“
Companionate love is neurologically different from passionate love. Passionate love always spikes early, then fades away, while companionate love is less intense but grows over time. And, whereas passionate love lights up the brain’s pleasure centers, companionate love is associated with the regions having to do with long-term bonding and relationships. Anthropologist Helen Fisher, the author of Anatomy of Love and one of the most cited scholars in the study of sex and
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Aziz Ansari (Modern Romance: An Investigation)
“
The true test of any scholar's work is not what his contemporaries say, but what happens to his work in the next 25 or 50 years. And the thing that I will really be proud of is if some of the work I have done is still cited in the text books long after I am gone.
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Milton Friedman
“
Jubal longed for the days when a lawyer could cite the Bill of Rights and not have some over-riding Federation trickery defeat him.
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Robert A. Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land)
“
Every once in a while, an up-or-down-leg goes on for a long time and/or to a great extreme and people start to say "this time it's different." They cite the changes in geopolitics, institutions, technology or behaviour that have rendered the "old rules" obsolete. They make investment decisions that extrapolate the recent trend. And then it turns out that the old rules still apply and the cycle resumes. In the end, trees don't grow to the sky, and few things go to zero.
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Howard Marks (The Most Important Thing: Uncommon Sense for the Thoughtful Investor (Columbia Business School Publishing))
“
In other words, to be successful, American “Fascism” had to take on American form. Or to cite a dictum usually attributed to Huey Long: “When America gets Fascism it will call it Anti-Fascism.
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Wolfgang Schivelbusch (Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933–1939)
“
What is certain is that I am not a Marxist, as someone said a long time ago, let us recall, in a witticism reported by Engels. Must we still cite Marx as an authority in order to say “I am not a Marxist”?
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Jacques Derrida
“
By the Middle Ages… the introduction of the Trivium was well-known: SÂDI, an educated black from Tombouctou, author of the well-known work entitled, ‘Tarikh es-Soudan’ cites amongst the subjects that he mastered, logic, dialection, grammar, rhetoric, not to mention law and other disciplines...the long lists of subjects studied and the lettered African intellectuals who taught them at the University of Tombouctou…
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Cheikh Anta Diop (CIVILISATION OU BARBARIE)
“
A separate, international team analyzed more than a half million research articles, and classified a paper as “novel” if it cited two other journals that had never before appeared together. Just one in ten papers made a new combination, and only one in twenty made multiple new combinations. The group tracked the impact of research papers over time. They saw that papers with new knowledge combinations were more likely to be published in less prestigious journals, and also much more likely to be ignored upon publication. They got off to a slow start in the world, but after three years, the papers with new knowledge combos surpassed the conventional papers, and began accumulating more citations from other scientists. Fifteen years after publication, studies that made multiple new knowledge combinations were way more likely to be in the top 1 percent of most-cited papers. To recap: work that builds bridges between disparate pieces of knowledge is less likely to be funded, less likely to appear in famous journals, more likely to be ignored upon publication, and then more likely in the long run to be a smash hit in the library of human knowledge. •
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David Epstein (Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World)
“
In a long and fiercely argued process, against the strenuous resistance of the peers, he ordered the Sire de Coucy to stand trial. Enguerrand IV was convicted, and although the King intended a death sentence, he was persuaded by the peers to forgo it. Enguerrand was sentenced to pay a fine of 12,000 livres, to be used partly to endow masses in perpetuity for the souls of the men he had hanged, and partly to be sent to Acre to aid in the defense of the Holy Land. Legal history was made and later cited as a factor in the canonization of the King.
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Barbara W. Tuchman (A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century)
“
There is no such thing as a relationship without a contract. All relationships are governed by contracts, be they implied or explicit. Relationship contracts are not legal contracts, though sometimes societal expectations of relationships get worked into law (this can come into play in situations like divorce as well as the legal establishment and relinquishment of paternity).
The society in which you grew up provided you with a set of template contracts to which you implicitly agree whenever you enter a relationship, even a non-sexual one. For example, a common clause of many societal template contracts among friends involves agreeing to not sleep with a friend's recent ex. While you may never explicitly agree to not sleep with a friend's ex, your friend will absolutely feel violated if they discover that you shacked up with the person who dumped them just a week earlier.
Essentially, these social contracts tell an individual when they have “permission” to have specific emotional reactions. While this may not seem that impactful, these default standards can have a significant impact on one’s life. For example, in the above reaction, a friend who just got angry out of the blue at a member of their social group would be ostracized by others within the group while a friend who became angry while citing the “they slept with my ex” contract violation may receive social support from the friend group and internally feel more justified in their retaliatory action. To ferret out the contractual aspects of relationships in which you currently participate, think through something a member of that relationship might do that would have you feeling justifiably violated, even though they never explicitly agreed to never take such action.
This societal system of template contracts may have worked in a culturally and technologically homogenous world without frequent travel, but within the modern world, assumed template contracts cause copious problems.
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Simone Collins (The Pragmatist's Guide to Relationships)
“
For some, Life is rich and creamy, made according to an old peasant recipe from nothing but natural products, while Art is a pallid commercial confection, consisting mainly of artificial colourings and flavourings. For others, Art is the truer thing, full, bustling and emotionally satisfying, while Life is worse than the poorest novel: devoid of narrative, peopled by bores and rogues, short on wit, long on unpleasant incidents, and leading to a painfully predictable dénouement. Adherents of the latter view tend to cite Logan Pearsall Smith: ‘People say that life is the thing; but I prefer reading.’ Candidates are advised not to use this quotation in their answers.
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Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot)
“
What has Capitalism resolved? It has solved no problems. It has looted the world. It has left us with all this poverty. It has created lifestyles and models of consumerism that are incompatible with reality. It has poisoned the waterways. Oceans, Rivers, Lakes, Seas, the Atmosphere, the Earth. It has produced an incredible waste of resources.
I always cite one example; imagine every person in China owned a Car, or aspired to own a Car. Everyone of the 1.1 Billion people in China, or that everyone of the 800 million people in India wished to own a Car, this method, this lifestyle, and Africa did the same, and nearly 450 million Latin Americans did the same. How long would Oil last? How long would Natural Gas last? How long would natural resources last? What would be left of the Ozone layer? What would be left of Oxygen on Earth? What would happen with Carbon Dioxide? And all these phenomenon that are changing the ecology of our world, they are changing Earth, they are making life on our Planet more and more difficult all the time.
What model has Capitalism given the world to follow? An example for societies to emulate? Shouldn’t we focus on more rational things, like the education of the whole population? Nutrition, health, a respectable lodging, an elevated culture? Would you say capitalism, with it’s blind laws, it’s selfishness as a fundamental principle, has given us something to emulate? Has it shown us a path forward? Is humanity going to travel on the course charted thus far? There may be talk of a crisis in socialism, but, today, there is an even greater crises in capitalism, with no end in sight.
”
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Fidel Castro
“
Even if we have a reliable criterion for detecting design, and even if that criterion tells us that biological systems are designed, it seems that determining a biological system to be designed is akin to shrugging our shoulders and saying God did it. The fear is that admitting design as an explanation will stifle scientific inquiry, that scientists will stop investigating difficult problems because they have a sufficient explanation already.
But design is not a science stopper. Indeed, design can foster inquiry where traditional evolutionary approaches obstruct it. Consider the term "junk DNA." Implicit in this term is the view that because the genome of an organism has been cobbled together through a long, undirected evolutionary process, the genome is a patchwork of which only limited portions are essential to the organism. Thus on an evolutionary view we expect a lot of useless DNA. If, on the other hand, organisms are designed, we expect DNA, as much as possible, to exhibit function. And indeed, the most recent findings suggest that designating DNA as "junk" merely cloaks our current lack of knowledge about function. For instance, in a recent issue of the Journal of Theoretical Biology, John Bodnar describes how "non-coding DNA in eukaryotic genomes encodes a language which programs organismal growth and development." Design encourages scientists to look for function where evolution discourages it.
Or consider vestigial organs that later are found to have a function after all. Evolutionary biology texts often cite the human coccyx as a "vestigial structure" that hearkens back to vertebrate ancestors with tails. Yet if one looks at a recent edition of Gray’s Anatomy, one finds that the coccyx is a crucial point of contact with muscles that attach to the pelvic floor. The phrase "vestigial structure" often merely cloaks our current lack of knowledge about function. The human appendix, formerly thought to be vestigial, is now known to be a functioning component of the immune system.
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William A. Dembski
“
I resolutely refuse to believe that the state of Edward's health had anything to do with this, and I don't say this only because I was once later accused of attacking him 'on his deathbed.' He was entirely lucid to the end, and the positions he took were easily recognizable by me as extensions or outgrowths of views he had expressed (and also declined to express) in the past. Alas, it is true that he was closer to the end than anybody knew when the thirtieth anniversary reissue of his Orientalism was published, but his long-precarious condition would hardly argue for giving him a lenient review, let alone denying him one altogether, which would have been the only alternatives. In the introduction he wrote for the new edition, he generally declined the opportunity to answer his scholarly critics, and instead gave the recent American arrival in Baghdad as a grand example of 'Orientalism' in action. The looting and destruction of the exhibits in the Iraq National Museum had, he wrote, been a deliberate piece of United States vandalism, perpetrated in order to shear the Iraqi people of their cultural patrimony and demonstrate to them their new servitude. Even at a time when anything at all could be said and believed so long as it was sufficiently and hysterically anti-Bush, this could be described as exceptionally mendacious. So when the Atlantic invited me to review Edward's revised edition, I decided I'd suspect myself more if I declined than if I agreed, and I wrote what I felt I had to.
Not long afterward, an Iraqi comrade sent me without comment an article Edward had contributed to a magazine in London that was published by a princeling of the Saudi royal family. In it, Edward quoted some sentences about the Iraq war that he off-handedly described as 'racist.' The sentences in question had been written by me. I felt myself assailed by a reaction that was at once hot-eyed and frigidly cold. He had cited the words without naming their author, and this I briefly thought could be construed as a friendly hesitance. Or as cowardice... I can never quite act the stern role of Mr. Darcy with any conviction, but privately I sometimes resolve that that's 'it' as it were. I didn't say anything to Edward but then, I never said anything to him again, either. I believe that one or two charges simply must retain their face value and not become debauched or devalued. 'Racist' is one such. It is an accusation that must either be made good upon, or fully retracted. I would not have as a friend somebody whom I suspected of that prejudice, and I decided to presume that Edward was honest and serious enough to feel the same way. I feel misery stealing over me again as I set this down: I wrote the best tribute I could manage when he died not long afterward (and there was no strain in that, as I was relieved to find), but I didn't go to, and wasn't invited to, his funeral.
”
”
Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)
“
At a lunchtime reception for the diplomatic corps in Washington, given the day before the inauguration of Barack Obama as president, I was approached by a good-looking man who extended his hand. 'We once met many years ago,' he said. 'And you knew and befriended my father.' My mind emptied, as so often happens on such occasions. I had to inform him that he had the advantage of me. 'My name is Hector Timerman. I am the ambassador of Argentina.'
In my above album of things that seem to make life pointful and worthwhile, and that even occasionally suggest, in Dr. King’s phrase as often cited by President Obama, that there could be a long arc in the moral universe that slowly, eventually bends toward justice, this would constitute an exceptional entry. It was also something more than a nudge to my memory. There was a time when the name of Jacobo Timerman, the kidnapped and tortured editor of the newspaper La Opinion in Buenos Aires, was a talismanic one. The mere mention of it was enough to elicit moans of obscene pleasure from every fascist south of the Rio Grande: finally in Argentina there was a strict ‘New Order’ that would stamp hard upon the international Communist-Jewish collusion. A little later, the mention of Timerman’s case was enough to derail the nomination of Ronald Reagan’s first nominee as undersecretary for human rights; a man who didn’t seem to have grasped the point that neo-Nazism was a problem for American values. And Timerman’s memoir, Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number, was the book above all that clothed in living, hurting flesh the necessarily abstract idea of the desaparecido: the disappeared one or, to invest it with the more sinister and grisly past participle with which it came into the world, the one who has been ‘disappeared.’ In the nuances of that past participle, many, many people vanished into a void that is still unimaginable. It became one of the keywords, along with escuadrone de la muerte or ‘death squads,’ of another arc, this time of radical evil, that spanned a whole subcontinent. Do you know why General Jorge Rafael Videla of Argentina was eventually sentenced? Well, do you? Because he sold the children of the tortured rape victims who were held in his private prison. I could italicize every second word in that last sentence without making it any more heart-stopping. And this subhuman character was boasted of, as a personal friend and genial host, even after he had been removed from the office he had defiled, by none other than Henry Kissinger. So there was an almost hygienic effect in meeting, in a new Washington, as an envoy of an elected government, the son of the brave man who had both survived and exposed the Videla tyranny.
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Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)
“
Twenty-five hundred years ago it might have been said that man understood himself as well as any other part of his world. Today he is the thing he understands least. Physics and biology have come a long way, but there has been no comparable development of anything like a science of human behavior. Greek physics and biology are now of historical interest only (no modern physicist or biologist would turn to Aristotle for help), but the dialogues of Plato are still assigned to students and cited as if they threw light on human behavior. Aristotle could not have understood a page of modern physics or biology, but Socrates and his friends would have little trouble in following most current discussions of human affairs. And as to technology, we have made immense strides in controlling the physical and biological worlds, but our practices in government, education, and much of economics, though adapted to very different conditions, have not greatly improved. We can scarcely explain this by saying that the Greeks knew all there was to know about human behavior. Certainly they knew more than they knew about the physical world, but it was still not much. Moreover, their way of thinking about human behavior must have had some fatal flaw. Whereas Greek physics and biology, no matter how crude, led eventually to modern science, Greek theories of human behavior led nowhere. If they are with us today, it is not because they possessed some kind of eternal verity, but because they did not contain the seeds of anything better.
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B.F. Skinner (Beyond Freedom and Dignity (Hackett Classics))
“
Bessel van der Kolk told me. He then cited Socrates: “An unexamined life is not worth living. As long as one doesn’t examine oneself, one is completely subject to whatever one is wired to do, but once you become aware that you have choices, you can exercise those choices.
”
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Gabor Maté (The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture)
“
But the most powerful arguments in favor of "a
tragic optimism" are those which in Latin are called
argumenta ad hominem. Jerry Long, to cite an example,
is a living testimony to "the defiant power of the
human spirit," as it is called in logotherapy.8 To quote
the Texarkana Gazette, "Jerry Long has been paralyzed
from his neck down since a diving accident
which rendered him a quadriplegic three years ago. He was 17 when the accident occurred. Today Long can
use his mouth stick to type. He 'attends' two courses
at Community College via a special telephone. The
intercom allows Long to both hear and participate in
class discussions. He also occupies his time by reading,
watching television and writing." And in a letter I
received from him, he writes: "I view my life as being
abundant with meaning and purpose. The attitude that
I adopted on that fateful day has become my personal
credo for life: I broke my neck, it didn't break me. I
am currently enrolled in my first psychology course in
college. I believe that my handicap will only enhance
my ability to help others. I know that without the
suffering, the growth that I have achieved would have
been impossible.
