Of Course They're on Drugs...

… it's Rolling Stone! The excessively venerated editorial staff at Rolling Stone—many of whom make Hunter S. Thompson look positively sober, based on their questionable judgment—has released its list of the top 500 albums of all time. Yeah, right. Unlike Jeralyn Merritt, I do not have 40 or so of the top 50 in my basement.

It's been clear virtually forever that musicianship is not one of the criteria used in the popular music press—RS being a repeat offender, but far from the worst recidivist—in determining the "value" or "greatness" of an album. Consider, for example, the number two album on the list, the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds. Sorry, guys, but one cannot call a studio album filled with off-pitch notes and inconsistent (and apparently accidental) syncopation "great," particularly given the opportunity to correct things present. Work of that quality at a dress rehearsal, or even a practice session, would get a classical musician fired from a middling-or-worse post-romantic orchestra. We'll leave the banality of the songwriting out of it.

At least a couple of RS's long-running obsessions seem to have much less influence than one might otherwise expect. The highest Springsteen—the overblown Born to Run—doesn't appear until number 18; the highest Lead Balloons Led Zeppelin—the waste-of-dead-dinosaurs eponymous album—holds off until number 29. On the other hand, very much as expected, the top 100 contains nothing from the Moody Blues, or Genesis (or, for that matter, Peter Gabriel), or Dire Straits (or, for that matter, Mark Knopfler), or Renaissance, or Jethro Tull, or Procol Harum, or Al Stewart (the highest placing for any of these artists is 187!); the first few Alan Parsons Project albums are notable by their absence; only one Simon & Garfunkel and one solo Paul Simon; and so on. On the other other hand, four of the top ten albums are from the Beatles, including two on which one can hear studio-producer bitching and moaning and dropped instruments in the background. My guess is that the reviewers were completely incapable of distinguishing performance from songwriting (which, come to think of it, explains a lot about Bob Dylan's prominence and Joan Baez's absence). True greatness requires both; they thought it only required one.

Either that, or I didn't do enough LDS back in the 70s.

More Snorting and Kersnuffling…

but this time about advances. It appears that Jack Welch, the former chairman of GE, has gotten himself another book contract. According to the story,

The book, which will be called Winning, did not quite fetch the advance of Jack: Straight From the Gut, which he sold in 2000 without any written proposal for an extraordinary advance of $7.1 million. But the $4 million HarperCollins is said to be paying is still a hefty sum for a business book, or any book for that matter.

*  *  *

When Mr. Welch got $7.1 million for his memoirs in 2000, with Time Warner Trade Publishing winning a frenzied bidding war with rivals including HarperCollins, the Doubleday unit of Bertelsmann and the Simon & Schuster unit of Viacom, the price was one of the highest for a work of nonfiction. Since then Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton have each sold books for larger amounts. Sales of Straight From the Gut were, however, somewhat disappointing, industry executives said, partly because it went on sale on Sept. 11, 2001. (Time Warner executives have said the book was profitable.) Still, HarperCollins is willing to bet a hefty advance that Mr. Welch's imprimatur is powerful enough to propel sales of a business how-to book.

Hugo Lindgren, "Welch Makes Another Major Book Deal," New York Times (04 Feb 04) (typography corrected and fake paragraphing removed for clarity).

What I find most interesting about this is the implicit admission of deception and dodgy accounting practices behind Straight From the Gut. I know it's a bit early, with no caffeine and all, but let's do a little math. (Caveat: the following is based upon industry-standard practices, and the exact results might well be different—although I think not the conclusion.)

