The magic that is Carly Fiorina

From the "Are they lying or are they stupid?" files:

I think, I hope, that the American people are getting sick of lies. Not the kind in the spin room after a debate when the supporters all tell the slack-jawed media how well their candidate did; we're used to that and don't much care any more.

No, I'm talking about the blatant bald-faced lies that candidates or their surrogates tell when they want to appeal to a certain constituency. You want to make yourself look tough and experienced, you tell the world that you braved sniper fire. You want to appear to care about the struggles of motorists, you offer up a gas tax "holiday" that will do little for anyone except reduce the money in a fund to maintain an already decrepit infrastructure. You play up your "35 years of experience" when anyone can see that a good portion of that time was spent in photo ops and banquet appearances.

And I pray that Americans are finally tired to death of stuff like this, of being told that black is white and up is down, in which people who know better behave as if the people are flat-out stupid, unable to discern what is right in front of them.

If so, I think John McCain has a big problem. Because he sent Carly Fiorina, failed business executive, out to do battle with George Stephanopoulos on yesterday's This Week on ABC. I've written about Carly before, I'm not a fan; I expressed it this way on March 30:

Carly Fiorina, 53, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, who held a great deal of responsibility for the decline of once-proud Lucent Technologies through her vendor financing schemes. After leaving Lucent in a huff because she didn't get the top job, she took over HP, continued their drop in quality while merging it with equally decrepit Compaq; upon failing to make the combined company work, Fiorina was dismissed by the HP board. She is now rumored, for no reason anyone can understand, to be a possible candidate for the vice presidency under John McCain.

She is one of the cornerstones, along with Phil Gramm and Pete Peterson, of the campaign to make us think that McCain is up to speed on economics, a topic about which he has seemed totally uninterested.

As she settled in with George, he asked her about the gas tax initiative ("economists know nothing") and health care ("the market will provide"), and then he came around to the movement of profits overseas (and the tax break we give American companies as long as they never bring those profits back) and the offshoring of jobs.

When you evaluate anything Carly has to say about offshoring, keep in mind that she did a ton of it while at Hewlett-Packard, fired a lot of people who actually knew something about the technologies she was touting, and even called it "right-shoring." So we already know she's pretty cavalier with the whole American job thing.

But what she did say with George was remarkable for its obtuseness. She contended that there are two reasons that companies offshore jobs: the onerous tax burden on American companies, and the lack of Americans to get and maintain their skills. Her solution, right out of the Republican playbook: cut those taxes and free American companies to keep those jobs right here.

Leave aside that this proposal makes absolutely no sense (how would lower taxes in the U.S. be able to compete with no taxes on the money made abroad?). What is significant is that she omitted the actual reason that companies offshore: that labor is cheaper overseas.

No matter what you think of offshoring or McCain or Fiorina herself, this is a remarkable omission. How stupid do these people think we Americans are when they expect us to swallow the idea that moving a $30/hour job overseas to someone making $.50/hour has no effect on the decision to move it? It shows a complete sense of contempt for logic to insist that taxes and education are the only factors.

Even if you believe that offshoring is a good thing, you have to be disturbed that this level of thinking is what passes for economic wisdom in a future McCain administration. Because, make no mistake, Carly is angling for a prominent position, a taxpayer-financed job in which she will be free to ignore such trivialities as facts. I would be appalled if I were a McCain supporter that he couldn't find anyone who can make a case based on reality; as it is, all I can see is another four or eight years with a group of people who can willfully ignore even basic truth in order to further their agenda. And that's mighty scary.

Review - T is for Trespass

There is a two-edged sword when an author creates a series: there is the built-in advantage of crafting stories around a known quantity versus the possibility that the character will get stale. That's especially a risk when much of the storytelling comes from the perspective of the main character. It's easy for the reader to get tired of the persona. There are techniques that can be used to minimize character fatigue: Doyle did it by having John Watson "write" the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, so we never heard the inner voice of Holmes.

Sue Grafton has been writing the stories of California private investigator Kinsey Millhone for 25 years, and, as one can tell from the title, is up to the 20th book with T is for Trespass (2007). I haven't read every single one along the way, something closer to half of them, but I generally have enjoyed them. But there is a creeping sameness, as Kinsey does not change much from book to book (Grafton chose to have the books lag real time; the series began in 1982 as did the story, but the current book is only inching into 1988).

So you have two threads at work in series like this. You have the continuing saga of tough, but not quite hard-boiled, Kinsey, as she deals with relationship issues and her cast of recurring characters, and you have the book as mystery. Patricia Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta series has managed to fail on both counts, with the last entry, Book of the Dead, a particularly unappetizing mix of unpleasant characters and paper-thin plot (see my full review here).

But Grafton has, for the most part, avoided the negatives. Kinsey Millhone is not someone you look to for a big character arc, and her neighbors and friends have comforting familiarity. The plots weave around one another in realistic fashion; Kinsey doesn't have the luxury of focusing solely on one case. The main plot, the abuse of an elderly neighbor, is handed well.

To me, there were two main flaws in the book, irritating without being disqualifying. The ending seems hurried, as if Grafton had to wrap things up. The building sense of menace is dissipated too quickly. And the main villain isn't quite as frightening as we might hope, more along the lines of "the banality of evil."

Nevertheless, this book is a fine read, nothing that will provide a reader with a new perspective on the human condition, but entertaining - you'll enjoy spending a few hours with Kinsey Millhone.

Yet another thing...

I don't fully understand. From Matt Roush's column in TV Guide:

Question: I've really been debating recently: Lost or Battlestar Galactica. Lost is probably the most innovative and original drama on network TV in a long time, and I'm a bit surprised it even got made. I think there is a chance it will go down as one of the best shows in history. But at times it's more flawed then people think. There are occasionally episodes that go nowhere ("Tricia Tanaka is Dead," for example.) Sometimes there are the flashbacks no one cares about, like Jack in Thailand, and the dialogue can be very predictable, unlike the story. But when Lost is on its game, it is amazing. (And it usually is, especially this season.) But I've recently been watching Battlestar Galactica, and I wish I had started sooner. The story is dense, yet not nearly as much as Lost, which is both good and bad. The acting overall is better in my opinion, yet Lost has many great actors as well. What makes Battlestar so good, though, is the solid writing. It's much more poignant than Lost since it deals with issues of politics and religion. Overall, they are both great shows that more people should be watching— Grant

Matt Roush: So why are you comparing them, exactly? They both live in the genre of the fantastic and high concept, but are so distinctive individually I don't really see the point. One is an epic mystery adventure in which action is informed by character, revealed through flashbacks and flash-forwards and other manipulations of time. The other is an epic science-fiction quest that, as it has developed, has grown increasingly interior as it addresses the nature of humanity through spirituality, mortality, evolution, politics and war. I can't really fault the writing and acting on either show. They're both so staggeringly ambitious, and if you find one more satisfying than the other, that's a matter of personal taste and not really worth sparking an either-or debate. I don't pretend to understand absolutely everything going on with either show these days, and I'm OK with that.

I don't think the new TV Guide is as good as the old one. I liked the smaller format, and they attempted, from time to time, to talk about important issues concerning this important medium. The new one is heavy on pictures, and gives a remarkable amount of coverage to a few shows (if you don't watch Survivor, American Idol, and Dancing with the Stars, there isn't much for you to read).

