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There comes a time in your life when you can no longer put off choosing. You have to choose one path or the other. You can live safe and be protected by people just like you, or you can stand up and be a leader for what is right. Always, remember this: People never remember the crowd; they remember the one person that had the courage to say and do what no one would do.
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Shannon L. Alder
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You will hardly find wrong people at right places. Choose to be at the right places and you will find the right people who will inspire you to make it happen!
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Israelmore Ayivor (Leaders' Watchwords)
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You are either supporting the vision or supporting division
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Saji Ijiyemi
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Life’s good when it’s lived for oneself; it’s great when lived for others. The true means of happiness is to lose your mind by thinking for others!
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Israelmore Ayivor (Leaders' Watchwords)
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Leaders do what is uncomfortable but helpful. They run away from the comfort that doesn't produce any help for the world.
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Israelmore Ayivor (Leaders' Ladder)
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There was a lot to be said for the job of assistant section leader—when you come right to it, it’s a lot easier to die than it is to use your head.
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Robert A. Heinlein (Starship Troopers)
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This is an everyday question and you must take note of it always. When you wake up, it should be among your number one thoughts. What are you doing for others?
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Israelmore Ayivor (Leaders' Frontpage: Leadership Insights from 21 Martin Luther King Jr. Thoughts)
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All leaders need to ask questions, but they also need to assist in providing answers, to bridge the gap between questions and answers.
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Pearl Zhu (Digital Gaps: Bridging Multiple Gaps to Run Cohesive Digital Business)
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There is no more noble occupation in the world than to assist another human being, to help someone else succeed. —ALAN LOY MCGINNIS
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John C. Maxwell (Developing the Leader Within You 2.0)
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Leaders who want to create adaptive, self-organizing teams steer rather than control—they influence, nudge, facilitate, teach, recommend, assist, urge, counsel, and, yes, direct in some instances.
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Jim Highsmith
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Our goal is to assist leaders and for-profit B2B organizations in implementing a culture of high proactive trustworthiness by assessing, capturing, measuring, and utilizing it’s greatest asset; Relationship Capital (RC).
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Robert Peters (Standard of Trust Leadership: Transforming Business Cultures Through Purpose, Performance, and Relationship Capital)
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The State Department received detailed reports of the extent and nature of the Army operations as killings began in Java. A “Moslem Youth Leader” reported that “assistants” were accompanying troops on sweeps that led to killings.
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Vincent Bevins (The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World)
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It’s been said that when one of Wooden’s players asked, “Coach, what happens if I point to the player who gave me the assist and he isn’t watching?” Coach Wooden replied, “He will always be watching.” People desire validation and encouragement. It’s human nature.
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John C. Maxwell (Developing the Leader Within You 2.0)
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As leaders have sought revelation, the guidance received over the past few years is to strengthen the sacrament meeting, honor the Sabbath day, and encourage and assist parents and individuals to make their homes a source of spiritual strength and increased faith—a place of joy and happiness.
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Sheri Dew (Insights from a Prophet’s Life: Russell M. Nelson)
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President Eisenhower was not particularly interested in assisting integration, as he more than once made clear, but he worried that he could not maintain face as the leader of the free world if he ignored this affront to the nation’s legal system, one the Soviet Union was broadcasting to the world.
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Nancy MacLean (Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America)
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The short-sighted refusal to make an effort towards improving labor conditions, the refusal to adopt measures which would insure the workman in case of accidents in the factories, the refusal to forbid child labor, the refusal to consider protective measures for female workers, especially expectant mothers - all this was of assistance to the Social Democratic leaders, who were thankful for every opportunity which they could exploit for forcing the masses into their net. Our bourgeois parties can never repair the damage that resulted from the mistake they then made. For they sowed the seeds of hatred when they opposed all efforts at social reform.
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Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
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People don't expect perfection, but they do appreciate when they see leaders who sincerely try to improve and ask for help in areas where they might be weak. You don't have to be good at everything to lead, but the best leaders are honest about where they need assistance, working to fill in those gaps, while also taking action and responsibility for areas of personal growth.
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Amy Fenton Lee (Leading a Special Needs Ministry)
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Once upon a time, we made a revolution. We said we were tired of hunger, of sweat and of lice. So we cut throats, and broke skulls, and poured blood, our blood, their blood, to wash a clean road for freedom. Now look around you. Look around you, Comrade Taganov, Party member since 1915! Do you see where men live, men, our brothers? Do you see what they eat? Have you ever seen a woman falling on the street, vomiting blood on the cobblestones, dying of hunger? I have. Did you see the limousines speeding at night? Did you see who’s in them? There’s a nice little comrade we have in the Party. A smart young man with a brilliant future. Pavel Syerov’s the name. Have you ever seen him open his wallet to pay for a whore’s champagne? Did you ever wonder where he gets the money? Did you ever go to the European roof garden? Not often, I bet. But if you had, you’d see the respectable Citizen Morozov getting indigestion on caviar. Who is he? Just assistant manager of the Food Trust. The State Food Trust of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. We’re the leaders of the world proletariat and we’ll bring freedom to all suffering humanity!
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Ayn Rand (We the Living)
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Wilson imagined a conversation among European leaders as they realized they had been wrong, and Wilson right, about the war. “Do you not think it likely that the world will some time turn to America and say, ‘You were right, and we were wrong. You kept your heads when we lost ours . . . Now, in your self-possession, in your coolness, in your strength, may we not turn to you for counsel and for assistance?’ ”23
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Arthur Herman (1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder)
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One of the ways Coach Wooden used to do that was to ask his players to acknowledge the skills and contributions of others. He told each player that if a teammate made a great pass or set a pick that allowed him to score, he should acknowledge the teammate on the way back down the court. One time a player asked, “Coach, if we do that, what if the teammate that made the assist isn’t looking?” Coach Wooden replied, “He will always be looking.” Coach knew that people look for and thrive on acknowledgment and appreciation.
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John C. Maxwell (Good Leaders Ask Great Questions: Your Foundation for Successful Leadership)
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What I hadn’t realized was that, above all else, Favs was a prodigy. Speechwriters, even great ones, tend to lead either from the head or heart. I was a head-first writer, connecting logical dots and only later adding emotions. Heart-first people went the other way around. Favs was the only true switch-hitter I ever met. His writing was both lyrical and well organized, arcing between timeless values and everyday concerns with astounding ease and grace. Perhaps because he possessed innate talent, Favs tended to separate people into two categories: those who had it and those who did not. I was lucky enough to be lumped into the haves. From the day I arrived he acted as if, all evidence to the contrary, his team benefited from having me around. “So, is it amazing?” friends would ask. Of course it was amazing. Sometimes Kathy, Valerie’s assistant, would explain that we needed to reschedule a meeting because Valerie had been called into the Oval. She said this casually, as though her boss had been put on hold with the cable company and not summoned by the leader of the free world. Other times I would watch Favs and the POTUS speechwriters spitball lines for a set of remarks. A few days later, I would see those exact same lines on the front page of the New York Times. It was unbelievable. I felt like Cinderella at the ball.
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David Litt (Thanks, Obama: My Hopey, Changey White House Years)
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win. I thought the bureaucrats who had overseen the Emergency Rental Assistance program deserved a parade. They had to settle for scattered applause. When the ERA program was sputtering in the unsteady early days, it seemed that everyone was writing and tweeting about it. Later, when the rollout was working, it was ignored. Because journalists and pundits and social influencers did not celebrate the program, ERA garnered few champions in Washington. Elected leaders learned that they could direct serious federal resources to fighting evictions, make a real dent in the problem, and reap little credit for it. So, the Emergency Rental Assistance program became a temporary program, and we returned to normal, to a society where seven eviction filings are issued every minute.[31] Imagine if we had met the results of the ERA program with loud cheers. Imagine if we had taken to social media and gushed over what a difference it had made. Imagine if newspapers had run headlines that read, “Biden Administration Passes Most Important Eviction Prevention Measure in American History.” Imagine if we’d worked together to ensure that the low eviction regime established during the pandemic became the new normal. But we chose to shrug instead. Poor renters in the future will pay for this, as will the Democratic Party, incessantly blamed for having a “messaging problem” when perhaps the matter is that liberals have a despondency problem: fluent in the language of grievance and bumbling in the language of repair. Meaningful, tangible change had arrived, and we couldn’t see it. When we refuse to recognize what works, we risk swallowing the lie that nothing does.
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Matthew Desmond (Poverty, by America)
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If government had declined to build racially separate public housing in cities where segregation hadn’t previously taken root, and instead had scattered integrated developments throughout the community, those cities might have developed in a less racially toxic fashion, with fewer desperate ghettos and more diverse suburbs. If the federal government had not urged suburbs to adopt exclusionary zoning laws, white flight would have been minimized because there would have been fewer racially exclusive suburbs to which frightened homeowners could flee. If the government had told developers that they could have FHA guarantees only if the homes they built were open to all, integrated working-class suburbs would likely have matured with both African Americans and whites sharing the benefits. If state courts had not blessed private discrimination by ordering the eviction of African American homeowners in neighborhoods where association rules and restrictive covenants barred their residence, middle-class African Americans would have been able gradually to integrate previously white communities as they developed the financial means to do so. If churches, universities, and hospitals had faced loss of tax-exempt status for their promotion of restrictive covenants, they most likely would have refrained from such activity. If police had arrested, rather than encouraged, leaders of mob violence when African Americans moved into previously white neighborhoods, racial transitions would have been smoother. If state real estate commissions had denied licenses to brokers who claimed an “ethical” obligation to impose segregation, those brokers might have guided the evolution of interracial neighborhoods. If school boards had not placed schools and drawn attendance boundaries to ensure the separation of black and white pupils, families might not have had to relocate to have access to education for their children. If federal and state highway planners had not used urban interstates to demolish African American neighborhoods and force their residents deeper into urban ghettos, black impoverishment would have lessened, and some displaced families might have accumulated the resources to improve their housing and its location. If government had given African Americans the same labor-market rights that other citizens enjoyed, African American working-class families would not have been trapped in lower-income minority communities, from lack of funds to live elsewhere. If the federal government had not exploited the racial boundaries it had created in metropolitan areas, by spending billions on tax breaks for single-family suburban homeowners, while failing to spend adequate funds on transportation networks that could bring African Americans to job opportunities, the inequality on which segregation feeds would have diminished. If federal programs were not, even to this day, reinforcing racial isolation by disproportionately directing low-income African Americans who receive housing assistance into the segregated neighborhoods that government had previously established, we might see many more inclusive communities. Undoing the effects of de jure segregation will be incomparably difficult. To make a start, we will first have to contemplate what we have collectively done and, on behalf of our government, accept responsibility.
