[Taken from MetaFilter] Paul Krugman, in Tuesday’s New York Times [registration required, sorry], highlights Secretary of the Army Thomas White’s involvement in Enron’s fraud. Also of note is Cheney’s golden handshake from his pals at Halliburton. I don’t have anything to add beyond another link in the datasphere to keep the info alive. Just thought y’all should know about this stuff.

Incidently, MeFi-er michaelonfs pointed out that Secretary White’s résumé has been tidied up a bit since the Enron debacle broke. Look at his current profile and compare it to what it looked like on June 29th, 2001.

NP: Luna, California (All the Way) via KEXP

I’m having trouble breathing… I feel as if the air is made of lead, pressing in on my chest. It’s a very strange sensation, this inescapable dread of the next moment—even in my anxiety I am able to focus my attention on the sensation and observe my breathing, its shallowness, its timidity, its ineffectuality.

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1. All that is good in academic economics would include: David Levine’s work on intellectual property.
2. All that is good in music would include: Blümchen, whose rare Verliebt Goldedition 2CD set I just won on eBay.de for €2.5.

NP: Coldplay, The Scientist

There is no such thing as personal tragedy. If a tree falls, with no one near to hear it, it never made a sound.

NP: Marine Research, Parallel Horizontal

I killed my computer dead. I’ve been having problems with it for awhile; the CPU fans died most horribly, shrieking and groaning for weeks, so the CPU has been running hot for some time. I finally decided to do something about it, and tried to replace the fans, but it seems I shorted out the board or my memory stick (I had to take it out to get at the CPU fan screws), or I jostled the CPU into oblivion, or something similar, but the thing won’t boot. It just lets off a series of shrill beeps and won’t turn off. I can’t do a thing about it.

As a result, I won’t be able to post very often until I get it fixed. No computer at home means no writing. Nothing tragic to you, I suppose, but I’m in the midst of a terrible desperation. It’s horrible.

There are certain projects I’ve been meaning to undertake; I need to respond to my friend Ben’s comments, I’ve wanted to write several email letters for quite some time, and there are a couple of small pieces I need to finish. All will have to wait indefinitely.

I have to do some work while I’m at work now, but I did want to mention that just this morning I’ve begun reading Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, Part I. I’m quite excited.

NP: Cocteau Twins, Lorelei

Thank you, Jimmy Carter. Former US President Jimmy Carter wrote a piece for the Washington Post (apparently buried on page A31) decrying recent changes he perceives in traditional US foreign policy. He suggests that Washington is now in the hands of some wiry belligerents, “a core group of conservatives who are trying to realize long-pent-up ambitions under the cover of the proclaimed war against terrorism.” Let us be quite clear about who these war-mongers are: the old hawks Cheney and Rumsfeld. A theory about what their ambitions might include can be found in this Salon article from June 17. Carter restricts his attention to changes in human rights policies, our turn from “good-neighbor” participation in the global community, and our rôle in the Middle East peace process. That’s no small umbrella—it shelters an alarmingly broad coterie of crimes. Carter writes:

Peremptory rejections of nuclear arms agreements, the biological weapons convention, environmental protection, anti-torture proposals, and punishment of war criminals have sometimes been combined with economic threats against those who might disagree with us. These unilateral acts and assertions increasingly isolate the United States from the very nations needed to join in combating terrorism.

…

Also from the Post: September 11: ‘American Idol’ Seizes the Day. I don’t think I have anything intelligent to say about this one. Just read it—and weep with me.

NP: Future Bible Heroes, From Some Dying Star on KEXP

I’ve just started re-reading Russell’s Unpopular Essays. I was torn between Russell and Nabokov’s Pale Fire, which has been sitting unread on my shelf for far longer than I care to admit. Ultimately, I chose to re-read the Essays because in them Russell offers prescient and portentous arguments on the dangers of dogmatic authoritarianism, not unlike that espoused by the present Bush administration. While Bush and Co. haven’t exactly delineated their motivating principles (quite the contrary: they’ve been careful to mask them with some nominal commitment to vague “democratic” values based in weakly Christian “ideals,” whereby citizens may be held indefinitely, without charge, under unmonitored conditions and wars may be waged without congressional approval or sanction), neither have they eschewed the anti-scientific moralism that has been the biggest deterrent to critical liberalism for the past three millennia. In “Philosophy and Politics,” Russell notes that, “The scientific outlook… is the intellectual counterpart of what is, in the practical sphere, the outlook of Liberalism.”

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I have just made the most wonderful discovery. I was busy gluing some pieces on to a writing table I’m making and I had some old “goth” post-punk CDs in the changer. A bit of Bauhaus, a little Sisters of Mercy, some Siouxsie Sioux… I had also included one of my favorite bands, (Clan of) Xymox, which was on the 4AD label back when it had claim to Lush and The Pixies and the Cocteau Twins. It shames me to admit it, but I’d never really listened to a lot of the lyrics very closely—which helps to explain how I was surprised today to find that CoX quotes my favorite poet Swinburne in their song “Back Door,” which appears on the Medusa album.

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On Friday, my web host (WebQuarry) performed some service upgrades on the server, which is great, because now we have the latest versions of everything, and it’s all on a faster, more reliable machine, and ain’t life great, yada yada yada, except that some of the programs I was running before the upgrade no longer worked afterward. Of course, I didn’t know about any of this, until Friday afternoon when I tried to update my page here with Important News that you Can’t Live Well Without.™ I have since forgotten what that Important News was. At any rate, I couldn’t update all weekend, and I watched anxiously as my blog sat idle for days, and I felt as if I had Failed the World.

I’m sorry, World, I failed you.

But everything’s fine, now. The good people at Movable Type were able to pinpoint the problem quickly, and now I can post more drivel to my blog. Never again, World, will I let you down. Blog on, Michael. Blog on.

Ohohohoh!!! I remembered one piece of the Important News! My good friend, Stephanie Pytlinski, turned… um… well, she turned old like me on Friday.

Happy Birthday, Steph!

NP: Sisters of Mercy, More

Since late May I have been taking a 6:30am bus to the train station to make my daily jaunt into the nation’s capital. Since late May I have almost every day been joined on the bus, two stops after I get on, by a rather attractive woman about my age. ‘M—’ is not beautiful in the ordinary way—her lower lip thrusts too far forward, her nose is too prominent, her cheekbones are flatter than one might hope, her toes turn slightly outward, giving an ever-so-distant hint of a limp to her walk. Yet her ice-blue eyes are bright and clear, her voice is pleasant and forthright, and her wispy but perfectly coiffed wheat-colored hair surrounds her head like a Giotto halo. She dresses sharply but comfortably, usually wearing grey or black wool slacks and a button-down, half-sleeved, soft-colored shirt. She is poised but demure, reserved but affable. She generally keeps to herself, but when engaged in light talk by a stranger she will usually respond openly, with a smile. I took interest the moment she first stepped onto the bus, but my inability to approach her has steadily grown increasingly oppressive.

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