Category Archives: linkedin

America’s Government: the Worst of Both Worlds

Posted on July 29, 2011 | Leave a comment

What’s wrong with America’s government? Essentially we have evolved into a leaderless Parliamentary system, which is the worst of both worlds.

I had an extended conversation today with two individuals who are expert practitioners of American politics. I can’t say anything more specific but they know from personal experience of what they spoke. And they made the above point. Over the last two decades or so, the two parties in Congress have become ideologically fixated so there is no longer a real possibility of compromise. The most liberal of Republican members is too conservative for the Democrats and the most conservative Democrat is too liberal for the Republicans. This wasn’t always the case. The House and Senate that Baby Boomers remember, during the 1970s and 80s, witnessed a few if not several dozen Republicans and Democrats who would routinely support the other party on certain legislative issues. This just doesn’t happen anywhere near as often any more.

What essentially caused this shift? Gerrymandering districts so they are safe seats is one reason. Another is the fact that the social divide between urban/coastal America and the center of the country has become starker over the last few years. But the policies of Congressional leaders have also contributed. Check out this Washington Post story from 2004 on Dennis Hastert declaring that legislation would only be brought forward if a majority of the majority party supported it–a philosophy that inherently prevents compromise and disrespects bipartisanship.

Parliamentary systems work because the leader of the majority party becomes the Prime Minister. No compromise is necessary because you always have the votes. Of course, our system doesn’t work that way. The President is elected separately and has almost no ability to influence the actions of an ideologically fixated opposition party, which sometimes is also a majority party. (And of course the President’s own party is ideologically fixated.)

So there you have it. Compromise becomes almost impossible because for compromise to work best you need the Democratic and Republican Parties to have some overlapping political territory. The end game right now is about scrambling to have the Senate and House pass separate bills so that the two can be resolved in Conference, where some compromises are possible. But even this maneuver may become less feasible over time if Congress continues to polarize.

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Posted in Democracy, Government Performance, Leadership, linkedin

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Ship, Sheep, Shit, Sheet

Posted on June 6, 2011 | 3 Comments

On Mother’s Day about a month ago I posted 5 facts about my mother, except they were seven.  So many people commented that I’ve been thinking they deserved a blog post. And since I’m just leaving San Antonio from visiting her, now seems the right time to write it.

Her mother, my grandmother, never married which made her life very difficult in 1930s/1940s Puerto Rico. I consider this a type of IQ test for my friends. I’ve actually had friends exclaim, upon hearing for the first time that mi Abuela never married. “How can that be???” (I know that’s unkind but it happens to be true.) Abuela, who died in 2003, was in my view a spectacular person. She never went beyond first grade in Spanish, so could barely read or write, but had a copy of the Catholic missal and would ask me to find the Sunday reading for her every week. (We were Catholic but really only liked to go to church on Palm Sundays, when you got the lucky fronds.) My mother’s father, my grandfather, whom I knew quite well, was an accountant (!) and much to my mother’s embarrassment, I guess, Abuela and he maintained a relationship for quite a long time. He was married twice and with his first wife had a daughter, Juana, my mother’s half-sister who was born 1 day earlier than my mom. (He was a man of considerable achievement.) I got to meet her once about ten years ago and they might as well have been twins. Juana noticed my reaction and said, “It’s frightening, isn’t it.”

Despite her limited English, Abuela had an unfailing grasp of the Bingo numbers, 1-75.

She never learned to ride a bycicle and regrets it to this day. So Abuela and my mother’s family hailed from Santo Domingo, a poor neighborhood of Caguas, Puerto Rico. Caguas supported two high schools, one was better than the other, and on my mother’s first day in high school, the teachers discovered that she and Juana, who were of course classmates, were half-siblings but worse, my mother was, gasp, illegitimate. So to avoid the embarrassment, the school administration forced my mom to go to the other, lesser high school, an affront she has not forgotten to this day. I think this is why when we travel we always book the very best hotels. I actually heard my mother tell a travel agent once that the hotel she was suggesting was not expensive enough.

In her 40s she went back to school while working full time and got her bachelor’s degree in accounting in five years. Mom has worked almost all her life. Abuela lived with us and took care of the kids. I understand there are studies now suggesting this is one of the healthiest ways for children to be brought up. Once she realized that she could not get the more senior positions as an accountant in the Department of the Army without a college degree, my mother resolved to fix that. My father, who had just retired from the Army, told her she’d never make it!! (My father had many talents but I don’t think he was cut out to be a student.) My mother even passed calculus, which never ceases to amaze me, whose math education NEVER went beyond high school geometry.