1. Under standard industry practices for a casebound book, royalties would have been around 12% of cover price up to 20,000 or so copies, then 15% of cover price beyond that. Because a lot more than 20,000 copies were sold, for simplicity we'll just treat this as a 15% royalty on the whole print run.
2. Publishers typically claim that earn-out of the advance represents the break-even point for both the author and the publisher. (As we'll see below, this assumption is hogwash.)
3. At a cover price of $29.95, each book earned $4.4925.
4. With an advance of $7.1 million, and excluding support for multi-city book tours and signings, earn-out of the advance would occur, if all books were sold at retail (because royalties on book-club books are significantly less, when they are even offered—most book-club deals are flat-rate payments, of which the author gets 25-50%), would be $7,100,000 / $4.4925 = a hair over 1.58 million copies.
5. Although it is impossible to state with any real certainty exactly how many copies were sold, sales were termed "disappointing." Analysis of those general figures available indicates sales in the 600,000-800,000 range (a range, one might ad, that would cause terminal mania for 99% or more of all published authors). Thus, at the high end, half the advance remained unearned, and probably more than that.
6. The publisher now claims that the book was "profitable."

Even a complete maroon would understand that the math leading to item 6 contradicts item 2. It in fact leads to the advance for this newest book of about $4 million—an achievable target on comparable sales with a slightly higher cover price, since it's highly doubtful that the book would be available this year and unlikely for next year. We're thus looking into 2006.

Now, with due respect to Mr. Welch, the last book deserved even fewer sales than it garnered. The advice in it was warmed over and obvious to anyone who even managed or commanded a logistics-based unit in the U.S. military, among other places. It was poorly written, self-aggrandizing, misleadingly organized, and overpromising. (No, I didn't buy a copy; I borrowed it from the library.) The conclusions that one can draw about this, when compared to the $5,000 advances offered to first novelists who are not themselves celebrities, should give one pause. And more than that.

More snow, anybody? We got an inch or so more last night. I think I saw some snowboarders out snorting from the neighborhood kids' fort, but I couldn't be sure. At least there was some sun today, so most of the roads are now bare. And wet. And icing up, but who's counting?

Snort. Kersnuffle. More nonsense about reviewers.

As far as the proportion of nonfiction reviews goes, I am less concerned about that than the proportion of less-than-happy reviews (since the NYTBR doesn't do vicious ones, except at specific editorial invitation—which it continues to deny). No matter how good one's evaluation of books based on the cover, whether author's name, cover art, whatever—I'm referring to extrinsic properties, as opposed to what is actually on the page—a certain proportion of what one reads is crap, or at least a severe disappointment. For example, I still recall my disappointment of two decades ago when Le Guin's Always Coming Home was published; it is a slightly-better-than-mediocre book, and simply not up to the standards of her preceding (or following, for that matter) work. The difficulty is a combination of reviewers' self-censorship, often refusing to finish a work and review it when it starts disappointingly, inexcusably low standards, and editorial/advertising department pressure for "happy" reviews.

But, if one needs more, and more-considered, nonfiction reviews, one can always go to the New York Review of Books. Outside of marketing-category magazines like Chronicle, Locus, and RT, there isn't very much in national-circulation reviews available to typical readers that emphasizes fiction. Thus, the NYTBR is filling a marketing niche, even with the relatively low proportion of fiction reviews that it now prints; and trying to go outside that niche to an area of greater competition is not the soundest business plan I've ever heard of. One cannot assume that one will maintain current dominance in the new market niche; look what has happened to Toyota in mid- and full-sized pickup trucks, to all of those children's imprints from successful editors that last about three years, and so on.

Marvin the Misunderstood Manuscript

Early this morning Making Light, the blog of Tor editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden, offered a fascinating and worthwhile discussion of the art of rejecting manuscripts. It's a very educational look at authors' complaints about rejection letters from the viewpoint of a leading speculative fiction editor. Keep that last in mind—as valuable as it is, being something that authors should read before they first submit a manuscript; I hope she will make it available in a more-permanent and more-visible form—because the perspective behind it is just a bit too narrow.

