perfidy

Found in my daily mail from The SimplyHeadlines Experiment:

Mich. man in wheelchair takes wild ride

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. - A 21-year-old man got the ride of a lifetime when his electric wheelchair became lodged in the grille of a semitrailer and was pushed down a highway for several miles at about 50 mph.

I hope he had a change of diaper with him.

Cops raid wrong place, kick man in groin

ANNAPOLIS, Md. - Annapolis police raided the wrong apartment Wednesday night, using flash grenades and kicking a resident in the groin before they realized their mistake, police and the family said.

As everyone knows, a kick in the groin is guaranteed comedy gold, as long as it's someone else's groin.

Calif. man charged with killing Wee Wee

Uh...

Never mind.

As Chtulu is my witness, the heading above is copied straight from the SimplyHeadlines email. Apparently, Yahoo or AP subsequently changed it to read "Man charged with shooting pet goose". Which, honestly, doesn't even qualify as funny enough to excerpt, let alone make fun of, so if you want to read anything about that story, you'll have to just click the link above.

Via CNN: Congressman indicted in global corruption case

Story Highlights

• William Jefferson faces 16 charges of bribery, obstruction, racketeering
• Louisiana Democrat's schemes reached across Atlantic, prosecutors say
• Investigators found $90,000 in Jefferson's home freezer
• Search of Capitol Hill office prompted constitutional questions

I hope that the long time between the refrigerator raid and the indictment helped the Feds guarantee this smug, smarmy, thieving fuck does hard time for the rest of his life.

What do these two suits have in common?

"Couple sue Wal-Mart over slip in vomit" 
(AP/Nashville Tennessean)

and 

"ACLU: Boeing offshoot helped CIA" 
(AP/Houston Chronicle) Simple:

• They each have a distinct odor associated with them
• They're both based on slippery circumstances
• They're both as baseless as the day is long

Only one of them, however, appears to have been categorized by the Associated Press as an "Odd Story". So let's look at that one first:

Couple sue Wal-Mart over slip in vomit DAVENPORT, Iowa (AP) -- A woman's fall in a puddle of vomit has resulted in a lawsuit against Wal-Mart. June Medema, slipped in the vomit at a Davenport Wal-Mart on June 13, 2005, according to the lawsuit, filed by Medema and her husband, James, in Scott County District Court earlier this month.

Medema claims that she was seriously injured in the fall.

The lawsuit alleges that Wal-Mart's negligence led to Medema's fall, but it does not specifically say how the store was negligent.

John Simley, a Wal-Mart spokesman, decline comment saying he hadn't seen the lawsuit.

The lawsuit claims that Medema suffered serious neck and upper back injuries in the fall and has undergone several surgeries and is unable to work.

It's a mercifully short story, so it's included here in its entirety. All you need to know is in that third paragraph - "...but it does not specifically say how the store was negligent." In order to prove negligence, of course, the Medemas will have to prove that Wal-Mart knew the vomit was puddled on the floor. Which will be rather difficult - if they didn't see it, why should Wal-Mart have done so?

As to the second story, I can completely understand the ACLU going after a Boeing subsidiary - They can't sue the US government or the CIA on a classified matter, so they simply picked someone else in the transaction chain to sue.

NEW YORK — A Boeing Co. subsidiary that may have provided secret CIA flight services was sued Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of three terrorism suspects who claim they were tortured by the U.S. government. The lawsuit charges that flight services provided by Jeppesen Dataplan Inc. enabled the clandestine transportation of the suspects to secret overseas locations, where they were tortured and subjected to other "forms of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment."

The ACLU, of course, has been known to provide valuable legal services. They've also been known to tilt at windmills in pursuit of an agenda that tends to be decidedly leftist. Not "liberal" - leftist. As I said, I can understand their grasping at straws to find someone to sue, because money-grubbers have to go where the money is, even if they expect to get no money out of the matter.

I just can't understand why they think their suit will survive a summary judgment request. Jeppesen Dataplan didn't man the flight, didn't own the plane, and didn't load or unload alleged passengers from the alleged extraordinary alleged rendition alleged mission. Jeppesen provides flight planning services. Logistics.

Undaunted by this bit of reality, the ACLU soldiers on:

The ACLU said the company "either knew or reasonably should have known" that they were facilitating the torture of terrorism suspects by providing flight services for the CIA.

That's one of the ten most absurd things I've read in the last 48 hours. Having been on flights which used the services of flight planning companies like Jeppesen, and having occasionally been with the pilot when he was planning the flight, I'm comfortable asserting that in no case did a flight services vendor demand to know, let alone show even the slightest interest in, what the purpose of the flight was. Which is just as well - it would have been none of their business, and they'd have been told as much.

It occurs to me that there are two other things these two suits have in common - they're both weakly disguised fundraising attempts, and neither one will be successful at anything other than garnering publicity for its plaintiff.

Also posted at issuesblog.com

Period Suppression Pill OK'd

The FDA approved Lyrel, a birth control pill that stops the monthly menstrual cycle altogether. What do you think?

Or not, as it turns out.

[wik] My mother would have totally missed the humor in that last lady's comment.

Who knew that trail mix was cheaper than corn? Not me, at least not until this morning's WSJ article entitled "With Corn Prices Rising, Pigs Switch To Fatty Snacks".

GARLAND, N.C. -- When Alfred Smith's hogs eat trail mix, they usually shun the Brazil nuts.

"Pigs can be picky eaters," Mr. Smith says, scooping a handful of banana chips, yogurt-covered raisins, dried papaya and cashews from one of the 12 one-ton boxes in his shed. Generally, he says, "they like the sweet stuff."

Mr. Smith is just happy his pigs aren't eating him out of house and home. Growing demand for corn-based ethanol, a biofuel that has surged in popularity over the past year, has pushed up the price of corn, Mr. Smith's main feed, to near-record levels.

...

