The Atlantic is bookmarked I think because my brother occasionally forwards things to me from it.  In the September 2008 issue, there is a brilliant article detailing the Senator Hillary Clinton campaign, looking in a detailed manner at how the staff worked to lose the Democratic nomination.  The core lesson to me is a lack of execution, the inability to decide on a path then complete actions with hopes for an expected outcome.  Regadless of who you have supported or do support, it is a fascinating read.  We can all learn from this in our professional lives especially.

In an ironic twist for me, I awarded a Republic of Georgia national jersey to the soccer coach working with me to launch a new soccer club (the new little hobby that has consumed me the last two months).  We used the specific red in the Georgia’s flag for the logo design of the new club.  All of this was the first I’d really thought of this nation in my life.  Since I handed Coach David that jersey, his homeland has been in upheaval, his brother was called into active duty since he was slightly under 50 years of age, even though he’d only recently had open-heart surgery.  He was raised as a Georgian Soviet, played football professionally in the Soviet Union, and won what would now be the Champions League back in the 1980’s.

So Russia has been at war with this nation over the last week, and today a cease fire has been announced.  Should we care about any of this?

Not only should we care about all of this, but we should be stunned by both the turn of events as well as anxious about the next decade.

Georgia was one of the few nations who joined the US in Iraq, brought to our collective attention when 2,000 troops were ordered back to Georgia this past week.  They have pursued NATO membership, wishing to join the ranks of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, and Slovakia among others.  President Bush was the first and only US president ever to visit the Republic of Georgia.

Regardless of who exactly did what to start this, Russia has been waging war against Georgia over the last week.  The US response seems to have been limited to chatting at the Olympics between Bush and Putin, as well as some sort of assistance to get the 2,000 Georgian troops from Iraq back to Georgia.

The aftermath of all this is much more important than the actual incident, with my apologies to the families of soldiers and civilians who lost their lives in Georgia this week.  Georgia is a relatively new ally of the US, much like Pakistan for that matter.  What exactly does that buy you in our new world order?  Who sets our foreign policy when it comes to our alliances, the President or Congress?  And how exactly should all of this work in the future?

Obviously, the US did not come to the defense of our dear friends, the Georgians.  We did not cut off diplomatic ties with Russia, did not send in aircraft to support the troops.  What have we told Russia, France, England, India, Pakistan, North Korea, China, Uganda, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Vietnam, Serbia, and countless others around the world?

No, the 21st Century is a much more complex one when it comes to good and evil, friend and foe.  Throw in diminishing raw materials and a finite energy supply, and we have indeed entered into a world of fractured misunderstanding.  We have only a hint of realization that we poorly understand these sub-nations, these emerging places of interest.

We had a severe problem once at the Aerospace company I worked in when we lived in Phoenix, and the CEO had a day where everyone would “Stand Down.”  Basically, we took a day where everyone stopped to focus on our core problem, much as he said the Navy would do in a time of crisis.

In the midst of this Election period and the aftermath of Iraq and this crisis in Georgia, it is time for a “Stand Down” for our leaders; really, for all of us.

With Senator Barack Obama’s late surge of delegates yesterday, the inevitable has been realized:  an Obama-McCain race to the finish line.  I’m on the team with all three candidates that the result of our choices in November must mark a comprehensive, seismic shift in America’s policies, actions, and resulting influence around the world.

The Wall Street Journal has a lengthy analysis of what went wrong with Senator Hillary Clinton’s run for the nomination (can’t link it as it is a subscriber-only article).  They cite Mismanagement, a Flawed Message (experience vs the change movement), Failure to Mobilize, and Clinton Craziness (i.e., her spouse).  Fundamentally, I don’t think she and her team understood the deep, lingering resentment and ill feelings that many of us normal Americans felt toward she and her husband.  I think it was always going to be a huge battle between Senator Clinton and whomever emerged as the alternate, anybody-but-a-Clinton candidate.  That the finalist just happened to be a charismatic, fresh-faced outsider made it even tougher to head toward her.

Senator John McCain, in my opinion, should be completing his second term in office rather than preparing for a bitter race toward the November elections.  It was during the South Carolina primary in the 2000 campaign that Governor George W. Bush brought out all the stops to cast doubt about McCain in the eyes of my wife’s home state.  The specifics of the assault I’m not exactly familiar with (here is a laundry list of either accurate or inaccurate information), but this summary from Richard Davis in a 2004 Boston Globe article has a nice synopsis.  I’m pretty sure I would have voted for McCain had he won the GOP nomination, and I am absolutely certain that America and the world would be significantly different had he been our President in 2001.

There will be a sizable groups who will blindly head to the polls in November with their minds made up without much thought.  Obama won this race partly due to his race and the dramatically high percentage of African Americans who voted for him.  These large percentages should be repeated in November, just as a chunk of America will vote against him due to his skin color.  A chunk of America will salute the donkey and elephant flags and line up behind them.  Some states are decided basicallly, so it falls to our brains hopefully to dive into these two, see into the future as much as possible, then make our decisions.

