POLLS

Poll results are not news. There is no such thing as an unbiased poll because there is no such thing as an unbiased pollster. They're all being paid by somebody who wants their point of view proven, and pollsters get ahead the same way everybody else does, by telling the boss what he wants to hear. On top of the bias of the pollsters, there is also a bias on the part of the media who decide which poll results to report and which poll results not to report.

As if that weren't bad enough, at the end of each story about the latest poll, the newsbabe often cautions the audience that the poll featured in the story is unscientific. They might as well waste your time with an astrology report.

MUSIC IN THE MOVIES

I blame John Williams and Steven Spielberg. Once upon a time moviemakers evoked emotions in the audience using story, character, poetry, imagery and a host of other tools. Nowadays every minute of every movie is juiced up with a Wagnerian soundtrack. The moviemakers have decided that the viewer is either too stupid or too insensitive to be trusted to have his own feelings about a scene.

MUSIC IN THE STORES

It has become universally accepted that if you've got a public space, you've got to have music playing in it because music reduces stress and masks unpleasant noise.

That rationale is being disastrously misapplied.

Stress is not reduced when I have to order my sandwich by screaming over the soundtrack to your life.

Stress is not reduced when an otherwise pleasant song is interrupted every twelve seconds by a distorted, piercing voice on the PA, "Associate report to lumber."

Stress is not reduced when music is played on a sound system that cannot reproduce music.

If the ambient noise in the workplace or the car is bad enough to cause stress, playing music loud enough to drown it out is going to be more stressful.

There is a wide range of musical tastes, and in this country people are pretty militant about their musical likes and dislikes. If you've got a hundred people working in your warehouse, playing hip hop is going ito set half the nerves on edge. Playing Flatt and Scruggs will set off the other half.

SHAKESPEARE

Point number one. Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast, not beast. Not beast as in animal. Breast as in chicken breast.

Point number two. At every literary discussion there's a tiresome turd who likes to point out that Shakespeare mixed his metaphors in Hamlet when he wrote of taking arms against a sea of troubles.

That person is a shithead.

This is not a mixed metaphor. Any saltwater bay, inlet, estuary or fjord is referred to as an "arm" of the sea. Since the beginning of literature, salt water has been used as a metaphor for blood. So in Hamlet's case his troubled flesh and blood body is metaphorically a sea of troubles. So if he pits his own arms (get it?), arms of that troubled sea, against his own body in an attempt to take his own life, we see that the metaphor isn't mixed at all. Shakespeare's insertion of the phrase "to take arms" (implying arms of war) adds a pun to a metaphor that's already three levels deep. The metaphor isn't mixed at all. It's carefully blended.

IF YOU'RE GOING TO USE A CLICHE, USE IT PROPERLY

Carrot and stick. This is not reward and punishment. This is a reward that is promised, but never delivered.

"You can't eat your cake and have it, too." That's the way it makes sense. "You can't have your cake and eat it, too," is logically wrong.

"Forte," meaning one's strong point, has one syllable and it rhymes with "snort." It's a fencing term. There are two particular points on a sword. Near the tip is a weak point called a "foible." Near the hilt is a strong point called a "forte." The word does not come from the musical term "forte," meaning "loud."

ECONOMIC INCENTIVES

Lately there's been a lot of talk among the Arkansas movers and shakers about offering businesses economic incentives to locate facilities here. Tax breaks is what we're talking about. Giant wealthy corporations want free use of infrastructure paid for by taxing some of the lowest paid workers in the country..

I've worked in a lot of states for a lot of bosses. They'll take what incentives they can get; but what they really want, no state in the union can offer them. They want an educated workforce that'll show up on time, sober, never call in sick when they aren't really sick, never pilfer and never goof off or pass shoddy work even when they're unsupervised.

If Arkansas workers had a deserved reputation for that kind of work ethic, there'd be no trouble attracting industry. We certainly can't match the kind of corporate tax-bribe incentives that can be offered by our wealthier neighbors.

COST OF HEALTH INSURANCE

My health insurance premiums almost doubled this year, and chances are yours did, too. I've read a lot of complicated explanations as to why this happened, but nobody has dared to offer the real explanation.

Every hospital has a roomful of people called "resource allocation executives" or "billing consultants" or something like that. Whatever euphemism is used, what they actually do is find out how much insurance each patient has and figure out a legally justifiable course of treatment to get as much of that insurance money as possible. They're only doing their job if they max out the insurance, medicare and medicaid of every patient that comes in the door.

So it should come as no surprise when every year the insurance companies run out of money and not only raise rates, but also every year they send you a "policy clarification," which is a list of treatments for which they will no longer pay.

