Abundance New Year Quotes

Allow not, the shallow intentions or vile aspirations of others to taint your heart; Love always. - With an abundance of positivity you will counter the negative, always.

To see the first sun rise in New Year is the most sacredness of existence.

It has taken me a lot of years, but I find silence is sometimes the best answer.

On Generosity On our own, we conclude: there is not enough to go around we are going to run short of money of love of grades of publications of sex of beer of members of years of life we should seize the day seize our goods seize our neighbours goods because there is not enough to go around and in the midst of our perceived deficit you come you come giving bread in the wilderness you come giving children at the 11th hour you come giving homes to exiles you come giving futures to the shut down you come giving easter joy to the dead you come – fleshed in Jesus. and we watch while the blind receive their sight the lame walk the lepers are cleansed the deaf hear the dead are raised the poor dance and sing we watch and we take food we did not grow and life we did not invent and future that is gift and gift and gift and families and neighbours who sustain us when we did not deserve it. It dawns on us – late rather than soon- that you “give food in due season you open your hand and satisfy the desire of every living thing.” By your giving, break our cycles of imagined scarcity override our presumed deficits quiet our anxieties of lack transform our perceptual field to see the abundance………mercy upon mercy blessing upon blessing. Sink your generosity deep into our lives that your muchness may expose our false lack that endlessly receiving we may endlessly give so that the world may be made Easter new, without greedy lack, but only wonder, without coercive need but only love, without destructive greed but only praise without aggression and invasiveness…. all things Easter new….. all around us, toward us and by us all things Easter new. Finish your creation, in wonder, love and praise. Amen.

Every New Year brings its sacred blessings.

We joyfully pray with grateful heart’s to welcome blessings in New Year.

Live a life abundant in love and rich in spirit, these are the seeds of a fulfilling existence. Be the safe harbor you seek in the world. Follow your dreams, not your fear. Go into the New Year with an open mind and hopeful heart. Don't let the chains of unforgiveness weigh you down. Life is too short to live in a prison of past hurts. The futures is yours for the taking and creating. Life is bittersweet, when we can let darkness and light co-exist as illumination, we can live in true happiness. When we live life at its best, it is a symphony of feelings, of high and low notes, of tragedy and comedy, love and loss, magic and the sublime. It can be quite a spectacular journey when we fully embrace and accept it.

What an abundant harvest has been collected in autumn! The earth has now fulfilled its design for this year, and is going to repose for a short time. Thus nature is continually employed during the greatest part of the year: even in her rest she is active: and in silence prepares a new creation.

Some of the faithful had a distinct aspect of roostering, loudly proclaiming that they were going to pray on any number of topics, how God was walking beside them through their incarceration, how Jesus loved sinners, and so on. Personally, I thought that one could thank the Lord at a lower volume and perhaps with less self-congratulation. You could worship loudly and still act pretty lousy, abundant evidence of which was running around the Dorms.

Twenty years from now you will be disappointed you never used Cosmic Ordering today.

we’ve been redefining what it means to be human. Over the past 60 years, as mechanical processes have replicated behaviors and talents we thought were unique to humans, we’ve had to change our minds about what sets us apart. As we invent more species of AI, we will be forced to surrender more of what is supposedly unique about humans. Each step of surrender—we are not the only mind that can play chess, fly a plane, make music, or invent a mathematical law—will be painful and sad. We’ll spend the next three decades—indeed, perhaps the next century—in a permanent identity crisis, continually asking ourselves what humans are good for. If we aren’t unique toolmakers, or artists, or moral ethicists, then what, if anything, makes us special? In the grandest irony of all, the greatest benefit of an everyday, utilitarian AI will not be increased productivity or an economics of abundance or a new way of doing science—although all those will happen. The greatest benefit of the arrival of artificial intelligence is that AIs will help define humanity. We need AIs to tell us who we are.

g) Time it takes to reinvent yourself: five years. Here’s a description of the five years: Year One: You’re flailing and reading everything and just starting to do. Year Two: You know who you need to talk to and network with. You’re doing every day. You finally know what the Monopoly board looks like in your new endeavors. Year Three: You’re good enough to start making money. It might not be a living yet. Year Four: You’re making a good living, and you can quit your day job. Year Five: You’re making wealth. Sometimes you get frustrated in years one through four. You say, “Why isn’t it happening yet?” That’s okay. Just keep going. Or stop and pick a new field.

I had come to New York when I was seventeen because—and maybe I was not fully conscious of this then—the city had seemed like a great place to discover who you are. It just seemed that there was a lot to experience here, as if all you had to do was show up and the city would take care of the rest, making sure you got the education, the maturing, the wising-up you needed. Its crowds, the noise, the endlessness of it all, the perpetual motion, felt exciting then—revealing—just the deep end I needed to jump into. There is something unique about New York, some quality, some matchless, pertinent combination of promise and despair, wizardry and counterfeit, abundance and depletion, that stimulates and allows for a reckoning to occur—maybe even forces it. The city pulls back the curtain on who you are; it tests you and shows you what you are made of in a way that has become iconic in our popular culture, and with good reason. In thirteen years, the city has kicked my ass and made me strong and served me well.

We joyfully pray with grateful hearts, to welcome the sacred-blessings in New Year

I wish you a very merry Christmas filled with abundance and a magnificent magical New Year.

New year is the new way of inviting transformation, abundance and prosperity to life.

When you talk to the experts about developing new technology to provide clean drinking water for the developing world, they’ll tell you that—with four billion people making less than two dollars a day—there’s no viable business model, no economic model, and no way to finance development costs. But the twenty-five poorest countries already spend twenty percent of their GDP on water. This twenty percent, about thirty cents, ain’t much, but do the math again: four billion people spending thirty cents a day is a $1.2 billion market every day. It’s $400 billion a year. I can’t think of too many companies in the world that have $400 billion in sales a year. And you don’t have to do a market study to find out whether there’s a need. It’s water. There’s a need!

How would you live differently today if you believed deep down that God had crowned your year with his goodness? What would you dare to accomplish for his kingdom if you believed the path he has set you on drips with abundance? He has… and he will. The God we serve has purpose and plans for your life that are good. His thoughts about you are good; his will for you is good. All things are made new in his presence… your glorious future was planned before the foundations of the earth.

There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer silently crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the fall mornings. Along the roads, laurel, viburnum, and alder, great ferns and wildflowers delighted the traveler's eye through much of the year. Even in winter the roadsides were places of beauty, where countless birds came to feed on the berries and on the seed heads of the dried weeds rising above the snow. The countryside was, in fact, famous for the abundance and variety of its bird life, and when the flood of migrants was pouring through in spring and fall people traveled from great distances to observe them. Others came to fish the streams, which flowed clear and cold out of the hills and contained shady pools where trout lay. So it had been from the days many years ago when the first settlers raised their homes, sank their wells, and built their barns. Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens, the cattle, and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death. The farmers spoke of much illness among their families. In the town the doctors had become more and more puzzled by new kinds of sickness appearing among their patients. There had been sudden and unexplained deaths, not only among adults but even among children whoe would be stricken suddently while at play and die within a few hours. There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example--where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh. On the farms the hens brooded, but no chicks hatched. The farmers complained that they were unable to raise any pigs--the litters were small and the young survived only a few days. The apple trees were coming into bloom but no bees droned among the blossoms, so there was no pollination and there would be no fruit. The roadsides, once so attractive, were now lined with browned and withered vegetation as though swept by fire. These, too, were silent, deserted by all living things. Even the streams were not lifeless. Anglers no longer visited them, for all the fish had died. In the gutters under the eaves and between the shingles of the roofs, a white granular powder still showed a few patches; some weeks before it had fallen like snow upon the roofs and the lawns, the fields and streams. No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of life in this stricken world. The people had done it to themselves.

The weird thing is that, when normal, inevitable challenges come up – like a refund request – some people not only fall down, they launch themselves down a snake/chute and refuse to play the game again, convinced they’re a failure. They quit, or remain paralyzed by fear, shame, and indecision for years.

Once there were three tribes. The Optimists, whose patron saints were Drake and Sagan, believed in a universe crawling with gentle intelligence—spiritual brethren vaster and more enlightened than we, a great galactic siblinghood into whose ranks we would someday ascend. Surely, said the Optimists, space travel implies enlightenment, for it requires the control of great destructive energies. Any race which can't rise above its own brutal instincts will wipe itself out long before it learns to bridge the interstellar gulf. Across from the Optimists sat the Pessimists, who genuflected before graven images of Saint Fermi and a host of lesser lightweights. The Pessimists envisioned a lonely universe full of dead rocks and prokaryotic slime. The odds are just too low, they insisted. Too many rogues, too much radiation, too much eccentricity in too many orbits. It is a surpassing miracle that even one Earth exists; to hope for many is to abandon reason and embrace religious mania. After all, the universe is fourteen billion years old: if the galaxy were alive with intelligence, wouldn't it be here by now? Equidistant to the other two tribes sat the Historians. They didn't have too many thoughts on the probable prevalence of intelligent, spacefaring extraterrestrials— but if there are any, they said, they're not just going to be smart. They're going to be mean. It might seem almost too obvious a conclusion. What is Human history, if not an ongoing succession of greater technologies grinding lesser ones beneath their boots? But the subject wasn't merely Human history, or the unfair advantage that tools gave to any given side; the oppressed snatch up advanced weaponry as readily as the oppressor, given half a chance. No, the real issue was how those tools got there in the first place. The real issue was what tools are for. To the Historians, tools existed for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes. They treated nature as an enemy, they were by definition a rebellion against the way things were. Technology is a stunted thing in benign environments, it never thrived in any culture gripped by belief in natural harmony. Why invent fusion reactors if your climate is comfortable, if your food is abundant? Why build fortresses if you have no enemies? Why force change upon a world which poses no threat? Human civilization had a lot of branches, not so long ago. Even into the twenty-first century, a few isolated tribes had barely developed stone tools. Some settled down with agriculture. Others weren't content until they had ended nature itself, still others until they'd built cities in space. We all rested eventually, though. Each new technology trampled lesser ones, climbed to some complacent asymptote, and stopped—until my own mother packed herself away like a larva in honeycomb, softened by machinery, robbed of incentive by her own contentment. But history never said that everyone had to stop where we did. It only suggested that those who had stopped no longer struggled for existence. There could be other, more hellish worlds where the best Human technology would crumble, where the environment was still the enemy, where the only survivors were those who fought back with sharper tools and stronger empires. The threats contained in those environments would not be simple ones. Harsh weather and natural disasters either kill you or they don't, and once conquered—or adapted to— they lose their relevance. No, the only environmental factors that continued to matter were those that fought back, that countered new strategies with newer ones, that forced their enemies to scale ever-greater heights just to stay alive. Ultimately, the only enemy that mattered was an intelligent one. And if the best toys do end up in the hands of those who've never forgotten that life itself is an act of war against intelligent opponents, what does that say about a race whose machines travel between the stars?

Another New Year's dawned, new opportunities and difficulties are sneaking around you. To take hold of good and let go bad, face the new challenges and open the new chances to anew your life again. Everyday train your brain to solve all difficulties and transform them into opportunities, get rich mentally, physically and financially. Love your family, friends, colleagues and all folks surrounded by you. Take care of your health, children, wealth and travel new exotic places, people and enjoy good food. Life is very short, fully enjoy it. Embrace new ideas, knowledge and every opportunity. And always surround yourself with good people and avoid toxic and negative people to secure your peace of mind and dignity. I wholeheartedly and boldly set my plan as is the best year of my life for financial freedom, good health, richness, love, care and abundance. I do solemnly yearn for the folks around the world a thoroughly Peaceful, Happy and Beautiful New Year free from hunger, poverty, disease, inequality, war and conflict.

MARCH 1 Envision Your Dreams I counsel you to buy from me . . . salve to put on your eyes, so you can see. REVELATION 3:18 DO YOU LOOK UPON your life with eyes of faith? Think of it this way: when we close our eyes, we should see more than we do when we have our eyes open. See your whole family serving God. See yourself rising to new levels of effectiveness. See yourself stronger, healthier, and living a more abundant life. See God using you in

The answers to your questions will come, but only after you know which ones are worth asking. Wait. Live your questions. Then ask. Become open to the changes that the answers will inevitably bring. This may take some time, but time is the New Year’s bountiful blessing: three hundred sixty-five bright mornings and starlit evenings; fifty-two promising weeks; twelve transformative months full of beautiful possibilities; and four splendid seasons. A simply abundant year to be savored.

