Diseconomies of scale

Originally posted 7-24-04

While we often read about economies of scale, we probably should pay more attention to the diseconomies of scale.

When a solid sphere doubles its radius, its surface area increases 300% while its mass goes up 700%. The same ratio seems to affect organizations. As they grow, the center becomes more remote from the surface-the part that actually is in contact with customers, competitors, and new technology. The gravitational pull of the increased mass draws more and more efforts inward where they focus on internal processes, procedures, rules, expenses, and politics.

Internal forces soon overwhelm the organization's ability to respond intelligently to external events. As Jack Welch puts it, the company "has its face toward the CEO and its ass toward the customer." An odd posture to be sure since as Peter Drucker has preached for a half-century "the only profit center is a customer whose check hasn't bounced."

Costs Versus Expenses

It is counterintuitive to include expense control as one of the driver's of diseconomies of scale. How can saving money be bad?

There is a big difference between costs and expenses. Accountants, for example, rarely quantify the costs (in lost revenue) of inertia, strategic indecision, or product delay. They can easily calculate money saved using less expensive materials, but they rarely capture the erosion in brand equity which results from using inferior materials. Accountants are willing to spend time to save money even though we know that is usually better to be first to market.

If effective employment of intellectual capital is the key success factor in the new economy, then should training and education be an expense or investment? And where do most accounting departments put it?

Furthermore, most cost containment exercises are Mickey Mouse. They focus on little items like office supplies, travel, and training budgets. As such they are Band-Aids and placebos. Managers get to feel like they are doing something while big issues are ignored.

Moreover, an expense focus is a continuation of a nineteenth century mindset. It presumes that customers are grateful to have something rather than nothing. But the days are long gone when the typical customer will happily lineup for black Model T's simply because they are cheap. We have, as consumers, come to expect more choices and new products. Squeezing out expenses threatens a company's ability to compete on these other dimensions customers care about.

But what's the first lever executives reach for when trying to improve profits?

For 40 years after the end of Prohibition Schlitz was America's best-selling beer. Then they decided to change the formula so it would brew faster (i.e. cheaper). The new formula changed the beer's taste and customers deserted in droves. By 1984 nobody drank Schlitz anymore.

Notional Benefits, Real Problems

Take this everyday example of the center becoming a drag on performance.

The organization decides "leverage its buying power" to reduce costs. At the outset, everything sounds great. Centralized buying promises increased profits because costs will go down while responsiveness and quality will not change one iota. With great fanfare, a new purchasing process is put in place and new experts appointed to oversee it. But the benefits are only notional.

The purchasing staff quickly makes suppliers aware of the new decision criteria. The latter get with the program and focus on delivering low costs. Quality service and responsiveness usually suffer because they are less quantifiable than price and because the purchasing unit is too removed from the action to gauge the non-quantifiable dimensions of the product. (If they can't graph it, it doesn't exist).

Often, the central buyers become an internal police force- shoving standardization on diverse business units so that order quantities can be increased and inventories managed more efficiently. But standardization can create products that fail in the marketplace because they are neither fish nor fowl.

GM experienced this when they consolidated platforms. In theory this allows multiple divisions to utilize the same basic components with immense savings in research, engineering, and tooling. The result was the Cadillac Cimmeron-a Chevy Cavalier with minor changes and a high price. Not only did it flop in the marketplace; it inflicted grievous harm to Cadillac's image as a premium product. Even today, standardization has created look-alike models which have strong appeal to no particular segment. GM sales are lackluster. They keep losing share.

Ford faced similar dilemmas as it pursued the white whale of the "world car"-a single model that can be sold in dozens of countries in great quantities. But the Ford Escort was too bland and under-powered to sell at a profit in the US. At the same time, it was too large and expensive to be successful in Latin America and Eastern Europe.

Centralization also creates political problems. Like courtiers around the throne HQ staffs create suspicion between the center and the market frontier. They usually have influence, sometimes they are responsible for some expense lines. But they do not have responsibility for any whole project. The line managers, who do have that responsibility, have to deal with the marketplace and the central staff. No surprise, often the latter gets the most attention.

Peter Drucker has written of management's "degenerative tendency" to focus on internal and operational data, to the exclusion of the more important and more strategic information about customers, competitors, and technology. Centralization and defused authority feed this tendency and exacerbate the problems it causes.

China and "quality fade"

This is an interesting article in light of the problems Mattel is having.

'Quality Fade': China's Great Business Challenge

One of the problems facing China is that manufacturers continue to engage in a practice I call "quality fade." This is the deliberate and secret habit of widening profit margins through a reduction in the quality of materials. Importers usually never notice what's happening; downward changes are subtle but progressive. The initial production sample is fine, but with each successive production run, a bit more of the necessary inputs are missing.

What is maddening to importers is that quality fade often occurs in the last place an importer thinks to check. One American company had been importing a line of health and beauty care products for over a year when the cardboard boxes that held its product suddenly started collapsing under their own weight. There was no logical explanation for the collapse except quality fade, and the supplier in this case blamed sub-suppliers for replacing an acceptable cardboard box with ones that were inferior.

The Case of the Missing Aluminum

Some quality issues are not all that serious, but others are downright frightening. One of the most disturbing examples I have encountered while working in China involved the manufacture and importation of aluminum systems used to construct high-rise commercial buildings. These are the systems that support tons of concrete as it is being poured, and their general stability is critical. The American company that designed and patented the system engineered all key components. It knew exactly how much each part was supposed to weigh, and yet the level of engineering sophistication did not stop the supplier from making a unilateral decision to reduce the specifications. When the "production error" was caught, one aluminum part was found to be weighing less than 90% of its intended weight.

Notice how stock analysts and business journalists rarely bring this issue up when they are praising some CEO's outsourcing initiative and its projected cost savings.

Wonder if saving those pennies was worth it for Mattel?

Speaking of Mattel. Why didn't the board fire the CEO last night? A rolling recall is bad enough because it keeps the bad news in the headlines. Better to emulate J&J during the Tylenol scare. Be over-cautious and get ahead of the problem.

What makes it unforgivable is that Mattel knew how the pet food mess worked out. They had every reason to believe that the problem would be bigger than their first estimates. And yet, they acted slowly.

This can't be true

can it?

O'Donnell retired after the season, this time for good. In 2004 he declined an offer to return to the Pittsburgh Steelers by Coach Bill Cowher after Tommy Maddox fell to injury.

Maybe it is just another example of Timesmen trolling Wikipedia.

Yeah. That has to be it. Not even Cowher could be that stupid.

Scandal at NBC

The many issues surrounding NBC's "To Catch a Predator" deserve much more attention than they are getting. We have accusations that NBC bribes the local police to get them to cooperate in their on-camera stings, that NBC forced an over-reaction by local police that resulted in a man's death, that many of the arrests are legally questionable and result in dropped charges. Moreover, NBC News actively shares its work product with police and prosecutors-- something most news organizations view as verboten. (I wonder if NBC would be as agreeable if the Marines asked for their cooperation in hunting down terrorists in Iraq?)

Moreover, it appears that NBC fired a whistle-blower who raised ethical concerns about how they did business.

A last point deserves mention as well. The focus on online predators distorts the reality of child abuse and exploitation. The vast majority of perpetrators are known to the victims. By concentrating on the "pervert in the bushes" (or in the chat room) NBC creates a false image of where children are vulnerable.


Here are three very good piece on the subject:

Legally Speaking: Perverted Journalism - Part One

Legally Speaking: Perverted Journalism-Part Two

Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die

Big thumbs up

Tom Dowd was the producer/ sound engineer for the Allman Brothers Live at the Fillmore East. That alone is enough to earn him the eternal gratitude of every real fan of rock and roll. Dowd's career, however, spans decades and genres and may be unparalleled in the record business.

He did not work with every important artist of the post-war period, but he seemed to come close: Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Eric Clapton, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, The Allman Brothers Band, Lynyrd Skynyrd...

I just watched a remarkable documentary on Dowd and his career. It's one of the best pieces of non-fiction movie-making i've ever seen.