Mr. Smith says he's paying about $63 to feed a single pig for five or six months before it goes to market -- up 13% from last year. His costs would be even higher if he didn't augment his feed with trail mix, which he says helps him save on average about $8 a ton on feed.

(ellipsis mine)

The presumption that corn-based ethanol was somehow going to be a great net-positive for the US economy has always been based on the thinnest of pretense, put forward by the farm lobby in the US. As covered in an earlier post here (regarding Michael Bloomberg's energy plan), corn is just about the stupidest way to make ethanol, perhaps second only to making ethanol out of oil itself, if such a thing is even possible.

And even if it were technically wise to do so, the mad rush to corn-based ethanol, driven by government mandates and subsidies that help nobody but the farm lobby, was always going to affect the supply/demand curve for corn.

Better late than never, there appears to be a sudden realization of the problem, if recent press mentions count for anything:

• LA Times (via Truth About Trade) -
     Why ethanol backfires
• Food USA -
     Expanding US ethanol market provokes food price surge
• From the investing world, Seeking Alpha -
     Taking Stock in Ethanol: Risks, Challenges and Opportunities
• Pork Magazine (really) -
     Ethanol Industry Needs to Look Beyond Corn
• Rochester (NY) Democrat and Chronicle -
     U.S. should buy cane-based ethanol from Brazil
• Spero News -
     Expert says Brazil could meet world's gas needs

The items above are cherry-picked from among many, many other such recent stories. The last two are of a genre that puts the lie to the entire boondoggle being foisted onto the American consumer, particularly given that cane-based ethanol actually generates far more energy than it takes to produce, unlike corn-based ethanol. Cane-based suffers, however, from the choke-hold the farm lobby continues to wield on the American legislative windpipe.

Much the same as, say, in the waste industry, where at a high enough price for landfill space, people are willing to recycle, prices for oil in the energy market can cause people to willingly overpay for alternatives. But when the costs of the alternatives, direct and indirect, become high enough, as they appear to be doing in the ethanol market, consumers are certain to rethink that entire "energy independence" thing.

Corn based ethanol is "ethanol done wrong". Add to that the fact that it's "ethanol done expensive", and you can just wait for the increased backlash, attempting to drown out the farm lobby. The question, of course, is whether our legislative overlords will be allowed to listen and undo the damage they've done over the past twenty years on this front.

A final tidbit from the WSJ piece:

Dwight Hess, a cattle feedlot operator in Marietta, Pa., is located in the heart of snack country, near Hershey and Herr Foods Inc., a maker of potato chips, pretzels and snack mixes. His cattle ration consists of about 17% "candy meal," a blend of chocolate bars and large chunks of chocolate; 3% of what he calls "party mix," a blend of popcorn, pretzels, potato chips and cheese curls; 8% corn gluten; and the remainder corn and barley he grows. He says the byproducts save him about 10% on feed costs. Still, it costs him about 65 cents to put a pound on a steer, up from 42 cents last year.

Near the Snake River in Idaho, Cevin Jones of Intermountain Beef is struggling to feed his 12,000 cattle in light of higher feed costs. Traditionally, he has used up to 30% corn or other grains in his feed mix. This year he's using 100% byproducts, including french fries, Tater Tots and potato peels.

"It's kind of funny," Mr. Jones says, "every once in a while, you can spot a couple of cattle fighting over a whole potato."

I suppose that soon, my family too will be able to eat junk food more cheaply than grains. I'm not looking forward to that, and I have something like 2% of the US population (plus 80% of the legislature) to thank for the sad fact.

See also - "Corn Too Expensive? Turn Pigs into Ethanol"

Also posted at issuesblog.com

(apropos previous story, below)

Democrats seek "no confidence" vote on Gonzales

As previously covered here, I don't see the firing of the US Attorneys, itself, as an affair worthy of even 10% of the coverage it's received over the past several months.

That said, the fact that the Senate is working to craft and pass a "no confidence vote" on Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' tenure in his present office strikes me as far less silly than does the World Bank's dogged (and successful) pursuit of Paul Wolfowitz.

The initial response to the Democrats' concern over the firing of political appointees for (gasp!) political reasons was completely mishandled. Obfuscation, bluster, and confusion were the order of the day. None of this was required, and instead the response should have been to tell the Democrats to get stuffed, as it is the president's prerogative to fire any of his appointees, without regard for the sensitivities of Democrats looking to make political hay out of thin air.

However, once the AG's office acted as though they needed to explain the events, bordering on covering up the facts, it seemed clear that the AG wasn't qualified to handle his office. Subsequent events haven't been kind to his position, because each has seemed to provide yet another opportunity for him to demonstrate his cackhandedness in office.

Among those subsequent events, the May 14 resignation of Paul McNulty, Deputy AG, and the testimony on Tuesday, May 15, of James Comey, describing the attempts by Andy Card and Alberto Gonzales to get John Ashcroft, then in intensive care, to approve of an administration spying proposal.

Using only NPR as a signpost, have a look at the recent progression of this story:

• May 10, 2007 Despite Furor, Gonzales Likely to Stick Around
• May 11, 2007 Gonzales Gets Gentler Reception in House Visit
• May 14, 2007 Deputy U.S. Attorney General McNulty Resigns
• May 15, 2007 Gonzales: McNulty Played 'Central' Role in Firings

Gonzales himself has recently opined that it looked like he'd weathered the storm, even while, in a complete reversal of form for anyone in the Bush administration, he took responsibility for the firings, sort of, -ish.

I continue to believe that nothing wrong was done in the termination of the US Attorneys. Far more important, though, is the focus on how the aftermath-that-shouldn't-have-been was handled, and Gonzales has repeatedly shown himself to be a tone deaf stumbler during his defense.

Such a set of skills seems ill-suited to the highest levels of the Justice Department, and the Democrats (plus either 6 or 11 Republicans, depending on how you count, so far) seem likely to get their vote of no confidence passed, symbolic as it might be. Better still to hope for Gonzales' resignation as a result, though, as a friend pointed out to me yesterday, how hard might it be to get confirmation for a replacement?

