This is getting monotonous

So this McConnell guy is unstoppable, apparently. Not content with hacking out mystery stories, now he's got a business book out there! What does he know about business? Monkey business, maybe. Here's what he claims:

People fear Carnegie Mellon's CMMI models because they think they're just a big, prescriptive way of imposing the waterfall development method on everybody. Wrong. In this book, I argue that what CMMI is (or can be used as) is a big compendium of common sense things to do, and you do them to avoid trouble. You can be as agile as you like, and there's nothing that says you have to get appraised at some specific level. You can benefit just by treating CMMI as a checklist: Do we do this at all? Could we be doing it better? Or just differently?

This volume is about the overall starting point: three process areas that all start with "Organizational", and consequently are known as the Os. The plan is to have at least one more book, probably more than that, all looking at what CMMI calls for and asking the question, "If we don't do this, what could go wrong"?

Anyway, you can read it on a Kindle device or on almost anything else (PCs, Macs, Android devices, iPhones and iPads ... Amazon gives away free reader software). Oh, and McConnell says he might consider print versions, too. No promises there. That stuff costs money!

Have a look in your medicine cabinet

Consider this: the FDA says that "...only products intended solely for self-limiting disease conditions amenable to self-diagnosis (of symptoms) and treatment may be marketed over the counter (OTC)."

So unless a condition is a) going to go away of its own accord (is self-limiting) and is something you can diagnose and treat successfully yourself, companies can't sell their nostrums over the counter. Or to put it another way, while it's conceivable that a homeopathic treatment might make something go away or get better more quickly, whatever disease or condition it's marketed for has to be one that will just kill itself off anyway.

The FDA also says "The labeling for those products offered for OTC retail sale must bear at least one major OTC indication for use ...", meaning that "You'll feel better!" or "Increase your quality of life!" don't cut it. The labeling has to tell you why you might actually want to participate in a large collective hallucination take the product.

Recently, the FDA has had to send warning letters to at least six homeopathic marketers, reminding them of this.

Do you enjoy being creeped out?

Then you might enjoy reading this New York Magazine interview with Antonin Scalia. It is terrifying that this idiot-savant is actually on the supreme court, given his stated belief that the devil is "a real person", and that "Most of mankind has believed in the Devil, for all of history."

He knows the law and parts of the Constitution (but not, until recently, the Ninth Amendment, according to him), and the rest of his knowledge comes from The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times, oh, and he listens to the radio. He says in one place that he hunts and fishes with people from Louisiana, and in another place that the people he knows don't say the F-word. And he accused the interviewer of being out of touch with mainstream America. You can't make this stuff up; I wish I was.

Tonight on TRU TV: Top 10 Dumbest Populations

It is -- or was -- a major world power. Its name is synonymous with cultural development. It was a key driver of the Industrial Revolution. For a time, it was the world's policeman. Today, it's a sad shambles, its economy in disarray and its youth actually dumber than its adults. That's right, horrifyingly, the young people are less clueful WRT reading and math than their elders, bucking a long, long trend. And its two leading political parties jumped at the chance to blame each other for it.

Which country? You might say, "The US, of course." You might say that, and you'd be wrong with a capital WR. It's the motherland, the United Kingdom. Its kids are morons, comparatively speaking. At least according to this BBC story. Take it with a grain of salt; it is, after all, the BBC, a paragon of take-no-chances journalism. But they sound pretty confident of their data, and the response of Labour and the Conservatives (there ought to be an emoticon for two fingers, pointing at each other, but if there is, I can't find it) is so US-like that our House and Senate are considering a lawsuit for patent infringement.

Duh, Britannia, Britannia can't spell "waves".

Meanwhile, another country, tired of dealing with opposition in a civilized, democratic way, has simply decided to jail the wilder ones. Where is this crackdown taking place? Egypt? Syria? Texas? No, this week anyway, it's in the birthplace of democracy, Greece, where they're rounding up the neo-nazis and charging them with, um, things. Admittedly, one of them probably did murder a critic of their crypto-populist viewpoint, but still ... Aristotle did not return phone calls, asking for comment.

