Where is the Love, V - Continued

Like I said in my last post, there are more layers to this judgyness.

First point - as someone once said, if you want a zero defect army you will soon have no army at all. We are imperfect, we do make mistakes, and it seems like there are two ways of handling this:

You can go a punitive route and address those mistakes by giving real consequences for them - but you also then need to give people a way to recover from them. To learn and grow. Otherwise you will lose a lot of people, and the few you keep may just be the ones who covered up their mistakes better or never risked doing anything that could go wrong in the first place.

Or you can avoid penalizing people entirely for their mistakes, but if you go that route you have to be fair and consistent and apply it to everyone. No double standard. Otherwise penalties are just an indicator of who has power and who doesn't, and isn't really related to their mistakes at all.

I have heard officers criticize how generals are no longer held accountable, and often look back at WWII and Eisenhower's generation. There are multiple stories of officers were penalized or demoted for a failure, like General Miller. But such failures were not necessarily a career ender, just like I talked about with that warrant officer in my previous post.

Going back to some of the people I served with - some of the things I judged them for were indicators of low experience or poor training. Things that could probably be fixed eventually. And how are they ever going to get that experience or learn to do better if they're not put in the positions where they can learn?

So that's another layer - the system and culture around them. 

I also realized that some of the things I thought were pretty obvious (like avoiding groupthink) were things I learned about in specific college courses I took. 

And the way ROTC programs work is that cadets go through the training and courses required to get a commission on top of their bachelor's degree. By which I mean - some of my fellow cadets majored in chemistry, or computer science, or biology. 

They did not have the same classes I had. They did not learn the same things I learned. And sometimes they just legitimately didn't know.

Ignorance is not incompetence. And, again, people can learn and grow.

Which brings me to the next layer, where I go right back to judging them anyway.

Sort of. 

This is all getting a bit convoluted, but try to follow me here.

Someone once asked - is it better to have a perfect plan, executed imperfectly? Or an imperfect plan, executed perfectly?

I would argue the latter, because perfect execution includes checking on the progress of your plan and adjusting it as needed to meet your goals.

If your plan isn't that great, but you're good at monitoring it's progress and adjusting as needed, then you will get where you are trying to go.

On the other hand, if you're plan is perfect but you suck at implementing it... it doesn't matter how great the plan is. It will fail when things inevitably go wrong, or someone fails make a deadline, or they fail to communicate with each other where they're at in the process.

The important part, to me at least, is that follow through. It's knowing how to evaluate your progress, adjust course if needed, and effectively communicate any changes to that plan.

So someone may not start out as a great leader, and that's fine. The military is full of dumbass privates (affectionate) and butterbar lieutenants (also affectionate) who don't know shit, and somehow most of them end up being competent non-commissioned and commissioned officers anyway. 

The important part isn't being perfect from the get go.

The important part is knowing how to learn and grow along the way. 

And most of our solders do. 

Rather than applying this to planning, though, I'll apply it to learning how to lead your troops.

If you want to be a good leader, you will evaluate your progress and adjust course if needed. You will ask the questions. You will do the work. 

So the ones I am judging, the ones I am side-eyeing, I am doing because they don't seem to be doing the work. 

You're in a position that comes with certain privileges, primarily because of all the responsibilities and duties that come with it. Trying to keep those privileges without taking on those responsibilities and duties is the height of incompetence. 

If you're in a leadership position, it's not to lord it over everyone else. It's to make sure that your people are in the right place, at the right time, with the right training, with the right resources, doing the right tasks to accomplish the mission. 

It seems to me that some people, somehow, wind up in these positions without any interest in or care for doing the actual work required.

Which brings me to another layer. (Or should I say 'why?'  This is a bit like going through the '5 whys') 

Sometimes people stick around in positions they really aren't suited for. And I think it's because of the status and privileges that come with that position, or some other ego-threat that prevents them from looking for something more suitable.

To elaborate on "positions they really aren't suited for", I do think everyone has a talent in something. It's just that their talent might not be for the thing they are trying to do. Ideally, we want to have the right people in the right positions on the bus (as Jim Collins said in his book Good to Great.)

If someone isn't performing very well, and if it isn't because of some failure in training or resources or establishing expectations, then it could very well be that their talents aren't suited to the role they are trying to fill.

What you want is an easy way to move people in the positions that do suit their talents. One where they can excel, and you can set them up for success. (Note again, that they are not a failure. They're just not in the right place.)

