Thought of the day: Is effective communication a virtue? I asked myself this while surfing the slick site of a "professional image consultant," so slathered with cliches and glittering promises, cheesy aesthetics alone seemed to eliminate the possibility that anything useful was going on. But this person, and hundreds like her, earn a nice living running seminars and giving speeches. They're effective. But where is the wisdom? I've been thinking about this in the context of the commercial media, for which I somewhat ambivalently work. The basic motive is to profitably communicate, not necessarily to wisely, usefully, challengingly, or educationally communicate. Unfortunately, this is also the line preached by social engineer-ish leftists and elitists, who create ghettoes in ivory towers from which they poo-poo the dumbing down of society. Still, it is worth challenging the conventional wisdom of businesses, p.r. and advertising people, and yes, motivational speakers, that effective communication is a virtue. Put morbidly, the Nazis were some of the most effective communicators there were. Less morbidly, so was Bill Clinton on the campaign trail, and, apparently, throughout his many scandals. But in a capitalist society, we must always distinguish, when need be, between effectiveness and wisdom.

Looks like Los Angeles will not be broken up by secession, and Chicago will not overtake it as the nation's No.2 city:
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/timespoll/socal/la-me-poll2jul02.story

Link of the day: www.politicalgraveyard.com
True to its Halloween-ish name, a frighteningly comprehensive site of living and dead politicians

Transition time for the prestigious 60 Minutes? Despite its icon of the ticking clock, the show has been a timeless fixture in the ephemeral world of television:
http://tvguide.com/magazine/robins/020701.asp

Thought of the day: The new Cold War? Between World War II and the Soviet Union's collapse, we anchored our identity in emnity--of the Soviet Union, of Communism, of oppressive government. Our noble opposition of these, in practice and spirit, defined us as Americans, we thought. We were Us because we weren't Them. Such a black-and-white worldview was functional, was patriotic, was vaguely reassuring. The post-Cold War 90s were disorienting by comparison, and patriotism was rudderless. But is a polarizing worldview now beginning to return? Is al Qaeda--whoever, whatever, and however big it is--our new foil for righteousness? And does the spy-drama-loving media egg us on? Michael Wolff fleshes this out in a brilliant piece in New York Magazine:
http://www.newyorkmag.com/page.cfm?page_id=6191

More from Chris Suellentrop's Salon article on Amtrak: He refers to railroad planning author Anthony Perl, who points out, as Suellentrop puts it:

With air travel and road travel, the government provides the infrastructure, and the private sector moves the passengers. The government runs the airports, and the private sector flies the planes. The government builds the highways, and the private sector handles the cars, trucks, and buses. But with passenger rail, we've got it backward. The government (Amtrak) runs the trains, and the private sector (the freight railroads) owns the rails, except in the Northeast Corridor between Washington and Boston. That creates a double whammy—the private companies don't have the deep pockets or the interest in maintaining the infrastructure needed for a viable passenger rail system, and the government doesn't have the market incentives to be entrepreneurial or customer-focused. The result is a lot of decrepit tracks and routes that respond to political, rather than consumer, demands.

Suellentrop recommends dismantling Amtrak and allowing the private sector to fill in the vacuum with better-run, profit-minded organizations. My question is, where is the army of investors who would jump at this opportunity? They don't exist. Without a sure bet to go on, breaking up Amtrak is premature. Besides, post-9/11 fear of flight or at least dread of lines at the airport, plus a backlash against gas-slurping SUV's, mean train transit is an idea that could be sold anew to Americans.

And, as responses to the Salon piece point out, beating up on Amtrak (albeit a poorly-run outfit) is a bizarre overreaction to the rather ordinary phenomenon of government subsidies for less-than-ideally-run organizations:

"The airlines are still essentially a government agency that is bleeding the taxpayers. They may be called "private", they may sell stock, and they may get to keep their profits (when they come along). However, when it comes time to sink or swim, they are a government agency propped up by tax dollars. If United ends up with 1.8 billion in loan guarantees (on top of the Sept. 11 pork), it would take a large amount of willful ignorance to say that the airlines are a model for private success."

"Chris Suellentrop calls Amtrak 'a government-owned corporation that lost more than $1 billion last year.' Does that make the Department of Defense the goverment body that lost more than $288 billion last year?"

Salon article and responses

Number of the day: 64,000: Number of Amtrak passengers per day, compared with 1.8 million daily domestic airline passengers and 984,000 daily passengers on intercity buses, according to a grumpy Salon article.

A good piece in the NY Times today on the subculture of the in-crowd and their stock tips, and the fine line between insider tips and insider trading:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/01/business/01SOCI.html
enter user name and password of "nbiermaread"

Quote of the day, from the Globe and Mail:

"If sunbeams were weapons of war, we would have had solar energy long ago."
Nobel laureate Sir George Porter.

Thought of the day:I've been trying to console myself about the decline of the written and printed word amid the torrent of images in today's multimedia world with some historical perspective: the history of written communication is elitist and exclusivist; print and literacy were the privilege of the tiny educated royal or upper classes and religious scribes for centuries, in many ways right up until the 20th. The history of communication is filled with images--signs, drawings, paintings, portraits. Only in this past century has mass literacy become normal.

As the New York Times reported last week, some professors are taking that a step further. Even spoken words, in the evolutionary view of these researchers, are a recent twist to human communication, while hand gestures are the oldest norm:

Michael C. Corballis, a psychologist at the University of Auckland, in New Zealand, is the latest proponent of a controversial idea known among language experts as 'gestural theory.' In essence, gestural theorists contend that long before early humans spoke, they jabbered away with their hands. [In his new book, From Hand to Mouth (Princeton University), he writes:] 'The common ancestor of five or six million years ago would have been utterly incapable of a telephone conversation but would have been able to make voluntary movements of the hands and face that could at least serve as a platform upon which to build a language. Grammatical language may well have begun to emerge around two million years ago but would at first have been primarily gestural . . .'"

The Globe and Mail writes that "Mr. Corballis proposes that our ancestors made the switch from gestures to speech at around 50,000 years ago, a mere yesterday in evolutionary terms."