Occasional Observations

My friend Paul sent me this tonight.  I like it.

A brief summary of a life’s learnings:

Age 5: I learned that things are easier when someone is holding your hand.

Age 10: I learned to never blow in a cat’s ear.

Age 15: I learned that although it’s hard to admit it, I’m secretly glad my parents are strict with me.

Age 20: I learned that if you want to cheer yourself up, you should try cheering someone else up.

Age 25: I learned that if someone says something unkind about me, I must live so that no one will believe it.

Age 30: I learned that there are people who love you dearly but just don’t know how to show it.

Age 35: I learned that if I want to do something positive for my children, I should work to improve my marriage.

Age 40: I learned that the greater people’s sense of guilt, the greater their need to blame others.

Age 45: I learned that I can never allow life’s disappointments to steal my enthusiasm.

Age 50: I learned that I can tell a lot about a person by the way they handle these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights.

Age 55: I learned that keeping a vegetable garden is worth a medicine cabinet full of pills.

Age 60: I learned that life sometimes gives you a second chance.

Age 65: I learned that I shouldn’t go through life with a catcher’s mitt on both hands. I need to be able to throw something back.

Age 70: I learned regardless of your relationship with your parents, you miss them terribly 

after they die.

Age 75: I learned that children and grandparents are natural allies.

Age 80: I learned that even suffering has its gifts.

Age 85: I learned that whenever I decide something with kindness, I usually make the right decision.

Age 90: I learned that even when I have pains, I can live without being one.

During this time of campaining, we’re asked to make choices.  The candidates tell us who they are and what they’ll do.  It’s very easy to just be cynical and say that it doesn’t matter who’s elected, but it does.  The next president will be faced with many tough choices, and the direction of his choices will affect us for a long time.

How about the choice of spending $1,000,000,000,000 of cash (certainly of less value than the lives of 4,500 US Soldiers and thousands of others) in the Iraq war?  What could we have done with that TRILLION dollars?  A writer provides a few choices…..

When the Sunday morning political pundits began talking last year about the tab for the war in Iraq hitting $1 trillion, Rob Simpson sprang from his sofa in indignation.

“Why aren’t people outraged about this? Why aren’t we hearing about it?” Simpson said. And then it came to him: “Nobody knows what a trillion dollars is.”

The amount — $1,000,000,000,000 — was just too big to comprehend.

So Simpson, 51, decided to embark “on an unusual but intriguing research project” to put the dollars and cents of the war into perspective. He hired some assistants and spent 12 months immersed in economic data and crunching numbers.

The result: a slim but heavily annotated paperback released, “What We Could Have Done With the Money: 50 Ways to Spend the Trillion Dollars We’ve Spent on Iraq.”

Simpson is no geopolitical, macro-economic, inside-the-Beltway expert. He’s an armchair analyst and creative director for an advertising agency, a former radio announcer and music critic in Ontario and a one-time voiceover actor.

His alternative spending choices reflect his curiosity and wit.

Read the whole article from CNN here.  Access Simpson’s web site here.

From the article by Scott Berkun:

It’s nowhere to be found in major coverage, but smart folks have studied what traits led to more successful presidencies. Sure, these things are subjective, but they offer a better framework, based on history, for making our next big bet.

Fred I. Greenstein, Professor of Politics Emeritus at Princeton University, calls out 6 attributes most related to success in office, a veritable scorecard for our use:

1. Effectiveness as a public communicator
2. Organizational capacity
3. Political skill (well duh, but he explains specific traits)
4. Vision
5. Cognitive Style
6. Emotional Intelligence

Read the whole article here: http://www.scottberkun.com/essays/how-to-pick-a-president

This is what politics is to me. Someone tells you all the trees on your street have a disease. One side says give them food and water and everything will be fine. One side says chop them down and burn them so they don’t infect another street. That’s politics. And I’m going, Who says they’re diseased? And how does this sickness manifest itself? And is this outside of a natural cycle? And who said this again? And when were they on this street? But we just have people who shout, “Chop it down and burn it” or “Give it food and water” and there’s your two choices. Sorry, I’m not a believer.

- John Malkovich, Esquire Magazine, Nov 2008

Sam Harris, in an article for Newsweek, defends the concept of being elite and questions our political system where mediocrity is rewarded.  From the article:

Ask yourself: how has “elitism” become a bad word in American politics? There is simply no other walk of life in which extraordinary talent and rigorous training are denigrated. We want elite pilots to fly our planes, elite troops to undertake our most critical missions, elite athletes to represent us in competition and elite scientists to devote the most productive years of their lives to curing our diseases. And yet, when it comes time to vest people with even greater responsibilities, we consider it a virtue to shun any and all standards of excellence. When it comes to choosing the people whose thoughts and actions will decide the fates of millions, then we suddenly want someone just like us, someone fit to have a beer with, someone down-to-earth—in fact, almost anyone, provided that he or she doesn’t seem too intelligent or well educated.

Harris echos my thoughts that the idea that Governor Palin might have input to, or even one day direct US foreign policy is very scary.  It’s not the inexperience that worries me — it’s the experiences she has had up to this point.

I want to see our “best and brightest” get into politics, but unfortunately, there is no motivation for them to do so.

Yes, more offshore drilling in US waters will add to our domestic oil production in a few years.  Here’s how much:

UPDATE: May 11, 2010

Well, does the latest spill convince you of the high cost of offshore drilling???

The Consumerist has a deal for you from File Savr. Check out the article and give File Savr a try.

Just use Alt-RightShift-Del.  No battery removal needed!

Warning! Rebooting your BB takes longer than rebooting your PC!

From the Upliftin web site: