Two bills being voted on next week in the House of Representatives contain language that could censor the Internet in ways you would never imagine.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House of Representatives and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate are well meaning, but if passed, will be destructive to internet freedoms we’ve all come to expect as well as forces that have helped innovation on the internet flourish. Both pieces of legislation greatly weaken theDigital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which for over a decade has helped Internet companies grow and flourish.

The recording industry, movie studios and television studios are the driving forces behind these bills. We are all very aware of how the music industry ‘s slow and regressive response to digital music backfired while not helping recording artists or the music industry.

Instead of creating better ways to legally download music (as Apple did for them by creating iTunes), their solution was to sue music lovers. Imagine the repercussions of this industry, and the Hollywood studios that have not adapted to how digital innovations have affected their industry, dictating policies that regulate the Internet.

Some of the companies and organizations that have opposed these bills so far include American Express, AOL, Creative Commons, Demand Progress, Discover, eBay, Etsy, Facebook, Foursquare, Google, LinkedIn, MoveOn, Mozilla, OpenDNS, PayPal, Twitter, Visa, Wikimedia Foundation, Yahoo! and Zynga. They are joined by web founders, public interest groups, non-profits, advocacy organizations, thinktanks, industry associations, websites, online services, cybersecurity companies, engineers, international human rights advocates, entrepreneurs, founders, CEOs, executives, venture capitalists, academics, experts, educators, editorial boards and student newspapers.

Would you rather have these companies and Internet-related professionals determine what’s best for the Internet and its users? We can probably agree that they are more aware of what’s beneficial for the Internet than the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America.

Reddit has announced a blackout on January 18th to protest SOPA and Wikipedia is considering joiningthem. Thousands of people are changing their Twitter and Facebook avatars to include a Blackout SOPAbadge across their face in protest.

SOPA and PIPA aim to help private corporations shut down unauthorized websites where people download music, movies, and TV shows. Most of these websites are outside of America, so these corporations are looking to combat them in a few ways. 1) Block access to infringing domain names. 2) Sue U.S. based search engines, blogs, websites, directories and forums to remove links to these sites. 3) Stop funding these websites by not allowing advertisers to support them.

The consequences that SOPA and PIPA supporters do not mention include: 1) This will not stop downloaders. History has proven this. 2) It will cripple startups by allowing corporations to sue any company they decide is not filtering to their subjective satisfaction. One of these lawsuits can easily bankrupt new websites and search engines that offer competitive alternatives to their corporate brethren. 3) The ambiguous language in PIPA and SOPA leaves plenty of room for misinterpretation that can make websites pioneering new avenues look like pirates. In the past, this could have affected sites like YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Facebook and hundreds of other social sites where people express themselves, organize protests, share news or make art.

The bottom line and main question to ask yourself is, “Do I trust the U.S. government to censor the Internet and protect free expression of its people? And if I do, do I trust other governments who will probably follow suit?” The next question to ask yourself is, “Is it worth the potential of creating a censored internet that is less innovative and stable in order to possibly help the RIAA and MPAA sell more music and movies?”

I strongly recommend contacting your Senators and Congressional Representatives or visiting American Censorship to make your voice heard on these critical bills that can negatively impact the Internet that you use every day. If online activists could make GoDaddy flip its support on SOPA and PIPA, then it can happen with Congress too.

This article was originally posted in Huffington Post

Magical thinking can kill you. Now it’s been proven. After James Arthur Ray, self proclaimed ‘self help expert’ and one of the stars of the book and movie The Secret charged 70 participants $9,933 each to attend a sweat lodge event, two died, 19 went to the hospital and the ‘law of attraction‘ will never be the same.

Somehow I’m guessing that James Arthur Ray didn’t have this or possible jail time and losing his millions on his vision board but somehow it’s in his life anyway. Hmm, how could that happen?  Do things ever happen in your life that aren’t on your vision board?

James Ray’s Twitter bio says “Create Harmonic Wealth in every area of your life: Financial, Relational, Mental, Physical and Spiritual.”  …not this time.

