Fatal Strategies Quotes

There can’t be anything more fatal to a business than making decisions based on somebody else’s assumptions.

Bipedalism is a demanding and risky strategy. It means refashioning the pelvis into a full load-bearing instrument. To preserve the required strength, the birth canal in the female must be comparatively narrow. This has two very significant immediate consequences and one longer-term one. First, it means a lot of pain for any birthing mother and greatly increased danger of fatality to mother and baby both. Moreover, to get the baby's head through such a tight space it must be born while it's brain is still small - and while the baby, therefore, is still helpless. This means long-term infant care, which in turn implies solid male-female bonding.

The most frequent reasons we get turned down as romantic prospects (or as job applicants) are because of a lack of general chemistry, because we don’t match the person’s or company’s specific needs at that time, or because we don’t fit the narrow definition of who they’re looking for—not because of any critical missteps we might have made nor because we have any fatal character flaws.

It is as well to avoid illusions of control, but in the end all we can do is act as if we can influence events. To do otherwise is to succumb to fatalism.

Avoid a frontal attack on a long established position; instead, seek to turn it by flank movement, so that a more penetrable side is exposed to the thrust of truth. But, in any such indirect approach, take care not to diverge from the truth-for nothing is more fatal to its real advancement than to lapse into untruth.

But against the acceleration of networks and circuits, we will also look for slowness—not the nostalgic slowness of the mind, but insoluble immobility, the slower than slow: inertia and silence, inertia insoluble by effort, silence insoluble by dialogue. There is a secret here too.

We mustn't believe we are living the realization of some evil utopia - we are living the realization of utopia, period. That is to say, its collapse into the real.

Great, I thought. The afterlife is just like Hollywood, with nobodies passing themselves off as somebodies. My ongoing strategy of postponing death had been vindicated.

I'VE SAVED THE BEST FOR LAST: There is ONE technique that can work to both find the risk, and close the deal. BUT it's a delicate one that requires mastery through preparation and practice. The strategy is called: What's the risk? What's the reward? When a prospect hesitates, you simply ask him or her to list the risks of purchase. Actually write them down. Prompt others. If the prospect says "I'm not sure," you ask, "Could it be ..." After you feel the list is complete, ask the prospect to list the rewards. Write them down, and embellish as much as possible without puking on the prospect. Then eliminate the risks one by one with lead in phrases like: Suppose we could ... did you know that ... I think we can ... Then you simply ask, "can you see any other reasons not to proceed?" One at a time, brick by brick, remove the risks that the buyer perceives as fatal mistakes in his decision-making process. Then drive home the rewards, both emotionally and logically.

The masses know that they know nothing and they have no desire to know. The masses know they are powerless, and they don’t want power. We reproach them vigorously for these signs of stupidity and passivity. But they’re not that at all: the masses are very snobbish; they act like Brummel and sovereignly delegate the faculty of choice to someone else, in a sort of game of irresponsibility, ironic chal¬ lenge, sovereign lack of will, or secret ruse.

The world’s population explosion is a biological problem, that is we pursue a policy that would be fatal for any species, then it will fatal for us in exactly the same way. We can’t will it to be otherwise. We can’t say our civilization is built on an evolutionarily unstable strategy but we can make it work anyhow, because we are humans. The world will not make an exception for us. And of course what religions teach is that God will make an exception for us. That is like expecting God to make our airplanes fly even if they are aerodynamically incapable of flight.

Bipedalism is a demanding and risky strategy. It means refashioning the pelvis into a full load-bearing instrument. To preserve the required strength, the birth canal in the female must be comparatively narrow. This has two very significant immediate consequences and one longer-term one. First, it means a lot of pain for any birthing mother and a greatly increased danger of fatality to mother and baby both. Moreover, to get the baby’s head through such a tight space it must be born while its brain is still small – and while the baby, therefore, is still helpless. This means long-term infant care, which in turn implies solid male–female bonding.

