Aim Global Quotes

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The ideological blackmail that has been in place since the original Live Aid concerts in 1985 has insisted that ‘caring individuals’ could end famine directly, without the need for any kind of political solution or systemic reorganization. It is necessary to act straight away, we were told; politics has to be suspended in the name of ethical immediacy. Bono’s Product Red brand wanted to dispense even with the philanthropic intermediary. ‘Philanthropy is like hippy music, holding hands’, Bono proclaimed. ‘Red is more like punk rock, hip hop, this should feel like hard commerce’. The point was not to offer an alternative to capitalism - on the contrary, Product Red’s ‘punk rock’ or ‘hip hop’ character consisted in its ‘realistic’ acceptance that capitalism is the only game in town. No, the aim was only to ensure that some of the proceeds of particular transactions went to good causes. The fantasy being that western consumerism, far from being intrinsically implicated in systemic global inequalities, could itself solve them. All we have to do is buy the right products.
Mark Fisher (Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?)
Yet I wondered fancifully if he had seen more clearly than they did, had sensed the threat which my presence implied – the approaching disintegration of his society and the destruction of ‘his beliefs. Here especially it seemed that the evil that comes with sudden change would far outweigh the good. While I was with the Arabs I wished only to live as they lived and, now that I have left them, I would gladly think that nothing in their lives was altered by my coming. Regretfully, however, I realize that the maps I made helped others, with more material aims, to visit and corrupt a people whose spirit once lit the desert like a flame.
Wilfred Thesiger (Arabian Sands)
Globalization is an attempt to create one global country, and according to the laws of power politics, the greatest nations will take the lead and reap the most benefits from the effort. For those who believe globalization’s aim is to foster equal opportunity among nations, I am sorry; there is no free lunch in human affairs.
Bangambiki Habyarimana (Pearls Of Eternity)
The Arab people are haunted by a sense of powerlessness . . . powerlessness to suppress the feeling that you are no more than a lowly pawn on the global chessboard even as the game is being played in your backyard.”6 Unable to achieve their aims in the modern world, the Arabs see themselves as pawns in the game of nations, forced to play by other peoples’ rules. This
Eugene Rogan (The Arabs: A History)
The science that we are doing is a threat to the world’s most powerful and wealthiest special interests. The most powerful and wealthiest special interest that has ever existed: the fossil fuel industry. They have used their immense resources to create fake scandals and to fund a global disinformation campaign aimed at vilifying the scientists, discrediting the science, and misleading the public and policymakers. Arguably, it is the most villainous act in the history of human civilisation, because it is about the short-term interests of a small number of plutocrats over the long-term welfare of this planet and the people who live on it.
Michael E. Mann
No anti-slavery crusader aimed for a partial solution or settled on a regimen of interim targets. The fight to end slavery was a fight to end 100 percent of slavery for all time. In just that way, we can't settle for partial measures if we are going to win the war for our world. We need to fight for 100 percent sustainability, now.
Rob Stewart (Save the Humans)
Since histories were first written, the aim of the writer has invariably been to ‘correct’ our view of the past, and to align it more closely with the writer’s view of the present, and the way it was reached.
John Darwin (Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain)
...the consequences of this shift of emphasis from the police to the military in the power game were of great consequence. It is true, ascendancy of the secret police over the military apparatus is the hallmark of many tyrannies, and not only the totalitarian; however, in the case of totalitarian government the preponderance of the police not merely answers the need for suppressing the population at home but fits the ideological claim to global rule. For it is evident that those who regard the whole earth as their future territory will stress the organ of domestic violence and will rule conquered territory with police methods and personnel rather than with the army. Thus, the Nazis used their SS troops, essentially a police force, for the rule and even the conquest of foreign territories, with the ultimate aim of an amalgamation of the army and the police under the leadership of the SS.
Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism)
Indeed, there were those who maintained that Russia’s defeat at the hands of the Japanese was itself the result of a Jewish conspiracy. According to S. A. Nilus, a secret Jewish council known as the Sanhedrin had hypnotized the Japanese into believing they were one of the tribes of Israel; it was the Jews’ aim, Nilus insisted, ‘to set a distraught Russia awash with blood and to inundate it, and then Europe, with the yellow hordes of a resurgent China guided by Japan’. The
Niall Ferguson (The Abyss: World War I and the End of the First Age of Globalization-A Selection from The War of the World (Tracks))
At the end of the eighteenth century the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham declared that the supreme good is ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’, and concluded that the sole worthy aim of the state, the market and the scientific community is to increase global happiness. Politicians should make peace, business people should foster prosperity and scholars should study nature, not for the greater glory of king, country or God – but so that you and I could enjoy a happier life.
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
The aim of predatory lending in much of the world is to obtain labor to work off debts (debt peonage), to foreclose on the land of debtors, and in modern times to force debt-strapped governments to privatize natural resources and public infrastructure.
Michael Hudson (Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy)
The manoeuvres of the US imperialists for 'globalization' and 'integration' are aimed at turning the world into what they call a 'free' and 'democratic' world styled after the United States, and thus bringing all countries and nations under their domination and subordination.
Kim Jong Il (On Nationalism)
In our day, this global offensive plays a well-defines role. Its aim is to justify te very unequal income distribution between countries and social elates, to convince the poor that poverty is the result of the children they don't avoid having, and to dam the rebellious advance of the masses.
Eduardo Galeano (Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent)
The pharmaceutical drug industry is a half-trillion dollar per year global industry, with almost 300 billion dollars in the United States alone. The pharmaceutical companies and their shareholders rely on people to be sick, or else their stocks will plummet. There is no money to be made in health.
Joseph P. Kauffman (Conscious Collective: An Aim for Awareness)
In his book Politics, which is the foundation of the study of political systems, and very interesting, Aristotle talked mainly about Athens. But he studied various political systems - oligarchy, monarchy - and didn't like any of the particularly. He said democracy is probably the best system, but it has problems, and he was concerned with the problems. One problem that he was concerned with is quite striking because it runs right up to the present. He pointed out that in a democracy, if the people - people didn't mean people, it meant freemen, not slaves, not women - had the right to vote, the poor would be the majority, and they would use their voting power to take away property from the rich, which wouldn't be fair, so we have to prevent this. James Madison made the same pint, but his model was England. He said if freemen had democracy, then the poor farmers would insist on taking property from the rich. They would carry out what we these days call land reform. and that's unacceptable. Aristotle and Madison faced the same problem but made the opposite decisions. Aristotle concluded that we should reduce ineqality so the poor wouldn't take property from the rich. And he actually propsed a visin for a city that would put in pace what we today call welfare-state programs, common meals, other support systems. That would reduce inequality, and with it the problem of the poor taking property from the rich. Madison's decision was the opposite. We should reduce democracy so the poor won't be able to get together to do this. If you look at the design of the U.S. constitutional system, it followed Madison's approach. The Madisonian system placed power in the hands of the Senate. The executive in those days was more or less an administrator, not like today. The Senate consisted of "the wealth of the nation," those who had sympathy for property owners and their rights. That's where power should be. The Senate, remember, wasn't elected. It was picked by legislatures, who were themselves very much subject to control by the rich and the powerful. The House, which was closer to the population, had much less power. And there were all sorts of devices to keep people from participation too much - voting restrictions and property restrictions. The idea was to prevent the threat of democracy. This goal continues right to the present. It has taken different forms, but the aim remains the same.
Noam Chomsky (Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire (American Empire Project))
Ideally, a fair and equitable society would regulate debt in line with the ability to be paid without pushing economies into depression. But when shrinking markets deepen fiscal deficits, creditors demand that governments balance their budgets by selling public monopolies. Once the land, water and mineral rights are privatized, along with transportation, communications, lotteries and other monopolies, the next aim is to block governments from regulating their prices or taxing financial and rentier wealth. The neo-rentier objective is threefold: to reduce economies to debt dependency, to transfer public utilities into creditor hands, and then to create a rent-extracting tollbooth economy. The financial objective is to block governments from writing down debts when bankers and bondholders over-lend. Taken together, these policies create a one-sided freedom for rentiers to create a travesty of the classical “Adam Smith” view of free markets. It is a freedom to reduce the indebted majority to a state of deepening dependency, and to gain wealth by stripping public assets built up over the centuries.
Michael Hudson (Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy)
We hold nothing back – not our effort, not any resources we might have, not time itself. We do not even hold our futures to ourselves. If we limit our aspirations to short-term aims and allow our aspirations to end when we attain those limited results, we will not create the momentum needed to maintain our enthusiasm over the long haul, until that time when we have developed our qualities of mind and heart to their fullest capacity. – 17th Karmapa
Ogyen Trinley Dorje (Interconnected: Embracing Life in Our Global Society)
If your own cultural identity is more important to you than unification of the world, then the world will remain segregated for the rest of time, but if you can truly, actually, genuinely aim towards the unification of the world even at the cost of your own identity, then not only we'll create a world of peace and assimilation, but also, in that world there will be place for all identities, with none of them being superior or inferior to any of them.
Abhijit Naskar (Boldly Comes Justice: Sentient Not Silent)
If the masterful work of global imperialism functions through the dehumanization of those it aims to conquer, and if we can now argue that the human to which we have been aspiring is intimately bound to a logic of mastery, then looking toward those “other genres of being human” that have been lived and will be lived by those subjected by imperial force might offer us other performances of the human that allow us to begin to practice nonmasterful forms of politics.
