Hummer Years, Politicians, and Breakdance Videos

This morning at the gym I saw a music video with breakdancing and thought I'd write about that, then I saw John McCain climbing the stairs up to his campaign plane and decided I should write about that instead, but it being Friday and you having all weekend to read this, I'll go long and write about both.

Breakdance Videos
So apparently at some point it became acceptable to throw a music video together for a pop artist's latest single consisting of 1. Thirty, one-second clips of person singing, 2. thirty five second clips of people breakdancing.
The genius of this is in its simplicity. From the director's standpoint, you strike a homerun because you don't have to teach a singer how to act or dance. Anyone can look like they are singing their guts out when they only have to do it 1 in every 6 seconds. Then, you cut to a shot of a circle of teens having a great time with one teen moving into the middle of the circle. This establishes that it is a breakdance contest. Then, flash back to another 1-second clip of the singer. Then, show some dancer doing a crazy move. Repeat.
The clever thing about this is that you subconsciously associate the breakdancers to the song and the singer.
The really clever thing is that the singer never technically has to interact with anyone but the camera, and usually you can get what you want in 1 or 2 takes. Costume changes complicate this so they are often left out.
Breakdancing in music videos started with Buffalo Gals, a 1982 song by Malcolm McLaren. But it didn't really burst into mainstream popularity until Run DMC's "It's like that" in 1997. Since then, it's been a steady stream of the same, the same, the same.
It really shouldn't suprise, however, that music videos are just recycling themselves...that's what the singers are doing. The number of cover songs in the Billboard Top 100 per week has gone up 32% in the last 5 years.
I point, as I always do, to overpopulation.

Hummer Years
So last night after the finale of the DNC all the politicians and lobbyists rich enough to afford their own plane flew home. Early unofficial records show that this was one of the busiest evenings/next days in the history of the Denver Airport.
My mentor in hyperlogic, Gregg Easterbrook, has come up with a term that fits here: Hummer Years." The definition of a "Hummer Year" is the amount of carbon emissions produced by a Hummer in a year.
So since Al Gore was at the DNC this week, I feel it my patriotic duty to rail on his hypocrisy. As some might know, Al Gore was recently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his "work" on environmental awareness.

Gore wasn't the first quack to win the Nobel Peace Prize, and history suggests he will not be the last. Gore spent eight years in the White House, and in that time took no meaningful action regarding greenhouse gases. The Clinton-Gore administration did not raise fuel economy standards for cars and trucks or propose domestic carbon trading. Though Clinton and Gore made a great show of praising the Kyoto Protocol, they refused even to submit the treaty to the Senate for consideration, let alone push for ratification. During his 2000 run for the presidency, Gore said little about climate change or binding global-warming reforms. In the White House and during his presidential campaign, Gore advocated no consequential action regarding greenhouse gases; then, there was a political cost attached. Once Gore was out of power and global-warming proposals no longer carried a political cost -- indeed, could be used for self-promotion -- suddenly Gore discovered his intense desire to demand that other leaders do what he had not! It is a triumph of postmodernism that Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize for no specific accomplishment other than making a movie of self-praise. Gore caused no peace nor led any reconciliation of belligerent parties nor performed any service to the dispossessed, the achievements the Peace Prize was created to honor. All Gore did was promote himself from Hollywood, and for this, he gets a Nobel. Very postmodern.

An annoying complication of Gore's Nobel is that few realize the award was given jointly to him and to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an organization well worthy of distinction. The IPCC is a group of scientists who have spent two decades studying climate change in obscurity, and in many cases without pay. The IPCC's efforts have been selfless, motivated only by concern for society. Had the Nobel Peace Prize gone solely to the IPCC, it would have been a great day.

An astonishing measure of how out-of-touch the Norwegian Nobel Committee seems is that it gave a prize to Gore for hectoring others about energy consumption in the same year it was revealed that Gore, at his home, uses 20 times the national power average. Gore's extraordinary power waste equates to about 377,000 pounds of greenhouse gases annually, or about 20 Hummer Years worth of global warming pollution. When his utility bill made the news -- though apparently not in Oslo -- Gore responded by saying he buys carbon offsets. That takes you back to the offset problem: All offsets do is prevent greenhouse gas accumulation from increasing. If you really believe there will be a global calamity unless greenhouse gas emissions are reduced 80 percent, as Gore told the Live Earth crowd, you would buy offsets and cut your own energy use. Instead, Gore flies around in fossil-fuel-intensive jet aircraft telling others: Do as I say, not as I do!

