George Patton quotes

From Signal vs. Noise:

A few [General] George Patton quotes:

"A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week."

"Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results."

"If you tell people where to go, but not how to get there, you’ll be amazed at the results."

"If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking."

"Prepare for the unknown by studying how others in the past have coped with the unforeseeable and the unpredictable."

"Take calculated risks. That is quite different from being rash."

"The time to take counsel of your fears is before you make an important battle decision. That’s the time to listen to every fear you can imagine! When you have collected all the facts and fears and made your decision, turn off all your fears and go ahead!"

"Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack."

The Ethics of Elfland

As much as I ever did, more than I ever did, I believe in Liberalism. But there was a rosy time of innocence when I believed in Liberals.

It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated, and ought to be treated, more respectfully than a book of history. The legend is generally made by a majority of the people in the village, who are sane. The book is generally written by the one man in the village who is mad.

-- G.K. Chesterton (Orthodoxy)

12 Essential Rules to Live More Like a Zen Monk

From Zen Habits:

“We have more possibilities available in each moment than we realize.” - Thich Nhat Hanh

1. Do one thing at a time.
2. Do it slowly and deliberately.
3. Do it completely.
4. Do less.
5. Put space between things.
6. Develop rituals.
7. Designate time for certain things.
8. Devote time to sitting.
9. Smile and serve others.
10. Make cleaning and cooking become meditation.
11. Think about what is necessary.
12. Live simply.

How to Make the Time for Your Personal Goals

From Zen Habits:

“Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.” - Henry Ford

One of the biggest challenges in trying to accomplish any personal goal is that we tend to put them off until tomorrow, or next week, in favor of more pressing matters at work and home. Unfortunately, tomorrow never gets here.

If you want to accomplish a goal, you have to start on it today...

1. One goal at a time.
2. Make sure you really want it.
3. Make it your top priority.
4. Reduce your commitments.
5. Keep it simple.
6. Stay focused.
7. Block off time.
8. Make it your most important appointment.
9. Show that you’re serious.
10. Find your time wasters.
11. Make it a part of your daily or weekly routine.

How to Find Good Ideas for Business and Life

Excellent article by Donald Latumahina from Life Optimizer:

There is a lesson ... I learned from the book On Writing Well:

You should always collect more material than you will use. Every article is strong in proportion to the surplus of details from which you can choose the few that will serve you best.

...to find good ideas, you should:

• Have as many ideas as possible, and then
• Choose the few ideas that serve you best

...here are some steps to find good ideas:

1. Expect ideas from every situation
2. Bring a capture tool wherever you go
3. Don’t filter the ideas you get
4. After you’ve collected enough ideas, filter them

. . .

Besides collecting as many ideas as possible, it’s good to increase the quality of your input. That way you can have higher-quality ideas to choose from. Here are some tips to increase the quality of input:

1. Diversify your reading
2. Choose the most important book to read next
3. Get the most out of your reading
4. Surround yourself with positive people
5. Find a mentor
6. Use the art of arbitrage and increase your arbitrage power

Hofstadter’s rule

As documented in "Five steps to enlightened expectations" on TechRepublic:

Everything takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter’s rule into account.

Good and Bad Procrastination

From Paul Graham's wonderful discourse on procrastination this bit stood out like a diamond in the sun:

In his famous essay You and Your Research (which I recommend to anyone ambitious, no matter what they're working on), Richard Hamming suggests that you ask yourself three questions:

1. What are the most important problems in your field?
2. Are you working on one of them?
3. Why not?

Hamming was at Bell Labs when he started asking such questions. In principle anyone there ought to have been able to work on the most important problems in their field. Perhaps not everyone can make an equally dramatic mark on the world; I don't know; but whatever your capacities, there are projects that stretch them. So Hamming's exercise can be generalized to:

What's the best thing you could be working on, and why aren't you?

If Something Seems Boring, Skip It

A BIG note to self. (More from Matt Blodgett's Dev Blog):

...I tried two tactics to increase the amount of money I could charge for my programming services. One of them failed spectacularly, and one of them succeeded wonderfully. The failure was learning the skills that had the most job posts; the success was learning the skills that most engaged my own curiosity. I learned Java and got nothing out of it; I studied Bayesian filtering for fun and did consulting work in Bayesian filtering through my activity on a Ruby mailing list.

...

The moral here is that if something seems boring, skip it. Trust your intuition.

- Giles Bowkett

Ten Tips for a (Slightly) Less Awful Resume

From Stevey's Blog Rants:

Today's scientific question is: why are the resumes of programmers so uniformly awful? And how do we fix them?...

Tip #1: Nobody cares about you

Tip #2: Use Plain Text

Tip #3: Check, please!

