Useful Education, Information, Communications

The worst thing about reading the newspapers and especially the editorials, is that it is an insult to most intelligent people -- and so THAT segment of their readership is the first to migrate on to “smart” media -- which of course, dooms the prospects for any recovery and revitalization of an older culture and institutional hierarchy.

The secret to competition is to recruit the talent to your side -- and not to demand that nobody can be better than their present top guys. That’s why organizations fail; they suffocate themselves by shutting themselves off from the talent that would be their salvation -- circle their wagons, and roll themselves into fetal positions to deny the impending realities. They always hire down, rather than up; nobody can be smarter than their immediate supervisor.

Meanwhile, excellent leaders and growing movements are not afraid to recruit competent people to their cause -- as equals rather subordinates.

Now the Mayor is warning that if we build the rail transit system, it will cost untold billions -- but if we don’t build the rail transit system, it will cost almost as much. That would be the “do-nothing” plan they already have in the works.

Maybe they could spend those billions educating and informing the people to ride the present bus system (mass transit) and to car/van pool, along with developing a state-of-the-art information/communications network that will facilitate that orientation and purpose. Obviously, better education, information and communications are key to the better societies of the future -- and not more underutilized and misused physical plant.

That is a very 20th century vision of what was needed -- more physical plant, more capacity -- rather than how it is used.

A second theme in today’s editorials is the Democrats resurrection of the gas cap distraction from the realization that gas prices go down when people use less -- and not when government forces down prices so irresponsible consumers can burn all they want. These are the kinds of readers that only the newspapers have now -- so that their editors can still crow that they are the smartest people in town; they shrink the intelligence pool so that no credible ideas can ever see the light of day.

That’s why it is imperative to build a vastly superior modern education/information/communications infrastructure rather than throwing more money at perpetuating these inefficient hierarchies that cannot solve the problems because they don’t have these integrated purpose and approach. Each narrow self-interest undermines all the others -- to achieve their own supremacy and dominance, which is even a 19th century mentality and outlook.

A fragmented, partial, partisan advocacy is not going to bring about the kind of society that serves all, as equals, co-creating the reality -- rather than just being forced to accept the ultimatums of the powers that be who wish to remain so until they die.