“
I am walking forever on the path from the border to base camp. It is taking a long time, and I know it will take even longer to get back. There is no one with me. I am all by myself. The trees are not trees the birds are not birds and I am not me but just something that has been walking for a very long time…
”
”
Jeff VanderMeer (Annihilation (Southern Reach, #1))
“
We are not cabin-dwellers, born to a life cramped and confined; we are meant to explore, to seek, to push the limits of our potential as human beings. The world of the senses is just a base camp: we are meant to be as much at home in consciousness as in the world of physical reality.
”
”
Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa (The Bhagavad Gita)
“
Seriously, Iv…You could climb him like Everest, make base camp at his cock, and tackle the rest in the morning.
”
”
Kristen Callihan (The Friend Zone (Game On, #2))
“
Above the comforts of Base Camp, the expedition in fact became an almost Calvinistic undertaking. The ratio of misery to pleasure was greater by an order of magnitude than any mountain I'd been on; I quickly came to understand that climbing Everest was primarily about enduring pain. And in subjecting ourselves to week after week of toil, tedium and suffering, it struck me that most of us were probably seeking above all else, something like a state of grace.
”
”
Jon Krakauer (Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster)
“
Often, no sooner would the mind begin to scale the heights of Mt. Knowledge than it would receive a frantic call from body base camp, demanding it return to oversee "Operation Masturbate.
”
”
Jon Stewart (Earth (The Book): A Visitor's Guide to the Human Race)
“
Tania, I was spellbound by you from the first moment I saw you. There I was, living my dissolute life, and war had just started. My entire base was in disarray, people were running around, closing accounts, taking money out, grabbing food out of stores, buying up the entire Gostiny Dvor, volunteering for the army, sending their kids to camp—” He broke off. “And in the middle of my chaos, there was you!” Alexander whispered passionately. “You were sitting alone on this bench, impossibly young, breathtakingly blonde and lovely, and you were eating ice cream with such abandon, such pleasure, such mystical delight that I could not believe my eyes. As if there were nothing else in the world on that summer Sunday.
”
”
Paullina Simons (The Bronze Horseman (The Bronze Horseman, #1))
“
The world of the senses is just a base camp: we are meant to be as much at home in consciousness as in the world of physical reality. This
”
”
Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa (The Bhagavad Gita)
“
Family and home are the bedrock of everything we've gone on to do. It's out base camp. Our refugee. Our only place in the world where we feel completely safe and wholeheartedly ourselves.
”
”
Connor Franta (A Work in Progress)
“
I nearly wet myself when I saw him,” Fi prattles on. “Jay-sus, he’s hot. And freaking huge. A veritable mountain of sexy.” She fans her face with exaggerated movements. “Seriously, Iv…You could climb him like Everest, make base camp at his cock, and tackle the rest in the morning.
”
”
Kristen Callihan (The Friend Zone (Game On, #2))
“
It takes an enormous amount of internal security to begin with the spirit of adventure, the spirit of discovery, the spirit of creativity. Without doubt, you have to leave the comfort zone of base camp and confront an entirely new and unknown wilderness. You become a trailblazer, a pathfinder. You open new possibilities, new territories, new continents, so that others can follow.
”
”
Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change)
“
This fills me with anger, although I already know that it is in the normal order of things that the privileged oppress the unprivileged: the social structure of the camp is based on this human law.
”
”
Primo Levi (Survival in Auschwitz)
“
Sometimes, when we are far from clocks and schedules, we can still recapture a lost sense of place-based time. On a relaxing camping trip or a long day outdoors, perhaps, we can slip back into the rhythm of the sun.
”
”
Richard J. Borden (Ecology and Experience: Reflections from a Human Ecological Perspective)
“
Cotton says he’s been in the race for two and a half months. Enough time to cover the jungle, desert, and ocean, and arrive safely at base camp. But then why, when I inspect his dyed black hair, don’t I see blond roots that reflect that same story? It’s something I’ve thought before but never really dwelled on.
”
”
Victoria Scott (Salt & Stone (Fire & Flood, #2))
“
There are few words which are used more loosely than the word “Civilization.” What does it mean? It means a society based upon the opinion of civilians. It means that violence, the rule of warriors and despotic chiefs, the conditions of camps and warfare, of riot and tyranny, give place to parliaments where laws are made, and independent courts of justice in which over long periods those laws are maintained. That is Civilization—and in its soil grow continually freedom, comfort, and culture. When Civilization reigns, in any country, a wider and less harassed life is afforded to the masses of the people. The traditions of the past are cherished, and the inheritance bequeathed to us by former wise or valiant men becomes a rich estate to be enjoyed and used by all.
”
”
Winston S. Churchill
“
When you're out in the wilderness and get back to base camp only to discover sleeping bag turndown service….that's no chocolate on the pillow
”
”
Josh Stern (And That’s Why I’m Single)
“
A common and traditionally masculine marital problem is created by the husband who, once he is married, devotes all his energies to climbing mountains and none to tending to his marriage, or base camp, expecting it to be there in perfect order whenever he chooses to return to it for rest and recreation without his assuming any responsibility for its maintenance. Sooner or later this “capitalist” approach to the problem fails and he returns to find his untended base camp a shambles, his neglected wife having been hospitalized for a nervous breakdown, having run off with another man, or in some other way having renounced her job as camp caretaker. An equally common and traditionally feminine marital problem is created by the wife who, once she is married, feels that the goal of her life has been achieved. To her the base camp is the peak. She cannot understand or empathize with her husband’s need for achievements and experiences beyond the marriage and reacts to them with jealousy and never-ending demands that he devote increasingly more energy to the home. Like other “communist” resolutions of the problem, this one creates a relationship that is suffocating and stultifying, from which the husband, feeling trapped and limited, may likely flee in a moment of “mid-life crisis.” The women’s liberation movement has been helpful in pointing the way to what is obviously the only ideal resolution: marriage as a truly cooperative institution, requiring great mutual contributions and care, time and energy, but existing for the primary purpose of nurturing each of the participants for individual journeys toward his or her own individual peaks of spiritual growth. Male and female both must tend the hearth and both must venture forth. As an adolescent I used to thrill to the words of love the early American poet Ann Bradstreet spoke to her husband: “If ever two were one, then we.”20 As I have grown, however, I have come to realize that it is the separateness of the partners that enriches the union. Great marriages cannot be constructed by individuals
”
”
M. Scott Peck (The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth)
“
At Tom's back, receding from view, lay State Street's Victorian brick facades, where lobbyists and trade associations housed their offices, like a Mount Everest base camp for professional influence peddlers.
”
”
Joan Quigley (The Day the Earth Caved In: An American Mining Tragedy)
“
I don't know that it is possible to construct anything more atrociously hideous or uninteresting than a Base Camp. It consists, in military parlance, of nothing more than:—
Fields, grassless 1
Tents, bell 500
”
”
Bruce Bairnsfather (Bullets and Billets)
“
Randomisation is not a new idea. It was first proposed in the seventeenth century by John Baptista van Helmont, a Belgian radical who challenged the academics of his day to test their treatments like blood-letting and purging (based on ‘theory’) against his own, which he said were based more on clinical experience: ‘Let us take out of the hospitals, out of the Camps, or from elsewhere, two hundred, or five hundred poor People, that have Fevers, Pleurisies, etc. Let us divide them into half, let us cast lots, that one half of them may fall to my share, and the other to yours … We shall see how many funerals both of us shall have.
”
”
Ben Goldacre (Bad Science)
“
Regret crossing the street for me, soldier?” Taking her hand into both of his, Alexander said, “Tania, I was spellbound by you from the first moment I saw you. There I was, living my dissolute life, and war had just started. My entire base was in disarray, people were running around, closing accounts, taking money out, grabbing food out of stores, buying up the entire Gostiny Dvor, volunteering for the army, sending their kids to camp—” He broke off. “And in the middle of my chaos, there was you!” Alexander whispered passionately. “You were sitting alone on this bench, impossibly young, breathtakingly blonde and lovely, and you were eating ice cream with such abandon, such pleasure, such mystical delight that I could not believe my eyes. As if there were nothing else in the world on that summer Sunday. I give you this so that if you ever need strength in the future and I’m not there, you don’t have to look far. You, with your high-heeled red sandals, in your sublime dress, eating ice cream before war, before going who knows where to find who knows what, and yet never having any doubt that you would find it. That’s what I crossed the street for, Tatiana. Because I believed that you would find it. I believed in you.
”
”
Paullina Simons (The Bronze Horseman (The Bronze Horseman, #1))
“
Yes, Camp Vrede.” It was one of the deadliest incidents in the alliance’s fight for peace. The large base was located near the Kuwait, Iraq and Saudi Arabia tri-border, its presence there sanctioned by the three countries, which welcomed its assistance in maintaining the area’s stability. The attack, by insurgents who opposed the alliance’s presence in the region, came in the middle of a heavy desert storm, and the number of dead and injured was high. Donovan remembered the incident clearly, USFID had been one of the agencies put on alert following it. “The United States lost people there, too,” he said. “Fifty-nine were killed there that day.
”
”
A. Claire Everward (Oracle's Diplomacy (Oracle #2))
“
All the bargaining-transactions outlined above are based on the smuggling of materials belonging to the Lager. This is why the SS are so eager to suppress them: the very gold of our teeth is their property, as sooner or later, torn from the mouths of the living or the dead, it ends up in their hands. So it is natural that they should take care that the gold does not leave the camp.
”
”
Primo Levi
“
He said maybe some fear isn’t so bad. When you’re taking on a mountain the magnitude of Mt. Fuji or K2, you have to bring oxygen. It’s scary. But if you go up and a storm comes, you can go back to base camp, and nobody’s going to tell you that you’re a failure. I loved that because it expressed so well that not only were we engaged in a great challenge, which would involve setbacks, but we were also on a great adventure.
”
”
Patty McCord (Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility)
“
In this country, lesbianism is a poverty-as is being brown, as is being a woman, as is being just plain poor. The danger lies in ranking the oppressions. The danger lies in failing to acknowledge the specificity of the oppression. The danger lies in attempting to deal with oppression purely from a theoretical base. Without an emotional, heartfelt grappling with the source of our own oppression, without naming the enemy within ourselves and outside of us, no authentic, non-hierarchical connection among oppressed groups can take place.
When the going gets rough, will we abandon our so-called comrades in a flurry of racist/heterosexist/what-have-you panic? To whose camp, then, should the lesbian of color retreat? Her very presence violates the ranking and abstraction of oppression. Do we merely live hand to mouth? Do we merely struggle with the "ism" that's sitting on top of our heads?
The answer is: yes, I think first we do; and we must do so thoroughly and deeply. But to fail to move out from there will only isolate us in our own oppression- will only insulate, rather than radicalize us.
