[Photo by Dario Veronesi at Unsplash]
Commentary by management consultant Michael Wade on Leadership, Ethics, Management, and Life
Commentary magazine: Rob Long on the movie biz and the Maverick cocktail.
And greater love hath no man than this: that of the Washingtn Male for the Washington Male. A really pure Washington Male can be wrong about everything he does and says for decades without harboring a single twinge of self-doubt. (Robert McNamara was probably the platonic ideal here. You would think that a man who had given the world the Edsel, flexible response, and the war in Vietnam would stop to consider whether he was really cut out for executive work. But no, on to the World Bank and to building the debt crisis.)
- Michael Kelly, "A Plea for Diversity" in Things Worth Fighting For (2004)
Read the rest of the article at The Daily Caller.
I am aware of what the nutrition books say and am certainly aware of the opinions of the ultra-physically fit.
But.
My body often cries out for coffee and, less frequently, it cries out for ice cream. Not just any ice cream. Certain key flavors. I now regard them as medicinal and actually feel better as a result of limited consumption.
"Limited?" An eyebrow cocks.
Precisely. I'm not like a friend who would say he was getting a "little bowl of ice cream" while getting a very large bowl because he regarded "little" as a term of endearment and not one of measurement.
I mean "limited" in that one bowl will do, but it has to be good stuff, not the bargain basement stuff my parents used to get which, if you read the ingredients - and we kids did - wasn't really ice cream at all but something cranked out with cottonseed oil.
Of course, we ate it anyway. Any port in a storm. But we quietly made vows.
I can hear one of them now.
This is how River Cartwright slipped off the fast track and joined the slow horses.
- From Slow Horses by Mick Herron
Park Ranger John takes us to the Harry S Truman National Historic Site.
You'll see the lavish lifestyle of the former president and the Bentley hidden in his garage.
Althouse on reports of changes at Yale Law School.
I wonder if the Yale Law students realize how toxic their brand is becoming to a large segment of the public.
Washington Examiner (Michael Barone): Enter the Biden administration, quickly stopping wall construction and scuttling Remain-in-Mexico. Anyone purported to be seeking asylum is admitted, often flown to the Northeast, and, sometimes, given an easily ignored order to attend a hearing. Official numbers tell an alarming though surely understated story. Southern border crossings fell under 50,000 a month in mid-2019 and throughout 2020, then zoomed to 160,000 a month in 2021 and have plateaued there every month. Border apprehensions from October to March stayed under (sometimes far under) 400,000 from 2012 to 2020. They soared to 1,000,000 in the six months ending March 2022.
NBC News: The Biden administration will be filling the border wall gaps near Yuma, Arizona.
Tablet: Jeff Garzik and Jeremy Stern on "The Borg of the Gargoyles." An excerpt:
The consolidation of government, tech, finance, and law enforcement into a Borg-like hive mind that continually collects data on our private lives—allowing it to criminalize, de-bank, and de-platform any citizen at will, without any pretense of due process—has emerged as an imminent civilizational threat.A school wants its students to document micro-aggressions.
What was the name of the Big Brother-approved youth group in Orwell's prophetic novel?
The Spies.
"The Contract Says: We'd Like the Conversation to Be Bilingual" by Ada Limón.
Althouse: "The Cleavers were the best of the TV families."
Amazing cast.
Christine Rosen: "How Trauma Became a Political Tool."
Elementary schools that look like prisons. Post offices that resemble hardware stores. Newspapers packed with opinion pieces disguised as news stories. Television programs with commentators peddling snake oil. Chief executive officers with the spine of a noodle. Political candidates who are more programmed than a computer. Children's books with sermons in place of stories.
At some point, the bill comes due.
Fundamentalism - the intellectual style, not the religious movement - is the strong disinclination to take seriously the notion that you might be wrong.
- Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors
The National Interest magazine: Michael Lind on "America's Grand Strategy."
Not a pretty picture.
I call it the "What We Won't Have Time or Resources For If We Choose This Option" section.
[Photo by Anthony McKissic at Unsplash]
Wally Bock has management lessons from Daniel McCallum.
Steve Layman at A Layman's Blog provides the interesting take of Martin Gurri on presidential politics.
I also recommend running, not walking, to get the book "Postjournalism and the death of newspapers" by Andrey Mir.
Stunning.
Reminder: You can fill vacancies but you never replace people.