With Tommy by his side but Anthony Jr. nowhere to be seen, Anthony cranks out an old 8mm projector, and soon choppy black- and-white images appear on the cream wall capturing a few snapshots from the canyon of their life—that tell nothing, and yet somehow everything. They watch old movies, from 1963, 1952, 1948, 1947—the older, the more raucous the children and parents becoming. This year, because Ingrid isn’t here, Anthony shows them something new. It’s from 1963. A birthday party, this one with happy sound, cake, unlit candles. Anthony is turning twenty. Tatiana is very pregnant with Janie. (“Mommy, look, that’s you in Grammy’s belly!” exclaims Vicky.) Harry toddling around, pursued loudly and relentlessly by Pasha—oh, how in 1999 six children love to see their fathers wild like them, how Mary and Amy love to see their precious husbands small. The delight in the den is abundant. Anthony sits on the patio, bare chested, in swimshorts, one leg draped over the other, playing his guitar, “playing Happy Birthday to myself,” he says now, except it’s not “Happy Birthday.” The joy dims slightly at the sight of their brother, their father so beautiful and whole he hurts their united hearts—and suddenly into the frame, in a mini-dress, walks a tall dark striking woman with endless legs and comes to stand close to Anthony. The camera remains on him because Anthony is singing, while she flicks on her lighter and ignites the candles on his cake; one by one she lights them as he strums his guitar and sings the number one hit of the day, falling into a burning “Ring of Fire ... ” The woman doesn’t look at Anthony, he doesn’t look at her, but in the frame you can see her bare thigh flush against the sole of his bare foot the whole time she lights his twenty candles plus one to grow on. And it burns, burns, burns . . . And when she is done, the camera—which never lies—catches just one microsecond of an exchanged glance before she walks away, just one gram of neutral matter exploding into an equivalent of 20,000 pounds of TNT. The reel ends. Next. The budding novelist Rebecca says, “Dad, who was that? Was that Grammy’s friend Vikki?” “Yes,” says Anthony. “That was Grammy’s friend Vikki.” Tak zhivya, bez radosti/bez muki/pomniu ya ushedshiye goda/i tvoi serebryannyiye ruki/v troike yeletevshey navsegda . . . So I live—remembering with sadness all the happy years now gone by, remembering your long and silver arms, forever in the troika that flew by . . . Back

Climate Change is caused by human emissions; it moves faster or slower partly in response to our rate of emissions, but also because of natural "tipping points" that make the planet take things in its own hands. So, for example, during one of the last great climactic shifts, the planet may have gone from being fairly warm to an ice age in less than ten years; and then the ice age may have ended in a single season! These things are very hard to model, but projections for the future that imagine Climate Change will occur in a gradual and orderly fashion are probably wrong.

Prohibition had been good to Tijuana . . . . The number of saloons had doubled in the span of a few years. Gambling clubs mushroomed: Monte Carlo, the Tivoli Bar, the Foreign Club. Raunchy establishments mixed with others that promised a glimpse of "old Mexico," a false creation more romantic than any Hollywood film. But what did the tourists know? The Americans streamed into Mexico, ready to construct a new playground for themselves, to drink the booze that was forbidden in Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco, but flowed abundantly across the border. Lady Temperance had no abode here.

The whole party rose accordingly, and under Mrs. Rushworth's guidance were shewn through a number of rooms, all lofty, and many large, and amply furnished in the taste of fifty years back, with shining floors, solid mahogany, rich damask, marble, gilding, and carving, each handsome in its way. Of pictures there were abundance, and some few good, but the larger part were family portraits, no longer anything to anybody but Mrs. Rushworth, who had been at great pains to learn all that the housekeeper could teach, and was now almost equally well qualified to shew the house. On the present occasion she addressed herself chiefly to Miss Crawford and Fanny, but there was no comparison in the willingness of their attention; for Miss Crawford, who had seen scores of great houses, and cared for none of them, had only the appearance of civilly listening, while Fanny, to whom everything was almost as interesting as it was new, attended with unaffected earnestness to all that Mrs. Rushworth could relate of the family in former times, its rise and grandeur, regal visits and loyal efforts, delighted to connect anything with history already known, or warm her imagination with scenes of the past.

...[H]uman beings are neurologically ill-designed to be modern Americans. The human brain evolved over hundreds of thousands of years in an environment defined by scarcity. It was not designed, at least originally, for an environment of extreme abundance... Even a person on a diet who sensibly avoids coming face-to-face with a piece of chocolate cake will find it hard to control himself if the chocolate cake somehow finds him... When faced with abundance, the brain's ancient reward pathways are difficult to suppress. In that moment the value of eating the chocolate cake exceeds the value of the diet. We cannot think down the road when we are faced with the chocolate cake.

Whatever increases the fertility of land in producing food ... contributes likewise to increase that of many other lands, by creating a new demand for their produce. That abundance of food, of which, in consequence of the improvement of land, many people have the disposal beyond what they themselves can consume, is the great cause of the demand both for the precious metals and the precious stones, as well as for every other conveniency and ornament of dress, lodging, household furniture, and equipage ... The poor inhabitants of Cuba and St. Domingo, when they were first discovered by the Spaniards, used to wear little bits of gold as ornaments in their hair and other parts of their dress. They seemed to value them as we would do any little pebbles of somewhat more than ordinary beauty, and to consider them just worth the picking up, but not worth the refusing to anybody who asked them ... They were astonished to observe the rage of the Spaniards to obtain them, and had no notion that there could anywhere be a country in which many people had the disposal of so great a superfluity of food, so scanty always among themselves, that for a very small quantity of those glittering baubles they would willingly give as much as might maintain a family for many years. Could they have been made to understand this, the passion of the Spaniards would not have surprised them.

end of the 1950s. The great story of post-war America revolves around the adjustment to this totally new way of living together. Within a period of less than ten years, the basic values of the dominant culture were turned on their head. Americans switched from a culture in which they had to deal with deprivation – with all the rigour and tenacity that required – to one in which the enjoyment of abundance, and the ever-increasing enjoyment of ever-greater abundance, was central. This quiet social revolution, this fundamental change of priorities, this evaporation of American values such as thrift, frugality and solidarity, made quite a few Americans feel insecure. They sensed that the festivities surrounding washing machines, pink

The sociologist Robert Merton famously called this phenomenon the “Matthew Effect”after the New Testament verse in the Gospel of Matthew: “For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance. But from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.”It is those who are successful, in other words, who are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success. It’s the rich who get the biggest tax breaks. It’s the best students who get the best teaching and most attention. And it’s the biggest nine- and ten-year-olds who get the most coaching and practice. Success is the result of what sociologists like to call “accumulative advantage.”The professional hockey player starts out a little bit better than his peers.

And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. 9 ¶ And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. 10 And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good. 11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. 12 And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good. 13 And the evening and the morning were the third day. 14 ¶ And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: 15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. 16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. 17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, 18 And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good. 19 And the evening and the morning were the fourth day. 20 And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.

What we all have to avoid is the notion that we can buy our way out of our problems. Instead, the goal is to reduce our costs by extreme frugality. This is psychologically difficult because if there is one great certain confidence in American society it is this: you can buy your way out of almost anything. Other than a few things that will land you in jail even if you are rich, we tend to look for solutions that involve buying things. Having trouble with your marriage? Take a vacation. Pay a counsellor. Don't want to eat pesticides? Buy organic food! Indebted? Buy a book about how to get out. Worried about Peak Oil? Look at all the things there are to buy. Got a crosscut saw and a year's supply of dry milk yet? Don't want to give up driving and flying? We'll sell you some nice carbon offsets.

A businessman buys a business and tries to operate it. He does everything that he knows how to do but just cannot make it go. Year after year the ledger shows red, and he is not making a profit. He borrows what he can, has a little spirit and a little hope, but that spirit and hope die and he goes broke. Finally, he sells out, hopelessly in debt, and is left a failure in the business world. A woman is educated to be a teacher but just cannot get along with the other teachers. Something in her constitution or temperament will not allow her to get along with children or young people. So after being shuttled from one school to another, she finally gives up, goes somewhere and takes a job running a stapling machine. She just cannot teach and is a failure in the education world. I have known ministers who thought they were called to preach. They prayed and studied and learned Greek and Hebrew, but somehow they just could not make the public want to listen to them. They just couldn’t do it. They were failures in the congregational world. It is possible to be a Christian and yet be a failure. This is the same as Israel in the desert, wandering around. The Israelites were God’s people, protected and fed, but they were failures. They were not where God meant them to be. They compromised. They were halfway between where they used to be and where they ought to be. And that describes many of the Lord’s people. They live and die spiritual failures. I am glad God is good and kind. Failures can crawl into God’s arms, relax and say, “Father, I made a mess of it. I’m a spiritual failure. I haven’t been out doing evil things exactly, but here I am, Father, and I’m old and ready to go and I’m a failure.” Our kind and gracious heavenly Father will not say to that person, “Depart from me—I never knew you,” because that person has believed and does believe in Jesus Christ. The individual has simply been a failure all of his life. He is ready for death and ready for heaven. I wonder if that is what Paul, the man of God, meant when he said: [No] other foundation can [any] man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble; every man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is. If any man’s work abide which he hath built thereupon, he should receive a reward. If any man’s work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire (1 Cor. 3:11-15). I think that’s what it means, all right. We ought to be the kind of Christian that cannot only save our souls but also save our lives. When Lot left Sodom, he had nothing but the garments on his back. Thank God, he got out. But how much better it would have been if he had said farewell at the gate and had camels loaded with his goods. He could have gone out with his head up, chin out, saying good riddance to old Sodom. How much better he could have marched away from there with his family. And when he settled in a new place, he could have had “an abundant entrance” (see 2 Pet. 1:11). Thank God, you are going to make it. But do you want to make it in the way you have been acting lately? Wandering, roaming aimlessly? When there is a place where Jesus will pour “the oil of gladness” on our heads, a place sweeter than any other in the entire world, the blood-bought mercy seat (Ps. 45:7; Heb. 1:9)? It is the will of God that you should enter the holy of holies, live under the shadow of the mercy seat, and go out from there and always come back to be renewed and recharged and re-fed. It is the will of God that you live by the mercy seat, living a separated, clean, holy, sacrificial life—a life of continual spiritual difference. Wouldn’t that be better than the way you are doing it now?

On this side of eternity, Christmas is still a promise. Yes, the Savior has come, and with him peace on earth, but the story is not finished. Yes, there is peace in our hearts, but we long for peace in our world. Every Christmas is still a “turning of the page” until Jesus returns. Every December 25 marks another year that draws us closer to the fulfillment of the ages, that draws us closer to . . . home. When we realize that Jesus is the answer to our deepest longing, even Christmas longings, each Advent brings us closer to his glorious return to earth. When we see him as he is, King of kings and Lord of lords, that will be “Christmas” indeed! Talk about giving Christmas gifts! Just think of this abundance . . . You do not lack any spiritual gift as you eagerly wait for our Lord Jesus Christ to be revealed. (1 Cor. 1:7) And carols? You’re about to hear singing like you’ve never heard before. Listen . . . Then I heard something like the voice of a great multitude and like the sound of many waters and like the sound of mighty peals of thunder, saying, “Hallelujah! For the Lord our God, the Almighty, reigns.” (Rev. 19:6, nasb) Christmas choirs? Never was there a choir like the one about to be assembled . . . They held harps given them by God and sang . . . the song of the Lamb: “Great and marvelous are your deeds, Lord God Almighty. Just and true are your ways, King of the ages.” (Rev. 15:2–3) True, Main Street in your town may be beautifully decorated for the season, but picture this . . . The twelve gates [of the city] were twelve pearls, each gate made of a single pearl. The great street of the city was of pure gold, like transparent glass. (Rev. 21:21) Oh, and yes, we love the glow of candles on a cold winter’s night and the twinkling of Christmas lights in the dark, but can you imagine this? There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever. (Rev. 22:5) Heaven is about to happen. The celebration is about to burst on the scene. We stand tiptoe at the edge of eternity, ready to step into the new heaven and the new earth. And I can hardly wait.

A lot of these viruses, a lot of these pathogens that come out of wildlife into domestic animals or people, have existed in wild animals for a very long time,” he said. They don’t necessarily cause any disease. They have coevolved with their natural hosts over millions of years. They have reached some sort of accommodation, replicating slowly but steadily, passing unobtrusively through the host population, enjoying long-term security—and eschewing short-term success in the form of maximal replication within each host individual. It’s a strategy that works. But when we humans disturb the accommodation—when we encroach upon the host populations, hunting them for meat, dragging or pushing them out of their ecosystems, disrupting or destroying those ecosystems—our action increases the level of risk. “It increases the opportunity for these pathogens to jump from their natural host into a new host,” he said. The new host might be any animal (the horse in Australia, the palm civet in China) but often it’s humans, because we are present so intrusively and abundantly. We offer a wealth of opportunity.

