Author: Chris Barrus

From the New York Times…

“The real reason conservatives want to drill in ANWR is the same reason they want to keep snowmobiles roaring through Yellowstone: sheer symbolism. Forcing rangers to wear respirators won’t make much difference to snowmobile sales – but it makes the tree-huggers furious, and that’s what’s appealing about it. The same is true about Arctic drilling; as one very moderate environmentalist told me, the reason the Bush administration pursues high-profile anti-environmental policies is not that they please special interests but that they are “red meat for the right.” (The real special-interest payoffs come via less showy policies, like the way the administration is undermining enforcement of the Clean Air Act.)”

[via RRE]

Some folks over on the OmniWeb mailing list were wanting the Omni folks to add a feature to open the current OmniWeb URL in that other browser. Anyway, there’s no need to disturb OW, just add the following script to ScriptMenu.

on run
    tell application "OmniWeb"
        set insertURL to address of browser 1
    end tell
    tell application "Internet Explorer"
        GetURL insertURL
    end tell
end run

Carlyle Group chairman Frank Carlucci sues to censor his name out of biopic of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of independent Congo. Back when he was a CIA agent in Congo in 1960, Carlucci along with the US ambassador to Congo and CIA chief Lawrence Devlin successfully planned the overthrow and assassination of Lumumba and installed dictator Mobutu.

Shit.

One year after the Mir space station power-dived into the Pacific, speculation continues about the exact nature of the microorganisms that chewed up metal and corroded windows. More to the point, could any of the critters have survived re-entry? Nobody knows, and nobody really wants to find out either. The bottom line: partially sterilized spacecraft + a 16 year bath in cosmic radiation = angry bugs

“Throughout Mir’s life in space, the number of microorganisms grew continuously, one generation replacing another every 20-30 minutes. If in 1990 there were registered 94 species, in 2001 they numbered 140. But the real problem was not the species increasing in number but their growing aggressiveness: each new generation seemed to be more ferocious than the last.”

Business Week finally groks what us Macintosh IT guys have been saying for years…

“Corporate information-technology managers favor PCs because these machines are so befuddling. The rising complexity of workplace computing makes big companies ever more dependent on tech support, so what self-respecting chief information officer is going to recommend a computer — such as the Mac — that might shrink rather than expand his department’s influence? Macs generally require less support than PCs and are thus cheaper and easier to run and maintain. So perhaps the PC’s dominance of the workplace is about power — not money.”

Why contacting Brian Eno may not be a good idea.

Kent Southard at BushWatch nicely follows up last week’s nuke story and outs Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz as this decade’s Dr. Strangelove.

The nexus of the Bush war party seems to be Rumsfeld’s Deputy Sec. of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. Pat Buchanan in his book ‘A Republic, Not an Empire’ finds Wolfowitz, and a 46 page memorandum he wrote while in the Pentagon under the first Bush, at the center of Republican foreign policy. As his book’s title suggests, Buchanan’s apprehensions are based on the agenda explicitly laid out by Wolfowitz – that America should dominate the world, in every sense, that the planet shall serve as our empire; that we should militarily prevent any country or consortium of countries from controlling the resources that would allow them to escape their dependence and subservience: which is how we now find ourselves building a string of military bases in Central Asia, to control Caspian Sea oil reserves not for America’s use, but to control China and India who will.

And so we also find ourselves with ‘contingency plans’ for nuclear weapons, with apparent abandonment of our historic ‘no first strike’ policy – in case somebody didn’t get the message and needs to be slapped down. When Pat Buchanan says a conservative is too extreme for him, it should tell you something.