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I've been lucky enough now in my life to meet all sorts of extraordinary and accomplished people - world leaders, inventors, musicians, astronauts, athletes, professors, entrepreneurs, artists and writers, pioneering doctors and researchers. Some (though not enough) of them are women. Some (though not enough) are black or of color. Some were born poor or have lives that to many of us would appear to have been unfairly heaped with adversity, and yet still they seem to operate as if they've had every advantage in the world. What I've learned is this: All of them have had doubters. Some continue to have roaring, stadium-sized collection of critics and naysayers who will shout I told you so at every little misstep or mistake. The noise doesn't go away, but the most successful people I know have figured out how to live with it, to lean on the people who believe in them, and to push onward with their goals.
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Michelle Obama (Becoming)
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Now i'm home again and none of my usuals methods of escape are doing the trick. I tend to watch a lot of movies. Ideally, documentaries about loners, outcats, pioneers. Give me a cult leader, obscure historical figures, dead musicians. I want to see a misunderstood person who someone is finally taking the time to understand.
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Val Emmich (Dear Evan Hansen)
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Critics are loud, but success is louder.
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Matshona Dhliwayo
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An entrepreneur is a leader of excellence, trailblazer and pioneer who constantly brings change to their generation.
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Onyi Anyado
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If there was one thing I learned from all my research, it was that the majority of the early pioneers didn’t dwell on the hard times; they indeed related every aspect of their lives to their relationship with God, specifically in regards to this disastrous journey. They thanked Him for their lives and the fact that they made it through. Most didn't blame leaders or those around them. They learned to accept their plight and move forward with faith.
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Mike Ericksen (Upon Destiny's Song)
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To rule your mind, control your gates.
To rule your world, take hold of its gates.
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Martin Uzochukwu Ugwu
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Movements are led by Pioneering Leaders who can go into unreached fields, connect, share the gospel, make disciples, form new churches, and multiply leaders. But how do you grow Pioneering Leaders when your existing methods only produce pastor-teachers? Don’t begin with a denominational or church-wide restructuring. Don’t begin by blaming the leaders you have. Cast vision widely for making disciples.
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Steve Addison (The Rise and Fall of Movements: A Roadmap for Leaders)
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How solemn and beautiful is the thought, that the earliest pioneer of civilization, the van-leader of civilization, is never the steamboat, never the railroad, never the newspaper, never the Sabbath-school, never the missionary—but always whiskey! Such is the case. Look history over; you will see. The missionary comes after the whiskey—I mean he arrives after the whiskey has arrived; next comes the poor immigrant, with ax and hoe and rifle; next, the trader; next, the miscellaneous rush; next, the gambler, the desperado, the highwayman, and all their kindred in sin of both sexes; and next, the smart chap who has bought up an old grant that covers all the land; this brings the lawyer tribe; the vigilance committee brings the undertaker. All these interests bring the newspaper; the newspaper starts up politics and a railroad; all hands turn to and build a church and a jail—and
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Mark Twain (Life on the Mississippi)
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On a chilly morning in early January, a self-described ‘militant’ opened the door of CasaPound’s squat in central Rome. Inside, he pointed to the walls of the corridor, colorfully painted with the names of the party’s heroes. Italian leader Benito Mussolini and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, important historical inspirations for contemporary fascists, were among the more obvious names. Less explicable were names such as Ahmad Shah Massoud, the late Afghan militia leader who battled the Soviets and the Taliban alike, and Jack Kerouac, the American novelist and pioneer of the Beat Generation.
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Patrick Strickland (Alerta! Alerta!: Snapshots of Europe's Anti-fascist Struggle)
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For years, the suspicion that Mr. Putin has a secret fortune has intrigued scholars, industry analysts, opposition figures, journalists and intelligence agencies but defied their efforts to uncover it. Numbers are thrown around suggesting that Mr. Putin may control $40 billion or even $70 billion, in theory making him the richest head of state in world history. For all the rumors and speculation, though, there has been little if any hard evidence, and Gunvor has adamantly denied any financial ties to Mr. Putin and repeated that denial on Friday. But Mr. Obama’s response to the Ukraine crisis, while derided by critics as slow and weak, has reinvigorated a 15-year global hunt for Mr. Putin’s hidden wealth. Now, as the Obama administration prepares to announce another round of sanctions as early as Monday targeting Russians it considers part of Mr. Putin’s financial circle, it is sending a not-very-subtle message that it thinks it knows where the Russian leader has his money, and that he could ultimately be targeted directly or indirectly. “It’s something that could be done that would send a very clear signal of taking the gloves off and not just dance around it,” said Juan C. Zarate, a White House counterterrorism adviser to President George W. Bush who helped pioneer the government’s modern financial campaign techniques to choke off terrorist money.
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Peter Baker
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For possession of a single bullet, Shaykh Farhan al-Sa‘di, an eighty-one-year-old rebel leader, was put to death in 1937. Under the martial law in force at the time, that single bullet was sufficient to merit capital punishment, particularly for an accomplished guerrilla fighter like al-Sa‘di.57 Well over a hundred such sentences of execution were handed down after summary trials by military tribunals, with many more Palestinians executed on the spot by British troops.58 Infuriated by rebels ambushing their convoys and blowing up their trains, the British resorted to tying Palestinian prisoners to the front of armored cars and locomotives to prevent rebel attack, a tactic they had pioneered in a futile effort to crush resistance of the Irish during their war of independence from 1919 to 1921.
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Rashid Khalidi (The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017)
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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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A Remarkable Woman
She is so exquisite
Even without make-up on her face
She is very special
Even if she lets others seem important
She is selfless
Even when the selfish surround her
She offers a lot of love
Even so, she needs it often
She has a big heart
Even though she appears small
She lets others belong
But she longs to be appreciated
She adds value
Despite her own worth being undermined
She is attentive
Nonetheless; no one pays attention to her needs
She is patient
No matter how long it takes, she waits
She is giving
While no one could be willing to give
She is forgiving
Much as the worst was done against her
She is trusting
Albeit her trust was broken a countless times
She is wise
In spite of being treated otherwise by some
She works hard
Notwithstanding that she requires to rest
She is helpful
Yet, there is none to lend her a hand
She makes life seem easy
Whilst going through difficult times herself
She stands by others
Although there is no one to stand by her
She chooses to be peaceful
Against being somehow provoked
She is calm
Undeterred by what is not
She is bold
In defiance of tough battles ahead
She shows bravery
Still in the presence of adversity
She is fearless
Though she may seem helpless
She is spirited
Contrary to attempts to bring her down
She is never destroyed
Irrespective of storms she faces sometimes
She keeps moving forward
Granting the hindrances along the way
She does not look down on others
Regardless of some doing so to her
She recognizes those who shielded her on rainy days
Whenever the sun shines upon her
She keeps on running her race
Because she knows for her, grace is abundant
She puts a smile on, always
Since prayer keeps her in the right place
She is an inspiration
A pioneer of transformation
True leader of economic revolution
How the world aspires for such
A remarkable woman!
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Gift Gugu Mona (From My Mother's Classroom: A Badge of Honour for a Remarkable Woman)
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If Bezos took one leadership principle most to heart—which would also come to define the next half decade at Amazon—it was principal #8, “think big”: Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Leaders create and communicate a bold direction that inspires results. They think differently and look around corners for ways to serve customers. In 2010, Amazon was a successful online retailer, a nascent cloud provider, and a pioneer in digital reading. But Bezos envisioned it as much more. His shareholder letter that year was a paean to the esoteric computer science disciplines of artificial intelligence and machine learning that Amazon was just beginning to explore. It opened by citing a list of impossibly obscure terms such as “naïve Bayesian estimators,” “gossip protocols,” and “data sharding.” Bezos wrote: “Invention is in our DNA and technology is the fundamental tool we wield to evolve and improve every aspect of the experience we provide our customers.
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Brad Stone (Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire)
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The supposedly eyewitness authority of the Pseudo-Turpin finds a parallel in another genre in which vernacular prose was pioneered: that of the historical memoir. There were twelfth-century verse histories narrated by authors who had personally participated in the events they describe, such as the Third Crusade. But the Fourth Crusade of 1202-4 saw a switch to prose. This shameful fiasco, in which the crusaders were induced to turn aside from the Holy Land and attack instead the Christian city of Constantinople, inspired two contrasting accounts. Robert de Clari--ignorant of higher-level strategy, but all agog at the splendours of Constantinople--gives a worm's eye view. Geoffroi de Villehardouin, by contrast, has a top diplomat's suave authority and a leader's eye for the aesthetics of war--the splendid sight of a fleet, or the noble heroism of a ruler. For both authors the medium of prose seems to convey the purported authenticity and transparency of lived experience.
