The NSW Labor Council has released a study that shows that, contrary to the typical corporate claims that high executive pay tracks with a high return to shareholders, the truth is quite the contrary. The research, led by John Shields from the University of Sydney's School of Business, gauged the performance of Australia's Top 100 companies, and shows that high executive pay levels actually coincide with a lower bottom line.

You are Cedric son of Cyril


Which CAPGAS member are you?
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You''re ok. Actually, I kind of like you. We should
be friends.


What the hell is wrong with you?!?
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For some of the most sanctimonious journalistic mannerism you're ever likely to read, see. It includes this choice paragraph: "The New York Times continues as before. Every morning, stacks of The Times are piled at newsstands throughout the city; every morning, newspaper carriers toss plastic bags containing that day's issue onto the lawns of readers from Oregon to Maine. What remains unclear is how long those copies will carry the dust from the public collapse of a young journalist's career." I seem to recall that Janet Cooke's infamous article began in similarly faux-Sirk-ian tones, something like: "Fear hung like misplaced tinsel over the streets of..." or somesuch. (I remember it well, because the day it first ran, I read it, was astounded that the Washington Post was accepting that kind of florid crap as even possibly truthful, and clipped the article to share my astonishment with anyone who'd listen.) Most impressive here is the way that the fourth estate continually falls into self-deception and -absolution by failing to imagine that, while it lays absurd claim to pious objectivity, it in fact resides within the structures of wholesale self-deception that are the hallmark of so much of American culture. This is, of course, a rhetorical question - Holden Caulfield expressed, long ago, the futility and frustration of trying to sound the alarm on the issue of The Status of The Bogus in the Middle-Class American Mentality.

John Howard writes right back:

Thank you for writing to me via e-mail. I appreciate the comments you have made.

Although there will be no further correspondence via e-mail you may receive a reply via Australia Post if you have supplied a postal address.

My office may also take the liberty to forward your correspondence to other government ministers for their consideration.

Once again, thank you for your email.

Yours sincerely

John Howard
Prime Minister

A letter to John Howard, Prime Minister of Australia, about his insistence on maintaining in office the Governor General, Peter Hollingsworth, whom a church enquiry has found guilty of having helped to suppress public knowledge of the physical abuse of children by Anglican priests, while he was Bishop of Brisbane, and to have maintained the abusers in their jobs in the church.

Mr. Howard

The ABC reports, today, May 8, 2003:

"I've already said that there is nothing in his conduct as Governor-General that would warrant or support a recommendation from me to the Queen that his appointment be terminated," Mr Howard said.

Of course, your position is lamentable, but I wonder if you will stand by it, even as appropriate horror mounts at having, as the Australian head of state, a revealed catalyst of institutionalized, systematic child abuse (whose sexual-abuse component is, of course, only one part of the picture of church physical abuse of children)?

Are you prepared, now, to declare that you will not alter this response to suit political expediency? That is to say, Do you insist on your position, even in the face of broad condemnation of those who abet the carnal abuse of children? And will you undertake, now, to leave office yourself, once your support of Hollingsworth and all his ilk comes to be seen more and more clearly as equivalent to their own gross moral failure?

Of course, you will not. You have no moral position, apparently, nor ability to form one, nor to see how grievous the actions of people like Hollingsworth have been. Your posturing and illogicality seem in keeping with their cowardice, deceit, hypocrisy, and complicity.

A curious vogue noted in Atul Gawande's article, Desperate Measures: Francis Moore remade modern surgery. But he couldn't live with the consequences (The New Yorker, May 5, 2003):
"The taking of body parts from one being for another had a long and unsavory history. In the eighteenth century, for example, a British surgeon demonstrated that human teeth could be transplanted, and this became briefly popular in England. But it proved a disaster. Teeth were stolen from corpses and purchased from the poor for the gums of the gap-toothed wealthy. And though the transplanted teeth sometimes took, they also brought with them infections, including syphilis, that spread unhindered through people's jaws. In France just before the First World War, two attempts at kidney transplantation failed. Then, between the wars, there was a vogue for testicular transplants, which were thought to produce sexual "rejuvenation." In Partis between 1921 and 1926, a Russian surgeon named Serge Boronoff transplanted wedges of monkey testis into close to a thousand men..."
And so on. Surely there are some feature films in all this?

At this site you can read -- and at this site listen to (until about May 11), a wonderful interview (dated May 6, 2003) with long-time South African civil-rights protester, and now Supreme Court judge, Albie Sachs. Asked, for example, about how he recovered from severe injuries when his car was bombed by the Apartheid regime's intelligence service, he said:

Albie Sachs: I remember when I was being (I didn’t even know what was happening to me) taken to the hospital, I would have moments of consciousness, unconsciousness and I wrote ‘I think, therefore I am’. But it was just the faintest sense of existence. And then I told myself a joke as I was recovering from the bomb. It was Hymie Cohen falls off a bus and I was recovering from the operation, I’m in total darkness, and he gets up and he gives what appears to be the sign of the cross, and his friend says, ‘Hymie, I didn’t know you were Catholic.’ He said, ‘What do you mean Catholic? Spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch.’ Well I told myself that joke, smiling inside to myself, and I started with the testicles, and all there, and wallet, my heart was OK, and spectacles, I tried it, my head was OK, and then my left arm slid down my right arm and I realised watch has gone. But that’s when I felt this tremendous elation, and I thought to myself ‘I joke, therefore I am’. And then afterwards it was simple bodily functions. ‘I shit, therefore I am’. Each time, as I recovered, ‘I can write, therefore I am’, there was a sense of reconstructing my personality, ‘I stand, therefore I am’.
Damien Carrick: How long did it take for you to make a physical recovery?
Albie Sachs: I would say it was three to four months to be able to move around and dress myself and write and so on. But kind of slowly. And then another three, four months before I was starting to run, ‘I run, therefore I am’, and running to me was a sign of somehow engaging with the earth, feeling your feet ‘boof, boof, boof’, and I would imagine I’m back on the beach near Capetown where I grew up...