31st floor

uhoh

At closing time today. 1US$=1.0431 Canadian. Gonna be a long month of very slow drivers 'round here.

Pure Gold, "Things I Wish I'd Known When I Was Younger", by Adrian Savage

* Most of it doesn’t matter. So much of what I got excited about, anxious about, or wasted my time and energy on, turned out not to matter. There are only a few things that truly count for a happy life. I wish I had known to concentrate on those and ignore the rest.

* The greatest source of misery and hatred in this world is clinging to past hurts. Look at all the terrorists and militant groups that hark back to some event long gone, or base their justification for killing on claims of some supposed historical right to a bit of land, or redress for a wrong done hundreds of years ago.

* Waiting to do something until you can be sure of doing it exactly right means waiting for ever. One of the greatest advantages anyone can have is the willingness to make a fool of themselves publicly and often. There’s no better way to learn and develop. Heck, it’s fun too.

* Following the latest fashion, in work or in life, is spiritual and intellectual suicide. You can be a cheap imitation of the ideal of the moment; or you can be a unique individual. The choice is yours. Religion isn’t the opiate of the masses, fashion is.

* If people complain that you’re too fond of going your own way and aren’t fitting in, you must be on the right track. Who wants to live life as a herd animal? The guys in power don’t want you to fit in for your own sake; they want you to stop causing them problems and follow their orders. You can’t have the freedom to be yourself and meekly fit in at the same time.

* If you make your work your life, you’re making your life into hard work. Like most people, I confused myself by looking at people like artists and musicians whose life’s “work” fills their time. That isn’t work. It’s who they are. Unless you have some overwhelming passion that also happens to allow you to earn a living doing it, always remember that work should be a means to an end: living an enjoyable life. Spend as little time on the means as possible consistent with achieving the end. Only idiots live to work.

* The quickest and simplest way to wreck any relationship is to listen to gossip. The worst way to spend your time is spreading more. People who spread gossip are the plague-carriers of our day. Cockroaches are clean, kindly creatures in comparison.

* Trying to please other people is largely a futile activity. Everyone will be mad at you sometime. Most of the people you deal with will dislike, disparage, belittle, or ignore what you say or do most of the time. Besides, you can never really know what others do want, so a good deal of whatever you do in that regard will go to waste. Be comforted. Those who love you will probably love you regardless, and they are the ones whose opinions are worth caring about. The rest aren’t worth five minutes of thought between them.

* Every winner is destined to be a loser in due course. It’s great to be up on the winner’s podium. Just don’t imagine you can stay there for ever. Worst of all is being determined to do so, by any means available.

* You can rarely, if ever, please, placate, change, or mollify an asshole. The best thing you can do is stay away from every one you encounter. Being an asshole is a contagious disease. The more time you spend around one, the more likely you are to catch it and become one too.

* Everything takes twice as long as you plan for and produces results about half as good as you hoped. There’s no reason to be downhearted about this. Just allow for it and move on.

* People are oddly consistent. Liars usually tell lies. Cheaters cheat whenever it suits them. A person who confides in you has usually confided in several others first—but not got the response they wanted. A loyal friend will stay loyal under enormous amounts of thoughtless abuse.

* However hard you try, you can’t avoid being yourself. Who else could you be? You can act and pretend, but the person acting and pretending is still you. And if you won’t accept yourself—and do the best you can with what you have—who then has any obligation to accept you?

* When it comes to blatant lies, there are none more egregious than budget figures. Time spent agonizing over them is time wasted. Even if (miracle of miracles!) yours are honest and accurate, no one else will have been so foolish.

* The loudest noise in the world is the sound of people whining. Don’t add to it.

Adrian Savage is a writer, an Englishman, and a retired business executive, in that order, who now lives in Tucson, Arizona. You can read his other articles at Slow Leadership, the site for everyone who wants to build a civilized place to work and bring back the taste, zest and satisfaction to leadership and life. Recent articles there on similar topics include Chickens, eggs, and happiness and Why perfection isn’t a viable goal. His latest book, Slow Leadership: Civilizing The Organization, is now available at all good bookstores.

The 213 Things Skippy is No Longer Allowed to Do in the U.S. Army.

Warning label

Priceless.

Vox Populi, indeed.

Keith bats it out of the park, again.

Court Bitchslaps Prezdunt Shrub, (from Hindu News, India)

Reveal data on Guantanamo detainees, court tells US

New York, July 22 (PTI): A United States court has ordered the Bush administration to reveal virtually all its information on Guantanamo Bay detainees who are challenging their detention, rejecting an effort by the government to limit disclosures.

