Sorry Steve, you were no Edison

I know this will be hard for those of you who know me to believe, but I was a bit of a bookwormish little nerd as a kid, as opposed to the bubbling, outgoing, sparkling extrovert I have become. (Turn off sarcasm generator now.)

Early on - and I'm talking first and second grade - I learned to love the library. I was lucky enough to develop pretty good reading skills at a young age, and the school library was my favorite place to hang out. In particular, I loved a series of books called the "Landmark series" of American history. Whatever I wanted to learn about history - The Alamo, Abraham Lincoln, the Revolutionary War, Thomas Jefferson, Pearl Harbor - was all there in a book written specifically for elementary school kids. I learned to look for books that had that little Landmark chevron logo in the upper right corner of the cover, and I soaked them up.

And one that particularly captured my imagination was the Landmark biography of Thomas Edison (pictured here). I because engrossed in the story of his curiosity and his way of experimenting over and over until he could figure something out. I read dozens of these Landmark books, and Edison's story is the one I remember most.

Years later, I would end up working for General Electric, a company that was formed by merging the company Edison himself founded - Edison General Electric Company - and a competitor known as the Thomson-Houston company to become General Electric. Having admired Edison so much as a child, I got real pleasure in working for the company he founded.

(Today, of course, GE is practically a criminal enterprise, famous for making billions in profits without paying income taxes, dumping pollutants in the Hudson River for decades, turning out crappy appliances and getting government to subsidize its "green" business units that can't earn a spot in the competitive marketplace. (You know those stupid CFL bulbs that don't give you enough light and contain dangerous mercury to boot? GE became one of the first to figure out how to make them, then spent millions lobbying the government to make them mandatory.) But I digress...another story for another day.)

So....my point (and I'm getting to it) is that I always considered Edison an historical giant, which he certainly was. And though I admired the recently deceased Steve Jobs, I cringed a little when I heard or read commentaries about his death that called him things like "The Edison of his generation," because, frankly, there is NO Edison of this generation.

So I was pleased to come across this commentary in The American magazine, written by Vaclav Smil, which you can read by clicking on here: http://www.american.com/archive/2011/september/why-jobs-is-no-edison.

I don't write this to denigrate Jobs in any way, but it's a nice chance to bring Edison's name up to a new generation, and remind people of what a remarkable genius he was. And if you're rummaging around a garage sale and find any of those old Landmark books, buy them for your kids. Someday they'll thank you.

Oh, those "evil" corporations

You've probably seen this posted in several other places, but I like it so much I'm going to put it up here anyway. What little coherent thought that is coming out of the "Occupy Wall Street" and similar protests seems to be centered around the notion that corporations are evil.

Of course, corporations are nothing more than an organization of people who produce goods and services that people have the option of purchasing. I'm not sure what's inherently "evil" about that, but this graphic does a nice job of pointing out the silliness of the idea. Enjoy. (click on the picture for a bigger view).

Steve Jobs, R.I.P.

I'm not one of those people - though I've worked with some, particularly graphic designers - who get emotional arguing about the utility and reliability of Apple computers vs. PCs. That doesn't limit, however, my admiration for Steve Jobs' story as an entrepreneur and innovator. But rather than have you read my own (inadequate) thoughts, I'm just going to turn this over to Kevin Williamson of National Review Online, who sums it all up pretty well, and uses it as a great illustration of what people with ideas and a vision can do for society, versus those who sit and wait for government to do something. Enjoy Kevin's work.

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By Kevin D. Williamson

I don’t know what Steve Jobs’s politics were, I don’t much care, and in any case they are beside the point. The late Mr. Jobs stood for something considerably better than politics. He stood for the model of the world that works. The model that made this:

into this:

and this:

into this:

That old Motorola cinderblock would cost about $10,000 in 2011 dollars, and you couldn’t play Angry Birds on it or watch Fox News or trade a stock. Once you figure out why your cell phone gets better and cheaper every year but your public schools get more expensive and less effective, you can apply that model to answer a great many questions about public policy. Not all of them, but a great many.

