Steve Wynn for Al Copeland Humanitarian Award

October 28, 2011

"Stay Thirsty My Friends..."

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Last year, Jay nominated the Most Interesting Man in the World for the Al, arguing that he represented an appealing avatar for the manly good life.

Often on the blog, I have used the image of Leonardo di Caprio’s portrayal of Howard Hughes in the Aviator as a tribute to the restless innovator overcoming challenges.

Today it is my pleasure to nominate a real person who embodies qualities of both of these fictional characters: Steve Wynn.

WSJ reporter Christina Brinkley wrote a fascinating book about the battle to control the Las Vegas Strip called Winner Takes All: Steve Wynn, Kirk Kerkorian, Gary Loveman and the Race to Own Las Vegas. There were many interesting things about this book, but Steve Wynn without a doubt steals the show.

Steve Wynn essentially created the modern Las Vegas, transforming the city from a seedy, neon lit gambling hole to what it is today. I’ll let you decide for yourself what it is today, because the seedy neon lit gambling hold is certainly still there.

Ick...

I can remember watching the U2 video I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For, filmed on Fremont Street back in the late 1980s and thinking to myself “Vegas is repulsive. I have absolutely no interest in ever going there.”

Some of you reading this will have exactly the same reaction to Vegas today, but mine has entirely changed, and it is because of Steve Wynn. Steve Wynn invented the Las Vegas that I enjoy visiting.

Steve Wynn invented the modern Las Vegas in the late 1980s when he built the Mirage, the first of the modern casinos, on the strip. Wynn’s vision for updating Vegas was straightforward: he was out to build destination resorts so interesting that people would want to visit even if they weren’t interested in gambling.

Today, the Mirage has fallen into meh status (a volcano? Snore….) but that is a tribute more to the fantastic cycle of one-up manship that the success of the Mirage inspired.  Wynn imagined a Las Vegas that would appeal to far more than gambling junkies, paving the way for a hyper-competitive market in every type of distraction, from fine dining to elaborate stage productions, fine art to high-end nightclubs.

In other words, the tacky Vegas is still available, but now, so is everything else.

Winner Takes All paints a fascinating portrait of Steve Wynn as the ruthless capitalist moving Vegas forward. Others had tried to top Wynn in developing new resorts, but for the most part, Wynn was in a competition against himself. In building the Bellagio, a resort which would make Louis XIV green with envy, someone asked Mr. Wynn what he had in mind for decoration behind the check in counter. When someone suggested a piece of fine art, Wynn liked the idea so much that at one point he had multiple auctioneers in New York and London buying everything in sight. When you read winner takes all, you can imagine the London and New York auctioneers wondering to themselves “Egads, who is this person in Las Vegas buying all of our art?”

Today, you can visit Mr. Wynn’s gigantic Picasso collection in a restraunt in the Bellagio known, appropriately enough, as Picasso’s, which combines fine dining with a museum of art experience. I highly recommend it.

Winner Takes All details the rise and fall of Steve Wynn. In building the Bellagio, vacuuming up fine art, and other projects (including the Beau Rivage, a “baby Bellagio” in Biloxi Mississippi- a market faux pas) Binkley presents Wynn as the capitalist gone mad. Wall Street analysts began calling Wynn out on his extravagent spending. Wynn’s reaction as conveyed by Binkley is priceless, something along the lines of “These idiots and their quarterly profit statements! Don’t they get it? I’m an artist!”

Wynn went so far off the financial deep end that his rival Kerkorian, developer of the MGM, wrote a check and bought Wynn’s company straight out from under him. I’m trying to imagine anyone having the ability to write a check with enough zeros in it to purchase the Bellagio and various lesser properties, but it certainly says something about the depths to which Wynn had driven his stock price. The transformative mastermind of the modern Las Vegas was finished, a victim to his own obsession.

Well, that wouldn’t do for an ending, now would it?

Despite losing it all, Wynn found new investors willing to back his vision of excellence. Wynn secured $2.7 billion to build the Wynn hotel, buying an old property for a relative song, and topping himself yet again with a fantastic new resort. Today Vegas is down like everything, but don’t count Steve Wynn out. Personally I can’t wait to see what the mad artist/capitalist comes up with next.

1 Comment | Al Copeland Humanitarian Award | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

And “The Al” Goes to…

October 31, 2010

In keeping with our tradition on JPGB, Halloween is the time to announce the winner of the Al Copeland Humanitarian Award.  ”The Al” is meant to honor a person who has made a significant contribution to improving the human condition.

