Special Leadership Quotes

I don’t see myself being special; I just see myself having more responsibilities than the next man. People look to me to do things for them, to have answers.

Oh! What honour for the female sex! It is perfectly obvious that God has special regard for it when all these wretched people who destroyed the whole Kingdom – now recovered and made safe by a woman, something that 5000 men could not have done – and the traitors [have been] exterminated. Before the event they would scarcely have believed this possible.

Parker Palmer observes, "A leader is a person who must take special responsibility for what's going on inside him or her self, inside his or her consciousness, lest the act of leadership create more harm than good.

Compassion does not need any special preparation, place or time. You can start it anywhere and anytime. Try it at home, work, school —or anywhere! The more you cultivate compassion the more will be your fulfillment, resilience, patience, grit, endurance and equanimity.

...he preferred to view his crew leadership not as decision making, but as sensemaking. "If I make a decision, it is a possession, I take pride in it. I tend to defend it and not listen to those who question it...If I make sense, then this is more dynamic and I listen and I can change it.

When special people touch our lives then suddenly we see how beautiful and wonderful our world can really be. They show us that our special hopes and dreams can take us far by helping us look inward and believe in who we are. They bless us with their love and joy through everything they give. When special people touch our lives they teach us how to live.

The day you no longer believe you have something to prove, the day you no longer believe you must give it your all, the day you think you are entitled to special treatment, the day you think all your hard days are behind you, is the day you are no longer the right leader for the job.

When an actor reaches down into his emotional well and pulls up a deeply personal response, the audience can sense something special is going on. They may not know exactly what they're seeing, but they recognize it as authentic.

The Marxist constituency has remained as narrow as the conception behind it. The Communist Manifesto, written by two bright and articulate young men without responsibility even for their own livelihoods—much less for the social consequences of their vision—has had a special appeal for successive generations of the same kinds of people. The offspring of privilege have dominated the leadership of Marxist movements from the days of Marx and Engels through Lenin, Mao, Castro, Ho Chi Minh, and their lesser counterparts around the world and down through history. The sheer reiteration of the "working class" theme in Marxism has drowned out this plain fact.

power dynamic operates in emotional contagion, determining which person’s brain will more forcefully draw the other into its emotional orbit. Mirror neurons are leadership tools: Emotions flow with special strength from the more socially dominant person to the less. One reason is that people in any group naturally pay more attention to and place more significance on what the most powerful person in that group says and does. That amplifies the force of whatever emotional message the leader may be sending, making her emotions particularly contagious. As I heard the head of a small organization say rather ruefully, “When my mind is full of anger, other people catch it like the flu.

Words and actions will separate a wise man from the crowd.

Leaders know where they can function better. They don’t cry over what they cannot do.

Leaders reject free opportunities they don't need, so that they can have time to create the expensive opportunities they need.

On July 22, 1862, Abraham Lincoln convened a special session of his cabinet to reveal—not to debate—his preliminary draft of the Emancipation Proclamation.

You don’t need a special occasion to say thank you.

You don’t need a special occasion to say, thank you.

As a prophet and communal leader, Muhammad was entitled to special treatment, such as eating better while campaigning with his men. Yet he ate only what his warriors ate and suffered privations — intense heat, hunger and thirst, exhaustion and discomfort — equally with them. When he led a force of slightly over three hundred warriors to Badr in March 624, for example, they had only seventy camels between them. Three or four men therefore rode cramped on each camel. Muhammad asked for no preferential treatment, even though no one would have begrudged him the right to ride alone, and he uncomfortably shared his camel with ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib and Zayd ibn Harithah (some sources say Marthad ibn Abi Marthad al-Ghanawi).

Whom the society deems worthless, once they discover their special inclination, it will change the very course of their lives as well as the shape of the very society that distastes them.

Fame requires every kind of excess. I mean true fame, a devouring neon, not the somber renown of waning statesmen or chinless kings. I mean long journeys across gray space. I mean danger, the edge of every void, the circumstance of one man imparting an erotic terror to the dreams of the republic. Understand the man who must inhabit these extreme regions, monstrous and vulval, damp with memories of violation. Even if half-mad he is absorbed into the public's total madness; even if fully rational, a bureaucrat in hell, a secret genius of survival, he is sure to be destroyed by the public's contempt for survivors. Fame, this special kind, feeds itself on outrage, on what the counselors of lesser men would consider bad publicity-hysteria in limousines, knife fights in the audience, bizarre litigation, treachery, pandemonium and drugs. Perhaps the only natural law attaching to true fame is that the famous man is compelled, eventually, to commit suicide. (Is it clear I was a hero of rock'n'roll?) Toward the end of the final tour it became apparent that our audience wanted more than music, more even than its own reduplicated noise. It's possible the culture had reached its limit, a point of severe tension. There was less sense of simple visceral abandon at our concerts during these last weeks. Few cases of arson and vandalism. Fewer still of rape. No smoke bombs or threats of worse explosives. Our followers, in their isolation, were not concerned with precedent now. They were free of old saints and martyrs, but fearfully so, left with their own unlabeled flesh. Those without tickets didn't storm the barricades, and during a performance the boys and girls directly below us, scratching at the stage, were less murderous in their love of me, as if realizing finally that my death, to be authentic, must be self-willed- a succesful piece of instruction only if it occured by my own hand, preferrably ina foreign city. I began to think their education would not be complete until they outdid me as a teacher, until one day they merely pantomimed the kind of massive response the group was used to getting. As we performed they would dance, collapse, clutch each other, wave their arms, all the while making absolutely no sound. We would stand in the incandescent pit of a huge stadium filled with wildly rippling bodies, all totally silent. Our recent music, deprived of people's screams, was next to meaningless, and there would have been no choice but to stop playing. A profound joke it would have been. A lesson in something or other. In Houston I left the group, saying nothing, and boarded a plane for New York City, that contaminated shrine, place of my birth. I knew Azarian would assume leadership of the band, his body being prettiest. As to the rest, I left them to their respective uproars- news media, promotion people, agents, accountants, various members of the managerial peerage. The public would come closer to understanding my disappearance than anyone else. It was not quite as total as the act they needed and nobody could be sure whether I was gone for good. For my closest followers, it foreshadowed a period of waiting. Either I'd return with a new language for them to speak or they'd seek a divine silence attendant to my own. I took a taxi past the cemetaries toward Manhattan, tides of ash-light breaking across the spires. new York seemed older than the cities of Europe, a sadistic gift of the sixteenth century, ever on the verge of plague. The cab driver was young, however, a freckled kid with a moderate orange Afro. I told him to take the tunnel. Is there a tunnel?" he said.

When you see someone do what no one else is doing take notice. Something truly special is about to happen. Not only will they be lifted up, they will lift up those around them as well. That is called leadership.

In advanced societies it is not the race politicians or the "rights" leaders who create the new ideas and the new images of life and man. That role belongs to the artists and intellectuals of each generation. Let the race politicians, if they will, create political, economic or organizational forms of leadership; but it is the artists and the creative minds who will, and must, furnish the all important content. And in this role, they must not be subordinated to the whims and desires of politicians, race leaders and civil rights entrepreneurs whether they come from the Left, Right, or Center, or whether they are peaceful, reform, violent, non-violent or laissez-faire. Which means to say, in advanced societies the cultural front is a special one that requires special techniques not perceived, understood, or appreciated by political philistines.

Your competitors have the same idea of how unique, special, vital, and relevant they are with everyone spending a lot of money using the same words, messages, and promises to convince prospects how unique they each are.

Currently our society tends to churn out individuals that tend to ask the system, “What are you going to give or do for me?” We see this attitude all around us. Self-serving individuals concerned with their personal comfort and welfare beyond the norm. These individuals expect the system to take care of them at all costs. When I run across one of these individuals, it makes me want to puke. This attitude is damn near a form of communism.

Enhancing personal growth and greatness means keeping your mind soaked in stimulating educational resources. Read and study the Bible, personal-development books, and areas of information that you would like to specialize in.

Helping teacher leaders come to understand their gifts is the first step in developing a specialty. Some leaders are great coaches and should focus on instructional leadership in a district or network where that is valued and supported. Great conceptual thinkers are good in startup mode but the daily grind of leading a school doesn't suit them. Other leaders thrive on the turnaround challenge. The dynamic blended future of education will allow more role specialization.

When I’m sitting by my gay friends in church, I hear everything through their ears. When I’m with my recently divorced friend, I hear it through hers. This is good practice. It helps uncenter us (which is, you know, the whole counsel of the New Testament) and sharpens our eye for our sisters and brothers. It trains us to think critically about community, language, felt needs, and inclusion, shaking off autopilot and setting a wider table. We must examine who is invited, who is asked to teach, who is asked to contribute, who is called into leadership. It is one thing to “feel nice feelings” toward the minority voice; it is something else entirely to challenge existing power structures to include the whole variety of God’s people. This is not hard or fancy work. It looks like diversifying small groups and leadership, not defaulting to homogeny as the standard operating procedure. Closer in, it looks like coffee dates, dinner invites, the warm hand of friendship extended to women or families outside your demographic. It means considering the stories around the table before launching into an assumed shared narrative. It includes the old biblical wisdom on being slow to speak and quick to listen, because as much as we love to talk, share, and talk-share some more, there is a special holiness reserved for the practice of listening and deferring.

There are so many ways the fixed mindset creates groupthink. Leaders are seen as gods who never err. A group invests itself with special talents and powers. Leaders, to bolster their ego, suppress dissent. Or workers, seeking validation from leaders, fall into line behind them.