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Sarah Cay Terence Cave Malcolm Bowie
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Fleeing first, in November 1813, Presley represented the greatest blow, for a body servant was a master’s favorite and confidante: no one knew Jones better than Presley did. Presley, however, preferred to serve a Royal Navy captain. In 1815 a visitor to HMS Havannah recognized Presley, whom he praised as “uncommonly likely & trained as a House Servant.” The visitor noted that Presley had renamed himself “Washington,” evidently after the great revolutionary leader who had won liberty and independence for the Americans.3 As a black Washington, Presley returned to free his friends and family left behind. In October 1814, Presley guided a British raiding party to Kinsale, liberating the rest of the slaves and casting Jones out. Presley’s return represents a common pattern in the slave escapes during the war. Runaways tended to bolt in two stages: in the first, a pioneer runaway made initial contact with the British, and then in the second stage, he returned home to liberate kin and friends.
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Alan Taylor (The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832)
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The Saint-Domingue business was a great piece of folly on my part,’ Napoleon later admitted. ‘It was the greatest error that in all my government I ever committed. I ought to have treated with the black leaders, as I would have done the authorities in a province.’71 One lesson he did learn was that blacks could make excellent soldiers, and in November 1809 he set up a unit called the Black Pioneers, made up of men from Egypt and the Caribbean under a black battalion commander, Joseph ‘Hercules’ Domingue, to whom he gave a special award of 3,000 francs. By 1812 Napoleon didn’t believe any colonies could be held in perpetuity, predicting that they would all eventually ‘follow the example of the United States. You grow tired of waiting for orders from five thousand miles away; tired of obeying a government which seems foreign to you because it’s remote, and because of necessity it subordinates you to its own local interest, which it cannot sacrifice to yours.’72 The defeat in Saint-Domingue ended for ever Napoleon’s dreams of a French empire in the West.
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Andrew Roberts (Napoleon: A Life)
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For Kaminer, argument and persuasion could no longer be operative when belief and subjective experience became the baseline proofs that underwrote public and private assertions. No speaker or writer was under any obligation to answer his or her critics because argument and testimony were fatefully blurred. When reasoned impiety was slowly being banished from public dialogue, political responsibility would inevitably wane. In the warm bath of generalized piety and radical plurality, everyone could assert a point of view, an opinion, and different beliefs, but no one was under any obligation to defend them. Whereas cultural studies scholars saw themselves contesting dominant forms of discourse and hegemonic forms of thinking, Kaminer saw them participating in a popular embrace of an irrational Counter-Enlightenment. Like Andrew Ross, Kaminer cited Franz Mesmer as an important eighteenth-century pioneer of twentieth-century alternative healing techniques. Mesmer’s personal charisma and his powers of psychic healing and invocation of “animal magnetism” entranced the European courts of the late eighteenth century. Mesmer performed miracle cures and attracted a devoted, wealthy following. Despite scandals that plagued his European career, the American middle class was eager to embrace his hybrid of folk practices and scientific-sounding proofs. Mesmerism projected an alternative mystical cosmology based upon magnets and invisible flows of energy. Mesmer, who was said to control the invisible magnetic flow of forces that operated upon human and animal bodies, built upon a network of wealthy patrons who were devoted to the powers of a charismatic leader, Mesmer himself. Mesmer’s manipulation of magnets and hands-on healing evoked for the French court the ancient arts of folk healing while it had recourse to ostensibly modern scientific proofs. Historian of the French eighteenth century Robert Darnton insisted that mesmerism could not be dismissed as mere quackery or charlatanism but represented a transitional worldview, one that bridged the Enlightenment and the particular forms of nineteenth-century Romanticism that followed.
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Catherine Liu (American Idyll: Academic Antielitism as Cultural Critique)
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In the 1990s legal scholar and public policy advocate Wendy Kaminer published a brace of books engaged with the New Age cultures of recovery and self-help. She represented an Old Left perspective on new superstition, and although she was of the same generation as the cultural studies scholars, she did exactly what Andrew Ross warned academics and elites against. She criticized the middlebrow, therapeutic culture of self-help for undermining critical thinking in popular discourse. She encouraged the debunking of superstition, deplored public professions of piety. Her books were polemical and public interventions that were addressed to the maligned liberal and more or less thoughtful reader who took an interest in the issues of the day. In some ways, her writing was a popularization of some of psychoanalytic theory scholar, sociologist, and cultural critic Philip Rieff’s and Richard Hofstadter’s critiques of a therapeutic culture of anti-intellectualism.77 She speculated that the decline of secular values in the political sphere was linked to the rise of a culture of recovery and self-help that had come out of the popularization of New Age, countercultural beliefs and practices. In both I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions and Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and the Perils of Piety, Kaminer publicly denounced the decline of secular culture and the rise of a therapeutic culture of testimony and self-victimization that brooked no dissent while demanding unprecedented leaps of faith from its adherents.78 Kaminer’s work combined a belief in Habermasian rational communication with an uncompromising skepticism about the ubiquity of piety that for her was shared by both conservatives and liberals. For Kaminer, argument and persuasion could no longer be operative when belief and subjective experience became the baseline proofs that underwrote public and private assertions. No speaker or writer was under any obligation to answer his or her critics because argument and testimony were fatefully blurred. When reasoned impiety was slowly being banished from public dialogue, political responsibility would inevitably wane. In the warm bath of generalized piety and radical plurality, everyone could assert a point of view, an opinion, and different beliefs, but no one was under any obligation to defend them. Whereas cultural studies scholars saw themselves contesting dominant forms of discourse and hegemonic forms of thinking, Kaminer saw them participating in a popular embrace of an irrational Counter-Enlightenment. Like Andrew Ross, Kaminer cited Franz Mesmer as an important eighteenth-century pioneer of twentieth-century alternative healing techniques. Mesmer’s personal charisma and his powers of psychic healing and invocation of “animal magnetism” entranced the European courts of the late eighteenth century. Mesmer performed miracle cures and attracted a devoted, wealthy following. Despite scandals that plagued his European career, the American middle class was eager to embrace his hybrid of folk practices and scientific-sounding proofs. Mesmerism projected an alternative mystical cosmology based upon magnets and invisible flows of energy. Mesmer, who was said to control the invisible magnetic flow of forces that operated upon human and animal bodies, built upon a network of wealthy patrons who were devoted to the powers of a charismatic leader, Mesmer himself. Mesmer’s manipulation of magnets and hands-on healing evoked for the French court the ancient arts of folk healing while it had recourse to ostensibly modern scientific proofs. Historian of the French eighteenth century Robert Darnton insisted that mesmerism could not be dismissed as mere quackery or charlatanism but represented a transitional worldview, one that bridged the Enlightenment and the particular forms of nineteenth-century Romanticism that followed.
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Catherine Liu (American Idyll: Academic Antielitism as Cultural Critique)
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Zion National Park is a place where history deepens one's appreciation for beauty of the canyon. Visitors marvel at the pioneering spirit of those who created an oasis in the arid desert. In many languages, tourists note their fascination with the engineering of the tunnel and wonder how trails to remote reaches of the park were constructed. Even when water was scarce and prospects were dim. early Mormon pioneers remained vigilant in their quest to settle at the mouth of Zion Canyon because their leader Brigham Young, told them that the time would come when 'Hundreds of thousands will pass through your canyon and they will need you.' The majestic wonders of Zion existed long before humans ever set foot in the canyon, yet it was only through ingenuity and foresight of the area's early settlers that the canyon was opened to the world.
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Tiffany Taylor (Zion National Park (Images of America: Utah))
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Leadership does not particularly belong to men. History has shown, that most of our leaders, and pioneers are women.
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Petra Hermans
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In a 5 November leader article the West African Pilot vented its anger at Churchill’s words in the Commons: ‘That a British prime Minister could utter such a statement during an unparalleled destructive war which has cost Colonial peoples their material resources and manpower is, indeed, a revelation. What, now, must we expect our fate to be after the war?’120 Nnamdi ‘Zik’ Azikiwe, the editor of this pioneering Nigerian nationalist newspaper, also cabled Churchill requesting clarification of the discrepancy between Attlee’s statement and Churchill’s. Did the Charter apply to West Africa or not? Churchill gave instructions for a reply, which, echoing his Commons statement, claimed that the government’s Empire policy was ‘already entirely in harmony with the high conceptions of freedom and justice which inspired the joint declaration [i.e. the Atlantic Charter]’. Therefore, no fresh statement of policy on Africa was required.121 But his efforts were to no avail. In 1943 Zik travelled with a delegation to Britain and used the Charter as the basis for a demand for a timescale for complete independence.