Nielsen Hayden offers the following list of reasons for rejecting a manuscript, presumably in some sort of hierarchical order:

1. Author is functionally illiterate.
2. Author has submitted some variety of literature we don't publish: poetry, religious revelation, political rant, illustrated fanfic, etc.
3. Author has a serious neurochemical disorder, puts all important words into capital letters, and would type out to the margins if MSWord would let him.
4. Author is on bad terms with the Muse of Language. Parts of speech are not what they should be. Confusion-of-motion problems inadvertently generate hideous images. Words are supplanted by their similar-sounding cousins: towed the line, deep-seeded, incentiary, reeking havoc, nearly penultimate, dire straights, viscous/vicious.
5. Author can write basic sentences, but not string them together in any way that adds up to paragraphs.
6. Author has a moderate neurochemical disorder and can't tell when he or she has changed the subject. This greatly facilitates composition, but is hard on comprehension.
7. Author can write passable paragraphs, and has a sufficiently functional plot that readers would notice if you shuffled the chapters into a different order. However, the story and the manner of its telling are alike hackneyed, dull, and pointless.
   (At this point, you have eliminated 60-75% of your submissions. Almost all the reading-and-thinking time will be spent on the remaining fraction.)
8. It's nice that the author is working on his/her problems, but the process would be better served by seeing a shrink than by writing novels.
9. Nobody but the author is ever going to care about this dull, flaccid, underperforming book.
10. The book has an engaging plot. Trouble is, it's not the author's, and everybody's already seen that movie/read that book/collected that comic.
    (You have now eliminated 95-99% of the submissions.)
11. Someone could publish this book, but we don't see why it should be us.
12. Author is talented, but has written the wrong book.
13. It's a good book, but the house isn't going to get behind it, so if you buy it, it'll just get lost in the shuffle.
14. Buy this book.

This is a useful list, but it leaves a lot of uncovered ground, particularly in nonfiction. I offer a few more reasons to put on the list:

0.9 The author has filled the cover letter with outrageous puffery (or worse, verifiable untruths) that the editor will surely spot.

1.1 The author has sent a syllabus and writing sample when we asked for the full manuscript (or vice versa).

1.2 The author has plastered the manuscript with copyright notices and constant assertions that the idea(s) is/are new/dangerous/valuable/unique.

1.3 The author is playing in somebody else's sandbox without permission. This ranges from media-fiction novels to workbooks based on bestselling self-help books—especially when submitted to a different publisher than the source or authorized licensee.

4.1 The author is on bad terms with the Muse of Logic. Although the sentences are in acceptable English, they substitute grandiosity for thought, being rife with non sequiturs, unstated assumptions, Olympic-caliber conclusion jumping, poor math skills, ad hominem arguments, straw-man attacks, and other grade-school-level fallacies.

4.2 The author is on bad terms with the Muse of Research. Although the subject is technical or controversial, the author has provided no reference material, perhaps not even a bibliography, and is not a recognized expert in the field.

5.1 The author's competent basic paragraphs are self-contained units that bear little relationship to each other. There is no there (or argument, or exposition, or story) there.

6.1 The author has a moderate (or worse) neurochemical disorder, and has submitted a book on a technical matter without any apparent qualifications or real familiarity with the matter.

6.2 The author has a moderate (or worse) neurochemical disorder, and has submitted a book based upon a conspiracy theory that one cannot follow from paragraph to paragraph.

7.1 Although the writing is technically adept, there isn't a character present who could stir up any reader involvement; the characters are all at best avatars of the author and the author's friends, but more likely are props for an idiot plot.

9.1 The author is filling a publish-or-perish requirement with little or no originality.

11.1 Someone could have published this book three years ago, but it will be entering a mature, cannibalistic marketing niche dominated by two or three other books without clear superiority.

11.2 We are already under contract with a more-established author for very similar material.

14 (replacement) Recommend to the acquisition committee that we buy this book (the reality is that a completed serious nonfiction manuscript ordinarily cannot be acquired by a single editor).

