Strategic Kindness Quotes

The most attractive thing about you should have less to do with your face or body and more to do with your attitude and how you treat people.

Tweet others the way you want to be tweeted.

We need serious strategic and tactical thinking about how to create new models of leadership and forge the kind of persons to actualize these models.

No army is comprised of all the same kinds of units or types of troops. There is power in diversity. If you always see only one choice, or use only one option, you will surely lose more than you win.

His military triumphs had been neither frequent nor epic in scale. He had lost more battles than he had won, had botched several through strategic blunders, and had won at Yorktown only with the indispensable aid of the French Army and fleet. But he was a different kind of general fighting a different kind of war, and his military prowess cannot be judged by the usual scorecard of battles won and lost. His fortitude in keeping the impoverished Continental Army intact was a major historic accomplishment. It always stood on the brink of dissolution, and Washington was the one figure who kept it together, the spiritual and managerial genius of the whole enterprise: he had been resilient in the face of every setback, courageous in the face of every danger. He was that rare general who was great between battles and not just during them.

One of the greatest ways you can affirm value in another person is by giving them the gift of your undivided attention, the kind of attention that says, “I hear what you are saying because I value who you are.” You don’t have to agree with someone to show them their value as a person. Listening demonstrates that any person you meet is worthy of your respect and attention.

That war [Bosnian war] in the early 1990s changed a lot for me. I never thought I would see, in Europe, a full-dress reprise of internment camps, the mass murder of civilians, the reinstiutution of torture and rape as acts of policy. And I didn't expect so many of my comrades to be indifferent - or even take the side of the fascists. It was a time when many people on the left were saying 'Don't intervene, we'll only make things worse' or, 'Don't intervene, it might destabilise the region. And I thought - destabilisation of fascist regimes is a good thing. Why should the left care about the stability of undemocratic regimes? Wasn't it a good thing to destabilise the regime of General Franco? It was a time when the left was mostly taking the conservative, status quo position - leave the Balkans alone, leave Milosevic alone, do nothing. And that kind of conservatism can easily mutate into actual support for the aggressors. Weimar-style conservatism can easily mutate into National Socialism. So you had people like Noam Chomsky's co-author Ed Herman go from saying 'Do nothing in the Balkans', to actually supporting Milosevic, the most reactionary force in the region. That's when I began to first find myself on the same side as the neocons. I was signing petitions in favour of action in Bosnia, and I would look down the list of names and I kept finding, there's Richard Perle. There's Paul Wolfowitz. That seemed interesting to me. These people were saying that we had to act. Before, I had avoided them like the plague, especially because of what they said about General Sharon and about Nicaragua. But nobody could say they were interested in oil in the Balkans, or in strategic needs, and the people who tried to say that - like Chomsky - looked ridiculous. So now I was interested.

I believe it was Napoleon who first sensed the ease with which, in modern society, the illusion of freedom can be created by strategic relaxation of regulations and law on individual thought, provided it is only individual, while all the time fundamental economic and political liberties are being circumscribed. The barriers to the kind of power Napoleon wielded as emperor are not individual rights so much as the kinds of rights associated with autonomy of local community, voluntary association, political party. These are the real measure of the degree to which central political power is limited in a society. Neither centralization nor bureaucratized collectivism can thrive as long as there is a substantial body of local authorities to check them

The art of speaking,” it was later said, “depends on much effort, continual study, varied kinds of exercise, long experience, profound wisdom, and unfailing strategic sense.

The one with the plan is the one with the power. It doesn’t matter in what kind of activity you’re involved. Employees want to follow the business leader with a good business plan. Volunteers want to join the pastor with a good ministry plan. Children want to be with the adult who has the well-thought-out vacation plan. If you practice strategic thinking, others will listen to you and they will want to follow you. If

A Spade brother: A Lord is placed strategically out into the world. But no Lord is safe from their own if they break their oath. If you don’t believe in hell, the Spade brothers will change your mind. They are a special kind of Lord. They will sit on their thrones and watch you burn to death for eternity with the fire they started. They give no fucks and have no limits. They collect the names they are given, and erase you from the world as if you never existed, and make you wish that was the truth.

President Obama dropped the term 'war on terror', and rightly so. Terrorism is not an enemy but a type of warfare that may or may not be adopted by an enemy. Imagine if, after Pearl Harbor, an attack that relied on aircraft carriers, President Roosevelt had declared a global war on naval aviation. By focusing on terrorism instead of al Qaeda or radical Islam, Bush elevated a specific kind of assault to a position that shaped American global strategy, which left the United States strategically off-balance. Obama may have clarified the nomenclature, but he left in place a significant portion of the imbalance, which is an obsession with the threat of terrorist attacks. As we consider presidential options in the coming decade, it appears imperative that we clear up just how much of a threat terrorism actually presents and what that threat means for U.S. policy.

You think because l'm kind that it means I'm naive, and maybe I am. It's strategic and necessary. This is how I fight.

...it was at Vogue that I learned a kind of ease with words, a way of regarding words not as mirrors of my own inadequacy but as toys, tools and weapons to be deployed strategically on the page.

When your principal goal is one of cultivating authenticity, wisdom, kindness and generosity, then all experience strategically supports achieving these qualities...this brings reliable happiness.

Existential Flexibility is the capacity to initiate an extreme disruption to a business model or strategic course in order to more effectively advance a Just Cause. It is an infinite-minded player’s appreciation for the unpredictable that allows them to make these kinds of changes.

In the living room Derek sprawled on the floor on a blanket, his eyes closed, his body human, corded with hard muscle, and covered only with a strategically placed towel. Julie knelt by him, long tweezers in her hand. “What’s going on?” “Quills,” she said. “Very thin quills. There was a magic plant and he decided it would be a good idea to give it a hug. Because he is smart that way.” So they had taken Julie with them. Considering where I’d gone and what I did while there, I didn’t have room to talk. Derek didn’t bother opening his eyes. “I wasn’t giving it a hug. I was shielding Ella.” “Mm-hm.” Julie plucked a thin needle from his stomach. “You shielded her really well. Because it’s not like we didn’t have Carlos with us.” Carlos was a firebug. The plant must’ve gotten torched. “We’ll need to work on mixed-unit tactics,” Curran said. He looked tired. It must’ve been hell. “So what did you do in Mishmar?” Umm. Ehh. In my head I had somehow expected Erra to stay in Mishmar. “I saw my father,” I said. Start small. “How was that?” Curran asked. “He’s a little upset with me.” “Aha.” “I broke Mishmar a little bit.” The three of them looked at me. “But it was mostly my grandmother who did it.” “How much is a little bit?” Derek asked. “There might be a crack. About maybe seven feet at the widest point.” Derek laughed. “And what else?” Curran asked. Perceptive bastard. “And this.” I pulled out the dagger and showed it to him. “You made a magic knife?” he asked. “Yes. In a manner of speaking.” “But you still have to get close enough to stab Roland with it,” Derek said. “That’s not how it works.” Help me, somebody. Curran was looking right at me. “Kate?” “It’s more of an advising kind of knife.” “You should come clean,” he said. “Whatever it is, it’s done and we can handle it.” My aunt tore into existence in the center of the room. “Hello, half-breed.” Curran exploded into a leap. Unfortunately, Derek also exploded at exactly the same time but from the opposite direction. They collided in Erra’s translucent body with a loud thud. Derek fell back and Curran stumbled a few steps. Erra pointed at Curran with her thumb. “You want to marry this? Is there a shortage of men?” Curran leapt forward and swiped at her head. His hand passed through my aunt’s face. Derek jumped to his feet and circled Erra, his eyes glowing. “I fear for my grandnephew,” Erra said. “He will be an idiot.

Management must think of itself not as producing products but as providing customer-creating value satisfactions. It must push this idea (and everything it means and requires) into every nook and cranny of the organization. It has to do this continuously and with the kind of flair that excites and stimulates the people in it.

A Spade brother: A Lord is placed strategically out into the world. But no Lord is safe from their own if they break their oath. If you don’t believe in hell, the Spade brothers will change your mind. They are a special kind of Lord. They will sit on their thrones and watch you burn to death for eternity with the fire they started.

Cole envisioned the next few weeks passing as a sort of painless montage: there'd be music, and different moments of the townspeople hard at work building a defensive wall around the perimeter of the town, and digging holes to serve as traps, and training with the few weapons they had. There'd be a wiping of perspiration and drinks raised to one another and the exchange of friendly smiles between comrades, and perhaps deeper, more meaningful glances between him and MaryAnn. But by midmorning of the first day, Cole had come to the unavoidable conclusion that the remainder of the experience would in fact drag on in exceedingly real time, with lots of heaving and hoing and digging and hauling under the hot sun, full of the kind of intense straining that raised the danger of a really spectacular hernia. And, judging from the few tense conversations he'd had so far, he foresaw a series of increasingly strident arguments with Nora regarding matters strategic. Plus, of course, at the end of all this effort they'd all probably be dead.

Few things hold the potential to so drastically alter the landscape of your life as when you claim godly authority over the insane amount of unnecessary pressures you face. Be ready to see your eyes opened as you close them in prayer. One day soon a whole new kind of woman is going to be emerging from that prayer closet. A free one. A rested one. A contented one.

So, the next time you’re faced with injustice, don’t wait quietly for someone to notice. Speak up. Demand what’s right with the kind of confidence only a hungry cat can muster. Be loud. Be persistent. And if the fascists try to drown you out, just yowl louder. After all, if cats can get their way with nothing but a meow and some strategic chaos, imagine what you can do with your voice.

From the perspective of sixties radicals, who regularly watched antiwar demonstrations attacked by nationalist teamsters and construction workers, the reactionary implications of corporatism appeared self-evident. The corporate suits and the well-paid, Archie Bunker elements of the industrial proletariat were clearly on the same side. Unsurprising then that the left-wing critique of bureaucracy at the time focused on the ways that social democracy had more in common with fascism than its proponents cared to admit. Unsurprising, too, that this critique seems utterly irrelevant today.* What began to happen in the seventies, and paved the way for what we see today, was a kind of strategic pivot of the upper echelons of U.S. corporate bureaucracy—away from the workers, and towards shareholders, and eventually, towards the financial structure as a whole. __________ *Though it is notable that it is precisely this sixties radical equation of communism, fascism, and the bureaucratic welfare state that has been taken up by right-wing populists in America today. The internet is rife with such rhetoric. One need only consider the way that 'Obamacare' is continually equated with socialism and Nazism, often both at the same time.

Pushkin said that some readers would condemn Tatiana–they would call her impulsive or unseemly. But those readers weren't being truthful. What they really meant was that Tatiana wasn't strategic. She didn't know how to play games. 'The coquette reasons cooly; Tatiana in dead earnest loves and unconditionally yields.' I loved Tatiana, because she didn't hide what she felt, and I loved Pushkin for calling out the kind of people who conflated discretion and virtue. You still met people like that: people who acted as if admitting to any feelings of love, before you had gotten a man to buy you stuff, was a violation–not of pragmatism, or even of etiquette, but of morality. It meant you didn't have self-control, you couldn't delay gratification, you had failed the stupid marshmallow test. Ugh. I refused to believe that dissimulation was more virtuous than honesty. If there were rewards you got from lying, I didn't want them.

Self-Management If you can read just one book on motivation—yours and others: Dan Pink, Drive If you can read just one book on building new habits: Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit If you can read just one book on harnessing neuroscience for personal change: Dan Siegel, Mindsight If you can read just one book on deep personal change: Lisa Lahey and Bob Kegan, Immunity to Change If you can read just one book on resilience: Seth Godin, The Dip Organizational Change If you can read just one book on how organizational change really works: Chip and Dan Heath, Switch If you can read just two books on understanding that change is a complex system: Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations Dan Pontefract, Flat Army Hear interviews with FREDERIC LALOUX, DAN PONTEFRACT, and JERRY STERNIN at the Great Work Podcast. If you can read just one book on using structure to change behaviours: Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto If you can read just one book on how to amplify the good: Richard Pascale, Jerry Sternin and Monique Sternin, The Power of Positive Deviance If you can read just one book on increasing your impact within organizations: Peter Block, Flawless Consulting Other Cool Stuff If you can read just one book on being strategic: Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley, Playing to Win If you can read just one book on scaling up your impact: Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao, Scaling Up Excellence If you can read just one book on being more helpful: Edgar Schein, Helping Hear interviews with ROGER MARTIN, BOB SUTTON, and WARREN BERGER at the Great Work Podcast. If you can read just two books on the great questions: Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question Dorothy Strachan, Making Questions Work If you can read just one book on creating learning that sticks: Peter Brown, Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel, Make It Stick If you can read just one book on why you should appreciate and marvel at every day, every moment: Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything If you can read just one book that saves lives while increasing impact: Michael Bungay Stanier, ed., End Malaria (All money goes to Malaria No More; about $400,000 has been raised so far.) IF THERE ARE NO STUPID QUESTIONS, THEN WHAT KIND OF QUESTIONS DO STUPID PEOPLE ASK?

You remind Cruise that I was the one who begged him to run screaming from that script,” Graham shouts into a speakerphone on his desk in an office just like every office in movies with studio executive scenes. Where a window fills the entire rear wall on a floor so high you could see your house from it if it weren’t obscured by its own weather system. The kind that silhouettes the man in power with a Christ-like halo of sunlight meant to intimidate guests into squinting in what could be mistaken for awe. He waves me inside to sit in a chair that’s at least one strategic foot lower than his own.

The primary purpose of the organizational hierarchy in a company is decision-making efficiency. It follows that most CEOs tend to be Ones. If the person at the top of the decision-making hierarchy doesn’t like making extremely complex decisions, the company’s processes will be slow and unwieldy. If you’re a One, it can be counterproductive to have another One on your staff, because she will want to set her own direction rather than follow yours. This kind of strategic contention can confuse the organization and send employees in opposing directions. As a result, many great One CEOs employ primarily Twos and Functional Ones on their staff.

Power itself is founded largely on disgust. The whole of advertising, the whole of political discourse, is a public insult to the intelligence, to reason - but an insult in which we collaborate, abjectly subscribing to a silent interaction. The day of hidden persuasion is over: those who govern us now resort unapologetically to arm-twisting pure and simple. The prototype here was a banker got up like a vampire, saying, 'I am after you for your money' . A decade has already gone by since this kind of obscenity was introduced, with the government's blessing, into our social mores. At the time we thought the ad feeble because of its aggressive vulgarity. In point of fact it was a prophetic commercial, full of intimations of the future shape of social relationships, because it operated, precisely, in terms of disgust, avidity and rape. The same goes for pornographic and food advertising, which are also powered by shamelessness and lust, by a strategic logic of violation and anxiety. Nowadays you can seduce a woman with the words, 'I am interested in your cunt' . The same kind of crassness has triumphed in the realm of art, whose mounds of trivia may be reduced to a single pronouncement of the type, 'What we want from you is stupidity and bad taste' . And the fact is that we do succumb to this mass extortion, with its subtle infusion of guilt. It is true in a sense that nothing really disgusts us any more. In our eclectic culture, which embraces the debris of all others in a promiscuous confusion, nothing is unacceptable. But for this very reason disgust is nevertheless on the increase - the desire to spew out this promiscuity, this indifference to everything no matter how bad, this viscous adherence of opposites. To the extent that this happens, what is on the increase is disgust over the lack of disgust. An allergic temptation to reject everything en bloc: to refuse all the gentle brainwashing, the soft-sold overfeeding, the tolerance, the pressure to embrace synergy and consensus.