The criteria of the Al Copeland Humanitarian Award can be summarized by quoting our original blog post in which we sang the praises of Al Copeland and all that he did for humanity:

“Al Copeland may not have done the most to benefit humanity, but he certainly did more than many people who receive such awards.  Chicago gave Bill Ayers their Citizen of the Year award in 1997.  And the Nobel Peace Prize has too often gone to a motley crew including unrepentant terrorist, Yassir Arafat, and fictional autobiography writer, Rigoberta Menchu.   Local humanitarian awards tend to go to hack politicians or community activists.  From all these award recipients you might think that a humanitarian was someone who stopped throwing bombs… or who you hoped would picket, tax, regulate, or imprison someone else.

Al Copeland never threatened to bomb, picket, tax, regulate, or imprison anyone.  By that standard alone he would be much more of a humanitarian.  But Al Copeland did even more — he gave us spicy chicken.”

Last year’s winner was Debrilla M. Ratchford, who significantly improved the human condition by inventing the rollerbag, beating out Steve Henson, who gave us ranch dressing,  Fasi Zaka, who ridiculed the Taliban,  Ralp Teetor, who invented cruise control, and Mary Quant, who popularized the miniskirt.

This year the nominees were The Most Interesting Man in the World, the fictional spokesman for Dos Equis and model of masculine virtue, Stan Honey, the inventor of the yellow first down line in TV football broadcasts, Herbert Dow, the founder of Dow Chemical and subverter of a German chemicals cartel, Wim Nottroth, the man who resisted Rotterdam police efforts to destroy a mural that read “Thou Shall Not Kill” following the murder of Theo van Gogh by an Islamic extremist, and Marion Donovan and Victor Mills, the developers of the disposable diaper.

These are all worthy nominees.  They all meet the minimum requirements in that none of them threatened to bomb, picket, tax, regulate, or imprison anyone.  And they all have done something to significantly improve the human condition.  But I think we can rule out The Most Interesting Man because I’m not comfortable with the idea of giving the award to a fictional person.  I also think we can rule out Herbert Dow because I’m not sure that he did anything beyond what almost all entrepreneurs have to do — overcome the government-assisted cartels of existing businesses to prevent the entry of new competitors.

Stan Honey’s yellow first down line is an amazing improvement for watching football on TV, but what about those who see the game in the stadium?  I keep expecting there to be a yellow line on the field, which decreases my pleasure from watching the game in person.  As soon as Stan Honey figures out how to install yellow lights to form lines in the turf, I’ll be sure to give him The Al, but until then he will have to be satisfied with a nomination.

Marion Donovan and Victor Mills greatly improved my life and the life of countless million with the invention of the disposable diaper.  I should mention that in addition to their greater convenience, better function, and lower cost, disposable diapers may even be better for the environment.

All of this makes for a compelling case to award The Al to Donovan and Mills.  But there is an even more compelling case to give The Al to Wim Nottroth.  All of the consumer items that improve our lives, whether spicy chicken, roller-bags, or disposable diapers, depend on the existence of liberty for people to choose how they live, including what they make, what they buy, and what they believe.  If the forces of tyranny that Wim Nottroth resisted prevail, we will eventually lose the liberty to enjoy these other benefits.

The tyranny Nottroth directly resisted was the kowtowing of Western governments to radical Muslims who found it offensive to say “Thou Shall not Kill” in the aftermath of the murder of Theo van Gogh by an Islamic fascist who disliked a film made by van Gogh criticizing Islam. If we allow these restrictions on free speech we are surrendering our liberty bit by bit.

The only way we lose our liberty completely is if we surrender it to the new wave of fascists.  Contrary to the gloomy claims of defeatists during the Cold War and today, freedom is not at a disadvantage in a struggle with tyranny.  Freedom does not make us weaker; it makes us much stronger.  Freedom makes us richer, which gives us the material advantages to defeat the enemies of freedom.  Freedom improves the quality of our information and decision-making.  Under tyranny everyone distorts information to fit the wishes of the tyrants for fear of punishment.  And no one scrutinizes the quality of decision-making.  The competitive market of ideas and the freedom to critique decisions improves the their quality in free societies.

As long as we maintain our appreciation for freedom and our desire to struggle for it, both at home and abroad, we are sure to win.  The problem is that it is all too easy forget how wonderful our freedom is relative to the tyranny that exists in many other places.  And it is an even greater danger for us to tire of having to struggle to preserve it, both at home and abroad.  That struggle never ends.  When the challenge from Nazis faded, the threat from the Soviets rose, and when that crumbled the danger has come from radical Islam.  And when we defeat them, as I am confident we eventually will, some other threat will take its place.