”
”
Cherríe L. Moraga (Loving in the War Years)
“
Above the comforts of Base Camp, the expedition in fact became an almost Calvinistic undertaking. The ratio of misery to pleasure was greater by an order of magnitude than any other mountain I’d been on; I quickly came to understand that climbing Everest was primarily about enduring pain. And in subjecting ourselves to week after week of toil, tedium, and suffering, it struck me that most of us were probably seeking, above all else, something like a state of grace. Of
”
”
Jon Krakauer (Into Thin Air)
“
Kurt Schumacher, the Hanover-based anti-Nazi who quickly became the leading figure in the post-war Social Democratic Party, was outraged. ‘Wir sind kein Negervolk’ (‘We are not blacks’) the fiery former concentration-camp inmate told Annan.
”
”
Frederick Taylor (Exorcising Hitler: The Occupation and Denazification of Germany)
“
Our industries, our trade, and our way of life generally have been based first on the exploitation of the earth's surface and then on the oppression of one another--on banditry pure and simple. The inevitable result is now upon us. The unsuccessful bandits are trying to despoil their more successful competitors. The world is divided into two hostile camps: at the root of this vast conflict lies the evil of spoliation which has destroyed the moral integrity of our generation. While this contest marches to its inevitable conclusion, it will not be amiss to draw attention to a forgotten factor which may perhaps help to restore peace and harmony to a tortured world. We must in our future planning pay great attention to food--the product of sun, soil, plant, and livestock--in other words, to farming and gardening.
”
”
Albert Howard (The Soil and Health: A Study of Organic Agriculture (Culture of the Land))
“
Mountaineering, she understood, was an essential expression of some odd, immutable aspect of my personality that I could no sooner alter than change the color of my eyes. Then, in the midst of this delicate rapprochement, Outside magazine confirmed it was sending me to Everest. At first I pretended that I’d be going as a journalist more than a climber—that I’d accepted the assignment because the commercialization of Everest was an interesting subject and the money was pretty good. I explained to Linda and anyone else who expressed skepticism about my Himalayan qualifications that I didn’t expect to ascend very high on the mountain. “I’ll probably climb only a little way above Base Camp,” I insisted. “Just to get a taste of what high altitude is about.” This was bullshit, of course. Given the length of the trip and the time I’d have to spend training for it, I stood to make a lot more money staying home and taking other writing jobs. I accepted the assignment because I was in the grip of the Everest mystique. In truth, I wanted to climb the mountain as badly as I’d ever wanted anything in my life.
”
”
Jon Krakauer (Into Thin Air)
“
Here's one way that we try to actively and immediately bring in kindness in our meetings and camps: we ask our girls to stop before they speak and reevaluate what they're going to say based on this acronym:
True
Honest
Important
Necessary
Kind
Is what they're out to say True? Is it Honest? Is it Important? Necessary Kind?
We ask the to T.H.I.N.K. before they speak text, or type, and try to incorporate it into their daily lives -- especially within their interactions with their friends and classmates -- as much as possible. It's a choice girls can make: Do they want to encourage others with their words, or bring others down?
You might think this won't resonate with your middle school girl, but I promise that it works. It's not about self-editing or asking her not to speak her truth, of course; it's about thinking of others too.
”
”
Haley Kilpatrick (The Drama Years: Real Girls Talk About Surviving Middle School -- Bullies, Brands, Body Image, and More)
“
Twas the night before Christmas, and all
through the base
Only sentries were stirring--they guarded the place.
At the foot of each bunk sat a helmet and boot
For the Santa of Soldiers to fill up with loot.
The soldiers were sleeping and snoring away
As they dreamed of “back home” on
good Christmas Day.
One snoozed with his rifle--he seemed so content.
I slept with the letters my family had sent.
When outside the tent there arose such a clatter.
I sprang from my rack to see what was the matter.
Away to the window I flew like a flash.
Poked out my head, and yelled, “What was that crash?”
When what to my thrill and relief should appear,
But one of our Blackhawks to give the all clear.
More rattles and rumbles! I heard a deep whine!
Then up drove eight Humvees, a jeep close behind…
Each vehicle painted a bright Christmas green.
With more lights and gold tinsel than I’d ever seen.
The convoy commander leaped down and he paused.
I knew then and there it was Sergeant McClaus!
More rapid than rockets, his drivers they came
When he whistled, and shouted, and called
them by name:
“Now, Cohen! Mendoza! Woslowski! McCord!
Now, Li! Watts! Donetti! And Specialist Ford!”
“Go fill up my sea bags with gifts large and small!
Now dash away! Dash away! Dash away, all!”
In the blink of an eye, to their trucks the troops darted.
As I drew in my head and was turning around,
Through the tent flap the sergeant came in with a bound.
He was dressed all in camo and looked quite a sight
With a Santa had added for this special night.
His eyes--sharp as lasers! He stood six feet six.
His nose was quite crooked, his jaw hard as bricks!
A stub of cigar he held clamped in his teeth.
And the smoke, it encircled his head like a wreath.
A young driver walked in with a seabag in tow.
McClaus took the bag, told the driver to go.
Then the sarge went to work. And his mission today?
Bring Christmas from home to the troops far away!
Tasty gifts from old friends in the helmets he laid.
There were candies, and cookies, and cakes, all homemade.
Many parents sent phone cards so soldiers could hear
Treasured voices and laughter of those they held dear.
Loving husbands and wives had mailed photos galore
Of weddings and birthdays and first steps and more.
And for each soldier’s boot, like a warm, happy hug,
There was art from the children at home sweet and snug.
As he finished the job--did I see a twinkle?
Was that a small smile or instead just a wrinkle?
To the top of his brow he raised up his hand
And gave a salute that made me feel grand.
I gasped in surprise when, his face all aglow,
He gave a huge grin and a big HO! HO! HO!
HO! HO! HO! from the barracks and then from the base.
HO! HO! HO! as the convoy sped up into space.
As the camp radar lost him, I heard this faint call:
“HAPPY CHRISTMAS, BRAVE SOLDIERS!
MAY PEACE COME TO ALL!
”
”
Trish Holland (The Soldiers' Night Before Christmas (Big Little Golden Book))
“
There was a big lake three days’ walk from Nya’s village. Every year when the rains stopped and the pond near the village dried up, Nya’s family moved from their home to a camp near the big lake. Nya’s family did not live by the lake all year round because of the fighting. Her tribe, the Nuer, often fought with the rival Dinka tribe over the land surrounding the lake. Men and boys were hurt and even killed when the two groups clashed. So Nya and the rest of her village lived at the lake only during the five months of the dry season, when both tribes were so busy struggling for survival that the fighting occurred far less often.
”
”
Linda Sue Park (A Long Walk to Water: Based on a True Story)
“
Musk burst in carrying a sink and laughing. It was one of those visual puns that amuses him. “Let that sink in!” he exclaimed. “Let’s party on!” Agrawal and Segal smiled. Musk seemed amazed as he wandered around Twitter’s headquarters, which was in a ten-story Art Deco former merchandise mart built in 1937. It had been renovated in a tech-hip style with coffee bars, yoga studio, fitness room, and game arcades. The cavernous ninth-floor café, with a patio overlooking San Francisco’s City Hall, served free meals ranging from artisanal hamburgers to vegan salads. The signs on the restrooms said, “Gender diversity is welcome here,” and as Musk poked through cabinets filled with stashes of Twitter-branded merchandise, he found T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Stay woke,” which he waved around as an example of the mindset that he believed had infected the company. In the second-floor conference facilities, which Musk commandeered as his base camp, there were long wooden tables filled with earthy snacks and five types of water, including bottles from Norway and cans of Liquid Death. “I drink tap water,” Musk said when offered one. It was an ominous opening scene. One could smell a culture clash brewing, as if a hardscrabble cowboy had walked into a Starbucks.
”
”
Walter Isaacson (Elon Musk)
“
The boundaries between groups overlapped and we must not try to simplify matters by saying that these men were angels and those were devils. Certainly, it was a considerable achievement for a guard or foreman to be kind to the prisoners in spite of all the camp’s influences, and, on the other hand, the baseness of a prisoner who treated his own companions badly was exceptionally contemptible
”
”
Viktor E. Frankl (Man's Search for Meaning)
“
Thinking on this issue tends to fall into two camps: either race is a social category that has nothing to do with the biological causes of disease, or race is a biological category that causes differences in disease. Both approaches fail to grasp the way in which race as a social grouping can affect health—because of different life experiences based on race, not because of race-based genetic difference.
”
”
Dorothy Roberts (Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century)
“
The South Col is a vast, rocky area, maybe the size of four football pitches, strewn with the remnants of old expeditions.
It was here in 1996, in the fury of the storm, that men and women had struggled for their lives to find their tents. Few had managed it. Their bodies still lay here, as cold as marble, many now partially buried beneath snow and ice.
It was a somber place: a grave that their families could never visit.
There was an eeriness to it all--a place of utter isolation; a place unvisited by all but those strong enough to reach it. Helicopters can barely land at base camp, let alone up here.
No amount of money can put a man up here. Only a man’s spirit can do that.
I liked that.
The wind now blew in strong gusts over the lip of the col and ruffled the torn material of the wrecked tents.
It felt as if the mountain were daring me to proceed.
”
”
Bear Grylls (Mud, Sweat and Tears)
“
Altogether, the United States handed over to Afghanistan about $900 million of “foreign excess real property”—military hand-me-downs of various kinds—and destroyed another $46 million worth because the items were too sensitive or impractical to transfer. The largest single gift was Camp Leatherneck, the United States Marine base in Helmand, valued at $235 million; the Marines lowered the American flag and flew away in late October.28
”
”
Steve Coll (Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2001-2016)
“
Fixed settlements were perhaps inevitable, but they were dangerous. Their ancestors' way of life had been the nobler one, the life of tent-dwellers, often on the move. Nobility and freedom were inseparable, and the nomad was free. In the desert a man was concious of being the lord of the space, and in virtue of that lordship he escaped in a sense from the domination of time. By striking camp he sloughed off his yesterdays; and tomorrow seemed less of a fatality if its where as well as its when had yet to come. But the townsman was a prisoner; and to be fixed in one place, - yesterday, today, tomorrow - was to be a target of time, the ruiner of all things. Towns were places of corruption. Sloth and slovenliness lurked in the shadow of their walls, ready to take an edge off a man's alertness and vigilance. Everything decayed there, even language, one of man's most precious possessions.
”
”
Martin Lings (Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources)
“
If this isn't a guidebook, what is it? A book of sermons, perhaps.
I preach that air travel be scaled back, as a start, to the level of twenty years ago, further reductions to be considered after all the Boeing engineers have been retrained as turkey ranchers.
The state Game Department should establish a season on helicopters — fifty-two weeks a year, twenty-four hours a day, no bag limit.
Passenger trains must be restored, as a start, to the service of forty years ago and then improved from there.
The Gypsy Bus System must not be regularized (the government would regulate it to death) but publicized cautiously through the underground.
I would discourage, if not ban, trekking to Everest base camp and flying over the Greenland Icecap. Generally, people should stay home. Forget gaining a little knowledge about a lot and strive to learn about a little.
