Some months or years ago, BoardAd announced to me that I had written four thousand articles for Whitakeronline .

So by now we’re coming up on five thousand.

I hate to shock you, but I suspect that some of you have not read every single one of them. Or maybe you forgot some.

When I was describing the permanent punishment I recommended for anti-whites, one of you actually looked up my first description of it: “Don’t Lose the Victory!”

I deeply appreciate that. I could never have found it.

I hit the link, but I still can’t figure out the date on that article.

As White Rabbit very accurately pointed out, I tend to panic when something technical happens to our site.

But then again, the reason you tolerate me knowing so little about the web and other topics is because there is advice someone else can’t give you.

My experience is that if you seek power you simply have to give up being too embarrassed to make a fool of yourself.

I went from international aviation negotiator to special assistant to the director of the entire Federal Civil Service. In between I was called in as a merc as cover, in which job I had to pass muster with the real mercs, though I never had basic military training and have never cleaned my own gun. .

When I was senior staff and my congressman went off to China, I had to fill his place and speak for him.

The essential point is that, if you are going to exercise power, you have to go in not only blind, but at the top. Like a new lieutenant taking over command of career sergeants, you have to get used to going in with everybody looking to you for guidance when you start out with less information than the receptionists.

I do this here, and I beg your patience with me. If I have the facts wrong, I will simply spill out to you the story as I have heard it. I don’t mind looking like a fool in front of my own people.

Please look at that last sentence. If you think about it you will realize that everyone who takes a high level job has to be that way. It is not unusual for somebody to go straight from Deputy Assistant Secretary of something huge in the government to a private sector job administering show production or chewing gum.

He goes in blind.

He depends on the people around him. He has to be able to find, not so much the information as the PEOPLE who can GIVE him the straight dope.

So my apparent sloppiness with information and my ignorance of internet savvy are not anything new. If I screw up the history, BBG is there, if I need advice on real-world internet wisdom, White Rabbit is at my beck and call. BoardAd is much, much younger, but he has become one hell of an editor.

I like to say that my basic rule of management is “Get good people and then stay out of their way.”

Actually, I never stayed out of their way. I was always reachable. Incompetent people who are given too much authority tend to not delegate at all or else to delegate and then hide.

If some of you get as far as I expect you to in life, you will find out exactly what I am talking about here.