Tag: leadership
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power and consequences are directly proportional
“With great power comes great responsibility” — Uncle Ben in every Spider-Man media ever made We want fairness, and in that fairness we want those who are more powerful to be punished more when they use that power to harm. We want this because of a concept of fairness called “fairness as justice” which is…
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Types of meetings
I have a lot of experience having my time wasted in meetings that don’t serve a purpose other than to “have a meeting”. They don’t make a decision, they don’t make the participants better or smarter or more valuable, and they don’t convey information very well. What they did do is show me how not…
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EIS: Building Integrated Systems
Anyone can set-up a computer, and if you can set up one, you can set up two. Almost anyone can plug those two computers into a hub or switch and get them to talk to each other. If you can do that, then replacing the hub or switch with a broadband router isn’t much harder,…
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deconstructing the Fourth Amendment
Since the USAToday story about the NSA warrant-less-wiretaps broke, we’ve been entertained by numerous inflamed public figures and hyperbolic claims to this or that, many of them centered on privacy, and the legality of searching vast stores of “generic” information. Most of these claims of legal violation come back to Amendment IV of the U.…
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Bush Endorses the Creation of a New National Security Service
via: Voice of America One would hope that years from now we aren’t looking back on this day with a sense of failure. Domestic spying has traditionally been a benchmark of a government with too much power over the people who empower it. The creation of the National Security service certainly has the potential to…
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Fear itself
Someone named Graham Allison has written a book titled, “Nuclear Terrorism, the ultimate preventable tragedy.” There is a web page [archive.org] and the bio indicates that Mr. Allison is the founding dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, which means, I suppose, that he is an old white man, a parent of…
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What I learned in the Marines
I wrote this the last week I was on active duty and left it on the unit bulletin board: Don’t Believe the Hype Damn the Man Make the Right Way your way Just Say No Do it right or don’t do it at all
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Bring Lawyers, Guns, and Money
Private Security Firms (and the Executive Branch’s willingness to use them) are infringing upon the State’s Monopoly on Violence and Death, on the Constitutional power to Declare War, and their mercenaries are in the same legal status as the members of al Qaeda; combatants in a network-tribe with no particular loyalty to the United States.…
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Ancient Greek word of note
…the subject of the Charmides is, What is sophrosyne? – and that word cannot be translated by any one English word. The truth is that this quality, this sophrosyne, which to the Greeks was an ideal second to none in importance, is not among our ideals. We have lost the conception of it. Enough is…
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Mission(s)
“We will lead the unified national effort to secure America. We will prevent and deter terrorist attacks and protect against and respond to threats and hazards to the nation. We will ensure safe and secure borders, welcome lawful immigrants and visitors, and promote the free-flow of commerce.” “To provide the military forces needed to deter…