Thomas Frank dissects the
continued
lionization of the people who created the stock bubble, including the way they manage
to blame everyone except themselves for the recent crash.
ISSN 1534-0236
Technology and ideology alike are exercises in applied imagination.
Thomas Frank dissects the
continued
lionization of the people who created the stock bubble, including the way they manage
to blame everyone except themselves for the recent crash.
We are finally rid of the most egregious corporate swindlers of the 1990s. Why aren't the intellectual snake-oil salesmen following the dot-cons into oblivion? On the most elementary level, it's because the nation's newspapers, think tanks, magazines and TV networks have a great deal to lose were we to turn on the New Economy theorists in the manner they deserve. If the intellectuals of the '90s boom are to sink like the stock analysts and CEOs into the depths of public scorn, those newspapers and think tanks would bear the brunt too. After all, any comprehensive list of those guilty for puffing the '90s bubble would read like a who's who of American media.It's one thing to be wrong about whether Coca-cola is a good investment this year: it's another to admit that your god is a fraud. As long as the conservative media can fill their time with people prepared to blame you and me, or Bill Clinton, or sunspots for the bear market, they don't risk letting people on who will remind their listeners that the market is not a benevolent deity, and that there's a reason we have government regulations and labor unions in the first place.Try to remember what it was like in those feverish days. Virtually everyone agreed: The stock market was a form of democracy. It was a juggernaut powered by the divine inevitabilities of Silicon Valley and the awesome assembly of the people of the globe. This was well-nigh universal stuff: Both Tony Blair and Bill Clinton were believers, as were Al Gore and George W. Bush. Small-town papers across the country carried the stock-picking homilies of the Motley Fool. Bookstores everywhere allowed you to choose between reassuring stock tips penned by the Beardstown Ladies, a set of kindly Midwestern grandmas and irony-drenched stock tips penned by the Capitalist Pig, a hip Chicago Gen-Xer. Your next-door neighbor had seen the light and was day trading from his rec room, and you were thinking about doing it too.
Another reason that so many of the hyperventilating pundits of the 1990s have proven impervious to the usual consequences of error is that generating an accurate depiction of economic life really wasn't their main function. When they told the world about the miracles of the Internet and the obsolescence of all previous economic knowledge, the public thinkers of the New Economy were interested in something else.
That something else was politics. After all, the central tenet of the New Economy faith was that the free market was the highest and most rewarding form of human existence, a notion that would have seemed transparently ideological had it not always been couched in the language of technology and in lofty phrases about the juggernaut of history and the will of the common man. The great economic commentators of the '90s didn't dissect the corporation so much as propagandize for it, looking ahead to a time when the little people would identify more with the corporation than with the government.
I've found a marvelous toy: the
Icelandic Word Bank.
You pick a subject area and a source language, then type a query, and it will tell you
that the Icelandic for "comet" is "halastjarna", and that a cliff is a klif.
I'm sure there are people who have practical use for this; then there are
those of us who will play with it, and are delighted that the source languages
include not only English, French, German, and Japanese, but Finnish, Latin,
and Sami. Enter "oak" and you get translations into Danish, Dutch, Faeroese,
Finnish, French, German, Icelandic, Japanese, Latin, and Swedish, plus a
definition in Icelandic. (All the Germanic ones cluster around "eik".)
In a new study of
bird embryo
development, the researchers broke ostrich eggs to examine the developing
embryo at all stages. They found vestigial thumbs appeared around day 14, and vanished at
day 17. The researchers found that only digits 2, 3, and 4 develop fully in ostriches--and,
presumably, other modern birds. Since dinosaurs developed digits 1, 2, and 3, with 4 and
5 vestigial, Alan Feduccia, the lead researcher on this project, argues that birds cannot be
descended directly from theropod dinosaurs, and that the similarities are due to descent from
a much earlier common ancestor. Feduccia has been a critic of the birds-are-dinosaurs
theory since the 1970s; this article briefly summarizes his other arguments on the subject.
Planting trees to
absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide
may not work,
may even be a net loss, because the grasslands they replace have far more carbon
stored in the soil.
The researchers started with a literature search, and
found that "as you move to increasingly wet environments, grasslands have a lot more soil carbon than shrublands and woodlands do," he said. "That was somewhat of a surprise. The analysis suggested that sites with the potential to store the most plant carbon also had the potential to lose the most soil organic carbon."Then they set up experiments in areas spanning a wide range of annual rainfall, sampling the soil as much as ten meters below the surface.
Loses of "organic" soil carbon at the wetter sites were "substantial enough" to offset the increased "plant biomass" carbon stored in the growing wood.
Trees are a fine thing--shade, oxygen, fruit, good for the eyes and the soul--but they're not going to solve all our problems.
*croggle*
The Department of Justice is
routing phone calls
for its spy-on-your-neighbor "Operation Tips" project to America's Most
Wanted.
