Category Archives: Media

The Russians are Coming! The Russians are Coming!

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“Everybody to get from street!”

I was late to bed and early to rise but it could have been worse. Somebody triggered a backup alarm somewhere within earshot about 0:dark:30; it woke me. I folded the pillow over my head but I didn’t really sleep that well from then until the alarm.

Speaking of alarms…

I know where the Russians are. I want to know where American reporters are.

The Russian navy announced Carribean maneuvers with the Venezuelans about 2-1/2 months ago or during the height of the presidential campaign season. Nobody noticed, caught up as we were in the color barrier and the cost of Sarah Palin’s wardrobe. Speaking of color, a Cuban poll released this morning noted that no black man would ever ascend to a leadership position in Cuba.

Cuba? CUBA? The biggest foreign policy problem for the new administration is not Iran, Afghanistan, or Iraq. The biggest foreign policy problem is having missile-toting, nuclear-powered warships some 150 miles from my personal front door. (Remember the now-fabled “90 miles from the Bay of Pigs”? Regular readers may recall that my house in the Keys is about that distance away from Cuba).

Four Russian North Fleet and 12 Venezuelan ships lead by nuclear cruiser Peter the Great sailed today from Venezuela’s La Guaira port. The joint naval exercises began this morning and will last two days. You can read the entire story from Novosti, the English-language Russian News and Information Agency.

The Russian and Venezuelan ships-of-war will “practice sea rescue operations and maneuvering, and conduct live-firing artillery drills.” The public reason for the exercises is to plan terrorism and drug trafficking countermeasures but the exercises include aircraft, missiles, and 1,600 Russian marines. Russian strategic bombers overflew South America last month.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev called the military cooperation “very useful.”

Indeed.

Russia’s entire economy is based on petrodollars. Oil has tanked and they are getting very nervous. When Russia or China (or both together) get nervous, we need to be very worried.

If that’s not enough to get your attention, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez believes he is the second coming of Castro. Except he may be nastier.

I remember the original Missile Crisis in the Carribean. “Duck and cover” is not a particularly useful exercise against nuclear attack but it is a great exercise to scare fifth-graders.

Here’s the bigger question: I googled and found that the closest American media to notice this is Voice of America. I wonder why no major American reporter seems to remember the last crisis and why no major American news organization is covering this one.

Dewey Wins!

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I’m not a jock. Not really. I have done some gymnastics. I had a WSI, taught swimming, and did a bit of diving. I raced cars until I retired in 1980. Despite that, I don’t watch many televised sports.

I watched the Olympics.

Michael Phelps blew me away.

One one-hundredth of a second. Eight gold medals in eight attempts.

Mr. Phelps burns more calories in an hour than I burn in a day. He swam the 4 x 200-meter relay less than an hour after winning the 200-meter fly. He won his definitive event at about 11:30 p.m., Eastern Daylight Time, on Saturday.

It is the biggest sports story of the decade bar none.

I’m glad the Red Sox won the Series. I’m glad the Pats won the Super Bowl. This is bigger. This is batting 1.000 against a spitballer. This is hitting a home run in every at bat.

Oddly, The Burlington Free Press opted to cover a different event. The front page lead story on Sunday and the sports page lead story on Sunday was that Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt “shattered the men’s 100-meter record Saturday.” Sorry, Mr. Phelps. I guess the Secretary really will “disavow any knowledge of your actions.”

The Freep did have a little box of weasel words down low on the sports page. We’re sorry, they said. We know Michael Phelps was swimming yesterday but we had to go to bed early and we missed it.

I understand that the reporters’ union requires the paper to allow us to sleep once a week and that Saturday night is it. But really. The only good news here is that the Freep avoided the “Dewey Defeats Truman!” kind of headline. The bad news is that this was the biggest sports story of the decade. Somebody should have stayed up for it.

Spinning the Entire Planet

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This column looks at media spin.

First, the backstory: ExxonMobil, the most profitable company in the history of mankind, made an $11.68 billion profit this quarter on the back of General Motors which lost $15.5 billion.

“America’s oil and natural gas industry earns less than many others…” That’s the televised gospel according to “the people who bring you oil and natural gas” (that would be API, the American Petroleum Institute).

