"Who am I kidding? I mean, we all have strings."

The subject of motivational speakers has been coming up recently, so I just had to post this one.

Why I'm not writing a post on Napoleon Hill

When I write a post on a new topic I usually do a quick pass through Wikipedia and after about thirty or forty-five minutes (longer if I get distracted) of following the most reliable links I can find, I'm comfortable enough to proceed. That's not what you'd call thorough research, but combined with a pretty good bullshit detector, it's usually enough to provide me some level of protection against the really embarrassing errors.

Sometimes, though, no amount of online research will get me to my desired comfort level. Case in point, a recent John Oliver segment on televangelists lead me to this fascinating piece by Budge Burgess about Napoleon Hill, one of the most successful and influential self-help authors of the past hundred years and, if Burgess is to be believed, a serial fabulist.

On one hand, Burgess makes what seems to be a convincing case that Hill, rather than having been mentored by Andrew Carnegie, never actually met the industrialist, and that the secrets he claimed to have gotten from Carnegie, Ford, Edison, Rockefeller and the rest were simply made up out of whole cloth.

The trouble is that I can't find any outside confirmation, nor can I find anything about Burgess other than what's on his site. If I were a reporter for a highly respected publication like, say, the New York Times, I might be comfortable printing something without checking it out, but, as an obscure blogger, I don't have an institutional reputation to rely on, which puts the onus on me to check my facts.

This means that the Napoleon Hill post will have to wait until more facts come in, which is too bad because it's a fun story.

"I was the Duke"

I'm always on the lookout for interesting counterexamples to conventional wisdom in places like the Internet Archive. For example, this 1956 documentary from the wonderful CBS Radio Workshop provides a fascinating glimpse of what people thought of gangs and juvenile delinquency in the 1950s. It also contains a surprising amount of language that might get you in trouble with the FCC if you ran it today.

In the spirit of the day

The Night Gallery was a tragically uneven show, but it did have its moments, such as this Rod Serling adaptation of a classic Margaret St. Clair story directed by John Badham.

If you're going to do a series called "Smarter Every Day," you should probably try to be, well, smarter

Or at least better researched. Don't get me wrong -- I am entirely on this guy's side -- but this analogy for theft of non-rival goods is terrible.

"The Friends of Frank Fay."

I believe I've mentioned fairly frequently that I'm a fan of Kliph Nesteroff. Nesteroff is a writer and pop culture specializing in the middle half of the Twentieth Century. He has logged thousands of hours interviewing survivors from the era and his knowledge of certain areas goes down to the molecular, but he never sinks to the level off the fanboy obsessive who have come to dominate popular culture discourse. He's objective and scholarly (the article quoted below cites twenty sources) and always aware of the larger context.


All of this allows Nesteroff to consistently pull off something that most of his competitors try frequently with terrible results: he can use his specialized knowledge to tell us something interesting and useful about bigger issues like racism, censorship, the influence of organized crime in the mid-Twentieth Century (one of his specialties). For example, I knew that the Thirties was a period of intense extremism across the political spectrum, but I had assumed that during and immediately after the war, Hitler supporters would be keeping a low profile.


The Fascist Stand-Up Comic June 10, 2014

Frank Fay is considered the very first stand-up comedian. Prior to his emergence in the early 1920s, comedians accompanied their act with props and funny costumes. Even those without gimmicks rarely appeared onstage alone. Comedians had their punchlines set-up by another person, a straightman. To be a comedian meant you performed with the help of a costume or an instrument or another guy. “A comedian without a prop can’t click,” said actor Wesley Ruggles. “I learned that back in the days when I pushed the props around for Charlie Chaplin. Great pantomist that he is, Chaplin realizes the necessity of props.”

Frank Fay realized that as long as you knew what you were doing, as long as you had confidence in your material, props weren't necessary at all. The comedians insisting on props and costumes did so out of conformity or out of fear. Fay started with gimmicks like everyone else, wearing baggy pants, squirting seltzer, delivering straight lines for a comedian that circled him on roller skates - and he hated it. After humiliating himself onstage for two years, Fay decided to use the same persona he had offstage. No props, no costumes, no partner, he took to the stage wearing a well-tailored tuxedo and told jokes alone. It was so unconventional that The New York Times frowned: "“Fay needs a good straight man, as before, to feed his eccentric comedy." There was initial resistance to a man just standing and talking, but Fay's success would transform stand-up as an artform. Fellow comedians saw Fay succeed and they abandoned their props and emulated his style. Jack Benny, Milton Berle, Bob Hope and Jack Paar all cited him as an influence. Fay became one of the most influential stand-up comics of all time.
   
He was also comedy's most notorious racist. In January 1946, several months after Germany had been defeated, a rally of ten thousand white supremacists gathered at Madison Square Garden. They delivered speeches in support of Franco, Mussolini and their fallen hero Adolf Hitler. They promised that the defeat of Germany would not go unpunished. The podium was beneath a banner that saluted their guest of honor. The event was called "The Friends of Frank Fay."

…
People were resistant to hire him in Hollywood now that his anti-Semitism was famous. “In a business known for its lack of bigotry, he was a bigot,” said comedy writer Milt Josefsberg. “This was no secret, but widely known and well substantiated.” Fay married the struggling actress Barbara Stanwyck in 1928, before she found stardom. When she became famous, a joke about Fay made the rounds:

     Q: Which Hollywood actor has the biggest prick?
     A: Barbara Stanwyck.

While many celebrities distanced themselves from Fay, he found a friend in the popular radio commentator Father Charles Coughlin. Coughlin railed against “Jewish bankers” and spoke favorably of Mussolini and Hitler. His crusade against trade unions, social security and many elements of President Roosevelt's New Deal (Coughlin reportedly called it The Jew Deal) made him a hero to anti-Semites and a friend of Fay. Coughlin's political views would influence Fay in the years to come.

…

In 1944 he was resurrected by Broadway director Antoinette Perry, for whom the Tony Award is named. Perry cast Fay as the star of Harvey, a Pulitzer Prize winning play about an alcoholic that befriends a vision of an invisible rabbit. It brought Fay back to prominence and ran nearly eighteen hundred performances. He used his latest success to endorse Franco, Spain's fascist dictator.

At the end of 1945, several members of the theatrical union Actor's Equity rallied in favor of Spanish Refugee Appeal. Actors David Brooks, Jean Darling, Luba Malina and Sono Osato criticized the Spanish Catholic Church for executing leftists and campaigned to help Spanish leftists in exile. Fay was furious. He said their criticism was an attack on Catholicism as a whole. Fay demanded Actor’s Equity investigate each anti-Franco member for un-American activity.

The House Committee on Un-American Activities acted on Fay’s suggestion and the actors were vetted. The New York Times reported that Fay “held no brief against any member of [Actor’s Equity] for political beliefs. He resented, however, that Equity members should be party to rallies that condemn religious groups.” Equity president Bert Lytell objected to the political investigation. “Equity members have a wide latitude of interests and beliefs that they may practice and advocate as private citizens.” Actor’s Equity stood by Brooks, Darling, Malina and Osato. Rather than expel them from his union, Lytell censured Frank Fay for “conduct prejudicial to the association or its membership.”

…

In response to the censure, allies of Franco, members of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi party organized a rally at Madison Square Garden in January 1946 called "The Friends of Frank Fay.” Speakers included Klan ally Joseph Scott, Nazi Laura Ingalls, publisher of anti-Semitic pamphlets John Geis, and the prolific Joseph P. Kamp, who had used the KKK's mailing list to distribute his work about “Jewish influence” and America’s “Communist President” Franklin D. Roosevelt.

"George" "F." "Will" is no David Brooks

When I write a post criticizing David Brooks (which around here pretty much equates to writing a post about David Brooks), I generally try to work in a positive comment about Brooks' talents. This may come off as damning with faint praise or even outright sarcasm, but I am being absolutely sincere. I have serious problems with Brooks' ethics, but great respect for his craft. He is capable of sharp and elegant prose and even when the writing goes pretentious and overripe (his epic mixed metaphors come to mind), it is still bad for a reason. Sometimes, muddled can pass for erudite, and erudition is an essential part of Brooks' likable professor persona.

To fully grasp how good Brooks is, check out the occasional George Will column. Taking on a Brooks piece can be like explicating a poem. You usually have to carefully unwind the arguments until you get to the fallacies or the subtle rhetorical misdirection. With Will, it's more like grading a stack of eleventh grade English papers (complete with pretentious but not quite apt language -- "The diaspora of Reagan administration alumni" -- and a totally gratuitous Great Gatsby quote).

Take the recent dust-up with Bill O'Reilly. Here's a representative excerpt (And yes, the overuse of quotes continues throughout the piece).

