 |
Family Circus gives “cute” a bad name, says David of No Code – Comfort Care Only (the blog’s title is explained here). I used to feel that way too, but Bill Griffith (who creates Zippy the Pinhead) opened my eyes. Check out the classic Bill Griffith/Bil Keane collaborations. |
|
Toby Sackton reminds us that the U.S. imprisons more citizens than any other nation in the world. The Economist says the U.S. “is beginning to look a little like early Australia.” |
Celebrity pill pushers
Salon Blog watch
|
Interesting things are happening in the paranoia-laden office lanscape of Plan B. I’m still trying to figure out whether this “blognovel” is more Kafka or Kornbluth, but I’m enjoying it. |
|
Mike Pence (Dances With Cactus) has a touching imaginary dialogue with his childhood self. |
|
David Harris commemorates the centenary of the birth of physicist Paul Dirac with links to these very cool posters. |
|
Kat Donohue (She’s Actual Size) provides a perspective on the “hacker hag.” |
|
John Farr celebrates his birthday |
When vaporware smells
.Net continues to be Microsoft’s ball of confusion. News.com reviews the company’s marketing blunders — in particular, the way it rolled out two largely separate initiatives, one aimed at developers and one aimed at consumers, and gave them both the “.Net” moniker. Not since the days of Java and Javascript have people been this confused.
Salon Blog watch
|
David Harris has details of today’s report that the old “eight glasses of water a day” standard is scientifically unsupported. I heard the scientist behind this interviewed on NPR this morning. It’s just a myth, a bit of common knowledge that got repeated so many times everyone assumed it was solid science. |
|
Unrelated Disney is offering Critiques of Editorials, along with an interesting look at how big recent revisions to the GDP numbers have been. |
|
Adam Lasnik has taken my enthusiasm for They Might Be Giants lyrics as a cue and pushed it over the edge of absurdity! |
|
Christian says his blogging time is cutting into his time to read Salon. There’s always cutting back on your sleep… |
Stem cell backlash?
John Robb suggests that Bush’s year-old stem-cell research policy — hailed by some at the time as a Solomonic compromise — is a failure, one that will bite back at the president in future elections, as voters with ailing relatives who might have been helped by robust research turn on him.
As I argued at the time (and Michael Kinsley later echoed), the policy — which is built around Bush’s stated conviction that all embryos are sacred and the government should act to protect them — is baldly hypocritical. Vast numbers of embryos are created and discarded every year during fertility treatments like in vitro fertilization. If Bush actually felt this was profoundly immoral, he’d do something to stop it. But since such fertility treatment touches the lives of a huge swathe of the electorate, the president wouldn’t think of banning it. Couples who are stuck with extra embryos as a byproduct of such treatment typically have no choice but to dispose of them; stem cell research offers a way to make good use of them for the betterment of all. Why not allow that? Why not, in cases where it doesn’t conflict with people’s religious beliefs, encourage that?
Worldcom’s “operational shambles”
Thursday’s New York Times features this jaw-dropping account of Worldcom’s rise and fall by Kurt Eichenwald. Worldcom grew by acquisition, gobbling up big Internet backbone providers like UUNet and big long-distance providers like MCI into one humongous telecommunications combine that wowed investors for years. In a company that grows by acquisitions, what’s the most important skill? Operations — the ability to take different organizational entities, business structures and technological systems and merge them into a cohesive, and profitable, whole.
Guess what area it seems Worldcom was utterly clueless about? That’s right — operations. From Eichenwald’s piece:
|
Leading it all was Mr. Ebbers, a man who insiders and analysts said was out of his league in the rough and tumble world of telecommunications.
“WorldCom wasn’t operated at all, it was just on auto pilot, using bubble gum and Band-Aids as solutions to its problems,” said Susan Kalla, an analyst at Friedman, Billings & Ramsey. “Bernie was endearing, but he didn’t even have a working knowledge of the business.” |
“Endearing” but “out of his league,” lacking even a “working knowledge” of his own business — this is the guy who was hailed as harboring the visionary future of telecom in the flecks of his beard. What I want to know is, where were analysts like Kalla when investors could have made use of such trenchant analysis?
Saudi-bashing: Perle to Murawiec to Larouche?
Slate’s Jack Shafer has done some good sleuthing on the identity of Laurent Murawiec, the Rand consultant who told the Bush Pentagon that Saudi Arabia was a hostile nation, and whose report was leaked to the Washington Post. Seems Murawiec spent at least some of the 1980s in the orbit of fringe fascist and paranoid perennial presidential candidate Lyndon Larouche. He was invited to give his talk by the defense policy world’s leading Iraq hawk, Richard Perle. Shafer has also posted Murawiec’s entire Powerpoint presentation, “Taking Saudi out of Arabia.”
Salon Blog watch
Quote of the day
Evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins, in the Guardian, “suggested Mr Bush was just as much of a danger to world peace as Saddam Hussein, adding: ‘It would be a tragedy if Tony Blair were to be brought down through playing poodle to this unelected and deeply stupid little oil-spiv.'” (Via Nick Denton.)