A Swiss paper is going to start fining its writers for simple mistakes, including spelling, grammar, and poor sentence construction. That’s harsh.
Salon has a nice exclusive today. They’ve got the list of people who received “retention bonuses” totalling $55 million right before Enron filed for bankruptcy. The bonuses also came right before Enron announced that those employees who wouldn’t need “retention bonuses” because they weren’t being retained at all were to have their severance packages eliminated. I’m beginning to think that the appropriate punishment for Enron’s excutives (current and former) would be one free kick in the crotch from every employee and shareholder who got burned, all to be administered by surprise.
Apparently inclusion in the “axis of evil” irked the millions of Iranians who took to the streets in Iran’s version of an independence day celebration (attendance at which was “encouraged” by the government). Us calling Iran “evil” is about as useful as Iranians referring to the United States as “the Great Satan.” Name calling on a national level is moronic. I think that our motives in antagonizing Iran need to be carefully examined – yeah, it’s a country that has problems, but is isolating them really the best way to work toward solving those problems? If you ask me, it looks like we’re trying to manufacture an enemy.
The Economist has a profile of the creepy Paul Wolfowitz.
There’s now talk that the missile speculated to have blown up Osama bin Laden himself might in fact have hit innocent men collecting scrap metal. Oh, and some of the guys we captured in a late night raid that later turned out not to be our enemies are saying that they were beaten while they were held captive. I think it’s time for a new strategy in Afghanistan. Here’s a revolutionary idea: why don’t we send over a bunch of peacekeepers who can work on the ground protecting the Afghans that we haven’t yet blown up, and also work with locals to round up remaining Taliban and al-Qaeda guys? The returns on flying around bombing things are diminishing rapidly.
Just for fun: I started a new job today and was provided with a new PC. I installed Mozilla, vim, Emacs, Cygwin, WinCVS, HTML-Kit, the JDK, ant, Tomcat, WinMerge, AIM, Trillian, Yahoo Messenger, JDEE, and ECB. I’m still missing SecureCRT, AbsoluteFTP, QuickTime, and WinAmp for sure.
Micheal Kinsley has stepped down as editor of Slate. He kept the job a lot longer than I thought he would when Microsoft made waves by hiring a big name journalist to head up their experimental political zine on the Web. I think that back then most people, myself included, thought that Slate wouldn’t even be around by now. I have no idea whether Slate has ever made a dime of profit, but I think Kinsley is leaving the magazine in good shape. Slate has a lot of talented writers and a number of excellent regular features, and is consistently enjoyable to read. Kinsley has also revealed that he was Parkinson’s disease 8 years ago, I wish him good health.