Julietta Singh (Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements)
Some people believe that there is somebody in charge after all. Not democratic politicians or autocratic despots, but rather a small coterie of billionaires who secretly run the world. But such conspiracy theories never work, because they underestimate the complexity of the system. A few billionaires smoking cigars and drinking Scotch in some back room cannot possibly understand everything happening on the globe, let alone control it. Ruthless billionaires and small interest groups flourish in today’s chaotic world not because they read the map better than anyone else, but because they have very narrow aims. In a chaotic system tunnel vision has its advantages, and the billionaires’ power is strictly proportional to their goals. When the world’s richest tycoons want to make another billion dollars, they can easily game the system in order to do so. In contrast, if they felt inclined to reduce global inequality or stop global warming, even they wouldn’t be able to, because the system is far too complex.
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: ‘An intoxicating brew of science, philosophy and futurism’ Mail on Sunday)
There are three groups of people. There are the rich who are never satisfied because their wealth is never enough for them—these citizens are totally useless for the city. Then there are the poor who, because their daily bread is never enough, are dangerous because they are deceived by the tongues of crooked politicians and by their own envy and so they aim the arrows of their hatred towards the rich. And then, between these two, there is a third. This one is between them. It’s there to keep the order, it’s there to keep the city safe. —EURIPIDES, Suppliants
Victor Davis Hanson (The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America)
Philanthropy is like hippy music, holding hands’, Bono proclaimed. ‘Red is more like punk rock, hip hop, this should feel like hard commerce’. The point was not to offer an alternative to capitalism – on the contrary, Product Red’s ‘punk rock’ or ‘hip hop’ character consisted in its ‘realistic’ acceptance that capitalism is the only game in town. No, the aim was only to ensure that some of the proceeds of particular transactions went to good causes. The fantasy being that western consumerism, far from being intrinsically implicated in systemic global inequalities, could itself solve them. All we have to do is buy the right products.
Mark Fisher (Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?)
The political and the economic organizations of the world are at variance with each other. The international economic system has become global, while the political structure of the world has remained based on the nation-state. The global economic impetus is on removing obstacles to the flow of goods and capital. The international political system is still largely based on contrasting ideas of world order and the reconciliation of concepts of national interest. Economic globalization, in its essence, ignores national frontiers. International policy emphasizes the importance of frontiers even as it seeks to reconcile conflicting national aims.
Henry Kissinger (World Order)
Opinion polls showed that two-thirds of Greeks rejected the conditions attached to the bailout, but wanted to stay in the eurozone. Demonstrations spread throughout Greece advocating a “No” vote. So the Germans and French tried to frame the issue in a narrow way designed to get a “Yes” answer: Did voters want to be part of Europe? The aim was to avoid asking the really important question: Did Greek voters want to impose a decade of depression on themselves, cut public services, impose anti-union labor “reforms,” and sell off the Athenian water supply, its port, their beautiful islands and their gas rights in the Aegean to Germans and other creditors?
Michael Hudson (Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy)
Not satisfied with controlling information pipelines, the tech oligarchs have been moving to shape content as well. Controllers like those at Facebook and Twitter seek to “curate” content on their sites, or even eliminate views they find objectionable, which tend to be conservative views, according to former employees.35 Algorithms intended to screen out “hate groups” often spread a wider net, notes one observer, since the programmers have trouble distinguishing between “hate groups” and those who might simply express views that conflict with the dominant culture of Silicon Valley.36 That managers of social media platforms aim to control content is not merely the perception of conservatives. Over 70 percent of Americans believe that social media platforms “censor political views,” according to a recent Pew study.37 With their quasi-monopoly status, Facebook and Google don’t have to worry about competing with anyone, as the tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel observes, so they can indulge their own prejudices to a greater extent than the businesses that might be concerned about alienating customers.38 With their tightening control over media content, the tech elite are now situated to exert a cultural predominance that is unprecedented in the modern era.39 It recalls the cultural influence of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, but with more advanced technology.
Joel Kotkin (The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class)
For too long we have been the playthings of massive corporations, whose sole aim is to convert our world into a gargantuan shopping 'mall'. Pleasantry and civility are being discarded as the worthless ephemera of a bygone age; an age where men doffed their hats at ladies, and children could be counted on to mind your Jack Russell while you took a mild and bitter in the pub. The twinkly-eyed tobacconist, the ruddy-cheeked landlord and the bewhiskered teashop lady are being trampled under the mighty blandness of 'drive-thru' hamburger chains. Customers are herded in and out of such places with an alarming similarity to the way the cattle used to produce the burgers are herded to the slaughterhouse. The principal victim of this blandification is Youth, whose natural propensity to shun work, peacock around the town and aggravate the constabulary has been drummed out of them. Youth is left with a sad deficiency of joie de vivre, imagination and elegance. Instead, their lives are ruled by territorial one-upmanship based on brands of plimsoll, and Youth has become little more than a walking, barely talking advertising hoarding for global conglomerates. ... But now, a spectre is beginning to haunt the reigning vulgarioisie: the spectre of Chappism. A new breed of insurgent has begun to appear on the streets, in the taverns and in the offices of Britain: The Anarcho-Dandyist. Recognisable by his immaculate clothes, the rakish angle of his hat and his subtle rallying cry of "Good day to you sir/ madam!
Gustav Temple and Vic Darkwood (The Chap Manifesto: Revolutionary Etiquette for the Modern Gentleman)
However marred, the world vessel of clay is not without some of the influence of the Master Molder. God has not left Himself entirely without witness in the global calamity; He discloses Himself in the tragedies as well as the triumphs of history. He works in history as well as above history. There is a universal confrontation of men and women by the divine Spirit, invading all cultures and all individual lives. There is a constructive work of God in history, even where the redemptive Gospel does not do a recreating work. The evangelical missionary message cannot be measured for success by the number of converts only. The Christian message has a salting effect upon the earth. It aims at a re-created society; where it is resisted, it often encourages the displacement of a low ideology by one relatively higher.
Carl F.H. Henry (The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism)
it would have been better never to have made a sacrifice of blood and treasure to save the Union than to have the democratic party come in power now and sacrifice by the ballot what the bayonet seemed to have accomplished.” Grant had striven to protect the black community, met regularly with black leaders, and given them unprecedented White House access, making global abolitionism an explicit aim of American foreign policy. In his annual message of December 1871, he applauded emancipation efforts in Brazil, deplored ongoing bondage in Cuba and Puerto Rico, and asked Congress for legislation to forbid Americans from “holding, owning, or dealing in slaves, or being interested in slave property in foreign lands”—a practice that hadn’t ceased with emancipation at home. Black leaders echoed Grant’s view that the merger
Ron Chernow (Grant)
In his 1966 book, Tragedy and Hope, Professor Carroll Quigley said: [T]he powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences.1 Their scheme is close to fulfillment unless public outrage stops them. They plan global control of money, credit and debt to be able to dominate economies, politics, commerce, and military adventures, so that these might be conducted in a way that benefits them advantageously. In fact, the power to create money can build or destroy nations. In private hands, it goes to the root of today’s problems.
Stephen Lendman (How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion and Class War)
Bank-friendly writers and lobbyists fostered a myth that the economy needed its investment banks to remain solvent to keep the economy functioning. But many former officials, including Bair, SIGTARP‘s Neil Barofsky, and Reagan Administration budget director David Stockman, rejected the claims that public guarantees for reckless bank loans was needed to protect insured depositors. Retail savings and checking accounts were never threatened by the bad gambles that banks made. But this myth had to be promoted in order for Paulson, Geithner Bernanke and other bank protectors to persuade Congress to overrule Bair and make government (“taxpayers”) pay. Their aim was to save the banks from being nationalized, and to protect bankers from being prosecuted for fraud or reining in the exorbitant salaries and bonuses they had given themselves. No attempt was made to change the system that had led to the crash. If
Michael Hudson (Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy)
Take students today They are in some ways freer than they were 60 years ago in their attitudes and commitments and so on. On the other hand they are more disciplined. They are disciplined by debt. Part of the reasoning for arranging education so you come out with heavy debt is so you are disciplined. Take the last 20 years—the neo-liberal years roughly—a very striking part of what is called "globalization" is just aimed at discipline. It wants to eliminate freedom of choice and impose discipline. How do you do that? Well, if you're a couple in the U.S. now, each working 50 hours a week to put food on the table, you don't have time to think about how to become a libertarian socialist. When what you are worried about is "how can I get food on the table?" or "I've got kids to take care of, and when they are sick I've got to go to work and what's going to happen to them?" Those are very well-designed techniques of imposing discipline.
