Archive Listing
August 8, 2009 - August 1, 2009

Friday, August 22, 2008

MORE REASONS. You know how it is when you hear something a hundred times without really listening and then, suddenly, on the hundred-and-first repetition you go, "No. Wait a minute. That's total nonsense."?

That's how I'm feeling right now about the meme that "This is Obama's election to lose." No, it isn't. It's McCain's. And I think I can prove it. So bear with me for a bit of background exposition and I'll make it all clear.

When I finally realized I had a gut-level objection to this meme, I found myself remembering a great salesman I knew in the computer business twenty-some years ago. He was hugely successful selling against the most powerful sales force in American industry at the time, the blue-suited army of IBM. Those were the days when the truism that best characterized IBM's hegemony went like this: "Of the Fortune 500 companies, 492 have IBM mainframes, and the other eight are computer companies." Yet Bert, as I will call him, consistently sold large-scale software products into IBM environments against directly competitive IBM products. Eventually he quit the rat race to become a Miami-based sales consultant offering very expensive sales training courses to the companies who couldn't figure out how to beat IBM. I worked for such a company. Time after time, our sales reps got our offering onto the buyer's short lists and then lost, without any reasonable explanation, to IBM. Our product was clearly superior, slicker, faster, more flexible, and competitively priced. But we lost. Almost always. Company executives were tearing their hair out.

If you're a Democrat, this is a scenario that should sound familiar -- remember Dukakis, Gore, Kerry...? Way up in the polls until late in the day, and then a grinding, disappointing, downward course to electoral defeat. Why?

Bert introduced our sales force to something he called the Sales Cycle Matrix. It looks like this:


The nine boxes show everything that's relevant to the purchase of a large-scale computer system. He taught our people to fill each of the boxes with the advantages and disadvantages our products offered to individual major accounts. He also used the matrix to teach them why they lost so frequently:


The blue X's indicate the emphasis of most sales efforts. Our products perform brilliantly in operation. They have all kinds of neat bells and whistles. They make the competition look sick. And we're reasonably priced, too. When they get an enthusiastic reception, the reps schedule glamorous demos, which make everyone feel good, and before you know it, they've made the short list.

You'll note that the matrix also works pretty well for consumer decisions like buying a new car. It's beautiful, it's got dozens of dazzling features, it makes me feel good to drive it, I can just see myself behind the wheel, and I can afford to buy or lease it.... Hurray.

BUT. As the actual moment of decision approaches, the buyers begin to shift their focus to other boxes in the matrix:


It's an attractive product and they like it, but as they get closer to a personal commitment, they begin to worry about their own personal exposures and vulnerabilities. A computer system is at its most visible and potentially destructive of individual careers when it's being implemented and when it breaks. This is when the unknowns begin to supercede the feature bells and whistles in importance. CHANGE IS RISK. Who are you? We don't know your company. We've never done business with you before. How do we know you won't leave us in the lurch and put all our careers in peril for having taken the risk of buying your product? But the sales reps tend not to recognize the shift. They've gotten such great feedback from their product presentations and demos that they keep talking about the same things that succeeded in getting them on the short list in the first place. And the real underlying sales process passes right over their heads and under their radar until, inevitably, they lose.

Again, the new car analogy is useful. People fall hopelessly in love with Jaguars during test drives. But, statistically speaking, they rarely buy them. Because Jaguars break. They aren't reliable. They have no resale value. The test drive is a doomed infatuation. Unless you're so rich a Jaguar isn't transportation but fashion, it's simply not a viable choice. You buy the Lincoln or the Cadillac instead. Not as deep-down sexy, perhaps, but at least it's an automobile that can get you to and from work every day.

Bert made his sales by anticipating the risk factors and addressing them before his customers did. He carried an implementation plan in his briefcase, specific, detailed, thorough in its capacity to relieve the decision makers of any sense of personal risk. That's why he topped out every sales compensation plan for every company he ever sold for. IBM didn't have the implementation plan, Usually they didn't need it. They were IBM. They would muddle though, somehow, and nobody would get fired in the process. They were consistently mediocre, perhaps, but they still posed little to no risk. And that's why they won so often.

In terms of the current election, McCain is IBM. He's MicroSoft Windows versus an incredibly slick, high-tech freeware Linux tweak, a Cadillac Fleetwood versus a hybrid Jaguar-Bugatti stretch limo. He's the stolid, unexciting, known quantity that definitely won't transform your sex life, but he also won't leave you helpless and confused on the shoulder of some dangerous back road.

