Fundraising Letters to Look Forward To Oh - and we just might live forever May 30, 2008March 11, 2017 STOP THE PRESSES! From the New York Times yesterday: ‘Two monkeys with tiny sensors in their brains have learned to control a mechanical arm with just their thoughts . . . ‘ This is very good news for those of us who want to live forever, or at least for a very long time. As I wrote half a year ago: My conception has long been that technology is on such an astonishing exponential trajectory – we’ve begun mapping the human genome, for crying out loud! Oh, look, we’ve finished! – that one day soon we’d be able to download our consciousnesses into a brain bank, basically, where we’d be able to do almost all the things we do now . . . email our friends, watch Seinfeld reruns, order movies on demand, play web boggle, go for virtual treks to Machu Pichu . . . a world in which the big addiction would be not cocaine or meth but the orgasm button. (In a brain bank, you wouldn’t literally press buttons. But how far are we now from being able to send electrical impulses from our brains? Not very far.) Class warfare would be primarily between the virtual humans, like me, with 500 years of compound interest enhancing my vast fortune, and the physical humans, like some 25-year-old with an actual screw driver. I’d have $50 trillion (a good chunk of it in Borealis stock); but he would have the ability to disconnect me. ☞ Well, it seems we are not so far at all from ‘being able to send electrical impulses from our brains,’ thereby to control our TiVos. (And if Ray Kurzweil is right, as I wrote in that same column, we might not even need to surrender our bodies.) I know this is a tiny bit creepy. But consider the alternative. A NON-FUNDRAISING LETTER You know how Warren Buffett’s annual shareholder letters have come to be eagerly awaited? And widely read by an audience of (bitter, envious) people (like me) who don’t even own his stock? Well, I feel much the same way about Congressman Barney Frank’s fundraising letters. Why haven’t they been collected in a book? Foolishly, I haven’t saved them over the years. But I thought I would share his latest. Dear Friends: Political life has an enormous number of benefits. One of the things I most dislike is to hear my colleagues complain about the terrible burdens under which we labor, and give the impression that they are doing the world an enormous favor by holding onto their jobs. In fact, in the majority of instances the facts are exactly the opposite: we want very much to keep our jobs and are prepared to impose on relatives, friends, random passers-by and others in an effort to do so. But there is one downside. Precisely because we are in a position where we are allowed – even expected – to solicit people for favors, money, kind words, etc., we can come to think of this as the normal form of human interaction. In particular, there is a very real possibility that we can transform ourselves into one of the most unpleasant of characters: an acquaintance from whom you hear only when he or she needs something. So I am writing this to you simply to stay in touch, and it includes no request whatsoever for money, praise, moral support or anything else. It is simply a letter to people who have been extremely good friends and who have made the career that I continue to enjoy possible. This has been a very exciting time for me, more exciting than anticipated. From the standpoint of the country, it would obviously have been good if it had been less exciting. I took over the Chairmanship of the Committee on Financial Services precisely at the time when the subject matters in the jurisdiction of that committee became among the most important facing the country. We deal not only with housing in both the public and private sectors, but insurance, banking, and the securities industry in all of its recent, exotic transmogrifications. Consequently, I have been working much harder at this job than I can remember working since my first years as Executive Assistant to [Boston Mayor] Kevin White, and I am forty years older today than I was then, which is not an enormous advantage overall. (More wisdom and a lot less energy does not make the ideal trade-off.) The result is that I have seen my horizons shrink in some ways. I now know a very great deal about those things that are in the jurisdiction of my committee, and less about almost everything else than I have ever known in my life. But the responsibility of trying to cope in both the short and long term with this financial crisis takes precedence. There is a silver lining to the dark cloud that the current economic situation presents. I have for years been frustrated by those who greatly over-argue the case for our free market system. I am a capitalist, and I believe it is clear that the free market system, properly run, is the best way to generate wealth that human beings have ever come upon. But that system has both strengths and weaknesses, and I have long felt that the need for a well financed and well run public sector working along with the private sector has been substantially undervalued in our politics. For nearly thirty years, we have been governed excessively by the line from Reagan’s first inaugural, that “Government is not the answer to our problems; government is the problem.” People argued that economic growth is not only a good thing, but a complete one, and that if we were to exceed on an annual basis three percent growth, all would be well and all of our citizens would prosper. Many of us argued that we were growing in a way that exacerbated inequality unnecessarily, and that this would have not only negative social consequences, but ultimately a deleterious economic impact, but we were the minority. Dominant opinion also held that regulation was a bad thing. The mantra here was that of the distinguished economic philosopher and former Majority Leader, Dick Armey, who insisted that “markets are smart and government is dumb.” From one perspective, recent events may have borne that out. Some observers may believe that the people who were doing business with Bear Stearns were smart enough to get the dumb Federal Reserve to take care of them when the investment decisions they had made went sour. But I don’t think that the ability of the market to stick the government with the cost of its mistakes was what Armey had in mind. The lesson we should be drawing from this is that, even though there are times when the government will in fact have to step in to prevent greater economic troubles — as I think the Fed ultimately did appropriately in this case — the most important thing for us to do is to put in place rules that make it less likely that this will occur. So just as with the notion that we need not worry about fairness in the distribution of income as long as we have growth, the argument that the greatest threat to the market system is excessive regulation has been substantially discredited by results. History is to some extent repeating itself in the grand scale. The formation of large industrial enterprises in the late nineteenth century led to the reforms known as the anti-trust laws, the establishment of the Federal Trade Commission, and similar actions under Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. The subsequent flourishing of the stock market and its steep decline beginning in 1929 led to the reforms instituted under Franklin Roosevelt. In these cases, the economic activity was largely beneficial, but it had negative side effects (which of course were especially severe during the Great Depression) that had to be curtailed by sensible regulation. This is where we are today with securitization and the other exotic market instruments. So while it would obviously have been much better for the country if none of this negative activity had happened, we can at least take some comfort in the fact that there is a broad recognition in the country today politically that it is time for the kind of significant economic reforms that we have seen in prior eras. This makes the 2008 election extraordinarily significant. Of course the number one issue remains the need to withdraw from this badly conceived and execrably conducted war in Iraq, with all the damage it does in so many ways. And the fate of the United States Supreme Court is clearly at stake given the age of the justices, particularly those who continue to uphold basic constitutional liberty. Add to this the fact that we face one of the most important decision points in our economic history, and you have an election of overwhelming importance. The bad news is of course that we are in this economic bind. But the partially mitigating good news is that more and more people now realize what must be done to prevent its recurrence. I am very grateful to you and others who have helped me get to the position where I am Chairman of the Financial Services Committee so that I am able to participate in our efforts to deal with this crisis in both the short and long terms. BARNEY FRANK ☞ See what I mean? Have a great weekend.
Quit Smoking, Brush Your Teeth, Pay Off Your Credit Cards AND Cut Down on Your Junk Mail May 29, 2008March 11, 2017 FROM IRON LUNG TO . . . IRONY Joe Cherner: ‘Pfizer is getting into big trouble because Chantix (its medicine to help people stop smoking) apparently has some side effects that cause depression. So Pfizer is getting in big trouble for several thousand lives at risk, while the tobacco industry – you know, the ones who actually sell the underlying product which kills millions – goes free. Ironic, no? The regulatory world has got its head screwed on backwards.’ TRUTHINESS Jack Rivers: ‘I liked the column about little dishonest things that companies do. My favorite is ‘Crest Night Time.’ I wondered what was so different about brushing your teeth at night, so I looked at the label in the store. There is NOTHING different from regular Crest, other than a ‘special night time flavor.’ They do charge you more and sell it in a smaller tube though.’ ☞ Cynic! They don’t charge you more for Night Time, they charge you less for Regular. AND SPEAKING OF LITTLE CORPORATE DISHONESTIES How about this: Drowning in debt: Deceptive credit card practices Tuesday May 27, 1:04 pm ET By Jessica Dickler, CNNMoney.com staff writer When 53-year-old Don Cressman was struggling financially, he charged a bit more than usual on his card, but carefully watched his balance to make sure he didn’t go over his limit. When he opened his credit card statement, he was shocked to find a $29 over-the-limit fee added to his bill. “I was charged an over-limit fee when the interest charge kicked my account over my limit,” said Cressman. When he called his credit card issuer to complain, they refunded the charge. “I was told that in the future I would ‘just have to watch my balance,'” he recalled. Over-the-limit fees aren’t the only tactic in the credit card companies’ bag of tricks. There are a slew of penalties, fees and other billing practices that can cause consumers to find themselves drowning in debt. Americans hold $850 billion in credit card debt, and the average balance per card-holding household is $8,568, according to the Consumer Federation of America. But even borrowers who pay their bills on time can fall victim to deceptive practices used by the card issuers and get slammed with rising interest and hidden fees, which have become the industry norm in recent years. “The issuers have gotten a lot more trigger happy over the last few years,” according to Curtis Arnold, founder of CardRatings.com, a consumer advocacy group. . . . Most credit card holders are well aware that missing a payment can result in a hefty late fee, which ranges from $15 to $39. But meeting a payment deadline isn’t always easy. Credit card companies reserve the right to change the date of your deadline with little notice or specify an exact time of day that payment is due. Trying to stay on top of an early morning deadline or due dates that change unexpectedly often leave even the most responsible customers saddled with charges. Those that have never exceeded their spending limit may also be unaware that going above your credit limit will result in an over-the-limit fee (up to $39) without warning. Like Don Cressman, many consumers who stopped charging when they neared their limit find that the interest rate and additional charges are what pushed their account over the line. As if the late fees, over-the-limit fees and the interest charges themselves weren’t steep enough, there are also a slew of sneaky tactics that credit card companies can use to make sure you keep paying additional charges, even when you pay off your bill. For example, many banks calculate finance charges using what’s called double-cycle billing, a confusing practice that averages out the balance from your previous two bills. So if you carry a balance and pay a finance charge one month, you’ll get hit with a finance charge on your next bill as well, even if you’ve paid off the balance. Then, there’s a practice known as “trailing interest” – another “gotcha” to watch out for, Arnold said. If you send in a payment according to the full amount on your statement, you may