Yawn

Here are 40 facts about sleep...and the fact that you're reading this means you may be sleep-deprived.

[HT: reddit ]

Sneezing Video

My co-workers know my germophobic ways. One was sick today and stayed home and out of gratitude I sent flowers and bought her a Corvette.

That's why they won't be surprised when I whip out this humorous video at the next staff meeting.

[HT: Neatorama ]

Environmentalism More Hip Than Hippie

From a sustainability point of view, a blog seems highly superior to a book. After all, books consume paper. Timber! Toxic metals and solvents from the inks seep into the environment. Not good. Books require container ships run on fossil fuels to ferry them around the globe, and often arrive in oversize, plastic-bubble-stuffed packages from Amazon.com. Bad and just plain wrong.

But take another look at that blog -- on your computer, which itself generated no small amount of chemical waste to produce. Each component was manufactured in a different country, requiring ample fuel to bring it all together. In three years it'll be left for dead at the dump, leaking its own noxious brew into the soil. Ugh.

Book or blog? Paper or plastic? Beef or chicken? After reading Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century, a book based on the popular blog, it's difficult to look at anything in the same way again. Every banal choice becomes freighted with the future of the planet.

Read the rest of Jenn Shreve’s review here.


Also check out: Tech Central Station has an interview with Bjorn Lomborg, the skeptical environmentalist.

[HT: Instapundit ]

Our NATO "Allies"

Still another story on the failure of some NATO countries, France and Germany in particular, to commit sufficient troops to combat zones in Afghanistan.

I don't think the leaders of those nations have the slightest sense of how much they have alienated the average American.

On the other hand, the sacrifices and friendship of nations such as Britain, Australia, Poland, and Denmark won't be forgotten.

Lileks Does Lantern

James Lileks must be preparing to teach a deconstructionist literature class on The Green Lantern.

Yes, his ward is on drugs. It's such a shock he doesn't even notice how someone shot a flare gun at the back of his head. Does anyone have a ward anymore? It was common in '71 for courts to award custody of minor boys to unrelated single men who run around at night in tights shooting criminals with arrows, but I think that’s changed. I blame judicial activists.

DonorsChoose

Some sites (such as this one) should be better known and here's one to check out:

DonorsChoose permits you to donate as little as ten bucks to help fund a teacher's class project. You get to pick the project and, well, Cool Tools has the details. Click here.

The Power Game

Despite all of the books and articles about teamwork and collegial leadership, there are times when a supervisor must exert power.

Don’t let being collegial dilute your power. Asking for advice is simply that. When you ask others for advice, you have not abdicated authority. You are simply getting another opinion. Don’t let them trick you into thinking otherwise.

If you have to confront a snake, play the perception card. If a team member is disrespectful or insubordinate, confront the person. The person will probably deny it, but the matter should not end there. (Confessions occur all the time in Perry Mason episodes but seldom in workplace confrontations.) Your response should be, “That is how I perceive your behavior and since I am your supervisor and the author of your performance appraisals, you’d better start working on changing that perception.”

Don’t let others browbeat you. The person who shouts or says abusive things should be stopped at that point and you should calmly state the ground rules. You’ll be glad to hear out the person but basic courtesy and respect must be given or else there will be no discussion.

Don’t get team-played. If confronted by a sizable group that appears to be more of a lynch mob than people who are sincerely seeking redress, note that you will be glad to meet with a representative. If they don’t pick one, tell them to do so. No representative, no meeting.

Beware of stacked decks. Watch out for rules that favor the other side. Either ignore or replace them or counter with rules that favor your side. Remember that the very act of participating in a process is a concession. You should always determine if you’d be in a more powerful position by withdrawing.

Don’t have weak allies. It’s better to have one valiant ally than 500 wimpy ones.

Cover your back. Know all possible avenues of attack and have them covered. If surprised, buy time so you can collect your thoughts.

Penalize negative behavior. If you want a matter resolved promptly, it should be clear that delay will produce a worse result for your opponent, not a better one.

Remember a major rule of negotiations: The side that cares least controls. If you find yourself caring too much about an outcome, you are indirectly giving power to your opponents. Change your attitude. And always be ready to walk away from the table.

Life Story

American Heritage tells the story of Life (magazine, that is):

In 1936 Luce was already a formidable magazine publisher, having started Time in 1923 and Fortune in 1930. He knew that a wider use of photographs was helping tabloids like the New York Daily News attract readers, and Time editors were themselves including plenty of pictures. Luce thought a magazine that gathered the best images of breaking news, along with visuals on the arts, show business, and the human experience, would be a hit. For $92,000 he bought a moribund humor magazine called Life in order to use its name.

Magazine editors, partial to the written word, had always seen photos and drawings as secondary to text. Life reversed the notion, relying on pictures buttressed only by explanatory captions.

Don't Recline

Like window-seat lovers and aisle-seat devotees, travelers are split into two philosophical seat-recline camps -- recliners who believe they are entitled to a little more comfort (and perhaps sleep) versus upright travelers who prefer to use their tray tables for reading or working. Battles over cabin space can get nasty, from annoying kicking of the reclined seat to heated arguments. Many tall travelers admit to trying to send a message through a seatback by repeatedly bumping and kneeing the reclining passenger in front, or holding a newspaper up high so it brushes the head of the recliner.

Read the entire Wall Street Journal article here.

My take: Given the fact that airline coach sections resemble cattle pens, unless the seat behind you is unoccupied, it is impolite to recline. I’m 6’2” and when the person in front reclines, it is extremely uncomfortable. And in many years of flying, I’ve never had anyone ask permission before reclining a seat.

[HT: Buzzmachine ]

The Man with Two Briefcases

One of the most interesting juggling acts in the business world:

Carlos Ghosn, who's heading both Nissan and Renault.

Will he be getting a third briefcase?

Dowry Killings

It seems like every other day produces a story resembling something out of the 13th century. This article on dowry killings in India is one of them.

The largest prison in Delhi, Tihar Jail, has a "mother-in-law" cell block, currently home to roughly 120 women, some of whom are serving 20-year sentences for murdering their daughters-in-law. The majority of these crimes stem from disputes over dowry: A bride whose dowry payments are viewed as inadequate is burned to death by her in-laws or husband, the cause of death listed as "kitchen accident." According to India's National Crime Record Bureau, one dowry death is reported every 77 minutes. The bureau recorded 7,026 dowry deaths in 2005 alone.

Since India opened up to foreign investment in 1990, the country has seen a rise in dowry-related violence alongside its economic boom. Dowry deaths surged from 400 a year in the mid-1980s to 5,800 a year in the mid-1990s, according to a 2001 report in Time magazine. The fact that more people are coming forward to report the crimes accounts for part of this increase, but official figures are still thought to reflect a mere fraction of the total number of dowry killings.

How Generous are Americans?

John Stossel examines Americans, charity, and a book that is getting a lot of attention:

After the Asian Tsunami two years ago, the U.S. government pledged $900 million to tsunami relief. American individuals donated $2 billion -- three times what government gave -- in food, clothing, and cash. Private charities could barely keep up with the donations.

Americans' preference for voluntary contributions over forced giving through government is one way in which Americans differ from other people. (Don't think it's forced? See what happens if you don't pay your taxes.)

Syracuse University professor Arthur Brooks's new book, "Who Really Cares", points out that Americans give more than the citizens of any other country. Individually, Americans give seven times more money than people in Germany and 14 times more than Italians give. We also volunteer more.

The Putin Problem

Leon Aron, writing in Commentary, on what Putin wants:

The ideology behind the Putin restoration rests in the first place on a distinct interpretation of recent Russian history. When Putin came into office, the fall of the Soviet Union and the reforms of the late 1980’s and 90’s were generally accepted as the consequences of a free, if imperfectly implemented, choice of the Russian people. Today, that crucial decade-and-a-half is seen in a very different light. Many key policies from that time are now viewed as shameful mistakes, deeply harmful to the country’s interests and committed by leaders who were at best naïve and weak, at worst venal and perfidious—if not, in fact, participants in a vast plot perpetrated by outsiders intent on weakening the Soviet (and then Russian) state. As Putin himself famously declared, the collapse of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.”

Key postulates of Russian national political culture—so magnificently and, many of us thought, permanently banished by Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin—have now returned in force. It is once again respectable to say that the glory of Russia is the state, that what is good for the state is necessarily good for the country, and that the strengthening of the state is society’s primary objective. Hence, the state functionary (naturally conceived as a model of enlightenment, probity, and public spirit) is today considered a far more effective agent of progress than a free press (so sensationalist and profit-seeking), the voter (so uneducated and fickle), the judge (a bribe-taker), or, heaven forbid, the private entrepreneur.

Quote of the Day

The trouble with being punctual is that nobody's there to appreciate it.

- Franklin P. Jones

Patriotic Wildflowers

Christopher Gray reflects on flying the flag:

They sprang up in a day, like April wildflowers. Big ones, small ones, expensive ones, cheap ones, linen, cotton, polyester—there were even color printouts from the Web. Five years later, the American flags that covered the city in red, white, and blue have almost all faded away.

I had long suspended a flag on the wall outside my office, between the two windows—I loved how the wind would lift it up, splashing the room with red and blue. So I was a touch proprietary about the flags that popped out after 9/11—it fits my sinful pride to feel superior to all the Patriot-Come-Latelys. But I was also happy to see them, as if in one of Childe Hassam’s World War I paintings—not just on Fifth Avenue, but across the city. To judge from photographs from the 1940s, New York had a hundred times the flags displayed in 2001 than flew during the “Good War.”

I had never liked flag wavers. But I began to respond to the flag after working up-country in Nigeria in 1975. When I returned to the U.S., I realized that we were so rich. Not money so much as infrastructure: courts, roads, sewage, telephone lines, health systems, and, especially, a tradition of fairness and freedom—what a privilege to live here! This vegetarian hippie kissed the ground at JFK.

First Names and Success

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but would a businessperson without a popular first name be as likely to savor the smell of success in the executive suite?

Maybe, because success is mainly merit-based, but a common name doesn't hurt, according to research by Lee McPheters, senior associate dean with the W. P. Carey School of Business. To his surprise, McPheters found that six names accounted for 35 percent of the highest-paid executives in Phoenix. The names are, in order: Robert, John, Steve, Richard, Donald and William.

Read the rest here.

Unfortunately, the Frank Zappa family names Moon Unit and Dweezel did not make the list.

[HT: BusinessPundit ]

Diplomacy Update

Back by popular demand:

Leighton Davis’s Responses to People on the 6 Train That Hopefully Convey My Feelings in a Polite Way.

Defending Civilization

Historian Victor Davis Hanson on our greatest vulnerability:

But our newest foes of Reason are not the enraged Athenian democrats who tried and executed Socrates. And they are not the Christian zealots of the medieval church who persecuted philosophers of heliocentricity. Nor are they Nazis who burned books and turned Western science against its own to murder millions en masse.

No, the culprits are now more often us. In the most affluent, and leisured age in the history of Western civilization--never more powerful in its military reach, never more prosperous in our material bounty--we have become complacent, and then scared of the most recent face of barbarism from the primordial extremists of the Middle East.

What would a beleaguered Socrates, a Galileo, a Descartes, or Locke believe, for example, of the moral paralysis in Europe? Was all their bold and courageous thinking--won at such a great personal cost--to allow their successors a cheap surrender to religious fanaticism and the megaphones of state-sponsored fascism?

Read it all here.

Enjoy That Holiday!

A Rasmussen Reports poll (story via Adfreak) indicates that 69 percent of adults prefer the greeting "Merry Christmas" while only 23 percent prefer "Happy Holidays."

"Happy Holidays" has always struck me as something cooked up by a bureaucrat whose job is to drain as much meaning as possible out of a phrase.

Has it ever evoked a warm feeling in any recipient?

As a public service, here is the real meaning behind many "Happy Holidays" greetings:

(a) "I am giving you the politically correct, corporately approved, greeting for a certain season which shall be unnamed. Wink."
(b) "Hey, it sounds better than 'Enjoy Whatever Holiday.'"
(c) "I am a aficionado of the bland."
(d) "I regard you as so fragile and weak that if I say 'Merry Christmas' or a greeting for any other religious holiday you will break into little pieces."

Spain's Boat People

Writing in The Weekly Standard, Christopher Caldwell examines Spain’s immigration problem. An excerpt:

Spanish laws towards foreigners are generous, and punctilious about human rights. They also invite chicanery. You cannot detain an immigrant for more than 40 days unless you charge him with a crime, and you cannot deport an immigrant unless you know where he comes from. If he can keep his mouth shut for a month or so, or if he can mis direct the bureaucracy until his 40 days have elapsed, he's in like Flynn. A common way to throw authorities off balance is to pretend to be from somewhere else. Since Spain does not have an extradition treaty with strife-torn Ivory Coast, for instance, many of the Senegalese who have arrived by boat in recent weeks have claimed to be from there (even though the two countries speak mutually exclusive sets of African languages). In October, Pakistan demanded that a half dozen boat people (out of hundreds taken off a rusty old freighter and "repatriated" there) be sent back to Spain. They turned out to be from Indian Kashmir, not Pakistanis at all. You have to be pretty unlucky to get repatriated. Of the 30,000 Senegalese who have arrived this year, only 4,000 have been sent back. The others are put on flights to the Spanish mainland, with an expulsion order in their pocket. Such orders are virtually never enforced. For a migrant, this is roughly a 7-out-of-8 chance of settling in Spain indefinitely: excellent odds.

Draining the Swamp at Siemens

The corruption scandal at Siemens: bribes, slush funds, and…decentralization?

The story from Spiegel:

In order to understand why the Munich-based multinational is so susceptible to corruption cases, it is necessary to go back to the large-scale restructuring that took place in 1989. The 15 divisions which were newly created at that time were given a considerable degree of autonomy, and they were also allowed to carry out financial transactions without supervision by the company's headquarters. The small central management enthroned above them was mainly responsible for company-wide issues, while also checking up on the newly created divisions.