Just as the printing press led to the appearance of a new set of possibilities for democracy, beginning five hundred years ago—and just as the emergence of electronic broadcasting reshaped those possibilities, beginning in the first quarter of the twentieth century—the Internet is presenting us with new possibilities to reestablish a healthy functioning self-government, even before it rivals television for an audience. In fact, the Internet is perhaps the greatest source of hope for reestablishing an open communications environment in which the conversation of democracy can flourish. It has extremely low entry barriers for individuals. The ideas that individuals contribute are dealt with, in the main, according to the rules of a meritocracy of ideas. It is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge. An important distinction to make is that the Internet is not just another platform for disseminating the truth. It’s a platform for pursuing the truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services. It’s a platform, in other words, for reason. But just as it is important to avoid romanticizing the printing press and the information ecosystem it created, it is also necessary to keep a clear-eyed view of the Internet’s problems and abuses. It is hard to imagine any human evil that is not somehow abundantly displayed somewhere on the Internet. Parents of young children are often horrified to learn what obscene, grotesque, and savage material is all too easily available to children whose Web-surfing habits are not supervised or electronically limited. Teen suicides, bullying, depravity, and criminal behavior of all descriptions are described and—some would argue—promoted on the Internet. As with any tool put at the disposal of humankind, it can be, and is, used for evil as well as good purposes. And as always, it is up to us—particularly those of us who live in a democracy—to make intelligent choices about how and for what we use this incredibly powerful tool.

Ultimately, the United States is prepared to intervene with its own forces to defend the regime against internal attack. This was made abundantly clear in 1981, when President Reagan declared that the United States would not allow an insurgent movement to overthrow the Saudi monarch, as had occurred in Iran two years earlier. “I will not permit [Saudi Arabia] to be an Iran,” he told reporters at the White House.67 Direct American involvement in a civil war is, no doubt, the last thing that Washington would like to see happen. To prevent this, great emphasis is being placed on intelligence activities and the disruption of antigovernment organizations. But President Reagan’s 1981 statement provides an unambiguous indication of America’s determination to protect the Saudi monarchy at all costs. Nor is there any evidence to suggest that this commitment has in any way been diluted since Reagan’s time; if anything, the United States is even more closely wedded to the Saudi regime now than it was in 1981. And while it is impossible to predict the exact nature of the U.S. response to any particular threat to the regime, it is likely to be swift, muscular, and lethal.

He was sitting at his desk. He had to get some relief from seeing what he did not want to see. The factory was empty. There was only the night watchman who’d come on duty with his dogs. He was down in the parking lot, patrolling the perimeter of the double-thick chain-link fence, a fence topped off, after the riots, with supplemental scrolls of razor ribbon that were to admonish the boss each and every morning he pulled in and parked his car, “Leave! Leave! Leave!” He was sitting alone in the last factory left in the worst city in the world. And it was worse even than sitting there during the riots, Springfield Avenue in flames, South Orange Avenue in flames, Bergen Street under attack, sirens going off, weapons firing, snipers from rooftops blasting the street lights, looting crowds crazed in the street, kids carrying off radios and lamps and television sets, men toting armfuls of clothing, women pushing baby carriages heavily loaded with cartons of liquor and cases of beer, people pushing pieces of new furniture right down the center of the street, stealing sofas, cribs, kitchen tables, stealing washers and dryers and ovens—stealing not in the shadows but out in the open. Their strength is tremendous, their teamwork is flawless. The shattering of glass windows is thrilling. The not paying for things is intoxicating. The American appetite for ownership is dazzling to behold. This is shoplifting. Everything free that everyone craves, a wonton free-for-all free of charge, everyone uncontrollable with thinking, Here it is! Let it come! In Newark’s burning Mardi Gras streets, a force is released that feels redemptive, something purifying is happening, something spiritual and revolutionary perceptible to all. The surreal vision of household appliances out under the stars and agleam in the glow of the flames incinerating the Central Ward promises the liberation of all mankind. Yes, here it is, let it come, yes, the magnificent opportunity, one of human history’s rare transmogrifying moments: the old ways of suffering are burning blessedly away in the flames, never again to be resurrected, instead to be superseded, within only hours, by suffering that will be so gruesome, so monstrous, so unrelenting and abundant, that its abatement will take the next five hundred years. The fire this time—and next? After the fire? Nothing. Nothing in Newark ever again.

Hemingway studied, as models, the novels of Knut Hamsun and Ivan Turgenev. Isaac Bashevis Singer, as it happened, also chose Hamsun and Turgenev as models. Ralph Ellison studied Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. Thoreau loved Homer; Eudora Welty loved Chekhov. Faulkner described his debt to Sherwood Anderson and Joyce; E. M. Forster, his debt to Jane Austen and Proust. By contrast, if you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, “Nobody’s.” In his youth, he has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he himself likes only the role, the thought of himself in a hat. Rembrandt and Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Gauguin, possessed, I believe, powerful hearts, not powerful wills. They loved the range of material they used, the work’s possibilities excited them; the field’s complexities fired their imaginations. The caring suggested the tasks; the tasks suggested the schedules. They learned their fields and then loved them. They worked, respectfully, out of their love and knowledge, and they produced complex bodies of work that endure. Then, and only then, the world maybe flapped at them some sort of hat, which, if they were still living, they ignored as well as they could, to keep at their tasks.

Back then, Japan as a nation aspired to something in which each individual seemed invested. And that "something"wasn't just about economic growth, or transforming the yen into an international currency. It had more to do with accessing information. Information was indispensable, and not only as a means of obtaining necessities like food and clothing and medicine. Within two or three years of World War II's end, starvation had been basically eliminated in Japan, and yet the Japanese had continued slaving away as if their lives depended on it. Why? To create a more abundant life? If so, where was the abundance? Where were the luxurious living spaces? Eyesores dominated the scenery wherever you went, and people still crammed themselves into packed commuter trains each morning, submitting to conditions that would be fatal for any other mammal. Apparently what the Japanese wanted wasn't a better life, but more things. And things, of course, were a form of information. But as things became readily available and information began to flow smoothly, the original aspiration got lost in the shuffle. People were infected with the concept that happiness was something outside themselves, and a new and powerful form of loneliness was born. Mix loneliness with stress and enervation, and all sorts of madness can occur. Anxiety increases, and in order to obliterate the anxiety people turn to extreme sex, violence, and even murder.

Naval’s Laws The below is Naval’s response to the question “Are there any quotes you live by or think of often?” These are gold. Take the time necessary to digest them. “These aren’t all quotes from others. Many are maxims that I’ve carved for myself.” Be present above all else. Desire is suffering (Buddha). Anger is a hot coal that you hold in your hand while waiting to throw it at someone else (Buddhist saying). If you can’t see yourself working with someone for life, don’t work with them for a day. Reading (learning) is the ultimate meta-skill and can be traded for anything else. All the real benefits in life come from compound interest. Earn with your mind, not your time. 99% of all effort is wasted. Total honesty at all times. It’s almost always possible to be honest and positive. Praise specifically, criticize generally (Warren Buffett). Truth is that which has predictive power. Watch every thought. (Always ask, “Why am I having this thought?”) All greatness comes from suffering. Love is given, not received. Enlightenment is the space between your thoughts (Eckhart Tolle). Mathematics is the language of nature. Every moment has to be complete in and of itself. A Few of Naval’s Tweets that are Too Good to Leave Out “What you choose to work on, and who you choose to work with, are far more important than how hard you work.” “Free education is abundant, all over the Internet. It’s the desire to learn that’s scarce.” “If you eat, invest, and think according to what the ‘news’ advocates, you’ll end up nutritionally, financially, and morally bankrupt.” “We waste our time with short-term thinking and busywork. Warren Buffett spends a year deciding and a day acting. That act lasts decades.” “The guns aren’t new. The violence isn’t new. The connected cameras are new, and that changes everything.” “You get paid for being right first, and to be first, you can’t wait for consensus.” “My one repeated learning in life: ‘There are no adults.’ Everyone’s making it up as they go along. Figure it out yourself, and do it.” “A busy mind accelerates the passage of subjective time.

A man decides to be a lawyer and spends years studying law and finally puts out his shingle. He soon finds something in his temperament that makes it impossible for him to make good as a lawyer. He is a complete failure. He is 50 years old, was admitted to the bar when he was 30, and 20 years later, he has not been able to make a living as a lawyer. As a lawyer, he is a failure. A businessman buys a business and tries to operate it. He does everything that he knows how to do but just cannot make it go. Year after year the ledger shows red, and he is not making a profit. He borrows what he can, has a little spirit and a little hope, but that spirit and hope die and he goes broke. Finally, he sells out, hopelessly in debt, and is left a failure in the business world. A woman is educated to be a teacher but just cannot get along with the other teachers. Something in her constitution or temperament will not allow her to get along with children or young people. So after being shuttled from one school to another, she finally gives up, goes somewhere and takes a job running a stapling machine. She just cannot teach and is a failure in the education world. I have known ministers who thought they were called to preach. They prayed and studied and learned Greek and Hebrew, but somehow they just could not make the public want to listen to them. They just couldn’t do it. They were failures in the congregational world. It is possible to be a Christian and yet be a failure. This is the same as Israel in the desert, wandering around. The Israelites were God’s people, protected and fed, but they were failures. They were not where God meant them to be. They compromised. They were halfway between where they used to be and where they ought to be. And that describes many of the Lord’s people. They live and die spiritual failures. I am glad God is good and kind. Failures can crawl into God’s arms, relax and say, “Father, I made a mess of it. I’m a spiritual failure. I haven’t been out doing evil things exactly, but here I am, Father, and I’m old and ready to go and I’m a failure.” Our kind and gracious heavenly Father will not say to that person, “Depart from me—I never knew you,” because that person has believed and does believe in Jesus Christ. The individual has simply been a failure all of his life. He is ready for death and ready for heaven. I wonder if that is what Paul, the man of God, meant when he said: [No] other foundation can [any] man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble; every man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is. If any man’s work abide which he hath built thereupon, he should receive a reward. If any man’s work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire (1 Cor. 3:11-15). I think that’s what it means, all right. We ought to be the kind of Christian that cannot only save our souls but also save our lives. When Lot left Sodom, he had nothing but the garments on his back. Thank God, he got out. But how much better it would have been if he had said farewell at the gate and had camels loaded with his goods. He could have gone out with his head up, chin out, saying good riddance to old Sodom. How much better he could have marched away from there with his family. And when he settled in a new place, he could have had “an abundant entrance

Keynes was a voracious reader. He had what he called ‘one of the best of all gifts – the eye which can pick up the print effortlessly’. If one was to be a good reader, that is to read as easily as one breathed, practice was needed. ‘I read the newspapers because they’re mostly trash,’ he said in 1936. ‘Newspapers are good practice in learning how to skip; and, if he is not to lose his time, every serious reader must have this art.’ Travelling by train from New York to Washington in 1943, Keynes awed his fellow passengers by the speed with which he devoured newspapers and periodicals as well as discussing modern art, the desolate American landscape and the absence of birds compared with English countryside.54 ‘As a general rule,’ Keynes propounded as an undergraduate, ‘I hate books that end badly; I always want the characters to be happy.’ Thirty years later he deplored contemporary novels as ‘heavy-going’, with ‘such misunderstood, mishandled, misshapen, such muddled handling of human hopes’. Self-indulgent regrets, defeatism, railing against fate, gloom about future prospects: all these were anathema to Keynes in literature as in life. The modern classic he recommended in 1936 was Forster’s A Room with a View, which had been published nearly thirty years earlier. He was, however, grateful for the ‘perfect relaxation’ provided by those ‘unpretending, workmanlike, ingenious, abundant, delightful heaven-sent entertainers’, Agatha Christie, Edgar Wallace and P. G. Wodehouse. ‘There is a great purity in these writers, a remarkable absence of falsity and fudge, so that they live and move, serene, Olympian and aloof, free from any pretended contact with the realities of life.’ Keynes preferred memoirs as ‘more agreeable and amusing, so much more touching, bringing so much more of the pattern of life, than … the daydreams of a nervous wreck, which is the average modern novel’. He loved good theatre, settling into his seat at the first night of a production of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country with a blissful sigh and the words, ‘Ah! this is the loveliest play in all the world.’55 Rather as Keynes was a grabby eater, with table-manners that offended Norton and other Bloomsbury groupers, so he could be impatient to reach the end of books. In the inter-war period publishers used to have a ‘gathering’ of eight or sixteen pages at the back of their volumes to publicize their other books-in-print. He excised these advertisements while reading a book, so that as he turned a page he could always see how far he must go before finishing. A reader, said Keynes, should approach books ‘with all his senses; he should know their touch and their smell. He should learn how to take them in his hands, rustle their pages and reach in a few seconds a first intuitive impression of what they contain. He should … have touched many thousands, at least ten times as many as he reads. He should cast an eye over books as a shepherd over sheep, and judge them with the rapid, searching glance with which a cattle-dealer eyes cattle.’ Keynes in 1927 reproached his fellow countrymen for their low expenditure in bookshops. ‘How many people spend even £10 a year on books? How many spend 1 per cent of their incomes? To buy a book ought to be felt not as an extravagance, but as a good deed, a social duty which blesses him who does it.’ He wished to muster ‘a mighty army … of Bookworms, pledged to spend £10 a year on books, and, in the higher ranks of the Brotherhood, to buy a book a week’. Keynes was a votary of good bookshops, whether their stock was new or second-hand. ‘A bookshop is not like a railway booking-office which one approaches knowing what one wants. One should enter it vaguely, almost in a dream, and allow what is there freely to attract and influence the eye. To walk the rounds of the bookshops, dipping in as curiosity dictates, should be an afternoon’s entertainment.