There will always be people who prefer to tell other people how to live — what you can say, what you can buy, what you can sell, with whom you can sleep, and what you can think.  In fact, there is nothing natural about freedom.  It’s natural to want your own freedom, but it is equally natural to want to tell everyone else what to do.  Respecting other people’s freedom is something that is acquired and sustained, not something with which we are born.

Clearly some government officials in The Netherlands as well as in other places in the free world are failing to teach and sustain the love of freedom.  They tire of the struggle to preserve freedom and look for compromises with tyrants.  Wim Nottroth resisted his government’s unacceptable surrender to tyranny.  He reminded us how free speech is worth fighting for, even in the face of murderous thugs and their lackey government enablers.  For that he has significantly improved the human condition and is most worthy of this year’s Al Copeland Humanitarian Award.

3 Comments | Al Copeland Humanitarian Award | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

“No, I’m Not Going to Stand Somewhere Else.”

October 14, 2010

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Molly, if you’re reading this – you still have a choice. You can try to run away from what you know you’re called to do, but Victor Laszlo is right: like Rick Blaine, you’re trying to run away from yourself, and you will never succeed. Or you can rejoin the fight from wherever you are now; the Internet makes it possible to do your part to save the world from any computer station, anywhere.

In case you missed the news, Molly Norris, the cartoonist who came up with the idea for Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, was admonished by the FBI that she needed to erase her identity and go into hiding, and she has done so. As Mark Steyn and others have observed, it appears that the United States law enforcement apparatus is now, effectively, working for the other side. Terrorizing people into abandoning their freedoms is precisely what the enemy is trying to accomplish. Now the FBI is helping them.

This is not the same thing as doing this for a witness in a criminal trial. You send mob informants into hiding because for them, hiding is what they need to do in order to fight the enemy. You can’t testify against the mob if the mob can kill you before you get to the stand. And if they get to you after you take the stand, the next informant won’t testify.

But for people like Norris, not hiding is what they need to do to fight the enemy. If mob informants go into hiding, we win. If Molly Norris goes into hiding, the enemy wins.

Earlier this year, when Norris cancelled her proposed Everybody Draw Mohammed Day out of fear for her life, I expressed my disappointment and she showed up in the comments to ask where all the people who were supposed to be protecting her had gone. It was a very just question! And she was thinking only of politicians and intellectuals, not the police. Who knew, then, that even the police would turn against her?

Yet we can’t give up. We can’t become cowards just becasue the FBI has done so. We are still human beings, and there is no escape from responsibility.

That’s why, in the tradition of Fasi Zaka, I’m proud to nominate Wim Nottroth for this year’s Al Copeland Humanitarian of the Year Award.

The Gates of Vienna blog recounts the story:

Back in the fall of 2004, just after Theo Van Gogh was murdered, an artist named Chris Ripke painted a mural on a Rotterdam street with the text: “Thou Shalt Not Kill”. A scriptural quote, but universally accepted, one would think, and not at all controversial.

Needless to say, local Muslims complained, and the municipality ordered city workers to remove the mural. A video reporter [for a local TV station] named Wim Nottroth stood in front of the mural in an attempt to prevent its removal, but he was arrested by police.

The authorities also ordered all news videos of the operation destroyed, but at least one survived and was uncovered by the diligent detective work of Vlad Tepes.

The mural was on private property. The owner of the property had approved the mural. No laws were violated. But the police destroyed the mural and confiscated all videos of their crime (or so they thought) and erased them.

Four months later, it was revealed that an imam from the mosque that demanded the destruction of the mural was connected to terrorist organizations and inciting his followers to violence. He was deported for being in the country illegally.

Nottroth had been sent to the scene in his capacity as a journalist. His job was to film the police destroying the mural. But as the moment of destruction approached, Nottroth realized that although he was a journalist, he was a human being first. And nobody else was going to do what needed to be done by somebody.

So he went and stood in front of the mural. And he stood there until the police arrested him.

The translation from the Dutch is awkward in some places, but it’s impossible not to hear the courage and integrity behind the awkwardness: “We all do agree to that, don’t we? Thou shalt not kill, we all agree to, isn’t it?…If this goes away there will be more misery than there would be if you leave it.” He couldn’t have been more eloquent if he’d quoted Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration or Milton’s Aeropagetica.

This exchange encapsulates a lot in a short space:

Nottroth: It should be possible here in a democratic…

Policeman: You rather go stand there.

