Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog

The end of (what’s left of) Journal

October 8, 2015

media, US business, Wisconsin business
Last year, Journal Communications, the state’s largest media company, “merged” (the scare quotes are there for a reason) with the E.W. Scripps Co., with Journal’s broadcast properties, including Milwaukee’s and Green Bay’s NBC stations and the mighty WTMJ radio going with Scripps, and Scripps’ print publications going into the new Journal Media Group, including the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

As a former Journal employee in its employee-owned days and its publicly traded days (the former was vastly preferable to the latter), I wrote that it was obvious that Wisconsin and the print side got the raw end of the deal.

As proof that however bad things may be, things can get worse, the Journal Sentinel reports a strange celebration of National Newspaper Week:

Gannett Co. Inc. said Wednesday it plans to buy Journal Media Group — the parent company of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel — for about $280 million in cash.

The deal, which is expected to close in the first quarter of 2016 if it receives regulatory and shareholder approval, adds Wisconsin’s biggest newspaper to Gannett, which already owns newspapers in Green Bay, the Fox Valley and other important markets in the state.

“This transaction marks a critical next step in the transformation of our industry as we build local media brands that matter at a time when operational scale is a competitive advantage,” Tim Stautberg, president and chief executive officer of Journal Media Group, said in a statement. “Both Journal Media Group and Gannett are guided by a vision of strengthening lives and communities, and we’ll be better stewards in our local markets by sharing ideas, content and best practices among our new and larger family.”

The agreement is part of an era of further consolidation in the U.S. newspaper industry, as newly pure-play newspaper companies take steps to meet the competitive threat of scaled digital news and advertising businesses, the companies said in a statement.

When the deal is completed, Gannett, the parent company of USA Today, The Arizona Republic and The Indianapolis Star, will be in 106 U.S. markets and have a digital audience of more than 100 million unique visitors each month.

In addition to the Journal Sentinel, Journal Media Group owns papers in more than a dozen other markets, including in Memphis and Knoxville, Tenn., where Gannett owns the Nashville newspaper, and in Naples and Treasure Coast in Florida, where Gannett owns the Fort Myers paper.

In a letter to employees, Stautberg said it is too early to determine the potential impact of the transaction on jobs or day-to-day operations in Journal Media Group markets.

The companies estimated in a joint news release that the deal will yield an estimated $10 million in immediate savings and the potential for $25 million more over the next two years. That is anticipated through the consolidation of a variety of functions, including corporate operations, printing and distribution, the companies said.

The transaction has been approved by the boards of directors of both Gannett and Journal Media Group. Under the terms, Journal Media Group shareholders will receive cash of $12 per share, representing a premium of 44.6% over the $8.30 closing price of Journal Media Group stock Wednesday.

“The publications of both Gannett and Journal Media Group have a rich history, a commitment to journalism and a dedication to informing and being active members of the communities we serve,” Bob Dickey, president and chief executive officer of Gannett, said in a statement.

Dickey continued: “Our merger will combine the best of each of our organizations to create a journalism-led, investor-focused company which will provide substantial value to the shareholders of both companies. This transaction is an excellent first step in the industry consolidation strategy we have communicated to our shareholders.” …

Both companies underwent major transitions in the past year. Journal Media Group was created in April after The E.W. Scripps Company and Journal Communications merged their local television operations and spun off their respective newspaper assets into an independent, publicly-traded company based in Milwaukee.

Gannett, based in McLean, Va., returned to its own roots as a newspaper company on June 29, when it completed its own split, creating separate companies focused on local newspapers and local television. Its local television and national digital operations, including Cars.com, are now part of Tegna, also based in McLean.

Although the acquisition will cost Milwaukee a corporate headquarters, Journal Sentinel Publisher Elizabeth Brenner said the newspaper will remain local in its approach.

“Look back on when Journal Media Group started. All of the news decisions, the editorial decisions, the community support — everything we do isn’t going to change,” Brenner said. “We’re still here. We make our decisions and run our newsrooms out of Milwaukee, not anywhere else. We serve our advertisers and subscribers out of Milwaukee, not anywhere else. And we support causes that are important to our community from this building. So all of that, it’s not going to change. It didn’t change when Journal Media Group started up. It’s not going to change now.”

That line “Everything we do isn’t going to change” reads like whistling in the dark, and a statement Brenner (who wrote me a nice email after my enforced departure from Journal) really can’t make with credibility this far away from the closing. (As for “strengthening lives and communities,” whatever happened to reporting the news without fear or favor?) Gannett owns the daily newspapers of Green Bay, Appleton, Oshkosh, Fond du Lac, Sheboygan, Manitowoc, Wausau, Stevens Point, Wisconsin Rapids and Marshfield now. And now Gannett will run the biggest newspaper in the state.

The issue is not that Gannett is the biggest media company in the U.S. The issue is the mediocrity, or worse, of Gannett’s Wisconsin newspapers, to which the Journal Sentinel most likely will be dragged down. That is, unless you think printing pages of the previous day’s USA Today (those would be the USA Yesterday pages, I guess) strikes you as superior journalism. Most Gannett newspapers aren’t like USA Today, or the Arizona Daily Republic, or the Des Moines Register, or the Indianapolis Star. Most are at best like The Post~Crescent in Appleton, which has a decades-long history of typographical errors, wrongheaded editorial stances, poor editorial decisions, and previous employment of a sportswriter who loudly proclaimed the Packers would never win the Super Bowl the year the Packers won the Super Bowl.

There used to be a debate, back before The Post~Crescent was acquired by Gannett (it previously was owned by Thomson Newspapers, which makes Gannett look like the Wall Street Journal in comparison), as to whether The Post~Crescent was a worse newspaper (the opinion of Fox Cities residents) or the Green Bay Press-Gazette was worse (the opinion of Green Bay residents).