As I wrote awhile back, the biggest secret about The Secret is that the stars of the movie were all proven internet marketing/self help gurus with responsive opt-in lists of well over 100,000 each.

They seeded the marketing campaign for the movie on the internet to well over a million people for a year before it’s DVD release.  Remember that it wasn’t a theatrical release, it was a brilliant online marketing campaign.

The Secret movie and book had a low overhead and a high profit margin mixed with a planned back end of products and services by all of the featured ‘experts’ to offer to all the new people looking to experience “The Secret” in their lives too.

I know a couple of the people who devised the scheme, so this isn’t conjecture.  It was a smart way for them to joint venture their individual successes in order to boost all of their careers by creating a premium brand for self help.

Today they are all multi-millionaires based on how the success of the book and movie allowed them to send their speaking fees, products and course costs through the ceiling.  Self help is a multi-billion dollar industry, and it’s selling false hope at a premium price.

They are all master marketers who fill rooms of people with cheap tickets, and then pitch back of the room offers (their advanced courses and advanced advanced VIP courses with ever-higher dollar price tags) that promise to be THE answer to your problems.

Note the latest internet marketing technology on their Science of Getting Rich website if you don’t believe me.  They have gotten rich by selling the idea that they have the key to YOUR wealth and happiness though most of their customers have not gotten either wealth or happiness as a result of becoming their customers.

Preying on people’s hopes and fears related to their money, careers, relationships, health and death for profit is nothing new.  It’s the backbone and life blood of politics, religions and mainstream media.

Unfortunately, this time selling self-help snake oil resulted in tragic and preventable deaths.  I doubt that participants paying $9,933 to be a ‘spiritual warrior’ thought this would be what they got out of the seminar.

I have a friend who has spent $6,000 a year and used his two weeks of vacation every year for 7 years going to T. Harv Eker, the master of back of the room sales, seminars on how to get rich.  My friend is currently unemployed, but Harv’s doing just fine thank you.

Is positive thinking and visualizing a better life a bad thing? Of course not, but selling people on the fact that it will magically give them everything they want from God and ‘The Universe’ is a flat out sham.

Unfortunately, millions of people will still not wake up, even after this tragedy.  They’ll continue to part with their money to gamble on the hope that someone will deliver a magic book, CD or event to change their lives.

If you want to change your life, it’s pretty simple.  Do something.  Drop the stories and excuses and just take action.  If you do smart things and have luck you’ll have a better chance of succeeding, but there are no guarantees.  As you know and have experienced yourself, both good and bad things happen to both good and bad people.

There is no magic pill, no magic teacher, no magic course and no magic book (including ‘holy’ books written and edited by powerful men with a vested interest in amassing and controlling followers.)

There are helpful tools, but when push comes to shove you have to keep taking action with good intentions and hope for the best.  If there was a magic formula everyone would use it and we would not be in a worldwide recession.  Focus on what you can control, let go of what you can’t and be thankful you did better in the womb lottery than people born in Rwanda.

If you insist on submissively following a guru then I encourage you to follow the wisdom, um, I mean Duhism, of Bob Tzu, Lao Tzu’s long lost American cousin.  His wisdom is encapsulated in three simple, yet life changing steps: 1. Shut up and stop whining. 2. Get off your butt and do something, and 3. Repeat (as necessary.)

I am not making light of this tragic event.  Far beyond that, I’m hoping that it causes more people stop paying money to these charlatans and start creating their own destinies instead.

Leave it to the government, this time in the U.K., but they’re all buried in bureaucracy, to take 20 pages to encourage civil servants to tweet.

I totally understand this because I’m still owed money by a county government for work I did with them from July through September. Six weeks after I submitted invoices for the work from early July, I asked what was up.

They responded by saying they had to confirm details like whether my name and the name of the course I taught were spelled properly. Apparently the invoices go through about 5 different divisions to get processed. How do you spell waste? That’s our tax dollars working as inefficiently as ever.  Maybe by January I’ll get paid for the work I did for them in July.