OUR PAST BRINGS US TO OUR FUTURE “I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten.” —Joel 2:25 I believe in a very deep way that our past is what brings us to our future. I understand the temptation to draw an angry X through a whole season or a whole town or a whole relationship, to crumple it up and throw it away, to get it as far away as possible from a new life, a new future. In my worst moments, I want to slam the door on the hard parts of our life in Grand Rapids. Deadbolt it, forget it, move forward, happier without it. But I don’t want to lose six years of my own history behind a slammed door. These days I’m walking over and retrieving those years from the trash, erasing the X, unlocking the door. It’s the only way that darkness turns to light. I’m mining through, searching for light, and the more I look, the more I find all sorts of things Grand Rapids gave me. I see moments of heartbreak that led to honesty about myself I wouldn’t have been able to get to any other way. I am thankful for what I learned, what I became, what God gave me and what God took away during that season. WHAT HAVE the hard, dark seasons of your life yielded in light and insight and growth and gifts? Have you sifted through those times, looking for those gifts? Ask God to bring light out of that darkness. May 11 WHY WE WRITE Shout for joy to the LORD, all the earth. —Psalm 100:1 A writer friend came over yesterday. She’s written a novel. She brought over a fat, beautiful binder full of story, and I can’t wait to read it. We talked about publication and agents and sharing your work, about marketing and the internet and a million other things. And we talked about why we write. You know those conversations when you think you’re helping someone, sharing from your vast well of knowledge, only to realize that this person is actually instructing you, reminding you of something fundamental that you’ve forgotten? My friend sat across the table from me, and it seemed like she could have combusted into flames, burning with sheer, clean passion about this story. After she left, I realized that some days I forget why we write, and she reminded me. I write because other writers’ words changed my life a million and one ways, and I want to be a part of that. I began writing because there were things I wanted to say with so much urgency and soul I would have climbed a tower and shouted them, would have written them in skywriting, would have spelled them out in grains of rice if I had to.

The state of New Hampshire boasts a mere eighteen miles of Atlantic Ocean coastline. The Piscataqua River separates the state's southeastern corner from Maine and empties into the Atlantic. On the southwestern corner of this juncture of river and ocean is Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The smaller town of Kittery, Maine, is on the opposite side of the river. The port of Piscataqua is deep, and it never freezes in winter, making it an ideal location for maritime vocations such as fishing, sea trade, and shipbuilding. Four years before the founding of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1603, Martin Pring of England first discovered the natural virtues of Piscataqua harbor. While on a scouting voyage in the ship Speedwell, Pring sailed approximately ten miles up the unexplored Piscataqua, where he discovered “goodly groves and woods replenished with tall oakes, beeches, pine-trees, firre-trees, hasels, and maples.”1 Following Pring, Samuel de Champlain, Captain John Smith, and Sir Ferdinando Gorges each sailed along the Maine-New Hampshire coastline and remarked on its abundance of timber and fish. The first account of Piscataqua harbor was given by Smith, that intrepid explorer, author, and cofounder of the Jamestown settlement, who assigned the name “New-England” to the northeast coastline in 1614. In May or June of that year, he landed near the Piscataqua, which he later described as “a safe harbour, with a rocky shore.”2 In 1623, three years after the Pilgrim founding of Plymouth, an English fishing and trading company headed by David Thomson established a saltworks and fishing station in what is now Rye, New Hampshire, just west of the Piscataqua River. English fishermen soon flocked to the Maine and New Hampshire coastline, eventually venturing inland to dry their nets, salt, and fish. They were particularly drawn to the large cod population around the Piscataqua, as in winter the cod-spawning grounds shifted from the cold offshore banks to the warmer waters along the coast.

Dear Friends & Folks, "Another New Year's dawned, new opportunities and difficulties are sneaking around. To take hold of good and let go bad, face the new challenges and open the new chances to anew your life again. Everyday train your brain to solve all difficulties and transform them into opportunities, get rich mentally, physically and financially. Love your family, friends, colleagues and all folks surrounded by you. Take care of your health, children, wealth and travel new exotic places, people and take good food. And enjoy life fullest as it is very short... Embrace new ideas, knowledge, and every opportunity. And always surround yourself with good people and avoid toxic and negative people to secure your peace of mind and dignity. I wholeheartedly and boldly set my plan as is the best year of my life for financial freedom, good health, richness, love, care, and abundance. May all your Dreams, Hopes and Wishes Come True This New Year. Very 'Happy New Year 2019' to All Of You." From, Lord Robin

we do not know the physics of climate system responses to warming well enough to blame most of the warming on human activities. Human causation is simply assumed. The models are designed with the assumption that the climate system was in natural balance before the Industrial Revolution, despite historical evidence to the contrary. They only produce human-caused climate change because that is the way they are designed. This is in spite of abundant evidence of past warm episodes, such as 1,000- to 2,000-year-old tree stumps being uncovered by receding glaciers; temperature proxy evidence for the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods covering that same time frame; and Arctic sea ice proxy evidence for a natural decrease in sea ice starting well before humans could be blamed. Natural warming since the Little Ice Age of a few hundred years ago is simply ignored in the design of climate models, since we do not know what caused it. Simply put, the computerized climate models support human causation of climate change because that’s what they assume from the outset. They are an example of circular reasoning. There is little to no evidence of long-term increases in heat waves, droughts, or floods. Wildfire activity has, if anything, decreased, even though poor land management practices are now making some areas more vulnerable to wildfires even without climate change. Contrary to popular perception and new reports, there is little to no evidence of increased storminess resulting from climate change. This includes tornadoes and hurricanes. Long-term increases in monetary storm damages have indeed occurred, but are due to increasing development, not worsening weather. Sea level has been rising naturally since at least the mid-1800s, well before humans could be blamed. Land subsidence in some areas (e.g. Norfolk, Miami, Galveston-Houston, New Orleans) would result in increasing flooding problems even without any sea-level rise, let alone human-induced sea-level rise causing thermal expansion of the oceans. Some evidence for recent acceleration of sea-level rise might support human causation, but the magnitude of the human component since 1950 has been only 1 inch every 30 years. Ocean acidification is now looking like a non-problem, as the evidence builds that sea life prefers somewhat more CO2, just as vegetation on land does. Given that CO2 is necessary for life on Earth, yet had been at dangerously low levels for thousands of years, the scientific community needs to stop accepting the premise that more CO2 in the atmosphere is necessarily a bad thing. Global greening has been observed by satellites over the last few decades, which is during the period of most rapid rises in atmospheric CO2. The benefits of increasing CO2 to agriculture have been calculated to be in the trillions of dollars. Crop yields continue to break records around the world, due to a combination of human ingenuity and the direct effects of CO2 on plant growth and water use efficiency. Much of this evidence is not known by our citizens, who are largely misinformed by a news media that favors alarmist stories. The scientific community is, in general, biased toward alarmism in order to maintain careers and support desired governmental energy policies. Only when the public becomes informed based upon evidence from both sides of the debate can we expect to make rational policy decisions. I hope my brief treatment of these subjects provides a step in that direction. THE END

Circumcision is well-known in the ancient Near East from as early as the fourth millennium BC, though the details of its practice and its significance vary from culture to culture. Circumcision was practiced in the ancient Near East by many peoples. The Egyptians practiced circumcision as early as the third millennium BC. West Semitic peoples, Israelites, Ammonites, Moabites and Edomites performed circumcision. Eastern Semitic peoples did not (e.g., Assyrians, Babylonians, Akkadians)—nor did the Philistines, an Aegean or Greek people. Anthropological studies have suggested that the rite always has to do with at least one of four basic themes: fertility, virility, maturity and genealogy. Study of Egyptian mummies demonstrates that the surgical technique in Egypt differed from that used by the Israelites; while the Hebrews amputated the prepuce of the penis, the Egyptians merely incised the foreskin and so exposed the glans penis. Egyptians were not circumcised as children, but in either prenuptial or puberty rites. The common denominator, however, is that it appears to be a rite of passage, giving new identity to the one circumcised and incorporating him into a particular group. Evidence from the Levant comes as early as bronze figurines from the Amuq Valley (Tell el-Judeideh) from the early third millennium BC. An ivory figurine from Megiddo from the mid-second millennium BC shows Canaanite prisoners who are circumcised. Southern Mesopotamia shows no evidence of the practice, nor is any Akkadian term known for the practice. The absence of such evidence is significant since Assyrian and Babylonian medical texts are available in abundance. Abraham is therefore aware of the practice from living in Canaan and visiting Egypt rather than from his roots in Mesopotamia. Since Ishmael is 13 years old at this time, Abraham may even have been wondering whether it was a practice that would characterize this new family of his. In Ge 17 circumcision is retained as a rite of passage, but one associated with identity in the covenant. In light of today’s concerns with gender issues, some have wondered why the sign of the covenant should be something that marks only males. Two cultural issues may offer an explanation: patrilineal descent and identity in the community. (1) The concept of patrilineal descent resulted in males being considered the representatives of the clan and the ones through whom clan identity was preserved (as, e.g., the wife took on the tribal and clan identity of her husband). (2) Individuals found their identity more in the clan and the community than in a concept of self. Decisions and commitments were made by the family and clan more than by the individual. The rite of passage represented in circumcision marked each male as entering a clan committed to the covenant, a commitment that he would then have the responsibility to maintain. If this logic holds, circumcision would not focus on individual participation in the covenant as much as on continuing communal participation. The community is structured around patrilineal descent, so the sign on the males marks the corporate commitment of the clan from generation to generation. ◆

Where carbon comes from in the universe is also a deep function of quantum physics. Like all the heavier elements, it us produced via nucleosynthesis (from nuclear fusion) in stars. But the high abundance of carbon (it comes in fourth in the count of atoms in today's universe, after hydrogen, helium, and oxygen) relies on several key properties of the cosmos. Most carbon forms through the triple-alpha process: the fusion of two helium nuclei into a beryllium-8 nucleus, followed by the fusion of the beryllium nucleus and another helium nucleus into carbon. This would be a horribly inefficient way to make carbon, except for some subtle coincidences. These coincidences are pretty technical, and may only be truly relished by nuclear physicists, but they're worth knowing about because they can help you grasp the connections between fundamental physics and us. The first coincidence is that in a star's interior, the combined energy of a beryllium-8 nucleus and a helium nucleus can closely match that of an energized carbon-12 atomic nucleus. This "resonance" in energies is key; it greatly enhances the rate of the next fusion step-making carbon-12. The second coincidence is that the nuclei of beryllium-8 just happen to be stable for long enough for them to have a good chance of catching one of those helium nuclei as they buzz around. And finally, the new carbon-12 nucleus is not efficient about immediately fusing with any spare helium nuclei to make a heavier oxygen nucleus-the carbon doesn't get gobbled up into oxygen, and lives to build your DNA a few billion years later.

autonomous cars are but a small slice of a much larger picture. Diagnosing patients, teaching our children, serving as the backbone for a new energy paradigm—the list of ways that AI will reshape our lives in the years ahead goes on and on.

Electrical signals require electrons, which generate heat, which limits the amount of work a chip can perform and requires a lot of power for cooling. Light has neither limitation. If IBM’s estimations are correct, over the next eight years, its new chip design will accelerate supercomputer performance a thousandfold, taking us from our current 2.6 petaflops to an exaflop (that’s 10 to the 18th, or a quintillion operations per second)—or one hundred times faster than the human brain.