After news of Gore's personal energy consumption broke, Gore spokeswoman Kalee Kreider told The Associated Press the utility bill was justified because "Al and Tipper both work out of their home." This raises the question -- what kind of work are they doing? Perhaps reanimating Frankenstein; in Frankenstein movies, there is always a lot of electricity crackling wastefully about. Here are other possible reasons the Gores' home requires so much energy:

• Gore is building a time machine to return to Palm Beach, Fla., in October 2000.

• The former vice president is doing everything he personally can to cause global warming, so he can claim his predictions came true.

• Gore is growing marijuana in his basement.

• Members of Gore's species require high power levels to maintain human form.

• Al and Tipper don't just leave the lights on when they make out, they leave the lights on all over the house.

And speaking of the Live Earth festival...in July 2007, numerous pop musicians and celebrities flew in private jets, then rode limos to the Live Earth concerts, where they demanded that others conserve. Some 150 acts performed at the event's various venues. Suppose half the acts flew commercial, half aboard private jets. Flying a private jet a transcontinental distance generates greenhouse gases equivalent to driving a Hummer for a year. So that's 75 Hummer Years of greenhouse gases caused by the Live Earth acts that arrived by private jet.

If the other acts flew commercial, assuming the average act has five performers and crew and flies a medium distance, that would translate to about 550 tons of greenhouse gases, which is another 60 Hummer Years of global-warming emissions. Now factor in all the spectators and staff attending the various Live Earth concerts. John Buckley of Carbonfootprint.com estimated that around 35,000 tons of greenhouse gases were caused by spectators and logistical support for Live Earth -- converted into HYs, that's about the same as driving a Hummer for 4,000 years. Four thousand years' worth of Hummer emissions for an event demanding conservation! And we're just talking about one day of screeching guitars and slurred lyrics, not about the many pop stars who live the private jet lifestyle the year long. As Marina Hyde of London's Guardian newspaper pointed out, Sting's wife recently charted a helicopter to fly her to an environmental meeting.

Harvard

Harvard reported that they have put a new woman in charge of their 35.6 BILLION dollar endowment.

My question is this: Why on earth are they charging tuition? To put those numbers into perspective, the Harvard endowment now exceeds the gross domestic product of Sri Lanka or Kenya or Costa Rica or Iceland.

It's wonderful that such great institutions of higher learning are funded so well, with assets that seem to assure their continued existence for centuries. But as Gregg Easterbrook asked in 2006 when Harvard's endowment hit a mere $29 billion, why does anyone pay anything at all to attend this school?

Conservatively managed investments using low-risk strategies yield 5 to 7 percent per year; Federal law requires many types of philanthropies to disburse a minimum of 5 percent per year or lose their tax-exempt status. At 5 percent, the Harvard endowment would throw off $1.7 billion annually. That's $104,000 for each of the 16,715 undergrads and graduate students currently attending the university. Yet according to College Board figures, the average undergrad who lives on campus at Harvard this year will pay $37,900, that being the official price minus average financial aid award. Can Harvard seriously expect us to believe it is spending $144,000 per year per undergraduate? (That's the actual payments from students plus 5 percent of the endowment.) Shifting Harvard's endowment spending from empire-building to reducing tuition -- either lower prices for everyone, or, say, eliminating all costs for students from families that make $200,000 or less -- would be a tremendous progressive step without jeopardizing Harvard's legitimate desire to hold a rich endowment into the indefinite future.

Instead, Harvard just keeps charging an arm and a leg and the endowment keeps empire-building. One result of the extremely high cost of private colleges is that many graduates feel they must go into high-paying professions to justify what was spent on tuition. If Harvard were free for students whose families aren't rich, or cost much less for all students, perhaps graduates would be more likely to become public-school teachers or Peace Corps volunteers or work for the U.S. Public Health Service or in legal-aid settings. Rather than use its colossal financial assets to educate a generation of smart people willing to serve society in thanks for a great education at little cost, Harvard continues to soak parents, teach money obsession and set an example of hoarding.