Everything we do and say will either underline or undermine our discipleship process. As long as there is one unsaved person on my campus or in my city, then my church is not big enough. One of the underlying principles of our discipleship strategy is that every believer can and should make disciples. When a discipleship process fails, many times the fatal flaw is that the definition of discipleship is either unclear, unbiblical, or not commonly shared by the leadership team. Write down what you love to do most, and then go do it with unbelievers. Whatever you love to do, turn it into an outreach. You have to formulate a system that is appropriate for your cultural setting. Writing your own program for making disciples takes time, prayer, and some trial and error—just as it did with us. Learn and incorporate ideas from other churches around the world, but only after modification to make sure the strategies make sense in our culture and community. Culture is changing so quickly that staying relevant requires our constant attention. If we allow ourselves to be distracted by focusing on the mechanics of our own efforts rather than our culture, we will become irrelevant almost overnight. The easiest and most common way to fail at discipleship is to import a model or copy a method that worked somewhere else without first understanding the values that create a healthy discipleship culture. Principles and process are much more important than material, models, and methods. The church is an organization that exists for its nonmembers. Christianity does not promise a storm-free life. However, if we build our lives on biblical foundations, the storms of life will not destroy us. We cannot have lives that are storm-free, but we can become storm-proof. Just as we have to figure out the most effective way to engage our community for Christ, we also have to figure out the most effective way to establish spiritual foundations in each unique context. There is really only one biblical foundation we can build our lives on, and that is the Lord Jesus Christ. Pastors, teachers, and church staff believe their primary role is to serve as mentors. Their task is to equip every believer for the work of the ministry. It is not to do all the ministry, but to equip all the people to do it. Their top priority is to equip disciples to do ministry and to make disciples. Do you spend more time ministering to people or preparing people to minister? No matter what your church responsibilities are, you can prepare others for the same ministry. Insecurity in leadership is a deadly thing that will destroy any organization. It drives pastors and presidents to defensive positions, protecting their authority or exercising it simply to show who is the boss. Disciple-making is a process that systematically moves people toward Christ and spiritual maturity; it is not a bunch of randomly disconnected church activities. In the context of church leadership, one of the greatest and most important applications of faith is to trust the Holy Spirit to work in and through those you are leading. Without confidence that the Holy Spirit is in control, there is no empowering, no shared leadership, and, as a consequence, no multiplication.

We could have dramatically reduced COVID fatalities and hospitalizations using early treatment protocols and repurposed drugs including ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and many, many others.” Dr. McCullough has treated some 2,000 COVID patients with these therapies. McCullough points out that hundreds of peer-reviewed studies now show that early treatment could have averted some 80 percent of deaths attributed to COVID. “The strategy from the outset should have been implementing protocols to stop hospitalizations through early treatment of Americans who tested positive for COVID but were still asymptomatic. If we had done that, we could have pushed case fatality rates below those we see with seasonal flu, and ended the bottlenecks in our hospitals. We should have rapidly deployed off-the-shelf medications with proven safety records and subjected them to rigorous risk/benefit decision-making,” McCullough continues. “Using repurposed drugs, we could have ended this pandemic by May 2020 and saved 500,000 American lives, but for Dr. Fauci’s hard-headed, tunnel vision on new vaccines and remdesivir.

McCullough observes that, “We could have dramatically reduced COVID fatalities and hospitalizations using early treatment protocols and repurposed drugs including ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and many, many others.” Dr. McCullough has treated some 2,000 COVID patients with these therapies. McCullough points out that hundreds of peer-reviewed studies now show that early treatment could have averted some 80 percent of deaths attributed to COVID. “The strategy from the outset should have been implementing protocols to stop hospitalizations through early treatment of Americans who tested positive for COVID but were still asymptomatic. If we had done that, we could have pushed case fatality rates below those we see with seasonal flu, and ended the bottlenecks in our hospitals. We should have rapidly deployed off-the-shelf medications with proven safety records and subjected them to rigorous risk/benefit decision-making,” McCullough continues. “Using repurposed drugs, we could have ended this pandemic by May 2020 and saved 500,000 American lives, but for Dr. Fauci’s hard-headed, tunnel vision on new vaccines and remdesivir.

