Category: A Major Pardigm Shift Well Under Way

The huge focus of the media — both liberal and conservative — on President Trump’s accomplishments in his “first 100 days” in office is yet another clear confirmation of what I’ve been saying for several years now, particularly since I set up this web site last year and started posting to its Blog section. What prompts me to say this? …

“Outside The Box” Thinking

Almost nobody in the media seems to be “thinking outside the box” in covering what is going on in our government these days.  News anchors, as well as the “expert panels” they have on their nightly broadcasts, are simply looking at historical information and comparing conclusions drawn from that information to what is going on now, and making their assessments accordingly.  This approach completely ignores the fact that we are in a completely different environment than any that has existed certainly in my lifetime, possibly since this country’s founding.

Let me use a simple parallel to describe what I’m saying.  Let’s look at Podunk, a town of 10,000 people in a largely rural area somewhere, one of six similar-sized towns about 20-25 miles apart, each within 25 miles of Metropolis, a city of 500,000 people. Acme Water Company, the water company serving Podunk, is projecting its future needs for expansion and upgrade of its infrastructure.  Analyzing historical usage trends, they project that in the next 10 years demand for the water they supply to Podunk will increase by 2-3% per year, and they outline their infrastructure projects accordingly [sizes of pipes, pumps, etc.]. Two years later, the town is in an uproar because water usage has doubled and very unpleasant restrictions on water usage have been necessary to balance supply and demand until massive “emergency” infrastructure upgrades can be made by Acme. … In making its ten-year projections two years earlier, Acme had failed to take into account several significant facts that made linear projection based on Podunk’s past data meaningless: 1) the population of Metropolis at that time was almost twice what it had been just three years earlier, and property prices were driving residential development to the surrounding smaller towns [but at that time, not to Podunk]; 2) four large manufacturing plants had recently been built in the two towns closest to Podunk, one having gone into production six months earlier and one scheduled to do so later that year. I won’t go into more here because I think my point [and hopefully the parallel connection] has been made.

The Seven Most Dangerous Words …

I shall never forget the words a Partner of a major “big eight” consulting firm made in a presentation to the Board and Executive Team [of which I was a part] over twenty years ago: “The seven most dangerous words within an organization are ‘We’ve never done it that way before’ “. Let me introduce here my corollary to that statement: “Seven additional dangerous words within an organization are ‘But we’ve always done it this way’ “.

The media today is failing to recognize either of these warning signs. They’re doing exactly what Acme Water Company did in my allegorical parallel above. … Looking at past presidencies, matching First 100 Days “success” with years-later evaluations of overall “success” after their one or two terms — using parameters like “major” legislation passed, Executive Orders issued, etc. Then, they’re comparing their resulting conclusions with Trump’s “success” or lack thereof in his First 100 Days and projecting what they think that means in terms of how his presidency will ultimately be assessed vis-à-vis past presidencies. There’s a total failure to recognize that they are comparing apples to oranges.

One Thing On Which Everybody Seems To Agree …

For all his faults, there’s one thing about President Trump on which I think almost everybody, whether they like him or hate him, agrees: he doesn’t fit any of the “molds” that characterize past presidents. Just as two recent examples of how he just thinks differently — like a businessman, not a politician: “The price tag for the new Air Force 1 is ludicrous” [result: it has been negotiated significantly downward]; “Let’s use American steel in the Keystone and Dakota pipelines” [result: limited because of contracts already in place, but the idea would probably never have even occurred to a politician].

This “doesn’t fit past molds” observation alone should put the media in “outside the box” thinking mode. The message to the anchors and “expert panels”? … Quit trying to force this square peg into the nice round holes you’ve bored into which you put daily “happenings”. Instead, consider the cumulative post-2016 “pile” of “happenings” as pieces of a puzzle which, when grouped into categories — some of which will be entirely new categories — and placed onto the board, can begin to reveal the image of the New Paradigm. As you do that, you will see every day a bigger and bigger percentage of the mosaic depicting the New Paradigm. That, in turn, will enable you to report information that actually interests people, rather than continuing to develop content that feeds your own perceptions of reality [which are clearly in the Old Paradigm]!

For starters, how about this? … Pull from your databases two lists: 1) everything DJT said in the campaign he’d do in his First 100 Days and “score it”; and 2) everything HRC said in the campaign she’d do in her First 100 Days and try to objectively “score it” [i.e., try to realistically view how much from that list she might have actually gotten done within that 100 days with Republican majorities in both the House and the Senate].  Also, try to paint a picture of what our overall status would be now had she won last November and had that projected First 100 Days “score”, and compare that to what our overall status is now [“overall status” meaning the economy, international perceptions, national security, etc.]. I for one would find any truly objectively-produced content like that very interesting.