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Richard Rothstein (The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America)
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Future Europe’s problems are many, but four stand out. The first is energy: The Europeans are more dependent upon energy imports than the Asians, and no two major European countries think that problem can be solved the same way. The Germans fear that not having a deal with the Russians means war. The Poles want a deal with anyone but Russia. The Spanish know the only solution is in the Western Hemisphere. The Italians fear they must occupy Libya. The French want to force a deal on Algeria. The Brits are eyeing West Africa. Everyone is right. Everyone is wrong. The second is demographic: The European countries long ago aged past the point of even theoretical repopulation, meaning that the European Union is now functionally an export union. Without the American-led Order, the Europeans lose any possibility of exporting goods, which eliminates the possibility of maintaining European society in its current form. The third is economic preference: Perhaps it is mostly subconscious these days, but the Europeans are aware of their bloody history. A large number of conscious decisions were made by European leaders to remodel their systems with a socialist bent so their populations would be vested within their collective systems. This worked. This worked well. But only in the context of the Order with the Americans paying for the bulk of defense costs and enabling growth that the Europeans could have never fostered themselves. Deglobalize and Europe’s demographics and lack of global reach suggest that permanent recession is among the better interpretations of the geopolitical tea leaves. I do not see a path forward in which the core of the European socialist-democratic model can survive. The fourth and final problem: Not all European states are created equal. For every British heavyweight, there is a Greek basket case. For every insulated France, there is a vulnerable Latvia. Some countries are secure or rich or have a tradition of power projection. Others are vulnerable or poor or are little more than historical doormats. Perhaps worst of all, the biggest economic player (Germany) is the one with no options but to be the center weight of everything, while the two countries with the greatest capacity to go solo (France and the United Kingdom) hedged their bets and never really integrated with the rest of Europe. There’s little reason to expect the French to use their reach to benefit Europe, and there’s no reason to expect assistance from the British, who formally seceded from the European Union in 2020. History,
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Peter Zeihan (The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization)
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For many years there have been rumours of mind control experiments. in the United States. In the early 1970s, the first of the declassified information was obtained by author John Marks for his pioneering work, The Search For the Manchurian Candidate. Over time retired or disillusioned CIA agents and contract employees have broken the oath of secrecy to reveal small portions of their clandestine work. In addition, some research work subcontracted to university researchers has been found to have been underwritten and directed by the CIA. There were 'terminal experiments' in Canada's McGill University and less dramatic but equally wayward programmes at the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Rochester, the University of Michigan and numerous other institutions. Many times the money went through foundations that were fronts or the CIA. In most instances, only the lead researcher was aware who his or her real benefactor was, though the individual was not always told the ultimate use for the information being gleaned. In 1991, when the United States finally signed the 1964 Helsinki Accords that forbids such practices, any of the programmes overseen by the intelligence community involving children were to come to an end. However, a source recently conveyed to us that such programmes continue today under the auspices of the CIA's Office of Research and Development. The children in the original experiments are now adults. Some have been able to go to college or technical schools, get jobs. get married, start families and become part of mainstream America. Some have never healed. The original men and women who devised the early experimental programmes are, at this point, usually retired or deceased. The laboratory assistants, often graduate and postdoctoral students, have gone on to other programmes, other research. Undoubtedly many of them never knew the breadth of the work of which they had been part. They also probably did not know of the controlled violence utilised in some tests and preparations. Many of the 'handlers' assigned to reinforce the separation of ego states have gone into other pursuits. But some have remained or have keen replaced. Some of the 'lab rats' whom they kept in in a climate of readiness, responding to the psychological triggers that would assure their continued involvement in whatever project the leaders desired, no longer have this constant reinforcement. Some of the minds have gradually stopped suppression of their past experiences. So it is with Cheryl, and now her sister Lynn.
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Cheryl Hersha (Secret Weapons: How Two Sisters Were Brainwashed to Kill for Their Country)
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The fact is that society produces very many persons fit for “the cause”, but we are unable to make use of them all. The critical, transitional state of our movement in this respect may be formulated as follows: There are no people — yet there is a mass of people. There is a mass of people, because the working class and increasingly varied social strata, year after year, produce from their ranks an increasing number of discontented people who desire to protest, who are ready to render all the assistance they can in the struggle against absolutism, the intolerableness of which, though not yet recognised by all, is more and more acutely sensed by increasing masses of the people. At the same time, we have no people, because we have no leaders, no political leaders, no talented organisers capable of arranging. extensive and at the same time uniform and harmonious work that would employ all forces, even the most inconsiderable.
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Vladmir Lenin
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Despite the fact that Uncle Rulon and his followers regard the governments of Arizona, Utah, and the United States as Satanic forces out to destroy the UEP, their polygamous community receives more than $6 million a year in public funds. More than $4 million of government largesse flows each year into the Colorado City public school district—which, according to the Phoenix New Times, “is operated primarily for the financial benefit of the FLDS Church and for the personal enrichment of FLDS school district leaders.” Reporter John Dougherty determined that school administrators have “plundered the district’s treasury by running up thousands of dollars in personal expenses on district credit cards, purchasing expensive vehicles for their personal use and engaging in extensive travel. The spending spree culminated in December [2000], when the district purchased a $220,000 Cessna 210 airplane to facilitate trips by district personnel to cities across Arizona.” Colorado City has received $1.9 million from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to pave its streets, improve the fire department, and upgrade the water system. Immediately south of the city limits, the federal government built a $2.8 million airport that serves almost no one beyond the fundamentalist community. Thirty-three percent of the town’s residents receive food stamps—compared to the state average of 4.7 percent. Currently the residents of Colorado City receive eight dollars in government services for every dollar they pay in taxes; by comparison, residents in the rest of Mohave County, Arizona, receive just over a dollar in services per tax dollar paid. “Uncle Rulon justifies all that assistance from the wicked government by explaining that really the money is coming from the Lord,” says DeLoy Bateman. “We’re taught that it’s the Lord’s way of manipulating the system to take care of his chosen people.” Fundamentalists call defrauding the government “bleeding the beast” and regard it as a virtuous act.
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Jon Krakauer (Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith)
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I can hardly believe that our nation’s policy is to seek peace by going to war. It seems that President Donald J. Trump has done everything in his power to divert our attention away from the fact that the FBI is investigating his association with Russia during his campaign for office. For several weeks now he has been sabre rattling and taking an extremely controversial stance, first with Syria and Afghanistan and now with North Korea. The rhetoric has been the same, accusing others for our failed policy and threatening to take autonomous military action to attain peace in our time.
This gunboat diplomacy is wrong. There is no doubt that Secretaries Kelly, Mattis, and other retired military personnel in the Trump Administration are personally tough. However, most people who have served in the military are not eager to send our young men and women to fight, if it is not necessary. Despite what may have been said to the contrary, our military leaders, active or retired, are most often the ones most respectful of international law. Although the military is the tip of the spear for our country, and the forces of civilization, it should not be the first tool to be used. Bloodshed should only be considered as a last resort and definitely never used as the first option. As the leader of the free world, we should stand our ground but be prepared to seek peace through restraint. This is not the time to exercise false pride!
Unfortunately the Trump administration informed four top State Department management officials that their services were no longer needed as part of an effort to "clean house." Patrick Kennedy, served for nine years as the “Undersecretary for Management,” “Assistant Secretaries for Administration and Consular Affairs” Joyce Anne Barr and Michele Bond, as well as “Ambassador” Gentry Smith, director of the Office for Foreign Missions. Most of the United States Ambassadors to foreign countries have also been dismissed, including the ones to South Korea and Japan. This leaves the United States without the means of exercising diplomacy rapidly, when needed. These positions are political appointments, and require the President’s nomination and the Senate’s confirmation. This has not happened! Moreover, diplomatically our country is severely handicapped at a time when tensions are as hot as any time since the Cold War.
Without following expert advice or consent and the necessary input from the Unites States Congress, the decisions are all being made by a man who claims to know more than the generals do, yet he has only the military experience of a cadet at “New York Military Academy.” A private school he attended as a high school student, from 1959 to 1964. At that time, he received educational and medical deferments from the Vietnam War draft. Trump said that the school provided him with “more training than a lot of the guys that go into the military.” His counterpart the unhinged Kim Jong-un has played with what he considers his country’s military toys, since April 11th of 2012. To think that these are the two world leaders, protecting the planet from a nuclear holocaust….
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Hank Bracker
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All leaders were equal at the conference table, but those from heavyweight countries showed that they were more equal by arriving in big private jets, the British in their VC 10s and Comets, and the Canadians in Boeings. The Australians joined this select group in 1979, after Malcolm Fraser's government purchased a Boeing 707 for the Royal Australian Air Force. Those African presidents whose countries were then better off, like Kenya and Nigeria, also had special aircraft. I wondered why they did not set out to impress the world that they were poor and in dire need of assistance. Our permanent representative at the UN in New York explained that the poorer the country, the bigger the Cadillacs they hired for their leaders. So I made a virtue of arriving by ordinary commercial aircraft, and thus helped preserve Singapore's third World status for many years. However, by the mid-1990s, the World Bank refused to heed our pleas not to reclassify us as a "High Income Developing Country", giving no Brownie points for my frugal travel habits. We lost all the concessions that were given to developing countries.
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Lee Kuan Yew (From Third World to First: The Singapore Story: 1965-2000)
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As I became older, I was given many masks to wear. I could be a laborer laying railroad tracks across the continent, with long hair in a queue to be pulled by pranksters; a gardener trimming the shrubs while secretly planting a bomb; a saboteur before the day of infamy at Pearl Harbor, signaling the Imperial Fleet; a kamikaze pilot donning his headband somberly, screaming 'Banzai' on my way to my death; a peasant with a broad-brimmed straw hat in a rice paddy on the other side of the world, stooped over to toil in the water; an obedient servant in the parlor, a houseboy too dignified for my own good; a washerman in the basement laundry, removing stains using an ancient secret; a tyrant intent on imposing my despotism on the democratic world, opposed by the free and the brave; a party cadre alongside many others, all of us clad in coordinated Mao jackets; a sniper camouflaged in the trees of the jungle, training my gunsights on G.I. Joe; a child running with a body burning from napalm, captured in an unforgettable photo; an enemy shot in the head or slaughtered by the villageful; one of the grooms in a mass wedding of couples, having met my mate the day before through our cult leader; an orphan in the last airlift out of a collapsed capital, ready to be adopted into the good life; a black belt martial artist breaking cinderblocks with his head, in an advertisement for Ginsu brand knives with the slogan 'but wait--there's more' as the commercial segued to show another free gift; a chef serving up dog stew, a trick on the unsuspecting diner; a bad driver swerving into the next lane, exactly as could be expected; a horny exchange student here for a year, eager to date the blonde cheerleader; a tourist visiting, clicking away with his camera, posing my family in front of the monuments and statues; a ping pong champion, wearing white tube socks pulled up too high and batting the ball with a wicked spin; a violin prodigy impressing the audience at Carnegie Hall, before taking a polite bow; a teen computer scientist, ready to make millions on an initial public offering before the company stock crashes; a gangster in sunglasses and a tight suit, embroiled in a turf war with the Sicilian mob; an urban greengrocer selling lunch by the pound, rudely returning change over the counter to the black patrons; a businessman with a briefcase of cash bribing a congressman, a corrupting influence on the electoral process; a salaryman on my way to work, crammed into the commuter train and loyal to the company; a shady doctor, trained in a foreign tradition with anatomical diagrams of the human body mapping the flow of life energy through a multitude of colored points; a calculus graduate student with thick glasses and a bad haircut, serving as a teaching assistant with an incomprehensible accent, scribbling on the chalkboard; an automobile enthusiast who customizes an imported car with a supercharged engine and Japanese decals in the rear window, cruising the boulevard looking for a drag race; a illegal alien crowded into the cargo hold of a smuggler's ship, defying death only to crowd into a New York City tenement and work as a slave in a sweatshop.
My mother and my girl cousins were Madame Butterfly from the mail order bride catalog, dying in their service to the masculinity of the West, and the dragon lady in a kimono, taking vengeance for her sisters. They became the television newscaster, look-alikes with their flawlessly permed hair.
Through these indelible images, I grew up. But when I looked in the mirror, I could not believe my own reflection because it was not like what I saw around me. Over the years, the world opened up. It has become a dizzying kaleidoscope of cultural fragments, arranged and rearranged without plan or order.
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Frank H. Wu (Yellow)
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Soon all humane people would understand the need for a revolution from below, where those who worked and struggled and produced would be the ruling class. Those with eyes to see could detect this with ease, while those whose eyes had yet to be opened could always… well, it was thought that events would also assist in persuading them. I realize that this may sound slightly as if I had joined a cult. There actually was a rival Trotskyist group, later to make itself notorious by recruiting Corin and Vanessa Redgrave, whose depraved “leader” Gerry Healy did in fact teach us all we needed to learn about cultism and the mental and sexual and financial exploitation of the young and the credulous. (I learned a lot about “faith-based” movements from this early instruction.) But the “I.S.,” as our group was known, had a relaxed and humorous internal life and also a quizzical and critical attitude to the “Sixties” mindset. We didn’t grow our hair too long, because we wanted to mingle with the workers at the factory gate and on the housing estates. We didn’t “do” drugs, which we regarded as a pathetic, weak-minded escapism almost as contemptible as religion (as well as a bad habit which could expose us to a “plant” from the police). Rock and roll and sex were OK. Looking back, I still think we picked the right options.
