Tonight, we lost power again. While we were out for only about an hour, the astonishingly unreliable National Grid distribution system has me thinking.

First, National Grid should be heavily fined and their management replaced. Tonight, when I called “customer service” to report our outage (it takes real effort to talk to a human — they’d rather not actually speak to customers), I got an earful of how heroic their response has been. Well, that may be the conventional wisdom inside that company. But here, in the real world, the consensus of everyone I talk with is that National Grid should be tarred, feathered and run out of town in one of their bucket trucks. National Grid is patting itself on its collective back while people continue to suffer and their repairs don’t hold. (It’s an interesting marketing problem — but that’s a topic for a different blog post.)

Second, the fury of the people — some 85K of whom are still lights out in the sixth day of this event — has reached our politicians. Governor Patrick has called for an investigation. Senator Brown has written a letter expressing the outrage of the common man. As National Grid owns the DPU (see regulatory capture), the former will accomplish nothing to improve National Grid’s mismanagement. And Senator Brown is burnishing his lunch-bucket, regular dude populist credentials in an effort to get ahead of the real populism of his apparent re-election challenger, Democrat Elizabeth Warren. A pox on all these politicos’ heads for their cynical (and ultimately ineffective) manipulation of these events for their own political objectives.

Third, I am reminded of the first time I went to India on business. It was 1995; I was working at Lotus Development. We were there to deliver a symposium for Notes application developers. I was just beginning the heavy international travel for business that dominated my career in the 1990s. I was naïve. In those early trips, I assumed that the world was like home: you could drink the water wherever you went and nobody ever thought about electricity supplies.

I remember visiting a Notes reseller on my first full day in Delhi, accompanied by our country marketing manager. We sat with the reseller’s managing director at the end of a long hall. Running down the spine of this hall snaked more than a dozen folding tables placed next to each other on their short sides like you might see set up for an event . On each side of the table were employees, working furiously on a variety of terminals — DEC VT101 compatibles, IBM 3270 compatibles and generic TTYs (all antiques today). This was the beginning of out-sourcing. I was told these people were doing contract programming for companies in the US.

All of a sudden, the power stopped. Nobody looked up. The fans stopped, the humming of the terminals stopped. It was silent. The programmers sat with their fingers curled at the ready over the keyboards of their terminals, eyes staring straight ahead at blank, dark terminal screens. Each programmer was in his or her own world, trying to remember where they were in the logic they were programming. They were at the ready, waiting for the power to come up in a few minutes — for just a couple of minutes. It was as if they, too, had been stopped dead by the power outage.

At our table, nobody missed a beat — except for me, the provincial dork. “Why,” I asked, “is everyone staring straight ahead, waiting to pounce on the keyboards? In a US office, when this happens, people push from their desk, laugh, talk sports and gossip until the power comes back on.”

“Not to worry,” I was told. “They are mentally paused at the last set of programming instructions just before they lost power and saved the items they were working on. They won’t remember as much if they relax and start talking. Plus, this happens several times a day. They’re used to it.”

And so it did happen, twice more in my hour meeting. I left astonished at the adaptation these programmers had to develop to keep their train of thought going during repeated, random power outages. They adapted by putting them minds into pause when power went out as a way of preventing re-work. It was my first taste of what happens to people who have to rely on third-world infrastructure.

Tonight, it’s a metaphor for what National Grid is doing to Southborough: they are pulling us backwards into the third-world, where we will all have to adapt, somehow, to an increasingly unreliable electricity supply. And that adaptation can only mean a step backwards for our living standards.

So, no, Governor Patrick, calling for an investigation won’t help. And, Senator Brown, you can save your franking privileges; it’s not going to do any good and it’s an utterly transparent political maneuver.

Instead, how about making DPU accountable for the third-world condition of our grid? Why not replace management there with new blood, people who have been explicitly charged with making sure National Grid is accountable for its failures? Why not put some teeth into this regulator to make sure that, one day, Southborough can once again rejoin the first world?

In case you need a refresher, in August, 2011, Hurricane Irene blew through central Massachusetts and 400,000 plus National Grid customers lost power, some for almost a week. (We were out 37 hours.) In October, 2011, a nor’easter blew though Massachusetts and, surprise!, 400,000 plus National Grid customers lost power.

National Grid can’t control the weather. I understand that. But apparently, they can’t control their grid either. The same areas, in approximately the same proportions, were affected in both storms. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

A post-storm driving tour I took in August matched up perfectly with the tour I took today: cross from Southborough into Framingham and you move from no power to power. Cross from Southborough into Hopkinton, you get power. The difference? Hopkinton and Framingham are not National Grid service areas. How could the weather be so significantly different in those two communities from the weather in Southborough twice in 90 days? Answer: it can’t.

Worse, National Grid is repeating its ham-handed handling of pr with this outage. In August, I tweeted two screenshots from their outage website. One showed that after about 32 hours of outage, National Grid was still “assessing” the situation. Here’s the screenshot from their website for today’s outage:

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It’s now 22 hours after the start of the outage in Southborough. And nobody at National Grid has assessed the conditions in Southborough yet? I and most of the town were out early today, cleaning up downed tree limbs and assessing our properties. I live off of Route 85 (on which there were no operable traffic signals). Does National Grid expect us to believe they couldn’t get a truck through the the heart of Southborough to determine the problems and use that info to update their website?

In August, 92% of Southborough lost power.

Remarkably, today 91% of Southborough lost power:

Click to enlarge

This speaks volumes to me. National Grid did nothing to improve its distribution network after the major outage resulting from Irene.

In public communications, National Grid continues to prefer bromides (“We’re working as hard as we can”) to actual information. I called the Southborough Police in August and today, asked what they’d heard from National Grid and got the same answer both times: “We have no information from them.”

I think the picture is pretty clear: a broken-down UK utility has bought up US utilities from New York to New England and operates them with minimal investment and maintenance in order to maximize profits. Meanwhile, they rely on the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities to continue to suffer from a classic case of regulatory capture to avoid having to operate and invest in the system in a way that would minimize disruption from severe weather.

It’s shocking that a public utility can away with repeatedly exploiting its customers, manipulating its regulators and avoiding accountability in crisis situations.

Click to enlarge

It’s Memorial Day and a little rainy here, so I pulled out the iPad to catch up on tech news. And I stumbled on to a piece of proposed legislation that scared the bejesus out of me. The so-called PROTECT IP act (S.968), now fortunately placed on hold in the US Senate by the same senator who prevented the misbegotten COICA legislation from moving forward, is something every Internet user should know about.