However, Roush's answer to this question is excellent, but the larger question is, why must we rank everything? In sports, it makes sense to figure out who's "best," so we have tournaments (or polls) to determine the winner.

But in so many other areas, what's best is either irrelevant or idiosyncratic. In the case above, it's irrelevant whether Lost or Battlestar Galactica is better; they're both (I assume, I've never seen BG) riveting stories with high production values and good acting. It absolutely doesn't matter which one is "best."

In other cases, "best" is idiosyncratic, that is, it's what's best to you. If you believe that According to Jim is the best show in the history of television, it just happens to strike some chord in you, then it's best...to you. And that's fine.

Is it some need for external validation? Does Grant want Matt Roush to confirm his opinion that one is better than the other (it seems he's leaning to BG)?

But, in this case, it's truly unnecessary. Watch 'em both, Grant; don't choose until someone makes you.

Blogging is fun

I wasn't naive when I started this blog. I had read enough other blogs to know that the level of comments is often quite disappointing, that, for every interesting discussion where disparate ideas fly back and forth, there are a hundred (a thousand?) where the discourse is essentially, "Oh, yeah, I'm right because I'm right."

Obviously, I expected that, if I ever did attract any attention, and if I commented on political and economic matters, there would be comments that would disappoint me, dissent that would come without basis, and I was prepared for that. I preferred to think that disagreement would come from people armed with solid evidence, I even looked forward to that; I've learned a lot in my life, changed opinions as new facts or new situations presented themselves, and I'm always willing to listen.

What, I guess, has surprised me is the philosophy of those who have disagreed with me. (It shouldn't have, but I guess I never did much meta-thinking about the ludicrous exchanges I've seen on other blogs.) It's a philosophy so opposed to my own that I have real trouble understanding it.

You see, I have developed beliefs over a period of time. But I try to stay grounded in realizing the things I know (if I kick the ball, it will move in the direction of the kick), the things I don't know (how, really, does consciousness work?), and the things I believe based in part on what I've experienced, but mostly on inference based on a preponderance of evidence. If I state in this blog that I know exactly the right number of H-1B visas to issue each year, whether it be 0, 20,000, or a million, then I need to back it up with some evidence (or at least be willing to; it's unlikely that I can recreate my full thinking in every blog post).

But, for that vast category of things that fall into the third class, evidence can certainly sway my opinion and, since I am most interested in getting closer to truth, I am quite pleased to entertain any such evidence. If I write that we should scrap the entire H-1B program, and someone says, no, the best 2,000 people we let in each year actually do generate more jobs than they cost, and they have something more than simple regression to back that up, then I might well go along with that. But I wouldn't then support an argument that says we should increase the quota to 200,000 on the off chance we'll find those 2,000 - I would say instead that we need to develop some method to identify the 2,000, and let them in.

So, to have had a couple of disagreements the past couple of weeks is not surprising to me, but to have had them based on utterly specious premises, or a deliberate misreading of what I am stating, is profoundly disappointing. My recent dust-up on another site with a fellow who insisted that, because his personal situation is fine, everyone else's is as well was a waste of time. He offered no evidence beside his personal story and those of a couple of family members, but ignored the larger trends. Had he argued that the larger trends would be subsumed to something even larger, that the American economy is inevitably self-correcting and our current problems transitory, it might have been possible to have a discussion. He didn't, and it wasn't.

My current conflict, which can be seen here and here if anyone wants to go through it, started with the simplest of assertions (that, if you split off a certain segment of the population and could measure it as we measure the aggregate economy, that segment may already be in a recession). The respondent proposed that it was incorrect to redefine the term "recession," that it applied only to the economy as a whole.

This is fair, if limited, and I commented back that I was willing to use a different term for a non-recession recession, but it still argued for some policy intervention. At that point, the discussion flew off the rails, but the respondent never offered up another fact, just an increasing level of invective, wholly inappropriate to the point.

I spent a little time looking around the Net to see if this was unusual for this respondent; indeed, it is not. This is a person who has had his comments taken off several sites for, apparently, the same kind of escalating nonsense that I saw.

I have no way to understand why someone seeks out someone else's post, then uses it as a springboard not to make an argument, but to be willfully inflammatory and simplistic. I know there's a lot of anger and bitterness in the world, but to translate that into the kind of behavior we see too often in the Web 2.0 world is foreign to me. Even though I want to foment discussion that will expand my thinking, my knowledge base, I begin to understand why reasonable bloggers need to moderate comments. I hope it doesn't come to that, I really don't want to spend that time, but a blog is a little like a virtual home, and I don't need other guests to feel their visit is ruined by a couple of clowns standing in the corner.

Is there a time clock?

Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast writes a good post this morning called "What Hillary Clinton forgets," questioning whether she is really more electable than Barack Obama (because some of the big states aren't going to go for her in the general election anyway, and Rush Limbaugh's idiotic idea of urging Republicans to vote for her). Jill goes on to discuss Hillary's "right" to stay in the race, which is a false idea promulgated by Clinton supporters - no one has questioned her "right," they've questioned her wisdom in doing so. (And isn't that interesting, that the Clinton-ites prefer to assert a right in lieu of good judgment, sort of where we stand today with a goodly segment of the women's movement and other identity politics proponents.)

We are pointed to a post from yesterday on Huffington, in which Thomas Edsall discusses what Hillary has to gain if she drops out now; the Obama campaign would make up her current losses, and she would enhance her position in the party, very possibly getting the Senate majority leader post. Others have talked about the party positioning her for a run as New York governor.

This idea has been floated for several weeks now, that Hillary will get some major consolation prize if she drops out and starts working for the good of the party. My question: What's the time limit on this offer?

When does the party switch from providing inducements to exacting punishment? Is there a moment when her continued corrosive attacks on Obama outweigh whatever value her support would give?

If the party has not made it clear to her that there's a time limit on all these getting-out prizes, she has no real reason to get out. She's already pushed it past reasonable boundaries. One can hardly blame her if she thinks that the golden apple lies at the end of the race no matter how far she runs. It allows her to believe in her self-styled image as a "fighter."

So get it together, Democratic Party. Tell Hillary that she gets out now, that this farce has gone on long enough. Get out Thursday, get all your money back and the Senate majority leadership. Get out Friday, get half your money back and Senate whip. Any later than that, no money and the party moves George Clooney to New York to run against you.

The tide is high

From WWW Tide and Current Predictor:

5/8-9:
Alcatraz Island
High Tide
23:16 UTC
09:36 UTC

Low Tide
03:39 UTC
16:44 UTC

Elbow Point, Australia
High Tide
01:25 UTC
13:59 UTC

Low Tide
07:08 UTC
20:36 UTC

In my previous post, I talked about the corrosive effect of absolutism on public discourse and effective action. Here I want to talk about something specific in the comments on my Monday post, namely, the idea that the disparities of wealth in the capitalist system lead inexorably to growth for all: "as the disparity grows, all are all lifted up."

This philosophy is most often expressed in a saying attributed to an Irish Prime Minister: "A rising tide lifts all boats." (See Wikipedia for more on the origin of this adage.)

The saying is generally used to support "growth" policies, in particular tax cuts (where the saying justifies an imbalance as to who receives the cuts) and free trade. The idea is that economies are like harbors, in which the tide elevates everyone.

