1) I will make $80,000 in 2009. I will have fun doing it.
2) I will find a great girlfriend, or many.
3) I will be ripped like Daniel Craig in Quantum of Solace. I will do it with a 99% vegetarian diet.
4) I will buy a sailboat to take my girlfriend(s) on.
5) I will not share a bedroom with my brother again. I will have as many rooms as girlfriends.
6) I will indulge in no less than trips to Brazil, Argentina, Greece and India. In case of civil wars, the country next to it will suffice.
7) I will take my One-A-Day vitamins, once a day.
8) I will score ten (10) “Tries” at rugby.
9) I will end the year being able to prove wrong the Obama nay-sayers.
10) I will enjoy this year in peace and happiness, whether or not these resolutions come true.
Byron Shirley on December 17th, 2008
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Bush Gets The Boot!! The Shoe-throwing Incident
Here's the video of an Iraqi journalist throwing both of his shoes at President Bush in protest.
Bush's response shows how clueless he is: "So what if the guy threw a show at me?[...] I don't know what this was protesting against."
Bush's response shows how clueless he is: "So what if the guy threw a show at me?[...] I don't know what this was protesting against."
Friday, December 12, 2008
How Wall Street Started Betting on Both Sides--and Lost, Finally!!
Great article by One-time Bond trader-turned Genius Journalist Micheal Lewis (Liar's Poker, The New New Thing, Moneyball,...), about how the game Wall Street insiders where playing for years fiiiiinnnnaaalllllyyyyy came to an end--maybe 10 years too late?
The End: The era that defined Wall Street is finally, officially over. Michael Lewis, who chronicled its excess in Liar’s Poker, returns to his old haunt to figure out what went wrong.
(from the article posted above, page 4)
"[this is around 2005] The juiciest shorts—the bonds ultimately backed by the mortgages most likely to default—had several characteristics. They’d be in what Wall Street people were now calling the sand states: Arizona, California, Florida, Nevada. The loans would have been made by one of the more dubious mortgage lenders; Long Beach Financial, wholly owned by Washington Mutual, was a great example. Long Beach Financial was moving money out the door as fast as it could, few questions asked, in loans built to self-destruct. It specialized in asking homeowners with bad credit and no proof of income to put no money down and defer interest payments for as long as possible. In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $720,000.
More generally, the subprime market tapped a tranche of the American public that did not typically have anything to do with Wall Street. Lenders were making loans to people who, based on their credit ratings, were less creditworthy than 71 percent of the population. Eisman knew some of these people. One day, his housekeeper, a South American woman, told him that she was planning to buy a townhouse in Queens. “The price was absurd, and they were giving her a low-down-payment option-ARM,” says Eisman, who talked her into taking out a conventional fixed-rate mortgage. Next, the baby nurse he’d hired back in 1997 to take care of his newborn twin daughters phoned him. “She was this lovely woman from Jamaica,” he says. “One day she calls me and says she and her sister own five townhouses in Queens. I said, ‘How did that happen?’ ” It happened because after they bought the first one and its value rose, the lenders came and suggested they refinance and take out $250,000, which they used to buy another one. Then the price of that one rose too, and they repeated the experiment. “By the time they were done,” Eisman says, “they owned five of them, the market was falling, and they couldn’t make any of the payments.”
How can we be surprised that the market failed??
And some more, in 2004:
"There’s a simple measure of sanity in housing prices: the ratio of median home price to income. Historically, it runs around 3 to 1; by late 2004, it had risen nationally to 4 to 1. “All these people were saying it was nearly as high in some other countries,” Zelman says. “But the problem wasn’t just that it was 4 to 1. In Los Angeles, it was 10 to 1, and in Miami, 8.5 to 1. And then you coupled that with the buyers. They weren’t real buyers. They were speculators.”
Not convinced we where delusional? How is this for strange:
"By the spring of 2005, FrontPoint was fairly convinced that something was very screwed up not merely in a handful of companies but in the financial underpinnings of the entire U.S. mortgage market. In 2000, there had been $130 billion in subprime mortgage lending, with $55 billion of that repackaged as mortgage bonds. But in 2005, there was $625 billion in subprime mortgage loans, $507 billion of which found its way into mortgage bonds. Eisman couldn’t understand who was making all these loans or why."
(Thank you Steven for the article!!)
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Us Vs. Them---I mean, How Our Different Brains Function
I'm thinking up of a piece on relationships and dating, and my friend Alexandra pointed out this video, a 5 minute sample of a DVD. Hilarious and totally true.
Tale Of Two Brains - The best free videos are right here
Tale Of Two Brains - The best free videos are right here
Thursday, December 4, 2008
AIMING AT THE TARGET: TIPS FOR SUCCESS
From the desk of Byron Shirley, San Francisco, CA. December 4th, 2008
My goal in my professional life is to be in work that is engaging and fun, while allowing for financial and personal growth. To my knowledge, the most fun and growth to be had comes from starting and running your own business. It also happens to be the easiest way to become a millionaire (and, eventually, billionaire). In my career I have always thought to be an entrepreneur, and I believe that my work experiences have each given me a different piece to add to the puzzle and become one.
