I’ve been a news junkie since I was a kid. I blame the groundbreaking CNN coverage of the Gulf War in ’91 as the instigator of all that during my impressionable youth. Between working in front of a computer all day, having a dozen news and business channels in cable TV, and carrying the interwebs around on my belt, there really isn’t a waking moment when the news of the world is out of reach. I like it that way. In print, audio, and visual formats, I’m realizing now that I consume a massive amount of data every day and being smack in the middle of a three-day weekend, I can’t help but feel a little disconnected. There are no new stories popping up on Drudge or Google News. The Washington Post and the New York Times are even letting me down. Even the news channels are having a hard time stretching the oil spill and Obama administration political fumbles into more than rehashed stories from yesterday. It’s a holiday weekend and no one is left in the newsrooms to feed the beast. Then again, maybe I’m the only person out there waiting for feeding time. That probably means it’s time to grab a cold beverage and stick my nose in a book. After all, old news and analysis is better than no news.
Category Archives: News & Media
The world around us… and the stupid things that are happening in it…
Left, right, and center…
The unfortunate part of getting home most days around 4:30 is it means I’m going to catch a few minutes of Glenn Beck on Fox News. I don’t know why I do it to myself, because all it leads to is an unhealthy rise in my blood pressure and the vague feeling of unease as if I’ve just been in the presence of unadulterated evil. I could just as easily say that if my television were tuned in to one of the news channels with a liberal bent. The problem I have is all I hear from either side is “Progressives are bad” or “Republicans are the party of No” depending on who I’m listening to at the time.
Want to know a secret? Neither party extreme cares about all of your rights. They’d rather cherry pick the ones they like and ignore the others. The far right wants to roll back government regulation everywhere except in your bedroom and on television… I mean we wouldn’t want anyone to get offended if they accidentally saw a nipple (incidentally, what do people who are offended by nipples do with the mirrors in their bathrooms?) and we certainly wouldn’t want to give voice to someone whose religious views, orientation, or lifestyle wouldn’t have been recognizable in 1954. No, freedom and personal liberty don’t go that far. On the extreme left, we have those who want Uncle Sugar to care for us all from cradle to grave and who want to drive all imaginable standards towards the middle and the sad, sad condition of institutionalized mediocrity. Why worry about paying for it, right? Surely everything will work out alright in the end. What could possibly go wrong?
I’ve loved politics for all of my adult life, but I’m tiring of the straw-men and extremists. Sure, I’ll stay informed and I’ll keep voting… but until politicians and the media stop insulting my intelligence, I have no use for either of them. I’ll be making my own decisions based on my beliefs and understanding about individual issues… I worry, though, about so many who are going to pick up the banner of one side or the other and carry it forward as absolute truth.
Nails on a chalkboard…
I was just listening to a rehash of Governor Palin’s keynote address at the Nashville Tea Party Convention and was struck absolutely dumb by one of her applause lines… that the United States needs “a commander-in-chief, not a professor of law.” I’ve got a degree in political science and have watched candidates and elected officials since well before I could vote for any of them… and I have no idea what phrase actually means. I’m not sure anyone does. But to my horror the audience went wildly anyway.
As an aside, the sitting president, by definition, is the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces of the United States (see Article 2, Section 2 of the Constitution for reference purposes). In Article 2, Section 3, the Constitution also provides that the president will “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” For those of us who aren’t professors of law, that means that the president is the chief law enforcement officer of the United States, among his other duties as assigned.
My point is simply this… Maybe knowing something about the law isn’t a bad thing if you want to be in charge of carrying them out. Having an education, whether it’s from Harvard, Frostburg, or Berkeley shouldn’t be something you’re ashamed of or try to hide by dumbing down your vocabulary. What I basically heard a former governor say on television was that you shouldn’t be allowed to hold office if you’re too smart because you can’t understand the “common” man and woman. I don’t know about you, but personally, I’m not comfortable with Joe Sixpack or Jane Hamburgerhelper setting foreign policy.
I think the thing that I find most troublesome about politics is the tendency of the masses to blame whoever happens to be in office for everything that happens. The reality is that the world we have today was built on a million small decisions by elected (and unelected) leaders who were Republicans and Democrats, Federalists, Whigs, Jeffersonian-Republicans, and others who had no party. The world is too complex to be effectively distilled into a 5 second sound bite. It’s nuanced and complicated… and it’s going to take more than “common sense” to correct the issues we face nationally and abroad.
