DragonI

• “If you thought elections don't matter, I hope these last two years have corrected that impression.”
• “What happened to the Republican Party?”
• “Better is always worth fighting for” 
• “What are YOU going to do?”
• “Thirty minutes. Thirty minutes of your time. Is democracy worth that?”
• VOTE

So if you don't like what's going on right now -- and you shouldn't -- do not complain. Don't hashtag. Don't get anxious. Don't retreat. Don't binge on whatever it is you're bingeing on. Don't lose yourself in ironic detachment. Don't put your head in the sand. Don't boo. Vote.

Former President Barack Obama gave a speech at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on Friday, September 7, 2018, urging Americans to vote this November.

It shouldn't be Democratic or Republican to say we don't target certain groups of people based on what they look like or how they pray. We are Americans. We're supposed to standup to bullies. Not follow them.

We're supposed to stand up to discrimination. And we're sure as heck supposed to stand up, clearly and unequivocally, to Nazi sympathizers.

I am here to tell you that even if you don't agree with me or Democrats on policy, even if you believe in more Libertarian economic theories, even if you are an evangelical and our position on certain social issues is a bridge too far, even if you think my assessment of immigration is mistaken and that Democrats aren't serious enough about immigration enforcement, I'm here to tell you that you should still be concerned with our current course and should still want to see a restoration of honesty and decency and lawfulness in our government.

Sometimes the backlash comes from people who are genuinely, if wrongly, fearful of change. More often it's manufactured by the powerful and the privileged who want to keep us divided and keep us angry and keep us cynical because that helps them maintain the status quo and keep their power and keep their privilege. And you happen to be coming of age during one of those moments.

It did not start with Donald Trump. He is a symptom, not the cause. He's just capitalizing on resentments that politicians have been fanning for years. A fear and anger that's rooted in our past, but it's also born out of the enormous upheavals that have taken place in your brief lifetimes.

So that with Republicans in control of Congress and the White House, without any checks or balances whatsoever, they've provided another $. trillion in tax cuts to people like me who, I promise, don't need it, and don't even pretend to pay for them. It's supposed to be the party, supposedly, of fiscal conservatism. Suddenly deficits do not matter, even though, just two years ago, when the deficit was lower, they said, I couldn't afford to help working families or seniors on Medicare because the deficit was an existential crisis. 

What changed? What changed? They're subsidizing corporate polluters with taxpayer dollars, allowing dishonest lenders to take advantage of veterans and students and consumers again.

And, by the way, the claim that everything will turn out okay because there are people inside the White House who secretly aren't following the President's orders, that is not a check -- I'm being serious here -- that's not how our democracy is supposed to work.

These are extraordinary times. And they're dangerous times. But here's the good news. In two months we have the chance, not the certainty but the chance, to restore some semblance of sanity to our politics.

The antidote to a government controlled by a powerful fear, a government that divides, is a government by the organized, energized, inclusive many. That's what this moment's about. That has to be the answer. 

• Why Obama is speaking out
• Russia
• Global Recession, Economy and Jobs
• Affordable Care Act
• Abuse of Power
• Witch Hunt
• Nazis
• Paris Agreement - Climate Change
• Fight fire with fire will further erode “our civic institutions and our civic trust”
• Great awakening: citizens movement - marching, more younger, women and veteran first-time candidates

When experts are wrong, it's often because they're experts on an earlier version of the world.

Can you protect yourself against obsolete beliefs? To some extent, yes. I spent almost a decade investing in early stage startups, and curiously enough protecting yourself against obsolete beliefs is exactly what you have to do to succeed as a startup investor. Most really good startup ideas look like bad ideas at first, and many of those look bad specifically because some change in the world just switched them from bad to good.

...

The winds of change originate in the unconscious minds of domain experts. If you're sufficiently expert in a field, any weird idea or apparently irrelevant question that occurs to you is ipso facto worth exploring. [3] Within Y Combinator, when an idea is described as crazy, it's a compliment—in fact, on average probably a higher compliment than when an idea is described as good.

...

Another trick I've found to protect myself against obsolete beliefs is to focus initially on people rather than ideas. Though the nature of future discoveries is hard to predict, I've found I can predict quite well what sort of people will make them. Good new ideas come from earnest, energetic, independent-minded people. Betting on people over ideas saved me countless times as an investor. We thought Airbnb was a bad idea, for example. But we could tell the founders were earnest, energetic, and independent-minded. (Indeed, almost pathologically so.) So we suspended disbelief and funded them. This too seems a technique that should be generally applicable. Surround yourself with the sort of people new ideas come from. If you want to notice quickly when your beliefs become obsolete, you can't do better than to be friends with the people whose discoveries will make them so.