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Journalism and other myths.

Outrage

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Every day we are bombarded with information – far more than we can handle thrown at us from a perspective we don’t understand. The most common response is outrage – disbelief that this could possibly happen.

Every day we find ourselves in situations we don’t understand – things that are going crazy around us.. The most common response is outrage – disbelief that this could possibly happen.

The officers responsible for the death of Jamar Clark on 15 November was one of these incidents, and the reports and (lack of) legal proceedings comes at us in much the same way. Everything about this makes no sense if you look deep enough into it yet everyone has an opinion about it. Let me tell you the simple, clear facts that we can be sure of:

Jamar Clark is dead. Any city that has been through this and wants to be known as “civilized” has to make sure that this does not happen ever again.

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On, Wisconsin!

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The big winner once this election is over will almost certainly be religious people, who will see their ranks swell by November. Nearly everyone in the nation will be saying, “Please, dear God, not Trump!” Some will even be on their knees, others will light candles at the cathedral. It will be a good time for religion everywhere as a cheeto-filled populace hooked on teevee pleads with the divine that they don’t get what they deserve.

Is that too harsh? Yes, it probably is. And it may not come to pass, either, if the good people of Wisconsin do their job. There is a good chance that they will be voting in large numbers for not-Trump, which will generally be Ted Cruz.

With their Democratic side up for grabs, the state that gave us Brett Favre’s NFL career might yet be the most exciting place in the nation, at least for a short time.

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Fed Futzes, Fuses Financial Fracas

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Janet Yellen – is there anything she can’t do?

In a speech to the Economic Club of New York the most powerful person in the world, elections be damned, called back the need for continuing “ramp up” in the Fed Funds Rate. The stock market rallied as the happy days of last year returned and everyone had reason to believe that free money was on the horizon.

Funny, they don’t cheer like that for Bernie Sanders.

What is going on? Are we not going to raise rates this year after all? Has Yellen started channeling her inner Greenspan by saying as little as possible in the maximum number of words?

No, this is what we have to expect. It’s really all about China, which is to say all about currency conversion, and the much-hyped “dual mandate” of the Fed that’s really a much more complex triple mandate or more. And we all, sadly, have to stay tuned to find out what it really means.

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How? the System? Works?

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If you’re paying attention to things like the Arizona primary, you probably wonder what could possibly go wrong next. This cluster-eff of an event featured 60 polling places where 200 were normal, creating miles-long lines and many hours of wait just to vote.

Of course, if you’re a cynic, you might say that the attempts at voter intimidation worked perfectly.

But that’s the strange miracle of an election cycle that has been so incredibly surprising that nothing, absolutely nothing has gone by the script. The systems we have are being strained to the point where we have to ask why we have them in the first place. The cynics? As always, it’s easy to point out places where our Democratic-Republic was deliberately designed to be less than open. Systems, as we know them, are hardly designed for today’s world – that much is true.

But today we have light shone on nearly everything in ways we never have before. The main reason that every gear in the machine of democracy seems more broken than ever is at least in part because we never knew how ugly it was before. And that’s reason enough to get ourselves to the point where the system is fixed.

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Coopertition

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Robotics season – it’s intense.  It’s time for another repeat, this one about the team and the world that our kids are learning to navigate even as they create it.

Our team, 2491 No Mythic,  is set for the North Star Robotics tournament next week. It’s an event that teaches all the aspects of engineering and entrepreneurship – design, build, teamwork, and budgeting. This year’s competition also brings back an important concept in any business – Coopertition. The teams competing in a match can bump up all their scores at once if they work together.

It goes against the sporting aspects of the match in many ways, but it is critical. In business, companies have always worked together for mutual benefit even as they have competed. Cooperation can be a powerful force for change or a descent into stagnation. No matter what, business has never been purely a “survival of the fittest” in ways that define the boundaries of ethics and will almost certainly be more critical in a close-knit global economy increasingly defined by technology.

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