Sonogram machines arrive in every town and hamlet in China. The unintended consequence? Female birthrates plunge as parents heed early warnings. Craig Newmark starts his little email list in 1995 about what’s going on for friends in San Francisco. Unintended consequence 10 years later: the death of the American newspaper  (and maybe most of the papers in the world) as Craigslist siphons off the classifieds in 70 countries so far. Other unintended consequences: rabbits take over Australia, giant carp may destroy the Great Lakes, Big Gulp sizing triggers a tidal wave of childhood diabetes.

And there’re some little ones we don’t want to overlook, like global warming and the eventual destruction of the home planet. All unintended, but very real consequences.

And that, my friends, all of that is a mere ant’s sneeze (bless you!) compared to what the Supreme Court dropped on us yesterday. The Decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, will change everything. It will raise military spending, corrupt local governments, make the next generation or two of Americans the most cynical in the nation’s history. And that’s just the obvious unintended consequences. We may well see members of Congress no longer be identified by party, but more likely by owner.

Remember the fantastic crash scene in Cast Away, when the FedEx plane flying over the middle of nowhere suddenly gives a little shudder? Hanks asks if he should worry. And then seconds later, all hell breaks loose.  The plane is falling apart, plunging into the ocean.

Where’s that first shudder going to be for us? I’ve got a guess. I’ve always wondered about the ulterior motives of those companies that sponsor The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer, now simply called PBS NewsHour. Ever wonder why one of the biggest global petroleum firms, Chevron, is dropping a few million on the NewsHour? And what about Intel (Antitrust! Us? We’re just a bunch of way smart people) and for many years, everyone’s favorite purveyor of fine foods, Archer Daniels Midland (Convicted of conspiring to control the world price of lysine. The reason is that sponsoring the NewsHour was one of the few legal ways the big corporations could woo a particularly influential audience. The message that has been pounded in day after day is quite simple: how nefarious could Chevron really be if every night they remind us how much many millions they are investing for our benefit? Don’t they seem like such nice people?

Jim Lehrer — heads up! This just might be it. Exxon just doesn’t need you anymore. They don’t need the National Geographic and The New Yorker, the NY Times and even the Wall Street Journal. They don’t need to influence the voters any more. They don’t care how we vote anymore. That part of our democracy will soon seem, as John Yoo might put it, quaint.

Why go through the voters when you can now go direct? All the Chevrons of the world now need to do is buy up our representatives. It’s legal. And don’t think in a close race it will make any difference who wins: Big Oil, Big Pharma, and Big Anything will buy both sides of the race. They will never be losers again. Us? Not so good.

This nightmare scenario is not out there somewhere, waiting to happen. It happened yesterday. Now it’s us flying over the South Pacific on a dark and stormy night. A massive wind shear is moments ahead. We’re about to feel that first ominous shudder. Look around, find the exit signs. Think about those life raft instructions. We’re going in. And even if Sully himself were at the controls it won’t make any difference at all.

William Safire passed away this year and with him the hope for another slew of his year-end prognostications. As an insider’s insider he would frequently predict Israeli-Arab detente, Henry Kissinger’s return to the State Department and Richard Nixon’s final vindication. Of course, since much of his insider’s knowledge came straight from Nixon and Kissinger it wasn’t too hard to predict Safire’s success rate. (About the same as Nixon’s second term.)

Into this vacuum someone needs to step. Someone who is a complete outsider, who cannot help but see the future as distorted by an optimistic heart. That’d be me. So here’s what I see, clear as daylight, for the first year of this new decade.

The Supreme Court: Justice Antonin Scalia is showing signs of serious judicial burnout — ever more sarcastic and intemperate. He’s not enjoying the court and the prospect of having to outlast Obama’s second term, which will end in January of 2017 when Antonin will be 81, grates on him. He’ll be thinking of resigning all this summer, and when the court returns in the fall, he’ll announce. Two weeks later, Justice Clarence Thomas will also resign and the two will make public their plans for a joint memoir and tour via Thomas’s motor home, both to be named, “None of your damn business.”