I would also quibble with the placement of item 13; it belongs at least a couple of considerations earlier, at least for nonfiction and mainstream fiction. Nonetheless, this is a useful list, and the remainder of the post is, umm, educational for those who do not know how the publishing industry really works.

There was a rather interesting decision ("unpublished," naturally enough) on a publishing- and First Amendment-related issue from the California Court of Appeals (the middle level) this week. It concerns itself not with phantom reviews, but phantom reviewers.

A few years ago, a Sony Pictures employee came up with a neat idea for making movies seem great: invent a reviewer and plaster his nonexistent comments in advertisements! Allegedly, only the employee's immediate supervisor knew of this inventive bit of deception (which begs the question about self-deception, but that is not legally significant—at least not yet). This was later exposed. Naturally enough, somebody sued Sony for the deception under California Business and Professions Code § 17200 (California's consumer fraud statute). The interesting twist is Sony's response: an accusation that the lawsuit was merely a SLAPP action (California Code of Civil Procedure § 425.16).

SLAPP stands for "strategic lawsuit against public participation." In its "original" form, a SLAPP suit might be filed by a developer against an individual who criticized the environmental soundness of the development plan in public, particularly if that criticism resulted in an inquiry by a zoning board or other government agency. SLAPP suits often accuse a party of defamation, interference with contractual advantage, or another business tort. The key is that defending against a SLAPP suit is expensive and takes attention away from the underlying criticism, even when it does not succeed in outright silencing the critic. That Sony has resorted to calling this a SLAPP suit, while perhaps within the literal meaning of § 425.16, put the iron boot on the other foot: this is the equivalent of the environmentalist suing the developer to stop deceptive statements, with the developer responding that the environmentalist is unjustly trying to suppress the developer's free speech rights.

Yes, this is a bit like Nike v. Kasky. It turns on the distinction between the extremes of deceptive advertising and political speech. As the California Court of Appeals put it,

For purposes of the anti-SLAPP statute, if Sony’s film advertisements constitute commercial speech, the statute does not apply because the ads did not “further[]… [Sony’s] right of petition or free speech [arising] under the United States or California Constitution in connection with a public issue.” The trial court found that the ads were commercial speech. We agree.

Rezec v. Sony Pictures Entertainment, Inc., No. B160586 (Cal. Ct. App. 2d Dist., Jan. 27, 2004), slip op. at 5 (citations omitted) (PDF, 154kb).

There is a lot of room between the two extremes of pure commercial advertisement (on this analysis, not protected by the First Amendment) and pure political speech (which is). Consider, for example, a vendor who is trying to sell products through student representatives at a high school—perhaps T-shirts emblazoned "Fuck the Draft". This would be a difficult case, with multiple clashing rights. That is not Rezec (or, for that matter, Suziki Motors v. Consumer's Union or Nike v. Kasky), for a very simple reason. "Fuck the Draft" is an opinion that is directly related to political speech, and thus has a strong constitutional relationship to the First Amendment. Attributions of puffery to nonexistent reviewers, however, are not, except perhaps in a satire like This Is Spinal Tap. There is no such suggestion here; Sony's own conduct in firing the "responsible employee" and suspending his immediate supervisor prevents such an argument from passing the laugh test.

The point, then, is this: The right to sell does not include the right to deceive along with it, even when the means of selling involves something that might be characterized as "speech." It might include the right to include utterly ridiculous excerpts from sycophantic reviewers who would say anything for a few more shrimp at Spago—but to attribute those statements to those reviewers, those reviewers must actually have stated it. <SARCASM> It would also be a good idea if they even exist in the first place. </SARCASM> This issue has some interesting parallels in the McCain-Feingold requirement that political ads of certain natures at certain times must clearly state whether they originate with the candidate or a third party. But that is for another time. Under consumer protection law, there is a line between "mere puffery" and outright deception, and there is little question where the Sony ads fall. Thus, claiming that being held responsible for the results of such deception is an infringement on the First Amendment rights of the deceiving commercial party would mean that no lawsuit for fraud could ever succeed, and would remove fraud from the realm of civil or criminal wrongs in this country. The First Amendment does not reach that far.

