Bad Attorney Advertisements, Part 3

For the third installment in my occasional series of bad attorney advertisements, I have found a television commercial.

Embedding of the video here is disabled, so you'll have to follow this link to see a truly tacky TV ad for a lawyer. Now, you might think that a divorce lawyer would be uniquely able to produce something that could readily cast the entire legal profession into serious disrepute (and indeed, they are well-equipped to do so), the fact of the matter is that at least one other candidate for that the title of "most shameless TV ad ever" comes from that same "Hammer" guy. Frankly, this bit of trivialization of bankruptcy, while lowbrow, doesn't really go over the top the way a lawyer using the decidedly unoriginal nickname "the Hammer" can. (This other "Hammer" guy even uses the same stock clip-art graphic of a steel hammer.)

The lack of dignity in the commercial is apparent. But this begs the question of whether good taste is actually necessary for the ad to accomplish its purpose. Maybe not -- the point of the commercial is to attract business to the lawyer and he doesn't owe any duties to the profession to make the rest of us look good. It's hard to say whether Jim "The Hammer" Shapiro is able to discern what good taste even is, given that the commercial may well not fairly represent what he's like in real life. Who knows, maybe he's really a quite sedate, pleasant, and polite guy when he's not cheesing it up for a TV spot.

But if the commercial is intended to give an idea of what he'd be like as your lawyer, I for one would rather take my business elsewhere.

Why is that? While people might be looking for a zealous advocate who will get angry on their behalf and I would too, I don't think most clients with worthwhile cases are looking for someone whose mental health is subject to reasonable question based on their presentment on TV. Both of these commercials hint that "The Hammer" is a little bit, well, off. Particularly knowing what I know about how litigation works, I know that there is a "sweet spot" that you reach in every case, when the settlement value maximizes with respect to the work done. I don't want a lawyer so blinded by his hatred of the evil insurance company that he does not understand when the case has reached its "sweet spot."

Beyond which, what if I piss him off? Clearly he's contemplated ripping peoples' hearts out and severing their heads from their bodies, and that's just for people who hurt his clients. What might he want to do if you did something he personally didn't like? Maybe it's best if I just avoid the guy altogether.


Now, I can't fault the guy for a lack of focus. A good TV ad should have as a prominent element a clear, direct focus and I'll admit it: Jim "The Hammer" Shapiro has achieved in this respect. One might take issue with the nuance of the focus on display. There is no pretense that what's going on here is about "fairness" or "justice" or "compensation for the innocently hurt" or "healing injuries." Many other personal injury ads speak to equalizing the fight between a claimant with few resources and a big, scary, powerful insurance company. Others tout the competence and aggressiveness of the attorneys whose services are being sold. Still others focus on the money that can be obtained in court, which is after all the point of personal injury law.

But here, it's not even so much about the Benjamins, or even about zealous advocacy, as it is about revenge. For anyone who has thought about how personal injury law works on an economic level, it ought to be obvious that a 40% contingency share of revenge isn't worth a penny, and speaking as someone who has interviewed his fair share of potential clients with worthless cases, I can assure the rest of you that the emotional intensity of a client's desire for revenge has nearly nothing to do with the magnitude of tangible injuries for which I might conceivably recover damages on their behalf in a court. Once again, the fact that the guy went over the top makes me question his judgment and disinclines me to hire him to handle my personal injury situation.

Now, on to practical matters. You only take away one thing from a typical TV commercial and the thing to take away from an injury lawyer's commercial is the number you should call if you've been hurt. Jim "The Hammer" Shapiro is so busy explaining how much hatred he has for the people you want to sue that he only leaves himself enough time to say his telephone number once. It's easy to forget the number after the commercial is gone, because he hasn't hammered it into your head through repetition. What I take away from this commercial is that Jim "The Hammer" Shapiro has got more than his fair share of Teh Crazee. He's practically spitting in the camera at the end when he says "You call, I hammer!" But I've completely forgotten the phone number because I'm so astonished at the lack of good taste and common sense that went in to the commercial itself.

He tries to make up for it with the overall presentation. The whole commercial is a black background frame with parallel video windows in it. The graphics are changing in the right-side window, showing a series of explosions and fires, interspersed with fast-edited black-on-white graphics. But steady on the top part of the background frame is the name of Jim "The Hammer" Shapiro and stead on the bottom of the frame is the phone number.

YMMV, but I personally think this technique fails, because my eye is drawn rapidly back and forth from the image of the frothing lunatic in the left video window with the violence of the explosions in the right video window. I can't concentrate on anything at all while watching the commercial, and my residual reaction when it's all done is a combination of stunned incredulity at the bizarre emotional intensity of the strange man screaming at me, and fatigue in my eye muscles from bouncing my visual focus so many times between the left and right video windows. It's too much, too fast, for me to mentally process.

Hudson On Healthcare

U.S. District Judge Henry E. Hudson of the Eastern District of Virginia has found that the "individual mandate" portion of the healthcare reform act is unconstitutional. His is sure to not be the last word on this issue. What makes it interesting is the grounds -- not buying health insurance is not interstate commerce and therefore beyond the ability of Congress to regulate under the Commerce Clause.

To my knowledge, only two other kinds of human activity have been found to not be interstate commerce in the modern era. Those things are 1) a high school student carrying a concealed pistol while at school, absent specific Congressional findings about the effect on commerce of such activity (United States v. Lopez (1995) 514 U.S. 549) , and 2) a Federal civil lawsuit for nonconsensual sexual contact (United States v. Morrison (2000) 529 U.S. 598). Note that the state court grand jury found insufficient evidence to authorize a charge of rape in Morrison, denying us the ability to describe what sounds like "rape" with that word. More importantly, note how these two kinds of activities are criminal and indeed likely violent in nature.

Compare this to growing and eating wheat rather than selling it under a comprehensive scheme of economic regulation (Wickard v. Filburn (1942) 317 U.S. 111) and smoking marijuana given away for free for medicinal purposes (Gonzales v. Raich (2005) 545 U.S. 1), which the Court has ruled do affect interstate commerce, under the "aggregation theory" -- the idea be being that while an individual transaction has no perceptible economic effect on commerce, if everyone did it, there would be a significant effect on commerce.

As between these four seminal cases, I would have thought that not buying health insurance in the 2010's was most similar to not selling wheat in the 1930's. But Judge Hudson's key reasoning is this:

The power of Congress to regulate a class of activities that in the aggregate has a substantial and direct effect on interstate commerce is well settled. Gonzales, 545 U.S. at 22, 125 S.Ct. at 2209. This even extends to noneconomic activity closely connected to the intended market. Hoffman v. Hunt, 125 F.3d 575, 587-88 (4th Cir. 1997). But these regulatory powers are triggered by some type of self-initiated action. Neither the Supreme Court nor any federal circuit court of appeals has extended Commerce Clause powers to compel an individual to involuntarily enter the stream of commerce by purchasing a commodity in the private market.⁷ In doing so, enactment of the Minimum Essential Coverage Provision exceeds the Commerce Clause powers vested in Congress under Article I.