”
”
Harvey Manning (Walking the Beach to Bellingham (Northwest Reprints))
“
The valley was bright with sunshine when we opened our eyes the next morning. But it was not the same malevolent sun that had scorched the Kalahari for months. Soft, mellow rays caressed the backs of several hundred springbok, nibbling grass bases succulent with glittering droplets. The storm was only a smudge on the distant horizon. From camp we could see Captain and Mate and a pair of bat-eared foxes drinking from puddles on the spongy desert floor.
”
”
Mark Owens (Cry of the Kalahari)
“
In a matter of sixty short minutes, that thing could whisk Neil away to civilization, I thought. Hmm.
My goodness, that was a beautiful prospect.
Somehow I had to get on that chopper with him.
I packed in thirty seconds flat, everything from the past three months. I taped a white cross onto my sleeve, and raced out to where Neil was sat waiting.
One chance.
What the heck.
Neil shook his head at me, smiling.
“God, you push it, Bear, don’t you?” he shouted over the noise of the rotors.
“You’re going to need a decent medic on the flight,” I replied, with a smile. “And I’m your man.” (There was at least some element of truth in this: I was a medic and I was his buddy--and yes, he did need help. But essentially I was trying to pull a bit of a fast one.)
The pilot shouted that two people would be too heavy.
“I have to accompany him at all times,” I shouted back over the engine noise. “His feet might fall off at any moment,” I added quietly.
The pilot looked back at me, then at the white cross on my sleeve.
He agreed to drop Neil somewhere down at a lower altitude, and then come back for me.
“Perfect. Go. I’ll be here.” I shook his hand firmly.
Let’s just get this done before anyone thinks too much about it, I mumbled to myself.
And with that the pilot took off and disappeared from view.
Mick and Henry were laughing.
“If you pull this one off, Bear, I will eat my socks. You just love to push it, don’t you?” Mick said, smiling.
“Yep, good try, but you aren’t going to see him again, I guarantee you,” Henry added.
Thanks to the pilot’s big balls, he was wrong.
The heli returned empty, I leapt aboard, and with the rotors whirring at full power to get some grip in the thin air, the bird slowly lifted into the air.
The stall warning light kept buzzing away as we fought against gravity, but then the nose dipped and soon we were skimming over the rocks, away from base camp and down the glacier.
I was out of there--and Mick was busy taking his socks off.
”
”
Bear Grylls (Mud, Sweat and Tears)
“
I have always loved the quote from John F. Kennedy: “When written in Chinese, the word crisis is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.”
Looking back on my life, I can see that I have never had a crisis that didn’t make me stronger. And here was all that I loved before me: great risk, but also great opportunity.
I had never felt so excited.
Neil was already preparing to come back up. Mick, so fortunate to be alive, was staying firmly, and wisely, at base camp.
But for me, my time had come.
That evening, camp two was again full of friends. Neil and Geoffrey were there along with Michael and Graham, Karla and Alan. But the weariness of coming back up to camp two again oozed painfully from Karla’s gaunt face.
She was utterly exhausted, and you could see it.
Who wouldn’t be after three months on Everest, and having got within four hundred feet of the summit only days earlier?
Tomorrow the biggest battle of our lives would begin.
”
”
Bear Grylls (Mud, Sweat and Tears)
“
To identify and isolate his perceived political enemies, Kim Il Sung created a neofeudal, blood-based pecking order in 1957. The government classified and, to a considerable extent, segregated the entire North Korean population based on the perceived reliability of an individual’s parents and grandparents. North Korea called itself the Worker’s Paradise, but even as it professed allegiance to communist ideals of equality, it invented one of the world’s most rigidly stratified caste systems.
”
”
Blaine Harden (Escape From Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West)
“
Among the dead was Rob Hall, one of the most highly acclaimed mountaineers in the world. He ran out of oxygen attempting to rescue a stricken climber. He collapsed from a lethal combination of exhaustion, oxygen deprivation, and the cold.
Somehow, as night fell and the thermostat plummeted, he managed to hold on.
Rob endured a night at 28,700 feet with temperatures as low as minus fifty degrees centigrade. Then at dawn he spoke to his wife, Jan, from his radio, patched through to a satellite phone at base camp.
She was pregnant with their first child, and those on the mountain sat motionless as he spoke to her. “I love you. Sleep well, my sweetheart. Please don’t worry too much.”
They were his last ever words.
The lessons were clear: Respect the mountain--and understand what altitude and bad weather can do to even the strongest of climbers. In addition, never tempt the wild, and know that money guarantees you nothing--least of all safety--when you climb a mountain as big as Everest.
”
”
Bear Grylls (Mud, Sweat and Tears)
“
That afternoon, I went to Henry with a suggestion.
Michael and Graham were still ill. But I was feeling almost fit again.
“Why not let Geoffrey and me head up to camp two, so we can be in position just in case the typhoon heads away?”
It was a long shot--a very long shot--but as the golfer Jack Nicklaus once said: “Never up, never in.”
Sure as hell, I wasn’t going to stand any chance of the summit, sitting here at base camp twiddling my thumbs, waiting.
In addition, at camp two, I could be a radio go-between from base camp (where Henry was) and the team higher up.
That was the clincher.
Henry knew that Michael and Graham weren’t likely to recover any time soon. He understood my hunger, and he recognized the same fire that he had possessed in his own younger days.
His own mountaineering maxim was: “Ninety-nine percent cautiousness; one percent recklessness.”
But knowing when to use that 1 percent is the mountaineer’s real skill.
I stifled a cough and left his tent grinning.
I was going up.
”
”
Bear Grylls (Mud, Sweat and Tears)
“
The difference between the butch and the queen is rooted in the system of male supremacy. Gay male camp is based not simply on the incongruous juxtaposition of femininity and maleness, but also on the reordering of particular power relationships inherent in our society’s version of masculinity and femininity. The most obvious cause for the minimum development of camp among lesbians was that masculinity was not and still isn’t as incongruous as femininity in twentieth century American culture and therefore not as easily used as a basis for humor. Concomitantly although individual women might be able to sexually objectify a man, women has a group did not have the social power to objectify men in general. Therefore, such objectification could never be the basis for a genre of humor with wide appeal. But why didn’t camp develop and thrive within the lesbian community itself? Because the structures of oppression were such that lesbians never really escaped from male supremacy. In lesbians’ actual struggles in the bars or out on the streets, authority was always male. For queens to confront male authority was a confrontation between two men, on some level equals. The queen was playing with male privilege, which was his by birthright. For women to confront male authority is to break all traditional training and roles. Without a solid organization of all women, this requires taking on a male identity, beating men at their own game. Passive resistance or the fist is most appropriate for the situation, though not a very good basis for theater and humor.
”
”
Joan Nestle (The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader)
“
Both camps maneuvered to win the endorsement of Kaiser Wilhelm, who, as the nation’s supreme military leader, had the final say. He authorized U-boat commanders to sink any ship, regardless of flag or markings, if they had reason to believe it was British or French. More importantly, he gave the captains permission to do so while submerged, without warning. The most important effect of all this was to leave the determination as to which ships were to be spared, which to be sunk, to the discretion of individual U-boat commanders. Thus a lone submarine captain, typically a young man in his twenties or thirties, ambitious, driven to accumulate as much sunk tonnage as possible, far from his base and unable to make wireless contact with superiors, his vision limited to the small and distant view afforded by a periscope, now held the power to make a mistake that could change the outcome of the entire war. As Chancellor Bethmann would later put it, “Unhappily, it depends upon the attitude of a single submarine commander whether America will or will not declare war.
”
”
Erik Larson (Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania)
“
He felt as though he were standing on the edge of a giant hole – a hole filled with the black despair of nothingness. I am alone now. I am all that is left of my family. His father, who had sent Salva to school . . . brought him treats, like mangoes . . . trusted him to take care of the herd . . . His mother, always ready with food and milk and a soft hand to stroke Salva’s head. His brothers and sisters, whom he had laughed with and played with and looked after . . . He would never see them again. How can I go on without them? But how can I not go on? They would want me to survive . . . to grow up and make something of my life . . . to honour their memories. What was it Uncle had said during that first terrible day in the desert? ‘Do you see that group of bushes? You need only to walk as far as those bushes. . .’ Uncle had helped him get through the desert that way, bit by bit, one step at a time. Perhaps . . . perhaps Salva could get through life at the camp in the same way. I need only to get through the rest of this day, he told himself. This day and no other.
”
”
Linda Sue Park (Long Walk to Water: International Bestseller Based on a True Story)
“
Like high mountain climbers who set up a base in the valley at the foot of the mountains and another camp and camp number two and camp number three at various heights on the road to the peak, and in every camp they leave food and provisions and equipment to make their last climb easier and to collect on their way back everything that might help them as they descend, so I leave my childhood and my youth and my adult years in various camps with a flag on every camp. I know I shall never return, but to get to the peak with no weight, light, light!
”
”
Yehuda Amichai (The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (The Copenhagen Trilogy Book 2))
“
The responsibility of setting an army in motion must devolve on the general alone; if advance and retreat are controlled from the Palace, brilliant results will hardly be achieved. Hence the god-like ruler and the enlightened monarch are content to play a humble part in furthering their country's cause [lit., kneel down to push the chariot wheel]." This means that "in matters lying outside the zenana, the decision of the military commander must be absolute." Chang Yu also quote the saying: "Decrees from the Son of Heaven do not penetrate the walls of a camp."]
”
”
Sun Tzu (SUN TZU THE ART OF WAR FULL TEXT ( ILLUSTRATED ): 2020 Edition Classic Book Of Military Strategy And Thought Based On Chinese Warfare)
“
So the Scouts went to work
setting up camp--
raising the tent,
filling the lamp,
building the fire,
getting it lit.
Jane took time
to explore a bit.
She collected some leaves.
She studied some seeds.
That’s when she heard
a voice in the weeds.
Chuckling and talking
to himself in there
was--you guessed it--
Papa Q. Bear!
“This trick will be fun,”
Papa Bear said
as he pulled the sheet
over his head.
“Hmm,” said Jane
as she tiptoed away.
“This is a game
that two can play!”
Then using twigs
and leaves as a base,
she started to make
what looked like…
A FACE!
”
”
Stan Berenstain (The Berenstain Bears and the Ghost of the Forest)
“
Before he’d ended up in that alley, he’d been a canine bomb-sniffer trainee at Camp Pendleton, the local marine base. Unfortunately, he’d failed miserably. Not only could he never seem to sniff out the bomb in time, but he also had to endure the praise heaped upon the smug German shepherds who always did. He was eventually discharged—not honorably—by his angry handler, who drove him out to the highway and dumped him in the middle of nowhere. Two weeks later he found his way to that alley. Two weeks and five hours later, he was being shampooed by Elizabeth and she was calling him Six-Thirty.
