Rather Than Working

In Search of Burgundy

2011-11-06T07:31:00.000-05:00

Hey, sorry for my absence. I’ve been busy. I had an unusually busy summer and fall at work. More importantly for this post, I’ve been playing in the freefalling real estate market.

In August I had dinner with a friend who is a real estate agent and we got talking about the market. Looking into it, I realized that prices were very, very low. Though I can’t cite evidence, I’d say home prices are historically low.

I ran some numbers and realized that, without going into detail, I could save about half on my housing expenses by buying a home.

So I started looking at properties that were “short sales” and foreclosures.

For the uninitiated, a short sale is a home in which the owner owes more than the property is worth. The lender has agreed to forgive the loan balance above the current sale price on the theory that it is better off cutting its loss rather than going to the expense of foreclosing and then sitting with an empty house in a glutted market.

A foreclosure is that empty house, that the lender wants to get rid of in the same market glutted with short sales and other foreclosures. Usually the price is even cheaper because there’s no seller wanting to come out of it financially even and the banks have learned that they aren’t very good at managing real estate.

Beware potential buyers of either. Though there is motivation on the part of the short seller and his or her lender, the process is chaotic.

I made a full asking price offer on a short sale, which was “conditionally accepted,” subject to mortgage insurance and lender final approval. Let’s leave it at such approval (though they had agreed to the asking price) was not forthcoming. As the tentative closing date approached, there was no word; and, there is no one to talk to about these deals.

Picture a low level employee with stacks of files on the desk who knows they are in a dead end job likely to be eliminated in a few years when the market recovers. They methodically go from one file to the next, checking boxes or deciding that form “A” is not properly filled out and the file has to be returned to the selling agent for more information, with the process and the timeline returning to day one.

My transaction had several problematic form A’s. I learned that the tentative closing date, September 30, would need to be extended to, are you ready for this…..December 1.

While cooling my heals, impatiently, I’d done some more research and realized that there are literally thousands of distressed properties in Atlanta and that is in all senses of the word, a buyer’s market (other than speed). So, when faced with a two month delay, I ….

I think this is a-three part post, a skill I learned from Curmudgeon at Second Effort, who stretched out the story of a one-day trial for a month of posts. Searching for Burgundy doesn’t come into play, now that I think about it, until part 3.

Stay tuned as your grandparents used to say.

I'm not in Netflix' target demographic

2011-10-13T13:24:00.001-04:00

Netflix has taken a lot of flak over the past couple of months. Raise the price. Amicable divorce from Starz. Split the DVD and streaming businesses. Recombine the businesses. Sign a bunch of new content deals that leave me underwhelmed.

That last one is what this post is about.

I’ve never been “whelmed” by Netflix’ streaming selection. It was a nice supplement to the DVD deal. When you’re bored, find an old movie you liked or missed and watch it at your convenience. Ignore all the old TV episodes of shows you didn’t watch when they were on TV in the first place.

Netflix announced a deal with CW today. It has acquired long-term rights to past and future CW shows such as “”Ringer,’ ‘Hart of Dixie’ and ‘The Secret Circle;’ returning hits ‘The Vampire Diaries,’ ‘Gossip Girl,’ ‘90210,’ ‘Supernatural,’ ‘Nikita’ and mid-season series, ‘One Tree Hill.’”

I’ve heard of a couple of these, though I’ve never actually seen any of these shows.

I watch very little network TV and nothing on channels like TBS, CW, WB or E! I’ve always thought of their programming as the kind of thing you used to find on a UHF channel, next to the PBS channel.

I think Netflix is becoming the modern version of UHF, a dumping ground for re-runs of shows that weren’t that good in the first place. If you like that kind of stuff, $8 a month isn’t a bad price to find it in one place without commercials I suppose.

But, it is seeming like an increasingly poor deal for me when it represents 80% and growing of what Netflix streaming has and I’m only interested in the 20% and shrinking part.

Death at the Hands of Government

2011-10-12T18:37:00.000-04:00

No, this isn’t about the death penalty.

It appears a couple of Iranian guys, one with U.S. Citizenship and one connected to the Iranian government plotted to kill a Saudi Ambassador and got caught.

We are officially incensed and Iran is officially dismissive.

We offed bin Laden with a Seal team and more recently, the other American born terrorist guy and trumpeted that we had done so. Others are incensed.

Whether or not we and the other side should be, we are in a guerilla war. Currently, we seem to be scoring better than they are and defending better than they are.

But, right or wrong both sides are killing or trying to kill. I don’t see that we are inherently morally superior in this exchange. Maybe we need to do what we are doing; but, and here’s the big but – I don’t know because our government won’t tell me what it’s got on the people it targets, even after the fact. Have you ever seen anything that rose to the level of legal proof that bin Laden is indeed the architect of terrorism? I think he probably was, but I don’t know that. The guy we offed with the drone last week – what did he do? We won’t know any time in the mid-term future.

Do we really expect Iran, if it is behind the most recent failed plot to fess up, cry and ask forgiveness? We are engaged in table stakes, death being the losing hand, poker. Our officials' decrying the other side’s attempts to harm us seems to be a bit disingenuous to me.

Goose and gander, it seems, who is who depending on your bias.

It Takes a Village

2011-10-08T18:29:00.002-04:00

While I’m totally disillusioned with the President; and, I don’t think the Democrats have clue as to what to do to solve our economic problems; and, the Republicans seem to be consumed with being against anything the President, and his wife while at Target, do, there are some things they all could do, which they won’t

Quit the games. None of you are totally evil, though there are days, weeks and months that I wonder. Our national and global future is not a game of table stakes poker. Quit acting like everything is a bet on what will get you re-elected and if it actually does some good is lagniappe.

Face up to the huge infrastructure problems that we face while at the same time facing huge social liabilities.

We can’t spend billions of dollars weekly making the world safe for whatever it is we are selling, whatever it is being totally squishy. Israel, while it gets money from us to fend off its regional enemies, doesn’t try to buy off its enemies. If we are going to play a global game, and we need to, be realistic – spend money and lives only if and when it is absolutely necessary to protect us from the people that want to kill us. And while you are at it, explain why you are spending the money.

The people in Afghanistan and Pakistan don’t like us and they aren’t going to become Western democracies in our great-grandchildrens’ lifetimes. Figure out what is the absolute minimum we need to do to make sure they don’t come after us and set them free to do as they will. When we are leaving, we should apologize for our part in what got them to the current mess.

Iraq, will get by, it always has and it always will. The same is true of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Given some time, perhaps there will be an Arab Spring in those countries.

North Korea – leave it to its neighbors, keeping an eye out for really crazy stuff.

China? Let it figure out how to deal with its rigid and structured economy in the face of the rest of the world’s economic meltdown. It and we need to figure out how to be major players in a world that won’t let either of us dominate.

What to do about Europe and Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and the next countries on the economic block? I don’t have a clue. But I suspect the solution to their problems is similar to the solution to the problems we have here that could earn us a place in the queue for defaulting country of the year.

I’ve said this before, but people are cussed. The “free market” doesn’t work if it is rigged.

I could go on and on with this. I think I’ll end with the thought that Hillary Clinton had a pretty good book title: It Takes a Village. Small groups of people can have their problems; but, when faced with having to live with each other, they can usually figure out a way to make the experience bearable.

We’ve spent the last century or so doing everything possible to eliminate the personal relationships inherent in a village.

Think about it. We get mad at our friends and family on a regular basis. And we get over it. Not always, but most of the time. If we can’t handle the issue, the larger but still small group steps in. The remaining problems are few.

Perhaps the solution to the world’s ills is to figure out how to replicate the process of a community on a large scale.

Not happy with this post overall; but, I’m not in the mood to polish it. Bottom line, we need to figure out a way to talk not shout, reign in the rogues, not bail them out.

Gotta Love Republicans

2011-10-02T18:40:00.002-04:00

The Washington Post had a sort of expose article today on Rick Perry’s maybe, kinda racist years in the wilds of Texas. It seems his father rented a “hunting camp” in the early eighties. He and Perry kept it going into this century, though Perry’s folks swear he hasn’t been there since 2006, an interesting swearing as Perry also says that a rock at the entrance that had the word Niggerhead in block letters painted on it was painted over shortly after Perry mentioned it to his father in the early eighties, a matter disputed by a number of people, named and unnamed in the Post article.

Herman Cain says that Perry is obviously “insensitive” given the story, Cain of the view that there will be “no Muslims in my administration” for months and months until he took too much flack for it, had a meeting with an actual Muslim, and repented.

We all have our prejudices, I just find that Republicans, when caught, are especially humorous when squirming away from the light thrown on them.

A Modest Proposal About the Death Penalty

2011-09-20T15:30:00.002-04:00

Georgia's Pardons and Parole Board has denied Troy Davis’ request for clemency. In Georgia, the Governor has no role in the process. Barring something totally unexpected, he will die tomorrow night about 7:00 p.m. in the state prison in Jackson.

I did some surfing to find out just what will happen and couldn't find the protocol. My recollection from the past is that there are “official” and other witnesses who sit behind a window watching the person being strapped down, needles inserted, drug flow started and doctors checking to make sure the process “worked.”

I think that is a much too sterile way to go about it.

For proponents and those on the fence, we should go back to public and gruesome spectacles – hanging, firing squad, electrocution, maybe drawing and quartering, or the “give it to him the way he gave it to his victim” approach. Give the proponents their money’s worth and the fence stradlers a graphic view of what their ambivalence leads to.

The village square is thing of the past so I suppose we’ll have to rent the local sports stadium and broadcast the execution on PBS and the local public access stations. If we go pay per view it would provide a quick straw poll on public support for state killing, the more viewers, the more support there is. I don’t want to hear NIMBY crap or that isn’t in good taste or suitable for children. The process is in place because “We the People” put and keep it in place. The spectacle will get them ready for real life, which includes death by way of the State.

Now, I’m not unsympathetic to the needs of broadcasters and the regular TV viewing habits of people in our country. We could treat the process like elections – conduct all the executions in a big batch on say the first Monday of each November, just in time for elections the next day. We could have “cards” with the lesser offenders and their quicker, cleaner, less gruesome killings coming first, leading up to the main event, it is to be hoped, a drawing and quartering or ritual torture.

My proposal satisfies all the stated purposes of state killing – vengeance, the “he won’t do it again” value and a much better “deterrent to others” potential, with a huge bonus for hockey, UFC and video game fans.

Come on, death penalty advocates, poke holes in my proposal. If the death penalty is a good thing, it should be open and made into a societal event. If you are squeamish and want to hide it away, what does that say about your real feelings?

Goldilocks and Class Warfare

2011-09-18T17:49:00.002-04:00

Goldilocks said the porridge was “just right.”

President Obama is talking about fair shares of taxation and the Republicans are shouting that he’s engaging in class warfare.

He probably is - I’m sure more of his potential voters next year are not millionaires than are.

And, it strikes me as odd that the Republicans are accusing him of class warfare other than the fact that many of us engage in class envy and class aspiration despite reality that says neither will pan out for most of us.

That said, the GOP is absolutely clear that it will tolerate NO TAX INCREASES! Having drawn that line, the GOP presupposes that the taxes in this country are “just right.” Democrats say that taxes have to be raised – Obama trumpeting more taxes on oil companies, jet owners and millionaires and that will be “just right.”

Says who? Please explain.

But the GOP doesn’t do that beyond repeating the mantra that increasing a tax of any kind will ruin the already near-death economy. Obama proposes band-aid tax increases and building nicer schools and then all will be well.

On Thursday John Boehner said that “[j]ob creators in America are essentially on strike.” And from the evidence, I think he’s right. Corporations have hundreds of billions of dollars sitting on the sidelines and are raking in billions more in profits as I type.

Will Google, Microsoft, all the banks, hedge funds and other industries shut down if their executives get a tax bill that’s a couple of percent higher than it’s been for the last ten years?

Alternatively, maybe we should reduce the marginal tax rate for the richest of us, will that spur the companies they control to hire people?

The answer to each question is no.

That being so, the question isn’t taxes on the rich. The question is indeed class warfare and a refusal on the part of the people on both sides of the aisle to deal with reality.

Left wing Democrats appeal to have-nots. Right wing Republicans appeal to haves and those that think the haves having will help them.

Neither side is willing to even consider addressing the structural problems of our economy for fear of losing the votes of their core voters resulting in classic class warfare.

Obama’s proposal to increase the taxes that millionaires pay will not solve one problem that we have. Boehner’s insistence that millionaires not pay one penny more in tax is equally unavailing.

Money for investment will continue to be on strike until … well isn’t that the question that I see neither Democrats nor Republicans trying to answer. I guess we need a Goldilocks to tell us what is just right and then do it.

It appears some of you still kinda like me

2011-09-16T19:43:00.001-04:00

I haven't looked at Sitemeter in months, many months. Whatever a Visit and a Page View are, they've been trending down for about a year. But, it seems there are still a few hundred wayward souls a month coming past and a few more hundred clicking beyond the main page.

Kind of amazing given that my output and the quality of said output has declined this year.

I'm not sure what it says about you or me; but, the blog had a bit over 90 page views when I re-posted the 9/11 stuff on September 10 this year.

I've had a busy working year and a year that I've just not had the spark to write much. Some of that lack of writing energy is the result of Facebook and now, to a small, very small extent, Google+. It's so much easier to dash off a few sentences or even easier to link something with, I hope, a pithy or funny sentence. (Evad Knat on both - nothing to hide - it's the same me).

And, hah! I just realized that Rather Than Working started towards the end of this month, five years ago in 2006.

Happy Anniversary to me!

Richard Jewell was no Sarah Palin

2011-09-16T18:01:00.001-04:00

The Atlanta-Journal Constitution this week declined to publish Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury strip in the paper paper because… well we’ll get to that.

In 1996 Atlanta hosted the Summer Olympics. Perhaps one of the reasons the International Olympic Committee didn’t pronounce the games “the best ever!” had to do with a small explosion in the then new Centennial Olympic Park. A couple of people died.

Richard Jewell, a hapless security guard, was identified in an AJC story as a suspect based on unnamed sources. There’s a lot of background and back and forth; but, as it turns out, he wasn’t the bomber, he was a hero – he urged people to leave the area. The bomber and villain was Eric Rudolph, who is currently a resident in one of the supermax prisons we maintain, the name of which I forget.

The AJC has spent hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars defending Mr. Jewell’s, and since his death, his family’s, defamation suit. One of it’s defenses was that Mr. Jewell was a “public figure,” something it made him, and thus he had to prove that the AJC acted with actual malice in publishing admittedly false information about him.

To date, the AJC has won and I think the case is finally over.

Back to the former Alaskan Governor and Mr. Trudeau. Doonesbury this week was about the new book coming out about Sarah Palin that accuses her of cocaine use and interracial, pre-marital sex, matters not exactly fitting with her image.

Let’s assume that the book and Doonesbury got all of it wrong.

The AJC, and a number of other newspapers, didn’t run the strips. The AJC’s editor stumbled and dissembled in an interview with the local public radio station which you can listen to here.

After being caught with giving some bogus reasons for censoring the strip, he settled on the matter being breaking news and it not being fair to Ms. Palin to run the satire before she had a chance to respond. “Readers expect and demand that we be fair.”

The AJC was hardly fair in its coverage of Richard Jewell. I know it didn’t wait to report the allegations until he responded to them. Perhaps it has learned something from its treatment of him in the past decade and a half which informs its decision about the Palin “reporting.” More likely, it considered him a schlub, unworthy of proper sourcing and fair reporting and decided to censor obvious satire about Palin which it felt would offend what it thinks are its mostly conservative readers.

For me, I do want fair reporting. I didn’t get it with respect to Mr. Jewell from the AJC. Political cartoons are by definition biased, that is their whole point and I do want them published by the newspapers I read. I didn’t get that from the AJC.

One guy did it, the other guy probably didn't and both will probably be executed

2011-09-16T13:42:00.001-04:00

The guy that did it is on death row in Texas. He was supposed to be killed last night but the U.S. Supreme Court issued a stay to consider whether he got a fair trial in light of testimony by a psychologist that black people (the defendant is black) are more likely to pose a danger to the public if they are released.

The guy that probably didn’t do it is on death row in Georgia. He was convicted of killing a policeman. Of the nine witnesses at his trial, seven have now said they didn’t tell the truth. One of the other two witnesses is a guy who may well have done the killing.

The Texas guy has had a little bit of fame lately since Rick Perry is running for President and when asked last week if he worried that one of the several hundred people executed while he has been Governor might be innocent said

"No, sir. I've never struggled with that at all. The state of Texas has a very thoughtful, a very clear process in place of which -- when someone commits the most heinous of crimes against our citizens, they get a fair hearing, they go through an appellate process, they go up to the Supreme Court of the United States, if that's required.