Apathetical Analysis

National Convention time is a time of relative apathy for moderates, and for the small percentage of us who don't have a strong party affiliation.
You can't watch TV without hearing about it, so the obvious solution is to not watch TV. Or you turn on the TV and see Mrs. Clinton railing on McCain, then lauding Obama, and you wonder to yourself "How is she saying this, when only a few weeks ago she claimed Obama was an unqualified neanderthal and she (and only she) could lead the Dems to a Presidential victory?"

Then I remember that politicians will say anything to get elected, or to stop someone else from getting elected. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Hence, my jaded apathy during the DNC.

Or maybe its just that I think Mrs. Clinton is a two-faced liar and a thief and a cheat, so I don't listen to her.

Pride goeth with a screeching of tires.

I rear-ended someone this morning on the highway. Pretty much totally my fault, too. I was about 3 inches behind a lumbering SUV in the left lane at a major intersection, using my lightning-quick reflexes to ride their derriere and not allow some jerk to merge in, and the SUV in front of me used its 9" wide tires to stop on a dime. Unfortunately, the tired slicks I have been driving on that are desperately in need of replacement did not fare as well, I sat on my brakes, and slid neatly into the SUV's rear.

The problem here is that I have liability only, and my car is pretty smashed up. Since reading Mere Christianity I have been working very hard at curbing my pride, but as I growled fiercely at the other drivers on the road and indignantly clamped off the space between me and the car in front of me I must have forgotten that we all have someplace to be and I should just relax.
Some sort of combination of anger at bad drivers, anger at the bad morning radio show, anger at the merging traffic, and anger at the crappy highway that is falling apart caused me to forget my Calmness Initiative.
Now I'm paying the price for it.

There's a deeper message here. We all share the road and I should have given the car in front of me more space. But I also need to look at the character flaws within myself that caused the collision. Sure, things like this just happen. But the more I think about it (which is all you can do after an accident), the more I begin to believe that the fundamental characteristics of me are what caused this accident.
Competitiveness, anger, pride, and greed.
I want to drive faster, better, cleaner than the other drivers. I want to be the one that can get away with being 20 feet behind a car at 65 mph with no qualms.
Other drivers that don't adhere to my driving rules make me angry. Especially as I teach myself to drive safer and calmer, the people who drive aggressive make me very indignant. Very angry.
I feel if I whip in and out of lanes, if I can foresee the slower lane far ahead and prevent myself from being in it, somehow I'm driving a cleaner drive than the people who listlessly change lanes for no reason, who just idly sit by in the right lane and take the delays.
And last but not least, greed. I want to beat everyone and be the first to the front. I want to get to work as fast as I legally can, so I can clock in and get more money. I want to see people behind me, falling further behind, and know the road ahead is mine, and mine alone.

These are the reasons I had a collision this morning. And they are the fundamental things about my character that I most want to change.

Calculated risk

It is my FIRM belief that anyone who holds a public office should resign that public office, effective immediately, upon officially declaring themselves in the running for a public office superior to the one they currently hold.

It is a farce and an injustice that U.S. Senators will throw their name in the hat for the Presidency, completely ignore their jobs, and spend their time campaigning. Then, if they don't go far in their run, they quietly switch their Presidential election campaign into a Senatorial re-election campaign, for the express purpose of getting another 4 years to build support for their next run at the Presidency.
No one is innocent at this. Gregg Easterbrook noted as of April 25th of this year, when McCain, Obama and Clinton were all three still in the mix, that March 13th and April 8th were the only two times so far in 2008 that all three senators had actually been in Washington D.C. for senatorial business at the same time. Meanwhile, all three were receiving 169,300 dollars a year plus health care benefits and a generous pension as U.S. Senators...taxpayer money given to them so they could do their job as Senators. Taxpayers also fund their office expenses and staffs. Now, if I told my boss "Hey Phil, please keep paying me while I go around the office and argue for my self-promotion while ignoring my duties at my desk" then I would get a one-way ticket out to the parking lot. But somehow Senators seem to think (and the media is happy with this decision and never speaks up about it EVER) that if they say "I'm running for President," then they can happily ignore their present duties as they quest for future ones.