O’Reilly “reports” that the trauma of the assassination attempt was somehow causally related to the “fact” that Reagan was frequently so mentally incompetent that senior aides contemplated using the Constitution’s 25th Amendment to remove him from office. But neither O’Reilly nor [Martin] Dugard spoke with any of those aides — not with Ed Meese, Jim Baker, George Shultz or any of the scores of others who could, and would, have demolished O’Reilly’s theory. O’Reilly now airily dismisses them because they “have skin in the game.” His is an interesting approach to writing history: Never talk to anyone with firsthand knowledge of your subject.

It pretty much goes on like this.

I was tempted to say more about the style, but I think the English paper comment covered what needed to be said on that topic. Instead, let's focus on the rhetoric.

Argument by eye roll is seldom a good idea even when you have the weight of the evidence squarely behind you. If the points you're mocking aren't obviously wrong, the sarcasm will usually turn around and bite you.

In this case, Will is dismissing the assertions (in reverse order) that: Reagan was showing symptoms of dementia during his second term; and the onset was accelerated by the assassination attempt. It's entirely possible that both statements are incorrect, but they aren't so obviously incorrect that you can just mock and move on, particularly when it comes to the first assertion, which was around long before O'Reilly picked it up

Here's Charles Pierce (who has written extensively on Alzheimer's).

As it happens, O'Reilly's speculation is on solid scientific footing. Alzheimer's researchers and caregivers have known for years that physical trauma can worsen the effects of the disease. Certainly, the recent  research into the connection between head trauma and dementia backs this up, and I remember a fascinating Japanese study at an Alzheimer's research conference that I attended in Osaka that studied the effect of a massive earthquake in that country on Alzheimer's patients in the affected regions. In almost all cases, the disease accelerated.

...

I am not willing to go as far as O'Reilly apparently does, but I have believed—and written—for years that Reagan was a symptomatic AD patient at least throughout his entire second term. My initial concern in this regard arose in 1984, during Reagan's first debate with Walter Mondale, when he plainly did not know where he was or what he was supposed to be doing. At the time, my father was beginning a slow slide into Alzheimer's himself. I knew what I was looking at on TV—and so, I learned later, did Dr. Dennis Selkoe, a prominent AD researcher in Boston. Since then, accounts of Reagan's curiously vacant episodes have popped up all over various historical accounts, and personal memoirs, of the Reagan presidency. In the latter case, everybody from Ollie North to Lawrence Walsh mentions at least one moment in which the person who was Ronald Reagan disappeared right before their eyes. In an interview in 1999 for this magazine, John McCain told me of his experience at a White House dinner, when Reagan lapsed into some middle space of his own.


Why didn't anyone try to do something? Well, they did. In Landslide, the book Jane Mayer and Doyle McManus wrote about Reagan's second term, they begin with an account of a serious investigation by concerned members of the administration to see if activating the presidential succession process was warranted. It went nowhere.

And according to the New York Times on Mayer and McManus talked to lots of people with firsthand knowledge:

Ms. Mayer and Mr. McManus are both working reporters - she for The Wall Street Journal, he for The Los Angeles Times - and this is clearly a reporter's book, full of rich anecdote and telling detail. But it is also a hybrid, a somewhat awkward hybrid at times. The core of the book, written mainly by Mr. McManus, a foreign policy expert, contains an exhaustive account of the Iran-contra affair. The political side of the story, told mainly by Ms. Mayer, a White House reporter, sometimes takes second place. Still, I am impressed with the amount of inside information collected here. The Reagan White House has retired the trophy when it comes to news management - in covering the President for the last 20 months, I have been able to ask him exactly three questions - and any effort to shatter the protective shield so assiduously constructed around Mr. Reagan is an important contribution to our understanding of the White House.

Put bluntly, the man is not sharp enough to criticize a Bill O'Reilly book. 

I previously argued that David Brooks is very good at being David Brooks. By the same token, George Will is simply terrible at being George Will.

The Witch of November

Forty years ago today.

"Heathens don't amount to shucks alongside of pirates" -- understanding Ben Carson

One of the things I've realized watching the coverage of the Carson campaign is that almost none of the people reporting or commenting on the story have the slightest grasp of how evangelical culture works. For example, I've seen a great deal of confusion around Carson's insistence that he had a wild and dangerous youth, but if you know the Bible Belt, there is no mystery here.

Carson has built a lucrative second career and substantial political base on a brilliantly realized redemption narrative. These narratives invariably start with an unredeemed sinner headed for a bad end. The more lurid the sin, the more entertaining the story.

This is not a new development.


from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

The first shed we come to the preacher was lining out a hymn.  He lined out two lines, everybody sung it, and it was kind of grand to hear it, there was so many of them and they done it in such a rousing way; then he lined out two more for them to sing—and so on.  The people woke up more and more, and sung louder and louder; and towards the end some begun to groan, and some begun to shout.  Then the preacher begun to preach, and begun in earnest, too; and went weaving first to one side of the platform and then the other, and then a-leaning down over the front of it, with his arms and his body going all the time, and shouting his words out with all his might; and every now and then he would hold up his Bible and spread it open, and kind of pass it around this way and that, shouting, "It's the brazen serpent in the wilderness!  Look upon it and live!"  And people would shout out, "Glory!—A-a-men!"  And so he went on, and the people groaning and crying and saying amen:

"Oh, come to the mourners' bench! come, black with sin! (Amen!) come, sick and sore! (Amen!) come, lame and halt and blind! (Amen!) come, pore and needy, sunk in shame! (A-A-Men!) come, all that's worn and soiled and suffering!—come with a broken spirit! come with a contrite heart! come in your rags and sin and dirt! the waters that cleanse is free, the door of heaven stands open—oh, enter in and be at rest!" (A-A-Men!  Glory, Glory Hallelujah!)

And so on.  You couldn't make out what the preacher said any more, on account of the shouting and crying.  Folks got up everywheres in the crowd, and worked their way just by main strength to the mourners' bench, with the tears running down their faces; and when all the mourners had got up there to the front benches in a crowd, they sung and shouted and flung themselves down on the straw, just crazy and wild.

Well, the first I knowed the king got a-going, and you could hear him over everybody; and next he went a-charging up on to the platform, and the preacher he begged him to speak to the people, and he done it.  He told them he was a pirate—been a pirate for thirty years out in the Indian Ocean—and his crew was thinned out considerable last spring in a fight, and he was home now to take out some fresh men, and thanks to goodness he'd been robbed last night and put ashore off of a steamboat without a cent, and he was glad of it; it was the blessedest thing that ever happened to him, because he was a changed man now, and happy for the first time in his life; and, poor as he was, he was going to start right off and work his way back to the Indian Ocean, and put in the rest of his life trying to turn the pirates into the true path; for he could do it better than anybody else, being acquainted with all pirate crews in that ocean; and though it would take him a long time to get there without money, he would get there anyway, and every time he convinced a pirate he would say to him, "Don't you thank me, don't you give me no credit; it all belongs to them dear people in Pokeville camp-meeting, natural brothers and benefactors of the race, and that dear preacher there, the truest friend a pirate ever had!"

And then he busted into tears, and so did everybody.  Then somebody sings out, "Take up a collection for him, take up a collection!"  Well, a half a dozen made a jump to do it, but somebody sings out, "Let him pass the hat around!"  Then everybody said it, the preacher too.

So the king went all through the crowd with his hat swabbing his eyes, and blessing the people and praising them and thanking them for being so good to the poor pirates away off there; and every little while the prettiest kind of girls, with the tears running down their cheeks, would up and ask him would he let them kiss him for to remember him by; and he always done it; and some of them he hugged and kissed as many as five or six times—and he was invited to stay a week; and everybody wanted him to live in their houses, and said they'd think it was an honor; but he said as this was the last day of the camp-meeting he couldn't do no good, and besides he was in a sweat to get to the Indian Ocean right off and go to work on the pirates.

When we got back to the raft and he come to count up he found he had collected eighty-seven dollars and seventy-five cents.  And then he had fetched away a three-gallon jug of whisky, too, that he found under a wagon when he was starting home through the woods.  The king said, take it all around, it laid over any day he'd ever put in in the missionarying line.  He said it warn't no use talking, heathens don't amount to shucks alongside of pirates to work a camp-meeting with.

Groo

Mark Evanier, who co-writes Sergio Aragonés' successful and long-running comic series Groo, shares an interesting anecdote about the origin of the book. [Emphasis added]

Today, there are these things called "creator-owned comics," meaning that the writer and/or artist own(s) the comic, not the publisher. In the early-to-mid-seventies, as Señor Aragonés was doodling out his ideas for Sergio-created comics, there was no major American comic book publisher who was willing to publish a creator-owned comic. In fact, some even told you it legally could not be done.