”
”
Viktor E. Frankl (Man's Search for Meaning)
“
Denis Burkitt, fueled a decade-long fiber craze. Americans were forcing down unprecedented amounts of bran muffins, oatmeal, and high-fiber breakfast cereals. Whorton cited a 1984 survey that found a third of Americans eating more fiber to stay healthy. You don’t hear so much about fiber these days.
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Mary Roach (Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal)
“
For millennia, religions in general, and Jewish, Christian, and Islamic churches in particular, have had little problem with the forced enslavement of hundreds of millions of people. It was only after the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment that rational arguments were proffered for the abolition of the slave trade, influenced by and citing such secular documents as the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. After an unconscionably long lag time, religion finally got on board the abolition train and became instrumental in helping to propel it forward.
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Michael Shermer (The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom)
“
The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, the preeminent US-based center for detailing communist crimes, cites the figure of 100 million deaths. Numerous others agree and could be listed here. Dr. Malia aptly noted that the communist record offers the 'most colossal case of political carnage in history.
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Paul Kengor (The Devil and Karl Marx: Communism's Long March of Death, Deception, and Infiltration)
“
if you remembered everything that comes into your brain, your brain would not work properly and your ability to creatively think and imagine would be diminished. Everyday life would be difficult; sure, you’d be able to recall long lists and cite elegiac love poems, but you’d struggle to grasp abstract concepts and even to recognize faces. There’s
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Sanjay Gupta (Keep Sharp: Build a Better Brain at Any Age)
“
One cannot escape the question by hand-waving at the past, disavowing the acts of one's ancestors, nor by citing a recent date of ancestral immigration. The last slave holder has been dead for a very long time. The last soldier to endure Valley Forge has been dead much longer. To proudly claim the veteran and disown the slave holder is patriotism á la carte.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates (We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy)
“
Without the pathos of distance, the sort which grows out of the deeply rooted difference between the social classes, out of the constant gazing outward and downward of the ruling caste on the subjects and work implements, and out of their equally sustained practice of obedience and command, holding down and holding at a distance, that other more mysterious pathos would have no chance of growing at all, that longing for an ever new widening of distances inside the soul itself, the development of ever higher, rarer, more distant, more expansive, more comprehensive states, in short, simply the enhancement in the type 'man,' the constant 'self-conquest of man,' to cite a moral formula in a supra-moral sense. Of course, where the history of the origins of aristocratic society is concerned (and thus the precondition for that raising of the type 'man' —), We should not surrender to humanitarian illusions: truth is hard. So without further consideration, let's admit to ourselves how up to this point every higher culture on earth has started! People with a still natural nature, barbarians in every dreadful sense of the word, predatory men still in possession of an unbroken power of the will and a desire for power, threw themselves on weaker, more civilized, more peaceful, perhaps trading or cattle-raising races, or on old, worn cultures, in which at that very moment the final forces of life were flaring up in a dazzling fireworks display of spirit and corruption. At the start the noble caste has always been the barbarian caste: its superiority has lain not primarily in physical might but in psychical power — it has been a matter of more COMPLETE human beings (which at every level also means 'more complete beasts').
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Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)
“
Citing the University of Pittsburgh study, the New York Times noted, “The average adolescent is exposed to approximately 84 references to illicit substance use per day and 591 references per week, or 30,732 references per year. . . . Studies have long shown that media messages have a pronounced impact on childhood risk behaviors.” A study of sixteen thousand teenagers in six European countries found that the more drinking kids saw in movies, the more likely they were to binge drink.
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David Sheff (Clean: Overcoming Addiction and Ending America's Greatest Tragedy)
“
in 1880 a wife could not cite adultery alone as a grounds for ending her union. While a man could divorce his wife for a sexual liaison outside the marital bed, a woman had to prove her husband was guilty of adultery in addition to another crime, such as incest, rape or cruelty. The Victorian double standard was enshrined in law, permitting a man to enjoy as many sexual dalliances as he wished, so long as he did not also rape the servants, have sex with his sister and beat his wife too severely.
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Hallie Rubenhold (The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper)
“
[Robert] Newell's recommendation of walking is also interesting:
'The best way undoubtedly of seeing a country is on foot. It is the safest, and most suited to every variety of road; it will often enable you to take a shorter track, and visit scenes (the finest perhaps) not otherwise accessible; it is healthy, and, with a little practice, easy; it is economical: a pedestrian is content with almost any accommodations; he, of all travellers, wants but little, 'Nor wants that little long'. And last, though not least, it is perfectly independent.'
Newell cites independence, as do a number of the 'first generation' of Romantic walkers I have already surveyed; more striking are his commendation of walking as the safest option, which reflects a very altered perception of the security of travel from that which prevailed in the eighteenth century, and his advocacy of the practical and health benefits of pedestrianism, which against suggests its institutionalisation as a form of tourism and its extension to lower reaches of the middle classes.
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Robin Jarvis (Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel)
“
She'd heard more than a few of her friends and clients complain about their dead sex lives, citing disgruntled husbands, over-active children, and under-active libidos as major culprits. One of her best friends, Debbie Long, who was like the sister she never had, had recently confided that since the birth of her son seven years ago, her love life with her husband had dwindled to a state of near non-existence. "We're like rommmates," Debbie had told Victoria a few months ago. "We love each other but the passion is gone. We're just going through the motions. As a matter of fact, I can't remember the last time Rob and I made love," she'd complained.
”
”
Trice Hickman (Keeping Secrets & Telling Lies)
“
It’s like this,” Mayuri had once explained, citing the several thousand pounds and five years in therapy she had spent to find herself. “You keep going to a bookstore and asking for a dozen red roses. They obviously don’t have red roses and you come home disappointed. That’s what’s going on with your mother. You keep expecting roses and keep getting disappointed. I know not to ask for roses at a bookstore. That’s why I have no issues with my amma.” “You make it sound so easy,” Priya said. “I didn’t say it was easy,” Mayuri said. “It took me a long time and a lot of effort. There were a lot of tequila shots, irresponsible one-night stands, and shrinks involved.
”
”
Amulya Malladi (A House for Happy Mothers)
“
But I can cite ten other reasons for not being a father."
"First of all, I don't like motherhood," said Jakub, and he broke off pensively. "Our century has already unmasked all myths. Childhood has long ceased to be an age of innocence. Freud discovered infant sexuality and told us all about Oedipus. Only Jocasta remains untouchable; no one dares tear off her veil. Motherhood is the last and greatest taboo, the one that harbors the most grievous curse. There is no stronger bond than the one that shackles mother to child. This bond cripples the child's soul forever and prepares for the mother, when her son has grown up, the most cruel of all the griefs of love. I say that motherhood is a curse, and I refuse to contribute to it."
"Another reason I don't want to add to the number of mothers," said Jakub with some embarrassment, "is that I love the female body, and I am disgusted by the thought of my beloved's breast becoming a milk-bag."
"The doctor here will certainly confirm that physicians and nurses treat women hospitalized after an aborted pregnancy more harshly than those who have given birth, and show some contempt toward them even though they themselves will, at least once in their lives, need a similar operation. But for them it's a reflex stronger than any kind of thought, because the cult of procreation is an imperative of nature. That's why it's useless to look for the slightest rational argument in natalist propaganda. Do you perhaps think it's the voice of Jesus you're hearing in the natalist morality of the church? Do you think it's the voice of Marx you're hearing in the natalist propaganda of the Communist state? Impelled merely by the desire to perpetuate the species, mankind will end up smothering itself on its small planet. But the natalist propaganda mill grinds on, and the public is moved to tears by pictures of nursing mothers and infants making faces. It disgusts me. It chills me to think that, along with millions of other enthusiasts, I could be bending over a cradle with a silly smile."
"And of course I also have to ask myself what sort of world I'd be sending my child into. School soon takes him away to stuff his head with the falsehoods I've fought in vain against all my life. Should I see my son become a conformist fool? Or should I instill my own ideas into him and see him suffer because he'll be dragged into the same conflicts I was?"
"And of course I also have to think of myself. In this country children pay for their parents' disobedience, and parents for their children's disobedience. How many young people have been denied education because their parents fell into disgrace? And how many parents have chosen permanent cowardice for the sole purpose of preventing harm to their children? Anyone who wants to preserve at least some freedom here shouldn't have children," Jakub said, and fell into silence.
"The last reason carries so much weight that it counts for five," said Jakub. "Having a child is to show an absolute accord with mankind. If I have a child, it's as though I'm saying: I was born and have tasted life and declare it so good that it merits being duplicated."
"And you have not found life to be good?" asked Bertlef.
Jakub tried to be precise, and said cautiously: "All I know is that I could never say with complete conviction: Man is a wonderful being and I want to reproduce him.
”
”
Milan Kundera (Farewell Waltz)
“
House of Commons: ‘You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.’ Later this speech was generally cited as a classic example of determination and courage, but the reactions at the time were not all that enthusiastic. In his diary, Harold Nicolson noted: ‘When Chamberlain enters the House he gets a terrific reception, when Churchill comes in the applause is less.’ Many of the British, including King George VI and most of the Conservatives, considered Churchill in those days to be a warmonger and a dangerous adventurer. There was a strong undercurrent in favour of reaching an accord with Hitler.
”
”
Geert Mak (In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century)
“
Once a competitor’s move has occurred, the denial of an adequate base for the competitor to meet its goals, coupled with the expectation that this state of affairs will continue, can cause the competitor to withdraw. New entrants, for example, usually have some targets for growth, market share, and ROI, and some time horizon for achieving them. If a new entrant is denied its targets and becomes convinced that it will be a long time before they are met, then it may withdraw or deescalate. Tactics for denying a base include strong price competition, heavy expenditures on research, and so on. Attacking new products in the test-market phase can be an effective way to foretell a firm’s future willingness to fight and can be less expensive than waiting for the introduction to actually occur. Another tactic is using special deals to load customers up with inventory, thereby removing the market for the product and raising the short-run cost of entry. It can be worth paying a substantial short-run price to deny a base if a firm’s market position is threatened. Essential to such a strategy, however, is a good hypothesis about what a competitor’s performance targets and time horizon are. An example of such a situation may be Gillette’s withdrawal from digital watches. Although claiming it had won significant market shares in test markets, Gillette bowed out, citing the substantial investments required to develop technology and margins lower than those available in other areas of its business. Texas Instruments’ strategy of aggressive pricing and rapid technological development in digital watches probably had a substantial impact on this decision.
”
”
Michael E. Porter (Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors)
“
I think people use fuzzy verbs when they are afraid that if they make strong statements, someone may challenge them or they may be wrong. If people feel challenged, you have engaged their interest, and that is good. Challenging proposals sometimes get funded; boring ones never do. Also remember, you are a scientist — it is not your job to be right. It is your job to be thoughtful, careful, and analytical; it is your job to challenge your ideas and to try to falsify your hypotheses; it is your job to be open and honest about the uncertainties in your data and conclusions. But if you are doing cutting-edge work, you are not always going to be right. You may have some aspects of the system right but others wrong; your piece of the system may be counterbalanced by others; you may even have misinterpreted your data. As long as you did it with honesty, integrity, and intellect, you did right, even if you weren’t right.
”
”
Joshua Schimel (Writing Science: How to Write Papers That Get Cited and Proposals That Get Funded)
“
Whether by this he meant the clergy I know not; though I observed he spoke favourably of that body in France, pointing out that, long before the recent agitations, they had defended the civil rights of the Third Estate, and citing many cases in which the country curates had shown themselves the truest friends of the people: a fact my own observation hath confirmed. I remarked to him that I was surprised to find how little talk there was in Italy of the distracted conditions in France; and this though the country is overrun with French refugees, or emigres, as they call themselves, who bring with them reports that might well excite the alarm of neighbouring governments. He said he had remarked the same indifference, but that this was consonant with the Italian character, which never looked to the morrow; and he added that the mild disposition of the people, and their profound respect for religion, were sufficient assurance against any political excess. To this I could not forbear
”
”
Edith Wharton (Works of Edith Wharton)
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Just as there are batterers who will victimize partner after partner, so are there serial victims, women who will select more than one violent man. Given that violence is often the result of an inability to influence events in any other way, and that this is often the result of an inability or unwillingness to effectively communicate, it is interesting to consider the wide appeal of the so-called strong and silent type. The reason often cited by women for the attraction is that the silent man is mysterious, and it may be that physical strength, which in evolutionary terms brought security, now adds an element of danger. The combination means that one cannot be completely certain what this man is feeling or thinking (because he is silent), and there might be fairly high stakes (because he is strong and potentially dangerous). I asked a friend who has often followed her attraction to the strong and silent type how long she likes men to remain silent. “About two or three weeks,” she answered, “Just long enough to get me interested. I like to be intrigued, not tricked. The tough part is finding someone who is mysterious but not secretive, strong but not scary.” One of the most common errors in selecting a boyfriend or spouse is basing the prediction on potential. This is actually predicting what certain elements might add up to in some different context: He isn’t working now, but he could be really successful. He’s going to be a great artist—of course he can’t paint under present circumstances. He’s a little edgy and aggressive these days, but that’s just until he gets settled. Listen to the words: isn’t working; can’t paint; is aggressive. What a person is doing now is the context for successful predictions, and marrying a man on the basis of potential, or for that matter hiring an employee solely on the basis of potential, is a sure way to interfere with intuition. That’s because the focus on potential carries our imagination to how things might be or could be and away from how they are now. Spousal abuse is committed by people who are with remarkable frequency described by their victims as having been “the sweetest, the gentlest, the kindest, the most attentive,” etc. Indeed, many were all of these things during the selection process and often still are—between violent incidents. But even though these men are frequently kind and gentle in the beginning, there are always warning signs. Victims, however, may not always choose to detect them.
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Gavin de Becker (The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence)
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Psalm
How leaky are the borders of man-made states!
How many clouds float over them scot-free,
how much desert sand sifts from country to country,
how many mountain pebbles roll onto foreign turf
in provocative leaps!
Need I cite each and every bird as it flies,
or alights, as now, on the lowered gate?
Even if be a sparrow—its tail is abroad,
Though its beak is still home. As if that weren’t enough—it keeps fidgeting!
Out of countless insects I will single out the ant,
who, between the guard’s left and right boots,
feels unobliged to answer questions of origin and destination.
If only this whole mess could be seen at once in detail
on every continent!
Isn’t that a privet on the opposite bank
smuggling its hundred-thousandth leaf across the river?
Who else but the squid, brazenly long-armed,
would violate the sacred territorial waters.?
How can we speak of any semblance of order
when we can’t rearrange the stars
to know which one shines for whom?
Not to mention the reprehensible spreading of fog!
Or the dusting of the steppe over its entire range
as though it weren’t split in two!
Or voices carried over accommodating air waves:
summoning squeals and suggestive gurgles!
Only what’s human can be truly alien.
The rest is mixed forest, undermining moles, and wind.
