Sports "journalism"

I know, I'm flogging a dead horse even to try to take seriously what goes on in the fun and games section of even a respected newspaper like the Chicago Tribune, but this is my last chance to criticize the "old' Tribune before their upcoming cool, compete-with-the-Internet redesign (coming Sunday, apparently).

Actually, the Tribune is only one of the many outlets that suffer from what I'm saying here, but I have higher expectations of them than I do of local sports news or the abomination that is sports talk radio. One assumes that their columnists are a little more considered and rational than the blowhards who make and take phone calls right after the game.

Of course, I'm wrong. Tuesday the buzz in Chicago was that the White Sox were going to wrap up the divisional championship with ease, that their 2-1/2 game lead made the title a cinch, that it was business as usual. I can't really convey to you the offhandedness with which these assumptions were made, but it pervaded every single story.

Let me say here that I am the unusual Cub fan who also roots for the Sox. My first baseball game was at old Comiskey Park, and the first pennant race I remember well was the 1967 American League, in which four teams, including both Sox, had a chance to win on the final weekend (I still have vague memories of the long list of playoff possibilities if 2, 3, or 4 teams all tied for the title). I don't follow the Sox as closely as I do the Cubs - I waste enough time on baseball every summer - but I have no animosity toward them, and I can never understand why that's considered so natural in Chicago (I think it has to do with pinheads, yes, pinheads).

Each day since Tuesday, though, has been a lesson in journalistic hysteria. The Sox lost all three games against the Twins this week, now trail them by a half game, and the attitude has turned 180 degrees. Now there's screaming, gnashing of teeth, calls for the manager's head, statements that the writer "knew it all along."

What a joke! Even within the strange rules of "sports journalism," this manic-depression is inappropriate. Try covering the games, gang, tell us what you see, explain why things are happening. I don't want a deep dose of your psyche every time a game goes the "wrong way." I'll decide what I want to feel, I don't need your hyper-overreaction trying to frame it for me.

Before the first debate

I'm profoundly disappointed with John McCain. While I never really bought into his "maverick" status, no matter how eagerly the press thrust that label upon him, I thought him free enough of current Republican orthodoxy to offer something different in this campaign. While I have been frank about my slight preference for Obama in 2008, feeling that he represented the best hope of swinging the pendulum back toward democratic ideals and away from free-market obsession, it has always been a curiously passionless preference. His lack of experience is a concern to me, though what I have seen of his approach to that, so very unBush-like provided some comfort.

My greatest hope was that McCain would force Obama to up his game, that he would run a campaign as free of Republican orthodoxy as he has been touted as being, that we would avoid the Willie Horton-izing and the Swift Boat-ing, at least mostly, and focus on our challenges. [I realize that seems naive, that no campaign in my lifetime has spent enough time on the issues, but I can dream.]

At least as important was my wish that we could spend an election pretty much ignoring "the base," that collection of theocratic knee-jerk voters who seem to be the ones mostly responsible for the Bush horror show. They don't like McCain, I know because Rush told me, and they sure as heck don't like Obama. So maybe, for once, instead of ignoring my needs as a voter, we could ignore the needs of those who are convinced that we need less gum'mint, so we need to get gum'mint to tell gum'mint to lay off (or whatever their reasoning is).

But then McCain decided to throw in his lot with Bush on the two biggest issues we have; though that didn't seem to appease the base much, it certainly turned off anyone like me. And then came Sarah, one of the most cynical and contemptuous choices I have ever seen from a major candidate. We can find a few motives for McCain's choice, each one more distressing than the last.

And then this week, the week of suspending the campaign, which was foolish, unnecessary, and a total lie, the inability to do anything to assist in the bailout effort, and the unsuspension of the campaign, all done with incompetence and mendacity. And we've seen this all before, for the past eight years, and we see that McCain can do Bush, only, amazingly, less competently.

So here is the first debate, coming up in less than an hour, and, my friends, I expect very little. Given what has happened over the last couple of months, I would be stunned to see anything that will change my view. And that is profoundly disappointing, as I would love to be in a position in which there was something left to decide, in which two honest men were laying out their plans for the future of this nation, and I could look at each plan, and weigh, and decide.

But that isn't going to happen. Only one of the men on the stage tonight has even a chance to be honest. The other, blinded by his ambition for an office that he thought should be his already, stunned that he lost in 2000 to a profoundly unqualified candidate and is likely to lose again, in his last chance, to another man he considers of less merit, has no "straight talk" to offer. I'll watch, but McCain's chance of regaining his credibility with me is vanishingly minute, and that saddens me.

Bush and Brian, making us laugh

The funniest part of Bush's speech last night, which I'm rapidly becoming convinced nobody but me watched, had nothing to do with the speech itself; there's really nothing at all funny about a president who neglects problems for 7-3/4 years, then tries to convince the country that we should all jump on his bandwagon now to address them.

No, it was afterwards, as Brian Williams hastily tried to make way for America's Got Talent, and he did the usual, "for more coverage of the financial crisis, turn to MSNBC, CNBC, Telemundo (or does NBC own Univision), Polska TV, Oxygen, HGTV, and the Internet (you may have guessed I'm paraphrasing generously here), and also tune into your late local news (emphasis mine)."

Ha, ha, ha, Brian. The probability that my late local news will have any insight into this situation is less than zero. I knew they would cover the Trump Tower topping-off ceremony (look, the Donald noticed us, this Podunk town of Chicago), show a few baseball highlights, devote an inordinate amount of time to the weather, but Warner and Alison (fill in the names of your own ethnically-, racially-, and genderly-balanced news team here)? Give us any information about a complicated business problem? Please, Brian, I know you've met them, I've seen the ads where these seven-figure news readers swoon over breathing the same air as you.

I guess that's why Brian makes the big money, his ability to read stuff like that without dissolving into gales of laughter.

The downside of prayer

Do you think there are a whole bunch of people sweating right now, people who underwent some crisis in their lives and, in the bargaining stage, said, "God, please just keep me alive until the Cubs win the World Series," then sat back, secure in the knowledge that they had very likely just become immortal?

The vacuum of leadership

I will admit that I haven't gone out and checked every possible blog, but I have looked at many of the usual suspects, and there has been pretty much zero comment on the Bush speech tonight, at least so far (two hours after he finished). It seems clear that few people find any of what the president has to say particularly relevant.

For my part, I found the speech pitched at about the third grade level, and basically boiled down to the typical Bushian "I think it's a good thing to do so just go along with it." Given his approval ratings, isn't this more likely to turn citizens away from the plan?

Review - Compulsion

Clinical psychologist Jonathan Kellerman has become famous (and, presumably, wealthy) from his series of crime novels, most featuring (as the flyleaf says) "the modern Sherlock Holmes of the psyche," psychologist Alex Delaware. I have read this series (now up to 22 books) ever since the first, When the Bough Breaks (1985), so I have followed the exploits of Dr. Delaware even before these books became guaranteed Number 1 best sellers.

And that's why I have found recent entries in the series, including the most recent, Compulsion (2008), so disappointing. The original books crackled with excitement as we saw Alex, whose independent wealth gives him the time to go traipsing around crime scenes, wrestle with psychologically complex killers as he worked out his own life. We never delved into the doctor's mind the way that James Lee Burke has done with his Dave Robicheaux character, but there was some sense of progress and, in a series, the main character's development is a critical part of why we keep coming back.

Obviously, that can be overdone. As I talked about in my review of the last Kay Scarpetta novel by Patricia Cornwell, a writer can get so carried away with the development of the main character that it can swamp the actual book, leading to preposterousness or, worse yet, boredom. And Kellerman has avoided that trap in Compulsion by failing to show us any of the internal workings of Delaware, even though the story is told in first person.

What used to be a nice juxtaposition of the mental insights of the doctor with the straight-ahead police work of his longtime foil, Milo Sturgis, has been reduced to a few admiring comments from Sturgis on Alex's incisive questions in an interview. There is virtually no reason for this police procedural even to include a psychologist, as his talents are not needed (most of Alex's effort involves the kind of legwork that any young cop could do).

So we're left with a few interesting character sketches (Kellerman has always had a talent for including a few witnesses/suspects who are drawn in brief but fascinating ways) and a plot, well, two and a half plots (the half is a minute subplot concerning Delaware's long-time love, the beautiful luthier Robin). The main plot concerns a series of killings that initially seem to be unrelated, but we never doubt will be, and this is a by-the-numbers, Law & Order: Criminal Intent-style story with very little engagement and even less menace. None of it really comes together, the surprise twist is ho-hum, and the resolution unexciting.

Far more affecting are the other two plots, which do carry some real emotional kick, but are quite brief. That the resolution of a 16-year-old case carries more weight than the main plotline is a serious problem for this book; that the virtual throwaway of the half-plot concerning the construction of a mandolin does too is even more of a fatal flaw.

After writing three Alex Delaware novels, Kellerman wrote a crime thriller set in Israel called The Butcher's Theater; that was surprisingly good even without the crutch of the hero we had come to know. Maybe it's time for him to put Delaware on the shelf for a year or two, do something else, and come back to the tried and true with fresh eyes.