I'm not kidding about this. There were writers and artists who created comics and had — or felt they had — no avenue but to hand All Rights over to the company in exchange for no credit, no ownership, no royalties. They got work doing the comic, if that much. Some tried to dicker — and they didn't even want full ownership…just, say, 20%. And they were told, "No, we will never in a zillion years make a deal like that." Sergio showed Groo to one publisher and was told, "Great…but we legally have to own it. You, as an individual, cannot legally own a copyright. It's invalid unless it's in the name of a company like ours."

Sergio knew that was wholly untrue. I wonder how many other writers and artists who heard that speech didn't.

Both Joseph and I have been over this a number of times, but for those just tuning in, intellectual property laws basically amount to government-granted monopolies. These monopolies can be enormously beneficial both to creators and to society as a whole, but there's also a huge potential for abuse, particularly on the part of those buying the work of the creators.

You often have actual or near monopsony conditions. Add to that large asymmetries in information, power, size, liquidity and legal resources. Strengthening and extending copyrights and patents is often presented as something that is uniformly good for those who actually come up with the artist works and technical innovations being protected, but if those creators are not adequately protected, stronger IP laws can simply provide more incentive to screw them over.

Return of the rabbit ears

I've gotten way behind on the over-the-air television/terrestrial superstation story. For example, I missed this very good LA Times piece by Stephen Battaglio (I originally called it excellent, but a quick reread uncovered a couple of mistakes -- Weigel launched ThisTV before MeTV and stations can carry more than five sub-channels. Other than that, it was possibly the best write-up I've seen to date).  

I'll be revisiting this later but for now here's a short excerpt and a few brief comments. 

Unplug your cable system and find MeTV, which stands for Memorable Entertainment Television. The network airs hits such as "M*A*S*H," "Bonanza" and "Star Trek," and averages about 521,000 viewers in daytime — higher than all but nine national cable networks. From 5 to 11 p.m., MeTV ranked 20th with 667,000 viewers compared with those networks.

Other media companies have also turned to classic TV as a low-cost programming solution for multicast channels, which now reportedly take in more than $250 million a year in ad revenue.

A quarter of a billion dollars is quite a bit of money, particularly with an audience that is disproportionately poor and over fifty.

A quarter of a billion dollars would be downright incredible if Nielsen were right and OTA were small and shrinking.

Furthermore, the terrestrial superstation world was much smaller when this article came out in early April. Among other developments, CBS and ABC both jumped into the game.

Weigel's MeTV broke the top ten daytime and the top twenty prime time with very little original programming, almost no PR budget and no external advertising. A small independent leading an industry just through word of mouth is nearly unheard of.

There has been a remarkably clear regional pattern in the coverage of OTA television. The best and most comprehensive has come from Chicago, historically a broadcasting town and, not coincidentally, home of the first two major players, Weigel and Tribune. The second best has come from LA, another TV town. By far the worst has come from NYC, which does support some production, but not enough to affect the flavor of the city. This isn't a slam against East Coast journalists but rather a reminder that location still matters. If most of the people you listen to live within fifty miles of each other, you aren't truly getting a wide range of viewpoints. And if they also come from the same income level, and went to the same schools and...

The more things change -- advertising edition

One of these days, I want to start a good, detailed thread on advertising and marketing. If and when I do, it will almost certainly mention this very cool find from Wikipedia.

In ancient China, the earliest advertising known was oral, as recorded in the Classic of Poetry (11th to 7th centuries BC) of bamboo flutes played to sell candy. Advertisement usually takes in the form of calligraphic signboards and inked papers. A copper printing plate dated back to the Song dynasty [960–1279 A.D. -- MP] used to print posters in the form of a square sheet of paper with a rabbit logo with "Jinan Liu's Fine Needle Shop" and "We buy high quality steel rods and make fine quality needles, to be ready for use at home in no time" written above and below is considered the world's earliest identified printed advertising medium.

Of the things that's fascinating about this is how many of the elements and how much of the specific language of modern advertisements were in place a thousand years ago. We have branding complete with logo, claims of high quality, and appeals to convenience. Add three cameras and an over-eager studio audience and you have an infomercial.

Just because you're a critic doesn't mean you have to be critical

[in case you're wondering, this one has been in the queue for a while]

I know this is a fairly trivial matter, but in keeping with our running thread on the flack-to-hack ratio, it is worth noting that Tom Cruise seems to have bought a lifetime pass for good reviews from the LA Weekly movie section ever since their chief critic, Amy Nicholson, wrote a book length puff piece on Cruise which she then cut down to a feature ("Our Last Real Movie Star") for the weekly.

Having firmly established the appearance of conflict of interest, the editors go on to make her the default reviewer for all Tom Cruise films in the future. It is therefore not much of a surprise when Rogue Nation gets a review that starts like this.

At 53, Tom Cruise is past the retirement age of every James Bond except Roger Moore. Yet his 19-year-old Mission: Impossible series ticks on, counting down the seconds till its next explosion — and Cruise's Ethan Hunt is determined to unman his cross-Atlantic competition. Forget high-tech gadgets. The older Cruise gets, the more he relies on his fists. (And his abs, and his nerves — he'll never let you forget he does his own stunts, and why should he?) His body is the wonder-gizmo, and Christopher McQuarrie, writer and director of the fifth entry, Rogue Nation, keeps the camera on him like a nature show about a hungry lion.

And pretty much proceeds in a straight line from there.

Obviously, the stakes are fairly low here ("Journalists writing puff pieces? I'm shocked, shocked I tell you!"), but it is always good to remind ourselves how much of what we read, be it reviews or articles or op-ed pieces, started out as a gleam in some publicist's eye.

Outlaws

I'll just give you the short version of the first part of the story (my brakes are quite good; those of the guy behind me, not so much) and skip to the part where I'm driving down the street listening to satellite radio in a crappy rental car.

I am sure that if I were familiar with the system, I could find all sorts of interesting offerings on Sirius XM, but since I'm only going to have the car for a few days and I don't feel like digging through all of the channels, I decided to leave it on the first one that seemed passable. That turned out to be the outlaw country station.

I normally jump around the dial quite a bit, but given the lack of commercials and the number of really bad stations I had to go through to find a decent one, I just decided to leave the radio where it was.

So I am on the second day of getting in touch with my good old boy roots and listening to Merle and Waylon and songs that rhyme whiskey with "frisk me," and I get to thinking about the connections between outlaw country and punk and gangsta rap.

I decide there might be a post in this, so there I am, driving down the road thinking about the various similarities in topic and attitude and, I swear I'm not making this up, this song comes on the radio:




Sometimes, God just loves bloggers. Maybe that's why he made so many of us.

Defending the indefensible for fun and profit – lesson 1: tone and framing

David Brooks has come in for a lot of mockery for his latest column on Marco Rubio from commentators like Jonathan Chait (“What Should We Believe: Marco Rubio or Math?”) and Charles Pierce. Even Paul Krugman, who is required by NYT policy not to engage Brooks directly, couldn't resist pushing the envelope.

Here's the passage that seems to have inspired the most reaction.

At this stage it’s probably not sensible to get too worked up about the details of any candidate’s plans. They are all wildly unaffordable. What matters is how a candidate signals priorities. Rubio talks specifically about targeting policies to boost middle- and lower-middle-class living standards.

Both Krugman and Chait both draw a parallel between Brooks' signals-over-details approach and the coverage of George W. Bush sixteen years ago, then go on to criticize Rubio's details. Chait goes on at some length:

One defense of Rubio’s alleged moderation is that he would cut the top tax rate to 35 percent, as opposed to the even lower rates proposed by various other candidates and multilevel marketers posing as candidates in the GOP field. But, remember, the Bush tax cuts also cut the top tax rate to 35 percent. Bringing that rate back to that level was the subject of intense political struggle in 2001 and again in 2012 to 2013, because there is a lot of money at stake. And whereas Bush merely reduced taxes on dividends and capital gains — forms of income that overwhelmingly accrue to the very affluent — Rubio would eliminate them altogether.

Rubio does create a $2,500-per-child tax credit, which would help families if it was refundable. (Rubio’s campaign has said it would not be refundable, and thus do very little to help the poor.) Even if we assume otherwise, however, the assumption that Rubio’s tax cut helps the poor relies on the assumption that his proposals have no trade-off whatsoever. In reality, reducing federal revenues by $6 trillion over a decade would put immense pressure on the federal budget. Rubio has already promised to increase defense spending and keep Medicare and Social Security untouched for current or near-retirees, making them unavailable for budget savings within the next decade. Those programs — along with interest on the national debt, which cannot be cut — account for two thirds of the federal budget. Domestic discretionary programs, which fund things like transportation, scientific research, and the basic nuts and bolts of the federal agencies, have been cut so deeply that even many Republicans are eager to lift their caps. That means the brunt of Rubio’s fiscal pressure would come to bear on the minority of the federal budget that goes directly to the poor.