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Christopher Hitchens (Hitch-22)
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Twas the night before Christmas and in SICU All the patients were stirring, the nurses were, too. Some Levophed hung from an IMED with care In hopes that a blood pressure soon would be there. One patient was resting all snug in his bed While visions—from Versed—danced in his head. I, in my scrubs, with flowsheet in hand, Had just settled down to chart the care plan. Then from room 17 there arose such a clatter We sprang from the station to see what was the matter. Away to the bedside we flew like a flash, Saved the man from falling, with restraints from the stash. “Do you know where you are?” one nurse asked while tying; “Of course! I’m in France in a jail, and I’m dying!” Then what to my wondering eyes should appear? But a heart rate of 50, the alarm in my ear. The patient’s face paled, his skin became slick And he said in a moment, “I’m going to be sick!” Someone found the Inapsine and injected a port, Then ran for a basin, as if it were sport. His heart rhythm quieted back to a sinus, We soothed him and calmed him with old-fashioned kindness. And then in a twinkling we hear from room 11 First a plea for assistance, then a swearing to heaven. As I drew in my breath and was turning around, Through the unit I hurried to respond to the sound. “This one’s having chest pain,” the nurse said and then She gave her some nitro, then morphine and when She showed not relief from IV analgesia Her breathing was failing: time to call anesthesia. “Page Dr. Wilson, or May, or Banoub! Get Dr. Epperson! She ought to be tubed!” While the unit clerk paged them, the monitor showed V-tach and low pressure with no pulse: “Call a code!” More rapid than eagles, the code team they came. The leader took charge and he called drugs by name: “Now epi! Now lido! Some bicarb and mag! You shock and you chart it! You push med! You bag!” And so to the crash cart, the nurses we flew With a handful of meds, and some dopamine, too! From the head of the bed, the doc gave his call: “Resume CPR!” So we worked one and all. Then Doc said no more, but went straight to his work, Intubated the patient, then turned with a jerk. While placing his fingers aside of her nose, And giving a nod, hooked the vent to the hose. The team placed an art-line and a right triple-lumen. And when they were through, she scarcely looked human: When the patient was stable, the doc gave a whistle. A progress note added as he wrote his epistle. But I heard him exclaim ere he strode out of sight, “Merry Christmas to all! But no more codes for tonight!” Jamie L. Beeley Submitted by Nell Britton
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Jack Canfield (Chicken Soup for the Nurse's Soul: Stories to Celebrate, Honor and Inspire the Nursing Profession)
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American DEWAR FAMILY Cameron Dewar Ursula “Beep” Dewar, his sister Woody Dewar, his father Bella Dewar, his mother PESHKOV-JAKES FAMILY George Jakes Jacky Jakes, his mother Greg Peshkov, his father Lev Peshkov, his grandfather Marga, his grandmother MARQUAND FAMILY Verena Marquand Percy Marquand, her father Babe Lee, her mother CIA Florence Geary Tony Savino Tim Tedder, semiretired Keith Dorset OTHERS Maria Summers Joseph Hugo, FBI Larry Mawhinney, Pentagon Nelly Fordham, old flame of Greg Peshkov Dennis Wilson, aide to Bobby Kennedy Skip Dickerson, aide to Lyndon Johnson Leopold “Lee” Montgomery, reporter Herb Gould, television journalist on This Day Suzy Cannon, gossip reporter Frank Lindeman, television network owner REAL HISTORICAL CHARACTERS John F. Kennedy, thirty-fifth U.S. president Jackie, his wife Bobby Kennedy, his brother Dave Powers, assistant to President Kennedy Pierre Salinger, President Kennedy’s press officer Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Lyndon B. Johnson, thirty-sixth U.S. president Richard Nixon, thirty-seventh U.S. president Jimmy Carter, thirty-ninth U.S. president Ronald Reagan, fortieth U.S. president George H. W. Bush, forty-first U.S. president British LECKWITH-WILLIAMS FAMILY Dave Williams Evie Williams, his sister Daisy Williams, his mother Lloyd Williams, M.P., his father Eth Leckwith, Dave’s grandmother MURRAY FAMILY Jasper Murray Anna Murray, his sister Eva Murray, his mother MUSICIANS IN THE GUARDSMEN AND PLUM NELLIE Lenny, Dave Williams’s cousin Lew, drummer Buzz, bass player Geoffrey, lead guitarist OTHERS Earl Fitzherbert, called Fitz Sam Cakebread, friend of Jasper Murray Byron Chesterfield (real name Brian Chesnowitz), music agent Hank Remington (real name Harry Riley), pop star Eric Chapman, record company executive German FRANCK FAMILY Rebecca Hoffmann Carla Franck, Rebecca’s adoptive mother Werner Franck, Rebecca’s adoptive father Walli Franck, son of Carla Lili Franck, daughter of Werner and Carla Maud von Ulrich, née Fitzherbert, Carla’s mother Hans Hoffmann, Rebecca’s husband OTHERS Bernd Held, schoolteacher Karolin Koontz, folksinger Odo Vossler, clergyman REAL HISTORICAL PEOPLE Walter Ulbricht, first secretary of the Socialist Unity Party (Communist) Erich Honecker, Ulbricht’s successor Egon Krenz, successor to Honecker Polish Stanislaw “Staz” Pawlak, army officer Lidka, girlfriend of Cam Dewar Danuta Gorski, Solidarity activist REAL HISTORICAL PEOPLE Anna Walentynowicz, crane driver Lech Wałesa, leader of the trade union Solidarity General Jaruzelski, prime minister Russian DVORKIN-PESHKOV FAMILY Tanya Dvorkin, journalist Dimka Dvorkin, Kremlin aide, Tanya’s twin brother Anya Dvorkin, their mother Grigori Peshkov, their grandfather Katerina Peshkov, their grandmother Vladimir, always called Volodya, their uncle Zoya, Volodya’s wife Nina, Dimka’s girlfriend OTHERS Daniil Antonov, features editor at TASS Pyotr Opotkin, features editor in chief Vasili Yenkov, dissident Natalya Smotrov, official in the Foreign Ministry
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Ken Follett (Edge of Eternity (The Century Trilogy, #3))
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My hope is that our leaders will capitalize on our country's most admirable qualities. When people in other nations face a challenge or a problem, it would be good for them to look to Washington for assistance or as a sterling example. Our government should be known to be opposed to war, dedicated to the resolution of disputes by peaceful means and whenever possible, eager to accomplish this goal. We should be seen as the unswerving champion of human rights both among our own citizens and within the global community. America should be the focal point around which other nations can rally against threats to the quality of our common environment. We should be willing to lead by example in sharing our great wealth with those in need. Our own society should provide equal opportunity for all citizens and assure that they are provided the basic necessities of life. It would be no sacrifice in exemplifying these traits. Instead, our nation's well being would be enhanced by restoring the trust, admiration and friendship that our nation formerly enjoyed among other peoples. At the same time, all Americans could be united in a common commitment to revive and nourish the political and moral values that we have espoused and sought during the past 240 years.
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Jimmy Carter (A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety)
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means seeing how changes such as these fit into the big picture, too. Are all staff members and, indeed, students engaged in developing the vision and mission of the school? Do leaders constantly explain how specific changes or team tasks fit into this larger vision? Can teachers and students articulate that connection as well? When asked what kind of school they are involved with, will you get the same sort of answer from teachers, students, bus drivers, janitors, parents, and administrative assistants, as well as the principal?
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Andrew Hargreaves (Collaborative Professionalism: When Teaching Together Means Learning for All (Corwin Impact Leadership Series))
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By turning the blind eye to all the non-democratic, corrupt practices in Russia, as well as assisting Russian ruling elites in laundering money in Europe, Western leaders not only emboldened those who were involved in these practices, but also created a very specific image of the West among the ruling Russian elites. The latter understood their own nature well, but the evident acceptance of their dubious practices by the West informed them that Western political and business leaders were as corrupt and double-faced as they were.
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Anton Shekhovtsov (Russia and the Western Far Right: Tango Noir (Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right))
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Action speaks more than words when assisting others with their needs and wants.
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Saaif Alam
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By April 23, 2014, thirty-four cases and six deaths from Ebola in Liberia were recorded. By mid-June, 16 more people died. At the time it was thought to be malaria but when seven more people died the following month tests showed that was the Ebola virus. The primary reason for the spreading of the Ebola virus was the direct contact from one person to the next and the ingesting of bush meat. Soon doctors and nurses also became infected. On July 2, 2014, the head surgeon of Redemption Hospital was treated at the JFK Medical Center in Monrovia, where he died from the disease. His death was followed by four nurses at Phebe Hospital in Bong County. At about the same time two U.S. health care workers, Dr. Kent Brantly and a nurse were also infected with the disease. However, they were medically evacuated from Liberia to the United States for treatment where they made a full recovery. Another doctor from Uganda was not so lucky and died from the disease. Arik Air suspended all flights between Nigeria and Liberia and checkpoints were set up at all the ports and border crossings.
In August of 2014, the impoverished slum area of West Point was cordoned off. Riots ensued as protesters turned violent. The looting of a clinic of its supplies, including blood-stained bed sheets and mattresses caused the military to shoot into the crowds.
Still more patients became infected, causing a shortage of staff and logistics. By September there had been a total of 3,458 cases of which there were 1,830 deaths according to the World Health Organization. Hospitals and clinics could no longer handle this crisis and patients who were treated outside died before they could get help. There were cases where the bodies were just dumped into the Mesurado River. The Ivory Coast out of compassion, opened carefully restricted humanitarian routes and resumed the previously suspended flights to Liberia.
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf the president of Libera sent a letter to President Barack Obama concerning the outbreak of Ebola that was on the verge of overrunning her country. The message was desperate, “I am being honest with you when I say that at this rate, we will never break the transmission chain and the virus will overwhelm us.” Having been a former finance minister and World Bank official, Johnson Sirleaf was not one for histrionics however she recognized the pandemic as extremely dangerous.
The United States responded to her request and American troops came in and opened a new 60-bed clinic in the Sierra Leone town of Kenema, but by then the outbreak was described as being out of control. Still not understanding the dangerous contagious aspects of this epidemic at least eight Liberian soldiers died after contracting the disease from a single female camp follower.
In spite of being a relatively poor country, Cuba is one of the most committed in deploying doctors to crisis zones. It sent more than 460 Cuban doctors and nurses to West Africa. In October Germany sent medical supplies and later that month a hundred additional U.S. troops arrived in Liberia, bringing the total to 565 to assist in the fight against the deadly disease. To understand the severity of the disease, a supply order was placed on October 15th for a 6 month supply of 80,000 body bags and 1 million protective suits. At that time it was reported that 223 health care workers had been infected with Ebola, and 103 of them had died in Liberia.
Fear of the disease also slowed down the functioning of the Liberian government. President Sirleaf, had in an emergency announcement informed absent government ministers and civil service leaders to return to their duties. She fired 10 government officials, including deputy ministers in the central government who failed to return to work.
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Hank Bracker
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Teddy Roosevelt or Theodore Roosevelt Jr. captured my imagination. As a child he had debilitating asthma, which he overcame by leading an active outdoor lifestyle. As a young man he attended Harvard College, the undergraduate institution, which is served by the faculty of Arts and Sciences and wrote books relating to history. In 1882 he wrote The Naval War of 1812, establishing himself as a serious historian. He was the Assistant Secretary of the Navy under President William McKinley and later served with the Rough Riders, during the Spanish American War. In 1898 Roosevelt was elected Governor of New York, and then in 1900 he ran for the office of Vice President with William McKinley. Less than a year later, he became the youngest President, following the death of President McKinley on September 14, 1901
As President of the United States, he became the leader of the “Progressive Movement.” Among his accomplishments was the establishment many national monuments, forests and parks. He was responsible for the building of the Panama Canal and sent the U.S. Navy around the world establishing the United States as a world power, setting the stage for the United States to become the leading country of the free world. Unfortunately, this blog only scratches the surface of his accomplishments but you can see his influence in my award winning book “The Exciting Story of Cuba.” Theodore Roosevelt is ranked 4th of our 25 Presidents.