Managerial abilities, bureaucratic skills, technical expertise, and political talent are all necessary, but they can be applied only to goals that have already been defined by military policies, broad and narrow. And those policies can be only as good as strategy, operational art of war, tactical thought, and plain military craft that have gone into their making. At present, the defects of structure submerge or distort strategy and operational art, they out rightly suppress tactical ingenuity, and they displace the traditional insights and rules of military craft in favor of bureaucratic preferences, administrative convenience, and abstract notions of efficiency derived from the world of business management. First there is the defective structure for making of military decisions under the futile supervision of the civilian Defense Department; then come the deeply flawed defense policies and military choices, replete with unnecessary costs and hidden risks; finally there come the undoubted managerial abilities, bureaucratic skills, technical expertise, and political talents, all applied to achieve those flawed policies and to implement those flawed choices. By this same sequence was the fatally incomplete Maginot Line built, as were all the Maginot Lines of history, each made no better by good government, technical talent, careful accounting, or sheer hard work. Hence the futility of all the managerial innovations tried in the Pentagon over the years. In the purchasing of weapons, for example, “total package” procurement, cost plus incentive contracting, “firm fixed price” purchasing have all been introduced with much fanfare, only to be abandoned, retried, and repudiated once again. And each time a new Secretary of Defense arrives, with him come the latest batch of managerial innovations, many of them aimed at reducing fraud, waste, and mismanagement-the classic trio endlessly denounced in Congress, even though they account for mere percentage points in the total budget, and have no relevance at all to the failures of combat. The persistence of the Administrator’s Delusion has long kept the Pentagon on a treadmill of futile procedural “reforms” that have no impact at all on the military substance of our defense. It is through strategy, operational art, tactical ingenuity, and military craft that the large savings can be made, and the nation’s military strength greatly increased, but achieving long-overdue structural innovations, from the central headquarters to the combat forces, from the overhead of bases and installations to the current purchase of new weapons. Then, and only then, will it be useful to pursue fraud, waste, and mismanagement, if only to save a few dollars more after the billions have already been saved. At present, by contrast, the Defense Department administers ineffectively, while the public, Congress, and the media apply their energies to such petty matters as overpriced spare parts for a given device in a given weapon of a given ship, overlooking at the same time the multibillion dollar question of money spent for the Navy as a whole instead of the Army – whose weakness diminishes our diplomatic weight in peacetime, and which could one day cause us to resort to nuclear weapons in the face of imminent debacle. If we had a central military authority and a Defense Department capable of strategy, we should cheerfully tolerate much fraud, waste, and mismanagement; but so long as there are competing military bureaucracies organically incapable of strategic combat, neither safety nor economy will be ensured, even if we could totally eliminate every last cent of fraud, waste, and mismanagement.

In my long life, Ryadd, I have seen many variations—configurations—of behaviour and attitude, and I have seen a person change from one to the other—when experience has proved damaging enough, or when the inherent weaknesses of one are recognized, leading to a wholesale rejection of it. Though, in turn, weaknesses of different sorts exist in the other, and often these prove fatal pitfalls. We are complex creatures, to be sure. The key, I think, is to hold true to your own aesthetics, that which you value, and yield to no one the power to become the arbiter of your tastes. You must also learn to devise strategies for fending off both attackers and defenders. Exploit aggression, but only in self-defence, the kind of self-defence that announces to all the implacability of your armour, your self-assurance, and affirms the sanctity of your self-esteem. Attack when you must, but not in arrogance. Defend when your values are challenged, but never with the wild fire of anger. Against attackers, your surest defence is cold iron. Against defenders, often the best tactic is to sheathe your weapon and refuse the game. Reserve contempt for those who have truly earned it, but see the contempt you permit yourself to feel not as a weapon, but as armour against their assaults. Finally, be ready to disarm with a smile, even as you cut deep with words.

