Attending Conference Quotes

John F Kennedy (President Elect) was at the White house in order to confer with his predecessor Dwight Eisenhower. He was told to wait while the President of the United States of America attended to some necessary items. After a time, John was escorted into the Oval Office, and he found himself directly in front of the out-going president. So it was that the conversation between two of the most powerful men on earth began.

Birds do not attend flight schools; Rivers do not attend flowing colleges; Fishes do not attend swimming conferences; Trees do not attend fruit bearing seminars... There is something that you can do automatically that someone may not do... Find it and do it! There is something someone may do automatically that you may not do; leave it for him to it!

Twenty years ago at a conference I attended of theologians and professors of religion, an Indian Christian friend told the assembly, “We are going to hear about the beauties of several traditions, but that does not mean that we are going to make a fruit salad.” When it came my turn to speak, I said, “Fruit salad can be delicious! I have shared the Eucharist with Father Daniel Berrigan, and our worship became possible because of the sufferings we Vietnamese and Americans shared over many years.” Some of the Buddhists present were shocked to hear I had participated in the Eucharist, and many Christians seemed truly horrified. To me, religious life is life. I do not see any reason to spend one’s whole life tasting just one kind of fruit. We human beings can be nourished by the best values of many traditions.

We would be attending the conference under false pretenses and dealing, from the start, with a crowd that was convened for the stated purpose of putting people like us in jail. We were the Menace - not in disguise, but stone-obvious drug abusers, with a flagrantly cranked-up act that we intended to push all the way to the limit...not to prove any final, sociological point, and not event as a conscious mockery: It was mainly a matter of life-style, a sense of obligation and even duty. If the Pigs were gathering in Vegas for a top-level Drug Conference, we felt the drug culture should be represented.

I have attended a number of psychological conferences dealing with this whole problem of the difference between the mystical experience and the psychological crack-up. The difference is that the one who cracks up is drowning in the water in which the mystic swims.

In every country, those who were against war had been overruled. The Austrians had attacked Serbia when they might have held back; the Russians had mobilized instead of negotiating; the Germans had refused to attend an international conference to settle the issue; the French had been offered the chance to remain neutral and had spurned it; and now the British were about to join in when they might easily have remained on the sidelines.

As a result, we create our own camps, attend only our own gatherings and conferences; soon enough, we’re talking only to those who agree with us. Dialogue within the ummah disappears, our differences become only more polarized and our views become more extreme.

We hire coaches for our mindsets, attend conferences to improve our skill set, work with specialists for every need in our business and wonder why we feel like we’re all over the place.

If you look closely at how he spent his time,” says Tim Cook, “you’ll see that he hardly ever traveled and he did none of the conferences and get-togethers that so many CEOs attend. He wanted to be home for dinner.

But “empowerment” is a tricky word. It’s also a decidedly neoliberal word that places the responsibility for combating systems on individuals. Neoliberalism is endlessly concerned with “personal responsibility” and individual self-regulation. It tells us that in a free market, devoid of any regulation or accountability at the top, what happens to those on the bottom is entirely our fault. Did we have enough drive? Enough vision? Enough hustle to change our condition? The politics of personal empowerment suggests to us that if we simply “free our minds, then our asses will follow.” I’m not convinced that this is true. Why? Have you ever noticed that people who have real “power”—wealth, job security, influence—don’t attend “empowerment” seminars? Power is not attained from books and seminars. Not alone, anyway. Power is conferred by social systems. Empowerment and power are not the same thing. We must quit mistaking the two. Better yet, we must quit settling for one when what we really need is the other.

Most would sooner attend a conference on self-esteem and self-realization than listen to one sermon on sanctification, without which no one will see the Lord.15 Many would cross land and sea to find their best life now, but they would not walk across the street to attend a series of meetings on the infinite worth of Christ or the sufferings of Calvary!

Citing the WHI for Hormone Replacement Therapy standards equates with attending the Flat Earth Society Conference and listening to people try to prove the earth is flat.

[Israel's military occupation is] in gross violation of international law and has been from the outset. And that much, at least, is fully recognized, even by the United States, which has overwhelming and, as I said, unilateral responsibility for these crimes. So George Bush No. 1, when he was the U.N. ambassador, back in 1971, he officially reiterated Washington's condemnation of Israel's actions in the occupied territories. He happened to be referring specifically to occupied Jerusalem. In his words, actions in violation of the provisions of international law governing the obligations of an occupying power, namely Israel. He criticized Israel's failure "to acknowledge its obligations under the Fourth Geneva Convention as well as its actions which are contrary to the letter and spirit of this Convention." [...] However, by that time, late 1971, a divergence was developing, between official policy and practice. The fact of the matter is that by then, by late 1971, the United States was already providing the means to implement the violations that Ambassador Bush deplored. [...] on December 5th [2001], there had been an important international conference, called in Switzerland, on the 4th Geneva Convention. Switzerland is the state that's responsible for monitoring and controlling the implementation of them. The European Union all attended, even Britain, which is virtually a U.S. attack dog these days. They attended. A hundred and fourteen countries all together, the parties to the Geneva Convention. They had an official declaration, which condemned the settlements in the occupied territories as illegal, urged Israel to end its breaches of the Geneva Convention, some "grave breaches," including willful killing, torture, unlawful deportation, unlawful depriving of the rights of fair and regular trial, extensive destruction and appropriation of property not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly. Grave breaches of the Geneva Convention, that's a serious term, that means serious war crimes. The United States is one of the high contracting parties to the Geneva Convention, therefore it is obligated, by its domestic law and highest commitments, to prosecute the perpetrators of grave breaches of the conventions. That includes its own leaders. Until the United States prosecutes its own leaders, it is guilty of grave breaches of the Geneva Convention, that means war crimes. And it's worth remembering the context. It is not any old convention. These are the conventions established to criminalize the practices of the Nazis, right after the Second World War. What was the U.S. reaction to the meeting in Geneva? The U.S. boycotted the meeting [..] and that has the usual consequence, it means the meeting is null and void, silence in the media.

The vocation of psychotherapy confers a few unexpected fringe benefits on its practitioners, and the following is one of them. It impels participation in a process that our modern world has all but forgotten: sitting in a room with another person for hours at a time with no purpose in mind but attending. As you do so, another world expands and comes alive to your senses--a world governed by forces that were old before humanity began.

In the two years after No Logo came out, I went to dozens of teach-ins and conferences, some of them attended by thousands of people (tens of thousands in the case of the World Social Forum), that were exclusively devoted to popular education about the inner workings of global finance and trade. No topic was too arcane: the science of genetically modified foods, trade-related intellectual property rights, the fine print of bilateral trade deals, the patenting of seeds, the truth about certain carbon sinks. I sensed in these rooms a hunger for knowledge that I have never witnessed in any university class. It was as if people understood, all at once, that gathering this knowledge was crucial to the survival not just of democracy but of the planet. Yes, this was complicated, but we embraced that complexity because we were finally looking at systems, not just symbols.

I don't want to be around people who accept me as is, in my unrefined state of becoming. I consistently want people around me who push and encourage me to be my ultimate best, who bring out the inner diamonds. I want to be around those intellectual giants who extract the gold within me, those who force me to read, to attend classes, seminars, conferences, and who steep me in an environment of perpetual growth and upward mobility. Not trying to be funny, but I've learned that I simply cannot afford to invest too much time around mediocrity. It's contagious.

Worldly Christians look to God primarily for personal fulfillment. They are saved, but self-centered. They love to attend concerts and enrichment seminars, but you would never find them at a missions conference because they aren’t interested. Their prayers focus on their own needs, blessings, and happiness. It’s a “me-first” faith: How can God make my life more comfortable? They want to use God for their purposes instead of being used for his purposes.