Slip op. at 23-24. By Judge Hudson's logic, then, noneconomic activity closely connected to the intended market, triggered by some sort of self-initiated action on the part of the person thus regulated, is a valid thing for Congress to regulate -- which would seem to suggest that taking a gun to school ought to be within Congress' powers to regulate. There is little doubt that Lopez "self-initiated" bringing his gun to school and there seems little doubt that if a teacher is thus deterred from going to school for fear of being shot by Lopez, there is an economic effect (the teacher isn't paid) which if repeated and aggregated over a large pool of people, would drag on the economy.

What's more, footnote 7 in the opinion reads: “The collective effect of an aggregate of such inactivity still falls short of the constitutional mark.” Here, I just can't see where Judge Hudson is coming from. The larger the pool of insured in an insurance market, the more diluted individual risks become and thus the amount of premium per policyholder needed to cover claims decreases. If large numbers of people voluntarily abstain from purchasing a particular kind of insurance, the premium per policyholder rises. This is not a hugely complex concept -- and even if it is ultimately proven incorrect, Congress is clearly within its discretion and authority to be thus incorrect because the idea is not so far out of left field as to be "irrational."

As an alternative, the Government argued that the individual mandate is enforced by a "penalty" that should be considered a "tax," but Judge Hudson looked at the exact meaning of those phrases -- a "penalty" is levied in response to an unlawful act or omission, while a "tax" is a burden imposed to generate revenue for the government -- and concluded from legislative history, legislative text, and political statements of both Congressional leaders and the White House that the claim that this enforcement mechanism is a "tax" is a "transparent afterthought" and therefore not to be credited. It is a penalty, according to the Court, a penalty designed to punish conduct deemed undesirable by Congress, viz., not buying health insurance -- and since the conduct deemed undesirable is not itself something that Congress can regulate, Congress lacks power to impose a penalty for it. This portion of the reasoning seems sound to me.

As I noted above, this is not the end of the road for the individual mandate provision of the healthcare reform act. It does demonstrate that the idea that the law exceeds Federal power is not a crazy one, it is persuasive and serious and should be carefully weighed. To damn modern commerce clause jurisprudence as "unprincipled" is only to say that it is like much other Constitutional jurisprudence, in that much depends on the policy desirability of the law, the political mood at the time of the decision, and the general philosophical cast of the nine Justices who eventually and inevitably will render a final decision.

I don't particularly want the individual mandate to be Constitutional. And I'm pleased that the bench is taking seriously the notion that there are Constitutional limits on Congress' powers. But I have a hard time squaring Judge Hudson's reasoning with the outstanding jurisprudence. Unless there is going to be a new contour in Commerce Clause jurisprudence written in by this case, I would have ruled that this was near the limits of, but still within, Congress' Commerce power.

Did You Notice This

Crude oil is going for $90 a barrel. Remember in 2008 when it topped $100 a barrel and 89-octane unleaded cost over four dollars a gallon? Yeah, that looks like it's about to happen again.

Happy Holidays!

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.5

Bad Attorney Advertisements, Part 2

For our second installment of this intermittent series of posts, I have an ad that passes one test but fails another. The ad in question takes the form of a magnet, attached to one of the three local yellow pages. The firm in question must have paid a tremendous amount of money to get the one magnet ad available.  This is what they chose to put on it:

Now, Messrs. "Beeblebrox" and "Prefect" (names changed) paid probably more than any other single advertiser in the book, in the hopes that people would peel the magnets off the back of the yellow pages and put them on their refrigerators, just in case they ever needed someone to represent them in a personal injury suit.

I give them credit for one thing. The ad has focus. You look at the ad and you know what this firm does -- personal injury work. They represent people who have been hurt.

What I really don't like here, though, is that the print on the ad is so damned small you have no idea what is going on. For some reason, the ad is cluttered will all sorts of verbiage, so that nary a single square millimeter of the expensive ad space lacks information. You can't read very clearly in my scan of the ad, and in fact you can't read very clearly in the original thing, that "Zaphod Beeblebrox" is a former instructor at two Universities You May Have Heard Of, that he is a "Senior Partner" in this law firm, that he is a member of the Consumer Attorneys of California and the American Trial Lawyers Association. What you see is itty bitty tiny thin letters that say something, which may or may not be about the man pictured in the upper-left corner of the ad, and if you squint at them they sound sort of lawyer-like.

The typical layperson probably doesn't appreciate the fact that attorneys who teach do so typically either for extra money or because it is something fun and different than litigation (both of which are true for me). If you want someone who is all-litigation, all the time, someone who teaches classes isn't that. If you know something about how law is taught in a law school, you may not necessarily think that the Socratic method is a particularly good way to prepare for presenting a case to a jury or, more important, working a case up to prepare for settlement. The Socratic method is useful to train new attorneys in figuring out important abstract concepts. But it isn't going to help your discovery disputes very much and is only of marginal utility in a courtroom setting -- because in a good examination, the examiner is providing the bulk of the information, not the examinee.

It is my belief that a layperson will have no idea what the phrase "Senior Partner" means, but the idea that a guy whose name is on the door would be something other than a key decision-maker for the firm is alien. Of course this guy is the one who calls the shots. It doesn't matter what he calls himself.

Then, why is he advertising his membership in ATLA and CAC? These are vaguely lawyer-like things that may sound impressive but don't convey much information to the layperson about what they mean. If you do know what it means to be in ATLA and CAC, you aren't surprised that a guy advertising for personal injury work is in them, because for the most part, ATLA and CAC are organizations of personal injury attorneys. In fact, there are some benefits to membership in these groups, but they are technical, behind-the-scenes sorts of things, which will not be obvious to the layperson and in fact most clients would be uncomfortable learning about ("You mean you let someone else write your pleadings for you?" referring to the pleading banks available to ATLA/CAC members).

So when you peer through the micro-print, what you find isn't of much substantive help to the consumer looking for an attorney. It's just... stuff.

Then there's the rest of it.  "95% success rate since 1984." I sort of like the "since 1984" part of that, because it tells me that there are very experienced attorneys at this firm. The "95% success rate," though, is deceptive -- this rate looks an awful lot to my eye like the number of cases upon which the firm has collected money, mainly through settlements. But it sounds like they take 95% of their cases to trial and win. If they had actually done that, they wouldn't have had time to recover over $100 million for their thousands of satisfied clients.

I've never known why there are long laundry lists of different ways one can be personally injured, but there are always these sorts of things in P.I. advertisements. I guess it's because someone, somewhere, thinks that an attorney who will take an auto accident case won't take a motorcycle accident case. (Motorcycle cases work just like auto cases, except the motorcyclist tends to be much more severely injured.) The six categories of cases listed really only compromise two kinds of work -- personal injury and workers' compensation cases.

The most important parts of the advertisement come below this laundry list -- they will come to you, 24/7, they will not charge you any out-of-pocket fees, they will arrange for free towing for your vehicle and financial help for medical care and other needs of the injured. (This looks like they will help pay you while your case is pending, which I know not to be true; they're talking about doing medical care and other getting other services on liens. But that's a bit deceptive.) If I were an injured person, these would be the things I cared about most. What can these attorneys do for me, and can they do it right now? This is buried towards the bottom of the ad and in smaller print, indicating that it is of lesser importance to the author of the ad than the other, more prominent things.

The most prominent thing on the ad is the photograph of the attorney. Valuable space was taken up describing the attorney's credentials, which look good on the surface but turn out to have little substance. After that, the next most prominent part of the ad is the description of the attorneys as "INJURY ATTORNEYS" followed by a big box describing how much money they've made. Who is the real target of this advertisement here -- the potential clients of the attorney, or his ego?

