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Join today’s blackout and protest SOPA.
Find out more here
(Source: youngcobra, via tedr)
I read this quote on Seth Godin’s blog today from Martin Luther King, Jr. It’s tremendous, and worth repeating, especially with the circus we are about to endure in an election year.
“The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority.”
May you live as a maladjusted nonconformist.
I spent the week between Christmas and New Years in Tulsa, OK visiting family. On one of the days my wife and I decided to go get some coffee (or tea in my case). There were, of course, sixteen Starbucks within a five mile radius of where we were, but I wanted something different.
We stumbled upon a cool little, locally owned, coffee shop called Agora with the help of Google Maps. What I loved about this place was that they took the time to help us find a coffee and tea that were really perfect for the day and our mood. I actually ordered something, changed my mind, and got something different without the guy rolling his eyes and treating me like an idiot (or charging me for the first drink).
Later on that same day we went to Pepper’s Grill for dinner. If you are ever in Tulsa, this is really the only place I would characterize as a must-visit. They have some of the best tex-mex food on the planet. Not coincidentally, they are also locally owned.
I am getting to where I will drive a good bit out of the way to have an experience that I can’t get on every corner in every city in the US. I know people love Panera and Starbucks, but they are all so bland. Who wants bland?
How about you? Do you prefer convenience and consistency over quality and excellence? Do you look for local and unique over national and same?
A man with two clocks never knows the time.
A man cannot serve two masters.
These independent thoughts have in common the distraction of having two of something. In the case of business, this might be having two competing objectives, or to be more to the point not having one clear objective.
I think there is also something to the idea that trying to be something you are not (personally or professionally) creates two of you. The real you and the other you.
Lots of people think of the new year as a time to add to their lives those things that they think are missing. There is more value, I would submit, in ruthlessly getting rid of things that don’t belong.
Getting down to one is where I am headed each day. It’s a lot harder than I thought it would be.
How about you?
I usually pull most of the books I recommend each month from my current reading list. Last month, however, was a particularly bad month for reading for me. I seemed to get in a rut of books I didn’t like and had a hard time getting out of it. That is, until the last week and a half or so. I only have three books on this month’s list, but all of them are very much worth a read.
Self Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Rarely do I read a book that so gets ahold of me that I have pages of notes after only being half way through it. Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are certainly two of them. Emerson’s essays on self reliance are simply brilliant and will push you into uncomfortable questions about yourself. This group of essays has been republished by Seth Godin’s Domino Project and I can’t recommend this reading any higher. It’s January’s must-read.
Animal Farm by George Orwell
This is my first time reading the classic by Orwell, and I have found it to be both very entertaining and creative as well as prescient to our modern age as well. Although the book was clearly focused on the gaping holes in Communist ideology (and practice), there are a remarkable number of practices in modern government that are played out in the drama on Animal Farm. The self-importance, privilege and self-proclaimed aristocracy practiced by Napoleon and the pigs of Animal Farm will sound entirely too familiar. This is a very easy read (I read it in about two or three hours), but well worth it.
The Litigators by John Grisham
I have been a fan of John Grisham from his first books. He always seems to release a new book around this time of the year, and I usually end up reading it not long after. The Litigators is an entertaining, easy-to-read story in the Grisham tradition of the small firm taking on the machine. In this case, it’s toy manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies that play the villain, but it’s still classic Grisham fare. If you are looking for something to read to relax, this is a good book to pick up.
Thanks as always for the feedback. I am reading a book this month recommended by one of the regular readers, and am looking forward to reviewing it next month. Until then, happy reading and happy new year!
If you use Twitter, there is a well-kept secret about starting your tweets with @. If the first character in your tweet is a Twitter address (e.g. @joeblow), only the people that follow both you and @joeblow will be able to see the tweet.
Here is how it works:
Tweet: I am good friends with @joeblow
Who Sees It: Anyone that follows me
Tweet: @joeblow and I are good friends
Who Sees It: Only people that follow BOTH @joeblow and me. This is handy if you are only wanting a known group to see it, but not real handy if you are expecting everyone to be able to see it.
Tweet: .@joeblow and I are good friends
Who Sees It: Everyone because I started the message with a period. The period can be any character other than the @ or D (D is syntax for direct message). I usually use the period because it’s unobtrusive.
This particular bit of fun bit a good friend of mine today, so I thought I would share it in case others also might have made this mistake.
Hope this helps someone!
Except, well, death.
When I am in periods like I am right now, where everything is going sideways, it’s a good reminder that there are very few things that are unrecoverable.
