Missing from the internet

Major positive programs created and supported by the Democratic Party. 

Switzerland Loses 20% of Its Glacier Ice in Just 5 Years

Swiss glacier researchers report that the Swiss Alps have lost almost 20% of their ice since 2021, including a staggering 5.5% in 2026. This year's ice loss fell just shy of the 2022 record. Intense summer heat waves, following a winter with very little snowfall to replenish glacier ice, fueled the near-record 2026 loss. Mid-latitude glacier regions such as Switzerland are among the most sensitive regions to warming from fossil fuel use. 

Meanwhile, the head of Sweden’s oldest glacier station, in the Tarfala valley, noted that rapidly melting Swedish glaciers and thawing permafrost risk causing collapse events such as those in Rasuwa, Nepal in August and Blatten, Switzerland last year.  Experts called on Swedish policy makers to conduct a risk analysis including potential impacts of collapse on downstream dams and other infrastructure, especially in the Luleå region. 

Scientific Data  - Greenland and Antarctica have lost more than 11 trillion tonnes of ice over the past five decades, contributing more than 3 cm to global sea level rise according to an assessment of changes in both ice sheets. Ice loss from both Greenland and Antarctica has accelerated substantially since the 1990s. Greenland lost more than 6 trillion tonnes of ice between 1972-2023, while Antarctica lost nearly 5 trillion tonnes between 1979-2023. Most of this loss (84%) was caused by changes in ice dynamics, meaning glaciers are flowing faster and discharging more ice into the ocean. The remaining 16% resulted from losses at the ice sheet surface, including increased melting and reduced snowfall. The findings highlight that ice sheet loss is driven not only by surface melting, but also by changes in how quickly ice flows into the ocean – an important consideration for understanding and preparing for future sea-level rise.

Donald Trump

NY Times - President Trump personally instructed his budget director to use taxpayer money for TV ads praising him and his presidency, setting in motion a $20 million contract that used funds from the Department of Homeland Security, according to people familiar with the matter. The ads have run across cable and network television — on Fox News, CNN and MS Now, with football games on Fox and with national newscasts on CBS, ABC and NBC, including “Meet the Press,” which Mr. Trump is known to watch.

Independence Journal -- President Trump just canceled $810 million in federal money that Congress already approved, using a rare budget trick that some Republicans and Democrats both call illegal. President Trump ordered $810 million in cuts on September 25, targeting immigration-related services and race-based grant programs.

The White House used a "pocket rescission," a move that delays a funding request until it expires on its own before Congress can act. The Government Accountability Office has previously said this exact tactic breaks federal law.

Critics on both sides of the aisle, including some Republicans, say the maneuver strips Congress of its constitutional power over spending

Meanwhile....

People  - A total of 69 vehicles were involved in a massive chain-reaction crash in South Carolina. The crash occurred around 8:50 a.m. local time on Thursday, Oct. 1, near the 100-mile marker on I-95 southbound, according to the South Carolina Highway Patrol and Clarendon County Fire Rescue.

Some answers to questions about artificial intelligence

Massachusetts Catholic clergy abused children

More than 270 Catholic clerics sexually abused nearly 1,000 children across three Massachusetts dioceses over several decades, according to a report released by the state’s attorney general’s office on Wednesday.

The eight-year-long investigation did not result in new indictments, the office said, claiming that some conduct identified was not a crime under Massachusetts law at the time it occurred, and that in other cases the applicable statute of limitations had expired.

However, three cases were referred to different district attorney’s offices and one of those resulted in criminal charges. The majority of the abuse occurred before 2002.

“The evidence gathered during this investigation also shows that, for decades, and especially before 2002, church officials in all three dioceses knew about the sexual abuse of children yet did not take effective action to prevent it or to examine the institutional failures of leadership that led to scores of children being victimized at the hands of abusive priests,” the report stated.

The attorney general’s office said the report was “the first comparable public accounting of the institutional failures within the Fall River, Springfield and Worcester dioceses”.

The abuses in the archdiocese of Boston drew international attention after the Boston Globe published its Pulitzer-winning coverage in 2002, and prompted other investigations around the world that found similar cases of sexual abuse.

