Eric Wilson

The Obama Administration has the worst timing

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 17:59:14 -0500

Aside from being wrong on a lot of issues, President Obama and his team have THE WORST timing. Case in point:

Exhibit A:

Catholics rally against Obama contraception mandate

NEW ORLEANS — From Maine to Arizona to southern Louisiana, Catholic churches across the country echoed with scorn for a new federal rule requiring faith-based employers to include birth control and other reproductive services in their health care coverage.

Dozens of priests took the rare step of reading letters from the pulpit urging parishioners to reach out to Washington and oppose the rule, enacted Jan 20.

Exhibit B:

Time to Panic: Pfizer Just Recalled 1 Million Packs of Birth Control Pills

If you rely on the female contraceptive pill to avoid having babies, you might want to check the packet: Pfizer just recalled a million packs because a fault means they could increase the chances of getting pregnant. Deep breaths: it’ll probably be fine.

…

Normally contraceptive pills come in ordered sequence, with some containing active hormone and others being plain old placebo. Some of the faulty packs have no active hormone at all, while others don’t have any placebos. Either way, you don’t want to use them, unless you’re keen to gamble on having a kid real soon.

Revenge of the Nerds: How SOPA was killed

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 10:20:01 -0500

Great post-mortem from POLITICO’s Anna Palmer on how the effort to kill SOPA and PIPA amounted to a disruption of Washington’s traditional lobbying game. Highlights:

>Fights are no longer just about which side has the most — or best — lobbyists. The new world of Washington influence is more diverse:Traditional access lobbying is waged alongside campaigns that use media, grass-roots activism and the Internet — activity often not reported in federal lobbying filings.

…

Several lobbyists pointed to last week’s massive online mobilization that tanked two fast-moving anti-online piracy bills as the perfect example of how the influence game is changing. While clients are still willing to pay for access lobbying, there is more of a focus on nonreportable strategy through social media and other grass-roots initiatives.

And the best nugget from the story:

“A well-resourced content group of people completely got outmaneuvered by the guys in the basement,” Ogilvy Government Relations’ Drew Maloney said of the anti-piracy fight.

You must have friends

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 18:25:46 -0500

“In this world you will have to make your own way. To do that you must have friends. You can make friends by being honest, and you can keep them by being steadfast. You must keep in mind that friends worth having will in the long run expect as much from you as they give to you. To forget an obligation or be ungrateful for a kindness is a base crime-not merely a fault or a sin, but an actual crime. Men guilty of it sooner or later must suffer the penalty. In personal conduct be always polite but never obsequious. None will respect you more than you respect yourself.”

— Advice to Andrew Jackson from his mother

via Art of Manliness

No amount of honesty...

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 18:09:00 -0400

“It is, of course, not enough that a public official should be honest. No amount of honesty will avail if he is not also brave and wise. The weakling and the coward cannot be saved by honesty alone; but without honesty the brave and able man is merely a civic wild beast who should be hunted down by every lover of righteousness. No man who is corrupt, no man who condones corruption in others, can possibly do his duty by the community. When this truth is accepted as axiomatic in our politics, then, and not till then, shall we see such a moral uplifting of the people as will render…”

— Theodore Roosevelt, 1900, The Strenuous Life

"Vinge asks us to ponder the role of humans in a world where machines are as much smarter than us as..."

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 18:53:00 -0400

“Vinge asks us to ponder the role of humans in a world where machines are as much smarter than us as we are smarter than our pet dogs and cats.”

- Paul Allen, “The Singularity Isn’t Near”

A crab on the altar

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 11:38:55 -0400

“I remember that my own grandmother, a devout Wesleyan, believed to her dying day that at the Roman Catholic mass the priest let a crab loose upon the altar, which it was his mysterious duty to prevent from crawling sideways into the view of the congregation. (Hence the gestures of the celebrant.) How she became possessed of this notion, or what she supposed eventually happened to the crustacean I never discovered. But she affirmed with the utmost sincerity that she had once with her own eyes actually watched this horrible rite in progress; and there could be no doubt of the deplorable effect that solitary visit to a Roman Catholic church had on her estimate of Roman Catholics in general, though she was the soul of charity in all things else.” — Dom Gregory Dix

What could go wrong?