Maybe it's time to retire this phrase, and the idea behind it. As we see above, San Francisco and Australia can have very different tidal effects, as can any two places sufficiently distant from each other.

That this discussion even needs to be held given the persistence of poverty in the world is remarkable; it is obvious that the tide can go up and up, Fundy-esque, in certain places, and the ocean can remain flat in another, and this can persist for years, decades, centuries.

[This brings us back to the Rubin-Reich discussion as to whether we make the pie bigger first, then divvy up the pieces, or vice versa - I've talked about that before.]

A rising tide does not lift all boats everywhere at the same time, and believing it does is simply a substitute for the hard work of moving the water from place to place. Of course, if you believe that some magical force is putting the water where it "deserves" to be, you can disregard this discussion.

Absolutism

I've been having an interesting discussion in the comments based on my Monday post, where I commended Paul Krugman for understanding that the technical definition of recession is largely irrelevant when many Americans are hurting, threatened with the loss of their homes or their jobs, uncertain as to what to do to dig themselves out of increased uncertainty (Megan McArdle is currently writing a set of posts criticizing Elizabeth Warren's ubiquitous talk on the "Coming Collapse of the Middle Class"; my guess is neither is totally right, which leads us into the topic of this post).

A person named sbvor has taken issue with the post, arguing that we are not in a recession (I'll take the liberty of assuming that sbvor is male; pardon me if I am wrong). He cites the definition of the National Bureau of Economic Research:

A recession is a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales.

[I stop here to point out that this definition is wholly insufficient; it fails in several places, mainly in its use of ill-defined terms like "significant" and "a few," and its lack of guidance as to what to do when two of their five measures are positive, three negative. It leaves far too much room for interpretation of when a recession actually occurs, rendering it close to irrelevant.]

Without going into the entire exchange, I'll touch on one part of sbvor's comments (and my response):

I also sense in your initial post a disillusion with what is most obvious about the Capitalist system (that it produces disparities of wealth). What the media never tell you, least of all, Paul Krugman and The Old York Times, is that, as the disparity grows, all are all lifted up. Any attempt by government to “redistribute” the wealth inevitably drags everybody down. Sure, the gap is reduced. But, the net result is grinding poverty for all. If you’ve never visited a Communist country, do so. There, you will see your idyllic vision of fiscal equality (except, of course, for the Communist Party members who live in luxury).

My answer to that:

I also know that communism is a far inferior system, but you are creating a false dichotomy and ascribing it to me.

To say that capitalism is not perfect and requires some non-free market mechanisms is not at all the same as saying that we must move to communism.

Additionally, it takes a misreading of the equations of the free market to contend, as you do, that disparity inevitably creates greater wealth for those at the low end (or even in the middle). There is nothing that guarantees that, and one can easily posit a kind of neo-feudalism that is entirely consistent with free market principles.

You and I probably disagree on what the American Dream constitutes, and, until we can define that, I have to assume that your view of it is thriving, mine not so much.

What this post is about is the "false dichotomy" I mentioned. sbvor believes we are not in a recession, which is his right; I was arguing (as was Krugman) that the term was irrelevant to what most Americans are experiencing.

He goes on to argue that government action inevitably "drags everyone down." That is also his right, there are many people who believe that to be true. I believe that to be simplistic, and easily disprovable.

But the objectionable part, to me, is the belief that, if I believe that sharing some amount of the common wealth is desirable, I automatically become a Communist. And that's just the kind of thinking that has made the politics of this country contentious and unpleasant. sbvor has chosen to adopt a philosophy (I have the impression of libertarianism) that colors his views of not only economics but of people who do not share his "pure" stance. Any deviation from that orthodoxy implies that the person willing to consider other options is a Communist.

Of course, this is a form of the ad hominem fallacy coupled with a straw man argument, but, what is worse, it forestalls all further discussion. I'm willing to concede that the level of government intervention in the economy is open for discussion and negotiable, but the absolutist mentality will not allow for that.

Similarly, the discussion as to whether or not we're in a recession falls apart as soon as we realize that one side is saying that a recession is the only way to define economic trouble; if we're not in one, by the definition, we must be doing OK. I just don't believe that.

Earlier, I mentioned Megan McArdle, who is currently trying to dismantle the arguments that Elizabeth Warren is making about the increasing threats to the middle class. McArdle somewhat self-importantly has anointed herself as the person who must stop this ("Mine is a high and lonely destiny").

This post is not the one to go into the two sides: my point is with the attitude, as McArdle assumes that, in taking down specifics of Warren's points, she invalidates the premise, that the middle class is struggling. Once again, we see absolutism, the idea that either the middle class is heading for disaster, or that this is just alarmist talk, not worth consideration.

Most complex issues do not allow for simplistic, one-size-fits-all solutions, and we desperately need to elevate the level of discourse beyond that. Instead, we stake out our positions on one side of the big wall or the other, and we're done, content in our eternal rightness (leading to self-righteousness). Thus, we solve no problems, find no room for compromise, and make no progress. That's a pretty sad turn of events in a country that prides itself on its can-do attitude.

Where's Tom Friedman?

Anyone reading this is probably familiar with Thomas L. Friedman, foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times, notable for his best-selling book The World Is Flat. The book, which I reviewed a couple of months ago, has stirred up a lot of controversy, mostly for its seeming pro-globalization attitude (enhanced by Friedman's gee-whiz appearances on talk shows and his prose, in which a frisson of excitement goes through him at seeing brilliant Indians arriving at work).

For those who believe they will profit from globalization, TWIF became a virtual primer on what to do and how to do it. I have to believe that it has been passed down corporate hierarchies as much as any other three books combined (with the possible exception of the execrable Who Moved My Cheese?).

However, for those who believe that globalization opens up some issues that the U.S. is ill-equipped to handle, Friedman's book is seen as Exhibit 1 in the "let's do it and see what happens" sweepstakes. It has been criticized for its unwillingness to engage sufficiently with the very real disruption globalization can create, and not just in the United States.

Whichever side of the fence you stand on (I tend toward the latter; while I am not as critical of TWIF as some, that the first 200 pages [and most business executives would be hard-pressed to get through even that much of the near-500 pages] is so incredibly rosy takes away a lot of my respect for Friedman's identification or some very real trends), there is no denying that the book was an important one, and that Tom Friedman has been associated indelibly with the issue of globalization and the changes it has wrought.

Friedman's been off finishing up his next book on how American needs to have a green revolution, and how it will "renew America." I admit to being a little skeptical about this (as I wrote last week, nothing has convinced me yet that going green will enhance the economic situation of the U.S. - not to say that we don't have to do it, regardless of cost), but I don't want to prejudge his arguments.

As you can tell, I have a decidedly mixed reaction to Tom Friedman. His puppy-dog naivete strikes me as inappropriate given the challenges he himself has outlined, but he has gone out and done some solid reporting (and for those who dislike his writing style, here and here, for example, I think of it as fairly good for a modern newspaper guy).

So imagine my surprise to read a column by Friedman that struck me as pretty much dead on. I certainly think this is right:

People want to do nation-building. They really do. But they want to do nation-building in America.