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Wisława Szymborska
“
For years I’ve been asking myself (and my readers) whether these propagandists—commonly called corporate or capitalist journalists—are evil or stupid. I vacillate day by day. Most often I think both. But today I’m thinking evil. Here’s why. You may have heard of John Stossel. He’s a long-term analyst, now anchor, on a television program called 20/20, and is most famous for his segment called “Give Me A Break,” in which, to use his language, he debunks commonly held myths. Most of the rest of us would call what he does “lying to serve corporations.” For example, in one of his segments, he claimed that “buying organic [vegetables] could kill you.” He stated that specially commissioned studies had found no pesticide residues on either organically grown or pesticide-grown fruits and vegetables, and had found further that organic foods are covered with dangerous strains of E. coli. But the researchers Stossel cited later stated he misrepresented their research. The reason they didn’t find any pesticides is because they never tested for them (they were never asked to). Further, they said Stossel misrepresented the tests on E. coli. Stossel refused to issue a retraction. Worse, the network aired the piece two more times. And still worse, it came out later that 20/20’s executive director Victor Neufeld knew about the test results and knew that Stossel was lying a full three months before the original broadcast.391 This is not unusual for Stossel and company.
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Derrick Jensen (Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization)
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out of their equally sustained practice of obedience and command, holding down and holding at a distance, that other more mysterious pathos would have no chance of growing at all, that longing for an ever new widening of distances inside the soul itself, the development of ever higher, rarer, more distant, more expansive, more comprehensive states, in short, simply the enhancement in the type 'man,' the constant 'self-conquest of man,' to cite a moral formula in a supra-moral sense. Of course, where the history of the origins of aristocratic society is concerned (and thus the precondition for that raising of the type 'man' —), we should not surrender to humanitarian illusions: truth is hard. So without further consideration, let's admit to ourselves how up to this point every higher culture on earth has started! People with a still natural nature, barbarians in every dreadful sense of the word, predatory men still in possession of an unbroken power of the will and a desire for power, threw themselves on weaker, more civilized, more peaceful, perhaps trading or cattle-raising races, or on old, worn cultures, in which at that very moment the final forces of life were flaring up in a dazzling fireworks display of spirit and corruption. At the start the noble caste has always been the barbarian caste: its superiority has lain not primarily in physical might but in psychical power — it has been a matter of more COMPLETE human beings (which at every level also means 'more complete beasts').
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Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)
“
McMaster said he had been completely in the dark about this. The secretary of state had not consulted or even informed him in advance. He had learned from press reports! In a news conference in Qatar, Tillerson had said the agreement “represents weeks of intensive discussions” between the two governments so it had been in the works for a while. Porter said Tillerson had not gone through the policy process at the White House and had not involved the president either. Clearly Tillerson was going off on his own. “It is more loyal to the president,” McMaster said, “to try to persuade rather the circumvent.” He said he carried out direct orders when the president was clear, and felt duty bound to do so as an Army officer. Tillerson in particular did not. “He’s such a prick,” McMaster said. “He thinks he’s smarter than anyone. So he thinks he can do his own thing.” In his long quest to bring order to the chaos, Priebus arranged for each of the key cabinet members to regularly check in. Tillerson came to his office at 5:15 p.m. on Tuesday, July 18. McMaster had not been invited but joined the meeting anyway. He took a seat at the conference table. The national security adviser’s silent presence was ominous and electric. Tell me, Priebus asked Tillerson, how are things going? Are you on track to achieve your primary objectives? How is the relationship between the State Department and the White House? Between you and the president? “You guys in the White House don’t have your act together,” Tillerson said, and the floodgates gushed open. “The president can’t make a decision. He doesn’t know how to make a decision. He won’t make a decision. He makes a decision and then changes his mind a couple of days later.” McMaster broke his silence and raged at the secretary of state. “You don’t work with the White House,” McMaster said. “You never consult me or anybody on the NSC staff. You blow us off constantly.” He cited examples when he tried to set up calls or meetings or breakfasts with Tillerson. “You are off doing your own thing” and communicate directly with the president, Mattis, Priebus or Porter. “But it’s never with the National Security Council,” and “that’s what we’re here to do.” Then he issued his most dramatic charge. “You’re affirmatively seeking to undermine the national security process.” “That’s not true,” Tillerson replied. “I’m available anytime. I talk to you all the time. We just had a conference call yesterday. We do these morning calls three times a week. What are you talking about, H.R.? I’ve worked with you. I’ll work with anybody.” Tillerson continued, “I’ve also got to be secretary of state. Sometimes I’m traveling. Sometimes I’m in a different time zone. I can’t always take your calls.” McMaster said he consulted with the relevant assistant secretaries of state if the positions were filled. “I don’t have assistant secretaries,” Tillerson said, coldly, “because I haven’t picked them, or the ones that I have, I don’t like and I don’t trust and I don’t work with. So you can check with whoever you want. That has no bearing on me.” The rest of the State Department didn’t matter; if you didn’t go through him, it didn’t count.
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Bob Woodward (Fear: Trump in the White House)
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In the fall of 1990 Iraq invaded Kuwait, and in the run-up to the Gulf War, Americans were sickened by a story that emerged. On October 10, 1990, a fifteen-year-old refugee from Kuwait appeared before a congressional Human Rights Caucus.23 The girl—she would give only her first name, Nayirah—had volunteered in a hospital in Kuwait City. She tearfully testified that Iraqi soldiers had stolen incubators to ship home as plunder, leaving over three hundred premature infants to die. Our collective breath was taken away—“These people leave babies to die on the cold floor; they are hardly human.” The testimony was seen on the news by approximately 45 million Americans, was cited by seven senators when justifying their support of war (a resolution that passed by five votes), and was cited more than ten times by George H. W. Bush in arguing for U.S. military involvement. And we went to war with a 92 percent approval rating of the president’s decision. In the words of Representative John Porter (R-Illinois), who chaired the committee, after Nayirah’s testimony, “we have never heard, in all this time, in all circumstances, a record of inhumanity, and brutality, and sadism, as the ones that [Nayirah had] given us today.” Much later it emerged that the incubator story was a pseudospeciating lie. The refugee was no refugee. She was Nayirah al-Sabah, the fifteen-year-old daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. The incubator story was fabricated by the public relations firm Hill + Knowlton, hired by the Kuwaiti government with the help of Porter and cochair Representative Tom Lantos (D-California). Research by the firm indicated that people would be particularly responsive to stories about atrocities against babies (ya think?), so the incubator tale was concocted, the witness coached. The story was disavowed by human rights groups (Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch) and the media, and the testimony was withdrawn from the Congressional Record—long after the war.
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Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
“
Weaknesses in claims about self-esteem have been evident for a long time. In California in the late 1980s, the state governor set up a special taskforce to examine politician John Vasconcellos’s claim that boosting young people’s self-esteem would prevent a range of societal problems (see chapter 1). One of its briefs was to review the relevant literature and assess whether there was support for this new approach. An author of the resulting report wrote in the introduction that ‘one of the disappointing aspects of every chapter in this volume … is how low the associations between self-esteem and its [presumed] consequences are in research to date.’1 Unfortunately, this early expression of concern was largely ignored. Carol Craig reviews more recent warnings about the self-esteem movement in an online article ‘A short history of self-esteem’, citing the research of five professors of psychology. Craig’s article and related documents are worth reading if you are interested in exploring this issue in depth.2 The following is my summary of her key conclusions about self-esteem: • There is no evidence that self-image enhancing techniques, aimed at boosting self-esteem directly, foster improvements in objectively measured ‘performance’. • Many people who consider themselves to have high self-esteem tend to grossly overestimate their own abilities, as assessed by objective tests of their performance, and may be insulted and threatened whenever anyone asserts otherwise. • Low self-esteem is not a risk factor for educational problems, or problems such as violence, bullying, delinquency, racism, drug-taking or alcohol abuse. • Obsession with self-esteem has contributed to an ‘epidemic of depression’ and is undermining the life skills and resilience of young people. • Attempts to boost self-esteem are encouraging narcissism and a sense of entitlement. • The pursuit of self-esteem has considerable costs and may undermine the wellbeing of both individuals and societies. Some of these findings were brought to wider public attention in an article entitled ‘The trouble with self-esteem’, written by psychologist Lauren Slater, which appeared in The New York Times in 2002.3 Related articles, far too many to mention individually in this book, have emerged, alongside many books in which authors express their concerns about various aspects of the myth of self-esteem.4 There is particular concern about what we are doing to our children.
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John Smith (Beyond the Myth of Self-Esteem: Finding Fulfilment)
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In opting for large scale, Korean state planners got much of what they bargained for. Korean companies today compete globally with the Americans and Japanese in highly capital-intensive sectors like semiconductors, aerospace, consumer electronics, and automobiles, where they are far ahead of most Taiwanese or Hong Kong companies. Unlike Southeast Asia, the Koreans have moved into these sectors not primarily through joint ventures where the foreign partner has provided a turnkey assembly plant but through their own indigenous organizations. So successful have the Koreans been that many Japanese companies feel relentlessly dogged by Korean competitors in areas like semiconductors and steel. The chief advantage that large-scale chaebol organizations would appear to provide is the ability of the group to enter new industries and to ramp up to efficient production quickly through the exploitation of economies of scope.70 Does this mean, then, that cultural factors like social capital and spontaneous sociability are not, in the end, all that important, since a state can intervene to fill the gap left by culture? The answer is no, for several reasons. In the first place, not every state is culturally competent to run as effective an industrial policy as Korea is. The massive subsidies and benefits handed out to Korean corporations over the years could instead have led to enormous abuse, corruption, and misallocation of investment funds. Had President Park and his economic bureaucrats been subject to political pressures to do what was expedient rather than what they believed was economically beneficial, if they had not been as export oriented, or if they had simply been more consumption oriented and corrupt, Korea today would probably look much more like the Philippines. The Korean economic and political scene was in fact closer to that of the Philippines under Syngman Rhee in the 1950s. Park Chung Hee, for all his faults, led a disciplined and spartan personal lifestyle and had a clear vision of where he wanted the country to go economically. He played favorites and tolerated a considerable degree of corruption, but all within reasonable bounds by the standards of other developing countries. He did not waste money personally and kept the business elite from putting their resources into Swiss villas and long vacations on the Riviera.71 Park was a dictator who established a nasty authoritarian political system, but as an economic leader he did much better. The same power over the economy in different hands could have led to disaster. There are other economic drawbacks to state promotion of large-scale industry. The most common critique made by market-oriented economists is that because the investment was government rather than market driven, South Korea has acquired a series of white elephant industries such as shipbuilding, petrochemicals, and heavy manufacturing. In an age that rewards downsizing and nimbleness, the Koreans have created a series of centralized and inflexible corporations that will gradually lose their low-wage competitive edge. Some cite Taiwan’s somewhat higher overall rate of economic growth in the postwar period as evidence of the superior efficiency of a smaller, more competitive industrial structure.
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Francis Fukuyama (Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity)
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In Healing the Masculine Soul, Dalbey introduced themes that would animate what soon became a cottage industry of books on Christian masculinity. First and foremost, Dalbey looked to the Vietnam War as the source of masculine identity. The son of a naval officer, Dalbey described how the image of the war hero served as his blueprint for manhood. He’d grown up playing “sandlot soldier” in his white suburban neighborhood, and he’d learned to march in military drills and fire a rifle in his Boy Scout “patrol.” Fascinated with John Wayne’s WWII movies, he imagined war “only as a glorious adventure in manhood.” As he got older, he “passed beyond simply admiring the war hero to desiring a war” in which to demonstrate his manhood. 20 By the time he came of age, however, he’d become sidetracked. Instead of demonstrating his manhood on the battlefields of Vietnam, he became “part of a generation of men who actively rejected our childhood macho image of manhood—which seemed to us the cornerstone of racism, sexism, and militarism.” Exhorted to make love, not war, he became “an enthusiastic supporter of civil rights, women’s liberation, and the antiwar movement,” and he joined the Peace Corps in Africa. But in opting out of the military he would discover that “something required of manhood seemed to have been bypassed, overlooked, even dodged.” Left “confused and frustrated,” Dalbey eventually conceded that “manhood requires the warrior.” 21 Dalbey agreed with Bly that an unbalanced masculinity had led to the nation’s “unbalanced pursuit” of the Vietnam War, but an over-correction had resulted in a different problem: Having rejected war making as a model of masculine strength, men had essentially abdicated that strength to women. As far as Dalbey was concerned, the 1970s offered no viable model of manhood to supplant “the boyhood image in our hearts,” and his generation had ended up rejecting manhood itself. If the warrior spirit was indeed intrinsic to males, then attempts to eliminate the warrior image were “intrinsically emasculating.” Women were “crying out” for men to recover their manly strength, Dalbey insisted. They were begging men to toughen up and take charge, longing for a prince who was strong and bold enough to restore their “authentic femininity.” 22 Unfortunately, the church was part of the problem. Failing to present the true Jesus, it instead depicted him “as a meek and gentle milk-toast character”—a man who never could have inspired “brawny fishermen like Peter to follow him.” It was time to replace this “Sunday school Jesus” with a warrior Jesus. Citing “significant parallels” between serving Christ and serving in the military, Dalbey suggested that a “redeemed image of the warrior” could reinvigorate the church’s ministry to men: “What if we told men up front that to join the church of Jesus Christ is . . . to enlist in God’s army and to place their lives on the line? This approach would be based on the warrior spirit in every man, and so would offer the greatest hope for restoring authentic Christian manhood to the Body of Christ.” Writing before the Gulf War had restored faith in American power and the strength of the military, Dalbey’s preoccupation with Vietnam is understandable, yet the pattern he established would endure long after an easy victory in the latter conflict supposedly brought an end to “Vietnam syndrome.” American evangelicals would continue to be haunted by Vietnam. 23
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Kristin Kobes Du Mez (Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation)
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Mendel died in 1884, not long after the church-state imbroglio; his nurse found him stiff and upright on his sofa, his heart and kidneys having failed. We know this because Mendel feared being buried alive and had demanded a precautionary autopsy. But in one sense, Mendel’s fretting over a premature burial proved prophetic. Just eleven scientists cited his now-classic paper on inheritance in the thirty-five years after his death. And those that did (mostly agricultural scientists) saw his experiments as mildly interesting lessons for breeding peas, not universal statements on heredity. Scientists had indeed buried Mendel’s theories too soon.
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Sam Kean (The Violinist's Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code)
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that doesn’t take away from how profound it was. In fact, not only do those five simple words mark a major turning point in the sale but they also mark the point where you’re going to begin your next pattern. You’re going to say, in a sympathetic tone: “Now, that I can understand. You don’t know me, and I don’t have the luxury of a track record; so let me take a moment to reintroduce myself. “My name is [your first and last name], and I’m a [your title] at [the name of your company], and I’ve been there for [actual number] years, and I pride myself on …” And now you’re going to tell your prospect a little bit about yourself—citing any degrees you have, any licenses you have, any special talents you have, any awards you’ve won, what your goals are at the company, what you stand for as a person in terms of ethics and integrity and customer service, and how you can be an asset to him and his family over the long term.