Let 'em keep their bucks, what can it hurt?

At least that seems to be the attitude of a lot of the punditocracy. Over the weekend I heard several commentators opine that an insistence that putting limits on executive compensation as part of the bailout plan was pointless, that it wouldn't accomplish much, that it would detract from the real hard work of straightening out the nation's economy. Then Andrew Sullivan points us to an Ezra Klein post (titled The Executive Compensation Scam) that reads, in part:

The Democrats are making a big deal over limits on executive compensation. Such limits are nice, but in the context of this crisis, utterly meaningless. If Democrats extract concessions such that CEOs can be paid a lot of money rather than an obscene sum of money, but are unable to add provisions protecting homeowners, they will have lost, and lost badly.. Limits to executive compensation are a feel-good provision with little real world relevance or impact, and while it would be nice to have them in the bill, no one should be fooled into thinking them a high-level priority, nor believing that a compromise where compensation limits feature as a key Democratic boast suggests anything other than a total collapse in the negotiations.

This is rather stupid. Is there really someone at the negotiation table who has the power to say, "OK, we'll put some limitations on CEO pay, but, in return for that, we will do nothing to help homeowners"? Who would be taking that position, exactly? No one in politics, to be sure, and this crisis has inconveniently come around in an election year.

At any rate, this is not really supposed to be a negotiation, but a bailout. The people with the money, namely the representatives of the American people, need to dictate the terms of this deal to the people who need the money, the CEOs. If they don't want the money, fine by me, we'll just let the taxpayers keep a bit more of the money they've earned. (Actually, given the virtual acquisition of AIG by the government, one can easily envision the U.S. employing hostile takeover tactics if needed; let's make an offer to the board if the CEO doesn't want to play just because we'll take away a few of his toys.)

For those people who call this a minor issue, one which shouldn't be allowed to sidetrack an otherwise wonderful deal (yes, that was sarcasm), it's not, because SYMBOLS MATTER. Any journalist who sat through two four-day political conventions just a few weeks ago should understand that these content-free shows are designed to produce gobs and gobs of happy symbols, fleecing the voter with feel-good moments instead of serious attempts to convince anyone why one party's better than the other.

Yet these same journalists are now applying cost-benefit analyses to the bailout and deciding that it just isn't worth it to apply some unwanted discipline to runaway executive compensation packages. We shouldn't be bothered that the three-month tenure of AIG CEO Robert Willumstad is entitled to be rewarded with $22 million (yes, I know that he has turned it down, but the appalling thing is that he is eligible for it).

We're asking the American people to take on vast amounts of risk and debt while permitting those who profited from the risk and created that debt to walk away with treasuries worth of money, and educated people see that as just part of the price that needs to be paid (and I am tired of Barney Frank and others telling us that the government may make money off this bailout; you have no way of knowing that, so you're just lying).

There are people, hard-working people, who are wondering if they'll keep their houses, keep their jobs, keep their lives, and we debate whether or not we can put a provision in a rescue plan that punishes the perpetrators of this monstrous fraud? Is this crazy?

Guess what, pundits, it's possible to put more than one provision into a complicated piece of legislation. We can try to fix the financial situation (with emphasis on the word "try"), maybe help out some of the homeowners and investors (attempting not to reward truly irresponsible behavior), and penalize the nimrods whose poor judgment and laser-like focus on the short term got us into this Ponzi scheme in the first place.

I'm not incredibly hopeful here anyway. We have two disfunctional groups, our Congress and the high-roller financiers, sitting down to hammer out an agreement to fix a system which rational people knew was already broken. Crisis rarely brings on judicious thought, and the American people seem all too content to call on Bruce Willis...no, Superman...no, of course I mean Big Hank Paulson (and his successor - Phil Gramm, anyone?) to clean up a problem which he ignored, well, until now.

Yo, government, hurricanes can hit cities, wars kill people, and an unregulated financial system leads to collapse and insecurity. Prayer might have seemed like a good proactive step to handle all these things, but it just hasn't worked. The cracks have been in the foundation for years; the time to seal them came before the 2-foot rain.

But we didn't do that, so now our basement is flooded. Is it really so wrong for the American people to insist that the CEOs have to get out the buckets like everyone else?

Passwords

Speaking of Joel Spolsky, as I did in my last post, I don't mention him very often because his very popular site, Joel on Software, doesn't need any pub from me, and I don't write about software much on this blog.

I'll make an exception here because Joel published a post while I was away that deals with the problem of managing passwords. If you're like me, you have passwords on a whole lot of different sites (five e-mail accounts, a few bank and financial institutions, and so on, and so on), and you might get nervous about either of the two common solutions: 1) Use the same password for all (maybe with some slight variations), or 2) Have a file someplace that contains all of your passwords. Neither of these is ideal, as I'm sure you know.

I cannot yet personally vouch for the method that Joel outlines (I just read the post), but I plan to give it a try, and Joel has a pretty good track record on ideas and recommendations.

So what makes...

a successful blog? I surely don't know for certain, but it's a question I've seen discussed a time or two and I'll offer some thoughts.

If one listens to the hype about Web 2.0, one would assume that a good blog needs to have an open and active comments section. Then it's not just a series of thoughts by a single person, which could seem boring after a while, but it becomes a community in which the blogger throws out ideas and the intelligence of the crowd magnifies those ideas.

There's a lot wrong with that theory, clearly. All the successful blogs of The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan, Ross Douthat, James Fallows, and the rest, seem to have quite large followings, and there is nary a comment to be found on them. At some point someone seems to have reached the conclusion that there was no need to create that kind of community on these blogs, and they seem to work fine.

[Note 1: I find Andrew Sullivan pretty good, if exhausting to read, but does he always have to have a target for his feelings? I wasn't in love with Hillary's run, but Sullivan posted many times a day on why she was such a bad candidate. Now that she's gone, it's on to Sarah Palin. To be sure, he is talking about important things (The Twelve Lies of Sarah Palin is a must-read), but it is tiring to wade through the number of words he puts down about her every...single...day.]

[Note 2: I'm using Web 2.0 in its most common definition, that of user-generated content, which is how most people seem to take that term. For an alternative view, read the invaluable Hank Williams at Why does everything suck?, who has been writing some posts (one recent one here) on Web 2.0 vs. Web 3.0 - very provocative, uncommon thinking.]

Furthermore, given the relative meaninglessness of the vast majority of comments that are written, that community objective certainly isn't being realized very often on the sites that do allow comments. Despite the publicity about how the Web is what the users will it to be, I've seen little so far that convinces me that we're getting particularly close to that. Too many blog comments are still the random scribbling in the margins of a book you find in the street; there's a far greater chance that the book is interesting than the scribbling.

All of which is a fairly long-winded way of coming around to a prosaic idea: Content remains defined by the original content, and the model really hasn't changed all that much from the newspaper, book, and magazine method we've had for years. If someone's blog is reasonably well-written with interesting subjects and opinions on those subjects, it's probably a good blog.

We may one day move beyond that, to a point where the Web enables new structures that allow blogs to be more than their base-level material, but I don't think we're particularly close yet. (That's not the case with non-blog material, and admittedly I haven't tried to define "blog" here. For a look at what someone is doing that tries to use the Web in a more expansive way, check out this post by Joel Spolsky, in which he describes how some folks are trying to redefine Programmer Q&A websites, which are, for the most part, dreadful and disappointing. Even if you're not a programmer, it's worth reading the post to see how some people are trying to think beyond the already-ossified way things are done on the Internet.)

So, if I were to offer advice to a new blogger, it would be to write interestingly about interesting things, and let the Web 2.0-type stuff take care of itself. In the end, you will learn more from your own efforts than from your comments (some people will argue with that statement, but I'm referring to the vast majority of blogs), and the discipline of casting your thoughts out into the ether will prove useful to you.

Blogging fatigue

One might think that I would come back from vacation fired up and ready to blog, full of lengthy trip reports and photos of the remarkable Utah geography, with the kind of insights that only travel can bring (what does the Utah story reveal that is different from my usual Illinois existence?).

Instead, I barely got a truncated trip report in on Friday, made a political comment on Saturday, and gleaned one personal observation from my travels on Sunday. I've also taken the questionable time to respond to comments I received while I was away, the vast majority of which were from a single person - some of them had some interest, others betrayed a colossal misreading of what I wrote and imputed to me beliefs I have never espoused. I probably should have spent less time formulating replies to those.

And there are things going on, things that cry out for some comment, the financial meltdown and accompanying bailout (the American Taxpayer Hold-Executives-Blameless Plan), the continuing campaign with pigs and lipstick and a chirpy small-town mayor who has an excellent chance to become president, the clinching of a second straight division title by my Chicago Cubs, the perfect awfulness of the Emmy telecast, the rapidly encroaching autumn if I want to wax rhapsodic over the seasons. Heck, I could take some of the comments I received and turned them into posts (but should I really spend time defending myself from spurious ideas? Is it really worth my while to point out that I have never claimed that we are run by an "idiocracy," especially when my commenter uses that erroneous formulation to brand me a loser and a failure?).

