You Know, It's Really Very Simple.

Either immigration laws have meaning or they don't.

Either national borders have meaning or they don't.

Either American society has the self-confidence to preserve itself or it doesn't.

This has been a difficult few weeks to be a conservative Republican, because I'm a firm believer that we as Americans get the government we deserve. To be fair, Bush isn't the source of the problem, though he's far from helping with its solution. I knew W was iffy on illegal immigration when I voted for him, so his continuing to be so in the face of open revolt by his conservative base is hardly surprising, or even too disappointing, though his use of Vicente Fox to vet plans to move our own troops is worrying in the extreme.

What's boggling to me is the naked insouciance that (primarily Senate) Republicans have shown when presented with the clear opinion of their electorate: secure the border. Don't play patty-cake with how many illegals we're going to offer a decidedly amnestic "path to citizenship." Don't hide behind canards about whether it's feasible to deport 11 million illegals when depriving them of sympathetic employers would cause them to self-deport. Don't, for God's sake, extend Social Security benefits to illegals who attempt to qualify with fraudulent papers, or with time spent successfully avoiding the INS!

I'm very patient on the subject of immigration: at least one of my grandparents came over on a boat--I'm a relative newcomer in terms of genetic time in-country, but my ancestors obeyed the rules. One of America's strengths is that we assimilate and integrate new blood from all over. It's great: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses..." I'm down with that.

But (shame this even needs saying), there's a war on. We have a crater in downtown Manhattan, and newly-released footage of the attack on the Pentagon. United 93 is in theaters. We've seen a little bit more of the far end, now, of what happens when immigration laws aren't enforced. There're also the little matters of wage depression, an increasing tax burden on communities where great numbers of illegals live without paying income tax, chaos in border communities, and sightings of men in Mexican Army uniforms violating the border.

I'm going to put this as clearly as I can, elected officials: keep this up and you will pay with your jobs.

There's a real chance of a bloodletting this November. I just hope it's in the name of replacing incumbents with young bucks rather than Republicans simply staying home in droves...

"Speaker Pelosi." Brrr.

-Rich

Of Distribution Methods and Kings

Pity the synchronous entertainment industry: movies, television, newspapers, radio. No, really.

Take movies (please): it's getting harder and harder to make a consistent profit by hitting the targets that used to draw audiences into theaters. Mission: Impossible III is doing fairly lackluster business (though the sheer manic insanity of Tom Cruise might have affected its receipts a smidgen), there are braindead sequels of sequels getting made right and left, there's an increasingly barefaced preachiness and liberal bent to movies and to actors these days, guaranteeing alienation of a certain portion of films' potential audiences, and on top of that home theater equipment has moved into the mainstream (62.3 million hits on Google as of this writing).

I realized this afternoon that I haven't darkened the door of a movie theater since sometime in December, 2005 (Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe). There simply hasn't been a cinematic offering since then that's been suitably compelling. I have, however, bought about a dozen DVDs (though none for a non-Pixar movie made in the past five years), subscribed to Netflix and watched hundreds of hours of TiVo- and/or Windows Media Center Edition-recorded TV in that time.

Then there's advertising-driven TV. Between (again) DVRs (TiVo, Windows Media Center Edition, etc.), Netflix (again) and the ability to download pretty much any TV show, movie, interesting video clip or photo from the internet, ads just aren't getting watched the way they used to be. There are more product placement deals being made, more technological hurdles being placed in front of TiVo and its cohorts by the more litigious TV content producers, but the technological trend is clear here.

Newspapers? Oy. I know I haven't subscribed to one of the dirty, bulky, fire hazards since the early 1990s. Internet, internet, internet, mobile internet, mobile internet, internet funnies! It's embarrassing how poorly physical newspapers serve my needs.

Radio: there are some bright points here (conservative talk radio, subscription satellite radio), but I know I find commercials amid my songs pretty well unbearable after nearly a year with XM. I download close to a half-dozen podcasts on a quasiweekly basis (only one of which is a recording of a radio show), and pretty much every talk radio show that values its audience publishes a podcast now. Again, asynchronous media is winning, and winning big.

