Classic! (Classically Canadian, that is!)

Also: don't miss the excellent comics on this site, which are very Barbara Kruger-meets-Jack Handey.

Looking for work is an exercise in selling yourself. You write cover letter after cover letter, listing the parts of you that you respect the least, listing the selling points that make you valuable in a buyer's market. You leave out the little details that you tell yourself in the morning to make things okay. You don't mention the way your heart flutters when you meet your lover's eyes across the table, the way your feet felt like lead at your aunt's funeral. You write cover letter after cover letter, listing the same store bought traits in the same wording, day after day, hoping to find another job.

And then maybe one day you just snap a little. You sit down to write a cover letter, and something entirely new comes out.

And you send it anyway.

Each one is different in its own way. And we love them all.

Overqualified

This guy is spot on.

The mistake the Army made in 1969 is the same mistake it is making now: how can you educate a group of handpicked students at one of the best universities in the world and then treat them as if they are too stupid to know when they have been told a lie?

In the fall of 2003 I was embedded with the 101st Airborne Division in northern Iraq, and its West Point lieutenants were among the most gung-ho soldiers I have ever encountered, yet most were already talking about getting out of the Army. I talked late into one night with a muscular first lieutenant with a shaved head and a no-nonsense manner who had stacks of Foreign Affairs, The New Yorker and The Atlantic under his bunk. He had served in Bosnia and Afghanistan, and he was disgusted with what he had seen in Iraq by December 2003.

I know people like this. Some of them even have MemeStreams accounts.

The Army will need this lieutenant 20 years from now when he could be a colonel, or 30 years from now when he could have four stars on his collar. But I doubt he will be in uniform long enough to make captain.

Sad, but true.

The Not-So-Long Gray Line

This op-ed by McSweeney's editor Dave Eggers is something of a follow-up to Tom Friedman's recent Behind Every Grad ... column.

One day they're shaping minds, a moral force in the lives of the young people they teach and know, and in some ways the architects of the future of the nation. The next day they're serving cocktails and selling plasma TV's at the mall.

The authors have written a "punchy, thoughtful" new book, "Teachers Have It Easy": The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America's Teachers, which received a Starred Review by Publishers Weekly.

Reading, Writing, Retailing

The rest of the Beethoven symphonies will be broadcast and posted this week. Listen while you read the Grokster decision.

Symphony 6 will be broadcast on Monday 27th June, and available to download from Tuesday 28th June to Monday 4th July.

Symphony 7 will be broadcast on Tuesday 28th June, and available to download from Wednesday 29th June to Tuesday 5th July.

Symphony 8 will be broadcast on Wednesday 29th June, and available to download from Thursday 30th June to Wednesday 6th July.

Symphony 9 will be broadcast on Thursday 30th June, and available to download from Friday 1st July to Thursday 7th July.

BBC - Radio 3 - Beethoven Experience - downloads

Mark Kurlansky, the bestselling author of Cod and The Basque History of the World, here turns his attention to a common household item with a long and intriguing history: salt. The only rock we eat, salt has shaped civilization from the very beginning, and its story is a glittering, often surprising part of the history of humankind. A substance so valuable it served as currency, salt has influenced the establishment of trade routes and cities, provoked and financed wars, secured empires, and inspired revolutions. Populated by colorful characters and filled with an unending series of fascinating details, Kurlansky's kaleidoscopic history is a supremely entertaining, multi-layered masterpiece.

You can read an excerpt:

Once I stood on the bank of a rice paddy in rural Sichuan Province, and a lean and aging Chinese peasant, wearing a faded forty-year-old blue jacket issued by the Mao government in the early years of the Revolution, stood knee deep in water and apropos of absolutely nothing shouted defiantly at me, "We Chinese invented many things!"

Amazon will show you instances of the statistically improbable phrase "solar evaporation" in the book.

