OneMind

Well, the San Francisco 49ers have their seventh offensive coordinator in seven seasons. This time, at least they went with a guy who will probably be around as long as the team wants him because nobody else seems to. By giving Jimmy Raye II a three-year contract, the Niners “landed” a guy who is as old as the franchise and as mediocre as the team’s playing facility.

Raye, 62, has been around the league’s coaching ranks since 1977 when he got his first job, amazingly enough with the 49ers. He’s been on a dozen coaching staffs and has 11 years of offensive coordinator experience, none more recent than 2004-2005 when he had that post on the Oakland Raiders roster. Whoopee. In 2004 the Raiders were 5-11, the 20th team in scoring in the NFL and one place from dead last in the margin-of-victory category losing by a total of 122. The following year they got worse! The 4-12 team scored a paltry 290 points (23d in the league) and lost those games by a combined margin of 96.

This is the best q proud franchise could do? A broken-down mediocre has-been? His last great year as a football dude was in 1966 when he led Michigan State to the Rose Bowl as the Spartans’ QB.

He’s one of those guys who hangs around the fringe of the NFL hoping something really good and miraculous will happen to him. Sorry, boys, but this relationship doesn’t bode well for either of you.

This article has the first report I’ve seen so far of what, as it suggests, may become an increasingly worrisome issue: disgruntled and worrisome laid-off techies sabotaging their former employers’ systems.

In this case, the employee in question, a contract UNIX systems engineer, launched malware that would execute Saturday and wipe out all of the data on all of the servers at Federal mortgage company FannieMae. (OK, so the first question that popped into my head is why in the hell is that system designed so stupidly that anyone anywhere could wipe all the data on all the servers? Your federal technology dollars at work!)

A few decades ago when I was a strapping youngster in the computer field, there were legends about Dick Pick and the Pick Operating System along these lines. Rumor had it that every few months, Pick would release a new version of his eponymous OS with few if any meaningful improvements and charge an upgrade fee. Companies that didn’t pay for the upgrade found their systems grinding to a halt thanks to a bomb Pick had put into the code. I do not claim or know if this rumor is true, though Wikipedia does note that, “Pick Systems was often tangled in licensing litigation, and relatively little effort was devoted to marketing and improving the software. Subsequent ports of Pick to other platforms generally offered the same tools and capabilities for many years, usually with relatively minor improvements and simply renamed….” Even if the story is apocryphal, the lesson it contains isn’t.

If you employ people with unlimited access to your systems — and you clearly must employ at least one such person — you’d better be very careful about laying them off, cutting off their system access right away (and even that may not work), monitoring their activities, and, gee, I don’t know…treating them fairly?

I really like MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show. It is threatening to move into first place ahead of her colleague Keith Olbermann. But tonight, she blew it. And regular guest Ana Marie Cox called her on it.

See, President Obama’s hosting a Super Bowl XLIII watch party at the White House. He invited the two senators from Pennsylvania and the two senators from Arizona. The former both said yes; the latter both declined. One of the latter is, of course, the old man Obama humbled last November, Sen. John McCain.

Rachel said that she viewed McCain’s declining the invite to be a snub of some proportion. Ms. Cox disagreed and so do I. McCain, Ms. Cox reported, is a serious football fan who figured if he went to the White House for the game, the small talk and other distractions (one of the Pennsylvania senators is bringing his four daughters to the party and having raised four girls, I know the odds of seeing the entire game with them present are pretty low) would make it highly unlikely he’d get to see the entire game, let alone see it his way.

I’m not particularly drawn to this Super Bowl. I have no vested interest in who wins, though I expect the Steelers to crush the Cardinals and for the game to be a laugher by halftime (go ahead, Kurt, prove me wrong!), but it’s the freaking Super Bowl. So of course I’m watching it. With a couple of friends.

If I were invited to the White House to see the game — and assuming it wouldn’t be the only chance I’d have to meet the President and be in his house — I suspect I’d turn it down as well.

Hand me the damn remote, get out of the way and shut up.

Please?

Flabbergasted. Amazed. Incredulous. Those are a few of the words that describe my reaction this week to the House Republicans’ self-serving, public-be-damned arrogance and disingenuousness in the way they toyed with President Obama’s stimulus package.