The division heads learned to value this new-found freedom, and apparently dipped generously into funds that Siemens maintained in order to make general payments in foreign countries. At that time, these expenses were disguised as consultant fees or commissions, and they were even tax deductible.

Quote of the Day

Cowardice does not make you safe. It makes you a safe target.

- Dale Amon

WWI Photos

Some unusual color photos from another world.

You'll have to move the screen laterally to see all of them.

[HT: Reddit ]

Danger, Will Robinson!

Well, the important things go drifting away into the fog of memory but you can probably remember a surprising number of the 100 greatest catchphrases from television.

[HT: Adfreak ]

Paycheck Discrimination: A Big Case

Linda Greenhouse, writing in The New York Times, on the Ledbetter case:

Is each new paycheck, reflecting a salary lower than it would have been without the initial discrimination, a recurring violation that sets the [statute of limitations] clock running again? Or does the passage of time, without fresh acts of intentional discrimination, render the initial injury a nonevent in the eyes of the law?...

[T]he E.E.O.C. ... has long applied what is known as the “paycheck accrual rule,” under which each pay period of uncorrected discrimination is seen as a fresh incident of discrimination. So although the 180-day limit applies to discrete actions like a discriminatory refusal to hire or failure to promote, it does not, in the view of the federal agency charged with administering the statute, prevent lawsuits for the continuing effects of past discrimination in pay.

Further discussion of the Ledbetter case here and here and here.

[HT: Althouse ]

Paradox of Military Technology

Max Boot, author of War Made New, on “The Paradox of Military Technology”:

“Irregular” attacks carried out by tribes, clans, or other non-state actors are as old as warfare itself; they long predate the development of modern armed forces and the nation-state. The religious fanaticism which animates so many of today’s terrorists and guerrillas is equally ancient. But technological advances have made such attacks far more potent than in the distant past. The progeny of the second industrial revolution—assault rifles, machine guns, mortars, rocket launchers, landmines, explosives—long ago spread to the remotest corners of the globe. Fighters who a century ago might have made do with swords and muskets now have access to cheap and reliable weapons such as the AK-47 capable of spewing out 100 bullets a minute. More advanced technologies, from handheld missiles to chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, give even a small group of insurgents the ability or potential ability to mete out far more destruction than entire armies could unleash just a century ago. And thanks to modern transportation and communications infrastructure—such as jumbo jets, the Internet, and cell phones—insurgents have the capability to carry out their attacks virtually anywhere in the world.

September 11 showed the terrifying possibilities of such unconventional warfare. It is easy to imagine that in the future super-terrorists will be able to kill hundreds of thousands, even millions, with effective weapons of mass destruction. All of the materials, as well as the know-how needed to craft such devices, are all too readily available.

The proliferation of nuclear weapons has the greatest ability to trump U.S. military hegemony. The atomic bomb is more than sixty years old. It belongs to an age of rotary-dial telephones and fin-winged cars. It is a miracle that it has not been used by maniac dictators or political radicals since 1945, but that streak won’t last forever. And while information age technology offers a reasonable chance of stopping a nuclear-tipped missile, there is much less probability of stopping a terrorist with a nuclear suitcase. There is little in theory to prevent al Qaeda from carrying out its oft-expressed desire to create an “American Hiroshima.” In the words of Eugene Habiger, a retired four-star general who once ran antinuclear terror programs for the Department of Energy, “it is not a matter of if; it’s a matter of when.”

Read his entire essay here.

[HT: Arts & Letters Daily ]

A Simple Pleasure

A dated but wise article from Claudia Rosett on the pleasures of reading aloud:

One of the best memories I have is of a freezing afternoon in Chicago, years ago, when my family, home for the holidays, ransacked the bookshelves to read aloud the stories, poems or passages we found most beautiful and my father choked up while trying to read the closing lines of "Charlotte's Web," by E.B. White. It is the story of a spider who saves a pig; more than that, it is a tale of mortality and abiding love: "It is not often someone comes along who is a true friend" was part of what he read aloud. It was the first time I had seen my father cry.

Spike Who?

Terry l. Woodard had just graduated from Morehouse College. A classmate named Shelton Lee asked him to pony up a few thousand bucks for Lee's film project. Short on cash, Woodard turned Lee down. What a mistake. You know the young filmmaker as Spike Lee. He scraped up enough money to make the 1986 hit She's Gotta Have It. A triumph for a film not made by a big studio and costing only $175,000, the flick grossed $7.1 million at the domestic box office, and its investors continue to receive profit checks. A 20th-anniversary DVD of the sex comedy has been planned, but no release date is set. Along the way Lee has produced 22 other films that did a combined $433 million at U.S. box offices.

Read the rest of the Forbes article on investing in films by clicking here.

[HT: Commerce Bucket ]

Background Checks and Diversity

Via Workplace Prof Blog, a study revealing that employers who conduct background checks are more likely to hire black applicants.

Recruitment Problems Checklist

A checklist of significant recruitment problems:

- Rushed selection process

- Unclear job requirements

- Insufficient outreach

- Recruitment outside of the personnel system

- Failure to post openings

- Tapping successors

- Vague selection criteria

- Untrained interviewers

- Inappropriate questions

- Failure to provide reasonable accommodation of disabled applicants

- No weighting of interview questions

- Poor setting for the interview

- Insufficient follow-up questions

- Failure to check with former employers

- Use of hiring quotas

- Failure to notify unsuccessful contenders of the selection decision

- Failure to provide the new employee with a substantive orientation of the job.

The Air War Against Nazi Germany

Fredric Smoler reviews Donald L. Miller’s Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany (Simon & Schuster, 688 pages, $35):

Did it work? It is now fashionable to assert, with very selective use of partial evidence, that strategic bombing was and will always be a failure, an assertion that gains a little force from the way bombing’s enthusiasts tend to overstate their case. After the horrors of World War I, strategic bombing’s enthusiasts claimed that their method of making war would be swift and decisive. Some of them also thought it would be relatively humane, some that it would win wars without land forces being involved at all. Most thought that we could bomb with pinpoint precision by daylight, without fighter escorts, and at relatively trivial cost in American lives. None of this turned out to be true. Strategic bombing was nonetheless for a long time the only way the Western Allies could make war on Adolf Hitler, and in the long run it was a devastatingly effective weapon, one that made a decisive contribution to destroying the Third Reich, and the intensity of arguments to the contrary seem directly proportional to ignorance of modern scholarship on the war. Miller knows this, and he is illuminating about the much-misquoted and seldom-read Strategic Bombing Survey conducted after the war.

The judgment of modern specialist historians, which Miller agrees with, is that strategic bombing worked, although not in the way intended, which is to say either alone or by destroying German morale. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, strategic bombing almost certainly did do appalling damage to German morale, but the demoralized subjects of an efficient tyranny became more passive and more dependent on that tyranny. Strategic bombing made its very significant contribution to victory in other ways. It forced the Luftwaffe’s fighters to stay over Germany, where American escort fighters destroyed them. That made the advances by the Allied armies much cheaper; in some cases, it made them possible. It diverted vast German resources into air defense, and by the end of the war it paralyzed German war production. The premier historian of the air war, Richard Overy, says that in 1944 the effects of the bombing deprived front-line German forces of 50 percent of the equipment and ammunition they would otherwise have received.

Turn Down the Heat

2Blowhards is analyzing chocolate art, one of most neglected areas of talent since black velvet portraits of Elvis.

Judging the Book by Your Cover

Penguin has published some books with blank covers so customers can design their own.

[HT: kottke ]

The Enemy's Plan Book

Michael Novak on what the Islamists have learned:

What we have discovered in Iraq is the weakest link in the ability of the United States to sustain military operations overseas. That link is the U.S. media. They are Islamists' best friends.

Experience shows that the mainstream press of the United States is alienated from the U.S. military. In addition, the American press is extremely vulnerable to anti-U.S. propaganda. Thus, the American public will be fed nearly everything that foreign adversaries--our band of brothers--wish to feed it about the war. Therefore, I write: Maxim # 1: To defeat America, impose upon the imagination of its media your own storyline.

Even if you can muster only 10,000 soldiers over the entire countryside of Iraq, paint the narrative like this: The Americans are irresistible occupiers, and yet they cannot prevent small (even individual) acts of destruction. Daily, unrelenting acts of destruction demonstrate that chaos rules. The American strategy, and the American storyline of the war, are invalidated by continuing chaos, highly visible, every single day, on worldwide television. The new dominating story is that the Americans cannot win.

Quote of the Day

The world breaks everyone, and afterwards many are strong in the broken places.

- Ernest Hemingway

Smothering Customers

James Lileks gives a tip that should be posted in every car dealership:

Today's how-to hint: driving off customers. It's simple. Smother them. I got a call the other day from the fellow who sold me my car. He's a great guy, and as long as his conversation doesn't begin with, "Say, you haven't noticed your skin sloughing off the bone when you run the heater, have you? Napalm got into the production line somehow. Damndest thing," I'm glad to hear from him. But it was the day after Thanksgiving, and I'd spent the previous day driving home into the night, and I didn't sleep until 2 a.m. He called at 8:30 a.m. on a post-holiday no-school sleep-in day. The only reason I want my dealership to call at 8:30 a.m. is because the GPS system has become self-aware and is targeting my model with death-lasers from space. And even then, I'm thinking 8:45 is more appropriate.

O.J. Book Titles

The O.J. Simpson book deal is mercifully gone but the list of possible book titles lives on.

Oops

“The streets were empty. There was darkness everywhere. Vultures perched on trees, and we all dressed in black hoods, carrying our scythes. But then you came.”

An editorial in the Sacramento Bee, sarcastically responding to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's recent comment that "Sacramento was death—until I got there."



Source: Sacramento Bee
[HT: Governing ]

Cab Stuff

One man abandoned his drunken girlfriend asleep and told the cabbie that he was leaving her as a tip. Another driver was lumbered with a man wearing only underpants. Other taxi drivers in the capital have reported finding a machinegun, an antique telescope and a bag of diamonds worth £100,000 on the rear seats of their cabs.

London emerged as the quirkiest and most forgetful place from the survey of 2,000 cabbies in 11 cities around the world.

The research was primarily aimed at assessing the quantities of business equipment lost in taxis daily. The survey suggested that, in the past six months alone, 54,872 mobile phones, 4,718 handheld computers, 3,179 laptops and 923 computer memory sticks were left in London cabs.

Find the rest on what gets left in London’s cabs here.

NY Times Books

As the end of the year approaches, get ready for the traditional "Most Notable" lists.

Here's The New York Times Book Review's list of the 100 notable books of 2006.

[I read a lot of nonfiction and fiction but the Niall Ferguson book is the only one on my reading list.]

[HT: kottke ]

Starbucks and Ethiopia

An issue to watch: Starbucks, Oxfam, and Ethiopian coffee.

Issues in India

Two surprising issues that might harm India's economic growth: HIV and drinking water.

The Passive-Aggressive Team Member

Over the years, Morgan been on several of my teams. A self-described team player, he (or she, for that matter) would quickly deny that any of these actions are negative or aggressive, but you be the judge. These are some of Morgan's favorite practices:

- Not giving a team member a "heads up" about a disagreement and then sandbagging the person with a collection of negative comments at the team meeting.

- Keeping silent during discussions of various options, then later badmouthing the option adopted by the team.

- Losing research material that supports an option he opposes.

- Calling team meetings and somehow "forgetting" to invite potential dissenters from his preferred course of action.

- Researching only one side of an issue and presenting it as a thorough study.

- Placing the option he favors between two strawman alternatives.

- Pretending to consult others on a course of action that is already in motion.

- Stacking subcommittees with his cronies.

- Leaking confidential information to stir up opposition to team proposals.

- Routinely making commitments to others and then ignoring them.

Stonehenge as Healing Center

An interesting new theory on Stonehenge: that its stones were thought to have healing powers and it was the Lourdes of its day.

This may make more sense than the ancient astronomical site theory and the study of the remains that have been unearthed has a certain "CSI" tone.

What Constitutes Success?

Some food for thought:

Which of the following people would you consider to be an overall success? Would any of them stand out above the others?

Mary has a graduate degree from Harvard, is an executive earning $300,000 a year, speaks four languages, and yet, in job after job, is hated by most of her colleagues.

Luther's goal was to become company president but he crossed some powerful people and was shunted to a side job. His family life is fine but he has hit a professional dead-end. He earns $70,000 a year, is twice as capable as people earning three times as much, and is well-respected in his professional niche.

Karen had the grades and ability to go very far, but she only wanted a relatively easy job with good benefits so she could pursue her true love: oil painting.

Roberto's wife is the main breadwinner. Roberto stays home, takes care of the children, and teaches a night class several days a week at the community college.

Carol describes herself as "married to the job." She travels on business for two weeks out of every month, has a cat that is cared for by neighbors when she's not around, is a meticulous dresser (she spends a sizable amount of money on shoes), and volunteers once a month at a shelter for battered women.

Kim got out of prison two years ago after serving four years for selling heroin, has since worked as a counselor in a drug recovery center, and has had two articles published in religious magazines on her experiences.

Carl works as a custodian. He dropped out of high school, later got a GED, has been married for 30 years, and has four children, each of whom has graduated from college. Carl's passion is fishing.

Quote of the Day

For some people, it's always 1968.

- Glenn Reynolds

Religious Symbols: British Airways Makes a Turn

Workplace Prof Blog on the decision by British Airways to reverse its position and let an employee wear a necklace with a cross.

Power Desk?

There are various versions of power desks.

The conventional, in which the technology is hidden in the desk, and the unconventional, where the desk looks like it's going to impale your opponents.

Rock Pillows

I could use some of these cushions. They're the perfect feature for a cutting edge office.

P.S. A couple of these babies for the lobby!

Wrong Target?