On the value of life experience in business…
I believe in learning through life experiences. I see the schools as helpful preparators, but, ultimately for my career as an entrepreneur—it at best gave me a rough idea of the real thing. True, I have just an A.A. in Business/Marketing and one in Liberal Arts, but I have a BA in Entrepreneurship from the School of Real Life. From taking marketing, business, entrepreneurship classes at the junior college level as well as quizzing graduates from the online universities I considered attending, I see that none offer more than mere theories and maybe an old-fashioned sense of what running a business is really like. When I compare my experience as Director of Interactive Marketing at Jiggerbug, an Internet startup for two and a half years to the “E-commerce” class I took in school, I can tell you I don’t need a passing grade to do this stuff. I got all I needed to know on the job. At Jiggerbug.com, I was being encouraged by my boss to take ever more tasks on, along with a few seminars, and grow within my role in the company. I took to wearing many hats, I learned many great lessons and was getting paid well for it, too.
If business school was so much like real-life, why not just do the real thing and get on with it? Why wait to have all the fun, the excitement?
In Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent study on the reasons for success, Outliers, the author outlines how people become “experts” at something. Essentially, to be an expert at any given thing you need, besides some talent, about 10,000 hours of practice at it. From the Beatles to Bill Gates to Mozart, all the great ones achieved success by practicing for a long, long time--10,000 Hrs= 10 years, given that you practice several hours per week (a certain amount of luck and timeliness helped, too). Bill Gates was a smart man and worked hard, but he also got to mess with computers and programming years ahead of everyone else. The Beatles started out playing 5-to-8 hour shifts 4-5 days a week in shady clubs in Hamburg---they worked for it. Without that real life experience, it’s doubtful that even on sheer talent they would be who have made it.
My point is, if you go to school, taking the same classes as everyone, in the end, are you really ahead? I prefer the value of experience, of gaining in “Practical Intelligence” as Gladwell calls it—the ability to handle any situation that you might encounter. In today’s world we are asked to be more flexible than ever. People can multi-task at will; they handle much more information than they ever did in the history of the world. That’s not necessarily learned in the classroom! That’s learned by practice, in the day-to-day challenges of running a business.
One of the most prized business skill is the ability to communicate effectively. Express your goals, your “know-how”clearly, and people will want to work with you. Not everyone is a social person, but everyone can sure get better at it. Schools will teach theories that are very useful, and although I will not be an accountant in this life time, Accounting 101 helped me be a better business manager. It got me to understand financial reports, and reminded me that it often comes down to one thing: making money.
On joining your first business…
The greatest excitement in business comes from being responsible of your’s and your company’s success, being the boss. Calling the shots forces you to take a hard look at what you know and how you can use that knowledge well. Time is critical because now it’s your time and maybe your money, too. Now, you don’t need to be the CEO of Ford, who is responsible for over a million jobs, to feel challenged.
Pick a smaller sandbox first, allow yourself to be creative. For people getting their first or second business experience, I encourage you to start working ASAP in small, upstart companies. An Internet business if often run on a shoestring budget with a small staff where communication and creativity is key. You’re going to have to be creative because, guess what: what you’re hired for may not the only job you’ll have to do. As marketing director at Jiggerbug I was responsible, as I put it in my resume, for “managing an online marketing campaign, Pay-Per-Click advertising on Google and Overture, web design and email marketing.” I helped run the PR campaign, wrote systems and procedures for the company to use as reference, helped design our mail-in envelopes, chose our stock of audio books we rented out, and even wrote reviews of my favorite books on blogs. Looking back, I like to think that I was far more than “Director of Interactive Marketing”.
Bottom line is: test yourself. Try different businesses, different roles, to find your strength and weaknesses; what excites you and what doesn’t. And if you fail, get up, try another way. Design your own website; you’ll be able to better understand what the value of professional web designers is. Plus, you can always DIY certain things in case of emergency or simple need. My company saved thousands in fees to designers because I could go in the back-end of our website and make simple changes, or design “satellite” websites to drive web traffic.
On owning your own business…
As Timothy Ferriss writes in his book The 4-Hour Work Week, you’ll want to take on fewer roles and defer responsibility. Once you know how to do every job in the business you’re involved in, or at least know the general steps to accomplish it, you can delegate and help others if needed. For a floor heating business, I manufactured, packaged, shipped and later installed floor heating before selling even a foot of it. I even took tours with other sales people. When I started selling floor heating in California, I had no true idea of how to go about it. I recognize now that I wasted time everywhere I went, and learned how to be more efficient and ask for what I wanted. I realized that having 50 representatives was much harder to deal with than having the best 10. I may sell a little less, but my time is much better spent, and I can represent other businesses in the meantime.
