“
Yes, we praise women over 40 for a multitude of reasons. Unfortunately, it's not reciprocal. For every stunning, smart, well-coiffed, hot woman over 40, there is a bald, paunchy relic in yellow pants making a fool of himself with some 22-year old waitress. Ladies, I apologize. For all those men who say, "Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?", here's an update for you. Nowadays 80% of women are against marriage. Why? Because women realize it's not worth buying an entire pig just to get a little sausage!
”
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Andy Rooney
“
There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation. It's a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die.
”
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Hunter S. Thompson (Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the '80's)
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I'm Penryn. I'm named after an exit off Interstate 80."
"Nice." They nod as if to say they understand what it's like to have parents like that.
”
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Susan Ee (Angelfall (Penryn & the End of Days, #1))
“
What we are teaches the child far more than what we say, so we must be what we want our children to become.
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Joseph Chilton Pearce (Teaching Children to Love: 80 Games & Fun Activities for Raising Balanced Children in Unbalanced Times)
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When I'm 80 years old and sitting in my rocking chair, I'll be reading Harry Potter. And my family will say to me, 'After all this time?' And I will say, 'Always.
”
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Alan Rickman
“
It's like chasing a beautiful woman for 80 years. Finally, she relents and you say, 'I'm terribly sorry. I'm tired.' [After winning his first Oscar after so many losses]
”
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Paul Newman
“
Someday I will stop being young and wanting stupid tattoos.
There are 7 people in my house. We each have different genders. I cut my hair over the bathroom sink and everything I own has a hole in it. There is a banner in our living room that says “Love Cats Hate Capitalism.” We sit around the kitchen table and argue about the compost pile and Karl Marx and the necessity of violence when The Rev comes. Whatever the fuck The Rev means.
Every time my best friend laughs I want to grab him by the shoulders and shout “Grow old with me and never kiss me on the mouth!” I want us to spend the next 80 years together eating Doritos and riding bikes. I want to be Oscar the Grouch. I want him and his girlfriend to be Bert and Ernie. I want us to live on Sesame Street and I will park my trash can on their front stoop and we will be friends every day. If I ever seem grouchy it’s just because I am a little afraid of all that fun.
There is a river running through this city I know as well as my own name. It’s the first place I’ve ever called home. I don’t think its poetry to say I’m in love with the water. I don’t think it’s poetry to say I’m in love with the train tracks. I don’t think it’s blasphemy to say I see God in the skyline.
There is always cold beer asking to be slurped on back porches.
There are always crushed packs of Marlboro’s in my back pockets. I have been wearing the same patched-up shorts for 10 days.
Someday I will stop being young and wanting stupid tattoos.
”
”
Clementine von Radics
“
Listen to me. I know something else. It will begin again. 200,000 dead and 80,000 wounded in nine seconds. Those are the official figures. It will begin again. It will be 10,000 degrees on the earth. Ten thousand suns, people will say. The asphalt will burn. Chaos will prevail. An entire city will be lifted off the ground, and fall back to earth in ashes…I meet you. I remember you. Who are you? You’re destroying me. You’re good for me. How could I know this city was tailor-made for love? How could I know you fit my body like a glove? I like you. How unlikely. I like you. How slow all of a sudden. How sweet. You cannot know. You’re destroying me. You’re good for me. You’re destroying me. You’re good for me. I have time. Please, devour me. Deform me to the point of ugliness. Why not you?
”
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Marguerite Duras (Hiroshima mon amour)
“
Over the last 25 years, the major popular movements that have had significant impact on the general society and have changed it, that have had a major civilizing effect – the feminist movement, the environmental movement, and so on – these are mostly developments of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Their roots might be in the activism of the ‘60s, but the movements themselves developed and extended later. The same is true of the changes in respect for other cultures, rights of oppressed people, and so on. These are quite significant changes. If you compare the United States now to what it was, say, 35 years ago, the changes are quite dramatic. These are changes in popular consciousness that are quite deeply embedded.
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Noam Chomsky
“
Your mind is an instrument, a tool. It is there to be used for a specific task, and when the task is completed, you lay it down. As it is, I would say about 80 to 90 percent of most people’s thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful. Observe your mind and you will find this to be true. It causes a serious leakage of vital energy. This kind of compulsive thinking is actually an addiction. What characterizes an addiction? Quite simply this: you no longer feel that you have the choice to stop. It seems stronger than you. It also gives you a false sense of pleasure, pleasure that invariably turns into pain.
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Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment)
“
As I grow in age, I value women who are over forty most of all. Here are just a few reasons why: A woman over forty will never wake you in the middle of the night to ask, “What are you thinking?” She doesn’t care what you think.
If a woman over forty doesn’t want to watch the game, she doesn’t sit around whining about it. She does something she wants to do. And, it’s usually something more interesting.
A woman over forty knows herself well enough to be assured in who she is, what she is, what she wants and from whom. Few women past the age of forty give a hoot what you might think about her or what she’s doing.
Women over forty are dignified. They seldom have a screaming match with you at the opera or in the middle of an expensive restaurant. Of course, if you deserve it, they won’t hesitate to shoot you, if they think they can get away with it.
Older women are generous with praise, often undeserved. They know what it’s like to be unappreciated.
A woman over forty has the self-assurance to introduce you to her women friends. A younger woman with a man will often ignore even her best friend because she doesn’t trust the guy with other women. Women over forty couldn’t care less if you’re attracted to her friends because she knows her friends won’t betray her.
Women get psychic as they age. You never have to confess your sins to a woman over forty. They always know.
A woman over forty looks good wearing bright red lipstick. This is not true of younger women. Once you get past a wrinkle or two, a woman over forty is far sexier than her younger counterpart.
Older women are forthright and honest. They’ll tell you right off if you are a jerk, if you are acting like one! You don’t ever have to wonder where you stand with her.
Yes, we praise women over forty for a multitude of reasons. Unfortunately, it’s not reciprocal. For every stunning, smart, well-coiffed hot woman of forty-plus, there is a bald, paunchy relic in yellow pants making a fool of himself with some twenty-two-year-old waitress.
Ladies, I apologize.
For all those men who say, “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free,” here’s an update for you. Now 80 percent of women are against marriage, why? Because women realize it’s not worth buying an entire pig, just to get a little sausage.
”
”
Andy Rooney
“
Refuse to complain about your problems. Keep them to yourself. As speaker-humorist Ed Foreman says, "You should never share your problems with others because 80 percent of people don't care about them anyway, and the other 20 percent are kind of glad that you've got them in the first place.
”
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Brian Tracy (Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time)
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I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, ‘OK, I’m looking back on my life. I want to minimise the number of regrets I have.’ And I knew that when I was 80, I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed, I wouldn’t regret that. But I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day.
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Jeff Bezos
“
The Japanese have a saying, “Eat until you are 80 percent full.
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Robert H. Lustig (Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease)
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Let's face it. It's taken years for you to learn to be the person you are, so you're not going to change overnight. But the good news in that you can unlearn those aspects that you want to change and chart a new path in life. And it's never too late to start, whether you're 20, 40, 60, or 80!
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Kevin Leman (What Your Childhood Memories Say about You . . . and What You Can Do about It)
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One might say that modern Honduran history began in 1873, when Jules Verne introduced Americans to the banana in his novel Around the World in 80 Days, where he praised it as being “as healthy as bread and as succulent as cream.
”
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Douglas Preston (The Lost City of the Monkey God)
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It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all, and comes to us bundled with several others in an anthology of comforting delusions: that global warming is an Arctic saga, unfolding remotely; that it is strictly a matter of sea level and coastlines, not an enveloping crisis sparing no place and leaving no life undeformed; that it is a crisis of the “natural” world, not the human one; that those two are distinct, and that we live today somehow outside or beyond or at the very least defended against nature, not inescapably within and literally overwhelmed by it; that wealth can be a shield against the ravages of warming; that the burning of fossil fuels is the price of continued economic growth; that growth, and the technology it produces, will allow us to engineer our way out of environmental disaster; that there is any analogue to the scale or scope of this threat, in the long span of human history, that might give us confidence in staring it down. None of this is true. But let’s begin with the speed of change. The earth has experienced five mass extinctions before the one we are living through now, each so complete a wiping of the fossil record that it functioned as an evolutionary reset, the planet’s phylogenetic tree first expanding, then collapsing, at intervals, like a lung: 86 percent of all species dead, 450 million years ago; 70 million years later, 75 percent; 125 million years later, 96 percent; 50 million years later, 80 percent; 135 million years after that, 75 percent again. Unless you are a teenager, you probably read in your high school textbooks that these extinctions were the result of asteroids. In fact, all but the one that killed the dinosaurs involved climate change produced by greenhouse gas. The most notorious was 250 million years ago; it began when carbon dioxide warmed the planet by five degrees Celsius, accelerated when that warming triggered the release of methane, another greenhouse gas, and ended with all but a sliver of life on Earth dead. We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate; by most estimates, at least ten times faster. The rate is one hundred times faster than at any point in human history before the beginning of industrialization. And there is already, right now, fully a third more carbon in the atmosphere than at any point in the last 800,000 years—perhaps in as long as 15 million years. There were no humans then. The oceans were more than a hundred feet higher.
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David Wallace-Wells (The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming)
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he wants people who make, say 30,000 dollars a year, to understand that they are not poor. In fact, they ARE the 1% they complain about. As of January of 2013 almost half the world lived on less than $2.5 a day, and 80% of the world lived on less than $10 a day.
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Claudia Azula Altucher (Become An Idea Machine: Because Ideas Are The Currency Of The 21st Century)
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I would say about 80% of my writing (including posts and blogs), has to do with unresolved anger and that's just fine with me
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Lori Lesko
“
Even the vaunted polygraph is accurate only 60 to 80 percent of the time, depending on the operator of the instrument (Ford, 1996, 230–232; Cumming, 2007).
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Joe Navarro (What Every Body is Saying: An FBI Agent's Guide to Speed-Reading People)
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True love is 20 percent care and 80 percent understanding.
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Abhijit Naskar (Wise Mating: A Treatise on Monogamy (Humanism Series))
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Nothing, say you? Perhaps so; nothing but a charming woman, who, strange as it may appear, made him the happiest of men!