Charles Krauthammer thinks that Borat went after a familiar target and it wasn’t anti-Semitism:

With anti-Semitism reemerging in Europe and rampant in the Islamic world; with Iran acquiring the ultimate weapon of genocide and proclaiming its intention to wipe out the world's largest Jewish community (Israel); with America and, in particular, its Christian evangelicals the only remaining Gentile constituency anywhere willing to defend that besieged Jewish outpost -- is the American heartland really the locus of anti-Semitism? Is this the one place to go to find it?

Roots

American Heritage looks at the roots of Microsoft:

Gates already stood out at Lakeside, his Seattle private school. The son of a wealthy, high-powered lawyer, he was the smartest kid in class, and he knew it. Obsessive and fiercely competitive, he had a photographic memory and a knack for math and science and would chortle at students who failed to master physics concepts in one try. But he didn’t understand true passion until he started eighth grade in 1968. Over the summer Lakeside had bought a teletype machine linked by a phone line to a mainframe computer downtown. Gates soon became one of a cluster of proto-techies who jostled to spend all their free time punching BASIC commands onto rolls of yellow paper tape.

Frequently a chubby sophomore stood at the teletype breathing down Gates’s neck. His name was Paul Allen. He and Gates became fast friends in the newly christened “computer room.” “We both were fascinated with the different possibilities of what you could do with computers,” Allen recalled. “It was a vast area of knowledge we were trying to absorb.” But as much fun as he had programming ticktacktoe and lunar landing games, Gates, a born capitalist, saw more lucrative possibilities. He, Allen, and two other classmates formed the Lakeside Programmers Group in the fall of 1970. Their sole mission: to make money. “I was the mover,” Gates later said. “I was the guy who said, ‘Let’s call the real world and try to sell something to it.’”

The first opportunity came while he was still in eighth grade.

Seven Virtues of Procrastination

1. He who hesitates is sometimes saved.
2. Some problems solve themselves.
3. Bold action does not always equal wise action.
4. Delay permits coordination and coordination can mean greater support.
5. Procrastinators learn to resist peer pressure.
6. Many deadlines are artificial.
7. Problems become clearer with age.

Do You Have a Spy Personality?

The CIA is using personality tests - well, sort of - and this article tells of their humorous bent.

Rhapsody in Brilliance

Their first musical, A Dangerous Maid, enjoyed modest success in 1921; so did For Goodness Sake in 1922. Neither production featured any hits; that sort of triumph would wait another two years. By then, George had established himself as America’s first crossover musician, linking the raucous nightclub and the decorous concert hall in something he called Rhapsody in Blue. Conductor Paul Whiteman remembered the audience at Aeolian Hall on the epochal afternoon of February 12, 1924. In addition to Sergei Rachmaninoff, Victor Herbert, and Jascha Heifetz, it included “vaudevillians, concert managers come to have a look at the novelty, Tin Pan Alleyites, opera stars, flappers, all mixed up higgledy-piggledy.” That motley group reflected Gershwin’s rhapsody, played by the composer himself. From the first clarinet glissando to the fluent chords in the middle to the broad melodic finale, Rhapsody in Blue enthralled the audience. All of haute New York seemed caught in the skeins of George’s music. It suggested the rhythms of black jazz, the melancholy strains of Yiddish folk melodies, the kinetic force of Manhattan in the Speakeasy Era, as well as the art of the Old Masters.

The crowd went wild, and even though a few critics carped at the composer’s use of “colored jazz music,” most were intrigued. The New York Herald critic was typical: “Mr. Gershwin will be heard from often, and one music lover earnestly hopes that he will keep to the field in which he is a free and independent creator, and not permit himself to be led away into the academic groves and buried in the shadows of ancient trees.”

Read the rest of Stefan Kanfer’s article on George and Ira Gershwin here.

Snake Charmers Protest

BHUBANESWAR: Snake charmers set loose scores of cobras on the Mahatma Gandhi Road near the state assembly on Sunday during a protest against the government, causing passers-by to maintain a safe distance.

Police moved in and directed the owners of the venomous snakes to put them inside their baskets as they are not allowed to display the reptiles in a public place.

A large number of snake charmers from Padmakesharipur village on the city's outskirts, who have been hit by a government decision that serpents cannot be kept confined in private custody, staged the protest to demand that the ban on public shows be lifted.

Read the rest here.

[HT: Dave Barry ]

"You Disreputable Slimeball"

Law professor blogger Ann Althouse responding to a comment on her post on Andrew Sullivan’s criticism of Mormons:

Glenn Greenwald is such an idiot. Am I supposed to respond to this foolishness? Glenn, you moron, in case you didn't notice, Sullivan is mocking Mormons in general. That's what bothered me. I don't object to the word "Christianists" if it is used fairly to refer to something that is the equivalent of "Islamists." I use the word "religionists" myself. See here, here, here, and here. Words like this mean something and have a place. The key is to use them in the right place. I criticize Sullivan when he shows a hostility toward ordinary religious people who aren't trying to bully their way around the political world. There are distinctions to be made here. Why not take a little trouble to try to understand the person you are criticizing before you write, you disreputable slimeball? (And your writing is putrid.) [But I do love the pathetic jealousy of your post title.]

Wow, my responses are pretty calm compared to that.

Fat Assumptions

Dieting may be more dangerous than being overweight. A study challenges many of our assumptions about dieting and obesity. Excerpt:

One of the principal targets of the obesity crusaders has been the school vending machine. However, the banning of these machines and their stocks of snacks and sweets is very much at odds with the most recent science on children, junk food, and obesity. In 2004, a World Health Organisation study of 8,904 British pupils found that overweight children ate sweets less frequently than normal-weight children did. Children who ate larger amounts of junk food actually had less chance of being overweight.

One large-scale American study spent three years tracking almost 15,000 boys and girls aged between nine and 14 to investigate the links between body mass index and the consumption of fruit and vegetables. It found no correlation, and concluded that "the recommendation for consumption of fruit and vegetables may be well founded, but should not be based on a beneficial effect on weight regulation".

The parallel claim of an adult obesity epidemic is equally unsubstantiated. There has been significant weight gain among the very heaviest segment of the adult population. However, this has not been true of most of the individuals who are labelled overweight and obese, whose weights have only slightly increased. In America, it is true that there was a rapid increase in the number of overweight people in the early years of this decade: but only because the classification of what was "overweight" was reduced from those with a body mass index of 27 to those of 25. Overnight, previously normal weight people discovered they were overweight.

Quote of the Day

If you ain't got a choice, be brave.

- Western saying

Rule Britannia?

Will Great Britain break up?

Check out this article from The Telegraph. An excerpt:

A clear majority of people in both England and Scotland are in favour of full independence for Scotland, an ICM opinion poll for The Sunday Telegraph has found. Independence is backed by 52 per cent of Scots while an astonishing 59 per cent of English voters want Scotland to go it alone.

Books That Make a Difference

Writing in Tech Central Station Nick Schulz examines David Brooks's contention that there are no "big books" nowadays and gives a list of contenders.

Wal-Mart's Mexican Bank

Daniel Altman examines a new twist in globalization:

In the bad old days of globalization (some would say they’re still with us), companies from wealthy countries went abroad in search of looser regulations on the treatment of workers and the environment. Sweatshops and polluted water supplies ensued. But whoever thought a big business would leave the United States in search of a less stringent… banking code?

That’s what Wal-Mart is doing. The retailer plans to open a bank in Mexico to offer cheap accounts to underserved people, and presumably to anyone else who wants one. The Mexican government is allowing Wal-Mart to put branches in its stores, and it’s actually pleased that the company might spur some competition among local banks who’ve previously ignored potential working class customers.

Steyn Speaks

From an interview with Mark Steyn by The New Culture Forum:

NCF: Looking across now to France, with the Presidential election coming up. The Muslim population is actually far greater than in Britain. The country seems to believe that because it opposed the Iraq war, they will not be attacked. How do you see the situation there developing?

MS: I think the continental countries have particular problems. The idea that Mr Sarkozy can be France’s Reagan, or that Angela Merkel can be Germany’s Thatcher, I’ve never given much credence to, because the reality is that the German or French population are not yet in the situation that the British and the American electorates were at the end of the 70s. In other words, they have not yet accepted that the old way is kaput, and I think that, as far as the Germans and the French are concerned, yes it’s true that a lot of them think that there are far too many Muslims in their cities and they are getting pretty sick of the crime and all that, but they haven’t yet realised that one of the reason why they are in these situation is because of the unaffordable social programmes, welfare entitlements, the cradle-to-grave welfare, the paid vacations, the controlled job market and all the rest of it that’s created this situation.

If you are going to have immigration, at least you should have immigration from multiple sources. Once your immigration becomes overly dependent on a particular source then there’s a cultural component to it, effectively it becomes a demographic transformation. If your immigrants are drawn in equally from the two hundred countries on the planet, there is no cultural component to that issue. Once they become overwhelmingly drawn from one particular self-segregating demographic, there very much is.

Gates's View

Michael Barone looks at Secretary of Defense nominee Robert Gates’ book on the presidents and finds some interesting perspectives. An excerpt:

He served in the White House under four presidents: Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Bush. And, as deputy to William Casey and then William Webster, he had ready access to the Reagan White House. As a career civil servant, albeit one who rose rapidly and to very high ranks, Gates tends to see continuity between different administrations. He argues in his memoirs, for example, that many of Reagan's policies had their roots in the Carter administration, including the defense buildup and the stress on human rights: "Indeed, the secret that all five of the Presidents and their political advisers hid from the American public was the extraordinary continuity in U.S. dealings with the Soviet Union from administration to administration. Hidden because, regardless of philosophy, the public approach of challengers in our politics is usually to tear down rather than to promise to build upon the work of incumbents—especially if the incumbent is of the other party.

"In truth, the roots of Nixon's SALT negotiations and his strategic programs were, for the most part, in the Johnson administration. Ford embraced Nixon's détente until Soviet actions forced a change. Carter's human-rights campaign built on Ford's signature of the Helsinki Declaration. He continued all but one of Nixon's strategic weapons programs as well as, ultimately, Ford's approach to SALT. Reagan's strategic programs, covert confrontation with the Soviets in the Third World, economic pressures, eventual engagement on arms control, and attacks on the legitimacy of the Soviet government itself built on Carter's efforts in each arena—even though partisans of both Presidents would rather have their tongues turn black and fall out than admit this."

Tech's Drawbacks

I was thumbing through an article on how technology makes our lives easier and, being somewhat contrarian in such matters, immediately thought of ways in which it makes our lives more complicated. Some examples:

- The person who emails a question today probably expects a reply either today or tomorrow. In the past, a person would send a letter to you and not expect a reply for a week, maybe two. On the surface of that example, technology benefits the sender but not the recipient. On the other hand, if the rushed reply is of lower quality than one given after more thought, then technology hasn't helped either side.

- The person who sends an email to a mass of co-workers, then immediately discovers an error, has used a device that permits mistakes to be made more quickly.

- A Google-preserved mistake is forever. Old letters containing mistakes are sometimes tossed out.

- The use of cell phones creates the expectation that you can be reached anywhere at any moment. Sometimes you don't want to be reached.

Any others?

Wii Ad

Here's a pretty slick ad from Japan:

Two sales people introducing Americans to a video game system. Charming.

"Wii you like to play?"

[HT: Adrants ]

Top Books on PR

Michael Kempner lists his top five books on public relations.

I'd add Jerry Della Femina's book on advertising: From Those Wonderful Folks Who Brought You Pearl Harbor.

Quote of the Day

A man has got to know his limitations.

- Clint Eastwood in Magnum Force

Disney's Genius

A modestly talented cartoonist whose real strength lay in his uncanny ability to anticipate the next big technological innovation, young Walt Disney was indifferent to money and material comfort, unfazed by the long string of setbacks he encountered as a fledgling motion picture animator, and completely unabashed when it came to borrowing and losing large sums of money from friends and family members who were inexplicably generous in financing his dreams.

Almost from the start, he and his brother Roy, who managed the business end of Disney Bros. Studios (later rechristened Walt Disney Enterprises), seemed to be several steps ahead of the crowd. His first major animation project was a silent series called the Alice Comedies, which anticipated Who Framed Roger Rabbit by more than 60 years, with its combination of a live human actor (Virginia Davis, who played Alice, as in Alice in Wonderland) and animated companion characters.

After a fallout with double-crossing business partners, Disney, as always on the verge of bankruptcy, worked night and day to develop a new character, a mouse with human-like qualities who would combine his own sense of adventure with a puckish spirit. In developing Mickey Mouse, he had to labor behind the backs of his staff animators, who were working in connivance with his former business partners to push him out of his own fledgling studio.

American Heritage reviews Neal Gabler’s new book on Walt Disney.

Have Some Moe

Liberal writer John Moe spent some time in Red State America and met a bunch of nice people.

He's turned it into a book.

[HT: 2Blowhards ]

Midways Time

On the Moneyed Midways is up at Political Calculations blog.

It has a collection of posts from various blog carnivals.

The History Channel's Competition

The satirical Uncyclopedia looks at The Bureaucracy Channel.

[HT: digg ]

Miscellaneous and Fast

Racism: Apply it as a cosmetic and look at what happens. A clever ad campaign.

Coca is being placed in cookies and cola in Columbia.

Our Russian friends are sending rockets to Iran. [HT: Drudge ]

Lip-readers can now determine what Hitler was saying in his home movies. [HT: linkbunnies ]

Moving On Up

A new study from the University of Essex analysed speed-dating sessions, and found that every extra inch of height a man has over his fellow Romeos correlates to an increase in the number of women who want to be introduced to him of 5 per cent.

Furthermore, statistics show that tall men earn far more than their shorter comrades and are more likely to be offered promotion. I was, I realised, being discriminated against because of my height.

Whenever a female scanned the room for potential boyfriend material, I would be filtered out, or dumped in the friends-only (maybe) category, along with the fat bloke who eats with his mouth open.

