Month: March 2009

Danny Sullivan:

Apparently, some people believe President Barack Obama wants to turn the United States into a socialist country — with fears that this would be a terrible step in the wrong direction. Fair to say, most people with these fears have never lived in a socialist country. I have, in Britain, for 12 years. I thought I’d share a bit about how terribly different and strange that economic system is from the one we enjoy in the United States.

It’s not that different.

In Britain, you have rich people, poor people and a lot of people in between. The key difference, economically speaking, is that the poor people have a safety net both in terms of income support and universal health care. This does not come by taxing the rich people to death. Neither does this produce a huge class of people who do nothing but live off the state.

Why waste crumbs?

The Cambridge Muslim College is designed to train Islamic specialists to “celebrate their identity”. Beats war, and any fool would know so. [story]

Asserting a constructive mindset:

But the one thing I will say is this: With the magnitude of the challenges we face right now, what we need in Washington are not more political tactics — we need more good ideas. We don’t need more point-scoring — we need more problem-solving. So if there are members of Congress who object to specific policies and proposals in this budget, then I ask them to be ready and willing to propose constructive, alternative solutions. If certain aspects of this budget people don’t think work, provide us some ideas in terms of what you do.

“Just say no” is the right advice to give your teenagers about drugs. It is not an acceptable response to whatever economic policy is proposed by the other party.

The American people sent us here to get things done.

Will they arrest George Bush when he steps on foreign soil?

Ahead of the visit, a group called Lawyers Against the War sent a letter to the RCMP war crimes section requesting the police force bar Bush from entering Canada, citing torture and other war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay committed under his watch.

“We are now very sure that the crimes were committed,” said Gail Davidson, author of the letter and co-founder of the Canadian-based international organization of jurists. “The Bush administration planned, authorized, directed and funded those crimes.”

“Obviously, maybe they ought to be removed,” said Sen. Charles Grassley during an Iowa City radio interview on Monday. “But I would suggest the first thing that would make me feel a little bit better toward them if they’d follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say, I’m sorry, and then either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide.”

HA!

Won’t we all want to grow?

Growing is a good thing and it’s important to be tops. But as important, yes, more important, is joining and sharing. We do this first. We do this in order to grow. We are first friends and then we gather and then we share and then we celebrate and then we love and we are intimate and then we grow.

We are bricks in the /et al/
It’s not commerce. It’s precious.
And the height we want is care.

Here.
I’ll post it.
You work with it.

WASHINGTON, D.C. and NASHVILLE, Tenn. – March 10, 2009 – Today, Gallup, Healthways and America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) are pleased to announce publication of one of the most powerful tools ever created for measuring and evaluating America’s relative health, well-being, and prosperity.

Ann Arbor change agent William Tozier rants about ‘the good people’ that surround our localities and suburbs – marketers and agents and landlords and bankers and people who publish shiny color magazines and promote their sunny offices in office parks….

He says,

“They’re good people.

“That said… Like all of us, these are plain old human beings armed with the standard human cognitive heuristic toolkit… personal experience… cultural norms… the sense of massive importance of all that…

“They try, really. But they’re crippled by insularity, by the people they hear and choose to listen to, by their distance from the Actual World. Hell, it’s a handful of them that even know the world exists as it does.

“No sense of the timescale…. a milestone on the road to obsolescence.”

Why are powers in London, New York, the Caribbean, and not at home? Our localities are where we live!

The most potent and trained and talented must come home. Until we are happy in our own neighborhoods, dusty democracy has never been, and Plato’s assertions to build government have been diluted to obscurity.

Place is where we build our powers. But today, we give our place away. We invite corruption to our town, a ribbon from underwriters to peddlers, and we are bled away.

We fail to create the nearby. For me, that’s nuts. Law allows us to invent pleasant, prosperous and sustainable places. Until, I think, we put fortune in our day to day culture, we are mere barracks.

The public pays more than cash to sloppy firms:

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found evidence that houseflies collected near broiler poultry operations may contribute to the dispersion of drug-resistant bacteria and thus increase the potential for human exposure to drug-resistant bacteria. The findings demonstrate another potential link between industrial food animal production and exposures to antibiotic resistant pathogens.

It will not be easy to contain pollution, but it is the task ahead.

Be Our Shame:

US interrogators attached detainees to collars like dogs and used their leashes to slam them against walls, forced them to stand for days wearing only diapers, and tied detainees necks with towels and threw them against plywood walls, according to accounts in a secret 2007 report issued by the Red Cross to be printed in a New York magazine and leaked on Monday.

The report — issued by the International Committee of the Red Cross and kept secret for the last two years — is the first first-hand document to legally say the Bush Administration’s harsh interrogation techniques “constituted torture.”

Tiny motives. Astounding ignorance. Lousy tactics.

A guy in northern California:

What is the strangest thing you believe?

Free markets are an illusion. I really doubt any such thing has ever existed. There has always been a class of people with so many more resources available to them that they can game pretty much everything to their advantage, to the detriment of those not in possession of such good positioning.

