Guns and Rocks

Posted on 2012.07.26 by Is Still Here

When­ever a new  Heav­ily Armed, Deranged, Attention-Seeking Per­son appears upon the scene and goes berserk with a firearm, those Amer­i­cans who irra­tionally sup­port an unlim­ited inter­pre­ta­tion of right of the peo­ple to keep and bear arms imme­di­ately become very defen­sive and claim the firearm is not to blame.

rock gun 300x225 Guns and RocksA very recent exam­ple is this flyer which is mak­ing the rounds fol­low­ing the actions of the lat­est Heav­ily Armed, Deranged, Attention-Seeking Per­son in Aurora, Col­orado. The actions of the Heav­ily Armed, Deranged, Attention-Seeking Per­son in Col­orado, using an AR-15 in addi­tion to other firearms, did bod­ily harm to 71 peo­ple in 10 min­utes and left many of those peo­ple extremely injured and 12 of them dead.

Think about the flyer for a minute. A rock is being claimed to be as big a threat as a gun. Make that, a rock is being claimed to be as big a threat as a an “Assault Weapon”.

AR 15 and load 300x109 Guns and Rocks71 peo­ple in 10 min­utes. The AR-71 is a semi-automatic ver­sion of the US mil­i­tary M16 rifle mod­i­fied for civil­ian sales. A quick search of the Inter­net shows that the rifle can fire 12–15 rounds a minute almost indef­i­nitely; but there are many, many reports of fir­ing rates as much as 10 times that (100’s per minute) for min­utes at a time. Also from the Inter­net you quickly find that drum mag­a­zines are read­ily avail­able that hold 100 rounds each. Damn, an AR-15 is an “Assault Weapon”!

Mellow Stone Decorative Garden Aggregate 300x300 Guns and Rocks71 peo­ple in 10 min­utes. Try it with a pile of rocks. Well first of all, it would prob­a­bly take longer than 10 min­utes to carry in all those rocks. You might harm one or two peo­ple. But by then at least a few of the oth­ers would start to steal some of your rocks and beat the crap out of you. OK, maybe you decide to use larger peb­bles and a sling­shot. You might get them to the loca­tion and you might harm a few peo­ple. But most of the rest would run out of range before long. I bet they would throw back any peb­bles that missed or that they found lying around. Prob­a­bly some of them would find other heavy sharp objects. Plus a few might have guns in their cars.

No, any­one who thinks a rock is as much of an “Assault Weapon”, or any­where near as dan­ger­ous, as a gun is purely delusional.

I learned to shoot at a young age. Small tar­gets at long ranges where not really a prob­lem. Still Here Too learned to shoot from a few, proud good men. She was a really good shot, would have put me to shame. For purely per­sonal rea­sons we do not keep any firearms in our home. We have no real fun­da­men­tal issue with firearms prop­erly used. But we would both feel a lot bet­ter about liv­ing in Amer­ica if there were a few less than the pro­jected 200–300 mil­lion pri­vately owned guns; and we would both feel even bet­ter about liv­ing in Amer­ica if “Assault Weapons” were not allow in the gen­eral population.

Is Still Here

Posted in Society | Tagged , , , , , , , , |

Please leave a comment

Related posts:

ENTJ or INTJ — Extrovert or Introvert

Posted on 2012.06.28 by Is Still Here

ENTJ INTJ11 ENTJ or INTJ Extrovert or IntrovertPeo­ple who have only been around me in a small group that is not a work or other goal ori­ented envi­ron­ment tend to view me as an intro­verted per­son. I know this because they have often com­mented on this to my dear part­ner Still Here Too and to oth­ers. I can fully under­stand why I appear to be so because in such an envi­ron­ment I find myself becom­ing very quiet exter­nally. I may be quiet exter­nally but I am gen­er­ally inter­nally very obser­vant of the peo­ple I am with and how they are interacting.

