R. Scott Appleby Lays an Egg

A few nights ago, I attended a lecture at UCSD given by Scott Appleby entitled "What Can Muslims & Catholics Teach One Another & the World." As a Catholic, it was an incredibly depressing and embarrassing talk.

Appleby is a history professor of some note at Notre Dame. Notre Dame being the foremost Catholic educational institution in the country, I was hoping for a lot more than I got. Professor Appleby was there as a representative of my faith and one of our most respected Universities and he let us down badly.

First off, his talk was so poorly composed that it was nearly incoherent. Two thirds of the way through, I was still trying to figure out where he was going with it.

Second, one of his key concepts - that Catholics and Muslims need to engage in theological conversation* - was blown out of the water in one of the first questions at the end when a Muslim fellow stood up and told him that the Koran was the word of God and that was the end of that discussion right there. On the way home from the lecture, my host for the evening expounded at length on how Muslim students in his class agree with that concept and that questioning the Koran was a distinct no-no. If one side takes its text as The Unquestioned Truth then discussions aren't going to be discussions at all, but lectures instead.

Third, the good professor trotted out his progressive bona fides right at the start of the talk and snarked about "right-wing talk show hosts" fanning the flames of religious paranoia. By coincidence, I had tuned in to Hugh Hewitt that evening on my way home from work before the talk and listened to his interview of Lawrence Wright. Here's a tidbit.

We have a population of about two and a half million Muslims in this country. But the truth is, our Muslims in this country, we’re so blessed by this community, it’s so much better off than, it’s the wealthiest Muslim community in the entire world, Saudi Arabia included. They make about as much money as the average American, they’re just as likely to go to college or graduate school as the average American, far less likely to go to prison.

Wow, that's some pretty serious paranoia. Err, maybe not. Hugh is as big a Republican honk as there is out there. It's a good bet that Professor Appleby has never met him. The audience of his lecture all sniggered sagely when Scott condescendingly sneered at Hugh and his peers. So much for dialog with one's opponents. Pathetic.

Fourth, Scott missed the mark badly in not discussing how the US military has contributed to the conversation between religions. The Abraham Lincoln Battlegroup probably did more for Christian - Muslim relations in one month than that entire room of academics will do in their lives. Our last several wars have been fought in defense of Muslims and we've accomplished a lot despite our attempts to inflict torture and atrocities on them.

Indian Ocean (Mar. 14, 2005) - An elderly Indonesian patient shows her sincere appreciation to a "Project HOPE" volunteer by kissing her hand and saying a prayer for her as she waits for her helicopter flight back to Banda Aceh, Sumatra, Indonesia, upon discharge from the Military Sealift Command (MSC) hospital ship USNS Mercy (T-AH 19). U.S. Navy photo by Photographer's Mate 2nd Class Jeffery Russell
Fourth, the talk ended with a paean to President Obama. That in itself is no issue, partisans will be partisans, but his discussion of Obama seemed Messianic to me. As he gushed, I mentally substituted "Jesus Christ" for "President Obama" and concluded that if the talk had been given 2000 years ago in the Middle East, not much would have changed. It was creepy to hear a professor touted as a Catholic thinker praise Obama as if he were the second coming of Christ. The good professor thought that President Obama had indeed earned the Nobel Peace Prize and trotted out the Cairo speech as a perfect example of what Obama is trying to accomplish. I'll leave it to Victor Davis Hanson to wreak havoc on that particular bit of Obama narcissism. Suffice it to say that it was embarrassing to hear a history professor from Notre Dame gush about such a dreadfully historically inaccurate speech.

But this is still missing the point. It's not that the professor's talk was flawed, it's that he missed the crucial point of what Catholics and Muslims have to teach the world - the denial of one's self in the pursuit of a holy life serving the will of God. As the talk went on, I wondered if Scott ever went to Mass any more, he missed the point of Catholicism that badly.

It's a good bet that the majority of the audience was secular and the secular world has much to learn from Catholics and Muslims. The greatest mass murderers of all time were secular - Mao, Stalin and Hitler (even if some of them are our favorite political philosophers). The secular world has brought us sex without commitment which has filled our prisons and impoverished more people than any corporate fatcat. The secular world is filled with taking without earning, a viewpoint that is at the heart of President Obama's domestic policies. (See also: debt, $1,400,000,000,000 of.)

As I sat there, I wondered what was going on in the heads of the academics around me. I doubted many of them understood in their hearts the meaning of my Catholic faith and that of the Muslim fellow in the audience. They had all gathered to listen to a Catholic historian from the premiere Catholic university in the country tell them what they could learn from Catholics and Muslims. It turned out that from him, they couldn't learn much at all.

* - At least I think that was one of his key concepts. The talk was such a disorganized hodgepodge of intellectual odds and ends that it was difficult to figure out just what he was trying to say.

Doomed

Today, Wake is playing Navy in football. They're doomed. Wake will always be behind Navy.

So What's the Big Deal About Fox News?

Joe Klein's panties are in a wad.

Let me be precise here: Fox News peddles a fair amount of hateful crap. Some of it borders on sedition. Much of it is flat out untrue.

But I don't understand why the White House would give such poisonous helium balloons as Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity the opportunity for still greater spasms of self-inflation by declaring war on Fox.

If the problem is that stories bloated far beyond their actual importance--ACORN's corruption, Van Jones's radical past--are in danger of leaching out of the Fox hothouse into the general media, then perhaps the Administration should be a bit more diligent about whom it hires and whom it funds.

If the problem is broader--that Fox News spreads seditious lies to its demographic sliver of an audience--the Administration should probably be stoic: the wingnuts will always be with us.

Read more: http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2009/10/23/outfoxed/#ixzz0UriKziNp

I think Joey needs to grab a couple of beers and watch some NFL this weekend. Joe goes on to advise the Administration to stop paying attention to Fox News, but it's couched in such enraged, distraught rhetoric that it's like he's screaming "there is no FIRE!" in a crowded theater.

What's the big deal here? I admit, I don't watch the news or read the newspapers any more, so I might be missing something, but from what little I've seen, I don't think that Fox is any more seditious or poisonous than anyone else. To give Joe some credit, he did put his finger on the real issue - Fox did, in fact, find some nuggets of truth. Van Jones was a racist kook and Anita Dunn really did find intellectual guidance in the greatest mass murderer of all time. In a world where the phrase "nappy-headed hos" is enough to temporarily trash a career, you'd think that showering praise on a guy who beat Hitler and Stalin going away would be something that would override little Joey's Wingnut Alarm-O-Meter.

I guess not. I guess that ideological purity beats real life. In the end, that's what Joe's spasms of rage against Fox seem like - proof to his "progressive" friends that he's just committed to The Cause as they are.

Maybe Joey needs to get a life.

On Rattlesnakes as Pets

Rattlesnakes do not make good pets. They're not terribly clever animals and when aroused can deliver a painful, envenomed bite. Bringing one home to live with you is a bad idea.

Not something to take home for your little girl to play with.
Similarly, while it may seem to make sense at first, bringing in a statist government is probably a bad idea if you're big business. B-Daddy has waxed supportive of the Obama Administration's efforts to restrict executive pay and, being a fellow who believes that people should have to deal with the consequences of their actions, I have to agree.

