Blogosphere: August 2005 Archives

Congratulations to Marsupial Mom, who gave birth to a boy yesterday. Swamphopper of The Rough Woodsman is the proud papa. Now they just need to come up with a Little House on the Prairie-themed pseudonym for the new addition -- on their family blog (Little House), the three girls are known as Mary, Laura, and Carrie.

Her most recent non-baby-related entry is this one, the third installment of her spiritual journey, which tells how they came to visit and ultimately join a Reformed church. We're very glad they did, because it's how we got to know this wonderful family.

Hither and yon, some articles worthy of your attention:

Manasclerk: For Alan: Sitting Here In Chocolate, Wasting Precious Time, Which I Have Too Much Of Anyway:

The news that I learned from the experts at the conference was dissettling, and perhaps it plays a part. I think it does, maybe, but I'm not sure. It turns out that if you are Modes 6-8 (forgetting Modes 9+ as being worthless to work), if you do not get "tapped" by upper management to join the executive suite to learn its ropes by the time you're 30 or so, you never will be. You have the capacity to do upper level work but you don't have the capability. What they recommended was to identify these high modes early and attach them to a mentor high up as "staff officers". The younger ones then get to see how to do the upper level work but aren't really doing it.

Of course, that just creates immoral or amoral leadership who has no idea how things get done or made. They have no moral compass.

And if you don't get tapped, you're absolutely, without a doubt, screwed. You are so, so very screwed. You're stuck doing work two levels beneath your capacity, moving from one lower level job to another, always succeeding in many ways at the same time that everyone sees you as a failure.

Unfortunately if I were going to create a Great Leader (not a refernce to Kim Il Sung) I would do the latter process rather than the former. It has to do with disasters and Sherman.

"Levels" and "Modes" refer to concepts in Requisite Organization management theory. Your level is your capacity to manage complex tasks and large organizations and make long-term decisions. Level 1 is getting and completing an assignment today. Level 9 is positioning a multi-national corporation for success over the next half-century. One's level grows over time, and your mode is the level at which your capacity plateaus; the higher the mode, the steeper the climb. In this article, Manasclerk cites Gen. William Sherman as a high-mode individual who wasn't "tapped" -- identified by the powers-that-be as a future leader worth cultivating. Gen. George McLellan was the golden boy, but Sherman and Grant succeeded where he failed:

How did [Sherman] do it? He did it because he'd been kicked in the teeth a good bit over his brief life (he was only 40 when war broke out). And because, in the disaster of the war, the powerful lost their power because they could not confront the brilliance of the Southern tactics.

The man who has it all, who is all success, is not the Great Men of the Civil War. It's Gen. George Brinton McClellan, the man who Pres. Lincoln fired for not being willing to fight the war. McClellan had the "tap" that escaped U.S. Grant and even moreso did not land on Sherman. McClellan had been chosen as the Next Great Man by the West Point chiefs and military leadership. He ascended and by the time of the war, he was the Next Great Thing. The Great White Hope. Take a look: he was John Kerry....

McClellan couldn't prosecute the war. It seems like he too much to lose if he lost. Too much prestige.

For Grant and Sherman, it was time to shine. They saw the disaster as not that complex, not a threat. It was an opportunity. These guys had absolutely nothing to lose. Sherman had been shunted off to Louisiana. I grew up there and J lives there: it's not the place you go to make a name for yourself unless you are a populist politician with a penchant for fraud. These guys were nothing, nothing to the powers that be at the time, at least. And they kicked ass. The South is always thought of as having the most brilliant generals. So why didn't they come out to fight Sherman on his march to the coast?

Manasclerk believes that it's the overlooked high-moder, the sort of person he describes elsewhere as a hidden high-potential, that will come to society's rescue in the wake of cataclysmic upheaval:

Were you to be "tapped", as the experts say is necessary for high moders to succeed, you would only serve the power structure. Because the tap did not fall on you, you have the ability to rise to the occasion of a disaster. You can join with the others to create a new world, to respond to evil or evil circumstances.

