Jim Medding’s Blog

In my book Charles Krauthammer is a brilliant guy. This quote from his March 9th column reflects some of his exceptional insight.

Indeed, one could perversely make the case that, if anything, the proliferation of overeducated, Gucci-wearing, smart-ass MBAs inventing ever more sophisticated and opaque mathematical models and debt instruments helped get us into this credit catastrophe in the first place.

This amusing quote can be found in Ann Coulter’s How to talk to a liberal (if you must):

The basic idea of a free market is that the consumer and the seller enter directly into mutually beneficial transactions. The consumer has the best information about what he wants and how much he is willing to pay; the seller has the best information about what he can provide and what it will cost him. That’s how we end up with great products like reasonably priced Chia pets in the shape of Jerry Garcia’s head.

Camporee was one of my favorite campouts to go on as an adult volunteer for my son’s troop. Among the various reasons I enjoyed it, was that I had the opportunity to interact with some great young men. You see, as an adult leader, we were required to help with the skills stations during the competition. I usually worked the nature station; my responsibilities were to instruct the patrols when they arrived at the station, observe how the worked together during the challenge, score their answers when they were done and then tell them how well they had done. We could give a few points for how well they worked together.

One patrol I especially remember; it was obviously a new-boy patrol since all of the scouts were about the age where Cub Scouts bridge into Boy Scouts. Working on the animal tracks challenge, one of the scouts pointed out that the beaver’s tracks were left by an animal that had webbed feet. The conversation went something like this:

First Scout: “Look, it has webbed feet.”

Bossy Scout: “Ducks have webbed feet, it’s a duck.”

Third Scout: “What else has webbed feet?”

Bossy Scout: “It’s gotta be a duck.”

First Scout: “It has four feet.”

Contemplative silence…

Bossy Scout: “It has webbed feet. It’s a duck!”

They wrote down “Duck.” Needless to say, they didn’t score well on this part of the challenge.

Be willing to be defined by your contribution, not your title.

Lonnie Mays, Freescale (EE Times 9/19/05)

This 1956 quote by Dr Henry Kissinger from Reflections on American Diplomacy I find interesting after hearing talk about the need coalitions.

Either the alliances add little to our effective strength or they do not reflect a common purpose, or both…. We have to face the fact that only the United States is strong enough domestically and economically to assume worldwide responsibilities and that the attempt to obtain the prior approval by all our allies of our every step will lead not to common action but inaction…. We must reserve the right to act alone, or with a regional group of powers, if our strategic interest so dictates.