So you go to your GP with a tummy ache. He refers you to a diagnostician, who sends you to a specialist. They're not running up the bill so much as subdividing the responsibility. The nurses are actually going to fix you up. The doctors are afraid to touch you. Why else would they each pay a quarter million in malpractice insurance premiums each year? So insurance money from your tummy ache has to pay three doctors and their staffs and their insurance companies and your HMO and don't forget about the lab work, and once you get into a hospital your diagnosis goes up to the resource allocation executives; and if they haven't been getting enough billable hours on that fancy new multimillion dollar butt-scanner they invested in, you're getting a butt-scan and a bill for it.

Ultimately the patient pays for health care. It might be in the form of insurance premiums or taxes, but in a statistical economic entropic way, money runs from the patient to the doctor. Along the way, money gets siphoned off by other interests that really don't add to the quality of the medical care.

THE JENIN OPERATION

The Israeli soldiers took potshots at the press who tried to cover the Jenin operation. They prohibited examination by a U.N. panel that wanted to check for evidence of war crimes. Eventually, after the Israeli pullout, an international group conducted a cursory investigation and found no evidence of massacre, but some evidence of possible war crimes. When it comes to these two parties, it's always going to come down to "did not,did so," but Israel's actions leave the impression that they intended to exclude witnesses.

Two days later, the White House announced withdrawal from a treaty that would set up an international court to try war crimes.

The timing of that action suggests that Arial Sharon called the White House, told George W. what to do and George W. did it quickly and without debate. It looks to me like Sharon has George W. completely buffaloed.

It takes one kind of balls to stand up to your enemies when they're doing wrong. It also takes balls to stand up to your allies when they might be stepping over the line. Friendship doesn't require that you ignore the transgressions of your friend.

SANDWICHES

As I travel around the state, I prefer to stop at local cafes and diners rather than national chain outfits. If you own one of these places take note:

1) A club sandwich is a double-decker BLT with ham on toast. A club sandwich is NOT just any sandwich plus bacon. A reuben is corned beef, saurkraut, swiss cheese and thousand island dressing on rye. A reuben is NOT just any sandwich with corned beef as its primary meat. And if it's made with ROAST beef, it's a roast beef sandwich, not a reuben.

2) If you mix freshly made french fries with stale french fries, the stale ones are still going to be stale. Potatoes cost a dime apiece, for crying out loud. You're not properly economizing by stretching out my order with eight or ten clammy, stale fries.

I'm not singling any of you out. Half of you are doing one of these things. If you can't make a reuben because you can't always get rye bread, then call it a corned beef sandwich.

STAR WARS AND THE JAR JAR BINKS RACIAL STEREOTYPE SCANDAL

The whole Star Wars universe is populated by ethnic stereotypes. It took four movies before you noticed? The evil empire is obviously German. The soldiers are called storm troopers, the officers wear German gray wool uniforms. Darth Vader's helmet is a 20th Century German helmet with an exaggerated neck flange. Hell, they do everything but goose step. Mos Isley Spaceport, referred to by Obi Wan Kenobe as a "wretched hive of scum and villainy" is a thinly disguised caricature of arab North Africa, right down to the fashions worn by its populace. The only non-muppet fat guy in the whole of episode IV is a good-ol-boy named "Porkins" and he has the only southern accent in the movie. I'm sure Mr. Lucas does not think of himself as a racist, but up until the Jar Jar Binks incident, he was picking on races that don't maintain cadres of sensitivity advocates.

Movies in general are loaded with racist stereotypes. If you're making a movie and you go to the storage room where they keep the bad guys, you're going to find Germans, Arabs and Southerners. If you make a movie about a southern cop who isn't a racist, you've got to have a scene explaining THAT he isn't a racist and another scene explaining WHY he isn't a racist.

And what about job stereotypes? Speaking as a scientist, I resent the portrayal of scientists as megalomaniacal madmen bent on manipulating technology to satisfy their twisted lust for raw power. Of course, the stereotype applies in my case, but on behalf of my less ambitious colleagues I do resent the stereotype. I read an article review in Skeptical Inquirer that listed the most dangerous occupations in the movies. Scientist was number one. If you're a movie scientist, you've either invented something that an evil scientist will kill you over, or you're an evil scientist bent on taking over the world, in which case Batman's going to getcha at the end of the movie.

There are perfectly good reasons why storytellers go for stereotypes. Mainly it's a big time saver. If your story requires that one character be a racist, if you make him a southerner, you don't have to spend ten minutes of screen time constructing the realistic psychological justification for his attitude. It's a prepackaged character that's been sold to the audience before. A southern racist is as familiar and comfortable to your audience as a big mac and fries.