I had to take action, I had to rise above this prejudice. I had to grow. Apart from restyling myself as a goth, a cowboy or a glam-rocker — and embracing the high-heeled footwear they can get away with — at first there seemed no obvious way of discreetly gaining those few vital inches of height. Thank God for the internet. A cursory search led me to products I had never heard of. Easiest to use, and cheapest, are the “height-increase insoles” or “lifts” that you insert into your existing shoes. More expensive are the ready-made or bespoke “status shoes” which have their lifts built in.

Read all of John Bamber’s quest for height by clicking here.

[HT: Arts & Letters Daily ]

Web Worst?

Is this the worst designed web site ever?

I'm sure I've seen worse but I just can't think of one right now.

[HT: reddit ]

Wee House

There are days when we are so overwhelmed with the clutter of possessions that a place like this small house looks very good.

Assorted Interviews

Dated but still interesting, interviews with:

James Michener

Oprah Winfrey

Stephen Ambrose

Shelby Foote

James Earl Jones

Milton Friedman

Hamid Karzai

Andrew Weil

Tom Wolfe

Hungry Architecture

Encouraging news: Architecture that "eats" smog.

[HT: fark ]

The Immigration Game

Peggy Noonan on the hard facts of the immigration problem:

You know the facts. Immigrants are here in huge numbers, unlawfully, in the age of terror. They swell the cost of local life--emergency rooms, schools--which has an impact on local taxes. There are towns and cities that feel, and are, overwhelmed. And no one will help them.

The essential reason, I think, is that America's elites don't want America's borders closed. Businesses want low-wage workers; intellectuals are wed to global visions of cross-border prosperity; politicians want Hispanic loyalty and the Hispanic vote. It's not convenient for any of them to close the borders. If Americans on the ground are enduring difficulties over this, it's . . . too bad. This is further eroding America's already eroding faith in its institutions.

Improving Performance Evaluations

James Heskett at Harvard Business Svchool's Working Knowledge has a lively exchange with readers on what needs to be done with performance evaluations.

My own take: The best evaluations that I've seen are brief and monthly. This permits problems to be addressed early, prevents employees from dodging the supervisor and then improving performance three weeks before the annual evalution is due, allows the easy use of incremental goals, and pushes supervisors to let good employees know that they are appreciated.

Every supervisor that I've known who uses monthly evaluations would never go back to the old six or twelve month system. Some time is spent up front, but far more time is saved down the road.

Quote of the Day

[The] global struggle against terrorism...will last a generation and more. But this I believe passionately: We will not win until we shake ourselves free of the wretched capitulation to the propaganda of the enemy - that somehow we are the ones responsible. This terrorism isn't our fault. We didn't cause it. It's not the consequence of foreign policy. It's an attack on our way of life. It's global. It has an ideology. It killed nearly 3,000 people, including over 60 British, on the streets of New York before war in Afghanistan or Iraq was even thought of....If we retreat now, hand over Iraq to al-Qaeda and sectarian death squads and Afghanistan back to al-Qaeda and the Taliban, we won't be safer; we will be committing a craven act of surrender that will put our future security in the deepest peril.

- Prime Minister Tony Blair

Furniture Store Beats Church

This just in:

The Swedes trust IKEA, Volvo, and Saab more than they do the church.

Why am I not surprised? But who is to blame: the Swedes or the church?

P.S. I know some people who regard going to IKEA as a quasi-religious experience.

Political Ad

This is not the best political ad that I've ever seen but it is pretty darned slick.

Perhaps too slick. What's its point?

[HT: reddit ]

"Kramer" Hires Help

Michael Richards has hired a crisis management expert to handle the damage control from his "racist when angry" tirade.

All well and good.

It's rather disappointing, however, when the expert's first move is to seek to get the Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton on board. Both of those gentlemen are damaged goods when it comes to credibility. Contacting them is a cynical and empty gesture.

Lawyers in Love

When Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly ran this ad, it created an uproar. Is the ad demeaning to women?

Slate is on the case.

Like a Steel Trap

There is a collection of lines from essays by high school students. Some samples:

Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a ThighMaster.

She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long it had rusted shut.

This one has a certain Raymond Chandler-flair:

He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East River.

[HT: Neatorama ]

The View in 1620

Being now passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before them in expectations, they had now no friends to welcome them, no inns to entertain or refresh them, no houses, or much less towns, to repair unto to seek for succour; and for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of the country know them to be sharp and violent, subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search unknown coasts.

Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wilde beasts and wilde men? and what multitudes of them there were, they then knew not: for which way soever they turned their eyes (save upward to Heaven) they could have but little solace or content in respect of any outward object; for summer being ended, all things stand in appearance with a weatherbeaten face, and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hew.

If they looked behind them, there was a mighty ocean which they had passed, and was now as a main bar or gulph to separate them from all the civil parts of the world.

From the record of Nathaniel Morton, keeper of the records of the Plymouth Colony, based on an account by William Bradford. Read the rest in The Wall Street Journal editorial here.

Food The Color of Your Computer

Since food is going to be a backdrop topic of today (It's Thanksgiving, in case you wonder why all of those people are at your house), you might want to get some nifty recipe ideas from the Fifties, an era noted for its cuisine.

James Lileks, author of The Gallery of Regrettable Food, gives a tour of cooking with gelatin.

Gaps, Markets, CEOs, and Basketball Players

A memorable Paul Graham essay on “Minding the Gap.” An excerpt:

In the United States, the CEO of a large public company makes about 100 times as much as the average person. [3] Basketball players make about 128 times as much, and baseball players 72 times as much. Editorials quote this kind of statistic with horror. But I have no trouble imagining that one person could be 100 times as productive as another. In ancient Rome the price of slaves varied by a factor of 50 depending on their skills. [4] And that's without considering motivation, or the extra leverage in productivity that you can get from modern technology.

Editorials about athletes' or CEOs' salaries remind me of early Christian writers, arguing from first principles about whether the Earth was round, when they could just walk outside and check. [5] How much someone's work is worth is not a policy question. It's something the market already determines.

"Are they really worth 100 of us?" editorialists ask. Depends on what you mean by worth. If you mean worth in the sense of what people will pay for their skills, the answer is yes, apparently.

A few CEOs' incomes reflect some kind of wrongdoing. But are there not others whose incomes really do reflect the wealth they generate? Steve Jobs saved a company that was in a terminal decline. And not merely in the way a turnaround specialist does, by cutting costs; he had to decide what Apple's next products should be. Few others could have done it. And regardless of the case with CEOs, it's hard to see how anyone could argue that the salaries of professional basketball players don't reflect supply and demand.

Garage Cooking

The mechanics/cooks at Jalopnik give step by step guidelines on deep-frying a turkey.

How Much Oil?

It will be 25 years before world oil production reaches its peak?

Daniel Yergin’s group thinks so.

[HT: American.com ]

Thanksgiving Quiz

Jack Kelly, writing in American Heritage, unearths some odd facts about Thanksgiving. A quick quiz:

1. The tradition of an “official pardon” for the turkey given to the president dates back to (a) Abraham Lincoln; (b) FDR; (c) Theodore Roosevelt; (d) George H. W. Bush.
2. Benjamin Franklin proposed that the turkey be the bird in the official seal of the United States. True or False?
3. Per capita, Americans eat how much turkey each year? (a) 17 pounds; (b) five pounds; (c) 12 pounds; (d) 26 pounds.
4. The two turkeys pardoned last year by President Bush were sent to: (a) The National Zoo; (b) Virginia’s Frying Pan Park; (c) Iraq; (d) Disneyland.



Answers:
1: d
2: False
3: a
4: d

Quote of the Day

Never order food in excess of your body weight.

- Erma Bombeck

Strategic Vision

From gapingvoid.

JFK

The History Channel has videos on President Kennedy's assassination.

Still jarring. Still sad.

Presumed Guilty

Frances Kemp booked an aisle seat on a recent British Airways (BA) flight because she had a bad leg that required extra space. Her 76-year-old husband Michael occupied the middle seat. A nine-year-old girl took the window position.

When a stewardess asked Frances to switch seats with her husband, she declined. The stewardess explained that the seating arrangement breached the airline's child-welfare regulations and moved the child.

Michael is a retired journalist with no criminal record; he made no contact physical or verbal with the girl; no complaint or request to move was received; the child's mother was elsewhere on the plane. The girl's welfare was deemed to be in peril solely because Michael was male.

BA has openly joined the ranks of airlines such as Air New Zealand and Qantas that view all men as a danger to children. It is difficult to know how many other airliners share this policy as it is rarely announced and can be enforced invisibly when seats are booked.

Read the rest of this amazing story by clicking here.

[HT: reddit ]

No Hobbit

Rats! Director Peter Jackson has confirmed that he won't be making The Hobbit.

Those of us who are hard-core Middle Earth fans can begin the grieving process.

Gen Y and Networking

Writing in Pepperdine University’s Graziadio Business Report, Teri C. Tompkins, Nancy C. Wallis, and Kent Rhodes examine Gen Y and networking.

An excerpt:

Employee network groups, also more recently called affinity groups or employee resource groups, can be beneficial to both management and employees. First formed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, network groups typically focused on race and gender.

Today network groups are more likely to be acknowledged for improving overall company performance as they are to be credited with improving recruiting and retention efforts and with providing an avenue for broader perspectives regarding company performance.[1] Texas Instrument’s (TI) diversity director Terry Howard says, “I think employee networks are part and parcel of any effective diversity strategy. I can’t imagine working in an organization that didn’t have them.”[2]

In spite of the benefits of network groups, the 2005 Workplace Diversity Practices Survey Report by the Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM) states that still only 29 percent of companies support network groups.[3] And where network groups do exist, often companies are underutilizing their potential. Nonetheless, companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Eli Lilly, and Ford each have multiple employee network groups which increases the likelihood that these companies are friendly, not just tolerant, to groups that can experience marginalization in the workplace. Such groups make it more likely that all employees will have a voice and thus contribute to a more collaborative, vibrant, and participative environment.

Jive Turkeys

Political Calculations blog has done the math: The number of turkeys in the United States has been dropping - depending, of course, on your definition of a turkey - but the size of the turkeys has been increasing.

In other words, they've been supersized.

Lileks: A Frenzy of Gold Bond Stamps Nostalgia

James Lileks looks at Thanksgiving ads and remembers the wizard behind Gold Bond stamps:

This Gold Stamp Bond Gold Book Bond book was my mom’s; it’s completely full, but unredeemed. No surprise; she was a saver. They gave Gold Bond stamps at the grocery store, and I remember the machines on the counter, right by the little platform on which you wrote your checks. My mom would let me lick them and put them in the book sometimes. I’d look at the thick books in the drawer, cinched with rubber bands, and think we were rich.

They certainly made money for the fellow who founded the company – a canny bird named Curtis Carlson. I interviewed him for a magazine cover stoy in the mid-80s, and I was a bit daunted; I was Little Master Lileks, and he was this Captain of Industry with great reserves of quiet self-confidence. I remember what he said about the Depression: there was a lot of money to be made if you wanted to work. He was one of those kids who sold papers and caddied and shined shoes, and that was in the spare time off from his other nine jobs. His company was eventually valued at 16 bazillion dollars, or something like that. They bought TGIF Fridays, ran all the Country Kitchens, and of course have that little Radisson hotel brand you may have seen here and there. It all began with tiny little glued pieces of pseudo-money.

Read the entire post here.

Robert Altman, R.I.P.

"My short-term plan is to wake up tomorrow morning and my long-term plan is to wake up tomorrow morning."

- Robert Altman, who died yesterday, in an interview with The Telegraph four months ago

"I got goose bumps and then punched myself in the face."

No one can say that Mr. Chandler didn't "bring it" in his performance, at times pointing his index finger skyward, hand over heart, and caressing the microphone with both hands. "And we've got Bank One on the run. What's in your wallet? It's not Capital One. It's us...so which card are you?" he sang passionately, wearing a tie and conference name tag. "And we'll make lots of money. Forever I can sing about trusting and teamwork and doing the right thing. We'll live out our core values, while the competition crawls."

A corporate video of the performance was leaked to YouTube and replicated on servers as far as New Zealand. Public response was uncharitable. Many noted that Mr. Chandler, who has had some musical success, could really sing. But more found it hard to watch. "Goodness, that had a car crash quality to it," wrote one viewer. Words like "awkward" and "painful" came to mind. Someone proclaimed they had to watch the video through their fingers and others theorized that this must have been a veiled marketing campaign, if not a joke. "I got goose bumps and then punched myself in the face," one person wrote.

From Jared Sandberg’s CareerJournal article about a corporate video featuring some employees singing about the merger of Bank of America and MBNA.

I made a conscious decision not to post the video. It was too painful.

Turkey and Gravy Soda? White or Dark?

Jones Soda is noted for its unusual flavors and just in time for Thanksgiving, here's its Holiday Pack, featuring Turkey and Gravy soda, Sweet Potato, and other treats.

Why cook when you can drink gross liquids?

[HT: Adfreak ]

Motivational or Not

Catherine Rampell looks at Jonathan Black's book on the world of motivational speakers and finds that the author may have had a personal agenda.

Throwing stones at motivational speakers is an easy sport - remember the father in Little Miss Sunshine? - but one person's mawkish can be another's inspirational. The fact that much of their advice is pretty basic should not discredit it.

Many of the major corporate disasters of our time did not occur because someone failed to do something complicated. They happened because a person or a group failed to do the basics.

Syria's Not-So-Hidden Hand

Michael J. Totten, who has written some fascinating travelogues on the road in Lebanon, Turkey, Israel, and Iraq, has posted some thoughts on what appears to be an on-going attempt by Syria to seize the government of Lebanon.

Coffee Snobs

An AP Business story on the rise of a new cult:

ARLINGTON, VA. — America's most finicky coffee drinkers tout their caffeine connoisseurship in many, often contradictory, ways. They spend a bundle at Starbucks, or refuse to patronize big chains. They only drink espresso, or decline any cup of joe they didn't brew themselves.

Then there are people like Chris Becker of Arlington, whose coffee worship involves a ritual that places him at the outer edge of the country's java culture.

Becker roasts coffee beans at home.