These guys loaded up on risk like there was no tomorrow and expected the Fed and the Congress to bail them out, which institutions promptly obliged. Where are the consequences that will change future behavior? Further, I hope this accelerates the pay back of the TARP/porkulus money, and stops further bleeding from the Treasury on this front. This is predatory government, when big special interests capture the government institutions that supposedly regulate them.

Emphasis mine.

The problem with electing a Juan Peron clone is that they're, well, fascist. Mr. Big Business does indeed get to keep his private property, but only at the sufference of the fascist leader's government. In this case, Big Business supported this guy, slorped down money the government borrowed from others and now they're finding themselves shackled by that same government.

Others have fussed that this is a breach of the rule of law, but that hardly matters unless those executives want to bring suit against the government for breach of contract. Given that many of their jobs exist only because the government has handed them wads of cash, I hardly think that's likely. Besides, the rule of law wasn't what they wanted in the first place, they wanted the cash and to place the economy in stasis so that all those icky, smaller, growing competitors could be squashed through government action. Now that their pay is being cut and capped, it's a little too late to fuss about it.

That's what you get when you decided to keep a rattlesnake as a pet.

Well, This Hardly Comes as a Surprise

Dogs are bad for the planet.

The eco-pawprint of a pet dog is twice that of a 4.6-litre Land Cruiser driven 10,000 kilometres a year, researchers have found ...

"If you have a German shepherd or similar-sized dog, for example, its impact every year is exactly the same as driving a large car around," Brenda Vale said.

"A lot of people worry about having SUVs but they don't worry about having Alsatians and what we are saying is, well, maybe you should be because the environmental impact ... is comparable."

Dogs. Ugh.

Alternate take: This problem is easily solved by exiling the appropriate number of noisy environmentalist wackos to live in the pastoral squalor of Somalia. The resultant reduction in aggregate carbon footprint will more than pay for Bodie the Wonder Dog and his canine friends.

Quote of the Day

... comes from Mark Steyn.

Don't expect too much from 2010. On present form, even if Obamacare leads to ebola outbreaks in 43 states, the GOP will still manage to screw it up.

Cheezburger of the Day

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Praise Jesus!

I have long envied my friend's Arrooophone (iPhone). I've got a Blackberry Curve and while it does what I need to do adequately, it just can't compete with the Arrooophone. I've seen these ads and wondered what the fuss was all about.

(Why, yes, I do live in a cave, why do you ask?)

Anyway, the Droid is a Motorola phone running Google's Android operating system and it will be available on my Verizon network. I just read a bunch of reviews which all say something like this one.

Just about anyone who has come in contact with the phone can’t stop talking about it. And from what we hear, they have good reason.

The phone is a three-way effort between Motorola, Verizon and Google. It looks a lot like the iPhone, and may even be as thin or thinner than the iPhone 3GS. It also has two key advantages over the iPhone – a slide out physical keyboard, and use of the Verizon network ...

The Droid poses a different and more significant challenge to the iPhone than any other phone to date ... According to people who’ve handled the device, the Droid is the most sophisticated mobile device to hit the market to date from a hardware standpoint.

There was another that said something to the effect of "Don't be surprised if you see people leaving the iPhone for the Droid."

I can't wait.

A Link That Kelly Will Like

I saw this over at our Pater of Prowling and immediately thought of our Missionary to the Frozen, Northern Wastelands.

Comparing Mathematics to Society

... I argue that society is far more complicated and unpredictable than mathematics and engineering.

A few days ago, I posted the question, what would happen if we all agreed that 3=407? All manner of strange results would occur. Some would be good - your bank account might jump by $404 on some random day - and some would be bad - the bridge you drove across could collapse as it was designed for 3,000 pounds of load, not 407,000.

The point is that equating two things that are not even remotely equal has a ripple effect across everything it touches.

So as American society moves closer and closer to gay marriage and we all rush to show how open-minded we are by equating homosexuals and heterosexuals, what will be the end result? How can anyone logically predict it? After all, the entire human race is derived from hetero relationships and zero percent of the human race is derived from homosexual ones.

We are moving to the point where we will say this:

The source of all humanity = the source of none of humanity.

3 will indeed equal 407 in our world. And after that ... who knows?

Cheezburger of the Day

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Just Thought You'd Like to Know

Our Maximum Leader just ralphed right into her water dish. A perfect bulls-eye!

Ewwwwww.

Liberal Arts Degrees Are Fine, But ...

... some companies are reaching out to foreign students to find workers.

I had a somewhat disturbing conversation yesterday with Steve Fussell, the senior VP of human resources at pharmaceutical maker Abbott. His basic message, which I may pursue in a column down the road, was that Abbott is going to be hiring tons of people for high-paying jobs over the next decade, but not many of them will be Americans because we study the wrong things in college and we're not willing to work overseas.

The key quotes:
1) "I hate to say we don't have the world's best universities. We may have the best minds, the best liberal arts education. The problem is it doesn't match the work anymore." (That is to say, not enough students are getting science and math degrees.)

This echoes what I heard when I visited the University of Houston to give a talk. I asked the professors (science and engineering disciplines all) why they didn't have American grad students. They told me they didn't get many applications from American kids, it was mostly from foreigners. They took what they could get.

Rage Is Expensive

There's been a lot of electrons spilled over the Obama Administration's obsession with Fox News and I'm sure I don't have anything original to say on it, but I just had to add my $0.02.

Huh?

I don't understand it at all. So a news outlet is against you - so what? It happens all the time to politicians. MSNBC couldn't have been more anti-Bush if it had photoshopped devil horns on him in every clip it showed. Again, so what?

Another point - did anyone in the administration game this all the way out to the end? Could they find any example anywhere in the history of the country where a politician defeated a news outlet? This wasn't picking a fight, this was deliberately driving your car into a brick wall.

The only explanation I can think of is blind rage, the same kind of blind rage the left expresses for Sarah Palin. There couldn't have been any cost-benefits trade-offs done for this one because I don't see how anyone could have listed anything in the benefits column. It's mindless.

Our Monastery of Miscellaneous Musings has more.

A Book Recommendation for Anita Dunn

I think that Obama's communications director, Anita Dunn, might want to read Hungry Ghosts before she prattles praise about Chairman Mao again.

This first authoritative expose of the 1958-1962 famine prompted by China's collectivization plan, "The Great Leap Forward," comes at a time when the cult of Mao is alive and well inside China, and while agents of Chinese influence are able to arrange audiences with a President. Via his painstaking research and reporting that included two treks through interior Chinese provinces, Becker tells how the famine occurred because ill-trained peasants were forced to undertake a gigantic and centralized industrial and agricultural expansion. The new factories, canals, and irrigation systems failed spectacularly, and in contrast to propaganda boasts of having economically outstripped the U.S., when in reality the populace was driven by starvation to cannibalism, slavery, and madness.

That Mao. What a joker!

The Catican Has Expanded

... it's now the Catican Compound.

The Catican is the name that our Holy Scribe, Niall Mor, gave to the home we made for our Maximum Leader in the garage. To recap, my new wife and one of her sons are allergic to cats. Having our Maximum Leader live in the garage and have access to the backyard seemed like a good compromise. As fitting a Maximum Leader, however, we've recently put in new fencing that adds the entire front yard to her domain and she's managed to claim most of the interior of the house by simply wandering in when the doors are open and finding her way into cozy places to sleep.

Click on the image for a truly regal version.

The linen closet makes a wonderful spot for a nap.

