Mambo Taxi

French is evocative.

So, this morning in my mailbox, I had about 12 emails from... [Tim]. [Tim] was some kind of Christian marketing mailing-list that apparently signed up a lot of people to an open list, late last night. Someone posted back to complain, and the mess was started. ("stop spamming me" "I'm not spamming you, stop spamming me" ...) Rgh. I procmailed it and beefed to the people who own the netblock, but before I did, there was the following post from someone at hotmail.fr:

"allez tous vous faire enculer avec vos mails de merde"

Now that's a great ( sentence! (translation NSFW). ).

I think that's about the sense of it; it's a command, but just "Go..." doesn't carry the "Allez tous vous". I knew all the words but "enculer", which oddly enough didn't come up in high-school French.

Sometimes, English language just doesn't measure up.

Today was my first (semi-official) day at my new job.

I'm going in today and Monday to overlap with the person I'm replacing, so I could pick his brains. All my new co-workers sound quite friendly, and the work still excites me quite a bit, even after I learned about some of the crufty software we're expected to use (principally one system whose acronym includes the name "Experimental" despite having been in use for well over a decade).

We stopped after five hours and I zipped home to continue work on one of the projects I'm trying to finish up before d and I leave on vacation in 11 days. Made some good headway.

---

This afternoon on Google News I saw that Dow Chemical was spoofed, causing the BBC to report that Dow was paying large repirations to the inhabitants of Bhopal, India who were (and still are) affected by the Union Carbide chemical leak that killed 15,000 people 20 years ago this week. The Washington Times article didn't say much about the spoof itself, and I idly wondered if it was related to The Yes Men, who were responsible for previous wonderful Dow Chemical spoofs.

The following arrived in my inbox mere hours later. Read down toward the bottom, it gets really good:


December 3, 2004
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

"DOW" STATEMENT A HOAX
"Historic aid package for Bhopal victims" a lie

Contact: Marina Ashanin, Corp. Media Relations, +41-1-728-2347
Related information: http://dowethics.com/bhopal/

Today on BBC World Television, a fake Dow spokesperson announced fake
plans to take full responsibility for the very real Bhopal tragedy of
December 3, 1984. (1) Dow Chemical emphatically denies this
announcement. Although seemingly humanistic in nature, the fake plans
were invented by irresponsible hucksters with no regard for the
truth.

As Dow has repeatedly noted, Dow cannot and will not take
responsibility for the accident. ("What we cannot and will not do...
is accept responsibility for the Bhopal accident." - CEO Michael
Parker, 2002.) The Dow position has not changed, despite public
pressure.

Dow also notes the great injustice that these pranksters have caused
by giving Bhopalis false hope for a better future assisted by Dow.
The survivors of Bhopal have already suffered 20 years of false hope,
neglect, and abdication of responsibility by all parties. Is that not
enough?

To be perfectly clear:

* The Union Carbide Corporation (UCC) will NOT be liquidated. (The
fake "Dow plan" called for the dissolution and sale of Dow's fully
owned subsidiary, estimated at US$12 billion, to fund compensation
and remediation in Bhopal.)

* Dow will NOT commit ANY funds to compensate and treat 120,000
Bhopal residents who require lifelong care. The Bhopal victims have
ALREADY been compensated; many received about US$500 several years
ago, which in India can cover a full year of medical care. (2)

* Dow will NOT remediate (clean up) the Bhopal plant site. We do
understand that UCC abandoned thousands of tons of toxic chemicals on
the site, and that these still contaminate the groundwater which area
residents drink. Dow estimates that the Indian government's recent
proposal to commission a study to consider the possibility of proper
remediation at some point in the future is fully sufficient.

* Dow does NOT urge the US to extradite former Union Carbide CEO
Warren Anderson to India, where he has been wanted for 20 years on
multiple homicide charges. (3)

* Dow will NOT release proprietary information on the leaked gases,
nor the results of studies commissioned by UCC and never released.

* Dow will NOT fund research on the safety of Dow endocrine
disruptors (ECDs) considered to have long-term negative effects.

* Dow DOES agree that "One can't assign a dollar value to doing
what's morally right," as hoaxter Finisterra said. That is why Dow
acknowledged and resolved many of Union Carbide's liabilities in the
US immediately after acquiring the company in 2001. (4)

Again, most importantly of all:

* Dow shareholders will see NO losses, because Dow's policy towards
Bhopal HAS NOT CHANGED. Much as we at Dow may care, as human beings,
about the victims of the Bhopal catastrophe, we must reiterate that
Dow's sole and unique responsibility is to its shareholders, and Dow
CANNOT do anything that goes against its bottom line unless forced to
by law.