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Jordan Belfort (Way of the Wolf: Straight line selling: Master the art of persuasion, influence, and success)
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The most cited experiment in this field was conducted a quarter-century ago. Researcher Benjamin Libet asked subjects to choose a random moment to perform a hand motion while hooked up to an electroencephalograph (EEG) monitor in which the so-called “readiness potential” of the brain was being monitored. Naturally, electrical signals always precede actual physical actions, but Libet wanted to know whether they also preceded a subject’s subjective feeling of intention to act. In short, is there some subjective “self ” who consciously decides things, thereby setting in motion the brain’s electrical activities that ultimately lead to the action? Or is it the other way ’round? Subjects were therefore asked to note the position of a clock’s second hand when they first felt the initial intention to move their hand. Libet’s findings were consistent, and perhaps not surprising: unconscious, unfelt, brain electrical activity occurred a full half second before there was any conscious sense of decision-making by the subject. More recent experiments by Libet, announced in 2008, analyzing separate, higher-order brain functions, have allowed his research team to predict up to ten seconds in advance which hand a subject is about to decide to raise. Ten seconds is nearly an eternity when it comes to cognitive decisions, and yet a person’s eventual decision could be seen on brain scans that long before the subject was even remotely aware of having made any decision. This and other experiments prove that the brain makes its own decisions on a subconscious level, and people only later feel that “they” have performed a conscious decision. It means that we go through life thinking that, unlike the blessedly autonomous operations of the heart and kidneys, a lever-pulling “me” is in charge of the brain’s workings. Libet concluded that the sense of personal free will arises solely from a habitual retrospective perspective of the ongoing flow of brain events.
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Robert Lanza (Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe)
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How are the universality, depth, and permanence of antisemitism to be explained? Why such hatred and fear of a people who never constituted more than a small minority among those who most hated and feared them? Why, nearly always and nearly everywhere, the Jews? Many answers have been offered by scholars. These include, most commonly, economic factors, the need for scapegoats, ethnic hatred, xenophobia, resentment of Jewish affluence and professional success, and religious bigotry. But ultimately these answers do not explain antisemitism; they only explain what factors have exacerbated it and caused it to erupt in a given circumstance. None accounts for the universality, depth, and persistence of antisemitism. In fact, we have encountered virtually no study of this phenomenon that even attempts to offer a universal explanation of Jew-hatred. Nearly every study of antisemitism consists almost solely of historical narrative, thus seeming to indicate that no universal reason for antisemitism exists. We reject this approach.To ignore or deny that there is an ultimate cause for antisemitism contradicts both common sense and history. Antisemitism has existed too long, and in too many disparate cultures, to ignore the problem of ultimate cause and/or to claim that new or indigenous factors are responsible every time it erupts. Factors specific to a given society help account for the manner or time in which antisemitism erupts. But they do not explain its genesis—why antisemitism at all? To cite but one example: the depressed economy in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s helps to explain why and when the Nazis came to power, but it does not explain why Nazis hated Jews, let alone why they wanted to murder every Jew. Economic depressions do not explain gas chambers.
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Dennis Prager (Why the Jews?: The Reason for Antisemitism (An Examination of Antisemitism))
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While pulling clean drafts together took thousands of hours of work, the stories had all but revealed themselves. Facebook had allowed human trafficking to take place in the Persian Gulf on its platform as long as it occurred through brick-and-mortar businesses. In trying to improve the platform and boost user numbers, it had actually made the site, and the people who used it, angrier. Mental health researchers had concluded “we make body issues worse” and that Instagram was a toxic place for many teen girls, in particular. We divided up the stories among ourselves. Georgia Wells began interviewing young women who had developed eating disorders or body image issues of the sort that Instagram’s researchers worried their product might aggravate. The story she led would cite company documents that found “comparisons on Instagram can change how young women view and describe themselves,” citing research that found 32 percent of teen girls said that “when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse.
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Jeff Horwitz (Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets)
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a religion steeped in the feminine mysteries of blood and childbirth, we might expect religious activity to be largely the province of women, as was the case in later goddess-centered cultures, yet most research takes for granted that the word shaman usually indicates a male. In Dawn Behind the Dawn, Geoffrey Ashe cites evidence from Russian anthropologists and linguists suggesting that, in some parts of the world, the original shamans were women. The clues are hidden in tribal languages. Among the Siberian and Altaic tribal peoples with a long tradition of shamanism, the words for a female shaman are very similar, showing that they derive from the same root. But the words for a male shaman are unrelated. Ashe concludes, "We can infer that these tribes are descended from groups that were ... in close touch, and then all shamans were women, known by a single term." Later, when men insinuated themselves into the sacred rituals, each tribe had to invent its own word to describe them. Male shamans to this day often dress in the clothing of women.
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Layne Redmond (When The Drummers Were Women: A Spiritual History of Rhythm)
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The very word "secrecy" is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it.
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John F. Kennedy
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Perhaps one of the most remarkable cases is one cited by F. W. H. Myers in his chapter on hypnotism in Human Personality: a young actress, an understudy, called upon suddenly to replace the star of her company, was sick with apprehension and stage-fright. Under light hypnosis she performed with competence and brilliance, and won great applause; but it was long before she was able to act her parts without the aid of the hypnotist, who stationed himself in her dressing-room. (Later in this same case the phenomenon of “post-hypnotic suggestion” began to be observed, and the foundations of the Nancy School of autosuggestion, of which Coué is the most famous contemporary associate, were laid.) In the same chapter in which he quotes the remarkable case of the actress, Myers made a theorizing comment which is of immense value to everyone who hopes to free himself of his bondage to failure. He points out that the ordinary shyness and tentativeness with which we all approach novel action is entirely removed from the hypnotized subject, who consequently acts instead with precision and self-confidence. Now the removal of shyness, or mauvaise honte (he wrote), which hypnotic suggestion can effect, is in fact a purgation of memory—inhibiting the recollection of previous failures, and setting free whatever group of aptitudes is for the moment required.
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Dorothea Brande (Wake Up and Live!: A Formula for Success That Really Works!)
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Recognition of hard work matters, especially when it comes to retaining talent. A decades-long study of two hundred thousand managers and employees conducted by OC Tanner found that 79 percent of people who leave their jobs cite “lack of appreciation” as a primary reason.
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Jennifer Aaker (Humor, Seriously: Why Humor Is a Secret Weapon in Business and Life (And how anyone can harness it. Even you.))
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Finally, after months of threats and petty harassment, HHS fired Morris for insubordination, citing a long list of drummed-up charges, including failure to return library books on time.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
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To bolster their argument, Friedman and Moore cited witness testimony from a long-dead civil engineer named Grady “Barney” Barnett,
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Garrett M. Graff (UFO: The Inside Story of the U.S. Government's Search for Alien Life Here―and Out There)
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That isn’t the problem,” Abraham replied. “There’s certain words in there that are against her beliefs.” He cited the word adore. There was also a problem with the phrase — roughly translated — “If he doesn’t come back, kill me, sky, eat me, dirt, take me, Jesus.” “She can’t do it. José, you gotta understand.” Hernández removed adore and replaced “take me, Jesus” with the line, “I want to die.” That led to hours of deep discussion with Abraham about God, Jesus, and religion. “Hey, compadre, bring me the Bible,” he shouted out. With the Good Book in hand, Abraham began to talk theology. “He was trying to convince me there was no Holy Spirit, that Jesus is just a teacher,” said Hernández, himself a born-again Christian. “He said, ‘Before you get out of here, I’m gonna convert you.’ He was trying to explain his beliefs and what he thinks about life after death, who he thinks Jesus was. It was really deep. A lot of people see him as a hard business guy, but I know how strong his beliefs are — so strong he tried to convince me.” Hernández left Corpus believing the same things he had when he arrived. But he also realized that both Abraham and Selena shared a deep spirituality he’d rarely seen before. Neither was a member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. As long as Selena pranced around the stage in clothes that were provocative and revealing, she couldn’t be accepted into the faith. Bustiers and bare midriffs did not qualify as the sort of modest dress required of women of the church. But that didn’t stop them from believing God’s kingdom was an actual government ruling in heaven that would soon return to earth to bring
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Joe Nick Patoski (Selena: Como la Flor)
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The Master of Shakespeare, by A. W. L. Saunders, after citing many of the above details, hung its hat on those similarities of poetic style while arguing that Greville, a famously amiable patron, had been the master of a long-standing collaboration marketed as “Will Shake-speare,” whose contributing members included Mary Sidney, Tom Nashe, Francis Bacon, Kit Marlowe, George Peele, and Samuel Daniel.
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Lee Durkee (Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint)
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While further exploring the first floor of the hospital, the friends discovered a dusty room filled with old photographs and crumbling letters; the room was labeled “Archives”. One picture caught their attention — a group of children in tattered school uniforms, their faces frozen in time. The letters spoke of longing and loneliness, and the pain of separation. “These kids do not look like they were at this school according to their own will. They look very sad, almost disturbed.” Emily said as she looked around, cautious of what may be in the basement of this place. Continuing on the main floor, a second room also had file cabinets in it but had no name on the door. Inside the room was an article from the Mountainside times of a time when the hospital had its own tale of tragedy and despair. During the war, the medical facility had been overwhelmed with wounded soldiers, and the staff struggled to provide adequate care. Rumors circulated of a nurse who, unable to cope with the constant death and suffering, succumbed to madness, killing 3 interns and one patient before being shot. It went on to say that since this incident, patients reported she still wandered the desolate corridors, her soft footsteps and distant sobs haunting those who dared to stay overnight. The war department cited an increase in transfer requests out of the hospital citing the interactions with “the inhabitants” that haunt the place. As the friends explored the hospital's abandoned wards and empty rooms, they could almost feel the weight of the past pressing down on them the whole time. Shadows danced along the peeling wallpaper, and the air was filled with an otherworldly chill and the dampness of a bog. Every creak and groan of the building seemed to whisper the stories of those who had lived and died within its walls. Its decrepit walls and shattered windows bathed in the ghostly light of the full moon.
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Shae Dubray (The Magician's Society: Rivalry in Mountainside)
“
The first concept is “Ikigai.” Ikigai is a Japanese life strategy that emphasizes the importance of finding your “true calling.” Colloquially, the word can be translated as “your reason for living” or your “reason to get out of bed in the morning.” The mindset is perpetuated by the long-lived residents of Okinawa Island—many of whom cite their Ikigai as the reason for their impressive longevity. The pursuit of one’s Ikigai is an important journey of self-discovery. If you can correctly identify the vocation that you are best suited for, then the spark of intrinsic motivation will illuminate within you—igniting the passions that power your pursuits, prompting you to accomplish momentous feats.
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Anthony Raymond (Ikigai & Kaizen: The Japanese Strategy to Achieve Personal Happiness and Professional Success (How to set goals, stop procrastinating, be more productive, build good habits, focus, & thrive))
“
Marc Andreessen (here) long ago referred to the above double-/triple-threat concept, citing Scott’s writing, as “even the secret formula to becoming a CEO. All successful CEOs are like this.” He reiterated that you could also cultivate this in school by getting unusual combinations of degrees, like engineering + MBA, law degree + MBA, or undergrad physics + economics.
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Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
“
One Saturday morning last May, I joined the presidential motorcade as it slipped out of the southern gate of the White House. A mostly white crowd had assembled. As the motorcade drove by, people cheered, held up their smartphones to record the procession, and waved American flags. To be within feet of the president seemed like the thrill of their lives. I was astounded. An old euphoria, which I could not immediately place, gathered up in me. And then I remembered, it was what I felt through much of 2008, as I watched Barack Obama’s star shoot across the political sky. I had never seen so many white people cheer on a black man who was neither an athlete nor an entertainer. And it seemed that they loved him for this, and I thought in those days, which now feel so long ago, that they might then love me, too, and love my wife, and love my child, and love us all in the manner that the God they so fervently cited had commanded.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
“
She's always scorned his squeamishness, citing the replacement of his vagina with a dick. Joon thinks that's invasion of a far more nail-biting nature. She has no idea. It was fucking heaven. He'd do it again a million times over. And it's one hell of a long way from chopping open your head for the sake of more tech.
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Ren Warom (Escapology)
“
So this was how our assistant directors were finding their guidance? Dug up from five-year-old e-mails? Later I learned that the staff members had to print out their e-mails in order to store them in safety. Evidently, the New York office server was scrubbed periodically to free up storage space. Dawn couldn’t save e-mails on her computer for long. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. A five-year-old crumpled paper copy of an e-mail in one employee’s files held crucial documentation for a federal agency? If SEC inspectors ever arrived at a financial firm for an examination and discovered that the firm had no manual on how to comply with federal securities laws, that firm would immediately be cited for deficiencies and most likely subject to enforcement action.
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Norm Champ (Going Public: My Adventures Inside the SEC and How to Prevent the Next Devastating Crisis)
“
Reflecting a long-standing schism within the profession, which persists into the twenty-first century, RASSW argued that “a dichotomy exists within NASW between” social activists and clinical practitioners, which is exacerbated by the promotion of licensing. When all social services are threatened by the conservative political and ideological climate, a focus on licensing undermines the profession’s efforts to fight for “the survival and well-being of millions” (RASSW, February 1,1976, p. 3). Citing the opposition to licensing by such groups as the National Association of Black Social Workers (NABSW), RASSW asserted that efforts by NASW to promote licensing contradict its stated intent to fight racism within the social service field and were destructive of professional unity. Promoting licensing, in lieu of uniting around this struggle “is to fiddle while Rome burns” (p. 3). The paper also disputed the linkage between licensing and service quality. It added an interesting twist to the growing debate over professionalization by arguing that “under current political conditions licensure may actually decrease the accountability of social workers to their clients” (RASSW, February 1,1976, p. 5). The paper concluded that licensure neither protected nor improved service quality; rather, it divided workers and undermined their job security, as the recent attack on public education in New York City had demonstrated. Instead of fighting for licensure, RASSW proposed an alternative strategy that focused on building worker-client-labor-community coalitions and combating racism in social service agencies and other institutions.
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Michael Reisch (The Road Not Taken: A History of Radical Social Work in the United States)
“
Al-Askarî gives examples of the high esteem shown to scholars and
the important position in society they occupy, often in spite of their
lowly origins which ordinarily would not have allowed them to advance
far beyond their fathers’ menial situations. Much more numerous, and
more interesting, are the anecdotes and remarks on the diffi
culties that
must be overcome on the road to knowledge. He cites the statement
concerning the six qualities needed: a penetrating mind, much time,
ability, hard work, a skilful teacher, and desire (or, in the parlance of
our own time, “motivation,” shahwah). On his own, he adds the very
elementary need for “nature,” that is, an inherited physical endowment,
such as Muslim philologians of al-Askarî’s type always claimed as
essential for their intellectual pursuits. The search for knowledge must be
unselfi
sh. As the author repeats over and over again, it is a never ending
process. Persistent study sharpens the natural faculties. The hunger for
knowledge is never stilled, as proclaimed by traditions ascribed to the
Prophet. Stationariness means ultimate failure, according to the widely
quoted saying that “man does not cease knowing as long as he studies,
but once he gives up studying, he is the most ignorant of men.”