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Richard Toye (Churchill's Empire: The World that Made Him and the World He Made)
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Half way through life a thoughtful person must undertake an honest assessment of their life. I am now fifty years old. I am rapidly turning into a dry stalk, my breath is sour, and I am beginning to smell of the grave. I melancholy project that in all probability I have now existed about half the period of time that I shall remain in this sublunary world. Resembling the trajectory of other men reaching middle age, my upward ascent in life crested and now I am commencing the meteoric downhill descent. Distinct from Americas’ pioneers and other luminaries whom played an important role in expanding our knowledge and deepened our appreciation of nature, I have done nothing to advance the human condition. I have not mapped any new territory, contributed to the arts or sciences, or expanded our comprehension of mathematics or the natural sciences: astronomy, biology, chemistry, the Earth sciences, and physics. I did not contribute to medicine, cognitive science, behavioral science, social science, or the humanities. Unlike revered social leaders whom advocated peaceful relations with all people, I remained mute while domestic and international conflicts sundered communities. I created no historical existence; I exist only as an introspective being. I have not added one iota to the bank of knowledge of succeeding generations. I have not added any quarter of happiness to other people. My contribution to the human race is nil. In all probability, I will flame out without leaving a lasting trace of my mundane personal existence.
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Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
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When leaders don't find the way, find new leaders.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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Manmohan Singh’s lost opportunity The anti-corruption agitations of 2011 provided a wonderful opportunity for the prime minister and his government to start the process of purging the system of corruption and retrieving black money illegally stashed away in foreign banks. The government had two options to get our money back. The first, to behave like a responsible, honourable and strong nation and demonstrate political will to fight corruption using the ample machinery available through international and bilateral legal instruments, the Tax Information Exchange Treaties (TIEAs), Double Taxation Avoidance Agreements (DTAAs) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) automatic exchange route. The Swiss have volunteered cooperation; and India can follow the example of the US and UK, and get India’s stolen money back to the country. Or, the government can take the other option and behave like a banana republic and a failed state, plunder capital from their own country through a UPA-sponsored version of imperialism, perpetuate poverty and backwardness by denying the people of this country their rightful development dividend while repeatedly rewarding and incentivizing the looters with amnesty schemes. Mr Singh’s government has continuously concealed information on black money by fooling the people of our country, shielding the corrupt and guilty who have illegal bank accounts in foreign banks, and by creating obstacles for any progress in the matter instead of taking proactive measures to obtain the information from the foreign governments concerned. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh could have chosen the former option and gone down in history as a great patriot and leader of our country, a pioneer against corruption. But sadly, he has lost the opportunity and chosen such, that history will remember him as having presided over the greatest frauds practised on this poor and gullible nation.
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Ram Jethmalani (RAM JETHMALANI MAVERICK UNCHANGED, UNREPENTANT)
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I immediately packed up Bindi and went to catch the next plane home. The family was in free fall. Steve was in shock, and Bob was even worse off. Lyn had always acted as the matriarch, the one who kept everything together. She was such a strong figure, a leader. Her death didn’t seem real.
I sat on that plane and looked down at Bindi. Life is changed forever now, I thought. As we arrived home, I didn’t know what to expect. I had never dealt with grief like this before. Lyn was only in her fifties, and it seemed cruel to have her life cut short, as she was on the brink of a dream she had held in her heart forever. These were going to be her golden years. She and Bob could embark on the life they had worked so hard to achieve. They would be together, near their family, where they could take care of the land and enjoy the wildlife they loved.
I couldn’t imagine what Steve, his dad, and his sisters were going through. My heart was broken. Bindi’s gran was gone just when they had most looked forward to spending time together. The aftermath of Lyn’s death was every bit as awful as I could have imagined. Steve was absolutely inconsolable, and Bob was very obviously unable to cope. Joy and Mandy were trying to keep things together, but they were distraught and heartbroken. Everyone at the zoo was somber. I felt I needed to do something, yet I felt helpless, sad, and lost.
Steve’s younger sister Mandy performed the mournful task of sifting through the smashed items from the truck. One of the objects Lyn had packed was Bob’s teapot. There was nothing Bob enjoyed more than a cup of tea. As Mandy went to wash out the teapot, she noticed movement. Inside was Sharon, the bird-eating spider, the sole survivor of the accident. Although her tank had been smashed to bits, she had managed to crawl into the teapot to hide.
After the funeral, time appeared to slow down and then stop entirely. Steve talked about moving out to Ironback Station. He couldn’t seem to order his thoughts. He no longer saw a reason for going on with all the projects on which we had worked so hard. Bindi was upset but didn’t have the understanding to know why. She was too young to get her head around what had happened. She simply cried when she saw her daddy crying.
It would be a long time before life returned to anything like normalcy. Lyn’s death was something that Steve would never truly overcome. His connection with his mum, like that of so many mothers and sons, was unusually close. Lyn Irwin was a pioneer in wildlife rehabilitation work. She had given her son a great legacy, and eventually that gift would win out over death. But in the wake of her accident, all we could see was loss.
Steve headed out into the bush alone, with just Sui and his swag. He reverted to his youth, to his solitary formative years. But grief trailed him. My heart broke for my husband. I was not sure he would ever find his way back.
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Terri Irwin (Steve & Me)
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By the time the settlers and pioneers of America reached the West Coast, they had gone through many dramatic landscapes, but nothing quite prepared them for the size of the California redwoods. The giant trees led to many disputes, including the very name that should be applied to them. In 1853, British botanists proposed to name the trees Wellingtonia gigantea and called them “Wellingtonias” in honor of the Duke of Wellington, who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. They justified the name on the grounds that the greatest tree in the world should bear the name of the greatest general in the world. Fortunately, the Americans resisted this choice and supported instead a native American name. Conservationists felt that so great a tree should not be named for a military general. They proposed instead the name Sequoia sempervirens, “evergreen Sequoia,” in honor of the man who invented a way of writing the Cherokee language and worked hard to promote literacy among his people. Both the coastal redwoods and the giant redwoods of the Sierra Nevada bear the genus name Sequoia, in honor of one of the greatest Indian intellectuals and leaders of the nineteenth century.
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Jack Weatherford (Native Roots: How the Indians Enriched America)
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Instead, finding a faith should help you to be freer, more full of life, more filled with joy, peace and love than you would ever imagine. And those qualities, in abundance, will only make you stronger and more capable of living a wild and adventurous life.
And what is even cooler is that Jesus turns out to be so much more than just a guide or a pointer of the way. He is also a backbone, a companion and a friend. When I look at my own heroes, I realize there aren’t many leaders who haven’t at some time quietly bent their knee and looked upwards for strength, resolve and peace.
Great men and women know their own frailty and have the humility to accept help to empower them to greatness. Be among their number.
Pioneers always take bold steps to explore new territory - you never know what you might find.
By the way, it is also good to know that faith isn’t one-sided. As Christ said: ‘I have come to seek and save.’
He is out looking for us, too.
So be brave and let Him do his side of the bargain. I call it the quest to be found.
You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
¹ I really recommend the book
The Jesus I Never Knew
by Philip Yancey to help get a better picture of this guy who hit Earth promising life in abundance. I mean, what the heck is that all about?!
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Bear Grylls (A Survival Guide for Life: How to Achieve Your Goals, Thrive in Adversity, and Grow in Character)
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Despite skyrocketing overdose death rates, none of the country’s leading advocates of harm reduction are rethinking their advocacy of decriminalization and harm reduction. Instead they focus on things like promoting Narcan. “It’s really about getting emergency responders to carry [naloxone/Narcan],” said Ethan. “The guy who was a real pioneer in all of this was a guy named Dan Bigg out of Chicago. He really took this issue by the horns in the early 2000s.” What happened to him? “He himself died of an overdose a few years ago,” said Ethan. Bigg’s death in 2018 attracted national media attention. “The substances found in his body included heroin, two benzodiazepines . . . methadone, fentanyl, and acetyl fentanyl,” wrote a journalist for Vice. “The cause of Bigg’s death, however, in no way repudiates the cause to which he devoted his life.”24 Leaders of the Harm Reduction Coalition agreed. “We can’t end overdoses until we end poverty,” said Kristen Marshall, “until we end racism, and until we end homelessness.
