Banned PETA Commercial

The great criticism of PETA has always been that it's just a money making machine that doesn't really accomplish much other than making nut-jobs feel better about themselves.

Here is a video of the commercial PETA wanted to place during the superbowl. I'm not going to embed it because it is in questionable taste and it was rejected for being too sexual.

The thing is, however much PETA spent making this ad, it was going to cost them three million bucks to place it. If PETA has that kind of money to throw away on that kind of ad, then I'm really wondering why they're not using it to actually do anybody some good, like feed the hungry or clothe the naked.

Keep this commercial in mind if you're ever tempted to give PETA a dime and give it a second thought. If that doesn't work, consider the video below from Pen & Teller's Bullshit:

If the crazy PETA protest lady sounds familiar, it's because she's Pamelyn Ferdin who did the voice for pretty much every animated little girl in the 1970's.

Protecting Steel from Foreigners

Last week I made an argument that there were some circumstances where protectionism might be logical and needed. Apparently the president agrees, because it's part of his economic stimulus package, particularly in regards to steel.

Almost immediately, representatives from the EU began calling for the removal of any protectionist elements from the bill, particularly with regards to steel. European steel isn't the problem. European steelmakers operate on a fairly level playing field with US steelmakers because Europe requires their factories to meet standards similar to those in the US with regards to pollution, product and worker safety. The problem is Asian countries who don't have these safeguards and can produce steel much cheaper because they don't.

There's a diplomatic problem though, with singling out Asia or particular Asian countries from the stimulus bill, which is probably why they chose to word it so that it covers all foreign-produced steel. The other possible problem is that I suspect this aspect of the bill comes from the United Steelworkers Union and invoking protectionism for the sake of unions can be problematic.

It may also be that we have WTO, EU and other treaties that prevent this element of Obama's stimulus package. If that happens, then we have the choice of either passing them as is and trying to change the treaties after the fact, or we can remove the provision until such time that we can secure changes in these treaties, or we can just pass it as is and let the chips fall where they may with regards to any trade treaties.

I can't recommend the third option, but I can't rule it out either. The answer here has to be a policy of not entering into international trade agreements with countries who use a lax legal environment with regards to pollution, worker and product safety to cut costs and make their products cheaper than ours. If we can get the EU to agree with us on this, then the move would have even more clout. Moves like this might even make agreements like the Kyoto document redundant and unnecessary.

Blame The Media, Again?

Dan Gillmor writes a pretty interesting piece suggesting financial journalists should have played a larger role over the last ten years in warning the country about the looming financial crisis:

"Journalists are notoriously thin-skinned, defensive about even legitimate criticism. But this lapse has been too blatant even for reporters to miss. Two-thirds of financial journalists in a recent survey said the news media "dropped the ball" in the period before the crisis became apparent. (Still, almost none of them assigned the press any responsibility for what has occurred.)"

Gillmor goes on to suggest that the media should play a larger role in warning the country about this and other disasters:

That common practice suggests an opportunity. When we can predict an inevitable calamity if we continue along the current path, we owe it to the public to do everything we can to encourage a change in that destructive behavior.

In practice, this means activism. It means relentless campaigning to point out what's going wrong, and demanding corrective action from those who can do something about it."

Although I like Gilmor's article very much there are some things I'd like to point out:

First, he's overly critical of print media journalists, suggesting their reporting might have been skewed in favor of their advertisers, even though, from my perspective print media journalists (and blog journalists) were much more responsible in reporting about the building bubble than electronic media journalists.

Secondly, he makes no mention of the obvious fact that although financial journalists were far too optimistic five years ago, helping build the bubble, they have also swung too far the other way now and their pessimism might slow the recovery.

I'm very much in favor of activism among journalism, but you have to temper it a good bit, because, sometimes these guys have no clue what they're talking about. If you're going to follow an activist journalist on any issue, it pays to also read another one on the opposite side of the issue so you can forge your own sense of the truth out of the middle.

It should be pointed out that Gilmor himself is a print (and blog) media financial journalist, who made a name for himself writing about the dot.com bubble, but failed to accurately predict its ultimate bursting.

You can read the entirety of Gilmor's article here: The Media's Role In The Financial Crisis

I recommend it, but with the reservations noted above.