Anyway, back to the U.K. and their explanation of why it takes 20 pages to describe how to use a 140 character micro-blogging tool.

There are some very bright, digitally enabled civil servants who unfortunately have to write these documents for their bosses, the mandarins, who still get their secretaries to print off their e-mails so they can read them.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Why are John McCain mentality drones still controlling our governments with antiquated nonsensical hierarchical wasteful ways in a world of new community-oriented systems?  Sooner than later the community will prevail over those in control that shouldn’t even be controlling the remote to a TV.

Read the full story about the U.K. Twitter document here

Socialnomics has put together a video driving home the reality of how social media is fundamentally shifting how we communicate, connect and consume culture in the 21st century.  Share it with anyone who tells you that social media is a fad, technology is isolating people rather than facilitating face-to-face meetings, or that Twitter is stupid.

One of the most significant shifts that social media is driving is the spirit of collaboration rather than competition in some business spaces and in intellectual property systems.  These are both driving scalable innovations that will benefit everyone.  What you don’t know won’t hurt you, but it will leave you in the dust as life moves forward with amazing changes.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Stats from Video (sources listed below by corresponding #)

1. By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network
2. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
3. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
4. Years to Reach 50 millions Users:  Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
5. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia
6. Yet, some sources say China’s QZone is larger with over 300 million using their services (Facebook’s ban in China plays into this)
7. comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network
8. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
9. 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
10. % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
11. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
12. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Ireland, Norway and Panama
13. 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
14. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen
15. What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
16. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
17. Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
18. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
19. 54% = Number of bloggers who post content or tweet daily
20. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
21. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
22. Facebook USERS translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than 4 weeks and cost Facebook $0
23. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
24. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
25. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services  than how Google ranks them
26. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
27. Only 14% trust advertisements
28. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
29. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do
30. Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009
31. 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video…on their phone
32. According to Jeff Bezos 35% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle when available
33. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
34. In the near future we will no longer search for  products and services they will find us via social media
35. More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.
36. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy Listening first, selling second
37. Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertiser

If you still don’t understand what social media is this will help:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Technology has rocked our world repeatedly in profound ways. This will happen many more times and is about to happen again with Google Wave.  It’s going to be a tidal wave!

Imagine email, instant messaging, document sharing and much more integrated into a real time platform.  Or don’t imagine it and just wait a few months because that’s when you’ll be using Google Wave. TechCrunch has a great overview explaining why this is a game-changing product.

With Google Wave being announced it seems like a good time to shine a spotlight on how our world has changed from the release of disruptive technologies.  Some of my favorites have been:

• Smart Phones – before them we actually used a phone for making calls.  Now we use our phones as watches, computers, Rolodexes, calendars, cameras, alarm clocks, jukeboxes, photo albums, yellow page directories, news resources, email clients, video game consoles and a hundred other devices-in-one.
• Pagers – First drug dealers used them with pay phones (remember those?  …pay phones, not drug dealers) and parents used them to get their kids to call home.   With their arrival we began to move into a world where we could be found at any moment aside from being in the shower.
• Mobile Phones - Remember when phones were used connect with a specific location?  Now they are used to connect to a person in any location.  This created a major shift in how we communicate.
• Satellites – Before 1957 there were no satellites.  Fifty-two years later we use them for many purposes across industries as varied as radio, television, telecommunications, navigation, meteorology, land mapping, business & finance, climate & environmental monitoring, space science to name a few.  When is the last time you used a paper map instead of Google Maps on your phone or computer?
• Cable news – I don’t watch it, think it’s moronic and a tabloid distraction, but when it first debuted it was a positive revolution to have 24 hour news.  It killed the habit of tuning into the evening news and broadened possibilities before imploding into itself and beginning to be killed by my favorite disruptive technology so far…
• The Interwebs – Also know as the intertubes or the internet.  Since you’re reading this on the internet you probably know how transformational the internet and personal computers have been.  Pause for a moment and try to remember what your life was like before owning a personal computer, much less a laptop or smart phone.