First, you want to know about PROTECT IP in order to call your Congressmen and Congresswomen to tell them you believe this bill is dangerous and ill-advised. Second, you want to know about PROTECT IP because a collection of academics and DNS experts has written the most informative and compelling description of PROTECT IP and the DNS itself I’ve ever read. The document in opposition to PROTECT IP is written for legislators and staff, so it has a primer on DNS technology and makes this crucial — and vulnerable — component of the Internet accessible to even newbies.

If you use the Internet (how’d you get here?), you need to read the Ars Technica story on PROTECT IP and spend an hour with the experts’ whitepaper on DNS describing why PROTECT IP is such a mistake.

What I can’t get out of my head days after watching the film isn’t the somewhat maudlin triumph of Watanabe-san over his mortality. Rather, it’s how the film illuminates Japanese mores and a culture that — some 60 years later —  still reflexively sweeps issues under the rug and suppresses any individuality at all.

In the film, Watanabe-san is the ultimate bureaucrat, dispensing with the real concerns of people without looking up from his desk. His doctors lie to him about his cancer, despite his pleas for honesty. And, in the most astonishing scene of all — which consists of the last 30 minutes of the film — nobody speaks the truth at Watanabe-san’s wake until the big shots have left and they are all stinkin’ blind drunk on sake. Meanwhile, the family sits by stoically as increasingly drunken theory after theory finally gives way to the truth. In a collective stupor, everyone agrees to remember their epiphany tomorrow, only to immediate punish the one who holds on to that commitment.

If you want to know how it is possible that TEPCO wasn’t ready for the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi, why the government at first didn’t tell more people to evacuate, why just today, finally, the government raised the level of the disaster to the maximum, why we will discover over time that much more radiation has been released than predicted, just watch this beautifully acted, stunningly photographed film.

Ikiru doesn’t look modern. The film has no special effects. It’s subtitled. It’s in black and white. But what it does do (in addition to being compelling on its face) is inadvertently and clearly explain the Japanese mindset to outsiders. That mindset is as powerful today as it was in post-war, occupied Japan. And it’s the reason that Japanese society is unable to face the reality of Fukushima Daiichi.

The message from 1952 is as cogent today as it must have been then: a society which systematically suppresses truth and individuality has only itself to blame for its inability to progress.

We all have leisure activities, right? One of mine is to read the actual text of bills pending in Congress. Hey, I have an interest in the legislative process — and I submit you do, too.

The good news is the Library of Congress makes the full text and history of every Congressional action available online at www.thomas.gov. C-SPAN will occasionally refer viewers to the site as it broadcasts legislative debates. (And yes, I watch the debates, too.)

Think about this level of access. From the comfort of my home, I am able to watch legislators bloviate while perusing the actual text of the laws they are making. It’s live, instant, free — and free of journalistic “interpretation.” It’s source material for the body politic. It’s truly amazing.

The bad news? thomas.gov is impenetrable for the casual user. You need a degree in “Beltway” to be able to form a high-level understanding of a bill.

Consider H.R. 4853, the year-end tax bill that Congress is debating this week and which is center-stage at the moment in American politics. While everything is “there,” I defy you to gain an understanding of what the bill actually is from this link. thomas.gov gives you all the data — but in a disconnected, you-have-to-be-a-legislative-aide-to-use-the-website way.

We are so close with sites like thomas.gov to making the political process more accessible in ways that I believe fundamentally enhance our democracy. The Library of Congress needs to “bulk up” the website a little, Charles Atlas style, to get it over that last usability hump to make it accessible for the casual user.

Absolutely everyone in the media is talking about WikiLeaks.org’s publication of a stunning number of diplomatic cables from the far corners of the American diplomatic world.

There’s so much going on here, I don’t know where to begin. First, any student of American history has to be beside himself or herself with joy to have so much contemporaneous material available. No need to wait 30 years. History is here today. I’m reading and reading and reading…and learning and learning and learning.

The unauthorized distribution of these materials lays bare the conflict inside the government between the need to share information to make sure the left hand knows what the right is doing and the need for (at least some) secrecy. The Feds must have just put these things on a shared folder somewhere — it doesn’t sound to me like you needed to be a mega geek to download these files. Message to President Obama’s CIO: check out TrueCrypt.

Another thing going through my mind as I read the cables is, “Wow, we’re not as wimpy as I suspected we are.” I like it when I read we landed on the Chinese to pressure North Korea to behave or when we assert the Russian government is essentially a mafia state. Good for us!

But what worries me more than anything else is that the “embarrassment” of these cables being made public will create such a backlash inside the government that the First Amendment will be weakened. The obvious institutional response is to see the leaks as a “problem” and “criminal” rather than the First Amendment at work. That means Patriot Act-like legislation, rules and procedures to “tighten” access.

That will only have the perverse effect of further isolating the government from the body politic.

Geesh…it’s been a long time since I’ve written for my personal blog. The muse left me…for a bunch of reasons. But, she may be back as I felt a strong urge to write about a controversy that matters to…just about nobody.

I am a huge fan of hyper-local blogging. It’s everything local newspapers can’t be: opinionated, accidentally compelling and useful. Here in Southborough, we have two hyper-local blogs, the better of which (IMHO) is www.mysouthborough.com.

In a demonstration of the power of hyper-local blogs, mysouthbourough.com is covering St. Mark’s decision to allow a portion of its property to lie fallow, or as St. Mark’s has put it, become a “sustainable meadow.” And the comments on this blog post show that it’s as easy for whole communities to talk past each other as it is for us to do so one-on-one.

As a local who has one child who went to Southborough public schools and another currently at St. Mark’s, I’ve participated in both communities. And it’s always amazed me how completely tone deaf each side is to the other’s concerns.

For its part, St. Mark’s seems to be unaware that their “meadow” is at the exact center of town, making it highly visible to everyone. Bottom line: it’s fugly to have a partially-fallow athletic field at the intersection of the main north-south and east-west roads in town.

How could St. Mark’s slap this “meadow” right-up-side-the-head of the locals? Simple: from the perspective of St. Marks’, it’s in the “back.” It’s far away, relatively speaking, from the action on campus. St. Mark’s people don’t see the “meadow” on the way to and from classes…or to and from West…or to and from most of the other athletic fields. I am not sure how many Southborough residents have ever seen Southborough from inside St. Marks’, but I assure you, the view is very different. What’s right in the locals’ faces is on the periphery at St. Mark’s.