[HT: Newsvine ]

Quality Wins

This is no surprise:

The Toyota Camry is Motor Trend magazine's Car of the Year.

There's a simple reason: It's a great car.

7 Ingredients of a Good Apology

1. Choose a time and place when you will not be interrupted.
2. Don't add footnotes, exceptions, or modifiers and especially avoid any remark that implies the person "had it coming."
3. Linking your behavior to some larger issue like world affairs or the environment won't get you off the hook. Stay focused.
4. You may choose to explain your behavior but this is dangerous ground. Many explanations sound like justifications.
5. Keep it short. Long apologies often drift into irrelevant or harmful subjects.
6. Make eye contact.
7. Be sincere and sound sincere.

Quote of the Day

I didn't get a toy train like the other kids. I got a toy subway instead.

You couldn't see anything, but every now and then you'd hear this rumbling noise go by.

- Steven Wright

Geek Shirts

Although my extraordinary tech skills peaked with the Commodore computer and Pong, I'm tempted to get one of these.

Discrimination Against Asian Americans

Yale freshman Jian Li has filed a federal civil rights complaint against Princeton for rejecting his application for admission, claiming the University discriminated against him because he is Asian.

The complaint, which was filed with the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights on Oct. 25, alleges that the University's admissions procedures are biased because they advantage other minority groups, namely African-Americans and Hispanics, legacy applicants and athletes at the expense of Asian-American applicants.
[skip]

Li, who has a perfect 2400 SAT score and near-perfect SAT II scores, was rejected this past year from five of the nine universities he applied to — Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania — and accepted to four: CalTech, Rutgers, Cooper Union and Yale.

Read the rest of the Daily Princetonian article here.

[HT: Center for Equal Opportunity ]

Where's That Muse?

The always-worth-reading Kathy Sierra on "waiting for the muse."

Great Roger Ebert line:

"The muse never shows up at the beginning."

Sarcasm at the Airport

Via Angela Gunn at Tech Space, a collection of flight-related messages from Overheard in New York.

An excerpt:

AirTran flight attendant over intercom: We hope you ladies and gentlemen had a nice flight, and we ask that you all press your faces against the windows so Delta can see what a full flight looks like.

--LaGuardia

"Policy is what happens."

David Maister passes along a couple of profound rules:

After a speech I gave, Francis Sheridan, whose title is Resource Efficiency Manager at 3 CES/CEOEE, sent in this comment:

“About ten years ago, while still a manager for Washington State, I took a week's class from a person considered, at the time, maybe the most talented and accomplished person in Washington State government, Dick Thomas. He'd been Chief of Staff for the Governor, house majority leader, president of Evergreen State College, etc., and a very cool guy to boot.

When I took that class, he said two things over and over until I, for one, wanted to kill him—-figuratively, of course. Long after the class ended I finally began to understand the wisdom of these two simple thoughts:
1. Policy is what happens.
2. Peoples' feelings about the process largely determine their feelings about the outcome of the process.”

Disciplinary Index

Number of times the employee violated policy: 12
Moments when co-workers wondered if management would take action: 53
Supervisory hints to the employee that correction is needed: 5
Times the supervisor thought the employee was improving: 3
Times the employee was actually improving: 0
Occasions when the supervisor directly spoke to the employee about the problem: 0
Actual documentation of an incident: 1
Mention of the problem on the employee's performance evaluation: 0
Supervisory consultation with human resources: 0
Supervisory training sessions on disciplinary actions: 0
Number of local plaintiff attorneys that handle wrongful discharge cases: 700

Language Diversity

Here's an interesting post in Workplace Prof Blog on an article by Cristina Rodriguez on language diversity in the workplace.

In general, I think that "English only" rules in workplaces can be a form of overkill and yet the article may underestimate is the extent to which team cohesiveness can be harmed if language is used as a form of exclusion. For example, if three people are in a room and two of them start using a language that the third does not understand, the third person has just been excluded.

Common courtesy would solve many of these problems.

Rogues' Gallery

Michael Totten, no friend of either party, has assembled a brutal gallery of embarrassing photos of politicians.

Thank God the rest of us always produce beautiful pictures.

Why Didn't I Think of That?

Neatorama has the details on the Japanese spa where you can swim in saki, green tea, coffee, or, yes, red wine.

Jack and Steve

If the Fifties were such a cultural wasteland, why is it they had Steve Allen interviewing Jack Kerouac (Here's a video) and we have David Letterman interviewing Pamela Anderson?

Of course, the deprived Fifties also had Hemingway and Steinbeck but we've got...hold on, I'm sure some names will occur to me.

[HT: boingboing ]

When a Dream Boss Leaves

Writing in Business Week, Liz Ryan has some thoughts on what should have happened when a dream boss resigned. An excerpt:

For sure, it would have been wonderful for the local human resources rep to have stopped by for a chat, not just with Allison but with each of the employees affected by the boss's departure (or all of them as a group). Sadly, too many HR people are clueless about their responsibilities to the employees in their care, who would naturally be concerned and in need of answers when their boss heads out the door.
But in my view, the HR person is not the principal villain in Allison's story. The person who has fallen down most on the job is her boss's boss!

Here is a manager who accepts a resignation letter from a manager on his or her team, writes and publishes a job opening, begins to interview candidates, and otherwise goes on about his or her business…all without any conversation with the managerless employees. That goes beyond poor leadership. Allison's boss's boss is asleep at the wheel.

"Subtle, fast and deep."

A great article on Lawrence Sager, the dean of the University of Texas at Austin law school. I love Dworkin’s letter of recommendation and Sager’s advice to the students:

A few years ago, Sager considered leaving NYU for Boston University, where his wife taught.

Ronald Dworkin, one of the most cited legal scholars of all time, wrote the briefest of recommendation letters.

"Sager is subtle, fast and deep," Dworkin wrote. "You should hire him."

Still, his casual, almost rumpled way inspires familiarity.

"Many academicians can turn you off, but he is the reverse," said San Antonio attorney and former U.S. Rep. Tom Loeffler, who serves on the UT Law School Foundation's governing board. "He is always capable of keeping one's attention."
Students said they also have found Sager to be attentive. Mindful of the lingering perception that the school is unfriendly to black and Hispanic students, he reacted swiftly to a recent "ghetto fabulous" party hosted by some law students.

Sager condemned the party, telling students: "Should the possibility of this sort of conduct present itself, please, please think twice. And then think twice again."

Read the entire article here.

[HT: Althouse ]

Unusual Opening

Qualified candidates should have some experience in the field, and most importantly, must be capable of delivering accurate and insightful readings to the public over the phone. We are looking for credible, reputable psychics, clairvoyants, astrologers and tarot readers who can deliver high-quality readings for our clients."

No, it’s not a job on Wall Street. This is from the Eccentric Employment site.

Ten Signs of Ego Creep

1. Undue emphasis on the use of titles.
2. Frequent turf wars with other work units.
3. Little or no self-deprecating humor.
4. Denigration or expulsion of dissenters.
5. Increased attention to status symbols, such as office size, parking spaces, etc.
6. Distancing from former associates.
7. Exaggeration of past achievements.
8. Aversion to sharing credit.
9. Results emphasized over the nature and quality of efforts.
10. Status and power trump mission.

Quote of the Day

Gratitude is the most exquisite form of courtesy.

- Jacques Maritain

The Real Fugitive

Forty years ago today, Dr. Sam Sheppard carried an unloaded pistol in his pocket as he awaited the verdict in his second trial for having allegedly bludgeoned his wife to death. If convicted again, he planned to pull out the empty gun and die in the resulting fusillade from courtroom guards. Having spent 10 years behind bars, he said, “I wasn’t going back.”

Read the rest of Jack Kelly’s November 16 article on the Sheppard case here.

The Truth Hurts. Learn From It.

Mary Schmidt's "Why You Didn't Get My Business" is marvelous.

And yes, I've done some of those things. [Ouch!]

[HT: The Social Customer Manifesto ]

No Time to Stumble

Victor Davis Hanson on whether Western civilization will rise to the challenge:

We in the West write novels and film scripts about killing our American President, while those in the Middle East plan it, as their latest vows to blow up the White House attest. Better yet, we supposed liberals--not Nazis, communists, or monarchs--now will censor our own cartoons, operas, films, novels, and Pope, as if the Enlightenment was a mere construct. If we find the struggle to stop Islamism is too costly or at least too bothersome, maybe appeasement of it will prove less so.

In short, while the Islamists get bolder and crazier, we become more timid and all too rational, quibbling over this terrorist's affinities and that militia's particular grievances--in hopes of cutting some magical deal with an imaginary moderate imam or nonexistent reasonable militia chief or Middle East dictator.

Well beyond us now is any overarching Churchillian vision of our enemies. We lack the practical understanding of an FDR that all of these Islamists loathe us far more than they despise each other. Their infighting, after all, is like the transitory bickering of thieves over the division of loot that always pales before their shared hatred of the targeted bank owner.

Payback

The hostess escorts a young couple to my section. As they walk to their table I notice they’re looking around nervously, like they’re out of their element. Maybe the Bistro’s the first fancy restaurant they’ve ever gone to. I sigh inwardly. Experience tells me I’m gonna get a lousy tip.

The couple sits down and opens the menus. The girl’s eyes widen when she sees the prices. She says something to the boy I can’t hear. He holds up his hand reassuringly. His expression says he’s saved his pennies. He’s got it covered.

As I approach the table I notice a weird halo enveloping the boy’s head. As I draw closer I realize his angelic countenance is not of divine but chemical origin. The kid’s used so much hair gel I’m afraid the overhead lights will combust his head. The young man completes his ensemble with shiny sharkskin pants and a t-shirt that looks sprayed on. I’m envious the kid can get away with that look. I haven’t been that skinny since I was in high school.


Read the rest of WaiterRant’s experience here.

Crow's Feet Perhaps

Workplace Prof Blog discusses an interesting case about the FMLA coverage of employers who have an aggregate of 50 employees within a 75 mile radius.

The case involved the question of how do you measure those miles, by surface or as the crow flies?

The answer: By surface. (We aren't crows!)

Cutting the Pay of Smokers?

Writing in Fast Company, Ian Wylie notes tough times ahead for smokers:

Smoking is no longer welcome at the movies. Philip Morris's leading brand, Marlboro, is reckoned to have featured in 74 of Hollywood's top-grossing films in the past 15 years, but this week the world's largest tobacco manufacturer ran up a white flag. "We do not want our brands or brand imagery depicted in movies and television shows," reads an ad running this week in Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and other industry publications.

Is this what the endgame for Big Tobacco looks like? Here in Europe, home of the moody, espresso-primed drag, public policy and opinion are swinging decisively into action. Ireland, Italy, Malta, Norway and Sweden have all banished tobacco from the workplace, restaurants and even pubs. Spain's partial ban allows smoking only in tapas bars and cafés or lounges. Even in France, a coming decree will ban smoking in restaurants next year, and in all public places from 2008.

Now in Italy an association of personnel managers has this week recommended smokers' pay be cut on the grounds that workers who take smoking breaks do an hour a day less work than others.

Carnival of the Capitalists Time

The Carnival of the Capitalists is up at Gongol.com.

As usual, an eclectic collection of posts on management, business, and finance.

"Unsafe is Safe"

Do traffic signs make you reckless and inconsiderate?

Psychologists have long revealed the senselessness of such exaggerated regulation. About 70 percent of traffic signs are ignored by drivers. What's more, the glut of prohibitions is tantamount to treating the driver like a child and it also foments resentment. He may stop in front of the crosswalk, but that only makes him feel justified in preventing pedestrians from crossing the street on every other occasion. Every traffic light baits him with the promise of making it over the crossing while the light is still yellow.

The result is that drivers find themselves enclosed by a corset of prescriptions, so that they develop a kind of tunnel vision: They're constantly in search of their own advantage, and their good manners go out the window.

The new traffic model's advocates believe the only way out of this vicious circle is to give drivers more liberty and encourage them to take responsibility for themselves. They demand streets like those during the Middle Ages, when horse-drawn chariots, handcarts and people scurried about in a completely unregulated fashion. The new model's proponents envision today's drivers and pedestrians blending into a colorful and peaceful traffic stream.

Read the entire Spiegel article here.

[HT: Drudge ]

O.J. Simpson, Author/Murderer

Another home run for Christopher Hitchens as he zeroes in on the O.J. Simpson mess:

And there are still people who write articles that refer to him just as "O.J." or "the Juice." Somewhere in these colloquial and jocular allusions, there may be a clue about the free pass that we seem to grant to celebrity crime. I don't happen to know Mr. Orenthal James Simpson, and I don't make a habit of using nicknames for psychopathic killers (I don't say "Osama" either) so call me pompous and old-fashioned if you will, but he's "Simpson" to me. And it's no news to anybody that he butchered two innocent people at close quarters, so there's no disclosure-value in this creepy business proposition. Nor is it news that he has escaped even the civil verdict in the case, by sheltering his assets under Florida's shady homestead law and by having his NFL pension considered inviolate. (Attach the assets of a former football "great" who has been ordered by a court to compensate his victims? How un-American can you get?) The only question is whether, having wholly devastated two families and part-orphaned two children, and having laughingly refused to pay a cent of the judgment against him, Simpson can find any new ways of inflicting pain and insult. I had previously thought that his cheery attendance at the "Slasher" convention might mark the low point, but there you go.

Read it all here.

Affirmative Action Forever?

John Fund on the on-going debate over Affirmative Action preferences in Michigan:

From the outraged cries of affirmative action diehards, you would think the dark night of fascism was descending with the passage of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative. Mary Sue Coleman is president of the University of Michigan, which has already spent millions of taxpayers' dollars defending its racial preferences in courts. She addressed what Tom Bray of the Detroit News called "a howling mob of hundreds of student and faculty protestors" last week. "Diversity matters at Michigan," she declared. "It matters today, and it will matter tomorrow." Echoes of George Wallace, who in 1963 declared from the steps of Alabama's Capitol: "I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."

