RattlerGator Blog

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.

Anyone Noticing the Dollar-Euro Exchange Rate?

I've always found it curious when Americans use something (anything!) European as a club over the American head. During the Olympics, I noticed this oddity with respect to the Euro versus the Dollar. Especially when discussions arose of Kobe Bryant going to some FIBA club (yeah, right).

It may have been me but it seemed that some folks were quite pleased that this currency seemed to be riding high against the venerable USD.

Don't look now but the Euro is crashing.

So is the British pound.

Well, well, well.

Perhaps the United States of Europe isn't quite so ascendant after all.

Later, Gators.

The Backstory Behind the Invention of Gatorade

I saw this just yesterday on a Gator sports board and thought it and interesting infomercial. The backstory on the legend of Gatorade:

I'm not sure why they felt the need to speed up the film of Larry Smith running for that record Orange Bowl touchdown run -- dude was obviously fast -- but what the hey, Go Gators!

Gatorade has a website with more videos, I presume.

Real Estate Food for Thought

I have no idea who this commenter (Tamquam Leo Rugiens, a Christian/Catholic reference of some sort) is on Wretchard's website but I was struck by the thoughts expressed. So, I wanted to post the whole thing here and if someone knows the context of Tamquam Leo Rugiens, please advise. Also, I don't want to overlook the substance of the post -- I am fascinated by Nassim Nicolas Taleb:

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There is no doubt but that a whole raft of government entities from both the executive and legislative branches have left their fingerprints on the housing bubble and the credit collapse. Whereas it is important in many respects to pursue studies of who did what in order to correctly remedy the situation and prevent it’s recurrence, there is another side to the story that nobody seems to be talking about.

Some time back Real Estate Commissioners across the country began relaxing the requirements for licensing procedures. It got to be fairly easy to become a licensed Real Estate Sales Person or Mortgage Broker. And when the market got hot everybody and his brother saw that there was money to be made in real estate so they jumped in. Many did so without properly understanding or caring about the responsibilities of the job. Many, a surprising number actually, jumped in without bothering with the niggling formality of passing the real estate exam and getting a license. The result was a whole lot of people who presented themselves as real estate professionals who were incompetent and many were simply unscrupulous. The result was that a public that perforce trusted an agent or mortgage broker to safely guide them through the process wound up taking bad advice. And, in the case of mortgage brokers in particular, advice that was not just bad but positively rapacious.

Not a week goes by but that I don’t run into somebody who got an adjustable mortgage who had been promised a 30 year fixed; who paid double or triple or more the going rate for fees; a higher interest rate than what they actually qualified for and were promised; who had gotten a mortgage on the basis of fraudulent information; who had hidden fees rolled into the loan; who bought a house only to discover some major fault that had been hidden at the time of sale; who had paid for services which were never rendered. On and on it goes. The FBI has begun to go after some of these parasites, but meanwhile people are losing their homes as a result of the illegal actions of these unlicensed, improperly educated, improperly supervised so-called professionals. It’s gotten almost as bad as politics, the reprehensible behavior of 90% of these people make the rest of us look bad.

In the case of mortgage brokers especially, the actions of the unscrupulous tends to debase the integrity of the honest ones. “If you’re not willing to fudge the numbers for me so I can get the loan I want, I’ll take by business over to a guy I heard about who will.” When the choice comes down to fudging the numbers or no food on the family table, standards erode.

It is the job of the Real Estate Commissioner and the Corporations Commissioner to set the standards, oversee and enforce them. This they have failed to do. Despite blatant, egregious, widespread and ongoing abuse they have not done their job. They have become useless watch dogs on the public payroll who can neither bark nor bite. Oddly, I don’t see anybody calling them on it.

The first step is to start cleaning up the mess on the ground, never mind what they do in Washington. Until the States are willing to implement and enforce the regulatory, oversight and accountability powers they already possess it will be business as usual even if Congress manages to pull off a miracle and clean up the cesspool in Washington. I personally feel that the penalties for this kind of illegal behavior are too mild. These blood suckers have been enriching themselves at the expense of the public who have in many cases lost their life savings, their credit, their home, their hope for the future, their good name and their native trust in not only their fellow man but in the social institutions which exist to protect them in the first place. The law need teeth. Big teeth in strong, relentless jaws that will not only leave a mark but draw blood and break bones.

First, the unlicensed real estate and mortgage players need to be taken down and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Same goes for licensed people who defraud their clients to enrich themselves.