The death of the Curé Ponosse occurred in the vintage month, when his beloved Clochemerle was impregnated with the odour of new wine, in the golden glory of a brilliant, hot September. The old priest died in the apotheosis of a great year, famous for its wine, one of those years whose fragrant soul is destined to be poured, later, from bottles, to rejoice the heart of man, to celebrate earth's abundance, the memories of happy days, and perfect summers.

However, I have a stronger hunch that the greatest part of the important biomedical research waiting to be done is in the class of basic science. There is an abundance of interesting fact relating to all our major diseases, and more items of information are coming in steadily from all quarters in biology. The new mass of knowledge is still formless, in complete, lacking the essential threads of connection, displaying misleading signals at every turn, riddled with blind alleys. There are fascinating ideas all over the place, irresistible experiments beyond numbering, all sorts of new ways into the maze of problems. But every next move is unpredictable, every outcome uncertain. It is a puzzling time, but a very good time. I do not know how you lay out orderly plans for this kind of activity, but I suppose you could find out by looking through the disorderly records of the past hundred years. Somehow, the atmosphere has to be set so that a disquieting sense of being wrong is the normal attitude of the investigators. It has to be taken for granted that the only way in is by riding the unencumbered human imagination, with the special rigor required for recognizing that something can be highly improbable, maybe almost impossible, and at the same time true. Locally, a good way to tell how the work is going is to listen in the corridors. If you hear the word, "Impossible!" spoken as an expletive, followed by laughter, you will know that someone's orderly research plan is coming along nicely.

Autumn to winter, winter to spring, Spring into summer, summer into fall— So rolls the changing year, and so we change; Motion so swift, we know not that we move. —DINAH MULOCK CRAIK Since ancient times, September has been viewed as the beginning of the new year, a time for reflection and resolution.

evaporation of the moisture. It was here, at Lake Valencia, that Humboldt developed his idea of human-induced climate change. When he published his observations, he left no doubt what he thought: When forests are destroyed, as they are everywhere in America by the European planters, with an imprudent precipitation, the springs are entirely dried up, or become less abundant. The beds of the rivers, remaining dry during a part of the year, are converted into torrents, whenever great rains fall on the heights. The sward and moss disappearing with the brush-wood from the sides of the mountains, the waters falling in rain are no longer impeded in their course: and instead of slowly augmenting the level of the rivers by progressive filtrations, they furrow during heavy showers the sides of the hills, bear down the loosened soil, and form those sudden inundations, that devastate the country.

Think of the last 150 years as a three-act drama. In Act I, the Industrial Age, massive factories and efficient assembly lines powered the economy. The lead character in this act was the mass production worker, whose cardinal traits were physical strength and personal fortitude. In Act II, the Information Age, the United States and other nations began to evolve. Mass production faded into the background, while information and knowledge fueled the economies of the developed world. The central figure in this act was the knowledge worker, whose defining characteristic was proficiency in L-Directed Thinking. Now, as the forces of Abundance, Asia, and Automation deepen and intensify, the curtain is rising on Act III. Call this act the Conceptual Age. The main characters now are the creator and the empathizer, whose distinctive ability is mastery of R-Directed Thinking.

Best Budget Travel Destinations Ever Are you looking for a cheap flight this year? Travel + Leisure received a list of the most affordable locations this year from one of the top travel search engines in the world, Kayak. Kayak then considered the top 100 locations with the most affordable average flight prices, excluding outliers due to things like travel restrictions and security issues. To save a lot of money, go against the grain. Mexico Unsurprisingly, Mexico is at the top of the list of the cheapest places to travel in 2022. The United States has long been seen as an accessible and affordable vacation destination; low-cost direct flights are common. San José del Cabo (in Baja California Sur), Puerto Vallarta, and Cancun are the three destinations within Mexico with the least expensive flights, with January being the most economical month to visit each. Fortunately, January is a glorious month in each of these beachside locales, with warm, balmy weather and an abundance of vibrant hues, textures, and flavors to chase away the winter blues. Looking for a city vacation rather than a beach vacation? Mexico City, which boasts a diverse collection of museums and a rich Aztec heritage, is another accessible option in the country. May is the cheapest month to travel there. Chicago, Illinois Who wants to go to Chicago in the winter? Once you learn about all the things to do in this Midwest winter wonderland and the savings you can get in January, you'll be convinced. At Maggie Daley Park, spend the afternoon ice skating before warming up with some deep-dish pizza. Colombia Colombia's fascinating history, vibrant culture, and mouthwatering cuisine make it a popular travel destination. It is also inexpensive compared to what many Americans are used to paying for items like a fresh arepa and a cup of Colombian coffee. The cheapest month of the year to fly to Bogotá, the capital city, is February. The Bogota Botanical Garden, founded in 1955 and home to almost 20,000 plants, is meticulously maintained, and despite the region's chilly climate, strolling through it is not difficult. The entrance fee is just over $1 USD. In January, travel to the port city of Cartagena on the country's Caribbean coast. The majority of visitors discover that exploring the charming streets on foot is sufficient to make their stay enjoyable. Tennessee's Music City There's a reason why bachelorette parties and reunions of all kinds are so popular in Music City: it's easy to have fun without spending a fortune. There is no fee to visit a mural, hot chicken costs only a few dollars, and Honky Tonk Highway is lined with free live music venues. The cheapest month to book is January. New York City, New York Even though New York City isn't known for being a cheap vacation destination, you'll find the best deals if you go in January. Even though the city never sleeps, the cold winter months are the best time for you to visit and take advantage of the lower demand for flights and hotel rooms. In addition, New York City offers a wide variety of free activities. Canada Not only does our neighbor Mexico provide excellent deals, but the majority of Americans can easily fly to Canada for an affordable getaway. In Montréal, Quebec, you must try the steamé, which is the city's interpretation of a hot dog and is served steamed in a side-loading bun (which is also steamed). It's the perfect meal to eat in the middle of February when travel costs are at their lowest. Best of all, hot dogs are inexpensive and delicious as well as filling. The most affordable month to visit Toronto, Ontario is February. Even though the weather may make you wary, the annual Toronto Light Festival, which is completely free, is held in February in the charming and historic Distillery District. Another excellent choice at this time is the $5 Bentway Skate Trail under the Gardiner Expressway overpass.

As they sailed from Lima towards Guayaquil, Humboldt examined the cold current that hugs the western coast of South America from southern Chile to northern Peru. The current’s cold, nutrient-loaded water supports such abundance of marine life that it is the world’s most productive marine ecosystem. Years later, it would be called the Humboldt Current. And though Humboldt was flattered to have it named after him, he also protested. The fishing boys along the coast had known of the current for centuries, Humboldt said, all he had done was to have been the first to measure it and to discover that it was cold.

Imagine a Sapiens group - a tribe of five hundred, say, in bands of twenty-five or so--living around 55,000 years ago in the lowlands near the headwaters of the White Nile in what is today southern Sudan. They are the inheritors of the modern culture that has spread from southern Africa, and they survive with the skillful hunting and fishing techniques developed over the millennia, the close-knit organizations that establish and maintain group harmony, the communications capabilities of at least a rudimentary language, and a healthy diet based on both plants and animals in abundance. But there are other inheritor bands around, for the region is fertile and the climate generally benign, and they continue to grow in population and this means that in time it gets harder and harder to find new fields of tubers, or large herds of impala, or the usual swamp tortoises. Human pressure on the area is pushing it past its carrying capacity, and relations with other bands in other tribes become increasingly stressful as competition intensifies.

Once the secret of nuclear fission was unlocked, the construction of the new pyramids went on at such a furious rate that the United States military strategists, within a dozen years, were forced to invent a new term, 'overkill,' to describe the superfluous powers of extermination they already possessed. On a planet holding perhaps three billion people, they had bombs enough to wipe out three hundred billion. In this new economy of negative abundance, the means of death outpaced the means of life.

Final checklist To significantly increase the quantity and quality of ideas that you generate, reading this book isn’t enough. You need to make principles from this book a part of your own habits. Below you will find the 7 most fundamental principles of creating successful business ideas. Write them down on a sheet of paper and hang it near the desk where you work or near your bed. Over the next 3 weeks, think for at least 15-30 minutes per day about ideas using these principles. These can be ideas that will help you improve your business, achieve your dreams or make your life more interesting. I promise you that by the end of these 3 weeks you will notice a significant jump in your creative performance. 1. Collect raw materials. Ideas are combinations or modifications of other ideas. The more you know the ideas of other people and the more life experiences you expose yourself to, the more creative raw materials you have. The more creative raw materials you have, the more combinations your subconscious mind will be able to make and the more likely you are to create new valuable and interesting ideas. 2. Set the task for the subconscious mind. Your subconscious mind is a powerful thinking mechanism, but it remains idle if you haven’t given it a task. Once you begin giving your subconscious questions to think about regularly, you will notice how the quantity and quality of your ideas will skyrocket. 3. Separate analyzing and generating ideas. When you are analyzing ideas, your analytical brain blocks your superfast creative brain from thinking. To let the creative brain do its work, separate the processes of analyzing and generating ideas. 4. Think and rest. The most effective thinking algorithm is the following: think about a problem for an extensive period of time, forget about the problem and rest, occasionally think about the problem for few minutes and forget about it again. The incubation period when you don’t think about the problem is essential for your subconscious mind to process millions of thoughts and combinations of ideas, however to give it a task you need to think for some time about the problem consciously. 5. Generate many ideas. In creative thinking, quantity equals quality. You can’t generate one great idea. However, you can generate many ideas and select one or several great ideas out of them. 6. Have fun. Your subconscious mind thinks most effectively when you have fun. When you are serious, you are very unlikely to create really creative and valuable ideas. 7. Believe and desire. Believe that you will generate great ideas and have a burning desire to generate them. If you do, great ideas will come to you in abundance and sooner or later the problem will be solved. Once you have made these 7 principles a part of your own creative habits, glance through the book again and practice other principles and techniques. In a year’s time of practicing generating ideas regularly, you will become a world-class creative thinker. The skill of creating ideas will make your business successful and your life an adventure. I wish you good luck in creating successful ideas and in achieving all your dreams in business.

A study of advertising found that the average person in Shanghai saw three times as many advertisements in a typical day as a consumer in London. The market was flooded with new brands seeking to distinguish themselves, and Chinese consumers were relatively comfortable with bold efforts to get their attention. Ads were so abundant that fashion magazines ran up against physical constraints: editors of the Chinese edition of Cosmopolitan once had to split an issue into two volumes because a single magazine was too thick to handle. My cell phone was barraged by spam offering a vast range of consumption choices. “Attention aspiring horseback riders,” read a message from Beijing’s “largest indoor equestrian arena.” In a single morning, I received word of a “giant hundred-year-old building made with English craftsmanship” and a “palace-level baroque villa with fifty-four thousand square meters of private gardens.” Most of the messages sold counterfeit receipts to help people file false expense reports. I liked to imagine the archetypal Chinese man of the moment, waking each morning in a giant English building and mounting his horse to cross his private garden, on the way to buy some fake receipts.

Pastor Bob’s breakthrough twenty years earlier had been the discovery that while Americans were hungry for spiritual nourishment, they wanted it bland and easy to digest—the religious equivalent of fast food. All that New Testament stuff about self-sacrifice and forgiveness puzzled them mightily. So Pastor Bob preached the Christian virtues of feeling good, relieving stress, getting rich, and hiring abundant deadly force to protect the good people from the bad.

I ran into similar, though less dramatic events after moving to Yale Law School, where I spent two years as a Senior Research Scholar. Hawaii’s two Democratic U.S. Senators once contacted the law school to complain about testimony that I gave before the Hawaii state legislature. They blamed me for somehow single-handedly scuttling the new gun registration laws that were being considered. The associate dean of the law school called me up about the complaints and grilled me about my testimony. I am certain that neither of these incidents would have occurred if I had been on the other side the gun debate. Over the years, many academics have told me that they would have studied gun control if not for fear of damage to their careers. They didn’t want to run the risk of coming out on the wrong side of the debate. From my experience, that is understandable. Eventually, I was forced out of academia. There is only an abundance of funding for those researchers who support gun control. There is a war on guns. Just like with any war there are real casualties. Police are probably the single most important factor in reducing crime, but police themselves understand that they almost always show up at the crime scene after the crime has been committed. When the police can’t be there, guns are by far the most effective way for people to protect themselves from criminals. And the most vulnerable people are the ones who benefit the most from being able to protect themselves: women and the elderly, people who are relatively weaker physically, as well as poor blacks who live in high crime urban areas—the most likely victims of violent crime. When gun control advocates can’t simply ban guns outright, they impose high fees and taxes on guns. When the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. territory, had their handgun ban struck down as unconstitutional by a federal judge in March 2016, they passed a $1,000 excise tax on guns—a tax they hoped would serve as a model for the rest of the U.S.8 I hope that this book provides the ammunition people need for some of the major battles ahead. We must fight to keep people safe.

