Ask Ken!

For years I’ve fought becoming The Man and I must be slowly losing that fight because it seems like every day I find myself further involved in management and leadership training session. If it makes any of you long-time readers feel any better, I still find my ways to stick it to The Man during these sessions, but that’s not why I’m here. A cohort of mine, who is The Man in training, had an assignment to create a visual representation of leadership as she saw it. Fortunately for sci-fi fans, she sees leadership through Star Trek colored glasses. Check out her Star Trek leadership chart. (Here’s a PDF version.)

Ken!

The Assocated Press the other day reported that Congress has just appropriated another 70 billion dollars for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying "with Iraq alone costing about eight billion a month, another infusion of money will be needed next spring."

Eight billion dollars a month. That’s $8,000,000,000. A month.

Or $266,666,666 a day. That’s $266 million dollars a day.

Or $11,111,111 an hour. Eleven million dollars an hour.

So George W. Bush has not only managed to piss away the tremendous politcal capital the U.S. gained after the 9/11 attacks, but he’s "stayed the course" from the Clinton-era budget surplus to a 2006 defecit of roughly $400 billion dollars.

Ken!

Over the weekend I read a fascinating article from the New York Times about how increasing numbers of students making their way into colleges are unprepared in some capacity or another for that level of coursework. That alone was fascinating but what really caught my attention was one statistic cited in the story: two-thirds of the students entering higher education lacked the comprehension and critical thinking skills necessary to compare viewpoints in a newspaper editorial.

And these two-thirds are the students who are making into our higher education system. Never mind those less educationally-inclined.

With Americans so incapable of analytical thought its little wonder the Bush Administration has been allowed for to run roughshod over Americans civil rights, piss away what political capital it had gained as a result of 9/11 and set the dangerous precedent of premption. I guess as long as Americans have their NASCAR, they’re good.

Ken!

For years now the cadre of scientists in the labs here at Ask Ken! Industries Unlimited, Ltd. have been working diligently to be not only the first to clone a human being, but clone me, Ken!, which is presumably more difficult because of the exclamation point. I’m quite pleased to report that this team of scientists have managed to save their own hides by sucessfully duplicating mine!

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