I'm being too unkind. The ad is focused, it does guide and encourage the right kinds of clients to the attorney, it provides useful information about what the attorney can do. But I think it hasn't been thought through from the audience's point of view. If the target is injured people looking for a lawyer, the lawyer has to offer something to that audience, front and center. I don't care where the attorney teaches, I care whether he is going to get my medical bills paid. I don't care if he's a good-looking man, I care that he's going to make sure I don't have an interruption in my income flow so I can provide for my family. I don't care what fraternal societies he has joined, I care whether I am going to have to pay him before or after I get back to work and have money in my bank account again.

This is there, but it's not prominent enough. I give the ad an "A" for focus, a "C" for content, and a "D" for poor organization and cluttered visual appeal. For the amount of money that went in to circulating a fridge-magnet ad, I'm sure that Beeblebrox & Prefect could have done better than this.

Who Really Rules Retail?

The Wife and I took a trip to a nearby town to, among other things,do some shopping. In every store we visited, they played Gipsy Kings over the stores' music systems. Now I think I know how to play the guitar in Spanish.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.3

Bad Attorney Advertising, Part 1

Yesterday, I was musing about a lack of blogworthy subjects. After all, what can I say about the Nevada Senate race that hasn't been said elsewhere a million times already? No good options available there, but that ought to be obvious to the casual observer. But I should have simply had a bit more patience, because today, under the windshield wiper of my car out in the parking lot at court, the subject for not only a new post but a whole series of posts was literally given to me, for free.

I speak, of course, of bad attorney advertisements.

I found the flyer to the left on the windshield of my car this morning. Unless I've missed my guess, you should be able to click on the picture and see it at a much higher resolution. The flyer itself was on an 8½" by 11" sheet of glossy paper, printed on only one side.

I've altered the attorney's name and telephone number. I found a font that is sort of like the one used in the ad but I frankly didn't dedicate a lot of effort to that part of this project, so my two alterations are a little darker than the scan, the font isn't exactly right, and is just a little bit smaller. This should be obvious to the casual observer, once you find the alterations I made.

Which is my very first problem with the advertisement.  You've really got to hunt to find the attorney's name and telephone number. There is no doubt that the advertisement is for a divorce lawyer.  What is that lawyer's name?  Assuming that I'm favorably impressed by the advertisement and want to hire this lawyer to handle my divorce, how do I get a hold of that lawyer?  The lawyer's name appears in the smallest size font used in the entire advertisement, at the very bottom of the page.  The lawyer's telephone number is nearly buried underneath stacks of visually oppressive block text.

Which is the second problem.  There are upper- and lower-case letters for a reason.  USING ALL CAPITAL BOLDFACED LETTERS IS LIKE SHOUTING and when you emphasize everything, the result is that nothing is emphasized.  The use of all-capital letters, and the clunky, blocky font gets in the way of the message, which ought to be "Hey, I'm a lawyer who can help you with your divorce." Instead, the ad says "I'M A LAWYER WHO CAN HELP YOU WITH YOUR DIVORCE!" and that suggests some rather disagreeable things about the lawyer's personality. This is only underlined by the central picture (more about that below).

My scan of the flyer is maybe a little blockier than the print, but not much.  The spacing of the fonts is badly-proportioned, and in the central, most important word ("DIVORCE") the spacing is so obviously over-wide that it is distracting.  Since my suspicion is that "Arthur Dent" designed the advertisement himself, I would suggest that he take some time to learn about why typography is important for lawyers and how to use typography advantageously so as to make documents with at least a modicum of care for the visual effect of the end product. A similar typographical disaster is the fact that every word of text on the advertisement is centered.  Some use of centering is good, too much and it looks like you don't understand how to use the "left-align" button on your word processor in addition to being indifferent about how you use your CAPS LOCK key.

The graphic elements of the ad have five parts -- the two pink trapezoids, the two blue trapezoids, and the photograph in the middle.  I like the photograph in the middle.  It is emotionally compelling, accurately describes the need for the service being offered, and it attracts the eye.  It's a shame that this nice photograph is surrounded by such primitive and ineffective graphic elements as the trapezoids.  They are at once so bright on the glossy paper as to hurt the viewer's retinas but also so dark as to create a low contrast with the black text of the advertisement.

On glossy paper, and viewed in the sun (as I first saw the flyer) the low contrast is much more dramatic than it looks in the scan (or the shade). Probably the glossy paper was the only format available that could transmit the clarity of the photograph -- I like the detail of the muscles straining on the man's neck especially -- so maybe "Arthur Dent" was stuck with that kind of medium instead of one that was both more affordable and easier to read.

Now, I've already spilt a lot of words about the flyer but I haven't yet said anything about its content.

My response to the content is not completely negative, however.  I'll say this for "Arthur Dent" -- he has created a properly-focused advertisement. "Arthur Dent" is probably not above taking a personal injury case, an eviction, or a criminal matter.  But this advertisement is going for one kind of business and one kind of business only -- family law.  If you need to get divorced, Arthur Dent does that.  Too many lawyer advertisements -- I'll share another one soon -- contain laundry lists of different sorts of things the attorney either has done, is willing to do, or is at least willing to take your money in exchange for promising to do.  The result is confusion, at best.  "Arthur Dent" does not suffer that problem here -- there is no confusion at all about what "Arthur Dent" does for his clients.

However.  "Arthur" also seems to suffer from low self-esteem.  Despite "13 years experience" our man "Arthur" describes himself as "cheap" twice, "cut-rate" once, and "competent" once.  I would hope that with thirteen years of experience, "Arthur" is not just "competent" at the core segment of his practice.  By now, he should be pretty good.  And he should also be good enough to command a healthy fee.  When I showed this ad to The Wife, her first reaction was, "This guy must not be very good if he has to cut his fees like that."  When I began doing real estate law, I was quickly corrected the first time I referred to a piece of property as "cheap." Real estate isn't "cheap," it's "inexpensive." Similarly, legal services aren't "cheap," they're "affordable" or "reasonable."

So given that his assurances about his "cheap" rates also convey the impression that the quality of the services offered in exchange are not high, what does "Arthur Dent" say about the quality of work he does?  Well, in his left-hand trapezoid, he asks if the reader wants "excellent" representation.  Then in the bottom trapezoid, he promises to deliver "competent" representation.  You might say I'm selling "Arthur Dent" short here, but he's the one who's doing that. I'm just pointing out what he says about himself.

"Arthur" uses the word "representation" four times, and twice in a single sentence.  I suspect most people know what that word means, but it is a long word, and in graphic terms, it eats up acres of space on the flyer.  So do words like "experience," "understanding," "procedures," and "competent."  The"Want-Have-Get" triptych is also a parody of what people cynically think of the legal system in general, and divorces in particular.  The overuse of dollar signs and question marks also does not add luster.

And finally, "Arthur" chose to advertise in the form of a large-format glossy-paper flyer placed on peoples' cars outside a courthouse.  Now, if you want to create a favorable impression for your product or service with me, leaving a flyer for it on my car while I'm not there to monitor you tampering with it is a really counterproductive way to go about doing that. But maybe other people are less bothered by that sort of thing than I.