The Irish Bagpiper

I got this gem in my email today from my mom and thought you would like it.

As a bagpiper, I was asked by a funeral director to play at a graveside service for a homeless man who had no family or friends. The funeral was to be held at a cemetery in the remote countryside and this man would be the first to be laid to rest there.

As I was not familiar with the backwoods area, I became lost and being a typical man, did not stop for directions. I finally arrived an hour late. I saw the backhoe and the crew who were eating lunch but the hearse was nowhere in sight.

I apologized to the workers for my tardiness and stepped to the side of the open grave where I saw the vault lid already in place.

I assured the workers I would not hold them up for long but this was the proper thing to do. The workers gathered around, still eating their lunch. I played out my heart and soul.

As I played the workers began to weep. I played and I played like I'd never played before, from Going Home and The Lord is My Shepherd to Flowers of the Forest . I closed the lengthy session with Amazing Grace and walked to my car..

As I was opening the door and taking off my coat, I overheard one of the workers saying to another, "Sweet Jeezuz, Mary'n Joseph, I never seen nothin' like that before and I've been putting in septic tanks for twenty years."

A Hypothetical Math Question

What would happen if we all decided that 3 = 407? That is, if whenever we found the number 3 (not just the digit), we could replace it freely with the number 407 and vice versa. We wouldn't change the times table or addition or subtraction facts explicitly, we just decided that 3 = 407.

What would happen? Would you notice?

Blogworld 09 - Creating Great Visuals

David Armano gave a talk on adding cool stuff to your blog post. The description can be found here. Here are my notes:

• "The eyes are not reponsible when the mind does the seeing" - Publilius Syrus.


• Dave went through a lot of good examples of how important visuals are to conveying information.


• It's important to present information in a very simple way so that people can grasp the concept immediately. It's a messy process to get to a simple diagram, but don't worry about that. The process to get to simplicity is complex. Simple visuals have the ability to grab your attention.


• Mindmap got a plug. I've always enjoyed mind manager, but I think it's got some serious limitations when it comes to posting information on the web.


• 6 steps to getting visual.


1. Empathize: See the world as a child.


2. Memorize: Commit thoughts to memory. Draw out your ideas.


3. Analyze: Take a step back.


4. Synthesize: Filter signal from noise. This is crucial and it's where most people fail.


5. Visualize: See it, then do it. David uses Adobe Illustrator to do his visuals.


6. Materialize: Make it tangible, make it stick. Make it something that grabs people and they take note of what you created.
• Dave went through a concrete example of a visual he made for HiveMind that went through these steps. It was excellent, but difficult to replicate here.


• The wrong question is what software he uses - Adobe Illustrator, the right question is how he goes through the process of developing the visuals. He admitted that Adobe Illustrator has a steep learning curve. He claimed he could have done the HiveMind graphic in Gliffy or PowerPoint as well.


• He recommended Tufte's Envisioning Information, Gray's Selling to the VP of No and Krug's Don't Make Me Think.

Here, David is preparing to take a photo of the audience, probably to use it as a great visual later on!

Blogworld 09 - Real Time Web

Louis Gray gave a talk on real-time web applications and their growth. The information about the talk can be found here. My notes:

• Why real time now? There are lots and lots of free tools out there available to us. We have shorter attention spans and these tools cater to that.


• The real time tools can be better than Google because you can see real-time feedback. Consider the difference between using Google to search for a movie review and searching Twitter for the same movie and seeing tiny reviewlets.


• FriendFeed is another example of the real-time web.


• Louis is going through a series of online tools that allow you to do this. The benefit to this is that it becomes closer and closer to a normal, face-to-face conversation instead of the equivalent of the postal service.


• Pingie allows you to get mobile phone alerts from your feeds instantly so that you can react instantly if that's important to you. It sounds like something that would be important to Public Affairs folks for companies that could get attacked out in the blogosphere / twittersphere.


• The real-time web is eliminating the need for hitting the refresh button.


• Google Wave is at the early stages of this. I think this is Google's effort to stake out a big part in the real-time web. It was generally agreed in the room that Google Wave's implementation wasn't great, but that it's potential is enormous.


• The other great thing about this is that you get tons of information fed to you without killing your email inbox. If your company limits the size of your inbox, real-time web sharing tools like Google Wave completely circumvents these problems.

Louis Gray

Blogworld 09 - Friday Keynote - The State of the Blogosphere

Richard Jalichandra of Technorati gave the opening keynote on Friday. You can see the details about the presentation here. What follows are my own notes from the talk.

• The state of the Blogosphere is STRONG! (The crowd goes wild!) Whoohoo!


• There's the rise of a class of professional bloggers. Mainstream media folks are starting to emulate the writing styles of bloggers. Citizen-journalism is growing as is blog readership.


• Technorati is rolling out a new look in the very near future.


• Richard recapitulated his talk from last year by way of introduction to the rest of his talk.


• This talk will focus on the rise of the class of professional bloggers.


• There's been a big growth in bloggers getting paid at least partially for their work. Richard showed a pie chart of his data that indicated that 72% of his respondents are just hobbyists. He doesn't have a truly gigantic sample size, so I would bet that the percentage of bloggers getting paid is probably smaller than he says. In any case, the number of people getting paid for their blogging is growing. Within the set of those getting paid are those that find business opportunities because of their blogging. That would then include the realtors we heard from yesterday who blog to make connections, but don't get directly paid for their blogging.


• Microblogging does not seem to be a threat to normal blogs. Of those who said they blogged less, only 1/3 of them said it was because they could microblog.


• A lot of unsurprising stats followed - people are taking blogs more seriously, more people are getting their news from blogs, lots of journalists and former journalists now blog and so forth.

I'm going to quit at this point. The theme here is that there is a flow of revenue and impact into the Blogosphere. Because of the negligible barrier to entry for publishing on a blog, there doesn't seem to be much of a reason to expect this to slow down.

I've got a nice photo of Richard, but I'll have to wait until I've got a table to hook up my camera. I'm going to shut down now to save my laptop battery.

Blogworld 09 - The Opening Night Party

... it rocked. See for yourself.

Blogworld 09 - How to Get Really Huge in the Blogosphere

I've been looking forward to this one. It's being given by Ben Huh, the fellow who runs I Can Has Cheezburger. He wants to help us all become corporate fatcats.

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Here are my notes.

• In order to be huge, you have to be very tightly focused. As things went on, Ben discovered that he was one of the biggest obstacles to growth because he kept trying to scatter their focus and chase interesting things.


• Their mission statement is very simple - we want to make you happy for 5 minutes a day. By making it clear and tight, they know what they're about.


• He highly prioritizes his actions and focuses on what he would do if he could only worked 1 hour a day, 2 hours a day, 4 hours a day and so forth. It's an interesting way to get at your priorities.


• They make their business processes as simple as possible.


• The more complicated you make things, the more you slow down your growth.


• They use WordPress as their online content management system. They don't see it as a blog, but instead as a communications system. They also use Skype for communications. They use cloud services to host their data - they don't want to get involved in hosting problems.


• Put your money where you're going to get a return. They don't have a phone system, they do it all through the Internet.


• All of this simplicity frees you up to spend your time focusing on improving the things that make you unique and successful.

Ben's talk was strongly reminiscent of Peter Drucker's work and most of the other business books I've read. Ben does the important stuff with passion and dedication and focus. This was an awesome talk.