Obama has all the bells and whistles, automatically and continuously adjustable leather orthopedic seats, 2,000 horsepower, spinner wheels, the lowest profile tires ever engineered, a billion terrabytes of computing and graphics memory, next-generation 3D multimedia showmanship, and absolutely no track record for dealer maintenance, parts availability, or certified mpg or crashworthiness testing.

God, how people loved the demos and test drives. Their hearts were singing. They were in love with the features and functions. But now we're on the threshhold of the shift to the risk boxes. What happens if the product just isn't, finally, viable? What if it crashes with all of us on board? What then?

That's the point at which voters will begin to ask all the questions the sales force -- i.e., the MSM -- hasn't bothered to address. Who knows this guy? Who can really vouch for him? Is he NHTSA or IEEE tested? Does the promised product actually exist in some form other than a cobbled together prototype? Is he a visionary genius or just a sorry coked-up loon like Delorean? What if it's all really an elaborate con job? Because if he isn't more substantial than all the glitzy bells and whistles, we could all pay for it in very real terms -- a broken economy, porous national security, corrupt government, spiraling taxes and inflation, a lot of failed fantastic schemes that don't mean a damn thing when you're trying to pay the bills every month and raise a family in a stable, steady community. Nobody likes a McCain but it always starts on a cold morning and the air-conditioner works in August.

Since the Vietnam War, Democrat presidential candidates have never produced a detailed implementation plan in advance of the election -- how voters will be protected from the failures of their most exotic ambitions -- and they have never even kept their most basic promises to customers when they were elected. Their early campaign promises are always bewitching, but they never recognize the moment when people start to get real and ponder the odds that pie-in-the-sky really can be had at low cost with little risk.

That's why the Democrats generally enjoy a huge lead right before the conventions and then -- in utter bewilderment -- watch it vanish before the first Tuesday in November. A Jaguar is its own kind of Utopia. Beautiful to dream about, but ultimately amost impossible to believe in. For all the people who know that rubber does meet the road sooner or later.

This election is McCain's to lose. It has been since he won the nomination. He may yet accomplish that improbability. But if Obama thinks he's defending an insuperable lead, we'll see him four years from now, two hundred pounds heavier, hawking his apocalyptic videos of "The Global Cooling Crisis."

But he won't be alone. That's pretty much the fate of most of the companies that believed they were about to beat IBM or MicroSoft at their own game.

PHILLY FILLY. So today, Philadelphia anchorman Larry Mendte pleaded guilty to, well:


Of course, it's all great gossip. Larry Mendte's wife is also a Philadelphia anchor, at rival Fox 29. Who isn't comparing the two women and developing their own storylines?


Yes, Larry is a Ted Baxter figure, a stereotype of the local anchor who adds brightly colored lead weights to his voice when there's a sad story without ever actually seeming to feel it. And the women involved are much the same. Every line on the teleprompter is/was freighted with a "look at me doing the news" sensibility that makes murders, arsons, and rapes into cheesy show business.

Why mention all this? Because it's simply not true that all local news people are shallow, two-dimensional narcissists. I can't remember all their names, but most of the local Philly newspeople aren't celebrities. They're devoted residents of their city doing a job. Many of them have aged from new college grads to late middle age on camera, growing grayer and heavier through the decades as they reported live from sordid murder scenes, awful weather emergencies, concerts, elections, and occasional sports triumphs to people whom they regard principally as their neighbors. I'll try to come back to this list and add to it, but at the moment I remember Robin Mackintosh, Don Polec, Edie Huggins, Carol Erickson, Terry Ruggles, Orien Reid, Jennaphr Frederick, Lisa Thomas-Laurie, Dave Roberts, Beverly Williams, Rob Jennings, Vernon Odom, and Cherie Bank, all faithful foot soldiers in a vocation that makes them subject to ridicule as we speak.

And being older than most, I remember the real anchors of Philadelphia local news, the men who became the hometown Cronkites and Brinkleys at the beginning of local TV news, always there, always dignified, always more cognizant of the news itself than their Q-Ratings. There was John Facenda on Channel 10, Vince Leonard on Channel 3, and Larry Kane on Channel 6. Not one of them a matinee idol in terms of physical appearance. Not one of them a star in his own mind. They were just responsible for reporting the news. What troubles me is how hard it is to find, in these internet days, pictures of men who were on our televisons every night for decades. Is it really so easy to disappear people who were so much a part of everyone's lives?

