Jim Manis on Most Anything

Jim Manis can formulate an opinion about a good many things, including those about which he has little knowledge. (And some dude named "Lazlo.") Visit The MagicFactory.

Friday, November 30, 2007

Political Pawn:

The nice lady teacher in Sudan (a British citizen named Ms. Gibbons) who allowed her students to name a Teddy bear Muhammad has received a jail sentence of 15 days, including time served (five days). While a host of Americans react with a range of behaviors from scratching of the head to declarations of insanity, it's appropriate to take a moment and reflect, as a citizen of Sudan has done:

“Our government creates such problems to divert the eyes of the world community from our domestic problems,” Ms. Hussein said. “I am sure that the case of the British teacher is politically motivated and has got nothing to do with our prophet.”

There's a long history between Sudan and the British—try Googling Lord Gordon and Khartoom—, and our cousins don't always come off looking so good on their relations with the former. On the other hand, Sudan is the place that has been sponsoring genocide in Darfur.

It is interesting that Ms Gibbons was teaching in a private school for the children of wealthy Sudanese families, a detail that is generally left out of TV reporting.

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Wednesday, November 28, 2007

How Technology Is Used:

Here's one for the books (to coin a phrase): In a recent posting we noted some differences between the generations in how technology is used, responding to an editorial published in a ZifDavis publication. Today's New York Times adds a new wrinkle to the formula. (No one claimed we didn't love a mixed metaphor.)

In Missouri, a 47-year-old mother used a fake MySpace blog to attack a 13-year-old girl, who lived only four houses away, urging the girl to commit suicide, which she did. Currently, it appears, there are no laws to prohibit this, although one would think otherwise.

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Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Yes, Deary, Once Upon A Time People Actually Read Books:

Fewer and fewer people read literature for fun, and they seem less capable of critical thinking. If we knew why people who do read do what they do, we might be able to encourage others to follow suit. MOTOKO RICH addresses the issue in a recent New York Times piece, "A Good Mystery, Why We Read." Rich doesn't have a concrete answer for this. It seems the reasons people read are as varied as there are readers.

One thing does seem to be clear: If you have a culture of readers—people who value reading and express this value by doing so and encourage others to do so as well—more people will read. But not everyone. That's just not going to happen.

So how many books did your parents have in your home?

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Monday, November 26, 2007

How does it work? "I don't care."

Back in the day, if a teenage boy wanted a car to drive, he went to the junk yard with his dad when he was fifteen, bought a junk shell of a car, rented someone's garage, went to another junk yard and bought an engine, looked around other junk yards for workable parts, then spent the next year or two building what was called a jalopy.

A lot of good engineers as well as mechanics got their start in just this way. And there weren't that many teenage car accidents because there weren't that many cars built in garages. More ended up being sold for junk than driven. But most of us learned something about trouble shooting our cars later on in life, which meant our lives were less at the mercy of others.

Nowadays, if a teen wants a car, he generally just wines a lot to mom and dad, or finds a job after school. (As we all know, progress is always down hill.) And when was the last time you saw a teen look under the hood of a car? Most people don't even realize that the faster you drive a car the worse mileage the car gets. Evidently, no one is aware that depressing the accelerator causes more gasoline to be pumped through the engine. (Yup, I've actually met college students who admitted that they did not know this.)

Technology seems to work this way. Eric Chabrow, in an editorial for CIO Insight entitled "Age Determines Technology's Value," addresses the age differential in technology today. His prime example is drawn from a small business when one owner wants to build a Web site and the other, a much younger man, explains that Web sites are passé, everyone has "spaces" today.

"Spaces," of course, are blogs, which are Web sites, or more correctly spaces on Web sites. The big difference in having your own space verses your own Web site is in how your visitors arrive at your site. The latter depends mostly on what used to be called "word of mouth," which as most business folks know is the best advertising money can buy.

And the other difference is that it takes almost no knowledge or ability to "create" a space. In fact doing so can hardly be called "creating" at all, unless you include content.

But that's okay. Being able to maneuver a car is more important than being able to check the oil, most of the time.

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Tuesday, November 20, 2007

The Decline of the West:

One day after the National Endowment for the Arts released its latest findings that we don't read much anymore (and reading comprehension test scores continue to fall), the hot news is that colleges and universities are relying ever more heavily on over worked and under paid part-time instructors to teach students in higher education. (See The New York Times story.)

Meanwhile Google has plans to create what the tech industry is referring to as "Google Magazine," presumably a magazine that allows the subscriber to choose what content, including which ads, he or she wishes to receive, corresponding to the social networking programs the tweeners, teenagers, and twenty-somethings spend all of their time with now (in place of reading?).

And yesterday, the big news was the release of a new eBook reader by Amazon.com. The device, which is wireless and plays music, costs $399, not counting the cost of the content. Who will purchase and use it to read with? Jeff Bezos, Amazon's CEO and founder, expects travelers and techies to be the primary market. Guess this won't help us all that much with our education problems.

What's interesting about the issues concerning the decline in reading and teaching is that these topics have been of primary concern among educators for over thirty years. Now that the economy is in free fall and America's place in the world seems more uncertain than at any time since the end of World War II, they have come to the fore.

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Sunday, November 18, 2007

Mortgage Fiasco—More Victims:

“You’re really unprotected in who you rent from,” [a renter said]. “You don’t know how overextended they are, or how well they’re managing their finances. It didn’t work out for me. These folks gambled on interest rates and lost. And now I lost, too.”

(From a story in today's New York Times on the other victims of the burst mortgage bubble.)