She got very upset during college history class when she discovered the British had burned Washington DC in War of 1812. My mother takes things very emotionally. (She’s a Cancer with a Pisces moon, so if you know anything about Astrology that’s like living in your own personal hurricane ALL THE TIME.) She’s lately taken to watching Fox News, which for her functions much like the warm Gulf waters.

She moved out on my father seven times but always went back to him. Three times in one year. I remember that well. My junior year in high school. It would hijack this post to get into too much detail about their relationship. When we visited our relatives in Puerto Rico, the women tended to sit together and try to one-up each other with stories about the sufferings they endured as the result of the actions of their men. I could tell going into these sessions that my mother always felt she was quite competitive, but truth be told she never could crack the Champion’s League.

As native Spanish speaker and accountant, caused her no end of problems that her pronounciation of shit and sheet are identical. Whenever some particular embarrassment occurred at work as a result of this issue, we invariably would sit around the dining room table practicing the difference between the two, which she just could never hear.  One “shit” was said in less than a second; the other “shit” lasted five seconds or longer, sometimes until she became short of breath. My mother really is a native Spanish speaker; I just pretend to be one. American idioms always were fun too. We spent another evening explaining to her what “screw you” meant.

Also her pronounciation of Ship and Sheep, but these are less likely to come up in tax conversations.

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Posted in Latism, linkedin, Multiculturalism

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Number 18

Posted on June 6, 2011 | Leave a comment

And so here I am sitting at the San Antonio airport yet again and I’ve observed a new variant. (Check the comments to the previous post for #17!!)

18. I need a good place where I can sit and work on my laptop. Oh look, there’s the bar!! That will do!!

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Posted in linkedin, Uncategorized

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Walking Long Distances Carrying Heavy Loads

Posted on June 5, 2011 | 6 Comments

I travel a lot, which means I spend a lot of time at airports, waiting and watching people. (Walking too, of course, carrying bags, which is why I think airport travel is the closest us modern humans get to what must have been the life of our early ancestors: walking long distances carrying heavy loads.) But I digress.

As I watch people I’ve noticed many distinctive “waiting styles” at airports. Some are golden oldies, having been with us since the earliest days of air travel–although I’m certain many more people then just looked scared to death as air travel really was much more dangerous in the 1930s and 1940s. Other waiting styles emerged after September 11.  Here is my list of observed waiting styles,  captured by what I imagine the different individuals are thinking as they wait. Please do let me know if there are others you have observed.

1. I’m in First Class; you are not.

2. I fly so often I’ve grown winglets on the ends of my arms.

3. You look very, very suspicious to me.

4. I have many pieces of paper that I need to organize RIGHT NOW!

5. No one, and I mean NOBODY, is going to beat me to the head of the priority access line.

6. Because I am a hugely significant business person and a Road Warrior, my two carry-on bags are HUMONGOUS, and I dare any flight attendant or gate agent to make an issue of it.

7. I must rearrange everything in my bags before I board, Here, this spot on the floor is perfect, right in the middle of where the road warriors are jousting for the pole position in the priority access line.

8. I am a young mother with 2 kids under 5 and one on the way and I’m not really sure why I married the jerk who thought it would be FUN if the whole family joined him for two days in Orlando at the end of his business trip (and he mentioned it to the kids first before I could do anything about it.)

9. I am starving. (That hike across the great Savannah lugging my TUMI bag just took the starch out of me!) I have bought 3 bags of food. I thought I could wait until we boarded but now I have to eat everything in the next 5 minutes. I hope nobody needs to sit on the chair I’m using as a table.

10. I have 23 phone calls I must make before we take off and I frankly don’t care if you can piece together my entire life story by listening to me. Just don’t tell anyone about the lies.

11. I really don’t understand this boarding by group process. Let me just stand in front of the gate so I block everyone else’s access.

12. I am a Premium Star Platinum Alliance 1 billion K person. What do you MEAN you DON’T HAVE a First-Class upgrade for me?

13. I haven’t enjoyed flying since they banned liquids and I can no longer bring my own vodka.

14. Are you looking at ME?

15. I cannot stand still. Let me pace again through the clump of people at the gate so I can run over their feet with my rolling suitcase.