The Senate: Talk of changing the filibuster rules will soon be forgotten and the Senate will settle into an angry mood. The Republicans will slowly come to understand that their solid opposition to health care reform has only enriched their legacy of opposition to Social Security, Civil Rights, and Medicare, each of which has required an entire generation to forget the Republican role. Predictions of Republican victories in the fall will be additionally undercut by the Tea Baggers’ continued purge of the moderates. The opportunity for comedy will continue unabated as new mirthmakers join Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, and the ever-sidesplitting Mitch McConnell. They don’t call him the Senate Wit for nothing.

The House of Representatives: The fall elections will have only a mild impact in the House, due to the effect of the Tea Baggers driving Republican candidates to the extreme right, and the Democrats eventually learning how to explain the success of health care reform. The Democrats will lose less than ten seats, some of which will be switcheroos of Blue Dogs coming out of the political closet as Republicans. Nancy Pelosi will finally learn to smile as if it doesn’t hurt.

The War in Afghanistan: Two things need to happen or the war is toast: First, the Pakistani leadership and the Pakistani people need to start loving us or the Taliban will continue to have a safe haven there, so dangerously near their Dr. Atomic Kahn. A new George Kennan-like containment policy will arise because that is the best we can hope for.

Afghan War Part II: Karzai needs to go. Since he can be bought out of his presidency, somewhere around March he’s going to be feeling the urge to retire to San Francisco, where he’ll join his family developing of a new chain of restaurants which may or may not be fronts for drug laundering. If the name of the chain turns out to be “Poppy’s,” consider it a clue.

The Commentariat of the New York Times: Gail Collins and Maureen Dowd will write frequently annoying and inane columns that will have intelligent women everywhere complaining that they could do better. Those intelligent women will be correct.

Tom Friedman will realize that he’s losing his success rate to the average stopped clock and retire to focus on writing non-political travel books. They will be very short. But somehow still turgid.

Paul Krugman will remain correct, but regretfully so, almost all the time. He will learn rigorous new writing discipline, and use the interjection, “But wait” only every other column.

Frank Rich will maintain his weekly backwards gaze, reviewing the political theatre of What Just Happened. He will not look forward, since you can’t review something that hasn’t yet taken place.

Ross Douthat, the latest and most confusing of the Time’s attempts to find a conservative voice who can speak without generating those annoying little flecks of foam that form at the corners of the mouth, will resign from the paper and begin his studies for the priesthood by joining Opus Dei.

Bob Herbert and Nick Kristof will regularly make us feel angry, guilty and bad. Thanks I guess.

David Brooks will continue his complex and highly public metamorphosis from an acolyte of William F. Buckley, Jr, into some new kind of political exotic that will combine a basic and caring liberal decency tempered by skepticism of big government in general and disoriented by an irrational fear of transitory deficits. A single lunch with Paul Krugman should be helpful, in which case the transition from genuine conservative to genuine liberal will be complete.

And those folks over at the White House? The President and his team will refine their new kind of executive branch: policy over politics, deep cool, and long-term thinking. Those in the chattering classes who can only understand what’s going on by noticing what moved in the previous 24 hour news cycle will persist in missing the unfolding tectonics of the new era.

What do you see? I can’t wait to hear what you think will (or ought) to happen in the coming year.

Turns out that running a political campaign on a vague, all-inclusive slogan like “Hope” can be a dangerous game. For the idealistic among us, Obama’s call for us to unleash our hope meant unleashing that latent desire for a new kind of politics. For the needy, hope could mean emergency help right now, on the line.

“Hope for me is I’ll finally get a good job.”

“I’ll be able to get my teeth fixed.”

“I’ll be able to pay for my wife’s cancer therapy.”

