For $300,000 You Can Get Someone To Read A Teleprompter At You

... or, you could buy about 4 Lotus Elises and then get one of those text-to-speech apps to read the text instead.

I can tell you how I'd spend that $300K if it were mine.

Hillary Clinton, it turns out, bags 300 large to read a teleprompter.

When officials at the University of California at Los Angeles began negotiating a $300,000 speech appearance by Hillary Rodham Clinton, the school had one request: Could we get a reduced rate for public universities?

The answer from Clinton’s representatives: $300,000 is the “special university rate.”

The money is just the beginning. There are scads of special demands. My favorite was this one.

After a lengthy call with a Clinton representative, UCLA administrator Patricia Lippert reported to campus colleagues, “She uses a lavalier [microphone] and will both speak from the audience and walk around stage, TED talk style. We need a teleprompter and 2-3 downstage scrolling monitors [for] her to read from.”

Outstanding! She will walk around the stage like a real professional speaker would do, acting like it's all spontaneous as a pair of huge video screens fill her empty head with thoughts written by someone else.

For heaven's sake, would it kill her to memorize her speech? It's not like she's saying anything new or revolutionary. She hasn't had an original thought in her life. Everything is calculated and hedged. What does it say for her intellect that she can't manage to mechanically regurgitate her progressive platitudes by now?

And how about UCLA? What a pack of rubes. If I had a kid in their MBA program, I'd withrdraw him immediately. If you can't convince your administration that 300 Gs is insanely overpriced for someone who reads pablum to you, you should all be fired and the school shut down.

Stepping back a bit further, this is beautiful. A politically hyper-connected, pampered, egocentric woman with insignificant credentials is being paid $300,000 of taxpayer funds to blather about income inequality and why even more needs to be taken from the taxpayer. I think this has all played out before.

Hillary Clinton = Eva Peron.

---

Catican Note: Have a Happy Thanksgiving! I seldom do holiday posts and was going to do one today when I saw this. Oh well. Here in the Compound, we hope you eat up, watch football, make merry and share love with the family.

Let The Baby Have His Bottle

... and let the media and the rioters and the race baiters have their fun far away. Where we live, it's just something you read about.

Yesterday, I was at a police station helping my daughter deal with her very first ticket. It was for a minor infraction, thankfully. At the station, there were several people gathered for job interviews. Some administrative position was open and there must have been 6 people queued up for their chance. One of the guys, a young black man, was sitting outside, waiting. As we left, I asked if he was there for a job interview. He said he was. I smiled and said, "Good luck!" He gave me a big smile and said, "Thanks!" I then told him I'd say a prayer for him, which got another big smile and thanks.

According to the media and the activists, I probably shouldn't have done that. I should have glared at him or walked as far as possible on the other side of the walkway, checking to see if the police were in range if he suddenly attacked me. As I drove away, I could have locked my car doors so he could hear the "CHUNK!" as we left.

Naaahhh. I think I can live my life without advice and help from the news media and the pundits. So can the rest of us. The pleasant interactions I've had with blacks in the last couple of days remind me of the Zimmerman Days of Rage when I was working downtown at Catholic Charities. A few blocks away, black activists were giving speeches and raging away. In our little storefront office, people of all races were laughing and smiling.

This is why I watch sports instead of the news. They don't tell me how I'm supposed to think and feel.
Image source.

Frankly, I Think HyperX Could Have Shown A Little More Sensitivity

The choice of words in this ad on a Ferguson rioting YouTube video does seem a bit inappropriate.

Perhaps they could have said, "Release that part of you that is filled with righteous anger at the social injustices which have led to the perfectly justifiable burning of businesses which had no part whatsoever in the shooting of Michael Brown."

Most Creative People

... don't care if the talent catches their death of cold?

Reading an article on the web, I came across this clickbait ad for another web site. It did not have the intended result on me.

The photographer is wearing a down jacket so long and heavy that they look like Arsene Wenger on a cold, London Saturday. The model must be freezing her cute, little tuckus off. That's not exactly a turn-on.

Catholics Are Judgmental

We all know this to be true. All those rules, the Sacrament of Confession*, and that horrible homophobia - it all adds up to judgmentalismishness. Lots and lots of it.

You're a sinner and so am I. That's all there is to it.

Yesterday, my wife and I taught the remarriage class for the diocese. It's a mandatory class for couples who want to get married in the Church and have been married before. This time, an unusual number of couples were already civilly married, some for many years. They wanted to finally get right with the Church. In the eyes of our hateful Catholic rules, they were, as one couple said with a laugh, "living in sin."

We all pointed and screamed at them in a rage.

Actually we didn't. One of the advantages of being a sinner and recognizing that everyone else is, too, is the ability to have a little perspective on this stuff. Those rules and regulations aren't there to make you feel guilty. You can do that on your own. Those rules and regulations are there to provide an ideal to strive to achieve.

Everyone in the room had been around the block a few times, so to speak, and the conversations during the class were fairly deep and sophisticated. We all recognized that the atomic bomb blasts we had set off in our lives through divorce, infidelity, drugs, alcohol, abuse and so on were the result of not following the rules.

It's almost like God laid out those rules because He loves us or something. Crazy, I know. (Why hasn't anyone told us?)

In any case, the class was a lot of fun, we led them through discussions of the primary ways marriages fail and got the couples to have conversations about topics they may not have addressed. There was lots of laughter and no one pointed fingers of shame, despite the fact that the room was full of world-class sinners. Instead, we acknowledged the existence of objective rules, laid out by Someone Else for our own good. If any of us felt deservedly shameful, it was an added bonus.

* - No, not Reconciliation, it's Confession. You did wrong and now you must confess. Confess! Like so:

Spider Mites

One of our late-season tomato plants was recently attacked by mobs of spider mites. After getting photographic evidence and investigating disciplinary actions against said mites, we chose to go old school and used dogs and fire hoses on them. The dogs didn't do much other than wander around the yard, seemingly unaware of the mites (a crafty ruse on their parts, no?), but the hose blew the mites off the plant and we hope that's the last we see of them.

I had wondered if there were predators we could buy as the mites were gathered in huge numbers. For aphids you can buy ladybugs and the ladybugs will make short, delicious work of the aphids. Ladybugs are not recommended for mites. I think the size difference is too great. It would be like inviting guests over for dinner and serving them a couple of rolls of Sweet Tarts. Unsatisfying all around.

In any case, here is the photographic evidence of the spider mite assault, in case I ever need to present it to a grand jury. Even after cropping in Photoshop, it's still in reasonably high res. Click and enjoy.

I Miss The Border Already

So if we're not going to deport anyone, just what are Border Patrol agents going to do now?

Why have a fence at all?

Is the border a marker for which government gets the taxes? If you're on this side, the taxes go to Mexico City, if you're on that side they go to Washington, DC?