Theater Safety: Accidental Shooting in Florida

Tragedy nearly struck during rehearsals for an amateur production of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men in Sarasota, Florida. The actor playing George shot the actor playing Lennie, as per the script, but this time the gun was real and so was the ammunition.

It was an accident, and luckily the bullet didn't penetrate the actor's skull, Incidents like this illustrate the very real need for anybody involved in theatre to really know what they're doing before trying to use potentially dangerous props or equipment.

Here is an article on the incident in Florida.

Here is a good article on using guns on stage.

Below are some books on Stage Safety:

The Pope On YouTube

Twenty-First Century Pope

In a pretty tech-savvy move to reach the flock, Pope Benedict XVI now has his own YouTube Channel. It's even in HD!

From their YouTube Profile:

This channel offers news coverage of the main activities of the Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI and of relevant Vatican events.
It is updated daily. Video images are produced by Centro Televisio Vaticano (CTV), texts by Vatican Radio (RV) and CTV.

This video-news presents the Catholic Churchs position regarding the principal issues of the world today.

Links give access to the full and official texts of cited documents.
Holy See (Vatican City State)

Watch the Pope on YouTube here, but be careful about leaving flame comments on his videos. God is watching you.

Deepening The River of Our Economy

Right now, everyone is focusing on the crisis in banking as the cause of our economic problems, but I wonder if this is an effect and not a cause.

The financial sector certainly made some really stupid mistakes, but they actually were doing fairly well until something set them off.

When that happened, they realized they had, over the years, removed a lot of the safeguards we installed to protect them. That was the stupid part.

For thirty years, maybe more, maybe twice as long, our economy has been a shallow river. The water moved very fast, but it wasn't very deep.

Two years ago, we found ourselves in a situation where growth in the the world's economy was outstripping the resources we built to fuel it. The problem was fuel itself. We were too reliant on fossil fuels and when demand outpaced supply, we saw fuel prices more than double.

Energy costs are a fundamental building block of any economy, and you can't double the cost of energy without having serious repercussions throughout the rest of the system. Fuel prices doubled and the economy stalled. When the economy stalled, it created a major back flow in the banking system so the banking system broke.

As painful as this recession is, it may have come not a moment too soon. Without a slow down in the world's economy we were facing the serious problem of literally running out of energy. This recession may give us just enough time to correct the problem before it's too late.

The river of our economy overflowed its banks and threatened the villages in the valley below.

Alternative forms of energy have been a part of our economy for more than seventy years, but they were only a small part. Instead we supplied our demand for energy with fossil fuels as a commodity. It was more profitable in the short-run, but lead to two major problems: global warming and dwindling supply.

Renewable forms of energy are part of the infrastructure, not a commodity. Wind, solar, tidal, thermal, hydroelectric, even nuclear energies cost more to build on the front end, but then they are free from the fluctuations of the commodity market as they are self-supplying to a large extent.

Our energy has always come from a mix of infrastructure sources like hydroelectric and commodity sources like natural gas and oil, but in the past the ratio of that mix was something like 10% infrastructure and 90% commodity, leaving us incredibly vulnerable to the fluctuations of commodity markets.

Suppose we change that ratio, to say 60% renewable infrastructure sources and 40% non-renewable commodity sources. We need to retain that 40% from commodity sources because they're more flexible and can respond to fluctuations in demand, but it's unlikely demand will ever fall below the 60% provided by infrastructure sources.

To do this will require a genuine increase in both leadership and responsibility in the public and corporate sector. Some will say we can never expect that kind of performance in people, people are too greedy and too stupid, but I say we can. We can accomplish anything we want to.

Hell, we went to the moon strapped to the tip of an over-glorified bottle rocket. We can do anything.

By changing the mix of where we get our energy, by investing in our energy infrastructure, we deepen the river of our economy. The water won't move as fast, but more will flow past us and our future will be more secure.

Image: Hoover Dam from the air; Source Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Dam

Well, Crap

Thanks to Frank Melton, my favorite city now looks pretty stupid on my favorite blog.

Boing Boing (how's that for a title) reports on Melton's threat to ignore the constitution when it comes to baggy pants. They also report on how nicely he folds a handkerchief.