They are totally different kinds of hard. As a mom, I can get help, share responsibility with my husband, enlist the help of grandmas and friends. That’s not to say it isn’t hard—because, holy moly, it’s hard!—but it can be shared. To truly be your best in running, you can’t outsource much, if anything. It’s all on you. Even if you have a coach, nobody else can do your training. Nobody else can sleep for you. Nobody else can refuel. Nobody else can set your goals. Nobody else can run the race. This realization hit me just the other day as I was planning for the upcoming year and strategizing my support crew to help with the various parts of my life: motherhood, running, and Picky Bars. Running was the one where I went, ‘Oh shit, that’s all me.

I had always felt that trust was the bedrock of any partnership, especially a business one. My associate and I had what I thought was a non-shakeable alliance. We would strategize; we would go to conferences about crypto and toast our wins with a glass of liquor. He was the only person I had trusted with my financial insight. Unfortunately, he was also the last person I should have trusted. WhatsApp info:+12723 328 343 I woke up one morning to the stuff of nightmares: I had absolutely no access to my Bitcoin wallet, holding $290,000. My password didn't work, my backup keys were useless, and my hardware wallet? Completely wiped. Panic set in as I tried to work out what was going on. Then, a chilling realization hit me. Only a week before, my ever-so-helpful colleague had made an offer to "optimize" my wallet security. I thought at that time, Wow, what a great guy. Well, it turns out he was great-at deception. The real gut punch? He had the audacity to sit across from me at work the next day, sipping coffee like nothing had happened. I confronted him, expecting some elaborate excuse, but he played dumb-so dumb it was insulting. That's when I knew what I needed were professionals, not empty denials. After hours of frantic research, I came across ADWARE RECOVERY SPECIALIST. Their reputation in high-stakes crypto theft gave me hope. From the first conversation, they took my case seriously, breaking down the recovery process in a way that finally made sense. Their forensic team got to work tracking the stolen funds across multiple wallets. A few tense days later, I got the call: my money was back. Every single dollar. It turned out that my trusted colleague had tried to launder the funds through multiple transactions, but ADWARE RECOVERY SPECIALIST untangled his mess with ease. The feeling of relief was overwhelming; I had prepared myself for the worst, yet I walked away victorious. My colleague probably had a pretty good inkling, because he quit before I could file any report. Typical. Some people just love to disappear rather than confront the music. Email info: Adware recovery specialist (@) auctioneer.net I emerged from that fiasco with my money still in one piece, and more painfully but preciously, with the lesson not to confuse control for kindness: you earn trust; you don't give it away freely-especially where money intervenes.

You already know what you know, after all—and, unless your life is perfect, what you know is not enough. You remain threatened by disease, and self-deception, and unhappiness, and malevolence, and betrayal, and corruption, and pain, and limitation. You are subject to all these things, in the final analysis, because you are just too ignorant to protect yourself. If you just knew enough, you could be healthier and more honest. You would suffer less. You could recognize, resist and even triumph over malevolence and evil. You would neither betray a friend, nor deal falsely and deceitfully in business, politics or love. However, your current knowledge has neither made you perfect nor kept you safe. So, it is insufficient, by definition—radically, fatally insufficient. You must accept this before you can converse philosophically, instead of convincing, oppressing, dominating or even amusing. You must accept this before you can tolerate a conversation where the Word that eternally mediates between order and chaos is operating, psychologically speaking. To have this kind of conversation, it is necessary to respect the personal experience of your conversational partners. You must assume that they have reached careful, thoughtful, genuine conclusions (and, perhaps, they must have done the work tha justifies this assumption). You must believe that if they shared their conclusions with you, you could bypass at least some of the pain of personally learning the same things (as learning from the experience of others can be quicker and much less dangerous). You must meditate, too, instead of strategizing towards victory. If you fail, or refuse, to do so, then you merely and automatically repeat what you already believe, seeking its validation and insisting on its rightness. But if you are meditating as you converse, then you listen to the other person, and say the new and original things that can rise from deep within of their own accord. It’s as if you are listening to yourself during such a conversation, just as you are listening to the other person. You are describing how you are responding to the new information imparted by the speaker. You are reporting what that information has done to you—what new things it made appear within you, how it has changed your presuppositions, how it has made you think of new questions. You tell the speaker these things, directly. Then they have the same effect on him. In this manner, you both move towards somewhere newer and broader and better. You both change, as you let your old presuppositions die—as you shed your skins and emerge renewed. A conversation such as this is one where it is the desire for truth itself—on the part of both participants—that is truly listening and speaking. That’s why it’s engaging, vital, interesting and meaningful. That sense of meaning is a signal from the deep, ancient parts of your Being. You’re where you should be, with one foot in order, and the other tentatively extended into chaos and the unknown. You’re immersed in the Tao, following the great Way of Life. There, you’re stable enough to be secure, but flexible enough to transform. There, you’re allowing new information to inform you—to permeate your stability, to repair and improve its structure, and expand its domain. There the constituent elements of your Being can find their more elegant formation. A conversation like that places you in the same place that listening to great music places you, and for much the same reason. A conversation like that puts you in the realm where souls connect, and that’s a real place. It leaves you thinking, “That was really worthwhile. We really got to know each other.” The masks came off, and the searchers were revealed. So, listen, to yourself and to those with whom you are speaking. Your wisdom then consists not of the knowledge you already have, but the continual search for knowledge, which is the highest form of wisdom.

Dinner was a family affair. And oh, how she enjoyed it! Who knew there was so much to talk about each day? She loved when the men shared stories about their work in the mines, while she often regaled them with stories about life in the castle when she was a small child or about the types of birds she spotted from the window. And then there were the questions. She found she had many! After staying silent for so long, there was much she longed to know, and she was always interested in learning more about the men and their lives. She wanted to know who had carved the beautiful wooden doorways and furniture around the cottage, and why the deer and the birds seemed to linger at the kitchen window while she prepped meals. "They must adore you, as we do," gushed Bashful. "And I you!" Snow would say. She found she could talk to them till the candle burned out each night. It felt like she was finally waking up and finding her voice after years of silent darkness. And while she promised the men she would not do more than her share of the housework, she couldn't help trying to find small ways to repay them for their kindness when she wasn't busy strategizing. Despite their protests, she prepared a lunch basket for them to take to work each day. She mended tiny socks. And secretly, she was using yarn and needles she had found to knit them blankets for their beds. It might have been summer, but she couldn't help noticing they had few blankets for the winter months.

Situation awareness means possessing an explorer mentality A general never knows anything with certainty, never sees his enemy clearly, and never knows positively where he is. When armies are face to face, the least accident in the ground, the smallest wood, may conceal part of the enemy army. The most experienced eye cannot be sure whether it sees the whole of the enemy’s army or only three-fourths. It is by the mind’s eye, by the integration of all reasoning, by a kind of inspiration that the general sees, knows, and judges. ~Napoleon 5   In order to effectively gather the appropriate information as it’s unfolding we must possess the explorer mentality.  We must be able to recognize patterns of behavior. Then we must recognize that which is outside that normal pattern. Then, you take the initiative so we maintain control. Every call, every incident we respond to possesses novelty. Car stops, domestic violence calls, robberies, suspicious persons etc.  These individual types of incidents show similar patterns in many ways. For example, a car stopped normally pulls over to the side of the road when signaled to do so.  The officer when ready, approaches the operator, a conversation ensues, paperwork exchanges, and the pulled over car drives away. A domestic violence call has its own normal patterns; police arrive, separate involved parties, take statements and arrest aggressor and advise the victim of abuse prevention rights. We could go on like this for all the types of calls we handle as each type of incident on its own merits, does possess very similar patterns. Yet they always, and I mean always possess something different be it the location, the time of day, the person you are dealing with. Even if it’s the same person, location, time and day, the person you’re dealing who may now be in a different emotional state and his/her motives and intent may be very different. This breaks that normal expected pattern.  Hence, there is a need to always be open-minded, alert and aware, exploring for the signs and signals of positive or negative change in conditions. In his Small Wars journal article “Thinking and Acting like an Early Explorer” Brigadier General Huba Wass de Czege (US Army Ret.) describes the explorer mentality:   While tactical and strategic thinking are fundamentally different, both kinds of thinking must take place in the explorer’s brain, but in separate compartments. To appreciate this, think of the metaphor of an early American explorer trying to cross a large expanse of unknown terrain long before the days of the modern conveniences. The explorer knows that somewhere to the west lies an ocean he wants to reach. He has only a sketch-map of a narrow corridor drawn by a previously unsuccessful explorer. He also knows that highly variable weather and frequent geologic activity can block mountain passes, flood rivers, and dry up desert water sources. He also knows that some native tribes are hostile to all strangers, some are friendly and others are fickle, but that warring and peace-making among them makes estimating their whereabouts and attitudes difficult.6

One of the commonly accepted narratives of the Internet is that it was built to survive a nuclear attack. This enrages many of its architects, including Bob Taylor and Larry Roberts, who insistently and repeatedly debunked this origin myth. However, like many of the innovations of the digital age, there were multiple causes and origins. Different players have different perspectives. Some who were higher in the chain of command than Taylor and Roberts, and who have more knowledge of why funding decisions were actually made, have begun to debunk the debunking. Let’s try to peel away the layers. There is no doubt that when Paul Baran proposed a packet-switched network in his RAND reports, nuclear survivability was one of his rationales. “It was necessary to have a strategic system that could withstand a first attack and then be able to return the favor in kind,” he explained. “The problem was that we didn’t have a survivable communications system, and so Soviet missiles aimed at U.S. missiles would take out the entire telephone-communication system.”76 That led to an unstable hair-trigger situation; a nation was more likely to launch a preemptive strike if it feared that its communications and ability to respond would not survive an attack. “The origin of packet switching is very much Cold War,” he said. “I got very interested in the subject of how the hell you build a reliable command and control system.”77 So in 1960 Baran set about devising “a communication network which will allow several hundred major communications stations to talk with one another after an enemy attack.”78

In Nevada, at Frenchman’s Flat, a bright flash and ugly mushroom cloud had signified a gigantic change in the tactical battlefield—a change that had not come about at Hiroshima, despite statements to the contrary. In its early years the atomic device had remained a strategic weapon, suitable for delivery against cities and industries, suitable to obliterate civilians, men, women, and children by the millions, but of no practical use on a limited battlefield—until it was fired from a field gun. Until this time, 1953, the armies of the world, including that of the United States, had hardly taken the advent of fissionable material into account. The 280mm gun, an interim weapon that would remain in use only a few years, changed all that, forever. With an atomic cannon that could deliver tactical fires in the low-kiloton range, with great selectivity, ground warfare stood on the brink of its greatest change since the advent of firepower. The atomic cannon could blow any existing fortification, even one twenty thousand yards in depth, out of existence neatly and selectively, along with the battalions that manned it. Any concentration of manpower, also, was its meat. It spelled the doom of Communist massed armies, which opposed superior firepower with numbers, and which had in 1953 no tactical nuclear weapons of their own. The 280mm gun was shipped to the Far East. Then, in great secrecy, atomic warheads—it could fire either nuclear or conventional rounds—followed, not to Korea, but to storage close by. And with even greater secrecy, word of this shipment was allowed to fall into Communist hands. At the same time, into Communist hands wafted a pervasive rumor, one they could neither completely verify nor scotch: that the United States would not accept a stalemate beyond the end of summer. The psychological pressures on Chinese Intelligence became enormous. Neither an evaluative nor a collective agency, even when it feels it is being taken, dares ignore evidence.

These include: 1.Do the Right Thing—the principle of integrity. We see in George Marshall the endless determination to tell the truth and never to curry favor by thought, word, or deed. Every one of General Marshall’s actions was grounded in the highest sense of integrity, honesty, and fair play. 2.Master the Situation—the principle of action. Here we see the classic “know your stuff and take appropriate action” principle of leadership coupled with a determination to drive events and not be driven by them. Marshall knew that given the enormous challenges of World War II followed by the turbulent postwar era, action would be the heart of his remit. And he was right. 3.Serve the Greater Good—the principle of selflessness. In George Marshall we see a leader who always asked himself, “What is the morally correct course of action that does the greatest good for the greatest number?” as opposed to the careerist leader who asks “What’s in it for me?” and shades recommendations in a way that creates self-benefit. 4.Speak Your Mind—the principle of candor. Always happiest when speaking simple truth to power, General and Secretary Marshall never sugarcoated the message to the global leaders he served so well. 5.Lay the Groundwork—the principle of preparation. As is often said at the nation’s service academies, know the six Ps: Prior Preparation Prevents Particularly Poor Performance. 6.Share Knowledge—the principle of learning and teaching. Like Larry Bird on a basketball court, George Marshall made everyone on his team look better by collaborating and sharing information. 7.Choose and Reward the Right People—the principle of fairness. Unbiased, color- and religion-blind, George Marshall simply picked the very best people. 8.Focus on the Big Picture—the principle of vision. Marshall always kept himself at the strategic level, content to delegate to subordinates when necessary. 9.Support the Troops—the principle of caring. Deeply involved in ensuring that the men and women under his command prospered, General and Secretary Marshall taught that if we are loyal down the chain of command, that loyalty will be repaid not only in kind but in operational outcomes as well.

A few years ago, a couple of young men from my church came to our home for dinner. During the course of the dinner, the conversation turned from religion to various world mythologies and we began to play the game of ‘Name That Character.” To play this game, you pick a category such as famous actors, superheroes or historical characters. In turn, each person describes events in a famous character’s life while everyone else tries to guess who the character is. Strategically you try to describe the deeds of a character in such a way that it might fit any number of characters in that category. After three guesses, if no one knows who your character is, then you win. Choosing the category of Bible Characters, we played a couple of fairly easy rounds with the typical figures, then it was my turn. Now, knowing these well meaning young men had very little religious experience or understanding outside of their own religion, I posed a trick question. I said, “Now my character may seem obvious, but please wait until the end of my description to answer.” I took a long breath for dramatic effect, and began, “My character was the son of the King of Heaven and a mortal woman.” Immediately both young men smiled knowingly, but I raised a finger asking them to wait to give their responses. I continued, “While he was just a baby, a jealous rival attempted to kill him and he was forced into hiding for several years. As he grew older, he developed amazing powers. Among these were the ability to turn water into wine and to control the mental health of other people. He became a great leader and inspired an entire religious movement. Eventually he ascended into heaven and sat with his father as a ruler in heaven.” Certain they knew who I was describing, my two guests were eager to give the winning answer. However, I held them off and continued, “Now I know adding these last parts will seem like overkill, but I simply cannot describe this character without mentioning them. This person’s birthday is celebrated on December 25th and he is worshipped in a spring festival. He defied death, journeyed to the underworld to raise his loved ones from the dead and was resurrected. He was granted immortality by his Father, the king of the gods, and was worshipped as a savior god by entire cultures.” The two young men were practically climbing out of their seats, their faces beaming with the kind of smile only supreme confidence can produce. Deciding to end the charade I said, “I think we all know the answer, but to make it fair, on the count of three just yell out the answer. One. Two. Three.” “Jesus Christ” they both exclaimed in unison – was that your answer as well? Both young men sat back completely satisfied with their answer, confident it was the right one…, but I remained silent. Five seconds ticked away without a response, then ten. The confidence of my two young friends clearly began to drain away. It was about this time that my wife began to shake her head and smile to herself. Finally, one of them asked, “It is Jesus Christ, right? It has to be!” Shaking my head, I said, “Actually, I was describing the Greek god Dionysus.