City Journal: Jonathan Clarke on the loss of Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Public consciousness has not yet assimilated the point that technology is ideology.
- Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 1985
There is a serious temptation to trim the branches when what is really needed is to go after the trunk.
But that takes time and thought and delays can demoralize your team so you cannot permit the trunk to be regarded as a huge project, too large to tackle, but instead as a series of small ones that can be picked off one-by-one and eventually will result in the cry of "Timber!"
Except on a few subjects where our own knowledge is great, we cannot choose between true and false accounts. So we choose between trustworthy and untrustworthy reporters.
- Walter Lippmann, 1922
Some diversity program tactics are about as effective as seeking change in a fire department by insulting the fire captains.
[Photo by JC Gellidon at Unsplash]
Educational Guidance Institute: "Teaching Truth, Goodness and Beauty Through Classic Movies to the Rising Generation."
A department may be engaged in misconduct. Policies look good. Practices seem fine.
But wait!
Which activities are being outsourced?
How are those being handled?
Bingo.
What happened to the media? Andrey Mir explains at City Journal.
Very interesting.
[Update: Name correction.]
You are not fragile. You won't shatter upon contact with a thought or phrase you find offensive. If you really think you're that timid, this is not the book for you.
- From The Rise of the New Puritans: Fighting Back Against Progressives' War on Fun by Noah Rothman
The man never sleeps.
Go to Google Maps. Type in James Rockford.
When President Nixon asked Daniel Patrick Moynihan for his favorite political biographies, Moynihan submitted these titles:
The worst, the most corrupting of lies are problems poorly stated.
- Georges Bernanos
The Spectator: Deborah Ross reviews Netflix's "Persuasion."
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
Read the rest of Noah Rothman in Commentary magazine.
I am the only person - perhaps in the world - who was a friend of both Richard Nixon and Daniel Patrick Moynihan before they knew each other.
- From The Professor and the President: Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the Nixon White House by Stephen Hess
The National Association of Scholars: A report on how some textbooks cover Early America and The New Deal.
If the danger seems slight, then truly it is not slight.
- Francis Bacon
If I were to write another long book on diversity, I would take as my model Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America and title it Diversity in America. And I would set out to capture the transformation of a republic founded on the ideals of freedom and equality into a regime scared into submission by the fear of being called a "racist." This all-purpose term of opprobium is diversity's way of silencing dissent and forcing its way ahead wherever its leaders choose to take it.
- From Diversity Rules by Peter W. Wood
Don't rely on:
The Native Governance Center's Guide to Indigenous Land Acknowledgement.
The post-acknowledgement action plan ideas involve voluntary land tax programs and returning land to indigenous people.
At two o'clock this morning, I was reminded that it is also not wise to read a business-related book that will generate a wave of thoughts.
My 2:30 a.m. strategy involved switching to a biography of Solzhenitsyn. It's a seemingly dry biography and yet, for late night reading, nothing about Solzhenitsyn is dry. An amazing man even aside from his books.
Tonight, it will be Tolstoy.
Commentary magazine: "The Mainstream Media Damaged Our Children" by Christine Rosen.
Read all of the 2019 City Journal article on the decline of men's magazines.
Woke has conquered the West. From schools and universities to multi-national corporations, social media, journalism, and even the police and military, woke values dominate every aspect of our lives.
- From How Woke Won: The Elitist Movement That Threatens Democracy, Tolerance and Reason by Joanna Williams
Jonathan Turley on when a law professor defends mobs.
"Ah, but it's different when we do it."
And I think the DEI stuff is a disaster. I think it lowers standards. I think it reifies identity, which we should be trying to rise above. We come to the university as black or white or Latino or gay or trans. That's not who we are. Our essence is much broader and finer and deeper and richer and human than that. The university sells its students short and betrays its own mission if it gets mired in this identitarian, small-minded, narrow way of looking at their charges, our students.
- Glenn Loury
Read all of the speech by Bari Weiss.
When Nancy Andersen saw her son's homework assignment just before Thanksgiving in 2019, she "started getting really, really scared." Her son, who was attending a private K-8 school near Durham, North Carolina, brought home an essay his teacher had given the fourth-grade class, which stated that the first Thanksgiving celebration in the New World resulted in "genocide, environmental devastation, poverty, world wars, [and] racism." The "Pilgrim heart" was one of "bigotry, hatred, greed, and self-righteousness."
- From Splintered: Critical Race Theory and the Progressive War on Truth by Jonathan Butcher