Oh, those foolish folks who got in over their heads, conned by the sleazy practices of the financial community offering megabucks for tiny percentages of interest that ballooned in a few years, right? But what about the rest of us, the renters, who trusted landlords to live up to the leases we signed with them? A good many of them have seemed to gone the way of a Bush administration that promised it had no interest in nation building.

Home and apartment renters are generally at the low end of the economic scale, so the Republican party doesn't need to worry much about any adverse effects here. Their constituency is the speculators and the Macmansion buyers. Ooops! Seems there might be a problem with them as well.

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Sunday, November 11, 2007

Finding Justice:

The New York Times "Book Section" reports on conservative authors resorting—of all things—to suing their own right wing publisher, Eagle Publishing, over royalties. It seems the right wing's propagandists are suffering at the hands of those who practice the very form of monetary religion they themselves proselytize. Sooner or later, folks, a tape worm kills its host. In this case it appears one form of parasite has been living off another and is now complaining about the deal it's made.


Yes, Dear, It Is All About Oil:

Today's Washington Post reports on the greatest shift in wealth in world history: According to The Post,

Oil consumers are paying $4 billion to $5 billion more for crude oil every day than they did just five years ago, pumping more than $2 trillion into the coffers of oil companies and oil-producing nations this year alone.
So who's benefitting? Read The Post article for a clearer idea. Among those who benefit outside the U.S. are Iran, which may be able to ignore any imposed sanctions for its nuclear activities; Venezuela, which is spreading its influence in Latin America; and Russia:

with Putin nearing the end of his second and final term as president, that sum now looks like peanuts. Russia's gold and foreign-currency reserves have risen by more than that amount just since July. The soaring price of oil has helped Russia increase the federal budget tenfold since 1999 while paying off its foreign debt and building the third-largest gold and hard-currency reserves in the world, about $425 billion.
While increased consumption world wide accounts for some of the increase in oil prices, the Iraq war has been the chief culprit, creating massive instability in the Mid-East has pushed the oil speculators to bid the price of oil higher than ever. The fact that Americans, the largest consumer group of oil, refuse to do much of anything to cut back on their use of it further adds to the problem.

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Saturday, November 10, 2007

How 'Bout That National Debt! :)

The nation's debt has reached the nine trillion mark and is still climbing. Let's put that in terms a little easier to understand: the interest rate alone now costs us the equivalent of fighting two Iraq wars at the same time.

Remember when Bushie promised us the Iraq war would cost a trifling $50 billion? And then he said the war would pay for itself. Uh, just who was it he had in mind. It sure wasn't me and you, sucker! Maybe he was thinking of Blackwater and Exon Mobil? Currently, the administration admits that the war is costing $500 billion per year, which probably means it's actually costing somewhere around four times as much. But let's give the Bushies their figure for a moment. Just how long do you think a CEO would last at a company if his estimates were wrong by a factor of ten? Any businessman would be ranked a complete failure.

That's just the argument that Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz makes in his recent Vanity Fair article.

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Friday, November 09, 2007

Apples to Oranges, or Why I Don't Buy Bottled Water:

According to JAD MOUAWAD of The New York Times, "Even at today’s highs, oil is cheaper than imported bottled water, which would cost $180 a barrel, or milk, at $150 a barrel." Yes, but I don't drink a gallon of milk or water on my way to work each day, Jad. Nevertheless, the story is well worth a read, focusing as it does on the increase in demand for oil. The best analysis seems to suggest there will be no relief in sight for the next twenty to twenty-five years.

In the meantime, foreign investors are beginning to shift to the Euro as the currency of choice. The dollar is headed for an all-time low, indicating boom times for American exporters, provided they actually have something to export. As you may recall, America ceased to be a producer country some years back. Our economy is based on consumption. Ooops!

How many Mac mansions does it take to create a burst housing bubble?

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Thursday, November 08, 2007

Great News!!!

This just in: The national debt has officially reached 9 trillion dollars! Thank you, George W Bush! You have given your country a truly wonderful legacy.

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Sunday, November 04, 2007

Ooops!

Today's Washington Post reports that "Republican presidential candidate Fred D. Thompson has been crisscrossing the country since early this summer on a private jet lent to him by a businessman and close adviser who has a criminal record for drug dealing." The Post story reports that Philip Martin was first arrested and plead guilty to drug charges in 1979. In 1983 he was charged with violating probation and plead no contest to cocaine trafficking and conspiracy charges. Apparently, Martin has been providing Thompson with big breaks in transportation costs as the candidate crisscrosses America in his bid to challenge "the nation's mayor" and the country's best known cross-dresser, Rudi G., for the Republican nomination. Looks like Hilly's campaign isn't the only one that criminals like to cozy up to.



It Can't Happen Here:

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf declared emergency rule yesterday, suspending the constitution and firing the country's chief justice at the same time. Private television stations have been blacked out and opposition leaders arrested. The Washinton Post reports on the events today.

So far, Bush has only joked about doing something like this.

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Friday, November 02, 2007

The Great Security Myth:

Yes, ladies and gents, we invaded Iraq to make America secure against Osama (currently hiding in a cave in Pakistan). Evidently that worked out very well, as Col. Steven Boylan, the military's top spokesman in Iraq, is all too happy to explain.

However, it would seem that Col. Boylan and the military are incapable of securing their own computers in Iraq. Salon.com has a great story on the military's inability to control its personnel or computers, no one, especially the military, seems to know which. You can read about it here. You don't want to pass this one up. Has the colonel's identity been stolen? Or is he just a loose cannon?