Ms. Coleman isn't the only Michigan official to employ Wallace-style rhetoric against MCRI. Detroit's Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick told a fundraiser last April that the measure would usher in an era of racial prejudice. "Bring it on!" he bellowed. "We will affirm to the world that affirmative action will be here today, it will be here tomorrow, and there will be affirmative action in the state forever."

So much for the position that such preferences would be temporary. The Supreme Court, thanks to an incoherent opinion by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, helped to muddy the water on this. Affirmative Action that uses quotas is discriminatory.

A shell game has been used by many of the quota advocates in this debate. First, they deny that Affirmative Action means hiring preferences, then they assert that any ban on hiring preferences will kill Affirmative Action. Fortunately, the voters aren't buying that.

Scam at Home

CareerBuilder reviews "work at home" scams.

Injecting Politics into Physical Geography

Much has been said about the Left-wing ideological bias on campus and how it seeps into subjects that have nothing to do with politics but the accounts are often about a quip here or there during a lecture. I would guess that few professors are so brazen as to put their biases in writing.

The following questions are from a study guide for a physical geography class at a major American university. The guide was prepared by the professor who must fancy himself a wit.

For overland flow to occur, what has to occur?
a. precipitation greater than infiltration
b. infiltration greater than precipitation
c. precipitation is greater than the water table
d. creep dominates slope transport
e. the American public has to actually believe that Al Qaida was connected to Iraq.

The most common explanation for glacial-interglacial cycles over the past 2.5 million years involves changes in what aspects of Earth's orbit?
a. obliquity
b. eccentricity
c. precession
d. a, b and c
e. Your church was right all along. The sun resolves (sic) around the Earth.

The load of this river is mostly
a. suspended load
b. dissolved load
c. bed load
d. none of the above
e. the equivalent of CIA intelligence reported to the American public

The Xs on this slide shows the formation of
a. tarns
b. deltas
c. oxbow lakes
d. point bars
e. where the weapons of mass destruction are now supposed to be

Look at the arrows. There is a boundary that is called:
a. sublimation line
b. nunatak
c. base level of the glacier
d. equilibrium line
e. the place where we put politicians that lie and try to deceive the American public

Quote of the Day

When we sing everybody hears us; when we sigh nobody hears us.

- Russian proverb

Holland Shifts on Multiculturalism

Ian Buruma, writing in the Times of London, notes that two murders have changed the Dutch attitude on multiculturalism.

Fat City

Jacob Sullum thinks it is time to get off the backs of the fat:

The government seems to have made tremendous strides in its War on Fat. In 2004 researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said “poor diet and physical inactivity” were killing 400,000 Americans a year, a number that was widely presented as an estimate of “obesity-related deaths.” Just one year later, the estimate had been reduced to about 100,000. To cut the death toll by 75 percent in the space of a year, the anti-fat crusaders must be doing something right.

Or something wrong. Ascribing deaths from chronic diseases to specific lifestyle variables is a tricky, highly uncertain business, and the 400,000 figure, which was announced in The Journal of the American Medical Association by a team that included the director of the CDC, was suspect from the start. For one thing, the association between fatness and mortality disappears among Americans 65 and older, the age group that accounts for most deaths. According to the CDC’s own data for the years 2001 to 2003, excluding older Americans leaves just 585,000 or so deaths a year, of which more than 180,000 are caused by accidents, suicide, homicide, lung cancer, HIV, influenza, pneumonia, and chronic lower respiratory diseases—none of which the CDC blames on obesity. To believe the 400,000 death toll, you’d have to believe that virtually all the remaining deaths, from causes such as heart disease, stroke, hypertension, cancer, and diabetes, are due to “poor diet and physical inactivity,” a phrase public health officials and the press have treated as synonymous with fatness. (More on that later.) That would leave no room for risk factors such as smoking, stress, and heredity.

Camorra: Lucrative Criminal Enterprise

This must be my day for posts on Italy. Michael Ledeen explores the Naples’s camorra, the mob organization that is significantly larger than the Sicilian Mafia:

The traditional picture of organized crime also ignores some of their most lucrative criminal enterprises, as for example the billion-dollar clothing industry, described in detail in a recent Italian best-seller, Gomorra, written by a 28-year old Neapolitan journalist named Roberto Saviano. Camorra companies in and around Naples produce tens of thousands of high-end branded clothes, including labels like Armani and Versace. Just like the authentic products, these are hand-stitched by skilled tailors, and are in fact indistinguishable from those manufactured at the official factories. Same materials, same quality, same label. The knockoffs are sometimes added to legitimate shipments, sometimes simply delivered directly to buyers in and outside Italy. Customers have no way of knowing where the clothes were made, nor, in many cases, do the producers know where their products are going. Saviano tells a moving story about a camorra tailor whose talent was the equal of anyone in the great fashion houses. One night he was watching the Academy Awards on television, and saw Britney Spears dancing in a gown he had made.

The only real difference is that the illegal workers are paid a fraction of the salaries of those in the legal companies, thereby limiting costs to near-Chinese levels, and escalating profits way above those that can be made from the high-cost authentic stuff. As Saviano sadly observes, the only victims of this criminal activity are the workers, and they don’t complain because the alternative is unemployment. Everyone else is happy, including the brand-name companies, which benefit both from the lower costs and from the ability to use the camorra’s global distribution system (the same used to move drugs and contraband cigarettes).

Read the entire article here.

The Bates Motel?

We check in periodically as James Lileks continues to update his tour of old motels:

Nostalgia for old motels, like most forms of nostalgia, is selective and dishonest. We like to imagine a pure world before the soulless hotel chains took over, a landscape of lovely neon, local charm, and individuality. No doubt this was the case, occasionally, in the 50s and early 60s, but it was only part of the story. Standardization has its benefits. Franchise outfits have their rules. Every Holiday Inn may feel the same, look the same, but you're reasonably sure there won’t be bugs in the mattress or Norman Bates peeping through a crack in the bathroom tiles.

A motel was only as good as the fellow who ran it. I’ve spent a lot of nights in cheap motels; I remember scratchy sheets, creaky beds, TVs that wobbled on their stand. Old soap. Nubby blankets. Pillows as thin as a small-town Sunday paper.

But. There’s something to be said for these humble places. Not because they were better, but just because they were the norm. This is the way things used to look, and that’s reason enough to pay attention.

Prepare for a flashback and click here to see his collection of motel postcards.

The Night Porter

Chris Shaw, a troubled night porter at London hotels, began to allay his boredom by taking photographs of the guests in unguarded moments.

What he found, to judge from his photographs, was a lot of people stuck in a similar sort of limbo to him. All of them - staff and guests alike - seem somehow adrift, lost in their own internal as well as external darkness. Men lie unconscious on long strips of carpet, or else slump glassy-eyed in chintzy armchairs, their ties twisted like nooses around their necks.

Yet it's not all darkness and gloom. Some of Shaw's pictures are very funny, while others have an alluringly carefree feel to them. These people may be bumping along the bottom, but they're clearly hellbent on having a good time. Two photographs in the book show a naked man wandering down a hotel corridor, beaming happily if unsteadily at the camera. How did those ones come about? I wondered.

'Ah, well, in that particular hotel you'd often find naked people wandering about. They used to get pissed and then get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night - or what they thought was the bathroom. In fact, it would be their bedroom door, and before they realised their mistake the door would have closed behind them.

Help Wanted: Toady

Help Wanted: Toady

Company seeking a person with a proven record of subordinating ethical standards to organizational goals and dedicated to the shameless pleasing of superiors. The latter duties shall include the usual bowing, scraping, and groveling as well as the skilled use of flattery. The successful applicant will have demonstrated the ability to embrace anonymity, suppress bad news, spread rumors, destroy reputations, browbeat others in the name of superiors, sacrifice family life, shred evidence, laugh at bad jokes, and employ the stiletto at management's direction. Naturally, there will be other duties as assigned. Fluency in doublespeak is a plus. Candidates who can perform their duties while maintaining an aura of complete sincerity will be given special preference. Salary will be negotiable. As might be expected, the previous incumbent was promoted. This is an extraordinary career opportunity.

Google Food

What's on the menu at Google's office cafeteria in New York?

New York magazine has the details.

And it's not vending machine fare.

Great Moments in Signage

Via Tom Mcmahon.

Juggling Coalitions in Italy

Italy’s prime minister Romano Prodi faces one of the more challenging chores in modern politics. Here’s an excerpt from The Wall Street Journal article:

Whether Mr. Prodi can last beyond Christmas, no one knows. But can Italy afford such political instability? Of the Continent's big countries, Italy's ailments are by wide consensus the most serious--no mean feat considering the competition from Germany and France. Growth is negligible (though rising from about zero last year); productivity is declining and export markets shrinking; universities spend a third of what America does on each student; Italy's labor pool has the highest share of the unskilled of any OECD country but Mexico; the population is declining and public finances are in disarray. In any scenario for a crisis in the euro zone, Italy plays the lead part. And, oh, throw in a weak (and wasteful) state, entrenched corruption and rising Mafia violence. This mess is now Mr. Prodi's responsibility.

Quote of the Day

It is almost axiomatic that as soon as a place gets a reputation for being paradise it goes to hell.

- Paul Theroux

7 Ways to Destroy the Effectiveness of a Department, Division, or Team

1. Let the operation be a dumping ground for the incompetent or barely competent.
2. Pile on extra responsibilities so the unit's budget is indirectly reduced.
3. Routinely decide against the unit in turf disputes with other offices.
4. Exile the unit to a geographically remote location.
5. Openly express skepticism about the value of the unit's work.
6. Permit political considerations to trump the unit's operational decisions.
7. Merge the unit with other pariahs.

Where's Whit?

As a fan of screenwriter/director Whit Stillman’s witty film Barcelona, I’ve wondered what happened to him.


So I tracked down this Guardian article. Part of the reason is the creative process. An excerpt:

I have a happy novelist friend who operates on the principle "first thought, best thought". My own experience has been "first thought, unbelievably stupid thought". If a producer wants something cliched, forced and unfunny that's also weird and meandering ... yes, I can turn that in within the contractually mandated 12 weeks. Writing my three films so far, Metropolitan, Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco, I found that however much I might have wanted to "hurry", it was only through a fitful stop-start process, with long gaps between versions, that I could come up with anything worth holding on to.

Side Benefits

A recent conversation with a college student sparked these thoughts.

Have you ever wondered how many of the classes that you took in school had the main benefit of teaching you to:

- Absorb vast amounts of boring material?
- Spot the professor's biases so you could accordingly shape your answers?
- Sift through dreck in order to find things of substance?
- Juggle your schedule to meet arbitrary deadlines?
- Conduct team exercises in which some team members rode on the backs of others?
- Forget previous material in order to make room for new?

Perhaps those classes weren't a complete waste of time.

Studying Ant Colonies and Finance

Money manager Bill Miller’s eccentric approach may be his secret. An excerpt from the Fortune article:

Miller's group is just as likely to be discussing the functionality of ant colonies or river systems as P/E ratios. The man runs a required book club for his investment team, for which he assigns works like "Deep Survival," by Laurence Gonzales, and "The Landscape of History," by John Lewis Gaddis.

Miller is chairman of the Santa Fe Institute, a think tank founded to study complexity, for goodness' sake. "The depth and breadth of Bill's intellect is pretty amazing," says Robert Hagstrom, who works as a portfolio manager at Legg Mason. "You watch the guy converse with someone like [American Nobel laureate in physics] Murray Gell-Mann and you ask yourself, 'This guy's a money manager?'" The fact is that Miller has spent decades studying freethinking overachievers, and along the way he's become one himself.

"What we are really trying to do is to think about thinking," Miller tells me. "Understanding how groups behave is central to understanding how complex adaptive systems - such as the stock market - work."

Miller is obsessive about studying what makes certain people and systems different. In simpler terms, Miller, his scholarly protégé, Michael Mauboussin, and the rest of the employees of Legg Mason Capital Management (the arm of Legg Mason over which Miller holds sway) try to understand how investors are wedded to certain beliefs about a stock - say, Amazon.com - that are completely wrong.

Yell or Praise?

Who gets better results? Coach Nice or Coach Tough?

Too Good to Miss

Back by popular demand: A light touch for Saturday:

The flashdance beer commercial.

Remembering Lincoln

David Shribman looks at the man who gave the United States a second founding:

GETTYSBURG, Pa. -- He was a man of faint faith, and yet he is remembered as the greatest believer in American history. He was a man of jokes and gags, and yet he harbored more hurt, more sadness, more loss, than any public man of his time or any other. He was an uncertain man, and yet he is remembered for articulating the great certainties in our national life. He was a humble man, and yet he is acclaimed as the greatest American of all time.

Abraham Lincoln was born 198 years ago, which is about the least remarkable thing you can say about the man with the stainless soul who steeled the Union for its struggle for survival, who thought through the difficulties of emancipation and reconciliation, even if the former made the latter more difficult, and who spoke of bonds of affection, mystic chords of memory and the greater angels of our nature -- three of the most evocative phrases in American history, all the more astonishing when you consider that they appeared in one luminous paragraph.
Read the rest here.

UPDATE: Apologies for the earlier post regarding Lincoln's birthday. That's what happens when I write posts in the early morning.

Imperial Grunts

Amid the usual management books, I've been reading Robert D. Kaplan's Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground.
Fascinating stuff. Kaplan bounces aound the globe, meeting with Green Berets, Rangers, and Marines in Yemen, Columbia, Mongolia, The Philippines, Afghanistan, North Carolina, East Africa, and Iraq.

An excerpt:

Arauca (Columbia) boasted a strategic location abutting Venezuela, where the radical-populist (yet democratically elected) president, the ex-army general Hugo Chavez, was providing Columbian guerrillas with rear bases. Control of Arauca gave the Columbian guerrillas a corridor for exporting narcotics to Venezuela, in exchange for weapons and munitions that, in turn, were smuggled into the region by Arab gangs based in the Venezuelan port of Maracaibo. There were credible reports that Hamas and Hezbollah had established havens on the Venezuelan island of Margarita near Caracas. Venezuelan authorities were providing thousands of local identity cards to Syrians, Egyptians, and Pakistanis.

