Press Conference Review

Turns out Pres. Obama was “monitoring” the situation from “Day One” with “regular briefings” and “meetings” all during his day.

I bet that just thrills all those Gulf fishermen and women who lost their livelihood to BP’s disaster.

Unfortunately, this was as pinned down as it got during today’s briefing (which he was forced to accede to.)

Obama (not unlike other government agencies) considers that he is “in charge” of the situation by holding MEETINGS.  And sending down people to investigate so they can “hold the boot on BP’s neck”, but question the metaphor as they do so.

Let’s have more meetings. Let’s cancel future oil projects. Let’s revise regulations. Oh, and we’ll need more “bipartisan cooperation” to get more laws passed, which will require — more meetings.

Take just half the suggestions that Carville said yesterday and implement them. How about those supertankers sucking up all that goo?!? In 30 days, I imagine you can get them about half-way around the planet by sea – though that’s just a guesstimate (Update: See above Esquire article: “…with the right calls, tankers could be on the scene in 2 days”. )  Not like BP doesn’t have any supertankers nearby which could be quickly commandeered for this. But heck, the Army Corps of Engineers can’t even approve a sand levee – much less sending the military in to handle a disaster and commandeer some vessels…

No – - it’s “I’m responsible” and “let’s have another meeting and more briefings…”

And, of course, this is before he goes on his second vacation since the Gulf Rig blew up. (While not laying a wreath on Memorial Day. Hope  his golf game goes well.)

Business as usual at the White House.

Heckava Job, Barry…

(OK, now I’m going to go do some Levenson release technique in order to cool off. Why I ever watch TV for anything…?)

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(continued from part 1…)

Medianomic Celebrities and the Long Tail

Chris Anderson has made a profitable study out of his “Long Tail” scenario. But he missed the most profitable point. The dull middle, where it’s really the most profitable. At one end, the “tall head”, you have celebrities and fads. Where a few people dominate one or two items and most of the advertising dollars to keep them there. For books, this means they have a steep curve up and just as steep down right after. They are blips on the radar. So any profit is made quickly – get in and get out. And too many are one-shot wonders – feast and then famine.

The Long Tail is the reverse. Very little profit made as you have to sell a lot of some very small-time sellers. Just as much total money changes hands, if not more – it’s a whole lot of hands, though. If you were running a bookstore, you wouldn’t keep a lot of these around.  A brick-and-mortar store couldn’t afford to keep hundreds of thousands of books available at any one time. The aggregate sales wouldn’t keep the lights on. And so long tail books usually do best as print-on-demand.

What keeps stores restocking are the evergreen products which continue to sell, regardless. You’ll find every bookstore in America (well, the bulk of them) sells some version or another of the Bible. Because people are always buying it. It’s the hands-down all-time bestselling book in history. Because is appeals to the middle, the median consciousness of English-speaking peoples. No, it’s not on the #1 spot every week. It just routinely sells. And sells. And sells.

So the real income to be made in book sales are authors like Napoleon Hill and Dale Carnegie, whose books just continue to sell, regardless of whether they are marketed or not. These aren’t Stephan King’s, or J. K. Rowlings’, or Dean Koonz’ – they are really more the William Shakespeare’s, Agatha Christie’s, Barbara Cartland’s, and Dr. Suess’s. No flash in the pan, but a consistent output of regular sellers – or one really good book based on common sense that just keeps selling regardless.

And if you look in any bookstore, you’ll find that the latest fad sellers are out front and hyped up. But the bulk of their stock is in books who just continue to sell routinely at moderate amounts. Anything that doesn’t sell is remaindered or discounted to get rid of it. Top-bottom-middle.

“Big Name” celebrities are mostly at the big head of this Long Tail. And you’ll see them mostly burn-out and fade from the scene. Some of them are smart, like Fess Parker (Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett), and Alan Hale Jr. (“the Skipper” on Gilligan’s Island) bought restaurants and lived comfortably. Others, like Jimmy Dean traded their fame for their own brand-name foods. The evergreen actors and actresses (as well as musicians) continue to have a nice living off of this. Dylan continues to churn out well-recieved hit albums, while infomercials are a nice income for those TV celebrities who were on for a very long time.  What is normal for the stage and screen wouldn’t be normal for you and I – but it can be a regular living like anything else. And the really long tail of celebrity-dom has people returning to their car sales or construction jobs after their one quasi-hit.

Medianomic Extremists, Gays, Acorn and Everyone Else

This study also embraces the extremists as necessary. Without them, life would be a bland bowl of lukewarm, un-salted oatmeal. Diversity is the spice of life.

But there is a caveat – don’t expect because an extreme view is tolerated that it will ever be accepted. Homosexuals (Gay’s, Lesbians, queers, fags, etc.) have never been and will never be mainstream. Nature has basically seen to that. And while there is every reason to give these their legal rights, they need to stay out of the mainstream in order to preserve those rights.

That seems odd, but it’s true. Their main problem is that they aren’t being allowed live a normal life in terms of hospital visitations, insurance, and so on. Otherwise, they’ve gotten everything they want, as long as they don’t step on anyone else’s toes – like dressing funny or scandalously, or playing loud music that keeps the neighborhood awake.  Their real problem is that government and religion are too closely connected. Government took over the function of saying what a “marriage” is, which is actually Religion’s function. If they would simply drop the marriage moniker and simply be honest, saying that they are just actually licensors of civil unions, then this whole scene would go away. (Then, if you wanted to be married, go find a church that agrees with you, that you can be average in.)