1 My son, forget not thou my Law, but let thine heart keep my commandments. 2 For they shall increase the length of thy days and the years of life, and thy prosperity. 3 Let not mercy and truth forsake thee: bind them on thy neck, and write them upon the table of thine heart. 4 So shalt thou find favor and good understanding in the sight of God and man. 5 Trust in the Lord with all thine heart, and lean not unto thine own wisdom. 6 In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy ways. 7 Be not wise in thine own eyes: but fear the Lord, and depart from evil. 8 So health shall be unto thy navel, and marrow unto thy bones. 9 Honor the Lord with thy riches, and with the firstfruits of all thine increase. 10 So shall thy barns be filled with abundance, and thy presses shall burst with new wine. 11 My son, refuse not the chastening of the Lord, neither be grieved with his correction. 12 For the Lord correcteth him, whom he loveth, even as the father doeth the child in whom he delighteth. 13 Blessed is the man that findeth wisdom, and the man that getteth understanding. 14 For the merchandise thereof is better than the merchandise of silver, and the gain thereof is better than gold. 15 It is more precious than pearls: and all things that thou canst desire, are not to be compared unto her. 16 Length of days is in her right hand, and in her left hand riches and glory. 17 Her ways are ways of pleasure, and all her paths prosperity. 18 She is a tree of life to them that lay hold on her, and blessed is he that retaineth her. 19 The Lord by wisdom hath laid the foundation of the earth, and hath established the heavens through understanding. 20 By his knowledge the depths are broken up, and the clouds drop down the dew. 21 My son, let not these things depart from thine eyes, but observe wisdom, and counsel. 22 So they shall be life to thy soul, and grace unto thy neck. 23 Then shalt thou walk safely by thy way: and thy foot shall not stumble. 24 If thou sleepest, thou shalt not be afraid, and when thou sleepest, thy sleep shall be sweet. 25 Thou shalt not fear for any sudden fear, neither for the destruction of the wicked, when it cometh. 26 For the Lord shall be for thine assurance, and shall preserve thy foot from taking. 27 Withhold not the good from the owners thereof, though there be power in thine hand to do it. 28 Say not unto thy neighbor, Go and come again, and tomorrow will I give thee, if thou now have it. 29 Intend none hurt against thy neighbor, seeing he doeth dwell without fear by thee. 30 Strive not with a man causeless, when he hath done thee no harm. 31 Be not envious for the wicked man, neither choose any of his ways. 32 For the froward is abomination unto the Lord: but his secret is with the righteous. 33 The curse of the Lord is in the house of the wicked: but he blesseth the habitation of the righteous. 34 With the scornful he scorneth, but he giveth grace unto the humble. 35 The wise shall inherit glory: but fools dishonor, though they be exalted.

p. 371 – 372 Living in a paradise of magnificent meadows and forests abundant with wild game, berries, and nuts, the Utes were self-supporting and could have existed entirely without the provisions doled out to them by their agents at Los Pinos and White River. In 1875 agent F. F. Bond at Los Pinos replied to a request for a census of his Utes: “A count is quite impossible. You might as well try to count a swarm of bees when on the wing. They travel all over the country like the deer which they hunt.” Agent E. H. Danforth at White River estimated that about nine hundred Utes used his agency as a headquarters, but he admitted that he had no luck in inducing them to settle down in the valley around the agency. At both places, the Utes humoured their agents by keeping small beef herds and planting a few rows of corn, potatoes, and turnips, but there was no real need for any of these pursuits. The beginning of the end of freedom upon their own reservation came in the spring of 1878, when a new agent reported for duty at White River. The agent’s name was Nathan C. Meeker, former poet, novelist, newspaper correspondent, and organizer of cooperative agrarian colonies. Most of Meeker’s ventures failed, and although he sought the agency position because he needed the money, he was possessed of a missionary fervor and sincerely believed that it was his duty as a member of a superior race to “elevate and enlighten” the Utes. As he phrased it, he was determined to bring them out of savagery through the pastoral stage to the barbaric, and finally to “the enlightened, scientific, and religious stage.” Meeker was confident he could accomplish all this in “five, ten, or twenty years.” In his humourless and overbearing way, Meeker set out systematically to destroy everything the Utes cherished, to make them over into his image, as he believed he had been made in God’s image.

You have to come for dinner soon. Alana seems to have perfected this insane braised chicken with chorizo and chickpeas that is perfect for this weather," he says, bragging about his wife. Alana is a terrific chef, best known for her role assisting Patrick Conlon on Master Chef Battle, and her own new show, Abundance, both staples on my TiVo. I've known her since I catered a cocktail party for her former boss Maria De Costa, the talk show host, about fifteen years ago, and we have stayed in casual touch ever since. When she moved into the neighborhood, we got a little closer, but since Aimee got sick I haven't been as good about staying in touch. But considering that was around the time she met RJ, she's been too really busy to notice.

How the new Chinese middle class behaves in the coming years will be the most important test of the universality of liberal democracy. If it continues to grow in absolute and relative size, and yet remains content to live under the benevolent tutelage of a single-party dictatorship, one would have to say that China is culturally different from other societies around the world in its support for authoritarian government. If, however, it generates demands for participation that cannot be accommodated within the existing political system, then it is simply behaving in a manner similar to middle classes in other parts of the world. The real test of the legitimacy of the Chinese system will come not when the economy is expanding and jobs are abundant but when growth slows and the system faces crisis, as it inevitably will.

The Scripture is abundantly clear that Jesus will return again to rule from Jerusalem for one thousand years. I know many preterists believe the second coming has already happened, and they try to use an interpretation of Daniel 9 to support that belief. I just don’t see how a preterist’s position is supported with a literal interpretation of the Scripture. The second coming is not contingent upon any interpretation of the prophecy of seventy weeks, even a flawed one. I know I don’t have all the answers right now, but I will go out on a limb here and say that this new understanding of Daniel 9,  will only strengthen the biblical proof for a literal second coming of Jesus. This may be just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

For generations beyond count, this land sustained one of the highest densities of population on earth. Without any chemical 'fertilizers', pesticides, exotic dwarf strains of grain, or the new, fancy 'bio-tech' inputs that [agricultural scientists] champion… The Upanishads say: Om Purnamadaha Purnamidam Purnat Purnamudachyate Purnasya Purnamadaya Purnamewa Vashishyate "This creation is whole and complete. From the whole emerge creations, each whole and complete. Take the whole from the whole, but the whole yet remains, Undiminished, complete!" In our forests, the trees like ber (jujube), jambul (jambolan), mango, umbar (wild fig), mahua (Madhuca indica), imli (tamarind), yield so abundantly in their season that the branches sag under the weight of the fruit. The annual yield per tree is commonly over a tonne - year after year. But the earth around remains whole and undiminished. – Open Letter from Bhaskar Save to M.S.Swaminathan

Instead of trying to resurrect or reform a system whose endless pursuit of economic growth has created a nation of material abundance and spiritual poverty—and instead of hoping for a new FDR to save capitalism with New Deal–like programs—we need to build a new kind of economy from the ground up. That is what I have learned from fifty-five years of living and struggling in Detroit, the city that was once the national and international symbol of the miracle of industrialization and is now the national and international symbol of the devastation of deindustrialization. That is why so many people, especially young people, have their eyes on Detroit today.

I know that many people including our President insist that it be called the Christmas Season. I’ll be the first in line to say that it works for me however that’s not what it is. We hint at its coming on Halloween when the little tykes take over wandering the neighborhood begging for candy and coins. In this day and age the idea of children wandering the streets threatening people with “Trick or Treat!” just isn’t a good idea. In most cases parents go with them encouraging their offspring’s to politely ask “Anything for Halloween.” An added layer of security occurs when the children are herded into one room to party with friends. It’s all good, safe fun and usually there is enough candy for all of their teeth to rot before they have a chance to grow new ones. Forgotten is the concept that it is a three day observance of those that have passed before us and are considered saints or martyrs. Next we celebrate Thanksgiving, a national holiday (holly day) formally observed in Canada, Liberia, Germany Japan, some countries in the Caribbean and the United States. Most of these countries observe days other than the fourth Thursday of November and think of it as a secular way of celebrating the harvest and abundance of food. Without a hiccup we slide into Black Friday raiding stores for the loot being sold at discounted prices. The same holds true for Cyber Monday when we burn up the internet looking for bargains that will arrive at our doorsteps, brought by the jolly delivery men and women, of FedEx, UPS and USPS. Of course the big days are Chanukah when the Maccabean Revolt against the Seleucid Empire, regained control of Jerusalem. It is a time to gather the family and talk of history and tell stories. Christmas Eve is a time when my family goes to church, mostly to sing carols and distribute gifts, although this usually continued on Christmas day. This is when the term “Merry Christmas” is justified and correct although it is thought that the actual birthday of Christ is in October. The English squeezed another day out of the season, called Boxing Day, which is when the servants got some scraps from the dinner the day before and received a small gift or a dash of money. I do agree that “Xmas” is inappropriate but that’s just me and I don’t go crazy over it. After all, Christmas is for everyone. On the evening of the last day of the year we celebrate New Year’s Evening followed by New Year’s Day which many people sleep through after New Year’s Eve. The last and final day of the Holiday Season is January 6th which Is Epiphany or Three Kings Day. In Tarpon Springs, the Greek Orthodox Priest starts the celebration with the sanctification of the waters followed by the immersion of the cross. It becomes a scramble when local teenage boys dive for the cross thrown into the Spring Bayou as a remembrance of the baptism of Jesus Christ in the Jordan River. This tradition is now over a century old and was first celebrated by the Episcopal Church by early settlers in 1903.

Look back on your life five years ago. Are you now where you’d thought you’d be five years later? Have you kicked the bad habits you had vowed to kick? Are you in the shape you wanted to be? Do you have the cushy income, the enviable lifestyle, and the personal freedom you expected? Do you have the vibrant health, abundant loving relationships, and the world-class skills you’d intended to have by this point in your life?” If not, why? Simple—choices. It’s time to make a new choice—choose to not let the next five years be a continuum of the last. Choose to change your life, once and for all.

If you only do one new thing between now and the end of the year, strive to make at least three evenings a week as personal as possible. Come home to yourself.

Figure 2.1 Cortical connections over two years adapted from Conel The top row shows the baby’s cortex at birth, then at one month and at three months. They all look about the same, don’t they? But look what happens at six months (bottom left box): the number of cell bodies remains the same, but the number of connections has multiplied exponentially. The connections grow so quickly in the first three years of life that neuroscientists call it neural exuberance. Neural exuberance! The name is well earned: The baby’s brain makes 24 million new connections every minute, and this continues for the first three years of life. Each neuron may be connected to 1,000 other neurons — that multiplies out to 100 trillion possible connections between neurons, more than the number of stars in the universe. This high level of connectivity between brain cells leads to the cortex of a three-year-old being twice as thick as an adult’s! As connections are created, new abilities emerge. For example, when connections grow in Broca’s area — speech production — around six months, then children begin to speak. Around nine months of age, the frontal areas (behind the forehead) become more interconnected, and that’s when most children develop object permanence: knowing that objects continue to exist even when they are out of sight. Before object permanence develops, when Mom is out of sight she’s no longer in the baby’s universe. This is why young babies are inconsolable when Mom leaves. Once they start to develop object permanence, babies can hold on to an internal image of Mom. This is about the age that babies play peek-a-boo. Mom disappears when she puts the blanket over her head, but the nine-month-old knows Mom’s still there even if he can’t see her. The infant tests his “knowledge” when he pulls the blanket off and sees — sure enough! —Mom really is there! What is the use of so many brain connections in the first three years of life? These connections are ready-made highways for information to travel along. The toddlers’ ability to quickly adapt and learn is possible because they have a vast number of brain connections available for making sense of the world. Thanks to neural exuberance, the child does not need to create connections on the spur of the moment to make meaning of each new experience; myriad connections are already there. Pruning of connections The number of connections remains high from age 3 until age 10, when the process of neural pruning begins. Connections that are being used remain; others get absorbed back into the neuron. It’s similar to pruning a bush. After pruning, individual branches get thicker, fruit is more abundant, and the whole bush gets fuller. This seems a little counter-intuitive, but pruning works because it allows the plant’s limited resources to go to its strongest parts; water and nutrients are no longer wasted on spindly branches and dried-out roots. Similarly, when unused brain connections are pruned, neural resources are more available for brain areas that are being used. This results in a more useful and efficient brain that’s tailor-made to meet each individual’s needs. This process of pruning occurs in all brain areas. Figure 2.2 presents findings published by Sowell and associates. They measured Magnetic Resonance Imaging in 176 normal subjects from age 7 to 87 years. The x-axes in these graphs present years from 10 to 90 years. Notice there is a common pattern of decreasing connections in all brain areas. In some brain areas this change is steeper, such as in frontal areas, but is flatter in other areas such as temporal areas in the left hemisphere.