But don’t believe my dire observations of Gannett. Ask a reader of the Oshkosh Northwestern, Fond du Lac Reporter, Manitowoc Herald Times Reporter or Sheboygan Press. They are run by one editor who is apparently under orders to not employ enough news or sports reporters to actually cover local news and sports. I’m all for eliminating the suits, but you need actual bodies to cover the news, and more bodies than Gannett is willing to employ.

This is not limited to Gannett. Earlier this year the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison, the newspaper I grew up reading, laid off three reporters people purchased the newspaper to read. (The State Journal resolutely refused to hire me, which I’m told by a departed State Journal-ist — get it? — was good for me.) The State Journal’s cuts appear to be less about the State Journal’s finances (if you can’t make money in the Madison media, you really need to find a new line of business) and more about the finances of its owner, Lee Enterprises, which has been in financial trouble for years due to overexpansion. (Lee really needs to sell the State Journal, and not to Gannett.)

Meanwhile, the Dubuque Telegraph Herald began printing its newspaper in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, last week. Cedar Rapids is not a suburb of Dubuque (nor is Waterloo, whose Courier is also printed at the Gazette), so I have been told that the deadline for stories inside the Telegraph Herald is now 2 p.m., and the deadline for front page and sports stories is 9 p.m. As you might imagine, this eliminates most government meetings, all weeknight sports, and a lot of weekend sports from the newspaper. (I believe that at least all six Northeast Wisconsin Gannett newspapers print in Appleton now.)

If it strikes you as strange that a daily newspaper would do things to handicap its ability to cover the news on a daily basis (as in the things that happen today appearing in tomorrow’s newspaper), you’re not alone. The big winner here is the weekly newspaper that covers an area that is not part of the primary coverage area (or not anymore) of a daily newspaper. Weeklies are doing better than dailies because weeklies don’t generally have print competition. No one has figured out how to deliver the news of a community newspaper (including such events as births, school news, engagements, weddings, deaths, criminal court listings and local sports) better than print. At least not yet.

This all was foreshadowed for the farsighted when Journal Communications abandoned its legacy of employee ownership and went public in between my terms as a Journal employee. (And, the first time, employee-owner.) Something like this had been rumored for years, because Journal was seen as being big enough to be acquired but not big enough to acquire, but impossible to pull off because the employee-owners (as well as the Grant family, which kept a minority interest) would probably not approve a sale. The employee-owners were gotten rid of by going public, which raised stockholder money so Journal could purchase more broadcast properties. Scripps shareholders ended up benefitting from that, and now Gannett shareholders will benefit, if not Journal Sentinel readers and advertisers. And as I discovered, while stock is good to own, a publicly traded company is not a good place to work, given the panic that takes place every time there is an earnings report that can be perceived as negative.

There will be some Wisconsinites who will be perfectly fine with this because they hate the Journal Sentinel and its liberal political slant and cheerleading for the John Doe investigations against Gov. Scott Walker and conservatives. At the risk of channeling my inner Chris Cillizza, they should be careful what they wish for. USA Today is not a politically conservative newspaper, nor is the Des Moines Register. The Journal Sentinel does a lot of reporting, including in sports, that has no political slant, including sports. (The JS employs Bob McGinn, the best current Packer writer; if I were McGinn I would be updating my resume immediately.) The chances a competing non-liberal Milwaukee newspaper will be published are slightly greater than absolute zero.

As I’ve written here before, the splitting of print from broadcast strikes me as a mistake, though something other media companies are doing. It’s a mistake because I see print and broadcast in the process of merging into one single information source, with different delivery vehicles, thanks to the Internet — print if you want it, audio if you want it, video if you want it, available 24/7. Splitting off print and broadcast properties goes in the wrong direction.

And as I wrote here before, this is yet another example of a Wisconsin company leaving the state by acquisition. As an employee it is good to work as far away from corporate headquarters as possible, but a company’s interest in corporate contributions to their community drops like a rock the farther you get away from the corporate offices. Journal was a huge presence as a corporate citizen in the Milwaukee area in its employee-ownership days; it probably dropped after the company went public, and it will drop near zero with the decisions being made in Virginia instead of Wisconsin.
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How Obama leads to Trump

October 8, 2015

US politics
Jim Geraghty:

“I never understood the appeal of Trump until I saw Kerry holding hands with Lavrov the day Putin started bombing secular rebels in Syria,” quipped former National Review news editor Dan Foster.

One of the less obvious assets of Donald Trump’s campaign is the Obama administration’s flailing foreign policy. The president’s penchant for making abysmal deals with our enemies abroad and advertising his inability to affect the course of events gives Trump exactly the contrast he needs to sell his reputation as a tough negotiator.

As Foster noted, a vivid example of the Obama administration’s signature style is Secretary of State John Kerry’s obsequious public appearance with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, touting their “constructive meeting” immediately after the Kremlin gave America and its allies one hour to clear out of Syrian airspace, lest they run into Russian warplanes.

Last Friday, President Obama insisted, everyone else’s perception of deteriorating U.S. influence in the region notwithstanding, that Putin’s intervention in Syria was actually a sign that the White House’s policies were working and the Kremlin’s weren’t. “Mr. Putin had to go into Syria not out of strength but out of weakness,” Obama said. But his overriding tone was one of helpless resignation, as if he himself hardly believed his own rhetoric. “This is a hugely difficult, complex problem,” he said. “No amount of U.S. military engagement will solve the problem.”

No wonder Americans are taking a long look at the guy with the bright red “Make America Great Again” hat, the one who keeps boasting that he never gets taken to the cleaners in negotiations. Trump’s view on the worsening humanitarian crisis in Syria isn’t that different from Obama’s — but it’s unlikely you will ever see Trump dwelling on American powerlessness and the daunting complexity of an issue. He’s risen in the polls by offering voters the fantasy of simple solutions to intractable problems.