Polls

AP -  Americans are deeply frustrated with President Donald Trump’s handling of the economy and rising prices, with most panning his performance and blaming his policies as higher costs threaten his party’s chances in November. A new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that only 17% of U.S. adults approve of the Republican president’s handling of the cost of living. Just 26% approve of his handling of the economy overall, marking a new low.

Redesigning a church

Washngton Post - Unlike many pastors in America today, the Rev. David Lose doesn't have a numbers problem at Mount Olivet Lutheran Church in Minneapolis. With about 16,500 baptized members, his congregation is the largest it has been in its 106-year history. Mount Olivet has grown so much that it now qualifies as a megachurch.

"But when you're here, we're as different from a megachurch as you can imagine," Lose said. "Our worship is pretty much the same as we've been doing since 1940."

The setting is urban. The sanctuary is Gothic. The music is classical.

But people are lonely, with many working from home and still socially isolated after the covid pandemic shutdowns….

To help, Lose wants to turn Mount Olivet's original chapel, which sits barely used across the street from the main church, into a community gathering space where people of all faiths - or no faith - can gather over a cup of coffee or pint of beer.

Mount Olivet Lutheran Church's aging Lynnhurst chapel. (Minnesota Star Tribune via Getty Images) Lose said the idea builds on the community connections formed by the church's longtime pastor, the Rev. Reuben Youngdahl, who was later succeeded by his son, Paul.

"Can we create a place where people come together and actually get to know each other and find common cause?" he said. The proposed new space, reported on by the Minnesota Star Tribune, has been approved by local officials but still has some rezoning and other hurdles to clear. It would involve tearing down the existing chapel and replacing it with a new building that, among other things, would serve freshly roasted coffee, lunch fare and local beers.

Big open spaces and a patio would allow community groups to meet. Smaller spaces could host tutoring sessions. The church’s choirs would have a place to unwind after evening practices. Bulletin boards would connect people with neighborhood groups and volunteer opportunities. Proceeds would flow to community-oriented organizations.

CNN & MS NOW have ratings booth, despite Trump's attack on them

Newsweek - MS NOW and CNN both saw a ratings boost in the week following President Donald Trump's ongoing press ban against outlets he says have reported "fiction and lies" from the White House.

According to an Adweek report citing Nielsen data for the week of September 21, CNN saw a gain of 5 percent overall and 6 percent in the key 25-54 age demographic for total day viewers. MS NOW grew 2 percent in viewers and 2 percent in the key demo.

CNN saw an 8 percent increase in total viewers and an 11 percent increase in the 25-54 age demographic for primetime programming compared with the previous week. For the key viewing block, MS NOW grew by 2 percent in total and 11 percent in the 25-54 demographic.

Jobs

NY Times - Employers added 29,000 jobs last month and the unemployment rate rose to 4.2 percent, federal data showed on Friday, slower than expected growth for a labor market that had shown surprising strength in recent months. That strength has stood in tension with the strain of higher prices as inflation has marched higher since the start of the war in Iran. For most workers, wages at their jobs haven’t kept up. Growth in average hourly earnings were weak in September, falling to 3 percent on an annual basis, well below the current rate of inflation.

Two Supremes call for end of gay marriage

Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have both called for Obergefell v. Hodges, the historic case that legalized same‑sex marriage, to be overturned

Polls

Gallup - Three in 10 Americans (31%) think a college education is "very important," four percentage points below last year’s reading, the previous low among the seven times Gallup has asked this question since 1978. As recently as 2013, more than twice as many U.S. adults (70%) said college was very important.

AP -   A new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that only 17% of U.S. adults approve of the Republican president’s handling of the cost of living. Just 26% approve of his handling of the economy overall, marking a new low.

Trump won't rule out invoking the Insurrection Act

The Hill  -President Trump said in an interview published Thursday that he has not ruled out invoking the Insurrection Act or declaring a national emergency around the midterm elections in November.  “I’m not committing to anything,” Trump said in an interview with Time when asked about the limits of his presidential power. “We’re going to see how it plays out in court.”…

Trump, however, has warned that if Democrats reclaim either chamber, they will attempt to impeach him for a third time. He dismissed unfavorable polling for him and other Republicans as being fake.

