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Leadership as a Qualification
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Ideas & Questions
- Hits: 2140
Now it seems, what with the elections recently passed in Canada and Alberta, and elections happening in the US, that we're not being offered a viable selection of candidates to choose from.
Popularity is not a qualification.
Now while leadership courses abound, few offer any measurable increase in skills and none are relevant towards leading a country. And everyone seems to have their own idea as to what constitutes "leadership" - in Alberta, most people feel that business is a great background, as if the country were somehow a corporation that exists to serve shareholders. While some aspects of the metaphor hold up, what generally transpires then is you end up with a government that favors corporations over people, and a fundamental principle of government is "For the people, by the people", not "For the corporations, by the corporations".
Education - degrees in Economics, Drama, Teaching, Political Science - where relevant embraces only a narrow aspect of government, or embraces theory over fact, and where irrelevant serves only to make the leaders a laughingstock.
So what then, would be an appropriate combination of skills and background, that would serve as a prerequisite for leading the country? Implicitly we like a post-secondary education, a church-going family man (married, with children), it's nice if you speak French (Canada is bilingual, after all), it's swell if you've a successful business background (inspires confidence), but each of these skills on their own and taken together hardly qualify anyone to run a Country.
But explicitly, what qualifications should we ask for? If we were running a help-wanted ad for Prime Minister, what would be some of the skills and background we'd look for?
Probably someone who had lived a fair number of years both in the East and West of the country, to gain an broad understanding of each of the provinces expectations of government. Too frequently we select leaders that have lived their entire lives in a single province, and govern as if that province were the world. A demonstrable understanding, first-hand, of the global economy, and of the history of the country, a shared determination as to the future of the country, perhaps someone who had financed their own education (because those people who have had their education given to them have a very different view of the world than those who have had to earn it), and perhaps favor candidates who had lived abroad a minimum of X years in countries that differed Q,Y,Z in terms of politics, GDP, etc.
These are just suggestions with a view at making you think: What background would your ideal candidate have? And what prerequisites would you consider imperative for the governance of a Country?
The Custer Wolf
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Link of the day
- Hits: 2044
A rather poetic remembrance of what sounds to be a rather remarkable wolf: Headline: "World's Greatest Animal Criminal Dead"
Link: http://www.fws.gov/news/Historic/NewsReleases/1921/19210103.pdf
And the Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Custer_Wolf/
Treasures in the Trash
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Found
- Hits: 2076
"On the second floor of a nondescript warehouse owned by New York City's Sanitation Department in East Harlem is a treasure trove—filled with other people's trash."
Collection of found objects picked from NYC's trash, curated by Nelson Molina.
Via Atlas Obscura: http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/fascinating-photos-from-the-secret-trash-museum-in-a-new-york-sanitation-garage
Folk Kink
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 3074
FOLK KINK - A term first used by Rod Boyle in the blog posting of the same name, "Folk Kink" is a term that embraces a comprehensive and multidisciplinary array of amateur sexual techniques. Seen as a reaction to more specialized and dispassionate Kink techniques and fetishes, such as latex, Shibari and Kinbaku, Folk Kink embraces and celebrates the enthusiastically bungled knots, duct tape trusses, toy handcuffs, clothespins, belts, straps, candles, saran wrap, the hastily improvised (and ill advised) lubricants and generally the DIY aesthetic that makes interesting and exciting sex available to the untutored dilettante.
Realizing the complex nature and nuances of sexual behavior, the Folk Kink enthusiast will typically resist the more formal labels and -philia's in favor of a more expansive and compendious approach to sex that not-infrequently necessitates the bemused involvement of the Fire Department or EMS services. With their willingness to creatively pervert handy and everyday materials to unintended ends, the motto or creed of the average Folk Kink Practitioner could be summed as
"It's the amps that Kill, not Voltage...".
A reassurance designed more to loosen bowels than knots. For a more expansive (although by no means complete) look at the ways one can specialize their enjoyment of sex follow the read more - or spend a couple of hours on Craigslist...
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