Strategic email marketing is what’s going to move the sales needle, but just doing the same old email blasts, and that sort of thing somewhat randomly is very unlikely to generate the kind of leads and sales you’re looking for.

[...]One positions an Axis of Evil where there is none. Good is directive, directional; it has a finality in principle and therefore constitutes an axis. Evil is more of a parallax. It is never directional, and is not even opposed to Good. There is always some kind of diversion, a deviation, a curve. As Good goes straight ahead, Evil deviates. It is a deviance, a perversion. You never know where Evil is going, or how. It cannot be mastered. In almost topological terms, it is merely a deviation. Only Good could lay claim to being an axis. But this axis is projected on Evil; an imaginary Axis of Evil is created to justify the Axis of Good. This is a strategic mistake. When you try to target Evil in its unfindable axis, when you fight it militarily, with a frontal attack, you can only miss it.

So a family member of mine recently said, "I got locked out of my apartment." It's funny. She left the keys in the apartment, then she locked the door. But she doesn't say she locked herself out, she says "I got locked out." I could correct her and say "you locked yourself out," but it might be kind of obnoxious - she knows she did it, I know she did it, she's using language to let herself off the hook a little bit.

can any organization really be sure of its strengths before it tests them? Every strategic change involves some new experience, a step into the unknown, the taking of some kind of risk. Therefore no organization can ever be sure in advance whether an established competence will prove to be a strength or a weakness.

Do reporting relationships help align effort? Is it clear who is accountable for what? Is the work of different units integrated effectively? Is the allocation of decision rights helping us make the best decisions to support the strategy? Is the right balance achieved between centralization and decentralization? Between standardization and customization? Are we measuring and rewarding the kinds of achievements that matter most to our strategic aims? Is the balance right between fixed rewards and performance-based rewards? Between individual incentives and group incentives?

This enemy seems to be on many counts a projection of the self: both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. A fundamental paradox of the paranoid style is the imitation of the enemy. The enemy, for example, may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry. Senator McCarthy, with his heavily documented tracts and his show of information, Mr. Welch with his accumulations of irresistible evidence, John Robison with his laborious study of documents in a language he but poorly used, the anti-Masons with their endlessly painstaking discussions of Masonic ritual—all these offer a kind of implicit compliment to their opponents. Secret organizations set up to combat secret organizations give the same flattery. The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy. The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through “front” groups, and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy. Spokesmen of the various Christian anti-Communist “crusades” openly express their admiration for the dedication, discipline, and strategic ingenuity the Communist cause calls forth.

The reason all this defector testimony and its attending literature has been ignored or ridiculed during last three decades, is because communist subversion has been effective at demoralizing our society. It is no accident that we now accept our own “effeminacy” and “loose principles” as a kind of “enlightenment.” Only in this context can we correctly interpret the frightening military developments now underway. Currently, our enemies know that we are incapable of correctly reading their strategic texts. They know that we routinely exaggerate our own military prowess even as we belittle their military buildup. All this is a consequence of a corruption that elevates feminine values where masculine values ought to predominate, together with a slackness that combines indifference, self-indulgence, and moral indecision.

Too many small businesses try to sound like billion dollar corporation. It's one thing to go to the website of American Express, where it's written in a certain kind of language, in third person and is very formal. But if you are starting a small business you do not want to come across that way. One of your strategic advantages is that you can provide more personal service, so it's better to communicate that you're homey, approachable, easy going. - page 23

The interval between the first and second wars in Iraq (1991 and 2003) has seen a remarkable shift from Clausewitz to Sun Tzu in the discourse about contemporary warfare. Clausewitz enjoyed an undreamed of renaissance in the USA after the Vietnam War and seemed to have attained the status of master thinker. On War enabled many theorists to recognize the causes of America’s traumatic defeat in Southeast Asia, as well as the conditions for gaining victory in the future. More recently, however, he has very nearly been outlawed. The reason for this change can be found in two separate developments. Firstly, there has been an unleashing of war and violence in the ongoing civil wars and massacres, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, in the secessionist wars in the former Yugoslavia, and in the persistence of inter-communal violence along the fringes of Europe’s former empires. These developments seemed to indicate a departure from interstate wars, for which Clausewitz’s theory appeared to be designed, and the advent of a new era of civil wars, non-state wars, and social anarchy. Sun Tzu’s The Art of War seemed to offer a better understanding of these kinds of war, because he lived in an era of never-ending civil wars. Secondly, the reason for the change from Clausewitz to Sun Tzu is connected with the ‘revolution in military affairs’. The concepts of Strategic Information Warfare (SIW) and fourth generation warfare have made wide use of Sun Tzu’s thought to explain and illustrate their position. The ‘real father’ of ‘shock and awe’ in the Iraq War of 2003 was Sun Tzu, argued one commentator in the Asia Times. Some pundits even claimed triumphantly that Sun Tzu had defeated Clausewitz in this war, because the US Army conducted the campaign in accordance with the principles of Sun Tzu, whereas the Russian advisers of the Iraqi army had relied on Clausewitz and the Russian defence against Napoleon’s army in 1812. The triumphant attitude has long been abandoned.

Expanding its strategy services, the company started to engage clients in the innovation process. The Simmons failure was partly explained by IDEO’s lack of appreciation for what the client’s manufacturing organization was set up to produce. The behind-closed-doors approach that served the company so well in product innovation services, shielding clients from failures along the way, backfired for strategic innovation services. To do better, IDEO began to hire more people with business degrees to complement the skills of the design, engineering, and human-factors experts. IDEO started to collaborate with clients to help them become better failure practitioners.

Isn’t it strange to see an event happening precisely because it was not supposed to happen? What kind of defense do we have against that? Whatever you come to know (that New York is an easy terrorist target, for instance) may become inconsequential if your enemy knows that you know it. It may be odd that, in such a strategic game, what you know can be truly inconsequential.

A review of China-linked espionage cases of all kinds in the US between 2000 and early 2019, carried out by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, tallied 137 reported instances. It found that 57 per cent of actors were ‘Chinese military or government employees’, 36 per cent were ‘private Chinese citizens’, and 7 per cent were ‘non-Chinese actors (usually US persons)’.29 (A study of all cases of economic espionage in the US between 2009 and 2015 found that 52 per cent of those charged were of Chinese heritage, a tripling of the percentage for the period 1997 to 2009.30) It’s possible that the high proportion of Chinese-heritage spies is due to racial bias in the FBI and Department of Justice. But rather than a sharp rise of anti-Chinese racism in federal agencies, a more plausible explanation is that Beijing has stepped up its program of industrial espionage in the US and has recruited Chinese visitors to America, and Chinese-Americans, to commit the crimes.31 Even so, the number of people of non-Chinese heritage induced to spy for China appears to be rising.

Here is the key point: Once you have determined how many projects you can support, and what mix of projects you need to support your strategy, similar projects must compete against other similar projects for budget and staff for the resources dedicated to that category of project. Let’s say that you have decided to allocate 20 percent of your available resources to positioning options. Any new candidate for getting resources that is a positioning option should compete for that 20 percent against all the other positioning projects. They shouldn’t compete against other kinds of options or against platform or enhancement launches. This ensures that you will pick only the very best positioning options for your portfolio. What’s more important, it gets you out of the constant tug-of-war between short-term and long-term projects. The strategic choice is how many of your resources you will put into each category. Then within each category, the very best projects should compete against one another for consideration.

Who are we, the people who have ADHD? We are the problem kid who drives his parents crazy by being totally disorganized, unable to follow through on anything, incapable of cleaning up a room, or washing dishes, or performing just about any assigned task; the one who is forever interrupting, making excuses for work not done, and generally functioning far below potential in most areas. We are the kid who gets daily lectures on how we’re squandering our talent, wasting the golden opportunity that our innate ability gives us to do well, and failing to make good use of all that our parents have provided. We are also sometimes the talented executive who keeps falling short due to missed deadlines, forgotten obligations, social faux pas, and blown opportunities. Too often we are the addicts, the misfits, the unemployed, and the criminals who are just one diagnosis and treatment plan away from turning it all around. We are the people Marlon Brando spoke for in the classic 1954 film On the Waterfront when he said, “I coulda been a contender.” So many of us coulda been contenders, and shoulda been for sure. But then, we can also make good. Can we ever! We are the seemingly tuned-out meeting participant who comes out of nowhere to provide the fresh idea that saves the day. Frequently, we are the “underachieving” child whose talent blooms with the right kind of help and finds incredible success after a checkered educational record. We are the contenders and the winners. We are also imaginative and dynamic teachers, preachers, circus clowns, and stand-up comics, Navy SEALs or Army Rangers, inventors, tinkerers, and trend setters. Among us there are self-made millionaires and billionaires; Pulitzer and Nobel prize winners; Academy, Tony, Emmy, and Grammy award winners; topflight trial attorneys, brain surgeons, traders on the commodities exchange, and investment bankers. And we are often entrepreneurs. We are entrepreneurs ourselves, and the great majority of the adult patients we see for ADHD are or aspire to be entrepreneurs too. The owner and operator of an entrepreneurial support company called Strategic Coach, a man named Dan Sullivan (who also has ADHD!), estimates that at least 50 percent of his clients have ADHD as well.

Ambition motivates one to excel in giving his best. Ambition can show appreciation for the strategic value of a high position of strong influence. And if that influence profits the company and honors the Lord, would not that kind of ambition possibly come from the Lord himself?

the story both overemphasized and underemphasized 1980, the definitive pivot point of Reagan’s election. The overemphasis was because I really hadn’t known about all the crucial advance work done by big business and the economic right during the 1970s—the decade of strategizing, funding, propagandizing, mobilizing, lobbying, and institution-building. My initial underemphasis was due to a different kind of ignorance. Because I’d lived through the 1980s and definitely noticed in real time, plain as day, the rapid and widespread uptick in deference to business and the rich and profits and the market,

battered and broken Thomas pleaded with Watson, as the new owner of his company, to be kind to a long-time devoted employee. Amos Thomas had been conquered.51

best market research companies in Myanmar: With AMT Market Research, you can learn more about Myanmar, a new market with a lot of potential. It is becoming a popular destination for businesses looking to expand in Southeast Asia. However, a thorough comprehension of the local consumer behavior, trends, and regulatory frameworks is necessary for successfully navigating this dynamic and rapidly changing landscape. AMT Market Research, one of the best market research companies in Myanmar, steps in to help businesses thrive by providing actionable insights and data-driven strategies. What Attracts You to AMT Market Research? AMT Market Research is well-known for providing customized, dependable, and comprehensive market research services. With a solid presence in Myanmar, AMT has been at the bleeding edge of assisting both neighborhood and worldwide organizations with figuring out the complexities of this one of a kind market. AMT stands out as one of the best market research companies in Myanmar for the following reasons: Local Knowledge: Myanmar is a nation with distinctive social, cultural, and ec onomic characteristics. AMT Market Research employs seasoned professionals who are well-versed in the dynamics of the local market. They provide in-depth knowledge of consumer behavior, upcoming trends, and potential obstacles unique to Myanmar's market. A Variety of Services: AMT Market Research offers a wide range of services, such as consumer research, competitor analysis, brand positioning, and product testing. Each client receives a service that is tailored to meet their specific requirements, ensuring that insights are accurate and actionable. Insights Driven by Data: To collect data, AMT makes use of cutting-edge research methods like qualitative and quantitative methods. AMT makes sure that the data it collects—from focus groups and surveys to in-depth interviews and field studies—is relevant and aids businesses in making informed decisions. Research on a Specific Sector: AMT Market Research provides industry-specific studies for businesses in the retail, telecom, healthcare, FMCG, and financial sectors. Businesses can more effectively target their audience and optimize their strategies using precise data thanks to this sector-specific approach. Strategic Entry into a Market: AMT provides strategic insights that can assist businesses attempting to navigate the complexities of market entry for the Myanmar market. AMT assists businesses in avoiding costly errors and accelerating growth by comprehending regulatory frameworks and determining the appropriate distribution channels. AMT Market Research's Advantages Accurate Data Collection: Get a clear picture of the market by having access to accurate, real-time data. Recommendations for Taking Action: AMT provides recommendations that assist businesses in taking immediate action in addition to providing data. Cost-effective Options: AMT Market Research is a cost-effective option for businesses of all sizes because they offer competitive pricing for their services. Conclusion: AMT Market Research is your go-to partner if you want your business in Myanmar to succeed long-term and with knowledge. AMT is one of the best market research companies in Myanmar thanks to their data-driven approach, extensive expertise, and wide range of services. Partner with AMT Market Research right away to empower your business with important insights!

In large-scale strategy, the presence of numerous troops is linked with an extra-long sword. Smaller numbers are consistent with the use of a short one. Is it not viable for a small number of troops to take the fight to a larger force? The virtue of strategy is precisely that smaller numbers can triumph [if guided correctly]. From the earliest days, there are many examples of small forces crushing big armies. In our school, this kind of narrow-minded preconception is to be rejected above all else. Research this well. (2) About Schools That Use Swords with Force （一、他流におゐてつよみの太刀と云事） One should not consider a sword [stroke] in terms of being strong or weak. The cut will be coarse if the sword is brandished with too much brute force. Such an uneven technique will make victory difficult. You will not succeed in cutting through human flesh and bone if you think only of striking with brute force. It is also bad to use too much power when testing the cutting power of a blade (tameshi-giri).4 When punishing some mortal foe, nobody thinks of cutting feebly or brutishly. “Cutting to kill” it is not achieved with a mind to do it strongly, and certainly not weakly. It is achieved with just enough power to ensure death. Your own sword could break into pieces by hitting the enemy’s sword with excess strength. Consequently, it is senseless to strike with excessive force. In large-scale strategy, relying on force of numbers to rout the enemy will lead to him countering with equal force. Both sides will be the same. Winning at anything is not achievable if correct principles are ignored. Thus, the underlying principle of my school is to defeat the enemy in any situation by applying strategic wisdom, without incorporating anything that is “excessive.”5 This must be researched attentively. (3) Schools That Use Short Swords （一、他流に短き太刀を用る事） Some warriors try to win using only short swords but this is at variance with the true Way. Since antiquity, swords were called tachi and katana, proving that distinctions have long been made between short and longer lengths.6 Warriors of superior strength can brandish a long sword as if it were light and thus there is no reason for them to prefer a shorter sword. They are, in fact, capable of wielding even longer weapons, such as yari (pikes) and naginata (glaives). With shorter swords, it is ill advised to look for openings as the enemy swings his blade and closing the distance to grab him. Aiming for an opening as the opponent attacks gives the impression of relinquishing the initiative and should be avoided as your swords will become entangled.

When we started Nalanda in 2007, there was a lot of buzz around a company called Eicher Motors led by a young, dynamic guy called Siddhartha Lal. Lal had inherited a hodgepodge of poor-quality businesses from his father in 2004. They manufactured motorcycles, footwear, garments, tractors, trucks, auto components, and a few other products, and none was an industry leader. In a remarkably bold strategic move, Lal decided to divest thirteen of the fifteen businesses to focus on just two products: trucks and motorcycles.30 Almost every analyst was gung ho about the future of Eicher; they were all taken in by its dynamic leader who was aggressively culling businesses, something that Indian firms rarely did. However, in 2007, this was a turnaround story with no empirical evidence of success. The company’s biggest hit, the Enfield Classic motorcycle, was launched only in 2010. We decided not to invest in the business. By the 2010s, the company’s motorcycles had taken on cult status in the Indian consumer’s mind. Sales exploded from just 52,000 units in 2009 to 822,000 units in 2019: a sixteen-fold growth. If you had listened to what we had to say about the business, you would not have invested. Your opportunity loss? Seventy times your money from 2007 until 2021. Tesla and Eicher Motors are the kinds of type II error we will inevitably commit because we reject highly indebted businesses, rapidly evolving industry landscapes, and turnarounds.