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 09:06:07 -0400

“The Plan to Bring an Asteroid to Earth”:

A robotic probe could anchor to an asteroid made mostly of nickel-iron with simple magnets or grab a rocky asteroid with a harpoon or specialized claws (see video below) and then push the asteroid using solar-electric propulsion. For asteroids too big for a robot to handle, a large spacecraft could fly near the object to act as a gravity tractor that deflects the asteroid’s trajectory, sending it toward Earth.

“Once you get over the initial reaction — ‘You want to do what?!’ — it actually starts to seem like a reasonable idea,” said engineer John Brophy from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who helped organize the workshop.

Use definite, specific, concrete language.

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 17:50:00 -0400

Good thoughts from the Harvard Business Review blog on spoken communication:

Qualifying words lessen the importance and the value of the nouns and verbs they accompany. Those nouns and verbs represent the products, services, and actions of the business — the family jewels — that the presenter is pitching, and a presenter should not diminish their worth. Parents do not describe their children as “sort of cute.”

Instead, follow the advice of the Strunk and White classic, The Elements of Style: “Use definite, specific, concrete language.” To accomplish this you must diligently delete meaningless words and phrases from your speech, a task easier said than done due to their pervasiveness.

Things you don't know about yourself

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 17:18:23 -0400

From a NASCAR press release:

Eric Wilson, the No. 29 team’s jackman, is proud to have learned his craft at the knee of NASCAR Hall of Famer Junior Johnson. Johnson was a superlative driver and perhaps even more accomplished as a car owner and team leader. But he also was one of the best jackmen to ever work pit road.

Becoming a jackman happened by accident for Wilson, a 41-year-old Bethlehem, N.C., resident who, in 1995, was carrying tires for Johnson’s No. 11 Ford team and driver Brett Bodine. The crew chief, Mike Beam, departed mid-season and his jackman followed. Johnson sauntered into the shop one morning and beckoned Wilson outside.

Wilson recalls Johnson telling him, “’I’ll show you how to jack a race car.’ I guess it was because I was 25 and in shape. He told me to be a team leader. It really helped me. There was no way I was going to let that man down.” The team won the annual series pit crew championship later that season. Wilson continues to hold the fastest time for a jackman, set in 2008, during the NASCAR Sprint Pit Crew Challenge presented by Craftsman.

Johnson’s advice created not only a position expert but a teacher as well. Wilson, a native Texan who moved to the Hickory, N.C., area to race and later win a NASCAR Dash Series championship, hired on with Cal Wells Motorsports where he worked as a crew member and pit crew coach from 2001-06. He joined Michael Waltrip Motorsports in the same capacity the following year and later with Ray Evernham Motorsports.

Jim Cooper: A lonely man

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 17:41:14 -0400

Jim Cooper, a well-respected Member of the House of Representatives, is highlighted in Joe Nocera’s Op-Ed “The Last Moderate.” Here are a few good excerpts:

The reason is that Cooper is the House’s conscience, a lonely voice for civility in this ugly era. He remembers when compromise was not a dirty word and politicians put country ahead of party. And he’s not afraid to talk about it. “We’ve gone from Brigadoon to Lord of the Flies,” he likes to say.

…

To Cooper, the true villain is not the Tea Party; it’s Newt Gingrich. In the 1980s, when Tip O’Neill was speaker of the House, “Congress was functional,” Cooper told me. “Committees worked. Tip saw his role as speaker of the whole House, not just the Democrats.”

The problem with sperm donors

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 10:35:12 -0400

This New York Times article “One Sperm Donor, 150 offspring” highlights the dangers of artificial insemination from a genetic perspective. The science-based concerns back up the moral and ethical questions surrounding this as well:

Now, there is growing concern among parents, donors and medical experts about potential negative consequences of having so many children fathered by the same donors, including the possibility that genes for rare diseases could be spread more widely through the population. Some experts are even calling attention to the increased odds of accidental incest between half sisters and half brothers, who often live close to one another.