Tom Dowd had a genius for record-making and he was a true pioneer when it came to recording technology. What made him really special, though, is that he put those talents to work on behalf of the artists instead of his own legend. You can't watch the movie without being stunned by his self-effacement and generosity of spirit.

Outstanding article

Why Greta, Geraldo and FOX News are bad for Law Enforcement

Choosing one crime out of many to over-investigate and microscopically speculate upon doesn’t do anything to improve justice, it just increases ratings. In fact, it often leaves the public with a gross misunderstanding of the criminal justice system, the investigative process, and even the frequency and nature of crimes. If you believe cable news networks, pregnant women should fear their mates above all else, all prosecutors are corrupt, beautiful coeds are the predominant victims of violent crime, children are constantly being snatched by strangers, and on and so forth.

Open source training tips for terrorists

I’ve written on this before but the subject is now hot thanks to the New York Times.

Gabriel Schoenfeld has the best response to Levitt’s little stunt. He does a great job pointing out the dangers of such public brain-storming:

Then there was Zacharias Moussaoui, who was encountering trouble in his Minnesota flight school. This deranged fanatic might have only needed scant prompting, perhaps by stumbling across a clever scenario cooked up by Steven Levitt, to find a way to work al Qaeda’s will that was easier than poring through aviation manuals and struggling to operate a Boeing 747 simulator.

He also nails Levitt’s overall attitude toward this project:

To Levitt, however, this solemn subject is not solemn at all. He writes about it in a glib and flippant tone, as in his summons to the public to come up with even more lethal scenarios by which al Qaeda might wreak death and destruction on the United States: “I’m sure many readers have far better ideas. I would love to hear them.”

There is one other aspect to Levitt’s approach that deserves mention. He and the Times want to pretend that this is a contribution to public discourse and counter-terrorism planning. “Look, here is a Big Brain thinking Deep Thoughts about an Important Subject.” In reality, though, it is just a puffed up pundit pulling stuff out of his backside.

Levitt knows very little about counter-terrorism, police work, or terrorist operations. Nor does he think it important to educate himself before playing Red Cell leader. Instead, his writing is studded with phrases like “I presume” and “I guess”.

Then there is this gem:

Third, unless terrorists always insist on suicide missions (which I can’t imagine they would), it would be optimal to hatch a plan in which your terrorists aren’t killed or caught in the act, if possible.

Dr. Big Thinker has apparently missed all the discussion about the role of martyrdom and 72 virgins in al Qaeda ideology and recruitment. Avoiding suicide sounds reasonable to an academic playing around with concepts. But to jihadis, the people most likely to attack us, the suicide is a feature not a bug.

It is really kind of sad. The majesty and credibility of New York Times is just a fig leaf for a lazy pundit who basks in his ignorant knowingness.

What a missed opportunity. We could learn a lot from serious analysis of terrorist scenarios. There were some excellent examples in the wake of 9-11. They served the twin purposes of pointing to vulnerabilities (which can be corrected) and dispelling hysteria.

Levitt is not the first person to ponder the possibility that the Washington could be a model for al Qaeda and others. It’s a shame that analysis was not in his job description.

Here’s a couple of points that seem relevant to his scenarios.

Recruiting and financing twenty snipers will leave a big intelligence footprint. What is the likelihood that the government will get wind of the plot, penetrate it, and roll-up the whole operation?

This happens all the time when amateurs try to hire a hit man to get rid of a spouse or business partner. They end up starring in a police video as they lay out their plan to an undercover cop.

We have also seen this happen repeatedly in terrorism cases.

How much would such an operation cost? Does al Qaeda still have the resources to commit to such a venture?

Most of the information I’ve seen indicates that they have to work on a shoe-string budget in this country.

I’m also reminded of the plotter in the ’93 WTC attack who needed to get the deposit back on the rental truck (the one that carried the bomb and was destroyed in the blast) because he needed that money to pay for his escape.

The Washington snipers were anomalies. Most famous sniper attacks end with the perpetrator killed or captured at the scene. Are mobile snipers a real threat nationwide or did the DC killers benefit from bad policework/policy in Maryland?

Could such a plan survive the capture of one of the snipers? Could terrorists maintain operational security and compartmentalization? Or would the network unravel quickly in the early days?

It’s a tough trade-off. Maintain tight security and your plan takes forever to get underway. That, in turn, means your recruits may lose motivation and drift away. Hurry the operation along and it becomes vulnerable.

A sobering look at wrongful conviction

Stuart Taylor, Innocents in Prison

Police and/or prosecutorial misconduct appears to figure in more than half of the 205 convictions that DNA has proven false. Specific reasons for those convictions are catalogued in "Judging Innocence, " a study by Brandon Garrett, a law professor at the University of Virginia, slated for publication in January in the Columbia Law Review. Mistaken eyewitness identifications -- often due to police subtly pointing witnesses toward the people the cops suspect -- figured in 79 percent of these false convictions. Flawed or corrupt testimony by scientific "experts" (about hair, blood types, and the like) figured in 55 percent. False confessions, mostly by juvenile defendants, figured in 16 percent.

Rarely bad and never woeful

In the 1960s, the Pittsburgh Steelers were a really bad team. Woefully bad. Then Chuck Noll took over.

Things did not improve improve immediately. They went 1-13 in 1969 and had losing records the next two years. But 1969 was the last year the Steelers failed to win at least five games in the regular season.

That's a fairly impressive record. The other dynasties cannot match it. Dallas sucked in 1988 and 1989 (only four wins in the two years combined). The Patriots had a horrible year in 1992 (two wins). The 49ers only won six games total in the 2004 and 2005 season.

Only one other NFL team can match the Steelers on this score. Denver only won four games in 1971 but that was in a fourteen game season and they had one tie. You have to go back to 1967 to find a woefully bad Broncos team.

I think this record says something about the quality of the ownership of those two teams. Both have consistently fielded playoff teams (and won Super Bowls) without ever dropping into the league's cellar.

There is, after all, a benefit to being occasionally woeful in the NFL. A really bad team gets the best draft position. The Colts "won" Peyton Manning by going 3-13. The prize the Cowboys got for their bad streak was Troy Aikman. Teams like Pittsburgh and Denver never receive that bonus. Yet, somehow, they keep operating at the top the league.

Puzzled

All at once i get a relative flood of hits from the Google search "josh" "billings" "quip".

Interesting

Peyton Manning in four post-season games (2006)

70.8 QB rating
3 Touchdowns
7 Interceptions


Ben Roethlisberger in four post-season games (2005)

101.7 QB rating
7 Touchdowns
3 interceptions

Conspiracy theories, solved cold cases and the long silent witness

A recurring motif in conspiracy literature is the “witness” who waits for years before coming forward to tell their stories. With popular subjects such as the JFK assassination or the Roswell UFO there seems to be no end to these witnesses. The flow is not even constrained by the actuary tables because we now hear from witnesses even after they die.

“My father, on his deathbed in 2003, told me…”

Non-conspiracy types have a real problem with this sort of “evidence”. It is exceedingly difficult to falsify. The passage of time makes it nearly impossible to check any details of the story. Hence, we have to take the witness on faith.

For example, say some guy comes forward tomorrow and tells Montel Williams that on 9 December 1965 he hid on a hillside and watched as US military personnel hauled four body bags and a large, tarp-covered object from the woods near Kecksburg, PA. Had he told his story in 1965, we could check a host of details to test his veracity. The milk truck driver can tell us if dozens of army trucks lined Ankney Hill Road as the witness claims. The high school teacher can confirm or rebut the claim that the witness missed school on December 10 because military intelligence officers interrogated him for eight hours and threatened to send him to Vietnam if he talked about what he saw.

It seems eminently reasonable to ignore such tardy witnesses unless they can provide compelling evidence to substantiate the critical elements of their story.

So what do we do with cold criminal cases?

All too frequently, the crucial “evidence” that prosecutors use at trial is the uncorroborated testimony of witnesses who came forward years after the crime occurred. Just as with the Kecksburg example, it is nearly impossible to verify their story with any sort of physical evidence.