This most recent economic collapse has enriched an infinitesimally small group of people to a degree that’s difficult to imagine, but we’re not hearing or reading anything about them, meanwhile millions of people around the globe have yet to appreciate how bad things are going to get for them. Media, government and capital markets have long been captured by these forces and it’s not likely that much is going to done about it. We’ll just have to absorb the pain and maybe things eventually get a little better, maybe they don’t. Your mileage will definitely vary.

Frank Rich at the NYTimes [damn firewall] says a good thing about this recession is that we can no longer afford petty tyranny:

Here, at last, is one piece of good news in our global economic meltdown: Americans have less and less patience for the intrusive and divisive moral scolds who thrived in the bubbles of the Clinton and Bush years.
…

History is cyclical, and it would be foolhardy to assume that the culture wars will never return. But after the humiliations of the Scopes trial and the repeal of Prohibition, it did take a good four decades for the religious right to begin its comeback in the 1970s. In our tough times, when any happy news can be counted as a miracle, a 40-year exodus for these ayatollahs can pass for an answer to America’s prayers.

Dick Cheney’s answer:

No, Rush is a good friend. I love him. I think he does great work and has for years.

Soft commentary, as most media enjoys, but ends with a purpose:

Yet in the end, as Cramer himself said, mistakes were made. His main line of defense was that others made mistakes as well. Though that’s no doubt true, it’s hardly a line you want to fight over, particularly when, considering the different audiences the networks serve, chances are most CNBC viewers would never have heard Stewart’s devastating take-down of the network had Cramer not kept the story growing and spreading.

By picking a fight he could not win, Cramer gave Stewart time and ammunition to launch a broader, more damaging attack on CNBC itself. The thrust, as he laid it out Thursday, is that the network gave up its role as watchdog and began to treat the market as a game and CEOs as star quarterbacks, forgetting what was at stake should the market fail. At a time when the market and the media are held in equally low regard, that’s an argument that can easily take hold.

And yet that could also be the one upside. If this affair makes the media reconsider their coverage and the rest of us consider how easily distracted we are by, say, stories about feuds between TV personalities, Cramer may have unintentionally done us all a service.

Funny how that works.

I noticed someone say Bruce Schneier is a celebrity, at least the closest thing to a celebrity that the security sector will ever find. His scholarship and clarity is profound. For example, his writing is the go-to source to explain airport conundrum to ourselves. Or to lead us along the way between freedom and repression. Or to save us from outright foolishness.

Data is the pollution of the information age. It’s a natural byproduct of every computer-mediated interaction. It stays around forever, unless it’s disposed of. It is valuable when reused, but it must be done carefully. Otherwise, its after effects are toxic.

And just as 100 years ago people ignored pollution in our rush to build the Industrial Age, today we’re ignoring data in our rush to build the Information Age.

Do put Schneier on Security in your roll.

Do senior editors in the financial press get this angry?

This was not a failure of markets; it was a failure to create proper markets.

What is to blame is a certain mindset, embodied not least by Mr Greenspan. It ignored a capitalist economy’s inherent instabilities — and therefore relieved policymakers who could manage those instabilities of their responsibility to do so.

This is not the bankruptcy of a social system, but the intellectual and moral failure of those who were in charge of it: a failure for which there is no excuse.

Financial Times, March 9, [free but firewalled]

Most who take the term ‘deregulation’ to bed at night believe in a principle, some hogwash about initiative and the human spirit, while at the same time they have saluted wealthy criminals and noisy pundits over three decades of suffering decline, faulty game theory and a global restructuring merely for the aid of simple pirates.

Herb Block warned us in 1985. The S&L collapse, Milken’s junk, Ken Lay at Enron, darkened the sky as years went by, but something ominously darker had captured the American voter.

Today’s odd defensiveness, the spit and hate, coupled to regurgitating communist-era sloganeering against socialism and government will not help our society.

Cleaning out board rooms, legislatures and committees might help.

Rethinking the purpose and goals of this great nation is overdue.

We are not a crop of population to be broken into demographics and sales rates.

A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt…. If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience til luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake. – Thomas Jefferson

During this global storm, it’s tough to get a long view on policy and what targets will form new commercial culture. Three items drew my attention, not because these answer long term thinking, but because the authors are not swayed in trees.

One is merely a comment on a blog post:

Cyril R.Says:
March 13th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
If this peak oil decline thing is true, then there’s a geological “cap and trade” system underway already. With 100% auctioning, a strong regressive cap, and no easy political way out. Better go for a carbon tax I say. Putting a volatile carbon market on top of volatile energy market is just too big a risk for me. Besides, the abatement cost reduction in the carbon trading system is rather small a benefit compared to a straight carbon tax.