I keep promising myself not to start the day by reading the news, but I can't seem to break the habit. Here at home (where we're apparently striving to take the idiot honors back from the UK), a group of at least two and possibly more truck drivers are planning their own shutdown of the government by driving at the speed limit around the beltway (presumably in their trucks). One faction says they're going to "arrest" any lawmakers they can find who aren't upholding the constitution; another faction says "Nuh uh!" That's why I say there are at least two of these concerned citizens. Except in extraordinary circumstances, you have to have at least one person to make up a faction, per Federal regulations.

And because this isn't Greece (or Egypt or Syria), they probably won't just be spike-stripped, tased, dragged out of their Kenworths, and summarily shot. And because the Air Force is on shutdown (or it isn't -- not exactly clear), they can't finish their program of phasing out the A-10 ground attack planes and turning them over to local police forces for traffic control. Pity.

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2013 10 11: Update on the trucker thing. Faction one now says it was all a "hoax" to get media attention, and he probably isn't going, himself.

Quick, while the government's shut down

So I carry a small plastic dongle that opens and closes my garage door. So far, it's basically done just that. You push a button, it transmits a radio signal to the door opener, and there you go.

Last night, we went out and got take-out for dinner. Coming home, I was riding in the passenger's seat and holding the food on my lap. As we drove up to the house, I fumbled around for my opener (which is on a carabiner, clipped to my belt, along with all my other keys). Pushed the button, no result. Again, nothing. Linda dug out her opener and the door opened. "Dammit" I thought, "battery's dead." Nope. Once we were inside, mine worked fine.

This morning, heading out for coffee, it worked properly again.

So, while everybody in DC is otherwise engaged, I'm going to send DARPA a proposal for research into ground and formed and sliced lamb, wrapped in pita bread, as a security material and general radio signal blocker. If all goes well in phase one, phase two will involve surrounding the Pentagon with bunkers of gyros sandwiches.

A third little mystery

Due to being one of the annoying people who send him mail, I'm now on Governor Snyder's email list. This week, he sent me a messzage that said, in part:

“Unlike Washington, we found a way in Michigan to get our fiscal house in order. We've balanced our budget three years in a row, eliminated a $1.5 billion deficit and have saved over $500 million in our rainy day fund. We did it by setting politics aside, planning ahead, and solving one problem after another with relentless positive action."


I am putting together a FOIA request for all documents related to what the Governor's been smoking.

Another of life's mysteries

So we got together with some people I went to college with. The weird thing was, I wasn't a decade older than any of them!

One of life's mysteries

So every time I open a news story these days, I see people being referred to as "coworkers". I didn't know we were still that much of an agricultural society. And what the hell is "orking", anyway?

Every year ...

... along about this time it all goes dry. Nothin' there for love or money that'll get you ...

Wait. Sorry. I shouldn't listen to New Riders while I'm blogging. I'll start over.

Every year along about this time the people who make news and the journalists (or what passes for them) who report on it return from vacation, During their absence, the volume of silly, irrelevant stories, focusing on silly, irrelevant people usually goes way up, and then, boom!, at the end of August, things get serious again. This morning, with my granola, I ran across all of the following, just in about ten minutes reading.

• Snarking about Detroit: First, the Mayor of Boston, Thomas Menino, said that he'd consider living in Detroit, but that he'd "...blow the place up and start all over." He attributed Detroit's problems to poor leadership. Not surprisingly, the man currently demonstrating the accuracy of that assessment, Detroit's lame-ass duck mayor, Dave Bing, says "Nuh-uh!". The best Bing could come up with as a riposte was to criticize Menino's use of the phrase "blow up", considering Boston's recent unfortunate incident. Classy, Mr. Mayor.
  
  Then, not willing to leave well enough alone, the ex-Mayor of Milwaukee, John O. Norquist, weighed in, saying that tearing down the city is a "stupid idea".
  
  This puts Bing in a difficult place, having on the one hand to resent the suggestion from one of his peers that Detroit should be blown up, while simultaneously hearing from another (ex)head of a decaying Midwestern berg-on-a-lake metropolis that his, Bing's, policy of tearing things down is "stupid." Tough place to be, especially since Mayor Bing is now mostly assigned to fetching coffee for Kevin Orr, the Emergency Manager.
  