Michael Barone: The trustfunder left: Barone, author of The Almanac of American Politics, notes the rise of a new force in American politics, wealthy leftists who feel no particular allegiance to America:

Who are the trustfunders? People with enough money not to have to work for a living, or not to have to work very hard. People who can live more or less wherever they want. The "nomadic affluent," as demographic analyst Joel Kotkin calls them.

These people tend to be very liberal politically. Aware that they have done nothing to earn their money, they feel a certain sense of guilt. At the elite private or public high schools they attend, and even more at their colleges and universities, they are propagandized about the evils of capitalism and globalization, and the virtues of environmentalism and pacifism. Patriotism is equated with Hiterlism....

Where can you find trustfunders? Not scattered randomly around the country, but heavily concentrated in certain areas. Places with kicky restaurants, places tolerant of alternative lifestyles, places with lots of art galleries and organic food stores and Starbucks competitors. The heaviest concentration is in the San Francisco Bay area, which, Kotkin says, has the largest percentage of trustfunders of any major metro area in the country....

The political map shows the trustfunders' impact. So, I suspect, would an analysis of the sources of the vast amounts of money that flowed in through the Internet first to Howard Dean and then to John Kerry and to outfits like moveon.org.

The good news for Democrats is that they have found a new source of votes and money. The bad news is that an important part of their core constituency has the characteristic that the British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin ascribed to the press, "power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages."

Hat tip to RedState writer Adam C.

Chez Joel: Hello Sabbath: Joel Helbling notes that management gurus are beginning to stumble upon the Biblical insight that human beings need time of strict rest and disengagement from work in order to be fully engaged. He quotes physiologist Martin Moore-Ede, president of Circadian Technologies and author of The Twenty-Four-Hour Society:

At the heart of the problem is a fundamental conflict between the demands of our man-made civilization and the very design of the human brain and body...Our bodies were designed to hunt by day, sleep at night and never travel more than a few dozen miles from sunrise to sunset. Now we work and play at all hours, whisk off by jet to the far side of the globe, make life-or-death decisions or place orders on foreign stock exchanges in the wee hours of the morning. The pace of technological innovation is outstripping the ability of the human race to understand the consequences. We are machine-centered in our thinking--focused on the optimization of technology and equipment--rather than human-centered--focused on the optimization of human alertness and performance.

UPDATED 2020/01/02: I came back to fix dead links and decided to fill out and publish this hitherto unpublished entry, which was little more than links, with blockquotes and a bit of commentary. One of the links I found interesting back in August 2005 has been excluded from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at the author's behest, so I can't tell you more than I noted at the time: "Is it nobler to buy from the local mom-and-pop store than from Wal-Mart? Julie Neidlinger has some thoughts from the plains of North Dakota." There was also a never-consummated outbound trackback to huffingtonstoast.com, a hilarious spoof of HuffPo that, alas, has also been excluded from the Wayback Machine.

I've added two new entries to my list of those who blog about Tulsa news. Joe Kelley, the new host of the KRMG Morning News, has started writing about local topics on his blog, The Sake of Argument. (UPDATE: I originally mentioned a second Tulsa blog here. See below for why it isn't mentioned here anymore.)

In the bigger blogroll, I've added Urban Elephants, the creation of my friend Scott Sala, whom I met at last year's Republican National Convention, where he was a credentialed blogger. Scott, whose personal blog is Slant Point, began blogging mainly about national politics, but he saw a niche to be filled in the coverage of New York City politics from a Republican perspective. Urban Elephants is a blogging community, organized similarly to RedState.org, with individual blogs, from which the best entries are promoted to the main blog. I'm pleased to see a focus on involvement and action -- there's a calendar of Republican events, including campaign volunteer opportunities, and a list of declared Republican candidates with links to their websites. In a heavily Democratic city, where Republicans can easily feel isolated and unable to make a difference, it's a great idea to use blogs to bring together a community of Republican activists. Best wishes to Scott and the rest of the herd, and I look forward to seeing the impact they make on this fall's New York municipal elections.