None of this is to say that Sony will necessarily lose (I think they will); it is only to say that Sony's accusers may have their day in court to try to prove their case and obtain relief. Were I in charge of Sony's defense, I would seriously consider defending by positing that movie reviews are such incredible crap that even the unsophisticated consumer could not reasonably rely upon them; but that would be political suicide in Hollywood. Nonetheless, it has worked as a libel defense in England; more some other time.

I sure seem to have it in for reviewers today.

If anybody needs more proof that Janet Maslin (an overly influential reviewer at the New York Times) needs a reality check, just try reading her breezy, meaningless whirl through a potpourri of recently released "bestsellers" (and by whose definition and on the basis of what hard data, I wonder… or is this just another self-fulfilling prophecy?) in today's Times. As noted at Publisher's Lunch (sorry, it's an e-mail newsletter, but you can subscribe for free), she breezes through ten books in less than 1700 words. Here's an example:

John Grisham's latest novel is one. His books have a way of hitting best-seller lists (with advance orders online) long before anyone even knows what they are. By happy coincidence, "The Last Juror" turns out to be one of his best: a thoughtful and atmospheric thriller that for the first time brings the author back to the fictionalized town of Clanton, Miss. This is the setting for another of his best efforts, "A Time to Kill." The Grisham brand name renders these assets superfluous. Whether they're forceful or meandering, quick or pokey, his books have a track record that proves them Pavlovian stimuli to loyal readers. He writes it; you buy it, even if it's blank or "Bleachers." That's a formula as simple as "Who Moved My Cheese?"

That is the entire review—not one word of substance. And that 150-word average is misleading; almost 30% of the article is devoted to a single, meaningless book.

I find the intellectual dishonesty of this approach quite disturbing. Leaving aside for the moment whether a reviewer has an obligation to say why he or she came to a particular conclusion about a book—I think he or she does, but I'm clearly in the minority—the approach Maslin took is more akin to the celebrity endorsement than even the crappy sixth-grade book report approach that dominates the publishing industry's favorite sources of book reviews and even infects the publishing-category magazines (Locus, Chronicle, Romantic Times, and so on). That's right—a book reviewer acting like a celebrity. That says volumes about both the industry and its inability to realize that its problems are self-inflicted.

That Ms. Maslin's judgment is suspect in any event is beside the point. The real judgment problem here is with the editor who found the article acceptable. Someone coming cold to "reviews" like this would begin to wonder how much the various publishers were contributing in endorsement fees. The reality is, sadly, worse: personal vendettas are far more influential. But that is for another time.

Speaking of the dangers of patronage…

It appears that the Bush Administration has proposed increased funding for the arts. This is far from an unvarnished good thing; and that is regardless of what political or partisan purpose or persuasion pervades the program, or might influence it in the future. On the one hand, I support increased funding, in a very general sense, for the arts. But I believe that such funding should be hands-off to channels with review later only for financial accountability. The shameful cuts in PBS funding under the Reagan Administration (and later) for the purported "political bias" in its programming are but the tip of the iceberg. The whole point of leaving artists in control of such programs is that polticians are not qualified to judge art, and perhaps nobody is qualified to judge it as it created. As Orwell noted, "[Using] the word 'political' in the widest possible sense…[, t]he opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude." Such as these:

Some conservatives, like Representative Tom Tancredo, Republican of Colorado, vowed to oppose the [proposed] increase. Even without support from the government, he said, "art would thrive in America. …. We are looking at record deficit and potential cuts in all kinds of programs," he said. "How can I tell constituents that I'll take money away from them to pay for somebody else's idea of good art? I have no more right to do that than to finance somebody else's ideas about religion."