Some technologies that were revolutionary and became extinct include the betamax, laser discs, vinyl albums, Polaroid pictures, PDAs, 8 Track tapes, cassette tapes and floppy discs.  The thing is, they were all necessary bridges to our modern world of digital convenience.  Much like how email and verbal voice mail may be out of use in 10 years, but they are necessary and interesting to us today.

The key to new innovative disruptive technologies is to look for the opportunities rather than being afraid because the old ways are passing away.  Dinosaur industries like music, TV and newspapers could have done much better than they have in the last 10 years.

They are still blowing it by blaming the world for changing rather than blaming their antiquated hierarchical business models.  The old models had large overheads and made a ton of money for few people while taking advantage of many others.  The new models value human, social, financial and environmental capital equally while collaborating to benefit many through innovation with low costs of entry.

There are tons of great examples like Amazon that have changed our personal and professional lives in deeply profound ways by unleashing innovative products, services and distribution models to an unsuspecting public.  Google Wave is just the next best thing, but lets welcome the changes it will bring to help us to do life in better and more collaborative ways.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Laws are not selective, unless you’re either rich, powerful, a celebrity , politically connected, or know someone who is when you break one.

Gravity is a law. It works 100% of the time with no excuses whether you like it or not.  In fact, you don’t have to buy a book or movie to see how it works; nor do you have to believe in it.  Gravity is a law of physics and doesn’t care what you think. It just does it’s ‘gravity’ thing and you cannot fight it and win.  Ever.  No matter what.

Attraction, the new age kind rather than the law of physics kind, is an emotional or electromagnetic force that does not occur consistently but appeals greatly to our greed, arrogance and inherent need to feel special.

If there was a Law of Attraction then the millions of consumers of the law of attraction and Oprah viewers worldwide would be manifesting every material desire for their health, relationships, careers and financial material wealth that the NYT #1 Best Seller, The Secret, promised them rather than there being a global recession.

Have you talked to a law of attraction believer lately?  How’s it working beyond believing results will arrive at some soon yet undisclosed time after years of practice?

Obama could mandate that every American citizen has to think better thoughts so we can attract our way out of economic crisis and have everything our hearts desire.  Yeah, an army of attractors, that’s the ticket.  Someone get that idea to the Treasury Secretary stat!

Good Emotional Marketing = Many Believers and More Manifrustration

Forget for a moment that the stars of The Secret are seasoned professional marketers who became even more rich and famous after inventing The Secret as a brand, and are about to unleash a sequel to get even more rich and famous.  (Cash cows have got to be milked, even in spiritual capitalism, right?)

Forget that the unfulfilled promises in The Secret just happen to be for the four things every psychic and marketer happens to sell you hope for – money, relationships, health and avoidance of death, lets look at the definitions of attraction from Dictionary.com that apply:

5.Physics. the electric or magnetic force that acts between oppositely charged bodies, tending to draw them together.

6. an entertainment offered to the public.

For #5 note that it says “oppositely charged” which is contradictory to the Secret’s formula of aligning yourself with what you want to attract.  So maybe thinking about poverty is the true road to attracting wealth. hmmm….

Also for #5, there is a “tendency” rather than a law (i.e. – a principle based on the predictable consequences of an act, condition, etc.: the law of supply and demand) though for #6 we’re getting closer.

It is practically a law that the public will pay to be entertained – especially if that entertainment makes them feel like they are special.

Instead, most people practicing the law of attraction techniques live in constant hope and manifrustration which ironically was the same state they lived in before buying into the marketing campaign for the law of attraction.

It Works Fine, You’re the One Who’s Broken

The scapegoat is that when the law of attraction doesn’t work there’s an easy answer; the law works, but YOU are the problem.  You’re not believing hard enough.  (You and the tens of millions of others who aren’t getting results.  Would you keep taking a drug with results like these?)