”
”
Bonnie Garmus (Lessons in Chemistry)
“
In general there was also a "cultural hibernation" in
the camp. There were two exceptions to this: politics
and religion. Politics were talked about everywhere in
camp, almost continuously; the discussions were
based chiefly on rumors, which were snapped up and
passed around avidly. The rumors about the military
situation were usually contradictory. They followed
one another rapidly and succeeded only in making a
contribution to the war of nerves that was waged in the
minds of all the prisoners. Many times, hopes for a
speedy end to the war, which had been fanned by
optimistic rumors, were disappointed. Some men lost
all hope, but it was the incorrigible optimists who were
the most irritating companions.
”
”
Viktor E. Frankl
“
Democratic citizenship requires a degree of empathy, insight, and kindness that demands a great deal of all of us. There are easier ways to live.
For example, we can reduce our public engagement to consumption, viewing our labour as whatever we need do to enter the consumer marketplace with money in our pockets, free to choose our widgets, to shape an identity based upon consumption.
Or we can go global and expand our understanding of “us” by wandering the world and appreciating its cultures and wonders, considering both the people living in the refugee camps of the world and the residents of small towns of Iowa to be our neighbours, while maintaining a connection with our own local traditions and duties.
”
”
Jason Stanley
“
Kissinger traces the balances made in foreign policy, including that of realism and idealism, from the times of Cardinal Richelieu through chapters on Theodore Roosevelt the realist and Woodrow Wilson the idealist. Kissinger, a European refugee who has read Metternich more avidly than Jefferson, is unabashedly in the realist camp. “No other nation,” he wrote in Diplomacy, “has ever rested its claim to international leadership on its altruism.” Other Americans might proclaim this as a point of pride; when Kissinger says it, his attitude seems that of an anthropologist examining a rather unsettling tribal ritual. The practice of basing policy on ideals rather than interests, he pointed out, can make a nation seem dangerously unpredictable.
”
”
Walter Isaacson (American Sketches: Great Leaders, Creative Thinkers & Heroes of a Hurricane)
“
After four days, during which I bathed with gritty wet wipes and figured out the long odds, I got out of Camp Hell. I had seen no real government and little aid that mattered. The United States had set up a tiny base in the middle of Taliban territory and started firing off howitzers every night, a move that probably terrified any Afghans who might have wanted them around. The base wasn't protecting anyone or able to win any hearts or minds. Instead, it stirred up a hornet's nest, with no conceivable way to calm it down, no real alternatives to poppies, no government authority. The United States did not bear all the blame. The lack of resources and troops here was the product of years of outrageous neglect by the entire international coalition.
”
”
Kim Barker (The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan)
“
Mr. and Mrs. Johnson in Omaha or San Francisco or Manhattan will watch the films and weep and decide once and for all that war is inhumane and terrible, and they will tell their friends at church and their family this, but Corporal Johnson at Camp Pendleton and Sergeant Johnson at Travis Air Force Base and Seaman Johnson at Coronado Naval Station and Spec 4 Johnson at Fort Bragg and Lance Corporal Swofford at Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Base watch the same films and are excited by them, because the magic brutality of the films celebrates the terrible and despicable beauty of their fighting skills. Fight, rape, war, pillage, burn. Filmic images of death and carnage are pornography for the military man; with film you are stroking his cock, tickling his balls with the pink feather of history, getting him ready for his real First Fuck.
”
”
Anthony Swofford (Jarhead: A Solder's Story of Modern War)
“
It is one thing to explain the causal origins of thinking, as science commendably does; it is an entirely different thing to conflate thinking in its formal or rule-governed dimension with its evolutionary genesis. Being conditioned is not the same as being constituted. Such a conflation not only sophistically elides the distinction between the substantive and the formal, it also falls victim to a dogmatic metaphysics that is impulsively blind to its own epistemological and methodological bases qua origins.
It is this genetic fallacy that sanctions the demotion of general intelligence as qualitatively distinct to a mere quantitative account of intelligent behaviours prevalent in nature. It should not come as a any surprise that this is exactly the jaded gesture of antihumanism upon whose shoddy pillars today's discourse of posthumanism supports its case. Talk of thinking forests, rocks, worn shoes, and ethereal beings goes hand in hand with the cult of technological singularity, musings on Skynet or the Market as speculative posthuman intelligence, and computers endowed with intellectual intuition. And again, by now it should have become obvious that, despite the seeming antagonism between these two camps - one promoting the so-called egalitarianism of going beyond human conditions by dispensing with the rational resources of critique, the other advancing the speculative aspects of posthuman supremacy on the grounds of the technological overcoming of the human condition - they both in fact belong to the arsenal of today's neoliberal capitalism in its full-on assault on any account of intelligence that may remotely insinuate an ambition for collective rationality and imagination.
”
”
Reza Negarestani (Intelligence and Spirit)
“
It is a rare zek who has not known from three to five transit prisons and camps; many remember a dozen or so, and the sons of Gulag can count up to fifty of them without the slightest difficulty. However, in memory they get all mixed up together because they are so similar: in the illiteracy of their convoys, in their inept roll calls based on case files; the long waiting under the beating sun or autumn drizzle; the still longer body searches that involve undressing completely; their haircuts with unsanitary clippers; their cold, slippery baths; their foul-smelling toilets; their damp and moldy corridors; their perpetually crowded, nearly always dark, wet cells; the warmth of human flesh flanking you on the floor or on the board bunks; the bumpy ridges of bunk heads knocked together from boards; the wet, almost liquid, bread; the gruel cooked from what seems to be silage. And
”
”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation)
“
From the start the proportion of asocials in the camp was about one-third of the total population, and throughout the first years prostitutes, homeless and ‘work-shy’ women continued to pour in through the gates. Overcrowding in the asocial blocks increased fast, order collapsed, and then followed squalor and disease.
Although we learn a lot about what the political prisoners thought of the asocials, we learn nothing of what the asocials thought of them. Unlike the political women, they left no memoirs. Speaking out after the war would mean revealing the reason for imprisonment in the first place, and incurring more shame. Had compensation been available they might have seen a reason to come forward, but none was offered.
The German associations set up after the war to help camp survivors were dominated by political prisoners. And whether they were based in the communist East or in the West, these bodies saw no reason to help ‘asocial’ survivors. Such prisoners had not been arrested as ‘fighters’ against the fascists, so whatever their suffering none of them qualified for financial or any other kind of help. Nor were the Western Allies interested in their fate. Although thousands of asocials died at Ravensbrück, not a single black- or green-triangle survivor was called upon to give evidence for the Hamburg War Crimes trials, or at any later trials.
As a result these women simply disappeared: the red-light districts they came from had been flattened by Allied bombs, so nobody knew where they went. For many decades, Holocaust researchers also considered the asocials’ stories irrelevant; they barely rate mention in camp histories. Finding survivors amongst this group was doubly hard because they formed no associations, nor veterans’ groups. Today, door-knocking down the Düsseldorf Bahndamm, one of the few pre-war red-light districts not destroyed, brings only angry shouts of ‘Get off my patch'.
”
”
Sarah Helm (Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women)
“
The next day’s call would be vital.
Then at 12:02 P.M., the radio came to life.
“Bear at camp two, it’s Neil. All okay?”
I heard the voice loud and clear.
“Hungry for news,” I replied, smiling. He knew exactly what I meant.
“Now listen, I’ve got a forecast and an e-mail that’s come through for you from your family. Do you want to hear the good news or the bad news first?”
“Go on, then, let’s get the bad news over with,” I replied.
“Well, the weather’s still lousy. The typhoon is now on the move again, and heading this way. If it’s still on course tomorrow you’ve got to get down, and fast. Sorry.”
“And the good news?” I asked hopefully.
“Your mother sent a message via the weather guys. She says all the animals at home are well.”
Click.
“Well, go on, that can’t be it. What else?”
“Well, they think you’re still at base camp. Probably best that way. I’ll speak to you tomorrow.”
“Thanks, buddy. Oh, and pray for change. It will be our last chance.”
“Roger that, Bear. Don’t start talking to yourself. Out.”
I had another twenty-four hours to wait. It was hell. Knowingly feeling my body get weaker and weaker in the vain hope of a shot at the top.
I was beginning to doubt both myself and my decision to stay so high.
I crept outside long before dawn. It was 4:30 A.M. I sat huddled, waiting for the sun to rise while sitting in the porch of my tent.
My mind wandered to being up there--up higher on this unforgiving mountain of attrition.
Would I ever get a shot at climbing in that deathly land above camp three?
By 10:00 A.M. I was ready on the radio. This time, though, they called early.
“Bear, your God is shining on you. It’s come!” Henry’s voice was excited. “The cyclone has spun off to the east. We’ve got a break. A small break. They say the jet-stream winds are lifting again in two days. How do you think you feel? Do you have any strength left?”
“We’re rocking, yeah, good, I mean fine. I can’t believe it.”
I leapt to my feet, tripped over the tent’s guy ropes, and let out a squeal of sheer joy.
These last five days had been the longest of my life.
”
”
Bear Grylls (Mud, Sweat and Tears)
“
On May 21, 1941, Camp de Schirmeck, Natzweiler-Struthof, located 31 miles southwest of Strasbourg in the Vosges Mountains, was opened as the only Nazi Concentration Camp established on present day French territory. Intended to be a transit labor camp it held about 52,000 detainees during the three and a half years of its existence. It is estimated that about 22,000 people died of malnutrition and exertion while at the concentration camp during those years. Natzweiler-Struthof was the location of the infamous Jewish skeleton collection used in the documentary movie “Le nom des 86” made from data provided by the notorious Hauptsturmführer August Hirt. On November 23, 1944, the camp was liberated by the French First Army under the command of the U.S. Sixth Army Group. It is presently preserved as a museum. Boris Pahor, the noted author was interned in Natzweiler-Struthof for having been a Slovene Partisan, and wrote his novel “Necropolis,” named for a large, ancient Greek cemetery. His story is based on his Holocaust experiences while incarcerated at Camp de Schirmeck.
”
”
Hank Bracker
“
Eventually, two Swedish climbers and a Sherpa called Babu Chiri found Mick. By chance--by God’s grace--Babu was carrying a spare canister of oxygen.
Neil and Pasang had also now descended, and met up with Mick and the others. Neil then located an emergency cache of oxygen half-buried in the snow nearby. He gave one to Alan and forced both him and Mick to their feet.
Slow and tired, his mind wandering in and out of consciousness, Mick remembers little about the next few hours. It was just a haze of delirium, fatigue, and cold.
Descending blue sheet ice can be lethal. Much more so than ascending it. Mick staggered on down, the debilitating effects of thin air threatening to overwhelm him.
Somewhere beneath the Balcony Mick suddenly felt the ground surge beneath him. There was a rush of acceleration as the loose topping of snow--covering the blue ice--slid away under him.
He began to hurtle down the sheer face on his back, and then made the all-too-easy error of trying to dig in his crampons to slow the fall. The force catapulted him into a somersault, hurtling him ever faster down the steep ice and snow face.
He resigned himself to the fact that he would die.
He bounced and twisted, over and over, and then slid to a halt on a small ledge. Then he heard voices. They were muffled and strange.
