal to bring the open-source Apache web server into the .Net tent) or a warning to file-sharers that the boom is about to be lowered on their heads (which might make sense during the same week that Hollywood-friendly congressmen introduced a bill making it legal for copyright holders to hack into your computer to see if you’ve been naughty).
The statement is in fact opaque. I’d guess that Microsoft is trying to say, “The free-for-all that began with the Internet boom is over — everybody better get used to paying more for everything digital from now on.” Which is probably, whether we like it or not, an accurate description of reality. The troubling thing, for Microsoft and everyone else in the technology business, is that the free-for-all also caused the Internet boom. It was the “free exchange of digital information” that enable the amazing growth rate of the ’90s, along with all the sales of hardware and software. Cutting it off may be what the holders of intellectual property rights (which includes both “content” publishers and software companies) want. Cutting it off is also a recipe for stagnation and loss.
Salon Blog Watch
Dave Cullen is posing an interesting question: Three different leads for an op-ed piece. Which is best? He’s also wondering about interactivity on blogs. “I’m just supposed to rant along in monologue?” Well, the comments option is there but, the way Radio UserLand’s interface is set up, the comments tend to be hidden from view. My experience is that the “interactivity” of blogs takes place *between* blogs, as bloggers comment on and link to one another’s posts. | |
Christian Crumlish compares Radio UserLand and LiveJournal on Radio Free Blogistan. | |
Roots and Branches: Confucian views on the war on terror and the corruption scandals. | |
Ken Schellenberg appreciates E. F. Benson’s “Lucia” books on his Book Blog. | |
2nd and Beale tracks the Memphis music scene. |
Leave no bozo behind!
President Bush is a kinder, gentler Republican, it turns out. He’s kind and gentle to those who work for him. He may have cast himself as the first CEO-style president, but he doesn’t seem to have the stomach to fire anyone.
Paul O’Neill’s failure as treasury secretary to establish stature or rapport with the financial world would probably have earned him the boot in any previous administration you might pick. But O’Neill shows no sign of going anywhere.
Army secretary Thomas White is a former Enron official who either (A) knew what was happening at that company and therefore shares responsibility in its ignominy or (B) was completely in the dark about Enron’s escapades. A he’s a crook, B he’s a boob (of the “Sgt. Schultz defense” species); either way he has no business in a critical military post at a time when we are nominally at war. But President Bush stands by his Enron man.
Then there’s SEC chief Harvey Pitt, who — in an act of jaw-dropping flat-footedness — decided to push for his own promotion to cabinet-level status at the very moment when much of the rest of the country is trying to figure out why he has not yet resigned. Bush still thinks Pitt, who took office by promising to make the SEC a “kinder, gentler” regulator of his friends in the accounting industry, is the right man for the job.
What do you have to do to get fired from this administration, anyway? Get arrested for drunk driving?
Patrick Hurley’s blog
Patrick Hurley, my colleague here, just started up a Radio blog from his Mac, and noticed the pages loaded really slowly. This note from UserLand explains the problem — it’s an IE and Mac thing. Worth reading if you’re blogging from an older Mac.
Dave Cullen’s blog
Dave Cullen did some superb reporting for Salon on Columbine, and he’s now started his own Salon Blog, “The Fact of the Matter Is.”
We’ve moved blogs.salon.com onto a different box and are hoping that the result is better performance.