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Michael Shellenberger (San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities)
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Life is not a spectator sport. Build a career as a pioneer and inspirational force of good leading the way for others to follow through your passion, community work and career.
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Germany Kent
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When the need for Christian character is most acute, we realize that this is just what Evangelicalism has failed to develop. We have been closeted in ghettos, instead of pioneering ways of sacrificial living in the outside world (except perhaps through missionary activity to Africa or wherever!). Within an increasingly soft culture, church leaders have accommodated rather than challenged our desire for comfort. We have become as spineless as the rest.
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Doug Serven (Firstfruits of a New Creation: Essays in Honor of Jerram Barrs)
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But the first-mover advantage is greatly overstated. In a watershed study, researchers compared the fates of “pioneer” companies that had been the first to exploit a market and “settlers” that had followed the pioneers into the market. Drawing on data from five hundred brands in fifty product categories, they found that almost half of pioneers failed, compared to 8 percent of settlers. The surviving pioneers took 10 percent of their market, on average, compared to 28 percent for settlers. Getting into the market early was indeed important—“early market leaders have much greater long-term success,” the researchers noted—but those “early” market leaders “enter an average of 13 years after pioneers.”7 The consensus of researchers today is that, yes, being first to market can confer advantages in certain specific circumstances, but it comes at the terrible cost of an inability to learn from the experience of others.
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Bent Flyvbjerg (How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors Behind Every Successful Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration)
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Drawing on data from five hundred brands in fifty product categories, they found that almost half of pioneers failed, compared to 8 percent of settlers. The surviving pioneers took 10 percent of their market, on average, compared to 28 percent for settlers. Getting into the market early was indeed important—“early market leaders have much greater long-term success,” the researchers noted—but those “early” market leaders “enter an average of 13 years after pioneers.
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Bent Flyvbjerg (How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors Behind Every Successful Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration)
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It seems fitting, however, that the single Western film which most unambiguously endorses the agrarian ideal, The Covered Wagon, should contain one of the cinema screen's most graphic attacks on Industrialism. The film's intertitles inform viewers that one of the most formidable hazards facing the character of Wingate (Charles Stanton Ogle), the leader of the wagon train, is greed arising from the California gold strike of 1849. Several pioneers opt to dig gold in California rather than plow land in Oregon. In a visual composition symbollically resonant with the importance and irrevocability of that choice, the wagon train divides, one part going north and the other south, while visible in the foreground lie the discarded plows of those who have foresaken the agrarian ideal. These shots from a silent Western summarise a major split in the American psyche.
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Colin McArthur (Cinema, Culture, Scotland: Selected Essays)
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Dare to be different. Be a pioneer. Be a leader. Be the kind of woman who in the face of adversity will continue to embrace life and walk fearlessly toward the challenge. – Oprah Winfrey
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John Davis (Oprah Winfrey: 50 Best Quotes, Teachings And Secrets To Success By Oprah Winfrey (Inspirational Motivation, Happiness, Oprah Winfrey Book))
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Our deeply troubled world can be reinvented through biomimicry. Nature's trillions of solutions throw open the door to far-reaching opportunities for building a better world; rescuing our ailing environment and atmosphere; and giving rise to a powerful, new, sustainable economy. To quote rock musician Tom Petty, "The future ain't what it used to be." No matter who you are, you can be a pioneer and leader in creating a new golden age on earth. A sweet twenty-first century and a third millennium are possible.
Imagine.
It's your life, your world, your opportunity, and your responsibility.
The possibilities are endless.
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Jay Harman (The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation)
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The strength of the culture, and not its size or resources, determines an organization’s ability to adapt to the times, overcome adversity and pioneer new innovations.
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Simon Sinek (Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don't)
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In the following pages, I attempt to show several things: (1) that liberal Protestant denominations were the pioneers of evangelical feminism, and that evangelical feminists today have adopted many of the arguments earlier used by theological liberals to advocate the ordination of women and to reject male headship in marriage (2) that many prominent evangelical feminist writers today advocate positions that deny or undermine the authority of Scripture, and many other egalitarian leaders endorse their books and take no public stance against those who deny the authority of Scripture (3) that recent trends now show that evangelical feminists are heading toward the denial of anything uniquely masculine, and some already endorse calling God “our Mother in heaven” (4) that the history of others who have adopted these positions shows that the next step is the endorsement of the moral legitimacy of homosexuality (5) that the common thread running through all of these trends is a rejection of the effective authority of Scripture in people’s lives, and that this is the bedrock principle of theological liberalism
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Wayne Grudem (Evangelical Feminism: A New Path to Liberalism?)
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Dr. Margaret Naeser and colleagues from Harvard, MIT, and Boston University, including Harvard professor Michael Hamblin, a world leader in understanding how light therapy works at the cellular level. Hamblin, at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Wellman Center for Photomedicine, specializes in the use of light to activate the immune system in treating cancer and cardiac disease; he was now branching out into its use for brain injuries. Building on lab work that applied laser therapy to the top of the head (transcranial laser therapy), the Boston group had studied its use in traumatic brain injury and found laser treatment helpful. Naeser, a research professor at the Boston University School of Medicine, had done studies using lasers for stroke and paralysis and was one of several pioneers using “laser acupuncture” by placing light on acupuncture points.
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Norman Doidge (The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity)
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Each person is ignited by different things based on their personal calling and gifting. Pastoral people are more community minded. Administrative or managerial people are more corporation minded. Visionary leaders and pioneers are more cause minded. Together, let’s seek to enhance our sense of community, excel in our corporation and run passionately towards the cause given to us by Jesus Christ.
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Mark Conner (Transforming Your Church: Seven Strategic Shifts to Help You Successfully Navigate the 21st Century)
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Become a thought leader by taking an idea, belief, or process and turning it inside-out and upside-down. Bust beyond the box and shatter a few ceilings to go where no one has gone before. Make your mark by becoming a pioneer in your pursuits.
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Susan C. Young (The Art of Preparation: 8 Ways to Plan with Purpose & Intention for Positive Impact (The Art of First Impressions for Positive Impact, #2))
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public statements condemning segregation, sharply worded telegrams to Washington, and meetings with White House officials—were demonstrably ineffectual. New and more dramatic measures were in order. Mass action, Randolph reasoned, would be required, and he proposed a protest of 10,000 black people marching down Pennsylvania Avenue to demand an end to segregation in the armed forces and exclusion from jobs in the defense industry. Drawing on community organizing and protest networks developed during the 1920s and 1930s, this would be a broad, national mobilization of African Americans. The substance of their demand would be full and equal participation in the national defense effort, and the form of the demand would be a mass mobilization designed to compel the federal government to action. The MOWM, in effect, pioneered the type of protest politics that was used to considerable effect during the civil rights movement to push the federal government to enforce or enact African American citizenship rights. Randolph announced the March on Washington proposal in a January 1941 statement to the press. He declared that “power and pressure do not reside in the few, and intelligentsia, they lie in and flow from the masses.… Power is the active principle of only the organized masses, the masses united for a definitive purpose.” 19 Two months later Randolph issued the official call for the march, set for July 1, 1941. Drawing on his standing as a prominent black leader, and especially as the head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), Randolph made his case that the time was right. “In this period of power politics, nothing counts but pressure, more pressure, and still more pressure,” he wrote in the call to march. “To this end we propose that 10,000 Negroes MARCH ON WASHINGTON FOR JOBS IN NATIONAL DEFENSE AND EQUAL INTEGRATION IN THE FIGHTING FORCES.” 20 To coordinate this massive effort, organizers established a March on Washington Committee, headed by Randolph, along with a sponsoring committee and regional committees in cities across the country. Galvanized by a rising desire for action within black communities, the idea found enthusiastic approval in the black press and eventually won the endorsement of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Urban League, and other elements of black leadership. 21 By the end of May, Randolph estimated that 100,000 black Americans would march. A national grassroots movement was afoot, and Randolph grew even more confident in his vision for the demonstration. “Let the Negro masses march!” he declared. “Let the Negro masses speak!” 22
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Stephen Ward (In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs (Justice, Power, and Politics))
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The quality of students wasn’t an issue; Tsinghua and nearby Peking University attracted the highest-scoring students from each year’s national examinations. But the SEM’s curriculum and teaching methods were dated, and new faculty members were needed. To be a world-class school required world-class professors, but many instructors, holdovers from a bygone era, knew little about markets or modern business practices. The school’s teaching was largely confined to economic theory, which wasn’t very practical. China needed corporate leaders, not Marxist theoreticians, and Tsinghua’s curriculum placed too little emphasis on such critical areas as finance, marketing, strategy, and organization. The way I see it, a business education should be as much vocational as academic. Teaching business is like teaching medicine: theory is important, but hands-on practice is essential. Medical students learn from cadavers and hospital rounds; business students learn from case studies—a method pioneered more than a century ago by Harvard Business School that engages students in analyzing complex real-life dilemmas faced by actual companies and executives. Tsinghua’s method of instruction, like too much of China’s educational system, relied on rote learning—lectures, memorization, and written tests—and did not foster innovative, interactive approaches to problem solving. Students needed to know how to work as part of a team—a critical lesson in China, where getting people to work collaboratively can be difficult. At Harvard Business School we weren’t told the “right” or “wrong” answers but were encouraged to think for ourselves and defend our ideas before our peers and our at-times-intimidating professors. This helped hone my analytical skills and confidence, and I believed a similar approach would help Chinese students.
