As you read this, a loyal ETS! reader, Charlie Brown (yes, that's his name) a Gulf War reserve now living in Sumas, Wash., is in New York City, parked in front of the U.N. and beginning a 21-day fast to demand lifting of the punitive (and genocidal) sanctions against Iraq. Charlie is one of five fasters, working through a Chicago-based group, Voices in the Wilderness, which has been instrumental in defying the embargo to bring needed medical, public health, and food supplies to Iraq. Voices does great work; for info, contact kkelly@igc.org.--Geov Parrish

Every now and then, my fellow travelers make me embarrassed to be identified as a (fill in the blank). In this case, labels like Luddite, leftist, anarchist, and anti-corporatist are getting the rap, and the humiliation is the pure idiocy that's making the rounds concerning the so-called "Y2K" problem. The problem--and there's no doubt it is a problem--is the widespread use in the military, utilities, banks, and so on, of computer programs whose automatic yearly dating mechanisms only have two digits (96, 97, 98, 99...) and hence no capacity to accommodate the year 2000 as the next year after 1999.

Somehow, large numbers of people who should have more sense have become convinced that on midnight, January 1, 2000, the lights will go off, the banks will shut down, and industrial civilization as we know it will collapse. This fits in nicely with millennial armageddon fantasies, and has also got some survivalists heading for the hills. Not only is this a bunch of bullshit, but it is based on a rather delusional assumption--namely, that the People Who Run Things don't know that there's a problem (only us enlightened folks do) and/or, faced with the prospective loss of their empires in 18 months, aren't going to do anything about it (or even try).

Those of us who want a change in the world's status quo aren't gonna get it by assuming our ideological foes are a bunch of morons. The people who are ruling (and ruining) the world generally do know what they're doing and act rather aggressively to protect and expand their interests. This is the real danger of Y2K--not that your stocks will be worthless (at least not for that reason), and not that it will be an expensive annoyance whose fixes will be passed along in higher costs to taxpayers and consumers. No, the danger is that such techno-fixes usually solve one problem and create three new ones; and that governments will create new bureaucracies, corporations will further invade your privacy, and billions of dollars will be billed in bogus solutions, all in the name of "solving" a software glitch. False (and, in some cases, hopeful) alarmism about the fall of capitalism only feeds the sense of urgency that such opportunists prey on.--G.P.

This just in from Government Computer News, a publication that tracks changes in U.S. government computing systems: the U.S. Navy is converting all of its computers to Microsoft Windows NT. Yes, the whole fleet is switching over from the more reliable Unix operating system to the more trendy Windows NT ... and, you guessed it, experiencing a lot of breakdowns. For example, the missile cruiser USS Yorktown recently lost control of its propulsion system and was left stranded; it had to be towed back to port. The problem was caused by an error in a database that was somehow picked up by Windows NT and spread throughout the ship, causing the whole computer network to crash. Sound familiar? According to Navy technicians involved in the switch, this is just one among many instances where Windows NT has caused a major system-wide shutdown. But you can't say Microsoft and the U.S. Navy don't deserve each other. They sort of go together like ... like Cheeze Whiz and Saltine crackers.--Maria Tomchick

Speaking of the culturally downtrodden, can anything be more pathetic than the Seattle Times running as a front page headline last week (7-21) "Mariners will pay cost overrun"? Implicit is that we should be surprised that the franchise is honoring the terms of their contract (and the law) rather than once again blackmailing public officials and taxpayers for more money to cover their stupidity, greed, and extravagance. Imagine as an equivalent headline, "Mariners promise not to break law." It's also been amusing to watch Seattle media cover as breaking news the stadium cost overruns, which ETS! covered in this column over a month ago, in its June 24 issue. The difference? By late July, the way-over-budget nature ($85 million and counting) of the rushed construction job on Shaftco Field, the most expensive baseball stadium in world history, was so obvious that even the Mariners were admitting it.

Now it's time to trot out another reminder: that, when both the baseball and football teams were arguing that the Kingdome was an inadequate place for modern professional sports, often cited was the slipshod construction when it was built in a hurry in the '70s. Wonder if, in the year 2005, we'll get pitched for a new publicly-funded stadium because of falling chunks of retractable roof and the hurried, slipshod construction of 1998?--G.P.