Recruiting Animal

Jerry The Recruiter June 2011

---

Once again - the only thing Twitter did for me was help add a few names to my list of people that really bug me. See you tomorrow! Thu Jun 09 21:17:56 +0000 2011 via web Jerry Albright
@Jerry_Albright

---

How Does A Hero Think

From: The man who fought Vancouver’s mob - Toronto Star, Sat Jun 18 2011, Joanna Smith (edited)

You can see him on video starting at the 2.50 minute mark

"It was more of a reaction than thinking. I just walked up there and saw people gutting the store and they needed help,” the 36-year-old chef said of his ultimately unsuccessful efforts to keep an angry mob from further smashing the windows of the flagship Bay store on Granville St. in downtown Vancouver after the Stanley Cup final game.

“I just felt it was the right thing to do. It was something I saw happening and I just wanted to stop it. I was pretty angry at that point.”

“Some guy prodded me or tried to lunge at me with a pole. I grabbed onto the pole and I just started pushing the crowd back and that is when I was surrounded and then taken down.  After I was down on the ground, some guy came up and bear-sprayed my face.”

Two more guys came to his aid. One spread his arms to protect him and placed his hand on his shoulder, the other joining him despite having his shirt tugged by a young woman who wanted him to leave.

“I couldn’t even open my eyes at that point,” he said. They brought him to police at Howe and W. Georgia Sts.

“I was sitting on the curb,” MacKay said. “People walking by gave me their water bottles so I could rinse off my head. And then my girlfriend picked me up and then we walked home.”

She was worried. She told him to never do that again.

Video of heroes who tried to stop the vandals

Astounding pictures of the Riot

 

Hypocrisy

From: Ron Radosh, Delusional Believers, June 11, 2011

Others invited who refused to come include the noted Columbia University historian Eric Foner, who although he has written about the case many times and even wrote an introduction to the Meeropol’s own book, said he would not attend because he doesn’t consider himself an expert on the case.

That did not stop him in the past from writing that they were innocent victims of a frame-up, and in particular regularly attacking my own book, The Rosenberg File, as a fraud.

Old-Fashioned Respect

From: Comments, Margaret Wente, We’ve institutionalized teacher abuse, Globe and Mail, May. 26, 2011

Where I am from, if you disrespect the teacher, you get whipped; and parents are not even allowed to enter the school.

I'm from South of Russia, from a Cossack community. In our lands, you walk through a school, all you hear are sounds of pens and pencils writing, teachers talking, and children only speaking up if asked something by the teacher.

All adults in our society, teachers included, carry a nagaika and do not hesitate to use it on a insolent youth. It happened to me a few times, and it hurts like hell itself. Very, very effective.

No, where I am from, you do not see drunk, disrespectful, rude, arrogant youth. When a elder walks into a room, if any young ones are there, they stand up, remove their hats, and bow.

In the street, you do not pass an elder who is walking before you without asking permission, it is rude.

On public transport, you would see, an elder comes in, on a bus, or a commuter train, even if it is not full, young ones right away jump up to yield their seats.

Discipline, respect, culture, it is beaten into you from a young age where I come from. And we are proud of that. The rest of Russia envies us for our ways.

Blogging is a guy thang

From: Why are bloggers male? - Margaret Wente, Globe and Mail, March 17, 2010 (edited)

Guys want lots of action and instant gratification. That's why guys like blogging – instant opinions, and lots of them.

Men clearly have an urge to blog that women lack. Not many women are interested enough in spitting out an opinion on current events every 20 minutes.

“Do you think men are more opinionated than women are?” I asked my friend Sarah. “No,” she said. “They just don't feel the need to think before they open their mouths.”

The urge to blog is closely related to the sex-linked compulsion known as male answer syndrome. MAS is the reason why guys shoot up their hands first in math class. MAS also explains why men are so quick to have opinions on subjects they know little or nothing about.

Do you ever wonder why the talk shows and opinion pages are still dominated by male voices? That's why.

Opinionizing in public is a form of mental jousting, where the aim is to out-reason, out-argue or out-yell your opponent. Women are just as good at this but are not as interested in doing it.

From: Female bloggers take on Margaret Wente, Globe and Mail, Thurs Mar. 18, 2010

Annie Urban: "I certainly don't think women are lacking in opinions or in a willingness to share them. I have been opinionated all of my life and have been sharing that opinion with the world on my blog for two years."

Tamara Plant blasted Ms. Wente's assertion that women are too demure to blog: "Nine times out of 10 I don't think before I talk. It's called having an attitude and I'm OK with it."