Constant travel in search of knowledge and regular attendance at the
teacher’s lectures are mandatory. The prospect of learning something
not known before should make a man forget his home and his family
and endure all possible hardships, as illustrated by an anecdote about
al-Asmaî. Scholars refrain at times from certain foods as too luxurious
or as harmful to the powers of memory. They study all night long.
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Franz Rosenthal (Knowledge Triumphant: The Concept of Knowledge in Medieval Islam)
“
AUTHOR’S NOTE The First Assassin is a work of fiction, and specifically a work of historical fiction—meaning that much of it is based on real people, places, and events. My goal never has been to tell a tale about what really happened but to tell what might have happened by blending known facts with my imagination. Characters such as Abraham Lincoln, Winfield Scott, and John Hay were, of course, actual people. When they speak on these pages, their words are occasionally drawn from things they are reported to have said. At other times, I literally put words in their mouths. Historical events and circumstances such as Lincoln’s inauguration, the fall of Fort Sumter, and the military crisis in Washington, D.C., provide both a factual backdrop and a narrative skeleton. Throughout, I have tried to maximize the authenticity and also to tell a good story. Thomas Mallon, an experienced historical novelist, has described writing about the past: “The attempt to reconstruct the surface texture of that world was a homely pleasure, like quilting, done with items close to hand.” For me, the items close to hand were books and articles. Naming all of my sources is impossible. I’ve drawn from a lifetime of reading about the Civil War, starting as a boy who gazed for hours at the battlefield pictures in The Golden Book of the Civil War, which is an adaptation for young readers of The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War by Bruce Catton. Yet several works stand out as especially important references. The first chapter owes much to an account that appeared in the New York Tribune on February 26, 1861 (and is cited in A House Dividing, by William E. Baringer). It is also informed by Lincoln and the Baltimore Plot, 1861, edited by Norma B. Cuthbert. For details about Washington in 1861: Reveille in Washington, by Margaret Leech; The Civil War Day by Day, by E. B. Long with Barbara Long; Freedom Rising, by Ernest B. Ferguson; The Regiment That Saved the Capitol, by William J. Roehrenbeck; The Story the Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell, by Thomas P. Lowry; and “Washington City,” in The Atlantic Monthly, January 1861. For information about certain characters: With Malice Toward None, by Stephen B. Oates; Lincoln, by David Herbert Donald; Abe Lincoln Laughing, edited by P. M. Zall; Lincoln and the Civil War in the Diaries of John Hay, edited by Tyler Dennett; Lincoln Day by Day, Vol. III: 1861–1865, by C. Percy Powell; Agent of Destiny, by John S. D. Eisenhower; Rebel Rose, by Isabel Ross; Wild Rose, by Ann Blackman; and several magazine articles by Charles Pomeroy Stone. For life in the South: Roll, Jordan, Roll, by Eugene D. Genovese; Runaway Slaves, by John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger; Bound for Canaan, by Fergus M. Bordewich; Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, written by himself; The Fire-Eaters, by Eric H. Walther; and The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, by Robert E. May. For background on Mazorca: Argentine Dictator, by John Lynch. This is the second edition of The First Assassin. Except for a few minor edits, it is no different from the first edition.
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John J. Miller (The First Assassin)
“
Let’s call it the theory of receptivity. It’s the idea, often cited by young people in their case against the relevance of even marginally older people, that one’s taste—in music or film, literature or fine cuisine—petrifies during life’s peak of happiness or nadir of misery. Or maybe it’s not that simple. Maybe a subtler spike on the charts—upward, downward, anomalous points in between—might qualify, so long as it’s formative. Let’s say that receptivity, anyway, can be tied to the moments when, for whatever reason, a person opens herself to the things we can all agree make life worth living in a new and definitive way, whether curiosity has her chasing down the world’s pleasures, or the world has torn a strip from her, exposing raw surface area to the winds. During these moments—sleepaway camp right before your bar mitzvah; the year you were captain of the hockey team and the baseball team; the time after you got your license and before you totaled the Volvo—you are closely attuned to your culture, reaching out and in to consume it in vast quantities. When this period ends, your senses seal off what they have absorbed and build a sensibility that becomes, for better or worse, definitive: This is the stuff I like. These films/books/artists tell the story of who I am. There is no better-suited hairstyle. This is as good/bad as it gets for me. The theory suggests that we only get a couple of these moments in life, a couple of sound tracks, and that timing is paramount. If you came of age in the early eighties, for instance, you may hold a relatively shitty cultural moment to be the last time anything was any good simply because that was the last time you were open and engaged with what was happening around you, the last time you felt anything really—appallingly—deeply. I worry about this theory. I worry because it suggests that receptivity is tied closely to youth, and firsts, and also because as with many otherwise highly rejectable theories—Reaganomics and communism come to mind—there is that insolent nub of truth in it.
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Michelle Orange (This Is Running for Your Life: Essays)
“
Violation of the Moral Code as a Basis for Assigning Blame But in spite of all possible points of view everyone will admit that there are crimes which always and everywhere from the beginning of the world, under all legal systems, have unhesitatingly been considered crimes and will be considered so as long as man remains human, said Dostoevski (as cited in Tucker, 1985). First and foremost, the moral code addresses abuse of power. Regardless of legalese, victims want to blame those who violate the heart and all codes and commitments that were set forth to guide human behavior. All humans agree that the guidelines, in some way, provide that: (1) I may not violate your right to live and enjoy what you have earned, (2) you may wish to live in a climate of freedom, to think and function as you wish and (3) your actions will not violate my right to live and enjoy what is mine and to think and function according to my conscience. If a violation occurs, then I have the right to confront you and inform you that you have violated the moral contract. All justice systems are designed and obligated to stand for and enforce that code. The act of blaming requires
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Karin Huffer (Legal Abuse Syndrome: 8 Steps for avoiding the traumatic stress caused by the justice system)
“
Partly, it is because we tend to think of black and white poverty differently. Sandra Barnes (2005, 17), citing census data from 2000, notes that “75 percent of all impoverished are white,” but also that (taken from Flanagan 1999): “poverty among whites appears to be less expected, less recognized, less stigmatized, and less often the focus of research and commentary.” Andrew Hacker (1995, 100) adds that:
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Karl Alexander (The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood (The American Sociological Association's Rose Series in Sociology))
“
Another recent work, an academic article that described research on a single type of nerve cell in the hypothalamus, was over one hundred pages long and cited seven hundred intricate experiments.
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Leonard Mlodinow (Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior (PEN Literary Award Winner))
“
One continually hears the declaration that the direct primary [for legislative offices] will take power from the politicians and give it to the people. This is pure nonsense. Politics has been, is, and always will be carried on by politicians, just as art is carried on by artists, engineering by engineers, business by businessmen. All that the direct primary, or any other political reform, can do is affect the character of the politicians by altering the conditions that govern political activity, thus determining its extent and quality. The direct primary may take advantage and opportunity from one set of politicians and confer them upon another set, but politicians there will always be so long as there is politics. (Cited in Key 1965, 394-95)
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Marty Cohen (The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform (Chicago Studies in American Politics))
“
Around a hundred Texans faced 3,000 Mexican Government troops. According to the account that long filled patriotic Americans’ schoolbooks, Crockett died a hero defiantly swinging the butt of his rifle, Old Betsy, at oncoming Mexicans after running out of ammunition. A Different Story Surfaces In 1975, a previously untranslated diary written by José Enrique de la Peña, senior Mexican officer at the battle, revealed that Crockett and six other survivors had actually surrendered. According to this account, they were executed shortly afterwards. The revelation did not come without controversy. Historians still dispute whether the diary is genuine, pointing to the unclear circumstances of its emergence in the mid-1950s in Mexico, just at the height of Disney’s fictionalisation of Crockett’s story across the border in the United States. Advocates cite a supporting pamphlet that was lodged in the archives of Yale University long before the Crockett fad began, which they suggest point to the diary being genuine. A crude Mexican attempt at Party pooping? Or bursting the bubble of a fabled tale? The truth may never be known, but the episode once more demonstrates Oscar Wilde’s observation of the truth being rarely pure and never simple.
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Phil Mason (How George Washington Fleeced the Nation: And Other Little Secrets Airbrushed From History)
“
Tesla applied for a patent on an electrical coil that is the most likely candidate for a non mechanical successor of his energy extractor. This is his “Coil for Electro magnets,” patent #512,340. It is a curious design, unlike an ordinary coil made by turning wire on a tube form, this one uses two wires laid next to each other on a form but with the end of the first one connected to the beginning of the second one. In the patent Tesla explains that this double coil will store many times the energy of a conventional coil. The patent, however, gives no hint of what might have been its more unusual capability. In an article for Century Magazine, Tesla compares extracting energy from the environment to the work of other scientists who were, at that time, learning to condense atmospheric gases into liquids. In particular, he cited the work of a Dr. Karl Linde who had discovered what Tesla described as a self-cooling method for liquefying air. As Tesla said, “This was the only experimental proof which I was still wanting that energy was obtainable from the medium in the manner contemplated by me.” What ties the Linde work with Tesla's electromagnet coil is that both of them used a double path for the material they were working with. Linde had a compressor to pump the air to a high pressure, let the pressure fall as it traveled through a tube, and then used that cooled air to reduce the temperature of the incoming air by having it travel back up the first tube through a second tube enclosing the first. The already cooled air added to the cooling process of the machine and quickly condensed the gases to a liquid. Tesla's intent was to condense the energy trapped between the earth and its upper atmosphere and to turn it into an electric current. He pictured the sun as an immense ball of electricity, positively charged with a potential of some 200 billion volts. The Earth, on the other hand, is charged with negative electricity. The tremendous electrical force between these two bodies constituted, at least in part, what he called cosmic-energy. It varied from night to day and from season to season but it is always present. Tesla's patents for electrical generators and motors were granted in the late 1880's. During the 1890's the large electric power industry, in the form of Westinghouse and General Electric, came into being. With tens of millions of dollars invested in plants and equipment, the industry was not about to abandon a very profitable ten-year-old technology for yet another new one. Tesla saw that profits could be made from the self-acting generator, but somewhere along the line, it was pointed out to him, the negative impact the device would have on the newly emerging technological revolution of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At the end of his article in Century he wrote: “I worked for a long time fully convinced that the practical realization of the method of obtaining energy from the sun would be of incalculable industrial value, but the continued study of the subject revealed the fact that while it will be commercially profitable if my expectations are well founded, it will not be so to an extraordinary degree.
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Tim R. Swartz (The Lost Journals of Nikola Tesla: Time Travel - Alternative Energy and the Secret of Nazi Flying Saucers)
“
The two revolutions, therefore, taken together, must be understood as a centuries-long process of fundamental change in which the triumphant Western worldview of colonial days is replaced by a planetary understanding of the meaning of human existence that so transcends particular national differences as to enable the human species to create a planetary peace in the absence of an imperial power to enforce its particular institutions on anyone. In short, a coming to maturity of the human species. A transformation of this profound a depth must necessarily take form in the actions of the most capable nation on the planet, and Revel, after surveying the various claimants to leadership, decided that the United States fulfilled the basic requirements such a role entailed. He acclaimed the United States as the prototype nation in a process of world transformation. He cited many factors present in the United States but absent or improperly developed in other nations as justification for his choice. The United States had a continuing pattern of growth and economic prosperity unmatched by any other nation, a technological excellence unrivaled by anyone else, and a high level of basic research that would continue to provide increasingly sophisticated insights into the nature of basic scientific and social problems. Revel also felt that the United States was culturally oriented toward the future, whereas the European countries were directed toward the past, and the Communists were mired in theoretical and doctrinal considerations, rendering them incapable of confronting rapid and continued change. The
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Vine Deloria Jr. (The Metaphysics of Modern Existence)
“
US Military Was Prepared to Act in Benghazi Contrary to what the Obama administration has told the American people, the US military was poised and ready to respond immediately and forcefully against terrorists in Benghazi, Libya. That’s what we learned in December 2015 from an email exchange from then–Department of Defense Chief of Staff Jeremy Bash to State Department leadership immediately offering “forces that could move to Benghazi” during the terrorist attack on Benghazi. In an email sent to top Department of State officials, at 7:19 p.m. ET, only hours after the attack had begun, Bash says, “we have identified the forces that could move to Benghazi. They are spinning up as we speak.” The Obama administration redacted the details of the military forces available, oddly citing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) exemption that allows the withholding of “deliberative process” information. The Obama administration and Clinton officials hid this compelling Benghazi email for years. The email makes readily apparent that the military was prepared to launch immediate assistance that could have made a difference, at least at the CIA annex. The fact that the Obama Administration withheld this email for so long only worsens the scandal of Benghazi.
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Tom Fitton (Clean House: Exposing Our Government's Secrets and Lies)
“
own. Save a parrot’s tree. Save ten. Without our help, without needed legislative protection and worldwide consciousness-raising on their behalf, parrots will be lost in short years to come. It is fitting to end this book with this succinct summation from Wayne Pacelle, president of the Humane Society of the United States: We are at an odd moment in history. There are more people in this country sensitized to animal protection issues than ever before. The Humane Society of the United States alone has 8 million members, and in addition, there are more than 5,000 other groups devoted to animal protection. At the same time, there are more animals being harmed than ever before—in industrial agriculture, research and testing, and the trade in wild animals. It is pitiful that our society still condones keeping millions of parrots and other wild birds as pets—wild animals that should be free to fly and instead are languishing in cages, with more being bred every day. It’s an issue of supply and demand and it’s also an issue of right and wrong. Animals suffer in confinement, and we have a moral obligation to spare them from needless suffering. Every person can make a difference every day for animals by making compassionate choices in the marketplace: don’t buy wild animals as pets, whether they are caught from the wild or bred in captivity. If we spare the life of just one animal, it’s a 100% positive impact for that creature. If we can solve the larger bird trade problem, it will be 100% positive for all parrots and other wild birds in the U.S. and beyond our borders. I believe we will look back in 50 -75 years and say “How could we as a society countenance things like the decades long imprisonment of extraordinarily intelligent animals like parrots?” Acknowledgments For this work, which took more than two and a half years to research and write, I amassed thousands of documents and conducted several hundred interviews with leading scientists, environmentalists, paleontologists, ecological economists, conservationists, global warming experts, federal law enforcement officers, animal control officers, avian researchers, avian rescuers, veterinarians, breeders, pet bird owners, bird clubs, pet bird industry executives and employees, sanctuaries and welfare organizations, legislators, and officials with the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), and other sources in the United States and around the world.