Hello? Are they on the same planet you and I inhabit?

Oh. Wait.

The API planet spins backwards!

Naturally they do have statistics to back up their claim, shown in their television ad in the form of a handy bar chart of earnings per dollar of sales in the First Quarter, 2008:

Pharmaceuticals 25.9
Beverage and Tobacco 17.8
Computer Products 13.7
All Manufacturing 7.6
Apparel and Leather 7.5
Oil and Natural Gas 7.4
Food 5.0
Furniture 3.0

[In the interest of full disclosure, I own some ExxonMobil stock.]

CEO Rex Tillerson announced that my company is, out of the largest profit in corporate history, paying one of the smaller dividends (~2%) in corporate history. On the other hand, Mr. Tillerson buys back shares like mine with all their extra cash and raised my dividend a whopping nickle while the investment he makes in production and exploration plummets.

That stock buyback at about $80 per share sucked up some $8 billion of the quarterly profit. They bought $30 billion in stock last year and have (so far) reduced the number of shares outstanding by about 400 million shares. I can see no reason that it helps me when Mr. Tillerson takes the stock out of play. It helps someone, though. At the current rate, ExxonMobil will buy back all of its shares and become a totally private company in just 14 more years.

Huh.

Just to show I am not playing favorites, Royal Dutch Shell’s second-quarter earnings were nearly as high as Exxon’s with a profit of $11.56 billion. That was 33% higher than Shell’s profit of $8.67 billion in the same period last year. Shell is half the size of Exxon.

Wow. $11.68 plus $11.56 billion in three months. Profit. Just two companies.

Profit that usually goes to the shareholders.

API states it is the only national trade association that represents all aspects of America’s oil and natural gas industry. Their 400 corporate members are the producers, refiners, suppliers, pipeline operators and marine transporters, as well as service and supply companies. They represent the largest major oil company to the smallest of independents. They spin the news for companies like ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, and more. By the way, Royal Dutch Shell has a stock buyback program. Chevron has a stock buyback program.

ExxonMobil did beat its own record for the highest profits ever by a U.S. company but the $2.22-per-share profit announced still led to a $3 decline in the share price.

I originally thought that Mr. Tillerson might have wished API had not spun the profit as such a small number.

That wasn’t right.

Mr. Tillerson, unlike every CEO in American history, wants his stock price to fall. The lower the price and higher the profits the more stock ExxonMobil can buy back.

See how well spinning backwards can work?

Hoofbeats

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The End is nigh. The hoofbeats of the Four Horsemen have sounded. I am about to agree with Gary Trudeau. A couple-three years ago, his Doonesbury™ strip introduced Dr. Nathan Null, the Situational Science Adviser™. Here’s an excerpt from that strip:

Young Republican College Kid: “Drat! These pesky scientific facts won’t line up behind my beliefs!”
Situational Science Adviser: “Then Challenge them, Stewie!”
—–
SSA: “Situational Science is about respecting both sides of a scientific argument, not just the one supported by the facts!”
—–
SSA: “That’s why I always teach the controversy like the Evolution Controversy or the Global Warming controversy …
—–
YRCC: “You’re right, Situational Scienceman–I’ll never trust science again! “It’s just too controversial!”
SSA: “Stewie gets it now, folks! Do you?”

Trudeau likes to pound the Bush administration (ya think) but there is a similar effort going on the Far Green camps to use science to forestall and obfuscate rather than simply to report.

Once upon a time I thought this wasn’t a wholesale attempt to discredit science, merely a concerted effort to ramp up tiny observations into generalized Truths to serve their agenda. After all, we are told the Far Right agenda tries to use common folk as cannon or environmental fodder so, situationally, the Far Green agenda must try to shut down one business segment after another.

That worries me, but not as much as what I now see as the wholesale drive to gain power over every facet of your life and mine. How? By discrediting science whenever it appears in public. It has been going on for years.

Big Tobacco tried mightily to discredit Dr. Koop as a poopyhead.

Natural Life Magazine tried mightily to discredit childhood vaccinations.

The Far Right tried mightily to discredit Evolution for 80 years.

Trudeau’s Situational Science Adviser pushed the pesticides controversy, the coal slurry controversy, the Everglades controversy, the acid rain controversy, the mercury controversy, and more.