”
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Jules Verne (Around the World in 80 Days)
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Doesn't the Federal Farm bill help out all these poor farmers?
No. It used to, but ever since its inception just after the Depression, the Federal Farm Bill has slowly been altered by agribusiness lobbyists. It is now largely corporate welfare ... It is this, rather than any improved efficiency or productiveness, that has allowed corporations to take over farming in the United States, leaving fewer than a third of our farms still run by families.
But those family-owned farms are the ones more likely to use sustainable techniques, protect the surrounding environment, maintain green spaces, use crop rotations and management for pest and weed controls, and apply fewer chemicals. In other words, they're doing exactly what 80 percent of U.S. consumers say we would prefer to support, while our tax dollars do the opposite.
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Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life)
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If I were a waiter, and a bald guy complained there was a hair in his food, I’d say, “Keep it, compliments of the house. We all pitched in to give you that. Too bad we couldn’t come up with 80,000 more.
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Jarod Kintz (This is the best book I've ever written, and it still sucks (This isn't really my best book))
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My instructor was a skinny guy in his midtwenties who had a shaved head that was always peeling from sunburns and who could only have smelled more like marijuana if he'd been made of it. The training vehicle was a mid- '80s tan Nissan that had working breaks on the passenger side; He often got his jollies slamming them on for no reason and then between wheezing laughs saying 'You were all like 'I'm in control of the car' and then I hit the brakes and shit and you were all like 'whaaaat?
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Justin Halpern (I Suck at Girls)
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Dr. Doris Parker: I have your ten week report. You know what it says "F, F, F… ". Do you know what that means? It means you don't care.
Student: You're brilliant. (Pause) Can I go now?
Dr. Doris Parker: (Sarcastic laugh) God! you're shallow, disgusting creature. You wanna know the truth?
Dr. Doris Parker: One, you're not gonna be in a band or a model missy because you have no ambition. With no skills you'd be competing with 80 percent of US work force for minimum wage job which you will work at for the rest of your life, till you're replaced by a computer.
Student: I don't care!
Dr. Doris Parker: The only talent you ever have is *insult*. Your life will basically become a carnival of pain and when you can't stand not one more day, not one more hour, it will get worse, much worse. Every day I come to this office and I listen to you kids *insult* all over your selves. It is so easy to be careless, it takes courage and character to care. Not that you have any of those qualities.
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Doris Parker
“
H appears no different from the corpses already here. But H is different. She has made three sick people well. She has brought them extra time on Earth. To be able as a dead person to make a gift of this magnitude is phenomenal. Most people don't manage this sort of thing while they're alive. Cadavers like H are the dead's heroes.
It is astounding to me and achingly sad that with 80,000 people on the waiting list for donated hearts and livers and kidneys, with sixteen a day dying there on that list, that more than half the people in the position H's family was in will say no, will choose to burn those organs or let them rot. We abide the surgeon's scalpel to save our own lives, our loved one's lives, but not to save a stranger's life. H has no heart but heartless is the last thing you'd call her.
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Mary Roach (Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers)
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Twenge says that in the 1950s only 12 per cent of teenagers agreed with the statement ‘I am an important person’, but by the late 1980s this proportion had risen to 80 per cent. So what could have been going on? People becoming much more self‐confident doesn’t seem to fit with them also becoming much more anxious and depressed. The answer turns out to be a picture of increasing anxieties about how we are seen and what others think of us which has, in turn, produced a kind of defensive attempt to shore up our confidence in the face of those insecurities.
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Richard G. Wilkinson (The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone)
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In our tradition, God says, „The heavens and the earth cannot contain Me.“ We know there are billions of stars and galaxies. Yet the Divine is saying, „No, all of that cannot contain Me. Only the heart of my faithful servant, the knower, is expansive enough to contain Me.“ It‘s a very high truth. (p. 80)
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Kabir Helminski (In the House of Remembering: The Living Tradition of Sufi Teaching)
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But what then? What had he really gained by all this trouble? What had he brought back from this long and weary journey? Nothing, say you? Perhaps so; nothing but a charming woman, who, strange as it may appear, made him the happiest of men! Truly, would you not for less than that make the tour around the world?
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Jules Verne (Around the World in 80 Days)
“
the International Monetary Fund basically acted as the world’s debt enforcers—“You might say, the high-finance equivalent of the guys who come to break your legs.” I launched into historical background, explaining how, during the ’70s oil crisis, OPEC countries ended up pouring so much of their newfound riches into Western banks that the banks couldn’t figure out where to invest the money; how Citibank and Chase therefore began sending agents around the world trying to convince Third World dictators and politicians to take out loans (at the time, this was called “go-go banking”); how they started out at extremely low rates of interest that almost immediately skyrocketed to 20 percent or so due to tight U.S. money policies in the early ’80s; how, during the ’80s and ’90s, this led to the Third World debt crisis; how the IMF then stepped in to insist that, in order to obtain refinancing, poor countries would be obliged to abandon price supports on
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David Graeber (Debt: The First 5,000 Years)
“
AHall80: Heh. It’s all right. How you feeling?
RubyMars: Compared to how I was feeling three weeks ago, a thousand times better. Compared to how I felt two months ago, still like crap.
RubyMars: :)
AHall80: You eating?
RubyMars: Yes, Mommy Aaron. I’m back up ten pounds.
RubyMars: Am I being too… familiar with you? I don’t want to make you feel weird.
AHall80: No. You’re how I expected
AHall80: You’re packing on that weight quick.
RubyMars: ……
AHall80: I’m messing with you. Glad you are
AHall80: Am I being too familiar now?
RubyMars: No, you’re just like I expected.
RubyMars: :)
RubyMars: How’s the constipation?
AHall80: ….
RubyMars: ….
AHall80: ….
RubyMars: No? You didn’t like that question?
AHall80: …..
AHall80: Did you finish your dating website profile?
RubyMars: I’ll take it you’re still constipated.
AHall80: Who are you?
RubyMars: I’m tired. I haven’t been sleeping much. My sister says I get feisty when I’m tired.
AHall80: I see. Now I know for next time. I’ll be prepared.
”
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Mariana Zapata (Dear Aaron)
“
I read these biographies all the time about these successful people and one of the patterns that I've discovered, and what I've discovered in myself and all of my friends who have become very successful, has been the fact that they say "Yes" to a lot of commitments.
If you just have this one goal, then that one thing may get shoved under the rug and procrastinated on. But if you say yes to a lot of things; if you almost overcommit, then you probably won't get all of the things you've committed to complete. But you'll get a good portion of them. The 80% that you DO get done will still be more than that one person who said no to a lot of things. The busiest people get the most things done.
”
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David Tian
“
There's a saying about ranch women. When they're 30, they look 50. When they're 80, they look 50.
”
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Craig Lancaster (The Summer Son)
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All our lives we rework the things from our childhood, like feeling good about ourselves, managing our angry feelings, being able to say goodbye to people we love. —Fred Rogers
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Gary Gulman (Misfit: Growing Up Awkward in the '80s)
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Many famous traders say trading is 80% psychology
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Andrew Aziz (Day Trading for a Living (Stock Market Trading and Investing))
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What America is tasting now is something insignificant compared to what we have tasted for scores of years. Our nation (the Islamic world) has been tasting this humiliation and degradation for more than 80 years. Its sons are killed, its blood is shed, its sanctuaries are attacked and no one hears and no one heeds. Millions of innocent children are being killed as I speak. They are being killed in Iraq without committing any sins. . . . To America, I say only a few words to it and its people. I swear to God, who has elevated the skies without pillars, neither America nor the people who live in it will dream of security before we live it here in Palestine and not before all the infidel armies leave the land of Muhammad, peace be upon him.
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Osama bin Laden (Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama Bin Laden)
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What I do know, is that I refused to compromise with the system and I was obsessed with preventing my work from being manipulated for their propaganda. Even stories about the Holocaust could have been promoted as anti-fascist stories, which they were in a way, but I didn’t want them to be taken only as such. I remember I had a reading in Berlin in the ‘80s and a man in the audience, asked me: ‘Sir, I read your book, I read the stories, you didn’t say who the oppressors were nor who are the people who are suffering.’ And I said, ‘No, I didn’t.’ It was important to me that a Vietnamese reader reading a story about a young boy who is in a camp, can recognize himself, without me saying: the boy is a Jew, the oppressor is a Romanian, or a Nazi, and so on. I wanted to have a more universal approach.
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Norman Manea
“
I wrote about everything I didn’t write on The Fame. While traveling the world for two years, I’ve encountered several monsters, each represented by a different song on the new record: my ‘Fear of Sex Monster,’ my ‘Fear of Alcohol Monster,’ my ‘Fear of Love Monster,’ my ‘Fear of Death Monster,’ my ‘Fear of Loneliness Monster,’ etc. I spent a lot of nights in Eastern Europe, and this album is a pop experimentation with industrial/Goth beats, 90’s dance melodies, an obsession with the lyrical genius of 80’s melancholic pop, and the runway. I wrote while watching muted fashion shows and I am compelled to say my music was scored for them.
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Lady Gaga (Lady Gaga - The Fame Monster Piano, Vocal and Guitar Chords)
“
[80] Respect means; put yourself out. That may look pointless, but it is quite right, because it amounts to saying: I should certainly put myself out if you needed it, because I do so when you do not; besides, respect serves to distinguish the great. If respect meant sitting in an armchair we should be showing everyone respect and then there would be no way of marking distinction, but we make the distinction quite clear by putting ourselves out.
