MeyerBros

Alright. So I haven’t been a very reliable blogger the last week or so. I repent and I’ll reform my ways, I promise. Starting now.

So, I put up some new mini-reviews of movies I’ve seen recently - The Red Violin, Pride & Prejudice, Mission Impossible 3, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Wag the Dog, some others. Some better, some worse.

Quality funny: the Yes Men strike again. Their MO is to build fake corporate websites, then get invited to conferences / media events as impostor representatives of a corporation. A couple years ago, the BBC interviewed them, believing them to be Dow Chemical reps, and on behalf of Dow they accepted responsibility for the Bhopal chemical disaster, which killed 15,000 and injured up to 600,000. Their stunt forced Dow to remind the world that neither Union Carbide nor its new corporate parent, Dow, have ever accepted any responsibility or lifted a finger to help the survivors.

In their newest trick, they “represented” Halliburton at an insurance industry conference on “catastrophic loss”, where they demoed Halliburton R&D’s newest project - the Survivaball, an inflatable “one-man gated community” to preserve the lives of corporate managers during future floods and natural disasters caused by global warming. In response to a serious question from the audience: “what about terrorism?” they “had to explain that, well, you know, it’s mainly — it’s got a bit of defensive capabilities, some elementary RPGs and maybe some other, you know, torpedo launchers, but basically … mainly that’s used against affluent members of the community who are trying to destroy your — you know, of the neighboring community, because those are the only people who can afford at that point to travel. You know, terrorism from the Middle East or whatever, we’re just not — that’s out of the picture at this point.”

Hey NWA, you got good actors - could they stand up in a suit in front of a bunch of insurance execs and say that with a straight face? If so, volunteer to help out the Yes Men! It’s like the Action-Comedy Co-Lab, but real life and even funnier. Elementary RPGs!

In other news, even Forbes magazine thinks that Bush’s plan to secure the border by giving a multibillion dollar “virtual fence” construction contract to one of the usual suspects (Halliburton/Raytheon/Lockheed Martin et al) could lead to “a nightmare of contract abuse and waste.” Meanwhile, in his speech about the issue, Bush made Orwell proud by claiming (with a straight face, I think) that “The United States is not going to militarize the southern border.” It’s certainly comforting to know that 6,000 National Guard troops won’t “militarize” anything. I wonder what would qualify? Mr. President, whenever you’re ready we’d be happy to admit you back into the “reality-based community”.

Oh, and remember My Lai? No, I don’t either, that was before I was born. But welcome to our generation’s version: Haditha.

Let’s see, what else… the “Competitive Enterprise Institute” (funded by ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute, Cigna Corporation, Dow Chemical, et al) has released some really funny ads to fight “global warming alarmism”. CEI’s founder Fred Smith said about global warming a couple years ago, “Most of the indications right now are it looks pretty good. Warmer winters, warmer nights, no effects during the day because of clouding, sounds to me like we’re moving to a more benign planet, more rain, richer, easier productivity to agriculture.” Heh.

Last, BBC investigative reporter Greg Palast has a new book out: Armed Madhouse: Who’s Afraid of Osama Wolf? China Floats, Bush Sinks, The Scheme to Steal ‘08, No Child’s Behind Left, and Other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War. I heard him talk about it on Democracy Now, and I want a copy. He has some very interesting stuff about the oil industry, the Saudis, why Chavez in Venezuela is such a threat, and why Iraq had to be invaded.

This has been your weekly Carl Meyer news update.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 18th, 2006 at 3:38 pm by carl and is filed under bush, movies, corporate criminals, global warming, funny, border, oil. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.