Noam Chomsky (Chomsky On Anarchism)
Europe’s war against debtor countries was turning into class war, which always ends up being waged on the political battlefield. One financial analyst noted that the money raised for putting up islands and public buildings, ports and the water system for sale “will barely put a dint in Greece’s now-unpayable public debt.” Creditors simply hoped to take as much as they could, in the absence of public protests to stop the selloffs. That is why bankers resort to anti-democratic methods in opposing any political power independent of creditor interests. The aim is to centralize financial policy in the hands of “technocrats” drawn from the banking sector – not only Lucas Papademos in Greece, but also Mario Monti in Italy almost simultaneously (as described in the next chapter). The fear is that democratically elected officials will act “irresponsibly,” that is, in the interests of the economy at large rather than catering to the demands of banks and bondholders. The
Michael Hudson (Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy)
The fractal panopticon If, following Bentham, we regard panopticism as a modality of power that rests on the principle of ‘seeing without being seen’, made possible by a flow of information that turns real subjects and activities into data, shadowy projections of real subjects, then, combining these principles of panopticism with its property of modularisation and Hayek’s characterisation of the market as the coordinating mechanism of the action of private individuals, we can understand the rationale of the neoliberal project as one aiming at the construction of a system of interrelated virtual ‘inspection houses’, which we may call the ‘fractal panopticon’. Each panopticon, that is each set of interrelationships of control and resistance defined by a scale of social action, is in turn a singularity within a series of singularities, which stand in relation to each other in such a way that their action constitutes a ‘watchtower’ that is external to them, thus forming a greater panopticon – and so on, in a potentially infinite series.
Massimo De Angelis (The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital)
It is possible that the critics of cross-referencing worry that the practice of citing foreign decisions will lead American judges to decide cases not through legal analysis but through “nose-counting”—that is, tallying up the number of countries on each side.19 There is a further worry, not entirely unfounded, that foreign opinions are subject to misunderstanding, because American judges are unlikely to grasp the foreign contexts in which those decisions arise.20 Moreover, even if the decisions of foreign courts do not bind American judges, they can influence them—indeed, that is the very aim of the cross-referencing practice. Finally, those who see judges throughout the world as belonging to the same social caste—one sharing generally “leftish” political views, and perhaps including state court judges, law professors, and lawyers generally—may not believe that this influence is salutary. Wielded by those whom Americans have virtually no voice in choosing, this influence, it is feared, could easily get out of hand, undermining basic American democratic values.21
Stephen G. Breyer (The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities)
The question is not whether the world’s problems will become everyone’s problems, but on what terms they will. Militarized borders, resource wars, and inequality that grows as its ecological and economic faces interact: These are the features of a re-barbarized world, in which people and peoples do not even try to live in reciprocity or aim at any shared horizon beyond the ecological scarcity that presses down inequitably on everyone. The ways the world’s respectable powers have been pretending to build a global commonwealth, by growth and trade, have brought us here. Although the polite official response to global inequality is still to regret it and seek ways to mitigate it, the rising political tide is a cruder and more candid call to maintain your own relatively and (temporarily) secure place in it against whoever would take it away. There is neither time enough nor world enough—we would need several worlds with comparable resources—to grow and trade our way to a global capitalist version of commonwealth. But the notorious fact that in the long run we are all dead, and so is the world, has become a perverse source of comfort to those who think they can ride out disaster long enough for their own purposes, until their own lights go out.
Jedediah Purdy (This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth)
The Belt and Road is global in nature. Its ruling principle is interdependence, a close network of common interests by which every country’s development is affected by the development path in other countries. In his Jakarta speech, Xi called it a “community of shared destiny.” The expression featured in Chinese official pronouncements since at least 2007, when it was used to describe relations between Taiwan and the Mainland. Applied to relations outside China’s borders, it was a reformulation—a modern version—of the traditional concept of Tianxia (天下), which scholars such as Zhao Tingyang had been popularizing with extraordinary success. Zhao argued that the most important fact about the world today is that it has not become a zone of political unity, but remains a Hobbesian stage of chaos, conflict, noncooperation and anarchy.16 Looking for a way to frame new political concepts distinct from Western ideas of world order, the Chinese authorities quickly appropriated Tianxia—a notion that originated about three thousand years ago—and made it the cornerstone of their most ambitious geopolitical initiative. The idea of a community of shared destiny and the Belt and Road develop the two sides of every human action. Both have their own emphasis: the former belongs to the idea, the concept or type, the latter is aimed at practice. Together they form the “dialectical unity of theory and practice, goals and paths, value rationality and instrumental rationality.”17
Bruno Maçães (Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order)
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Today there is much talk about democratic ideals in the outside world. But not in Germany! For here in Germany we had more than enough time-fifteen years-to acquaint ourselves with these democratic ideals. And we ourselves had to pick up the legacy left behind by this democracy. Now we are being credited with many a truly astounding war aim, especially by the English. After all, England is quite experienced in issuing proclamations of objectives in warfare as it has waged the greatest number of wars the world over. Truly astounding are the war aims announced to us today. A new Europe will arise. This Europe will be characterized by justice. This justice will render armament obsolete. This will lead to disarmament at last. This disarmament in turn will bring about an economic blossoming. Change and trade will spring up-much trade-free trade. And with the sponsorship of this trade, culture shall once more blossom, and not only culture will benefit, but religion will also prosper. In other words: we are heading towards a golden age! Well, we have heard of this golden age before. Many times precisely the same people attempted to illustrate its virtues to us who are now flooding us with descriptions of its benefits. The records are old ones, played once too often. We can only pity these gentlemen who cannot even come up with a new idea to trap a great people. For all this they had already promised us in 1918. Then, too, England’s objectives in the war were the creation of this “new Europe,” the establishment of a “new justice,” of which the “right to selfdetermination of the peoples” was to form an integral part. Back then already they promised us justice to render obsolete-for all time-the bearing of any sort of weaponry. Back then already they submitted to us a program for disarmament-one for global disarmament. To make this disarmament more evident, it was to be crowned by the establishment of an association of nations bearing no arms. These were to settle their differences in the future-for even back then there was no doubt that differences would still arise-by talking them to death in discussion and debate, just as is the custom in democratic states. There would be no more shooting under any circumstances! In 1918, they declared a blessed and pious age to come! What came to pass in its stead we all lived to see: the old states were destroyed without even as much as asking their citizenry. Historic, ancient structures were severed, not only state bodies but grown economic structures as well, without anything better to take their place. In total disregard of the principle of the right to self-determination of the peoples, the European peoples were hacked to pieces, torn apart. Great states were dissolved. Nations were robbed of their rights, first rendered utterly defenseless and then subjected to a division which left only victors and vanquished in this world. And then there was no more talk of disarmament. To the contrary, armament went on. Nor did any efforts materialize to settle conflicts peacefully. The armed states waged wars just as before. Yet those who had been disarmed were no longer in a position to ward off the aggressions of those well armed. Naturally, this did not herald economic prosperity but, to the contrary, produced a network of lunatic reparations payments which led to increasing destitution for not only the vanquished, but also the so-called victors themselves. The consequences of this economic destitution were felt most acutely by the German Volk. International finance remained brutal and squeezed our Volk ruthlessly. Adolf Hitler – speech in the Sportpalast Berlin, January 30, 1940
Adolf Hitler
When you have an honest heart, you do not get engaged nor get involved with any smear campaigns nor black propaganda! When you have an honest heart, you do not malign nor take advantage of generous people who helped and trusted you! When you have an honest heart, you do not shit on people whom you used and abused for three years! Do not fall into a political naïvety and become a victim or a doormat nor have your generosity and honest heart be used and abused by unscrupulous political movers, abusive, aggressive political harridans who scam gullible generous hearts by asking donations, funds, services, foods, urgent favours, and after using you and abusing your generosity, trust, and kindness; whereby these unscrupulous and deceptive political movers, abusive, aggressive political harridans intentionally and maliciously create forged screenshots of evidence convincing their audience or political groups that you are a mentally ill person, a brain-damaged person as they even brand you as "Sisang Baliw," or crazy Sisa, a threat, a risk, a danger, they maliciously and destructively red-tag your friends as communists, and they resort to calumny, libel and slander against you, to shame you, defame you, discredit you, blame you, hurt you, make you suffer for having known the truth of their deceptive global Operandi, and for something you didn’t do through their mob lynching, calumny, polemics mongering, forgery, and cyberbullying efforts. Their character assassination through libel and slander aims to ruin your integrity, persona, trustworthiness, and credibility with their destructive fabricated calumny, lies, identity theft, forged screenshots of polemics mongering, and framing up. Amidst all their forgery, fraud, libel and slander they committed: you have a right to defy and stop their habitual abuse without breaking the law and fight for your rights against any forms of aggression, public lynching, bullies, threats, blackmail, and their repetitive maltreatment or abuse, identity theft, forgery, deceptions fraud, scams, cyber libel, libel, and slander. When you defend human rights, you fight against corruption and injustice, help end impunity: be sure that you are not part of any misinformation, disinformation, smear campaigns and black propaganda. Do not serve, finance, or cater directly or indirectly for those dirty politicians. Those who are engaged in abusively dishonest ways do not serve to justify their end. Deceiving and scamming other people shall always be your lifetime self-inflicted karmic loss. Be a law-abiding citizen. Be respectful. Be honest. Be factual. Be truthful. You can be an effective human rights defender when you have clean and pure intentions, lawful and morally upright, and have an honest heart." ~ Angelica Hopes, an excerpt from Calunniatopia Book 1, Stronzata Trilogy Genre: inspirational, political, literary novel © 2021 Ana Angelica Abaya van Doorn
Angelica Hopes
Some of the world’s biggest banks and investor groups have swung behind a pledge to raise $200bn by the end of next year to combat climate change. In a move the UN said was unprecedented, leading insurers, pension funds and banks have joined forces to help channel the money to projects that will help poorer countries deal with the effect of global warming and cut reliance on fossil fuels. The announcement came at the start of a UN climate summit in New York aimed at bolstering momentum for a global agreement to lower planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions due to be signed in Paris at the end of 2015. “Change is in the air,” said UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon. “Today’s climate summit has shown an entirely new, co-operative global approach to climate change.” The summit opened with business and government pledges to make cities greener, create a renewable energy “corridor” in Africa and rein in the clearing of forests for palm oil plantations. The private sector’s contributions marked a “major departure” from past climate summits, the UN said, adding in a statement that financial groups “had never previously acted together on climate change at such a large scale”. One obstacle to the Paris agreement is developing countries’ insistence that richer nations must fulfil pledges made nearly five years ago to raise $100bn a year by 2020 for climate action.