Chuck Norris

A routine patrol took an unexpected turn for police in Gresham, Oregon, when they spotted a goat stuck on a roof...

‘The goat will charge you,’ one neighbour told the officers during the incident last week. Another told the perplexed Gresham police team that the ‘goat only respects one man’ and warned them to stay away.

The goat only respects one man...

What Matt Taylor Should Have Said About His Shirt

A dude lands a probe on a comet zillions of miles away and a pack of harpies goes bananas because he's wearing a shirt with pictures of comic book chicks on it. The story becomes his shirt and not the unbelievable feat of engineering and science.

Why? Why did anyone listen to these shrews in the first place? Because we did, that's why. We choose to listen to them every day, rather than doing what we should ...

---

Scene: Press conference room. The room is buzzing with reporters awaiting his apology for wearing a sexist shirt. Matt shows up, this time wearing a button-down Playboy-logo shirt with a cigar stuffed in the breast pocket and carrying a big tumbler of bourbon on the rocks. He stops at the podium, takes a big swig from the tumbler and sets it down. He looks at the room in scorn.

"I'd like to start this by saying I despise every one of you in this room. You chose to come here, hoping for me to apologize for wearing a shirt when you could have been chasing down those harridans and asking them what their problem was. I'm going to start with a brief slide show about the mission."

Matt, clearly with a bit of a buzz, proceeds to flash about 3-4 slides up on the screen with massive equations and geometry diagrams. They're inscrutable.

"I know what these mean. The hags that complained about the shirt don't. I doubt any of you have a clue, either. I'll be giving hard copies of them to each of you so you can see what real work looks like."

Matt takes a drag from his drink again, puts it down and pulls out his cigar. As he studiously clips off the ends of the cigar, looking intently at it and not the reporters, he says, "You know, you guys have a choice. You can either report on accomplishments and ingenuity or you can write gossip columns. You have chosen to write gossip columns."

Matt lights the cigar and takes a puff. After a bit of obvious pondering while looking at the smoke rising from his cigar, he takes another drag from the tumbler and says, "For the life of me, I can't figure out why I should care what a pack of whiny, little, spoiled brats has to say about what I wear. I never have before. Why should I start now?"

He puts the tumbler down and stares at the reporters. "Why do you? You need to ask yourselves why you decided that these pipsqueak scolds deserved your attention. I'm beginning to wonder if their ranting is as much as you can comprehend."

There's a long pause as he picks up the tumbler again and turns to leave. "Maybe you should spend a little time studying physics instead."

Matt walks out, never looking at the reporters again.

Another Reason I Love Twitter

Twitter allows me to connect with athletes and musicians. I've become a big Peter Furler fan and whenever I mention him in a tweet, he always says, "Thanks!" by favoriting that tweet. Recently, I tweeted a photo of a friend's grandson whose shock of black hair made me think of Newcastle striker Ayoze Perez. I mentioned Ayoze and it must have brought a smile to his face because he favorited it, too.

.@ayozepg I'm thinking I need to get this little guy a number 17 Newcastle United jersey. :-) pic.twitter.com/5J9liHUIOe
— K T Cat (@ktcat) November 15, 2014

Here's a little of the real Ayoze himself:

Animal-Induced Insomnia

On Saturday, I made the mistake of changing our Maximum Leader's food. Seduced by Science Diet's claim that their new food had no grains and was therefore better for cats, I ditched the Purina One Salmon and Tuna.

Bad move. The new food was not a hit with Her Serene Furriness and she let me know in no uncertain terms most of Saturday night. She was hungry. Very hungry.

We've also had a rabbit make occasional raids on our yard, getting in through a place in the fence where erosion had created a hole underneath. The Catican Guards could detect these invasions and would rally to our defense with leaps and barking, driving the lagomorphic intruder away in great pomp and style. On Saturday night, the rabbit was particularly aggressive.

Sleep? Why, no, we didn't get much. Why do you ask?

Yesterday, we picked up a bag of Purina One and replaced the anti-rabbit portions of the fence. We briefed the Catican Guards on the new situation and fed our Maximum Leader into a state of digestive torpor.

Ahh, sweet, sweet peacefulness.

The Guards during the briefing session. Note their attentiveness.

What If The Arawaks Had Battleships?

Reading Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus, a few thoughts have struck me re: America being built on the back of genocide and racism.

As background, the first natives Columbus met were helpful, peaceful Arawaks. Columbus, without any apparent moral qualms, captured some of them and used them as guides, interpreters and intended to bring them back to Spain to show to the King and Queen. His actions seemed natural and unquestioned as there is no record of debate on the topic.

While the Arawaks were peaceful, the neighboring Caribs were not. They were slavers and cannibals and the Arawaks were terrified of them.

Columbus and the Spaniards are frequently portrayed as greedy thieves and racist maniacs. Whatever their motives, let's engage in a little alternate history fantasy for a moment. Imagine that the Arawaks, instead of possessing technology equivalent to the Caribs, had superior weapons and boats? Now assume that this technological disparity lasted for, say, 200 years. Don't you think that over a 200 year time period, even the peaceful Arawaks would eventually say to each other, "You know, I've had my fill of these little swine Caribs. They can't seem to control themselves. Let's go finish them off once and for all."

Or how about this: "My wife and kids never seem to have enough fish to eat. Those pathetic Caribs do nothing but use up resources and make trouble. Let's go beat the tar out of them and take their islands."

There's an offhand remark in the book that some of the native tribes had done just that prior to Columbus' arrival, blotting out some particularly annoying neighbors. The Aztecs most certainly did that to bordering tribes prior to Cortez.

So what's the big deal with singling out the Spaniards? Yep, they killed to looted. Columbus himself was monomaniacal about finding gold. I find it hard to believe that any of their contemporaries would have acted differently.



Here, we see Arawak battleships in action against the Caribs.

Sing Along With Jonathon Gruber!

The thing that leaps out at me every time there's another Gruber video surfacing showing how he thinks we're all imbeciles and every time Obama says he's going to do something directly contrary to the stated wishes of the voters is that we're all just so much window dressing to them. We're all cardboard cutouts on the grass beneath the balcony where El Presidente and his retinue speak at us. We're extras on the movie set providing crowd noises. What we want doesn't matter to them at all.

With that in mind, I offer this hack job on a verse of a song by that Soviet-loving idiot, Woodie Guthrie.

This Land Is Our Land

This land is our land
  It is not your land
Back to your hovels
  you simple morons
We make decisions
  We know what's best, yeah
You only think you get to vote

---

Author's note: The word, "yeah" is a great syllable-filler when you need to finish a song to close off a blog post and get to Costco to do the week's shopping.

Sea Turtle Off Cape Kinau, Maui

On previous trips to Maui, seeing sea turtle was a rare treat. This time, we saw lots and lots of turtles. In fact, on our last snorkeling session, I had to push one out of my way to keep it from running into me. The turtle didn't mind, it just kept cruising along, doing whatever it was it was doing.

