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I'm reading the NYT coverage for Katrina, because I have no TV and missed it being so big. There are two ads.
Sheraton's says "Take the Scenic route" and offers 20% off hotel stays.
About Health offers "health solutions for everyday life".
I suppose any advert would seem inappropriate, but I was raised outside New Orleans (Luling) and Baton Rouge (in-town).
Poor folks. My old neighbourhood in Luling has to be flooded. All that kept the swamp's water back normally was a dike about four feet tall. It was "reclaimed" land.
We went through several hurricanes as kids, but nothing quite like this. Well, that one in the late 1960s, maybe.
I wonder if New Orleans will ever recover. With climatic change, it's likely that these massive hurricanes will continue. That means that insurance rates will have to skyrocket or coverage limited in order for State Farm, Allstate and the re-insurers to survive.
I'm glad I'm not Berkshire-Hathaway right now. As the world's largest reinsurer, I bet their hurting.
I hope J and his family are OK. They're in north part of the state, but he's had flooding before during a 12"/day rainfall event. One of those 100 year events that is happening more frequently.
One of the things that I'm wondering is how the chemical plants held out during this. The Clean Air Act of 1991 or whatever required us to start doing some major leak and stormwater runoff prevention. The plants well run, for the most part, and incredibly clean. Stormwater surges cause massive discharges, something we here in the North End have recently been dealing with. I'm not sure that any of the systems was designed to handle this amount of water. But perhaps this only qualifies as a 500 year rainfall event.
It's a bad time to be out of work.
Some random thoughts about Oil Markets and "Why China Will Cause a Land War In Asia, Probably With Siberia, Just To Get Oil". Mostly a place for me to place some notes.
There are interesting signs that the world oil markets have made a fundamental shift in the past months. Oil drives our world. It's why the US invaded Iraq and why Europe, Russia and China were so angry about it. By being in Iraq, the US wanted to change the oil equation by destabilizing the region and making OPEC less powerful. (Thanks to J for pointing out the destabilizing effect of the invasion a long time ago.)
It's obvious that the world is currently splitting into two camps, all around oil. One camp revolves around the US and its interests. The other revolves around China. Yes, there are interesting wildcards. Europe probably no longer matters. India does.
I received a phishing email that suggested that something was wrong with my PayPal account. Having just used it to purchase a replacement i1000+, I was concerned. But not enough to not look at the address:
http://www.paypal.com.cgi-binssl.net/ws/?cmd=_login-run
The address even uses PayPal links and graphics. Nice touch.
Yahoo! Small Business Hosting is hosting a phishing site. You get the Yahoo! name by any of the usual techniques. The easiest is simply to try the root of the subdomain.
How can one create a subdomain on the Yahoo! system that contains the word "paypal"? This seems to be a fairly easy correction, at least easy for Echo Software to have made. I know that there may be millions of subdomains at Yahoo! but there are surely some quality control checks to eliminate this type of thing. If you had this happen and you were a small hosting company, you'd probably be out of business from the legal problems.
What's interesting is that I notified Yahoo! at 18:33 CDST on 2005 Aug 27. By 21:46, the site was still operative. I notified PayPal first, of course. There's not too much that they can do. The requests for the gifs don't come from the Yahoo! hosted phish site but from the client's after downloading the phishing page.
Normally, by the time I get around to checking these sites, they have already fled. This one is getting a lot of uptime.
I'm tempted to set up a script to time the failure, when they take it off line. Nah, that's too much work. But it seems that Yahoo! is the way to go if you want to phish.
I must have a lot of time on my hands today to bother with this....
Sometimes I have to wonder if I have any faith whatsoever.
Every now and then, I take a dive over at The New Pantagruel (which is funnier if you are from Bloomington, Illinois here in the States) partly because I know a couple of people who have written for it and am friends of friends of the publisher or editor. And sometimes it's interesting. Like when András Visky did his interview, regarless of how Prof Visky thought it came out.
Anyway, if you ever think that I have my head up somewhere and am thoroughly irrelevant to the world, read the Panatgruel's Manifesto. I'm not really sure what makes a manifesto all that different from "who we are and what we believe" but it probably sounds more important. And there's probably some big difference. I've read a few manifestos (or is it manifestoes? I'm too lazy to even OneLook it) over my short life. I read Marx's, which seemed to alternate between brilliance and absurdity. I think I read one from some of the absurdists, too. The Humanist Manifesto was remarkably boring.
