ItSeemstoMe

I am a Globalist

A thought came to me sometime today.  I am a globalist. Not in the sense of favoring huge, multinational corporate powerhouses, although I have no inherent problem with them as such.  But I am a globalist in terms of people. As a blogger, I speak with people in three, occasionally four continents every week and I just love it.  I love seeing how much we have in common on so many levels.

There's a combination of factors that have been going on this week, all kind of blending together into this thought.  I've been reading Thomas L. Friedman's marvelous The World is Flat. An elderly Jewish person I care about is growing uncomfortable with the influx of Afghani Muslims and Indian Hindus into her neighborhood. A guy in front of me in the bakery line told me that all of America's problems could be solved if we built walls around our borders to keep all outsiders, well, out.  A client was telling me about the amazing transformations going in Bangalore.  My friend Ivan let me know that the Singapore Library system would be buying 22 copies of my book.  My email repeatedly failed to reach a friend in China who had voiced objections to the government's suppression of a blogger. A pair of Christian evangelists came to my door, and when I told them that I was Jewish they smiled and said we're all God's children, when I suspect they thought I was really destined to burn in Hell.

I am a globalist, because I feel kinship with people all over the world. Because we share similar ethics, interests, passions, knowledge.  Sometimes I don't feel that kinship with my own neighbors. I think one of the great miracles of the Internet and blogosphere is that we can find people we share kinships with all over the world--at least if their governments don't get in the way.

I may not ever belong in a business larger than my home office can accommodate, which means my wife, my dog, cat and myself, but I have truly become a globalist.

More Holiday Nostalgia

Elana Centor at Funny Business posted a great comment on my earlier post on a Jew's View of Christmas. Elana, obviously a Bagel Sister, talked about flashbacks of the New Jersey Turnpike whenever she hears the Little Drummer Boy relentlessly on the radio. I too am haunted by memories of the New Jersey Turnpike, whenever I hear that redundant rumpa-bum-bum. y now the little drummer kid is probably 180 years old, but that's another story.

I got stranded by a blizzard, one Christmas Eve, with college buddies trying t make it to Florida for school vacation.  It pelted snow so hard, they closed the road and we spent most of the night drinking coffee in a jammed roadside restaurant.  The Drummer just played over-and-over again.

But Elana's touch into my memory bank touched another chord, one I've been thinking about a lot lately.  Driving to Florida were four kids, two Jewish, one Protestant and one Catholic.  In those days, we kidded each other a lot about each other's religion or lack of it. It was delivered-and received-in good fun back in the early 60s.

It was Like that growing up in New Bedford, Mass., in the 1950s as well. We used to have interfaith dances, at our Jewish Community Center, the Catholic Youth Organization (CYO)annex and the local YMCA. Some of the best times of my youth were spent with buddies and sports team-mates of different religion.  Some of the most exciting moments of my youth were spent with Christian girls in the back seats of those wonderfully large cars of the 1950s, but that too, is another story.

In all of it, there was a lot of kidding  But there was a special shared respect.  We went t each other's homes. I went to Midnight Mass several years in a row on Christmas Eve, after getting into my friend Robert Pacheco's family's spike eggnog.  t was an annual high point. The Catholic kids joked about confession and we joked about our own fire and brimstone Rabbi. We were kids.  We came from homes where both parents worked and the mortgage got paid but no one got ahead. We had more in common with each other than we did with the so called leaders of our religious communities.

But two things happened. We grew up for one, and as we did so, the world around us seemed to have become far less ecumenical and even further less tolerant. A lot us went off to college, nearly all being the first of their families to do so. Those who did not stayed in New Bedford.  They remained good friends with each other but the rest of us moved on and scattered.

I'm still interfaith in my friendships.  I'm still convinced that people of varied races, religions and hues are essentially alike at the core, but unfortunately separated by cultures. Ad cultures everywhere seem to me today more entrenched is staying separated than they were when I was hanging out with the guys outside Finni's Pharmacy on Roche Street in New Bedford, Mass.

I am currently living a better life than I have ever had. But in the sense that the ecumenism's, which so shared the attitudes I have today seems to me to be on the wane, and this time of year, it makes me particularly sad.

But in any case, Elana, thanks for the memory flashback.

Question to the World #6

What do you most like about where you live? What could be better?

Questions to the World #4

I'm going to run with these questions for a while. I believe if enough people join in and answer enough of these questions over a period of time, the results will tell us something about what similarities and differences people have. I almost never ask for links, but if you find this effort interesting, please spread the word, encourage others to come. I want diversity in every way that wird is used. Question #4 What or who do you trust?

Questions to the World #1

We bloggers love to tell the world what we think.  Collectively, we are sort of this humungous global op ed page, with opinions spilling into all sorts of stuff. It dawned on me that it might be interesting to turn it around and ask the world what it thinks.

So, I'm going to start asking open-ended questions, one at a time. I am not going to enter my thoughts.  I am not going to comment on yours. You can tell us as much or as little about yourself as you wish, so long as you do not respond anonymously or in excessively bad taste. Your comments will endure in the blogosphere from this point forward.

Over time, I hope to have some very lengthy commentary.  I haven't a clue what it will prove or disclose--but here goes with my first question to the world:

From where you are, what do you think the world will look like ten years from today?

Canada's Move to Suppress Bloggers

Recently, I've been feeling envious of America's Northern neighbor. Canada has better schools and health programs than we Californians have.  They have a diverse, growing and active blogging community, and oh yeah, they seem to have wisdom on what wars to stay out of.

Now, my friend Curt over at the Committee to Protect Bloggers, says that all Canada's decency will not extend to bloggers. An op ed piece soon to be published in Montreal's French language press next month, Canada has introduced legislation designed to allow authorities to act with impunity against bloggers and others writing online.

This month Bill C-74 was introduced to Canada's parliament. If adopted, the legislation would do away with the need for warrants and would force internet service providers to hand over subscriber information including names, addresses, IP addresses, telephone numbers and cellphone numbers, on the written request of any law enforcement official.

Please note that at this point, this is proposed legislation.  It has not been passed, and I have no idea if it has any chance of it. In the U.S., every year, Congressional representatives introduce all sorts of lame ideas that get spiked by the wisdom of the Congressional crowd. Of course some of it becomes unjust new laws.

I hope this is not the case in Canada.

The Price of Low Price

Everybody likes to get a great price on goods and services. When we do, we occasional use the phrase, "it was a steal." And when the price is a steal, we should wonder a bit on the victim was. Over at Naked Conversations, I've been shooting darts at two companies known as low-price leaders--Wal-Mart and Dell.

I got a comment from Daneca Vail, telling me that people who do not like Wal-Mart "suck. Wal-Mart is the right place to go shopping when you do not have a lot of money." And she most certainly has a point.  Wal-Mart and Dell gained their positions by offering the right goods at the right price. But to accomplish that Dell is now accused of providing shoddy service in support of increasingly shoddy products.  Wal-Mart is accused of screwing their own employees and the communities where they have bullied their way in at the expense of local merchants and aesthetic charm.

I won't even go into the issue of the working conditions of people who make some of these products. I have no first-hand knowledge and I can only speculate as to what overseas manufacturing facilities look like.

Yet other companies seem to be able to make shoppers happy without squeezing profits from their own infrastructures and the costs of goods sold. Costco, has great prices and over 100,000 employees who have full health and labor benefits and you feel their job satisfaction when you shop the warehouses, and they continue to ignore Wall Street complaints that they are too generous to employees.  Honda, Toyota, GM (Saturn) and Ford (Taurus) make reliable products that are affordable if not downright inexpensive. Target has a shopper fan blog and an amazingly stable workforce for a retail chain.

My point is this: There is a point where low prices erode from values to cheap. And when we buy cheap, we are often paying for abuses in the supply chain, in quality control and in having courteous, qualified employees. In the short run, we get our "steals." In the long run, I hope it proves to be bad business for companies like Dell, Wal-Mart and a list that is all too lengthy.

Bye, Bye Bernie

It was with pleasure that I read on Friday that Bernie Ebbers will spend the remainder of his life incarcerated.  The $11 billion dollars he filched from investors, employees, partners and other who trusted him apparently won't buy Bernie out of this bind.  It's nice to see that not all juries and judges are purchasable. Now the former head of WorldCom, hets to be the new head of WorldCon.

I could not help but notice, as I stareed at his face, on Page One of the NY Times, after his conviction, that Bernie is still a charismatic devil. He looked calm, and in control, at ease with himself and downright dapper. 

Somehow, looking at his photo, I flashed on Elmer Gantry, both the book and the movie.  There's a scene where Gantry (or Burt Lancaster on film) has this powerful monolgue where he says something to the effect of: "The Devil, when he comes, will not have horns and a pitchfork.  He will be a well-dressed and courtly gentleman.  He will smile and call you friend."

It seems to me that the description fits Bernie as well as the custom-tailored suit he was strutting in the picture.

Conferenza Meets RoboCop

About a month ago, Conferenza sent out its report on PopTech one of the best conferences we've attended. Our report was the longest we ever produced, running 7960 words. One of those words began with the letter "f" and rhymed with "duck." It was in the context of quote, that when delivered, offended no one at the conference, as far as we could tell. When we sent the report out, no one expressed any objection to the word or the context in which it was used. Last week, Michael J. Miller, editor-in-chief of PC Magazine sent me some weird email that apprently was generated by his spam guard. After a little detective work, we figured out that the Ziff Davis spam guard had found something I sent to be offensive and it took very little work to narrow it down to that one dirty little from the PopTech report. Curious, I sent an inquiry out to our entire subscriber list and discovered about five percent of our paid subscribers had been blocked from the original support. This included recipients at three major publishers. We then sent a sanitized version, tagged as "PopTech.disney version," which seemed to me appropriate since the whole incident was a little goofy.

I've been writing a lot lately about the issues of free speech and free press and most recently unconstitutional searches. It never dawned on me that along with the concern that I may someday be hauled into court and ordered to reveal the source of a blog posting, I also now must deal with vigilance of a piece of software that determines what countless millions of people behinf firewalls may have access to.

There's gotta be a work-around.

A Space for Us

I have registered TheRedCouch.net. We'll start building there soon, in RSS, of course. It looks best if we use upper and lower case. I really hate the way Network Solutions tries to trick you into purchasing more than you wish to purchase. Next time, I'll use someone else.