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If you are a first-time visitor to this site, PLEASE read this Home Page first …

[Please scroll to the bottom of this page to see important Notes About Structural Changes To This Site on 4/26/17, and Blog emphasis on 9/21/21.]

Any person who has an idea or a view and creates a web site like this to describe it would be guided by his/her value system and worldview in expressing concepts.  Unfortunately, our society tends to quickly form initial impressions and label a person’s work a particular way based on the concepts that are included and the words used to describe those concepts.  So a book, for example, tends to be labeled in a category like Political or Religious based only on that initial characterization rather than on its author’s overall purpose in writing it.  That label, in turn, limits the potential audience to those who are prone to read books in that category.

If the concepts presented here are to accomplish this site’s intended purpose, the reader must rise above this tendency to apply labels.  The content must be interpreted from each reader’s own personal perspective and filtered through his/her own value system and worldview.  As the originator of this site, I will say up front that I am an Evangelical “Born Again” Christian, and it would be impossible for me to express my thoughts from the perspective of any other value system and worldview.  I have, however, attempted to avoid wording that would be overly tedious to those not sharing my views, and I honestly hope that nothing here prevents them from objectively reading the content on this site’s pages, and the content of my blog posts, and deciding for themselves whether any of that content has value for them.  This is exactly the view I take in deciding which news and opinion venues to access and how often to access them — i.e., I want to ensure that I am hearing all sides of the issues at hand, even if I am “predisposed” to  be on a particular side.  If we all do that, then true dialog about issues can occur without the vitriol that is so prevalent these days.

The Purpose Of This Site

During the latter half of the previous president’s second term, more and more “directives” were coming out as executive orders, either directly from him or from federal agencies, and the president himself publicly and very visibly took on an extremely defiant attitude toward what he characterized as a legislature that was trying to block his every move.  There was a huge migration toward an autocratic style of leadership.  America’s image internationally was virtually in shambles after eight years of essentially discontinued American world leadership, and the so-called “recovery” from the Great Recession was not evident to the average American.  Mr. Obama’s approval rating was among the lowest of all past presidents at the close of their terms, and approval in specific areas was dramatically lower than his average approval rating. People felt the country was “headed in the wrong direction” by an almost two-to-one margin.  Debt of over $17 trillion — that was still rising by close to $1 trillion annually — had put us in the most precarious financial situation we’ve faced in many decades.

This country is being driven by constituent groups who represent considerably less than a majority of the population, but who — viewed collectively, as a whole — have developed and refined to near perfection the capacity to identify issues that resonate with their adherents, gain control of the dialog around those issues [including even the words used to describe them], conduct campaigns, and until 2016, win presidential elections.  This phenomenon, combined with [what I believe to be] the fact that a huge swath of the voting public is made up of what one popular radio talk-show host calls “low-information voters”, means that presidential elections boil down to which of the two dominant parties is best at three things: 1) figuring out the math of the Electoral College vis-a-vis the vote-seeking process; 2) pandering to enough constituent groups to create large voting blocs for their candidate in key states; and 3) presenting last-minute imagery that makes their candidate look best to “low-information voters” [#1 is moot in elections other than presidential elections, but #’s 2 and 3 apply to all elections].  Two factors that have supported the creation of this climate are a) the media, which is generally left- / liberal-leaning, and b) the lack of a “coalescing voice” that clearly articulates what most right- / conservative-leaning people believe in a way that causes all people, liberal and conservative, to at least listen.

The first of these factors is not likely to change in the foreseeable future, if ever.  This site was launched in an attempt to at least be a part of addressing the latter factor.  If successful, an app- and/or web-based extension of it that I am contemplating could become a mechanism through which leaders in office, candidates running for office, and potential candidates considering running for office could gain reliable, actionable knowledge about how people in various philosophical categories view governmental issues — a much more sophisticated and fine-tuned base of information than current polling mechanisms are even theoretically capable of producing.

For more depth into what I have introduced at this Home Page, please visit the other pages at this site [top menu and sidebar menu]. First, please see the following note about structural changes made to the site on 4/26/17. …

A Note About A 9/21/21 Change In Blog Emphasis

Weekly posts to the Blog published through this site were originally intended to focus visitors’ attention on the 2016 election that was still a few months away when the site was first launched, and posts up to and considerably after Election Day [11/8/16] were in that same vein. Posts were much less frequent from mid 2017 to late 2020. Beginning with four posts in October 2020, the Blog’s focus rapidly changed because of the critical choice between two futures we would make on 11/3/20. So, posts from 9/21/21 to at least November 2022 and perhaps through November 2024 will reflect the new and alarming environment in which we now find ourselves [which I am certain is continuing confirmation that a New Paradigm is rapidly solidifying itself] with content focused on the future from a perspective that is a bit different. For a more in-depth explanation of the rationale behind this change, please read the Blog post Transitioning To The Only Thing That Matters Now.

A Note About 4/26/17 Structural Changes To This Site

The static pages of this site were originally designed to focus visitors’ attention on the 2016 election that was still a few months away when the site was first launched, and Blog posts up to Election Day [11/8/16] were in that same vein. To transform the site’s original static page structure into one that reflects the new post-election environment [which I am certain is continuing confirmation that a New Paradigm is rapidly solidifying itself] and set the stage for content focused on the future, the following changes to the menu structure were made on 4/26/17, just over three months into the new administration that began 1/20/17:

• The list of original pages in the sidebar menu, originally entitled WHAT THE HECK IS GOING ON?, was renamed to BACKDROP – SITE CONTENT LEADING UP TO 11/8/16 ELECTION [see About This Section at the top of that section.]
• A new menu section entitled NEW PARADIGM “GOINGS ON” was added just above this renamed section [see The Evolving Paradigm at the top of that section.]  The first “installment” in that section is entitled Repeal And Replace The ACA. Announcement of that page was made in the 4/26/17 Blog post Repealing & Replacing The ACA – A Realistic View. As new static pages are published, links to them will appear in this section, and they will be announced in concomitant Blog posts.