want some good news?

TOO BAD.

two articles to exercise your rubberneck and gnaw at your faith in human nature.
just what you needed, huh? don't mention it.

Something fishy about Salomon

This will give you someone else to hate besides Enron & Anderson--Salomon Smith Barney advised Worldcom employees to buy WCOM shares on margin (borrowed from SSB) and to hang on to their shares even as the market plummetted. I like this article because it gives the names of the 3 brokers responsible, so that if you see them in the street you can kick them.

Television and the Pentagon are strategic bedfellows

This article is about how the Pentagon consults on certain TV shows and how we WILL get a glimpse of the War Tribunals, after all, "Actors Portrayal" style. The show is called JAG (Judge Advocate General) and apparently it's been on for a couple years (I don't watch tv much, sorry if this is old news to everyone).

Here's a quote from the JAG's creator:

"I want to show people that the tribunals are not what many people feared they would be, which is that they would be nothing more than a necktie party, that they would have no foundation in law, that this was a way of taking these people and killing them," Mr. Bellisario said. "I wanted to show that we still have a system of justice." Personally, though, he said he believed "they should all be taken out and blown up."

and from one of the show's writers:

"War is terrible, conflicts are terrible, but somebody has to do it and so it's necessary — maybe not completely honest, but necessary — to imbue those things with glory," he said. "I don't shrink from it."


For him, soldiering is about comrades supporting each other, and writing a heroic script is his way of doing that. "I'm missing the conflict," he said. "This is the only way I can really contribute."

none of this is ANYTHING like propaganda, is it?

[note these are both New York Times articles, so you need to register to read 'em. I think you should, cuz it's free and pretty low stress as these things go. BUT I've just noticed that if the articles are more than a week old you have to pay like $.88 to read 'em, which is bogus and I don't think you should do. If you're reading this more than a week after I posted it, sorry about the incredible expiring links. But I bet there's more bad news today on their front page if you want some.]

happy easter.