Hasn’t anyone read 1984? It stuns me how many evil organizations can use straight Orwell-Speak with a straight face. Case in point: forced pooling versus “fair pooling.”
So, my organization wrote a letter and got a bunch of groups to sign onto it, taking a stance against forced pooling: the legal practice of forcing landowners to permit natural gas drillers to extract gas from beneath their land without permission. The landowners would get paid for the gas extracted, but they lose control over their own property.
Pennsylvania doesn’t have a law allowing forced-pooling yet, but the industry wants one. That said, they’ve started calling it “Fair Pooling.”
From an organizing perspective, it’s important to us because the traditional hold-out is a champion that can provide leadership to his or her neighbor. “Forced Pooling” makes it impossible to be a hold out.
This piece pretty much speaks for itself. In short, a big drug maker sometimes makes so much off of brandname drugs, that it can pay off companies that would make a generic version. If you’ve been getting away with a 1000% mark-up for your brand name drug, you can afford to pay a small, thinly margined generic manufacturer much, much more than they would make on their tiny markup on a generic.From Talking Points Memo. Totally messed up.Sometimes the market just doesn’t work and the state has to step in.
Nothing that I am about to write is going to do much for anyone who’s any good at making videos for the web. The people I want to write to about making videos are those who are sort of tempted/ know it might be good in their work/ just sorta feel curious. To those of you who haven’t or haven’t much, I say: give it a shot. Technology hasn’t exactly made it “easy,” but it has made it technically comprehensible (well, there’s mountains of questions I haven’t even thought of, but still…).I did this video for my organization, Clean Water Action - Pennsylvania. It’s a first person account from Dimock. This one comes from the woman whose water well exploded on New Year’s Day.Here are the little things I learned from this video:1) Keep your main narrative inside when your mic sucks.2) Move the camera around over the course of the conversation. Warn your person you’ll do this.3) Give her multiple faces to talk to (but make those faces keep their mouths shut if you want it to come out first person’y).4) Spend more time (than I did) shooting contextual shots. This piece needed more of that.5) (another thing that would have improved this) When your subject uses pronouns, make them say whatever they said NAMING the people they are talking about.This one was a little hard because I had a few chefs in the kitchen. Still, from a 14 minute conversation I think we got a pretty sweet 3:20 of video. I hope you dig it. If you’re curious — hit play, but click on the HD option first.
The best part of this story runs from about the 2:00 mark to 3:30. I’ll give away the end of this middle section: “Humans have a huge amount of confidence in their own judgement, even in the face of evidence that their judgement is wrong.” I wish I could make almost every executive in the whole of non-profit America listen to that 90 second section over and over and over again. It’s that important.
Basically, it tells the story of a psychologist charged with finding soldiers to train as officers. When officer training school called him up after he’d sent them a ton of candidates and said none of them were working out, he still believed that he had the right method for identifying officers. Sound foolish?
Are you seriously telling me that you’ve never caught yourself sticking to some very silly strategy despite evidence of its failure?
Think of all those people you know who get suckered, let down, misled or screwed over and yet, when asked, describe themselves as a “great judge of character.”
Did you know that economists once did a series of interviews with people in the emergency room after car crashes in which the respondent was at fault and found that 85% of them described themselves as excellent drivers? I heard that one from Robert Frank.
Think of the girl you know who keeps falling for losers. The simple truth is that most of us are too self-conscious to honestly assess outcomes against our goals and make changes accordingly. The above interview is with an academic who used his discipline to accomplish just that. It’s funny to think of research yielding courage, but the evidence suggests it can.