"But in the state of Texas, if you come into our state and you kill one of our children, you kill a police officer, you're involved with another crime and you kill one of our citizens, you will face the ultimate justice in the state of Texas, and that is, you will be executed."

Fair enough I suppose; but, the current guy is one of six defendants who had the same psychologist give the same prejudicial testimony – the other five got a new trial. And that “very thoughtful” process includes the governor’s consideration of a stay or clemency just before the scheduled execution – Governor Perry has been a tad busy this week running for President out of state.

Since from all accounts, the Texas guy is guilty, he doesn’t make an appealing poster child for opponents of the death penalty.

But the guy in Georgia has been in the spotlight for some time now and is a more attractive cause.

The U.S. Supreme Court gave him a hearing before a U.S. District Court Judge last year. The Judge set an impossible standard to throw out the verdict – actual innocence. In other words, though the state had to prove its case “beyond a reasonable doubt,” the guy had the burden to prove that there was absolutely no doubt that he was innocent. He didn’t meet that burden and is scheduled to be killed next week.

Yesterday death penalty opponents delivered petitions with over 600,000 signatures on them to Georgia’s Pardons and Paroles Board. Former FBI Director William Sessions sides with them. Writing about the absolute innocence conundrum he said:

“Some of these same witnesses also had testified at Davis’ trial but have since recanted their trial testimony. The judge at the evidentiary hearing found their recantations to be unreliable and, therefore, found Davis was unable to “clearly establish” his innocence. The problem is that the testimony of these same witnesses, whom the judge had determined were less believable, had been essential to the original conviction and death sentence.”

Former United States Attorney and U.S. Rep. Bob Barr, a death penalty advocate, wrote an editorial advocating clemency. “[I]mposing an irreversible sentence of death on the skimpiest of evidence will not serve the interest of justice. By granting clemency, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles will adhere to the most sacred principles of American jurisprudence, and will keep a man from being executed when we cannot be assured of his guilt.”

Execution doesn’t rehabilitate, it doesn’t deter. If vengeance is a legitimate goal I suppose the practice has a purpose. But even assuming that purpose, doesn’t life without parole accomplish the same thing?

Execution seems to me to be a symptom of an atavistic thread in our society. Early on, it was “us” and “them.” Our clan against the strangers. Early society had no time or inclination to rehabilitate and deter. If someone killed he became “them,” no longer one of us and now a threat to “us.” Putting utting him in “jail” to protect and to avenge harm to “us” wasn’t an option.

We are no longer hunter/gatherers. We can put people in jail to protect us from them and that is surely what we should do, especially when we cannot be assured of their guilt.

“In 2007, the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles issued a stay of execution for Davis and took the admirable position that it would ‘not allow an execution to proceed in this State unless and until its members are convinced that there is no doubt as to the guilt of the accused.’” AJC.com.

I hope they keep their word.

Just what is wrong with people?

2011-09-13T18:58:00.002-04:00

Last night at the CNN/Tea Party Republican Debate, the idea of letting a guy with no money and no health insurance die rather than being treated at a hospital got applause from the audience.

Today, I read an AP story about a 101 year old woman evicted from her son’s foreclosed home. The son, 65, apparently has some problems - he’d been ignoring the notices for some time. But, and here’s the big but – the sheriff or marshal or police guys there, they can’t call someone? She was literally put out on the street with her stuff. A friend is letting her stay in a place and the stuff is in the process of being moved from the curb. No one calls to anyone?

Tough luck guy and old, old lady, it’s a hard world these days. I got mine, you shoulda got yours when you could.

I’ve been thinking about that poster from way back about “they came for the Jews and I wasn’t a Jew,” the tradition of Jubilee and the fact that in an historical society that I can’t quite place, “stealing” enough food to eat for the day from a field wasn’t a crime if you were hungry. Can’t escape being a human that I know of.

One of these days, rich folks, and maybe some of us not so rich, may need more than gated communities.

I think, for the last time...

2011-09-10T18:44:00.001-04:00

I spent September 11, 2001 and the next few days in New Jersey being unable to get through the Lincoln Tunnel to Manhattan. I wrote about it a few years back and since have just linked to the posts. I've never been a fan of round number anniversaries, I'm not sure why they are special.

I actually haven't re-read the linked posts. What I do remember about my week in the wilds of Newark was the uncommon kindness of strangers and friends. I think that's what I'm going to hold on to from ten years ago, it seems so much more valuable than what has followed.

September 11 - 15, 2001.

Waiting for Godot

2011-09-06T13:48:00.001-04:00

There’s a line in the opinion piece I linked to yesterday that I’ve been thinking about. “There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic.”

By any measure, I’m not low on information. I have way too much information, not enough of it valuable. Put in legal terms, I don’t have enough relevant information. Put another way, I’m in over my head when it comes to assigning blame for the messes we have, much less knowing how to clean up the messes.

And the scary thing is, our leaders are in over their heads too. Obama, Boehner, Pelosi, McConnell, Reid and the various Tea Party types aren’t, at heart, evil. They have their biases and those biases get in the way of solving problems. But if the biases could be stripped away, I don’t think they have a clue, putting them in the same boat I’m in.

The boat is taking on water faster and faster and none of us know whether to row like hell for shore, bail like hell or wait for Godot* to rescue us. Most of us have settled on waiting for what will pass for Godot.

Waiting for Godot is an absurdist play by Samuel Beckett in which two characters wait endlessly and in vain for someone named Godot to arrive. Wikipedia, of course.

Some Light Reading For Labor Day

2011-09-05T12:23:00.003-04:00

The author thinks we are doomed. I'm inclined to agree. If you read it today and aren't too depressed to carry on, enjoy the holiday.

Ten Years Later

2011-09-04T10:00:00.003-04:00

Lengths of some wars you may remember:

Vietnam War--August, 1964 to April, 1975, 129 months

Afghanistan-- October, 2001 to Present, 119 months

Iraq War--March, 2003 to Present, 102 months

American Revolution--April, 1775 to September, 1783, 100 months

U.S. Civil War--April, 1861 to April, 1865, 48 months

World War II--December, 1941 to September, 1945, 45 months

World War I--April, 1917 to November, 1918, 19 months

Korean War-- June, 1950 to July, 1953, 37 months

War of 1812--June, 1812 to February, 1815, 32 months

U.S.-Mexican War-- May, 1846 to February, 1848, 21 months

Spanish-American War--April, 1898 to August, 1898, 5 months

Gulf War--January, 1991 to March, 1991, 3 months

Is there a lesson in the relative lengths of these wars? I think there is: if you are going to kill people for a cause, you need to know what the cause is and know whether killing people will get you to your goal. We haven’t undertaken that analysis the last three times we engaged in nation building (other than GHW Bush’s under-appreciated decision to live with the original goal of the Gulf War).

Leonard Pitts, September 12, 2001

It's my job to have something to say.

They pay me to tease shades of meaning from social and cultural issues, to provide words that help make sense of that which troubles the American soul. But in this moment of airless shock when hot tears sting disbelieving eyes, the only thing I can find to say, the only words that seem to fit, must be addressed to the unknown author of this suffering.

You monster. You beast. You unspeakable bastard.

What lesson did you hope to teach us by your coward's attack on our World Trade Center, our Pentagon, us? What was it you hoped we would learn?

Whatever it was, please know that you failed.

Did you want us to respect your cause? You just damned your cause.

Did you want to make us fear? You just steeled our resolve.

Did you want to tear us apart? You just brought us together.

Let me tell you about my people. We are a vast and quarrelsome family, a family rent by racial, cultural, political and class division, but a family nonetheless. We're frivolous, yes, capable of expending tremendous emotional energy on pop cultural minutiae: a singer's revealing dress, a ball team's misfortune, a cartoon mouse.

We're wealthy, too, spoiled by the ready availability of trinkets and material goods; and maybe because of that, we walk through life with a certain sense of blithe entitlement. We are fundamentally decent, though -- peace-loving and compassionate. We struggle to know the right thing and to do it. And we are -- the overwhelming majority of us -- people of faith, believers in a just and loving God.

Some people -- you, perhaps -- think that any or all of this makes us weak.

You're mistaken. We are not weak. Indeed, we are strong in ways that cannot be measured by arsenals.

Yes, we're in pain now. We are in mourning, and we are in shock. We're still grappling with the unreality of the awful thing you did, still working to make ourselves understand that this isn't a special effect from some Hollywood blockbuster, isn't the plot development from a Tom Clancy novel.

Both in terms of the awful scope of its ambition and the probable final death toll, your attacks are likely to go down as the worst acts of terrorism in the history of the United States and, indeed, the history of the world. You've bloodied us as we have never been bloodied before.

But there's a gulf of difference between making us bloody and making us fall.

This is the lesson that Japan was taught to its bitter sorrow the last time anyone hit us this hard, the last time anyone brought us such abrupt and monumental pain. When roused, we are righteous in our outrage, terrible in our force. When provoked by this level of barbarism, we will bear any suffering, pay any cost, go to any length in the pursuit of justice.

I tell you this without fear of contradiction. I know my people as you, I think, do not. What I know reassures me. It also causes me to tremble with dread of the future.

In days to come, there will be recrimination and accusation, fingers pointing to determine whose failure allowed this to happen and what can be done to prevent it from happening again. There will be heightened security, misguided talk of revoking basic freedoms. We'll go forward from this moment sobered, chastened, sad. But determined, too. Unimaginably determined.

You see, there is steel beneath this velvet. That aspect of our character is seldom understood by people who don't know us well. On this day, the family's bickering is put on hold. As Americans, we will weep; as Americans, we will mourn; and as Americans, we will rise in defense of all that we cherish.

Still, I keep wondering what it was you hoped to teach us. It occurs to me that maybe you just wanted us to know the depths of your hatred.

If that's the case, consider the message received. And take this message in exchange: You don't know my people. You don't know what we're about. You don't know what you just started.

But you're about to learn.

George W. Bush, September 20, 2001

Americans are asking, why do they hate us? They hate what we see right here in this chamber--a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms--our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other. They want to overthrow existing governments in many Muslim countries, such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. They want to drive Israel out of the Middle East. They want to drive Christians and Jews out of vast regions of Asia and Africa. These terrorists kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life. With every atrocity, they hope that America grows fearful, retreating from the world and forsaking our friends. They stand against us, because we stand in their way.

We are not deceived by their pretenses to piety. We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions--by abandoning every value except the will to power--they follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way, to where it ends: in history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies.

Americans are asking: How will we fight and win this war? We will direct every resource at our command--every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence, and every necessary weapon of war--to the disruption and to the defeat of the global terror network. . . . Our response involves far more than instant retaliation and isolated strikes. Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations, secret even in success. We will starve terrorists of funding, turn them one against another, drive them from place to place, until there is no refuge or no rest. And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.

Our nation has been put on notice: We are not immune from attack. We will take defensive measures against terrorism to protect Americans. Today, dozens of federal departments and agencies, as well as state and local governments, have responsibilities affecting homeland security. These efforts must be coordinated at the highest level. So tonight I announce the creation of a Cabinet-level position reporting directly to me--the Office of Homeland Security….

These measures are essential. But the only way to defeat terrorism as a threat to our way of life is to stop it, eliminate it, and destroy it where it grows. Many will be involved in this effort, from FBI agents to intelligence operatives to the reservists we have called to active duty. All deserve our thanks, and all have our prayers. And tonight, a few miles from the damaged Pentagon, I have a message for our military: Be ready. I’ve called the Armed Forces to alert, and there is a reason. The hour is coming when America will act, and you will make us proud.

****

Americans are asking: What is expected of us? I ask you to live your lives, and hug your children. I know many citizens have fears tonight, and I ask you to be calm and resolute, even in the face of a continuing threat.

I ask you to uphold the values of America, and remember why so many have come here. We are in a fight for our principles, and our first responsibility is to live by them. No one should be singled out for unfair treatment or unkind words because of their ethnic background or religious faith. . . .

We will come together to give law enforcement the additional tools it needs to track down terror here at home. We will come together to strengthen our intelligence capabilities to know the plans of terrorists before they act, and find them before they strike. We will come together to take active steps that strengthen America’s economy, and put our people back to work….

After all that has just passed--all the lives taken, and all the possibilities and hopes that died with them--it is natural to wonder if America’s future is one of fear. Some speak of an age of terror. I know there are struggles ahead, and dangers to face. But this country will define our times, not be defined by them. As long as the United States of America is determined and strong, this will not be an age of terror; this will be an age of liberty, here and across the world.

Great harm has been done to us. We have suffered great loss. And in our grief and anger we have found our mission and our moment. Freedom and fear are at war. The advance of human freedom--the great achievement of our time, and the great hope of every time--now depends on us. Our nation--this generation--will lift a dark threat of violence from our people and our future. We will rally the world to this cause by our efforts, by our courage. We will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail.

It is my hope that in the months and years ahead, life will return almost to normal. We’ll go back to our lives and routines, and that is good. Even grief recedes with time and grace. But our resolve must not pass. Each of us will remember what happened that day, and to whom it happened. We’ll remember the moment the news came--where we were and what we were doing. Some will remember an image of a fire, or a story of rescue. Some will carry memories of a face and a voice gone forever.

****

I will not forget this wound to our country or those who inflicted it. I will not yield; I will not rest; I will not relent in waging this struggle for freedom and security for the American people. The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.

Fellow citizens, we’ll meet violence with patient justice--assured of the rightness of our cause, and confident of the victories to come. In all that lies before us, may God grant us wisdom, and may He watch over the United States of America.

Senator and candidate Barack Obama, 2008

….As President, I will pursue a tough, smart and principled national security strategy – one that recognizes that we have interests not just in Baghdad, but in Kandahar and Karachi, in Tokyo and London, in Beijing and Berlin. I will focus this strategy on five goals essential to making America safer: ending the war in Iraq responsibly; finishing the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban; securing all nuclear weapons and materials from terrorists and rogue states; achieving true energy security; and rebuilding our alliances to meet the challenges of the 21st century….

President Obama, June, 2011.

My fellow Americans, this has been a difficult decade for our country. We've learned anew the profound cost of war -- a cost that's been paid by the nearly 4,500 Americans who have given their lives in Iraq, and the over 1,500 who have done so in Afghanistan -– men and women who will not live to enjoy the freedom that they defended. Thousands more have been wounded. Some have lost limbs on the battlefield, and others still battle the demons that have followed them home.

Yet tonight, we take comfort in knowing that the tide of war is receding. Fewer of our sons and daughters are serving in harm’s way. We’ve ended our combat mission in Iraq, with 100,000 American troops already out of that country. And even as there will be dark days ahead in Afghanistan, the light of a secure peace can be seen in the distance. These long wars will come to a responsible end.

As they do, we must learn their lessons. Already this decade of war has caused many to question the nature of America’s engagement around the world. Some would have America retreat from our responsibility as an anchor of global security, and embrace an isolation that ignores the very real threats that we face. Others would have America over-extended, confronting every evil that can be found abroad.

We must chart a more centered course. Like generations before, we must embrace America’s singular role in the course of human events. But we must be as pragmatic as we are passionate; as strategic as we are resolute. When threatened, we must respond with force –- but when that force can be targeted, we need not deploy large armies overseas. When innocents are being slaughtered and global security endangered, we don’t have to choose between standing idly by or acting on our own. Instead, we must rally international action, which we’re doing in Libya, where we do not have a single soldier on the ground, but are supporting allies in protecting the Libyan people and giving them the chance to determine their own destiny.

In all that we do, we must remember that what sets America apart is not solely our power -– it is the principles upon which our union was founded. We’re a nation that brings our enemies to justice while adhering to the rule of law, and respecting the rights of all our citizens. We protect our own freedom and prosperity by extending it to others. We stand not for empire, but for self-determination. That is why we have a stake in the democratic aspirations that are now washing across the Arab world. We will support those revolutions with fidelity to our ideals, with the power of our example, and with an unwavering belief that all human beings deserve to live with freedom and dignity.

Above all, we are a nation whose strength abroad has been anchored in opportunity for our citizens here at home. Over the last decade, we have spent a trillion dollars on war, at a time of rising debt and hard economic times. Now, we must invest in America’s greatest resource –- our people. We must unleash innovation that creates new jobs and industries, while living within our means. We must rebuild our infrastructure and find new and clean sources of energy. And most of all, after a decade of passionate debate, we must recapture the common purpose that we shared at the beginning of this time of war. For our nation draws strength from our differences, and when our union is strong no hill is too steep, no horizon is beyond our reach.

This is me.

With all due respect, bullshit.

When roused, we are righteous in our outrage, terrible in our force. When provoked by this level of barbarism, we will bear any suffering, pay any cost, go to any length in the pursuit of justice.

As much as I Iike and respect Leonard Pitts, he, and we, let our anger get in the way of our brains. It was sentiments like this that let GW Bush say and do stuff like this.

Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen.

I know there are struggles ahead, and dangers to face. But this country will define our times, not be defined by them. As long as the United States of America is determined and strong, this will not be an age of terror; this will be an age of liberty, here and across the world.

We will rally the world to this cause by our efforts, by our courage. We will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail.

The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain.

Was it? We wandered through the literal and figurative deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan for years, spending money and lives. We grew fatigued and in good part elected Barack Obama on his promise to end the adventure, albeit in a “balanced, responsible” way.

[T]here will be dark days ahead in Afghanistan, the light of a secure peace can be seen in the distance. These long wars will come to a responsible end….when our union is strong no hill is too steep, no horizon is beyond our reach.

There are hills too steep and there are false horizons. We were naïve to think that we could change centuries of a way of life in the Middle East based on its cultures by spending money and spouting slogans based on the imposition of our culture.

It’s a decade later, trillions have been wasted, tens of thousands of lives have been lost, a greater number of lives over there and back here have been made poorer, we have access to the oil that we secured in three months two decades ago, at a huge literal and figurative cost, and not much more.

Creating Need Versus Want

2011-09-02T10:26:00.002-04:00

I’ve posted before about my technological evolution. My Osborne “portable” computer in the mid-eighties, getting a cell phone and Email capability in the mid-nineties and going completely online just after 9/11.

I couldn’t do my job without what has been developed over the last 25 years. My personal life would be lessened without the technological evolution.

That said, while I might “want” an iPad, I don’t “need” one. Yet.

I know, those of you that know me, know I’ve got a lot of gadgets I don’t “need.” Flat screen TV, smart phone and a fancy DSLR come to mind.

In the realm of consuming stuff, I think that there’s a continuum between want and need, the point of need appearing at a different place for different people. When you reach your need point depends on economics, lifestyle, your social structure and a host of other factors.

Right now, I’m not up to my need point on the iPad continuum. I have a Mac Mini, an Android smart phone and a Macbook. The iPad has some of things all of them have with some things none of the others have.

I got the Mini and the Macbook to replace crapped out Dell products, escape from Microsoft and gain the benefit of elegant design and operation. I got the smart phone when it did enough things that I wanted to do, and couldn’t do on the phone I had. The iPad doesn’t replace the functions of the desktop, the phone or the laptop, so for me, it needs to do something I want to do and can’t now do.

When that happens, I’m in because I’ll “need” it.

What a Week

2011-08-27T08:15:00.000-04:00

First, for “all” those who missed me, I’m back. I learned yesterday that Blogger had shut me down for “suspicious” activity. What it was, I don’t know. There is a series of links you can use to verify yourself and get the lights turned back on. I did and here I am, back in business, so to speak.

Second, in my spare time, over lunch on Tuesday, I bought a condo. I suppose that’s a bit impulsive; but, I am now experiencing the wonders of the “short sale” process.

I had dinner last Saturday with friends, one of whom is a real estate agent. We talked about short sales and he mentioned that he knew of several potentially good deals in the area. I looked at one of them on Sunday but it turned out to be under contract. I looked at another, over the lunch hour Tuesday. The dollars were so compelling, I made an offer. After some back and forth about details, the offer was “accepted” yesterday, kinda.

In a short sale, there are a bunch of people who have a say. Me and the unfortunate seller of course. The lender, the servicing bank and the mortgage insurance company. Everyone has to say yes and everyone but me and the seller have a stack of folders that represent houses on which they’ve lost money on their desks. They are overworked and unhappy.

Right now they are all tentatively on board; but, they have two weeks to back out, we’ll see.

Third, in the world of computers, phones and internet, none of the players like me. Google, as noted above, burped and shut me down. It’s Gmail service which I use with Android on my phone quit working, sometimes, other times working just fine. The fix, I was told by the nice lady at T-Mobile was a “factory reset.” Liar. I still have the problem and between T-Mobile and Google, I can’t reload some of the apps.

Not to be outdone, AT&T has been flaky at the office for some time. The decision was finally made to switch to Comcast which will happen on Monday. AT&T’s DSL, apparently sensing the rejection has been even more flaky, shutting down, reappearing, shutting down, repeat constantly.

Fourth, for me, I’m working a lot amidst all of these distractions. I’m going to have to do something about that.

How was your week?

Did al Qaeda actually win?

2011-08-16T14:25:00.001-04:00

The United States has spent something just short of $8 trillion on security (military, homeland security and Iraq and Afghanistan) since 2001. The increase in the deficit during that period? About $8.2 trillion.

Factor in the Wall Street/Bank bailout a few years ago and spending for every thing else actually went down.

Gotta watch those welfare moms, the lazy unemployed, shiftless Medicaid recipients and illegal aliens sucking up all our tax dollars.

Old Number 6

2011-08-12T12:58:00.002-04:00

The Atlanta Braves are retiring Bobby Cox's number tonight. This is a slightly revised re-run of a post I did last September:

Bobby Cox was the manager of the Atlanta Braves, a position he held from 1990 to 2010 (after stints as manager and general manager with the Braves and another team). He’s won just a couple more than 2,500 games, fourteen Division Titles (in fifteen years, the missing year, baseball went on strike) and a World Series (making it to a few more). But those aren’t the important things.

Bobby is the ultimate manager. No one in baseball has a bad thing to say about him. He’s universally praised by executives, managers, coaches and players.

He’s been second-guessed by fans and reporters. He leaves players in too long. He goes with veterans too long. Great season record, playoffs not so much. All true to an extent.

He’s been thrown out of more than 150 games, a world record (he is said to have written a check for $10K at one point and sent it with a note to let him know when it ran out). You see, he’d rather pay the fine and spend a few innings in the clubhouse, keeping the arguing player, that he stepped in front of, in the game, to get a hit or make a catch.

He never says much of any significance to the press, and what he says is always positive about his players (even though he and everyone else knows he’s blowing smoke). They know he’s got their backs. (He mentioned to a reporter who was questioning a young player’s abysmal offense that the player had a swing like Stan Musial. The player started swinging like the legend.)

He doesn’t have many rules. Show up. Play hard. Don’t show off. Play for the team, not yourself. Break those rules enough and you’re gone, no matter how great your potential or your performance (See e.g., Kenny Lofton, Gary Sheffield, David Justice, most recently, Yunel Escobar). Follow those rules and you have a home for as long as your ability lasts (Chipper Jones, Greg Norton, Brian McCann, Javy Lopez, Eddie Perez – now a coach).

He treats players like adults and expects them to act that way. And they do. When was the last time you heard of a Braves player arrested or involved in a scandal? They’re very, very few and very, very far between. He gets the most out of his players, last year’s team, with injury after injury is a perfect example.

Any one out there that runs a company or teaches business? Bobby Cox would be the perfect case study for a course in how to manage people.

Roger Ebert is wrong

2011-08-08T15:02:00.002-04:00

I agree with the wisdom of almost every thing that Ebert says in this article; but, he's missing a piece of the First Amendment and is confused about another piece.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” U.S. Constitution.

“There are not two sides to the separation of Church and State. There is only this: They must be separated for the health of our democracy.” Roger Ebert.

“Separation of Church and State” is a legal construct that is intended to ensure that government doesn’t get into the religious favoritism and anti-religion business. In the meantime, people, under the “freedom” clause get to say and do pretty much what they like, including advocating an establishment of religion or trying to convince people that they have the one true religion and other contenders should be stomped.

Governor Perry, the other headliners and the 30,000 people that showed up at the “Response” rally on Saturday are a perfect example of how the First Amendment works. They, not a government, organized it. They assembled, spoke and prayed to their hearts content. They may have petitioned the government. The “press” rallied round them or against them, including Mr. Ebert. No laws were passed. No government did anything, just people.

The “Response” rally and how everyone reacted to it, is exactly how things in this country should go. Are they right as to what they want? If their God can help, great, though I don’t think our country’s political disputes are high on the celestial to do list.

The Poker Party

2011-08-08T10:48:00.001-04:00

So we now have the debt ceiling debacle and its unfolding consequences.

Here’s the Cliff Notes version of how we got to where we are, based on no research and a hazy memory of who did what, when and why.

We’ve been raising the debt ceiling since the 1930’s, early on to pay for WWII, and since, for a wide variety of things that most people thought were good things.

There have been so many “good things” over the decades that we now spend about forty cents of every dollar that the federal government takes in on paying interest on the money borrowed to pay for the “good things.”

Both Democrats and Republicans for the most part are complicit in what could be described as our national financial Ponzi scheme. (Too harsh? We give out goodies now with the price for them passed down the years to the schmucks who didn’t get out of the game in time – that’s a Ponzi scheme.)

From what I’ve read, the old guard of both parties intended to stay the spending and borrowing course, giving lip service to their constituents by decrying the other side’s programs. No new taxes! (Fees and service related charges are okay though.) You can’t balance the budget on the backs of the poor and middle class! (Making states pay for federal mandates with the result that they cut services is okay though.)

Then came the 2010 mid-term election. A bunch of wild-eyed newcomers had made a bunch of promises that, as it happened, appealed to the anti-tax crowd and it worked.. But what to do when faced with the reality of actual governance – especially when they were only a part of a majority, in only half the Congress?

Poker was the answer. Table stakes poker with a choice of economic stability or crisis as the prize.

Never mind that any rational person knew that the debt ceiling was going to be raised, let’s get whatever political currency we can out of the process. That doing so will do nothing meaningful in the way of what we say our goal is? Elections are fast approaching, this crisis is butchered red meat for our base.

The last paragraph isn’t directed solely to the Tea Party folks – the far left wants an unsustainable social structure to remain in place just as long as it can manage. No spending cuts, no reform of social welfare structures, no nothing. Raise “revenue” (notice the left never uses the word tax?).

There are two parties of “no” “working” in Washington, D.C. Why? It seems to work in what our political life has become. Damn liberals, they’ll take and take and take. Life sucking conservatives, they’d throw grandma out on the curb if it means more money for them in their gated communities. And we listen to it all, bitch, moan and groan, and then vote for the politician that seems to identify with our bias.

As I type, the Dow is down a little more than 2.5%. But the people sponsoring the poker game aren’t too worried I bet. (You do understand what, not who, I mean by people don’t you? Google Citizens United if you need a refresher course in power politics.) They’ll get their “rake” from the poker players no matter who “wins” any particular poker game.

Does government spending need to be cut? Yep. Does it have to be done without putting grandma out on the curb? Yep. Does that mean that some group of grown-ups needs to find out what cuts and what structural reforms can be made and make up the difference with some extra taxes on some of us? Yep.

Any of that going to happen? Nope.

Spam comment detection comes just in time...

2011-08-01T21:08:00.002-04:00

for the slow death of the blog. To explain the title, I haven't been here for just over two weeks. Blogger tells me I now have automatic spam detection enabled. Not that I've written much, I haven't had a comment on anything I've written in awhile, though since I cross-post on Facebook, people do occasionally say something there.

The sub-title of the blog says "Comments, and on my pretentious days, essays, on what on a given day interests, amuses, annoys or outrages me." Stuff still interests, amuses, annoys and, not so much, outrages me. The comments are on Facebook and I'm too busy and a bit too burned out to write essays these days.

I just took a look at the "Blogs" sub-folder in my Favorites. There are only three people in it that are still writing with any regularity: Thomas, Jeni and Curmudgeon (the latter, I'm being kind, you're great but you aren't prodigious anymore).

I'd announce the end of Rather Than Working; but, that seems way too final, and unnecessary. If and when it ends, I hope that it will finally answer that question about "if a tree falls in the forest...."

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and often a path to profit

2011-07-15T11:29:00.000-04:00

When I was a little kid in school, the teacher used to dole out little star stickers for good behavior, getting all the questions right on your homework, and so on.

As of yesterday, Google is giving out badges for reading the news:

http://www.google.com/support/News/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1237021

As best I can tell from the Google blurb, instead of being a Foursquare “Mayor” I can get colored badges for reading categories of news. More news in a category means a better color: bronze, silver, gold, platinum, with an eventual rise to “Ultimate.”

I’m really not sure what to think of this. Is reading a lot of news articles like “eating your peas” as the President wants the Republicans to do? Maybe Google is on to something here. Colored badges for the GOPers that play nice on the debt ceiling debate!

Google is on an imitation roll lately. Google+ seems to be attempting to combine Facebook (Stream), Twitter (Following and Inbox), Skype (Hangout), and pick your own flavor of photo sharing (Photos) and instant messaging (Huddle), with its own RSS/news feed thrown in (Sparks).

Google is getting a bit of media flack for its imitation; but, it’s also getting a bit of praise for the slick and often improved way it does what its competitors have been doing.

Ford wasn’t the first car company; but, it invented the assembly line. Microsoft stole Windows and made it ubiquitous. My Space came before Facebook, which pretty much drove it out of business. Remember Dogpile and Alta Vista and Google’s other early competitors? (Interestingly, they are both still around – Dogpile.com and Altavista.com – the latter looks like an early, stripped down Google.com.)

The interesting thing about Google+ is its shopping mall versus boutique approach to the internet. In a way, it’s a throw back to the early Yahoo and AOL – come here (and stay) for all of your World Wide Web needs!

I signed up for Google+ the other day, as those of you that got here from my Stream know. So far, it’s Facebook with a much better interface but only a couple of “friends.” (Be an early adopter, hang out at the mall with me, sign up so I’m not lonely!) I can say that Sergey Brin is boring and the Mark Zuckerberg has nothing to say, literally, nothing.

Until you get here, maybe I’ll spend my time getting some nice shiny, colored badges.

Nope, No Way, Maybe

2011-07-12T18:45:00.000-04:00

I’m not paying Netflix double what I’m paying now for what it gives me.

I used to get three at a time DVD’s with the streaming service when it came in. I added the Blu-ray when it became available.

I cut back to one DVD at a time when I ran out of new movies I wanted to watch.

All the while, I read about the business model. I should have known.

Netflix doesn’t want to send me round pieces of plastic. That costs too much money. And, most people want instant gratification.

People pay more for instant.

Then too, Netflix’s content providers saw all the money it was making on the sweet streaming deals it had signed. They wanted more of the pie.

What to do, what to do.

The future is streaming and streaming content is going to cost more money. And, DVD’s have high overhead.

We have no real competition for either service.

Ta Da!

Split it Netflix decided and it is a good decision for Netflix. More money to pay the content providers on the streaming and plastic ends of the business. More marginal income on both sides too.

They’ll lose some people, probably like me on both ends and keep one or the other income streams from most people.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do. I’m almost sure I’ll drop the DVD service – Redbox and Amazon will be the beneficiaries of my plastic or streaming purchases of new releases. The question is whether I’ll succumb to Netflix being the only real source of broad choice streaming content. I don’t want to; but, I might. Doing so, gives Netflix about the same revenue it gets now with no physical costs and I really don’t like the fact that Netflix has the leverage and I don’t.

I’m off to research steaming content sources and will let you know what I come up with, if I come up with something.

Bring On the Default!

2011-07-11T18:26:00.002-04:00

I’m ready to see us exceed the debt ceiling and see what will happen.

Greece seems to be doing okay, Spain and Portugal are still clicking along. I’m pretty sure Ireland and Iceland are still there. Us? Talk about too big to fail.

Minnesota, last I heard has not slide under Wisconsin, which hasn’t slide into Lake Michigan.

I did like the President’s line today that it’s time to “eat our peas.” But his buds and their opposition only want dessert in the way of scoring points with those they see likely to vote for them next year.

On the left, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are off the table. On the right, that’s pretty much all we can cut from, and no tax increases on anyone, anytime, for any reason.

Boys and girls, that ain’t going to cut it.

Maybe a double dip recession will help for those of us with jobs. Think about it, the markets will tank again and you can ride them back up (assuming you get out in the next week or so). If the markets crash, gas will probably go back down with them.

The poor, the halt and the weak? They’ll still be around, in about the same shape as they were before the default same as in Greece, Portugal, Spain, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

The boys and girls in Washington will eventually cobble something together, fixing none of the structural problems, same as they did a couple of years ago to “fix” the most recent recession.

Then for a few years we can go back to our desperate, or not too bad, lives till the next time our representatives let things get to yet another crisis.

Why are you down on our schools?

2011-07-07T19:23:00.000-04:00

That’s what a friend asked me in a comment to a Facebook link I posted to this opinion piece by Roger Ebert to which I’d added a header of “another thing wrong with our schools.”

For those of you that don’t feel like clicking over, Ebert bemoaned the MacMillan Reader edition of The Great Gatsby, which dumbs the novel way down, promoting it as some sort of gateway to reading to be used by teachers.

I take Ebert’s side; but, that isn’t the point of this post.

My friend and I went back and forth in the comments, the gist of my end of them being that schools “teach to the test,” and don’t teach a love of, and the method of, learning.