Anonymous
Over time, the Saudis gave $32m to the Contras.86 The routing of this money was linked to the AWACS sale in that a fund was created from the sale, from which the Contras’ monthly money was diverted.87 Bandar would say later: ‘I didn’t give a damn about the Contras – I didn’t even know where Nicaragua was.’88 This support was the Saudi way of investing in America, the ultimate aim being a Saudi–American alignment to compete with Israel’s relationship with the US.89
Andrew Feinstein (The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade)
EARNINGS McDonald's Plans Marketing Push as Profit Slides By Julie Jargon | 436 words Associated Press The burger giant has been struggling to maintain relevance among younger consumers and fill orders quickly in kitchens that have grown overwhelmed with menu items. McDonald's Corp. plans a marketing push to emphasize its fresh-cooked breakfasts as it battles growing competition for the morning meal. Competition at breakfast has heated up recently as Yum Brands Inc.'s Taco Bell entered the business with its new Waffle Taco last month and other rivals have added or discounted breakfast items. McDonald's Chief Executive Don Thompson said it hasn't yet noticed an impact from Taco Bell's breakfast debut, but that the overall increased competition "forces us to focus even more on being aggressive in breakfast." Mr. Thompson's comments came after McDonald's on Tuesday reported that its profit for the first three months of 2014 dropped 5.2% from a year earlier, weaker than analysts' expectations. Comparable sales at U.S. restaurants open more than a year declined 1.7% for the quarter and 0.6% for March, the fifth straight month of declines in the company's biggest market. Global same-store sales rose 0.5% for both the quarter and month. Mr. Thompson acknowledged again that the company has lost relevance with some customers and needs to strengthen its menu offerings. He emphasized Tuesday that McDonald's is focused on stabilizing key markets, including the U.S., Germany, Australia and Japan. The CEO said McDonald's has dominated the fast-food breakfast business for 35 years, and "we don't plan on giving that up." The company plans in upcoming ads to inform customers that it cooks its breakfast, unlike some rivals. "We crack fresh eggs, grill sausage and bacon," Mr. Thompson said. "This is not a microwave deal." Beyond breakfast, McDonald's also plans to boost marketing of core menu items such as Big Macs and french fries, since those core products make up 40% of total sales. To serve customers more quickly, the chain is working to optimize staffing, and is adding new prep tables that let workers more efficiently add new toppings when guests want to customize orders. McDonald's also said it aims to sell more company-owned restaurants outside the U.S. to franchisees. Currently, 81% of its restaurants around the world are franchised. Collecting royalties from franchisees provides a stable source of income for a restaurant company and removes the cost of operating them. McDonald's reported a first-quarter profit of $1.2 billion, or $1.21 a share, down from $1.27 billion, or $1.26 a share, a year earlier. The company partly attributed the decline to the effect of income-tax benefits in the prior year. Total revenue for the quarter edged up 1.4% to $6.7 billion, though costs rose faster, at 2.3%. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters forecast earnings of $1.24 a share on revenue of $6.72 billion.
Anonymous
The ultimate aim? A global brand focused on Asia’s growing middle-class thirst for entertainment.
Anonymous
The Emperor and his ministers might dance Western dances and even, in violation of traditional Japanese propriety, smile Western smiles. But their underlying and deadly earnest aim was always to wipe the smiles off European faces.
Niall Ferguson (The Abyss: World War I and the End of the First Age of Globalization-A Selection from The War of the World (Tracks))
WhatsApp user base crosses 70 million in India The total user base for WhatsApp is 600 million, according to a a vice-president of the company. Photo: AFP By PTI | 328 words Mumbai: Mobile messenger service WhatsApp's user base in India has grown to 70 million active users, which is over a 10th of its global users, its business head Neeraj Arora said on Sunday. "We have 70 million active users here who use the application at least once a month," Arora, a vice-president with WhatsApp, said at the fifth annual INK Conference in Mumbai. He said the total user base for the company, which was bought by Facebook in a $19-billion deal earlier this year, is 600 million. With over a 10th of the users from the country, India is one of the biggest markets for WhatsApp, he said, adding connecting billions of people in markets like India and Brazil is the aim of the company. Arora, an alumnus of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Delhi and ISB Hyderabad, said WhatsApp will continue to hold a distinct identity even after the takeover by Facebook and will not get merged with the social networking giant. He said WhatsApp, which has only 80 employees, will benefit through learnings from the social networking giant. Arora, who first heard of WhatsApp as a business development executive for the Internet search firm Google Inc. and later joined as its business head, said it took two years to stitch the $19 billion deal announced this April. Interestingly, Arora said he would have paid a fraction of the sum to buy WhatsApp three years back. It would have been in "low tens of million" dollars, he said stressing that the company has grown a lot since then. Arora said the user-base has doubled to 600 million from the 30 million when he joined three years ago. The company has flourished because of its focus on the product, rather than the business side of things, he said. "The founders wanted to develop a cool product which will be used by millions and did not have business things like valuations," he said, stressing that this continues to be a motto of the company.
Anonymous
The new GST: A halfway house In spite of all the favourable features of the GST, it introduces the anomaly of having an origin-based tax on interstate trade he proposed GST would be a single levy. 1141 words From a roadblock during the UPA regime, the incessant efforts of the BJP government have finally paved way for the introduction of the goods and services tax (GST). This would, no doubt, be a major reform in the existing indirect tax system of the country. With a view to introducing the GST, Union finance minister Arun Jaitley has introduced the Constitution (122nd Amendment) Bill 2014 in Parliament. The new tax would be implemented from April 1, 2016. Both the government and the taxpayers will have enough time to understand the implications of the new tax and its administrative nuances. Unlike the 119th Amendment Bill, which lapsed with the dissolution of the previous Lok Sabha, the new Bill will hopefully see the light of the day as it takes into account the objections of the state governments regarding buoyancy of the tax and the autonomy of the states. It proposes setting up of the GST Council, which will be a joint forum of the Centre and the states. This council would function under the chairmanship of the Union finance minister with all the state finance ministers as its members. It will make recommendations to the Union and the states on the taxes, cesses and surcharges levied by the Union, the states and the local bodies, which may be subsumed in the GST; the rates including floor rates with bands of goods and services tax; any special rate or rates for a specified period to raise additional resources during any natural calamity or disaster etc. However, all the recommendations will have to be supported by not less than three-fourth of the weighted votes—the Centre having one-third votes and the states having two-third votes. Thus, no change can be implemented without the consent of both the Centre and the states. The proposed GST would be a single levy. It would aim at creating an integrated national market for goods and services by replacing the plethora of indirect taxes levied by the Centre and the states. While central taxes to be subsumed include central excise duty (CenVAT), additional excise duties, service tax, additional customs duty (CVD) and special additional duty of customs (SAD), the state taxes that fall in this category include VAT/sales tax, entertainment tax, octroi, entry tax, purchase tax and luxury tax. Therefore, all taxes on goods and services, except alcoholic liquor for human consumption, will be brought under the purview of the GST. Irrespective of whether we currently levy GST on these items or not, it is important to bring these items under the Constitution Amendment Bill because the exclusion of these items from the GST does not provide any flexibility to levy GST on these items in the future. Any change in the future would then require another Constitutional Amendment. From a futuristic approach, it is prudent not to confine the scope of the tax under the bindings of the Constitution. The Constitution should demarcate the broad areas of taxing powers as has been the case with sales tax and Union excise duty in the past. Currently, the rationale of exclusion of these commodities from the purview of the GST is solely based on revenue considerations. No other considerations of tax policy or tax administration have gone into excluding petroleum products from the purview of the GST. However, the long-term perspective of a rational tax policy for the GST shows that, at present, these taxes constitute more than half of the retail prices of motor fuel. In a scenario where motor fuel prices are deregulated, the taxation policy would have to be flexible and linked to the global crude oil prices to ensure that prices are held stable and less pressure exerted on the economy during the increasing price trends. The trend of taxation of motor fuel all over the world suggests that these items
Anonymous
The memo provoked, and still provokes, deep division. At the time, the Foreign Office’s most strident critic was Thomas Sanderson, who rejected Crowe’s simplistic portrayal of German history as ‘an unchecked record of black deeds’.24 Since then, however, historians have tended to come down on Crowe’s side. Fritz Fischer’s Germany’s Aims in the First World War is the most controversial meditation on the idea that Germany sought to conquer Europe and the world. Yet his book is confined to Germany’s aims during the war, i.e. after the war began, when all nations were fighting for their lives; it finds no persuasive evidence that Germany intended global conquest – through force of arms – before the war began.
Paul Ham (1914: The Year the World Ended)
Product considerations for luxury goods and services should aim to clearly distinguish the brand from the competition. It should re-enforce the uniqueness and dream associated with the brand. Through careful user-experience design, rituals are often created that guide the user to the point where the use of the brands product becomes compulsory, pleasant and habit forming.