There’s a funny story about this video. I shot the basic interview segment of it and then handed it to my intern and said, “turn this into a real video.”She said, “But I’ve never edited a video before.”"You’ll be fine,” I said.This is what she came up with. I think it’s really good. Alternet, a progressive news wire, also picked it up for their water blog. It will probably hit 1,000 views by next week. Not exactly off the charts, but a nice start.The story captures the fact that at this moment, technology is not nearly the barrier to entry for creative work that it once was. That’s pretty exciting. Too bad so many people let the obstacles they create for themselves in their own heads get in the way.Video comes up a lot in my non-profit, advocacy work. Folks will say that they should do a video of some kind. I’ll say that they can do it in-house. That it’s pretty easy and I taught myself some basics in very little time. I’ll see them smile and laugh and say something defensive like, “I wouldn’t know how to begin” or “I haven’t tried anything like that.” They put up a wall.It’s not so much that I care whether or not anyone really does try editing video. Obviously, there is no shortage of folks doing it. The point is just that it’s so sad how people put up walls to trying things, even when doing it just gets easier and easier.My intern tried. Others would have put up walls and made excuses, but she tried and I think she got pretty sweet results. And now she can show this to people for years and years and say, “I did this.” Because, at the end of the day, like all creative work, it’s not how technically impressive it is, but how thoughtful the work is. And this is thoughtful. So it’s good.
Check it out. Let us know what you think (on YouTube, since, you know… you can’t do comments on here).
I’ve been doing Earth Day Comics (most years) since 2001. The purpose of the Earth Day Cards is to put ecological messages in a fun narrative, make it thought provoking, maybe just confusing enough to provoke discussion and (hopefully) fun.Click the following links to read each year:
If you want to find these pages again later, I’ve also made a page permanently affixed to the front page. Just scroll down the sidebar on the left, and you’ll see a link to “Earth Day Comix.” You can get back to them there.
The protagonist of these stories is Chalk Fooljob, a character I came up with around 2000. He flies around on rockets powered by the voice of God. He looks like a superhero, but he never behaves like one. He’s crazy. He’s brilliant. He’s unpredictable. He’s a flying mystic. Once a year, he’s also an eco-crusader.
I hope you enjoy these stories! Let me know what you think, and email me if you want to get on the list to receive the Earth Day Cards in the future.
The Andrew Maynard Architects have proposed a solution to our abandoned suburbs. What’s that you say? They aren’t abandoned yet?
Did you see the price of gas today?
Do you think that’s going to get any better?
How long will it be till they are abandoned? Really? Will anyone want to drive to work soon? We might as well get started on the solution, I’d say.
These Australian architects have defined a suburb as “A place cars go to sleep.” When we can’t afford to let our cars wander off to a comfortable bedroom community anymore, we’ll all have to live close together once again. Which will mean abandoning our suburbs for cities.
From our huge new cities, we’ll want something more attractive to look out upon than miles and miles of one-story houses and driveways. The CV08 is our solution!
The robots would consume suburban property, reprocess it into biodegradable components and terraform the land behind it into rolling meadows or other desired eco-systems. Simple!
Philadelphia would like two; whenever the prototypes are ready. We’ve got a place ready for a trial run. It was once known as “Lower Merion.”
I used to do a fair amount of political writing on here. I don’t anymore, because I don’t think straight up political argument has a place on ThisTooWillPass.com as it grows up and gets serious about itself.
That said, I think political issues do have a place so long as they get a new spin. Here’s a list of alternative ways to approach political points that might meet the standard of new and creative approaches to self-expression that this site wants to be all about. I thought I would write this up as a private page for myself, but then I thought other writers who read this might find the list useful as a starting point for coming up with new angles on old topics:
Make up stories about the issues; allegories, if I may be so bold.
Argue for the other side by taking their positions to absurd but plausible conclusions.
Very unique angle. Such as imagining the perspective on the issue for a person from the future, or from the distant past, or an alien, or the way it impacts someone that you wouldn’t think of (like how lots of doggies are homeless because of foreclosures).
Dialogues.
Satirical monologues from your opposition espousing their true motivation for opposing your view.
Limericks are always, always, always good. For example:
There once was a man named Bernanke,
The nation had made him quite cranky,
They said: “We’re all of us screwed,
“Now what will you do?”
Said he, “Cry me a stream, here’s a hanky.”
Visa’s initial public offering came out at $17.9 Billion. Is that how much a Depression is worth? When the American obsession with credit financed overconsumption comes crashing down, it turns out that Visa won’t be the company that takes the hit. I mean, why would they? [2:33] Click the image to listen to the homily.