Although Israel is targeted by terrorists much more frequently than the United States, Israelis do not live in fear of terrorism. A 2012 survey of Israeli Jews found that only 16 percent described terrorism as their greatest fear81—no more than the number who said they were worried about Israel’s education system. No Israeli politician would say outright that he tolerates small-scale terrorism, but that’s essentially what the country does. It tolerates it because the alternative—having everyone be paralyzed by fear—is incapacitating and in line with the terrorists’ goals. A key element in the country’s strategy is making life as normal as possible for people after an attack occurs. For instance, police typically try to clear the scene of an attack within four hours of a bomb going off,82 letting everyone get back to work, errands, or even leisure. Small-scale terrorism is treated more like crime than an existential threat. What Israel certainly does not tolerate is the potential for large-scale terrorism (as might be made more likely, for instance, by one of their neighbors acquiring weapons of mass destruction). There is some evidence that their approach is successful: Israel is the one country that has been able to bend Clauset’s curve. If we plot the fatality tolls from terrorist incidents in Israel using the power-law method (figure 13-8), we find that there have been significantly fewer large-scale terror attacks than the power-law would predict; no incident since 1979 has killed more than two hundred people. The fact that Israel’s power-law graph looks so distinct is evidence that our strategic choices do make some difference.

In my long life, Ryadd, I have seen many variations – configurations – of behaviour and attitude, and I have seen a person change from one to the other – when experience has proved damaging enough, or when the inherent weaknesses of one are recognized, leading to a wholesale rejection of it. Though, in turn, weaknesses of different sorts exist in the other, and often these prove fatal pitfalls. We are complex creatures, to be sure. The key, I think, is to hold true to your own aesthetics, that which you value, and yield to no one the power to become the arbiter of your tastes. You must also learn to devise strategies for fending off both attackers and defenders. Exploit aggression, but only in self-defence, the kind of self-defence that announces to all the implacability of your armour, your self-assurance, and affirms the sanctity of your self-esteem. Attack when you must, but not in arrogance. Defend when your values are challenged, but never with the wild fire of anger. Against attackers, your surest defence is cold iron. Against defenders, often the best tactic is to sheathe your weapon and refuse the game. Reserve contempt for those who have truly earned it, but see the contempt you permit yourself to feel not as a weapon, but as armour against their assaults. Finally, be ready to disarm with a smile, even as you cut deep with words.’ ‘Passive.’ ‘Of a sort, yes. It is more a matter of warning off potential adversaries. In effect, you are saying: Be careful how close you tread. You cannot hurt me, but if I am pushed hard enough, I will wound you. In some things you must never yield, but these things are not eternally changeless or explicitly inflexible; rather, they are yours to decide upon, yours to reshape if you deem it prudent. They are immune to the pressure of others, but not indifferent to their arguments. Weigh and gauge at all times, and decide for yourself value and worth. But when you sense that a line has been crossed by the other person, when you sense that what is under attack is, in fact, your self-esteem, then gird yourself and stand firm.