Nottroth: Well then, I will remain standing here.

Darn straight.

Each and every one of us must be ready to say that at any time, when our duty as human beings calls upon us. For reminding the world that standing for freedom, even against your own government when necessary, is every person’s responsibility, I nominate Wim Nottroth for the 2010 Al Copeland Humanitarian of the Year Award.

2 Comments | Al Copeland Humanitarian Award, politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Al Copeland Humanitarian Nominee: Herbert Dow

October 8, 2010

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

So I remembered reading the Mackinac Center’s book Empire Builders. The book featured stories of entrepreneurs that made Michigan great.  Years later when I watched The Aviator it reminded me of one of the stories from Empire Builders.

Herbert Dow is certainly worthy of a posthumous Al Copeland award. This 1997 piece from the Mackinac Center explains why:

Herbert Dow, the Monopoly Breaker

By Dr. Burton W. Folsom | May 1, 1997

Today, the Dow Chemical Company is an industrial giant, famous for its plastics, Styrofoam, and Saran Wrap. But when the company first went into business 100 years ago, in May 1897, almost no one took it seriously. The occasion of the company’s centennial offers a timely opportunity to retell an important economics lesson.

Herbert Dow, the founder, had already started two other chemical companies: one went broke, and the other ousted him from control. “Crazy Dow” was what the folks in Midland, Michigan, called him, as he pursued his entrepreneurial vision of an American chemical industry. Like David fighting Goliath, he actually believed he could throw stones at the large German chemical monopolies and topple them from world dominance.

In the story of Herbert Dow, not only do we see the spirit of freedom that helped America become a world power, we also learn how a small company can overcome the “predatory price cutting” of a large cartel.

Dow invented a process to separate bromine from the sea of brine underneath much of Michigan. He then sold bromine to other firms, which made it into sedatives and photographic supplies. With gusto, Dow sold it inside the U. S., but not outside—at least not at first.

The Germans had been the dominant supplier of bromine since it first was mass-marketed in the mid-1800s. No American dared compete overseas with the powerful German cartel, Die Deutsche Bromkonvention, which fixed the world price for bromine at a lucrative 49 cents a pound. Customers either paid the 49 cents or they went without. Dow and other Americans sold bromine inside the U. S. for 36 cents. The Bromkonvention made it clear that if the Americans tried to sell elsewhere, the Germans would flood the American market with cheap bromine and drive them out of business.

By 1904, Dow was ready to break the unwritten rules: He was so strapped for cash that he decided to sell in Europe. Dow easily beat the cartel’s 49 cent price and courageously sold America’s first bromine in England. After a few months of this, Dow encountered an angry visitor in his office from Germany—Hermann Jacobsohn of the powerful Bromkonvention. Jacobsohn announced he had “positive evidence that [Dow] had exported” bromine. “What of it?” Dow replied. “Don’t you know that you can’t sell abroad?” Jacobsohn asked. “I know nothing of the kind,” Dow retorted. Jacobsohn was indignant and left in a huff.

Above all, Dow was stubborn and hated being bluffed by a bully. When Jacobsohn stormed out of his office, Dow continued to sell bromine to countries from England to Japan. Before long, the Bromkonvention went on a rampage: It poured bromine into America at 15 cents a pound, well below its fixed price of 49 cents, and also below Dow’s 36 cent price.

The imaginative Dow worked out a daring strategy. He had his agent in New York discreetly buy hundreds of thousands of pounds of German bromine at the cartel’s 15 cent price. Then Dow repackaged the German product and sold it in Europe—including Germany!—at 27 cents a pound. “When this 15-cent price was made over here,” Dow said, “instead of meeting it, we pulled out of the American market altogether and used all our production to supply the foreign demand. This, as we afterward learned, was not what they anticipated we would do.”

Indeed, the Germans were befuddled. They expected to run Dow out of business; and this they thought they were doing. But why was U. S. demand for bromine so high? And where was this flow of cheap bromine into Europe coming from? Was one of the Bromkonvention members cheating and selling bromine in Europe below the fixed price? Powerful tensions surfaced from within the Bromkonvention. According to Dow, “the German producers got into trouble among themselves as to who was to supply the goods for the American market . . . .”

The confused Germans kept cutting U. S. prices—first to 12 cents and then to 10.5 cents a pound. Dow meanwhile kept buying the stuff and reselling it in Europe for 27 cents. Even when the Bromkonvention finally caught on to what Dow was doing, it wasn’t sure how to respond. As Dow said, “We are absolute dictators of the situation.” He also wrote, “One result of this fight has been to give us a standing all over the world . . . . We are in a much stronger position than we ever were . . . .”

