We've all heard that everyone's entitled to his own opinion. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan is famous for following that phrase with, but not his own facts. The link between opinions and the facts that could support or undermine them is at best unclear. To be clear here, everything you've read or listened to in the missiles I've published monthly are my opinion. In many cases, I can reach back to an audit trail that will factually support my opinions, case studies, clients I've worked with, baseball statistics to name a few. In other cases, I've taken a license to extrapolate from second-hand data, like from my mentors and associates, friends, enemies, media, for example, to form beliefs I use to function in the world. Now, let's look at that list of second-hand sources, I mentioned. I'd like to rank them for probability and accuracy. First mentors. Over the years, I've challenged many of my mentors, and I've assembled some beliefs based on their supported opinions. Then I estimate that that accuracy of that opinion to be 95% or better because I've done the research. Associates, well, they're usually team members with some cherished outcome that I believe in. I place it very close second. I have a familiarity with their methods and history, and so I can find my opinions aligning easily with theirs if I need to assemble one in a hurry. Friends and enemies? Well, I need to factor in motivation there. Certainly an adversary can willfully mislead me with their opinions, but with either friend or enemy, I stand very little chance of tracking their opinion back to some infallible data. And so I need to discount these contributions quite regularly with apologies to the many friends who click on these monthly misses. That said, I do have many friends whose opinions I will respect and test fly. Well, what about media? Forget about it. Media is neither my friend nor my enemy. It does not have my best interests in mind. It is motivated by its ownership and their best interests. My best, I can listen to a story or an opinion and adopt a snippet momentarily just to test it out. And history is another challenge for my assembling opinions. Long ago, I posited that if I wasn't actually present at some historical moment, and my opinion about that moment is merely what my source of information wants me to believe. Remember, winner's right history. I have a Civil War Army memoir as handwritten by a great uncle, and I believe from reports the facts that occurred, but he also has opinions that I take for the grain of salt. It's my opinion, assembled for many sources, mostly unprovable, that the divisiveness in our country today is the product of massive amounts of ill-supported opinions being purported as factual. And I think it's easier to just adopt an opinion rather than do the work to create one's own. I'm entitled to my own opinion, but not my own facts. It's Kim, and this is another moment of clarity.