On the town side, the same old invective — “We pay for all their services…and they send their teachers’ kids to the public schools” — is equally tone deaf. There’s a long-standing resentment I’ve seen and heard from my experience on town committees and boards that is endemic. When we moved here in the early 1990′s, I distinctly remember the builder of my home telling me how his parents used to “wash the St. Mark’s kids’ clothes” as if Southborough was indentured to the private schools located here.

Well, we have to get over it. St. Mark’s staff pays their taxes like everyone else. And plenty of public school funding and town revenue comes from sources other than the property tax. I understand the importance of the property tax to town revenues. But it’s just red-meat propaganda to suggest that these families are getting a totally free ride for local services. The comments on mysouthborough.com would have you think that the town’s private schools are here specifically to freeload on the rest of us.

I am not calling for kumbaya. That ain’t gonna happen. Mostly, I am amused that there’s so much passion over an unmowed piece of lawn. And that it might become another excuse for us to talk past each other.

Have you ever had a problem with a huge company that tries to “make you go away” by stonewalling and ignoring you? That’s what Charles Schwab has been trying to do since it sold me auction rate securities in 2008 on the day before markets froze. They had to have known when they took the order that these things weren’t liquid and safe, the two reasons they sold them to me in the first place. They were happy to take the order then…but today they, alone among retail brokers, have refused to make good on the ARSs they sold to conservative investors like me.

I have been using this blog (see my previous posts) and the interest of reporters to make my displeasure public.

Beth Healy of the Boston Globe missed the irony of Massachusetts residents lending the state money for the Big Dig and not being able to get it back by pointing out that the state “saved” money by not calling the notes.  Healy asserts, “…regulators say they’ve done all they can to help.”

Uh, no, not quite. I’ve never received a single response to repeated inquires to the governor, the secretary of state, the attorney general, my local representative and, above all, the source of these ARSs, the treasurer’s office. Why the silence? Simple: it would be too embarrassing for the politically ambitious Treasurer Cahill to force Schwab to settle. And no state department is going to make another department look bad. AG Coakley can get headlines for pursing fraud from just about any company. Why expose the shady dealings the state itself engages in?

Still, Schwab hated that Globe story enough to send me a letter terminating my accounts. No problem, guys, I was happy to leave.

So, you might think, why not complain to the SEC and to Wall Street’s “self-regulator,” the Financial Industry Regulatory Agency (FINRA)? I have, of course. In 2008 I filed complaints with both agencies. How’d that work out?

Just as you might expect. We all know how well the SEC has done at protecting people from Madoff, Stanford and CDOs. With so many larger fish to pry off the hook, paying no attention at all to individual investors stuck in ARSs is a natch.

And FINRA, known as Wall Street’s favorite regulator, actually contributed its former boss, Mary Schapiro, to the helm of the SEC. Miraculously, after years of doing nothing to protect the little guy at FINRA, Ms. Schapiro apparently grew a pair just in time for her confirmation hearings. Just saying you are for strong consumer protection is, I guess, enough to assure congressional committees you should run an agency we now know was dysfunctional.

Still, FINRA — like Schwab — is listening to the political discourse and is maybe (finally) rubbed a little raw by the attention their abject failures have generated. When Jed Horowitz of Investment News wrote about the lack of action in New York’s suit against Schwab, something must have clicked at FINRA headquarters.

A week or so after Horowitz’s article, I got a call from FINRA. I assume the timing wasn’t accidental. They probably hoped to convince me to shut up, at least for another year or two until they find a way to exonerate Schwab or the whole thing blows over.

They wanted me to know they were “actively engaged” and they’d “made progress.” They couldn’t say what, if anything, they actually plan to do. Or when, if ever, they plan to do whatever they decide they are going to do.

While Congress debates partially re-regulating Wall Street, the simple fact is that the entire industry is morally bankrupt and the interests of the country have been repeatedly subjugated to the greed of the industry. Worse, regulators, such as they are, are victims of “regulatory capture.” Even if FINRA wasn’t designed as Schwab’s concubine, it has willingly become one. Schwab asks, FINRA dances.

Well, the political battle of the (still young) century is over. And, despite the ugly fear mongering of the Republicans — and the very sad racial and homophobic epithets tossed at members of Congress this weekend during the final debate by “Tea Party” activists — the country has shown some political spine and done the right thing.

You’d expect me to have been, like the crazies on the right, apoplectic about the proposed changes to health care. Simply, I am a winner in the current system. I actually have a choice of excellent, affordable group coverage for me and my family through either my wife’s employer or mine.

My taxes will go up: I will have to pay Medicare taxes on unearned income. We won’t get a dime in government subsidies to buy insurance. Because we live in Massachusetts, I suspect the Cadillac tax will eventually hit us as well.

So, why am I pleased at the prospect of real, fundamental, systemic change in health care? Two simple reasons. First, even as a winner in the current system, I can tell you it’s broken, busted, kaput and will bankrupt us. Check this out: I went to see a doctor in my network. Six weeks later, I was checking claims online for another reason and noticed the insurance company had paid thousands for an office surgical procedure I didn’t have on that date. I called the insurance company who wanted me to have to call the doctor’s office and get them to fix it. Sorry, but I took the time to try and fix it by calling the insurance company, who effectively admitted to me that there’s so much waste and confusion in the system that unless I personally undertook to fix it, it would cost them more than they could recover to do it themselves.

Second, anything can happen. Today, I am winner. Tomorrow, I could be destitute. I am willing to pay more now to make sure that when and if the bottom of my life falls out, I could still get medical help. It just seems so basic, so fundamental to life in a civilized country that I am astonished it took 100 years and (probably) will destroy the Obama presidency. One thing I am certain of: without this reform, if the worst were to happen, it would easy to die indigent — a terrible way to go after a lifetime of work and taxes.

Bottom line, this was about fairness to people.

Here’s the ad she’s running ad nauseum:

Each time I see it, it rings less and less true, based on my direct experience.

