The Roads to Personal Success

... seem to run in parallel.

Recently, I've taken to reading books (and listening to audiobooks) on achieving personal success and satisfaction. This stems from some work I'm doing with two of our children trying to help them set goals and develop plans for their own success. In the process of doing it, I've gotten interested in it myself. At work, I recently got the job I've spent years aiming for and now I find myself needing a new set of career goals.

To start, here's my current reading and listening list.

• The Strangest Secret


• Goals : Setting And Achieving Them On Schedule


• Goals! How to Get Everything You Want--Faster Than You Ever Thought Possible


• Better Than Good: Creating a Life You Can't Wait to Live


• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People


• Think and Grow Rich

They all have common themes.

• You need a roadmap for success.


• You need written goals with a written plan to get to your goal.


• Your plan should have dates associated with it.


• Your plan should have lots of small steps to achieve your goal.


• Your goals need to be your own, not someone else's.


• You can't blame other people for your problems. We've all got obstacles to overcome, so overcome them and don't waste time complaining about it.


• You have to have integrity in dealing with other people. Contrary to what you see in popular culture, most successful people are extremely honest and giving.

When I started down this path of reading and listening to these, I didn't realize how much they would have in common. To me, that's another indication that human lives have more similarities than differences. I found that through personal failure - I've come to the conclusion that there really aren't that many ways to screw things up and those ways are pretty well codified in Christianity as sins.

I've skipped many of the steps listed above in my own life, particularly the parts about writing things down. I've got the feeling that if I had done so, I could have achieved the successes I have in a much shorter period of time. It's hard to argue with multiple authors writing conclusions from independent research.

Just thought I'd share.

The Pundits Are Catching On

George Will has a good take on the State of the Union address with this gem buried inside.

Wednesday night's debut of Obama as avenging angel of populism featured one of those opaque phrases -- the "weight of our politics" -- that third-rate speechwriters slip past drowsy editors. Obama seems to regret the existence in Washington of ... everyone else. He seems to feel entitled to have his way without tiresome interventions in the political process by the many interests affected by his agenda for radical expansion of the regulatory state.

Elsewhere, lots of folks are picking up on what Peggy Noonan saw - the internal contradictions of someone who say Washington is broken, but Washington needs to fix all of our problems.

Cold Enough to Freeze the Wind

... or maybe just the wind turbines. Dig this.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air has the details.

Minnesota invested itself in alternative energy sources years ago, and so the revelation that the state spent $3.3 million on eleven wind turbines hardly qualifies as news. However, the fact that they don’t work in cold weather does.

In the video, each turbine will power 35 homes. Assuming an $80 monthly power bill for each one, that works out to $2800 of retail electricity per month. Here I'm assuming that they use natural gas for heating and cooking. With a price tag of $3,300,000 for 11 wind turbines, each turbine cost $300,000. Each turbine will recoup it's cost in about 9 years, assuming no maintenance fees, an assumption that is clearly fantasy as illustrated in the video above. A capital improvement project that pays for itself in 10 years probably isn't such a bad idea, but I doubt this one will. I would bet that the internal workings of the turbines won't take so well to being frozen over and over again.

This brings up an interesting point about the two big alternative energy sources we want to use - solar and wind. You probably can't use them effectively anywhere that gets heavy snow and icing. Solar panels buried under snow won't produce any power at all and designing for the weight and freezing will make them cost that much more. If you assume that all wind and solar has to be produced south of a parallel drawn on the border of, say, Oklahoma and Kansas, that means that the denisty of such projects will have to more than double to make up for the lack of such projects to the north.

That's a lot of windmills and solar panels per square mile.

The BCS Could Buy Immunity Pretty Easily

... if they just started every bowl game with a minor, unobtrusive, hardly-noticeable invocation from The One. It might look something like this.

Really now, is a little face time for our president before each bowl game too much to ask?
What am I talking about? Dig this.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Obama administration is considering several steps that would review the legality of the controversial Bowl Championship Series, the Justice Department said in a letter Friday to a senator who had asked for an antitrust review ...

"Importantly, and in addition, the administration also is exploring other options that might be available to address concerns with the college football postseason"

No, this isn't insane. Not at all.

Update: It's actually unfair to put this all at the feet of the voracious statists in the Obama Administration. Orrin Hatch (Dingbat R - Utah) was the one who made the original complaint.

Update 2: Our Monks of Miscellaneous Musings have a take on this spasm of fascism.

Snowy Mountains in Las Vegas

... from last weekend's soccer tournament.

