The NANTUCKET Project

The Oracle is registered to attend this first-time event on Nantucket next month. Modeled after TED conferences and the Aspen Institute, it's inaugural theme is "Rethinking the Status Quo." Visionaries, thinkers, business leaders and innovators will give presentations to up to 350 attendees.

When I first became aware of the upcoming project, my BS detector went off as I read the list of speakers. Included among real visionaries and giants in the world of science and business were some names that raise my hackles. Two of these were Henry Louis Gates, the Harvard professor who was arrested on his own front porch for not playing nicely with the Cambridge police officer who was investigating what looked like a break-in. (As in "don't you know who I am?") The other name is Rahm Emanuel, formerly of the White House and now Mayor of that bastion of Political honesty, Chicago. I guess there are lessons to be learned for these two men. From "Skip" Gates...the police officer has the authority and the gun, shut up and cooperate whoever you are. And from Emanuel... even if you are turned down again and again as ineligible to run for mayor of your home town, stay the course and eventually dead people will have a chance to vote for you and you will win.

Fortunately, the other presenters are of such high caliber and global significance that the "Progressive" line of BS will hopefully be drowned out. It a great cast of players including: the founder of the Cato (Libertarian) Institute, the inventor of the Segway and many other innovations, the CEO of Google, the creator of Seal Team 6, several very savvy investors, artists, film makers, architects, and authors of great renown, economists, academics, and major movers and shakers in healthcare.

I am really looking forward to this event as an opportunity to position myself and the investments I control for the upcoming decade. In other words, though I am a perpetual student of everything, my focus is on practical information for the new world that comes from those who played big roles in creating the world in which we live. If it deteriorates into Baloney about reparations and political correctness, this will become a one time event, at least for me. If it delivers what it promises, it could become a permanent institute in Nantucket that will endure. I hope that it is not "hijacked" by the LEFT and turned into an indoctrination. There are seeds of this within the speakers' roster. It is up to the founders of the event to steer the theme in the direction of leaning forward not looking back, sociologically, or politically.