That was the year Marguerite Carlough first filed suit in New Jersey and Martland devised his tests. The executives had read Kjaer’s studies, attended the radium conference and seen the Eben Byers story: they knew radium was dangerous.

Attend any conference on telecommunications or computer technology, and you will be attending a celebration of innovative machinery that generates, stores, and distributes more information, more conveniently, at greater speed than ever before, To the question “What problem does the information solve?” the answer is usually “How to generate, store and distribute more information, more conveniently, at greater speeds than ever before.” This is the elevation of information to a metaphysical status: information as both the means and end of human creativity. In Technopoly, we are driven to fill our lives with the quest to “access” information. For what purpose or with what limitations, it is not for us to ask; and we are not accustomed to asking, since the problem is unprecedented. The world has never before been confronted with information glut and has hardly had time to reflect on its consequences (61).

If white American feminist theory need not deal with the differences between us, and the resulting difference in our oppressions, then how do you deal with the fact that the women who clean your houses and tend your children while you attend conferences on feminist theory are, for the most part, poor women and women of Color?

1. Get male leaders to attend women’s conferences. One technique is to encourage male senior leaders to attend women’s leadership conferences.

Attend seminars, forums, conferences, summits and sessions where interesting topics about dream fulfillment and personal branding are prioritized themes and topics. Get exposed to better ways of doing things

Kos had different tastes. He was on the lookout for that Midwestern housewife attending a conference with her husband. There was usually at least one in the hotel bar. She was always seated in a corner drinking a cocktail and pretending to read a novel while her husband was off doing manly things. Kos knew something Mason didn't—stewardesses partied in every port, but housewives were still waiting for the party.

She was a strong advocate for women’s rights and women in the workforce; for example, she permitted only female reporters to attend her press conferences, which forced publications to keep female journalists on staff.

IN 1959, Oppenheimer attended a conference in Rheinfelden, West Germany, sponsored by the Congress on Cultural Freedom. He and twenty other world-renowned intellectuals gathered in the luxurious Saliner Hotel on the banks of the Rhine near Basel to discuss the fate of the Western industrialized world. Safe in this cloistered environment, Oppenheimer broke his silence on nuclear weapons and spoke with uncharacteristic clarity about how they were seen and valued in American society. “What are we to make of a civilization which has always regarded ethics as an essential part of human life,” he asked, but “which has not been able to talk about the prospect of killing almost everybody except in prudential and game-theoretical terms?

In my life I’ve been very lucky to travel around the world and see students and teachers in nearly two dozen countries—but the most awe-inspiring experience I’ve ever had was two years after 9/11 when I had the chance to attend a conference in Manhattan and personally meet many of the heroic teachers who persevered under conditions that in our worst nightmares we could never have imagined. In my opinion there’s not been nearly enough written about those teachers, and I hope that changes soon.

In order to improve HOW and WHAT we do, we constantly look to what others are doing. We attend conferences, read books, talk to friends and colleagues to get their input and advice, and sometimes we are also the dispensers of advice. We are in pursuit of understanding the best practices of others to help guide us. But it is a flawed assumption that what works for one organization will work for another. Even if the industries, sizes and market conditions are the same, the notion that “if it’s good for them, it’s good for us” is simply not true.

Fundamentally, the factor that makes the difference is neither one’s intelligence quotient, nor the number of books one has read nor the conferences, camps and seminars one has attended, but the quality of the fellowship with Christ that one maintains through life’s vicissitudes.

One particular scene from Small World struck me: The protagonist, an aspiring literary theorist, attends a major international conference and asks a panel of leading figures, “What follows if everyone agrees with you?” The question causes consternation, because the panelists had been more concerned with intellectual combat than ascertaining truth or attaining understanding. It occurred to me then that an analogous question could be asked of the leading figures in AI: “What if you succeed?” The field’s goal had always been to create human-level or superhuman AI, but there was little or no consideration of what would happen if we did.

Once or twice a year I attended the English Romantic conferences held throughout Europe, brief gatherings perhaps not dissimilar in feeling for the participants than the feeling Jews have when they get off the plane in Israel: the relief of at last being surrounded on all sides by your own kind--the relief and the horror.

The idea of treating war as anything other than the harshest means of settling questions of very existence is ridiculous,” he challenged the army commanders. “Every war costs blood, and the smell of blood arouses in man all the instincts which have lain within us since the beginning of the world: deeds of violence, the intoxication of murder, and many other things. Everything else is empty babble. A humane war exists only in bloodless brains.” A field marshal who attended the conference reported Hitler warning them “that he would proceed against the Poles after the end of the campaign with relentless vigor. Things would happen which would not be to the taste of the German generals.

The wires noted how all four Beatles attended Bob Dylan’s Royal Festival Hall appearance, captured by D. A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back documentary. Dylan’s recent Bringing It All Back Home featured a side of electric rock, and this would be his last acoustic-only tour. Convulsed over Dylan’s identity, his British audience parsed every lyric, mistrusting his flirtation with rock ’n’ roll more for its flight from literary pretense than inexplicable lack of explicit social protest. The Beatles’ attendance conferred royal approval of Dylan’s vexing persona, whichever guise it took. With the publication of Lennon’s second book, A Spaniard in the Works, the Dylan rivalry intensified. Spaniard was both hastier than its predecessor and more ambitious, with more wordplay by the pound.

Grassley ordered the APA to disclose how much of its income was drug money. The answer turned out to be a lot—according to the Times, nearly one-third of the organization’s $62.5 million annual revenue41 in 2006. Some of it came from advertising, but much of it went to educational programs in which drug companies tutored doctors attending APA conferences in the fine points of prescribing their drugs.

Felder, the son of famed U.S. flying ace Milton Felder, executed for treason several years ago, said, “the convention was a success in that no one showed up.” When quizzed about the objectives of the sect, Felder said, “One of the objectives is to not attend any meeting held in this insolent city.” (The mayor of Miami in a news conference later in the afternoon said that Felder was welcome to leave Miami anytime he wished.)

Ahron Cohen, who, despite attending Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust Denial conference, in fact does not only not deny that it happened, but actually blames Jewry for it, saying: ‘There is no question that there was a Holocaust and gas chambers. There are too many eyewitnesses. However, our approach is that when one suffers, the one who perpetrates the suffering is obviously guilty but he will never succeed if the victim did not deserve it in one way or another.

There is nothing that the media could say to me that would justify the way they’ve acted. You can hound me. You can follow me, but in no way should you frighten those around me. To harm my wife and potentially harm my daughter—there is no excuse that could put any of you on the right side of morality. I met Rose when I was fifteen and she was fourteen, and through what she would call fate and I’d call circumstance of our hobbies, we’d cross paths dozens of times over the course of a decade. At seventeen, I attended the same national Model UN conference as Rose, and a delegate for Greenland locked us in a janitorial closet. He also stole our phones. He had to beat us dishonorably because he couldn’t beat us any other way. Rose said being locked in a confined space with me was the worst two hours of her life" They look bemused, brows furrowing. I can’t help but smile. “You’re confused because you don’t know whether she was exaggerating or whether she was being truthful. But the truth is that we are complex people with the ability to love to hate and to hate to love, and I wouldn’t trade her for any other person. So that day, stuck beside mops and dirtied towels, I could’ve picked the lock five minutes in and let her go. Instead, I purposefully spent two hours with a girl who wore passion like a dress made of diamonds and hair made of flames. Every day of my life, I am enamored. Every day of my life, I am bewitched. And every day of my life, I spend it with her.” My chest swells with more power, lifting me higher. “I’ve slept with many different kinds of people, and yes, the three that spoke to the press are among them. Rose is the only person I’ve ever loved, and through that love, we married and started a family. There is no other meaning behind this, and for you to conjure one is nothing less than a malicious attack against my marriage and my child. Anything else has no relevance. I can’t be what you need me to be. So you’ll have to accept this version or waste your time questioning something that has no answer. I know acceptance isn’t easy when you’re unsure of what you’re accepting, but all I can say is that you’re accepting me as me. I leave them with a quote from Sylvia Plath. “‘I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart.’” My lips pull higher, into a livelier smile. “‘I am, I am, I am.’” With this, I step away from the podium, and I exit to a cacophony of journalists shouting and asking me to clarify. Adapt to me. I’m satisfied, more than I even predicted. Some people will rewind this conference on their television, to listen closely and try to understand me. I don’t need their understanding, but my daughter will—and I hope the minds of her peers are wide open with vibrant hues of passion. I hope they all paint the world with color.

