Oh it is a New Year and time once again to commit to all sorts of silly new me kinds of things. Since I’m not very good at resolutions, maybe I will try a different strategy this year.
1. I will exercise less
2. Eat more
3. Be meaner
4. Drink more
5. Watch more TV
6. Blog less
7. Pay less attention to the family
8. Be a worse boss
9. Skip more classess
10. Win fewer lotteries
There, that should be 10 resolutions that I can actually keep.
Interesting. Is the selection of Rick Warren for the Inauguration a positive move designed to bridge the gap between liberals and evangelicals and demonstrate that policy disagreements should not prevent civil discourse? Or, is it an insulting slap to the face to those supportive of civil rights? Should we consider the positive aspects of Rick Warren even agreeing to speak at the Inauguration despite leading a congregation that is highly conservative? Also, when considered against the Jermiah Wright controversies, is this the continuation of a pattern of Obama being willing to tolerate any type of idiocy from any church leader? Many, many questions.
My overall conclusion is that Warren was simply a mistake but hopefully not a meaningful one. This inauguration represents such a historic step forward in terms of civil rights that it seems like a major blemish to have it kicked off by a guy who is tied directly and indirectly to a lot of anti-semitic and anti-homosexual views. Going back to Warren’s roots, he also has ties to some of the old racist evangelicals. A lot of people reeling from the unfairness of Proposition 8 will be travelling to DC with hope that Obama can and will make the world more tolerant, safe and fair for them. And for them to have to sit through Warren’s invocation, knowing that he represents and leads a big part of the movement to deny them their rights is downright horrible.
I hope Obama comes through in promoting an American resurgance in civil rights for all Americans but he is definitely setting a bad first tone. And it was completely unnecessary. As hard as it can sometimes be to remember, there are religious leaders out there that spend their time preaching compassion, forgiveness and tolerance instead of hatred, discrimination and judgementalism. It sure would have been nice to have someone like that lead the Invocation.
Looks like Saturday morning will be an early dose of work with a project set to kick off at around 5:30 AM. All so I can upgrade two storage arrays and a fibre switch with new firmware. That sounds like a really, really lame way to start a weekend, doesn’t it? And like most IT projects, it will be most successful if none of our end users know I was even there or did anything. It takes a lot of work and sacrifice to constantly keep your labor hidden.
I was listening to the radio today and a guy started talking about famous bad rulers like Hitler, Attila the Hun and Vlad the Impaler. Then he said I could be a good ruler and build my own Luann Platter at Luby’s. At which point, I thought “huh?” I mean, what advertising team recommended that Luby’s associate their brand with mass murdering psychopaths? If they were after a strong link between their ad and the product they were got it. I drove by a Luby’s tonight and immediately pictured it surrounded by a field of corpses stuck on spears. Then I decided that I didn’t feel all that hungry.
I still can’t believe that ad. Vlad the Impaler? For an eating establishment?
It gets even better when you Google “Luby’s” and some of those bad rulers because it brings up references to George Jo Hennard and his killing spree at a Luby’s in Killeen, TX in 1991. I had totally forgotten about that incident until Luby’s decided they need to reference themselves with some of the most evil men in history. I wonder if a little research by the ad company might have suggested that “Luby’s” and “mass-murderer” aren’t a good combination.
This wasn’t a bad advertisement in terms of being annoying or innefective. This was a bad advertisement in terms of giving me an incredibly strong and negative reaction. I’m sure they meant well but, really, what the hell were they thinking?
I forgot the key part of my first blog. Here’s the actual church report. I guess I still have enough journalism training in me to recogize that I should actually include references for my blogs …
I am doing something I thought that I would never do, but I am writing this post in praise of the Catholic church. The church just released its bio-ethics paper that has been in the works for six years. I haven’t read it yet and I will probably disagree with a lot of its conclusions but I want to give them props for putting serious time and effort into asking questions that 99.9% of the population isn’t asking. In the case of bio-ethics, we’re quickly going into the land of scientists doing anything and everything that they possibly can without ever asking if they should. There are serious research efforts happening right now that make Dr. Frankenstein look like a pediatrician handing out lollipops and immunizations.