But people resist being moved, and will sometimes cling quite desperately to a role they clearly aren't suited for and don't even seem to enjoy.

And they will quite naturally resist the most strongly when it's a position of power and privilege. 

I think that someone who truly cares about being a good leader will ask the right questions and learn and grow and eventually, probably, be pretty good at it.

But the ones who just want the status and privileges? Inevitably they will make mistakes, too. Everyone does, it's part of the process.

But instead of using that to learn and do better, it makes them realize that they could lose all those perks and privileges.

It makes them scared.

So they feel threatened, they get defensive, and they attack. They create a self-fulfilling prophecy where they make bad decisions that make people question their abilities which make them feel even more threatened which makes them make even more bad decisions. And they will always blame other people, always think that everything would have been fine if it weren't for _____. 

And so they fail. Which often makes them cling even more desperately to their power and position, and can easily turn them into tyrants.

Tyrannical rulers are incompetent rulers. (No, Peter Thiel. Evil is not competent.)

If they were competent, they would get people to willingly go along.

If they were competent, they wouldn't be threatened by criticism. They would know how to address it without suppressing it.

If they were competent, they wouldn't feel a need to hide their mistakes or find scapegoats and distractions.

The thing I am judging them on, the 'competence' they lack in, isn't that they screw up in the first place. 

It's that they let their fears push them into an ongoing series of bad decisions, ones that create the worst kind of command climate where everyone is scared to speak their minds and afraid of giving bad news or getting caught making a mistake. 

The kind of command climate that inevitably leads to terrible decisions.

 

 

Where is the Love, V

 There was something more I wanted to say along the lines of my previous posts, but I struggled to figure out where to start or how to say it.

So I have decided to go about it sideways.

Or backwards.

We shall stalk this idea, slowly following it's trail through the trees and grasses, getting closer and closer to it until we can pounce on it and make it ours.

Or, in other words, I'm going to start with something that seems completely unrelated. Two quotes from two very different traditions, though there are definitely some similarities on certain topics.

Judge not lest ye be judged

- Matthew 7:1 

 

If you keep your mind from judging
and aren't led by the senses,
your heart will find peace.

 - Tao Te Ching, Ch 52

I do try not to judge others, and I have noticed how often some form of judgement still creeps in.

It's there in the connotations and sub-text, there in our body language. We can say "tall" or "short", and often there's a hidden judgment. "Tall" is good. "Short", if associated with a man, is generally bad. If a woman, it might be good. 

Good and bad are poor words here, I'm really trying to capture nuanced subtext. Short men have a negative subtext, but calling a girl woman a "short stack" might be calling them cute and being flirty. 

Tall and short are, to me at least, easy to pull back on the judgement for. After all, your height is genetic and it mostly just means some people have an easier time reaching higher places than others.

Anything genetic is easy to look at that way, actually. It's not like anyone had a choice in their genetics, so what is even the point in casting judgment on it? 

There are other terms, though. Loaded terms where judgment seeps in. Like 'slut', which carries one of the heaviest loads of hidden - and not so hidden - judgment.

Given that Jesus hang out with prostitutes and refused to cast stones at an adulterous woman, I'm pretty sure Jesus would never slut-shame. And yet our society is full of people judging others - women especially - for who they're having sex with.

To me, that's also a fairly easy layer of judgment to let go of. I don't particularly care who is (consensually) sleeping with who. Unless, of course, it's someone I'm in a committed relationship where we've agreed not to. Even then, the issue is less about the sex and more about the lying, poor self-control, poor emotional maturity, and poor judgment. (As in, if you've agreed to be in a committed relationship and you want to change that - you talk to your partner first. And accept that you might lose that relationship entirely if they're not willing to accept that change. You don't just pursue your own selfish desires, hope not to get caught, and then think you can somehow keep your other relationship the way it was, and I am constantly amazed at how often people keep making that foolish mistake. Makes for lots of songs about heartbreak I guess.)

Note - you just saw whole bunch of judgment. I'm side-eying one of the most common bad decision people make, ever. One I'm not even fully exempt from.

I'd also like to point out that in this case, I am not saying that those people are bad. Or evil. Or terrible. Just - poor judgement, poor self-control, and poor emotional maturity. 

All things that people can get better at. If they choose to.