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Mira Tweti (Of Parrots and People: The Sometimes Funny, Always Fascinating, and Often Catastrophic Collision of Two Intelligent Species)
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The jury convicted him, the government urged life in prison, but the judge gave him only seventeen years and four months, citing his “harsh” imprisonment in the brig and noting that “there is no evidence that [Padilla] personally killed, maimed, or kidnapped.” The government appealed to the Eleventh Circut, where a panel, voting 2–1, ordered the judge to lengthen the sentence.47 Without the torture, he might have gone away for life. Humane interrogations have a long record of success, suggesting that he might have talked anyway. Or, if not, investigators would have been forced to investigate, nail down the facts, and prove his guilt—if he was actually guilty. Once again, torture was a substitute for hard investigation.
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David K. Shipler (Rights at Risk: The Limits of Liberty in Modern America)
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People can’t predict how long they will be happy with recently acquired objects, how long their marriages will last, how their new jobs will turn out, yet it’s subatomic particles that they cite as “limits of prediction.” They’re ignoring a mammoth standing in front of them in favor of matter even a microscope would not allow them to see.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable)
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The development and use of vibration in the 1970s allowed Russian cosmonauts to be in space twice as long as their nonvibrating American counterparts (approximately two hundred days versus one hundred days). More recently, a NASA website cited the effects of vibration on turkeys, sheep, and rats as “profound . . . promoting near-normal rates of bone formation”[21] under laboratory conditions simulating the zero gravity conditions of space flight.
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Becky Chambers (Whole Body Vibration: The Future of Good Health)
“
It could not. Sometimes you have to be there to understand—especially when a situation is fast-moving or contains soft, hard-to-quantify details, as is typically the case on the battlefield. The Nobel laureate economist Friedrich Hayek had a phrase for the kind of awareness that is hard to capture in metrics and maps: the “knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place.” Social scientists have long understood that statistical metrics are at their most pernicious when they are being used to control the world, rather than try to understand it. Economists tend to cite their colleague Charles Goodhart, who wrote in 1975: “Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.”[12] (Or, more pithily: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”) Psychologists turn to Donald T. Campbell, who around the same time explained: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”[13]
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Tim Harford (The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics)
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The reality of archaic civilization was centralization of political power, class stratification, the magnification of military power, the economic exploitation of the weak, and the universal introduction of some form of forced labor for both productive and military purposes. As against these undeniable realities we must also cite the major achievements of archaic society: the maintenance of peace within the realm, more productive agriculture, the opening of markets for long-range trade, and significant achievements in architecture, art, and literature. But equally important was, with the help of a literate elite, a new effort to give political power a moral meaning. The archaic king was almost always depicted as a warrior, as a defender of the realm against barbarians on the frontiers and rebels within; as such he embodied a powerful element of dominance. But he was also seen, and probably increasingly as archaic societies matured, as the defender of justice, in Mesopotamia and Egypt as the good shepherd, in Western Zhou as father and mother of his people. Gods as well as kings were increasingly thought of not only as dominant but also as nurturant. The very appeal to ethical standards of legitimacy for both gods and kings, however, opened new possibilities for political and theological reflection. In the axial age a new kind of upstart, the moral upstart who relies on speech, not force, would appear, foreshadowed as we have seen, by voices already raised in archaic societies.
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Robert N. Bellah (Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age)
“
In 1787, the future Lord Eldon (then plain John Scott) had argued a case in the equity court and lost. Thirty-three years later, the same case was cited to Lord Eldon when, as lord chancellor, he presided in the court of chancery. Lord Eldon said that he remembered the case: And very angry I was with the decision; but I [have] lived long enough to find out that one may be very angry and very wrong.9
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Fali S. Nariman (Before Memory Fades: An Autobiography)
“
The major difference shows up when these monkeys are highly stressed (overaroused) for a long time. Then, compared to other monkeys, these more reactive monkeys seem anxious, depressed, and compulsive. If repeatedly upset, they show these behaviors more often, and at this point their neurotransmitters decrease. These behaviors and physical changes also show up in any monkey traumatized in childhood by being separated from its mother. Interestingly when first traumatized, what increases are the stress hormones like cortisol. But again, with time, especially with other stressors, like being isolated, the serotonin levels decline. Then the monkeys are permanently more reactive. The point to be realized from these two studies is that what creates the problem is chronic overarousal or stress or trauma in childhood—not the inherited trait. We saw the same point in chapter 2. Sensitive children experience more brief moments of arousal, with its increased adrenaline, but they’re fine if feeling secure. But when a sensitive child is insecure (or when any child is), short-term arousal turns to long-term arousal, with its increased cortisol. Eventually, serotonin is used up, too (according to the studies with monkeys). This research is important for HSPs. It makes very concrete why we need to avoid chronic overarousal. If our childhood programmed us to be threatened by everything, then we must do the inner work, usually in therapy, that will change that programming even if it takes years. Kramer cites evidence that a permanent susceptibility to overarousal and depression can develop and real harm can be done if serotonin levels are not returned to normal. So we want to stay secure, rested, and serotonin-strong. This keeps us ready to enjoy our trait’s advantages, the appreciation of the subtle. It means that the inevitable moments of overarousal do not lead to increased cortisol over days and decreased serotonin over months and years. If we have blown it, then we can still correct the situation. But it takes time, and we may want to use medication for a while to help make this correction.
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Elaine N. Aron (The Highly Sensitive Person)
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In order to take the best precautions possible, the two physicians on the tribunal (the aforementioned Tadino and Senatore Settala, son of the celebrated Lodovico) proposed a ban, with harsh penalties, on the purchase of items of any sort from the soldiers passing through. But it was impossible to make the president of the tribunal understand the need for such an order. “He was a good-hearted man,” wrote Tadino, “who could not believe that so many thousands of people would meet their deaths through commerce with these people and their goods.” I cite this as one of the most remarkable passages of that time. As long as there have been commissions of health, there has never been a president who has made a similar argument, if indeed we can call it an argument.
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Alessandro Manzoni (The Betrothed)
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1. How much did you know about the culture Julia Haart grew up in before you read the book? What were some things that surprised you? 2. Religions come with many rules. What do you think religious rules provide for followers? 3. Talk about the role of women in the cloistered community. What are their responsibilities? Are the ideal standards to which they are held consistent with their realities? What other faiths tout similar views? 4. Julia has a very complicated view of her mother. How do you think that this informs her own role as a mother to four children? What example do you think her journey sets for them? 5. What traits from her upbringing, if any, do you think Julia has brought with her to her new life? 6. Have you ever experienced a situation in which you had to set boundaries or leave behind a group in order to be true to yourself? What feelings did you have surrounding that? What was the result? 7. Julia references many of the difficulties that some people who leave her former community face. How do you think her assertion that the community “forced them to be unprepared for modernity” ultimately serves to ensure its continuity? 8. Ultra-Orthodox Jews cite modesty and simplicity as the foundation of their values, yet Julia describes the high costs associated with following the community’s strict traditions and customs. How does this materialism conflict with the community’s values? How is it similar to materialism in the secular world? 9. Discuss your reaction to the fact that Julia was not born into ultra-Orthodox Judaism. How do you think her life might have been different if her mother and father had not converted? 10. Toward the end of the book, Julia states, “Every time I win, it makes me stronger and more able to handle the next attack that comes my way…. Now I listen to my own voice.” In what other ways has Julia demonstrated that same resolve throughout her life? 11. Seven years after leaving behind her community, Julia says she feels closer to a higher power than she ever did when she was religious. What does her memoir say about religion versus spirituality? 12. The memoir takes place in the period before My Unorthodox Life aired on Netflix in 2021. Did you watch the show before you read Brazen? What surprised you about Julia’s story that wasn’t addressed in the show? Did learning more of her backstory from the book change your understanding of Julia’s life on screen in any way? ABOUT THE AUTHOR Julia Haart is the CEO, co-owner, and chief creative officer of Elite World Group.
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Julia Haart (Brazen: My Unorthodox Journey from Long Sleeves to Lingerie)
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As Hippocrates would have predicted, scores of other studies on the effects of physical activity on morbidity and mortality yield similar results.61 That doesn’t mean, however, that physical activity is a surefire Fountain of Youth, and remember it doesn’t delay mortality by preventing aging per se. Instead, physical activity triggers a suite of mechanisms that increase the chances of staying healthy with age by retarding senescence and preventing many chronic diseases that contribute over time to mortality. This logic raises three vitally important insights that help explain the Donald Trumps of the world who don’t die young in spite of being sedentary and overweight. First, and most fundamentally, the mortality and morbidity statistics I have been citing are probabilities. Eating sensibly and exercising don’t guarantee long life and good health; they just decrease the risk of getting sick. By the same token, smokers have a higher risk of getting lung cancer, and individuals who are unfit or obese are more likely to get heart disease or become diabetic, but plenty don’t. Second, advances in medical care are shifting the relationship between morbidity and mortality.62 Conditions like diabetes, heart disease, and some cancers are no longer imminent death sentences but instead can be treated or held at bay for years with drugs that maintain blood sugar levels, decrease harmful cholesterol levels, lower blood pressure, and combat mutant cells. In Donald Trump’s case, for example, his reportedly normal blood pressure and cholesterol levels likely reflect the medications he takes to lower these risk factors.63
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Daniel E. Lieberman (Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding)
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The ideas in this book have been inspired by many. But it is probably significant that the previous chapter, looking at new theory, cites so many women scholars who have put life at the centre of the economy, not the economy at the centre of life: Hannah Arendt’s work on the public life, vita activa; Elinor Ostrom’s on creating community via the commons; Kate Raworth’s on the construction of a circular economy which minimizes waste; Stephanie Kelton’s on the power of long-run finance and an outcomes-based budgeting process; Edith Penrose’s on the dynamic capabilities of value-creating organizations; Carlota Perez’s on tilting the playing field towards a smart green transition.
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Mariana Mazzucato (Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism)
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speak of this terrain as a primeval and unsettled wilderness—yet this continent had been continuously inhabited by human cultures for at least ten thousand years. That indigenous peoples can have gathered, hunted, fished, and settled these lands for such a tremendous span of time without severely degrading the continent’s wild integrity readily confounds the notion that humans are innately bound to ravage their earthly surroundings. In a few centuries of European settlement, however, much of the native abundance of this continent has been lost—its broad animal populations decimated, its many-voiced forests overcut and its prairies overgrazed, its rich soils depleted, its tumbling clear waters now undrinkable. European civilization’s neglect of the natural world and its needs has clearly been encouraged by a style of awareness that disparages sensorial reality, denigrating the visible and tangible order of things on behalf of some absolute source assumed to exist entirely beyond, or outside of, the bodily world. Some historians and philosophers have concluded that the Jewish and Christian traditions, with their otherworldly God, are primarily responsible for civilization’s negligent attitude toward the environing earth. They cite, as evidence, the Hebraic God’s injunction to humankind in Genesis: “Be fertile and increase, fill the earth and master it; and rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and all the living things that creep on earth.”1 Other thinkers, however, have turned toward the Greek origins of our philosophical tradition, in the Athens of Socrates and Plato, in their quest for the roots of our nature-disdain. A long line of recent philosophers, stretching from Friedrich Nietzsche down to the present, have attempted to demonstrate that Plato’s philosophical derogation of the sensible and changing forms of the world—his claim that these are mere simulacra of eternal and pure ideas existing in a nonsensorial realm beyond the apparent world—contributed profoundly to civilization’s distrust of bodily and sensorial
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David Abram (The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World)
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Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world. Failing is something queers do and have always done exceptionally well; for queers failure can be a style, to cite Quentin Crisp, or a way of life, to cite Foucault, and it can stand in contrast to the grim scenarios of success that depend upon "trying and trying again." In fact if success requires so much effort, then maybe failure is easier in the long run and offers different rewards.
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Judith Halberstam
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Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world. Failing is something queers do and have always done exceptionally well; for queers failure can be a style, to cite Quentin Crisp, or a way of life, to cite Foucault, and it can stand in contrast to the grim scenarios of success that depend upon "trying and trying again." In fact if success requires so much effort, then maybe failure is easier in the long run and offers different rewards.
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J. Jack Halberstam
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A study cited in the Family and Consumer Sciences Research Journal disclosed that sitting down to a family meal helped working parents reduce the tension and strain from long hours at the office. The researchers found that, even if test subjects had major stress at work, if they could make it home in time to eat dinner with their family, their employee morale stayed high. However, as work increasingly interfered with the ability to eat dinner with their family, levels of dissatisfaction at work began to creep up.
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Shawn Stevenson (Eat Smarter: Use the Power of Food to Reboot Your Metabolism, Upgrade Your Brain, and Transform Your Life)
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At this period, after his long fast, the toad has a very spiritual look, like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent.
George Orwell, cited by John Carey
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John Carey (The Faber Book of Science)
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By 1636, civil authorities on the island decreed a rule that became common in chattel systems throughout the hemisphere: slaves would remain in bondage for life. In 1661, with the island now amid a full-blown sugar boom, the authorities formulated a fuller set of laws governing the lives of slaves, a Black code that one historian has called “one of the most influential pieces of legislation passed by a colonial legislature.” Antigua, Jamaica, South Carolina, and, “indirectly,” Georgia adopted it in its entirety, while the laws of many other English colonies were modeled after it. The law described Africans as a “heathenish, brutish and uncertaine, dangerous kinde of people,” and gave their white owners near total control over their lives. The right of trial by jury guaranteed for whites was excluded for slaves, whom their owners could punish at will, facing no consequences even for murder, so long as they could cite a cause. Other rules barred Black slaves from skilled occupations, thus helping to reify race as a largely impermeable membrane dividing whites and Blacks in the New World. With steps like these, tiny Barbados became an enormously powerful driver of history, not only through the prodigious wealth it would generate, a wealth hitherto “unknown in other parts of colonial America,” but by its legal and social example as well. The island colony stood out as a pioneer in the development of chattel slavery and in the construction of the plantation machine, as the originator of codes like these, and later as a crucial source of early migration, both Black and white, to the Carolinas, Virginia, and later Jamaica. Here was the seed crystal of the English plantation system in the New World, or in the words of one historian, its “cultural hearth.
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Howard W. French (Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War)
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Inconsistencies are as definite an indication of the presence of conflicts as a rise in body temperature is of physical disturbance. To cite some common ones: A girl wants above all else to marry, yet shrinks from the advances of any man. A mother oversolicitous of her children frequently forgets their birthdays. A person always generous to others is niggardly about small expenditures for himself. Another who longs for solitude never manages to be alone. One forgiving and tolerant toward most people is oversevere and demanding with himself.
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Karen Horney (Our Inner Conflicts: A Constructive Theory of Neurosis)
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9. The God introduced by the Torah began the long journey to belief in human equality—solely as a result of the Torah statement that each of us is created in God’s image. Slavery was abolished on a wide scale first in the Western world—by Christians who were rooted in the Torah and the rest of the Hebrew Bible and who specifically cited the Torah doctrine that all humans are created in God’s image. 10.
