Jargonaut: noun: someone who expresses him or herself in meaningless babble. Word invented by Shel Horowitz (that’s me) as I commented on Drayton Bird’s Bird Droppings blog.
He has a fabulously funny essay about jargonauts. Go read it.
I use automated translations frequently to get a rough idea of what someone is talking about, and some pages of my sites offer free translation. But I know better than to rely on them for anything that really matters if I’m translating more than a single word.
Here’s an example of why. I am quite sure that a human translator would have rendered this very differently:
The material that we include has expressed you the aspirations of many people with longings to change radically the transforming processing that the art has in the human beings. If, by any motive, it not out of your current interest or possibilities of participation, a lot we will thank transfer this anxiety to your close persons.
I have always found Ann Coulter’s blend of racism, homophobia, and general bitchiness extremely distasteful. Proof, if you will (along with Bill O’Reilly), that good looks and brains are not enough; a certain degree of compassion is necessary as well. And that’s sorely lacking here.
Coulter’s latest crazy idea is that Jews need to be “perfected” by converting to Christianity. I didn’t make this up. I couldn’t make this up. It’s right here in the pages of one of Israel’s premier daily newspapers.
If you want to see the full range of Coulter’s insults against Jewish talk show host Donny Deutsch, you have to go here. I won’t dignify them by repeating them but they are classic Coulter.
I put this filth in the same category as Don Imus’s words about the women’s basketball team–a slur that eventually, when CBS finally woke up, cost him his job.
Isn’t it time for the major media to stop condoning Coulter’s hate speech and toss her off the air? Shouldn’t they have done this years ago? Free speech does not mean you need to buy and pay for a platform for people expressing this continuous level of vileness. If she were a high school student and said those words to another student in the school yard, she’d be prosecuted for hate speech. If the hate speech laws mean anything, she should not be allowed on mainstream media. That’s not censorship; it’s refusing to condone disgusting behavior. Censorship would be if she were prevented from writing or speaking, but it’s not censorship to say, go bring that trash somewhere else.
Let her buy her own damn TV network!
Forgive me if I can’t work up too much sympathy for Justice Clarence Thomas. I didn’t find him credible during his confirmation hearings with his “poor, pitiful me” bit, and I don’t find him credible now, as I read about his new book.
And I always found it incredibly distasteful that he had the chutzpah to claim that being asked some questions about allegations of grossly unsuitable behavior–sexual harassment of an employee, in fact–was in the same category as a lynching. Just because you’re black doesn’t mean you get lynched if people ask you some tough questions. Questions that you still haven’t really ever answered in a meaningful way.
Thurgood Marshall, a man who truly deserved the term “Honorable” in front of his name, with a distinguished career not only as a jurist but earlier, as a lawyer, must be throwing up. (Marshall, you may not know, was one of the attorneys who argued the landmark desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court. And Thomas inherited his seat on the Court.)
Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post cites a large pile of evidence that Thomas does not have clean hands in the Anita Hill matter–and cites his own words from the book to prove that he’s still just as angry, arrogant, and completely clueless as ever.
This is his own words about actually getting confirmed:
“Mere confirmation, even to the Supreme Court, seemed pitifully small compensation for what had been done to me.”
Sorry, Clarence, but you’re way off base. The Senate had the right and the duty to ask questions, and should have asked a lot harder ones about your views of the Constitution. Maybe if they had, we wouldn’t have been stuck with an extremist like you.
And if today’s Congress was more willing to ask similarly hard questions, we might not be fighting an illegal and unprovoked war in Iraq, we might still have some standing in a world community that increasingly sees the U.S. as a “rogue state,” and we might have found out who actually won the last two Presidential elections, both of which are shrouded in a veil of mystery and deceit.
If Clarence Thomas wants to take his toys and go home, fine. But don’t look to me to agree that he’s been done wrong.
This is a post I’ve been wanting to write for over a month, but it deals with some big concepts and I wanted to let it roll around the back of my brain until it was ready to come out. And Erev Rosh Hashana, the night beginning the Jewish New year, is the perfect time to do it.
As a teenager and young adult, I was very skeptical about God in general, and about prayer in particular. Over time, and especially the last few years, I’ve made more space for God in my life. Not the beaded and fierce old man of my childhood, but a spiritual force, a higher power. And in the last year or so, I’ve begun actively communicating with that higher power, asking for advice–usually about little things.
On July 30, I was bicycling the hilly state highway I live on, coming back from the post office in South Hadley, Massachusetts. I was just coming out of one of the downhills, going at a good clip, when I got caught in a pothole I hadn’t even seen. I remember hitting the pothole, and the next thing I can remember is lying on the ground, unable to get up, bleeding from 19 different places, and in acute pain.
Somehow, I managed to flag down the next car. The driver, and another car coming the other way (Peter Edge of South Hadley, and thank you so much), helped me to sit on the guardrail and called my wife to come get me. My wife took me to see our regular doctor, who prescribed some Percoset and a sling and told me to get seen by an orthopedist.
But I couldn’t get an appointment until the next day, and even though it was strong enough that the pharmacy had to follow narcotics procedures, the Percoset did absolutely nothing for my pain.
