RattlerGator Blog

America, Again

While racing through some of the morning papers and websites, I ran across this article in the London Telegraph, World Power Swings Back to America. Here's a representative sampling:

As Cleveland Fed chief Sandra Pianalto said last week, US manufacturing is "very competitive" at the current dollar exchange rate. Whether intended or not, the Fed's zero rates and $2.3 trillion printing blitz have brought matters to an abrupt head for China.

Fed actions confronted Beijing with a Morton's Fork of ugly choices: revalue the yuan, or hang onto the mercantilist dollar peg and import a US monetary policy that is far too loose for a red-hot economy at the top of the cycle. Either choice erodes China's wage advantage. The Communist Party chose inflation.

Foreign exchange effects are subtle. They take a long to time play out as old plant slowly runs down, and fresh investment goes elsewhere. Yet you can see the damage to Europe from an over-strong euro in foreign direct investment (FDI) data.

Flows into the EU collapsed by 63 [percent] from 2007 to 2010 (UNCTAD data), and fell by 77 [percent] in Italy. Flows into the US rose by 5 [percent].

The current China fixation is the "Japan, Inc." phenomenon from the 1980s all over again with a major, extended worldwide recession thrown in right now, rather than looming on the horizon. I haven't been able to watch this video (embedding of the video has been disallowed) from one of the authors of the book that serves as much of the basis for the article, The American Phoenix: And Why China and Europe Will Struggle After the Coming Slump, but I'm sure it's an interesting five minutes.

Rarely is it a good bet to wager against the United States of America. However, as the article concludes:

The switch in advantage to the US is relative. It does not imply a healthy US recovery. The global depression will grind on as much of the Western world tightens fiscal policy and slowly purges debt, and as China deflates its credit bubble.

Yet America retains a pack of trump cards, and not just in sixteen of the world’s top twenty universities.

It is almost the only economic power with a fertility rate above 2.0 - and therefore the ability to outgrow debt - in sharp contrast to the demographic decay awaiting Japan, China, Korea, Germany, Italy, and Russia.

Europe's EMU soap opera has shown why it matters that America is a genuine nation, forged by shared language and the ancestral chords of memory over two centuries, with institutions that ultimately work and a real central bank able to back-stop the system.

The 21st Century may be American after all, just like the last.

Hubba Hubba !!!

Best Super Bowl Commercial of 2011

If you're somewhere around 50 (like me), how do you not love this Volkswagen commercial???

That was definitely the best Super Bowl commercial for me. I missed some of them while texting and tweeting, but of those I saw, this was the best.

Specific Hope for Haiti

I'm getting old and today is depressing reminder of the effects of getting old on yours truly. Back in mid-December I came across a video purporting to show 200 years of global progress in just four short minutes. It was impressive and on-point, I thought, for the work in Haiti that I've been contemplating for a few years now. This morning, a good friend who is also involved in the agricultural and economic development strategy we hope to implement in Haiti sent me a forwarded eMail on the same video. I responded to him that I had sent the YouTube video to him weeks ago. He responded that I had not.

Wrong, I thought to myself. When time presented, I searched for the eMail so that I could then send the proof to him.

Couldn't find it.

Never sent the eMail.

In fact, I didn't even post about it on the blog, and I had begun the preparation to do that as well. Obviously, something came up that day, I laid the immediate task down, never got back to it, and now can add to my collection of anecdotes that multitasking for me just isn't what it used to be. Here's the video in question:

Isn't that impressive? It's also damning, isn't it, but I'll leave that discussion for another day. That presentation was followed up in January with a good column from Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times (Ladders of the Poor) that said, in part, this:

Private and public donations saved lives in Haiti, no question. But it’s also true that well-meaning bleeding-hearts tend to exaggerate the impact aid typically has on a country. Those nations that have managed to lift themselves out of poverty have done so mostly with trade, not aid — with giving people jobs and a ladder, not handouts and an elevator.

Precisely.

That superior column was accompanied by a video that helped to shed light on the specific hope for progress in Haiti. In my opinion, that hope is made evident when one considers the import of the prior video detailing 200 years of global progress. How so? First, here's the video on Odecile Jean, and the progress that has been made possible (in part) by the peasant bank, Fonkoze:

When I look at Odecile Jean and contemplate her striving for more, I think of Maya Angelou's poem, Still I Rise, and it's famous line, “I am the hope and the dream of the slave.”

