Pretzel Logic

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The difference between a stumbling block and a stepping stone is how it is used

African Proverb

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Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.

African Proverb

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“It is just the little difference between the good and the best that makes the difference between the artist and the artisan. It is just the little touches after the average man would quit that makes the master's fame.”                                                             - Orison Swett Marden

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"The cover of the latest issue of New York magazine offers a powerful glimpse of Manhattan during Hurricane Sandy." - HuffPost

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on reflecting

"To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection" - Henri Poincaré

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Everything on the earth has a purpose, every disease an herb to cure it, and every person a mission. This is the Indian theory of existence. - Mourning Dove

Mourning Dove (Christine Quintasket)

Mourning Dove was the literary name chosen by Christine (or Christal) Quintasket, an Okanogan from the Colville Reservation of eastern Washington. She is credited with one of the earliest novels, Cogewea, the Half-Blood, (1927) to be written by an American Indian woman. At the urging of her editor and supporter, Lucullus V. McWhorter, she also collected a group of traditional Okanogan stories, eventually published as Coyote Stories(1933). Her personal reminiscences were published in 1990 under the title, Mourning Dove, A Salishan Autobiography, fifty-four years after her death in 1936.

Mourning Dove's Indian name was Humishuma. She was born in Idaho, probably in 1888, of an Okanogan father, Joseph Quintasket, and a Colville mother, Lucy Stukin.

Credit: Carol Miller is an Associate Professor in the Program in American Studies and the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota.

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“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” - H. L. Mencken

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No Pie for you!

In their article "When It Comes to Wealth Creation, There Is No Pie" Yaron Brooks and Don Watkins argue that:

Wealth is created by, and morally belongs to the individual creator. 

While I generally agree with the above, I reject the inherent absolutism central to that argument:

Suppose Robinson Crusoe is tired of trying to scoop up fish with his hands and figures out how to turn a tree branch into a spear, increasing his daily catch tenfold. Can Friday, who never thought to make a spear, properly complain that Crusoe has received an “unfair distribution” of fish?

Whatever the complications and intricacies involved, the basic issue is the same whether we’re talking about a remote island or a complex division of labor economy like America’s: a man uses his mind and his existing property (i.e., previously created wealth) to bring new wealth into existence. He doesn’t gobble down an already-baked pie–he produces.

Richard Branson, for instance, got his start selling record albums out of the back of his car. The albums? They were his property. The money he made by selling them? His property. Branson used that money to implement his ideas for making records cheaper, phones more user-friendly, air travel less annoying. He didn’t grab a bigger piece of some socially produced pie any more than Crusoe did: he brought new wealth into existence.

Is it any fairer to make them surrender their wealth to us than to make Crusoe surrender his wealth to Friday?

The answer to that question is a resounding - no! Of course they should'nt have to surrender their wealth to society, yet we cannot ignore the fact that Crusoe wouldn't have been able to make a spear from a tree branch had Friday burned down the tree to make charcoal (who owns and/or controls the tree?).

Likewise, Richard Branson would not have been able to sell albums out of the trunk of his car to phantoms in the middle of nowhere. 

Whatever society Branson lived in, its laws, infrastructure, and all the trappings of that society made possible Branson's wealth creation. Yes, he ad to apply his own effort and creativity, but doesn't negate the unearned benefits accrued to him by default as a result of being born into that society. Hernando De Soto aptly explains this in his book "The Mystery of Capital" how invisible network of laws can turn dead assets into liquid capital, or ideas into products into wealth. 

In the West, standardized laws allow us to mortgage a house to raise money for a new venture, permit the worth of a company to be broken up into so many publicly tradable stocks, and make it possible to govern and appraise property with agreed-upon rules that hold across neighborhoods, towns, or regions.  

Indeed! Even on Crusoe's island, the tacit expectation that his shipwrecked companion, Friday, would heed to certain societal rules, is critical to any form of wealth creation, let alone the protection and enjoyment of such wealth (Crusoe may have the reasonable expectation that Friday would not take away his spear by force.  Or that neither of them would indulge in behavior that devalues the commons). 

