Jay’s Thoughts on Stuff

Here’s a great line from Don Boudreaux: “Politics is absurd.  Looking to it as a source of earthly salvation, or even as a good means of getting potholes filled, is mystifying.”

1. Focus on developing your people and the job will take care of itself. The job needs to be done or nobody gets paid, but don’t make the job the focus of your leadership. Use it to develop your people, not the other way around. As your followers grow as technicians, as servants, and as a team, they will naturally do their jobs better. People will start to talk.
2. Don’t lead in fear. Don’t be afraid to act or speak when it’s necessary. Don’t pawn the unpleasant aspects of your job off on others, especially not on those who are looking to you for leadership. Make decisions. Don’t leave people hanging, wondering what’s going on, or you will lose their trust and respect in a landslide.

She certainly has stolen the show, hasn’t she? This was a really depressing election cycle. It still doesn’t bode so well for America’s future, but it’s a lot more fun to watch now.

I’ll be out of town in Hurricane Land for a few days.

I love storms, the wind and thunder and lightning, the raw power of nature on a rampage. There’s nothing like it.

Update September 4, 2008: I made it back. Gustav scrambled my itinerary, but Plan B played out very well. I visited friends, met some remote co-workers, and watched some movies. I was really tempted to go into town but was quite content playing in the country and even in the burbs for one afternoon. I am so, so very done with Denver.

I said a long time ago that Sarah Palin would make a great Veep pick. Check the comments on this post from last December. Now if they could switch places, with Palin as President and McCain as Veep, I’d vote for them. Unless someone can guarantee me that McCain will have a stroke as soon as he takes office, I’m still sitting this one out.

Update: Lack of experience: So what? The last thing we need is more politics as usual. Obama, Biden, and McCain are just more of the same nanny-state-do-what-we-say-is-good-for-you-or-die-with-your-puppies politics. I’d like to see someone with nothing but backbone, character, and a giant axe take on Washington. It doesn’t take years of foreign diplomacy. It takes moral uprightness and perseverance. It takes a determination to stay out of other people’s business. It takes humility. Neither McCain nor Obama have any of those things.

Feminist: That’s a problem. Of course, everyone knows she has to be a feminist to want to be a mayor, governor, or vice president, but that doesn’t necessarily preclude high moral standards and good judgment in other areas. Public acclaim of Hillary Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro is something else, however. It demonstrates a serious lack of wisdom. She should have continued playing the hard-line moralist. Admiration of hedonistic, murderous, authoritarian mysandrists doesn’t fit the image she needs to portray. 

Down Syndrome: That she has a child with Down Syndrome isn’t negative in any way. That she knew her son had Down Syndrome before he was born and chose not to kill him is a big positive. That her son is still an infant and will always require a great deal of care is a big negative. It’s not a flaw, but it means she cannot possibly be both a good vice president and a good mother. Unless she has a specific divine calling to the White House, motherhood always comes first.

The long and short of it is that I am no longer so excited about Palin for Veep. Certainly, she would be an improvement over either Obama or McCain, but that’s not so hard.

Deuteronomy 11:29-32  And it shall come to pass, when the LORD thy God hath brought thee in unto the land whither thou goest to possess it, that thou shalt put the blessing upon mount Gerizim, and the curse upon mount Ebal. Are they not on the other side Jordan, by the way where the sun goeth down, in the land of the Canaanites, which dwell in the champaign over against Gilgal, beside the plains of Moreh? For ye shall pass over Jordan to go in to possess the land which the LORD your God giveth you, and ye shall possess it, and dwell therein. And ye shall observe to do all the statutes and judgments which I set before you this day.

There is a common perception among Christians that Jesus will come and take us all away before anything really bad happens. God saved Noah from the flood and Lot from the brimstone and Israel from the plagues. I’ve got some bad news for you.

No. He didn’t.