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Blaise Pascal (Pensees)
“
Most incarcerated women—nearly two-thirds—are in prison for nonviolent, low-level drug crimes or property crimes. Drug laws in particular have had a huge impact on the number of women sent to prison. “Three strikes” laws have also played a considerable role. I started challenging conditions of confinement at Tutwiler in the mid-1980s as a young attorney with the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee. At the time, I was shocked to find women in prison for such minor offenses. One of the first incarcerated women I ever met was a young mother who was serving a long prison sentence for writing checks to buy her three young children Christmas gifts without sufficient funds in her account. Like a character in a Victor Hugo novel, she tearfully explained her heartbreaking tale to me. I couldn’t accept the truth of what she was saying until I checked her file and discovered that she had, in fact, been convicted and sentenced to over ten years in prison for writing five checks, including three to Toys “R” Us. None of the checks was for more than $150. She was not unique. Thousands of women have been sentenced to lengthy terms in prison for writing bad checks or for minor property crimes that trigger mandatory minimum sentences. The collateral consequences of incarcerating women are significant. Approximately 75 to 80 percent of incarcerated women are mothers with minor children. Nearly 65 percent had minor children living with them at the time of their arrest—children who have become more vulnerable and at-risk as a result of their mother’s incarceration and will remain so for the rest of their lives, even after their mothers come home. In 1996, Congress passed welfare reform legislation that gratuitously included a provision that authorized states to ban people with drug convictions from public benefits and welfare. The population most affected by this misguided law is formerly incarcerated women with children, most of whom were imprisoned for drug crimes. These women and their children can no longer live in public housing, receive food stamps, or access basic services. In the last twenty years, we’ve created a new class of “untouchables” in American society, made up of our most vulnerable mothers and their children.
”
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Bryan Stevenson (Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption)
“
You see, one of the reason why I embark on this journey is to question myself on the many myth of security that has been imprinted on us from the day we are born.
... It was also driven from my readings on the early theory of feminism (Simone de Beauvoir's) that say that 80% of a woman's life everyday (in a house) is spent cleaning the dirt that keeps on coming back. Therefore I wanted to explore the other side of it, that is, if I don't have a house, what would the 80% of my day be filled with?
”
”
Mislina Mustaffa (Homeless by Choice)
“
At some point, sisters began to talk about how unseen they have felt. How the media has focused on men, but it has been them - the sisters - who were there. They were there, in overwhelming numbers, just as they were during the civil rights movement.
Women - all women, trans women - are roughly 80% of the people who were staring down the terror of Ferguson, saying “we are the caretakers of this community”. Is it women who are out there, often with their children, calling for an end to police violence, saying “we have a right to raise our children without fear”.
But it is not women’s courage that is showcased in the media. One sister says “when the police move in we do not run, we stay. And for this, we deserve recognition”. Their words will live with us, will live in us, as Ferguson begins to unfold and as the national attention begins to really focus on what Alicia, Opal and I have started.
The first time there’s coverage of Black Lives Matter in a way that is positive is on the Melissa Harris-Perry show. She does not invite us - it isn’t intentional, I’m certain of that. And about a year later she does, but in this early moment, and despite the overwhelming knowledge of the people on the ground who are talking about what Alicia, Opal and I have done, and despite of it being part of the historical record, that it is always women who do the work even as men get the praise. It takes a long time for us to occur to most reporters and the mainstream. Living in patriarchy means that the default inclination is to center men and their voices, not women and their work.
The fact seems ever more exacerbated in our day and age, when presence on twitter, when the number of followers one has, can supplant the everyday and heralded work of those who, by virtue of that work, may not have time to tweet constantly or sharpen and hone their personal brand so that it is an easily sellable commodity. Like the women who organized, strategized, marched, cooked, typed up and did the work to ensure the civil rights movement; women whose names go unspoken, unknown, so too that this dynamic unfolds as the nation began to realize that we were a movement.
Opal, Alicia and I never wanted or needed to be the center of anything. We were purposeful about decentralizing our role in the work, but neither did we want, nor deserved, to be erased.
”
”
Patrisse Khan-Cullors (When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir)
“
Why, for example, wasn’t AIG required to reserve capital against them? Why, for that matter, were Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s willing to bless 80 percent of a pool of dicey mortgage loans with the same triple-A rating they bestowed on the debts of the U.S. Treasury? Why didn’t someone, anyone, inside Goldman Sachs stand up and say, “This is obscene. The rating agencies, the ultimate pricers of all these subprime mortgage loans, clearly do not understand the risk, and their idiocy is creating a recipe for catastrophe”?
”
”
Michael Lewis (The Big Short)
“
Before each meal she takes a moment to say hara hachi bu, and that keeps her from eating too much.” “Hara hachi bu?” I repeated. “It’s a Confucian-inspired adage,” Craig chimed in. “All of the old folks say it before they eat. It means ‘Eat until you are 80 percent full.
”
”
Dan Buettner (The Blue Zones: 9 Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who've Lived the Longest)
“
I would say about 80 to 90 percent of people's thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunction and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful. Observe your mind and you will know this to be true. It causes a serious leakage of vital energy.
”
”
Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment)
“
Jerry Seinfeld is a genius. Seinfeld, who doesn’t need to work, still does stand-up comedy, fine-tuning his bits obsessively, averaging close to a hundred shows a year. He says he’s going to keep doing it “into my 80s, and beyond.” In a recent interview, he compared himself to surfers: “What are they doing this for? It’s just pure. You’re alone. That wave is so much bigger and stronger than you. You’re always outnumbered. They always can crush you. And yet you’re going to accept that and turn it into a little, brief, meaningless art form.” Selya
”
”
William Finnegan (Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life)
“
RubyMars: Have you heard anything else about when you’re leaving for good?
AHall80: Not yet, but everything seems to be on schedule. Should be about 8 weeks. The longest 8 weeks of my life.
RubyMars: I’m sure.
AHall80: I want a shitty, greasy, deep dish pizza like you can’t imagine. I can already taste it.
AHall80: A hot shower… a real bed… AC everywhere…
RubyMars: Clean clothes?
AHall80: Clean clothes. Clean socks. No sand.
RubyMars: Clean underwear.
RubyMars: No sand? I thought you were planning on going to the beach?
AHall80: The beach is different. There’s water. It isn’t just desert and more desert.
RubyMars: I guess that makes sense.
RubyMars: My brother said once that his goal is to never see sand in his life again.
AHall80: For real.
RubyMars: What I didn’t finish saying was that he said that, but he’s gone to Cancun twice with his boyfriend, LOL.
AHall80: It’s different. I’m over this sand shit.
AHall80: Never again
RubyMars: Does that mean you’re dead set on not re-enlisting?
AHall80: …
RubyMars: Whatever you want. I’m not judging. We don’t have to talk about it.
AHall80: It’s not that I don’t want to talk about it…
RubyMars: But you don’t want to talk about it.
AHall80: :] Basically.
RubyMars: I’ll change the subject then.
RubyMars: Have you gone #2 lately?
AHall80: Three days ago.
RubyMars: Are you joking?
AHall80: I wish.
RubyMars: AARON
AHall80: I know. I KNOW.
RubyMars: Does it hurt?
AHall80: Uh, when it comes out?
RubyMars: Omg
RubyMars: Aaron
RubyMars: I meant your stomach.
RubyMars: Does your stomach hurt?
RubyMars: I can’t breathe
RubyMars: Or type
RubyMars: I didn’t mean your… rectum.
RubyMars: Aaron?
RubyMars: Aaron?
RubyMars: Are you there?
RubyMars: AARON?
AHall80: You’re not the only one who couldn’t breathe or type.
RubyMars: LMAO I’m crying.
AHall80: me too
AHall80: me too
RubyMars: I mean… you can tell me if your butt hurts too, I guess.
AHall80: Ruby, stop
RubyMars: Seriously. You can tell me. I won’t judge.
RubyMars: It happens.
RubyMars: I think.
AHall80: Stop
RubyMars: I can’t breathe
AHall80: I don’t know when the last time I laughed so hard was.
AHall80: Everyone is looking at me wondering wtf happened.
RubyMars: Your rectum happened
AHall80: BYE
RubyMars: I can’t stop laughing
AHall80: You’re never hearing from me again
RubyMars: There are tears coming out of my eyes.
AHall80: Bye. I’ll write you again when I find my balls.
RubyMars: It was nice knowing you.
AHall80: BYE
”
”
Mariana Zapata (Dear Aaron)
“
Microbes make up 80 percent of all biomass, says microbiologist Carl Woese. In one-fifth of a teaspoon of seawater, there are a million bacteria (and 10 million viruses), Craig Venter says, adding, “If you don’t like bacteria, you’re on the wrong planet. This is the planet of the bacteria
”
”
John Brockman (This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking)
“
So I was going to let it go. And then he said something about sickness being 80% mental. And then the poor victim of his babbling said, “Really?” And I couldn’t help myself. “No,” I interjected, “not really.” Because at a certain point my brain ignores the social instinct and says that when people are spreading demonstrably false medical information correcting that is more important than being polite. So I was an asshole. And I was just enough of an asshole to make my point without permanently alienating our friendship, because, like I said, I’m good at the asshole thing.
”
”
Noah Lugeons (Diatribes, Volume 1: 50 Essays From a Godless Misanthrope (The Scathing Atheist Presents))
“
As it is, I would say about 80 to 90 percent of most people’s thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful. Observe your mind and you will find this to be true. It causes a serious leakage of vital energy.
”
”
Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment)
“
The bacteria species in your colon today are more or less the same ones you had when you were six months old. About 80 percent of a person’s gut microflora transmit from his or her mother during birth. “It’s a very stable system,” says Khoruts. “You can trace a person’s family tree by their flora.
”
”
Mary Roach (Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal)
“
You chide yourself for walking too far ahead, for regressing into 80s song lyrics territory so soon. But then he says, "The supermassive black hole at the center of the milky way recently sparked 75 times brighter over the course of a 2 hour period, and twice as bright as it's ever been in the 20 years astronomers have been monitoring it." By now you're used to him talking Science, but you're not sure where he's going with this. "One theory," he continues "is that the event was caused by a star about 15 times bigger than the sun getting close to the edge of the black hole disturbing some gasses, heating things up, increasing the infrared radiation from the edge. But get this, we observed that star getting close to the black hole about a year before we observed the affects on the black hole." "That just shows how vast the universe is, how enormous the distance," you say. "Exactly! Distances, plural. The distance between the star and the edge of the black hole, and the distance between the black hole and Earth. So, I say all of this to say that sometimes wheels are set in motion long before the spark is manifest. Is that the same thing as fate? I don't know but...I do know that rare brilliant events take time.