16. Why is this person with no visible electronic devices (except the hearing aid) (and reading a hardcover book no less) blocking access to the only electric outlet??? I could kill him!! Wait!  I don’t think anyone would notice if I used my charging cord to strangle him…

 

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Posted in linkedin

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Revisiting Lessons from a CIA Heretic

Posted on April 30, 2011 | 3 Comments

Events in Middle East have led me to reflect on the talk I gave in September of last year at the Business Innovation Factory. (You can read the prepared text here or see the video of my speech here)  I was noting how the world is changing and how that in turn requires a different sensemaking method. The key paragraphs:

If you think that the world is driven mostly by the secret deals and aspirations of powerful people—the Hitlers, the Communist Party of the Soviet Unon, Mao Tse Tung, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, I’m desperately trying to think of a likely woman here—then you will conclude that you need some kind of capability to figure out what these people are doing, to ferret out their secrets. To protect our nation from some very nasty ideas these individuals cook up. And you may also want an organization that can impede their plans, cross your fingers.

But if you think that most of the forces the US will need to navigate are not specifically man-made, or at least not specifically made by one man or a small group of them–then you need a different kind of organization. If what matters is that the US understand the trends in the world, like globalization or the emergence of new economies such as India and China and Brazil (which clearly no one is like trying to keep a big secret) than spending a lot of time digging out secrets seems not as important, and what you really want is to have your hand on the pulse of the world, to be out there sensing and in many ways just being part of the whole big ride.

(A little later in the talk.)  

Making sense of the world is so hard and so important that it demands collaboration with as broad a network as possible. It was around this time that this thought entered my mind: The CIA will end up being the last secret organization in the world. And being the last of anything is never a good thing.

And so back to the question. I actually think the answer to it is very complicated. But I do believe that more of what will be important to US prosperity in the future will lie in the second dynamic and our success will depend on how well we understand these large shift changes underway and are able to engage them. Here’s where the imbalance of the Intelligence Community really can hurt us. To deal with the first circumstance it’s important to be a closed network. But to understand and prosper in the second dynamic it’s best to be an open network.  What we have here is a real innovator’s dilemma.

That’s why one of my passions now that I’ve retired from the Agency is to do what little I can to help Americans think about connecting, about working in open networks, about transparency. I believe as a successful multicultural society the US is poised to be innovative in this new world, and this time perhaps all out of proportion to our size. I love all social networks and in particular Twitter because of its power to spread ideas faster than the speed of light. Just think of it. One thought can reach a thousand people much faster than a single beam of light could physically touch those same individuals.

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Posted in Change, Collaboration, Democracy, Foreign Affairs, Future Thinking, Innovation, Intelligence, Knowledge Work, linkedin, Social Change, Social Networks

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A Political Statement, of Sorts

Posted on April 17, 2011 | 1 Comment

This morning I wrote back to a friend who had asked me what I was up to these days. This particular friend, whom I haven’t seen in 20 years probably, is very interested in politics of the conservative spectrum and so I wrote a rather long paragraph that connected my interest in social media to my political views, such as they are. After rereading, I’m resposting here. Parentheticals represent text I added here but were not part of my original email response.

“…I have over the years developed a very small brand as a senior government executive who really believes in social media and the need to reconceptualize the concept of work. And let me tell you…I really believe in the transformative power of what these technologies achieve, which is effective connectivity between people, effective enough to let people self-organize to do important things together without the need for government or some other artificial authority. When I was in college 35 years ago it struck me that government was essentially “middleware” in human society–that conviction has never left me–so in that sense I am definitely not a liberal (at least not as it is understood today.) (The idea that government is something humans created to deal with transactions they could not otherwise handle themselves did actually invade my head at some point during my undergraduate years at Catholic University, where I majored in Comparative Government. I couldn’t at all imagine how humans could or what would allow us to thrive without government, but I developed the conviction that we would in fact evolve to this point. In the work context, managers fill that government role, and I similarly think social work, social business, networked work–pick the term you think least inadequate, will change the role of managers. Instead of controlling the work of individuals, they will transition to monitoring the health of the business network.)

