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dansnaturepictures · 3 years

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09/04/2021-Speckled Wood and more at Lakeside and home (10 different photos in this post to those I tweeted tonight)

I took the second picture in this photoset of one of a few nice and bright sky scenes and general scenes out the back today especially this morning. On my Lakeside lunch time walk I went in by the tarmac path along the properties and took the third picture in this photoset of some of the sweet looking white daffodils by the railway track at the Monks Brook Halt platform when I got into the country park. I enjoyed walking into the deep woods to the west of the site, deviating from the path through it a little and I loved seeing the bright yellow lesser celandine still going strong after a fair few weeks since I spotted my first of the year now and began seeing them here and elsewhere and adorning the forest floor of course. As I walked down around Concorde lake and through the middle of the lakes I was enthused to notice both the Canada and greylag geese nesting in the woods on the island. I had never actually seen where the geese species nest at Lakeside whilst their goslings are always such a key part of the strong Lakeside nesting festival of life each year so this was really interesting. I think some cutting of the trees on this island has allowed us a slight glimpse into where they nest. The Great Crested Grebes showed well on the lakes again as did the Tufted Ducks with brilliant views of them the females especially looking really beautiful in a special colour both on the water and on a bank of the island too. I also enjoyed as I tweeted a picture of on Dans_Pictures a Mute Swan the returning birds here of late quite close.

My Mum had said on a walk with Missy to Lakeside before my lunch break today that she had seen a Speckled Wood butterfly one of the next butterflies I needed to see. I entered the southern fenced off area just going through on the way back as I wanted to use my macro lens which I had with me today to take pictures of some of the newer groups of snake’s-head fritillary flowers on the ground in this area I had noticed. When at the point I had seen my first Speckled Wood of the year walking through last spring, I spotted a butterfly the right size and colour for one and I was pretty sure it was this butterfly. I walked on hoping for a better look, when I heard the exciting cackle of the Green Woodpecker as I had done a lot at lunch time and it was an honour to then see this emerald delight dashing into the almost as bright green landscape. I heard a beautiful and loud Chiffchaff and saw Woodpigeons flying off too and as the the sun really started to come out from behind the clouds I saw another butterfly I believe a Peacock it was a red one I didn’t get the best look of it and I saw another one too. Then I was thrilled to see the Speckled Wood again, as it flew on and then slowed down even settling on the bright blossom which looked wonderful and I could beyond a shadow of a doubt tell that this was a Speckled Wood now as I made out its sweet brown markings. It flew up now and again and then came back to blossom, I loved enjoying and taking it in such a beautiful sight. I couldn’t quite get my macro lens out in time to take a macro picture but I got the first picture in this photoset as well as one other I tweeted of this butterfly with the other lens I had my big lens. I was delighted when looking down on the ground following this butterfly to notice yet more snake’s-head fritillaries first hidden in trees behind and then more I could see on the ground. This meadow is teeming with them, and its a picture of a perfect spring and a vibrant, rich and colourful piece of grassland and few wooded areas I can never tire of these. I took the fourth and sixth pictures in this photoset a view with the snake’s-head fritillary visible over the meadow and snake’s-head fritillaries and another brilliant flower around lately at Lakeside the cowslips and fifth picture of a view in the area that gave me some glorious spring moments.

That’s now four of my year lists running that Speckled Wood was seen by me for the first time in a year either at Lakeside or on the green just outside, the last time I got Speckled Wood as a year tick at a place other than Lakeside was four years ago today in fact at Acres Down in the New Forest. There were more nice connections as I saw this one at the exact same bit of Lakeside I did for the first time last year and like last year its butterfly number seven of my year. I am only one butterfly behind how many I had seen last year and 2019 my two highest ever butterfly year lists which is promising in the early stages. I am five ahead of how many I saw in 2018 at this stage my now third highest ever butterfly year list a record for me at the time but admittedly that one did have a famously slow start thanks to the beast from the east. I was thrilled to see the Speckled Wood today. It came up in my last run of a butterfly a day tweets on Twitter this week I now have just two days left of them and including all 46 species of butterfly I’ve ever seen and photographed in them so its quite sad that an activity through lockdowns and times I needed the days to pass a bit, the original animal I focused on is coming to an end but I also reflect on the immense good it has done for me and being able to still feel happy. The spring ones in this run as last year a bit too definitely served to excite me for when I would hopefully actually see them and its not bad that I waited only two days after it was featured to see a Speckled Wood this year. The Speckled Wood a true highlight of my day and week.

When nearly back home at lunch time I took the seventh picture in this photoset of more great dandelions lately and some of the purple flowers that are commonplace on the green out the front. With it a brilliant bank holiday last Friday today I got the first chance since lockdown eased slightly, with it now also light late in evenings to do a second walk after work with me usually finishing work a bit earlier on a Friday. I did do that but not a Lakeside or camera one, instead a walk around the area outside around the block you might say a quick one. In the still evening air it was great to be serenaded a little by a babbling and gushing Blackbird and hear the beautiful screech of a Green Woodpecker again. As well as taking in as I had noticed earlier in the day and photographing as I tweeted a spider by the front door when I returned I also took the eighth picture in this photoset of daffodils in the front garden after the walk. I then went on this evening to take the final two pictures in this photoset of a moody lit Jackdaw on the roof out the back and a sky scene with just a little bit of red visible from the sunset.

Wildlife Sightings Summary: My first Speckled Wood butterfly of the year, Peacock, bees its interesting how when trying to see the Speckled Wood a second time suddenly my eyes were so focused on everything little and flying so I enjoyed bees well I am having a great spring for them so far, two of my favourite birds the Green Woodpecker and Great Crested Grebe, Greylag Goose, Canada Goose, Coot, Moorhen, Mallard, Tufted Duck, Mute Swan, Lesser Black-backed Gull, Black-headed Gull, Jackdaw, Great Tit and Robin seen both singing very nicely together in the woods on one tree, great Goldfinch views at home again from my window, House Sparrow, Starling and I heard Blackbird. I also loved seeing some perwinkle beside the neighbour’s house on both my walks today.

I have made no secret where I’ve felt it relevant before that I do have another Twitter to Dans_Pictures and another Tumblr to this one where I post about other interests of mine and general life both nationally, globally and personally and these are my profiles to focus on my birdwatching/butterflies/general wildlife watching and photography interest which I put most of my time into. There are sometimes things though that happen that are more about that general, but they are so big, important and all-encompassing that I want to give them a mention on my more focused to my main hobby and interest social media pages which has been common over the last year or so. Today I must say rest in peace Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, what an extraordinary life he had. I send my deepest condolences to Her Majesty the Queen and the rest of the family. On the more topical side to these social media presences from me I celebrate the Duke of Edinburgh award and all its done for getting youngsters outdoors and active. And it was interesting to hear Sir David Attenborogh talk about someone he was clearly very close to bringing things topical for these social media pages of mine. I also want to say today, rest in peace DMX and my thoughts at this difficult time are with his family and friends.

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ultrakouka · 4 years

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Senators - The Danger of Trump

Dear Senator,

I am sending this information to you as a concerned citizen and as a Christian. ( Yes, there are evangelical Christians in Massachusetts. ) I am upset with the unequivocal backing of Donald J Trump by the Republican Party when , at the start of the 2016 election, the Republican Party did not want him to be their candidate. And now, former Secretary of Energy Rick Perry stated that Donald Trump was chosen by God to be president. He said throughout history God had picked “imperfect people” such as King David or Solomon to lead their people. ( See article below ) This statement mirrors the thrust of the late Doug Coe and his religious group “The Family” who subtely influenced our federal government officials for years. ( See the Netflix special on “The Family” and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Coe ). Yes, God chose David to be king of Israel. Yes, David was imperfect. They failed to continue the story about the affair with Bathsheba and then the murder of her husband. That God punished David severely. ( read 2 Samuel 11 - 2 Samuel 18 ) Here is basically what was said: “ 2 Samuel 12:9 Why did you despise the word of the Lord by doing what is evil in his eyes? You struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword and took his wife to be your own. You killed him with the sword of the Ammonites. 10 Now, therefore, the sword will never depart from your house, because you despised me and took the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your own.’ “ David sinned in God’s eyes and was punished, severely. Once again read 2 Samuel 11 - 2 Samuel 18.

From the New Testament 1John 3:4 “ Everyone who sins breaks the law; in fact, sin is lawlessness.” 1John3:10 “This is how we know who the children of God are and who the children of the devil are: Anyone who does not do what is right is not God’s child, nor is anyone who does not love their brother and sister.” Please read all of 1John3.

Let’s get back to Rick Perry. He flip flops on policy. “Perry said using foreign aid as a policy tool against foreign countries that violate the human rights of homosexuals was "not in America's interests" and was part of a "war on traditional American values”.” Now Perry wants to use foreign aid as a policy tool? “Two weeks after the inquiry was launched, Trump claimed in a conference call with Congressional Republican leaders that he had only made the telephone call at Perry's urging.” Here is another topic in which Perry did a flip flop. “In 2016, The Texas Tribune wrote that "Perry has long been a critic of building a wall or fence along the border."[118] After Trump won the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, Perry backtracked and fully embraced Trump's proposed border wall.”