Most churches do not grow beyond the spiritual health of their leadership. Many churches have a pastor who is trying to lead people to a Savior he has yet to personally encounter. If spiritual gifting is no proof of authentic faith, then certainly a job title isn't either. You must have a clear sense of calling before you enter ministry. Being a called man is a lonely job, and many times you feel like God has abandoned you in your ministry. Ministry is more than hard. Ministry is impossible. And unless we have a fire inside our bones compelling us, we simply will not survive. Pastoral ministry is a calling, not a career. It is not a job you pursue. If you don’t think demons are real, try planting a church! You won’t get very far in advancing God’s kingdom without feeling resistance from the enemy. If I fail to spend two hours in prayer each morning, the devil gets the victory through the day. Once a month I get away for the day, once a quarter I try to get out for two days, and once a year I try to get away for a week. The purpose of these times is rest, relaxation, and solitude with God. A pastor must always be fearless before his critics and fearful before his God. Let us tremble at the thought of neglecting the sheep. Remember that when Christ judges us, he will judge us with a special degree of strictness. The only way you will endure in ministry is if you determine to do so through the prevailing power of the Holy Spirit. The unsexy reality of the pastorate is that it involves hard work—the heavy-lifting, curse-ridden, unyielding employment of your whole person for the sake of the church. Pastoral ministry requires dogged, unyielding determination, and determination can only come from one source—God himself. Passive staff members must be motivated. Erring elders and deacons must be confronted. Divisive church members must be rebuked. Nobody enjoys doing such things (if you do, you should be not be a pastor!), but they are necessary in order to have a healthy church over the long haul. If you allow passivity, laziness, and sin to fester, you will soon despise the church you pastor. From the beginning of sacred Scripture (Gen. 2:17) to the end (Rev. 21:8), the penalty for sin is death. Therefore, if we sin, we should die. But it is Jesus, the sinless one, who dies in our place for our sins. The good news of the gospel is that Jesus died to take to himself the penalty of our sin. The Bible is not Christ-centered because it is generally about Jesus. It is Christ-centered because the Bible’s primary purpose, from beginning to end, is to point us toward the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus for the salvation and sanctification of sinners. Christ-centered preaching goes much further than merely providing suggestions for how to live; it points us to the very source of life and wisdom and explains how and why we have access to him. Felt needs are set into the context of the gospel, so that the Christian message is not reduced to making us feel better about ourselves. If you do not know how sinful you are, you feel no need of salvation. Sin-exposing preaching helps people come face-to-face with their sin and their great need for a Savior. We can worship in heaven, and we can talk to God in heaven, and we can read our Bibles in heaven, but we can’t share the gospel with our lost friends in heaven. “Would your city weep if your church did not exist?” It was crystal-clear for me. Somehow, through fear or insecurity, I had let my dreams for our church shrink. I had stopped thinking about the limitless things God could do and had been distracted by my own limitations. I prayed right there that God would forgive me of my small-mindedness. I asked God to forgive my lack of faith that God could use a man like me to bring the message of the gospel through our missionary church to our lost city. I begged God to renew my heart and mind with a vision for our city that was more like Christ's.

I have never bought into the bullshit theory of acceptable losses. We have the technology, the talent, the aggressiveness, and the expertise to bring more of our warriors home than ever before. Our combat, military, and political leaders choose to be mediocre at their jobs. That is as simple as I can put it.

I’ve trained you to be as honest as any man who ever lived, but if virtue serves to guide our actions with our friends and allies, every sort of trick can be used against our enemies. That’s why you were taught never to hunt a lion or a bear without some special advantage. Didn’t that kind of lesson teach you cunning and deceit?

His special gift was the ability to see the essence of a worthwhile suggestion and to relate it to what was already in existence or planned. Then he would encourage and shape the new project, repeatedly redesigning the curriculum so that a new department or course could have a comfortable place in which to grow and offer it benefits.

When you get obsessed about yourself and remain busy in promoting yourself, you will quickly learn that people forgot about you the moment you were out of their sight. On the other hand, when you put other’s interest in your heart and give your best to serve them wholeheartedly, prepare to be surprised that you earned a special and lasting place in their heart.

Leadership Philosophy: Understand where we have been; focus on the present and plan for the future. Everything has a triangle which encompasses three major points. Discipline, Competence and Trust comprise the first triangle. Trust was the base of the triangle. We were expected to be able to look in the mirror, not out the window. Confidence and familiarity with even the smallest tasks established this. Competence was next. There was always an expectation to focus on the fundamentals, understand the psychology of war, and do the right thing. The final and most crucial ingredient was discipline; discipline in yourself and in your soldiers. To Lieutenant Colonel Bolduc, discipline was not about power, it was about the judicious use of authority and responsibility. Special Forces had a boatload of both.

Duckworth learned that the Whole Candidate Score—an agglomeration of standardized test scores, high school rank, physical fitness tests, and demonstrated leadership—is the single most important factor for admission, but that it is useless for predicting who will drop out before completing Beast. She had been talking to high performers across domains, and decided to study passion and perseverance, a combination she cleverly formulated as “grit.

Under the leadership of Henry Kissinger, first as Richard Nixon’s national security adviser and later as secretary of state, the United States sent an unequivocal signal to the most extreme rightist forces that democracy could be sacrificed in the cause of ideological warfare. Criminal operational tactics, including assassination, were not only acceptable but supported with weapons and money. A CIA internal memo laid it out in unsparing terms:        On September 16, 1970 [CIA] Director [Richard] Helms informed a group of senior agency officers that on September 15, President Nixon had decided that an Allende regime was not acceptable to the United States. The President asked the Agency to prevent Allende from coming to power or to unseat him and authorized up to $10 million for this purpose. . . . A special task force was established to carry out this mandate, and preliminary plans were discussed with Dr. Kissinger on 18 September 1970.

As you become successful in your own field, your responsibilities may begin to change. Days become less and less about doing and more and more about making decisions. Such is the nature of leadership. This transition requires reevaluating and updating your identity. It requires a certain humility to put aside some of the more enjoyable or satisfying parts of your previous job. It means accepting that others might be more qualified or specialized in areas in which you considered yourself competent—or at least their time is better spent on them than yours.

In agricultural communities, male leadership in the hunt ceased to be of much importance. As the discipline of the hunting band decayed, the political institutions of the earliest village settlements perhaps approximated the anarchism which has remained ever since the ideal of peaceful peasantries all round the earth. Probably religious functionaries, mediators between helpless mankind and the uncertain fertility of the earth, provided an important form of social leadership. The strong hunter and man of prowess, his occupation gone or relegated to the margins of social life, lost the umambiguous primacy which had once been his; while the comparatively tight personal subordination to a leader necessary to the success of a hunting party could be relaxed in proportion as grain fields became the center around which life revolved. Among predominantly pastoral peoples, however, religious-political institutions took a quite different turn. To protect the flocks from animal predators required the same courage and social discipline which hunters had always needed. Among pastoralists, likewise, the principal economic activity- focused, as among the earliest hunters, on a parasitic relation to animals- continued to be the special preserve of menfolk. Hence a system of patrilineal families, united into kinship groups under the authority of a chieftain responsible for daily decisions as to where to seek pasture, best fitted the conditions of pastoral life. In addition, pastoralists were likely to accord importance to the practices and discipline of war. After all, violent seizure of someone else’s animals or pasture grounds was the easiest and speediest way to wealth and might be the only means of survival in a year of scant vegetation. Such warlikeness was entirely alien to communities tilling the soil. Archeological remains from early Neolithic villages suggest remarkably peaceful societies. As long as cultivable land was plentiful, and as long as the labor of a single household could not produce a significant surplus, there can have been little incentive to war. Traditions of violence and hunting-party organization presumably withered in such societies, to be revived only when pastoral conquest superimposed upon peaceable villagers the elements of warlike organization from which civilized political institutions without exception descend.

You’ve already said that,” Alex says. “Why should I go?” “You’re the only person I have,” I say. “And I want us all to be together. It will be good for us.” “Oh, so now I’m back in the picture again.” “Alex. Something bigger than you is occurring right now. I’m sorry about your unhappy childhood.” She glares at me in that special way of hers and Joanie’s that makes me feel worthless and foul-smelling. “So we’ll tell Scottie we’re going on a vacation while Mom is in the hospital?” “It’s for a day or two,” I say. “Scottie’s been in the hospital every day for almost a month now. She needs a break. It’s not good for her. I’d like you to be in charge of answering any questions she may have. She looks up to you. She’ll hang on whatever you say.” I’m hoping a leadership role, a specific chore, will make Alex act like an adult and treat Scottie well. “Can you do that?” She shrugs. “If you can’t handle things, let me know. I’ll help. I’m here for you.” Alex laughs. I wonder if there are parents who can say things to their kids like “I love you” or “I’m here for you” without being laughed at. I have to admit it’s a bit uncomfortable. Affection, in general, is unpleasant to me. “What if Mom doesn’t make it for two days?” “She will,” I say. “I’ll tell her what we’re doing.” Alex looks uncomfortable with this idea, that what I’ll say will make her mother want to live. “I’m bringing Sid,” she says. “If he doesn’t come, then I’m not going.” I’m about to protest, but I see the look in her eyes and know this is yet another battle that I’m bound to lose. Something about this guy is helping her. And Scottie seems to like him. He can keep her distracted. He can work for me. “Okay,” I say. “Deal.

