Candidates: How Do You Decide?
We elect people to do one thing only – to make decisions.
But we never ask them the fundamental question: ”How do you make a decision?”
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“You Get What You Measure”
You get what you measure. That’s another well-known truth in business organizations. When you want a particular kind of outcome (say, increased customer base for a lagging product), you require your workers to measure that outcome and report the results. The effect is that workers focus on improving their measurements – sometimes to the detriment…
Facts and Emotions: Battling A Culture of Lies
We need to answer emotion with counter-emotion. If we don’t trigger an emotional response, our facts won’t matter because they won’t be heard.
Mars Insight, Earth Insight
Almost 50 years ago, I was transfixed as a NASA astronaut climbed down a ladder and pressed his boot into the grainy surface of the moon. A week ago, I sat transfixed as NASA guided a vehicle to a soft landing in Elysium Planitia, a “flat, boring equatorial plain” on a planet 300 million miles…
There’s 7 New People Born
Into this world came this song. It certainly wasn’t on the radio, but I had bought the album – my second Dylan album – and listened to it, late at night, in the living room, on the hi-fi console, with my headphones on, in stereo.
When I first heard it, it was just “the next track” on the album. But halfway through, I stopped and moved the needle back to the beginning. I listened. Then played it again. And again. And again.
I learned, in 5 minutes, about poverty. Farming. South Dakota. Pain. Helplessness. Desperation. Terror. Loss.
THEIR own self-interest? Or ours?
I think people always operate in their own self-interest. Always.
And I think we rarely know what someone else sees as their own self-interest. Instead, we impose on them what we believe they should be interested in.
Common But Not Normal
In the wake of the most recent mass shooting – this time, in a Florida school – many commentators are noting, sadly, that tragedies like this have become the “new normal.” I disagree – tragedies like this have become “all too common“, but I reject the notion that this is “normal“, whether new or old….
“We have met the enemy and he is us.”
A favorite quotation from American founding documents is this partial quote: “We, the people.” Taken from the Preamble (and thus the first words) of the U.S. Constitution, “We, the people” is meant to illustrate the primacy of the people of the United States over other powers, especially the powers of the government formed by that same Constitution.
But this reading misses the mark. I take those opening words to reflect that the people and the government are one and the same.
This seems like an important point in the discussion of 2nd Amendment rights. It is also an important point in many other aspects of how the people and the government relate to one another. And understanding that point drives many of the policies we operate under, and advocate for or against, today.
If we hold that “the government” is some entity that exists outside of, separate from, and in enmity against, the people, then many of the policies of the Republican party follow quite naturally.
Who needs democracy?
For most people, democracy only exists on election day. And for many people, the vote itself was lost long ago. For them, democracy has no place in their lives. They feel that their vote and their voice already don’t matter.
For them, losing democracy isn’t something to worry about
Politics Never Stops – That’s Good!
But there’s no need to stop canvassing. Perhaps it’ll be less formal than a campaign might canvass – no mobile app, no careful selection of which doors to knock and which to skip, no glossy door-hangers to leave behind. But canvassing is a formalized version of that most basic political act – talking.