What better day to demonstrate readiness to handle disaster than to hold a disaster training exercise on 9/11?

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In another example of the my-outraged-sensitivity-is-bigger-than-your-outraged-sensitivity trend, there was the by now predictable sad and media-fanned moral outrage at the reports of a fire training exercise being conducted at Boston’s Logan Airport yesterday, the 12th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Logan Airport is where American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, the two flights that hit the World Trade Centers in 2001, originated from that morning, and since then Massport employees have had to fight an embarassed defensive shame that somehow, there was some way they could have foreseen, and something they could have done better or differently to prevent, something that was at that time utterly unthinkable.

Eric Lowrey, president of the Massachusetts 9/11 Fund, said, “I could very much see it being an issue and very worrisome for anyone who saw that smoke and fire, knowing this date has some significance.” Oh, the insensitivity! How DARE they conduct realistic training exercises when people are busy gathering in large groups to remember the day, or perhaps raptly watching their favorite media outlet’s Special Edition Coverage Of The Twelfth Anniversary Of The 9 | 11 Attacks complete with haunting soft-focus still-shots and segue music to commercials set in a heart-touching plaintive minor key.

There’s a secondary story here about the media milking of our public tragedies, but that pretty much writes itself, and in itself would be a diversion from the real issue, which Continue reading →

What is wrong with you, Lawrence O’Donnell? The Last Word’s Monday night Fox News-style ambush rant on Anthony Weiner

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Last night on his MSNBC show The Last Word, Lawrence O’Donnell did two things that I didn’t think were possible: he made former representative and current NYC mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner look like a sympathetic, reasonable candidate and made himself look like a stereotypical haranguing Fox News hack.

O’Donnell began the segment with a sucker-punch question to Weiner: “What is wrong with you?” He continued almost without letting Weiner complete a full sentence, let alone a full answer, constantly interrupting and peppering him with judgmental opinions disguised as “journalism”:

  • What is wrong with you that you cannot seem to imagine a life without elective office?
  • …what seems to be your absolute desperate need for elective office and what seems to be your inability to live outside of it.
  • You have been pursuing elective office for over 20 years now….it does not seem to be a fully healthy pursuit.
  • If you take in the totality of your life, Anthony, do you think you’ve spent your time well?
  • Why didn’t you do something for no money?
  • What drives you?…. I mean it from a psychiatric level…. You are being driven by some kind of demons….

And Murrow turns over in his grave….

O’Donnell repeatedly accused Weiner of “hustling his services” as a lobbyist. His proof? “Come on, I know the racket of ex-officials in this town.” Yes, that’s it: superiority without substance – always good to fall on when facts fail you. He calls Weiner a lobbyist because it wouldn’t sound as sneeringly gotcha to say “consulted to businesses that do business with the government”. Consulting to businesses that lobby the government or do work for the government is not lobbying, no matter how much your straw man wants it to be.

O’Donnell must remember replaying Bill O’Reilly’s February 2011 Fox News interview with Obama and keeping count of how many times O’Reilly interrupted the President. The final count, according to O’Donnell, was more than 70 (live and taped parts combined). The number of times that O’Reilly allowed Obama to complete an answer uninterrupted: 0. We all thought at the time that O’Donnell was being scornful of O’Reilly when he reported this…but maybe he was really just watching the Continue reading →

Extreme perseverance: 64-year-old Diana Nyad’s 5th try at the “Xtreme Dream” of swimming from Cuba to Key West

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Imagine being at the top of your game, doing what you love – and then abruptly walking away.

Diana Nyad, the long-distance swimmer who set world records in the 1970s, did just that. From 1969 to 1979, she was arguably the world’s greatest long distance swimmer, breaking numerous men’s as well as women’s records. On August 22, 1979, Nyad set an open sea record for both men and women by swimming 102.5 miles from Bimini in the Bahamas to Jupiter, Florida without a shark cage. That day was her 30th birthday – and her last competitive swim.

For 30 years she didn’t swim a single stroke.