In conclusion…
What’s meaningful in life? Growth. As humans our instinct is to get better, to improve the quality of our lives as we grow older. As work is a given part of life, we must find the kind of work that provides growth while being pleasurable and fun. Being an entrepreneur is such a career. You could go to school to become an accountant, a PR person at some highly placed multi-national corporation, or a trader on Wall Street. All those careers are fine, obviously; they provide money, balance, security, and you can usually find 1,000s like them, so you’ll always have work. But is really fun and exciting, over the long term? You’ll probably find yourself bored with 5-10 years, and simply look forward to the two weeks a year you get off, or even retirement at the end of the tunnel. The fun, the excitement, it can be found in being part of something you created, even with friends. It can start out as someone’s passion—audio books, or antique floors—and grow from there to that multi-million dollar business you only thought other people achieved. The other thing to remember is that most people don’t achieve success alone. There is power in numbers, and entrepreneurs are only as good as the people they enroll to help out on the way. If you don’t know how to make that one business idea you always had happen, talk to the people around you about it, and they could help you put it together. Best of luck. See you at the top. :)
My goal in my professional life is to be in work that is engaging and fun, while allowing for financial and personal growth. To my knowledge, the most fun and growth to be had comes from starting and running your own business. It also happens to be the easiest way to become a millionaire (and, eventually, billionaire). In my career I have always thought to be an entrepreneur, and I believe that my work experiences have each given me a different piece to add to the puzzle and become one.
On the value of life experience in business…
I believe in learning through life experiences. I see the schools as helpful preparators, but, ultimately for my career as an entrepreneur—it at best gave me a rough idea of the real thing. True, I have just an A.A. in Business/Marketing and one in Liberal Arts, but I have a BA in Entrepreneurship from the School of Real Life. From taking marketing, business, entrepreneurship classes at the junior college level as well as quizzing graduates from the online universities I considered attending, I see that none offer more than mere theories and maybe an old-fashioned sense of what running a business is really like. When I compare my experience as Director of Interactive Marketing at Jiggerbug, an Internet startup for two and a half years to the “E-commerce” class I took in school, I can tell you I don’t need a passing grade to do this stuff. I got all I needed to know on the job. At Jiggerbug.com, I was being encouraged by my boss to take ever more tasks on, along with a few seminars, and grow within my role in the company. I took to wearing many hats, I learned many great lessons and was getting paid well for it, too.
If business school was so much like real-life, why not just do the real thing and get on with it? Why wait to have all the fun, the excitement?
In Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent study on the reasons for success, Outliers, the author outlines how people become “experts” at something. Essentially, to be an expert at any given thing you need, besides some talent, about 10,000 hours of practice at it. From the Beatles to Bill Gates to Mozart, all the great ones achieved success by practicing for a long, long time--10,000 Hrs= 10 years, given that you practice several hours per week (a certain amount of luck and timeliness helped, too). Bill Gates was a smart man and worked hard, but he also got to mess with computers and programming years ahead of everyone else. The Beatles started out playing 5-to-8 hour shifts 4-5 days a week in shady clubs in Hamburg---they worked for it. Without that real life experience, it’s doubtful that even on sheer talent they would be who have made it.
My point is, if you go to school, taking the same classes as everyone, in the end, are you really ahead? I prefer the value of experience, of gaining in “Practical Intelligence” as Gladwell calls it—the ability to handle any situation that you might encounter. In today’s world we are asked to be more flexible than ever. People can multi-task at will; they handle much more information than they ever did in the history of the world. That’s not necessarily learned in the classroom! That’s learned by practice, in the day-to-day challenges of running a business.
One of the most prized business skill is the ability to communicate effectively. Express your goals, your “know-how”clearly, and people will want to work with you. Not everyone is a social person, but everyone can sure get better at it. Schools will teach theories that are very useful, and although I will not be an accountant in this life time, Accounting 101 helped me be a better business manager. It got me to understand financial reports, and reminded me that it often comes down to one thing: making money.
On joining your first business…
The greatest excitement in business comes from being responsible of your’s and your company’s success, being the boss. Calling the shots forces you to take a hard look at what you know and how you can use that knowledge well. Time is critical because now it’s your time and maybe your money, too. Now, you don’t need to be the CEO of Ford, who is responsible for over a million jobs, to feel challenged.
Pick a smaller sandbox first, allow yourself to be creative. For people getting their first or second business experience, I encourage you to start working ASAP in small, upstart companies. An Internet business if often run on a shoestring budget with a small staff where communication and creativity is key. You’re going to have to be creative because, guess what: what you’re hired for may not the only job you’ll have to do. As marketing director at Jiggerbug I was responsible, as I put it in my resume, for “managing an online marketing campaign, Pay-Per-Click advertising on Google and Overture, web design and email marketing.” I helped run the PR campaign, wrote systems and procedures for the company to use as reference, helped design our mail-in envelopes, chose our stock of audio books we rented out, and even wrote reviews of my favorite books on blogs. Looking back, I like to think that I was far more than “Director of Interactive Marketing”.
Bottom line is: test yourself. Try different businesses, different roles, to find your strength and weaknesses; what excites you and what doesn’t. And if you fail, get up, try another way. Design your own website; you’ll be able to better understand what the value of professional web designers is. Plus, you can always DIY certain things in case of emergency or simple need. My company saved thousands in fees to designers because I could go in the back-end of our website and make simple changes, or design “satellite” websites to drive web traffic.