The video below was shot with my GoPro Hero3 without any filters at all. On this trip, we discovered that the red filter at less than 20' of depth makes a hash of the scene, turning everything a sickly yellow. There's another filter designed for snorkeling that is only slightly red and I'm going to get one of those before our next tropical island foray.

In the meantime, this video really is best seen in full screen and HD. The lower res versions don't do the turtle justice.

Enjoy!

How The Rich Get Richer, Japanese Style

Here's how I think it works.

1. The Bank of Japan (BoJ) prints money and buys government bonds.
2. Government retirement accounts sell their bonds to the BoJ to buy stocks.
3. The Japanese stock market goes way up.

At the same time:

1. Rich Japanese borrow money at artificially low interest rates using their accumulated wealth as collateral.
2. They invest this money in the stock market.
3. They make scads of cash because of numbers 2&3 above.

In other words, if I, rich Japanese dude, can borrow at 1.5% and invest in the stock market where the return is 10-20%, it's free money for me. Note that nothing was actually produced. No goods or services were provided. At the risk of seeming egotistical, I will quote myself from The Rise And Fall Of Bear Stearns.

Midway through the book, I found that I despised Alan Greenberg. He is the quintessential greedy banker. Nothing has value to him and all that matters is making more and more money. Even the money loses meaning as money after a while and it becomes just a pile of poker chips. In reality, money represents value created through human labor. $20 is equivalent to two grown men working for an hour on your landscaping, a point seeminly lost on Mr. Greenberg. When he found a new financial instrument that allowed Bear Stearns to reap more profits, those profits were just numbers in an adding machine. Contact with the real world was lost as time went on.

This is Alan Greenberg on a national scale. Short of some kind of Black Swan event, clobbering the market, this bet is a sure thing. Printed money is pouring into the stock market. What direction can it go but up? As soon as the central bank ceased to be independent of the government, this was bound to happen.

Meanwhile, you, wage slave that you are, have no such collateral or access to big, low-interest loans. You toil along and pay your mortgage or rent and buy groceries and gasoline without enough yen on the side to join the party. You stay where you are while I float in a sea of money.

This is what happens when governments, central banks and the wealthy collude. It's a hallmark of fascism. Awesome, no?

Artistic Urchin

We found this perfect sea urchin shell while walking on the beach near Kihei, Maui. My wife took this photo with her phone with the urchin resting on a glass table on our lanai. I love it.

The photo was left large, so it might be worth a click. Enjoy!

Black Durgon Triggerfish

Yesterday, we found a new favorite snorkeling spot on Maui, better even than Ulua Beach. It's Cape Kinau, way down south almost at the end of Makena Road.


I got a lot of video, including a nice one of a sea turtle. While the Black Durgon below aren't colorful, there was just something about their schooling and swimming I loved. The video is still in 720p, so full screen and HD might be worth a click. Enjoy!

Do Spiders Get Motion Sickness?

Sitting on the lanai of our rental here on Maui, there's a tiny spider who has spun a web between two chairs. The breeze is blowing her* back and forth as she sits in the center.

I had to use manual focus to get the shot. My eyes aren't the best, so I apologize for the mediocre quality.

Is she getting airsick as the wind blows her this way and that? Strangely enough, when I see spiders in windy webs, I feel a little sympathy for them, wondering if it's hard to hang on and if they get nauseous. It's all very silly, I know. Spiders have been doing this for millions of years. I'm sure by now they've learned how to spin tiny air sickness bags which they store on their front legs.

* - Notice how I made the spider feminine? I did that to smash the patriarchy! Not only that, I think she's a lesbian. Take that, you heteronormative bigots!

A Few Thoughts On Mass Amnesty

So President Obama, as near as I can figure, is threatening to turn a couple million illegals into citizens if he doesn't get his way with some kind of "comprehensive immigration" bill. On the surface of it, this seems insane. The more I think about it, the more insane it becomes. Here are a few random thoughts, in no particular order.

1. Someone ought to ask him or his henchcreatures, "What is a border?" As far as I can tell, we don't have one. If unattended children can get into a place without much effort, then that place isn't secure at all. What's the point of even drawing a line on a map and saying this side of the line is one thing and that side of the line is another if children can cross the line at will?


2. If Obama can leave the southern border unguarded and then turn everyone who crosses it into a citizen, why can't a future president do the same with a different nationality? What if a devout Catholic president said that everyone from Ireland and the Philippines can get in for free and then I'll make them a citizen with a wave of my magic wand?


3. Where in the constitution does it say that he can do this? Article II, Section 2 is the closest I could find to granting the president such powers, but it seems pretty sketchy to me. 

   The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.

   I could see where that might allow him to grant amnesty, but making them citizens is another thing entirely. All of the stuff about rules for becoming citizens is granted to the legislature.


4. How does this not end with impeachment? Can you allow any president to simply run wild? Clinton committed perjury and that was enough for impeachment proceedings. This is orders of magnitude worse. If this happens and is allowed to stand then you no longer have a legislature worthy of the name.


5. Where on Earth did Obama and his cronies go to school? What were they being taught? I know the answer to that one already. They were taught by the same lunatics that teach my daughter right now. It's all activism all the time. There are no rules, no classics, no standards, only injustices to be fought and fought and fought. Rage, organize, vote, picket, protest - these are what she is taught, if only implicitly and yet constantly in every class, science included.


6. If it does not end in impeachment, how does this not end in secession? If the president can make things up out of thin air and impose his will on the states, a la King George, why do they have to stick around and take it? Dittos for a judiciary gone mad. To take one instance, Californians voted legally to amend our state constitution to define marriage and the Supreme Court said our constitutional amendment was unconstitutional. From that point on, Californians ceased to have control over their government.


7. Further along the secession point, how much weed and porn do you need to consume on a daily basis to surrender sovereignty in border and sovereignty in law and lay around taking it? If Federal courts can overturn your voting and Obama dissolves the border and lets everyone in to vote, you cease to be a citizen and have become a subject. Does anyone care?

I guess that last thought is the most important. Is moral relativism so pervasive that only a few holdouts still care about this stuff?

It's a weird time to be an American, man. A really weird time.

Just to be clear, I am not advocating either impeachment or secession. This is just some noodling around, a free thought writing exercise triggered by the events of the day.

Urchins And Coral

... seen while snorkeling at the Molokini crater. I left it large so it might be worth a click. Enjoy!

Mission Trails Clouds Time Lapse

When the groomer called and told me the Catican Guards were running an hour behind schedule, I was already in the truck heading over to pick them up. Fortunately, I had my camera gear with me and was near a very nice photography spot in Mission Trails Park. The video below was the result. Enjoy.

The video is available in full 1080p, so a full-screen viewing might be worthwhile.

Imaginary Friends Are Fun!

... and the president has millions of them.