Like so many products of our civilization, stereotypes come in two flavors, fashionable and unfashionable. Empire-building Germans? Sure, why not? I done seen it on the Tee Vee. Rasta Binks? How dare you! Are those stereotypes true or false? Sometimes and sometimes. Do movies cause us to accept those stereotypes in real life? Yup. Hollywood tries to set our default assumptions. So does your church. So does your government. So does your boss. So does your family.

In summary, there is no summary. This is a rant, not an essay.

AOL TIME WARNER SHAREHOLDER MEETING

I squirm in my seat when I see some poor guy tricked into a career-ending job.

The new CEO at AOL Time/Warner is named Parsons, and he's just swallowed a piranha. His address at the shareholders' meeting confirmed my suspicions. His talking points outlining his goals included a half-dozen vagaries like "restore shareholder confidence" and "re-energize the work force." Then there was one substantive goal: "more clearly delineate the operations of the various divisions."

Uh oh.

Looks to me like the board realized the AOL merger was a mistake and hired Parsons to preside over the expected decline in shareholder value. Separating the divisional operations looks like preparations for a spin-off of an AOL-batross. Then when the worst is over and there's no place to go but up, the board might fire Parsons and hire a white guy. It'd look like the black guy ruined the company and the white guy saved it. With that on his resume he won't be considered for any more top level jobs.

The sad part is that the AOL board of directors is going to look very liberal and progressive for putting a black CEO at the head of such a huge company, and then that progressiveness is likely to look like a mistake. I don't mean to suggest racist subterfuge on the part of the AOL board. I don't think they cared what flavor the sucker was.

I wonder if Parsons fully appreciates what he's stepped into and what the racial inferences are likely to be. It might be that he knows what's going on and he's just taking the paycheck and riding out the storm. His address suggested no plan to make AOL profitable (a desire, perhaps, but no plan), which would be the only possible way he could claim success.

I'll bet there's a long list of people who turned that job down. It'd be interesting to know how many. I don't want to sound like I pity this Parsons guy. He's about to get a milion bucks just to dink around the executive suite for a year. How many people are paid a million bucks with the expectation of failure? Outside of sports, that is.

In the CNBC interview, Parsons gratefully noted that the people attending the shareholders' meeting didn't give him a hard time about the recent loss of shareholder value or about the nebulous nature of his recovery plan. The guys that go to these meetings are institutional investors and mutual fund managers and representatives of brokerage houses and guys like that. They're grown men and wise in the ways of business. They heard what I heard and they let Parsons slide. I interpret this to mean that they share my appraisal of the situation. In any case, they feel that if a big investor has an opinion, there's no real value in expressing it to Parsons at the shareholders' meeting.

You know there's something on their minds. Their AOL shares have dropped like a ton of bricks this past year. They're going to say something to the man in charge. If Parsons was the man in charge, they would have grilled him. So he ain't. The board made a bad decision with this merger, and Parsons was hired to take the blame the way the family dog gets blamed for the household farts.

ACT 1465

Act 1465 establishes a "do not call" list. You send $5 to the Arkansas Attorney General's office and, in theory, telemarketers can no longer pester you. In practice, though, you might as well flush that five bucks down the toilet, because the law exempts practically everybody. It's a do-nothin' law that tricks the unwary out of their money. You can always count on the Arkansas legislature to proactively do nothing when inaction is most urgent.

You can still be called by car salesmen, bankers and insurance companies selling anything other than credit cards, real estate agents, funeral homes, collectors, investment brokers, charities, newspapers selling subscriptions and any business with which you've had a "relationship" in the last three years. I'm guessing "relationship" will be interpreted broadly, so if you recieved a mailing from a company, that company will argue that a relationship has been established and will phone you at dinnertime for three years.

So if you're a financial institution and you've had no contact with Citizen X in the last three years, and the inner planets are in trine with Saggittarius during a lunar eclipse, THEN you may NOT call Citizen X for the specific purpose of signing him up for a credit card.

DVD FORMAT DIRECTOR'S CUT WITH EXTRA BEHIND THE SCENES FOOTAGE

This is something I don't particularly care for. I don't ask to see Leonardo's leftover paint. The tower of Pisa is interesting precisely because of the technical compromises. Movie scenes rescued from the dumpster might be of some academic interest to film students, but I'm a consumer and I'm paying for a finished product. Some day I expect they'll be lazy enough to sell us a DVD with all the raw footage and we can edit the sumbitch our owndam selves.