On owning your own business…
As Timothy Ferriss writes in his book The 4-Hour Work Week, you’ll want to take on fewer roles and defer responsibility. Once you know how to do every job in the business you’re involved in, or at least know the general steps to accomplish it, you can delegate and help others if needed. For a floor heating business, I manufactured, packaged, shipped and later installed floor heating before selling even a foot of it. I even took tours with other sales people. When I started selling floor heating in California, I had no true idea of how to go about it. I recognize now that I wasted time everywhere I went, and learned how to be more efficient and ask for what I wanted. I realized that having 50 representatives was much harder to deal with than having the best 10. I may sell a little less, but my time is much better spent, and I can represent other businesses in the meantime.
In conclusion…
What’s meaningful in life? Growth. As humans our instinct is to get better, to improve the quality of our lives as we grow older. As work is a given part of life, we must find the kind of work that provides growth while being pleasurable and fun. Being an entrepreneur is such a career. You could go to school to become an accountant, a PR person at some highly placed multi-national corporation, or a trader on Wall Street. All those careers are fine, obviously; they provide money, balance, security, and you can usually find 1,000s like them, so you’ll always have work. But is really fun and exciting, over the long term? You’ll probably find yourself bored with 5-10 years, and simply look forward to the two weeks a year you get off, or even retirement at the end of the tunnel. The fun, the excitement, it can be found in being part of something you created, even with friends. It can start out as someone’s passion—audio books, or antique floors—and grow from there to that multi-million dollar business you only thought other people achieved. The other thing to remember is that most people don’t achieve success alone. There is power in numbers, and entrepreneurs are only as good as the people they enroll to help out on the way. If you don’t know how to make that one business idea you always had happen, talk to the people around you about it, and they could help you put it together. Best of luck. See you at the top. :)
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
For the Single guys out there..listen to a 9 year-old's advice!
9 Years-old, precocious kid Alec Greven has written a book on how to how to talk to girls and "Get them to like you", in his words.
From The New York Post:
The fourth-grader from Castle Rock, Colo., advises Lothario wannabes to stop showing off, go easy on the compliments to avoid looking desperate - and be wary of "pretty girls."
"It is easy to spot pretty girls because they have big earrings, fancy dresses and all the jewelry," he writes in Chapter Three.
"Pretty girls are like cars that need a lot of oil." [Smart kid!!]
He advises, "The best choice for most boys is a regular girl. Remember, some pretty girls are coldhearted when it comes to boys. Don't let them get to you." [My favorite point. He's dead-on, unfortunately. We where just discussing this at lunch: cute girls got attention early on, and learned that they don't need to make an effort to be liked.]
Over a few Shirley Temples yesterday at Langan's on West 47 Street, Alec said that he culled his wisdom by peeking at his peers at play.
"I saw a lot of boys that had trouble talking to girls," Alec said.
As for his how-to, he concedes, "I never expected people to buy it like a regular book in a bookstore."
But with classic plain-spoken advice - like "comb your hair and don't wear sweats" - it's no surprise his 46-page book was a hit with boys and girls of all ages.
He believes the best way to approach a girl is to keep it to a simple "hi."
"If I say hi and you say hi back, we're probably off to a good start," he said. [LOL]
As for his own love life, he said he is not dating anyone at the moment. "I'm a little too young," he confessed.
From The New York Post:
The fourth-grader from Castle Rock, Colo., advises Lothario wannabes to stop showing off, go easy on the compliments to avoid looking desperate - and be wary of "pretty girls."
"It is easy to spot pretty girls because they have big earrings, fancy dresses and all the jewelry," he writes in Chapter Three.
"Pretty girls are like cars that need a lot of oil." [Smart kid!!]
He advises, "The best choice for most boys is a regular girl. Remember, some pretty girls are coldhearted when it comes to boys. Don't let them get to you." [My favorite point. He's dead-on, unfortunately. We where just discussing this at lunch: cute girls got attention early on, and learned that they don't need to make an effort to be liked.]
Over a few Shirley Temples yesterday at Langan's on West 47 Street, Alec said that he culled his wisdom by peeking at his peers at play.
"I saw a lot of boys that had trouble talking to girls," Alec said.
As for his how-to, he concedes, "I never expected people to buy it like a regular book in a bookstore."
But with classic plain-spoken advice - like "comb your hair and don't wear sweats" - it's no surprise his 46-page book was a hit with boys and girls of all ages.
He believes the best way to approach a girl is to keep it to a simple "hi."
"If I say hi and you say hi back, we're probably off to a good start," he said. [LOL]
As for his own love life, he said he is not dating anyone at the moment. "I'm a little too young," he confessed.
Monday, December 1, 2008
Is this an article from The Onion???
This article feels like a joke. Or it's the interview that was a joke, or it's Good Ol Prez that is phucking with us, but somewhere, there's a jokester.
ABC News' Charlie Gibson Interviewed G.W. Bush today to reflect on the past (His presidency) and the present (Obama getting elected). Here is what was said:
From ABC News: Bush on the Iraq War...
Looking back on his eight years in the White House, President George W. Bush said he was "unprepared" for war and pinpointed incorrect intelligence that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction as "biggest regret of all the presidency."
