According to a recent survey (featured on MarketingProfs) by UPrinting, which has skin in the game of small business promotion, one third of small business owners consider designing their own materials to be “scrappy.” The objective is to lower their marketing costs. 

Of course (or unfortunately), there’s no definition of “scrappy,” but if you’ve ever seen materials that make you wonder, “Whoever approved that?” you’ve probably seen an SMB’s DIY effort. And you’d probably remove the letter “s” from the front of “scrappy” to describe it.

AI for Artistic Ineptitude
Usually, your average person, business or not, will readily admit that they can barely draw a stick figure, let alone do respectable graphic design. It would seem as if this 33% thinks they can. Or thinks design doesn’t matter. Or taps into the capabilities of Figma or Canva with their seemingly endless catalog of templates. Yet….

There’s a difference between picking something an owner likes and choosing something that reflects the character and positioning of the business. Or an approach that, more importantly, motivates customers to pay attention. That’s the key to generating any interest from people who might care about the products or services you sell.

Melody and lyrics
An equally critical consideration goes beyond how you “look” to what you say. That’s where marketing communications can get really painful. All those people who say they have no artistic skill may well be the same ones who believe, “Anyone can write.” They’re wrong. 

The effect of words and pictures working together, reinforcing one another, and creating the desire to want something is not a casual endeavor. Nike didn’t rely only on its signature “swoosh” to attract athletes. It combined it with “Just do it” (and with great ads that showed the footwear in action) to generate demand. DeBeers didn’t need action. It simply needed alluring photography of its gems to persuade people that “A diamond is forever.” 

Better directions make journeys shorter… and cheaper
This all comes down to perspective. Are marketing materials expenditures or investments? If they’re done badly, either in-house or by designers and copywriters who haven’t analyzed the perceptions, expectations, and needs of the business’s buyers, it’s a cost. Done correctly, it provides an ROI that greatly exceeds the up-front expense. 

Rather than think “What can I cut?” to save money, it’s wiser and, ultimately, more profitable to ask, “Is this conveying the right message to my most likely buyers, and will it convince them to try what we’re selling?” Figure that out first, and the professionals you hire will know exactly what they have to do, why they have to do it, and do it far better than business owners who should be focusing on their core business responsibilities.

Those insights and creative direction will drastically reduce the time (and cost) required to produce great work and increase the number of qualified responses. Think of it as quality over crappity.

The government will let you down. Any government, but especially ours in the United States. It’s nothing new. 

Mark Twain was insightful (or observant) enough to say, “Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress, but I repeat myself.” True then, true now.

Most of you reading this have had to prove yourselves to get your job and to retain it. If you hold positions in accounting or engineering or law or medicine or finance, there are exams you have to pass to practice your profession… honorably, at least. 

Objective proof
Contractors have to be licensed in most states, and electricians and plumbers have to be in many. Great chefs train in the kitchens of other great chefs or get diplomas from culinary schools. Law enforcement, emergency service, and firefighting personnel almost always have to demonstrate their aptitude after training for their jobs. Teachers? Absolutely.

Politicians? Nope. They don’t have to prove any qualifications to anyone. There’s something wrong with that. 

Unfamiliar territory
The current situation in this country involves elected officials who are not intimately (or even casually) familiar with the Constitution, the separation of powers, or the role of the three branches of government. They seem to consider that laws they don’t like don’t deserve to be enforced… unless it might harm someone they don’t like.

Imagine if an accountant ignored the Internal Revenue Code and told you that only idiots pay taxes. Think about whether you want to have spine surgery performed by a pipe fitter instead of an orthopedic surgeon because they both understand structural stability. Consider whether a court stenographer is a suitable choice to initiate a lawsuit against a supplier suspected of fraud on a global scale.

Not interested? Good. 

Inmates who run the asylum
So why, if government legislation and regulations affect so many aspects of your business and your life, aren’t there any minimum requirements for holding elective office or being appointed to a public one. Shouldn’t those people be credentialed or, at the very least, be able to pass the test that applicants for citizenship must pass? 

Shouldn’t they demonstrate familiarity with economics, history, trade, diplomacy, the justice system, education, employment, environmental science, and any other discipline they’ll be in charge of directing or overseeing? 