Here in Atlanta we have a current scandal running because a hundred or so Atlanta teachers and administrators made wholesale corrections of students’ achievement test answers. I’m not too interested in the fact of the cheating, as deplorable as it is. But, it seems to me that is a somewhat predictable result of an overwhelming emphasis on shoving a prescribed body of “education” down the throats of our kids with the hope and expectation that they will cough it back up on the yearly tests.

The failure is at both ends of the ability spectrum. Neither a very smart, nor a barely able, five-year old seems to get the different educations that each needs. The very smart float through the system, unchallenged. The barely able are pushed along, not helped to do more than get through the process of getting an “education.”

I don’t know much about current curriculum; but, I do know that whatever is being taught is resulting in too many adults that don’t spell very well, can’t write very well and don’t read at all. It results in too many adults that have little or no ability to think critically. It results in an increasing number of our “hard science” professionals being foreign born.

Kids aren’t fungible, they are unique. Education isn’t one, or two or ten sizes fit all. Until we figure out how to create a system that finds out what a particular kid “is,” where the kid is on his particular path and how best to move him along that path, be it at the high, middle or low end of ability, all the money in the world won’t result in an educated society.

July 4, 1776...

2011-07-01T18:58:00.000-04:00

gave us the Declaration of Independence.

March 4, 1789 is a more important day as the Constitution became operative having been endorsed by New Hampshire, the necessary ninth state.

December 15, 1791 is arguably even more important, the Bill of Rights was ratified.

Then too, if you aren’t Caucasian, a date in the late 1800’s during or just after the Civil War, or the day Brown v. School Board came out might be a big day for you.

Gay and living in New York? Last week had a pretty good day for you.

Then there’s Arab Spring which is spinning into Summer.

But, live in Syria and you don’t have much to celebrate, yet.

All that in mind, maybe Monday will have just a bit of importance as the anniversary of a distillation of some ideas that informed what has come after:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security….”

In the words of a friend, have a sparkly Fourth. But, words do matter. I’m thinking about what we learned and applied from the paragraph above, and what it says that we forget.

Current Conditions: Partly Cloudy. Forcast: A Bad Storm A Comin'

2011-06-16T14:25:00.000-04:00

Which doesn’t belong:

IMF, Apple, Google, the U.S. Senate, Sony, Lockheed Martin, Chase, CIA

To my knowledge, only Apple hasn’t been hacked. I’ve written about this before; but, for the life of me, I don’t understand putting anything important in “the Cloud.”

First, there is no “cloud.” The Cloud is a bunch of servers sitting all over the place – you send your stuff to them and they will let you retrieve it. Usually. If all of the entities listed above can’t keep hacker’s out, why does anyone think they can protect your important stuff?

If someone wants to hack the text of my Gmail’s, fine. I never use Gmail for anything important, precisely because it’s all sitting on Google’s servers ready to be hacked. For work, I use a domain service that deletes Emails when they are downloaded by me – it’s scary enough that I’m trusting strangers for the short time the Emails are in their servers.

The trouble with the Cloud is that it makes vandalism and theft a lot more efficient. It used to be that bad guys had to physically break in and take or damage your stuff. Now they can sit in a basement, drinking Mountain Dew, and wreak havoc at their leisure.

Cyber-war is a word we’re hearing more and more about. The U.S. is thought to have screwed up Iran’s nuclear reactors by messing with the computers used to run them. Someone in China hacked Google and Lockheed Martin.

Computers and the internet were supposed to be a boon to mankind. We just forgot that mankind is the reason we can’t have nice stuff.

As it turns out, it turns on timing,...

2011-06-09T09:46:00.001-04:00

the constitutionality of health care reform, that is.

The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments on “Obamacare” yesterday. Most of the time was spent on the “individual mandate” which would make us buy insurance or pay a “fine” to be collected by the IRS. The Government argues that the requirement is constitutional under the Commerce Clause, which says “[The Congress shall have Power] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes….”

The question for the Court is whether people are “engaged in commerce,” which Congress can regulate, while sitting in their living rooms and refusing to buy health insurance. Paul Clement, representing states and individuals opposing the law, said they weren’t. But then he conceded that a broke and bleeding person on a hospital doorstep that didn’t have insurance could be forced to buy it before he was treated. At that point, seeking health care, he was “engaged in commerce.” By that logic, a person sitting in his living room, suffering a heart attack while doing nothing, runs afoul of Congress’ power and engages in commerce when he dials 911 for an ambulance. What if he does nothing and his neighbor makes the call for him?

This debate seems to be a matter of form over substance. No one argues that Congress could increase income tax rates by whatever percentage was necessary to pay for a national health care plan. Congress, in its wisdom or folly, decided that everyone needs to have health care. Wisely or foolishly, it devised a plan to pay for it.

This is exactly the kind of issue that judges do poorly at and are always required to deal with when politicians are divided.

Conservatives are always arguing that “the will of the people” should prevail until that will, as expressed in a law they don’t like, comes to their attention. (I’m not saying Liberals haven’t done the same thing.) Conservatives didn’t have the votes last year to stop Obamacare and don’t have them this year to repeal it.

Maybe, just maybe, if the people in Congress decided to talk to each other and stop engaging in brinksmanship they could come up with a better way to deal with everyone’s need for health care. If pigs could fly….

Which President said what, when?

2011-06-05T18:17:00.005-04:00

One of these quotes is from GWB, one from BHO:

“As president, I can promise you your country will be with you every single step of the way. We’re not going anywhere… We will be with you every step of the way.”

“In the life of this nation, we have often been reminded that nature is an awesome force, and that all life is fragile. We are the heirs of men and women who lived through those first terrible winters at Jamestown and Plymouth, who rebuilt Chicago after a great fire, and San Francisco after a great earthquake , who reclaimed the prairie from the dust bowl of the 1930s. Every time, the people of this land have come back from fire, flood, and storm to build anew – and to build better than what we had before. Americans have never left our destiny to the whims of nature – and we will not start now.”

Were I a resident of Tuscaloosa, Joplin or Springfield, I'd be a bit worried.

Adhesion and the Internet

2011-06-03T12:47:00.000-04:00

Over the last few months I’ve been playing with a new DSLR and Photoshop (the latter kicking my butt regularly). When I produce something I like, I sometimes post it to my Facebook page, but not using Photoshop or iPhoto.

Why you ask?

Here’s what iPhoto wants from me in return for uploading a picture (and Photoshop is similar):

Access my basic information

Includes name, profile picture, gender, networks, user ID, list of friends, and any other information I've shared with everyone.

Post to my Wall

iPhoto Uploader may post status messages, notes, photos, and videos to my Wall

Access my profile information

Likes, Music, TV, Movies, Books, Quotes, About Me, Activities, Interests, Groups, Events, Notes, Birthday, Hometown, Current City, Website, Religious and Political Views, Education History, Work History and Facebook Status

Access my contact information

Online Presence

Access my family & relationships

Significant Other and Relationship Details and Family Members and Relationship Status

Access my photos and videos

Photos Uploaded by Me, Videos Uploaded by Me and Photos and Videos of Me

Access my friends' information

Birthdays, Religious and Political Views, Family Members and Relationship Statuses, Significant Others and Relationship Details, Hometowns, Current Cities, Likes, Music, TV, Movies, Books, Quotes, Activities, Interests, Education History, Work History, Online Presence, Websites, Groups, Events, Notes, Photos, Videos, Photos and Videos of Them, 'About Me' Details and Facebook Statuses

Why does iPhoto need info about my Facebook Friends, all of my contact information, my “relationships,” etc. to transmit a lousy picture? A short answer, it doesn’t; but, it does want the info and forces me to give it if I want to use its services.

iPhoto, Photoshop, Android, and iPhone “permissions” are adhesion contracts. Want a mortgage, an apartment, Windows? Say yes to all the terms or you don’t get what you want. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt don’t negotiate with their customers. Yes it’s “opt-in” which is an improvement over “opt-out,” Facebook’s infamous mode of operation. And it’s transparent, another trendy word these days. But is it a good idea?

Law over the centuries has evolved to protect people in circumstances where they are dealing with someone that has all the leverage. In most states, an exculpatory agreement is invalid or limited in its scope (think the tiny print on the back of your ticket for an amusement park, a raft trip and so on). Most states have laws about what apartment complexes can put in leases and what banks can put in mortgages. Utility companies are regulated by states.

Not so the internet – the wild, wild west. Maybe it’s because it came about in the Reagan Eighties, grew up in the go-go Nineties and matured with last decade’s lasseze faire government approach to business regulation.

But, I think it’s time the internet is recognized for what it has become – a utility – “a public service, as a telephone or electric-light system, a streetcar or railroad line, or the like.” Dictionary.com.

Your electric and gas companies can’t make you give them private information (beyond credit qualifications) as a condition of providing you their products. You don’t have to give them your address book and disclose your current significant other.

Proposing that the government step in to protect consumers doesn’t make me feel all warm and fuzzy given its track record with regulation of cable companies and the financial industry over the past few decades; but, it running interference might slow down some of the excesses of our new tech masters just as it did with Twentieth Century industry, before it pretty much gave up the fight.

I've been busy and...

2011-06-01T18:49:00.000-04:00

find myself not having much to say in long form lately. It may be that I've said everything and can only repeat myself.

Then too, if you look under the blog name, it says I write about things that interest, annoy or amuse me, or something like that. Lately, with a lot to do professionally, I'm not interested in much else and even if I am, I don't have the time and inclination to write about it. While I'm often annoyed, I'm getting used to it. Amusement seems to come in small bits these days.

And I have to admit, small bits of amusement, annoyance and interest are ready made for Facebook. If you want to see them, friend me: Evad Knat. I do promise I will not ever, ever go to Twitter: too small, small bits.

Facebook, okay; but, Google, I've got a problem

2011-05-22T17:38:00.002-04:00

A week or so ago I was “playing” with Facebook trying to get it serve me ads on specific topics based on what was in a status or a comment I had written. Facebook is kind of like your trusty dog, it doesn’t believe you would con it. And you know you’ve betrayed a dog’s trust, throwing the ball, throwing the ball, then not throwing to the ball and laughing as your dog takes off running to catch the ball that’s still in your hand.

Likewise, Facebook takes everything you write, runs it through a few algorithms and ta da! If you are writing about Destin, Florida, quite possibly you might click on an ad for beach condos on Hilton Head Island (can’t afford them, at least during the “season). If you use the word liquor, Facebook wants you to “Like” Jim Beam.

That’s all fine and good and actually fun, for a few minutes. But, have you noticed that Google can give you some odd results lately? It used to be that I’d almost always find what I was looking for in the first few results, certainly on the first page of results.

I spent most of this week in Iowa trying a lawsuit, though that’s another story. I’d made a reservation at a Holiday Inn Express in Keokuk last weekend. While there I did a little surfing a couple of times looking for local restaurants. I’ve done this before while at home a search for “Midtown brunch” will give you twenty links to restaurant and ratings sites. Not in Keokuk. I typed in “Keokuk IA restaurants and got paid results for resorts and hotels with meta tags for the word restaurant.

I finished my trial on Friday, too late to get a flight and decided to stay the weekend in Burlington, Iowa on the Mississippi, making a reservation at a Fairfield Inn & Suites. This morning I Googled “breakfast Burlington IA” and got a list of Bed and Breakfast place, again that used breakfast as a meta tag.

Google is getting as dumb as Facebook. It knows I’ve made two hotel reservations in a week and thinks I’ve got some sort of lodging fetish.

Facebook and Google have “personalized” my “online experience” and I’m not at all sure I like it. There’s of course the creepy factor and the stay out of my business factor. But the dumb algorithm factor is troubling.

I started computer searching decades ago using Westlaw, a legal database, which required a basic understanding of Boolean logic. With the advent of Google and its like I didn’t have to be as precise, as the algorithm “crowd sourced” the likely correct results of my search; and, with millions of users it worked really well.

This new emphasis on what I’ve done in the past having a bearing on what I want to do now doesn’t seem to me to be working well. Maybe they’ll refine it; but, in the meantime, what results that I might well want to see is it filtering based on it’s, flawed, assumptions about me?

Newer isn’t always better. I don’t mind Facebook’s little games, I’m confident I can outthink a 25 year old billionaire, though I sometimes resent him making me have to do it. But, I don’t like the idea of Google skewing the results it gives me based on a poor understanding of who I am and what I want.

Are two lousy tickets too much to ask for?

2011-05-10T10:54:00.002-04:00

Dear Ticketmaster and The Atlanta Braves,

I have an employee of a very good client who wants two tickets to a Braves Game in June; thus, his wish is my command.

No big deal you would think given the wonders of the internet and a credit card.

Not so. Google “Atlanta Braves tickets” and see what you get. First there’s all the paid ads for brokers, ticket exchanges and scalpers.

No “Atlantabraves.com” or anything of the sort. There are multiple iterations of “MLB.com” all of which somewhere on a crowded, graphically challenged page have a link to Ticketmaster.com.

Click that link and you get a graphic of Turner Field and its seat sections, represented by tiny, tiny little colored rectangles with unreadable numbers in them (which a little further down, you will learn are totally irrelevant to the process of getting tickets). The different colors represent different areas of seats with different prices. And you can't enlarge the page.

This wasn’t a real problem as I’ve been to the Ted and knew that I wanted Terrace seats anywhere is sections 201 to 205. Except you can’t get there from the page. No, you have to go to a selection area of the page where you type in the number of seats you want, whether you want to “add value” (pre-buy food and drink), whether you have a coupon or promo code and then, you can’t choose where you want to go. You have to choose “Best Available” or “Terrace.”

Best Available doesn’t get you Terrace and Terrace doesn’t let you limit your choices to the sections you want, it tries to push less desirable sections of Terrace out past the infield on you.

At one point in the odyssey, I gave in and tried to buy seats in Section 208. I clicked “Buy” and it churned and churned and churned while I looked at the advice that it would take less than a minute and that I should not hit the back button or refresh or I’d have to start over again.

Several minutes of churning and I noticed that Firefox had blocked Ticketmaster’s attempt to redirect me to “another page.” So I clicked “Allow.” It seems “Allow” is the equivalent to Refresh and Back and I “had to start all over again.” I tried several variations of this process with no success.

On to Ticketmaster’s 800 number. The nice female computer voice directing me through phone hell understood a good 40% of what I said. Again, you can’t pick what you want, I got the same Best Available or Terrace. Then you had to pick a price within Terrace. You can’t pick "any price" and you can’t pick a range of prices. So I picked a few discrete prices,and each time my friend (I think I can call her a friend, we’d been “talking” for over ten minutes at this point) told me she didn’t have any seats for that price.

I hung up. Some more surfing and I got the hours (8:30 to 6:00) on non-game days) for the ticket office at Turner Field figuring I’d go down at lunch time. I did. Guess what isn’t open at 10:45 a.m.?

If anybody at Ticketmaster or with the Braves reads this, I’ll pay, I really have to get the tickets; but, I’ll be damned if I know how to get them.

Best Regards,

Dave.

So, you want to live in the cloud?

2011-05-01T18:10:00.002-04:00

Or, as it used to be called, on internet servers. “The Cloud” is trendy. What it is, is not quite as sexy – a bunch of buildings in a bunch of places with a bunch of servers that have data in them. Usually the data is in more than one place so a place goes down, the others pick up the slack.

Google, at least to my recollection, started the rush to the “cloud” with Google Docs, an online kind of equivalent to the programs in Microsoft Office. Why pay MS hundreds of dollars every couple of years and take up space on your hard drive with the program and the files when you can go to the cloud and use the free Docs program and store your files there?

Apple is building a 500,000 square foot building to house a new server “farm,” reportedly to house data for the rumored “iCloud” it is about to introduce to sync all your music and videos to and from all of your Apple devices.

But, as we all know, computers are finicky things. They quit doing what they are supposed to do on annoyingly frequent basis. The Blue Screen of Death. Control + Alt + Delete. Defragmenting. Viruses and worms.

And all those things happen no matter where you keep the hardware – in your home or office or in a server farm on the other end of the cloud.

Sony’s Playstation Network has been down for about a week and may be up this week after being hacked. Amazon has a very nice server business that didn’t get a lot of attention until recently when it went down and shut down a whole bunch of websites.

I’ve always been wary of the cloud for security reasons, and still am. As a lawyer I can’t see putting client information in the hands of a third party that might access it or let others. But lately, the inherent fallibility of computers (and nuclear reactors, but that’s a different post) has added a new reason for me to keep my stuff closer to home. If one of my computers goes down, the stuff in it is sitting in an external hard drive and mirrored on the other computer. I’m not dependent on whichever flavor of cloud computing company wants my business.

Maybe someday I’ll have to but not as long as I don’t absolutely have to. After all, though I bank online and use ATM’s to get money, I still have a paper check register, keep all my credit card and ATM card receipts and refuse to put money or checks into the machine in front of the bank.

