How We Think Matters

Reason, Society & Culture

IBM used to give away desk name plates with the word THINK on them. Perhaps that’s what the title of this post should have been. Pausing to think is as much of a challenge today as how one thinks.

We are becoming increasingly scatter-brained. Business and Life at the Speed of Thought leaves no time to smell the roses unless of course the scent comes packaged as aromatherapy. “Ready, fire, aim,” we’re told. “If you snooze you lose.” “Just do it!”

When was the last time you had the patience to watch, much less actually watched a show on television that wasn’t comprised of five minute segments, where the people interviewed weren’t forced to rush their answers because of “hard breaks”? As an aside, when was the last time you saw commentators who actually presented meaningful analysis or had something truly substantive to say? (Answer: the only contemporary show I can think of is “Life, Liberty and Levin”.

FOMO. The Fear of Missing Out. It’s not just a millennial thing. I see countless supposed adults with their noses pinned to small screens studying the latest (within the last 2 minutes) pop-culture meme. Too many of us to block out the real world and live in a virtual one. FOMO causes shallow thinking. No thinking, really…just reaction to often heart-string-tugging snippets or easy-to-remember, catchy slogans and phrases.

Since information, whether true or false, right or wrong, good or bad is always at our fingertips through Google! (it’s a verb now), why bother to memorize, remember or LEARN anything? Fewer and fewer people actually concentrate on a single subject or topic. And thus, increasingly, we have an entire generation who are a mile wide and an inch deep. And fewer and fewer people actually think. Most just respond to stimuli.

What happened to “Less haste, less waste?” What happened to Critical Thinking?

Laziness. What the internet and exponentially growing databases of “stuff” has done is condition people to obtain information from sound bites, with no real depth, no substantive corroboration, no skepticism. If it sounds good, or “feels” right, it’s accepted.

Talk about mind control! The demagogues of the Third Reich would have loved this medium. An ability to influence/brainwash an entire population of dumbed-down, lazy people would have meant we might all be speaking German today! Oh, and by the way, the Russians and Chinese and the LEFT  have figured this out and are doing precisely what the Third Reich would have done…broadcasting propaganda with an efficiency and effectiveness that only “The Matrix” could improve on.

Think. Think! When so much garbage is constantly overloading our input circuits, at an ever-increasing rate, we have to force ourselves to stop and think. And it’s not just stopping to think. It’s compartmentalizing so as to shut out the noise. It’s not just turning off the ring tone. It’s turning off the vibration notification as well. It’s finding a quiet spot and moment amid the chaos to consider what’s important, what really needs to be done, not what the voice in your ear or the face on the screen are telling you to do.

And it’s being skeptical, increasingly. We used to say, “Don’t believe everything you read.” That became, “Don’t believe everything you hear.” Whether you liked him or not, everyone expected and relied on Walter Cronkite to give us Real News. Can you say the same of the 6PM news anchors today? Sure, the Bon Ami folks tried to convince you that their product would’t scratch your porcelain surfaces. But we all recognized that as advertising. Now, “infomercials” abound, and ALL the news is biased, colored, i.e. ‘fake’ in the sense that it never just reports what’s happening. We need to listen to or watch EVERYTHING with a major, not just healthy, dose of skepticism.

It’s sad that we can’t count on anyone or any organization to provide honest information anymore. But that’s the current reality. The only antidote is Critical Thinking – forcing ourselves to sort the wheat from the chaff, to make decisions and form opinions based not on what the firehose of noise directs at us, but on what reasoned judgment emerges from pause and reflection.

In short, don’t just think.

Ponder.

Our Word Matters

Morality, Society & Culture

My Greatest Generation father used to make a distinction between making a promise and giving one’s word. They oughtn’t be different, but he emphasized, “You should be able to count the number of times in your life you give your word on your two hands.”

His point was that giving your word was a sacred oath, to be reserved for the most important commitments of your life, not to be doled out capriciously.

Look at your spouse at the altar and say the words, “I do.” You’re giving your word.

Place your hand on a bible and vow to defend your country. You’re giving your word.

Promise you’ll take out the garbage. That’s rather different.

Giving your word is often expensive, hard and inconvenient, and almost always has a cost. Sometimes it’s a small cost…perhaps even an economic one. At the other end of the spectrum it can have the highest cost of all – the loss of one’s life.