As a companion to this idea, Seth Godin’s post yesterday about failure and mistakes was another reminder that every decision made, while not fatal most of the time, does have consequences. Taking the time to think about “Have I been here before, and how did that go?” is a good thing.
I rarely delve into politics on this blog. The reason for this is that I aim primarily for this blog to be informative and interesting, and politics is usually neither.
There are times, however, when the laws being considered and passed by the United States government need to be talked about. Such is the case with two pieces of legislation that have received widespread notoriety in the past few weeks: The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
SOPA is the latest bill being considered (currently by the house) to put an end to content theft. The bill gives authority to the government to unilaterally block or take down sites that are infringing on copyrighted content. Sounds OK right? Except that current copyright law already provides clear guidelines for displaying or posting copyrighted content. I am sure we have all seen that video on Youtube that used to be there, but was removed because it violated copyright law. So why do we need another law? When asked about the justification for the new law, Chris Dodd (former senator and now head of the Motion Picture Association of America) equated the rights granted the government to the same rights taken by the Chinese government in blocking “illegal” sites there. His quote: ”When the Chinese told Google that they had to block sites or they couldn’t do [business] in their country, they managed to figure out how to block sites.” We are now apparently patterning our laws after a country that has no concern for civil liberties at all. Furthermore, the current iteration of SOPA will hold companies liable for content posted by their users. That means, for instance, that Youtube would be legally liable if I post a bootlegged copy of Death Blow (obscure Seinfeld reference), or if I post a video of me singing “Don’t Stop Believing.” If that seems crazy to you, it’s because it is. The members of Congress feign ignorance and chuckle and chortle about “they aren’t nerds” and “don’t really understand the internet.” It does not seem to stop them from trying to pass asinine, overreaching laws about the subject, however. The reason for this law is clear: Content producers are shoveling money into the pockets of legislators as fast as they can. I think we can all agree that copyrighted content deserves protection, a protection that already exists. We have witnessed the witch hunt taking place by the RIAA, where anyone sharing music is a target of jail time and huge fines. The ambiguity in SOPA will allow the government to have wide-sweeping authority to define “illegal” sites and will cripple technical innovation on the internet. Thankfully yesterday the committee adjourned without a vote and has not scheduled a new date for the vote. We have a temporary victory.
The second, and potentially far worse, breach of liberty is the NDAA, which was passed yesterday by the Senate by a vote of 86-13. The NDAA is passed every year to fund the defense department of the United States. Included in this year’s bill were a few provisions that should scare the living daylights out of every US citizen. These provisions allow for the capture and indefinite detention without due process of American citizens who are suspected of terrorism. The language of these provisions was drafted by none other than John McCain, former Republican presidential candidate, and was drafted and passed in closed committee. I took the time this past week to write to one of the North Carolina senators, Kay Hagan, about her support of this bill. An excerpt of her response is below. The bolding highlights are mine.
“I understand your concerns regarding a number of provisions relating to the detention of terrorists captured by the United States government. I carefully considered these provisions while the legislation was debated on the floor. While I agree that the provisions in the bill are not perfect, I believe they represent a significant improvement over the original version passed by the Armed Services Committee in June. Furthermore, I supported three amendments offered by Senator Diane Feinstein to make reasonable modifications that would have clarified the applicability of the provisions in the bill. While two of those amendments failed by votes of 45-55, the Senate did adopt an amendment from Senator Feinstein to ensure that the bill does not affect existing U.S. law or authorities relating to the detention of U.S. citizens, lawful resident aliens, or any person captured or arrested in the United States. On December 1, 2011 the Senate passed the NDAA by a vote of 93-7.”
What is interesting about the above is that the Feinstein amendments mentioned above were not, so far as I can tell, included in the final version of the bill that passed yesterday. Also interesting is how, apparently, the standard of acceptable law is now that it must be better than the last version, not law that actually makes sense. President Obama had originally promised to veto this bill and has now backed away from that pledge. It appears that the bill will be signed in its current form.
The consideration and passage of these two bills has me deeply concerned. The government is usurping power at an alarming rate, and our ability to speak out is now threatened in real ways on two very important fronts.
I would urge you to get engaged. The cynical view is that there is nothing you can do. There is too much power, and too much money, coalescing in Washington. I know, because it’s a view I share often. However, the price of doing nothing is becoming higher and higher. Check out people like Buddy Roemer, Larry Lessig, and others that have real ideas on how things can be fixed, and get behind someone that values personal freedom. Don’t vote for anyone currently running for President. They are all cut from the same cloth. It will take nothing short of revolution by evolution to reverse our course.
With liberty and justice for all.
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