The claims about getting “$1B back from banks” conveniently leave out the fact that the Mass. AG’s office left thousands of small-fry holders of ARSs high and dry in the Commonwealth’s settlement with the banks. She got her press conference announcing a settlement…freeing the AG, the Treasurer’s Office and the banks to get back to business as usual. And the claims of accountability don’t match up with the fact that nobody from her office has ever returned my calls or a letter about this in nearly two years.

Madame Attorney General, isn’t it time, as you say in your ads, that you or someone in your office responds to retail customers’ frozen ARSs? (On the off chance you didn’t see my letter from December, 2008, I’ve attached it to this post.) Isn’t it time for you to stop claiming you’re for the little guy when your office cut deals with Goldman Sachs and UBS that left us out in the cold?

There’s at least one voter in the Commonwealth who knows what the AG’s brand of accountability will mean.

And, no, I am not a Republican.

Well, growing a business ethically continues to defy Bank of America. First, it duped shareholders by concealing girnormous losses at Merrill-Lynch last year — then it agreed to paying ML’s brokers astronomical bonuses, all apparently in exchange for an extra $50B in TARP funding.

Next, it pissed off a Federal judge who wouldn’t let BofA off the hook for the ML debacle. The judge simply refused to approve a sweetheart settlement.

Now, its CEO is leaving early…much to the relief of taxpayers, shareholders and John Thain (who’s looking for a new office to redecorate for millions of dollars). And, worst of all from BofA’s perspective, slamming credit card customers is going to be much harder next year because Congress passed new, long-overdue credit card regulations.

So, I guess it’s no surprise that BofA’s marketing is as ham-handed and tin-eared as the rest of the company. Consider this: the well-known WalletBlog has taken Bank of America to task for misleading customers and congressmen on credit card charges. First, Bank of America said it wouldn’t increase fees; then it announced it will. When WalletBlog pointed this out, they got a call from BofA corporate communications, trying to explain how a fee increase isn’t a fee increase by using Clintonesque parsing of words like “pricing.”

OK, so I don’t begrudge a PR type arguing strict meanings with bloggers; they have lawyers who can assure them that the plain meaning of their promise to not raise fees — what normal people understand — doesn’t count…that it’s OK to write a letter to legislators that sounds like a commitment, then decide to do what they really want to: fleece people.

But what shows how completely off the planet BofA is…how tin-eared they are…is their request to WalletBlog to lay off:

Naturally, at the end of our call, Bank of America asked that we stop circulating our blog post from last week. But we’re going to hold off on that until they provide the public with some clearer answers. The more digging we do, the more it seems like Bank of America should be taken to task. And it’s possible that we’ve just cracked the surface.

Anyone with half a day’s experience in press relations knows you never ask a writer, blogger or journalist to retract a story in the absence of factual errors. It’s guaranteed to produce exactly what this did: a mention of your arrogance along with an enhanced determination to keep the story going.

Would BofA have asked the Wall Street Journal to recall copies of the paper with a story it didn’t like? How about asking MSNBC to stop talking about a story like this? No…it’s only because the fool who called WalletBlog thinks less of new media — that it can be more easily controlled — that he or she asked WalletBlog to quash the story. It’s emblematic of problems not just in the risk management side of BofA, but throughout the entire bank.

My message to the WalletBlog: keep it up and don’t ever consider retracting something because some corp comm hack who thinks you’re unimportant asks you to leave them alone.

Dear Chairman Steele,

Last November, I made a $25 contribution to your party’s candidate. I also made a $25 contribution to the Obama campaign. Then, I wasn’t sure who would have been the better president.

Now, after months and months of non-stop invective from you and your party against President Obama, I am sure I did the right thing in voting for Obama.

Let me get something off my chest: when I gave you my contribution I asked you not to send me email…not to call me at home…not to keep sending me the vile propaganda and lies via snail mail that you are now sending at least twice a week. (We’ll get to the “survey” I’ve attached to this post in just a minute). I made the same request of the Obama campaign. They honored my request; you and your party of naysayers and obstructionists have not.

Instead, you keep sending me items like the “survey” I’ve scanned in and attached to this post. Maybe you thought that you could make wild claims like the one that the current administration is issuing “radical environmental regulations based on unproven theories and the demands of out of-touch left wing extremists.” Or maybe that some misguided Republicans might be pleased that your politicians “…have successfully blocked or amended many of their most radical proposals” while proposing and contributing nothing to the debate.

I get it…I really do. Negative works. Calling everyone names…calling their mothers nasty names…works better than actually governing…being a loyal opposition…contributing to the greater weal. Instead, for your party everything the other party does is wrong; only you can solve problems like Wall Street’s greed, a war based on lies and a sunken economy. Oh…I forgot. For those, we have Republicans to thank. As President Bush said, “Mission accomplished.”

I hope everyone reading this post takes a look at the “survey” you sent me. C’mon…do you think your voters are idiots? These questions are one-sided and are like waving the red flag at a bull. All you want is money…and if you piss people off at government…make them feel it’s working against them, so much the better for you and your power-hungry Senators (and so much the worst for us).

It’s too hard to pick the most egregious of the 19 questions on this “survey.” Clearly, you don’t give a damn about what people think…you just want them to read this, get angry and send you money. Still, what’s the point of a question like #16 (Are you in favor of the federal government taking a permanent ownership stake in the nation’s largest banks)? Aren’t Citibank and AIG dying to pay back TARP funds so they can get back to ripping off investors without government oversight? Didn’t the taxpayers line Goldman Sachs’s pockets with credit-default swap payments via AIG’s bailout? Isn’t it enough for you that Wall Street is too big to fail while the rest of us aren’t?

Seriously, Chairman Steele, if you want people to consider Republicans to be capable of running the country, start by working with the current administration to fix the problems we have. Next, admit to the failed policies of eight years of the Bush administration…including torture, warmongering and being asleep at the economic switch.

And please, please stop sending me twice-weekly appeals for money disguised as the worst kind of pandering direct mail.

Well, this is one of those times when the government acts and you get to chose your reaction. On the one hand, the emergence of the ‘net as the definitive source of reviews for everything from software to celery has become a bonanza for the shills of the world who review products for filthy lucre and who pretend or obscure that they’ve been bought.

On the other hand, while advertising isn’t a protected form of free speech, it’s sad that we need government intervention limiting speech to prevent these people from preying on grandma’s Google search for cookie dough.

Into this fray steps the FTC with new rules to take effect in December, 2009. (I’ve attached a PDF of the new rules to this post for your convenience.)