The president has a history of threatening to deploy troops via the Insurrection Act of 1807 between his two terms. He threatened to send troops to Minneapolis after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer shot and killed U.S. citizen Renee Good in January, before saying there was no reason to invoke the law.

In June 2025, he said he would “certainly” invoke the act in response to anti-ICE demonstrations in the streets of Los Angeles, and he said so again about similar protests in Portland, Ore., in October. He likened both situations to “insurrections.”

Trump also said he considered sending troops to Minneapolis late in his first term after protests erupted following the murder of George Floyd by police in 2020.

The law’s history is tied to possible violence riled up by a former vice president, as former President Thomas Jefferson sought to confront former Vice President Aaron Burr’s organized venture to establish a new country in the Louisiana Territory in 1807, according to the National Constitution Center. The Insurrection Act became law after Burr was arrested in Alabama and charged with treason.

The act allows the president “in all cases of insurrection, or obstruction to the laws, either of the United States, or of any individual state or territory,” to deploy members of the military or federalize members of a state’s National Guard “for the purpose of suppressing such insurrection, or of causing the laws to be duly executed.”

Trump has relied on Title 10 to send federal troops to U.S. cities. Title 10 is a federal code that gives the president the authority to deploy the National Guard to assist local law enforcement in a supporting function.

Wrecking national parks

Center for Western Priorities - Earlier this year, National Park Service headquarters in Washington shifted about 1,500 projects, many already approved, to a new "low priority" list, the Associated Press reported in August. The projects span more than 200 sites and carry a combined cost estimate of more than $400 million. Park Service employees "were told to not expect anything on the low priority list to be contracted," one official told the AP, and officials said almost all of the work is expected to go undone.

Meanwhile, White House priorities, including projects tied to President Donald Trump's Freedom 250 initiative, were given a new, top-priority status. That list included the $16 million botched effort to paint the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool blue.

A new interactive map from the Center for Western Priorities shows 1,492 projects designated low priority at 276 national parks and Park Service offices, drawn from an internal NPS project database. They range from roof repairs and computer upgrades to toilet paper and garbage bags. In the West, 548 projects across 12 states landed on the list, including 97 in Alaska, 90 in California, and 78 in Wyoming.

The Park Service's repair backlog has doubled over the last decade to more than $24 billion, and the agency has lost at least a quarter of its permanent workforce under the current Trump administration. 

Trump still blocking CNN

New Republic - President Donald Trump blocked CNN from the White House press pool Thursday morning, continuing his feud with the network despite a court order allowing them on the White House grounds.

Trump removed CNN journalists from his upcoming trip to Texas and Oklahoma after they were scheduled to fly on Air Force One in order to report on his visit to a truck manufacturing facility in Denton, Texas, and a speech in Durant, Oklahoma. CNN was also barred from traveling with the president last weekend when he went to Tennessee.

While U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly’s order last week preventing Trump from blocking CNN, Politico, and MS NOW was limited to media access on the White House premises, the president’s actions Thursday are still “a blatant violation of the First Amendment and due process,” said Theodore Boutrous, an attorney representing the media outlets, in a statement.

“The White House is persisting in unpredictably and inconsistently implementing the President’s unconstitutional ‘ban on the free press’ by barring CNN from fulfilling its role as a designated television network pooler—to the detriment of CNN, its fellow pool members and, ultimately, the American public,” Boutrous’s statement said.

Voting

League of Women Voters - On September 10th, the Census Bureau announced it would make sweeping changes to how we count people on the census. The proposed rule would count only US citizens and green card holders, NOT other visa holders or undocumented immigrants. This would severely distort population counts and give an inaccurate representation of communities when apportionment and redistricting happen.

But the proposed rule doesn’t stop there. It would stop collecting race and ethnicity data and ban the collection of sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) data from any future Census Bureau surveys, including the census. These data are vital for how state and local governments plan services like education, public health needs, emergency services, disaster planning, and more. Additionally, many organizations beyond the government and public institutions rely on the Census Bureau for accurate, reliable data.

