Month: February 2008

Negotiation Workshop, A Michael Scott Joint

Negotiation Workshop, A Michael Scott Joint

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Several weeks ago, a couple of team mates of mine had a disagreement, and fireworks ensued. This inspired my boss to buy us all a book and scheduled “negotiation workshops” to go over the material, and pain ensued.

I’m not opposed to reading the book. We all have room for improvement in every area of our lives. I recognize that, and I’m comfortable with that confession. These workshops are pretty painful, though, as there’s nothing in it I couldn’t have garnered simply by reading the book, save one awful thing: role playing. I hate role playing, but we were all assured we’d all get the opportunity to participate in future sessions. There’s going to be more! I’m not sure how much of this I’ll be able to stand without going absolutely crazy. As my beautiful wife pointed out, this is just like a Michael Scott scene. For reference, here’s what I got out of today’s session, one syllogism, inspired by a line on one of the PowerPoint slides, and one haiku:

Negotiatiors are people.
Soylent Green is people.
Negotiators are Soylent Green.

and

Negotiations –
A dumb role playing workshop.
Shoot me in the head.
Fie on Obama!

Fie on Obama!

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I don’t get all the breathless oohing and ahhing over Obama. Sure, he’s a good looking guy, and he speaks well, but so what? There’s plenty of politicians like that. What are his policy goals and initiatives? What experience does he have that qualifies him for the highest office in the land? (The answer is none, really. Remy sums it up nicely: “Though that Barack Obama seems like he’s the best. He’s got like a year of real experience. They won’t let you run an Arby’s with under two years…”). I just don’t get it. John Derbyshire agrees, but is much more eloquent than I: …

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Mad Libs, Yahoo, and the U.N.

Mad Libs, Yahoo, and the U.N.

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My Yahoo has a kinda neat, but mostly annoying feature on its news page. If you hover over a link, it gives you a preview of the article, which is neat. If you click on it, though, it *sometimes* pops up a dialog with a larger preview and you need to click another link to go to the article itself. If you ctrl-click (or middle click) on the link, you go straight to the article in a new tab or window. At any rate, I was browsing the headlines and moused over one titled ” Age of ‘green economics’ is upon us: U.N.’s Ban” which got me this preview:

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Thursday the world is on the cusp of “the age of green economics” and called on nations to cooperate to fight global warming and promote the transf…

So, based on my understanding of the U.N.’s true function, my mind finished that as follows:

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Thursday the world is on the cusp of “the age of green economics” and called on nations to cooperate to fight global warming and promote the transferring US wealth to anyone but the filthy, evil Americans.

Of course, that’s not what the article said, but I’m pretty sure that’s what it meant…

A Primer on Intelligent Design

A Primer on Intelligent Design

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Intelligent Design, or simply ID, is a pretty fascinating area of study to me. Put simply, it postulates that life is too complex to have arisen by chance, and that the intricacies we can observe in the physical world demand that some sort of intelligence was involved in its creation. Despite all of the scientists involved in promoting the idea, its detractors insist that it is not science, which shows, in my opinion, that they either don’t know what they’re talking about, or that that DO know what they’re talking but really want to keep ID off the table for fear of losing their materialistic grip on science and education. With that in mind, it was with great joy that I came across a great primer on Intelligent Design at Salvo Magazine, which has several articles on the topic written by some the brightest minds in the ID movement. If the area is of interest to you, or if you think these ID people are religious nuts masquerading as scientists, you should check out the issue.

RSS (and Leftist Wackos) Killed the Slashdot Star

RSS (and Leftist Wackos) Killed the Slashdot Star

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After (too many) years of reading Slashdot fairly regularly, today I removed it from my feed reader. The signal-to-noise ratio has gotten really, really bad (and has been forever), and I finally got tired of it. Far too often, a story about some piece of technology, or law/policy regarding technology, for example, inexorably leads to hard-left screeds about the Bush, the Republican Party, etc., even when there’s no clear link. And if Intelligent Design is ever mentioned, you can rest assured that people of faith (though ID in no way demands a faith of any kind. More on that in another post) will be betrayed as stupid, buck-toothed, back woods inbred imbeciles. These days, the site is a complete waste of time and bandwidth. I can get the same info, much less noise, and certainly fewer insults from my 100+ feed strong reader.

“Hi. My name is Jason, and I’ve been Slashdot-free for 15 minutes now.”
“Hi, Jason!…”

A Great Anti-Abortion Story

A Great Anti-Abortion Story

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While there’s nothing explicitly pro-life about this story, I love how the doctors suggested abortion (Hippocrates must be spinning in his grave), but the mother refused and it ended up saving her life. It reminds me of this heartbreaking story. A mother refuses to terminate her pregnancy or start chemo for her liver cancer, saying, “If I am going to die, my baby is going to live.” A truly awful outcome for the mother, but what a beautiful picture of love and self-sacrifice. “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”