The one that Jan Tsichhold wrote, if I recall rightly, was pretty good. It has pictures. He wanted to revolutionize the typography world and succeeded, although not the way he wanted. Maybe that's too long for a manifesto: it runs to a nice sized trade paperback. I picked up mine as a gift from my wife, along with a book of woodcut prints.
I didn't make it all the way through New Pantagruel's. But it has been observed that I'm both a bit dull and probably a few cards short of a deck.
In my continuing job as the World's Most Successful Unsuccessul Person, I have been asked to consider putting together an advisory panel of sorts, a sounding board, for an US advisor on AIDS orphans. I'm not sure what that would be, exactly: mostly, it's trying to get y'all to leak out new thinking.
Anyone interested? I can't promise anything. I'm just a conduit, you know.
I'm sitting in the South Bend Chocolate Company cafe, a North End franchise that sells way too much Notre Dame logo sweets. I've finally rescued the RCA Lyra (never, ever buy a Thomson product; there's a reason why we hate the French now, I think, and mostly it has to do with lousy electronics) and have it playing what I think is Alison Krauss's debut album. It's a great day outside, coolish but still sunny. We've had a hot and dry summer, now ending it with April showers. I had 1.3" in the rain meter from an overnight set of showers. Not a lot of rain admittedly, at least not compared to the 4"/hr that I drove through to get to me brother's pad in Austin from San Antonio. Since the IHs were flooding, I decided to go north over 281 and then over. Really, really stupid idea, even back when there wasn't a whole lot up there. Four inches is a lot of rain in an hour. Of course, San Antonio got, what, 35" in a week a couple years back? That's rain. I got to take over my brother's business for a week or so while he was recovering from pneumonia at the time. JMMJ and I went out to Boerne (wasn't it Boerne, John?) to check out a property and if we hadn't had a flat tire, we'd have been caught between low water crossings as another rainstorm hit (another inch or two) and wouldn't have gotten back out for days.
So it's been wet here.
Life here in the North End has gotten strange. Or perhaps it's just lousy. It could be that, like Alan's community, we're all waiting for some leader currently unknown to stop being stupid and take hold of what God has given him or her. But we're all languishing in the Church of PowerPoint. Even the folks with autism related disorders are beginning to say that the pastor has become bitter. And pissed off. I suppose that's what I would be like if my dreams hadn't come true. Well, probably not: my dreams have been dashed so many times that I really don't do that too well any more.
The Global Organisational Design Society has released Lord Wilfred Brown's excellent management videos from the earlyt 1970s, Explorations In Management. I keep another blog about Requisite Organization, a management theory that has a great deal of support in the literature. But it's a complex theory, it seems, and it gets a bit too much support from those of us who don't actually run businesses.
(Well, actually I do run a business, but it's closing down, and it never had more than three employees.)
Lord Brown ran the Glacier Metals company in the United Kingdom and made a good deal of money, before becoming the Minister of Health (I think). His accent alone makes it interesting — he pronounces "hierarchy" as HEAR-arky — but his focus on real life management makes it priceless. There's even some wonderful storyline between a general manager (CEO) and his personnel officer that is embarassingly accurate.
Hands down, the most informative management film I've ever seen. Lord Brown has something to say, something that's hard to grasp but worth the effort. He even describes a method for handling staff roles to make them clear and accountable. Hard to believe, I know, but he pulls it off.
The Global OD Society has been given permission to disseminate the DVD for non-commercial use. You can watch it but you can't charge for showing it or sell it. But you can use it in your factory or company.
Send them an email and ask for a copy. Let them know that manasclerk sent you: I need the PR. I don't know what the shipping and handling fees will be yet, but they can't be that much. If I get permission, I will burn copies them myself and slap on the Global OD Society label and pass this out like water at a marathon.
I'm really impressed. Some of you can expect to get a DVD in the mail as soon as I get a stack of them to send out.
It is probably obvious, but for whatever reason it wasn't to me: Jesus is smarter than we are. It's not just an argument of his divinity. I'm saying that he is simply smarter than the rest of us. I believe that he is divine on top of it, but that's not what I'm saying here.
Dallas Willard makes this point in Divine Conspiracy, a book that I am reading by small chunks since my mind is smaller than Willard's. His arguments tend to crowd my head a bit. But he says that if you ask a bunch of evangelicals to word associate "smart" or "intelligent", they will never come up with "Jesus". And yet he's so clearly such a great moral philosopher and thinker that he is surely smarter than the rest of us.