Remembering Milton Friedman

The Wall Street Journal has published some excerpts from publications of Milton Friedman. Here’s one of them:

What most people really object to when they object to a free market is that it is so hard for them to shape it to their own will. The market gives people what the people want instead of what other people think they ought to want. At the bottom of many criticisms of the market economy is really lack of belief in freedom itself.
The essence of political freedom is the absence of coercion of one man by his fellow men. The fundamental danger to political freedom is the concentration of power. The existence of a large measure of power in the hands of a relatively few individuals enables them to use it to coerce their fellow men. Preservation of freedom requires either the elimination of power where that is possible, or its dispersal where it cannot be eliminated.

It essentially requires a system of checks and balances, like that explicitly incorporated in our Constitution. . . .

The person who buys bread doesn't know whether the wheat from which it was made was grown by a pleader of the Fifth Amendment or a McCarthyite, by person whose skin is black or whose skin is white. The market is an impersonal mechanism that separates economic activities of individual from their personal characteristics. It enables people to cooperate in the economic realm regardless of any differences of opinion or views or attitudes they may have in other areas.

Vroom Vroom

Brock Yates gives his list of the top five books on car racing.

Quote of the Day

A good horse is never a bad color.

- Old Cowboy Saying

Topless Speed Signs

Denmark has found either a way to slow down speeding drivers or create traffic jams: Using sex to remind drivers of speed limits.

And yes, this is NSFW.

But Austria Sent Five Soldiers! Wow!

People talk about the “Arab street” erupting. Do they ever worry about the American street? The German magazine Spiegel on Germany’s military commitment to Afghanistan; a commitment that appears to exclude any serious exposure to danger:

The friction arises out of the very real danger being faced by US, UK, Canadian and Dutch soldiers in the Kandahar region. Forty-two Canadian soldiers and 41 British have been killed in Afghanistan. They trail only the US, which has lost a total of 350 soldiers. Together, the three countries account for 90 percent of total coalition casualties.

Meanwhile, German troops in the north have been limited by the parliament in Berlin as to engaging in combat -- and have seen little reason to change those caveats despite NATO pleas for more troops and more flexibility.
Germany makes the point that it has some 2,900 troops stationed in Afghanistan, 6,000 stationed elsewhere in the world, and is tapped out militarily. "We have Lebanon and other commitments," said Helmut Königshaus, part of the German delegation in Quebec City.

While NATO has upbraided some countries for sending too few troops -- Austria only has a token contribution of 5 soldiers -- Germany isn't one of them. The problem is the limitations those troops are under.

Fire It Up!

Some Hungarian engineers took a Russian tank, mounted a couple of MIG-21 jet turbines on it, pumped in a bunch of water, and now have a jet-propelled fire extinguisher.

Click here for the Gizmodo story and a video of the monster in action.

Superficial Heroism

Via Ann Althouse, a 1977 ranking of heroes. What a difference time and a couple of murders make.

Citizenship Test

The federal government is going to be trying out a new version of the citizenship test; one that looks more for an understanding of principles than just a knowledge of simple facts. They hope to encourage assimilation. (Bravo!) An excerpt from The Christian Science Monitor story:

Canada offers a test similar to the current US one. Other Western nations that are concerned about assimilation are now requiring tests, says Mr. Fonte, and some are taking it a step further. The Netherlands shows a video featuring gay men and beach-going women to ensure that newcomers - particularly Muslims - will be comfortable with the country's liberal social mores. Australia is reportedly considering a test with questions about the sport of cricket.

The changes in the US bring the test closer to the notion sweeping Europe that gaining citizenship requires subscribing to a set of shared values - though no one is likely to be quizzed about the ins and outs of baseball any time soon.

"The receiving nations have been more or less acquiescent - and in a certain sense dissuaded - from foisting expectations of robust civic attachment on the part of the newcomers. And that has had consequences," says John Keeley at the Center for Immigration Studies, citing the terror plots in Britain. "Now we are reconceptualizing what our expectations are."

An Employee?

If you are using an unlicensed contractor to do work around your house, you may have just acquired an employee.

At least in California. Check out the story of one case.

Respect and Burn-Out

Wharton School professors Lakshmi Ramarajan and Sigal Barsade look at the lack of "organizational respect" and its impact on employee burn-out.

Need Some Water Here, Straw Boss

The Wall Street Journal Law Blog looks at a report on the American justice system and asks: Are the sentences for white collar defendants too long?

My answer: Nope. It's a pity that some of them aren't on a chain gang.

Anti-Americanism Update

Following European anti-Americanism has been one of my hobbies over the years.

It requires putting up with the sort of "deep" thought celebrated by the sophisticated readers of the Guardian.

Via James Lileks, here's evidence that even in the so-called golden days of the European and American relationship, you could still rely upon the depiction of the American president as a dangerous dunce.

Midways Up!

On the Moneyed Midways, with its collection of business, management, and financial posts, is up at Political Calculations.

Looking Ahead

Over 70 scientists give their forecasts for the next 50 years.

[HT: kottke ]

Miscellaneous and Fast

Did the 35 hour work week really make the French happier?

The Army's development of a one-person flying machine.

Milton Friedman: Economist and Genius.

An interesting study of the charitable donation practices of liberals and conservatives. [HT: Drudge ]

A Russian woman who drank three liters of Coke a day for five years and developed heartburn has sued and won.

Business Week looks at how Chinese factories hide workplace abuses.

Don't Want This MTV

The first time I saw this Sheena Easton music video, I thought it was a joke.

Great song. Laughable video.

Gaining Support for EEO

Some ground rules to consider when communicating about your equal opportunity program:

Lead by example. You must model the sort of nondiscriminatory behavior that the program promotes.

Focus on behavior, not on attitudes. You don't care if a person has hidden prejudices so long as those biases aren't acted out at work.

Tell the employees what you are not saying, then tell them what you are saying. Give them some perspective.

Guilty people are defensive people. Avoid trying to instill a sense of guilt or shame. It only increases resistance.

Build alliances within the departments. You'll need decision makers at all levels if the program is to succeed.

Act more like a consultant than a cop. Strive to become a trusted advisor. Beware of zealotry.

Bring in reinforcements, such as consultants and lawyers, if they are needed.

Make no compromises regarding bigoted behavior. If you lower the bar for one, you'll be asked to do it again and again.

Have a program that you can shout from the rooftops. Avoid any "wink, wink, nudge, nudge" practices.

Watch out for sins of omission; i.e., not speaking up and implying agreement.

Do what you say you will do.

Back!!!!

I apologize for the gap in posting. We had a mega-archive problem and it has now been - knock on wood - corrected.

More to follow.

Quote of the Day

If you ever think you're too small to be effective, you've never been in bed with a mosquito.

- Anita Roddick

Man Against Machine

I'm on the road. The communist wireless system in the hotel is playing tricks.

Bear with me. If you can read this, the hammer worked.

CEOs As Politicians

Check out this Chief Executive magazine article on CEOs who went into politics.

One thing I discovered while researching my book on leadership: It is easier to apply the lessons learned from governmental leadership to the private sector than to do the reverse.

[HT: BusinessPundit ]

Work Work Busy Bee

And now there is a desk for those of you who wish to use the laptop in bed.

Is no place safe from our quest for work?

Conference Rip-Off?

I’ve encountered some bizarre hotel charges but this PoMoBlog post about huge fees for an internet connection from a conference room is new:

There were 11 of us in a small conference room with a table that seated 12. Naturally, we all wanted access to the net, but the charge for that was $175 per person! That’s $1,925 for internet access for the group. We (I) pitched a fit, and they agreed to cut it significantly, but it was still far more than what we were willing to pay.

Access in a room at the hotel is $12, but $175 for the same access in one of the conference rooms. “It’s standard in the industry,” I was told by the frightened girl I confronted in Conference Services (this challenges the meaning of that word). Can anybody say rip-off?

[HT: Instapundit]

"Jumping Jack Flash Senior"

An interesting tale of a father's influence: Mick Jagger's dad Joe:

It was the bespectacled, balding Joe who, according to Sir Mick himself, "taught me how to apply myself and how to distribute myself".

It was Joe, a leader in the physical education field, who arranged many of Mick's routines over the years. And it was Joe and his wife Eva who lent Mick the money to start up the callow singer's first band, Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys.

Eva, formerly an active member of the Conservative Party who died six years ago, once said: "Mike [Mick was always called Mike among his family] was a bit sensitive about his singing in those days.

"He didn't like being watched or overheard. Joe and I loaned them the money for their early equipment, although money was tight. We had to… to keep Mike quiet."

The "Not to Do" List

Many of us have daily "To Do" lists of the items we hope to accomplish and yet there are days when we would be better advised to have a "Not to Do" list.

The "Not to Do" list would include:

• Don't try to do too much. Focus on your top two priorities.
• Don't worry about the behavior of others more than about your own.
• Don't rush to ascribe bad motives to others.
• Don't neglect the "Not urgent but important" items.
• Don't fail to confront bad news or poor performance.
• Don't treat others as objects.
• Don't let perfectionism paralyze you.

Fast Is Slow, Slow Is Fast

Adrian Savage at Slow Leadership pinpoints an aspect of technology that deserves more attention. An excerpt:

Electronic communications have made it more important, not less, that people slow down, take time to think, and consider carefully before entrusting their thoughts, let alone their emotions, to the rest of the world. It's easy enough to screw up when the means involves walking along the corridor and speaking to someone else, or even sending a letter by snail mail. When you do it electronically, in the heat of the moment and under all the usual pressure to get things done —now—the potential for disaster is whole orders of magnitude greater.

[Execupundit note: President Eisenhower used to tell his staff, "Let's not be in a hurry to make our mistakes."]

Comedies for a Desert Island

The New York Times Magazine asked a bunch of movie folks which five comedies they'd take with them if they were going to be stranded on a desert island. Some of their choices were surprising. [HT: kottke ]

My own list (not necessarily in priority order):

1. Night at the Opera (The Marx Brothers)
2. The In-Laws (Peter Falk and Alan Arkin)
3. Groundhog Day (Bill Murray)
4. It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (Jonathan Winters, Sid Caesar, and many others)
5. The Freshman (Marlon Brando) and some more if I could smuggle them along:
6. Michael (John Travolta)
7. Radio Days (Woody Allen)
8. Little Miss Sunshine (Alan Arkin)
9. Barcelona (Taylor Nichols, Chris Eigeman)
10. The Producers (Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder)
11. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (Phil Silvers, Michael Crawford)
12. Men in Black (Tommy Lee Jones, Will Smith)
13. Harvey (James Stewart)
14. My Favorite Year (Peter O'Toole)
15. Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder)
16. As Good As It Gets (Jack Nicholson)
17. Bowfinger (Steve Martin)
18. The Pink Panther (Peter Sellers)
19. Animal House (John Belushi)
20. Bullets Over Broadway (Dianne Wiest)

What am I missing?

Shot a Man in Memphis

A classic: Blues for Beginners by Judith Podell.

Be sure to read the entire thing.

Quote of the Day

Marketing is not just a business function. It is a consolidating view of the entire business process.

- Theodore Levitt

Matt Dancing

Back by popular demand:

Where is Matt...and it is impossible to watch him without smiling.

Conkers Jeopardized

Fear of litigation is threatening the hallowed British game of conkers which, although not as exciting as ferret-legging, does have its appeal:

Conkers has been around for 200 years. It evolved from a game called "conquerors," originally played with snail shells dangling from string. By the 20th century, the horse-chestnut version had come into play. Today, the game remains as common among British school kids as marbles once was among their American counterparts. In the autumn horse-chestnut season, British playgrounds ring with the sound of conkers clacking and being stamped.

It's a fight to the death - of the conker. Having picked your conker, you bore a hole in it with a skewer or screwdriver, thread a shoelace through, then tie a knot at the end to hold the nut in place. Then battle begins. It's a clash between two players. Each takes a turn bashing the other's conker with his own. One player lets his conker dangle; the other wraps his own shoelace around one hand, pulls his conker back with the other hand, and then - bam! - takes fire at his opponent's conker. This continues until one conker has been smashed.

If your conker is knocked from its shoelace your opponent can yell "Stampsy!" - an invitation to spectators to stamp your conker into the earth. If shoelaces become entangled, someone usually screams "Tugsy!"- giving rise to a ruthless tug of war to see who can yank his opponent's conker from its lace.

Read the entire Christian Science Monitor article here.

"Things are out of control...."

For the trained eye, it is easy to see that there are stories behind stories:

LIVINGSTON - A Park High School student has been suspended and may be expelled for punching a teacher in the face, Principal Eric Messerli said Wednesday."This is all on the heels of serious instances with guns and fights," said Messerli, who himself was suspended for six days last month after giving a student a wedgie. "Things are out of control at this school, and as administrators, we're trying to cool things down."

[HT: Dave Barry ]

Labels and Limits

Here's an interesting article from Gallup Management illustrating the danger of placing negative labels on co-workers.

Once we label, we limit.

And if a negative label is justified, why is that person still around?

Micro-Loans as Perpetual Motion Machines

Kevin Kelly at Cool Tools has compiled some helpful information on micro-loans, including a detailed list of the various sites that permit you to give a small loan to someone in a developing country. An excerpt:

This year the father of micro-finance and founder of the Grameen Bank won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work in inventing and promoting micro-loans in the developing world. A micro-loan is as little as a few hundred dollars invested into a one-person business with minimal qualifications. That tiny borrowed amount can launch a vegetable stand, repair shop, or bicycle taxi -- a living in other words. As each micro-loan is repaid (and most are), the effects of that small goodness are amplified and leveraged by being loaned out and invested again and again. Micro-loans are the world's only perpetual motion machines.