Here's what I've been able to find from their anchor days. I don't even recognize the picture of Vince Leonard because it's so very old.


Why are they slipping down the memory hole? John Facenda, in particular, is embedded in the brain of every single professional football fan over the age of 40. He was the voice of NFL Films (go here and listen to the audio file -- that's John Facenda) until he died.

Oh well. Fame is fleeting. That's our real message here. Celebrity comes and then it goes. What matters is not how pretty or popular you were, but whether you did anything for anyone else. Most of the local news professionals in Philly are engaged in discharging exactly that pursuit, serving their community for years at all hours and in every kind of weather. It's a pure shame they're being judged by the shallowest, callowest members of their business. But that won't last either. People always remember the good ones in the end -- and forget the fakers.

Besides, Philadelphia still has one anchor in the mold of Vince and John and Larry. How many other cities can say that? Maybe it's time we appreciated him a little more.


Yeah, he's gotten gray. But we all believe he still cares about what happens in Philly. That's a lot better than a network contract in our book.

Thursday, August 21, 2008

MORE TROUBLE. I don't know if you've noticed, but there's practically nothing left of Barack Obama. He has no intimate friends anymore: so many of them have been thrown under the proverbial bus that the term is about to be dropped from the MSM lexicon for overuse. His wife has been shoved off the stage and made over into a mannequin still life. He no longer has, apparently, any professional, school, or personal acquaintances, at least none that are allowed to speak to the media.

He no longer has any political positions unless you're of a mind to follow the evaporating contrails of what used to be positions. He strongly favors an immediate pullout from Iraq, but not really. He wants to have open diplomatic discussions with all world leaders, regardless of preexisting hostilities, but not really. He strongly favors much higher taxes on the rich, but not really. He's adamantly opposed to drilling for more oil in the United States, but not really. He's radically pro-choice on abortion, but not really. He's unalterably opposed to giving telecommunications companies immunity for cooperating with the Bush administration after 9/11, but not really. He wants to carry the War on Terror to Pakistan and get OBL once and for all, but not really. He thinks it's dangerous to rebuke the Russians too harshly for invading Georgia and defying NATO, but not really. He's a post-racial bridgebuilding candidate determined to put our long history of racial animus behind us, but not really. He's an agent of a brand new kind of politics, post-partisan, civil, and far above cheap attacks, negative ads, and dubious campaign contributions, but not really. Watch any of his latest public appearances and he seems to do little but snipe pettishly at Republicans, conservatives, and McCain. That's not change. It's tiresomely clicheed Dem politics.

Isn't it time to start adding all this stuff up? What's left of the man behind the glowing charismatic image? Is there any there there?

I've been waiting in vain for his MSM and blog supporters to come to grips with the new Obama and explain why he is still deserving of so much admiration and unwavering support. But the Obama of their cheerleading efforts is a lot like the Iraq War of their fevered imaginings -- a subject which can only be discussed in terms of the past. Their Obama is the Obama of the early campaign, hope and change and ringing oratory. I'm beginning to suspect they have no remaining reasons for supporting the new Empty Suit Obama except the same old old one -- he's not a Republican.

If they do have other reasons, I'd like to hear what they are. Because I'm under the impression the Democrats don't actually have a candidate for president, just the fading outline of one who used to be there but is no longer. And that's kind of discomfiting.


Who wants to see the Oath of Office taken by the Invisible Man?

FOLLOW-UP. If you're anything like us, you're wondering where all those Chinese gold medals come from. Why do most other nations have approximately the same number of silver and bronze medals as gold medals, while China has approximately double the number of golds compared to their silvers and bronzes?

The answer is actually quite simple. As part of its '119 Program' China has been fielding teams in events no one else even knows are Olympic Sports. It started with ping-pong, which everyone else in the world thought was a children's game. The Chinese decided sometime back in the days of Mao that it was their National Football League, which is why we still confront the ludicrously overblown spectacle shown in the YouTube video above. Who gives a flying f___ that there are people who play ping-pong as if they were on the center court at Wimbledon? No one. So China gets the gold medal while nobody else plays at all. Which is exactly the right response. And we're not suggesting any nation seek to change the situation.