In the world of business, if you hold one position and receive compensation for it while trying to obtain another position, this is called a conflict of interest and it is in some cases illegal. Presidential candidates who are taking tax-funded pay from an office whose duties they are not performing essentially hold no-show jobs, and the no-show job is among the worst forms of government corruption.

States including Arizona, Florida and Georgia have in recent years passed "resign to run" laws that require an office-holder seeking higher office to resign from his or her present position. The time has come for a resign-to-run law at the federal level. Membership in the U.S. Congress should not be treated as a lifetime entitlement that pays whether you perform your sworn responsibilities or not. In 2007, Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut, then in the Democratic field, actually moved to Iowa and lived in the state -- yet was still taking his taxpayer-funded salary for serving the people of Connecticut, a job he was making no pretense of performing. It may be nonsense that the current political reality requires a year of round-the-clock campaigning to win a party's nomination, but taxpayers should not subsidize this nonsense.

A federal resign-to-run law would make government more accountable, and how can anyone but the holder of a no-show job object to that? Such a law also would eliminate many marginal candidates, especially senators who have scant hope of winning a nomination but declare for the presidency for reasons of vanity -- then demand taxpayers support them as they self-stroke their own egos. Members of the Washington establishment constantly praise the risk-taking spirit of entrepreneurs, but when it comes to themselves, they want zero risk, running for President while clinging to their current positions. If declaring for the presidency meant a senator could lose his or her seat, few senators would run. And what a relief that would be!

Here's a backup possibility: return Congress to per diem. Until 1855, members of the Senate were paid on a per diem basis -- they drew money for those days on which they engaged in their duties. Suppose senators were given a high per diem rate (say $1,000 per day) but only received this pay when actually performing the public's business, rather than when campaigning, fundraising or slipping away for other self-serving activities. Panic would strike the Senate if such a law were passed. Senators would be expected to earn their pay!

Technology + Boredom = Coolness

Apparently some guy figured out where each possible Obama VP candidate was and then looked up charter flights leaving Friday night to where Obama was, and determined that Joe Biden was the VP candidate. That's using technology and boredom creatively.

I am sure there exist meeeellions of blog entries devoted to discuss Biden, and what this pick means. But I want to discuss something else. I want to talk about how exciting it is that Obama didn't choose Hillary. Some might accuse me of wasting words on floccinaucinhilipilification, but there are serious implications here that we need to address. By making the choice of Biden, Obama effectively slammed the door on 20 years of Bushes and Clintons.
For those 1 or maybe 2 readers of this who aren't blood-relatives, I'm 26 years old, which means literally as long as I've been mentally aware of Presidential elections, the winner has been named either Clinton and Bush. I'm sure that is fine, and in some countries it's fairly normal to keep people in power much longer than 4 or 8 years. But the Bush/Clinton flip-flopping was starting to smell an awful lot like a regime. And as the democratic nomination wore down and I didn't know if Obama would beat out Clinton, I felt ...fatigue... towards our Federal government and its inability to right itself when it is screwed up. Thankfully Obama got the democratic nod, but then whispers started to appear that Hillary might get the VP spot. I swore up an down that Obama wouldn't do this, not just because I loathe that harlot...I mean woman...but also because surely he wouldn't reward her for making the democratic primary last so long? And then I worried, what if he does pick Clinton for his VP, and then he gets assassinated? It's not an unheard of scenario. My personal favorite president, T Roosevelt, became president by backing into the spot. My mind raced with fear, what if Hillary does the same? What if she's then reelected 4 years later and we get 8 MORE years of Clinton?

Thankfully Obama proved me right, and didn't choose Clinton as his VP choice. We'll get at least a 4 year break from the Bush/Clinton yo-yo. Maybe even 8 years, because if Obama is elected president, then surely he'll be the democratic candidate in 2012. And by then Mrs. Clinton may not be in a position to make a run for the White House. I'll keep my fingers crossed.

Don't get me wrong. I want a woman to be president, and I want it to happen during my daughter's formative years so she can see that there is no job in America for which a woman is unqualified. But I just don't want that woman President to be Mrs. Clinton.