Why am I bringing Rick Perry into the discussion? INC Christianity of which “we found, to have some close ties to conservative politicians, including Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Bobby Jindal, Rick Perry and more recently President Donald Trump. Now to the First Amendment to our Constitution to which our President and Representatives have sworn an oath to uphold.

In United States law, the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, together with that Amendment's Free Exercise Clause, form the constitutional right of freedom of religion. The relevant constitutional text is: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...".

The Establishment Clause was based on a number of precedents, including the Constitutions of Clarendon, the Bill of Rights 1689, and the Pennsylvania and New Jersey colonial constitutions. An initial draft by John Dickinson was prepared in conjunction with his drafting the Articles of Confederation. In 1789, then-congressman James Madison prepared another draft which, following discussion and debate in the First Congress, would become part of the text of the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. The second half of the Establishment Clause includes the Free Exercise Clause, which allows individual citizens freedom from governmental interference in both private and public religious affairs.

The Establishment Clause is a limitation placed upon the United States Congress preventing it from passing legislation forcing an establishment of religion, broadly making it illegal for the government to promote theocracy or promote a specific religion with taxes. The second half of the Establishment Clause inherently prohibits the government from preventing the free exercise of religion. While the Establishment Clause does prohibit Congress from preferring or elevating one religion over another, it does not prohibit the government's entry into the religious domain to make accommodations for religious observances and practices in order to achieve the purposes of the Free Exercise Clause. Furthermore, it does not prevent the placement of religious symbols on government premises.

The problem that we have here is that the First Amendment does not prohibit the influence of religion on our government, which is exactly what is happening at this very moment. From the conversation.com : “A large number of evangelical Christians in the U.S. believe that God has chosen Donald Trump to advance the kingdom of God on Earth. Several high-profile religious leaders have made similar claims, often comparing Trump to King Cyrus who was asked by God to rescue the nation of Israel from exile in Babylon.” Here is the problem with INC Christianity: “INC beliefs, however, are different. Most INC Christian groups we studied seek to bring heaven or God’s intended perfect society to Earth by placing “kingdom-minded people” in powerful positions at the top of all sectors of society. These “seven mountains of culture” include business, government, media, arts and entertainment, education, family and religion. In this form of “trickle-down Christianity,” they believe if Christians rise to the top of all seven “mountains,” society will be completely transformed.

“The goal of this new movement is transforming social units like cities, ethnic groups, nations rather than individuals,” one INC leader we interviewed explained. “If Christians permeate each mountain and rise to the top of all seven mountains…society would have biblical morality, people would live in harmony, there would be peace and not war, there would be no poverty.”

We heard these ideas repeatedly in most of our interviews, at events we attended and in INC media materials.

Most significantly, since the 2016 presidential election, some INC leaders have released public statements claiming that the Trump presidency is part of fulfilling God’s plan to “bring heaven to Earth” by placing believers in top posts, including Perry, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson.”

Here is what Jesus said : John 18:36. “Jesus said, ‘My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place.’” What are these INC Christians thinking? “A large number of evangelical Christians in the U.S. believe that God has chosen Donald Trump to advance the kingdom of God on Earth.” Jesus has said that His kingdom is not here , but “from another place.” Do you know who’s kingdom IS here?

Read Matthew chapter 4: Matt 4:1 “Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted[a] by the devil. “ Matt 4:8 “ Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. 9 “All this I will give you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.” Why am I writing this? BECAUSE!! It is not God’s plan to have his kingdom here. Please read the following:

Matt 24:29-32

“Immediately after the distress of those days

“‘the sun will be darkened,

and the moon will not give its light;

the stars will fall from the sky,

and the heavenly bodies will be shaken.’[b]

30 “Then will appear the sign of the Son of Man in heaven. And then all the peoples of the earth[c] will mourn when they see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven, with power and great glory.[d] 31 And he will send his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other.

32 “Now learn this lesson from the fig tree: As soon as its twigs get tender and its leaves come out, you know that summer is near. 33 Even so, when you see all these things, you know that it[e] is near, right at the door. 34 Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened. 35 Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.

Did we see this? Matthew 24:35 Heaven and earth will pass away.

Will we be sheep or goats?

Matt 25:31-46

31 “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. 32 All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.

34 “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. 35 For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

37 “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39 When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

41 “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42 For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

44 “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

45 “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

46 “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”

Read Matt24:35 “ Heaven and earth will pass away..”

If Jesus said “My kingdom is not of this world” and “Heaven and earth will pass away” Then the INC Christians are wrong in their efforts. Matthew chapter 4 tells us who’s kingdom is here on earth, and it is not the one Jesus or God will establish.

My point: Our representatives in all three branches of our government should not be swayed or even listen to these so called Christians. Our founding fathers insisted as stated in the First Amendment that there was to be a separation of church and state. But, as I have stated before, the amendment is has only one direction - government influence down to control

religion. It does not prohibit the influence of religion up to and through our government. I think that our founding fathers intended the First Amendment to be a two way street, not the one way avenue that it has become.

Why this rant? Back to R Perry and his flip flopping and influence on DJT POTUS. DJT called the Ukranian president after Rick Perry asked him to make the call. Seems like Mr Trump really does not have any clear ideas about what policies he should have and is open to “anyone” influencing those ideas. Because he is so easily influenced , DJT has and is making BAD decisions. He is the President of the United States of America !! He is in charge of our national security! His actions have undermined the office of the President and of Congress. Yes, he was elected to office. But, he is incompetent. Have you heard of the Peter Principle?

To my Democratic Senators : Please vote to Impeach. You are correct that DJT is a threat to our national security. To the threat to our national security please note these reported events about DJT-POTUS :

1) September 18, 2019 Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson says Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “played” Pres Trump. Who else has “played” Trump. Maybe the President of Turkey?

2) September 18, 2019 Trump visits the US-Mexico border to talk about his wall. After discussing some of the wall’s technological features, Lt Gen. Todd Semonite, acting head of the Army Corps, says, “Sir, there could be some merit in not discussing that.” Sure - give away military secrets. Isn’t that treason? A high crime?

3) September 9, 2019. CNN reports that the U.S. successfully extracted a high-level covert asset from Russia in 2017 because of “ concerns that President Donald Trump and his administration repeatedly mishandled classified intelligence and could contribute to exposing the covert source as a spy.” The decision came after Trump spilled classified information to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and then-Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak during a may 2017 meeting in the Oval Office.

To my Republican Senators : Mr Trump is an embarrassment to the office of the President and to this country. The few policies that he does have go counter to my understanding of what a Christian should be. The Democrats have given you the opportunity to remove him from office and to spare this country from more of his idiotic claims and rants. You will still have a Republican in office as President, and control of the Senate. Do us all a favor - remove DJT from office.

And my response to Romans 13:1 “ Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.” Jesus did not question the physical authority of the Romans, but he did separate authority on earth from God’s authority in Matthew 22:21, Mark 12:17, and Luke 20:25 when “He said to them, “Then give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.” . Here is what was happening at that moment :

Luke 20:20-25 “Paying Taxes to Caesar”

20 Keeping a close watch on him, they sent spies, who pretended to be sincere. They hoped to catch Jesus in something he said, so that they might hand him over to the power and authority of the governor. 21 So the spies questioned him: “Teacher, we know that you speak and teach what is right, and that you do not show partiality but teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. 22 Is it right for us to pay taxes to Caesar or not?”

23 He saw through their duplicity and said to them, 24 “Show me a denarius. Whose image and inscription are on it?”

“Caesar’s,” they replied.

25 He said to them, “Then give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”

26 They were unable to trap him in what he had said there in public. And astonished by his answer, they became silent.”

Remember John 4:24. “ God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”

The truth is that the coming kingdom of God is NOT going to be here on earth. Please do not let anyone influence our government to act in a way that expects that outcome. Resist the one way street that the First amendment has become.

December20, 2019

The following is for your reference :

FROM: Wikipedia ( a web site that DJ Trump likes )

Perry said using foreign aid as a policy tool against foreign countries that violate the human rights of homosexuals was "not in America's interests" and was part of a "war on traditional American values".[96]

In 2016, The Texas Tribune wrote that "Perry has long been a critic of building a wall or fence along the border."[118] After Trump won the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, Perry backtracked and fully embraced Trump's proposed border wall.

A July 25, 2019 telephone call between Trump and Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky led in September to a whistleblower complaint and an impeachment inquiry against Trump. Two weeks after the inquiry was launched, Trump claimed in a conference call with Congressional Republican leaders that he had only made the telephone call at Perry's urging.[165] Perry's spokesperson said that Perry had suggested Trump discuss energy security with Zelensky, but energy was not mentioned in the publicly released memo about the conversations, which instead focused on Trump asking Zelensky to launch investigations into Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, Crowdstrike, and the 2016 U.S. presidential election.[166] Per Trump's direction earlier this year, Perry spoke with Rudy Giuliani about Ukraine, which Mick Mulvaney confirmed.[167][168][169] Perry denied ever mentioning the Bidens in his discussions with Trump or Ukrainian officials.[170] Mulvaney had put Gordon Sondland, Kurt Volker, and Perry in charge of managing the Ukraine–United States relations instead of diplomats at the National Security Council and the US Department of State.[171][172]

Perry was mentioned in October 2019 by former U.S. officials in relation to reports he planned to have Amos Hochstein replaced as a member of the board at Naftogaz with someone aligned with Republican interests. Perry denied the reports.[173][174] In November 2019, both Sondland and David Holmes, who serves as counselor of political affairs at the U.S Embassy in Ukraine, testified that Perry had played a senior role in the Ukraine campaign, with Holmes even describing Perry, along with Sondland and Volker, was one of the "Three Amigos" who directly assisted both Trump and Giuliani.[175][176][177][178][179]

US Energy Secretary Rick Perry urged President Donald Trump to talk with Ukraine’s newly elected president, a suggestion that resulted in the telephone call that has triggered House Democrats to launch an impeachment inquiry.

“Secretary Perry absolutely supported and encouraged the president to speak to the new president of Ukraine to discuss matters related to their energy security and economic development,” spokeswoman Shaylyn Hynes said Saturday after the Axios website reported on comments it said the president made about Perry and the origins of the call.

According to the website, Trump told House Republicans on Friday during a conference call that he spoke with President Volodymyr Zelensky at Perry’s urging.

The only reason I made the call was because Rick asked me to. Something about an LNG [liquefied natural gas] plant.”

Hynes said Friday that Perry wasn’t on the call between Trump and Zelensky.

As energy secretary, Perry has regularly travelled to Eastern Europe to promote the sale of US-produced natural gas and coal.

Perry told confidants in recent days that he plans to resign from the Trump administration by the end of the year. ( How convenient. Me)

While Perry’s contacts with Ukraine have drawn him into the impeachment inquiry into Trump by House Democrats, three people said his expected departure was not related to the Ukraine controversy, POLITICO reported last week.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the impeachment investigation after a whistle-blower lodged a complaint about Trump asking Zelensky to look into investigating former US vice-president and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

The complaint mentioned Perry, who led a small US delegation to Zelensky’s inauguration in May, replacing US Vice-President Mike Pence.

Trump has openly called on China as well as Ukraine to investigate Biden.

Trump alleges that Biden, as vice-president in 2014, tried to block a Ukraine corruption probe into his son Hunter’s business partner, a Ukraine gas tycoon, using US aid as leverage.

He also alleged the younger Biden used his stature to raise $1.5 billion in 2013 from China for a new investment vehicle in Beijing.

He made “millions” off these investments, Trump alleges.

Biden has responded by calling Trump “the most corrupt president we’ve had in modern history.”

No evidence has surfaced showing wrongdoing by either Biden.

US President Donald Trump fired back at Mitt Romney on Saturday morning, calling the Utah senator a “pompous 'ass'” while defending his calls for Ukraine and China to investigate political rival Joe Biden.

“Somebody please wake up Mitt Romney and tell him that my conversation with the Ukrainian President was a congenial and very appropriate one, and my statement on China pertained to corruption, not politics,” Trump wrote on Twitter.

“If Mitt worked this hard on Obama, he could have won. Sadly, he choked!

“Mitt Romney never knew how to win. He is a pompous ‘ass’ who has been fighting me from the beginning, except when he begged me for my endorsement for his Senate run (I gave it to him), and when he begged me to be Secretary of State (I didn’t give it to him). He is so bad for R’s!” Trump wrote.

FROM: Theconversation.com

In a recent interview with Fox News, Secretary of Energy Rick Perry stated that Donald Trump was chosen by God to be president. He said throughout history God had picked “imperfect people” such as King David or Solomon to lead their people.

Perry is not alone. A large number of evangelical Christians in the U.S. believe that God has chosen Donald Trump to advance the kingdom of God on Earth. Several high-profile religious leaders have made similar claims, often comparing Trump to King Cyrus who was asked by God to rescue the nation of Israel from exile in Babylon.

Many of these Christians are part of a movement that we call “Independent Network Charismatic,” or “INC Christianity” in our 2017 book.

Leaders such Rick Perry are connected to this movement. Eight years ago – in August of 2011 – more than 30,000 people cheered wildly when Perry, who was then a U.S. presidential candidate and Texas governor, came center stage at “The Response: A Call to Prayer for a Nation in Crisis” at Reliant Stadium in Houston. Perry quoted from the Bible and preached about the need for salvation that comes from Jesus. Many of the leaders who organized this event are the same leaders who claim that Trump is God’s chosen to advance the Kingdom of God.

We argue that INC Christianity is significantly changing the religious landscape in America – and the nation’s politics.

Here is what we found about INC

INC Christianity is led by a network of popular independent religious entrepreneurs, often referred to by their followers as “apostles.” They have close ties, we found, to some conservative politicians, including Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Bobby Jindal, Rick Perry and more recently President Donald Trump.

Charismatic Christians emphasize supernatural miracles and divine interventions, but INC Christianity is different from other charismatics – and other Christian denominations in general – in the following ways:

It is not focused primarily on building congregations but rather on spreading beliefs and practices through media, conferences and ministry schools.

It is not so much about proselytizing to unbelievers as it is about transforming society through placing Christian believers in powerful positions in all sectors of society.

It is organized as a network of independent leaders rather than as formally organized denominations.

Finding followers

INC Christianity is the fastest-growing Christian group in America and possibly around the world. Over the 40 years from 1970 to 2010, the number of regular attenders of Protestant churches as a whole shrunk by an average of .05% per year, while independent neo-charismatic congregations, the category that includes INC groups, grew by an average of 3.24% per year.

Its impact, however, is much greater than can be measured in church attendance. This is because INC Christianity is not centrally concerned with building congregations, but spreading beliefs and practices.

The influence of INC Christianity can be seen in the millions of hits on many of their web-based media sites, large turnouts at stadium rallies and conferences and millions of dollars in media sales.

In interviews, leaders of Bethel, an INC ministry based in Redding, California, claimed to have had an income of US$8.4 million in media sales in 2013. This included music, books, DVDs and web-based content. Another $7 million came from tuition to the Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry.

Sean Feucht, one of Bethel’s popular musicians and worship leaders, is now running for Congress in California’s Third Congressional District.

Appeal of INC

As part of our research, we conducted in-depth interviews with senior leaders, staff and current and former participants in INC Christian ministries. We also conducted supplementary interviews with Christian leaders and scholars with knowledge of the changing religious landscape and attended conferences, numerous church services, ministry school sessions, healing sessions and exorcisms. In all, we conducted 41 in-depth interviews.

Our primary conclusion is that the growth of these groups is largely the result of the informal way in which the network is governed. When compared to the oversight and accountability of formal congregations and denominations, the network allows for more experimentation. This includes “extreme” experiences of the supernatural, unorthodox beliefs and practices, and financing as well as marketing techniques that leverage the power of the internet.

We also witnessed the appeal of INC Christianity, particularly among young people. We saw the thrill of holding impromptu supernatural healing sessions in the emergency room of a large public hospital, the intrigue of ministry school class sessions devoted to the techniques of casting out demonic spirits and the adventure of teams of young people going out into public places, seeking direct guidance from God as to whom to heal or to relay specific divine messages.

‘Seven mountains of culture’

Most Christian groups in America have seen the role of the church as connecting individuals to God through the saving grace of Jesus and building congregations that provide communities of meaning and belonging through worship services.

They also believe in serving and providing for the needs their local communities. Such traditional Christian groups believe that although the world can be improved, it will not be restored to God’s original plan until Jesus comes back again to rule the Earth.

INC beliefs, however, are different. Most INC Christian groups we studied seek to bring heaven or God’s intended perfect society to Earth by placing “kingdom-minded people” in powerful positions at the top of all sectors of society. These “seven mountains of culture” include business, government, media, arts and entertainment, education, family and religion. In this form of “trickle-down Christianity,” they believe if Christians rise to the top of all seven “mountains,” society will be completely transformed.

We heard these ideas repeatedly in most of our interviews, at events we attended and in INC media materials.

Changing the landscape

INC Christianity is a movement to watch. If it continues to draw adherents in large numbers in the future, as we predict, it will produce a growing number of Christians who see their goal not just as saving souls but as transforming society by taking control over its institutions.

While the Ukraine scandal, family separations at the border, and allegations of corruption have made some evangelical Christians question their support of Donald Trump, most of those steeped in INC Christianity will never abandon their president.

To them, as we found, to oppose Donald Trump is to oppose God who chose him specifically to bring America and the world back to God.

This is an updated version of a piece first published on March 15, 2017.

