Kellyanne Conway: Press Secretary Sean Spicer Gave 'Alternative Facts' |...

Two Truths and an Alternative Fact: Kellyanne Conway, Shake Shack

Alternate Realities

Kellyanne Conway - SNL

Vladimir Putin Cold Open - SNL

Third record-breaking hot year in a row. Still think climate change's not real?

 In February 2015, Senator James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma), senior member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, hefted a snowball on the Senate floor to underscore his denial that climate change was nothing more than a hoax. Inhofe’s circus act was part of a rambling speech trying to rebut, among other things, scientific evidence that 2014 was the warmest year on record due to climate change. Inhofe, who along with his grandchildren built an igloo near the Capitol during a record snowstorm in 2010, is noted for claiming that global warming was ‘the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.’

At the time of Inhofe’s stunt, and despite Washington’s cold weather, January 2015 had been one of the warmest January’s on record.

Now, here we are in mid-January 2017. If Inhofe wants to pull his snowball stunt this month, he’s out of luck. At 5:30 pm on January 19, 2017, the thermometer at my house in suburban Maryland, just outside DC reads 48 degrees Fahrenheit. We’ve even had a couple of days when it was near 60, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced that 2016 was the hottest year on record since such we began keeping records in 1880. In fact, this marks the third year in a row of the hottest temperatures on record, and NOAA’s findings have been supported by NASA, the World Meteorological Organization, the British meteorological office, and other monitoring groups.

Now, don’t break out the sunblock just yet. Even though the U.S. northeast is warming faster than other regions of the country, it hasn’t yet reached the point where you can sun bathe year round. But, scientists see a clear warming trend since the late 20^th century, and have determined that most of it’s due to heat-trapping gasses from the burning of fossil fuels. The average amount of ice in the Arctic Ocean, for instance, reached a record low in 2016.

Only the blind or the incredibly stupid could fail to see that the climate has changed. I recall in 1968, the first time I went to Southeast Asia, you could almost set your watch by the Monsoon rains. When I returned to the region in 2002, you could no longer predict when, or if, it would rain during Monsoon season.

What worries me, and should worry everyone, is that too many of the people in positions to do something about climate change before it’s too late, are too political, too greedy, or too stupid to take the necessary actions to forestall it. They’d rather say it’s a hoax created by the Chinese, or that it’s just a hoax, and the presence of the occasional snowfall proves their view. One has to wonder what they’ll say when we all wake up one day and discover that we should have done something the day before.

Somehow, ‘oops’ just won’t be enough. 

My America - it's already great, so don't demean it

After the terrible rhetoric of the 2016 presidential campaign, and with the possibility of some really exclusionary and divisive words and actions over the next four years, I think it appropriate that all Americans stop and remember that this country is, in fact, a country of immigrants--that, the Founding Fathers were immigrants or sons of immigrants--and that it is this diversity that makes us great. We don't need to make America great again, we have to ensure that it remains the great nation that it was intended to be.

Secretary Kerry Delivers Remarks at the U.S. Diplomacy Center Pavilion

After watching this, your brain will not be the same | Lara Boyd | TEDxV...

Same car, different driver - same terrible route!

As an American, I'm conditioned to wish things will turn out for the best after an election, even when my preferred candidate doesn't win. Having watched last year's campaign, and now, watching the Trump Administration try to put saddles on bucking broncos, all the while making some really disturbing noises, I have to wonder. Do I wish this bunch well? I do want my country to prosper--I want everyone in my country to have peace and prosperity, not just a select few. But, I don't want that prosperity to be gained by short-sighted, short-term strategies that will come back in a not-so-distant future to bite us in the butt.

For several years now, I've watched certain Republicans (let's be blunt, mainly, but not solely, the Tea Party activists) pushing the GOP in the direction of exclusiveness, us vs. them, destruction, creating an America that would no longer be welcoming to people like me, an America that seems hellbent on giving the rest of the world the finger and pulling back into its shell of racial, religious, sanctimonious isolation.

