BuzzMachine

Guts
: Ken Layne said it well today:

Today is a good day for bloggers to remember that there’s nothing to blog without guys like Pearl out there writing the stories and collecting the news.

Amen to that. It takes guys with guts to get the real facts so pundits can pundit and so we all can be informed.

I don’t have guts. When I was in San Francisco working on the Examiner as an editor and then a columnist, my paper broke the Jonestown story and we lost a friend there, killed in the line of duty. Around the same time, someone I knew was killed reporting in Africa and someone else who was injured while reporting. I decided then that I did not have the guts to be a hard, true reporter; I went into fluff, becoming a columnist and a TV critic and other essentially useless things.

I always remembered that I was not a real reporter and I hold real reporters in respect.

The next time you complain about the media and make fun of the media and whine about media bias and conspiracies, remember what the media really is at the source: guys with guts asking questions it takes guts to ask, guys like Daniel Pearl.

Memorial
: Beliefnet‘s memorial to Daniel Pearl. Says one mourner:

When I was a child, I watched the news and saw these incredibly brave human beings, with a microphone in one hand and the other hand on top of their helmet, trying to whisper there report without attracting the attention of any snipers that might be lurking. My father explained to me that they were War Correspondents. I was overawed. These people who risked there lives, going out there searching for truth and bringing it back to me through my TV set as I ate dinner. I knew that’s what I wanted to do with my life. Be brave enough to search out the truth, and tell the world.

Snobs to the left, please
: Ken Goldstein says what I was thinking: How ridiculous of the feds to eliminate VIP screening lines at the airport. I’m (thank God) not a frequent flier these days, so I wouldn’t benefit from them but I have to say that this should be the business of the airlines; they should be free to give extras to their best customers (as airlines do with quick lines through customs on overseas flights). How odd that the Bush administration would be so business-unfriendly. Are they trying to make us regret the federal takeover of airport security?

Blog withdrawl
: I was gone for two damned days because my damned ISP got hit with a damned denial-of-service attack and obviously didn’t know what the hell to do about it (do I sound mad?). So I was off the air for that long and I have to tell you that a forced silence is hell. Blogging is an addiction. Without it, I got grumpy. I got depressed. I lost my appetite. I was about ready to sign up for a 12-step program. But I’m back… tomorrow.

Me, muse
: I’m honored. Will Warren, poet laureate of Blogdom, was inspired by my declaration that we are in the He Decade. His verse, here.

I think I’ll vacation in Baghdad instead
: I’m not alone cancelling my vacation plans thanks to terrorism and recession (below). Via Holy Weblog comes word that Muslims aplenty are canceling their pilgrimages to Mecca.

Have you slapped a pacifist today?
: Via Relapsed Catholic in the Women’s Quarterly, the difficulty of being a pacifist:

Have you slapped a pacifist today? If not, get to it. Itís one thing to protest a war undertaken in some remote jungle you have to take a long flight to, and whose purposes may be a bit gauzy. Itís quite another when the enemy is dive-bombing New York and Washington. The fact that our enemies are determined to return the world to the seventh century and force our women to dress in sacks makes the anti-war position all the more controversial. There seems little choice but to douse these people with the hot oil of ridicule.

Welcome Instapunditters
: The post on the post-post-feminist He Decade below.

The hunker bunker
: Call me crazy but I just canceled our family’s spring vacation to DisneyWorld.

I simply don’t feel safe. It’s one matter for me to put myself at risk; I know I will end up flying for work again. But it’s quite another matter to put my family at risk.

I don’t feel safe in the air, because I don’t believe that much has changed at airports since Sept. 11. Gates are still guarded by too many uneducated and unprepared slugs. Bags aren’t inspected. Cockpit doors are flimsy. Terrorists are still at large.

Don’t try to give me a lecture about odds, how I’m more likely to be taken down by a tse-tse fly than a terrorist.

I was only a few hundred yards below two jets that hit two buildings, all full of lives that aren’t here any longer. Death was too close.

I used up my odds that day.

So I worry about flying and I even worry some about DisneyWorld. The terrorists scoped out the place and other key destinations; I haven’t heard much about increased security there (or Disney didn’t bother to tell me; they didn’t even bother to ask why I was canceling many thousands of dollars of business with them).

This is why I get so worked up over the lack of apparent action from Ridge and Ashcroft. This is real. It is changing the way we live.