But just for your information, we've compiled a list of some of the other sports China is "dominating" at the Olympics.


The only aspect of all this that might occasion some concern is the accumulating evidence that the Peoples Republic of China is taking this whole dimension of semi-sport way too seriously and possibly abusing children in the process. We've managed to procure some videos which are, in aggregate, more than a little alarming vis a vis Chinese training techniques.

Should children as young as one or two be conscripted into Olympic mah jongg training programs?


(Particularly in light of the enormous high-tech investment being made in big-league mah jongg infrastructure...)

And, yes, it is a pattern. Tibet is much in the news, but has anyone reported the shame of Tibetan toddlers forced into marathon caroms practices?


Or children who are inducted into the game of quoits by being compelled to become quoits?


This is the kind of sports-obsessed cancer that could easily lead to the quoit-subjugation of mere infants, even in our own supposedly enlightened nations. It just makes you sick.

And perhaps worst of all, what about the small children who get hijacked into the moral quagmire of Twister before they're old enough to know anything about "good touch/bad touch"?


It would seem that some very serious investigations need to be carried out into the entire Chinese Track & Field athletic program.

But does anybody really care?

We've thought about this long and hard, and we've come to the conclusion that we don't care. As far as we're concerned, China can get as many ping-pong and tiddly winks medals as it wants (as long as there's no stick-beating terrorism involved). That doesn't mean you couldn't get all fired up about it if you felt like it. You could start with a Jarts witch hunt. Why can't we see the teams's faces? Are they so riddled with Jarts puncture scars that we couldn't bear to see them? Are Jarts made of lead now? And why are dogs being systematically exploited in quoits training? And on and on. Don't get us started. The last thing we need is to get involved with some group of concerned world citizens based in San Francisco...

But what else do you have to do?

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

TIME TO DECIDE. When you see it, it seems so obvious. Heavy Metal + Rap = Rock'n'Roll Renaissance. With Pakistan imploding, Europe and Canada sinking into the maw of Islam and cultural suicide, Russia on the march back to their twentieth century fantasy of dominion through Cold War, Iran itching oh-so-publicly to develop and use nuclear weapons on the Jews while the Jew-haters of Europe do nothing, and China getting away with its Olympic snow job on the feminized democracies of the west, it IS time for American pop music to reassert itself as the voice of the freest people on earth. This should be the soundtrack of the McCain campaign. Obama Girl vs. Stuck Mojo. Let the people choose. We'll close with a number that's even better than the one above, but be warned: It's definitely NSFW.

Monday, August 18, 2008

WE LOVE'EM. Now that the Michael Phelps story has been completed and everyone in the U.S. will stop watching the Olympics, it's time to call NBC to account for a few things.

Does it bother anyone else that facts like these -- reported in the London Times -- don't receive NBC airtime equivalent to all the lovely cinematography of Chinese countryside and dynastic architecture?


Yes, I understand the argument that the Olympics is a sporting event and shouldn't be ruined with a lot of unpleasant politics and news that's embarrassing to the host country. I don't happen to agree, but I do understand the argument. Nonetheless, the fact that these games are being conducted in a semi-totalitarian state as opposed to an open democracy is relevant, even with regard to the coverage of sports. NBC has been notably if not maliciously disingenuous in this respect.

Yes, despite some lapses -- its odd characterization of the USA women's gymnastics team and Chris Collinsworth's bizarre exchange with Kobe Bryant -- NBC has done its requisite home-team rooting for Phelps, Torres, and other high-profile American athletes. On the other hand, anchorman Jim Lampley (oh how we miss Jim McKay) and his counterparts at MSNBC and USA Network seem to regard all the various Chinese teams and athletes as a kind of secondary home team we're obviously rooting for. If there's nothing big and American underway, the automatic broadcast default is to China (including damned ping-pong and badminton), where the announcers and color commentary experts never seem to run out of admiring superlatives, even though they're fearlessly critical of American performances. And just when you start to think there isn't a sport so insignificant that the Chinese haven't produced an overnight world class sensation in it, NBC finally confirms it by reporting enthusiastically on the "119 Program," which was chartered to do exactly that -- win medals in every possible Olympic sport, regardless of what may be any native tradition or interest in it.

