Monday, August 26, 2002
The title's too harsh, but the content hits the target in Slate's review, Everything is Wrong About the New Wilco Movie. I am Trying to Break Your Heart is a good film, but the David and Goliath storyline was unneccessary --and deceptive. Writes James Surowiecki;
If you don't have the potential to sell a million copies of your record, the philistine suits want nothing to do with you. This was a well-worn theme in the reviews of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and it's made explicit in I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, where one critic describes Reprise's rejection of Yankee Hotel as "a measure of what corporations that own record companies are willing to put up with." There's an inherent conflict, we're told, between the time it takes to understand and appreciate a great album and the bottom-line mentality that demands success on a quarter-by-quarter basis...
There's only one problem with this story: Both Nonesuch and Reprise are owned by AOL Time Warner. In other words, the same suits who supposedly found Wilco's approach too artistic to tolerate when the band was working for one part of the company apparently found it commercially viable when the band was working for another part. In the movie, this comes across as simply an ironic twist of fate. But it's more than that. In fact, Nonesuch's move makes the whole "victim of multinational capitalism" narrative look rather suspect. After all, if Reprise's axing of Wilco was really the inevitable result of a corporate ethos that privileges commercial appeal over artistic integrity, then Nonesuch's decision makes no sense. If Wilco wasn't going to be profitable enough for AOL Time Warner when it was at Reprise, it wasn't going to be any more profitable for AOL Time Warner at Nonesuch.
Monday, August 26, 2002 The Post has a special section on biotech food. Last month, Zimbabwe rejected thousands of tons of US emergency food aid, on the grounds that some of it was genetically engineered. Biotech advocates are dismissing it as Mugabe bureaucracy, but "if some of the corn seeds are sown instead of eaten, the resulting plants will produce gene-altered pollen that will blow about and contaminate surrounding fields." Corn is a major source of income to Zimbabwe. If the US corn contaminated their crops, Zimbabwe could not export it to Europe because of their strong regulations against bioengineered food. Reason's Ronald Baily explains the situation best in this LA Times op-ed:
One scientific panel after another has concluded that biotech foods are safe to eat, and so has the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Even an EU review issued last fall of 81 separate European scientific studies of genetically modified organisms found no evidence that genetically modified foods posed any new risks to human health or the environment...It's clear that the EU ban is not so much a safety precaution as a barrier to trade. The EU is citing phony safety concerns to protect its farmers from competition and to protect its system of bloated farm subsidies.
Sunday, August 25, 2002
Friday, Septemper 6th in front of the Capital from 3pm-8, ravers will protest the RAVE Act with speakers and DJs. ROAR (Ravers Organized Against the RAVE act) looks to be a good time. I'll be there.
Sunday, August 25, 2002
If u l3m4rs 3vr wo//7 †0 l3rn 1337 h4x0r 5p3k k1k h3r3
Friday, August 23, 2002 Karyn epitomizes the non-functional urban working-girl. She puts more money toward her cat than in her savings account. She is a twenty-nine year old woman who probably expected to be married by now, thus relieved of fiscal responsibility. DC is filled with girls like that, who think they can afford Prada suits on Research Assistants salaries. I direct those beasts to Vanessa Summer's book, Get in the Game: A Girl's Guide to Money and Investing. See, Vanessa likes exclamation marks and Sex and the City too! Plus, she's wicked pretty and used to be a model! But, Vanessa's now a financial analyst and has plenty of money in the bank. You can too, if you take her tips like:
How about your haircut or coloring? Can you do this every eight weeks instead of six, hence saving a whole two months' worth of haircut and/or coloring expenses a year? Can you do your own nails? How about your magazine subscriptions; can you do without one? Do you currently have the most competitive cell phone plan? If so, can you cut back on the number of minutes you use each month, perhaps shaving another twenty-five bucks off your monthly budget?
Friday, August 23, 2002
The LP has always struck me as dumbed-down free-market liberalism. Jacob Sullum knocks their ham-fisted celebration of Bob Barr's defeat with a thoughtful essay in Reason
Despite his reputation as a rabid right-winger (based mainly on his early support for impeaching President Clinton), Barr is probably a more consistent defender of individual rights than the typical ACLU member.
Friday, August 23, 2002
Here is a Black Hawk helicopter. This picture captures an air assault on marijuana crops in Tennesse. On command from someone on the ground, the helicopter lifted straight into the blue sky, revealing what must have been one of the most curious sights to be found in these woods on the Cumberland Plateau. Clipped securely on the rope was a stack of three men, dangling like marionettes. Around the waist of the bottom man hung a bundle of green foliage.
It was marijuana, someone's home-grown stash. Now it belongs to the Governor's Task Force on Marijuana Eradication, a multi-agency effort that already has found more than 360,000 patches of pot this summer, with several more weeks remaining in the growing season.
Friday, August 23, 2002
The Houston police raided a local K-mart at 12:30 am, arresting 425 people for trespassing In a follow up report, the officers were instructed to investigate illegal drag-racing in the parking lot. When they found no such activity, they were ordered to go after teenagers. "That operation had been planned for weeks," one of the supervisors said. "It was not planned with the intent to arrest everyone in sight. It was to arrest drag racers."
