Bob's Blog

Austin Bay writes at Observer that the overriding issue in this campaign is honesty.

...This month’s fascinating pro-honesty sequence of events began on September 7, when The Washington Post and New York Times panicked as the sky fell on their world. While moderating an NBC-sponsored forum focusing on defense issues, Matt Lauer made the mistake of asking Hillary about her mishandling of classified national security information (the Media Privilege term is “email scandal”) and her record for obsessive lying (what Democratic operatives with by-lines call “the trust issue”).

Read the Time.com transcript. Lauer asked her if her mishandling of classified information wasn’t more than a mistake, but a display of very bad judgment—judgment so awful as to disqualify her from serving as commander-in-chief.

Totally fair question, and one the press should have asked in March 2015 when we learned she was using her own private communication system that was beyond the reach of the Freedom of Information Act.

Washington Post and New York Times editorials lynched Lauer. Suddenly The Today Show co-anchor was yesterday. For seeking to elicit truth from the powerful—and in Hillary’s case, a presidential candidate who avoided press conferences for almost ten months—Matt was treated as a treasonous deplorable, a pariah on par with Rush Limbaugh.

Lauer violated Media Privilege protocol. According to the rules of Media Privilege, presidential debate moderators are supposed to Go Full George “War On Women” Stephanopoulos and Complicity Yours Candy Crowley, making certain the Democrat shines and the Republican gets hammered.

...Matt Lauer’s September 7 questions cut to the real core of the 2016 election. The decisive element in every judgment Hillary makes is how it affects her, personally and politically—not how it might help or harm America. Like William Safire said in 1996, Hillary is a congenital liar. She cannot be trusted with the power of the presidency. To say otherwise is to Wage War On Honesty.

Read much more here.

What the two candidates have in common is that both tell lies of self-aggrandizement. Donald Trump is staggeringly boastful while Hillary loves to buff her resume, whether she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary (who gained fame after she was born) or landed under sniper fire in Bosnia (when all was peaceful at the airport).

...Where Hillary beats Trump, though, is that she tells not just self-aggrandizing lies but consequential lies. Hillary hid Watergate information in the 1970s and lied about it. Hillary committed financial fraud in the 1980s and lied about it. Hillary hid legal documents in the 1980s and lied about it. Hillary knew all about Bill’s trouser problem and forthrightly lied to America about it throughout the 1990s. Hillary engaged in Travelgate in the 1990s and lied about it.

Today, no one can keep up with the lies Hillary has told about her email system and the national security documents she exposed to enemies. Hillary also lied about what happened in Benghazi and then lied about her lies.

Looked at this way, it’s apparent that Hillary’s are substantive lies that go to national security, national policy, fraud, criminal law, etc. They are meaningful lies. They’re not just vain lies that say, “Aren’t I wonderful?” Instead, they are lies that change national policy, get people killed, defraud people, and enable Hillary and those around her to avoid prosecution for actual crimes.

...I’ll point out that Hillary too is on every side of every issue except for three, to which she’s remained true her entire career: She wants to destroy the Second Amendment; she wants unlimited abortion; and she believes that, no matter the question, government is the answer.

Read more here.

Seth Godin writes,

My friend Lisa is fascinated by the self-cleaning oven. In principle, it takes care of itself, an ongoing cycle of productivity. One button gets it dirty, then another button cleans it right up. Even better, consider the camera that cleans its mirror every time it's turned on.

Relationships, processes, interactions--these can be self cleaning too, if we build them that way.

Instead of waiting for things to degrade or even to break, we build in a cycle of honesty, a tradition of check-ins. Instead of a strategy that includes [and then an emergency happens/and then a miracle happens] as a key steps, we have a process in which growth fuels more growth, where satisfaction leads to more satisfaction.

The interstate highway system will continue to degrade until it falls apart, because infrastructure funding and repair wasn't built into it from the start. On the other hand, a company that earmarks a big part of its sales commissions and profits to ongoing customer support probably won't have to overspend when a crisis hits.

Self-cleaning systems don't careen until they hit a crisis point, because they're designed from the start to be in sync, the process itself avoids the crisis.

It's neither obvious nor easy to build a system that's self cleaning. It requires addressing problems before they show up, and putting in place the (apparently distracting and expensive) cycles necessary to keep them from showing up in the first place.

Researchers did a test of honesty in major cities around the world based on lost wallets.

Sixteen world cities, times twelve wallets. Each wallet containing the equivalent of $50 in local currency, some business cards and family photos, and a mobile phone number. How many wallets are returned?

...First, the good news: none of the cities surveyed brought shame on itself by returning none of the wallets. The bad news: globally, your chances or getting your wallet back are less than half. Of the grand total of 192 wallets sprinkled across malls, parks and sidewalks in those 16 cities, only 90 were returned - not more than 47%.



Thanks to Ace of Spades