Your life is on the line; pick up
That doesn’t seem to be asking for much when those individuals will be making decisions that affect your livelihood and wellbeing. And it doesn’t seem to be asking for much when, because truth-in-advertising laws don’t cover political advertising, candidates tend to… what’s the word… lie. They make outlandish statements about what they will do, can do, and for whom. So back to Sam Clemens: “We have the best government that money can buy.” 

I don’t think we’re getting our money’s worth. Lobbyists, I’m sure, would disagree.

Edward Bernays, the father of modern public relations, was still going into the office several times a week when he died in his sleep… at 103. Broadway producer/director George Abbott was working on a revival of his hit musical Damn Yankees when he passed away in his sleep. He was 107.
​

Both men had lived through and adapted to countless numbers of technological, cultural, and political changes. When Bernays and Abbott both died in 1995, information had evolved from print to digital, distribution shifted from postal mail to faxes and then email, live events morphed into film, radio, television, and online presentations, musical tastes shifted from ragtime to jazz to big bands to rock ’n’ roll, and the world shifted the balance of power to the United States.

Mailing lists for news releases went online. Lighting and sound cues for stage productions were being programmed with software. Sexual content was no longer forbidden. 

Hire people smarter than you are... and get out of their way
Bernays and Abbott (and the organizations they led) adapted. In the tradition of great management, they relied on people who knew more about certain things than they did… and let them do it. 

Today, however, people like that are looked at as anomalies. Oddities. Relics. They weren’t. The “don’t trust anybody over 30” mantra of the 1960s seems back in style. Yet the underlying principles of business and the techniques of marketing, sales, operations, and finance haven’t changed; just the ways they’re implemented. It’s easier to learn those new ways than it is to grasp the foundational concepts, but the people running the latest wave of business ventures don’t seem to believe that. 

AI -- the old new thing
In 1991, the benefits of AI were very clear. Implementing AI/expert systems, however, involved months of interviewing domain experts and then months or years of transforming that knowledge into applications using a programming language called LISP. Unless you were a Fortune 100 corporation like American Express, Dun & Bradstreet, General Electric, American Airlines, Chemical Bank, Nippon Steel, and similar firms, the cost was prohibitive. Yet Chemical Bank’s application for fraud and error detection in international currency transactions paid for itself the first night it ran. 

Who worked on those applications? People who were in their 40s, 50s, and even 60s. Some of the domain experts at those Fortune-ranked firms were on the high side of that, having gathered institutional knowledge over decades. That’s considered unimportant, it seems, in the era of machine learning and AI agents.

Fading futures
Companies are already considering eliminating junior positions and replacing them with AI. People with years of experience are no longer considered valuable once their knowhow is turned into code. 

That should force people to wonder: “What’s my best-by date?” When will employers decide they can replace you with software? How long can you survive when AI isn’t offered as a tool to improve your productivity but as a replacement for you? 

Most of all, what will be sacrificed? If technology undermines the workforce and eliminates workers’ income, who will have any money to buy what the robots and AI produce? Not many. That raises another question: “If no one has the income to buy essentials, let alone discretionary purchases, what will be an industry’s best-by date?" It could be the time when it unintentionally plans its own demise.

Years before it was poached by another company — after the home security client I developed it for was acquired — the tagline “What have you got to lose?” always was more than a double entendre. Today, it’s even more meaningful. The economy, international alliances, educational standards, and the US government itself are all at risk.

​Peter Thiel lecturing on the antichrist (and suggesting Greta Thunberg as a prototype) is like Machiavelli expounding on democracy.

Thiel, like his PayPal colleague Elon Musk, uses wealth and the high profile it brings to commandeer public attention and espouse a world view that demonizes altruism and repositions the detrimental actions of the rich as beneficial and, in Thiel’s case, somehow Christian. He is himself a good candidate for antichrist.

The new goodness of bad
It is, in New Testament terms, incompatible to equate Donald Trump, as Thiel seems to do, with anything Christ-like. The current President lacks understanding, compassion, charity, forgiveness, gratitude, and morality… unless it’s toward sycophants who, despite his violations of nearly all of the Ten Commandments, praise him as the Second Coming. Yet Thiel supports him, and Thiel’s conservatism mirrors those same self-serving attitudes. 