Moar Lambsicles!

We're nomming on these tonight. It's one of our greatest hits!

Tierrasanta Sunset

How to Report the News

Hilarious!

Shrooms Before and After

... from the stuffed mushrooms I made earlier this week. I used this recipe from Cook's. It really needed fresh crabmeat instead of canned, but even with that it was a pretty bland dish. Topped with Crystal Hot Sauce, it perked up a bit.

Noonan on the SOTU

The Feline Theocracy's Holy Ambassador to the Court of the Mainstream Media, Peggy Noonan, has a great piece today analyzing the president's State of the Union speech. What I like most about Peggy is how she analyzes things as a professional and not an idealogue. Peggy was a speechwriter for Reagan and often has shrewd insights about what a speech means and the internal mechanisms by which it was crafted. Here was one of her best points on this one.

The central fact of the speech was the contradiction at its heart. It repeatedly asserted that Washington is the answer to everything. At the same time it painted a picture of Washington as a sick and broken place. It was a speech that argued against itself: You need us to heal you. Don't trust us, we think of no one but ourselves.

Italics in the original. It's a great point and one that illustrates the problem with being a populist and a statist at the same time, particularly when your party has had partial control over the government for the last 36 months and total control for the last 12.

My Take on the iPad

I didn't see the presentation, but I've seen some of the preview videos and read some of the reviews. To me, the iPad seems a lot like a Lotus Exige. It's beautiful and would be fun to have, but it's got very limited utility.

On second thought, I'd rather have the Exige.

Canned Crab

Last night, I made stuffed mushrooms. I was running late, so I bought canned crabmeat instead of crab legs that had to be cracked open to get the meat. The result: meh.

I've never used canned crabmeat before, but after doing so, I wondered if anyone has ever made anything worthwhile with it. It's not that it tasted bad, it just didn't taste at all.

This Is Just Weird

Here's President Obama meeting with his middle-class task force.


This is a joke, right? The guy shows up to meetings with his podium, presidential seal and his teleprompters?

What would you think of your boss if he showed up with teleprompters?

How It Starts

There is an absolutely outstanding article today by Steve Malanga that discusses how California might default on it's loans. It's not a rant against this politician or that, instead it's an examination of the mechanisms by which this has happened before in smaller instances. It's worth reading the whole thing, but this snippet in particular was instructive.

To understand what I mean it's worth looking at the whopping New York City default in the mid-1970s. Like California, New York spent years building up a spending regime that went beyond its resources, built on locked-in costs like employee pensions and municipal debt obligations that are not so easily cut or deferred, and which ultimately left city leaders with the politically unpopular choice of cutting services sharply or reneging on their other obligations.

Like California, New York addressed these problems initially by rolling them over into future years with accounting gimmicks and mounting borrowing that did nothing to fix the underlying, structural nature of the problem. When the end came, it was not because the city could not meet some single big debt payment. Rather, it was when officials recognized that enough investors had fled the city's debt instruments that New York could no longer float even short-term financing notes, the sort of borrowing that many governments engage in to smooth over the cycles in tax collections and other revenue streams that make paying bills tough.

There's another bit near the bottom of the article that is particularly appropriate given Obama's recent turn towards leftist, class-warfare rhetoric.

For one thing, when a budget crunch gets so severe that bondholders start to worry about their investments, it usually means that politicians are facing the choice between paying off a government's senior obligations and cutting services to the bone. Yes, the state's bondholders might be citizens, but under budget duress they will inevitably be characterized (rightly or wrongly) as rich citizens whose demands for payment are being made at the expense of those getting their programs and services cut.

Emphasis in the original.

I think Obama's reaction to the Scott Brown victory is instructive for California. He's grown more combative and is clearly digging in to fight an ideological battle in favor of yet more government control over the nation. The Democrats who control California are of the same ilk. The budget crisis has not changed their minds about setting rational limits on government power. Instead, as the crisis deepens, they've become ever more strident defending their bloated government programs. I'm a UCSD grad and I've been receiving frequent emails from them asking me to help them defend their budget from any kinds of cuts at all.

Clearly, their world view is beyond the reach of fiscal reality. Mr. Malanga is dead on - the rich capitalist pigs who own the California bonds are the ones who are going to take a beating.

These people look like they make decent money and might even be investors. They're probably out there trying to make a profit. Are you going to let them slash education and savage social services for the poor just so they can salvage their investment portfolios?

Adverbs

Did you know that an adverb can modify a verb, an adjective or even another adverb? I didn't. I just discovered this while helping my daughter with her English.