But a single passage can't really capture either the skill or the duplicity of Brooks' column. He is defending the indefensible here, not in the sense that Rubio's proposals are morally reprehensible, but in the sense that Brooks has been tasked with making a rational, wonky case for a plan where two plus two equals one here, equals seventeen there, and a couple of pages later, equals the inverse of the square root of pi. The Rubio campaign doesn't even try to hide the contradictions. They point to a Tax Foundation report to support the claim that “the largest after-tax gains is for the people at the lower end of the tax spectrum under my plan” while simultaneously admitting that the Tax Foundation got those gains from the mistaken belief that the refunds were refundable (and thus, would actually go to the very poor). See Dylan Matthews for the details and Rick Perlstein for some interesting background on the Tax Foundation.

It is Brooks' job to make calm, reasonable arguments supporting establishment conservative positions. That's what he's paid to do. That's where his reputational capital lies. At the moment the top priority of the establishment is to get the non-Trump/Carson wing of the party to coalesce behind an establishment candidate, which, at this point, more or less has to be Rubio. The challenge here is to sound Brooksian (maintaining an air of rationality and scholarship) while making an argument based on emotional associations.

Here's how he begins:

So after all the meshugas on the right over the past few years, the Republicans could wind up with two new leaders going into this election, Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan. That’s a pretty excellent outcome for a party that has shown an amazing tendency to inflict self-harm.

Ryan is the new House speaker and right now Rubio is the most likely presidential nominee. The shape of the presidential campaign is coming into focus. It’s still wise to expect (pray) that the celebrity candidates will fade as the shopping phase ends and the buying phase begins.

Voters don’t have to know the details of their nominee’s agenda, but they have to know that the candidate is capable of having an agenda. Donald Trump and Ben Carson go invisible when the subject of actual governance comes up.

Brooks starts casual – after all those meshugas, it's pretty excellent to have these guys – and he takes his time getting to that first key claim about Rubio. In typical fashion, the first half of the claim is sensible bordering on obvious -- I suspect most people would say that voters don't need  to know the details; they only need to know that independent experts find the details reasonable -- while the second half is highly questionable.  “Capable of having an agenda” is an incredibly low standard for a presidential nominee.

A bit later we get another nice pivot with the paragraph that's gotten so much attention:

While other candidates are repeating the formulas of the 1980s and 1990s, Rubio is a child of this century. He understands that it’s no longer enough to cut taxes and say bad things about government to produce widespread prosperity. In a series of major policy speeches over the past two years (he’s one of the few candidates who actually gives them), Rubio has emphasized that new structural problems threaten the American dream: technology displacing workers, globalization suppressing wages and the decline of marriage widening inequality.

His proposals reflect this awareness. At this stage it’s probably not sensible to get too worked up about the details of any candidate’s plans. They are all wildly unaffordable. What matters is how a candidate signals priorities. Rubio talks specifically about targeting policies to boost middle- and lower-middle-class living standards.

Check out how the first paragraph and the first sentence of the second seem to be leading up to a discussion of the ideas laid out in all of these major policy speeches? (by the way, if you're trying to slip a paragraph with a questionable thesis past readers, taking the last sentence of the previous paragraph and moving it to the beginning of the questionable one is a useful technique.) Then Brooks pulls a sharp rhetorical turn and says forget details, what matters is signaling.

[A quick aside. As Krugman points out, “any candidate” here apparently means “any GOP candidate” (and possibly “any leading GOP candidate”) None of Clinton's proposals appear to be wildly unaffordable.]

Signaling priorities might be a valid topic for a column but that's not where this one goes. Having told us that the details don't matter, Brooks dives back into the details. He spends the next half dozen paragraphs praising Rubio's policy ideas on taxes, education and the social safety net before concluding:

If Ryan and Rubio do emerge as the party’s two leaders, it will be the wonkiest leadership team in our lifetime. That’s a good thing.

You can see Brooks' dilemma. He wants to portray Rubio as a serious, detail-oriented policy thinker, a wonk among wonks, but Rubio's actual proposals make this line of argument extremely difficult. Even in the column's brief summary, Brooks includes Oren Cass's debunked claims about disabilities benefits and the aforementioned tax credit (where Brooks appears to make the same mistake that the Tax Foundation did).

By framing the discussion in terms of signaling and being “capable of having an agenda,” Brooks is able to praise Rubio's ideas without actually having to defend them. It is a characteristically smart and well-executed strategy and another reminder that David Brooks is very good at being David Brooks.

I ain't scared of no posts

I've got a full week's worth of Halloween fun at the comics and pop culture blog, Mippyville. Twilight Zones, Lugosi's Zombies, Orson Welles in Dracula, and a couple of Briefer classics.

Joe Bob says check it out.

"[POPULAR APP] for [BLANK]" -- it's like Mad Libs but you end up getting twenty million in venture capital

At the risk of making blanket pronouncements, here are some blanket pronouncements.

When you hear a proposed business model described as being like "[POPULAR APP] for [BLANK]" (Skype for sandwiches" to use Oliver's phrase), you can be reasonably confident that the entrepreneurs:

Don't understand the business model behind the app (in this case, Yelp);

Don't understand blank (in this case; social media).

There's also a very good chance that they are either trying to scam investors or successfully scamming themselves (in this case apparently the latter -- just check out their reaction to the taxi driver clip).





I have to admit that I'm breaking my own rule by not researching this business further before blogging about it. Though I feel a bit guilty about not doing due diligence, it's late, I'm tired and most importantly, while there is the possibility that this is not as bad as it sounds, there is also the possibility that it's worse, and that's just not good for the blood pressure.

Corporate statisticians survival guide – – rule of nominal overcompensation

There is an inverse relationship between an organization's tendency to come up with special names for something and the likelihood of your actually finding examples at the organization.

Be on the lookout for the following in slogans, mission statements and PowerPoint bullet points:

Innovation

Data-driven

and, of course,

Employee Empowerment

More Netflix

This is my second big Netflix story of the week which makes me a little nervous. I am afraid that these posts often come off as attacks on the company when the intention is to use the company as a jumping off point for discussing the way business journalists cover topics like technology, growth, superstar CEOs, and particularly in this case marketing.

Reporters often seem to have an extraordinarily weak grasp of how advertising and PR work as part of a business model. I say "seem" because there has to be a degree of playing dumb here. The two worlds are simply too closely connected with too much overlap in personnel for either side to be all that naïve and reporters often have a vested interest in being at least a little bit gullible.

What ever the reason, far too many suspect and out-and-out unbelievable narratives find their way into the business pages. One particularly questionable assumption that shows up all the time is that all marketing is meant to increase profitability either through more subscribers or less churn.

I know I've gone over this before so we will just stick with the short version here. A great deal of PR and advertising is intended not primarily to improve the profitability of the company, but to improve its reputation in a way that sustains high stock value and/or improves the professional and social standing of its leadership.

Responsible business journalist need to be alert to these different types of marketing and not simply go along with the version said to them by a company's press spokesman.

Case in point...



 From Wikipedia:

Beasts of No Nation is a 2015 American war drama film written, shot, and directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, about a young boy who survives as his country goes through a horrific war. The film, based on the 2005 novel of the same name by Uzodinma Iweala, was shot in Ghana, and stars Idris Elba, Ama K. Abebrese, Abraham Attah, Grace Nortey, David Dontoh, and Opeyemi Fagbohungbe.

Beasts of No Nation is, by almost all accounts, a skillful, serious film featuring Oscar caliber performances by Elba and Attah, but most of the coverage has had less to do with the film's artistic merit and social significance and more to do with the way it was released.

Red Crown Productions was the financier and producer, along with Primary Productions and Parliament of Owls. On May 17, 2014, Participant Media, along with Mammoth Entertainment, came on board to co-finance the film, initially budgeted at $4.3 million but which ultimately cost about $6 million.

...

Netflix bought the worldwide distribution rights for around $12 million. The film was simultaneously released theatrically and online through its subscription video on demand service on October 16, 2015, with Bleecker Street handling the theatrical release. Considering the online release a violation of the traditional 90-day release window of exclusivity to theatres, AMC Cinemas, Carmike Cinemas, Cinemark, and Regal Entertainment—four of the largest theatre chains in the United States—announced that they would boycott Beasts of No Nation, effectively downgrading it to a limited release at smaller and independent theatres. The film was also theatrically released in the United Kingdom on October 16, 2015, in Curzon Cinemas.

Netflix is spending a lot of money publicizing this film. Probably more than they paid for it which was, in turn, probably more than they had to.



A total tab of 20 to 30 million certainly seems credible, particularly when you add in the inevitable Oscar blitz. From a movie lovers standpoint, it is great that Netflix is pouring money into this kind of project.
 