[wik] For the record, all the ninnies calling for a wave of impeachments should also get stuffed. Focus on the problem at hand, rather than the problems you want to be at hand, sez me.

[alsø wik] Specter indicates that the pressure may be working. For once, I hope Specter is right. He hasn't been worth much since he created the Wall of Sound, and isn't even competent to hire a decent combination of chauffeur/murder trial witness.

...don't underestimate their ability to get it. Late last week, Paul Wolfowitz announced his resignation from the presidency of the World Bank. Having sensed the inevitability of the outcome, his Thursday started with an offer to resign on his own terms. From that morning's Financial Times, in a story entitled "Wolfowitz discusses terms of resignation":

Paul Wolfowitz yesterday began negotiating terms that could lead to his resignation as president of the World Bank. Last night the Bank board said the discussions had been adjourned and would continue today.
...
His lawyer, Robert Bennett, insisted he would not leave "under a cloud" and would rather risk the prospect of a vote on the board to dismiss him.

Given his repeated insistence, apparently supported by the facts if not by the rhetoric of his (many) enemies within the institution, that he'd done nothing wrong, neither his defense of his position nor his desire, after the defense has failed, to leave on his own terms can come as a huge surprise.

A quick summary of the case, from WSJ's OpinionJournal:

• Wolfowitz's girlfriend, Shaha Riza, was a staffer at the World Bank before he became president in 2006
• At the time he became president, he was directed by the bank's ethics committee to find a new job for her, even though he asked to recuse himself from the task.
  

  The committee suggested an "in situ promotion" to the next paygrade or an "ad hoc salary increase" as part of a "settlement of claims." The offer was intended to be generous, given that Ms. Riza--who already had been shortlisted for promotion--was being forced out of the bank, possibly for good, for a conflict she did not create and to a job she had not sought.

• She got an assignment at the State Department, with a significant increase in pay
• All hell has now broken loose, because he played a role in setting her new salary

Ms. Riza was eventually given an external assignment at the State Department with a salary (paid by the bank) of $193,000, up from the $133,000 she had previously made at the bank. To Mr. Wolfowitz's critics, this was improper and excessive, especially given that Condoleezza Rice makes about $10,000 less.

For other background, see:

• "World Bank Scholar"
• "The Real World Bank Scandal"
• "The Wolfowitz Files - Anatomy of a World Bank Smear"
• "A Tale of Two Scandals"
• "World Bank Jobbery - More evidence the Wolfowitz accusers chose to ignore"

If one chose to ignore all the facts, the affair would seem very sinister, to be certain. But of course, it's not at all. A reasonable person could look at the chain of events and come to the conclusion that Wolfowitz bent over backward to avoid both the fact and the appearance of impropriety. The near-50% increase in Ms. Riza's salary looks odd, but the fact that it's more than Dr. Rice makes is a red herring. In any event,

...this is highly selective outrage given normal procedure at the bank.

Of its roughly 10,000 employees, no fewer than 1,396 have salaries higher than the U.S. Secretary of State; clearly "fighting poverty" does not mean taking a vow of poverty at "multilateral" institutions. At the time of Ms. Riza's departure from the bank, she was a Grade "G" (senior professional) employee; the typical salary in that grade hovers around the $124,000 mark. For the next level, Grade "H"--the level to which Ms. Riza was due to be promoted--salaries average in the $170,000 range, with an upper band of $232,360. No fewer than 17% of bank employees are in this happy bracket.

So, no, it's not sinister in the least.

Sinister or not, Wolfowitz has now chosen to give up the ghost. As reported in Friday's WSJ, "Wolfowitz Quits World Bank as U.S. Relents". The mythical "reasonable person" could conclude he was railroaded. (For the record, the corrolary of the previous statement is not "Anyone who thinks he wasn't railroaded is unreasonable").

Unable to overcome charges of ethical misconduct, Paul Wolfowitz resigned as World Bank president yesterday within hours of getting a final White House signal that he should abandon a fierce battle save to his job.

So, why all the feigned outrage, and why the blatant politics involved in the ouster of Wolfowitz? At least four things, according to reports.

• Most often reported is the Bank's constitutional aversion to ensuring that it's not flushing money down various ratholes. The signature of Wolfowitz's administration at the Bank has been his anti-corruption drive. Doing so, of course, makes the jobs of the Bank's staff more difficult, and it subjects them to standards they're not used to, and unwilling to abide.
  

  Some of Mr. Wolfowitz's accusers--notably, former general counsel Roberto Danino--are angry precisely because he upset their lifetime sinecure by demanding higher performance.

  So there's that.

• Also at issue is the discomfiture of the staffers from the other countries which comprise the Bank's shareholders (of which the US is the largest) at the fact the US has named the last ten presidents of the Bank. Like many of the world's international institutions, smaller countries get chapped at the continually recognition of the US present role at the head of the table, in terms of financial heft. In addition to their successful hounding of Wolfowitz from office, the rumbles for non-American leadership at the bank are flowing, as advocated at Reuters, pseudo-reported at the Globe and Mail, and surely made part of the palaver elsewhere.
• Furthermore, there are those who trace the beginnings of this end to Wolfowitz's involvement elsewhere, to matters utterly unrelated to his actions at the World Bank. An example can be found in the Telegraph story entitled "Downfall precipitated by Iraq war"
• And of course, the generalized "Bush Explanation", from the Globe and Mail, prior to the resignation:
  

  The scandal that is likely to cost Mr. Wolfowitz his job was narrowly about favouritism toward Ms. Riza. More broadly, however, the showdown at the World Bank became a metaphor for Mr. Bush's troubled relations with the rest of the world -- and particularly Europe -- over Iraq, the broader Middle East, global warming and trade.

Oddly, without giving any of them any credence for operational worthiness, each of those four rationale for his ouster seems far more solid than the one by which he was finally forced to fall on his sword.