The Bible itself is a cesspit of contradictions. If it were clear on every point, there wouldn’t be more than a thousand denominations of Christianity, each claiming to be the true interpreter of the Testaments. To selectively choose an interpretation that supports one claim — while ignoring other parts of the Bible that contradict that explanation — is disingenuous. 

The write way
The accounts of the creation vary depending on whether they were written by Aaronids or Levites. The gospels of the New Testament, none of which was written less than 100 years after the crucifixion, have their own unique stories and viewpoints on the events they have in common. Each one emphasizes a particular viewpoint. Each can be used to support assertions that contradict someone else’s. 

Scholars, rabbis, ministers, and priests will never agree on a single meaning for anything in the Bible. It’s human nature to claim evidence, real or imaginary, that supports your own point-of-view. Just as iis now happening with the United States Constitution.

Lost in mutation
Unlike “the good book” (about which Oscar Wilde said, “When I think of all the harm that book has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it”), the Constitution used to be considered straightforward and clear in its meaning. Not now. The separation of powers has become undetectable: the Supreme Court has assigned powers to the Executive branch that are not mentioned or implied anywhere in the document, and Congress has allowed its control over financial matters and treaties and international alliances to be usurped.

The Bible and the Constitution have both been appropriated as totems. Donald Trump has used them both: holding up the Bible in front of a church during Black Lives Matter protests in Washington, and displaying his signature-stained executive orders that, one by one, represent claims of Constitutional power that he does not legitimately possess. He qualifies as both antichrist and antipresident, yet his supporters, most of whom want to see a Christian nationalist nation, are happy to ignore both the founding fathers and the father, son, and holy spirit to seize power on earth and, like Crusaders, annihilate the infidels. 

Rallying the dupes
Thiel’s lectures are sold out. Republicans in Congress understand that, having sold out themselves. “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no native American criminal class,” Mark Twain wrote, “except Congress.” Combine that with Blaise Pascal’s assertion that “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction,” and you have a modern profile of wolves in sheep’s clothing preying on their flocks and their constituents.

Businesses in this country have been boycotted over their support for people their customers don’t like (Target for its DEI initiatives and gay-friendly product displays; Bud Light for featuring a transgender celebrity; Tesla for the anti-personnel mine that is Elon Musk; advertisers’ boycott of Fox News because of Tucker Carlson’s toxicity; South African products during apartheid). Yet American corporations have folded like empty wallets when threatened with financial penalties and operational restrictions by an administration that has no official power to impose them.

Profit over piety, safety over spine, partyotism over patriotism, feudalism over freedom: the drumbeat of defeat against the creep of dictatorship and the unholy veneration of an antichrist.

With each new executive order, each refusal by Congress to assert its Constitutional authority, each administration-friendly misinterpretation of the Constitution by the Supreme Court, the United States moves closer and closer to dictatorship. Yet the government is not solely responsible. Businesses are equally culpable.

Each time a corporation capitulates to threats from the White House, each time a law firm abandons legal principles to avoid penalties, each time a university agrees to modify its curricula, and each time state and local governments collaborate with Washington to threaten individual rights and replace freedom with fear, it becomes easier for the administration to continue to impose its unConstitutional will on the nation.

The new American mafia
The closest equivalent to the administration’s current modus operandi is organized crime. The demand for protection money to be “allowed” to continue in business. The bribes to be permitted to engage in free trade. The taxes (in the form of tariffs) that negatively affect profitability and reduce revenues while raising prices for consumers. All of it is harmful. All of it is based on ignorance of economics and an unwillingness — by business leaders, especially — to make it clear that the emperor, the capo dei capi of the D. C. mob, has no clothes.

By now, it’s clear that Mr. Trump desires to be king. His gold-encrusted office would embarras King Midas. That’s true, in part, because Mr. Trump’s Midas touch turns everything to mufflers.

Government of, by, and for the people may perish
His tendencies are always self-serving and intent on eliminating Americans’ knowledge of the real world. Replacing museum exhibits that trace the truth of history with displays of whitewashed reinterpretations that mirror an uneducated man’s lack of knowledge only serves to make Americans willfully uninformed, unable to face reality, and incapable of dealing with people, institutions, and nations that recognize the facts.