Now the Republican ship (car, bus, train, some form of transportation - oh, hell, let's say car because of my illustration) has a new captain/driver. Just when I thought they'd found the worst possible leadership, they went and outdid themselves. Now, they have a . . . not sure what's the appropriate label here . . . wild driver?? at the wheel. Now, they're not just weaving back and forth all over the road, they're ignoring the road entirely.

The problem if they crash and burn is, we're in the path of that careening vehicle, and could very well become collateral damage.

Here's my graphic view of the current situation:

The Temptations - Ball of Confusion

Trump voters after the election

Trump wants to use taxes to build his wall (he'll make Mexico pay later), and he's stocked his cabinet with mega-millionaires who owe more to Wall Street than to Main Street. The poor schmucks who fell for his promises to make things great for them will, if the weeks leading up to his inauguration are any indication, have a long, long wait.

When It Comes to Trump’s Foreign Policy, Loyalty Takes Precedence over Experience

When It Comes to Trump’s Foreign Policy, Loyalty Takes Precedence over Experience

The Daily Show with Trevor Noah - A farewell address from President Obama's anger translator

The Daily Show with Trevor Noah
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This Year in Unnecessary Censorship

Old Mac Donald (Learn The Words)

No New Year's Resolutions for me - I'm just following my grandmother's advice

My grandmother and her first husband some time
in the early 1900s

 It is now officially 2017 and 2016 is just sad history. Many people are already failing to live up to the resolutions they made two days ago. I, for one, don’t make resolutions. I follow the rules set by my grandmother, who was mainly responsible for raising me from around the time I turned twelve; her philosophy was that if you had to make resolutions to do better at the end of the year, it meant that you’d been slacking off for a whole year, and that you’d  likely slack off again, resolutions or not, so it would be better to try and live right all the time, and not have to worry about making amends at the end of the year.

As a gag once, I used one of those computerized sign generators found online to make a little poster of Bart Simpson writing on a chalkboard, “I am what my grandmother made me.”  This was a parody of the central thesis of my first published book, a short essay on leadership entitled, Things I Learned from My Grandmother about Leadership and Life.”

Subsequently had occasion to reflect on that sentence (I am what my grandmother made me) and I came to the conclusion that what I meant originally as a joke has a larger truth imbedded within it.  Furthermore, I realized that for leaders, this is a truth that must be fully grasped.  As we mature, we are shaped by our education and experience, but the basic core of who we are has already been formed by those who guided and mentored us in our formative years.  For many of those of my generation that was largely grandmothers and other older relatives who were too old to work in the fields; and to whom fell the responsibility of “taking care of the young-uns.”

Places like West Point or the Harvard School of Business might teach us the sophisticated techniques for gaining the trust of our followers, but the basic traits of honesty and integrity either will or will not have been engraved into our behavior at the knees of that older relative before we hit our mid-teens.  Lacking that basic honesty and integrity learned from them, the techniques you learn later in life become merely tools of manipulation and exploitation.

Self-confidence is enhanced by increased knowledge and experience.  But, a true belief in yourself and your ability to succeed will have been learned from a caregiver who treated you with respect and taught you that you were a person of worth; who taught you to think highly of yourself—but, hopefully, not too highly.

This is not to say that people are incapable of change.  Far from it, but, without understanding the influences that have shaped a person during the formative years of childhood, change is more difficult. It is especially difficult, as a leader, to change people who have had the wrong values engrained from childhood.

Most importantly, though, if you’re to understand what motivates you as a leader, it helps to consider your upbringing.  You might be surprised to learn that your habits and preferences in leadership or in life in general, stem from what you learned as a child.  Once you have that knowledge about where you came from, you can more clearly see where you are, and plan intelligently and effectively for where you want to be.

So, instead of making resolutions, I make a call to action: decide what you want to be, and then be that person all year long. You’ll slip now and then, but you’re only human, and to err is human. When you do slip, pick yourself up, admit your mistake, and get back on track. That way, come the end of 2017, you won’t need to make resolutions.

It’s just that simple. That’s what my grandmother taught me.