While I'm all in favor of generating as much wealth as possible and keeping as much of the fruits of one's labor, what cannot be ignored is that whatever our individual accomplishments, we ride the coattails of something far beyond our individual efforts and abilities. The objectivist is misguided in implying that one doesn't owe anything to society. Were that not the case, Somalia would have been the objectivists' paradise - no government, no laws, no taxation.

Yet, Somalia highlights the ultimate failure of objectivism to take into account the benefits accrued to any individual living in a free society - personal freedom secured through impartial law and order, the right to free speech, to elect your government, and above all the right to your pursuit of happiness. And we ensure these benefits through a variety of means, both by obligation (taxation), and by choice (philanthropy).  

To ensure the continued viability of the very society that underwrites our success is the quintessential display of enlightened self-interest. 

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“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. ” - Alvin Toffler

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Zipcar sweetens the deal

Ah, the convenience of urban living just went up a notch courtesy of ZipCar - you can add this to the many benefits and qualities that makes ZipCar irresistible to customers of many stripes. If you happen to live in the Boston area where late night public transportation practically crawls to a halt (the T service shuts down by 2:00 am), you could find your night life severely constricted.

Fret no more, 'cos ZipCar has your back with their super cheap, after-midnight rentals. For as little as $4.88 an hour, gas and insurance included, and with a little planning, you get the convenience of a car when you need it without the hassle of owning one. 

Imagine the possibilities the other side of midnight - go grocery shopping with little or no hassle, attend a Rick Perry prayer meeting, or settle for a booty call. Speaking of booty calls, finally a plausible excuse for an age old dilemma... "honey I'd love to stay the night, but I've got to drop off the ZipCar".

I mean, you simply can't beat this kind of value.

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Stream, it knows where to flow. - African Proverb

From the Collection of 104 Kuria Proverbs, collected by Emmanuel P. Chacha, Research Committee, Maryknoll Language School, P.O. Box 298, Musoma, Tanzania. Meanings/Interpretations/Inferences: Getting the fundamentals right ensures desired outcomes. Business: hire smart people and leave them alone. Parenting: well-raised children make good choices on their own.

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whither a knowledge sharing culture

John Moore on how the government's post-9/11 approach to KM helps keep the US attack free: 

Accordingly, knowledge management practices expanded to accommodate more ways to aggregate and share critical information. From an architectural point of view, installations are less monolithic. Single knowledge repositories are giving way to multiple databases. Agencies may wield a number of collaboration tools to curate intelligence insights as opposed to a single, specifically designated knowledge management system.

The departure from monolithic installations is also evident in the system-of-systems nature of post-9/11 knowledge management. A deployment now might include portals, collaboration products, unified communications systems and social media tools. Because many agencies have some or all of those elements already in place, the focus of knowledge management shifts from acquiring a purpose-built system to harnessing existing resources.

“Everyone has a big ‘aha!’ moment when they realize they have all the pieces but just need to put them together in a different way,” said Holm, who listed portals, collaboration capabilities and search among the key elements of knowledge management.

Technology is but one aspect of any KM initiative, the other being a knowledge sharing culture. The biggest impediment to many KM initiatives is knowledge hoarding within an organization (employees might hoard knowledge as a key to their own job security and/or advancement). Was knowledge hoarding a problem, and how was that resolved? Unfortunately, the article does not delve deeper into that aspect.

In organizations where knowledge hoarding is pervasive, KM initiatives tend to be dead on arrival, with such 'aha' moments never materializing even as useful knowledge rots away in 'protected' territorial silos. How then do you engender a knowledge sharing culture? It remains to be seen whether a knowledge sharing culture can be mandated into existence.

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CHIMAMANDA ADICHIE: THE DANGER OF A SINGLE STORY

The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story. Show a people as one thing, and only one thing, and that is what they become. 

Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.

Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African states, and not the colonial creation of the African states, and you have an entirely different story.

The consequence of a single story is this, that it robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we're similar.

Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity. 

Stories matter, many stories matter.

When we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.

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"Little palm tree, stop crying, your child is the tall palm tree." - African Proverb

Three Thousand Six Hundred Ghanaian Proverbs by J.G. Christaller, Copyright © 1990 Edwin Mellen Press. Meanings/Intepretations/Inferences: You're worth more than you think. Don't be too hard on yourself, your accomplishments may extend beyond the obvious.