The small group is the most strategic training environment used by Christ to make the kind of disciples that glorify God.

strategic thinking as an informal process, noting: It’s not this kind of problem solving, formula, straight-line thinking—it’s more about just opening up—seeing what kinds of opinions you can draw on. How many different perspectives can you find? What precedent has been set? Is there a new twist you can give? It’s not very linear.

Cell’s final kind of learning, transcendent learning, requires that we modify or create whole new concepts. This kind of learning is generative and provides new possibilities and new tools for interpreting individual situations. Transcendent learning is sometimes referred to as transformational learning.

Surf learning holds to validity tests of facts, measurements, and outcomes; something is true or false, accurate or inaccurate. The validity test is seen in concrete experience—something either happens or it does not; there is a result or there is not. This kind of testing is typical and familiar in strategy discussions and debates. Meanwhile,

Clients with whom I have worked have occasionally experienced this kind of intense, life-redefining frame change as a result of major loss—both expected or unexpected—such as a corporate takeover, the death of a partner, spouse, or child, or the diagnosis of a critical disease, to name just a few. An intense transformational learning experience can also result from a gain, such as the realization that over the years their income has ballooned to substantially more than that of their parents, a successful corporate takeover, the birth of a child, recovery from a critical illness, or adjusting to living in a different country. Executives who have experienced learning in these circumstances sometimes claim to feel “enlightened” or to have become a “new person.

Speaking of cupcakes, Will wants two dozen off your special menu to take on the road after the wedding.” “The, erm, peach kind?” “The peach kind,” Lindsey said. “I like the peach kind,” Josh said. Mikey had named them Sex on a Peach. And they were Kimmie’s second biggest seller, after the Hairy Dicks, which were coconut cake balls strategically placed with Dahlia’s chocolate-covered, ice cream-filled bananas. And Josh’s frown had disappeared, and now he was grinning as if he knew it. All of it.

Is that not what consumer research is for—to find out before the fact what is going to happen? The answer is that Detroit never really researched customers’ wants. It only researched their preferences between the kinds of things it had already decided to offer them. For Detroit is mainly product oriented, not customer oriented.

A low-context culture is a place where little is left to assumption so things are spelled out explicitly. In contrast, high-context cultures are places where people have significant history together and so a great deal of understanding can be assumed. Things operate in high-context cultures as if everyone there is an insider and knows how to behave. Written instructions and explicit directions are minimal because most people know what to do and how to think. Our families are probably the most tangible examples we have of high-context environments. After years of being together, we know what the unspoken rules are of what to eat, how to celebrate holidays, and how to communicate with each other. Many of our workplaces are the same. We know when to submit check requests, how to publicize an event, and how to dress on “casual” Fridays. New employees joining these kinds of organizations can really feel lost without adequate orientation. And many religious services are also very high context. People routinely stand, bow, or recite creeds that appear very foreign and confusing to someone just joining a religious community for the first time. Discerning whether a culture provides direct and explicit communication versus one that assumes a high degree of shared understanding is a strategic point of knowledge. And leaders need to bear in mind the areas of their own organizational and national culture that are high context and how that affects outsiders when they enter. Table

Her relationships were more about shared memories and common values than about strategic partnerships to help each other succeed. That one killed me. I’d ask why we were getting together with so-and-so and she’d say something about how they hadn’t seen each other in a long time and one time they’d stayed up all night smoking cigarettes on the lawn and talking about boys. I had no mental category for that kind of friendship. I wasn’t sure how that kind of friendship profited anybody anything. What were they trying to build? Who were they trying to beat? What were the rules of the game, and how were they going to win? These are the questions in life that matter, right? “Staying up all night smoking cigarettes and talking about boys seems to me a waste of time,” I said sweetly. Betsy rolled her eyes. “Sometimes the real bonding happens in conversations about nothing, Don,” she said. “Sometimes being willing to talk about nothing shows how much we want to be with each other. And that’s a powerful thing.” She might be right. I’m unwilling to say at this point. God knows I’m not staying up all night to sit on a lawn and talk about nothing. Betsy said if we have children I’ll do it and I suppose I will. It’s funny what happens to you when part of your heart gets born inside somebody else. I trust I’ll do the crazy things parents do and they won’t seem crazy.

Ben ducked beneath the arbor and paused by the fishpond when a memory crept upon him like a shadow. This was the spot where Alice had first read to him from her manuscript. He could still hear her voice, as if it had somehow been captured by the leaves around them and was being played back now, just for him, like a gramophone recording. "I've had a brilliant idea," he heard her say, so young and innocent, so full of joy. "I've been working on it all morning and I don't like to boast, but I'm quite sure it's going to be my best yet." "Is it?" Ben had said with a smile. He'd been teasing, but Alice had been far too excited to notice. She'd leapt on with telling him about her idea, the plot, the characters, the twist, and the intensity of her focus- her passion- changed her face completely, bringing an animated beauty to her features. He hadn't noticed she was beautiful until she spoke to him of her stories. Her cheeks flushed and her eyes shone with intelligence. And she was 'very' clever. It took a certain kind of clever to figure out a puzzle- to look ahead and see through all the possible scenarios, to be so strategic. Ben didn't have that kind of brain. In the beginning he'd simply enjoyed her enthusiasm, the indulgence of being told a story while he worked, the chance to bat ideas back and forth, which was so much like play. She made him feel young, he supposed; her youthful preoccupation with her work, with the very moment they were in, was intoxicating. It made his adult worries disappear.

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Of course I read the same data everybody else does (laughter) … everybody reads the same things! But you know, one of the advantages to traveling is that you hear from people first-hand. We need to get out there and talk to people and think about things, and think about different things—what it could mean for us. Talking to people is kind of a check. Actually, it gives perspective and meaning to data, when everybody’s reading the same stuff. It

Swallows   The peppered sky chimes in the key of swallows. Arcing northward from Central America, dual citizens of the torn world, though native to the unity, wonderful yet I find myself dispossessed of wonder. Like the birds, we all sleep under bridges of one kind or another. When the core competency of a culture is strategic judgmentalism many things go rancid into the mean and meaningless. The routines set in, the procedures, the long, slow death-drone of sameness. The occasional lone hawk feathers up a bit of mild novelty here and there, then gets wing-clipped by celebritism, homeless in a cage. If my faith was real, I would abandon my luxurious pursuit of a mythopoetic identity and go fetch water for the dying. We are each and all the dispossessed if one child stands at our gates unwelcome.

however, the round trip was a very long one (fourteen months was in fact well below the average). It was also hazardous: of twenty-two ships that set sail in 1598, only a dozen returned safely. For these reasons, it made sense for merchants to pool their resources. By 1600 there were around six fledgling East India companies operating out of the major Dutch ports. However, in each case the entities had a limited term that was specified in advance – usually the expected duration of a voyage – after which the capital was repaid to investors.10 This business model could not suffice to build the permanent bases and fortifications that were clearly necessary if the Portuguese and their Spanish allies* were to be supplanted. Actuated as much by strategic calculations as by the profit motive, the Dutch States-General, the parliament of the United Provinces, therefore proposed to merge the existing companies into a single entity. The result was the United East India Company – the Vereenigde Nederlandsche Geoctroyeerde Oostindische Compagnie (United Dutch Chartered East India Company, or VOC for short), formally chartered in 1602 to enjoy a monopoly on all Dutch trade east of the Cape of Good Hope and west of the Straits of Magellan.11 The structure of the VOC was novel in a number of respects. True, like its predecessors, it was supposed to last for a fixed period, in this case twenty-one years; indeed, Article 7 of its charter stated that investors would be entitled to withdraw their money at the end of just ten years, when the first general balance was drawn up. But the scale of the enterprise was unprecedented. Subscription to the Company’s capital was open to all residents of the United Provinces and the charter set no upper limit on how much might be raised. Merchants, artisans and even servants rushed to acquire shares; in Amsterdam alone there were 1,143 subscribers, only eighty of whom invested more than 10,000 guilders, and 445 of whom invested less than 1,000. The amount raised, 6.45 million guilders, made the VOC much the biggest corporation of the era. The capital of its English rival, the East India Company, founded two years earlier, was just £68,373 – around 820,000 guilders – shared between a mere 219 subscribers.12 Because the VOC was a government-sponsored enterprise, every effort was made to overcome the rivalry between the different provinces (and particularly between Holland, the richest province, and Zeeland). The capital of the Company was divided (albeit unequally) between six regional chambers (Amsterdam, Zeeland, Enkhuizen, Delft, Hoorn and Rotterdam). The seventy directors (bewindhebbers), who were each substantial investors, were also distributed between these chambers. One of their roles was to appoint seventeen people to act as the Heeren XVII – the Seventeen Lords – as a kind of company board. Although Amsterdam accounted for 57.4 per cent of the VOC’s total capital, it nominated only eight out of the Seventeen Lords.

The uncomfortable truth that not a lot of people wanted to talk about was the fact that the terrorists always had the upper hand. Always. Kind of the point of being a terrorist. They had no centralized database to hack. They didn’t have an army to monitor via satellite. They ran stealthily and quickly. Adapting to the landscape, able to make strategic changes in the blink of an eye.

points to the church at Antioch as a kind of ideal local church, in part because every social group is represented. That church was the only place Herod’s brother (an aristocrat) and a slave (considered very low) could have been drawn together. Antioch was also a strategic church because its members were all “tellers

The Lessons of the Past  Ancient strategists provide us with modes of thinking and practical guidance that we can use in the present.  First, any area, no matter how dominated by thoughtless effort, can be transformed by the application of tactics. Try to use special forces at special times and in special ways.  Second, understand that plans must change. Learn to recognize the fluid nature of reality and be aware that any strategy must constantly adapt to that reality. The most brilliant plans are those that spring into being in the action-response dynamic of the moment.  Third, preparation is the heart of strategic capability. Whether you’re running a household or a billion-dollar business, training, discipline, hard work, and sound planning are the foundations of strategic reserves, which are necessary for many kinds of maneuvers. If you have no reserves, you have no strategy.  Fourth, know your opponents. You can gain astonishing leverage if you know the preparations and capabilities of your opponents. A combination of surprise and superb tactical execution can allow you to defeat an opponent with twice your strength.  Fifth, be bold; seize your fortune. The greatest challenge in strategic thinking is getting started.

The acquisition process was complicated by the fact that the negotiators for Lucasfilm weren’t very good. The chief financial officer, in particular, underestimated Steve, assuming he was just another rich kid in over his head. This CFO told me that the way to establish his authority in the room was to arrive last. His thinking, which he articulated out loud to me, was that this would establish him as the “most powerful player,” since he and only he could afford to keep everyone else waiting. All that it ended up establishing, however, was that he’d never met anyone like Steve Jobs. The morning of the big negotiating session, all of us but the CFO were on time—Steve and his attorney; me, Alvy, and our attorney; Lucasfilm’s attorneys; and an investment banker. At precisely 10 A.M., Steve looked around and, finding the CFO missing, started the meeting without him! In one swift move, Steve had not only foiled the CFO’s attempt to place himself atop the pecking order, but he had grabbed control of the meeting. This would be the kind of strategic, aggressive play that would define Steve’s stewardship of Pixar for years to come—once we joined forces, he became our protector, as fierce on our behalf as he was on his own. In

In the series of great offensive pressures which Joffre delivered during the whole of the spring and autumn of 1915, the French suffered nearly 1,300,000 casualties. They inflicted upon the Germans in the same period and the same operations 506,000 casualties. They gained no territory worth mentioning, and no strategic advantages of any kind. This was the worst year of the Joffre régime. Gross as were the mistakes of the Battle of the Frontiers, glaring as had been the errors of the First Shock, they were eclipsed by the insensate obstinacy and lack of comprehension which, without any large numerical superiority, without adequate artillery or munitions, without any novel mechanical method, without any pretence of surprise or manœuvre, without any reasonable hope of victory, continued to hurl the heroic but limited manhood of France at the strongest entrenchments, at uncut wire and innumerable machine guns served with cold skill. The responsibilities of this lamentable phase must be shared in a subordinate degree by Foch, who under Joffre’s orders, but as an ardent believer, conducted the prolonged Spring offensive in Artois, the most sterile and prodigal of all.

Conservative elites first turned to populism as a political strategy thanks to Richard Nixon. His festering resentment of the Establishment’s clubby exclusivity prepared him emotionally to reach out to the “silent majority,” with whom he shared that hostility. Nixon excoriated “our leadership class, the ministers, the college professors, and other teachers… the business leadership class… they have all really let down and become soft.” He looked forward to a new party of independent conservatism resting on a defense of traditional cultural and social norms governing race and religion and the family. It would include elements of blue-collar America estranged from their customary home in the Democratic Party. Proceeding in fits and starts, this strategic experiment proved its viability during the Reagan era, just when the businessman as populist hero was first flexing his spiritual muscles. Claiming common ground with the folkways of the “good ole boy” working class fell within the comfort zone of a rising milieu of movers and shakers and their political enablers. It was a “politics of recognition”—a rediscovery of the “forgotten man”—or what might be termed identity politics from above. Soon enough, Bill Clinton perfected the art of the faux Bubba. By that time we were living in the age of the Bubba wannabe—Ross Perot as the “simple country billionaire.” The most improbable members of the “new tycoonery” by then had mastered the art of pandering to populist sentiment. Citibank’s chairman Walter Wriston, who did yeoman work to eviscerate public oversight of the financial sector, proclaimed, “Markets are voting machines; they function by taking referenda” and gave “power to the people.” His bank plastered New York City with clever broadsides linking finance to every material craving, while simultaneously implying that such seductions were unworthy of the people and that the bank knew it. Its $1 billion “Live Richly” ad campaign included folksy homilies: what was then the world’s largest bank invited us to “open a craving account” and pointed out that “money can’t buy you happiness. But it can buy you marshmallows, which are kinda the same thing.” Cuter still and brimming with down-home family values, Citibank’s ads also reminded everybody, “He who dies with the most toys is still dead,” and that “the best table in the city is still the one with your family around it.” Yale preppie George W. Bush, in real life a man with distinctly subpar instincts for the life of the daredevil businessman, was “eating pork rinds and playing horseshoes.” His friends, maverick capitalists all, drove Range Rovers and pickup trucks, donning bib overalls as a kind of political camouflage.

Now, there obviously is a white working class in the u.s. A large one, of many, many millions. From offshore oil derricks to the construction trades to auto plants. But it isn't a proletariat. It isn't the most exploited class from which capitalism derives its super profits. Far fucking from it. As a shorthand I call it the "whitetariat". Unfortunately, whenever Western radicals hear words like "unions" and "working class" a rosy glow glazes over their vision, and the "Internationale" seems to play in the background. Even many anarchists seem to fall into a daze and to magically transport themselves back to seeing the militant socialist workers of Marx and Engels' day. Forgetting that there have been many different kinds of working classes in history. Forgetting that Fred Engels himself criticized the English industrial working class of the late 19th century as a "bourgeois proletariat", an aristocracy of labor. He pointed out how you could tell the non-proletarian, "bourgeois" strata of the English working class – they were the sectors that were dominated by adult men, not women or children. Engels also wrote that the "bourgeois" sectors were those that were unionized. Sounds like a raving ultra-leftist, doesn't he? (which he sure wasn't). So that this is a strategic and not a tactical problem, that it has a material basis in imperialized class privilege, has long been understood by those willing to see reality. (the fact that we have radical movements here addicted to not seeing reality is a much larger crisis than any one issue).

