Category: Uncategorized

Maureen Dowd finally admits to herself that men truly do prefer Pamela Anderson to Harriet Miers:

He had hit on a primal fear of single successful women: that the aroma of male power is an aphrodisiac for women, but the perfume of female power is a turnoff for men. It took women a few decades to realize that everything they were doing to advance themselves in the boardroom could be sabotaging their chances in the bedroom, that evolution was lagging behind equality….

Women moving up still strive to marry up. Men moving up still tend to marry down. The two sexes’ going in opposite directions has led to an epidemic of professional women missing out on husbands and kids.

Sylvia Ann Hewlett, an economist and the author of “Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children,” a book published in 2002, conducted a survey and found that 55 percent of 35-year-old career women were childless. And among corporate executives who earn $100,000 or more, she said, 49 percent of the women did not have children, compared with only 19 percent of the men.

Hewlett quantified, yet again, that men have an unfair advantage. “Nowadays,” she said, “the rule of thumb seems to be that the more successful the woman, the less likely it is she will find a husband or bear a child. For men, the reverse is true.”

A 2005 report by researchers at four British universities indicated that a high I.Q. hampers a woman’s chance to marry, while it is a plus for men. The prospect for marriage increased by 35 percent for guys for each 16-point increase in I.Q.; for women, there is a 40 percent drop for each 16-point rise.

I find it rather amusing that when I point out exactly the same phenomenon as Miss Dowd, so many women leap on their high horses. But sometimes one can’t hear the message for the messenger. One must commend Ms Dowd for being so brutally open about what is clearly a major societal disappointment for her and overlook the vaguely aggrieved tone that leaves one with the impression that she thinks this has somehow got to be men’s fault for not wanting what some women think they should want. After all, what is unfair about experiencing the logical consequences of your choices?

I quite like intelligent women. I’ve dated them and I married one. But there’s no question that they are more difficult, more complex and generally less happy in life than the dumb ones. I speak from experience; the girl I dated throughout high school and college scored in the sixth percentile on her SAT and she remains to this day one of the best and nicest people I have ever known. Girls may be made of sugar and spice, but there’s no question that men prefer sugar.

Perhaps the biggest mistake that women make is thinking that men want to be challenged in their relationships. But life is full of challenges, some of which men embrace with enthusiasm, some of which we take on only if we must. An ability to pose a challenge is not on the normal man’s list of desirable attributes, far more preferable is someone you know is on your team, someone you trust to get your back when your friends aren’t around to do it.

Space Bunny is not my equal and I am not hers. We compliment each other, we are not interchangeable.

Last week: 9-5. Season: 65-37, .637. Fantasy 5-2.

L-Tampa Bay Buccaneers over San Francisco 49ers
Pittsburgh Steelers over Baltimore Ravens
L-Jacksonville Jaguars over St. Louis Rams
W-Cincinnati Bengals over Green Bay Packers
W-Dallas Cowboys over Arizona Cardinals
W-Carolina Panthers over Minnesota Vikings
W-Oakland Raiders over Tennessee Titans
New England Patriots over Buffalo Bills
W-San Diego Chargers over Kansas City Chiefs
W-Chicago Bears over Detroit Lions
W-New York Giants over Washington Redskins
W-Houston Texans over Cleveland Browns
W-Miami Dolphins over New Orleans Saints
W-Denver Broncos over Philadelphia Eagles

The big question this week was starting Dominick Davis or one of Pittsburgh’s dynamic duo. Since I’ve started precisely the wrong Steeler the last three weeks in a row – twice it didn’t matter, but it cost me the game against the league-leading Wallabies when Fast Willie failed to score a single point – I’m going with Mr. Davis going against the Brownies.

Dallas is my big concern. Mr. Bledsoe and Mr. Glenn have me off to a solid start despite my usual horrendous early drafting, but they performed poorly last week. Arizona should be the cure, but with Atlanta on the bye week I had to pick up the Dallas DEF as well, so one bad game in Texas could sink me.

It’s too bad it’s not a playoff game. In that case, I’d be completely confident with Denny Green on the other sideline.

