Faith Healing and Mendacity: 2's seek to deceive for personal gain to the destruction of the church, 7's want self-esteem and
popularity, 1's do it to help people.  When people associate themselves with the miracle ("I am a healer"), they forget that healing
is a gift for a particular purpose: there are NT cases when healing someone was bad because God inflicts people with problems as
well as heals them.  Healing is not always good.  Judge someone by the fruit of their actions, not their grace and charm.

"Google's code of conduct can be boiled down to a mere three words: Don't be evil...'Evil', says Google CEO Eric Schmidt, 'is what
Sergey says is evil.'  But what constitues evil when Google promotes pornography but not cigarettes?  Effectively, Google reinforces
popular trends in morality. [more] ["Google Sells Its Soul", Wired 1/03, pg.132]

C tried to be a portable language.  Java had a portable run-time.  Linux is better than both: it's a portable operating system.  The
only thing Java is good for is creating applets to upload to ISPs who won't let you compile O/S apps.  Java is a stop-gap measure,
not a solution, and is doomed to long-term failure.  There is no point to running Java on Linux.

In a 1996 memo, Microsoft engineer Adam Bosworth  recommendedd that MS build Java "extensions" in order to control Java--anyone
using the extensions would be locked in MS Windows. [Salon]

"Is there hope for Java?"  Salon.com, Jan 21, 2003 Farhad Manjoo

There is no such thing as karma.  There's no guarantee that bad things will happen to bad people.  Neither is there a guarantee that
good things will happen to good people.  Life is a test of characters which is why bad things happen to both the bad and the good.

Once I had a class that had many Hong Kong students who had already had the material.  The class had an unusually high average.  The
professor was forced to "bell curve" the class, distorting the original marks even though the original marks accurately reflected
the disproportional number of students who were taking the material for a second time.  The best way to achieve high marks is to
know the material before the class starts.  The grading system does not take such things into account.

A professor once did assigned an unusal first-year assignment.  He had the students generate random numbers and assign them to
multiple choice tests for a mock class of students.  The result was a class that had a perfect bell curve.  The professor asked the
students what conclusion could be reached.  "A perfect bell curve is generated when a class contains all students who only guess.
Since the university expected classes to be a perfect bell curve, the professors who do a terrible job are rewarded."  That was the
correct answer.  The universities reinforce mendacity.

"[A business man] was born illegitimate, and through infancy and early childhood was raised soley by his mother, who was both deaf
and dumb, in the slums of Chicago.  When he was five years old the state, believing that no such mother could be competent to raise
a child, believing that no such mother could be competent to raise a child, took him away from his her without warning or
explanation and placed him in a succession of foster homes, where he was treated to rather routine indignities and with a total
abscence of affection.  At the age of fifteen he became partially paralized as the result of a rupture of a congential aneurysm of
one of the blood vessels in his brain.  At sixteen he left his final set of foster parents and began living by himself.
Predictably, at the age of seventeen he was jailed for a particularily vicious and meaningless assault.  He received no psychriatric
treatment in jail...by the time he entered treatment with me he had in addition [to a successful business man] become a loving and
effective father, a self-educated individual, a community leader and an accomplished artist." [Peck, pg. 241"

Meanwhile a child of a single mother and poverty in St. Catharines, adopted by the church, sent to a top university, interned as a
preacher and graduated with distinction has a different story.  He abandoned his religion, cheated on his wife, delierately crippled
himself and now works at Wal-mart and hangs out in seedy bars.  As Peck says, neuroses are easy to determine but how some people
overcome their past to be oustanding and noble individuals is a mystery.


"[Spiritual evolution] is conducted against a natural resistance, against the natural inclination to keep thinhgs the way they were,
to cling to the old maps and old way of doing things, to take the easy path." [Peck, pg. 266]

My grandfather was a notorious shoplifter.  He believed that stealing made good economic sense (for him) and the problems it caused
for others was not his concern.  One day my father accidently took home an item without paying for it.  When he returned to the
store, the clerk told him, "I knew you took it.  I wanted to see if you were like your father."  Evil burns its own bridges because
it doesn't see things the way they really are.

"Among humanity, love is the miraculous force that defies the natural law of entropy." [Peck, pg.268]  That is, under the 127 rule,
7's are the least loving, not the 2's (villians).

"He who is not content with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have." [BR14, pg.264]  Why form a company
with ambitious people who will remain ambitious even when success is achieved?  But the opposite is a problem as well.  Clear
thinking should prevail.

The expression "half-cocked" comes from the western gunfigher genre, where the cowboy walks into a bar with his revolver out and the
hammer cocked into the firing position.  The patrons of the bar raise from their seats and draw their own pistols.  When people are
paranoid about their jobs, they create self-fulfilling prophecies.  They, too, go around half-cocked, stirring up more paranoia
around them.  They justify themselves, saying, look at all the corruptions I found...corruption that they themselves created.
Sometimes when you look for trouble, you create trouble.  It's better for the gunfighter to walk into the room with his gun in its
holster and wait for the bad guys to reveal themselves.

"There really are people, and institutions made up of people, who respond with hatred in the presence of goodness and would destroy
the good in so far as it is in their power to do so.  They do this not with conscious malice but blindly, lacking awareness of their
own evil--indeed, seeking to avoid any such awareness." [Peck, pg 278]

"Evil [is defined] as the exercise of political power--that is, the imposition of one's will upon others by overt and covert
coercion--in order to avoid extending one's self for the purpose of nurturing spiritual growth." [Pwck, pg. 278]

"Ordinary laziness is nonlove; evil is antilove." [Peck, pg.278]

"People of great spiritual power may be wealthy and may upon occasion occupy political positions of leadership, but they are as
likely to be poor and lacking in political authority." [Peck, pg 284]  Good people must be identified wherever they are because they
are people who "make decisions with maximum awareness" [Peck pg. 285], not through laziness and political power.

Don't be surprised when people with good skills don't want to become leaders.  There is an aloneness that comes with leadership, and
the knowledge that you have no one else to blame for your decisions.  Fear can derail both the leader and what he could have
contributed to the company.

Recognizing evil: it is not possible to determine who will respond well to a therapy and who will not from a first evaluation. [
Peck, pg. 306]

The Parable of the Sower applies to starting a company in regars to how people respond to a message.