The medium and venue for the advertisement also suggests that Arthur Dent" is targeting people who are already in the middle of divorce proceedings and find themselves overwhelmed by the legal system without a lawyer.  That's certainly filling a need, but it doesn't seem like a particularly profitable market.  These are people who didn't get a lawyer when they first ventured in to court -- most likely because they didn't have enough money to hire one so they went on their own to do the best they could.  This dovetails with the ad's emphasis on "cheap" fees.  "Arthur Dent" is making a significant mistake here that has been underlined to me by experienced lawyers, marketing consultants, colleagues, and bitter experience -- any attorney can get all the work they want to do, and more, from clients who can't pay.

It's a hard enough time for family lawyers as it is.  Typically, attorney's fees in a middle-class divorce are paid for out of the liquidation of the former family house.  With so many homes upside-down these days, a lot of people who would otherwise get divorced are not doing so, because they can't afford the transaction cost.  One colleague at court tells of a situation where he has a would-be client who can't afford his fee so he and his wife both continue to live together in the house they jointly own within their still-extant marital estate -- he with his girlfriend, she with her boyfriend, all under the same roof.  A ticking time bomb of a situation, if you ask me.

Within that sort of economic environment, "Arthur Dent" is spending money, probably a lot of it, to have these flyers printed up and distributed, so that he can attract clients who will have difficulty compensating him for his services.  My verdict is that the only thing that will save "Arthur Dent" from the ruinous consequences of a successful marketing campaign will be the singular ineffectiveness of the advertisement deployed in pursuit of that strategy.

Waiting at the Mall

The audible-alarm inventory control system here enjoys the same respect that audible car alarms do on the street: none at all.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.5.9

Amway For The 2010's

The other day I was escorting a prospect through the firm's lobby. There were several people there, including another attorney who was talking with an attractive woman in her forties, and this attorney said, "You might want to talk to TL here about that, it seems like the sort of thing he might be interested in," and practically shot out the front door. So I was left talking with this woman who first established that we had some common social acquaintances, and then proceeded to pitch me on MonaVie.

A quick glance at the glossy 8 by 14 sheet of written material revealed to me that 1) it was badly out of date in that it indicated that "very few baby boomers are now in their 40's,"* 2) the product in question was fruit juice, and 3) this was a multi-level marketing scheme. Is MonaVie a scam? If you ask me, anything sold through a multi-level marketing mechanism becomes a scam sooner or later. There are certainly appreciable numbers of people who have stuck their necks out to explain why they think it is a scam.

Now, it's not hard to see how when you sell fruit juice for forty dollars a quart you can get to a fairly high amount of revenue in the first place or how there would be considerable profit left over for the various tiers in your marketing pyramid. As a business model, I approve of huge profit, all other things being equal. But I have real doubts that this is a particularly ripe business opportunity.  The real flaw I see here is that competing products are readily and cheaply available. Who the hell is going to pay forty dollars for 750 ml of something they can get in a 2 liter bottle for about a tenth of the price at their supermarket, bearing a label that reads "Ocean Spray" instead of "MonaVie"? Suckers, that's who. So how are you going to sucker them?

By touting your product as possessing magical qualities, that's how. The marketing material dwells on the pseudoscience of antioxidants as an anti-aging measure. Drink MonaVie and you'll never get old! Well, sorry, but you will. Fruit juice may contain a large concentration of helpful nutrients and essential vitamins, but super fruit juices sold on the strength of their antioxidant content are the modern version of snake oil and there are potential harms -- there are hints that certain kinds of antioxidants in large enough doses can actually suppress your body's immunodefense system; the most commonly-touted antioxident, resveratrol, may actually increase the risk of the very harms it is deployed to mitigate or prevent when not used appropriately. A morning of looking around the science available on the internet tells me that there is no substantial scientific consensus on any of the purported health benefits of any particular antioxidant, much less that of an antioxidant cocktail like MonaVie. There may be some health benefits, and there are some hints of real promise and progress to be made. But "science" doesn't know for sure that any of the four varieties of antioxidants (ascorbic acid or "vitamin C"; tocopherols or "vitamin E"; polyphenols like resveratrol; or carotenoids like lycopene from tomatoes) does anything even resembling the claims made in fundamentally dishonest marketing materials associated with products.

My conclusion after a very brief survey of scientific literature is that MonaVie sells sweet, purply woo at forty dollars a bottle. Your mileage may vary, but no sane consumer of even average intelligence would buy the stuff without having first had their critical thinking skills suspended through the use of dishonest claims (largely based on testimonials rather than cited scientific reports in peer-reviewed journals) about its purported health benefits.

The real proof, though, is that most any MonaVie representative you come across has a day job. The woman I spoke to was employed as a mortgage broker. If she was really making such good money selling a healthful product that actually excited her and gave her joy, why would she keep her day job? No, at best this is a sideline and most likely she got suckered in by a sales pitch from her upline in the MLM pyramid and bought hundreds of dollars worth of this fruit juice, realized that she can't sell the product and that the only way to do anything worthwhile is to sell "the system" instead, and therefore is now looking to unload these bottles of grossly overpriced blueberry smoothies on the next, greater fool.

Who isn't going to be me.


* Really? Very few boomers left in their 40's?  What is this, the Clinton Administration? A baby boomer is someone who was born in the several years after World War II ended, from around 1945 to some indeterminate, arbitrary date in the early 1950's. As I can personally attest, the children of baby boomers are now entering their 40's. Boomers are entering retirement age although thanks to the financial crash of 2008, many are postponing retirement for a few years so as to recover their assets before ceasing work, and who could blame them?

† According to the corporate website, the ingredients are a proprietary blend of: "Açai, white grape, apple, acerola, aronia, purple grape, cranberry, passion fruit, prune, kiwi, blueberry, wolfberry, camu camu, pomegranate, lychee fruit, pear, banana, cupuaçu, and bilberry." Cupuaçu is probably the trendiest ingredient in that list; açai used to be almost totally unknown ten years ago but now you can get açai juice fairly cheaply and without much difficulty at grocery stores all over California. Not that MonaVie cares about that, particularly.

Deluxe Pabst Blue Ribbon

No, I'm not kidding.  The owners of Pabst Blue Ribbon are releasing an up-market, premium beer branded with the PBR label, called "PBR 1844."  In China.  For thirty times the price of the ordinary stuff sold there.

If there was ever an offender in the "hoppy, semi-sweet, tasteless, too-carbonated barley pop" category, it would be PBR.  There was never a sillier trend than when affluent urban hipsters collectively decided to drink PBR as an ironic affectation of their communion with the blue collar lifestyle.

I understand the corporation that bought out the original rights to the brand name wants to get value for their money and that the profit margin on premium beer may well be enough to justify making and selling something more on the order of barley wine than ordinary suds.  But the niche they've carved out for themselves is one that borders on the edge of kitsch; their other branding properties include Colt 45 Malt Liquor, Lone Star, Schaefer, Schlitz, Schmidt's, Old Milwaukee, Old Style, Stroh's, and St. Ides Malt Liquor. 

So did they not also get the rights to use "Best Select" along with the PBR brand?  That was the original name, after all.  Maybe you tie an actual blue ribbon around the neck of the bottle in another nod to the brand's history.  Seems like a good idea to me, but then again I chose a career in law, not in marketing.  So let's just add this to the "world turns upside down" file.

Via James Joyner.