”
”
Deesha Philyaw (The Secret Lives of Church Ladies)
“
This shift in culture has changed us. In the first place, it has made us a bit more materialistic. College students now say they put more value on money and career success. Every year, researchers from UCLA survey a nationwide sample of college freshmen to gauge their values and what they want out of life. In 1966, 80 percent of freshmen said that they were strongly motivated to develop a meaningful philosophy of life. Today, less than half of them say that. In 1966, 42 percent said that becoming rich was an important life goal. By 1990, 74 percent agreed with that statement. Financial security, once seen as a middling value, is now tied as students’ top goal. In 1966, in other words, students felt it was important to at least present themselves as philosophical and meaning-driven people. By 1990, they no longer felt the need to present themselves that way. They felt it perfectly acceptable to say they were primarily interested in money.20 We live in a more individualistic society. If
”
”
David Brooks (The Road to Character)
“
I ask Dennis how, knowing what he knows and seeing what he sees, he ever manages to board a plane. He points out that most crashing airplanes don’t hit the ground from thirty thousand feet. The vast majority crash on takeoff or landing, either on or near the ground. Shanahan says 80 to 85 percent of plane crashes are potentially survivable.
”
”
Mary Roach (Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers)
“
If i could tell the misfits something to make the journey through school and beyond more comfortable, it would be this: you will always be the same person the bus driver was so happy to see on the first day of school. Never stop noticing things like a bus driver opening and closing a door from way past her reach. Don’t worry too much about show and tell – toys and lunch boxes don’t make you happy and some people are fibbing. Just try to get some laughs. If you’re scared about something you’ve never done before like reading or multiplication or dating, say this: “I’ll figure it out.” Then, remind yourself of everything you’ve figured out so far. It’s okay if it takes you a while to make friends – you’ll better appreciate what a friend is worth. As you grow, so will your world. And the bigger your world, the more people will hear your story and say, “I know how you feel.” In the meantime, hold on tight to your Joanies, Billys, Finns, Lauries, and Sades. And never forget this – all the great laughs come from the minds of misfits.
”
”
Gary Gulman (Misfit: Growing Up Awkward in the '80s)
“
If one is generously contracted 80 years, that amounts to 29,220 days on Earth. Playing that out, how many times then, really, do I get to look at a tree? 12,395? There has to be an exact number. Let’s just say it is 12,395. Absolutely, that is a lot, but it is not infinite, and anything less than infinite seems too measly a number and is not satisfactory.
”
”
John Green (The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet)
“
While nearly 80 percent of fifth graders report being engaged at school, that number drops to only 40 percent by the start of high school. And according to Brandon Busteed, executive director of education at Gallup, “Teachers are dead last among all professions Gallup studied in saying their ‘opinions count’ at work and their ‘supervisors create an open and trusting environment.’
”
”
Tony Wagner (Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era)
“
Eventually I had gotten it together enough to call her. I did so partly to let her know where I was and partly to almost brag about where I was. Whenever I’d get morose, sulky, or stuck somewhere between crabby and suicidal, she was quick to say something disarming or indirectly tell me things weren’t that bad. Laura wasn’t exactly dismissive of my feelings, but I often left our conversations feeling like she didn’t quite get how harsh things felt for me—or at least that she wasn’t willing to acknowledge it. This frustrated and upset me. I spent so much time trying to hide the depths of my feelings and the clusterfuckedness of my life from everyone, except her. The one person I was honest with was often telling me that I was being too dramatic, or overdramatic, or overthinking things, or would I just please change the subject. It wasn’t like she didn’t believe me—it was more like she questioned why I let things bother me so much. In a small way, ending up in the mental ward was a strange kind of validation for me. Being in Timken Mercy proved that when I was insisting that things were terrible, and she kept insisting that they weren’t, they were, in fact, kind of terrible.
”
”
Eric Nuzum (Giving Up the Ghost: A Story About Friendship, 80s Rock, a Lost Scrap of Paper, and What It Means to Be Haunted)
“
The researchers discovered that there was a dramatic shift from an internal to an external locus of control in children of all ages, from elementary school to college. To give you an idea of how great a shift it was, young people in 1960 were 80 percent more likely to claim that they had control over their lives than children in 2002, who were more prone to say they lacked such personal control.
”
”
Jessica Joelle Alexander (The Danish Way of Parenting: What the Happiest People in the World Know About Raising Confident, Capable Kids)
“
For example, if you believe that 3% of graduate students are enrolled in computer science (the base rate), and you also believe that the description of Tom W is 4 times more likely for a graduate student in that field than in other fields, then Bayes’s rule says you must believe that the probability that Tom W is a computer scientist is now 11%. If the base rate had been 80%, the new degree of belief would be 94.1%.
”
”
Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
“
Moments of pride commemorate people’s achievements. We feel our chest puff out and our chin lift. 2. There are three practical principles we can use to create more moments of pride: (1) Recognize others; (2) Multiply meaningful milestones; (3) Practice courage. The first principle creates defining moments for others; the latter two allow us to create defining moments for ourselves. 3. We dramatically underinvest in recognition. • Researcher Wiley: 80% of supervisors say they frequently express appreciation, while less than 20% of employees agree. 4. Effective recognition is personal, not programmatic. (“ Employee of the Month” doesn’t cut it.) • Risinger at Eli Lilly used “tailored rewards” (e.g., Bose headphones) to show his team: I saw what you did and I appreciate it. 5. Recognition is characterized by a disjunction: A small investment of effort yields a huge reward for the recipient. • Kira Sloop, the middle school student, had her life changed by a music teacher who told her that her voice was beautiful. 6. To create moments of pride for ourselves, we should multiply meaningful milestones—reframing a long journey so that it features many “finish lines.” • The author Kamb planned ways to “level up”—for instance “Learn how to play ‘Concerning Hobbits’ from The Fellowship of the Ring”—toward his long-term goal of mastering the fiddle.
”
”
Chip Heath (The Power of Moments: Why Certain Moments Have Extraordinary Impact)
“
Heart disease is the Jeffrey Dahmer of modern ailments. It kills more than 25 percent of us. That’s one person in the United States dying of it every 37 seconds. Expanding fitness just a bit—the equivalent of a person improving their max running speed from five to six miles an hour—reduces the risk of heart disease by 30 percent, according to the American Heart Association. Next is cancer. It kills 22.8 percent of us. The most fit people face a 45 percent lower risk of dying from the disease, according to a study in the Annals of Oncology. Then we have accidents. They take 6.8 percent of us. If a person is in a serious car accident, being in shape drops their chances of dying by 80 percent, according to a study in the Emergency Medical Journal. If the docs have to operate—regardless of whether it’s an emergency or a planned surgery—fitter people also face fewer surgical complications and recover faster than unfit people, say scientists in Brazil.
”
”
Michael Easter (The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self)
“
If you ever meet a person who was a Skin from the late 70s and 80s and they say they never got into politics, I'm afraid to say they're lying to themselves. You could not help being drawn into far right or far left. Not because you were just patriotic. Left or Right are both patriotic, but a lot of things were changing all around and you followed what your mates and family were doing; you were young and ‒ well you went along with the flow, but the biggest influence was the music scene.
”
”
Spike Pitt (Skinhead... The Life I Chose: Memoirs of a Real Skin)
“
The now-famous yearly Candlebrow Conferences, like the institution itself, were subsidized out of the vast fortune of Mr. Gideon Candlebrow of Grossdale, Illinois, who had made his bundle back during the great Lard Scandal of the '80s, in which, before Congress put an end to the practice, countless adulterated tons of that comestible were exported to Great Britain, compromising further an already debased national cuisine, giving rise throughout the island, for example, to a Christmas-pudding controversy over which to this day families remain divided, often violently so. In the consequent scramble to develop more legal sources of profit, one of Mr. Candlebrow's laboratory hands happened to invent "Smegmo," an artificial substitute for everything in the edible-fat category, including margarine, which many felt wasn't that real to begin with. An eminent Rabbi of world hog capital Cincinnati, Ohio, was moved to declare the product kosher, adding that "the Hebrew people have been waiting four thousand years for this. Smegmo is the Messiah of kitchen fats." [...]
Miles, locating the patriotically colored Smegmo crock among the salt, pepper, ketchup, mustard, steak sauce, sugar and molasses, opened and sniffed quizzically at the contents. "Say, what is this stuff?"
"Goes with everything!" advised a student at a nearby table. "Stir it in your soup, spread it on your bread, mash it into your turnips! My doormates comb their hair with it! There's a million uses for Smegmo!
”
”
Thomas Pynchon (Against the Day)
“
An hour into the meeting, Bossie said, “We have another big issue.” “What’s that?” Trump asked, seeming a little more wary. “Well,” he said, “80 percent of the donations that you’ve given have been to Democrats.” To Bossie that was Trump’s biggest political liability, though he didn’t say so. “That’s bullshit!” “There’s public records,” Bossie said. “There’s records of that!” Trump said in utter astonishment. “Every donation you’ve ever given.” Public disclosure of all political giving was standard.
”
”
Bob Woodward (Fear: Trump in the White House)
“
In this kind of situation one might well ask: why continue to make the 80 percent of products that only generate 20 percent of profits? Companies rarely ask these questions, perhaps because to answer them would mean very radical action: to stop doing four-fifths of what you are doing is not a trivial change. What J-B Say called the work of entrepreneurs, modern financiers call arbitrage. International financial markets are very quick to correct anomalies in valuation, for example between exchange rates. But business organizations
”
”
Richard Koch (The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less)
“
Not to mention that God speaks in a language more difficult than Portuguese or Mandarin or HTML; He speaks in silence. I remember saying ‘bullshit’ the first time someone told me that, but I’ve come to realize that if you are still enough you can listen to silence like listening to music, you can read silence like reading a book. Moreover, if more than 80 percent of the way humans communicate is nonverbal, couldn't that mean that the majority of communication with the Divine is nonverbal as well? Prayer, meditation, listening - each was a tool for reading God's body language.
”
”
Gary Jansen (Holy Ghosts: Or, How a (Not So) Good Catholic Boy Became a Believer in Things That Go Bump in the Night)
“
You will be flogged for being right and flogged for being wrong, and it hurts both ways—but it doesn’t hurt as much when you’re right. There are times, however—and this is one of them—when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring rain on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison scum right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation. It’s a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die.
