From the Washington Post’s story on the Bush administration’s methodical destruction of the Occupational Health and Safety Administration through appointment of incompetents:

In 2006, Henshaw was replaced [as head of OSHA] by Edwin G. Foulke Jr., a South Carolina lawyer and former Bush fundraiser who spent years defending companies cited by OSHA for safety and health violations. Foulke quickly acquired a reputation inside the Labor Department as a man who literally fell asleep on the job: Eyewitnesses said they saw him suddenly doze off at staff meetings, during teleconferences, in one-on-one briefings, at retreats involving senior deputies, on the dais at a conference in Europe, at an award ceremony for a corporation and during an interview with a candidate for deputy regional administrator.

His top aides said they rustled papers, wore attention-getting garb, pounded the table for emphasis or gently kicked his leg, all to keep him awake. But, if these tactics failed, sometimes they just continued talking as if he were awake. “We’ll be sitting there and things will fall out of his hands; people will go on talking like nothing ever happened,” said a career official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to a reporter.

If you had to wear attention-getting garb to wake up your boss, perhaps let’s say because of his psychopathic indifference to human well-being or his public responsibilities or even any minimal sense of dignity or decorum — if you had to wear attention-getting garb to meetings, what would you wear?  Would you coordinate with your co-workers?  Would you take it in turns, would you choose a shared theme for greater impact, or would you try to clash for the shock value? Would you have to keep upping the ante from meeting to meeting?

“Are Employers Unwilling to Hire, or Are Some Workers Unwilling to Work?”

Casey B. Mulligan, the Chicago School economist’s Chicago School economist, explains that the recent drop in employment is due to a sharp decrease, over the course of the last year, in everyone’s willingness to work.  It may appear to you that the economy is terrible and that you have been laid off and no one is hiring, but in fact you are just much, much lazier than you were last year. He has a mathematical proof, to appear in a forthcoming post.

Merry Christmas to you too, University of Chicago Department of Economics!

(via)

“It’s hard not to think of Obama when you read ‘Othello’ now.”

Philip Seymour Hoffman, interviewed in the New York Times.

Thunderer made it onto the Onion’s best books of 2008 list.

Mixing Guy Debord’s urban alienation with China Miéville’s rarified fantasy, Felix Gilman isn’t a writer to be taken lightly. And yet he somehow turns a teeming plot and a cauldron of half-cooked ideas into a compulsively readable debut. One of Thunderer’s persistent indelible images is that of a magic warship sailing over the fictional city of Ararat, which should be readers’ first clue that Gilman giddily deconstructs and fiddles with myth. Flying boys turned arrogant revolutionaries and gods mutated into monsters by pseudo-science are just two of the ingredients Gilman throws into the stew—most of which could have been the subject of entire novels themselves. Just when things start to become overwhelming, though, Gilman’s story takes flight through the side door, using rich prose as rocket fuel on a voyage toward dizzying, bittersweet wonder.

The Onion’s commenters proceed to tear the cover to shreds, which, well, fair enough.