Unheeded

Perhaps it’s just the waning warmth of summer closing around me like a blanket on a fall day, but I’ve had a feeling lately.  Events have conspired to make me think about the long term perspective on what is going on in our world, the bigger picture that I like to think is what I do best.   Digging into this feeling with a series of internet searches uncovered a wealth of information that I have to share so that, if nothing else, you can all make your own conclusions about things.

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Jefferson versus Hamilton

I use Barataria to throw out a few ideas and new perspectives that I’m not entirely sure of myself.  I hope you see this as a way of thinking out loud.  Difficult social topics are rarely settled in one person’s mind, no matter how much they are mulled over.  I want to take the time to tell you where I’ve been going with some of this and see what you think.

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Sixteen Tons

I have proposed that understanding the connections that make up a system give us a greater insight into how that system will respond to the stresses of change than any kind of institutional or academic perspective.  My readers have responded by demanding specific examples, so I thought I’d start with the big one:  Health Care.  The system we have was developed from the connections of a time that has long passed but once made sense.  This becomes important because most of the current proposals reflect the connections of our time – meaning we could be making the same mistakes all over again.

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Platform

What are we gonna do?  If you read those of us who kvetch constantly about not just what’s wrong but exactly what’s wrong you probably get a kind of fatigue after a while.  That’s understandable.  I strongly believe that if you are in the business of pointing out the bad stuff you have an obligation to produce a credible way that it can be fixed – or else it’s just whining.  While I’ve done my best to produce a framework for understanding how things can go wrong that includes ways to understand fixing the world, it requires a lot of working through the abstraction – and brain ache.

This is where I get specific.  This is my platform.

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