I know very little about mercury other than its toxicity and ubiquity. And its distance from the Sun. I did read that if you lose a single mercury filling in a ten-acre pond, the EPA would have to ban all fishing, swimming, bathing, and boating in that pond. Makes you wonder why we still have “silver” fillings–or why Al Gore pushes mercury-laden fluorescent light bulbs–innt.

Now, of course, everything from the unnaturally high snowfall in the winter of 2007-08 to the unnatural temperature rise of the Atlantic Ocean is caused by Global Warming, and all a result of Carbon Dioxide.

Heh.

Anybody want to guess the agenda here?

It’s almost the same as mine.

I want you to read this, decide I am brilliant, and do what I tell you is right.

The Far Green wants you decide they are brilliant and do what they tell you is right. But they want more. The Far Green wants to force you and you and you to do what they tell you is right And they are developing the tools to enforce their whims.

One of my correspondents related a story from the historical times after the Tet Offensive when gasoline cost 40 cents per gallon. His friend, a Quaker, had received Conscientious Objector status and was assigned to a group called “Environment!” After working there several months, he said “These guys don’t care a bit about the environment. This is all about power… We, the great and stupid unwashed, needed to be doing what the folks at “Environment!” said we should be doing.”

That was more than 35 years ago.

I think the group Environment! has joined the Extinct Species list but other Far Green groups are growing stronger.

Today their tools include taxes, criminal penalties, and news attacks on science.

Our Quaker friend said then that “if the environmental movement could define Carbon Dioxide as a pollutant, they would have total control.”

OK, everybody inhale … and hold.

Next up will be the ban on that other dangerous chemical, Dihydrogen Monoxide.

Your Carbon Footprint
NASA and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that the earth has entered a natural cooling phase that will last decades.
OTOH, Al and Tipper Gore’s Tennessee home uses about the same amount of electricity as a dozen or more average American homes or at least 156 Swahili villages. The Gore’s Nashville residence is just four times the size of those average American homes and the Gore’s consumption has jumped yet another 10% since their “energy-efficient” home renovations. Do as I say, not as I do, eh Al?

My How We Have Changed

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A friend emailed me this Care 2 Make a Difference presentation. “Gotta love the punchline,” he wrote.

Even if you don’t recognize the voice, the credits show it is Eric Idle singing. Yup, that Eric Idle, of Monty Python fame.

Got me to thinking, that did.

Actually pretty much anything will get me to thinking. A pair of white sox. Cornflakes. A boat wake which is not to be confused with a wake for a boat.

I got to thinking about the media my grandfather grew up with, the media my father grew up with, the media my son grew up with, and the media we are growing now.

My grandfather was born before Mr. Marconi plumbed the airwaves. He heard Edward R. Murrow broadcast the news during World War II and watched Mr. Murrow take down Senator Joseph McCarthy on television. He watched Walter Cronkite tell of men walking on the Moon. He saw the Tiananmen Square Massacre on television and he read my email about it. (As an aside, my great-grandfather was brought to us by a Pony Express rider because the Stork was busy. He lived to see jet aircraft but communications, for him were still by radio, telephone, and mail.)

Making the change from letters and newspapers to radio was life changing in the way the printing press changed lives. Making the change from the instant transmission of radio or television to the instant transmission of email is simply humdrum. I love technology, but email is just a new technology for the same old letters.

See, email is cool, but it’s not revolutionary. After all, email is just a badly spelled letter that gets there really really fast. Think Ben Franklin meets The Flash. Likewise, HDTV is a really neat media but it’s not revolutionary. After all, it’s just movin’ pitchers attached to your radio set.

But the YouTube digital movies and the Flash-based presentations like Mr. Idle’s, that’s a revolution. Thanks to advertising, we are overwhelmed by imagery in color and sound and motion. Like any predator, we need more and more and more color and sound and motion to retain our attention. Movies have color and sound and motion innit.

Oddly, the revolution isn’t the technology this time. The revolution is what we do with the technology that lets us make our own color and sound and motion and deliver it in almost real time to our viewers.

Darn it, now I need to relearn Flash. I’ll try to resist using it on this blog, though.