I’m not sure that I can see a clear distinction between the Grassy Knollers and the hero DA who convicts a man on the word of a witness who waits twenty years to tell their story.


More on this later.

Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History

They're talking about it, the JFK assassination, and conspiracies over at Patterico's joint.

See also here and here.

I haven't read the book yet, but his interviews on CSPAN and on radio have been impressive.

Do magazines have DNA?

Is the New Republic cursed with a liar gene?

The magazine of Scott Beauchamp also gave us Lee Seigel, Stephen Glass, and Ruth Shalit. Michael Kinsley was an editor there for years before moving to Slate and the “monkey fishing” debacle. Sullivan was the TNR editor when both Shalit and Glass were doing their thing. The whole blogosphere has seen plenty of evidence that honesty is a low-value commodity to Exitable Andy. (He, after all, defended Kinsey on the monkey fishing mess.)

From 1948 to 1956 TNR was run by Michael Straight. Thus, we had the spectacle of a liberal magazine denouncing Joe McCarthy for his “witch hunts” while the magazine was under the direction and control of a member of the Philby spy ring.

Go back to the 1930s and you find Malcolm Cowley using TNR’s pages to spin for Stalin and to lie about Joe’s enemies.

That’s a pretty impressive record. I guess the big question is: how does it keep surviving these self-inflicted wounds?

This record also suggests that magazine "brands" are built on something other than credibility and honesty.

Beauchamp Affair: The New Republic tries to use the Nixon playbook

I thought they were supposed to be smart people over at TNR. So why are they trying to bluff their way out of this with a modified, limited hangout?

Baldilocks has the best analysis of their most recent "clarification". Ace is just on fire. Michelle Malkin has an extensive round-up.

UPDATE: Credit where due.

AMac, the most astute commentator over at KC's place, predicted that TNR would try this ploy. He sent me an email several days ago that zeroed in on the critical issue.

The key question is not "did something like these incidents happen?" Beauchamp's stories had shock value only because he claimed that the incidents were seen by many soldiers and officers and NO ONE DID ANYTHING because the Iraq war destroyed their humanity.

So now, in the case of the wounded woman in the mess hall, TNR's "verification" of the story actually shreds Beauchamp's credibility.

But TNR is trying to pretend that their diarist was right and their critics were wrong.

Which is exactly what AMac said they would do.

Sales versus relationship marketing

David Maister discusses the critical differences:

Fat Smoker Principles: Build Relationship Plans Not Sales Plans

Why the hurry?

Speed and "connectedness" are the new opiates of the managerial class. Too often we confuse being fast with being right-- as though George Custer is a better model than George Washington. In our seven by twenty-four obsession with the urgent we risk staleness and a loss of creativity. Few heed William James's observation that "we learn to swim during the winter, and to skate during the summer" or Jacques Barzun's that "the inner integration of experience takes place slowly and during inactivity."

We want to innovate but we refuse to internalize David Gelernter's insight that creativity occurs "in a state of unconcentration" and that "hard work does not pay. You can't achieve inspiration by concentrating hard, by putting your mind to it."

I wonder what the adherents of hyperconnectedness and hyperkinetics would make of an education program that gives executives " a breather"? One where they have "time to get to know their families again and to renew ties with old friends in a whirl of cocktail parties, dances, and barbecues." A place with time for "pickup softball games in the afternoon and spur-of-the-moment parties that go on at all hours."

This sounds like a boondoggle and it would be easy to write off the participants as future losers. But the former student was Gen. Schwartzkopf describing his year at the Army War College.

I suspect that this opiate is addictive for two reason. First, most products and services are really commodities. For all the talk of special competencies, brands, etc., there really isn't a lot of meaningful differences. So we rely on slavish availability as a substitute for distinctiveness.

As the old joke goes, you can sum up an advertising man in five words: "yes, sir, no, sir ulcer." Painful, but true, and a reflection of the fact that most advertising cannot demonstrate its value and most agencies cannot show that their ads are special.

A real craftsman, no matter what her field, does not need a pager or even voice mail. There are sufficient customers willing to wait to get unique wares. A Bernbach or Ogilvy understood this. The work, not merely hard work, was the focus.

Second, I believe that some of this incessant action is a reaction to the sudden onset of competition. Most businesses have not faced real competition. Distance, tradition, and scarce information combined to create cozy oligopolies. Firms in these markets (which were the norm for most of this century) could ignore customers.

That is gone. Managers must change the habits of a lifetime. Rethinking their business is hard work. It is so much easier to simply substitute "service" and action.

This last point is rarely given the attention it deserves. Peter Drucker wrote in 1954 that "any organization in which marketing is either absent or incidental is not a business and should never be run as if it were one." Further, that a "business enterprise has two-- and only two-- basic functions: marketing and innovation." If this is so and if many or most businesses have traditionally been protected within an oligopolistic fortress, then the implications are staggering.

Most executives, it seems, are only businessmen manqués because their organizations are not really businesses. The lessons of a lifetime do not need to be revised, they need to be tossed aside completely. It is no surprise, then, that many executives recoil when they apprehend this fact. They take refuge in action, connection, and other "irritable mental gestures" as a substitute for hard thinking.

A puzzle with a purpose

Rob at Business Pundit asks little question that is more important than it first appears:

During World War II, statistician Abraham Wald tried to determine where to add extra armor to airplanes. Based on the patterns of bullet holes in returning airplanes, he suggested that the parts not hit should be protected with extra armor. Why?

Personal productivity and technology

Outstanding post over at the Evolving Excellence Blog:

Lowering The Water Level

Toyota calls it “lowering the water level.”

Imagine a value stream or a production process as a river. Reducing the inventory in the process – “lowering the water level” – exposes the “rocks” that represent all of the hidden costs and waste in production. Only by revealing those rocks can you improve the process and reduce the waste.

This metaphor works for knowledge workers, too. In this case, however, their key inventory item is time. Having too much time to do one’s work hides the waste and inefficiencies in the process.

Tom Snyder, RIP

A nice appreciation is up over at In from the Cold.

Nearly speechless

Anyone who doubts that "Libertarianism is applied autism" should check out the the comments over at Volokh.

Criminal justice and political hacks

The Michael Vick case is going to be an interesting acid test for professional right-wingers. The Duke lacrosse case and the Scooter Libby trial found them defending due process and warning of the dangers of ambitious prosecutors. Now we’ll see if those positions were heartfelt and principled or simply a matter of political tactics and spin.

Newsbusters has already flunked.

Will the Vick Co-Defendant Plead-out Stop the Inane Duke Lacrosse Comparisons?

They are happy to engage in the sort of speculative pre-judgment that caused so much harm in Durham. Almost every point they make about Vick’s guilt is just an echo of what was said about the lacrosse players and Nifong in April 2006.

The agony of the push media guild

In one episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy ends up with the power to read minds. This turns out to be a curse instead of a gift. The thoughts of those around her are raging cacophony of voices inside her head that drives her to madness and the brink of death.

That’s what the internet has done to the people who make their living in the old media. Once they lived in a quiet world where they talked and every one else listened. Their work was rarely criticized. Sometimes they heard whispered praise or demurrals from other guild members but it was all very civilized.

Now, unfortunately, the great unwashed have a voice and the push media do not like what they hear. They spend months, even years, writing a book and then the barbarians deface its Amazon page with unflattering reviews. The New York Times goes all out on a story that illustrates the evils of class, privilege, and racism and then some blogger in Brooklyn shows that the Grey Lady is a gullible fool. The New Republic tries to find a new Hemingway in Iraq and uncredentialed amateurs suggest that his dispatches are not true.

No wonder Brian Williams moans about the dire threat posed by guys like Vinny in the Bronx.

Buffy was cured with the blood of a demon. Unfortunately for the MSM, no one has found a cure for fisking and fact-checking.

That is the dark specter that troubles the sleep of the push media. Now they know what we really think of them. Now they know that we do not trust them.