Whatever the actual reasoning of those wanting a head on a pike, resourceful enemies in politics, just like activists in the business world or, for that matter, a group of sixth grade girls, can find a way to introduce chum into the water. And if they're able to fool enough of the people enough of the time, they'll get their man.

Possible successors, according to the New York Times?

Speculation about Mr. Wolfowitz’s successor ranged from Paul A. Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, to Mr. Blair and Stanley Fischer, the finance minister of Israel and a former top official at the International Monetary Fund. Also mentioned have been various prominent figures on Wall Street, including Douglas A. Warner III, a former chairman of J.P. Morgan Chase and chairman of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

In addition, speculation has centered on two officials close to Mr. Bush: Deputy Treasury Secretary Robert M. Kimmitt and Robert B. Zoellick, a former deputy secretary of state.

There are some worthies in there, but I'd prefer Fischer be removed from the list, as he's no longer American (relinquished citizenship and took Israeli residency) and I see no problem with continued American stewardship of the Bank.

My favorite two choices, not on the list? John Bolton, or failing that, Dick Cheney. Because sometimes, the best response to a defeat such as the US (no, not Bush, and not Wolfowitz - the US) has had jammed down its throat by the bureaucrats at the World Bank (or the other international institutions whose design allows the pretense that each crappy little country has just as much to add as all others) is the same thing, only more so.

Addendum - Worth reading, the after-action op-ed at OpinionJournal.

Dept. Of Evil: 'All Of You Must Die'

WASHINGTON, DC-The department warned that all necks would feel the steely bite of its soul-thirsty axe as soon as funding is approved.

Bad things can happen when you treat "An Inconvenient Truth" as an authoritative documentary.

And no, of course the link has nothing to do with Algore's movie.

I hope this doesn't become commonplace, because it's already been done, to a tee, by Johnny Knoxville.

I'll just ask the question: When you see a story like this one:

Deadly insurance fraud case nears trial

By TOM HAYS, Associated Press Writer Mon May 7, 2:24 PM ET

NEW YORK - When Basdeo Somaipersaud's body was found in his favorite park in 1998, his family assumed he cracked his head during one of his drinking binges. But an autopsy detected small puncture wounds on his torso, and a sedative sometimes used to treat schizophrenia in his system.

Authorities now say Somaipersaud was injected with lethal doses of the sedative chlorpormazine while he was in a defenseless, drunken stupor — and then his killers tried to cash in on his life insurance policy.

...(blah, blah, blah - not to steal the fun out of the story, turns out the insurance guy named James who wrote the policies was likely the guy who set up the murder. Condolences to the family, murder diminishes us all, and so on and so forth - none of that's my point, because, really, my reaction would have been the same if the story had been written about puppies, or hemorrhoids, or any number of other things)

...and the picture next to the story is this one:

...am I the only one whose mind immediately goes to a skit from Dave Chappelle's show, the one with the punchline:

I'm Rick James, bitch!

? Never mind, it's probably just me. But at least I can drag that AP story to the trash now.

Allegedly taken from patrol car video recordings.

• "You know, stop lights don't come any redder than the one you just went through."
• "Relax, the handcuffs are tight because they're new, they'll stretch after you wear them a while."
• "If you take your hands off the car, I'll make your birth certificate a worthless document."
• "If you run, you'll only go to jail tired."
• "Can you run faster than 1200 feet per second? Because that's the speed of the bullet that'll be chasing you."
• "You don't know how fast you were going? I guess that means I can write anything I want to on the ticket, huh?"
• "Yes, sir, you can talk to the shift supervisor, but I don't think it will help. Oh, did I mention that I'm the shift supervisor?"
• "Warning! You want a warning? O.K., I'm warning you not to do that again or I'll give you another ticket."
• "The answer to this last question will determine whether you are drunk or not. Was Mickey Mouse a cat or a dog?"
• "Fair? You want me to be fair? Listen, fair is a place where you go to ride on rides, eat cotton candy and corn dogs and step in monkey poo."
• "Yeah, we have a quota. Two more tickets and my wife gets a toaster oven."
• "In God we trust, all others we run through NCIC."
• "How big were those 'Just two beers' you say you had?"
• "No sir, we don't have quotas anymore. We used to, but now we're allowed to write as many tickets as we can."
• "I'm glad to hear that Chief (of Police) Hawker is a personal friend of yours. So you know someone who can post your bail."

AND THE WINNER IS....

• "You didn't think we give pretty women tickets? You're right, we don't. Sign here."

via Kenny, my Melbourne, FL correspondent

Reuters has a story today, "North Korean general cracks George W. Bush joke".

SEOUL (Reuters) - In North Korea, where cracking a joke about the country's leader could see you, well, die laughing, poking fun at the U.S. president is obviously not as serious.

As military chiefs from both sides of the Korean peninsula met on Tuesday for talks, a general from the North started proceedings by telling a joke at George W. Bush's expense.

The South Korean generals appeared befuddled as to what to make of the humour...

Why the reticence to laugh, I don't know. It can't be because of a language barrier, right? The lack of laughter shouldn't be due to the DPRK being, basically, a totally screwed up wasteland, even though that's precisely what it is. The fact that the same joke couldn't be made about the Human Chia Pet in Platform Shoes is moot, really - it's got nothing to do with the story, notwithstanding Reuters' lead in.

And, if you ask me, it shouldn't be due to the joke not being funny, because, while not yucktastic, it mildly humorous, not at all offensive, and doesn't seem wildly far from the truth:

"I recently read a piece of political humour on the Internet called 'saving the president'," Lieutenant-General Kim Yong-chol was quoted as saying in pool reports from the talks.

He then retold the old yarn about Bush who goes out jogging one morning and, preoccupied with international affairs, fails to notice that a car is heading straight at him.

A group of schoolchildren pull the president away just in time, saving his life, and a grateful Bush offers them anything they want in the world as a reward.

"We want a place reserved for us at Arlington Memorial Cemetery," say the children.

"Why is that?" he asks.

"Because our parents will kill us if they find out what we've done."

