BillSaysThis

Isn’t it just wrong for a ‘Softie to want a Palm?

Today the Mercury News published a letter to the editor from Gary Katz about the upcoming US Supreme Court hearing on a lawsuit filed by Marc Kasky against Nike. The shoe company is appealing a decision by the California Supreme Court in Kasky’s favor. The suit, filed as a class action on behalf of all Californians claims that consumers were being duped by Nike’s defense of its overseas business practices and proclamations of a squeaky clean corporate image.

Katz is the president of the Silicon Valley chapter of the Public Relations Society of America. His letter argues that the First Amendment precludes such restirctions on corporate speech and a SCOTUS decision that holds otherwise would have terrible consequences. I can see how the consequences would be terrible for Katz and his colleagues, but not for Americans at large or even for corporations in general.

I wrote the following letter in response:

I’m glad I’d put my coffee cup down by the time I read Gary Katz’ letter in today’s paper, but why would one expect less than such a self-serving response from someone paid to spin the truth? Free speech is an extremely important aspect of American society but for a corporation to be able to lie in official communications (and not, say, exaggerate as is done every day in advertising) is just absurd. If Nike can lie about the reality faced by the workers in its plants, why couldn’t the company also lie in SEC filings?

Katz asserts, with no supporting arguments, that compelling honesty in corporate speech would exclude businesses from public comment and debate but I do not see how this is true. All it does is require such words to be truthful, but, and this is the crux of the problem for Nike et al, the truth might cost them money.

In the wake of the disclosure of the last few years of terrible choices by American corporations, I am hard-pressed to understand how this is a bad thing. Free speech is valuable because of how it benefits society as a whole, not just how it benefits an individual, and there is no value to society in allowing corporations to lie about themselves. The US Supreme Court should uphold the state Supreme Court’s ruling.

Since the Sweet One and I are keeping things small and simple, we’re not hiring a band or DJ for the upcoming nuptials. Instead, we’re making a custom CD (please don’t report us to the bad people at the RIAA) with the following set of love ballads:

– Genesis, Follow You Follow Me

– Springsteen, All That Heaven Will Allow

– Chicago, Feeling Stronger Every Day

– Chicago, Baby What a Big Surprise

– Van Morrison, Moondance

– Van Morrison, Have I Told You Lately

– Stevie Wonder, My Cherie Amour

– Stevie Wonder, Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours

– Beatles, Something

– Bread, Everything I Own

– Barry White, Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe

– Styx, Mr. Roboto Babe

– Sinatra, I’ve got You Under My Skin

– McCartney, My Love

– Elvis Costello, Every Day I Write the Book

What, you expected headbanging deathmetal? With my Mom in the room, uh, yeah sure.

Aha!

Risk of sanity, health, doesn’t seem to matter these days. Item one is the firestorm over Senator Rick Santorum’s comments on homosexuality and especially his response to the reaction his original comments engendered. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, looking hubris in the eye and not blinking, called on Santorum to resign as chairman of the Republican Senate Caucus; Gay groups called his comments hurtful and divisive. Santorum acknowledged that the original article quoted him correctly but called the story itself “misleading.” The Associated Press then released the unedited interview.

Surprise, surprise, surprise, as my old pal Gomer used to say, the AP actually published a less damaging article from the interview than they could have and Santorum (hey, Karl, where did this guy come from?) simply made it worse. Here’s a representative quote from the unedited tapes: “I have no problem with homosexuality, I have a problem with homosexual acts.” Is this going to be Trent Lott all over again?

Item two comes out of the Land of the Lobbyists. The World Health Organization is apparently about to release a report called “Diet, Nutrition, and the Prevention of Chronic Diseases” and the US Sugar Association, a group of the 22 major manufacturers, is up in arms. Seriously! They even wrote a letter to WHO’s director threatening the organization if the report came out unedited: “We will exercise every avenue available to expose the dubious nature of the [report],” the letter stated. All because the draft now circulating recommends that people get no more than 10 percent of their daily calories from added sugars.

The group is now threatening to push Congress to eliminate the $400 million we contribute to WHO. Are these people greedy fucks, or just nuts? Haven’t we learned yet that sugar is just this side of cigarettes when it comes to legal products that are bad for one’s health? Because America, taking the lead in another terrible trend, isn’t besieged by obesity–oh wait, yes we are! Does this remind you of Chris Buckley’s novel Thank You for Smoking, because it does me.

