Where Have All the Leaders Gone?

This is an excerpt from Lee Iacocca's book "Where Have All the Leaders Gone?". If you like what you are reading, click the link and buy a copy from Amazon. It was published in 2007 and probably begun before the 2006 elections:

Am I the only guy in this country who's fed up with what's happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We've got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we've got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can't even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, "Stay the course."

Stay the course? You've got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I'll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out!

You might think I'm getting senile, that I've gone off my rocker, and maybe I have. But someone has to speak up. I hardly recognize this country anymore. The President of the United States is given a free pass to ignore the Constitution, tap our phones, and lead us to war on a pack of lies.
Congress responds to record deficits by passing a huge tax cut for the wealthy (thanks, but I don't need it). The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs. While we're fiddling in Iraq, the Middle East is burning and nobody seems to know what to do. And the press is waving pom-poms instead of asking hard questions. That's not the promise of America my parents and yours traveled across the ocean for. I've had enough. How about you?

I'll go a step further. You can't call yourself a patriot if you're not outraged. This is a fight I'm ready and willing to have.

My friends tell me to calm down. They say, "Lee, you're eighty-two years old. Leave the rage to the young people." I'd love
to — as soon as I can pry them away from their iPods for five seconds and get them to pay attention. I'm going to speak up because it's my patriotic duty. I think people will listen to me. They say I have a reputation as a straight shooter. So I'll tell you how I see it, and it's not pretty, but at least it's real. I'm hoping to strike a nerve in those young folks who say they don't vote because they don't trust politicians to represent their interests. Hey, America, wake up. These guys work for us.

Who Are These Guys, Anyway?

Why are we in this mess? How did we end up with this crowd in Washington? Well, we voted for them — or at least some of us did. But I'll tell you what we didn't do. We didn't agree to suspend the Constitution. We didn't agree to stop asking questions or demanding answers. Some of us are sick and tired of people who call free speech treason. Where I come from that's a dictatorship, not a democracy.

And don't tell me it's all the fault of right-wing Republicans or liberal Democrats. That's an intellectually lazy argument, and it's part of the reason we're in this stew. We're not just a nation of factions. We're a people. We share common principles and ideals. And we rise and fall together.

Where are the voices of leaders who can inspire us to action and make us stand taller? What happened to the strong and resolute party of Lincoln? What happened to the courageous, populist party of FDR and Truman? There was a time in this country when the voices of great leaders lifted us up and made us want to do better. Where have all the leaders gone?

The Test of a Leader

I've never been Commander in Chief, but I've been a CEO. I understand a few things about leadership at the top. I've figured out nine points — not ten (I don't want people accusing me of thinking I'm Moses). I call them the "Nine Cs of Leadership." They're not fancy or complicated. Just clear, obvious qualities that every true leader should have. We should look at how the current administration stacks up. Like it or not, this crew is going to be around until January 2009. Maybe we can learn something before we go to the polls in 2008. Then let's be sure we use the leadership test to screen the candidates who say they want to run the country. It's up to us to choose wisely.

So, here's my C list:

A leader has to show CURIOSITY. He has to listen to people outside of the "Yes, sir" crowd in his inner circle. He has to read voraciously, because the world is a big, complicated place. George W. Bush brags about never reading a newspaper. "I just scan the headlines," he says. Am I hearing this right? He's the President of the United States and he never reads a newspaper? Thomas Jefferson once said, "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter." Bush disagrees. As long as he gets his daily hour in the gym, with Fox News piped through the sound system, he's ready to go.

If a leader never steps outside his comfort zone to hear different ideas, he grows stale. If he doesn't put his beliefs to the test, how does he know he's right? The inability to listen is a form of arrogance. It means either you think you already know it all, or you just don't care. Before the 2006 election, George Bush made a big point of saying he didn't listen to the polls. Yeah, that's what they all say when the polls stink. But maybe he should have listened, because 70 percent of the people were saying he was on the wrong track. It took a "thumping" on election day to wake him up, but even then you got the feeling he wasn't listening so much as he was calculating how to do a better job of convincing everyone he was right.