Legal Warfare

2011-04-28T19:57:00.003-04:00

I am engaged in the title’s activity. We’ll see how this post goes as I can’t really tell you anything about the case.

Let’s say the other side is caught cold doing wrong and judicially admits it in the Answer to the Complaint (I have the distinct feeling I’m writing this for an audience of one, Curmudgeon). For the other three or four of you, if you say something in something you file with the court, you are stuck with it – true or not – it is true.

Ah, but you get a Counterclaim filed against your client that is, charitably put, not quite based on facts or reality. To add to the insult, the damages claimed would fund the deficit of some of our smaller distressed cities.

You figure out early on that the lawyer on the other side pretty much doesn’t have a case and wants to scare you so you will convince your client to do a walk away – each side dismisses and calls it even. And while the lawyer is at it, said lawyer is milking his client for fees. I really would pay for the pleasure of being in the room when the first bill is opened.

Your client understands all this and instructs you to soldier on, the right thing to do for legal and business reasons.

And I am; but, it is really depressing when I step back from it a bit. I’m going to make a relatively nice amount of money. My client may even come out ahead if the other side has some money to grab after a probable judgment.

And the lawyer on the other side is creative, if not quite what I consider professional, requiring me to think, something I don’t have to do very often at this stage in my career – I’m told it will stave off senility in the coming years.

But, it is all kind of distasteful. The other lawyer is condescending and smarmy which makes me want to engage in some equally unpleasant behavior, which I’m so far resisting.

I don’t like any of it.

Oh My! I'm on the side of the Republicans!

2011-04-25T14:50:00.001-04:00

The title was just for shock value. I’m actually on the side of lawyers acting like lawyers. Stop laughing.

An Atlanta “silk stocking” law firm, King & Spalding has been under fire for a week or so as one of its partners (at the rate of $520 an hour) took on the defense of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) for Republican House leaders when the Justice Department announced that it would not defend the law in lawsuits asserting that the law is unconstitutional.

The firm’s chairman, announcing the firm would withdraw, said “[i]n reviewing this assignment further, I determined that the process used for vetting this engagement was inadequate.” AJC.com. He didn’t mention that the firm was under fire from gay groups and liberal quarters, with protests planned against it later in the week.

The partner who is handling the case, Paul D. Clement, a former Solicitor General, resigned saying “’I take this step not because of strongly held views about the statute. My thoughts about the merits of DOMA are as irrelevant as my views about the dozens of federal statutes that I defended as Solicitor General.

‘‘Instead, I resign out of the firmly-held belief that a representation should not be abandoned because the client’s legal position is extremely unpopular in certain quarters. Defending unpopular positions is what lawyers do. The adversary system of justice depends on it, especially in cases where the passions run high. Efforts to delegitimize any representation for one side of a legal controversy are a profound threat to the rule of law.’

“Clement closed his letter by quoting from a … former King & Spalding partner (and former Attorney General and former federal appellate judge) Griffin Bell: ‘You are not required to take every matter that is presented to you, but having assumed a representation, it becomes your duty to finish the representation.’” NationalReview.com. (Emphasis added.)

Laugh if you will, lawyers have certain ethical obligations that result from the grant of the privilege to practice law. King & Spalding got lawyering exactly wrong and Mr. Clement got it exactly right.

I hope Mr. Clement with his new firm loses big time in his defense of DOMA but he should be applauded for his representation. His old firm needs to take a remedial professionalism course. Perhaps Mr. Clement will volunteer his services to teach it.

It's 8:20 p.m. and everything in Atlanta is quite nice

2011-04-21T20:22:00.000-04:00

I just looked out the window and saw a guy and I assume his maybe 3 year old daughter. She had her dad's Braves cap on, which kept falling off her head and an orange plastic bat. He tossed her the plastic ball which she let land next to her (she's a lefty) and then took a great golf swing, popping it ten or so feet each time. They were always hooks or slices because she came off of the bat with her left hand. She has promise though, nice fluid swing.

Just about the end of twilight and to my mind Spring in Atlanta is quite nice.

Facebook pushes the envelope yet again

2011-04-21T14:34:00.000-04:00

Just after lunch I went to the Huffington Post while surfing and was greeted by a popover that informed me that a Facebook friend (one of the owners of a yellow dog which pines over the other owner’s tennis shoe when he is gone) had linked her facebook account to HuffPo and invited me to do the same.

I thought I had blocked all access to my Facebook page other than to friends. Not so grasshopper. If your friends like a page or a website or an app, they get access to you now.

If you click through to “Account Settings” and then click this line:

“Info accessible through your friends

Control what information is available to apps and websites when your friends use them”

you will get this below. When I did, all of the items were checked:

Use the settings below to control which of your information is available to applications, games and websites when your friends use them. The more info you share, the more social the experience.

Bio	My videos
Birthday	My links
Family and relationships	My notes
Interested in	Photos and videos I'm tagged in
Religious and political views	Hometown
My website	Current city
If I'm online	Education and work
My status updates	Activities, interests, things I like
My photos	Places I check in to

Your name, profile picture, gender, networks and user ID (along with any other information you've set to everyone) is available to friends' applications unless you turn off platform applications and websites.

I don’t remember seeing that screen before; and, even if I had, I damn well know I didn’t check the boxes. The only thing I can think of that I’ve done is give Photoshop permission to upload pictures recently. Maybe that reset everything. Sorry Photoshop and HuffPo, you are now on the shit list. And Facebook, it may be true that “[t]he more info you share, the more social the experience:” but, I like designing my own social circumstances and I’m getting real tired of you forcing me to catch you each time you decide to change the rules.

Pick a side: my friend says I'm wrong

2011-04-18T20:43:00.002-04:00

Regular readers will know that one of my friends is a cop. We often agree on stuff you might think would separate us. That didn’t happen today.

I told him about sitting on an entrance ramp to the Connector (I-75 and I-85 are the same expressway through downtown Atlanta for a couple of miles, a design failure) on Saturday, on my way to play golf near the airport. I just missed getting ahead of what I thought was a police funeral procession, being the tenth or so car not permitted to enter the expressway by the police car that blocked it. (I had about 15 minutes while sitting to count.)

I watched police cars from a bunch of Georgia cities and counties, maybe a couple of hundred, pass me and then about a thousand, private, motorcycles, then a dozen or so more police cars, all with lights and sirens operating, before I was allowed to move.

Here’s the thing. All the cars and bikes were in the HOV lane to the far left of the southbound, seven or eight lane expressway. All of the remaining lanes were empty.

I was finally allowed to move and caught up to the procession in maybe a minute, just past the next entrance – no blocking, cars now were allowed to occupy the lanes next to the procession.

As it turns out, my friend the cop says it wasn’t a funeral (I wasn’t happy but I could have “lived” with fifteen minutes out of my life for a show of respect for a fallen cop). Nope, I was stopped for no good reason (at least that I can think of or that my friend offered) for the entire connector being blocked for the annual Georgia police something or other ride for the families of slain officers.

Don’t get me wrong, I want police to be paid well. I want them to be taken care of if they’re hurt. I want their families taken care of if they are killed. But I don’t think it’s a matter of respect for a few thousand people to be stopped in their tracks through downtown Atlanta while a thousand or so cops ride south in one lane with the rest empty. Though I didn’t mention it to my friend, it seems to me to a bit arrogant on the part of the cops.

My friend the cop and I have agreed to disagree on this one.

All spending is discretionary (or, I think we are screwed)

2011-04-18T14:07:00.000-04:00

Don’t hammer me on the absolute accuracy of the dollars in this article, though they do seem to be borne out by spending info I found at Wikipedia.

That said, we paid more than $100 billion and $50 billion for our adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, respectively, in 2010. Those numbers don’t count money spent from the $513 billion Defense Department budget. Even if no other money had been spent (and I’m sure that isn’t true) those two wars represent about 25% of “defense” spending and just under 5% of all spending.

According to Wikipedia, the Federal government took in $2.16 trillion in taxes in Fiscal Year 2010 and spent about $3.45 trillion. Here’s a breakdown of Federal spending for the same year:

Mandatory spending: $2.009 trillion (-20.1%)

$695 billion (+4.9%) – Social Security

$571 billion (−15.2%) – Other mandatory programs

$453 billion (+6.6%) – Medicare

$290 billion (+12.0%) – Medicaid

$164 billion (+18.0%) – Interest on National Debt

$11 billion (+275%) – Potential disaster costs

$0 billion (−100%) – Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP)

$0 billion (−100%) – Financial stabilization efforts

Discretionary spending: $1.368 trillion (+13.1%)

$663.7 billion (+12.7%) – Department of Defense (including Overseas Contingency Operations)

$78.7 billion (−1.7%) – Department of Health and Human Services

$72.5 billion (+2.8%) – Department of Transportation

$52.5 billion (+10.3%) – Department of Veterans Affairs

$51.7 billion (+40.9%) – Department of State and Other International Programs

$47.5 billion (+18.5%) – Department of Housing and Urban Development

$46.7 billion (+12.8%) – Department of Education

$42.7 billion (+1.2%) – Department of Homeland Security

$26.3 billion (−0.4%) – Department of Energy

$26.0 billion (+8.8%) – Department of Agriculture

$23.9 billion (−6.3%) – Department of Justice

$18.7 billion (+5.1%) – National Aeronautics and Space Administration

$13.8 billion (+48.4%) – Department of Commerce

$13.3 billion (+4.7%) – Department of Labor

$13.3 billion (+4.7%) – Department of the Treasury

$12.0 billion (+6.2%) – Department of the Interior

$10.5 billion (+34.6%) – Environmental Protection Agency

$9.7 billion (+10.2%) – Social Security Administration

$7.0 billion (+1.4%) – National Science Foundation

$5.1 billion (−3.8%) – Corps of Engineers

$5.0 billion (+100%) – National Infrastructure Bank

$1.1 billion (+22.2%) – Corporation for National and Community Service

$0.7 billion (0.0%) – Small Business Administration

$0.6 billion (−14.3%) – General Services Administration

$19.8 billion (+3.7%) – Other Agencies

$105 billion – Other

Some numbers that jump out at you:

"Mandatory" spending was down 20.1% and discretionary spending was up 13.1% over 2009.

Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid spending totaled $1.438 trillion, about 40% of all spending.

The Departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs, State and Homeland Security account for $810.6 billion or about 23% of all spending.

About 39 cents of every dollar spent was borrowed.

End spending in the seven categories just mentioned and the government is in the black. Can’t do that?

End all the wars, all the economic aid to other countries, shut down all foreign military operations, cut off all economic aid for seniors, students, children and others who have assets or private income that they could survive on, end the Bush tax cuts, end government subsidies to businesses and you might get close to the same point.

And you’d get a Tea Party membership card in the mail. And a few wars that threaten our economic interests. And some more dead or sick little kids. An even less educated, less able next generation. A few more seniors dead before their time.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Don't talk to the PO-lice

2011-04-14T13:08:00.000-04:00

The title uses the Southern pronunciation. For purposes of this post, the police are anyone in authority investigating a crime.

The grand jury exchange which the Barry Bonds jury found to be an “obstruction of Justice:

"Q: Did Greg ever give you anything that required a syringe to inject yourself with?

Bonds: I've only had one doctor touch me. And that's my only personal doctor. Greg, like I said, we don't get into each others' personal lives. We're friends, but I don't — we don't sit around and talk baseball, because he knows I don't want — don't come to my house talking baseball. If you want to come to my house and talk about fishing, some other stuff, we'll be good friends, you come around talking about baseball, you go on. I don't talk about his business. You know what I mean? ...

Q: Right.

A: That's what keeps our friendship. You know, I am sorry, but that — you know, that — I was a celebrity child, not just in baseball by my own instincts. I became a celebrity child with a famous father. I just don't get into other people's business because of my father's situation, you see ..."

Jurors were only supposed to make their decision based on the second answer, the one beginning "That's what keeps ..." However, it seemed after the verdict on Wednesday that they looked at the whole exchange. The foreman of the jury, who said his first name was Fred, repeatedly used an expletive to describe Bonds' answer to the question from the prosecutors.

"When you're in front of a grand jury you have to answer, and he gave a b------- answer. It was a b------- answer," Fred said. "He gave a story rather than a yes or no answer."

CBSNews.com.

In January 2000, Ray Lewis, an NFL player, was in Atlanta for the Super Bowl. He almost certainly saw, and may have participated in a murder. There wasn’t much of a case against him. He pled to misdemeanor obstruction for making a “misleading” statement to the police the morning after the murder.

In October 2005, Scooter Libby, an aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, talked to federal investigators about their inquiry into leaks about Valarie Plame’s connections to the CIA and was later convicted on four of the five counts in an indictment (one count of obstruction of justice, two counts of perjury, and one of the counts of making false statements) and acquitted on the second count of making false statements and was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison, a fine of $250,000, and two years of supervised release, including 400 hours of community service.

Wikipedia.com

None of the three is in anyway an attractive example; but, they are the examples that I’ve got. None of them would have had any problem had they just kept their mouth shut when the police knocked at their door.

I don’t and would never do criminal defense work. A couple of decades ago I’d have done anything I could to help a criminal investigation. I’d have to think long and hard about having any conversation with the police these days.

Political Ethics

2011-04-12T15:17:00.000-04:00

Stop laughing. The phrase in many peoples’ mind is almost as ludicrous as legal ethics.

You hear phrases like “I can’t be bought for a cup of coffee” on a regular basis. And that is almost certainly true. But the price of cups of coffee and sandwiches and rounds of golf and a nice bottle of ’97 Beringer Reserve cab to go with some juicy prime steaks at dinner adds up.

Some years back I represented a state agency defending a lawsuit. I had to spend a lot of time with two fairly low-level agency employees reviewing and organizing hundreds of boxes of documents. They took very seriously the agency’s “no gratuities” rule. Instead of me buying them lunch or dinner at a nice restaurant which my firm did for all clients (yes the client is paying for it at the end of the day in the form of rates that are marginally higher than if the firm did no entertaining) we ate lunch at McDonalds and dinner at Western Sizzler so they could stay within their per diem.

Things have apparently changed since then. Georgia’s legislators trot out the word “transparency” whenever anyone talks about ethics. They loudly proclaim they aren’t influenced by free suite tickets at Braves and Falcons games. The Speaker of the House was unashamed when it was reported last fall that he, aides and his family went on a $17,000 jaunt to Europe paid for by lobbyists.

Then, last week it came out that lobbyists had spent over $200,000 over the last couple of months wining and dining Georgia Representatives’ and Senators’ staffs and that the state’s Ethics Commission had ruled that this spending didn’t have to be disclosed under the current ethics law. So much for the ameliorative powers of transparency, though they may find time before this year’s session ends to amend the law.

If largesse by lobbyists doesn’t buy influence and votes, just why do you think that companies spend the money? Just as with the river of campaign contributions, corporations spend millions of dollars a year on politicians with the full expectation that it will get them what they want out of the political process. Remember, corporations have their stockholders’ interests at heart, not yours and mine.

Calvin Coolidge said that what’s good for General Motors is good for America. An honest man old Silent Cal. He admitted what he thought where the current bunch won’t. We are becoming at most an afterthought in the minds of our well-fed and well-funded leaders. Rather than getting what we pay for we are getting what corporations pay for. And suckers that we are, we keep on inviting them back to feed at the public political trough.

Consequences

2011-04-05T19:13:00.003-04:00

The longer I think about what needs to be done politically - locally, nationally and internationally, I am more and more bewildered and depressed.

We are a people of… well maybe I need to put that a bit differently. We aren’t “a people” anymore, if we ever were.

For millennia now, we have fought each other because of ethnic, cultural, religious and economic differences. I’ve had the advantage of being a white male of a non-descript ethnic, cultural and economic strata growing up in a place and time that made it seem that all would be good and over time, better.

I dearly wish I were rich and could wall myself off from the, I fear, coming storm of fear and hate. But I’m not and will deal with the consequences of our moral, cultural and economic profilgacy for the rest of my life.

We are not a country or a world of “exceptionalism” other than in a material sense for some people in some places. Traditional politics will not solve the problems facing us, be the politics those of Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Tea Party folks or any international flavor you would like to name.

Some medicine for whichever flavor you favor:

You are a flaming economic liberal and want to spend and spend and spend to make all well for all people in every way. Noticed how well decades of deficit spending have worked? Social liberal? Noticed how your mannered approach to the differences among us doesn't lead to, in the immortal words of Rodney King, us all being able to “get along?” And maybe more importantly for me, a flaming social liberal, have you noticed that for the most part, most people don’t give a damn about civil liberties, because, pick your reason – they are starving, they are oppressed, they are cussed. Think that’s going to change anytime soon?