"I think I was unprepared for war," Bush told ABC News' Charlie Gibson in an interview airing today on "World News." "In other words, I didn't campaign and say, 'Please vote for me, I'll be able to handle an attack,'" he said. "In other words, I didn't anticipate war. Presidents -- one of the things about the modern presidency is that the unexpected will happen."
Shut up, Mr. Bush. Just SHUT UP. You wanted this war, you wanted your Saddam Hussein, that much is clear. You jumped at it, you loved it, and now you don't because it's like a migraine that just won't go away. So please, sit down.
Bush on the economic crisis...
President George W. Bush expressed remorse that the global financial crisis has cost jobs and harmed retirement accounts and said he'll back more government intervention if needed to ease the recession.
"I'm sorry it's happening, of course," Bush said in a wide-ranging interview with ABC's "World News," which was airing Monday. "Obviously I don't like the idea of people losing jobs, or being worried about their 401(k)s. On the other hand, the American people got to know that we will safeguard the system. I mean, we're in. And if we need to be in more, we will."
God, I hope this guy doesn't end up writing his own book. Dear God, just do it with a tape recorder, or better yet, just let Karl Rove write it. This last sentence, it's like I can just hear his southern Texas "Everyman" speak through it. Does this guy only talk in generalities, or what? it's like he just comes up with these big, reassuring messages. "We're in." And wait!! "if we need to be in more, we will"!! Wow, I feel better already. Bush is finally backing us up. Phew.
Next...
Bush on helping lose the election for McCain...
President Bush told an interviewer that his presidency may have helped Barack Obama win the White House.
"I think it was a repudiation of Republicans," he told Charlie Gibson of ABC News, according to a transcript released by the network Monday. "And I'm sure some people voted for Barack Obama because of me. I think most people voted for Barack Obama because they decided they wanted him to be in their living room for the next four years explaining policy."
Wait, did they vote against you, or for Obama? It sounds like he's basically admitting that he caused the Republicans' loss, but then backtracks because, well, that doesn't sound to good to say that at the end of your presidency.
And we voted for Obama "because [we] wanted him to be in [our] living rooms explaining policy?" Well, I hope I didn't vote for him so he could make me pancakes, yes, so I hope he will be involved in policy. That's right, Captain Obvious. Also, I hope Bush understood that this whole "Being President" thing is not just about explaining away what you did, but really, you know, doing things to help our country go from stalled to "forward".
Phew. That's the most typing I've done on THIS president.
ABC News' Charlie Gibson Interviewed G.W. Bush today to reflect on the past (His presidency) and the present (Obama getting elected). Here is what was said:
From ABC News: Bush on the Iraq War...
Looking back on his eight years in the White House, President George W. Bush said he was "unprepared" for war and pinpointed incorrect intelligence that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction as "biggest regret of all the presidency."
"I think I was unprepared for war," Bush told ABC News' Charlie Gibson in an interview airing today on "World News." "In other words, I didn't campaign and say, 'Please vote for me, I'll be able to handle an attack,'" he said. "In other words, I didn't anticipate war. Presidents -- one of the things about the modern presidency is that the unexpected will happen."
Shut up, Mr. Bush. Just SHUT UP. You wanted this war, you wanted your Saddam Hussein, that much is clear. You jumped at it, you loved it, and now you don't because it's like a migraine that just won't go away. So please, sit down.
Bush on the economic crisis...
President George W. Bush expressed remorse that the global financial crisis has cost jobs and harmed retirement accounts and said he'll back more government intervention if needed to ease the recession.
"I'm sorry it's happening, of course," Bush said in a wide-ranging interview with ABC's "World News," which was airing Monday. "Obviously I don't like the idea of people losing jobs, or being worried about their 401(k)s. On the other hand, the American people got to know that we will safeguard the system. I mean, we're in. And if we need to be in more, we will."
God, I hope this guy doesn't end up writing his own book. Dear God, just do it with a tape recorder, or better yet, just let Karl Rove write it. This last sentence, it's like I can just hear his southern Texas "Everyman" speak through it. Does this guy only talk in generalities, or what? it's like he just comes up with these big, reassuring messages. "We're in." And wait!! "if we need to be in more, we will"!! Wow, I feel better already. Bush is finally backing us up. Phew.
Next...
Bush on helping lose the election for McCain...
President Bush told an interviewer that his presidency may have helped Barack Obama win the White House.
"I think it was a repudiation of Republicans," he told Charlie Gibson of ABC News, according to a transcript released by the network Monday. "And I'm sure some people voted for Barack Obama because of me. I think most people voted for Barack Obama because they decided they wanted him to be in their living room for the next four years explaining policy."
Wait, did they vote against you, or for Obama? It sounds like he's basically admitting that he caused the Republicans' loss, but then backtracks because, well, that doesn't sound to good to say that at the end of your presidency.
And we voted for Obama "because [we] wanted him to be in [our] living rooms explaining policy?" Well, I hope I didn't vote for him so he could make me pancakes, yes, so I hope he will be involved in policy. That's right, Captain Obvious. Also, I hope Bush understood that this whole "Being President" thing is not just about explaining away what you did, but really, you know, doing things to help our country go from stalled to "forward".
Phew. That's the most typing I've done on THIS president.