But it’s fundamental to integrity. And integrity is fundamental for trust. It’s also fundamental to one’s reputation, trustworthiness, respectability, dignity, and above all, self-respect. And it’s also about Honor.

These are principles in short supply these days. The constant diet of hypocrisy, deflection, half-truths and outright lies the Left argues is necessary because it serves noble ends such as “Social Justice”, “Equality”, “Fairness”, saving the planet, “freedom” (basically, amoral license to do anything at any time for any reason), etc., leaves no room for the kind of integrity I’m talking about.

That’s the moral bankruptcy of not all but most of the Left, the majority but not all politicians, lawyers, pitchmen, spin doctors and con artists. And it’s, regrettably, reflected in much of what we see on television or hear on the radio.

Giving one’s word, telling the truth, and honoring commitments are fundamental to the fabric of a free society and to growth and prosperity of us as individuals, of our communities and our nation.

Yet I expect that if someone other than a clergyman were to try to explain the merits of giving and keeping one’s word (as I am here) he or she would be laughed at, perhaps even scorned.

“Everybody does it.” “Everyone lies.” “Promises are made to be broken.”

Not true. There are plenty, perhaps even a silent majority of people in this country, who’s word is still their bond. Who will at great cost and sacrifice say what they’ll do and do what they say.

They’re unheralded, unidentified, unacknowledged, but they’re there.

May they continue to honor their commitments, keep their word, and inspire others to do the same.

Keeping one’s word matters.

Economics & Investing

Economy, Finance and Investments

What seems like a hundred years ago as I was applying for college I had no real idea what I wanted to be when I grew up. My Greatest Generation/Product-of-the-Depression/Corporate Treasurer- father’s influence made my default “engineering” and I was better at math and science than other subjects so that sounded about right. Four years later I graduated with a B.A. in Economics.

Economics was so much easier than engineering. In math, physics, chemistry you had to get correct answers. Get one sign wrong in an algebra or calculus problem and you were screwed. There were no points for effort or using the right approach if you ended up with the wrong answer or the machine you were designing/building didn’t work (think Hubble Telescope)!

In Economics, you didn’t need to get the right answer. All you needed to do was understand the theories underlying the various models economists constantly tinker with and regurgitate them. It was all entirely theoretical and so long as you had a reasonable explanation for your argument, and it didn’t contradict what the professor had been preaching throughout the semester, you did well.  

Some economic concepts like the ‘Laws’ of Supply and Demand seem to explain individual, institutional, government and market behavior, but not always! For virtually the whole of economics hinges on two specific assumptions: the Rational Man Hypothesis and the Absence of the Outside Shock. As my boss at a multinational oil company drilled into me, “Assuming something just makes an ass out of u m e.” He was right.

Because there is no such thing as a Rational Man. Mr. Spock, after all, was half Vulcan, so he doesn’t qualify.  The truth is, people don’t make wholly rational decisions. Psychology (another imprecise subject far from engineering) obviously plays a huge roll in decision-making.

Similarly, there are frequently wholly unpredictable outside shocks that screw up the ability of economic models to forecast the future. Outside shocks range from tiny to massive. An unexpected labor report figure on one hand, can have outsized impact. A 9-11 on the other hand, messes up everything! 

Another thing that makes me question the wisdom of economists. The numbers on which the models and theory are built, the numbers that are supposed to support them, are in a word, crap! Wrapping data in fancy PowerPoint presentations or published reports along with charts and graphs and analysis doesn’t mean the data is any good.

I once had the job of collecting health care expenditure data and decided to go right to the source, what was then called HCFA or the Health Care Finance Administration. Interviewing one of their reported top statistical gatherer/analysts on the subject of the percent of Gross National Product being spent on healthcare, I took a detour to ask how they came up with the numbers.

“Do you interview all the hospitals, doctors’ offices, testing laboratories, clinics, etc. to obtain primary source data?”, I asked.

“Oh yes,” the analyst proudly replied, “We use rigorous sampling methods.”

“And how do you know the data the health care providers are giving you is accurate?” I queried.

“We have to rely on what they submit to us,” he explained without an ounce of skepticism.

“And you just take a sample, not a universal survey?” I pressed.

“Yes.” And he went on for five minutes talking about sampling methodologies. And then I asked,

“When did you last take a sample?”

“At the last census,” he said. (At that point it had been six years.)

“So how then do you know if your data for last year is accurate?”

“We apply inflation and other adjustments to the prior year’s data,” he explained.