CC, officially Undecided.

(Photo:  AP)

It is so very easy to see this world of ours solely from our corner of it.  We all learned about our nation’s history as a melting pot, a place for people all around the world to come and have a chance at freedom and success.

Some of those places were bad placed, nations who were self-proclaimed enemies of ours, nations who took a different path than ours, nations whose people had less human rights than ours, nations who looked and spoke and lived differently than we do.

China is one of those lands.  The country has been flipped on its head since I first visited Beijing in 1994.  Very few Westerners visited then; in fact, you could count the number of Western hotels in Beijing on one hand.  I wasn’t a very experienced traveler, so all of it was a bit bewildering for me.  I made the good decision to have a young engineer give me a tour in and around Beijing, and so we saw Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, and the Great Wall.  My favorite memory of that trip was going to a ceramic factory, where entire families of grandparents and parents and children made beautiful vases and other items.  They hand-bent slivers of tin and brass to create the ornate designs then filled these patterns with whatever you use to make such things.  We still have the vase which I brought back from that trip.

I’ve been back probably ten times since then, traveling to the big cities as well as into the rural areas outside of Shanghai.  The one thing about this land that has stayed with me since my first trip there was just how many people a billion people is (now 1.3bil, I believe).  Every conceivable contraption that can have a minimum of two wheels is driven or ridden on impossible paths and roads and highways to carry impossible loads of stuff from here to there.

We’ve been led to believe that this is a country of evil people, a Communist country at one time looking to conquer Southeast Asia unless we prevented it.  I’ve never been much of a revisionist historian, and I do not fault the slippery slope that led us to the Korean War and to Vietnam.  Our logic was based on the domino theory, that if one of these countries slipped into China’s grip, then the entire region would eventually capitulate.

I must admit I am only recently learning about what’s going on in Darfur and China’s role in blocking UN efforts to take action on the government there.  China has invested significantly in the oil industry in the Sudan, and this is an example of their policy to go directly after raw materials procurement at the source rather than buying on the open market.

So, it’s easy to compartmentalize a nation of evil people led by evil men and women who have zero human rights, a nation of foreigners speaking multiple languages with so many people that they even manipulate the birth rate and skew the percentage of boys born due to their One Child program.

(Photo:  Getty Images)

Yes, it’s easy until you see that the tears of a child in China who has lost her mother are no different than the tears of a child in Birmingham who has lost his father.  35,000 people lost, a number that may grow to 50,000 among a people of 1.3 billion.  Then 158 relief workers die in a mudslide as they frantically care for those injured and mourning and in shock.

And you see that the people of China place as much value on each life lost as we do.  Their nation mourns, and their leaders are faced with challenges that seem overwhelming.  5,000,000 people left homeless?  That would be all people in Minnesota or Colorado told to get out of their homes immediately.

As I head to grab lunch, I am struck by this question:  am I connected to any of this?  Do the tears of that young girl, do they fall on my cheek?  And should they?

Food has been in the news of late.  Our President almost started a riot in India with his comments blaming Indians for driving food prices higher by increasing their caloric intake.  One of the comments in the aftermath challenged the US to take the money spent on liposuction each year and invest it in food and agriculture in developing countries.

The graphic above is from a NY Times article that lays out the consumption of various foods in leading countries.  It is a stunning collection of data, comparing the food consumption in pounds per person between the US, India, and China for foods like beef (93lbs for Americans vs 3lbs and 12lbs per person in India and China respectively), milk (198lbs for US vs 78lbs/23lbs), and chicken (99lbs vs 4lbs/17lbs).  Rice is the only outlier (29lbs for US vs 170lbs/213lbs).

The Freakonomics blog has a Q&A with Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio, authors of Hungry Planet:  What the World Eats.  Here is an NPR article and podcst from 2005 when the book came out.  The two sat down with thirty families in twenty-four countries, photographing and documenting their meals.

Sobering stuff.  With oil prices topping $127 a barrel today, raw materials and food continue to be consumed and prices move up globally.  Should we be concerned?  Should we do anything as a nation?  Should you and I do anything personally?

The Affiliate Marketing Blog first reported that Overstock.com was cutting off New York companies involved in their Affiliate Marketing program, effective 20 May 2008.  This is due to ex-Governor Eliot Spitzer’s policy “…mandating that online retailers collect sales tax on Internet purchases to state residents, even when the retailers have no tax nexus in New York.”

Amazon.com filed a lawsuit challenging the law on 2 May, but the issue won’t be resolved before it goes into effect on 1 June 2008.  The New York Times reported that Amazon.com will keep its New York affiliates and begin collecting taxes.  “Nothing is changing with regard to Amazon’s relationships with Affiliates in New York state,” said Patty Smith, a spokesperson for Amazon.  “We expect to begin collecting sales tax (as the new legislation requires) no later than June 1, 2008.”

Is this the beginning of the free ride for the web?  Will this cripple small businesses and websites focused on affiliate marketing revenues, or is this just a speed bump along the way?

