a crank's progress

Regime Change Begins At Home | Powered by CafePress.com

This is taking off like a grass fire . . .

Regime Change Begins At Home

If everyone who’s worried about Bush’s plans votes on November 5, we can engage in a little “regime change” of our own. The good news is that a majority of the people in this country are concerned. But that doesn’t matter unless they voice that concern at the polls.

You know you want one of these.

GW Bush Went AWOL – Home Page

This is the story of how George Walker Bush walked away from a years duty while in the National Guard.

In the words of Medal of Honor winner Sen. Bob Kerrey: “I can understand if he forgot a weekend. But 18 months?”

The hard question I come back to? Would I do any differently for my own kids? Korea, Vietnam, and Kuwait (coming soon: Iraq) are not the same as WWII, so it’s not as if they would be defending their home turf.

Of course, the bigger issue here is not avoiding service but lying about it. The deeds of 30-40 years ago are done, but lying about it today is another matter.

Instructional Technology

Swift, in his “A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet” suggests that

A commonplace book is what a provident poet cannot subsist without, for this proverbial reason, that “great wits have short memories:” and whereas, on the other hand, poets, being liars by profession, ought to have good memories; to reconcile these, a book of this sort, is in the nature of a supplemental memory, or a record of what occurs remarkable in every day’s reading or conversation. There you enter not only your own original thoughts, (which, a hundred to one, are few and insignificant) but such of other men as you think fit to make your own, by entering them there. For, take this for a rule, when an author is in your books, you have the same demand upon him for his wit, as a merchant has for your money, when you are in his.

Typically these books were compilations of brief passages, often with commentary, ordered topically or thematically—in short they were collections of commonplaces—or, for those with the Greek tongue, koinoi topoi, or loci communes, in the Latin .

The sig-o-matic got me thinking of the old notion of the commonplace book, that portable and personal trove of epigrams, thoughts, and bromides that people used to treasure. The idea was that you read with an eye to noting for your own later use passages that resonated with you: these would be carefully transcribed in a blank book of your own, perhaps with your own observations, perhaps just as a collection of the wit and wisdom of others. Weblogs are an analog of this idea and the sig-o-matic (readers are invited to convert their favorite works in .sig entries) is a way of sharing your “commonplaces” with others.

Google Search: “regime change begins at home”

The Seattle Times: Nicole Brodeur: The man who could move a city

Before he died in 1964, M.D. Mills left his daughter with a small part in the city’s transportation history.

She was on board when the city’s last cable car and streetcar were driven into the barn.

“We had a big party,” she said, “and my father autographed the tickets.”

The next morning, she was up early for the first run of the city’s first trackless trolley, and the first diesel bus — her father behind the wheel.

The dismantling of street rail was the biggest mistake the progress-minded big city officials of the 40s and 50s made, followed by the routing Interstate highways through their downtown cores instead of around them as Eisenhower envisioned.

It’s all very well to talk about how nothing has been done with the monorail, how expensive it will be, etc. but what of the cost to replace what we already had? This area was linked by streetcar lines from Everett to Tukwila. Neighborhoods were platted and built at the end of streetcar lines, linking them with downtown. And we tore all that up in the name of progress.

Beginning during the 1920s, a General Motors Corp. (GM) Bus Division subsidiary purchased streetcar lines in Springfield, Ohio, Kalamazoo and Saginaw, Michigan. gm set up a corporation staffed with dedicated functionaries, funneled dollars into it, bought private and municipal transit systems around the country, and then ensured through tightly worded contracts that the transit systems could buy only GM and Mack buses, Firestone tires, and fuels and lubricants from Standard Oil of California.

from http://www.njtpa.org/

This is often alluded to by anti-transit activists as a myth: it’s anything but. It was a real court case, with [sur]real damages (a $5,000 fine for GM: what a burden that must have been), and now a festering mess for every city that sucumbed to the allure of NCL’s siren song to clean up.

It makes me mad as hell that cities like Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Seattle were enticed to squander their infrastructure to inflate the profits of the auto cartel.
Continue reading “sing a dirge for public transport, not a paean for the man who dismantled it”

Forbes.com: The Psychology Of Success

“To understand the entrepreneur,” Zelaznick told The New York Times in 1986, “you first have to understand the psychology of the juvenile delinquent.”

“That’s a great quote,” responds Kelly Shaver, a professor of psychology at William & Mary College who is working in the field today. “But I think it’s really not true.”

Yeah, it is a great quote, irresistibly so. The meat of the article is in the excerpt below.

Nor, says Shaver, do the entrepreneurs seem to be devil-may-care risk takers. Only a subtle difference in the way they appreciate risk emerged. The entrepreneurs are worse at coming up with reasons they might fail. “Being able to generate more unpleasant possibilities might be making non-entrepreneurs more afraid,” Shaver says, but we don’t know that.

So far there is one other big difference between those who go into business for themselves and those who don’t, Shaver says. Entrepreneurs don’t care what other people think about them. “They really don’t care as much,” Shaver says. “They’re just happy to go ahead and do what they’re doing.”

Statistically speaking, then, [John R.] Simplot and [Bill] Gates would seem to have two things in common: They have trouble imagining failure, and they don’t care what you think.

Interesting article. It’s not surprising to see a mixture of self-confidence and charisma in the successful entrepreneur, but I’d be interested in seeing more detail on how they respond to the setbacks they face. If they can’t imagine failure, how do they deal with it when it happens? Cited in the article are such luminaries as Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs,as well as Simplot and Gates: how does the charismatic leader who laughs at disaster move past it without losing momentum?

Found in Rebecca’s Pocket