Needing to show up or tune in at a specific time for media is so 1998.

Part of this is probably just me, and the fact that I have a beautiful woman to occupy my attention and my time, and that she and I are internet, DVD and timeshifting fools. But demographically I have to imagine that I'm not such an outlier. The coveted 18-to-35 male audience segment (which I exited only yesterday) is watching less synchronously-aired, mass-produced entertainment and occupying its time with more technologically tricksy stuff like TiVo-d media, iPods (containing everything from simple music to podcasts to video), videogames, and plain old websurfing.

Case in point: this past week I acquired a truly remarkable device: a Cingular 8125 Pocket PC, which is actually more of a smartphone than a full Pocket PC. I used to use a Palm Treo 650, and it did a decent job as a phone, camera, organizer and e-mail device, but a poor one as a web-surfing platform. Well, how bad can that be, you ask? It's a stinkin' phone! True, but now that I have a unit that excels at being a phone, a camera, an organizer and a web-surfing platform (I know, I scarcely believe it myself) I will never, ever, ever go back. Shoot, for the fun of it I streamed a Harry Potter trailer over the thing's cellular modem, and while it was hardly HDTV, it was impressive nonetheless. And it'll look positively Jurassic in a year.

Give me a flatscreen monitor and broadband connection for comfort, but the ability to get the latest news via RSS and WAP from a Panera Bread over coffee and croissants without even needing to lug a laptop around is where it's at, baby.

-Rich

The Big Reveal--Meet Amy!

After a brief spate of frequent blogging, followed by a return to sporadicity, I'm moved to introduce everyone to "A," the woman who's keeping me entirely too happy to get blogworthily excited about all the myriad ways the world is circling the bowl of late.

Her name is Amy, her nom de plume is the Geek Girl Blonde, and I am well and truly over the moon about her, and, wonder of wonders, she about me.

As Amy writes in her latest post, she and I visited my parents over the Easter holiday, and everyone was splendidly impressed with one another (whew!). She's already met Matt (of occasional commentarial note on this humble site) and his wife Amy*, and gotten along famously with them. She has yet to meet my sister Meagan, or much of my extended family, but we're working on that. :-D

I have met Amy's parents (as they live, conveniently, here in Birmingham) and a fair amount of her close and extended family over the past month or two myself, and been well and truly impressed.

It'd be fair to say we're both excited, in that knot-tying kind of way.

It'll be the end of the summer at the earliest before any pointed questions get asked, if I make myself clear, but it's also safe to reveal (since Amy has) that we've begun discussing "bling" designs (we're both fond of emeralds). Yes, it's an exciting time around Squeezings Central, with Spring in the air and all, but sadly that isn't likely to translate into too many impassioned-yet-cogent rants on the socio-political-economic state of the world. It is likely to translate into moony-eyed accounts of the ups and downs of our two lives and their convergent journeys down this exhilarating and sometimes-daunting road.

Hopefully that'll be entertaining anyway.

-Rich

* Yes, Matt's wife is named Amy, and that means we're well on the matrimonial way to Amy-squared. That's actually nothing: my mother and both her sisters married Richards, and two of the three had sons named Richard, of which I'm one. Call it Kismet, call it tradition, call it God having a big hearty laugh, but as Dad put it we seem to seek an economy of names in this family.

I Meme, You Meme...

create your own visited countries map
or vertaling Duits Nederlands

Pretty spiffy, though it highlights how much more of the world I need to get busy and visit. :-D

Courtesy Tripp.

-Rich

Abdul Rahman is Safe, but the Problem Persists

Italy Takes In Afghan Convert

I'm very glad that Rahman wasn't torn to pieces by an Afghan mob after being released. I'm also glad that the man (currently--we'll see how long the situation lasts, given the Religion of Peace's propensity for ignoring national borders when inconvenient) doesn't have to live like some homeless fugitive, because Italy took him in.

