Dear readers–

Things are finally settling down a bit. With 95% of my belongings safely transported to my new apartment (less than a third of which are unpacked), and my latest film project completed, I can now focus my attention on… shit, I have to find some work for this month. If anyone needs an AVID editor, let me know.

Since the election, I've been avoiding the news, but I'm slowly coming out of my media cave. Not that I have internet access at my new apartment (or cable, for that matter), but I have been reading the newspapers over people's shoulders on the subway.

Recently, the New York tabloids have featured some local soldiers' deaths on the front page. Apparently now that the whole elction deal is done, we can focus on losing the war again, this time by sending another 22,000 troops and pleading for various resistant nations to send more military manpower.

Our military capacity is being stretched quite taut, as it has been for a while now. The administration is protesting that no one need to worry about a draft (even as they update the mechanisms for one) because we're going to recruit more soldiers! Fortunately, the economy is doing badly enough that the young and unemployed may gladly volunteer to become the young and irradiated. The Bush White House, taking a page from their pals the Waltons, are in the process of Wal-Martizing the country. As Stay Free magazine and others have noted, Wal-Mart's great business advance was to provide depressed areas with low-paying jobs–if you can't afford not to work at Wal-Mart, you can't afford to shop anywhere else. They create a customer base by wrecking the local economy.

And speaking of New York tabloid covers, one headline I saw yesterday proclaimed, "Wal-Mart Invades New York." How's that for synergy?