Peter Krupa

I suspect that the government is, at this moment, screwing the pooch. Starting in November, the government sold the bank bailouts as a way to stave off a truly catastrophic economic tailspin. Just a little priming of the pump, a little life support. Fine.

But what I hear now – from everyone – is that we need to do everything we can to “get banks lending again” – as in, consumer lending – which is insane. That lending is precisely why we got into this crisis in the first place. For the last decade, Americans have been on a debt-fueled spending spree that is completely unsustainable. Borrowing does not create wealth. We need to pause to pay back our debts, and then start actually producing things to generate wealth.

Instead, the government is obsessed with cajoling you into taking out a mortgage, and banks into offering it to you. Great plan.

What’s worse, yesterday’s new plan seems intended to keep the real estate-backed asset bubble inflated by, basically, subsidizing shit, keeping the risk with the taxpayer, and handing the profit to private companies.

Of course the stock market rallied yesterday: We’re about to write those knuckle-heads another check for $1 trillion!

Why we don’t force some banks into bankruptcy, fire the management, restructure them, and sell off the pieces, rather than keep bailing out someone else’s leaky boat, is beyond me.

Have you stopped to ask yourself what the world is going to look like a few years from now? What with millions of people getting canned, stable employers no longer stable, the whole economy on fire. Imagine: General Electric just cut its dividend. GENERAL ELECTRIC. GE hasn’t done that since THE GREAT DEPRESSION.

How bad can it get? Let’s see. The last Great Depression culminated in global fascism, World War II, and the invention of the atom bomb.

Forget T-bills… I’m investing in Krugerrands and ammunition.

The Economist comes out in favor of legalizing drugs as “the least bad policy.” They make a very convincing case. Come on people: Prohibition doesn’t work. And we have better things on which to spend $40 billion a year.

I guess if you look at the facts, the reasoning is obvious. As The Economist puts it, the West’s war on drugs has lasted 100 years, and completely failed. Can’t we try something else? The hard part would be convincing unreasonable people – like Limbaugh Republicans who get extremely bent out of shape over cigarette smoking bans (it’s a free country!), yet rally around felony charges for the possession of minor quantities of marijuana.

Does this make sense? No.

It’ll be awhile before the topic of drug legalization is anything but political suicide in the U.S.

The gun debate is kind of insane, and I can argue both sides of it, depending on context. What I could never get particularly excited about, however, were bans on semi-automatic assault weapons or other large-caliber, high-capacity, war-like contraptions. Only rarely are they used to commit crimes (handguns are much more dangerous), and mostly they’re the provenance of hobbyists. Assault weapons bans don’t do much good for anyone. They only fan the culture wars.

However, with the drug war going on in Mexico (a real war! with hand grenades and everything!), it’s time to revisit assault weapons regulation. The New York Times reported on Wednesday that the Mexican bad guys get their guns in the U.S. – high-caliber guns like AK-47s – and traffic them across the boarder. It’s easy to acquire the weapons because U.S. gun regulations are so lax (this type of firearm is illegal in Mexico).

When weapons like AR-15s, Kalashnikov rifles, and machine pistols bought easily in the U.S. become tools of criminality in our neighboring countries, it’s time to regulate the hell out of them, and fast. I know Americans don’t generally give a shit about how their actions affect the rest of the world, so to put it in terms they can understand: It’s only a matter of time before these Mexican gangs start staging shootouts in Tempe, Arizona, and by then we’ll be wishing we disarmed them when we had the chance.

I wouldn’t venture to take a stab at what, exactly, the new gun regulations should be. Of course, no regulation is perfect, and the criminals will find ways around them. But we’ve got to start somewhere, and before it’s too late.

By now, it’s a given that in a short amount of time (if not already) people in industrialized nations will get most of their information through electronic devices, much of it by way of the Internet. It’s a fact that news “papers” are obsolete as a means of delivering content. At one time they were the most efficient and cost-effective method. They no longer are.

In time, new businesses will pop up based exclusively upon the creation and delivery of content to people electronically, whether through Web browsers or by some other means. I had hoped that newspapers and the people who worked at them would lead the charge. Upon reflection and observation, however, I seriously doubt it.