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Hank Bracker
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Bill's" wife became a Mormon after they had been happily married for years and had several children. When he wouldn't convert to Mormonism, the local LDS leaders assisted "Diane" in divorcing and relocating in Utah, where she was quickly married to a "righteous" LDS widower. When attempts by both the husband and Diane's family were made to see the missing children, the LDS family disappeared to Alaska.
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Ed Decker (The God Makers: A Shocking Expose of What the Mormon Church Really Believes)
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Conall must have joined the morning hunting party. His willingness to assist others and volunteer his time to another clan endeared him to her even more. If Heldreth’s words were true—if he did desire her for more than a passing fling—could she ask for a kinder, more generous and selfless man to court her than the leader of Clan TalWolthe? And did she even want another to try?
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Vivienne Savage (Red and the Wolf (Once Upon a Spell, #2))
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Liberals including James Tobin, Paul Samuelson, and John Kenneth Galbraith and conservatives like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek have all advocated income guarantees in one form or another, and in 1968 more than 1,200 economists signed a letter in support of the concept addressed to the U.S. Congress.4 The president elected that year, Republican Richard Nixon, tried throughout his first term in office to enact it into law. In a 1969 speech he proposed a Family Assistance Plan that had many features of a basic income program. The plan had support across the ideological spectrum, but it also faced a large and diverse group of opponents.5 Caseworkers and other administrators of existing welfare programs feared that their jobs would be eliminated under the new regime; some labor leaders thought that it would erode support for minimum wage legislation; and many working Americans didn’t like the idea of their tax dollars going to people who could work, but chose not to. By the time of his 1972 reelection campaign, Nixon had abandoned the Family Assistance Plan, and universal income guarantee programs have not been seriously discussed by federal elected officials and policymakers since then.* Avoiding
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Erik Brynjolfsson (The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies)
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Page 49-50:
… more than 30 different trade guilds (kung-hui) flourish among Chinese merchants and professional men in Bangkok … Their importance lies in the assistance they render in the economic adjustment of the Chinese immigrants and in the continuing services of an economic nature they perform for members—circulating trade information, advising on economic trends and policies, hindering the development of unwanted competition. …
Membership in these trade guilds is entirely Chinese, either immigrants or their immediate descendants. To become a member of a trade guild, one has first to be engaged in a particular type of business or profession; and secondly, one must be approved by the leaders of that particular guild. Both these provisions work to exclude Thai. An individual cannot ordinarily become a goldsmith, or vegetable merchant, or printer, or take up any of the other occupations represented by these guilds without first learning the trade. This apprenticeship system is controlled by Chinese organizations, open normally to other Chinese whatever their dialect group affiliation, but closed to outsiders, i.e., the Thai …
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Richard J. Coughlin (Double Identity: The Chinese in Modern Thailand)
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The Fugitive Slave Act ordered all citizens to assist law enforcement in apprehending fugitive slaves. It voided state laws in Massachusetts, Vermont, Ohio, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island, which barred state officials from aid ing in the capture, arrest, or imprisonment of fugitive slaves. In the Fugitive Slave Act, Congress “nationalized slavery. No black person was safe on American soil. The old division of free state/slave state had vanished.”40 If there was any question of whose states’ rights Southern leaders supported, it was certainly not those of free states.
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Steven Dundas
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Leadership is the ability to stand for those who cannot stand for themselves by sitting down with them and finding out what can be done best to assist them.
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Gift Gugu Mona (The Effective Leadership Prototype for a Modern Day Leader)
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Roosevelt was a brilliant, vociferous, combustible man, not the type who ordinarily reaches the presidency. In his whirlwind career, which had taken him from college to the White House in less than twenty years, he had been many things: a historian, lawyer, ornithologist, minority leader of the New York State Assembly, boxer, ranchman, New York City police commissioner, naturalist, hunter, civil service reformer, prolific author, devoted husband and father, voracious reader, assistant secretary of the navy, war hero, empire builder, advocate of vigorous physical exercise, governor of New York, and vice president of the United States. He was a big, broad-shouldered, barrel-chested man, with tan, rough-textured skin. His hair was close-cropped and reddish-brown in color, with bristles around the temples beginning to show gray, and his almost impossibly muscular neck looked as if it was on the verge of bursting his collar-stays. He wore pince-nez spectacles with a ribbon that hung down the left side of his face. When he smiled or spoke, he revealed two very straight rows of teeth, plainly visible from incisor to incisor, their gleaming whiteness sharply accented by his ruddy complexion.
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Ian W. Toll (Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942)
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Our patriarchal political leaders make abortion available instead of dealing with male responsibility for unplanned pregnancies.
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Rachel M. MacNair (Consistently Opposing Killing: From Abortion to Assisted Suicide, the Death Penalty, and War)
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Take time to identify specific tension builders that are difficult for you to navigate, then work through them.
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Jeremy Burrows (The Leader Assistant: Four Pillars of a Confident, Game-Changing Assistant)
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Be stubborn about your goals, and flexible about your methods.
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Jeremy Burrows (The Leader Assistant: Four Pillars of a Confident, Game-Changing Assistant)
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When was the last time I lost my cool? What triggered it? What helps me be steady when things around me fall apart? What parts of the process do I enjoy? What parts do I dislike? How can I remedy those problem areas? What’s a tension holding me back right now that I could embrace instead?
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Jeremy Burrows (The Leader Assistant: Four Pillars of a Confident, Game-Changing Assistant)
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Use questions like “What would it mean for me to be curious this week?” or “How can I embody assertiveness today?” to get you thinking.
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Jeremy Burrows (The Leader Assistant: Four Pillars of a Confident, Game-Changing Assistant)
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What did not happen in Florida, in either the Second or Third Seminole War, was the provision of enough forces and transportation to affect the object of these wars, the final removal of all Native Americans from the peninsula. Prior to the war’s end, rewards were offered by the United States government for the capture of Seminoles. This policy failed to bring in any significant number of Native Americans; however, by early 1858, the war was winding down. White flags and other signs were hung out on known paths used by the Seminoles, and military operations were ordered stopped by Colonel Loomis. Elias Rector, the superintendent for Indian Affairs in the southern superintendency, came to Florida in January 1858 to assist in the negotiations for peace. After a conference was held 35 miles from Fort Myers with Assinwah’s band and others, the terms were offered and monetary inducements guaranteed. On May 4, 1858, Billy Bowlegs and most of his band boarded the Grey Cloud and sailed to Egmont Key, at the mouth of Tampa Bay. Here this group was joined by 41 prisoners and made ready for the trip west. By May 8, the war was declared officially over. The army believed that there were only about 100 Seminoles and Miccosukees left in Florida. This number included the aged leader Sam Jones. There is a debate on just when this ancient and respected leader died; however, it is known that he was gone before the end of Civil War. Where his remains were deposited is a secret to this day. It is from this small number of Seminoles and Miccosukees that today’s recognized tribes have descended as a continuing tribute to the tenacity of their ancestors’ will to survive. As historian Patsy West has aptly called them, they are “The Enduring Seminoles.” BIBLIOGRAPHY DOCUMENTS A number of collections of documents exist from which the above was drawn, including the Letters Received by the Secretary of War, Registered Series, 1801–1860; Letters Sent by the Secretary of War Relating to Military Affairs, 1800–1889; Letters Received by the Office of the Adjutant General (Main Series) 1822–1860; and Letters Sent, Registers of Letters Received, and Letters Received by Headquarters, Troops in Florida, and Headquarters Department of Florida, 1850–1858. The collections are all on microfilm from the National Archives. Numerous Congressional documents were also consulted
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Joe Knetsch (Florida's Seminole Wars: 1817-1858 (Making of America))
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In a group situation, INTPs are sensitive to whether they believe they will be listened to or not… Hence, INTPs make very poor leaders, for they depend too much on the attitudes of others… On the other hand, they can make very good assistants to leaders, provided they and the leader are of one mind... An INTP's ideal is to provide all the ideas for a project and have a charismatic leader, who agrees with him, carry them out. The only area in which an INTP will carry out his own ideas to completion is in his personal interest world, where other people are not involved.
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INTP Central [https://intpcentral.com/index_page_id_7.html]
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Your title is child of God, not pastor, director, coordinator, associate, assistant, or what other title you have in your role as a female leader.
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Melissa Mashburn (Ministry Chick: Find Your Community, Own Your Leadership, Take Your Step!)
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American leaders sat by watching as vast sectors of their heavy industry hemorrhaged and ultimately fled offshore. Factories that didn’t leave closed down. Some politicians actually assisted these industries
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Steve Martini (The Enemy Inside (Paul Madriani #13))
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the Jewish Agency and they had agreed to allocate from the next immigrant ship twenty-four Moroccans to Kibbutz Makor for work at the dig. “They’ll be pretty rough diamonds,” Eliav warned. “No English. No education.” “If they speak Arabic I can handle them,” Tabari assured the leaders, and two nights later the team went to greet the large ship that plied monotonously back and forth across the Mediterranean hauling Jewish immigrants to Israel. “Before we go aboard,” Eliav summarized, “I’ve got to warn you again that these aren’t the handsome young immigrants that you accept in America, Cullinane. These are the dregs of the world, but in two years we’ll make first-class citizens of them.” Cullinane said he knew, but if he had realized how intellectually unprepared he was for the cargo of this ship, he would have stayed at the tell and allowed Tabari to choose the new hands. For the ship that came to Israel that night brought with it not the kind of people that a nation would consciously select, not the clean nor the healthy nor the educated. From Tunisia came a pitiful family of four, stricken with glaucoma and the effects of malnutrition. From Bulgaria came three old women so broken they were no longer of use to anyone; the communists had allowed them to escape, for they had no money to buy bread nor skills to earn it nor teeth to eat it with. From France came not high school graduates with productive years ahead of them, but two tragic couples, old and abandoned by their children, with only the empty days to look forward to, not hope. And from the shores of Morocco, outcast by towns in which they had lived for countless generations, came frightened, dirty, pathetic Jews, illiterate, often crippled with disease and vacant-eyed. “Jesus Christ!” Cullinane whispered. “Are these the newcomers?” He was decent enough not to worry about himself first—although he was appalled at the prospect of trying to dig with such assistance—but he did worry about Israel. How can a nation build itself strong with such material? he asked himself. It was a shocking experience, one that cut to the heart of his sensibilities: My great-grandfather must have looked like this when he came half-starved from Ireland. He thought of the scrawny Italians that had come to New York and the Chinese to San Francisco, and he began to develop that sense of companionship with Israel that comes very slowly to a Gentile: it was building itself of the same human material that America was developed upon; and suddenly he felt a little weak. Why were these people seeking a new home coming to Israel and not to America? Where had the American dream faltered? And he saw that Israel was right; it was taking people—any people—as America had once done; so that in fifty years the bright new ideas of the world would come probably from Israel and no longer from a tired America.
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James A. Michener (The Source)
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To peel back the layers of a candidate’s character, I suggest some additional steps: • Ask for permission to contact those who worked under the candidate in their prior two jobs. This would include assistant pastors, administrative assistants, ministry coordinators, and more. These individuals, if allowed to speak confidentially, would give significantly more accurate information about the candidate’s character. • Make sure to reach out to women at the candidate’s prior church, either a volunteer leader or female staff. In my experience, search committees almost never talk to women but only men—and only men handpicked by the candidate. That is a broken system. Women often have a radically different perspective on their church than the men do. • Ask for permission to speak to the elders of the candidate’s prior church, and not just the ones the candidate handpicks. Their evaluation of the pastor after his departure (confidentially, of course) would be enlightening.
