The lads and I had the amazing opportunity today to tour the IEAA’s air-worthy B-17, Aluminum Overcast.  I’ve been a fan of this particular bird since I was around the age of my older son, yet this is the first time I’ve gotten to go inside one.

I don’t know how those guys did what they did all those years ago.  But thank heavens they did.  God keep them.

“Where Eagles Have Been.”  Good stuff.

I found this blog post at chrishernandezauthor.com causing me some serious deja vu as I read it.

His description of the top-down safety stupidity he saw practiced in the National Guard and the active-duty Army sounded a lot like many Continuous Improvement tools/activities/practices I’ve witnessed in the manufacturing world.

They share a few characteristics.  Despite being well-intended initially, they metastasized into something as useless as they are overweening.  They were forced down to the ranks by some brilliant leader (likely someone neither truly brilliant nor truly a leader).  And they were made mandatory with threats of punishments both active and passive.

Now, don’t get me wrong — there are plenty of awfully useful and even valuable concepts in the Continuous Improvement realm.  Unfortunately, their value is often overshadowed and the credibility of the initiative as a whole severely damaged by the stupid stuff.

All leaders, civilian or military, should routinely take time to ask their true experts — the ones on the front lines — if they’re being asked to do anything really idiotic and counterproductive.  And then, if at all possible, they should do away with anything that comes up.

Been reading up on how to build your own sandbox, since AJ wants one.

Plenty of good ideas out there.  But along with them, it seems like half the online articles have something to say about the grave threats to children’s health from sandboxes.  Put it the shade, because sun will cause serious health problems.  Don’t put it in the shade, because leaves, twigs and bird droppings could cause fatal illnesses.

Just what in heaven’s name is wrong with these people?  It’s.  A.  Freakin’.  Sandbox!  Could someone point me to any instance in all of recorded history where any child was ever seriously injured in one?  Sheesh…

Honestly, when did people get so irretrievably stupid?

I heard “Heard It in a Love Song” last night and I realized I knew absolutely nothing about the band.

First, there was no Marshall Tucker in the band.  Apparently Mr. Tucker was a piano tuner down there in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where the band was from, and his name came up by happenstance as they were trying to come up with a band name (he owned the building the band was practicing in, and they saw his name on the key ring and adopted it, not knowing it was a real person).

The lead singer and guitar player was a guy named Toy Caldwell, and his little brother Tommy, the bass player, was a fellow founding band member and was considered its leader.  Both were ex-Marines, Toy a Purple Heart Vietnam vet.

Tragically, Tommy was killed in a car accident in 1980.

The band was never the same.  It continued for another few years, but broke up in 1983.  (It was re-formed in 1988, but without Toy Caldwell, and it never had significant commercial success again.  A modern lineup continues to play shows regularly today, with just a single original member.)

Toy had another little brother, Tim, who was also killed in a car accident, this one in 1993.  A month afterward, Toy died of heart failure attributed to cocaine use.

A very sad story behind a name almost everybody knows.  Rest well and Semper Fi, Marines.

The first one tells how Newegg led by example by winning in court against a patent troll trying to steal their profits with bogus patent infringement claims.

The second one has some excellent guidance from a Navy SEAL on using lessons from their world for effective business leadership.

We finally got into our own house a month ago, after renting a less-than-comfortable place ever since we moved last January.  And since we got into the new place, it’s been one home project after another (in between bouts of emptying boxes, hauling boxes and paper away, and moving stuff around to set up).

There’s nothing like a good challenging home project to make you feel manly.  But I got thrown an especially good one when I first tried to mow my lawn, when my rider that had been stored away all summer gushed gas out the exhaust pipe when I tried to crank it up.

My little brother correctly diagnosed a carburetor float/needle valve/seat problem (it was the needle valve — its rubber tip was bad), as I found when I finally got it off the machine and torn down.  A quick online order and I had new parts in less than a week.  And once I figured out how to pull the old seat out of the carb body (took brains AND brawn), everything went back together in a flash, and I was mowing in no time.

My first carb rebuild.  Very satisfying.  Plus I newly discovered the wonder that is carb cleaner.  Where has that been all my life?!?

I’m about to finish Alan Greenspan’s book, The Age of Turbulence.

The pivotal moment in the book is about halfway through when he declares that he had decided to add economic growth to the Fed’s responsibilities.

It was at that point that he jettisoned once and for all whatever tenuous threads that remained of his free-market principles.  He’d already come a long way in convincing himself that he remained a libertarian and a believer that central planning was doomed to failure, even while he attempted central planning via control of interest rates and the money supply on an unimaginable scale.

The book shows that he is a) clearly enamored of his own intelligence and ability, and b) tragically addicted to power, prestige, perqs and rubbing shoulders with the famous and fabulously wealthy.  These failings were his — and our nation’s, as now seems evident — downfall.

It’s an interesting thing to read Greenspan’s thoughts and realize he still truly believes he’s a worthy acolyte of Ayn Rand, and is completely ignorant of the reality that he wound up becoming exactly what he’d always excoriated.  I wonder if even now (the book was written before the horrendous crash of his real estate bubble) he hasn’t managed to convince himself that the colossal failures he alone owns are actually the province of somebody else, as he did with all his more minor failings covered in his book.

What’s interesting is that, while he clearly believes himself a towering intellect, I knew 90% of what he wrote merely because I keep up with politics and read The Economist for some years during the time covered by this book.  I’m no genius.  Greenspan is smart, yes — but having completely missed the message of Leonard Read’s I, Pencil, he also clearly misses that his intellect really isn’t all that earth-shattering, and certainly doesn’t allow him to understand everything it takes to make a pencil any more than anyone else.

It’s a shame we’ve allowed our once limited government to metastasize into the Leviathan it now is.  Greenspan is a product of what we’ve let slip away — an overpaid, overfed failure who’s brought us ruin instead of the riches he promised.  He and Barack Obama must get on famously.

…is to keep their teen daughters from going to prom dressed like hookers.

An old college pal of mine just posted his daughter’s pre-prom pictures, of her and her friends.  Their attire was disgusting.

I have neither teens nor daughters.  But I can emphatically state that if I did, one of mine would never leave the house looking like that.

Here is a spirited defense of the much-maligned Koch brothers and Koch Industries by Hall of Fame NFL quarterback Fran Tarkenton.

Tarkenton correctly points out the destructive, poisonous political source of the attacks on the Kochs.  Because the Kochs stand in the way of the left’s demolishing of America’s free enterprise system in favor of a cronyish Fabian socialist “paradise,” they are targeted for destruction.  Tarkenton’s defense is magnificent.

The Kochs represent everything that is right about the business world.  Indeed, you’ll not find a better leadership book than Charles Koch’s The Science of Success.