They are not only tired of nation-building in Iraq and in Afghanistan, with so little to show for it. They sense something deeper — that we’re just not that strong anymore. We’re borrowing money to shore up our banks from city-states called Dubai and Singapore. Our generals regularly tell us that Iran is subverting our efforts in Iraq, but they do nothing about it because we have no leverage — as long as our forces are pinned down in Baghdad and our economy is pinned to Middle East oil.

He contrasts Singapore's airport and Berlin's central train station with JFK Airport and Penn Station, and wonders how "a great power" could have allowed things to slip this far. He quotes the president of Harvard:

“China, India, Singapore ... have adopted biomedical research and the building of biotechnology clusters as national goals. Suddenly, those who train in America have significant options elsewhere.”

He sees America as a nation in trouble:

We are not who we think we are. We are living on borrowed time and borrowed dimes. We still have all the potential for greatness, but only if we get back to work on our country.

While none of this is exactly news, especially to those of us who have been writing about such things already, to see the happy huckster expressing this doom and gloom in the pages of the New York Times is pretty remarkable.

Of course, I have to mention before I finish that it would have been nice for Friedman to acknowledge his own contribution to this phenomenon. The World Is Flat, while certainly not the cause of globalization, did make it look pretty darned desirable. The connection between the corporate executives who decided to abandon the nation that helped build their companies in search of profits, and the increasing weakness of that nation, well, that seems clear to me. Not to Tom, I guess.

Walk with me down the corridor

Citizen Carrie (at Carrie's Nation) has yet another interesting post about the state of Michigan wanting to give a massive tax break to a silicon manufacturer to get them to build an expansion to their facility. It's a fairly typical corporate welfare story, the kind where the big company threatens to take its ball and go home if it isn't given, well, anything it wants. Once it gets the tax break, the jobs will flow into the community (interesting how the magic multiplier is always invoked when jobs are brought to a community, never when they're taken away - wouldn't you once like to see an honest headline like, "XYZ Corp to layoff 3,000; 15,000 in local businesses expected to lose jobs").

But Carrie deals with that issue just fine. What caught my eye was this:

This is all part of a master plan to turn the Michigan into a high-tech nirvana, where a few hundred jobs here and there will supposedly make up the shortfall created by the thousands of manufacturing jobs that have already left the state.

Michigan may be a little late to that party, but, here in Illinois, we've already had a taste of becoming the next Silicon Valley, and we spit it out. Some years ago, we created the Illinois Technology and Research Corridor, which essentially was Interstate 88 as it ran from Oak Brook to Aurora (roughly spanning DuPage County). The state put brown signs up on the highway touting this miracle area, and there were high hopes that we would see a wealth of innovation that would flow into the community and create a new center of accomplishment. This was going to put Chicago on the high-tech map.

We were going to build on the two government labs, Argonne National Laboratory and Fermilab, which would generate spin-off companies. Furthermore, there was a major presence by the pre-eminent private research company, AT&T Bell Laboratories.

And how well has this worked? Let's take a look at the Wikipedia page for the Illinois Technology and Research Corridor, and see how it's doing. First, the two labs: Fermilab is in serious financial trouble, as Congress has refused to fund it at a maintenance level, much less making it into a crown jewel of the U.S. R&D system. It's no different for Argonne; their funding has been cut (story here).

Wikipedia cites three educational institutions, Illinois Institute of Technology, DeVry University, and Northern Illinois University. IIT is a fine school, but it has never been the source of new technology the way a Stanford or an MIT has been. DeVry is essentially a vocational school for computer programming. And NIU, which has produced a lot of fine teachers and accountants, has never been known as a research institution. (Wikipedia does omit several schools that have a presence in the corridor, but none offers any game changers in technology.)

So we're left with the companies. There is a degree of hand-waving on the Wikipedia page, as several companies nowhere close to the nominal corridor are included on their list (Abbott Labs, Motorola, TDS, Exelon). Others have no significant technical presence; Boeing may have moved their headquarters to Chicago, bringing a few hundred executive positions, but they don't do significant technical work here. Microsoft is on the list, but they're not developing products here.

And the other companies are in decline, reducing their presence in the Chicago area. Alcatel-Lucent is the current owner of what is left of Bell Laboratories, but they have mostly-empty buildings amid continual rumors that they will pull out of the area altogether. Tellabs has laid off 2/3 of its workforce since the end of the Internet bubble, and is promising to get rid of still more. (The one exception may be BP, which operates a large research facility along I-88, but it has never really established itself as a leader among technical companies in the area.)

That's it. The vaunted Illinois Technology and Research Corridor has failed, not bringing Silicon Valley to the Heartland (what some have called Silicon Prairie). There is no tech boom, no mass migration of the best and brightest to Chicago, just a lot of empty buildings and wasted tax incentives (Tellabs was given millions to move its corporate headquarters 5 miles - no huge bounty for the city of Naperville there).

There's the lesson for our friends in Michigan, and anywhere else that thinks that erecting highway signs and providing tax incentives will transform that irritating farmland into high-tech business parks. It doesn't work. There are a host of reasons, most particularly a lack of critical mass of brains and innovation, but Chicago is not a high-tech center, and it's highly unlikely that Saginaw, Michigan will fare any better.

But the companies that get these incentives, that are, in effect, being paid to make profits, they'll likely do just fine. And the politicians who cut the ribbons and talk up their contribution to the "great people of our state" will do just fine. Why their health should be a matter of public policy is beyond me.

You might be in recession

I've said before that, as far as I can tell, much of the country has been in a recession for some time. Very simply, if 30 million people are doing really, really well, and 270 million people are doing worse and worse, the country (the aggregate United States) may not be in a recession, but the country (the people of the United States) is.

The formal definition may or may not be met (though we rarely truly know that until well after the fact), but the recession is here, and most of us can feel that. It's nice (well, somewhat satisfying) to see Paul Krugman coming around to that.

Make the solution fit the problem

As I have mentioned before, the majority of my career has been spent in software development. Quite often, I have seen people try to solve problems inappropriately.

[Let me point out something here. Many people have a mistaken view of what software development is. It should be, simply, the solving of problems, usually business problems, by any means necessary. Some require a solution based solely in the writing of computer code; most need a solution based in the real world with assistance from the computer.

One of the saddest developments along the path of my career is the way software development has become ghetto-ized, partitioned off into a silo of code, code, code. What should be an opportunity to revisit the way one does business has become code first, think later. Too many people think, I can make the code do this, rather than, I can help the customer do this. The Internet boom failed for a lot of reasons, but the biggest was that people tried to find solutions, whether or not there was a problem, instead of finding problems.]

Generally the inappropriate solutions come from mis-scoping, the attempt to make a "big" solution fit a small problem, or to find a quick and dirty solution for a big problem. The former usually comes from a desire to implement something a developer has read about and wants to try ("Let's rewrite 100,000 lines of server code in Ruby on Rails"), the latter from management pressure to cut corners ("Can't we just slap in a little open-source stuff - search the Net").

I'm drawing examples from my domain because I know it best, but we see this kind of failure all the time. The replacement of Coca-Cola with New Coke is the canonical example of a large corporation trying to solve a problem that didn't exist (I'm oversimplifying here, the problem was the failure of market share to grow as desired, but the "solution" was clearly too large). Many, if not most, business failures come from an inability or unwillingness to properly scope a problem and devise a right-sized solution.