FROM: Christian Science Monitor. June 18, 2018

When Julie Frady planned to make a poster to protest the Trump administration’s new “zero tolerance” immigration policy last week, she wanted to find the perfect Bible verse to stand against it, she says, one nobody else would expect.

She’s voted Republican most all of her life, but Ms. Frady, an evangelical Christian who lives in Wichita, Kan., says she’s been “appalled” by the Trump administration’s practice of separating immigrant children from their parents. And she’s been especially appalled, she says, at the administration’s stated purpose to use the practice as a deterrent to other immigrant families thinking of crossing the border illegally.

Since she joined about 60 protesters who marched in front of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Delano, Kan., Thursday, more and more people across the United States, and from across its often-polarized political spectrum, have begun to express deep moral reservations at the logistical realities of the practice.

Former first lady Laura Bush called the zero-tolerance policy “cruel” and “immoral” on Sunday, and first lady Melania Trump spoke out in favor of a resolution that would reunite families as well. Conservatives in Congress, including House Speaker Paul Ryan and other Trump loyalists, have also voiced their opposition.

But in many ways, it was evangelical Christians, including some of President Trump’s most vocal supporters, who first began to change the course of the national conversation about immigration.

As federal agencies began to put into place the actual protocols of separating, detaining, and then finding suitable care for more than 11,400 immigrant children in custody – including about 2,000 taken from their parents since the Trump administration began its “zero tolerance” policy in April – many Evangelicals began to speak out against it.

Before opposition to the policy began to dominate the national conversation, Frady decided to use a verse from the small Book of Obadiah for her poster. The Hebrew prophet condemns the nation of Edom for closing its borders to Israelite refugees fleeing the Babylonians.

In multiple colors, she drew: “The LORD declares: You should NOT stand at the crossroads to cut down fleeing REFUGEES … in the day of their DISTRESS.”

It’s in many ways a defining feature of American Evangelical identity: the centrality of Scripture for both personal piety and political action.

“I place an extremely high value on the authority of Scripture, and the place it should hold in our lives,” says Frady, a lay leader who often leads Bible studies at Northwest Free Methodist Church, a small congregation in Wichita, where she also plays tenor sax for morning worship. “I would not knowingly go against something I thought the Bible commanded, no matter how I felt about it.”

Indeed, the Bible, and the voices of Evangelicals around the country, have become a focus of the debate.

The Rev. Franklin Graham, one of the president’s most outspoken evangelical supporters, called the policy “disgraceful” last week. “It's terrible to see families ripped apart, and I don’t support that one bit,” he said.

The Evangelical Immigration Table, which includes pastors from the president’s group of faith advisers, wrote a letter to the president earlier this month, calling for the end to the policy. “As evangelical Christians guided by the Bible, one of our core convictions is that God has established the family as the fundamental building block of society,” members of the coalition wrote. “The traumatic effects of this separation on these young children, which could be devastating and long-lasting, are of utmost concern.”

The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the nation and one of the most politically and theologically conservative, overwhelmingly passed an immigration resolution at its annual meeting last week. The resolution called for immigration reforms that would include a path to legal status for those here illegally – which has long been anathema to most Evangelicals. Such reforms should maintain “the priority of family unity,” the convention proclaimed, and should “[honor] the value and dignity of those seeking a better life for themselves and their families.”

“It’s been a really interesting week or so,” says David Gushee, an professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University in Atlanta, and an Evangelical.

“I don't think we should be using Scripture to defend any of these laws. My question is: How does love demand us to act?” said Sister Phyllis Peters, a Roman Catholic nun, speaking at a roundtable in Brownsville, Texas, Monday afternoon after elected officials visited the Casa Padre and Casa Presidents children's shelters in the city. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, (D) of Texas, called on Evangelicals, Mr. Graham, and other religious leaders to act, saying, “It will take that kind of spirit that is nonpartisan, religious, social, and humanitarian, and I think that group is much stronger than the federal government at this time. We must stand up to the federal government when it is necessary, and it is necessary now.”

Still, white Evangelicals have been Trump’s most ardent supporters from the start, and as a group they remain the most supportive of his administration’s immigration policies, polls suggest.

And Evangelicals within the Trump administration, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions and press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, invoked the Bible to defend the policy of separating children.

Discussing the “concerns raised by our church friends about separating families,” Mr. Sessions told an audience in Fort Wayne, Ind., last week, “I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order.”

Later, Ms. Sanders told reporters that “it is very biblical to enforce the law. That is actually repeated a number of times throughout the Bible.”

On the one hand, it speaks to the power and influence that Evangelicals wield in US politics, notes Professor Gushee, given that a political debate over immigration policy became a debate over biblical interpretation. “Only in America, really, and only in America in the 21st century and with a conservative Republican government, would we be having these public biblical arguments about immigration policy.”

The fraught history of Romans 13

Yet after Sessions invoked Romans 13, “Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established,” Christians, including many white Evangelicals, pointed out the long history of this passage, a passage that Gushee says “has been used and abused by tyrants and governments doing injustice for centuries.”

“There are two dominant places in American history when Romans 13 is invoked,” said John Fea, a professor of American history at Messiah College in Pennsylvania, to The Washington Post. “One is during the American Revolution [when] it was invoked by loyalists, those who opposed the American Revolution.”

The other was in the middle of the 19th century, to support defense of the Fugitive Slave Act, Professor Fea continued. “I mean, this is the same argument that Southern slaveholders and the advocates of a Southern way of life made.”

Steven Colbert, a devout Roman Catholic and the host of “The Late Show,” suggested Thursday that the attorney general continue reading the passage on submitting to civil authorities through Romans 13:8-10. “Love thy neighbor as thyself. Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.”

Trump has been backtracking from his policy of zero tolerance, falsely asserting that his hands are tied, and that Democrats are the ones responsible for legal requirements that his administration is only enforcing.

But as the Monitor reported in March 2017, the Trump White House has been mulling separating children from their families as a deterrent policy from the first months of the administration. After an outcry from religious leaders, however, the plan was postponed.

‘Prosecutorial discretion’ vs. ‘zero tolerance’

The Obama administration, too, separated immigrant children from their parents, advocates note. And it also greatly expanded a policy of detaining mothers with children in expanded facilities. If a father crossed the border illegally with a child, they would typically be separated.

“The separation of families at the border is not new,” says Christina Fialho, co-executive director of Freedom for Immigrants, who advocates for immigrants being held at places like the private, for-profit Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego. “Under the Obama administration, we worked with hundreds of parents who were separated from their family in home raids, including mothers who were still nursing young children.”

The difference, however, was that the Obama administration maintained a policy of “prosecutorial discretion”: the focus of resources on known, dangerous individuals, rather than “zero tolerance,” an adherence to the letter of the law in all instances.

“We realized that we had limited resources in what we could do,” says Kevin Fandl, who worked as a senior counsel for the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from 2007 to 2013. “We believed we should target those resources toward the most serious threats to the country, those threats being convicted felons or those with a criminal history, terrorists, threats for national security, and recent border crossers, those people with no ties whatsoever to the United States.”

“Everybody else was considered a really low level for enforcement, which encouraged agents to say, ‘OK, if we spot a family with children, we’re probably not going to spend much time with them,’ ” Mr. Fandl continues. Sometimes, if they were picked up, the policy of “catch and release” allowed families with children to enter the country after being given a Notice to Appear order – which, he admits, no one expected them to do.

For critics, however, this created a perverse incentive. “No nation can have the policy that whole classes of people are immune from immigration law or enforcement,” said Stephen Miller, the president’s senior policy adviser, to The New York Times last week. “It was a simple decision by the administration to have a zero tolerance policy for illegal entry, period. The message is that no one is exempt from immigration law.”

And as Sessions put it earlier this month: “If people don’t want to be separated from their children, they should not bring them with them. We’ve got to get this message out.”

As a result, however, the system has been severely strained. Sessions said last week that taking care of unaccompanied minors was costing taxpayers more than $1 billion a year, most now under the care of the US Department of Health and Human Services and its Office of Refugee Resettlement.

Logistically speaking, the system is not prepared to handle the care of thousands of children, says Lisa Koop, associate director of legal services for the National Immigrant Justice Center, who represents a number of immigrant woman whose children were taken from them by the US government.

“They did not know what was going on with their kids, and when we finally managed to figure that one of the kids was being detained in New York, the child’s mother [being held at the Otay Mesa Detention Center] said to me, Where is New York? Is New York far away from here?’ ” says Ms. Koop, who recounts stories of mothers having their children literally torn from their arms. “They just have no concept of where their children are, and what conditions they’re in.”

Gushee says he has been heartened by the biblical responses to Sessions’ use of Romans 13, from those on Twitter to the discussions in the media. Biblical passages that have to do with compassion and care for those suffering, and especially for “the least of these” and the most vulnerable in society, he says, “they surfaced when they were needed.”

“But the story is not just the Bible verses,” Gushee continues. “The tears and suffering of human beings whose rights are being violated speaks. That is a language that should be taken seriously. In fact, one might even say this language is revelatory.”