From a business standpoint however, there is no getting around the fact that, despite extensive publicity, very few people wanted to see this movie enough to show up in the theaters. Just how few? The minuscule box office (around $80,000) isn't that informative in this instance since the movie had an extremely limited release, only opening in thirty-one theaters. In this case the relevant metric is the theater average.



Limited release films with high profiles tend to do quite well by this metric; Beasts' $1,645 average was tiny, even allowing for some of the audience opting for the streaming option. By comparison, the PBS documentary Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution broke  $2,000 in its seventh week.

Calculating brand effects can be tricky, but even taking that into account, it is difficult to see how Netflix expected a grim arthouse picture with little buzz and no bankable talent to come close to justifying a $25 million expenditure in terms of revenue. Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer, tried to make the case in terms of artistic merit --“This story had to be told.” -- but that's almost as difficult to believe. The film was, after all, completed before Netflix entered the picture and it's likely that more conventional theater-then-streaming distribution deal would have meant a bigger audience (and cost Netflix perhaps a tenth as much money).

Netflix spent probably an extra twenty million dollars so that they could label a prestige film a "Netflix Original" and possibly get their name associated with a best supporting actor nomination. This is absolutely consistent with a longstanding pattern.

Netflix is a high-flying stock with a paper-thin profit margin and a somewhat shaky business model facing a fiercely competitive market. Under those conditions, aggressive PR is essential to maintaining stock prices. Relative to earnings, you would be hard pressed to find another major player that spends as much on efforts to depict itself as an influential, dynamic company on the verge of great things.

We could go back and forth on the accuracy of that picture and we could argue over where the line is between portraying a company in a positive light (which is management's obligation) and misrepresenting a company to pump up the stock. These are not trivial questions and I honestly don't know where I would come down on them (though I do have stronger opinions about the first than I do about the second).

For journalists, though, the ethics seem fairly clear. They have an obligation to give their readers and viewers an accurate picture. That means making a distinction grassroots and astroturf, between a word-of-mouth groundswell and PR-driven hype. You can't do a story on how everybody's talking about a new business without mentioning the company is paying everyone to talk about it/

This would tend to support the hack hypothesis

This would certainly qualify as making up things Niall Ferguson's right-wing audience would like to hear, though I'm not quite ready to give up on hack and ideologue

Nonetheless, I still prefer to think of music executives as rapacious creeps

I've been meaning to write something about AntennaTV's successful campaign to air episodes of Johnny Carson's Tonight Show in roughly their original form (rather than the clips and highlights that have been available up until now). My interest was mainly on the terrestrial superstation aspect of the story but it also raises some interesting intellectual property issues.

From the moment it arrived as a popular medium, television started shaking up the IP world. Previously near-worthless properties like Three Stooges shorts and old Hopalong Cassidy movies were suddenly worth millions (Cassidy star William Boyd made a fortune after buying up the rights to the character for $350K in the late Thirties). Then came broadcast syndication followed by satellite stations and VHS tapes, followed by DVDs, followed by streaming . Each new development brought additional potential revenue streams for copyright holders and endless waves of work for lawyers.

This was particularly true when music was involved. Dating back at least to Your Hit Parade, the two industries have had a symbiotic relationship. The recording industry provided content for the always voracious television; television provided both money and extraordinarily effective advertising. The ability of TV to promote was so powerful that numerous major careers grew out of sitcom storylines (Ricky Nelson and the Monkees to name a couple).

Music-heavy shows run into all sorts of problems when trying to tap into new revenue streams. Miami Vice had its DVD release significantly delayed and as did WKRP (which still isn't available with its original music).

The Carson Show faced similar problems:

The deal involved nearly six months of negotiations with Hollywood’s talent guilds and the American Federation of Musicians. The talks were complicated because there’s not much precedent for residual fees for full-length reruns of a vintage variety show re-airing on a digital broadcast channel. A few weeks ago the deal almost fell apart over cost issues that seemed insurmountable, but Compton and his team kept hammering away until compromises were reached.

Tribune execs are determined to keep each episode as intact as possible — which means negotiating new agreements for the show’s many musical performances on an episode-by-episode basis, in most cases.

When the release of a show is delayed by these negotiations, the standard response is to blame the shortsighted greed of the rights holders (that's what I always assumed), but Mark Evanier, who has been navigating the copyright waters of various media since the early Seventies, recently suggested an alternate explanation.

I think you're making the mistake of presuming that the fault in these cases is always with the music owners. There are instances when the company trying to license the music goes to them, makes a real insulting offer and says, "We're not paying another cent. Take it or leave it!" If you're in the business of licensing the rights to something you control, there are cases when you just don't want to empower those who use those tactics or you just don't want to lower your price too often.

If you're routinely charging $500 for the rights to something and you start getting offers of $100 ("Take it or leave it!") and you give in to enough of those offers, eventually the folks who were paying you $500 are going to start offering $100 ("Take it or leave it!"). In fact, sometimes you've assured the guy paying $500 that that's your absolute bottom line so a bit of your honor and ethics are at stake.

Very often, it works like this: Harry the Business Affairs Guy comes to you representing a company that wants to license a piece of music or a story or something you own. You tell him the price is $1000 and that's firm. He goes to his boss and says, "If we want this, it's going to be $1000. They won't sell us the rights for a cent less." The boss okays it and the fee is paid. Later, the boss hears that someone else got the same thing from you for $300…so you've made Harry look bad to his boss. That's not nice, it's not really ethical and it may cost you money the next time you have to deal with Harry.

All that said, there certainly are rights holders who are greedy or who think that in the long run, holding firm on a high price will yield more revenue even if it sometimes means losing out on some small amounts. Also, it has been known to happen that the rights holders are warring partners who can't agree on a lower price…or any price. I just wouldn't leap to assume that when a deal can't be made, the fault is always with the seller. Sometimes, not always.

Things that a data-driven company ought to know

This is the first of a couple of Netflix stories I'd like to get to this week. Just to review, the price of the stock is very high relative to earnings and since Netflix isn't acquiring significant assets such as large content libraries and has no plans for (or apparent interest in) radically cutting costs, the only reason to buy the stock is a belief that the company's subscriber base is on the verge of explosive growth.

Under those circumstances, it's not surprising that the leadership of Netflix was scrambling to explain its failure to meet growth estimates recently; it was the explanation itself that caught analysts off-guard.

From Wired:

Netflix is blaming its lower-than-expected US subscriber growth to changes to Americans’ credit cards.

In a letter to shareholders, the company said its over-optimisitic estimates for its third-quarter results were “driven in part by the ongoing transition to chip-based credit and debit cards.” In other words, the company is claiming that the number of US subscribers to Netflix didn’t meet what the company had expected for the third quarter in part because, well, fewer people than expected paid up.

“I read this Netflix quote and I scratched my head and thought, ‘What?'” says Ken Oros, a senior associate at The Strawhecker Group, which focuses on the electronics payments industry.

In the past few months, credit card issuers have been transitioning from cards without chips to ones with them, known as EMV technology, to help curtail credit card fraud, which you may have noticed. Card users have been receiving these new cards in the mail as banks rushed to meet the October 1 deadline. Since then, new liability rules have taken effect that now hold merchants who don’t switch over to the new technology liable for credit card fraud.

To industry experts watching the country’s shift to EMV, Netflix’s statement is somewhat surprising. After all, while brick-and-mortar businesses have had to update their processing systems to account for the new cards, the way we pay at digital businesses remains pretty much unchanged.

“It sounds like a bunch of customers received new cards at once and their old cards on file were inactive,” says Forrester analyst Sucharita Mupuru-Kodali. “Most people may not even realize all the things they need to change for autobilling and they forget until the next time they use Netflix.”

Regular users, however, would likely soon realize if they weren’t able to sign into their accounts because they hadn’t paid their bill or if their cards were no longer active. “I can’t imagine it’s meaningful and, even if it is sizable for one quarter, I’m sure people will realize soon enough,” she says. “Anyone who churns out probably wasn’t using the service much in the first place.”


...

When pressed on the issue during the earnings call, Netflix chief financial officer David Wells clarified the statement from its letter about why US subscriber growth may not have met expectations. “We think it’s a contributor,” Wells said of the chip-card transition. “It’s likely multi-factored, there may be other things going on here, but certainly the transition to the chip cards is not helping and that has to be a factor.”

From the Wall Street Journal:

But those in the payments industry say their systems in place should prevent any such billing disruptions.

Henry Helgeson, who runs a company that processes transactions for small businesses, described the Netflix explanation as “curious” because other merchants haven’t complained about such a problem.

“I would be surprised if this was an issue in the industry right now and we’re only hearing about it from Netflix,” said Mr. Helgeson, chief executive of Boston-based Cayan, which was formerly called Merchant Warehouse.