OK, admittedly, it's a bit poorly constructed and it's derivative of other jokes I've heard, but so are most jokes, at my age. Apparently, both Reuters and the SoKo generals thought it was a bigger deal than it really was.

Today's WSJ (subscription for fulltext), in the Business Technology section, juxtaposes two pieces on the hypergrowth of digital information, discussing its reasons, its effects, and some responses to the growth.

The first piece is a straightforward and informative mini-whitepaper, entitled "Cutting Files Down to Size". It mentions the efforts of Chevron and Credit Suisse to control their information, primarily through implementation of new tools, new methods, and new employee work habits. There's something about an information base that's presently 1.2 petabytes in size, potentially growing by 57% per year, that can focus the minds of management. Add to that the million email messages per day that the 59,000 employee Chevron claims to process, and you're talking some serious data. So much data, perhaps, that's it's not even possible to glean the information from it. A veritable flood.

The primary solutions discussed are conceptually simple:

• Get people to pay attention to the amount by which they're increasing the deluge
• Put systems in place to eliminate redundancy, such as using Microsoft's well-reviewed SharePoint server, ensuring that even the worst PowerPoint slide decks are only stored once
• Admitting, and getting data creators to admit, that not all information is equally valuable

All excellent steps, though both expensive and difficult to implement. Totally aside from the grotesque knock-on effects of continually increasing technology infrastructure to store all new information, the real benefit from such efforts is to remove potential sources of background noise; the unimportant, the duplicative, and the no-longer-operative. "Data" is both easy and not intrinsically valuable - it's "information" that's both difficult and valuable, and too much data can obscure the information. Best of luck to the contestants in slaying their particular dragons.

The companion piece, on the same page, in Lee Gomes' "Talking Tech" column was the more intriguing of the two. Entitled "Computers Should Be Taught To Let Certain Memories Go", it contained an interview with Harvard KSG professor Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger, and was among the more thought-provoking pieces in the entire day's paper.

Mr. Mayer-Schoenberger's thesis is this:

Human beings ... weren't designed to remember everything we ever learned, and sometimes are better off when we forget. Computers, he adds, should as a result be taught to let some memories go.
...
We are biologically hard-wired to selectively remember. But in moving into a digital age, we are now surrounding ourselves with tools that have inversed (sic) that.
...
How does this make life different?

In the predigital age, we might have called someone who knew a person we were interested in learning about, got them to tell us about the person. And we would get a quick picture -- but not a complete and comprehensive picture of each and every piece of communication or behavior that the person did over the past 20 years. I think we have lost something by moving from that sort of short encapsulation toward a complete picture that provides us with all the details, the sort that over time, we as a society, and as human beings, tend to forget.

But what's the problem with that?

Things that happened 10 or 15 years ago might have happened to a different person. Therefore, we should put less weight on what we did 15 years ago than we would do now. In the past, our brains did this automatically for us by forgetting it. But we haven't been able to develop another evolutionary method, another method by which we can weigh things that happened further in the past differently from those that happened more recently.

(ellipses mine)

Interesting theory, and one that makes some rational sense. I can't speak for anyone but myself on the subject, but I'm surely not the same person today as I was 15 years ago, and would want any judgment of me weighted more on the current me than the one from decades ago.

The (mild) shocker in the piece, however, was this, his prescription for a solution:

My proposal is that we have a law that mandates that software coders build into software a better ability for people to let their digital tools forget, if they so wish. Right now, both Windows as well as Mac OS have a huge amount of meta data that they keep track of for each file that we use: "Date Created," "Owner," and so on. So I suggest that we add another type of meta data: "Expiration Date."

Conceptually, he has a point - that would be at least a potential solution to the problem he's laid out. Why the rush to what I can guarantee would be massively ineffectual legal efforts, I wondered? For starters, I presumed it's because he's an associate professor with Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, whose faculty, perhaps by definition, thinks more abstractly and less rationally than, say, Harvard Business School's must. Then I visited his faculty page at KSG:

...He advises businesses, governments, and international organizations on regulatory and policy issues. He holds a bunch of law degrees, including one from Harvard, and an MS (Econ) from the London School of Economics.

That explains it. Ignoring any questions about how many law degrees one can effectively use, the "bunch" he holds appear to have been enough to outweigh any pragmatism learnt at LSE.

(also posted at issuesblog.com)

Certainly not the tenants of this fine abode:

For 20p/night, this too can be yours. (via Z, my Beirut correspondent)

...that Barack Obama was correct when he singled out the most important problem that we, the people of the United States of America, need to deal with:

"The biggest enemy I think we have in this whole process (and why I'm so glad to see a lot of young people here, young in spirit if not young in age)--the reason I think i'ts [sic] so important, is because one of the enemies we have to fight--it's not just terrorists, it's not just Hezbollah, it's not just Hamas--it's also cynicism," Barack Obama told a reception after the AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee] policy conference last night.

Mr. Obama, I'd like to introduce you, via the May 2, 2007 Star-Ledger, to former NJ Governor Jim McGreevey:

Former Gov. James E. McGreevey has started the process to become a priest in his newly adopted Episcopal faith and has been accepted into a three-year seminary program starting this fall.

[wik] As an added bonus, one of the very few commenters on that story who actually seemed to be supportive of McGreevey (or McCreepy, as he was referred to a time or two) was able to inject into the conversation some of that delicious truthiness we all crave:

Reader11722 says...

McGreevey has a right to become whatever he wants. We should not censor his free expressions. After all, censorship is becoming America's favorite past-time. The US gov't (and their corporate friends), already detain protesters, ban books like "America Deceived" from Amazon and Wikipedia, shut down Imus and fire 21-year tenured, BYU physics professor Steven Jones because he proved explosives, thermite in particular, took down the WTC buildings. Free Speech forever (even for McGreevey). Last link (before Google Books caves to pressure and drops the title):

America Deceived (book)

Posted on 05/02/07 at 2:22PM

Of course, we live in a fascist dictatorship, which is why "Reader11722" was immediately collected and shipped off to a re-education facility. Free speech forever, indeed! Even for, nay, especially for, utter dipshits.