”
”
Hunter S. Thompson (Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the '80's)
“
Based on their work and his own, Dobyns argued that the Indian population in 1491 was between 90 and 112 million people. Another way of saying this is that when Columbus sailed more people lived in the Americas than in Europe. According to a 1999 estimate from the United Nations, the earth’s population in the beginning of the sixteenth century was about 500 million. If Dobyns was right, disease claimed the lives of 80 to 100 million Indians by the first third of the seventeenth century. All these numbers are at best rough approximations, but their implications are clear: the epidemics killed about one out of every five people on earth.
”
”
Charles C. Mann (1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus)
“
Despite this, I have a bet with Kip Thorne of the California Institute of Technology that in fact Cygnus X-1 does not contain a black hole! This is a form of insurance policy for me. I have done a lot of work on black holes, and it would all be wasted if it turned out that black holes do not exist. But in that case, I would have the consolation of winning my bet, which would bring me four years of the magazine Private Eye. If black holes do exist, Kip will get one year of Penthouse. When we made the bet, in 1975, we were 80 per cent certain that Cygnus was a black hole. By now, I would say that we are about 95 per cent certain, but the bet has yet to be settled.
”
”
Stephen Hawking (A Briefer History of Time)
“
In 2014, 54 percent of women described themselves as “unhappy with their body,” and 80 percent said that looking in the mirror “made them feel bad.” These numbers are significantly higher than in previous years. I am sure there are many contributing factors, but one is surely that, more and more, we are being presented with unrealistic standards of beauty. Models and actors are subjected to training and dietary regimens that are often unsustainable, hugely expensive, and extreme. And even then, images are cropped, airbrushed, and recolored so that the final image we end up seeing on a giant poster may not actually be anyone’s actual body but a weird hybrid of one or more people and a whole lot of digital editing.
”
”
Sam Allberry (What God Has to Say about Our Bodies: How the Gospel Is Good News for Our Physical Selves)
“
When Libya fought against the Italian occupation, all the Arabs supported the Libyan mujahideen.
We Arabs never occupied any country.
Well, we occupied Andalusia unjustly, and they drove us out, but since then, we Arabs have not occupied any country.
It is our countries that are occupied.
Palestine is occupied, Iraq is occupied, and as for the UAE islands...
It is not in the best interest of the Arabs for hostility to develop between them and Iran, Turkey, or any of these nations.
By no means is it in our interest to turn Iran against us.
If there really is a problem, we should decide here to refer this issue to the international court of Justice.
This is the proper venue for the resolution of such problems.
We should decide to refer the issue of the disputed UAE islands to the International Court of Justice, and we should accept whatever it rules.
One time you say this is occupied Arab land, and then you say...
This is not clear, and it causes confusion.
80% of the people of the Gulf are Iranians.
The ruling families are Arab, but the rest are Iranian. The entire people is Iranian.
This is a mess.
Iran cannot be avoided.
Iran is a Muslim neighbour, and it is not in our interes to become enemies.
What is the reason for the invasion and destruction of Iraq, and for killing of one million Iraqis?
Let our American friends answer this question:
Why Iraq? What is the reason?
Is Bin Laden an Iraqi? No he is not.
Were those who attacked New York Iraqis? No, they were not.
were those who attacked the Pentagon Iraqis? No, they were not.
Were there WMDs in Iraq? No, there were not.
Even if iraq did have WMDs - Pakistan and India have nuclear bombs, and so do China, Russia, Britain, France and America.
Should all these countries be destroyed?
Fine, let's destroy all the countries that have WMDs.
Along comes a foreign power, occupies an Arab country, and hangs its president, and we all sit on the sidelines, laughing.
Why didn't they investigate the hanging of Saddam Hussein?
How can a POW be hanged - a president of an Arab country and a member of the Arab League no less!
I'm not talking about the policies of Saddam Hussein, or the disagreements we had with him.
We all had poitlical disagreements with him and we have such disagreements among ourselves here.
We share nothing, beyond this hall.
Why won't there be an investigation into the killing of Saddam Hussein?
An entire Arab leadership was executed by hanging, yet we sit on the sidelines. Why?
Any one of you might be next. Yes.
America fought alongside Saddam Hussein against Khomeini.
He was their friend. Cheney was a friend of Saddam Hussein.
Rumsfeld, the US Defense Secretary at the time Iraq was destroyed, was a close friend of Saddam Hussein.
Ultimately, they sold him out and hanged him.
You are friends of America - let's say that ''we'' are, not ''you'' - but one of these days, America may hang us.
Brother 'Amr Musa has an idea which he is enthusiastic. He mentioned it in his report.
He says that the Arabs have the right to use nuclear power for peaceful purposes, and that there should be an Arab nuclear program.
The Arabs have this right.
They even have the right to have the right to have a nuclear program for other...
But Allah prevails...
But who are those Arabs whom you say should have united nuclear program?
We are the enemies of one another, I'm sad to say.
We all hate one another, we deceive one another, we gloat at the misfortune of one another, and we conspire against one another.
Our intelligence agencies conspire against one another, instead of defending us against the enemy.
We are the enemies of one another, and an Arab's enemy is another Arab's friend.
”
”
Muammar Gaddafi
“
Here’s a man who single-handedly sets off a chain reaction which ultimately leads to the deaths of 80 million people. Top that, Albert Einstein! With just a couple of bullets, this terrorist starts the First World War, which destroys four monarchies, leading to a power vacuum filled by the Communists in Russia and the Nazis in Germany who then fight it out in a Second World War. . . . Some people would minimize Princip’s importance by saying that a Great Power War was inevitable sooner or later given the tensions of the times, but I say that it was no more inevitable than, say, a war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Left unsparked, the Great War could have been avoided, and without it, there would have been no Lenin, no Hitler, no Eisenhower.41
”
”
Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined)
“
Michael Ward knows. Ward loves railroads. His loves his own railroad company, CSX, which traces its origins to 1827 when the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad was formed as the nation’s first common carrier. He traces his own origins at CSX back thirty-seven years, when he took an analyst job as a newly minted Harvard Business School M.B.A., rising to become chairman, president, and CEO in 2003. And he loves the whole American freight rail industry. “Railroaders are like farmers,” Ward declares. “You heard about the farmer that won the lottery? They said to him, ‘Oh my gosh, you won the lottery; what are you going to do with all that money?’ He said, ‘I’m a farmer and I love farming, and I’m going to farm until every penny of it is gone.’ And I say railroaders are like that. When we make more money, we’re going to invest more back into the infrastructure, so we can strengthen the railroad and grow the business.” Ward may sound like a press release, but that’s exactly how he talks, and why he’s a major industry spokesman. He lavishes praise on industry performance: “While we’ve improved the profitability of the industry, we’ve also cut rates in half of what they were in 1980 for our customers, on an inflation-adjusted basis. We’re providing a more economical product to them, and it’s safer and more reliable. Over the years, as an industry, our train accident rate is down 80 percent; our personal injury rate is down 85 percent; and we’re doing this with about one-third of the workforce we had in 1980.” He calls the industry “the envy of the world.
”
”
Rosabeth Moss Kanter (Move: Putting America's Infrastructure Back in the Lead: How to Rebuild and Reinvent America's Infrastructure)
“
The role played by stress in the causation of cancer is so great that it would not be an exaggeration to say that 80% or more cancer cases have their immediate origin in some form of mental pressure or strain. Grief, distress, fear, worry, and anger are emotions which have horrible effects on the body's functions. Researchers have discovered that these emotions cause the release of chemicals from the brain called neuropeptides. These potent compounds have a profound immune-suppressive action. Scientists have traced a pathway from the brain to the immune cells proving that negative emotions can stop the immune cells dead in their tracks. This results in part from the release of chemicals from nerve endings. Once this happens, harmful microbes or cancer cells can invade any tissue in the body.
”
”
Cass Ingram (Eat Right or Die Young: When Will Your Biological Clock Stop?)
“
Above all else, therefore, it must definitely be established where man actually stands in his innermost being. A priori he is as much sensation as thinking; he is in opposition to himself, hence he must stand somewhere in between. In his deepest essence he must be a being who partakes of both instincts, yet may also differentiate himself from them in such a way that, though he must suffer them and in some cases submit to them, he can also use them. But first he must differentiate himself from them, as from natural forces to which he is subject but with which he does not declare himself identical. On this point Schiller says: Moreover, this indwelling of the two fundamental instincts in no way contradicts the absolute unity of the mind, provided only that we distinguish it in itself from both instincts. Both certainly exist and operate within it, but the mind itself is neither matter nor form, neither sensuousness nor reason.80
”
”
C.G. Jung (Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 6: Psychological Types (The Collected Works of C. G. Jung))
“
A long decade ago economic growth was the reigning fashion of political economy. It was simultaneously the hottest subject of economic theory and research, a slogan eagerly claimed by politicians of all stripes, and a serious objective of the policies of governments. The climate of opinion has changed dramatically. Disillusioned critics indict both economic science and economic policy for blind obeisance to aggregate material "progress," and for neglect of its costly side effects. Growth, it is charged, distorts national priorities, worsens the distribution of income, and irreparably damages the environment. Paul Erlich speaks for a multitude when he says, "We must acquire a life style which has as its goal maximum freedom and happiness for the individual, not a maximum Gross National Product." [in Nordhaus, William D. and James Tobin., "Is growth obsolete?" Economic Research: Retrospect and Prospect Vol 5: Economic Growth. Nber, 1972. 1-80]
”
”
James Tobin (Economic Research: Retrospect and Prospect : Economic Growth (General Series))
“
Insofar as craft and poetics in a poem have a politics, I wanted to avoid that brittle enjambed-prose-sentence-lyric verse, where you have standard sentences snapped off and scattered decoratively across the page (which I might go out on a limb and say was characteristic of some leftist poets, Beat poets, street poets and populist poets of the 70s and 80s—all of whom I basically view as comrades, I should probably say, to this day) and on the other hand I also wanted my poetics to operate differently than those more right-wing academics—in practice—even if in their poems or statements they proclaim public leftist views or ideas—they remain academic poets, operating in elite university-supported circles, institutionalized and reading before institutional audiences, awarding grants and awards to each other, sitting on each other’s grants panels, awards and tenure committees, as Philip Levine admitted in an interview in Don’t Ask, 'giving prizes to friends.
