So, two Mondays ago, I just rolled my eyes after the legendary beatdown issued by Michael Vick.

Until I saw this post on The Economist’s Democracy In America Blog, which archly and eloquently describes one of the predicaments of our political culture.

I have a friend, a fellow Redskins fan, who persuaded herself earlier this year that Washington’s acquisition of Donovan McNabb was a more important development than the Eagles’ signing of Michael Vick, and that the Redskins were now championship contenders. On Monday night, real-world developments demonstrated the inaccuracy of this analysis, 59-28. Fortunately, however, while my friend is now free to persist in her optimistic delusions about the wisdom of making Mr McNabb a franchise player, she can’t actually try to maintain that the Eagles did not beat the Redskins on Monday night. The score is up there for everyone to see, everyone in Washington is forced to acknowledge that their team got stomped, and this will help generate the appropriate pressure to perform better in the future.

It’s hard to imagine a world in which Redskins-leaning newspapers pretended the team had won, tried to sow confusion by re-reporting the Skins’ 17-12 victory over the Eagles earlier this year, refused to report the loss entirely, cherry-picked positive statistics showing their side was outperforming the opponent on rushing second downs behind their own 30-yard line, or generally muddied the waters such that most Washington fans were under the impression they had beaten Philadelphia. The sports press simply isn’t that biased or cavalier about the importance of reporting what’s actually happening in the world.

The Economist’s correspondent goes on to cite a recent Pew Research Poll that finds “finds 53% of Republicans say there is no solid evidence the earth is warming. Among Tea Party Republicans, 70% say there is no evidence.”

Whether or not global warming is directly caused by human activity is — I will grudgingly allow — a matter of interpretation of the data; much like whether the signing of McNabb is directly the cause of the ‘Skin’s poor performance this season. What isn’t open to debate is that the world is getting warmer and that the Redskins have sucked since the Snyder era began.

The evidence that so many people who once accepted the facts on global warming have now un-accepted them, indicates, as the Economists’ correspondent says, “that people are busy at work promoting ignorance.”

I suppose it can be expected and permitted in a democracy that those wealthy individuals and institutions who have a huge fixed investment in the sources of pollution and greenhouse gases should expend a lot of money on various attempts to muddy the scientific waters with regards to the facts of global warming. But these attempts have always been transparent nonsense.

What should be disturbing is that it appears that a distinct majority of the party in power in the House of Representatives, and many of the governorships and legislatures in this country has accepted as facts and are enacting policies based on a pack of lies. Lies that are as easily disproved as by looking at the scoreboard and seeing 59-28.

Facts being stubborn things, those conclusions could not be ignored forever and as more mature hands took charge, climate change was officially included as a security threat in the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review. The QDR concludes that changing weather patterns “may act as an accelerant of instability or conflict, placing a burden to respond on civilian institutions and militaries around the world.”

Aerial view of flooding in Pakistan's Nowshera district. (AFP via news.com.au)

Whether the cause is global warming or not, more weather-driven disruptions are occurring, such as drought-driven wildfires in Russia and a recent drought in Mexico that may add millions to the numbers seeking to immigrate to the US.

Despite the localized chilly weather last winter, 2010 is going to be the hottest year ever all over the world. Whether one wants to believe in global warming or not and whether one thinks that it is driven by human activity or not is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Sure, a stalwart skeptic might say, “This is just a bad year.” Or, “Globalized media just means that we hear about all the little things where before they might not have made the news.”

Hancher Auditorium in Iowa City was flooded out in 2008 and has been condemned. (Photo: Lisa Peperkorn)

Mmkay. But what happens if it happens again next year and the next? This is the third year in a row we have had major flooding on several Iowa rivers. Places where there were once parks, housing and commercial development on the banks of the Raccoon River in Des Moines and the Iowa River in Iowa City are now basically unusable flood plains. The facts on the ground are getting pretty hard to ignore.

Jesus, I’ve had like ten people make some snide remark about the recent cold snap and global warming in the last week. Yes, it has been quite cold here. But it has been even hotter in the summer. In fact, the ratio of record highs to record lows has never been higher. See below graph from the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

And another thing… Notice how much rain and snow we’ve been getting the last couple of years. This last December set records across the state for snowfall. In fact, Iowa and the Upper Midwest have been getting hotter and wetter. According to NOAA records, the average annual precipitation in Iowa was 34.03 inches in the 1971 – 2000 period versus 33.11 for 1961 – 1990 and 32.09 for 1951 – 1980. And changing in weather patterns is something to be expected according to most climatology models.

I guess if I had to pick between a hotter and dryer Iowa and a hotter and wetter, I’d take the latter. So, climate change throws us a bone.

But, there had to be a but.

Ashford’s parent company, Bridgepoint Education, Inc, had its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange on April 15. (Ticker: BPI) . This is an important development for the community but there was no coverage of this by the local press.