Peo­ple who are have been around me in a sit­u­a­tion that is work or other goal ori­ented envi­ron­ment view me in a very dif­fer­ent way and usu­ally as a very extro­verted per­son. In these sit­u­a­tions I am most likely to seek to take over the con­ver­sa­tion. If the inter­ac­tion involves prob­lem solv­ing I will strive to lead the effort, espe­cially if the group is hav­ing trou­ble focus­ing of the goal. I thrive on pub­lic speaking.

I have long felt that Myers-Briggs type indi­ca­tor (MBTI) test­ing offers a appro­pri­ate method to help under­stand and dis­cuss one’s per­son­al­ity and behav­ior. As I have dis­cussed before, I have taken MBTI a large num­ber of times. I have tested essen­tially the same way each time I have taken the test. Extro­ver­sion (E) over Intro­ver­sion (I) but not very strongly, Intu­ition (N) very strongly over Sens­ing (S), Think­ing (T) strongly over Feel­ing (F), and Judg­ment (J) strongly over Per­cep­tion ( P); in other words, an ENTJ with a lit­tle lean­ing towards an INTJ. I have tested this way over decades. I recently took a Stengths­Finder assess­ment that sug­gested I might actu­ally lean more toward INTJ than ENTJ. But so many MBTI assess­ments have come up ENTJ.

My inter­pre­ta­tion of my behav­ior, lean­ing toward intro­verted in some envi­ron­ments and extro­verted in oth­ers was that I was in MBTI terms an ENTJ but only mildly E over I, i.e. an ENTJ who was close to being and INTJ. How­ever I read what Thor­gar posted in a dis­cus­sion on the topic “What are some dif­fer­ences between ENTJs and INTJs?” on the Per­son­al­ity Café forum and his com­ment lead me to believe I really must be an ENTJ. What Thor­gar posted is:

INTJs usu­ally come off as a lot more nerdy than ENTJs, although ENTJs can be pretty nerdy behind their more approach­able and pol­ished exte­ri­ors. Although there are excep­tions, many ENTJs can be pretty reserved such that you might think they are intro­verts until you see them give a talk or work a party. They can be as reluc­tant as INTJs to share per­sonal details with peo­ple they don’t know extremely well.

I think INTJs more often fall in love with ideas, while ENTJs are pretty focused on what util­ity the idea has rather than its intel­lec­tual merit. If there isn’t an imme­di­ate appli­ca­tion, they lose interest.

INTJs can get excitable under stress, while ENTJs get even more calm and delib­er­ate. I think INTJs are bet­ter at cre­ative and “out of the box” think­ing, while ENTJs are bet­ter at choos­ing a course and putting things into action.

The ENTJs I know are all very “pro­grammed” and not very spon­ta­neous. Every­thing is planned out weeks, months, and years in advance. I real­ize this is a TJ trait in gen­eral but ENTJs seem much more entrenched in this than INTJs.

When I read Thorgar’s com­ment, three points really made me feel as if I must be an ENTJ

  1. “ENTJs can be pretty reserved such that you might think they are intro­verts until you see them give a talk or work a party.” – this one should be clear from what I said above.
  2. “I think INTJs are bet­ter at cre­ative and ‘out of the box’ think­ing, while ENTJs are bet­ter at choos­ing a course and putting things into action.” – When I was in aca­d­e­mics, I believe that I con­tributed much to the research efforts that I worked. How­ever, I must admit that per­haps my biggest weak­ness was iden­ti­fy­ing the ini­tial approach to take. My strength was in clos­ing on a prob­lem once a glim­mer of an idea was in place. I could fill in the pieces bet­ter than most. I have had my share of orig­i­nal thoughts, but I would not com­pare myself to the best that I worked with. On the other hand, dur­ing my career I have dri­ven more prob­lems to the path to clo­sure than most that I know.
  3. “INTJs more often fall in love with ideas, while ENTJs are pretty focused on what util­ity the idea has rather than its intel­lec­tual merit” – If one thing drove me out of Aca­d­e­mic research it was the thought of hav­ing to build a career focused on one area of study that was def­i­nitely never going to lead to an actual appli­ca­tion. The prob­lems I worked on were chal­leng­ing and fun to solve but were of inter­est only because they fur­thered Humankind’s knowl­edge of the phys­i­cal uni­verse. When I left I got to work on prob­lems that lead to imple­men­ta­tion in prod­ucts, and then I got to work on prob­lems in Busi­ness Devel­op­ment, and then I got to work on prob­lems in Finance, and then I got to work on prob­lems in per­son­nel man­age­ment, and then I got to work on prob­lems in Busi­ness Plan­ning, and then … and all of them had to be dri­ven to clo­sure and com­plete­ness with real con­straints and deadlines.