You can see the rules struggling to keep up with new and social media. That, in itself, is an interesting commentary on how technological innovation always outstrips government’s ability to keep pace, much less anticipate the impact of technological change. Consider this heavily parsed defintiion from the rules:

An advertiser’s lack of control over the specific statement made via these new forms of consumer-generated media would not automatically disqualify that statement from being deemed an “endorsement” within the meaning of the Guides….Thus, a consumer who purchases a product with his or her own money and praises it on a personal blog or on an electronic message board will not be deemed to be providing an endorsement.

In contrast, postings by a blogger who is paid to speak about an advertiser’s product will be covered by the Guides, regardless of whether the blogger is paid directly by the marketer itself or by a third party on behalf of the marketer.

…For example, a blogger could receive merchandise from a marketer with a request to review it, but with no compensation paid other than the value of the product itself. In this situation, whether or not any positive statement the blogger posts would be deemed an “endorsement” within the meaning of the Guides would depend on, among other things, the value of that product, and on whether the blogger routinely receives such requests.

You all clear on that now?

The short version of a long story is that Charles Schwab sold me auction-rate securities, promising liquidity, then stonewalled me when the market disappeared for the ARSs. Meanwhile, every other firm on the planet — and I mean every one – made their clients whole. Goldman Sachs, the auction agent for the ARSs I bought: settled. Fidelity: settled. BofA: settled. TD Ameritrade (late of zero-doc mortgage loan fame): settled.

You can only imagine the lengths I’ve gone to to try to bring this to the attention of regulators. I’ve spoken to regulators in Massachusetts (the issuer of the ARS I bought, the proceeds of which were used to finance the Big Dig), Illinois, and last summer, New York.

I’ve written letters…called representatives…filed complaints with FINRA (famous for being the securities industry’s favorite regulator and the former home of the new SEC chairman. Buy lots of empty mattresses as long as these people are protecting you).

I clearly remember the conversation I had with the NY AG’s office last year. They “got it” but when nothing happened for months, I assumed that office, like all the others I had implored, had moved on to more newsworthy pursuits. Like compensation at AIG and why Lehman Brothers’ collapse was good for the candle-making industry.

Then, finally — finally! – last week, the New York State Attorney General — from among all the attorneys general in the country who were beating their chests about protecting investors last year — sent Charles Schwab a demand letter (attached below).

Charles Schlemeil had convinced themselves they hadn’t lied…they hadn’t stolen my money…that it was those nasty Wall Street firms who were at fault when the ARS auctions tanked. “We’re not the bad guys,” they claimed. “We just sold these things ‘downstream.’ We don’t have anything at all to apologize for or make good on.” Schwab stood on principle! It was a victim, too!

Principle, shminsciple. Now that the NY AG is onto them, they’re talking about how much it’ll cost them to hold off the litigation and whether or not that’s a better deal for them than paying up. This was always a calculation of cost and until now it simply cost those bozos-in-$900-suits less to stonewall than to pay up. When nobody appeared to care, it was easy to argue principle.

Yes, I’m upset that I can’t get to my money…that Schwab lied to me…that talking to Chuck turned out to be talking to a wall. That Schwab is full of schit when it comes to doing the right thing — what everyone else did — for their clients.  But mostly, I was unhappy that in the face of such obvious avarice and fraud, none of the responsible regulators did anything about it. One nastygram like this was all I was looking for…and now that my home state AG has sent it, it’s only a matter of time until Charles Schwab capitulates.

But until then, I am anticipating the pound of flesh the NY AG will extract from Schwab and grateful to my fellow Noo Yawkers for stickin’ with it for us little guys.

Maybe it’s your health care insurer manipulating your out-of-network health care claim reimbursements to increase their profits.

Remember last fall when you signed up for the significantly more expensive plan that lets you choose a doctor out-of-network? You thought you were being smart.

Instead, it turns out you’re being screwed. Your extra premiums are finding their way into the pockets of the same insurer who buys TV ads with happy, young, healthy mothers and fathers in the park playing Upsie with their cute, giggling babies. Not a care in the world, presumably, because they’re covered…but it’s really a picture of ignorant bliss because when that baby needs a specialist, that couple’ll have to sell the Chevy and walk to appointments to pay the doctor’s bill.

Check out this report from the New York State Attorney General on how insurance companies are screwing their policyholders on out-of-network reimbursements. It’ll make you sick (just be damn sure you don’t go out-of-network to see a doctor).

For me, this is just another example of the unrestricted greed that nearly 30 years of Reaganism (“government is bad…unrestricted markets are good”) has generated and the incalculable damage it has done to our society. If a business can figure out a way to screw you — and better yet, legally do it in the dark like United Healthcare did with the cost database it uses to reimburse policyholders — well, that’s just normal, right?

Everywhere you look, we’ve been  cheated. Big Business is totally out-of-control. The financial system has collapsed — and taken our security with it. Even our ideals were trashed mercilessly by a government that lied to us all.

But, oh boy, watch out. This country has had mega-pendulum-political-swings in the past (the Progressive Era, the New Deal). If there are more people out there who think like me (and you bet there are), politicians had better get the message and get some stuff done (health care, re-regulation of the business and financial worlds, a sane foreign policy). And they better get it done now.

I was channel surfing recently (no mean feat on a Verizon FIOS system), and paused briefly on Animal Planet’s Whale Wars. I was instantly riveted…but not because of what the show is ostensibly about.

Briefly, it’s a cinema verité recounting of the struggle between environmental radicals and the Japanese whaling fleet in the Southern Ocean. The self-styled “sea shepherds” aren’t letter-writing activists. They’re true amateur anarchists who favor “direct action,” placing themselves in danger to save whales from the Japanese whom they believe are illegally killing whales.

For their part, the Japanese are clearly hiding behind a combination of doubleplusgood international agreements (which allow a limited catch of whales for “research”) and lax enforcement of environmental policies by other governments. At $1M per whale and a permitted catch in the thousands, this is a big business and the research claim is patently bogus.

It makes for a great plot for a reality show. But while all the critical reviews of the show have focused on the action, the question of who’s right and who’s wrong in this struggle (the producers clearly favor the environmentalists) is less gripping for me than watching a cult leader in action.

The real centerpiece of the show is Captain Paul Watson (always referred to as “Captain”). This is a man who has pissed off his home country of Canada and lead them to criticize him individually like nobody I’ve ever seen (here and here). Imagine a national government calling you out like this! He co-founded Greenpeace (something he writes extensively about with apparent pride), yet was drummed out for being, apparently, uncontrollable.