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Dennis Prager (The Rational Bible: Exodus)
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when approached about signing the October 7 statement, Comey refused. The reason he cited—that the White House had waited too long and it was now too close to the election for the FBI director to be speaking publicly about anything related to the election—would in hindsight be hard to understand, particularly given the news he was about to make in two weeks’ time regarding Clinton’s emails.
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Greg Miller (The Apprentice)
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what caused a law review article to be cited more or less. Fred and I collected citation information on all the articles published for fifteen years in the top three law reviews. Our central statistical formula had more than fifty variables. Like Epagogix, Fred and I found that seemingly incongruous things mattered a lot. Articles with shorter titles and fewer footnotes were cited significantly more, whereas articles that included an equation or an appendix were cited a lot less. Longer articles were cited more, but the regression formula predicted that citations per page peak for articles that were a whopping fifty-three pages long.
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Ian Ayres (Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart)
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In the same year as the original Disaster article, Meredeth Turshen attacked the paradigm of clinical medicine as excessively preoccupied with how the individual body reacts to disease, missing the bigger picture of class and other collectivities. She cited Engels’s descriptions of how polluted air, poorly ventilated houses, overcrowded slums and omnipresent sewage predisposed the workers of Manchester to become ill. She could have also quoted Rosa Luxemburg: ‘The doctors can trace the fatal infection in the intestines of the poisoned victims as long as they look through their microscopes; but the real germ which caused the death of the people in the asylum is called – capitalist society, in its purest culture.’ Since the 1970s, critical epidemiology has agreed with critical vulnerability theory on emphasising the social over the natural: disease and disaster as produced through processes internal to society.
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Andreas Malm (Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century)
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I could tell Jeung was skeptical about my line of questioning from the get-go. There was a long pause, after which I could hear him puzzling hesitantly on how best to respond. “I don’t know if silence is necessarily secret-keeping,” he said slowly. “I’m sure parents don’t talk about their kids about a lot of things. They don’t talk about their sex lives. I don’t know that it’s necessarily a Taoist approach. There are probably things they’d just rather forget. And there is a Chinese popular religion thing where people don’t talk about negative things. It’s why people don’t talk about cancer. You know The Farewell?” he asked, citing Lulu Wang’s Golden Globe- and BAFTA-winning film about her family’s decision to hide her grandmother’s lung cancer diagnosis from her. Her grandmother was supposed to live only six months, but her family thought she would fare better and live longer if they told her she was just fine. The approach may have worked. At the time I am writing this, eight years after her diagnosis, Lulu’s grandmother is still alive.
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Stephanie Foo (What My Bones Know)
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Long and personal familiarity with the application of Scripture was a key element in the Puritan ministerial makeup,” Sinclair Ferguson writes. “They pondered the riches of revealed truth the way a gemologist patiently examines the many faces of a diamond.”[11] They used Scripture wisely, bringing cited texts to bear on the doctrine or case of conscience[12] at hand, all based on sound hermeneutical principles.
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Joel R. Beeke (Puritan Evangelism)
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As a distillation of some of the things we have talked about in this chapter, we present here a brief list of hermeneutical guidelines that we hope will serve you well whenever you read the Old Testament Pentateuchal law. Keeping these principles in mind may help you to avoid mistaken applications of the law while seeing its instructive and faith-building character.
1. Do see the Old Testament law as God’s fully inspired word for you. 2. Don’t see the Old Testament law as God’s direct command to you. 3. Do see the Old Testament law as the basis for the old covenant, and therefore for Israel’s history. 4. Don’t see the Old Testament law as binding on Christians in the new covenant except where specifically renewed. 5. Do see God’s justice, love, and high standards revealed in the Old Testament law. 6. Don’t forget to see that God’s mercy is made equal to the severity of the standards. 7. Do see the Old Testament law as a paradigm — providing examples for the full range of expected behavior. 8. Don’t see the Old Testament law as complete. It is not technically comprehensive. 9. Do remember that the essence of the law (the Ten Commandments and the two chief laws) is repeated in the Prophets and renewed in the New Testament. 10. Don’t expect the Old Testament law to be cited frequently by the Prophets or the New Testament. Legal citation was first introduced only in the Roman era, long after the Old Testament was complete. 11. Do see the Old Testament law as a generous gift to Israel, bringing much blessing when obeyed. 12. Don’t see the Old Testament law as a grouping of arbitrary, annoying regulations limiting people’s freedom.
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Gordon D. Fee (How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth)
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Identifying – and then acquiring – non-performing properties, on which developers can profitably build (or rehab) within neighborhoods which are in the process of being gentrified, has long been cited as one obstacle when it comes to increasing access to affordable housing. Then, once a suitable property has been identified to redevelop, would the developer elect to build affordable housing when homeownership may have been proven to be – historically speaking – difficult to attain for residents who live in neighborhoods where a disproportionately notable portion of potential future home buyers fall within a “very-low” income categorization? “Very low,” meaning, an income at or below 50% of HUD median income.
Lower credit scores for prospective home buyers who live in now-underserved neighborhoods could also be one assumption developers have. This would further exacerbate the limited-access-to-quality-affordable-housing challenge.
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Ted Ihde, Thinking About Becoming A Real Estate Developer?
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Hello.” “Hello.” “You’re not too crowded?” “No, it’s all right.” “Have you been in the jug a long time?” “Long enough.” “Are you past the halfway mark?” “Just.” “Look over there: how poverty-stricken our villages are—straw thatch, crooked huts.” “An inheritance from the Tsarist regime.” “Well, but we’ve already had thirty Soviet years.” “That’s an insignificant period historically.” “It’s terrible that the collective farmers are starving.” “But have you looked in all their ovens?” “Just ask any collective farmer in our compartment.” “Everyone in jail is embittered and prejudiced.” “But I’ve seen collective farms myself.” “That means they were uncharacteristic.” (The goatee had never been in any of them—that way it was simpler.) “Just ask the old folks: under the Tsar they were well fed, well clothed, and they used to have so many holidays.” “I’m not even going to ask. It’s a subjective trait of human memory to praise everything in the past. The cow that died is the one that gave twice the milk. [Sometimes he even cited proverbs!] And our people don’t like holidays. They like to work.” “But why is there a shortage of bread in many cities?” “When?” “Right before the war, for example.” “Not true! Before the war, in fact, everything had been worked out.” “Listen, at that time in all the cities on the Volga there were queues of thousands of people…” “Some local failure in supply. But more likely your memory is failing you.” “But there’s a shortage now!” “ ‘Old wives’ tales. We have from seven to eight billion poods of grain.” “And the grain itself is rotten.” “Not at all. We have been successful in developing new varieties of grain.”[…] And so forth. He is imperturbable. He speaks in a language which requires no effort of the mind. And arguing with him is like walking through a desert. It’s about people like that that they say: “He made the rounds of all the smithies and came home unshod.”[
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Jordan B. Peterson (We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine)
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People can't predict how ong they will be happy with recently acquired objects, how long their marriages will last, how their new jobs will turn out, yet it's subatomic particles that they cite as "limits of prediction." They're ignoring a mammoth standing in front of them in favor of matter even a microscope would not allow them to see.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable)
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The United States Marines were in Nicaragua in force again. When the United States became a world power after the Spanish-American War it began to concern itself with territorial prerogatives in policy toward Latin America. They point was to keep European powers out of the area. While the ostensible reason for American intervention was to protect American lives and property and the rights of United States creditors, the main concern was maintaining security in the Caribbean and Central America. That mean keeping in power governments that were favorable to United States interests.
Each time the United States intervened in Latin America the invaded country's strategic proximity to the Panama Canal was cited. Also publicized, virtually to the point of preaching missionary work, was the fact that the country's finances would be reorganized and a responsible armed force created to ensure democracy and constitutional order. The United States Marine Corps became pistol packing zealots carrying the faith to the infidels. Ironically, the Marines' actual legacy to Nicaragua was one of the most long-lived repressive regimes in Latin American history.
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Bernard Diederich (Somoza and the Legacy of U.S. Involvement in Central America)
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If one has an aspiration to become a well-cited researcher, s/he must
constantly strive to give the best efforts in a long-term period.
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Eraldo Banovac
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In the most capital-intensive industry, automobiles, peak economy of scale was achieved at a level of production equivalent to 3-6% of market share.84 And even this level of output is required only because annual model changes (which arguably wouldn't pay for themselves without state capitalist subsidies) require an auto plant to wear out the dies for a run of production in a single year. Otherwise, peak economy of scale would be reached in a plant with an output of only 60,000 per year.85 In any case, these figures relate only to productive economy of scale. Increased distribution costs begin to offset increased economies of production, according to Borsodi's law, long before peak productive economy of scale is reached. According to an F.M. Scherer study cited by Adams and Brock, a plant producing at one-third the maximum efficiency level of output would experience only a 5% increase in unit costs.86 This is more than offset by reduced shipping costs for a smaller market. The point of this digression is that the size of existing firms reflects the role of the state in subsidizing increased size by underwriting the inefficiencies of corporate gigantism--as Rothbard pointed out, the ways "our corporate state uses the coercive taxing power either to accumulate corporate capital or to lower corporate costs."87 A genuine free market economy would be vastly less centralized, with production primarily for local markets.
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Kevin A. Carson (Studies in Mutualist Political Economy)
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The urban theorist Jane Jacobs observed many years ago that huge cites create environments where small niches can flourish.
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Chris Anderson (The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More)
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My paper has to be very long and complex,” I said. “I shall cite all the great thinkers—Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud.” “What about Adolf Hitler?” “Oh, him. He’s not a thinker. He’s just a ranter and raver.” “There may come a time,” said Pepi, “when people cannot tell the difference.” “Impossible,” I solemnly predicted. “I have read Hitler’s book Mein Kampf and also some works by his colleague Herr Alfred Rosenberg because I am a fair-minded, objective person and I believe one should always hear out all sides before making a decision, and so I can tell you from firsthand knowledge that these men are idiots. Their ideas about how the Jews have poisoned their so-called superior Aryan race and caused all of Germany’s troubles are utter nonsense. No intelligent person could possibly believe them. Hitler is laughable. He will soon disappear.” “Just like all your old boyfriends,” Pepi said with his sly smile.
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Edith Hahn Beer (The Nazi Officer's Wife: How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust)
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The Jungian critic took issue with this interpretation, citing many instances of hacked-off hands in myth and magic: the Hand, she said, was an echo of the Hand of Glory cut from a hanged criminal's corpse, and pickled, then set alight with embedded candles, long used in break-and-entering charms. It was known in French as main de gloire, thus giving its name to mandragore, or mandrake.
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Margaret Atwood
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Citing private reasons—Morris was already lurching down a long, slippery path that led to bankruptcy and debtors’ prison—Morris politely declined the offer.
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Ron Chernow (Alexander Hamilton)
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Yes, when I was a very young man, a long time ago... I impregnated a young woman. I could cite you chapter and verse how I was seduced into it, and how it was her doing, not mine, and it would be true to a point... but only to a point. Ultimately, one takes responsibility for one's actions. Abortion was not an option, nor was marriage. Had it been, I would have pursued either. As it was, well... To forestall any further questions... I have not seen the young woman in many, many years, and the offspring died. But I can tell you in all honesty - which is the only way I know how to deal with matters - that not a day goes by where I don't think of him, and dwell upon the many ways in which I wish things could have gone differently. Then again... what else can anyone, particularly someone who calls himself a potential leader, do, other than try to impart his own mistakes to others so that they will learn from his errors and not commit the same ones.
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Peter David (Knight Life (Modern Arthur, #1))
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Revisiting Batnick’s periods of low real returns using Shiller CAPE, we also observe that long periods of poor performance often begin with overvaluation that is worked off over time. The Shiller CAPE levels of the broad market on January 1 of each the years cited above were as follows: 1929 – 27.06 1944 – 11.05 1965 – 23.27 2000 – 43.77 Today – 28.80 Mean – 16.67
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Daniel Crosby (The Behavioral Investor)
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Here’s the painful irony: The big-picture economy, which is largely out of any president’s control, is the real source of this president’s political strength with voters who like him. The SSRN poll for CNN in June 2019 had a striking finding. Of those who approve of Trump, a plurality of 26 percent said they do so because of the economy, more than twice the next most-frequent answer. In the same economic issue basket, 8 percent cited jobs as a reason for liking him. On immigration, 4 percent said that’s the reason they like him. When it comes to other aspects of Trump’s persona, support falls to the single digits. Just 1 percent said they approve of him because he’s draining the proverbial D.C. swamp. A whopping 1 percent said they like him because he’s honest, which proves you can fool 1 percent of the people all the time. All of this is a sign of trouble ahead for Donald Trump, because his economic record is a rickety construction prone to collapse from external forces at any moment. A BUBBLE, READY TO POP The long, sweet climb in economic prosperity we’ve enjoyed for a decade comes down to the decisions of two men and one institution: George W. Bush in taking the vastly unpopular step of bailing out Wall Street in the 2009 economic crisis, and Barack Obama for flooding the economy with economic stimulus in his first term. The Federal Reserve enabled both of these decisions by issuing an ocean of low- or zero-interest credit for ten years. Sure, the bill will come due someday, but the party is still going. While Trump took short-term political advantage of it, every bubble gets pricked by the old invisible hand. In the current economic case, the blizzard of Trumpian bullshit will inevitably hit the fan. We’re awash in trillion-dollar deficits, the national debt is asymptotically approaching infinity, and we have a president who’s never hesitated to borrow and spend well beyond his means, or to simply throw up his hands and declare bankruptcy when it suits him. We never did—and most likely never will—tackle entitlement reform. Nations don’t get to go bankrupt; they collapse. The GOP passed a tax bill that is performing exactly as expected and predicted: A handful of hedge funds, America’s top corporations, and a few dozen billionaires were given a trillion-dollar-plus tax benefit. Even the tax cut’s most fervent proponents know that its effects were short-lived, the bill is coming due, and in 2022 or thereabouts it’s going to lead to annual deficits of close to $2 trillion.
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Rick Wilson (Running Against the Devil: A Plot to Save America from Trump--and Democrats from Themselves)
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Though racial animus is often cited as the source of regional realignment, the debate over gender roles has become a powerful component of partisan polarization.
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Angie Maxwell (The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics)
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A report citing a Hamburg radio announcement regarding the death of Adolph Hitler precedes Harlow’s introduction. The tongue twister returns after a long absence, last used on the February 24, 1942 broadcast. In his blow-by-blow account of an imaginary encounter with Bronson, McGee gets the worst of it but listeners get to enjoy the best of it.