During their several-decades-long tenure as pseudo-monopolies, newspapers developed a culture based on very strong traditions. The AP Style Manual was their Bible. Ledes were sacrosanct. Headline-writing was an art. Terms like “above the fold,” “cutline,” and “news hook” were the insider currency of the newsroom.

In some cases, the rules and traditions were good. Fact-checking standards, libel precautions, and interview etiquette, for example. In other ways, traditions were wasteful, dull, and not particularly useful to the reader. Foreign correspondents enjoyed huge expense accounts to produce mediocre, little-read content. Reporting and news judgment were subservient to story-telling formulas. Layers and layers of editors turned safeguard into bureaucracy.

Worst of all, much of the content in newspapers is there because it’s always been there. While I might be wrong, I doubt most newspaper editors ever pause to wonder if anyone reads “Fred Basset” or the weather page. They’ve just always been there, and were they to be cut, a handful of octogenarians would write letters. Best leave them alone.

In sum, newspapers and the people who made their careers with them are fundamentally creatures of tradition.

Unfortunately, the news (or rather, content) business is entering an era when traditions will get you killed. The business has gone from zero competition to intense, global, and extremely fast-paced competition. I just don’t think people who’ve made their careers in the warm cocoon of traditional newspaper monopolies are going to survive out here on the cold, hard Internet. They will not be able to turn away from their traditions long enough to visualize something fresh

Enough rhetoric. How about an example?

Take GlobalPost.com. I like this site, I really do. And a good friend of mine works for it. But the entire concept is wrong. Basically, it’s a Web site dedicated to traditional feature articles written by foreign correspondents posted around the world. I would like to see this site succeed, and I’m sure they did their market research and will make some money.

But all the power of the Internet and the backing of a billionaire, and that’s the best they could come up with? The content isn’t nearly rich or varied enough to gain the attention of someone who follows news from a particular country avidly. Neither is it quirky enough to draw in the casual Web surfer. The reporter “notebooks” are updated rarely and are too formal to be interesting.

The sky was the limit, and they decided to focus their resources on safe, predictable, long-form, 800-word, perspectiveless feature stories, of the kind favored by Reuters. This is what you get when a team of former newspaper people launches a Web product.

When a bunch of programmers decide to deliver content, however, you get Patch.com. Funded by some ex-Google people, this site takes a stab at community journalism, I presume so they can sell ads to local businesses that otherwise aren’t interested in Internet marketing. There’s a Patch.com site for three New Jersey suburbs at the moment.

So far, it looks like they have an editor and two or three reporters, and about two-dozen engineers and designers. The news comes in short, significant bits, a sizable portion of it is opinion, and user-generated community announcements, business listings, and reviews play important roles.

This is different, useful, fresh… it just might work.

As more people get online and more money flows into Internet advertising, we’ll see more investment in Web enterprises that actually produce content, as opposed to aggregating (digg) or commenting on (Gawker) other people’s content. Those who figure out how to do this will get rich.

I doubt those people will come from traditional newspapers.

The most pointed analysis I’ve yet read for what just happened to the American economy comes from a comment on a Slate.com article:

I’ve always felt that 90% of what you need to know to understand the US can be conveyed in just one slogan: “The more you shop, the more you save.”

I was recently laid low by a fit of nostalgia upon reading an old blog post by Jared Cook about Hillsdale’s “disgruntled sons of the moral majority,” a group of which I am apparently part. I realized that I miss being around people who care about ideas, appreciate a well-turned phrase, and talk about books the way others discuss college basketball.

The great thing was it never really mattered if we agreed. It was the sparing that counted, the sword-crossing. I consider myself fortunate to have been invited to spar with people who, to this day, are the most intelligent I’ve ever met. We had a fine time.

Sadly, as I clicked through Jared’s various links to Hillsdale blogs, almost all of them have fallen silent, with Daniel Silliman’s being the notable exception.

Whither the disgruntled sons? Bob? Sam? Prizio? Anybody out there? The fit of nostalgia continues.

