I recently had the pleasure of seeing “No Country For Old Men,” the Oscar-winning adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel of a drug deal gone bad and how one man’s decision to take a case of stolen money leads to a meditation on fate, circumstance, and destiny. Of particular note was Javier Bardem’s portrayal of murderous hitman Anton Chigurh not only as the embodiment of pure evil, but as an avatar of capricious, merciless fate, striking down people left and right, with no regard for their circumstances. Full story »
The accessing of private passport-based travel data of all three Presidential candidates by contractors working for the State Department has finally galvanized Capitol Hill to address the issue of privacy–something we’ve been begging them to do for years. Ron Wyden sums it up succinctly:
“The Government Accountability Office has been warning about this problem for a decade. And it seems to me in this administration, there’s been pretty much a culture of disregard for privacy, and that’s part of the problem,” he said.
Wyden may have been referring to a 2006 report from the GAO documenting the lack of oversight in sharing Social Security Numbers with contractors working for various federal agencies, including the IRS and the FBI, as well as within the private sector. It is but one of many reports the investigative agency has issued documenting the serious vulnerabilities our government’s mad drive to outsource its functions to the private sector has wrought–but it’s only the tip of the iceberg. Full story »
Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World
by Dan Koeppel
Hudson Street Press
(December 27, 2007)
by Chris Mackowski
I fell for Dan Koeppel’s new book like a man slipping on a banana peel.
Maybe that’s because of the appeal of the cover: a close-up of a banana with a blue sticker on it so identical to a real banana sticker that I had to do a double-take.
I picked it up, peeled open the cover, and read the first line to get a taste of the writing. “If you are an average American, about forty years old, you’re probably approaching banana ten thousand, just as I am,†Koeppel writes. Full story »