Blogworld 09 Thursday Afternoon Keynote - Sponsored Blogging

As an occasional user of Pay Per Post, this talk was of particular interest to me. Jeremiah Owyang was the moderator and the panelists were Ted Murphy from Izea, Jennifer Lezio (sp?), Lisa Baradokin (lawyer, spelling?) and Wendy Piersall a blogging network owner that uses sponsored conversations. You can find detail about this session here.

The panel is being billed as a debate on this topic, but I'm not quite sure I follow why there's a debate in the first place. It's not like when you use Izea to make money on a pay-per-post you don't let eveyone know you're doing it. When they took a quick show of hands poll in the room, about 70% of the room were in favor and 5% were against it. The rest were undecided. Here are my notes from the conversation.

• Lisa the lawyer discussed the recent changes in FTC regulations. She claimed the regulations are pretty simple and I blogged about them here.


• Product placement and similar sponsored conversations has been going on for years


• Jennifer is against it because they're not for everyone. My initial reaction is who is she to decide who should do it and who shouldn't? She's playing the nanny, worrying about others' reputations. I can worry about my own branding, thank you very much.


• Wendy agrees that it isn't for everyone. Again, who is Wendy to tell me what I can or can't do?


• Wendy's view of herself is much larger than she really is. Wendy had a sponsored conversation! Great Caesar's Ghost! Now how will I ever manage to change the oil in my car?


• Ted supports sponsored conversations, but has a strong position about declaring that such things are happening.


• Jennifer is bothered by our relationships with our readers, afraid that we're making money off of our audiences by our sponsored conversations. Her issue is do you want to be a spokemodel or a thought leader? She claims you can't do both. I'm glad she's worried about me.


• Wendy wrote about some product or another and the link she had used to the product site had been sold and it now pointed to a pr0n site. Um, so what?


• I'm getting ticked off now. CNN was licking the sweat off of Saddam Hussein's balls so they could have access within Iraq, so now we've all got to be like them? 60 Minutes knowingly libeled General Westmoreland, but they're not a sponsored site? Dan Rather spreads absolute crap from forged documents about George Bush trying to get John Kerry elected and he's the one we should emulate?


• The gist of it is that Wendy and Jennifer want to look over my shoulder as I write. They dont seem to find their own lives sufficiently interesting to fill their days. Neither do I.


• If these dingbats had ruled the place in 1840, the US's western border would still be in Indiana.

Blogworld 09 - Integrating Media Into the "One Site"

The presentation has already begun, so this link to the description of this talk will have to do for an intro.

My takes:

• Richard Nicolay is the speaker. The presentation is aimed at real estate sites, but it's applicable to all.


• The website is all about creating relationships and the way the site looks is part of how you brand yourself.


• As long as you keep the key elements of your site as you change it, your visitors will be able to easily adapt to the changes.


• Richard spent a lot of time discussing Posterous. Posterous is a lightweight blogging tool that allows you to mix all kinds of media. Posterous even works with Blogger! Way cool. I may need to try this from my Blackberry. The presentation is more of a demo than a standard presentation so if I want to share this with you, I'll have to use Posterous myself and report back.


• Rich is a big WordPress user and has another cool tool - Lifestream. Lifestream is a WordPress plugin for displaying feeds on your site. Looks interesting, but not applicable to everyone.

OK, this is a pretty cool session, but he's really just getting into his favorite tools and gadgets. What it shows is that there are lots of tools out there that allow you to integrate multiple streams and feeds into your blog or website so that you retain the look and feel.

Blogworld 09 - Social Media Success Stories

I had to pop over to my work network for a second, so I'm coming back late to this one. Here are the details about this session. What follows are my notes.

• Brian Wiegand of Alice.com is using Social Media to build a base of fanatics by connecting to MommyBloggers. They sell consumer products like toilet paper and cosmetics. They started something like 16 weeks ago(?) and have already seen a lot of interactions and traffic from their efforts.


• Frank Eliason of Comcast Cares is passionate about what he does. You have to put your most passionate people out there as bloggers. Frank isn't passionate about their product line, he's passionate about customers. Companies need to teach their employees to be out in the social media world. Frank is big on one-tweet resolution. Customers tweet their problems and Comcast jumps in and tries to fix it after only a single tweet. Different tools are good for different things. Twitter is great for listening to the customers talk between themselves. Forums are used to allow customers to form communities around your products. Every space has its own community aspect. Facebook is a great place for meeting people you already know, not so good for meeting people you don't know.


• Samantha Gammell of Oscar Meyer uses social networking to help custoemrs interact with the WeinerMobile. Seriously. The WeinerMobile is a marketing vehicle. The used social media to help for communities of the nuts who love the WeinerMobile. They use their blog to keep people up to date on what the 6 WeinerMobiles are doing.


• Justin Levy Caminito Argentinean Steakhouse bought into the company a while back. The company didn't have brand recognition as a small steakhouse outside Boston. When he took over, the restaurant was losing money. Justin immediately cut their advertising budget and went to social media. His goal was to own the front page of Google on search terms related to his restaurant. He figured that his customers found him through Google searches. In the first month of trying this, they were making a profit again because of the increased customer traffic.

The theme of this session was using social media to interact with and create communities formed around your products.

The Social Media Success Stories panel.

Blogworld 09 - Social Media ROI

OK, the first keynote went well, now it's time for the first panel session. This one is populated by real estate folks who are using social media to drum up business. You can find out the details of the session here. Here are my quick notes.

• Jim Marks: Define ROI - traditional financial measures can be used - how much money do you generate from social media. A more difficult measure is Return on Influence.

Mike Simonsen - He takes the attitude that Return on Influence is more important.

• Sherry Chris sees the Return on Influence as important and uses social media for branding. From Web 2.0 Expo, Aaron Kim had a better take on this. Much more concrete.


• Jim is sticking with the revenue side of this. Aaron Kim would agree.


• Mike is playing the goodwill and karma cards.


• Dan Green is hitting some good notes. Time invested in social media is time not spent doing other things.


• Sherry is seeing opportunities and connections being made because of her participation on the social media sites. It's an echo of what Laura said in the first keynote.


• Dan spends about 132 minutes a day on social media marketing. He figures his hourly wage for blogging is $245 an hour after taking into account the sales he has made because of connections he made on line. It took Dan 5 years to get to this point. It took him 18 months to get his first lead with social media.


• Jim maintains that you must have a strategy to your social media efforts and you must keep track of the time and effort you invest.


• Rob Hahn, the moderator, says if you can't measure it, you don't have a strategy. Turning the question on its head, the question is when do you decide to quit?


• Jim maintains that the question is over, blogs are worthwhile.


• What should you measure? Dan: inbound inquiries. Mike: unique visitors to your site. Sherry: sales calls that come from the social media sites. Jim: traffic and conversion are the only two to measure.


• A questioner brings up a good point - we can measure ROI on this because it's on a computer while the rest of the things we do during the day aren't measured. Social media sure beats sitting around in the office and playing solitaire.


• How do you improve your social media ROI? Jim: figure out how to get people to follow your links from Twitter to your blog which is where you'll convert visitors to business. Sherry: don't do the same thing on every site. Each site is very different. Mike: Be informative and interesting in order to make connections. Dan: Market to the people who are predisposed to buy from you. Don't market to Google, market to the people who already know you. The word of mouth from supporters will bring you business.