When you combine this mismatch of solution to problem with political philosophy and "success bias" (the tendency to believe something works just because it's associated with something that succeeds - once), you end up with activities enshrined in policy that result in subsequent failure.

Just in the last 24 hours, I've seen a couple of examples of this kind of thinking. First, this post from Signal vs. Noise, which extols an online community called Ravelry that asked their members for donations. They succeeded remarkably: "In 3 weeks, 3,457 Ravelers gave donated a total of $71,000 to Ravelry. Not only did we receive an amazing financial boost, we also received a flood of love."

Second, last night 60 Minutes did a report on a group called "Partners in Health," which was a marvelous story about Dr. Paul Farmer and his group. Dr. Farmer's organization has brought medical care to people who desperately need it, saving countless lives in nine countries. The report focused on the work they're doing in Haiti, having opened a free medical clinic and provided doctors to this unbelievably poor area in the Western Hemisphere.

These are marvelous things, and are true examples of the spirit of private giving that is inspirational in the same way as fundraisers for ill children and aid to the Asian tsunami victims are. These are tributes to the essentially generous nature of human beings who could easily look the other way.

But there is an underlying danger to all of these efforts. They are all localized, one-off solutions to a specific problem.

Will the next online community be able to raise $3,000 a day? Aren't there more than nine poor countries that desperately need medical care? Do all illness-stricken children get bowl-a-thons? Will the Myanmar cyclone victims (10,000 at last count as of this writing) get the same aid from developed countries as the tsunami victims did?

There are problems that demand collective, concerted action, that should not be left to the ability of an organization to hold charity balls or walks for the cure, but must grow out of the will of us all. No matter what you may have gleaned from reading this blog, I have been a conservative all my life - I believe in the power of the market and the individual.

But I grew up in a context of collective action, and my beliefs were a counterweight to that. Now, since the Reagan revolution, collective action is seen as un-American, as against the principles of this nation.

But it isn't. It's a matter of fitting the solution to the problem. If a Web community needs funds, it's probably right to ask for donations. But, if someone's seriously ill, and can't afford treatment, or a desperately poor country is ravaged by a natural disaster, the only rational way to help is through larger intervention, not by holding a telethon.

Government was invented by people to solve problems; otherwise, we would all be independent actors and much of our progress wouldn't have happened. It's the same as when we talk about free-market solutions to health care or energy policy; that approach simply won't work, because these problems are too big and have too much lead time to wait around for market incentives to make those solutions attractive. It's popular to say it will get done, but it requires a sense of magic that I have trouble relying upon.

Progress(?) in videos

A-Ha - Take On Me (Video)

Madonna - 4 Minutes

Two music videos, both concerning a couple in peril, both using state-of-the-art special effects. One is 23 years old, by a group that essentially had only that one hit in the United States. The other is new, by three of the biggest names in music.

By any measure, the second, 4 Minutes by Madonna, should be far more successful. We should marvel at the modern effects, made possible by modern computing power. The first, Take On Me by the Norwegian group a-ha, should seem crude in comparison.

So why does the Take On Me video seem so much fresher? It uses rotoscoping, the same technique used in those peculiar commercials of Charles Schwab. In effect, the animator draws over a filmed image to create near-real animation.

On the other hand, 4 Minutes uses CGI to depict a strange flesh-eating crystalline distortion of reality that is sweeping across the world. It features a rap by producer-of-the-moment Timbaland, followed by singing and dancing from Madonna and Justin Timberlake.

Yet I find Take On Me far more satisfying. Perhaps it is due to the happy ending, the fresh-faced youth of Bunty Bailey and a-ha lead singer Morten Harket as opposed to the synth-heavy tune, the unnecessary Timbaland rap, and the ultimately nihilistic ending of 4 Minutes, but, for whatever reason, I just feel good after watching Take On Me.

Maybe the biggest difference, though, is that the earlier video tells a story, and the technology is used to serve that story. 4 Minutes, on the other hand, seems to have some kind of narrative, but it is buried under images and quick-cut Madonna/Timberlake dancing and some bizarre skin-flaying effects. One is left empty after watching four minutes that amount to nothing.

Dye that collar and get rich

I guess I'm in an environmental mood, as this post is something of a follow-up to yesterday's, in which I criticized the proponents of cap-and-trade systems for carbon emission control for mischaracterizing these schemes as market-based when they're really not. To clarify, I'm not against programs to combat global warming, and cap-and-trade has some real advantages, but I think its supporters blunt the argument for it when they use false advertising simply to lure in the market zealots.

Today, I'm going to change gears slightly and look at another claim of the green revolutionaries, that, far from being a GDP killer, changes in our environmental policy will usher in a brave new world of so-called green-collar jobs. Taking one candidate's plan as an example, Hillary Clinton's initiatives will "help transform our economy and create at least 5 million jobs from clean energy over ten years."

I'm not picking on Hillary here, I'm using her program to talk about this because it's the most elaborately worked out one I could find (Obama's is very similar, but not as detailed, and McCain seems to feature a lot of hand-waving). (The details of her plan are here.) I'm not going to go through it in detail, but I want to pick out the parts that have to do with job creation.

These claims are summarized by Eric Pooley in a TIME article as:

The green jobs that cap and trade could help create would be a big employment sector—including production of wind turbines, pollution scrubbers and more.

Hillary's plans also talk about another category of jobs, those in construction and installation of these new green products, and swings by engineering and consulting without specific quantification. Unfortunately, these rosy predictions aside, there are two major criticisms that can be made.

1) Incremental or replacement?
There is an underlying assumption that these new green-collar jobs will simply appear with the right combination of tax breaks and innovation. Pleasant as that might be to believe, it is not clear that would happen.

Let's say that liquid hydrogen becomes the winner in the "How do we fuel our cars?" sweepstakes. Hey, we'll need thousands of drivers to get the liquid hydrogen from the plant to the new hydro stations, that'll be plenty of jobs.

Yes, it will, but what will happen to the existing gas truck drivers? Oh, right, they'll become the hydro truck drivers. It's difficult to see exactly how this switch will generate more jobs (unless hydrogen is less dense than gasoline, requiring more trucks, but also requiring more fill-ups - not a total win).

Right down the line, in every job category that has been mentioned, I have seen no appraisal of how the switch to green technology will create more jobs than old non-green technology. I accept the obvious truth that the environmental industry will grow; I'm not sure how that generates more jobs than we have today.

(One possible counter-argument: by sending less money to overseas petro-nations, we'll be keeping more of our money in the U.S., allowing us all to become rich. That's possible, but mitigated by my second point.)

2) American jobs?
We're going to add jobs by building "wind turbines, pollution scrubbers and more." Presumably this will happen in the same way that we've added jobs by producing consumer electronic goods in the U.S....

Wait, we moved those jobs overseas a while back. Just because it's a green revolution doesn't make the pressure to offshore new jobs any less. If it makes financial sense to let Korea or China make our plasma televisions, it almost certainly makes just as much sense to let those same countries make our turbines and scrubbers. We run into the same issues with environmental manufacturing as we have with any other manufacturing, and any plausible plan needs to address that.


