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.
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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…
A Teaching Moment, Squandered
Give 30 minutes to walk out and return, then give an hour to study of these basic tenets of being a citizen in the US, their history, the difficulties of conflicts between rights and safety, how bills become law, and how protests change (or don’t change) law, how courts decide conflicts.
Basic civics education.
Imprison People Because Jobs and Taxes: Michigan Value?
There’s money to be made, and there are jobs to be created, by imprisoning people. And there are many private, for-profit companies feeding at that trough.
Is that a Michigan Value?
A People In Motion
The story of America cannot be told in terms of what we are or what we have been. The American story is that we are a people in motion – we are going someplace. Someplace better than where we are or where we were. It’s not about where we are, it’s about the journey we are on.
It’s not about what we are, it’s about what we are trying to become.
“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.
TWOFER: Tax and Health Care Cuts
Trump has two top legislative priorities: “Tax Reform” and “Repeal the ACA”. Today, they intersected: his “Tax Reform” plan cuts exactly one tax from the ACA – the 3.8% Medicare tax on Net Investment Income for high-income taxpayers. It has long been a badly-kept secret that the driving force behind “repeal the ACA” has been…
The Value of a Presidential Melee
Trump emerged as the nominee through his ability to defeat 16 competitors, turning front-runners into challengers. It made him look strong, tough, smart, ruthless, powerful … presidential. Democrats should learn how to win by studying the winners.
Guilty … but what’s the verdict?
A Matter of Fact On the fact question, there are three elements to the question of responsibility and one to the question of exculpation. These four elements, as questions, are: (1) did it happen? (2) did he cause it to happen? (3) did he intend to cause it to happen? (4) did he (try to)…
We Persist
We are now being tested, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. What progress we have won seems to be slipping away, not by the natural forces of time and change, but by the sinister forces of greed and wealth and power and deceit. Like our predecessors whose radical ideas have gone before, we must persist.