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Michael J. Kruger (Bully Pulpit: Confronting the Problem of Spiritual Abuse in the Church)
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Principles are the first thing dictators attack. Various “Putins” around the world are undermining principles in their societies through propaganda and repression so that people cannot stand up for what they believe in. And then, when the dictatorship gains strength and resources, it tries to export its lack of principles, creating gray zones devoid of values.
Europe has had to face this many times. Now we are experiencing another defining moment. Russia is trying to convince nations that it is easy to compromise principles—that they can ignore international law and turn a blind eye to injustice if it will supposedly bring stability.
This is Moscow's main message - Putin invites everyone to forget about their principles, to show no resolve, to give up Ukrainian land and people, and then, he says, Russian bombing will stop. But throughout history, every time such agreements have been made, the threat has returned even stronger.
Today, we have a chance to win in Eastern Europe so that we don't have to fight on the northern or other eastern fronts—in the Baltic states and Poland, or in the south—in the Balkans, where it is easy to ignite a conflict, or in African countries, whose problems are much closer to European societies than it may seem.
We have to stand up for international law and the values on which our societies are built. We must be decisive. People matter. The law matters. State borders and the right of every nation to determine its own future matters. And while we know that Putin is threatening leaders and countries who can help us force Russia to peace, we must not give in.
I thank you for every package of defense assistance to Ukraine. Every weapon you have provided helps to defend normal life—the kind of life you live here in Iceland or in any of your other countries, a life that no longer exists in Russia, where basic human rights have been taken away.
We are now in the third year of a full-scale war, and our soldiers on the front lines need fresh strength. That is why we are working to equip our brigades. This is an urgent need. We are already cooperating with others—France has helped to equip one brigade, and we have an agreement on another. We invite you to join us in creating brigades, Scandinavian brigades, and demonstrate your continued commitment to the defense of Europe.
I am grateful to Denmark and other partners who invest in arms production in Ukraine. Artillery, shells, drones—everything that allows Ukraine to defend itself despite any logistical delays on the part of partners or changing political moods in world capitals.
We see that Putin is increasing weapons production, and rogue regimes like Pyongyang are helping him with this. Next year, Putin intends to catch up with the EU in munitions production. We can only prevent this now (...).
- Translated from Ukrainian
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Volodymyr Zelensky
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I listened to you,” she vehemently said at last. “I loved you, and I trusted you, and I fought not to lose you after my brother’s death.”
“You never trusted me,” Narian contradicted, interrupting whatever else she had intended to say. “And with good reason. You believe the only way to repay a betrayal if with a betrayal. You betrayed me in the worst way imaginable. You lied to me my entire life, trained me and used me as a weapon, never telling me the real reason I was of value to you.” His blue eyes flashed, their sapphire brilliance rivaling the ever-changing emerald sparks in hers. “But I will no longer be manipulated for your causes, and I will not become another warlord. You can consider yourself repaid.”
The High Priestess’s rage built to a frightening level, her body almost shaking with the effort to retain control. Her shield maidens watched in fear from where they stood near her throne, while I locked my knees to force myself to stay in place. Then she backhanded Narian across the face, forcefully enough that he stumbled.
“You will regret what you have done, Narian,” she swore as he brought a hand to his cheek. “The Hytanicans will not succeed. You will pay for protecting their leaders from execution and for your willingness to step aside.”
“They may very well succeed. Don’t pretend otherwise. This is no longer a game of tug of war, Your Highness. It is a game of chess. And as you well know, Cannan and London have always been masterful strategists.”
“London?”
“Yes, he is alive and well. I suspect he is responsible for the chaos that surrounds us.”
At the mention of London, my eyes snapped to Narian, and my heart ached to hear more. But something in Nantilam’s visage changed, and she turned away to take up her throne.
“So you have lent no assistance to the Hytanicans--you have not armed them, have not repositioned our troops to aid their strike, have not left our soldiers without strong leadership?”
“No, I have not. Our forces are in place, and I took all the usual precautions before traveling here as you ordered.”
“Then it may indeed be interesting to see what the Hytanicans can do. Cannan as a commander long rivaled my brother, and London…well, a man such as London is rare. If he and I had not been enemies, I would have chosen him to father my own child.”
My heart lurched at this revelation, but Narian showed no reaction, continuing to stand stiffly before her. The High Priestess met his eyes, evaluating him for another long moment.
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Cayla Kluver (Sacrifice (Legacy, #3))
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The prime minister was provoked by what he considered to be unfriendly or inept coverage, or both, over many months. He concluded that the editors had lost control of the newsroom. . .What was probably the last straw for him was coverage of Israeli president Chaim Herzog's visit. When the Foreign Ministry announced the visit, fury flared across the Causeway. The Malaysian prime minister, Dr Mahathir Mohamad, recalled his high commissioner to Singapore and demanded the visit be cancelled. For Singapore to do so after the visit was announced would inflict serious damage on its sovereignty. Demonstrations erupted in many parts of Malaysia, and at the Malaysian end of the Causeway more than 100 demonstrators tried to stop a Singapore-bound train. Singapore flags were burnt. There were threats to cut off the water supply from Johor. Malaysia saw the visit as an insult. It did not recognise Israel, and had expected Singapore to be sensitive to its feelings. Singapore, however, could not refuse the Israeli request for its head of state to make a stopover visit in Singapore, the tail end of his three-week tour of Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and the Philippines, the first visit to this part of the world by an Israeli leader. Singapore could hardly forget the crucial assistance Israel had provided the Singapore Armed Forces in the early days of independence, when other friendly countries like Egypt and India had declined to help.
What angered Lee Kuan Yew was our coverage of the Malaysian reactions to the visit. He felt it was grossly inadequate. . .Coverage in the Malaysian English press was restrained, but in their Malay press, Singapore was condemned in inflammatory language, and accused of being Israel's Trojan horse in Southeast Asia. A threat to target Singapore Airlines was prominently reported. . .And by depriving Singaporeans of the full flavour of what the Malaysian Malay media was reporting, an opportunity was lost to educate them about the harsh reality of life in the region, with two large Muslim-majority neighbours.
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Cheong Yip Seng (OB Markers: My Straits Times Story)
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The Spirit of God knows the mind and heart of the child and how best to communicate. We must never forget that we are merely assistant teachers or worship leaders, but God does give us the privilege of assisting, and he honors us by sometimes speaking through us to the children.[21]
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Catherine Stonehouse (Joining Children on the Spiritual Journey: Nurturing a Life of Faith (Bridgepoint Books))
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(1) Karl Barth was not an evangelical. He was a European Protestant wrestling with how to salvage Protestant Christianity in the wake of World War I, which exposed the debacle of liberal theology. Barth was not an inerrantist or a revivalist, and he was wrestling with a different array of issues than the “battle for the Bible.” (2) Karl Barth is on the side of the good guys when it comes to the major ecumenical doctrines about the Trinity and the atonement. Barth is decidedly orthodox and Reformed in his basic stance, though he sees the councils and confessions mainly as guidelines rather than holy writ. (3) Karl Barth arguably gives evangelicals some good tips about how to do theology over and against liberalism. Keep in mind that Karl Barth’s main sparring partner was not Billy Graham or the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, but the European liberal tradition from Friedrich Schleiermacher to Albert Ritschl. For a case in point, whereas Schleiermacher made the Trinity an appendix to his book on Christian Faith because it was irrelevant to religious experience, Barth made the Trinity first and foremost in his Church Dogmatics, which was Barth’s way of saying, “Suck on that one, Schleiermacher!” (4) Evangelicals and the neoorthodox tend to be rather hostile toward each other. Many evangelicals regard the neoorthodox as nothing more than liberalism reloaded, while many neoorthodox theologians regard evangelicals as a more culturally savvy version of fundamentalism. Not true on either score. Evangelicalism and neoorthodoxy are both theological renewal movements trying to find a biblical and orthodox center in the post-Enlightenment era. The evangelicals left fundamentalism and edged left toward a workable orthodox center. The neoorthodox left liberalism and edged right toward a workable orthodox center. Thus, evangelicalism and neoorthodoxy are more like sibling rivals striving to be the heirs of the Reformers in the post-Enlightenment age. There is much in Karl Barth that evangelicals can benefit from. His theology is arguably the most christocentric ever devised. He has a strong emphasis on God’s transcendence, freedom, love, and “otherness.” Barth stresses the singular power and authority of the Word of God in its threefold form of “Incarnation, Preaching, and Scripture.” Barth strove with others like Karl Rahner to restore the Trinity to its place of importance in modern Christian thought. He was a leader in the Confessing Church until he was expelled from Germany by the Nazi regime. He preached weekly in the Basel prison. His collection of prayers contain moving accounts of his own piety and devotion to God. There is, of course, much to be critical of as well. Barth’s doctrine of election implied a universalism that he could never exegetically reconcile. Barth never could regard Scripture as God’s Word per se as much as it was an instrument for becoming God’s Word. He never took evangelicalism all that seriously, as evidenced by his famous retort to Carl Henry that Christianity Today was Christianity Yesterday. Barth’s theology, pro and con, is something that we must engage if we are to understand the state of modern theology. The best place to start to get your head around Barth is his Evangelical Theology, but note that for Barth, “evangelical” (evangelische) means basically “not Catholic” rather than something like American evangelicalism. Going beyond that, his Göttingen Dogmatics or Dogmatics in Outline is a step up where Barth begins to assemble a system of theology based on his understanding of the Word of God. Then one might like to launch into his multivolume Church Dogmatics with the kind assistance of Geoffrey Bromiley’s Introduction to the Theology of Karl Barth, which conveniently summarizes each section of Church Dogmatics.