Adriaan Brits (Luxury Brand Marketing: The globalization of luxury brand cults)
When we do harm to one thing we are essentially harming ourselves. For example when we use poisonous toxins and pesticides to grow our food, we pollute the soil, kill the life of the surrounding ecosystems, decrease the quality of the food supply, which then decreases our health and the level of energy we operate on. When we do this every day on a global scale for several decades we end up with soil infertility, habitat loss, environmental pollution, low quality food, poor health, malnutrition, and a lack of productivity, which is so apparent in today’s society.
Joseph P. Kauffman (Conscious Collective: An Aim for Awareness)
A global revolution is the last thing that the rich people in power want to happen, so of course it is not documented on any major media outlet. Regardless of what the media says, the people are waking up to the truth and the potential is incredible. What we do with this potential and how we choose to guide it is extremely important.
Joseph P. Kauffman (Conscious Collective: An Aim for Awareness)
This book originally aimed at pressing a useful metaphor into the service of elucidating a troubled world; a world that could no longer be understood properly by means
Yanis Varoufakis (The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy (Economic Controversies))
the sensationalist media of the time coined the term “Incompetence Epidemic” to describe the recent series of government and corporate errors, and the public cried out for corrective action. Hoping to placate the masses, the Global Chancellor unveiled the Sterilize the Stupid campaign, a form of eugenics aimed solely at removing the incompetent from the gene pool. 
Will Hartzell-Baird (The Taste of Cashews)
Page 10-11: Because of America's vigorous growth, and because the dollar plays a special role in the international economy, foreigners have been willing to finance the nation's imports and consumption. The bad news is that America's trade and investment deficits with the rest of the world (i.e., the amounts by which it is spending more than it is producing and borrowing more than it is lending) are growing so fast that they threaten to place the United States in the position of Thailand in 1997. That is to say, America's debts to the rest of the world may soon become large enough that its creditors could start wondering about the nation's ability to repay. Should foreigners lose faith in America's creditworthiness, they may start dumping dollars the way they dumped Thai baht. In that case, the American consumer would face significant belt-tightening to enable to country to start paying the debt down. Alternatively, the Federal Reserve could raise interest rates very high. This step would aim at persuading foreigners to keep up their lending by offering them higher rates of return on their loans, but it would also slow down the domestic economy by making the cost of money much more expensive for businesses and consumers. It would also add greatly to the total debt that would have to be repaid. ... A significant U.S. slowdown, therefore, would most likely leave the Japanese and Europeans (plus the Chinese and the rest of Asia and Latin America) with ever greater stockpiles of goods that no one could or would buy. These products would either languish on the shelf, or global price wars would break out, with each country trying to undercut the other in a frantic attempt to trim losses. Nations would either offer their goods for sale for much less than their production costs, or they would devalue their currencies, making them cheaper relative to other currencies. Thus their goods would automatically sell for less in foreign markets, and foreign goods would automatically become more expensive in their market.
Alan Tonelson (The Race To The Bottom: Why A Worldwide Worker Surplus And Uncontrolled Free Trade Are Sinking American Living Standards)
Actions Summary The following list of new institutions, policies and actions is my best effort at envisaging what is required for Australia to survive the climate emergency. • A National Target and Plan for 95% or more of electricity to be supplied by renewables by 2030. • State plans to electrify all transport, beginning with the swift retirement of non-electric buses and including a plan for 50% of all new car sales to be EVs by 2030. • Implement planned changes to how we work and live so as to minimise unnecessary travel. • A plan for clean hydrogen to replace bunker fuel in shipping. • A plan for the adoption of e-fuels for aviation, with an aim to have all domestic flights running on e-fuel by 2030. • A National Commission for Climate Adaptation, with a Coastal Defence Fund and a Commission for Primary Production operating under its umbrella. • A National Initiative on Drawdown Innovation to provide leadership in early stage research and fund some on-ground projects. • The Federal Government to help convene a Global Working Group on Geoengineering.
Tim Flannery (The Climate Cure: Solving the Climate Emergency in the Era of COVID-19)
The British bankers at that time also controlled the fledgling American banks which offered to loan Abraham Lincoln money to fight the war. Lincoln wisely refused and created the famous Lincoln greenbacks with which he financed the Civil War.38 Abraham Lincoln, in a famous address, declared: “At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us it must spring up among us, it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die of suicide.” 39 Lincoln’s refusal to finance the Union through debt to the internationalists demonstrated his keen insight into their strategy for global dominion. Hence, he financed the Civil War by printing the Lincoln greenbacks. In both respects—with regard to the Civil War and the British bankers’ attempt to seize control of the economics of America—once again the aims of the globalists were frustrated. This is what caused Lincoln’s assassination. Nonetheless, America remained in control of her own credit. The result of this victory was low interest loans for entrepreneurs, which led to great business expansion. This great expansion in the post-Civil War era enhanced the fears of those who sought to bring the world into a One World Order. If America was allowed to continue to expand, she would be a major—perhaps insurmountable—obstacle in the way of their goal. For one hundred years, America was able to avoid total control of her capital by the international bankers. Lincoln was most certainly a great irritant and obstacle to the aspirations of the globalists. He was the last president to seek categorically a halting of the globalists’ drive toward a Global One World Government. It cost him his life; he was murdered by John Wilkes Booth, also an agent of the internationalists.40 America’s emergence from the Civil War as a great industrial power was due to the effective centralization of capital and credit within the Federal Government, thanks to Lincoln. It was America’s control over her own capital that was making her prosperous. It was the aim of the international bankers to change all that. Lincoln was the victim of a major conspiracy—a conspiracy so important that even the European bankers were involved. Lincoln had to be eliminated because he dared to oppose their attempt to force a central bank on the United States. He became an example to those who would later oppose such machinations in high places. Could it be that, one hundred years later, John F.
Kenneth B. Klein (The Deep State Prophecy and the Last Trump)
Those who care exclusively about “identities” aim to place everybody on the same starting line but do not care that some come to the starting line with Ferraris and others with bicycles.
Branko Milanović (Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization)
The concept of inclusive education, discussed here in relation to students with disability, has emerged from a global trend aimed at ensuring the most marginalised and vulnerable students can access and participate in education (Carrington et al. 2012).
Linda Graham (Inclusive Education for the 21st Century: Theory, policy and practice)
In short, Thetenthub are a team of outdoor enthusiasts who deliver in-depth walkthroughs, how-to guides and product reviews on all things camping and outdoors. With vast experience between our team, from backpacking, traditional campsite camping, to remote tarp camping all the way through to hikers and kayakers we hope to serve the community. Our shared knowledge and passion for the outdoors combined, we aim to share our experiences, thoughts and ideas on a global scale, with like-minded readers.
The Tent Hub
However, I repeat: not every question, but only one that goes down to the origin of the problem, that aims at a global knowledge, a question on which our entire lives depend: what is good and what is evil, what is right and what is wrong? This sort of question, which assumes a super-human knowledge, inevitably leads into the zone of unknowing. Such a question places one in an interval. We are ‘interval beings’ precisely because we ask questions of this kind. And in this case, the status of the question derives from the human condition itself, which is one of interval: between knowing and unknowing, between good and evil, between life and death.
Alexandru Dragomir
sobs” (sanglots). Some days I enter poetic melancholic states, what the Portuguese call saudade or the Turks hüzün (from the Arabic word for sadness). Other days I am more aggressive, have more energy—and will write less, walk more, do other things, argue with researchers, answer emails, draw graphs on blackboards. Should I be turned into a vegetable or a happy imbecile? Had Prozac been available last century, Baudelaire’s “spleen,” Edgar Allan Poe’s moods, the poetry of Sylvia Plath, the lamentations of so many other poets, everything with a soul would have been silenced. … If large pharmaceutical companies were able to eliminate the seasons, they would probably do so—for a profit, of course. There is another danger: in addition to harming children, we are harming society and our future. Measures that aim at reducing variability and swings in the lives of children are also reducing variability and differences within our said to be Great Culturally Globalized Society.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder)
Resources such as energy, matter and information can flow through these networks in ways that achieve a fine balance between the system’s efficiency and its resilience. Efficiency occurs when a system streamlines and simplifies its resource flow to achieve its aims, say by channelling resources directly between the larger nodes. Resilience, however, depends upon diversity and redundancy in the network, which means that there are ample alternative connections and options in times of shock or change. Too much efficiency makes a system vulnerable (as global financial regulators realised too late in 2008) while too much resilience makes it stagnant: vitality and robustness lie in a balance between the two.
Kate Raworth (Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist)
A more venomous opponent, Christopher Hitchens, made the charge, all too familiar on the left, that Kissinger was a war criminal—what else could he be if his lethal policies had no other aim but his personal advancement? Hitchens drew up a “Bill of Indictment” that charged Kissinger with crimes in such places as Bangladesh, Chile, Cyprus, and East Timor. International relations, Hitchens wrote, were treated “as something contingent to his own needs.” One Kissinger defender, his authorized biographer Niall Ferguson, has argued that every postwar administration before Nixon’s—Truman’s, Eisenhower’s, Kennedy’s, and Johnson’s—“could just as easily be accused of war crimes or crimes against humanity.” He pointed out that Eisenhower’s policies in Guatemala had led to the deaths of about 200,000 people. Causing or condoning death, even of innocents, was the price of being a superpower with a global role. Yet perhaps with the exception of Truman (because of his decision to use atomic weapons against Japan), no one was put in the leftist dock as a war criminal so often or to the same degree as Kissinger, not John Foster Dulles, not Dean Rusk. Why, Ferguson wondered, did Kissinger’s accusers subject him to a “double standard”? The left, however, didn’t see a double standard. Kissinger, alone among postwar policymakers, was charged with making decisions out of personal interest, not national or global concerns. According to his critics, he “believed in nothing,” though it would be more accurate to say that what he believed in was weighing means against ends, a kind of situational, pragmatic ethics that rejected the left’s moralistic strictures. What he didn’t believe in were absolutes. “There is no easy and surely no final answer,” he said. To be sure, valid objections could be raised against specific Kissinger policies, even in his own terms of weighing means against ends—the invasion of Cambodia, for example, or the tilt toward Pakistan during the Bangladesh crisis—and there is certainly truth to Seymour Hersh’s assertion that “Nixon and Kissinger remained blind to the human costs of their actions.” Callousness has always been the besetting sin of Realpolitik, and it is not difficult to find examples of almost brutal coldness in Kissinger’s record. “It’s none of our business how they treat their own people,” he said of Moscow’s policy toward Soviet Jews. “I’m Jewish myself, but who are we to complain?” Actual human beings could get lost as power was being balanced.
Barry Gewen (The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World)
the new world will be one where bottom-up, network-designed companies and countries will trump the old top-down hierarchies that have dominated since the Industrial Revolution. My motto is: Every customer a market, every employee a business. There is no way to make America great again by returning to the rote assembly-line jobs of the past. In the not too distant future, we’ll enjoy decentralized and instant access to information technologies that allow a more egalitarian, democratic, inclusive, and productive economy and culture. Ironically, it’ll be the complete opposite of how this revolution started, with its nationalistic and racist policies aimed at protecting against the extremes of globalization
Harry S. Dent (Zero Hour: Turn the Greatest Political and Financial Upheaval in Modern History to Your Advantage)
improving designs online for free. His idea soon grew into the Global Village Construction Set, which aims to demonstrate step-by-step how to build from scratch 50 universally useful machines, from tractors, brick makers and 3D printers to sawmills, bread ovens and wind turbines.
Kate Raworth (Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist)
The transatlantic eugenics movement, powered by Darwin’s half cousin Francis Galton, aimed to speed up natural selection with policies encouraging reproduction among those with superior genes and re-enslaving or killing their genetic inferiors. Global outrage after the genocidal eugenics-driven policies of Nazi Germany in the mid-twentieth century led to the marginalization of biological racism within academic thought for the first time in four hundred years. Biological racism—curse theory, polygenesis, and eugenics—had held strong for that long. And yet marginalization in academic thought did not mean marginalization in common thought, including the kind of common thinking that surrounded me as a child.
Ibram X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist)
The transatlantic eugenics movement, powered by Darwin’s half cousin Francis Galton, aimed to speed up natural selection with policies encouraging reproduction among those with superior genes and re-enslaving or killing their genetic inferiors. Global outrage after the genocidal eugenics-driven policies of Nazi Germany in the mid-twentieth century led to the marginalization of biological racism within academic thought for the first time in four hundred years. Biological racism—curse theory, polygenesis, and eugenics—had held strong for that long. And yet marginalization in academic thought did not mean marginalization in common thought, including the kind of common thinking that surrounded me as a child. —
Ibram X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist)
Various energy strategies, targets and the majority of the policies aiming at decreasing investment costs can be used to trigger the deployment of renewables in all sectors
Manfred Hafner (The Geopolitics of the Global Energy Transition (Lecture Notes in Energy Book 73))
force Americans from the suburbs into cities. The Republican National Committee described it as “erosive of American sovereignty.” It’s been called “the most dangerous threat to American sovereignty” and an “anti-human document, which takes aim at Western culture.” The goal of the new “2030 Agenda” is to persuade every nation to give up even more national sovereignty. “The U.N. vote is about to put America and the
Thomas Horn (I Predict: What 12 Global Experts Believe You Will See Before 2025!)
1)  In Europe, especially France, ethnic civil war will break out, with Islam for its banner. It has already begun in a diffuse but clear fashion, a war of internal conquest that aims quite simply at making our continent a new Muslim land (Dar al-Islam)[99] where people of European stock are called upon to become subject minorities and the populations that came from the South intend to become the majority. If the initiative succeeds, it will be a case of the pure and simple disappearance of European civilisation, which was born 3,500 years ago. 2)  On the world scale, we are going to witness a global Islamic offensive, on the European front (from France to the Balkans) and the African front, but also in Russia, Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent and the Far East. 3)  The American superpower can only decline, especially in the face of the formidable rise in Chinese power. Taking account of the atavistic militarism of the USA, a major confrontation between Americans and Chinese cannot be excluded. All the same, we can count on America’s clumsy militarism, which starts fires without ever succeeding in eliminating its designated enemies, to multiply hotbeds of war throughout the world.
Guillaume Faye (Convergence of Catastrophes)
What is more, by being able to call upon a truly global contributor base, we not only stayed true to the spirit of FinTech, making use of technological channels of communication in reaching out to, selecting, and reviewing our would-be contributors, we also made sure that every corner of the globe had the chance to have its say. Thus, we aimed to fulfil one of the most important purposes of The FinTech Book, namely to give a voice to those that would remain unheard, those that did not belong to a true FinTech community in their local areas, and spread that voice to an international audience. We
Susanne Chishti (The FINTECH Book: The Financial Technology Handbook for Investors, Entrepreneurs and Visionaries)
Liberalism developed flawless weapons aimed at achieving its straightforward alternatives, which was the basis for its victory. But it is this very victory that holds the greatest risk to liberalism. We need only to ascertain the location of these new, vulnerable spots in the global system and decipher its login passwords in order to hack into its system. At the very least, we must try to do so. The events of 11 September 2001 in New York demonstrated that this is technologically possible. The Internet society can be useful, even for those who staunchly oppose it. In
Alexander Dugin (The Fourth Political Theory)
What is the Paris Climate Agreement? 195 countries signed a pledge to keep global temperature rise below 2°C (3.6°F), and, if possible, below 1.5°C (2.7°F). All countries agree to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions to net zero as soon as possible in the second half of the century. The U.S. pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. India aims to install 175 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity by 2022. China will peak its CO2 emissions by 2030. Developed countries will provide $100 billion in climate finance by 2020. Countries should raise the ambition of their initial commitments over time to make sure we meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. The Paris Agreement entered into force on November 4, 2016.
Al Gore (An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power: Your Action Handbook to Learn the Science, Find Your Voice, and Help Solve the Climate Crisis)
Whether you consider yourself an economic veteran or novice, now is the time to uncover the economic graffiti that lingers in all of our minds and, if you don’t like what you find, scrub it out; or, better still, paint it over with new images that far better serve our needs and times. The rest of this book proposes seven ways to think like a twenty-first-century economist, revealing for each of those seven ways the spurious image that has occupied our minds, how it came to be so powerful, and the damaging influence it has had. But the time for mere critique is past, which is why the focus here is on creating new images that capture the essential principles to guide us now. The diagrams in this book aim to summarise that leap from old to new economic thinking. Taken together they set out – quite literally – a new big picture for the twenty-first-century economist. So here is a whirlwind tour of the ideas and images at the heart of Doughnut Economics. First, change the goal. For over 70 years economics has been fixated on GDP, or national output, as its primary measure of progress. That fixation has been used to justify extreme inequalities of income and wealth coupled with unprecedented destruction of the living world. For the twenty-first century a far bigger goal is needed: meeting the human rights of every person within the means of our life-giving planet. And that goal is encapsulated in the concept of the Doughnut. The challenge now is to create economies – local to global – that help to bring all of humanity into the Doughnut’s safe and just space. Instead of pursuing ever-increasing GDP, it is time to discover how to thrive in balance.
Kate Raworth (Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist)
She was part of a social network that included artists and activists who were always hatching what they called “disruptive strategies” aimed at undermining all forms of authority: cultural, economic, scientific. Mostly their disruptions involved artistic fashion shows full of uselessly beautiful GMOs and tissue mods that said something about global recolonization.
Annalee Newitz (Autonomous)
Social wars of a society should aim to reinstate a dignified life where love can thrive; not to create a future bound by immense discord.
Wayne Chirisa
Economic growth is not the sole aim of our society,” the Hall Report said. “The value of a human life must be decided without regard to . . . economic considerations. We must take into account the human and spiritual aspects involved.
T.R. Reid (The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care)
Beyond Inclusion (The Sonnet) It is not really inclusion that we must aim for, Rather we must work to outgrow the need for inclusion. It is not really global harmony that we must aim for, We must outgrow the very term international relations. It is not really a reform in policy that we must aim for, Rather we must aim to outgrow the need for policy aids. It is not really social awareness we must aim to advocate, Rather we must be the living epitome of social oneness. It is not a flea market of parties that we must aim to build, Rather we must turn the very term partisanism obsolete. It is not a junkyard of ideologies that we must aim to raise, Absorbing good from all, let us stop being ideological elites. Plenty of time we have wasted on arguments of philosophy. Now let's go out on the streets and soil to get our hands dirty.