To my mind, one of the great tragedies of the abortion debate is that it seems to have frozen a lot of people’s views and opinions in time. The question of whether a woman has a right to an abortion is an important one but is almost quaint compared to some of the new ones that are coming every day. Right off the bat, we have over 400,000 estimated embryos in freezers in this country right now as left-overs from IVF procedures. That’s well over half-a-million around the globe and nobody has any clear idea about what to do with them. The biological parents have the right to decide, but most never do and are rarely counseled about it. I’m not a radical pro-lifer, but if I was, I would think that a campaign to save those half million embryos from either disposal or eternity in frozen limbo would be a higher priority that stopping abortions. I am also starting to lean against IVF procedures since they result in these spare embryos. (The Catholic church is also taking a stand against such procedures in its report so I may end up agreeing with them on more than I originally expected …)
I lean pro-choice with some limits but I have to honestly say that the thought of half-a-million embryos in freezers really gives me pause and doubt about the consequences of not believing in some set of rights for embryos. My general views have generally followed a belief that embryos do have rights but that those rights are subordinate to the mother’s. That puts me generally in the pro-choice camp. However, since I do believe in some embryo rights, it is really, really hard to say it is OK to put them in a freezer forever or to throw them in the trash especially since the body of the mother is removed from the equation.
If the fetus is not in the mother’s body, why should her rights trump the embryos’ rights? Also, why should her rights trump the father’s? I can see giving a woman final say on an abortion issue since it is her body not the father’s, but for a donated egg and sperm that results in a embryo outside her body, it really seems the two biological parents would have totally equal rights in terms of deciding what can and can’t be done with the fetuses. These are tough questions that families, communities, legal systems, religious groups and governments should have addressed before we had all of these embryos sitting in freezers. It’s too late now for a good answer but we should be thinking about these things before thousands more end up in frozen limbo.
Cloning, experimentation on fetuses, bringing fetuses to term specifically for organ harvesting, using animals to grow human organs, etc., are all scientific realities at this time. I don’t have any grand ideas or conclusions about any of those things, just a recognition of my own moral doubt and confusion about them. With that it mind, I am willing to salute the Catholic Church for taking the lead on asking these questions because I don’t think there is any other organization, particularly at the international level, that could bring them up as seriously and with such a large audience. Even if a lot of people (including myself) end up disagreeing with their conclusions, at least they are getting the conversation a lot closer to where it needs to be in terms of modern scientific reality.
As a side note and point of information about where science is headed, consider this article. It is about a serious effort to bring a mammoth to life by manipulting the dna of an elephant. The same technology is being considered with manipulating chimpanzee dna with that of a neanderthal. Technically, neanderthal’s aren’t human and are therefore exempt from most currently existing bio-ethics policies regarding cloning and experimentation. There is a definite reality to bio-ethics and scientific research and that is that there is a very limited amount of time before the question “Should we do this?” gets replaced with the question of “Should we have done this?”
With that in mind, once again I want to commend the Catholic Church for asking some of those questions and trying to get a conversation started. Even if I end up disagreeing with most of their policy recommendations, at least they have some.
Yes, it is a good day for the U.S. Many (maybe most) people both here and abroad had doubts that America would ever elect a black person. Sure, it was always theoretically possible but there also that simmering doubt about whether enough white people would really pull the lever. It may not have happened without the incredible damage done by Bush/economy/failed wars, but it did happen.
And it is perfectly natural that the media is spending a lot of time documenting this day but the stock market is falling again and Russia is rattling sabers so it only took a day for a set of reminders that the world is still a dangerous place in a dangerous time. Good luck to you, Mr. President.
I’ve been mulling over mission statements for a while because I recently found myself back in one of those long meetings where managers and consultants try to hammer out the heart and soul of an organization in 25 words or less. It’s the traditional job of creating a unique identity and framing the outer parameters of an organization’s strategy. Yet more and more, I am thinking it is really a waste of time. Corporations can be sued for violating shareholder rights if they turn down a profitable buy-out offer yet no corporation has a mission of being sold. It comes back to the idea that all corporations exist to increase shareholder value no matter what the plaque on the wall says.
Non-profits tend to agonize over mission statements even more but then managers play games spinning the descriptions of their favorite programs to fit the mission. In some cases, they violate the mission on purpose for the greater good. A classic example is the big government contract that has 75% of its money tied to something directly in the mission but requires 25% of the work be something completely outside an organization’s mission. They’re still going to take that contract 10 times out of 10 if it’s a big pot of money.
Even from a strategy viewpoint, mission statements may be more trouble than they are worth. In an age where everyone is aiming to be flexible, adaptable and nimble, does it make sense to chain your strategy to a single sentence that is supposed to last for years and years?
My new unified theory of mission statements is that every organization on the planet has one of two mission statements. You’re either an organization dedicated to selling stuff or an organization dedicated to helping people. Beyond that, there are strategic decisions. What stuff do you sell, to whom, where, when and for how much? Which people do you help, where, when, how? Those strategic decisions can be changed when necessary (or simply advantageous). Whether you are a giant government agency, a small mom and pop store, a corporation, a church or any other type agency, one of those two mission statements will apply to you.
I still believe in the conventional wisdom that you don’t want to be changing strategy on an everyday basis because it takes time for strategic changes to be implemented and measured. But I think a lot of agencies could save a lot of time and money if they just accepted that mission statements aren’t that important because, at the end of the day, they all come down to selling stuff or helping people.
I’m still mulling the bailout. I have read so many differing theories that I thought I would start categorizing them.
Theory 1 says that Henry Paulson is a brilliant investment banker from Goldman Sachs with the perfect resume to buy securities, stabilize the market and resell those securities down the road. He did the right thing in saving Fannie, Freddie and AIG while letting Lehman’s fail to purge some bad debts out of the system through the bankruptcy. Nobody else is as qualified as he is to do this work.
Theory 2 says that Henry Paulson is an idiot who has been saying the markets are fine for a couple of years, is going to hire a bunch of his billionaire buddies to manage these new accounts for the government and they are the same buddies who created these risky derivitaves in the first place. He only saved AIG because his buddies at Goldman Sachs were hooked into AIG for $20 billion. Nobody else is less qualified than him to do this work.
Theory 3 says that this issue was largely caused by too many individuals, companies and countries going into debt. Some proponents of this theory embrace the idea of the government borrowing $700 billion to attempt to fix the problem. Other proponents believe that more debt will only delay and deepen the invevitable as the only real solution is to tighten belts, accept a lower standard of living and start moving forward in a world with less credit.
Theory 4 says this issue was largely caused by the government’s policies to encourage home ownership among people who really couldn’t afford a home.
Theory 5 says that regardless of government policies, mortage companies should have had enough common sense not to make stupid loans that didn’t require down payments and had risky terms for the home buyer with the belief that ever escalating home prices would allow for perpetual refinancing and everybody would win.
Theory 6 says that deregulation allowed companies’ greed to overwhelm their common sense. Depending on their particular party, theory 6 people either blame Barney Frank and the dems for blocking Fannie/Freddie reform or Bush and company for pushing deregulation in other areas.
Theory 7 says that deregulation had nothing to do with it as many regulations that were in place were not followed. This theory is more about how existing regulations were not enforced.
Depending on my mood at the time, I find all of these theories to be believable. The one area of blame/anger that I have that never wavers is for the finance and banking committees on congress. Based on the revelations of how many donations they received from the industry they were regulating and how big this implosion was, I think everyone on those committees from both parties should be removed from those committees (ideally from office as well, but some of them aren’t up for re-election any time soon). I just don’t see how any of them can look people in the eye and say they deserve to still be there. Barney Frank is particularly annoying as he runs around trying to take credit for the bailout plan and never accepting any responsibility for his committees’ failures that led to this point.
The bailout is an interesting quandry. The first issue is that from the moment Paulson’s idea went public, the markets absorbed the idea of the bailout, making it a self fulfilling event. Once people/companies buy stock expecting 700 billion in help, there is no way to not give it to them. My general thought is pretty much the consensus opinion. It wasn’t a very good bill but the government did have to do something.
I think the best idea I saw in terms of being fair and feasible was for the government to set up a giant refinancing program through Fannie and Freddie. People would be able to refinance to a 6%, 30-year loan for no fees through the government program. It would be fair, since anyone with a mortgage could participate; it would help those financial companies higher up the food chain because many of the loans that their derivitaves are based on would get paid in full; and it would directly help people in danger of foreclosure. People who couldn’t afford their home even with that assistance would still need to move. Markets have to be allowed to adjust some.
The biggest thing that I think this will do is change the national perspective and debate on the free market, which is unfortunate, because a lot of that is misplaced. It is true that the market ran wild and better regulations might have at least slowed down or reduced the bubble. However, the government has been intervening in the housing market for years and greatly increasing its intervention in recent years. Both parties pursued policies to encourage home ownership. Mortage payments as tax shield have been inflating home prices in the US for decades. The recent push for Fannie and Freddie to get more low-income families into houses made an even bigger impact.
These policies were based on two goals. The first was altruistic, in that people believe families in homes are more independent, resilient and less needy on government assistance. The second was greed. People started smelling money and believing that this government intervention would indefinitely keep home prices climbing. One interesting piece of data that I would like to see is how many people didn’t just buy one home they couldn’t afford but multiple homes by selling one to pay for the next one with ever-climbing home prices. I’m sure there were some folks in that category and they got caught holding an expensive house that they thought they could sell if they got into trouble. But when the property nose-dived, there was no recovery in a home sale.
