DATELINE–Korea

Technology shareholders have taken a beating this month, as computer-related stocks lost between 10 and 30 percent of their value in recent weeks.

What invisible force is at work behind this reversal of fortune? Memory.

Not surprisingly, all U.S. memory is manufactured in Korea. Despite current political unrest and a recent history of famine and civil war, South Korean memory suppliers have somehow managed to boost the prices of DRAM by 20 percent. This dramatic increase in the cost of memory has had a dire effect on the price margins of American personal computer makers.

U.S. PC firms depend on the low valuation of memory to skim profits from each and every personal computer sold. Ironically, when memory is cheap, computers are big sellers – and highly profitable to boot. But when the value of memory rises, so rises the cost of computers, negatively impacting the fortunes of the technology industry.

Unfortunately, computer companies are not the only interests invested in keeping memory cheap. With every passing day, more and more American capital is voluntarily pumped out of local communities and funneled into multi-national corporate coffers via the stock market. White-under-the-collar hi-tech firms have been the primary beneficiaries of this new middle class foray into the form of gambling affectionately known as “investment.”

Why would hard-working American families deliberately drain local resources by investing in faraway and often fantastical high-technology ventures? Anthropologists studying the cult of multimedia point to a phenomena termed “Wall Street white flight.” In the 1960s and 1970s, the term “white flight” was used to describe the exodus of white children from public schools, recently integrated by court order, to lily-white private schools, most of them newly-founded by parents and clergy. In the same tradition, “Wall Street white flight” explains a blind, almost fanatical investment of family savings in newly founded, lily-white companies.

In turn, these “technology” companies provide high-paying jobs to the white middle class – recent college graduates, in particular. These kickbacks, known as “multimedia” jobs, are not primarily underwritten by company profits (which are often non-existent) but by a flurry of white, middle-class investment dollars.

As local communities brace themselves to ride out the horrendous wake of the Welfare Reform Act, technology-infatuated investors appear to have staked out the land of cyberspace as their amoral high ground. Until this March, that strategy seemed to be working. But in the valley of the shadow of DRAM price inflation, that “high” technology ground might just be Korean soil.

The price of DRAM may be higher than the cost of forgetting America’s ongoing involvement in “Oriental” affairs; particularly, the legacy of American military intervention in the Far East which has forced so many Asians – Vietnamese, Koreans, Laotians – to emigrate to the United States. Could it be that Korean memory makers are retaliating for recent (and not so recent) insults and injuries?

As Yellow Tide hysteria grips a White House cringing under allegations of illegal campaign contributions from Asian interests, the Democratic National Committee has begun cold-calling 1996 presidential campaign contributers who have Asian-sounding names. The DNC’s contribution cleansing effort requires Asian surnamed donors to prove they were fiscally fit to contribute; i.e., Asians deemed “too poor” to have given money to the Democratic party are refunded their monies. In sum: “You’re money is no good here.”

Surprisingly, their memory still is.

DATELINE–Hobe Sound, Fla.

“On bended knee” may have described a good number of female Arkansas state employees more than a decade ago, but “weak at the knees” is how today’s president will be remembered in years to come.

At approximately 1:20 a.m. on Friday morning, President Bill Clinton “fell” and tore the tendons off his right knee. Luckily, the inebriated Clinton “fell” into the waiting arms of his host, Australian golf champion, Greg Norman. Mr. Norman, who is known on the PGA Tour as “The Great White Shark,” is a legal alien residing in a multi-million dollar mansion in southern Florida and apparently a “golf buddy” of Clinton.

Drunken collapse or conversion experience?

Just last year, President Clinton spit into the political wind when he signed a death warrant for all government-sponsored relief to the poor, aged and infirm (aka the Welfare Reform Bill). Could it be that Friday’s late night fiasco is only the first installment of a karmic payback about to be served on our Commander-in-Chief?

White House staffers have already attempted to spin last Friday’s nocturnal “misstep” as a simple slip of the heel. But any American with eyes to see knows the recent rent in the presidential musculature is an epiphany of biblical proportions.