These changes are unprecedented and unconstitutional. Further, the Census Bureau only gave the public 33 days to comment on a process that would normally allow at least 90 days for public comment. This rule would create bad data and erode a key legal doctrine of representation: “one person, one vote.” If this residence rule is implemented, there would be major undercounts and Congressional districts would lack the data to accurately apportion communities.

Meanwhile. . .

The Hill- An appeals court Tuesday sided with a lower court judge who determined President Trump colluded with the Department of Justice (DOJ) in bringing and later dismissing a case seeking $10 billion in damages from the IRS. 

Tennessee Pauses a Planned Execution After a Failed Attempt

Supreme Cout to judge Trump's mandatory detention policy

The Hill -  The Supreme Court announced Thursday it will decide the legality of President Trump’s mandatory detention policy, putting one of his banner immigration programs on the justices’ docket for their upcoming term.

The Trump administration argues it can detain people without bond if they’re found to be in the country unlawfully, even if they have been living on U.S. soil for years.

It’s a significant expansion of the government’s immigration powers. The push has fueled thousands of cases claiming the policy exceeds federal law, creating an avalanche of work for judges across the country, who are racing to keep up.

The dispute is set to be heard during the Supreme Court’s upcoming term. Oral arguments are expected early next year, with a decision likely by summer. 

Chief Justice Roberts' Maine island retreat

Donald Trump

Alternet -  By now, we all probably have seen ciips from of these three Donald Trump television campaign ads “paid for by the U.S. government.”  And while we’ve seen some bipartisan criticism for Trump blatantly violating federal campaign law, what we haven’t seen is anyone acting to stop him.

Indeed, Trump insists that the ads – at least one of which is mostly video imagery from his own 2024 presidential campaign, thundering against “warmongers” and “communists” – are a benign prod to Americans to vote in the Nov. 3 congressional elections.

Using public tax dollars for a campaign commercial is flatly illegal. Moreover, doing so intentionally is government propaganda, the preferred tool of authoritarian regimes that know they can act with impunity. And apparently, they are just getting started, with $2.5 million worth so far, but plans to spend up to $100 million.

But obviously, a Justice Department remade to protect Trump and aggressively prosecute his political foes is not going to bring charges against the White House or even request a legal injunction to stop them. Where are the state attorneys general to demand that courts pull the ads as illegal interference? For that matter, why do the networks allow the sale of commercial time to what clearly are illegal campaign ads?

…Backed by a largely compliant Supreme Court, Trump has cracked the code on doing whatever he wants in the name of the presidency – despite the tradition that campaigns have been regarded as beyond government behavior. We have Attorney General Todd Blanche and Defense/War Secretary Pete Hegseth openly campaigning – with Hegseth broadly suggesting to military troops to vote Republican – in violation of separate Hatch Act prohibitions.

Europe's deadly heat wave

Inside Climate News  - A series of deadly heat waves from May to August overwhelmed Germany’s healthcare and emergency response systems and led to an estimated 16,000 heat-related deaths during the summer, the most heat mortalities ever recorded in the highly developed country.

At the 2026 Extreme Weather Congress in Hamburg this month, experts from local and regional governments, hospitals and universities said that Germany’s advanced climate research and weather technology provided accurate forecasts of persistently dangerous high temperatures, but the death toll exposed gaps between scientific knowledge and the country’s adaptation efforts, as well as shortcomings in the emergency response.

A report released during the Hamburg meeting explains that Germany’s building, cooling, water and transportation infrastructure was built for a climate that no longer exists, and that its health system is not heat-resilient. Meteorologists said heat messaging was fragmented across levels of government, while health researchers and other caregivers described hospitals’ lack of procedures for declaring and managing heat emergencies.

Polls

Newsweek - Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Donald Trump Jr. gained ground among voters considering potential 2028 presidential contenders in a new Harvard CAPS/Harris poll, while the leaders of the hypothetical Democratic and Republican fields saw their support slip.

The shifts offer an early look at a 2028 race that is still taking shape, with none of the potential contenders tested in the poll having formally announced a campaign.

Among Democrats, former Vice President Kamala Harris remains the leading choice at 38 percent, down 4 percentage points from August. California Governor Gavin Newsom followed at 17 percent, while Ocasio-Cortez climbed 3 points to 12 percent.

