WORD AROUND THE NET

"One Fortune Global 500 company remains. But its founder and chairman is not merely an economic man. He has webs between his toes. But he, too, has some limits."
-Phil Knight

Governor Kulongoski (Democrat) in Oregon is deciding whether or not to sign a bill passed by the state legislature. In Oregon, as in other states, employers are able to look at credit reports on potential hires as part of the decision process. This bill would ban employers from doing so for most jobs. And to be honest, I agree that in most cases it really is none of the business of an employer how bad my credit is. I might be looking for a job because my credit is bad and I need to fix it. Some jobs it makes perfect sense; accountants, for example. Most employers didn't bother with the check because it is costly and more work than it was worth (few even check references either, in my experience).

English police were able to find a stolen van for Christopher Sims. According to Luke Salkeld at the Daily Mail, they even told him where it was. They just didn't bother recovering it:

But Gloucestershire Police insisted they could not take any action as it would be ill-advised to visit the site because of the strong criminal element who lived there.

Mr Sims, 46, said: 'They said they were sympathetic but couldn't risk putting officers' lives at risk.

'They were saying they knew where the van could be but they weren't prepared to go in and find it.'

Mr Sims, who used his van for his job as a market trader, said a female officer told him the 1995 Transit, worth around £1,000, was on a well-known travellers' site, The Willows, near Gloucester.

The father-of-three, of Cheltenham, added: 'She told me it is a very dangerous and volatile place for the police to go.

'She said they would have to mount a huge operation with armed officers, dogs and helicopters and it would never be authorised by senior officers for the sake of a van worth £1,000.'

"Traveler" = Gypsy but for some reason the Daily Mail is shy about using that term. Seems to me that if an area is so awful that it requires a full scale assault for police to enforce the law, that's a group of people who ought to be under arrest already. Yet the British are very skittish about doing anything about Gypsies, since they are an "oppressed minority." Funny I thought it was sort of the job of police to take risks that others wouldn't to enforce the law.

Last year, the international ACORN body changed its name to COI because the old name had become so odious and associated with corruption and lawbreaking. Now the US version is changing its name as well. ACORN is supposedly breaking up because of "bad elements" in the organization, but in truth they're simply reorganizing under a bunch of new titles. For example, the New York Communities for Change and Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE). The leadership is the same, the funding is the same, the organizational structure, goals, and tactics are the same, and usually the addresses of the organizations have not changed. They're just fleeing the ACORN name like rats from a sinking ship and trying to cling to the money and power without changing their organizations. A turd by any other name....

Legacy media outlets are working hard at keeping their power and influence over American culture and political awareness despite loss of advertising revenue and being left behind by technology. ABC for example is "restructuring" their news division, which means a lot of people are losing their jobs. AFP reports:

[ABC News president David] Westin did not say how many jobs the company was seeking to eliminate but he said the restructuring of the news operation to take advantage of digital technology will result in "substantially fewer" people on staff at ABC News.

The Los Angeles Times, citing unidentified newsroom employees, said the network was looking to cut as many as 300 jobs, or around 20 percent of its total staff of around 1,400. The New York Times put the figure at up to 400.

"We anticipate that between now and the end of the year ABC News will undergo a fundamental transformation that will ultimately affect every corner of the enterprise," Westin said.

At this point not many people are watching the nightly news from any network, and the ones that do are old and getting even more elderly every year. That's fine in one sense, but its not a very enduring market share.

Michael Douglas starred in The China Syndrome, a movie about a nuclear power plant melt down. He spent his life and career bieng opposed to nukes for his whole career, but according to an interview with NPR he's changing his tune:

I do support nuclear power now. I wish there were other alternatives, but I don't think there are."

Why this change of heart? Because he thinks global warming is going to doom us all, so we are forced into it. Well, even stupid reasons can lead to good policy some times.

Senators in the US passed a "jobs bill" which is half about jobs (tax breaks for employers who hire unemployed people) and half pork ($20 billion for mass transit and highway departments). Newly elected Republican senator Brown from Massachusetts voted with the Democrats (along with other usual suspects such as Olympia Snowe), as I predicted he would and suspect he will tend to do most of the time. Yet at the same time, this 70-28 vote violated the recent "fiscally responsible" pledge congress recently undertook by passing the so-called "paygo" plan. This plan requires congress to either cut spending elsewhere or find new funding any time new spending is passed. Well I don't think anyone took them seriously anyway.

Journalism isn't what it once was, largely because of a fundamental shift in worldview. Old school journalism was about facts and the basics: who, what, where, when and why. These writers believed that there wasn't just absolute truth but that we could learn enough about it to reasonably inform others and act upon it. Modern journalists are more interested in the narrative, the story that's being told and the background of the people telling it, not the facts or the truth. Recently Jonathon Springston learned all about that when he lost his job. Why the firing? His boss, editor Matthew Cardinale of the Atlanta Progressive Journal explained, courtesy Creative Loafing:

“because he held on to the notion that there was an objective reality that could be reported objectively, despite the fact that that was not our editorial policy at Atlanta Progressive News.”