At the first trans health conference I ever attended, a parent asked about long-term health risks for people taking hormones. The doctor gave a full assessment of issues that trans men face; many of them mimic the risks that would be inherited from father to son if they'd been born male, now that testosterone is a factor. "What about trans women?" another parent asked. The doctor took a deep breath. "Those outcomes are murkier. Because trans women are so discriminated against, they're at far greater risk for issues like alcoholism, poverty, homelessness, and lack of access to good healthcare. All of these issues impact their overall health so much that it's hard to gather data on what their health outcomes would be if these issues weren't present." This was stunning-a group of people is treated so badly by our culture that we can't clearly study their health. The burden of this abuse is that substantial and pervasive. Your generation will be healthier. The signs are already there.

The core of the problem for women in a profession like law is the very word balance. There is none. Any attempt to convince women that they can and should meet all obligations on all conceivable fronts is misguided. Of course there were no comparable male conferences. i refuse on principle to attend or even participate in a myriad work life balance conferences. I will however gladly speak to a room full of men on how they can adjust their work life balance to accommodate female work loads and success.

In June 1994, Ross was among twelve Black feminist activists attending a pro-choice conference in Chicago who felt that the healthcare agenda presented by representatives from the Clinton administration was too concerned with avoiding Republican opposition and did not adequately address concerns of Black women around sexual and reproductive autonomy. These issues included maternal mortality, evidence-based sex education, and whether women could afford abortions or preventative reproductive healthcare.

It starts with what customers first see when they visit our Web site. In the United States, we offer free shipping both ways to make the transaction as easy as possible and risk-free for our customers. A lot of customers will order five different pairs of shoes, try them on with five different outfits in the comfort of their living rooms, and then send back the ones that don’t fit or they simply don’t like—free of charge. The additional shipping costs are expensive for us, but we really view those costs as a marketing expense. We also offer a 365-day return policy for people who have trouble committing or making up their minds. At most Web sites, the contact information is usually buried at least five links deep and even when you find it, it’s a form or e-mail address that you can only contact once. We take the exact opposite approach. We put our phone number (1-800-927-7671) at the top of every single page of our Web site, because we actually want to talk to our customers. And we staff our call center 24/7. I personally think it’s kind of funny when I attend marketing or branding conferences and

As the diplomats are fond of saying when they have little else to say, the importance of the Madrid Conference was the fact that it convened. If anyone expected that sitting around a common table with all the world to see would temper the proceedings, they were soon proven wrong. As expected, everyone played to the gallery, their gallery. The speeches were largely wooden and flat. The conference concluded with a decision to continue bilateral talks between the delegations in Washington, some of which I later attended. They didn’t get very far either. During

Sceptical global experts attending the Vienna conference questioned Dr Valerii Legasov and his fellow scientists about the event for three hours, at the end of which they accepted his description with a standing ovation. It was a political triumph. However, it transpired that, “members of the Soviet delegation were strictly instructed not to meet with foreigners [in private], not to answer any questions on their part, and to follow the published report in every respect. Only because of the resolute stand taken by Legasov was it possible to go away from this policy.”255

Ten days later, speaking on Kara Swisher’s Recode Decode podcast, the influential venture capitalist Bill Gurley voiced concern about a bubble.6 Gurley had attended an investor conference in Las Vegas where he heard five of eight unicorns talk about “trillions” in their presentations. “We have done something in the ecosystem to encourage this type of outlandish promotion, where you need to use words like ‘trillion,’” Gurley said. “And I think it’s dangerous. When we act like we have the right to disrupt everything or eat every industry, we look like entitled brats,” he continued.

Contrary to what had long been assumed, Himmler did not give the order for the general extermination of all Jews in Soviet territory during his August 15 visit to Minsk, when, at his request, he attended a mass execution of Jews on the outskirts of the city.48 The move from selective to mass murder had started earlier, probably as a result of Hitler’s remarks during the July 16 conference regarding the “possibilities” offered by “antipartisan” operations. All Jews may not have been partisans in German eyes, but why not assume that they would offer assistance to partisans if they could?

Monica nudged her husband’s shoulder. “On-time flights are easier when you’re behind the controls.” Trent Fairchild and his two brothers owned and operated Fairchild Charters. A private air charter company with a fleet of jets, big and small, not to mention more helicopters than one could count, which was why they were attending the conference of International Emergency Medicine . . . a conference where professionals worked to improve the emergency response to natural disasters all over the world. “Is Glen with you?” Glen was Trent’s brother and liaison to the fixed-wing portion of air travel for the sick and injured.

Rebecca,” she says coolly, grasping my hand. “You’re on Successful Saving, aren’t you?” “That’s right,” I say, equally coolly. “It’s very good of you to come today,” says Alicia. “I know you journalists are terribly busy.” “No problem,” I say. “We like to attend as many press conferences as we can. Keep up with industry events.” I feel pleased with my response. I’m almost fooling myself. Alicia nods seriously, as though everything I say is incredibly important to her. “So, tell me, Rebecca. What do you think about today’s news?” She gestures to the FT under my arm. “Quite a surprise, didn’t you think?” Oh God. What’s she talking about? “It’s certainly interesting,” I say, still smiling, playing for time. I glance around the room for a clue, but there’s nothing. What’s she talking about? Have interest rates gone up or something? “I have to say, I think it’s bad news for the industry,” says Alicia earnestly. “But of course, you must have your own views.” She’s looking at me, waiting for an answer. I can feel my cheeks flaming bright red. How can I get out of this? After this, I promise myself, I’m going to read the papers every day. I’m never going to be caught out like this again. “I agree with you,” I say eventually. “I think it’s very bad news.” My voice feels strangled. I take a quick swig of champagne and pray for an earthquake.

A group of pastors was attending a conference at our church, and at the end of the first morning session, they headed to the fellowship center for lunch. Several minutes later I followed, expecting that they would already be seated. Much to my surprise, all one hundred fifty of them were lined up outside the door. Then I saw why. At the head of the line stood Joel, my then six-year-old, with both hands raised, giving orders. “It will be a couple more minutes and then they’ll be ready for you!” Joel had no clue what was going on, but he gave directions with the greatest of confidence and these pastors did as they were told. Confidence is contagious even if it’s the confidence of a six-year-old. The

conventions hosted by the Miami Morrison. The question was, what convention was Laker Girl attending? Walt had arrived at the hotel earlier in the day to find massive banners and the entire second floor of the conference hall filling up with pictures of half-naked men and women embracing. At first, he thought the competing conference had something to do with adult film. When he asked, he was told a writers convention was dominating the hotel for the weekend. By comparison, the number of people at the conference he was attending was a drop of water in the ocean. Soon the hotel would be filled with writers, readers, publishers, and agents. The genre of choice . . . romance. Books written with nothing but happily-ever-after in mind.