“To see children weeping, to see bereft parents not knowing where their children are, to learn about a man who killed himself in a detention center because he was torn apart over the destruction of his family – these stories speak, too.”

And they have spurred devout evangelical Christians like Frady to action.

“I love America,” says Frady, who wore a purple T-shirt with “Jesus was a Refugee” to the protest near her home in Wichita. “It is my homeland, and I am certainly blessed to be an American.”

“But I am also not naive to its warts,” she continues. “And this is more than a wart.”

Staff writer Henry Gass contributed to this report from Brownsville, Texas.

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rosaetae · 6 years

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landscapes

☇ “Not all good things can be given so easily”

➢ pairing: jungkook x reader

➢ genre: post break-up!au, angst all around

➢ word count: 3.1k

➢ summary: to him, you were all the good things that life had to offer and in an abundance of the all good things that were solely compiled of you, jungkook understood. he will never forget you.

People usually blame gravity for falling in love.

For you, you've blamed almost everything for foolishly falling in love that it was hard not to realize that the only thing you could blame was yourself.

Yourself and your inability to resist the chocolate eyes that immediately became like stardust under the sun's gaze, your inability to resist his touches that felt all too ineffably comfortable with the contact of your skin but still always brought goosebumps, your inability to resist his lips touching yours and leavings trails of remembrance all over your neck, your body, your everything, and finally, your mistake of falling for the biggest trick that was so oblivious in your and others' eyes; trusting him.

Before, you blamed the sun. Blaming the big red hot ball of glory, you charged it for letting light pass through his appealing, but deadly eyes, creating nothing but a facade of beauty and perfection in something so small that immediately had you wrapped around his pretty finger. You blamed the mountains and the pine trees for being one of the most vivid memories you had of him— where his touches and where he held onto you were still imprinted on your brain. You blamed time for creating an illusion in your mind as the moments with him were too short compared to the dragging months when he left and you blamed that little red string that attached you and him together as it was hard to admit that that feeble string wasn't strong enough to hold you two together, and you accused wholly and utterly everything. But it's been eight months. Eight months since he left you with a shit of a nebulous reason, 'I'm sorry' and never once returned your calls or your texts. Eight months of you crying over him and swimming in hopes that maybe one day— one day, he'll come back, and you wouldn't even hesitate to run into his arms again. Eight months of you blaming everything that this world has to offer because you knew then that no matter what the world left at your feet, it wasn't him, and it'll never be him.

But it's been eight months. And no matter how many times you would stare at your door to have him come back, or how many parties you go to hoping that you would see the boy who thought you were fireworks in the room, you finally swallowed the pill that you couldn't swallow; not all good things can be given so easily.

To Jungkook, you are all the good things.

And somewhere roaming in the back of his mind, Jungkook comes to terms to realize what should be said soon before he loses you (completely) again. And he's lost you one too many times to let you slip from his fingers once more.

He will always love you. And he will never forget you.

His months trying so hard to forget you and forget all the exhausting and painful feeling sticking in the back of his neck has finally reached its culmination and here he was, lying flat on his bed, eyes trained on the ceiling as he realizes what had him lost in thought.

He will never forget the day he met you. This girl who was different from all the other girls in the room, and his eyes go wide as they land on your form— as if you had just blew up a firework in the middle of room, that was how distinct you were from everyone else. Maybe it was the way your hair was rested perfectly on your shoulders— even when it was wet as if you had gotten out of the pool, an oversized t-shirt hanging over your mid-thigh, and God forbid the immediate attraction to you after seeing your bare legs— it was all mesmerizing to him. Though he didn't introduce himself that day at his friend's kickback, and the next kickback where he saw you again, it was that first time that he saw you that you didn't just light up the whole room with fireworks, you sparked a whole firework in him enough to go mad.

He also won't forget that moment when it was you and him in his car and you were too drunk and embarrassed to even go home and have your parents see you in an intoxicated state. But, he didn't mind waiting in his car until you would finally let him unbuckle your seatbelt. In fact, his view of you is so admiring. The way your cheeks had turned instantly red after your second shot and how your eyes kept opening and shutting close. Your head rolled, the dizziness getting to you, as you sat inside his car. Your lips also did a pouty sort of action and he couldn't help but to also admire your drunken state at that moment. He remembered feeling happy, but a light type of happy when he was with you. How the firework girl he's come to know can make him feel all sorts of things and right now, you made him melt in an ever so soft and adoring way, just having you drunkenly sing some gibberish song.

There are so many things people would forget about you, but your brilliance was brighter than any dark that could attempt to shadow it away, and with him, he will always remember every second with and every inch of you. The way your eyes light up when you would talk about something you adored with such passion ongoing, and the way you bite down on your natural roseate lips when your nerves got the best of you, and the way you laugh at the small things, the big things, the dumb things, every single thing to the tiniest nub.

To him, you are all the good things, and it was his fault for letting go of it— of you.

There was one time when you both stayed at a cabin during the spring time with a group of friends. Jungkook caught you outside staring at the view before you, the rows of pine trees below and above you, the sun attempting to make its glorious appearance through the opaque clouds, and the diaphanous white mountains that showed bits of green as the snow had been gradually melting with every second passing. And though you thought that view of the landscape set before you was breathtaking, he thought his view of you was easy to take his breath away.

It was like you felt eyes on yourself because then you turned around, your eyes surprised at his presence behind the glass door, but they sheepishly meet his eyes and he will never forget how mesmerizing you looked then and there. You were wearing his hoodie you may have stolen without asking, but he didn't mind, and your hair was ruffled and unbrushed but Jungkook couldn't help but marvel at you from afar. Your eye smile, your shy grin, and your pink tinted cheeks— you had everything. To him, you were his everything.

And it scared him.

Does he regret leaving you that day?

Jungkook spotted you one faithful day at a party and sure enough, you were still the fireworks in the dark and you still had that ability to make his heart jump, even when you were candidly talking to one of your friends, drinking out of a red cup, and oblivious to the fact that he was staring at you from afar.

But it was your sixth sense, as if you had grown used to his constant far away gazing, that your eyes met his, and everything in the room simultaneously disappeared. Jungkook notices that you froze, your mouth closed as you held the cup in your quivering hand. None of you did anything.

With that, you tear apart from his gaze and eye your unfinished drink before sighing and gulp down the rest of the Jungle Juice in your cup, and storm away, trying to find the nearest door that led to outside, and frankly, at that moment you didn't care if a door led you to an abyss of nothing. He followed.

His eyes never leave your figure as you weave through the crowds of the intoxicated bodies ever so gracefully, as if a ballerina, moving past with such fluidity and ease compared to his stumbling and ignorance to those in front of him. He just wanted to reach you, but you were getting further and further and in a blink of his eyes, he had lost sight of you.

However, it wasn't long before he knew where you would be, and that was the balcony of some room, two stories high, gazing at the city lights over the ledge, and god, he wishes that he could wrap his arms around you and kiss you and tell you that it was okay and that everything was okay because he was there now.

But not all good things can be given so easily.

Hearing the door open and close behind you, you knew very well that was him by just the rhythm of his foot steps and you couldn't dare to look at him— because you were scared that if you did, the waterworks would start and it would never stop. And he was aware of this. He ensured that there was space between both of you because he didn't want to make one wrong move.

Both basking in silence, none of you said anything, and you blamed yourself once again for letting the tension drag for so long that you bite your tongue and turn to face him to break the ice in some sort, but your eyes had taken a glance at his profile and you immediately found yourself inhaling sharply. The face that you knew so well, the face that you could draw just by memory— it hasn't changed.

It gave you nostalgia.

His eyes met yours and you couldn't help but smile at him and Jungkook couldn't help but to marvel at you. Like he said, your brilliance was too bright, even in the dark.

He opens his mouth to say something, but he closes it. He feared to say the wrong thing again. One word and you would be gone from him forever. So he sighs and you understand him completely and you help him by beginning the conversation of 'it's been awhile' and he simply nods.

It's been 8 months.

It was his turn to speak, and when he wanted to say 'I really miss you' he settles with 'how have you been?' and you knew what he meant. After all, you were the only person to understand him.

You're biting your lip and Jungkook knows you're nervous now, and safe to say, the feeling was very much mutual for him. "I've been better."

"Really?" Even when I left you? Even when I hurt you?

Nodding, you purse your lips, crossing your arms across your chest. "Yeah, I've been busy with school, but next weekend we're planning to go to the cabin again."

Jungkook forms an 'o' with his mouth as he suddenly realizes why Yoongi contacted him out of nowhere to invite him to a getaway at his uncle's cabin again. You tried to refrain from asking him, but seeing that the silence was continuing to drag, you couldn't help yourself.

"Y-you should come!" You say with a sudden tone to your voice and you find yourself growing hot on the cheeks, when Jungkook's eyebrows shot up.

He only chuckles in response and there's this knot in your stomach tightening as his recognizable and melodious laughter elicits from his mouth. And he settles with 'I'll be there' and you shake your head up and down slightly, forcing your eyes to tear away from his to look back over the view and with the broken ice, Jungkook left it like that.