Mick tried to shout to them but nothing came out. The climbers who were now at the col then surrounded him, clipped him in, and held him. He was shaking uncontrollably.
When Mick and Neil reached us at camp two, forty-eight hours later, they were utterly shattered. Different men. Mick just sat and held his head in his hands.
That said it all.
That evening, as we prepared to sleep, he prodded me. I sat up and saw a smile spread across his face.
“Bear, next time, let me choose where we go on holiday--all right?”
I began to laugh and cry at the same time. I needed to. So much had been kept inside.
The next morning, Mick, Neil, and Geoffrey left for base camp. Their attempt was over. Mick just wanted to be off this forsaken mountain--to be safe.
I watched them head out into the glacier and hoped I had made the right decision to stay up at camp two without them all.
”
”
Bear Grylls (Mud, Sweat and Tears)
“
It is apparent that the mere knowledge that a man was either a camp guard or a prisoner tells us almost nothing. Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn. The boundaries between groups overlapped and we must not try to simplify matters by saying that these men were angels and those were devils. Certainly, it was a considerable achievement for a guard or foreman to be kind to the prisoners in spite of all the camp's influences, and, on the other hand, the baseness of a prisoner who treated his own companions badly was exceptionally contemptible. Obviously the prisoners found the lack of character in such men especially upsetting, while they were profoundly moved by the smallest kindness received from any of the guards...From all this we may learn that there are two races of men in this world, but only these two- the "race" of the decent man and the "race" of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere; they penetrate into all groups of society. No groups consists entirely of decent or indecent people. In this sense, no group is of "pure race" - and therefore one occasionally found a decent fellow among the camp guards.
”
”
Viktor E. Frankl
“
Different persons ruled in me in turn, though no one of them for long; each fallen tyrant was quick to regain power. Thus have I played host successively to the meticulous officer, fanatic in discipline, but gaily sharing with his men the privations of war; to the melancholy dreamer intent on the gods, the lover ready to risk all for a moment’s rapture; the haughty young lieutenant retiring to his tent to study his maps by lamplight, making clear to his friends his disdain for the way the world goes; and finally the future statesman. But let us not forget, either, the base opportunist who in fear of displeasing succumbed to drunkenness at the emperor’s table; the young fellow pronouncing upon all questions with ridiculous assurance; the frivolous wit, ready to lose a friend for the sake of a bright remark; the soldier exercising with mechanical precision his vile gladiatorial trade. And we should include also that vacant figure, nameless and unplaced in history, though as much myself as all the others, the simple toy of circumstance, no more and no less than a body, lying on a camp bed, distracted by an aroma, aroused by a breath of wind, vaguely attentive to some eternal hum of a bee.
”
”
Marguerite Yourcenar (Memoirs of Hadrian)
“
Even years later traumatized people often have enormous difficulty telling other people what has happened to them. Their bodies reexperience terror, rage, and helplessness, as well as the impulse to fight or flee, but these feelings are almost impossible to articulate. Trauma by nature drives us to the edge of comprehension, cutting us off from language based on common experience or an imaginable past. This doesn’t mean that people can’t talk about a tragedy that has befallen them. Sooner or later most survivors, like the veterans in chapter 1, come up with what many of them call their “cover story” that offers some explanation for their symptoms and behavior for public consumption. These stories, however, rarely capture the inner truth of the experience. It is enormously difficult to organize one’s traumatic experiences into a coherent account—a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Even a seasoned reporter like the famed CBS correspondent Ed Murrow struggled to convey the atrocities he saw when the Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald was liberated in 1945: “I pray you believe what I have said. I reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it I have no words.
”
”
Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
“
Silvanus, the camp prefect, took a step forward. I heard his voice every morning after parade, but had never listened to the tones of it as I did now. He was not afraid, that much was clear; he was angry.
"Pathetic. I should cashier you all now and destroy your Eagles." Silvanus spoke quietly; we had to strain to hear his voice. You could have heard the stars slide across the sky, we were so still and so silent. "If General Corbulo were here, he would destroy you. He dismissed half of the Fifth and the Tenth and sent them home. The rest are billeted in tents in the Armenian highlands with barley meal for fodder. He intends to make an army of them, to meet Vologases when he comes. I intend the same and therefore you will be treated the same as your betters in better legions. You will be proficient by the spring, or you will be dead." His gaze raked us, and we wondered which of us might die that night for the crime of being ineffectual. His voice rocked us. "To that end, you will spend the next three months in tents in the Mountains of the Hawk that lie between us and the sea. One hundred paces above the snow line, each century will determine an area suitable for three months’ stay and build its own base camp. You will alternate along the mountains’ length so that each century of the Fourth has a century of the Twelfth to either side, and vice versa. Each century will defend and maintain its own stocks against the men of the opposing legion; you are encouraged to avail yourselves of what you can. You may not remove stocks from camps belonging to other centuries of your own legion, and equally you may not aid in defending them against raiding parties from the opposing men. So that you may tell each other apart, the Twelfth legion will wear" – did I hear a note of distaste there? – "red cloth tied about their left arms at all times. The Fourth will wear blue. You will be provided with raw fleece with which to wrap your weapons that they might strike but not bite. A man who is careless enough to be captured by the other side will be flogged and returned to his unit. Any man who kills another will be flogged until dead and any man who wounds another will be staked out beyond the boundary of his camp for two days and nights; if he lives, he will be returned to his unit. Any man who dies of hunger, cold or fright, or who falls off the mountain, will be deemed to have died by his own hand. You have until the next watch to make ready. You are dismissed.
”
”
M.C. Scott (Rome: The Eagle of the Twelfth (Rome, #3))
“
In a matter of sixty short minutes, that thing could whisk Neil away to civilization, I thought. Hmm.
My goodness, that was a beautiful prospect.
Somehow I had to get on that chopper with him.
I packed in thirty seconds flat, everything from the past three months. I taped a white cross onto my sleeve, and raced out to where Neil was sat waiting.
One chance.
What the heck.
Neil shook his head at me, smiling.
“God, you push it, Bear, don’t you?” he shouted over the noise of the rotors.
“You’re going to need a decent medic on the flight,” I replied, with a smile. “And I’m your man.” (There was at least some element of truth in this: I was a medic and I was his buddy--and yes, he did need help. But essentially I was trying to pull a bit of a fast one.)
The pilot shouted that two people would be too heavy.
“I have to accompany him at all times,” I shouted back over the engine noise. “His feet might fall off at any moment,” I added quietly.
The pilot looked back at me, then at the white cross on my sleeve.
He agreed to drop Neil somewhere down at a lower altitude, and then come back for me.
“Perfect. Go. I’ll be here.” I shook his hand firmly.
Let’s just get this done before anyone thinks too much about it, I mumbled to myself.
And with that the pilot took off and disappeared from view.
Mick and Henry were laughing.
“If you pull this one off, Bear, I will eat my socks. You just love to push it, don’t you?” Mick said, smiling.
“Yep, good try, but you aren’t going to see him again, I guarantee you,” Henry added.
Thanks to the pilot’s big balls, he was wrong.
The heli returned empty, I leapt aboard, and with the rotors whirring at full power to get some grip in the thin air, the bird slowly lifted into the air.
The stall warning light kept buzzing away as we fought against gravity, but then the nose dipped and soon we were skimming over the rocks, away from base camp and down the glacier.
I was out of there--and Mick was busy taking his socks off.
As we descended, I spotted, far beneath us, this lone figure sat on a rock in the middle of a giant boulder field. Neil’s two white “beacons” shining bright.
I love it. I smiled.
We picked Neil up, and in an instant we were flying together through the huge Himalayan valleys like an eagle freed.
Neil and I sat back in the helicopter, faces pressed against the glass, and watched our life for the past three months become a shimmer in the distance.
The great mountain faded into a haze, hidden from sight. I leaned against Neil’s shoulder and closed my eyes.
Everest was gone.
”
”
Bear Grylls (Mud, Sweat and Tears)
“
Mais la question ne se réduit pas seulement à l'ennui que procure cette gent écrivassière ; il faut aussi souligner sa nocivité, car la « stupidité intelligente », surtout dans l'Italie actuelle, est remarquablement organisée. C'est une sorte de franc-maçonnerie implantée dans différents milieux et qui détient pratiquement toutes les positions-clés de l'édition, lorsque celles-ci ne sont pas déjà tenues et contrôlées par des éléments de gauche. Ses représentants possèdent un flair très développé pour reconnaître immédiatement ceux qui ont une nature différente et pour les frapper d'ostracisme. Nous donnerons à ce sujet un exemple banal mais significatif II existe en Italie un groupe d'intellectuels rassemblés autour d'une revue assez largement diffusée et bien faite, qui se voudrait anticonformiste et qui critique volontiers le régime politique et les moeurs d'aujourd'hui. Mais cette revue s'est bien gardée de contacter les rares auteurs qui pourraient lui donner, si elle voulait faire un travail sérieux, une base positive en matière de principes et de vision traditionnelle du monde. Ces auteurs ne sont pas seulement ignorés, ils sont aussi rejetés, exactement comme fait la presse de gauche, précisément parce qu'on sent que ce sont des hommes d'une autre trempe. Cela montre clairement que ce brillant anticonformisme n'est qu'un moyen pour se faire remarquer et pour parader, tout restant sur le plan du dilettantisme. Au demeurant, le fondateur de la revue en question, mort il y a quelques années, n'hésita pas à dire un jour que si un régime différent existait aujourd'hui, il changerait probablement de camp, de façon à être toujours dans l'« opposition» - le but, évidemment, étant de « briller » et d'étaler son « intelligence ».
”
”
Julius Evola (L'arco e la clava)
“
The present system is a capitalist system. This means that the world is divided up into two antagonistic camps, the camp of a small handful of capitalists and the camp of the majority - the proletarians. The proletarians work day and night, nevertheless they remain poor. The capitalists do not work, nevertheless they are rich. This takes place not because the proletarians are unintelligent and the capitalists are geniuses, but because the capitalists appropriate the fruit of the labour of the proletarians, because the capitalists exploit the proletarians. Why is the fruit of the labour of the proletarians appropriated by the capitalists and not by the proletarians? Why do the capitalists exploit the proletarians and not vice versa? Because the capitalist system is based on commodity production: here everything assumes the form of a commodity, everywhere the principle of buying and selling prevails. Here you can buy not only articles of consumption, not only food products, but also the labour power of men, their blood and their consciousness. The capitalists know all of this and purchase the labour power of the proletarians, they hire them. This means the capitalists become the owners of the labour power they buy. The proletarians, however, lose their right to the labour power which they have sold. That is to say, what is produced by that labour power no longer belongs to the proletarians, it belongs only to the capitalists and goes into their pockets. The labour power which you have sold may produce in the course of a day, goods to the value of 100 rubles, but that is not your business, those goods do not belong to you, it is the business only of the capitalists, and the goods belong to them - all that you must receive is your daily wage which, perhaps, may be sufficient to satisfy your essential needs if, of course, you live frugally.