”
”
Sesshu Foster
“
Yesterday while I was on the side of the mat next to some wrestlers who were warming up for their next match, I found myself standing side by side next to an extraordinary wrestler.
He was warming up and he had that look of desperation on his face that wrestlers get when their match is about to start and their coach is across the gym coaching on another mat in a match that is already in progress.
“Hey do you have a coach.” I asked him.
“He's not here right now.” He quietly answered me ready to take on the task of wrestling his opponent alone.
“Would you mind if I coached you?”
His face tilted up at me with a slight smile and said. “That would be great.”
Through the sounds of whistles and yelling fans I heard him ask me what my name was.
“My name is John.” I replied.
“Hi John, I am Nishan” he said while extending his hand for a handshake.
He paused for a second and then he said to me: “John I am going to lose this match”.
He said that as if he was preparing me so I wouldn’t get hurt when my coaching skills didn’t work magic with him today.
I just said, “Nishan - No score of a match will ever make you a winner. You are already a winner by stepping onto that mat.”
With that he just smiled and slowly ran on to the mat, ready for battle, but half knowing what the probable outcome would be.
When you first see Nishan you will notice that his legs are frail - very frail. So frail that they have to be supported by custom made, form fitted braces to help support and straighten his limbs.
Braces that I recognize all to well.
Some would say Nishan has a handicap.
I say that he has a gift.
To me the word handicap is a word that describes what one “can’t do”.
That doesn’t describe Nishan.
Nishan is doing.
The word “gift” is a word that describes something of value that you give to others.
And without knowing it, Nishan is giving us all a gift.
I believe Nishan’s gift is inspiration.
The ability to look the odds in the eye and say “You don’t pertain to me.”
The ability to keep moving forward.
Perseverance.
A “Whatever it takes” attitude.
As he predicted, the outcome of his match wasn’t great.
That is, if the only thing you judge a wrestling match by is the actual score. Nishan tried as hard as he could, but he couldn’t overcome the twenty-six pound weight difference that he was giving up to his opponent on this day in order to compete. You see, Nishan weighs only 80 pounds and the lowest weight class in this tournament was 106. Nishan knew he was spotting his opponent 26 pounds going into every match on this day. He wrestled anyway.
I never did get the chance to ask him why he wrestles, but if I had to guess I would say, after watching him all day long, that Nishan wrestles for the same reasons that we all wrestle for.
We wrestle to feel alive, to push ourselves to our mental, physical and emotional limits - levels we never knew we could reach.
We wrestle to learn to use 100% of what we have today in hopes that our maximum today will be our minimum tomorrow. We wrestle to measure where we started from, to know where we are now, and to plan on getting where we want to be in the future. We wrestle to look the seemingly insurmountable opponent right in the eye and say, “Bring it on. - I can take whatever you can dish out.”
Sometimes life is your opponent and just showing up is a victory.
You don't need to score more points than your opponent in order to accomplish that.
No Nishan didn’t score more points than any of his opponents on this day, that would have been nice, but I don’t believe that was the most important thing to Nishan. Without knowing for sure - the most important thing to him on this day was to walk with pride like a wrestler up to a thirty two foot circle, have all eyes from the crowd on him, to watch him compete one on one against his opponent - giving it all that he had. That is what competition is all about. Most of the times in wrestlin
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JohnA Passaro
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A good way to measure the ubiquity of the male perspective masquerading a the human perspective is to check out the Nobel Prizes. The Nobel Prizes are awarded in six categories: literature, medicine, chemistry, peace, physics, and economics. Who we are as a species, what we value, where we expend our energy and our resources, and our priorities, goals, and dreams can be charted through the development of these categories. As of 2018, Nobel Prizes in total have been awarded to 853 men and 51 women. One hundred ten Nobel Prizes in Literature have been awarded since 1901, and only 14 of those were awarded to women... The world would have been different-and better-if women had had equal say in the development of literature, medicine, chemistry, physics, peace, and economics. Better, not because women are better, but because they are more than half of humanity, representing more than half of what it means to be human. If you can convince me otherwise, you should receive a Nobel Prize." The Greatest Books - pg. 80-81
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Elizabeth Lesser (Cassandra Speaks: When Women Are the Storytellers, the Human Story Changes)
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The Japanese have a saying—hara hachi bu—counseling people to stop eating when they are 80 percent full. The Ayurvedic tradition in India advises eating until you are 75 percent full; the Chinese specify 70 percent, and the prophet Muhammad described a full belly as one that contained ⅓ food and ⅓ liquid—and ⅓ air, i.e., nothing. (Note the relatively narrow range specified in all this advice: somewhere between 67 and 80 percent of capacity. Take your pick.) There’s also a German expression that says: “You need to tie off the sack before it gets completely full.” And how many of us have grandparents who talk of “leaving the table a little bit hungry”? Here again the French may have something to teach us. To say “I’m hungry” in French you say “J’ai faim”—“I have hunger”—and when you are finished, you do not say that you are full, but “Je n’ai plus faim”—“I have no more hunger.” That is a completely different way of thinking about satiety. So: Ask yourself not, Am I full? but, Is my hunger gone? That moment will arrive several bites sooner.
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Michael Pollan (Food Rules: An Eater's Manual)
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The communists didn’t release their grip until the late 1980s. Effective organisation kept them in power for eight long decades, and they eventually fell due to defective organisation. On 21 December 1989 Nicolae Ceaus¸escu, the communist dictator of Romania, organised a mass demonstration of support in the centre of Bucharest. Over the previous months the Soviet Union had withdrawn its support from the eastern European communist regimes, the Berlin Wall had fallen, and revolutions had swept Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia. Ceaus¸escu, who had ruled Romania since 1965, believed he could withstand the tsunami, even though riots against his rule had erupted in the Romanian city of Timis¸oara on 17 December. As one of his counter-measures, Ceaus¸escu arranged a massive rally in Bucharest to prove to Romanians and the rest of the world that the majority of the populace still loved him – or at least feared him. The creaking party apparatus mobilised 80,000 people to fill the city’s central square, and citizens throughout Romania were instructed to stop all their activities and tune in on their radios and televisions. To the cheering of the seemingly enthusiastic crowd, Ceauşescu mounted the balcony overlooking the square, as he had done scores of times in previous decades. Flanked by his wife, Elena, leading party officials and a bevy of bodyguards, Ceaus¸escu began delivering one of his trademark dreary speeches. For eight minutes he praised the glories of Romanian socialism, looking very pleased with himself as the crowd clapped mechanically. And then something went wrong. You can see it for yourself on YouTube. Just search for ‘Ceauşescu’s last speech’, and watch history in action.20 The YouTube clip shows Ceaus¸escu starting another long sentence, saying, ‘I want to thank the initiators and organisers of this great event in Bucharest, considering it as a’, and then he falls silent, his eyes open wide, and he freezes in disbelief. He never finished the sentence. You can see in that split second how an entire world collapses. Somebody in the audience booed. People
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Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
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Virtually every version of CBT for anxiety disorders involves working through what’s called an exposure hierarchy. The concept is simple. You make a list of all the situations and behaviors you avoid due to anxiety. You then assign a number to each item on your list based on how anxiety provoking you expect doing the avoided behavior would be. Use numbers from 0 (= not anxiety provoking at all) to 100 (= you would fear having an instant panic attack). For example, attempting to talk to a famous person in your field at a conference might be an 80 on the 0-100 scale.
Sort your list in order, from least to most anxiety provoking. Aim to construct a list that has several avoided actions in each 10-point range. For example, several that fall between 20 and 30, between 30 and 40, and so on, on your anxiety scale. That way, you won’t have any jumps that are too big. Omit things that are anxiety-provoking but wouldn’t actually benefit you (such as eating a fried insect).
Make a plan for how you can work through your hierarchy, starting at the bottom of the list. Where possible, repeat an avoided behavior several times before you move up to the next level. For example, if one of your items is talking to a colleague you find intimidating, do this several times (with the same or different colleagues) before moving on.
When you start doing things you’d usually avoid that are low on your hierarchy, you’ll gain the confidence you need to do the things that are higher up on your list. It’s important you don’t use what are called safety behaviors. Safety behaviors are things people do as an anxiety crutch—for example, wearing their lucky undies when they approach that famous person or excessively rehearsing what they plan to say.
There is a general consensus within psychology that exposure techniques like the one just described are among the most effective ways to reduce problems with anxiety. In clinical settings, people who do exposures get the most out of treatment. Some studies have even shown that just doing exposure can be as effective as therapies that also include extensive work on thoughts. If you want to turbocharge your results, try exposure. If you find it too difficult to do alone, consider working with a therapist.
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Alice Boyes (The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points)
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In your mind, change the name of every day to Saturday. And change the name of work to play. 77. When you watch the news and see members of your species in turmoil, do not think there is nothing you can do. But know it is not done by watching news. 78. You get up. You put on your clothes. And then you put on your personality. Choose wisely. 79. Leonardo da Vinci was not one of you. He was one of us. 80. Language is euphemism. Love is truth. 81. You can’t find happiness looking for the meaning of life. Meaning is only the third most important thing. It comes after loving and being. 82. If you think something is ugly, look harder. Ugliness is just a failure of seeing. 83. A watched pot never boils. That is all you need to know about quantum physics. 84. You are more than the sum of your particles. And that is quite a sum. 85. The Dark Ages never ended. (But don’t tell your mother.) 86. To like something is to insult it. Love it or hate it. Be passionate. As civilization advances, so does indifference. It is a disease. Immunize yourself with art. And love. 87. Dark matter is needed to hold galaxies together. Your mind is a galaxy. More dark than light. But the light makes it worthwhile. 88. Which is to say, don’t kill yourself. Even when the darkness is total. Always know that life is
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Matt Haig (The Humans)
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As they worked through the order types, they created a taxonomy of predatory behavior in the stock market. Broadly speaking, it appeared as if there were three activities that led to a vast amount of grotesquely unfair trading. The first they called “electronic front-running”—seeing an investor trying to do something in one place and racing him to the next. (What had happened to Brad, when he traded at RBC.) The second they called “rebate arbitrage”—using the new complexity to game the seizing of whatever kickbacks the exchange offered without actually providing the liquidity that the kickback was presumably meant to entice. The third, and probably by far the most widespread, they called “slow market arbitrage.” This occurred when a high-frequency trader was able to see the price of a stock change on one exchange, and pick off orders sitting on other exchanges, before the exchanges were able to react. Say, for instance, the market for P&G shares is 80–80.01, and buyers and sellers sit on both sides on all of the exchanges. A big seller comes in on the NYSE and knocks the price down to 79.98–79.99. High-frequency traders buy on NYSE at $79.99 and sell on all the other exchanges at $80, before the market officially changes. This happened all day, every day, and generated more billions of dollars a year than the other strategies combined.
