Despite efforts by the Administration to ignore the matter, some 30-year-old FBI misconduct will be investigated after all, albeit by Dan Burton.

(See this entry for some background.)

From the Boston Herald:

The chairman of a congressional committee investigating FBI misconduct that led to the jailing of a Boston man for a murder he didn’t commit will move forward with the probe over the objections of President Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft.



Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) said on CBS’ “60 Minutes” last night that the case involving Joseph Salvati is one the biggest miscarriages of justice he has ever seen. He said he wants former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s name removed from the agency’s headquarters because of evidence Hoover knew Salvati was innocent.

You can hardly read anything these days without hearing how some TV or print commentator has been taking large amounts of money from Enron over the past few years.

The assumption, like with similar bribes — let’s be honest here, for a moment, campaign contribution and the like are bribes — to politicians, is that the commentators will favor Enron in their opinions, and fail to note problems with the company as they otherwise would. Having bought off all criticism, the company can more or less do whatever it likes, the rest of the world be damned.

This appears to be what Enron did; but the rest of the world is chugging along quite nicely, while Enron is in its death throes.

That’s not my point, though. My point is this. The management of Enron fucked up, in a big way. That particular part of the story has been, to put it mildly, well-covered. We’re never going to find out the true story, though, because of fear on the part of journalists and politicians. I doubt that the management of Enron got together, one day, and decided to run the company into the ground; instead, they made decisions to take certain business risks, and to exploit certain hidden opportunities (”loopholes”) in U.S. corporate law in order to make the company (and themselves) stronger and richer. And they failed. Their risks did not pay off. This happens some times.

And we — by that I mean American culture, and particularly American business culture — can learn from that. This set of risks, this strategy in this situation by Enron has been proven to not work as spectacularly well as the architects of that strategy (presumably) hoped it would. So for God’s sake, let’s not try that particular approach in those particular circumstances, ever again.

We’re never going to learn that, though; instead, both the government and the press are going to throw the book at the Enronites. You can’t write a thoughtful column or hold a thoughtful hearing on what actually happened, because it would immediately be assumed that you were in Enron’s secret employ.

And that’s today’s Lesson In Bribery, boys and girls: after it becomes known that you’ve paid people off, you won’t be able to get a fair shake from anyone, whether you’ve bribed them or not, because support of or neutrality toward you will be universally suspect.

At some point, someone in the U.S. government decided that the government had to be “accessible” to children online. Nearly every government agency has some kind of web presence for the under-13 set.

In some cases, this makes sense; I’m sure that the Smithsonian’s kid-targeted information is greedily snapped up by fingers sticky with jam and ennui. The CIA and NSA both have surprisingly interesting kids’ web pages, focusing on disguises and codebreaking.

A lot of thse pages, of course, manage to weave some kind of anti-drug message into their overt message; but the majority are simply about the thrills of, say, the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, or the Treasury Department’s Bond Calculator for Kids, or the U.S. Fire Administration, or the Simplified Tax and Wage Reporting System for Kids (on whose site you can run a virtual lemonade stand; the main activity is — I am not kidding — filling out tax forms. They do not seem to intend any irony at all.

Taking the cake for ineptitude and general puzzlement, however, is probably The National Agricultural Statistics Service For Kids website is worth a look, complete with little cartoon Stanley Statistician, and “Pam Pie-Chart”.

(There’s also NASS para los niños, con Estadistico Stanley. Ay caramba!)

Both the English and Spanish versions seem to be entirely content-free. After reading the sites, I still had no idea what the National Agricultural Statistics Service did. Something to go with agriculture and statistics, I’d wager.

(Update 14 May 2002: Sadly, the Simplified Tax and Wage Reporting System for Kids page seems to have gone away. It was truly a thing to behold; but now you’ll have to settle for the Wayback Machine version, which is missing some of the images. I cannot emphasize enough how jaw-droppingly funny this site was; if you were an anti-tax activist and wanted to underscore how government interference hobbles small businesses, you could not have put together a web site that illustrated your poitn any better.)

An article in today’s Washington Post business section addresses the problem of corporate human resources departments without a clue. One technical job-seeker is quoted as saying “At my level, trying to get past human resources is a real difficulty.”

So what good are human resources departments, at least as far as hiring people goes? I’ve never got a job by applying through the normal channels for one, and I’ve only very rarely seen a new hire who came through the HR system actually turn out to know anything.

According to this Washington Post article, the White House is going to persist in refusing to hand over documents relating to Dick Cheney’s energy policy task force.

This in itself is interesting, but what’s more interesting is the differing treatment this story gets in various papers, and the daily shifts in spin coming from Cheney’s office. Together, these tidbits make one wonder what “energy policy” really means in this case. (more…)

Pete Parisi, St. Louis public-access television icon, has died. And the world is poorer for it.

Though the trend seems to have abated somewhat of late, we still hear on a regular basis about the dangers of cartoon violence, and how children cannot possibly understand that while Wile E. Coyote can fall off a cliff and not be seriously injured (aside from being temporarily turned into a concertina), they, being neither coyotes nor cartoon characters, cannot. (Watching those same cartoons when I was a wee tot never gave me the notion that I could jump off cliffs, but then I’m not the child of Boomers, either.)

Anyway, last week we were watching Die Hard for the umpteenth time, and it occurred to us that a far larger problem is violence on the screen enacted by humans: not that there’s too much of it, but that so much of it is so damned unrealistic.