For more information please contact Marina Ashanin, Corporate Media
Relations, +41-1-728-2347, or reply to this email.


NOTES TO EDITORS:

(1) On December 3, 1984, Union Carbide - now part of Dow -
accidentally killed thousands of residents of Bhopal, India, when its
pesticide plant leaked a vast cloud of lethal gas over the city.
Since that date, at least 12,000 more people have died from
complications, and 120,000 remain chronically ill. The Dow Chemical
Corporation hereby expresses its condolences to the victims.

(2) Union Carbide was originally forced to pay US$470 million in
compensation to survivors, which amounts to about US$500 per victim.
(Note: Dow hereby wishes to retract the 2002 statement of Dow PR Head
Kathy Hunt as to US$500 being "plenty good for an Indian." The poor
phrasing of this statement has often come back to haunt us.)

(3) Arrested in India following the accident, Andersen posted
US$2000 bail and successfully escaped India.

(4) Dow settled Union Carbide's asbestos liabilities in the US, and
paid US$10 million to one family poisoned by a Dow pesticide. This
is a mark of Dow's corporate responsibility.

# 30 #


I absolutely love the ending bit: "we must reiterate that Dow's sole and unique responsibility is to its shareholders, and Dow CANNOT do anything that goes against its bottom line unless forced to
by law."

Go, Yes Men! :)

I just got the following email which had me wiping tears from my eyes:

September 16, 2004
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: mailto:agenda@cheneybush.com

OREGON WILDERNESS PLAN EXEMPLIFIES BEST OF BUSH POLICY
Senator's bravery in the face of public opinion earns him award; new
Forest Service mascot unveiled

The Bush campaign is awarding its first annual "Healthy Forestry"
award to Senator Gordon Smith, R-OR, for finding a way to convert
19,000 acres of prized wilderness into a highly valuable tree farm.

Converting the partially burnt Siskiyou "roadless areas" to tree
farming, despite 70% public opposition to "old growth" logging, will
mean not only the creation of several dozen temporary jobs, but also
will guarantee that the area will never again be subject to "old
growth" and "roadless" restrictions, and will remain forever open to
logging regardless of public opinion.

Sen. Smith has announced that to make this happen, he will attach a
"rider" to a disaster relief or other "must pass" Senate bill,
requiring that the Siskiyou area be logged immediately and replanted
with thousands of timber trees, bypassing Nature's slow,
inefficient, and unprofitable process of recovery. The rider will
also stipulate that it "shall not be subject to judicial review by
any court of the United States"--preventing ecoterrorists from using
the courts to interfere with the health of the forestry industry.

Even some ecoterrorists acknowledge that burnt old-growth trees can
be hazardous to wildlife, as their rotting limbs can easily fall on
innocent elk or deer. But the agreement ends there. By stubbornly
refusing to let burnt old-growth forests build jobs, ecoterrorists
have made it increasingly difficult for the forestry industry to turn
a profit from America's last few bits of nonproductive landscape.

Sen. Smith was inspired in devising his rider by the earlier, 1995
"salvage rider," which for one year allowed virtually unregulated
logging to occur on wilderness lands throughout the Pacific Northwest.

By again moving the issue from the recalcitrant local level to the
Republican-controlled Senate, Sen. Smith's rider suggests a way to
bypass such opposition in a more permanent way. Following his
example, we must devise a "rider" that will open not just one region,
but the entire federally-controlled National Parks System, for
selective logging use.


The amount of useful acreage in Yellowstone and Yosemite alone, for
example, would more than equal the contested areas of the Siskiyou.
Such forests aren't quite as valuable to either the timber industry
or to ecologists as those in the Siskiyou, but logging our National
Parks would mean replacing many smaller, time-consuming local battles
with one bigger one more likely to be won.

To popularize this idea, the Bush campaign has unveiled a new mascot
for the USDA Forest Service: Smokey the Log. Smokey the Log is a
replacement for Smokey the Bear, as bears have no use and are
therefore not appropriate in the modern forest-use context. On a
recent canvassing tour, Smokey the Log collected numerous signatures
in favor of logging our National Parks
(http://www.CheneyBush.com/smokey/petition/), and received
endorsements from Congressional Candidate Jim Feldkamp
(http://www.CheneyBush.com/smokey/feldkamp/) and former Oregon
governor Victor G. Atiyeh (http://www.CheneyBush.com/smokey/atiyeh/).

-----

I am so glad I joined the (r)TMark mailing list, because things like this just brighten my evening... The Feldkamp photo is classic.

Sure enough, browsing The Yes Men rewarded me with a fuller explanation of their latest exploits.

I love these guys. Sometimes I wish I were a better liar/actor, to join their crew. I would *so* like to be a Billionaire for Bush...