In a town called Hobe Sound, in a mansion named Tranquillity, after nearly five inoperative years as the “leader” of the Free World, the self-made man from Hope finally met his maker.

Hospital room photographs taken on Saturday show President Clinton and his estranged wife, Hillary Rodham, obviously overcome with religious fervor, aglow with a tenderness no mere “non-narcotic” pain killer could have induced.

“I feel my pain,” Clinton declared at a post-op photo-op, and his pain, transmogrified into the empty stomachs of millions of America’s poorest children, is truly everlasting.

As television news perpetuated the subterfuge of the “official story” using ready-made anatomical models, colorful medical infographics and “expert” opinions, the real drama at the White House continued to unfold behind closed doors.

An anonymous source within the Clinton cabinet reports that Greg Norman was indeed the only “witness” present when President Clinton succumbed to the voice of God and swept down to the ground to beg the Lord’s forgiveness. Mr. Norman is said to have picked up a weeping, disoriented president, all the while reassuring him that “history would forget what God could not forgive.”

Clinton was purportedly visiting Florida to support education…and to play golf.

“He’s fine, he wasn’t sedated at all,” White House spokeswoman Mary Ellen Glynn said. “It looks like the president will not be playing golf today.”

Golf or God?

Is it not painfully apparent that Clinton’s breakdown was a result of the ongoing moral battle raging inside the president’s head? The hand of God has touched Bill. Perhaps, now that he has been crippled, humbled, and made a man once more, no longer will President Clinton lord over America with such reckless disregard for the welfare of its people.

DATELINE–District of Colombia

The white sheep of Scotland may be dominating the news, but elsewhere in the world, humankind’s problems are multiplying without the help of spiked RNA.

Ewe-genics pales in comparison to international news outages.

Pay no mind to the real possibility that a nuclear holocaust will take place on the Korean peninsula over the symbolic defection to China of North Korea’s leading communist ideologue. Don’t lose sleep over the fact that communist China, recently bereft of its perennial premier Deng Xiao Peng, has a few problems of its own. Try not to give a second thought to rebellion in the former Soviet republic of Albania, a nation-state bordering the birthplace of western civilization, a.k.a. Greece, where shepherds now tote guns as they watch over their (non-cloned) flocks by night.

Speaking of politics, have you heard about a standoff in Peru involving 72 hostages? It appears that the irreconcilably feuding parties involved include a revolutionary communist organization and the governments of Japan, Cuba, Peru and the United States.

Leave cloning for the wimps in white smocks – real men prefer a shave with the undead REDS.

But nothing the Communist zombies might dish out can compare with the potential carnage about to be served up on a silver mirror in our very own “backyard.” Latin America, the “FOR RENT” 51st state of the U.S., appears to be throwing her Yanqui fans in Washington a curve ball, yet again. The spitball pitch? Cocaine.

You probably didn’t notice that on the last day of National Snack Food month, President Clinton issued his annual certification of U.S. allies in the War on Drugs. Based on a noble tradition of supply-side economics (cf. Ronald Reagan’s $3 trillion deficit, a.k.a. “Voodoo Economics"), Clinton’s edict shifts the blame for America’s recent, across-the-board increase in drug consumption from North American consumers to Latin American governments.

Yes, the state governments of Mexico and Colombia are actually to blame for the multi-billion dollar U.S. drug trade. Do not be fooled by the hundreds of Colombian and Mexican government workers, lawyers, peace officers and judges who have been assassinated, their families kidnapped, tortured and murdered – they have all been killed for naught. Now, thanks to President Clinton and the 105th U.S. Congress, we realize that these martyrs are part of the problem not the solution.

For the answer, my friends, is blowing in the northern trade winds. Obviously, Latin American governments are, in fact, comprised of Spanish-speaking Latinos and, thus, are not really Americans, at all. It is far from coincidental that Spanish is also the language spoken by the Latin American cultivators of coca and poppy; agricultural ingredients transformed into Crack and Smack in North American processing facilities.