Other payment industry experts also expressed doubt that the new cards were the root of Netflix’s disappointing subscriber numbers.

“If this was an issue, it would be affecting every subscription-based business and it isn’t,” said one card-industry executive at a large financial institution.

For subscriber based companies with automatic billing, the issue of churn based on credit card disruptions is a familiar problem, and, in those companies I worked for, it was very much a known quantity. Executives closely tracked these numbers on a weekly, and in some cases daily, basis. The thought of a C level executive from one of these corporations standing up and saying "we lost a bunch of customers last quarter. We think it might be because of credit cards." would be unthinkable. What's worse is that, not only do they not have solid data on this problem, their informal estimates appear to be wildly off-base.

For Netflix, this is particularly embarrassing. At the end of the day, the value of business data and statistics relies almost entirely on your ability to tie them to drivers of profitability such as acquisition, retention, pricing and cost. Netflix has aggressively and successfully pushed the narrative of being a heavily, even uniquely data-driven company, but, by the management's own account, they seem to be failing to collect the data required to take advantage of all of those online behavior metrics. Knowing how often a show is paused or viewed to completion is only useful if those metrics tell us something about retention and reactions to upcoming price increases.

As with most posts in the Netflix thread, the main significance here is not in the story itself, but in what its coverage says about larger trends. In the Twenty-first Century, journalists have become enamored with data, but their understanding of statistics has not significantly improved and the results are, in practical terms, worse since common sense is increasingly pushed aside to make way for misinterpreted numbers and badly understood technical terms.

In addition to this lack of analytic understanding, the Netflix story also plays on other longstanding weaknesses of the press: an appetite for simplistic narratives (especially ddulite narratives); an infatuation with visionary CEOs; a tendency to defer to authority. Fortunately, with Netflix, the stakes are fairly low and gullible journalists can't cause that much damage. Unfortunately, these same weaknesses apply to journalists covering segments of the economy like financial services, and there the stakes are not low at all.

In case this sounds familiar.

As cracked.com observed, the fact that Apple chose this guy to represent the competition tells us loads about the way the company looks at its customers.

John Hodgman has some characteristically smart things to say about Rush Limbaugh:

I said traffic counting [was the worst job] because it was very boring and cold to sit out on the streets of New Haven in five pairs of pants—well, that’s an exaggeration; it was three pairs of pants—in November for hours and hours clicking buttons counting which cars go left, right, and forward. That was torturous, but I had the pleasure of listening to Rickie Lee Jones’ Flying Cowboys album on audio cassette, which had just come out at that time because I am an elderly man. I was just remembering how much I loved that record the other day, so that’s good.

When the double-A batteries from the Walkman that I stole from my college roommate—or borrowed without his permission—wore out after about seven minutes, I could then switch over and get a couple of hours of AM radio and that was the first time I ever listened to Rush Limbaugh, which was a fascinating experience. You don’t understand Rush Limbaugh’s appeal to listeners until you are standing alone on a street corner, freezing and angry. Then, even though he might be saying things that are completely anathema to your social and political point of view, when you are that angry, his voice comes upon you like a bomb. You just want to keep listening to him being angry, because it reflects how angry you are. So for people who feel alienated in the world because of changing cultural demographics or because they lose their jobs or whatever, I could understand why you want to listen to this monster because it’s a comfort and a solace to you.

Not that it's relevant, but this has always been my favorite Rickie Lee Jones song.

"But the world is turning faster than it did when I was young"

With any luck, the last we'll hear from these two

I've been arguing for a while that the make-up and culture and truly bizarre politics of the education reform movement (which is overwhelmingly made up of honest, well-meaning people) leave it exceptionally, perhaps uniquely vulnerable to grifters who can master the rhetoric. When you combine this vulnerability with plans that put billions upon billions of tax payer dollars up for grabs, things get ugly quickly.

Recently in Sacramento, they got downright hideous.

Charles Pierce points us to a remarkable series by Deadspin's Dave McKenna exploring the various scandals of Mayor Kevin Johnson. Along with wife Michelle Rhee, Johnson formed the ultimate ed reform power couple. Johnson was a former NBA star and up-and-coming politician. Rhee was, of course, the face of the movement. The press loved them, they had extensive lobbying connections and they were great at fund-raising. Johnson even started his own charter school system. They also created a political machine that defies brief description, but some excerpts will give you some idea.

Who's Funding Kevin Johnson's Secret Government?

For example: Stephanie Mash identified herself as “Stephanie Mash, Director of Governmental Affairs for African Americans for Mayor Kevin Johnson” and “Stephanie Mash, Esq., Office of Mayor Kevin M. Johnson City of Sacramento.” But Ballard Spahr’s filing indicates that she was never actually an employee for the city; instead, while helping plan and execute the NCBM coup [National Conference of Black Mayors -- MP], Mash was employed by Stand Up, a non-profit charter school advocacy firm founded by Johnson. Mash’s online resume makes no mention that she ever worked for Stand Up.

Fellow coup team member Mariah Sheriff used the title “Director of Governmental Affairs in Education, City of Sacramento, Office of Mayor Kevin M. Johnson” for years while serving the mayor. Her LinkedIn page identifies her as “Deputy Chief of Staff, Office of Mayor Kevin Johnson,” and says while there she focused on “education initiatives.” Ballard Spahr’s filing, however, says that Sheriff was with Stand Up, not the mayor’s office. Sheriff’s online resume makes no mention of Stand Up. Aisha Lowe used the title “interim director of African-American affairs” for the mayor’s office during the NCBM debacle. Ballard Spahr says Lowe was another Stand Up employee, never a civil servant.

The Sacramento city payroll office says there’s no record that Sheriff, Mash, or Lowe ever worked for the city.

...

With private operatives working out of City Hall and masquerading as public employees, the question is who’s bankrolling them—and the rest of the mayor’s off-the-reservation missions. It’s not hard to answer. Consider that since his 2008 election, Johnson has requested and received millions of dollars for Stand Up, the group that employed the fake civil servants, from the Walton Family Foundation, a conservative grant-giver backed by the founders of Wal-Mart and known for being hell-bent on spreading its pro-charter school gospel. Between 2012 and 2014, while he was planning and executing his NCBM coup, Johnson reported at least six grants from that foundation totaling $1.625 million.

And that’s just the Wal-Mart money the public knows about; Johnson has a history of not abiding by disclosure rules. In 2012, the California Fair Political Practices Commission (CFPPC), a panel charged with enforcing state financial disclosure laws, found that Johnson had failed to report at least 25 donations totaling $3.1 million made at his direction to his non-profits, including a $500,000 payment to Stand Up made by the Walton Family Foundation. State law requires that every gift over $5,000 must be reported. (The commission also found that Johnson hid a $200,000 donation to Stand Up he’d requested from the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation. The Los Angeles Times reported last month that the Broad Foundation was planning to fund “a major expansion of charter schools in Los Angeles.”)


...


The Walton Family Foundation is also a massive financial supporter of Students First, another financially flush group. Founded by Michelle Rhee, it houses its headquarters in the same office building in downtown Sacramento as Johnson’s Stand Up. In 2013 alone, the Walton Family Foundation gave $8 million to Rhee’s non-profit.



...

Johnson’s bewildering gaggle of foundations—Stand Up is just one of at least seven 503-C organizations he controls—have long lent an aura of shadiness to his administration. Since taking office, he’s directed big corporations to donate gobs of money to his non-profits and to St. HOPE, his chain of public charter schools. And his behest filings indicate that the groups regularly share money with each other, meaning it’s effectively one really deep pool of money for Johnson to swim in. These gifts can have the impact of campaign donations, but aren’t subject to campaign-finance regulations.

“It’s almost like a parallel government structure has been created,” Common Cause’s Derek Cressman told the News & Review in 2012 of Johnson’s multi-coffered set-up. “But one that doesn’t have the same transparency and accountability.”


...

NCBM brass understand why Johnson would cover up how Stand Up funded his presidential run. NCBM has a long, close relationship with the National Education Association, a massive teachers union with deep anti-charter school leanings. The NEA website lists NCBM as a partner, and NEA president Reg Weaver was a featured speaker at the 2008 NCBM convention in New Orleans, alongside Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Having a charter school zealot in charge of NCBM wouldn’t sit well with the group’s old guard.

“The black mayors are not buying the charter schools, period,” former NCBM president Robert Bowser told me last year.

As we know now, Johnson’s takeover mission went horribly, so he never got to exploit the pipeline into the black community for charter schools that he tried to get from NCBM. But while the Waltons didn’t get much ideological bang for their bucks, they didn’t walk away with nothing to show for the millions of dollars they threw at Johnson. In 2013, Johnson successfully lobbied the city council to repeal Sacramento zoning regulations that had kept Wal-Mart out of the city.

