Saturday, July 23, 2005
 
Quick Hits
Some quick hits from my browsing at iWon, where I still hope I will win the million bucks or whatever they have left to award:
  • With Bush's help, GE courts Indian PM, nuke sector:

      Just over an hour after the White House's surprise pledge to help India develop its civilian nuclear power sector, the head of General Electric, the American company that could benefit most from the policy change, sat down for a celebratory dinner.

      The host was President Bush; a few feet away was India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh, and his top aides. GE Chief Executive Jeff Immelt, a contributor to Bush's presidential campaigns, had a coveted seat at the president's table.

      Bush's announcement on nuclear trade with India -- followed by a formal dinner in the State dining room -- was not just a victory for Singh. For GE, the only U.S.-owned company still in the nuclear business, it marked a possible turning point in a years-long push to re-enter the Indian nuclear power market, which it was forced to leave in 1974 when India conducted its first nuclear test.


    I'm not sure how this conspiracy fits into the whole Bush Works For Big Oil thing, but if our country's nuclear industry has fallen to only a single company continuing to work on nuclear industry, I blame the same groups who banged the trash can lids of China syndrome and called them symbols in the 1980s. They drove the other corporate entities out of nuclear energy. If freaking PETA made nuclear power plants, green and with no harm to animals, it would benefit them, too, but PETA just plays dress up and engages in useless theatrics. So who do you think would benefit from a compact designed to get real work done? Oh, yeah, companies that do real work.

  • LAPD Recruits Computer to Stop Rogue Cops:

      Dogged by scandal, the Los Angeles Police Department is looking beyond human judgment to technology to identify bad cops.

      This month, the agency began using a $35 million computer system that tracks complaints and other telling data about officers - then alerts top supervisors to possible signs of misconduct.


    Let's watch libertarians and civil rights zealots experience the Kirk-driven conundrum in this one. One on hand, it's a potentially-problematic invasion of privacy, but on the other hand, it's pigs, man!

    Personally, I am ambivalent on this one. It's an employer tracking employee behaviour. LAPD cops, if you have a problem, you have a right to become SFPD or security guards. I don't think that it's inappropriate to track efficiency and productivity or other performance on the job, even for police. However, I would like to see the program extended to the other, more dead, weight of the government. Track the behavior, complaints, and productivity of every state employee, and bring down the wrath of firing and embarrassment upon anyone who's not carrying their share of the taxpayer-funded load.

  • Pressure on U.S. to Use More Surveillance:
      Pressure is building for greater use of video cameras to keep watch over the nation's cities - particularly in transportation systems and other spots vulnerable to terrorism - after the bombings in London.

      The calls have come over the last few weeks as British investigators released surveillance footage of the bombers in the deadly July 7 attacks and then put out frames of suspects in Thursday's failed attacks.

      "I do not think that cameras are the big mortal threat to civil liberties that people are painting them to be," Washington, D.C., Mayor Anthony A. Williams said Friday.


    Civil liberties matter less than actual safety, dear Mayor-Who-Hasn't-Been-Caught-Smoking-Crack-Yet. Note that the cameras in the July 7 blasts, which killed a pile of people, did nothing to stop the killing. They only provided handy images with which to assign blame.

    But that's what contemporary government is all about, ainna? Letting things happen, and then assigning blame. Assuming one survives to spectate the whole thing, of course.

  • Spoof of Bush Wins Faux Faulkner Contest:
      A scathing parody that likens President Bush to the "idiot" in William Faulkner's novel "The Sound and the Fury" has won this year's Faulkner write-alike contest - and touched off a literary spat.

      Organizers of the Faux Faulkner competition are accusing Hemispheres, the United Airlines magazine that has sponsored the contest for six years, of playing politics by not putting Sam Apple's "The Administration and the Fury" in its print edition - only on its Web site.

      "One of the things they asked was that we didn't have profanity or any obvious sexual content. We watch for that. But anything else, like a political subject, was funny, it was parody. ... We felt that that shouldn't be censored," said Larry Wells, who organizes the contest with his wife, Dean Faulkner Wells, Faulkner's niece.


    I agree. Let's prevent censorship. Allow me to stand in front of the jack-booted Bureau of Proper Bush Worship thugs preventing Hemispheres from printing its views. But pardon me if I recognize that Hemispheres understands that blatantly anti-Bush twaddle could offend over 50% of its clientele and decides not to print it, or that Faulknerian anti-Bush twaddle appeals to less than 10% of its clientele who both hate Bush and have actually made it through The Sound and The Fury.

    Because, brother, the fact that you can villify Bush and write like William Faulkner might make you a genius in literary circles, but that doesn't make you salable. As you probably already know.
Geez, acting as a one man sanity patrol can be tiring. I think I need another beer.


- posted by Brian J. @ 10:18 PM
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