When Dow broke the German monopoly, all users of bromine around the world could celebrate. They now had lower prices and more companies to buy from. This victory propelled the remarkable Dow to challenge the German dye trust, and, after that, the German magnesium trust. His successes in these industries again lowered prices and helped liberate the American chemical industry from its European stranglehold.

Those who value the spirit of freedom and the rise of America as a world power can thank Herbert Dow for what he started in Midland, Michigan, 100 years ago.

BOOOOOOOM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

2 Comments | Al Copeland Humanitarian Award | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Donovan and Mills for Al Copeland Humanitarians of the Year

October 6, 2010

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

It’s taken me a week to think of it, but I have come up with what I believe is the ultimate nominee for the Al Copeland Humanitarian of the Year award this year. Or rather, two nominees.

Yes, the most interesting man in the world is . . . very interesting! I love the ads, but does he really represent the spirit of “The Al”? He certainly has done a lot of things – but what has he actually accomplished?

I propose that the true spirit of “The Al” is what you find inside . . . diapers.

Marion Donovan and Victor Mills’ diapers, to be exact.

Just spend a moment thinking about what life was like during the endless centuries when a diaper was nothing but a piece of cloth – one you had to wash and reuse, because manufactured goods couldn’t yet be made cheap enough for disposability. Contemplate, for a moment (but no longer than that!) how many diapers were changed from the first human beings technologically sophisticated enough to make clothing down through the middle of the twentieth century – and what was involved in changing each and every one of those diapers.

When Martin Luther wanted to illustrate the point that joyfully worshipping God was not a special activity that you did by going to church or performing other “religious works,” but something that had to infuse every single solitary human activity, even the most unpleasant, he was shrewd to choose diaper changing as an example:

Now observe that when … our natural reason … takes a look at married life, she turns up her nose and says, “Alas, must I rock the baby, wash its diapers, make its bed, smell its stench, stay up nights with it, take care of it when it cries, heal its rashes and sores, and on top of that care for my wife, provide for her, labour at my trade, take care of this and take care of that, do this and do that, endure this and endure that, and whatever else of bitterness and drudgery married life involves? What, should I make such a prisoner of myself? O you poor, wretched fellow, have you taken a wife? Fie, fie upon such wretchedness and bitterness! It is better to remain free and lead a peaceful. carefree life; I will become a priest or a nun and compel my children to do likewise.”

He went on to focus on diaper-changing as the representative activity encompassing all these unpleasant duties. Luther knew that by sticking up for the honor of the married estate, he was sticking up for getting poop on your hands. Daily.

But having a family doesn’t mean daily poop-scrubbing anymore.

Born in 1917, Donovan spent much of her childhood hanging around the Ft. Wayne factory run by her father and uncle. They were inventors in their own right – having invented, among other things, an industrial lathe for making automotive gears and gun barrels – and she absorbed their entrepreneurial spirit.

Her first invention was a waterproof diaper cover, made out of a shower curtain, to contain the small leaks that were endemic to diapers in the pre-Donovan era. Rubber baby pants were already on the market, but they weren’t widely used because they caused diaper rash and pinched the skin. The plastic “changing pads” we use today are a distant descendant of Donovan’s innovation.

For good measure, she put snaps on her diaper cover instead of using safety pins, which at the time were the universal fastening technology in the diaper sector. Today we use velcro, but the original quantum leap away from the use of dangerous and labor-intensive pins was Donovan’s.

None of the big manufacturers would even consider marketing her invention, so she went into business for herself. Her product was an overnight success, debuting at Saks Fifth Avenue in 1949. After two years she sold it to one of those super-smart manufacturing companies that had been too dumb to give her the time of day back when it would have counted.

Like any good entrepreneur, she didn’t rest on her laurels but plowed her success into the next innovaiton – this time, disposable diapers. The challenge was significant; she needed to make the interior out of paper (so it would be cheap enough to manufacture in large numbers) but make it durable and absorbant.

She produced what she thought was a workable solution, but once again she couldn’t get the manufacturers interested. They were already working on the same idea – and Victor Mills, a chemical engineer at Proctor & Gamble, had a better solution than hers. (Those are the breaks! “The Al” celebrates the tough life of entrepreneurial struggle.)