(Although this view would seem to place me at the conservative end of the political spectrum), I am extremely turned off by the ethnoracist/xenophobic beliefs of some “conservatives”–not all. Some of the anti-intellectual bent is also a turn-off; I don’t care what they say, Ayn Rand was not the acme of intellectual achievement in the 20th century. I think perhaps I might vote for Carl Reiner, P.G. Wodehouse, or Preston Sturges! I am almost equally turned off by the elitist views of many liberals–not all. So I find myself not really represented by any political party, which would bother me more if it weren’t for the case that I think there are much more important things to spend energy on than partisan politics. My essential political/philosophical conviction is belief/faith/trust that human society still has a lot of upside potential–so in that respect I call myself progressive. I tire very quickly of individuals who have a kneejerk reaction against any new idea. My bias definitely is to be much more tolerant of individuals who are enthusiastic about the new.”

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Posted in Change, Collaboration, Democracy, Future Thinking, Government Performance, Innovation, linkedin, Social Change, Social Networks

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The Politics of Curls

Posted on March 5, 2011 | 7 Comments

I have very, very curly hair. It is naturally curly. I went through a brief period in my teenage years when I tried to straighten it, but through no particular wisdom and stemming more from general laziness and cheapness I soon abandoned those efforts. So I have kept it short and curly ever since.

Curly hair is an ideological position. Even if you don’t intend it as such, American society, in fact most Western societies, attach some type of value to curly hair, and it ain’t a positive one. (I think, I don’t know, that this may just stem from the fact curly hair is a minority occurrence in most parts of the world. See this excellent Wikipedia article on hair for more information as to its evolution.) As I ended up in more senior positions at the CIA, I realized the importance of looking neat and crisp, a condition I nevertheless rarely attained. There is something about your physical profile that projects authority to others. (I’m not happy about this, but it remains so. A wise friend of mine has noted that social conventions mean it’s easier in office settings for men to look crisp than women. Men wear a suit, a white shirt, a tie. Women wear a wide range of outfits, jewelry, shawls–i.e., not crisp.)

Curly hair looks neatest when it is shortest. So as I climbed up the corporate steps, I sat more often in my hair stylist’s chair. Now that I’m working again post-government retirement I’m getting my hair cut every 4-5 weeks. (25 years now Rita has cut my hair. I find curly-headed people are very particular and loyal about who cuts their hair.) I’m obviously not brave enough to let my hair go longer and look less organized. Less organized! I guess that’s what others see in people with curly hair–a messiness that they assume extends to other parts of curly heads’ lives, such as thinking. (Tangent: The climbing of the corporate ladder is quite an apt metaphor for what happens to individuals as they acquire status. As you climb a ladder, you must concentrate more and more on your position to remain safe and stop looking down lest you get distracted. In fact, smart climbers mostly look up. Isn’t this what happens to senior managers?)

I was discussing these ideas with a young woman at my new workplace who also has curly hair but who recently showed up with straight blonde hair, something she does every once in a while. She said people have actually told her she looked smarter, more competent with straight hair. Sigh!

So what’s my point? Well, first, do I really have to have one? I mean, having a point is just so, I don’t know, linear. But, second, it is to sensitize that there are many subtle, subconscious ways we categorize others as less important or less competent. And curly hair is one of them. (Grey hair is another, I think.)

Not having straight hair, not looking crisp are just more examples of the subtle barriers to entry that diminish our effectiveness as a species. Curly hair affects me but every person probably can tell a story about some characteristic they have. These subtle barriers to entry are legion. I’ve actually never been sure I wanted to enter and more importantly stay wherever it was others found so compelling, but I’ve always believed all of us have the right to discover that for ourselves, and not have others make that selection for you.

PS: I did a few google searches on the subject of curly hair. I recommend the following blog posts.

Everyday Life with Curly Hair

Hair Manifesto

Manifesto of a Former Self-Hater

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Posted in Diversity, linkedin, Multiculturalism

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You Feel the Earth Move Under Your Feet

Posted on February 2, 2011 | 5 Comments
You feel the sky come tumbling down.

EGYPT

Egypt is about much more than a popular uprising against a ruler who has stayed in power through what can only be described, charitably, as a corruption of the democratic process. Egypt is the most compelling example to date of how the physics of human society are being rewritten. In much the same way that Quantum Physics turned Classical Physics on its head, the twin revolutions of information and connectivity are turning society upside down or perhaps better put, every which way and loose. 