“To everyone that voted, I want you to know that I heard you,” Obama began. “To two-thirds of voters that chose not to participate in the process yesterday, I hear you, too.”

He listened to people that didn't talk? I wonder what they were saying to him. I bet it was something about global warming, racism or contraception. Those are really, really important things. Those are the kinds of things imaginary people talk about a lot. They must be, because that's what the Democrats tried to sell for the last few months of the campaign. It's too bad the imaginary people didn't go vote. They're probably smarter than the goobers who did.

Maui Sunset

Not spectacular, but still very nice.

Crazy Tea Party Republicans Hating Women And Minorities

Just look at this picture of Mia Love (R) who won her Congressional race in Utah. Look at it! It represents everything that's wrong with the Rethuglicans.

#WarOnWomen #Racism

San Diego Au Naturale

Here's a little palate cleanser for all of the election news. This is a photo from Mission Trails Park here in San Diego. It's what San Diego looks like, sans imported water. I left it rather large, so it might be worth a click. Enjoy!

I Don't Understand. Am I Supposed To Wolf Whistle Or Not?

So there's a video of some chick walking past a bunch of minority dudes getting catcalls and wolf whistles. (I'm not going to find it and share it here because I'm too lazy right now.) This has feminists in Full Freakout Mode, demanding, err, something. I'm not quite sure of what they want, probably because what they want is fundamentally contradictory with something else they want and so the whole thing is incoherent.

Now I come to find out that Lena Durham, Hollywood social justice fascist that she is, penned this piece of rubbish for the mass murdering trolls at Planned Parenthood giving a list of 5 reasons why you should vote.

1. When you vote, you feel so, so good...I wore fishnets and a little black dress to vote, then walked around with a spring in my slinky step.

Wait, what? She wore fishnets and slank around all day? I dunno, maybe she did it in her bedroom where no one could see her. If she did it out in public, then she was deliberately inviting ogling and wolf whistles. But we were just told that guys aren't supposed to do that.

I give up. I have no idea what these bitter, feminist skanks want. It's all so Escheresque. The staircase is going up and down at the same time and there are people walking on the top and the bottom and if you turn the picture to any side it still makes sense and now I think I just sprained my cerebral cortex trying to figure it out.

Whatever. Here's something we can all understand. A wonder goal by Papiss Cisse.


Now that makes sense.

Update: If you watched that goal and want a laugh, watch the first 20 seconds of this video to see a group of British sports talk blokes witnessing it live on TV in their studio. Wonderful.

Scott Peters Is The Worst. Or Maybe The Worst Is Carl DeMaio

Thanks to redistricting, our Politburo congressional midterm election is one of the few competitive ones in the whole country.

Aside: isn't that awesome? In a nation that prides itself on being a democracy, our congresscreatures effectively have positions for life.

Money is pouring into this race from all over the place and their ads are omnipresent on TV, usually playing back-to-back. There's not a single positive one in the lot, save for a 30-second spot where someone says Scott Peters handed them wads of cash or something.

Carl DeMaio is this runty, gay dude who oozes loud-mouthed self-importance. Scott Peters is a diffident, WASP-y weasel who looks like the type seen in the background of Mussolini photos wearing tailored suits bought with looted money. If either of them sat next to you at a bar, you'd be handing the bartender a $100 bill to clear a $15 tab and heading for the door without waiting for the change and most of your drink untouched.

I have no idea what either of them stand for or what they'd do once elected. I do know that Scott Peters did his best to wreck San Diego by having us borrow tons of money so he could hand it out like a big shot. In any case, I don't have the slightest notion what my vote means in the race between these two.

A bigger pair of loathsome, self-aggrandizing weasels you might never find.

And there's no one else on the ballot.

Thanks to our election rules, there is no one from the Green Party, the Libertarians or even the Peace and Freedom party for whom I can vote. I can't even protest vote. This weekend, after enduring another pair of ads which informed me that Scott Peters' hand was in the till up to the shoulder and Carl DeMaio was a puppet of the Tea Party and hated students, I told my wife, "That's it! I'm voting Libertarian or Green Party or ANYTHING but these two!" She quite agreed. Then I looked up the ballot and found no other choices.

Yay for democracy.

Purple And Fuzzy

I'm pretty sure I've posted a photo or four of this kind of flower before, but, gosh darn it, it's fuzzy!

I left it large, so it might be worth a click. Enjoy!

More fuzzy = more better.

Party In Tokyo!

First, a trip to the liquor store.

(T)he BOJ (Bank of Japan) said it would expand its annual asset purchases—its main tool to spur higher inflation—to ¥80 trillion from the previous target range of ¥60 trillion to ¥70 trillion. The central bank aims to achieve the new target mostly by buying more Japanese government bonds, cementing its status as the single largest investor in JGBs. The BOJ also said it would triple the pace of its purchases of stock and property funds.

Then, the wild binge at the BOJ's house.

Japan Mega-Pension Shifts to Stocks
Government Makes Bold Bet on Inflation, Higher Equity Returns

Afterwards, a really bad hangover.

TOKYO— Sony Corp. reported a hefty net loss of ¥136.0 billion ($1.2 billion) for the July-September period as it wrote down the ¥180 billion book value of its struggling smartphone business.

Tim Cook Is Proud To Be Gay

Full story here.

Me, I'm proud I don't have to clean the sheets in his house.

Mistaking Cuba For Japan

Continuing along with my reading of Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus:

Columbus was not looking for India as most people think. He was looking for Japan and China.

The essence of Columbus' view of the world. "Cippangu" is Japan.

That map represents what Columbus derived from the stories of Marco Polo and others. The errors in distances came from two primary sources.

• Columbus used too small a value for the number of miles in a degree of longitude, making his version of the globe too small.
• Marco Polo overestimated the size of Asia, the Sea of Japan and Japan itself, effectively merging the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.

Note that the map above is more pessimistic than the one Columbus used. His distances were shorter because of the smaller value he had for the number of miles per longitudinal degree.

What's interesting is that Columbus reached the Caribbean near enough to where he thought Japan lay to reinforce his incorrect notions of geography.

Cuba and Haiti could easily have been mistaken for Japan at first.

It's worth remembering that everything Columbus saw was from the deck of a small ship. His horizon was on the order of 10 miles. A sailor of that time could miss something as large as China or Japan by 30 miles, a tiny distance in a vast ocean, and never even know it. Columbus was well aware of this and it gave him hope that Japan and China lay just out of sight even as he came up empty on one island after another.

More later. I've got some Linux to play with now, so I've run out of time here.

How Much Water Does A Shower Use?

... about 5 gallons in my case. I can do it in 4, but give me 5 and I'm happy.

This weekend, I managed to wreck my tankless hot water heater. I flushed it with vinegar as per the manufacturer's directions and managed to cause a leak. San Diego water is more like chunks of limestone than an actual fluid. It causes all kinds of corrosion and calcium buildups.