If you want to disagree on issues, that’s a great and good thing. If you want to see change in government policy, that’s fine too. But don’t insult my intelligence by saying that because someone bothered to get an education they’re not qualified to lead. Pick a real argument, present it logically and appeal to my reason… Then maybe I can get behind it… until you do, it’s all just nails on a chalkboard.
Pedal to the metal…
Toyota has recalled 2.3 million vehicles for a problem reported, as close as I can gather, in somewhere around 12 actual cars and trucks. That’s a problem reported in .00005% of the eight vehicle types impacted by the recall; or one in every 191,667. The problem, according to reports, is that the accelerator is “sticky” and people may go faster than they intended to. Of course I’m not making light of this terrible, terrible situation, but as best I can recall, my Tundra already comes with a component that compensates for unwanted acceleration… it’s the brake pedal… That’s hooked to the very large disk brakes, that can drag my very large truck to a stop in short order from even speeds in excess of those posted for highway traffic.
I’m only going to say this once: A car or truck is a machine. Machines are, from time to time, prone to breakdown or the need for maintenance. The fact that these requirements come up occasionally does not constitute a “crisis” nor does it signal the impending collapse of a major manufacturer. It does, however, remind me that the media loves a good story more than any three people I know and that whipping the motoring public into a frenzy about Toyota’s Accelerator Pedal of Doom or Floor Mat of Chaos generates interest, fills column-inches and air minutes, and more importantly, increases revenue. How ‘bout we all start reading, watching, and critiquing the news of the day with a critical eye, kay? Yeah, that would be helpful.
Content…
I’m no special fan of the New York Times, I find most of their editorial content to be smug and arrogant… and those are traits I generally tend to value only in myself. Actually, I have no problem with smug if you have a reason to be, but from what I can see, the Times, like most other major newspaper publishers, is continuing to struggle to gain traction in an world that turns more and more towards the digital media for its news. I usually ignore news and commentary from the Times, but this article was special… it mentioned that the Gray Lady was trying to find a way to charge readers for its online content in an effort to stem the losses its taking in its print division.
Maybe some people will be willing to pay for an online subscription to the New York Times, or Washington Post, or Possumtown Gazette… but I’m pretty sure you’ve discovered a bad business model here boys. I can’t see how it is smart to start charging people for content that you have been giving away for years without substantially improving the product. It seems that to start charging, you would need to improve the service you are providing in some way… Otherwise, what’s to stop me from getting my highlights from Drudge, the AP, and the ten thousand or so other news sources that populated the interwebs?
This isn’t really a rant about the Times. I don’t want to see the end of good, independent journalism, but if a stalwart of print media like the Times can’t manage to survive the internet age, perhaps it should move aside and allow more responsive companies to take its place… or the government could give them a bailout. Either way.
Slightly used…
NASA is putting two space shuttles up for sale at the low, low price of $28.8 million each. I mean, come on, that’s a steal at twice the price. It’s a friggin’ space shuttle after all. And yeah, I know it’s technically not for sale to individuals, but between the bunch of us, surely we can find some state or local government that wouldn’t mind picking it up for us… Sort of like the guy who bought beer for you before you were 21. All we’d actually be paying for was the shipping and handling of getting the thing from Houston to our destination of choice. It’s so much better than a Shamwow or even that crap that Billy Mays use to peddle in the small hours of the morning. So if anyone out there has a really big garage or wants to make a donation, get in touch! Discovery is already spoken for, but Atlantis and Endeavour are still available. Act now to take advantage of this special offer before supplies run out!
Overpriced…
Most Saturday mornings I end up watching, or at least listening to the business/financial news on Fox (think of them as cartoons for adults). This week, though, I was caught a bit cold by the strident and almost universal opinion of the assembled group of talking heads that federal employees were the most over paid and under worked employees in the country (actually, I think most of the argument was that there were too many feds making over $100,000 a year). To be sure there are those out there that go out of their way to avoid doing much of anything and those people need to go. But for the most part, feds tend to be very highly educated bunch at the senior levels… Masters degrees are the bare minimum in most leadership positions and PhD’s and advanced technical degrees are not uncommon. Add in that the majority of feds have been on the job for more than 15 years and there should be even less surprise that people are climbing towards the top of the pay scale.