A leader has to be CREATIVE, go out on a limb, be willing to try something different. You know, think outside the box. George Bush prides himself on never changing, even as the world around him is spinning out of control. God forbid someone should accuse him of flip-flopping. There's a disturbingly messianic fervor to his certainty. Senator Joe Biden recalled a conversation he had with Bush a few months after our troops marched into Baghdad. Joe was in the Oval Office outlining his concerns to the President — the explosive mix of Shiite and Sunni, the disbanded Iraqi army, the problems securing the oil fields. "The President was serene," Joe recalled. "He told me he was sure that we were on the right course and that all would be well. 'Mr. President,' I finally said, 'how can you be so sure when you don't yet know all the facts?'" Bush then reached over and put a steadying hand on Joe's shoulder. "My instincts," he said. "My instincts." Joe was flabbergasted. He told Bush, "Mr. President, your instincts aren't good enough." Joe Biden sure didn't think the matter was settled. And, as we all know now, it wasn't.

Leadership is all about managing change — whether you're leading a company or leading a country. Things change, and you get creative. You adapt. Maybe Bush was absent the day they covered that at Harvard Business School.

A leader has to COMMUNICATE. I'm not talking about running off at the mouth or spouting sound bites. I'm talking about facing reality and telling the truth. Nobody in the current administration seems to know how to talk straight anymore. Instead, they spend most of their time trying to convince us that things are not really as bad as they seem. I don't know if it's denial or dishonesty, but it can start to drive you crazy after a while. Communication has to start with telling the truth, even when it's painful. The war in Iraq has been, among other things, a grand failure of communication. Bush is like the boy who didn't cry wolf when the wolf was at the door. After years of being told that all is well, even as the casualties and chaos mount, we've stopped listening to him.

A leader has to be a person of CHARACTER. That means knowing the difference between right and wrong and having the guts to do the right thing. Abraham Lincoln once said, "If you want to test a man's character, give him power." George Bush has a lot of power. What does it say about his character? Bush has shown a willingness to take bold action on the world stage because he has the power, but he shows little regard for the grievous consequences. He has sent our troops (not to mention hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens) to their deaths — for what? To build our oil reserves? To avenge his daddy because Saddam Hussein once tried to have him killed? To show his daddy he's tougher? The motivations behind the war in Iraq are questionable, and the execution of the war has been a disaster. A man of character does not ask a single soldier to die for a failed policy.

A leader must have COURAGE. I'm talking about balls. (That even goes for female leaders.) Swagger isn't courage. Tough talk isn't courage. George Bush comes from a blue-blooded Connecticut family, but he likes to talk like a cowboy. You know, My gun is bigger than your gun. Courage in the twenty-first century doesn't mean posturing and bravado. Courage is a commitment to sit down at the negotiating table and talk.

If you're a politician, courage means taking a position even when you know it will cost you votes. Bush can't even make a public appearance unless the audience has been handpicked and sanitized. He did a series of so-called town hall meetings last year, in auditoriums packed with his most devoted fans. The questions were all softballs.

To be a leader you've got to have CONVICTION — a fire in your belly. You've got to have passion. You've got to really want to get something done. How do you measure fire in the belly? Bush has set the all-time record for number of vacation days taken by a U.S. President — four hundred and counting. He'd rather clear brush on his ranch than immerse himself in the business of governing. He even told an interviewer that the high point of his presidency so far was catching a seven-and-a-half-pound perch in his hand-stocked lake.

It's no better on Capitol Hill. Congress was in session only ninety-seven days in 2006. That's eleven days less than the record set in 1948, when President Harry Truman coined the term do-nothing Congress. Most people would expect to be fired if they worked so little and had nothing to show for it. But Congress managed to find the time to vote itself a raise. Now, that's not leadership.

A leader should have CHARISMA. I'm not talking about being flashy. Charisma is the quality that makes people want to follow you. It's the ability to inspire. People follow a leader because they trust him. That's my definition of charisma. Maybe George Bush is a great guy to hang out with at a barbecue or a ball game. But put him at a global summit where the future of our planet is at stake, and he doesn't look very presidential. Those frat-boy pranks and the kidding around he enjoys so much don't go over that well with world leaders. Just ask German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who received an unwelcome shoulder massage from our President at a G-8 Summit. When he came up behind her and started squeezing, I thought she was going to go right through the roof.