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Joseph Stalin (Anarchism or Socialism?)
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In September 1999, the Department of Justice succeeded in denaturalizing 63 participants in Nazi acts of persecution; and in removing 52 such individuals from this country. This appears to be but a small portion of those who actually were brought here by our own government. A 1999 report to the Senate and the House said "that between 1945 and 1955, 765 scientists, engineers, and technicians were brought to the United States under Overcast, Paperclip, and similar programs. It has been estimated that at least half, and perhaps as many as 80 percent of all the imported specialists were former Nazi Party members."
A number of these scientists were recruited to work for the Air Force's School of Aviation Medicine (SAM) at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas, where dozens of human radiation experiments were conducted during the Cold War. Among them were flash-blindness studies in connection with atomic weapons tests and data gathering for total-body irradiation studies conducted in Houston. The experiments for which Nazi investigators were tried included many related to aviation research. Hubertus Strughold, called "the father of space medicine," had a long career at the SAM, including the recruitment of other Paperclip scientists in Germany. On September 24, 1995 the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that as head of Nazi Germany's Air Force Institute for Aviation Medicine, Strughold particpated in a 1942 conference that discussed "experiments" on human beings. The experiments included subjecting Dachau concentration camp inmates to torture and death.
The Edgewood Arsenal of the Army's Chemical Corps as well as other military research sites recruited these scientists with backgrounds in aeromedicine, radiobiology, and opthamology. Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland ended up conducting experiments on more than seven thousand American soldiers. Using Auschwitz experiments as a guide, they conducted the same type of poison gas experiments that had been done in the secret I.G. Farben laboratories.
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Carol Rutz (A Nation Betrayed: Secret Cold War Experiments Performed on Our Children and Other Innocent People)
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Porteurs
Notre monde repose sur les épaules de l'autre. Sur des enfants au travail, sur des plantations et des matières premières payées bon marché : des épaules d'inconnus portent notre poids, obèse de disproportion de richesses. Je l'ai vu.
Dans les ascensions qui durent bien des jours vers les camps de base des hautes altitudes, des hommes et aussi des femmes et des enfants portent notre poids dans des hottes tressées. Tables, chaises, vaisselle, tentes, cuisinières, combustibles cordes, matériel d'escalade, nourriture pour plusieurs semaines, en somme un village pour vivre là où il n'y a rien.
Ils portent notre poids pour le prix moyen de trois cents roupies népalaises par jour, moins de quatre euros. Les hottes pèsent quarante kilos, mais certains en portent de plus lourdes. Les étapes sont longues, elles fatiguent le voyageur avec son petit sac à dos et le minimum nécessaire.
Des porteurs de tout notre confort marchent avec des tongs ou bien pieds nus sur des pentes qui manquent d'oxygène, la température baissant. La nuit, ils campent en plein air autour d'un feu, ils font cuire du riz et des légumes cueillis dans les parages, tant que quelque chose sort de terre. Au Népal, la végétation monte jusqu'à trois mille cinq cents mètres.
Nous autres, nous dormons dans une tente avec un repas chaud cuisiné par eux.
Ils portent notre poids et ne perdent pas un gramme. Il ne manque pas un mouchoir au bagage remis en fin d'étape.
Ils ne sont pas plus faits pour l'altitude que nous, la nuit je les entends tousser. Ce sont souvent des paysans des basses vallées de rizières. Nous avançons péniblement en silence, eux ne renoncent pas à se parler, à raconter, tout en marchant.
Nous habillés de couches de technologie légère, aérée, chaude, coupe-vent, et cetera, eux avec des vêtements usés, des pulls en laine archiélimés : ils portent notre poids et sourient cent plus que le plus extraverti de nos joyeux compères.
Ils nous préparent des pâtes avec l'eau de la neige, ils nous ont même apporté des oeufs ici, à cinq mille mètres. Sans eux, nous ne serions ni agiles, ni athlétiques, ni riches. Ils disparaissent en fin de transport, ils se dispersent dans les vallées, juste à temps pour le travail du riz et de l'orge. (p. 11-12)
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Erri De Luca (Sulla traccia di Nives)
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In theory, toppings can include almost anything, but 95 percent of the ramen you consume in Japan will be topped with chashu, Chinese-style roasted pork. In a perfect world, that means luscious slices of marinated belly or shoulder, carefully basted over a low temperature until the fat has rendered and the meat collapses with a hard stare. Beyond the pork, the only other sure bet in a bowl of ramen is negi, thinly sliced green onion, little islands of allium sting in a sea of richness. Pickled bamboo shoots (menma), sheets of nori, bean sprouts, fish cake, raw garlic, and soy-soaked eggs are common constituents, but of course there is a whole world of outlier ingredients that make it into more esoteric bowls, which we'll get into later.
While shape and size will vary depending on region and style, ramen noodles all share one thing in common: alkaline salts. Called kansui in Japanese, alkaline salts are what give the noodles a yellow tint and allow them to stand up to the blistering heat of the soup without degrading into a gummy mass. In fact, in the sprawling ecosystem of noodle soups, it may be the alkaline noodle alone that unites the ramen universe: "If it doesn't have kansui, it's not ramen," Kamimura says.
Noodles and toppings are paramount in the ramen formula, but the broth is undoubtedly the soul of the bowl, there to unite the disparate tastes and textures at work in the dish. This is where a ramen chef makes his name. Broth can be made from an encyclopedia of flora and fauna: chicken, pork, fish, mushrooms, root vegetables, herbs, spices. Ramen broth isn't about nuance; it's about impact, which is why making most soup involves high heat, long cooking times, and giant heaps of chicken bones, pork bones, or both.
Tare is the flavor base that anchors each bowl, that special potion- usually just an ounce or two of concentrated liquid- that bends ramen into one camp or another. In Sapporo, tare is made with miso. In Tokyo, soy sauce takes the lead. At enterprising ramen joints, you'll find tare made with up to two dozen ingredients, an apothecary's stash of dried fish and fungus and esoteric add-ons. The objective of tare is essentially the core objective of Japanese food itself: to pack as much umami as possible into every bite.
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Matt Goulding (Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture)
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Zubaydah was transferred in 2006 to the Guantánamo Bay detention camp. The videotapes of his interrogations, along with recordings of the torture of other detainees, were ordered destroyed by the head of the CIA’s clandestine service, Jose Rodriguez, despite standing orders from the White House Counsel’s Office to preserve them. According to his attorney, Zubaydah, who remains in Guantánamo today, has “permanent brain damage,” has suffered hundreds of seizures, and “cannot picture his mother’s face or recall his father’s name.” Some might read this and say to themselves, “Who gives a damn what happened to a terrorist after what they did on September 11?” But it’s not about them. It never was. What makes us exceptional? Our wealth? Our natural resources? Our military power? Our big, bountiful country? No, our founding ideals and our fidelity to them at home and in our conduct in the world make us exceptional. They are the source of our wealth and power. Living under the rule of law. Facing threats with confidence that our values make us stronger than our enemies. Acting as an example to other nations of how free people defend their liberty without sacrificing the moral conviction upon which it is based, respect for the dignity possessed by all God’s children, even our enemies. This is what made us the great nation we are. My fellow POWs and I could work up very intense hatred for the people who tortured us. We cussed them, made up degrading names for them, swore we would get back at them someday. That kind of resistance, angry and pugnacious, can only carry you so far when your enemy holds most of the cards and hasn’t any scruples about beating the resistance out of you however long it takes. Eventually, you won’t cuss them. You won’t refuse to bow. You won’t swear revenge. Still, they can’t make you surrender what they really want from you, your assent to their supremacy. No, you don’t have to give them that, not in your heart. And your last resistance, the one that sticks, the one that makes the victim superior to the torturer, is the belief that were the positions reversed you wouldn’t treat them as they have treated you. The ultimate victim of torture is the torturer, the one who inflicts pain and suffering at the cost of their humanity.
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John McCain (The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations)
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As soon as the Rabbi of Bluzhov had finished the ceremony of kindling the lights, Zamietchkowski elbowed his way to the rabbi and said, “Spira, you are a clever and honest person. I can understand your need to light Hanukkah candles in these wretched times. I can even understand the historical note of the second blessing, ‘Who wroughtest miracles for our fathers in days of old, at this season.’ But the fact that you recited the third blessing is beyond me. How could you thank God and say ‘Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who has kept us alive, and hast preserved us, and enabled us to reach this season’? How could you say it when hundreds of dead Jewish bodies are literally lying within the shadows of the Hanukkah lights, when thousands of living Jewish skeletons are walking around in camp, and millions more are being massacred? For this you are thankful to God? For this you praise the Lord? This you call ‘keeping us alive’?” “Zamietchkowski, you are a hundred percent right,” answered the rabbi. “When I reached the third blessing, I also hesitated and asked myself, what should I do with this blessing? I turned my head in order to ask the Rabbi of Zaner and other distinguished rabbis who were standing near me, if indeed I might recite the blessing. But just as I was turning my head, I noticed that behind me a throng was standing, a large crowd of living Jews, their faces expressing faith, devotion, and concentration as they were listening to the rite of the kindling of the Hanukkah lights. I said to myself, if God, blessed be He, has such a nation that at times like these, when during the lighting of the Hanukkah lights they see in front of them the heaps of bodies of their beloved fathers, brothers, and sons, and death is looking from every corner, if despite all that, they stand in throngs and with devotion listening to the Hanukkah blessing ‘Who wroughtest miracles for our fathers in days of old, at this season’; if, indeed, I was blessed to see such a people with so much faith and fervor, then I am under a special obligation to recite the third blessing.”2 Some years after liberation, the Rabbi of Bluzhov, now residing in Brooklyn, New York, received regards from Mr. Zamietchkowski. Zamietchkowski asked the son of the Skabiner Rabbi to tell Israel Spira, the Rabbi of Bluzhov, that the answer he gave him that dark Hanukkah night in Bergen Belsen had stayed with him ever since, and was a constant source of inspiration during hard and troubled times. Based
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Yaffa Eliach (Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust: The First Original Hasidic Tales in a Century)
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Sharon passed around a handout: "Triangle of Self-Actualization" by Abraham Maslow. The levels of human motivation. It resembled the nutrition triangle put out by the FDA, with five horizontal levels of multiple colors. I vaguely remembered it from my one college psychology course in the 1970's.
"Very applicable with refugees," Sharon said. "Maslow theorized that one could not move to a higher level until the prior level was satisfied. The first level, the triangle base, is physiological needs. Like food and water. Until a person has enough to eat and drink, that's all one would be concerned with."
I'd never experienced not being able to satisfy my thirst or hunger, but it sounded logical that that would be my only concern in such a situation. For the Lost Boys, just getting enough food and water had been a daily struggle. I wondered what kind of impact being stuck at the bottom level for the last fourteen years would have on a person, especially a child and teen.
"The second level is safety and security. Home. A sanctuary. A safe place."
Like not being shot at or having lions attack you. They hadn't had much of level two, either. Even Kakuma hadn't been safe. A refugee camp couldn't feel like home.
