We hear all this hype on TV about how the younger generations are now experts at multi-tasking and texting and how video games help our children grow up to be surgeons. But who wants a surgeon who multi-tasks and texts? I mean neither multi-tasking nor texting contribute to a surgeon’s operating-room skills. Both multi-tasking and texting interfere with our ability to concentrate at the task at hand; multi-tasking and texting help us waste our time.

Multi-tasking and texting are products of our service economy; as skills they benefit secretaries, telemarketers, and corporate middle managers. Conversely, specialists (scientists, astronauts, mechanics, doctors, nurses, drivers, engineers, etc.) need to concentrate, not multi-task. Writers need to write, not text. read more

I am good at seeing patterns in life and in data, and I am often good at predicting (although sometimes I do not follow my own good advice), but right now I am unwilling to spend the time necessary to perhaps substantiate the following possibility:

When Alan Greenspan decided to pop the High Tech stock bubble by raising interest rates back in 1999 – 2000 (despite the fact that corporate leaders said he was doing the wrong thing, that he should let the good times continue), he did not take into account unforeseen disasters. Yet unpredicted disaster was on us soon enough, in 2001, when the World Trade Towers fell to dust on 9/11, furthering the decline on Wall Street and in our economy. read more

On the news last night, the reporter called it the lost tribe, but that label seems like propaganda, given that the news report was about how Brazil’s ranchers and farmers had exterminated the tribe over a number of years–obviously the tribe was not lost to these ranchers (or to the Brazilian government, which has been synonymous with unfettered ranching and rainforest destruction for decades now).

I mean the world has been after Brazil to change its ways. The world has been after Brazil for decades. Yet the Brazilian government allowed its ranchers to commit blatant genocide, and neither the United Nations nor any of its members have instituted sanctions against Brazil. I think this state of affairs–a renegade, evil Brazilian government; a United Nations that looks the other way over and over again, even after acknowledging the crime–shows us that our so-called world leaders are a sham. They come from the scrapings at the bottom of the barrel. They are not doing their jobs and are probably too brainwashed and greedy to ever do the right thing. read more