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Michael F. Bird (Evangelical Theology: A Biblical and Systematic Introduction)
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American DEWAR FAMILY Cameron Dewar Ursula “Beep” Dewar, his sister Woody Dewar, his father Bella Dewar, his mother PESHKOV-JAKES FAMILY George Jakes Jacky Jakes, his mother Greg Peshkov, his father Lev Peshkov, his grandfather Marga, his grandmother MARQUAND FAMILY Verena Marquand Percy Marquand, her father Babe Lee, her mother CIA Florence Geary Tony Savino Tim Tedder, semiretired Keith Dorset OTHERS Maria Summers Joseph Hugo, FBI Larry Mawhinney, Pentagon Nelly Fordham, old flame of Greg Peshkov Dennis Wilson, aide to Bobby Kennedy Skip Dickerson, aide to Lyndon Johnson Leopold “Lee” Montgomery, reporter Herb Gould, television journalist on This Day Suzy Cannon, gossip reporter Frank Lindeman, television network owner REAL HISTORICAL CHARACTERS John F. Kennedy, thirty-fifth U.S. president Jackie, his wife Bobby Kennedy, his brother Dave Powers, assistant to President Kennedy Pierre Salinger, President Kennedy’s press officer Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Lyndon B. Johnson, thirty-sixth U.S. president Richard Nixon, thirty-seventh U.S. president Jimmy Carter, thirty-ninth U.S. president Ronald Reagan, fortieth U.S. president George H. W. Bush, forty-first U.S. president British LECKWITH-WILLIAMS FAMILY Dave Williams Evie Williams, his sister Daisy Williams, his mother Lloyd Williams, M.P., his father Eth Leckwith, Dave’s grandmother MURRAY FAMILY Jasper Murray Anna Murray, his sister Eva Murray, his mother MUSICIANS IN THE GUARDSMEN AND PLUM NELLIE Lenny, Dave Williams’s cousin Lew, drummer Buzz, bass player Geoffrey, lead guitarist OTHERS Earl Fitzherbert, called Fitz Sam Cakebread, friend of Jasper Murray Byron Chesterfield (real name Brian Chesnowitz), music agent Hank Remington (real name Harry Riley), pop star Eric Chapman, record company executive German FRANCK FAMILY Rebecca Hoffmann Carla Franck, Rebecca’s adoptive mother Werner Franck, Rebecca’s adoptive father Walli Franck, son of Carla Lili Franck, daughter of Werner and Carla Maud von Ulrich, née Fitzherbert, Carla’s mother Hans Hoffmann, Rebecca’s husband OTHERS Bernd Held, schoolteacher Karolin Koontz, folksinger Odo Vossler, clergyman REAL HISTORICAL PEOPLE Walter Ulbricht, first secretary of the Socialist Unity Party (Communist) Erich Honecker, Ulbricht’s successor Egon Krenz, successor to Honecker Polish Stanislaw “Staz” Pawlak, army officer Lidka, girlfriend of Cam Dewar Danuta Gorski, Solidarity activist REAL HISTORICAL PEOPLE Anna Walentynowicz, crane driver Lech Wałesa, leader of the trade union Solidarity General Jaruzelski, prime minister Russian DVORKIN-PESHKOV FAMILY Tanya Dvorkin, journalist Dimka Dvorkin, Kremlin aide, Tanya’s twin brother Anya Dvorkin, their mother Grigori Peshkov, their grandfather Katerina Peshkov, their grandmother Vladimir, always called Volodya, their uncle Zoya, Volodya’s wife Nina, Dimka’s girlfriend OTHERS Daniil Antonov, features editor at TASS Pyotr Opotkin, features editor in chief Vasili Yenkov, dissident Natalya Smotrov, official in the Foreign Ministry Nik Smotrov, Natalya’s husband Yevgeny Filipov, aide to Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky Vera Pletner, Dimka’s secretary Valentin, Dimka’s friend Marshal Mikhail Pushnoy REAL HISTORICAL CHARACTERS Nikita Sergeyevitch Khrushchev, first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Andrei Gromyko, foreign minister under Khrushchev Rodion Malinovsky, defense minister under Khrushchev Alexei Kosygin, chairman of the Council of Ministers Leonid Brezhnev, Khrushchev’s successor Yuri Andropov, successor to Brezhnev Konstantin Chernenko, successor to Andropov Mikhail Gorbachev, successor to Chernenko Other Nations Paz Oliva, Cuban general Frederik Bíró, Hungarian politician Enok Andersen, Danish accountant
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Ken Follett (Edge of Eternity Deluxe (The Century Trilogy #3))
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The president and Colson were in the middle of their conversation about Henry Kissinger when assistant Steve Bull entered the Oval Office to report that Coach Allen of the Redskins had finally arrived. Bull also informed the president of the news, just filtering in, that baseball star Roberto Clemente was on a plane that had crashed after taking off from the San Juan International Airport late the night before. “Was he killed?” Nixon asked. “They don’t have confirmation yet,” Bull replied.1 Clemente, the popular outfielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates, had boarded a rickety four-engine DC-7 plane that was overloaded with relief supplies for the victims of a massive earthquake in Nicaragua. The earthquake was believed to have resulted in the deaths of more than seven thousand people. Most of the deaths had occurred in the capital city of Managua, which had taken the brunt of the 6.2 magnitude shock at midday on Saturday, December 23.2 The city was leveled. The lumbering plane that Clemente was on nose-dived into heavy seas shortly after takeoff from San Juan. Clemente was thirty-eight years old and had been a perennial All-Star, four-time winner of the National League batting championship, defensive genius, and MVP in 1966. He led the Pirates to two world championships, one in 1960 and the other a decade later in 1971. “Mr. Clemente was the leader of Puerto Rican efforts to aid the Nicaraguan victims and was aboard the plane because he suspected that relief supplies were falling into the hands of profiteers,” the New York Times reported after his death was presumed.3 Clemente was scheduled to meet Anastasio Somoza, the military dictator of Nicaragua, at the airport, one of the very grafters he was attempting to circumvent with his personal mission. Clemente’s body was never recovered. It was a bad omen for the start of 1973.
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James Robenalt (January 1973: Watergate, Roe v. Wade, Vietnam, and the Month That Changed America Forever)
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Destructive inborn traits of social life can be viewed as a parallel of the physical presence of parasitic organisms, and the cultural diminishment of their impact as the lessening of a tolerable dogma load. One obvious example of the latter is blind faith in supernatural creation stories. Of course in most parts of the world today, moderating the dogma load would be difficult, even dangerous. The stories are harnessed to both tribal rule by means of subordination of the faithful and their assumption of religious superiority over believers of rival creation stories. To examine each of the stories in detail objectively and to spell out their known historical origins would be a good start, and one that has begun (albeit slowly and carefully) in many scholarly disciplines. A second step, granted an unrealistic one, would be to ask the leaders of each religion and sect, assisted by theologians, to publicly defend the supernatural details of their faiths in competition with other faiths and aided by natural-cause and historical analysis.
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Edward O. Wilson (The Meaning of Human Existence)
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At least US and Iranian leaders agree on something: Assad's downfall would tremendously weaken Iran's regional influence. From the beginning of the Syrian uprising, Iran worried that “if the Assad government fell, the replacement would have much stronger ties with the US government and Israeli government,” according to Professor Foad Izadi, an assistant professor at the University of Tehran's Faculty of World Studies. He told me, “that was the dilemma that Iran had.”9
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Reese Erlich (Inside Syria: The Backstory of Their Civil War and What the World Can Expect)
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I am vice president,” wrote John Adams, the first to inhabit the office. “In this I am nothing. But I may be everything.” In January 1961, as Lyndon Johnson left the Senate for the vice presidency, his future held the dim but tantalizing promise of the presidency, of “everything.” But in the meantime LBJ would not resign himself to nothingness. It was not his nature. Throughout his life Johnson had assumed positions with no inherent power base and infused them with irrepressible energy, drive, and ambition: as assistant to President Cecil E. Evans of Southwest Texas State Teachers’ College, as speaker of the “Little Congress” of staff members in the 1940s, and as party whip and leader in the 1950s, power seemed to flow to him and issue from him naturally. In Johnson’s political ascent, power was the constant; public offices were quantities to be stretched, exploited for public and personal gain, and, ultimately, discarded along the climb. If this was arrogance, it was well grounded. Lyndon Johnson was never nothing; and if the vice presidency meant little today, that could not be the case for long. The press accepted Johnson’s bold claim with little skepticism. On the eve of the inauguration, U.S. News & World Report exclaimed that “the vice presidency is to become a center of activity and power unseen in the past.” The magazine foresaw “important assignments” for LBJ in foreign affairs, especially in the explosive Cuban situation. Undoubtedly, President Kennedy would rely heavily upon the negotiating skills of his brilliant second, Lyndon Johnson, “a new kind of vice president.” And LBJ, surely, would demand no less. “The restless and able Mr. Johnson is obviously unwilling to become a ceremonial nonentity,” Tom Wicker rightly predicted in the New York Times. Johnson’s former Senate colleagues agreed, assuring reporters that LBJ “will be very important in the new Administration—and much utilized.” Headlines heralded Washington’s new “Number 2 Man.
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Jeff Shesol (Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud that Defined a Decade)
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You, as a church member, can assist your pastor in the preaching of the Word by praying for him. Never say to your pastor, “Well, the least I can do is to pray for you.” The most you can do is to pray! Pray for your pastor as he prepares the Word, studies, and meditates. Pray that the Holy Spirit will give deeper insights into the truths of the Word. Pray too that your pastor will practice the Word that he preaches so that it will be real in his own life. As he preaches the message, pray that the Spirit will give him freedom of utterance, and that the Word will reach into hearts and minds in a powerful way. (It wouldn’t hurt to pray for other church leaders too.)
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Warren W. Wiersbe (Be Complete (Colossians): Become the Whole Person God Intends You to Be (The BE Series Commentary))
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Lenin’s and Stalin’s form of communism is gone, yet its trappings have been expropriated by mega-corporations. We have companies featuring central planning by troikas, mission statements crafted by apparatchiks, five-year plans, no right to choose leaders in companies, no democracy in the workplace, a clear distinction between intelligentsia and peasants (top CEOs make 152 times the median salary and enjoy company dachas, jets, and limos), and state monitoring (time clocks, dress codes, drug screening, “employee assistance” plans, e-mail monitoring, no smoking, and other personal conduct rules, as well as family-life audits).
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Ricardo Semler (The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works)
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The Wall Street Journal (The Wall Street Journal) - Clip This Article on Location 1055 | Added on Tuesday, May 5, 2015 5:10:24 PM OPINION Baltimore Is Not About Race Government-induced dependency is the problem—and it’s one with a long history. By William McGurn | 801 words For those who see the rioting in Baltimore as primarily about race, two broad reactions dominate. One group sees rampaging young men fouling their own neighborhoods and concludes nothing can be done because the social pathologies are so overwhelming. In some cities, this view manifests itself in the unspoken but cynical policing that effectively cedes whole neighborhoods to the thugs. The other group tut-tuts about root causes. Take your pick: inequality, poverty, injustice. Or, as President Obama intimated in an ugly aside on the rioting, a Republican Congress that will never agree to the “massive investments” (in other words, billions more in federal spending) required “if we are serious about solving this problem.” There is another view. In this view, the disaster of inner cities isn’t primarily about race at all. It’s about the consequences of 50 years of progressive misrule—which on race has proved an equal-opportunity failure. Baltimore is but the latest liberal-blue city where government has failed to do the one thing it ought—i.e., put the cops on the side of the vulnerable and law-abiding—while pursuing “solutions” that in practice enfeeble families and social institutions and local economies. These supposed solutions do this by substituting federal transfers for fathers and families. They do it by favoring community organizing and government projects over private investment. And they do it by propping up failing public-school systems that operate as jobs programs for the teachers unions instead of centers of learning. If our inner-city African-American communities suffer disproportionately from crippling social pathologies that make upward mobility difficult—and they do—it is in large part because they have disproportionately been on the receiving end of this five-decade-long progressive experiment in government beneficence. How do we know? Because when we look at a slice of white America that was showered with the same Great Society good intentions—Appalachia—we find the same dysfunctions: greater dependency, more single-parent families and the absence of the good, private-sector jobs that only a growing economy can create. Remember, in the mid-1960s when President Johnson put a face on America’s “war on poverty,” he didn’t do it from an urban ghetto. He did it from the front porch of a shack in eastern Kentucky’s Martin County, where a white family of 10 eked out a subsistence living on an income of $400 a year. In many ways, rural Martin County and urban Baltimore could not be more different. Martin County is 92% white while Baltimore is two-thirds black. Each has seen important sources of good-paying jobs dry up—Martin County in coal mining, Baltimore in manufacturing. In the last presidential election, Martin Country voted 6 to 1 for Mitt Romney while Baltimore went 9 to 1 for Barack Obama. Yet the Great Society’s legacy has been depressingly similar. In a remarkable dispatch two years ago, the Lexington Herald-Leader’s John Cheves noted that the war on poverty sent $2.1 billion to Martin County alone (pop. 12,537) through programs including “welfare, food stamps, jobless benefits, disability compensation, school subsidies, affordable housing, worker training, economic development incentives, Head Start for poor children and expanded Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.” The result? “The problem facing Appalachia today isn’t Third World poverty,” writes Mr. Cheves. “It’s dependence on government assistance.” Just one example: When Congress imposed work requirements and lifetime caps for welfare during the Clinton administration, claims of disability jumped. Mr. Cheves quotes
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Anonymous
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The best solution is for all independent sodalities to make a threefold commitment. First, they must all be governed by an independent board made up of godly, well-respected Christian leaders who, in turn, are accountable to the church. Second, these organizations must clearly communicate that their ultimate purpose is to serve the church and to assist in the mobilization of men and women from the church into the mission field. Third, these organizations must insist that all of their individual members produce, as a part of their application process, a signed statement from the leadership of a local church that they are members in good standing and that they are going to be held accountable to that church in some regular and definable way.