As challenges become more complex the appropriate strategy is one that mixes new ingredients into the soup and then waits to see what kind of flavours come out.

may also include coming up with a number—that is, the amount of money you’d be happy to walk away with when the time comes—and a time frame. Stage two is strategic. It requires learning to view your company as a product itself, not just as a deliverer of products or services, and then building into it the qualities and characteristics that will maximize its value and allow you to have the kind of exit you want. Stage three is about execution. It’s the process you go through to get a deal done, whatever type of exit you may be looking for, be it a sale to a third party, a management

In his outstanding book Why the Allies Won (1995), the British historian Richard Overy analyses the outcomes of the Second World War, which were not, he claims, a given. One explanation he offers is the German army’s attempt to optimise use of its military munitions at the expense of tactical combat efficiency. At one point in the war, the Germans had no fewer than 425 different kinds of aircraft, 151 kinds of trucks, and 150 kinds of motorcycles. The price they paid for the technical superiority of German-made munitions was difficulty in mass-production, which was ultimately more important from a strategic point of view. In the decisive battles fought in Russia, one German force had to carry approximately one million spare parts for hundreds of types of armed carriers, trucks and motorcycles. The Russians, in contrast, used only two types of tanks, making for much simpler munitions maintenance during war. It was ‘good enough’ for them.

You need to be more strategic.” When someone receives this kind of feedback, what does it mean?

We can already see from the aforementioned things that faith is an integral part of the Christian life. I would even go so far as to say that without it we cannot really live a Christian life at all. So why does the subject of faith seem so elusive to so many people? The Bible tells us in Hebrews 11:6, “But without faith it is impossible to please Him [God]....” Satan knows that if you and I learn to walk by faith in every area of our lives, we will ultimately be pleasing to God. Therefore, the enemy has strategically brought confusion in the area of faith. It seems that faith has become a taboo word. Over the past 20 years, the church has embraced many dimensions of the New Testament paradigm, such as prophecy, apostolic ministry, the gifts of the Spirit, and revival culture; however, it seems that we have still fallen short in the area of faith. This subject has been smeared with abuse, misunderstanding, ignorance, and outright fear. Once we learn to tap into this kind of faith, we are accessing the realm of the supernatural, and it is in this environment that we experience the miraculous.

WHY SATAN HATES FAITH We can already see from the aforementioned things that faith is an integral part of the Christian life. I would even go so far as to say that without it we cannot really live a Christian life at all. So why does the subject of faith seem so elusive to so many people? The Bible tells us in Hebrews 11:6, “But without faith it is impossible to please Him [God]....” Satan knows that if you and I learn to walk by faith in every area of our lives, we will ultimately be pleasing to God. Therefore, the enemy has strategically brought confusion in the area of faith. It seems that faith has become a taboo word. Over the past 20 years, the church has embraced many dimensions of the New Testament paradigm, such as prophecy, apostolic ministry, the gifts of the Spirit, and revival culture; however, it seems that we have still fallen short in the area of faith. This subject has been smeared with abuse, misunderstanding, ignorance, and outright fear. Once we learn to tap into this kind of faith, we are accessing the realm of the supernatural, and it is in this environment that we experience the miraculous.

The Huge Artifice: an interim assessment Enough of this great work has now appeared For sightings to be taken, the ground cleared, Though the main purpose - what it's all about In the thematic sense - remains in doubt. We can be certain, even at this stage, That seriousness adequate to engage Our deepest critical concern is not To be found here. First: what there is of plot Is thin, repetitive, leaning far too much On casual meetings, parties, fights and such, With that excessive use of coincidence Which betrays authorial inexperience. We note, besides these evident signs of haste, A great deal in most questionable taste: Too many sex-scenes, far too many coarse Jokes, most of which have long lost all their force. It might be felt that, after a slow start, Abundance incident made amends for art, But the work's 'greatness' is no more than size, While the shaping mind, and all that implies, Is on a trivial scale, as can be guessed From the brash nature of the views expressed By a figure in an early episode, who Was clearly introduced in order to Act as some kind of author-surrogate, Then hastily killed off - an unfortunate Bid to retrieve a grave strategic lapse. More damaging than any of this, the gaps In sensitivity displayed are vast. Concepts that have not often been surpassed For ignorance or downright nastiness - That the habit of indifference is less Destructive than the embrace of love, that crimes Are paid for never or a thousand times, That the gentle come to grief - all these are forced Into scenes, dialogue, comment, and endorsed By the main action, manifesting there An inhumanity beyond despair. One final point remains: it has been urged That a few characters are not quite submerged In all this rubbish, the they can display Reason, justice and forethought on their day, And that this partly exculpates the mind That was their author. Not at all. We find Many of these in the history of art (So this reviewer feels), who stand apart, Who by no purpose but their own begin To struggle free from a base origin.

There are two main kinds of decisions: strategic decisions and operational decisions. BI

What resulted from this approach was a complicated flowchart enabling the Kochs to use their fortune to influence public policy from an astounding number of different directions at once. At the top, the funds all came from the same source—the Kochs. And in the end, the contributions all served the same pro-business, limited-government goals. But they funneled the money simultaneously through three different kinds of channels. They made political contributions to party committees and candidates, such as Dole. Their business made contributions through its political action committee and exerted influence by lobbying. And they founded numerous nonprofit groups, which they filled with tax-deductible contributions from their private foundations. Other wealthy activists made political contributions, and other companies lobbied. But the Kochs’ strategic and largely covert philanthropic spending became their great force magnifier.

Because of the constant media surveillance, I could not venture out to see the countless tributes that mourners laid down in front of the zoo. But all the items were collected and stored safely, and we now display a lovely memorial selection. The public response to Steve’s death would have overwhelmed him most of all--the kind thoughts, prayers, sympathy, and tears. I wasn’t facing this grief on my own. So many people from around the world were trying to come to terms with it as well. The process seemed particularly difficult for children who had not had the opportunity to experience the circle of life as Bindi had. I felt it was important to get a message out to them. When your hero dies, everything he stood for does not end. Everything he stood for must continue. There was never a doubt in my mind that I’d keep working toward stopping the destruction of our environment and wildlife that was spiraling out of control. There were so many triumphs that Steve had already worked so hard for. I sat down with Wes. “First, we’re going to work on everything Steve wanted to achieve,” I said. “Then we’ll move on to everything that we were collectively working toward. And finally, I want to continue with my own goals, in terms of our conservation work.” We strategized about the expansion of the zoo. I didn’t want to just maintain the zoo as it was, I wanted to follow Steve’s plans for the future. I felt that I was still having this wonderful, cheeky, competitive relationship with Steve. Wes and I took the stacks of plans, blueprints, and manila folders from Steve’s desk. I assembled them and laid them out on a conference table. “This was Steve’s plan for Australia Zoo over the next ten years,” I said. “I want to do it in five.” We would secure more land. I remember the first two acres we ever bought to enlarge the zoo, how Steve and I sat with our arms around each other, looking at the property next door and dreaming. Now we were negotiating for an additional five hundred acres of forestry land. This tract would join the existing zoo property with the five hundred acres of our conservation property, bringing our total to fifteen hundred acres at Australia Zoo. This winter we christened Steve’s Whale One, a whale-watching excursion boat that will realize another of his long-held dreams. He always wanted to expand the experience of the zoo to include whales. Steve’s Whale One is a way for people to see firsthand some of the most amazing creatures on earth. The humpbacks in Australian waters approach whale-watching boats with curiosity and openness. It is a delightful experience, and one that I am confident will work to help inspire people and end the inhumane practice of whaling.

Delivering great content requires some kind of investment: user research, strategic planning, meaningful metadata, web writing skills, and editorial oversight.

The first Superfortress reached Tokyo just after midnight, dropping flares to mark the target area. Then came the onslaught. Hundreds of planes—massive winged mechanical beasts roaring over Tokyo, flying so low that the entire city pulsed with the booming of their engines. The US military’s worries about the city’s air defenses proved groundless: the Japanese were completely unprepared for an attacking force coming in at five thousand feet. The full attack lasted almost three hours; 1,665 tons of napalm were dropped. LeMay’s planners had worked out in advance that this many firebombs, dropped in such tight proximity, would create a firestorm—a conflagration of such intensity that it would create and sustain its own wind system. They were correct. Everything burned for sixteen square miles. Buildings burst into flame before the fire ever reached them. Mothers ran from the fire with their babies strapped to their backs only to discover—when they stopped to rest—that their babies were on fire. People jumped into the canals off the Sumida River, only to drown when the tide came in or when hundreds of others jumped on top of them. People tried to hang on to steel bridges until the metal grew too hot to the touch, and then they fell to their deaths. After the war, the US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded: “Probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a six-hour period than at any time in the history of man.” As many as 100,000 people died that night. The aircrews who flew that mission came back shaken. [According to historian] Conrad Crane: “They’re about five thousand feet, they are pretty low... They are low enough that the smell of burning flesh permeates the aircraft...They actually have to fumigate the aircraft when they land back in the Marianas, because the smell of burning flesh remains within the aircraft. (...) The historian Conrad Crane told me: I actually gave a presentation in Tokyo about the incendiary bombing of Tokyo to a Japanese audience, and at the end of the presentation, one of the senior Japanese historians there stood up and said, “In the end, we must thank you, Americans, for the firebombing and the atomic bombs.” That kind of took me aback. And then he explained: “We would have surrendered eventually anyway, but the impact of the massive firebombing campaign and the atomic bombs was that we surrendered in August.” In other words, this Japanese historian believed: no firebombs and no atomic bombs, and the Japanese don’t surrender. And if they don’t surrender, the Soviets invade, and then the Americans invade, and Japan gets carved up, just as Germany and the Korean peninsula eventually were. Crane added, The other thing that would have happened is that there would have been millions of Japanese who would have starved to death in the winter. Because what happens is that by surrendering in August, that givesMacArthur time to come in with his occupation forces and actually feedJapan...I mean, that’s one of MacArthur’s great successes: bringing in a massive amount of food to avoid starvation in the winter of 1945.He is referring to General Douglas MacArthur, the supreme commander for the Allied powers in the Pacific. He was the one who accepted theJapanese emperor’s surrender.Curtis LeMay’s approach brought everyone—Americans and Japanese—back to peace and prosperity as quickly as possible. In 1964, the Japanese government awarded LeMay the highest award their country could give a foreigner, the First-Class Order of Merit of the Grand Cordon of the Rising Sun, in appreciation for his help in rebuilding the Japanese Air Force. “Bygones are bygones,” the premier of Japan said at the time.

Yet, we can’t bypass these emotions. The strategic question is how to selectively provoke resentment, bring it to consciousness, or rather bring shame to conscious and transform it into resentment, and educate it in the direction of a more sober, slow-burning, impersonal class hate, one that is patient, rigorous, humane, pluralist, anti-Manichaean and constructive. I think of how Bernie Sanders campaigns in the United States, linking resentment toward billionaires and the rich with demands like a $15 minimum wage, and contrast it ruefully with the priestly pieties of “the politics of kindness” and “they go low, we go high”. Not that kindness and the high road are undesirable, and not that we could or should imitate the Right’s relentless nihilistic war on decency and truth. But we must start with the dark materials, the labour of the negative, if we are to get there.

In addition to improving R&D and engineering processes, we pushed hard for our business leaders to treat R&D more strategically. Our individual business units used to decide how much to spend on R&D based on previous budgets and what they thought their proper “share” of available money was, regardless of the impact on current and future projects. We centralized R&D budgeting at the business level, analyzing potential projects and channeling more funds to those we thought would yield the biggest business impact. In our Aerospace business, we also began choosing new projects in ways that would balance long- and short-term growth. Most new product development had entailed what we called “long-cycle” projects. We’d invest in designing a revolutionary new cockpit design, but it might be six to eight years before the project was finished and sales started coming in. Beginning around 2005, we balanced these kinds of projects with new, “short-cycle” ones—products that customers might purchase within months, not years (incremental enhancements to existing aircraft, for instance, rather than entirely new platforms for new aircrafts). Then we started adding the salespeople to support it, giving it an even bigger boost in 2010. Together, the combination of short- and long-cycle projects would allow us to realize steadier, more predictable growth. Over the years, our shorter-cycle products have grown, and today they are a highly profitable, $1 billion business.

Colonizers justify their oppression of the subordinated group by regarding it as a monolithic “other” that can be stereotyped and disparaged. Strategic essentialism applies this same sense of monolithic group identity as an act of resistance, suspending individuality and in-group diversity within the subordinated group for the purpose of promoting common goals through a common identity. In other words, it defines a particular kind of identity politics, built around intentional double standards.

Practice: Mantras for Patience Pick one or two of these mantras, write them on sticky notes, and post them strategically around your home. Repeat to yourself as needed! I help my child most when I am calm. When the kids start yelling, I get calmer. I choose peace. [Breathing in] I am love. [Breathing out] I can pause. Relax, release, smile. This will pass. Breathe. Just be kind. It is what it is.

I grew up—as most women do—believing that the world was inherently dangerous. These narratives were most often pushed by people who had never truly gone out to see for themselves. Why would they? They had been traumatized by the nightly news and the horror movies and the wide-eyed stories whispered from one woman to another. It’s a profitable business, the business of fear. For every terrifying scenario, there is a strategically placed antidote for sale alongside it. I spent many nights alone in the van beneath streetlights or blackened desert skies wishing that I could snap my fingers and erase all the stories I’d been told, but I couldn’t. If I was going to do these things alone, I was going to have to do them afraid. I would not let societally induced fear be a placeholder for the kind of life I wanted to live,

Innovation starts with information. If you want your team to solve more problems or to bring more ideas, they need Clarity about where you’re headed and what matters most. They need to know the one to three big strategic priorities where their ideas would make the most difference and which kinds of best practices are most important to share.

With the absence of subsidized childcare, paid federal parental leave, and rampant pregnancy discrimination, young women who have had a healthy amount of class advantages are left to ask themselves if they want to effectively lose them—because that’s what parenthood in the United States will ultimately entail: If they want to partake in a different kind of labor that will offer them fewer legal protections, limited pay, increased hours, increased personal financial burdens, and with zero support from the institutions to which they have dedicated expanding days and increased workloads. In this increasing neoliberal cultural terrain, where everyone is encouraged to optimize themselves for the best employment, the strongest partnerships, the most successful path, what strategically middle-class, somewhat self-aware woman wants to do more work for less money? If it wasn’t parenthood we were talking about but a white-collar job, Sheryl Sandberg would tell these young women to lean out. The pragmatics of having a baby are fundamentally incompatible with the dominant cultural messages surrounding economic security, class ascension, and performance aimed at women of these particular socioeconomic backgrounds. This is the tension that underlies many of these waffling motherhood essays and, I think, what young, professional, child-curious people are looking to reconcile when they click on these “Should I, a Middle-Class Woman Who Went to NYU, Have a Baby and Fuck Up This Good Thing?” headlines. But what often awaits them is a contemplation of “choice” and very seldom an expanded structural critique. They are placated into the numbing mantra that having children is “a personal choice,” encouraging increased individual reflection on what is actually a raging systemic failure that relies on women’s free labor. But structuring the conversation of having children around personal autonomy and lone circumstances also successfully eclipses the identification of parenthood as labor in the first place.