OUR EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS

Arkansas lags behind the rest of the country educationally. Always has. I'm beginning to think our leaders keep us ignorant on purpose. Playing catch up with the educational system is a great way to get more money. The voters always approve more money for schools.

Lately I've been hearing that our leaders want money to set up more elite level courses, a second year of physics, for example.

When you spend money to educate the elite student, that means you're not spending that money to educate the average student. The average Arkansas student is the one lagging behind. That elite guy is going to be fine. You won't be able to keep him out of MIT; but Joe Average is going to end up driving a forklift because the state decided there were enough smart students to justify forming a class to learn hieroglyphics.

All of these high school electives and accellerated programs cost money. You might expect these classes to cost more because you'll need higher priced teachers and specialized equipment.

The problem Arkansas has is not at the elite level. Our elite students are as good and bad as those of any group, and as I mentioned before they'll manage to use their minds despite the best efforts of their friends and neighbors. The educational problem we have is in the middle of the bell curve, not at the upper end.

They see that the average student can't properly work an algebra problem or compose an essay as well as the average student in most other states. Their answer is to give more resources to the smartest students. It doesn't make sense to me. By this reasoning, if average people don't have enough money, you give more money to rich people. Wait a minute. Reagan did that.

If half your people are going hungry, you don't give seconds to the fat ones. The brainiacs that would be taking Physics II will graduate from high school with enough academic advantages.

The purpose of our public schools should not be the creation of an elite master race at the expense of the rest of us. Our schools should teach proficiency in necessary basic skills to the largest number of students.

THE WRONG DEMOGRAPHIC

If you're watching a TV commercial, and the people in it look and dress and act like you and your friends, they're telling you someting unpleasant about yourself. You're in the wrong demographic.

The art of the TV commercial is not about using rational arguments to convince discriminating, educated, skeptical consumers to make wise purchases. The art of the TV commercial is about making the most gullible and weak-willed of us trade the most money for the least value. If the advertisers are talking to you, it's because they think you're a sucker.

YOU'RE "IT"

For students of game theory, suppose there was a game involving three parties, the good guys, the bad guys and "it."

"It" is a guy wandering around, making his way in the world; and like any puck he is unaware that a game is being played.

By giving guidance and advice, and subject to certain rules, the good guys are trying to get It to succeed in his endeavors and the bad guys are trying to get It to fail.

So It is getting all this advice and is making judgements about which advice to follow and is living with the consequences.

Assuming randomness on the part of Its' judgements, half of the good advice will be followed and half of the bad advice will be ignored, resulting in a win for the good guys. Similarly half the good advice will be ignored and half the bad advice will be followed, resulting in a win for the bad guys. To win, each team must try to gain Its' confidence.

You would think the good guys would always win, what with success and failure being contingent on that advice; but the random element discussed above will confuse the pattern of advice.

Here's the paradoxical part. The optimal good guy strategy is to give no advice at all. This means that It gets only bad advice. The game environment is simplified, and soon It comes to assume that all advice is bad. Once this realization is reached, the bad guys fail to score in every round.

The ball is dead and the game is over unless the bad guys subdivide their team into bad bad guys and good bad guys, who give good advice. Just to keep the game alive, some of the bad guys have to give enough good advice to keep It thinking that all advice isn't bad, putting the bad guys in the position of working against their own goals while the good guys sit on the sidelines and watch the bad guys score points for the good guys.

The good guys' non-intervention strategy creates a world for It that is treacherous and hostile. It survives by cultivating the social skills of an asocial paranoid. If you read much Bible you'll see that this is God's strategy as well. The devil runs amok 24-7 and the Lord sends angels so infrequently that their appearance frightens the shepherds.

So here we are in the real world, and like it or not, you're "It." Congratulations.

You are surrounded and bombarded by advice on matters regarding your life. People are trying to get you to vote for Republicans and invest in mutual funds and sign up for weight loss programs and buy Zima. Come to the prayer meeting, read the book, buy the album, donate to the charity, wear the ribbon, eat the cookie, buy the condo.

Every time you slide your money across a counter, somebody has won and somebody has lost; and to both of those teams you are just a puck. Life's a game, but it ain't much fun for the puck.

If you think the game metaphor is ill chosen, consider the example of soft drinks. Super Duper Cola employs an army of brainwashers, called advertizers, who talk you into spending on average about a buck a day on colored sugar water. Who advises you not to spend that money? Nobody. The only contrary advice you get is from somebody trying to get you to make the same bad decision in favor of their roughly equivalent product.

Where are guys with the good advice regarding beverages? They don't come around. They don't buy a lot of air time. They're waiting for you to figure out that the loudest voices offer the poorest choices.