Hope was intrinsically too big a promise to run on. Hope unleashes dreams of the beautiful, while politics by its nature can only deliver the truly ugly and barely functioning compromise. For anyone who dared, even for a moment, to let go of a sceptical frame of mind and give flight to hope, disappointment is inevitable. Reality can never catch up with all the dreams that hope unleashes. If any of those things that were once imagined arrive, they will certainly be bent out of shape, maybe beyond recognition.

How do you like your end of war, high speed rail, Wall Street reform so far?

That’s why hope is going to be replaced by a hope gap. Every time.

The nastiest of these hope gaps is coming early next year with the successful passage of health care legislation. Public option or not, Obama has given hundreds of millions of Americans reason to hope that the health care system will finally start working. The uninsured will be covered. Your doctor’s bedside manner will warm up. You’ll be able to get your teeth fixed. Chemo will be paid for. No more bankruptcies for medical bills. No more pre-existing conditions. No more turndowns from the insurance companies.

Our spirits will be lifted and hope will swell for many of us at that thrilling moment only a few months from now when President Obama gathers that huge crowd around him for the historic signing of the new Health Care For All legislation. Maybe it’ll be a few weeks after Thanksgiving, with the White House Christmas tree as a backdrop. Maybe Obama will be wearing a tasseled red cap. I can see Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and maybe even Olympia Snowe crowded around the same desk that F.D.R. once used to sign Social Security. Obama signs the documents and hands out the historic pens. The crowd cheers. A star rises in the East.

But it’s not going to happen that way. The real phase-in of health care change will take four years. Sure – the politicos are jockeying to move up some cosmetic talking points, but in cold (and it will certainly be cruel) reality the deaths from neglect, the bankruptcies, the denials of care will continue over the many years of phase-in. And if the media front-pages the continued horror stories while the uninsured and under-insured continue their suffering, hope will not only vanish, but health care reform will seem like a cruel hoax to those who will have been betrayed.

Obama, of course, will continue to be cool. Yes, the man is generally cool for all the right reasons. Unfortunately, we’re learning he can also be cool for some wrong ones.

Cool can be read as grace under pressure. Cool can be seen as smart, the calm of someone playing a deep game. But there is another side of cool, and when hope runs out for some, Obama’s cool will be read as condescension:

“I’m cool because I know things that are just too complicated to explain to everyone at this moment. I can make deals with big pharma – and I when I want you to know all the details, you’ll see how smart I was. In the meantime, be cool.”

What hope did Obama elicit in your heart during the campaign? Which of the many small and great wrongs of the Bush administration did you let yourself hope that Obama would somehow right? Big for me was torture. I believed we would shed a bright light on the evil perpetrated in our good name, and justice would be done. I’m sorry to report that I have entered my own little hope gap on torture.

And as far as your toothache that’s getting worse every day? Try not to lose hope.

The current civic war over health care restructuring that’s raging in Congress and across America is instructive to anyone who is interested in improving things anywhere. I often wonder why, 48 years after the establishment of the Peace Corp, or 90 years after the creation of the League of Nations (that held among its goals ending malaria, yellow fever, and preventing typhus epidemics) that progress, as measured by world health and poverty, seems so slow.

One thing we can see clearly in the midst of all the fog surrounding health care change in the United States is that a significant portion of the populace is terrified of change, so much so that even the thought of discussing change frightens them. Instead of attending town meetings and listening and asking, they would prefer that these town meetings not take place at all. For these millions of people, it is clear that they would prefer to hold on to the status quo.

But the status quo is a funny thing, an ephemera, something that never existed except in retrospect. The expression taken as a whole tells us why: status quo ante bellum — the way things were before the war. It’s an idea often invoked in peace treaties. Let’s return part of this situation to the way it was before the war. But of course, if we did that completely, we would be returning ourselves to the exact same situation that gave rise to the war in the first place. The return to the status quo, then, means returning to the time and conditions that gave rise to upheaval. And to do so would cause an endless cycle of upheavals.

