Chopped Liver and Paris Hilton

I never thought I’d hear myself say it and it took only one minute and fifty seconds to happen.  I’ve become an unabashed Paris Hilton fan.  All cheap glamor, shallow videos, bared breasts, and other superficialities are forgiven.

I might have expected it from Lewis Black but not from Paris.  In just 110 seconds, she skewers two presidential candidates, pokes fun at herself, and probably picks up placement payments from Traveler Magazine.  I don’t even care if someone else wrote the video, at least she hires well.

For fans of irony like myself, I am most tickled that the superficial star exposes the superficiality of the so-called differences in the Obama and McCane energy policies.  One is stumping on the short term, the other on the long term.  In truth, no matter who ends up in the White House, real options are going to be severely constrained by global and environmental factors outside the control of both the president and the country.  They both better be trying to figure out how to get divergent interests to collaborate.

So let’s hear it for the chopped liver.  I stand in awe.

If anyone was lucky enough to have missed John McCane’s “celebrity” campaign ad, find it here.

Catch Paris’s reply here.

Healthy Food, Healthy Image, Healthy Fearmongering.

I know a lawyer who tells her clients that a time comes when the client needs to stop listening to her.  That is, do what’s right and damn the whining lawyers.  The California Milk Processors Board might want to heed her advice.

Got Milk?  Healthy message, right?  Not the message the Milk Board’s lawyers are sending to Talkeetna, Alaska artist Barbara Holmes.

Remember that guy in the cartoon, Snidley Whiplash?  The Milk Board is doing its best to imitate him.  It is bringing a cease and desist order against Ms. Holmes.  It seems that Ms. Holmes embroidered a handful of baby shirts for a church auction.  The fuss you ask?  She hand embroidered each shirt with the message, “Got Breastmilk.”

Her act, according to the Milk Board’s attorneys, is a clear copyright violation.

A nice summary of the situation here.

The website of the local Talkeetna lawyer who is defending Ms. Holmes against the Milk Board is here.

To me, it looks like some healthy stuff had been going down.  That is, some healthy fearmongering by the Milk Board’s legal counsel.

Update: July 30.  If you have more free reading time than me and prefer Hiaku with your intellectual property law, check out the coverage at f/k/a.

Ethics within Ethics?

I have a folder of unread RSS items. I poke through it from time to time. So It was that I found a May 23 blog entry by Daniel Altman.

I like Mr. Altman’s blog. I like his insights on globalization. Consequently, I was disappointed with a note he added to the bottom of his article. He blamed his staff for losing a computer file.

Ironically, the May 23 article focused on the value of socially ethical investing, with allusions to Enron. Is not Mr. Altman’s action in blaming his staff the same type of behavior we saw from Enron’s senior executives?

An organization’s culture flows from its top. Whether it is ethical or organizational behavior, the behavior of an organization’s leaders serve as a template for that of the organization’s employees.

I’ll bet that Mr. Altman’s leadership played a role in the loss of the computer file, even if indirectly. I believe it speaks volumes when a leader, such as Mr. Altman, tries to evade responsibility for an error in his organization. Were there similar evasions that took place in his staff?

C’mon Mr. Altman, step up and take some responsibility. Losing a set of blog comments is an embarrassment but not more. Don’t cower behind your staff. If you lead, they will lead too.

In this case, your actions not only shined poorly on you, they served as a sardonic self commentary on your own article.

The Fall of Rome

I could enjoy watching flights of hubris if they did not have the nasty habit of landing on top of pedestrians when they return to earth.

I was reading this morning an article on the Bear Stearns debacle. The pundits continue to debate the source of the subprime mess. “Did Bear Stearn’s downfall cause it?,” they ask. “No, it was the other way around,” others contend.

