Despair, Inc.: “Unfathomable incompetence…

Legendary miscalculation… Pitiable

misfortune… Almost stupifying hubris.” Portraits of burnout, doubt, idiocy, futility and pessimism to counter the empty-headed pronouncements of the motivational catchphrase industry.

The selling of “sanity”: American Gallery of Psychiatric Art. Reprints of ads for psychiatric medications from 1960 to the present. Many are now household names. If you scroll through the gallery, you’ll notice a sea change: after 1994 all the ads feature the face of relief — sound sleep, smiling relaxed faces — whereas previous ads emphasize the distress and terror of the psychiatric symptoms the medications are advertised as treating.

A “nightmarish story – a real

anthropological heart of darkness“.’ BBC

A New Republic editorial argues that The Olympics should be abolished both because they erase the moral distinctions between regimes of all stripes and because their founding spirit of amateurism has gone totally defunct.

In a sense, it’s too bad that the Olympics are being held

in Sydney and not Beijing, the early favorite. Were they

being held in China, the moral farce that the Olympics

today represent would be plain to see. Promoted to

foster “friendship, peace, and solidarity,” the games

now subvert the ideals of freedom and human rights on

which any meaningful international solidarity must be

based. Designed as a tribute to human excellence, the

Olympics are now a testament to human greed. On

October 1, the Olympic flame will be extinguished in

Sydney. Let’s never light it again.

Dubya: Afro-Americans should vote for me because, I swear to God, I really like you. Forget the past. The New Republic

I’ve been looking for the download of the Palm OS 3.5 upgrade since it began to appear in new Palm devices in February. Now it’s finally coming, and Palm argues that it is such a major upgrade that you’re going to have to pay to download it. The Register

Christopher Hitchens: Why Dubya Can’t Read.

I kicked myself hard when I read the profile of

Governor George W. Bush, by my friend and colleague Gail Sheehy, in this month’s Vanity Fair. All those jokes and cartoons

and websites about his gaffes, bungles and malapropisms? We’ve been unknowingly teasing the afflicted. The poor guy is

obviously dyslexic, and dyslexic to the point of near-illiteracy. Numerous experts and friends of the dynasty give Sheehy their

considered verdict to this effect.

The symptoms and clues have been staring us in the face for some time. Early in the campaign, Bush said that he did indeed

crack the odd book and was even at that moment absorbed by James Chace’s biography of Dean Acheson. But when asked to

report anything that was in the damn volume, the governor pulled up an empty net. His brother Neil is an admitted dyslexic.

His mother has long been a patron of various foundations and charities associated with dyslexia. How plain it all now seems.

So Bush is dyslexic. Should we compassionately temper our contempt, be ashamed of having such politically incorrect fun with someone with a disability? No, as Hitchens points out; his own chief of staff has noted that Dubya’s atttention span seems no longer than fifteen minutes. What does this make, for example, of his assertion that he personally reviewed the clemency petition of more than a hundred of Texas’ condemned prisoners? Can someone cripplingly dyslexic, even if nonverbal IQ is inflated in compensation (as I have often seen to be the case, but which Hitchens [and I] doubt is the case in Bush’s case), do the President’s job? The Nation

Do you recognize this blurb, commonly used by email spammers?

“This message is sent in compliance with the new email bill S. 1618.

Section 301, Paragraph (a) (2) (C) of S. 1618 states that further

transmissions to you by the sender of this email may be stopped at

no cost to you by sending a reply to this email address with the

word ‘remove’ in the subject line.”

This quotation refers to an amendment that Sens. Frank Murkowski and

Bob Torricelli added to S. 1618, a bill whose primary purpose was to

prohibit slamming, the practice of fraudulently changing a customer’s

long-distance provider. But guess what: the bill never became a law.

Libyan Hotel Dilemma for U.S. Delegates. U.S. representatives to the IMF-World Bank meetings in Prague face penalties if they stop for a drink or a snack at a neighboring hotel owned by a Libyan. Although the U.N. has lifted the economic embargo against Libya after it turned over the two Lockerbie bombing suspects for trial, the U.S. maintains its sanctions. The U.S. embassy in Prague has issued a warning to the U.S. delegates about compliance. Reuters

A small French Riviera town has issued a decree banning death to anyone who does not have a burial plot in the town cemetery. One-third of the town’s population is over 65. “I issued the decree yesterday hoping for official attention,” (the mayor) said Thursday. “No

one has died since then and I hope it stays that way.” Reuters

World’s Loneliest Bird may soon find relief.

Authorities in Michigan describe oddest case of racial harassment they’ve ever encountered.

Annals of the Age of (Online) Depravity: Man Accused of Ordering Woman to Molest Kids. “A local man is facing up to 20

years in prison for allegedly ordering a woman in Pennsylvania to

send him online pictures of her having sex with her 7-year-old

daughter and 10-year-old son, authorities said today… Searle told investigators that he might have directed his girlfriend to have sex with people

who have the same names as her children, but that he was not referring to her children, the

affidavit said.”