Trump’s most frequent refrains are that the Obama presidency has been “a disaster” and “we have incompetent people — probably stupid — but incompetent people making deals.” The administration brought home a bad deal with Iran, and the American people knew it; only 21 percent told Pew they supported it.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu — remember when Israel was a respected, valued ally? — called the deal “dangerous” and “a historic mistake,” declaring that it “paves Iran’s path to the bomb.” The president who once talked of his vision for a future without any nuclear weapons appears to have set off a nuclear-arms race in the Middle East, as Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt examine their options for a nuclear deterrent. That sure looks like disastrous incompetence.

Trump insists he could straighten it out through sheer toughness and savvy. While most Republican presidential candidates talked about ripping up the Iran deal, Trump suggested he knows how to defeat an opponent by tying him up in red tape and contractual minutiae that would otherwise go unenforced.

“You know, I’ve taken over some bad contracts. I buy contracts where people screwed up and they have bad contracts,” he said. “But I’m really good at looking at a contract and finding things within a contract that, even if they’re bad, I would police that contract so tough that they don’t have a chance. As bad as the contract is, I will be so tough on that contract.”

While Trump doesn’t specify how that would work, it’s not hard to understand why the idea of “policing that contract so tough” might sound refreshing to voters. After all, in its eagerness to make a deal, the Obama administration excused Iranian leaders’ chanting “death to America” and the Iranians’ decision to conduct a military practice exercise sinking a U.S. aircraft carrier. An administration willing to excuse those provocations might appear likely to ignore any minor breaches of the resulting agreement.

It’s the same with China, another of Trump’s favorite themes. The administration has failed to muster a muscular response to Chinese aggression in the Pacific, and Obama responded to Chinese intelligence agents’ massive cyber-theft of American government-personnel records by inviting Premier Xi Jinping to dinner at the White House. Trump, on the other hand, assures voters that the Chinese are “going to listen to me. … And if they don’t do that, they have to suffer economically because we have the engine that makes China work. You know, without the United States or without China sucking out all our money and our jobs, China would collapse in about two minutes.”

It’s a preposterous analysis, of course — but alluringly so. The GOP primary electorate, fed up as it is with the president’s fecklessness abroad, is an easy mark for Trump’s strong-man act. It remains to be seen how far that act will take him. But it’s worth noting just how bad things had to get for it to take him anywhere at all.
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Your individual Second Amendment rights

October 8, 2015

History, US politics
Damon Root:

In 2008 the U.S. Supreme Court recognized what numerous historians and legal scholars have been saying for many decades: Namely, that the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution secures an individual right—not a collective one—to keep and bear arms. Yet despite this widespread legal and academic consensus, certain gun control advocates still insist on behaving as if the Second Amendment does not mean what it says.

The latest example of such regrettable behavior comes from liberal New Yorker pundit Adam Gopnik, who claims that a vast and intrusive gun control regime can happen here in the United States because the U.S. Constitution protects no such thing as an individual right to possess guns. Nothing in the Constitution, he asserts, “limits our ability to control the number and kinds of guns in private hands.” The only reason so many people think otherwise,Gopnik says, is because they’ve been hoodwinked by the “radical” and “tortured” interpretation of the Second Amendment put forward by “right wing” Justice Antonin Scalia in his “younger-than-springtime decision D.C. v. Heller, in 2008.”

For a freshly minted piece of “right wing” radicalism, the individual-rights interpretation of the Second Amendment sure has a lengthy and long-running list of distinguished liberal supporters, including some of the biggest names in legal academia. For example, there is University of Texas law professor Sanford Levinson, a leading liberal scholar, who published an essay in the prestigious Yale Law Journal back in 1989 titled “The Embarrassing Second Amendment.” As I explain in my recent book Overruled:

The embarrassment, Levinson argued, came from the legal left’s refusal to take the Second Amendment seriously. “I cannot help but suspect that the best explanation for the absence of the Second Amendment from the legal consciousness of the elite bar,” he wrote, “is derived from a mixture of sheer opposition to the idea of private ownership of guns and the perhaps subconscious fear that altogether plausible, and perhaps even ‘winning’ interpretations would present real hurdles to those of us supporting prohibitory regulation.”

Eleven years later, Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, a respected scholar and teacher whose former students include a young Barack Obama, amended the new third addition of his legal treatise American Constitutional Law to officially endorse the individual-right interpretation of the Second Amendment. This was a marked change from the two previous editions, where Tribe had accepted the collective-right view. “My conclusion came as something of a surprise to me, and an unwelcome surprise,” Tribe admitted to the New York Times after the third edition came out. “I have always supported as a matter of policy very comprehensive gun control.”

Along similar lines, the Constitutional Accountability Center, a respected liberal think tank and law firm “dedicated to fulfilling the progressive promise of our Constitution’s text and history,” filed anamicus brief at the Supreme Court in the 2010 gun rights case McDonald v. Chicago. As that brief plainly (and accurately) stated, “the original meaning of the Privileges or Immunities Clause [of the 14th Amendment] protected substantive, fundamental rights against state infringement, including the constitutional right of an individual to keep and bear arms.”

In short, there is nothing “radical” or even particularly “right wing” about the well-founded idea that the Constitution secures an individual right to keep and bear arms.

Or, you could ask such Founding Fathers as …
- George Mason: “I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people, except for a few public officials.”
- Samuel Adams: “That the said Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms … “
- James Madison: “[The Constitution preserves] the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation…(where) the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.”
- Tenche Coxe: “Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom. Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birthright of an American…[T]he unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people.”
- Richard Henry Lee: “Whereas, to preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them; nor does it follow from this, that all promiscuously must go into actual service on every occasion. The mind that aims at a select militia, must be influenced by a truly anti-republican principle; and when we see many men disposed to practice upon it, whenever they can prevail, no wonder true republicans are for carefully guarding against it.”
- Thomas Jefferson: “No Free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms.”
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Presty the DJ for Oct. 8

October 8, 2015

Music
The number one song today in 1955:

The number one British song (which is not from Britain) today in 1964:

Today in 1971, John Lennon released his “Imagine” album:

(more…)
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An Evil Koch Brother speaks!