Tesla IPO

I don't follow things like initial public offerings very closely, but I was interested to learn that Tesla Motors had an IPO today.  Had I known, I'd have considered taking a flier on it.  The Tesla Roadster inspired automotive lust in me from the moment I laid eyes on it in its Westwood showroom, and its development of a four-door sedan seems like a great next step.

Frankly, I think it would behoove the company to look at making luxury cars, sacrificing the high performance of its Roadster for the heavier weight and greater comfort of something like a 7-series BMW while still appealing to the high end of the auto consumer market.  But it looks like instead, they're going to compete directly with the Chevy Volt.

In any event, I think this is a company that will do well in the future.  It's getting the funding it needs at the right time in its development.  It's not been profitable yet, but that doesn't mean it won't be.  One day I can see Tesla growing to the point that it replaced Chrysler as the #3 American auto maker.  Another opinion voiced about the subject was that it will be moderately profitable but always catering to a niche market; it will not have the mass-market appeal of, for instance, Chevrolet.  Still another opinion is that electric cars are doomed in the high-end market; aside from a few novelty buyers, sports car buyers want to hear a rich, throaty "vroom-vroom" and feel the vibration of an engine and will never fully embrace a glorified golf cart.

Regulating The Black Market

The ideal state for immigration would be that the United States takes in only the immigrants that it needs to fill open and low-wage positions, from a diverse mix of origin nations, and that those immigrants all get the appropriate work visas and then have a reasonable path towards naturalization or a return home after they've made enough money to make their sojourn here worthwhile. They would pay taxes, get livable wages, and be a part of the system. They would be welcomed for their cultural contributions, they would be valued for the fruits of their labor and contributions to our economy, and be an asset to both the U.S. and their nation of origin. What a wonderful world this would be.

The real world, of course, is a place very different from this pleasant reverie. More immigrants enter the nation than there are jobs for them. They work for employers, a disproportionate number of which are in the agricultural industry, for sub-minimum wages and some of them live in horrifying conditions. Others do pretty good work in industries that are fairly casual about paperwork and conforming to the law -- think construction, one of the few jobs where convicted felons can earn a reasonable wage, precisely because construction employers are not particular about paperwork or background checks. Debatably, they depress wages in some sectors of the economy. They stay for long periods of time using counterfeit, stolen, or defunct documentation, when they use documentation at all; such a culture of avoiding and deceiving the law seems to necessarily create an attitude of lawlessness. They have families here and their children become citizens, work in the underground economy where they can avoid taxes, and drain our social welfare programs like public schools and TANF. They are resented by people already here – no more so than by properly-naturalized citizens who did it the right way. Nothing these negative effects of the phenomenon of undocumented laborers entering the country illegally is racist; however, resentment over these thigns is all too often tinged with racism, inspiring the worst in Americans.

The question always seems to me to come down to this: "How much are you willing to pay for a head of lettuce?" A directly related question is "How much would I have to pay you to spend ten to twelve hours a day picking lettuce?" The cost of the labor needed to create produce is directly reflected in the price of produce and cheap, plentiful food is one of the fundamental parts of the foundation of our economy. And if I'm willing to pay it, and he's willing to accept it, what's the problem? It occurs to me that the ways one might approach the issue from a policy standpoint, I've decided that the policy approaches one might take on the issue. On the far left side of the continuum we have something like "open borders" policies, and on the far right we have the policies moatdiggers love best. We might classify them thus:

Most Radical Reform										Most Dramatic Counter-Reform
Open Borders	Amnesty	Fast Track to Naturalization	Guest Worker Program	Liberalized Work Visas	Status Quo	Restricted Visas	Tightened Border Control	State Police Arrest and Refer to ICE	Fast Track Deportation	Shooting Illegal Immigrants for Sport

Arizona's infamous new immigration law is the result of a public frustration with a very real phenomenon – the drain on public resources and the development of a counterculture that is overtly aligned along lines of evading and in some cases deceiving authority – that is an unavoidable result of having these people in our nation. But it's not nearly as radical as some are saying. What it says (after modification) is that if an Arizona state police officer has a "reasonable suspicion" that someone who is being questioned or detained for some other reason is an undocumented alien, that person may be arrested and referred to ICE. Some law enforcement agencies in Arizona have already been doing this, and most law enforcement agencies pretty much everywhere are reputed to use the threat of doing this to intimidate people whose English language skills are not very good. Is it true? I don't know, I'm not a Spanish speaker who has been detained by the police.

The biggest flaw I see with Arizona's law is not so much its unconstitutional usurpation of an exclusive Federal power by the state of Arizona – although that's a serious issue. Article I, Section 8 provides that Congress is to provide for a "uniform rule of Naturalization" which under current case law means that only the Feds can make and enforce immigration law. But I'm not entirely sure that a "reference" from a state law enforcement authority to a federal one when there is a legitimately "reasonable suspicion" of a Federal law being violated of a Federal law is contrary to this policy.

The real problem is, what is a "reasonable suspicion" of someone being an undocumented alien? The standard is something objective about the suspect that can be articulated and is not based upon a suspect classification (like race). There's a bunch of things that I can think of:

• Apparent inability to speak or understand English
  
• Emotional reaction when the phrases "La Migra" or "documentos por favor" is used
  
• Flight from police upon approach
  
• Lack of identification documents
  
• Large quantities of cash or, alternatively, very little cash or other implements of money
  
• Congregation in areas known to be frequented by day laborers seeking employment
  

None of these things, though, is unique to the situation of the undocumented alien. A citizen of the U.S. could easily have one or more of these attributes under a countless series of legitimate or even low-level criminal scenarios any of you could easily imagine. So how is a police officer to form a "reasonable suspicion" that someone is an undocumented alien based on articulatable, but non-racial, characteristics? "I could just tell" isn't going to cut it. It doesn't seem workable to me.

Personally, I think going in the other direction is a smarter thing for us to do. We need the labor. I don't want to pay $8.00 for a head of lettuce and that means we need cheap and plentiful agricultural labor, which for the most part only undocumented workers are currently willing to provide, at least in the border states. I don't think amnesty is just as to those already here – I think that there should be a way to get those workers here integrated into the system without making them go home first, because that's both asinine from a logistical point of view and putting the undocumented worker who wants to get into compliance into a difficult economic position. Perhaps a fine for those already here, which can be pro-rated and incorporated into their tax withholding?

But unless we're going to make it easy to get that green card, we're going to have more illegal immigration, more undocumented labor, and more of the problems associated with it. Attempts to build walls, moats, electronic fences, and any other sort of physical or enforcement barriers to entry will all prove laughably and expensively ineffective against simple human ingenuity mixed with economic desperation; already, people are squashing themselves ten at a time into the trunks of cars and literally risking death in the middle of the Sonora desert to enter the United States and an underground industry of coyotes willing to smuggle them in, often supplying their labor to illegal sweatshops, meth labs, or worse. And there are plenty of legitimate employers willing to offer them money should the immigrants succeed in escaping those hazards.

Simply put, there is a large black market for labor out there. There is very little that any government, at any level, can do to regulate a black market – without legalizing the trade. Intercession and penalization has failed spectacularly in regulating the black market for drugs. Why should we think that a similar tactic is going to work with undocumented labor?