However, I'm very unhappy that Rahman had to be gotten off the Afghan legal hook on a technicality. If "insufficient evidence" rings false to me (the man converted to Christianity sixteen years ago with the full knowledge of his family--if the guy hasn't left any discernable breadcrumbs since the Soviet Union fell, then I'm a ballerina named Fifi), then it's got to ring false to the Muslisms calling for Rahman's head, and the decision will carry neither public-square nor legal weight.

It's simply unacceptable that people don't have freedom of religion without fear for their lives in a infant democracy that we're still spending blood and treasure to protect. The President and his administration have been disturbingly mealy-mouthed on the subject: the words held to account may be some of the most ill-chosen in the President's verbal history. And why on God's green Earth did the Italians need to offer sanctuary? Good on them for doing so, but Rahman should have been given a first-class seat on the first Boeing leaving for Hawaii.

It's been said before elsewhere, but I'll amplify: we're seeing nothing more than the fruits of allowing Islam's Sharia law to be installed as fundamental to the Afghan and Iraqi constitutions. This business of death being the penalty for renouncing Islam isn't some Afghani or even Islamofascist concoction: it comes straight from the Hadiths, or accounts and quotations of Mohammed:

Narrated 'Ikrima: 'Ali burnt some people and this news reached ibn 'Abbas, who said, "Had I been in his place I would not have burnt them, as the Prophet said, 'Don't punish (anybody) with Allah's Punishment.' No doubt, I would have killed them, for the Prophet said, 'If somebody (a Muslim) discards his religion, kill him.'" — Volume 4, Book 52, Chapter 149, Number 260. p. 160-161.

(quoted from the Wikipedia Article on Apostasy in Islam)

This is something we'll see more and more of as time goes on: there are thousands of people in Afghanistan alone who are in similar danger to that which Rahman has just escaped.

-Rich

Enemy of My Enemy

This post is not about foreign policy, for a change. It's about domestic policy, and how it seems to create strange bedfellows lately.

To start:

• Two Cheers for Nancy Pelosi: Democrats think outside the Sarbox.
• Sarbanes-Oxley: A Price Worth Paying?

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (known affectionately as "Sarbanes-Oxley," "Sarbox," or merely "SOX") is quickly becoming the prototypical example of well-intentioned legislation whose effects as a cure are worse than the disease for which it was fashioned.

From the OpinionJournal article:

Recent estimates from the American Electronic Association, for example, show that U.S. companies are spending $35 billion annually simply to comply with the law as opposed to original federal estimates of $1.2 billion. A University of Nebraska study found that audit fees for Fortune 1,000 companies, on average, increased a staggering 103% from 2003 to 2004. The costs of being a U.S. public company are now more than triple what they were before the law passed, according to a study conducted by the Milwaukee-based law firm of Foley & Lardner. Some smaller firms report that they are spending 300% more on Sarbox compliance than on health care for their employees.

And:

Beyond the direct cost of compliance to individual companies, a recent University of Rochester study concluded that the total effect of the law has reduced the stock value of American companies by $1.4 trillion. That is $1.4 trillion that could be invested in infrastructure improvements, jobs, innovative technologies or research and development. As Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy says, Sarbanes-Oxley throws "buckets of sand into the gears of the market economy."

"Sand in the gears" is a phrase I first heard my father apply to anti-business (or merely confiscatory-via-tax) policy a few years ago; the thrust of our discussion at the time was both awestruck and cynical: "Isn't it amazing that the U.S. economy is so immense, so powerful, that we can pour incredible quantities of regulatory sand into its mechanism and it not only continues to work, but to work well enough to shame the other economies of the world?" The metaphor does raise a few questions, though: just how much sand can the mechanism take before it fails, and good grief, imagine what it could do without all that sand!

The company where I work has recently completed its Sarbanes-Oxley compliance audit, and passed. It took an incredible amount of work, and diverted truly flabbergasting resources away from our core business: i.e., selling things. Yet we still turned a decent profit this quarter; earnings were down slightly from forecasts, but still, as I said, decent. More vindication of the strength of the mechanism, I suppose, but was this trip necessary?