After wheedling and whining several concessions from Obama’s plan — taking snickering, adolesecent, unfair advantage of his perhaps naive desire to gain some bipartisan support for his program — not one freaking Republican voted for the stimulus package. That is outrageously bad, impolite and shoddy behavior on the part of supposed professionals.

Obama cannot let this stand. His desire for bipartisanship is doomed to failure given the hard-right bent of the few remaining House Republicans. The people of this country spoke loudly and clearly on Nov. 4 and soundly repudiated the policies for which these pandering ignoramuses stand. They are snickering behind their closed lockers today at the gullibility and naivete of Obama and his supporters who were stupid enough to believe that even if they made every single concession asked for, the GOP would ever vote for a Democratic stimulus package. Any such package that does anything other than dump tax breaks and no-strings-attached money on the most unethical band of robber barons in the history of this country and then wait for the eternally slow “trickle down” to the economy is going to fail their litmus test.

Fine.

The President should engineer the next round to remove every single concession wrought from the bill by these scurrilous prevaricators so that in the end the stimulus bill has not a single GOP fingerprint on it. If they want to play partisan games in an atmosphere where, as Obama himself reminded their leaders last week, he won, let them play. Their gamble seems to me to recall the first term of President Clinton when the House GOP played Grand Obstructionist Party and was rewarded by the American people with a mid-term win that put them back in charge. That will not happen this time. The fact that these nincompoops are too stupid to read those huge tea leaves ought to give us pause about what qualifies one to be a Congressperson in our society.

When two years from now, the GOP has nothing to point to as an accomplishment or a success, let’s see how many of them get re-elected. They stood and looked the nation’s leader square in the face and spit in his eye. They deserve nothing good in return. Ever. Period.

My friend Tony Seton, author of the widely read and distributed Seton Notes, sent me an email today with a column by David Brooks of the New York Times. In the column, Brooks offers a bit of a paean to institutional thinking, which he contrasts with the kind of free thinking entailed in a liberal education. I thought I’d share my response to Tony with you.

It seems to me that while institutionalist thinking has a role to play in society, it cannot be allowed, ever again, to become the dominant force it has been the past few years. Religious fundamentalists are institutional thinkers. They rebel at the very notion of the aims of a liberal education as set forth in the Harvard report Brooks mentions. It is to shelter their children from that intellectual openness that so many fundamentalist parents home-school their children or send them to religious schools, oppose scientific progress, and seek to make the laws and mores of society conform to their limited and limiting world views.

It does seem to me, too, though, that even within institutionalized thought channels, there is a danger of over-conformity. I think, e.g., of the Old Boys Network that has dominated the world of scientific research for centuries, the system that kept Rosalind Franklin from getting her rightful share of credit for the DNA discoveries and Candace Pert from a probable Nobel for her pioneering work in opiate receptor studies. When an “ism” is ingrained in instiututional thinking, then the need for more individual and liberal thinking becomes readily apparent.

Ultimately, I think, the blending of institutionalist and individuated thinking is what’s likely to have the optimal result for the person and for the society. Operating institutionally within instuttional boundaries is, for the most part, beneficial to the individual and the institutions. But when one carries that thinking outside the specific institution, one too often finds the only role to be played is that of the obstructionist. And unreasoning institutionalized obstruction is the most counter-productive form of behaivor plaguing us today.

I read this morning that Microsoft is laying off 5,000 people, Google is also considering layoffs, and a number of other tech companies are in the same “let’s shed some people” mode. Microsoft and Google, at least, both have huge cash reserves, so I think layoffs are a dumb move. In fact, they should be doing the opposite.

Back in the 70′s and 80′s when I worked with and at Intel, one of the things that made that company so successful was its ability to rely on a cash cushion to get it through tough times not only without layoffs but by actually hiring new talent. Competitors who were less prepared, cash-wise, to weather the storm, laid off highly talented people or cut programs that resulted in people resigning. Intel would pick them up and give them creative work to do. Once the downturn ends — as they all do, eventually — Intel was in a stronger position to dominate its niche than before the downturn.

Now if you don’t have cash reserves, you probably do have to pull in your horns, cut back your staff and wait for better times. But if you’ve managed your resources intelligently and have an adequate cash reserve, then you ought to be blasting through the bad times, not hiding from them.