Abhijit Naskar (Handcrafted Humanity: 100 Sonnets For A Blunderful World)
From the outset, the BRI has been presented as a model of ‘inclusive globalisation’ and aimed at those who feel shut out. The language plays to the dream of global harmony through trade and cultural exchange. When Xi Jinping uses the phrase ‘community of shared future’, the subtext is that China’s new world order will replace the postwar American hegemony. The BRI can be seen as the CCP’s principal vehicle for promoting and entrenching the Party’s alternative discourse system for the world. To the outside world, Xi and other leaders talk about ‘win-win cooperation’, and ‘a big family of harmonious co-existence’ and ‘a bridge for peace and East-West cooperation’, but in discussions at home, the talk is of achieving global discursive and geostrategic dominance.
Clive Hamilton (Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World)
A marine biologist came onstage and was particularly upbeat. He said we had to meet the 1.5-degree target, because that way only 70 to 90 per cent of the coral would disappear, and not all, as the two-degree Celsius rise projected. He spoke like this was a worthy fight. Despite my interest in these matters, I hadn’t been aware of this. Was he telling me, so very directly, that up to 90 per cent of the world’s coral would die out if we reached an almost impossible goal of keeping global warming within 1.5 degrees Celsius? Was that knowledge available when people were deciding whether to aim for the two-degree goal? Was there a group of councillors who approved this on behalf of the Earth’s inhabitants? I thought back through the news from recent years and couldn’t remember television and radio broadcasts being interrupted by this decision. I do not remember an election where a nation mandated the elected government to sacrifice the world’s coral reefs. I didn’t recall coral reefs being used as leverage in negotiations: ‘The car manufacturers’ association celebrates victory.
Andri Snær Magnason (On Time and Water)
That brings to mind Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever, who surprised me when we were both members of a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. He took that opportunity to announce that Unilever had adopted the goal of cutting the company’s environmental footprint in half by 2020 (this was in 2010, giving it a decade to get there). That was laudable, but a little ho-hum: many socially responsible companies announce global warming goals like that.8 But the next thing he said really shocked me: Unilever is committed to sourcing its raw agriculture material from small farms, aiming to link to half a million smallholders globally.9 The farmers involved mainly grow tea, but the sourcing initiative will also include crops for cocoa, palm oil, vanilla, coconut sugar, and a variety of fruits and vegetables. The farms involved are in areas ranging from Africa to Southeast Asia and Latin America, with some in Indonesia, China, and India. Unilever hopes not only to link these small farmers into their supply chain, but also to work with groups like Rainforest Alliance to help them upgrade their farming practices and so become reliable sources in global markets.10
Daniel Goleman (Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence)
PCD & Franchise Company, International Standard Quality Products in Ahmedabad Gujarat India. Desta Life Sciences is the top PCD Pharma Franchise company in India. We are procured from faithful vendors to ensure its International Standard Quality Products. We're at Desta Science for Health Life providing the best PCD Franchise for business. This is the best Business Opportunity in India. We have 200+ Products, 4 Divisions and 13 Innovative Products. Desta Lifesciences, Started in 2011. The company's philosophy has been rooted in Quality and care and it is this ideology that has kept us alive through ups and downs. The company's greatest asset has always been its employees and it is in them we place our trust to shoulder the company's corporate responsibility and to uphold the company's ideals and values. A healthy blend of World-Class Quality, Disease prevalence-dependent, wide variety of products, stress on preventive Lifestyle products, a positive upbeat mood of one & all in the company and a feeling of oneness, is the recipe that Desta Lifesciences presents humbly to humanity. The "For the people, By the People" dictum is followed by the management in the company, thus making it surge forward with the force of the common goal to accomplish our Mission. We aim to serve mankind globally through our affordable and international standard quality products, encompassing the environmental synergy in the process. As we enter into the technological age of pharmaceuticals, we promise to adapt to more advanced technologies while simultaneously focusing on delivery of care. The future holds great promise as we gradually hope to venture into Exports and R&D to establish ourselves in the global market.
International Standard Quality Products
Global governance is commonly defined as the process of cooperation among transnational actors aimed at providing responses to global problems (those that affect more than one state or region). It encompasses the totality of institutions, policies, norms, procedures and initiatives through which nation states try to bring more predictability and stability to their responses to transnational challenges. This definition makes it clear that any global effort on any global issue or concern is bound to be toothless without the cooperation of national governments and their ability to act and legislate to support their aims. Nation states make global governance possible (one leads the other), which is why the UN says that “effective global governance can only be achieved with effective international cooperation”.
Klaus Schwab (COVID-19: The Great Reset)
The World Sonnet The world will never be a place without troubles, But that is not the point, the point is something else. The point is that most of the troubles we do have, Are caused by our own archaic stupidity 'n shallowness. Shallow and indifferent, that's the norm of the world. With such norm how can we expect there to be equality! Civilization comes from the ground, not the government. The ones walking the ground are the cause of humanity. Rhythm of the world comes from the rhythm of your heart, Place your hand on your heart and listen across biases. If there is music in you there'll be music in the world, But if there's just noise within, all around there’ll be travesty. WORLD means We On Road of Love and Determination. The aim is to conquer our last ounce of discrimination.
Abhijit Naskar (The Gentalist: There's No Social Work, Only Family Work)
The only thing you must keep from them is the fact that what we are aiming at is virtual global hegemony, McCaine had warned him. Be modest.
Andreas Eschbach (One Trillion Dollars: An absolutely gripping page turning thriller about a man who inherits a life-changing fortune)
Despite Noetic Science’s use of cutting-edge technologies, the discoveries themselves were far more mystical than the cold, high-tech machines that were producing them. The stuff of magic and myth was fast becoming reality as the shocking new data poured in, all of it supporting the basic ideology of Noetic Science—the untapped potential of the human mind. The overall thesis was simple: We have barely scratched the surface of our mental and spiritual capabilities. Experiments at facilities like the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) in California and the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab (PEAR) had categorically proven that human thought, if properly focused, had the ability to affect and change physical mass. Their experiments were no “spoon-bending” parlor tricks, but rather highly controlled inquiries that all produced the same extraordinary result: our thoughts actually interacted with the physical world, whether or not we knew it, effecting change all the way down to the subatomic realm. Mind over matter. In 2001, in the hours following the horrifying events of September 11, the field of Noetic Science made a quantum leap forward. Four scientists discovered that as the frightened world came together and focused in shared grief on this single tragedy, the outputs of thirty-seven different Random Event Generators around the world suddenly became significantly less random. Somehow, the oneness of this shared experience, the coalescing of millions of minds, had affected the randomizing function of these machines, organizing their outputs and bringing order from chaos. The shocking discovery, it seemed, paralleled the ancient spiritual belief in a “cosmic consciousness”—a vast coalescing of human intention that was actually capable of interacting with physical matter. Recently, studies in mass meditation and prayer had produced similar results in Random Event Generators, fueling the claim that human consciousness, as Noetic author Lynne McTaggart described it, was a substance outside the confines of the body . . . a highly ordered energy capable of changing the physical world. Katherine had been fascinated by McTaggart’s book The Intention Experiment, and her global, Web-based study—theintentionexperiment.com—aimed at discovering how human intention could affect the world. A handful of other progressive texts had also piqued Katherine’s interest. From this foundation, Katherine Solomon’s research had vaulted forward, proving that “focused thought” could affect literally anything—the growth rate of plants, the direction that fish swam in a bowl, the manner in which cells divided in a petri dish, the synchronization of separately automated systems, and the chemical reactions in one’s own body. Even the crystalline structure of a newly forming solid was rendered mutable by one’s mind; Katherine had created beautifully symmetrical ice crystals by sending loving thoughts to a glass of water as it froze. Incredibly, the converse was also true: when she sent negative, polluting thoughts to the water, the ice crystals froze in chaotic, fractured forms. Human thought can literally transform the physical world.
Dan Brown (The Lost Symbol (Robert Langdon, #3))
Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century” and it recommends six strategic aims on which to focus healthcare quality improvement efforts.
Greg Seager (When Healthcare Hurts: : An Evidence-Based Guide for Best Practices in Global Health Initiatives Second Edition)
Decolonisation as a political project responds to specific untenable conditions of global life. The aim of decolonisation anywhere is that decolonisation should no longer be the aim everywhere.
Folúkẹ́ Adébísí (Decolonisation and Legal Knowledge: Reflections on Power and Possibility)
A campaign supporting the global project “# ENDviolence,” started by UNICEF in 2013, which aims to create a safe world free of violence against children and young people. The donations collected through the “LOVE MYSELF” campaign were given to help children and young people who were the victims of violence, and were also used to exhort a systematic overhaul of regional-based violence prevention.