This is what bothers me the most.  It’s the same crazy making blame game that people get in multi-level marketing and sales rooms with no proven sales system.

Remember that you only need a handful of success stories (or actors reading their lines) on your infomercial to appear successful and deflect the fact that 99% of your customers didn’t lose weight with your plastic exercise device.

How many people do you know of who appear to have great relationships, material wealth, successful careers or great health?  Out of those people who enjoy the results promised by marketers of the law of attraction, how many do you think practiced the principals in The Secret?

Most successful people I know have been so busy taking action to create results that they didn’t have time to watch the Secret movie much less buy into it’s superstition.  A couple of them do have vision boards and the like, but they use those tools to remind them of what they’re working so hard to achieve while taking massive amounts of action.

Notice that the correlation of success to taking action, reviewing results and taking more action (very concrete steps) is much higher than the correlation of success to ‘believing the right thoughts’ – which is pretty damned nebulous.  Who determines what thoughts are right and whether they’re ‘right’ enough to attract what you want?

Note that magnets attract 100% of the time by being in proximity to what they naturally attract, metal.  A magnet needs to be close to it’s target (humans do this by taking action) and it does not attract anything else like sand, carpet or plastic (which would be what for humans?  Bad jobs? Mean people? Losing money?)

The Secrets to Success

Sorry Charlie, the secret to success is that there is no perfect formula to follow that anyone can sell to you.

See, there are also people taking tons of action and not getting results with or without playing The Secret game.  Heck, you may even know some or be one of them.  Look in the mirror real quick and check.

Why aren’t they succeeding?  Luck, timing, how they did in the womb lottery (being born in L.A. gives you a better shot, though no guarantee, at success than being born in Uganda), how rich and powerful their families were or weren’t, whether their talent was nurtured or not, who they did or didn’t  meet as they grew up, how industrious their attitude is, and so on.

Read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success,  Geoff Covin’s Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else or Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets to really wake up to this.

Can the principals work?  Maybe.  Are they the principals most successful people throughout history have used?  No.  Will they work for you? Magic 8 ball says “probability doubtful.”   Will a little focus and a lot of action give you a better shot at achieving your goals? Probably.

A Mind is a Terrible Thing

The mind makes up meaning and is not very good at it.  That’s it’s job like a teenager’s job is to push their parents buttons.  That’s just how the wiring works.  Deal with it.

In hindsight, you will probably attribute your success or lack thereof to a misguided conclusion that getting up early, practicing the law of attraction, going to a good school or whatever explains your situation.  The truth is that many factors, including many we miss, contribute to our perceived failures and successes.

Do your thoughts create your reality? Well, thinking positively and consciously is never a bad thing, but we’ve all experienced both great and terrible circumstances without either consciously believing that we could or couldn’t experience them.

Did most of your happiest moments occur after intense practice visualizing them?  I didn’t think so.  How about your unhappiest? Uh huh.  And you’re moderately not-so-notable experiences?  Okay.

If You Believe in the Law of Attraction it Can’t Just Work for the Stuff You Like.

Are children molested, adults contracting cancer or drivers getting in car accidents because their thoughts attracted that experience?

Did the US Airways flight crash into the Hudson with no casualties because the passengers were attracting an exciting yet non-lethal experience in an airplane?

Or maybe it was because the pilot was skilled and had been flying since he was a teenager which enabled him to react in the best possible way to a random life threatening occurrence.

Or maybe we’ll never know because our brains are experts at making meaning out of the first possible plausible explanation it comes up with or is exposed to.

Did every single one of the 9/11 victims or the millions of Iraqi’s killed in the last 8 years envision those experiences to manifest them?  If some of those 9/11 victims would have told someone their visions of planes crashing into buildings maybe we could have prepared better.

Law of attraction? Nope.  Theory of attraction? More accurate by definition.

If it helps you to take better action in your life great.  If it’s another late night infomercial emotional crutch to provide false hope, not so good.