The transformationist leaders are not men, but they are white, they are “European,” they are middle-class. Minority women have begun to deny that the leaders of the women’s movement have any right to speak for them. Most members of the women of color caucus boycotted the 1992 Austin National Women’s Studies Conference I attended for its failure to recognize and respect their political identity. The slighted group sent the conferees an African-American women’s quilt made from dashiki fabrics, as both a reprimand and a “healing gesture.” The assembled white feminists sat before it in resentful but guilty silence. In the game of moral one-upmanship that gender feminists are so good at, they had been outquilted, as it were, by a more marginalized constituency.

TO ACHIEVE THE peace between Israel and Arab states we had overcome many obstacles, none more enduring than the obsessive belief in the centrality of the Palestinian issue and the need to achieve a Palestinian-Israeli peace before any other peace could be made. John Kerry, like so many others, had held that belief, and he expressed it in December 2016 during a conference in Washington attended by many of my political opponents, invited especially from Israel to hear it: There will be no separate peace between Israel and the Arab world. I want to make that very clear to all of you. I’ve heard several prominent politicians in Israel sometimes saying “Well, the Arab world is in a different place now, we just have to reach out to them and we can work some things with the Arab world and we’ll deal with the Palestinians.” No, no, no and no… There will be no advance and separate peace with the Arab world without the Palestinian process and Palestinian peace. Everyone needs to understand that. That is a hard reality. When Kerry finished delivering his remarks, he received thunderous applause. It was only by breaking out of this flawed way of thinking, however, that true progress was made. In its first seventy-two years, Israel made peace with two Arab countries, Egypt and Jordan. In the span of four months, Israel had made peace with four more. By building Israel’s power and challenging Iran, we had made Israel an attractive ally to our Arab neighbors. By bypassing the Palestinians, we could now achieve four diplomatic breakthroughs and sign four historic agreements. This was truly a New Middle East, one built on real strength and no false illusions.

After I left finance, I started attending some of the fashionable conferences attended by pre-rich and post-rich technology people and the new category of technology intellectuals. I was initially exhilarated to see them wearing no ties, as, living among tie-wearing abhorrent bankers, I had developed the illusion that anyone who doesn’t wear a tie was not an empty suit. But these conferences, while colorful and slick with computerized images and fancy animations, felt depressing. I knew I did not belong. It was not just their additive approach to the future (failure to subtract the fragile rather than add to destiny). It was not entirely their blindness by uncompromising neomania. It took a while for me to realize the reason: a profound lack of elegance. Technothinkers tend to have an “engineering mind”—to put it less politely, they have autistic tendencies. While they don’t usually wear ties, these types tend, of course, to exhibit all the textbook characteristics of nerdiness—mostly lack of charm, interest in objects instead of persons, causing them to neglect their looks. They love precision at the expense of applicability. And they typically share an absence of literary culture. This absence of literary culture is actually a marker of future blindness because it is usually accompanied by a denigration of history, a byproduct of unconditional neomania. Outside of the niche and isolated genre of science fiction, literature is about the past. We do not learn physics or biology from medieval textbooks, but we still read Homer, Plato, or the very modern Shakespeare. We cannot talk about sculpture without knowledge of the works of Phidias, Michelangelo, or the great Canova. These are in the past, not in the future. Just by setting foot into a museum, the aesthetically minded person is connecting with the elders. Whether overtly or not, he will tend to acquire and respect historical knowledge, even if it is to reject it. And the past—properly handled, as we will see in the next section—is a much better teacher about the properties of the future than the present. To understand the future, you do not need technoautistic jargon, obsession with “killer apps,” these sort of things. You just need the following: some respect for the past, some curiosity about the historical record, a hunger for the wisdom of the elders, and a grasp of the notion of “heuristics,” these often unwritten rules of thumb that are so determining of survival. In other words, you will be forced to give weight to things that have been around, things that have survived.

There has been so much misinformation spread about the nature of this interview that the actual events that took place merit discussion. After being discreetly delivered by the Secret Service to the FBI’s basement garage, Hillary Clinton was interviewed by a five-member joint FBI and Department of Justice team. She was accompanied by five members of her legal team. None of Clinton’s lawyers who were there remained investigative subjects in the case at that point. The interview, which went on for more than three hours, was conducted in a secure conference room deep inside FBI headquarters and led by the two senior special agents on the case. With the exception of the secret entry to the FBI building, they treated her like any other interview subject. I was not there, which only surprises those who don’t know the FBI and its work. The director does not attend these kinds of interviews. My job was to make final decisions on the case, not to conduct the investigation. We had professional investigators, schooled on all of the intricacies of the case, assigned to do that. We also as a matter of procedure don’t tape interviews of people not under arrest. We instead have professionals who take detailed notes. Secretary Clinton was not placed under oath during the interview, but this too was standard procedure. The FBI doesn’t administer oaths during voluntary interviews. Regardless, under federal law, it would still have been a felony if Clinton was found to have lied to the FBI during her interview, whether she was under oath or not. In short, despite a whole lot of noise in the media and Congress after the fact, the agents interviewed Hillary Clinton following the FBI’s standard operating procedures.

ED ABBEY’S FBI file was a thick one, and makes for engrossing reading. The file begins in 1947, when Abbey, just twenty and freshly back from serving in the Army in Europe, posts a typewritten notice on the bulletin board at the State Teachers College in Pennsylvania. The note urges young men to send their draft cards to the president in protest of peacetime conscription, exhorting them to “emancipate themselves.” It is at that point that Abbey becomes “the subject of a Communist index card” at the FBI, and from then until the end of his life the Bureau will keep track of where Abbey is residing, following his many moves. They will note when he heads west and, as acting editor of the University of New Mexico’s literary magazine, The Thunderbird, decides to print an issue with a cover emblazoned with the words: “Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest!” The quote is from Diderot, but Abbey thinks it funnier to attribute the words to Louisa May Alcott. And so he quickly loses his editorship while the FBI adds a few more pages to his file. The Bureau will become particularly intrigued when Mr. Abbey attends an international conference in defense of children in Vienna, Austria, since the conference, according to the FBI, was “initiated by Communists in 1952.” Also quoted in full in his files is a letter to the editor that he sends to the New Mexico Daily Lobo, in which he writes: “In this day of the cold war, which everyday [sic] shows signs of becoming warmer, the individual who finds himself opposed to war is apt to feel very much out of step with his fellow citizens” and then announces the need to form a group to “discuss implications and possibilities of resistance to war.

today as I was reading an article about a recent convention of psychologists in San Francisco. One of the major concerns of the psychologists and medical doctors attending the conference is the increase in the use of “legal psychoactive” drugs, such as tranquilizers. Many patients who do not have an organic illness go to their doctors because of emotional problems and are given drugs which will calm them, help them sleep better, or stimulate them. As these psychologists point out, this chemical therapy is based partly on the assumption that we should all be in a state of continuous pleasure, untroubled by stress. The consequences of taking these drugs are far-reaching, and dependence upon them actually takes away from the capacity to deal with the problems of life. Also, dependence upon drugs by the older generation can influence their children to seek instant happiness through the more powerful mind-altering drugs.

The missile crisis "was the most dangerous moment in human history," Arthur Schlesinger commented in October 2002 at a conference in Havana on the fortieth anniversary of the crisis, attended by a number of those who witnessed it from within as it unfolded. Desision-makers at the time undoubtedly understood that the fate of the world was in their hands. Nevertheless, attendees at the conference may have been shocked by some of the revelations. They were informed that in October 1962 the world was "one word away" from nuclear war. "A guy named Arkhipov saved the world," said Thomas Blanton of the National Security Archive in Washington, which helped organize the event. He was referring to Vasil Arkhipov, a Soviet submarine officer blocked an order to fire nuclear-armed toredoes in October 27, at the tensest moment of the crisis, when te submarines were under attack bu US destroyers, A devastating response would have been a near certainty, leading a major war.