Chuck demands to know where the carriers were:

There were, on 7 December, only three [carriers] in the Pacific. USS Enterprise, USS Lexington (CV-2), and USS Saratoga (CV-3). While USS Ranger (CV-4), USS Wasp (CV-7), and the recently commissioned USS Hornet (CV-8) remained in the Atlantic, Yorktown departed Norfolk on 16 December 1941 and sailed for the Pacific, her secondary gun galleries studded with new 20-millimeter Oerlikon machine guns. She reached San Diego, Calif., on 30 December 1941 and soon became flagship for Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher’s newly formed Task Force (TF) 17. The carrier’s first mission in her new theater was to escort a convoy carrying Marine reinforcements to American Samoa. Departing San Diego on 6 January 1942, Yorktown and her consorts covered the movement of marines to Tutuila and Pago Pago to augment the garrison already there.

Having safely covered that troop movement, Yorktown , in company with sistership Enterprise, departed Samoan waters on 25 January. Six days later, TF 8 built around Enterprise, and TF 17, built around Yorktown , parted company. The former headed for the Marshall Islands, the latter for the Gilberts — each bound to take part in the first American offensive of the war, the Marshalls-Gilberts raids.

I note that I have already posted this information before.

Internment Order: February 19, 1942

Total carriers in the Atlantic: Nine – Wasp, Hornet, Ranger, Long Island, Charger, Archer, Biter, Avenger, Dasher.

Total carriers in the Pacific: Four – Yorktown, Enterprise, Lexington and Saratoga.

Total carriers assigned to protect the West Coast and Hawaii: Zero.

Clearly the admirals were terrified of invasion…. of New York. Please remember that Michelle Malkin is on record as asserting that there were ZERO carriers in the Atlantic at this time. The Japanese invasion theory is silly and betrays a remarkable ignorance of military history.

DH faces a dilemma:

I don’t have a college degree, and yet I am responsible for narrowing and selecting a pool of programmers when my company needs a new programmer (I’m the Senior Programmer). I used to have a programming in three parts test which asked applicants to write pseudo code to solve common problems. After receiving an application or resume I e-mail the first part of the test, and if they do well, they get another part with more difficult questions. After that an applicant would be granted an interview and be asked to do the third part of the test verbally and on a whiteboard.

Word came down from “upper management” that my interviwing procedures were unfair, and so, HR has implemented a standard hiring procedure that grades people “fairly” on 15 criteria. My programming test was eliminated.

Needless to say “my” last 4 hires have been CS degree packing incompetents who actually make more work for me. So I decided last year to simply not fill open positions. Half my department is empty now – 3 out of 6 slots – and I need to fill in the gap before the new year.

Any tips on how to weed out the losers knowing that 100% of them will have college degrees?

You need to attack this problem in two ways. First, I assume that you have documented the incompetence of the people that HR has forced you to hire. You need to find an internal champion at the executive level and use that information to lay your case against HR with him. Remember, many executives are competent and intelligent individuals whose access to accurate information is extremely limited by the managers immediately below them. They often make terrible decisions because their data is bad, not because they are stupid, malicious or solely focused on their personal gain. If you can find an executive who actually cares about corporate performance, you may well have found someone who will cheerfully take a chainsaw to that HR department. Many execs don’t think a whole lot of HR and see them as barely competent necessary evils anyhow.

Second, you should refine your interview questions to weed out the tools. Remember that a college degree isn’t necessarily an indication of incompetence, it just isn’t necessarily an indication of competence either. When I had to weed the tools out, I would ask an interviewee what their favorite game was. If they told me “Doom” or any other obvious game, I immediately asked them why it was their favorite and ask detailed questions about obscure things on difficult levels, the sort of thing that any aficionado could easily answer off the top of his head, but would catch a tool off guard.

Ask what industry magazines they subscribe to, or better yet, what web sites and mailing lists they follow regularly. Ask them seemingly innocuous questions about their familiarity with Linux and smartphone hacks, and other things of the sort that every college programmer worth his salt finds irresistable. A veteran programmer like you should be able to size up a genuine hacker from a classroom pretender without having to see them code; the trick is to trust your instincts.