October 7, 2015

US business, US politics, Wisconsin business, Wisconsin politics
Forbes magazine has an interview with Charles Koch, one of The Evil Koch Brothers:

At the Freedom Partners semi-annual conference for rich conservatives in January, Koch officials privately exhorted some 400 rich attendees to spend $900 million over the next presidential election cycle to try and influence U.S. policy on everything from regulation to criminal justice. Koch says only a third of the money will go directly into politics, and he sounded distinctly unenthusiastic about any of the candidates. In fact, he has said “I am not a Republican.”

Q. What are your goals in this election?

A: My view of the political realm, not just now but for many decades, is that the Democrats are taking us down the road to serfdom over the cliff at 100 miles an hour and the Republicans are going around 70 miles an hour. What I want is to reverse the trajectory of this country.

Q. What are the key issues?

A. There are a lot of topics we could talk about but two really big ones. One is we have out of control, irresponsible spending by both parties that are taking us toward bankruptcy as a country and as a government. Related to that is we’re headed toward a two-tiered society. We’re destroying opportunities for the disadvantaged and creating welfare for the rich. This is coming about by misguided policies creating a permanent underclass, it’s crippling the economy and corrupting the business community.

Q. How do you fix poverty?

A. Our priorities are criminal justice reform and eliminating the barriers to low-income people starting a business or even getting a job. The biggest is occupational licensure. There are hundreds of these. You name it, depending on the locale or the state you have to get a license. They’re knocked out of it and of course, this is all cronyism corporate welfare. Those who are in the business don’t want all these newcomers coming in undercutting ‘em and destroying their profit margins.

Q. Who do you like in the GOP field?

A. I’ll let somebody else decide that. I’m not going to talk about personalities or the individuals.

Q. If Donald Trump is the Republican candidate for president, will you support him?

A. We’re not going to talk about that.

Q. Is it true you’re spending close to a billion dollars on the 2016 campaigns?

A. No. The billion dollars is for all these things we do.

Q. How much of that will be from you and your brother?

A. Well, a small fraction.Most of what I give is to my foundation, and the Charles Koch Institute. Almost all of what I give personally (to political action committees like Koch PAC and Freedom Partners PAC) is public and I’m fine with that.

Q. We now know that organizations affiliated with you including Freedom Partners spent more than $200 million in the 2012 cycle. Will we have to wait two years to find out what you’re spending on this one?

A. We’re estimating around $300 million out of the $900 would go to that. But it depends on what the donors give.

Q. The whole $200 million last time wasn’t you and David writing checks?

A. No, absolutely not. No.

Q. Have you had any impact on the Republican Party?

A. It’s tough. Not nearly what we’d hope. (An aide suggests he seems to have succeeded in killing the Export-Import Bank.) But that’s a small issue in the whole scheme of things. I take a much longer view. My brother David is much more interested in the political side. I’ve been doing this for more than 50 years, as you know. I’m more interested in the understanding, the education, the cultural aspects. Because I think that’s what’s going to drive what kind of country we’re going to have and whether can really change the trajectory of the country. To have a white knight come in and going to save us, that may help a little, but you’ve gotta change the hearts and minds of the people to understand what really makes society fairer and what’s going to change their lives. And it’s not more of this government control, and those in power telling us all how to live our lives. Throughout history that has not worked. And the more you have of that, the more people suffer, particularly the poorest people suffer.

Q. So will this presidential election decide anything? It doesn’t sound like you’re enthusiastic about anybody.

A. My ideal candidates would be Calvin Coolidge or a William Gladstone. I mean, you look at what they did. Of course they were different time and place. (Gladstone served as British Prime Minister four times between 1868 and 1894 and helped eliminate tariffs, cut budget deficits and increased government transparency. Coolidge was the famously frugal president from 1923-29) Look what Calvin Coolidge did. He cut government expenditures in half. Cut tax rates by two- thirds, reduced the national debt by a third and cut unemployment from 12% to 2.4%. Now the only thing I hold against him is he didn’t run again so we got Herbert Hoover, who turned a recession into a great depression with his policies.

Q. You mentioned a white knight. What about Trump?

A. Yeah, I mean, he’s… I’m not the only one person who’s frustrated with what’s going on in both parties. But I would hope there would be somebody who would capture that frustration, and what’s behind that frustration, and do what Calvin Coolidge or William Gladstone did and change the trajectory of the country. Now it’s not likely, because I’ve got to go back to Calvin Coolidge to find somebody who did that. I’ve got to go back to Gladstone in 1846.

Q. What about Reagan?

A. In his first term the growth of government was slightly less, but in the second one it was right on target right with what the Democrats had done.

Q. George W. Bush?

A. In fact we got this seminar group (now the semi-annual Freedom Partners summit) started in opposition to Bush 43’s policies. We started in `03. Bush was running on free enterprise, more freedom, more opportunity and then he grew the government more than Clinton. And increased regulation more than Clinton and got us in more wars than Clinton. So I mean my God, what are we doing? He is a fine person. I’ve met him, and know something about him individually trying to do the right thing, but I don’t know, he must have had bad advisors or something.

Q. How about our current president?

A. Well, he’s helping us on criminal justice reform, so we’re grateful on that. And there’s a sign they may be beginning to realize the inequity and the harm that this occupational licensing does.

Q. So you won’t name a favorite?

A. I want someone who’s going to change the trajectory of the country in the ways I said, away from the two-tiered society and away from bankrupting us. And that’s out. And you can’t tell from their rhetoric or their popular appeal. So I need some better evidence on who’s going to do that. And who’s glib and who has the most popular appeal has not been good evidence for bringing that about.

Q. Your conferences in California have been criticized for secrecy, so you invited the press this year. Was that a mistake?

A. We did the last two. As far as I’m concerned we could be completely open on everything. We have participants, donors to this that aren’t as comfortable with being public. And who can blame them? They don’t want to get the kind of abuse I get, the death threats I get. I had 153 death threats last year. Now al Qaeda has me on their hit list. So others don’t want that. They don’t want their names exposed,. So that’s why we’re not more open than we are. But as far as I’m concerned I’m not doing anything I’m ashamed of, I’m happy to tell why I do things, what I stand for, what I’m trying to accomplish. So all my presentations at the conference are open to the press. But I leave that up to the person.

Q. Why do you generate so much hostility?

A. These ideas, the idea that we believe that people are going to be better off when they control their own lives rather than have somebody in power have what Hayek called the “Fatal Conceit,” and Easterly called the “Tyranny of Experts,” think they can tell people, force people to run their lives the way those in power think they should. So this threatens people in power, or people who believe the opposite have a different vision on how society can best function. So I understand it perfectly. …

Koch’s management philosophy is an amalgam of personal experience, an engineer’s obsession with measurement and analysis (Koch has master’s degrees in chemical and nuclear engineering from M.I.T.) along with a large dose of the libertarian economic thinking of economists like Friedrich von Hayek, Joseph Schumpeter and William Easterly. It’s based on “five dimensions:” Vision, Virtue and Talents, Knowledge Processes, Decision Rights, and Incentives.

Q. Explain Market Based Management in 20 words or less.

A. It’s a way for organizations to succeed by helping others improve their lives. Now that sounds like left-coast pyschobabble and it normally would be, but not if you base everything on it. And that’s who you are, and you don’t just have posters on the wall and put all this stuff up for show and don’t implement. (MBM drives) who we hire, the training, having leaders who live up to our values, and then testing everything for results. …

Q. Conservatives like you say the government shouldn’t be in the business of picking winning technologies, but Koch employees have to. What’s the difference?

A. We don’t do it from a politically correct or bureaucratic standpoint. We run experiments all the time. And those that prove out, we do. You limit the amount, and then if it doesn’t work, you kill it. Whereas in the government and they get something that politically correct and it doesn’t work then they say “Well, we need to spend more money on it.” So you never kill it.

Q. How would Market Based Management work in the White House?

A. Oh my god. You can just go through the five dimensions. You start with the vision. What capabilities do we have to create superior value and help make other peoples’ lives better? What can we do better than our competitors? Well, that’s the first thing the White House needs to do. What is the nature of government? Government is a social agency of coercion. It has a monopoly of force in a given geographic area. So what kind of activities does force work better than voluntary cooperation and competition? And that’s what government ought to be limited to. You need to test every one. I mean certain things basically involve coercion. Like protecting peoples’ life and property. Like national defense. Like enforcing dispute settlements. To do those things, you need to use force. So those are roles for the government.

Q. Is the Obama administration doing a good job in education, with its emphasis on testing and incentives for improvement?

A. No, I think that the education system should be run locally and there ought to be competition and the students have choice. The main thing is the education system needs to be run for the benefit for their customers. The schools need to be run today for the benefit of the students, with innovation and experimentation, rather than being run for the benefit of the teachers and the administrators. …

Koch Industries is deeply involved in the carbon economy, with refineries, chemical plants and energy-gobbling manufacturers like Georgia-Pacific. Yet Charles Koch lobbied to end ethanol subsidies, favors exports of crude oil that would theoretically raise his price of raw materials, and supports the XL pipeline even though it would force his Minnesota refinery to bid more for heavy Canadian oil. I started by asking him his views on global warming, and he rattled off from memory statistics going back to 1880 comparing atmospheric CO2 levels to temperature.

Q. Is this evidence of CO2-induced global warming?

It’s highly probably that CO2 has contributed to that.

Q. Is it good science to conclude humans are the cause?

A. It’s not settled, it’s not certain. Anybody who says something this complex is settled is not using good science.

Q. Is current energy policy too focused on fighting carbon emissions?

A. The present policies of subsidizing and mandating inefficient alternatives is counterproductive. The enormous cost and unreliability of wind and solar are making people’s lives worse. They’re increasing the cost of energy, they’re corrupting the business community, increasing corporate welfare, and they’re counterproductive. On the other hand, if people believe this is a problem, or could be a problem, then it’s worth investing a certain amount in, not by government mandating, but by letting companies like ours and others innovate to find economic solutions that will make peoples’ lives better today and in the future. Because there are economic alternatives to fossil fuels and because they reduce whatever risk there is that CO2 emissions can cause real harm in the future.

Q. You have engineers working on energy-saving and low-carbon technologies at Koch. How about ethanol?

A. Here’s the thing about ethanol. Remember, we helped get rid of all the subsidies except the mandate. They have this mandate they need to get rid of. And we’re the sixth-largest ethanol producer. Get rid of the mandate and let ethanol to stand on its own feet. Is it really economical? Is it really adding value?

Q. In your book you say you support the XL pipeline even though it would cost you money. Explain.

A. If that pipeline is built it will reduce the cost of transporting Canadian crude to the Gulf Coast by $3 a barrel. So presumably the price of Canadian heavy oil will increase by $3 a barrel compared to foreign competition, which is what the Gulf Coast refiners are running now. So that will increase the cost of our crude oil at our Minnesota refinery by $3 a barrel. We run 250,000 barrels a day of it, so that will cost us $750,000 a day, which is a little less than $300 million a year. But we’re still in favor of it because it makes good sense.

Schools run for students instead of for teachers and administrators? Force ethanol to stand on its own merits in the marketplace? Create economic opportunity for poor people? How radical!