 In 1956, P&G had acquired a new paper pulp plant, and it asked Mills and his team what they could do with it. Lots of companies were working on disposable diapers, but nobody had solved the problem yet. Mills, a grandfather at the time, had a pretty strongly vested interest in coming up with a solution. And the new plant yeilded just enough durability and absorbancy to solve the problem. Using his grandchild to test the prototypes, Mills developed the disposable diaper that ultimately became Pampers in 1961.

Well earned

So if you have kids, thank Donovan and Mills for their contribution to your well-being – and vote for them for Al Copeland Humanitarians of the Year.

HT Thomas Frey, Women Inventers and Chemical Engineering World for images, Famous Women Inventors and Jon Marmor for info

7 Comments | Al Copeland Humanitarian Award | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Nominees for the 2010 Al Copeland Humanitarian Award

September 21, 2010

It’s time again to consider nominees for the Al Copeland Humanitarian Award.  The award is meant to honor a person who has made a significant contribution to improving the human condition.

The criteria of the Al Copeland Humanitarian Award can be summarized by quoting our original blog post in which we sang the praises of Al Copeland and all that he did for humanity:

“Al Copeland may not have done the most to benefit humanity, but he certainly did more than many people who receive such awards.  Chicago gave Bill Ayers their Citizen of the Year award in 1997.  And the Nobel Peace Prize has too often gone to a motley crew including unrepentant terrorist, Yassir Arafat, and fictional autobiography writer, Rigoberta Menchu.   Local humanitarian awards tend to go to hack politicians or community activists.  From all these award recipients you might think that a humanitarian was someone who stopped throwing bombs… or who you hoped would picket, tax, regulate, or imprison someone else.

Al Copeland never threatened to bomb, picket, tax, regulate, or imprison anyone.  By that standard alone he would be much more of a humanitarian.  But Al Copeland did even more — he gave us spicy chicken.”

Last year’s winner was Debrilla M. Ratchford, who significantly improved the human condition by inventing the rollerbag, beating out Steve Henson, who gave us ranch dressing,  Fasi Zaka, who ridiculed the Taliban,  Ralp Teetor, who invented cruise control, and Mary Quant, who popularized the miniskirt.

This year I would like to nominate The Most Interesting Man in the World.

The Most Interesting Man has improved the human condition by modeling “the good life.”  In an age that lionizes anti-heroes, slackers, and losers, it is nice to be reminded of what masculine virtue can look like (even if Harvey Mansfield would find that redundant).

Yes, The Most Interesting Man is fictional, but the award is for a “person,” which I believe could include a fictional person.  In the past we have focused on entrepreneurs as nominees for the Al Copeland Humanitarian Award, with the purpose of emphasizing how inventors and business people can improve the human condition much more than the politicians and activists who more typically receive such awards.

But I think we should expand our set to include the idea of a person.  The creation of that idea — whoever developed the ad campaign — could be at least as important for improving the human condition as the creation of a business or product.

The floor is now open for other nominations.

7 Comments | Al Copeland Humanitarian Award | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Submit Your Nominations by Halloween!

October 22, 2009

Al Copeland with Popeye

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

For those of you who have been following the announcements over the past week of this year’s nominees for the Al Copeland Humanitarian of the Year Award – we want to hear from you!

Whom would you nominate to recieve “the Al” – what person has made the largest net contribution to the happiness of humanity in a field of endeavor not traditionally recognized by the people who give out awards as contributing to the happiness of humanity?

Just leave a comment on any of the Al Copeland nomination posts with your nomination. If your suggestions strike our fancy we may compose a new post featuring your nomination. And make sure you tell us why you think that person is worthy of “the Al.”

Oh, and let us know which of this year’s nominees you think should win! Our panel of prestigious judges (well, OK, Jay) is not bound to respect the majority vote, any more than the Nobel committee is bound to respect basic common sense. But unlike the Nobel committee, our judges are at least interested in hearing what you think!

Get your nominations in by WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 28. Why that deadline? Because in honor of the Halloween holiday, we plan to announce the winner of “the Al” on Friday, October 30.

popeye-costume-01

Halloween captures the spirit (so to speak) of the Al Copeland Humanitarian of the Year award almost perfectly. It’s a ton of fun and it’s harmless, and it therefore makes a large net positive contribution to the happiness of humanity. Yet the snobs and the do-gooders – whom Michael Miller of the Acton Institute once remarked should be called “mean-wellers” because on balance they rarely do more good than harm – don’t value that as a contribution to humanity.

Germanetti___Popeye's_20th_Anniversary

So reserve your seat at the head table, get your tux out of mothballs, and get ready to join us for the big awards banquet next Friday.

