licentious radio

Thursday, September 5, 2002
[5:47:48 PM]

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[5:14:51 PM]

A licentious radio golden oldie, to remind you how well the "real" media diverts attention from the big stories:

Lincoln Bedroom -- "Kenny Boy" Lay responded to questions about WorldCom: "Hiding expenses isn't a story. It even took them five quarters to hide barely $3 billion. We were stealing half a billion dollars a day, just from Californians. Hiding *that* kind of money is what counts. We also managed to pull a billion out for the executives, and more than three billion for our partners -- in just a couple of weeks before filing bankruptcy papers. So don't get me started on WorldCom. Where are the off-shore accounts? How many WorldCom execs got Bush appointments? Did you see WorldCom flooding Florida with money to prevent counting black votes? No! Don't get me started on WorldCom."

[4:55:58 PM]
In my youth, "Double-dip" stood for ice cream -- lots of it. Now, alas, it stands for recession. An initial horrendous policy move creates the recession (Greenspan's assassination of the economy), but when we're all ready to go back to prosperity, more stupid policies (by Bush this time) kill any hope of recovery and leave us teetering on the edge of a dark pit that is so deep we can't stand to think of how bad things could get.

[4:39:17 PM]
John Dvorak had a couple of good rants in the latest PC Magazine. He repeatedly slammed the stupidity of the airport security checks that are in place. But then he points out the equally obvious: we all think "my God! If there really is a security threat and this is the best the Bush regime can do, we are doomed." The good news, of course, is that the security measures are mostly propaganda, designed to scare us into submission. The bureaucrats know what will promote security and what won't.

Dvorak also insisted IT purchases have to be justified economically. I find that improbable, as a generalization. Large organizations have titanic political struggles about how to allocate resources. A lot of the IT boom was because of the political leverage created by all the tech hype. The glamor of tech sank even faster than the stock market. You know there are big projects that would win on cost-benefit analysis, but lose on political allocation of resources. The urgency of keeping stock prices high (by firing thousands of workers) trumps any suggestion of using the downturn to create *new* products and technologies for when the economy turns around.

The problem with that is that with Bush at the helm, it could literally be years before the economy improves -- attacking Iraq will screw us for at least two years in itself, but the master plan of destroying the economy through income transfers to the super-rich will continue as long as the Bush mafia retains power.

[11:32:52 AM]
Joy in Mudville! Linux for the ipaq 3800 finally supports the Stowaway keyboard!

This morning I sat in Cafe Borrone playing jazz mp3s on my ipaq while I wrote an article on cookies and session maintenance for transaction-oriented websites.

Instead of carrying a laptop, I had slipped the ipaq in my back pocket, the headphones in my jacket pocket, and carried the folded keyboard.

[10:31:32 AM]
In the notes from a Rumsfeld meeting last September 11, you can practically hear him saying "I hit the trifecta":

And at 2:40 p.m., the notes quote Rumsfeld as saying he wanted "best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H." -- meaning Saddam Hussein -- "at same time. Not only UBL" -- the initials used to identify Osama bin Laden.

"Go massive," the notes quote him as saying. "Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

[10:10:51 AM]
"I'll ask Congress...." "NO!" "Who cares what you think?"