But right now, I don't care. Whether it's due to the fact that my few reasonable readers are all quite quiet and the noisy ones are, well, not consistently reasonable, or the reality that nine months of blogging really hasn't amounted to anything (c'mon, one little book contract is all I ask), or the realization that all the bloggers on all their chairs haven't made one executive think, hmm, what are the long-term effects of this offshoring and should I hold off?, I'm simply weary of opening up my head and my heart for the examination of anyone who wanders by.

I'm even tired of reading other blogs. These careful examinations by bright people as to why McCain or Obama would be a disaster for this country, all these futile words being thrown at people who are still going to vote by the famous Bush, who do I want to have a beer with, measure, they all seem rather pointless. The earnest people who look at the financial bailout, try to make sense of it and propose something other than that we give Hank "Working for the Weekend" Paulson czar-like powers, they're just spittin' in the wind (as Sarah would say) if they think that these decisions will be made on the basis of what's best for the taxpayer or the homeowner. I've started to see posts and articles on defining the Bush legacy, as if history will look at these eight years as anything other than the point at which it became clear that you couldn't just set and forget the American Dream in order to sustain it, that laissez-faire and "king of the mountain" are great ways to produce rich people but lousy ways to produce a functioning society.

Maybe I'm just frustrated by other people in general. The folks who believe that a good People magazine back story about moose and snow machines and five oddly-named kids are a replacement for actual competence and truth, the folks who have twisted respect for an office into a need to prop up the complete incompetence of the people who hold the office, or, more personally, the people who purport to be friends when you have something to offer them, whether it is a job opportunity or a ticket to a playoff game, but are absent when you simply want to be and to have a friend, I'm kind of down on all of them right now.

I have no conclusion to offer here, perhaps I'll have some spring in my step and a song in my heart tomorrow. Maybe the season premiere of Two and a Half Men will redefine my life and make me eager to embrace the world in its totality again (I don't know about you, but that Charlie Sheen never fails to make me laugh). It's possible that I'll read that Howie Mandel has decided to quit show business after watching a tape of his Emmy performance last night, and I'll know once again that there's a God in heaven and justice can prevail. I'll let you know.

Hanging-out stuff

I don't comment on things like personal attractiveness, because this isn't that kind of blog. But I'm going to make an exception today; I hope that doesn't turn off any readers.

I am a straight male, so I do tend to notice the, ahem, attributes of females, I think in a fairly natural and visceral way. I don't walk around with my tongue hanging out, I don't whistle or catcall, and, most importantly, I don't confuse that first reaction with anything larger (at least I hope not; I've met smart blonds and stupid people with glasses, and I find that my initial impression based on looks is very quickly subsumed to other considerations, but I'd be lying if I claimed I'm totally oblivious to such things).

During my trip to Utah, I took a quick stop at Brigham Young University on a Sunday afternoon. My knowledge of the Mormon church is scant, though I know enough to recognize that it does tend toward the conservative in personal matters, so I was not entirely surprised to find that the students dressed quite well, suits for the males, long skirts or dresses for the females. (I also happened to be there eight days later and, while Monday doesn't feature quite the formality, there still appears to be a higher standard of dress than at the average college.)

Of course, I also spent quite a bit of time in our national parks and other outdoor locations, and, as anyone with eyes could probably foresee, saw quite a bit of unharnessed flesh. The most extreme case may have been the young woman who removed her pants to go wading in the Great Salt Lake, walking about in rather scanty unmentionables, or perhaps it was the young woman on all fours at the Four Corners Monument, but it would be hard not to have noticed the acres of cleavage and rear exposure.

And you know what, I found the first group far more attractive. Whether the members of group two had the goods or not (no, the muffin top look is never very alluring, ladies...and gentlemen), there simply was something unmoving about the bosoms and buttocks that seem to be de rigueur in today's "fashions."

I suppose one might say something about primate display, as young people attempt to demonstrate their sexual availability, or it might imply something about my encroaching fuddy-duddiness - I don't know about that. I'm sure the young women with all their stuff hanging out don't care what I think, but, in my book, amazing other people with how much you can show is not the same thing as demonstrating how attractive you can be. A pretty girl can wear a parka and still be lovely; a bustier and a thong don't do anything to enhance that.

The future of the Republican Party

To show that I have not been totally oblivious to some of the larger issues during my trip, I had another thought about the McCain selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate. I have expressed puzzlement and concern about this pick before, and Governor Palin's remarkable media and popular attention has done little to dispel my misgivings.

I accepted long ago that I would rarely find absolutely perfect politicians to get behind. While it is clear that I lean toward Obama, I have doubts as to his ability to effect major change in Washington, and doubt that he even really means to. It's very hard for someone for whom the system has consistently worked to understand how badly it is failing for so many. When Obama did his community work, his "customers" were people who had fairly obvious problems, be it addiction or poor education or long-term poverty, and helping them, while frustrating at times, was a matter of gaining for them opportunities to get things they had never had - addiction counseling, training, and so forth.

But the problems that confront a growing number of people today are afflicting some who have done the right things, who have gone to the "right" schools and had good jobs, but are seeing opportunities to succeed taken away by those who would rather use overseas or immigrant labor. I don't believe the problems of income inequality and, worse, opportunity inequality are likely to be solved by legislative fiat; therefore, those problems, the result of complex social and economic transactions, will be harder to solve, and I don't think Obama has the answers to them (as I have written before, there is no reason to believe that New Energy will beget a New Economy, and Obama's inability or unwillingness to understand that is a major blind spot).

But let's look at McCain's choice of Palin, what that implies for the Republican Party in the future, and what that says about John McCain, the "original maverick."

Whatever happens in November, Sarah Palin is poised to become a major figure in the party for at least the next 30 years (ending around the time she becomes a great-great-grandmother). Her fame and popularity, which may actually be enhanced if her ticket loses this fall (the actual need to govern so often causes problems, darn it), will ensure that she will be a "name" for years to come. And that means the party will likely continue on its current path, its theocratic, anti-science, anti-logic, know-nothing path. And that means there will not be a place in it for people like me, well, probably as long as I'll be here.

I have written before that I am a lapsed Republican, and that is largely the result of the party moving away from me, beginning in the time of Ronald Reagan and continuing through the reign of G.W. Bush. All of the precepts that I grew up believing are no longer convenient for the party, not in the Atwater-Rove period of anything-for-a-win, and I cannot in all conscience call myself a Republican any longer. And there is nothing in the record or stated beliefs of Sarah Palin that could bring me back. If she is a dominant Republican force going forward, I, and I believe other moderate Republicans, will have no standing in a party made up of ignoramuses (no, not "ignorami," no matter how cute I might think it is). The chant of "Drill, baby, drill" at the Republican convention was chilling in its celebration of stupidity.

And what does this say about the judgment of John McCain? As a self-styled maverick, one who ostensibly takes issue with the policies of George W. Bush, he might be thought to want to move the party away from its bizarre and ahistorical orthodoxy of the past few years. His apparent desire to pick Joe Lieberman as his running mate, no matter how disastrous I would think that to be in specific, showed that kind of willingness. I wanted to believe that he desired taking the party in a new direction, one that might have a place for people like me.

But then he chose Palin, whose People magazine-ready personal narrative totally fails to compensate for her antediluvian stand on issues. Either McCain recognizes that he is casting the party into a direction antithetical to his previous stance, or he doesn't care, so desperate is he to appease the base and win the election. Whichever is true, that is simply not the kind of thinking we need in this country today, and I am content to cast my lot with the thoughtful candidate, the one who seeks out different viewpoints in formulating his decisions. And, no matter how it squares with my upbringing, that candidate is the Democrat.

Utah, in brief

Time grows short today, largely because of all the necessary post-trip doings, so I'll give brief impressions of the Big 5 national parks in Utah, with longer trip reports to come. I'm also not prepared to post any pictures yet, as that would involve finding my cable and looking through all the photos.

Arches: I had pictured a vast plain punctuated by arch-like structures, and it wasn't that at all. There are a lot of ups and downs as you drive around the park, and the arches are not all there is to see. The famous Balanced Rock is even more imposing than it is in the guide books. I admit to being partial to Double Arch, though there is a poignancy in seeing the fallen Wall Arch.

Bryce Canyon: The Bryce Amphitheater is remarkable, as these spires of rock come shooting off the canyon floor. Hiking near these huge structures was probably the visceral highlight of the trip; it is hard to believe that they weren't constructed, so city-like and intricate.

Canyonlands: We only went to the Island in the Sky portion, which is aptly named, as the Y-shaped road leads along a plateau that is surrounded by the cutting left by the Green and Colorado Rivers. Here, the vistas are enormous in scale, and there is a smallness you feel as you look at just how much land has been removed. It is absence that is awe-inspiring here.

Capitol Reef: The park of which I expected the least, but I was impressed to find that the Waterpocket Fold which defines this landscape had a beauty all its own. In some ways, perhaps because of my sense going in, this was my favorite, as it has a somewhat more intimate feel than the others.

Zion: The flagship park, but the one I found the least thrilling. Its fame comes, I think, from the sylvan nature of the canyon, offering a lovely river and surrounding trees. But the surrounding structures are not so "wow"; it's not that I was disappointed, per se, just that I had thought it would be the highlight, and it didn't quite make that for me.