As far as I can tell, the pipes in the heat exchanger had corroded and sprung leaks. Water didn't leave because calcium deposits had plugged the holes. When I flushed the system with vinegar, I managed to unplug the holes. Turning the water back on led to drip-drip-drip-drip-drip. Since I did this exercise on the Saturday when plumbers were not available, we had nearly two full days without hot water.

I've now taken two showers by heating a large pot on the stove and using it to heat up a 5-gallon bucket of water. I then stand outside with my bathing suit on or stand in the shower and dump bowls of water over my head to shower.

It's like going back to the 1800s. We're very retro here in the Catican Compound.

In any case, the 5 gallon bucket was plenty of water for me. Now I know.

One Of The Best Photos

... I've ever taken. I don't know why, but this one, a spur-of-the-moment hipshot taken this morning just to have something to post on the blog speaks to me. I left it really big and I think it's worth a click.

Enjoy.

Fetishizing Incompetence And Ignorance

These days, I'm making my way through Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus. I'm listening to it rather than reading it and it's one of those books that I wish I could memorize. It's chock-full of wonderful anecdotes, analysis and captures the drama of Columbus' life.

I try not to read history books written after 1960. It's an arbitrary date, but it represents the transition from history books as history to social justice advocacy essays. Admiral of the Ocean Sea was written in the late 1930s and early 1940s by a fellow who sailed Columbus' route. He knows from whence he speaks and he works very hard to be as historically accurate as possible. In contrast, my daughter's high school history textbooks were practically free of information and instead focused on social justice narratives.

As I listen to this and after listening to others such as The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Stanley's accounts of his travels in Africa, it struck me how very weird it is to have come up with the Europeans-as-oppressors narrative. The Africans were enslaving each other and fighting wars of conquest, the Aztecs were committing acts of sadism on an industrial scale and the German tribes were warlike and vicious. What differentiated them from their conquerors was their ignorance and incompetence. The worst you can say of the Europeans is that they were just better at behaving according to the standards of the time.

If the Africans, Aztecs and Germans had been as studious and industrious as the Europeans and Romans, they certainly would have been perpetrating precisely the crimes against humanity that we all love to blame on the Europeans. In fact, they probably would have been much, much worse.

I would argue that the assessments of the natives made at the time by the conquerors themselves were more accurate than the misty-eyed romantic ideals of them we embrace today. As Dennis Green might say, the Aztecs / Africans / Germans were who we thought they were and we've let them off the hook.

Update: Make no mistake, the author does not pull any punches about the behavior of the Spaniards and the Portuguese, but he doesn't turn the natives into the noble primitives, either.

Solar Power In Germany

... is succinctly summarized by this comment from this blog post.

Did you know that the most southerly point in Germany is at the same latitude as Bemidji, Minnesota? Right now the day is only about 10 hours long in Berlin. Two months from now it will be 7:40 long and the sun will not rise above 15° above the horizon. Not much solar energy, Klaus.

As the Germans and the rest of the morally preening, European, socialist greens struggle to find ways to keep from freezing to death this winter, they'll discover that solar power needs, you know, the sun.

Advantage: Putin.

Ach du lieber! Wo ist die Sonne?

Yes On 83!

I love election season. I love all of the ads that tell you absolutely nothing in a breathless, urgent tone. I never know what any of the initiatives are about, but I know that if I vote yes on 42, illegal alien children will be killed because they'll eat bread with gluten and if I vote no on 37, we'll continue to be bombarded by cosmic rays.

Or something like that.

I've always wanted to put a sign up in my yard, supporting a proposition that doesn't exist with a tagline that makes you go, "Huh?" I never find the time for it, so instead, I've created an image you can use to make your very own bumper stickers.

And please, if you value freedom for sparrows and other small birds, vote yes on 83.

Yes on 83. It's time for a change!

You're welcome.

Racial Animus Is Way Overstated

I work in a racially integrated group. We don't ever have disagreements along racial lines.

When I serve at Catholic Charities, it's quite common to see inter-racial support. My favorite of these was watching a young, black man make sure an elderly, Chinese woman, who spoke no English, was served when it was her turn.

Today, the Washington Post has a long article about the shooting in Ferguson. Here's the key tidbit for me:

Because Wilson is white and Brown was black, the case has ignited intense debate over how police interact with African American men. But more than a half-dozen unnamed black witnesses have provided testimony to a St. Louis County grand jury that largely supports (Police officer) Wilson’s account of events of Aug. 9, according to several people familiar with the investigation who spoke with The Washington Post.

The witnesses cared more about the truth than skin color. They cared more about justice and making sure Officer Wilson wasn't railroaded than whatever race loyalty the media and political leaders expect from them.

Hmmm. It's almost like our media and political leaders want us to form up into racial groups. It's like there's something in it for them when we do.

I wonder what that is.

The World Hasn't Come To An End

Fear not

There have been no new cases of Ebola in the US. It appears to be just as difficult to transmit as the experts told us.

It looks like Kobani is turning into ISIS' Stalingrad. Thanks to stepped-up American air power and the grit and determination of the Kurds, ISIS might be stalled there. Neither they nor their colleagues in Al Qaeda have figured out the value in going after the soft American infrastructure like power and water.

Russia is content for now with digesting Eastern Ukraine. There's a limit to what you can do with only a handful of combat-ready brigades. You may have a bigger army than your neighbors, but if you're going to launch Barbarossa, you need the Wehrmacht. Russia ain't got it.

The recent US stock market decline was just that, a decline and not a crash. The American Fascist Party, err, Democrats, have strangled the US economy with regulations, but it's a slow asphyxiation, not an ISIS-style beheading. We're not in crisis, we're just stagnating.

Despite what people like me say about President Obama and the wild predictions we make, the world hasn't come to an end.

And yet...

I'm still betting on Japan to be the crisis point of the decade. They continue to find ways to wriggle off the hook and live a few more months, but their doom is out there, circling like a shark in the form of mountains and mountains of debt.

Me, I'm doomed, too. Doomed to mix metaphors. Fishing, sharks, mountains. Oh yeah. Those went together real well.

One year in the Nikkei. Look at it wriggle off the mountains and avoid the fishing sharks!

How Central Banks Printing Money Turns Into Stock Bubbles

From Bloomberg:

Japan’s $1.2 trillion Government Pension Investment Fund will increase its allocation target for local shares to about 25 percent from 12 percent, the Nikkei newspaper reported without attribution. GPIF will also boost its holdings of foreign bonds and stocks to about a combined 30 percent from 23 percent, while reducing domestic debt to the 40 percent level from 60 percent, the Nikkei said Oct. 18.

1. The Bank of Japan (BoJ) prints money. 
2. It uses the money to buy government bonds (domestic debt, above). 
3. The Government Pension Investment Fund sells its government bonds to the BoJ.
4. The Government Pension Investment Fund uses that money to buy Japanese stocks. 
5. Stock prices rise and everyone feels wealthier. 
6. Yay!