As we have certainly learned in this nation, poems and sassiness and resilience aren't enough.  Hopes and dreams sure as heck aren't sufficient. Faith, alone, isn't enough. It has to be married up with the responsibility required if one is to survive in the world of commerce.

For better or worse, Haiti has to embrace the world of commerce and it has to do so now.

Beyond Sabetha's Snow

I've returned from what must have been a solid week on the road that involved travel to South Florida, a flight out to Kansas through DFW, driving through major snow on Kansas roadways back to the KC airport, flight back to South Florida via DFW, and then a welcomed and leisurely seven-hour drive back home to Tallahassee.

Readers of this blog may remember me briefly discussing my contemplation of efforts to get involved with an organization trying to help Haiti move forward. Well, that's been done via a start-up. Thus the trip to Kansas. One highlight among many: we saw a fascinating presentation revolving around extrusion technology that has the potential to seriously impact malnutrition in Haiti.

But. Kansas in January?

Oh my goodness was it cold (eight degrees on the morning of our departure). On the drive into Kansas, my brain literally started sending signals to my entire body: prepare to hibernate, hibernate, hibernate. Must hibernate! Bundle up!

But our host family was warm and couldn't have been more gracious to us. That helped.

Still, this was the scene that greeted us at our hosts' home. I call it "Beyond Sabetha" as this could have been the theme for our visit, focused as it was on Haiti:

Sabetha had a certain charm to it (trust me, it truly did), and -- covered in a serious blanket of snow -- the white stuff probably transformed the winter landscape. The snow was quite dry and danced across the roadway when the wind blew. Luckily, the wind didn't really blow until Saturday night on our way to a fantastic steak place (the Country Cabin) in Hiawatha, Kansas. My 18 ounce prime rib, as I had been assured, was absolutely outstanding.

Why Kansas in January? Because we are endeavoring to implement an agricultural and economic development strategy in Haiti that actually moves the needle, so to speak. Something practical and away from Port-au-Prince. Something that isn't primarily governmental but private sector.

I'll close with a photo of one of my best friends. He's a driving force behind our efforts and a proud Haitian who aches to try and improve conditions in the land of his birth. I love this photo; it seems to capture so much. But, what can you do with a Black Man in the snow . . . hmmmm?

Trust me when I tell you this, we didn't stay out in the snow for long. No sir, buddy! I was just happy to not get crushed with a snowball.

Please wish us Godspeed and good fortune. Haiti needs it.

Innovation Saved the Chilean Miners

Innovation that is the hallmark of capitalism, that is.

Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal has the interesting take on the rescue this morning.

If those miners had been trapped a half-mile down like this 25 years ago anywhere on earth, they would be dead. What happened over the past 25 years that meant the difference between life and death for those men?

Short answer: the Center Rock drill bit.

This is the miracle bit that drilled down to the trapped miners. Center Rock Inc. is a private company in Berlin, Pa. It has 74 employees. The drill's rig came from Schramm Inc. in West Chester, Pa. Seeing the disaster, Center Rock's president, Brandon Fisher, called the Chileans to offer his drill. Chile accepted. The miners are alive.

Longer answer: The Center Rock drill, heretofore not featured on websites like Engadget or Gizmodo, is in fact a piece of tough technology developed by a small company in it for the money, for profit. That's why they innovated down-the-hole hammer drilling. If they make money, they can do more innovation.

This profit = innovation dynamic was everywhere at that Chilean mine. The high-strength cable winding around the big wheel atop that simple rig is from Germany. Japan supplied the super-flexible, fiber-optic communications cable that linked the miners to the world above.

The profit = innovation dynamic is the path forward, and we caricature it (as President Obama is given to do) at our own peril.

More Context on George W. Bush

In the aftermath of President Obama's somewhat disappointing speech last night on the largely successful Fight for Freedom in Iraq, now is another moment for me to reflect on our 43rd president.

