Opinions

The Facebook IPO is starting to look like a fiasco, not only because of mechanical glitches the first day of trading but because of alleged sneaky insider shenanigans that may have tipped off a favored few that that FB’s revenues weren’t going to be quite as robust as hoped. Morgan Stanley, the chief underwriter, is under scrutiny. Facebook shares went down in price rather than up, and the wizards of Wall Street know how to make money in either direction. So if certain favored clients had info that the unwashed masses weren’t privy to, that might not pass the smell test. Here’s the Reuters report. Here’s the AP account.

What strikes me about this is that it echoes cranky, snarly, surly things written in this space in recent days. I was partly kidding, but now I’m thinking that I should be every bit as cynical as I often pretend to be.

Of course no one has actually been charged with a crime and, when and if such charges are filed, they will be presumed innocent – just not here on my blog, where we will default to invective and rage and presumptions of guilt. Why do people use the term “class warfare” as if it were something bad?

Mazel tov to Mark Zuckerberg and his lovely bride! Now let’s talk about that Facebook IPO again. Your blogger, as previously noted in this space, will not be purchasing any Facebook stock, because of the lack of clarity about its value. Yeah, I guess I could do some research, but my assumption is that most of the information available to someone like me — an outsider, and a confirmed doofus with a history of losing money in the market — will have the net effect of making me less, rather than more, likely to reach a sensible decision. It’ll be a trap. It’ll just sucker me. We have a saying around here: If you don’t know who the pigeon is at the table, it’s you.

The tech world befuddles me, as does anything involving money, so the Facebook IPO was, for me, marked with skull and crossbones. Question:Will Facebook even exist in 10 or 20 years? I had a Compuserve email account back in the day, and also MCI mail, and I still have an AOL email account, which for many people is laughable, a fact necessitating mockery and outrage, followed by derisive comments about my sad, scuzzy cell phone. My cell phone is so primitive it’s hidden in the heel of my shoe.

I come from backward people: When I was growing up we were in a Hobbesian state of nature and had barely mastered the technology of fire. We would sit around the dinner table chewing and chewing and chewing and chewing and chewing and chewing hunks of stringy meat, desperately trying to swallow it, and then someone would say, “This might be easier to eat if we cooked it.”

I heard on the radio this morning that Facebook shares were trading below the original IPO price. Let’s check again: Ouch, it’s down 11 percent at the moment from the previous close. See how smart I was to stick my money in the mattress instead?

The Copernican Principle worries me a bit here. As you may recall from many previous Achenblog items, the Copernican Principle goes beyond the whole earth-revolves-around-sun concept. It states, broadly, that we should not presume to find ourselves in a special position in time or space.

The principle tells us we will rarely find ourselves right at the beginning or right at the end of something that has a long duration. This is not deterministic. It’s just a guide, a general truism — a playing of the odds. The astrophysicist J. Richard Gott of Princeton has extended the principle to cover a great deal of social and political phenomena. He goes so far as to use it to craft a general range of future human population. Bottom line: We're probably not living on the home planet of a future galactic civilization because that would put us in a privileged position. (COULD be, but you wouldn’t want to bet on it — or invest in Galactic Empire, Inc.)

[Because it’s Microbe Friday: If you haven’t seen it, check out my story on ancient, boring, enervated, malingering and very ancient bacteria buried in clay deep beneath the abyss of the Pacific Ocean. These organisms make your average slug look like a Kardashian. They’re barely alive. The story has links in it to some of our past perusings here on the blog about ET and microbes and shadow biospheres and all that jazz.]

[Geopolitics fix: I really liked this Ezra Klein column on America’s future, which I found on page 2 of the newspaper this morning (he really ought to have a blog or something — he’s that smart). The piece basically says to people bemoaning American decline: chill. Not a problem. He mentions some stuff we’ve discussed here in the past — demographic challenges in China, Japan, Europe, for example — but makes a key point that you don’t hear very often: We want these other countries to get rich. It’s win-win — provided we’re good with diplomacy and spreading American values. Ezra writes:”... the sun may now set on the British Empire, but the average British citizen lives much better because of the medical and computer technologies developed in Britain’s former colonies. If those colonies hadn’t grown rich and strong enough to throw off the mother country’s yoke, the result would be a worse world for everyone — including the British.”]

Now, the main item: The latest issue of American Heritage magazine has a piece by Douglas Brinkley on Walter Cronkite’s famous February 1968 report for CBS News about the Vietnam War.[I can’t seem to track down a link to the story, but will keep trying.] Brinkley reminds us of the immense power of the news anchors in that day. They had outsized influence with their half-hour broadcasts each evening at the dinner hour in a country that had fully embraced television but could pick from only three networks. Cronkite was given the anchor chair at CBS in 1962 when it was still a 15-minute broadcast. He took it to 30 minutes the next year, changing the formula for the industry. By early 1968 he had surpassed his competition at NBC (the Huntley-Brinkley Report) to become the most-watched anchor.