Tip #4: Avoid Weasel Words

Tip #5: Avoid Wank Words

Tip #6: Don't be a Certified Loser

Tip #7: Don't say "expert" unless you really mean it

Tip #8: Don't tip your hand

Tip #9: Don't bore us to death

Tip #10: Don't be a lying scumbag

In fact, read the entire rant (at Stevey's link above) ... much valuable information direct from the guy who apparently put/left "Objective: Obtain a position at IBM" in his resume when first applying for a job at Amazon.com

The definition of insanity

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

– Benjamin Franklin

Don Cherry

A very nice commentary by Howard Berger:

Millions of people watch Don Cherry in his Coach's Corner segment each Saturday on Hockey Night In Canada. Perhaps 2% of TV viewers have ever met the man. As a result, 98% of those tuning in wouldn't realize that Cherry's presentation is mostly schtick. A dog-and-pony act with Ron MacLean that both men understand is a magnet for hockey watchers. And an absolute ratings bonanza for the CBC. The part of Cherry that is lesser known and acknowledged is his warm, caring nature. He'll do almost anything for charity, or for an ill person that is brought to his attention.

Several years ago, the father of one of my friends was dying of cancer, and my buddy wondered if Cherry might have time to give the man a call. The dying person was a big fan of Coach's Corner and my pal suggested that hearing from Cherry would brighten his day. I phoned Don with the request and he told me to leave it with him. A few days later, I found out that not only did Cherry phone the man, but he arranged for a limo to pick him up and drive him to his Mississauga, Ont. restaurant. There, Don took the time to have lunch with the stricken man.

Cherry will probably curse me for telling this story, because he prefers to do his good deeds anonymously. But, I feel it's important for TV viewers to realize that the moments he spends commemorating Canadian soldiers that are lost in Afghanistan are the most genuine moments of his weekly program. No person in this country has done more for the morale of our servicemen, or has better represented the memory of those we have lost.

The Oprah Club

From S.M. Hutchens, writing at Touchstone - Mere Comments:

Whenever Oprah Winfrey comes out with a new book club selection, we at the public library know it within twenty seconds. This is no exaggeration. The Oprah books are, of course, favored almost exclusively by women. Middle-aged white women comprise the largest group of fiction readers. I expect them to be reading the kind of stuff she recommends, even without her recommendation. What happens when Oprah selects is that the huge number of them who are currently reading Danielle Steel or Sue Grafton or Nora Roberts are alerted to another woman-type fiction book and all crowd over to the lee rail of that particular literary ship to get sight of something they might otherwise have passed over, since the Oprah books are typically not mere entertainment, but entertainment salted with cracker-barrel philosophy that helps them feel, well, whatever it is that Oprahites need to feel.

Her audience (as I can see it from where I sit) is interesting in that she seems to range considerably outside this group of typical fiction readers to younger women, non-whites, and the less-educated. If mere literacy is a societal value, then Oprah certainly encourages it, and deserves every bit of lionessization that American Library Association types can lavish on her.

Mere literacy has no value in itself. It is worthy only as the servant of virtue. The virtues of Oprahism, however, appear to be subordinate to, and ordered by, the prime virtue of self-realization and self-actualization rather than that of finding the self by losing it in sacrificial service to others, subject to the will of God. Its heroes tend to be Prometheans injured by, and in defiance of, the Traditional Moral Order (let us all weep for them a bit), lap-christs for the entertainment of silly women. Oprahism, to be sure, is chock-full of "virtues," but the order in which they are placed relative to one another in the scheme of the whole makes the phenomenon a veil of evil.

LifeSiteNews - Ominous Connections

From LifeSiteNews:

LifeSiteNews Message for February 13

Dear LifeSiteNews readers,

Many new readers of LifeSiteNews have difficulty making a connection between abortion, euthanasia, contraception, feminism, explicit sex education, promotion of homosexuality, de-population programs, eugenics, environmental extremism, suppression of religious freedom and globalism. We always hope that after a few months of reading LifeSiteNews they begin to see the connection. Many, including most of the world's religious leaders, haven't been exposed to this information, or if they have, still don't get it or, in very many cases, don't have the courage or trust in God to face the disturbing truth.

The development in Brazil, reported in today's top story by our Latin American correspondent Matthew Hoffman, is exciting news. The Brazilian [Roman Catholic] bishops appear to have suddenly come much farther than all others in realizing and accepting the reality of the "big picture", the above mentioned, "connection", that we at LifeSiteNews have been aware of for years. Even more exciting is that they are taking bold actions to hold accountable those responsible for this massive manipulation and abuse of power - even at the highest international levels.

We hope the Brazilian Bishops' example will be emulated by many more leaders throughout the world. The world is in great danger from the de-population totalitarians who have already caused great harm. Theirs is indeed a very dangerous movement of people and organizations who have very little, if any regard for the inherent dignity of every human life and for freedom. What they wish to achieve far exceeds anything accomplished by Nazism or Communism - and so far they have made huge advances. The producers of the film "Demographic Winter" attest to that.