But “don’t ask, don’t tell” is another policy that won’t disappear soon. Because the  vast middle is straight. And that’s they way they expect people around them to act. (If you notice what happened with this in the news lately – Obama had to fulfill at least one political promise. The head of the military and the Secretary of Defense said, “Yes, yes – but, we’ll need a year-long study before we do anything with this.” So they effectively tabled the motion. Have your political cake and eat it, too.)

The majority only rules as long as they also listen to the extreme edges. That’s Medianomic politics defined.

You’ll find an interesting thing happening with the old Civil Rights movement. They went mainstream, got nearly everything they wanted corrected, and now are busy turning conservative and building their own “good old boy” networks.  When some flock-less “Reverend” tries to start a protest rally for some imagined “right” that was stepped on, you’ll see only a handful turn out. The extreme became part of the middle and now has little to complain about overall.

Now, when some extremists get into power, they often find themselves isolated. Mostly where they don’t quickly learn to become mainstream in their actions. Especially in this Internet Age. Acorn is a poster-child for this. Better get respectable if you are in the spot light – or you get defunded. If they’d studied what happened to the National Endowment for the Arts, they would have known. An example of doing this right was former-president Bill Clinton, who quickly learned to turn everything the Republican Congress approved into his idea. And we got the excesses of Welfare corrected, plus some other stuff. The worst presidential example so far was Millard Fillmore, who wouldn’t listen to even his own party – a real extremist, elected because he looked and sounded “Presidential.”

(continued in Part 3…)

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Medianomics is an interesting study.

It’s lacked a name so far, even though it’s principles are well known and practiced. No one has tried to put it all into one framework before – but it touches all of our lives.

It’s been known mostly by it’s results: the mundane, the average, the hum-drum, the mediocre. And as much as it’s been run down, it’s the way the vast majority of us live our lives.

But practically, it runs the planet, produces the majority of the goods, and consumes them in turn. The subject of Medianomics actually runs this humankind planet we live on.

A simple definition (and graphical) is found in the Bell Curve. It’s all that big hump in the middle which researchers found are in neither extreme.

Practically, it really looks like a 3D bump -like one you run over in your average car -  as there are all sorts of extremes out on the edge with that great common bump in the middle. Most of our academia (itself an extreme) only compares two different types of things, instead of studying a universe of them all at once. But that’s how we live our lives – the law of averages sur-plus in technicolor.

What does Medianomics cover?

Just about everything. Politics, Religion, Government, Celebrities, Economics, Media, you name it.

Because Medianomics studies involve the middle ground. It involves what is routinely popular and common sense. It comes from finding the “median” or the middle.

But it also includes the study of extremist edges, the fads, the oddball stuff that winds up in Freakonomics books.

It’s easiest to explain if we cover some examples.

What Wal-Mart, Dubya and Obama have in common

Sam Walton found the “sweet spot” of merchandizing by finding out how to offer and deliver most of what everyone wants for just a little bit less than anyone else. He started it out in the Middle West, where big store chains like J.C. Penney, Sears and Montgomery Ward had settled long ago and become complacent, fat, and lazy. They were also shrinking.

Walton apprenticed in Penney’s, got a business degree in University of Missouri, and set up his business operations in Arkansas. This was contrary to the “conventional wisdom” of all time. No one starts and expands a national (and now multinational) business out of Flyover Country (except the very Medianomic Warren Buffett).  But the business model was the one which made the success.

You won’t find specialty items in Wal-Mart – just the usual stuff you can find anywhere. Sure, they’ll stock some extremely popular items, but once they quit selling, they are off the shelves and sent back to be remaindered. Merchanizing is a very cut-throat, black-and-white business.

Because average people have average needs. While they will buy flatscreen TV’s, they also buy a whole lot more soap, tires, and dog food. So finding suppliers who can give decently priced goods and then have them set up their headquarters and warehouses next to yours in the middle of nowhere is actually a win-win all around. If you study Wal-Mart’s hub-and-spoke distribution in conjunction with his sales strategies, you’ll see exactly how brilliant this guy was.

The key point is that he’s selling to the middle, with prices that they can afford – and keeping it all under one roof as a convenience. Same way with expanding into groceries.

Bush and Obama were elected with pluralities (well, mostly) – so they knew how to tell the middle of the country what they wanted to hear. Both of them had decidedly different coalitions of middle-ground supporters, but nonetheless, they were popular when elected. But both were found to be polarizing extremists, who dropped in popularity rapidly. Subquently this made it hard to get anything done.  Both spent a lot (LOT) of our taxpayer money in order to get a lot of support from Washington cronies,  but this made them extremely unpopular outside the Beltway. (Because we voted them in to act like we do – and spending borrowed money we know isn’t very wise.)

But they both applied Wal-Mart marketing (Medianomically speaking) of telling the bulk of the people what they wanted to hear. But this talk of bipartisanship really gets annoying after awhile. Because it’s not possible. Both political parties are extremist – so they are unpopular, except within their hard-core middle.

What is popular (and always has been) is the independent middle. People who make up their own mind, regardless of what candidates say, and what party they are registered with. And they are usually “surprised” when some politician doesn’t own up or follow up on their many promises. Because they are being told by politicians every two years (or weekly in a special interview on TV) exactly what political analysts think they wanted to hear.

But a funny accident happened when Bush cut taxes – revenue went up. Which means that to find the real  sweet-spot of taxes, they have to keep cutting.  People don’t mind paying taxes as long as 1) they get something valuable back from it, and 2) it doesn’t make things too expensive to buy or costs them their job.  No one knows what the popular level of taxation actually is. Because our politicians quit being average once they live in Washington for a few years. They turn into elite extremists. (Voter-enforced term limits usually cures that addiction.) Since most elected officials buy into the notion that spending other-people’s money on your local pet-pork boondoggle is the way to get re-elected. Not.

(Continued in Part 2…)

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