Brinkley’s story is a dramatic narrative of Cronkite’s decision to go to Vietnam after the Tet Offensive and find out first-hand whether the rosy scenarios of the administration and the generals were legitimate. As Brinkley tells it, Cronkite knew that he would do something different with his special report: He would render an opinion. It went against CBS News tradition and policy, but he got the green light from his boss, and, with two producers, flew to Saigon and hit the pavement — and the jungle.

He slept on the floor of a doctor’s house just like the other war correspondents. He talked to everyone, took copious notes. In the end he anchored a 30-minute prime time special. He judgment was carefully worded, and thus all the more powerful: We couldn’t win the war.

“[I]t seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate....it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy and did the best they could.”

And thus LBJ famously lost Cronkite.

Reductionism has its charms. You can eliminate a lot of clutter and complexity by believing that the future will hinge entirely upon one dis­cern­ible and measurable factor, element or thingamajig. It’s like knowing a code word, or a secret handshake.

Remember this:

“Ben — I just want to say one word to you — just one word.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Are you listening?”

“Yes I am.”

“Plastics.”

So what’s going to decide the 2012 presidential election? “The economy, stupid,” is the officially sanctioned response. And the economy will depend on oil prices. Or something happening in Greece, maybe.

Carter Eskew picks the unemployment rate. That’s the statistic that matters, he think. I’m not sure about that, but in his blog post he makes a good point that everyone should heed: “presidential elections are increasingly a series of state-wide elections” His message is that the national unemployment rate doesn’t matter as much as the unemployment rate in, say, Ohio, or Virginia, or Iowa, or Missouri — swing states that have lower-than-average unemployment and where Obama could well pick up the electoral votes he needs to get over the top.

Of course, under the Constitution, presidential elections have always been a collection of statewide contests. The national popular vote doesn’t matter a jot. So it’s hard to know what to make of national polls, particularly ones that don’t sort out the likely voters. This morning, the estimable Nate Silver of the Times warns that we’re still in the general-election preseason, and haven’t seen the best and sharpest arguments from the campaigns about why their guy is the right choice and the other guy is a doofus. Silver focuses on Obama’s national approval rating. Talk about a country that’s divided on Obama: “Right now, in the RealClearPolitics average, 48.3 percent of Americans approve of the job that Mr. Obama is doing, and 48.6 percent disapprove.” So, close election ahead. According to Silver, approval ratings are good predictors of elections, particularly for incumbents.

This morning I read with some concern and personal discomfiture if that’s a word my colleague Darryl Fears’ story about the Potomac being named America’s most endangered river. The story notes that the river is full of sewage and agricultural runoff and there are all these pharmaceuticals that get in the water and cause fish to change sexes, to the point where there are male fish swimming around with eggs inside them. Whoa: I swim in the Potomac! I got swimmin’ holes up and down this river. I have immersed myself countless times in the hormonally discombobulating waters of the Nation’s River. And suddenly it occurs to me that, whenever I get lost these days, I stop and ask for directions. Ruh-roh.
The Potomac River near Georgetown — endangered by pollution and, obviously, rowers. (Astrid Riecken - FOR THE WASHINGTON POST)

Back to the river: A group called American Rivers puts out an annual list of the most endangered rivers. This year the Potomac tops the list, followed, in order, by the Green, the Chattahoochee, the Missouri, the Hoback, the Grand, the South Fork Skykomish, the Crystal, the Coal and the Kansas.

I like this list a lot because it includes a bunch of rivers I’ve never heard of, and which sound like they’d be fun to raft down. I like the sound of the Hoback. I am happy that there’s a Skykomish with multiple forks. I question whether there’s really such a thing as the Kansas River. I didn’t think they had rivers there, just vast fields of grain and a lot of cows and the occasional tornado that can deposit a house from someplace black-and-white to someplace in color.

That said, there is nothing here that I can see in this American Rivers report that explains why the Potomac is more endangered than any other river in the country. Why are we number one? A Potomac River fact sheet states:

“[T]he Potomac is threatened by agricultural and urban pollution that will only get worse if Congress rolls back national clean water protections. If Congress puts polluters before people, our nation’s river— and many other rivers nationwide— will become a threat to public health, unsafe for drinking water, wildlife, or recreation.”

I have a hunch this most-endangered designation is political at some level, but I don’t want to go out on a limb here.