These examples aren’t drawn from any film in particular, but most if not all of them do occur in Die Hard. Most of the following things happen in most action movies:

1. Man with a short-barrelled pistol accurately shoots targets at long range
2. Combatants with machine guns fire hundreds and hundreds of rounds at one another in an enclosed space; no-one is injured.
3. In hand-to-hand combat, people are kicked repeatedly in the head; when this happens, they just “shake it off” and re-enter the fray.

All of these things are entirely unrealistic, and I’d suggest that they result in far more problems in real life than anything than happens to Homer Simpson.

People see actual human beings on the screen shooting at someone 200 feet away with a handgun held with one hand; this leads to random bystanders getting shot in real life.

People see these machine-gun battles on the screen, and fail to properly appreciate what will happen when you try this in real life. First of all, you’re not even going to be able to see your targets after the first dozen shots or so, because of all the smoke and dust. And at least one of your posse will be injured with that much lead flying around. Conversely, if you are approached by several men with machine guns, you have pretty much lost the fight already, unless you have a fragmentation grenade hidden in your pocket, or a sniper hidden in the rafters.

The biggest problems, though, come not from the guns but from the fighting. Most people don’t have guns, and people who do have guns usually have some experience with what the gun will and will not do. And when they don’t know, they usually assume that the gun is incredibly powerful, will shoot locks off, cause things to explode, etc., the strange thing with the machine-guns notwithstanding.

Everybody’s got fists and feet, though, and most people haven’t been in a fight since high school, if ever. What they know of fighting they’ve learned from watching highly-trained athletes duke it out in the boxing ring, and from movies.

In the boxing ring, even these highly-trained athletes are often staggering around after a few rounds of batting at each other with padded gloves. In movies, you see these ordinary guys getting repeatedly kicked in the head and/or hit with big sticks, only to bounce right back. (Though, strangely enough, in movies being hit on the head (or neck, or just about anywhere) with the butt of a pictol knocks you right out for the rest of the scene.)

The useful crusade against violence in media would be against unrealistic fighting. The trouble is that realistic fighting isn’t all that picturesque (or of long duration). If filmmakers were required to portray fights as something like physiologically accurate, they’d soon either write the fights out of the scripts because they’re boring, or they’d move toward a more Jackie-Chan-esque ballet with occasional groin kicks.

Or, more likely, they’d just hand everyone a machine gun.

First, there are people actually trying to sue the Coca-Cola Company in (unwitting) imitation of Marge’s over-the-top ban on sugar as a threat to Springfieldians; now, a school bus driver named Otto has taken a busload of kids on a joy ride.

It turns out that the kids helped Otto plan the route and played games while he drove. One of the kids said, “We were having fun. We were having cars honk their horns.” Otto even bought the kids lunch at Burger King.

The parents, on the other hand, were Concerned and Alarmed, as the SOP manual says they should be. One parent called his six-hour ‘ordeal’ “the most horrible thing I’ve ever experienced.” He does not connect this to the fact that he is a Pessimist.

According to The Washington Post, John Walker was flown into Dulles Airport tonight before being helicoptered to the jail in Alexandria, Virginia.

Reston is only a few miles from Dulles, and the main road from the airport into Washington runs right through the middle of town. When I went to pick up Nicole from work, I noticed a whole lot of cars with very unofficial-looking laser-printed signs reading “Official Traffic Survey” posted in their windows parked up on the grass near the airport road and at all nearby intersections; there was even one in front of AOL. This isn’t unheard of, but actual Fairfax County traffic surveys tend to be conducted by a single guy in a single old truck — I mean, we all know the traffic is awful without conducting a “survey” at all — not young guys in suits occupying a dozen late-model Crown Victorias bristling with antennas. The (marked) police were also out in force, and there was at least one van with D.C. plates and a TV camera on a tall pole watching the airport road.

Possibly this was part of the backup plan in case the helicopter broke down.

A recent article in The Boston Globe (which has, of course, since been removed because the Boston Globe website is like that) touches on a number of subjects I’ve been complaining about recently, so I’d like to dissect it here.

It’s headlined “For some, a word weighs heavily: ‘Minority’ label gets a second look”. It’s about an apparent injustice done to members of, well, minority demographic groups by calling them “minorities”. The article says that opponents of the ‘minority’ “say it’s demeaning because it has come to mean individuals who are lesser people.” However:

As Boston steps into the forefront of a growing debate over whether the word has the outdated ring of ”Negro,” ”Oriental,” ”Spanish,” and ”Eskimo,” there’s discord over which replacement term to use.

The Boston City Council, which voted unanimously last month to delete the term from official documents (Mayor Thomas M. Menino later vetoed the move) favors ”people of color.” But many argue that this leaves out light-skinned people.

In San Diego, the only US city that has banned the word ”minority” from official use, they use the terms ”people of color,” ”underserved,” and ”underrepresented.” The contract compliance office uses ”DBE,” the acronym for Disadvantaged Business Enterprise.

So, let me get this straight: it’s demeaning to refer to groups of people as “minorities” just because their numbers are such that they are a mathematical minority of the population as a whole. And in order not to be demeaned, these people need to be referred to as “disadvantaged” based solely on their skin color? Or to define them based on their skin color, as the term “people of color” does? I’d like to point out that the terms colored and nigger — totally socially unacceptable because they’re so demeaning — do precisely the same thing. (more…)