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Anonymous
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Between 1929 and 1930, one-third of the hard-pressed private agencies went under, unable to raise the money they needed. As Hastings Hart, a pioneering child-welfare leader, pointed out, it was time for government to step in with far more than it had ever done to deal with this unprecedented crisis. In September 1931, with Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt leading the way, the New York State Legislature finally passed the first law giving relief to the unemployed. By the end of December 1933, what was called Home Relief had started all over New York City. This was the beginning of the change from the dominance of private philanthropy to the dominance of public welfare, and the recognition that citizens had a right to expect to be taken care of. But getting help wasn’t made easy or pleasant. William Matthews, head of the Emergency Work Bureau in New York City, protested, “The whole damn theory of the thing is to make relief giving so unpleasant, so disagreeable, in fact so insulting to decent people that they stay away from the places where it is given.” As William Bremer detailed in his book Depression Winters, recipients of private and public charity were subject to scrutiny, told what they could and could not buy, and even accompanied by “voluntary shoppers” who supervised their purchases. Buying cigarettes, beer, candy, pies, and cakes was forbidden. And no cash changed hands. Recipients were given bags of coal and clothing, food tickets, and rent vouchers, and storekeepers were forbidden to give them change in cash.
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Geraldine Youcha (Minding the Children: Child Care in America from Colonial Times to the Present)
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As Jack Welch, the famous former CEO of General Electric, once said, “Before you become a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.
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Daniel Sinclair (A Vision of the Possible: Pioneer Church Planting in Teams)
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Marlan Rico Lee
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PIONEERS
People who become leaders first learn what it means to be able to follow. They also are idealist in the fact that they must think outside of the norm. You don't become original by following everyone else but you get your idea of how people feel when you need them to adhere to your ideas. First In order to have an original idea you use what you have learned but take old ideas and put a dynamic twist to it recreating the idea. You must think the idea first before it can be manifested. But know that as long as an idea stays in your mind it really means nothing to the world and it stays only a figment of your imagination.
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Marlan Rico Lee
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Many church-planting pioneers have opted to start a church and create their own problems rather than inherit problems like the ones facing those pastors. Here’s the rub. In an attempt to create structures that allow greater leadership freedom (which is a good thing), many have opted for structures that include little formal accountability (which is a bad thing). Instead of a church model where the leader answers to everyone, some have created a leadership model where they answer to no one. It’s a recipe for dysfunction and disaster when a leader is organizationally and relationally isolated. My observation is that a leader who is isolated organizationally is twice as isolated relationally.
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Lance Witt (Replenish: Leading from a Healthy Soul)
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We human pioneers of the “great camping trip,” as George Attla would dub it, will remain incorporated, as it were, in the fabric that weaves our history. But what of the four hundred pioneer dogs? Those wonders of God’s creation, who weathered Arctic gales, slept in snowbanks, suffered exhaustion, sore, raw feet, and, to some degree, human ignorance, and neglect. What of them? Leaders Genghis, Kiana, and Sonny. Others, who strained in wheel, team, and swing positions, and at times, in lead as well, were Kuchik, Koyuk, Snippy, Eska, Shiak, Flame, Bandit, Casper, and Crazy. Names listed on a sheet of paper seem such a hollow tribute to twelve of a person’s most loyal, tested friends. And hollow that tribute would be, if all twelve of them were not imprinted indelibly in my heart. Those twelve devoted, steadfast trail companions bestowed upon me the one true adventure of my life. In so doing, they became the pathfinders for all ensuing generations of endurance race dogs. Genghis, Kiana, Sonny, Kuchik, Koyuk, Snippy, Eska, Shiak, Flame, Bandit, Casper, and Crazy—a renewed and heartfelt salute.
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Dan Seavey (The First Great Race: Alaska's 1973 Iditarod)
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In many cases, unproven ideas carry too much risk and uncertainty. Managers know that if they bet on a bad idea, it might be a career-limiting move, but if they pass on a good idea, it’s unlikely anyone will ever find out. And even if managers are supportive of an idea, if they perceive leaders above them as opposed to it, they tend to see it as a losing proposition. All it takes is one gatekeeper to close off a new frontier. That kind of hierarchy is set up to reject ideas with hidden potential. You can see it clearly in the tech world. Xerox programmers pioneered the personal computer but struggled to get managers to commercialize it. An engineer at Kodak invented the first digital camera but couldn’t persuade management to prioritize it.
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Adam M. Grant (Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things)
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Great creative ideas and pioneering intentions come to humanity not because we merely want them, but because we need them. They come first to the people who can access them because of high aspirations to help serve humanity and add more meaning to the world.
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Master Del Pe (8 Types of Leaders: Every Leader Should Know)
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Cloudex healthcare private limited Started in 2008 and incorporated as a limited company in 2012, Cloudex today is one of the industry leaders, by initiating pioneering efforts to establish teleradiology in India. and one of the award-winning startups from Kerala State.
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Cloudex Radiology
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IMG Gold buying company in Calicut are the one of the market leaders and pioneers with the idea of promoting jewellery for immediate cash, in a cosy expert up market environment. IMG gold buyers identified because of the reliable and first-rate place to sell your gold in Calicut. IMG gold buyers is the best Gold buying company in Calicut and they guarantee you the best value for your gold. The quickest, safest, and easiest way to sell gold.
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img gold buyers
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IMG Gold buyers in Calicut are the one of the market leaders and pioneers with the idea of promoting jewellery for immediate cash, in a cosy expert up market environment. IMG gold buyers identified because of the reliable and first-rate place to sell your gold in Calicut. IMG gold buyers is the best gold buyers in Calicut and they guarantee you the best value for your gold. The quickest, safest, and easiest way to sell gold.
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img gold buyers
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IMG gold buyers in Hyderabad are the one of the best market leaders and pioneers with the idea of promoting jewellery for immediate cash, in a cosy expert up market environment. IMG gold buyers identified because of the reliable and first-rate place to sell your gold in Hyderabad. IMG gold buyers is the best gold buyers in Hyderabad and they guarantee you the best value for your gold. The quickest, safest, and easiest way to sell gold.
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img gold buyers
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IMG gold buyers are the Sell Gold for Cash in Hyderabad are the one of the best market leaders and pioneers with the idea of promoting jewellery for immediate cash, in a cosy expert up market environment. IMG gold buyers identified because of the reliable and first-rate place to sell your gold in Hyderabad. IMG gold buyers is the best gold buyers in Hyderabad and they guarantee you the best value for your gold. The quickest, safest, and easiest way to sell gold.
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img gold buyers
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The guy who was a real pioneer in all of this was a guy named Dan Bigg out of Chicago. He really took this issue by the horns in the early 2000s.” What happened to him? “He himself died of an overdose a few years ago,” said Ethan. Bigg’s death in 2018 attracted national media attention. “The substances found in his body included heroin, two benzodiazepines . . . methadone, fentanyl, and acetyl fentanyl,” wrote a journalist for Vice. “The cause of Bigg’s death, however, in no way repudiates the cause to which he devoted his life.”24 Leaders of the Harm Reduction Coalition agreed. “We can’t end overdoses until we end poverty,” said Kristen Marshall, “until we end racism, and until we end homelessness.”25 For several years in the early 2010s, a UCLA sociologist named Neil Gong studied two very different drug treatment programs in larger Los Angeles.