I know text is a terrible way of conveying sub-text and body language, but I want you to think of it like saying someone is a terrible cook. Like - you would never trust that person in the kitchen, you may choose not to eat any dishes they make, but you don't think they're a waste of space that shouldn't exist.

And if they took a cooking class and put some effort in, you eventually might be willing to try some of their cooking again.

In a similar fashion, if someone made poor decisions in the past but has put in the work to learn better, I'd try not to keep holding that past against them.

This is the layer of judgment that I'm much less comfortable letting go, because there are real world consequences to the behavior I am judging.

Not just in personal lives, either. 

I started thinking about this more because of my experience in the Army. I worked with some very competent and talented people - but there were also some that were... not.

Some of them were very nice, and I didn't wish them ill at all. But would I want to have them in a leadership position if I was sent into a combat zone? Where my life, and the lives of the people around me, might depend on them?

...

...

Thank God that never got truly put to the test.

That sort of scenario reminds of a story a warrant officer I knew once told me. He was a Vietnam vet I worked with during our deployment to Iraq, and he talked about how his team was ambushed once. I don't remember the exact situation, but they were driving vehicles of some sort when they were hit.

The officer in charge froze up, and wasn't making the right call (if you are unfamiliar with the situation - freezing up in an ambush site is a terrible decision. You're pretty much in their kill zone, where they will keep shooting at you and killing you and you need to move. Quick. Which way will depend on if it's a near ambush or a far ambush and whatever your team has already communicated to do, but the point is you move.) 

This warrant officer said that he basically shoved the guy aside, took the wheel, and got his team moving. He said he was demoted, which isn't a surprise. He also got a private "Atta boy" for making the right call, which also isn't too surprising. At least, not surprising if you have competent leadership. Also, given he was a warrant officer when I met him, he clearly had not been kicked out of the military or denied a later promotion.

The reason I relayed all that is this - I judge the poor leadership of the person who froze. And I judge it hard.

Again, not in the sense that I think they're a terrible person who deserves to die. I don't even know the guy, or if it was his first ambush ever... freezing is a pretty normal reaction to situations like that. It's part of why the military trains so endlessly. When the shit hits the fan you're likely to start doing what you trained to do without thinking, which is significantly better than just locking up and getting shot because you're an easy target.

At the same time, if you're in a leadership position in a war zone, you absolutely need to be ready to make the right calls in combat. 

If you can't, you're going to get your people killed.

What I have learned, then, is that when it gets to leadership and decision-making I am in fact very, very judgy. 

I have opinions. And I have whole blog here to share them.

There are more layers to this, too. But this seems like a good stopping point, lest this post get ridiculously long. 

 

 

 

 

Did Not Expect the Relevance...

This article caught my eye, but given it was discussing a 17th century book about the son of Odysseus I was not expecting it to be so relevant to my recent post. 

While this quote is not quite as relevant, it fits some of my other posts.

"Fénelon’s Pygmalion also anticipates a central finding of modern scholarship on authoritarian rule: Hyper-concentration of power often leads to narrower advisory circles, distorted information flows, and increasingly brittle decision-making. The result is something of a recurrent paradox — even as personalist rulers become more powerful, they also become less capable of accurately perceiving the world around them." 

Where is the Love, IV

I feel like there's more I need to say on this topic, though the thoughts are a bit fuzzy and diverse. 

Blogging has always helped with that, so here we go.

First, I want you to take it on faith that every life is precious. Most people probably are nodding their heads in agreement, and yet there's a callousness to the world today that belies that. 

We do not act as though every life is precious.

And so I wanted to talk more about the example I used earlier in this series of posts, about anti-vaxers.

We have already seen cases of newborns dying of measles.

Oh, they fudge the data and try to obfuscate it with things like "they did with measles, not because of it!"

Or they'll try to say it was truly because of an underlying condition, as if adding a deadly disease on top of an underlying condition doesn't stress a body out and make it more likely they will die. (Plus there's that nasty fact that obesity counts as an underlying condition, so a good 40% of our adult population always has an underlying condition, and does that mean we can just ignore any death that comes their way?)

All of those arguments are pretty gross and disgusting, because they are all trying to make us pretend that these deaths were not preventable. That allowing treatable diseases to spread does not have any impact on how many people die.

Given how difficult it is to trace how a virus spreads, it is impossible to truly apportion blame... and even if we were, the ones most to blame are probably the ones who had direct contact with the children. Many of whom have probably suffered enough for the loss, to the point where blaming them just seems to be in bad taste.