Yeah, I know. This downturn is stronger than most and will probably last longer than most. But the principle remains the same. If you can grow while your competitors shrink, you own markets.

Some miscellaneous observations about this morning’s inauguration of President Barack H. Obama.

• Obama’s inaugural speech was a bit of letdown for me. None of the soaring rhetoric, brilliant cadence, and breathtaking parallels that marked many of his other presentations. Not even one reference to “Yes We Can!” By most standards, a far-above-average speech but against the standard he himself has set, only slightly above average.
• Pastor Rick Warren gave a powerful, ecumenical and inclusive invocation. Ending it as he did in the name of Jesus Christ took just the slightest sheen off the polish of the prayer, but taken in its entirety, it was a prayer with which most Americans can and will be proud.
• The poem by Elizabeth Alexander was terribly, terribly weak. Pedestrian, unimaginative, linguistically simplistic, intellectually impoverished. Not a single line stands out. I know Maya Angelou’s done it before, but she would have been so much better.
• The closing cadence of the benediction by Rev. Joseph E. Lowery of Atlanta was strangely appropriate: a series of humorous couplets that, taken together, made for a very light-hearted ending to a perfectly impassioned prayer.
• You have to wonder if Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts remembered it wrong, read it wrong or deliberately misled Preident Obama taking the oath of office. Be sure of this: the wing nuts on radio will make a big issue of this flubbing and blame it all on the new President.
• I was glad the cameras didn’t spend much time on the Obama kids and I hope this is a precursor of their coverage of the children throughout the Obama Administration’s existence.

All in all, an historic occasion to be remembered, replayed and recognized for what it truly was.

It is difficult to express the joy I feel this morning having watched the peaceful transition of power from the most incompetent and criminal of all the Presidents in my lifetime to the most hopeful and intelligent man of integrity to take that office in that same period.

While the nation, with all of its problems and potentials, is clearly always greater than its leaders, those at the top can clearly and obviously affect a great deal of whether we experience more problems or more growth, more peace or more war, more prosperity or more poverty, more good or more bad. I believe President Obama will preside over more good than bad for at least the next four years. I am filled with hope, optimism and a desire to be of service to my country and it appears that millions of others are like-minded. Even if President Obama does nothing more than achieve that inspiration and then get out of the way of the people, he will have opened the door to a better world.

Due to a scheduling mistake — or a mixup between HBO and the Presidential Inaugural Committee — the opening invocation for today’s activities in Washington, D.C., was not broadcast by the network with sole rights to do so.

But Christianity Today magazine captured the prayer and posted it on YouTube so we could all hear it. Here is a transcript but if you want to hear it spoken, check it out:

It seems to me to be close to unarguable that outgoing (it is good to be able to say that at last!) President George W. Bush and his cronies have almost certainly committed war crimes. If there were doubt before (which I don’t think there was), the recent spate of commentary from within his own administration seems to me to confirm that.

The question is whether I can add any value to the discussion by probing the subject more deeply, taking a public stance on the issue, urging the incoming (see above parenthetical remark) administration of President Barack S. Obama to prosecute these wrong-doers to the fullest extent of the law, and otherwise discussing the topic. Or is it better for me to let others carry that water and go focus on the positive aspects of spirituality that are the core principles of my transformed life?

Because even though the commentary I’d engage in if I followed my long-time political and journalistic instincts here would appear (perhaps be?) negative, the fact is that pointing out the truth of wrongdoers often is negative. Ought that thereby preclude me from kibitzing?

What would the sight of an ex President, ex VP or ex Cabinet Member of an American administration being arrested in, say, Paris or Stockholm or the Hague or Moscow or Beijing or even London do to this country? And yet, there exists the very real possibility that should we decline to investigate and as appropriate prosecute these individuals for their gross criminal acts while in office, another country might well do so, and be legally justified. When the world declared Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Miloševi? a war criminal, he was hunted down, captured, tried and convicted. What makes us think the world will be less hesitant to pursue charges against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, et. al., if they could get their hands on them?

I still have to think more about the subject but I’m interested in what you think. If you aren’t a member here, you can join and then post a comment or you can just send an email to dan at danshafer dot com.