You are a right wing conservative of either a fiscal or social or both, persuasion: Let’s assume you are right in all your beliefs. Okay, what are you going to do with “the other,” those you fear and hate? Those that insist on living their lives immorally to your mind, those that don’t have the physical, mental or plain moral ability to make it on their own in the world. There are a lot of them, quite possibly more of them than there are of you. Plan to man the ramparts when they are starving and fed up with your moralizing?

Libertarian are you? Burn your Ayn Rand books and smell, the more and more putrid, odor of our coming catastrophe. John Galt didn’t and doesn’t exist. And if I’m wrong, he’s retreated to the secret valley in the mountains.

Tea Party your bent? You are deluding yourself – the GOP and its main supporters have no intention of fulfilling any of the unworkable mandates you insist on promoting. Noticed that the entire U.S. government is at a virtual standstill debating about whether to cut, what, a percent or so of the budget that won’t make a damn bit of difference socially or economically the minute it happens? When is it that you think that defense and social entitlements are going to be meaningfully cut? Not anytime soon.

I’m not going to harass my few readers around the world – I don’t know your situation well enough to tell you you’re screwed, though I think you are if you think there’s a good outcome around the corner.

We “the people” really need to get slapped in our individual and collective faces and face the consequences of our long avoidance of reality. I suggest we all read some history books about what happened to fat and happy cultures. Or take a look at the Middle East and Africa today for a more current lesson.

We really don’t need to blame our “leaders” as we have encouraged their errors, indeed demanded them to earn our votes. Bread and circuses are what you get when you think constantly only about your small place in society. Economic chaos is what you get when you are out to get only what you think benefits you. Ethnic, cultural and religious hate? I don’t have a clue what drives you.

Solutions, I have none. Maybe we will get the next miracle leader to actually fix everything. I very much doubt it and think we all should start thinking about to do in the absence of a savior.

Perpetuity?

2011-04-04T12:43:00.002-04:00

I mentioned here recently that I don’t know anything about antitrust law. I also know little about patent, copyright and trademark law.

Saturday I went to the Atlanta Botanical Garden. Lots and lots of tulips, roses aren’t quite here yet.

I’d thrown my ticket on the passenger seat and was about to throw it in the trash this morning; but, for some reason I looked at the back. In addition to an add for a department store, I read this: “NO REFUNDS – NO EXCHANGES – NO RAINCHECKS Visitor agrees not to use commercially any photography taken at the Atlanta Botanical Garden. Visitor grants permission to the Atlanta Botanical Garden to utilize the visitor’s image, likeness, and/or sound recordings for the purpose whatsoever in perpetuity.”

Beyond a couple of grammatical problems, are they talking about their recordings of me or my recordings of their flowers? Both? Whichever, they get them in perpetuity?

I think even I could beat this back of the ticket “contract.”

A Desperate Letter to a Man That I KNOW Can Save Me!

2011-03-29T19:21:00.001-04:00

Dear Ira,

I've been slogging through the WABE (Atlanta) pledge drive for what seems to be the fourteenth week (rather than the ninth day) which of course means that I listen a lot. As I started typing, you were berating Megan for her pledging deficit. (I also heard you do your magic with the guy that stammered his way through your low key questioning on just why he listened and didn't cough up a few bucks.) You're much better at the guilt than which ever Baldwin brother has been on lately, I've got to say.

You might have some influence with WABE that I don't have. You see, I don't want to be a member, I don't want a gift, I don't want to talk to anyone with WABE or read the barrage of what WABE sends me when I give money. I just want to give some money in return for what I get. For a number of years after being barraged for more money after giving, I quit giving. A couple of years ago I started giving again, having been expressly promised that no one would contact me.

And of course, computers have more control than humans and each year I get Emails. Each year I threaten to stop giving, the latest being a few weeks ago when I got an Email telling me that WABE loved its loyal listeners "like me" and wanted to let me know that I would be getting an Email survey from an independent company to find out what I want to listen to and what I liked about the station and didn't like. I got the promised Email survey (some promises WABE keeps) and filled it out taking the opportunity to tell the independent people about my ire with yearly broken promises and a vow to not contribute again.

Then, for the third or fourth time in the now seemingly six month current pledge drive (did I say I spend a lot of time listening to WABE?) I heard your voice with the aforementioned Megan and was inspired!

In the event you know anyone down here, say Lois Reitzes, John what's his name, the COO, Denis O'Hare, the Burris kid on the weekends, any of the new reporters that my money has played a small part in hiring (they aren't great yet but they are persistent and not too bad), could you, would you, make one of your calls and question them on why they harass someone who gives them money and asks and pleads not to be bothered? I'd really like to know why it's so hard to give them money. I bet they'd pay attention to you, if for no other reason that you'd take the piece to say, who? Fox News would love it! Juan Williams could do a series of diatribes about the idiocy of the government funded, insensitive, liberals at NPR.

Best regards,

Dave

Tax the Corporate Bastards?

2011-03-25T11:00:00.000-04:00

When you do, here’s what happens.

The link will take you a NYTimes.com article (I’m going to miss the Grey Lady) about GE. GE didn’t pay any U.S. taxes last year; indeed, it got a bit over $3 billion back from the Feds for 2010.

Here’s the part that struck me: “Over the last decade, G.E. has spent tens of millions of dollars to push for changes in tax law….[T]he most lucrative of these measures allows G.E. to operate a vast leasing and lending business abroad with profits that face little foreign taxes and no American taxes as long as the money remains overseas.”

U.S. tax structure causes G.E., and certainly other foreign and multi-national companies, to invest overseas, employee people overseas and keep the money from the investments and work overseas. Capital investment and jobs that could be here aren’t because we see corporations as marks. Bastards you say?

“’G.E. is committed to acting with integrity in relation to our tax obligations,’ said Anne Eisele, a spokeswoman. ‘We are committed to complying with tax rules and paying all legally obliged taxes. At the same time, we have a responsibility to our shareholders to legally minimize our costs.’”

She’s right about that boldfaced statement. Despite what the Supreme Court says in Citizens United about corporations, they, unlike Soylent Green, aren’t people. Corporations are legal fictions that make raising capital easier and less risky for their owners, people – the shareholders. The managers are charged with maximizing profit. If staying out of the U.S. is the “price” of profit, so be it.

What would happen if we started treating corporations as what they are, not people? Well, we of course wouldn’t tax them; but, they aren’t paying much in the way of taxes now are they?* We would be giving them an incentive to stay at home with their capital and jobs. Guess what that means? They are buying more American goods and employing more American people. American goods mean American companies that make a profit for their shareholders, people, Americans who pay taxes. And those American workers not in the leisure classes pay taxes too. And invest in 401(k)’s and SEPs which invest in corporations’ stocks – profits for corporations mean retirement for people.

Instead of no taxes and capital and jobs overseas, you have capital, jobs and taxes here in the good old U.S.A.

*And though I’ve said it before here, probably too many times, corporations don’t pay taxes. (I’m in a boldfacey kind of mood today.) They tack the cost of taxes on to the price they charge people, and then pass it on to the government. You pay the taxes that corporations remit to the government.

Yet another subject I'm not qualified to opine about...

2011-03-22T15:38:00.001-04:00

…and that is anti-Trust law. Don’t go away, I’m not really going to lecture you on it. Indeed, I know almost nothing about it other than that the Feds almost always let companies do whatever it is the companies want to do after a couple of small concessions.

What I really don’t know about is telecommunications, other than the effects of the current system on me and what looks to be a worse situation after AT&T buys T-Mobile.

AT&T is probably right that it can save a boatload of money from the purchase. A forest of new cell towers, a sea of new bandwidth, 30 some million new customers without having to keep many of T-Mobile’s employees and stores - some great looking economy of scale.

AT&T is also probably right that voice and data coverage and quality will probably increase for a lot of people.

What AT&T doesn’t talk about is price, which will almost certainly go up if the deal gets done. And, did you notice that Verizon said it doesn’t have any big objections to the purchase? Wondering why?

If the deal gets done, the country will have a de facto duopoly wireless market. AT&T and Verizon would have 80% of the national market with a few bit players fighting over the leavings. Neither company would have much incentive to compete on price or service. Where are their customers going to go?

But I think I could give AT&T what it says it wants and give us a wireless market that provides quality, coverage and reasonable price.

Let AT&T and T-Mobile get married, but:

1) require that phones sold in the U.S. be un-locked, work on both GSM and CDMA and across all spectrums;

2) require that a phone offered to any carrier must be offered to all carriers and/or any consumer;

3) require wireless carriers to offer monthly contracts and pre-paid plans; and, finally,

4) require carriers to "re-sell" data bandwidth to other carriers.

This would allow for more competition from the small carriers and let consumers "vote with their feet" while giving the big boys the economies of scale they want.

Free market economics only works, if it works, when there is a true market. Like in the cable/satellite business, there is less and less of a market in wireless.

Can you imagine car companies working deals with local governments for exclusive use of their roads as cable companies have done for decades? Which is the more competitive and innovative market, cars or cable? Want ESPN? You got to take, and pay for, 50 more channels you don’t want. Want an iPhone? Guess what, you can’t go to Sprint or Metro PCS. The idea of ala carte cable pricing scares Comcast to death. Monthly contracts and pre-paid plans on unlocked phones that work everywhere would similarly scare AT&T and Verizon to death. They’d actually have to compete for customers based on quality and price.

And if Virgin and Metro PCS and the other bit players could offer voice and data that they buy from AT&T and Verizon, guess what? They could offer more competitive pressure to lower or keep prices in check.

The "churn" rate would go through the roof as people hopped from carrier to carrier and phone manufacturer to phone manufacturer looking for the best service and price, until the carriers and manufacturers all gave good service and low prices.

Ah Dave, you dreamer you.

Sea Change or a Sinking Ship?

2011-03-17T14:30:00.003-04:00

The New York Times announced today that it is going to a pay wall for its online content on March 28. Simplistically put, it will give you 20 articles a month (with some exceptions depending on how you arrive at NYT.com). After that you have to pay between $15 and $35 a month to read the site.

I’m all in favor of The Times and other news providers providing quality product and I know that costs money. My problem is that my news reading has changed over the last 15 or so years.

I used to read the local paper, watch some network news, listen to NPR and a local radio news program or two and call it a day. Total cost $10 or so a month for the paper, a contribution to public radio station and an annoyance factor from the radio and TV commercials and pledge drives.

Now, in any given week, most on a daily basis, I read the online versions of The New York Times, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, both Chicago newspapers, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Las Vegas Review-Journal, Slate, Salon, Engadget, TechCrunch, three Android OS sites, CNN, NPR, The Apple Insider, Hacking Netflix, The Hill, The New Orleans Times-Picayune, Forbes, Leonard Pitts, Roger Ebert, Google News, The Huffington Post, some occasional Fox News, BBC News, and probably some other publications that aren’t coming to mind as I type this.

NYT is big in the rotation but it’s not $15 a month big.

With some guilt, I hope the Grey Lady fails to attract enough subscribers to make a go of this. Why? If it’s a success, many of the news providers listed above will do the same thing; and, I’m for sure not going to pop for multiple $15 subscriptions each month.

But there’s a solution to this problem. I invented it some time back. A company like Google in the form of Google News or Apple with its iTunes and other products are perfectly situated to start the "News Store." Have a website where someone like me that reads a lot of news from a lot of sources can pay $x a month, something in the neighborhood of $15-20, for "all you can eat" news from the site's content providers. The site takes a cut of the revenue and the rest of it is divided among the providers based on the number of hits they get. Good content, more revenue for the provider, more quality, more revenue - a positive "vicious circle." I think it would be win-win for everyone.

Netflix and LoveFilm in Europe (that Amazon just bought) seem to me to have proved that people will pay for varied content and that the distributer and the content provider can make money under the model. Netflix has perfected the all you can eat for one price model with streaming movies. It negotiates a price with the content providers and keeps the extra as its profit. The trick is to strike a balance where the provider is just this side of happy with the payment, it is just this side of happy with its cut and I am just this side of happy with what I pay.

Just doesn’t seem all that hard to me; but, who am I to tell The New York Times how to run its business?

Can I get some of my money back?

2011-03-15T13:11:00.000-04:00

It’s been a long time since I left law school. Back then in the dark ages, the University of Miami School of Law was well respected, as I recall consistently ranked in the top thirty or so law schools in the country.

No longer. I was shocked to find that it ranks 77^th in this year’s U.S. News listing.

Skimming the list for Southern schools, it doesn’t even hit the top ten, trailing Virginia, Tulane, Emory, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Florida State, Tennessee, Vanderbilt, Georgia State and Kentucky. We whipped Louisiana State and West Virginia though.

I don’t have a big finish for this, I just can’t figure out what my alma mater did to get so bad.

Why do they keep changing things?

2011-03-09T13:49:00.000-05:00

I think car designers got over this some years back; but, for much of my life, the hood releases on cars could be just about anywhere on or in the grill. My last few have stabilized at the middle/top of the grill.

Though there aren’t a lot of options for placement, why do some manufacturers put the gas fill opening on the left and some put it on the right (are there any still behind the license plate?). Ah, the adventure of putting gas in a rental!

PC’s and Macs do all the same things but insist on putting controls in different places. I’m not sure which came first; but, why is Ctrl Alt Del, Cmd Option Esc on a Mac? (I didn’t even know there was a force close function on a Mac until the other day when Photoshop Elements froze – I’d never in two years had a crash. Take that MS!)

The impetus for this post came yesterday when I got a new phone. Same carrier – T-Mobile. Same manufacturer – HTC. Same OS – Android. But things had to be just a bit different. When the phone comes on, you have to unlock it by sliding the unlock icon to the right, rather than sliding it down. Answering a call and ending it are now left/right rather than up/down swipes of the same icon. The mini-USB port is on the left side rather than the bottom. The on/off switch is on the upper right rather than the upper left side, having swapped positions with the audio port. The “Internet” icon is now the “Browser” icon. The “hard” buttons at the bottom for “Home,” “Menu” and “Back” aren’t real buttons now, just dedicated spots on the casing that respond to touch (though I kind of like that change).

After a day, I’m pretty much already used to the changed placements and labels; but, I still can’t figure out why they were necessary. I’ve got it – someone passed the “Designers Full Employment Act” and didn’t tell me.

Are Dems just following in the path blazed by the GOP?

2011-03-04T12:38:00.000-05:00

Democratic refugees from Indiana and Wisconsin are still settled in Illinois last I checked. They are still being lambasted by their Republican colleagues back home and Fox News pundits.

But, right or wrong, aren’t the Dems just doing what Republicans in the U.S. Senate have done for years, except on a larger, more visible scale? I’m talking about the fine tradition of the filibuster that we all learned about from Jimmy Stewart. You remember how he stood and talked and stood and talked in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington until he couldn’t do it any more.

Filibusters in the U.S. Senate these days are a lot more wimpy and a lost less dramatic. A Senator simply announces the filibuster and that’s it, other than that the bill under consideration can’t proceed until the Senator says so.

Senates in this country have tradition of “consensus” as opposed to the lower chambers’ majority rules approach to lawmaking. When one or the other party has a majority and could otherwise ramrod their bills, the filibuster serves to slow them down and force them to compromise with the minority. Ask any Republican and any Fox pundit – they’ll tell you I’m right and that the filibuster is a time honored mechanism to protect the rights of the minority. Except of course in Indiana and Wisconsin.

I haven’t taken the time to find out; but, I gather that the rules in Indiana and Wisconsin don’t provide for filibusters. But aren’t the Midwest Democratic politicians just doing the same thing, and doing it in the old fashioned dramatic mode popularized by Jimmy Stewart?

I don't want to trust them

2011-03-03T13:07:00.000-05:00

Don’t boo; but, the problem is women. Stay with me here. It isn’t women as opposed to men. It’s women in their role as spouses (and on a rare occasion it’s men in their role as spouses).

Let’s look at two spouses. Ginny Thomas and Supriya Jindal.

Ginny is married to Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court. Supriya is married to Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana.

Mrs. Thomas is quoted as saying "I did not give up my First Amendment rights when my husband became a justice of the Supreme Court." She is absolutely right; and, she’s been exercising them for years.

Until December she ran Liberty Central, “a conservative Web site that she founded in 2009 and that has strong links to the Tea Party movement. An anonymous $500,000 donation to start up Liberty Central came from Harlan Crow, a Dallas real estate investor and Republican financier….” NYTimes.com

Before that, she worked for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. USAToday.com

This year, she formed a consulting and lobbying firm, Liberty Consulting, Inc., which will“advocate for ‘liberty-loving citizens’ who favored limited government, free enterprise and other core conservative issues. She promised to use her ‘experience and connections’ to help clients raise money and increase their political impact.” NYTimes.com

A couple of months after Governor Jindal took office, Supriya Jindal formed Supriya Jindal Foundation for Louisiana’s Children. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the foundation has received large amounts of money from corporations with pressing legal and regulatory concerns in Louisiana.