REGULARLY ATTEND AN ANNUAL security conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The only thing unusual about the November 2016 meeting was that it occurred just after the U.S. presidential election, and most of the formal and informal conversations among the conferees were about what to expect from the President-elect, Donald Trump. The subject was causing consternation among the governments, military, and intelligentsia of the West, including ours. I spent most of my time in Halifax reassuring friends that the United States government consists of more than the White House. Congress and, I hoped, the people the new President would appoint to senior national security positions would provide continuity in U.S. foreign policy, compensate for the lack of experience in the Oval Office, and restrain the occupant from impulsively reacting to world events. Saturday evening, when the day’s presentations were finished, a retired British diplomat, who had served as the United Kingdom’s ambassador to Russia during

Challenge’ is one of those words executives like to say at conferences. It makes them sound like they’re at the forefront of something. Words such as ‘modernisation’, ‘development technology’ and ‘the future’ are bandied about at any professional gathering, even if it’s one attended by just milkmen. The word that bugs me most at the moment is ‘choice’. Businesses and governments now say ‘choice’ as readily as a two-year-old says ‘poo’. Somehow our movers and shakers have got it into their heads that our lives are enriched by having available a vaster spread of options, but there are certain times when the last thing you need is a choice. When you’re ill, for example. You want to go straight to hospital, without having to decide which one. Yet our administrators think it’s nice we can now choose the hospital we go to. It’s a false choice. If there are two hospitals nearby, a good one and a terrible one, there’s nothing to be gained from offering sick people the option of going to the terrible one. Better to knock it down or improve it. People who choose to go to the terrible one need their heads examining, although not at the hospital they’ve just chosen.

Starting with a Statement •What a beautiful day.What’s your favorite season of the year? •I was truly touched by that movie.How did you like it? Why? •This is a wonderful restaurant.What is your favorite restaurant? Why? •What a great conference! Tell me about the sessions you attended. •I was absent last week.What did I miss? •That was an interesting program after lunch.What did you think? •Presidential campaigns seem to start immediately after the inauguration.What do you think of the campaign process? •I am so frustrated with getting this business off the ground.Do you have any ideas? •I am excited about our new mayor.How do you think her administration will be different from her predecessor’s? •Your lawn always looks so green.What is your secret? •We’ve been working together for months now.I’d like to get to know you better.Tell me about some of your outside interests. •You worked pretty hard on that stair stepper.What other equipment do you use? •You always wear such attractive clothes.What are your favorite stores? •What a beautiful home.How do you manage to run a house with four children? •I read in the newspaper that our governor has taken another trip overseas.What do you think of all his travel?

Work and family Unfortunately, the new ambitious ideals of parenting have developed at exactly the same moment as has modern capitalism. In other words, just as unprecedented demands have been made on us in our working lives, so too the parenting sphere has become more exacting than it has ever been. We are no longer expected just to show up at work in order to get a wage. Work has thrust itself forward as the intended obsession of all admirable people. We are to come to work early and stay up late. We are to take up all possibilities for labouring on weekends and travelling to remote corners to attend conferences and congresses. We are to expend every last bit of energy in reaching the top of the corporate pyramid – this at exactly the point when society has also started to expect us to be home every night to read bedtime stories and to take an intimate interest in every detail of a child’s inner life. Capitalism and childcare are at loggerheads, but neither admits as much; indeed, both sides torture us by promising that we might be able to achieve ‘work–life balance’, an ideal as sentimental and humiliating as expecting that someone manage to be simultaneously both a professional ballerina and a brain surgeon.

entire project would be kicked back, and he would need to start the submission process again. The proposal had to be perfect this time. If not, he was sure his competitors would swoop in on this opportunity to launch their own devices. He had spent the last two years on this project, and he was so close—only twenty-seven days left to make all the necessary corrections. He could not afford distractions now. Too much was riding on this; his name was riding on this. He remembered what his father always told him: “No one remembers the name of the person who came in second.” These words motivated him all through high school to earn a full scholarship to Boston University, where he earned his BA and master’s degrees in computer science, and then his PhD in robotics engineering at MIT. Those degrees had driven him to start his own business, Vinchi Medical Engineering, and at age thirty-four, he still lived by those words to keep the company on top. The intercom buzzed. “Your conference call is ready on line one, Mr. Vinchi.” “What the hell were you guys thinking?” Jon barked as soon as he got on the line. Not waiting for them to answer, Jon continued, “Whose bright idea was it to submit my name to participate at this event—or any event, for that matter? This type of thing has your name written all over it, Drew. Is this your doing?” As always, Trent said it the way it was. “If you had attended the last meeting, Jon, you would have been brought up to date for this and would have had the chance to voice any opposition to your participation.” It was a moot point, Jon knew he’d missed their last meeting—actually, their last few meetings—due to his own business needs. But this stunt wasn’t solely about the meeting, and he knew it. “Trent, I have always supported the decisions you guys have made in the past, but I am not supporting this one. What makes you think I will even show? I don’t have time for this nonsense.” “Time is valuable to all of us, Jon. We all have our own companies to run besides supporting what is needed for Takes One. Either you’re fully invested in this, or you’re not. There are times when it takes more than

Even if we restrict ourselves to the comparatively limited conceptual repertoire for talking about such matters that early Wittgenstein makes available, we may already say this: in order to learn a first language, the potential speaker needs not only to learn to see the symbol in the sign, she needs the very idea of language to become actual in her. This formal aspect of what it is to be human—the linguistic capacity as such—is something that dawns with the learning of one’s first language, with one’s becoming the bearer of a linguistic practice. We touched above, in the reply to Sullivan, on how the Tractatus inherits and adapts yet a further feature of the Kantian enterprise of critique: it starts with the assumption not only that we already have the very faculty we seek to elucidate in philosophy, but also that the prosecution of the philosophical inquiry must everywhere involve the exercise of the very capacity it seeks to elucidate. The Tractatus does not seek to confer the power of language on us: we already have this and bring it to our encounter with the book. Hence, it does not seek to explain what language is (as it is sometimes put) from sideways-on—from a position outside language—but rather from the self-conscious perspective of someone who already, in seeking philosophical clarity about what language is, seeks clarity about herself qua linguistic being. Through its exercise, however, the book does seek to confer a heightened mastery of that capacity on us—a reflective self- understanding of its logic and its limits, and of the philosophical confusions that arise from misunderstandings thereof. This heightened mastery (like the general power itself) can be acquired only through forms of further exercise of that same capacity. What I just said about the Tractatus, at this level of methodological abstraction, is no less true of the method of the Philosophical Investigations. The author of the Tractatus, however, unlike later Wittgenstein, never pauses for even a moment to reflect upon what it means to learn to recognize the symbol in the sign through attending to contexts of significant use. Nevertheless, early Witt- genstein would certainly agree with his later self on this point: for the learner of language, light must gradually dawn over the whole—over sign and symbol together.