*  *  *

"Government involvement is designed to take the arts from the grand citadel of the privileged and bring them to the public at large," [Rep. Jim] Leach [R-Iowa] said. "This democratization of the arts ennobles the American experience."

Robert Pear, "Bush Is Said to Seek More Money for the Arts" (29 Jan. 04) (fake paragraphing removed for clarity).

These two extreme opinions are so far at odds with reality that by themselves they demonstrate that neither the Administration nor Congress has any business whatsoever in making these kinds of decisions. On the one hand, Mr. Tancredo's attitude is almost identical to Stalin's; look at what happened to Zamiatin, Pasternak, et al. That's right: he's acting liking a Commie. As soon as government claims control over content in the arts, the arts go to hell. Directly to hell. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200. On the other hand, Mr. Leach's comments disclose an equally dangerous, if not equally obvious, difficulty with government funding of the arts. The unstated roadblock in his glib truism is the grant process. All this does is slightly change the address of the "grand citadel of the privileged," so long as there is anyone other than artists (and even that is with a big caveat) involved in the grant process. The address moves down the road to those artists who are prominent enough, and otherwise well-supported enough, to survive the grant process itself. That is simply not going to include an unknown genius or a radical dissenter (whatever form that radicalism takes).

A more-realistic alternative would be an indirect increase in arts funding by removing some of the market and taxation barriers to the arts. It's all well and good to have marketplace involvement; in fact, it's critical; but perhaps the Oxford University Press's influence on British publishing should be looked at very carefully for some ideas. The OUP has an immense advantage over most publishers: it is untaxed. That may be too radical a solution, particularly since so much of the recognizable "arts" in this country already sits in the hands of corporate conglomerates that seem to be doing quite nicely in the profit column (particularly when using real, and not illusory, accounting). But there are surely ways to manage this that would both increase the real funding available to artists by making it less risky to take a chance and simultaneously avoid the obvious Tancredo problem of pinning particular dollars to particular works. <SARCASM> Besides, the Bush Administration is so fond of bizarre tax cut programs that it should positively enjoy the challenge of creating an appropriately Byzantine system. </SARCASM>

First, the general (and bizarre) news this morning, then (later today) a comment on another item.

   
• The truly bizarre nature of trademark law, which allows mark-holders (and, in fact, requires them) to constantly assert ownership of common terms, came out yesterday from the dysfunctional Sixth Circuit. The decision in the Eagles (or eagles?) case is much more important for what it implies than for what it says. At its core, this is a case about civil procedure, not trademark law; but the context of the matter is otherwise revealing. From a procedural aspect, it reflects some serious problems with prior counsel; one basis for requesting a delay in the trial date should have been known months before the trial, but was not made clear to the district court: that band members who are critical witnesses would be on tour in Europe during the scheduled trial period. (Yes, those Eagles.) It also reflects the ridiculous standard for "defending" one's mark; the Eagles, from all appearances, had to defend the derivative mark "Eagles Records" from a foundation devoted to preserving the American eagle that, among other things, used the intuitive domain name eaglerecords.org.

  Trademark law should allow a holder to disclaim a particular "unauthorized" or "unlicensed" use of its mark, such as a nonprofit organization using common English terms that just happen to add up to a "fanciful" mark, without jeopardizing all ability to defend the mark against others. It does not; and thus this lawsuit.

   
• Senator Leahy's statement on judicial confirmations is an interesting piece of rhetoric. Although it is at times a bit over the top, and resorts to some unfortunate language, the underlying facts indicate that the judicial confirmation process is broken at this time, and will remain so until somebody blinks. That's not good for anybody; it involves a clear dereliction of duty by everybody involved in the name of partisan advantage; and it should result in a serious spanking behind the woodshed for the Bush judicial-nomination people, for both parties in the Senate—and for the media for misreporting the context of the dispute. There's plenty of blame to go around here; and, frankly, it starts (but by no means ends) with the Administration's removal of the ABA committee on nominations from the process. It's one thing to say post hoc as to a specific candidate that "the Committee's partisanship or 'liberal bias' improperly influenced a particular rating, so I'm going to ignore it"; it's another entirely to cut the Committee out before it says a word as to a particular candidate.