After studying self-awareness for 15-years, it is more than a feeling, and it is more than a thought. It’s that space in time where we ‘think less and we live more’ abundantly in the story of the moment’s gift. Self-awareness is, thus, a three-part connection. We must understand it, feel it, and live it through its living, breathing, daily adapting commitment in our heart that’s a micro reflection of life itself. In Cinderella In Focus, her invisible crown teacher her to be her own kind of brave through a new focus: To love deeply is to live freely. Cindy's Secret...

If humans do not belong in California or Arizona, where do they belong? In Reisner's native Minnesota where there's many lakes? Of course, this is absurd. Very few people could survive in Minnesota without the energy that is produced there from fuel brought from elsewhere without rapidly deforesting it and belching the pollution of numerous wood fires. So what about further south? Just about everywhere you go, humans are out of their "natural" element—which is some place in Africa. Even where they are in their element, they are there in numbers that are unsustainable based on using only very local resources. (Unless we allow trains, trucks, ships, and planes into our "natural" world.) Indeed, most human habitations make little sense in some way, just as Speaker Hastert said of New Orleans. But, yet, there they are. Hastert's remark was just one comment made in the wake of terrible suffering, and was probably driven by his human sympathy, not wanting to see this go on again. But it was insensitive on another level and he was criticized for it. Reisner's whole book is basically saying the same thing about the entire Southwestern United States. The irony is that this book was largely written at a time when it was abundantly clear than energy, not water, was the common denominator in resource policy. A few short years after the oil shocks, the Iranian revolution, during the Iran-Iraq War, and revised months after the First Gulf War, Resiner and other water conservationists must realize they are the junior varsity. This is before all of this activity unleashed the events of the Bush era.

Several weeks before he left Peking, Meyer visited a small village and noticed, in a house's doorway, a small bush with fruit as yellow as a fresh egg yolk. Meyer ignored a man who told him the plant was ornamental, its fruit not typically eaten but prized for its year-round production. The fruit looked like a mix between a mandarin and a citron (which later genetic testing would confirm). It was a lemon, but smaller and rounder---its flavor surprised him as both sweeter than a citron and tarter than an orange. And its price, twenty cents per fruit or ten dollars per tree, suggested that people with an abundance of other citrus valued it greatly. Meyer had little room in his baggage, but he used his double-edged bowie knife to take a cutting where the branches formed a V, the choice spot to secure its genetic material. That cutting made the voyage to Washington, and then the trip to an experiment station in Chico, California, where it propped up a new lemon industry grateful to receive a sweeter variety. The lemon became known as the Meyer lemon, and from it came lemon tarts, lemon pies, and millions of glasses of lemonade.

Identify Your Strengths With Strengths Finder 2.0 One tool that can help you remember your achievements is the ‘Strengths Finder’ "assessment. The father of Strengths Psychology, Donald O. Clifton, Ph.D, along with Tom Rath and a team of scientists at The Gallup Organization, created StrengthsFinder. You can take this assessment by purchasing the Strengths Finder 2.0 book. The value of SF 2.0 is that it helps you understand your unique strengths. Once you have this knowledge, you can review past activities and understand what these strengths enabled you to do. Here’s what I mean, in the paragraphs below, I’ve listed some of the strengths identified by my Strengths Finder assessment and accomplishments where these strengths were used. “You can see repercussions more clearly than others can.” In a prior role, I witnessed products being implemented in the sales system at breakneck speed. While quick implementation seemed good, I knew speed increased the likelihood of revenue impacting errors. I conducted an audit and uncovered a misconfigured product. While the customer had paid for the product, the revenue had never been recognized. As a result of my work, we were able to add another $7.2 million that went straight to the bottom line. “You automatically pinpoint trends, notice problems, or identify opportunities many people overlook.” At my former employer, leadership did not audit certain product manager decisions. On my own initiative, I instituted an auditing process. This led to the discovery that one product manager’s decisions cost the company more than $5M. “Because of your strengths, you can reconfigure factual information or data in ways that reveal trends, raise issues, identify opportunities, or offer solutions.” In a former position, product managers were responsible for driving revenue, yet there was no revenue reporting at the product level. After researching the issue, I found a report used to process monthly journal entries which when reconfigured, provided product managers with monthly product revenue. “You entertain ideas about the best ways to…increase productivity.” A few years back, I was trained by the former Operations Manager when I took on that role. After examining the tasks, I found I could reduce the time to perform the role by 66%. As a result, I was able to tell my Director I could take on some of the responsibilities of the two managers she had to let go. “You entertain ideas about the best ways to…solve a problem.” About twenty years ago I worked for a division where legacy systems were being replaced by a new company-wide ERP system. When I discovered no one had budgeted for training in my department, I took it upon myself to identify how to extract the data my department needed to perform its role, documented those learnings and that became the basis for a two day training class. “Sorting through lots of information rarely intimidates you. You welcome the abundance of information. Like a detective, you sort through it and identify key pieces of evidence. Following these leads, you bring the big picture into view.” I am listing these strengths to help you see the value of taking the Strengths Finder Assessment.

This doctrine has been rejected as a form of magical thinking, but the New Biology explains a possible scientific mechanism by which these two seemingly unrelated entities—the walnut and the human brain—mirror one another so literally and poetically. Because plants and animals have co-evolved intimately over countless millennia and have become dependent on one another for various functions, the visual homologies may speak to the existence of an informational bridge through which genetic/epigenetic information has flowed. Thanks to the New Biology, we now know that exosomes allow plants and animals to share RNA-coded genetic information of significant impact with one another. As the entire biosphere participates in this exosome-based information-sharing network, it is plausible the resemblance of walnuts to the mammalian brain reflects their intimate genetic connection and interdependency? Not surprisingly, abundant research has established that walnuts boost cognition, including inferential verbal reasoning abilities,66 especially supporting the brain health of the elderly when consumed daily. Researchers from Harvard University and Brigham and Women’s Hospital estimated that women who are 70 years or older saw a reduction in cognitive decline equivalent to two years.67

Most humans who were ever alive lived inside a single culture that had not changed for hundreds of thousands of years.

On March 1, 2002, at 1:00 p.m., three men broke into our high-rise apartment in Russia and brutally attacked me and my children. By the grace of God, our lives were spared and we were not terribly injured—physically. But the masked attackers had left deep spiritual and emotional wounds. We were sent to a trauma center for counseling for a month, then returned to Russia, our field of service, to complete our missionary term. Four months later, burned-out and spiritually empty, we packed our bags and returned to America for our scheduled one-year home service. I had no plans to return. Secretly, I harbored deep in my heart a resolve to never again set foot in Russia, with its many dangers. I had done eight hard years of service there and felt that I had given the best part of myself to a country that didn’t care. And no one—not even God—was going to change my mind. Yes, He’d spared my life, but I had serious doubts I could ever trust Him again. But God knew better. Not only is He gentle, but He understands and can handle my pain and my questions. I dove into the Psalms, finding hope in David’s cries to the Lord and healing in his praise to the Almighty in the darkest hours. I observed God’s goodness to me, providing for my needs in the past—and present—and I allowed myself to be embraced by the body of Christ, who loved us well. Finally, as time and distance began to heal me, I was able to look behind and see God’s grace embracing me every moment of the difficult journey. He reminded me that He would meet me in my future with the same abundance of grace. I wrote Anne and Noah’s story while struggling through the dark night of the soul. Amazingly, many times I felt as though the words that appeared on the page were more for me than for Anne. I journeyed with Anne until I, too, could see God embracing me in the darkest hour. Her victory is mine. On New Year’s Eve 2003, I surrendered to the Lord my future, agreeing to continue missionary work in Russia if God so chose. The peace that flooded my heart told me that His grace would carry me wherever He took our family. His grace is sufficient. For every heartache, every fear, every wound. Thank you for reading Tying the Knot. I pray that somehow Anne and Noah’s journey of faith and love will encourage and bless you. And that you will know, above all, that it is well with your soul. In His grace, Susan May Warren

Silicon Valley’s and China’s internet ecosystems grew out of very different cultural soil. Entrepreneurs in the valley are often the children of successful professionals, such as computer scientists, dentists, engineers, and academics. Growing up they were constantly told that they—yes, they in particular—could change the world. Their undergraduate years were spent learning the art of coding from the world’s leading researchers but also basking in the philosophical debates of a liberal arts education. When they arrived in Silicon Valley, their commutes to and from work took them through the gently curving, tree-lined streets of suburban California. It’s an environment of abundance that lends itself to lofty thinking, to envisioning elegant technical solutions to abstract problems. Throw in the valley’s rich history of computer science breakthroughs, and you’ve set the stage for the geeky-hippie hybrid ideology that has long defined Silicon Valley. Central to that ideology is a wide-eyed techno-optimism, a belief that every person and company can truly change the world through innovative thinking. Copying ideas or product features is frowned upon as a betrayal of the zeitgeist and an act that is beneath the moral code of a true entrepreneur. It’s all about “pure” innovation, creating a totally original product that generates what Steve Jobs called a “dent in the universe.” Startups that grow up in this kind of environment tend to be mission-driven. They start with a novel idea or idealistic goal, and they build a company around that. Company mission statements are clean and lofty, detached from earthly concerns or financial motivations. In stark contrast, China’s startup culture is the yin to Silicon Valley’s yang: instead of being mission-driven, Chinese companies are first and foremost market-driven. Their ultimate goal is to make money, and they’re willing to create any product, adopt any model, or go into any business that will accomplish that objective. That mentality leads to incredible flexibility in business models and execution, a perfect distillation of the “lean startup” model often praised in Silicon Valley. It doesn’t matter where an idea came from or who came up with it. All that matters is whether you can execute it to make a financial profit. The core motivation for China’s market-driven entrepreneurs is not fame, glory, or changing the world. Those things are all nice side benefits, but the grand prize is getting rich, and it doesn’t matter how you get there.

I had heard such predictions all my life from Malcolm and all his posthumous followers who hollered that the Dreamers must reap what they sow. I saw the same prediction in the words of Marcus Garvey who promised to return in a whirlwind of vengeful ancestors, an army of Middle Passage undead. No. I left The Mecca knowing that this was all too pat, knowing that should the Dreamers reap what they had sown, we would reap it right with them. Plunder has matured into habit and addiction; the people who could author the mechanized death of our ghettos, the mass rape of private prisons, then engineer their own forgetting, must inevitably plunder much more. This is not a belief in prophecy but in the seductiveness of cheap gasoline. Once, the Dream's parameters were caged by technology and by the limits of horsepower and wind. But the Dreamers have improved themselves, and the damming of seas for voltage, the extraction of coal, the transmuting of oil into food, have enabled an expansion in plunder with no known precedent. And this revolution has freed the Dreamers to plunder not just the bodies of humans but the body of the Earth itself. The Earth is not our creation. It has no respect for us. It has no use for us. And its vengeance is not the fire in the cities but the fire in the sky. Something more fierce than Marcus Garvey is riding on the whirlwind. Something more awful than all our African ancestors is rising with the seas. The two phenomena are known to each other. It was the cotton that passed through our chained hands that inaugurated this age. It is the flight from us that went them sprawling into the subdivided woods. And the methods of transport through these new subdivisions, across the sprawl, is the automobile, the noose around the neck of the earth, and ultimately, the Dreamers themselves. I drove away from the house of Mable Jones thinking of all of this. I drove away, as always, thinking of you. I do not believe that we can stop them, Samori, because they must ultimately stop themselves. And still I urge you to struggle. Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. Struggle for the warmth of The Mecca. Struggle for your grandmother and grandfather, for your name. But do not struggle for the Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all. The Dream is the same habit that endangers the planet, the same habit that sees our bodies stowed away in prisons and ghettos. I saw these ghettos driving back from Dr. Jones' home. They were the same ghettos I had seen in Chicago all those years ago, the same ghettos where my mother was raised, where my father was raised. Through the windshield I saw the mark of these ghettos - the abundance of beauty shops, churches, liquor stores, and crumbling housing - and I felt the old fear. Through the windshield I saw the rain coming down in sheets.

At its core, this new minimalism is recognizing what matters most to you and your family, and then consciously disregarding the rest.