A leader has to be COMPETENT. That seems obvious, doesn't it? You've got to know what you're doing. More important than that, you've got to surround yourself with people who know what they're doing. Bush brags about being our first MBA President. Does that make him competent? Well, let's see. Thanks to our first MBA President, we've got the largest deficit in history, Social Security is on life support, and we've run up a half-a-trillion-dollar price tag (so far) in Iraq. And that's just for starters. A leader has to be a problem solver, and the biggest problems we face as a nation seem to be on the back burner.

You can't be a leader if you don't have COMMON SENSE. I call this Charlie Beacham's rule. When I was a young guy just starting out in the car business, one of my first jobs was as Ford's zone manager in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. My boss was a guy named Charlie Beacham, who was the East Coast regional manager. Charlie was a big Southerner, with a warm drawl, a huge smile, and a core of steel. Charlie used to tell me, "Remember, Lee, the only thing you've got going for you as a human being is your ability to reason and your common sense. If you don't know a dip of horseshit from a dip of vanilla ice cream, you'll never make it." George Bush doesn't have common sense. He just has a lot of sound bites. You know — Mr. they'll welcome us as liberators no child left behind heck of a job Brownie mission accomplished Bush.

Former President Bill Clinton once said, "I grew up in an alcoholic home. I spent half my childhood trying to get into the reality-based world — and I like it here."

I think our current President should visit the real world once in a while.

The Biggest C is Crisis

Leaders are made, not born. Leadership is forged in times of crisis. It's easy to sit there with your feet up on the desk and talk theory. Or send someone else's kids off to war when you've never seen a battlefield yourself. It's another thing to lead when your world comes tumbling down.

On September 11, 2001, we needed a strong leader more than any other time in our history. We needed a steady hand to guide us out of the ashes. Where was George Bush? He was reading a story about a pet goat to kids in Florida when he heard about the attacks. He kept sitting there for twenty minutes with a baffled look on his face. It's all on tape. You can see it for yourself. Then, instead of taking the quickest route back to Washington and immediately going on the air to reassure the panicked people of this country, he decided it wasn't safe to return to the White House. He basically went into hiding for the day — and he told Vice President Dick Cheney to stay put in his bunker. We were all frozen in front of our TVs, scared out of our wits, waiting for our leaders to tell us that we were going to be okay, and there was nobody home. It took Bush a couple of days to get his bearings and devise the right photo op at Ground Zero.

That was George Bush's moment of truth, and he was paralyzed. And what did he do when he'd regained his composure? He led us down the road to Iraq — a road his own father had considered disastrous when he was President. But Bush didn't listen to Daddy. He listened to a higher father. He prides himself on being faith based, not reality based. If that doesn't scare the crap out of you, I don't know what will.

A Hell of a Mess

So here's where we stand. We're immersed in a bloody war with no plan for winning and no plan for leaving. We're running the biggest deficit in the history of the country. We're losing the manufacturing edge to Asia, while our once-great companies are getting slaughtered by health care costs. Gas prices are skyrocketing, and nobody in power has a coherent energy policy. Our schools are in trouble. Our borders are like sieves. The middle class is being squeezed every which way. These are times that cry out for leadership.

But when you look around, you've got to ask: "Where have all the leaders gone?" Where are the curious, creative communicators? Where are the people of character, courage, conviction, competence, and common sense? I may be a sucker for alliteration, but I think you get the point.

Name me a leader who has a better idea for homeland security than making us take off our shoes in airports and throw away our shampoo? We've spent billions of dollars building a huge new bureaucracy, and all we know how to do is react to things that have already happened.

Name me one leader who emerged from the crisis of Hurricane Katrina. Congress has yet to spend a single day evaluating the response to the hurricane, or demanding accountability for the decisions that were made in the crucial hours after the storm. Everyone's hunkering down, fingers crossed, hoping it doesn't happen again. Now, that's just crazy. Storms happen. Deal with it. Make a plan. Figure out what you're going to do the next time.