  
  
• Not everyone, of course, is talking in these critical terms about the city. Beloved musical performer and one-time Pepsi spokesman MC Hammer publicly prayed for Detroit, saying "... Detroit still can't be touched!" We concur, in the same sense that it's inadvisable to touch a rattlesnake or in the sense your mother had in mind when she said "Don't touch that! You don't know where it's been!"
  
  
• Moving up to the state level, Michigan is apparently on a list of states (actually so are almost half of the rest of 'em) that "...do not require schools or day care centers to meet minimum standards to protect children during major emergencies...". This is deplorable, especially in light of recent disasters such as the continued threat from the legislature. "We just don't have any plan for dealing with these statewide attacks on our educational system," said a spokesman for Is-our-children-lerning?, a non-profit organization concerned with cuts in educational funding. "I mean, are you aware that unlike dozens of other states, Michigan has no plan for arming third-graders and sending them to Lansing?"
  

There were other interesting bits of commentary by other interesting nit-wits, including good old Donald Rumsfeld, snarking at the President for not having nuked Damascus yet, but frankly, it's time to get something useful done.

Well, this is going to be boring

This blog has long maintained an editorial policy of fairness and impartiality, not to mention the use of pseudonyms, but recently we have been coerced into convinced to publish a series of political and social rants essays by a famous author and publisher who, as part of the bargain, agrees to attribution. This is the first.

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Clearly, the Olympics exist to sell advertising (same-same the Superbowl). While the claim is that they provide revenue and investment for the cities that host the games, a look at the actual effects shows that to be a blatant lie. Facilities for the games have been widely treated as excuses for slum clearance and displacement of urban populations, and the structures, once the games are over, become decaying reminders of squandered public funds. The games also claim to offer talented amateurs a path to glory and recognition. The facts suggest otherwise. And the idea that the Olympics are somehow a way of achieving peaceful communication among diverse peoples -- well, as the cliche' goes, how's that working out for you? Diverse peoples are at each others' throats just as much as they ever were, whether the diversity is ethnic, religious, political, or gender-based.

So no, the Olympics are a corporation whose product is publicity. They would not exist, at least in their current form, unless corporations with their own products to sell provided sponsorship. And that brings us to a recommendation.

As you have probably heard (unless you're deaf and blind), the upcoming Winter Olympics are planned for the city of Sochi, in Russia. That's Russia, the one with the sub-human social agenda, a country almost if not quite as widely-despised by everyone as we are (albeit for different reasons). Russia's frankly insane laws concerning homosexuality have caused people to poke at the International Olympic Committee, suggesting a change of venue to someplace with a more enlightened outlook -- Texas, for example; Russia makes Houston look like Stockholm. However, the IOC, like the German General Staff in 1914, says it's too late to make a change. The fact that one of the IOC's goals is to "Act against any form of discrimination affecting the Olympic Movement" appears not to be operative, as the Nixon administration once said. For reference, here's their fundamental principle Number 4:

The practice of sport is a human right. Every individual must have the possibility of
practising sport, without discrimination of any kind and in the Olympic spirit, which
requires mutual understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play.

Despite this, on the strength of an assurance from Russia that they were just kidding and everything's going to be just fine, the IOC is adamant.

So what's to be done, if anything, to get them to think again? Probably nothing. The Olympics will go on, in Russia, and civil rights be damned. But here's a notion. Contact the IOC and your own national Olympic committee, plus the network that will be broadcasting the games, plus the major corporate sponsors that sign up, and promise them that if the event is held in Russia:

• You will not attend
  
• You will not watch or listen to broadcasts of the games
  
• You will not purchase products of sponsors (e.g., McDonald's and Coke)
  
• If you own stock in those companies, consider selling it (and tell them that)
  
• If you own shares of a mutual fund that invests in sponsors, contact the fund's manager and complain
  
• And, if you were thinking of it, you will no longer donate to any Olympic fund or appeal
  

In summary, you'll do what an individual can do to reduce the value of their product. And then, most importantly, keep those promises.
Write to: International Olympic Committee Lausanne, Switzerland.
USOC: United States Olympic Committee US Olympic Complex Colorado Spring, Colorado
Coke and McDonald's linked above
Other sponsors
by Joe McConnell

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