My fear is that, perhaps without even realizing it, we’ve fallen into the very dangerous habit of neglecting God’s commands in favor of our logic. For example, if I invite the most famous Christian artist to do a concert at my church, I’m sure to get a crowd of people, maybe even some open-minded unbelievers. I can give a gospel presentation in the middle and an altar call at the end, and through a couple hours of work, I’m almost guaranteed to have some kind of positive response. On the other hand, if I commit to becoming like family with a few other believers, I could spend years pouring time and energy into building those relationships, and I have no idea how that is going to affect any unbelievers. I would have to put all my hope in a promise. When I look at those two options, there’s no question which one makes more sense in the flesh. Many people stop right there and make their decision. But I would ask you to consider: • Does marching around a city seven times and blowing trumpets sound like the most effective way to conquer a city? • Does a little shepherd boy with a slingshot sound like the best candidate to defeat a giant warrior? This list could be expanded at length, but you get the point. God often asks people to pursue strategies that don’t make the most logical sense. If they did make sense to us, we wouldn’t need faith. And without faith, it is impossible to please God (Hebrews 11:6) God’s ways are not our ways. He has not asked us to strategize; He has asked us to obey. It seems simple, so why haven’t we obeyed? I can’t speak for you, but I know what usually keeps me from staying committed to His plan: disbelief.

Take a look at your calendar and write down your role in meetings. This goes for explicit roles, like owning a meeting’s agenda, and also for more nuanced roles, like being the first person to champion others’ ideas, or the person who is diplomatic enough to raise difficult concerns. Take a second pass on your calendar for non-meeting stuff, like interviewing and closing candidates. Look back over the past six months for recurring processes, like roadmap planning, performance calibrations, or head count decisions, and document your role17 in each of those processes. For each of the individuals you support, in which areas are your skills and actions most complementary to theirs? How do you help them? What do they rely on you for? Maybe it’s authorization, advice navigating the organization, or experience in the technical domain. Audit inbound chats and emails for requests and questions coming your way. If you keep a to-do list, look at the categories of the work you’ve completed over the past six months, as well as the stuff you’ve been wanting to do but keep putting off. Think through the external relationships that have been important for you in your current role. What kinds of folks have been important, and who are the strategic partners that someone needs to know?

There are going to be some guaranteed catastrophes bearing down on you that you aren't going to be able to avoid (i.e. death), so evolution has kindly given you a strategically located mental blind spot, an inability to imagine future disasters in any way you can really believe, so that you can continue to function, as pointless as that may be...Useful. Except when disastrously bad.

Most strategic interactions are one of two kinds of “games.” In the first type of game, both sides win. Both sides are better off at the end than at the beginning. Or, at least, both sides go into the game expecting to benefit at the end. The first type of game is a win-win game. To make it work, both sides usually give something to the other side. Or trade something. Or exchange something. Or pool their resources. So something bigger is built. So they can share in something greater. So both sides win. It’s a Positive-Sum Game.6 The second type of game is different. It’s when only one side can win. At the end, only one side is better off. Which means one side isn’t better off. The other side is worse off. The other side lost. The second type of game is a win-lose game. Totaling up the additions and subtractions at the end, you get zero. What is added to one side is taken from the other side. A plus for one is a minus for the other. It’s a Zero-Sum Game. Zero-Sum Games are competition or conflict over something. Maybe it’s land. Or money. Or influence. Or a customer relationship. If one side wins it, the other side loses it. There’s a third kind of game, but it’s rare. It’s rare because both sides lose. Both sides are worse off at the end than they were at the beginning. It’s a Negative-Sum Game. If it’s planned, a Negative-Sum Game is expected to be short. Like in a war of attrition. Because people can only stand to lose for so long. People want to return to Positive-Sum Games and Zero-Sum Games as quickly as they can. The first two types of games happen all the time. In business. In war. In politics. In espionage. Even in friendships. Zero-Sum Games and Positive-Sum Games are everywhere.7

Revolutionary theory also enshrined the living utopian hope that the State would wither away, and that the political sphere would negate itself as such, in the apotheosis of a finally transparent social realm. None of this has come to pass. The political sphere has disappeared, sure enough - but so far from doing so by means of a self-transcendence into the strictly social realm, it has carried that realm into oblivion with it. We are now in the transpolitical sphere; in other words, we have reached the zero point of politics, a stage which also implies the reproduction of politics, its endless simulation. For everything that has not successfully transcended itself can only fall prey to revivals without end. So politics will never finish disappearing - nor will it allow anything else to emerge in its place. A kind of hysteresis of the political reigns. Art has likewise failed to realize the utopian aesthetic of modern times, to transcend itself and become an ideal form of life. (In earlier times, of course, art had no need of self-transcendence, no need to become a totality, for such a totality already existed - in the shape of religion.) Instead of being subsumed in a transcendent ideality, art has been dissolved within a general aestheticization of everyday life, giving way to a pure circulation of images, a transaesthetics of banality. Indeed, art took this route even before capital, for if the decisive political event was the strategic crisis of 1929, whereby capital debouched into the era of mass trans politics, the crucial moment for art was undoubtedly that of Dada and Duchamp, that moment when art, by renouncing its own aesthetic rules of the game, debouched into the transaesthetic era of the banality of the image. Nor has the promised sexual utopia materialized. This was to have consisted in the self-negation of sex as a separate activity and its self-realization as total life. The partisans of sexual liberation continue to dream this dream of desire as a totality fulfilled within each of us, masculine and feminine at once, this dream of sexuality as an assumption of desire beyond the difference between the sexes. In point of fact sexual liberation has succeeded only in helping sexuality achieve autonomy as an undifferentiated circulation of the signs of sex. Although we are certainly in transition towards a transsexual state of affairs, this has nothing to do with a revolution of life through sex - and everything to do with a confusion and promiscuity that open the door to virtual indifference (in all senses of the word) in the sexual realm.

Onboarding helps people set up the experience. Different experiences might need different kinds of content, from simple first-run experiences to complete get-started guides and how-to information.

The Road to a Hassle-Free Journey: My Experience on a World-Class Indian Highway Traveling by road in India has always been an adventure—sometimes thrilling, sometimes frustrating. But my recent journey on the Agra Etawah Toll Road Project was nothing short of a revelation. This modern highway is a game-changer for anyone who loves road trips or frequently travels between Agra and Etawah. Designed with efficiency, safety, and traveler convenience in mind, this highway offers the kind of smooth, stress-free ride that every traveler dreams of. #modernroad A Highway That Makes Driving a Pleasure From the moment I merged onto the highway, I noticed the difference. The road was flawless—well-maintained with clearly marked lanes, proper lighting, and minimal congestion. Unlike older highways that come with uneven surfaces, sudden speed breakers, and chaotic traffic, this toll road is built for comfort and efficiency. Even the toll system is designed to keep things moving. With digital payment options, quick lane processing, and well-managed toll booths, the entire experience feels effortless. No long queues, no unnecessary delays—just a smooth transition from one point to another. Safety and Convenience at Every Turn What really sets the Agra Etawah Toll Road Project apart is the emphasis on safety. With dedicated lanes for different types of vehicles, well-monitored speed limits, and emergency services along the route, travelers can drive with complete peace of mind. Additionally, the highway is equipped with proper night-time illumination, making late-night travel much safer. As someone who enjoys night drives, I found the well-lit roads and clear signboards extremely reassuring. #indiabesthighway Well-Planned Rest Stops for Travelers Long drives require breaks, and this highway understands that. Strategically placed rest stops offer everything a traveler might need—fuel stations, food courts, and clean restrooms. I took a short break at one of these stops and was pleasantly surprised by the neatness and efficiency of the service. Gone are the days of struggling to find a decent place to rest on highways. With well-maintained facilities, this toll road ensures that your journey is not just about reaching the destination but enjoying the ride itself. Enhancing Regional Connectivity Beyond the traveler experience, this highway plays a crucial role in improving connectivity between key cities. Faster travel times mean more efficient business transport, reduced fuel consumption, and an overall boost in regional trade. Highways like these are reshaping India’s road network, making travel not just convenient but also economically beneficial. For anyone looking for a smooth, well-managed, and traveler-friendly road trip, this highway is a must-experience. The Agra Etawah Toll Road Project isn’t just another road—it’s a glimpse into the future of Indian highways. #modernroadmakers

A Journey Through Perfection: Experiencing India’s Best Highway Infrastructure Traveling across India is an adventure filled with surprises, but nothing enhances the experience like a smooth, well-constructed highway. On my recent journey, I had the pleasure of driving through a highway that truly represents the pinnacle of modern road infrastructure in India. From flawless roads to scenic surroundings, this stretch stands as a testament to how far the country has come in revolutionizing its highway networks. #modernroad Seamless Driving Experience Like Never Before As I entered the highway, the first thing that caught my attention was the sheer quality of the road. The well-paved surface, neatly marked lanes, and efficient traffic management made my drive effortless. Unlike many highways where potholes and congestion make the journey exhausting, this route offered a smooth and uninterrupted ride. Wider lanes and minimal traffic congestion ensured that vehicles moved swiftly without unnecessary delays. Smart toll systems reduced wait times, making the overall journey more efficient. Clearly visible signboards and proper lighting made night driving safer and more convenient. The highway is a perfect example of how modern engineering can transform road travel into a luxurious experience. #modernroadmakers Scenic Beauty Along the Way A great highway isn’t just about infrastructure; it’s also about the experience it offers. As I drove along, I was captivated by the breathtaking landscapes surrounding the road. Green fields, small villages, and a peaceful countryside atmosphere made my trip even more enjoyable. Rest stops at strategic locations provided much-needed breaks with clean washrooms and food outlets. Lush greenery along the edges of the highway helped in reducing pollution and enhancing the visual appeal. Safe pedestrian crossings and underpasses ensured that local communities weren’t affected by high-speed vehicles. This perfect blend of nature and technology sets a new benchmark for Indian highways. #indiabesthighway Unmatched Safety and Maintenance A highway is only as good as its maintenance, and this one excels in that department. The regular upkeep and advanced monitoring systems ensure that the road remains in top condition throughout the year. Some key features that make this highway stand out include: ✔ Emergency Response Systems: Quick-response helplines and patrol vehicles are available for assistance. ✔ Well-Planned Drainage Systems: Prevents waterlogging during monsoons, making driving safer. ✔ Speed Monitoring & Surveillance: Reduces the risk of accidents and promotes disciplined driving. These aspects make it not only a comfortable but also a safe travel route for all kinds of passengers. Impact on Connectivity and Economy This highway isn’t just about convenience; it plays a crucial role in boosting regional connectivity and economic growth.

The Road to a Hassle-Free Journey: My Experience on a World-Class Indian Highway Traveling by road in India has always been an adventure—sometimes thrilling, sometimes frustrating. But my recent journey on the Agra Etawah Toll Road Project was nothing short of a revelation. This modern highway is a game-changer for anyone who loves road trips or frequently travels between Agra and Etawah. Designed with efficiency, safety, and traveler convenience in mind, this highway offers the kind of smooth, stress-free ride that every traveler dreams of. #modernroad A Highway That Makes Driving a Pleasure From the moment I merged onto the highway, I noticed the difference. The road was flawless—well-maintained with clearly marked lanes, proper lighting, and minimal congestion. Unlike older highways that come with uneven surfaces, sudden speed breakers, and chaotic traffic, this toll road is built for comfort and efficiency. Even the toll system is designed to keep things moving. With digital payment options, quick lane processing, and well-managed toll booths, the entire experience feels effortless. No long queues, no unnecessary delays—just a smooth transition from one point to another. Safety and Convenience at Every Turn What really sets the Agra Etawah Toll Road Project apart is the emphasis on safety. With dedicated lanes for different types of vehicles, well-monitored speed limits, and emergency services along the route, travelers can drive with complete peace of mind. Additionally, the highway is equipped with proper night-time illumination, making late-night travel much safer. As someone who enjoys night drives, I found the well-lit roads and clear signboards extremely reassuring. #indiabesthighway Well-Planned Rest Stops for Travelers Long drives require breaks, and this highway understands that. Strategically placed rest stops offer everything a traveler might need—fuel stations, food courts, and clean restrooms. I took a short break at one of these stops and was pleasantly surprised by the neatness and efficiency of the service. Gone are the days of struggling to find a decent place to rest on highways. With well-maintained facilities, this toll road ensures that your journey is not just about reaching the destination but enjoying the ride itself. Enhancing Regional Connectivity Beyond the traveler experience, this highway plays a crucial role in improving connectivity between key cities. Faster travel times mean more efficient business transport, reduced fuel consumption, and an overall boost in regional trade. Highways like these are reshaping India’s road network, making travel not just convenient but also economically beneficial. For anyone looking for a smooth, well-managed, and traveler-friendly road trip, this highway is a must-experience. The Agra Etawah Toll Road Project isn’t just another road—it’s a glimpse into the future of Indian highways. #modernroadmakers

City Idle Tycoon: Build Your Dream Metropolis City Idle Tycoon is a captivating city-building and management game available for free at monkeymartgame.io. This idle simulation game allows you to become the mastermind behind a growing city, where your strategic decisions shape the future of your bustling metropolis. What is City Idle Tycoon? In City Idle Tycoon, you start with a modest piece of land and gradually develop it into a thriving urban center. Construct buildings, manage resources, and optimize your layout to generate income and attract new residents. With idle gameplay mechanics, your city continues to grow and earn revenue even while you're offline, making it perfect for both casual and dedicated players. Game Features Idle Mechanics: Progress continues even when you're not playing. Collect profits and reinvest for maximum growth. City Planning: Design residential areas, commercial zones, and industrial districts to maintain a balanced economy. Upgrades and Expansion: Unlock new buildings and districts as your city evolves. Improve efficiency with strategic upgrades. User-Friendly Interface: Simple controls and a clean visual layout make the game easy to navigate and enjoy. How to Play The gameplay is straightforward. Tap or click to build and upgrade structures. Monitor your earnings, invest in infrastructure, and optimize your layout to maximize income and population growth. City Idle Tycoon delivers a satisfying mix of idle progress and strategic city management. Whether you have a few minutes or several hours, it's the kind of game that rewards both short and long play sessions. Build, manage, and watch your city come to life with every click.

I think John Mearsheimer is quite correct in his theory in describing the United States and other European or European related countries. That is to say, we do react as Graham Allison described in his "Thucydides Trap" idea. We do react militarily. We try to oppose uh the rise of others. We insist on hegemony. That is our our our history, and it derives from Europe. I don't think it applies really very well in East Asia. Pacific Asia never had, or I should say not never, but for two millennia it has not had waring states, which are typical of Europe. I mean Europe is full of little countries that relatively small countries that have been at war with each other for much of history. That's not been the pattern in in Pacific Asia. It has been the pattern in India by the way. India, like Europe, is an extension of the Eurasian landmass a peninsula. It has had this same kind of pattern of states contending with each other by whatever means they can come up with. Very Machiavellian. Actually the Indians outdo Machiavelli in their own, they make him look like a very devout Christian. I think my problem with John Mearsheimer's theory is that, I think it is a strategic theory that does not take account of cultural factors, geography and history adequately. [...]I think the pattern in in Pacific Asia just doesn't fit the Mearsheimer's or the Allison's theory very well. But, of course, he has described our behavior very well. And I think we are very foolishly leading with our chin. And I think we're very likely to get into a war, and we're going to be very sorry about that, because we're not going to win it. (Excerpt from interview "Amb. Chas Freeman: The Dangerous Myths We Tell Ourselves About China, Russia, and Iran")

While we all wish that love were a place of unconditional approval and acceptance, real-life marriage doesn’t work that way. The reality is that each of us constantly evaluates whether we’re getting as much out of the bargain as the other. When we are getting enough, our needs to strategize and negotiate recede into the background and a kind of harmony is achieved. When we’re not, we have to reexamine what we’re getting, what we’re not, and how we’re gonna go and get it. Women often feel more guilty engaging in this kind of hard-boiled, strategic thinking in marriage because they’re socialized to be more empathic and self-sacrificing.