The return of Androcass

What do I do first, catch up on my online world, or my real world? Clean up my inbox, or clean my laundry?

Well, folks, I know you're breathlessly anticipating my insights on my travels, and they will come one of these days, but I think I'll have to go with the real world today. I'm sure some stuff has happened in the world the past couple of weeks, but it has seeped in only as a foglike substance around the need to get in the car and see stuff (I gather there was some kind of financial problem, some big storms, and so forth, but my concerns have been focused on where the cheapest gas station is).

So I thank those of you who have been reading, and I will read and comment on your comments, maybe later today, more probably tomorrow. I will just say this today about my trip: If you want to appreciate the natural world, go to Utah - you will see things that are absolutely remarkable in their scope. The trip was essentially a natural park kind of thing (I'm still catching up on all the things my mother never did, so I'm still doing the, it's 1:00, we should be in Bryce Canyon by now, kind of vacation). But it was amazing, and I'll tell you all more over the coming days.

The business candidate, part 2 - 1/30/08

[Journalists still fail to see the things I'm talking about here; they simply don't know enough to look beyond the resume.]

TIME magazine once referred to President Bush as the first CEO president. After eight years of stasis in Washington (years that the most ardent Clinton supporters have forgotten), while the business community created prosperity for all, the 2000 campaign hinged on competence. Gore was a remnant of the political fighting, Bush offered the knowledge to keep the gravy train running. He had an MBA! He had run companies! He got the Texas Rangers a new stadium!

What no one seemed to understand was that Bush was a lousy CEO; it certainly wasn't reported by the docile press. His "successes" came from bailouts by friends of his father, and he had to go back to Dad's Rolodex when he put together the deal for a new stadium that enriched him at taxpayers' expense.

What he did have was the CEO mentality. If you say something, people jump to do it. If you believe something, everyone around you will support you, and call you brilliant for believing it. That his corner office came, not out of years of work and growth, but from the name he held never occurred to him.

It shouldn't need to be pointed out that these are not the skills needed by a president. Negotiation, subtlety, nuance, these are the tools of the effective president (and many successful CEOs - again, Bush was not successful).

Journalists seem to understand none of this. They see a CEO, commanding people, expressing a vision, and they assume that these surface qualities are useful in a president. They fail to see the disconnect between the appearance and the reality, and they don't see how even the best CEOs may not have the qualities needed to run the country.

Romney's experience may have nothing to suggest as to how well he would run the country. A CEO has tools unavailable to the president, and vice versa. CEOs can focus on competition, while presidents need to think about cooperation at least as oftem. I don't know how Romney would fare as chief executive of our country, but the pundits and columnists don't either.

Making history - 1/26/08

[Obama's winning the nomination and the choice of Palin as the Republican running mate have intensified this trend, to the point where commentators believe that people will vote simply to "make history." If that's true, it's sad, and shows me that we may never escape identity politics.]

I've written before about the misuse of the word historic, a word that, for a variety of reasons, is applied to almost any event of whatever significance. It's an inflationary word, one that is used to pump up all manner of fairly trivial events. The vast majority of events described as historic will not be noted by history (except as stored on various servers on the Internet, preserved for all time, the Domesday Book of our time), because they offer no insight on the flows of history.

Now the word has come full force into the presidential campaign. It has become commonplace for commentators to throw around the word in every story reported or written. That a black man, or a woman, might become the president of the dominant world power is treated as the story, and is seen as justification by some voters to throw their vote one way or another.

There have been 43 presidents. Given the importance of the United States on the world stage, every president has found himself prominent in the mix of world events. Some have risen to the challenge, some have not. Some changed the direction not only of the U.S., but of the globe. Every single one, yes, even Millard Fillmore, can be considered historic.

It is interesting that the country may be ready to elect either an African-American or a woman. I don't know that I fully buy into the vast significance, because this country still has race and gender issues, issues that will not disappear simply because one person has been elected to one office. It certainly does not denote the kind of self-congratulatory back-patting that we will go through if one of these people does become president.

But the issues that confront this nation transcend identity politics. There are so many challenges facing anyone that would take the job of president, and those are not black challenges, or female challenges (what constitutes a women's or black issue, anyway? I well understand the legal and moral hurdles that an earlier generation of activist had to overcome, and I'm not suggesting that we are precisely where we should be on gender or race, but do we want a president who will see redressing past wrongs as a big priority?).

Even if a president didn't want to be historic, world events would prevent that. The office, by its very nature, is historic, and it's very hard, especially in real time, to decide what will be more or less historic. I'm hoping the next president will make history, not because of the color of skin or the presence of certain chromosomes, but by helping this country deal with its internal divisiveness, uniting us in taking a path back to where we should, and can, be.

Picking a chief - 1/22/08

[Nothing to say here, my concerns haven't changed a bit.]

To follow up on my last post, it's fair to ask why I am pessimistic that Americans will carefully consider the candidates for president and make a rational choice based on their priorities. Why do we base our vote (for any office, but most importantly for president) on half-baked emotionalism or imagined personal compatibility?

There are probably any number of reasons for this; I'll just jot down those that come immediately to mind, and think about them as the campaign forges on.

First, there are people who honestly don't believe there is any difference between the parties and, thus, the candidates. It's easy to see why. All the candidates (save the unelectable mavericks like Paul or Kucinich) believe unquestioningly in the benefits of the free market and free trade, they all believe in the inescapable power of representative democracy, they all believe that we're under siege from Islamo-fascistic terrorism. Given the simplistic questioning in the debates or on the interview shows, it's no wonder we can't find distinctions. Have we ever asked Hillary Clinton how she squares the conflict between the free market and democracy? Have we ever asked John McCain why terrorism is so much worse than other forms of conflict?

No. We just accept the prepackaged, focus group-tested sound bites (I'll be an agent of change, I'll be ready to use my 35 years of experience day 1, and so forth). In addition, we know that the probability of fundamental change inside the Beltway is very small. The president really doesn't have control over a huge percentage of what goes on in Washington, so we're unlikely to see, for example, significant less influence by special interest groups.

Second, we're lazy. Most Americans are not engaged with the issues; they don't spend any time trying to find distinctions between the candidates. It's true that the jargon doesn't help in grappling with the nuances of the various health care plans or the long-term foreign policy direction. But most people don't even try.

It probably takes a crisis to focus our minds on the issues that we face, and despite 9/11, or our loss of jobs overseas, or our real estate meltdown, most Americans are just not convinced that any of this denotes a crisis. (I'm not sure what would rise to that level; Hitler and Sputnik got this country moving, but not unanimously.) As long as most of us get our three squares a day (even if we pay more), or can still drive little Johnny to his oboe lessons (even if we pay more), or are not under siege from Islamic terrorists, we're going to believe we're essentially OK.

It is said we get the president we deserve, and that is probably true. It's also unfortunate, in that I believe that we face previously unknown challenges, and it's going to take a little more than vague hand-waving about "change" to confront them.

Recession, schmecession - 1/19/08

[I hesitate to get into the whole recession thing again, because so many people are so touchy about the term. But the conclusion here seems to have been a valid one; the economic stimulus has worked no miracles.]

Justin Fox, writing The Rites of Recession in the current Time magazine, gets it just right, I think. The economy, which has been remarkably underreported during the presidential campaign, is a major concern of a lot of people. But the reporting, what there has been of it, has been devoted to the possibility of a recession: Are we in one? Will we be in one? How long will it last?

All of which misses the point. The problems that confront this nation right now transcend this discussion. Who cares if we're technically in a recession? As I've written before, much of the country is already in a recession. So our current challenges go beyond whether we're in something called a "recession" or just in a "slowdown." If you lose your home, or your job, you don't feel better if it turns out, years later, that you didn't lose them in a recession.

Even Fox spends 80+% of the article talking about recession - interesting stuff, but not vital. What is important "[are] long-term trends like the rise of China and India, the growth in income inequality, ... U.S. competitiveness, the state of the middle class." That he even mentions the possibility that "America's global role has been permanently downgraded" is journalistic progress that I am surprised to see.

Despite all that, the bandwagon-jumping legislators, who in a remarkable show of non-partisan support are backing the President, in what coincidentally is an election year, are getting behind a fiscal stimulus plan. Tax rebates (that even respected economists say should not be used to pay down debt, despite the fact that Americans desperately need to pay down debt) will be thrown around, but just try getting Americans to spend this windfall domestically. It won't happen, as we endorse our new checks directly over to China or Korea.

One of the downsides to globalization is that you can't control what happens within your own nation any more. The fiscal stimulus package may do very little to create growth in the U.S., but it may allow China and India to continue their surprising progress. Of course, our CEOs will still skim off some of that money as it crosses the border, so some of it will stay here.

Competitiveness - Part 3 - 1/13/08

[I've developed some of my ideas about education further, and will continue to do so, but this gives something of a summary of my feelings on the subject.]

Let's work out a hypothetical situation. Say we want to have a nation in which every person can high jump. We look at the problem, and we reason that we are unlikely to train a lot of adults to high jump; the specter of Grandma having to clear the bar in her short shorts is probably enough to cool us on this idea.