Third, take the time to build up a pool of potential applicants that you’d like to hire even when you’re not hiring. When you have an opening, there should be a few people you can call right away to see if they are available or might be interested in changing jobs.

Finally, if you get it wrong, don’t hesitate to get rid of the zeros immediately. If HR demands to know why, you simply tell them that the zero couldn’t do his job and you have important deadlines to meet that don’t permit the carrying of dead weight. Ask them if they want to explain to upper management why project X isn’t getting done on time. Remember, they are usually cowards and busybodies who are used to being unaccountable for anything important, so directing a little pressure in their direction will tend to go a long way.

It can be so tempting to just let things go and look the other way when you’ve got an underperformer, but that is the hallmark of the weak and ultimately unsuccessful manager, even if it could work to your advantage in the short run. If you are careful to always pick office battles where you have the overwhelming advantage of the facts being on your side, sooner or later, the political types in other departments will learn to leave you alone and let you do your job. If you consistently ratchet up the pain each time they stick their nose in inappropriately, they’ll eventually knock it off.

The AP reports on some record-setting women:

There were 1,470,152 babies born to single women in 2004, 35.7 percent of all births in the country, NCHS said. That was up from 1,415,995 a year earlier…. Births to whites declined by nearly 18,000 while Hispanics were up 32,000, there was an increase of more than 8,000 in births to Asians and a rise of just 72 births among black women.

It’s so hard to keep up on who the government has decided is what these days. But since we’ve apparently decided there is no such thing as race and that all cultures everywhere are equal, it seems strange that we need to bother doing this sort of record-keeping. If people truly believe that race is irrelevant or even nonexistent, then why does the government – which nominally opposes racism – keep such copious records of it? Why should there even be any checkboxes in the first place?

Anyhow, I don’t see any cause for concern here. I’m sure those few Latin Americans who don’t hail from countries with a strong republican tradition of limited democracy and Constitutional government will readily adopt the cultural traditions of white males of European descent dead for two centuries. Especially since Americans of all colors are so highly respectful of the cultural traditions belonging to living white males of European descent.

MB ha dubbi:

Berlusconi: «Ho tentato di convincere Bush. Con Gheddafi cercate altre vie»

ROMA – «Io non sono mai stato convinto che la guerra fosse il sistema migliore per arrivare a rendere democratico un paese e a farlo uscire da una dittatura anche sanguinosa. Io ho tentato a più riprese di convincere il presidente americano a non fare la guerra». Lo ha affermato il presidente del Consiglio Silvio Berlusconi nel corso di una lunga intervista esclusiva (la prima dopo sei mesi) realizzata da Rula Jebreal per La7 e che sarà trasmessa nel corso di «Omnibus» lunedì 31 ottobre a partire dalle 7.45. «Ho tentato di trovare altre vie e altre soluzioni – dice il premier – anche attraverso un’attività congiunta con il leader africano Gheddafi. Non ci siamo riusciti e c’è stata l’operazione militare». «Io ritenevo – prosegue Berlusconi – che si sarebbe dovuta evitare un’azione militare».

VD, Lacrime di cocodrillo, No?

Forse. Ma deve ricordare che Gheddafi non ha fatto niente per quasi venti anni, e gli italiani hanno tanti legamenti economici con Libia. Per esempio, il figlio di Gheddafi e’ un propietario di Juve e Tamoil ha piu di due centi stazioni servizi in Italia. Berlusconi e’ nel boca del lupo perche lui vuole sostenere la programma americana ma il suo popolo non supportono questa guerra.

Secondo me, Berlusconi non ha mai avuto tanto interesse in Irache; si e’ collegato al’invasione sotto pressione statiunitense e dal suo desidero per segnare punti col presidente. Adesso, tre anni fa, perche l’occupazione non sta andando bene, lui deve apparire che ha un disegno per rimmuovere subito i soldati italiani.

