Men and women in leadership roles

Ladies, men making decisions about you (like VP Mike Pence and the “Freedom Caucus” here) should be incentive enough to start taking charge.

I’ve been fortunate to work with a number of strong, amazing women, many of whom have stories of times when they have been (or felt they’ve been) shut out of important discussions in their professional lives simply because of their gender. I’m always sad to hear that they face this treatment and strive myself to treat everyone with whom I work (and, frankly, everyone I meet) with respect.

I got a small taste of how this feels as PTA president when I’d be the only man in a meeting and the women would never address me. Education, it seems, is so overwhelmingly associated with women that as a man I felt like an interloper. Other PTA volunteers would so often applaud the efforts of “our PTA ladies” that rather that fight the point it was easier just to quietly consider myself an “honorary lady.” There are ongoing efforts to get more dads involved in PTA but I came to realize that the deck is stacked against them.

Another thing I have noticed after years of serving on various boards and groups is that some women love to call the shots but only if they’re not the actual leader. They have strong views of how things should be done but when given the opportunity to take charge of the changes they demur. This drives me nuts because I know what they’re capable of doing – these are women who are great leaders – but for whatever reason are reluctant to be in charge. I don’t know if this is a culture thing or what but many women seem to hold themselves back – a self-imposed glass ceiling. They have so much going for them! If they’d only step up and add the authority to their ideas they would have it all.

It might come down to men and women leading differently. Or it might come down to me being full of shit, too. As an off-again-on-again leader myself, though, I do enjoy studying the topic.

Home projects getting done

While I’ve been away from my blog, several honeydos have been getting done (or worked on, anyway). I’ve scrubbed our boat down and started replacing parts in order to get it ready to sell. Kelly and I have also made plans to replace our cracked, rotted deck with something nicer. We’ve also explored expanding our screened porch, though not quite ready to pull the trigger on that one.

One thing we did decide to do is fix the drainage in our back yard. We get deluged by stormwater every time it rains as a catch basin on Glascock street empties into the neighbors’ yard and settles in our yard. The new homes next door have “industrial strength” storm drains at the edge of our property, so we hired a contractor to put in an underground pipe to move the water from one end of our yard to the other. Right now our backyard resembles the trenches of the Western Front of World War One. It should be better than new in a few days, though. Good to be investing in the home again, and knocking out those things we’ve been meaning to do for so long.

Where’s Mark?

Been a while since I posted. As y’all should know by now, that means I’ve been busy! Got home from Spain with so much to say about the trip but couldn’t find the time to put it all down. Instead, I had consolidate my two Amazon instances into one, working to save money (and complexity). Since my old server was running CentOS 6.x and I wanted to be able to run Docker, I had to build an identical server, only based on CentOS 7.x. This took a while to transfer but hopefully no one out there noticed.

The reason I wanted Docker was to work on a new project, kicking the tires of new web forum software that I hope to use here in Raleigh for a new community site. It took some work but I got it going, though launch date is still several weeks away.
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KremlinGate Just Put the Trump White House in a Precarious Place | Observer

Last week I explained in this column how President Donald Trump, despite facing serious political challenges over his murky ties to the Kremlin, was fortunate to have opponents more motivated by partisanship than truth-telling. As long as that state of affairs continued, the commander-in-chief was likely to avoid the thorough scrutiny which his apparent links to Moscow actually merit.

A lot has changed in just a few days. Last week began promisingly for the president, with his joint address to Congress on Tuesday evening earning better reviews than many had anticipated. Then it all unraveled the next day, when it was reported that Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a key member of the White House inner circle, had two discussions with Sergei Kislyak, the Russian ambassador in Washington, during the 2016 election campaign.

It’s hardly abnormal for sitting senators—as Sessions was last year—to meet with foreign diplomats, even Russian ones, but the precise capacity in which he chatted with Kislyak suddenly became important. Was Sessions parleying with the Kremlin’s emissary as a senator or as a top advisor to Donald Trump?

Source: KremlinGate Just Put the Trump White House in a Precarious Place | Observer