CEOs have paraded through the Oval Office with gifts of gold, as if they were courtiers in the court of Ivan the Terrible, hoping to be rewarded for ignoring that the recipient is not smart enough to know he’s not. They argue or are interpreted to claim that their actions are designed to protect investors and the company itself. They don’t. They only serve to give power to an individual who rules with an iron whim and could, at the mere perception of a slight, take action to inflict greater harm. It is a vicious circle of delusion and deceit.

Now is the time for all good men…
The longer business leaders stay silent, the more they capitulate to unwarranted decrees, the less power they will have to control the destinies of their companies, their employees, and their fortunes. They must take a stand. 

They must refuse to donate to the political campaigns of any candidate who has abnegated their responsibility to their constituents and the Constitution. They must withdraw support from political action committees that endorse the policies of Project 2025 which undermine democracy and the rule of law. They must let their suppliers, distributors, partners, employees, and customers know that they will not follow in the footsteps of Volkswagen, Bayer, Siemens, Bertelsmann, Hugo Boss, and American companies that supplied the Nazi government. 

In 1935, Doubleday published Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here. Ninety years later, it has.

The Bill of Rights contains no amendment granting people the right to be stupid. Unfortunately, millions of Americans are insisting there is.

They want to be stupid about science, medicine, religion, guns, and the restrictions of the Constitution itself. They’re Con artists, attempting to convince those “other” people that the Cons have Constitutional protections you don’t and that you don’t have protections you do. It’s the underbelly of idiocy that drags along the soil of ineptitude.

America is rife with past examples. There’s America’s “peculiar institution” that insisted that the people we enslaved were inferior — mentally if not physically. We’ve made a market in bias against the Irish, Italians, Jews, Asians, and just about anybody born somewhere else. 

In the 20th Century, after running through the usual ethnic victims, there was the vituperative hatred of Father Coughlin. The Catholic “radio priest” couldn’t seem to remember — in the midst of his venomous condemnation of Jews — that Jesus just so happened to be Jewish. 

McCarthyism thrived on willful ignorance. The junior senator from Wisconsin made claims (like today’s) with no basis in fact against people who were guilty of nothing. People whose behavior was permitted. By the Constitution. 

The John Birch Society joined in on the fun of a political kakistocracy. Back then they hated Russians. Today’s heirs-apparent think that Russia has the right idea: no opposition, no dissent, no choice, and no room for intelligent thought.

After having defeated Nazis in Germany, George Lincoln Rockwell still rose his stiff armed salute with a swastika armband and persuaded too many Americans that Adolf was right about the whole master race thing. In a sense, he was the ideological godfather of modern white supremacists. It wasn’t the Klan. That crowd was at least smart enough to wear a mask.

Another George (Wallace) had the sense to understand that racism was, well… stupid. Strom Thurmond did not, at least not until he had to admit he had a daughter whose mother was Black. 

Nixon, who should have had the wiles to work around the perceptions that he knew he should avoid, was almost clinically moronic. What made things worse was that the people he relied on were even less perceptive than he was. It’s too bad he was allowed to resign. It was a “good of the country” maneuver that set a pattern for tolerance of unConstitutional behavior. It was, yes, stupid.

Reagan? Oh, God. He was the best snake oil salesman the White House had ever let in. Nothing that he said or did helped the people that he said he was helping. And they weren’t smart enough to see that his actions helped the wealthy, not them. The “Great Communicator” was, in fact, a great deceiver. 

All the highly vocal men in Congress who went after Bill Clinton for his lies about sex with an intern turned out to have committed far greater sins of the flesh. At least they didn’t have the gall to claim “I wasn’t really that into her.” Just brainless enough to have opened their mouths after previously opening their zippers.

If Cheney was Tweedle Dum, poor Dubya was Tweedle Dumber. Instead of accepting the world’s willing help to eliminate the threat from Al Qaeda and terrorism, he listened to neocon nincompoops and put us even further in harm’s way. Apparently, too many of his cronies swallowed yellow cake.