[ Continue reading "Jesus Is Smarter Than You Are" ]Nothing like coming back to your own country and find 129 spam comments. If you've posted a comment in the past couple of days and I deleted it with them, I apologize.
[ Continue reading "An Addendum to Spencer's "A Letter To Andrew and Other Young Artists Injured By The Church"" ]Before I go off the grid for personal reasons, I'm posting some of the unfinished pieces I had laying about the MT database. It's not something I would normally let out, but, hey, it's the Olmec new year.
Michael Spencer, the inimitatable Internet Monk, is probably my favorite writer in the Christian blogsphere. He's often wrong, sometimes pigheaded, and even vainglorious in his worst moments. He's probably even got a streak of persecution complex, although having read some of what people say about this obscure hillbilly, it's hard not to feel he's got a point. All of which still classifies him well ahead of me on any righteousness scale. He seems to be someone who truly cares about his world, his God, his family, his life. He struggles with a variety of doubts or confusions on certain deep topics. He can complain about Focus on The Family's list of 10 Things That Mean Your Son Is A Fag and still compliment them for their fine work on parenting.
In my own vaingloriousness, I'm adding to his thoughts on Christians with art in "A Letter To Andrew and Other Young Artists Injured By The Church". He really does carry the day with an excellent piece, well thought out, and characteristically showing his years of thoughtfully considering this issue. Only a fatheaded jerk would feel he has anything to add to it, but I'm a blogger, so that goes without saying.
So my addendum to Andrew:
Yes, I was angry when I wrote this. I am still angry at these people who don't have hope to give these people, all the while talking about how important their ability to create new realities is. (Hard phrase that I'm not going to explain now.) In the end, I want to get out of owning my life: these are my people and I am responsible for them.
You know, I have this friend down in the DR named Rod Davis who is The Real Deal, who could probably use some excess power down there. I've got a pal in Transylvania who could use some business savvy folks willing to one-way ticket, leaving behind an American life or retirement.
Back in the 1800s, some bright young shinies in England decided that they would go to Africa to preach the Good News of Jesus Christ. They were some amazing young people. And of the 12, 11 died within 2 years or so.
A waste?
I rather think not. Their deaths showed that the Christians were willing to die to bring the Good News. No one came and rescued them from their tortures, disease or deaths. A one-way ticket to serve God by dying in the effort. Had they not gone, would the Gospel have ever been taken seriously?
And they knew the deprivations that they were going into. Eyes wide open, friends.
Would it be any different if I took these bright young shinies into danger for the Gospel's sake? I am not Jesus and I never will be. He is beyond me, not just because he's the Son of God through whom all created things found being, but also because he is smarter than I am or ever will be. What does it matter? Perhaps it takes someone who can see that going into danger, willing to die for the Gospel, that this can be a great benefit to Christ's message, that it would be taken seriously because I take it so seriously that I would be willing to die for it. With all my potential dying with it.
Perhaps that's the message here for me, that if I want to lead these people perhaps there exists already a model. They died terrible deaths, but is it any worse for me to die a terrible death than for those oppressed by despots, war, starvation or disease?
I know the answer. I just don't like it.
I've been attending the Global Conference on Org Design here in Toronto, and some of the things that the speakers here have been saying will be relevant to all of y'all who are high-potentials who languish in underemployment with bosses who think much smaller than you do. You're in your thirties and weren't tapped as the Golden Boy or Girl back when you started your worklife, and have been bouncing from one career to another, doing various things for about one or two years before needing to move on.
You are so totally screwed.
I mean, you are totally, abosolutely SOL.
Yep, the news from the conference here is that as a high-potential [modes 6-9 will do for my actual argument, if you've been tracking me for awhile] if you don't have a career path of high advancement by the time you are 30, you will never have one.
Ever.
Give it up because your boat ain't coming in, even filled with potatoes. Your boat sunk offshore and you, my incredibly talented but highly unfocused friend, are screwed.
Except that this is so much bullshit coming from people who have little understanding of history, and it explains a bit why RO theory has almost but not quite no traction at all with anyone who actually does things.
Let me tell you why.
Yes, I finally go to that conference in Toronto. I might have opporutunities, jobwise, but I rather doubt it. When I get back I'll be pinging retail stores if they need people now that the kids are going back to college.
Anyway, I'll be off. Please don't be offended if your comment is not approved in a timely manner.