find that you still owe a small balance next month. That’s because you accrued interest between the time you sent the payment and when it was posted to your account. And all it takes is one delinquent payment to cause the credit card company to up your interest rate, often substantially. But thanks to a widely-used practice called universal default, you could end up with a higher interest rate, even if you pay on time. Credit card issuers can increase your interest rate – even if you have a perfect payment history – just because you missed a payment on another card or bill. Pushing back Because of the scrutiny, some card issuers are beginning to lighten up on their fee structures and billing practices. For example, in spring of 2007 Citigroup announced it would stop using universal default and JPMorgan Chase followed suit in November. But until sweeping legislation is passed, there are a few things consumers can do to avoid getting hit the next time. For starters, Chris Viale, president and CEO of Cambridge Credit Corp., a nonprofit credit counseling agency based in Agawam, Mass., suggests calling each credit card company to nail down your credit limit, due date and interest rate. Card-issuing companies, such as American Express, Capital One, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase also disclose all of this information either online, under the terms and conditions for each card, or in the account disclosure statement you receive when you first open an account. The important point is to “get familiar of the terms of each of your cards and get them down on paper,” Viale said. If you are having problems call customer service. “There is so much spotlight on this industry right now [credit card companies] are being a lot more careful about negative publicity,” Arnold said, referring to the practices lawmakers like Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., dub unfair and deceptive. “Use the publicity as leverage.” Many card companies are willing to lower your interest rate, raise your limit or waive a fee as a one-time courtesy if you ask nicely. “We strongly encourage our customers to engage with us directly” said a representative from CitiCards. “Particularly if they have questions about their card, payments or credit limit.” Once the terms are established, make them work for you. Though the credit card company decides the due date, you can request to change the payment deadline to a time that’s more convenient – at the beginning of the month, for example, if you have more cash on hand then. Then set up online bill pay so your payment gets posted to your account immediately. . . . GO GREENER Cut back on the junk mail you receive.
Honest Tea and Straight Talk May 28, 2008March 11, 2017 HONEST TEA Pat Davies: ‘Since I await (daily) your commitment as a superdelegate, I hope this bit from a story in yesterday’s New York Times (‘On the Trail, One Aide Looms Over Obama’) will make you decide immediately.’ He knows that ‘the boss,’ as he calls Mr. Obama, likes MET-Rx chocolate roasted-peanut protein bars and bottles of a hard-to-find organic brew – Black Forest Berry Honest Tea. He keeps a supply of both on hand. ☞ Reason enough to decide the fate of our country. But the truth is, I remain enthusiastically neutral between our two superb candidates. STRAIGHT TALK FROM BILL GROSS In his current investment letter, Pimco’s Bill Gross – always worth listening to – argues that we need to shape up . . . and that the inflation rate is higher (and thus real economic growth lower) than they’re telling us. In small part: It’s Sunday afternoon at the Coliseum folks, and all good fun, but the hordes are crossing the Alps and headed for modern day Rome – better educated, harder working, and willing to sacrifice today for a better tomorrow. Can it be any wonder that an estimated 1% of America’s wealth migrates into foreign hands every year? We, as a people, are overweight, poorly educated, overindulged, and imbued with such a sense of self importance on a geopolitical scale, that our allies are dropping like flies. ‘Yes we can?’ Well, if so, then the ‘we’ is the critical element, not the leader that will be chosen in November. Let’s get off the couch and shape up – physically, intellectually, and institutionally – and begin to make some informed choices about our future. ☞ It was good to see on the news last night that childhood obesity has at least begun to level off. And it feels as though we are finally beginning to take energy efficiency, and ‘going green,’ seriously. Change is in the air, and maybe we’ll just do what we’ve done in the past – rise to the challenge. But expect a lot of belt-tightening first. The good news is that it doesn’t take a fortune to live almost as well as people with a fortune – and (as oft repeated in this space, but worth recalling) better than the richest potentates in virtually all of human history. King Arthur had his court, but neither aspirin nor dentistry nor the new robot that lets surgeons perform heart by-pass surgery without cracking open your rib cage. Henry VIII had his wives, but neither central heating or air conditioning. Catherine was Great (and Ivan, Terrible), but could not travel faster than 7 miles an hour – or make a phone call. Let alone watch TV while they fly 2000 miles in five hours at 37,000 feet. The further good news is that, taken with the right attitude, some of the belt tightening has silver linings. Walking or biking instead of driving, where practicable, saves money and improves health (not to mention the environment). Likewise, eating less meat (and smaller portions). The problem is, fewer and fewer Americans can take for granted the kind of middle class income that allows for all these things . . . especially as they look toward what could easily be a 25-year retirement without having built appreciable capital to supplement the bare subsistence of Social Security. And for too many, the portions are already small. It’s an ongoing tug of war between Daunting Challenges and Dazzling Technologies. Oil is getting harder to extract and gasoline prices are killing us (a challenge); yet cars that routinely get 100 miles to the gallon should not be more than a decade off, which could bring the cost per mile, as opposed to gallon, way back down. Another example: the dramatic improvement in energy efficiency to be had from energy recycling, along the lines of yesterday’s link to Tom Casten on NPR. The trick has always been to live beneath one’s means and save the difference. Too few of us have been doing that, and these are among the chickens headed roostward.
Hope for Energy Efficiency – and Perhaps Even for FMD May 27, 2008March 11, 2017 TOM CASTEN ON RECYCLING ENERGY “We think we could make about 19 to 20 percent of U.S. electricity with heat that is currently thrown away by industry,” he says. “This electricity is just as pristine as making it with a windmill or making it with a solar collector – no additional fuel, no additional pollution. Just a little bit of additional brains.” ☞ The idea – not a new one – is to capture the heat from our nation’s smokestacks and convert it to energy. How can this not be worth doing? AND YET IT’S AGAINST THE LAW (more or less). Click here for the whole story, or here to listen to it – four and a half minutes – on NPR. One more example of how we can have a brighter future if we can get on with the job of problem-solving, not impeding change. FIRST MARBLEHEAD, NSMC, CON ED – AND THE TITANIC Here is a case for not selling your FMD. Or for buying more (and then perhaps, after 31 days, to avoid the wash-sale rule, selling your original shares for a tax loss). Or, if you never bought any in the first place (why didn’t I listen to you?), for buying it now – but only with money you can truly afford to lose (because if anyone failed to take this warning seriously before, I should hope that, with FMD at $3.46, down from $26 where some of us first bought it and $56 where some of us – I have in mind particularly me – were too dumb to sell it), you now do. The very fact that many wince at the mention of FMD, and that much tax-loss selling likely throughout the rest of the year, whets my interest. Certainly, the company faces very real challenges it may not surmount. But it’s often when no one wants something that it’s most worth considering. (‘Buy straw hats in the winter, for summer will surely come’ – Bernard Baruch, the Warren Buffett of his day.) My first experience with this phenomenon was with the stock of a company called National Student Marketing Corporation – NSMC. It went public at $6 in April, 1968, touched $140 in late 1969, split four for one, and bottomed out at 37.5 cents about a year later. The president of the company went to jail, as did one of its auditors. The lowliest of its vice presidents went to business school and wrote a book about it. And the point of this story is that,while it’s true you could have made 23 times your money buying the stock at $6 and selling it at $140, it’s also true that you could have made a more than a dozen times your money buying it at 37.5 cents and selling it $6.50 several years later, when the final liquidation was complete. With one difference: at $6 in April, 1968, no stock was really available unless you were one of the few able to get in on the IPO. So many people wanted it, its first real public trades were done at $10 or $12. Whereas at 37.5 cents a few years later, you could have bought all you wanted – because no one wanted it. Similarly, in 1974, Con Ed – founded 151 years earlier to supply gas light to New York City – got into such a bind, thanks to OPEC and some other problems, that its stock had taken a terrible beating. At the risk of quoting from my own book (never an attractive quality) . . . Attracted by its 9% yield and hopelessly ignorant of its problems, I [bought] 50 shares at 20. Shortly thereafter, Con Ed omitted its quarterly dividend for the first time in twelve thousand years and, to my dismay, I found myself buying 100 more shares at 12. Then 100 more at 8½. Then, even, 100 more at 6. I kept buying because I just could not believe that the State of New York—which needed only to grant Con Ed’s rate requests to solve all its problems—would prefer to have the company go bankrupt, and thus have to take on the burden of power generation itself. (Especially considering New York’s own financial position at the time.) Sure enough, the state began cooperating, the dividend gradually was restored (even raised a notch), and the stock recovered to 20. (It would later go on to double and split.) I would be lying if I told you I was smart enough to hold all 350 shares, or even most of them, all the way back up to 20 and beyond. But at least I held some. And I made sure that the first 50 shares I sold were the 50 I had purchased at 20, thus giving me a nice loss to help out with my taxes. The last shares I sold I had held long enough to qualify for long-term capital gain. ☞ Not to say this will necessary happen with FMD, by any means. But I do think kids will continue to go to college and I don’t think they will all be able to go via government loans alone. Student loans still survive bankruptcy, and FMD’s are co-signed by the parents. So there may yet be a business here, and that FMD may yet be able to reemerge. Or not. We’ll see. Subprime mortgage lenders collapsed because so many of their loans were bad. That’s not necessarily the case with student loans, backed (at least in theory) by a lifetime of earnings once the student graduates (and before the co-signing parents retire). Arguably, it’s the freezing up of the credit markets, not company-specific failings, that led to the stock’s collapse. Which makes the collapse no less real, but some form of recovery at least a little more likely. Then again, one can certainly imagine FMD going the way of other ships lost at sea. My continued apologies to those of you who have gone – and my preemptive apologies to any of you who may now go – down with the ship. (Here’s the link to that NPR link again, on energy recycling, if you have four and a half minutes to listen.)