So we turn to our usual method of social engineering - we will teach all of our students how to high jump. That won't do anything for our adults, but they'll all die eventually, leaving us with a population of high jumpers.

We start by establishing standards for age-group high jumping. We'll be hard-pressed to find any world or national records by age for young people (if a quick Google search is any indicator), so we'll assemble a blue-ribbon panel of elementary and high-school coaches, maybe a few famous high jumpers, some human performance experts, and so forth. The panel will meet, perhaps in Washington, more likely in St. Kitts, and come up with grade standards: kindergarteners will need to clear 1'6", eighth-graders 3'0", seniors in high school 3'9", or some such.

Now we have our first big choice. Do we mandate the methods by which we must teach our students how to high jump, or should we simply publish the standards and provide negative incentives, that is, punish schools that don't manage to get every student over that bar? Let's say we believe in standard economic thinking, where creating proper incentives will solve every problem, so we'll take the latter of the two approaches. (This is also preferable to the former approach in that it allows us to duck the responsibility if our mandated methods fail to work.)

It's really important to us that everybody be able to high jump, so our negative incentives are quite harsh. We can even close schools if they don't get those kids over that bar.

Let's try to figure out what will likely happen. First, a lot of school time will be spent on teaching the high jump. Other activities will be curtailed in order to teach the Fosbury Flop, the proper run-up, leg clearing, and the like. Second, we will see a lot of experts emerge who understand how to get an eighth-grader over three feet. Some of them will be self-taught P.E. instructors who will buy the Complete Book of Jumps and apply that to all the kids, and some will be consultants who will charge a lot to do the same thing (but they're worth it, because the alternative is to CLOSE THE SCHOOL).

The other main thing that will happen is that we will stop training the naturally outstanding kids. We're devoting a lot of resources to getting every kid over that three-foot bar, so we're not going to expend a lot of effort on the child who lines up the first time and clears it with ease. (In fact, what we'll likely see is an attempt to have that child become something of an auxiliary coach; after all, you can't beat the cost, and we can convince ourselves that making a student into a teacher is a worthwhile educational experience.)

The problem with this won't arise until the Olympics of 20 years from now. We'll lose, and lose badly, because we haven't done the work necessary to develop near-8 foot high jumpers. Despite having the greatest national high jump training program in the history of the world, we won't be able to compete at the highest level of the sport. And we'll have almost nothing to show for this expensive program, as how many adults will continue to high jump once they're out of school?

Well, I've made the analogy too obvious, I of course am talking about No Child Left Behind. We mandate standards for all children, punish schools for not meeting the mandate, and ignore the truly gifted (they'll do fine anyway). No intelligent competitor would do it this way, not if they're competing in a global marketplace.

The intention is kind and nice, that we'll educate everyone equally. But anyone who has spent any time with children knows that they are endowed with different talents and skill levels. Equal education does not mean equal outcome, no matter how much we might wish it to be so.

Ultimately, NCLB will not make us more competitive in the world economy, not if it means that we are going to train every student down to an average level. Like it or not, it is the outstanding who lead the way, not having large numbers of the mediocre. The Chinese education is constantly winnowing at each level, trying to identify the students of greatest potential.

When we establish our highest educational priority as the minimal attainment for the maximal number, we will have a pudding of uniformity, and we will lose the top, the potential innovators. And that is no way to remain competitive.

Competitiveness - Part 2 - 1/12/08

[I haven't included Competitiveness - Part 1 because it now seems redundant. As for this post, I've only seen this trend intensify. The Olympics are a case in point; Michael Phelps becomes a proxy for our system and our way of life, but he's just one guy. As a nation, we have no intention of competing in the Olympics, not if it means tax dollars and state gymnasiums and so forth. The chances are very good that the Chinese will beat us in total medal count in 2012, at which point we'll talk about how irrelevant this all is. We will continue not to do the things that we need to do to remain competitive in anything important.]

To follow up from yesterday, it's my contention that, despite all the talk about our wonderful capitalist system, and how the cream inevitably rises to the top, and how individual failure comes from a lack of will or ability, the U.S. actually has very little knowledge as to how to compete in the new world.

Part of this comes from a willful blindness, a lack of recognition that a nation with the proper attitude and beliefs could fall from its self-appointed position as leader of the world. Part comes from the confusion between national and individual competitiveness (no, having the most billionaires does not serve as a proxy for having a strong country). And part comes from the confusion between the appearance of competitiveness versus actually being effective in competition.

If you were to ask the average American where the U.S. stands, the answer would almost certainly be that we are #1 in every category that matters. To believe that requires one to ignore our backsliding in areas relative to the rest of the world: health care, infant mortality, education, etc. Yet the concern about our slippage only seems to arise when our basketball team loses in the Olympics. We have replaced actual accomplishment with useless sloganeering.

Many people think that the financial success of a few somehow proves something about the country as a whole. We trumpet the wealth of the 400 richest Americans, we marvel at the salaries of our professional athletes and our actors, we live vicariously through the lifestyles of our rich and famous. At the same time, median real income is in decline, the savings rate is negative, and the comfort to which we once aspired seems to be forever farther out of reach. Which represents a strong country, the wealth of our wealthy, or the wealth of our average?

And we believe that our intense interest in competition translates into competitiveness. We compete furiously on the field, the court, the diamond. We lie, cheat, and steal to make the next deal, to get the corner office. But this furor has not extended to effective raising of standards. We're not competing on the same playing fields as the rest of the world; other countries intend to dominate the world economy and garner the wealth, while we shake our fists and claim that we fight hard.

We have seen a remarkable decline in our innovation, as other countries have been able to train engineers and computer scientists, open R&D centers (often with our money), and have at least begun to dominate certain technological areas.

Since I believe that innovation is the key to growth, and only through that growth do overall living standards rise, we need to understand how to foment innovation. That clearly comes through education, and our mistakes there are the subject of my next post.

Democracy vs. capitalism - 1/8/08

[I wish that we were making even the slightest bit of progress in thinking about these issues. Alas, we're not.]

This post is the first of a series in which I try to work out some of my feelings about democracy and capitalism. I wrote a post on May 22 of last year, which said some of what I think. It's bad form, I guess, to quote oneself, so I shan't, but, in that post, I outlined the basic conflict I see between the two systems.

I want to go further here and start to think about how we resolve those conflicts. Let me discuss it through the medium of the issue of offshoring jobs.

Offshoring is vitally important, not only for the effects it has already had, but for the future potential. I don't want to discuss comparative advantage here, but that idea, which is thought to allow maximum (and efficient) production in all nations, may no longer hold. With the triumph of technologies that eliminate borders, there may be nothing left (at least someday) for Americans to trade - not without a serious diminution of living standards in the U.S. There are other effects, like the lowering of prices, which factor in on the positive side, but I'm not writing about that here. I'm merely trying to show that offshoring is an important issue.

Unemployment insurance is a matter that we do not trust to the capitalist system, that is, we do not assume that companies will lay people off, but support them for a certain length of time. Because it is a social goal not to allow people to go without that support, the democratic system kicks in and provides for this insurance (which it does by taxing the capitalist system, i.e., making it less efficient).

Offshoring, however, of much greater potential import for restructuring the way we live, is left totally within the capitalist sector. Yes, I know there were some ineffectual Congressional hearings, and it flared as a campaign issue in 2004, however briefly, but polticians have steered clear of any real action.

Companies get to decide what industries, professions, jobs will be handed over to other countries. If that means that a town is without its source of livelihood, or a family is without a means of making a living, that's how change goes - at least you can pay a dollar less for that sweater down at Wal-Mart. But democracy keeps its hands off the issue.

I know that Ronald Reagan had a lot to do with this. His dislike of government (in all matters except his personal living style and providing arms illegally) has become the accepted norm, which means that, despite his stated intent, he hurt democracy to the benefit of capitalism.

For we are all complicit in allowing certain issues to fall outside of the purview of our elected representatives, and to be under the control of our decidedly unelected CEOs. (Offshoring is not the only such example; our energy policy, such as it is, seems to be driven far more by the desires of capitalists than by the needs of the people.) But what is the end result of this division (drivers' licenses to the democratic system, job policy to the capitalist)? It's not simply that business items fall into capitalism, because these items cross all lines in our society.

And how do we restrike this balance before everything important is handled by those who want to make money, not those who wish to fulfill larger social goals?

OK, now... - 1/7/08

[I've had reason to reconsider my absolutist position on libertarianism, though I think it is still a long way from becoming mainstream. I'm glad that the party is discussing what it wants to be in a realistic way, but escaping "fringe" status will be hard.

The rest of this post holds up well. The two candidates we have are unwilling to confront our problems in an adult manner, pandering to the mass electorate instead of reexamining issues in the light of reality.]

I want to follow up on my Saturday comments about Ron Paul. Again, I do not support his "philosophy" (libertarianism is arbitrary and unrealistic), but he reminds me of, well, myself.

I'm a software developer with an MBA who has worked in quite a few industries on different problems. While I don't profess that this background grants me great wisdom (just a little, maybe), it does allow me to comment on things from a fairly broad perspective. I've seen various issues arise, and seen (and participated in) various solutions, some of which have worked better than others.