Jobs was sometimes criticized for not being a philanthropist along the lines of Bill Gates. Take this article, for example:

Last year the founder of the Stanford Social Innovation Review called Apple one of “America’s Least Philanthropic Companies.” Jobs had terminated all of Apple’s long-standing corporate philanthropy programs within weeks after returning to Apple in 1997, citing the need to cut costs until profitability rebounded. But the programs have never been restored.

CNN, being CNN, misses the point. Mr. Jobs’s contribution to the world is Apple and its products, along with Pixar and his other enterprises, his 338 patented inventions — his work — not some Steve Jobs Memorial Foundation for Giving Stuff to Poor People in Exotic Lands and Making Me Feel Good About Myself. Because he already did that: He gave them better computers, better telephones, better music players, etc. In a lot of cases, he gave them better jobs, too. Did he do it because he was a nice guy, or because he was greedy, or because he was a maniacally single-minded competitor who got up every morning possessed by an unspeakable rage to strangle his rivals? The beauty of capitalism — the beauty of the iPhone world as opposed to the world of politics — is that that question does not matter one little bit. Whatever drove Jobs, it drove him to create superior products, better stuff at better prices. Profits are not deductions from the sum of the public good, but the real measure of the social value a firm creates. Those who talk about the horror of putting profits over people make no sense at all. The phrase is without intellectual content. Perhaps you do not think that Apple, or Goldman Sachs, or a professional sports enterprise, or an internet pornographer actually creates much social value; but markets are very democratic — everybody gets to decide for himself what he values. That is not the final answer to every question, because economic answers can only satisfy economic questions. But the range of questions requiring economic answers is very broad.

I was down at the Occupy Wall Street protest today, and never has the divide between the iPhone world and the politics world been so clear: I saw a bunch of people very well-served by their computers and telephones (very often Apple products) but undeniably shortchanged by our government-run cartel education system. And the tragedy for them — and for us — is that they will spend their energy trying to expand the sphere of the ineffective, hidebound, rent-seeking, unproductive political world, giving the Barney Franks and Tom DeLays an even stronger whip hand over the Steve Jobses and Henry Fords. And they — and we — will be poorer for it.

And to the kids camped out down on Wall Street: Look at the phone in your hand. Look at the rat-infested subway. Visit the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue, then visit a housing project in the South Bronx. Which world do you want to live in?

Seems realistic, doesn't it?

As some of you may be aware, there is a group of nutjobs calling themselves "Occupy Wall Street" who have been setting up camp in New York's financial district for a couple of weeks. Copycats are springing up around the country, and they seemed to be the same types of protestors we had in St. Paul for the Republican National Convention: Anarchists who have no real aim other than generating attention for themselves.

But I wanted to be fair, and so I went to their web site, where one of the protestors listed the demands the group has. They are:

Demand one: Restoration of the living wage. This demand can only be met by ending “Free trade” by re-imposing trade tariffs on all imported goods entering the American market to level the playing field for domestic family farming and domestic manufacturing as most nations that are dumping cheap products onto the American market have radical wage and environmental regulation advantages. Another policy that must be instituted is raise the minimum wage to twenty dollars an hr.

Demand two: Institute a universal single payer healthcare system. To do this all private insurers must be banned from the healthcare market as their only effect on the health of patients is to take money away from doctors, nurses and hospitals preventing them from doing their jobs and hand that money to wall st. investors.

Demand three: Guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment.

Demand four: Free college education.

Demand five: Begin a fast track process to bring the fossil fuel economy to an end while at the same bringing the alternative energy economy up to energy demand.

Demand six: One trillion dollars in infrastructure (Water, Sewer, Rail, Roads and Bridges and Electrical Grid) spending now.

Demand seven: One trillion dollars in ecological restoration planting forests, reestablishing wetlands and the natural flow of river systems and decommissioning of all of America’s nuclear power plants.

Demand eight: Racial and gender equal rights amendment.

Demand nine: Open borders migration. anyone can travel anywhere to work and live.

Demand ten: Bring American elections up to international standards of a paper ballot precinct counted and recounted in front of an independent and party observers system.