Secondly, these people, including licensees, should be required to make restitution to the full extent of their assets. That goes for the Commissioners who failed in their trust. The practice of fining someone $1,000 for failures of ethics that cost their clients hundreds of thousands of dollars is baloney. You got paid $20,000 for setting someone up a crooked deal which led your client to lose their $500,000 home which gets auctioned by the bank for $350,000? You pay back the $20,000 plus the $150,000 plus you get the 1099 for the bank’s loss. You did it 175 times between 2001 and 2007? Add it up. Sorry, bankruptcy’s not an option and there’s no statute of limitations.

Third, there should be a Rapid ReFi available through FHA for people with these rotten loans who have been making their payments for two consecutive years. No appraisal required, the barest minimum of paperwork. Just a simple modification of terms to clean up the loan. In most cases people bought the home in the first place because they liked it and wanted to live there and that hasn’t changed.

Homeowners in trouble who contact the bank on their own initiative to try to work out a modification of terms should be able to do so whether or not they currently qualify for the loan under the new rules. Having spent years giving away loans based on insanely flimsy criteria, the banks have now thrown out the baby with the bathwater and are setting the bar so high that you almost have to prove that you don’t need a loan to buy in order to get one. Charge a little higher mortgage insurance to cover the risk. If a bank refuses a reasonable workout with an existing mortgagor they should not be allowed to dump the loan under the provisions of the rescue package, but must keep it.

Finally, REO asset managers need to thoroughly vet the brokers they are using to sell the inventory they’ve taken back. They are in many cases trusting the same crooked brokers and agents who caused so much of the problem in the first place. Unless they do so they will guarantee that the issue will not be solved, but keep on cascading into the future.

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That, my friends, is a very interesting take.

As was the case with the ridiculous responses of nonstop bitching and moaning about the Katrina aftermath, so much of this situation comes back to state and local failures. As the folks closest to the people, and most responsible for protecting ordinary Americans, I always start my focus at this level and not the federal level.

Federally, I always think of the current commercial incessantly played of the motorized wheelchair that is available FOR FREE -- no cost to you -- and I always think . . . well, damn, there has to be a cost to someone. The only someone that can be is the American taxpayer.

In any kind of turnaround, we're going to have to relentlessly attack that kind of thinking. Many of us are sinners in this regard, myself included. The sins may differ and my excuses may be unconvincing to you and vice-versa but, there you have it.

All the more reason why Sarah Palin is the right individual for this time, the right politician we need as one of the primary faces of the Republican Party.

Fantastic Piece by Kenneth Anderson

With so many people perpetrating at this time of uncertainty (those presumed to be learned and otherwise, and yes I realize I may be guilty as well), I found Kenneth Anderson's piece, Prematurely Jumping From the Global Financial Crisis to the End of the World as We Know It, very persuasive. Below is his ending but the whole thing should be read:

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[I]s it not far too early for sweeping geopolitical and historical interpretations?  I had reason recently, in reviewing Paul Kennedy’s 2006 book on the UN (reviewing the recent Spanish translation), to go back and reread Kennedy’s 1987 The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.  Goodness.  If ever the un-wiseness of speaking too soon in sweeping historical terms were on display, that book is it - appearing, famously, as a tract on American decline just before the collapse of the Soviet empire.  Curiously, the monumentally-comic timing of the book seemed to have no impact on Kennedy’s international reputation; it has been translated into at least twenty-three languages because, I venture, the facts of what happened are less important than awaiting the final triumph of hope over experience.  There is a big gap between the indubitably true proposition that no empire has ever survived forever to the proposition that the American empire, if that’s what it is, is falling now, and we know this because … the Dow has crashed a gazillion points and credit default swaps won’t sell and no one knows for sure what a liquidity put is, and it will cost trillions and trillions to put it all back together again.  Ergo, the days of the dollar as reserve currency are numbered, and from there, it is up to Russia and China (and perhaps Venezuela, save for the fall in oil prices) to pick up the pieces of the international economy - pick up the torch, as it were, from the faltering Americans. 

As Richard Posner pointed out acidly in his book on American public intellectuals a decade ago, there is essentially no reputational cost to scholars who make spectacularly wrong public predictions and, for public intellectuals, all publicity is good publicity.  Gary Becker, it seems to me, is a lot more realistic in his assessment of what this all means, in an opinion piece today in the Wall Street Journal.  The euro is not coming to an end, so far as the actual evidence suggests; the dollar’s role is shifting somewhat in relation to the euro, but it will continue as the main reserve currency for the foreseeable future; if massive political-historical changes in hegemony are now underway, they can surely wait a couple of weeks before predicting them (although part of the novelty market in public intellectualism is to be there first, right or even plausibly, or not).  We might at least wait until after the election.

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That, to my way of thinking, is how you deliver meat to the hungry.

