Quartz City

Michael Moore TKO’s Bill O’Reilly last night

O’REILLY: But I also know that they have us in a vise in the capitalistic system, because they provide jobs. They provide retirement benefits. They provide health benefits. And anything that we do to them, Michael, is going to be passed back on to the consumer in terms of higher costs.

MOORE: Well, unless we pass laws to prevent them from doing that.

O’REILLY: Yes, but then you’re not in the capitalistic system anymore. You’re managing…

MOORE: But where’s the capitalistic system when — I mean, these corporations, they believe in socialism more than you or I. I mean, the airlines need a handout. They go to the government. Anytime they are hurting, they go for welfare. And anytime that they can get rid of the competition, they hate free enterprise. They don’t want you to have the choice of 12 airlines or five car companies, you know, or a dozen radio stations in one town owned by a dozen people.

O’REILLY: But Enron wanted deregulation. They wanted competition, you know, so they could maneuver the market and do all kinds of things that they were…

MOORE: Yes, they were the people from Bulgaria.

[via Fark]

Last night I had an anxiety dream about having to send in my PowerBook to Apple for some undisclosed reason. Dream time was spent dutifully waiting on the phone for a RMA number while obsessively making sure I had at least several backups (over and above the usual one) on hand in case I needed to get at the files I haven’t touched in over two years.

Perhaps the most interesting part is that in my dream, cell phone connections still suck. This leads me to believe that like the weather, lousy cell phone connections are as iron-clad a fact of nature as say… gravity.

This also leads me to believe that the most impossible item in the Star Trek universe isn’t the transporter or warp drive, but the lowly communicator.

So why is a South Carolina textile billionaire funding Ralph Nader’s group Public Citizen? Even odder, a multinational consumer goods company is funding the Ruckus Society.

Coolness! There’s a new translation of Guy Debord’s Situationist text The Society Of The Spectacle up on the web.

From the “well duh!” files… “Study shows how much people hate a winner“

Microbiologists are dropping like flies. Since Sept. 11, at least a dozen high-powered microbiologists have died under violent and/or mysterious circumstances. Mike Ruppert’s story had to be pulled down and updated because three more have died in the week since his story was first published.

Impressive “This American Life” show about the mob mentality (Listen and think about campus confrontationalists or talk radio ranters) [RRE]

Science fiction without the future….
Science fiction author Judith Berman looks at a year’s worth of issues of Asimov’s and ponders the dearth of new, young sf readers. She raises the point that very few of the stories being published today are a celebration of the future (or indeed, the present), but rather they look backwards to the “Golden Age” of sf when writers were exuberant about tomorrow. She calls me on this — rightly so — for a couple of future-shocky stories I sold to Asimov’s, and goes on critique the genre for being almost exclusively focused on its fear of the present and the future. Good, thought-provoking stuff!Link [bOing bOing]

The Intensification of Global Instability. Iran is moving toward internal crisis. Venezuela’s political problems are worsening. The Israeli and Palestinian conflict is entering a new era, and civil war has broken out in Colombia. The United States’ inevitable obsession with al Qaeda has ultimately contributed to this process of destabilization. [via Stratfor (subscription required)]