So, in a meeting, I'm frequently going to be the person bringing up the larger issues ("if we want to support the needs our customers have, we will have to restructure the database access to allow users to query it directly"). A huge proportion of the time, the response, from people ostensibly concerned with the same situation, is stark uncomfortable silence, followed by, "OK, now..." ("what color should the splash screen be?", a topic which then consumes the rest of the hour).

I don't think I'm particularly strident in bringing up these matters; quite the contrary, there are people close to me who say I'm far too quiet and unassuming. What I think is happening is that the room is simply not prepared to discuss such things, no matter how true or significant they may be. It takes a long time for most people to accept that the world is not the way they want to assume it is, that the status quo may be downright wrong.

From my standpoint, however, the worst thing is not that the problem is going to go on, possibly fester, until it becomes so obvious that change is needed that action is finally taken. (Managers, who ought to be taking the longer-term view, tend to be the leading proponents of the conservative, backward-looking approach.) That should bother me the most, but I'm human, and what frustrates me is the is-he-an-alien look that the other people tend to have before moving on to another, far less critical, issue. I want to go Close-ian on all these people who are neglecting what ought to be a major part of their responsibility ("I'm not going to be ignored, Dan").

And this is Ron Paul in a meeting of candidates.

Does terrorism against the West result from the actions of the West in Muslim countries? Does our "occupation" of holy Saudi Arabia inflame anti-U.S. passions (and "they asked us to be there" is no defense; many Muslims feel that the sheiks are as bad in their decadence and embrace of Western ways)? Is our historical interference in their politics a rallying cause? Do our actions come out of a need to prop up a failing, petroleum-based lifestyle?

These are valid issues to discuss, and discussing them would seem to be extremely pertinent in the changed post-9/11 world. (An interesting book on this is Imperial Hubris by intelligence official Michael Scheuer; regardless of how you evaluate his ideas and solutions, it struck me as an important contribution to the literature.) Being simplistic would seem to be the worst thing we could do.

Yet it is exactly what the candidates do. Ron Paul is trying to bring up these issues, albeit in a quasi-lunatic style that does not serve him well. And he gets the look (particularly from Romney, who strikes me as a supercilious smarm-master), that look that says we're not just going to disagree with you, but that you're insane to try to discuss such things.

But we have to discuss such things if we're going to reach a long-term accommodation with Islam. Sound bites like "they hate us, they hate our way of life" may sound tough on the stump, but will not assist the next President in actually engaging the problem. We all fear terrorism and the uncertainty it brings to our lives, but reducing the causes to individual pathology will not illuminate the situation, nor will it lead to a solution.

So I wonder how frustrated Ron Paul is getting, as he tries to be the adult in a room of intellectual children. I suspect that Paul's support, which has surprised a lot of pundits, comes from people who suspect that the issues we face are more serious and complicated than the other candidates are letting on. Blathering on about change is meaningless unless the change is meaningful (and kudos to Huckabee for at least acknowledging that), and meaningful change should only result from a deep understanding of the forces involved, not from focus group-tested, simplistic slogans.

This post is historic, by the legendary Androcass - 1/6/08

[No change here; if anything, these words are being used more now that they were back in January. And Britney Spears is called "legendary" by some nitwits, just search Google if you want to see it for yourself.]

Two words that have become abused, almost beyond meaning, are "legendary" and "historic." The reason is the constant need for aggrandizement, for hype, even for promotion of self-importance.

"Legendary" is applied to anyone you've ever heard of, and has been reduced to the meaning of "famous." I'm not sure that Britney has been called that yet, but it wouldn't surprise me. The original definition, synonymous with "fictitious," has been lost in the rush to inflate everyone. A quick Google search shows the following legendary figures: Bob Marley (at least he's dead), Dr. John, The Jordanaires (they woo-wooed behind Elvis), football coach Bo Schembechler (most college football and basketball coaches are legendary), Bobby Darin, Van McCoy (do the Hustle), Alfredo Alcala (who?), Eartha Kitt, Sandra Dee, and on, and on.

"Historic," which used to carry at least some sense of something that had already happened, whether it had yet stood the test of time or not, now means something that the speaker or writer thinks will be important. Football playoff games are historic before they are played (the New England Patriots game last weekend was historic either way; they were going to win to go to 16-0, or they were going to lose to fall short). Charlie Gibson desribed last night's debate as historic before it happened, despite the sheer number of debates that have already occurred.

Folks, "historic" means something of significance, something that people will remember and talk and think about in decades and centuries to come. World War II was historic, no football game is (what was the result of that Bath-York soccer game back in 1734?).

It seems to me that both of these words have taken this prevalence (and, therefore, much less importance) due to a need/desire to seem significant. Charlie Gibson believes the debate is historic in no small part because he's a part of it. Sandra Dee is legendary because that makes your obsession with her somehow acceptable.

But all that ends up happening is that the words lose their meaning and their significance. If everybody is legendary, if every event is historic, than nobody and no events are, and we lose yet another distinction.

Move the People - 1/4/08

[Nothing has happened to change my opinion here. Given United's stated intention to downgrade their service, charge more for basic services, and so forth, I doubt there is a viable business model here any longer. One wonders how much longer they can continue without taxpayer help.]

Yesterday I called United Airlines "perhaps the worst-run major company in the history of the U.S." I'm probably inclined that way because I live close to its headquarters (one of the few left in Chicago) and hear a lot of news about it. Is it the worst? Hard to say. But it has to be a contender.

This is a company that was unquestionably #1 in the world just a few short years ago, and now cannot get through some snow and ice in December (surprise!), thunderstorms in the summer (double surprise!), pay workers what was promised, can't staff sufficiently, etc.

Mission statements are forever in vogue. For those who don't know, mission statements are designed to give focus to an organization's activities, to allow everyone, customers, suppliers, and employees, to understand the objectives toward which the organization will work. They are formulated by top executives, usually on weekend resort retreats, and are to be taken very seriously even after the tans fade.

United Airlines, like all right-thinking companies, has a mission statement: To be recognized worldwide as the airline of choice. This is supposed to tell us that, 1) United is a global enterprise, and 2) that they want to be first in market share. That's it.

Any company that has as its purpose the act of moving people from one place to another, whether airline, bus company, or train, needs a common mission statement: Get the people where they're going. I don't care how you want to be recognized, I don't care what your market share is, I want to go up in the airplane, and come down in the airplane safely and reasonably close to the time you promised. Every action, every stock deal, every negotiation with a union must be subsumed to the idea that you have to move the people.

United has forgotten this. Their bankruptcy was an exercise in indifference to anyone other than a few hundred corporate bigwigs, and their actions since have reinforced that idea. Move the people, United, and maybe you can remain viable. Don't, and you'll be the next on the aviation scrapheap.

By-Products - 1/3/08

[Would that eight more months have made the ideas here more prevalent. But people still don't understand that American companies have no manifest desire to create American jobs.]

I produce sweat, carbon dioxide, urine, feces. That production is a biological imperative; I can control when I eat, when I drink, when I sleep (within certain limits), but it is difficult to control the output of waste products.

However, it would be quite a stretch to claim that production of waste is my purpose in life. Even if the proverbial man from Mars were to observe me and make that claim, it would not be true. (What my purpose in life is is unclear - maybe that's another day's post.)

Businesses exist to make money. They generate revenues through economic activity, incur necessary expenses, and this results in profits. These profits may be put to any number of uses (enriching executives), but the very survival of the enterprise depends on the creation of profit.

There are a lot of institutional structures in our system that support and assist business, especially big business. Our tax code, our bankruptcy laws, grants, TIFs, and on and on, all designed to help and protect business. United Airlines, perhaps the worst-run major company in the history of the U.S., can lay off employees, stiff shareholders, obliterate their pension obligations, all under the auspices of kindly bankruptcy courts, and return to disappointing customers and making their executive talent (?!) wealthy.

Why does business get treatment under our laws that the individual can only dream of? We have to assume it comes from the belief that companies create jobs in a way that the average person does not, that the synergy that comes from assembling a number of people in one place is worth the sweetheart deals.

But here's the flaw in the argument. Just as I do not exist to produce waste products, neither does a company exist to create jobs. The days when a CEO would look proudly at the company's employees, toiling away to create products and profits, are gone, replaced by resentment over how many resources those employees are using.

Companies do not want to create jobs, and public policies that devote tax dollars to assisting companies are reckless and wasteful. We who pay taxes to support this madness should insist that it stop.

Basic Precepts [II] - 5/22/07

[It would be unfair to reprint I without II. This was the end of my Basic Precepts series, which succumbed to last year's irregular blogging. Wasn't a bad idea though. This one, for example, has ideas that run through many of my subsequent posts, and, in rereading it, I'm surprised to see how explicit I was able to make my ideas.]

I believe in democracy and the free market.

What I don't believe is that they are necessarily correlates, that is, unlike a lot of what is said today, they do not "naturally" go together. The basic idea that underlies democracy is "one person, one vote." Everyone, whether Bill Gates-rich or homeless-poor, gets (in theory) an equal right to have a say in our government. No one has more of an effect on choosing our leadership than anyone else.