BTS (Beyond the Story: 10-Year Record of BTS)
Not surprisingly, Interfaithism denounces fundamentalism of any kind, but especially fundamentalist Christianity and Biblical Judaism. As I write, the World Council of Church is condemning Israel for defending itself after terrorists in Gaza launched hundreds of missiles aimed at targets all over Israel. We should suspect a malevolent, duplicitous agenda when Interfaithism mechanically turns a blind eye to terrorist activities of radical extremists, but categorically and harshly condemns Christians and Jews. Nevertheless, global Interfaithism bulldozes forward, forever trying to put a pretty face on its diabolical agenda of crushing all religions, purportedly in search of common ground for all faiths. These deluded globalists would have you believe that someday a one-size-fits-all religion will finally come into existence, and with it, a one-size-fit-all messiah. But on close inspection, their ethereal “global peace” mantras follow in the tradition of many of the world’s most evil and pagan occultists, such as Madame Helen Blavatsky, Alice Bailey, Aleister Crowley, Albert Pike, Robert Muller, and even “enlightened” and “illuminated
Ken Raggio (The Daniel Prophecies: God's Plan for the Last Days)
Neoliberal enzymes aim to sedate the industrial host into believing that the financial sector is part of the real economy, not external to it and extractive. That is the first myth. Modern national income and GDP accounting formats treat tollbooth systems and other rent seeking as “output.
Michael Hudson (Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy)
In my experience, venture capitalists regularly report that Canadians come to the marketplace with ideas that are just as good their American counterparts' ideas. However, we aim too low. We ask for $10 million to own the Canadian market or to own a niche in the global market, whereas the Americans always ask for $100 million because they want to dominate the world. Venture capitalists repeatedly comment on the cultural difference between Canadian and American entrepreneurs. Canadians are very practical people. We generally do enough to get results, but we are not maniacal about it. Our attitude is that for us to win, others don't have to lose. Canadians are concerned about everyone winning. In other cultures, though, for them to win, not only do they have to win, but also their competitors have to lose.
Alex Benay (Canadian Failures: Stories of Building Toward Success)
Communism: An international, conspiratorial drive for power on the part of men in high places willing to use any means to bring about their desired aim―global conquest.
Gary Allen (None Dare Call it Conspiracy)
defense companies whose primary aim was to monetize the occupation and sell that experience in controlling another people to a global market.
Antony Loewenstein (The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World)
You can’t see the Party because it chooses to stay out of view, and as a result, what visitors to China see are the institutions (which the Party controls from behind the scenes) that on the surface resemble those of any other country: a government and cabinet ministries, courts at all levels, a central bank, two houses of parliament, and of course, above them all, a president. Yet, even the president, largely for the purposes of global optics, dons this title only for the outside world. ‘President’ does not even exist within the lexicon of domestic Chinese politics. China’s English-language media refer to ‘President’ Xi Jinping, but the domestic media translate the same title as the ‘National Chairman’, all aimed at conveying to the world a subtly different message about how this system really works. The title of National Chairman is itself the least important of the three crowns Xi wears. His position as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China is what gives him his power, as does his being the Chairman of the Central Military Commission that controls the PLA. The Party, as always, comes first.
Ananth Krishnan (India's China Challenge: A Journey through China's Rise and What It Means for India)
Gutenberg just wanted to make money printing Bibles. Yet his press catalyzed the Scientific Revolution and the Reformation, and so became the greatest threat to the Catholic Church since its establishment. Fridge makers didn’t aim to create a hole in the ozone layer with chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), just as the creators of the internal combustion and jet engines had no thought of melting the ice caps. In fact early enthusiasts for automobiles argued for their environmental benefits: engines would rid the streets of mountains of horse dung that spread dirt and disease across urban areas. They had no conception of global warming.
Mustafa Suleyman (The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma)
William Blum, the former State Department employee who became one of its most severe and encyclopedic critics, drew up a disturbing balance sheet of American interventions since the end of the Second World War, and there are numerous cases of overturning democratically elected governments. He also emphasized Washington’s meddling in elections, as it has not hesitated to invest considerable sums and to use very dubious tactics—from misinformation campaigns and economic destabilization efforts to clandestine cia operations—to swing so-called democratic elections in a direction favorable to its own interests. In one of his most recent books, entitled quite simply America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy, he reaches the conclusion that the American administration, for which the question of democracy remains utterly secondary, aims above all at world domination. For the United States has shown itself to be hostile to any popular movement likely to contest its hegemony. It is in this vein that it has • endeavored to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which were democratically elected; • grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries; • attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders; • dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries; • attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist movement in 20 countries. Needless to say, such a performance inevitably calls into question the history of the spectacular blossoming of democracy. Numerous other specialists have corroborated Blum’s conclusions, often with detailed investigations bearing on individual cases of what Chomsky judiciously named “deterring democracy.
Gabriel Rockhill (Counter-History of the Present: Untimely Interrogations into Globalization, Technology, Democracy)
During the modern period and particularly in the last two centuries in most Western countries there has developed a broad consensus in favor of the political philosophy known as “liberalism.” The main tenets of liberalism are political democracy, limitations on the powers of government, the development of universal human rights, legal equality for all adult citizens, freedom of expression, respect for the value of viewpoint diversity and honest debate, respect for evidence and reason, the separation of church and state, and freedom of religion. These liberal values developed as ideals and it has taken centuries of struggle against theocracy, slavery, patriarchy, colonialism, fascism, and many other forms of discrimination to honor them as much as we do, still imperfectly, today. . . . However, we have reached a point in history where the liberalism and modernity at the heart of Western civilization are at great risk on the level of the ideas that sustain them. The precise nature of this threat is complicated, as it arises from at least two overwhelming pressures, one revolutionary and the other reactionary, that are waging war with each other over which illiberal direction our societies should be dragged. Far-right populist movements claiming to be making a last desperate stand for liberalism and democracy against a rising tide of progressivism and globalism are on the rise around the world. They are increasingly turning toward leadership in dictators and strongmen who can maintain and preserve “Western” sovereignty and values. Meanwhile, far-left progressive social crusaders portray themselves as the sole and righteous champions of social and moral progress without which democracy is meaningless and hollow. These, on our furthest left, not only advance their cause through revolutionary aims that openly reject liberalism as a form of oppression, but they also do so with increasingly authoritarian means seeking to establish a thoroughly dogmatic fundamentalist ideology regarding how society ought to be ordered.
Helen Pluckrose (Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody)
For while asceticism is certainly an important strand in the frugal tradition, so, too, is the celebration of simple pleasures. Indeed, one argument that is made repeatedly in favor of simple living is that it helps one to appreciate more fully elementary and easily obtained pleasures such as the enjoyment of companionship and natural beauty. This is another example of something we have already noted: the advocates of simple living do not share a unified and consistent notion of what it involves. Different thinkers emphasize different aspects of the idea, and some of these conflict. Truth, unlike pleasure, has rarely been viewed as morally suspect. Its value is taken for granted by virtually all philosophers. Before Nietzsche, hardly anyone seriously considered as a general proposition the idea that truth may not necessarily be beneficial.26 There is a difference, though, between the sort of truth the older philosophers had in mind and the way truth is typically conceived of today. Socrates, the Epicureans, the Cynics, the Stoics, and most of the other sages assume that truth is readily available to anyone with a good mind who is willing to think hard. This is because their paradigm of truth—certainly the truth that matters most—is the sort of philosophical truth and enlightenment that can be attained through a conversation with like-minded friends in the agora or the garden. Searching for and finding such truth is entirely compatible with simple living. But today things are different. We still enjoy refined conversation about philosophy, science, religion, the arts, politics, human nature, and many other areas of theoretical interest. And these conversations do aim at truth, in a sense. As Jürgen Habermas argues, building on Paul Grice’s analysis of conversational conventions, regardless of how we actually behave and our actual motivations, our discussions usually proceed on the shared assumption that we are all committed to establishing the truth about the topic under discussion.27 But a different paradigm of truth now dominates: the paradigm of truth established by science. For the most part this is not something that ordinary people can pursue by themselves through reflection, conversation, or even backyard observation and experiment. Does dark matter exist? Does eating blueberries decrease one’s chances of developing cancer? Is global warming producing more hurricanes? Does early involvement with music and dance make one smarter or morally better? Are generous people happier than misers? People may discuss such questions around the table. But in most cases when we talk about such things, we are ultimately prepared to defer to the authority of the experts whose views and findings are continually reported in the media.
Emrys Westacott (The Wisdom of Frugality: Why Less Is More - More or Less)
In the first decades of the twenty-first century China must aim to surpass the United States ‘to become the world’s No. 1 power’.32 Liu’s 2010 book became a nationwide bestseller in China, appealing to a public ready to embrace a global master narrative in which the revival of the Middle Kingdom would restore China to its proper place as the centre of the world, and from where it would spread harmony through its culture, language and values, an empire that, in the words of another scholar, ‘values order over freedom, ethics over law, and elite governance over democracy and human rights’.33
Clive Hamilton (Silent Invasion: China's Influence In Australia)
As Angela Davis has explained, if we accept uncritically the notion that prisons offer an answer, and that all we must do is improve our so-called justice systems, we evade the 'responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.' Our ultimate goal-if we truly aim to overcome our nation's habit of constructing enormous systems of racial and social control-cannot simply be to reduce the number of people behind bars. We must strive to create a nation in which caging people en masse-digitally or literally-and stripping them of basic civil and human rights for the rest of their lives is not only unnecessary but unthinkable. . . . The important question, however, is whether we want to celebrate as 'progress' any development that might reflect the morphing or evolution of the system, rather than its demise. Human rights champion Bryan Stevenson has observed that 'slavery didn't end; it evolved.' Today, we can see, in real time, the system of mass incarceration evolving before our eyes, as enormous investments are made in immigrant detention centers and digital prisons, and as growing numbers of white people become collateral damage in a war that was declared with black people in mind.
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)