In short, unverified source data from health care providers obtained not from all health care providers but from a “sampling” of health care providers six years earlier, adjusted each year by “factors” that came out of the head of one analyst or worse, a committee of analysts, resulted in a proclamation, say, “Health Care Expenditures last year represented 10.5% of Gross National Product” that was used in numerous scholarly journals, the Congressional Record, used over and over to justify arguments that expenditures were either too high or too low by self-serving politicians, and also used by investment analysts to justify portfolio and trading decisions.

Yes, it’s a bad as that. Oh, and by the way, there were six other authoritative studies/surveys done by reputable and lauded experts and their institutions that came up with numbers anywhere from 9.875% to 12%! Does that inspire confidence in the wisdom of economists and experts? If you still have doubt, look up the history of Long Term Capital Management. It was staffed with the smartest guys in the world, and crashed, losing BILLIONS!

Investing and Investment Management are activities that benefit mightily from appearances and the chaos.

If there’s one ‘rule’ that, in our opinion, has universal merit at all times and in all situations, it is the one made famous in the 1976 movie All the President’s Men: “Follow the Money.” It doesn’t just apply to corrupt politics. It applies to human behavior generally, and investment management in particular.

I’m not suggesting that altruism doesn’t exist, it does; just look to your church and your community for examples which thankfully, abound. Altruism just doesn’t exist in finance.

While the inability of economists to reliably explain or predict anything is good for economist job security because the further study and refinement of models must therefore continue, it gives rise to a lot of sound bites and platitudes, not to mention “expert” opinions that contradict one another.

So what does all this mean? Here are my conclusions:

There are no absolutes, no formulas, no algorithms, no laws, rules of thumb, or experts, statisticians or economists who can consistently lead you to correct investment decisions. The guy who made a fortune overnight is today a wizard. When he loses the fortune over the next couple of trades he fades into the background.

No-one cares more about your investments than you do. No matter how much they advertise objectivity, expertise and fiduciary responsibility, if you make money, they make money. If you lose money, they make money.

If you feel you must use an investment advisor of any kind, look beyond track record, slick brochures and the charts and graphs. The most important qualities to look for are transparency, honesty, and conservatism. Here’s a hint: if he or she speaks and behaves like a high-flying success, run away as fast as you can. If he or she looks, sounds like and behaves like Warren Buffett, take a closer look.

And finally, consider the cost of advice. It’s often deeply hidden. Insist on and make sure you understand how your investment advisor is compensated for helping you. The compensation of fee-only advisors is a lot easier to understand and evaluate than that of brokers and agents. But even then, is his or her advisory firm affiliated with a broker-dealer through which any investment trades are routed and on which fees are earned and either accumulated or distributed back to the advisor, albeit indirectly? That’s just one example of a conflict that, even if fully disclosed, eludes most clients.

In short… Be skeptical. Think critically. Trust but Verify. And don’t believe everything you read or hear from economists!

Caveat Emptor.

D-Day

History, Society & Culture

This day has great meaning for me. I moved to Paris, France in 1961 and lived there with my parents through the turbulent 60’s until I came home for college in 1970. During those years I had the opportunity to walk the beaches and streets of the towns that constituted the battlefields of the allied invasion on June 6, 1944.

I attended the commemoration in Normandy on June 6th, 1964, only twenty years after it occurred, when what happened there was still fresh in the minds of many. At that time there were still Frenchmen and Frenchwomen who remembered the Americans coming ashore in Normandy. My own French teacher at the American School of Paris was a member of the French Resistance.

As is true here, the attitude of those in the French countryside is vastly different from that of the large cities. I’ll never forget one trip we took to Normandy by car sometime in the mid 60’s. It was one of those foggy, grey days, and around lunchtime, we found ourselves somewhere on the backroads trying to find a place to have a quick bite to eat before heading to our next destination.

Fast food hardly existed in France in the 60’s generally, and in the French countryside, it was unheard of. Seeing a sign on a byway that simply said “restaurant” with an arrow pointing up a country lane towards what looked like a modest chateau on a hill, we shrugged and followed the unpaved lane to the entrance.

The restaurant didn’t appear to be open. There were no cars in the courtyard, no sign of activity. We were about to turn around to leave when suddenly an elderly gentleman came out the door and approached us, beckoning us to come in. In our broken French we explained we were looking for a spot to have lunch and he assured us that they would be happy to serve us. So we went in for a quick bite to eat.