And yet...

Some children have died who did not need to.

Precious children with their whole lives ahead of them. We have no idea who they could have become, and while the odds are they probably would have been average, isn't that still a life of value? Shouldn't we be upset at such a needless loss? Do we really want to callously and casually accept deaths like this?

While it is impossible to say who exactly is to blame, or how much they are to blame, and it might even be a bad idea to start talking about blame in the first place, I do think it's safe to say this:

We, as a society have failed those children.

Because it really isn't just one person's bad decision. 

Something like that doesn't happen unless a whole lot of people make bad decisions.

I say that partly because of the whole concept of herd immunity. One person who is unvaccinated is probably fine, if the rest of their community gets their vaccinations. Heck, that's part of how we protect newborns too young to get the shot, as well as people who for medical reasons can't get it.

It only becomes a problem when lots of people choose not to get vaccinated.

And why are so many people making such a terrible choice?

That brings us straight to the question of our day. Not just with vaccines, either. It's the same question I'm asking when I try to understand why Trump got re-elected.

And as I've said before, the answers are... unsatisfying.

Is it ignorance? Then why don't we, as a society, do a better job of educating people?

Is it gullible fools being led astray by immoral assholes?

Why are they so easily led astray then?

And why are these immoral assholes given free rein?

We again get to that complex relationship between the individual and society at large, to leader and led, to student an teacher. Where the individual does have a choice, does have a say, and can choose not to follow if they're being led in the wrong direction. And yet we can't honestly say that the context of their lives has no impact. That leaders don't influence them, that the media they swim in doesn't sway their choices...

And so I look at those who deliberately spread lies. I naturally can't get into their heads, can't see who is just a gullible fool and who is knowingly spreading lies...

But I think it's clear that at least some people are. That there are influence campaigns that spend money and resources to try and convince everyone that vaccines are dangerous (or that Trump is a templar for God, or other things that don't match up to reality if you question some of the crap getting shared on social media).

I made the comment about bearing false witness applying to misinformation because it seems to me that the Bible - and other religions - try to help us create a society that gets past our parochial vision.

That murder, for example, is terrible for society. Not just for big moral reasons, but because if someone can kill you to get what they want, then naturally someone else can kill them to get what they want, and basically we all end up living in a miserable society where we're never safe and can never be at peace.

Bearing false witness is similar. If someone can just make shit up to get you arrested, then others will do the same, and then we end up living in hell. We end up living, again, in a place where we can never be safe and never be at peace and always have to worry about who is going to make up lies about us.

Misinformation falls into that category for me. It's like poisoning the well. There's this whole 'wisdom of crowds' people have noticed, but that wisdom doesn't work if someone deliberately manipulates it to skew perceptions.  

So I keep coming back to 'them'. The people we all think are out there, even if it's hard to point to any specific one of them.

The ones who deliberately and knowingly lie. About vaccines. About climate change. About Sandy Hook.

And here is the challenge.

We're supposed to love our neighbor as ourselves. Supposed to love our enemies, bless those who curse us, and pray for those who mistreat or persecute us.

How are we supposed to love people like that, though?

It feels like a cop out. Like you're willing to overlook the very real harm done, like it doesn't matter.

That a young newborn baby needlessly dying of a preventable disease is nothing.

That these failures of society don't matter.

I will circle back to that, though.

Because there is something more to say first.

The ones I just described are easy to hate. But I think, perhaps, the call to love is because hating on them is a trap.

Or rather, it's dehumanizing them, just as they callously do others. 

It makes them sound like some cartoon villain. You can picture them twirling a mustache and laughing, or really just sitting in some smoke filled room laughing at the fools their preying on. (Or giving talks about how evil is actually good. Though why he thinks evil is "at least competent" is beyond me, because evil and incompetence seems to go hand in hand.)

But nobody is honestly that two-dimensional. Which means there is a greater challenge.

Why would someone think these things are actually good?

And, since "there but for the grace of God go I", what would make someone like me ever think like that?

When I think about it like that, I generally circle back to the same thing.

These people are absolutely terrified.

You laugh, I'm sure. It seems unbelievable.

But so much of what they do is about control. About trying to force things to go in a certain direction.

And while planning is important, and using the resources at your disposal to achieve your goals is natural, it seems clear to me that these people are taking that to a whole other level.

This is the part I need to take a moment and think about how to explain.