The good news is that Johnson won't be running for a third term, but that may be due to an entirely different set of scandals.

Martian Climate Truthers

It is very easy to hit the point of diminishing returns with Rush Limbaugh, particularly with the drip-drip-drip pace of a blog. I think there is value in the exhaustive Franken's Big Fat Idiot approach. If you're going to attack a despicable figure, there is something to be said for not stopping until you've left no stone upon stone and salted the ground so that nothing there will grow again.

Playing outrage of the week with someone like Limbaugh quickly degenerates into morbid repetition that ceases to inform and may perversely end up increasing the relevance and respectability of the subject. If you're going to quote Limbaugh, you need a better reason than simple offensiveness.

That said, it is worth checking in from time to time. Lots of people regularly listen to these shows. Not all of audience is in full agreement, but these rants are striking some kind of chord and some of them are definitely worth analyzing.

Take, for instance, the following passage noted by John Holbo at Crooked Timber.

Pay close attention to the underlying attitudes, the paranoia, the conspiracy mindset, the resentment and distrust of the scientific establishment.  A substantial part of the conservative coalition feels this way, probably not a majority, but a large enough block to have an effective veto in the Republican primaries.

RUSH LIMBAUGH: There’s so much fraud. Snerdly came in today ‘what’s this NASA news, this NASA news is all exciting.’ I said yeah they found flowing water up there. ‘No kidding! Wow! Wow!’ Snerdly said ‘flowing water!?’ I said ‘why does that excited you? What, are you going there next week? What’s the big deal about flowing water on Mars?’ ‘I don’t know man but it’s just it’s just wow!’ I said ‘you know what, when they start selling iPhones on Mars, that’s when it’ll matter to me.’ I said ‘what do you think they’re gonna do with this news?’ I said ‘look at the temperature data, that has been reported by NASA, has been made up, it’s fraudulent for however many years, there isn’t any warming, there hasn’t been for 18.5 years. And yet, they’re lying about it. They’re just making up the amount of ice in the North and South Poles, they’re making up the temperatures, they’re lying and making up false charts and so forth. So what’s to stop them from making up something that happened on Mars that will help advance their left-wing agenda on this planet?’ And Snerdly paused ‘oh oh yeah you’re right.’ You know, when I play golf with excellent golfers, I ask them ‘does it ever get boring playing well? Does it ever get boring hitting shot after shot where you want to hit it?’ And they all look at me and smile and say ‘never.’ Well folks, it never gets boring being right either. Like I am. But it doesn’t mean it is any less frustrating. Being right and being alone is a challenging existence. OK so there’s flowing water on Mars. Yip yip yip yahoo. You know me, I’m science 101, big time guy, tech advance it, you know it, I’m all in. But, NASA has been corrupted by the current regime. I want to find out what they’re going to tell us. OK, flowing water on Mars. If we’re even to believe that, what are they going to tell us that means? That’s what I’m going to wait for. Because I guarantee, let’s just wait and see, this is September 28, let’s just wait and see. Don’t know how long it’s going to take, but this news that there is flowing water on Mars is somehow going to find its way into a technique to advance the leftist agenda. I don’t know what it is, I would assume it would be something to do with global warming and you can—maybe there was once an advanced civilization. If they say they found flowing water, next they’re going to find a graveyard.

Meta-perception and plausible deniability

Given the readership of this blog, I may be starting a fight I can't win by criticizing social science research in fairly general terms, but I have long had the suspicion that researchers in fields like political science aren't paying enough attention to certain aspects of the data, both in terms of what they gather and what they focus upon. Specifically, I would like to see more time spent studying and discussing what I'm calling meta-perception. The use of the term appears to vary somewhat from user to user. My definition is perceptions of perceptions. We spend a great deal of time asking people "what do you think?" when the operative question might be "what do you think other people think?"

This question is particularly relevant when trying to figure out what is going on in primaries. I previously argued that a great deal of the violent fluctuations we saw in the 2012 Republican race could be explained by voters who were unhappy with Romney trying to decide behind whom the other voters who were unhappy with Romney would coalesce. Of course, those other voters were also engaged in the same activity. Opinions of candidates shouldn't change all that rapidly, but opinions of opinions of opinions certainly might.

One of the reasons that meta-perceptions get pushed to the side may be because they very often track with plain old perceptions. The causality behind this relationship goes both ways. Because of social norming, we instinctively tend to align our views with what we perceive as being the consensus view and we also tends to project our views on to other people. Both of these factors mean that the questions "what do you think?" and "what do you think they think?" will tend to get similar answers, but as with so many situations, it is when variables that normally correlate veer away from each other that things get interesting.

Check out this excerpt from a recent Paul Krugman post:

But the odd thing about these revelations is that they weren’t at all revelatory. We shouldn’t have needed McCarthy blurting out the obvious for the press to acknowledge that the Benghazi investigations have utterly failed to find any wrongdoing; and Clinton has been in public life a long time, so that her strengths were or should have been well known.

Let's phrase this in a different way. We would expect a strong correlation between new information and changes in perceptions. The more information, the bigger the changes in my worldview. That's not at all the case here. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, McCarthy's comments were in no way informative to anyone who has closely followed the story, let alone to members of the Washington press corps or editors of national newspapers, and yet the statements had a powerful and immediate effect on the narrative. That's the odd part.

Why should the conversation change so radically just because a senator refers to something that everyone knows, something that everyone has always known? Because the change came, not in perception but in meta-perception. When McCarthy forgot not to use his outdoor voice, he created an I-know-you-know-I-know situation. The journalists covering the story and the pundits discussing it lost their plausible deniability.

Papering the house -- Twentieth Century style

As a follow-up to our previous post on "crowd-casting," this excerpt from a 1996 column by Mark Evanier gives you some idea of the harsh economics of "papering the house" and of the always questionable ethics of show business. Also note the role asymmetry of information plays.

The members of The Rock Group were in the green room, finalizing some details when the Entertainment Director sauntered in. This was the gent who'd hired them and was in charge of keeping the casino's showroom filled with the top acts. I will call this man Mr. Beef and if you'd seen him, you'd understand the name. Just trust me on this: The man was Mr. Beef.

"Sad, sad," Mr. Beef was muttering. Everyone asked him what was so sad.

"I just checked some of the other hotels," he said. "Johnny Mathis is sold out over at Caesar's. Don Rickles is sold out down at the Sahara. The Everly Brothers are just about sold out over at Bally's. Everyone in town is selling out tonight…

"…except you guys. I just checked and it looks like we're only gonna be at about half-capacity for both shows tonight…and on a Friday. Looks like you guys ain't a draw no more."

The group's manager immediately jumped in and complained that the hotel had done insufficient publicity. They always say that. In show business, from a performer's standpoint, there is no such thing as sufficient publicity.

"We did the same amount we did last week for Lou Rawls," said Mr. Beef. "The same amount we do for everyone."

The leader of the group spoke up. "When we played here last January, we sold out every night."

Mr. Beef grunted. "That don't prove anything. That was during the Consumer Electronics Show. With a convention that size in town, my Aunt Tillie could stand on-stage and knit for two hours and sell out. No, this week proves if your act has any drawing power and you ain't close to sold out. If you were sold out, it would be a different story. But as it is, I don't think we can ever book you again. And when word gets around of how badly you did, I wouldn't count on you ever playing Vegas again."

By now, the manager was turning the color of Ovaltine. "What do you expect us to do?" he demanded.

"Do whatever you have to," said Mr. Beef as he walked out of the room, having maintained his casual demeanor throughout the entire verbal assault and battery. He had just pulled the pin on a grenade and he knew it.

It was 7:00 — one hour until the first of their two shows that night. The Rock Group had just been put on notice that if they didn't sell-out this week (or come darn close), they would never play The Big Hotel again and might never get a booking in Vegas. The Small Crisis on stage was put on hold for a moment while all the principals in the operation huddled there in the green room, considering what to do about The Big Crisis.

They talked for no more than five minutes. There weren't a lot of options to consider: They could hope for the best…or they could buy their way out of this.
Let's do the math on that second option together, shall we? The showroom could house 1,200 people for a performance. They were about half-sold for each show tonight so that's 600 empty seats to fill each performance.

But maybe 100 seats each show are reserved for guests of the hotel, guests of the performers, reviewers, etc. So that left 500 per show to fill.

The tickets were twenty-five bucks (today, they're probably forty). So we're talking about $12,500 worth of admissions.

That's per show.

There were two performances that evening so double it. To  buy out their own house, The Rock Group had to pay $25,000.

That's just for one night.

They were in for a week, remember. They'd probably sell a little better Saturday night and the hotel wouldn't expect them to go absolutely clean on the mid-week nights. But packing the place for the week could easily run from $100,000 to $150,000. So to keep the Vegas door open would be expensive.

They debated quickly. The consensus was that this week was not indicative of their true drawing power. Several conventions were in the city, their themes unlikely to attract the kind of audience that would flock to see The Rock Group. "It's just a bad week," the manager said. "Next time we come back, we'll be more careful about checking what's in town…and we'll spend a few bucks of our own on advertising."

They decided to buy their way out of it. The manager sat down and wrote out a check for that night's tickets. An assistant ran to the box office and completed the transaction.

But that was only a partial solution to The Big Crisis. The hotel, being a Vegas hotel, was less interested in selling those seats than they were in having people sit in them — especially people who would gamble on their way in or out.

Instantly, every spare member of The Rock Group's entourage was summoned and the tickets were divided up. "Give them out to anyone who promises to use them," the manager shouted. "And make sure you give out the eight o'clock tickets first!" They all scattered in different directions.

Some headed out into The Big Hotel Casino. Others ran to nearby hotels to pass out their freebies. Still others approached tourists out on the Strip, out on Las Vegas Boulevard. "Would you like to see The Rock Group tonight? Absolutely free?" they'd ask passers-by. Inevitably, some thought it was a scam of some type…but lots of folks go to Las Vegas for the freebies, few and far-between though they may be.

...

On my way out of the hotel the next day, I ran into the manager of The Rock Group and he told me that Mr. Beef was quite pleased with how they'd filled the room the night before. He also told me that they were contracting with one of the bus-tour companies to distribute some of the tickets they'd likely be giving out for the rest of their run. "What you're doing here is kind of expensive," I said.

"True," he replied. "But if it buys us a contract renewal here, it will have been worth it." (It didn't. In fact, I think that week was the last time The Rock Group ever played Las Vegas.)

 Ten days later, The Stand-Up Comic sent me an article that had run in one of the Vegas papers. Headlined, "Seasonal Slump Socks Showrooms," it discussed how poorly all of the shows in Vegas had fared the previous week. It noted that, of Johnny Mathis, Don Rickles, the Everly Brothers and The Rock Group, only The Rock Group had filled its seats and that they had only accomplished this by "papering the house" (i.e., giving out free tickets). The other showrooms, they said, were all at half-capacity every night.

"What does this mean?" I asked my friend.

"It means," he said, "that Mr. Beef found a way to get his showroom filled and to get The Rock Group to pay for it."

The Big Hotel didn't get to be The Big Hotel by being dumb.

Education reform

Go and read Atrios' useful perspective on education reform.  A broad movement can have many goals and it can be helpful to acknowledge all of them. 

Well, this looks interesting

I want to be careful not to get ahead of myself on this -- still waiting for some good, solid reporting before I get too confident -- but, assuming things are as they appear, here are a few quick thoughts, some or all of which may have to be retracted as I learn more.



The story of SpaceX has always been as much or more innovation through disruption than innovation through technological advances. (And yes, this is one case where I actually do buy the beneficial disruption narrative.) They took tech that had been sitting on the shelves of a sclerotic industry for years and literally got it off the ground. I'd argue that the auto industry is relatively responsive and fast moving compared to aerospace, but Musk still seems to have managed to do something similar here, partially I suspect by requiring less testing than companies like Volvo, GM, Mercedes-Benz.

Still, this is a very cool development, particularly in terms of data. Tesla has always had a progressive approach with intellectual property. If this liberal attitude extends to sharing data...

This should (but won't) cut the head off of the myth of the regulatory monster holding back all progress on autonomous vehicles. We can all ignore the obvious fig leaf of "advising drivers to keep their hands on the wheel." There will be hands-free driving (check out the video) and there will be accidents (though probably fewer than there would have been without the technology). If Tesla didn't feel they had a handle on the regulatory and liability issues, they wouldn't have rolled out the system.

This should also make people rethink Google's role in the narrative. Tesla's approach appears to be entirely different (Musk doesn't even have plans to use LIDAR for his cars in the future). Even the companies that are using a more similar approach appear to be advancing on their own faster than Google.

Of course, Mountain View is filled smart people and a tremendous amount of great innovation and research flow from the company, but its "leadership" in the field of autonomous vehicles has always had as much to do with PR as with engineering.

Dean Dad on assessments

Of interest to our discussion on education reform:

Instead, I’m a fan of the “few, big, dumb questions” approach. At the end of a program, can students do what they’re supposed to be able to do? How do you know? Where they’re falling short, what are you planning to do about it? Notice that the unit of analysis is the program. For assessment to work, it can’t be another way of doing personnel evaluations. And it can’t rely on faculty self-reporting. The temptation to game the system is too powerful; over time, those who cheat would be rewarded and those who tell the truth would be punished. That’s a recipe for entropy.

I very much agree with this point of view.  It is hard enough to measure on thing well -- when you try to do both personal evaluation and program evaluation using a single measure then you have problems.  If you make the tests "high stakes" for one party and "low stakes" for the other then interests are misaligned.

Everybody has an interest in how many students from a particular program pass the actuarial exams, because both the students and the faculty want the same thing (people to pass).  This has made these tests look good as tools for evaluating both students and programs (similar value can be found in any licensing exam). 

But to pull apart "the course is poor" and "the instructor is poor" is a very hard thing to do, like with all correlated variables.  And it presumes that the largest effect size is the teacher, which may be true if the teacher is extremely poor.  But like a lot of tasks that improve with practice, I suspect teaching ability will end up being a second order effect for experienced teachers. 

Teach For America's aspect dominance*

From a pretty good Slate article by Jessica Huseman [emphasis added]:

In the current parlance of Vegas schools, teachers are now “superheroes.” Beginning in January of this year, the city embarked on a rambunctious teacher-recruitment campaign titled “Calling All Heroes” that aimed to bring about 2,600 new teachers to the district. The effort—which could be considered creative, desperate, or desperately creative, depending on your point of view—featured the superintendent of the Clark County School District, the nation’s fifth-largest, zip-lining down Vegas’ famous Fremont Street. Last winter, Vegas school officials enlisted volunteers in Boston to spell out the district’s website address into a Boston snow bank. And in a district-created Web video, two elementary school–aged news anchors announced: “Breaking news! Turns out that we are in crisis, as we have a severe hero teacher shortage!”

...

As baby boomers retire and applications drop to both traditional education schools and alternative programs like Teach for America, a growing number of school districts are expected to face teacher shortages comparable to Vegas’. But Sin City’s attempted remedies might be most instructive in teaching us what not to do when scrambling to fill teacher vacancies nationally. The emphasis has been on using glitzy, if mostly inexpensive, strategies to get teachers in the door with far less focus on holding onto veterans who are already there.

This is followed by quotes from two new teachers: Jayne Gray, a veteran from Los Angeles and Jessica Recarey a first-year Teach for America recruit. You might assume that TFA supplied a significant share of the applicants. You'd be wrong.

I don't want to single out Huseman on this. Most stories that mention the program give the impression that it's fairly large and many suggest that it's cost effective. Neither is the case.

From Wikipedia:

Year	# of Applicants	# of Incoming Corps Members	# of Regions	Operating Budget
2003	15,708	1,646	20	$29.8M
2004	13,378	1,626	22	$34.0M
2005	17,348	2,181	22	$38.4M
2006	18,968	2,464	25	$55.6M
2007	18,172	2,895	26	$77.9M
2008	24,718	3,614	29	$122.3M
2009	35,178	4,065	35	$153.4M
2010	46,359	4,493	40	$176.0M
2011	47,911	5,066	43	$229M
2012	48,442	5,800[21]	46	$244M
2013	57,000	6,000[22]	48

TFA is a big deal in terms of influence and fund-raising but, in terms of boots on the ground, it is a fairly minor player. It is widely perceived as being much larger than it is partly because the people behind the organization are so good at managing the media (you can be almost certain that Huseman didn't just happen on a TFA recruit when looking for new teachers to interview).

We can go back and forth on the role of TFA in education reform in general, but if we're talking about ways to address a teacher shortage, the table above makes it difficult to treat the program as more than a footnote.


* "Aspect dominance in forest ecology typically refers to the plant life embedded within an ecosystem community that is most apparent or obvious. This generally will be the plant life that is tallest and most readily observed. However, this approach ignores the life existing on ground level, which may have a greater biomass. This is illustrated in biology by the “Daisy Field” metaphor. Imagine that you are walking through a meadow and you come upon an area covered in daisies in full bloom. Because the daisies rise above the groundcover to form a canopy, it is human nature to assume that daisies are the dominant species and to refer to the area as a daisy field. However, the reality is that grass may in fact be the dominant species, it just may be the eye is drawn to the daisies.


From What You See is not Always What You Get:Aspect Dominance as a Confounding Factor in the Determination of Fishing Dependent Communities
Steve Jacob, Michael Jepson, and Frank L. Farmer