The lesson to be drawn from X's fatal fall after leaving a moronic show: only go to shows where you would not mind dying immediately after seeing them. One cannot reasonably trust in the will, that 'rational' strategy that works only one time in ten. One has, rather, to clear the decks around a decision, leave it hanging, then let oneself slide into it, as though being sucked in, with no thought for causes and effects. To be willed by the decision itself; in a sense, to give in to it. The decision then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If Bliss Brain is so desirable and pleasurable, why is it so fragile? Why can our brains be distracted from happiness by the slightest hint of a thought? Why is the demon’s slightest whisper enough to drag us out of bliss? Why are our brains hardwired for negativity? The answer is simple: That’s how our ancestors survived. Those who were the most responsive to danger lived. If your ancestor’s brain had a genetic mutation that heard the rustle of the tiger in the grass a nanosecond earlier, he started running a moment sooner. Genes that paid close attention to threats conferred an enormous survival advantage, as I illustrate in my book The Genie in Your Genes. People who were less responsive to potential threats died, and their genes were lost to the gene pool. Those who reacted to the smallest hint of danger survived, passing their paranoid genes to the next generation. In contrast, happiness provided little or no survival value. Fail to notice a beautiful sunset, ignore the sound of children singing, walk by a rose bush without smelling the blooms? Nothing bad happens. But miss the rustle of the tiger? That’s fatal. So thousands of generations of evolution have honed our ability to respond to even the most minuscule whisper of the remotest possibility of threat, and abandon happiness at the drop of a hat. Mother Nature cares greatly about your survival—and not at all about your happiness. That’s why the DMN defaults to worry, instead of to bliss. Mentally rehearsing future stuff that might just possibly hurt us, past stuff that definitely hurt us, and present stuff that might signal danger—all these are signs of a brain that is successfully practicing the strategies that ensured our ancestors’ survival. This isn’t bad. It’s just excessive for the safe modern world in which we live. If you’re at a construction site where a skyscraper is being built, you wear a hard hat and safety goggles. Such an outfit is entirely appropriate for that context. As attire for tea with the queen? Not so much. Although the DMN interrupts meditation, it plays a useful role in our lives. It is active when we are thinking about others, considering our safety, remembering the past, and planning for the future. It is also active in self-oriented and social tasks, including memorizing the experiences we collect during task-oriented activities. The path of your inner mystic will elevate you to enlightenment. The goal of your inner demon is to keep you safe. You can’t get enlightened if you’ve been eaten by the tiger.

Gaming is wonderful

If you don’t know and believe that human beings have the power, unique within nature, to utterly transform themselves, then you are fatally handicapped.

Nobel Laureate Frederick Hayek eloquently makes this case in his book, The Fatal Conceit. Hayek inveighed against the notion of ever being able to plan a productive economy. He argues that formal planning methodologies—which are models of how an economy works—do not capture what really drives a competitive economy, in particular the information processed through decisions made daily by millions of buyers and sellers.

A so-called Len Bias case is based in federal law. Under that law, a person who supplies drugs that cause a fatal overdose may be charged with a conspiracy that results in death—a charge that carries a twenty-year prison sentence. Cops have to prove the person died from the suspect’s drugs; a chain of custody has to be established. But if they can do that, they have a powerful prosecutorial tool and one that was getting a closer look in many parts of the country as the opiate epidemic and fatal drug overdoses spread across the nation. One place that refined the strategy was Portland, Oregon. The benefit prosecutors see in Len Bias is that it allows investigators to work up a chain of drug distribution. To save himself from a Len Bias prosecution, a dealer needs to flip, and quickly, burning the dealer one link above him in the chain, hoping for leniency at sentencing time. The last man detectives can trace the drugs to faces the twenty years if convicted—a fateful game of musical chairs.

For the German fighter pilot, there was no magic number of sorties or hours, the completion of which guaranteed a return home. He was already home, and in the skies over the Reich he faced an opponent who enjoyed overwhelming superiority. If he survived the first missions and his skills reached those of his opponents, he would fly until fatigue and strain led to a mistake that was more often than not fatal.

It’s tempting to go it alone when leading a change initiative. There’s no one to dilute your ideas or share the glory, and it’s often just plain exciting. It’s also foolish. You need to recruit partners, people who can help protect you from attacks and who can point out potentially fatal flaws in your strategy or initiative. Moreover, you are far less vulnerable when you are out on the point with a bunch of folks rather than alone. You also need to keep the opposition close. Knowing what your opponents are thinking can help you challenge them more effectively and thwart their attempts to upset your agenda—or allow you to borrow ideas that will improve your initiative. Have coffee once a week with the person most dedicated to seeing you fail.