THE PAYOFF IS EXTRAORDINARY I was giving a seminar in Detroit a couple of years ago when a young man, about thirty years old, came up to me at the break. He told me that he had first come to my seminar and heard my “3 Percent Rule” about ten years ago. At that time, he had dropped out of college, was living at home, driving an old car, and earning about $20,000 a year as an office-to-office salesman. He decided after the seminar that he was going to apply the 3 Percent Rule to himself, and he did so immediately. He calculated 3 percent of his income of $20,000 would be $600. He began to buy sales books and read them every day. He invested in two audio-learning programs on sales and time management. He took one sales seminar. He invested the entire $600 in himself, in learning to become better. That year, his income went from $20,000 to $30,000, an increase of 50 percent. He said he could trace the increase with great accuracy to the things he had learned and applied from the books he had read and the audio programs he had listened to. So the following year, he invested 3 percent of $30,000, a total of $900, back into himself. That year, his income jumped from $30,000 to $50,000. He began to think, “If my income goes up at 50 percent per year by investing 3 percent back into myself, what would happen if I invested 5 percent? KEEP RAISING THE BAR The next year, he invested 5 percent of his income, $2,500, into his learning program. He took more seminars, traveled cross-country to a conference, bought more audio- and video-learning programs, and even hired a part-time coach. And that year, his income doubled to $100,000. After that, like playing Texas Hold-Em, he decided to go “all in” and raise his investment into himself to 10 percent per year. He told me that he had been doing this every since. I asked him, “How has investing 10 percent of your income back into yourself affected your income?” He smiled and said, “I passed a million dollars in personal income last year. And I still invest 10 percent of my income in myself every single year.” I said, “That’s a lot of money. How do you manage to spend that much money on personal development?” He said, “It’s hard! I have to start spending money on myself in January in order to invest it all by the end of the year. I have an image coach, a sales coach, and a speaking coach. I have a large library in my home with every book, audio program, and video program on sales and personal success I can find. I attend conferences, both nationally and internationally in my field. And my income keeps going up and up every year.

Before long the meeting at headquarters got down to a serious discussion of how General Bragg was to be dealt with, and Howard suddenly realized that he had never attended a strategy conference like this one: matters were not handled so informally in the Army of the Potomac. Grant and Thomas and Sherman simply talked things out, putting a whole campaign in review—Sherman bubbling with ideas, as always, Thomas full of solid facts about the roads and mountains and rivers where they would have to fight, Grant listening to both men and now and then putting in an observation of his own. Howard, who was not especially fanciful, felt that it was almost like being in a courtroom: Thomas was the learned judge, Sherman the brilliant advocate, and Grant was the jury whose verdict would settle everything.

The best growth is aided by community. Yes, we teachers should study our craft vigorously. We should take classes. We should attend conferences. But, in truth, without discussion practice, we will never see our fullest potential. Here, teaching is no different from other pursuits: Lasting improvement requires dedication to the humbling cycle of practice and reflection.

Imagine a video conference in which you are appearing in court, or in a multinational meeting where millions or billions of dollars are on the table, or a meeting where you will be discussing the status of a project or program, and where the daily conduct of business has always been coat and tie, but is now conducted virtually. Some might ask, “what difference does it make? I’m on time, I’m in attendance, and I know the subject. Who cares what I look like?” Viewed from the perspective of those that have to look at you, however, the message is completely different. It not only makes you appear unprepared, it shows a lack of respect for the position you hold (not to mention gravitas), as well as a lack of concern for the responsibilities that have been entrusted to you. It also shows a lack of respect for those in the virtual “room” with you, and it shows a complete disregard for the institution of which you are a part.

1990 I organized a conference that both Nelson Mandela and a minister from the de Klerk government attended. At the opening of the conference, the minister turned to Mandela and said, ‘Nelson, I grew up under apartheid. Now my fervent wish is to attend its funeral.’ This small human exchange launched a dialogue that led to the end of apartheid and a new reality for South Africa. How can there be peace in other tormented areas of the world? Through such small, modest, human encounters.

It is inconceivable to many modern scientists who have also studied Qur’an that how can a person without extensive travel, writing ability and attending modern universities of knowledge, could explain things about history, nature and make socio-political predictions that would appear perfectly correct afterwards. Dr. Keith Moore, former President of the Canadian Association of Anatomists and of the American Association of Clinical Anatomists remarked at a conference in Cairo that details of human development as mentioned in Qur’an must have come to Muhammad from God, or Allah, because most of this knowledge was not discovered until many centuries later.

Phase I is very product focused and involves pursuing initial traction while also building your initial product. This often means getting traction in ways that don’t scale—giving talks, writing guest posts, emailing people you have relationships with, attending conferences, and doing whatever you can to get in front of customers.

Exhaustion Salima sat in the fancy hotel room In the evening time. Here she is again in another foreign city, Attending a conference discussing “human rights”. Her eyes roamed the room. She suddenly felt a severe chill in her body. She suddenly realized that she is exhausted, But her exhaustion is not that of one day, It was one of a lifetime! It fell upon her abruptly. The thoughts of the bygone years Nested in her head, Were suddenly awoken. One thought after another. She realized at that moment That she is tired of responding to The same absurd questions About her origins Her ethnicity, Her religion, Her hobbies, Her favorite foods, Her education background, Her age, And her occupation. Questions asked frequently by people who don’t care. She suddenly realized That throughout her life, She never found a friend who could really understand. The evening was about to draw its dark curtains. She remembered that ever since she was a child, She had been hiding her favorite words and writings In notebooks that nobody will read. She has been murmuring her favorite tunes, In places where nobody could hear her. The evening was about to draw its dark curtains. She realized that her true thoughts and feelings Lived nowhere expect inside of her head, And there they will most likely die. Her head had become like a prison for her thoughts. The evening was about to draw its dark curtains. She suddenly realized That she had wasted so many years of her life Looking for someone who might understand. And each time she thought she had found one, She found herself in yet another prison. She looked through the window of the fancy hotel room And saw that the darkness had covered the entire city. September 9, 2017

In 2008, the Taliban took control of the Swat Valley, a remote part of northeastern Pakistan. They quickly implemented their Muslim extremist agenda. No television. No films. No women outside the house without a male escort. No girls attending school. By 2009, an eleven-year-old Pakistani girl named Malala Yousafzai had begun to speak out against the school ban. She continued to attend her local school, risking both her and her father’s lives; she also attended conferences in nearby cities. She wrote online, “How dare the Taliban take away my right for education?” In 2012, at the age of fourteen, she was shot in the face as she rode the bus home from school one day. A masked Taliban soldier armed with a rifle boarded the bus and asked, “Who is Malala? Tell me, or I will shoot everyone here.” Malala identified herself (an amazing choice in and of itself), and the man shot her in the head in front of all the other passengers.

Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Jack Dorsey formerly of Twitter, Tim Cook of Apple, Elon Musk of Tesla—all these business leaders regularly attend their companies’ quarterly calls. Let’s take a concrete example. Chevron, one of the world’s largest oil companies, had revenues of about $140 billion and a market value of about $190 billion in 2019. The management held a conference call for investors and analysts on January 31, 2020, to highlight its performance.20 The analysts and investors asked twenty-nine questions. What percentage of these do you think were about the future? More than 70 percent.

Please allow this book to offer one piece of serious advice (don't worry, this is the only one): Take control. Decide that enough is enough. Stop waiting for your advisor to guide your work - write a paper using your own brain and slap it down on his or her desk. Study - really, actually study - what it is you're studying. Realize that you can't include everything in your thesis, and drop your lofty and unrealistic plan to transform the field. You won't. Plan what you need to do to graduate, write it down, sit with the person whose approval you need, and work up a timeline. Seek out interesting conferences, and if your department won't pay for you to attend them, search for outside sponsorship. (You have the freaking internet, for crying out loud.) Actively pursue your goals, because - and it's so easy to forget this - that's why you're here. Can't find the motivation to work today? Tough shit. It's like a snow day: Every day off you give yourself makes you feel good that day, but it's one more day you'll have to make up in June when you really want to be out of school. It's possible that many graduate programs want you to get depressed, say "Fuck it" and take charge of your own destiny. They may consider this part of your necessary struggle. Well, so be it. Wait no longer. Take charge now. And get on with your stupid, stupid career.

These series of events placed the conference pastors into two distinct camps: pastors who sided with the ERF and sought more tension, and pastors who supported same-sex marriages and sought less tension-a large additional group included those who did not commit to either side. Once again, when the clergy's congregations were compared, the evangelical clergy showed growth in giving, attendance, and even membership, for pastors who had served in a congregation three years or longer. But the most dramatic changes were in congregations served by clergy seeking less tension with the culture. Congregations with "officiant" pastors showed sharp drops for all of the measures (Finke and Stark, 2001).