It seems that Hugo Chávez could take a lesson on the definition of insanity from Ben Franklin. In his defense, it's not that Chávez is repeatedly trying something that's previously failed for him, just something that's failed every other time a state actor has attempted to put it into place. Perhaps it's just insanity by proxy, then.

Of course, I'm talking about his aggressive advancement of the long-vaunted "Bolivarian Revolution". From the Mother Jones article linked left:

To his increasingly frustrated political opponents in Venezuela, Chavez, a former army colonel, is a leftist demagogue who stirred up a wave of class and racial resentments and rode it to the presidency, and who, in office, has dealt himself new powers at every chance, on his way to becoming an out-and-out caudillo. And to a certain school of international opinion, exemplified by The Economist magazine, Chavez is an wacky utopian who sooner or later will run the Venezuelan economy into the ground.

That introductory paragraph leads into an October 2005 interview with Richard Gott, a former correspondent for the London Guardian who seems knowledgeable and sympathetic to the fiery populism that sometimes seems the prime illuminating factor for Latin American progressive governments. The interview was done in support of his then-updated book, "Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution":

...the first account in English to place Chavez in historical and intellectual perspective. In Gott’s sympathetic account, Chavez is a magnetic personality of the Clintonian type, “a genuinely original figure in Latin America,” a radical left-wing nationalist, to be sure, but a pragmatic improviser, and certainly no dogmatic socialist.

Among his statements during the interview, you'd find:

Okay, it's true that Chavez, for the first time this year, has used the word "socialism"—he talks about a "21st Century Socialism"—but he's given absolutely no indication that he wants to emulate Soviet socialism, Cuban socialism, or indeed the sort of state capitalism that existed in Europe for much of the late 20th century. {...} I think he [Chávez] still recognizes the significance of the ideas of Bolivar. He's more interested in culture than in economics. All leftist revolutions in the past have been based on an economic restructuring of society.

Whoops. Looks like Mr. Gott spoke too soon. Because the wacky utopian, contrary to Gott's expectations, seems to have moved even farther left, embracing something that looks a lot like Soviet/Cuban socialism, and has recently chosen to dispense with even the veneer of normal government. 

Last week, as reported in the WSJ, he took steps to nationalize the remaining bits of the Venezuelan oil industry that were still in private hands, handing control of them to PDVSA, the state oil company.

The flamboyant leader set the worker's holiday as a deadline for the companies involved to transfer the facilities to state firm Petroleos de Venezuela SA, or PDVSA. This past week, five of the six companies agreed to hand over the keys: Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp., BP PLC, Total SA, and Statoil ASA. ConocoPhillips was the only holdout, but in the end will have no choice.

And when they said ConocoPhillips would have no choice, they weren't kidding. From today's Houston Business Journal:

Venezuelan officials vowed to boot ConocoPhillips Inc. out of their country Thursday if the Houston-based oil giant doesn't cooperate in nationalizing its multibillion-dollar assets in the Orinoco reserve.

Of the five companies with major oil investments in Venezuela, ConocoPhillips (NYSE: COP) has been the only one to refuse to sign an agreement ceding financial control to Venezuela as part of President Hugo Chávez's plan to take back his country's largest economic driver.

{...}

Alongside the other companies, ConocoPhillips participated in an operational transfer Tuesday ordered by Chavez, but it's the unsigned agreement that has Venezuelan officials steaming.

Reuters reported that Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez told state television that ConocoPhillips has been knocked to the lowest priority in the negotiations, and went on to say that the OPEC nation would not offer cash concessions or assume debt.

Ramirez also said that if talks break down, Venezuela will assume a 100 percent financial stake.

Conoco has already ceded physical control, mind you; they just haven't signed the agreement Chávez wants indicating that they think it was a great thing to do, and wondering why they hadn't thought of it earlier, on their own, apparently. The end result could be their expulsion from the country, and the loss of 100% of their assets there. The deal breaker, of course, is that entire "no concessions, no assumption of debt" thing. As it should be.

The six private companies whose assets have been expropriated have stated their intention to stay in the market, for the time being. Why? Because they don't want to completely lose their business opportunities and investment in a project that, overall, produces something like 600,000 barrels/day of oil, but perhaps more so because they have no expectation that PDVSA will be able to proceed without their help. From the 4/28/2007 WSJ article in which the nationalizations were originally reported:

PDVSA, saddled by Mr. Chávez's social spending demands, is already struggling to keep production from falling in other parts of the country. If it bungles the operations at the Orinoco, that could be bad news for the oil market.

A rational observer might ask what this all has to do with insanity, even though the autocracy referenced in the title of this post seems clearly explained.

Chávez, notwithstanding Gott's complete misreading of his intentions several years ago, isn't stopping with the oil industry. Having paid off all debts to the World Bank and IMF, he's pulling out of both organizations, citing his feeling that

...the two organisations are implements of US imperialism, with their lending policies perpetuating poverty across the world.

It's a symbolic gesture, then, but symbolic of what? He's chosen the US as his stalking horse, the imperialist yin to his socialist yang, and he needs to use that imaginary relationship as a prop. From the other side of the table, the US ignores him assiduously, not commenting very much on anything he does, partly because Venezuela, while providing 15% of US oil supplies, really doesn't have the capacity to affect the US in any meaningful way. And partly because I'm sure that the US basically ignoring him must drive him crazy.

And, having already nationalized the telecom and electricity industries and threatened the same in the hospital market, he's not stopping with the oil industry asset-thievery, or the withdrawal from the IMF and World Bank and a mandated 20% rise in the minimum wage. Next on the list? The banks and Sidor, a steel company. What's driving all this, one might wonder?