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Michael Lewis (Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt)
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When I pursued an education in healing in the USA in 1984, I was told that I had the capacity to become a crownchakrahealer, a spiritual healer, to act as a channel and catalyst for spiritual energy from the 7th chakra through the heart. At that time I had no idea what a crownchakrahealer really was and since than it has been a continuous process during the last 17 years to deepen and develop my understanding about what a crownchakrahealer is. This process has resulted in a way of working I call "Synchronicity – Transmission of the Light", which uses healing and energy work from the Source on a formless level. With this way of working I have worked with groups up to 80 people. It is really a way of working, which goes around the ego and speaks directly to the heart. It allows a person to come in direct contact with his own inner being, with his own life source. With my intellect I still do not understand how this way of working functions. It is not a way of working, which can be understood on a method plane. It is a way of working, which relates directly to the heart and which can only be understood through insight and experience.
One participant in Gothenburg in Sweden described his experience of Synchronicity as being like a thousand suns suddenly had been lit in his own consciousness. He says: "It was like an inner explosion, an expansion of my own consciousness – and I felt only love for the other people in the room".
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Swami Dhyan Giten (Presence - Working from Within. The Psychology of Being)
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In addition to all the information about income, education, and looks, men and women on the dating site listed their race. They were also asked to indicate a preference regarding the race of their potential dates. The two preferences were “the same as mine” or “it doesn’t matter.” Like the Weakest Link contestants, the website users were now publicly declaring how they felt about people who didn’t look like them. They would reveal their actual preferences later, in confidential e-mails to the people they wanted to date.
Roughly half of the white women on the site and 80 percent of the white men declared that race didn’t matter to them. But the response data tell a different story. The white men who said that race didn’t matter sent 90 percent of their e-mail queries to white women. The white women who said race didn’t matter sent about 97 percent of their e-mail queries to white men. This means that an Asian man who is good-looking, rich, and well educated will receive fewer than 25 percent as many e-mails from white women as a white man with the same qualifications would receive; similarly, black and Latino men receive about half as many e-mails from white women as they would if they were white.
Is it possible that race really didn’t matter for these white women and men and that they simply never happened to browse a nonwhite date that interested them? Or, more likely, did they say that race didn’t matter because they wanted to come across — especially to potential mates of their own race — as open-minded?
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Steven D. Levitt (Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything)
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Even at rest we sweat steadily, if inconspicuously, but if you add in vigorous activity and challenging conditions, we drain off our water supplies very quickly. According to Peter Stark in Last Breath: Cautionary Tales from the Limits of Human Endurance, a man who weighs 155 pounds will contain a little over forty-two quarts of water. If he does nothing at all but sit and breathe, he will lose about one and a half quarts of water per day through a combination of sweat, respiration, and urination. But if he exerts himself, that rate of loss can shoot up to one and a half quarts per hour. That can quickly become dangerous. In grueling conditions—walking under a hot sun, say—you can easily sweat away ten and a half to twelve and a half quarts of water in a day. No wonder we need to keep hydrated when the weather is hot. Unless the loss is halted or replenished, the victim will begin to suffer headaches and lethargy after losing just three to five quarts of fluid. After six or seven quarts of unrestored loss, mental impairment starts to become likely. (That is when dehydrated hikers leave a trail and wander into the wilderness.) If the loss gets much above ten and a half quarts for a 155-pound man, the victim will go into shock and die. During World War II, scientists studied how long soldiers could walk in a desert without water (assuming they were adequately hydrated at the outset) and concluded that they could go forty-five miles in 80-degree heat, fifteen miles in 100-degree heat, and just seven miles in 120-degree heat.
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Bill Bryson (The Body: A Guide for Occupants)
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There has been a revolution in the way people think. They have just noticed, without daring to say it, that the old paradigm, according to which ‘the fate of humanity, individual and collective, is getting better every day, thanks to science, democratisation, and egalitarian emancipation’, is false. The age that believed it is over. This illusion has fallen. This progress (debatable anyhow according to people like Ivan Illich)[203] lasted probably less than a century. Today, the unintended consequences of mass technology are beginning to be felt: new resistant viruses, the toxicity of processed food, the exhaustion of the soil and the shrinking of the world’s agricultural production, the general and rapid degradation of the environment, the threat of the invention of new weapons of mass destruction to add to nuclear weapons, and so on. In addition, technology is entering its baroque age. The fundamental inventions were discovered by the end of the 1950s. The improvements to them made in later decades have contributed fewer and fewer concrete ameliorations, like so many useless decorative motifs added to the superstructure of a monument. The Internet has probably had fewer revolutionary effects than the telegraph or the telephone. The Internet is a significant improvement applied to a pan-communication that was already substantially realised. Techno-science is following the ‘80-20’ power law. At the beginning it takes 20 units of energy to obtain 60 units of force. Later it takes 80 units of energy to realise only 20 units of force.
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Guillaume Faye (Convergence of Catastrophes)
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My dad always told me that there are three types of humans on this planet. First there’s the Sheep. The everyday types who live in denial—spoon-fed by the morning news, chewed up by another monotonous workday, and spit back out across the urban streets of the world like a mouthful of funky meatloaf that’s been rotting in the back of the fridge. Basically, the Sheep are the defenseless majority who are completely unwilling to acknowledge the inevitability of real danger, and trust the system to take care of them. Next you’ve got your Wolves. The bad guys who abide by no societal laws whatsoever but are good at pretending when it suits them. These are the thieves, murderers, rapists, and politicians, who feed on the Sheep until they’re thrown in prison, or better yet, belly up in a landfill alongside sheaves of your grandma’s itchy hand-knit Christmas socks. The ones you ritualistically blow up every year with an M80. And lastly, you have people like us. The McCrackens. The Herders of the world. Sure, our kind may look a lot like Wolves—large fangs, sharp claws, and the capacity for violence—but what sets us apart from the rest is that we represent the balance between the two. We can navigate the flock freely, with the ability to protect or disown as we see fit. My dad says that we’re the select few with the power of choice, and when real danger arises, we’ll be the ones who survive—and not just because we own a 357 Magnum, three glock G19’s, and a Mossberg pump-action shotgun, but because we’ve been prepping, in every possible badass way, since as long as I can remember, for the inevitable collapse of society as we know it.
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Neal Shusterman (Dry)
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Generalized Social Anxiety
In contrast to people with specific social anxieties, you may be afraid in a wide variety of situations. You might feel that people are judging everything you do and you might set unreasonable standards of perfection for yourself. This condition is called generalized (or discrete) social anxiety. Generalized social anxiety accounts for 80 percent of all cases of social anxiety.
Often, people with generalized social anxiety get caught in a vicious cycle. Because they are overly anxious in many situations, they act in clumsy and awkward ways, which in turn makes them feel even more discouraged and anxious. This cycle often results in depression and chronic stress.
Generalized social anxiety can affect almost every aspect of your life. This has been the case for Toni, a college senior.
In high school, I hardly had any friends. I didn’t participate in any extracurricular activities and managed to get by with average grades. Because I attend a large state university, I am even more invisible. So far, I have avoided any class that has any interaction with my peers, such as discussion groups or labs.
As graduation approaches, I need to decide what type of career I want. The thought of job interviews terrifies me. I am considering grad school but would need recommendations to apply. I haven’t even spoken to most of my professors, and the ones who know me probably can’t say anything good about me.
As a result, I’m really depressed. When I imagine the future, I can’t see myself being happy. I’ll probably move back to my parents’ house after graduation. I know they are disappointed in me, and that makes me feel like a complete failure.
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Heather Moehn (Social Anxiety (Coping With Series))
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Lloyd moved to the blackboard and wrote ‘Maneater, Hall and Oates’ at the bottom of a long list of songs and artists.
The blackboard in the kitchen had once been installed as a way of communication for the house. It had turned into a list of Songs That You Would Never See In The Same Light Again. This was basically a list of songs that our serial killing landlord had blared at one time or another at top volume to cover the sound of his heavy electric power tools. It was a litany of 70’s and 80’s music.
Blondie, Heart of Glass was on the list. So was Duran Duran’s ‘Hungry like the Wolf’. Sam had jokingly given him an Einstürzende Neubauten CD on the premise that his tools would blend right in to the music, and he’d returned it the next day, saying it was too suspicious-sounding and made him very nervous for some reason. The next weekend, we had gone right back to the 80’s with the Missing Persons and Dead or Alive.
I tried not to think about why he was playing the music, but it was a little hard not to think about. The strange thumps sometimes suggested that he’d gotten a live one downstairs and was merrily bashing in their skull in the name of his psoriasis to the tune of ‘It’s My Life’ by Talk Talk. Other times I listened in horror as my favorite Thomas Dolby songs were accompanied by an annoying high-pitched buzzsaw whine that altered as if it had entered some sort of solid tissue. He never borrowed music from us again – he claimed our music was too disturbing and dark, and shunned our offerings of Ministry and Nine Inch Nails in favor of something nice and happy by Abba. You’ve never had a restless night from imagining someone deboning a human body while blaring ‘Waterloo’ or ‘Fernando’. It’s not fun.
