Consider impact before you consider benefit.
—Lisa Mason
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Category Archives: Leadership
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It’s much harder to be relevant than it is to be successful.
— Paul David Hewson (aka Bono)
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Talent is a dull knife that will cut nothing unless it is wielded with great force[.]
—Stephen King
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Knowing others is intelligence;
knowing yourself is true wisdom.
Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.
—Lao Tzu
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Iuris præcepta sunt hæc: honeste vivere, neminem laedere, suum cuique tribuere. The following are the precepts of the Law: to live honestly, not to injure another, and to give to each one that which belongs to him.
—Corpus Juris Civilis, Institutes, Bk I
“New” Jobs
The Bureau of Labor Statistics is reporting that the unemployment rate is down because 2.5 million more people were working in May.
I’ll bet that very few of those people were hired for new created jobs. Most of them were rehired or recalled to an old job that was put terminated because of the Wuhan virus shutdown. I suspect that there will be a fairly rapid recall of employees to businesses that were able to withstand the shutdown. The unemployment rate is now around 13 or 14 percent, and I’m guessing that it will drop to 7 or 8 percent by Labor Day. At that point, we’ll need to be creating new businesses to replace those killed off by the pandemic shutdown in order to create the new jobs necessary to restore the 2021 economy to a level comparable to 2019’s.
It’s going to be easier to rebuild in those places where the residents haven’t trashed their communities’ physical and moral resources.
A substantial number of communities will now have to make hard choices. The cost of rebuilding housing, businesses, and public facilities and the cost of restoring standards of public behavior will undoubtedly make some previously fashionable luxury opinions untenable. It will be interesting to see who engages in what sort of bitter clinging.
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Every strike brings me closer to the next home run.
—Babe Ruth
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Assaults and terrorism in indiscriminate form should not be employed.
—Che Guevara
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Any time you see someone more successful than you are, they are doing something you aren’t.
—Malcolm X
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Laws which are consistent in theory often prove chaotic in practice.
—Napoleon Bonaparte
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It’s kind of fun to do the impossible.
—Walt Disney
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In general, pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes.
—John Ruskin
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Qui se ultro morti offerant facilius reperiuntur quam qui dolorem patienter ferant. It is easier to find men who will volunteer to die than to find those who are willing to endure pain with patience.
—Julius Caesar
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Right action is better than knowledge; but in order to do what is right, we must know what is right.
—Charlemagne
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Geðenc hwelc witu us ða becomon for ðisse worulde, ða ða we hit nohwæðer ne selfe ne lufodon ne eac oðrum monnum ne lefdon! Remember what punishments befell us in this world when we ourselves did not cherish learning nor transmit it to other men.
—Alfred the Great
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见胜不过众人之所识，非善之善者也。To see victory only when it is within the ken of the common herd is not the acme of excellence.
—Sun Tzu
Good Advice—From China
My training as a military officer included reading Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. The most famous quote from that ancient Chinese classic is probably
是故勝兵先勝而後求戰，敗兵先戰而後求勝。Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.
Patricia McCarthy has a post over at The American Thinker titled The unbearable pettiness of the Washington press corps which looks at the disrespectful manner in which the press treats Donald Trump at the manner in which the President turns their futile behavior back on them, especially during the Wuhan virus pandemic briefings. Throughout her piece, she quotes Sun Tzu.
What makes these briefings so entertaining is when the president calls them out for their dishonesty. He has a steel-trap mind and remembers what he has said. When they twist or edit his words, he knows it and humiliates them. But they seem not to realize they are being humiliated.
President Trump has been teaching us all. It is only the men and women of the media who fail to learn. Donald Trump, as John Perazzo has written, is a superb and unappreciated president.
“Engage people with what they expect; it is what they are able to discern and confirms their projections. It settles them into predictable patterns of response, occupying their minds while you wait for the extraordinary moment — that which they cannot anticipate.” —Sun Tzu
This is that moment.
Read the whole thing. I’ll add this—
上兵伐謀 What is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy’s strategy.
The Art of War is available from Amazon.
There Ought To Be A Law
Parkinson’s Law states that “”work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. Gresham’s Law states that “”bad money drives out good”.” The news coverage of the Wuhan virus pandemic I’ve been seeing over the past couple of appears to be the result of some sort of intersection of those two laws. Something on the order of “bad journalism expands so as to drive out good journalism.”
Of course, in any situation as serious as the current pandemic there will be a mix of good news and bad news, successes and failures. I get the distinct impression that the too much of the Main Stream Media is more invested in reporting bad news about Donald Trump than truthful news about what’s happening.
In the near term, the American public needs to be given a clear picture of the what’s happening nationally and locally so that we can act responsibly.
In the long term, we need to know what worked and what didn’t so that we properly evaluate people and policies—and take appropriate action on election day.
Over at Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds has remarked, “One of the problems with our ruling class is that it’s not just frequently wrong, it’s that it’s always self-assuredly arrogant in its wrongness.” Arrogance is fairly common trait of people who wind up in leadership positions for which they lack training, experience, and/or talent, and too many of the current crop of the best and the brightest weren’t trained in the disciplines of leadership. They are credentialed but uneducated.
Murphy was an optimist.
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The moral of this story is, anything you don’t understand is dangerous until you do understand it.
—Larry Niven
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The art of leadership is saying no, not yes. It is very easy to say yes.
—Tony Blair
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Marxists get up early in the morning to further their cause. We must get up even earlier to defend our freedom.
—Margaret Thatcher
Swamp Draining
President Trump has withdrawn the nomination of Jessie Liu to position at the Treasury Department. According to a post by J. Christian Adams over at PJ Media, the reason for the withdrawal is the President’s disapproval of Liu’s work as the U. S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, and the straw that broke the camel’s back in this case was her office’s sentencing memo for Roger Stone. For lying to the FBI, Democrat senate intelligence staffer James Wolfe who leaked secret data to his girlfriend got 2 months. Liu’s “career prosecutors” recommended 9 years for the same behavior by Stone.
Adams goes through a long list of biased prosecutions by the “career prosecutors” in Liu’s U. S. Attorney’s office, and concludes—
This was the week that Trump got his sea-legs. He campaigned on draining the swamp, and he has learned how subtle and how sophisticated the swamp is.
Meanwhile, institutionalists, including some Republicans too cowardly to be quoted by name, have gone on record as clutching their pearls at Trump’s actions. They want the bureaucrats to be unmoored to the executive branch.
The “career lawyers” at the Justice Department did not stand for election and win. The entire Department should take note. There is a unitary executive. Elections matter. The President ran against the elites who are dispensing biased, sanctimonious unequal justice in Washington D.C.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that he is keeping his promises.
Read the whole thing.
Given the house cleaning at the National Security Council and the withdrawal of the Liu nomination, I won’t be surprised if there are more vacancies in certain government positions in the near future.
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The world is full of willing people, some willing to work, the rest willing to let them.
—Robert Frost
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El fine si ha a riguardare in tutte le cose. One must never forget to look at the aim of a matter.
—Niccolò Machiavelli
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This would be a great time in the world for some man to come along that knew something.
—Will Rogers