Monday, November 24, 2008
Picked up a new book--Outliers: the Story of Success
On Sunday, even know I am pretty broke right now, I made sure to pick out the new Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point, Blink, also writer at The New Yorker) book called OULIERS: THE STORY OF SUCCESS. It's about how Gladwell wanted to get behind the reasons for success, and followed successful people.
In an interview last week, for example, he points out that with mathematics, Westerners tend to think of being "good" or being "bad" at math is something inane in you, and can't be changed. That's it: you're either made to be good at it or bad. In a very telling find, he also notes that the Chinese tend to see being "good" or "bad" at math as something dependent on how hard you work at it. So we Westerners find this excuse, and meanwhile the Chinese say "the heck with that", and lo and behold, who consistently achieves better scores at the SAT, for example? The Chinese.
"Outliers" is a math term and here Malcolm uses it to describe people who live outside of the norm.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
How the Republican Party Blew itself Up
Great article in Rolling Stone about the destruction, dismantling, whatever you want to call it, of the Republican party. I'll post the highlights.
(See the whole article here.)
Requiem for a Maverick
John McCain ran one of the most incompetent, schizo campaigns in history — and for that we owe him big-time
Election night at the Biltmore in Arizona is a hilariously dismal scene, like a funeral for a family member nobody liked, who died owing everyone money. The rats here are already bailing off the ship with lightning speed, like L.A. Dodgers fans leaving a playoff game to catch the latest episode of Entourage. The exodus, in fact, begins about eight seconds into John McCain's concession speech, which incidentally starts off on the classiest of notes: with the remaining crowd cursing the name of the new president.
"A little while ago, I had the honor of calling Sen. Barack Obama," McCain begins.
"Boooooo!" bellows the crowd. Outside the hotel, a wine-drunk young woman in a fluffy white ball gown probably last worn at a Liberty University frat mixer angrily flings a would-be celebratory pompom she has been clutching into my face. "I can't listen to this shit!" she yells, scooting away.
--
I ask [local Young Republicans] why they think McCain lost. Dori says a big reason is that "a lot of big movie stars came out for Obama." I ask her which ones.
"Um, Puff Daddy?" she says. "Although I don't know if Puff Daddy came out for Obama."
"There's Oprah," adds Emily.
"Yeah, Oprah," says Dori.
--
Obama, [a McCain supporter] assures me, is a "novelty" who will "go away within the next couple of years."
"Um," I say. "Go away?"
"I just don't think America's ready for a black president," she explains. "And I don't mean that in a racial way whatsoever."
---
The ironic thing is that the destruction of the Republican Party was a two-part process. Their president, George W. Bush, did most of the work by making virtually every mistake possible in his two terms, reducing the mightiest economy on Earth to the status of a beggar-debtor nation like Pakistan or Zambia.
---
McCain's shtick wasn't exactly that, but it was close. He was a war hero who married an heiress to a beer distributorship and had been in the Senate since the Mesozoic Era. His greatest strength as a politician had up until this year been his ability to "reach across the aisle," a quality that in the modern Republican Party was normally about as popular as open bisexuality. His presence atop the ticket this year was evidence of profound anxiety within the party about its chances in the general election. After eight disastrous years of Bush, they thought they had lost the middle — so they picked a middling guy to get it back.
Which made sense, right up until the moment when they stuck him with Pinochet in heels for a running mate. Sarah Palin would have been a brilliant choice as a presidential nominee — and she will be, in 2012, when she leads the inevitable Republican counter-revolution against Obama's presidency. She's a classic divide-and-conquer politician, an unapologetic Witch Hunter and True Believer with a gift for whipping up the mob against the infidel. In a way that even George W. Bush never was, she is Karl Rove's wet dream, the Osama bin Laden of soccer moms, crusading against germs, communism, atheism and other such unclean elements strictly banned by American law.
---
Like millions of Americans, I watched Barack Obama's victory on Election Night in a state of amazement. The only thing that gave me pause was the question of what kind of country this remarkable figure was now inheriting. Some of the luster of Obama's triumph would come off if the American presidency were no longer the Most Powerful Office in the World but simply the top job in a hopelessly broken nation suffering an irreversible decline.
Of all the problems facing this country by the end of the Bush years, the biggest is the absence of a unifying national idea. Since the end of the Cold War, America has been grasping left and right for an identity. We tried being a "world policeman" in Somalia, which didn't work so well. We tried retaining our Cold War outlook by simply replacing communists with terrorists. We created two bubble economies that blew up in our faces, and headed into 2008 a struggling capitalist state with a massive trade deficit and an overtaxed military that suddenly had to ask itself: For the supposed world leader in the community of nations, what exactly is it that we're still good at? Who are we, and what do we represent to the peoples of the Earth here and now — not in 1775 Concord, or 1945 Paris, or 1969, from the surface of the moon?
When Obama took the stage in Grant Park as president-elect, that question was answered. We pulled off an amazing thing here, delivering on our society's most ancient promises, in front of a world that still largely thought of us as the home of Bull Connor's fire hose. This dumbed-down, degraded election process of ours has, in spite of itself and to my own extreme astonishment, brilliantly re-energized the American experiment and restored legitimacy to our status as the world's living symbol of individual freedom. We feel like ourselves again, and the floundering economy and our two stagnating wars now seem like mere logistical problems that will be overcome sooner or later, instead of horrifying symptoms of inevitable empire-decline.