Printed money has become real wealth. Well, it's real only so long as you can get yours out of the market and run away to some place where they don't print money out of thin air to inflate stock prices.

Is there such a place any more?

Janet Yellin Visits Chicago's South Side

Janet Yellin, chairwoman of the Federal Reserve, recently visited the violent, disadvantaged, pathology-laced south side of Chicago. After spending quite a bit of time with the residents, discovering just why economic mobility is so difficult for them, she released a statement and a video.

Here's the statement:

“The extent and continuing increase in inequality in the United States greatly concern me,” Ms. Yellen said to a conference on economic opportunity and inequality sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. “I think it is appropriate to ask whether this trend is compatible with values rooted in our nation’s history, among them the high value Americans have traditionally placed on equality of opportunity.”

Here's the video:


I mean, I think that was her shooting the video. She's a Really Smart Person. She went to Yale and Brown, both Ivy League universities. I can't imagine she'd make firm pronouncements about the underclass from inside of a government-academic bubble.

Would she?

Update: OK, I'm sold. Janet Yellin had to be the one shooting that video. Another Really Smart Person who went to an Ivy League School had this to say (emphasis mine):

“I think she broke new ground in terms of a Fed chair looking at such a serious socioeconomic issue with that degree of rigor,” said Karim Basta, chief economist at III Associates, an investment adviser, who attended the conference.

Ebola Is About Race

... because everything is about race.

Up to now, I've not been able to figure out why we don't have a travel ban on flights from infected countries and why we're not taking steps to close our borders. While it won't stop the spread, it will certainly slow it down. I'd rather fight the disease inside the country with 5-10 initial cases than 500-1,000.

Peggy Noonan today shows what gobbledygook the Administration response is to questions about travel bans. It's clearly lies, but why? Up to now, I'd thought it was the traditional Democrat fetishization of race. Africans are black and any restrictions on blacks is racist. A travel ban is racist and therefore religious apostasy to the Administration.

Jonathon Last disabused me of this notion. It is indeed about race, but, being more precise, it's about racial politics.

Marine Corps General John F. Kelly talked about Ebola at the National Defense University two weeks ago and mused about what would happen if Ebola reached Haiti or Central America, which have relatively easy access to America. “If it breaks out, it’s literally ‘Katie bar the door,’ and there will be mass migration into the United States,” Kelly said. “They will run away from Ebola, or if they suspect they are infected, they will try to get to the United States for treatment.” ...

Ebola has the potential to reshuffle American attitudes to immigration. If you agree to seal the borders to mitigate the risks from Ebola, you’re implicitly rejecting the “open borders” mindset and admitting that there are cases in which government has a duty to protect citizens from outsiders. Some people on the left admit to seeing this as the thin end of the wedge. Writing in the New Yorker, Michael Specter lamented, “Several politicians, like Governor Bobby Jindal, of Louisiana, have turned the epidemic into fodder for their campaign to halt immigration.” And that sort of thing just can’t be allowed.

What would happen in the event of an Ebola outbreak in Latin America? Then America would have to worry about masses of uninfected immigrants surging across the border—not to mention carriers of the virus. And if we had decided it was okay to cut off flights from West Africa, would we decide it was okay to try to seal the Southern border too? You can see how the entire immigration project might start to come apart.

And there you have it. If Democrat leaders become pro-border-security, the party loses its key wedge issue with Hispanics. Since the Democrats live and die with racial-block voting, they can't give up this issue. If Hispanics ever divided their votes 50-50 between Republicans and Democrats, the progressive era would be over, o-v-e-r.

On the plus side, an Ebola outbreak would make it easier for the Democrats to vote the graveyard.

Link Of The Day

... comes from the level-headed Calafia Beach Pundit. Here's a tidbit.

Might I suggest that if indeed the world population were to collapse in short order, most of those who managed to survive would face bleak prospects at best; the machinery of the global economy would be effectively broken, and modern civilizations would be hard-pressed to survive. What good would it do to sell everything you own today? Investing in anticipation of the "end of the world as we know it" is a questionable exercise at best. If you are convinced we are faced with an inevitable global catastrophe, then buying plenty of guns, ammunition, food, and a private, isolated island is probably your best strategy.

Read the whole thing.

I've pondered taking some of my S&P 500 money off the table and move it into safe bonds, but I think the time for that has come and gone. I wanted to pull the trigger at 2000, but I didn't. I can't imagine there will be too much more downside before the Fed contracts fiscal Ebola and begins to spray money out every orifice to stop whatever business cycle is causing them to wet their pants.

If things get too dire in the market, the Fed will save us from ourselves by manufacturing money out of thin air. Well, it will hand out free money until it can't do that any more because printed money has no value, but that looks like it's a ways off.

Infantry Against Ebola?

One more thought on Ebola. For the life of me, I can't figure out why we sent Army soldiers to Africa to do something about Ebola. It seems to me that they're just going to become disease vectors. Allegedly they're there to set up testing and treatment labs.

Eventually, up to 4,000 military personnel are expected to be deployed to West African countries battling the Ebola outbreak

It seems like a force that size will be devoured by both the country and the virus.

Do we keep them in quarantine before we let them back in the country?

The Ultimate Lean Six Sigma Success Story

As long-time readers know, I'm a huge fan of Lean Six Sigma (LSS) and other process improvement techniques. There's nothing I love more than ignoring the purpose of my work to spend endless hours focusing on how I can shave thirteen cents off the cost of purchasing a pencil. It's freakin' Paradise, man.

Yesterday I was in a meeting at work where we were discussing how one of our sister organizations could save tens of thousands of dollars by discarding their subscriptions to some electronic journals and instead accessing those same journals through our system. Had they taken the deal, they would have saved about $25,000 in the first four months and picked up access to about six times as many journals as they currently had.

Forunately, their LSS guru put a stop to it.

The dude was amazing. He forced the entire decision process to stop dead in its tracks so they could do a full-on LSS process improvement effort. Tollgates, voice of the customer, problem definitions, the full treatment. It was awesomeness squared. I sat there, playing Bejeweled on my Droid, marvelling at the way he enforced our organization's rigid orthodoxy of Continuous Process Improvement on a group that would have otherwise run off and saved money while picking up more benefits.

Lean Six Sigma. Is there anything more beautiful in the world?

Lean Six Sigma is just one success story after another.

A Thought About Ebola And Quarantines

I'm sure that as soon as Health and Human Services can break someone free from their Birth Control Enforcement Division they'll be all over this with a wonderful solution. In the meantime, I'm thinking that if Ebola ever gets loose in, say, the migrant worker camps of California, the back hills of West Virginia or New Orleans' 9th Ward, we're pretty much screwed.