 

Body Chemistry and Personality

From: Why are bloggers male? - Margaret Wente, Globe and Mail, March 17, 2010

For most of my adult life, I was almost struck dumb in the presence of strangers. I managed to complete five years of university without raising my hand, and the idea of a dinner party used to make me faint.

Several of my female friends tell similar stories. No matter how brilliant they were, they lacked the confidence to express themselves in public.

Fortunately, something happens to women in midlife that disinhibits them. It is the same thing (in reverse) that turns bold, extroverted little girls into painfully self-conscious adolescents: a drastic change in hormones.

These days, I no longer care when someone calls me an idiot, and my husband often has to drag me home from dinner parties.

 

Real Leaders Do Unpopular Things

Billy Christian has an interesting posting about leadership called McGuinty’s Bold Plan

In it, he congratulates the premier of Ontario for harmonizing the Provincial Sales Tax (PST) with the Goods and Services Tax (GST).

The message is that a real leader will do unpopular things.

"Thursday’s budget," Christian says, "showed that he is a genuine leader." Why? "He has the courage to take a big political hit."

The Globe and Mail highlighted the fact that common consumer purchases like coffee, muffins, gym memberships, golf and Internet fees and vitamins would become more expensive. McGuinty knew that this kind of attack was coming but it didn't stop him.

Ironically, in spite of his praise for bold public action, Christian also implies that sometimes a leader should be deceptive.

He claims that Brian Mulroney slit his own throat when he made the GST a visible rather than a hidden tax. "The visible tax irritated people" and "it destroyed his popularity forever."

Instead of billing the public directly at the point of purchase he could have imposed the tax on the producer or importer who would have added it to the price and passed it onto the consumer. This would have achieved the same effect without damaging the leader's relationship with a short-sighted public.

Inotherwords, if you're dealing with ignorant, prejudiced, narrow-minded people it's unwise to give them information that will only inflame them because it's more than they can understand.

This is a conservative idea of leadership. I'm thinking here of conservatism as a political and social idea that manifests itself in a structured society in which the leading roles are reserved for people who deserve them by virtue of their knowledge and character.

Since the leaders have greater understanding than the popular masses they are not obliged to be fully transparent with the lower orders or to deal with them as equals. The common people govern themselves  more by emotion than deep thought and so, like children, don't have to know everything.

 

 

 

Internet or Not Students Are The Same

From: Facing down a Wiki World by William Christian April 6, 2009

I once sat towards the back of a large class during a guest lecture and I estimate that one-third of the class had Facebook on their screen. Others were accessing their Gmail accounts. A couple were playing solitaire.

In olden days I would have been forced to pay attention, faute de mieux, or perhaps clandestinely read a newspaper, but now I play Scrabble or do little quizzes to see which car I’m most like.

Working With Women

From: Margaret Wente, Just bar men from politics, Globe and Mail, Thursday, Jun. 09, 2011
Comment: R Rowat June 9, 2011

I have had the experience of working in two or three environments in which the vast majority of employees were women, including management. In each case, the atmosphere became poisonous with the all the behind-the-back whispering, back-stabbing and general character assassination. The workplace was dysfunctional and remained so until the gender balance was righted.

Changing A Culture

Andrew Sullivan was the first person I read who discussed the idea of a war against Iraq. He was very enthusiastic and here's why.

He believed that Iraq could be democratized in the same way that Germany and Japan were democratized after World War Two.

I don't remember him mentioning that Germany and Japan had been beaten to a pulp after years of war. And here's another thing that might have been considered as well.

Educated Western readers tend to see the case of de-nazification in Germany and the complete rejection of Hitler's past by the Germans as something normal. But it is actually an exception with few if any parallels worldwide.

Japan, for example, is far less willing to admit the scale of its former misdeeds, and in Turkey the mainstream opinion is not ready even to accept the fact of Armenian genocide - probably, the first "modern" genocide.

Each case has its explanations, but one should realize: the total rejection of the recent past, German style, is by no means typical.

The inevitability of Kim revisionism, Andrei Lankov, Asia Times, May 4, 2011

Those countries which already had strong internal opposition to communist rule, like Poland, were the ones which were better able to adapt to post-communist life.

Where opposition was weak or ruthlessly suppressed - Russia, or East Germany perhaps - there's still for many a strong nostalgic pull back to the "good" old days

Mick Hartley, Kim Revisionism, June 09, 2011