Maybe instead of Scott Walker running for president, Charles Koch (employer with his family of 2,400 Wisconsinites) should run for president. He’d get my vote.
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Just in case, thanks for reading

October 7, 2015

Culture
Any plans you have for today or afterward are wasted, according to a “Christian” group …

… on which Raw Story reports:

While our planet may have survived September’s “blood moon”, it will be permanently destroyed on Wednesday, 7 October, a Christian organization has warned.

The eBible Fellowship, an online affiliation headquartered near Philadelphia, has based its prediction of an October obliteration on a previous claim that the world would end on 21 May 2011. While that claim proved to be false, the organization is confident it has the correct date this time.

“According to what the Bible is presenting it does appear that 7 October will be the day that God has spoken of: in which, the world will pass away,” said Chris McCann, the leader and founder of the fellowship, an online gathering of Christians headquartered in Philadelphia.

“It’ll be gone forever. Annihilated.”

McCann said that, according to his interpretation of the Bible, the world will be obliterated “with fire”.

The blood moon – a lunar eclipse combined with a “super moon” – occurred without event on 27 September. This was despite some predictions that it would herald the beginning of the apocalypse. Certain religious leaders had said the blood moon would trigger a chain of events that could see our planet destroyed in as little as seven years time.

According to this new prediction, however, there will be no stay of execution. On the day of 7 October, the world will end.

“God destroyed the first earth with water, by a flood, in the days of Noah. And he says he’ll not do that again, not by water. But he does say in 2nd Peter 3 that he’ll destroy it by fire,” McCann said.

The expectation of the world ending this fall stems from an earlier prediction by Harold Camping , a Christian radio host who was based in California. In 2011 Camping used his radio station, Family Radio, to notify people that the world would end on 21 May of that year. When that turned out to be incorrect, Camping revised his prediction to October 2011. That also turned out to be incorrect, and Camping retired from public life soon after. He died in 2013, at age 93.

McCann believes that Camping’s 21 May 2011 prediction did have some truth, however. That day was declared to be “judgment day” because it was actually the day God stopped the process of selecting which churchgoers will survive Wednesday’s massacre, McCann said.

Following 21 May 2011, God turned his attention to deciding which non-churchgoers to save, according to McCann. The eBible Fellowship believes that God said he would devote 1,600 days to this task – bringing us to 7 October 2015.

“There’s a strong likelihood that this will happen,” McCann said, although he did leave some room for error: “Which means there’s an unlikely possibility that it will not.”

The eBible Fellowship, which McCann was at pains to point out is not a church, is a predominantly online organization. The group does hold meetings once a month, however.

Scientists have several theories about when earth will be destroyed, although none of the data points to this Wednesday. The most widely accepted theory is that the sun, which is already gradually increasing in temperature, will expand and swallow up the planet. Some scientists believe this could happen as soon as 7.6bn years time.

As noted, Camping was wrong the last time, and the time before that, and he’s not around anymore to explain why today’s prediction won’t happen. It is possible that someone’s prediction will eventually be correct, and yet Matthew 24:36 more likely applies.
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Presty the DJ for Oct. 7

October 7, 2015

Music
Today in 1975, one of the stranger episodes in rock music history ended when John Lennon got permanent resident status, his “green card.” The federal government, at the direction of Richard Nixon, tried to deport Lennon because of his 1968 British arrest for possession of marijuana. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that trying to deport Lennon on the basis of an arrest was “contrary to U.S. ideas of due process and was invalid as a means of banishing the former Beatle from America.”

The number one British single today in 1978 came from that day’s number one album:

The number one album today in 1989 was Tears for Fears’ “Seeds of Love”:

(more…)
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Number one … hundred 10

October 6, 2015

Culture, US politics
The video of the day comes from Bill Whittle, who whittles down the argument that more guns mean more murders:

In such tragedies as the Oregon community college murders Thursday, the call is usually to do something — anything — whether or not well thought out, and whether or not it would address the problem. At the beginning of World War II, Franklin Roosevelt did something — anything — to respond to the Pearl Harbor attack by interning Japanese–Americans during the war, despite no evidence they were conspiring against their country.

There are also calls to improve mental health care, including making it easier to commit mentally ill people. For that to work requires a person who contemplates killing others to realize he is crazy, or sick, or whatever term you’d prefer. The problem is that, as you may have noticed from reading various killers’ manifestos, they don’t think they’re mentally ill at all. The only one who comes to mind who thought something was wrong with him was Charles Whitman, the Texas Tower shooter, who left a note beside his mother’s and wife’s corpses asking for an autopsy after he was dead before he killed 14 more people. He had a brain tumor.

It is revealing that Barack Obama denounced guns immediately after the murders and said nothing then or since about the killer’s apparent targeting of victims based on their religion. He shot Christians in the head.

What do you do about evil?

At least there is a hero, as profiled by The Weekly Standard:

Chris Mintz’s biography seems to fit the profile of a student enrolled in community college. He’d finished high school, done a stint in the army, worked at Walmart among a series of unremarkable jobs. He fought mixed martial arts and was going to school because he wanted to become a personal trainer. He’s the father of a young son with autism, and though he is no longer together with the boy’s mother, he remains thoroughly engaged in his son’s life.

It all sounds perfectly ordinary, and in most ways it was. Under almost all of the plausible scenarios in which a life such as this plays out, the rest of his countrymen would never have heard of him. He would have lived his life as tens of millions do, privately, with the travails and rewards of work, family and friendship. And the rest of us—and perhaps he himself—would never have known that a heroic heart was quietly beating inside him, awaiting only the occasion to reveal itself.

That occasion came in the form of a gunman who descended on the school that day heavily armed—not only with the weapons he carried, but also apparently with the warped and poisonous view that the way to make a name for himself, to make his mark on the world, was to kill as many people as possible and get himself killed in the process.