Several hours later we left having had one of the most memorable meals and experiences of our lives. For we were welcomed into the proprietor’s home and ‘restaurant’ not just with open arms, but with a reverence and respect that I had never before encountered in France, just because we were American. In Paris “Ugly Americans” were treated with disdain and disrespect, an attitude I had thought was ubiquitous.

The husband and wife who owned the chateau and restaurant were there on D-Day. Paratroopers landed on their grounds the night of June 5th and subsequently, as the invasion moved inland off the beaches, they housed American, British and Canadian soldiers. Their home was a makeshift hospital at one point. They remembered vividly and clearly every facet of that first 72 hours of the battle as they recounted story after story with deep sincerity and moist eyes.

We had ordered the standard steak and fries fare for lunch. After all, we were looking for “fast food” and that was usually the menu item most quickly produced in most french cafés and restaruants. However, our hosts insisted on bringing us appetizers, a leek “potage” (thick soup), fresh-from-the-oven “pain de campagne” (hefty country bread), and, anxious to ensure we were happy with our meal, madam and monsieur spent so much time around our table we invited them to sit down and join us, which is when the stories about D-Day emerged.

I’ll never forget that after more than two hours of eating and talking and toasting, for our hosts offered numerous toasts to the Americans who fought for them in June 1944, , to America in general, to the Brits, to the allies, and even to us who were seated at their table…there must have been a dozen toasts and mini speeches, madame emerged from the kitchen with a fresh-made apple tart the size of a medium pizza which she had surreptitiously baked specially for us while we were eating our main meal. With ceremony she presented it as a gift, an emblem of her gratitude that we had deigned to visit their home and restaurant.

Never before had I witnessed such profound respect and admiration of America and Americans as I did that day. And notwithstanding the obnoxious teenager that I was, I couldn’t help but tingle with pride as these good residents of Normandy repeatedly thanked us, as if we had stormed the beaches or dropped from planes on their lawn ourselves.

So as I watched the ceremonies for the 75th anniversary of D-Day on tv today, I was reminded of the pride I have for our country and the force for good it has been since its founding. And I was reminded of my own experiences in Normandy, and of my profound gratitude and reverence for the sacrifices made by those who fought and died there 75 years ago.

May God bless their souls and notwithstanding its faults and many problems, may God forever bless the United States of America.

Projection

Politics, Reason, Society & Culture

Most definitions of psychological projection begin by stating that it’s a defense mechanism. Perhaps some unconsciously use it to protect themselves from looking in the mirror, but shrill politicians and their operatives use it consciously as an offensive mechanism.

It’s like little children on the playground. “You did it!” “No, I didn’t, YOU did it!” One can almost visualize the scene.

As with most behaviors, there are abundant examples of projection on both sides of the political aisle. However, as with most bad behavior, the Left is guilty of much greater frequency and abundance than the Right (see previous post entitled “It’s a Question of DEGREE!). And while the Right’s use of projection usually amounts to peccadilloes, on the Left its use is egregious!

Some examples:

  • The Left says the Right is bereft of morals while promoting promiscuity, infanticide, drug abuse, profanity, homosexuality, profligacy, illegal immigration, etc.
  • The Left condemns the use of fossil fuels and the companies that supply them while freely using their cars and planes.
  • The Left calls the Right fascist at the drop of a hat, while Antifa is precisely the opposite of its name.
  • The Left cries “racism” so frequently serious people don’t even bother to defend themselves against the labeling. It’s laughable that those who scream the accusation the loudest are themselves the poster children for racism.

I could go on and on. But if you’ve read this far, I’m preaching to the choir. You know precisely what I’m talking about and are probably as disgusted by the Leftist talking heads and rhetoric as I.

The question is, with a gullible, dumbed-down population receiving a constant dose of Leftist drivel, how do we combat the false impression created by their projection, and return to civility and equal time for traditional views?

Unfortunately, there is no high road to be taken. The megaphone the Internet and social media has placed in the hands of the Left has given them influence far beyond what they should have and certainly far more than they deserve.

The only answer is to fight fire with fire. That’s not to suggest the Right should engage in projection itself. It is to suggest that traditionalists cannot afford to let the “airwaves” be filled with Leftist nonsense and allow that nonsense to go unchallenged. We must use the megaphone ourselves, broadcasting what is right (Right) and counter punching and challenging every incidence of Leftist projection and other hypocritical behavior.