Charles M. Jones

I honestly don’t understand why Mitch McConnell’s 4/6/17 decision to extend Harry Reid’s 2013 “nuclear option” method of getting federal judgeships through Senate confirmations and apply it to Supreme Court confirmations as well was such a big deal. To me, it’s just another confirmation of what I’ve been saying since starting this web site and making posts to its Blog section — that a major paradigm shift is well underway in this country [see the A Major Paradigm Shift Well Underway page at this site]. Democrats would have tried to filibuster any SCOTUS nominee — it wasn’t about Neil Gorsuch.  And, despite all the rhetoric about this filibuster being “payback” for the Republican filibuster of President Obama’s nominee [Merrick Garland] last year, it wasn’t about that, either. They are determined to block President Trump at every point possible, and it is likely that many more filibusters are in the pipeline [you can certainly bet on that for any healthcare bill that is characterized as a repeal of the ACA (rather than improvements/enhancements to it)].

The next step, which practically all Senators in both parties are saying would “destroy the Senate as we know it” [those actual words have been used by some Senators in media interviews], would be to just go ahead and drive the last nail in the coffin of the whole filibuster concept and remove it from Senate rules altogether. That last step would be to extend what Reid [a Democrat] and McConnell [a Republican] have already done to apply to legislation as well — and the way I see it, that would be a good thing.

Original Rationale For The Filibuster No Longer Valid

I’m not a history buff, but from a little research I found that the original rationale for the filibuster was that the minority party should not be totally powerless — i.e., if Senators in that party were so adamantly opposed in principle to something that they would do everything possible to block it, maybe it would be best to provide a mechanism for them to do so. The logic was probably that this mechanism would ensure that minority opinions were at least heard and understood before the Senate voted on an issue, thereby possibly enabling the minority to gain majority support for at least some of the modifications they considered to be the most important.

So why isn’t that rationale still valid? Here’s a brief synopsis …

Senate rules first allowed for filibusters in 1806, though the first filibuster actually occurred more than 30 years later, in 1837. They continued to be rare for more than another century.

Prior to 1917, as long as a senator kept talking on the floor, a bill could not move forward, and ending the filibuster was up to the filibustering senators. In 1917, the Senate adopted the cloture rule, under which two thirds of senators could vote to force an end to debate and bring the question under consideration to an up-or-down vote. The two-thirds requirement was later changed to the current three-fifths [60%].

For the next sixty years, the filibuster continued to be used sparingly. In 1975, though, the Senate made a change that made it significantly easier to filibuster by adopting rules that allow other business to be conducted while a filibuster is, technically underway. Since then, senators have not needed to stand up on the floor and make their case to their colleagues and their constituents in order to halt legislation. Instead, these “virtual filibusters” can be conducted in absentia.

The filibuster has been used 1,300 times since 1917. However, the vast majority of those filibusters have taken place in recent years. Filibuster use began to increase dramatically in the 1970s. Even so, there still had only been a grand total of 413 Senate filibusters by 1990. Over the last 12 years, however, the filibuster was used nearly 600 times!

These filibusters aren’t just being used to extend debates or stall votes—today, senators filibuster motions to proceed, preventing bills from being debated at all. A device intended to promote comprehensive discussion has turned into a tool to keep ideas from even being heard. Filibusters on motions to proceed prevent the Senate from even being able to consider ideas for how to solve our country’s big problems. For years now, small numbers of senators representing as little as 11% of the country have kept the Senate from even discussing important legislation that has passed committee review.

“Virtual filibusters” allow small numbers of senators to effortlessly place personal political agendas above the work of government with no consequence. As a result, even routine Senate functions like approving executive appointees get mired in partisan politics, resulting in [numerous] vacancies on federal judiciary benches. Major pieces of legislation … have enjoyed majority support in the Senate yet died in the face of filibusters for lack of cloture.

Legislation that should pass into law has been canceled and courts have been thrown into disarray, but the senators who have helped make that happen have never needed to actually make a case to their colleagues or their constituents.

Source: About The Filibuster.

It would be difficult to find a more convincing example to serve as evidence that a paradigm shift is clearly underway in America’s government.