Now if one notices carefully one will see that between these two worlds, despite much physical contact and daily intermingling, there is almost no community of intellectual life or point of transference where the thoughts and feelings of one race can come into direct contact and sympathy with the thoughts and feelings of the other. Before and directly after the war, when all the best of the Negroes were domestic servants in the best of the white families, there were bonds of intimacy, affection, and sometimes blood relationship, between the races. They lived in the same home, shared in the family life, often attended the same church, and talked and conversed with each other. But the increasing civilization of the Negro since then has naturally meant the development of higher classes: there are increasing numbers of ministers, teachers, physicians, merchants, mechanics, and independent farmers, who by nature and training are the aristocracy and leaders of the blacks. Between them, however, and the best element of the whites, there is little or no intellectual commerce. They go to separate churches, they live in separate sections, they are strictly separated in all public gatherings, they travel separately, and they are beginning to read different papers and books. To most libraries, lectures, concerts, and museums, Negroes are either not admitted at all, or on terms peculiarly galling to the pride of the very classes who might otherwise be attracted. The daily paper chronicles the doings of the black world from afar with no great regard for accuracy; and so on, throughout the category of means for intellectual communication,—schools, conferences, efforts for social betterment, and the like,—it is usually true that the very representatives of the two races, who for mutual benefit and the welfare of the land ought to be in complete understanding and sympathy, are so far strangers that one side thinks all whites are narrow and prejudiced, and the other thinks educated Negroes dangerous and insolent. Moreover, in a land where the tyranny of public opinion and the intolerance of criticism is for obvious historical reasons so strong as in the South, such a situation is extremely difficult to correct. The white man, as well as the Negro, is bound and barred by the color-line, and many a scheme of friendliness and philanthropy, of broad-minded sympathy and generous fellowship between the two has dropped still-born because some busybody has forced the color-question to the front and brought the tremendous force of unwritten law against the innovators. It is hardly necessary for me to add very much in regard to the social contact between the races. Nothing has come to replace that finer sympathy and love between some masters and house servants which the radical and more uncompromising drawing of the color-line in recent years has caused almost completely to disappear. In a world where it means so much to take a man by the hand and sit beside him, to look frankly into his eyes and feel his heart beating with red blood; in a world where a social cigar or a cup of tea together means more than legislative halls and magazine articles and speeches,—one can imagine the consequences of the almost utter absence of such social amenities between estranged races, whose separation extends even to parks and streetcars.

The stump speech is the pre-planned, baked spiel that people have given a thousand times. We all stump speeches and many of the more formal and important gatherings that we attend, it is the stump speeches that come out to play. If the term stump speech evokes out the strongest, most durable purpose of the tree, the part that is firmly in the ground, the sprout is by contrast the newest and weakest part of the tree. It is the part still forming. What I learned... is people's sprouts ... are most interesting, and perhaps most prone to making a group feel closely connected enough to attempt big things together. So much in our culture tells us to present our stump speeches anytime we're in the vicinity of opportunity, especially at something like a conference. But I keep stumbling on interesting experiments doing just the opposite - inviting people with impressive stump speeches to leave them at home and bring their sprout speeches instead.

During a closed conference in Judge Soper’s chambers attended by Adashek, Hall, Gallegos, Alan Yochelson, and Phil Halpin, Ramirez told Judge Soper he did not, under any circumstances, want Alan Adashek representing him. He wanted Joseph Gallegos. Halpin had no objection to the change of attorneys. His only concern was getting a plea from Ramirez and moving forward. He did not want to make this case his whole career. Judge Soper granted Richard’s request and appointed Gallegos as his attorney.

Flights out of Omaha were canceled. With thirty thousand people who had come for the Berkshire weekend missing flights and wanting to leave as soon as possible, it looked as if we would be delayed at least two days. We held a family conference and within an hour Jeff had chartered a private jet for us. The next morning we took a ten-minute ride to the local airport and boarded in minutes—no wait, no lines, no luggage hassle, no TSA body scans and searches. We had two engines, two pilots, a flight attendant, and a good lunch. Seven-year-old Ava spoke for everyone when she declared she never wanted to fly any other way again. Whereas it took ten hours to reach Omaha from Newport Beach, California, including hours of delay in Dallas due to thunderstorms, we got home in two hours.

Two weeks before trial there’s something called a trial readiness conference; a meeting between judge, prosecutor, and defense to ensure they are ready. While this is happening, the victim is off somewhere, lying on her bed, peeling string cheese into limp shreds. No readiness conference exists for her; the witnesses do not gather into a room for a pep talk, putting hands into a pile, to yell out a team cheer. I was not allowed to attend other witnesses’ testimonies, which meant that for the next few weeks I’d spend most days waiting aimlessly at home. I would later learn eighteen people testified, but I had no idea most of them existed. We were like horses, lined up in separate stalls with our blinders on, unaware of those in our periphery. When you heard the bang, felt the smack, you ran for your life.

The most powerful person Gandhi met in London was the British monarch, King George the Fifth, one of whose titles was Emperor of India. On 5 November, the king hosted a reception for the delegates to the Round Table Conference. The invitation specified that those attending should wear ‘Morning Dress’; finally, after much to-ing and fro-ing between the palace officials and Mahadev Desai, they decided to make an exception for Gandhi.

While on faculty at a writer’s conference recently, I attended a talk by another teacher who claimed that the magical incantation abracadabra, made familiar by cartoons and magician parodies, means, at root, “what is spoken is what becomes.” While this is certainly a happy thought

The Gordon Research Conferences hold a special place in science in the United States. The American Association for the Advancement of Science sponsors them, every summer, on various topics, in the idle buildings of several New England private boarding schools. The conferences each last a week, are attended by invitation, and have the aim of encouraging informal discussion—so that, for instance, no later quotation of another scientist’s remarks is permitted. The one Crick had been invited to was in New Hampton, New Hampshire, from August 30 through September 3. The week before that, Crick, Watson, and Brenner all drove down to Cold Spring Harbor for the annual end-of-summer phage meeting.

dialing the first hypnotist, I listened to a recording that said Dr. Hopkins would be out of the office until next Monday because she was attending a conference in Cleveland. I jotted that down and moved on to the next name. Dr. James Goering was the second one. His secretary answered—a good first step—and I explained who I was and what I needed. I told her it was an urgent matter and was promptly put on hold for three minutes. I tapped the pen against my desk as I waited. “Hello, sir.

I felt that I owed more to children in general, and in particular to girls. Some of this was spawned by the response people tended to have to my life story -- the surprise that an urban black girl had vaulted through Ivy League schools and executive jobs and landed in the White House. I understood that my trajectory was unusual, but there was no good reason why it had to be. There had been so many times in my life when I'd found myself the only woman of color -- or even the only woman, period -- sitting at a conference table or attending a board meeting or mingling at one VIP gathering or another. If I was the first at some of these things, I wanted to make sure that in the end I wasn't the only -- that others were coming up behind me. As my mother, the plainspoken enemy of all hyperbole, still says anytime someone starts gushing about me and Craig and our various accomplishments, 'They're not special at all. The South Side is filled with kids like that.' We just need to help get them into those rooms.

during a theological conference in the mid-1990s, which Peter Kreeft recalled in 1998 as “the most memorable moment of the most memorable conference I ever attended.” Attending the meeting, says Kreeft, were “dozens of high-octane Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Eastern Orthodox and Protestant Evangelicals,” who, despite their noted theological differences, converged near the end of the conference in a crescendo of agreement. Kreeft continues: In the concluding session Father Fessio got up and proposed [tongue in cheek] that we issue a joint statement of theological agreement among all the historic, orthodox branches of Christendom saying that what united us was Scripture, the Apostles’ Creed, the first six ecumenical councils and the collected works of C. S. Lewis. The proposal was universally cheered.