I have talked before about the importance of feedback, especially negative feedback. That we need our after action reviews in the military, for example. Because you can't excel, you can't improve, you can't grow to be better and more competent if you are unable to tolerate hearing when you screw up.

I say that, and I emphasize it, partly because I know exactly how hard it is to do. 

I know how bad it feels to head into your annual review, even when you know there can't be anything too bad to hear.

I know how a simple complaint from one of your employees can sound like an attack. Like they're saying you failed. (Even though they don't actually see it that way, and oftentimes just want to be heard. And might even have a great suggestion you can make happen.)

Maybe there are people out there who are bold and brash and can truly brush things off, but for me at least... that's not always true.

However.

I have also learned not to let that knee-jerk reaction control my responses. And I have learned that things are much better when I don't let that happen.

That that employee, for example, really did just want to vent. Or that if I don't take it personally and instead focus on solutions then we fix things and get better, and don't get bogged down in finger pointing and infighting.

This, btw, is exactly why we talk about toxic masculinity. Because that macho 'can't ever admit when they screw up' attitude means they're stuck hunkering down and getting defensive instead of fixing shit.

Screwing up is not the end of the world. You live long enough, and it's practically inevitable.

It's how you handle it when you make a mistake that really matters.

Let me add in one more little anecdote, because it fits the theme and highlights how the military tries to train us.

One of my instructors in ROTC had a cute little story, like many of the cute little stories leaders collect in the military, that may or may not be accurate but was meant to make a point.

A parable, if you will.

It was about how lions hunt. How one will face you and roar, and chase you into the rest of the pride lying in wait.

And the point was that when you're faced with that roar, you're better off turning around and facing that single lion then you are by letting it send you into the waiting jaws of the pride.

Basically making the exact same point about how to handle a mistake, or the roaring of an angry boss.

To bring this back to politics - if someone screws up, but they own their mistakes and face that angry roar, then they can recover and get past that. 

I know that seems hard to believe given what we've seen, but I think that's partly because people don't have the patience to let that process happen. 

Instead they always try to spin it or ignore it or manipulate things so that they don't ever have to own a mistake. Used to be we, as a society, looked down on that... but I guess the Trump-era proves that's no longer the case. 

The frustrating part about these assholes is that you can see how things compound. Because they never actually face up to their mistakes, never take responsibility or ownership, it all just becomes some big game of blame-shifting and finger pointing. Or distraction. Lots of distraction. 

Meanwhile, shit still isn't getting fixed. It's even farther from getting fixed than it was before. 

They even seem to think that the only reason things aren't working out great is because of 'enemies' or other people, not realizing that quite a lot of it is self-inflicted. And that they were never going to succeed so long as they kept 'spinning' failures and looking to manipulate information instead of actually getting back to truthfulness instead of truthiness. 

 

 

 

 

Operation Blooming Onion

 I had some other ideas percolating, but saw a video I wanted to discuss in more detail first.

A long time ago, I was a young junior officer sent to Iraq. What some of you may not know is that there was this push for privatization, to the point where we had big defense contractors who took on jobs - like hiring cooks in the dining facility - that used to be done by US soldiers. While you can have a very long discussion on that, and whether it's a good idea or not, that's not what this post is about.

Rather, I wanted to talk about how so many of those cooks came from third world countries. The business logic is obvious - if you get a defense contract for a ton of money, but you hire workers who see a low wage (like $5/hr) as good pay, then you can pocket the rest.

You can even, maybe, find workers willing to work for less. For example, at one point the contractors were primarily from the Phillipines or other such places, then the next day there were was some sort of change and most of them were from the Congo.

My contract job in Iraq after I left the military was primarily about vetting such third country nationals. Trying to find reports that might refer to them, so I could identify security risks.

There was always a concern about an 'insider threat', especially in Afghanistan. Though that primarily referred to our local allies rather than the third country nationals. Still, there was a risk there, too.

I don't remember exactly where or when I learned about what I'll discuss next. I primarily heard about it more as illegal activity we (rightly) tried to stop when we discovered it, but the thing is that workers like this are vulnerable.

You bring them to a foreign country, to a place where they don't know anybody and don't know the language, and if you're particularly an asshole you can confiscate their passport and hold them in bad conditions and they don't exactly have a lot of options.

I have learned about that happening in other places, too. Saudi Arabia, for example, with all that oil money flowing - hires third country  nationals to do all the grunt work they don't want to. 