Four current facts render the original rationale for the filibuster no longer valid: 1) the extremely polarized environment [two parties whose ideologies as well as their philosophies on government’s role are so far apart that there is a huge chasm between them]; 2) a “herd mentality” within both parties that usually results in “bloc votes” along party lines [although the failure of the first attempt to repeal and replace the ACA shows that the Republicans are not quite as monolithic as the Democrats in this context]; 3) a total focus on gaining, maintaining, or restoring party dominance, and on personal reelection [for all the warm and fuzzy rhetoric about helping people, it’s the power focus that drives individual actions of individual lawmakers]; and 4) a huge swath of what one radio talkshow host calls “low information voters” [unfortunately, this is probably the largest single segment of voters].

These facts, coupled with what I strongly believe is the beginning of the end of the two-party system in America [see these links at this site: Revisiting Hope And Change; Binary Party Affiliation Choices — We Need Something Better], are moving us rapidly toward more and more tight-margin votes — which, if the “last plank left” in the filibuster rule remains in place, will produce even more gridlock than we have seen in recent years. This dysfunctional government [see the Dysfunctional Government page at this site] is clearly a part of the Current Paradigm that is rapidly giving way to the New Paradigm.

So “Shoot For The Moon”, Senator McConnell!

So Senator McConnell, just go ahead and “shoot for the moon”, as players of at least one card game say when bidding a hand they think can win them every trick. Go ahead and get rid of the filibuster altogether. You’ll catch a lot of flack initially, but the blistering speed with which you will be able to get great things done will ultimately be what you, Speaker Ryan, others in party leadership, and President Trump and his administration will be remembered for decades from now.

Charles M. Jones

Watching coverage over the past few months of Congressional hearings on Cabinet nominees, and now on the “Russian invasion” against the U.S., I’ve had a strange sense of déjà vu — kind of like “I’ve seen this movie before”. After thinking that through a bit, I realized that this feeling stems from the fact that these hearings are precisely like last year’s hearings on the Benghazi embassy attack, the Clinton email scandal, etc. The only difference between the former group of hearings and the current group is which party is taking the “half full” view and which party is taking the “half-empty” view [see my post “Fake News”? (Or Is It Just Meaningless “News”?) for more depth on that phraseology]. In the former hearings, questions from Republicans stemmed from a half-empty view [where there’s this much smoke, there must be a fire somewhere], and questions from Democrats stemmed from a half-full view [there is no evidence / this is just partisan witch-hunting]. In the current hearings, questions from Republicans stem from a half-full view [ditto previous translation], and questions from Democrats stem from a half-empty view [ditto previous translation].

This was kind of an epiphany for me — the seed of an idea that has now developed into the Guide For Participants In Congressional Hearings that I am announcing via this blog. I think you will agree that if this catches on, it will be a huge time-saver for our dedicated public servants in both branches of the Legislature, freeing up hundreds of thousands — maybe millions — of person-hours of staff time devoted to preparing them for these kinds of hearings. This freed-up time, then, can be devoted to actual productive work — the possibilities are mind-boggling. There will, of course, be a time of transition to allow our legislators and their staffs to get their “sea legs”, since atrophy has already set in from the long dearth of productive activity. I am confident, however, that those with any signs of life other than a pulse will be able to rise to the occasion.

So Here It Is! … [Cick Here For Fanfare]

Step 1 — Participant Profile Development

Just answer these simple questions:

• I am a __Senator __ Representative from __ [State] {if Representative, __ Congressional District}
• I caucus with [__Democrats __Republicans] {Check one (If you think you are truly “Independent”, see Note 1)}
• I am considering running for President in 2020 or 2024: [__Yes __No __Maybe] {Check one}

Step 2 — Subject Of Hearing

The purpose of this Hearing is to {Check one}:

__ 1 Confirm somebody nominated by the President [who is in my party] for _________________ [Position]

__ 2 Confirm somebody nominated by the President [who is in “the other party”] for _________________ [Position]

__ 3 Investigate this issue raised by my party: _______________________________ [Issue]

__ 4 Investigate this issue raised by “the other party”: _________________________________ [Issue]

Step 3 — Generation Of Initial Opening Statement And Question List [Automated Step]

A draft Opening Statement will now be generated, followed by a preliminary list of questions for you to ask at the Hearing.