The Advantage of Long Range Technique and Why Close Range Is Deadly Let's be clear: you always want to maintain distance. For the long stick, long range is the optimum strategy. At long range, the opponent must reach out with his hand to hit you. At the farthest range, he can only hit you with that hand: the other hand is too far back to touch you, and his feet are planted as he stretches. If he extends to kick you, his hands can't touch you, while his other foot is planted. In either case, at this longest range only one hand or foot threatens you. With the big stick, you want to maintain a range where you can blast him, but he can't touch you. This is the safest range. As the opponent gets closer he enters a range where he can hit you with both hands and kick you with both feet, so you now have four potential weapons to contend with. At even closer range he can hit with the hands, elbows, knees, head, so the number of threats grows larger still. At this range if he has a knife, he can use one hand to hold you while he stabs with the other, which is easily a fatal attack. At close range an opponent can bring a concealed gun or knife into play, and you may not see the weapon until it is too late. While long range is the desired range, you must realize that you can't always maintain that range, so you must be prepared to fight in close. You not only want to be able to hit at very close range, but be able to drive the opponent back out into the kill zone. Countering the Closing Opponent 1) Recognize the Danger Avoid overconfidence, the delusional thinking, “If anybody tries to tackle me I'll knock him out.” It's not that easy. As long as you're standing, running is always an option, but once an opponent has clinched or tackled you, you lose that option. If you get taken to the ground spectators can very easily kick you in the head, a very powerful, inconspicuous kick that is like kicking a football off a tee. Martial artist Geoff Thompson knew two men who were killed in just such a fashion. A gang tactic is to assign one member to tie you up, sacrificing himself if necessary, so that the rest of the gang can pick you off. Against multiple opponents your primary strategy is mobility, fleeing if possible, but once you're clutched or tackled you've lost that option. A clinching assailant with a knife is your worst nightmare, posing a highly lethal threat.

Countering the Knife The knife attack is very serious, and easily fatal. Avoid a knife confrontation if at all possible. If you must confront the knife wielder, and are able to do so at a distance, draw both the ASP and the neck knife. You can start with Kick and Draw to get the expandable baton into play while keeping the opponent at bay with a low kick. Your basic strategy is to hit the opponent with the ASP from a distance. His kneecap is a good target, because it is hard to defend and if you damage his knee, it will become difficult for him to close in on you. The knife serves as a backup and a deterrent to keep him from rushing in on you, which is the obvious strategy against someone armed with a stick or baton. In close, you can execute Move 2, striking with the ASP at his forearm as you twist your torso. Hit with the empty hand or slash with the knife. The prison-style knife attack, wherein the attacker grabs and smothers with his lead free hand while repeatedly stabbing with the rear hand, is a simple yet deadly attack that is difficult to defend against. The most effective counter to the prison-style knife attack comes from Ray Floro. First of all, assume the existence of a knife. It is too easy to assume that you are in a fistfight and get surprised when you are stabbed. Many people who are cut or stabbed are unaware of the existence of a knife, and may perceive a thrust as a punch. So don't get surprised by a weapon in an opponent's hand –be looking for it. From the High Backhand Guard chop downward at the opponent's forearm, only add the live hand. Grasp the ASP with both hands in staff grip and repeatedly slam the attacker's forearm. The slams are parallel to the ground, forming a very powerful counter to the upward knife thrust. These multiple slams not only serve as a defense, but as an offense, damaging the opponent's weapon arm. The Vertical Strike From the High Backhand Guard, strike vertically, chopping straight down with the ASP. Like the horizontal chop, the left/live hand follows just behind the ASP as you strike, and retreats with it as you quickly retract it back your original start position in the high backhand guard. The vertical strike can be used to hit targets of opportunity, such as a hand or elbow, but it can also be used to defend against a horizontal attack, such as a swing with a bottle, a slash with a knife, or a kick. Don't think of the strike as a block, but as attacking the opponent's striking arm or leg.

Tidakkah ada yang melihat? Betapa ketulusan bisa menjadi teramat konyol. Hasrat yang berlebih tanpa persiapan bisa berakibat fatal. Percaya membabi buta pada pihak asing bisa jadi senjata makan tuan. Strategi. Kemandirian. Itu dia kuncinya.