It also illuminates (for me, anyway) some of the unhelpful doom-and-gloom among too many Republican public intellectuals when discussing the prospects of this election. Or, on the other end of the strictly conservative spectrum, the feeling among some on the more Jacksonian right wing that all is lost if Barack Obama wins the Presidency.

America will not come to an end if Obama wins. Black people and radicals will not go rampaging through the streets, win or lose. They will be smug as hell, and talk much smack, but that's the way it goes. I don't think we're going to have to deal with that but this is why we have ballot boxes and value the enfranchisement of our vote.

Moving the Money from Wall Street to Main Street

This article in the Washington Post last week may not have garnered much attention but I thought it useful to give it more play

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Banks throughout the United States carried on with the business of making loans yesterday even as federal officials warned again that their industry is on the verge of collapse, suggesting that the overheated language on Capitol Hill may not reflect the reality on many Main Streets.

The industry is resilient despite the struggles of some members. Washington Mutual, a troubled Seattle savings and loan that was among the nation's largest mortgage lenders, yesterday was seized by the government and sold to J.P. Morgan Chase.

At the same time, many smaller banks said they were actually benefiting from the problems on Wall Street. Deposits are flowing in as customers flee riskier investments, and well-qualified borrowers are lining up for loans.

"We collect money from local savers, and we lend it in the local community," said William Dunkelberg, chairman of Liberty Bell Bank in Cherry Hill, N.J. "We're doing fine. There are 9,000 financial institutions out there, and most of them are small and most of them are doing fine."

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Just a small reminder that there is another side to the panic story and it is probably the side with the closer proximity to truth.

Is This the Leading Edge of the Unseen Political Earthquake This November?

Interesting press release from the Americans for Limited Government organization:

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ALG Urges Congress to Amend Bailout to Repeal CRA

October 1st, 2008, Fairfax, VA—Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson in a letter today called upon Congressional leaders to amend the $700 billion financial sector bailout bill to repeal the Community Reinvestment Act, rescind all federal funding for ACORN, dissolve Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and eliminate the dual mandate at the Federal Reserve.

The letter was addressed to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-OH), Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Senator Barack Obama (D-IL), and Senator John McCain (R-AZ).

“As you work to craft a new proposal to bring stability to the financial system, I call on you to include provisions that will go directly toward a remedy for the root cause of this crisis, lax lending standards imposed on the private sector by government edict,” wrote Wilson in his letter.

In particular, Wilson called upon Congress to repeal the Community Reinvestment Act and the 1995 Clinton administration regulations “that forced lending institutions to give loans to individuals lacking the ability to repay the loans.”

“For the tens of millions of families who have played by the rules, paid their bills and lived within their means, it is an insult to now force them to pay for those who did none of these things. Over and above this fact, Congress owes these families a realistic assurance that such lending practices will end, that we are not creating the next financial crisis while attempting to repair the current one,” wrote Wilson.

In a statement, Wilson said, “There has been a culture of cheap credit that has pervaded Washington and our economy. Congress needs to set an example and bring an end to the ‘we’ll pay for it later’ mentality.”

“The proposal that was defeated on Monday would have raised the national debt ceiling to $11.3 trillion. Have we learned nothing from our mistakes? Congress’ solution to getting the financial sector out of debt is to borrow yet more money. There is something simply insane about this approach,” Wilson added.

“And since Congress does seem to have its heart set on doing something, they might as well do the right thing and reshape the way America approaches credit. We need honest credit, not easy credit.”

Wilson also called for an end to all federal funding for the extremist organization, ACORN. “There can be no excuse for activist organizations such as ACORN receiving large payments of public funds. The work of this organization is now under investigation in numerous states. Their involvement in pushing sub-prime mortgages onto lending institutions and unwitting borrowers is well documented. It is an outrage to the taxpayers to fund such groups,” wrote Wilson.

In his statement Wilson called upon Americans to sign a petition against ACORN. “Concerned citizens should visit StopAcorn.org to sign our petition and let Congress know they do not want any more taxpayer funds going to this corrupt organization.”

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There's something seriously bubbling out in America that's whizzing right by D.C. and Wall Street. The only remaining question is will it coalesce by the time the first Tuesday in November rolls around?

Another Take on Manufacturing A Crisis

First, I didn't see the first debate last night so until I read a transcript or see some snippets I'll likely have little to say about it. My experience is that people usually see what they want to see in those things. As long as Jim Lehrer was fairly neutral, I'll be satisfied.

Apparently, however, I spoke too soon in an earlier post and the Wall Street Rescue is a manufactured crisis (of a sort) after all:

The graphics display at a rapid rate, to be sure, but it does cut to the chase.