The fact that Egypt, the society political scientists always marveled at for its stability even in the face of daily, accumulating disasters, is the country that’s exploded has concussed even the most loyal adherents of the Status Quo. When the Tunisian regime fell you could discount it as the kind of thing that happens to small countries, even the Colored Revolutions of the former Soviet Union didn’t really capture the elite’s attention, because in these revolutions you often were replacing one elite-based power construct with another. (And this might still happen to Egypt, by the way.)

But Egypt seems different right now.

And everyone should be paying attention. Not just the political scientists, the national security experts in their dark suits reciting by rote the laws of classical society, the intelligence agencies. Everyone should be paying attention, particularly anyone supposedly in charge of an organization of any kind. Steve Denning today writes a blistering post on what the dynamics behind Egypt mean for American business leaders. There’s very little I can add but these two points:

  • The history of the world has been dominated by the machinations of men, and they’ve usually been men, making secret deals in backrooms. Transparency and Collaboration are destroying the backrooms of all institutions. Open, dynamic forces that carry with them their own advantages and disadvantages will take their place. Start adjusting now.
  • All institutions of any age are disconnected from this powerful dynamic. Their survival depends entirely on how quickly they adjust to it. Time grows short.

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Posted in Change, Collaboration, Democracy, Foreign Affairs, Future Thinking, Government Performance, Intelligence, Internet, Leadership, linkedin, Social Networks

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When Mexico had an Illegal Immigration Problem

Posted on January 7, 2011 | 1 Comment

I’ve been meaning to post this picture for some time. Participating in a great Tweetchat last night #Latism reminded me to do it.

Here’s a picture of a historical placard located in the Alamo in San Antonio. (I’m there often because my mom has a home in the Hill Country of TX.)

History Placard at the Alamo

Zooming in on the text:

I have no huge point to make here other than note, as I’ve done before, that irony is the most powerful force in the universe. (Also I was reminded by the folks in #Latism last night that, as this text implies, the Mexican Government also had a problem with the settlers owning slaves.)  And perhaps this can serve as a small antidote to the self-righteous and smug tone of many (not all) in the immigration debate.

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Posted in Foreign Affairs, linkedin, Multiculturalism

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Thoughts for the New Year

Posted on December 31, 2010 | 4 Comments

Does my right to privacy extend to the right to be invisible?

Are humans basically good or bad?

Why do we try to control others?

Why do we tolerate such a sub-optimum nation-state system?

Is the material world the only reality?

Something big is going on right now in how we humans organize our societies and our lives. Most people don’t deny that now even though I still encounter folks who ask me whether all this social media is just a fad. I’m full of optimism about how humans will continue to learn and thus improve our lot. These steps forward are not for anyone to prescribe; they will emerge from our interactions and our improving ability to record and share our experiences.

Still there are some habits of thought, propositions that are too often accepted as true in public discourse, that stand in the way of that forward momentum. In my view, they’re increasingly not true but I must admit also tremendously stubborn in their influence. These 5 mental frameworks, most of which have been with us for a very long time, for the most part create friction and inefficiencies in human society. I’m betting that in the years to come they will all be recalibrated as we work to achieve a fuller human potential.

Does my right to privacy extend to invisibility? OK, I admit this is a relatively new difficult question. It’s been with us for most of the post WWII period but sharpened acutely in the last five years. But here is the distinction I want to make. Much of what we think of as privacy issues in this social media/Facebook/Twitter/Google Latitude/pervasive video cameras-engineered world aren’t really privacy issues at all. They are visibility issues. When I go to the store to buy milk, I’m not trying to keep that transaction “private.” It of course would be impossible to do so. What’s really different is that by checking in on Four Square or using my loyalty card or simply carrying my smart phone (really consumers lost this battle a long time ago!!) I am making the transaction more visible (and more important recordable and thus analyzable). There are legitimate privacy concerns out there: I don’t want everyone to know my bank balance or my SSN but it’s important to distinguish that much of what we are fretting about is a new kind of visibility, not an invasion of privacy. If something bad happened on the way to the grocery store–if I backed into a car leaving the parking lot and fled the scene–the police would immediately look for people who “saw what happened.” I would not be able to claim a right to privacy because none exists. Why is any of this relevant? A society that understands more of what is happening will be a smarter society and should make better decisions. I would be smarter about myself if I understood the patterns of my own life better. And a society with improved understanding should be able to self-organize more effectively. Again, it’s not my intent to argue for the right trade-off between visibility and invisibility. We will work this out over time with the usual fits and starts. I just believe we’re confusing two important terms–privacy and visibility.