• Jim is a big fan of the hand-written note for cementing relationships. Rob agreed and quipped that the next big social media invention will be the pen and paper.

Jim Marks, a hard-nosed business man, made some great points.

Blogworld 09 - Thursday Keynote Crowd

It's standing room only at the opening keynote. It's much bigger this year than it was last year and last year it was big. I could see this outgrowing the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Blogworld 09 - Thursday Keynote - Laura Fitton

OK, here we go! Can a little tuxedo cat keep up with a steady stream of presentations and keynotes and blog through the day? You bet! Caffeine ingested, power cord plugged into the wall, wireless connection made, let's boogie!

After some admin notes from our Vicar of Victory, Laura's on. Here are the key points from what she had to say.

Rick Calvert, a man who rocks.

• Laura claims her life was totally changed by Twitter. She was a stay-at-home mom who decided to restart her consulting business. Or something like that. I was still setting things up, so I missed some of her intro.


• She's jazzed by Twitter's ability to connect people all across the world. In fact, if you're not tweeting and connecting, you're cheating the rest of the world of your talents.


• Mentoring is a key part of all of this. By making these connections, we now have the ability to mentor people all across the World. There are things you can do that other people need and want to learn.


• What people will do for love is what drives her.


• Umair Haque is referenced.


• If you don't connect, you cheat the rest of the world of your talents and something awesome won't happen that would have had you connected. Similarly, if you don't connect, you cut yourself off from all kinds of support and love from others.


• Laura's really energetic and fun, but you don't have to be, all you need to do is connect and make yourself available to others and others available to you.


• Laura's formed a group from these connections that is doing awesome things. Well, more wacky and fun than awesome to me, but still, it's way cool what she's done with her connections.


• What is your superpower?

What she's not saying, but what is the theme of the talk is using these new tools like blogging and Twitter and Facebook to increase the opportunities available to you. From there, it's a matter of having a positive attitude to sieze these opportunities. Twitter and blogs haven't changed what it takes to provide water supplies to the city of Des Moines, the physical acts of producing things and services still exist, but the opportunities available for you to participate and contribute in things all over the world will leap out at you and beg you to grab them if you just make the decision to connect.

Laura is a fun speaker and makes you feel good.
Update: Here are some more points.

• Twitter disrupts isolation.


• Twitter gives us a gloabl sensing the detecting system. The ability to follow the Iranian protests was a good example of this.


• My take: She talks a lot about how things change with the connections from Twitter, but the big things that are coming right down on top of us - the penalties we pay for thinking we can have things we haven't earned - might not be tractable through things like Twitter. On the other hand, the medium is a way to influence society. Hmmm ...


• Don't repress yourself! Share what you're doing so mighty forces of connections can come to your aid!


• She used the example of Iran, but that's not exactly a success story. The protestors got shot and the Obama Administration stood by with their thumbs in their mouths.


• Laura is a wonderful altruist. Her four key words are Listen, Learn, Care, Serve. Amen, Laura.

Blogworld Warmups

We just sat down in the back of the room for the first keynote speech of Blogworld Expo. We've staked out the strategic high ground - we're right next to the power outlets. We met Rick Calvert, our Vicar of Victory, the fellow who runs the show and who hooked us up with free passes this year*. He told us that this year's show already has more people registered than any of the previous shows.

This should be way cool. More blogging to follow.

* - My employer is changing accounting systems. All financial transactions are paralyzed, so this trip is not being paid for by work.

An Inauspicious Start

OK, so here we are in Vegas, just about to walk over to the Convention Center and go to Blogworld. It all seems so easy ...

Everything packed? Check!
Alarm went off in time? Check!
Wander into the bathroom - do they have an in-room coffee maker? Check!
Two foil pouches of coffee? Check!
Take a look at the first one - decaf. Hmm, well, we had a 50-50 chance of getting it right the first time, so let's just open the second, which is ... also decaf!

Aaaaaaaaaaauuuuuuuuuuuuuggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Road Trip to Blogworld!

We're heading for Vegas, baby! A friend and I are on our way to Blogworld Expo, riding in the world-famous FredMobile*. I'll be blogging from there to let you know what's going on. If you're going to be there and you want to meet up or you'd just like me to try and find some people or get some questions answered, leave me a comment and we'll do our best to get you what you want.

Look out, Vegas, here comes the FredMobile!
* - It may not actually be world famous.

What Would You Be Doing If You Weren't Blogging?

... or spending time reading blogs?

I started The Scratching Post in February of 2006 with the intent to make money with it. I had just gone through a prolonged family tragedy that wiped me out financially. I was struggling to the point that it took me a month to save up the $15 entrance fee to the landfill so I could dump some rubbish from my yard. I had time in odd increments and wondered what I could do with that time to make money. I figured blogging might work out. I'd read that you could make some money with advertising on your blog, so off I went, blogging away.

That turned out to be a waste of time. My hourly wage was practically zero and I found I couldn't force myself to do the one key thing you need to do to succeed - focus on one topic. I made $100 from AdSense and probably another $100 or so from Pay Per Post before I quit trying to make money with the blog, but I kept writing.

So what else could I have done? Up until a few days ago, I had figured the choice I made was about as good as any when a stray thought came into my head. What if I had decided to moonlight as a street performer instead? Way back when, I used to play the flute. With the dedication I gave this blog, I could have been skilled enough to come up with a good 45-minute set list and would have made a lot more playing with my flute case out at Balboa Park or somewhere like that. That effort would have led to opportunities to play elsewhere, just like the research and effort on this blog has led to career opportunities in the life I did choose.

I've always loved Debussy.
So how about you? What would you have done had you decided not to blog or spend time reading blogs?

Dear Neal Gabler, Feel Free To Leave

... your departure would undoubtedly make America an even better place.

Multiculturalist Neal wrote today on boston.com that the US is not exceptional.

There is nothing wrong with self-satisfaction or national pride. But the incessant trumpeting of our national superiority to every other country in the world is more than just off-putting and insulting. It is infantile, like the vaunting of a schoolyard bully that his Dad is better than your Dad. It is wrong. And it might be dangerous both to ourselves and to the rest of the world.

Err, yes. Dangerous. I'm sure of that. I mean, look how dangerous we've been so far, what with our garrisons of troups in Paris, Marseilles and Lyon of Occupied France. And think of how we've turned all of Kyoto into one giant slave-labor camp, devoted to the manufacture of Snuggies.

How many more Japanese laborers must we kill to manufacture cuddly warmth so we can watch "Dancing with the Stars" in comfort?
I'm sorry. I accidentally entered poor Neal's delusionary world for a moment there. The truth of the matter, at least for my family tree, is that my ancestors escaped some pretty lousy situations to get here. We thrived while the ones we left behind didn't. Despite mountains of evidence, Neal still insists on equality between nations. Neal needs to study some statistical analysis before he writes about this again. To suggest we're equivalent to, say, Ghana or Bosnia or even mighty Italy, is a pretty tough sell in the face of the facts.

However, if we give Neal and his multiculti buddies a little time, we might be able to legitimately claim equality with Argentina.

TVs at the Point of Sale Make no Sense

At our local Texaco Shell (thanks for the correction, Dean) stations, they have TVs at the pump. At our local Albertson's grocery store, they have TVs in the produce section and at the check out counter. They look like this.