It sure would be nice to close off the border right now and ban flights from Africa. If you can't control it once it gets loose inside the country, your best bet is to stop it while it's still outside.

Naahhhhhh. Closing the border is racist. I'd rather die from Ebola than risk being called a racist.

Small Talk With A Homeless Dude

... is pretty tough.

Yesterday, my wife and I were having lunch after Mass on an outdoor patio at a local Mexican place. We saw a homeless fellow walk by, take a look in the trash and then wander around. My wife got up and offered to buy him lunch. He sat down at the table next to ours while she went inside to order. It was then that I realized how hard it was to chat with him.

His name was Dwight. Dwight looked like he'd spent the night in the bushes. He was pretty baked as well, only marginally able to hold a conversation. Beer or cheap wine was my guess. We talked about the weather and he told me about the ocean temperature and what that meant and I asked if he was from San Diego and he pointed in the direction of where he was born.

And then the conversation stopped.

What do you ask? Where do you live? How are things in the bushes? What's the foraging like these days?

After an awkward silence, I asked if he'd lived anywhere else. That was a good line as it gave him his chance to spin a yarn about having traveled the world. He was pretty drunk or maybe his brain had been fried from bouts of drinking, so his speech was difficult to understand. I was able to pick out the word "Shanghai" and that led me to ask if he'd been in the Navy. Jackpot again. He launched into another unintelligible story about serving on the Enterprise and something or other. It wasn't important that the stories were true or even whether or not I understood them, it was just a chance to show him some affection.

When I work downtown, the conversations start themselves. It's a customer-clerk relationship. The business end of the deal keeps the conversation going and everything flows from that. In this case, there was no such anchor and keeping it going was much, much harder.

We left Dwight with a hearty lunch and he was shoveling it into his mouth almost with the palms of his hands when we left. From the looks of things, he'd been drinking whatever money he had found and food had been cut from the budget.

I'm still not quite sure where I should have gone with our confab.

Here's a site with suggested conversation starters. It's decent, but I feel like I'd tried those. The housed-homeless cultural gap can be tough to bridge, I guess.

Abortion Is Darwinian

I've always loved the smug, condescending characterizations of religion as some kind of psychological pacifier, concocted by savages to calm their mortality-worried minds. I'm also a big fan of evolutionary biology where scientists explain species and sub-species differences by noting competitive advantages. When Darwinian advantage analyses are applied to humans, it's particularly fun. After all, Darwin himself suggested the "inferior" races would vanish from the earth and we'd be left with the "superior" humans, a gap and then the apes in the whole ESPN Evolution Power Poll.

This weekend, I came across this tweet.

😈 rips off leg of another woman’s child while her own kicks inside of her https://t.co/gip2lfrYvh Daily Newsletter #PraytoEndAbortion
— YHWH (@kecheritomne) October 10, 2014

The story at the link is fascinating, like the diary of a Einsatzgruppen field officer describing how he helped cleanse Grossdeutsches Reich of subhumans, making room for a future influx of the Volk. After all, let's face it, there's no Sky Fairy and we're all just animals, DNA strands trying to propagate down the misty corridors of time in robotic fashion. Everything we do is governed by biology and natural selection.

Once you discard the primitive superstitions created by confused and hysterical minds, you can embrace the world as it is and realize that abortionists are merely carrying out their programming - destroying competitors to their own progeny. It's all so simple. The pro-choice crowd is naturally following their Darwinian impulses.

Instead of pro-choice, we should call it pro-natural-selection. We're not exercising reproductive rights, we're weeding out the inferior members of the species.

Baboons do this. When a new male defeats the old alpha, he will slay all the nursing babies so their mothers will come into heat sooner and he can mate with them. It's natural, it happens all the time in the wild and best of all, it's understood by science.


Science!

---

I felt weird posting this after coming home from a retreat, but it jumped out at me while reading my Twitter stream and I thought it worth posting. The subject is a bit harsh, but there you have it.

Spiritual Positioning

This weekend, I'm working a men's retreat. I posted this on Thursday, scheduling it to come out today. Instead of blogging, I'll be in the kitchen chopping veggies, doing dishes and serving others. For a variety of unavoidable, small but cumulative reasons, I've been spiritually and psychically tired lately. It's been difficult to be thoughtful or creative.

When I took kung fu a few years back, my instructors taught me about "positioning." While you can learn how to protect yourself, you'd be far better off not to put yourself into a situation where you're called to do it.

Positioning is what this weekend is all about for me. I'm not very enthused by the prospect (writing on Thursday right before I drive up), but I know that at the very least, I won't be doing something stupid or sinful. By hanging out with a bunch of great guys who are also there to serve and share their love, chances are really good that I'll gain strength and energy from them and bring it home with me.

Sometimes it's hard to push yourself to do the things you ought to do. When that happens it's best to position yourself so that's all you can do.

I'm bringing my camera with me. I hope to get some decent photos to share when I come back. I'll be sure to pray for all my blog readers, too. You give me strength even when you don't realize it.

God bless you all.

Scratch Beginnings

For various reasons, just a short post today.

I recently finished Adam Shepard's excellent Scratch Beginnings. It's the story of a college graduate who decides to find out if the American Dream of making it from nothing is dead or not. He moves to Charleston, SC with $25 in his pocket, the clothes on his back, an empty backpack and a sleeping bag. He doesn't trade on his social or family connections nor his college degree. His goal is to have $2500 in the bank, a working vehicle and a place to live after one year.

Scratch Beginnings is the story of the homeless and the underprivileged. I loved it for that reason. When I work downtown at Catholic Charities, I've often wondered what my customers' lives are like. Where do they go and what do they do? Is their situation totally hopeless? This book helped me understand their lives a lot better. There are opportunities and escape routes, but it's not easy to stick to what you need to do to make it out.

If you've got a few hours, I'd definitely read it. It might put you in contact with a world you would otherwise never experience.

Snarling Less In Your Marriage

Here's another tidbit from the Brian Tracy book I've been reading.

To improve your self-confidence, set goals and every day, tell yourself, "I have (already accomplished my goal)!" If your specific goal is to become the top salesman at IBM, you tell yourself, "I am the top salesman at my IBM!" It sounds wacky, but I think I understand how it works.

Let's try a different example as an illustration. Say you want to have a great relationship with your wife. Every day you would tell yourself, "I really love my wife. I love being around her and I'm going to look for ways to make her happy today!" You say that even if you've been fighting like two cats in a bag for the last couple of years. It works because it changes your expectations and perspective on your relationship.

When things are going great in your marriage, there are still days when your wife snaps at you. She's had a bad day at work or the car broke down or maybe the weather is really beastly and everyone's tempers are short. When she snarls, you don't snarl back because you know that it's just a passing thing and you can shrug it off. It's not part of an ongoing war. You know if you let it slide, the rest of the day is going to be great because pretty soon you'll be happily cooperating on something.