There's another aspect to this - what if the breakthrough in the green revolution doesn't come in the U.S.? We're going to ramp up our educational systems to produce the environmental engineers of the future, but, presumably, we're going to continue to educate the world's children in that area (as in all others). Therefore, there's no guarantee that our efforts to upgrade the workforce will actually upgrade the American workforce. We don't have intellectual property laws covering what someone learns in our colleges, where an Indian MIT grad who finds the next advance is forced to work for an American company until we've wrung every piece of innovation out of him or her.

I'm not advocating restriction of providing educational opportunities to the rest of the world, but we need to think about what will happen if the next big energy discovery comes out of China or Kazakhstan or Norway. We may not be dependent on the Middle East sheiks any longer, but seeing solar-dollars or hydro-dollars flow out of the country instead of petro-dollars hardly seems a slam-dunk improvement.

I'm gonna cap your carbon

I don't write much about environmental issues, global warming and the like, because I'm no expert and offer no special knowledge. I believe that global warning is real, and the debate (largely muted by now) as to whether it's natural or man-made is unhelpful, even specious. Even if it were true that the increase in temperature is largely an outgrowth of natural forces, we've built our society around the conditions we have; New York City developed with sea level at a certain point, and, if that changes, the city will be in trouble.

So if we can do something to mitigate the effects of global warming, we should, but the solutions will have to fit into a context of political and economic reality (Fareed Zakaria, on Charlie Rose last night, said that the U.S. will have to built green energy plants in China and India to replace coal; to his credit, he acknowledged that it would be a tough sell politically - I think he underestimated that).

The answers seem to be coalescing around a consensus, that the nation must invest in research for clean energy, that we need to increase the fuel economy standards, that we must talk up the benefits to adopting everyday measures to cut harmful emissions, and, most particularly, that we should institute a cap-and-trade program for carbon emissions. While this is probably a good idea, there is one grating central idea that underlies all these discussions (there was a pretty good summary of the current cap-and-trade situation in TIME magazine written by Eric Pooley).

I could summarize cap-and-trade, but I'll let Wikipedia do the job this time:

A central authority (usually a government or international body) sets a limit or cap on the amount of a pollutant that can be emitted. Companies or other groups are issued emission permits and are required to hold an equivalent number of allowances (or credits) which represent the right to emit a specific amount. The total amount of allowances and credits cannot exceed the cap, limiting total emissions to that level. Companies that need to increase their emissions must buy credits from those who pollute less. The transfer of allowances is referred to as a trade. In effect, the buyer is paying a charge for polluting, while the seller is being rewarded for having reduced emissions by more than was needed. Thus, in theory, those that can easily reduce emissions most cheaply will do so, achieving the pollution reduction at the lowest possible cost to society.

I'll not get into the charges and cross-charges that surround the general idea of cap-and-trade, especially as it compares to direct taxation. What I want to talk about is why this mechanism is so attractive to people in the modern-day political climate.

That can be simply expressed (Pooley: "That's the trade in cap and trade, and it harnesses the power of the
marketplace to fight warming, a concept that helped Republicans like McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee, fall in love with the idea."). This is something that you hear all the time, that cap-and-trade is a market mechanism, and therefore superior to other forms of emission controls.

But, of course, this is nonsense. Cap-and-trade is market-esque, in that half of it is something that appears to be a market. After all, trading is the essential market activity, isn't it? But there's still that nettlesome word cap in the term, and that clearly has nothing to do with the market at all. Whenever an external body creates limitations to a market (or, as in this case, creates the market from nothing), we simply do not have a true market in the economic sense.

I understand there's a need to sell the idea of restricting carbon emissions, especially when it appears that there will be a cost, certainly in financial terms and probably in lifestyle changes, but to push one particular scheme ahead of others because it is "market-based" is spurious.

There's a difficult reality coming, and it's very unlikely that magic will occur and the pain eliminated. The easy way is to continue living as we have, burn oil and gas and coal, fueling a long-driving exurban life.

But it's ever more obvious that the easy way is no way at all. Things will change, and the nation that has been riding the highest on the status quo will have to change the most. That will be a tough realization for the United States, but a necessary one. Invoking the magic of the market won't ease any of the pain, and is intellectually bankrupt to boot.

Click me, choose me

I wrote a post earlier today in which I continued a discussion on how disappointing (to some people) the progress on the Internet has been, how it's failed to solve big problems, how innovation seems to have been lost.

Maybe part of the reason is that we have used the Internet in ways like this. Here is an article on the 30 fastest declining occupations. Instead of writing them in an old, Web 1.0 list, the Boston Globe thought it would be more fun to put them in a gallery, so that each one could have its own page and a picture (check out the picture of wood, or the one with file folders).

Is anyone really going to click through all 34 pages to see every one of these? Having gotten all the way to page 33, are you then going to check out the fastest-growing jobs, another 33-page gallery? (This one features a guy listening to headphones to illustrate computer software engineers.)

And, just to pick on the Boston Globe a little more, here is something even more pointless: a gallery of 25 pages in which the reader is asked to participate in a click poll to determine, yes, which celebrity of a presented pair is taller. You can decide whether Ashlee Simpson or her sister is taller, or Sean Connery vs. Pierce Brosnan. (I'm surprised there isn't a legal disclaimer pointing out that your vote will not actually change the height of any celebrity.)

This is how we use this remarkable technology, for faux-interactive galleries and polls. Coming tomorrow to the Boston Globe: Which number is larger? Which country name has more occurrences of the letter 'e'? Whose tattoo is that? (Oops, they've already done the last one.)

Pick me, choose me, love me

[My title comes from the most urp-inducing moment ever on Grey's Anatomy.]

If you ever wonder why people run for office, you need only look at the current controversy concerning the gasoline tax. (I won't get into the utter folly of the plan itself, plenty of others have already handled that.)

No, my point is that even such a useless bit of pandering gets immediate blanket coverage by the media, merely because it's being offered up by a presidential candidate. This is part of the hierarchy of ideas, which shows that there is no meritocracy even in the marketplace of thinking.

I can come up with the best idea on this blog, innovative thinking, well-presented. But I have very little rep in that market, so the idea just sits out there on a server. Another blogger, say Matt Yglesias, might come up with something, and it might cause a stir in the blogosphere for a few hours, but the interest will taper off quickly and be forgotten tomorrow.

Two months ago, Congressman Dingell of Michigan proposed increasing the gas tax by 50 cents a gallon to reduce consumption. That received a little attention, but not too much. But, let McCain talk about doing something pointless, and let Clinton jump on the bandwagon (flying in the face of he idea that she's such a policy expert), and it's big news.

And you know, that's pretty heady stuff. When you can say any fool thing that pops into your head, and it instantly becomes a major discussion topic for your nation, that's got to be hugely exciting, a real boost to the ego. Hard to believe that isn't at least part of the reason these candidates "put themselves through" the rigors of the campaign.

Are you sure it's not suckitude?

From Why does everything suck?, a trenchant post titled Too Much Suckage, in which Hank Williams discusses how disappointing the Web is, in that it is not producing anything truly useful:

Are we all so devoid of creativity and insight that the best we can come up with is some new mashup on some old mashup all mashed up?

The answer is almost certainly yes.

Williams links to three interesting posts, one notes of a talk given by Tim O'Reilly at the Web 2.0 Expo, another by Paul Graham that essentially calls out the venture capital (VC) companies for not finding the next Google, and the last by Umair Haque that calls out pretty much everybody, in an impassioned call to action (which he parochially restricts to Silicon Valley).