This makes no sense to me at all. The TV distracts you from all the goodies they have on display for impulse buyers right at the checkout stand. There's no time to peruse the magazines to pick one up with a TV blaring at you. At the Shell station, it makes even less sense. There's nothing to buy at the pump except the gas you were going to buy anyway, so why put the TVs there? I would think you would want the pump area to be boring so the customer would zip into the minimart to get a Coke and some chips.

What am I missing?

Quote of the Day

Comes from Anita Moncrief's post about how she went from being a black radical to a black conservative and from hating America to loving it.

Friends who are still radicals rail at me for loving a country that enslaved us, and I tell them I don’t. I love a country that had the guts to stand up time and time again and right a wrong. A country that is not afraid to pick itself up and start again.

Good Morning! Today, Your Investments Lost 8 Billion Dollars

... is the report the Chinese have been getting lately on their $1T worth of US Treasuries. I wonder if palms are getting sweaty in Beijing? They don't seem to be getting sweaty in Washington.

World leaders are acting on threats to dump the dollar while the Obama administration shows a willingness to tolerate a weaker currency in an effort to boost exports and the economy as long as it doesn’t drive away the nation’s creditors. The diversification signals that the currency won’t rebound anytime soon after losing 10.3 percent on a trade-weighted basis the past six months, the biggest drop since 1991.

“Global central banks are getting more serious about diversification, whereas in the past they used to just talk about it,” said Steven Englander, a former Federal Reserve researcher who is now the chief U.S. currency strategist at Barclays in New York. “It looks like they are really backing away from the dollar.”

A 10.3% drop in the dollar is a $103B loss for the Chinese over the last 6 months. Ouch!

The short synopsis of the situation is this: We can't stabilize the dollar until we raise interest rates. We can't raise interest rates until we see economic growth. We won't see economic growth until the private sector starts expanding. We won't see private sector expansion while the government sucks all the money out of the economy.

The solution being proposed is massive health care spending by the government and possibly a second stimulus package.

Message to Beijing: I'd start buying Maalox. Lots and lots of Maalox.

The Peace Prize for Zorro?

Maybe.

I Blame Bush

For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

Link of the Day

B-Daddy hits the nail on the head with this post about the Nobel Peace Prize going to Obama.

Gold vs. the S&P 500

In a recent National Review post, Republican apologist Larry Kudlow makes this point:

We know that gold is soaring. And we know the dollar is slumping. But, did you know that year-to-date, while the S&P 500 is up 18 percent — a great showing, no doubt — gold is up even more? The precious metal is up 21 percent. In other words, measured in true, gold-backed purchasing power, stocks have really done nothing this year.

This got me to thinking and I did some surfing around this morning to see if I could find a decent gold-denominated S&P 500 index.

The first think I found is that none of the sites I visited have a way to download data into Excel. It was a complete exercise in futility. Yahoo! was the best and I was able to get a decent S&P 500 spreadsheet, but gold was nearly impossible. I finally found a site with annual average gold prices since 1973 and started entering them by hand into my S&P 500 spreadsheet until it dawned on me that gold was not the right way to look at it.

Gold is a rock. You don't really use it for much of anything, at least not in the way we consume oil or wood. It's subject to all kinds of wild swings in prices that don't have anything to do with anything real, but instead are measures of investors' level of anxiety. Instead of measuring things in terms of gold, we should measure in terms of inflation. After all, inflation represents the prices normal humans pay for the things we use, not hobgoblins from the fevered imaginations of gold bugs.

With that in mind, I found this:

After looking at this, I realized that I should have known better than to have taken Larry Kudlow seriously. He's the Republican equivalent of Paul Krugman. Comparing the S&P 500 to gold is an interesting intellectual exercise, but nothing more than that. The truth of the matter is that the S&P 500 has indeed made a very nice recovery this year. His measuring it against gold is just an academic comparison done by a Republican hack who is struggling to find something negative to say about the stock market's recent rise.

As usual, the remainder of Larry's post goes along the standard Republican tracks: "Cut taxes!" There's no serious discussion of what gigantic cuts in benefits will be made, so there's not a shred of fiscal responsibility in his post. After noodling about with all of this, I came to one, simple conclusion.

Man, I wish we'd elected Fred Thompson president.

Link of the Day

Is this disturbing bit from our Precentor of Measurements.

The Answer to Yesterday's Quiz Question

... can be found in this chart of the Federal budgets in 1945 and our near future.


To refresh, the question was this:

Some economists have suggested that our current deficit and debt is no big deal because we've been here before and gotten out of it. For example, our relative debt burden in 1945 was greater than it is today and yet we managed to pay it off.

What is the flaw in that comparison?

The answer lies in the source of the deficit spending. In 1945, we spent like crazy to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Once we won the war, we could stop buying all those Sherman tanks and use that money to pay off the debt we had incurred during the war. No one was jumping up and down screaming that we needed to keep buying Liberty ships for the sake of the poor or that cutting the strategic bomber budget was racist.

In short, the cash flow we had used to win the war was now available for debt reduction.

There is no comparable event on the horizon today. The completion of the stimulus spending will be replaced by more money for all kinds of social programs. The spending that has led us here will go on and on and on and on and on ...

Until our culture embraces the concept of earning what we get, we're doomed to continually reap these deficits.

The graphic came from this post over at Political Math which has a much better take on this concept.

After The Nobel Prize, This Is Even Funnier

Dig this. Hilaaarious!

The Perfect Nobel Prize for our Times

In thinking more about Obama's Nobel Prize, is it possible to find anything more perfect for the world in which we live? It's a fantastic, concrete example of getting something you haven't earned. Obama supporter Ruth Marcus from the Washington Post had this gem buried in her blog post on the award:

This turns the award into something like pee-wee soccer: everybody wins for trying.

That's close, but it places the blame at the wrong feet. Instead, I suggest that the award is totally fitting for the Western World in the year 2009. It's benefits without costs, rewards without effort. It's Health Care and Stimuloids and Gay Marriage and everything else that we insist on having because we want it and, by George, have the ability to borrow to pay for it in one sense or another.

Bingo.

Cheezburger of the Day

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Quiz Question

Some economists have suggested that our current deficit and debt is no big deal because we've been here before and gotten out of it. For example, our relative debt burden in 1945 was greater than it is today and yet we managed to pay it off.

What is the flaw in that comparison?

Update: The answer has been posted here.

Quote of the Day (Bumped)

... comes from the comments of this London Times article displaying apoplexy over the hilarious decision to award President Obama the Nobel Peace Prize.

Laugh at the old Soviet 'awards' system all you like; you had to do far more than this to get a Lenin prize.

Hahahahahaha!

Reactions from around the Feline Theocracy (and elsewhere):

Our Archbishop of Texas is incredulous.

The Secular Apostate has found the (almost) proper music video.

Our Pater of Prowling gives us the Facepalm.

Our College Of Cardinals alleges payback.

Update:

Our Precentor of Measurements is shocked.

Others are calling for us to help Obama win the Heisman Trophy. Sounds good to me!

If you've got a take on it, leave it in the comments or if you've blogged it, leave the URL in the comments and I'll link back to you.

Where Are We in the Recovery?

Nowhere near where we should be.

Recall that this is a balance sheet recession. That is, we stopped spending and expanding because we ran up too much debt.

Every corporation in the land is going to cut back so it won't go bust. That's called a balance-sheet depression because what they are trying to do is make sure that they are not going to go bust and they will do anything to get rid of costs, to get rid of debt in order to survive.

The recession stops and expansion begins again when the fear of default and collapse subsides. Now consider the following chart borrowed from Rolfe Winkler's recent excoriation of the ever-dim Paul Krugman.

Before we recover, we will need to reduce our debt burden.
Clearly, we've yet to even begin to go in the right direction. Any recovery now will be anemic at best because the money we could spend on expansion will instead be spent on ever greater debt payments.

Now check out this graphic borrowed from Mish's most recent post wondering when interest rates will start to rise.

Fed interest rates and unemployment.
What this shows is that the Fed has been encouraging borrowing by continually reducing interest rates over the last 15 or so years. The corresponding leap in debt shown in the first chart is no surprise. However, now that interest rates are at 0.25%, there's nowhere left to go. The debt payments that are strangling us are not doing so because of the interest charges.

That's when you're in real trouble.

Think of it in your own life. Imagine having a mortgage payment so large that you can barely purchase necessities. Now imagine that the interest rate on your mortgage is 0.25%. Now imagine that you had to take a pay cut (this corresponds to the drop in tax revenues for the government and the drop in sales for corporations).

Being the responsible type, your immediate response would be to vote in a monstrous new entitlement program giving everyone health care, right? (Sorry. I got off track and jumped into B-Daddy's favorite topic.)

So where are we in the recovery? Still going in the wrong direction and perhaps about to accelerate.

Enough Psychoanalyzing Obama Already

... and enough of the dire warnings about his presidency falling apart.

Geeze, the dude is doing the best he can. Like the Chargers drafting Ryan Leaf to be their QB, we deliberately elected someone who had "disaster" written all over him. You don't pick a pouty little boy to lead an NFL team and you don't pick someone who has never even run a taco shop to be president. Now that we've done it, the pundits are starting to fret.

George Will is worried that Obama is an egomaniac. David Kuhn is concerned that Obama is becoming a joke. Richard Cohen doesn't think the guy has a spine.

Get a grip. What's going on is precisely what you would have expected had you read his resume and paid attention during the campaign. Now that it's all unfolding just as one would expect, the editorial writers are scratching their mighty craniums and delving into Freud to figure out Just What's Going On.

It's really not that complicated.

Taco shop night manager: Not the ultimate experience to be president, but a pretty good start.

What If Both Bush and Obama Are Failed Presidents?

... who do we blame then?

If the rat-faced conservative Rethuglicans had the presidency and the legislature and managed to set up the housing crash and then the commie pinko Dumbocrats got the presidency and the legislature and manage to drive us to inflation, high unemployment and global war-sized deficits, who do we blame then? What will be on our protest signs and blogs?

Once every electable person has been tried out and failed and each one of them in turn has been caricatured as Hitler / Marx / a monkey, then what? Where will we look for villains to blame?

Libertine slobs who don't want to earn what they get are closer than they appear.

What Would They Have Handed Out Had It Been Some Kind Of Transvestite Protection Bill?

The Obama Adminstration used a bunch of MD supporters like dress-up dolls for a recent photo op and handed out white lab coats to all of them in the audience. That way, when the press took photos of the President with some of them, the truly dim among us would think, "Oh. They must be doctors. They're wearing those white doctor coats." The rest of us thought, "What a bunch of tools."


So what kind of Party City Halloween Costumes would they have handed out if their supporters had been there to support National Transvestite Protection Day? How about Mime Awareness Week? Manned Spaceflight Appreciation Month?

One can only imagine.

Cheezburger of the Day

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For Mom and Dad

When I was a little boy, we used to listen to comedy records. (Yes, that's right, vinyl records!) One that I've never forgotten was this church revival-like piece from Johnny Standley. After all these years, I can still sing the song at the end almost entirely from memory. It still brings a smile to my face.

Enjoy.

I'm Totally Creeped Out Now

I've seen the SNL skit making fun of Obama and I had heard about the CNN Fact Check of that skit. In finally watched the CNN bit. Here it is.

What I had thought was silly and vapid before I watched it is truly disturbing after seeing it. This is propaganda with a 21st Century sophistication. CNN is serving notice that they will go after anyone who makes fun of the President. It's so fundamentally weird to see this. It's like watching a live M C Esher drawing.

Luckily, there's a Twitter thread making fun of CNN's idiocy. If it weren't for that, this would be even more surreal.

A Little Bit About the FTC Ruling on Blogs

Our Nun of the Above has the details and analysis. Here's a tidbit.

Bloggers are now regulated by the Federal Trade Commission which just came out with a new law (effective on December 1, 2009 – Merry Christmas!) that cover those free products bloggers receive with no strings attached. Here’s the what it means for you:

• If you buy a product on your own and you write about it, then you don’t have any worries.


• If you get a free product and write about it, but the product doesn’t cost much, you rarely receive free products, and don’t have a wide readership, then you probably don’t have anything to worry about.


• If you get a free product and write about and regularly receive such products and have a wide readership and the item is used by your targeted audience, then you should disclose who sent you the product and that you got it for free.


• If BMW send you a free car with the hopes that you’ll write about it on your blog, then I would say that you must disclose the goodness of BMW.


• If someone pays you to write about the product, then absolutely you should disclose the payment.

There's lots more at the link. It's worth the visit.

I know lots of folks are all up in arms about this and are screaming about the First Amendment, but I don't see what the big deal is. Blogs are publications - they are produced so that any number of people can read them and give news, information and commentary. Lots of us gloat when the blogosphere scoops the MSM, like Breitbart did on the ACORN story. Glenn Reynolds has made that sort of thing a theme on his blog. Well, if we're going to play in the world, we need to abide by some of its rules.

I don't know the history of such disclosure laws, but I would bet their filled with abuses that led to all kinds of problems. Now that blogs are becoming the primary means for many of us to get our news and information, it's probably time we started living within those same rules.

A Papanez Retweet

... that was too long for Twitter, but too good to condense. On Twitter, @papanez is Michael Nesmith.

true story -saw a lady at the Louvre fixing her hair using a reflection she saw of herself in the bullet proof glass covering the Mona Lisa

Link of the Day

Click on the image.

On Men and Women

Prior to my recent wedding, I spent about 10 years as a single father. As a single dad, I put on both of my kids' birthday parties every year. These weren't trips to Chuck E. Cheese, either, these were old school home parties with games and scavenger hunts and contests and prizes and home made food. We usually had 6-12 kids over so they were sizable bashes.

My daughter had her 13th birthday party this weekend and we hosted it. My new wife did everything. Oh, I sent out the invitations and called the bowling alley and little stuff like that, but make no mistake, she did 90% of the work. Dittos for the family party for my girl last night.

I may have been good at the job, but I wasn't a natural at it. Thank goodness we've got a professional in the house again.

:-)

Vote for CNN Hero of the Year!

Way back when, I used to write a weekly post called The World of Good. I did one on Brad Blauser's heroic efforts to bring wheelchairs to crippled children through his Reach Out and Care program. CNN is now holding a Hero of the Year contest and Brad is one of the finalists. The prize is $100,000 and as Brad has told me, that cash will bring 285 more wheelchairs to kids all across the world.

Stop by and vote over at CNN. You can vote as often as you like, so pop over a couple of times today and stuff the ballot box.