While the flesh-and-blood lecturer is speaking, his double looms up behind him on a giant screen, and his words spool out like a cartoon speech bubble. Where do the concepts and figures of analysis come from? Are they not purely and simply the metaphysical expression of a set of character traits, of an unfitness for reality and a fitness only for illusion and disillusion? Denial of reality, duplicity and intelligence of evil, ellipsis of the will and fatal strategies - might these things not all be faked? But isn't it a success to be one more spiral in the simulation?

Unemployment, too, has taken on new meaning. It is no longer a strategy of capital (the reserve army of labour). It is no longer a critical factor in the play of social relationships - if it were, since the danger level was passed long ago, it would necessarily have sparked unprecedented upheavals. What is unemployment today? It too is a sort of artificial satellite, a satellite of inertia, a mass with a charge of electricity that cannot even be described as a negative charge, for it is static: I refer to that increasingly large portion of society that is deepfrozen. Beneath the accelerating pace of the circuits and systems of exchange, beneath all the frenzied activity, there is something in us - in each of us - that slows down to the point where it fades out of circulation. This is the inertia point around which the whole of society eventually begins to gravitate. It is as though the two poles of our world had been brought into contact, shortcircuiting in such a way that they simultaneously hyperstimulate and enervate potential energies. This is no longer a crisis, but a fatal development - a catastrophe in slow motion.

Early abuse and abandonment forces the child to merge his identity with the superego, the part of the child’s brain that learns the rules of his caretakers in order to get and maintain acceptance. However, because acceptance is impossible in the Cptsd-engendering family, the superego gets stuck working overtime to achieve the impossible. Perseverating on finding a formula to win over her parents, the child eventually embraces perfectionism as a strategy to make her parents less dangerous and more engaging. Her one hope is that if she becomes smart, helpful, pretty, and flawless enough, her parents will finally care for her. Sadly, continued failure at winning their regard forces her to conclude that she is fatally flawed. She is loveless not because of her mistakes, but because she is a mistake. She can only see what is wrong with or missing in her.

The planters responded to this challenge by adopting a three-part strategy to break the will, or at least the ability to fight, of a people who had been snatched from their homeland and brutalized and who were overwhelmingly “hostile to those who controlled their labor.” 14 In a series of moves that would scar the United States well into the twenty-first century, colonial Virginia deployed this triad of brutal control. It denied the enslaved the right to bear arms; ignored the right to self-defense for Black people; and put in place a “large-scale military machinery,” the militia, “to crack down [on] any conspiracies or uprisings.” 15

The logic of going downhill, the logic of decline, entails an absolute failure to bite through. It signifies a softening. It is known, as well, that soft people no longer have the stomach for what is necessary. They are focused on shopping. What occurs is a form of denial, in which the realities of politics and war are cast aside in favor of fantasy substitutes, heavily laced with ideological logos of the kind that paralyze all thought. This intellectual failure, born out of spiritual collapse, heralds the end of rational calculation and grand strategy. One does not need strategy to win. Merely, the right kind of publicity is all-in-all sufficient. When something tangible occurs, which may be strategically fatal, the answer is to revile the opposition. There is no analysis, no judgment, no genuine fright at the prospect of death and destruction. Few are those who believe that real destruction is possible. Few suspect that weapons of mass destruction can and will be used against people who are too silly to know, and too careless to consider, who is preparing these weapons against them. Soft people imagine that such weapons cannot be used because the world would end. And nobody wants that. Here is a failure of imagination alongside a dismissal of the concept "enemy," done without any hesitation, with the survival instinct overridden by the daily corruption that attends absolute comfort. Those who are soft cannot see into an enemy that emerges from totally different conditions of life.

Great successes are tasking, so are fatal failures… your ability to secernate the direction of your action is what brings you either of them.