Salt: A World History, by Mark Kurlansky

Acidus wrote:
Google just added satellite view for most of the world. This link is something I found in the north east part of Austrailia. Its an insanely huge structure, and Google doesn't have any more zoomed in data.

-Giant solar panel field?
-Irrigation?
-Eschalon [sic] listening post?

These are Evaporative salt pans at Port Alma. (They are also sometimes called solar salt pans.) This aerial view (which is not of Port Alma, but of a different site) offers a different angle and more natural color than the Google overhead shots of the fields at Port Alma.

Two companies working in this area are Cheetham Salt Limited and Olsson's Pacific Salt. Cheetham seems to own the mines. Apparently Olsson's is more involved in the production end of things. This map shows where Cheetham's facilities are located.

Olsson’s Pacific Salt is a salt producer from seawater near Rockhampton (Port Alma) in Queensland. Cheetham Salt currently operates 10 solar salt fields throughout Australia (Queensland, NSW, Victoria and South Australia) with total production over 600,000 tonnes annually. Five refineries produce a variety of salt grades ranging in grade from kitchen salt to industrial salt.

The Cheetham web site has an excellent description of "the pond system." Navigate their menu: "about salt" and then "salt from the sea."

Olsson's Pacific Salt is a salt producer from seawater near Rockhampton (Port Alma) in Queensland. Pacific Salt produces a range of processed salt which includes water softener salt, pool salt, table salt, cooking salt, flossy salt, dairy salt, iodised salt (fine, coarse and medium size), refined salt, rock salt, and sea salt.

Here's an interesting tidbit:

A salt company from central Queensland that employs former drug addicts, alcoholics, convicts and the long-termed unemployed has received a Salvation Army employer of the year award.

Robert Logan from Olsson's Pacific Salt at Port Alma, south of Rockhampton, accepted the award in Melbourne.

He says at least 75 percent of the company's current workforce has some sort of disadvantage.

Andrew Brown once worked there:

Andrew commenced with Cheetham Salt in January 1998 and is current... [ Read More (0.8k in body) ]

Bajool-Port Alma Salt Mines

We Are All French Now?, by Tom Friedman

In the 1980's, we were worried Central America was going to go communist. Now we are worried it is going to go capitalist?

Tom Friedman complains that the Democrats are blocking approval of CAFTA as part of another one of those petty turf wars.

Tom also takes a moment in today's column to recommend The Opportunity, quoting Richard Haass:

"The administration has to get out and connect the dots for people."

"The world is not Las Vegas. What happens there will not stay there."

The War President, by Paul Krugman

The United States will soon have to start reducing force levels in Iraq, or risk seeing the volunteer Army collapse. Yet the administration and its supporters have effectively prevented any adult discussion of the need to get out.

Once the media catch up with the public, we'll be able to start talking seriously about how to get out of Iraq.

Foreign Makers, Settled in South, Pace Car Industry

A quarter of all cars and trucks built in the United States are now made in factories owned by foreign automakers producing foreign brands.

'Kill Bill' Did It. 'Lost in Translation' Did, Too. Now Mitsubishi Plays Up Japan's Hip Factor.

Toyota, Nissan and Hyundai can't seem to stop talking about how American they are. Not Mitsubishi; it wants you to know the red diamonds in its logo are as red as the rising sun.

Mitsubishi is in a "do or die" situation. "There's no question they need a substantially hip product. Everything is on the line."

The hip factor is the reason Mitsubishi chose to highlight its Japanese roots. Looking at the recent popularity of Japanese culture with American consumers, Mitsubishi believes it can cash in on that in the same way makers of the movies "Kill Bill" and "Lost in Translation" did.

For some, the ads give the appearance of a last resort for Mitsubishi. "They've tried everything else. To hark back to the great legacy of Mitsubishi is a bit shaky, but it's a little bit above grasping straws."

"We are living in an era where national identities are less and less relevant. I would venture to guess that they have been unable to come up with any other meaningful points of differentiation between their brand and their competing brands."