In all the flurry, what caught my eye was a statement attributed to Bear Stearn’s fund manager Ralph Cioffi. Ralph was the manager of one of Bear Stearn’s subprime portfolios. He reportedly earned tens of millions of dollars annually to shepard these monies. When he belatedly realized his funds had failed, he emailed a colleague and stated that he had “effectively washed a 30-year career down the drain.”

A remarkable statement. A man who has just squandered 1.6 billion of other people’s money and his first thought is to his career and, by extension, his pocketbook?

I would guess that if the pundits paused long enough to meditate on Ralph’s statement, they would find in it the answer to their questions. For I would also guess that Ralph is not alone.

And then it was Obama

I ride a bicycle. I’m just a weekend warrior, which made the kind comments by New York photographer and bike courier Brian McGloin a special treat. What he does is real cycling.

A few years back, I decided to ride my bicycle over the Going to the Sun Highway. This so-called highway is a two lane road climbing through Glacier National Park in Montana. It goes up to the height of land without a break. On a bicycle and in rough numbers, it is 25 miles of nothing but up hill. For me, this meant hours of pedaling. Just pushing one foot down, then the other.

At times, the road simply ground through miles of trees, with nothing more to see. At other times, the road reached singular points of reward: an arched bridge over an impassible gorge or a stone tunnel through a barrier of granite. There was even a small cliff called the Weeping Wall.

What I found most grueling about the ride was that, for much of it, I could look literally miles ahead and see the road scratched into the mountainside, still climbing toward the pass. For all the sweat I’d put in, all I could see was more hill ahead.

At one point, however, I stopped. Focused on the riding as I had been, I had not looked back at the road behind me. I was moved to see how far I had come. Below me lay valleys and forests as far back as I could see. As others who have traveled the road will tell, it is one of the most spectacular sights in the United States. It caused me to pause and reflect that my efforts had, in fact, had remarkable results.

So I got on my bicycle and started pedaling again.

And so I think it is with hate and bigotry too. Let us pause a moment and reflect on how far we have come. Then, move forward again.

Congratulation Mr. Obama. Congratulations to all African Americans. Congratulations America.

Of Communication and Capitulation

President Bush has taken a swing at the presumptive Democratic candidate, by likening him to Neville Chamberlain and the Nazi appeasers. (NY Times but you may have to register).

There are many reasons I find the President’s statements ill advised. I find it especially ironic, however, that Chamberlain’s negotiations preceded a war — and are often credited with causing it. Any negotiations that might take place with Iran now would be negotiations following a war — and one can draw his or her own conclusion as to what caused what.

I know a lawyer who is a professional negotiator. I have often heard him say that “those who do not communicate will litigate.” I accompanied him once when he suggested to a client that communication and negotiation might be in the client’s best interest. The client assailed him as being a “Chamberlain.” His response, which I have carried with me since, was, “I know a thousand respectful ways to say ‘No.’”

I have a hunch that if we do not communicate with Iran, we will end up fighting with Iran. Communication, however, is not the same thing as capitulation.

Sex, Guns, TV, and Classrooms

Tara Parker-Pope writes too quick a byte on sexual harassment in our schools. One of the comments states,

What boy HASN’T played “Tune in, Tokyo” with the girls in school? Sex is a beautiful, natural act and should be encouraged, not confined into a dark, shameful corner. Let’s work to produce an enlightened, healthy Generation Y.

Tara fires back,

FROM TPP — But the discussion here isn’t about sex. It’s about harassment. And “tune in tokyo” is about grabbing a girls breasts without permission and turning them like they are radio dials. The fact that you think this is just harmless boy behavior is really disgusting.

I think Tara and her commenter both miss the mark. Sex, harassment, violence, and bullying are interrelated in complex ways that we may never fully understand.

I rarely watch TV. Each time I do, however, I see two things in almost all shows: violence and sex. The violence is explicit, graphic, and acceptable. It is most effective when used by the good guys. The sex is usually implicit, seductive, and subliminal. When it is shown graphically, it is usually lustful not loveful.