Ask your doctor if the law of attraction is right for you and then remember that results WILL vary.  You can count on that.

Click here to view the embedded video.

You may have heard that tomorrow there’s some inauguration thing going on.  Apparently there’s been a little bit of news coverage on this event.

Actually, there’s been more media coverage on Barack Obama’s inauguration than any other previous inauguration.  In fact, tickets for the inauguration are going for thousands of dollars online. It seems that The Decider is out and now The Influencer is moving in.  When this man talks, people become energized to do whatever it takes to build a better tomorrow.

Click here to view the embedded video.

After eight years in office George Bush has left America the same way he’s left every business his hands have touched – crippled with his personal fortunes increased.  Lets hope The Influencer can at least steer the ship out of the treacherous storm The Decider created and back towards prosperous shores.

Barack Obama is The Influencer because he’s the first president in modern times to have the power to ignite a fire of service and action into the majority of the American population.  Obamamania has shifted the national mood from confused hopeless thoughts of “WTF?” to declarations of “Yes We Can.”

The man is not a messiah or a magician who can wave his hand and make it all better, but something about him is bringing out the best in people across the globe.  And for that we can all be inspired and thankful.

Tomorrow is not just the inauguration of the 44th American president.  It is not just a historic moment because Americans have elected a black man to lead them.  It is a symbol of change for a population ready to be influenced with integrity and ready to take that experience into how they live and influence the people they care about most and the people they share the world with.

This video of The Young Turks helps to point out how political pundits lie to the public while kissing up to the most powerful politicians until they begin to lose power.  Then, like magic, the truth that everyone knew all along comes out of their mouths for the first time …years after it could have helped to change what wasn’t working.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Frontline recently had a show exploring the life of Lee Attwater, who was the mentor to Karl Rove in how to win at all costs in the arena of politics.  It was a fascinating show revealing how dirty politics get in the pursuit of power.

Politicians and political operatives know that perception is reality.  He who molds public perception controls what the public thinks is reality even when it obviously is not.

Through this historical look back many political operatives admitted the outright lies and manipulations they knew of, instigated, or were a part of  that were promoted to the public, you and me, to blindly influence our perceptions in service to their personal and political goals.

Before I go further, it’s important to acknowledge that this is not a demonization of Lee Attwater, the Bushes or the Republican party.  Your brain probably went to a “Republicans bad, Democrats good” or vice versa conversation.

Drop the illusion of an “us versus them” mentality.  That’s another result of blind influence from PR campaigns and the hard wiring of your brain looking to compare and be on the side of the “best team” when there isn’t a “best team.”  We’re all living creatures on the same planet who have to live with the results of our actions.

Humans of all shapes, sizes, colors and political affiliations act out versions of what is exemplified by the life of Lee Attwater.

He’s just an extreme example of a political operative like Madonna is an extreme example of a musical entertainer.  They both possess a lot more drive, charisma and chutzpah than your average human so they stand out with their over the top success in their endeavors.

This legacy lives on in tactics created by Lee Attwater that have been improved upon and are used today:

- Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat talking points, whether they are truths or lies, ad nauseum to promote your agenda and mold public opinion (Iraq has WMDs, mentioning 911 and Saddam Heussein together to link them, mentioning that Heussein is Barack Obama’s middle name, talking about Barack Obama being connected to Roy Ayers, mentioning that Sarah Palin has a pregnant daughter, etc.)

- Use symbols like American flag lapel pins or call out Obama for not having his hand over his heart while the national anthem plays. For example, Attwater had George Bush Sr. pull up his pant leg at a press conference to reveal that he was wearing cowboy boots wih the Texas flag on them to send a message that he wasn’t a WASP from Connecticut, but a salt-of-the-Earth Texan.

- Use Orwellian “newspeak” to frame or spin the story where you name something like the failed attempt to call rural dwellers “real Americans” though 80% of America’s population lives in urban areas, calling an increase in the number of troops a “surge,” renaming global warming “climate change,” naming the bill that allows corporations to pollute more the “Clean Air Act” and so on.