Speaking about it in 2010, Nyad said  “I was so burned out. You couldn’t pay me to take one more stroke.” But 30 years later, she had a change of heart and mind. “I was having an existential crisis about being 60,” she said. “I told myself, ‘You have to get real with life’s lessons, one of which is, you can’t go back.’ ” But, she realized, she could in a way go back – by going forward to complete her dream swim between Cuba and Florida. In 1978 she had attempted the 103-mile journey from Havana to Key West, using a shark cage. After almost 42 hours though, Nyad had to stop: she was so far off course due to high waves and strong currents that completing the swim would have been impossible.

The distance per se would not be the goal this time: she’d already successfully completed that open-water swim of almost 103 miles in 1979. The goal was finishing what she’d started in 1978, but upping the ante in two ways: 1) going slightly farther than she did in 1979, this time not with favorable winds and currents, but through strong shifting currents and 2) swimming through those shark-filled waters without a cage.

Training for this swim would test far more than her physical endurance – it would test her mental toughness, her resolve, her ability to find that razor’s edge between realizing your utmost, fullest capabilities and accepting limits. Continue reading →

It’s not enough to do what you love: Russell Wilson, Keith Olbermann, and the importance of organizational fit

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Last night in his interview of Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson on ESPN’s new sports show ‘Olbermann’, Keith Olbermann noted admiringly that Wilson went in last year as a rookie and, before playing a single game, provided a list of goals to his coaches, including a goal of winning multiple Super Bowls. “Where,” Olbermann asked, “does the confidence come from to do that, before you’ve played a game in the NFL, and did you give them a new list this year?” Wilson’s response:

“Well, I think, for me, I’m a self-motivator. At the end of the day, you have to be a self-motivator if you want to do something great and, I’ve got a long ways to go. You just take one day at a time, you take those steps, and just continue to climb and continue to grow. And so, I think, you know, I definitely want to win multiple Super Bowls, but to do that you have to win the first one first and…to do that too you have to win the first game, the second game, and keep going on from there, and when you get those opportunities, when you have those game-altering plays – I call them GAP plays – when you have those GAP plays, you’ve gotta capitalize on them and when you have those game-altering situations throughout the season, you have to, you know, do the best that you can to be successful and that gives you a chance, and that’s where I’ve started, that’s where our football team starts.” (The full interview can be heard here starting at 31:30.)

Break your goals down into shorter goals, and break those down into action steps. Develop discipline. Motivate yourself. Plan your work, work your plan. Capitalize on opportunities. It’s all true. Hearing the words, you know he’s right. He’s an inspiration. You want to believe. **I** want to believe. But many of us – Olbermann included – have the career scars to demonstrate that talent and discipline are not always enough to carry the day. As it turns out, there’s more to Wilson’s story.

It goes without saying that talent – or at least decent competence – is the first requirement for any amount of success at what you do. (Note that I said success. Let’s set aside for now any snarky discussions of people who get jobs solely based on connections or favors; by definition, they’re not performing well.) And discipline and motivation are the oil and gas that get the engine running. But there is a third critical factor: the work environment. If there is a mismatch Continue reading →

Texas: where the government hamstrings itself with laws that prevent laws.

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The article headline: “Texas lawmakers following up on the deadly April explosion in West hesitated Monday to support new regulations for storing, moving and insuring ammonium nitrate in the state.”

Judging from this example, the laws in Texas – such as they are – seem to be more in the business interest rather than in the interest of voters. I was amazed to learn that, although the state has a fire marshal, it has no fire code. Now, I suppose I could say “Although the state has no fire code, it has a fire marshal” if I wanted to try to make some sarcastic point about overbloated gummint bureaucracies, but this isn’t about that. The serious issue is about ensuring some level of public safety, which one would think would be an inherently governmental function.

By statute, only Texas counties with populations more than 250,000, or ones that share a border with such a county, can adopt their own fire code. (Apparently, the rule of law defaults to the state code otherwise – and there is none). But, they don’t have to, and McLennan county, which is where the West facility is located, could have but has not. The other counties – that would be over 70% of the counties in Texas – are thus effectively prevented by law from enacting their own fire code.

The legislative committee looking into the matter cannot propose any bills that might address this issue because the legislature is not currently in regular session. The Texas legislature only meets in regular session in odd-numbered years (and only for 140 days at that). The next session won’t be until January 2015.

Texas: where the government hamstrings itself with laws that prevent laws.

 

Bulletproof whiteboards in schools: preying on fear and child safety to separate school districts from their dollars.

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I just had the misfortune of turning on the tv only to see Piers Morgan interviewing someone about the use of bulletproof whiteboards in schools. (Of course, seeing him in and of itself was a misfortune – but, that’s what channel was on when I turned on the tv.) WHAAAAAAT??? What an utter absurdity: the notion that somehow all of our nation’s children will be so much safer if ONLY school districts would make an investment in these educational latter-day chalkboards-cum-shields.

As it turns out NPR did a story on them back in May. School safety consultant Kenneth Trump’s take: “The vendors may be opportunistic, but the people on the purchasing end aren’t thinking it through, either.”

It is a very poor risk assessment: the likelihood of a lone shooter coming into any particular school is small, and if he (it is invariably a he) gets that far – past door buzzers and scanners – the likelihood of a teacher being able to deploy the whiteboard as a personal shield in time is small to nonexistent. But, people do make money preying on and exaggerating other people’s fears.

The title of this post says it all.

Is cable dead? The problems with providers, competition, and access seem familiar.

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Is cable dead? Respected technology writer Doc Searls thinks so. In his blogpost today he talks about the recent example of Al Jazeera restricting its online Al Jazeera English stream in the US when it began broadcasting its cable channel, Al Jazeera America, on August 20. Searls’ take is that Al Jazeera’s move to cable is a backwards one; he sees it as sacrificing the future for the past.

Cable may not be dead – yet. I think that Al Jazeera’s sacrificing a bit in the short term and playing the long game in order to have access to the American market. But what is interesting is Al Jazeera’s explanation for the move: “Due to copyright and distribution restrictions, not all viewers will be able to access all of our streaming video services.” It highlights the distinction between cable channel (content) and cable provider (access), and the power that providers currently have over what viewers can see.

Time Warner Cable, which owns CNN, immediately dropped Al Jazeera America from its lineup. (In other news, they have also blacked out CBS in several major markets during their fee negotiations but will undoubtedly reach an agreement before football season starts.) AT&T’s U-verse pay-TV service said it wouldn’t carry Al Jazeera America because of a contract dispute.

The customers served by these providers have no choice in the matter. They can’t see Al Jazeera America – yet.

In almost all US markets there is a monopoly on the provision of cable services. Susan Crawford, a communications policy expert and a professor at the Cardozo School of Law, warns in her recent book “Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age” that a handful of cable companies have become monopolies that stifle competition and innovation. Crawford compares the cable company structure to that of the 19th century railroad and steel monopolies, which faced minimal competition Continue reading →

Why words matter: shaping public opinion about the NSA

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“NSA Analysts Intentionally Abused Spying Powers Multiple Times” blared the Bloomberg article headline. The article’s tone suggests that deliberate and willful violations of American’s privacy were made by “people with access to the NSA’s vast electronic surveillance systems” and “were the work of overzealous NSA employees or contractors”. The NSA, it clearly should be inferred from the language in this article, is a nefarious organization that Must Be Reined In.

But a closer read of the article, stripped of its shellacking, shows that:

“The deliberate actions didn’t violate the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or the USA Patriot Act, the NSA said in its statement. Instead, they overstepped the 1981 Executive Order 12333, issued by President Ronald Reagan, which governs U.S. intelligence operations.”

Executive Order 12333 outlines the authorities and responsibilities of the various intelligence agencies. It marks the boundaries of each agency’s scope of work. In other words, it’s a who-does-what document. The careful quote by an official who spoke on condition of anonymity makes it clear that that’s what’s important:

“The agency has taken steps to ensure that everyone understands legal and administrative boundaries….”

In other words, it’s a turf battle, folks. Note that no one is saying that these actions couldn’t/wouldn’t/shouldn’t have been undertaken by another agency; they are only saying that the NSA overstepped its bounds. The reader is left to leap to the conclusion that the violations would not have happened otherwise. If the “correct” agency had undertaken those actions, it is quite probable that no privacy right would have been violated because there would have been no privacy right: the “correct” agency would have been acting within its authority.

The Bloomberg article is not so much reporting news as it is shaping the news: attempting to Continue reading →