Latent toxoplasmosis is generally assumed to be harmless, but a Czech study
found that infected people are 2.65 times as likely to be
involved
in a traffic accident as people without the disease. The characteristic
feature of "inactive" toxoplasmosis--a disease that affects between 30 and
60 percent of the human population worldwide--is cysts on muscle and nerve
tissues; the researchers suggest that those cysts interfere with concentration.
Software
in case your computer isn't making you nervous enough. (We here at YAWL aren't running this,
and wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it were spyware or contained other dubious
payloads.)
"The Bush
administration sat on a Clinton-era plan to attack al-Qaida in Afghanistan for eight months because
of political hostility to the outgoing president and competing priorities".
Clinton's staff had the plan ready in December 2000, but Clinton decided that the
decision about it should be left to the incoming administration. Which started by
overlooking it, then decided the anti-missile plan, the War on Some Drugs, and an
attack on pornography were higher priorities. (Those last two courtesy of Ashcroft,
of course.)
A federal judge
has ruled
that the US government
must reveal the names
of people arrested on charges related to terrorism. There are two exceptions: material
witnesses, although
The government has never disclosed the number or identities of those people but it has been estimated to be about two dozen, most of whom have been released. Judge Kessler asked the government to provide further evidence why the names of materials witnesses should not be released.and any detainee who asks that his name not be released. (That, in part, addresses the claim that the prisoners will be afraid to talk to the government if their names are known.) (The BBC article is less detailed, but will be a valid link longer, and includes different comments.)
A delivery guy explains why
he
won't spy.
Plastic
surgery is increasingly common in East Asia. Men believe it's a career
necessity, and teenagers are getting their eyelids altered.
Even if you're cheerful about botox and deliberately cutting nerves to make leg muscles atrophy, and don't find anything weird about Asians largely trying to look more European, the number of unskilled practitioners is disturbing. (I can't object to body modification in general--that would be hypocritical--but some of the specifics bother me.)
Economics being what it is, the government of Thailand is promoting plastic surgery tours. [Thanks to Philip Chee]
The Australian government will
consult the
National Farmers Federation before listing species as threatened or endangered.
This decision is in response to complaints by landowners that the listings were
limiting their use of their land. A spokesperson for the farm group said that
We need to protect the biodiversity and threatened species we have in this country but I think there are very significant impacts being borne by land owners.Environmentalists are angry, arguing that the decisions should be made on scientific grounds, and comparing the new policy to putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop.
The chemistry of belief: people with
high levels of
dopamine in their brains are more likely to believe in the paranormal.
They're also, less surprisingly, both better at spotting patterns, and more
likely to find patterns in random data.
Molly Ivins
would
like to know why, in all the articles about the Worldcom bankruptcy, nobody has
mentioned the Telecommunications Deregulation Act of 1996.
For
the first time in over a century, a
new species--and,
indeed, a new genus--has been discovered in Central Park.
Nannarrup hoffmani is a centipede, living in the leaf litter. It doesn't
appear to be native to the city, but by those standards none of us are; it
probably got here in a flowerpot.
It
doesn't look
good for tabletop fusion: fresh calculations come up with temperatures
of only 15-20,000 K inside the bubbles produced by sonoluminescence,
which is several million degrees short of what would be needed.
Yet another
online poll: the
Straphangers Campaign isn't going to have a lot of people on its mailing list
who support a subway fare hike.
Quote of the year:
"I was raised as a good Catholic boy and a Communist, so I'm not allowed to lie."
Even two cases of Creutzfeld-Jacob
disease among people who knew each other is a cluster; three would be very unlikely.
Chronic wasting
disease in deer and elk may have jumped to hunters in Wisconsin.
It's a connection state officials dread having to make, given the grave health and economic consequences it could have for Wisconsin. The state Department of Natural Resources has gone so far as to say on its Web site that there is "no scientific evidence that CWD is transmissible through consumption of meat from an infected animal."[via MetaFilter]Still, the department is taking unprecedented precautions, telling hunters to wear rubber gloves when field-dressing carcasses, minimize handling of brain and spinal tissues and avoid consuming brain, spinal cord, eyes, spleen, tonsils and lymph nodes. The department is also requesting that hunters process their animals individually without mixing meat from different animals.
"Health experts advise that no part of any animal with evidence of CWD should be consumed by humans or other animals," the department mentions on its Web site.
Meanwhile, state health officials are escalating their surveillance of Creutzfeldt-Jakob cases in Wisconsin.
A serial criminal, whom
the police are calling the "Italian Unabomber", has been
booby-trapping
packaged foods. The latest was a jar of Nutella. Fortunately, the
woman who bought it heard ticking and ran away just in time.
[via McTavish]
Copyright 2002 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@redbird.org.
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