There has been so much misinformation spread about the nature of this interview that the actual events that took place merit discussion. After being discreetly delivered by the Secret Service to the FBI’s basement garage, Hillary Clinton was interviewed by a five-member joint FBI and Department of Justice team. She was accompanied by five members of her legal team. None of Clinton’s lawyers who were there remained investigative subjects in the case at that point. The interview, which went on for more than three hours, was conducted in a secure conference room deep inside FBI headquarters and led by the two senior special agents on the case. With the exception of the secret entry to the FBI building, they treated her like any other interview subject. I was not there, which only surprises those who don’t know the FBI and its work. The director does not attend these kinds of interviews. My job was to make final decisions on the case, not to conduct the investigation. We had professional investigators, schooled on all of the intricacies of the case, assigned to do that. We also as a matter of procedure don’t tape interviews of people not under arrest. We instead have professionals who take detailed notes. Secretary Clinton was not placed under oath during the interview, but this too was standard procedure. The FBI doesn’t administer oaths during voluntary interviews. Regardless, under federal law, it would still have been a felony if Clinton was found to have lied to the FBI during her interview, whether she was under oath or not. In short, despite a whole lot of noise in the media and Congress after the fact, the agents interviewed Hillary Clinton following the FBI’s standard operating procedures.

This point is underlined in the well-known parable which Jotham told the men of Shechem: ‘Once upon a time the trees went out to anoint a king over them; and they said … to the vine, “Come and reign over us.” And the vine said to them: “Should I leave my wine, which cheers God and man, and go to be promoted over the trees?”’ Similarly, the fig-tree declined because of its sweetness, and the olive because of its own good qualitites. Then a bramble, a barren plant full of thorns, accepted the sovereignty which they offered, though it possessed neither a special good quality of its own, nor those of the trees that were to be subject to it (cf. Judg. 9 : 7–15). Now in this parable the trees which sought a ruler were not cultivated but wild. The vine, the fig-tree and the olive refused to rule over the wild trees, preferring to bear their own fruits rather than to occupy a position of authority. Likewise, those who perceive in themselves some fruit of virtue and feel its benefit, refuse to assume leadership even when pressed by others, because they prefer this benefit to receiving honour from men.

The essence of Roosevelt’s leadership, I soon became convinced, lay in his enterprising use of the “bully pulpit,” a phrase he himself coined to describe the national platform the presidency provides to shape public sentiment and mobilize action. Early in Roosevelt’s tenure, Lyman Abbott, editor of The Outlook, joined a small group of friends in the president’s library to offer advice and criticism on a draft of his upcoming message to Congress. “He had just finished a paragraph of a distinctly ethical character,” Abbott recalled, “when he suddenly stopped, swung round in his swivel chair, and said, ‘I suppose my critics will call that preaching, but I have got such a bully pulpit.’ ” From this bully pulpit, Roosevelt would focus the charge of a national movement to apply an ethical framework, through government action, to the untrammeled growth of modern America. Roosevelt understood from the outset that this task hinged upon the need to develop powerfully reciprocal relationships with members of the national press. He called them by their first names, invited them to meals, took questions during his midday shave, welcomed their company at day’s end while he signed correspondence, and designated, for the first time, a special room for them in the West Wing. He brought them aboard his private railroad car during his regular swings around the country. At every village station, he reached the hearts of the gathered crowds with homespun language, aphorisms, and direct moral appeals. Accompanying reporters then extended the reach of Roosevelt’s words in national publications. Such extraordinary rapport with the press did not stem from calculation alone. Long before and after he was president, Roosevelt was an author and historian. From an early age, he read as he breathed. He knew and revered writers, and his relationship with journalists was authentically collegial. In a sense, he was one of them. While exploring Roosevelt’s relationship with the press, I was especially drawn to the remarkably rich connections he developed with a team of journalists—including Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and William Allen White—all working at McClure’s magazine, the most influential contemporary progressive publication. The restless enthusiasm and manic energy of their publisher and editor, S. S. McClure, infused the magazine with “a spark of genius,” even as he suffered from periodic nervous breakdowns. “The story is the thing,” Sam McClure responded when asked to account for the methodology behind his publication. He wanted his writers to begin their research without preconceived notions, to carry their readers through their own process of discovery. As they educated themselves about the social and economic inequities rampant in the wake of teeming industrialization, so they educated the entire country. Together, these investigative journalists, who would later appropriate Roosevelt’s derogatory term “muckraker” as “a badge of honor,” produced a series of exposés that uncovered the invisible web of corruption linking politics to business. McClure’s formula—giving his writers the time and resources they needed to produce extended, intensively researched articles—was soon adopted by rival magazines, creating what many considered a golden age of journalism. Collectively, this generation of gifted writers ushered in a new mode of investigative reporting that provided the necessary conditions to make a genuine bully pulpit of the American presidency. “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the progressive mind was characteristically a journalistic mind,” the historian Richard Hofstadter observed, “and that its characteristic contribution was that of the socially responsible reporter-reformer.

The biggest fear for homeschooled children is that they will be unable to relate to their peers, will not have friends, or that they will otherwise be unable to interact with people in a normal way. Consider this: How many of your daily interactions with people are solely with people of your own birth year?  We’re not considering interactions with people who are a year or two older or a year or two younger, but specifically people who were born within a few months of your birthday. In society, it would be very odd to section people at work by their birth year and allow you to interact only with persons your same age. This artificial constraint would limit your understanding of people and society across a broader range of ages. In traditional schools, children are placed in grades artificially constrained by the child’s birth date and an arbitrary cut-off day on a school calendar. Every student is taught the same thing as everyone else of the same age primarily because it is a convenient way to manage a large number of students. Students are not grouped that way because there is any inherent special socialization that occurs when grouping children in such a manner. Sectioning off children into narrow bands of same-age peers does not make them better able to interact with society at large. In fact, sectioning off children in this way does just the opposite—it restricts their ability to practice interacting with a wide variety of people. So why do we worry about homeschooled children’s socialization?  The erroneous assumption is that the child will be homeschooled and will be at home, schooling in the house, all day every day, with no interactions with other people. Unless a family is remotely located in a desolate place away from any form of civilization, social isolation is highly unlikely. Every homeschooling family I know involves their children in daily life—going to the grocery store or the bank, running errands, volunteering in the community, or participating in sports, arts, or community classes. Within the homeschooled community, sports, arts, drama, co-op classes, etc., are usually sectioned by elementary, pre-teen, and teen groupings. This allows students to interact with a wider range of children, and the interactions usually enhance a child’s ability to interact well with a wider age-range of students. Additionally, being out in the community provides many opportunities for children to interact with people of all ages. When homeschooling groups plan field trips, there are sometimes constraints on the age range, depending upon the destination, but many times the trip is open to children of all ages. As an example, when our group went on a field trip to the Federal Reserve Bank, all ages of children attended. The tour and information were of interest to all of the children in one way or another. After the tour, our group dined at a nearby food court. The parents sat together to chat and the children all sat with each other, with kids of all ages talking and having fun with each other. When interacting with society, exposure to a wider variety of people makes for better overall socialization. Many homeschooling groups also have park days, game days, or play days that allow all of the children in the homeschooled community to come together and play. Usually such social opportunities last for two, three, or four hours. Our group used to have Friday afternoon “Park Day.”  After our morning studies, we would pack a picnic lunch, drive to the park, and spend the rest of the afternoon letting the kids run and play. Older kids would organize games and play with younger kids, which let them practice great leadership skills. The younger kids truly looked up to and enjoyed being included in games with the older kids.

The more the State of Israel relied on force to manage the occupation, the more compelled it was to deploy hasbara. And the more Western media consumers encountered hasbara, the more likely they became to measure Israel’s grandiose talking points against the routine and petty violence, shocking acts of humiliation, and repression that defined its relationship with the Palestinians. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a professional explainer who spent the early years of his political career as a frequent guest on prime time American news programs perfecting the slickness of the Beltway pundit class, the Israeli government invested unprecedented resources into hasbara. Once the sole responsibility of the Israeli foreign ministry, the task of disseminating hasbara fell to a special Ministry of Public Diplomacy led by Yuli Edelstein, a rightist settler and government minister who called Arabs a “despicable nation.” Edelstein’s ministry boasted an advanced “situation room,” a paid media team, and coordination of a volunteer force that claimed to include thousands of volunteer bloggers, tweeters, and Facebook commenters fed with talking points and who flood social media with hasbara in five languages. The exploits of the propaganda soldiers conscripted into Israel’s online army have helped give rise to the phenomenon of the “hasbara troll,” an often faceless, shrill and relentless nuisance deployed on Twitter and Facebook to harass public figures who expressed skepticism of official Israeli policy or sympathy for the Palestinians.

investigations and reported the completion of significant investigations without charges. Anytime a special prosecutor is named to look into the activities of a presidential administration it is big news, and, predictably, my decision was not popular at the Bush White House. A week after the announcement, I substituted for the attorney general at a cabinet meeting with the president. By tradition, the secretaries of state and defense sit flanking the president at the Cabinet Room table in the West Wing of the White House. The secretary of the treasury and the attorney general sit across the table, flanking the vice president. That meant that, as the substitute for the attorney general, I was at Vice President Dick Cheney’s left shoulder. Me, the man who had just appointed a special prosecutor to investigate his friend and most senior and trusted adviser, Scooter Libby. As we waited for the president, I figured I should be polite. I turned to Cheney and said, “Mr. Vice President, I’m Jim Comey from Justice.” Without turning to face me, he said, “I know. I’ve seen you on TV.” Cheney then locked his gaze ahead, as if I weren’t there. We waited in silence for the president. My view of the Brooklyn Bridge felt very far away. I had assured Fitzgerald at the outset that this was likely a five- or six-month assignment. There was some work to do, but it would be a piece of cake. He reminded me of that many times over the next four years, as he was savagely attacked by the Republicans and right-leaning media as some kind of maniacal Captain Ahab, pursuing a case that was a loser from the beginning. Fitzgerald had done exactly as I expected once he took over. He investigated to understand just who in government had spoken with the press about the CIA employee and what they were thinking when they did so. After careful examination, he ended in a place that didn’t surprise me on Armitage and Rove. But the Libby part—admittedly, a major loose end when I gave him the case—