I guess I am an ENTJ (and have an ego appro­pri­ate for one). For what it is worth, Thor­gar is an INTJ.

Is Still Here

Posted in Random Thoughts | Tagged , , , , , , |

1 Comment

Related posts:

StrengthsFinder or MBTI

Posted on 2012.03.29 by Is Still Here

SF MBTI StrengthsFinder or MBTIA few days ago I received the results of a new per­son­al­ity assess­ment. Cor­po­rate Amer­ica just loves per­son­al­ity assess­ments. I am con­vinced there are a lot of peo­ple who believe that these assess­ment will some­how make the very dif­fi­cult task of assign­ing the right peo­ple into the right jobs a mat­ter of just using a for­mula. Either that or there are some very good sales peo­ple work­ing for the con­sult­ing firms – actu­ally I know that to be true. But even given that, the per­son­al­ity assess­ments can be extremely interesting.

ENTJ INTJ1 StrengthsFinder or MBTII have taken MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indi­ca­tor) a large num­ber of times. I have tested essen­tially the same way each time I have taken the test. Extro­ver­sion (E) over Intro­ver­sion (I) but not very strongly, Intu­ition (N) very strongly over Sens­ing (S), Think­ing (T) strongly over Feel­ing (F), and Judg­ment (J) strongly over Per­cep­tion ℗; in other words, an ENTJ with a lit­tle lean­ing towards an INTJ. I have tested this way over decades.

ENTJ: Frank, deci­sive, assume lead­er­ship read­ily. Quickly see illog­i­cal and inef­fi­cient pro­ce­dures and poli­cies, develop and imple­ment com­pre­hen­sive sys­tems to solve orga­ni­za­tional prob­lems. Enjoy long-term plan­ning and goal set­ting. Usu­ally well informed, well read, enjoy expand­ing their knowl­edge and pass­ing it on to oth­ers. Force­ful in pre­sent­ing their ideas.

INTJ: Have orig­i­nal minds and great drive for imple­ment­ing their ideas and achiev­ing their goals. Quickly see pat­terns in exter­nal events and develop long-range explana­tory per­spec­tives. When com­mit­ted, orga­nize a job and carry it through. Skep­ti­cal and inde­pen­dent, have high stan­dards of com­pe­tence and per­for­mance – for them­selves and others.

I have always felt myself well described by these. Which per­son­al­ity more dom­i­nates depends upon my mood as much as any­thing. I am clearly a mix of the two but when pushed to action or when thrust into a social sit­u­a­tion I will become an ENTJ. When allowed soli­tude, per­haps I slip into being an INTJ.

Strengths­Finder is quite dif­fer­ent from MBTI. Strengths­Finder ranks 34 sep­a­rate strengths in descend­ing order. I found the actual list of strengths some­what inter­est­ing. What was also inter­est­ing is a report that cor­re­lated Strengths­Finder (unfor­tu­nately an ear­lier ver­sion) and MBTI that did a fair job of match­ing my results.

