Link: http://www.nypress.com/article-7043-new-narc-city-sam-vaknin-and-the-narcissism-of-wall-street.html

As we watch the train-wreck that is the AIG bonus mess continue to unfold, it is worth while remembering that none of what we are witnessing is really new, at least in terms of human behaviour. Not too many years ago, we watched the implosion of Enron, a corporation that, with hindsight, was dominated by a the mindset so appropriately dubbed "Master Of The Universe" by Tom Wolfe in his book "The Bonfire Of The Vanities", which is still one of the great tales of greed, hubris and excess (Gordon Gecko's infamous "Greed is good" speech in the movie "Wall Street" could have been lifted entirely from "Bonfire Of The Vanities").
This interesting article was written a few years ago on the subject of Enron and other related corporate malfeasances of the time.The messages in the article are just as relevant to the AIG fiasco. Here is the most directly applicable one (which is also the most chilling):

The "few rotten apples" theory ignores the fact that affairs like Enron and WorldCom were not isolated incidents—nor were they conducted conspiratorially and surreptitiously. What is now conveniently labeled "misconduct" was an open secret. Information — albeit often relegated to footnotes — was available. The charismatic malignant narcissists who headed these corporations were cheered on by investors — small and institutional alike. Their grandiose fantasies were construed as visionary. Their sense of entitlement—never commensurate with their actual achievements — was tolerated forgivingly. Their blatant exploitation of co-workers and stakeholders was part of the ethos of the virile Anglo-Saxon, natural selection, can-do, dare-do version of capitalism. Everyone colluded in this mass psychosis. There are no victims here—only scapegoats.

UPDATE - Here is another interesting article about Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

...was a study eagerly cited to me by a work colleague who argued that the media in the USA has a left-wing or liberal bias. I did try to point out to him that any argument based on "liberal" vs. "conservative" or "left-wing' vs. "right-wing" is obsolete; the right discussion topic is libertarianism vs. authoritarianism. I didn't get very far with that part of the debate.
I read the UCLA study that he cited, and found it to be no different in may respects to several other studies that I have read in the past, all of which claimed to demonstrate some degree of bias within the media. Since I consider the real issue in media reporting to be truth and full coverage of issues, rather than bias, I find most of these studies to be at best peripheral and at worst totally irrelevant to the current reality that most mainstream media outlets in the USA are a waste of human endeavour.
I just found this dissection of the UCLA study in Media Matters. The most important part of this dissection to me was the demonstration of the extent to which the authors either overlooked or ignored a large amount of preceding academic research on the topic.
Whenever I see people who represent themselves as scholars or experts ignoring most of the previous endeavours in their field, I tend to become rather skeptical of their credibility. After all, would you place much faith in the diagnosis of a doctor if during his discussion with you he admitted "I don't read most medical textbooks and articles"?

Link: http://edcone.typepad.com/wordup/2009/03/phony-balance.html?cid=6a00d8341cc33e53ef0112796e190628a4#comment-6a00d8341cc33e53ef0112796e190628a4

By commenter Justcorbly, who does a good job of explaining why the media is a terrible forum for any form of balanced discussion:

The way most of the media portrays balance is the way those car magazines I read as a kid reviewed new models: They pair them off in phony combat with some other brand. Camaro vs. Firebird! Corvette versus 911!.
It's the same way PC Magazine would review things like printers in its special annual "All The Printers In The World" issue (just aother 450-page magazine, with printer companies placing ads mysteriously close to the reviews of their products). Epson versus Lexmark! Canon versus Brother!
It was, and is, an effort to frame almost every story as a zero-sum battle to the death. That's what drives much of media, not a compulsion to deliver balance.