Name me an industry leader who is thinking creatively about how we can restore our competitive edge in manufacturing. Who would have believed that there could ever be a time when "the Big Three" referred to Japanese car companies? How did this happen — and more important, what are we going to do about it?

Name me a government leader who can articulate a plan for paying down the debt, or solving the energy crisis, or managing the health care problem. The silence is deafening. But these are the crises that are eating away at our country and milking the middle class dry.

I have news for the gang in Congress. We didn't elect you to sit on your asses and do nothing and remain silent while our democracy is being hijacked and our greatness is being replaced with mediocrity. What is everybody so afraid of? That some bobblehead on Fox News will call them a name? Give me a break. Why don't you guys show some spine for a change?

Had Enough?

Hey, I'm not trying to be the voice of gloom and doom here. I'm trying to light a fire. I'm speaking out because I have hope. I believe in America. In my lifetime I've had the privilege of living through some of America's greatest moments. I've also experienced some of our worst crises — the Great Depression, World War II, the Korean War, the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam War, the 1970s oil crisis, and the struggles of recent years culminating with 9/11. If I've learned one thing, it's this: You don't get anywhere by standing on the sidelines waiting for somebody else to take action. Whether it's building a better car or building a better future for our children, we all have a role to play. That's the challenge I'm raising in this book. It's a call to action for people who, like me, believe in America. It's not too late, but it's getting pretty close. So let's shake off the horseshit and go to work. Let's tell 'em all we've had enough.

Response to a headline

My response to the USA Today headline "Bush says Olympics exceeded expectations". . . Did no one tell him that the Olympics are still going on?

If you are interested, the article is here

The Mr. Hyde of Religion's "Dr. Jekyll"

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/james_haught/holy.html

It was written in the early 90's, but it obviously still applies today because the same religious hatred we see around the world has been going on for thousands of years.

"Anything that divides people breeds inhumanity. Religion serves that ugly purpose."

Olympic Torch Relay Created as Nazi Propoganda

Yes, you read the title correctly. That spaz Adork Hitler and his minions considered the ancient Greeks to be an early form of the Aryan race, so when they won the bid for the 1936 Olympic games, they sent the torch on a relay to show off Aryan strength or some crap like that.

You can read more here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_Flame#The_modern_era

Of course, Wikipedia isn't known for its total accuracy, so you can do a little more research on your own.

"Concerts" followup

I asked some people I know the same question as the post below about concerts and a couple of them were really offended that I considered Billy Ray Cyrus a one-hit wonder. I decided that it was in my best interest that I not tell them that I didn't actually consider "Achy Breaky Heart" a "hit" because, basically, the song sucks ass. I merely consider it a song that a lot of people with limited musical taste listened to for a short period of time.

A Question About Concerts

Picture this:
You're at a Lynrd Skynrd concert, it's about 1978, they come out and perform one of their hit songs. Let's say it's "Sweet Home Alabama". When the song is over, people start yelling out for another of their hits (Freebird!).

Now, fast forward, it's 1992, and you're at a Billy Ray Cyrus concert (for some unknown reason). He comes out on stage and performs "Achy Breaky Heart". What song does the crowd yell out for after that?

Senate passes expanded GI bill despite Bush, McCain opposition

Out of everyone in the senate, you'd think that McCain would want to actually "support the troops" as opposed to just using those three words in attack speeches and political rhetoric:
McCain

McCain Defends Bush's Iraq Strategy

John McCain, a war hero and a former P.O.W., is towing the :stay the course" party line:
McCain

Morning run

I went for a longer than usual morning run (about 11.6 miles vs. my normal 10.25 miles). For some real reason I didn't see as many broken bottles on the road this morning, but I did see a dead snake, a couple of dead armadillos, a dead vulture, and a plastic Nesquik bottle. I also saw what was left of an armadillo, and although it smelled pretty bad, it was kind of cool that the only thing that was left was the hard shell. The buzzards and other members of nature's cleaning crew devoured the rest.