My top ten strengths turn out to be:

  I E S N T F J P
Learner       X        
Strate­gic       X        
Achiever                
Ideation       X        
Acti­va­tor                
Com­mand       X X      
Ana­lyt­i­cal X   X   X   X  
Indi­vid­u­al­iza­tion                
Rela­tor                
Focus         X   X  

The columns to the right under the MBTI traits (I/E, S/N, T/F, J/P) are from a pre­sen­ta­tion by Dr. Dick Thomp­son report­ing cor­re­la­tion between Strengths­Finder Ver­sion 1 (I actu­ally took Ver­sion 2) and MBTI. The “X”s denote those strengths that cor­re­late with each MBTI trait. As you can see from the table, there is a strong over­lap with MBTI “N”, and cor­re­la­tion with “T”, “J”, and to a lesser degree “I”. If you look at all 34 strengths, the cor­re­la­tion with “N’ is strongest, the only dif­fer­ence between my slight ENTJ over INTJ MBTI assess­ment is that this cor­re­la­tion of Strengths­Finder to MBTI would sug­gest a stronger INTJ assess­ment. But that is not really what Strengths­Find­ers is all about. The words asso­ci­ated with the ranked strengths are what mat­ter. If you read the words from my top ten strengths they sound very much like the descrip­tion of an ENTJ/INTJ mix as described by Myers-Briggs.

SF strengths1 StrengthsFinder or MBTIMy top ten strengths in descend­ing order and their sum­mary descrip­tions are:

Learner

  • Love the process of learn­ing as much as what is actu­ally learned
  • Want to con­tin­u­ously improve
  • Learn­ing builds confidence
  • Thrive in dynamic work envi­ron­ments and short-term projects

Strate­gic

  • Cre­ate mul­ti­ple ways to do things
  • Always have Plan B
  • Can quickly see rel­e­vant pat­terns and issues in any problem
  • Always ask “what if?”
  • Can see dif­fer­ent ways of reach­ing a goal or solv­ing a problem

Achiever

  • Hard work­ing
  • Sta­mina
  • Busy, long “to do” list
  • Highly pro­duc­tive
  • Goal-oriented
  • Highly moti­vated

Ideation

  • Cre­ative and original
  • Love to brainstorm
  • Always look for con­nec­tions and new perspectives
  • See pos­si­bil­i­ties
  • Good at help­ing oth­ers reframe things
  • Can syn­the­size a lot of dif­fer­ent ideas into sim­pler concepts

Acti­va­tor

  • Turn ideas into actions
  • Impa­tient with talk­ing about doing things—wants to do them now
  • Pow­er­ful force in mak­ing things happen
  • Action is the best method for learning—learn by doing

Com­mand

  • See what needs to be done and say so
  • Will­ing to confront
  • Take charge in a crisis
  • Very will­ing to share opin­ions with others
  • Push oth­ers to take risks
  • Pres­ence and poise

Ana­lyt­i­cal

  • Search for rea­sons for why things are
  • Cause and effect
  • Want to see the evidence
  • Ask ques­tions
  • Objec­tive and data-driven
  • Look for pat­terns and connections
  • Log­i­cal and rigorous

Indi­vid­u­al­iza­tion

  • See oth­ers as dis­tinct, unique persons
  • Can see how peo­ple who are very dif­fer­ent can work together
  • Can build pro­duc­tive teams because they see the tal­ents and strengths and struc­ture their teams around hose strengths
  • Form pow­er­ful rela­tion­ships with oth­ers that build on trust and being taken seriously

Rela­tor

  • Enjoy work­ing hard with close friends to achieve a goal together
  • Deep rela­tion­ships with a small circle
  • Pulled toward peo­ple they already know
  • Com­fort­able with intimacy
  • Self-disclosing

Focus

  • Pri­or­i­tize actions
  • Good follow-through
  • Goal-oriented—need to see a clear destination
  • Stay on track
  • Fil­ter out any­thing that doesn’t get them toward the goal

My first thought was to try to under­stand what strengths were miss­ing that would imply a stronger lean­ing towards a Myers-Briggs Intro­ver­sion (I) rather than Extro­ver­sion (E). But when I read through the descrip­tion of the strengths and then read the descrip­tions of an ENTJ and an INTJ again it seems like a point­less exercise.

