Looks like Steve Earle decided to kick a hornet’s nest. The lyrics of the song don’t seem particularly profound or meaningful to me, but hey, sing what you want. I also think that there are better people to glorify than John Walker Lindh. I mean, maybe he is a confused kid who got caught up in something, but that doesn’t change the fact that he found his way into an army that fought every principle prized by liberal society.

I found a link to The Talent Myth, a must read article by Malcolm Gladwell, at Jonathan Delacour’s weblog. I can’t say how affronted I am by the idea that “talent” is the key to success at anything. Even if talent won out over all, the systems that we have for measuring talent are incredibly inexact. If you look at sports like baseball, where the skills required for success are well defined and there are objective measurements for many of them, you’ll see that evaluators of talent miss on prospects all of the time, both by overrating some and underrating others. In the corporate environment, where the skillset is more complex and difficult to measure, it’s nearly impossible to even say who’s talented and who isn’t. Simply assuming that every jerk who managed to ace a standardized test and work his way through a blue chip school is more talented than people with less fancy educational backgrounds is possibly the worst way to go, and yet it seems to rule the day.

My little jeremiad yesterday was not aimed at the hard working businessmen who go about their daily business honestly and ethically. I know that there are plenty of them, and as I’ve said, I’ve even worked with plenty of them. It’s aimed at the various commentators (like Andy Grove, President Bush, and any number of other executives I’ve seen on TV) who want to try to persuade us that unethical behavior in the world of business is somehow unusual. I’m not saying that these business men are all bad people, and that they beat their dogs and plot evil in the shower before work every morning. What I am saying is that most people are prone to ethical lapses, and that once you get started in that direction, it’s hard to stop. Anyway, if you’re a businessman who behaves ethically, keep up the good work. If you’re a businessman who’s unethical, I hope you get fired before you screw things up too badly. Either way, somebody ought to be keeping an eye on you.

Andrew Grove (former Intel CEO and current chairman) wrote a Washington Post column last week urging people not to stigmatize executives for the current crappy economy. His main point is that we’ve seen an entire systems failure, involving regulators, auditors, shareholders, board members, and investment banks, and he’s 100% right. It’s just too bad that he spends the rest of the words in his column whining about how people are coming down on businessmen for being unethical, even though most of them are. All I can say is that I’ve done a number of years in the corporate trenches and my personal experience tells me that the ranks of upper management are filled with venal, dishonest people who do what they must in order to feather their nests and bolster their reputations. Maybe it’s a product of being in the tech industry, but what I see is a world full of filthy liars and the pathologically incompetent. I’ve run into a number of notable exceptions as well, but that doesn’t change the fact that the whole “the vast majority are ethical, upstanding people” trope is a myth.

Capitalism is based on maximizing the utility of man’s greed. I agree with Grove that it takes a system to keep things working properly, but the bottom line is that for the system to work properly, we cannot blindly place our faith in the people who runs these companies. The system requires vigilance from analysts, and shareholders, and especially outside directors to make sure that executives don’t cheat and that they don’t incompetently run companies into the ground. It requires government agencies and unions to make sure that companies don’t exploit workers, the environment, and the business climate.

And as for Grove’s complaining about business executives being treated as second class citizens, I say, what a joke. We’re talking about the best paid and most privileged people in America. They make most of the money, wield most of the power, and fill the halls of government along with America’s boardrooms. I’ll save my pity for the people who have had their planned retirement pushed back by 5 or 10 years thanks to the criminal greed of the poor, put upon executive class, thank you very much.

Today, MEMRI sent out a translation of an Al-Hayat column by Tunisian writer Al-‘Afif Al-Akhdhar, condemning suicide bombings. In it he points out that violence by Hamas (and other terrorist groups) is the sustaining force for Israel’s right wing. Al-Hayat, an Arabic-language London daily, must be a fascinating paper to read. They seem to publish both the most liberal and the most bellicose Arab writers without discrimination (at least judging by what I get from MEMRI).

Via Interesting People: The TCPA; What’s wrong; What’s right and what to do about by professor William A Arbaugh.

Anyone have a favorite SFTP client for Windows? I’m still using regular old FTP a lot and was hoping to move to SFTP. Of course, I’m still using regular old unecrypted POP to get my email, but I’ll address that problem some other time.

I just saw Helen Thomas on CSPAN answering questions at a book reading. First of all, I had no idea that she writes a column these days. I figured she’d retire after five decades in the White House press corpse. Secondly, I think it’s amazing that she is doing so well given her advanced age (she was born in 1920). Anyway, it’s pretty cool to see an old lady excoriate John Ashcroft before an audience of more old ladies.

A Connecticut production company is developing a TV show targetted at cats. It seems to me that cats make up a demographic that has an extremely low average income.

The Economist has an interesting article today on the growing conflict between the conservative clergy that runs Iran and the reformers who want to drag the country out of the gutter. Despite the three decade US project to discredit and isolate Iran, the country is hardly a backwater. There are plenty of educated and cosmopolitan Iranians who are rapidly losing interest in the antics of the Ayatollah and his minions. Indeed, Iran very well might be an exemplary state right now had we not inflicted the Shah on them, prompting the Islamic takeover in 1979.