When the great U.S. Civil War came to an end the people of the United States shared no common vision of how to bind up the wounds of the nation. Just because the Confederacy had lost the armed struggle did not mean that a great mass of people did not still yearn for a world that preceded the war. I would venture that there are still pockets of sentiment in the South that yearn for the status quo, and I really do mean the status quo ante bellum of the Civil War. Ante bellum mansions, ante bellum thinking, ante bellum repression.

Now we are met on the battleground of a new war, currently a civic war, over the fundamental issue of how we, as a people, will care for each other, if at all. This battle has its origins in the founding of the country and even before then. So far the American people have agreed to fight wars together, fight fires together, build roads together, collect taxes together (with some serious dissent here and there) and educate our children together — at least as a common effort. With the New Deal, we agreed to create some retirement security for our workers, and with L.B.J. we agreed to provide health care for our elderly.

The next step, if we’re actually in this together, is health care as a right of citizenship. In the nations ranked among the world’s first tier, America is generally dead last in health care statistics, and tops in cost. Most rational people see this as an indicator that there is a serious problem here. When one looks at economic forecasts for healthcare costs, it is not difficult to see that we will bankrupt ourselves if something isn’t done.

It is fascinating that the debate, then, is not simply over what might be the best solution to the problem. That maybe as many as 25% of Americans prefer this thing called the status quo to any other approach tells us a great deal about human nature and just how great the challenge is when it comes to making progress of any kind. We are seeing clearly, for the first time in a great while, that when it comes to a need for major change, a great portion of the population of a supposedly modern democracy would prefer to do nothing. The status quo, no matter how flawed, dangerous and untenable, is preferable to even contemplating change.

When we finally do achieve health care restructuring, I hope that some of us will take a moment to look at that powerful human preference for the status quo over anything else, including reasoned discourse, and think about what it might take to bring that most change averse part of the population into a genuine conversation about anything that might bring about positive change. Maybe if we can solve that problem, we can unlock the secrets to human progress.

In the meantime, we’ll always have Tara. Or will we? Unfortunately for those who would prefer to return there, Tara, the house from Gone With the Wind, was only a movie set. By 1959 the wood was ruined and the papier-mâché melted. Tara has been torn down. Only the front door remains, on view at the Margaret Mitchell Museum in Atlanta. If we really want to return to Tara we’ll be able to do so. In our fantasies.

Ever regret finding a book in a used book store, think about buying it, and then a long time later regretting that you had decided not to?

Many years ago I was visiting my hometown, Cleveland, and found a wonderful old bookstore. Suddenly I came across a twenty-some volume set of a complete transcript of the War Crimes Trials at Nuremberg. It was a massive set, and expensive. But it stood for me as the actual first-hand document of one of the ultimate moments in the history of humankind when the rule of law had taken the necessary first steps to restoring civilization after the world had gone mad at the hands of the barbarians.

I wanted those books today.

Two stories on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer last night offered a vivid contrast, especially had they been presented as one story. But they weren’t.

First we heard the sad and even terrifying story of the young and vulnerable U.S. journalist Roxana Saberi sentenced to eight years in prison in Iran, on charges that began with Ms. Saberi being accused of the grievous crime of purchasing a bottle of wine and which escalated into her being accused of spying. Another woman on the show, Haleh Esfandiari, who had also been imprisoned in Iran on false charges explained what Ms. Saberi would be going through – such as nine hours straight questioning by an unseen inquisitor as the victim faced a wall – and it didn’t take long to get that this was damn close to torture. Ms. Saberi is thinking about going on a hunger strike. What would help get her out? Well, certainly it would help if her home country could bring some good old American moral authority to the court of world opinion. Yep, sure could use that good ol’…. Now where the heck did that go?

And then came the vivid contrast. Jim Lehrer interviewed Jeffrey Smith, a former CIA official, who was there to defend the Obama/Axelrod/Emmanuel position that we needed to get torture behind us and move on. Michael Ratner, of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who has been outspoken on every issue regarding human and constitutional rights violations since the beginning of the ‘War on Terror” was there to explain, once again, the implications of not prosecuting those who authorized and carried out torture.