Print is Dead, and I Don't Feel So Good Myself

In the 1984 film, Ghostbusters, mousy secretary Janine tries to sex up uber-nerd scientist Egon Spengler by impressing him with the books she's read, to which Egon replies: "Print is Dead."

It's no secret I get frustrated with electronic journalism. Conservative, liberal, politics, showbiz, lifestyle, all of them, they just disappoint the crap out of me sometimes. When I was a kid, there were some truly great journalists working in the electronic media, but, the only one left in the business is Barbara Walters and she's a hundred and eight(sorry, Barbara).

For fifty years, print journalism was able to compete by offering more depth, and better quality. Newspapers survived by doing the same things TV and Radio news did, only better, even though they were less convenient. They were even pretty profitable.

Then along came the web, and you could get the same data (the exact same articles in many cases) without having to deal with a stack of printed pages. It could have been really cool. Newspapers could do pretty much what they always had, but without the expense of having to print anything.

The problem was, it's a lot harder to sell advertising on the web. Most advertisers only want to pay for web advertising if the end user actually clicks on their ad. Nobody wants to pay just for the exposure without somebody clicking on the ad, even though anybody who's ever studied advertising will tell you, exposure is the most valuable part of advertising. There's also no way to insert a whole page of advertising in the middle of the news on the web.

Newspapers are in the business of publishing the news, but they made their money by selling advertising, which gave the end user the expectation that the news itself is either free or nearly free. Double that on the web where almost all the non-pornographic content is free and it became almost impossible for newspapers to profitably make the transition from printed paper to the internet.

I think you'll see many of the best writers and comic artists and some of the most fleet-footed mastheads successfully make the transition over to web journalism, but it will be a painful transition and the newspaper printed on paper itself will be an anachronism in fifteen years. Ironically, I think we'll probably retain the term "newspaper" for text based journalism long after there's no actual paper involved.

This will be painful, and I can't promise that what we'll get will be nearly as good as what we had, but I don't think there's any way to change the path we're on either.

Seth Godin makes an interesting blog entry on what he'll miss about newspapers. He's kind of an asshole about it, but he makes some good points.

Brownie points and kudos if you can name the newspaper writer I ripped off for the title of this article.

A Radical Proposal For Peace

How do you respond proportionately to somebody who's willing to die to attack you? You can't, and that's Israel's dilemma. That's also why their enemies have chosen this tactic: it's almost impossible to defend against.

A person who's already decided to die attacking you will attack from a school or a hospital or a mosque. They don't care. Attacking from a place you might be reticent to counterattack might give them a few more minutes to inflict whatever damage they can while you hesitate.

The only thing Israel can accomplish with counter attacks is to diminish the enemies capacities before they build up enough strength to inflict more damage.

It's a catch-22 though. The collateral damage from their counter attacks creates more fanatics who are willing to attack them, so each counterattack may end the current round of attacks from that area, but it lays the groundwork for the next round. It is literally a vicious cycle.

So, how do you break the cycle?

It's brutally painful, but one tactic might be to adapt a policy of no reprisals. If Hamas or Hezbollah launch missiles or mortars into Israel, simply don't respond with violence of any kind.

If counterattacks had any hope of ending the violence, then I would never suggest such an outrageous course of action, but since counterattacks don't end the violence, one has to look at the total body count here, not just which side has the most casualties and a policy of no counterattacks dramatically reduces the total amount of suffering in the region.

Nonviolence may be the only hope for dealing with an enemy that's willing to blow themselves up to attack you or launch missiles from a school playground. An enemy who's already decided to die attacking you isn't going to stop for fear of counterattacks. They don't care what you might do to their countrymen either. All they care about is inflicting as much damage as they can before they die.

It may be inappropriate to refer to the teachings of Jesus in this context, but there's a real genius behind his lessons to give your coat to the man who stole your cloak or turning the other cheek.

Israel can break the cycle of violence if they respond, not with guns but with love. If they worked to build up these areas and improve the lives of the people who lived there, despite the attacks, then their enemies would soon learn that life is a lot better with Israel than with the people who are encouraging them to attack Israel and the violence would end.

Oops CNN Does it again

Here's the headline: Retail sales drop for 6th straight month

Here's the Sub Head: Slump is the longest in at least four decades.