Running thoughts

Before anyone asks, the title is a play on words that not only describes how my mind wanders, but how it wanders while I'm running. The last few times I've been on long weekend runs (10 + miles), I couldn't help but notice all of the garbage (or just strange things) along the road and it distracts me from the latest Korn album that I have blaring on my iPod. To give you an idea, here are a few things I saw this morning:

• At least 20 broken bottles, most of which weren't there last weekend
• A half empty 20 oz. Mountain Dew Code Red (I guess they didn't like it)
• A mostly full 2 liter Coke
• A dead squirrel being picked at by a couple of buzzards
• A (presumably) used condom (I didn't stop to inspect it)
• An unknown quantity of Burger King, McDonald's, Sonic, and Starbucks containers
• People that don't understand that the car they are driving doesn't belong in the bicycle lane that I'm running towards them in.
• People that don't know how to look left to see if maybe, just maybe, there is a pedestrian there about to run in front of them before they merge into traffic
• A lot of commercial aircraft flying into Orlando airport.
• A state trooper that has pulled someone over (but I still say they are never around when you need one)
• Really, really fat people in really, really big vehicles
• Dozens of nails
• Dozens of very large bolts with washers attached
  

Anyway, you get the idea. Not even Trent Reznor's latest Nine Inch Nails album can grab my attention long enough to ebb the flow of thoughts in my chaotic mind.

I once asked someone about clearing their mind. She was supposedly into meditation and I asked her how it was possible to have clear thoughts. She didn't understand what I was talking about so I went on to explain to her that when I try to clear my mind, I am very aware of the fact that I'm trying to clear my mind. I go from trying to think about nothing to thinking about trying to think about nothing. The next thing you know, my inner monologue is singing the words to a song by Pink Floyd or the Offspring for no apparent reason. She really had nothing to say other than "wow".

I can't begin to tell you the number of problems this has caused me in the past and will continue to cause until the day I die (which will hopefully be before I become dependent on others to survive). The only thing I can do is ask "why am I here" and get on with my boring day.

Winter holiday cards

Normally I only get one or two cards but this year the two cards I received had a summary of what happened the previous year. If I were to (for some reason) send out a card with one of those, I wouldn't have enough very much to say, but it would probably sound something like this:

You may or may not know me, but I couldn't buy a small number of cards (the smallest box had 50 cards in it), so I decided to send the 43 cards that I didn't need out to random people. It would mean a lot to me if you feign interest in my life as it makes me feel like I have friends.

It's been a pretty hectic year. Actually in hindsight, it's been pretty much the same as every year. I'm still alone (over six years now. Is that a record?), but I just spent $6,000 at Great Expectations, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that spending an insane amount of money as a final sign of desperation is all it takes to find a good woman. A live-in hooker might have been cheaper, but I think that's still technically illegal

I bought a new car (a Scion XD), even though the car that I traded in on it was paid for, so maybe it wasn't the smartest thing to do. I guess I was just bored (see previous paragraph.)

I'm still working, but I can't really tell you much about it because it's a Dept. of Defense project.

I'm still running. I'm up to about 40 miles a week. I don't really have any reason to run or a particular goal other than not getting insanely fat like most people I see. Maybe I'm just bored (see three paragraphs ago).

That's about it. Whether you know me or not, I wouldn't be offended if you tried to hook me up with any single women you know (no children and no fat chicks).

Happy Winter Solstice!!

Dying young

The only thing worse than dying young is growing old.

Secure the Gmail notifier on OS X

This was found on macosxhints.com via digg.com:

I was shocked to discover that the Gmail Notifier, as distributed by Google, defaults to sending your Gmail password over the network in clear text every time it checks your inbox for new mail. This is incredibly insecure, especially since Google has plenty of smart people who now how to secure internet communication. They have the capability to enable secure communication as proven by the ability to access Gmail entirely over HTTPS (by using https://mail.google.com as the entry point). As it turns out, there is an easy "hack" for Mac users to switch Gmail notifier to HTTPS as well:

Pull down the Notifier menu (either Calendar or Gmail), hold down Command and Option, and click Preferences on the menu. You’ll see a hidden settings editor. Enter SecureAlways in the Key field (upper and lower case must be entered as shown) and 1 in the Value field, then click Set. Quit Notifier and start it up again. From now on, all connections with both Gmail & Gcal will be https. Thanks to this comment on the O'Reilly blogs for this trick!