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Michael Shellenberger (San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities)
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Fall River, an old mill town fifty miles south of Boston. Median household income in that city is $33,000, among the lowest in the state; unemployment is among the highest, 15 percent in March 2014, nearly five years after the recession ended. Twenty-three percent of Fall River’s inhabitants live in poverty. The city lost its many fabric-making concerns years ago and with them it lost its reason for being. People have been deserting the place for decades.14 Many of the empty factories in which their ancestors worked are still standing, however. Solid nineteenth-century structures of granite or brick, these huge boxes dominate the city visually—there always seems to be one or two of them in the vista, contrasting painfully with whatever colorful plastic fast-food joint has been slapped up next door. Most of these old factories are boarded up, unmistakable emblems of hopelessness right up to the roof. But the ones that have been successfully repurposed are in some ways even worse, filled as they often are with enterprises offering cheap suits or help with drug addiction. A clinic in the hulk of one abandoned mill has a sign on the window reading, simply, “Cancer & Blood.” The effect of all this is to remind you with every prospect that this is a place and a way of life from which the politicians have withdrawn their blessing. Like so many other American scenes, this one is the product of decades of deindustrialization, engineered by Republicans and rationalized by Democrats. Fifty miles away, Boston is a roaring success, but the doctrine of prosperity that you see on every corner in Boston also serves to explain away the failure you see on every corner in Fall River. This is a place where affluence never returns—not because affluence for Fall River is impossible or unimaginable, but because our country’s leaders have blandly accepted a social order that constantly bids down the wages of people like these while bidding up the rewards for innovators, creatives, and professionals. Even the city’s one real hope for new employment opportunities—an Amazon warehouse that is in the planning stages—will serve to lock in this relationship. If all goes according to plan, and if Amazon sticks to the practices it has pioneered elsewhere, people from Fall River will one day get to do exhausting work with few benefits while being electronically monitored for efficiency, in order to save the affluent customers of nearby Boston a few pennies when they buy books or electronics.15
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Thomas Frank (Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?)
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As leaders you can never tell people that they are empowered, all you can do is to create the environment and give people the skills and tools to enable them to grow. You feel valued for the part that you play and from that you breed loyalty. Loyalty not only to the team, the leadership, but to the organisation as a whole.
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Mandy Hickson (An Officer, Not a Gentleman: The Inspirational Journey of a Pioneering Female Fighter Pilot)
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A Special Prayer For Mothers
To all the Mothers
Who stand for what is right
They work so hard
Never let the weather dictate
How they love their children
Always there whenever needed
Do what is best for loved ones
Yes, they guide leaders on how to reign
Cry out to God to save future generations
As they plead for true liberation
A reliable source of inspiration
Not ordinary humans
But special women
Whom we call Moms
Fighters of hunger
Seekers of wellbeing
Promoters of longevity
Providers of stability
Pioneers of societies
Pillars of many countries
Teachers of morals and values
We pray for their blessings
And breakthroughs in all they do!
This is our special prayer for Mothers
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Gift Gugu Mona (From My Mother's Classroom: A Badge of Honour for a Remarkable Woman)
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Leaders in the age of superintelligence must not only pioneer the frontiers of technology but also bear the weight of guiding humanity through uncharted territory, ensuring that wisdom prevails in harnessing AI's immense power for the greater good.
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Farshad Asl
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The earliest attempt to form an independent Zen group in Japan seems to have been led by Nōnin, who taught his form of Zen at Sanbōji (a Tendai temple in Settsu) during the latter part of the twelfth century. Because Nōnin's following, which styled itself the Darumashū (after Daruma, i.e., Bodhidharma, the semilegendary founder of the Chinese Ch'an school), failed to secure a permanent institutional base, scholars had not fully realized Nōnin's importance until recently. As early as 1272, however, less than eighty years after Nōnin's death, Nichiren had correctly identified Nōnin as the pioneer leader of the new Zen groups. Eisai, a contemporary of Nōnin, also founded several new centers for Zen practice, the most important of which was Kenninji in Kyoto. In contrast to Nōnin, who had never left Japan, Eisai had the benefit of two extended trips to China during which he could observe Chinese Ch'an (Jpn. Zen) teachers first hand. The third important early Zen leader in Japan was Dōgen, the founder of Japan's Sōtō school. Dōgen had entered Eisai's Kenninji in 1217 and, like Eisai, also traveled to China for firsthand study. Unlike Eisai (or Nōnin), after his return to Japan Dōgen attempted to establish the monastic structures he found in China. Dōgen's monasteries, Kōshōji (Dōgen's residence during 1230–1243) and Eiheiji (1244–1253), were the first in Japan to include a monks' hall (sōdō) within which Zen monks lived and meditated according to Chinese-style monastic regulations.
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William M. Bodiford (Sōtō Zen in Medieval Japan (Kuroda Studies in East Asian Buddhism, 8))
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As much as the Christian right of the twenty-first century is now fixated on abortion and sexual politics, the backlash against the efforts of the federal government to desegregate tax-exempt private schools is embedded in the movement’s DNA. The white evangelical attraction to Trump was not in spite of his extended birther crusade against Barack Obama, his racist outbursts in tweets and rallies, and his administration’s plans to eviscerate federal protection of racial minorities from discrimination in housing and education by eliminating their ability to show discrimination based on the disparate impact of a policy, as opposed to having to prove discriminatory intent. The Christian right movement was born out of grievance against civil rights gains for blacks, and a backlash against the government’s efforts to ensure those gains could endure. When Trump offers paeans to “religious freedom”—the very clarion call of the Bob Jones University defenders—or sloganeers “Make America Great Again,” he is sending a message that rings true for a movement driven by the rhetoric and organizing pioneered by Weyrich and Billings. Trump’s white evangelical admirers do not just see a leader who is making it safe to say Merry Christmas again, or holding the IRS back from penalizing pastors who endorse him from the pulpit. In Trump’s words and deeds, they see an idealized white Christian America before civil rights for people of color—and a meddling government—ruined it.
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Sarah Posner (Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump)
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To make any vision a reality, a mission leader needs the confidence in herself to persist regardless of the naysayers. She needs the will to persevere when obstacles seem insurmountable.
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Suzanne F. Stevens (Make your contribution count for you, me , we: An evolutionary journey inspired by the wisdom of pioneering African women)
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A mission leader recognizes that while she can progress independently, momentum only occurs when people align with, act on, and amplify a message. The amplification makes a messenger’s mission multiply and eventually creates a movement worth following.
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Suzanne F. Stevens (Make your contribution count for you, me , we: An evolutionary journey inspired by the wisdom of pioneering African women)
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A mission leader listens, and as a consequence, is heard. She has the power to mobilize people who are engaged or to bring those who hide in dark corners into the light.
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Suzanne F. Stevens (Make your contribution count for you, me , we: An evolutionary journey inspired by the wisdom of pioneering African women)
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Salesforce.com, a $1 billion software firm that has pioneered software as a service, has been making the shift from the logic of addition to the logic of multiplication. They enjoyed a decade of outstanding growth using the old idea of “throwing resources at a problem.” They addressed new customers and new demands by hiring the best technical and business talent available and deploying them on the challenges. However, a strained market environment created a new imperative for the company’s leadership: get more productivity from their currently available resources. They could no longer operate on outdated notions of resource utilization. They started developing leaders who could multiply the intelligence and capability of the people around them and increase the brainpower of the organization to meet their growth demands.
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Liz Wiseman (Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter)
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of the USA. When the Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound, one of the pioneering prepaid group health plans, was organized in the late 1930s, its founders included activists in trade unions and producer co-ops. Because health co-ops were fiercely opposed by organized medicine, their leaders and members necessarily had to become active in progressive politics.
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Robert Kuttner (Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism?)
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When I asked Big Bruno to describe the characteristics of his job supporting football coaches he chose the words ‘visionary, pioneering, challenging, curious, resilient’. These all sound like textbook qualities of a leader, ‘That’s because I am a leader. A leader of thought and ideas,
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Richard Hytner (Consiglieri - Leading from the Shadows: Why Coming Top Is Sometimes Second Best)
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Leading MSO in India
Fastway group is pioneer in digital entertainment services and dominant market leader in this space. Fastway has an internet arm Netplus Broadband which is 100% subsidiary of Fastway group and fastest growing ISP in the region providing Next-Gen Services.
Netplus Services Includes:
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High-speed broadband services.
Fastest growing broadband service provider with 3 lac customers and 300+ towns launched.
1st service provider to launch 1000 Gig plan and smart telephony services in the region.
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Leading 2000+ Enterprise customers.
We are recognized organization directly involved in providing Wi-Fi solution under govt. Smart city projects.
Netplus Core Strengths:
Next-Gen Services including Broadband , IPTV | OTT & Voice.
Truly unlimited plans.
Affordable & economical pricing.
Service reach – 14K+ channel partners.
Technology:
Fiber to the home – (FTTH)
FTTH is the installation and use of optical fiber from a central point directly to individual residences, apartment buildings to provide unprecedented high-speed Internet access. FTTH increases the connection speeds available to computer users. FTTH promises speeds up to 1000 Mbps and can deliver a multitude of digital information -- video, data, more efficiently.
Fixed Line Services – Smart Telephony
Netplus Next Gen “Smart Telephony Services” works over broadband Network and will offer Unlimited local & STD Calling. This service offers customers HD quality voice calls along with faster call set up time and host of new features.USP of this service is that calls can be received both from Fixed line and Mobile.Including Freedom of Movement within WIFY.
IPTV & OTT Services
The Only organization giving Quad Play experience to users across North India. IPTV stage gives quick access to many channels, combined with alternatives and imaginative administrations, for example, Video-on-Demand and Catch Up TV for watchers who need to watch a program post-communicate. One of the areas where Netplus is going to emphasize on with its new offerings is the use of Smart Home Solutions. Using the FTTH services, users will be able to take hold of their Surveillance Cameras, smart connected Speakers, IP TV, Smart Plugs, Alarms , Video Doorbells and more.
5th floor OPP GURDEV HOSPITAL THE GRAND MALL H BLOCK Ludhiana 141012
Telephone: +91-70875-70875
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Netplus Broadband
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Role Modeling and Meaningful Mentors Given the importance of socialization in leadership education and the power of analogue to organize people's approaches, one important facet of training the next generation of impact investors is to celebrate role models. Historically business schools have exposed students to leading businesspeople who have exemplified a model life in which their business success was followed by a retirement enriched by charity work. Now the increasing popularity on business school campuses of impact investing pioneers is offering an alternative model for students to follow. Schools that recognize the importance of mentoring and role modeling will need to identify additional opportunities to expose students to similarly forward-looking role models. Beyond the charismatic entrepreneurs, role models can also come from the leaders of networks, standard-setting bodies and other industry-builders who will increasingly represent high-leverage leadership in the impact investing industry's next phase.
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Antony Bugg-Levine (Impact Investing: Transforming How We Make Money While Making a Difference)
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Kurtz Bros., Inc. employees take pride in the company’s strong family tradition, history of growth and innovative approach to problem solving in the “green industry”. With over 65 years of experience, Kurtz Bros., Inc. is a pioneer in caring for Ohio’s environment and natural resources. Using specialized techniques in resource management and sustainability, we produce the finest topsoils, mulches and composts for beautiful yards and gardens. As a multi-faceted industry leader committed to excellence in customer satisfaction, our company will continue to provide innovative products and solutions to the waste-to-resource and soil-related industries we serve.
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Kurtz Bros
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Imagine your business and you as a leader to become the ‘go-to‘ person in your field, as you are the pioneer in initiating changing behaviors that are wanted and needed by the people you serve with your products and services.
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Naomi Mc Laughlan (How to apply Global Goals to Your Business: The #1 Guide to becoming Greener, Leaner, and more Profitable by applying the 17 Sustainable Development Goals)
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One winter in Manila in the mid-1930s, Wylie walked into the wardroom of his ship, the heavy cruiser Augusta (Captain Chester W. Nimitz commanding), and encountered a “fist-banging argument” between two of the ship’s up-and-coming young officers. At issue was what it took to become skilled at rifle or pistol marksmanship. One officer, Lloyd Mustin, said that only someone born with a special gift could learn to do it well. The other, a marine named Lewis B. Puller, said, “I can take any dumb son of a bitch and teach him to shoot.” Mustin would go on to become one of the Navy’s pioneers in radar-controlled gunnery. Puller would ascend to general, the most decorated U.S. Marine in history. Gesturing to Wylie standing in the doorway, Chesty Puller declared, “I can even teach him.” A ten-dollar bet ensued. The next time the Augusta’s marine detachment found time to do their annual qualifications at the rifle range, Wylie was Puller’s special guest. And by the end of the experiment, he was the proud owner of a Marine medal designating him an expert rifleman. The experience helped Wylie understand both native gifts and teachable skills and predisposed him to work with the rural kids under him. Now he could smile when the sighting of an aircraft approaching at a distant but undetermined range came through the Fletcher’s bridge phones as, “Hey, Cap’n, here’s another one of them thar aero-planes, but don’t you fret none. She’s a fur piece yet.” Wylie was a good enough leader to appreciate what the recruits from the countryside brought to the game. “They were highly motivated,” he said. “They just came to fight.
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James D. Hornfischer (Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal)
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In his effort to appease his Christian taxpayers in parliament, Edward stripped away the traditional protections that earlier kings of England had extended towards the country’s Jewish community. During his rule the Jews were forbidden to lend money at interest, stigmatised as infidels and ultimately expelled. Modern commentators have naturally judged Edward harshly for this, though they often err in presenting him as a pioneer. He was, it is true, the first European leader to carry out an expulsion on a nationwide scale, but this only goes to show that he was a powerful ruler of a precociously united kingdom. Other kings, earls and counts before him had expelled Jews to the furthest extent of their more limited authority. To say this much is not to deny that Edward was a thorough-going anti-Semite: he was, as his pogrom of 1279 proves all too clearly. It is merely to emphasise that, in his anti-Semitism, Edward was altogether conventional. A bigoted man, he lived in a bigoted age, and was king of a bigoted people. Abhorrent as it seems to us today, the fact that ‘he expelled the faithless multitude of Jews and unbelievers from England’ was regarded by his Westminster obituarist as one of Edward’s most commendable achievements.
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Marc Morris (A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain)
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Quoting page 56-57: Most important for the content of immigration reform, the driving force at the core of this movement, reaching back to the 1920s, were Jewish organizations long active in opposing racial and ethnic quotas. These included the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, and the American Federation of Jews from Eastern Europe. Jewish members of Congress, particularly representatives from New York and Chicago, had maintained steady but largely ineffective pressure against the national origins quotas since the 1920s. But the war against Hitler and the postwar movement against colonialism sharply changed the ideological and moral environment, putting defenders of racial, caste, and ethnic hierarchies on the defensive. Jewish political leaders in New York, most prominently Governor Herbert Lehman, had pioneered in the 1940s in passing state antidiscrimination legislation. Importantly, these statutes and executive orders added “national origin” to race, color, and religion as impermissible grounds for discrimination.
Following the shock of the Holocaust, Jewish leaders had been especially active in Washington in furthering immigration reform. To the public, the most visible evidence of the immigration reform drive was played by Jewish legislative leaders, such as Representative Celler and Senator Jacob Javits of New York. Less visible, but equally important, were the efforts of key advisers on presidential and agency staffs. These included senior policy advisers such as Julius Edelson and Harry Rosenfield in the Truman administration, Maxwell Rabb in the Eisenhower White House, and presidential aide Myer Feldman, assistant secretary of state Abba Schwartz, and deputy attorney general Norbert Schlei in the Kennedy-Johnson administration.
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Hugh Davis Graham (Collision Course: The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America)
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Movement pioneers form missionary bands that become catalysts for evangelism in unreached fields, leading to initial discipleship, church formation, and church strengthening. These bands work in partnership with new and existing local churches. Neither the churches nor the bands control the other.19
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Steve Addison (The Rise and Fall of Movements: A Roadmap for Leaders)
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Hitler and Mussolini, by contrast, not only felt destined to rule but shared none of the purists’ qualms about competing in bourgeois elections. Both set out—with impressive tactical skill and by rather different routes, which they discovered by trial and error—to make themselves indispensable participants in the competition for political power within their nations.
Becoming a successful political player inevitably involved losing followers as well as gaining them. Even the simple step of becoming a party could seem a betrayal to some purists of the first hour. When Mussolini decided to change his movement into a party late in 1921, some of his idealistic early followers saw this as a descent into the soiled arena of bourgeois parliamentarism. Being a party ranked talk above action, deals above principle, and competing interests above a united nation. Idealistic early fascists saw themselves as offering a new form of public life—an “antiparty”—capable of gathering the entire nation, in opposition to both parliamentary liberalism, with its encouragement of faction, and socialism, with its class struggle. José Antonio described the Falange Española as “a movement and not a party—indeed you could almost call it an anti-party . . . neither of the Right nor of the Left." Hitler’s NSDAP, to be sure, had called itself a party from the beginning, but its members, who knew it was not like the other parties, called it “the movement” (die Bewegung). Mostly fascists called their organizations movements or camps or bands or rassemblements or fasci: brotherhoods that did not pit one interest against others, but claimed to unite and energize the nation.
Conflicts over what fascist movements should call themselves were relatively trivial. Far graver compromises and transformations were involved in the process of becoming a significant actor in a political arena. For that process involved teaming up with some of the very capitalist speculators and bourgeois party leaders whose rejection had been part of the early movements’ appeal. How the fascists managed to retain some of their antibourgeois rhetoric and a measure of “revolutionary” aura while forming practical political alliances with parts of the establishment constitutes one of the mysteries of their success.
Becoming a successful contender in the political arena required more than clarifying priorities and knitting alliances. It meant offering a new political style that would attract voters who had concluded that “politics” had become dirty and futile. Posing as an “antipolitics” was often effective with people whose main political motivation was scorn for politics. In situations where existing parties were confined within class or confessional boundaries, like Marxist, smallholders’, or Christian parties, the fascists could appeal by promising to unite a people rather than divide it. Where existing parties were run by parliamentarians who thought mainly of their own careers, fascist parties could appeal to idealists by being “parties of engagement,” in which committed militants rather than careerist politicians set the tone. In situations where a single political clan had monopolized power for years, fascism could pose as the only nonsocialist path to renewal and fresh leadership. In such ways, fascists pioneered in the 1920s by creating the first European “catch-all” parties of “engagement,”17 readily distinguished from their tired, narrow rivals as much by the breadth of their social base as by the intense activism of their militants. Comparison acquires some bite at this point: only some societies experienced so severe a breakdown of existing systems that citizens began to look to outsiders for salvation. In many cases fascist establishment failed; in others it was never really attempted.
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Robert O. Paxton (The Anatomy of Fascism)
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The Likud championed retention of the West Bank, which it referred to by its biblical names, Judea and Samaria, whereas Labor advocated turning over some of the area to Jordan as part of a peace treaty. By using the names Judea and Samaria, the Likud emphasized the biblical link with the land. In their platform, they stated, “The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable and linked with the right to security and peace; therefore Judea and Samaria will not be handed over to any foreign administration.” Moreover, the Begin-led government planned not only to retain the territory, but to greatly increase the number of Jewish inhabitants there through the introduction of settlements. It was a major part of their ideology: “Settlement, both urban and rural, in all parts of the Land of Israel is the focal point of the Zionist effort to redeem the country, to maintain vital security areas, and serves as a reservoir of strength and inspiration for the renewal of the pioneering spirit.”1 Likud leaders referred to the building of settlements as “the creation of facts,” which would prevent any withdrawal from the West Bank in the future.
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Eric Gartman (Return to Zion: The History of Modern Israel)
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Welch and others, through the 1980s, pioneered using people as an expendable resource to the benefit of investors. Since then, it has become increasingly more common for companies to use layoffs to beef up their bottom line. It is considered an acceptable business practice today to lay off people, often ending their careers, simply to balance the books for the quarter or the year. If careers are to be ended, it should be for negligence or incompetence or as a last resort to save the company. But in our twenty first-century version of capitalism, the expectation that we are working in meritocracies seems false. In many cases, it doesn’t matter how hard we’ve worked; if the company falls a little short, people will have to be laid off. No hard feelings, it’s just business. Can you imagine getting rid of one of your children because you made less money than you expected last year? Imagine how your kids would feel if that were the plan. Well, that’s how it is in too many companies today.
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Simon Sinek (Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don't)
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Accept yourself. Accept yourself with confidence. Accept yourself with confidence and courage. Do this and you are destined to be a leader or a pioneer.
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Lawren Leo (Horse Magick: Spells and Rituals for Self-Empowerment, Protection, and Prosperity)
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1) “How did I end up down this rabbit hole of being obsessed with men on the DL (down-low)? Why did I prefer playing more in the straight arena with the closet cases (as they were called in my day) and the bisexual men over the gay ones?”
2) “We didn’t identify in my day; you were either gay, bisexual, or straight. People will always label others or pigeonhole them without even knowing for sure who they really are. They presumably stereotype and judge just by your outward appearance.”
3) “It wasn't until the seventh grade that Sister Gloria would be my social studies teacher, and I began leaning more towards being an extrovert than the anxious introvert that I was. All the accolades go to her. She lit the flame under my ass that would be the catalyst for my advocacy. Her podium, located front and center of the classroom, became ground zero for me and where I found my voice.”
4) “Their taunting was my kryptonite. My peers hated me for no other reason than the fact that they thought I was gay. I was only thirteen and often wondered how they knew who I was before I did.”
5) “Evangelical Christian Anita Bryant (First Lady of Religious Bigotry), along with her minions, led a crusade against the LGBTQ community back in 1977 and said we were trying to recruit children and that ‘Homosexuals are human garbage.’ My first thoughts were, how unchristian and deplorable of her to even say something like that, not to mention, to make it her life’s mission promoting hate.”
6) “Are there any more Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. kind of Christians in this country today? Dr. King knew about his friend’s homosexuality and arrest. Being a religious man and a pastor, Dr. King could have cast judgment and shunned Bayard Rustin like so many other religious leaders did at the time. But he didn’t. That, to me, is the true meaning of being a Christian. He loved Bayard unconditionally and was unbiased towards his sexual orientation. Dr. King was not a counterfeit Christian and practiced what he preached—and that, along with remembering what Jesus had said, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself,’ is the bottom line to Christianity and all faiths.”
7) “We are all God’s children! That is what I was taught in Catholic school. God doesn’t make mistakes—it’s as simple as that. Love is love—period! I don’t need anyone’s validation or approval, I define myself.”
8) “You will bake our cakes, you will provide us our due healthcare, you will do our joint tax returns, and yes, you will bless our unions, too. Otherwise, you cannot call yourselves Christians or even Americans, for that matter.”
9) “The torch has been passed. But we must never forget the LGBT pioneers that have come before and how they fought in the streets for our lives. Never forget the Stonewall riots of 1969 nor the social stigma put upon us during the HIV/AIDS epidemic from its onset in the early 1980s. Remember how many died alone because nobody cared. Finally, keep in mind how we were all pathologized and labeled in the medical books until 1973.
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Michael Caputo
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Sami Abouzid
Singer | Songwriter | Music Producer | Author | Publisher
Profile:
A versatile and accomplished artist with over two decades of experience in the music industry. Sami Abouzid is a singer, songwriter, music producer, and music arranger who has established himself as a creative force in both the music and literary worlds. Renowned for his original compositions and innovative soundscapes, Sami is also a published author with a passion for storytelling.
Professional Experience:
Founder & CEO
White Horse Records (2003–Present)
• Established an independent record label to promote original music and artistic innovation.
• Managed all aspects of production, marketing, and distribution for multiple projects.
Band Leader
Romantic Star (2003–Present)
• Formed and led the band, releasing music that resonated with audiences worldwide.
• Released debut album Romantic Dreams, featuring the hit song “Vanessa,” which gained airplay on multiple U.S. radio stations.
Soundtrack Composer (2013–Present)
• Transitioned into the world of soundtracks, starting with Isabella in 2013.
• Composed, arranged, and produced 657 original soundtracks, known for their emotional depth and cinematic quality.
Music Artist (2001–Present)
• Released 54 albums and 50 singles available in stores worldwide.
• Composed, arranged, mixed, mastered, performed, and produced all his music independently.
Books Authored:
• Love, Life, and Music – A reflection on creativity and personal experiences.
• Scarlett Johansson Forever – A tribute to art, passion, and inspiration.
• Arabic Poetry – A collection of poetic works exploring love and emotion.
Skills & Expertise:
• Music Composition, Arrangement, Mixing, and Mastering
• Songwriting and Lyric Creation
• Soundtrack Development for Film and Media
• Publishing and Record Label Management
• Literary Writing and Poetry
Notable Achievements:
• Pioneered a new era of music with over 700 compositions, soundtracks, albums, and singles.
• Gained international recognition with music featured on major radio stations in the U.S.
• Successfully bridged the gap between music and literature, creating a lasting artistic legacy.
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Sami abouzid