Political confusion

The following, which I received in an email from a friend, is funny because it's so damned true.

If you grow up in Hawaii, raised by your grandparents, you're exotic and different.
However... If you grow up in Alaska eating moose burgers, you're a quintessential American story.

If your name is Barack, you're a radical, unpatriotic Muslim.
However... If you name your kids Willow, Trig and Track, you're an admired maverick.


If you graduate from Harvard Law School and are president of the Harvard Law Review, you are unstable.
However... If you attend five different small colleges before finally graduating, you're well grounded.

If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising two beautiful daughters, all within Protestant churches, you're not a real Christian.
However... If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, then left your disfigured wife and married the heiress the next month, you're a real Christian.

If you teach responsible, age-appropriate sex education, including the proper use of birth control, you are eroding the fiber of society.
However... If, while governor, you staunchly advocate abstinence-only sex education with no other option in your state's school system, while your unwed teenage daughter ends up pregnant, you're very responsible.


If your wife is a Harvard graduate lawyer who gave up a position in a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of her urban community, then gave that up to raise a family, your family's values don't represent real America.
However... If your husband is nicknamed "First Dude", works for big oil, has at least one DUI conviction, no college education, didn't register to vote until age 25 and once was a member of a group that advocated the secession of Alaska from America, your family is extremely admirable.

If you spend three years as a community organizer, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, spend eight years as a State Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, become chairman of the State Senate's Health and Human Services committee, spend four years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran's Affairs committees, you don't have any real leadership experience.
However... If your total resume is local weather girl, four years on the city council, six years as the mayor of a town with less than 7,000 people and 20 months as the governor of a state with only 650,000 people, you're qualified to become the country's second highest ranking executive.

A dog's purpose

The following story is told by a veterinarian:

I had been called to examine a ten-year-old Irish Wolf hound named Belker who was very sick. The dog's owners, Ron, his wife Lisa, and their six-year-old boy Shane, were all very attached to Belker, and they were hoping for a miracle. I examined Belker and found he was dying of cancer. I told the family we couldn't do anything for Belker, and offered to perform the euthanasia procedure for the old dog in their home. As we made arrangements, Ron and Lisa told me they thought it would be good for Shane to observe the procedure. They felt as though Shane might learn something from the experience.

The next day, I felt the familiar catch in my throat as Belker's family surrounded him. Little Shane seemed so calm, petting the old dog for the last time, and I wondered if he understood what was going on. Within a few minutes, Belker slipped peacefully away. The little boy seemed to accept Belker's transition without any difficulty or confusion. We sat together for a while after Belker's Death, wondering aloud about the sad fact that animal lives are shorter than human lives. Shane, who had been listening quietly, piped up, "I know why."

Startled, we all turned to him. What came out of his mouth next stunned me. I'd never heard a more comforting explanation.

He said, "People are born so that they can learn how to live a good life... like loving everybody all the time and being nice, right?"

The six-year-old continued, "Well, dogs already know how to do that, so they don't have to stay as long."

VMware buries the competition

From Anders Bylund of The Motley Fool:

When I opened up my virtual mailbox Monday morning, I was buried under an avalanche of press releases from virtualization specialist VMware (NYSE: VMW). Then the annual VMworld conference kicked off, adding heaps of fresh PR atop the first pile. After I dug my way out, one thing was abundantly clear to me: VMware won't sit still and let the likes of Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: JAVA), and Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) run circles around this incumbent market leader. This company hasn't exhausted its own research and inventions -- not by a long shot.

"Okay, tell us something we don't know."
The big deal that ties this news together is VMware's new Virtual Datacenter Operating System (VDC-OS). Think cloud computing on steroids, where an intrepid director of corporate IT can pool all hardware resources at his or her disposal into a giant blob of flexible computing power. Processor time, memory, network access, storage space, and other data-processing assets can then be assigned on demand to whatever application or project needs them the most -- automatically.

This is more than just a management suite for virtual machines, like Microsoft's Virtual Server or Sun's xVM product family. It's more like Amazon.com's (Nasdaq: AMZN) Elastic Computing Cloud or Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG) famously decentralized information infrastructure, scaled down to the size of a single data center and packaged for private use by any company with IT-management problems. On the flipside of that analogy, it's like stretching a traditional IBM (NYSE: IBM) "big iron" mainframe, with all of its fault tolerance and massive parallel processing acumen, to cover the entire data center.

Used correctly, a solution like this should lead to significantly more efficient use of the available hardware, alongside higher reliability -- when one processor or memory bank dies, its workload just gets shifted somewhere else. That means better efficiency, longer uptime, and big cost savings.

Building a secure market share
VMware is years ahead of the competition when it comes to advanced features like this virtual OS functionality. Sure, I think that both Microsoft and Oracle have it in them to produce a product like this -- eventually. But by then, I expect that VMware will have carved out a very comfortable slice of the potential market, because the early adopters will be the companies that most need better IT management.

These tough test cases will iron out any remaining wrinkles in the solution in short order, via the normal back-and-forth of production-level tech support. Get them settled on a workable solution to problems like complex data management and scattershot hardware purchasing, and they won't feel any need to fix what ain't broke anymore. And then they become perfect marketing tools: "Look how we helped Hyper-Mega-Mart (Ticker: HMM) and Worst-Case Scenarios, Inc. (Ticker: NOWAY)! Your data center will be a walk in the park!"

What this means for you
I really don't see how even Mr. Softy can hope to find a chink in armor plating like that, though I do appreciate Microsoft's efforts, since competition drives innovation in any business. But in the end, virtualization will be an afterthought in Microsoft's and Oracle's sprawling product portfolios, at most. The same goes for Sun, albeit on a smaller scale. Anybody else in this space looks like shark bait to me -- fishing for buyout offers from one of the big boys, rather than aiming for the top of the heap themselves.

Meanwhile, VMware will keep leading the way to bigger and better virtualization achievements. This is one of the days I mutter curses at our Foolish disclosure policy under my breath, because it's the only thing keeping me from buying VMware today.