…I have the big picture in mind. I also know there are parts of that picture that aren’t fully focused yet. I know that I’ll have to figure them out when I get to them. But I can’t not start because I don’t have all the answers. I need to start. By starting I get to the missing bits faster and will have more information to fill them in when I get there.
This is what happens when analytics make decisions for you.
Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force:
You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of liberty loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers in arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.
Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle hardened. He will fight savagely.
But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man to man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!
I have full confidence in your courage and devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full Victory!
Good luck! And let us beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.
Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.
The White House is defending the practice of gathering telephone records from American citizens while neither confirming nor denying a report that the National Security Agency is collecting records from Verizon customers.
File under newspeak.
It’s not that a G rating gets in the way of making money. Pixar-Disney has figured out the formula. They’ve had the top-ranked G-rated film every year but one in the past decade — from Ratatouille and Wall-E to The Princess and the Frog and Tangled.
But other studios aiming at kids’ audiences have done just as well, if not better, without the G. Every one of the big animated franchises not made by Pixar-Disney is rated PG — including Despicable Me, Ice Age, Kung Fu Panda and Madagascar. And Pixar goes there, too — with the likes of The Incredibles, Brave and Up.
G may still mean suitable for general audiences, but parents seem to have decided it means suitable for babies. And that means even animation is trending away from the G.
At this point, I can’t tell if CNN is really sharing large rare events or if they determined they could use this as a traffic source to their site to increase profits. Worse yet, instead of being limited to worldwide major events, the emails contain the results of reality shows, final scores in basketball games, or minor news about the US economy.
It’s become such a frequent email that it no longer feels like a rare alert system for tomorrow’s worldwide front page headlines, instead it feels like I’m following the most dramatic personal blog written by someone dealing with one daily tragedy after another.
This is not a political scandal. The implications of unchecked abuses of executive power extend way beyond the battle for Congress in 2014. There are real public-policy issues at hand, such as making sure that citizens who try to obtain health-care coverage through Obamacare are not subject to the same selective abuse by unelected paper-pushers.
If the IRS can target and discriminate against one group of Americans, it can arbitrarily do it to anyone. This is an attack on the civil liberties of all Americans, and Congress needs to act now to make sure it never happens again.
So though this is a fine time to push the politics of scandal — because occasionally, politics is substantive — it would be more constructive for the GOP to push for tax and IRS reform.
The progressive answer to this is more rules and regulators, more agencies and safeguards and accountability projects. Republicans should recognize this intervention for the ridiculousness it is – creating more federal entities to watch over federal entities – and focus their arguments instead on the only solution which will actually work: removing power from the federal government and returning it to the states or the people. The only way to ensure that government doesn’t abuse a power is to make sure it doesn’t have this power in the first place.