Free-market capitalism, on the other hand, is "one dollar, one vote." Bill Gates gets 40 or so billion votes, I get a lot fewer. The goods and services available to me will have a lot more to do with what Bill wants than what I want.

So why are these two systems inevitably linked? Because in one area, that of individual choice, they are similar. We choose whom to elect, we choose what to buy. For people who pride themselves on having a right to choose, this is quite compelling.

But there are many differences between the two systems. In one vital area, rationing, they are completely different. Markets act as rationing devices, with price used as the mechanism (maximal profits occur at a certain price/production point; it is rare that that point allows enough production for everyone to "get one"). Democracy, at least in its classic formulation, is not rationed, not governed by price.

It would appear that if there are goods and services that we feel uncomfortable rationing, they shouldn't be subject to the market. Health care is a good example. There is a lot of talk about how Canada's system rations health care, leading to long waits for certain procedures. But the U.S. system just as surely rations, but conceals it within the cloak of market mechanisms.

We have two systems in the U.S., then, which are not entirely compatible. To determine where we might be heading in the future, it's natural to ask whether the two systems can get along, or whether one is on the rise at the expense of the other.

Need one ask? Attempts to inject some form of democracy into, say, corporate governance are almost inevitably beaten down. Politics, as has been chronicled everywhere, is infected with the influence of money and large corporate interests. Governments are filled with the spirit of privatization, in which elected leaders admit that they cannot properly manage the complexity of, for example, a parking garage, and turn it over to private companies that will utilize "relentless efficiency" to make parking a wonderland of fun (and give everyone a pony!).

When one system is forging ahead, it is natural to wonder if there's an inevitability to that; do people want the free market to take precedence over the ideals of democracy? Or are there powerful forces pushing us in this direction against the true preference of the American people?

For the past 25 or so years, the message has been, government is bad, the market is good. This is believed to have been originated by Ronald Reagan, but he just made it popular. (Always interesting how many people are eager to associate themselves with an institution that is so blitheringly incompetent, including Mr. Reagan himself.) We have a whole generation of citizens who have been inculcated with the idea that public works are doomed to failure from a cost-benefit standpoint, while private industry supplies us with all that is good.

But the goals of private industry are not always the goals that we would choose in a perfect society. CEOs do not even profess to be great leaders of the masses, confining themselves to the upward motion of profits (and, quite often, personal enrichment). It seems to me that much of the trouble that the average American sees in the future results from the idea that the market is king, and that democracy, as expressed so imperfectly by elected officials through government, is outmoded and unnecessary.

I don't think we know that's what we're doing, however, and that is what is so profoundly troubling about where we find ourselves.

Basic Precepts [I] - 5/18/07

[This was my first real post, save a short introductory post. I had a bit more of a high-blown tone when I started, a little more college essay perhaps. But I think the philosophy here is close to what I feel, that we don't pay enough attention to risk and the costs of that risk.]

It would be unfair, I think, to jump in and start commenting on current events without giving you, Gentle Reader, some idea of what beliefs I have that underscore that commentary. So I plan a series of Basic Precepts posts in which I try to convey a sense of the ideas that inform my thinking.

Civilization is social order promoting cultural creation. Four elements constitute it: economic provision, political organization, moral traditions, and the pursuit of knowledge and the arts. It begins where chaos and insecurity end. For when fear is overcome, curiosity and constructiveness are free, and man passes by natural impulse towards the understanding and embellishment of life.

This is the first paragraph of The Story of Civilization by Will Durant. It is as good a summary of what man has been striving for over the last centuries, but it is long. For me, civilization is more succinctly defined as the actions and institutions we have created to reduce risk.

From earliest times, all of the most basic inventions of humankind have been designed to reduce risk, from the finding of permanent shelter to the reliable production of food to division of labor to the creation of communities and so forth. Society itself, and all its derivations, exist primarily to give a sense of security to all people who fall within the group (I am not unaware that the creation of weapons, to choose one example, increased the risk to outsiders - the notion of community as "common" is something we struggle with today).

Therefore, everything that we do today as a society that increases risk to sizable segments of that society needs to be examined closely. When an administration suggests putting Social Security at risk, making it market-based, we should question the wisdom of that thinking. When we go to war without a clear idea of our objectives. long- and short-term, it is fair to wonder why. When we allow jobs and careers to be sold to the lowest bidder without an understanding of what will replace them, it is necessary for us to identify what this increase in risk will accomplish.

The greatest single gift that has been bestowed upon us is the civilization that we inherit and the desire to increase it (and become more inclusive as to its application). It is a grave concern when we reject that gift.

What price streak?

I'm leaving for a vacation tomorrow. So, added to the normal concerns about getting the most out of the journey, and the difficulty of traveling in the modern-day world, I need to think about this blog. I have a number of options. I could ask someone to guest blog for a couple of weeks, but I don't know anyone who would do this (despite the very real possibility that the quality would improve). I could let it lay fallow for the time I'm away, but I did commit myself to posting every day. I could find Internet cafes in my destination, but that wouldn't please me very much (it is a vacation). I could buy a laptop and look for wireless hotspots, but that would require a revenue model that would exceed my current $0.

What I'm going to do, then, and this may show a disturbing need to keep my "streak" of posting every day alive, is the tried and true network television model: reruns. Given the limited readership of this blog, I have to imagine that the vast hordes have missed some of my classic posts of the past. So I'm choosing some of the posts that seem more "universal" (or less time-bound) than others, and using the scheduling feature to release them daily. As it turns out, the posts that I'm reprinting all come before the end of January 2008 (it is unlikely that anyone has ever looked back this far, and I will still have a lot from which to draw the next time I go out of town).

Of course, this means, Gentle Reader, that you will be deprived of my insight about the last day of the Republican Convention, the opening of the NFL season, and whatever arises while I'm away. While I believe you'll live, I will give you a taste of what I have planned upon my return. I have some thoughts on innovation that will be the subject of a couple of posts, I want to continue my long-postponed series on education, and I may have some insights about traveling (though usually I get too tired on a trip to have any insights at all). Have fun, all, and let's hope the world holds together.

Self-sacrifice

This is from about a week ago, but Andrew Sullivan linked to a Clive Crook post about Michelle Obama's convention speech, noting in particular the part where Crook writes:

It's starting to annoy me that Barack keeps telling us how he turned down Wall Street for a career in "public service". By this he means politics. Just how great a sacrifice is that? The kind of ambition that gets you into the Senate and maybe the White House is not exactly renouncing the world and all its temptations, is it? And now here we have Michelle doing the same thing. She gave up lawyering, she says, and chose "public service"--the kind that leads in due course to a 300k-plus salary. I've no problem with it. I just don't want to keep being asked to admire the sacrifice.

I have to say I share this sentiment somewhat. The nobility of people's personal choices, choices that we really have no way to evaluate, strikes me as overblown. We regard a person's subsequent success in the path they chose as a validation of all the alternatives they supposedly had. In other words, we think the way one commenter on Crook's post does:

Barack Obama would be making a lot more money as a Wall Street lawyer today if he had stayed there. Michelle Robinson would be making a lot more money today as a partner in a big Chicago law firm today if she had stayed there.

Who says? We have no way to know if Barack Obama's skills would have translated into infinite success in the Wall Street environment, or if Michelle would have made partner. For all we can say, Michelle jumped to a not-for-profit just before she was pushed out the door (which happens to many associates in law firms).

Anyone who has worked for any length of time has seen people who are ill-suited to a particular environment despite their demonstrated skills. There are those who flourish in a bureaucratic situation who flounder when put into an entrepreneurial-style company, and vice versa. We constantly see corporate vice presidents who are considered top-notch, and they abjectly fail when put into the top spot. Michael Jordan, despite his obvious athletic talents, couldn't hit a pitched ball and never was seen as a true baseball prospect.

Imagine a mover and shaker like Barack Obama logging serious time as an 80 hour-a-week associate in a big law firm, spending most of his time doing research and writing briefs. That might have been the path to great riches, but we don't know that; what we do know is that the path would have been a waste of his talent to connect with people, to inspire them with a vision (strangely enough, most law partners resist the "vision" of their new associates).

Just as Obama at some point had to realize that he was not going to be an NBA star, it may well be the case that he had a similar realization concerning his ability to thrive within a standard legal environment. His success, while admirable, may not be transferrable to any other arena - his path may well have been optimal for him, and, therefore, his choice may not have represented a sacrifice at all.

Lest this be seen as criticism of the Obamas, it is not. The point can be made about a host of other decisions that we are routinely expected to admire. The marginal high school grad who goes into the military based on the lack of unskilled jobs in his or her town and the educational benefits being offered is not necessarily sacrificing a future, but trying to build one. The law school graduate who goes into public aid law, then has to take a bartender job on weekends to pay back student loans, is in that situation as a consequence of choices, and I'm just not going to spend a lot of time crying about that.

As one travels along the road of life, decisions are constantly being made. Some of them work out, some don't, but trying to parse out which are noble and which are not is a pointless exercise after the fact. Had Barack Obama seen community organizing as an untenable choice for a career, he wouldn't have chosen it, but he did - that is neither admirable nor not.