AMC and Loews to Merge

Whether the movie houses will thrive in a... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]

This paper by Steven Huybrechts won the National Defense University President's Award for Excellence in Writing in 2004. It's an interesting fusion of influences, many of which may be familiar to the MemeStreams community.

In a sentence, the basic message is that human genetics precludes world government.

Perhaps the best way to encourage you to read the paper is to highlight some of the footnotes.

Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 1976.
Plato: "only the dead have seen the end of war."
Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors
The National Security Strategy of the United States
The Dialectical Logic of Thucydides' Melian Dialogue (JSTOR subscription required)
Samantha Power, A Problem From Hell (New York: Perennial, 2003).
Robert Upshall, Antibiotic Resistance (United Kingdom: Whinfield, May 1998).
Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. (article), (chapter 1).
Jane Goodall's Wild Chimpanzees
Robert Kagan, America's Crisis of Legitimacy, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2004, 65-87.
Sisterhood is hungry: An egalitarian society of ants, The Economist, 23 August 1997
Joseph Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004).
Alison George, "March of the Superbugs," New Scientist, 19 July 2003, S1.
Robert D. Kaplan, The Coming Anarchy, The Atlantic Monthly, February 1994.
Sewall Wright and Evolutionary Biology (Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 1986).
Errol Morris, The Fog of War. Sony Pictures Classics, 2003.
Joshua Blu Buhs, The Fire Ant Wars, 2004.
Natalie Angier, "Is War Our Biological Destiny?" New York Times, 11 November 2003.

The Biology of Conflict [PDF]

The Supernova buzz has begun, and MemeStreams is the talk of the town.

"Going forward, trust (will be) the thing that makes the Internet possible. Reputation management will be more and more important."

WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR? How long do I have to wait?

Trust thy Internet neighbor

To travel around America today is to find a country also deeply concerned about education, competition, health care and pensions. It is a country worried about how its kids are going to find jobs, retire and take care of elderly parents. But instead of focusing on a new New Deal to address the insecurities of the age of globalization, the president set off on his second term to take apart the old New Deal, trying to privatize Social Security, only feeding people's anxiety. It won't fly.

If this is how Mr. Bush intends to use his political capital, that's his business. But if he had a vice president with an eye on 2008, I have to believe he or she would be saying to the president right now: "Hey boss. What are you doing? Where are you going? How am I going to get elected running on this dog's breakfast of antiscience, head-in-the-sand policies?"

Tom Friedman pulls no punches in this latest column.

In case you missed it, Lawrence Kotlikoff's The Coming Generational Storm is now available in an updated paperback edition for only $11.53 at Amazon. Sample chapters (including the new foreword by the authors) are available from MIT Press. You may recall that "Storm" was named one of Barron's 25 best books of 2004 and was a forbes.com top ten business book for 2004. If you can't read, "don't have time for a book", or simply prefer moving pictures to written words, you can watch a one-hour presentation by Kotlikoff.

---
(Burns offers Homer a check for $2,000. All he has to do is sign this form.)

Homer: Wait a minute, I'm not signing anything until I read it, or someone gives me the gist of it.
---

On a related topic, How Scary Is the Deficit? When China decides to stop funding the war in Iraq, the GWOT, your education, and your next McMansion, will you still vote for the politicians who have to double your income taxes even as they undo the New Deal? (Oh, you didn't know? Get wise to the impending meltdown; sell your house before it's too late.) But don't be too quick to lay all the blame on your elected officials; they can't help it. You see, political ideology is genetically transmitted:

We test the possibility that political attitudes and behaviors are the result of both environmental and genetic factors.

The results indicate that genetics plays an important role in shaping political attitudes and ideologies but a more modest role in forming party identification; as such, they call for finer distinctions in theorizing about the sources of political attitudes.

We urge political scientists to incorporate genetic influences, specifically interactions between genetic heritability and social environment, into models of political attitude formation.

Run, Dick, Run