When things are going badly and you've been fighting a lot, a snarl is the bugle sounding, "Charge!" and you go over the top with fixed bayonets to counter attack your wife. You do that because the mood in the house is combative. You counter attack so she mobilizes reinforcements and attempts a flanking maneuver. You bring up artillery and lay down a barrage. Pretty soon, you're stringing barbed wire across the bedroom and setting up machine gun nests in the kitchen.

In both cases, she's provoked you by snarling. Your reaction depends on what you expect out of the future. If the future is happy, you're not going to screw that up by snarling right back. That's the key to why telling yourself you've already accomplished your goals works.

In the IBM salesman example, you approach your sales relaxed and confident. You know that if you don't get this one, you'll get the next one because, after all, you're the top salesman at IBM. It's a lot easier to sell when you're relaxed and confident.

7, now 8 paragraphs without a picture. That won't do. I'm out of time for this blog post, so here's a picture to wrap things up.

A surfer, two swimmers and two fishermen at Sunset Cliffs. Yes, I know, it has nothing to do with the rest of the post. Oh well.

Fantastic Photography

... can be found at Tim's blog, The Backyard Arthropod Project. Here's a sample.

Tim has inspired me, educated me and amazed me with his terrific blog. Pop on over and see one more reason why he's a great example of what makes the Internet such a wonderful invention.

Red Bugs

While out on maneuvers with the Catican Guards on Fiesta Island, we saw zillions of these little, red bugs. It turns out they're called ... red bugs. They're invasive, but I can't see that they're doing all that much damage. Here's the scoop on that front.

Here are the photos, taken with my new Galaxy S5. I think the photos came out quite well. Enjoy!

They liked to gather in big piles in the shade amongst dried vegetation.

Here's one racing across open ground looking for a pile to join.

This was my favorite. A dog an dug a hole in the sand and these guys must have been drawn to the cool shadows.

The Power Of Righteousness

... is a key to self-confidence.

Continuing with lessons learned from my latest Brian Tracy book, one of my favorites is this: a lot of self-confidence comes from aligning your decisions with your values.

One of the first exercises in the book is to work out your values and goals. It's a straight lift from his excellent book, Goals, but with a different purpose. Having already iterated that process several times, I could coast past this one and get to the payoff. While Brian chattered away about how to determine your values and goals, I decided to mentally adopt the Catholic Catechism wholesale as my values. That shorthand allowed me to concentrate on subsequent lessons. Here's the essence of those lessons:

When you make a decision or take a position based on your deeply-held values, you gain a strength that comes from without. Criticism is partially defanged because you can correctly claim you are pursuing something higher than yourself. It encourages courage, too. To not defend your decision is to betray your higher calling.

Yesterday, my wife and I encountered Beverly, a crippled, homeless woman on a street corner. Before the light changed, I gave her $10 and chatted with her. Had my wife objected, I would have been more confident to disagree as I felt I was doing Christ's work. It wasn't that I was doing it for me, I was doing that which I had been called to do. My self-confidence would have been greater as I was borrowing strength from external values.

Good stuff, that.

Odds and ends:

• Brian Tracy, I love you, but could you get someone else to read your book next time? This one sounds like it was recorded in your kitchen.
• Beverly asked us to pray for her. If you joined in, I'd appreciate it.
• My wife object to Beverly's gift? Ha! That's a laugh. My wife is kinder and more giving than I am.

Working Too Hard At Leadership And Planning

Listening to my new Brian Tracy book, I've been forced to confront some failings at work. I know where I want to take my team and product line and I know the steps to get there, but I don't use that to govern my daily actions.

Both Zig Ziglar and Brian Tracy recommend making a daily list of prioritized tasks. What needs to get done today? Once in a while, I work on this and try to make a detailed, structured road map to go from where we are to where we want to go. I use that road map to figure out what to do today.

Unfortunately, the road map very quickly becomes useless - overcome by events. Pretty soon, I've got no plan and am going in to work and playing whack-a-mole with random tasks. Days become weeks become months and while important things have been done and there are no complaints from customers, we're not achieving the big, revolutionary goals I've set.

The problem is not in the individual road maps, it's their existence in the first place.

A flow chart for building a house. I argue that this is overkill.

Who cares what's on the road map 3 months from now? All you really need is to know what to do next. What should you be working on today?

In the case of building a house, as illustrated above, there are dependencies that require lots of planning, but in the case of my team at work, such things are obvious just from making a list of things that need to be done to achieve our goals.

Instead of taking the time to draw out complicated Gantt charts that show every phase of the project, I think it would be much better to make an unordered list of all the things that need to be done to achieve our goals. From that list, pick out the very few things you need to do right now. Once you've completed those things, you delete them from the list and pick out the next things that need to be done right now. If you discover new tasks to get to your desired end state, throw them on the list and don't worry about when they need to be done.

Since identifying what has to be done immediately is almost always the easiest part of drawing any road map, you've dramatically simplified the planning process and can knock out your daily list of tasks with minimal effort and time. When you go in to work, your daily task list is trivial to prepare.

Inverse Paranoia

I'm listening to a Brian Tracy motivation / sales / goals book right now and he presented a pretty cool concept: inverse paranoia.

With paranoia, you believe that everything and everyone around you are conspiring to make your life worse. With inverse paranoia, you believe that everything and everyone around you are conspiring to teach you life lessons.

I like it! It's a neat mental model for dealing with setbacks.

I'll Bet The Latvians Are Feeling Pretty Secure Right Now

Dig this.

Technical problems with Germany’s military aircraft have left 150 troops stranded in Afghanistan and forced commanders to consider using Chancellor Angela Merkel’s jet to fly the soldiers home...The equipment breakdown was the fourth consecutive German military aircraft failure in recent weeks and comes as aid destined to help fight Ebola in west Africa was left stranded after another plane malfunction...The breakdown comes as a further embarrassment for German Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen, who has admitted that the military is facing severe equipment shortages which are hampering Germany’s efforts to meet its NATO commitments.

This is Germany, Europe's wealthiest country. Just imagine what the Latvians could expect in the way of help from, say, Italy, should Putin turn his eyes to the Baltic states.

Not to worry. Military aggression is so 19th Century. No self-respecting world leader would want to be caught behaving like Otto Von Bismark. They'd never be invited to a poetry recital at the Grolier Poetry Bookshop ever again!



It's not quite the same Luftwaffe as the one that thought it could conquer England.

The Best Thing About My New Samsung Galaxy S5 Is ...

... its battery life.

I just upgraded from a Galaxy S3 to an S5. Oh sure, the screen is bigger, the processor is faster, the camera is better and it instantly knows precisely where it is with speed and accuracy unheard of in the S3, but the best part of all is how long it lasts. I don't have any hard data as I've never let it drain to zero, but both my wife and I agree that our S5s best feature is the battery life.

That was unexpected, to be sure.