Does the Columbia Journalism Review want to be a joke?

The World Wide Standard looks at their take on the Beauchamp fiasco:

CJR Weighs in on Scotty Beauchamp

It's as bad as the CJR's reaction to the end of the Duke lacrosse hoax.

Missing something

Using steroids is cheating according to baseball purists and that means Barry Bonds should be anathema to all right thinking fans.

OK. Then why is notorious spitballer Gaylord Perry in the Hall of Fame?

FYI: I'm a Bonds-hater of long standing, but for the right reasons. I can't forgive him for coming up small in the post-season for the Pirates and then bailing on the team as a free agent.

UPDATE: Scott Chaffin has some smart thoughts here.

Just to clarify-- i think steroids need to be banned. They are dangerous. I'm just puzzled by the idea that there is good cheating (Gaylord Perry) that gets you to the Hall of Fame, and bad cheating (Bonds) that keeps you out of the Hall.

I think i am mainly disgusted by the sportwriters who are now so high and mighty about McGwire, Sosa, and Bonds. Not too long ago, they were celebrating those men and their homers even though the whispers about steroids were everywhere.

Also, it's true that the steroid era has played havoc with the records book. We are to blame the players for this. On the other hand, no one has a problem with the shrinking size of ball parks that also produce more home runs. (Though, truth is, the Babe had a pretty sweet place to play in the Bronx for a lefty power hitter.)

Steyn on then justice system

He was several good ideas for reform.

No surprise here

Wow, JPod thinks that the nepotism angle on Scott Thomas is a non-issue. Of course, he sort of has to say that, doesn't he?

Very good analysis of Scott Thomas and "Shock Troops"

The Scott Thomas affair at New Republic -- maybe a different take

Based on a mix of semiotic analysis and my seat of the pants experience as a frequent reader of professional and near-professional writing by new writers, my guess is this: I think "Scott Thomas" is actually an MFA writing student, or a recent graduate of such a program, probably with some military experience – he may be serving in some non-combat specialty in Iraq – probably from one of the elite MFA programs, the twenty or so from which college creative writing faculty and small-press staff come disproportionately. I also think I know how his piece came to be published in New Republic, in outline if not in detail, and that story will also be somewhat instructive and revealing.

Barry Bonds

Steve Sailer has some good points about steroids in sports:

Bonds started taking steroids in 1999 because he was jealous of the credulous admiration paid to Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa for hitting all those homers in 1998. You kept hearing silly stuff like "McGwire and Sosa have returned the innocence to the game!" McGwire was caught with a steroid precursor in his locker in late 1998 and it still didn't instill many doubts.

[And]

Baseball stat guru Bill James was shamefully quiet during the many years while the steroid scourge distorted individual statistics, and he's not doing his reputation any favors by digging himself a deeper hole by still talking about Bonds' new wonder bat and other rationalizations.

It's funny to see so many sports reporters wail about Bonds when many of them (cough, Lupica, cough) jumped on the McGwire/Sosa bandwagon in 1998.

JFK: Myth-making and the unmaking of modern liberalism

A good review of what sounds like an interesting book.

Trapped In Camelot

As James Piereson recently told me, "If Kennedy had been killed by a right winger with the same evidence that condemned Oswald, there never would have been any talk about conspiracies. It would have fit neatly into the moral framework of 1950s and '60s-style liberalism. And the liberals would have been off and running with it, and no one would have talked about conspiracies."

That's the subject of Piereson's new book, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism, in which he argues both that Kennedy was a victim of the Cold War, and that the repression of his killer's ideology caused tremendous psychological damage to the collective health of the nation.

UPDATE:

Having now read it, I have to say that Camelot and the Cultural Revolution is a must-read. Not at all the usual JFK assassination book, it is a superb work of intellectual and political history.

The heart of the issue

AMac, a frequent commentator over at KC Johnson's blog, points to a great blog find:

David Thompson

I especially liked this point on post-modernism:

The issue, as I see it, is one of bad faith. Hiding a small and tendentious idea, or no idea at all, inside Very Big Language is not a promising indicator of good character, honesty or wisdom. As I’ve argued elsewhere, one might suspect that the unintelligible nature of much postmodern ‘analysis’ is a convenient contrivance, if only because it’s difficult to determine exactly how wrong an unintelligible analysis is. In this respect, one might see the PoMo phenomenon as not so much a loose collection of often disreputable ideas, but more as a rhetorical tactic employed by narcissists, ideologues and academic shysters.

No surprise here

The Humane Society has set-up a website so that people can send emails to the NFL calling for Vicks's suspension. I used it but changed the wording to call for respect of due process and referencing the Duke lacrosse case.

Shortly thereafter i received an email from the Humane Society. They thanked me for joining the effort to suspend Vick, asked me to tell my friends about their site so they could email the NFL as well, and then, inevitably, there was this:

And if you haven't already, please help us care for the dogs seized in the Michael Vick case by making a special donation today:

Tomlin makes changes

On to happier football news. It sounds like the new coach is making his mark already with the Steelers. Unlike Cowher, he is focusing a lot of time and effort on improving special teams play. Given how that has been a weakness for years with the Steelers, i like the message.

Crews and teammates

One theme that reoccurs in the cases of athletes in legal trouble is that of the entourage, posse, crew. Rich famous athletes now travel with a group of hangers-on who ride the gravy train but have no connection to the team. Not that long ago, even the most famous players on championship teams tended to hang out with other players.

The trouble with a posse is that no one dares stand up to the player and no one has the team's interest at heart. If you want to see how it used to work, read the best football book ever written.

OTOH, this article makes it pretty clear that the Falcons were willing enablers of Vick's behavior for a very long time.

Michael Vick

I've never been a fan of Vick and the the accusations against him are horrific. OTOH, if the Duke lacrosse case taught us anything it is that indictments are just accusations-- not evidence, not proof. So i'm going to wait for more information and give the QB his presumption of innocence. I wish the cable pundits would do the same.

They have learned nothing. Nancy Grace is ready to hang Vick today, right now. Lester Munson is making the rounds as a legal expert despite his laughably bad performance on the lacrosse case. Hannity and O'Reily at Fox News are back to their usual position as police state apologists.

For the time being, i'm going to ignore the story. The indictment is lurid, no doubt about it. But, then, so were the first batch of documents from Nifong and the DPD. We all know how wrong those documents were. It makes sense to wait and see.

UPDATE: Bob Smizek gets it:

Count me among the tens of millions of Americans who considers himself an unabashed dog lover -- man's best friend.

I'm fond also of the Constitution -- mankind's best friend.

The rush to judgment on Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick for his alleged involvement in a dogfighting ring, considering we recently saw much the same thing in the Duke lacrosse case, is disturbing and disheartening. How many times do we have to be deceived by the criminal justice system before we can put aside our rage and act like citizens, not fools?

Duke lacrosse: The AJR review

The American Journalism Review has a long article that assesses the media’s performance on the case.

Justice Delayed

It does a stellar job covering the main points from the beginning to the end of the case.

The first thing that stands out is how few of the media bigwigs will take responsibility or admit to mistakes.

Times Executive Editor Bill Keller says criticism of his paper's performance has "in some instances been unfair to the point of hysteria." But he also says, "I think we were a little slow to get traction on the story, frankly. Partly we were slow figuring out who had custody of the story: sports, national, investigative. It took us awhile to get specific people focused on this as their responsibility."

He makes it sound like The Times was guilty of not giving the story its due. As all who followed the case know, (and as the AJR points out) The Times ran over 100 articles on an out of state crime story. Worse, their big name sports columnists were happy to dive in and condemn the lax players from the get-go.

Like the DPD, Keller wants to blame the wrongly accused for his paper’s mistakes.

Keller says the Times tended to cover the saga episodically "rather than early on focusing a lot of investigative energy on the story. It took us longer than it should have for us to give the holes in the prosecutor's case the attention it deserved." He adds that reporters' jobs were complicated initially because the defense wasn't talking.