Sansa MP3 players

I currently own an 8 GB (e280) version of the Sansa portable music players. I bought my first 4 GB unit about 18 months ago. Overall, I really like the device (small, light, decent GUI, priced right), but I have to say that if I hadn't bought the $29 extended warranty from Best Buy, I wouldn't be a happy person.

About two months after I bought the first 4 GB unit, the screen had a series of diagonal lines across it and the device was locked up. I took it back to Best Buy and they happily replaced it under the extended warranty. This happened four more times over the following 8 months (sometimes the device just wouldn't power up anymore).

When I returned it the last time, the 4 GB model had been discontinued so they gave me a full refund of the original purchase price. I didn't feel like driving around town shopping for another player so I checked out what they had for the same price (about $249). The 8 GB model was there, and they had some iPod Nanos for a few bucks more. I decided to stick with the Sansa if I could buy another extended warranty, but I couldn't help but think "Surely they've fixed the quality problems by now." Six weeks later, it died. That was in January 2007 and I've had two more e280s die since then.

You may be asking "what the heck are you doing to these things?" I'm not rough with it, I keep it in a neoprene case, it doesn't get wet, etc. I take pretty good care of the players, so it must come down to poor manufacturing quality.

All in all, I would recommend buying one, but only if you buy a "no questions asked" extended warranty and you don't mind driving back to Best Buy/Circuit City every 6 weeks or so to exchange it

Final Second Life entry

I forgot to make an entry after I abandoned SL, so here are my final comments on the application (for now at least).

I did meet a few cool people there, but everything was so oriented towards the sex industry (there are an inordinate number of transsexual prostitutes there). Once you meet a friend or two, then what. You hang out at someone's house, go to an overcrowded night club (the more people there, the slower everything runs), or just fly around exploring stuff.

If you are a little creative, you can try to build stuff, but land is pretty expensive so you might want to reconsider spending a lot of time building a house.

So, I transferred all of my transferable stuff to people I knew, gave my money to a club I would sometimes hang out in, and canceled my account. If SL goes more mainstream, maybe I'll go back, but I just think that with the current trend, it will not be sustainable.

Does Science Leave Room for Faith?

I wrote the following essay for a scholarship a few years ago. The subject was "Does Science Leave Room for Faith (or vice-versa)?" I don't think the people granting the scholarship liked it because they didn't even bother letting me know that I didn't get the money.



To begin with, "science" suggests a fact or series of facts leading to a conclusion, while "faith" is typically used when an unobservable event happens (i.e. the origin of life) that is explained by the existence of a supreme being.

The question "Does science leave room for faith" (or vice-versa) suggests that everything we, as humans, know allows for a dichotomous existence. With a lack of hard facts, many people have filled in the scientific gaps with divine influence, and over the years, a schism formed between religion and science.

A Brief History of Time provides a description, in relatively plain English, of what we currently know about the origin of the universe and life within. However it is also an example of how science requires faith in its facts. Stephen Hawking, was not at the quantum singularity that the universe was created from, but based on the evidence given, we should "believe" that he is correct in his findings.

As far as faith leaving room for science, any religion should allow for humanity's gathering of knowledge. As humans have overcome intellectual hurdles, it is natural for us to take what we have learned, expand on it, and work toward the next goal. During this process, many items originally explained by religion are reevaluated in scientific terms.

For example, Galileo professed that the Earth was not the center of the Universe. Since this went against the Catholic Church's doctrine, he was imprisoned for his beliefs despite overwhelming evidence supporting his findings.

Another example is the discovery by the ancient Greeks that the Earth is round simply by noting that the mast of an approaching ship is visible before the hull. If the Earth were flat, the entire ship would be equally visible. Despite this, the Earth was believed to be flat and surrounded by demons for another 1500 years.