This weekend, I took my kids to see the latest Disney movie (irony noted), Return to Neverland, a Peter Pan sequel that begins in a London suffering under the blitz. This, of course, was terror, constant terror, on a greater scale. The children in the movie — Wendy’s children — are growing up in war; they are facing transport to the country to keep them safe; they are giving up childish things and they are turning into adults long before their time.

I look down the row at my kids and realize that they, too, are growing up during war on their homefront. It’s a different war but it’s war nonetheless and it is changing their lives. It’s even robbing them of DisneyWorld.

I feared I was crazy worrying about flying on our vacation; I thought that perhaps it was just me; it was about being so close and not being able to get away from the event. But when the subject was finally broached, my wife agreed quickly. My parents were relieved. My eldest was wondering whether we’d go and understood why we aren’t.

So I canceled Disney. I called the airline but first went online to discover that they had canceled my flights, thanks to terror’s travel recession, so I got a full refund on my nonrefundable ticket. “Meant to be,” said my wife.

I made new reservations at an undisclosed location outside Washington; I’ll say hello to Cheney for you all as I hunker in my bunker this vacation.

Let us pray
: The late father Mychal Judge, chaplain to the FDNY, left behind this simple prayer, which he handed to people he met [via Holy Weblog and the Sacramento Bee]:

Lord, take me where you want me to go.

Let me meet who you want me to meet.

Tell me what you want me to say.

And keep me out of your way.

A million stories in the naked city
: The Observer has a wrenching piece following up on the lives of the people who Were There That Day. It’s awkward online; the story is about people in pictures we’ve all seen and they didn’t put those pictures online. Nonetheless, we know these people: the fireman climbing the stairs, the dust lady… Their nerves are still raw. A U.S. Marshal who helped rescue people:

My whole life has changed. There’s not a time I’m talking to someone, whether it’s talking about the disaster or talking about work, that I don’t see images in my mind. It’s a video that goes over and over in my brain. Especially working in the city, I can’t get away from it. East Side or West Side, I keep expecting to see the Towers, but they’re gone. I can still function, but it’s always there. Some days I don’t feel like getting out of bed. Everything reminds me of it. I don’t watch it on TV. What am I going to see? A building falling? I don’t need to see that on the screen because I was right at the bottom of it. A burning building? I saw it right in front of me. People jumping out? I was there when it happened. So what do I need to watch it on TV for?

The lady covered with dust, as so many of us were:

People call me the Dust Lady now. At Halloween a lady who lives in my apartment building covered herself in flour and went trick-or-treating as the Dust Lady. I don’t think they realise how much it hurts. I’m just tired of crying. My whole life has gone downhill since 9/11…. don’t have juice or milk in the refrigerator for my daughter. She’s eight years old and doesn’t want to be here with me anymore. She comes after school, but then she goes to her dad’s house. Sometimes I lay on the couch crying and she says, ‘Why are you crying so much?’.

The firefighter on the stairs:

People don’t realise that the plane hit at the worst possible time for the fire department. We change shifts at 9am, so there were two shifts of guys hanging around the firehouse, having coffee, talking. When something like that happens, everyone wants to help, so all the guys went to the Twin Towers. It’s our job, to help people and possibly put the fire out. That’s why we were in the stairwell. At one point, I felt like no firefighter should go up there. Not that I was afraid, just that it seemed a little crazy. It’s easy to say now, but you knew something wasn’t right.

The soul survivor from a firehouse helped start a website for his fallen brothers as he tries to recover.

A businessman who helped lead people to safety:

I’ve been given a mission from God. Now I feel like my life has a reason and I have to search until I’m sure what that reason is and carry out whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing. I thought for a while God brought me there because I was able to maintain my composure and lead everyone to the emergency exit. I wondered if one of the people in that office was going to turn out to be important, or maybe a very important person was going to be born from one those people. But now I believe there must be more. I don’t know what it is, but my feeling that there is something more for me to do sits very heavily with me now. If there’s one thing that’s changed about my life, it’s looking for that reason. My wife also believes I was saved for a reason and is keeping her eyes and ears open, searching for the reason.

Yes, the nerves are still raw, the dreams still stark, the questions still large. It was only yesterday.