What a crock. A month into a case there were three facts that should have made all fair-minded reporters take a close look at the case. First, the DA was in a tough primary election campaign. Second, the players eschewed the easy and expected defense strategy: “she consented”. Instead, they insisted that no sexual encounter took place between the escort and any lax player. This was a dangerous position to take because DNA tests could blow it out of the water. Third, the DNA results confirmed that there was no attack as described by the accuser.

When Stuart Taylor’s first article appeared, there was no excuse for any reporter not to take another look at the story they were pedaling. Very few did. That should shame the MSM and helps explain why so few people believe them.

Newsweek’s Evan Thomas still justifies the most grievous sin of the case:

“The narrative was properly about race, sex and class... We went a beat too fast in assuming that a rape took place... We just got the facts wrong. The narrative was right, but the facts were wrong."

As usual KC Johnson has the best response to this line of “argument”:

If the facts are wrong, though, why explore the narrative at all? Is it fair to use the Duke lacrosse players to tell a larger story of athletes run wild--a theme that appeared not only on sports pages but also was splashed, repeatedly, on the front pages of major newspapers and amplified on cable shoutfests? Says Johnson: Once the facts are "proven not to be true, you certainly have to consider whether the narrative is relevant."

Thomas’s stance is simply bigotry dressed up as sociology. (See more here).

Stuart Taylor offers some good advice to reporters:

Asked what the media should learn from the Duke case, Taylor, sounding exasperated, strikes a similar note. "Read the damn motions," he says. "If you're covering a case, don't just wait for somebody to call a press conference. Read the documents."

I doubt, however, that they will take it. Digging for facts is hard work and most MSM pundits prefer to get by with a combination of trendiness, laziness, arrogance, and knowingness. They also evince an amazing condescension toward outsiders who do the work that the media refuses to do. More than one journalist mocked bloggers for their “obsession” with the case when confronted with inconvenient facts. (A Newsday hack did it just this week.)

One last point. Nancy Grace stays true to form and hides behind her spokesman rather than answer hard questions about her coverage of the case.

Nimitz

Adm. Chester Nimitz and Gen. George Marshall are the greatest American military leaders of World War Two. While Marshall made his mark at the level of grand strategy, Nimitz was a military commander and his accomplishments deserve to be mentioned with those of Grant, Wellington, and von Moltke.. Further, it is arguable that Nimitz had more lasting influence on the American military establishment than did Marshall.*

Nimitz took over the Pacific Fleet in January 1942. Most of his capital ships lay crippled in Pearl Harbor. The Japanese were sweeping west across Burma, south toward Australia, and east into the Gilbert islands. Three and one-half years later, the U. S. Navy had Japan isolated with an air-sea blockade and had completely destroyed the Imperial Japanese navy.

The Pacific war covered unimaginable distances. Paris is only 200 air miles from London. Berlin is only 1,000 miles from Moscow. Tokyo is nearly 4,000 miles from Pearl Harbor. The Atlantic sea lanes covered 3,400 miles from New York to London. The Pacific sea lanes measured 7,800 miles from San Francisco to Austrailia.

The official naval history notes that “nothing in past warfare told how amphibious forces could advance in great leaps across an ocean where the enemy had dozens of island bases.” Nimitz had to wage a modern combined-arms amphibious war across those vast distances. Moreover, the three critical components of that war--fleet logistics, carrier operations, and storm landings--were in an embryonic state. Each of them had a fledgling doctrine that had never been tested in battle. Nimitz was simultaneously building the greatest fleet in history, training that fleet in a new way to make war, and wielding that fleet against an enemy that was initially superior in numbers, quality, training, and experience.

It is easy to look at the lop-sided victories at the end of the Pacific war and chalk them up to the vast material superiority of the United States. This history by hindsight obscures Nimitz’s achievement. It ignores his masterful use of intelligence in 1942 when the Pacific Fleet was numerically inferior. At Coral Sea, Midway, and Guadalcanal he blunted the Japanese offensives and destroyed much of its carrier force. In 1943 he pressed forward in the Solomons and the Gilberts which denied Japan the opportunity to rebuild those forces. Even in the great battles of 1944, the relentless operational tempo of the Pacific Fleet had much to do with the overwhelming victories.

The Japanese fleet did not dare to oppose the landings at Tarawa and the Marshalls because her carriers had no trained aircrews: the fight for the Solomons and the defense of Rabaul had ground them down to the point of impotence. Nimitz followed up the success in the Marshalls with a massive strike on Truk (Japan’s “Gibraltar of the Pacific”) which neutralized that base for the remainder of the war. When Japan fought the decisive battle for the Marianas, Truk was of no use to them and no threat to the US fleet. Further, the Americans did not have to invade it and, thus, avoided months of effort and thousands of casualties.

Each month saved meant fewer losses for the Americans and more problems for the Japanese. IJN air crews went into battle with limited training and no experience. That was the main reason that the Battle of Philippine Sea became the “Marianas Turkey Shoot”.

This was the hallmark of the last half of the Pacific War. Japan, off-balance and with incomplete preparations, faced the onslaught of the greatest maritime force in history. Nimitz never relinquished the initiative and so never gave the IJN a chance to recover their strategic equilibrium.

It was a supreme example of the importance of “will” in strategy. Nimitz and his superior Adm. King had many opportunities to accept delay in the Pacific. Lesser commanders might have pointed to the long supply lines (often over 3,000 miles from the Fleet to Pearl Harbor) as a reason to move more slowly or to take smaller steps in the island hopping campaign. Nimitz pressed forward with a measured aggressiveness that marks the commander who possesses Clausewitzian “genius”.

Samuel Morison, the official historian of the Navy in World War Two introduces the man this way:

Nimitz, calm in demeanor and courteous in speech, with blue eyes, a pink complexion, and tow-colored hair turning white, was a fortunate appointment. He restored confidence to the decimated Pacific Fleet. He had the prudence to wait through a lean period; to do nothing rash for the sake of doing something. He had the capacity to organize both a fleet and a vast war theater, the tact to deal with sister services and allied commands, the leadership to weld his own subordinates into a great fighting team, the courage to take necessary risks, and the wisdom to select, from a variety of intelligence and opinions, the correct strategy to defeat Japan.

A half-century later, Nimitz’s star is even higher. Here is Dan van der Vat’s appraisal from The Pacific Campaign:

All in all, Nimitz has a claim to be considered the most important military leader in the war against Japan, the greatest admiral in American history, and the outstanding naval officer of the Second World War.

* Marshall’s military contribution in WWII was the building of a twelve million man army for the battle in Europe. After the victory, that army was dismantled and we have fought all our later wars with smaller armies. Nimitz, however, brought the carrier warfare to the fore of American military doctrine and refined the use of carrier task forces to near-perfection. The use of carriers has been central to every war, skirmish, and crisis the US has faced since 1945.

The Duke perp walk

It was a piece of videotape that was replayed hundreds of times on television. Reade Seligmann and Colin Finnerty arriving for their arraignment, handcuffed, and in the back of police cars. Look, the pictures said, the DPD chased down two dangerous men.

It was one more lie in a case founded and perpetuated by lies. A story in the Brown Daily Herald tells us what really happened:

He and fellow sophomore Collin Finnerty, who was also indicted the day before, drove to the back of the Durham County jail, where they had arranged to meet officers. (Team captain David Evans, who held the party where the rape was said to have occurred, would be indicted a month later.) They were handcuffed and then driven 15 yards to the front of the jail, where camera crews were waiting, Seligmann says. He believes Nifong orchestrated the whole thing to maximize media attention.

The DPD and Nifong were acting in character. This little bit of drama is of a piece with the set-up on the DNA collection. It also confirms what Judge Sentelle wrote about the "perp walk" and its threat to justice:

The perp walk would be bad enough if the humiliation of the accused were the only intended or accomplished result. however, the walk, commonly conducted at such time as to achieve maximum media exposure, is displayed not just for family and neighbors of the accused, but for every potential juror who sees the front page of the newspaper or the beginning of the evening news.

Like dumping a jar of scorpions into a box of tarantulas

Pro wrestling fans clash with true crime fans over the Chris Benoit case.