But the real drama in Whale Wars — and something I think was unintentionally documented in the video — is how Watson creates, develops and promotes his cult of direct action. In short, we’re watching a Jim Jones or maybe a Hitler at work.

Watson clearly uses people as grist for his “mission.” A cook damages a propeller on the helicopter. Watson then publicly asks him to illegally board one of the Japanese vessels to “make up for the helicopter.” After 36 hours being held as a prisoner on the Japanese boat, the cook is returned to the welcome of the entire crew. The camera catches Watson at the moment the cook is back on board saying that he won’t go down on deck to welcome the cook back…instead one of the staff “priests” Watson has on board should bring the poor Aussie up to see him on the bridge. Upon being lead to see Watson, the cook is immediately placed on sat phone with the media in order to extract maximum press value from the incident. Not once do we hear Watson commend the cook for his foolish bravery.

To up the ante, later Watson proposes an all-female team to board a Japanese vessel. This goes awry, and in the process one woman shatters her pelvis. Ladies, how’d you like to have a shattered pelvis on a boat in Antarctica weeks from port with your only company being zealots on a mission? Not once do we see Watson demonstrating any concern for the woman. Only for the “mission.” We do, however, see him pissed off at the amateurs’ ineptness in carrying out his plans.

Watson, in true cult style, is also isolated from the volunteer crew — the raw meat — by a layer of officers on the boat who transmit both his orders and his message. They reveal themselves to be sycophants of the worst type, and when the original doctor on board raises questions about the dangers of boarding parties, he is quickly purged for a more pliant medic.

Are you fascinated yet? I am telling you, this TV show isn’t about whales. It’s Introduction to the Psychology of Cults 101. It demonstrates how in the crucible of a complex environmental issue a charismatic leader can, using classic techniques of isolation (what’s more isolated than a boat at sea for three months?) shape, implore, shame and motivate people into doing his bidding. Chat ‘em up, get ‘em to do what you want, no matter how dangerous, call the press, dock the boat, send ‘em home and do it again next year.

For me, the proof of all this is on the Sea Shepherd website. I noticed that on the show every time Watson was shown in his cabin, he was on a computer. After reading the website, I am convinced that he’s writing and posting much of the news on the site himself. And the site is really a paean to Watson, penned by Watson, who always refers to himself in the third person.

I am reading Ian Kershaw’s massive Hitler: A Biography, in which Kershaw documents exactly how Hitler — unable to have normal relationships with anyone save his mother — uses people in the most expedient, opportunistic way possible to achieve his ideological objectives. And, on a much smaller scale (but maybe just as dangerously?), that’s how Watson uses the people on his boat.

I’ve never seen a more fascinating television show…it isn’t about whales at all. It’s about a whale of a demagogue.

I’ve been way too busy to blog.

But today, while my kid was drilling analogies in preparation for the SSAT, the blog muse struck.

It’s Sunday, and I’ve just reviewed my retirement account statements from September 30. That was bad enough. But with the miracle of Quicken, I was able to see specifically the carnage wrought by the market meltdown of the last two weeks since 9/30. Going from bad to cataclysmic has wiped out years of parsimony, leaving my personal financial situation questionable. We’ve often heard the stories of people “wiped out” in the Depression of the 1930′s. Could that be happening here?

Then, on a happier note I searched on “UMA” because I’d just gotten a BlackBerry that switches from the cell network to Wi-Fi. I think this is amazing because seamlessly switching from one protocol to another is no mean trick.

Clicking around, I found this story on college students preferring Wi-Fi to beer.

Sorry, but no. I remember college without Wi-Fi. The only thing we preferred to beer was women. And since I founded a failed Wi-Fi hotspot company in early 2002, I know how popular beer remains with respect to being…uh…”online.”

Now the only question is, if you can’t afford beer or the college loans it takes to get that free dorm-room Wi-Fi, does this absolutely guarantee an Obama victory next month, just as Roosevelt was swept in after the Hoover administration’s market-based dogma ruined the economy? (Sounds just like the current Bush administration, doesn’t it?)

And, if it’s Obama (oh yeah, it’s gonna be Obama), does he drink beer? Hillary did…that’s why I liked her.

Now you get the SSAT-level analogy that politics is to beer as poverty is to Wi-Fi, right?

Remember the Star Trek episode entitled “The Trouble with Tribbles“? Remember how the furry creatures ingratiate themselves with the crew, then multiply so rapidly they nearly overtake the ship?

FiOS TV is like a tribble. With apologies to Dr. McCoy, FiOS TV is born pregnant with problems.

I spent most of 2006 and part of 2007 negotiating with Verizon to bring their cable service to Southborough, MA. I’ve never blogged about their negotiating tactics, which defined mendacity, because I believed strongly that competition would be good for the residents of the Town and if I went public, it would piss them off and we’d end up with no agreement.

Finally, in May of 2007, after a public hearing in which VZ execs promised great service and technology, we agreed on a franchise and VZ began offering FiOS TV in town.

I had high hopes for the system. I had been an early FiOS customer for voice and Internet and both had been rock solid. In particular, the Internet connection was fast and extraordinarily reliable (if a little too nanny-fied; VZ blocks port 80 on dynamic IPs and in the early days of FiOS VZ insisted on pretending it was DSL by requiring routers to support PPPoE to connect).

But TV has been an unrelenting disaster. There are three intersecting areas that combine to make FiOS TV unremittingly infuriating.

First, billing. The bills are really from three separate companies: voice, data and TV. Errors compound each other and take months to resolve. Representatives misrepresent available options and pricing (resulting in VZ insisting that I am their prisoner now for two years when I am certain I only agreed to a one-year package deal).

How’s this for a nightmare? To get back the Internet speed I was promised on the one-year-deal-that-morphed-into-a-two-year-deal generated a $139 disconnection charge. If you can make sense of a VZ bundled bill, please let me know. I think you’re a genius.

Next, technology. During the licensing process, we specifically asked VZ about their technology (see this “issuing authority report” and a memo from me to the committee complaining about their non-answers).

Now, I know why they obfuscated. They have the most fiendishly complex system imaginable. It could have only been designed by a former monopoly. You could only love this system if you think Soviet design and engineering was underrated.

