I Think, Therefore I Rant!

Okay, I get it. Teens like to wear clothes that make old people upset. This happened in my day with bell bottoms, embroidered jeans, and long hair (yes, I am that old). But common sense dictates that if you can’t jog down the street or play a casual game of basketball (baseball, Frisbee throwing, hopscotch - take your pick) without holding up your pants, then you aren’t fully dressed. I don’t care about baggy or ripped but can you please pull your pants up?

The sad part of all of this is that this “style” is actually a throwback to being in jail where the guards will remove a prisoners belts to avoid its use as a weapon or noose for suicide. The style was originally called “jailin” or “sagging” and was made mainstream by the Rap culture. By wearing pants below the buttocks, teens are actually making the statement that they are imprisoned and that is simply not true.

I cannot believe the story I just read on the Daily Mall that has a man being publicly flogged 80 times for supposedly having extramarital sex and drinking. This man will physically scarred for life! This is the same country that is developing nuclear capability!

There should be a general uproar and outcry about this terrible treatment. Rock stars should do concerts about the amazing abuse of civil rights (instead of doing Live Aid). I read about the story at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=477088&in_page_id=1770

PEOPLE OF THE WORLD - WE NEED TO CONDEMN IRAN FOR THIS TERRIBLE EXERCISE!

I am done with this topic for now but I reserve the right to rant more on it someday.

Did you know that you can have these articles emailed to you? Click on the Email link in the upper right corner Subscribe section, fill out the details, and you are set. No one will see your email address and you won’t get more spam by doing this.

Your signature on an email is essential. It should contain the information that allows the reader to contact you without sending you an email. It should not contain images as these will only slow down the transmission of the email and may not be read by the reader’s email program (remember, assume they are reading this on their phone).

Your original email should have quite a bit of contact information. This may include your full name, phone numbers, address, and a link to a website about you or your company. However, don’t be a bandwidth hog and include that same signature on a reply email since it is likely the person already has most of that information. For replies, you should only have the basics e.g. your name and a pertinent phone number.

INCLUDE A SIGNATURE AFTER EVERY EMAIL BUT DON’T OVERLOAD IT WITH WASTED JUNK - EMAIL IS ESSENTIAL SO KEEP IT SIMPLE!

It is time to rant about email again. Yes, I know that email is the greatest thing of the Internet. It has become the “killer app” that has truly driven corporate America to provide computers to all of its white collar work force. More than Word or Excel, email has become essential to today’s workforce. For this reason, we need to chastise those that screw it up.

EMAIL IS ESSENTIAL SO DON’T SPEND TIME TRYING TO MAKE IT PRETTY!

Putting tables and graphs in an email is bad. You should use the rule of thumb that the reader is going to look at it in a pure text view (like on a phone). Don’t use bullets - use dashes instead or an asterisk (*) instead.

My last post on this subject was about rock stars not spending enough time on today’s problems but instead they are spending time on a theoretical problem for the future - global warming.

I realize that some stars like Bono have done a great job of trying to use his status to create awareness of issues that he cares about. That is awesome! More big personalities should do this.

So here are some small facts:

• More than 25 million people have died of AIDS since 1981. Africa has 12 million AIDS orphans. (source)
• Every year 15 million children die of hunger. (source)
• Up to 2.7M people die of malaria every year (source) which is incredibly preventable. (source and source)
• More than 70% of all cancer deaths occur in low and middle income countries, where limited or no resources are available for prevention, diagnosis and treatment of the disease. (source)

The party is over. There were thousands of people in attendance and hundreds of people playing musical instruments. Supposedly, there were millions of people watching the show on TV but who really knows the correct number.

There was a lot of controversy, ranging from trash pickup to the lack of reality for the 90% reduction pledge. There was also some good music played so I am sure there will be a CD put out for the greatest hits (which will use more energy in creating).

Overall, I have a hard time with all of this attention. Yes, there does seem to be some validity to the argument that Earth is getting warmer but the science doesn’t seem to be conclusive that it is being caused by humans (check out Is It Getting Warmer for a bunch of articles on both sides of the subject - for and against).

It hasn’t gotten any better since the vicious greed and land grabbing of the mid 20th century. People are fighting and dying over power and greed. This isn’t about ethnic homelands as neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis have had a continuous control over these lands for centuries.

People in this region need to work together and understand that everyone needs a place to live and raise their families. They want to be close to their cousins to celebrate important dates. Laws need to be fair that no one is persecuted because of what they worship. Their should be no need to kick someone out of their family farm just because they are on the wrong side of some line drawn by some politician. Who cares!

After the UN partitioned a homeland for the Palestinians and Israel (a plan that the majority of Jews agreed to but some warned that they would be attacked), their neighbors went on a land grab. Almost immediately on the creation of the state of Israel, approximately 21,000 soldiers from 4 different countries invaded Israel with their stated goal of eliminating the new country that was officially only days old. Before long they had about 3 times that many troops.

In the process of attacking, these invading countries essentially occupied all of the new Palestinian state and used that advantage to attack Israel. They essentially destroyed Palestine and controlled the land from their respective countries.

Israel, as a new sovereign nation, had a right to protect itself. It successfully defended itself and in the process repelled its attackers from adjoining land, which essentially meant repelling the the invading army from Palestine.

The United Kingdom and the US (to a much lesser degree) are actually the good guys in the entire Palestinian homeland issue, so the world should give them a collective break.

If you look at history, UK (and a few friends) beat the snot out of the Ottoman’s in WW1. They then broke up this massive land that was under Ottoman rule into states (basically the ones that exist today). Palestine was one of those states, as was Israel. Hurray for UK! Don’t believe me - see the map.

It is interesting that the Israeli - Palestinian problem has achieved such notoriety and in particular that the Israeli state, the United States, and UK have taken such enormous blame over the entire issue. The proposed Palestinian state has as much right to exist as the state of Israel but it is not Israel’s fault that the Palestinian’s have no homeland …

IT IS THE UNITED KINGDOM’S FAULT!
(with a helping from Nazi Germany and others as we will see as I post more on this subject)

Actually the fault truly lies with the Ottoman empire as they were the most recent to occupy the territory (I won’t blame the Greeks and the Romans). The supposed homeland to Palestinians and Jews wasn’t their homeland for hundreds of years - it was under Ottoman rule. So all of the complaining about a homeland is really a little immature - they were both out of power for a massive amount of time (in fact, the Israel nation was gone many centuries ago).