Secrets, lone wolves, and inept terrorists

There there is a cautionary lesson in the silence of Oscar Collazo and Booth's abettors. Sometimes investigators close the books too early on a case. They fail to discover all the threads in a plot because the perps maintain their silence or persist in their lies.

This is especially true when the culprits are driven by ideology rather than the greed of common criminals. The Rosenbergs, after all, kept silent even though that meant a date with the electric chair. Alger Hiss kept lying for a half century.

Peter Lance's research shows that the FBI and DOJ missed important links in the terror cell that carried out the 1993 WTC bombing. Some of those links reappeared in the investigation of 9/11.

It is never wise to underestimate the enemy. Most of the recent terror arrests in the US have been reassuring. The accused look fairly inept. On the other hand, Timothy McVeigh was an inept bomber who managed to build the OCK bomb and kill 68 people. Terrorists can ride the learning curve just like any one else.

The Booth Cell

To Americans living in 1865, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln was a seismic event, a shock like that of 9-11-01. That fact gets lost when we look back after a century and a half. Time may not heal all wounds, but it certainly obscures the damage from later generations.

Manhunt does a pretty good job recapturing the shock, horror, and anger that gripped Washington in April 1865.

More books have been written on Lincoln than any other American. It is a marvel that writers find new things to say. Yet, Manhunt is fresh and exciting: it covers a well-known story but manages to read like a piece of investigative journalism. In part, that is because it devotes most of its attention to the aftermath of the murder at Ford’s Theater. The hunt for Booth and his conspirators makes for a gripping, less familiar tale.

Another factor, i think, is that each generation reads history in light of their own experiences. In a post-9/11 world, certain aspects of this story stand out in ways they did not in 1999 or 1962.

If J.W. Booth had died 1 April 1865 no one except historians specializing in American theater would know his name. If some diligent Civil War scholar managed to piece together Booth’s attempts to aid the South, the conspiracy would sound like a joke. Unsuccessful terrorists look fairly stupid and Booth & Co. are no exception. A vain actor, a crazy ex-soldier, a drunk, a matron, and a few hangers-on -- how could such people think they could change the course of history?

Yet, the Booth cell did just that. They murdered a president, nearly murdered the Secretary of State, and intended to kill the vice-president. All the attackers escaped from the scene of their crimes. Booth and Herold remained at large for twelve days.

What is striking is that the whole plan was a marvel of improvisation. Booth had only eight hours to make his preparations, hand out assignments, and carry out the deed. (Booth even took time to write a letter to the newspapers claiming credit for the act.) He did all this without cell phones or email; everything was done through face to face meetings.

That may have worked to his advantage. The conspirators shared pro-Southern sympathies and they hated Lincoln and the Republicans. It was Booth’s charisma, however, that held them together and turned malcontents and bigots into accomplices to political murder.

Swanson’s book also does a great deal to rehabilitate the dour Edwin Stanton. The Secretary of War comes off as the Rudy Giuliani of the story. He is the man who holds shock and grief at bay while he sets the manhunt in motion and takes steps to ensure that Confederate die-hards do not exploit the assassination. Stanton’s actions were also improvised and show why Lincoln held him in high esteem.

Manhunt delineates the help that Booth received from Confederate sympathizers during his twelve days of “freedom”. These accessories after the fact kept their secrets for decades. While the government suspected much, they never turned up hard evidence against most of these accomplices. Like Oscar Collazo even those who were caught kept their secrets.

(Swanson discussed his book with Instapundit here.)

Recommended

I've been reading Stephen Hunter's American Gunfight. It's an interesting read on a forgotten episode of American terrorism. It's especially good because Hunter is thoroughly knowledgeable about firearms and the dynamics of deadly force.

Two points had special resonance in light of current events. First, one of the assassins, Oscar Collazo, was, to all outward appearances, a hard-working immigrant who was on his way to assimilating into New York's melting pot. He was married, had a good job, and was active in his community. Yet, for all his outward normality, he was a willing recruit for a suicide mission.

Second, Hunter and Bainbridge make it clear that the assault on Blair House was not the work of a couple of lone loonies. There was a deeper conspiracy that included political leaders in Puerto Rico. Collazo, who spend 29 years in prison for his crime, kept his secret. For decades, the government had an incomplete and distorted picture of the men who carried out the attack, their motives, and their enablers.

(Hunter discusses his book on Northern Alliance Radio.)

Media criticism and corralled rebellion

Most of what passes for self-scrutiny in the MSM resembles the corralled rebellion of the corporate bureaucrats. They want the appearance of criticism, but they have no heart for the real thing. So they make certain that the appraisals are not too critical.

We see thus with the ombudsmen (public editors) at big papers like the Washington Post and New York Times. Their critiques read more like artful defenses of bad journalism. Did the paper print “fantastic lies”? Well, our reporter had a credible source who confirmed the story. How can a source be credible and confirm a lie? That question will rarely make it into the ombudsman’s column.

What will show up is lots of trivia. “We got this date wrong.” “We apologize for getting that name wrong.” They truly praise themselves with faint damns.

CNN’s Reliable Sources is supposed to offer an independent look at how the press covers stories. Yet, even there, the scrutiny is carefully managed. Reliable Sources cannot be choreographed like pro wrestling, but boxing knows how to fix the outcome without fixing fights. Kurtz runs his show the way a boxing manager picks the bouts for a highly-touted but suspect heavyweight. Pick opponents who will do their best, but who cannot do real damage. Feed your boxer a clumsy bleeder who won’t make it out of the fifth round; set up your puncher with a glass-jawed Adonis who has no jab.

On Reliable Sources it means that the bloggers who assail the MSM will be represented by Jeff Jarvis and Ana Marie Cox. That is, by bloggers who work for the MSM and who never forget where their professional loyalty lies.

Kurtz and Reliable Sources are also masters of another avoidance tactic: the automatic filibuster. The set-up is simple. Take three opinionated talking heads, make them cover two or three important issues, and only allot ten minutes for the whole discussion. What you get is assured superficiality with no one able to lay a glove on any of the media miscreants under examination.

The show has a great fondness for using talk radio jocks on the pundit panels. People like Rachel Maddow rarely bring deep understanding to the questions at hand. They do know how to claim their share of air time. Not surprisingly serious press mistakes get lost in a flood of unfunny one-liners.

Iraq and al-Qaeda

Two very good articles

Iraq, al-Qaeda and Tenet's Equivocation

Paul Pillar, the CIA, the DIA and "The Connection"

Fad-surfing and corralled rebellion

One of the big banks I worked for built a brand new campus for our division. At the time, we were growing but faced many strategic challenges: aggressive competitors were forcing prices down, our credit management area was struggling, our cost structure was higher than the industry leaders, and we were “blessed” with antiquated IT systems.

Yet for six months the new campus was the hot management topic. There would be no offices. Just small cubicles with low walls and lots of open space. There would be all these tables and the tables had rollers so people could just slide them together and collaborate. That was going to spark creativity and innovation and make us a great company.

The whole thing looked like a giant call center that was having a yard sale.

After it was completed, senior managers and visitors came by for tours. They admired the radical design and heard about all the benefits. This was The Bank of the Future. No hierarchy. No department boundaries. Easy collaboration. The dawning of a new age.

Unfortunately, the radical space did not help us address the strategic issues. Competitive pressures increased; credit problems got ugly. Still, we got a fair amount of publicity for our innovative office design. Executives were always happy to talk about that.

The same thing happened with Chiat/Day, the advertising agency. There was a time when they got more press for office space than they did for the ad campaigns they produced for clients.

During the dot-com boom, corporate types were inordinately proud of their internet rebels. All sorts of stodgy companies started bragging about their counter-cultural web geeks housed in funky spaces. For those who did not want to buy their own rebels, consultants like Scient were happy to rent them out.

Much of the impetus for this behavior was just the usual cluelessness and fad surfing. A lot of it was PR: “ACME Widgets isn’t your father’s boring old widget-maker. We get the Web. Look! See there? Our web-designer has a shaved head and wears a nose ring. Check out the goth chick who does our online advertising.”