How Borealis Could Save the World May 23, 2008March 11, 2017 McCAIN V. OTHER VIETNAM VETS The basic point of last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine cover story: Senator McCain had a different Vietnam experience from Senators Hagel (a Republican), Webb, Kerrey, Kerry and Cleland (Democrats), all of whom disagree with him on the war. ‘We’re gonna win this thing if it kills us,’ seems to be McCain’s view. ‘It’s unwinnable and is killing us,’ seems to be the view of the others. ‘I have seen this movie before, and I know how it ends,’ says Cleland, who lost three of his limbs to an errant grenade during the battle of Khe Sanh. ‘With thousands dead and tens of thousands more injured, and years later you ask yourself what you were doing there. To the extent my friend John McCain signs on to this, he is endangering America’s long-term interests, and probably his own election in the fall.’ ☞ But the full article offers much more than my tiny synopsis and I commend it to you. (And it’s a long weekend, so who knows.) Likewise: GEORGE WILL’S QUESTIONS FOR McCAIN Here, in Newsweek. I want to say that neither of these is a hatchet job. George Will is a thoughtful and brilliant conservative. And the Times profile, above, treats its subject with respect. (I disagree with the premise of Will’s global warming question. I think McCain can have good answers to that question and the follow-up on ‘cap and trade.’) GLOBAL CATASTROPHIC RISKS TO BRIGHTEN YOUR WEEKEND John Seiffer: ‘With your new-found interest in death by asteroid, perhaps you want to read this new book, Global Catastrophic Risks.’ Andy Long: ‘This problem can be solved simply. Just use a small space ship to implant a WheelTug™ on the oncoming object. It can then pull the asteroid out of the way (or at least to the end of the runway). Not only that, it might – might – improve Borealis’s stock price.” ☞ This could be our best hope. David D’Antonio: “Somehow I doubt that other governments are going to be happy with space-based laser systems capable of deflecting asteroids; it would seem fairly trivial to point them in a slightly different direction and, say, vaporize satellites. Or cities.” ☞ As I read the Atlantic Monthly article, they – like the gravity tractors or jet engines—would be launched from earth. Which is why we need to see impending threats from great distances. But your apathy is noted (says Andy, grinning in a friendly way, as if he were using an emoticon) . . . and perhaps justified (emphasis on the perhaps): Jim Kozma: “I’ve been reading a bit on the NEOs (Near Earth Objects) since you mentioned them in your column, and I don’t think we have much cause to worry. It is quite interesting, and I urge you to read more about it here. In 1998 NASA started a project to discover and catalog 90% of the NEOs larger than one kilometer by the end of 2008. They are a little bit behind schedule in that they have only found and cataloged 80% of the 900 that they estimate exist. The new project is to extend that search to objects as small as 140 meters by 2020. (The one kilometer or larger size corresponds to a strike that would ‘cause global consequences.’ The 140m size is about where something could ‘punch through the Earth’s atmosphere and cause regional damage if they strike land or create a harmful tsunami should they impact into an ocean.’) NASA is funding the ‘Air Force Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) project…[and] this system alone could discover over 70 percent of the potentially hazardous objects larger than 140 meters by 2020.’ There is also some interesting material here on the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. I assume the presenter is trying to get funding for the project, but it still looks quite promising.” ☞ So we seem to be working on the “looking for trouble” piece of this – excellent. I’d like to think we’ll soon be developing the capability to do something if we find trouble.