Before the war, Hoover had maintained a number of friendly ties with Hitler's police officials. Among other examples, he sent Hitler's Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler a personal invitation to attend the 1937 World Police Conference in Montreal. The following year, he welcomed one of Himmler's top aides to the United States, and we now know that after the war he embraced "former" Nazis into his Red-hunting FBI apparatus.

In its simplest terms, allyship is about mentorship or sponsorship across race lines. It's about creating opportunities for colleagues of color that can help them advance in their careers. Think promotions, attendance at conferences, nominations for awards or speaker-positions, inclusion on high profile committees, teaching your young colleagues of color the soft skills and rules of the game that they might not have learned otherwise. Ask what they need, share what you can offer, and see what makes the most sense. Don't assume you know what they need, and don't ask for kudos for your behaviour. Contribute to the change and know that the benefits of your efforts will come back to you.

When I was separated from the lab, attending some seminar or conference, it was the series of twisted e-mails from Bill that held me fast to what I loved about my job, even while trapped with pasty middle-aged men who regarded me as they would a mangy stray that had slipped in through an open basement window. There’s a place somewhere where I am part of the in-group, I would remind myself as I stood alone with my buffet dish in some Marriott ballroom, apparently radiating cooties and so excluded from the back-slapping stories of building mass spectrometers during the good old days.

In 2022, Congressman Paul Gosar of Arizona (via video) and Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene both attended a neo-Nazi convention, called the America First Political Action Committee conference, sponsored by avowed Nazi fanboy Nick Fuentes; Gosar also has two alleged white nationalist sympathizers on his staff.

The last Summit Hunt had attended had been in an ancient, sprawling palace in Pangera, bedecked in the riches of the empire: silk tapestries and sconces of pure gold, goblets twinkling with precious stones, and succulent meats crusted in the rarest spices. This one was held in a conference center.

the right of bishops to leave the country to attend conferences and that of kings to divorce their wives.

We must live by faith and not by sight. An elderly lady fell and broke her leg while attending a summer Bible conference. She said to the pastor who visited her, “I know the Lord led me to the conference. But I don’t see why this had to happen! And I don’t see any good coming from it.” Wisely, the pastor replied, “Romans 8:28 doesn’t say that we see all things working together for good. It says that we know it.” Faith means surrendering all to God and obeying His Word in spite of circumstances and consequences. Love and faith go together: When you love someone, you trust him. And faith and love together help to strengthen hope, for where you find faith and love, you will find confidence for the future. How can we grow in faith during times of testing and suffering? The same way we grow in faith when things seem to be going well: by feeding on the Word of God (Rom. 10:17). Our fellowship with Christ through His Word not only strengthens our faith, but it also deepens our love. It is a basic principle of Christian living that we spend much time in the Word when God is testing us and Satan is tempting us.

In the course of the meeting the two leaders discussed what terms of surrender they would eventually insist upon; the word “unconditional” was discussed but not included in the official joint statement to be read at the final press conference. Then, on January 24, to Churchill’s surprise, Roosevelt inserted the word ad lib: “Peace can come to the world,” the President read out to the assembled journalists and newsreel cameras, “only by the total elimination of German and Japanese war power. . . . The elimination of German, Japanese and Italian war power means the unconditional surrender of Germany, Italy, and Japan.”1976 Roosevelt later told Harry Hopkins that the surprising and fateful insertion was a consequence of the confusion attending his effort to convince French General Henri Girard to sit down with Free French leader Charles de Gaulle: We had so much trouble getting those two French generals together that I thought to myself that this was as difficult as arranging the meeting of Grant and Lee—and then suddenly the Press Conference was on, and Winston and I had had no time to prepare for it, and the thought popped into my mind that they had called Grant “Old Unconditional Surrender,” and the next thing I knew I had said it.1977

The Wireless Broadband Development Conference was held and attended by industrial and academic leaders in April to form

through conferences (held 4 times) and seminars (held in 5 regions) attended by broadcasting businesses

Though the conference I’d received a grant to attend was still a few months off, it was already starting to bug me. The plane could crash. I could be raped and murdered. I could get stress cancer from excessive dread beforehand. To put it succinctly, my life could be torn asunder. All in the attempt to score a few idiotic career advancement points with my department chair and a colleague who hardly knew what my name was and certainly had no idea what my research interests were.

When, in February 1885, at the Berlin Conference that not a single Congolese attended, the fourteen participating powers, headed by Great Britain, the United States, France, and Germany, graciously ceded to Leopold II—at whose side Henry Morton Stanley was a constant presence—the million square miles of the Congo and its twenty million inhabitants so that he “would open the territory to commerce, abolish slavery, and civilize and Christianize the pagans,

However, in October 2010, the Government of India appointed a set of interlocutors—Dilip Padgaonkar, Radha Kumar and M.M Ansari—with the mission of taking the peace process further after due consultations with the several stakeholders in Jammu & Kashmir. Mr Dilip Padgaonkar was my colleague in the Kashmir Committee, but I do not have the pleasure of knowing the other two interlocutors personally. This does not detract from their stature or merit. Whispers around Delhi suggested that while the interlocutors were sincerely trying to talk to the people of J&K, they were scarcely talking to one another. This subsequently appears to have blown up into a full scale war, after it was discovered that two of the three interlocutors accepted hospitality from the ISI-funded Ghulam Nabi Fai to attend conferences in plush capitals of Europe and the US. Till date, the interlocutors have made no significant contribution to the peace process.

In February 2011 a conference of lawyers from the Commonwealth was held in Hyderabad. Surprisingly, no member of the Executive Committee of the Supreme Court Bar Association was invited to attend, but it has been reported that during the conference, the prime minister complained against judicial interference with the workings of the government which, in its arrogance, considers itself to be omniscient and omnipotent. He apparently forgot that a litigant must argue his case in court and not in a public meeting.

I once attended a conference on the crises in the banking system where I was able to have a brief, informal chat with an economist for one of the Bretton Woods institutions (probably best I not say which). I asked him why everyone was still waiting for even one bank official to be brought to trial for any act of fraud leading up to the crash of 2008. OFFICIAL: Well, you have to understand the approach taken by U.S. prosecutors to financial fraud is always to negotiate a settlement. They don't want to have to go to trial. The upshot is always that the financial institution has to pay a fine, sometimes in the hundreds of millions, but they don't actually admit to any criminal liability. Their lawyers simply say they are not going to contest the charge, but if they pay, they havent't technically been found guilty of anything. ME: So you're saying if the government discovers that Goldman Sachs, for instance, or Bank of America, has committed fraud, they effectively just charge them a penalty fee. OFFICIAL: That's right. ME: So in that case… okay, I guess the real question is this: has there ever been a case where the amount the firm had to pay was more than the amount of money they made from the fraud itself? OFFICIAL: Oh no, not to my knowledge. Usually it's substantially less. ME: So what are we talking here, 50 percent? OFFICIAL: I'd say more like 20 to 30 percent on average. But it varies considerably case by case. ME: Which means… correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't that effectively mean the government is saying, "you can commit all the fraud you like, but if we catch you, you're going to have to give us our cut"? OFFICIAL: Well, obviously I can't put it that way myself as long as I have this job… (p. 25-26)

Theology that steps back in time only to hide there from the problems to be faced in the present ends up hidebound and moribund. Or, worse, it becomes an empty scholasticism that refuses to attend to the needs of the present, accepting only what has been hallowed by time and use, as if it is sufficient to look backward without looking forward.