It's no secret that I don't take well to criticism of George W. Bush, especially when it is of the know-nothing and historically obtuse variety (these are most often delivered by partisan Democrats). However, it is a particular sore spot with me when Republicans and self-described conservatives are providing the critique -- and I've heard more than my share of those. I, naturally, was pleased yesterday morning to read a post from Matt A. Mayer of the Buckeye Institute over at National Review that does a good job of providing good context on the financial era actually inherited by Dubya (rather than the mythological economic presumptions touted by Democrats) in his post titled The Hole that We're In:

Look, as a conservative who dragged my six-months-pregnant wife from beautiful Colorado to the swamp of Washington, D.C., in 2004 to serve Pres. George W. Bush, no one was more frustrated by the big-government growth that occurred under Republican rule than me. That said, I have grown tired of the near-constant assault on the Bush years, especially when those assaults focus on the economic weakness of those years and conveniently ignore what happened in the few years before President Bush took office.

Here, here!

Mayer goes on to attack, quite properly, the alleged boom years of the Clinton presidency.

[T]he Clinton boom was built upon the mirage of the dot-com and technology craze, as well as the book-cooking of companies like Enron, Global Crossing, and WorldCom. The fact of the mirage is clear when one looks at the S&P 500. Specifically:

On December 9, 1994, the S&P 500 traded at 446.96. From that day until May 24, 2000, it grew by 242%, or an annualized growth rate of 26.15%, to a then record 1,527.46. Even the dotcom and corporate fraud bust failed to totally squeeze the inflated gains out of the market. On January 19, 2001, the day before Bush started his presidency, the S&P 500 traded at 1,342.54, which was still a 200% net gain from December 1994 or a 19.71% annualized growth rate.” Although written in January 2009, when the S&P 500 traded slightly lower than it is today, “[t]he reality is that the current trading price at around 900 is where the S&P 500 would have been had it grown at 5% per year, which is close to the pre-December 1994 annualized growth rate.

The piece goes on to look at the housing bubble and makes the same comparison regarding historical growth compared to the bubble growth that occurred from 1997 to 2006.

Read his entire post; we should never gloss over or forget these factors. For good background on the financial numbers from a layman's perspective, you might want to read a book I wish I had followed years ago -- Get Rich Slowly, by William T. Spitz (at the time of its original publication in the early 1990s, Treasurer at Vanderbilt University; currently, he is a Director & Principal at Diversified Trust Company). From the new media universe, you might also want to review the apparently unrelated Get Rich Slowly blog.

Finally, Jennifer Rubin at Commentary Magazine's Contentions Blog has a post up explaining that a Democrat pollster (Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling) has revealed survey results that indicate “by a 50-42 margin voters [in Ohio] say they’d rather have George W. Bush in the White House right now than Barack Obama."

My, my.

The bloom certainly is off that particular rose, isn't it? Why come, as the street committee might ask? Rubin gives up three probabilities:

First, Obama’s juvenile buck-passing hasn’t and won’t work. The election game plan of threatening the return of Bush isn’t going to fly. Heck, the voters wouldn’t mind having him back! Second, Obama has, to a degree we have not seen in recent years, shied away from acknowledging error. His “out” was always that Bush had messed things up — far worse than we even imagined. Now with Bush-bashing proven to be entirely counterproductive, what will Obama do to deflect blame? And finally, you have to keep faith with the American people. They may get impatient and lose perspective, but they remain exceedingly fair and possess a large reservoir of common sense (e.g., a mosque at Ground Zero is absurd, Bush was a decent man who made tough calls, we shouldn’t dump on loyal allies). It is good to be reminded of that.

Amen.

There is a tremendous amount of satisfaction in observing the nation awaken from the jaw-dropping unseriousness that sang the praises of Barack Obama for simply looking good and enunciating well. That foolishness has finally evaporated, thank goodness.

Great Podcast You Should Listen To

Just in case you didn't notice my tweet, I want to draw your attention to a podcast I was especially pleased to come across today. Coffee & Markets with Francis Cianfrocca; the podcast from the first week in February is hosted by Ben Domenech and is titled, It's Not About Him: America's Decline is About a Lot More Than Obama.

The discussion is engaging and helps to explain why Obama and his agenda must be defeated.

Productivity.

Their use of "decline" is relative, I do believe. But "it" surely isn't about Obama -- he's simply the manifestation of the problem

When the majority of Americans come to believe (heaven forbid) that it is the job of government to make things right in their world -- rather than they, themselves, or their kinfolks or workmates -- we will be screwed.