Whom do you trust?
: The stock market will collapse if we cannot trust the valuations of companies because (a) auditors and accountants are so beholden to their clients across multiple lines of business that they cannot see straight and (b) analysts are also so weighed down with conflict — their companies trying to sell, sell, sell that which often should not be bought, bought bought — that they are suspect.

It’s just like the Olympics: the French judge can’t judge because of conflict of interest. It’s just like politics, where pols who get too much special-interest money are also smudged by conflict.

The solution is obvious: Independence. We must make those who judge and value companies independent of those companies. Auditors must not be allowed to sell other services to their clients; they should be replaced reguarly so that other auditors will check their work; they should be liable for their lies.

But what about the analysts who sold not only lying scumbag companies such as Enron but also pigs in pokes on the Internet? I’ve long said that analysts have far too much influence and power for the idiots they are; they buddy up to the companies they cover and readily swallow the financial spin that’s fed to them (I’ve worked around the PR people who do the feeding) and they are influenced by their own brokerage house’s need to sell, sell, sell. They are not to be trusted.

My humble solution: A news organization — Dow Jones, Thomson, the FT, Reuters — should buy the analyst operation of a leading brokerage house and operate it independently, without influence, trading purely on the value of its research and opinions. The brokerage house can buy the services of these independent analysts for their top clients; it will be more valuable to them (and brokers can save by not providing valuable analysis to cheap, discount customers like me). The news organization can sell these services to other brokerage houses and directly to consumers. The problem with news organizations’ financial reporting today is that it is too damned shallow; they, too, swallow the PR fed them by investor relations flacks and conmen and can’t afford to dig deeper. With the depth of a full team of analysts, they can deliver real value.

To see how it can work, look no farther than Chris Byron, now a columnist on the New York Post. He calls a spade full of bull a spade full of bull. In his latest column, he found that even Krispy Kreme dabbled in Enron-like off-the-books accounting and KK immediately reformed. He exposed Boston Market for the lumpy gravy it was long before the market realized it. He exposed lots of dot.con idiocy.

Imagine if you had a staff of similarly grumpy — and independent — analysts going after every industry and every major company, a hundred Chris Byrons calling the shots. I would pay for that. I’m not talking about mere blathering, like that on Motley Fool. I’m talking about real reporting.

We would finally have something to believe: We’d know that these reporter/analysts were digging on our behalf, to ferret out the lies and let us know what was true. That is how we would know the true value of the companies in which we are investing.

This, after all, is what journalism is all about, or what it is supposed to be about: Independent reporters finding the facts and asking the tough questions on our behalf, beholden to no one but us, trading only on their own credibility.

We need these standards now more than ever. We have to find this indepdent, smart, tough voice in financial reporting and analysis. The economy is now built on the stock market. Our 401Ks and pensions and insurance and much of the worth of every company and charity and even government is built on stock. If we cannot trust the value of that stock simply because auditors are crooked and analysts are biased, then we will watch the collapse of our very economy.

Soft money, soft spine
: For all the reasons above, Bush should not — cannot — veto campaign reform. Soft money breeds a conflict of interest. We, the people, are going to be far more demanding of all institutions — financial, governmental, media — to eliminate conflict of interest for while that conflict exists, trust, credibility, and value do not. The times demand higher standards.

There goes the neighborhood
: Ken Layne finds no connection between (a) the riot/assassination that killed a government minister at the airport in Kabul and (b) the soccer riot that broke out shortly thereafter. He’s right about this: It appears one is a political event, the other not. Nonetheless, I do see a tie: Afghanistaned is one f’d up country and it is going to be harder than we admit to drag them back to civilization. I won’t be vacationing there for a very long time.

Merchant of death
: The Times of London says bin Laden’s arms merchant has been revealed: a former Soviet air force office. A Times profile of him.

Next stop: Baghdad
: The Times says Bush is finalizing plans to topple Saddam Hussein:

If all goes well with President George W Bushís rapidly developing plan to overthrow Saddam Hussein, General Najib al-Salhi, a former chief of staff of the Iraqi 5th mechanised corps, might be back in Baghdad by the end of the year.

As one of the highest-ranking defectors from Saddamís elite Republican Guard and one of the founders of the Movement of Free Officers, a clandestine Iraqi opposition group, Najib believes the moment of reckoning has finally arrived for the tyrant he used to serve. ìThe Iraqi people are ready for action,î he said last week.