ARTS & FARCES internet

Isn’t this rich? The Bush administration’s acting assistant secretary for Western Hemisphere affairs is seeking to bar a Nicaraguan official from entering the US because “...nations…were largely responsible for their own economic misfortunes and that they should not seek American financial support until they enforced official integrity and fiscal discipline.”

We cannot excuse the dastardly behavior of the likes of Mr. Byron Jerez of Nicaragua, or even attribute his behavior to the events that lead to putting that country in the tragic position of growing drugs for profit, rather than food for their own citizens. But, the following rationale from our assistant secretary is very rich, indeed.

Addressing the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Mr. Otto Reich had this to say: “When we are sure that there’s an individual or individuals who have stolen from the public treasury of their country, we are not going to let them into the United States of America.” (both quotes from the New York Times)

Is it possible for a health care system, when organized by institutions with primary objectives that are more tied to their own economic growth than to patient outcomes, to be a truly healthy system? Medicine acknowledges that cancer cells grow in total disregard of the cells around them. We’ve known since the early eighties that health care was becoming just another commodity in a free market with its marriage to the bottom-line of potent institutions. So, should we be surprised to discover that the typical forces that produce the Enron’s of the world are alive and well in the health care industry? A recent article in the New York Times suggests to me that kickbacks have evolved into a fine-art form with stock or options being offered to executives at Premier, one of two powerful buying groups that serve as middlemen for supply purchases for half the country’s non-profit hospitals. It looks like I’m not alone with that thought.

Larry R. Holden, president of the Medical Device Manufacturers Association, according to the Times article by Walt Bogdanich, Barry Meier, and Mary Williams Walsh, had this to say: “Billions of dollars are being controlled by two companies, and nobody knows who they are. Nobody looks at their books. Nobody knows what companies they are investing in.”

Here’s a scary thought. You know those specialty magazines for motorcyclists, woodworkers, home designers, and computer users? People read them for the advertisements, according to Deborah Branscum’s “Magazines Feed Desire.”

Branscum quotes from a forthcoming paper by Rusell W. Belk, N. Eldon Tanner Professor of Business at the University of Utah:

“Far from resisting temptations, these consumers read specialty magazines (and no doubt use other sources of stimulation as well) specifically in order to find new and better things to wish for, want, and own. Far from resisting advertisers’ appeals and ignoring their messages, they hang on every word and image and return to these ads repeatedly, as if they were religious scholars studying a sacred text. And far from a cultivated equilibrium of consumer satisfaction balanced between rationality and passion (Sherry 1990), they seek a frenzied madness in the market and relish allowing their desires to run wild (see Bakhtin 1984; Buttimer and Kavanagh 1995).”

Here I thought all those years I spent writing for the computer trades people were actually reading my work. Sigh. All that time I thought the ads were filler. I’m shocked—shocked, I tell you—to learn that I was the filler.

On the other hand, come to think of it, I haven’t subscribed to or picked up a specialty magazine in years.

The basic fundamental disingenuousness of politicians should come as no surprise to anyone in the United States old enough to tie his shoes. President Bush the Younger’s administration flatly refuses to release the records of Vice-President Dick Cheney’s energy task force meetings to the General Accounting Office (GAO). Everyone and their brother suspects some sort of linkage between President Bush and Enron. The more adamantly the White House refuses to release the records, the more the suspicions grow.

The Bush administration insists that it’s the “basic fundamental principle,” as Vice President Cheney calls it, of the idea that is the source of its refusal, not any imaginary linkage to the Enron debacle. The White House, so the argument goes, wouldn’t get good advice should the advice be made public.

Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, this “basic fundamental principle” is disingenuous at best. The GAO has asked the Bush administration to reveal the identities of the advisors who met with Vice President Cheney during the process of formulating the nation’s energy plan last year. The GAO has not asked for any information about the content of those energy task force meetings, only a list of advisors.

Dave Winer is thinking about what I wrote last night about RCS, and it looks like we’re going to play a round of intellectual ping pong. That’s good, I’m game and looking forward to exploring yet another application for this unique communication medium. What we would ordinarily do in email, we get to do in public and you get to watch. Here’s Dave’s initial response supporting the desktop model. I’m sure there will be more to come.

Todd Hoff has some thoughts about the desktop model that are pretty much inline with my own. He says that laptops don’t make good servers. intrepid.farces.com is a PowerBook “Wall Street” with a 266MHz G3 processor, a 30Mb hard drive, and 192Mb of RAM. I find it more responsive than the 850MHz Pentium III with 768Mb of RAM that runs this server. I wouldn’t want to try to run something like Slashdot on either machine, but for several thousand users per day, either works just fine.