What a recipe. Take kids aged 12-18, add hormones, and stir a toxic mix of acceptable violence and unacceptable sex. The result cannot be anything but harassment and bullying.

I think Tara’s commenter, for all his misunderstanding, may have stumbled on a better solution than Tara’s violent name calling. I suspect if sex was acceptable and violence was not, the results in our classrooms might be different.

We’re out of Ammo and the Battle’s Just Getting Warm

The New York Times today reports that Al Qaeda’s latest HIPO is a brash leader named, Abu Yahya al-Libi.  A focus of the article was on a video released by Abu Yahya on  September 10, 2007.  In the video, Abu Yahya offers six strategies the U.S. and others might take in their fight for the hearts and minds of the Muslim world.

Quoted in the article is Jarret Brachman, who has explained Abu Yahya’s strategy behind the video.  Dr. Brachman calls the ploy brilliant.  I agree.  He believes the action helps inoculate Jihadists from propaganda produced by countries seeking to discredit Al Qaeda.  I agree again.  Noticably absent from the discussion, however, is the issue of credibility.

In an information war, credibility is the ammunition that wins battles.  As Dan Rather knows, an error of information, a loss of credibility, and the battle is lost.  In this era, an error of information is not long hidden.

Credibility is gained a yard at a time.  It can be lost in an instant.  An error need not be intentional.  Dan Rather did not intend to lie.  He simply screwed up.  The result, in the language of labor relations, was his industrial death.

I think Abu Yahya’s stategy is more than brilliant.  He taunts the U.S. and his other enemies.  Like a school yard bully, he goads us to come fight him on his turf.  The turf at issue?  It is the hearts and minds of the moderate Muslim community.  That is, the battlefield of ideas and information.  On this battleground, bullets and bombs will do us as much harm as good.  Our best ammunition is credibility: being believed by those we are trying to convince.

The current administration, with its focus on bullets and bombs, has tossed away its most valuable weapon as worthless.  It has squandered our credibility as if it were nothing more than a fistful of sand.

I have no doubt that Abu Yahya understands that we are out of ammo and it’s time to fight.  He is aware that we are as far behind in this arms race as we were at the onset of WWII.   Unfortunately, we cannot this time rebuild our arsenal simply by cranking up our factory production or asking the public to invest in war bonds.  Credibility is not manufactured.   It is earned.  And slowly at that.

The Argument Culture

A favorite is Deborah Tannen’s book, The Argument Culture. In it, she points to similarities that can be drawn between war and public discourse. She observes that in order for a public discourse to have sizzle, (my word, not hers) there must be conflict.

This morning, I found an example of the sort of thing she describes. Dan Schur, in his guest blog on the NY Time’s site, made the following statement:

Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s comments would seem to have forced Senator Obama to choose sides — to either stand with Reverend Wright and others who support his condemnations of the United States, or with those who think they should be rejected out of hand.

I commented there and elaborate here.

I disagree that Reverend Wright’s statements required Obama to “choose sides.” Choosing sides is helpful in creating dramatic tension for Schur’s article but of limited value in bringing people together. The Reverend’s actions were divisive. But so is Schur’s suggestion that Obama, and by implication the rest of us, should all choose sides.

We have just seen that Eliot Sptizer, held up by the public as a rock of integrity was, in fact, human. So too, it appears, is the Reverend Wright. I am not without sin. I will not be the first to cast stones at either of these two men.

For those of you who may have missed Obama’s speech, he both rejected Wright’s remarks and stood with him as a decent human who cared for people of all races.

Collaboration and healing take place only when differences are acknowledged honestly and openly. Collaboration and healing take place only when individuals are brave enough to stand the middle ground and see the virtue — and the sin — in those individuals, like Schur and Wright, who have chosen their respective sides.

Contrary to Schur’s thinking, I think Reverend Wright’s actions were a call to Obama to hold the middle ground. I think he did so directly and with honesty. All the more brave for a man on the stump.