Joe Jackson - I'm The Man (1979)

Put Joe Jackson on the underrated list.

H. Ross Perot: Businessman And Presidential Wannabe

Harry Truman was a dry-goods store owner and Jimmy Carter had the family peanut farm, but neither of them ran for office based on their business skills. Of the others, there was one actor and quite a few professional politicians. (I’m limiting my search group to presidents in my lifetime.) Three candidates stressed their business experience and promised to bring those skills to running the government. That would be George W. Bush, Donald J. Trump and H. Ross Perot.

(I’m leaving out Willard Romney. Most of his resume was business related, but it was not the kind of experience that anyone would want voters to even know about, much less consider, being all robber-baron stuff.)

The funny part is that the two men in that small group who actually won the presidency were awful businessmen. W. Bush’s resume included several business failures that lost a lot of money for other people but from which he was curiously bailed out, plus a few downright shady deals (The Texas Rangers episode), and even included allegations of insider trading. Not a lot of textbook success there. D. J. Trump talks a good game, but his own record is full of bankruptcies, defaults and the stiffing of partners and vendors. The Donald received a few curious bailouts himself (like his dad buying millions of dollars’ worth of chips to help him meet payroll in Atlantic City). Neither of those fellows seems to have been very successful at running businesses at all.

The one who was demonstrably a wild business success was H. Ross Perot, and he is the only one of the three to fail in his bid for the presidency.

Being a third-party candidate hurt his chances, but he made a historically great show from that status. He got 19% of the popular vote in 1992 (19,741,065 votes). (Zero electoral votes, although he did win majorities in many individual counties.)*

Perot, unlike those other two clowns, was a business wiz. Everything he touched turned to gold. He was a graduate of Annapolis, the U. S. Naval Academy. As a salesman for IBM he made his quota for the year within a month or so and decided that he could do all that and more if he were on his own. This was the early 1960s. Perot started Electric Data Systems and it was a winner. In 1984 he sold that company to General Motors for two point four billion dollars ($2,400,000,000.) In 1988 he started Perot Systems Corporation. That company was sold to Dell Computers in 2009 for three point nine billion dollars ($3,900,000,000).

It’s safe to say that Henry Ross Perot was the best businessman ever to run for the presidency.

They say, though, that running the country is not like running a business, and it’s true. It’s totally different, is what it is. If you are running a country, you cannot default on loans just to achieve some strategic advantage. You cannot declare bankruptcy just to put pressure on creditors. And then there are the things that you can do, such as printing money and borrowing at low interest. It’s totally different.

W. Bush, and now Trump, only proved that business experience not only does not help, but also is very likely to make matters worse.

What would Mr. Perot have done in office? 

His platform included:

1.   Balance the Federal budget;

2.   He opposed NAFTA (he came up with the quote, “that giant sucking sound that you hear is jobs moving to Mexico;”

3.   He opposed gun control;

4.   End job outsourcing (i.e., shipping jobs overseas); and

5.   Reduce the deficit by imposing a gasoline tax and cutting Social Security.

That looks an awful lot like Donald Trump’s professed goals. It’s a program without a chance of working. In fact, it’s a program that will do more harm than good. So I guess that even H. Ross Perot, the genuine business success, would also have failed to run the government better than mere politicians.

Incidentally, H. Ross Perot is alive as of this writing. In 2015, he was listed as the 129^th richest man in America, with $4 billion dollars. He was an odd bird, but likeable, in his way. I wish him well.

*Which major party candidate was assisted by the votes that went to Perot? That’s about as clear as mud. Perot’s votes seem to have come from all points of the political compass, so you can’t say that he took conservative votes away from George H. W. Bush. Perot’s votes came mostly from the middle-class, so the votes of the rich and the poor went to their respective natural beneficiaries. I’m no expert, and I haven’t made an exhaustive study of it, but it appears likely that Clinton won in spite of Perot, and not because of him. 

Billy Joel - The River of Dreams

I was never a Billy Joel fan back in the day. He and I are about the same age, and we come from adjacent counties in New York, and I became aware of him about six months before he got on the radio because his manager had something to do with a band of my friends. Not my thing, though.