And those workers are also vulnerable, and you can easily find similar stories.

At some point I got curious about some bigger picture things. Anti-terrorism, of course. But terrorists often make their money illegally, which got me looking into organized crime. And modern slavery wasn't too far of a stretch from that.

And so I learned of Brazilian charcoal makers. Of workers brought to a remote site to produce charcoal, except then they are told they owe money for the transportation. And of course for the food and sleeping places they require, and it's again in a remote place where they'd have to trek through jungle if they ran away, and it's a system ripe for exploitation and abuse.

Or brickmakers, I think in India, where the 'debt' that they are never paid well enough to clear, is passed on to their children. Children born into debt for something they never really benefited from, who are not taught math and don't really know enough to realize how predatory the system they're born into is. Even if they seem to be able to do well - for a time - there is always some crisis or need that drives them further into debt.

A health issue, one that requires medicine. Their employers/creditors might loan them money to get through the emergency, but if you try to leave or find something better suddenly that debt is called in. All at once.

It functions kind of like Company Towns, and the company grocery store, which has a bad reputation for very good reason.

This isn't just something that happens in remote places like Brazil or India, either. Nor is it always trans-national crime, like the story of the scam center in Indonesia. 

Workers in situations like this are, again, vulnerable. They might even wind up conscripted to fight for Russia (which, frankly, if Russia has to go to this length to 'win' they should just accept that they have lost. If you can't carry on your nation's fight with your own people then you're basically a zombie and should be put out of your misery). 

Even that isn't the whole of it, though. Sometimes the exact same systems appear much closer to home. Like the recent human trafficking case in our own state of Georgia. 

The reason I posted about this is because I saw a video talking about that, and it added another layer to what the politics of undocumented immigrants is all about.

Let's step back for a minute though. Because I wanted to talk about something else I've seen. I work in the tech industry, and there are a number of highly educated workers who immigrate here for jobs on one of those visas. H1 I think? Our immigration is complex and a real pain to navigate (almost like they're trying to make it difficult or something. Oh wait...)

And for workers like this, losing their sponsorship is a huge concern. If they want to stay in the US they have to have a sponsor, which means it's not very easy for them to just quite a company when the work environment is bad. They always have to have something else lined up, or they risk being deported.

It's one thing when we're talking about highly educated individuals who are well-payed and who work in urban environments.

What this video shows, though, is that that same dynamic is in play with documented agricultural workers. Ones who are often not well-educated, aren't paid as well, and are often working in remote rural areas. Like farms.

The part that was new to me, then, was that apparently undocumented immigrants had a much easier time of leaving crappy work environments. And that the push to hire them as H2 (? I can't remember the exact form, but it's a different type of work visa than the tech workers have) is essentially a way of locking them in and controlling them.

Like those immigrants with their passports confiscated, stuck in inhuman and abusive situations, with no way out.

That in some ways the war on undocumented individuals is also about trying to gain control.

And this is the part that really sticks in my craw.

Because while of course I, like others, prefer low grocery prices and cheap food, I don't want it built on such a horrible system.

I don't want it to be done by exploiting people and forcing them to work in abusive and crappy situations.

I get, sometimes, why people just want to tear the whole thing down. 

We should be valuing our people, paying them well, and if that means higher grocery prices then the people buying those groceries should be paid well enough to afford it.

And you all know what economists say will happen next. That doing so would just cause inflation, and prices would rise everywhere, and we'd all be stuck in basically the same situation.

But... that's only the case if businesses keep raising prices in order to keep their profits. 

If they're reporting a record year in earnings, then it's clear that some of that profit could have gone towards making a more sustainable system.

They just don't want to. (And then they wonder why socialism is appealing to so many people, or why 'eat the rich' is a slogan, or why there is such dissatisfaction and disgruntlement.)

I think we all know this, it's the tension underlying so many of our issues today. 

I just don't know how we can fix it when the people benefiting from it are using every resource at their disposal to prevent exactly that.

And so we stagnate. So we ossify. So the system breaks down. 

And we keep wondering what straw is going to break the camel's back.

 

Fascinating and Thought Provoking

https://www.humansontheloop.com/p/rent

Fits the Last Theme

Love is definitely missing here, and what perversion to twist the words of the Bible around like this. 

https://ewerickson.substack.com/p/the-midwestern-fuhrerbunker-driving

Sometimes... 

I think people are just looking for an excuse to hate. Even better with a side of moral justification.