So the world is going to hell because of the sub-prime crisis. Holy crap! Community Organizers like me are feeling pretty smug because we saw it all coming two or three years ago. In fact, I know people who said it was coming to Alan Greenspan’s face (who, now, seems to be trying to pretend that it’s not so simple as bad people making bad loans, I think he’s just trying to cover his tracks). I shared my self-satisfaction with a friend over beers lately. He said:
“Yeah, I feel pretty smug when I call stuff like that, too, but I also call other things at other times and end up wrong. I forget about those things.” My first thought was that an honest blogger should point out, using links, both when he turns out to be right and when he turns out to be wrong. That’s still not very efficient, though. Then, I thought, the Net should be able to give us an efficient way to track the predictions people make about the world.
It hit me: a good social networking site could be constructed around people making all kinds of predictions and tracking their success or failure rates.
You could start with predictions for events with very objective outcomes: sports spreads, political elections, court cases, box office takes, draft picks, etc. A good database or database crawler could track when people made predictions and then record how close they came and award them with rankings or percentages. Predictors would have a great incentive to participate. It could add credibility to your work, your blog and you fantasy football cred.
You could open it up beyond the objective, though. Allow people to make predictions about mushier stuff that you might have to assess one way or another. Mergers, unionization drives, contract negotiations, movie star salaries, celebrity break-ups.
Or really mushy stuff, such as: “China will overtake us in manufacturing personal computers.” Or, “President Bush will fail to make major reforms in Social Security.” When it takes a judgement to assess an outcome, let the votes of users decide.
You could even go one step beyond that. Let’s say that the category you are making a prediction in is “Business,” right? If people voted on whether or not a Business prediction is right, you could show both the OVERALL vote and a vote WEIGHTED by the past success rates of the predictions of the other users in the “Business” category that voted.
Get me?
One friend I floated this idea with said that the problem is that people would want to make crazy predictions, like about assassinating important people or blowing up buildings. I think that’s a red herring. People say crazy shizzle all over the Internet all the time. Does Blogger shut down the blogs run by nutbags? No, but only other nutbags read them. The Internet is a meritocracy, in this way. If you’re talking crazy about nonsense, you get ignored.
The nice thing about the PREDICTION social networking site is this: now you’ll be able to quantify how good someone’s nonsense really is.
You know things have gone bad when this is what your lawyer has to say about you:
Attorney Ron Greenblatt, who’s representing Kirsch but spoke on behalf of both defendants, described them as “sad and scared.”
He said both acknowledge wrongdoing, but said he hadn’t decided whether to seek a plea bargain for Kirsch because new evidence continues to arise daily.
“Taking the credit information from someone who lives across the hall from you - how anyone thinks they can get away with that kind of stupidity for more than a few months is beyond me,” Greenblatt said. “They know how much trouble they’re in. This is a stressful time for them.”
A number of Kirsch’s old friends have acknowledged that she was a troubled person, and the more we learn about Anderton the more we learn that he was a helluva kid up until he met Kirsch. I can speculate a lot about how Anderton got sucked into this whole scheme, and I have in the comments section of past posts.
This morning I was captivated by trying to imagine the atmosphere in the family homes that the boy and the girl have returned to. Is there an attitude of “how do we make this go away” or are the children now held in state of temporary silent contempt by furious parents? What’s the families’ priority: helping their kids get right or preserving the family name?
I have no way to know. But I wonder.
I remain unmoved by any story of Kirsch looking not-so-much-the-criminal-and-very-much-the-little-girl as this goes on. Every male of any age at all knows that when a pretty, manipulative girl wants something from older men with power, the standard move is to adopt a helpless pose. That doesn’t mean she isn’t still posing and that doesn’t mean she isn’t still conniving.
Let’s say that they both get religion, though. Let’s assume the best. It’s not my strong-suit, but I’ll try… What do they do?
Where do you go when you’ve fallen from grace and the place you’d climbed before that fall wasn’t so high in the first place? You know, we have a tragic politician here in Philadelphia who’s done very well for himself. I won’t name him, but he’s done a great job of rising high in state politics. He can’t really make a crack in his own city, though, despite great talent, great intelligence and great understanding of the problems and the issues. Some people say that it’s not so much because he’s a sellout, but that when he sells out, he sells out cheap.
This sort of makes me think of that guy. Anderton and Kirsch sold out very, very cheap and only bought ephemera.