Qualification

I've been reading a number of people who claim that Sarah Palin is at least as qualified as Barack Obama to be president, that she has executive experience where he has none, and that her personal story somehow is more meaningful (we'll do a kindness for addle-headed people everywhere and ignore the contention that Alaska's proximity to Russia somehow implies a knowledge of foreign policy).

Even if you can make a case that Palin and Obama have roughly equivalent experience in terms of their ability to take on the job of president, there is one very critical difference: Obama chose to run for the office.

Barack Obama decided, presumably after consultation with people close to him, that he could run for this office and win. He was certainly not unaware that there would be those who would claim that his background was insufficient, and that he would be roundly attacked as a result. So he went out and prepared himself for the job, as well as anyone can; he (I assume) studied and talked to learned people and briefed himself on the issues and went through more than 20 debates and faced down some of the most formidable politicians on the scene today - and he won the nomination.

You can argue that voters are not as concerned about issues as they should be, and I would agree, but a manifestly unqualified person, no matter how "celebrified" they become, is unlikely to get a shot at the presidency. There has to be something there, otherwise the candidate will be lampooned as ignorant. And that hasn't happened with Obama.

Palin did not choose to run for president, and recently expressed ignorance of what the vice president does. We have no evidence that she has ever thought seriously about national or world issues, because she had no reason to, getting up to speed on what it means to be a governor.

So, if you want to make the case that Sarah Palin is roughly as qualified as Barack Obama to be president, you need to get over one simple fact: Obama wants to be president and has done what is needed to prepare, Palin has not.

What is the chance that Sarah Palin becomes president?

There has been a fair amount of uneasy talk about John McCain's age, mostly confined to late-night talk shows. Conventional commentators don't want to talk about it, for fear of being labeled with the "discrimination" tag. But McCain's pick of first-term governor Sarah Palin as his running mate has brought the subject back to the fore, though still in a somewhat veiled form. (After all, if we start to disqualify people based on age, how will we work Doris Kearns Goodwin into every conceivable situation?)

But it is a factor that we need to take into account. If you want to argue that the vice presidential pick is truly irrelevant, then you are assuming that it is a sure thing that the president will be around for the full complement of 4 or 8 years. And we know that it is less likely to be true of John McCain than of Barack Obama.

But how much less likely? Let's turn to the actuarial tables at the Social Security Administration for an answer. This is a table of life expectancies by age broken down by males and females (the numbers are for 2004, but they have not appreciably changed in a few years).

I can foresee some objections to using these tables. They aggregate all ethnic groups, and they ignore any specifics about an individual's health. I'll grant that, but, taking into account McCain's past history of cancer and Vietnam experience, and weighing that against his vigor and his superior medical care, I'm going to use these numbers while conceding a degree of variability.

First, a 72 year old man has a 3.3% chance of dying in the next year. That doesn't seem too bad, 1 out of 30, but a quick calculation yields a 14.4% chance of dying in four years and 31.7% in eight. In other words, there's a 1 out of 7 chance that McCain won't last out his first term. (For the sake of completeness, the numbers for Obama are 1.8% for 4 years, 4.3% for 8; in other words, Obama has a greater probability of lasting two terms than McCain has of lasting two years.)

It would be interesting to find historical actuarial tables and try to determine if we can find an "aging factor" for the job of president. We've all seen the photos that show how much a president seems to age in his years in office, and it appears that the job is extra wearing on the men who have held it. So it's possible that McCain's numbers should be higher (with the caveats I mentioned above that could adjust them higher or lower).

So one can argue that Sarah Palin's lack of experience is unimportant, that she has other skills which will compensate for that, and that's a fair argument to have. But to argue that there is little chance that the country will have to face the situation of President Palin, well, that's clearly nonsensical - it's a very real possibility that this mayor and first-term governor will become the most powerful person in the world.

The money honey

I've never understood the cult attraction status of Maria Bartiromo of CNBC. She got a lot of attention during the tech stock market boom of the late '90s, when she reported from the floor of the stock exchange. Many considered her attractive, but the talk about her was more than that, it seemed to come out of an association of her with that boom.

And the buzz around her seems somewhat more muted since the subsequent tech crash, but, having paid her dues as a "real" reporter, she is now seen as a financial expert. I'm not a big respecter of financial reporters, they generally seem to have little understanding of larger trends and economics as a whole. They have access to the movers and shakers of the business world, but ask few questions designed to do more than elicit the PR firm-approved talking points.

I guess I'm confessing my bias as much as making a point, that I am less likely to find a Maria Bartiromo credible in discussing financial issues. I may not be alone; even in these times when the economy is such a hot-button issue, we rarely see her or any other financial reporter invited on the Sunday morning political shows, which seems curious.

But once in a while they do get on, as Maria did Sunday on Meet the Press (transcript here). And all that did was to confirm my view on the persipicacity of the "Money Honey." Bartiromo was on because she had just interviewed Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, and Brokaw requested her insight into Palin's views of drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. We found out that Governor Palin is in favor of it, and then we got this from Bartiromo:

I think the biggest value she brings to the ticket is her expertise in energy. This is her comfort zone. She made a very compelling case to me that the area that we're talking about that is being debated about whether or not to drill, ANWR as you mentioned, is 2,000 acres in a 20 million acre plain. This is her comfort zone, this is really what she's overseeing.

Alaska is one of the few oil-rich areas we have in this country alone. She is going to really campaign on that--on that platform, not only as energy and oil relates to the economy. We know that oil is one of the biggest issues we face when it comes to the economy. It's certainly crippled the economy over the last year, watching oil prices reach record highs. But also, as energy relates to national security. So this is a very, very important piece of the picture, and I think she brings great value there, making that point that it is a small swath of land, and it really will not impact the wildlife, as of course is the concern, because we've got caribou and bears and moose there, and the upset or the worry is that it's going to impact the breeding of the wildlife. She feels very strongly that that is not the case, and I think that that knowledge of energy is going to be very important for the McCain ticket.

This all is embarrassing enough. That the governor of Alaska is in favor of drilling wantonly in a protected reserve is no surprise, it's the business of Alaska, one of the few that still brings in money. There is a lot of controversy over whether it is really only 2000 acres, given the infrastructure that will have to be created, but drilling in the ANWR is a defensible position.

But to say that she has "expertise in energy"? Does Governor Palin understand the first thing about alternative forms of energy, about the need to start looking for ways to break our dependence on carbon-based fuels? Or does she just have expertise in how lucrative oil has been for Alaska, and wants even more of the same?

Then Tom Brokaw asked financial expert Maria Bartiromo, "Beyond energy, how conversant is she with the other big economic issues of the day, especially the liquidity crisis that this country is facing, home foreclosures?" A fair question, especially when Palin is running with a self-admitted economics moron. I'll give Bartiromo's answer in full, I just don't have the skill to excerpt it:

Well, she felt, actually, that the Republican Party has a--has a advantage when it comes to the credit card issue, when it comes to credit. She felt that Joe Biden dropped the ball on that. She talked to me a little about that in the interview. She also talked about healthcare. She had real opinions in terms of what should be done with regard to economic growth overall. And the truth is, Tom, is that energy is a big party of that. I mean, that really is one of the, one of the biggest issues we face.

On the, on the banking sector upset, he's going to need more credibility, obviously, McCain, on that issue. I don't think that she's necessarily well-versed in, in, in the liquidity crunch, but, but I think that, that she came across so strong with regard to economic matters as they relate to energy and as they relate to overall economic growth that I think it was a very savvy pick, actually. She's very accessible, very personable, as, as you've said. You know, when I was walking around, we went to the highest point in Anchorage and we walked around a field so she could show me really where the main areas were for, for drilling and you had to see her with some of the people on the ground. She, she went over to people. I mean, clearly a reporter is, is there with her, so she has an agenda there, but she was very comfortable going and, and, and welcomed by the people and, and even the people on the ground, when I was traveling there throughout Alaska. You know, one person said to me, I said, "So how's the governor doing?" to the driver of the, of the car and people on the plane and in the airport. And they said, "You know, we, we really, we love her. The first thing that she did when she got in office is she gave up the plane, the private plane, and she gave up the chefs." And she said, "Look, I don't need any of this. I want to focus on economics. I want to focus on what Alaska can do for the rest of the country."

And remember, if we were to see drilling, not only in that ANWR area, but on the coast in the North Slope, that's also a lot of job creation because there are ripple effects to drilling and she talked a lot about that as well, how we could see tremendous job creation as a result of activity in that part of the country. So clearly that is her sweet spot and that's what she is going to be focused on. I think you make a good point about the liquidity crunch, but I also have to be impressed with her knowledge on this issue of energy, one of the biggest that we face.

Yikes. Leaving aside the massive irrelevance of the answer to Tom's question, one has to marvel at how poorly this reporter, one who gets in front of a camera every day to earn her hefty salary, responded to an easily-anticipated question. This wasn't Brokaw playing gotcha with a politico, this was the usual round-table lovefest. And the best the "Money Honey" could come up with is that the people really love her. Thanks so much for the insight, Maria.