The two arguments came down to two very simple statements. They were close to perfect in expressing whether or not the end justifies the means that you almost wanted to take the transcript into every Sunday school in the country for a little class discussion.

Michael Ratner simply asserted that the rule of law is necessary for civilization. Want to live in a civilized world? Then the rule of law is a requirement.
Mr. Ratner: “If people, in the high levels of government, can break the law, what kind of example does that send, first, to the American people, who want to comply with the law, and, secondly, to nations of the world that say, “Well, the Americans did this when they had a terrorist attack. Why can’t we?” and then just give people some legal memos and a slap on the wrist at best, if that, and let them off.
“You just can’t have a lawless world, and that’s what we have here.”

Jim Lehrer then asked the perfect question: “Mr. Smith, do we have a lawless world?”

Mr. Smith: “We have a lawless world, and I believe very much that the United States needs to stand up for the rule of law.”

But the president’s decision not to prosecute? If “…he decided that he was going to open this up and prosecute them, who knows where it might have led? I think it could have been enormously destructive to the CIA, and I think our national security is enhanced by what the president did. And I think we should let him continue to do as he wants to do.”

So we have a lawless world and the president can do what he wants to do (didn’t we just see how that turns out?) and somehow that is standing up for the rule of law.
And that’s one of the reasons Ms. Roxana Saberi will be thinking about a hunger strike for her rights as she continues to be abused in an Iranian prison. The posse is being detained on morals charges.

I don’t go to the ballet all that often, but when I do the same thing always happens to me. By the time I get to intermission, I’m walking differently. Watching incredible dancers is a little contagious for me. I feel as if I’d like to do a grand jeté and maybe click my heels as I fly through the air. But one thing’s for sure — I’m standing a little taller. You just can’t slump after an hour of ballet.

Watching the Obamas glide through Europe this week I couldn’t help but notice that they were the center of attention wherever they went. There were a couple of particularly striking images that came back to us. First was the Obamas meeting the Queen and Prince Philip. The Queen looked tiny next to the Americans, and the royal husband looked as if he had stumbled into the wrong century. Something revolutionary had happened and he was downright wary.

The next image was of President Obama and Nicholas Sarkozy. Sarkozy is apparently more than a few millimeters shy of six feet, and must have been feeling a powerful vertical tug when he stood next to Obama. In the picture, his head is canted back almost as if in the hope that the height of his forehead will somehow improve things, but the effect reminds me more of when I’m out walking Tesla, our German Shorthaired Pointer and some little dog comes up. I don’t know why Tesla has this effect on little dogs, but they seem to have a huge need for her approval. Maybe it’s that they crave recognition that lowly as they are, they too are dogs, somehow ennobled by sharing dogness with our beautiful hound. Sarkozy was proud to be head of state too, sharing head-of-stateness with the magical President Obama.

I viewed and read a middling amount of coverage of the G-20 conference, and of other events in the UK and France this week, but no-one seemed to capture the essence of what the fact of Barack and Michelle Obama being the new first family of the U.S. means to the rest of the world. Yes, Obama faces a challenge similar to FDR’s, and he has a lot of Lincoln’s qualities, and he even has much of the megawatt charm and wit of JFK. Obama is like them, and he is completely different. He is an intellectual, a serious writer. He has wisdom. The speed at which he became comfortable with the weight of the office was astonishing, as if he had been preparing his entire life to bear the burden. His stride to a podium is more than just an athlete’s gate, it’s as if he, not Rahm, had been the dancer.

You see, I don’t think it’s just Sarkozy that Obama has up on their toes. I think its the G- 20, and all the other leaders he visits, and the populations of their respective countries, and most Americans, too.

Great leadership is transformative. Most of us are going to be beneficiaries of someone who just might be one of the greats. On your toes!