They use several different “optical network interfaces” or ONTs to connect the network to your home. Older ones, like mine, bring 802.3 Ethernet into your home along with coax cable and twisted-pair voice. Newer ones bring only coax into the home along with voice.

In either case, you MUST bridge the cable and Ethernet networks using a bridge called a network interface module because their set-top boxes speak coax for programming and IPTV for on-demand using a protocol called MoCA. And the set-top boxes use plain old IP for the interactive guide.

(Lost yet? Stay tuned for when we talk about service.)

How do they ever get this mess installed? They give their installers a multi-function router containing so many functions I can’t remember them all. But for fun, let’s see what I can remember off the top of my head.

This thing is an Ethernet switch, a router with a DHCP server, a firewall, a wireless access point using 801.11g set to default to insecure WEP connections, a NIM to bridge the coax and Ethernet networks, among other things. It tries to connect to the VZ network as a DHCP client or as a PPPoE client. And, best of all, it has an back-door open port to allow VZ to completely mess it up for you with updates you don’t expect. You cannot use your own equipment, precluding the possibility of putting a VPN or more effective firewall on your network.

Oh, and when you are watching on-demand movies, getting blasted with 20Mbits of IPTV content while you simultaneously surf your 5M/20M Internet connection, you can watch this consumer-grade device almost smoke.

VZ network designers tried to hide their network technology mashup by cramming so many functions into a single box that you almost pity the electrons consumed in this overmatched device.

But the real prize for Rube Goldberg-ness goes to the Motorola HD DVRs and the interactive program guide. VZ had the time and money to send customers beautiful marketing brochures touting the new features of a IPG they downloaded over the summer. But apparently, they didn’t have the time to test the software. The Internet is alive with people suffering problems with this software, and I’ve been bitten worst than most.

That brings me to the last issue: service. No human being can service a system this complex. That means that everyone at VZ involved in servicing this mess is simply guessing. Nobody, apparently, has a clue. Through bitter experience (and some serious reading of the dslreports.com forums), I have a better picture in my head of what’s going on than the poor shlumps who have to deal with customers.

Once VZ upgraded the guide, my DVR starting hanging. I called about this, and was told they’d ship me a replacement. It never arrived. Then I called again. They sent a guy out. He threw rocks at the people who said they’d ship one, replaced mine and left.

Thing still hangs, refuses to record, deletes recordings, etc. etc. Called on a Friday night. Service guy — obviously hacking the problem — factory resets the device remotely. Now, it can’t even tune a channel. Dead HDTV on NFL opening weekend.

Third guy comes Monday to replace the box for a third time and tells me it’s the “levels”. (Old phone guys miss copper with its certainty of volts and ohms.) Box promptly hangs.

Guy calls me today to tell me they think it’s the IMG software (Really?) and a fix will be out “soon”.

On the positive side, VZ techs speak English well and are polite. These guys (and the one hot-looking woman they sent) are not grease-monkeys. They’ve just not been trained. Who could be?

VZ is birthing tribbles at a Malthusian rate.

Though I am not a native Bostonian, I have some experience with authentic Boston accents.

My lovely wife can occasionally be unintelligible (“Alex, have you seen the sizzzahs?”). To wile away traffic-jam time, I sit in the car and mimic Tom Finneran. Finneran, a WRKO talk-show radio host, former Massachusetts legislative big-wig and (unsurprisingly) a plea-bargained felon, has an amazingly real Boston accent, one you can hear in every word.

You know that you can hear the real thing, even if you can’t imitate it, when your ears bleed listening to Matt Damon in The Departed. This actor’s attempt is among the worst fake Boston accents I’ve ever heard, and a complete embarrassment to everyone in Chelsea, Malden and Lynn, not to mention Southie itself.

Anyway, when I first heard about CAPTCHAs, I thought it was a killer pun: someone from CMU must have had a Boston background. Maybe so, but really it means something else entirely, and only sounds like it was invented in a drunken episode at the Black Rose.

I manage a bunch of blogs that have been increasingly become the victim of comment spam, usually from China and always complimentary. I now realize that dude in Guangdong who reads my posts mutliple times and always says, “Good post” isn’t really into my content. Naivety mixed with ego had me manually marking these as spam just in case there was a real gem from somewhere in the Middle Kingdom.

The volume has gotten so large that it’s been driving me crazier than Matt Damon’s inability to banish the letter “R” from his spoken English.

Enter reCAPTCHA. An easy way (there’s a simple WordPress plug-in) to stop the comment spam and build a digital library. Can’t beat it. Took five minutes to implement on all the blogs I manage.

Now, it’s off to the Cape and them lobstah rolls.

Mid-April! So metaphor rich: the Boston Marathon…tax season in the US…EMI and Apple Corps have settled their disputes.

What’s a blogger to do with all this? Easy: cram it all into a rant about Google.

You will advertise your product or service on Google. You will allow your competitors to bid against you for the sole purpose of increasing revenue for Google. You will take whatever Google believes is your rightful SEO position and you will never really know how it was determined (after all, they’ve read Kafka, too).

Finally, and most importantly, you will advertise like it was a marathon until you (or your budget) drops dead from exhaustion.

George said it best:

Let me tell you how it will be
There’s one for you, nineteen for me
‘Cause I’m the taxman
Yeah, I’m the taxman

So there, I’ve crammed it all into one more-or-less coherent rant about Google. What’d you think?

I am seriously bent out of shape by an editorial entitled “Franchise Freedom” that I read in the January 2, 2007 edition of the Wall Street Journal.

I can’t link to the editorial here, because even the Journal’s red-meat-Republican opinions are locked behind a subscription site. (How very web-centric…how very authentic it makes me think they are when they report on the Internet. See?…I’m so upset I am “side-ranting.”)

What’s got me so fired up are the unfounded, baseless accusations printed in the editorial to add emphasis to the Journal’s support of the smoke-filled-room FCC action to “deregulate” the cable TV franchising process.

Fortunately, nobody believes this FCC gift to the regional Bells will stand.

So, enter the WSJ…defender of mega-telcos against people like me. I am apparently “beholden” to the cable industry. (I may be infamous elsewhere, but I absolutely guarantee you nobody in Charter Communications in Worcester knows who I am.)

I and my hard-working colleagues on the Southborough Cable TV Committee have been, apparently, “shaking down” Verzion for things like service to our whole town, requests to interconnect their system with the existing system for public programming and a fair level of support for continuing that programming.