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Timothy Tennent (Invitation to World Missions: A Trinitarian Missiology for the Twenty-first Century (Invitation to Theological Studies Series))
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As the crowd jeered and laughed, the leader of the attackers vowed meekly, “We will never touch girls again. Honest, we won’t.” Then the three men edged away from the smirking crowd. As my pulse rate returned to normal, I discovered I was as amazed as everyone else. Taking a deep breath, I thanked God for His help and miraculous assistance. Those who had seen the encounter continued to call out their approval and good wishes. “Well done, Superwoman!” “You should be a coach. You should be training all the young women and girls. Make the streets safe!” Eventually I would earn my black belt, become a coach and share the Gospel the same way that I was saved.
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Samaa Habib (Face to Face with Jesus: A Former Muslim's Extraordinary Journey to Heaven and Encounter with the God of Love)
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It was not unusual at the Disney Studio for an employee to have a main responsibility but also occasionally assist in other areas.
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Jim Korkis (Who's the Leader of the Club?: Walt Disney's Leadership Lessons)
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Our questioning—again echoing Ghazali—of the likely impact of development efforts (“prosperity,” in his formula) also flew in the face of received wisdom. For years, the notion had prevailed that the best way to sway Afghan “hearts and minds” was by giving away stuff: blankets, bags of wheat, wells for drinking water, schoolrooms. Among the conditions fueling extremism, commentators and policy makers often repeat, is economic malaise, aggravated by demographic shifts or such externals as drought. Foreign assistance is seen as a palliative to those ills. Evolving U.S. military doctrine even referred to “money as a weapon system.” But examination of extremist leaders’ sociological backgrounds casts doubt on these presumptions. Studies by such analysts as Andrew Wilder have found that in Afghanistan, infusions of development resources often exacerbated local conflict rather than reducing it, by providing new prizes for opposing groups to fight over.6
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Sarah Chayes (Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security)
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In churches that care about special needs inclusion I have found that the single biggest determinant for a child's success is the strength of the relationship between the church and the child's parents. When church leaders and parents are in general agreement regarding a child's abilities and needs, problems tend to get solved with greater speed and ingenuity. But when parents view their child's special needs as nonexistent or insignificant, it creates extra work (and stress!) for everyone serving that child. This is the reason that it is sometimes easier for churches to successfully include children with complex needs that are obvious than it is for churches to successfully include high-functioning children whose disabilities are less obvious. When parents dismiss a child's legitimate need for even occasional assistance it makes it really hard for the child and the volunteers serving them to experience success.
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Amy Fenton Lee (Leading a Special Needs Ministry)
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On the main foredeck, two more crewmen readied diving gear, while inside the main-deck saloon, seven men pulled on neoprene suits. The operators were crowded, but they were accustomed to living and working in close proximity to one another. As members of the elite and secretive Zaslon (Shield) Unit of SVR, this very team of paramilitaries had helicoptered across eastern Ukraine and Dagestan on direct-action missions. They’d killed terrorists and kidnapped local rebel leaders in Chechnya after sitting huddled together in the back of armored vehicles for hours on end, and they’d parachuted into Syria to assist with the escape of a Syrian Army general from a position being overrun by rebels
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Mark Greaney (Gunmetal Gray (Gray Man, #6))
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To develop influence, you have to teach other people how to think. Much of this comes through coaching and training and, again, role-modeling the behavior. Provide a safe, yet challenging, place for people to come to help them work through their thinking, and then hold them accountable to taking action. Push your team members. Issue them challenges and see who rises to the occasion. Regardless of your title, when you are challenging others to think differently and to become the best version of themselves by trying new things and getting out of their comfort zone, you can’t help but be seen as a leader.
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Adam Hergenrother (The Founder & The Force Multiplier: How Entrepreneurs and Executive Assistants Achieve More Together)
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Being academically gifted Burton was saved from a life of drudgery down the mines but when his family hit a rocky financial patch he was forced to quit school and take a job as a shop assistant, his way out of the valleys through education seemingly strangled at birth. It was then that acting presented itself as a new means of escape when Burton joined a local club and began performing in shows, so impressing the youth leader who managed to persuade the council to readmit the boy to school after almost two years’ absence. It was an unprecedented move.
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Robert Sellers (Hellraisers: The Life and Inebriated Times of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O'Toole, and Oliver Reed)
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Puget Sound Annuities leader, David Snavely leads the financial planning firm which was brought about through the company he founded 36 years ago—Sound Investment Services. He focuses on retirement income planning and assists clients as they create customized plans to meet their future goals. Mr. Snavely’s company provides an array of services as well as financial products. These include retirement and estate planning, insurance, and investments. In his spare time, he can be found enjoying the outdoors.
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David Snavely
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As does copilot,” Jian jumps in, hands balling into fists at his sides. Now that we’re a world away, it seems no one is afraid to stand up to our leaders anymore. The general frowns her disapproval at the two of them. “I certainly shouldn’t need to explain this. The copilot is chiefly concerned with assisting Cyb on the flight deck, while lieutenant commander means serving as the right hand to whomever we choose to lead,” she says crisply. “In our absence, that will mean Beckett.” Dev looks repulsed, and I’m slightly gratified to see that I’m not the only one who feels this way about my fellow American. The thought of him having any power over me makes me ill, and more than that, it makes no sense. What sway does he hold over Takumi and Sokolov, and why?
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Alexandra Monir (The Life Below (The Final Six, #2))
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There’s another level at which attention operates, this has to do with leadership, I argue that leaders need three kinds of focus, to be really effective, the first is an inner focus, let me tell you about a case that’s actually from the annals of neurology, there was a corporate lawyer, who unfortunately had a small prefrontal brain tumour, it was discovered early, operated successfully, after the surgery though it was a very puzzling picture, because he was absolutely as smart as he had been before, a very high IQ, no problem with attention or memory, but he couldn’t do his job anymore, he couldn’t do any job, in fact he ended up out of work, his wife left him, he lost his home, he’s living in his brother spare bedroom and in despair he went to see a famous neurologist named Antonio Damasio. Damasio specialized in the circuitry between the prefrontal area which is where we consciously pay attention to what matters now, where we make decisions, where we learn and the emotional centers in the midbrain, particularly the amygdala, which is our radar for danger, it triggers our strong emotions. They had cut the connection between the prefrontal area and emotional centers and Damasio at first was puzzled, he realized that this fellow on every neurological test was perfectly fine but something was wrong, then he got a clue, he asked the lawyer when should we have our next appointment and he realized the lawyer could give him the rational pros and cons of every hour for the next two weeks, but he didn’t know which is best. And Damasio says when we’re making a decision any decision, when to have the next appointment, should I leave my job for another one, what strategy should we follow, going into the future, should I marry this fellow compared to all the other fellows, those are decisions that require we draw on our entire life experience and the circuitry that collects that life experience is very base brain, it’s very ancient in the brain, and it has no direct connection to the part of the brain that thinks in words, it has very rich connectivity to the gastro- intestinal tract, to the gut, so we get a gut feeling, feels right, doesn’t feel right. Damasio calls them somatic markers, it’s a language of the body and the ability to tune into this is extremely important because this is valuable data too - they did a study of Californian entrepreneurs and asked them “how do you make your decisions?”, these are people who built a business from nothing to hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, and they more or less said the same strategy “I am a voracious gatherer of information, I want to see the numbers, but if it doesn’t feel right, I won’t go ahead with the deal”. They’re tuning into the gut feeling. I know someone, I grew up in farm region of California, the Central Valley and my high school had a rival high school in the next town and I met someone who went to the other high school, he was not a good student, he almost failed, came close to not graduating high school, he went to a two-year college, a community college, found his way into film, which he loved and got into a film school, in film school his student project caught the eye of a director, who asked him to become an assistant and he did so well at that the director arranged for him to direct his own film, someone else’s script, he did so well at that they let him direct a script that he had written and that film did surprisingly well, so the studio that financed that film said if you want to do another one, we will back you. And he, however, hated the way the studio edited the film, he felt he was a creative artist and they had butchered his art. He said I am gonna do the film on my own, I’m gonna finance it myself, everyone in the film business that he knew said this is a huge mistake, you shouldn’t do this, but he went ahead, then he ran out of money, had to go to eleven banks before he could get a loan, he managed to finish the film, you may have seen
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Daniel Goleman
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And here is the crux: hospitals agreed to follow, and in return demanded financial compensation—they negotiated with the leader about their terms. This is a naive approach to followership. The IT firms, on the other hand, played a smarter game. They not only negotiated with the leader for the financial assistance that would help their sales; they also negotiated for the inclusion of meaningful use—an imposition not on the leader, but on the behavior of other followers. They shaped the long term-governance of the ecosystem when the rules were still malleable. Smart.
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Ron Adner (Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World (Management on the Cutting Edge))
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Simon Graves, Nottingham, a teacher with a lot of knowledge in the English world, now decided to write books for his students. He also gives lectures on the internet about the English language and is very good at it. In his years of instructing, he's had loads of tasks. Simon Greaves, Nottingham, started and developed an internet coaching company, mainly focusing on assisting education leaders and individuals searching for career assistance. Keep in mind that he has over 20 years of expertise to draw upon.
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Simon Graves Nottingham
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The life of Moses presents a series of striking antitheses. He was the child of a slave, and the son of a queen. He was born in a hut, and lived in a palace. He inherited poverty, and enjoyed unlimited wealth. He was the leader of armies, and the keeper of flocks. He was the mightiest of warriors, and the meekest of men. He was educated in the court, and dwelt in the desert. He had the wisdom of Egypt, and the faith of a child. He was fitted for the city, and wandered in the wilderness. He was tempted with the pleasures of sin, and endured the hardships of virtue. He was backward in speech, and talked with God. He had the rod of a shepherd, and the power of the Infinite. He was a fugitive from Pharaoh, and an ambassador from heaven. He was the giver of the Law, and the forerunner of grace. He died alone on Mount Moab, and appeared with Christ in Judea. No man assisted at his funeral, yet God buried him" (Dr.
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Arthur W. Pink (Gleanings in Exodus (Arthur Pink Collection Book 26))
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If you want to construct the perfect virtual team, there are a number of elements that you need to consider. The first is how many staff members will you require? If you have several employees, you may require more than one team to complete various jobs. If you are working with individuals from various histories, it will be harder to examine their capacities. If you employ people with varying degrees of experience, the team will be less efficient as well as will only wind up developing even more irritation.
The 2nd aspect is the ability degree of each member. This is necessary since you will certainly require to produce a sense of neighborhood among employees. A virtual team-building video game will certainly aid you to attain this. A virtual team-building game called the 100 Information Obstacle is fun and also can make everyone included really feel even more connected. You can locate an assisted-in virtual team structure game with a business such as a Tag. If you do not intend to employ a team leader, you can attempt the 100 Things Challenge to discover exactly how you can develop a community within your business.
Another attribute of a virtual team monitoring device is the capability to take care of digital teams from throughout the globe. This device makes it less complicated to take care of online teams from anywhere. As an example, if you have a remote employee, you can use the ClickUp app to appoint jobs and timetable meetings. You can even use it as a style accessory, which has been hailed by Path magazine. And also if you're seeking one more virtual team-building tool, it deserves to think about Donut.
Virtual team structure video games are enjoyable ways to create a connection and also construct team comradery. Gamings like online retreat areas, murder mysteries, tests, as well as facts video games can also be an enjoyable way to connect with a staff member.
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perfectvirtualteam
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But just as my assistant platoon commander had to be ready to lead, in this situation I had to be ready to follow. The goal of all leaders should be to work themselves out of a job. You never quite get there, but by putting junior leaders and frontline troops in charge, our SEAL platoon and task unit were far more effective. It created a culture of leaders at every level of the team. Trying to navigate between leadership and followership was an example of the Dichotomy of Leadership, the balance that every leader must find between two opposing forces in leadership. Ready to lead, but also knowing when to follow.