President-elect Barack Obama’s announcement this weekend of a massive top-down jobs and infrastructure program comes as no surprise, but I had a queasy feeling as I listened to him describe each specific example: build schools, bridges, roads, high speed internet. One word came to mind. Slow. Rebuild our nation’s schools? Glorious, of course. But how long will it be before the surveys of the existing school conditions, committee meetings, architecture review panels, competitive bids and environmental reviews give way to high numbers of workers actually building something? Can you see any impact in less than a year or more?

What about roads and bridges, the shovels-in-the-dirt projects the governors were suddenly so enthused about? Again, planning, permits, delays, bidding. Months will pass, many millions will remain desperately unemployed.

And it’s all so heavily top-down. Not to mention, WPA. Guys building stuff. Anyone see a problem here?

How about a simultaneous mirror program, bottom-up, a huge jobs program, one that could be hiring people by the hundreds of thousands as soon as February? I’m thinking of the massive hiring power of the millions of small businesses, start-ups, and entrepreneurs in this country. What if we really had a Small Business Administration, not the existing huge and slow bureaucracy, but a streamlined U.S. Small Business Bank that would get dollars into the hands of the fastest hirers in the country? So the question is, how to get that money into the right hands without creating a huge new, slow bureaucracy?

Actually, they’re already out there in communities all over the U.S. The people most astute in understanding small business and entrepreneurs: the hundreds of MBA schools all over the U.S., many of which have entrepreneurship programs. Harvard, Chicago, Stanford, Wharton, USC and hundreds of others. Take that faculty and those graduate students, and start them out with give $50 million each. Their job is to invite, or go out into the communities and discover, companies that can use money right now to hire and to grow. We will have grass-roots hiring flourishing in every corner of the country. And it can happen really fast.

Every investment doesn’t need to be perfect, but they do need to move fast. Thinking like good portfolio managers of venture funds, and unlike the SBA, the faculty and grad student combine will be instructed to aim for one highly successful venture for each ten invested in. That in itself will be provide a decent payback for the taxpayer-investors.

But what about the side benefits: a thousand entrepreneurial lights will give birth to hundreds of thousands of jobs, ma and pa businesses will get a chance to grow, and the private sector will be hugely strengthened coming out of this deep recession. Without this bottom-up initiative, all we will have produced will be a massive, mostly one-time investment, with little new technology to show for it, and no development of small business and entrepreneurial skills to show for this huge opportunity for learning.

A new U.S. Small Business Bank. Money directly to those who can hire best, hire fast, and create long-term wealth. It’s what a good community organizer might come up with.

In the one-on-one Obama Clinton debate in California, Ms. Clinton at one point quietly acknowledged that although “single-payer” was the preferred health system that most Americans wanted and that most professionals who focus on fixing the healthcare system also prefer, it was not practical to even go there at this time given the forces involved.

What are the implications of that thought? It means that in this democracy, what the people want cannot be done because certain forces, not of the “people” are too strong for democracy to actually work. What was the purpose of Gettysburg? “That we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Apparently, it has.

It is a pleasure to welcome you here. This site is where I will be introducing my ideas and methodology about thinking creatively. At the time of this site’s creation, my process consists of eleven steps, and although I hope that that number will change in time as we exchange ideas, as I learn, and as our understanding of the thinking process evolves, we are eleven right now. I went looking for other words to express eleven, and in my Oxford Abridged I came across the Olde English world, “endleofon,” for eleven.

Over the coming weeks and months I will be presenting and discussing what each of these steps does, and how each one intereacts with others to quickly prototype solutions, test them, explore their consequences and implications, and test all that against who we are, what we stand for, and what we’re trying to achieve. My hope is that this site will become a magnet for those people who are passionate about thinking about a special kind of thinking, let’s call it endlefonic thinking at the moment, and that over time we will form a community of people who are passionate about developing important ideas and solving the challenges preventing their efficient diffusion.