I keep writing about post modernism and relativism not because its a fun philosophical exercise, but because it matters. What you believe defines and drives what you do.

One of the most influential books to my political thought is a little booklet called The Imperial Congress put out by the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s. This booklet was all about how the legislators in congress were abusing their power and demanding everyone else live by rules which they continually and by policy exempted themselves. When the Contract With America Republicans took over most of congress in 1994, one of the first things the House did was change the rules to require them to follow whatever laws they require others to. Things really haven't gotten a lot better in some ways, as Jordy Yager explains in The Hill:

More than 70 percent of congressional offices have violated worker safety standards over the past year.

While the majority of all lawmaker offices on Capitol Hill have at least one health or safety hazard violation, this year’s inspection data from the Office of Compliance inspections is an improvement over last year’s.

The number of Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) violations found in each office has significantly decreased over the years as well — from an average of about 8.15 violations per office in 2007 to an average of 1.75 hazards in each office this year.

I commend the Democrats in congress for making things better, but they're still basically ignoring the OSHA rules they require everyone else to follow or face stiff fines (congress can basically ignore the fines). My basic question is this: if you think these laws are so complex, difficult to follow, or absurd and unnecessary that you don't put out the effort, why do you demand everyone else do so?

President Obama hasn't had a press conference in almost a full year; 219 days as of this writing. President Bush was routinely attacked by the left and the legacy media (but I repeat myself) for not talking to the press enough. He was secretive! He was afraid! He was hiding something! Personally I don't blame any president for not wanting to speak to the press: they're obnoxious, ask idiotic questions, and generally are adversarial, particularly to Republicans. And really given how lousy President Obama is at speaking off the cuff without carefully prepared speeches fed to him on his omnipresent teleprompter, I am not surprised by this news.

Chase, Citibank, and Bank of America are getting ready to release applications for your advanced cell phone to let you bank easier. This one relies on image recognition technology which lets you take a picture of an item and the phone recognizes and acts on the data. New Zealand's Stuff has the details of this new plan:

Here's how it works. When you take a picture of a check, a computer that receives the image looks for the amount, the check number and the digits on the bottom with information on the check writer's account number and the bank's routing number. A photo of the back of the check verifies that it's been signed by the recipient.

A banking clearinghouse then routes the funds from the check writer's account to that of the recipient. That also prevents the same check from being deposited multiple times.

Oh yeah. I can't see how that would end up bad for anyone in any way. Reliance on images in an era when images are at their absolutely least reliable is just bizarre to me.

Deadly global warming continues to take its toll. In Mongolia, weather has killed most of the livestock and presents a potential deadly hazard in disease from rotting carcasses. Thousands have died from the extreme weather conditions as temperature soar as high as -50 degrees Fahrenheit. Oh wait, that's really cold. Seriously though, the area is being hammered unmercifully by the worst winter in human memory and the UN is trying to help. For once, it seems like they've actually come up with a good plan, according to AFP:

The UNDP on Thursday announced a plan to pay 60,000 herders to clean and bury the carcasses of the dead livestock to prevent the spread of disease before the spring thaw begins.

No strangers to harsh conditions, Mongolians call such extreme weather a "Dzud": a severely cold winter after a dry summer that combined mean food shortages for the livestock that generations have depended on for survival.

A third of Mongolia's 2.6 million people lead nomadic lives and depend entirely on livestock for a living.

Mongolia has approved a special 2.6-million-dollar budget for emergency aid to Dzud-affected areas, but the UN says it will need at least six million dollars more to care for surviving animals and clear the carcasses of the dead.

Instead of just shipping money in, they're paying the nomads to clear the corpses out which will prevent disease and rot come thaw. What will happen in the spring when tall this snow melts is a matter of some concern. When you're thinking about aid for Haiti, consider these people, too.

Nike is one of the biggest companies in Oregon, and employs thousands of workers at its Beaverton headquarters. Phil Knight, the CEO and owner of Nike, warned Oregonians that the ballot measures to raise taxes on companies and the wealthy would not be well received, warning in an article at the Oregonian newspaper:

"They will allow us to watch a state slowly killing itself. They are anti-business, anti-success, anti-inspirational, anti-humanitarian, and most ironically, in the long run, they will deprive the state of tax revenue, not increase it."

He called the bills Oregon's Assisted Suicide Law II, and noted ten other major corporations which have left Oregon in the past because of the state's increasingly business-unfriendly laws and policies. Well the tax measures passed, and now Nike is laying off workers and eyeing a move to Idaho. Like Boeing which grew up in Washington but has begun moving its operations out of state because things got so anti-business it wasn't worth staying, Nike could be next to go. But hey, the state has to pay for midnight basketball and all those union pensions.