I grew in a small town in Southwest Mississippi, about an hour south of the state capital Jackson and 2 1/2 hours north of New Orleans. I thought our town had a population of 18,000, but the census has it at a little less than 10,000 and our county at around 33,000. Growing up in a small town had its disadvantages to be sure, but one thing I’ll always remember is how everyone knew everyone, or at the least knew of them and recognized them. I don’t get back there at all anymore, what with my parents moving to Memphis after I was in college and all.

The death toll in Myanmar/Burma is now estimated to be 22,464 with almost 41,000 missing. It is as if my entire hometown and county have been wiped off of the face of the Earth. I don’t watch the news, so I haven’t seen any of the images from this, just reading about it on the web. My entire town, dead.

The people in Myanmar are a poor, backward people. They look different than me, talk multiple languages. 55,000,000 people live there in a country slightly smaller than Texas. These tens of thousands of people lost are a drop in the bucket in a place where life is always tough. The value of these lives is so much less than the value of the lives of people here in Atlanta or the US.

At least, it’s easy to think that way in our inner-most thoughts.

No, these aren’t 22,464 nameless, faceless, strange, poor people who have been lost. I’ve searched for an hour to find the name of one of these who have died, but nothing comes back. A 12-foot wave crashed down on these tens of thousands of people, but that’s too impersonal.

No, it was a young father who huddled in his shack with his wife, two daughters, and two sons (ages 8-3). He had steered clear of the military and earned money as a day laborer, picking up money doing everything from hauling trash from construction sights to carrying boxes of goods to market. The mother took care of the young children, sewing children’s clothes to put a bit more food on the table. There were no paychecks to regularly cash, so neither of them knew for certain if there would be enough food for them or if it would go to the children each day.

Their life was drastically hard, but no different than anyone else in Labutta, this remote place over 100 miles from Yangon. They prayed that Saturday as they held one another, prayed until their shanty disappeared in the foam of the waters higher than a basketball goal. And each of them, this father and mother and daughter and son and son and daughter, children who could be running in and out of my house if they had only been born in Suburbia, each of them has been separated from their loved one. You see, these six humans are among the hundreds now floating in the Pyarmalot River.

Nameless, faceless victims, half a world away as I drink my coffee and go on to the next bit of thinking and typing and figuring out what I’m paid to do. 22,464 and counting.

OK, this is a bit complicated, so hang in for a second.

We’re all quite familiar with how the television has changed over our lifetime (my lifetime). When I first watched “Days of our Lives” with my Mom, television was black in white in so many ways. We had two or three channels (NBC, CBS, and ETV sometimes) on our black and white set. Clear cut choices, either this or that. ABC joined the mix on some weird second dial (the regular channels went 2-13, and ABC was on Channel 16).

Fast forward to today, and I have a couple dozen high-definition channels and who knows how many channels (I stumble upon new channels when I’m surfing the guide). I can watch shows on stations so specialized now that the interested audience seems to be the size of our neighborhood. The major network’s viewers have fractured their viewing behaviors as they have become more nuanced in the specifics of what they do and don’t want to watch.

So what does that have to do with the price of tea in China? Plenty.

Obama and Clinton are in a slugfest for the Democratic nomination while McCain sits with the Republican nomination. Democratic Party officials wring their hands about the damage this is causing while the GOP squeals with glee. And what is the difference?

Proportional delegates vs winner-take-all.

You see, we Americans no longer do what we’re told nor think what we’re supposed to. Pundits are searching for the next Soccer Mom category of citizens that, if only they could figure out the segment’s characteristics and then bombard them with marketing, could get them elected.

Let’s look at how neatly I fit into a category. I’m fiscally conservative, have a passion for taking on our long-term problems, was vehemently against invading Iraq yet feel we now can’t quickly pull out, feel we have to reinvent ourselves on the global stage, pro-NAFTA, feel manufacturing jobs leaving the US will only accelerate, socially compassionate, passionately pro-public education yet feel the greatest problem with US education is rooted in our social problems (single parent homes, lack of parental involvement in their child’s education in pre-K through middle school), green but not a nutjob. What will my criteria be for casting my vote in November? I haven’t the foggiest.

And that’s just me. If the GOP had a proportional scheme for linking primary votes to delegate assignment, I assure you we’d still have candidates banging one another. Jump up to 30,000 feet, and the question starts to look like this: who gets to decide on our next President? Suburbanites? Southern working class? The struggling poor? Those over 50? Those under 30? If there is any lesson that we can gain from this campaign, it’s that the US is no longer a clean-cut nation. I would guess we haven’t been for awhile; regardless, we’re a fractured nation. If we had a parliamentary system, where niche groups built a coalition to select a Prime Minister, I assume we would quickly see a dozen political parties and new governments on a pace more like Israel’s revolving door than our current model.

Is this a good assessment, should we care, what does this mean to the three candidates and two parties, and what does this mean for each of us?