Another takes a necessary longer view of poor strategy, that markets are not mystical, and points again to institutional raiders as a true mark of our era:

Banking Industry Sick Since At Least the S&L Crisis

And it seems Obama is fixing food safety too:

I’ve often said that I don’t believe government has the answer to every problem or that it can do all things for all people. We are a nation built on the strength of individual initiative. But there are certain things that we can’t do on our own. There are certain things only a government can do. And one of those things is ensuring that the foods we eat, and the medicines we take, are safe and don’t cause us harm.

But in recent years, we’ve seen a number of problems with the food making its way to our kitchen tables. In 2006, it was contaminated spinach. In 2008, it was salmonella in peppers and possibly tomatoes. And just this year, bad peanut products led to hundreds of illnesses and cost nine people their lives – a painful reminder of how tragic the consequences can be when food producers act irresponsibly and government is unable to do its job. Worse, these incidents reflect a troubling trend that’s seen the average number of outbreaks from contaminated produce and other foods grow to nearly 350 a year – up from 100 a year in the early 1990s.

Part of the reason is that many of the laws and regulations governing food safety in America have not been updated since they were written in the time of Teddy Roosevelt.

It’s also because our system of inspection and enforcement is spread out so widely among so many people that it’s difficult for different parts of our government to share information, work together, and solve problems.

And it’s also because the FDA has been underfunded and understaffed in recent years, leaving the agency with the resources to inspect just 7,000 of our 150,000 food processing plants and warehouses each year. That means roughly 95% of them go uninspected. That is a hazard to public health.

Does our Congress really want to solve problems?

There was a key block of legislators in the mid-1960s who really wanted to dramatically advance social justice in the United States. They wanted black kids and white kids to attend the same schools, and they wanted the schools to be better. They wanted equal voting rights and equal rights to public accommodations and a guarantee of health security for the poor and the elderly. They though it was obscene for extreme poverty to flourish in the wealthiest country on earth. Lyndon Johnson’s leadership was important to making that happen as was, obviously, the role of social movement leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. But LBJ and MLK didn’t bewitch the congress into having those priorities. A critical mass of key members really wanted to solve these problems.

Today’s stasis and decline is no great mystery.

Dana Blankenhorn, “and I say this as someone who has been part of the financial press for 30 years”:

The difference between what Bernie Madoff did and what Hank Paulson did at Goldman Sachs, what John Thain did at Merrill Lynch or what Jamie Dimon did at J.P. Morgan is that Madoff was more cost-efficient. Madoff just pretended to invest for his Ponzi scheme. Paulson and Thain and Dimon used the government to pretend their scheme was real.

All while CNBC cheered them on.

We need to stop identifying with the crooks and concentrate on bringing them to justice.

Recent history may too easily be forgotten. Do you remember Sarah Palin’s incessant stumping about the Bridge to Nowhere, “thanks, but no thanks”, no more earmarks?

Again Alaska is number one in earmarks. Alaska’s Republicans, Palin, Murkowski and Young, lead all other states in extracting off-sheet money.

An example is a million dollar airstrip to an island of 800, the Airport to Nowhere.

PurposiveDrift exploring:

Now there is nothing wrong with administrators and administration, indeed they play an important part in maintaining the stability of organisations. The problem comes when what they do is confused with management…

There’s a public infrastructure we don’t see, and that’s the channels dredged under ships coming to port.

While offering dredges for sale to the Philippines, I remember a story of Ferdinand Marco’s brother, perhaps only a story, while in charge of Manila’s port dredging. If he liked a company, dredges were regularly sent out to move silt and assure a port of call. If a company didn’t ‘meet his terms’, an underwater mountain was raised near their slips and no ship could pass. It was said that Manila’s hydrographic survey moved on a whim and a bank deposit. Ingenious?

765 blog is looking at a new project on an old claw of land in Baltimore. It has all the issues.

Erosion is constantly filling the harbor and the bay. For centuries, dredging has been the invisible accompaniment of transport and logistics. More and more things need to be moved, ships get bigger, channels get deeper, and spoils from dredge are used to build new land and new terminals for larger vessels, which then create even more turbulent churn. Shipping, development, erosion, wakes, and dredging are then caught in a feedback loop, each link in the circle generating more of the next.

Dredging and Port Construction is a large industry.

Ships require deep channels that fill with silt only to require removal. It’s a permanent task. Hundreds of millions of tons of material must be removed. Today’s port dredges are huge machines that travel from contract to contract or berth nearby larger ports. Great volumes of silt are generated, including millions of tons of toxic plumes.

Billions of tons of sand and soils move along our coasts too. Tides push soils and sand in and out of coastlines and up and down rivers. Sand is migrating roughly parallel to the shore and deposited by ocean currents. As materials migrate, we build perpendicular jetty and groin while dredges pump material back toward shore.

Charlie Petit at KnightSci:

President Obama said yesterday that NASA suffers a “sense of drift” and needs to get a clear mission.

One can only conclude that the mission it has had the last several years – rather glorious from some angles, a pipe dream from others – to get people back on the Moon and prepare to send members of our species to Mars does not do the trick. See Orlando Sentinel