For this to happen, absolutely everything had to break right. And for that we will someday owe sincere thanks to John McCain, and Sarah Palin, and George W. Bush. They not only screwed it up, they screwed it up just right.
[Issue 1066 — November 27, 2008]
(See the whole article here.)
Requiem for a Maverick
John McCain ran one of the most incompetent, schizo campaigns in history — and for that we owe him big-time
Election night at the Biltmore in Arizona is a hilariously dismal scene, like a funeral for a family member nobody liked, who died owing everyone money. The rats here are already bailing off the ship with lightning speed, like L.A. Dodgers fans leaving a playoff game to catch the latest episode of Entourage. The exodus, in fact, begins about eight seconds into John McCain's concession speech, which incidentally starts off on the classiest of notes: with the remaining crowd cursing the name of the new president.
"A little while ago, I had the honor of calling Sen. Barack Obama," McCain begins.
"Boooooo!" bellows the crowd. Outside the hotel, a wine-drunk young woman in a fluffy white ball gown probably last worn at a Liberty University frat mixer angrily flings a would-be celebratory pompom she has been clutching into my face. "I can't listen to this shit!" she yells, scooting away.
--
I ask [local Young Republicans] why they think McCain lost. Dori says a big reason is that "a lot of big movie stars came out for Obama." I ask her which ones.
"Um, Puff Daddy?" she says. "Although I don't know if Puff Daddy came out for Obama."
"There's Oprah," adds Emily.
"Yeah, Oprah," says Dori.
--
Obama, [a McCain supporter] assures me, is a "novelty" who will "go away within the next couple of years."
"Um," I say. "Go away?"
"I just don't think America's ready for a black president," she explains. "And I don't mean that in a racial way whatsoever."
---
The ironic thing is that the destruction of the Republican Party was a two-part process. Their president, George W. Bush, did most of the work by making virtually every mistake possible in his two terms, reducing the mightiest economy on Earth to the status of a beggar-debtor nation like Pakistan or Zambia.
---
McCain's shtick wasn't exactly that, but it was close. He was a war hero who married an heiress to a beer distributorship and had been in the Senate since the Mesozoic Era. His greatest strength as a politician had up until this year been his ability to "reach across the aisle," a quality that in the modern Republican Party was normally about as popular as open bisexuality. His presence atop the ticket this year was evidence of profound anxiety within the party about its chances in the general election. After eight disastrous years of Bush, they thought they had lost the middle — so they picked a middling guy to get it back.
Which made sense, right up until the moment when they stuck him with Pinochet in heels for a running mate. Sarah Palin would have been a brilliant choice as a presidential nominee — and she will be, in 2012, when she leads the inevitable Republican counter-revolution against Obama's presidency. She's a classic divide-and-conquer politician, an unapologetic Witch Hunter and True Believer with a gift for whipping up the mob against the infidel. In a way that even George W. Bush never was, she is Karl Rove's wet dream, the Osama bin Laden of soccer moms, crusading against germs, communism, atheism and other such unclean elements strictly banned by American law.
---
Like millions of Americans, I watched Barack Obama's victory on Election Night in a state of amazement. The only thing that gave me pause was the question of what kind of country this remarkable figure was now inheriting. Some of the luster of Obama's triumph would come off if the American presidency were no longer the Most Powerful Office in the World but simply the top job in a hopelessly broken nation suffering an irreversible decline.
Of all the problems facing this country by the end of the Bush years, the biggest is the absence of a unifying national idea. Since the end of the Cold War, America has been grasping left and right for an identity. We tried being a "world policeman" in Somalia, which didn't work so well. We tried retaining our Cold War outlook by simply replacing communists with terrorists. We created two bubble economies that blew up in our faces, and headed into 2008 a struggling capitalist state with a massive trade deficit and an overtaxed military that suddenly had to ask itself: For the supposed world leader in the community of nations, what exactly is it that we're still good at? Who are we, and what do we represent to the peoples of the Earth here and now — not in 1775 Concord, or 1945 Paris, or 1969, from the surface of the moon?
When Obama took the stage in Grant Park as president-elect, that question was answered. We pulled off an amazing thing here, delivering on our society's most ancient promises, in front of a world that still largely thought of us as the home of Bull Connor's fire hose. This dumbed-down, degraded election process of ours has, in spite of itself and to my own extreme astonishment, brilliantly re-energized the American experiment and restored legitimacy to our status as the world's living symbol of individual freedom. We feel like ourselves again, and the floundering economy and our two stagnating wars now seem like mere logistical problems that will be overcome sooner or later, instead of horrifying symptoms of inevitable empire-decline.
For this to happen, absolutely everything had to break right. And for that we will someday owe sincere thanks to John McCain, and Sarah Palin, and George W. Bush. They not only screwed it up, they screwed it up just right.
[Issue 1066 — November 27, 2008]
President Obama Addresses the American People--by YouTube!!