Jacob Weisberg Savages the Right

... with brilliant analysis! In a piece in Slate, Jake tries to figure out who will save the intellectually bankrupt conservatives. Had Jake stuck to the Republican Party, I'd be far more sympathetic. Instead, he goes for the conceptual right rather than the organizational right and fails miserably. Here's a sample.

But the goal of the neoconservatives—who in those days were still principally focused on domestic rather than foreign policy—remained better government, more mindful of tradition, and respectful of the values of the people.

How did this prudent outlook devolve into the spectacle of ostensibly intelligent people cheering on Sarah Palin? Through the 1980s, the neoconservatives became more focused on political power and less interested in policy. They developed their own corrupting welfare state, doling out sinecures and patronage subsidized by the Olin, Scaife, and Bradley foundations. Alliances with the religious right skewed their perspective on a range of topics.

Again with the Sarah Palin! What's wrong with these guys? You'd think they'd get a clue and stop bringing her up. It's becoming crystal clear that she was far more qualified than the lefties' darling, Barack Obama, to be president. He is just not an executive of any kind at all. He'd struggle if you put him in charge of a Dairy Queen. Meanwhile, Caribou Barbie's management credentials are pretty darn good.

As an aside, Jim Treacher has the Top Ten Reasons to Accept That Job Offer from David Letterman, with number one being "After the sex, he lets you keep the Palin wig." That pretty much typifies the left's spazoid reponse to the former governor of Alaska.

The rest of the Weisberg article goes pretty much along the standard lines, giving bland analysis and exemplars of the kind of corruption and dimwitted pandering that is the natural consequence of big government no matter who is in charge. His entire article could be rewritten, substituting liberal for conservative and it wouldn't miss a beat.

The premises upon which Jake's article is written - global warming is a monster problem, health care is a disaster, etc. are accepted without debate as if there is no position save the one he holds. If you start with such a beginning, then the rest of the article is extraneous. It's like writing an article wondering why people who dispute basic math are so intellectually bankrupt. You don't need to bother writing it at all.

In the end, Jake flounders because he fails to ask the real question, so enraptured is he with the famous and powerful figures of politics and media. That question is this: Why in the world did we ever think that we could get someone else to solve our problems for us?

I just put this here to drive liberal visitors crazy.

So Why Is Hollywood Supporting Polanski?

... because they don't see anything wrong with what he did.

Dig the photo and text here.

Now go watch a Quentin Tarantino movie.

QED.

PS - I wish Scipio was still posting. He'd have had a field day with this. Moloch is laughing and rubbing his hands together to be sure.

Cheezburger of the Day

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Some Dave Burge Poetry

Here's my entry for the Iowahawk Endowment for the Arts $33.18 Steel Cage Art Death Match.

First, a haiku:

Growing in the corn
See the chrysalis’ jewel
Comic prose takes wing
And next, a little traditional poetry:

On the fragile wings of freedom
merry words do play
but now that we own GM
we're all screwed today.

Dana Milbank, The Nose On Your Face Is Calling

Poor Dana must not own a mirror, figurativley speaking, because he can't see a darn thing. Dana is a writer for the Washington Post, where he posed the following question triggered by a question from Helen Thomas:

Actually, conscience isn't the problem for Gibbs and his boss; it's spine. Thomas's question got at an Obama administration trait that is puzzling opponents and demoralizing supporters: Why isn't the president more decisive and forceful? On many of the most pressing issues -- the public option in health reform, troop levels in Afghanistan, sanctions against Iran -- the administration has hewed to hemming and hawing.

Err, Dana? When has the guy ever shown a spine? You don't rack up tons of "present" votes as a legislator when you've got a spine. His track record as an executive is similarly spineless ... err, no, that's not true, is it? His track record as an executive is non-existent because he never, you know, actually was an executive at any level at all.

So now poor Dana is wondering what happened to President Obama's forcefulness and courage. Well, that was a projection on the part of Dana Milbanks everywhere and it never really existed.

Not to worry, though. Things could be far worse. We could have elected that dimwit Sarah Palin.

President Blah Blah Fails

This is hilarious. President Windbag and his wife flew out to pitch Chicago as the site of the 2016 Olympics and Chicago was the first city eliminated by the judges. The panel members were probably pressing their little red buzzers, fighting to get the gong hammer, smashing down on their "NO" buttons, or whatever it is they do to vote it down while he was still in full ObamaBlatherMode. "Please, anything to make him stop talking!"

Freaking Out The French

At the recent UN and G-20 blatherfests, our president had this to say: "No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation." French President Nicolas Sarkozy freaked out. "We live in the real world, not in a virtual one," he exclaimed. Poor Nick is starting to wake up to the horrible fact that he and his Euro pals have gotten just what they asked for - a squishy, multilateralist, appeasenik American president. Sorry, Nicky, no returns without a receipt!

Memo to the president: next time you want to expound your faculty lounge, bong smoke theories about international relations, try not to do it in front of a president of France.

France, June, 1940 - no domination here!

Cheezburger of the Day

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Thanks, Dave!

Oh that Letterman! What a card! When he's not riffing on baseball players raping that idiot Sarah Palin's* daughters, he's boinking his interns. What a guy!

Now to be fair, we're not really sure it was interns. According to his confession, it could have been any number of women working for him in any capacity. And we're not sure about the timing, so it may well be that he didn't technically break his marriage vows to the chick he slept with for years and who bore him a son long before he decided he would actually, you know, commit to her. (Commit is such an old-fashioned word. Hip, modern people all know that commitment may not mean remaining sexually faithful.)

I'm sure there are those out there who would pass judgment on Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky Dave. Bah! Just because his mammoth fortune is utterly dependent on his position as the most public of public figures and his fame is totally reliant on the hours and hours his smirking face is broadcast on TV, there is absolutely no reason he should be expected to live up to any kind of prudish standards of behavior. I mean, just because his place as a major player in the popular culture has poured cataracts of benefits over him and his retinue, only the most narrow-minded among us would consider living as a role-model for society to be part of the price one would have to pay for such a career.

So thanks, Dave. We're happy as all get out that you've done what is so hard for celebrities to do - act like a martyr and have the courage to admit that you've sexually spent yourself upon countless women who depended on you for a paycheck, fathering who knows how many children or generating untold numbers of abortions. And due to your personal contribution to the glorification of Caligulan libertine behavior, we will all continue to reap the rewards.

Since most prison inmates are products of lifestyles like Dave's, the more people that live like him, the more good-paying prison guard jobs we will have. Thanks, Dave!
PS - Dave, if it's not too much to ask, could you do another riff or two on that dingbat Sarah Palin*? I mean, she actually, knowingly gave birth to a child with Downs Syndrome. And she was pregnant by her husband, no less. Pathetic!

* - Sarah Palin's so dumb that when she was governor of Alaska, she only spent as much money as the state brought in with taxes. What a dope! Hahahahaha!

Link of the Day

... belongs to our Missionary to the Frozen, Northern Wastelands. I love it.

What's with Everybody this Morning?

Our Maximum Leader is trying to get into the house like water flowing downstream. She's right at the front door, struggling to slither around people's legs and get inside. Meanwhile, Bodie the Wonder Dog is barking at things that aren't there.

I can't imagine I missed a full moon. After all, I'm the nocturnal one.

Update: OK, now I get it. The workmen are here to finish the neighborhood fencing jobs. Sheesh! What a lot of turmoil over a few boards being nailed up! Whatever. I'm going to sleep.