It's as if we're really supposed to feel unabashedly good about this. As if such a top-down, state-driven, quasi-military effort is somehow equivalent to the kind of financial sponsorship advertised during the nonstop commercial breaks by Home Depot, Coca Cola, and other U.S. companies (which, incidentally are paying for NBC's unending commercial endorsement of the Peoples' Republic of China). It isn't. And this Olympics is replete with abundant evidence that it isn't.

Other news and wire services contain stories indicating that China cheats on the Olympic rules (here), may be intimidating or manipulating the International Olympic Committee (here), and may be exploiting (here) if not actually abusing (here) thousands of the nation's athletes -- all for the purpose of winning Olympic medals. Even some of the judging within events is highly suspect. (if you can muscle the IOC, who can't you influence?) Last night's absurd vault competition in women's gymnastics awarded two medals to communist athletes who simply failed to land their jumps as we've been led to expect, for a generation, that medal winners must; the X-Games have higher standards for form than this. NBC's expert commentator seemed disappointed but not outraged that Sacramone, the lone American in the finals, who landed both her vaults with small hops that he tutted over, ultimately lost the bronze medal to a Chinese girl who finished her second vault on her knees. He explained that the differential had been made up by degree of difficulty. (Let's see: if I promise a vault that will take me over the Snake River Canyon and I land instead in the Snake River Canyon, it must count as a success, right? Uh, not at the X-Games anyway.) The worst moment of the night was Bob Costas's subsequent interview with Bela Karolyi, who decried the judging as an unspeakable corruption of the sport. Costas was actually jolly in his dimissal of Karolyi as a partisan.

In my first notes on these Olympics, I suggested NBC might have some kind of subconscious hidden agenda. I no longer have any doubts about it. All those ads for MSNBC election coverage pretty much tell the tale. They're working to ensure the election of World Citizen Obama, and that's a title which sounds pretty empty if there really are ruthless, scheming, unprincipled, genuinely evil governments in the world -- Look at the pretty pictures and faces instead.

I still hope they'll try to make up for it in the remaining coverage, though the truth is, it's too late. No one's going to be tuning in to the long track and field gauntlet in which American defeat and humiliation is apparently inevitable. Although -- if anyone tries to steal the gold from our two basketball teams, even NBC might finally get pissed off.

We'll see.

P.S. And what's up with the Nike "I've got soul but I'm not a soldier" campaign. Yes, athletes frequently have courage. Is it a better kind of courage than a soldier has? Is that the message? If so, I strenuously disagree. Putting your life on the line on behalf of your fellow citizens is several orders of magnitude above risking injury for trophies, gold medals, and seven-figure endorsement contracts. Sorry. That's just the peculiar way I think..


I think it's insulting to our troops, and Nike marketers should be ashamed of themselves. Surely there are ways to celebrate athletes without making implied value judgments such as this.

P.P.S. In honor of our illustrious commenters, Brizoni has designed a new InstaPunk graphic, which you can see at the About InstaPunk posting in the lefthand column of the website. The text has also been revised to give you a better idea of who we are  -- more info, I guarantee than you'll find at any other blogsite -- and just how much freedom you have as commenters. Which is also, I gurarantee, much more than at other websites.

PSAYINGS.5Q.54. No, we don't normally do this. Cute isn't our thing. We can't confirm the scant info we received about it, which we half expect to be debunked at Snopes.com in a week or so. But what the hey. Aren't you sick of just about everything else? We are. It's nice to entertain even the possibility that this little anecdote is true:


In its favor, the story contains specific local information, the lack of which is usually Snopes's first criterion for skepticism.

And the beagle looks as if he's intensely aware the interloper is there, doesn't he? "uh, I don't know if he's supposed to be here, but I am keeping an eye on him. At all times." That argues against a PhotoShop.

Hell. Let's all believe it. For right now. Who could it hurt?

P.S. In honor of our illustrious commenters, Brizoni has designed a new InstaPunk graphic, which you can see at the About InstaPunk posting in the lefthand column of the website. The text has also been revised to give you a better idea of who we are -- more info, I guarantee than you'll find at any other blogsite -- and just how much freedom you have as commenters. Which is also, I gurarantee, much more than at other websites.

ONE OF MANY. What a relief. Not to have to keep tabs on the continuing catastrophic implosion of the U.K. Because Rachel's on the case. Go here. Read it all. Enjoy.

Back to Archive Index