Of course one of the things that no one ever thinks about when they make the argument that the workforce is overpaid compared to other large organizations is that over the last 20 years, the feds have contracted out nearly all of the basic labor functions that happen on other organizations. Janitorial, building management, electricians, plumbers, mailrooms, and other functions are performed under contract and don’t lower Uncle Sam’s average salary the same way they do to private sector companies. So, when you’re accounting for only professional, management, technical, and scientific positions within a large organization, I would be interested in seeing how other large organizations stack up. Of course they never talk about that comparison because it’s not interesting.
Don’t get me wrong here, no one likes to bitch and complain about federal waste more than I do, but I don’t need to fudge the numbers to make my argument… I’ll give you examples from real life. I have no problem cutting waste, but I know what I bring home at the end of the week and I’m pretty confident in saying that I’m nowhere near overpaid for what I do. I don’t see anyone from the private sector knocking down the doors to come take my job, so until I do I’m afraid Fox’s big brains and I are going to have to part company on this issue.
Watching the world wake up…
Tell most people younger than me that there were once two Germanys and two Berlins and they’ll look at you like you’ve suddenly sprouted a third arm in the center of your chest. They don’t remember a world where a great city was divided by concrete barricades and when all of Europe was divided by an iron curtain; or when two superpowers stood toe-to-toe and tried to spend one another into oblivion through proxy wars and an arms race. And then we watched that world that we had all grown up with dissolve before our eyes on cable television.
If a man is extraordinarily lucky, he gets to live through that kind of change once in his lifetime. In twenty years there’s been nothing to compare those days against. A hundred years from now when the first relatively objective histories of the last half of the 20th century are being written, they will tell the story of leaders like Walesa, Thatcher, Reagan, John Paul II and Gorbachev. They’ll tell stories of round the clock airlifts to ensure the freedom of a city cut off from the rest of the world. They’ll tell stories of every day heroics by those who sought freedom on both sides of the wall. And finally they’ll tell stories about the day that wall was torn down.
Twenty years ago today, all the world watched and wondered as the unthinkable happened, as history suddenly shifted on its axis, as the rising tide of freedom washed over the concrete battlements of an empire in retreat. I can’t imagine when I’d rather be than right here, right now.
Getting healthy…
It’s hard to imagine that the trillion dollar healthcare plan passed by the House last night will do much of anything good for the vast majority of Americans. I’ll admit that I haven’t been following the issue as closely as others, but a cursory look seems to indicate that the federal government will be getting into head-to-head competition with private insurers. As a rule, I tend to believe competition in the marketplace is a good thing for consumers as it encourages development of new and innovative solutions and helps to control costs or dive them down. In order to do this, though, competition must take place on a level playing field. Private sector companies must look to their bottom line and compete using limited resources. The federal government recognizes no such resource limitations, making head-to-head competition with the private sector an inherently unfair proposition.
I don’t think Met Life or Blue Cross Blue Shield will go out of business tomorrow, but I do think the direct competition between the federal government and the private sector as defined by the House is going to be bad for all of us… Or at least all of us who are happy with our current insurance plan. Until someone can tell me how this program can be sustained over time without contributing to an increasingly unsustainable operating deficit or dramatically higher taxes, I remain opposed.
Getting mooned…
I know this is slightly old news, but it was sort of a busy weekend and I’m just not getting around to commenting on the fact that we friggin’ bombed the moon… The friggin’ MOON! That’s some old school flag waving, there, son! Now I’m not at all surprised that we can bomb the moon. After all, we got pretty good at getting there in the 60s and 70s, but the fact that someone had the fortitude to sit in a meeting with very serious people and say, “You know, if we spent a few hundred million dollars, I bet we could throw a big rock at the moon and then test whatever it kicks up.” Seriously, I want to sit in meetings like that. The last meeting I was in involved looking at how many investigations were ongoing into people who lost government property. Guess which meeting was more fun.
I’m sure there was plenty of legitimate science to justify bombing the moon, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say I’m glad we did it for no other reason than because we can. The last half of the 20th century was full of “that’s friggin’ sweet” moments and I, for one, would like to see more of them in this century. So, whatever you guys at NASA are dreaming up, I say go forth and do great things. The more your experiments sound like the next episode of Mythbusters, the better off you and your budget are going to be in the long run. I just hope you’ve got something good dreamed up for your next act, because following this up is going to involve some serious work.
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