The answer is yes. He regretted it so much. And he wishes that he could manipulate time and bring you back, but he knew and you knew that it wasn't possible.

Jungkook found you there, staring at the same mountains, the same row of pine trees above and below you, the same sun glistening through the opaque clouds— it was like looking at the same piece of art, but it was a wholly new interpretation. You were wearing different clothes rather than his hoodie that you stole, it was a white oversized sweater. He's seen you wear that before. Once at a Christmas party with your family and you shamelessly introduced him to all your loved ones, as you once told him that he became your loved one.

After much debating and hesitating, Jungkook finally grew the courage to slide open the door and join in on admiring nature's calm. Hearing the noise of the door opening, you couldn't help but to peer over your shoulder to spot him, and it felt like the same scenario from 2 years ago. "It was just like yesterday I found you outside on this exact balcony," he recalls in a tranquil-like tone, and you could only respond by a snort as he approaches you. "You were looking at the same breathtaking view while I was admiring mine."

Immediately knowing what he meant, you gnaw on the inside of your cheek. Of course, you could not forget that memory when he caught you up on here. And though, it felt like some sort of deja vu, you were admittedly forlorn when the absence of his touch in the memory wasn't repeated.

"___," he begins and you felt your chest heave when you hear your name roll off his tongue so easily, as if it was the only thing that he knew how to say fluently. "I don't know how else to put it, but just— I'm sorry."

Jungkook knows you're nervous. He knows when you're happy, sad, angry, distressed, but he could always distinct your nervousness easily. It was understandable; how you feel, what emotion is erupting through your whole body, and he was prepared for anything. He just wanted you to speak, to say something to him.

"Jungkook," you start after you release your lip from your upper teeth, and his eyes watch you tentatively as you bring yourself closer to him and you take his warm hands enveloping in your cold ones, eyes not wanting to look up at his. "It's been eight months... I couldn't do anything but only to constantly turn back time, but other than that, I had to accept that you were gone. And yeah, it hurt— god, it hurt a lot. But I forgive you. I have forgiven you— for awhile now. There's really nothing else to say."

"Yes, there is," he furrows his eyebrows and he dares to let one his fingers touch your chin, lifting it to have your gaze meet his. "I still love you."

And you wince. Why was it so hard? "And I love you." Though it were those words that Jungkook hoped to hear, there was an inexplicable 'but' in this context, and it shattered the hopes and wishful thinking in Jungkook's acquisition. "I will always love you, Jungkook. But it hurts too much.

"Loving me, loving you," you croak with a feeble chuckle following after. Why couldn't this be easy? "It's so hard for the both of us. It's better if we—"

He knew what you meant and he didn't dare let you finish that sentence. "__, I mean it with all my heart when I say—"

"Stop," you quietly plead.

"No, __, you need to know that I love you."

And he means that in every meaning possible and he just wanted to bring you back to him.

"But you don't," you utter, tears welling in your eyes, and even with your still voice, he flinches. "No matter how many times you say it, you don't love me. Not anymore, you don't, so why are you trying so hard to fix this? To fix us?"

"Because, __," Jungkook exasperatingly starts. "There are people in this world who do give a shit about you, and I still do."

No matter how glassy your eyes were, you look at him with too many emotions all at once. "Then why'd you end it? Why'd you never responded for eight months? Why'd you make me cry over you the whole time you were gone? Why are you here?"

"Because like any scared person does when they fall in love with someone like you, they can't help but to run," he finally admits and you swore your heart dropped. Your lips quiver as you inhale sharply, without knowing what else to say.

"I didn't deserve you— I don't deserve you," he begins. "And I don't deserve to fall hopelessly in love with you and to think that you would do the same. But I did. And I don't mean to come here unexpectedly to win you back, but I wanted you to know that I'm sorry and no matter what, I love you."

Even with your eyesight hazy with your tears, it wasn't hard to spot the guilt and truth in his eyes. You close your eyes for a split second before you close the distance between you and Jungkook by pulling him into a hug. And it was as bittersweet as it may seem, because Jungkook held onto you like you were his last breath of air and you clung onto him with the same feeling. There was no way your waterworks were stopping at that moment when you felt his lips come into contact with your forehead, and that moment felt so surreal.

And you both stood there, breathing in each other and arms engulfing one another— none of you wanting to ruin the moment of the calm tranquility that you both have placidly placed between each other, and that fine.

Because then at that time, at that same place where Jungkook dove into the realization that he was in love with you, he knew that that little good that would never come, finally came; and it was that moment. With everything that has happened and this abundance of all the good things, the bad things, the hopes, and all the accusations, Jungkook knew that you two would be fine.

That you two will be just fine.

And that was all the good that he needed.

#jungkook scenarios #jungkook drabble #jungkook ff #jungkook fanfic #jungkook angst #bts ff #bts #bts scenarios #bts angst #bts fanfiction #kwriterskollection #kpopwritingnet #btswriters #kkreationsnet #guys im in a phat sad jungkook mood #landscapes

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michaelandy101-blog · 3 years

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The New Moz website positioning Q&A: 100Ok URL Migration Case Examine

New Post has been published on https://tiptopreview.com/the-new-moz-seo-qa-100k-url-migration-case-study/

The New Moz website positioning Q&A: 100Ok URL Migration Case Examine

The creator’s views are solely his or her personal (excluding the unlikely occasion of hypnosis) and will not all the time replicate the views of Moz.

Do you have to all the time count on a site visitors drop throughout a web site/URL migration, even a short lived one?

In case you did not discover, Moz not too long ago launched a shiny new website positioning Q&A platform for all of the world to see, discover, and use to find out about website positioning.

Initially launched as a personal function for Professional members a few years in the past, the Q&A was opened for public — and search engine — viewing again in 2011.

Within the years since, it grew to over 60,000 posts masking each website positioning matter possible, and tens of thousands and thousands of web page views. For a very long time, a good portion of Moz’s natural site visitors got here from the Q&A.

Sadly, although, as usually occurs, over time the Q&A noticed critical neglect. Because of this:

The platform collected a ton of technical debt, making it almost unimaginable to replace

Pages loaded so slowly many customers gave up solely

Spam turned increasingly widespread

Moderation instruments had been outdated, and could not sustain

For these causes, two predictable issues occurred:

The Q&A turned much less helpful and satisfying to customers

Over time, site visitors dropped considerably

So Moz had a alternative: enhance the Q&A instantly, or kill it.

Fortunately, we select to enhance it.

Working with the unbelievable workforce at NodeBB (extremely really helpful, by the way in which), we rapidly spun up a brand new Q&A utilizing our present database, however with solely fashionable know-how on the entrance and backend.

Why this migration was difficult

We had been underneath intense time constraints. What would possibly usually take months, we would have liked to perform in a few weeks. This introduced distinctive challenges from an website positioning perspective.

The most important problem? Our complete URL construction wanted to alter. (If we had extra time, we may have averted this, however it was a luxurious we did not have.)

That meant we would have liked emigrate hundreds of URLs that regarded like this:

The migration additionally included all of Moz’s consumer profiles, which quantity within the lots of of hundreds. To be honest, a lot of the consumer profiles aren’t truly listed.

Regardless, this was an enormous migration!

The opposite potential purple flag was that a lot of the Q&A would use client-side rendering — not thought-about a finest website positioning apply! We may’ve applied an answer for server-side rendering, however once more, we merely did not have time. We had been involved Google would have bother rendering the content material, and this would possibly tank our rankings (extra on this later.)

How we executed the migration

To drag off this enormous migration whereas minimizing the danger of site visitors loss, we adopted primary website positioning web site migration finest practices, together with just a few “special” extras for an added increase.

1. 301 redirect mapping

To place it merely, the way you implement your 301 redirects is both going to make or break your migration implementation.

For us, this was truly the best, most easy a part of the job, as we’ve a number of expertise with web site migrations! (Does anybody keep in mind seomoz.org?)

We made a listing of each attainable URL and URL path. It is superb what number of URLs and patterns you would possibly miss. crawler is important to assist with this to be sure you remember something. For Moz, we had been in a position to accomplish this with knowledge from Google Analytics, Search Console, and our personal Moz Professional web site crawl.

We mapped each URL to its corresponding URL on the brand new NodeBB platform. Whereas we discovered many edge circumstances, this was comparatively easy.

We made positive to redirect every thing by way of 301. That is essential as a result of many platforms and builders could use 302s by default. Whereas Google has instructed us that they go PageRank equally via 302s and 301s, Google has additionally indicated that 301s are a stronger canonicalization signal.

Talking of canonicalization, we additionally ran crawls of the brand new URL buildings utilizing the NodeBB platform. In situations the place we discovered URL paths that did not match our outdated patterns or we thought had been extraneous, the NodeBB workforce was in a position to simply arrange canonicalization patterns to keep away from Google over-indexing our URLs.