"The third level is social. A sense of belonging."
Since they'd been together, they must have felt like they belonged, but perhaps not on a larger scale, having been displaced from home and living in someone else's country.
"Once a person has food, shelter, family and friends, they can advance to the fourth level, which is ego. Self-esteem."
I'd never thought of those things occurring sequentially, but rather simultaneously, as they did in my life. If I understood correctly, working on their self-esteem had not been a large concern to them, if one at all. That was bound to affect them eventually. In what way remained to be seen. They'd been so preoccupied with survival that issues of self-worth might overwhelm them at first. A sure risk for insecurity and depression.
The information was fascinating and insightful, although worrisome in terms of Benson, Lino, and Alepho. It also made me wonder about us middle-and upper-class Americans. We seldom worried about food, except for eating too much, and that was not what Maslow had been referring to. Most of us had homes and safety and friends and family. That could mean we were entirely focused on that fourth level: ego. Our efforts to make ourselves seem strong, smart, rich, and beautiful, or young were our own kind of survival skill. Perhaps advancing directly to the fourth level, when the mind was originally engineered for the challenges of basic survival, was why Prozac and Zoloft, both antidepressants, were two of the biggest-selling drugs in America.
"The pinnacle of the triangle," Sharon said, "is the fifth level. Self-actualization. A strong and deeply felt belief that as a person one has value in the world. Contentment with who one is rather than what one has. Secure in ones beliefs. Not needing ego boosts from external factors. Having that sense of well-being that does not depend on the approval of others is commonly called happiness."
Happiness, hard to define, yet obvious when present. Most of us struggled our entire lives to achieve it, perhaps what had brought some of us to a mentoring class that night.
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Judy A. Bernstein (Disturbed in Their Nests: A Journey from Sudan's Dinkaland to San Diego's City Heights)
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Speech to the German Folk
January 30, 1944
Without January 30, 1933, and without the National Socialist revolution, without the tremendous domestic cleansing and construction efforts, there would be no factor today that could oppose the Bolshevik colossus. After all, Germany was itself so ill at the time, so weakened by the spreading Jewish infection, that it could hardly think of overcoming the Bolshevik danger at home, not to mention abroad. The economic ruin brought about by the Jews as in other countries, the unemployment of millions of Germans, the destruction of peasantry, trade, and industry only prepared the way for the planned internal collapse. This was furthered by support for the continued existence of a senseless state of classes, which could only serve to transform the reason of the masses into hatred in order to make them the willing instrument of the Bolshevik revolution. By mobilizing the proletarian slaves, the Jews hoped that, following the destruction of the national intelligentsia, they could all the more reduce them for good to coolies. But even if this process of the Bolshevik revolt in the interior of Germany had not led to complete success, the state with its democratic Weimar constitution would have been reduced to something ridiculously helpless in view of the great tasks of current world politics. In order to be armed for this confrontation, not only the problems of political power but also the social and economic problems had to be resolved.
When National Socialism undertook the realization of its program eleven years ago, it managed just in time to build up a state that did not only have the strength at home but also the power abroad to fulfill the same European mission which first Greece fulfilled in antiquity by opposing the Persians, then Rome [by opposing] the Carthaginians, and the Occident in later centuries by opposing the invasions from the east.
Therefore, in the year 1933, we set ourselves four great tasks among many others. On their resolution depended not only the future of the Reich but also the rescue of Europe, perhaps even of the entire human civilization:
1. The Reich had to regain the internal social peace that it had lost by resolving the social questions. That meant that the elements of a division into classes bourgeoisie and proletariat-had to be eliminated in their various manifestations and be replaced by a Volksgemeinschaft. The appeal to reason had to be supplemented by the merciless eradication of the base elements of resistance in all camps.
2. The social and political unification of the nation had to be supplemented by a national, political one. This meant that the body of the Reich, which was not only politically, but also governmentally divided, had to be replaced by a unified National Socialist state, the construction and leadership of which were suited to oppose and withstand even the heaviest attacks and severest tests of the future.
3. The nationally and politically coherent centralized state had the mission of immediately creating a Wehrmacht, whose ideology, moral attitude, numerical strength, and material equipment could serve as an instrument of self-assertion. After the outside world had rejected all German offers for a limitation of armament, the Reich had to fashion its own armament accordingly.
4. In order to secure its continued existence in Europe with the prospect of actual success, it was necessary to integrate all those countries which were inhabited by Germans, or were areas which had belonged to the German Reich for over a thousand years and which, in terms of their national substance and economy, were indispensable to the preservation of the Reich, that is, for its political and military defense.
Only the resolution of all these tasks could result in the creation of that state which was capable, at home and abroad, of waging the fight for its defense and for the preservation of the European family of nations.
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Adolf Hitler
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The troupe also made a 20,000–mile trip into the European war. Hope was the first American entertainer to perform in Sicily. He did a show at Messina just after the enemy had fled the town and was still bombarding the area with its artillery. By the end of the war, it was estimated that Hope had appeared at virtually every camp, naval base, and hospital in the country. He had made half a dozen trips overseas, including a tour of the South Pacific in 1944 that was highlighted by a crash landing in Australia. With him then was the same crew that had gone to Italy the year before: Langford, Colonna, dancer Patty Thomas, guitarist Tony Romano, and an old vaudeville pal, Barney Dean. Newsweek called it “the biggest entertainment giveaway in history,” a pace that no one in show business has ever equaled. “It is impossible to see how he can do so much, can cover so much ground, can work so hard, and can be so effective,” novelist John Steinbeck said of Hope. For his service to the country, Hope was given more than 100 awards and citations and two special Oscars. He was voted a place in the Smithsonian’s Living Hall of Fame.
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John Dunning (On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio)
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DOUG ELLIN, Writer and Director: When we went to sell Entourage to HBO, the character of Ari didn’t really exist. There was an agent, but at that point it was based on some version of Jeff Jacobs, my agent at the time. I first met Jeff when he was a counselor at the camp I went to when I was twelve, and he was what I knew best of as an agent. At the pitch meeting, it was me, Jeff, Steven Levinson, and Ari, who was there because he represented Mark Wahlberg. I had never even heard of Ari before this, but as soon as the meeting started, Ari said three or four things that just blew me away. The guy was unlike anyone I had ever met, and I remember I looked at Jeff right there and said, “This character is changing to Ari.
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James Andrew Miller (Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood's Creative Artists Agency)
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An ecological farmer once told me that he quit industrial farming when he realized that his first waking thought every morning was: 'I wonder what's dead up there in the hog house today?' He couldn't hear the birds chirping. He couldn't enjoy the sunrise, or the rainbow after a thunderstorm. And his kids wanted nothing to do with the farm.
But after this epiphany, he closed down the pig concentration camp and devoted himself to pasture-based farming. Suddenly his children wanted to be involved. His thoughts turned lofty. He developed a can-do spirit. And his emotional zest returned.
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Joel Salatin (The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs: Respecting and Caring for All God's Creation)
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He unstrapped his axe and swung it around. It was beautiful in a harsh I’m-going-to-gut-you-like-a-fish kind of way. Each of its twin blades was shaped like an omega: Ω—the last letter of the Greek alphabet. Maybe that was because the axe would be the last thing his victims ever saw. The shaft was about the same height as the Minotaur, bronze wrapped in leather. Tied around the base of each blade were lots of bead necklaces. I realized they were Camp Half-Blood beads—necklaces taken from defeated demigods.
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Rick Riordan (The Last Olympian (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, #5))
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In September 1999, the Department of Justice succeeded in denaturalizing 63 participants in Nazi acts of persecution; and in removing 52 such individuals from this country. This appears to be but a small portion of those who actually were brought here by our own government. A 1999 report to the Senate and the House said "that between 1945 and 1955, 765 scientists, engineers, and technicians were brought to the United States under Overcast, Paperclip, and similar programs. It has been estimated that at least half, and perhaps as many as 80 percent of all the imported specialists were former Nazi Party members."
A number of these scientist were recruited to work for the Air Force's School of Aviation Medicine (SAM) at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas, where dozens of human radiation experiments were conducted during the Cold War. Among them were flash-blindness studies in connection with atomic weapons tests and data gathering for total-body irradiation studies conducted in Houston. The experiments for which Nazi investigators were tried included many related to aviation research. Hubertus Strughold, called "the father of space medicine," had a long career at the SAM, including the recruitment of other Paperclip scientists in Germany. On September 24, 1995 the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that as head of Nazi Germany's Air Force Institute for Aviation Medicine, Strughold particpated in a 1942 conference that discussed "experiments" on human beings. The experiments included subjecting Dachau concentration camp inmates to torture and death.
The Edgewood Arsenal of the Army's Chemical Corps as well as other military research sites recruited these scientists with backgrounds in aeromedicine, radiobiology, and opthamology. Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland ended up conducting experiments on more than seven thousand American soldiers. Using Auschwitz experiments as a guide, they conducted the same type of poison gas experiments that had been done in the secret I.G. Farben laboratories.
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Carol Rutz (A Nation Betrayed: Secret Cold War Experiments Performed on Our Children and Other Innocent People)
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Rokossovsky’s Second Belorussian Front had taken Prenzlau, fifty miles to the east. The German army now blew up fuel depots and military bases around Fürstenberg, ready for the final retreat.
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Sarah Helm (If This Is A Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women)
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Roman general Flavius Silva arrived at the base of Masada Fortress in the winter of AD 72–73. History tells us he had a full legion of soldiers at his command, as well as thousands of slaves and camp followers. History does not preserve what he was thinking at that moment, but anyone who has ever seen Masada Fortress knows it must have been some version of, “Oh, shit.
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Thor Hanson (The Triumph of Seeds: How Grains, Nuts, Kernels, Pulses, and Pips Conquered the Plant Kingdom and Shaped Human History)
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As Steve glided along the edge of the overhanging leaves, every now and then a golden orb spiderweb would clutch at my hair, the thick, yellow, sticky webbing covering my head, the boat, and the torch. Steve was oblivious to anything but the crocodiles.
Some of them allowed us to get close. Steve could gauge a croc’s total size based on the length of its head. My heart kept pounding, and I tried to do everything right. He showed me how to hold the spotlight right under my chin, so that I could look directly over the beam and pick up the eye-shine of the crocs. I was tired, yet adrenaline surged through my veins.
“Look, look, look,” Steve whispered excitedly, “there’s another one.” There was something strange about this one, only a single red eye reflected. Perhaps the other one had been shot out, Steve suggested.
“He’s big,” he whispered. “Maybe fifteen feet.”
We edged closer. The engine coughed and suddenly ground to a stop. Steve leaned over the back of the dinghy, reaching in up to his shoulder in the water, to clear the weeds from around the propeller.
The single red eye blinked out. The big croc had submerged. Submerged where? I thought. Steve finally cleared the weeds and yanked the ignition cord, but the engine refused to turn over.
I am in the middle of nowhere. It’s nighttime. I am surrounded by crocodiles. The boat motor won’t start. Steve will be snatched and eaten by One-Eye right off the back of the boat. Then I’ll be alone.