The seemingly ubiquitous axiom that cops are racists has led to this age where non-compliance during police engagement is an encouraged strategy e.g. Eric Garner and Freddie Gray. Undoubtedly, the motive is financial since filing frivolous civil suits against cops for a financial settlement has become a new lottery system. However, confrontation instead of compliance will continue to lead to fatal consequences, and that’s what BLM gleefully envisions.

reducing encounters between on-duty law enforcement and individuals with the most severe psychiatric diseases may represent the single most immediate, practical strategy for reducing fatal police shootings in the United States.

general who ranked second to Giáp in North Vietnam’s military hierarchy, Nguyễn Chí Thanh, laid out this strategy in a paper titled “Five Lessons Learned in a Highly Victorious Dry Season”: Always keep the initiative on your side in battle. Force the enemy to fight on your terms. Try to be always on the offensive, fighting only when the odds favor your side. Otherwise it is better to avoid the enemy, to deflect his attention—to hide, even, while waiting for a time and space of your choosing or a better opportunity. Always try to fight at close range, to fight vigorously and quickly, and to conclude the battle expeditiously; never drag it out or fight an inconclusive battle. Always prepare carefully and understand the enemy, the terrain, and the rules of action, and predict correctly the enemy’s reactions. You must also be flexible, always be on the move, concentrating only enough force for the action; assemble and disperse quickly, and move fast. Finally, keep your moves secret and unpredictable, giving special attention to creating diversions and dissimulation to throw off the enemy’s calculations.35 Such a strategy enabled the Vietcong and North Vietnamese to dictate the tempo and level of fighting and thus to control their casualties—thereby nullifying the fundamental premise and effectiveness of the attrition strategy. Westmoreland’s operations chief, General DePuy, came to see this fatal flaw of attrition after the war. “They metered out their casualties, and when the casualties were getting too high, they just backed off and waited,” he said in retrospect. “I was surprised at the difficulty we had in trying to find the VC. We hit more dry holes than I thought we were going to hit. They were more elusive . . . They were the ones who decided whether there would be a fight.”36 In hindsight, the chiefs themselves acknowledged that “the enemy, by the type of action he adopts, has the predominant share in determining enemy attrition rates.”37 This gave the Vietcong and North Vietnamese the precious commodity of time in a conflict against a militarily superior but adaptively inferior opponent fighting a war half a world away—and they knew it. Instead of a grinding war of attrition, it became a protracted war of endurance that the Vietcong and North Vietnamese would win.

Personal SWOT SWOT, a common business strategy practice, flushes out the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of a particular business. Applying this common business strategy to yourself will fine-tune your self-understanding. The strengths you identified in the last section can go under your strengths, but what about your weaknesses? Just as important as knowing what you’re good at and what you enjoy is knowing what type of activities you should avoid. What areas, tasks, and even possible industries are off-limits for you? What activities just absolutely do not interest you? What assignments do you drag your feet on? These should be identified so you can concentrate on working within your sweet spot and focus on what you do best. Get it all down on paper: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Once you’ve examined where you thrive and what to avoid, it’s time to build your resume. The exercise of putting it together is an important part of looking inward. Record your relevant work experience and what your role was in each position. Be sure to use action verbs to frame your accomplishments; quantify the specific results you achieved. This helps to emphasize what really stands out in your career, where your interests lie, and where and how you get the best results. It also serves to identify what your role should be moving forward. Do you excel in marketing, sales, process implementation, or accounting? What areas are you comfortable growing into and which ones do you want to hire assistance for. One of the most fatal mistakes an entrepreneur can make is assuming that just because they understand the technical work of the business does not mean they can successfully run a business that does the technical work. As Michael Gerber describes at length in his book The E-Myth: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It, staffing, marketing, and cash flow management have nothing to do with baking pies, but everything to do with running and growing a pie business. Spend time reflecting on yourself. The exercise will drive interest in opportunities that may have otherwise not appeared interesting. For the purpose of true self-discovery, ignore your passions and interests for a moment. Simply focus on the activities and functions you are well-equipped to execute. This is about getting in tune with what you’re good at and doing a deep dive into your skillset. At the end of this section, you should have a personal SWOT analysis and a resume written out for your review.