Over the years I developed a respect for what he was doing. I came to feel like he was a very talented individual, and many of the songs were really very good. Good for you, Billy. Homeboy! I've probably been over this ground before on this blog, perhaps many times.

Forgive me if I repeat myself, but I really like this song.

Various ‎– Sound Effect Of Godzilla 2 - Godzilla's Rivals : Movie Specia...

Are there any other Godzilla fanatics out there? Well, this guy Sunnyboy66 really has our number.

I love the Sunnyboy, myself. He's way up in the punk, the garage, the . . . well, the every Goddamn thing, really. First of all, its' amazing that anybody, any company, Japanese or otherwise, would release a compilation like this. It's Beyond Amazing! Secondly, it a bit surprising that anyone who had access to such a compilation would think to share in on YouTube. I mean, what's the market for such a thing? Even I wouldn't buy it if I saw it in a store. Not, at least, in my current limited financial circumstances. (If I were suddenly a millionaire, I would certainly buy it upon discovery. But that has not happened yet and I don't expect it to happen at all.)

Forgive me, some explanation is required. You may not know that I am Godzilla fan number one. Just the Godzilla footsteps are enough to freeze me with terror. My eyes go wide when I hear the Godzilla call, and I am fixed with anticipation. I listen to this CD with a real sense of fear and horror.

Thanks, Sunnyboy!

Peggy Neal's Actress Experiment

Peggy Neal attended Sofia University in Tokyo and acted in three Japanese movies, as follows:

1.   Terror Beneath the Sea (1966);

2.   The X from Outer Space (1967; see photo); and

3.   Kurreji ogon sakusen (1967).

You could hardly call that a career in films, but because of the nature of the first two films she will be remembered for all time as a small part of the highly entertaining and wildly popular Japanese sci-fi monster (Kaiju) universe.

Ms. Neal has not completely disappeared, but nearly so. On the film sites Internet Movie Data Base and Rotten Tomatoes her bio is the fact that she was a student at Sofia and the three film credits. That’s it. There are no photos on those sites.

A Google search turns up nothing for this particular Peggy Neal, although several others are represented. I didn’t see any articles. There are some images, though, and one of the images of a recent picture that looked plausibly like her clicked through to an article on an Australian website called The Age (dot com dot au). Oooops! That's Peggy O'Neal. (Later edit; my bad to anyone who read it as it was.) 

Terror Beneath the Sea (1966)

Peggy and her Japanese love-interest are reporters covering some new submarine-launched weapons. There are Creature-from-the-Black-Lagoon type mutant amphibian creatures and a mad scientist. Drama ensues and there is a happy ending.

The X from Outer Space (1967)

There’s a lot more meat in this second movie. Peggy and a new Japanese love-interest are astronauts, sent to Mars or something for a typical fool’s errand. Peggy does a lot of flirting with the Japanese astronaut, but at the end she realizes that he is better off with the other female lead because, after all, they’re both Japanese. That last bit of social theorizing came at the last minute of the movie and it was a surprise. All through the movie, Peggy and the alpha-male were getting along famously. Japanese women must have been complaining about the blond getting all the action. Peggy is beautiful enough to be threatening; I think so anyway.

Both of these movies feature a lot of gaigin (white) actors, lots more than any of the Toho or Nikkatsu movies of the time. (Peggy’s movies came from Shochiku Studios.) The foreign actors play mostly good natured, sympathetic characters, with only one in each movie playing a pain in the ass. Neither of these movies is very good, nor particularly bad. They are mildly entertaining and they don’t waste a lot of your time. I’ve seen worse.

But Peggy Neal! Very interesting, Peggy! I wish you well in your current endeavors. Thanks for everything, and it’s always nice seeing you. 

This Week In WTF: A Death In Fukushima

Every news cycle for many months now has been rich in WTF moments. Many of these have been provided by politics, which seems to have gone completely off the rails. The shocking political news has crowded What the Fuck moments in other subject areas way over to the corners of our attention. There are moments, however, when one of those other topics really squeezes a “WTF!” out of us.