“AT&T, which needed Mr. Jindal, a Republican, to sign off on legislation allowing the company to sell cable television services without having to negotiate with individual parishes, has pledged at least $250,000 to the Supriya Jindal Foundation for Louisiana’s Children. Marathon Oil, which last year won approval from the Jindal administration to increase the amount of oil it can refine at its Louisiana plant, also committed to a $250,000 donation. And the military contractor Northrop Grumman, which got state officials to help set up an airplane maintenance facility at a former Air Force base, promised $10,000 to the charity.

The foundation has collected nearly $1 million in previously unreported pledges from major oil companies, insurers and other corporations in Louisiana with high-stakes regulatory issues….” NYTimes.com

Ginny Thomas has every right to promote whatever political views she wishes. Supriya Jindal is using the corporate donations to help Louisiana kids who desperately need the help.

To pick on someone from the other side of the political spectrum, Michelle Obama is promoting reducing child obesity and encouraging all Americans to eat healthy foods. She’s able to do this because of her status as the First Lady. And while I don’t know it, I would not be at all surprised if some corporations have gotten on board with money and effort to help her.

So here’s my problem. Clarence Thomas has said that he isn’t influenced by his wife’s political work. Bobby Jindal has said the same things about the money his wife has collected. I’m sure Barack Obama would say similar things about corporate largesse helping Michelle Obama. I’m not at all sure I believe them.

If Clarence, Bobby and Barack can’t do the things their wives are doing and operate legally and ethically (though Clarence might disagree with me given recent speeches), shouldn’t the prohibition extend to their wives? The answer is no.

Marrying someone doesn’t extinguish the non-public spouse’s “personhood.” We are long past the days of Lady Bird Johnson and Jackie Kennedy confining their efforts to flowers and the arts. The influence wielded by the corporations, through the spouses, on the public officials can’t and shouldn’t be stopped by statutes, regulations or ethics rules. I just have to trust to the officials’ integrity and honor to resist the temptation to look favorably on the corporations making the indirect bribes. But, I’m nervous.

I suppose I have to write something about this stuff

2011-02-24T18:51:00.000-05:00

This stuff being Wisconsin and DOMA.

And the problem is that the bad guys are wearing me down.

Unions – bad. We can’t outlaw private unions (yet) so let’s blame teachers, cops and firefighters for all the woes of Wisconsin. Never mind that unions, if they are one of the reasons for the current economic meltdown the country, states and cities are facing, are a minor factor. Let’s focus on class envy. Us that don’t have the decent wage, the pension or the benefits the union workers have, having been beaten down are looking down the street, around the corner and are jealous. We’ve taken a beating, why haven’t they? We are a little too pleased with politicians that want to take the people that have what we don’t down a notch or two, maybe three.

We don’t focus on the fact that big corporations are on the rebound, in part as the result of cutting cost to the bone at their employees’ expense. We aren’t thrilled that the corporate rebound was aided by the bailout, and we didn’t get much bailout on our block, but “what ya gonna do?” We can’t control corporate or political America so let’s vent our anger at someone we can hurt. We aren’t rebounding and those teachers over there have got more than we do. They ought to suffer as much as we do.

And our politicians are all too willing to pander to our anger.

Our politicians are unwilling to do anything to bring us together, other on a rare occasion when a timid President recognizes what should be a no-brainer and is immediately attacked by the opposition and tepidly supported by his party.

Here’s what a wuss the Prez is.

Sorry, I’ve got to talk a little bit about law. Courts look at laws that are accused of being unconstitutional with three sets of standards – rational basis, heightened scrutiny and strict scrutiny. Religion and race get strict scrutiny treatment, the government can’t mess with them unless it has a “compelling” reason and there is no other way to promote the government interest. At the other end of the spectrum is, what I’ll call, the “laugh test,” usually applied to economic concerns of people. If the government can come up with a reason for the law that doesn’t make the lawyer or the judge laugh, the reason is reasonable and the government can impinge on peoples’ economic rights. In the middle is the heightened scrutiny test, which is muddle of, often conflicting, analysis.

The Obama Administration has decided to forge new ground (cue sarcasm) by announcing that it will not defend the Defense of Marriage Act in Courts of Appeal that have not decided that it is subject to the laugh test. If they have decided on the laugh test standard, the Administration will support their ruling. I know that doesn’t make much sense to anyone but Curmudgeon.

Let me try it another way. Our courageous leader doesn’t like discriminating against gay people but he isn’t going to push it. If a set of judges is newly considering discriminating against gay people, the Justice Department is not going to weigh in on the side of the discrimination – they are going to leave that to Congress. But, if another set of judges has already decided that discrimination against gay people is rational - no one laughed when the argument was made - then they’ll defend the discrimination on an appeal to the Supreme Court.

That too makes no sense, unless, unless, Obama is just playing politics as he is wont to do. Gay people will finally be less pissed at him and may come around again to support him in ’12 - same with the straight liberals and a lot of the youngins. Faced with the alternative of whatever Neanderthal, in their minds, the GOP runs, at least Obama is living up to some of his promise – maybe some of them won’t sit out the election in disgust. Obama doesn’t have the hard right, the mostly hard right or the religious right no matter what he does, so the move won’t hurt him and may help him. Chicago politics at its best.

I just think we as a country, we as regions and we as communities have lost our way. We’re scared and we listen to whomever plays to our fear. I’ve got mine or I don’t have mine and I’ll be damned if I’m going to do anything for someone that is different, seems to have more than me or threatens to take some of mine. And Obama and Boehner, and friends, play to the respective fears and vulnerabilities of their sheep.

Unions and gay people aren’t hurting non-union or straight people. But they are nice targets when we can’t control what’s happening and want to lash out.

Gotta Love Consistency

2011-02-22T15:14:00.002-05:00

This post is pretty much a short, but total, rip-off of a piece by a columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Jay Bookman.

You may remember that a bunch of Republican dominated states are suing the Feds over Obamacare, arguing that it is unconstitutional. One of their primary arguments is that the Constitution’s Commerce Clause doesn’t allow government to force people to buy health insurance, a strictly local matter.

But wait, it seems not all states are doing a good enough job on their own when it comes to malpractice lawsuits according to some Republicans. They want a federal law that caps damages. And remember that they have a rule among themselves that requires a bill to specify the part of the Constitution that authorizes the legislation. Guess what provision they say allows the Feds to regulate malpractice damages, the horrid commerce clause.

I wasn’t aware there was a lot of interstate malpractice being committed.

Props to Amazon. UPDATED: A Jeer for UPS.

2011-02-18T10:47:00.001-05:00

Maybe I’m being too easy on Amazon; but, I’m happy and it is the reason.

I wrote a post a few days back about my plan to buy a DSLR camera. Despite thinking about it, I can’t think of anything fascinating or funny that is worthy of the post I promised you about the process of buying it.

The camera is a Nikon D3100, a lower end model that debuted last fall. I got an extra lens, a media card (none comes with the camera) and Adobe Elements. I really wanted to buy locally; but, with Amazon’s prices and not having to pay 7% sales tax, I saved a bit over $150.00 and struck another little nail in the coffin of local bricks and mortar business. Sorry B&M.

So, why am I happy with Amazon? If you’ve bought something from Amazon, you know it sends you a confirming Email and then sends another Email when your order ships. My camera started wending its way to me yesterday morning and is somewhere in the bowels of UPS between Lexington and Atlanta. Which means it wouldn’t be delivered until Monday, a bit of a disappointment because I was hoping to get it today and play with it over the weekend.

UPS has a huge distribution center three or four miles up the road where my camera will land before being put on a local delivery truck. The center is open on Saturdays. But, some research on Amazon’s and UPS’s sites about redirecting a delivery was also disappointing. I couldn’t have UPS hold it at the center for pick-up until after UPS made a delivery attempt.

But the “shipper” could. All I had to do is find a person at Amazon to do it.

Past experience with technology companies didn’t make me optimistic. Ever talk to a person at Microsoft? Ever find a person at say, Dell that could actually do something?

Amazon’s website doesn’t have a customer service phone number on it, at least that I could find. Google to the rescue! If you want to call Amazon, the number is 800-742-5877. The voice recognition software works quite nicely and hitting “0” gets you out of menu hell immediately.

After confirming that I am indeed Dave, and listening to my request that he tell UPS to hold the shipment at the distribution center for me to pick up in the morning, Ishan asked me to hold. A few minutes of bad harpsichord music later, Ishan came back on the line to tell me I can pick up my camera tomorrow between 10:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m.

Amazon, you’re pretty good. Ishan, you are officially my favorite person of the week, thanks.

In looking at the tracking information, I learned my package was "ready for pick-up;" so I drove the couple of miles to the distribution center. It was not ready. The truck that had indeed arrived, would be unloaded, maybe, Sunday night and, maybe, I could pick up the package on Monday morning, maybe not. Since that defeated the whole purpose of holding the package at the center, I asked the young lady if I could switch back to a Monday delivery. I got a disinterested yes and asked that she do that. Turn out she couldn't (or perhaps wouldn't), but I could do it on line. Turns out that isn't true. So I guess I'm taking a drive to UPS on Monday, maybe. Boo UPS.

Sausage Making, Georgia Style

2011-02-17T14:06:00.002-05:00

Every year the Georgia Legislature considers whether to allow us citizens to buy take out booze on Sunday. Every year, it decides we aren’t deserving of the privilege.

Our last Governor, Sonny Perdue, is a Baptist teetotaler. He famously said if you want to drink on Sunday, you should be organized enough to buy the booze on Saturday. (Of course you can buy booze on Sunday by getting into your car, driving to a restaurant or bar, drinking as much as they will serve you and then driving home. - so much for the public safety arguments used by Sonny and the religious right opposition.

Another argument against Sunday sales has been that “it’s the Lord’s day.” Apparently God doesn’t mind drunk driving but subscribes to the never drink alone theory of imbibing.

We have a new Governor, Republican Nathan Deal, who announced that, though he doesn’t drink, he wouldn’t veto a bill allowing Sunday sales.

In case you didn’t know it, there are two parts to Georgia: Atlanta and the rest of the state. Metro Atlanta county polls show overwhelming support for Sunday sales. Counties in the rest of the state either split or are overwhelmingly against Sunday sales.

So, some bright politicians decided to accommodate those that are agin it and those that are fer it. They introduced a bill that would allow counties and municipalities to hold referendums on whether they wanted to allow Sunday sales. Don’t want it in Valdosta, fine; but, stock up the beer shelves in Atlanta.

The Chamber of Commerce came out in support of the bill, telling legislators that it was going to make it a “scorecard issue” for future support. The bill came out of committee in the Senate. On to a floor vote, approval by the House and new era in Georgia will soon begin!

Then the sausage making started.

Ministers started whining - no one had told them about the public hearing that preceded the committee vote. The Christian Coalition or one of its clones announced that it would make the vote a scorecard issue. All of the people that have excoriated the health reform bill since last year on the grounds that it eliminated “local control” and trampled the “will of the people” suddenly lost their fervor for those bedrocks of democracy. Now, they wanted the bill stopped and stopped at the state level without giving “the people” a vote.

Oh, and it turned out not all members of the Chamber of Commerce were in love with Sunday sales. Liquor store owners (and for a religious state we seem to have a lot of liquor stores) like the idea of being closed on Sunday. A week’s worth of sales in six days would turn into an extra day of labor costs with no increase in revenue, giving them less profit.

So, what were the good Senators going to do when confronted with the stark reality that campaign money might dry up if they turned on the liquor store lobby and the religious folks?

They held a closed caucus meeting and mentioned coming out that it didn’t look good for the bill. They were going to take a private poll of all the Republican Senators – no majority among the majority, no bill. So the anonymous poll was held. The bill died a quiet death. No Republican had to stick his neck out by publicly voting for or against it.

So, all of the Democratic Senators and Representatives were disenfranchised, along with a few million people across the state. Liquor store profits are safe and Baptists once again succeeded in using government to force their religious views down the throats of their neighbors. The sausage doesn’t taste real good going down; but, I’ve got plenty of time to get to the store before the Christian Sabbath to get something to wash it down.

Walking the Walk

2011-02-15T13:56:00.003-05:00

States and municipalities are talking up government employee pension “reform.” Basically, their argument is that they were stupid and hoodwinked by evil, liberal government employee unions; and, in any event, they can’t afford to pay the generous benefits anymore.

From a 2007 report by the Congressional Research Service (a government entity):

“Under both CSRS and FERS [the two federal pension plans], Members of Congress are eligible for a pension at age 62 if they have completed at least five years of service. Members are eligible for a pension at age 50 if they have completed 20 years of service, or at any age after completing 25 years of service. The amount of the pension depends on years of service and the average of the highest three years of salary. By law, the starting amount of a Member’s retirement annuity may not exceed 80% of his or her final salary.”

Senators and Representatives make $174,000.00 a year (leadership makes a bit more). 80% of that is $139,200.00. Not a bad Social Security supplement at 62 if you can get elected once as a Senator or three times as a Representative. Even better at 50 for a Senator that’s been elected four times or a Representative winning ten times.

Did I mention they get full health benefits for life; and, that since 1984, they also get Social Security?

The Dems and the GOP are sniping at each other about Obama’s proposed 2011 federal budget. I haven’t heard any of them propose cutting of their own retirement benefits. Yes, the savings would be a drop in the ocean, not just a bucket, of debt. Totally symbolic, just like cutting the federal home heating oil subsidy for poor people in half (about $2.5 billion) as Obama has proposed or the $500 million the GOP wants to save by defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Sound Advice, As I Recall, From Fifth Grade

2011-02-14T19:07:00.002-05:00

Who, What, When, Where, Why and How?

When you are deciding about something, don’t trust anything or anyone until you gotten an answer to at least the first four W questions. If you have answers to them, you can use what you learned to give your own answer to why and how, or judge someone else’s answers.

Google seems to be screwing up the fifth grade test lately as judged by reading this article at NYTimes.com yesterday. (For whatever reason the linking function is not working. Thanks Thomas.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/13search.html?_r=2&src=busln

Immediate Pleasure, Part One

2011-02-12T16:59:00.002-05:00

For some reason I want to buy a DSLR camera.

I started out with SLR’s years and years ago with a Yashica, focus and set the shutter speed and aperture manually.

I moved to a Canon AE 1 Program. Same deal, though it would let you shoot with aperture or shutter speed priority. Choose one and it would give you the best available other, given the available light, if that makes sense.

That got stolen and I bought a Canon EOS 630. Auto focus with more auto program features, which I mostly ignored, having learned cameras manually.

Then I got a high end Canon point and shoot.

Then my phone became my camera.

One of the downsides to what I do for a living is that it never ends. Even when you get a good result for a client, you move on to the next thing on the calendar. I make my living playing serial table stakes poker that lasts for months and years.

One of the reasons I like my blog is that there is a start and a finish to each post that aren’t too far away from each other. I get an idea, type a bit and either say, or don’t quite say, what I thought about. Maybe half the time, I think I’ve written a little piece of art. Okay, less than half.

I’ve always had some sort of hobby that has a shorter effort/reward cycle.

I used to play pool until I got to the point that I was as good as I was going to get, unless I started playing hours a day. But I loved the art of pool. So many variables on each shot, each shot leading, if you thought it out to the next then the next, until you got to the nine or the eight, depending on the game. Either game, if you thought it through and executed, pleasure quickly.

Back in the last decade of the last century I took up photography seriously. Lots of variables, play them right and you get a thing of beauty, fairly quickly for the times.

Digital has speeded up the results to “now,” subject to the time you play with the data with software.

But the enjoyment disappeared with the point and shoot and the phone. I “see” a lot of stuff that I can’t reproduce. The 630 and the point and shoot still work; but, each have a flaw. The 630 has film, the point and shoot lacks a base quality for what I’ll, hubistrically, if that’s a word, call art (Word says it isn’t a word).

So, I’m thinking I need a platform that will let me produce what I “see” again. The next post will chronicle my search, driven by another part of my personality – “damn that’s expensive.” But, I think I’ve found a way. I found out this morning that one of my lenses, that I bought for about $150, sells for over $1,000 today.

Megabytes Over Guns?

2011-02-12T08:59:00.002-05:00

I’m still trying to figure out what I think about Eygpt.

One theme of the “revolution” has been that it is the latest example of the power of social media – Facebook, Twitter. The cellphone will set you free.

And to an extent, I think that is true.

Going forward? I’m not too sure. I’m afraid I think that Eygpt has traded one dictator for a group dictatorship, the Army. From a CBS News article: “With 468,000 members, the Egyptian military is the largest in the Arab world. It controls an estimated one-third of the Egyptian economy….” I really don’t think the guys that backed the last guy are going to turn things over to the “opposition” by way of “free and fair” elections.