Little Corporate Dishonesties May 22, 2008March 11, 2017 JERK AND KNEE-JERK Roger Berkley: ‘Gee, it turns out that Israel is doing just what Barack Obama has advocated and John McCain has opposed. Here’s a juicy side story: the negotiations are taking place with U.S. approval. So as Bush attacked Obama in front of the Knesset, his administration was supporting peace talks between Israel and Syria, a state sponsor of terrorism (Hezbollah and Hamas). Hypocrisy from Bush and more knee jerk bad policy from the ‘straight talk express.” WARREN WANTS A DEMOCRAT Click here for the whole article (thanks, Mark L.), but this is the nub of it: “They say in the stock market, ‘Buy into a business that’s doing so well an idiot could run it, because sooner or later, one will,'” Buffett said. “The U.S. is sort of like that. I think the country will do fine whether it’s the Democratic or Republican candidate, but I strongly prefer the Democrats.” LITTLE CORPORATE DISHONESTIES I pay for CreditSecure from American Express, and it mails me a quarterly review that includes, among other things, my credit score from one of the three rating agencies. The report could have just as easily shown all three scores, but instead it gives instructions for getting the other two at no extra charge, ‘instantly,’ on line. I go to that URL and am instantly asked to sign up for on-line access. In the fine print, I see something that seems to suggest that if I take the time to sign up, I would no longer get the mailed reports. It’s not completely clear (one might almost say hidden), so I called to check and – sure enough. So basically this is a ploy by Amex to get me to lower their printing and mailing costs, hoping I won’t notice or mind. At least for me, a straightforward message would have been honest and more effective. Dear Customer: We’d like you to consider switching to our on-line service. The advantage to you: you can access your credit situation 24/7 at no extra cost and have the satisfaction of knowing you did something good for the environment. The advantage to us: we lower our costs and have the satisfaction of knowing we did something good for the environment. If you consider this a ‘win-win,’ please go on-line and sign up! Instead, they tried to trick me into it. Or how about this: those web sites, like DirecTV, that ask whether you want to receive occasional marketing offers – with the default box checked (‘yes, I do’) – so you uncheck it . . . but then when it turns out you used hyphens in your phone number (or some other glitch that forces you to go back and redo an error) they’ve quietly rechecked the marketing boxes in the hope you’ll make whatever little correction was needed without noticing that – while everything else remained the same – the empty check boxes had reverted to being checked. And now they have your permission to send you marketing offers and sell your email to others. These are tiny manipulations that amount to little more than over-eager salesmanship, with perhaps a pinch of duplicity – and a dollop of cynicism – thrown in. But they bug me. Like the late-night infomercial guy GIVING AWAY his book of SECRETS THE BIG DRUG COMPANIES DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW – yours absolutely FREE because the author just wants you to have this life-changing information. How can he do it? Because he’s the author, he says, so he doesn’t need to take a royalty, and because he publishes the book himself. (And, well, because he’s just a very caring, very successful guy.) The book is ABSOLUTELY FREE and will help you enormously. He does not mention the $14.95 in shipping and handling, perhaps a third of which is the cost of shipping and handling, with $10 left over for the author. Or how about FedEx, who would much rather you ship your 10 boxes by three-day ExpressSaver air for $907 – and so make it very easy – than have you ship FedEx Ground for $208, and so make you (or at least me) nuts? Gosh it feels good to vent.
We Do A Lot of Good Things in the World May 21, 2008March 11, 2017 SPACE ROCKS Stewart Dean: ‘Re: ‘This is a cataclysm we could head off. Maybe we should try?’ Naaaah, give God a clean piece of paper to try again……’ ☞ You know you’re just annoying Him with talk like that. Cut it out. Jim Hayes: ‘There is a group that lobbies congress about Near Earth Objects.’ ☞ See page 5 of their agenda for more scary facts. Peter Kaczowka: ‘Deflecting an asteroid would require exploding large thermonuclear bombs on or near the asteroid. To save critical launch time, and reduce the size of the missiles needed, the bombs would likely be kept in space, in orbit around the earth. The result will be nuclear weapons in space. I still remember the Cuba Missile Crisis, and “duck-and-cover” drills. I’ll take my chances with an asteroid, thank you.’ ☞ Happily, we don’t need to blow anything up. If you read that Atlantic Monthly article, you’ll see there are more benign options: Tiny alterations might be enough to deflect a space rock . . . Schweickart envisions a ‘gravitational tractor,’ a spacecraft weighing only a few tons-enough to have a slight gravitational field. If an asteroid’s movements were precisely understood, placing a gravitational tractor in exactly the right place should, ever so slowly, alter the rock’s course, because low levels of gravity from the tractor would tug at the asteroid. The rock’s course would change only by a minuscule amount, but it would miss the hole-in-one pipe to Earth. Will the gravitational-tractor idea work? The B612 Foundation recommends testing the technology on an asteroid that has no chance of approaching Earth. If the gravitational tractor should prove impractical or ineffective, other solutions could be considered. Attaching a rocket motor to the side of an asteroid might change its course. So might firing a laser: as materials boiled off the asteroid, the expanding gases would serve as a natural jet engine, pushing it in the opposite direction. PLAN AHEAD I don’t know what cows think about, but I doubt it is stuff like, ‘I wish I had an opposable thumb, so I could bust out of here and build myself a proper barn. With a view.’ Animals, so far as I know, just can’t imagine causes and effects the way we can, which is why we milk them and not the other way around. But for all our astounding ability to imagine possibilities and then achieve them – only the self-making bed and time travel seem permanently beyond our grasp – it is amazing how short-sighted we are. In 1974, with OPEC quadrupling the price of oil and the Shah saying it should be $100 a barrel – that oil was way too precious to be burned as fuel – we could have imposed an annual dime-a-gallon escalation in the tax (every penny slated to lower the income tax), thus giving us $4 a gallon gas by 2008 (we got it anyway) – and an automotive fleet that averaged 80 miles to the gallon and an automotive industry that led the world. But we just figured (to the extent anyone did any figuring) we’d leave the pain to our children and grandchildren. We love them, but not enough to pay more for gas. Levees in New Orleans? Here‘s my column from April 20, 2001 (‘Are Your Ready for the Flood?’) four and a half years before Katrina. It was widely known a disaster was coming (albeit not when), but we just couldn’t get off our butts and strengthen the levees. (Here‘s Maureen Dowd’s column four years later, after it did come.) Iraq? Our ‘thinking ahead,’ past shock and awe, was non-existent. That lack of planning significantly damaged our prosperity and security and that of our kids and grandkids. So now, in 2043 – when your 2-year-old daughter or grandson will be 37, with a family of his or her own – someone on one of the continents that has survived the initial impact will look back and write a column lamenting the impending planetary starvation (a three-year winter will do that) and railing against the short-sighted, selfish people in 2008 who failed to fund a project that, by 2043, could very likely have detected – and diverted – the Near Earth Object that did our species in. The good news is that this November could just be the kind of transformative election that opens us up to a wiser decisions across a host of fronts, including this one. We just might get ourselves an Administration that respects science and believes there are some problems government has a role in solving. Folks in 2043 just might watch on their TV walls as the big rock hurtles harmlessly past, 75,000 miles to our left. OUR INTENTIONS ARE GOOD Dianne and Greg: ‘This was reprinted in our local paper. I think it is worthy of remembering that we do a lot of good things in the world also.’ ☞ You can say that again! Not to belabor the point, but wouldn’t ‘leading a global initiative to detect and deflect incoming asteroids’ be one of them?
Snippets from the End of the World May 20, 2008January 5, 2017 Wasn’t that story riveting? If you didn’t have time to read it yesterday, here are a few bits of it to whet your interest: . . . Only after the rain of space objects ceased could life begin; by then, most asteroids had already either hit something or found stable orbits that do not lead toward planets or moons. Asteroids still exist, but most were assumed to be in the asteroid belt, which lies between Mars and Jupiter, far from our blue world. . . . . . . These standard assumptions-that remaining space rocks are few, and that encounters with planets were mainly confined to the past-are being upended. On March 18, 2004, for instance, a 30-meter asteroid designated 2004 FH-a hunk potentially large enough to obliterate a city-shot past Earth, not far above the orbit occupied by telecommunications satellites. (Enter ‘2004 FH’ in the search box at Wikipedia and you can watch film of that asteroid passing through the night sky.) . . . . . . Extrapolating from recent discoveries, NASA estimates that there are perhaps 20,000 potentially hazardous asteroids and comets in the general vicinity of Earth. . . . . . . The object that hit the Indian Ocean [around 2800 BC] was three to five kilometers across, Abbott believes, and caused a tsunami in the Pacific 600 feet high-many times higher than the 2004 tsunami that struck Southeast Asia. Ancient texts such as Genesis and the Epic of Gilgamesh support her conjecture, describing an unspeakable planetary flood in roughly the same time period. If the Indian Ocean object were to hit the sea now, many of the world’s coastal cities could be flattened. If it were to hit land, much of a continent would be leveled; years of winter and mass starvation would ensue. . . . . . . [A]s Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer of Microsoft, put it, ‘The odds of a space-object strike during your lifetime may be no more than the odds you will die in a plane crash-but with space rocks, it’s like the entire human race is riding on the plane.’ . . . NASA supports some astronomy to search for near-Earth objects, but the agency’s efforts have been piecemeal and underfunded, backed by less than a tenth of a percent of the NASA budget. And though altering the course of space objects approaching Earth appears technically feasible, NASA possesses no hardware specifically for this purpose, has nearly nothing in development, and has resisted calls to begin work on protection against space strikes. Instead, NASA is enthusiastically preparing to spend hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ dollars on a manned moon base that has little apparent justification. ‘What is in the best interest of the country is never even mentioned in current NASA planning,’ says Russell Schweickart, one of the Apollo astronauts who went into space in 1969, who is leading a campaign to raise awareness of the threat posed by space rocks. “Are we going to let a space strike kill millions of people before we get serious about this?” he asks. ☞ Truly cool that this is a cataclysm we could head off. Maybe we should try?