Ocasio-Cortez has not yet decided whether she will run for president in 2028, saying she plans to weigh the decision after the midterm elections. In an interview with The New York Times published last week, Ocasio-Cortez discussed the challenges of a potential presidential campaign.

“This country has never elected a female president. Why are we pretending that this is not a factor?” Ocasio-Cortez told the Times. “That doesn’t make it impossible, but to act as though it’s not a factor in anything ever is really a form of, like, denialism.”

Health

Independent, UK - Nearly one million Americans will soon receive $500 checks from the federal government as a refund for alleged overcharges on the Affordable Care Act’s federal exchange for buying health insurance.  Starting Wednesday, the Treasury Department will begin to send checks, along with letters signed by President Donald Trump, to more than 950,000 Americans in 30 states.

Trump announced the $500 Obamacare refund checks on September 10 in a video released by the White House, claiming the refunds would correct overcharges incurred under the Biden administration’s Obamacare exchange and Healthcare.gov website.

Time - In medical emergencies, time matters. Seeing a surgeon soon after your appendix has ruptured or you’ve been in a car accident can mean the difference between life and death. But more than a third of U.S. counties have no general surgeons, according to a new analysis published Sept. 28 in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons.

While many people assume that surgeons primarily perform elective procedures, many surgeons in rural communities serve multiple roles, says Dr. Thomas Tsai, medical director for health policy research at the American College of Surgeons and a co-author of the study. In that way, “access to surgeons is the keystone for the broader rural health care ecosystem,” he says.

The study provides yet another data point that rural health care is in trouble in the U.S. It found that 38% of counties—home to roughly 15 million Americans—have no general surgeons, and 30% have no surgeon across 12 different specialties.

Women's rights

Free & Fair Democracy - 37 to 1.

That was the vote at the United Nations on a landmark resolution to protect basic women’s rights, expand access to justice, and advance global gender equality. 37 nations stood up and said YES. Only one country voted NO: The United States.

Read that again.

While the rest of the world joined hands to push human rights forward, the Trump administration stood completely isolated, fighting to block and dismantle progress for women.

This isn't just backward politics - it’s an explicit message from the current regime: they view women as second class citizens.

Environment

WalletHub compared the 100 largest U.S. cities across 28 key indicators of environmental friendliness and sustainability. The data set ranges from greenhouse-gas emissions per capita to the water quality to green job opportunities.
 

Greenest Cities in America		Least Green Cities in America
1. Oakland, CA		91. Memphis, TN
2. San Jose, CA		92. Chandler, AZ
3. San Francisco, CA		93. Newark, NJ
4. Washington, DC		94. Baton Rouge, LA
5. Honolulu, HI		95. Louisville, KY
6. San Diego, CA		96. Gilbert, AZ
7. Fremont, CA		97. Hialeah, FL
8. Irvine, CA		98. Houston, TX
9. Portland, OR		99. Mesa, AZ
10. Minneapolis, MN		100. Glendale, AZ

 
Best vs. Worst

• San Francisco, Oakland and Fremont California, have the lowest median air-quality index, which is 4.1 times lower than in Riverside and San Bernardino, California, the cities with the highest. (Lowest index = Best).
   
• Anchorage, Alaska, has the most green space, which is 48.8 times more than in Hialeah, Florida, the city with the least.
   
• St. Paul, Minnesota has the highest walk score, which is 4.3 times higher than in Chesapeake, Virginia, the city with the lowest.
   
• Honolulu has the most farmers markets (per square root of population), which is 80.5 times more than in Arlington, Texas, the city with the fewest.

 To view the full report and your city’s rank

Middle East

NY Times - U.S. forces formally withdrew from Iraq on Wednesday, ending a two-decade military presence that stoked years of devastating bloodshed, and leaves behind a battered nation struggling to unshackle itself from its two most powerful, and now warring, allies.

After toppling Saddam Hussein in 2003, the brutal dictator who ruled Iraq for nearly 24 years, American forces are making their second withdrawal from the country.

The U.S. invasion and subsequent occupation, which ended in 2011, left a country reeling from sectarian bloodletting and militant insurgencies that cost nearly 4,500 U.S. lives and killed more than 115,000 Iraqis, according to the most modest counts

Meanwhile.. .