Here's my whole problem with the very idea of legislation like Sarbanes-Oxley: it presumes guilt until convinced of innocence. It points a legal shotgun at the forehead of every publicly-traded company in the U.S. (and their compliance-auditing firms) and says, "Prove to us that you're not a bloodsucking, fraudulent bastard!" Of course, this is designed to protect investors from falling prey to the real bloodsucking, fraudulent bastards out there in the world.

The problem is that there are already laws on the books to prosecute the living Hell out of people who defraud both small and large investors, not to mention the securities market and the government. Those laws even seem to have worked: where are Enron * and WorldCom ** today (or for that matter Arthur Andersen *** consulting)? Two effectively had the death penalty exacted on them, and WorldCom re-renamed itself to MCI, and is a shadow of its former self.

All in a world before the blunt instrument of "justice" that is Sarbanes-Oxley.

There are those who believe that such safety measures are necessary for the protection of the investor, and since everybody has a 401(k) or similar stake in the market of late, even the "little guys" are investors now, so the Enron and WorldCom scandals robbed lots of little people of considerable sums of their money. Even so, I'd argue that risk is simply part of investment. There's very little reward in this life that doesn't have risk involved, and the stock market, offering some of the most impressive monetary rewards, also comes with some of the highest levels of monetary risk.

When I buy stock in a company, I'm professing my faith in that company. This means that I take on a whole slew of risks: its business model might be flawed; it might get outcompeted by other companies in the same business; and, at its helm, there might be a slack-off, an idiot, or even a crook. Risk is part of the package, and trying to mitigate that risk limits the possible reward: in forcing all public companies to comply with its purposely vague requirements, Sarbanes-Oxley consumes those companies' resources and diverts those resources from serving the companies' goal of actually making money. That figure in the second quote is haunting: $1.4 trillion dollars that might have been plowed back into the economy (and generated tax revenue, for the socialists in the crowd), instead poured down the comparative drain of Sarbanes-Oxley compliance auditing.

I've looked around as much as I can this afternoon, and the estimates I can find of the total damages caused by the Enron and WorldCom scandals amount to around $10 billion. (If anybody knows better numbers, please let me know.) Based on these napkinback numbers, we get an amount of 140 times the original cost of the problem to "prevent it happening again," which is sadly Quixotic: all Sarbanes-Oxley does is penalize the rule-followers. Diehard rule-breakers will find ways around the auditing process, and in the meantime we've thrown a massive quantity of sand into the machine, hurting the law-abiders, to little positive effect.

My hope is that articles like the above (and why are Democrats leading the charge to neuter Sarbanes-Oxley?!?) are harbingers of a change in opinion now that the real costs of the legislation are becoming apparent. I'd love to see Sarbanes-Oxley struck down or made ineffective (or less onerous) soon; the fewer fetters we have on the American prosperity engine, the better.

-Rich

PS. Speaking of risk and reward, I am in love. The inimitable 'A' will need to watch herself if she doesn't want to become the future Mrs. Rich. :-D

* From the Enron website: "Enron is in the midst of restructuring various businesses for distribution as ongoing companies to its creditors and liquidating its remaining operations."

** From the MCI site: "MCI, formerly known as WorldCom, has paid a penalty consisting of $500 million of cash and 10 million shares of new common stock of MCI, Inc. in connection with the settlement of charges brought against WorldCom by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission."

*** From the Wikipedia entry on Andersen: "On June 15, 2002, Andersen was convicted of obstruction of justice for shredding documents related to its audit of Enron. Since the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission does not allow convicted felons to audit public companies, the firm agreed to surrender its licenses and its right to practice before the SEC on August 31."

In Case Any of Us Had Forgotten the Meaning of the Word "Courage"...

Muslim’s Blunt Criticism of Islam Draws Threats

Dr. Wafa Sultan has set herself against all that is modern fundamentalist Islam. I can hardly imagine the shadowy tendrils of Hell that are scratching at her door in the wake of her Al Jazeera interview.

-Rich