Two Presidents in a row, one a Republican and one a Democrat, have both said that some kind of a guest worker program and liberalization of immigration and naturalization laws is necessary. They're both right and even crediting the most noble of motives to the lawmakers in Arizona, what's going on there is not a step in the right direction.

Admitting It

I said that giving billions of dollars to General Motors was wrong.  I said it was lighting the money on fire, we'd never see it back again, and it was being used to keep a dinosaur alive.

While I'm not quite ready to retract the dinosaur remark, I am very glad to have been proven wrong about getting the money back.  Over eight billion government dollars are being paid back by GM today and GM plans to sell new stock to repurchase the equity currently held by the American and Canadian governments.  Five years ahead of schedule -- aided, perhaps, by the fact that GM's cars, for all their faults, at least have properly-functioning brakes.

TARP money continues to come back in, too -- not all of it, but a healthy fraction.  And at a reasonable profit, to boot.  So that's a more than acceptable result from this cynic's perspective.

Doing Nothing Is The Better Strategy

Nearly two years ago, I wrote about Ira Isaacs, the guy who makes astonishingly disgusting pornography and who still faces the potential of prosecution for the "crime" of obscenity after having made and distributed literally dozens of copies of such masterworks as Gang Bang Horse "Pony Sex Game" and Hollywood Scat Amateurs No. 7.  (Don't worry, the link goes to wikipedia and is as safe for work as this post.)  In fact, Isaacs' trial was declared a mistrial after some unusual behavior by his judge was uncovered, and his motion to dismiss further prosecution under the double jeopardy clause is still pending review by an en banc panel of the Ninth Circuit.

One of the things I tried to express before is that over time, concepts of what is and is not acceptable reading of viewing material are fluid.  Where in the 1950's, Playboy was considered shocking, it is now so passe that the magazine is having trouble selling itself, losing nearly 10% of its subscribers every year and losing readers overall at more than seven times the rate of the ailing magazine industry.  I hoped that I could make an appeal to decency, in the form of respecting your neighbor's privacy:

Can we agree that if your neighbor were to buy a copy of Penthouse at the corner liquor store, you would not find that particularly offensive? Seriously, why would you be offended? Why would you consider it any of your business? Why would you even care, other than a level of mild discomfort with the intrusion into your neighbor's privacy? If Penthouse is a bit too spicy for your tastes, what about Playboy? Or Maxim? Or the Victoria's Secret catalog? At some point, it's going to become being something for you to not worry about.

Well, thanks to Marco Randazza, I am reminded that bizarrely, some people seem to care very, very much about what kind of media their neighbors choose to consume in the privacy of their own homes. A church in a town near Syracuse, New York is objecting to a video store opening up next to its church which intends to offer a total of four percent (4%) of its overall catalog in the form of sexually-explicit videos.  The pastor calls this an "immoral situation."

Now, it is the case that the town has an ordinance that prohibits any business from offering adult films may not be within 1,000 feet of any residential area, school, or church.  Such laws are, absent further information, Constitutional so long as they are based on an attempt to control the "secondary effects" of adult businesses and permit at least some such businesses to exist somewhere within the jurisdiction.  City of Renton v. Playtime Theaters, Inc. (1986) 475 U.S. 41.  So I'm not suggesting that the city is acting contrary to the Constitution to have such a law or that the church is exceeding its rights to insist that the law be enforced.

There's two ideas I offer for your consideration, however.  First, I'd like to ask, "What's so special about a church?"  Why are churches singled out for special protection with the adult business zoning law?  It certainly can't be to protect children from sexual predators -- as Randazza points out, a child is at much greater risk of being molested in a church than in a video store.  The idea may be to keep property values high, and churches may be thought to increase property values while adult businesses depress them.  Okay, but whose property values are we protecting here?  The church is the beneficiary of the law.  If it is the case that government may not favor religion over non-religion,  Board of Education of Kiryas Joel Village School District v. Grumet (1994) 512 U.S. 687, then isn't a law that protects the property values of churches from the depressing effects of otherwise-legal commercial activity a law that favors religion?  Simply put, churches are popular, therefore they get the protection. This, in turn, gives churches an effective veto power over whether such businesses can exist or not, and that comes pretty close to letting churches decide what can and cannot be done by non-parishioners in their community, which we know is a Constitutional violation.  Larkin v. Grendel's Den (1982) 459 U.S. 116.

There is, I must insist, nothing normatively special about a church as compared to any other sort of non-residential entity -- yes, it offers a variety of social services like fellowship, counseling, personal guidance, and child care.  But social clubs, psychologists, and day care facilities all are not protected by this law where churches are.  I suppose if I were a judge, I realize that I'd have to defer to the silly preferences of the majority since the case law seems to allow the majority to implement this silly preference, but if I were king, I'd say that a church gets to be treated the same as any other business.  After reading that, I'm sure that church-loving readers out there will all breathe a sigh of relief that TL is not king and therefore their beloved churches will continue to enjoy preferential treatment before the law. 

The light bulb I want to turn on, though, is that the churches are enjoying preferential treatment before the law.  Even if you are a believer and a church-lover, that ought to give you pause.  Even if you are a believer, that means you likely believe that your own church is the one which offers a true path to salvation, and by extension that other churches offer false paths.  Yet those false churches receive preferential treatment by the government.  I submit that a believer ought not to be pleased with such a result.

Second is the same sentiment I expressed in reference to Isaacs:  "Why do you care so much about your neighbor's porn-viewing habits?"  They don't affect you in any way.  No one is going to make you go in to this video store.  If you do go in to this video store, no one is going to make you browse the pornos or rent them or buy them or watch them.  If you want to, that's your decision and no one else's.  If your neighbor makes that choice, how does that affect you?  You don't have to watch the videos with him.  You don't have to observe what he does while he's watching them.  He isn't going to steal from you to support his habit of renting pornos.  Indeed, chances are that your neighbor would prefer to be discreet about what he's watching and for you to learn what he is watching requires you to engage in an act of investigation that goes beyond reasonable observation what I would consider to be an acceptable boundary into the realm of "snooping," otherwise known as invading your neighbor's reasonable expectation of privacy.

Perhaps, then, you want to use the law to eliminate the possibility that you will be tempted to rent such a movie yourself.  That such a thing is an inappropriate use of the law seems obvious to me but maybe it isn't obvious to anyone else.  I should be free to make a choice different than you.  If you don't want to rent a porno, no one's forcing you to.

Moreover, what about like Showgirls, Body Heat, Basic Instinct, American Pie, or any other "R" rated title that has a strongly sexual theme?  The difference between the sexual content of Sexy Secrets Of The Sorority House Part XVII and Wild Things is one of degree, not quality.  The law isn't really good at drawing such lines because it must do so prospectively and in terms of general application. 

The market, however, is free to make such distinctions on whatever arbitrary, unarticulatable, or even objectively inconsistent terms it wishes.  And by "the market," of course I mean the collective decisions of individuals.  Very few people object to Wal-Mart selling, or Blockbuster Video renting, "R"-rated movies with sexual themes, but it's likely that a significantly larger number of people would make such an objectionto pornos.  Some kind of a line is being drawn, to be sure, but that's the marketplace doing it rather than the law.  I've no objection to Wal-Mart electing to sell or not sell certain titles.  I have a real problem, though, when a government starts telling Wal-Mart what it can or cannot sell. 