When I first arrived in Dallas in 1994 on a 1 year overseas assignment from the UK, it did not take me long to discover that the Dallas Independent School District (DISD) was the sort of organization that Will Rogers would have loved to report on. For examples of incompetence, malfeasance and just plain awful governance, DISD truly is the gift that keeps on giving.
Not too long ago, DISD "discovered" that it had a budget shortfall of at least $60m, and possibly as high as $80m. The fact that nobody seemed to be able to provide a consistent number for the shortfall, or explain how the shortfall had occurred, ought to have been cause for the termination of at least some DISD officials. However, the N.O. Body syndrome appeared to eliminate accountability, and the DISD set about cutting left right and center to balance the books.
Now, courtesy of the Dallas Observer, we learn that on 21st November the DISD proposed to extend the term of DISD trustees from 3 to 4 years. This proposal would be extremely convenient, in that 3 trustees would be up for election early next year, and 2 of them happen to be supporters of the current superintendent, Michael Hinojosa.
The Dallas Observer article, in best Molly Ivins style, summarizes the proposal thusly:

The Dallas school board, in the throes of the worst fiscal crisis in the history of the district and growing voter unrest, this week will consider dealing with its political problems by suspending upcoming school board elections.
No, now, I told you. This is not a joke. This is not a bulletin from Zimbabwe. The Dallas school board at its November 20 meeting will vote on canceling school board elections due to take place next May.
In fact, it's a little worse than that. They don't just want to cancel the election. They want to do it without public debate.

Earlier this year, I kept reading conspiracy theory suggestions that President Bush was planning to cancel the 2008 Presidential Elections on some pretext...but it seems that DISD has boldly decided to actually implement a similar idea to perpetuate the terms of office of trustees, who, I would suggest, ought to be accepting at least some miniscule smidgeon of accountability for the unholy financial mess that the DISD has been mired in. They, as far as I can tell, voted to appoint the leaders and officers who were in charge when DISD suddenly "discovered" its budget shortfall.
This is not like a third world country. The DISD is operating right now as a third world country within a city. This sort of behaviour is just mind-bogglingly unbelieveable. It resembles the worst duplicity, anti-democratic actions and attitudes of Stalinist Russian. Josef Stalin would be laughing from his grave.
It might be worth noting that this sort of unbelievable behaviour is not exactly new in this part of Texas. Next door to DISD, the Wilmer-Hutchins ISD was shut down in 2005 by TEA after continued decline, poor academic performance, and accusations of corruption and malfeasance from all points of the compass. This 2004 article provides some insight into the mess.
UPDATE - It seems that the proposal was passed by a 7-2 majority at the school board meeting, with no serious debate, and in the teeth of clear public opposition.
This sort of egregiously anti-democratic behaviour is going to continue until electors toss all of the current DISD trustees from office. Until electors fire school boards and trustees for Stalinist nonsense like this, the bad behaviour and endemic stupidity and waste wihin the DISD will most likely continue.
Over to the electorate.
UPDATE 2 - Not to be outdone, the Lancaster ISD has now joined the North Texas School Board Malfeasance Contest, via the investigation of their superintendent for various alleged malfeasances. Examples:

...an outside investigator reported that Dr. Lewis used district funds to give employees interest-free loans, authorized payroll advances to himself and other employees and handed out cash prizes to employees.

If these allegations are true, and another superintendent is fired, I'm starting to wonder if there is something in the water in North Texas. Something that electors are drinking, which renders them consistently unable to stop voting idiots into positions of power on school boards. If you wanted to make a compelling case that local electors are not capable of making sound decisions on these aspects of local governance, you won't have to go far to find the evidence.
UPDATE 3 - The Lancaster ISD board has now fired the superintendent...
UPDATE 4 - The Lancaster ISD superintendent has now asked for a public hearing on his case...
UPDATE 5 - A settlement has been reached between Superintendent Lewis and the Lancaster ISD. He will work out his contract until July 2009 and then leave with a cash settlement.

Link: http://the-osterley-times.blogspot.com/2009/03/american-republicans-versus-british.html

From the UK blogger The Osterley Times comes this highly useful comparison between politics in the USA and the UK.
One of the more amazing memes that has become prevalent here (to my dismay, I have already heard it from at least 3 friends in the last 2 months), is that Barack Obama is a "socialist" or is going to introduce "socialism".
My response is usually to ask them to define "socialism", which often leads to confusion, since they usually got the term off of talk radio, and they have no idea what it means. Another possible response is to point out that in absolute political terms, calling Barack Obama socialist is so far off the mark as to be embarrassing. Most mainstream members of the Democratic Party would be regarded as highly conservative in European countries, including the UK, where Obama would feel right at home in the Conservative Party.
The main thrust of The Osterley Times is to point out that most of the memes and debating points being deployed by fringe commentators in the USA who are opposed to the Obama administration would not be taken seriously in the UK, because they would be regarded at best as irrelevant, and more likely would be dismissed as intellectually and morally bankrupt. To wit:

Bush, when asked about the criticism of waterboarding - which he refuses to see as torture, despite the fact that the US itself has prosecuted people for doing that very thing - asked, "Which attack would they rather not have stopped?" He actually acted as if this could be sold as a "red pen or blue pen" scenario where one has to choose between torture and attacks.
No British politician could dare sit on national TV and make that argument. But in the US, Bill O'Reilly can sit on national television and actually argue that people who oppose torture are "despicable".

As he neatly summarizes:

Every society has politicians who hold disgraceful positions on things like torture, abortion and gay rights; but I can think of no European country, indeed almost no country anywhere outside the Muslim world, where a political party who espoused such views could possibly hope to be taken seriously.

Link: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/extras/radio/355_transcript.pdf

...that does a really good job of explaining how the current asset valuation bubble based on housing developed over time.

Despite all of the fury, light, heat and sound surrounding the McLaren spying affair and the involvement of former Ferrari employee Nigel Stepney, with the Italian legal system launching investigations, and threats of criminal charges against Stepney and McLaren employees, the investigations have apparently ended and the case will be settled via some McLaren personnel paying fines.
Any prosecution of Nigel Stepney risked embarrassment for Formula 1. Stepney was the Ferrari chief mechanic through the Schumacher years, and probably knows more than almost anybody else on the team what interesting, er, actions were taken by Ferrari in their interpretation of the F1 Technical Regulations. He had the potential to severely embarrass not only Ferrari, but F1 in general if he was to be cross-examined. Ditto Mike Coughlan, who Stepney was alleged to have funnelled information to concerning the design of the 2007 Ferrari.
The last thing F1 needed in an economic recession was more scandal, so it is no surprise to me that the case has been quietly settled.

Link: http://www.theagitator.com/2009/02/01/a-letter-id-like-to-see-but-wont/

Some of you may have noticed a controversy a couple of weeks ago when Michael Phelps admitted to smoking marijuana after a picture of him inhaling from a bong was published on the Internet. Phelps issued a grovelling apology, and has been banned from competitive swimming for 3 months.
This alternative ghost-written letter is IMHO the letter that Phelps should have written...

Link: http://online.barrons.com/article/SB123517396995937201.html?page=sp

This article peripherally discusses a key indicator of whether a housing boom is unsustainable - the spread between rent values and mortgage values. The graph enclosed in the article is instructive...and confirms my suspicion that the housing market in many parts of the country has yet to hit bottom. I forecast no uptick until 2010.

Link: http://consumerist.com/5150175/facebooks-new-terms-of-service-we-can-do-anything-we-want-with-your-content-forever

There has been a whole heap of controversy in the last week or so about a change to the Terms Of Service for Facebook. The change would, as strictly read, give Facebook the rights to distribute or sell any user's content in perpetuity after they stop using Facebook.
Not surprisingly, this change has ignited a firestorm of commentary and comment, much of it unfavourable to Facebook. Some clarifications to the underlying reasoning behind the change were issued by Facebook and can be viewed here.
This controversy is a real one; however, the best rule that we can all operate by is the Pandora's Box rule, which I remember discussing with a lady friend of mine back in July 2007, who had been encouraged by some friends to set up a personal web site. My observation was that for all practical purposes, any content that you put on an Internet site that is not password-protected will be public domain, therefore you can expect that anybody can (and sometimes will) appropriate it and distribute it, usually without credit. So...if you were looking to include those pictures of you prancing around naked on a far-away beach...probably best to not do that, unless you want your work boss or censorious aunt to eventually find them. As one commenter noted:

I think a good rule of thumb is to just presume that anything you put on the internet is out there forever and ever regardless if you want it there or not. Follow that logic, and no TOS will catch you off guard.

UPDATE - Facebook has (for now) re-instated its prior Terms of Service. They are promising an overhaul of the entire Terms of Service soon. It appears that they were persuaded by the mostly negative feedback...