And until then, don’t miss your chance to make your voice heard!

4 Comments | Al Copeland Humanitarian Award | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Ralph Teetor for Al Copeland Humanitarian of the Year

October 15, 2009

ralph-teetor

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

After careful consideration of various possibilities, including:

  • Richard Belanger, inventor of the sippy cup
  • Reiner Knizia, inventor of numerous board games
  • Edward Lloyd, inventor of modern business insurance
  • Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek
  • Charles V, preventor of the Ottoman conquest of Europe
  • Jay P. Greene, inventor of the Al Copeland Humanitarian of the Year award

. . . I have at last settled on my nomination:

Ralph Teetor, inventor of cruise control.

Cruise control makes driving far less burdensome, which not only makes our lives more enjoyable on a day-to-day basis, it also facilitates a great increase in long-distance travel and reduces shipping costs by reducing not only the labor burden but also the cost of gas (since cruise control is more fuel-efficient). The truckers have a bumper sticker showing a stork delivering a baby, with the tagline “everything else you have arrived by truck.” Well, if that’s true, then anything that lowers the cost of trucking must have tremendous reverberations throughout the economy – which is to say, we’ll never know just how much our lives have been enriched by it.

Oh, and it saves lives. Lots of them. The professional safety narcs strongly resisted the introduction of cruise control on grounds that it would lead to inattentive driving and more deaths. But in fact it led to more uniform driving, with everyone going the same speed and therefore a big drop in the frequency of cars passing each other, and thus a dramatic drop in deaths.

P.J. O’Rourke contacted some of the professional safety narcs to ask them whether they were sorry for having opposed something that turned out to dramatically increase safety. If memory serves, I believe they were unrepentant. No doubt they were worried they’d have to give back the Nobel Peace Prizes they’d won for opposing it.

I chose to focus on cruise control because I thought it fit the values of the Al Copeland award most closely, but it’s worth noting that Teetor was a prolific engineer and inventor – he and his cousin built their first car, with a one-cylinder engine, at age 12 – and contributed far more to our lives than cruise control. In his first job out of college he developed a better way to balance steam turbine rotors in the torpedo boat destroyers we used to kick the Kaiser’s kiester in WWI. Later he ran a company that made piston rings for car engines, supplying Packard, General Motors, Chrysler and Studebaker.

Teetor got the idea for cruise control after a jerky and uncomfortable car ride. His lawyer, driving the car, was an incessant talker and paid more attention to the conversation than the car’s speed, letting the car speed up and slow down as his attention wandered.

Teetor secured the patent for automatic car speed control in 1945, dubbing it Controlmatic. It would later be called Touchomatic, Pressomatic and Speedostat before finally being christened cruise control. The technology was first offered on three Chrysler models in 1958. By 1960 it was available on all Cadillac models.

Oh, and did I mention that Teetor did all this after being blinded in a shop accident - at age five?

I proudly nominate Ralph Teetor for the Al Copeland award.

Now if only he had developed a control for this kind of Cruise:

tom-cruise-oprah-winfrey

HT Symon Sez

3 Comments | Al Copeland Humanitarian Award, tributes | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Nominee for the Al Copeland Humanitarian of the Year Award — Fasi Zaka

October 14, 2009

After triumphing over Nazism and Communism in the 20th century, liberty faces a new threat in this century — radical Islam.  This threat is being counteracted (we hope) by diplomacy with potential allies, force against enemies, and high-minded speeches to remind all that the cause of liberty is right and the cause of tyranny is wrong.

In addition to all that, there is another essential element in the arsenal of liberty — ridicule.  Tyrants of all stripes, in addition to being monstrously cruel and evil, are also almost always laughably, pathetically, and outrageously ridiculous. 

Charlie Chaplin realized this when he mocked Hitler in  The Great Dictator.  In Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick portrayed the communist leader as a weepy drunk and the war-mongering general as a paranoid suffering from ED.  South Park has portrayed Osama Bin Laden as the slapstick LooneyTunes villain, Wile E. Coyote.  The Daily Show and Colbert Report make their living off of puncturing the pomposity of politicians.  Humor may not be the best weapon against tyrants, crooks, fools, and all other kinds of politicians, but it is a very important one.

 But Chaplin, Kubrick, Parker, Stone, Stewart, and Colbert have mocked tyrants from the safety of the free world.  Fasi Zaka does it from the front lines.  Zaka is a Pakistani radio DJ — a shock-jock – and host of a TV news parody show, News, Views, and Confused.  Given long stretches of military rule, government censorship, and death threats from extremists, Zaka can’t and doesn’t address oppression in Pakistan head-on.  Instead, he flirts with the issues, poking fun at the Taliban and corrupt and incompetent Pakistani leaders with social satire more than political criticism. 