  "Liberal bias"? What do the following confirmed judges have in common (hint: it's not liberalism)? Hon. Alex Kozinski (CA9), Hon. Alice Batchelder (CA6), Hon. Michael McConnell (CA10), and Hon. Patrick Higginbotham (CA5)?

   
• Fascinating that NASA Administrator O'Keefe is now using safety concerns as his main justification for not sending up Hubble telescope maintenance missions when those very same safety concerns were raised repeatedly five years ago and denigrated as impossible. Nothing like a billion-dollar accident to make one realize that safety concerns are valid, eh? One might also wonder whether the ultimate cost is much higher or not, but the problem with assessing costs and benefits of scientific research is that the benefits are seldom truly apparent until a couple of decades down the road from the costs.
   
• Of more than passing interest, the World Economic Forum has begun demonstrating some of the potential dangers of patronage in the arts. Although it is giving a public presence to prominent authors who do not necessarily accept the views of the Forum, one must question whether the real audience—the attendees—is listening to or rubbing elbows with the celebrities, or just being a potential pool of patrons.

  "There's no such thing as being a writer, and that's the be-all and end-all," [Nobel Prize in Literature honoree Nadine] Gordimer said. "I'm also a citizen, a human being, and I have social responsibilities. I'm here to learn how the world is being run and see what I regard as the biggest problem, the gap between rich and poor. …. There's a feeling that the past is the past, and we start from zero. But the past largely forms the present, and from there one looks at the future. And the writer's imagination encompasses this role."

  Alan Cowell, "Writers, Spying in the House of Power" (29 Jan 04) (fake paragraphing removed for clarity).
   
• I have only disgust for some obviously improper behavior (plenty of disgust to go around for plenty of improper behavior) in the Detroit terrorist-cell trial. Did nobody even ask an experience analyst who did not have a preset political agenda just what might be going on? I suppose not; because if they had, and the analyst gave a complete answer, and the answer was given much weight, that trial would not have happened—or at least would not have proceeded in that fashion.

A few notes around the Internet this morning…

• Amazon has declared its first annual profit. That is, if you accept traditional accounting definitions of profit—and there is more than one GAAP in that logic. Reading between the lines, if Amazon was a "traditional" brick-and-mortar retailer, analysts would be decrying its (virtual equivalent of) poor same-store sales performance.
• Similarly, Time-Warner has reported an operating profit, as opposed to its $45 billion loss a year ago. Some of that loss, however, was at least as illusory as any that I've seen reported, being founded on the indefensible and bizarre notion of "goodwill" as an accountable asset. There is little doubt that the merger of AOL and Time-Warner was a bad idea; it's just that the particular numbers being bandied about have about as much relationship to reality as Vietnam-era body counts.
• Over at The Atlantic, one can see that spin control over Iraq is up to at least 45 rpm and getting faster. We've now got the administration blaming "incompetence" in the intelligence community for the decision to go into Iraq on inadequate evidence. Hogwash. The intelligence community is far from blameless; but George III and his people should take a close look at what George II did to the community in 1989 and 1990 before asserting that any "incompetence" was the community's own "fault." Clinton and Reagan didn't help, either; but let's keep this in the family. It's rather ironic that George II had served as Director of the CIA and yet hired so many policymakers who had nothing but disdain for HumInt and the providers thereof. On the other hand, the policy people didn't cause all of the problems; there's plenty of blame to go around, and we can't forget the bureaucrats.