Are humans basically good or bad? I’m in the basically good camp, always have been, although I would phrase it a little differently. I think humans are usually well-intentioned but feckless. I think bad behavior follows bad decisions and bad outcomes, not the other way around. Most people don’t set out to do the “wrong” thing; they think they are choosing the best option, although admittedly there is plenty of delusional thinking out there, and frankly absence of thinking, not to mention hyperactive lizard brain. (Absence of knowledge and lack of understanding of other perspectives also contribute to the bad decisions that lead to bad behavior.) But when the decision begins to go bad and they are scrambling to recover, that’s when I think humans most often fall into the bad behavior trap. They run with their survival instincts, which evolution tells us are largely selfish. So to return to the visibility issue, if you think humans are basically bad then no wonder you worry about what people will do with all that information about you. My friends who ask me if social media are a fad also like to ask me if I’m not worried about all the information that is out there about me. Well as an optimist about human nature I’m not worried. And even if I were to worry, I trust that the general lack of feck will waylay most plans to do bad by me.

My first point here is that I really hope we humans can get beyond this debate about our basic natures sometime soon. I am biased here as to what I think the right answer is. The belief that humans are basically bad, in my view, is the driver behind many institutions/processes that over-control and micromanage. But I also recognize that we will only bury the humans-are-basically-bad meme through a long record of actions, fueled by truly millions of personal conversion experiences. My second point: if you are an advocate of self-organizing communities, you are essentially assuming people are basically well-intentioned and that more, shared information will allow them to make better decisions. So it’s best not to mock people who don’t get it; I know I’m guilty of that myself sometimes.

Why do we try to control others? The belief that you know the right way and your job is to force others to accept that truth is the single most destructive quality in humans, in my view. It must also have some significant evolutionary benefit for it to persist. If you’re asking: well, isn’t your writing of this blog an indication you too want a slice of that control, then I have to admit you have a point. I think enough of my views to try to express them carefully, although luckily I can’t force anyone to read my blog. Indeed, this is why this particular drive is so seductive and so strong in so many individuals, even those that start off with the best–that word again–intentions. I believe our human potential will be best expressed when we minimize our control instinct, but I’m not sanguine this will happen quickly. But it will happen. Governments and organizations built on the desire and need to control others will eventually contract as individuals learn–and have the capabilities–to manage most of the transactions themselves.

Why do we tolerate such a sub-optimum nation-state system? Why indeed? You know, I worked for 32 years in one of the great creations of the modern nation-state, the Intelligence Agency, so you would think I’d know better than to ask such a question. After all, I must be a realist, right? But nevertheless I’m puzzled more people don’t question why we tolerate such a nutty arrangement. The nation-state system, and here I’m speaking specifically about how countries relate to each other, runs on a set of rules–spoken and unspoken–that have been largely discredited in and abandoned by other systems. The nation-state system still assumes the inevitability of conflict, the need to expect the worst from others, the need to hide things from and trick others, the wisdom of short-term, grab-it-while-you-can thinking, etc. etc.  (There was recently a good article in Financial Times by Parag Khanna describing how the world system might evolve differently.)

The reason I phrased the question the way I did is because I think the answer is in the question. The nation-state system exists as is because we tolerate it. In fact, we more than tolerate, we accept it and some–neocons and marxists, for example?–revel in it. We are complicit. What will be interesting to see is the reaction of nation-states as individuals and communities begin to distance themselves from their status quo. You see the beginnings of this today as individuals, many of them completely delinked from their nation-state identities, interact with each other seamlessly across Twitter and other social media. If you dismiss such thinking as utopian or pollyanish, fact is humans have already broken at least twice in our history with very powerful governing systems–Royalty and Churches. But both aristocracy and the church heirarchy went down swinging and I’m betting the governing class will find it hard to accept its displacement. Stay tuned, more coming.

Is the material world the only reality? Well, in for a penny, in for a pound. If you don’t already think I’m nutty, this will convince you. But as I read about theoretical physicists struggling to understand the universe or universes, I can only surmise that our own existences are more complex than just the physical entities we know. Understanding what that exactly means is a purpose for human existence. We exist in large part to understand. And we understand better together.

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Posted in Change, Foreign Affairs, Future Thinking, Internet, linkedin, Social Networks

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