I’m incensed. (Duh!) I wrote the Journal a letter, which met with complete silence. I’ve copied it here, mostly for catharsis.

Last year, you may remember that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia got upset for being caught giving a gesture in public that conveys precisely how I feel about the Journal’s editorial. Since Justice Scalia is a favorite of the Journal’s opinion editors, I though I’d send them an “alito” of my own. Maybe they understand that better.

Here’s the letter I sent the Journal:

Dear Sir and/or Madame:

Usually, your more strident opinions roll off my back easily.

But reading Franchise Freedom (WSJ, January 2. 2007) felt more like being stabbed in the back. As a member of a “so-called” local franchising authority, I vehemently reject the accusation that anyone is “shaking down” the competitive cable applicant in my Town. Further, nobody I know working in the largely volunteer cable franchising authorities in Massachusetts cities and towns is doing anything “at the behest of the cable industry.” It’s wrong of you to assert that is the case and an insult to many of the good people working on these issues at the local level. Painting us with the brush of corruption is facile…and dead wrong.

On the contrary, the Bells have used their resources and power at the Federal and state regulatory and legislative levels to seek expedited entry to the cable business while simultaneously dragging their heels and bemoaning their fate at the lands of local officials. They simply placed multiple bets…and the FCC rolled their number. Meanwhile, they just sat pat. The irony is that with local authorities – like my Town — who have consistently expressed a desire for rapid negotiations and which want vigorous cable competition, the imperious Bells have slow-rolled us while seeking a better regulatory deal.

What the FCC’s decision has done is to introduce chaos to the franchising process, ultimately delaying cable competition by ensuring legal challenges and injecting uncertainty into the process. Disrupting 40 years of well-established process does not accelerate government. It paralyzes it, and for far longer than more comprehensively thought-out deregulation would have. This was bad public policy…and a not-so-subtle parting gift from the Republicans to the Bells.

You have reflexively sided with the Bells, impugning not just the entire cable industry (an easy target, I must admit) but also scores of well-intentioned and civic-minded people who have until now effectively managed local cable franchising. The system does need improvement – and both Democrat FCC Commissioners said as much during hearings – but that change cannot come by transferring public assets to the Bells.

Thank you.

Alex Neihaus

Sometimes, the combination of a new medium (podcasting, in this case the video version of it some people call vlogging) with politics and journalism produces something very, very special.

Alive in Baghdad is an impressive example. I won't go on here about what it means…or how it affected me. That's for you to discover for yourself. Please…click on the link right now…watch the videos, read the blog entries.

Then, please send Brian Conley a contribution and spread the world about this project. These guys are famous inside the podcasting world. But they deserve to be heard and seen by a much wider audience. 

Like Lady Macbeth, Germany once again is trying — mechanistically, naturally — to deal with its criminal past. This time it turns out that a famous author signed up for the Waffen-SS. And just like it ever was, Germany’s celebrated Günter Grass turns out to have the same damn’d spot Lady Macbeth tried hard to, but couldn’t, wash away.

This review of Grass’s autobiography by a UK author comes closest — at least for a while — to assessing the contradictions of an old man whose memory is claimed to be failing, who refers to the nasty, racist Grass as “he” and the kinder, gentler, purged-of-his-guilt older Grass as “I.”

But to call the autobiography of a closet criminal “entertaining” and to ponder uncritically the impact of the new German cultural lie “we were victims, too” misses the fundamental point: this culture was and remains deeply disingenuous.

Europeans like to think they know all about Americans and American culture. I’ve had cabbies in Amsterdam describe Southern fundamentalists to me. I’ve had French from Corsica tell me everything I wanted to know about my home town, New York City. The rest of the world “knows” us because they purchase our popular culture.

But they don’t know us. Ours is a society deeply divided over things like the war in Iraq and domestic social policies. But do our authors hide their war service? Do they spend a lifetime covering up their complicity, only to minimize it when it’s revealed? Not a chance.

Only in Europe, in the heart of the beast, in Germany, could a cultural icon turn out to be so guilty.

This new demonstration of an old German flaw coincides with a book I am reading. As part of her summer’s reading, my younger daughter read Dry Tears. She asked me to read it as well. Herr Grass and your fellow countrymen: the truth is right there in the words of an 11-year-old girl. Stop washing your hands till they bleed. The skin rubs off, but the guilt remains.

Sure, Mel. Send us roses, crank up the defensive PR and get a lot of sympathy for your "struggle" with alcoholism.

But we all know that the desperation to blame your disease is only a cover for the reality that you're a closet bigot.

Funny thing about alcohol: with vino comes veritas.

Please do get well. Treat the disease; then maybe you can attack that bigotry as a sober guy. Meanwhile, spare us the phony contrition.

People here in eastern Massachusetts are just plain revolted today with our government's inability to build public infrastructure that's safe. Note that I am not even asking for on-time or reasonably on budget. Just safe.

This isn't the first time in my lifetime that Massholes in government have taken the Commonwealth to the cleaners. Sharp local minds will remember the construction scandal of the 1970's constructing UMass buildings, of which the New York Times said, in part, 

Corruption in state and local government in Massachusetts was so pervasive in the 1960's and  1970's" that it became ''a way of life,'' a special state investigating commission concluded today after two and a half years of study. In one of the most sweeping indictments ever made of the conduct of a state government, the commission said that bribery, extortion, tax evasion, illegal campaign contributions and the laundering of money to disguise its origins were commonplace and that ''there is a tacit understanding between public servants and private professionals that this is how business is done in Massachusetts.'' The Special Commission Concerning State and County Buildings, set up in
1978 after the state's worst corruption scandal, said in its 2,500-page report that blame could not be narrowed down to a handful of individuals. 'Broad and Pervasive Pattern' ''It was not a matter of a few crooks, some bad apples which spoil the lot,'' the commission said. ''The pattern is too broad and pervasive for that easy excuse. At those crucial points where money and power came together the system has been rotten.''

What astonishes me now is that even after the largest public works project in US history, the astonishing cost overruns, the delays in the project (they redesigned "scheme Z" in the stinkin' middle of the project), the graft, the waste, the self-aggrandizing politicians, people are getting killed while fingers get pointed.

Tonight at dinner, my wife said she'd only go to an appointment in town next week if she could avoid the tunnels. That's what $14 billion buys in Crush-achusetts.