Archives for June 2012

Buckminster Fuller was an architect, engineer, writer, inventor and futurist, but he was also a rebel who was kicked out of Harvard twice and never finished there. After he was admitted for the second time, he was expelled for “irresponsibility and lack of interest.” He had no interest in the existing systems and practices he found. He was only interested in inventing the future — in bringing to life the vision he saw in his own mind.

Fuller saw different ways of designing and engineering buildings, among other things. He didn’t try to convince architects and engineers that their conventional designs were wrong. He didn’t care about fighting them. He simply went about the work of inventing what he saw in his mind’s eye. He was very conscious of this approach.

“You never change something by fighting the existing reality,” Fuller said. “To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

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Ronald Reagan supposedly gave some advice to George Bush in 1988 when Bush was gearing up to run for the presidency. I can’t find the exact quote, but it was something like this: “Unless you’re the incumbent, always run on change. People always want change.”

Politicians can promise change every single election and never have to modify their basic message. Why? Because nothing substantially changes. Especially in the U.S. system, positive change is very difficult, because the system is designed to slow change down.

Even when there is change, you’ll always find it tending — over the long term — to be in the direction of government taking more and more power. For those who would like to roll back the power of government — libertarians and some conservatives — that’s a problem. (It’s actually a problem for left liberals at times, too, at least the ones who want more individual rights in some social areas.)

The weight of the evidence suggests that voting doesn’t produce change very often — and it never seems to produce change that actually reduces the size of government. Yet for some reason, some libertarians and all conservatives seem bound and determined that if they will just find a way to win this election — for whatever pathetic statist the Republicans have nominated — things are going to be different this time.

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I know from years of experience that many successful politicians aren’t the same people in private that they are in public. I also know that on rare occasions we get to see scary glimpses of those people’s private lives. What you see should cause you to reconsider the notion of trusting human beings with the power that you willingly grant to governments.

Anthony Sanchez is a 34-year-old director of the Imperial County Irrigation District in California. It’s not a high elected position, but it’s the sort of lower position where ambitious young politicians get electoral experience before trying to move up. Until the last couple of days, there was nothing to distinguish him from thousands of other low-level elected officials across the country.

That all changed when a neighbor of Sanchez caught him on video in his back yard Wednesday instructing his 10-year-old stepson about how to play baseball. When the child dropped a ball or didn’t perform as Sanchez instructed, this fine young public servant beat the boy with a belt. (See video below. Note that there’s a lot of profanity toward the end.)

The neighbor confronted Sanchez from the window, telling him to stop. Sanchez was belligerent, clearly not seeing anything wrong with what he was doing. After some delay, the neighbor posted the video online. Eventually, he called police. Sanchez is now in jail on charges of felony child abuse. (Here’s video from police explaining the charges.)

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