And that’s exactly what the gunman did. After he claimed his first victims, people started to flee the building, Mintz apparently among them. And it was at this moment, according to witnesses, that Mintz’s true character revealed itself. Because Mintz decided not to continue to safety but to turn around—to rush back toward the gunman to see if he could help others escape the mayhem. He chose to risk his life to try to save the lives of others.

He ran back into a library and pulled alarms, urging people to get out of the building to safety. In a classroom as the gunman advanced, Mintz tried to hold the door closed to prevent him from getting in. He was shot several times through the door. As the gunman gained entry past the wounded man on the floor, Mintz tried to dissuade him from further carnage with an unsuccessful appeal to common humanity: “It’s my son’s birthday!” It fell on a heart too black and a mind too clouded to respond, except by shooting Mintz at least two more times.

Mintz survived his seven bullet wounds and now faces a lengthy spell of physical therapy to rehabilitate his shattered legs.

What can we say about Mintz’s impulse to turn back and run toward the gunman in an effort to save others? From the point of view of self-preservation, it makes no more sense than the 9/11 firefighters running into rather than away from the burning Twin Towers. Those heroic firefighters at least had their comrades to encourage them to accept supreme adversity. Mintz had no one but himself.

This is the heart of modern heroism. In its most extreme form, it is a supreme act of generosity—risking and perhaps losing your life for the sake of others, often strangers. Some people, like firefighters and first responders, actively train for the moment when they have to put it all on the line. Others, such as Mintz, have had military training or pursue activities (cage-fighting, say) that demand physical prowess and courage.

But the impulse to charge a gunman is hardly common, and the unwillingness to do so is only human, as we know from many others that day in Oregon. We honor Chris Mintz’s heroism not only for its own sake but in the hope that other people who seem to be living perfectly ordinary lives will turn out to be as extraordinary as he was at a time of maximum peril.
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Presty the DJ for Oct. 6

October 6, 2015

Music
The number one song today in 1970:

The number one song today in 1973:

Britain’s number one album tonight in 1984 was David Bowie’s “Tonight”:

(more…)
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Postgame schadenfreude, Edition by the Bay

October 5, 2015

Packers
Our occasional look at the foibles and finger-pointing of Packer victims moves south down U.S. 101 from Seattle two weeks ago to San Francisco.

The 49ers-Packers rivalry is of relatively recent vintage in the NFL scheme of things. Packer coach Mike Holmgren was previously the 49ers’ offensive coordinator. Former Packers assistant coach Steve Mariucci became the 49ers’ coach. And then there have been the recent losses to the 49ers and quarterback Colin Kaepernick, which seem a long time ago given how badly Kaepernick is now playing.

(To add Wisconsin ties: Kaepernick was born in Milwaukee and grew up in New London. His offensive coordinator is Geep Chryst, son of late Wisconsin assistant and UW-Platteville head coach George Chryst and father of Badger coach Paul Chryst.)

SFGate’s Eric Branch picks apart the offensive 49ers offense:

The 49ers made Green Bay’s all-world quarterback, Aaron Rodgers, look mortal Sunday, but their commendable effort came in a 17-3 loss at Levi’s Stadium because of the shortcomings of their quarterback.

On the heels of a career-worst, four-interception performance, Colin Kaepernick didn’t make many mistakes against Green Bay, but he also didn’t do much of anything else. Kaepernick directed an offense that produced 196 yards, eight first downs, six sacks and six punts.

Kaepernick completed 13 of 25 passes for 160 yards and one interception. He has thrown for 227 yards and five interceptions in 44 attempts in his past two games. Prior to that stretch, he’d thrown five interceptions in 209 attempts.

With the 49ers trailing 17-3 on their final drive, Kaepernick began by targeting wide receiver Anquan Boldin with two passes that sailed wildly out of bounds. He then showed excellent touch on a 47-yard strike to Torrey Smith, but he bent down in frustration two plays later after bouncing a short pass at running back Reggie Bush’s feet. The drive — and the 49ers’ last chance — ended when Kaepernick was sacked two plays later on a 4th-and-5 at the 15-yard line with just more than four minutes left. …

Meanwhile, Kaepernick directed a low-risk attack and completed 7 of 10 passes for 78 yards in the first half. More than half of Kaepernick’s yards came on a pass he completed four yards behind the line of scrimmage: Kaepernick shoveled a pass to wideout Quinton Patton, who caught in stride it as he came in motion and sprinted 40 yards down the left sideline.

[Wide receiver Torrey] Smith (2 catches, 54 yards), who didn’t have a catch until the last play of the third quarter, marched directly to the bench and ripped off his helmet after Kaepernick targeted him with wayward a deep pass on 3rd-and-9 late in the first quarter. Head coach Jim Tomsula appeared to have a brief “let’s-calm-down” meeting with Smith on the bench.

Trailing 7-3, the 49ers faced 3rd-and-11 from their 34-yard line on the first drive of the second half. The play call: a handoff to Bush up the middle, a decision that had Boldin throwing his hands downward in disgust when Bush was stopped for no gain.

Here’s how you know it’s a rivalry: Linebacker Clay Matthews sacked Kaepernick and told him “You ain’t no Russell Wilson, bro.”

The view didn’t look any better down San Francisco Bay to the San Jose Mercury News’ Cam Inman:

The 49ers (1-3) rarely threatened offensively behind embattled quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who got sacked a season-high six times and had to scramble far too often because of offensive-line woes.

The 49ers had won their past four meetings against the Packers, the most recent a wild-card playoff game at Lambeau Field in January 2014.

A week after throwing a career-high four interceptions in a 47-7 loss at Arizona, Kaepernick had one pass intercepted by the Packers. That came in the fourth quarter on a 50-yard bomb, which he underthrew to Anquan Boldin and instead landed in cornerback Sam Shields’ hands.