"Privately owned banks must prioritize low-cost financing for Venezuela's industry. If they don't want to do this they can leave, they can give us the banks, we can nationalize them."

and this, about Sidor:

"If the company Sidor ... does not immediately agree to change this process, they will obligate me to nationalize it," Chavez said. "I prefer not to," Chavez added, as he ordered Mining Minister Jose Khan to immediately head over to Sidor's headquarters and come back with a recommendation with 24 hours.

"Sidor has to produce and give priority to our national industries ... and at low cost," he said.

Reminiscent of the old Mafia stereotype, "Nice store you've got here - a shame if something were to, uh happen to it"? Quite a bit. Command economy? Unquestionably. That's been tried before, of course, and has never led to sustainable success. Its aftermath is poverty, and without regard to Venezuela's supposedly massive oil reserves, it will do the same in Venezuela. And it's already started - see the article "Venezuela — Inflation -> Price Controls -> Shortages" at The Liberty Papers, or this Reuters story pegging inflation through April at nearly 20% per annum. Huge inflation in Venezuela's not unprecedented, as seen in a 1989 NYTimes piece pegging inflation that year between 65% and 70%. But the country's exit from the international government lending system seems ill-timed, because they're going to need help eventually, and perhaps sooner rather than later, with the trajectory they're on.

The odd thing about this is that Chávez gives every impression of meaning well for his people, and has been rewarded by ultimately credible, if perhaps a bit inflated, majorities in the last several elections (recall and re-election). Meaning well and doing well are of course two completely separate things, and he also gives every impression of taking his country down a road which from he won't be able to navigate back as it all falls down around his ears.

He's not implementing one of those fuzzy-soft socialist systems commonly found in Europe - this isn't socialism, it's communism. It's got socialism at its core, but add in the enforced state control and the mandated indoctrination, and the only difference between Venezuela and the USSR is the gulags. Well, the gulags and the oil. And the language. But it will fail, and that will happen without overt involvement from what he presumes to be his greatest enemy, the United States. Chávez's actual greatest enemies are economic reality and a willful ignorance of history in pursuit of the utopia he seeks.

Utopia is as unattainable as is perpetual motion, and for similar reasons. Notwithstanding the breathless reporting, low-rent activism, and opinionating in the years since Chávez came to power, history won't be kind to this attempt, either.

(also posted at issuesblog.com)

Subject: Tragedy vs Accident

Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, while visiting a primary school class. They suddenly found themselves in the middle of a discussion related to words and their meanings.

The teacher asked both men if they would like to lead the discussion of The word "tragedy".

So the illustrious Rev Jackson asks the class for an example of a "tragedy".

One little boy stood up and offered: "If my best friend, who lives on a farm, is playing in the field and a runaway tractor comes along and kills him, that would be a tragedy."

No," says the Great Jesse Jackson, "that would be an accident."

A little girl raised her hand: "If a school bus carrying 50 children drove over a cliff, killing everyone inside, that would be a tragedy."

I'm afraid not," explains the exalted Reverend Al. "That's what we would call a great loss." The room goes silent.

No other children would volunteer.

Reverend Al searches the room. "Isn't there someone here who can give me an example of a tragedy?"

Finally at the back of the room little Johnny raises his hand. In a stern voice he says: "If a plane carrying the Reverends Jackson and Sharpton was struck by a missile and blown to smithereens that would be a tragedy."

Fantastic!" exclaims Jackson and Sharpton, "That's right. And can you tell me why that would be a tragedy?"

Well," says little Johnny, "because it sure as hell wouldn't be a great loss, and it probably wouldn't be an accident either.

(h/t Kiwi)

...and once again, I find myself astounded by the institutionalized idiocy of the Transportation Security Administration.

Thanks to Richard Reid, for instance, I still get to experience the silly waste of time inherent in removing my shoes and running them through the scanning equipment. Thanks to the efforts of the 21 alleged terrorists in the UK during the summer of 2006, passenger screening personnel still get to inflict the silly waste of time inherent in depriving passengers of any liquid or gel not contained in a properly sized receptacle, or that receptacle itself not contained in the proper 1-quart see through bag. (See also this item on the Department of Homeland Security's designation of an entire state of matter as a national security risk)

A screener told me yesterday, with no small hint of pride, that, Yes! We still check all passengers' shoes! This, in sleepy little Myrtle Beach, SC, where many, though not most, of the flights are turbo-prop or 57 seat commuter jets with presumably low value as flying projectiles, and even lower value as targets for suicide bombings.

The experience reminded me of the many instances in which Bruce Schneier has had occasion to comment on the misguided nature of our government's reaction to events, including its apparent fetish for adding every new terrorist's trick to the permanent list of reasons for inconveniencing the traveling public, while adding no safety to the equation at all. Zero. I would direct the curious reader to this list of articles on Mr. Schneier's site for a thorough review of all that's wrong with the manner in which our bureaucratic overlords maintain their ridiculous pretense to be adding to our security. He's rightly called it "Security Theater", among other things.

At the time of this writing, the link just above produces a list of 244 such articles. They cover the failures of security, the knee-jerk TSA reactions to events, the useless political correctness and abuses of power inherent in current process, and the arguably unconstitutional restrictions on rights to redress for incorrect blacklisting or commentary about the process as you're having it inflicted on your person. Add to this the gaping productivity hole (estimated at $10 billion/year and up) left by the process, the passengers' costs for security (you didn't think the airlines were absorbing that, of course), and factor in a rational cost/benefit analysis (even under the assumption we wanted to guarantee that no person ever died except from natural causes) and it seems clear that security is not just irksome - it's poorly and stupidly implemented.

Luckily, it's not yet illegal to parody the process while away from airports.

(also posted at issuesblog.com)

I'm taking off tomorrow morning for another in a long series of annual gatherings of a group of my friends, at which much golf will be played and several other forms of hell may well be raised. In preparation for the trip, one of the participants, Rick, sent out a link to this video.

In our group's defense, I'm comfortable asserting that none of us will play anything near as badly as those on the film above. At least not during the first 18 holes of any given day. Oh, and the several incoherent misspellings you see in the video were there when I got it, just in case you were wondering.