2. Most sitemap administration

A key a part of our migration technique was sitemap administration. This concerned two steps:

1. Previous URLs: We already had sitemaps of all of the outdated URLs in place. Importantly, we stored these sitemaps stay and registered in Search Console. This manner, Google would proceed to crawl the outdated URLs and “see” the redirects.

Usually, site owners make the error of eradicating sitemaps too early, which can trigger a lower in crawl charge by Google. This implies it may doubtlessly take longer for Google to course of the redirects.

Sitemaps aren’t an ideal assure that Google will go to all of your outdated URLs, however they do present a touch. In actual fact, we nonetheless had a number of thousand URLs after a number of months that Google nonetheless hadn’t visited, even with the sitemaps in place. Regardless, with out the sitemaps of the outdated URLs, the difficulty may have taken for much longer.

2. New URLs: Our outdated sitemaps had been grouped into lists of 50,000 every — the utmost allowed by Google. There’s some suggestion within the website positioning group that grouping URLs into smaller sitemaps can truly enhance crawling effectivity.

Thankfully, NodeBB allowed us to construct smaller sitemaps by default, in order that’s precisely what we did. As an alternative of 2-Three sitemaps with tens of hundreds of URLs, we now had 130 particular person XML sitemaps, usually with not more than 500 URLs every.

Three. Spam + cruft cleanup

As I discussed earlier, the outdated Q&A had over 60,000 particular person posts constructed up over 10 years.

Inevitably, numerous these posts had been very low high quality. We suspected each the low high quality of the posts, together with poor consumer expertise, could possibly be inflicting Google to rank us decrease.

Once more, time constraints meant we could not do a full content material pruning audit. Thankfully, NodeBB got here to the rescue once more (that is beginning to sound like an advertorial — I swear it isn’t!) and ran all 60,000 posts via their spam plugin to take away the obvious, low-quality offenders.

In whole, we eliminated over 10,000 posts.

We didn’t redirect these URLs, and easily allow them to 404 after the migration. Nobody appeared to overlook them.

FYI: one other glorious useful resource on content material pruning is this excellent webinar with Bernard Huang, Suganthan Mohanadasan, and Andy Chadwick.

four. Higher inner linking & consumer expertise

Though we had been porting over the identical content material and primary design, the migration introduced a terrific alternative to enhance consumer expertise. To perform this, we made two tiny tweaks to the general UX:

Added breadcrumbs all through the app

Added extremely related “related questions” within the sidebar

The outdated Q&A had neither of those options. Customers who landed on a query had no choices to discover different questions. Because of this, we suffered for years with a frustratingly excessive bounce charge and poor web site engagement metrics.

Outcomes: Earlier than and after the migration

To be sincere, I’ve by no means seen a migration fairly like this. Having carried out many migrations, I did my finest to arrange everybody for the most definitely situation: be ready for a 15-30% dip in site visitors for 1-Three months whereas Google processes all of the URLs.

In fact, nothing even near that occurred.

As you’ll be able to see within the chart beneath, we truly noticed a rise in site visitors, almost beginning at day one.

In actual fact, within the two months after the migration, natural Google site visitors to Q&A pages was up almost 19% in contrast with site visitors to all different pages.

What induced this rapid raise in site visitors? Was it the improved sitemap protection, the higher inner linking, or one thing else?

We merely do not know for positive, however we do have a touch.

As quickly as we launched the brand new Q&A, engagement numbers shot via the roof:

Increased time on web site

Decrease bounce charge

Extra pages per session

Briefly, customers gave the impression to be a lot happier and extra engaged with the brand new expertise.

May the improved consumer engagement have helped rankings?

Once more, we do not know. Google is reasonably tight-lipped about the way it could or could not use consumer click on alerts for rating functions, however we do have our suspicions.

Transferring to the longer term

We’re nonetheless persevering with to enhance the Q&A expertise. Most notably, we’re working to prioritize pace enhancements, particularly in gentle of Google’s work round Core Internet Vitals.

Regardless, this was positively a pleasant migration the place we did not expertise a site visitors drop — not even for a single day!

Maybe for those who vastly enhance your consumer expertise, web site structure, and website positioning finest practices, migrations would possibly truly result in a fast web win.

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summerinsacramento-blog1 · 6 years

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ur really a 5 star man: aligning Jairo in my head with Jairo in real life

The last Day of 8th grade, one of the girls I considered my friends told my friend the following “Do you really want to go to University High School? You’ll end up alone with Jairo.”

On that day I decided never to talk to anyone from middle school again. Luckily though, I lied and have been reforging relationships with both people I knew and people I didn’t.

[I would like to take a second to shoutout Bryana here. If you read my first post, she’s Girl 0. Since we rekindled our friendship we’ve become each other’s go-to’s on our pursuits, including romance. If Bry tells me I’m dumb for talking to a girl, she’s cancelled and that’s IT. Bry also helps me with clothing choices sometimes, but she has a better eye for fashion than I do. Thanks homegirl. You’re great]

Anyway, me and this kid from middle school were talking and memeing each other for months and he hit me with the title. And I realized he’s right. But I also realize its really hard for me to believe that just because of the person I am. So with that, I decided to write a blog post updating my recent successes and what they mean to me. I am also going to open up about one thing that I have struggled with for years, because letting

I have friends now – too many! The moment has passed where I was alone. I now have multiple friend groups in this city and I can happily say I feel like Phoenix Jairo again. I got a ragtag group of Hispanics to go dancing with. Last time we went out I had 7 shots and they made sure I got home safe. Real homies right there. I have a lunch group and we play exploding kittens almost every day. The days we don’t are because *I* can’t make it. We went to a baseball game the other day and had 2 dollar beers! (Well they did, I don’t drink beer anymore – I did buy my beers and gave them away though). The other day some guy I know invited me out for drinks and I had to tell him no because I had conflicting plans. My frist friend here talked to me the other day and was like “you’ve gotten so popular! You met my brother the other day and he told me about you!” I totally had, but in my defense I met the kid and was like “he looks like this other guy, but I DOUBT this is anything more than a coincidence, the other guy is from Minnesota.”

Anyway, this makes me happy becase this is the kind of social group I lost when I moved. To be able to say that I built a new one has given me so much confidence and patience. This all happened 5 months after I moved out here and mostly by accident. One of the groups I met because I went to a social and one guy was bold enough to say “fuck it, lets make a WhatsApp group so all this socializing isn’t bullshit” and I respect him for having the balls to do so. Another one I happened to go to a Latino social and me and the other young guy there were immediately made friends by everyone else there.

Ultimately, this makes me happy because I cleared the hurdle of socializing. That was such a hard thing for me because I don’t know how I used to do it, but now I do know, and I am ready to continue kicking ass.

Jairo Ivan’s Tinder Experiment

I am finally at the point that I have closed out my crutch usage of Tinder. I don’t need it to feel good about myself anymore. I used to really like getting the occasional random compliments, but now it just feels like a waste of time. I don’t need it anymore.

Also, the one girl I met thru tinder and dated actually stood me up when I was trying to date her again. Twice in a row. And that helped a lot for me to realize how much better I am off. Because when she did I remember texting Bry and saying “Yeah, C is cancelled.” Sure, it hurt a bit and my ego was bruised, but being able to say that I am free from someone and moved on made me realize that I am ready to just live my life again. Girl or no girl, I am comfortable doing what I am doing. And that is a liberating feeling that I didn’t know I had in me anymore. I’m…

Back on my bullshit. I finally hit my stride in Sacramento. I’m finally my own biggest fan.

…

With that said, I did create a profile to see how many likes I could get in a week, and in its glorious. I will drop only one image as the rest of it is irrelevant.

I got 150 matches in a week. This is because I swiped right on everyone just to see what kind of numbers I could pump. I didn’t really start any conversations, but I did say thank you and explain myself to girls who first messaged me because I am not a total dick. In this whole period I made one friend that I still talk to, so it wasn’t a total waste!

Anyway, Tinder was fun, but I have another priority now.

Dealing with my body

Lastly, I hit the gym. My goals are mine and I won’t share them here, but I realized that I needed to lose weight and am on it. Have made progress.

The cat just jumped from table to table, screwed up, and smacked his belly on the landing. Shit was funny.

Anyway, I realize that even as I slim down, I still feel like I’m huge. I need to talk to a medical professional to confirm, but I do think I have some degree of body dysmorphia. I am cognizant of it, and I think I’ll feel better when I meet with a medical professional and he tells me I’m a healthy weight.

I do feel confident though because I am in the mindset of handling it… and I look a little better every day.

Everything gets left behind and I grow confident. Next is the weight.

In conclusion

What do these things have in common? They’re all hurdles I need to overcome someday. I have two done. One more. I will one day believe myself to be a 5 star man – but for now, I am confident in the 4-4.5 I feel every day.

That alignment is coming along nicely, but it will take a while to complete. However, I do know that the people who say the nice things like that are right. I am a 5 star man. But I need to believe in the stars and believe in myself. I will get there.