Haque's is the one most on topic, if the topic is the basic uselessness of most of the innovation we're seeing today. He feels that the "radical innovators," whether they be VC firms or technical wizards, aren't doing enough:

There are huge shocks rolling across the global economic landscape. Here are just a few. Food prices are skyrocketing. The financial system is melting down. Energy, of course, is more and more toxic, and costly. We are all, make no mistake, dancing on the precipice of economic cataclysm.

It is the obligation of radical innovators to create new value by solving these problems - or cede capital and resources to those who can.

But today's revolutionaries are sheep in wolves' clothing. They're lost in the economically meaningless, in the utterly trivial, in the strategically banal: mostly, they're cutting deals with one another to...try and sell more ads. That is, when they're not too busy partying.

I have no doubt that these people have a point. I certainly get the feeling that most of what I see is derivative; everyone is adding social networking to their websites, because, of course, I want to bond with every other person who checks on Cubs scores.

But I think that these people are asking too much from the Internet, especially as it's been rolled into the fervor over the so-called Web 2.0. I'm not precisely sure what that is, but no one else is either; the definition seems to be coalescing into the user interactive aspect of the Internet.

And most of that is junk. Look, I write a blog, so obviously I feel there's some value in doing so. I like reading other people's blogs. But, if they all went away tomorrow, I'd survive. The ability to leave comments on, for example, newspaper stories has less value still. I admit it's kind of neat to get some feedback from a columnist I've enjoyed reading, but it's not so neat, obviously, that I'd pay anything for it. Slapping a comment section on everything may seem cool, building new communities and all, but the general level of comments makes it far more of an ordeal than providing an opportunity to interact with fellow thinkers.

I love the idea that economic cataclysm is going to be solved by using the Internet; it sounds very neat and clean and cool, but it's highly unlikely. Economics comes out of real activities, real added value, not out of a virtual mental frame. There's a reason that buzz-worthy Second Life hasn't made any money, there's no there there. Nothing has received more press than MySpace/Facebook (they're pretty much the same thing), but there is no clear context for generating revenue. Even such a "success" as YouTube is not as much a success as the average bicycle shop, if you measure success by feeding one's family.

We've been told time and again that the Internet has brought us a revolution, but let's get serious. Where's the revolution? It's been used mostly as another marketing channel by people with things to sell. There's a lot of boring chitchat about potential Lost spoilers, or people's uninformed opinions about the Dancing with the Stars results.

It undoubtedly has made some things more convenient, but I don't think we've even reached the point yet at which the sudden disappearance of the Internet would be catastrophic. It may become that central someday, but I don't believe it's close to that now.

The closest analogy to the Internet is television. When television came to the living room, it was heralded as a great boon to education, a way of exposing Americans to politics and making them better citizens, an extension of human minds.

What have we actually received from television? Maybe a little of that here and there, but, mostly, it's a pure entertainment medium. You can tell that when you see the priorities of the broadcast networks - how much convention coverage will there be this summer? After all, you can't expect the selection of our leader to take precedence over another episode of Deal or No Deal.

And the Internet is heading the same way. It can be used for shopping, for watching television or movies, for having "conversations" that would bore you in a tavern. But that's a far cry from solving global famine, or the energy crisis, and I think we're very, very far away from the point where it can even begin to help with those problems. The people above who are disappointed with the failure of the Internet to wave its magic wand are asking an awful lot of it.

A Chicago political primer

I've lived almost my entire life in and around Chicago, so I'm pretty accustomed to how politics works around here (though I'm certainly no expert). I guess it's natural that I would forget that other people don't understand it, which would explain some recent outrage. Let me take one issue and try to frame it in Chicago/Illinois politic-think.

As a base for this discussion, I will try to convey some sense of the power of Mayor Richard M. Daley. He has been the mayor of the city of Chicago (by the way, it is always said that way, the city of Chicago, I guess so it won't be confused with the state of Chicago) for 19 years, and he will be mayor as long as he wants to be. His father was mayor for 21 years, and it is very likely that his son will take over for him. But numbers don't come close to explaining the hold he has over this city.

Let me put it this way: Daley has the ultimate power, in that he doesn't have to involve himself in any issue he doesn't want to. During the recent transit crisis, in which it appeared that thousands of Chicagoans would have serious problems getting to work, the mayor was absent. Even though there are few things more basic to the livability of a large city than moving people around it, Mayor Daley did nothing to break through the logjam in Springfield - he didn't have to, or want to, so he didn't.

Nothing of any importance occurs outside of the mayoral purview. Only the incredibly naive believe otherwise. Therefore, if you want to accomplish something, if you want to be someone in Chicago or Illinois politics, you go through the mayor. The remarkably inept current governor of Illinois is there largely because he married the daughter of a stooge alderman.

Now let me tell the stories of two people, two young men who wanted to make a difference.

The first grew up wealthy, the son of a utility company executive (again, I can only imperfectly relate how important the leaders of public utilities are in Chicago, but they are extremely important, and need to have very close ties to the mayor). The young lad went off to a Big Ten school, where he, as young people will, became suffused with the power of change. There was a war on, and society seemed to be turning, and many students of the time joined groups, marched, burned draft cards.

But this young man was a high achiever, and hooked up with a group that believed bombs were useful instruments of change. (I know, we call them terrorists these days, but it was a different time.) After three of his friends blew themselves up, he and his future wife went on the run. About ten years later, he turned himself in, and all charges ended up being dropped due to misconduct by the prosecutors.

He went back to school, made himself into something of an expert in education, and came back to Chicago to teach. In no small part because of his family ties, he has become an important figure in school reform, and has been praised by, that's right, Mayor Daley. Despite his past, he's got serious juice, so much so that he can be unrepentant about his past and not see any diminution in his power.

The second man didn't have any connection to Chicago until he was 23 or 24, worked as a community organizer, then, after three years, went east to get a law degree from Harvard, then returned to Chicago. (An important note here: you might think that a Harvard J.D. would be a real plus, but it absolutely isn't in Chicago. You're far better off with a degree from Loyola or DePaul; you can't trust those high-falutin' Ivy League lawyers.)

Within six years, this young man, articulate, intelligent, persuasive, had worked his way into the Illinois Senate. He tried for the U.S. House, failed, then ran for the U.S. Senate. He was up against a very attractive Republican candidate. The Republican wasn't ideal, as he had two graduate degrees from Harvard, but he had redeemed himself by retiring from an investment banking company and taking a job as a teacher in a Chicago high school. He was articulate, intelligent, and persuasive.

(By the way, Republicans can do fine in state-wide office, despite the fact that the Daleys are Democrats. The issue is, will they do anything to hurt Chicago? Almost no one will, so there is no conflict; Mayor Daley might not openly support a Republican for Congress or governor, but he won't necessarily have a problem with it.)

The Republican did turn out to have a problem; he had been married to a glamorous actress, and, apparently, had wanted to take her to (and "in") sex clubs in various cities. He dropped out, and the Illinois Republican Party, having no uncorrupted candidates, imported a fringe (if perpetual) candidate from out of state, who lost big to our young man.

After a couple of years in the Senate, this young man decided to run for president, a preposterous idea if ever there was one.