By the time Mr. Trump stumbled into the Executive Mansion the first time, H. L. Mencken was proved right after nearly a century.

…All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” [Baltimore Sun, July 26, 1920]

Those plain folks are now — thanks to decades of descent in the quality of education, the lack of compromise in politics, the belief that facts are optional, and the assurances that “there are good people on both sides” — the prevailing idiocracy. They all declare the right to be stupid, but the rest of us should never be so stupid that we ever admit that they’re right.

This won’t be easy, given that a member of the Supreme Court has suggested eliminating contraception (after joining the majority on the Dobbs decision that undid Roe v Wade), but let’s give it a try. 

The easiest thing would be to realize that sexuality is a business, and usually the promise of profit makes conservatives drool. Yet we’re the country that thinks that nudity is wicked, and American tourists get either uncomfortable or unnecessarily stimulated when they visit Europe and see bare-breasted women on billboards. (We’re also the nation that objected loudly and often when cable television first debuted and offered X-rated content… as an option… and when courts decided it was, in fact, an option that wasn’t included as part of the basic package, people relaxed… and signed up for porn in droves.)

Promiscuous profits
Contraception has been profitable for generations. Condoms were initially promoted as a way to prevent sexually-transmitted disease. Only later did anyone concede, publicly at least, that they were a form of birth control. But they were a worthwhile, profit-generating business for ages.

The interesting thing is that they were aimed at male customers. Birth control in the form of IUDs, diaphragms, and the pill shifted the focus to women — women who, in the women’s lib era, wanted to enjoy sexual activity without the risk of pregnancy. What was wrong with that? Oh, lots of things.

The price of pleasure
First, it suggested that, as validated by Kinsey and Masters & Johnson research, women actually enjoyed sex. Well! As any Bible thumper can tell you, that’s horrible. It puts those women — single women — up there with Jezebel and Delilah. We can’t have that now, can we?

Second, birth control, whether condoms or anything else, has a cost. That’s how the manufacturers earn their profits, but it’s why so many people don’t use birth control because, well… they can’t afford it. 

For the “oh, in the throes of passion, there’s no time to rubber-up or put a diaphragm in place” crowd, there are, as they say, consequences. Like VD. Or AIDS. Those two things support the sexual-industrial-pharmaceutical-medical complex. They are, in other words, good for business. But pregnancy? Whole ‘nother thing.

The price of prevention
Sure, pregnancy keeps OB/GYNs in business, but only for the women who can afford them. It also used to support clinics that help women who cannot afford birth control or proper medical care. The morality police, however, never liked that part of the overall equation.

What’s left then? Three very obvious things that mimic basic crime prevention and law enforcement: access to prevention, accountability, and prosecution for avoiding obligations.

Free or subsidized condoms, IUDs, diaphragms, and birth control and morning-after pills will reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies. It’s a ridiculously cheap alternative to having unwanted children wind up on public assistance rolls.

Who me?
Accountabilty? There’s the rub (and not the sexual variety). Everyone, particularly male legislators and judges, puts the blame for getting pregnant and the responsibility for raising unwanted children on women. But tell me: how did those women get pregnant? Immaculately? Au contraire. There was definitely a penis involved. Which was attached to a man. Who is, as far as those legislators and judges are concerned, not obligated in any way. Let’s change that.

Rule, instead, that any woman who is prevented from having an abortion and is compelled to give birth is entitled to have the child supported by the man who got her pregnant. There should be no such thing as “fun and run.” If a man can get into it, the woman he gets into must get something out of it… besides a newborn.

If men refuse to provide child support, they do not pass Go, they do not collect $200. They go directly to jail. If a guy claims, “It isn’t mine,” a DNA test will settle that in a couple of hours.

The wages of sin are paid in secret
This will not please the sex-out-of-wedlock-is-sinful crowd. Just don’t catch them at it, as too many politicians have been. Just as with X-rated cable, what people say and what people do have very little in common a great deal of the time. Besides, if it weren’t for infidelity (and pickup trucks, dogs, guns, and trains), there’d be no country music.