Step 4 — Review And Screening Of Initial List [Manual Step Now, But See Note 2]

If you checked #1 or #3 in Step 2, the Opening Statement will have an overall tone that is positive and supportive, and questions will be what you might call “soft” — e.g., “Do you think being a Supreme Court Justice is an honor, and do you feel that you are qualified for this role?” If you checked #2 or #4 in Step 2, the Opening Statement will have an overall tone of skepticism and cautiousness, and questions will be what you might call “hard” — e.g., “Since your controversial Smith v. Brown ruling was overturned on appeal, have you stopped issuing rulings that reflect your personal ideological positions — please answer Yes or No?”

All you have to do is check the items you want retained in the final list — and if you wish, make edits in your Opening Statement. Be aware, however, that the automatically-generated information stems from a very sophisticated algorithm that is designed to maximize your chances of re-election, so by making edits you may be unwittingly reducing those chances.

Step 5 — Generation Of Script For Hearing [Automated Step]

This is what you will need to have with you in the Hearing. For maximum effectiveness at the Hearing, you should read through this very carefully in advance, paying particular attention to the embedded tips on optics [voice intonation, facial expressions, hand and body language, etc.].

Step 6 — Participation In Hearing

Don’t forget to bring your script, and as you give your Opening Statement and ask your questions, to pay very close attention to the imbedded tips on optics.

Step 7 — Review Of Transcripts From Hearing [Partially Manual Step Now, But See Note 2]

First, run the transcript text through the screening agent that is part of this guide. It is designed to find excerpts that best relate to “hot button” issues that will resonate with your particular constituents. From the generated list, pick those you feel are best suited for incorporation into your overall campaign strategy, and refine them into “talking points”.

Step 8 — Resume Daily Routine

Keep campaign talking points handy at all times, and actually memorize the ones you think are most critical to your re-election. You never know when a media pundit may want to interview you, and maximizing public exposure is a critical part of any re-election campaign strategy.

That’s It! … It’s That Simple

Once you’ve used this guide for one Hearing, you will have mastered the technique. Using the guide for future Hearings will be as easy as falling off a log — and you will have the satisfaction that you are making your party proud! [Except possibly not if you checked Yes or Maybe to the Step 1 question “I am considering running for President in 2020 or 2024” — the output from Step 3 might have produced some items that will ruffle the feathers of your party’s leadership.]

Note. … this Guide is available only to Legislators as an App for Apple and Android devices. It is not available to the general public because that would allow their constituents to see what drives the thinking of their elected officials on a day-to-day basis. That, in turn, would likely result in a massive “un-election” of all incumbents over the next three election cycles. Although I think that might actually be a good thing, I’d hate to think that I was the cause of such a massive upheaval that the country might not be quite ready to absorb.

What Readers Of This Blog Post Can Do

Send this link to this post to the two Senators from your state, and to the Representative for the Congressional district in which you reside.

———-

Notes

1. There is no need for you to proceed. This Guide will only be useful for legislators who understand current reality. Keep yourself informed about it, though — as the Paradigm Shift that is now underway intensifies, this guide will either a) be updated accordingly or b) become obsolete and no longer useful [see the page A Major Paradigm Shift Well Underway at this site].
2. The basic technology to automate major parts of, and ultimately all of, these steps already exists. However, providing that level of automation will require considerably more time. Because so much legislator and staff time is currently being wasted, I felt that focusing on getting out a workable initial version was most important right now; hence this release being announced today. I’ll follow up with future enhanced versions that will automate these steps.

Charles M. Jones

It’s interesting to me that some things from many years ago that I remember just vaguely now are things I think today I should remember more clearly — and vice versa: some things from many years ago that I remember very vividly today are things that seem now like trivia I should have long-since forgotten about. One thing in the latter category is an article I read in the Scientific American when I was in college [back then, that magazine was a much more scientifically erudite publication than it is today]. The article was in their “50 [and 60, and 70, and … ] Years Ago” section that contained a brief synopsis of what was notable in each of the stated timeframes. I found it both fascinating and humorous at the same time. As I think back on it today, it brings to mind a lesson I think we can learn from gloomy predictions of the future some people are making today.

The article was about what since has been referred back to by many writers as The Great Horse Manure Crisis Of 1894. Someone back then observed a problem that was getting steadily worse, portending a looming crisis: within a few decades, large cities that depended on thousands of horses for their daily functioning would be anywhere from 2 or 3 feet to 9 feet or more deep in horse manure [because the number of horses their projected populations would require would render their manure disposal methods inadequate].