Pretty dire huh? Ready to cut your wrists yet?

Don't give up hope yet though, buried deep in the article is this: Of the $9.4B drop in sales between November and December, just over half was due to the plunge in gas prices, which pushed gas sales down by $4.9B, or 15.9%.

So, rather than going with a headline that says something like "Retail Sales Drop Driven by Falling Gas Prices", which would be true, instead they go with the end of the world scenario.

Never mind that six months ago gas prices were at an all time high and people were ready to go through the village with torches and pitchforks to hunt down oil executives, or that the real drop in retail sales is more like under 2.4%, let's REALLY scare the crap out of people with our headlines!

People are frightened about their economic future and that's understandable, but it would really help if the fourth estate would step up to the bar and start trying to make things better rather than worse. All they have to do is start reporting the news rather than trying to sell it with supermarket tabloid headlines.

read the article here

Law and Disorder

Mississippi can't ever get in the swing of things. Just when the Democratic party is on the rise nationally, here in Mississippi it's in the crapper, due almost entirely on the fallout from the Dickie Scruggs web of intrigue.

While most of us focused on the executive and legislative branches of state government, the real power was in the judicial all along and since it wasn't as well noticed as the other two, hijinks ensued.

I think it's time to admit that the Republican party, in Mississippi and nationwide, was far too influenced by big business and big finance, but the Democratic party was likewise far too influenced by big law and big labor.

Since Mississippi doesn't offer much by way of big business or big finance, big law stepped in to fill the gap and we're only now discovering the full extent of their influence and their corruption.

How big was it? Let's put it this way: they could afford to pay Ed Peters a million bucks just to be the bag man, and that was just the tip on the tip of the iceburg. I really hate it too, because Peters was a guy I admired in a lot of ways, but a million bucks can do a lot to lure a guy to the dark side.

Looking on the bright side, it may be a good sign that any Mississippi scandal could involve so much money. Maybe that there was so much money to be had is an indication of how far Mississippi has come and how much potential there is out there for somebody willing to do things the right way.

How Not To Write A Headline

On www.money.cnn.com, the headline reads: Worst Holiday Shopping Season Since '70

Now, to read just the headline, you would think CNN is saying that retailers sold about as much in 2008 as they did thirty-eight years ago in 1970, which would have been an unmitigated disaster.

Fortunately, if you read the article, you'd discover that they really meant holiday retail sales were down around four percent from last years holiday retail sales, which is the worse year-to-year decline since 1970.

In terms of actual dollars, retailers actually sold over three times as much in 2008 as they did in 1970.

Considering the state of the economy, that year-to-year sales were down no more than four percent would actually be pretty good news if it weren't for the massive markdowns retailers took to try and maintain their revenue.

Still a four per-cent decline isn't news that the sky is falling. In fact, retail sales beat in 2008 beat some projections and some retailers like amazon.com reported their best Christmas sales ever.

A big part of any recession is the pessimism people feel about the state of the economy which curbs spending. With that in mind, one would hope that a responsible news agency would forgo incendiary headlines in favor of more factual ones so not to inflate people's fears.

This doesn't seem to be the case over at CNN.com.

You can read the article here: http://money.cnn.com/2008/12/30/news/economy/holiday_shopping.reut/index.htm

The lesson here may be that if one really wants to understand the news they have to go a good bit beyond the headlines, and even then it's best not to trust just one source for your news. The downside is that it's actually a lot of work to keep yourself informed.

On Dogs and Free Markets

I want to talk about free market economies, but first I want to talk about dogs.

Dogs in the City

Dog-owners who live in cities and don't have yards know that they have to walk their dog once, sometimes twice a day.

Dogs are remarkable creatures. They're highly intelligent and blessed with sharp natural instincts as well. Their senses are far superior to ours and pound-per-pound, they are much stronger and faster than us, but, the city isn't their natural environment.

Owning a dog in the city means using a leash. The leash prevents the dog from walking in front of a moving bus, going into a sewer drain, after another dog, into a garbage can or humping a cop's leg. It keeps the dog safe and healthy and keeps the owner out of trouble.

The leash needs to be long enough to allow the dog some natural freedom of movement, but short enough to keep the dog out of dangerous situations and keep the owner out of trouble.