You Just Never Know May 19, 2008March 11, 2017 So much backed up to write about, but how can I not start with this? I am sitting here with an opened bag of New York Style® Brand Original Plain Bagel Crisps®. It’s a blue and yellow themed bag with a bit of the New York skyline and the faint outline of a street map labeled MANHATTAN – these are the original New York style bagel crisps, after all. I haven’t opened the bag because I already fell for that once. Plain bagel crisps seem an ascetic snack. Crunchy and tasty, yes (try the garlic or sea salt varieties, too) – but without butter or cheese or caviar, what could we be talking about here? Six ounces for the whole bag. (And, trust me, I would eat the whole bag.) Well, the first thing to say about New York Style® Brand Original Plain Bagel Crisps® is that consuming the contents of that 6-ounce bag would set you back 840 calories. A like weight of filet mignon: 348 calories. The second thing to say about New York Style® Brand Original Plain Bagel Crisps® is that they are distributed by a company called New York Style Brand based in – New Jersey. But the main thing to tell you about New York Style® Brand Original Plain Bagel Crisps® – and as a guy born on 77th Street and Lexington Avenue I feel I know something about New Yorkiness – is that, according to an imprint on the side of the bag (and this is what impelled me to my keyboard) . . . scroll down . . . scroll down . . . scroll down . . . scroll down . . . scroll down . . . scroll down . . . scroll down . . . scroll down . . . scroll down . . . they are “MADE IN BULGARIA.” IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD – PART 3 I love that we are becoming one cozy human village, far too interconNetted by commerce and culture ever again to go to war (well, not with Bulgaria, anyway). But when it becomes economical to import original New York Style bagel crisps from Bulgaria, I do worry a little about our competitiveness. And about the ecological folly of eating food grown not in our own backyards but all over the world . . . (Where did the palm oil come from? New Jersey? Where did the sugar and locust bean gum come from? Bulgaria?) . . . and processed 7,000 miles away. (Needless to say, I didn’t buy these bagel crisps; my young and handsome partner, who as a point of pride never reads labels or price tags, did.) But just when you were maybe getting used to the threat of climate change (you’ve switched to CFLs, the rest is in God’s hands) and numb to our economic problems, the worst of which, the stock market seems to be saying, may be over (but I wouldn’t bet on it) and unconcerned about Bird Flu (summer’s here!) – and everything else we have to worry about (it’s always something) – now comes this. It’s the June cover of The Atlantic Monthly, a completely fascinating story about the prospect for something really big hitting the Earth sometime in this century (about 10%) . . . how a probability like that can be calculated (it actually can be) . . . and just how small that big thing would have to be (and why it wouldn’t necessarily even have to hit the earth) to wipe out all of us, or a great many of us – and what we might be able to do about it, if we get cracking, if only NASA had not been instructed to focus on manned missions to the moon and Mars instead. Granted, this is not keeping me up nights. Ten percent is a pretty small chance and any given century has roughly 100 years to run, by my calculation, which brings the chance this year down to one in a thousand, and the chance today (for those of us who live in the moment) to one in three hundred sixty-five thousand, also known as “simply not gonna happen.” But it’s fascinating nonetheless – and a problem we could solve without having to kill anyone or spend a trillion dollars – so we really ought to try, and hats off to The Atlantic for making such an engaging, compelling case. As I was reading it, I kept coming back to an e-mail I got last week from a friend who had been detained in Houston. Just another email like any other, on a day like any other, this one asking whether I might be able to put up his girlfriend, flying in from Germany, until Sunday night when he got back. “I am in a bit of a bad situation,” he explained. “I was talking with two friends on the street early Sunday morning. A drunk driver hit a parked car and sent it crashing towards us. I and one of my friends were pinned under the car. I was able to wiggle my out from underneath him and the car and am fine. My friend died. I am staying in Houston until the memorial service.” Ugh, ugh, ugh. But do you see my point? Whether it be a drunk driver out of the blue affecting one person, or an earthquake out of the blue affecting millions, or a space rock out of the blue affecting all life on earth . . . every miraculous day – I’m telling you nothing you do not know – is precious. The neat thing about the space rock is that you can see it coming and divert it. (Comets are harder.)
So Sayeth the (California) Supreme Court May 16, 2008March 11, 2017 From yesterday’s 172-page four-to-three decision: . . . we cannot find that retention of the traditional definition of marriage constitutes a compelling state interest. Accordingly, we conclude that to the extent the current California statutory provisions limit marriage to opposite-sex couples, these statutes are unconstitutional. ☞ If the ruling seems an example of ‘judicial activism,’ note that the California legislature had already passed same-sex marriage. Twice. (It was vetoed.) And that ‘judicial activism,’ where needed to protect minority rights, was exactly what the founders intended. Patriots – even those who don’t much care for minorities – understand this. From Justice Joyce Kennard’s concurring opinion: The architects of our federal and state Constitutions understood that widespread and deeply rooted prejudices may lead majoritarian institutions to deny fundamental freedoms to unpopular minority groups, and that the most effective remedy for this form of oppression is an independent judiciary charged with the solemn responsibility to interpret and enforce the constitutional provisions guaranteeing fundamental freedoms and equal protection. Kenard, 67, is one of the Court’s six Republican-appointed justices, three of whom joined the lone Democratic appointee. A fourth Republican appointee – while dissenting – nonetheless argued that ‘Californians should allow our gay and lesbian neighbors to call their unions marriages.’ For a good account of the decision and the background leading up to it, click here. Quite properly, nothing in the Court’s ruling will affect what churches choose to do; only the state government bureaucracy, which must now afford same-sex couples equal rights. If Massachusetts’ experience is any guide, traditional marriage will not suffer. Promiscuity may take a small hit.