I think guns, at least in the near future, will trump media. I hope I’m wrong; but, I don’t think I am.

I need a scorecard

2011-02-09T11:18:00.000-05:00

The U.S. House failed to pass a bill to extend some of the provisions in the Patriot Act. From what I’ve read, a bunch of new GOP representatives joined with a block of senior GOP representatives and only about two-thirds of Democratic representatives and voted against it on civil liberties grounds.

The Obama administration is backing the bill and a third of the Democrats voted for it?

Topsy-turvy it is.

I’m on the side of Republican veteran pols and wet behind the ears Tea Party nuts. Scary.

NIMBY

2011-02-08T14:18:00.000-05:00

There are things we all agree need to be done (or can’t be seen as not agreeing to). Prisons, landfills and so on. Sure we need them; but, don’t put it in my back yard.

I think there’s a somewhat related concept working in national and state politics since the last election. Republicans swept in on promises reduced spending, local control, no tax increases, “fixing” immigration, etc.

But now the new Congress and legislatures around the country are faced with the reality of governance.

Take earmarks. Everyone knows they’re bad; no one is for them. But wait a minute! Couple this platitude with the Republican promise to cut $100 billion in spending (now something south of $40 billion – they don’t have a full year to keep the promise). Couple that with the general proposition that you can’t cut military and entitlement spending, and you have some squeals coming from the hinterlands.

Well yeah, it’s an earmark but it’s a good earmark for this neighborhood. Here in Georgia, the state wants to dredge the Savannah River to accommodate bigger ships to attract imports and exports to the Port of Savannah. More traffic, more spending, more taxes and so on. But you see, we’d rather not pay for the project, which will cost a bit less than a billion bucks. But all of our Republican federal elected officials ran on the no earmark and cut spending pledges. They and their state Republican colleagues ran in large part by painting Obama and Washington as twin devils. They are twisting and turning trying to figure out ways to get the money out of the devil feds they reviled last fall.

Another example. Like any other state worth its salt, we’re outraged about the federal failure to protect our borders and stop illegal immigration, so we’re going to take it into our own hands. They had a hearing this week with testimony from Georgia’s agricultural interests. Turns out they aren’t too thrilled with the Arizona model of stopping, arresting and shipping out everyone with brown skin. Why you ask? Who’ll pick the peaches?

Those evil people in Washington that were the cause of all of our troubles also hold the answer to the dilemma of the millions in interest Georgia is supposed to start paying this year on the money it borrowed last year from the feds to pay unemployment claims. Obama has proposed deferring the interest owed by the states and there’s the rub. The local GOPpers are all for it. Their federal counterparts aren’t too thrilled with deferring billions in revenue needed to offset the cosmetic billions they want to cut.

Last fall, politicians talked the talk. With spring coming, they aren’t so much walking the walk as tiptoeing through the landmines laid by their rhetoric.

HALF OFF! EVERY DAY!

2011-02-07T17:31:00.002-05:00

Groupon.com had a controversial commercial during yesterday’s Super Bowl, a riff on a public service announcement about Tibet.

I’ll leave it up to you as to whether Groupon was edgy or went over the line.

Now I want to talk about JoS. A. Bank. Until I started to write this post, I didn’t know if JAB was local, regional or national. A quick search shows it to be a national clothing chain.

That means some of you will have heard its continual radio and TV commercials about the “HUGE [fill in the blank] SALE: ANY THREE SUITS FOR THE PRICE OF ONE!!!!”

Is it any secret that the “price” isn’t the “price?” Would anyone in their right mind go to JAB and buy a suit on a day there wasn’t a HUGE SALE? Not that I think there ever is such a day. It isn't half off if it's the price every day.

JAB is a cheap clothing discounter. I’ve never been in one of its stores; but, I’m betting that everything it sells is last year’s line, seconds and/or inferior quality lines. It’s the loud version of Wal-Mart. Buy huge quantities of cheap stuff and sell it at a low margin to a lot of people. There’s a market for this.

Groupon and Scoutmob and their cousins have come of age in a recession. Retailers, restaurants, gyms and so on are desperate to draw in customers. I get an Email from Half Off Depot each day, offering really good prices on what seem to be pretty marginal businesses.

Should I assume that these offers represent the true value of the products and services and make sure I never pay the “normal price?” Should I assume that a point in time, Groupon, et al. will run out of desperate businesses and fade away? Are Groupon type companies creating an unsustainable model of consumer choice – go from coupon offer to coupon offer, never returning to a business that reverts to regular prices?

Any of these scenarios aren’t good for online coupon companies or their clients. Then too, Groupon turned down a $6 billion offer from Google and is being valued at $15 billion for a planned IPO; so, what do I know?

A Haircut and a Suit of Clothes

2011-02-04T14:20:00.004-05:00

This post is optional - I know, all posts are optional. I guess what I’m saying is this one will need a little bit of work on your part; and, if you aren’t in the mood, feel free to move along.

First, the quotes come from this article by Wallace Shawn.

Shawn says we are the victims of our personal and societal perceptions, which are self-reinforcing. We look at the exterior, the haircut and the clothes, and judge the interior. By doing so, we limit ourselves and everyone else. We play roles, we don’t live lives that we are capable of.

Had he stopped there, I’d be in agreement; but, according to Shawn,”[t]he global market selects out a tiny group of privileged babies who are born in certain parts of certain towns in certain countries, and these babies are allowed to lead privileged lives. Some will be scientists, some will be bankers. Some will command, rule, and grow fantastically rich, and others will become more modestly paid intellectuals or teachers or artists. But all the members of this tiny group will have the chance to develop their minds and realize their talents.

“As for all the other babies, the market sorts them and stamps labels onto them and hurls them violently into various pits, where an appropriate upbringing and preparation are waiting for them. If the market thinks that workers will be needed in electronics factories, a hundred thousand babies will be stamped with the label ‘factory worker’ and thrown down into a certain particular pit….The reason…was not that [they] lacked ability but that the market wanted workers, and so [the babies were] assigned….

“[U]ntil they’re ready to go to work, they’re all assigned appropriate costumes. And once they know what costume they’ll wear, each individual is given an accent, a way of speaking, some characteristic personality traits, and a matching body type, and each person’s face starts slowly to specialize in certain expressions that coordinate well with their personality, body type, and costume. And so each person comes to understand what role he will play, and so each can consistently select and reproduce, through all the decades and changes of fashion, the appropriate style and wardrobe, for the rest of his life.

****

“If we look at reality for more than an instant, if we look at the human beings passing us on the street, it’s not bearable. It’s not bearable to watch while the talents and the abilities of infants and children are crushed and destroyed....Their performances as these characters are consistent and convincing, because they actually believe about themselves just what I believe about them -- that what they are now is all that they could ever have been, they could never have been anything other than what they are. Of course, that’s what we all have to believe, so that we can bear our lives and live in peace together. But it’s the peace of death.

****

“If the play we’re watching is an illusion…, then the division of labor, as now practiced, is inherently immoral, and we must somehow learn a different way to share out all the work that needs to be done. The costumes are wrong. They have to be discarded. We have to start out naked again and go from there.”

Shawn blames the self and societal delusion on capitalist markets, without any explanation and goes on to conclude that we must become socialists.

It seems to me that he is just trading haircuts and suits of clothes. I don’t know of anything about capitalism that creates or exacerbates the human tendency to categorize things and to see oneself in the better category (or to see someone or something else as the reason we aren’t). So too, I don’t know anything about socialism that frees people to see themselves and others more clearly.

I don’t know of any society, historical or current, that has an economic system that results in clear-eyed self-examination or judgment of others.

Shawn seems to me to be an anti-Ayn Rand. She thought rugged individualism would be our salvation. He thinks cooperative production and allocation will do the trick. Both systems, show their flaws when exposed to reality. Neither system will result in the “perfection” of mankind by realization of the potential of each of us. That brings us to my favorite verity. People are basically cussed. This is a verity that of course calls out for a divinity. But, because we are cussed, we can't agree on just who that divinity should be, giving us as many flavors of god as there are political and economic systems. So, on second thought....

To everything...there is a season

2011-02-02T19:01:00.003-05:00

Last year’s health care reform act (Obamacare if you will) is two for four in legal tests of its constitutionality, with the latest result playing big in the media. A district court judge has ruled that the “mandate” that people must buy insurance is not allowed under the Commerce Clause or the “necessary and proper” language of the Constitution.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to go all legal on you; but, the feds can indeed provide health care for every living soul in the country if they want to, they just didn’t do it the right way if the most recent judge weighing in on the question is right.

“The Congress shall have Power to lay and collect Taxes … to … provide for the … general Defence and Welfare of the United States….” U.S. Constitution, Section 8, Clause 1.

Translated, this means that using the same analysis that makes Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid constitutional would make universal health care constitutional. Lay and collect more taxes and then spend them on the legally rational, whether or not wise, proposition that the general welfare of the country would be increased by a more healthy population.

Health care, like most issues, at its heart is a political question. Over the centuries we decided that a large, global influence wielding military is a good idea and have taxed ourselves heavily to accomplish the goal. The same is true of railroads, airports, interstate highways and the previously mentioned retirement and more limited health programs.

The Gallup does a yearly poll on health care. Here’s the link to the November 2010 poll.

The first graph in the poll is interesting. People thinking health care is a government responsibility peaked in 2007 at 69% and declined to 47% last November, the lowest percentage since 2000. There are lots more poll questions. Maybe they explain the decline in popular support for universal health care.

Whatever the reason, there is no majority of support for, much less a mandate for health care for all of us – the Republicans are on to something, or the cause of it? We, at best seem ambivalent these days. For whatever reason, it may be that the chance for it was missed. Cheer or jeer as you will.

If nothing else, read the introduction to the piece

2011-01-28T18:18:00.002-05:00

Former Georgia Governor Roy Barnes on corporations and politics:

Even heterosexual corporations can't marry.

More Class Warfare

2011-01-28T14:00:00.000-05:00

Newt Gingrich and Jeb Bush wrote this week in the Los Angeles Times that they want to revise the bankruptcy statutes to let states file for bankruptcy.

Why?

“The new Congress has the opportunity to prepare a fair, orderly, predictable and lawful approach to help struggling state governments address their financial challenges without resorting to wasteful bailouts.”

What are the financial challenges that need addressing? Here’s some cherry picking from the op-ed:

“[Reorganize their finances free from their union contractual obligations.” [R]eform their bloated, broken and underfunded pension systems for current and future workers.” Get rid of “[t]he lucrative pay and benefits packages that government employee unions have received from obliging politicians over the years….” “If government employee union bosses know that they could have all their contracts annulled under federal bankruptcy law, either through a plan of reorganization voluntarily entered into by state leaders or by the voters through proposition, they may be far more accommodating with state governments to restructure government employee union workforces, pensions and work rules.” (Emphasis added.)

Sense any antipathy for unions? Click on the link above and you’ll see no mention of using bankruptcy to squeeze money from corporations who have lucrative contracts with states. You’ll see no requirement that a bankrupt state cut non-essential services and sell off non-essential assets as conditions to squeezing its employees.

What I see is, I think, an attempt to do to government workers what was done to private sector workers over the past couple of decades – get rid of employer responsibility for funding retirement. Private pension plans are an endangered species, replaced by 401(k)’s, SEP’s and only Social Security in an increasing number of cases. One of the methods used to make the transition was strategic bankruptcy by corporations.

I’ll leave aside the arguments for and against saving for retirement being an individual rather than a societal responsibility. But, I don’t like stacking the deck by the proponents of the change.

I’m not a rabid fan of unions. They’ve done good and bad over the decades to my mind. I am a fan of contracts; and, contracts are invariably the victim of bankruptcies.

Back in 2006, Congress passed a revision to the federal bankruptcy statutes “with the explicit intent of discouraging filings under the Bankruptcy Code.” The CPA Journal. Why? There was a growing sense that bankruptcy was being abused by debtors. Run up $25K in credit card debt, file, and walk away from your creditors, then do it again in a few years. That’s a little bit harder after the revisions in 2006.

In my experience, it’s worse with companies. File, stiff your creditors using the reorganization rules, including your employees and their pension plans, and start fresh on Monday morning. In the case of some companies, repeat as necessary. The thinking is, I guess, better that a relatively small group of creditors feel the pain than society as a whole as the result of a feared rash of liquidations.

Is it a good idea to provide this kind of leverage to states?

Bankruptcy historically has not always been so kind to debtors and the rules stacked against creditors.

From an early, modern era, Supreme Court bankruptcy case:

“This purpose of the act has been again and again emphasized by the courts as being of public, as well as private, interest, in that it gives to the honest but unfortunate debtor who surrenders for distribution the property which he owns at the time of bankruptcy a new opportunity in life and a clear field for future effort, unhampered by the pressure and discouragement of preexisting debt.”

Local Loan Co. v. Hunt, 292 U. S. 234, 244 (1934) (emphasis added).

States deciding on bankruptcy aren’t going to surrender anything to anyone. We aren’t going to liquidate a state. (Though, do we really need New Jersey?) Rather states would use the rules to take away from others, employees, by threat of an even worse outcome - the same approach used by a laundry list of airlines, car companies and other businesses over the past couple of decades. All extending bankruptcy protection to states will do is focus the pain on some people, employees, rather than diffuse it over all people, taxpayers. “Federal taxpayers in states that balance their budgets should not have to bail out the irresponsible, pandering politicians who cannot balance their budgets" say Gingrich and Bush. Nope, God forbid that – let’s take it out of the hides of the workers.

Spinning the State of the Union Speech and Reality

2011-01-24T10:46:00.000-05:00

From a NYTimes.com article about Dem and GOP spins on the not yet given State of the Union speech:

“The public itself seems split, or perhaps confused. Americans overwhelmingly say that in general, they prefer cutting government spending to paying higher taxes, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll published last week. Yet their preference for spending cuts, even in programs that benefit them, dissolves when they are presented with specific options related to Medicare and Social Security, the programs that directly touch millions of lives and are the biggest drivers of the long-term deficit.

****

“’To borrow an analogy, cutting the deficit by cutting investments in areas like education, areas like innovation — that’s like trying to reduce the weight of an overloaded aircraft by removing its engine,’ Mr. Obama said …’It’s not a good idea.’

****

“Republicans are themselves divided over how much of the budget they can realistically slash. The leadership has already acknowledged that it would be difficult if not impossible to fulfill the $100 billion campaign pledge, and instead has suggested that cuts prorated for the balance of the fiscal year would be more realistic. Tea Party conservatives are pushing the leaders to stick to the $100 billion target. Now the leaders face the task of uniting the rank-and-file around challenging the president.”

Both sides are poised to do the same thing - not much - while blaming the other side.

Obama and the Dems will preach the need to “invest,” or put it more clearly, continue spending money on things that make their constituents happy. The GOP will hammer on the need for huge cuts in spending and then not make them, hoping the Tea Party won’t notice and that its corporate constituency will notice that it is business as usual.

The reality of where we find ourselves is that the federal government spent 1.3 trillion dollars more than it took in last year. The coming fiscal year without cuts will burn about the same amount of borrowed money no matter which side prevails with its rhetoric.

Both sides are looking to borrow maybe $50 to $100 billion less than last year, still spending some 1.2 trillion dollars that the country doesn’t have. It’s just a matter of who gets the borrowed money at the margin.

What a difference a light year makes

2011-01-22T12:13:00.003-05:00

Since the Telegraph.co.uk article is short, I’ll paste it here rather than make you click a link:

“The supernova could provide the biggest light show since Earth was formed, and will be so bright that night will become like day for one or two weeks, experts said.

“Betelgeuse, which is part of the Orion constellation 640 light years away from Earth, is a red supergiant, meaning that it is nearing the end of its life and is due to explode.

“When it does [s]o, it will burn so brightly that the earth will appear to have two suns in the sky, the Daily Mail reported.

“What is less certain is when it will explode.

“Brad Carter, senior lecturer of physics at the University of southern Queensland in Australia, said the explosion could take place before the end of the year – or indeed at any point over the next million years.”

I’m no science guy; but, shouldn’t Mr. Carter be talking about when the increased light from the explosion gets here?

Yes, I’m bored.

Company Town: Citizens United in the Flesh*

2011-01-22T10:03:00.003-05:00

About 90 people live in the five and a half square miles of Vernon, CA, home to about 1,800 corporations. The people live in about 25 “households,” on property owned by the City. Most of them are City employees or officials.

Vernon is next door to Bell, CA, famous for the high income and indictments of its officials. A lot of Bell’s 38,000 real people work for Vernon’s 1,800 companies.

I don’t have anything pithy to say about Vernon, I just find the idea of a bunch of companies getting together and importing people to be the “government” to be fascinating.

* Citizens United is the Supreme Court case that said that corporations are people for purposes of political contributions.