The First Draft

He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

The Two Basic Questions Of Organization Science

1. Why do organizations look so similar?

2. Why do organizations look so different?

Pumpkin Spice Does Not Contain Pumpkin

I'm the first to admit that this is an odd thing to be annoyed at (I'm thinking that the blog might just become a series of short posts about things that annoy me), but I find it very annoying when people confuse pumpkin with pumpkin spice. This time of year, it's hard to go a day without having to listen/read someone complaining about how there isn't any pumpkin in their pumpkin spice latte -- which isn't surprising because pumpkin spice does not contain pumpkin.

Pumpkin spice is the spice that goes into pumpkin pie (Wikipedia on Pumpkin Spice). It is a very familiar taste and -- thank God -- completely masks the taste of pumpkin. Not having pumpkin in your pumpkin spice latte/candle/air freshener/ice cream/whatever is the point -- a feature and not a bug.

I Hate When People Ask Me What I'll Be Doing In Five Years

It's not like I have 2020 vision. (Got that in right under the wire.)

Seasonal Tidings of Not-Misery

In many ways, I live a blessed life. I'm healthy, I love my wife, my marriage is stable, we have economic and emotional security, my kids show every sign of turning out to be good people. I'm an American in the early 21st century, meaning that it's exceeding unlikely that my government is about to decide to kill me and everyone like me but might decide to take a little more of my money to give to other people. I like my job, my job seems to like me and what passes as oppression among my colleagues is that, four years from now, the college might decide not to give me a job for life but rather to only give me a terminal year of employment to find another job. Taking the long view I'm in the top 1% of the 1% of the 1% of everyone who ever lived.

First world people look at my problems and say, "Dude! Please!"

All of which is a preface to noting that grading really sucks.

Over the holiday season and all of next year, may your biggest problems be no bigger than mine, which is to say -- in the context of human experience -- nothing much at all.

The Greek Government's Strategy:

Happy New Year

As we enter 2015, we should expect that almost everything will get better in almost every measurable way, just as it did in 2014 and 2013 and almost every year since 1776. We shall of course never speak of this again.

Merry Sollstice and Happy Day-Lengthening

As we do most years, if it occurs to me, all of us here at the Secret Blog wish you and yours a happy day gathered around the ol'pagan symbol swapping the tokens of modern materialism.