A veritable pacifist when it comes to social guilds or luncheon clubs, I turn into something of a militant on the subject of the only true and living Church on the face of the earth. . . . Setting aside for a time the heavenly host we hope one day to enjoy, I still choose the church of Jesus Christ to fill my need to be needed--here and now, as well as there and then. When public problems or private heartaches come--as surely they do come--I will be most fortunate if in that hour I find myself in the company of Latter-day Saints. . . . When asked "What can I know?" a Latter-day Saint answers, "All that God knows." When asked "What ought I to do?" his disciples answer, "Follow the Master." When asked "What may I hope?" an entire dispensation declares, "Peace in this world, and eternal life in the world to come" (D&C 59:23), indeed ultimately for "all that [the] Father hath" (D&C 84:38). Depressions and identity crises have a hard time holding up under that response. . . . We cannot but wonder what frenzy the world would experience if a chapter of the Book of Mormon or a section of the Doctrine and Covenants or a conference address by President Spencer W. Kimball were to be discovered by some playful shepherd boy in an earthen jar near the Dead Sea caves of Qumran. The beneficiaries would probably build a special shrine in Jerusalem to house it, being very careful to regulate temperatures and restrict visitors. They would undoubtedly protect against earthquakes and war. Surely the edifice would be as beautiful as the contents would be valuable; its cost would be enormous, but its worth would be incalculable. Yet for the most part we have difficulty giving away copies of sacred scripture much more startling in their origin. Worse yet, some of us, knowing of the scriptures, have not even tried to share them, as if an angel were an every-day visitor and a prophet just another man in the street. We forget that our fathers lived for many centuries without priesthood power or prophetic leadership, and "dark ages" they were indeed.

Between the extreme limits of this series would find a place all the forms of prestige resulting from the different elements composing a civilisation -- sciences, arts, literature, &c. -- and it would be seen that prestige constitutes the fundamental element of persuasion. Consciously or not, the being, the idea, or the thing possessing prestige is immediately imitated in consequence of contagion, and forces an entire generation to adopt certain modes of feeling and of giving expression to its thought. This imitation, moreover, is, as a rule, unconscious, which accounts for the fact that it is perfect. The modern painters who copy the pale colouring and the stiff attitudes of some of the Primitives are scarcely alive to the source of their inspiration. They believe in their own sincerity, whereas, if an eminent master had not revived this form of art, people would have continued blind to all but its naïve and inferior sides. Those artists who, after the manner of another illustrious master, inundate their canvasses with violet shades do not see in nature more violet than was detected there fifty years ago; but they are influenced, "suggestioned," by the personal and special impressions of a painter who, in spite of this eccentricity, was successful in acquiring great prestige. Similar examples might be brought forward in connection with all the elements of civilisation. It is seen from what precedes that a number of factors may be concerned in the genesis of prestige; among them success was always one of the most important. Every successful man, every idea that forces itself into recognition, ceases, ipso facto, to be called in question. The proof that success is one of the principal stepping-stones to prestige is that the disappearance of the one is almost always followed by the disappearance of the other. The hero whom the crowd acclaimed yesterday is insulted to-day should he have been overtaken by failure. The re-action, indeed, will be the stronger in proportion as the prestige has been great. The crowd in this case considers the fallen hero as an equal, and takes its revenge for having bowed to a superiority whose existence it no longer admits.

The release of the book just tomorrow. Get ready for a good dose of adrenaline ;-) Meanwhile, I have for you next article. Let’s talk about terroritstic activity in Afghanistan. The problem with which we are dealing today almost everywhere. And turning back to the Wild Heads of War, in the book you will find a lot of military action in Afghanistan, led by NATO soldiers. One of them was my friend, who in 2009 was killed by IED (Improvised Explosive Device). The book tells the stories based on fiction but for all fans of the genre it will be surely good story. Article below made just to bring you closer to terroritstic activity in Afghanistan, that is, what is worth knowing by reading Wild Heads of War. Stabilization mission in Afghanistan belongs to one of the most dangerous. The problem is in the unremitting terroristic activity. The basis is war, which started in 1979 after USSR invasion. Soviets wanted to take control of Afghanistan by fighting with Mujahideen powered by US forces. Conflict was bloody since the beginning and killed many people. Consequence of all these happenings was activation of Taliban under the Osama Bin Laden’s leadership. The situation became exacerbated after the downfall of Hussein and USA/coalition forces intervention. NATO army quickly took control and started realizing stabilization mission. Afghans consider soldiers to be aggressors and occupants. Taliban, radical Muslims, treat battle ideologically. Due to inconsistent forces, the battle is defined to be irregular. Taliban’s answer to strong, well-equiped Coalition Army is partisan war and terroristic attacks. Taliban do not dispose specialistic military equipment. They are mostly equipped with AK-47. However, they specialized in creating mines and IED (Improvised Explosive Device). They also captured huge part of weapons delivered to Afghan government by USA. Terroristic activity is also supported by poppy and opium crops, smuggling drugs. Problem in fighting with Afghan terrorists is also caused by harsh terrain and support of local population, which confesses islam. After refuting the Taliban in 2001, part of al Qaeda combatants found shelter on the borderland of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Afghan terrorists are also trained there.

Even though the Internet provided a tool for virtual and distant collaborations, another lesson of digital-age innovation is that, now as in the past, physical proximity is beneficial. There is something special, as evidenced at Bell Labs, about meetings in the flesh, which cannot be replicated digitally. The founders of Intel created a sprawling, team-oriented open workspace where employees from Noyce on down all rubbed against one another. It was a model that became common in Silicon Valley. Predictions that digital tools would allow workers to telecommute were never fully realized. One of Marissa Mayer’s first acts as CEO of Yahoo! was to discourage the practice of working from home, rightly pointing out that “people are more collaborative and innovative when they’re together.” When Steve Jobs designed a new headquarters for Pixar, he obsessed over ways to structure the atrium, and even where to locate the bathrooms, so that serendipitous personal encounters would occur. Among his last creations was the plan for Apple’s new signature headquarters, a circle with rings of open workspaces surrounding a central courtyard. Throughout history the best leadership has come from teams that combined people with complementary styles. That was the case with the founding of the United States. The leaders included an icon of rectitude, George Washington; brilliant thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison; men of vision and passion, including Samuel and John Adams; and a sage conciliator, Benjamin Franklin. Likewise, the founders of the ARPANET included visionaries such as Licklider, crisp decision-making engineers such as Larry Roberts, politically adroit people handlers such as Bob Taylor, and collaborative oarsmen such as Steve Crocker and Vint Cerf. Another key to fielding a great team is pairing visionaries, who can generate ideas, with operating managers, who can execute them. Visions without execution are hallucinations.31 Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore were both visionaries, which is why it was important that their first hire at Intel was Andy Grove, who knew how to impose crisp management procedures, force people to focus, and get things done. Visionaries who lack such teams around them often go down in history as merely footnotes.

In the shock of the moment, I gave some thought to renting a convertible and driving the twenty-seven hundred miles back alone. But then I realized I was neither single nor crazy. The acting director decided that, given the FBI’s continuing responsibility for my safety, the best course was to take me back on the plane I came on, with a security detail and a flight crew who had to return to Washington anyway. We got in the vehicle to head for the airport. News helicopters tracked our journey from the L.A. FBI office to the airport. As we rolled slowly in L.A. traffic, I looked to my right. In the car next to us, a man was driving while watching an aerial news feed of us on his mobile device. He turned, smiled at me through his open window, and gave me a thumbs-up. I’m not sure how he was holding the wheel. As we always did, we pulled onto the airport tarmac with a police escort and stopped at the stairs of the FBI plane. My usual practice was to go thank the officers who had escorted us, but I was so numb and distracted that I almost forgot to do it. My special assistant, Josh Campbell, as he often did, saw what I couldn’t. He nudged me and told me to go thank the cops. I did, shaking each hand, and then bounded up the airplane stairs. I couldn’t look at the pilots or my security team for fear that I might get emotional. They were quiet. The helicopters then broadcast our plane’s taxi and takeoff. Those images were all over the news. President Trump, who apparently watches quite a bit of TV at the White House, saw those images of me thanking the cops and flying away. They infuriated him. Early the next morning, he called McCabe and told him he wanted an investigation into how I had been allowed to use the FBI plane to return from California. McCabe replied that he could look into how I had been allowed to fly back to Washington, but that he didn’t need to. He had authorized it, McCabe told the president. The plane had to come back, the security detail had to come back, and the FBI was obligated to return me safely. The president exploded. He ordered that I was not to be allowed back on FBI property again, ever. My former staff boxed up my belongings as if I had died and delivered them to my home. The order kept me from seeing and offering some measure of closure to the people of the FBI, with whom I had become very close. Trump had done a lot of yelling during the campaign about McCabe and his former candidate wife. He had been fixated on it ever since. Still in a fury at McCabe, Trump then asked him, “Your wife lost her election in Virginia, didn’t she?” “Yes, she did,” Andy replied. The president of the United States then said to the acting director of the FBI, “Ask her how it feels to be a loser” and hung up the phone.