Native American medicine men created three kinds of vortex portals: positive, negative, and mirror.

The girl you think is the perfect girl for you is never the perfect girl for you. One of these days, a girl is going to come along, and you won’t even see her comin.’ And she’ll rock your world.” Fisher said this like it was a done deal. “Oh yeah?” Finn already wanted to leave. But he wouldn’t. He would stick around until Fish was ready to go. And who knew when that would be. “Yeah! And I guarantee she won’t be your type. And you’re going to strategize, and think, and make lists. And it’s not gonna add up.” “That’s not your own theory, Fish. It’s chemistry. Opposites attract.” “Yeah. But it’s more than that. You can have opposites that don’t attract. It has to be just the right kind of opposite. And you won’t know what you’ve got . . .” “Til it’s gone?

In 1845 — she (Elizabeth Barrett) was almost forty — she began corresponding with Robert Browning, and noted that what most people call love is really a kind of warfare, with one side enjoying all the strategic advantages. Again and again one sees "the growth of power on one side" and "the struggle against it, by means legal & illegal on the other." The best counterattack that women can mount is guerrilla warfare.

the CTO is there to guide the board away from making decisive calls that are logical to people with a limited understanding of technology and the market conditions associated with it, but are clearly dangerous to somebody in the know. For example, buying a new proprietary HR and finance system on a five-year deal from a supplier that the department has already worked with for ten years might seem sensible to a non-technologist. The fact that the system is a complete pain to use (and ruinously expensive) may just about crop up on the leadership radar. What may not is the fact that systems like this are likely to become commoditised–which is to say, cheap and easily swapped with similar alternatives–in less than five years. Through a combination of ignorance and inertia, the department would be locking itself into the wrong deal, and constraining itself strategically as a result. A CTO stops this kind of mistake.

In a complex situation, when confronted with new considerations, Koba prefers to bide his time, to keep his peace, or to retreat. In all those instances when it is necessary for him to choose between the idea and the political machine, he invariably inclines toward the machine. The program must first of all create its bureaucracy before Koba can have any respect for it. Lack of confidence in the masses, as well as in individuals, is the basis of his nature. His empiricism always compels him to choose the path of least resistance. That is why, as a rule, at all the great turning points of history this near-sighted revolutionist assumes an opportunist position, which brings him exceedingly close to the Mensheviks and on occasion places him in the right of them. At the same time he invariably is inclined to favor the most resolute actions in solving the problems he has mastered. Under all conditions well-organized violence seems to him the shortest distance between two points. Here an analogy begs to be drawn. The Russian terrorists were in essence petty bourgeois democrats, yet they were extremely resolute and audacious. Marxists were wont to refer to them as "liberals with a bomb." Stalin has always been what he remains to this day—a politician of the golden mean who does not hesitate to resort to the most extreme measures. Strategically he is an opportunist; tactically he is a "revolutionist." He is a kind of opportunist with a bomb.

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

Most of the times we are mere spectators in the stadium, watching us run the race of our life. This race is not a defined format either; it could be a combination of short exhilarating sprints, strategic middle distance running, high hurdles, low hurdles or grueling marathons. The biggest challenge is the element of mystery in the format; each lap may require us to get into a rhythm to run a different kind of race and the number of laps assigned to us in the format is never known to us. We have to put our best performance irrespective of the outcome; we might blaze away to glory or we might pale into the oblivion, the race has to be run. We also share the track with fellow runners and each of them is engrossed in running their own race as per the format prescribed to them. Do not ever get intimidated by runners who zoom past us; we must plan to run our race at our own pace. Remember, the beauty of this format is that there is no competition among runners; the key is to concentrate on our own race and wish others well.

Many will agree with Valeriano and Maness. After all, nuclear weapons and tanks are thought to be irrelevant. The sheer destructiveness of modern war has supposedly rendered it unthinkable. But the destructive power of a weapon is precisely what makes it useful, especially when your objective is the total capitulation of your enemy. With better missile weapons, and better anti-missile weapons, Russia has begun to inch towards strategic nuclear supremacy. This is the kind of supremacy where America’s strategic deterrent is either destroyed in a first strike, or destroyed by Russian interceptor rockets. Meanwhile, the United States has an ABM defense so feeble, so decrepit, there is little chance it could stop a Chinese rocket let alone an advanced Russian Topol-M.

Miserabilism leads to a mixture of indifference towards the past and hatred of it. This hatred is visible in the architecture and urban planning of Europe since the war. [...] This mania for destruction, often carried out in lesser degrees by the strategic placement of a terrible building that the eye cannot escape (the Tour Montparnasse in Paris is a particularly fine example of the genre), is a symptom of an impotent rage that Europe has been left behind, is not longer in the vanguard of anything. It is also a kind of magical thinking: that by adopting the externals of modernity somehow modernity itself will be achieved and mastered.

The Creative Entrepreneur Mandala consists of four pathways that will help you design a viable creative business. Pathway 1: Heart and Meaning looks at how to follow your heart’s desire and creative dreams, while lessening the potential for heartbreak. Pathway 2: Gifts and Flow reveals how uncovering and using your unique gifts contributes to flow, or less-effortful accomplishment. Pathway 3: Value and Profitability is about creating a customer-centric business, and how to create and deliver value that people will pay for. Pathway 4: Tools and Skills presents the vital necessity of developing your business skills and leadership capacities (which few entrepreneurs are willing to do) to achieve the results you want in areas 1 through 3. Each of these four essentials is looked at as an individual pathway that, when put together, form a mandala, or flower shape. The goal is to find the overlapping center of the four pathways, which represents the “sweet spot” of your business—the absolutely unique value you offer to the marketplace that is aligned with your innermost aspirations and ideals. The mandala provides a template for working with the four pathways of the business in a visual manner. Awareness of and continual refinement of all four pathways is crucial for launching and sustaining the kind of enterprise that works for creative individuals. When even one pathway is missing, the outcome we get from our efforts is different—less—than if all four are used together. This process of refinement is meant to be continual, reflecting the dynamic nature of the marketplace and also the changing nature of our own goals and plans. Don’t be discouraged if “getting” all four pathways seems daunting at first. The mandala is a tool for reflection and critical thinking, which requires time and space to evolve. It is something to work with at regular strategic planning meetings, monthly, quarterly, and annually.

The most powerful super glue a marriage can have is to keep walking in love and dedication while going through the harder times; to still choose our spouse when we’ve experienced their worst, modeling the kind of love Christ has shown us.

we read a little farther in James, we find that the tongue cannot be tamed (James 3:7 – 8). Every creature, reptile, bird, or animal can be tamed, but not the tongue. Imagine a colossal circus full of every kind of creature: dancing bears, prancing horses — even a ferocious looking feline or two performing tricks or jumping through hoops when their trainers give the signal. But way off in one corner stands a booth with a closed curtain and a sign that reads: “The Utterly Untamable.” Then, at a very strategic time during the spectacular show the ringmaster hushes the audience in order to display this beast that will not bend. When he throws open the concealing curtain, sitting behind it is a woman

André Beaufre captured the interactive nature, the dueling character of strategic behavior when he states that strategy is the art of the dialectic of two opposing wills using force to resolve their dispute.37 A recently posited definition emphasizes the dynamic nature of this process, and of strategy, stating that strategy is a process, a constant adaptation to shifting conditions and circumstances in a world where chance, uncertainty and ambiguity dominate, a view that is very much in line with Boyd’s idea.38 Strategy has also widespread application beyond the military sphere. Since World War II civil institutions – businesses, corporations, non-military government departments, universities – have come to develop strategies, by which they usually mean policy planning of any kind.39 But here too there are various opinions of what strategy is and does.40 The following viewpoints enjoy agreement among experts:41 Strategy concerns both organization and environment: the organization uses strategy to deal with changing environments; Strategy affects overall welfare of the organization: strategic decisions are considered important enough to affect the overall welfare of the organization; Strategy involves issues of both content and process: the study of strategy includes both the actions taken, or the content of strategy, and the processes by which actions are decided and implemented; Strategies exist on different levels: firms have corporate strategy (what business shall we be in?) and business strategy (how shall we compete in each business?); Strategy involves various thought processes: strategy involves conceptual as well as analytical exercises.

As Facebook kept evolving—and growing faster with every change—the established powers of the technology and media world began paying ever closer attention. This appeared to be the kind of irresistible consumer website every executive had dreamed of owning since the Internet took off in the mid-1990s. Mark Zuckerberg suddenly had a lot of new older, well-dressed friends from Los Angeles and the East Coast. But he didn’t think like the CEO of an established technology or media company. He barely gave a thought to profit and was still ambivalent about advertising. This wasn’t easy for his newfound suitors to understand. One senior executive from a tech company recalls a frustrating visit during that time with Zuckerberg, who seemed uninterested in increasing the company’s revenue. “He didn’t know what he didn’t know,” he says. “But when he opened his mouth he was very direct, very smart, and he was very focused on Facebook as a social tool, to the point of naïveté. It sounded just too altruistic at the time. So I asked him, ‘Is it a social tool as a tactic to get to the next point?’ And he says, ‘No, all I really care about is doing this social tool.’ So I thought, ‘Either this guy is being very strategic and not telling me what his next thing is, or he’s just got his sandbox and he’s playing in it.’ I couldn’t figure it out.

In the Value Economy, you succeed by creating value for your company. You need time to create value, but a very different kind of time. You need blocks of your best, uninterrupted time to strategically focus on those things that you do for your company that create the most value. Low-value email and third-party requests? You’ll get to them, but only after you’ve invested the best hours of your week into your highest-value creation activities. The low-value stuff gets your remnant time, not your best time.

The gating resource here was not capital,” Thiel said. “The gating resource was the ideas and the people and executing it well. It’s not like lawsuits haven’t been brought in the past. It’s something that’s been done, so we were required to think very creatively about this space, what kind of lawsuit to bring.” Most of the ideas do not stand up to scrutiny, or to Thiel’s ambitions. A slap on the wrist from the FCC about affiliate commissions will accomplish little. Exploiting the financial misdeeds of the company would likely require an inside man, and this would be nasty, deceitful business. It wasn’t just a question of which strategy might actually win, it was also figuring out which one could actually do real damage. “It was important for us to win cases,” Thiel said. “We had to win. We had to get a large judgment. We did not want to bring meritless cases. We wanted to bring cases that were very strong. It was a very narrow set of context in which you could do that. You did not want to involve political speech, you did not want to involve anything that had anything remotely connected to the public interest. Ideally, our cases would not even involve the First Amendment at all.” The First Amendment was unappealing not because Thiel is a libertarian, though he is, but because as a strategist he understood that it was Gawker’s strongest and most entrenched position: we’re allowed to say anything we want. It challenges the legal system and conventional wisdom where they are the most clearly established. Forget the blocking and tackling of proof and precedent. At an almost philosophical level, the right to free speech is virtually absolute. But as Denton would himself admit to me later, free speech is sort of a Maginot Line. “It looks formidable,” he said, “it gives false confidence to defenders, but there are plenty of ways around if you’re nimble and ruthless enough.” That’s what Thiel was doing now, that’s what he was paying Charles Harder to find. Someone from Gawker would observe with some satisfaction to me, many years away from this period of preliminary strategizing from Thiel, that if Thiel had tried to go after Gawker in court for what it had written about him, litigating damages and distress from being outed, for example, he certainly would have lost. This was said as a sort of condemnation of the direction that Thiel ultimately did attack Gawker from. Which is strange because that was the point. The great strategist B. H. Liddell Hart would say that all great victories come along “the line of least resistance and the line of least expectation.” John Boyd, a fighter pilot before he was a strategist, would say that a good pilot never goes through the front door. He wins by coming through the back. And first, that door has to be located.

Few things hold the potential to so drastically alter the landscape of your life as when you claim godly authority over the insane amount of unnecessary pressures you face. Be ready to see your eyes opened as you close them in prayer. One day soon a whole new kind of woman is going to be emerging from that prayer closet. A free one. A rested one. A contented one. Strategy 9 Your Hurts Turning Bitterness to Forgiveness

The women who had passed transiently through his life would have likely all agreed that the sunburned Scottish expat possessed the kind of rugged features that promised exotic adventure—the inviting raffishness of a prom date who shows up wearing a scuffed leather jacket, riding a motorcycle with a strategically defective exhaust pipe. In reality, he had just the unkempt, haggard visage of a man who smoked too many unfiltered Dunhill cigarettes, wore too little sunblock, and long suffered from a malaise of which the only palliation seemed to come from roaming about the wilds of Africa in search of something tenacious enough to kill him.

Cruising Through Uttar Pradesh: My Ride on the Agra Etawah Toll Road Setting Off: A Spontaneous Trip Turns into a Pleasant Surprise I wasn’t planning anything big—just a simple weekend drive from Agra to Etawah to catch up with an old friend. I had heard about the Agra Etawah Toll Road Project, but honestly, I didn’t expect much. I’ve driven on plenty of highways across India, and they often come with a mixed bag of experiences. But this one… this one was different. Just minutes after entering the toll road, I realized I was in for a smooth ride—literally. Wide lanes, clean shoulders, proper lane marking, and a surface that felt like silk under my tires. A rare combination on Indian roads. #ModernRoadMakers A Highway Built for Real Travelers There’s something incredibly relaxing about a well-made highway. The kind where you don’t have to constantly hit the brakes or swerve to avoid potholes. The Agra Etawah Toll Road delivers that feeling perfectly. I was able to maintain a consistent speed, enjoy my playlist, and even admire the beautiful countryside as it passed me by. Plus, with emergency lanes, decent rest stops, and petrol stations strategically placed, the whole stretch feels safe and prepared for any traveler’s need.

Success is all about strategizing on the goals you have in mind, and putting in the right effort to accomplish those goals one by one.

Fascists, for all their posturing, are hilariously bad at handling assertiveness. They think they’re the ones in charge, but the moment someone yowls back at them, they’re completely thrown off their game. “Wh-wh-why are they so loud?” they’ll stammer, as if noise itself is the real threat. Meanwhile, you—channeling your inner cat—are already three steps ahead, making it abundantly clear that you won’t stop until your needs are met. So, the next time you’re faced with injustice, don’t wait quietly for someone to notice. Speak up. Demand what’s right with the kind of confidence only a hungry cat can muster. Be loud. Be persistent. And if the fascists try to drown you out, just yowl louder. After all, if cats can get their way with nothing but a meow and some strategic chaos, imagine what you can do with your voice.

The composition of the team itself is another task that falls to the leader. The principle here is diversity—not in the sense of affirmative action, though a range of ethnic and social backgrounds can certainly be useful. The more important kind of diversity is intellectual, to draw in people with different ways of thinking. This needs to be done strategically. Throwing a bunch of people from different backgrounds into a room and calling it diversity misses the point, which is to bring varying kinds of expertise to bear that are related to the problem at hand. The team that reinvented Febreze started with just five people; in a video explaining their experience, they described themselves this way: an artist, an archaeologist, a scientist, a philosopher, and the head honcho. All were acknowledged experts in their fields; they brought a self-confidence and mutual respect to the endeavor that allowed the creative juices to flow.