In conclusion, science doesn't eliminate faith, it simply attempts to provide answers based on given evidence, and many of those answers require a certain level of faith themselves. In contrast, religious faith doesn't eliminate science, but it can be used to provide answers to questions that science hasn't been able to explain. For us to grow beyond a choice between faith or science, we must realize that what we know and what we believe are not absolutes, and as we grow, we will find that some parts of science AND religion were wrong. When that happens, we must relinquish our old beliefs and embrace the new facts.

Military memories

Every now and then I'll read, hear, or see something that reminds me of a past experience. I was reading a comment thread on Digg.com about how Bush's approval rating had dropped to 26% and the posters were arguing about how/why people in the military voted in the last presidential election. One commenter stated that most of the people in the military voted for Bush because they (at one time) legitimately believed he had some sort of plan in Iraq and that it had nothing to do with how Republicans increase military budgets.

This caused a spark or two to go off in my weak brain and I remembered one time when I was stationed at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama and we were FORCED to go to church one Sunday (I'm an Atheist, so you can imagine how upset I was), and the guest speaker was some Sergeant Major that talked about how "God says it's o.k. to kill if it's for the right reason" and "there's no such thing as a [politically] liberal soldier on the battlefield". This was right after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1991 under Bush Sr. (the last successful Bush family member to be elected to office) and they were going full force with the whole brainwashing thing before a single U.S. soldier stepped foot on the sands of the middle east. They were expecting a horribly bloody ground war (much worse than we are currently experiencing in Iraq) and wanted to stretch out the time between a lot of soldiers dying and the living soldiers becoming disgruntled with the war.

/End of flashback

More Second Life observations

One of the first things I noticed about SL was that, just like in real life (RL) or 1st life, men get much less attention than really good looking women. I created a really good looking female avatar and people go out of their way to answer questions, or just say "hi". My male avatar could have exploded in a huge mushroom cloud (I'm sure it's possible to do in SL) and no one would have noticed.

The next thing I discovered is that people have virtual relationships in SL. Boyfriends, girlfriends, life partners, slave, whatever. They apparently treat it as if it were completely real by building a house and just hanging out staring at a fireplace and spooning on the sofa.

Further, the 1st life gender of the avatar doesn't seem to be important any more. The first 10-15 years of cyber sex held the stigma of "dude, that was probably a guy you were talking dirty to. What are the odds it was a hot 19 year old girl?" Apparently, SL has given people such a huge suspension of disbelief that they no longer care of who is sitting at the keyboard on the other end.

Of course, only SOME people are able to let go of their inhibitions there. Some people are just as big of a jerk in SL as they are in RL, or their avatar is a very close replica of their RL body and all of their phobias go with it.

There is apparently something for everyone in there. . .

Stay tuned.

Second Life

Ok, I never thought I'd do it, but I created an avatar in Second Life. At first I thought I'd get bored with it right away and abandon it, but I've been having fun meeting new people, having virtual sex (not quite as good as the real thing), dancing, etc. Basically everything I don't do in real life. as you can see from my picture, I'm very suave looking and can dance better than John Travolta (before he started believing in Xenu and gained 200 pounds).

The pic was taken at Club Cristi which is a pretty cool place. Cristi (the owner) and most of the patrons are pretty nice, so if you are in SL, drop by.

Trojan in fake monster.com e-mail

The other day I received an e-mail that looked and "acted" like it was from monster.com. In the e-mail it said that to keep access to my account after Dec. 18th, I had to download a program. A few years ago, it might have seemed like a legitimate thing for a company to create a stand-alone application to provide their customers with the latest data and a wide range of features.

It didn't take very much for me to realize that this was probably a phishing e-mail. After all, I'm a web developer and I know first-hand that anything that monster.com would have someone do with a stand-alone app could easily be achieved in a web browser. Not to mention that the application they wanted me to download wasn't being hosted at monster.com, it was something like "resume-monster.com".

I contacted monster's tech support via a live chat session (with someone in India, of course) and he/she confirmed that it was truly a phishing e-mail. More than likely, the app was created by some jerk that would get people to install it and it would (most-likely) capture log in information, credit card numbers, social security numbers, etc.

I hope the creator of the e-mail gets a big boil on the head of his tiny manhood.