This is a definite first for a President: Sending out messages with YouTube! Good words from Mr. Obama.
How The Election Was Won - And What Now Mr. Obama?
(I wrote this just before Obama was elected to office).
November 3rd, 2008 5:45 p.m. Desk of Byron Shirley, Common U.S. Citizen.
By this time tomorrow, the American populace should have elected Barack Obama as the newest President of the United States. This is both shocking and extremely well-deserved, because of the way Obama and his strategists—I always wonder how much of the end-result is directly of the candidate’s doing: Is it 10%? 25%? 50% couldn’t be more than that! -- ran his election campaign. Barack Obama, back in the latter part of ’07 (Yes! This campaign has lasted one, even TWO years!!) and beginning of ’08 was not even considered the leading candidate for the Democratic Nomination. That was Senator Hillary Clinton. He wasn’t even considered the runner-up—that was Sen. John Edwards.
Yet somehow, Barack Obama (How many of us knew of his name back in ’06, as a percentage of the population? 10%, maybe? And now?) came out of a group of respected and very well-known “career” politicians and made a swift impact. What is it that drove so many people toward him? We always speak of his message of hope, his charisma, but part of it, I think, may be fear of the direction this country is taking. (This is kind of an obvious and easy assumption: According to RealClearPolitics, 84.2% of those polled say the country is headed “In the wrong direction”, and InTrade Political “securities” lists Obama’s chances of being elected as the next president at 91.5%. That sounds pretty conclusive who’s going to win, and why people where looking for “change”.) Americans tend to make fear-based decisions, decisions “from the heart, not necessarily from what they think, but how they feel. Right now, they feel undeniably Blue. And the fear is obvious: America just may not be the #1, best country on Earth anymore, and that reality scares us. We’re more disliked than almost at any time in our short history, and stronger economies are coming out like China and India and even Russia—gasp!!- --that will take over as the world’s leaders.
So perhaps Obama came at the right time, with his “boring”, completely steady demeanor, his complete inability to be really shaken, even after Hillary and then McCain and his pet pit-bull-with-a-lipstick decided to go for the low blows (it was Hillary’s people, no less, who started the whole “Obama is a Muslim, and he’s been associated with a known terrorist” gimmick.) Obama came out and conveyed his message of HOPE, and became a symbol for normalcy. (How would scared and pissed-off Americans have responded to Obama in 2001, when we were all out for blood? Likely, not as well.) The Little Senator That Could, under the “CHANGE” banner, built a powerful campaign based partly on old-school campaigning but also on a new trend of DIY campaigning, where thousands of individuals motivated just motivated enough could meet and organize on the internet, create a page at My.BarackObama.com (I created mine in 10 minutes…and raised $275.00 for Obama’s campaign http://my.barackobama.com/page/outreach/view/main/byronforobama). Howard Dean, one of the Democratic candidates in ’04 showed the promise of the most powerful medium of the new millennium, but with his website and the backing of the likes of MoveOn.org, Barack Obama really did harness the Internet to his advantage. He saw that people, if given the ability to do so, could organize for a common purpose, even if they were just simple folks. And all of a sudden, the election wasn’t all about raising as much cash through wealthy donors, although Obama did plenty of that, too. Barack Obama was able to run the first privately financed Presidential campaign in three decades, and he did it with many contributors giving $100or less. (For September’s record-setting $150 million haul was ONE-QUARTER of contributors giving $100 or less. See a review of the money raised by Obama’s campaign so far at http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/summary.php?id=N00009638).
It is with this energy, all this “political capital” and goodwill from the American people that we are sending Barack Obama to the Presidency of the United States of America, as the first Black President, no less. It is my hope that Obama will take his great, enthusiastic and calming personality and change this country into what it has been, can and should be: a beacon of fairness and equality, a country strong in values and one that recognizes to respect its people more than its corporations. Let’s invest in the Enterprise of People, for once, shall we?
Thank you Barack Obama, now it’s time to make true CHANGE happen.
-Byron Shirley
PS Yes, we will win tomorrow:
Bush Vs. John Kerry Chart, back in 2004: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/Presidential_04/chart3way.html
And now, McCain Vs. Barack Obama, in 2008:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2008/president/us/general_election_mccain_vs_obama-225.html#chart
Is this the face of Happiness or what?
I have had this on my desktop background since the day after Obama got in...makes me smile every time.
Introductions, introductions
I started this new blog to create a way to put down my thoughts on what's going on in the world. I see the world in a very different light than even 5 or 10 years ago (I'm 26 now, so it's kind-0f obvious I would), and mostly I find that I want to take things in and relate them to others. I also love collecting info, and perhaps I need a way to collect for "Future Information/Reference".
I also know that my mind will change as I talk with people, as I figure things out for myself and grow older, so I consider this a time line of my train-of-thoughs.
Whatever, it should be fun, well-written and hopefully concise. Think of BoinBoing.net, less nerdy.
I also know that my mind will change as I talk with people, as I figure things out for myself and grow older, so I consider this a time line of my train-of-thoughs.
Whatever, it should be fun, well-written and hopefully concise. Think of BoinBoing.net, less nerdy.
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