But these brown wolves in sheep’s clothing will not be outdone by their Scottish brethren. Colombia has already begun a campaign of anti-American-cloning technology, resisting U.S. machismo with a policy of inaction on all drug fronts. No more extraditions, no more arrests, no more raids, no more dead Colombian lawyers, cops, judges, priests and politicians. Should President Clinton decide to truly “resist the temptation to replicate” (i.e., clone) himself, he would commend (not censure) both Colombia and Mexico for the political and personnel sacrifices they have made to the voracious U.S. appetite for drugs.

Ward Cleaver, Donna Reed, Bill Cosby – not Juan Valdez – are at the root of the North American drug problem, and until Clinton or the 105th Congress can address the alienation of America’s youth, punishing little Brown Brother will only add insult to injury.

DATELINE–San Jose, Calif.

Government, private sector confront massive structural damage

Debbie Ranscom was accustomed to receiving less than a dozen e-mail orders daily for her line of cross-stitched pillow shams. But between 2 and 4am on Monday morning, Ranscom received over 1,200 orders, complete with mailing addresses and detailed credit card information.

Ranscom, who works out of her college-aged daughter’s former bedroom in Livermore, Calif., was ecstatic. “At first I was thrilled at the numbers,” recalls Ranscom, “but then I started thinking about how I could possibly sew all those patterns.”

But when the entrepreneur began sorting through her growing pile of electronic orders she discovered that in fact they were meant for another destination, VeritoBill, an online credit verification service.

By 6:20am Monday morning, Network Solutions, the company responsible for assigning and maintaining Internet domain names, announced that it had experienced a “brief database failure resulting in corrupt .COM and .ORG zone files.” The malfunction reassigned Internet addresses to over 14,000 domains, including a host of Internet Service Providers and online financial services as well as smaller sites such as Ranscom’s pillowaccents.com.

“It’s as if there was an earthquake on the Internet,” explains Stefan Heiss, a systems administrator at one of UUNet’s network operations centers, “companies built on electronic exchanges suddenly lost their footing and a lot of things got tossed around every which way.” Heiss, who manages network traffic on one of the Internet’s major backbones, was one of the first technicians to report the faulty domain name server addressing instructions.

As a result of the minor error within Network Solutions’ root server database, e-mail messages addressed to one domain were received by another, with no way of tracking who received what message. Although many of the redirected e-mails were simply bounced back, tens of thousands were accepted at the wrong destination.

Web sites were also thrown out of balance as hundreds of thousands of requests for Web content were incorrectly rerouted to seemingly random domains. For example, a person wishing to read the front page of the Union Israelita de Caracas (www.uic.org) was instead referred to the home page of the online book “Deros: A year in Vietnam” (www.deros.com). Similar mixups affected well-known commercial sites like Salon magazine and Gateway’s virtual warehouse.

Analysts at MediaMetrix, an online traffic analysis firm, estimate Monday’s domain snafu will cost companies upwards of $40 million in revenue. The final amount may double when damages unreported thus far are finally tallied. Although there is no reliable means for calculating personal losses incurred as a result of the database malfunction, at least a half million users were left suddenly bereft of their own e-mails or flooded with someone else’s.

Max Hannon who moderates an electronic mailing list devoted to rare and valuable cameras guesses he missed at least 30 messages during the “dataquake.” In their place, Hannon received 127 pornographic messages addressed to max@pleasurecenter.com. The 63 year-old retired pharmacist remains upbeat despite having his confidence shaken. “I don’t suppose I have any real use for these messages but they’re quite fun.”

However, not everyone is taking the Internet earthquake in stride. Dave Fercer, a risk management specialist with the London Agency, suggests that Monday’s dramatic shifting of DNS zone files merely casts into sharp relief the fault lines upon which the Internet currently rests. Fercer expects insurance companies will now be pressured to develop policies specially tailored to the needs of the online world.

“This was a small event,” cautions Fercer, “but what happens when the Big One hits?”