Strengths­Find­ers sells itself is a test that helps a per­son iden­tify their strengths so they can empha­size those strengths rather than dwell on their short­com­ings. Hon­estly I have never found Myers-Briggs to dwell of short­com­ings either.

I think that once again a test has proven that my per­son­al­ity was set many, many years ago. Per­son­al­ity tests can be very infor­ma­tive. Per­son­al­ity test can pro­vide a good way to com­mu­ni­cate the traits you posses in a com­mon lan­guage that make it easy to com­pare your­self to oth­ers. I am sure that for some peo­ple the tests help them to dis­cover much about them­selves. But if you know your­self, as I feel I do, per­son­al­ity tests will just rein­force that you am what you am.

Is Still Here

Posted in Random Thoughts | Tagged , , , , , , |

5 Comments

Related posts:

The World Goes Round

Posted on 2012.03.14 by Is Still Here
potd pi pie 297x300 The World Goes Round
Happy π Day!

Happy 3.14159265358979323

8462643383279502884197169

3993751058209749445923078

1640628620899862803482534

2117067982148086513282306

6470938446095505822317253

5940812848111745028410270

1938521105559644622948954

9303819644288109756659334

4612847564823378678316527

1201909145648566923460348

6104543266482133936072602

4914127372458700660631558

8174881520920962829254091

7153643678925903600113305

3054882046652138414695194

1511609… Day.

If the world went square, we would have no pie. icon rolleyes The World Goes Round   (pretty bad, huh?)

Posted in Random Thoughts | Tagged , , |

Please leave a comment

No Related posts

Escape Into Fantasy

Posted on 2012.02.13 by Is Still Here

Kushiels Chosen e1329147831646 Escape Into FantasyIt is an old habit and it is not in itself a bad one. The only issue I must be care­ful to watch for is that, as has been true in my past, I do find it so enjoy­able that I tend to spend too much time indulging the habit. You see I love to read nov­els. At dif­fer­ent times, I have picked dif­fer­ent gen­res, but tend to stick with one for at least a short period of time.

Of late my life has been filled with filled with a sig­nif­i­cantly increas­ing num­ber of stress generators.

In my work life; the busi­ness cli­mate has forced many long dis­cus­sions of issues that will likely impact many peo­ples’ lives, I have had to play the role of Father Con­fes­sor to a never-ending stream of peo­ple seek­ing to resolve per­son­nel con­flicts in our anx­ious work envi­ron­ment, my role as chief critic has placed me at odds with many who have still not become accept­ing of the con­cept of inqui­si­tion in order to uncover hid­den issues and choose to take ques­tion­ing as per­sonal assault rather than sim­ply seek­ing a path to suc­cess for the group. My dear Still Here Too so wants to share the stress and frus­tra­tion from work and would like to dis­cuss these issues. But I would so just like to bury it all at least for the few hours I am away. Bury it at least as much as the inces­sant buzzing of the Black­Berry allows. If I every stop believ­ing I am mak­ing a dif­fer­ence I will be so tempted to just walk away … but then peo­ple still go out of their way to tell me I do make a dif­fer­ence, so on I go even though I feel so lit­tle sense of control.

And in my other life I must admit to also feel a loss of con­trol. Degrad­ing health issues aris­ing as side effects from past med­ical pro­ce­dures are caus­ing me to add to my col­lec­tion of med­ical spe­cial­ist, a col­lec­tion that has become much to expan­sive. These issues are restrict­ing my abil­ity to func­tion in nor­mal life in a man­ner that I find accept­able. Com­bined with med­ica­tions, the impact on my sex­ual capa­bil­i­ties does at times truly make me feel a sep­a­ra­tion from what it means to be human.