He even did the math: In New York in 1900, the population of 100,000 horses produced 2.5 million pounds of manure per day, which all had to be swept up and disposed of; he even factored in land area and the resulting buildup, removal capacity under current methods, etc. [re: Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, Oxford University Press, 1999].

In 1898 the first international urban-planning conference convened in New York. It was abandoned after three days, instead of the scheduled ten, because none of the delegates could see any solution to the growing crisis posed by urban horses and their output.

Enter Stage Left … A Paradigm Shift

The fundamental problem with most predictions of this kind, and particularly the gloomy ones, is that they make a critical, false assumption: that things will go on as they are [or in the terminology I’ve used on the pages of this site and blogs posted here, they stem from Old Paradigm thinking — see A Major Paradigm Shift Well Underway]. This assumption in turn comes from overlooking one of the basic insights of economics: that people respond to incentives. In a system of free exchange, people receive all kinds of signals that lead them to solve problems. In this case, better manure removal processes were never needed to avoid the crisis because of the invention of the internal combustion engine [the history of which goes back at least as far as 1680, but potential commercial feasibility came about with creation in 1876 of the first modern internal combustion engine by Nikolaus Otto]. The real solution to the manure problem, however, stemmed from conversion of this invention into mass-produced automobiles through the entrepreneurial and capitalistic genius of people like Gottlieb Daimler and Henry Ford, rapidly eliminating the source of the problem [while improving, I might add, the overall quality of life in many other ways].

Lessons And Takeaways

There are two lessons we can learn from this.  First, human beings, left to their own devices, will usually find solutions to problems, but only if they are allowed to; that is [for example], if excessive regulatory burdens do not quell innovation and creativity. Left to political mechanisms, problems will not be as effectively solved [if at all].  Left to themselves, our great grandparents solved the great horse-manure problem. If things had been left to the urban planners, they would almost certainly have turned out worse.

A second lesson we can learn is that those within our elected leadership [in both parties], as well as the appointees of the majority party, who are trying to project how the ideas on which President Trump campaigned will translate into laws under the Old Paradigm need to realize that his modus operandi, brash and unorthodox as it may be, stems from a recognition that the paradigm is shifting.  The traditional politicians still in “Old Paradigm mode” would be wise to ask themselves: 1) What is different about this New Paradigm [as compared to what I think is still the Current Paradigm, but which I may be just now realizing is rapidly becoming the Old Paradigm]? and 2) What changes in my way of thinking do I need to make in order to be successful in it?

Finally, people in the media need to learn that the above logic applies to many [I would argue most] of them as well — i.e., applying Old Paradigm coverage techniques to events unfolding in the New Paradigm simply does not work, and if they continue to try to fit the New Paradigm “square peg” into their Old Paradigm “round hole”, they will find themselves rapidly becoming irrelevant.

Thanks!

Charles M. Jones

Note. My description in this post of the horse manure crisis was paraphrased from this article: https://fee.org/articles/the-great-horse-manure-crisis-of-1894/.  Some amount of actual text from that article appears here as well. The reason I did not include quote marks in those cases is that the extracted text was rearranged considerably to fit the theme of this post.

NNTN Then, “News” Now

I’m sure most people in their 40s or older today remember NNTN [Not Necessarily The News], their memories probably stemming more from off-shoot segments on shows such as NBC’s Laugh-In and Saturday Night Live than from the original [which was a satirical sketch comedy that first aired on HBO as a comedy special in 1982, and then ran as a series from 1983 to 1990; the 2004 movie Anchorman was similar in concept, but focused its satire more on the deliverer of the news than its content].

For this blog post, I’m going to start out positing that much of what is called “news” in the media today is remarkably similar to NNTN episodes of the 1980s, the main differences being a) that the talking heads and pundits do a better job of putting on serious faces throughout their shows than did their NNTN counterparts and b) audience laughter is not audible because it occurs in the homes of the viewers rather than in the studio airing the broadcast. As for “journalists” writing for “news”papers and magazines or posting their articles on social media, the serious face part is not as applicable, but content similarities are just as remarkable.