Dog owners will tell you that, at first, dogs hate the leash, but pretty soon they grow to love just the sight of it because it means they get to go outside.

Markets are like Dogs.

Markets are like dogs. They're remarkable creatures, but stable societies aren't their natural environment. Markets are made up of human beings, but they, themselves are not human and they require human supervision and control to keep them out of trouble.

Think of government regulation as a leash for markets. They prevent the market from wandering in front of a bus, chasing after squirrels or humping a cop's leg.

Completely free markets are like dogs in a city without a leash. They're free to run around and have a great time, but there's a really high risk they'll end up as road kill, getting lost, or getting the owner in some sort of trouble, so responsible owners invest in a leash.

Regulation isn't necessarily anti-capitalism. Its a recognition that, unlike ants, human beings clearly aren't more intelligent when they act in groups than they are individually and need some sort of guidance to prevent them from doing something really stupid.

What happened to the Republican Revolution?

They called it "the Republican Revolution", but revolutions sometimes eat their children.

They promised a new focus on the middle class, yet, adjusted for inflation, the middle class was earning less when Ronald Reagan left office than when he was elected. Today, the middle class earns less in real dollars than they did in 1970, yet the earnings of the top one percent have increased over six hundred percent.

They promised balanced budgets, yet no republican president since world war II ever balanced the national budget. They called the Democrats "Tax and Spend", yet the Republicans had another plan, spend the same or more, but don't raise taxes: not a recipe for success.

George Bush waged two, very expensive wars, but would not relent on his pre-war tax cuts. Math was never his best subject.

Instead of delivering on the things Americans wanted from them, they brought in an agenda nobody asked for. Like making abortion and death penalty laws even more divisive than they already were.

They sought to break down the barrier of church and state that had been so successful for us with prayer in school and revisiting the Scopes Monkey Trial and they maximized the mistakes of an already woefully unsuccessful drug policy that benefited no one but organized crime.

The Republican Revolution came in with great hope and great promise, but we were never able to take delivery of that promise.

It's not like we didn't give them a chance to follow through with their plan. Twenty-Eight of the last forty years saw a Republican President.

For the next two years, the Republicans are completely out of power in two of the three branches of government. Let us hope they use this time for self reflection on how and why they could never deliver on their promises and come back with a new focus on the things that are really important to the American people.

If they can't do that, then let them stay out of power until they do.

The Natural Cycle

There has been bad news about the economy lately and, in times like these, many people are worried and afraid. Don't be too afraid though, a lot of what we're going through is natural. We've been through it many times in the past and we always came back stronger.

The economy behaves like a living thing because it is made up of millions of living things and like any living thing, it goes through cycles of expansion and contraction.

Contraction is a disturbing process, but everything I read tells me we are doing the right things to come back form this strong and healthy.

We'd like to think the economy would grow forever and on the news and among economists we tend to call an economy that grows from one quarter to the next "good" but one that doesn't grow or declines "bad".

That's not a very practical way to think of a living thing though. All living things have times when they must pull back to mend wounds and correct mistakes and prepare for the next cycle of growth.

We made mistakes with the housing market and sub-prime mortgages and now our economy needs to pull back to mend wounds and correct mistakes. This is natural and nothing to be afraid of. You could even say it was a necessary thing.

Even in declining times, living things always seek a means to grow and thrive, so will our economy. Even now, people all across the nation are making plans to grow again. We will come back stronger and better than before. We always have.

Have faith in God and nature and believe in each other and we'll come through this healthy and strong.

Frantic Financial Chatter

Just like hurricanes, storms on Wall St. may seem like the end of the world, but they're not.

They're saying this is the worst financial crisis since the great depression, and I suppose in some ways it technically is, but, it's a long, long way from being as bad as the great depression.

This started twenty-five years ago with Ronald Reagan and Alan Greenspan when they de-regulated the financial sector and began artificially stimulating the economy by manipulating the fed funds rate. It's the primary reason I'll never agree with the people who call Reagan a great president.

The good news is, that like with hurricanes, we are strong enough to recover from this and we are wise enough to learn from these experiences and take measures to prevent them in the future.

You'll hear a lot of frantic chatter over the next several days, but don't lose heart. The basic economy is fundamentally sound, even if these ancillary financial groups are not.