Kaepernick finished 13 of 25 for 160 yards and a 55.4 passer rating. His counterpart, Aaron Rodgers, followed up a five-touchdown performance by throwing for only one score against the 49ers and finishing 22 of 32 for 224 yards and no interceptions.

Carlos Hyde had only eight carries for 20 yards in his return to Levi’s Stadium, having run for 168 yards and two touchdowns in the season opener against Minnesota. …

When Kaepernick did try to stretch the field Sunday, overthrown passes often sailed out of bounds. Although he found Torrey Smith for a 47-yard completion to the 20-yard line with 5½ minutes remaining, that series ended without points, as Kaepernick was sacked on fourth down. …

Perhaps symbolizing the 49ers’ offensive ineptitude, Clay Matthews produced a third-down sack of Kaepernick in the third quarter and celebrated by “Kaepernicking,” with Matthews kissing his own right biceps. Bradley Pinion followed with a 30-yard punt, barely better than a 21-yard shank earlier in the game.

With three minutes remaining, a “Go Pack Go!” chant rang out among the strong contingent of Packers fans at Levi’s Stadium. …

The 49ers’ offensive frustration was on display earlier, at the end of their second series, as Smith bolted for the bench and was consoled there by coach Jim Tomsula. Smith was the intended target of a poorly thrown third-down pass by Kaepernick. On the preceding play, Kaepernick magically eluded a Matthews sack, only to have [Vance] McDonald drop a solid pass.

Yahoo Sports’ Charles Robinson shows how the 49ers didn’t really commit to Kaepernick despite throwing nine digits of contract at him:

Sometimes the digits and clauses say things that a coaching staff can’t or a front office won’t. And looking back at the $126 million extension Kaepernick signed in 2014, it’s fair to wonder how certain the franchise was in his development. The 49ers built a whole lot of exits into his deal with very little “real” guaranteed money from one season to the next. Concisely, San Francisco has an opportunity (multiple, actually) to cut the cord with Kaepernick in the coming offseasons. That means if his current decline continues, you have to wonder if the 49ers will take that opportunity sooner rather than later.

Is this hindsight quarterbacking just four games into the season? Sure. But the time is right for it, with Kaepernick seemingly on a weekly slide that takes him further from the player who nearly led the 49ers to a Super Bowl win following the 2013 NFL season. The 49ers have lost three straight to the Pittsburgh Steelers, Arizona Cardinals andGreen Bay Packers by a combined score of 107-28. In the past two horrific games, he has gone 22 for 44 for 227 yards and five interceptions with zero touchdowns. (If you want to throw in his 103 rushing yards with a touchdown as a redeemer, that’s your prerogative.) NFL Films’ Greg Cosell did a spectacular job of spelling out some of the problems recently.

The bottom line is exactly that – the bottom line. It keeps going lower for Kaepernick, and there are fewer things to blame beyond the quarterback. Strictly from the eyeball test, he has gone through a steady journey to the middle since that Super Bowl. The middle might actually be an improvement. He’ll enter Week 5 among the lowest rated quarterbacks in the NFL. And it’s not like he fell off a cliff over night, either.

In 2014, it was the Jim Harbaugh fallout and awkwardness that supposedly weighed on the whole franchise. Or it was the supporting cast. Michael Crabtree couldn’t get separation at the medium or deep level. Maybe Anquan Boldin‘s age was starting to show. His defenders suggested that could be why Kaepernick’s deep ball accuracy faded. Or he wasn’t 100 percent healthy. Or the offense hadn’t evolved to stave off changes from defensive schemes.

Now? The offensive line (which was intact during last season’s struggles) isn’t as good as it was a year ago. The free-agent addition, Torrey Smith (billed as a perfect match for Kaepernick’s arm), is too one-dimensional. The running game is banged up and inconsistent. Boldin hit a wall. Vernon Davis can’t play anymore. It goes on and on.

Or maybe it’s just the guy in the middle, who has never grown beyond the read-option scheme. Maybe it’s that Kaepernick has never shown he can consistently win from the pocket, or at the very least, build a passing acumen that makes surgical scrambling (like say, what Aaron Rodgers does) as effective as it can be. At this point, the 49ers would probably be happy to see him string together several first downs.

That’s scary for a guy who is due $16.7 million next season and $19.3 million the season after that. It’s hard enough defending those numbers for a quarterback who is proving to be average. Like, say, the guy Kaepernick unseated: Alex Smith. As much as 49ers fans want to cringe, there’s a legitimate argument that Smith is a better player right now.

This brings us back to that $126 million contract, which was announced in the summer of 2014 with no shortage of puffery. As the numbers trickled out, it was recognized that the segmented deal gave the 49ers a litany of eject buttons. And they can easily separate this offseason so long as Kaepernick doesn’t suffer a catastrophic injury that guarantees his 2016 salary. So long as they cut ties prior to April 1, the 49ers won’t be responsible for anything but the remainder of his prorated signing bonus, which would amount to roughly $7.4 million. After the numbers are crunched, they could cut him at a salary-cap savings of $6.9 million next year. And, poof, the contract is gone.

It is interesting to notice the apparent fate of such running quarterbacks as Kaepernick, Robert Griffin III and, before them, Michael Vick, who were going to revolutionize the NFL and then did not, or have not. NFL quarterbacks must be able to throw the ball first. It’s great to have a quarterback like Rodgers (and really that sentence could end right there) who can extend plays by moving inside and outside the pocket and even get you some yardage by running on occasion. But the dual-threat QBs like Kaepernick have their moment in the NFL sun for approximately one season, until NFL defensive coaches break down their weaknesses and, generally, work to make them throw instead of run, where their weaknesses, or their teammates’ weaknesses, get exposed. (As well as their insufficient NFL preparation while in college.)

The pistol formation in which Kaepernick played (where the quarterback starts from where the fullback usually stands in the I-formation), now seen at the high school level, looks as if it will last longer in football than Kaepernick’s NFL career does.
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