1 May Marches: Leadership Skill Hard Skills

“A country is considered the more civilized the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak or a powerful one too powerful.”

Without imagination of the one kind or of the other, mortal existence is indeed a dreary and prosaic business... Illumined by the imagination, our life, whatever its defeats — is a never-ending unforeseen strangeness and adventure and mystery.

— Walter de La Mare, born on this date in 1873

AS FORREST Gump once famously said: 'Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're going to get 

CHARLIE MARTIN:  Remember the VICTIMS of Communism on May Day!

TO BOLDLY GO WHERE FRANK J. FLEMING HAS GONE BEFORE: “At the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the United States found themselves locked in a chilling race to nuke the moon, declassified military documents reveal.”

To be fair, one could modestly describe such efforts as “A Realistic Plan for World Peace.”

HOLD THE CRIMINALS ACCOUNTABLE: Remember the VICTIMS of Communism on May Day!

ATO's 'nudge unit' gets to work on its own public servants

Trump on presidency: ‘I thought it would be easier’ The Hill

May Day: Calm in Berlin, but Molotov cocktails in Paris

Deutsche Welle

• Never forget
  
  

  What lingers from what you see at the theatre? Alarmingly random things, in my case. And, as I grow older, alarmingly distant things. Chatting with a friend yesterday evening, it turned out we’d both ... read more
  AJBlog: Performance Monkey
  
  A Whistle Was Blown, but Who Was Listening? Gretchen Morgenson, NYT
  

  
  

  Metadata law reform needed after AFP illegally accesses journalist's records 

  "Prior to the data retention legislation, warrants were not required to access the metadata of a journalist. Journalist information warrants were ...
  
  

  

  Journalists wonder: Is it 'tacky' for Obama to be cashing in?

  When Barack Obama was vacationing recently with Bruce Springsteen, Tom Hanks and Oprah Winfrey aboard a $300 million yacht in Tahiti, one wonders if he ever hummed Springsteen's "All Or Nothin' At All."

  We Need To Split The ‘Millennials’ Into Two Separate Generations

  

  “Old Millennials, as I’ll call them, who were born around 1988 or earlier (meaning they’re 29 and older today), really have lived substantively different lives than Young Millennials, who were born around 1989 or later, as a result of two epochal events that occurred around the time when members of the older group were mostly young adults and when members of the younger were mostly early adolescents.” Jesse Singal, an Old Millennial, explains.
  
  
  

  Exclusive: Trump says ‘major, major’ conflict with North Korea possible, but seeks diplomacy Reuters

  How Bio-Weapons Led To Torture … And North Korean Nukes Moon of Alabama

  Jimmy Carter asked to steer clear of North Korea rapprochement FT. Note this is the FT and not The Onion.

  
  

  Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un Risk Nuclear War Der Spiegel
  
  
  
  

  THOMAS RICKS: The Air Force doesn’t have a pilot crisis, it has a leadership crisis.

  
  

  The United States Air Force is facing a crisis, seemingly a recent one, which will define the service for decades to come.

  This “Dear Boss” letter is instructive for describing exactly why so many pilots are choosing not to stay in the Air Force, and are instead leaving to go to the airlines. There is a deep lack of faith in leadership at all levels of the Air Force, but especially at the Squadron Commander and above levels, and, from within, it seems that the organization is promoting toxic managers (not leaders) who are not promoted on their merits, but instead on how well they toe the party line.

  Complaints range, but highlights are; a lack of accountability, protection of the deficient leaders at all costs, overemphasis on promotion versus performance, and too much “queep” (an Air Force term for paperwork). There is no single root cause for pilots bailing out in such large numbers, and the issue contains much more nuance than simple bad leadership, but there is a glaring problem that is a significant contributor, and helps illuminate the distinct lack of Air Force leadership: In the USAF pilots are not provided the opportunity for meaningful leader development. I will explain.

  
  

  Clear out the deadwood, give pilots enough jets to fly, and allow them much more flight time

'People Have Had Enough of Experts'

 

“In my view … the intellectual life of Australia since the Whitlam years has been increasingly weakened by the reluctance of almost the entire educated population to deal with past events whose implications might undermine their heartfelt views.” — Clive James Upmarket agitprop: Clive James on John Howard on Bob Menzies 

While you can’t simply copy down notes on how to practice leadership, these skills can be developed. Reflecting on how you define and approach problems is a good place to start. Can leadership be learned?

Professor Stephen Martin: "I was blessed in that I was a member of a government that had someone like Bob Hawke and Paul Keating who could sell a message. You had someone like John Howard when I was in opposition who could sell a message. None of those fundamentally varied what that message might be. They tried to say to the people, “This is why we need to take these hard decisions now.” Paul might have said, “This was a recession we had to have,” and economic history will show that was probably right." (How to communicate public policy contentgroup)

 

"We do care about satisfaction. But we know that for most government services, how users’ feel about a service is very closely tied to whether they can use it effectively to get the right outcome for them." (Why we care more about effectiveness than efficiency or satisfaction. UKGDS)

Most back more spending for veterans, education, infrastructure. “As Congress faces an April 28 deadline to fund government operations, the public is now split in their general preferences on the size and scope of government: 48% say they would rather have a bigger government providing more services, while 45% prefer a smaller government providing fewer services. 

Poseville and Jane Austen bicentenary in 2017

Jane Austen at 200: still a friend and a stranger 

Jane Austen 200 | 

Author, Jane Austen who spent most of her life in Hampshire has a bicentenary in 2017.The year will be full of exhibitions and events. Jane Austen 200

Calendar - JASA - Jane Austen Society of Australia

Speculator Dragons note:
When will the new polymer £10 note be released

Which £5 notes are worth £50000? How to find the rare Jane Austen

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WHEN the new style £5 note was released, four limited edition Jane Austen notes entered circulation worth £50,000 each

Fujarvocka moja nechcela me piskat pri bohatych dievkach 

Female Dragonflies Fake Death to Avoid Males Harassing Them for Sex Newsweek

Of the forty-five people crammed into the train car that took Levi to Auschwitz, which he notes was “by far the most fortunate wagon,” only four survived. Toward the end of his memoir, in diaristic form, he offers a harrowing perspective barely imaginable to any free person:

This time last year I was a free man: an outlaw but free, I had a name and a family, I had an eager and restless mind, an agile and healthy body. I used to think of many, far-away things: of my work, of the end of the war, of good and evil, of the nature of things and of the laws which govern human actions; and also of the mountains, of singing and loving, of music, of poetry. I had an enormous, deep-rooted foolish faith in the benevolence of fate; to kill and to die seemed extraneous literary things to me. My days were both cheerful and sad, but I regretted them equally, they were all full and positive; the future stood before me as a great treasure. Today the only thing left of the life of those days is what one needs to suffer hunger and cold; I am not even alive enough to know how to kill myself.

It takes an extraordinary person to not only survive such a devastating extreme of inhumanity but to emerge from it with the awareness that existence always leans toward equilibrium. Reflecting on his experience in the camp, Levi writes:

Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite. Our ever-insufficient knowledge of the future opposes it: and this is called, in the one instance, hope, and in the other, uncertainty of the following day. The certainty of death opposes it: for it places a limit on every joy, but also on every grief. The inevitable material cares oppose it: for as they poison every lasting happiness, they equally assiduously distract us from our misfortunes and make our consciousness of them intermittent and hence supportable.