HO HUM, ANOTHER FAMINE IN AFRICA

I saw another story on the news about another famine in Africa. The crops failed as they do one year out of four, and the grain reserves have been sold off by their governments to pay debt. Corrupt officials had disappeared with the money, and the wealthy countries are being asked for cash, food and medicine.

The network news personalized the story by highlighting the plight of one man's family. His crop was so small that he expected that two of his nine children might starve.

Nine children.

Hell, if MY parents had had nine children, two of them might have starved, and they both had good jobs.

Somebody tell Daddy that if he hadn't aired that thing out so often, he might have had only seven children and then nobody would starve. He knows how much grain his field will produce. He knows how often the crops fail. He knows his own government has always been absent in his hour of need. This is a guy who planned to lose a percentage of his family to starvation.

When are they going to make the connection? Small family, prosperous. Large family, poor. The old theory of gaining political power in a democracy through unfettered reproduction has proven ineffective. Large families tend to be poor and the poor tend not to vote. And those that do are less educated and are easily persuaded. In effect, their votes are bought by the bushel through slick advertising and promises of the most meager handouts and programs.

There is no political or economic advantage in having a large, ragged, uneducated, malnourished family.

WHITE BREAD

I don't see how people eat that stuff. As far as I can tell the only value it has is to keep the mayonnaise off your fingers.

THE REORGANIZATION OF THE FBI

Government agencies have their successes and their failures. When they have a big loud public failure, such as the failure to act on important evidence available to them prior to the September 11 catastrophe, the responsible leaders always do the same thing. They scramble to keep their jobs. In this case, they pin the blame on a poorly drawn organizational chart.

They want to reorganize the FBI into a dedicated anti-terrorist organization. Bank robbers, kidnappers, frauds, interstate and white collar criminals are to be somebody else's problem. I'm sure that the Friends of Dubya will be glad to know that hundreds of FBI agents are going to be taken off their white collar crime cases and sent out chasing evildoers. I can hear those campaign contributions rolling in now.

First point: If I hired a company to build a house and they did a good job except they screwed up the roof, I don't think I'd hire them to work exclusively on roofs. I don't think I'd take their most competent pipefitters and send them up to tack shingles.

Second point: The agents in the field were doing their jobs just fine. They were on their toes. They behaved professionally. They saw the danger signals and reported them through proper channels to their superiors. According to the FBI lawyer that submitted a report on the handling of the situation, there was plenty of evidence to establish probable cause to get a search warrant on these hijackers. She spoke of her superiors' inexplicably blocking attempts to obtain these warrants.

The problem is not the FBI, it's the political appointees that head it up. They just plain let the bad guys loose on us despite the best efforts of the dedicated, professional cadre of law officers they manage. It doesn't matter how many new agents you hire. If the boss is determined to ignore ten danger signals, he can ignore fifteen.

Third point: Ashcroft now says he wants to grant autonomy to agents in the field, which is to say they can come up with their own operations and don't have to get approval from Washington.

Whoa! That's like saying every fighter squadron in the Air Force can make up their own missions without coordinating with the rest of the Air Force. This is a recipe for disaster. Not only will agents be stepping all over each others' cases, you're going to get into bizarre situations where undercover agents are assumed to be criminals by other undercover agents, who are simultaneously assumed to be criminals by the others. You'll get wildcat teams of agents investigating each other, maybe even getting into shootouts with each other.

Fourth point: Ashcroft said he wants to be able to send agents to any public event or space generally open to the public to establish a visible presence to deter terrorism, the way local law enforcement does by having a cop on the beat. This could be interpreted to mean that agents could be sent into mosques to intimidate the worshippers. That might not be the intent at this point, if this thing goes on long enough, sooner or later it's going to happen.

Now they want to hire 900 new agents. I pray that I'm wrong about this, but the kind of guy who signs up to fight "evildoers" when emotions are running high might not be the best guy to trust with a gun and a badge, especially if he no longer has to coordinate with superiors, as the Ashcroft plan implies.

The most frightening thing about the Ashcroft plan is that it insulates the aforementioned political appointees from responsibility when some fanatic goes and does something bad in the name of saving America from evildoers. The highest authority needed to initiate an investigation is that of regional station chief, and so that's the guy who'll take the blame.

Pardon me stating the cynically obvious, but these political appointees are trying to parley their own individual personal failure into a bigger budget and more power for themselves.

A PAIR OF MOVIES

I saw "Lord of the Rings" and "No Man's Land" the same week. The comparison made the Hollywood offering look silly. If you want to know the difference between movies and films, this is a good pair to compare.

RTJ--6/1/2002