Qualche volta, anzi un cocodrillo si puo trovarsi in difficolta’.

I’m looking for someone with military experience, preferably at the battalion level or above, to write an essay on the most effective way for the Antichrist to wage war against Israel using modern military technology. Pandagonians and Atriocities, please note that this is not a confession that I am the Antichrist and I am not intending to invade Israel, it’s simply the subject of an article I’d like to include in an anthology I am editing.

If you don’t fit the bill but know someone who might, please let me know.

From The Wall Street Journal:

William Strauss and Neil Howe have recently argued in the Chronicle of Higher Education that with tuition and the resulting debt reaching surreal levels, and colleges and universities failing to reverse the post-1960s collapse of academic standards, parents and students are increasingly skeptical about the value of a college education.

Parents born after 1961, Messrs. Strauss and Howe have found, experienced that collapse of standards in their own college educations and are determined not to tolerate another overpriced and underperforming disappointment for their own children. This is the generation that “propelled school choice, vouchers, charter schools, home-schooling and the standards-and-accountability movement.” These parents will be more likely to treat higher education as a market, in which smart buyers exercise discretion.

If you’re going to blow $100k, you’d do better to buy your 18 year-old a Ferrari and let him drive that to his next job interview. Chances are, he’ll get a better job armed with an automotive marker of success than with a degree.

What the upset little college kiddies, whose angry missives show up here from time to time, don’t understand is that their vaunted educations don’t mean a damn thing anymore. So, you’ve got a 3.8 General Prize for Attendance, so what? I have spoken with individuals holding economics majors from major universities who have never heard of John Maynard Keynes, I have spoken with political science majors who have never read Plato’s Republic or Marx’s Communist Manifesto, much less Cato, Aristotle or the Federalist Papers. English majors who can neither read nor write effectively are as ubiquitous as Philosophy majors incapable of rational thought and foreign language majors who can’t actually speak the language they have supposedly mastered.

An art director at a major game studio once complimented the art in our game and asked me how such a small development house had managed to acquire such a strong art team. Our answer was pretty simple. We gave the prospective artist a piece of paper, a pencil and told him to draw something. If he could do it well, we hired him. Most of the time, they couldn’t and we didn’t. I seldom bothered to look at resumes, much less diplomas or transcripts.

Colleges these days produce pieces of paper, not educated individuals. Unless you wish to work for a government or in a government-regulated profession – medicine, the law, hair-dressing – there is no longer any point to wasting four to seven years in a university system, and going into debt to do so.

Learning and education are tremendously important, but they have increasingly little to do with paying money to an “academic institution” for a piece of paper falsely claiming you know something that you demonstrably do not.

ESPN’s Daily Quickie on Sheryl Swoopes:

I’m all for finding true love, but I’m wary of the slippery slope of relationships between coaches and players; part of the Swoopes’ story is that her partner, Alisa Scott, is a former assistant coach with the Comets, the team Swoopes has played for since ’97

One of the most important underreported stories in sports is the damage that happens in otherwise unethical relationships between college coaches (women OR men) and players.

I can’t imagine giving up on the NFL, but I might have to consider it if Bill Parcells ever comes out of the closet and announces that he is in love with Julius Jones. (I was going to write Keyshawn Johnson, at first, but then I realized how absurd that sounded. As if Keyshawn has room for anyone in his life but Keyshawn.)

UPDATE: And while we’re on the subject of football, I can’t help but concur with SI’s The Rant. Michael Vick will never win a Super Bowl. He won’t even win an NFC Championship game. He’ll keep the Falcons in the postseason for years to come, he’ll keep fans entertained and he’ll give game commentators and football talking heads plenty of chances to wax poetic about his abilities. But Vick can only take the Falcons so far before coming up short, and the reason he’ll fail is simple: He is a terrible passing quarterback.

I’m not so sure about that postseason thing, but I will be truly stunned if Michael Vick ever ends up with a Super Bowl ring. He’s a HORRIBLE quarterback. I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but he’s actually worse than Kordell Stewart, aka Slash, aka Mr. INT.