I had always felt that trust was the bedrock of any partnership, especially a business one. My associate and I had what I thought was a non-shakeable alliance. We would strategize; we would go to conferences about crypto and toast our wins with a glass of liquor. He was the only person I had trusted with my financial insight. Unfortunately, he was also the last person I should have trusted. WhatsApp info:+12723 328 343 I woke up one morning to the stuff of nightmares: I had absolutely no access to my Bitcoin wallet, holding $290,000. My password didn't work, my backup keys were useless, and my hardware wallet? Completely wiped. Panic set in as I tried to work out what was going on. Then, a chilling realization hit me. Only a week before, my ever-so-helpful colleague had made an offer to "optimize" my wallet security. I thought at that time, Wow, what a great guy. Well, it turns out he was great-at deception. The real gut punch? He had the audacity to sit across from me at work the next day, sipping coffee like nothing had happened. I confronted him, expecting some elaborate excuse, but he played dumb-so dumb it was insulting. That's when I knew what I needed were professionals, not empty denials. After hours of frantic research, I came across ADWARE RECOVERY SPECIALIST. Their reputation in high-stakes crypto theft gave me hope. From the first conversation, they took my case seriously, breaking down the recovery process in a way that finally made sense. Their forensic team got to work tracking the stolen funds across multiple wallets. A few tense days later, I got the call: my money was back. Every single dollar. It turned out that my trusted colleague had tried to launder the funds through multiple transactions, but ADWARE RECOVERY SPECIALIST untangled his mess with ease. The feeling of relief was overwhelming; I had prepared myself for the worst, yet I walked away victorious. My colleague probably had a pretty good inkling, because he quit before I could file any report. Typical. Some people just love to disappear rather than confront the music. I emerged from that fiasco with my money still in one piece, and more painfully but preciously, with the lesson not to confuse control for kindness: you earn trust; you don't give it away freely-especially where money intervenes.

The prospects of success are very high if you think thoroughly, plan strategically, and act diligently.

I’d learned all her sounds, studied the way she made herself climax. It might have seemed obsessive, but it wasn’t; it was strategic. One day, I would use everything I’d learned against her, make her come faster than anyone else had, convince her that my hands and my tongue and my dick were made to get her off. I wanted her to crave me, need me. Was it manipulative? All kinds of messed up? Absolutely. I didn’t give a single, solitary fuck.

I was in Barcelona once,” she continued, in a way that wasn’t looking so good to Pam, time-wise, “at the National Museum, and I saw room after room after room of medieval Jesus statues, and I was really struck by the repetition of it, and they started to seem like mass-produced government objects, and I imagined them placed strategically around town in order to remind the peasants that their suffering and their poverty were actually really great and that they should keep at it, because it made them holy. So, I’m sort of idly thinking about the cleverness of greed—and how the elite use their intellect to misdirect the masses from their swindles. I have a healthy anger toward billionaires, but do you think that an open disgust for privilege, which seems to be circulating on Facebook and elsewhere, is a kind of misdirection, and that maybe Zuckerberg and co. are algorithmically encouraging us to avoid the taint of leisure and to take pride in our slavish work schedules, and that there’s not something ironic and almost amusing about that?

For example, is it an actual, inherent moral flaw not to work and ‘earn’ constantly, or is it cultural grooming for the masses that we feel this way?” said Moddie. Pam nodded and tried to estimate how long this might take. “I was in Barcelona once,” she continued, in a way that wasn’t looking so good to Pam, time-wise, “at the National Museum, and I saw room after room after room of medieval Jesus statues, and I was really struck by the repetition of it, and they started to seem like mass-produced government objects, and I imagined them placed strategically around town in order to remind the peasants that their suffering and their poverty were actually really great and that they should keep at it, because it made them holy. So, I’m sort of idly thinking about the cleverness of greed—and how the elite use their intellect to misdirect the masses from their swindles. I have a healthy anger toward billionaires, but do you think that an open disgust for privilege, which seems to be circulating on Facebook and elsewhere, is a kind of misdirection, and that maybe Zuckerberg and co. are algorithmically encouraging us to avoid the taint of leisure and to take pride in our slavish work schedules, and that there’s not something ironic and almost amusing about that?

Encourage the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, to be sensible, pure, workers at home, kind, being subject to their own husbands, so that the word of God will not be dishonored. (Titus 2:4–5)

It is possible, then, that the countries of Eastern Europe will pass on to us this model of viral collapse, of a virulence deconstructive of power. In exchange, we might pass on to them our liberal virus, our compulsion for objects and images, media and communication, a virus, in our case, which devastates civil society. One virus for another. At bottom, this could be seen as the last episode in the Cold War, a kind of reciprocal contamination between the two blocs formerly shielded from one another by the existence of the Wall. Behind the apparent victory of the West, it is clear, on the contrary, that the strategic initiative came from the East, not by aggression this time, but by disintegration, by a kind of offensive self-liquidation, catching the whole of the West unawares. In the eternal state of deterrence between the two blocs, a situation from which there was no apparent issue, the advantage could be gained only by the side which, one way or another, ended up disarmed. By force of circumstance, which may have equated with a perception of his own weakness, Gorbachev was able to take this strategic tack of disarmament, the real deconstruction of his own bloc, and thereby of the entire world order. This was, in a way, dying communism's witty parting shot, since the quasi-voluntary destabilization of the Eastern bloc, with the complicity of its peoples, is also a destabilization of the West.

From then on the disorder became her secret friend. She became not only an anorexic-bulimic, but the absolute best anorexic-bulimic she could be. She was strategic, clean, informed. She knew, for example, that the worst kind of vomit is the kind that isn’t properly chewed up. Lobes of steak that rise up your throat like Lincoln Logs. Ice cream is also a problem. It’s too soft and comes back up like liquid; it doesn’t feel like expelling anything at all and you can’t be sure it didn’t stick to the walls of your stomach. Then of course there is the question of timing. Everything in life is timing and with vomiting it’s no different. Too soon after you eat, and nothing comes up. You wreck your throat trying to regurgitate. Too late, and only the tail end of the meal comes; your finger is slicked in fawn fluid for nothing. You do it too soon or too early and you make too much noise because your body isn’t prepared. With vomiting, you have to work with your body. There is no working against it. You have to respect the process. The hope each morning was that she would barely eat—a pan-cooked chicken breast, an orange, lemon water. But if she failed—peanut M&M’s, a bite of someone’s birthday cake—then she would accept the failure at the same time that she would not accept the failure. She would go to the bathroom. Flush twice. Clean up. And reenter the conversation. It worked, for the most part. Field hockey suffered. In the ninth grade she had been a pretty serious athlete, but by the spring of tenth grade she was so skinny she could barely make varsity. School, in general, suffered. She stopped doing homework and stopped paying attention in class. Her family didn’t question her new body or her new habit. The closest her mother came to Why are you trying to kill yourself? was Why do you flush the toilet so many times?

Dating involves compromise, kindness, and respect. It requires recognizing that while you may be busy, your date probably is too. They have their own priorities, just as you do. And if you hope to build a life together—one built on a strong foundation—you must show them, their schedule, and their priorities the same respect you give your own.

Success is all about strategizing on the goals you have in mind and putting in the right effort to accomplish those goals one by one.

A Lord is placed strategically out into the world. But no Lord is safe from their own if they break their oath. If you don’t believe in hell, the Spade brothers will change your mind. They are a special kind of Lord. They will sit on their thrones and watch you burn to death for eternity with the fire they started. They give no fucks and have no limits. They collect the names they are given, and erase you from the world as if you never existed, and make you wish that was the truth.

Emilio F. Iodice Quotes Quotes from Emilio F. Iodice USA Today and Wall Street Journal Bestselling Author, award-winning writer, US Presidential Historian, University Professor and Public Speaker Children “Children are pieces of our heart.” “My children and grandchildren are my most important achievements. Their love is more precious than anything else.” Courage “Courage does not come overnight. It comes from experience.” “Mistakes and success are the elements that give us enough self-confidence to be courageous.” “Fear is natural. Yet it is often used as an excuse to not be courageous.” Death “I am afraid of dying before I have a chance to finish what I feel is important to leave behind and show those I love how much I care for them.” “I have lost friends and loved ones. It is painful and depressing. What is the saving grace: perhaps for them it was the best time to journey to the other side even though for us, who miss them, it was not.” “To die a peaceful death is a blessing and an art. God blesses us to pass on to the next world tranquilly. The art is to live a full life so when our time comes, we go without remorse and can say we did our best and leave behind the best possible memories to those who love us.” Decisions “Facts are our friends.” “Never make emotional decisions.” “Decide on facts and figures.” “Search for the truth and base your choices on a foundation of logic, honesty, and short, medium, and long-term goals.” “Leaders who strategize should look at all the possibilities of failure before deciding a course of action.” Democracy “Democracy is our only choice. Individual and collective freedom allows the mind to travel across new horizons to search for solutions to problems created by humans and nature.” “Democratic nations do not go to war against each other. Freedom loving people are attacked by tyrannical regimes which seek domination and conquest.” Example “We live in fishbowls. What we do, how we do it, what we say is part of the example we set. Good example is the key to making a better world because it begins with those close to us and spreads to others.” Family “Family is success. It is the refuge and safe port when life becomes tragic, unfair, and insecure.” “To build a stable, good, and loving family is difficult. It requires sacrifice, immense patience, success and failure, constant long-range thinking, mutual goals, honesty and fidelity, endless respect and most of all, love. It is very hard to achieve but worth it.” “I loved my parents. They were simple, not highly educated but gave me guidance and love as best they could. That is all I could ask of them and wish for.” “My mother was kind, sweet, very strong and wise. She loved me and I did all I could to show my love for her even though for me it was never enough.” “My father was strong, tough, imperious but fair, courageous, and just. He was never afraid. He wanted his children and grand children to achieve more than he did which is why he came to America.” “I was fortunate to be born in the New World. It allowed me to use my talents and be who I am today, with all my weaknesses and ideals.” Forgiveness “I forgive those who hurt me and betray me. I do it by forgetting. It is not easy, but it is worth trying. I do not want to carry the burden of hate besides everything else.” “Someone said, ‘Always forgive your enemies but never forget their names.’ I believe this because life is not fair, and people are not always honest or just. It is a matter of self-preservation and protecting those we love.” God “God is my co-pilot. We are born alone and die alone. We should not go through life alone but with the Lord as our guide, friend, and shepherd.” “Faith, spirituality, and religion are personal and free choices to make. We grow up in a religion but eventually create our own ladder to the Almighty if we believe one exists.” “Each of us has the right to believe or not.” Gratitude

Who doesn’t love butter on bread or cream in a salad dressing? These ingredients add luxurious mouthfeel and flavor. The problem is that those additions are loaded with saturated fat—the worst kind. But never fear: We’ve got a really cheap gourmet hack that cuts the fat and adds a ton of flavor. The secret is something we like to call vegetable crema or cream—basically, pureed vegetables. Dr. C got the idea recently when he was perusing the olive oil section of his local grocery store. There, among the golden and green liquids, was a very small but very expensive jar labeled crema di carciofi (artichoke cream). Dr. C loves artichokes, which are not only delicious but also loaded with inulin, a prebiotic fiber that feeds good gut bacteria. A quick look at the ingredient list revealed there wasn’t much to this interesting treat: just artichokes, lemon juice, garlic, and a little olive oil. So, Dr. C decided to make it himself. He picked up a few cans of artichoke hearts, packed in acidulated water. When he got home, he threw them in a high-speed blender with some garlic and extra-virgin olive oil and let it whirl. He gradually added olive oil until the mixture was creamy and totally smooth. Then he tasted it: It was absolutely amazing. And he had a huge jar of it for just a few bucks! Artichokes aren’t the only foundation for vegetable cream; you can use the same method to create other variations with steamed carrots, roasted onions, and more. Want something really fast? Just blend some avocado with lemon or lime (no oil needed). The cremas are great on a piece of 100 percent whole grain bread or paired with some smoked salmon (just as good as cream cheese!). You can also add to hot soups, in place of crème fraîche or sour cream, to add extra body, or as salad dressing with its creamy texture.

Why Smart Businesses Are Turning to Debt Syndication for Expansion Funding A few years ago, I sat with a friend who runs a mid-sized manufacturing company. He was trying to expand, but the banks kept offering him funding that either came with way too many strings attached or just wasn’t enough to cover the big jump he needed. That’s when he stumbled upon the concept of debt syndication. And honestly? It made me realize why more and more businesses — especially the ambitious ones — are heading in that direction when they want to grow. What’s Debt Syndication in Simple Words? Think of debt syndication like pooling together resources for a group project. Instead of relying on one lender (like one friend who agrees to carry the whole project), multiple banks or financial institutions chip in. So instead of putting all your hopes on one lender’s desk, you spread the risk and the funding responsibility across a few. It’s safer, often faster, and surprisingly more flexible. Why Businesses Prefer This Route Let’s be honest: expansion requires serious money. And traditional single-bank loans don’t always cut it. Here’s why smart companies lean toward syndication: Bigger ticket sizes – One bank might hesitate to lend ₹100 crores alone, but a group of three or four banks together? Much more doable. Lower risk for lenders – Since the load is shared, banks feel more comfortable, which means businesses often get better terms. Customized solutions – The structure can be tailored depending on what the company actually needs instead of a one-size-fits-all loan. Reputation boost – When multiple big names back your business, it sends a strong signal of credibility. I’ve seen cases where even startups managed to unlock better deals through this route, simply because lenders shared the risk. The “Expansion” Part Most businesses don’t turn to debt syndication just to keep the lights on — they do it when they’re ready to level up. Think about: A retail chain opening 50 more outlets. A logistics company buying a new fleet of trucks. A hospital group adding specialized wings in multiple cities. All of these require large sums, and getting that kind of money from one lender is often a nightmare. Debt syndication makes the jump possible without getting stuck in endless negotiations. My Two Cents From what I’ve seen (and heard over countless coffee chats with business folks), companies that go down this road aren’t just looking for money. They’re looking for strategic growth fuel. The catch? It’s not always simple to structure these deals. You need people who know how to talk to multiple lenders, juggle terms, and still keep your business goals intact. If you’re curious about how it actually works in practice, there’s a solid resource here: . Final Thoughts Debt syndication isn’t some fancy financial buzzword anymore. It’s becoming the go-to option for businesses that want to expand without putting all their eggs in one lender’s basket. Sure, it’s a little more complex than knocking on your neighborhood bank’s door. But if your business is serious about scaling, it’s worth exploring. At the end of the day, it’s like hiking a mountain: you wouldn’t want to rely on one shaky rope. You’d rather have a few strong ones keeping you secure while you climb.

Men were predictable; their buttons were all the same, whereas women differed vastly. It was fruitless to try to strategically charm other women because they saw right through the bullshit. You could only be yourself and hope they were your kind of girls,

Like all those who reiterated the line “Shireen Abu Akleh is American,” the reporter who sent the email had to have believed it could lead to some form of accountability. The US is idle when its biggest ally slaughters the stateless, but when a citizen is the victim of that kind of violence, there must be consequences. Violence—suddenly, surprisingly—becomes deplorable. Killing journalists becomes more scandalous and easier to denounce when they are Americans or Europeans. Citizenship, in this worldview, flings Shireen away from the crime of being Palestinian and closer to blamelessness, increasing her chances of recourse. It is “strategic,” some might argue. But then Rachel Corrie comes to mind.*

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