Interesting title, from a story in yesterday's WSJ (subscription).

Short answer? "Yes, in some cases, if the company's really, really tiny."

Slightly longer answer? "Are you nuts?"

The article centers around the management practices in place at a company called Ternary Software Inc.

During a recent strategy meeting at Ternary Software Inc., a programmer criticized the chief executive's new incentive plan for employees. An hourlong discussion ensued, in which several participants, including the CEO, critiqued the proposal. Ultimately, all six participants agreed to handle incentives differently.

That part was crucial: Ternary runs itself as a democracy, and every decision must be unanimous. Any of Ternary's 13 other employees could have challenged the incentive decision and forced it to be revisited.

...

The 19-person Exton, Pa., company has a policy-setting team of seven people, including two frontline workers elected by their peers. The team is linked to smaller groups through the company that ultimately give all employees a voice. The team meets to set policy for two hours once or twice a month.

The article's author cites instances of similar management practice, including Honest Tea Inc., of Bethesda, MD and Continuum Inc. from West Newton, MA. She also includes, for comparison, I guess, Google, which

...prides itself on an egalitarian culture that includes weekly updates from executives who field questions from employees.

As though that's somehow applicable.

The article goes on to include quotes from several b-school professors, including this from Ryan Quinn, a management professor at the University of Virginia's Darden School who says:

...these companies typically are willing to sacrifice some short-term profit to pursue innovation or other goals. Mr. Quinn says unorthodox practices can succeed at large and small companies, but says he has never seen a company like Ternary, that strives for unanimous agreement.

Note, he didn't say that this practice can succeed at large and small companies, just that unorthodox practices can. Like, for instance, having everyone wear a funny hat on alternating Fridays. So, overall, his response strikes me almost as a polite way of asking "Are you nuts?"

An additional bit of insight, from Harry Katz, dean of Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations, goes a bit further:

...[he] doubts a system like Ternary's could work on a large scale. In bigger companies, "there's an inevitable conflict of interest between managers and employees," Mr. Katz says.

The article also provides several other instructional views life within Ternary. Two excerpts:

Ternary's path to workplace democracy wasn't painless. The company, founded in 2001, first tried to draft a mission statement by consensus in 2004, when it had grown to more than a dozen employees. The meeting lasted two days and ended as participants too exhausted to continue arguing agreed in principle to run the company as a democracy. An attempt the next year to create a salary system by consensus was no better. But Mr. Robertson persevered, guided by two out-of-print books about a Dutch management technique called "sociocracy" or "dynamic governance." He has dubbed Ternary's system "holacracy" and has begun marketing it as a managing style.

I'll let the dripping irony in that passage speak for itself.

The meeting where the incentive scheme was discussed was typically busy. The team rejected Mr. Robertson's proposal to replace the profit-sharing program with an "ad hoc bonus system" based on performance, formulating a new plan that would keep the profit-sharing program and introduce monthly bonus incentives. The group also assigned the CEO new responsibility for spurring growth, gave the sales manager more authority to negotiate contracts, and decided to bill clients by the day, rather than by the hour.

Technology chief Anthony Moquin, one of the founders of the company, said his gut reaction to the billing change was that it was simplistic. But he accepted it, saying, "We can try it and see how it works."

That's a common refrain at Ternary. Managers don't look for an ideal solution, merely a workable plan that looks like progress. Employees who don't like the results can seek a seat at the next strategy meeting or ask a member of the policy group to revisit the issue.

(emphasis mine)

Funny when you read it that way, it sounds like it should be a whole lot less interesting to the owners or managers of a company. In effect, it eliminates the value of any management role, including that of the CEO:

"It takes getting beyond your ego," says Mr. Robertson, who, as one of the founders of the company, has the CEO title but little typical CEO authority.

And it brings into question why you'd even have the title, let alone give it to someone.

The story goes on to explain how the company has benefited, in tough times, from having the flexibility to get all employees to agreement on issues like pay cuts. Quite uplifting, if you're exceptionally light and aren't running a for-profit business.

Left unsaid, in the story itself or the comments from the professors, a couple of things.

• Ternary isn't Google, and whatever else you might say of Google, you won't say they're managerially incompetent or have created a company incapable of growth.
• Not only does the typical company have conflicts of interest between managers and employees, the typical company, particularly one larger than 19 employees, has conflicts between employees and employees, as well as between managers and managers.
• It might be horrible to contemplate, and even more horrible to enunciate, but not all employees have as much to add to any given decision-making process as the others.
• In any event, the dynamics of watering down decisions by making sure they're universally approved results in watery decisions, catering to the lowest and loudest common denominator.

No offence to managers, employees, or Ternary Software, Inc. itself, but I'll be anxiously awaiting the future WSJ story about how Ternary grew and found the limits of what is essentially an intellectually lazy, confrontation-free, feel-good management style that doesn't strive for excellence, instead only for "a workable plan that looks like progress", and then jettisoned it as laughably unworkable.

Unfortunately, though I think you can already see where I'm going here, Ternary seems quite unlikely to ever grow too awful much, constrained as they are by a system that enforces crushing mediocrity, even in a small company like theirs.

As Professors Katz and Quinn intimated, unorthodox isn't bad, but there are a lot of things that can work in small companies which would be impossible at scale. Paying for everything on the owner's personal credit card is an excellent example. Keeping all your invoices and receipts in a shoebox is another. And, with all due respect to the admirable goal of "giving workers a voice", so is the practice of pretending they've each got something crucial and important to say about the company's direction, or that, in the event of failure, your fallback position is that "at least we all agreed on the strategy".

Sorry, but not all opinions matter equally, and without accountability for failure, there cannot be success in any non-trivial enterprise, including Ternary's. The time spent in search of universal approval of all decisions, and of making sure that every last person is happy and contented, is time wasted. And yes, this metaphor can be extended to the broader social and political realm, but I'll spare you that for now.

(all ellipsis above, mine)

(also posted at issuesblog.com)