Radar Blips

A few items that popped up on My radar over the past two weeks:

-- Impeaching the murderous moron: Fourteen former government officials and constitutional scholars (see list below) present a compelling case against president bush’s illegal acts of wiretapping citizens. As can be expected, it is a heavily-documented bitch slap and if Life were fair, it would be another in a hopefully-short series of such leading to the downfall of the Oval Office criminal. Lest you think the authors of the piece are anonymous, check out this line-up:

• Curtis Bradley, Duke Law School, former Counselor on International Law in the State Department Legal Adviser's Office
• David Cole, Georgetown University Law Center
• Walter Dellinger, Duke Law School, former Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel and Acting Solicitor General
• Ronald Dworkin, NYU Law School
• Richard Epstein, University of Chicago Law School, Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution
• Philip B. Heymann, Harvard Law School, former Deputy Attorney General
• Harold Hongju Koh, Dean, Yale Law School, former Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, former Attorney-Adviser, Office of Legal Counsel, DOJ
• Martin Lederman, Georgetown University Law Center, former Attorney-Adviser, Office of Legal Counsel, DOJ
• Beth Nolan, former Counsel to the President and Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel
• William S. Sessions, former Director, FBI, former Chief United States District Judge
• Geoffrey Stone, Professor of Law and former Provost, University of Chicago
• Kathleen Sullivan, Professor and former Dean, Stanford Law School
• Laurence H. Tribe, Harvard Law School
• William Van Alstyne, William & Mary Law School, former Justice Department attorney


-- Current governor Aníbal Acevedo Vilá actually attacks Congress about the commonwealth status he idiotically insists on defending, stating that the most recent “report” was essentially an underhanded political maneuver. Yeah, right, and porkers glide. Here’s a topic you CAN do something about, Mr. Off-Base: unicamerality. Remember that? We actually voted for it. Your stance on the status is about as relevant as the Irish lottery on the Super Bowl, but maybe, just maybe, you could actually do something with this unicamerality idea. Then again, porkers may glide before you actually accomplish anything.

-- The much-vaunted EnterPrize Competition, aimed at fomenting the development of quality VC-attractive projects has led to…nothing. The winning project may have had slight appeal, like dating a 4 (on a scale of 10), but the other “winners” were dogs. A food franchise? A stand-alone “search engine optimizer”? Puh-lease. At Open Source Minds, We know of at least 8 projects that are easily rated at 8 or 9 on a scale of 10. Three reasons why EnterPrize didn’t know about them:

1) No solid quality project will go through the myriad and stupid hoops of the EnterPrize carnival for $25,000 or less. The hours invested in that crapfest can be put to MUCH better use.
2) The EnterPrize folks are “swinging for the fences,” looking for the next “Google” or “Hotmail”. To build solid project flow is very much like scoring runs in baseball: you get better results with singles and doubles and the occasional home run than you do trying to crush the ball with every swing.
3) The EnterPrize judges have very little grasp of technology and its impact on the current economic scene. Instead of choosing generalists who live by seeing big pictures (such as Dan Bariault, of the law firm Goldman, Antonetti), they chose specialists who know only one field, and thus are people who barely know anything useful to the start-up process.

The Jenius suggests that Guayacán Venture Fund, the carnies running the EnterPrize show, get together with Open Source Minds, Dan and a handful of others and spend a few hours listening and learning. Barring that, the best thing they can do with their money is bet Red or Black (and watch out for them green zeroes).

-- The Jenius will be speaking at the CaribeSoft Event, February 2, at the San Juan Marriott Hotel (morning session). The topic: How to Build Effective Teams. Mr. Off-Base is cordially invited.


The Jenius Has Returned.