I spent the whole rest of the day in severe pain, barely able to move. Shortly before I went to bed, I decided to ask for help. I sent this email to several hundred people:
Dina is typing for me because I can’t. I had a bicycle accident, broke my arm, and am in severe agony. Couldn’t see the orthopedist until tomorrow afternoon. Please send healing energy to me.
TIA
Shel
My wife checked the e-mail just before she came upstairs for the night, and reported that there were over a dozen responses. Just knowing that they were there lightened my load, and I was able to get some sleep.
In all, I got and responded to 30 messages–which means, probably, somewhere between 50 and 300 people actually held me in their prayers for a moment or more. An abundance of positive energy.
And I have to tell you, it worked a heck of a lot better than Percoset!
Very refreshing article in the New York Times about foundations not only not burying their mistakes, but actually looking at how they happened, what went wrong, and what to do better the next time around.
Just a few years ago, it would have been astonishing for a foundation, particularly one as traditional as Carnegie, to publicize a failure. Today, though, many of the nation’s largest foundations regard disclosing and analyzing their failures as bordering on a moral obligation.
“There’s an increasing recognition among foundation leaders that not to be public about failures is essentially indefensible,” said Phil Buchanan, the executive director of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, which advises foundations. “If something didn’t work, it is incumbent upon you to make sure others don’t make the same mistake.
I see this as a welcome trend, and one that businesses can learn from. Failure is not something to be ashamed of. I had a number of failures in business before I started the one I’m in now, back in 1981–and even then, it had to change with the times. It has reinvented itself several times, and I feel another reinvention percolating (don’t know how it will shape up yet).
Entrepreneurs almost always have failures to “brag” about. otherwise, we wouldn’t be entrepreneurs, because in order of succeed, you have to take risks.
When asked about has many failed attempts to develop a light bulb, Thomas Edison famously said, “I have not failed 10,000 times. I have
successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.” (Quoted in The
World Bank. 1994. World Development Report 1994: Infrastructure for
Development. New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press and cited here.)
I’ll tell you about a few of my failures over the years, within my current, successful business:
I won’t bore you with the whole long list. But I do think it’s important to take stock, to reflect on the mistakes/failures as well as the brilliant successes. I’ve learned, I’ve channeled my energy into becoming not only more successful financially, but a better person. And it’s showing results.
I urge you to admit and discuss your setbacks as well as your successes.
Maybe I should add admitting setbacks to the Business Ethics Pledge
Hidden Tech was founded by Amy Zuckerman five years ago, to provide both virtual and physical networking for those of us who work at home or other nontraditional settings and use technology to get our work done.
Originally it was focused on the hidden economy of the four westernmost counties of Massachusetts, including my home base of Hampshire County–but now there are members in all sorts of places, like Arizona.
Wile Amy has left the H-T board, she’s still very committed to the concept. She’s recently begun to profile some of the members, and I’m honored that she chose me as the second person to profile.
Here’s a bit from her article that not a lot of people know about me:
He has also been living the virtual American dream by operating a successful virtual business owner for the last 13 years — Accurate Writing & More — from a bucolic farm-house setting in Hadley, Mass. He and his wife, Dina Friedman, a children’s book author and academic, came to this lifestyle region in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts (also known as the “Five Colleges” region) “as a compromise between Brooklyn and the Ozarks.†They wanted “fresh air, clean water and an easy pace. Dina wanted job possibilities, friends, others of her ethnicity in the area, so we looked at the intersection of our needs and came to the Valley,” said Horowitz.
I’ve donated a fair amount of time to Hidden-Tech over the years, mostly as a speaker on various aspects of frugal and ethical marketing–and Amy and I have had some preliminary conversations about a book project. It’s nice to get some recognition. Thanks, Amy, and good luck with the new blog!
OK, so in December, I turned 50–and since I love discounts, of course I sent in my $7.50 to join the AARP (used to stand for American Association of Retired persons, I believe).
Well, I was looking at the organization’s magazine today and I was astonished by the lineup for the fall conference in Boston, just two hours drive from me: Headlined by Rod Stewart in concert, and featuring such Boomer luminaries as Whoopi Goldberg, Lily Tomlin, Maya Angelou, and Bill Russell.
I’ve got a wedding in Maryland that weekend, but I just might drive in for Friday’s program. Cheap, too–member price is $15 for the speakers and $25 extra for each concert.
Wow! Not at all what I expected, with my memories of AARP (from my days as an organizer with the Gray Panthers, back in 1979-80) as a very stodgy organization.
Can’t tell you how many times I wanted to post in the last two weeks–but a server switch left me locked out of my own blog! And I’m still discovering pieces of code that don’t work anymore on my various sites. Last week my contact form wasn’t working and I was appalled today to discover that the link to sign the Business Ethics Pledge isn’t working!
I’ve told my web wizard assistant, and I’m sure it’ll be up in a day or so.
Please bear with us.
Marketing legend Joe Vitale is one of the big boosters of the “think it and manifest it” school (often called “The law of Attraction”), much-publicized in the movie “The Secret,” among other places. Joe is, in fact, one of the people interviewed in that movie.
Today, Joe announced that for the past several months, he’s been dealing with several tumors that were thought to be cancerous.
While I am not without my skepticism about the Law of Attraction as a cure-all, I certainly believe it is an important tool in the toolbag–and reading how Joe approached this illness is simply astonishing.
Whether you’re a complete skeptic or a total convert, this post is worth reading.