bill berry

Kuumba (Creativity)

To do always as much as we can, in the way that we can, in order to leave our community more beautiful than when we inherited it.

Imani (Faith)

To believe with all our heart in our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders, and the righteousness and victory of our struggle.

It strikes me now that Kuumba and Imani are my favorite Nguzo Saba principles, maybe because creativity feels like such an act of faith. We try to create, not knowing our creativity’s impact on others or us. We will something new into existence, resistance notwithstanding, and our faith pulls us through.

I love how, back when I celebrated Kwanza in community with others, our celebration of Kuumba led us right into Imani at midnight. It seemed almost like magic!

My 2022 Wishes for you:

#HappyAndSafeNewYear!!!
#StayCreative!!!
#KeepTheFaith!!!

Pimientos de Padrón!!!

Nikole Hannah-Jones, Ta-Nehisi Coates joining Howard University faculty - The Washington Post

“It’s not my job to heal the University of North Carolina,” she said. “That’s the job of the people in power who created the situation in the first place.”

…

In a statement issued through her attorneys, Hannah-Jones said Tuesday that she could not work at UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media.

“I cannot imagine working at and advancing a school named for a man who lobbied against me, who used his wealth to influence the hires and ideology of the journalism school, who ignored my 20 years of journalism experience, all of my credentials, all of my work, because he believed that a project that centered Black Americans equaled the denigration of white Americans,” she said.

Nikole Hannah-Jones will not join faculty at UNC Chapel Hill | Raleigh News & Observer

“Since the second grade when I started being bused into white schools, I’ve spent my entire life proving that I belong in elite white spaces that were not built for Black people,” Hannah-Jones said.

“I decided that I didn’t want to do that anymore, that Black professionals should feel free — and actually perhaps an obligation — to go to our own institutions and bring our talents and resources to our own institutions and help to build them up as well.“

Here’s a little something I noticed…

What does it mean to say that you’re “head over heels” in love with someone when your head being over your heels happens all the time while you’re just standing up?

Apparently, the phrase began as “heels over head” in the 1300s.

“The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.”
– H. L. Mencken

“In God we trust; all others must bring data.”
– W. Edwards Deming

“Hmmm…”
– Bill E. Bob

Inside the all-hands meeting that led to a third of Basecamp employees quitting - The Verge:

Another employee said they had been thrown by the fact that the founders, after years of telling employees that they were part of an elite chosen few who were good enough to work at Basecamp, would get rid of them so easily.

“They just want to build cool shit all day,” the employee said. “They don’t want to deal with people, which is something you have to do as a manager … Jason and David just threw us away.”

Fascinating story about what happens when you don’t do your work.

“To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time.”
– Leonard Bernstein

Is that why some of my best ideas arrive late, almost at the end of possibility???

Why Zigging Is The Enemy of Innovation

As Henry Ford may have once said, “If I asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said, ‘faster horses’.”

This is why a real innovation culture in a business is really, really hard to cultivate. People’s first instinct is just to copy the competition with a tweak, and hope for the best.

But that’s not how transformational innovation is built. It never has.

This sounds like “best practices” to me. Why pursue mediocrity???

”I’m not the only one on-screen right now who has been falsely accused of a terrible sex act…“
– Rep. Matt Gaetz

Frank Figliuzzi: Senate asked all the wrong questions about the pro-Trump attack on the Capitol

Frank Figliuzzi joins Lawrence O’Donnell to discuss the questions lawmakers should ask after the first hearing about security failures that led to the Capitol riot failed to address key issues, including how racial bias impacted the police response to the threat: “We seem to collectively have a problem in this country… with seeing people who look like us as threats even when the threat and the intelligence is staring us in the face.”

The most familiar Q is portrayed by John de Lancie. He is an extra-dimensional being of unknown origin who possesses immeasurable power over time, space, the laws of physics, and reality itself, being capable of altering it to his whim.

Wikipedia

Hmmm…

Me: If my variances are varying together too much, I might have a case of heteroscedasticity.
Wife: “I’m not impressed!”

In any event, I was always better with multicollinearity, so I might’ve gotten that wrong…

“When you say something unkind, when you do something in retaliation, your anger increases. You make the other person suffer, and they try hard to say or do something back to make you suffer, and get relief from their suffering. That is how conflict escalates.”
– Thich Nhat Hanh, Taming the Tiger Within

aka, collusion…

Hip-Hop Group Tag Team: “Scoop, There It Is!”

I almost lost it!