But after some gentle persuasion (some of it verbal, and not so gentle), the engine finally started. The heat hadn’t really broken when we got back to camp. It was still well over ninety degrees. The insects that had been attracted to my spotlight were stuck and struggling in the sweat running down my back.
“How about a quick tub?” Steve said. That was Australian for bath. Somehow, the words “bath” and “crocodile” refused to go together in my mind.
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Terri Irwin (Steve & Me)
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There are many faces to the horrors of war-- decimation, mutilation, barbarity, and, of course, death itself. But one of the most savage and dehumanizing consequences of armed conflict is the prison system that springs up to house enemy combatants--and ordinary citizens too. These hellish camps encapsulate the lowest depths of human depravity; ruled by violence and degeneracy, political prisoners are forced to endure unthinkable conditions and unchecked cruelty--all without any chance of reprieve. Uta Christensen's latest novel, Caught: Surviving the Turbulent River of Life, chronicles this appalling consequence of war, weaving a narrative of atrocity that, despite its artful inventions and complex characters, is so starkly based on grim realities... that one cannot help but shudder.
Caught tells the story of Janos, a young German boy kidnapped by the Nazis during WWII--and forced into a Russian prison camp. There, Janos must survive against all odds, fighting off starvation and death at every turn as the years march on... and he becomes a man. It is, in fact, within the hardships of this very crucible, that Janos thrives, overcoming the frailties and ignobilities of existence to discover friendship, compassion, and love--making him into the apotheosis of an upstanding, self-reliant citizen: a true model to all his fellow countrymen.
Told in flashbacks, Caught: Surviving the Turbulent River of Life explores the intricate nature of suffering and memory, delving into the complexities of how the past--even the most vicious episodes--informs the present... and the very nature of the self. Uta Christensen, with striking prose and a poetic sensibility, brings the darker chapters of history to life in such a way that one is instantly captivated by a concurrent horror and pity, a sense of tragedy, but too a catharsis in overcoming, in human resilience and beauty itself. A truly breathtaking novel, Caught is a tour de force of literary perfection; poignant, unremitting, and painfully real, this book is essential reading for all those willing to face hard truths--and grow from them.
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Phi Beta Kappa review, 5 Star Review by Charles Asher.
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The admiral tossed the report at Molina and said to me, “Tell us about it.” “Jade Helm is an exercise about how the government will put down a right-wing uprising, or rebellion, and arrest everyone they think might be sympathetic with the rebels. They’ll use these paramilitary police they have tucked into every government alphabet agency as storm troopers and SS troops—” That was as far as I got. Molina exploded. “Comparing the federal government to Nazis is unacceptable. I am not going to sit here listening to that kind of shit, Carmellini.” I didn’t say anything. Sal Molina couldn’t fire me, and if Grafton did, I was ready to be on my way. Truth was, I had been in the belly of the beast for far too long. “Go on, Tommy,” Grafton prompted, ignoring Molina. “They’ll arrest every prominent Republican they can find and hold them in guarded camps, mainly at military bases. They have computer-generated lists. Gun owners, people who run their mouths on Facebook and Twitter, radio talk-show hosts, editors and publishers of Republican newspapers. . .you know, dangerous enemies of society.
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Stephen Coonts (Liberty's Last Stand (Tommy Carmellini #7))
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The name Camp Columbia came from a historic and rather poetic name for the United States. It was founded in 1898, for the purpose of housing U.S. Army troops during the provisional American protectorate over Cuba. It was also considered “the First American occupation of Cuba,” established in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War. After the withdrawal of American troops, the military establishment was turned over to the Cuban government and became the largest Cuban army base on the island. On September 4, 1933, at Camp Columbia, an army base in Havana, Batista with his inner circle of conspirators took over power as he forced a military coup. Labor leaders who had opposed Machado’s re-election, along with “The Student Directory” comprised of teachers as well as students, joined the sergeants in assuming control of the government. In this way, Batista turned the revolt within the military into the full-blown “Revolution of 1933.
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Hank Bracker
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If you can’t, and you think any strategic or performance goal will be successful without the hard-core support of this particular group, you’re building a base camp on Mt. Delusional.
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Stan Slap (Under the Hood: Fire Up and Fine-Tune Your Employee Culture)
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A Stand (based on a true story)
The lone figure emerges from the mist, his long white beard blows in the wind.
A peculiar sight for guard and prisoners alike. Soon more emerge as the old man advances. 7,14,21...soon a hundred unarmed saints. "What do they want?" "Who are they?" "Are these the followers of Jesus?" "Surely not, or they like others would sing louder as screams echo from death train." "No, no my brother it is them." "Why have they come?" The lone figure pushes gunmen aside. "Can't go in there!" Guards cry. Heeding them not he stands in the midst of the prisoners. Eyes of surprised prisoners, Eyes of dumb struck guards, Eyes of bold congregation standing at the gate."What will he do?" "What can he do?" "Tomorrow to death camp we go." But then...
Lifting up holy book he roars prophetically the words of Ruth 1:16,17. A thunder of applause within and outwith the gates. Gates that will not prevail.
Guards disband for the Word of the Lord has been spoken. Never again do they return, All because a few made A STAND to save children of the promised land.
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David Holdsworth
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By May 1864, the Fort Pillow affair became a matter of Congressional investigations, with many leaders from both Union and Confederate camps anxious to condemn Forrest simply on principle alone. Certainly those who had personally experienced his temper and knew of his volatile reputation could easily imagine him capable of a massacre. Somewhat surprisingly, one of the men who believed Forrest was not guilty of an intentional massacre was General Sherman, who by 1864 begrudgingly admired his troublesome adversary. Based on statements taken from many of his own men who had been taken prisoner by Forrest and attested that “he was usually very kind to them,
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Charles River Editors (Andersonville Prison: The History of the Civil War’s Most Notorious Prison Camp)
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But before I go, I will say this. Yes, my brothers are extreme, but I like them that way. Besides, there aren’t that many men in the universe who would kick down a League prison door, raid an assassin base camp, or start an intergalactic war to protect their spouses. Bat-shit crazy works for us.
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Sherrilyn Kenyon (Born of Fury (The League: Nemesis Rising, #6))
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The historical record also shows that attitudes toward homosexuality have little to do with whether people believe it occurs in animals or not, and consequently, in its "naturalness". True, throughout much of recorded history, the charge of "unnaturalness" - including the claim that homosexuality did not occur in animals - was used to justify every imaginable form of sanction, control, and repression against homosexuality. But many other interpretations of "naturalness" were also prevalent at various times. Indeed, the very fact that homosexuality was thought to be "unnatural" - that is, not found in nature - was sometimes used to justify its *superiority* to heterosexuality. In ancient Greece, for example, same-sex love was thought to be purer than opposite-sex love because it did not involve procreation or "animal-like" passions. On the other hand, homosexuality was sometimes condemned precisely because it was considered *closer* to "nature", reflecting the base, uncontrolled sexual instincts of the animal world. The Nazis used this reasoning (in part) to target homosexuals and other "subhumans" for the concentration camps (where homosexual men subjected to medical experiments were referred to as test animals), while sexual relations between women were disparaginly characterized as "animal love" in late eighteenth-century New England . The irrationality of such beliefs is highlighted in cases where charges of "unnaturalness" were combined, paradoxically, with accusations of animalistic behavior. Some early Latin texts, for instance, simultaneously condemned homosexuals for exhibiting behavior unknown in animals while also denouncing them for imitating particular species (such as the hyena or hare) that were believed to indulge in homosexuality.
In our own time, the fact that a given characteristic of a minority human population is biologically determined has little to do with whether that population should be - or is - discriminated against. Racial minorities, for example, can claim a biological basis for their difference, yet this has done little to eliminate racial prejudice. Religious groups, on the other hand, can claim no such biological prerogative, and yet this does not invalidate the entitlement of such groups to freedom from discrimination. It should be clear, then, that whether homosexuality is biologically determined or not - none of these things guarantee the acceptance or rejection of homosexuality or in itself renders homosexuality "valid" or "illegitimate".
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Bruce Bagemihl (Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity)
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We tend to fall into two camps: those who crumple, sink, wither and fade under the weight of the unimaginable pain; and those of us who take that hurt, ball it tightly, put it in the base of our gut and use it as fuel. And when that happens it is a very powerful thing, the most powerful. It is an unstoppable force and one that can do good, immeasurable good.
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Amanda Prowse (An Ordinary Life)
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enabling us to establish a near-permanent “base camp” near the summit, consistently close to the top, within striking distance, never falling to the bottom of the mountain and having to start all over again. Initially, it meant I had to drastically change the environment, raise the level of talent, and teach everyone what they needed to know to get to where I wanted us to go.
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Bill Walsh (The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership)
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Almost intermixed with the animals are the Masai following the grass cycle with their cattle herds, living off the milk and blood of their cows. We would go early in the morning from a base camp in Land Rovers and all-terrain vehicles, armed with cameras and binoculars. The tour operators apologized for the presence of the Masai.
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Alistair MacLeod
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Base Camp With “tough tech” ventures—in which product development demands a vast amount of leading-edge science and engineering work—entrepreneurs often consider creating ancillary businesses before launching their primary business. These pared-down versions serve as the first application for the technologies they’re developing. Samir Kaul and his partners at Khosla Ventures have likened these ancillary businesses to a base camp, where mountaineers pause to organize their provisions and get acclimated to low oxygen levels before their final push to the summit.
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Tom Eisenmann (Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success)
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Base Camp, We need advice. ... We've run out of Earth
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Bear Grylls (Facing Up: A Remarkable Journey to the Summit of Mount Everest)
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the People’s Republic of China has rounded up as many as three million of them, as well as other Muslim ethnic groups, into what it euphemistically calls “reeducation camps.” These arrests are extrajudicial, based on an individual’s race, ethnicity and religion, the same criteria used by Nazi Germany to round up Jews and Roma.
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Nury Turkel (No Escape: The True Story of China's Genocide of the Uyghurs)
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The following year, in April 1986, the AP published yet another report on Contras and cocaine. It revealed that the FBI had quietly launched an investigation into accounts of weapons shipments from the United States to Contra base camps in Central America, Contra involvement in drug smuggling, and a reported conspiracy to assassinate the U.S. Ambassador to Costa Rica. Several individuals interviewed by the AP confirmed the stories, sharing firsthand knowledge on the condition of anonymity.
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Donovan X. Ramsey (When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era)
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My health issues are now fully understood, treated and I am back to normal. It was a mix of amino acid deficiencies and low testosterone causing serious food intolerance and altitude hypersensitivity to occur. Low magnesium was causing sleep apnea and I now take magnesium supplements. I had also lost my circadian rhythm and it restored while I was homeless and camping outdoors for five months in the Hawaiian jungle. Based on my testing, I will have to take amino acids, magnesium and testosterone for the rest of my life. The sickness comes back if I stop the supplements.
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Steven Magee