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Jocko Willink (The Dichotomy of Leadership: Balancing the Challenges of Extreme Ownership to Lead and Win)
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Being a true leader, as opposed to a competent manager, requires a willingness to get your hands dirty. I have said before that I do not expect anyone to do a job I cannot do myself. While this is clearly unrealistic as a company grows and expands, the perception of being willing to step in and assist must remain. The weight of leadership includes staying calm while others panic and coming up with solutions rather than joining the chorus of complaints. The Covid-19 pandemic has certainly helped distinguish the leaders from the managers. Leaders are prepared to take responsibility when things go wrong, even if the true responsibility lies with someone else. Leaders are visible. Leaders have a vision, even if it is only short term. I don’t really believe in long-term planning. I make up the rules of the game based on one-year plans. This means I always retain visibility and control. Five years is too long a time to have any certainty that the objectives will be met. Leadership is not a popularity contest, but it also should not inspire fear. Leaders earn respect and loyalty, recognising that these take a long time to earn and a second to lose. A leader is not scared of collaboration and listening to the opinions of others, as well as accepting help when it’s needed. Leadership is not a quality that you are born with, it is something that you learn over time. I was not a leader in my Coronation days, and I am the first to admit that I made a lot of mistakes. Even at African Harvest, as much as I achieved financial success and tried different techniques to earn respect, I never truly managed to deal with the unruly investment team. But, having built on years of experience, by the time I hit my stride at Sygnia, I was a leader. Within any organisation of substantial size, there is space for more than one leader, whether they head up divisions or the organisation itself. There are several leaders across Sygnia weaving the fabric of our success. I am no longer the sole leader, having passed the baton on to others in pursuit of my own dreams. To quote the Harvard Business Review, ‘The competencies most frequently required for success at the top of any sizable business include strategic orientation, market insight, results orientation, customer impact, collaboration and influence, organisational development, team leadership, and change leadership.’ That is what I looked for in my successor, and that is what I found in David. I am confident that all the leaders I have groomed are more than capable of taking the company forwards.
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Magda wierzycka (Magda: My Journey)
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The U.S. economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less developed countries. That fact gives the U.S. enhanced interest in the political, economic, and social stability of the supplying countries. Wherever a lessening of population pressures through reduced birth rates can increase the prospects for such stability, population policy becomes relevant to resource supplies and to the economic interests of the United States.
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Assistance for population moderation should give primary emphasis to the largest and fastest growing developing countries where there is special U.S. political and strategic interest. Those countries are: India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, the Philippines, Thailand, Egypt, Turkey, Ethiopia and Columbia
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At the same time, the U.S. will look to the multilateral agencies, especially the U.N. Fund for Population Activities which already has projects in over 80 countries to increase population assistance on a broader basis with increased U.S. contributions. This is desirable in terms of U.S. interests and necessary in political terms in the United Nations.
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young people can more readily be persuaded to attack the legal institutions of the government or real property of the ‘establishment,’ ‘imperialists,’ multinational corporations, or other — often foreign — influences blamed for their troubles.
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Without diminishing in any way the effort to reach these adults, the obvious increased focus of attention should be to change the attitudes of the next generation, those who are now in elementary school or younger.
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There is also the danger that some LDC [less developed countries] leaders will see developed country pressures for family planning as a form of economic or racial imperialism; this could well create a serious backlash.… The U.S. can help to minimize charges of an imperialist motivation behind its support of population activities by repeatedly asserting that such support derives from a concern with:
(a) The right of the individual couple to determine freely and responsibly the number and spacing of children and to have information, education, and means to do so; and
(b) The fundamental social and economic development of poor countries in which rapid population growth is both a contributing cause and a consequence of widespread poverty.
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National Security Council (The Kissinger Report: NSSM-200 Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security Interests)
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Step 6: When Filofax grew enormously in the 1980s as an expensive, aspirational product, the absence of a generic niche description became a problem for the leader. People began to use ‘filofax’ to describe the category, which meant that every competitor could describe their product as a filofax (note the lower case f ). In 1986 David Collischon wisely coined the term ‘personal organiser’ to describe the category and encouraged everyone to use the term. Marketing experts are adamant that it is easier for us to think first about a category generally, and then about the brand. ‘I need a personal organiser to keep all my bits of paper.What brand should I ask for in the shop? Well, Filofax is the best known.’ This is an easier and more natural way of thinking than, ‘I need a Filofax.’ The clear benefit of a personal organiser was that it helped people be better organised . If the term ‘personal organiser’ had not gained widespread currency the benefit of the new category would have been much less clear, and Filofax’s brand name would have become devalued. Contrast the confusion caused in the electronic-organiser niche. When this developed in the 1990s, the leading brand was PalmPilot. But what was the category name? As Al and Laura Ries comment, ‘Some people call the Palm an electronic organiser. Others call the Palm a handheld computer. And still others, a PDA (personal digital assistant). All of these names are too long and complicated. They lack the clarity and simplicity a good category name should possess. If . . . a personal computer that fits on your lap is called a laptop computer, then the logical name for a computer that fits in the palm of your hand is a palm computer . . . Of course, Palm Computer pre-empted Palm as a brand name, leaving a nascent industry struggling to find an appropriate generic name . . . Palm Computer should have been just as concerned with choosing an appropriate generic name as it was in choosing an appropriate brand name.’9
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Richard Koch (The Star Principle: How it can make you rich)
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Chinese involvement is an attractive proposition for many African governments. Beijing and the big Chinese companies don’t ask difficult questions about human rights, they don’t demand economic reform or even suggest that certain African leaders stop stealing their countries’ wealth as the IMF or World Bank might. All the Chinese want is the oil, the minerals, the precious metals and the markets. This is an equitable government-to-government relationship, but we will see increasing tension between local populations and the Chinese workforces often brought in to assist the big projects. This in turn may draw Beijing more into the local politics, and require it to have some sort of minor military presence in various countries.
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Tim Marshall (Prisoners of Geography)
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On the other hand, far more people suddenly feel entitled to treat others differently now that they have the power. That is what happened to Lyndon Johnson once he attained a position of ultimate security in the Senate, as Senate majority leader. Tired of the years he had to spend playing the perfect courtier, he now relished the power he had to upset or humiliate those who had crossed him in the past. Now he would go up to such a senator and make a point of talking only to his assistant. Or he would get up and leave the floor when a senator he did not like was giving an important speech, making other senators follow him. In general there are always signs of these character traits in the past if you look closely enough (Johnson had revealed such nasty signs in the earliest parts of his political career), but, more important, you need to take notice of what people reveal once they are in power. So often we think that power has changed people, when in fact it simply reveals more of who they are.
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Robert Greene (The Laws of Human Nature)
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Dusk had fallen on December 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks, a tailor’s assistant, finished her long day’s work in a large department store in Montgomery, the capital of Alabama and the first capital of the Confederacy. While heading for the bus stop across Court Square, which had once been a center of slave auctions, she observed the dangling Christmas lights and a bright banner reading “Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men.” After paying her bus fare she settled down in a row between the “whites only” section and the rear seats, according to the custom that blacks could sit in the middle section if the back was filled. When a white man boarded the bus, the driver ordered Rosa Parks and three other black passengers to the rear so that the man could sit. The three other blacks stood up; Parks did not budge. Then the threats, the summoning of the police, the arrest, the quick conviction, incarceration. Through it all Rosa Parks felt little fear. She had had enough. “The time had just come when I had been pushed as far as I could stand to be pushed,” she said later. “I had decided that I would have to know once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen.” Besides, her feet hurt. The time had come … Rosa Parks’s was a heroic act of defiance, an individual act of leadership. But it was not wholly spontaneous, nor did she act alone. Long active in the civil rights effort, she had taken part in an integration workshop in Tennessee at the Highlander Folk School, an important training center for southern community activists and labor organizers. There Parks “found out for the first time in my adult life that this could be a unified society.” There she had gained strength “to persevere in my work for freedom.” Later she had served for years as a leader in the Montgomery and Alabama NAACP. Her bus arrest was by no means her first brush with authority; indeed, a decade earlier this same driver had ejected her for refusing to enter through the back door. Rosa Parks’s support group quickly mobilized. E. D. Nixon, long a militant leader of the local NAACP and the regional Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, rushed to the jail to bail her out. Nixon had been waiting for just such a test case to challenge the constitutionality of the bus segregation law. Three Montgomery women had been arrested for similar “crimes” in the past year, but the city, in order to avoid just such a challenge, had not pursued the charge. With Rosa Parks the city blundered, and from Nixon’s point of view, she was the ideal victim—no one commanded more respect in the black community.
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James MacGregor Burns (The American Experiment: The Vineyard of Liberty, The Workshop of Democracy, and The Crosswinds of Freedom)
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When it finally came time to analyze the data, what mattered most was what the researchers dubbed “psychological safety.” These were the teams in which the relationships were strong enough that mistakes weren’t held against people and it was okay to bring up hard stuff, to disagree, to ask for assistance, and (to quote Churchill) to show “charity towards each other’s shortcomings.
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Matthew Barzun (The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go)
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Britain emerged with the moral credit of having furnished the maximum of military assistance to her ally and this certainly earned the approval of the Americans.63 It revealed ‘the importance of the old military virtues such as toughness, good discipline, professional proficiency, ready resource, determination and the ability to take command’.64
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Michael K. Simpson (A Life of Admiral of the Fleet Andrew Cunningham: A Twentieth Century Naval Leader (Cass Series: Naval Policy and History Book 25))
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Cunningham, however, knew that the Italians were unschooled in night fighting, lacking the radar possessed by several of his ships; that the enemy’s morale was probably low; that fortune favours the brave and, crucially, that he was unlikely to have another opportunity to bring the Italian fleet to battle, especially as the enemy would have the assistance of dive-bombers at dawn.
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Michael K. Simpson (A Life of Admiral of the Fleet Andrew Cunningham: A Twentieth Century Naval Leader (Cass Series: Naval Policy and History Book 25))
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Judith Tobin suggests the value of five qualities that can assist you to connect with others: Appreciation allows for differences in people and considers them interesting. Sensitivity understands personal feelings and quickly takes into account the moods of others. Consistency has the quality of being “real,” not phony, and gives only sincere compliments. Security doesn’t try to be “top dog”; it knows that helping others win isn’t a loss for you. Humor laughs at itself; it is not overly sensitive.
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John C. Maxwell (The Self-Aware Leader: Play to Your Strengths, Unleash Your Team)
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It is hoped that the discussion of money and salvation in this book will encourage the leaders of parishes and Christian organizations to imitate the soul-centric approach of Jesus and Paul in all financial discussions. It is also hoped that they will restore the spiritual pillar of almsgiving, including tithing, to its traditional place of prominence alongside prayer and fasting in Orthodox life. This would greatly assist all the faithful in their journey to experience more deeply the love God has for us, both in this life and in eternity. Far more importantly, it would help satisfy God’s astonishingly great longing for our salvation.
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Andrew Geleris (Money & Salvation: An Invitation to the Good Way)
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Dulles usually favored amnesty for those whose class or economic status seemed to make them useful for postwar economic revival, and for people who had assisted him in intelligence gathering or covert operations. Culpability for Nazi crimes should be limited in most cases to German leaders who remained diehard Nazi enthusiasts,
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Christopher Simpson (The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Forbidden Bookshelf))
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All leaders were equal at the conference table, but those from heavyweight countries showed that they were more equal by arriving in big private jets, the British in their VC 10s and Comets, and the Canadians in Boeings. The Australians joined this select group in 1979, after Malcolm Fraser's government purchased a Boeing 707 for the Royal Australian Air Force. Those African presidents whose countries were then better off, like Kenya and Nigeria, also had special aircraft. I wondered why they did not set out to impress the world that they were poor and in dire need of assistance. Our permanent representative at the UN in New York explained that the poorer the country, the bigger the Cadillacs they hired for their leaders. So I made a virtue of arriving by ordinary commercial aircraft, and thus helped preserve Singapore's third World status for many years. However, by the mid-1990s, the World Bank refused to heed our pleas not to reclassify us as a "High Income Developing Country", giving no Brownie points for my frugal travel habits. We lost all the concessions that were given to developing countries.
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Lee Kuan-Yew