It’s ok to have opposing views. What’s not ok is to stand on the playground screaming projection epithets, accusations and patently false labels at others. Sometimes the playground bully is only silenced when the normally reticent recipient of that bullying runs up and punches the bully in the nose.

Right and Wrong Matter

Morality

One of the greatest casualties of the so-called ‘progressive’ movement and its antecedent, relativism, has been the obfuscation of right and wrong. These used to be obvious. Now, not so much.

Take violent protests for example. Hollywood and the leftist talking heads have created the impression that some violent protests are ok, even justified. Antifa, Occupy Wall Street, the riots at Berkley (choose from the long list)… all are at best excused and at worst condoned because they promote Leftist ends.

Despite the misreporting/outright lie that Far Right violence greatly surpasses Left, violent protest is wrong irrespective of whether it’s engaged in by either side. Yet, you wouldn’t know that by listening to many Hollywood heroes. Madonna, for example, flat out suggested she ought to blow up the White House. Kathy Griffin will forever be remembered for holding up a fake severed Trump head. Snoop Dog wrote a song entitled “Make America Crip Again” with a scene of Trump getting shot.

And the mainstream media and democrat leadership are, to any observer with eyes and ears, no better.

Roll back the clock to the Boomer generation and this kind of rhetoric and behavior was simply…wrong. Not today. It’s all relative, but paraphrasing George Orwell, “Some things are more relative than others.” If it allies with Leftist dogma, it’s right. If it allies with Right (.sic) dogma, it’s wrong, and once again, he who has the biggest megaphone is able to drown out the other side.

As if often the case, someone has said it better than I ever could. In a book titled 1938: A World Vanishing (London: Buchanan & Enright, 1982), Brian Talbot Cleeve contrasted Britain as it was entering World War II and the way it had become in the early 80’s.

“There really was, as nostalgia remembers, an air of greater contentment. Of a sturdier confidence in the future. [People] had a greater stock of moral certainties. Right and wrong were not matters for debate,” he wrote.

He went on to reflect, “To exchange a false morality for no morality at all is not necessarily an exchange for the better. And if, as a survivor of pre-war years, I were to offer an opinion as to one difference between then and now that is for the worse, I would have to choose morality. . . . the morality of believing that there are real and objective standards of behavior, that there are such things as virtues, and such things as vices; that certain things are unarguably good, and others unarguably bad.”

It’s often been noted that democracy carries within itself the seeds of its own destruction. The argument, with which I concur, is that what has happened today is the promotion of democratic ideas beyond reason.

“In our modern eagerness to be tolerant, we have come to tolerate things which no society can tolerate and remain healthy. In our understandable anxiety not to set ourselves up as judges, we have come to believe that all judgements are wrong. In our revulsion against hypocrisy and false morality we have abandoned morality itself. And with modest hesitations but firm convictions I submit that this has not made us happier, but much unhappier. We are like men at sea without a compass.”

And what was evident to Cleeve in 1982 is even more evident today.

How can we survive as a civilization if even right and wrong are confused and unclear? I believe the answer is, “We can’t, unless some outside shock brings us all down to earth again, causing us to focus on the basics.”

Right and wrong matter.

God Matters

Religion, Society & Culture

First, if you don’t believe in God or a Supreme Being, I’m not going to convince you there is one. But if you don’t, I urge you to go the country on a cloudless, moonless and no-light-pollution night and look up at the sky. Think of what you learned about probability and try to imagine what the probability is that we’re alone in the universe. To me it’s preposterous to suggest that there ISN’T a God!

God matters because He and His teachings are the basis for the standards by which we need to measure and conduct our lives – the basics of right and wrong, of good and evil, of truth and falsehood. The specifics of whether he is the Jewish God, or Catholic God, or Mormon God, or Muslim God is less relevant if one considers that virtually all religions and dogma subscribe to the fundamentals we know as the Ten Commandments. Without standards, there is only chaos, and without God, there are no standards.

God also matters because we need humility. Without humility, arrogance and the temptation to lord over others takes hold.  With all our advances, and with our advances coming at an increasing rate, it’s easy to see why we think we’re pretty special. It’s led to many people just assuming we don’t need God. And, since the array of circumstances we face vary widely, it’s tempting to think we’re better than someone who is less fortunate or who lives in less favorable circumstances than we. We need God to remind us that we’re really all just specs of dust and mustn’t get too big for our britches.