The we-won’t-pay-for-anything contingent — nothing for birth control, nothing for prenatal care, nothing for delivery or medical complications, and certainly nothing for post-natal child support — probably won’t be swayed by the reduced cost of legislation, regulatory enforcement, criminal procedings, incarceration, and lawsuits. That simply proves that those people failed both math and economics and, since most of them claim to be good Christians, that they have no understanding of Christ’s teachings. They’re too busy throwing stones.

The balance sheet
What the access-to-birth-control/healthcare-and-accountability-for-men alternative can do is
• improve mental health
• reduce sexually transmitted disease
• keep women in the workforce (and paying taxes on their income)
• preserve government resources for providing beneficial services
• lower the cost of enforcement and prosecution
and, most of all,
• increase happiness.

If most of the anti-abortion legislators could be honest, they might admit that their decisions have nothing to do with women. They’re focused on having power over women. When that’s the only way a man can feel like a man, he’s admitting that he’s less than one.

Nothing’s quite as annoying as nagging. If you’ve made a behavioral adjustment to do something (and you actually do it), reminders are like gravel on glass.

If those allegedly helpful notifications are inflexible, and Duolingo’s are, they go beyond annoying to irritating and engender feelings of appicide — the desire to kill software. So, during the week between Christmas and New Year’s when people have more fulfilling ways to fill their time with family and friends, Duolingo never relented in telling me that my streak was at risk. 

Not only did I not care (I’d been going non-stop for the other 51 weeks of the year), I could not be made to care. If I was going to let a piece of software tell me what to do and threaten me with retribution if I didn’t do it, I would be susceptible to Newspeak (which, in 2024, is just as insidious as it was in “1984”).

GROW ACCUSTOMED TO THE PACE
When my firstborn child awakened with inconvenient regularity at 5 am, I became accustomed to finding something to do between the time she went back to bed and the time that I would normally arise. I exercised. It was beneficial to my physical health and, because it gave me time alone with my thoughts, my mental health, as well. Yet, when she began sleeping through the night, I was attuned to rising well before dawn. Sleep became a total waste of time. Except to her.

If there had been consumer-level software and mobile devices and apps then, I might have used that time with Duolingo. Or an industry-specific news site. Or an exercise program. But I wouldn’t need the enticement of a streak. Self-improvement is its own reward and, if you want that reward, you do the work… and you do it without being noodged.

It is, of course, a very individual problem. The idea of accomplishment is often far rosier than the effort required to achieve it. It’s why I label all those people — the ones who show up at the gym in January only to vanish by Valentine’s Day — resolutionaries. They fight one minor battle and abandon the war. 

THE PARTS ARE GREATER THAN THE WHOLE
A psychoanalyst might say I’m a little, well… obsessive/compulsive. I probably am. But it’s helpful, and it’s learnable. 

Set a goal and break it into parts. Don’t look weeks or months or years into the future where the objective resides. Focus on reaching step one at the end of a day or a week. If someone, besides yourself, has to remind you to do it, it will not get done. It didn’t really matter enough. Or you hit a snag and abandoned the quest, admitting deep inside that you can’t solve the problem (you can) or that the goal was unrealistic (only if you quit) or there are other things much better (and easier) to do. 

It’s bad enough that others might think you’re insufficient. It’s worse when you think they might be right. They’re probably not. And neither are you.

If you’re really, truly, actually not succeeding at something for which you’re sure you have (or can acquire) the skills, it might not be a fit for your strengths. If you want to learn French but, no matter how hard you try, merci beaucoups sounds more like murky buckets, try another language. Or study phonics to understand pronunciation; it helps in English, too. So, when you visit Boston, you’ll know how to say “I need t’pahk at the hahbah” when you want to find a garage at the dock.

YOUR THING MIGHT NOT BE “THE” THING
Not everybody’s good at everything. Do what you’re best at, which is usually what you love most.

There are too many challenges that people abandon. I developed asthma in my teens and listened to my doctors and relied on medication. When I did my own research, changed my diet, increased my level of exercise, and abandoned bad habits, the asthma vanished. [Note: doctors do not know everything. They know averages. So if you’re not average (and you’re not), they need to spend the time to understand how you work and why. There’s a difference between “normal” and “normal for you.”]

So the Duolingo effect is only good when a task is a painful duty. If you need to be encouraged, you didn’t want to do it in the first place.