This is a very serious problem the left-wing (in all of their altruism) is almost completely blind to. We cannot allow this problem to cross the tipping point and Obama made a huge play to do just that.

Maybe, just maybe, he's been stopped in his tracks.

Say What? Intellectual Heft?

The public editor at the New York Times, Clark Hoyt, has posted a rather incredible recitation of the Walter Cronkite obituary fiasco. Here is the full correction, as printed:

The Arts

An appraisal on Saturday about Walter Cronkite’s career included a number of errors. In some copies, it misstated the date that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed and referred incorrectly to Mr. Cronkite’s coverage of D-Day. Dr. King was killed on April 4, 1968, not April 30. Mr. Cronkite covered the D-Day landing from a warplane; he did not storm the beaches. In addition, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969, not July 26. “The CBS Evening News” overtook “The Huntley-Brinkley Report” on NBC in the ratings during the 1967-68 television season, not after Chet Huntley retired in 1970. A communications satellite used to relay correspondents’ reports from around the world was Telstar, not Telestar. Howard K. Smith was not one of the CBS correspondents Mr. Cronkite would turn to for reports from the field after he became anchor of “The CBS Evening News” in 1962; he left CBS before Mr. Cronkite was the anchor. Because of an editing error, the appraisal also misstated the name of the news agency for which Mr. Cronkite was Moscow bureau chief after World War II. At that time it was United Press, not United Press International. (Go to Article)

How Did This Happen? attempts to explain what cannot be properly explained. Cannot be explained, rather, beyond an admission of sheer incompetence. Adding to the misery, here is another correction, added just this Saturday:

Correction: August 1, 2009

An appraisal on July 18 about Walter Cronkite’s career misstated the name of the ABC evening news broadcast. While the program was called “World News Tonight” when Charles Gibson became anchor in May 2006, it is now “World News With Charles Gibson,” not “World News Tonight With Charles Gibson.”

This episode will surely go down in Journalism's history as a bright-line marker and it will likely be paired, perhaps many years from now, with a parallel reappraisal of both the "institution" writing the obituary as well as the subject of the obituary. Neither party will shine as brightly as they do today.

Review the comments posted to the public editor's piece and one might argue that something of a trifecta has been obtained; a skewering of the Washington Post as well. This gem is from Thom in DC:

Rather a venial affair compared to The Washington Post [aggressively] marketing to sell direct access to its newsroom, senior editorial and management staff to the highest bidder. Mistakes, even serial mistakes[,] are one thing, a complete ethical collapse is another.

This is even small potatoes to the Post's continuing to publish the drivel of that discredited newsroom roundheels, Sally Quinn, under the guise of writing on faith. In Washington her ravings are known as the whoroscopes!

Venial? Hardly, but the point is well-taken. When the epitaph of the New York Times as we thought we knew it (the younger generation doesn't care about this subject at all) is written, the assertion of intellectual heft for a television critic who can't be bothered with fact-checking will surely have to be noted. Could anything more casually sum up the decline? A television critic was given this assignment? With a known (and permissively accepted) reputation for factual errors? To write about Walter Cronkite?

Okay, so you knew you had a problem writer. Now, how did this happen?

The short answer is that a television critic with a history of errors wrote hastily and failed to double-check her work, and editors who should have been vigilant were not.

Got that? If not, hang on for the nuance:

Five editors read the article at different times, but none subjected it to rigorous fact-checking, even after catching two other errors in it. And three editors combined to cause one of the errors themselves.

That, my friends, is one hell of an admission. Perhaps not as bad, though, as this:

On June 19, Alessandra Stanley, a prolific writer much admired by editors for the intellectual heft of her coverage of television, wrote a sum-up of the Cronkite career, to be published after his death.

Stanley said she was writing another article on deadline at the same time and hurriedly produced the appraisal, sending it to her editor with the intention of fact-checking it later. She never did.

“This is my fault,” she said. “There are no excuses.”

Bingo. But that didn't stop Clark Hoyt from including beaucoup excuses in his piece, none of which served the New York Times well. He should have taken a hint from Stanley; this was her fault. She started the chain of errors. But initiating the chain of errors is one thing, exposing the lack of competent professionals at that paper is quite another.