- Love,

Jay Reptilian / Jairo Ivan / Jairoraptor

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stoweboyd · 6 years

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Work Futures Daily - Slow Down, You Move Too Fast

Almost everything is done better when you reflect, rather than react.

2018-04-20 Beacon NY - We have learned a great deal in recent decades about human cognition, in the realm of science, but very little has trickled through to the conduct of business. The theme today — in the aftermath of the mess in Philadelphia, where two Black men were arrested for trespassing at a Starbucks while waiting for a friend before buying their drinks — is about countering bias and slowing down to get there.

On Implicit Bias Training

In the aftermath of the recent expulsion of two Black men from a Philadelphia Starbucks, and the company's plan to expose the entire US staff to implicit bias training, Katie Herzog did some research:

If you haven't taken the test, it works like this: You are shown a series of images and asked to pair them with a series of words that have either strong positive or negative correlations. For instance, I just took the test for sexuality bias, and positive words (Laughing, Happy, Friend, Friendship, Glorious, Attractive, Adore, Cheer) were contrasted with negative words (Grief, Sadness, Awful, Abuse, Selfish, Bothersome, Rotten) as well as images of either two blocky female figures (of the bathroom sign variety), two male figures, or one male and one female together. My task was to pair the images with the words, and according to the test, based on how quickly I sorted them, the test determined that I show "a moderate automatic preference for Gay people over Straight people," which, frankly, I didn't need a test to point out.

This test is hugely popular, in no small part thanks to Malcolm Gladwell, who wrote about it in his best-selling book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Gladwell called the IAT "a powerful predictor of how we act in certain kinds of spontaneous situations," and, in the years since its inception, the IAT has been taken many millions of times and has been incorporated into anti-racist trainings in business, academia, criminal justice, and other fields. But, while plenty of people accept that bias is a part of the human condition (babies as young as three months show preferences for faces of their own race over others), the idea that this implicit bias leads to specific action (say, calling the police on two black men who sitting in Starbucks) is anything but proven.

She contacted Tony Greenwald, one of the creators of the test:

It's just going to be bias training theater.

Being aware of your bias does not mean you can overcome it. It is as deep in our wiring as lust and language.

One tangent that people can take to minimize bias is to slow down, to enter the state of constructive uncertainty (see 10 Work Skills for the Postnormal Era) where you actively resist coming to a conclusion, and actively remain open to gathering more information rather than following your impulse to take action.

Naom Schiber and Rachel Adams wrote about this recently:

Some experts argue that the most effective way to eliminate unconscious bias is to limit the extent to which people engage in automatic, reflexive thinking. One solution is to try to nudge workers toward more thoughtful and deliberative decision-making.

In a study involving the Seattle Police Department, researchers randomly selected a group of officers to meet with their sergeants and have an open-ended, 20-minute conversation about a recent encounter with a citizen. The encounters frequently involved minor issues like loitering — a situation analogous to the Philadelphia Starbucks incident. Over a six-week period, the officers selected to have those conversations were about 12 percent less likely to resolve an incident with an arrest.

“We were getting the police officers to slow down their thinking,” said Emily Owens, an economist at the University of California, Irvine, who was one of the researchers. Although the study didn’t look explicitly at arrest rates by race, Ms. Owens argued that, “when you’re not automating, and you’re thinking slowly, bias is less likely to influence your behavior.” (Ms. Owens stressed that the study was only suggestive and that overall the evidence on the effectiveness of bias training for police is very thin.)

On Transforming Human Resources

I am not a fan of the term 'human resources' because people aren't resources. It's a failed metaphor, but one we are lamentably stuck with.

So I am always willing to listen when some says they want to transform HR. Jonathan Shieber reports on Eightfold.ai, a new startup that might have a new tack, and apropos of the Starbucks debacle, it starts with trying to 'wring all the biases out of recruiting, hiring, professional development, and advancement':

Founded by chief executive Ashutosh Garg, a former search and personalization expert at Google and IBM research, and chief technology officer Varun Kacholia, who led the ranking team at Google and YouTube search and the News Feed team at Facebook, Eightfold.ai boasts an executive team that has a combined 80 patents and more than 6,000 citations for their research.

The two men have come together (in perhaps the most Silicon Valley fashion) to bring the analytical rigor for which their former employers are famous to the question of how best to help employees find fulfillment in the workforce.

“Employment is the backbone of society and it is a hard problem,” to match the right person with the right role, says Garg. “People pitch recruiting as a transaction… [but] to build a holistic platform is to build a company that fundamentally solves this problem,” of making work the most meaningful to the most people, he says.

How are they going to do this? By analyzing a lot of data:

“We have crawled the web for millions of profiles… including data from Wikipedia,” says Garg. “From there we have gotten data round how people have moved in organizations. We use all of this data to see who has performed well in an organization or not. Now what we do… we build models over this data to see who is capable of doing what.”

There are two important functions at play, according to Garg. The first is developing a talent network of a business — “the talent graph of a company,” he calls it. “On top of that we map how people have gone from one function to another in their career.”

Using those tools, Garg says Eightfold.ai’s services can predict the best path for each employee to reach their full potential.

In case you were wondering, Eightfold.ai is named for the eightfold path of Buddhist enlightenment. Maybe that's a stretch, but who knows.

It been well established that people are terrible at hiring — a long list of cognitive biases get in the way — so getting people out of the loop may be the best idea going. Algorithms can have biases, too, of course. And simply sucking up data about who has gotten hired in the past for what jobs could simply replicate the prejudice and inequities of yesterday into the workplace of today. They say they are working on that angle.

Eightfold.ai already counts more than 100 customers using its tools across different industries. Its software has processed more than 20 million applications to date, and increased response rates among its customers by 700 percent compared to the industry average — all while reducing screening costs and time by 90 percent, according to a statement.

A company to watch, clearly.

Quote of the Day

What is clear is that failure to meet the challenges posed by new technologies will likewise affect U.S. national security, in this case by increasing political pressures for American retrenchment, the consequences of which would be a more unstable and less prosperous world. In addition, the country will have neither the resources nor the political bandwidth to play a large global role if society is in turmoil. In such a situation, populism would be sure to grow, as would opposition to both immigration and trade despite their record of contributing to the country’s prosperity.

| Richard Haas, President, Council for Foreign Relations, The Work Ahead

On Narratives

Jeff Bezos has released his annual investors letter, in which he shared some management lessons. Amazon does not run on powerpoint, like many others. Instead, the culture is driven by narrative.

Perfect Handstands

A close friend recently decided to learn to do a perfect free-standing handstand. No leaning against a wall. Not for just a few seconds. Instagram good. She decided to start her journey by taking a handstand workshop at her yoga studio. She then practiced for a while but wasn’t getting the results she wanted. So, she hired a handstand coach. Yes, I know what you’re thinking, but evidently this is an actual thing that exists. In the very first lesson, the coach gave her some wonderful advice. “Most people,” he said, “think that if they work hard, they should be able to master a handstand in about two weeks. The reality is that it takes about six months of daily practice. If you think you should be able to do it in two weeks, you’re just going to end up quitting.” Unrealistic beliefs on scope – often hidden and undiscussed – kill high standards. To achieve high standards yourself or as part of a team, you need to form and proactively communicate realistic beliefs about how hard something is going to be –something this coach understood well.

Six-Page Narratives

We don’t do PowerPoint (or any other slide-oriented) presentations at Amazon. Instead, we write narratively structured six-page memos. We silently read one at the beginning of each meeting in a kind of “study hall.” Not surprisingly, the quality of these memos varies widely. Some have the clarity of angels singing. They are brilliant and thoughtful and set up the meeting for high-quality discussion. Sometimes they come in at the other end of the spectrum.

In the handstand example, it’s pretty straightforward to recognize high standards. It wouldn’t be difficult to lay out in detail the requirements of a well-executed handstand, and then you’re either doing it or you’re not. The writing example is very different. The difference between a great memo and an average one is much squishier. It would be extremely hard to write down the detailed requirements that make up a great memo. Nevertheless, I find that much of the time, readers react to great memos very similarly. They know it when they see it. The standard is there, and it is real, even if it’s not easily describable.

Here’s what we’ve figured out. Often, when a memo isn’t great, it’s not the writer’s inability to recognize the high standard, but instead a wrong expectation on scope: they mistakenly believe a high-standards, six-page memo can be written in one or two days or even a few hours, when really it might take a week or more! They’re trying to perfect a handstand in just two weeks, and we’re not coaching them right. The great memos are written and re-written, shared with colleagues who are asked to improve the work, set aside for a couple of days, and then edited again with a fresh mind. They simply can’t be done in a day or two. The key point here is that you can improve results through the simple act of teaching scope – that a great memo probably should take a week or more.

Chew on that for a while.

Question or comment? (Can be private, or public: your choice. I occasionally publish public comments or questions.)

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More media, politics, and social commentary on stoweboyd.com, including bio.

#implicit bias #cognitive bias #starbucks #amazon #narrative #the work ahead #eightfold.ai #ai #ai in hr #Work Futures Daily

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