Like the latest news from Fukushima, Japan. It’s been a long time since Fukushima invaded our consciousness. It was a big story though, quite memorable. The earthquake was 9.0 or 9.1, depending on where you are reading. The tsunamis were legendary, and they struck densely populated coastal areas of northeastern Japan. 15,000 people were killed! That’s big event right there, a terrible, awful, tragic, miserable day. To complicate matters, there was a rather large nuclear power plant right on the oceanfront area of Tsunami Central.

That happened in March, 2011. The quake was over in minutes; the tsunamis raised hell for a matter of hours and caused the majority of the deaths; the effects of the earthquake and the tsunamis on the nuclear plant are still being felt six years later.

This week’s WTF moment came in the form of a small news article about one aspect of the cleanup effort at the site of the nuclear plant. It’s all very dangerous and complicated, since large areas of the hot spots are underwater. Radiation has been too high even for humans in protective clothing. The highest reading at the site, previous to this week, was seventy-three Sieverts*. (Ten Sieverts is enough to insure rapid death in an unprotected human.) So the company in charge of the cleanup has constructed some heavily shielded robots to do the work. You may have heard: last month one of the robots encountered drama.

After two hours of exposure, the robot broke down due to extreme radiation exposure. (Most of the articles use the more dramatic construction, “the robot died,” or “the robot was killed.” Let’s go with “broke down.” We’ll be talking about robots as though they were people soon enough.) The radiation reading has been described as “unimaginable.” How extreme was it, Johnny! Well, the reading was 650 Sieverts, that’s how extreme it was. That’s nine times greater than any previous reading in the six years since the accident.

To paraphrase Jaws, “we’re going to need a stronger robot.”

Credit where credit is due: I started reading about this phenomenon at the Raw Story this morning, clicking through to the International Business Times, which is evidently where the Raw Story found the news flash.

Pacific Ocean Fish

I’ve also been seeing bits about Fukushima and its effects on fish in our Pacific food chain. Strange tales of fish in Canadian waters with bleeding gills, and all kinds of Pacific fish with big tumors. I went over to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute’s website for an update. No particular methodology to the choice; they were the most likely trustworthy source near the top of the Google search.

Big article; real scientist; he’s been researching the effects of Fukushima since it happened. The good news is that all of the fish in the whole, giant Pacific Ocean are safe to eat. He didn’t find anything remotely threatening about any of it. People evidently worry about the tuna in particular, but they needn’t. It’s safe. Any Japanese debris washing up on West Coast beaches is similarly safe. The bad news? There is no bad news. 

I saw other articles debunking the Fukushima/tumor thing, so it's bogus.

But if we want to worry a bit, that’s probably okay as well. After all, a jump from seventy-three to 650 Sieverts is no small matter! And that poor dead robot, that doesn’t happen every day. Maybe the guy from WHOI will update the update.

*Sieverts. A Sievert is a unit of radiation exposure that is designed to measure health threats to humans.

One Sievert will cause radiation sickness symptoms, like dizziness, nausea and vomiting.

Ten Sieverts will cause rapid death, anywhere from one day to a week after exposure. (Although many people with more exposure have held out for longer periods.)

Sieverts are reduced to smaller measurements to measure low dose exposures. So, one millisievert is 1/1,000^th of a Sievert (0.001 Sieverts), and one microsievert is 1/1,000,000^th of a Sievert (0.000001 Sieverts).

For reference: one set of dental radiographs is between five and ten microsieverts.

1.7 millisieverts is the average annual dose of radiation for stewardesses.

1 Sievert is the maximum dose allowed for astronauts over the course of their careers. 

(Wikipedia)

The Fear of Language.

I'm really on a fence about sharing this bit onto Facebook. It's just about certain that some of my Facebook friends would be highly offended by the language in this video. I'm pretty certain as well that they wouldn't get the message.

These days you can tear down the very structure of our government and tear the heart out of our democratic institutions but please, please! don't you ever say the word "fuck" within my hearing.

Can we keep some sense of proportion here!