Appealing Across The Divide

Michael Barone, who as the founder and co-author of The Almanac of American Politics probably knows more about the subject as anyone, analyzes the post-election environment. An excerpt:

For a dozen years, our politics has been bitterly polarized, dominated by two baby boomer presidents who happen to have personal characteristics that people on the other side of the cultural divide absolutely loathe. Clinton in 1992 and Bush in 2000 both made genuine efforts to run as unifiers, but once in office proved to be dividers.

The 2008 cycle will bring a different cast of characters. The leaders in the polls -- Rudolph Giuliani, John McCain and Hillary Clinton -- all are, to varying degrees, in tension with their parties' bases. That suggests that they have the capacity, to varying degrees, to appeal across the cultural divide and pull their parties above the 51 percent ceilings they've been under for the past 10 years. Other potential candidates -- Republican Mitt Romney and Democrat Barack Obama -- may have similar potential. The culturally conservative Republican base and the vitriolically antiwar Democratic base don't seem to have strong candidates, unless you count Al Gore and John Edwards.

He’s right on the mark about Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Each man’s personality causes large segments of people in the opposite party to come unglued.

There’s a doctoral dissertation awaiting some daring student who will want to analyze that phenomenon.

Great Moments in Litigation Update

From The Wall Street Journal Law Blog:

“This lawsuit is the equivalent of the Catholic Church suing Michelangelo for painting the Sistine Chapel.”

That’s the reaction of a University of Alabama alumnus to a trademark-infringement lawsuit filed by the school against Daniel Moore, an artist who has made a lucrative business out of painting great moments in Crimson Tide football history. His paintings sell for as much as $65,000. Here’s the story by the New York Times’s Adam Liptak, which ran on yesterday’s front page.

“I can see why, if you’re sitting in a roomful of lawyers, you might come to that conclusion,” said a former Alabama journalism professor. “But no one outside of that room would say: ‘Hey, that’s a good idea. Let’s sue Daniel Moore.’ ” (Moore’s not only the Leroy Neiman of Tuscaloosa; he is an Alabama alumnus and has also sent his three daughters there.)

First Do No Harm Check-Up

If you subscribe to the principle that the job of a good executive/manager/supervisor is to first do no harm, check out your decisions today to see if you are inadvertently encouraging any of the following:

• Speed versus quality
• Initiative versus caution
• Complaining versus compliance
• Factions versus teamwork
• Diplomacy versus candor
• Vision versus execution
• Peace versus justice
• Activity versus action

Then ask yourself if the balance is appropriate.

Ingenuity Discouraged

Via the Governing.com site:

“There isn’t a scratch on it. I know how to start it, drive it, lower it, raise it.”

Ritchie Calvin David, a 15-year-old boy who was arrested for allegedly stealing a Central Florida Transportation Agency bus, which he reportedly drove along a public transit route, picking up passengers and collecting fares

Source: Associated Press

The World's Most Dangerous Road?

Drivers stop to pour libations of beer into the earth - to beseech the goddess Pachamama for safe passage.

Then, chewing coca leaves to keep themselves awake, they are off at break-neck speeds in vehicles which should not be on any road, let alone this one.

Perched on hairpin bends over dizzying precipices, crosses and stone cairns mark the places where travellers' prayers went unheeded. Where, for someone - the road ended.

But even these stark warnings are all too often ignored. As first one - and then a second impatient motorist - overtook our car on the ravine side of the road, my own driver - who hardly ever spoke a word and only then in his native Aymara - intoned loudly, eerily and in perfect English..."You will die."

It is not a rash prediction to make.

Read the rest about the world’s most dangerous road here.

[HT: Linkbunnies ]

Not a Ledger

Writing in The Weekly Standard, William J. Stuntz on why business lessons do not apply to Iraq.

[HT: Althouse ]

Non-Profit Organizations and Questionable Behavior

1. Our cause is noble and so efforts on behalf of the cause are noble.
2. We're not out to make a profit, so we can't be guilty of greed.
3. Our executives would make more if they were in the private sector and so we shouldn't have to justify our compensation practices.
4. We are competing with other nonprofits and if we don't engage in some aggressive fund-raising practices, they will.
5. If donations come from fortunes that we know were amassed in corrupt ways, we'll take them anyway and honor the givers because it is appropriate that the money be used for good purposes.

Creative Advertising

Via Creative Criminal, a great ad for a Mini Cooper.

Test of Will

Mark Steyn on how American resolve is being studied in rough quarters:

What does it mean when the world's hyperpower, responsible for 40 percent of the planet's military spending, decides that it cannot withstand a guerrilla war with historically low casualties against a ragbag of local insurgents and imported terrorists? You can call it "redeployment" or "exit strategy" or "peace with honor" but, by the time it's announced on al-Jazeera, you can pretty much bet that whatever official euphemism was agreed on back in Washington will have been lost in translation. Likewise, when it's announced on "Good Morning Pyongyang" and the Khartoum Network and, come to that, the BBC.

For the rest of the world, the Iraq war isn't about Iraq; it's about America, and American will. I'm told that deep in the bowels of the Pentagon there are strategists wargaming for the big showdown with China circa 2030/2040. Well, it's steady work, I guess. But, as things stand, by the time China's powerful enough to challenge the United States it won't need to. Meanwhile, the guys who are challenging us right now -- in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea and elsewhere -- are regarded by the American electorate like a reality show we're bored with. Sorry, we don't want to stick around to see if we win; we'd rather vote ourselves off the island.

Read his entire column here.

Quote of the Day

It's safer to have a good enemy than a bad friend.

- Old Cowboy Saying

Chart It!

Here's a simple place to chart out your daily activities: a whiteboard with a clock.

"How does one become a jihadist?"

John Rosenthal, writing in Policy Review, on “The French Path to Jihad”:

How does one become a jihadist? Just how unprepared Americans have been to confront this question was made embarrassingly clear during the recent trial of Zacarias Moussaoui as large parts of the established media dwelt thoughtfully on Moussaoui’s broken family and childhood spells in an orphanage — as if such banal details could somehow account for the behavior of a man who has pledged allegiance to Osama Bin Laden, been found guilty of plotting to fly a jetliner into the White House in connection with the 9/11 plot, and testified to his readiness to kill Americans “anytime, anywhere”3 every day until his death. Moussaoui was apparently supposed to be just like you and me — the defense witness who recounted for the court the allegedly sad story of young Zacarias was a social worker from Greenville, South Carolina — only not as well-adjusted. At the other extreme, a current of opinion has emerged that is widely represented in the “new” media and that offers a ready-made and conveniently foreshortened answer to the question: one that spares the investigator all need to enter into the details of individual life histories. How does one become a jihadist? By being a Muslim. For the representatives of this current, whose more or less openly avowed “Islamophobia” can easily degrade into simple racism, the jihadist threat is entirely a product of Islam or the “Muslim world” and consequently wholly alien to “the West.”

It is a pity that, in effect, none of the media — neither the old media nor the new — took advantage of the unique opportunity provided by the Moussaoui trial to seek more convincing answers. To this day, for instance, despite the sensation created by Moussaoui’s decision to take the stand, the full transcript of his testimony has never been published. If Americans were able to consider the portrait of Moussaoui that emerges from his own words, what they would discover is a figure who is neither so familiar as the sympathetic psychotherapeutic accounts in the old media suggest nor so alien as the theories of the new media pundits would lead one to assume. Of course, it would be hazardous to attempt to generalize from the single case of Zacarias Moussaoui. But a just-published collection of interviews with suspected members of al Qaeda in French prisons, Quand Al-Qäida parle: Témoignages derrière les barreaux (When al Qaeda Talks: Testimonials from Behind Bars), provides us with an unprecedentedly large body of evidence on the backgrounds, worldview, and motivations of those who make the choice for violent jihad in the name of Islam.

Read the rest here.

Upcoming Films

Click here for a detailed Entertainment Today list, complete with release dates and reviews, of the upcoming holiday movies.

Your Two Hours Are Up

Costa Tsiokos considers an upscale restaurant's new policy of limiting diners to two hours before escorting them from the table...and finds it may be defensible.

The Black Dog

In letters to his wife, Winston Churchill used to describe his bouts of depression as "the black dog."
The black dog population is numerous. Depression afflicts millions and yet it is not the only black dog out there. Here are some that I've noticed:

• Fear of success
• Fear of failure
• Fear of criticism
• Fear of loved ones being harmed
• Fear of unrequitted love
• Fear of abandonment
• Fear of being dependent
• Fear of being "found out"
• Fear of embarrassment
• Fear of being hustled

You can see the common factor. Gavin de Becker wrote of the advantages of fear in his excellent book, The Gift of Fear, and yet for many of us, fear is a debilitating force in our lives.

It often is well-disguised in cloaks provided by our own imaginations. Caring, loyalty, caution, deliberation, industry, and even love are draped around fear to hide its presence. We do so because staring boldly at fear presents two choices: surrender or confront. Neither option is enjoyable.

But each is more honest than the game of denial.

And confrontation is the first step toward victory.

Gapingvoid Stuff

For gapingvoid fans, Hugh Macleod's dinosaur mugs and t-shirts are now on sale at CafePress.

The Michigan Civil Rights Initiative

Abigail Thernstrom discusses Ward Connerly's latest win against hiring quotas. An excerpt:

The initiative's opponents enjoyed a fivefold funding advantage, which they used to broadcast a series of scary messages. The MCRI would be a tragedy on the scale of 9/11; it would perpetuate a "culture of inequity," and "endanger access to life-saving health-care services that apply only to women"--the language of the initiative to the contrary notwithstanding. Opponents even found basketball coaches to tout the importance of seeking "diversity."

In response to that last stunt, the tiny band of full-time, young MCRI workers (five on the payroll) sent a staffer--a very short Korean immigrant, carrying a basketball and dressed for the court--to the coaches' press conference where he stated his eagerness to add "diversity" to the game.

Goodbye Germany, Hello India

Spiegel examines a story that we’ll be seeing more of in several European countries:

They are fed up, truly fed up. Fed up with the constant bickering over the costs of wage benefits, social reforms, elimination of subsidies, store closing hours and all the other symbols of a country stuck in bureaucratic and legislative gridlock.

They are tired of living in country where landing a job is like playing the lottery, a country where not even half of citizens live from gainful employment and a country in which even academics in their mid-40s are already considered problem cases when it comes to job placement. In other words, they are fed up with living in a country where all opportunities already seem to be taken: opportunities to succeed in one's career, to own property and to achieve prosperity.

One issue not mentioned, possibly due to political correctness: The fear of radical Islamic immigrants.

Quote of the Day

A falling camel attracts many knives.

- Arabian proverb

7 Sins When Leaving Voice Mail Messages

1. Speaking so rapidly that the listener has difficulty understanding the message.
2. Failing to state the purpose of the call.
3. Failing to give the caller's name, organization, and phone number at the beginning of the call.
4. Giving the caller's name and telephone number at the beginning of the call and then failing to repeat the information near the end.
5. Going into unnecessary detail.
6. Covering too many topics.
7. Repeating points that have already been made.

Kinky's Concession

Dan Halpern reports on the final days of Kinky Friedman’s campaign for governor of Texas. An excerpt:

Around twenty minutes past eight, Kinky saw the writing on the wall, and set about deciding how bitter to make his speech. “Well, they wanted idiots, so they get idiots,” he said, preparing to address the crowd and the media. “I believe that’s the way it works.”

Sometime after nine, as his campaign staff gathered on a stage inside the beer garden before hundreds of supporters and a phalanx of cameramen and reporters, Kinky strode in. He stood behind the podium for just a moment before speaking, surveying the crowd, the cameras, the too-bright lights. “Allegations that I had sex with a male masseuse,” he said, “are entirely false.”

Nappers of the World, Recline!

To be an enthusiastic napper in 21st-century North America is to be out of step with your time and place. In most of the industrialized world, a nap is seen as a sign of weakness, either physical or moral. The very young and the very old nap. Sick people nap.

Bums nap. Healthy, productive adults do not nap.

We are a culture that celebrates action, doing, achieving, an attitude that leads to a disdain for sleep in general. We stay up late and get up early. We pull all-nighters. We'll sleep when we're dead, and in the meantime there's always a Starbucks on the corner.

Read all of Kurt Kleiner’s sage article on the virtues of napping by clicking here.

Midways Time

On the Moneyed Midways, the eclectic collection of business, management, and finance-related topics, has some very good posts this week.

I found the one on pricing to be especially interesting, if only because that's a constant issue in our consulting firm.

Veterans Day

Today is Veterans Day in the United States.

FAQs about Veterans Day

Where to send support to military personnel

Borat and the Lawyers

Borat:

First the movie, then the litigation.

Charity Tastes

Slate asked a diverse group, which includes Alan Dershowitz, Paul Berman, Christopher Buckley, and Jane Smiley, what they would do if they could give away one million dollars.

That's a good question. What would you do?

When They Concede

Peggy Noonan finds a special grace in the concession speeches:

In a way they never tell the truth until the concession speech. That's when nothing they say can hurt them anymore. They're worn to the bone and they've been in a struggle and it's over, and suddenly some basic, rock-solid, dumb knowledge of what they've been involved in--a great nation's life--comes loose and declares itself.

Rep. Harold Ford of Tennessee, who lost his Senate race, said he'd wanted to be in government since he was 4 years old, that people had taken a risk on him, that he was grateful. "I love my country," he said. "Don't lose faith in this great thing called America."

Sen. Lincoln Chafee up in Rhode Island said America is divided; "common ground is becoming scarce." He'd miss those in the Senate "who take their responsibility to govern more seriously than their personal ambitions."

From Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, a demonstration of patriotic civility. He praised his opponent as a human being--"a fine man, he'll do a fine job for the state."

Sen. George Allen, gentleman of Virginia, said, "We are placed here on earth to do something well." He vowed to do all he could to help Jim Webb come in and serve in the U.S. Capitol.

Oh, that the new ones would carry in what the old ones have finally learned, or finally meant, or said.

Reading About Islam

Karen Elliott House lists five books for understanding Islam.