1. La Ley de Hérodes (Eng: Herod’s Law) – A tragicomic fable of Mexican politics. An eager-beaver party no-body gets tapped to replace a corrupt provincial governor and bring the beleaguered locals “development and social justice.” Shenanigans ensue when the naif’s ideals begin to slip. He ends badly (or does he?).

2. Kung fu (Eng: Kung Fu Hustle) – An unlucky wanna-be Shanghai gangster ends up caught between a form-dancing hatchet gang and the residents of a slum who turn out to be not as helpless as they appear. People fly around, kung fu magic ensues, and things happen that you never, ever expect.

3. Nueve Reinas (Eng: Nine Queens) – A young man meets an experienced Buenos Aires confidence man who shows him the ropes. They’re soon gunning for the big con: Passing off a set of nine stamps to a Spaniard for a sizable amount of money. Double-crosses ensue, etc.

4. El Laberinto del Fauno (Eng: Pan’s Labyrinth) – Nominated for six Oscars in 2007, won three. Set during the time of the Spanish Civil War, a little girl caught between her brutal military father and her ailing mother escapes into a fantasy world in the countryside. Beautiful, haunting, informative (you thought Europeans were civilized?). Sadness ensues.

5. Le Placard (Eng: The Closet) – Sad-sack office drone learns he is about to be fired. The only way to keep his job is to make people think he’s a homosexual. Shenanigans ensue. This movie should be shown in University drama clinics as an absolute perfect modern execution of a comedy (that is, comedy as in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” not “Twins”).

Everyone loves Twitter! Well, actually, only about 6 million people love Twitter, and most of them (from what I can tell) are journalists working on trend stories about how everyone loves Twitter. Since every media outlet in the world appears intent on assaulting me with Twitter stories, I’m finally inspired to ask, What Is The Big Deal?

I know I sound like an old man, or worse, a Luddite with a blog. But I really don’t get it. So I type 140 characters about what I’m doing! And people can read that, then type back 140 characters about what they’re doing!

And this is… fun?

Or is it supposed to be useful? People say Twitter is the future of journalism, which, you know, God help us all. Although I guess most stories are probably only worth no more than 140 characters. “PLANE CRASHES ON HOUSE, 50 DEAD.” That pretty much sums it up.

But do I need this? Do I need to know instantly, I mean now, that a plane just crashed on a house? Some things I do need to know instantly, for example, maybe something like, “PLANE CRASHING ON YOUR HOUSE RIGHT NOW,” but I doubt there’s a Twitter feed for that.

I guess I just can’t figure out what Twitter does that RSS feeds, away messages, instant messages, text messages, blogs, and e-mail don’t already do. Mass subscriber text message service? Is that a business model?

My gut (which admittedly doesn’t know much about social networks) tells me that the venture capitalists who are right now in the process of raising a quarter of a billion dollars in funding for this company – which, remember, has no revenue and only 6 million users – are going to be really, really sorry.

In all seriousness, however, I would be interested to know if any of you think Twitter is worth the trouble, and why.

Have you heard of micropayments? This idea that people would pay teeny-tiny bits of money for each individual piece of newspaper they consume? (0.05$/article, for example.) Michael Kinsley, the founder of Slate.com, weighs in today in an nytimes.com op-ed, with kind of an interesting point:

Micropayments are systems that make it easy to pay small amounts of money. (Your subway card is an example.) You could pay a nickel to read an article, or a dime for a whole day’s newspaper.

Well, maybe. But it would be a first. Newspaper readers have never paid for the content (words and photos). What they have paid for is the paper that content is printed on. A week of The Washington Post weighs about eight pounds and costs $1.81 for new subscribers, home-delivered. With newsprint (that’s the paper, not the ink) costing around $750 a metric ton, or 34 cents a pound, Post subscribers are getting almost a dollar’s worth of paper free every week — not to mention the ink, the delivery, etc. The Times is more svelte and more expensive. It might even have a viable business model if it could sell the paper with nothing written on it. A more promising idea is the opposite: give away the content without the paper. In theory, a reader who stops paying for the physical paper but continues to read the content online is doing the publisher a favor.

He goes on to point out that the real reason newspapers aren’t profitable online is (duh) competition. Newspapers aren’t used to competing with anything, so of course they’re getting absolutely killed.