This is not easy for an ENTJ to accept. I live to act on issues. I live to influ­ence issues. Right now I have to make minor nudges and then sit back and see if the issue has made a minor course adjustment.

Rather than allow myself to slip into a deep dark depres­sion because I can­not rule my world, I have cho­sen to escape to other worlds; not real worlds but the worlds of fan­tasy fic­tion. Some­how read­ing about impos­si­ble char­ac­ters sur­viv­ing impos­si­ble sit­u­a­tions totally beyond their con­trol and pulling vic­tory from not only the jaws of defeat, but often from out of the stom­ach of defeat, gives me hope. Some­times the sex is good too. Now if I could just get myself to stay away from the multi-volume series. icon rolleyes Escape Into Fantasy

Is Still Here

Posted in Our Path | Tagged , , , , , , , |

Please leave a comment

Related posts:

Take My Cookies, Give Me My Google Search

Posted on 2012.01.26 by Is Still Here

Google privacy 300x45 Take My Cookies, Give Me My Google SearchGoogle has announced that effec­tive 1 March 2012 it will con­sol­i­date all 60 of its pri­vacy poli­cies into one and will share infor­ma­tion across all of its ser­vices. This has many of the pri­vacy para­noid in a tizzy. Among the more amus­ing con­cerns expressed are:

  • “I don’t want my bak­ery shop owner to know what kind of med­i­cines I buy from the nearby med­ical store”
  • “Pri­vate email mes­sages might con­tain any num­ber of per­sonal, embar­rass­ing, or oth­er­wise dam­ag­ing infor­ma­tion, and Google’s attempts to amplify and con­tex­tu­al­ize this infor­ma­tion through tar­geted ads, Maps sug­ges­tions, or Cal­en­dar reminders could have neg­a­tive con­se­quences for users.” — Sen. Richard Blu­men­thal (D-Conn.)
  • “Google will know more about you than your wife does”

Google privacy all 300x167 Take My Cookies, Give Me My Google SearchYou get the point, the typ­i­cal reac­tions. The truth is, the infor­ma­tion that is shared from the dif­fer­ent Google sources is just as pro­tected as it always has been. What is changed is that all of the Google ser­vices now share infor­ma­tion among each other.

If your e-mails include such pri­vate infor­ma­tion that you are seri­ously wor­ried about inter­cep­tion, you should be using some form of encryp­tion. If you are wor­ried about what is divulged on your social media page then you are just plain delu­sional, it is divulged and you should not be post­ing dummy. If you truly believe that your brows­ing his­tory is com­pletely pri­vate now you are most likely mis­taken. If you are that con­cerned about pri­vacy you should prob­a­bly stay off of the Internet.

I for one wel­come Google con­tin­u­ing to improve its busi­ness model. I greatly enjoy hav­ing such a great search engine avail­able for free. Any­thing that can be done to improve my abil­ity to find even more infor­ma­tion so quickly is fine with me. When I think back to the time when it took days, even weeks, in the uni­ver­sity library to find just one piece of infor­ma­tion that I can now find in min­utes I am con­tin­u­ally amazed.

Is Still Here

BTW, the impor­tant part of Google’s new pri­vacy state­ment is what infor­ma­tion they share. It reads as fol­lows:

Infor­ma­tion we share

We do not share per­sonal infor­ma­tion with com­pa­nies, orga­ni­za­tions and indi­vid­u­als out­side of Google unless one of the fol­low­ing cir­cum­stances apply:

  • With your consent

We will share per­sonal infor­ma­tion with com­pa­nies, orga­ni­za­tions or indi­vid­u­als out­side of Google when we have your con­sent to do so. We require opt-in con­sent for the shar­ing of any sen­si­tive per­sonal information.