Which is the real point here -- this is the sort of thing that the marketplace can and will sort out.  Fact of the matter is, video stores are based on a business model that is daily becoming more obsolete.  As it becomes easier to purchase movies in digital form directly over the net, either in streaming or in some kind of digital file mode, people are going to need DVDs less and less.  If the church doesn't like the video store, what it really needs to do is nothing -- sadly for them, the entrepreneurs who are starting a video store in 2010 are going to find themselves competing with better, faster, cheaper technology in a very short amount of time and then the issue is going to be what sort of business will replace the video store.

Well-Motivated Customer Service

Yesterday, I knew I'd have a long wait in court before my case was called, so I brought my Kindle with me to pass the time in the hallway.  Just as I was folding it up to go in to the courtroom, a guy walked past me, brushed up against me, and it fell to the ground.  Well, it wouldn't turn back on.  And there were these funny, faded horizontal lines coming from the midpoint of the bottom of the screen, and every time I pressed a button or tried to turn the thing on again, another pixel of the fading lines appeared.

When I called customer support, I had to get bounced through three people, but eventually found someone who knew something about how Kindles work, and he said "Nope, it's busted and you can't fix it.  Let me verify your address."

A sinking feeling set in at the pit of my gut.  "Wait!"  I said.  "I can't fix it?"

"Yep.  That's why I'm going to send you a replacement.  You'll have it tomorrow.  No charge."

"I...  I...  Wow!"  I confirmed my address and sure enough, the replacement Kindle came today, and it took me less than two minutes to log back on to the website and download the approximately fifty books and twenty magazines that I had on the old one.

So -- that's about 28 hours I had to do without my Kindle.  And if I'd really wanted to read something, I could have logged on to Kindle for PC and read it there in the meantime.  The replacement came to me free of charge, and I have a box to send back the old, busted product for Amazon to refurbish and re-sell later, also at no charge to me.  By the time I got home, I'd already had the thing charged up and now it's like the whole thing never happened.

What's sad about this is that this counts as an exceptionally good customer service story -- something rare and wonderful in its pleasantness, reasonability, and ease of use.  And that I was deathly afraid that Amazon's reaction would be, "Oh, too bad, so sad, customer mistakes are out of the warranty so you'll have to buy a replacement."  Indeed, that was my presumption, and the cause of the sick, sinking feeling I experienced when the tech guy said the Kindle couldn't be fixed.

Indeed, we can contrast this with my recent ordering of a replacement AC adapter for my laptop -- HP charged me an unreasonable amount of money for the spare part -- there's no way this thing costs eighty dollars.  Back when I had the Gateway Ultra-Heavy model, a replacement AC adapter for that cost three dollars.  I only agreed to pay the $80 demanded by HP because I want to make certain that whatever replacement I get will work.*  What's more, HP wanted to charge me an additional twenty dollars for next-day delivery.  Here is a company that just plain doesn't care whether I have a working computer or not.  They sold me the unit, and now they'd just as soon not support it -- and the misfortune of my cat deciding to use the power cord like the way the dogs use their chew toys is, for HP, an opportunity to earn more profit rather than an opportunity to generate goodwill.

Amazon treated me much better than HP did.

Now, you'll notice that Amazon has every financial reason in the world to want to do this.  The Kindle they sold me doesn't produce a revenue stream for them unless I'm using it and buying more books and getting more magazines.  So they want me to have a working device for the very good reason that a) I paid for it, and b) the more I use it, the more money they make.

But it's also a model for other companies to look at -- when you care about providing good service, when you care about making sure your customer has a working product they're happy with using, when you have to put your money where your mouth is in terms of keeping your customers happy, this is how customer service can work.


* I'm sure that there are plenty of tech-heads out there who will tell me that there were way cheaper ways I could have solved this problem.  I'm happy to hear them for next time, but I did what I did and it seemed like a reasonable thing to do, and most of all, I can't go back in time and change what I did.

Super Bowl Ads

At the Super Bowl party last night, I was amazed at the interest in the advertisements by the other guests.  Maybe half the people there even cared about the game at all.

The cleverest ad, I thought, was the "Green Police" ad by Audi.  Maybe it was the use of the Cheap Trick song.  Had we not been using TiVo, I would not have noticed the Focus on the Family advertisement with Tim Tebow -- an ad that, by itself, was completely innocuous.  The reason is that people were still laughing at the Betty White/Abe Vigoda ad for Snickers bars, which was probably the funniest of them all, even funnier than Brett Favre as the 2020 MVP wondering aloud whether or not he'd come back the next year (which was not an effective ad since I don't remember what product it was selling).

Oh, yeah, and the game was good too.  As soon as another guest finished making his gumbo, which tasted great, the Saints started winning again.  Coincidence?

We're Not Doing This To Make Money

San Francisco, 1981:

Money quote: "It takes two hours at $5.00 per hour to get the newspaper, so the online newspaper isn't going to be much competition for the twenty-cent version you can buy on the street." That sentence seems almost as outdated as telling someone who walks into your office that they need to wait because you're on a long-distance telephone call.  The economics look a little different when I can get the whole paper for free in less than two seconds as opposed to having to pay a buck fifty for the Sunday Fish Wrapper after driving forty miles to the nearest actual newstand run by a human being, or even one mile to the nearest vending machine.

Hat tip to Jules Crittenden. (Via.)

Sixteen Guesses For 2010

Renewing my tradition from last year, I boldly offer the following predictions for the next year.  I make no claim to psychic powers, clairvoyance, astral projection, divine or demonic information, or access to time machines.  These are SWAGs and nothing but.  As you can see from this morning's evaluation, my completion percentage is just over 50% so that's about what they're worth.

1. Jon Huntsman will resign as ambassador to China and begin to lay the groundwork for a Presidential bid in 2012.
2. Foolishly, Democrats will campaign in 2010 against George W. Bush.  This will fail and result in gains by Republicans, but more in the House than the Senate.  Congressional Republicans will realize a net gain of only two or three seats in the Senate, leaving the Democrats still firmly in control of that body and reviving talks of abolishing the filibuster.  But, net gains in the House of Representatives will be such that the Democrats' majority in the lower chamber will be roughly ten seats and Republicans will optimistically talk of re-taking the House in 2012.
3. A reconciled health care "reform" bill will not be passed out of Congress until March or maybe even early April.  Its effect will be to very moderately increase taxes on middle-class Americans, only negligibly affect their actual health care options, and substantially inflate both the governmental deficit and the profits of enterprise-level health care providers.
4. The net inflation rate of the United States for CY 2010 will be in excess of 4%.
5. President Obama will again increase the number of American troops deployed to Afghanistan.
6. Canada's government will collapse, for real this time, and new elections will result in a badly-fragmented Federal Parliament with the BQ playing the role of powerbroker.  However, the BQ will not be able to leverage this into actual autonomy.
7. An El Niño condition will manifest in the Pacific Ocean, relieving California's drought.
8. Despite the economic help of favorable (that is, "wet") weather, California will increase sales taxes to 10.5% or higher, resulting in the highest sales tax in the nation.  Despite this, functionally all incumbents in the Legislature eligible for re-election will be re-elected in November and the Democrat nominee (who right now looks like Jerry Brown) will win the Governorship.
9. A national newspaper of significant stature, I'm thinking the Boston Globe, will be liquidated.
10. 2010 will be a good year for the stock market.  The S&P 500 will realize a net gain of over 20% in CY 2010.  As of today, the S&P 500 is 1,124.57, so that means that to win this prediction, the S&P will need to be at least 1,349.48 on December 31, 2010.
11. Iron Man 2 will be the biggest box office hit of the summer.  But another much-anticipated sequel in the same general genre, Tron 2, will disappoint and lose money.  Wall Street 2 and Sex And The City 2 will both prove to be so unwatchably bad that we all would have been better off had they not been made at all.  Remakes of Clash of the Titans and Red Dawn will both prove to be convincingly entertaining.
12. In First Amendment news, the Supreme Court will decide for the government, 5-4, in the case of Salazar v. Buono, ruling that a large cross, originally built privately as a war memorial, later transferred to Federal land, then the subject of an Establishment Clause lawsuit, and then the subject of a law transferring the cross to the VFW.  The Court's decision will consider the longevity of the monument as a significant factor mitigating against the finding of an Establishment.  (I consider this a pessimistic prediction, for the record).  Justice Sonia Sotomayor will prove to be the decisive vote in favor of the government.
13. In Second Amendment news, the Supreme Court will decide, by at least 7 votes, that the individual right to own weapons articulated in District of Columbia v. Heller will be "incorporated" into the Fourteenth Amendment and thus apply to the several states as well as to the national government.  However, the Court will unanimously decline the opportunity to expand the "privileges and immunities" clause embodied in the arguments.  Watch for the decision in McDonald v. City of Chicago to be one of the last decisions announced in June.
14. Brett Favre will play his final year for the Minnesota Vikings, and then retire.  For real this time because he'll be 41 years old and in at least moderate pain almost all of the time.
15. Iran will successfully detonate a nuclear device.  This will cause much wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth and many Americans and a significant number of Europeans will consider this to be an existential threat.  While all of this is going on, the Russians will hem and haw and whistle tunelessly while staring at the ceiling while trying to blend into the background and go unnoticed.  However, the Iranians will not use their newly-developed nuclear weapon against anyone, including Israel.
16. On December 31, 2010, the U.S. national unemployment rate will be somewhere between 7.5% and 8.5%.

I feel I have to renew my prediction that Britney Spears will find Jesus and become even more intensely annoying than she already is.  But I won't make that a numbered prediction anymore because I've been predicting this for four years straight and I'm beginning to wonder just when she will hit a personal bottom such that the Baby Jeebus will get called in.  She does have a very great height from which to fall and a substantial network of leeches personal supporters who will do what is in their power to keep her generating profit personally and professionally functional.  So that's not one I'm offering for credit, just consideration.

Also to be answered in the upcoming year: will TL break down and actually buy his own domain and migrate the blog to WordPress?  The magic eight-ball says...

Predictions for 2009: Mixed Report Card

A year ago, I made some predictions for what would happen in 2009.  How'd I do?

1. The United States Federal deficit for calendar year 2009 will exceed $1.5 trillion. Check.

2. A human being will be cloned. Not Yet (that we know of).

3. There will be serious attempts at coups in two of the following: Morocco, Bolivia, Colombia, Ethiopia, or Pakistan. Fortunately, No.

4. GDP for the United States will decline for at least three of the four quarters in CY 2009. In fact, US GDP declined from 2008q4 to 2009q2, rose from 2009q2 to 2009q3, but 2009q4 data is not yet available.  Incomplete.

5. California will endure a shutdown of all non-essential state government functions, and then increase state taxes. As it turned out, taxes went up, but the state government didn’t shut down to only essential functions. Instead, we got furloughs.  So, this gets Half Credit.

6. Neither the United States nor Israel will participate in an overt military attack against Iran. As I predicted, this didn't happen.  Which is good.

7. Britney Spears will "find Jesus" and make a spectacle of displaying her newfound piety. I keep on waiting for this but no, Not Yet.

8. At least once in 2009, it will take two U.S. dollars to buy one Euro. Nope, I was too pessimistic here. It got up to $1.51 for a while but never quite reached $2.00.

9. "Watchmen will gross over $1 billion, including its timed-for-Christmas DVD release." Not even close.  "However, a movie called Public Enemies will get tons of hype but lose money in theatrical release, as its cast of hot young stars fails to excite audiences about crime in the 1930’s."  Public Enemies did indeed lose money in its theatrical release, although just barely.  Guess there aren’t as many geeky fanboys as I’d thought. Half Credit.

10. UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown will survive a no-confidence vote. He’s been in political hot water all year, including an inchoate challenge to his leadership from within his own party, but emerged from that with enough of the Labour Party rallied under his banner to avoid a realistic call for a no-confidence vote.  That's not enough for even half credit, so I'm grading myself "wrong" on this one.

11. The Detroit Lions will use their #1 overall draft pick to select Oklahoma quarterback Sam Bradford rather than the strong, fast DLB that they really need. They took Matt Stafford instead – a hot college QB, but not the exact one I predicted and certainly not the shore-up to their defensive unit that they needed (and still need) so badly. Half Credit.

12. General Motors will file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Check.

13. The United States will abandon plans to re-invigorate its space program with supra-orbital manned missions. It wasn't portrayed this way, but that is the result.  Check.

14. Over vitriolic but ineffectual Republican opposition, Congress will pass a “carbon tax.” Congress got hamstrung on health care reform instead, so this gets a "not so much."  Give them another year.

15. Barack Obama will name at least one Justice to the Supreme Court of the United States. Check.

16. The average U.S. price for a gallon of 87-octane unleaded gasoline in CY 2009 will be under $2.50 a gallon. This one’s right on the margin. For the first half of 2009, it was below $2.50, and for the second half of 2009, it was over $2.50.  Let's call it Half Credit.

So, that's more right than wrong.  Next -- predictions for 2010.

Weekend Weirdness, Volume X

To begin this tenth edition of Weekend Weirdness, I give you tens.

Tens of weird commercials.

Ten half minutes of a guy in a chicken suit playing "What is Love?" from Ring Mod on Vimeo.

Okay, "ten half minutes" is really "five minutes" but that didn't fit into my "ten" motif and I wasn't going to watch that chicken for ten whole minutes. But, I've got a graphical depiction of at least ten ways you can die in the United States, sorted by county.

And ten hot people involved in the Tiger Woods sex scandal.  I don't care what they say about the Perkins waitress, I think she's cute.  Bonus in the link -- these guys think every song Sarah McLachlan has ever written is about college football which, if you're obsessed with college football, might not be such a great stretch.  (See, it's "Fumbling Towards Ecstasy," right?  Her biggest single is all about "Possession."  How about them lyrics -- "Hold on to yourself, 'cause this is gonna hurt like hell" could easily be a threat from a linebacker to a quarterback.)

Yesterday's News

This is one of the more conservative corners of California that I live in.  A Democrat hasn't been elected to represent this area in generations.  The central industry here is building aircraft for the Air Force and the nation's premier aircraft testing facility is located here.  Bear that in mind as I deliver this bit of news.

I had dinner tonight with a friend who works at the local Barnes & Noble, by far the largest and most prominent  bookstore in the area.  The store received a shipment of 144 copies of Going Rogue last Tuesday.  So far, the store has sold 8 copies of the book.  8/144 = 5.6%.  The book is moving so slowly they've already marked it down to the "40% off" category.

Maybe the book is selling really well online.