UPDATE 9/10/2005: I have dropped a blog called "Republican Vet" from the blogroll, at least for now. I checked that site today -- all past entries have been purged, and there seems to be a dispute going on between the owner of that blog and other bloggers, with accusations of impersonation, among other things. It's hard to tell who's who, and rather than get involved in sorting things out, I'm simply dropping it off the list.

Mike of Okiedoke has posted the nominations for the inaugural Okie Blog Awards. Voting is open from now through September 3, but, just like the Academy Awards, only active bloggers are allowed to cast a ballot.

I'm honored to have been nominated by my blogging peers for Best Blog and Best Political Blog, although I doubt I'll win in either category, given the competition. In fact, I predict that in years to come we'll be referring to the trophies as Chazzes whatever the plural of Chaz is.

Once again I've gone overboard opening new tabs in Mozilla, but my excess is your gain, dear reader. Some items of note, in no particular order:

• Allen of Acorns from an Okie reports that Frontier City closed three hours early on Tuesday for no apparent reason other than the park wasn't full enough and wasn't making enough money. Very unexpected from an amusement park which is part of the world's largest amusement park chain and is right next door to the chain's world HQ in Oklahoma city.
• Dawn travels to the northern reaches of flyover country and visits the Mall of America, explores the Minneapolis skyway, and attends a wedding at a St. Paul library. She also tells of the removal of a superfluous tooth. They don't call her the blogosphere's single-and-still-living-at-home answer to Erma Bombeck for nothing. (They don't call her that, but you should read her stuff anyway.)
• Joel of On the Other Foot posted a touching tribute to his late grandmother on what would have been her 95th birthday. She was a preacher's wife, not much of a cook, but hospitable and never weary in well-doing. Of her generosity, he writes, "no baby was ever born in our church that didn't get a crocheted blanket." (I know how special that is: My little girl is very attached to the pink crocheted blankie made by her Great Aunt Bea.) When you visit that link, be sure to read some of his favorite posts. A couple of them have to do with a newspaper's hounding of a local politician, apparently driven by the newspaper's owners' other business interests. (By the way, Joel, feel free to move me into the "Prods" section of your blogroll!)
• Tim Bayly writes that just as a taste of a homegrown tomato spoils you from enjoying the hard, tasteless storeboughten variety, so an encounter with a church that follows the "old paths" -- right preaching of the Word, right administration of the sacraments, and right exercise of church discipline -- may spoil you from feeling at home in a congregation that lacks the marks of a true church. (If Tim should write a book on the topic, he should call it Secrets of the Vine-Ripened Church.)
• If you need motivation to acquire and enjoy some genuine homegrown tomatoes, read columnist Paul Greenberg's paean to an Arkansas variety of Lycopersicon esculentum: "Like life itself, the Bradley County Pink is perishable, but a joy while it's here."
• Here's another Greenberg summer classic, updated for 2005: "Fifty Ways to Beat the Heat." I can testify to Number 20 -- Ray Winder Field in Little Rock is a grand old ballpark, a great place to watch baseball.
• Three more interesting items from BaylyBlog: The use of zoning and other municipal regulations to harass churches; the history of William Tennent's Log College, predecessor to Princeton Theological Seminary, and the beginnings of a new school designed to train pastors in the tradition of the Log College, in the context of the local church; and thoughts on the decline of evangelical Christian colleges and the handful still worth considering.

Happy reading!

Mike of Okiedoke has initiated the first-ever Okie Blog Awards. Today is the last day to submit your nominations in 12 different categories. You must be an active blogger to make a nomination, to vote, or to be nominated -- "active" is leniently defined as having made at least one post in the last 60 days. I've submitted my nominations. Voting will commence on August 20. Click here for official rules and instructions.

I'm looking forward to seeing who is nominated, as I'm sure to learn about some great blogs I haven't yet come across.