But WHO is fighting back. Apparently, that 10 percent–far too much in my eyes–is not enough for Coca-Cola, Kraft Foods, and the rest of the USSA members. They want the report to give thumbs up to a diet in which up to 25% of the calories come from added sugars. These numnuts claim there is “a preponderance of recent scientific evidence” exonerating sugar as a cause of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, hyperactivity and tooth decay. Oh yeah, sure, and my name is Joe McCarthy, senator from Wisconsin, and I can name 57 communists working in the State Department.

Update, 5:00: Study says fat causes 90,000 U.S. cancer deaths every year and guess where all those pounds came from!

Just for the heck of it, Evan and I are going to the Bay.NET User Group meeting tonight to hear Amanda Silver, Program Manager for Microsoft VB.NET, talk about the future of (what else?) VB.NET. Wonder if I can get a free copy from her. Or a job. That would be better, or at least more useful. Buffy‘s a repeat anyway.

1) garret: enjoying the lingering cobalt

2) Good for a laugh: Oliver Stone and George W. Bush were classmates at Yale. Bet they partied hard together. Huh?

3) More yummy corporate/government badness: Inside Cisco’s eavesdropping apparatus

Hard to believe but nobody is blogging the death Friday of database theory god Edgar Codd. You know, the guy who invented relational theory and all that jazz while he was hanging around IBM’s Santa Theresa lab (right here in San Jose) because he was sickened by the crap that passed for organized storage back in the ’70s. Hard to think of any creation in software so important since then, yet no one mentions him going. Sad.

For some reason, the reviewers came down hard on Chow Yun Fat’s new flick Bulletproof Monk but after seeing it I can’t tell you why. About the only thing that Roger Ebert, for example, seems to like is the opening fight scene, which takes place on a rickety, missing a few slabs rope and wood bridge, and the one action scene for which I didn’t care as I though the wirework was simply too obvious.

I’m more of a mind with Mick Lasalle of the SF Chronicle, who points to the little dustup between Fat and co-star Seann William Scott (yeah, Stiffler but with no mom here) when, despite Scott’s best efforts, Fat doesn’t so much as spill a drop of milk from his bowl of coco puffs as Scott tries to evict Fat from his oh-so humble abode, and gives the movie a good review.

Any movie that revolves around a scroll (or more accurately the words on the scroll) that has the power to give a person who speaks its words aloud world dominion requires viewers to suspend disbelief. Films that use martial arts to drive the onscreen violence also require this, because even Jackie Chan can’t move quite as fast nor jump quite as high as all that. So bringing in Nazis as the villains was fine with me since writers Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris set this up by starting the action in 1943. Then we get the pleasure of seeing the original Nazi bastard’s hot granddaughter (Irish lass Victoria Smurfit) fight Scott’s desired female Jaime King. Cool that even the ladies get to do some wired flips and twists.

Fat is really making strides with his English enunciation, much better at this point than, say, Chan or Jet Li, and same with his comic timing. Chan has been making comedies for years and has good timing but I still spend just a few extra beats understanding what he’s said before I can laugh and I didn’t need to do that while watching this one. thumbs up to first time director Paul Hunter.

Side note: Hard to believe it but I checked and it has been two months since I was last in a movie theater, seeing Lord of the Ring: The Two Towers for the second time. Not counting movies that only opened in the last week or so, there’s only been one in all that time I really want to spend money to see, The Quiet American, which fortunately is still playing.

Recommended for action fans

Spurred, I suppose, by the release next Friday of his new film, People I Know, the Times’ film critic A.O. Scott takes a look back at Al Pacino’s career: Seen This Guy Lately? Scott’s assessment, of a sameness in the characters Pacino has portrayed over the past decade or more, seems spot on to me and apparently his role in this new film is no different. He plays a publicist this time out and, not having seen either movie, I wonder if Pacino’s Eli could be Colin Farrell’s Stu 40 years down the road. Pacino, though, is pretty much always worth watching even when the movie around him (S1m0ne, anyone?) is mostly crap.

I sure hope Dave means Yakko.

Have you tried Dano yet? It’s the beta of the new version of Blogger, available only to newly-created blogs at this point as far as I can tell. I created a new blog and the new version looks nice though some of the features one would hope to see, such as trackback and categories, aren’t in it. The new UI is cleaner and more attractive and, given, a completely rewritten, re-architected code base, one can only hope the performance will be much improved too, curtailing the calls for help on the various mailing lists.

Halftime of the Spurs-Suns first playoff game and the NBA runs a promo urging viewers to head to nba.com to buy playoff tickets and get entered into a sweepstakes for tickets to one of the NBA Finals games. Plus front row seats to a Christina Aguilera/Justin Timberlake concert. And I’m thinking, could they come up with a bigger disincentive? Not for me, unless it was the proverbial sharp stick in the eye. Can you say “Bye Bye Bye”?