Government Policy Rewards CEO Lying, So We Get More of It:

Increasingly Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are looking like little more than devices to transfer money from the pockets of taxpayers to the pockets of Fannie and Freddie senior executives. Former Fannie Mae boss Franklin Raines paid himself about $50 million for years in which, we now know, the company lied about its earnings in order to inflate executive bonuses, while management was playing fast and loose with other people's money. Beginning in 2007, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac went off the cliff, their stocks plummeting to less than 20 percent of their previous values, and taxpayers were put on the hook as guarantors of the firms' bad management decisions. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the Mae-Mac debacle will cost taxpayers $100 billion or more. Yet Freddie Mac CEO Richard Syron was paid $14.5 million for 2007, including a $2.2 million "performance bonus." Syron has taken home $38 million total from Freddie in the past five years. Fannie Mae CEO Daniel Mudd got $14.2 million for 2007, plus a substantial prepaid life insurance policy and other perks including "financial counseling, an executive health program and dining services," the Washington Post reported. Hey, $49,000-a-year median U.S. households, you are being taxed for millionaire Mudd's "dining services." Bon appetite.

Executives receiving very high pay justify their deals on two grounds: that they are risk-takers in high-pressure situations, and that they have valuable expertise. Now we know that no one at the top of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac took any personal risks -- everything was federally guaranteed, and all mistakes billed to the taxpayer. The New York Times reports that Syron was repeatedly warned in 2004 that the organization was taking on bad loans, and did nothing. Syron justified his inaction by complaining to the Times that he was under pressure from various Fannie constituents. That's why he was paid so much, to take the heat! Yet he took no heat, rather, devoted himself to avoiding responsibility. If things go well, executives are lavished with money and praised as risk-takers. If things go poorly, executives are lavished with money and blame others.

And just what incredible expertise do Syron and Mudd possess? They made billion-dollar blunder after billion-dollar blunder; they failed to realize things as basic as buyers borrowing without documentation of income may not be able to repay loans. People chosen at random from the phone book could hardly have performed worse. Yet the federal bail-out legislation just signed by George W. Bush does not require them to give back any of their ill-gotten gains.

This is the core lesson of CEO overpay scandals: The corrupt or incompetent executive always keeps the money. He may be caught and embarrassed by bad press, but he keeps the money while someone else -- shareholders, taxpayers, workers -- is punished. Raines recently settled a federal legal complaint by agreeing to return about $3 million of his $50 million, but kept the rest; his employment contract was worded such that even if he was malfeasant, whatever he took from company coffers was his. Hilariously, federal prosecutors claimed victory because Raines "surrendered" to the government a large block of stock options -- options now worthless, owing to the Fannie Mae decline Raines helped set in motion by lying about Fannie numbers. Until Congress enacts a law that allows money taken by corrupt or incompetent executives to be recovered, the lying will continue. Lying by CEOs is what society rewards!

Why does Congress tolerate the swindle aspect of Fannie and Freddie? For the standard reason: Congress is on the take. Lisa Lerer of Politico reports that in the past decade, Fannie and Freddie spent almost $200 million on campaign donations to Congress and on lobbying members of Congress, some of the lobbying money going to former members. This year, for instance, Fannie gave the legal max of $10,000 to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and to Republican House Whip Roy Blunt, neither of whom face meaningful re-election challenge. As for costly lobbying, the implied deal is: Don't rock the boat while in office and someday you too will be a former member getting easy money to lobby former colleagues. During Senate debate on the Mae-Mac bailout, Majority Leader Harry Reid refused to permit a vote on an amendment that would have barred Fannie and Freddie from giving money to members of Congress. Reid did not merely oppose the measure, he refused to allow the Senate to vote on it -- so that members of Congress could remain on the take, without having to go on record about the matter.

Now that taxpayers are covering Fannie and Freddie's cooked books, the $200 million diverted to Congress in effect came from average Americans, forcibly removed from their pockets -- and thanks to Senator Reid, more will be forcibly taken from your pocket and placed into the accounts of senators and representatives. This is what is called a Sliver Strategy. The Sliver Strategy is a means to disguise embezzlement. Congress looked the other way while Fannie and Freddie approved vast amounts of bad debt, in order to shave off a sliver for itself -- in this case, the $200 million in lobbying and donations. Had Congress simply awarded itself $200 million, editorialists would have been outraged. Because the money was slipped in to a larger fiasco of much greater sums wasted, Congress got away with it.