It's about saying 'No'

Sat, 03 Sep 2011 09:02:06 -0400

“I know you have a thousand ideas for all the cool features iTunes could have. So do we. But we don’t want a thousand features. That would be ugly. Innovation is not about saying ‘Yes’ to everything. It’s about saying ‘No’ to all but the most crucial features.” — Steve Jobs.

McDonald's, like drugs, impacts your brain

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 17:52:13 -0400

Really interesting stuff in this Psychology Today piece on the “7 Things McDonald’s Knows About Your Brain”:

Many recent neuroscience discoveries about food’s effects on our brains and how we make decisions about food are actually gold-standard trade secrets from super chains such as McDonald’s. With billions and billions served, they must be on to something.

Coolest damn one of 'em all

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 10:50:59 -0400

There’s races that pay more, there’s races that might have a little more prestige, but this is the coolest damn one of ‘em all. And we won today. Isn’t that awesome?

Deliberate and Definitive

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 19:33:33 -0400

If you’re not following Letters of Note, you’re really missing out. This recent entry highlights a memo from the Administrator of Parkland Hospital in Dallas, Texas. It was written a few days after President John F. Kennedy died in their Emergency Room.

It closes with an excellent reflection on the importance of a team:

the underlying factor is people. People whose education and training is sound. People whose judgement is calm and perceptive. People whose actions are deliberate and definitive. Our pride is not that we were swept up by the whirlwind of tragic history, but that when we were, we were not found wanting.

Technology has, sadly, ended the need for the House Page...

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 10:39:34 -0400

Technology has, sadly, ended the need for the House Page Program. This photo has hung for sometime in the Republican Cloakroom and shows House pages carrying Rep. Alvin Bentley of Michigan from the House Chamber after he was shot by Puerto Rican separatists in 1954.

POLITICO: House page program to end

Salah Mohamed Askar: The Fixer

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 18:28:00 -0400

This is an interesting obit for an NBC News “fixer” in Libya, but it’s also a solid piece of war correspondent journalism in the vein of Hemingway and Churchill.

Salah had arranged a briefing with the rebel commander the night we arrived back in Nalut. He took part in the briefing and asked pointed yet polite questions as though he was part of our team. Of course by then he was, and we learned the particulars of the rebels’ strategy and tactics. Salah, a proud Naluti with two brothers among the city’s rebel fighting force, knew the lay of the land – the dozen or so ridgeline “fronts” where the artillery barrage would commence before rebel ground units would move into the two towns.

He knew the risks, as we did – that the rebels’ artillery attack would trigger heavy retaliatory fire from below. We’d seen it weeks earlier, when one of those heavy return rounds exploded a few hundred yards from our position. But though the risk is minimal that a Grad rocket, an old Russian missile, will actually hit a target as small as an artillery team a dozen miles away, Salah was especially cautious this morning and made sure we were, too.

Sorry I'm Not Sorry

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 12:33:00 -0400

While asking for and granting forgiveness is an important part of our personal lives, in the professional realm, it’s never a good idea. This post from The Next Web does a good job of articulating the reasons why you shouldn’t apologize:

“If you are late, missed a deadline or did something wrong the people who like and respect you will understand that you didn’t mean for this to happen. Your excuse will only embarrass them.

The people who dislike you will take advantage of you putting yourself in that position. So don’t apologize. Just do better next time, and don’t let it happen again.”

In other words, own it.

“[T]he practice of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI...

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 18:13:35 -0400

“[T]he practice of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI has actually been to summon all new metropolitans to Rome to receive the pallium directly from the hands of the pope on the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pallium

The Knight's Tomb

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 18:10:26 -0400

Where is the grave of Sir Arthur O’Kellyn?
Where may the grave of that good man be? -
By the side of a spring, on the breast of Helvellyn,
Under the twigs of a young birch tree!
The oak that in summer was sweet to hear,
And rustled its leaves in the fall of the year,
And whistled and roared in the winter alone,
Is gone, - and the birch in its stead is grown. -
The Knight’s bones are dust,
And his good sword rust; -
His soul is with the saints, I trust.

- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1817