Sins of the (Great-Great-Grand)Father

The Perfesser noted today that

So who do we punish when we force the corporation to pay reparations [for long-past wrongs such as slavery]? Since the payment comes out of the corporation's treasury, it reduces the value of the residual claim on the corporation's assets and earnings. In other words, the shareholders pay. Not the directors and officers who actually committed the alleged wrongdoing (who in most of these cases are long dead anyway), but modern shareholders who did nothing wrong.

"The Immorality of Corporate Reparations" (27 Jan. 04). Two additional pieces of irony reinforce his conclusion, whether it's corporations or governments that are the payors.

• My ancestors weren't even in this country until this century. Further, going back about 350 years in the gene pool, none of them had anything to do with slavery or the slave trade over in the Old World, either. Thus, if the value of my shares in, say, JP Morgan Chase (neither implying nor stating that I do or do not own such shares) is harmed by forcing the corporation to pay "reparations," I have been harmed twice: Once by the mere fact that I am a current shareholder whose "profit" from 150-year-old conduct is so attenuated by time that it cannot reasonably be attributed to me (as the Perfesser noted), and again because it was legally impossible for me or my ancestors to have any responsibility for slavery. (None of this nonsense about how the Old World bears responsibility for allowing slavery to continue, because that assumes that individual citizens in the Old World had any influence on policy — in other words, it assumes that the forms of government common now were in use at all then.)
• Let's pretend for the moment that everything occurred last year, so that time is not an issue. Don't kid yourself about the potential consequences of reparations: successful blackmail would depress the market of all potentially targetted firms. If JP Morgan Chase pays, Citicorp stock will drop to discount possible extortion. So, if I very carefully made sure that my investments were in firms that did not have an obvious connection, the overall drop in market value (particularly if, say, I had invested in exchange-based futures or options) would "tax" me for the blackmail.

That my own "ethnicity" has a longer and greater historical claim on the "assets" of corporate and government wrongdoers reminds me of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, with every potential victim group racing to get a piece of an elusive (and quite probably illusory) fortune. That the fortune will eventually come out of the various contestants' own pockets seems to have escaped the rabble.

The "reparations for slavery" suits are really more about the failure of the Great Society programs — for Avogadro's Number of intextricably intertwined reasons — and the continued poverty-by-ethnicity in this country than anything else. They are not about economic justice, or anything else; even the accusation of "massive attorney's fees" as motivation is at best a tertiary consideration. The racism inherent in the claims themselves seems also to have escaped the proponents; but then, I took Dr. King at his word, and believe that the content of one's character (and not the color of one's skin, or for that matter the identity of one's ancestors' place of worship) is what matters.

Don't kid yourself, Professor Froomkin. Being a flag officer (general or admiral) is intensely political and partisan. Without either endorsing or denigrating his candidacy, General Clark has more foreign-policy political experience than the rest of the Democratic candidates combined. He did, after all, serve as the NATO boss for several years.

And, if you believe that pure leadership is how one rises to become a flag officer, you're definitely kidding yourself. In the modern era (that is, since the adoption of DOPMA in the early 1970s), one can no longer be a complete incompetent and make it to general or admiral. However, some of the politics that go into the designation of who is even eligible for that grade are so hidden to civilians that their bias is not readily apparent. For example, of all the generals in the Air Force less than twenty are not rated officers (pilots and navigators)—and most of them are doctors. This bias is built into the system, because Congress in its infinite wisdom has determined that nonrated officers may not command units that have any flying mission—or sit in the chain of command above them. However, most pilots do not begin to have any real supervisory authority over enlisted personnel until they become majors (10–12 years down the road), which to say the least causes those of us who did some real problems. Enlisted personnel are, even in the top-heavy Air Force, 80% of the troops.

It's no longer quite the case of getting promoted to general on family-tie grounds. However, the need for well-placed mentors is even greater than in "traditional" politics, for a very simple reason: "grass-roots campaigning" is insubordination, not building a power base.