A lie told often enough becomes truth.

— Lenin

OH YEAH!? Not if I have anything to say about it, comrade!

Not only do lying liars rely on Lenin’s repetition principle, they rely on people being generally inattentive, uniformed and eager to believe anything consistent with their existing opinions.

I say that as someone who’s as inattentive and uninformed as anyone on most topics. But I do know a couple of things, and I set them forth herewith.

Continue reading Antiwar Myths About Iraq Debunked

What I like best is a book that’s at least funny once in a while. … What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.

— J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

My son informs me that we have to buy one of those old-fashioned telescoping pointers because he needs it for a presentation at school.

“Can you use a laser pointer?” I ask. “Because we actually have one of those.”

“They’re not allowed at school,” he says.

Continue reading Zero-Tolerance Watch

UNITED NATIONS, May 19 — A U.N. anti-torture panel Friday called on the United States to close its prison for terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to expressly ban controversial interrogation techniques, and to halt the transfer of detainees to countries with a history of abuse and torture.

— The Washington Post

Meanwhile, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the Pentagon is considering a plan to transfer its 460 ‘Gitmo’ detainees to the U.N., “where a group of international thugs, still awaiting charges, would not attract so much attention.”

— ScrappleFace

A common piece of advice to job seekers is: Don’t focus your resume and cover letter on what you want; focus on how you offer what the hiring company wants. This advice also applies in reverse to a hiring company writing a job ad, but in practice, it’s almost never followed, which is why this ad for a position at the Irvine Public Schools Foundation (IPSF) jumped out at me:

Continue reading AntiPattern: Bore People to Death With Your Job Ads

Just in time for Mother’s Day, Save the Children has published its seventh annual State of the World’s Mothers report on newborn mortality.

As usual, the U.S. takes a beating:

Continue reading HW Explains the U.S. Newborn Mortality Rate

Hi Mom!

Happy Mothers Day!

I can’t believe another whole year has gone by already! Seven dog years! LOL!

My owners take really good care of me. They take me to the dog park here in Irvine almost every day. I am very loving, but when some dog at the park runs up on me and tries to get all dominant, I use my illegal ninja moves on him, especially if it’s a big dog, like a Great Dane.

You would be proud of me! Thanks for teaching me to always stand up for myself.

Miss you . . .

Love, Lightning

P.S. I wrote this post myself, but my owner helped me with the HTML.

P.P.S. Say hi to Dad.

— Lightning

I’m looking at my brokerage account on the laptop, with my son, age 12, watching over my shoulder.

“I know your account number,” he says, reading it off the screen.

“I’m not sure how that’s going to help you,” I say.

“I can hack in and trade stocks,” he says. “‘It’s going up! SELL! SELL! SELL! SELL! SELL! Now it’s going down! BUY! BUY! BUY! BUY! BUY! It’s going down some more! SELL! SELL! SELL! SELL! SELL!’ It’s a trading frenzy! . . .”

This little tale, which appears to be a book for children, is actually a clever evocation of what happens to a corporation when a management consultant is hired by absent, clueless senior management to evaluate its organizational structure and to effect change. Beginning slowly, the Cat proceeds to take everything apart, make a total mess and get everybody in potentially the worst trouble in the world — all at no personal cost to itself. By the time the Cat leaves, it has frightened everybody, and very little has changed except the mind-set of the protagonists, which has been forever disrupted and rattled.

— Stanley Bing, reviewing The Cat in the Hat

Somehow we’ve got it in our heads that every programmer in India is good, fast, and cheap, and every programmer in the United States is lousy, slow, and expensive. My theory is that for version 1.0 of a product, the maximum allowable distance between the engineers and marketers is thirty feet.

— Guy Kawasaki

The girl at Fantastic Sam’s cut my hair too short. She was telling me about a car accident she had yesterday and I asked her, “Were you drunk at the time?”

“In the morning?!” she yelled. “Hel-lo!? I was drinking coffee!“

O-kay, like, overreaction! Probably in major denial mode, and does in fact have a serious drinking problem. And like I said, she took it out on my hair.

Republican Party Looks to Embrace College Women

— The GW Hatchet

OK, I made a mistake on the hockey jerseys . . .

My son’s playing on a new team this season so I had to order new jerseys for him. They asked me what name I wanted to put on the back and I don’t know why, but I gave his first name instead of his last name.

It’s the only thing he talked about all weekend.

“I had my first name on my jersey in second grade!” he said. (He’s in seventh now.) “Does Steve Yzerman have ‘Steve’” — he draws out the “e” sound to make it sound extra ridiculous — “on the back of his jersey? NO! ‘GOAL, NUMBER 19! STEEEEVE!’”

Every time I tried to talk to him about something else, he’d look at me with a goofy blank stare on his face.

“Did you understand what I just said?” I’d ask.

“Does Teemu Selanne have TEEMU on the back of his jersey? . . .”