Bravo for the Brazilian bishops who are responding as bishops should, with great courage and boldness for the benefit of those who are being exploited and oppressed.

We suggest that you continue to read LifeSiteNews reports in the context of the above paragraphs. To further your understanding, if you have not already done so, we strongly suggest you take the time to read the most popular document on LifeSiteNews, The Inherent Racism of Population Control, by Paul Jalsevac.

More than any other report on LifeSiteNews, that document reveals the enormous, deadly influence of International Planned Parenthood and other elements of the depopulation/eugenics movement. It explains the connection between all those items in the first paragraph of this message. Please read the document and tell others about it.

Steve Jalsevac LifeSiteNews.com

A Brave New World

The media is telling us now that the economy is bad and going to get worse. Who knows? Confidence or lack of confidence itself can effect the overall economy, and these factors can be effect by media hype. I am not claiming media hype at the moment, but I do not generally trust the media (surprise) and for all the objectivity and independence of the media, it's amazing how often the same stories with the same spins appear. As important as the economy is, I think it pales in importance to the life issues facing our civilization, and I don't mean "just" abortion. I mean human cloning, chimeras, human-animal hybrids, fetal and embryo experimentation, euthanasia, genetic engineering, cyborgs, bio-medical science doing whatever can be done because it can be done. "Let's see what happens when we cross a human with a snake." We know we are in an ethical free-fall generally, (just look at our politicians and businessmen, in general, not all, of course); why should I trust "science" backed by billions of dollars to respect human dignity and the sanctity of life? I would favor a tough ban on a host of items--I don't know enough to list every one in detail, but I believe most of us think that the "frankenstein" factor is not well regulated. The 35th anniversary of Roe v Wade is upon us. Not long after that immoral ruling by our highest court, it became routine for many "doctors" to ask expecting mothers "do you want to keep 'it'?" We were assured that man's search-and-destroy mission in the womb would lead to a society in which children would be better off, always wanted, and women would be happier and healthier. The media loved it, promoted it. They lied, children died. James M. Kushiner - Touchstone

911 : Six Years Later

The American Sex Revolution

"In his book, The American Sex Revolution (1957), Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin reviewed the history of societies through the ages, and found that none survived after they ceased honoring and upholding the institution of marriage between a man and a woman." Linda Bowles. Damage for the Children. June 13, 2000. Worldnet Daily.

A Product of the "Modern University"?

Okay, this is probably stretching cause and effect a little but... Dr Kamau Kambon holds a B.A. degree in education/history, a master's degree in physical education, both a M.A. and a M. Ed. degree in education/administration, and an Ed. D. in urban education/curriculum and instruction:

The Modern University

From an interview with Dr. David A. White, Professor of Literature at the U.S. Naval Academy - posted by The Cornell Society for a Good Time: Q - [W]hy is the modern university not the place to go for a bright mind? A number of traditional faithful seem to think modern university and college is a non-negotiable norm for men and women. A - I have spent my entire life in modern universities. I first entered the university in the fall of 1966 as an undergraduate and I hope to retire within the next year or two, so it has been an entire lifetime. All I can say is that in the modern university there are a few un-stated, unofficial functions that they pursue above all others: (1) First and most importantly – to destroy any corpuscle of true faith that might reside in any young man or woman. (2) To render those same young men and women incapable of even dealing with questions of faith, goodness, truth, and beauty, to render them incapable of dealing with those questions in any serious way. (3) To distance them from and destroy any respect they might have for family, nation, superiors, and any authority figure whatsoever. (4) To indoctrinate them with liberal social doctrine and make them little machines that will make them spout automatically the liberal dogmas that are pounded into them every second they are in a modern university. (5) And, finally, to lead them into corrupt personal behavior that will sink them so in sin that they will be incapable of self-knowledge, self-analysis, and any kind of self-reflection that could pull them out of the degenerate pit that surrounds the modern university. Under no circumstances whatsoever would I recommend anyone send any child to any modern university.

9-11 - belatedly and reluctantly

So many more profound and moving memorials have been posted about that sad day five years ago (see, for example, Matthew's My Blog entry "As Buildings Burn" or Michael Reichmann's photo and comment on Luminous Landscape or a summary of Remembrances at Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam) that I didn't dare add anything. Except... Most people mention that 9-11-01 started as a "day like any other". Actually, no, for me, it didn't. By the time I'd finished my then 25 km commute to work, I already had a troubling, deep-down sense of something malignant and evil being in the air...and arrived in the office, just before 9:00 am, to find a few people gathered around a computer monitor displaying a news item about a plane hitting the World Trade Center... For all who've gone through the passion of losing loved ones or family or friends, or have had to bear the heavy cross of doubt and questioning unbelief...all I can offer is to join my heart to the words of the closing prayer of the Angelus that they "...may be brought, by His Passion and Cross, to the glory of His Resurrection."