They were also there in Newtown, Oklahoma City and in New York City on 9/11. They’re police, firemen, paramedics, doctors, nurses, friends, neighbors – hundreds of typically anonymous bystanders who happen to be in the area during a tragedy like the one we faced Monday at the end of the Boston Marathon. They’re like Carlos Arredondo who said he acted...

Tracee Hamilton gets it. The Washington Post columnist jumped ahead of me when she heard about the absurdly ethical lapses in actions and reasoning behind two recent college basketball stories. It was only eleven days ago when I wrote, “college and university presidents need to take a hard look in the mirror and consider just what’s important: winning-at-any-cost, or role-modeling a...

Who is Bobby Knight? He’s a legendary coach who ranks third in all-time wins for NCAA Division I men’s basketball. Take the word “wins” out of that description and what you really have is a world-class bully who has used his position as a college coach to badger, bully and demean his student players into winning. For Bobby Knight, winning...

Abraham Lincoln once said, “I don’t think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.” Lincoln never encountered the remarkable certitude of former Vice-President Dick Cheney. In a new Showtime documentary by filmmaker R.J. Cutler, aptly titled The World According to Dick Cheney, the former vice-president confidently riffs about everything from fly fishing to “enhanced interrogation...

What’s wrong with this picture? When Kentucky Senator Rand Paul finished his almost 13-hour filibuster on whether the government has the legal authority to order drone strikes against Americans living in the U.S., I rolled my eyes believing there are more than a few other priorities ahead of this issue. Last Wednesday (Mar. 6), during his talk-fest, Paul took to...

Wednesday’s New York Times (Mar. 6), offered two stories, appearing side-by-side, that present a contrast in decision-making between two high-profile executives. One uses rationalization while the other employs reason. The two company figureheads I’m talking about are Marissa Mayer, newly installed CEO of Yahoo, an Internet search engine company, and Martha Stewart, author, magazine publisher and founder of Martha Stewart...

Just off the 101 freeway in Carpinteria, California back from the road sits Rudy’s, a strip-mall-style Mexican restaurant where the tacos are tasty and burritos are muy bueno! It’s a place where my web designer Harold and I show up to meet… well, first a little backstory. Seventh grade and I’d just been hit with a stunner of a homework assignment: prepare a...

First of all, Colman McCarthy is funny. Every time he gets on the phone with me, he always asks, “Hey Jim, how are those orange trees doing in your backyard?” Colman is a philosopher: “Warmaking doesn’t stop warmaking. If it did, our problems would have stopped millennia ago.” Colman is a passionate pacifist who believes in fighting fire with… water. “Since...

You’re sitting in the front row of a sold out conference for self-help guru Tony Robbins, and here it comes, Ba-Bam!: “Positive thinking will let you do everything better than negative thinking will.” According to publisher Simon and Schuster, minister and author Norman Vincent Peale’s best selling book, The Power of Positive Thinking stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for...

It’s hard to believe that the 2012 presidential campaign is at an end… almost. What will “likely voters” do without all those hard-hitting, rhetoric-flailing, endless campaign ads? According toOpenSecrets.org, the total spent by both campaigns is reported to be almost $2 billion, and that doesn’t include money spent by PACs and Super PACs. After all the negative campaigning, what we...