The ruling came in one of the main cases relating to the fate of the detainees, effectively setting the stage for new legal battles over the government's reasons for holding the men indefinitely, 'The New York Times' reported yesterday.

It will also set the ground rules for scores of cases by detainees challenging the actions of Pentagon tribunals which decide whether terror suspects should be held as enemy combatants.

About 360 people are currently being detained at the United States naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The court said that meaningful review of the military tribunals would not be possible "without seeing all the evidence, any more than one can tell whether a fraction is more or less than half by looking only at the numerator and not the denominator".

A Justice Department spokesperson, Erik Ablin, however, declined to comment on the decision. "The department is reviewing the decision's implications and evaluating our options," the daily quoted the spokesperson as saying.

Iraq firefight with watermelon

This syncs nicely with Michael Franti, if you got broadband and a good machine, launch "Time to Go Home" at 32 sec. into the LiveLeak vid.

Happy Bastille Day, you fucking Frogs.

That is all, Continue eating your brie.

Hitting his stride, my man Obama has learned to deliver like a preacher and good on him! Good...on...him!

Who would you like to meet?

Had one of those, "If you could hang with anyone for a day" conversations today with a friend at work. The usual brilliant authors and historical luminaries were mentioned, but it got me thinking. Which people from history or contemporary celebrity-dom, living or dead, would I wanna really meet? Here's a partial list,
1. C. M. Kornbluth
2. Gil Scott Heron
3. O. Henry
4. Tom Jefferson (I'd call him "Tom")
5. John Lee Hooker
6. Charlie Chaplin
7. Johnny Depp
8. Hunter S. Thompson
9. Charles Bukowski
10. Lord Byron
11. Judas Iscariot
12. Jim Jarmusch
13. Henry Rollins ...("Don't do the list thing...")

Do the math....

$2,500,000,000,000.00, the looming cost of the war.

67,265, the number of confirmed dead Iraqi civilians as of 07/14/2007, according to the respected Iraq Body Count Project. This number is artificially low, as most Iraqi casualties go unreported. The actual number of dead Iraqi civilians has been estimated at 655,000. As of last October. (Link goes to WP article)

3,613, the number, today, of our sons, daughters, sisters, brothers that have come home in a box.

409 "Civilian" American casualties.

Minimum amount spent by BushCo. to kill just one person,
$3,793,500.07.

Of course, the administration insists that nowhere near that many Iraqis are dead, so let's see how much has been spent per human death according to confirmed casualties.

$35,069,507.80

That's one hell of an expenditure. Can our people come home now please?

RIP Khalid Hassan

July 13 (Bloomberg) -- An Iraqi journalist who had worked for the New York Times as a reporter and translator since 2003 was killed in Baghdad.

Khalid W. Hassan was shot dead as he made his way to work early today in Seiydia neighborhood, the newspaper said in an e- mailed statement.

The 23-year-old was ``a resourceful and brave member of our news team, who met the many professional and personal challenges of his four years on our staff with enduring good humor and optimism,'' the New York Times said.

``Khalid was part of a large, sometimes unsung community of Iraqi news-gatherers, translators, and support staff, who take enormous risks every day to help us comprehend their country's struggle and torment,'' Executive Editor Bill Keller said in the statement. ``To the Times, Khalid was family, and his death is heartbreaking.''

``The circumstances of the attack remain unclear at this time,'' the newspaper said.

Me, Fourth of July. Thanx fer the pics, Charity!

China miffed, who cares?

Headline from Xinhua:
"U.S. detention of Chinese seafood indiscriminate, unacceptable"
That's funny, 'cause
"Chinese definition of seafood indiscriminate, unappetizing"

Think yer tough? Yer not tough.

Missing for a month, Igloolik elder found alive.

"An 81-year-old elder and hunter from Igloolik was found alive Thursday, after four weeks of air and ground searches.

Searchers aboard a Twin Otter airplane spotted Enoki Kunuk near a vast fjord Thursday night.

"We found his kamotiq and snowmobile first, and then we found him beside his tent," Kunuk's son, Mathusalah Kunuk, told CBC News late Thursday....
...Enoki Kunuk left Igloolik on June 1 to embark on a caribou hunting trip about 100 kilometres north of the hamlet. When he hadn't returned home four or five days later as expected, (italics mine, expressing amazement) family and friends began searching for him...
...people in the community began having dreams about the lost elder's whereabouts.

'One particular dream did tell us that he's in a valley, his snowmobile is there,' he said.

'Nobody can see him, and we had flown over that area quite a few times. But this time around we went back to that same area, and sure enough, he's there.'"