I think that something else was happening as well. Dig a little bit and you can see the denial hiding behind the radicalism. Executives realized that their company needed to change. They sense that real change, fundamental change, is hard. So they opted for something softer. They would do something that appeared radical, but they would fence it off from the rest of the company. Or they would make dramatic changes but only in superficial matters like desk arrangement.

In short, they would corral the rebellion while they talked of revolution. That way, they never had to change much of anything that really mattered. All the while they could reassure each other that they were bold, and innovative, and cutting edge.

Why Pirates fans should be angry

For me, Williams is the classic ballplayer of the game on a hot August weekday, before a small crowd, when the only thing at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill. Baseball is a game of the long season, of relentless and gradual averaging-out. Irrelevance—since the reference point of most individual games is remote and statistical—always threatens its interest, which can be maintained not by the occasional heroics that sportswriters feed upon but by players who always care; who care, that is to say, about themselves and their art.

"Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu" by John Updike© 1960

This gets to the issue for Pirates fans. The fifteen years of losing is bad, very bad. That’s a chronic condition. Something a city has to live with. It’s no way to win new fans but old fans are bludgeoned into weary acceptance. In Pittsburgh, loving baseball means watching your team lose most of the time every year.

Still, as Updike says, any particular game is relatively detached from the season’s inevitable disappointment.

The acute problem, the ugly fact that jolts the baseball lover from bitter acceptance to boiling anger, goes back to Updike’s “tissue-thin difference.” This team is filled with players who do not care. Or at least do not care enough to do things well.

Lack of talent is a given for small market teams. Our lineup will never rival the Yankees; our pitching won’t make anyone forget the ’71 Orioles.

Yet, in each game a mediocre player has the same choice as a superstar: to take pains or go through the motions. In Pittsburgh there are too many who just go through the motions. What we see over and over is a group of millionaires who don’t give a damn about the game. Poor base running, bad fielding, and sloppy play all contribute to the general malaise hangs over this team.

UPDATE: I’d love to see a local paper do something gutsy with regard to the Pirates. In my dream scenario I’d love to see a sports editor announce that they are reassigning the reporters on the Pirates beat to “big-time sports” and using AP recaps for Pirates’s games. That would be a sweet statement:

“In a time of constrained resources for newspapers, we can no longer justify assigning full time reporters to a minor league team.”

That will never happen, of course. The local press is made up of wimpy little lapdogs who defend the owners and think that doing so is somehow principled. MSM delusions reign even on the sports pages as this column shows:

Fans waging fight against way Nuttings do business

We're not talking about a boycott, which some people are calling for. There's a movement afoot to boycott not only the Pirates but all of Nutting's business ventures. That's mean-spirited and wrong.

Nutting is not a bad person. He is not dispensing social injustice. What he is doing is not illegal, unethical or immoral. What he is guilty of -- in the eyes of most people -- is running his business in a fan-unfriendly manner. He does not deserve to be boycotted and most certainly the people who work for him, be it at PNC Park, Seven Springs or his many newspapers do not deserve to have their jobs placed in jeopardy because the Pirates stink.

I have to disagree strongly on this. First, when a business antagonizes its customers, it should pay a price. Mr. Smizek believes that Nutting should not worry about social justice, but apparently the paying customers must make that uppermost in their minds. (Buy tickets or some poor ticket-taker will lose his job). That is so silly that it boggles the mind.

Further, I do consider Pirate ownership unethical and immoral because lying is immoral and unethical. When tax payers put up millions for a new ball park, they did not do it so Bob Nutting could have a profitable, bad baseball team in Pittsburgh. They were told that the new park would make the Pirates competitive on the field, not just on the income statement. For the owner to take the money and not follow through is most definitely immoral and unethical.

The usual justification for keeping the Pirates was that big league sports enhanced Pittsburgh image. Maybe the Post-Gazette and Tribune-Review should start putting some tough questions to the “civic boosters” and politicians who led the charge to spend tax money on PNC Park. How does the city’s image look now? Is it a good thing for the national press to refer to the Pittsburgh Pirates as a “glorified triple A team”? Is “fifteen years of losing” really the best brand message for a struggling city?

Remember kids-- bloggers aren't journalists

We don't have fact-checkers, editors, special training, or professional ethics.

We are about as far from the Columbia School of Journalism and The New Yorker as you can get.

If you don't believe me, check this out.

Lesson in leadership

Everything your MBA classes should have taught you, but probably didn't:

Robin Olds, R.I.P.


General Olds will also be remembered as a leader who was unafraid to take risks, and took care of his men. As commander of the 8th Wing, he flew 152 combat missions during a 12-month tour, 105 of those over North Vietnam (his predecessor had flown on 10 missions over a one-year period). After the triumph of Operation Bolo, he ensured that everyone involved in planning and executing the mission--including maintenance personnel and intel specialists--received recognition for their contributions.

But another, lesser-known anecdote from his Ubon days also speaks volumes about Olds' leadership and character. Shortly after taking command of the 8th Wing, Olds appeared at the base finance office for in-processing. He discovered a long line of waiting airmen, who told him that the office operated on "bankers' hours," making it difficult for them to complete pay transactions.

Olds summoned the Major in charge of the organization, and ordered him to put the office on 24/7 operations, even if it meant the Major had to pull a shift at the pay window. Olds then waited until all the other airmen had been served before completing his in-processing. Word of the incident quickly spread, and the airmen of the 8th Wing understood that their new commander was genuinely concerned about their welfare. Their dedication to Olds was returned three months later, when hundreds of airmen lined the ramp at Ubon to congratulate the wing commander and his fellow pilots, returning from Operation Bolo.

RTWT

An interesting example of disintermediation

Gregg Olsen is a successful author of true crime books. He is also a blogger. His latest post is deeply pessimistic about the future of the genre in terms of sales and popularity.

WTF TC or TC RIP?

He points to cable TV as one of the culprits.

But TV also stabbed the heart of the TC publishing industry. Think about it. All of the Gretas and Nancys and Geraldos have humped the life out of so many great TC stories, that splendidly crafted and well-researched books were never written about some of the greatest cases of our time. Thank goodness TV sniffed and turned up its nose at wall-to-wall coverage of the great crime cases of the recent past. There'd be no Small Sacrifices, Fatal Vision or In Cold Blood if TV existed as it does in its current state.

At first, I thought this an odd argument. After all, two of cable's great obsessions-O.J. Simpson, Scott Peterson-spawned a flood of books. In the comments he addresses this and clarifies his point:

The OJ and Peterson books were were written for the most part by people associated with the cases. I really can't think of one book that was written by an outsider (which is what most crime journalists are) that did much on the list. Instead, we had the constant parade of Laci's mother, Scott's sister, OJ's ex-girlfriend, the lawyers, the jurors... Each one popped on the Today Show then moved over to the cable junk and shilled their books. Trash, most of it.

This strikes me as one more case where intermediaries lose out as information becomes more democratic. The people in Kansas had to talk to Truman Capote in order to tell their story. Now, however, cable news can raise enough interest in certain stories that the insiders are the people who get book deals. The writer/outsider is left behind. The best sources won't talk because they have their own deal; the book-buying public wants new information, which only insiders can provide.

Steve Sailer gives us the thought for today

A general lesson for our era is that cyberspace is far overrated as a way to influence events compared to personal contacts and behind the scenes machinations.

More here.

News, monopolies, and cross-subsidies

Patterico has an interesting take on the subject previously noted here:

The Internet: Aiding the Race to Appeal to the Lowest Common Denominator

I think he overstates the point because he does not distinguish between paying customers (subscribers) and the free-riders who read the paper on the internet. There might be an audience for for tabloid stuff but that does not make it a market.

Tthe cubicle rats killing time by surfing for Paris Hilton headlines have a vast appetite for this bilge as long as it's free.

Why should the LA Times, or any other paper, chase a non-paying audience. That's pretty poor decision-making on the business side.