So what now? Could they change and go into non-profit life? Could they join local law enforcement? Could they become motivational or religious speakers? Who is ever going to let them near anything meaningful again? Who’s going to entrust them with anything?
By all accounts, these are talented young people who could do good work in the world, but will they even be allowed to? Should they be allowed to? What the hell does society do with them after they get out?
No question, the people are intrigued by them both. They may have another 15 minutes of fame at the end of the trial or the prison term. Folks will want to see them, but, I think, they won’t want to be near them. I can’t help but believe that in the general public’s heart-of-hearts, they are drawn to this story because they have been tempted by such opportunities many times before, sometimes secretly regretting their lack of courage to lie, cheat and steal. So they read this story and follow its details and see themselves in those places and at those times and think, “ah-ha! See, I’m better off afraid.”
The lesson is not, in this way, that right is right, but that wrong is too unprofitable.
And I don’t think anyone is going to want to work so closely with someone who reminds them so much of that secret person inside them every bloody day.
“There is a chasm between the policies that are set at the top and what homeowners actually experience on the front lines,” he said. “If it’s voluntary, I have not much hope. I think it will help some people at the margins, but I think it needs to be mandatory.”
He’s absolutely right. We’ve gotten lenders to agree to similar deals before only for them to find a thousand weird reasons not to comply on a case-by-case basis once we started working with them.
1) I don’t understand why Bush is excluding people who’s ARMs have kicked in and fallen behind. Why is it their fault that he didn’t see this problem coming earlier, like the rest of us did.
2) The terms of “unable to afford the new rate” needs to be defined and defined well in favor of the borrower. My guess is it isn’t, and lenders are really going to futz with this. I am disappointed.
My organization has been demanding that lenders cut borrowers with Adjustable Rate Mortgates a break ever since the sub-prime mess hit the national news earlier this year (no surprise to us). The truth is, cutting them a break will lower the profits investors expected, but those were never realistic. If they don’t give loan mods, investors will face a loss.
The weird thing is, the Bush Administration is starting to see it our way. I should say, the really, really, really, really weird thing is… etc.
“Lenders and investors will ultimately benefit,” Sheila Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., said in an October speech in which she unveiled the idea to investors. “You’ll come out ahead of the game with a performing mortgage that’s being paid versus having a loan that’s in foreclosure.”
In other words: you might like to get that fat return but you ain’t gonna so take the profit that’s available to you instead of losing money.Duh. I can’t believe anyone is still clinging to the notion that those crazy profits might still be realized. I guess they are, though.
That last paragraph is a quote from a much more detailed post I wrote on this subject over at Young Philly Politics. You should really read it. You know want to. Get it here.
Of the many regrets I have in life, it’s not getting really, really into blogging sooner. That said, it wasn’t as easy in the early days as it is now. People forget that. They think that we always had a million web geeks out there coming up with a zillion ways to do things on-line for free. Anyway, color me resolved to keep embracing “what’s new” as it comes.
That said, I didn’t totally reject the web early on. Back in 2000, I was publishing regularly in Skirt! Magazine and I got a couple pieces in with WireTapMag.org, a project of Alternet. One of those two pieces was pretty good, and it’s still up on their web-site. I like this, because it was a very strategic essay. I deliberately misled the reader a couple times and then revealed how I’d done it later to make my point. I don’t feel like I’m that clever any more.
The funny thing is that it’s all about “the media.” I had sort of forgotten that I once sort of fixated on that stuff. You can hardly get me to talk about it in general terms, now.
It wasn’t all perfect, though. In the piece, I wrote that Britney was a flash in the pan. Well, seven years later and she seems to be going down in flames, but they are very big flames for a very big star. Check this:
They ought to teach lying in schools. Seriously. We would all be better off if everyone were a savvy liar. A great deal of deception concerns form or opinions — not substance or facts . Take this whole Britney Spears fiasco.
Britney: from whence did this pan flash come? Listen to any of her songs — someone put some serious money into giving her that sound. Economists will tell you that hefty media campaigns signal consumers that producers honestly think they have come up with a good product (rather than scamming out a bad one), but young Spears’s music is not all that good. So what’s the deal?