Demand eleven: Immediate across the board debt forgiveness for all. Debt forgiveness of sovereign debt, commercial loans, home mortgages, home equity loans, credit card debt, student loans and personal loans now! All debt must be stricken from the “Books.” World Bank Loans to all Nations, Bank to Bank Debt and all Bonds and Margin Call Debt in the stock market including all Derivatives or Credit Default Swaps, all 65 trillion dollars of them must also be stricken from the “Books.” And I don’t mean debt that is in default, I mean all debt on the entire planet period.

Demand twelve: Outlaw all credit reporting agencies.

Demand thirteen: Allow all workers to sign a ballot at any time during a union organizing campaign or at any time that represents their yeah or nay to having a union represent them in collective bargaining or to form a union.

So that all seems pretty reasonable, eh? Dissolve all debts, pay everyone at least $20 an hour whether they work or not and spend $2 trillion on infrastructure and "green energy." All that's missing is mandatory missions to the moon to harvest the green cheese, and free pixie dust rations for everyone.

I'm guessing that not too many of these kids have spent time in an economics class, or perhaps any classroom. But I'm sure it won't take long for the New York Times, Washington Post or Star-Tribune to call them something like, "An authentic voice of a generation yearning for social justice and equality."

How goofy is Maureen Dowd?

Granted, most people who live outside of the planet Manhattan - or its moon, Washington, D.C. - have never heard of Maureen Dowd. She's a New York Times columnist who has had her lips firmly planted on Obama's buttocks for a number of years.

In today's Times, writing about Chris Christie's decision not to run, she summed up the political mood of the country with this remarkably out-of-touch-with-reality sentence:

"Americans who have been hurt want to identify the villains, and Obama is loath to target villains."

Huh? Has anyone in the history of politics sought out and scapegoated villains more than Obama?

In less than three years in office, Obama has gone out of his way to demonize:

George W. Bush
Oil companies
Corporate jet owners
Insurance companies
Talk radio hosts
Millionaires
Israel
Oil "speculators"
Billionaires not named Warren Buffet
The Tea Party
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce
The European economy
Arizona
Greedy doctors
The Japanese tsunami
Large corporations
The Supreme Court
Pick-up truck owners
And of course, Republicans in Congress who would like to vote on his "jobs bill" (see post below).

There is almost no one in the world that the President isn't willing to demonize. He's managed to take an office once known as "the most powerful position on Earth" and turn it into an inconsequential little job that is totally controlled by a vast, worldwide collection of bad guys.

Of course, this may not all be recognizable from the Planet Manhattan, which would explain Dowd's continued defense of a failed presidency.

No shame in the White House

In case you doubted that the President's "jobs bill" was nothing more than a political play - rather than an attempt to create jobs - the White House removed all doubt with a ploy so cynical that even I'm shocked by it.

Republicans in the Senate are anxious to bring the jobs bill to a vote. In fact, Republican leader Mitch McConnell went to the floor of the Senate Tuesday to ask "unanimous consent" - a parliamentary move - that the bill be brought to the floor for a vote. But Democratic leader Harry Reid objected to the motion and blocked the bill from consideration.

Less than 15 minutes after this, the Obama campaign sent an email out to its supporters, complaining about Republican obstruction of the bill, and suggesting that people "Find Republican members of Congress on Twitter, call them out, and demand they pass this bill."

In other words, Obama and the Democrats have no intention of passing the bill, and introduced it only for the purpose of NOT passing it, then complaining about it not being passed, and trying to blame Republicans. These are the same folks that campaigned on "hope and change" and "no more business as usual." Their contempt for the American public is on full display, which may be why, according to this poll, ANY Republican candidate for President is six points ahead of Obama at this point.

Huh?

Once in a while a sports figure will give a sportswriter a really, really good quote. And then there are other times, when they something almost incomprehensible. The latter are much more common.

Today, Vikings coach Leslie Frazier was asked if - considering the team's 0-4 start - he might consider changing quarterbacks. According to the Star-Tribune, Frazier said:

"We're not in a situation where I don't think we're going to make a quarterback change."

I'm thinking the English faculty at Alcorn State might not be top-shelf material.