God matters because we need fellowship. Worshipping a Supreme Being with others who believe as we do gives us a sense of belonging that transcends ethnicity, politics, economic circumstances and all our other differences. We simply don’t do well by ourselves, as much as we’d sometimes like to think we do. Gathering together to acknowledge, pay homage to and invoke the blessings of God brings us together and helps us smooth those differences out.

God matters because we need to understand gratitude. Not to suggest for a second that I agree with anything Obama ever said, but borrowing on his phrase “You didn’t build that,” if you have success, comforts, joy, love, uplifting experiences and peace in your life, “you didn’t build that.” God had a hand in helping you. A dramatic sunset, a spectacular night sky…God (and most certainly not the government as Obama was suggesting) built those, not us. We need to be grateful.

Finally, God matters because there exist laws in the universe that we simply don’t understand yet. Notwithstanding the brilliant minds of scientists and philosophers, we still can’t say what happened BEFORE the Big Bang. And we still can’t comprehend an endless, infinite universe. Believing and trusting that there is a Being out there who knows more than we do and who has, who can, and who in the future can communicate His knowledge and expose new truth to us is not only comforting, but exciting. We should continuously try to get to know Him.

We need to look up at those stars from time to time and remember how small we really are…how insignificant compared to the vastness and power of an infinite universe and return to thinking about how we’re ALL related and need to help one another.

Today we know so much more than our grandparents new. And tomorrow, our grandchildren will know so much more than we do. Gaining knowledge with the help of a God who can reveal things to us and give us guidance as we progress…matters.

Truth Matters

Reason, Society & Culture

In 2016 the Oxford English Dictionary’s “Word of the Year” was post-truth, suggesting that truth is dead, and objective facts no longer have any meaning. Really? Have we become so poisoned with relativism that standards no longer exist and the individual is the sole arbiter of right and wrong, fact and fiction, truth or lies and, by way of conclusion, “anything goes?”

“What is truth?” is one of the central questions of philosophy. Is Corey Booker correct to suggest that we must all live “our truth”? Plato, Aristotle, Socrates and Corey Booker can debate the answer. Here’s one truth, however, that should but probably won’t be universally accepted. It is that there is a difference between truth and belief.

What is or should be of great concern is how falsehood, what a business school course once called “creative misrepresentation” and fiction are used to persuade or judge everyday matters. And of paramount concern is how lies have been weaponized so as to cause belief to be to pushed and accepted as truth. By way of example, that the Benghazi disaster was the result of an anti-muslim video was proclaimed so loudly and assertively, it brainwashed many.

It’s also true that not everything is black or white. Grey is the predominant color in debate. But has the questioning of norms and rules gone so far overboard that it attacks the very idea of having any rules at all as Victor Davis Hanson suggested in his 2014 essay “The Poison of Postmodern Lying“? As he so starkly points out, “Without notions of objective truth, there can never be lies, just competing narratives and discourses. Stories that supposedly serve the noble majority are true; those that supposedly don’t become lies — the facts are irrelevant.”

So it seems nowadays that truth is in the hands of he or she who has the bigger megaphone, or who can more cleverly devise a phrase or seven second soundbite that tugs at a heartstring or “sounds right.”

The antidote?

Critical Thinking…something that is sorely lacking in our population today. Or, how about, at least, healthy skepticism?

Not all news is fake news, but a lot of it consists of selective truth, or facts taken out of context. Not all advertising is nonsense, though healthy skepticism should cause us to consider whether ground-up peach pits will cure cancer, or whether an actress’s proclamation that vaccinations cause autism should be accepted as truth.

If you hear a talking head say, “Let me be clear,” or “Make no mistake”, or “The truth of the matter is”, or, my favorite…”It goes without saying,” immediately turn on your skeptic’s filter.

Separating fact from fiction, truth from lies, involves work. It is the work of seeking out, validating and judging evidence. In an era of information overload, (I like the analogy of trying to take a drink from a firehose), sounding plausible or looking, in the case of websites or television, as if it’s plausible does not mean it’s true. We used to say, “Don’t believe everything your read.” Now we have to add “hear” and “see” to the list. Today you can’t even believe your own eyes thanks to the wonders of PhotoShop.