Several years ago I mused on whether for-profit, online universities were a sustainable business. The crux of my argument was that there is probably an optimal enrollment size where student achievement, satisfaction and retention are in a good equilibrium with profits. Trying to scale to large will lead to a drop in quality of education product, lessening student satisfaction and retention and thus leading to a nasty churn rate and problems with student loans. A conservative business plan would be to strive for an enrollment level close to that profit-performance equilibrium and then use process improvement to wring efficiency and higher profits as well as modest enrollment growth. This would allow the company to pay consistent stock dividends over long periods and encourage shareholders to hold onto BPI stock long-term.

The fact that Bridgepoint made no secret of its plans to take the company public just deepened my worries. We still live with an investment model that values constant growth in stock value over consistent profits and dividends The pressures on Bridgepint management for quarterly and annual performance stock price gains will drive the company to scale up and up.

Similar pressures led the University of Phoenix — from which many of BPI’s founding members begain their careers in for-profit education — to pay a $9.8 milion fine for fraudulent recruiting practices to the US Department of Education in 2004.

This was all in the back of my mind then when I and other members of the business community took the guided tour of the call center two Wednesdays ago. The tour was conducted by two of the human resources and public relations staff at Ashford. Among the questions asked by another tour member one was rather pointed and to the point: What is your student retention and graduation rate?

I have to paraphrase the reply because I was not taking notes but I remember it well for its shocking lack of knowledge, candor or both. “We are currently calculating those figures, so I don’t have them for you. But they are good.”

My personal opinion is that unless the person conducting the guide was tremendously uninformed about her company that the answer had to be a bald-faced lie. There is just no way not to have those figures, even if they are not the most current, in one’s mind. They are the meat-and-potatoes, the be-all and end-all of the business. It simply wasn’t credible that she simply wouldn’t know. Later I discussed this with a couple of members of the tour group and they expressed a similar opinion.

The obvious conclusion — other than the speaker didn’t know what she was talking about, an option I’m certainly not completely discounting either — is that the company doesn’t want the locals to know.

None if this should be construed to think that I think there is a grand conspiracy going on. Only this. The citizens of Clinton should keep it firmly in their minds that Ashford University is no longer our beloved old Mount St. Claire/Franciscan College. It is run by a publicly traded company headquartered half a continent away in San Diego, CA. It will do whatever it thinks necessary to maximize shareholder value. That is its one and only reason for being. To the extent that Ashford University is a good corporate citizen in this area is a function of the company’s financial success and growth strategy. No more, no less.

His latest project is a collaboration with alternative dalrings, Sparklehorse, and featuredsa Who’s Who of guest artists: The Flaming Lips, Iggy Pop The Shins, and the Pixies’ Frank Black. The album is entitled Dark Night of the Soul,. It ships in a delixue case with a 50 page booklet of photos by filmmaker, David Lynch, of Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, and my personal favorite, Wild At Heart.

The record is amazing. It’s not really my cup of tea style-wise. A bit too broody and slow for my taste. I’m mostly an up-tempo kind of guy. Despite that though I can recognize great songwriting and producing when I hear it. And “Dark Night of the Soul” brings the goods.

So here is the technology transformation bit: An as-yet unspecified “contractual dispute” with his label, EMI has led to the label refusing to release the album commercially.

Danger Mouse’s solution? Set up a site where fans can purchase the David Lynch booklet, CD cover and a blank, recordable CD for $50. Then tell fans to go find the music on the Internet any way they can. Hint: Bit Torrent and Pirate Bay.

There are two epigrams that date from the Early Days of the Internet (say, 1998). One is: Information wants to be free. The other is: The Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it. You don’t hear people talk like that anymore. but that doesn’t mean that those things aren’t true.

The Recording Industry As We Know It™, and its twin sister Commercial Radio™ have about three to five years left to live. As soon as broadband wireless service (e.g. WiFi, 3G/4G cellular, WiMAX) becomes more or less ubiquitous, their customers are going to scatter like a school of fish chased by dolphins.

Why would anyone listen to the latest dreck from Christina Aguilera or to Boston for the billionth time when they could just listen to whatever they wanted streamed from their own music collection, or to a niche Internet based “radio” station that serves up the kind of music they like, or to Internet stations recommended by a friend on Facebook?

The large record labels are becoming increasingly irrelevant to many musicians as their reason for being amounts to a way to ship lots of bit of shiny, silver plastic. But digital downloads are steadily eating the market for CDs. Sales of CD’s have been down for years. Purchased digital downloads are largely replacing them. The problem is, you can’t mark up a digital download 80% like you can a bit of shiny, silver plastic. The margins on downloads are minuscule, like 2 percent. Two percent times several million is still money. It’s just not hot-and-cold running cocaine and hookers kind of money, if you know what I mean.

More and more band make their money on the road, doing the hard work of touring. This fact is seen in the increasingly consolidated ownership of large music venues and the possible merger between the world’s largest ticket broker, TicketMaster and the world’s largest venue and tour management company, Live Nation. Can you say anti-trust?

But, as Danger Mouse shows, there are a million ways to skin a buck from a market in fragments. None of them have anything to do with the Recording Industry As We Know It™.