Let’s start with all the mention lately of “fake news” [re: my blog post An Alarming Development]. This term began to catch on recently as there has been more and more media coverage about whether “fake news” cost Hillary Clinton the presidency.  In the above-mentioned post, I got into the potential dangers I can see in continued proliferation of the use of that term — for the simple reason that each news broadcaster/publisher will have a different interpretation of what is “fake” and what is “real”.  In this context, we must keep some key facts in mind:

• 90 percent of U.S. media is controlled by six corporations [see this link for source]. We can logically assume that they are driven by at least two factors that bring into question their objectivity: 1) their responsibility to their shareholders to maximize profits; and 2) the worldview of their top leadership [i.e., the context within which these leaders make decisions about what does and does not make it into their publications and broadcasts].
• Information on the amount of material available on the internet is hard to pin down with assurance of accuracy, but these statistics are as accurate as any and serve to make a point: there are well over a billion websites in existence; hundreds of new sites start up every minute; 288 million monthly active Twitter users tweet a combined average of 347,222 times per minute; 1.44 billion monthly active FaceBook users send an average of 31.25 million messages and posts and view 2.77 million videos every minute.
• Although the exact amount can be argued, scientists in medicine and psychology would agree that there is some finite limit to how much of the information to which the average person is exposed in a given day he/she will retain even at the end of that day, not to mention future days, weeks, months and years.

It is quite possible that the only place a person can go to find truly unbiased news is the uncensored internet; the key phrase being “to find“.  Unfortunately, applying some simple math to the above-mentioned facts clearly reveals that even if the average person spends an hour a day looking for news [which is far more than many sources indicate is the case], he/she decides [consciously or subconsciously] from among at least seven or eight TV channels and literally millions of internet-based sources where to spend that time [and in the latter case, the amount of available content being created per hour is far more than he/she could access by spending only one second on each page clicked on].

So Back To NNTN …

So from this perspective, consider a typical nightly news show on a broadcast or cable TV channel.  Whatever the talking head is reading from his/her teleprompter is the product of the company’s decision-making process for selecting what will and will not be included [after applying their own filter from the sea of possibilities — i.e., a decision has already been made as to what from that “sea” is real, what is fake, what will produce viewers and clicks, etc.].  The talking head has his/her own worldview and perspective, and through voice intonation, facial expressions and body language, affects how the actual content is perceived by many.  The same filtering process applies to print and posted media, the only difference in presentation being choice of words and phrases — and accompanying pictures and images — instead of voice intonation, facial expression and body language.

Fox News Photo of Bret Baier. Handout photo. MANDATORY CREDIT: Baltimore Examiner and Washington Examiner OUT

Comparing this scenario to an NNTN-type episode results in an obvious similarity [same description as above, the only differences being in bold italics]. … Whatever the talking head is reading from his/her teleprompter is the product of the company’s decision-making process for selecting what will and will not be included [after applying their own filter from the sea of possibilities — i.e., a decision has already been made as to what from that “sea” is funny and entertaining, what will produce viewers and clicks, etc.].  The talking head has his/her own worldview and perspective, and through voice intonation, facial expressions and body language, and perhaps some off-script content injections affects how the actual content is perceived by many.  The same filtering process applies to print and posted media, the only difference in presentation being choice of words and phrases — and accompanying pictures and images — instead of voice intonation, facial expression and body language.

Part Of Paradigm Shift

This fundamental change in “the media” — what it is structurally, how it is perceived, and how it can be used to influence public opinion — is simply one more piece of evidence confirming that a major paradigm shift is underway not only in America, but in the world [see A Major Paradigm Shift Well Underway; Election Aftermath – 1].  Evidence of this shift over the past two decades has been clearer and more visible in industry [manufacturing, mining, retailing, banking, etc. — and the entertainment component of the media].  Over the past two years, largely as a result of one of the most if not the most unusual presidential election campaigns in our history, evidence of it in politics and the news component of the media have moved to front and center.

So Where Can One Turn To Get Real News?

As I mentioned in my What I learned as a Boy Scout post, I believe all American citizens have an obligation to keep themselves informed about the issues of the day so they can vote intelligently in all elections at all levels of government. Only two things give a person the ability to develop truly well-informed positions on the issues: 1) personal choices of “channels” to access [“channels” here being much broader than the TV/YouTube connotation]; and 2) personal filters, based on his/her value system and Worldview, applied to the content flowing through those “channels”. Anyone who limits the first to just one or two channels and/or who essentially delegates the second to just one or two “trusted consolidators” runs a substantial risk of simply disappearing into the huge crowd of what one popular radio personality calls “low information voters”. Anyone who takes whatever time is required [whether he/she thinks he/she has that much time available or not] to control both of these things himself/herself will always be a part of making things better than they are. It’s a hard choice, but the greater the “flow” of people from the latter category to the former, the more rapid our drift toward authoritarianism will be.

Thanks!

Charles M. Jones