Besides applying the principle of critical thinking we can resolve to tell the truth ourselves, teach our children and grandchildren the difference between truth and a lie (remember George Washington and the cherry tree?) and remind ourselves not to be swayed by the herd, by popular opinion, by peer pressure and by what tugs at the heart while bypassing our brains.

The truth matters.

Stuff That Matters

Economy, Entertainment, Family, Finance and Investments, General, Health Care, Politics, Society & Culture

With a salute and due credit to Charles Krauthammer (1950-2018) whose book Things that Matter (New York: Crown Publishing, 2013 available from Amazon here) was the capstone of his exemplary life and the inspiration of this and future related posts, I’ve begun my own list.

New items come to mind daily so it is a work in progress. They’re in no particular order, although Truth, God and Right would be right up there at the top of any ordered list. From time to time I’m going to address these topics in more detail but to get started, here’s a first stab.

Truth matters.

God matters.

Right and Wrong Matter.

Our word matters.

How we think matters.

People matter.

What we teach our children matters.

What we do as a family matters.

Helping others matters.

Being friendly matters.

Courtesy matters.

Being considerate matters.

Our reputation matters.

Loyalty matters.

Being kind to animals matters.

Conservation matters.

Courage matters.

Catching someone doing something right matters.

Thrift matters.

Obeying/Respecting our parents matters.

Respecting our elders matters.

Respecting authority matters.

Saying what we mean and meaning what we say matters.

Words matter. What we say and how we say it matters.

Listening matters.

Perseverance and determination matter.

The choices we make matter.

Temperance matters.

Anticipation and thinking ahead matters.

Knowing ourselves matters.

Our health matters.

Controlling ourselves matters.

Deferred gratification matters.

Grooming matters.

Situational awareness matters.

Whom we choose as friends matters.

What we read matters.

What we watch on television matters.

What we tweet/post/email matters.

What we eat matters.

Our morning routine matters.

How we spend our non-working time matters.

Hard work matters.

Honoring our spouses matters.

Standing up for what we believe in matters.

How we treat those above us and how we treat those below us matters.

What we value and how we spend our money matters.

Where we live matters.

What we don’t say matters.

Please send us your additions to this list by email to admin@grumpsreport.com !

How to Recover from a Stall (or Why Sometimes Letting Go and Doing Nothing is Best)

Economy, Politics, Society & Culture

(Don’t try this at home!) Flying a small plane like a Cessna 172 Skyhawk is a hell of a lot safer than a 737 Max. Why? For a lot of reasons, but one is that for every 1000 feet of altitude the plane will glide 3 miles without the engine running! But there’s a another, more topically current reason…

A Skyhawk properly trimmed for straight and level flight (that means all the controls in the right position) wants to stay straight and level.

Let’s say a flock of birds appears in front of you and you pull up suddenly and accidentally stall the plane. Basically, that means that it starts to fall out of the sky. The nose points straight down and you’re in a dive headed for a rather abrupt landing.

With you and the nose looking straight down at the ground rushing up, your immediate reflex is to pull back on the yoke (or stick) to bring that aircraft nose back up. Unfortunately, if the plane is in a stall, pulling with all your might will do precisely nothing.

In fact, pilots are trained to do the exact opposite of what everything is screaming they should do. We force ourselves to push forward on the stick, restoring correct air flow over the wings and the horizontal stabilizer, and then pull out of the dive.

For sake of argument, let’s say you just can’t bring yourself to push forward when every part of your anatomy is screaming pull back, pull up? You know what? If you LET GO of all the controls, chances are the plane will right itself on its own and all by itself seeking to return to straight and level flight.

What does this have to do with anything? Often, when the economy is in free fall, legislators keep trying to pull back on the stick, to DO SOMETHING, when, in fact, were they to just let go, the economy would most likely right itself!

At another level, I’m talking about about control vs. freedom. The LEFT wants to control everything. For them, in their warped world view, if they have control over the sources of production as well as production itself it can be equitably divvied up among everyone. History proves that this communist/marxist/socialist approach to society results in the worst possible outcome (think Venezuela, North Korea, the U.S.S.R.).

In fact, letting go of the stick, i.e. giving more freedom to individuals, the Traditionalist approach to organizing society, results in growth and prosperity for EVERYONE.  One of the great truisms is that ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’.

Reagan was dead on right…government is not the solution. Government is the PROBLEM! If we can just figure out a way to get government’s hands off the stick, the plane will right itself.

But then why would we need politicians?

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