All the many successes and extraordinary accomplishments of the Gemini still left NASA’s leadership in a quandary. The question voiced in various expressions cut to the heart of the problem: “How can we send men to the moon, no matter how well they fly their ships, if they’re pretty helpless when they get there? We’ve racked up rendezvous, docking, double-teaming the spacecraft, starting, stopping, and restarting engines; we’ve done all that. But these guys simply cannot work outside their ships without exhausting themselves and risking both their lives and their mission. We’ve got to come up with a solution, and quick!” One manned Gemini mission remained on the flight schedule. Veteran Jim Lovell would command the Gemini 12, and his space-walking pilot would be Buzz Aldrin, who built on the experience of the others to address all problems with incredible depth and finesse. He took along with him on his mission special devices like a wrist tether and a tether constructed in the same fashion as one that window washers use to keep from falling off ledges. The ruby slippers of Dorothy of Oz couldn’t compare with the “golden slippers” Aldrin wore in space—foot restraints, resembling wooden Dutch shoes, that he could bolt to a work station in the Gemini equipment bay. One of his neatest tricks was to bring along portable handholds he could slap onto either the Gemini or the Agena to keep his body under control. A variety of space tools went into his pressure suit to go along with him once he exited the cabin. On November 11, 1966, the Gemini 12, the last of its breed, left earth and captured its Agena quarry. Then Buzz Aldrin, once and for all, banished the gremlins of spacewalking. He proved so much a master at it that he seemed more to be taking a leisurely stroll through space than attacking the problems that had frustrated, endangered, and maddened three previous astronauts and brought grave doubts to NASA leadership about the possible success of the manned lunar program. Aldrin moved down the nose of the Gemini to the Agena like a weightless swimmer, working his way almost effortlessly along a six-foot rail he had locked into place once he was outside. Next came looping the end of a hundred-foot line from the Agena to the Gemini for a later experiment, the job that had left Dick Gordon in a sweatbox of exhaustion. Aldrin didn’t show even a hint of heavy breathing, perspiration, or an increased heartbeat. When he spoke, his voice was crisp, sharp, clear. What he did seemed incredibly easy, but it was the direct result of his incisive study of the problems and the equipment he’d brought from earth. He also made sure to move in carefully timed periods, resting between major tasks, and keeping his physical exertion to a minimum. When he reached the workstation in the rear of the Gemini, he mounted his feet and secured his body to the ship with the waist tether. He hooked different equipment to the ship, dismounted other equipment, shifted them about, and reattached them. He used a unique “space wrench” to loosen and tighten bolts with effortless skill. He snipped wires, reconnected wires, and connected a series of tubes. Mission Control hung on every word exchanged between the two astronauts high above earth. “Buzz, how do those slippers work?” Aldrin’s enthusiastic voice came back like music. “They’re great. Great! I don’t have any trouble positioning my body at all.” And so it went, a monumental achievement right at the end of the Gemini program. Project planners had reached all the way to the last inch with one crucial problem still unsolved, and the man named Aldrin had whipped it in spectacular fashion on the final flight. Project Gemini was

Two kinds of development help explain how a readiness built up to kill all Jews, including women and children. One is a series of “dress rehearsals” that served to lower inhibitions and provided trained personnel hardened for anything. First came the euthanasia of incurably ill and insane Germans, begun on the day when World War II began. Nazi eugenics theory had long provided a racial justification for getting rid of “inferior” persons. War provided a broader justification for reducing the drain of “useless mouths” on scarce resources. The “T-4” program killed more than seventy thousand people between September 1939 and 1941, when, in response to protests from the victims’ families and Catholic clergy, the matter was left to local authorities. Some of the experts trained in this program were subsequently transferred to the occupied east, where they applied their mass killing techniques to Jews. This time, there was less opposition. The second “dress rehearsal” was the work of the Einsatzgruppen, the intervention squads specially charged with executing the political and cultural elite of invaded countries. In the Polish campaign of September 1939 they helped wipe out the Polish intelligentsia and high civil service, evoking some opposition within the military command. In the Soviet campaign the Einsatzgruppen received the notorious “Commissar Order” to kill all Communist Party cadres as well as the Jewish leadership (seen as identical in Nazi eyes), along with Gypsies. This time the army raised no objections. The Einsatzgruppen subsequently played a major role, though they were far from alone, in the mass killings of Jewish women and children that began in some occupied areas in fall 1941. A third “dress rehearsal” was the intentional death of millions of Soviet prisoners of war. It was on six hundred of them that the Nazi occupation authorities first tested the mass killing potential of the commercial insecticide Zyklon-B at Auschwitz on September 3, 1941. Most Soviet prisoners of war, however, were simply worked or starved to death. The second category of developments that helped prepare a “willingness to murder” consisted of blockages, emergencies, and crises that made the Jews become a seemingly unbearable burden to the administrators of conquered territories. A major blockage was the failure to capture Moscow that choked off the anticipated expulsion of all the Jews of conquered eastern Europe far into the Soviet interior. A major emergency was shortages of food supplies for the German invasion force. German military planners had chosen to feed the invasion force with the resources of the invaded areas, in full knowledge that this meant starvation for local populations. When local supplies fell below expectations, the search for “useless mouths” began. In the twisted mentality of the Nazi administrators, Jews and Gypsies also posed a security threat to German forces. Another emergency was created by the arrival of trainloads of ethnic Germans awaiting resettlement, for whom space had to be made available. Faced with these accumulating problems, Nazi administrators developed a series of “intermediary solutions.” One was ghettos, but these proved to be incubators for disease (an obsession with the cleanly Nazis), and a drain on the budget. The attempt to make the ghettos work for German war production yielded little except another category of useless mouths: those incapable of work. Another “intermediary solution” was the stillborn plan, already mentioned, to settle European Jews en masse in some remote area such as Madagascar, East Africa, or the Russian hinterland. The failure of all the “intermediary solutions” helped open the way for a “final solution”: extermination.

Fascism rested not upon the truth of its doctrine but upon the leader’s mystical union with the historic destiny of his people, a notion related to romanticist ideas of national historic flowering and of individual artistic or spiritual genius, though fascism otherwise denied romanticism’s exaltation of unfettered personal creativity. The fascist leader wanted to bring his people into a higher realm of politics that they would experience sensually: the warmth of belonging to a race now fully aware of its identity, historic destiny, and power; the excitement of participating in a vast collective enterprise; the gratification of submerging oneself in a wave of shared feelings, and of sacrificing one’s petty concerns for the group’s good; and the thrill of domination. Fascism’s deliberate replacement of reasoned debate with immediate sensual experience transformed politics, as the exiled German cultural critic Walter Benjamin was the first to point out, into aesthetics. And the ultimate fascist aesthetic experience, Benjamin warned in 1936, was war. Fascist leaders made no secret of having no program. Mussolini exulted in that absence. “The Fasci di Combattimento,” Mussolini wrote in the “Postulates of the Fascist Program” of May 1920, “. . . do not feel tied to any particular doctrinal form.” A few months before he became prime minister of Italy, he replied truculently to a critic who demanded to know what his program was: “The democrats of Il Mondo want to know our program? It is to break the bones of the democrats of Il Mondo. And the sooner the better.” “The fist,” asserted a Fascist militant in 1920, “is the synthesis of our theory.” Mussolini liked to declare that he himself was the definition of Fascism. The will and leadership of a Duce was what a modern people needed, not a doctrine. Only in 1932, after he had been in power for ten years, and when he wanted to “normalize” his regime, did Mussolini expound Fascist doctrine, in an article (partly ghostwritten by the philosopher Giovanni Gentile) for the new Enciclopedia italiana. Power came first, then doctrine. Hannah Arendt observed that Mussolini “was probably the first party leader who consciously rejected a formal program and replaced it with inspired leadership and action alone.” Hitler did present a program (the 25 Points of February 1920), but he pronounced it immutable while ignoring many of its provisions. Though its anniversaries were celebrated, it was less a guide to action than a signal that debate had ceased within the party. In his first public address as chancellor, Hitler ridiculed those who say “show us the details of your program. I have refused ever to step before this Volk and make cheap promises.” Several consequences flowed from fascism’s special relationship to doctrine. It was the unquestioning zeal of the faithful that counted, more than his or her reasoned assent. Programs were casually fluid. The relationship between intellectuals and a movement that despised thought was even more awkward than the notoriously prickly relationship of intellectual fellow travelers with communism. Many intellectuals associated with fascism’s early days dropped away or even went into opposition as successful fascist movements made the compromises necessary to gain allies and power, or, alternatively, revealed its brutal anti-intellectualism. We will meet some of these intellectual dropouts as we go along. Fascism’s radical instrumentalization of truth explains why fascists never bothered to write any casuistical literature when they changed their program, as they did often and without compunction. Stalin was forever writing to prove that his policies accorded somehow with the principles of Marx and Lenin; Hitler and Mussolini never bothered with any such theoretical justification. Das Blut or la razza would determine who was right.

Leadership is the special quality which enables people to stand up and pull the rest of us over the horizon.

5‘Now therefore, if you will indeed obey My voice and keep My covenant, then you shall be a special treasure to Me above all people; for all the earth is Mine. 6‘And you shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.

In effect, evolution has fixed the capacity for followership – and the recognition of leadership potential – into our grey matter. It takes minimal effort to coax these facilities to the fore: we have found that, if you throw a group of people together to perform a task, it can take as little as 25 seconds for the group to nominate a leader and fall into line behind him. The chosen one will usually have some special expertise that will help the group, making him an appropriate focal point for followership (or he’ll be the loudest, and we’ll see later why good talkers are able to command leadership positions).

As we surge towards Indonesia 2045, those who will lead us must have special qualities. To begin with, they will need to exercise transformational, rather than transactional, leadership. This means forward- looking leaders who will continue to transform the nation across sectors. They will need to have a higher risk-appetite and the courage to challenge old assumptions, while coming up with new ideas that suit present- day challenges.

An innovative idea is special because only a certain few get to have it

The evangelical position, represented by the personal stories in this book, including my own, understands that a fully authoritative Bible supports the freedom of women under Christ without male supervision to follow their God-given callings and special gifts of the Spirit, including full leadership ministries. This view can be called the “inclusive” view of ministry

You are special individual. Never envy others. You never know what they go through. Seek and be inspired by the works of others. Learn their secrets for success.

When you get obsessed about yourself and remain busy in promoting yourself, you will quickly learn to that people forgot about you the moment you were out of their sight. On the other hand, when you put other’s interest in your heart and give your best to serve them wholeheartedly, prepare to be surprised that you earned a special and lasting place in their heart.

Self-knowledge and self-examination. Parker Palmer makes this very sobering statement about leadership: “A leader is a person who must take special responsibility for what’s going on inside him/herself, inside his or her consciousness, lest the act of leadership create more harm than good.

the school leadership team should specifically: • Build consensus for the school’s mission of collective responsibility • Create a master schedule that provides sufficient time for team collaboration, core instruction, supplemental interventions, and intensive interventions • Coordinate schoolwide human resources to best support core instruction and interventions, including the site counselor, psychologist, speech and language pathologist, special education teacher, librarian, health services, subject specialists, instructional aides, and other classified staff • Allocate the school’s fiscal resources to best support core instruction and interventions, including school categorical funding • Assist with articulating essential learning outcomes across grade levels and subjects • Lead the school’s universal screening efforts to identify students in need of Tier 3 intensive interventions before they fail • Lead the school’s efforts at Tier 1 for schoolwide behavior expectations, including attendance policies and awards and recognitions (the team may create a separate behavior team to oversee these behavioral policies) • Ensure that all students have access to grade-level core instruction • Ensure that sufficient, effective resources are available to provide Tier 2 interventions for students in need of supplemental support in motivation, attendance, and behavior • Ensure that sufficient, effective resources are available to provide Tier 3 interventions for students in need of intensive support in the universal skills of reading, writing, number sense, English language, motivation, attendance, and behavior • Continually monitor schoolwide evidence of student learning

Friday, January 30 God Has a Plan For I know the thoughts and plans that I have for you, says the Lord, thoughts and plans for welfare and peace and not for evil, to give you hope in your final outcome. JEREMIAH 29:11 AMP When Jeremiah wrote this, Israel was already in captivity in Babylon. Things looked pretty bleak, and many held no hope of returning to the land God had given them generations before under Joshua’s leadership. It was because they refused to listen to the prophets, telling them to repent of their sin of consistently turning away from God’s plan and living the way they wanted to, that they were in this predicament. After the majority of the Jews were taken to Babylon, Jeremiah wrote them a letter telling them to accept where they were. Since they were going to be there the full seventy years God had predicted, they were to settle down, build houses, establish communities, plant gardens, marry, die, celebrate their special days—in other words, live life to the fullest while they were there. The sooner they accepted God’s punishment, the sooner they could begin living again. The letter concluded with a reminder that God had not forgotten them. He still had plans for His people. Good plans, not evil. He wanted to give them hope that this punishment wasn’t for forever. God still has a plan for each one of His children. They are still plans for peace and good, hope-filled plans. Father, thank You for the thoughts and plans You have for each of Your children. Help us to live life to the fullest in the hope of those plans.

Australia’s default stance in its dealings with the world is not one of leadership. More often, it is derivative and responsive. It usually takes its lead from the United States when it can and deals with crises when it must. Or as the former director-general of the Office of National Assessments Allan Gyngell puts it: ‘How much has to do with leadership and how much is sitting around waiting for something to happen and looking at what the Americans are doing and saying, “we will have a bit of that, but not too much”?

It is impossible to make predictions—to say if the Islamic Republic will collapse or if it will survive in its current form. Certainly its current form isn’t the one it took in the immediate wake of the revolution. Although Khamenei has been committed to safeguarding the revolution, he has also created a new theocracy—one that relies on the greed of the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij instead of the loyalty of its founding fathers. Khamenei has banished nearly all the clerics who held power when Ayatollah Khomeini was alive. Despite falling oil prices and economic sanctions, Khamenei had enough petro-dollar to satisfy his military base of support: the Guards and the Basij. The oil revenue has been the biggest deterrent to democracy in Iran, even though the windfall has transformed the fabric of Iranian society. The Iranian middle class, more than two-thirds of the population, relies on the revenue instead of contributing to economic growth, and thus has been less likely to fulfill a historic mission to create institutional reform. It has been incapable of placing “demands on Iranian leadership for political reform because of its small role in producing wealth, as in other developing countries. The regime is still an autocracy, to be sure, but democracy has been spreading at the grassroots level, even among members of the Basij and the children of Iran’s rulers. The desire for moderation goes beyond a special class. As I am writing these lines, Khamenei’s followers are shifting alliances and building new coalitions. Civil society, despite the repression it has long endured, has turned into a dynamic force. Khamenei still has the final word in Iranian politics, but the country’s political culture is not monolithic. Like Ayatollah Khomeini, who claimed he had to drink the cup of poison in order to end the war with Iraq, Khamenei has been forced to compromise. The fact that he signed off on Rohani’s historic effort to improve ties with the United States signals that the regime is moving in a different direction, and that further compromises are possible.

The goal of the modern, enlightened, forward-thinking technology company should be to create a user experience that is indispensable, delightful, memorable, useful, and special.

Significance is built through the use of many expressive and symbolic forms: rituals, ceremonies, stories, and music. An organization without a rich symbolic life grows empty and barren. The magic of special occasions is vital in building significance into collective life. Moments of ecstasy are parentheses that mark life’s major passages. Without ritual and ceremony, transition remains incomplete, a clutter of comings and goings; “life becomes an endless set of Wednesdays” (Campbell, 1983, p. 5).

2:1 This verse might seem at first glance to provide only incidental and minor information to the reader, but it does more. It demonstrates that Moses was a chosen child from the only proper tribe for his future calling, fully in compliance with the law that God had not yet revealed to Israel but would reveal within Moses' lifetime. In other words, the verse assures the reader that Moses was prequalified for the service God later gave him, even in advance of the revelation that would make that qualification necessary. The verse pointedly tells the reader that Moses was fully a Levite, that is, from Levite stock on both his father's and his mother's side. This means that he was unquestionably of the tribe that would soon be specially designated by God to provide the religious and spiritual leadership for the people of Israel (Exod 32:26–29; Num 3:12; 8:6–26; Deut 10:8–9)—the tribe that showed itself readily loyal to Yahweh (e.g., Exod 32:26), the tribe that would supply the priests to bridge the holiness gap between God and Israel (Exod 28–30) and the tribe selected to provide most of Israel's regular court judges (Deut 21:5).

Usability is the baseline. Your values, aspirations, and dreams are what fills the space above.

If the differences between team members aren’t bridged and fashioned into a shared set of values, your organization has very little chance of connecting with your audience in a coherent and long-lasting way.

Why Does Silicon Valley Want Designers That Can Code? Because the Valley Doesn’t Understand What Designers Do.

His promise is that all who seek him wholeheartedly will find relationship with him, because God created you and me for a uniquely special relationship. We don’t have to wait for eternity. You enter into that relationship by faith. Just like my wife and I entered marriage by faith—by pledging our lives with a simple “I do.” That’s all God requires: turning to him in faith, saying, “I want what Jesus did to count for me—I want your forgiveness and leadership—I want to spend eternity with you.

Just last year, Mrs. Clinton claimed that as secretary of state she didn’t carry a work phone. It was too cumbersome and inconvenient for her to carry two phones. She didn’t have room for them. Then we learned she carried an iPhone and BlackBerry, neither government issued nor encrypted. Then we learned she carried an iPad and an iPad mini. But she claimed she didn’t do email. Then we learned she had email—on a private server. But then she claimed her email was for personal correspondence, yoga, and wedding planning. Then we learned her email contained government business as well—lots of it. Listen, nobody transmits classified material on the Internet! Nobody! You transmit classified material via a closed-circuit, in-house intranet or even physically via courier. You can’t even photocopy classified data except on a machine specially designed for hush-hush material, and even then you still require permission from whatever agency and issuer the document originated. So the only way for that material to be transmitted over an email is for her or someone in her office to dictate, Photoshop, or white-out the classified material in question, to remove any letterhead, or to duplicate the material by rewriting it in an email. Government email accounts are never allowed to accept emails from nongovernment email accounts. We’re supposed to delete them right away. Exceptions exist for communications with private contractors, but those exceptions are built into the system. I repeat: To duplicate classified material without permission or to send it over an unsecured channel is completely illegal. That’s why every government agency employs burn bags, safes, and special folders for anything marked Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret. People have lost their careers and gone to jail for far less. Yet Hillary Clinton transmitted classified material by the figurative ton. No one else can operate like that in government. But she takes her normal shortcuts and continues to lie about it. There is no greater example of double standards in leadership than First Lady, Senator, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Is it too inconvenient or cumbersome for her to follow the same rules that agents in the field have to follow? Maybe it would make morale too high? Clinton’s behavior harkens to the old motto: “The beatings will continue until morale improves.

Harsh Interventions There are times when it seems as if one must intervene powerfully, suddenly, and even harshly. The wise leader does this only when all else fails. As a rule, the leader feels more wholesome when the group process is flowing freely and unfolding naturally, when delicate facilitations far outnumber harsh interventions. Harsh interventions are a warning that the leader may be uncentered or have an emotional attachment to whatever is happening. A special awareness is called for. Even if harsh interventions succeed brilliantly, there is no cause for celebration. There has been injury. Someone’s process has been violated. Later on, the person whose process has been violated may well become less open and more defended. There will be a deeper resistance and possibly even resentment. Making people do what you think they ought to do does not lead toward clarity and consciousness. While they may do what you tell them to do at the time, they will cringe inwardly, grow confused, and plot revenge. That is why your victory is actually a failure.

The relation of an organization to the external environment is, however, only one source of institutional experience. There is also an internal social world to be considered. An {8} organization is a group of living human beings. The formal or official design for living never completely accounts for what the participants do. It is always supplemented by what is called the “informal structure,” which arises as the individual brings into play his own personality, his special problems and interests. Formal relations co-ordinate roles or specialized activities, not persons.

Institutionalization is a process. It is something that happens to an organization over time, reflecting the organization’s own distinctive history, the people who have been in it, the groups it embodies and the vested interests they have created, and the way it has adapted to its environment. For purposes of this essay, the following point is of special importance: The degree of institutionalization depends on how much leeway there is for personal and group interaction. The more precise an organization’s goals, and the more specialized and technical its operations, the less opportunity will there be for social forces to affect its development.

Leadership is a kind of work done to meet the needs of a social situation. Possibly there are some individuals more likely to be leaders than others, possessed of distinguishing personal traits or capacities.[5] Whether or not this is so, we shall here be concerned with leadership as a specialized form of activity, a kind of work or function. Identifying what leaders do certainly bears on (and is perhaps indispensable to) the discovery of requisite personal attributes; but the questions are of a different kind and may be treated separately.

Third, character is functional, in the sense that it is no mere accidental accretion of responsive patterns. Character {39} development fulfills a task set by the requirements of personality organization: the defense of the individual against inner and outer demands which threaten him. “Biologically speaking, character formation is an autoplastic function. In the conflict between instinct and frustrating outer world, and motivated by the anxiety arising from this conflict, the organism erects a protection mechanism between itself and the outer world.”[9] Whatever the special content of varying theories of character-formation, they share an emphasis on the reconstruction of the self as a way of solving anxiety-laden problems.

President Bush did us proud at Ground Zero. We hadn’t even cleared the wreckage as safe, but he was there addressing emergency response workers and rallying a fearful nation. That’s real leadership. That’s actual character! But when all our United States senators peeked out of their fortresslike capitol to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” hands over their hearts, I wanted to scream. I was furious. For all their committees, subcommittees, and special boards and the previous administration, I knew damned well that they shared part of the blame. Bosnia hadn’t even been wrapped up. We had abandoned Somalia to become a hotbed of terrorism and fanaticism—a failed state. On television, the first person I watched on the news, alibi-ing that now was not the time for blame, was my old pal, now New York’s junior United States senator, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

For executives, simulator-style training is occasionally available in crisis leadership courses, where trainees are invited to take their turn at the helm in a crisis response exercise. But absent a crisis, most executive teams operate without any special training to help them interpret the myriad signals available or recognize important conditions quickly and pick the best response to different scenarios. In the absence of such training, many executive teams muddle through, having learned most of what they know through their own experience on the way up through the managerial ranks rather than through formal training. As one chief noted, the closest equivalent to executive-level simulator training is when one department has the opportunity to learn from the misery of another. A collegial network of police executives, ready to share both their successes and failures, is a valuable asset to the profession (see box 2-1).

Motivation is the by-product of desire. Desire and motivation can’t be separated. They are always at the same level. True motivation can’t be cranked up any higher than the level of desire. To best understand how desire increases, and motivation along with it, you must learn more about the three levels of motivation. Level Three: Commitment Level Two: Goal Identification Level One: Compliance The lowest level (Level One) is compliance, which is essentially doing something because you were told to do it. There isn’t much motivation or personal desire involved. Character is not built at the compliance level. The next higher level (Level Two) is identification with the goal. Identification gives the individual a feeling of investment in the goal and produces increased desire and motivation. The highest level of motivation (Level Three) is commitment. There is no greater motivation than when someone feels the goal is truly their own. “Because I said so” is all the management ability needed to get somebody to Level One. Simply order the person around as if they can’t think or reason for themselves and have no special ability or investment in getting the job done other than to avoid being fired. To help people reach Level Two, you must clearly and simply communicate the benefits of achieving the goal. Include them in why the job needs to be done and how it’s in their best interest for all to do it well. When there is something to gain, people invest more. Many a company turnaround has started at this level. To reach Level Three, a person needs to understand why they’re uniquely suited for the task. Show that person how his or her strengths (not yours) can be used to help achieve their part of the goal. Not only will they feel that there’s a personal benefit for a job well done, but more important, they’ll bring a part of themselves to the job. Nobody in your organization will be able to sustain a level of motivation higher than you have as the leader. If a person rises above the leader’s level of motivation, they have to leave you and go somewhere else. Therefore, it behooves you to internalize the goals of your organization and build everyone else up to your level of commitment. I’ve heard it described as “organizing energies around a goal.” What a responsibility! What a challenge! What a growth opportunity!

Labor unions have more and more been expressing their dismay about ObamaCare as they have realized in practice the thing isn't working. Recently the labor unions came to the Obama administration and said, We want an exemption too. Big businesses got an exemption, Members of Congress got an exemption. Shouldn't labor unions, shouldn't union bosses get an exemption? And with much fanfare the administration reportedly told them, No.   I am going to make a prediction right here and now. If the Congress does not act, if we don't show leadership in defunding ObamaCare, if we don't stand together in imposing cloture on Friday, if we don't act to avert this train wreck for the American people, before the end of this President's term we are going to see him grant an exemption for labor unions. That has been the pattern. Friends, political buddies--they get a slap on the back. They get special treatment.   It

Your special spiritual gifts and talents are your calling.

A player who is working hard and productively for the group shouldn’t receive the same treatment as someone who is offering less. And while each and every person on your team fills a role and performs a function, some of those roles and functions are filled by people much harder to replace than others. It would be naïve to suggest that a superstar in your organization—a top producer—won’t receive some accommodations not afforded others. This is not a double standard but rather a fact of life. Those small accommodations, however, must not apply in areas of your basic principles and values or they will soon be replaced by the perception that favoritism and special treatment are the norm.

I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious” — Albert Einstein

Other reasons account for Hamilton’s failure to snatch the prize. Though blessed with a great executive mind and a consummate policy maker, Hamilton could never master the smooth restraint of a mature politician. His conception of leadership was noble but limiting: the true statesman defied the wishes of the people, if necessary, and shook them from wishful thinking and complacency. Hamilton lived in a world of moral absolutes and was not especially prone to compromise or consensus building. Where Washington and Jefferson had a gift for voicing the hopes of ordinary people, Hamilton had no special interest in echoing popular preferences. Much too avowedly elitist to become president, he lacked what Woodrow Wilson defined as an essential ingredient for political leadership: “profound sympathy with those whom he leads—a sympathy which is insight—an insight which is of the heart rather than of the intellect.” Alexander Hamilton enjoyed no such mystic bond with the American people. This may have been why Madison was so adamant that “Hamilton never could have got in” as president.

Originally, the term “prophet” was applied to individuals who provided significant military and judicial leadership—for example, Moses (Deuteronomy 18:15) and Deborah (Judges 4:4). It was also used of persons who had ecstatic experiences of contact with God (Numbers 11:24–29; 1 Samuel 19:20–24; 2 Kings 3:15) and of individuals who were protected by God in some special way (Abraham, Genesis 20:7; see also Psalm 105:15).

The short version of it is, he and a squad of special operations troops flew into a village in southern Afghanistan in two Blackhawks, with a gunship flying support. They were targeting a house where two Taliban leadership guys were hiding out with their bodyguards. They landed, hit the house, there was a short fight there, they killed one man, but they’d caught the Taliban guys while they were sleeping. They controlled and handcuffed the guys they were looking for, and had five of their bodyguards on the floor. Then the village came down on them like a ton of bricks. Instead of just being the two guys with their bodyguards, there were like fifty or sixty Taliban in there. There was no way to haul out the guys they’d arrested—there was nothing they could do but run. They got out by the skin of their teeth.” “What about Carver?” Lucas asked. “Carver was the last guy out of the house. Turns out, the Taliban guys they’d handcuffed were executed. So were the bodyguards, and two of them were kids. Eleven or twelve years old. Armed, you know, but . . . kids.” “Yeah.” “An army investigator recommended that Carver be charged with murder, but it was quashed by the command in Afghanistan—deaths in the course of combat,” Kidd said. “The investigator protested, but he was a career guy, a major, and eventually he shut up.” “Would he talk now? I need something that would open Carver up.” “I don’t think so,” Kidd said. “He’s just made lieutenant colonel. He’s never going to get a star, but if he behaves, he could get his birds before he retires.” “Birds?” “Eagles. He could be promoted to colonel. That’s a nice retirement bump for guys who behave. But, there’s another guy. The second-to-the-last guy out. He’s apparently the one who saw the executions and made the initial report. He’s out of the army now. He lives down in Albuquerque.

progressives. Nobody expects otherwise. In early May, Knut M. Wittkowski, who specialized in biostatistics and epidemiology for twenty years at Rockefeller University, posted a video on YouTube. He offered sane and sober arguments against the American lockdown. YouTube memory-holed it.20 In April, when Wittkowski first began speaking out, his former employer felt compelled to respond, announcing that his views “do not represent the views of The Rockefeller University, its leadership, or its faculty.”21 Now, that normally goes without saying. We’re not aware of any university that says their faculty speak for it. But in the age of social mania, many universities fear the diverse and critical dialog that used to be the essence of higher education. Evidently, Rockefeller University is one of them.

In early May, Knut M. Wittkowski, who specialized in biostatistics and epidemiology for twenty years at Rockefeller University, posted a video on YouTube. He offered sane and sober arguments against the American lockdown. YouTube memory-holed it.20 In April, when Wittkowski first began speaking out, his former employer felt compelled to respond, announcing that his views “do not represent the views of The Rockefeller University, its leadership, or its faculty.”21 Now, that normally goes without saying. We’re not aware of any university that says their faculty speak for it. But in the age of social mania, many universities fear the diverse and critical dialog that used to be the essence of higher education. Evidently, Rockefeller University is one of them.

Wingate persuaded British commanders to allow him to put together a Jewish squad to attack Arab marauders, the so-called Special Night Squads. Under his leadership, the SNS attacked the infiltrators, scoring major successes. Before going into battle, Wingate would read the soldiers biblical passages relating to their area of operations, testimony to their upcoming success.

There’s another level at which attention operates, this has to do with leadership, I argue that leaders need three kinds of focus, to be really effective, the first is an inner focus, let me tell you about a case that’s actually from the annals of neurology, there was a corporate lawyer, who unfortunately had a small prefrontal brain tumour, it was discovered early, operated successfully, after the surgery though it was a very puzzling picture, because he was absolutely as smart as he had been before, a very high IQ, no problem with attention or memory, but he couldn’t do his job anymore, he couldn’t do any job, in fact he ended up out of work, his wife left him, he lost his home, he’s living in his brother spare bedroom and in despair he went to see a famous neurologist named Antonio Damasio. Damasio specialized in the circuitry between the prefrontal area which is where we consciously pay attention to what matters now, where we make decisions, where we learn and the emotional centers in the midbrain, particularly the amygdala, which is our radar for danger, it triggers our strong emotions. They had cut the connection between the prefrontal area and emotional centers and Damasio at first was puzzled, he realized that this fellow on every neurological test was perfectly fine but something was wrong, then he got a clue, he asked the lawyer when should we have our next appointment and he realized the lawyer could give him the rational pros and cons of every hour for the next two weeks, but he didn’t know which is best. And Damasio says when we’re making a decision any decision, when to have the next appointment, should I leave my job for another one, what strategy should we follow, going into the future, should I marry this fellow compared to all the other fellows, those are decisions that require we draw on our entire life experience and the circuitry that collects that life experience is very base brain, it’s very ancient in the brain, and it has no direct connection to the part of the brain that thinks in words, it has very rich connectivity to the gastro- intestinal tract, to the gut, so we get a gut feeling, feels right, doesn’t feel right. Damasio calls them somatic markers, it’s a language of the body and the ability to tune into this is extremely important because this is valuable data too - they did a study of Californian entrepreneurs and asked them “how do you make your decisions?”, these are people who built a business from nothing to hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, and they more or less said the same strategy “I am a voracious gatherer of information, I want to see the numbers, but if it doesn’t feel right, I won’t go ahead with the deal”. They’re tuning into the gut feeling. I know someone, I grew up in farm region of California, the Central Valley and my high school had a rival high school in the next town and I met someone who went to the other high school, he was not a good student, he almost failed, came close to not graduating high school, he went to a two-year college, a community college, found his way into film, which he loved and got into a film school, in film school his student project caught the eye of a director, who asked him to become an assistant and he did so well at that the director arranged for him to direct his own film, someone else’s script, he did so well at that they let him direct a script that he had written and that film did surprisingly well, so the studio that financed that film said if you want to do another one, we will back you. And he, however, hated the way the studio edited the film, he felt he was a creative artist and they had butchered his art. He said I am gonna do the film on my own, I’m gonna finance it myself, everyone in the film business that he knew said this is a huge mistake, you shouldn’t do this, but he went ahead, then he ran out of money, had to go to eleven banks before he could get a loan, he managed to finish the film, you may have seen

His followers, who are also typically his disciples, freely accept his leadership because they perceive him to be the possessor of extraordinary qualities or powers; and this “recognition” of his special qualification is seen by Weber as decisive for the validity of charisma.[

over twenty-eight hundred Saturdays. I got to thinking that if I lived to be seventy-five, I only had about a thousand of them left to enjoy. “So I went to a toy store and bought every single marble they had. I ended up having to visit three toy stores to round up 1,000 marbles. I took them home and put them inside of a large, clear plastic container right here . . . next to my gear. Every Saturday since then, I have taken one marble out and thrown it away. “I found that by watching the marbles diminish, I focused more on the really important things in life. There is nothing like watching your time here on this earth run out to help get your priorities straight. “Now let me tell you one last thing before I sign off with you and take my lovely wife out for breakfast. This morning, I took the very last marble out of the container. I figure if I make it until next Saturday then I have been given a little extra time. And the one thing we can all use is a little more time. “It was nice to meet you, Tom. I hope you spend more time with your family, and I hope to meet you again here on the band.” You could have heard a pin drop on the band when this fellow signed off. I guess he gave us all a lot to think about. I had planned to work on the antenna that morning, and then I was going to meet up with a few hams to work on the next club newsletter. Instead, I went upstairs and woke my wife up with a kiss. “C’mon honey, I’m taking you and the kids to breakfast.” “What brought this on?” she asked with a smile.“Oh, nothing special, it’s just been a long time since we spent a Saturday together with the kids. Hey, can we stop at a toy store while we’re out? I need to buy some marbles.

But Bill made it okay to bring love to the workplace. He created a culture of what people who study these things call “companionate” love: feelings of affection, compassion, caring, and tenderness for others. He did this by genuinely caring about people and their lives outside of work, by being an enthusiastic cheerleader, by building communities, by doing favors and helping people whenever he could, and by keeping a special place in his heart for founders and entrepreneurs. Love is part of what makes a great team great. Yes, this was a natural part of Bill’s personality—he was way more ebullient than most of us! But it was also something he likely learned from football.

Sharing Each week, we will take time to share what is happening in our lives. At first this sharing will include some planned “sharing questions.” After the first few weeks, it will become more informal and personal as our group feels safer and more comfortable. Study Each week we’ll study a portion of God’s Word that relates to the previous weekend’s sermon. Our goal is to learn how to apply and live out our Christianity in our day-to-day experiences and relationships. Support Each week, we’ll learn how to take care of one another as Christ commanded (see John 15:9–13). This care will take many forms, such as praying, listening, meeting needs, and encouraging and even challenging one another as needed. Five Marks of a Healthy Group For our group to be healthy, we need to 1. focus on spiritual growth as a top priority (Romans 8:29); 2. accept one another in love just as Christ has accepted us (Romans 15:7); 3. take care of one another in love without crossing over the line into parenting or taking inappropriate responsibility for solving the problems of others (John 13:34); 4. treat one another with respect in both speech and action (Ephesians 4:25–5:2); 5. keep our commitments to the group—including attending regularly, doing the homework, and keeping confidences whenever requested (Psalm 15:1–2, 4b). Guidelines and Covenant 1. Dates We’ll meet on ____________ nights for ____________ weeks. Our final meeting of the quarter will be on. 2. Time We’ll arrive between ____________ and ____________ and begin the meeting at ____________. We’ll spend approximately ____________ minutes in singing (optional),____________ minutes in study/ discussion, and ____________ minutes in prayer/sharing. 3. Children Group members are responsible to arrange childcare for their children. Nursing newborns are welcome, provided they are not a distraction to the group. 4. Study Each week, we’ll study the same topic(s) covered in the previous weekend’s sermon. 5. Prayer Our group will be praying each week for one another and specific missions requests. 6. Homework and Attendance Joining a growth group requires a commitment to attend each week and to do the homework ahead of time. Obviously, allowances are made for sickness, vacation, work conflicts, and other special events—but not much more! This commitment is the key to a healthy group. Most weeks, the homework will require from twenty to thirty minutes to adequately prepare for the group study and discussion. If we cannot come to a meeting, we will ________________________________ 7. Refreshments 8. Social(s) 9.

Yet the reality is that in the American church, very few people come to Christ through a small group. It’s much more likely that their first exposure to the gospel will come through a conversation with a friend, followed by a visit to a church’s special program or a worship service.

Staff turnover was blamed on immaturity, and because she was seen by many as specially prophetic and courageous, Jen wasn’t held accountable for her frenetic leadership.

Google was a company that’d made more money off advertisements than any other company in the history of the world, but it had been founded by people who were embarrassed by a business model dependent upon advertising lawn chairs, car insurance, and Viagra. To deflect the embarrassment, the company cloaked itself in an aura of innovation and some old bullshit about the expansion of human knowledge. Google maintained this façade by providing web and mobile services to the masses. The most beloved of these services was the near daily alteration of the company’s logo as it appeared on the company’s website. Almost every day, the Google logo transformed into cutesy, diminutive cartoons of people who’d done something with their lives other than sell advertisements. These cartoons were called Google Doodles. They encompassed the whole spectrum of achievement, with a special focus on scientific achievement and the lives of minorities. In its own way, this was a perfect distillation of politics in the San Francisco Bay Area. Whenever they appeared, the Google Doodles were beloved and celebrated in meaningless little articles on meaningless little websites. They were not met with the obvious emotion, which would be total fucking outrage at a massive multinational corporation co-opting a wide range of human experience into an advertisement for that very same corporation. Here was the perversity of Twenty-First-Century AD life: Native-American women had a statistically better chance of being caricatured in a Google Doodle than they did of being hired into a leadership position at Google. And no one cared. People were delighted! They were being honored! By a corporation!

On September 11, 2001 there were several hundred humiliation-enraged, young Saudis training at al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. They had gone there not to fight Russians, like their older brothers, but to support the country’s Taliban government. When US Special Forces units and CIA officers organized Operation Anaconda to topple the Taliban regime, these Saudis found themselves on the run. Some were killed; some found shelter in Iran. More than 100 were captured and imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, the detention camp set up at an American naval base in Cuba. Their leaders, including Osama bin Laden, retreated into Pakistan. Most of the others, between 300 and 1,000 deeply committed individuals, simply went home to Saudi Arabia.9 These Afghan veterans provided the bulk of the leadership and many of the foot soldiers for AQAP, which remained largely restricted to the Afghan alumni network, their friends, and relatives.10 For two years they organized a five-cell structure in the kingdom with military, finance, media, and religious units.