Fear & Loathing

A Post-Newspaper Era

Michael Kinsley says if the New York Times disappears, there will still be news. Life After Newspapers. I'm not so sure. Since most Web news is repurposed content from newspapers, especially financial and investigative reporting, and because few if any sites can monetize or profit from online news distribution, when newspapers die I fear there will be little to replace them. Certainly NOT television.

Posted via email from glenn's posterous

What's In a Name?

SciFi Channel is all set to become Syfy. But no, despite what CNet News implies, it is not the lawyers' fault.  The point here is a rather arcane one about trademark law, which prohibits use of a generic term as a protected description of goods or services.  The CNet article seems to suggest that "SciFi Channel" could not be trademarked because "Sci-Fi" is generic.  But if the mark is unique and the entire phrase has not been allowed into the public domain, as in Science Channel, there should be no problem.  So on this one, don't blame me!!

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As American Gun Culture Spreads, U.S. Media Ignore the Parallels

Watching BBC News last evening on DirecTV, I learned that Germany has suffered a rash of high school shootings over the past 8 years. School Killings Shake Germany to the Core [IHT]. Surprisingly (or not, sadly) we in the United States hardly ever hear of serious issues facing other nations, even when in reality they are American cultural exports.  In the aftermath of Virginia Tech, one would think a story like this -- how adolescent shootings are a dark side of almost all developed nations without gun control -- would have received more attention.

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These Guys Can Sure Play

via youtube.com

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Wasting More Tax Dollars

So exactly why are we paying for the "DTV transition" anyway? One can argue that taxpayers have a moral obligation to subsidize lower-class people in times of economic change. Obama urges Congress to postpone DTV transition [CNET News]. But did we pay for folks in the 1920s to switch from horses to automobiles, or in the 1960s to switch from B&W to color televisions? No way. 

In my view, having taxpayers foot the bill for "DTV converter boxes" would be like sending everyone a check from the Treasury so they can subscribe to cable or satellite television. It's completely absurd and a waste of money.  Sorry, Rachelle Chong, but that's how I see it.

Frittering Away the Franchise

PC World raved about Blockbuster's newly announced DVD set-top box for WiFi-enabled, downloaded movie rentals. But I disagree and think the BB franchise is played out. At the Motley Fool, Rick Aristotle Munarriz writes: 

Blockbuster is late to the game with something redundant, unnecessary and ultimately inferior. For what? Does anyone know where Blockbuster sees itself in three years? I sure don't. I'm not sure Blockbuster does either.... Instead of encouraging foot traffic in its stores, it is shooing people away to their couches.

Blockbuster is a Box Buster. Very well said.  When was the last time anyone walked into a Blockbuster store to rent movies?  This is 2008, not 1988, and things have changed, big time.  Wayne Huizenga may be a genius serial entrepreneur, but his flock is clearly not cut from the same mold.

Joe the Plumber

Call it "snoozer 2" if you want, but I thought last evening's third and final presidential debate was completely moronic. Neither candidate had good presence, neither stayed on message, neither actually responded to the questions and both engaged in the ritualistic pretense that they had not directed the campaigns to go negative. And then there was the repeated talk about, and to (via camera stares), "Joe the Plumber" and how "the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression" was affecting him.

What a bunch of crap. They spoke at each other, not to each other, and neither cares a hoot about anything except capaign donations. As the post-debate TV focus groups pointed out, neither Obama or McCain has ever lived a middle class lifestyle and both just pretend to have empathy for common folk. Joe, McCain says "you're rich" and Obama says "I've got your back." You're on your own buddy. With this level of campaign -- let alone government -- incompetence, you're definitely adrift without a paddle.

Snoozer

I agree entirely. Debate II: Can It Get Any More Boring? [CSMonitor.com].

Funny Is As Funny Does

Yes, Tina Fey was funny again impersonating Sarah Palin on Saturday night, but not that funny. Politics and Palin Lure Viewers to SNL [Reuters]..

Madmen

Last week's prime time speech by Pres. Bush was hardly reassuring. He was scared, shrill and stiff, almost the opposite of FDR as he spoke gloomily of the economic risks arising from the subprime mortgage crisis. If the point is to provide comfort and stability to investors and financial markets -- and what else can the government really do? -- it failed wildly.

Bob Herbert writes in When Madmen Reign [NYTimes.com] that

[w]hen President Bush went on television last week to drum up support for the bailout package, he looked almost dazed, like someone who’d just climbed out of an auto wreck.

But that's only half the story. By proposing to buy up failed mortgage assets (defaulted loans on real estate properties worth less than the oustanding loan balances) rather than inject capital and liquidity into the market, the government was offering simply to rescue these lenders from their own financial miscalculations. The comfort needed was reassuring depositors that their insured savings are safe and reasuring credit-seeking businesses that the Federal Reserve would ease up on the money supply to support the availability of lending capital.

So instead of reassurance and leadership, we got fear-mongering coupled with a straight-forward bailout, which spooked conservatives into limbo. Coming on the heels of Bear Stearns, Lehman Bros. and AIG, all now defunct and brokered firesales by the US government, investors saw a collapsing house of cards, while market professionals saw a financial policy bereft of new ideas and paralyzed by indecision.

I don't think the question to be asked in light of yesterday's Wall Street stock plunge is who caused the bailout plan to fail in the House of Representatives. Instead, it's why a bailout plan was being peddled in the first place and why no one focused on the psychology of investors and markets. In the 1930s, FDR closed all banks temporarily -- a "bank holiday" he called it -- to prevent a nationwide run and announced that fear itself was the only risk. Now our leaders cannot even "throw money at the problem," something legislators have been great at for decades.

There's a propular cable television series called Madmen on AMC. Reality is even better (worse)!!