Several years ago I visited a church in a nearby city. The pastor was known as a godly man and a prayer warrior. As we spoke about life in general, he said, “We’re not supposed to enjoy life, are we?” To him it was a rhetorical question; unfortunately most Christians hold this same view. They believe in Christ; He is their savior. They love Him with all their heart. Their future home is in heaven, they attend church each Sunday and most mid- week services. They endeavor to raise their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. They witness to friends and family, yet to them, life is something to endure. They are like the small orphan boy adopted by a well-to-do family from a poor orphanage. The child reveled in the luxury of his own room. Sleeping in such a wonderful bed was a dream come true. He awoke the next morning to the sun streaming in his open window. The songs of birds welcomed him to a beautiful summer day. As he came down to breakfast, he saw a place was set for him at the large table in the dining room. Fine china and silverware gleamed in the light of the expensive chandelier. At his plate set a large glass of milk filled to the brim. At the orphanage each child would drink from the glass only so far, then pass it on. This continued until the glass was empty. The glass was then refilled and passed to the next child. With big eyes the little child looked at his new mother. “Please, ma’am, how deeply may I drink?” With tears in her eyes, his mother said “Drink it all son, it’s all for you.” I believe God has given us the cup of life filled to the brim and overflowing. God says, “Drink it all, my child, it’s all for you.” Many Christians believe life is drudgery. Therefore they miss the real pleasures God has intended for His children. His word promises us abundant life. Albert Einstein said, “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” We can choose to view everything as a miracle from God. Will there be sorrows? Of course. Will we suffer difficult setbacks? Undoubtedly. Are there enemies of Christians and the Lord? Surely. Does this mean God has changed His mind or abandoned us? No. In this book we will discuss ways of enjoying living on God’s blessings. You can indeed “live life to the fullest.

In other words, we can – and to survive, we must – transform and even end within the next ten years the failed system of capitalism that now threatens to collapse earth’s life support systems and with them, human civilisation. We must replace that economic system with one that respects boundaries and limits; one that nurtures ‘soils, aquifers, rainfall, ice, the pattern of winds and currents, pollinators, biological abundance and diversity’;6 one that delivers social and economic justice.

Inextricably linked to the climate emergency is a broader environmental crisis. A third of the Earth’s land is now acutely degraded, with fertile soil being lost at a rate of 24 billion tonnes a year through intensive farming.[19] Generating three centimetres of top soil takes 1,000 years, and, the UN said in 2014, if current rates of degradation continue all of the world's top soil could be gone within 60 years.[20] 95% of our food presently comes from the soil. Unless new approaches are adopted, the global amount of arable and productive land per person in 2050 will be only a quarter of the level in 1960. The equivalent of 30 football pitches of soil are being lost every minute. Heavy tilling, monocropping multiple harvests and abundant use of agrochemicals have increased yields at the expense of long-term sustainability. Agriculture is actually the number one reason for deforestation. In the past 20 years, agricultural production has increased threefold and the amount of irrigated land has doubled, often leading to land abandonment and desertification. Decreasing productivity has been observed, due to diminished fertility, on 20% of the world’s cropland, 16% of forest land, 19% of grassland, and 27% of rangeland. Furthermore, tropical forests have become a source rather than a sink of carbon.[21] Forest areas in South America, Africa and Asia – which have until recently played a crucial role in absorbing GHG – are now releasing 425 teragrams of carbon annually, more than all the traffic in the US. This is due to the thinning of tree density and culling of biodiversity, reducing biomass by up to 75%. Scientists combined 12 years of satellite data with field studies. They found a net carbon loss on every continent. Latin America – home to the world’s biggest forest, the Amazon, which is responsible for 20% of its oxygen – accounted for nearly 60% of the emissions, while 24% came from Africa and 16% from Asia. Every year about 18 million hectares of forest – an area the size of England and Wales – is felled. In just 40 years, possibly one billion hectares, the equivalent of Europe, has been torn down. Half the world’s rainforests have been razed in a century and they will vanish altogether at current rates within another. Earth’s “sixth mass extinction”[22] is well underway: up to 50% of all individual animals have been lost in recent decades and almost half of land mammals have lost 80% of their range in the last century. Vertebrate populations have fallen by an average of 60% since the 1970s, and in some countries there has been an even faster decline of insects – vital, of course, for aerating the soil, pollinating blossoms, and controlling insect and plant pests.

There is enough in the world for everyone's need; there is not enough for everyone's greed.” —Gandhi

Miranda laughed. She missed her friend. She missed New York, the sheer wattage of the place, its mighty abundance, its chaos, its kinetic energy a comfort somehow. How long ago was it, those idyllic years, set free in the city to explore as she liked, to discover some cheap noodle shop or boho boutique or obscure sculpture garden tucked away somewhere in Queens?

You have to give yourself permission to accomplish your dreams, permission to get out of debt, and permission to overcome the obstacle. Your better days begin in your thinking. Studies show that when you are negative and think said, discouraging thoughts, your serotonin level goes down, and that causes you to feel sad. It’s not just in your head. It affects your moods. But when you get up each day in a positive frame of mind, feeling hopeful and expecting good things, endorphins are released that make you feel happy. You will have more energy, because being positive puts a spring in your step. If you go around with negative thoughts, they will drain you of your faith, your energy, and your zeal. It’s just like a big vacuum pulling out all the good things that God put in you. You’d be amazed at how much better you’d feel, how much more you’d accomplish, and how much further you’d go if you’d just switch over to this positive mind-set. You have to think positive thoughts on purpose. “This is going to be a great day. This is my year. I’m expecting an abundance of favor.” The scripture says, “Put on a fresh new attitude.” I’ve found yesterday’s attitude is not good enough for today. Every morning you have to consciously adopt a fresh attitude by thinking things like: “I’m going to be happy today. I’m going to be good to people. I’m going to go with the flow and not get upset. I know God is in control. He’s directing my steps. No obstacle is too big. No dream is too great. I am well able to do what I’m called to do.” That fresh new attitude will put you in God’s jet stream. You will accomplish things that you could not accomplish on your own. You’ll be more productive. You’ll have more wisdom, creativity, and good ideas. You will overcome obstacles that were bigger, stronger, and more powerful.

We have reached the end of the Roman republic. We have seen it rule for five hundred years in Italy and in the countries on the Mediterranean; we have seen it brought to ruin in politics and morals, religion and literature, not through outward violence but through inward decay, and thereby making room for the new monarchy of Caesar. There was in the world, as Caesar found it, much of the noble heritage of past centuries and an infinite abundance of pomp and glory, but little spirit, still less taste, and least of all true delight in life. It was indeed an old world; and even the richly-gifted patriotism of Caesar could not make it young again. The dawn does not return till after the night has fully set in and run its course. But yet with him there came to the sorely harassed peoples on the Mediterranean a tolerable evening after the sultry noon; and when at length after a long historical night the new day dawned once more for the peoples, and fresh nations in free self-movement commenced their race towards new and higher goals, there were found among them not a few, in which the seed sown by Caesar had sprung up, and which owed, as they still owe, to him their national individuality.

ship built by English settlers in the New World. In 1607, at the mouth of the Kennebec River in Maine, the Plymouth Company erected a short-lived fishing settlement. A London shipwright named Digby organized some settlers to construct a small vessel with which to return them home to England, as they were homesick and disenchanted with the New England winters. The small craft was named, characteristically, the Virginia. She was evidently a two-master and weighed about thirty tons, and she transported furs, salted cod, and tobacco for twenty years between various ports along the Maine coast, Plymouth, Jamestown, and England. She is believed to have wrecked somewhere along the coast of Ireland.6 By the middle of the seventeenth century, shipbuilding was firmly established as an independent industry in New England. Maine, with its long coastline and abundant forests, eventually overtook even Massachusetts as the shipbuilding capital of North America. Its most western town, Kittery, hovered above the Piscataqua. For many years the towns of Kittery and Portsmouth, and upriver enclaves like Exeter, Newmarket, Durham, Dover, and South Berwick, rivaled Bath and Brunswick, Maine, as shipbuilding centers, with numerous shipyards, blacksmith shops, sawmills, and wharves. Portsmouth's deep harbor, proximity to upriver lumber, scarcity of fog, and seven feet of tide made it an ideal location for building large vessels. During colonial times, the master carpenters of England were so concerned about competition they eventually petitioned Parliament to discourage shipbuilding in Portsmouth.7 One of the early Piscataqua shipwrights was Robert Cutts, who used African American slaves to build fishing smacks at Crooked Lane in Kittery in the 1650s. Another was William Pepperell, who moved from the Isle of Shoals to Kittery in 1680, where he amassed a fortune in the shipbuilding, fishing, and lumber trades. John Bray built ships in front of

Few records exist to establish a definitive date as to when the first ships were built in the Piscataqua region. Fishing vessels were probably constructed as early as 1623, when the first fishermen settled in the area. Many undoubtedly boasted a skilled shipwright who taught the fishermen how to build “great shallops”as well as lesser craft. In 1631 a man named Edward Godfrie directed the fisheries at Pannaway. His operation included six large shallops, five fishing boats, and thirteen skiffs, the shallops essentially open boats that included several pairs of oars, a mast, and lug sail, and which later sported enclosed decks.5 Records do survive of the very first ship built by English settlers in the New World. In 1607, at the mouth of the Kennebec River in Maine, the Plymouth Company erected a short-lived fishing settlement. A London shipwright named Digby organized some settlers to construct a small vessel with which to return them home to England, as they were homesick and disenchanted with the New England winters. The small craft was named, characteristically, the Virginia. She was evidently a two-master and weighed about thirty tons, and she transported furs, salted cod, and tobacco for twenty years between various ports along the Maine coast, Plymouth, Jamestown, and England. She is believed to have wrecked somewhere along the coast of Ireland.6 By the middle of the seventeenth century, shipbuilding was firmly established as an independent industry in New England. Maine, with its long coastline and abundant forests, eventually overtook even Massachusetts as the shipbuilding capital of North America. Its most western town, Kittery, hovered above the Piscataqua. For many years the towns of Kittery and Portsmouth, and upriver enclaves like Exeter, Newmarket, Durham, Dover, and South Berwick, rivaled Bath and Brunswick, Maine, as shipbuilding centers, with numerous shipyards, blacksmith shops, sawmills, and wharves. Portsmouth's deep harbor, proximity to upriver lumber, scarcity of fog, and seven feet of tide made it an ideal location for building large vessels. During colonial times, the master carpenters of England were so concerned about competition they eventually petitioned Parliament to discourage shipbuilding in Portsmouth.7 One of the early Piscataqua shipwrights was Robert Cutts, who used African American slaves to build fishing smacks at Crooked Lane in Kittery in the 1650s. Another was William Pepperell, who moved from the Isle of Shoals to Kittery in 1680, where he amassed a fortune in the shipbuilding, fishing, and lumber trades. John Bray built ships in front of the Pepperell mansion as early as 1660, and Samuel Winkley owned a yard that lasted for three generations.8 In 1690, the first warship in America was launched from a small island in the Piscataqua River, situated halfway between Kittery and Portsmouth. The island's name was Rising Castle, and it was the launching pad for a 637-ton frigate called the Falkland. The Falkland bore fifty-four guns, and she sailed until 1768 as a regular line-of-battle ship. The selection of Piscataqua as the site of English naval ship construction may have been instigated by the Earl of Bellomont, who wrote that the harbor would grow wealthy if it supplemented its export of ship masts with “the building of great ships for H.M. Navy.”9 The earl's words underscore the fact that, prior to the American Revolution, Piscataqua's largest source of maritime revenue came from the masts and spars it supplied to Her Majesty's ships. The white oak and white pine used for these building blocks grew to heights of two hundred feet and weighed upward of twenty tons. England depended on this lumber during the Dutch Wars of the

Halloween comes down to us from the pre-Christian Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced saw-wind), held October 31, the last autumn night before the cold and bleakness of winter. On this night—considered the Celtic New Year—the Druids believed that the supernatural world drew closer to the physical world, so human beings were more susceptible to the power and influence of the unseen.

And now let us welcome the New Year Full of things that have never been. —Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926)

Let us each grasp a new idea this year. Let us grasp the awareness of what it is that makes us truly happy. Let us consider our personal preferences and learn how to recognize, then embrace, moments of happiness that are uniquely our own.

Someone in the crowd said to Him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.” 14But He said to him, “Man, who appointed Me a judge or arbitrator over you?” 15Then He said to them, “Beware, and be on your guard against every form of greed; for not even when one has an abundance does his life consist of his possessions.” 16And He told them a parable, saying, “The land of a rich man was very productive. 17And he began reasoning to himself, saying, ‘What shall I do, since I have no place to store my crops?’ 18Then he said, ‘This is what I will do: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. 19And I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years to come; take your ease, eat, drink and be merry.” ’ 20But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your soul is required of you; and now who will own what you have prepared?’ 21So is the man who stores up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.