  • With domain administrators

If your Google Account is man­aged for you by a domain admin­is­tra­tor (for exam­ple, for Google Apps users) then your domain admin­is­tra­tor and resellers who pro­vide user sup­port to your orga­ni­za­tion will have access to your Google Account infor­ma­tion (includ­ing your email and other data). Your domain admin­is­tra­tor may be able to:

      • view sta­tis­tics regard­ing your account, like sta­tis­tics regard­ing appli­ca­tions you install.
      • change your account password.
      • sus­pend or ter­mi­nate your account access.
      • access or retain infor­ma­tion stored as part of your account.
      • receive your account infor­ma­tion in order to sat­isfy applic­a­ble law, reg­u­la­tion, legal process or enforce­able gov­ern­men­tal request.
      • restrict your abil­ity to delete or edit infor­ma­tion or pri­vacy settings.

Please refer to your domain administrator’s pri­vacy pol­icy for more information.

  • For exter­nal processing

We pro­vide per­sonal infor­ma­tion to our affil­i­ates or other trusted busi­nesses or per­sons to process it for us, based on our instruc­tions and in com­pli­ance with our Pri­vacy Pol­icy and any other appro­pri­ate con­fi­den­tial­ity and secu­rity measures.

  • For legal reasons

We will share per­sonal infor­ma­tion with com­pa­nies, orga­ni­za­tions or indi­vid­u­als out­side of Google if we have a good-faith belief that access, use, preser­va­tion or dis­clo­sure of the infor­ma­tion is rea­son­ably nec­es­sary to:

      • meet any applic­a­ble law, reg­u­la­tion, legal process or enforce­able gov­ern­men­tal request.
      • enforce applic­a­ble Terms of Ser­vice, includ­ing inves­ti­ga­tion of poten­tial violations.
      • detect, pre­vent, or oth­er­wise address fraud, secu­rity or tech­ni­cal issues.
      • pro­tect against harm to the rights, prop­erty or safety of Google, our users or the pub­lic as required or per­mit­ted by law.

We may share aggre­gated, non-personally iden­ti­fi­able infor­ma­tion pub­licly and with our part­ners – like pub­lish­ers, adver­tis­ers or con­nected sites. For exam­ple, we may share infor­ma­tion pub­licly to show trends about the gen­eral use of our services.

If Google is involved in a merger, acqui­si­tion or asset sale, we will con­tinue to ensure the con­fi­den­tial­ity of any per­sonal infor­ma­tion and give affected users notice before per­sonal infor­ma­tion is trans­ferred or becomes sub­ject to a dif­fer­ent pri­vacy policy.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , |

Please leave a comment

Related posts:

It’s Not Very Much (Relatively)

Posted on 2012.01.25 by Is Still Here

pile of money 5 e1327540826490 It’s Not Very Much (Relatively)Hey, he is actu­ally right. When you think about it, $375,000 is not really very much money. Well not really very much com­pared to $21,000,000. But for cry­ing out loud, just how out of touch with nor­mal peo­ple is some­one who would say “For the past 10 years, my income comes over­whelm­ingly from invest­ments made in the past, rather than ordi­nary income or earned annual income. I got a lit­tle bit of income from my book, but I gave that all away. Then, I get speak­ers fees from time to time, but not very much.” Well, not very much is rel­a­tive. Accord­ing to his per­sonal finan­cial dis­clo­sure, from Feb­ru­ary 2010 to Feb­ru­ary 2011, Mitt Rom­ney earned almost $375,000 in speak­ing fees.

But then this pales com­pared to Mitt Romney’s total income

“The tax returns, which Rom­ney had stead­fastly refused to release until now, show he earned $45m over the past two years, and paid just $6.2m in taxes, a rate of about 15%. Most of the income was derived from invest­ments from his $200m-plus fortune.