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Clair Schulz (FIBBER McGEE & MOLLY ON THE AIR, 1935-1959 (REVISED AND ENLARGED EDITION))
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Steroid
Steroid Science Diction
A compound having a unique chemical structure called steroid nuclei, such as gallbladder nectaric acid, heart venom, sex hormones, vitamin B, adrenal exfoliation hormones, etc. But usually referred to as steroids, it refers to the adrenal glands of the cortisone system, or hormone drugs that have a sugary metabolism and at the same time anti-inflammatory, anti-alerative action, and are widely used in medical care.
foreign language notation steroid (English)
Steroid Nursing Dictionary
It is the generic name of a group of compounds having steroid nuclei, one of the most widely present ingredients as natural substances, such as sterols, bile acids, sex hormones, adrenal cortex hormones, ganglion and insect metamorphosis hormones.
foreign language notation steroid, steroid(German)
Steroid Oceanographic Dictionary
The total designation of a family of compounds with nuclei of cyclopentanoperhyd-rophenanthrene. It performs biologically important functions such as sterols, bile acids, sex hormones, adrenal cortex hormones, and insect metamorphosis hormones.
foreign language notation steroid (English)
Steroid Nutrition Dictionary
The total designation of compounds having cyclopentanophenanthrene rings as common mother nuclei. It includes bile acid, steroid hormones, strong-seam dividend payers, steroid saponin, alkaloids and insect metamorphic hormones.
foreign language notation steroid (English)
reference sterol
steroid hairdressing dictionary
A large series of non-binary lipids with complex four ring bones.
Foreign Language notation Stereoid (English)
[Naver Knowledge Encyclopedia] Steroids (Science Dictionary, 2010..414, Newton Editing, Hyun Chun-soo)
Busan's Haeundae High School, whose designation as an autonomous private high school was canceled, will retain its self-employed status for the time being due to the court's decision. The permit haeundaego donghae, the academy is completely unjust to the disposition of revocation of administrative litigation will be well and truly over a specified as long as it criticizes independent status is maintained.
Pusan District Court in administration has 28 haeundaego study corporate donghae ‘ choose them over effective disposition of revocation of suspension given an injunction filed by the Pusan Metropolitan Office of Education.(suspension of execution) for quoting ’ said.
The court said as he “to institute donghae be deemed difficult to prevent damage to the urgent needs to recover.” according to the court's ruling the other hand, due to suspension of execution.A significant impact on public welfare may apply for an injunction referred to and have no data to " admit that there is to explain why. The court's ruling did not determine whether the Busan Metropolitan Office of Education's administrative disposition itself was legitimate. The court considered whether it was necessary to suspend the validity or execution of administrative proceedings, and acknowledged the need.
Administrative measure of legal academy is donghae is decided by an administrative litigation filed through the Pusan Metropolitan Office of Education. As the administrative litigation is expected to continue until early next year, Haeundae is expected to maintain its self-employed status next year. Hwang Yoon-sung, the head of the emergency committee of Haeundae High School, said, "We expected that the cancellation of the Busan education office's self-assessment of the self-assessment of the self-administration system will be cited for the suspension of the application as it is currently in the middle of recruiting freshmen from Haeundae High School, so that there will be no problem in recruiting new students.
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스테로이드판매,[☎?카톡↔kap6],스테로이드구입,클렌부테롤구입,클렌부테롤판매,아나바구입,아나바판매,디볼구입,비볼판매,메디택위니구입,울트라셋구입,
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But a knowledge of all studies carried out on a new product and comparison with already existent medications are indispensable for doctors to be able to prescribe the most effective medicine. Today, doctors have only results that are pre-selected by laboratories. In fact, the few systematic studies, long and costly, that have been carried out indicate that the majority of new medications placed on the market are no more effective than those that exist already. And, sometimes, they are even less effective. We’ll cite a revealing example, that of Tamiflu. In 2005, fearing an avian flu pandemic, governments all over the world spent billions of dollars to buy and store this medication purported to reduce complications from flu, which can be fatal. In England, there was enough to treat 80% of the population. However, to date, Roche, the manufacturer, has published no data showing that Tamiflu effectively reduced the rate of pneumonia and death. Roche’s Internet site, however, announces that this medication reduces complications by 67%.
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Matthieu Ricard (Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World)
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Here are a few examples of different levels of risks, ordered from high to low: If you don’t do this, competitors with AI can make you obsolete. If AI poses a major existential threat to your business, incorporating AI must have the highest priority. In the 2023 Gartner study, 7% cited business continuity as their reason for embracing AI. This is more common for businesses involving document processing and information aggregation, such as financial analysis, insurance, and data processing. This is also common for creative work such as advertising, web design, and image production. You can refer to the 2023 OpenAI study, “GPTs are GPTs” (Eloundou et al., 2023), to see how industries rank in their exposure to AI. If you don’t do this, you’ll miss opportunities to boost profits and productivity. Most companies embrace AI for the opportunities it brings. AI can help in most, if not all, business operations. AI can make user acquisition cheaper by crafting more effective copywrites, product descriptions, and promotional visual content. AI can increase user retention by improving customer support and customizing user experience. AI can also help with sales lead generation, internal communication, market research, and competitor tracking. You’re unsure where AI will fit into your business yet, but you don’t want to be left behind. While a company shouldn’t chase every hype train, many have failed by waiting too long to take the leap (cue Kodak, Blockbuster, and BlackBerry). Investing resources into understanding how a new, transformational technology can impact your business isn’t a bad idea if you can afford it. At bigger companies, this can be part of the R&D department.
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Chip Huyen (AI Engineering: Building Applications with Foundation Models)
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There have been several discoveries that have shown John to be very accurate,” McRay pointed out. “For example, John 5:1–15 records how Jesus healed an invalid by the Pool of Bethesda. John provides the detail that the pool had five porticoes. For a long time people cited this as an example of John being inaccurate, because no such place had been found. “But more recently the Pool of Bethesda has been excavated—it lies maybe forty feet below ground—and sure enough, there were five porticoes, which means colonnaded porches or walkways, exactly as John had described. And you have other discoveries—the Pool of Siloam from John 9:7, Jacob’s Well from John 4:12, the probable location of the Stone Pavement near the Jaffa Gate where Jesus appeared before Pilate in John 19:13, even Pilate’s own identity—all of which have lent historical credibility to John’s gospel.
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Lee Strobel (The Case for Christ: A Journalist's Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus)
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Many, if not most, of the Scripture passages cited for the Hebrew titles, are found in the Old Testament, which was written in Hebrew. The Scripture passages that are cited to help readers understand and pray with New Testament titles, originally written in Greek, come from both the Old and New Testaments. It seemed confusing to put the Greek title in headers that often contain passages originally written in Hebrew rather than Greek.
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Ann Spangler (Praying the Names of God for 52 Weeks, Expanded Edition: A Year-Long Bible Study)
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Singal also cited an anonymous clinician from the GIC who expressed concern that trans children who want to desist might be pressured into remaining trans if their parents get involved in advocacy work, if they come out to their school and classmates, and so forth. As a parent, this strikes me as deeply confusing. Our basement is littered with the toys and hobbies of ages past, and while that can indeed be annoying, at no point did I consider forcing my daughter to play more with her expensive handmade doll or ride her scooter. To be a child or adolescent is to be in perpetual flux, picking up hobbies, interests, and identities to find out what feels right, what feels like home. This can happen with sports, with music, and yes, with gender and sexuality, but at no point does any good parent insist that their child keep their hair blue or stay on the soccer team long after their interest has withered.
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Jonathan Foiles ((Mis)Diagnosed: How Bias Distorts Our Perception of Mental Health)
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Philosophers routinely cite an “ought implies can” principle: the idea that you have a moral obligation to do something only if you can do it; or, equivalently, you are not obligated to do something that you cannot do. Under a plausible adaptation of this principle, someone’s near inability to do something also makes it moot and unfair to demand that she do so. Hence the fact that most fat people cannot realistically make ourselves thin in the long term through diet and exercise has far-reaching moral implications: we cannot then be blamed for not doing the near-impossible.
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Kate Manne (Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia)
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It’s those adversities that open up your mind and your curiosity to see if there are new ways of doing things,” Bessel van der Kolk told me. He then cited Socrates: “An unexamined life is not worth living. As long as one doesn’t examine oneself, one is completely subject to whatever one is wired to do, but once you become aware that you have choices, you can exercise those choices.
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Gabor Maté (The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture)
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One has to grow old to understand the functioning of science. Then one may remember the papers which a long time ago aroused great interest and one may compare them to the present-day textbooks. [...] History becomes smooth, too smooth in writing. Right starts are forgotten, wrong expeditions into the desert disappear without a trace. Only a few papers will be cited.
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Benno Müller-Hill (The Lac Operon: A Short History of a Genetic Paradigm by Müller-Hill, Benno (1996) Paperback)
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The expert cited a Mandarin word, yu yi, which he defined as “the longing to feel intensely again, as you did when you were a child.
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Adrienne Brodeur (Little Monsters)
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Within just a few years, Nvidia’s success in graphics made it one of TSMC’s top two or three customers. Tsai remembered Jensen would negotiate hard over pricing and would repeatedly cite how the graphics company had only a 38 percent gross margin. One particular dispute prompted Tsai to travel to California and meet with Jensen at a restaurant that wasn’t much better than Denny’s. “We tried to resolve the dispute. I forgot the details,” Tsai said. “But it really hit me. Jensen taught me his philosophy of doing business called ‘rough justice.’ ” Jensen explained that “rough” meant the relationship was not flat but rather had ups and downs. Justice was the important part. “After a certain period of time, let’s say a few years, it would net out to roughly equal.” To Tsai, this was a way of describing a win-win partnership, though one that acknowledged there wouldn’t be a win-win every single time. Sometimes one side would get the better of a specific deal or incident, and the next time it would be the other side. As long as it was roughly 50-50 after a few years—not 60-40 or 40-60—it was a positive relationship. He remembers thinking Jensen’s approach made a great deal of sense.
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Tae Kim (The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant)
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The great central fact of the universe is that spirit of infinite life and power that is back of all, that manifests itself in and through all. This spirit of infinite life and power that is back of all is what I call God. I care not what term you may use, be it Kindly Light, Providence, the Over-Soul, Omnipotence, or whatever term may be most convenient, so long as we are agreed in regard to the great central fact itself. . . . The great central fact in human life is the coming into a conscious vital realization of our oneness with this Infinite Life and the opening of ourselves fully to this divine inflow. (cited in James, 1902/2009, p. 79)
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David B Yaden (The Varieties of Spiritual Experience: 21st Century Research and Perspectives)
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After citing his impressive list of publications and awards, he turned to me and asked: ‘How could you think I hate Hinduism when I have spent my entire life studying the Sanskrit tradition? How could someone possibly hate the tradition that he has devoted his life to studying? Only a person in love with the tradition could work so hard to understand it.’ This logic would certainly have impressed the vast majority of Indians he deals with. The mere fact that a famous westerner is working so hard to study our tradition is enough to bring awe into the minds of many Indians.
However, my response was different from what he might have anticipated. I told him he must have heard of certain American academicians who are considered Islamophobic (a well-known term referring to those who hate Islam). He replied, ‘Of course there are those scholars.’ Then I pointed out that Islamophobic scholars spend their entire lives studying Islam. By Pollock’s logic, their long-term investment in Islamic studies ought to make them lovers of Islam. Nevertheless, they hate Islam and they study it diligently for that very reason. Their careers are made by studying a tradition with the intention of demolishing it and exposing its weaknesses. Similarly, I said, there are scholars in many disciplines who study some phenomenon for the purpose of undermining it, not because they love it. People study crime in order to fight it. There are experts on corruption who want to expose it, not because they love corruption. There are public health specialists who study a disease with the intention of being able to defeat it. Therefore, I argued, it was fallacious to assume that merely studying Sanskrit made him a lover of sanskriti (the Indian civilization based on Sanskrit).
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Rajiv Malhotra (The Battle for Sanskrit: Is Sanskrit Political or Sacred, Oppressive or Liberating, Dead or Alive?)
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I don't agree with his [Netanyahu's] analysis of appeasement. It depends on who you are appeasing. Hitler is one thing. Appeasing Israel, by accepting its conquest of the Golan Heights or its occupation of parts of Lebanon and Syria, is a bad example that Mr. Netanyahu would never cite of why appeasement of the wrong enemy is wrong. But an enemy with limited objectives with a reasonable claim to things can be offered concessions, which is not an appeasement. It is an incent. And interestingly, the most vigorous defense of so-called appeasement as a diplomatic tool was Winston Churchill, who said you should appease those when you are strong, not when you're weak. You should appease, you should take advantage of your strength to solve long-term problems with short-term concessions.
(Excerpt from interview "Amb. Chas Freeman & Trita Parsi: The Next Israel-Iran War Is Coming")
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Chas W. Freeman Jr.
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Ancient cultures have long understood that we exist in relationship to all, are affected by all, and affect all.
In the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita, the divine avatar Krishna declares, "They live in wisdom who see themselves in all and all in them." And the early seventeenth-century cleric and poet John Donne famously mused, "No man is an island, entire of itself." He composed this line, perhaps not coincidentally, during a period of illness and convalescence. Walt Whitman, writing in mid-nineteenth-century America, could have cribbed the verse cited in the above epigraph from today's quantum physics.
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Gabor Maté (The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture)
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The Forbidden Secret Program – (Expert Review) Quantum Abundance Exposed
The Only Quantum Abundance Attraction Program Backed By Research From MIT, Harvard, Stanford.In the rapidly expanding field of manifestation and abundance training, The Forbidden Secret distinguishes itself as a digital program rooted in "quantum antenna" activation a technique aimed at allowing users to reshape their reality and attract abundance in all areas of life.
Download The Forbidden Secret Audio Track Here
Download The Forbidden Secret Audio Track Here
What is The Forbidden Secret?
The Forbidden Secret is a personal development and manifestation program that claims to help individuals activate their brain's "quantum antenna." By using targeted audio tracks and mind-training techniques, the system is marketed as a way to effortlessly draw wealth, success, and other desired outcomes into one's life without time-consuming activities like visualization or meditation.
The program was designed using research insights from major institutions and is presented by a creator who claims to have left behind the status quo to reveal these secrets to the public.
How Does The Forbidden Secret Work?
At the core of the program is a process called "quantum activation," which the creators say triggers new brainwave patterns that signal intentions to the universe. Unlike many manifestation systems, it relies on guided audio, subconscious scripting, and specific brainwave frequencies to "reprogram" the mind. The result, according to promotional materials, is a rapid shift in one's ability to attract abundance, even when used passively, such as while sleeping.
Why Choose The Forbidden Secret?
1. Simple application: No need for lengthy meditations, journals, or affirmations; most of the program is audio-based and can be experienced hands-free.
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Key Benefits
1. Potential to accelerate manifestation of wealth, health, career growth, and positive mindsets.
2. May help users break free from limiting beliefs and habitual negative thinking.
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Included Materials
1. Main audio program for "quantum activation"
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3. Special "God Frequency" track aims at optimizing brainwaves for focus and manifestation
4. A set of spoken "Reality Codes" for direct subconscious influence
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Start by listening to the brief audio activation session as instructed. Supplement your experience with the additional recordings to reinforce new mental patterns. Daily or nightly use is encouraged for best results.
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Pricing and Guarantee
The Forbidden Secret is offered at a modest one-time price, with all materials delivered digitally for immediate access. Users benefit from a one-year satisfaction guarantee, allowing plenty of time to assess personal results.
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