For example, Zaka mocks the Taliban for smelling bad rather than for beheading opponents and suicide bombings.  As an LA Times profile described his approach:

So when a guest host, a character named Mr. Enlightened Moderations, poked fun at fundos , slang for Islamic fundamentalists, it was not for any extreme religious views but for poor dress sense, aversion to after-shave and limited use of deodorant. “You sound like a  fundo,” he’d say accusingly to callers. “You doesn’t even wears a deo, smelly boy.”

By mocking tyrants and their followers Zaka makes them seem uncool.  Making them uncool may limit their power more than a speech on their logical errors.  Remember that young men were drawn to Nazism in part because they wore shiny boots and neat brown shorts.  It was a struggle whether people would perceive fascism as the trend of the future or a group of buffoons singing Springtime for Hitler.  Buffoons who smell bad don’t attract girls, so young men are much less interested in movements that are uncool.

Not everyone agrees with Zaka’s humorous approach:

Some critics say Zaka is squandering a golden opportunity to be constructive and foster moderation in a confused younger generation.  “It bothers me when people do silly entertainment shows when we really need people to make a difference,” says Mani, another radio host.

Radio hosts don’t have to be boring and didactic to get their message across, counters Zaka, pointing to frequent discussions on extremism, women’s equality and the violence sweeping Pakistan. “They presume preaching is the way for change,” he says. “It isn’t.”

Zaka can be serious.  He is, after all, a Rhodes Scholar who was educated at Oxford.  And he regularly writes op-eds with more standard political criticism.  But it is his humor and ridicule that are really advancing the cause of liberty.

I make no claim that  Fasi Zaka is as funny as Charlie Chaplin, Steven Colbert, and the others.  The parts not in English seem even less funny, but you can check out a clip of his TV show here:

And like Chaplin, not all of Fasi Zaka’s political views are necessarily desirable.  Again, Zaka is worthwhile because he mocks bad guys, not because he’s a sound political analyst.

While Zaka may not be the funniest of these satirists for freedom, he is clearly one of the most courageous.  Making crap of the Taliban and military dictators is a real contribution to improving the human condition and makes Fasi Zaka worthy of a nomination for the Al Copeland Humanitarian of the Year Award.

(edited for clarity)

5 Comments | Al Copeland Humanitarian Award, politics, tributes | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Debrilla M. Ratchford for Al Copeland Humanitarian of the Year

October 14, 2009

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Debrilla M. Ratchford, an airline stewardess, received U.S. Patent #4, 094, 391
for her invention of a suitcase with wheels and transporting hook in 1978.

Ratchford must surely stand as the most underrated inventor of the late 20th Century.

Some JPGB readers must be old enough to remember the bad old days when going to the airport meant lugging around a heavy bag. I remember a trip I made to England in the early 1990s, and my suitcase was just killing me. I happened across a store in London that sold a primitive add on device merely to emulate a modern suitcase with wheels and a telescoping handle (with elastic bands to bind the case).

I happily shelled out whatever it took to buy that contraption. My life as a tourist instantly improved. Mind you, it was terrible compared to a modern bag, but it beat the living daylights out of suffering as a human pack animal.

Strangely enough, America had sent a man to the Moon before inventing a decent roller bag. I’m all for guys jumping around in low gravity and planting flags, but to me, the roller bag is much more important advance in human civilization.

I can scarcely imagine modern business travel without the carry-on roller bag. Hop on the plane, stow your bag, land and hit the ground running. For you strange people still checking bags, **ahem**, catch a clue. You’ll be suprised how much you can stuff into a carry-on with a suiter for hanging clothes.

Sometimes it is the little improvements that make a big difference in life. Companies guided by the invisible hand of the market popularized and improved upon the Ratchford design, and now I don’t have to sit around bored out of my mind waiting for luggage. Better yet, luggage can now be renamed “rollage.”

If someone can name a Nobel Peace Prize winner that has had a more beneficial impact on my life than Debrilla Ratchford, I’d love to hear who and how. I’m sure there are some wonderful people on that list but amidst all those grandees, they will have had to have done something very special for me to appreciate them more than Ratchford.

I’m talking about something on the order of inventing Tex-Mex or College Football to even get in the neighborhood.

7 Comments | Al Copeland Humanitarian Award | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 959 other followers