He saved them through tribulation, not from it. Noah and his family was locked up in a boat for months with seven other people and thousands of animals. Lot walked out of Sodom and took shelter in a small town right in the middle of the most spectacular firestorm that has ever been. The Israelites suffered some of the plagues right alongside the Egyptians and then had to march through forty years of desert to reach the Promised Land. And what did they find when they finally got there? They found blessing and curse. “Are they not on the other side of the Jordan?”

The Promised Land wasn’t paradise, but it was where God wanted them to be. It was where they needed to be. Growth doesn’t come through leisure, but through joy and suffering, loving and fighting, blessing and cursing.

Yes, there is a place where there are no more tears. But it’s not just over the rainbow rapture. It’s not in the Millenial Kingdom. God wants you to grow a little more between now and the end.

…or amazingly gullible.

Why Hillary lost? Study finds Americans prefer male leaders
By Kat Glass | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Men and women agree that women are more honest, intelligent, compassionate, outgoing and creative, according to a survey out Monday. But men still get a significant edge as leaders — and from both sexes.

The finding, in a survey commissioned by the Pew Research Center, may help to explain why Hillary Clinton isn’t making an acceptance speech this week and why acceptance of women as leaders in politics and business has been slow.

Among men and women whom Pew surveyed, a large majority — 69 percent — thought that men and women made equally strong leaders. But only 6 percent said women made better leaders while 21 percent said men did. Men and women held those views almost equally.

My personal experience is that women tend to be reflexive liars in emotionally charged situations¹ and slightly less intelligent than men.² I’m pretty darn sure that just about every empirical study ever done on the subject will back me up on that. Of course, some women are more honest and/or more intelligent than most men.³ I’ll give women compassion. No contest there, I think, as long as “compassion” is limited to feelings and not action. As for extroversion and creativity…I couldn’t tell you. Insufficient data.

Here’s the real lesson from this survey: 6% of Americans are delusional or mysandrist. 21% of Americans believe honesty is more important than good feelings. Some of those might be mysogynists. 69% of Americans are either liars or brainwashed by forty years of politically correct indoctrination.

Nobody has to like the truth. I don’t like it much myself. Unfortunately, the truth–backed up by science, 6000 years of human history, and 38 years of my personal experience–doesn’t care about anyone’s feelings.

When it comes to business, this is all irrelevant. I don’t care about my boss’s or employee’s sex or gender. If they are effective at their job, if they can play well with others, then that’s all I ask. If they can’t, then they need to move on regardless of their plumbing. Some people will certainly be better at some jobs than others, but I’m willing to let them prove themselves one at a time.⁴

¹ At least in matters of personal relationships. Most people don’t like to make others feel bad, but women are much more likely to lie to avoid immediately hurting someone’s feelings even if it means causing much greater damage later. Obviously they don’t do this because they care about the other person. They do it because they don’t want to make themselves feel bad by having to witness the other person’s hurt.
² I am defining intelligence as abstract reasoning skills, especially as they relate to math, science, and logic. Perhaps that is unfair of me. There are other kinds of intelligence. Women tend to be much more apt at both verbal and non-verbal communication.
³ That the disclaimer is necessary just serves to prove my overall point.
⁴ This paragraph is necessary because political correctness has gone so completely overboard that people have lost all ideological depth perception. They are way too intolerant of any opinions that differ from their own or from those approved by the P.T.B., and they assume that everyone else is exactly the same.

I’m lazy or busy or distracted or I just have other priorities. I’m back anyway.

I just watched Be Kind Rewind. Great movie. Jack Black, Mos Def, Danny Glover, and others. Go watch it.

Here are some great step-by-step instructions for giving your virtual machine a larger hard drive. No pills or surgery required.

Using the command prompt on the ESX server.

Usint the VMWare Infrastructure Client. This one’s easier, but I think the author plagiarized the other one.

Antidepressants May Impair Driving Ability, New Research Finds
ScienceDaily (2008-08-18) — People taking prescription antidepressants appear to drive worse than people who aren’t taking such drugs, and depressed people on antidepressants have even more trouble concentrating and reacting behind the wheel. … > read full article

Do you mean to say that one’s driving could be affected by taking drugs!? Say it isn’t so!