Pesky adverbs.

And So It Begins

Dig this from the Wall Street Journal.

TOKYO—A leading credit-rating agency issued a dire warning to Japan's new government about the country's massive borrowing, threatening to downgrade the nation's sovereign debt unless policy makers find a way to pull the economy out of its deflationary spiral while curbing public spending.

The blunt statement from Standard & Poor's on Tuesday was the first formal declaration of concern from a ratings company about Japanese borrowing in the months since investors began to raise questions about the sustainability of government debt, estimated to have reached the size of the country's entire economic output for the year ending in March—the highest level in the industrialized world.

Mystifying to me is the statement, "unless policy makers find a way to pull the economy out of its deflationary spiral while curbing public spending."

Huh?

The Japanese economy (and ours, too) is like a colossal flywheel going in the direction of massive government spending. Getting the thing to turn around or stop or even just slow down will take an incredible amount of force. It's not like they can simply flip a switch and the problem will be solved. In fact, they're so far in debt that much of their spending is beyond even the realm of non-discretionary entitlements - it's interest on their loans.

Where was Standard and Poor's 10 years ago? That's when the alarm bells should have been sounded.

Questions for the QBs

... and everyone else associated with the Super Bowl.

As As Marques Colston's unofficial publicist, I cover the NFL here at The Scratching Post. Now that the Saints are in the Super Bowl, I've got something to write about!

Since we've got two weeks before the big game, the press will be trying to squeeze out every last, little story possible from both teams. Michael Lombardi over at NFL.com has gotten the ball rolling with this piece where he compares Peyton Manning to Michael Jordan.

His dominance of his sport is Michael Jordanesque because, like Jordan once did in the NBA, Manning controls the entire game. Manning might not play defense, but his ability forces opposing offenses to alter their thinking -- to adjust to the "Manning" factor. With Manning as the opponent, teams are living and dying on every play, hoping to tip one pass, hoping for one critical drop that can get the defense off the field. But it is all just hope, as there is never a plan to really stop Manning, at least not one I've seen.

I think we need to help these guys out a little bit. "How is Peyton Manning like Michael Jordan" is a good one, but they're clearly going to run out of topics if we don't suggest a few. Here are some to get you started before you leave yours in the comments.

• How is Drew Brees like Bart Starr?


• Can the Colts play as well as the '68 Jets?


• Would the Saints defense have been able to stop the Rams' Greatest Show on Turf?


• How is Joseph Addai like a green mamba?


• Does Reggie Bush change his own oil?


• If Peyton Manning was a sandwich, what type would he be?


• Who's better, Aquaman, the Incredible Hulk or Robert Meachem?

There. I've got you started. Feel free to add your own.

Captchadef

Thanks to our good Monks of Miscellaneous Musings, we have this captchadef to offer.

bropen (n): A stable of male friends that can be dialed up at a moment's notice to hang out if one's signficant other is being a pain.

Thanks, Dean!

Protecting the, err, Innocent

At South Philadelphia High School, Asian students are getting attacked by black students. Here's the story from philly.com.

Inside is a cauldron of cultural discontent that erupted in violence last month , off-campus and lunchroom attacks on about 50 Asian students, injuring 30, primarily at the hands of blacks. The Asian students, who boycotted classes for more than a week afterward, say they've endured relentless bullying by black students while school officials turned a blind eye to their complaints ...

Asian students say black students routinely pelt them with food, beat, punch and kick them in school hallways and bathrooms, and hurl racial epithets like "Hey, Chinese!" and "Yo, Dragon Ball!"

Lest you think the MSM is falling down on the job, here's the local NBC affiliate's take on the story.

Dozens of Asian students were attacked and beaten in the hallways of South Philadelphia High School by a gang of other students Thursday.

Other than the victims, there's no mention of the racial aspect at all. That's probably wise. NBC is clearly protecting the rights of the accused the narrative they're trying to maintain about racial oppression going just one way.

Then again, the whole incident could have been cooked up by the Asians as another disgusting attempt to push the ... well, let's let the principal of that school describe it.

Principal LaGreta Brown, the school's fourth principal in five years, was cited for a discriminatory attitude, particularly for referring to the advocacy groups' efforts as "the Asian agenda."

Typical Asians. They probably want to educate themselves or something. Sickening.

Who Dat Say Dey Gonna Beat Dem Saints?

As As Marques Colston's unofficial publicist, all I can say is, WHAT A GAME! Whoohoo! We're going to the Super Bowl, baby!

See you in Miami!