This story is moving on so many levels

Inmate built Ruth and Billy Grahams' coffins

NEW ORLEANS -- One of the most meaningful events of his life came near the end, when convicted murdered Richard Liggett was asked to make two of the simple plywood coffins he meticulously crafted for fellow prisoners for evangelists Ruth and Billy Graham.

"Humbled? He was honored, he was honored," Burl Cain, the warden of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, said Saturday. " ... He told me, of everything that ever happened in his life, the most profound thing was to build this coffin for Billy Graham and his family."

Michael Savage takes on Brian Lamb and CSPAN?

See the details here.

CSPAN is simply a treasure. Michael Savage? Not so much.

For those who think he is some sort of conservative, this article makes for interesting reading:

Inside the Savage Nation

This is a telling picture of the chameleon who now calls himself Michael Savage:

Savage recounts walking past it one evening to discover a photo of Ginsberg in the window shortly after the legendary Beat poet's death in 1997. Although not naming Ginsberg directly, he refers to "one of the last reigning beatnik poets" — whom he once adored — as "latrine slime," and writes, "I clasped my hands together and prayed to God. I said, 'Thank you, God, for answering my prayers. One of the blights of the human race is gone.'"

It's a far cry from his apparent eagerness to impress Ginsberg in the early '70s, when he sent the poet press clippings about his work as a student doing botanical research in the South Pacific, and repeatedly implored him to come and visit. Some of Weiner's purported communications with the openly gay poet, as contained in the Stanford collection, seem strangely homoerotic.

Among them is an undated postcard, signed "Michael Weiner," [Savage's real name] that says, "Watched a tourist from New Zealand taking pictures of Fijian people in the marketplace [and] thought of inserting my camera's lens in your A-hole to photograph the walls of your rectum. I really do apologize, but the thought did occur."

Duke lacrosse: End of Act II

Real life legal cases rarely offer the drama of TV and movies. The Bar hearing for Durham DA Mike Nifong has been an exception. Today's session saw him announce his resignation from office while on the witness stand.

KC Johnson has been blogging from the hearings and he is, as usual, the best guide for all the developments.

Durham in Wonderland

What is going on?

Stuart Taylor's column from last left me even more puzzled about the Bush administration.

How Not to Make Terrorism Policy

His main point (and it is a very good one) is that Bush and Gonzalez approached the question of torture solely from a legal perspective. That is, they seem never to ask "what is right" or "what works"; only "what does the law permit?"

That flaw was the almost exclusive focus on what could be done to captives as a matter of law—as interpreted by aggressive advocates of virtually unlimited presidential war powers—rather than on what should be done as a matter of morality and policy, taking account of careful cost-benefit analysis and past experience.

The result was that while approving in 2002 and 2003 the use of "extreme physical pressure on captives" during interrogations, the CIA and the White House not only disregarded the lessons of history but also engaged in "little substantive policy analysis or interagency consideration."

The puzzle, to me, is two-headed.

1. They did this at the behest of CIA.

Though former CIA officials dispute this, the CIA had little experience in questioning captives before 9/11, and the White House brushed aside the reservations of many officials at the FBI and in the military, which had far more experience.

[and]

A study to which the White House should pay close attention is well under way. A panel of experts commissioned by the advisory Intelligence Science Board suggested in "Educing Information," a 325-page initial public report completed in December, that the harsh methods Bush authorized after 9/11 are unreliable and that CIA interrogators are ill-trained in subtler techniques. Meanwhile, the military's successful use of such subtle techniques to crack the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's inner circle in Iraq is chronicled in riveting detail by Mark Bowden in the May issue of The Atlantic.

Question: Why were they so solicitous of CIA and so dismissive of the FBI and armed forces?

2. They continue to take the political hit on the torture question while CIA skates. In repayment, CIA leaks like a sieve to embarrass the administration. Nevertheless, the White House shows no appetite to rein in an agency that is playing this double-game.

Like i said, it is a puzzlement

Home grown terrorist

Sobering reading on the intentions and mindset of the Rockford, Illinois terrorist suspect

The Illinois Shopping Mall Plot (.pdf)

Litvinenko

Edward Jay Epstein has a highly informative post:

The Smuggled Polonium

Time to change the name

In the 1970s, the city of Pittsburgh became known as the 'City of Champions". It's image was enhanced by the titles won by the Steelers and Pirates. Now, the city's image, its "brand" is tarnished by the link to a pathetic baseball team.

It just seems unfair. The people of Pittsburgh held up their end of the bargain. They put up boatloads of money for a beautiful new stadium. They still sit in the stands to watch a bad team lose. What they get in return is the linking of "Pittsburgh" with "losers", "futility", and "joke".

Justice demands that something be done. Pittsburgh deserves a winner. At a minimum, Pittsburgh should not be tied to constant losing.

The Pirates are bad, not because the fans willnot support baseball, but because the team owners like steady profits more than winning.

The fair thing to do, it seems to me, is to stop calling this team the Pittsburgh Pirates. Call them what they are; make the name reflect who is calling the shots. When ESPN mocks the Pirates as a "glorified minor league team", it should be the "Nutting-McClatchey Pirates" being lampooned.

Why should the owners count their money in the shadows while the city takes the hit to its reputation? Maybe they would care more about winning if losing reflected poorly on their name instead of the city's

Duke lacrosse: The books start coming


KC Johnson has a post up on two of the new books set to hit the shelves.

I reviewed the Yaeger book several weeks ago, but it makes sense to run it again.



Duke lacrosse: Most of the story is still untold


Millions of words have been written about the Duke lacrosse case. The players have been exonerated by North Carolina’s Attorney General. The casually jaded among us might wonder if there is anything left to say.

Judging by It’s Not About the Truth by Don Yaeger (with Mike Pressler) the answer is a resounding “Yes”. This sorry saga began with a flood of lies, spin, and bias. There is still a lot of truth to uncover from beneath that slimy rubble.

Yaeger is a writer for Sport Illustrated. Pressler, of course, was the coach of the lacrosse team when the hoax got off the ground. This book marks the first time that we hear Pressler’s side of the story. For that reason alone It's Not About the Truth is essential reading for anyone interested in the disaster that swept through Durham and Duke.

The story of the Pressler family is compelling. Their lives were thrown into turmoil; Mike Pressler lost his job. Yet, they displayed grace and integrity throughout the ordeal. After all the public whining by the Gang of 88, the Presslers a dramatic and refreshing change. Unfortunately, Duke kept the Chafes and the Farreds while driving the Presslers away. It takes a special, twisted institution to discard the wheat and hoard the chaff.

The book is not a first person account of the scandal and frame-up. Yaeger has done extensive shoe leather reporting; he interviewed over one hundred people to write this story. His access to Pressler and many lacrosse players enabled him to break new ground in reporting the hoax. But make no mistake, he did a lot of valuable research into all aspects of this case.

For instance, Brodhead and his loyal factotum Burness turn out to be more anti-lax and pro-Gang of 88 than they pretended to be. Burness, says Yaeger, “became famous for ‘off-the-record, not for attribution’, slamming of the players” to reporters.

Yaeger digs into the seamy world of the Platinum Club and Bunnyhole Entertainment. Samiha Khanna’s carefully crafted portrait of a shy student who was new to dancing is now thoroughly and completely discredited. On the very day that story appeared, she was videotaped dancing at the Platinum Club.

It’s Not About the Truth also provides new insight into the activities of the police and players in the crucial first days of the disaster. His reporting should shatter the myth of the “blue wall of silence”. At the same time, it paints an unflattering picture of the key investigators. Well before Nifong entered the picture Gottlieb, Himan, and Clayton were happy to take their shots at some rich Dukies even if that meant ignoring evidence and conducting a sloppy investigation. They are also not above telling a bald-faced lie or two.

I’ve only skimmed the surface of all the new information this book offers. There is much more. In fact, I could blog for a month just on the new perspectives made possible by Yaeger’s reporting. Any one who was interested in this case will want to read it. Every Duke parent and alum should read it.