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Darren McKeeman (City of Apocrypha)
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Depression” is a problematic word. We all believe we know what it means because we toss it off so easily: “Oh, I’m depressed; I got a run in my stocking.” At the same time, when we are describing severe psychopathology, we presume that because the word is descriptive, it offers a definition as well. We move to the next step and presume that because we can take a picture of the brain and “see” depression, it therefore is real. It has been occurring to me more and more, not just from these conversations, but also from my work, that when the brain is in clearly different states—and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders80 says they are the same pathology—maybe our definition of the psychopathology is too broad. We need to redefine the nature of suffering to understand how it may be a condition more like dukkha, instead of a disease with a physiological cause as specific as something like a brain lesion. That is not to deny that true psychopathology exists, or that the patients I take care of do not suffer from a brain disease. I believe very strongly that they do. But I also see patients who, with focused attention and by acquiring new skill sets, can bring themselves out of it in the same way that William James did when he decided to focus his attention from inside to outside. The ability to focus attention means your brain is in a different state. Maybe we ought to understand those as different definitions of illness. What I’ve learned from all of you is that maybe we have to start making those distinctions more strongly. That will allow us to focus attention on how to handle ourselves in a world with natural levels of suffering, and help us not stigmatize people who don’t have the brain capacity to even start. Those are two separate items.
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Jon Kabat-Zinn (The Mind's Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation)
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It may seem paradoxical to claim that stress, a physiological mechanism vital to life, is a cause of illness. To resolve this apparent contradiction, we must differentiate between acute stress and chronic stress. Acute stress is the immediate, short-term body response to threat. Chronic stress is activation of the stress mechanisms over long periods of time when a person is exposed to stressors that cannot be escaped either because she does not recognize them or because she has no control over them. Discharges of nervous system, hormonal output and immune changes constitute the flight-or-fight reactions that help us survive immediate danger. These biological responses are adaptive in the emergencies for which nature designed them. But the same stress responses, triggered chronically and without resolution, produce harm and even permanent damage. Chronically high cortisol levels destroy tissue. Chronically elevated adrenalin levels raise the blood pressure and damage the heart. There is extensive documentation of the inhibiting effect of chronic stress on the immune system.
In one study, the activity of immune cells called natural killer (NK) cells were compared in two groups: spousal caregivers of people with Alzheimer’s disease, and age- and health-matched controls. NK cells are front-line troops in the fight against infections and against cancer, having the capacity to attack invading micro-organisms and to destroy cells with malignant mutations. The NK cell functioning of the caregivers was significantly suppressed, even in those whose spouses had died as long as three years previously. The caregivers who reported lower levels of social support also showed the greatest depression in immune activity — just as the loneliest medical students had the most impaired immune systems under the stress of examinations. Another study of caregivers assessed the efficacy of immunization against influenza. In this study 80 per cent among the non-stressed control group developed immunity against the virus, but only 20 per cent of the Alzheimer caregivers were able to do so. The stress of unremitting caregiving inhibited the immune system and left people susceptible to influenza. Research has also shown stress-related delays in tissue repair.
The wounds of Alzheimer caregivers took an average of nine days longer to heal than those of controls. Higher levels of stress cause higher cortisol output via the HPA axis, and cortisol inhibits the activity of the inflammatory cells involved in wound healing. Dental students had a wound deliberately inflicted on their hard palates while they were facing immunology exams and again during vacation. In all of them the wound healed more quickly in the summer. Under stress, their white blood cells produced less of a substance essential to healing. The oft-observed relationship between stress, impaired immunity and illness has given rise to the concept of “diseases of adaptation,” a phrase of Hans Selye’s. The flight-or-fight response, it is argued, was indispensable in an era when early human beings had to confront a natural world of predators and other dangers. In civilized society, however, the flight-fight reaction is triggered in situations where it is neither necessary nor helpful, since we no longer face the same mortal threats to existence. The body’s physiological stress mechanisms are often triggered inappropriately, leading to disease.
There is another way to look at it. The flight-or-fight alarm reaction exists today for the same purpose evolution originally assigned to it: to enable us to survive. What has happened is that we have lost touch with the gut feelings designed to be our warning system. The body mounts a stress response, but the mind is unaware of the threat. We keep ourselves in physiologically stressful situations, with only a dim awareness of distress or no awareness at all.
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Gabor Maté (When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress)
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I had an auto-repair man once, who, on these intelligence tests, could not possibly have scored more than 80, by my estimate. I always took it for granted that I was far more intelligent than he was. Yet, when anything went wrong with my car I hastened to him with it, watched him anxiously as he explored its vitals, and listened to his pronouncements as though they were divine oracles - and he always fixed my car.Well, then, suppose my auto-repair man devised questions for an intelligence test. Or suppose a carpenter did, or a farmer, or, indeed, almost anyone but an academician. By every one of those tests, I’d prove myself a moron, and I’d be a moron, too. In a world where I could not use my academic training and my verbal talents but had to do something intricate or hard, working with my hands, I would do poorly. My intelligence, then, is not absolute but is a function of the society I live in and of the fact that a small subsection of that society has managed to foist itself on the rest as an arbiter of such matters.Consider my auto-repair man, again. He had a habit of telling me jokes whenever he saw me. One time he raised his head from under the automobile hood to say: “Doc, a deaf-and-mute guy went into a hardware store to ask for some nails. He put two fingers together on the counter and made hammering motions with the other hand. The clerk brought him a hammer. He shook his head and pointed to the two fingers he was hammering. The clerk brought him nails. He picked out the sizes he wanted, and left. Well, doc, the next guy who came in was a blind man. He wanted scissors. How do you suppose he asked for them?”Indulgently, I lifted my right hand and made scissoring motions with my first two fingers. Whereupon my auto-repair man laughed raucously and said, “Why, you dumb jerk, He used his voice and asked for them.” Then he said smugly, “I’ve been trying that on all my customers today.”“Did you catch many?” I asked.“Quite a few,” he said, “but I knew for sure I’d catch you.”“Why is that?” I asked.“Because you’re so goddamned educated, doc, I knew you couldn’t be very smart.
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Isaac Asimov (It's Been a Good Life)
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Even if the press were dying to report on the Hmong gang-rape spree, the police won’t tell them about it. A year before the Hmong gang rape that reminded the Times of a rape in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, the police in St. Paul issued a warning about gang rapists using telephone chat lines to lure girls out of their homes. Although the warning was issued only in Hmong, St. Paul’s police department refused to confirm to the St. Paul Pioneer Press that the suspects were Hmong, finally coughing up only the information that they were “Asian.”20 And the gang rapes continue. The Star Tribune counted nearly one hundred Hmong males charged with rape or forced prostitution from 2000 to June 30, 2005. More than 80 percent of the victims were fifteen or younger. A quarter of their victims were not Hmong.21 The police say many more Hmong rapists have gone unpunished—they have no idea how many—because Hmong refuse to report rape. Reporters aren’t inclined to push the issue. The only rapes that interest the media are apocryphal gang rapes committed by white men. Was America short on Hmong? These backward hill people began pouring into the United States in the seventies as a reward for their help during the ill-fated Vietnam War. That war ended forty years ago! But the United States is still taking in thousands of Hmong “refugees” every year, so taxpayers can spend millions of dollars on English-language and cultural-assimilation classes, public housing, food stamps, healthcare, prosecutors, and prisons to accommodate all the child rapists.22 By now, there are an estimated 273,000 Hmong in the United States.23 Canada only has about eight hundred.24 Did America lose a bet? In the last few decades, America has taken in more Hmong than Czechs, Danes, French, Luxembourgers, New Zealanders, Norwegians, or Swiss. We have no room for them. We needed to make room for a culture where child rape is the norm.25 A foreign gang-rape culture that blames twelve-year-old girls for their own rapes may not be a good fit with American culture, especially now that political correctness prevents us from criticizing any “minority” group. At least when white males commit a gang rape the media never shut up about it. The Glen Ridge gang rape occurred more than a quarter century ago, and the Times still thinks the case hasn’t been adequately covered.
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Ann Coulter (¡Adios, America!: The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole)
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The ten rules of ikigai We’ll conclude this journey with ten rules we’ve distilled from the wisdom of the long-living residents of Ogimi: Stay active; don’t retire. Those who give up the things they love doing and do well lose their purpose in life. That’s why it’s so important to keep doing things of value, making progress, bringing beauty or utility to others, helping out, and shaping the world around you, even after your “official” professional activity has ended. Take it slow. Being in a hurry is inversely proportional to quality of life. As the old saying goes, “Walk slowly and you’ll go far.” When we leave urgency behind, life and time take on new meaning. Don’t fill your stomach. Less is more when it comes to eating for long life, too. According to the 80 percent rule, in order to stay healthier longer, we should eat a little less than our hunger demands instead of stuffing ourselves. Surround yourself with good friends. Friends are the best medicine, there for confiding worries over a good chat, sharing stories that brighten your day, getting advice, having fun, dreaming . . . in other words, living. Get in shape for your next birthday. Water moves; it is at its best when it flows fresh and doesn’t stagnate. The body you move through life in needs a bit of daily maintenance to keep it running for a long time. Plus, exercise releases hormones that make us feel happy. Smile. A cheerful attitude is not only relaxing—it also helps make friends. It’s good to recognize the things that aren’t so great, but we should never forget what a privilege it is to be in the here and now in a world so full of possibilities. Reconnect with nature. Though most people live in cities these days, human beings are made to be part of the natural world. We should return to it often to recharge our batteries. Give thanks. To your ancestors, to nature, which provides you with the air you breathe and the food you eat, to your friends and family, to everything that brightens your days and makes you feel lucky to be alive. Spend a moment every day giving thanks, and you’ll watch your stockpile of happiness grow. Live in the moment. Stop regretting the past and fearing the future. Today is all you have. Make the most of it. Make it worth remembering. Follow your ikigai. There is a passion inside you, a unique talent that gives meaning to your days and drives you to share the best of yourself until the very end. If you don’t know what your ikigai is yet, as Viktor Frankl says, your mission is to discover it.
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Héctor García (Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life)
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Scrapbooking also became more female, Tucker says. “Women are charged with memory. Men were taking the photos, but who was guarding that memory? That was women,” she adds. “That was part of the caretaking role.” This is true of many of today’s digital sharing tools: About 80 percent of the users of Pinterest are women.
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Anonymous
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When approximately 80% of the environmental impact is predetermined at the concept and design stage there is clearly action to take. As Kate Krebbs, executive director of the National Recycling Coalition (NRC) in the USA says, “Waste is a design flaw.
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Adrian Shaughnessy (How to Be a Graphic Designer without Losing Your Soul)