By now it's painfully obvious to anyone that I'm talking about William Ayres and Barack Obama, two men that have been linked, most obviously in the painful Democratic debate in Pennsylvania a couple of weeks ago. And I think I've given enough context to understand the dynamic.

On the one hand, you have a man with a, to say the least, checkered past, but one who's parlayed his connections into remarkable success. He knows the right people, most notably the mayor of the city of Chicago, and has a long list of accomplishments.

On the other hand, you have a man with no family connections, no background in this city - he doesn't come from Bridgeport, or Palos, or even Lincoln Park, and he sure didn't bring a lot of money he could spread around.

Again, remember that Chicago isn't close to being a meritocracy, and it doesn't pretend to be. If Obama had any chance of effecting change through politics, he would have to do it through the system. Being African-American wasn't necessarily a problem, not any more, but he certainly had to play within the system, pay tribute where needed.

And he meets Bill Ayres. This is a guy who knows the right people, moves in the right circles. No one cares about his past, inexplicable as that might be - he's a good person to know, and he lives right around the corner.

Explain to me how Barack Obama turns him away. Explain to me, given the context I've described, how Obama purses his lips and says coldly to a friend of Mayor Daley, "I will not associate with you because of your past." How, indeed?

[Personal disclaimer here: a good friend of my mother was related to one of the members of the Weather Underground, one of those who was blown up. I guess that makes me unsuitable for any future political positions.]

(By the way, this post was "inspired" by a Matthew Yglesias post from yesterday. He questioned how Ayres could have this "banal-yet-prominent position on the scene." I hope I've given the reader some idea as to how this has happened.)

Boycott, girlcott, we all cott

Via Andrew Sullivan, John Hinderaker on Power Line:

Barack Obama has boycotted Fox News for the past two years. Obama's boycott ended today, as he was interviewed by Chris Wallace. The result suggests that Obama had nothing to fear from the ostensibly hostile crowd at Fox.

I didn't see the Fox interview with Obama, so I'll assume that what I've heard is right, that he did a good job. No, my point today has to do with the word "boycott."

When did "boycott" change from a group action to an individual one? Apparently, it has, but I didn't notice it until a few weeks ago when various politicians (e.g., Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton) began urging President Bush to boycott the Olympic opening ceremonies.

I have always understood "boycott" to refer to the action of a group, refusing to buy products or do business with some offending party. I'll grant the definition in a number of dictionaries I consulted do not entirely specify a group: from American Heritage, "To abstain from or act together in abstaining from using, buying, or dealing with as an expression of protest or disfavor or as a means of coercion," though the word "together" is there.

The first time I remember the use of "boycott" was the grape boycott organized by Cesar Chavez. In all the years since, though, I can never remember it being applied to the actions of a single person.

The question is, is this change in usage meant to aggrandize the person or the event? Do we talk about Obama or Bush boycotting something because we want to make them more important, or because we want to make more out of what is a matter of individual choice to call attention to the issue?

Given the identity of the callers in the cases above, I'm assuming the latter. But if it's a "boycott" without a statement of larger principle, is it even important? If Bush decided not to attend the Beijing Olympics out of solidarity with Tibetans or Sudanese (and what in his presidency would make anyone believe that these are sufficient reasons to get him to do anything?), we would hardly expect him to call out the Chinese directly - he would cite "scheduling conflicts" or "ranch brush emergency," anything but risking a Chinese loss of face.

Or maybe it's a way of embarrassing the "boycotter." Clinton and Pelosi don't think Bush will accede, so they make an issue of it and inflate it further by using the term, "boycott." Similarly, Power Line isn't traditionally a pro-Obama blog, so they, in effect, ridicule him subtly by terming his previous failures to appear on Fox as a "boycott" (though Hinderaker was fairly positive, to his credit, while still insisting that McCain would win in November).

I don't profess to fully understand this, but I know that, when I refuse to do business at one company or another, I'll feel a little more proud thinking that I'm boycotting.

In loco agentis

I was finishing reading a Sports Illustrated from a couple of weeks ago, and one of the articles concerned the rehab of University of Oregon quarterback Dennis Dixon. Dixon tore his ACL this past season, likely moving down in the NFL draft (he was drafted yesterday in the fifth round). I've seen him on TV a couple of times, he is a very exciting player, and I wish him the best in his recovery.

The article opens with a description of the University of Oregon training facility:

...looks like the spa at a five-star boutique hotel, if all the guests were between 18 and 23 and the bulk of them weighed more than 300 pounds. The floors are finished oak, the walls smoked glass, the lighting soothingly dim. The 15,000-square-foot complex includes 25 stainless steel massage tables, a pharmacy lit with green neon and examination rooms for a dentist and an ophthalmologist.

Dixon is running on an underwater treadmill, while a university intern records him, then posts the footage to Dixon's website "so that NFL coaches, scouts and general managers can monitor the progress of his surgically repaired left knee."

I could rail against the remarkable facilities granted to elite athletes at our educational institutions; Nike founder Phil Knight is largely responsible for this five-star spa, T. Boone Pickens has given many millions to Oklahoma State for sports, and so forth. But I've pretty much given up on this topic. Rich people can do what they want with their money, and, if they choose to dump their millions into winning another game on the gridiron or the hardwood, that's their right (yes, I realize that Knight has financed those contributions largely through sweatshop labor - I don't buy Nike shoes, and that's about all I can do for now).

No, the point of this post comes from this sentence:

For five months Oregon has deployed its considerable resources to another project: reconstructing the quarterback who was once the nation's best and preparing him for the NFL draft on April 26-27.

Here we have a state university, one funded in part by the taxpayers of Oregon (to the tune of $3,232 per student, which the University contends is woefully low - seems OK to me). Yet it devotes time and money to moving one student up in the professional draft, instead of trying to improve its 112th-place standing in the US News & World Report college rankings.

I'm aware of all the arguments, all variants of "we invest in him now, he gives us big donations later." The same points apply to the oft-heard idea that players in the revenue-generating sports should be cut in on the deal, that football and basketball players should be openly paid.

But can't we at least pretend, for four years, that we don't have a privileged class of fast-running, hard-hitting, marginally-thinking young people? Look, I have been a sports fan my whole life, and I accept that the market will reward professional athletes in a disproportional way. I have seen the way that adults fawn over 15-year-olds who can catch a football, distorting their egos forever. Our creation of a deity class of symbolic warriors is complete.

However, there is no reason to officially consecrate this thinking. A public university should at least pretend that all students are equal. If Dennis Dixon needs an intern to chronicle his rehab so he can move up in the draft, let him pay for one. Open these state-of-the-art facilities to every student (actually, other students have a bigger claim, they're actually paying tuition).

Our colleges have done everything they can to move away from in loco parentis, the idea that they have a responsibility to stand in the "place of parents." Fearing lawsuits, administrators look the other way when underage drinking is rife on campus. Heaven forfend they act like adults and enforce regulations on their "customers." (That thinking has even extended to high schools. The high school nearest my house features students smoking across the street; apparently school officials are incapable of walking over and telling the kids to cut it out - after all, they're on private property.)

On the other hand, when a young man has the opportunity to grab a lucrative professional sports career, no expense or attention is too much. In effect, the University of Oregon is acting as an unpaid agent for Dennis Dixon. Don't we all wish the Placement Office would go that extra mile for every single student?