inkbluesky

carefully chosen direction  

If you listen to AM radio Paul Harvey is difficult to avoid, He doesn’t just have a regular radio program, his little snippets of wisdom if you will are broadcast on many stations. While much of his main emphasis is the heavily cliched, trite and simplistic  here’s another reason to have a big smile and see the silver lining type of thing that is relatively harmless. He apparently also ventures into deep insights into  blood letting and death and the proper ways to achieve the greatest bang for your buck,

Paul Harvey News describes itself as “the largest one-man network in the world, consisting of over 1200 radio stations, 400 Armed Forces Network stations that broadcast around the world, and 300 newspapers.” President Bush gave Harvey the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005.

This isn’t the first time Harvey has callously wished for more viciousness in American war fighting. In 2005, he said the United States should use nuclear weapons in Afghanistan and Iraq. After recalling the use of atomic bombs during World War II, Harvey lamented that “we sent men with rifles into Afghanistan and Iraq and kept our best weapons in their silos.”

He then warned of the dangers of “civiliz[ing]” ourselves too much that we won’t use weapons of mass destruction:

    We didn’t come this far because we’re made of sugar candy. Once upon a time, we elbowed our way onto and across this continent by giving smallpox-infected blankets to Native Americans. That was biological warfare. And we used every other weapon we could get our hands on to grab this land from whomever.

And we grew prosperous. And yes, we greased the skids with the sweat of slaves. So it goes with most great nation-states, which — feeling guilty about their savage pasts — eventually civilize themselves out of business and wind up invaded and ultimately dominated by the lean, hungry up-and-coming who are not made of sugar candy. (emphasis mine)

Paul and I see things a bit differently. I’ll borrow an analogy I read a few years ago. I see terrorism and a cancer and as such should be carefully cut out without harming the healthy tissue. Paul on the other hand thinks we should simply throw the patient into an incinerator and be done with it and furthermore if you don’t agree with him you’re a candyass.  More background on the reference to the pox infected blankets here.

 The E-Mail AddictStop using, start living

The first step to health is admitting that you have a problem, and then turning off Microsoft Outlook’s automatic send and receive. The second step is very steep: “You must commit to emptying your Inbox every time you go in there.”

Have you ever emptied your inbox? It’s like hacking off a limb. With no e-mail to reply to, I feel a disorientating lightness. I am at loose ends and have no way to fill those little holes in the day. That’s also part of the problem, according to Egan and her fellow productivity coaches. E-mail, which is innately reactive, has become the default method of “working.” The idea behind emptying your inbox is to convert all those e-mails into actions.

I have to include this line about the Blackberry outage, “Over on the tech site Slashdot, someone cracked wise with a line from Star Wars, saying the failure was “as though a million voices cried out and were suddenly silenced.” I used to be addicted. It was like, well either Tom Hanks or Meg Ryan from You’re Got Mail, I’d jump  up and run to see what wonderful message someone had sent me. After almost a year of 1% wonderful and 99% who cares, e-mail lost its luster for me. I still liked some newsletters I subscribed to, but then I got hooked on RSS, so while I try to have good Netiquette I end up ignoring half my e-mail business or personal. And you what the world does not come to an end. I should warn you that you ignore your boss’s or spouse’s e-mail at your own risk.