ICE plans to hire another 5,000 people by the end of the year to support Trump’s deportation campaign.

The Republican nominee for governor of Colorado says he was forced to kill a man at age 7. Some Republicans worry his sensational account of his biography could drag down the ticket

Donald Trump

The Guardian - Federal regulators have been urged to stop the broadcast of White House advertisements promoting Donald Trump that critics say amounts to government propaganda and violate laws against using public money to promote partisan causes. Public Citizen, an advocacy group, called on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to intervene and block further airing of three ads it said were “designed to boost the image and character of Donald Trump” as part of the Republicans’ campaign for November’s midterm elections.

“Federal law explicitly prohibits using appropriated public funds for government propaganda, self-aggrandizement, or partisan political advertising,” the organization wrote. “Yet, that is exactly the nature of Trump’s recent campaign ads.”

The Guardian - Federal regulators have been urged to stop the broadcast of White House advertisements promoting Donald Trump that critics say amounts to government propaganda and violate laws against using public money to promote partisan causes.

Public Citizen, an advocacy group, called on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to intervene and block further airing of three ads it said were "designed to boost the image and character of Donald Trump" as part of the Republicans' campaign for November's midterm elections.

"Federal law explicitly prohibits using appropriated public funds for government propaganda, self-aggrandizement, or partisan political advertising," the organization wrote. "Yet, that is exactly the nature of Trump's recent campaign ads."

Pope Leo XIV

Newsworthy News - PaParis authorities and the Vatican say Pope Leo XIV's open-air Mass filled central Paris with hundreds of thousands, turning Place de la Concorde and the Champs-Élysées into a vast, tightly secured cathedral in the street...French and church organizers registered more than 600,000 people, and some outlets projected even larger attendance along the route. The Mass marked the first papal celebration of this scale in central Paris since 2008, underscoring strong public interest despite France's secular identity.

Confessions of a vision impaired stakeholder with dubious management practices embarking on an ill defined mission

Sam Smith, 2009 -  Have pity on me. Say a prayer. Drop a penny in the pond on my behalf. In a few days I have to go to a non-profit's strategic planning meeting. It's a great organization that does great things, but - like so many non-profits - it periodically seeks to cleanse and refresh itself by turning what it does into indecipherable abstractions. I'll survive and maybe there'll be some good food, but, as a general rule, I don't do strategic visions.

Still it's happening all over America. "Strategic plan" and its semantic variations have appeared on Google seven million times just in the past month. On the Review's list of cliches that's right between "empower" and that ultimate expression of corporate insincerity - "any inconvenience" - you know, the one for which everyone apologizes.

Strategic planning, in its non-military sense, got its start at the Harvard Business School in the 1920s. Not long after we had the Great Depression. The concept had a revival in the 1980s and contributed to the philosophy and practices that have left us with the Penultimate Great Depression.

Coincidence, perhaps, but bear in mind that in the 1950s - when the economy was booming - we were turning out only 5,000 MBAs a year. The number of people in business who had any idea of about strategic planning was minute. By 2005, we were churning out 142,000 MBAs a year and we had huge trade and budget deficits, a disappearing auto industry, one of our most costly and disastrous wars, a growing gap between rich and poor, and a constantly projected inability to care for our ill or elderly.

Worse, everyone in the country had been infected by corporate verbiage and values. And, often unconsciously, much of America had bought into the rightwing and absurdly simplistic Reaganesque view of life and the very voices that should have been among the loudest in opposition - non-profits - signed up as well.

Non-profits found that it helped to adopt the language of business. It made them seem responsible rather than just over-idealistic do-gooders. It also reflected one of the most misguided assumptions of the educated elite: if one can understand, identify, manipulate and be loyal to abstract principles, the specifics will obediently follow.

Editors and reporters, among others, know better. Reporters run into this sort of language constantly at news conferences and elsewhere. They have a professional term for it: bullshit.

And editors know that a reporter may come up with a great idea for a story and even have a strategy for carrying it out, but if the journalist doesn't know how find the right sources, or ask the right questions and write it all down, the strategy won't work.