When you’ve lost the capacity to be surprised by how self-centered and self-serving corporate chieftains can be. Dan Gillmor posted American Airlines’ Betrayal of Trust to his blog today and after reading it I just thought, so what? I mean, the choices made by American’s executives and board are disappointing and sad but after the last couple of years, I just can’t get the old indignation up for it any more. Thank goodness for the Sweet One and sports, eh?

Update: Conservatives Attack Two GOP Senators With Electronically Doctored Images

I went through a little burst of changes on Springsteen, my semi-trusty two year old VAIO laptop, and thought I’d clue all you faithful readers in. All these are free (as in beer) if not free as in speech, a consideration for me without question these days. I’ve been thinking about finding a way, without spending money, to get into some form of .NET programming as well but haven’t yet acted on it (go Scoble!)

First off, a new tabbed browser add-on for Internet Explorer called SlimBrowser. The new tool doesn’t have a huge advantage, yet, over CrazyBrowser (for my purposes, that is) but does have someone actively developing and supporting it, while CB has not had an update in 12 months and the developer no longer responds to email.

Second, I’ve actually adopted an RSS aggregator after resisting for awhile, Luke Hutteman’s SharpReader. This is the first application I’ve used built on top of Microsoft’s .NET Framework, which was the first reason I tried it. But it works quite well, suits my way of doing things that other aggregators I’ve looked at don’t, and so far, so good. My OPML file exported from SR 0.9.1, for posterity.

Third is SpamPal for Windows, “a mail classification program that can help separate your spam from the mail you really want to read.” Works with most POP3 email accounts and Windows email software–I’ve used it with Outlook Express and now Outlook 2002–and works really well, very few false positives or false negatives. Also has a working, active plugin architecture, so I’m using the RegExFilter plugin written by Stephan Slabihoud.

I’ve also installed Knoppix, a variant of the Debian Linux distribution, on another PC but haven’t found the extra monitor necessary to get started on that huge playground.

Gotta love those lower mortgage rates, though I see they’re on the way back up since I locked in last month. Anywho, today was paper signing day; for those of you not here in Cali, let’s just say for all that this state is known for being eco-friendly, we kill trees by the truckload and the stack of papers just to refinance a mortgage is a stack inches thick of mostly 11″x14″ sheet, single-sided of course. You can imagine how much thicker the stack is when purchase of the property is added in!

Wells Fargo keeps offering me zero cost deals, the only thing I see is lower monthly payments (and a reset of the clock back to 30 years) and the possibility of a higher rate (I use a five year ARM). Hell, this time the mortgage broker called me to see if I was interested, didn’t even have to pick up a phone, no new docs required, just bending the elbow to sign or intitial all those pages. Lowered my nut another $110 per month, not shabby.

1) Seating arrangements, what an exciting chore. But necessary.

2) Why is Winerlog down when such easy targets as this are around near daily?

3) Finally! Ford has announced they’re killing off the Taurus, a car that never left the ’80s.

Sadly, Dr. Robert Atkins died today from the trauma caused when he slipped on an icy Manhattan sidewalk nine days ago (Official announcement). Atkins was known worldwide for his nutritional approach, which the Sweet One, myself, and many others follow, developed in the ’60s and early ’70s from the patients at his cardiology practice and bought by millions in the years since he published the Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution as a book. If you’re looking to lose weight and adopt a way of eating that can keep you healthy for years, I recommend you look into this.

Kevin Spacey, finally with the clout to get it done, makes his dream film, a biography of singer Bobby Darin. What most of us don’t remember, but all the publicity for this film points out, is that Darin knew from his mid-teens that he would die young due to a heart defect and did, indeed, die from it in 1973 at 37. In between Darin made sure he succeeded at becoming a star and leaving his mark on the world.

Spacey, though, is already in his mid-40s and will need either serious makeup or digital fx to succeed in this role, which will also cover his marriage to Sandra Dee. Who’ll be portrayed by the 20 year old Blue Crush hottie Kate Bosworth.

Further, Spacey plans to direct the film, something he’s only done once before and let’s be nice and just say that Albino Alligator wasn’t well received. One can only speculate that Spacey would likely be much better served by bringing in a younger actor to play Darin and satisfying himself with director and producer credits.

This sounds like a John Grisham novel: County Says It’s Too Poor to Defend the Poor. Only sadder since it’s true.