Who ever thought you could see this level of mistake made by the Times on such an important story and one in which it had a month to prepare?

Damn!

Does This Make Me A Geek?

I was completely blown away yesterday by an 80-minute presentation on YouTube from the folks at Google, talking about a new open-source product they will be releasing to the general public later this year. This is the way the product was described at TechCrunch:

Yesterday, during the Google I/O keynote, Google’s VP of Engineering, Vic Gundotra, laid out a grand vision for the direction Google sees the web heading towards with the move to the HTML 5 standard. While we’re not there yet, all the major browser players besides Microsoft are aligned and ready for the next phase, which will include such things as the ability to run 3D games and movies in the browser without additional plug-ins. But Google wants to take it one step further with a brand new method of communication for this new era. It’s called Google Wave.

Everyone uses email and instant messaging on the web now, but imagine if you could tie those two forms of communication together and add a load of functionality on top of it. At its most fundamental form, that’s essentially what Wave is. Developed by brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen and Stephanie Hannon out of Google’s Sydney, Australia offices, Wave was born out of the idea that email and instant messaging, as successful as they still are, were both created a very long time ago. We now have a much more robust web full of content and brimming with a desire to share stuff. Or as Lars Rasumussen put it, “Wave is what email would look like if it were invented today.”

Having seen a lengthy demonstration, as ridiculous as it may sound, I have to agree.

Me too!

It was an absolutely incredible demonstration. If you've never watched an online video presentation for 80 continuous minutes, this is the time to do so. It boggles the mind to try and think of how this is going to change communications. I'm going to embed the video below:

The technological advances these days are coming in ever quicker cycles. You do have to wonder how we're going to handle it all -- or whether we can. I have faith that we can, and we will. That, too, might make me a geek.

“Duty, Honor, Country, Truth, God.”

Vanderleun! What a talented guy. With the Slipstream Media idea, he's attempting to lay out a path forward, a path many of us are seeking and have been seeking.

This needs to be remembered, I do believe:

Summary:

The Media is how America fights its civil wars. In this war at least half the country is both under-served and is painfully aware it is being under-served and lied to. In pop culture parlance, “We’re going to need bigger guns.”

Seen as the 4th branch of government, the unelected and self-selected Mainstream Media, in cultural and political collusion with the present government, knows this and – even as it dies – will do everything it can to prevent the arming of the people with more and better media.

To control the medium is to control the message. And control of the message means control of the hearts, minds, and votes of the people. To bring a better, clearer, and brighter message to the American people, we must have media that, like the Internet itself, “sees censorship as system damage and routes around it.” To accomplish this we must, in a network of small pieces loosely joined together, work to create a pervasive new media across America. Many of these pieces are already in place. Many more need to be created. All need to be joined in an affiliation. Mainstream media already knows how to do this and we must, to paraphrase Abby Hoffman, "Steal Their Book." Media not busy being born is busy dying.

This is the first in a series of articles on how to go about building a new American media; a media composed of newspapers, television, radio, film, music, publishing, and the multi-media capabilities of the Internet; an American media open to all and founded on the five bedrock principles of “Duty, Honor, Country, Truth, God.”

When dinosaurs die large opportunities for growth bloom within the ecosystem. The death of the old media is such an opportunity. It affords a wide range of possibilities to create a new media, a media that runs to the side of the mainstream media, but ultimately supplants it by slipping by it. For now I call it, The Slipstream Media.

By “The Slipstream Media” I mean the use of all forms of media currently in use to inform and persuade the public that "There is another system."

This series of articles will be composed of theoretical and practical observations on the content, forms, principles, funding, and business structures involved in creating a new media network in the rapidly changing marketplace of today and the foreseeable future. It will focus on, in Lenin’s phrase, “What is to be done,” as well as what can be done, and how the creation of the Slipstream Media might be accomplished.

What is to be done.

The Premise: Better ideas require not only better arguments, but also better means of distribution.

To survive and thrive, better ideas also require funding, a sound business model based on the realities of the present, and a path to positive cash flow.

Now, what about that -- huh? Go read the rest, and keep his website near to your thoughts. The man is on to something.