Over the past three decades corporations have done an incredibly effective job of turning Americans into just so many more corporate employees desperate for a strategic vision that will foster formulations of actions and processes to be taken to attain the vision in accordance with agreed upon procedures in order to achieve a hierarchy of goals. It has - with bombast, bullying and baloney - convinced an extraordinary number of Americans that its childishly verbose and coldly abstract culture is transferable to every human activity from running a church to driving a tractor across a field.

Unfortunately, life doesn't work like that. You need to look no farther than the military to see this. During the post-war period when the US military devoted more effort to strategic planning that at any time in its history, it has also had the sorriest record. Over and over, the problem has been an attractive general principle overwhelmed or sabotaged by reality and facts.

Now bounce back 150 years to a war in which general strategy was more than balanced by specific generals. At one point a White House aide complained of General Grant's drinking and Lincoln invoked his best management practices - which was to tell the aide to find out what Grant was drinking and give it to all his other generals. Put that in your vision statement.

And the key battle at Little Round Top was won by a general named Joshua Chamberlain who had studied theology, taught ever subject except science and math and was fluent in nine languages. He had, however, never studied military strategy.

In any specific situation, a general strategy can quickly lose value without supporting virtues like wisdom, sufficient staff, adequate budget, imagination, energy and good fortune.

But of course, if all else fails, you can always fall back on your mission statement.

Like most people, I never read mission statements except under duress or when I have nothing better to do, like standing in the lobby of a pretentious restaurant waiting to be seated.

Gordon Luk said it well: "Douglas Adams wrote frequently about the human penchant for continuously stating the very, very obvious. Mission statements take that principle to the extreme, to the point where we even believe that we're going to persuade people about something or other by making an official public statement about what we are going to do that would be insane to negate."

Occasionally a mission statement rises to the occasion. The alternative newspaper Eat the State had one that read: "Missions were created by the Catholic Church to subjugate Native Americans in California. We oppose them." And a small computer consultancy business in West London posted a sign: 'We are not ruled by a mission statement, we are smarter than that'. But when you start to count the number of organizations - from religious to non-profit to social to political - that feel they can't get along without some gobbledygook on the inside cover of whatever they're publishing, you know the corporate cultural invasion is complete.

Which doesn't mean you shouldn't have plans, think about where you're going, discuss alternatives and figure out what you do best. But the better model should be the pragmatism, inventiveness and realism of small business culture which still provides most of America's new jobs - as many as 75 percent in some experts' view. Most small business people don't have time to sit around a table coming up with empty adjectives to describe their efforts. And they tend to call the people who buy their stuff customers rather than stakeholders, which makes sense, given that the pre-corporate definition of stakeholder was someone who held the bet during a gambling match and handed it over to the winner. Not a particularly exciting or profitable role in life.

Here's how David Weinberger put in back in 1999:

"Mission statements are vapid because they think of business as a march to a goal or a war of conquest. Businesses are far more complex than that. . . Further, missions are things you accomplish and are done with. Businesses, on the other hand, generally aim for long-term existence. The board doesn't get together and say, "Well, we've accomplished our mission of being the world's leading supplier of high quality wombats to blind gombricks, so I guess we can just shut it all down now. Good job, lads!"

"Businesses often are more like farming than like making war. How can we get maximum sustainable yield from this ground? And what happens when the ground changes radically? Are we going to keep trying to grow potatoes in the layer of ash, or are we going to see this as a splendid opportunity to succeed with ash-loving radishes?

"So, yes, write up something about your commitment to treating your customers well, building great products, and contributing to the lives of your employees and your community. Heck, even admit that you're in it for the money. But one thing is certain: if your mission statement achieves the usual goal of fitting on the back of a business card, then it's just about guaranteed to be empty of anything worth saying."

Which is why I don't look forward to my afternoon of strategic planning. We will declare, no doubt, some fine principles, but life is controlled not by the glories of the grand but by the uncertainties, blessings and perversities of the specific. It is in organizing the latter in some rational, useful, imaginative and, yes, enjoyable fashion that life becomes better. As Benjamin Franklin noted, happiness is not the result of great strokes of good fortune, but of the "little felicities" of every day.

Meanwhile, if you are still curious about my personal vision statement, please consult my optometrist.