Frank Luntz took this to another level.  Read his book Words That Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear for a deeper lesson in this.

- Stay on message by answering questions with the message you want to convey, even if it doesn’t answer the question.

“Spin” the story – Make sure the press hears and promotes your version of the story, even when, and especially when, it’s a lie.

There’s more, but you get the picture.  The point is to recognize these tactics so that you don’t get duped easily by them.  Newer tactics keep evolving to manipulate public perception all the time.

The way to be more immune to these tactics is to remember that what’s really going on is at least 3 to 5 steps behind the veil of the perception promoted to the public.

Back to Lee Attwater, what’s amazing is that after having no conscience about destroying people’s lives in the pursuit of building his own power he developed a brain tumor at the age of 40.  His illness caused him to rethink his positions and he apologized to everyone he had harmed before his death soon after.

He also admitted that he felt his deeds in politics had been bad for the country and had hurt America.  Lee Atttwater grew a conscience and made peace with himself, though his legacy of harmful actions are copied by today’s power hungry working on blindly influencing others for personal gain.

You have the power to see through their tactics since you now know more about how they work.

First off, I’m happy that Obama followed my lead and is choosing to get a puppy to open this new chapter of history.  The picture above is my puppy who’s still too young to come home, but I’ll have him well before inauguration day.

Most of the world appears to be ecstatic and elated that America somehow found a man to elect who is the polar opposite of George W. Bush in every imaginable and important way possible.  Then there are political pundits that seem as clueless as ever.

I must disclose that I rarely watch television news which makes cable “newscasters” seem a bit cartoonish when I do watch them.  (Don’t watch the news for a month and come back to it and you’ll see what I mean.)  The fact that most of the content these “news” channels provide is opinion rather fact shows the dilemma of creating 24 hour infotainment to win ratings wars with ever-declining viewership.  Therefore I have a little compassion for them, but only a little.

After Obama’s speech as our new President-elect I surfed through the cable news channels to see what the political “experts” (who are usually over 80% inaccurate in their predictions if you follow them) had to say.

What was interesting is that they were focused on statistics of how white men, Latinos, black women, white women, and other factions voted that they missed the whole point.  Everyone I know who felt that electricity when it was announced that Obama won felt they were having a JFK moment.  This kind of electricity hasn’t surged around in America or around the world since the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Finally we may have a President more interested in equality and rebuilding America than one focused on serving corporate and monied interests.

No, he’s not a messiah, but he does seem to be intelligent, thoughtful, heartful and effective in getting Americans to get involved in creating positive change.  After seeing millions of people donate time, money or both to the campaign it seems like we could be revisiting our historic roots of banding together to clean up after our current natural disasters.  Most of the people who worked on campaigns this season had never done so before and some were over 60 years old.

While pundits over analyze strategy, race and other factors, the electorate that voted for Obama did so for other reasons.  Obama supporters  feel like they are a part of something bigger than themselves – righting the wrongs, misdeeds and missteps our nation has embarked upon with imperialistic policies.

Older generations see electing a black man to be president as an historic occasion while younger generations who never saw blatant racism and grew up on hip hop music see this as a “duh” moment.  The most qualified person was elected and skin color is irrelevant in what he can achieve.  Both generations are right while the pundits are still busy ignoring the obvious fact that Obama won because he connected with voters like no other candidate in recent history.

No one knows exactly why anything happens.  We make up reasons in hindsight that fit our particular views and tell ourselves that our interpretation is a fact.  This is just how the human brain works.  So for once, lets not waste time looking to “experts” to see how it happened or listen to them about their inaccurate predictions of what will happen.  (Remember how the election was destined to be between Hillary Clinton and Rudy Guilliani?  …How did that work out and why are the same pundits still employed?)  No one will ever be in the same circumstances to create the same experiences that we went through the last two years.  So lets just enjoy the moment and prepare to start a ride on a much different train than any we’ve been on this century.