…

In 2010, Rom­ney earned more than $21m and paid $3m in tax, a rate of less than 14%. He expects to pay $3.2m in taxes on his 2011 income, a rate of 15.4%.”

So the speaker’s fees made up less than 2% of Mitt Romney’s income. For the aver­age U.S. fam­ily income of about $60,000, 2% would be only $1,200. I hate to tell Mitt Rom­ney, but if he walked up to an aver­age Amer­i­can fam­ily and handed them $1,200 in cash they would not say “it is not very much”. So maybe what I said back in the open­ing is a bit of an exag­ger­a­tion. But then if you make $21,000,000 a year, $375,000 is prob­a­bly pocket change. I really have trou­ble imag­in­ing how it feels.

Mitt Rom­ney has proven he is out of touch with the finan­cial con­di­tions of real Amer­i­cans with his words. What about other lead­ing can­di­dates for the Office of Pres­i­dent of the United States?

“Newt Gin­grich revealed at the week­end that he paid nearly $1m in income tax, a rate of about 31%.

The Oba­mas had a joint income of $1.7m in 2010, much of it from sales of the president’s two pop­u­lar books. They paid 26% in tax.”

They seem down­right poor com­pared to Mitt Rom­ney. But I think most of us would accept their income very will­ingly. I will make no other com­ments on the stand­ing of the two can­di­dates, or any of the oth­ers. On this par­tic­u­lar topic none have been quite as bla­tantly out of touch as Mitt Romney.

But we need to accept the fact that we shall prob­a­bly never see a per­son rise from a back­ground as hum­ble as Abra­ham Lin­coln reach the Oval Office again. Time and pol­i­tics have changed to the point where only those who have a cer­tain level of per­sonal wealth can play the game.

Is Still Here

Posted in Society | Tagged , , , , , , , |

Please leave a comment

Related posts:

It Is Simple Courtesy and There Is Too Little Left

Posted on 2012.01.06 by Is Still Here

starbucks e1325813590480 It Is Simple Courtesy and There Is Too Little LeftExit­ing one of the local houses of the inter­na­tion­ally known, caffeine-providing mer­maid with one hand full of a morning’s serv­ing of well-steamed milk and extract of slightly over roasted cof­fee beans; I tried to hold the door open for a young lady who appeared to be enter­ing for her own fix of caf­feine. The young lady stopped when I stopped to hold the door open for her, smiled, and said, “Why, you are so kind.” She actu­ally seemed some­what sur­prised that I would hold the door for her. I hon­estly found this both sur­pris­ing and mildly dis­turb­ing. You see, I grew up dur­ing a time when young men were taught to hold the door for ladies when they were enter­ing a build­ing. It was sim­ply some­thing you do. When my brain is not dis­en­gaged the habit con­tin­ues to this day (even though I am cer­tainly no longer young). But not just for ladies, but for any­one who is enter­ing when I am at the door. It is just in my per­son­al­ity (when my brain is engaged). I was mildly dis­turbed only because I did not think it was right that she should seem at all sur­prised that some­one should hold the door for her.

But before the young lady could enter, some­thing that rep­re­sents a very com­mon occur­rence hap­pened. Also rush­ing in to get his morn­ing caf­feine fix was a thirty-something human that I can only call a Rufus, a big lum­ber­ing, mind­less dog of a per­son; one that hap­pened to be dressed in a busi­ness suit and tie who had just exited from his styl­ish new BWM and felt no com­punc­tion against push­ing past the young lady into the mermaid’s house. The young lady had to step back to avoid being bumped by Rufus. All I could say was, “Per­haps he will spill his cof­fee all over his nice leather seats.” She laughed and gave me a sly smile.

It only takes about 5 sec­onds to hold the door for the other per­son and it does make their day a lit­tle nicer. I can only think of one or two things that are so urgent that you can­not spare the 5 sec­onds. Give it a try.

Is Still Here

Posted in Society | Tagged , , , , |

Please leave a comment

Related posts: