Citing Sources Quotes

In that most burdensome moment of all human history, with blood appearing at every pore and an anguished cry upon His lips, Christ sought Him whom He had always sought—His Father. “Abba,” He cried, “Papa,” or from the lips of a younger child, “Daddy.” This is such a personal moment it almost seems a sacrilege to cite it. A Son in unrelieved pain, a Father His only true source of strength, both of them staying the course, making it through the night—together.

I often learn more from one person's highly idiosyncratic experiences than I do from sources that detail universal practices or cite up-to-date studies.

Let’s call it a school project on the Pierce piece.” I bared my teeth in something vaguely resembling a smile. “You cited an anonymous source, saying that the decision was all but made. I’m wondering what made you think this information was legit.

In our current culture, we place a lot of emphasis on job description. Our obsession with the advice to “follow your passion” (the subject of my last book), for example, is motivated by the (flawed) idea that what matters most for your career satisfaction is the specifics of the job you choose. In this way of thinking, there are some rarified jobs that can be a source of satisfaction—perhaps working in a nonprofit or starting a software company—while all others are soulless and bland. The philosophy of Dreyfus and Kelly frees us from such traps. The craftsmen they cite don’t have rarified jobs. Throughout most of human history, to be a blacksmith or a wheelwright wasn’t glamorous. But this doesn’t matter, as the specifics of the work are irrelevant. The meaning uncovered by such efforts is due to the skill and appreciation inherent in craftsmanship—not the outcomes of their work.

Americans might ponder two quotations. One is the much-cited, self-congratulatory saying attributed to Tocqueville (but whose source no one has so far been able to show me): "America is great because America is good." The other is the very real saying of Samuel Johnson, attacking the similar self-congratulatory "greatness" of the English: "We continue every day to show by new proofs, that no people can be great who have ceased to be virtuous.

They really need to cite their sources, you think to yourself, which would make your seventh-grade science teacher proud if only he knew. It’s a moot point, however.

The psychoanalyst and social philosopher Erich Fromm claimed that humankind’s most basic fear is the threat of being separated from other humans. He believed that the experience of separateness, first encountered in infancy, is the source of all anxiety in human life. John Bowlby agreed, citing a good deal of experimental evidence and research to support the idea that separation from one’s caregivers – usually the mother or father – during the latter part of the first year of life inevitably creates fear and sadness in babies. He feels that separation and interpersonal loss are at the very roots of the human experiences of fear, sadness, and sorrow.

October 16, 2009 Avengers Paintball, Inc. 1778 Industrial Blvd. Lakeville, MN 55044 Esteemed Avengers, This letter recommends Mr. Allen Trent for a position at your paintball emporium. Mr. Trent received a C– in my expository writing class last spring, which—given my newly streamlined and increasingly generous grading criteria—is quite the accomplishment. His final project consisted of a ten-page autobiographical essay on the topic of his own rageful impulses and his (often futile) attempts to control them. He cited his dentist and his roommate as primary sources. Consider this missive a testament to Mr. Trent’s preparedness for the work your place of business undoubtedly has in store. Hoping to maintain a distance of at least one hundred yards, Jason T. Fitger Professor of Creative Writing and English Payne University (“Teach ’til It Hurts”)

As these quotations are examined and exposed, it will become quite clear that those Jesus mythicists citing the Church Fathers in such a fashion are not competent students on the subject of Christianity's origins. They have merely copied accusations from less than reliable sources without concern for whether their citations were interpreted properly or even existed. Nor have they ever bothered investigating the responses given by Christian apologists to these quotes. That it attacks Christianity is enough for them.

By Hades, I wish Goodreads.com would make it mandatory to cite the literary source in quotes.

You can't be cooler than the corners where you source all your parts

MEANWHILE, I DO MY DUE DILIGENCE. I research. I read every single one of the sources that Athena cited in her draft, until I’m as much an expert on the Chinese Labour Corps as anyone can be.

I pity those reviewers above, and people like them, who ridicule authors like R.A. Boulay and other proponents of similar Ancient Astronaut theories, simply for putting forth so many interesting questions (because that's really what he often throughout openly admits is all he does does) in light of fascinating and thought-provoking references which are all from copious sources. Some people will perhaps only read the cover and introduction and dismiss it as soon as any little bit of information flies in the face of their beliefs or normalcy biases. Some of those people, I'm sure, are some of the ones who reviewed this book so negatively without any constructive criticism or plausible rebuttal. It's sad to see how programmed and indoctrinated the vast majority of humanity has become to the ills of dogma, indoctrination, unverified status quos and basic ignorance; not to mention the laziness and conformity that results in such acquiescence and lack of critical thinking or lack of information gathering to confirm or debunk something. Too many people just take what's spoon fed to them all their lives and settle for it unquestioningly. For those people I like to offer a great Einstein quote and one of my personal favorites and that is: "Condemnation without investigation is the highest form of ignorance" I found this book to be a very interesting gathering of information and collection of obscure and/or remote antiquated information, i.e. biblical, sacred, mythological and otherwise, that we were not exactly taught to us in bible school, or any other public school for that matter. And I am of the school of thought that has been so for intended purposes. The author clearly cites all his fascinating sources and cross-references them rather plausibly. He organizes the information in a sequential manner that piques ones interest even as he jumps from one set of information to the next. The information, although eclectic as it spans from different cultures and time periods, interestingly ties together in several respects and it is this synchronicity that makes the information all the more remarkable. For those of you who continue to seek truth and enlightenment because you understand that an open mind makes for and lifelong pursuit of such things I leave you with these Socrates quotes: "True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.

May through to June I spent my time deciding how to spend my time, which is the first, second, and third through nine thousand seven hundred and griftyfifth items on the agenda of every writer, or neurotic. I was getting ahead of myself, fretting whether the book would have to have notes or sources cited, fretting whether I’d be allowed to decide anything at all.

Usama bin Laden has died a peaceful death due to an untreated lung complication, the Pakistan Observer reported, citing a Taliban leader who allegedly attended the funeral of the Al Qaeda leader...Bin laden, according to the source, was suffering from a serious lung complication and succumbed to the disease in mid-December, in the vicinity of the Tora Bora mountains.

One of the paradoxes about demagoguery is that it is simultaneously shameless and obsessed with honor. Shaming them about being internally inconsistent, incapable of reasonable defenses, citing sources that actually contradict what they say - that puts front and center the cognitive dissonance between their shamelessness and their obsession with honor. None of these strategies work with people who are deep into conspiracy theories, nor with bots, nor with people paid to argue, but, at least in a public forum, pointing out what is happening can get some other people to walk away from demagoguery. Notice that I'm not saying you will thereby persuade them they are wrong. After all, they might not be. You might be wrong. You might both be wrong. You might both be somewhat right. You're trying to persuade them to engage in deliberation, and that means you have to be willing to engage in it, too.

Critics have focused on three Supreme Court opinions decided between 2002 and 2005. All three moved the law in a progressive direction, with the majority opinions citing the views of foreign courts or lawmakers. These foreign sources were clearly not invoked as determinative of the meaning of the U.S. Constitution, nor could they have been. But mere mention of the foreign materials provoked anger by framing the question of how to interpret the Constitution in a global context of evolving views on human dignity.

Global health players can become impervious to critique as they identify emergencies, cite dire statistics, and act on their essential duty of promoting health in the name of "humanitarian reason" or as an instrument of economic development, diplomacy, or national security. We are left, however, with an open-source anarchy around global health problems--a policy space in which new strategies, rules, distributive schemes, and the practical ethics of health care are being assembled, experimented with, and improvised by a wide array of deeply unequal stakeholders

Disproportionate coverage in the news media plainly has effects on readers and viewers. When Esther Madriz, a professor at Hunter College, interviewed women in New York City about their fears of crime they frequently responded with the phrase “I saw it in the news.” The interviewees identified the news media as both the source of their fears and the reason they believed those fears were valid. Asked in a national poll why they believe the country has a serious crime problem, 76 percent of people cited stories they had seen in the media. Only 22 percent cited personal experience.29

According to Felipe Fernández-Armesto, at least thirty-eight theories have been put forward to explain why people took to living in communities: that they were driven to it by climatic change, or by a wish to stay near their dead, or by a powerful desire to brew and drink beer, which could only be indulged by staying in one place. One theory, evidently seriously suggested (Jane Jacobs cites it in her landmark work of 1969, The Economy of Cities), was that ‘fortuitous showers’ of cosmic rays caused mutations in grasses that made them suddenly attractive as a food source. The short answer is that no one knows why agriculture developed as it did.

In true, Taoist parlance, 'immortality' refers to a spiritual state, not a condition of physical permanence. In his books on the teachings of Don Juan, Carlos Casteneda refers to the primordial source of creation as the nagual, the vast ocean of emptiness in which material worlds take form and dissolve like drops of dew. Nagual refers to everything that cannot be expressed in words, which brings to mind the second line of the Tao Teh Ching: 'The name which can be named is not the real Name.' Don Juan's teachings are remarkably similar to Taoist alchemy, and they both cite our innate awareness as the only bridge between the awesome emptiness and power of the nagual and its material manifestation in the temporal world.

To narrow natural rights to such neat slogans as "liberty, equality, fraternity" or "life, liberty, property," . . . was to ignore the complexity of public affairs and to leave out of consideration most moral relationships. . . . Burke appealed back beyond Locke to an idea of community far warmer and richer than Locke's or Hobbes's aggregation of individuals. The true compact of society, Burke told his countrymen, is eternal: it joins the dead, the living, and the unborn. We all participate in this spiritual and social partnership, because it is ordained of God. In defense of social harmony, Burke appealed to what Locke had ignored: the love of neighbor and the sense of duty. By the time of the French Revolution, Locke's argument in the Second Treatise already had become insufficient to sustain a social order. . . . The Constitution is not a theoretical document at all, and the influence of Locke upon it is negligible, although Locke's phrases, at least, crept into the Declaration of Independence, despite Jefferson's awkwardness about confessing the source of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." If we turn to the books read and quoted by American leaders near the end of the eighteenth century, we discover that Locke was but one philosopher and political advocate among the many writers whose influence they acknowledged. . . . Even Jefferson, though he had read Locke, cites in his Commonplace Book such juridical authorities as Coke and Kames much more frequently. As Gilbert Chinard puts it, "The Jeffersonian philosophy was born under the sign of Hengist and Horsa, not of the Goddess Reason"--that is, Jefferson was more strongly influenced by his understanding of British history, the Anglo-Saxon age particularly, than by the eighteenth-century rationalism of which Locke was a principal forerunner. . . . Adams treats Locke merely as one of several commendable English friends to liberty. . . . At bottom, the thinking Americans of the last quarter of the eighteenth century found their principles of order in no single political philosopher, but rather in their religion. When schooled Americans of that era approved a writer, commonly it was because his books confirmed their American experience and justified convictions they held already. So far as Locke served their needs, they employed Locke. But other men of ideas served them more immediately. At the Constitutional Convention, no man was quoted more frequently than Montesquieu. Montesquieu rejects Hobbes's compact formed out of fear; but also, if less explicitly, he rejects Locke's version of the social contract. . . . It is Montesquieu's conviction that . . . laws grow slowly out of people's experiences with one another, out of social customs and habits. "When a people have pure and regular manners, their laws become simple and natural," Montesquieu says. It was from Montesquieu, rather than from Locke, that the Framers obtained a theory of checks and balances and of the division of powers. . . . What Madison and other Americans found convincing in Hume was his freedom from mystification, vulgar error, and fanatic conviction: Hume's powerful practical intellect, which settled for politics as the art of the possible. . . . [I]n the Federalist, there occurs no mention of the name of John Locke. In Madison's Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention there is to be found but one reference to Locke, and that incidental. Do not these omissions seem significant to zealots for a "Lockean interpretation" of the Constitution? . . . John Locke did not make the Glorious Revolution of 1688 or foreordain the Constitution of the United States. . . . And the Constitution of the United States would have been framed by the same sort of men with the same sort of result, and defended by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, had Locke in 1689 lost the manuscripts of his Two Treatises of Civil Government while crossing the narrow seas with the Princess Mary.

Brown-Séquard ground up the testes of domesticated animals (dogs and pigs are most often cited, but no two sources seem to quite agree on which animals he favored), injected the extract into himself, and reported feeling as frisky as a forty-year-old. In fact, any improvement he sensed was entirely psychological. Mammalian testes contain almost no testosterone because it is sent out into the body as quickly as it is made, and in any case we manufacture very little of it anyway. If Brown-Séquard ingested any testosterone at all, it was no more than a trace. Even though Brown-Séquard was completely wrong about the rejuvenative effects of testosterone, he was actually right that it is potent stuff—so much so that, when synthesized, it is treated today as a controlled substance. Brown-Séquard’s enthusiasm for testosterone seriously damaged his scientific credibility, and he died soon afterward anyway, but ironically his efforts prompted others to look more closely and systematically at the chemical processes that control our lives. In 1905, a decade after Brown-Séquard’s death, the British physiologist E. H. Starling coined the term “hormone” (on advice from a classics scholar at Cambridge University; it comes from a Greek word meaning “to set in motion”), though the science didn’t really get going until the following decade. The first journal devoted to endocrinology wasn’t founded until 1917, and the umbrella term for the ductless glands of the body, the endocrine system, came even later. It was coined in 1927 by the British scientist J. B. S. Haldane.

The dead man, Hippolytus continues, will rise again by passing through the “door of heaven.” Jacob saw the gate of heaven on his way to Mesopotamia, “but they say Mesopotamia is the stream of the great ocean that flows from the midst of the perfect man.” This is the gate of heaven of which Jacob said: “How terrible is this place! This is no other but the house of God, and the gate of heaven.”120 The stream that flows out of the Original Man (the gate of heaven) is interpreted here as the flood-tide of Oceanus, which, as we have seen, generates the gods. The passage quoted by Hippolytus probably refers to John 7 : 38 or to an apocryphal source common to both. The passage in John—“He who believes in me, as the scripture has said, Out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water”—refers to a nonbiblical source, which, however, seemed scriptural to the author. Whoever drinks of this water, in him it shall be a fountain of water springing up into eternal life, says Origen.121 This water is the “higher” water, the aqua doctrinae, the rivers from the belly of Christ, and the divine life as contrasted with the “lower” water, the aqua abyssi, where the darknesses are, and where dwell the Prince of this world and the deceiving dragon and his angels.122 The river of water is the “Saviour” himself.123 Christ is the river that pours into the world through the four gospels,124 like the rivers of Paradise. I have purposely cited the ecclesiastical allegories in greater detail here, so that the reader can see how saturated Gnostic symbolism is in the language of the Church, and how, on the other hand, particularly in Origen, the liveliness of his amplifications and interpretations has much in common with Gnostic views. Thus, to him as to many of his contemporaries and successors, the idea of the cosmic correspondence of the “spiritual inner man” was something quite familiar: in his first Homily on Genesis he says that God first created heaven, the whole spiritual substance, and that the counterpart of this is “our mind, which is itself a spirit, that is, it is our spiritual inner man which sees and knows God.”125

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

Yet the sources of their fanaticism are left undefined. The “last night” letter of the terrorists is posted on a wall, but without any English translation. And so the deeper truth that religious fanaticism was the whole of their horrible cause—that, in the last-night letter, God is cited a hundred and twenty-one times—is elided. It is disquieting to be reminded that the women-in-paradise promise, which sophisticates have widely thought to be a claim made by Western propagandists, is right there, too. The terrorists did not hate us for our freedom; they hated us for our lack of faith. (There’s a complicated sense in which the two go together, but they weren’t capable of making the complicated case.) Their godliness does not exhaust the meanings of religion, any more than Pol Pot’s atheism exhausts the meanings of doubt. But it is a central fact of the occasion, not illuminated by being ignored.

The reference to “the whole human” highlights the connection of the apokatastasis and the divinization of humanity through the incarnation with another feature of Gregory’s thought—his distinctive theological anthropology. The passage from Catechetical Oration 32 cited above continues: For since the God-bearing human was from no other source than our common mass, which through the resurrection was raised by union with the divinity, just as in the case of our body the working of one of the organs of sense extends to the whole consciousness—the unity in the member—so also the resurrection of the member goes completely through the whole, as if the whole nature were a single living being, being imparted alike from the member to the whole in accordance with both the continuity and the unity of the nature. 26 For Gregory, the image of God in human beings is located not in individual human beings but rather in humanity as a whole. 27 Human nature is then essentially corporate rather than individual, although Gregory’s anthropology does not negate individuality. Through the corporate solidarity of humanity all share in the death introduced into it by the choice of evil of one of its members. Through the union of the Word with this corporate human nature, all of humanity shares in the life of the resurrection when one of its members is raised from the dead.

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.

The paper cited 101 sources and so appeared to be scientific. Willie Soon had authored other discredited, industry-funded climate-denial papers in the past, including with Legates. He is not a climate scientist or a polar-bear expert. He is an aerospace engineer, and was one of the “new faces” the GCSCP public-relations plan had identified would be strategic in a disinformation campaign that created “uncertainties” about climate science.

Examine.com is a masterfully good source for learning about all type of substances.   Gwern.net is run by a wonderful and thorough amateur scientist who cites his work highly.   Look

The psychology of the unconscious and abstract art, two groundbreaking ideas of the early twentieth century, were actually close cousins, with a common ancestor in philosopher Karl Albert Scherner, whom both Vischer and Freud credited as the source of their key idea. Vischer called Scherner’s 1861 book The Life of the Dream a “profound work, feverishly probing hidden depths…from which I derived the notion that I call ‘empathy’ or ‘feeling-into’ ”; in The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud cited Scherner at length, praising the “essential correctness” of his ideas and describing his book as “the most original and far-reaching attempt to explain dreaming as a special activity of the mind.” Vischer led to abstract art via Wilhelm Worringer (1881–1965), whose 1906 art history dissertation Abstraction and Empathy had an argument as simple as its title: empathy is only half the story.

Dry logic also must be condemned. Another system declares that the universe is eternal, without beginning or end. It follows that the universe and its phenomena are self-existent; thus lifeless insentient matter is its own agent and keeper, which is absurd, because action implies intelligence and no example can be cited to the contrary. Scriptures also say that the Primal Cause is an intelligent principle, and we know that action always originates from an intelligent source alone.

As early as November 1966, the Red Guard Corps of Beijing Normal University had set their sights on the Confucian ancestral home in Qufu County in Shandong Province. Invoking the language of the May Fourth movement, they proceeded to Qufu, where they established themselves as the Revolutionary Rebel Liaison State to Annihilate the Old Curiosity Shop of Confucius. Within the month they had totally destroyed the Temple of Confucius, the Kong Family Mansion, the Cemetery of Confucius (including the Master’s grave), and all the statues, steles, and relics in the area... In January 1967 another Red Guard unit editorialized in the People’s Daily: To struggle against Confucius, the feudal mummy, and thoroughly eradicate . . . reactionary Confucianism is one of our important tasks in the Great Cultural Revolution. And then, to make their point, they went on a nationwide rampage, destroying temples, statues, historical landmarks, texts, and anything at all to do with the ancient Sage... The Cultural Revolution came to an end with Mao’s death in 1976. In 1978 Deng Xiaoping (1904–97) became China’s paramount leader, setting China on a course of economic and political reform, and effectively bringing an end to the Maoist ideal of class conflict and perpetual revolution. Since 2000, the leadership in Beijing, eager to advance economic prosperity and promote social stability, has talked not of the need for class conflict but of the goal of achieving a “harmonious society,” citing approvingly the passage from the Analects, “harmony is something to be cherished” (1.12). The Confucius compound in Qufu has been renovated and is now the site of annual celebrations of Confucius’s birthday in late September. In recent years, colleges and universities throughout the country—Beijing University, Qufu Normal University, Renmin University, Shaanxi Normal University, and Shandong University, to name a few—have established Confucian study and research centers. And, in the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Olympics, the Beijing Olympic Committee welcomed guests from around the world to Beijing with salutations from the Analects, “Is it not a joy to have friends come from afar?” and “Within the fours seas all men are brothers,” not with sayings from Mao’s Little Red Book. Tellingly, when the Chinese government began funding centers to support the study of the Chinese language and culture in foreign schools and universities around the globe in 2004—a move interpreted as an ef f ort to expand China’s “soft power”—it chose to name these centers Confucius Institutes... The failure of Marxism-Leninism has created an ideological vacuum, prompting people to seek new ways of understanding society and new sources of spiritual inspiration. The endemic culture of greed and corruption—spawned by the economic reforms and the celebration of wealth accompanying them—has given rise to a search for a set of values that will address these social ills. And, crucially, rising nationalist sentiments have fueled a desire to fi nd meaning within the native tradition—and to of f set the malignant ef f ects of Western decadence and materialism. Confucius has thus played a variety of roles in China’s twentieth and twenty-first centuries. At times praised, at times vilified, he has been both good guy and bad guy. Yet whether good or bad, he has always been somewhere on the stage. These days Confucius appears to be gaining favor again, in official circles and among the people. But what the future holds for him and his teachings is difficult to predict. All we can say with any certainty is that Confucius will continue to matter.

Whatever subject stays in the process of editing and copy editing by unqualified contributors every day and every time can never be reliable and notable; even one cites authentic sources. Wikipedia falls under such quality of context without a doubt.

Cooper: "Junk science." Mac: "I swear." Cooper: "Cite your sources." Mac: "Some magazine." Cooper: "Ohhhh, of course! Some magazine - the most reputable of publications." She glares at me. Mac: "Why can't you just accept I'm right?" Cooper: "Why can't you accept you might be wrong?" Mac: "I'm never wrong.

It is now clear that the kōan about Mahakasyapa's receiving the flower after Sakyamuni's wordless sermon, as well as slogans like "special transmission outside the teaching" and "no reliance on words and letters"—originally separate items that came to be linked in a famous Zen motto attributed to Bodhidharma—were created in the Sung dynasty. First making their appearance in eleventh-century transmissions of the lamp texts, including the Chingte chuan-teng lu (1004) and the T'ien-sheng kuang-teng lu (1036), these rhetorical devices were designed to support the autonomous identity of Zen in an era of competition with neo-Confucianism and are not to be regarded as accurate expressions of the period they are said to represent. A close examination of sources reveals that Tang masters with a reputation for irreverence and blasphemy were often quite conservative in their approach to doctrine by citing (rather than rejecting) Mahayana sutras in support of teachings that were not so distinct from, and were actually very much in accord with, contemporary Buddhist schools.

4 them: cite your sources. 4 us: protect your IP.

The most frequently cited source is the Roman author Tacitus, who described a divination process in his book Germania in the first century C.E..

The lack of knowledge on the part of followers perpetuates a culture of abuse by bad leadership. Every day, issues are being endorsed in the name of standing for the ignorant masses, only to benefit those who sponsor the agendas. Priorities are set and resources allocated, never to benefit or reach those cited as the underlying justification for sourcing the funds or setting the priorities.

Faust also discusses the belief in salvation as a factor in nerving soldiers to face death with equanimity and as a source of comfort to their families. She cites the funeral sermon for a Massachusetts officer killed at Petersburg, in which the clergyman defined death as “the middle point between two lives.” But she seems inclined at times to view this conviction as the equivalent of grasping at straws—or, to change the metaphor, of whistling past the graveyard. Instead of a deeply held belief, it was for many soldiers and their families, she writes, the product of “distress and desire” to make tolerable the intolerable prospect of death. She also suggests the provocative idea that the vision of death as the middle point between two lives was a nineteenth-century version of a death-denying culture.

already popular material, reducing the number of articles researchers cited and “narrowing” scholarship compared to paper databases. As the number of sources available online broadened, fewer journals and articles were cited, those that were cited were more recent, and citations were connected to fewer sources.

Smartass A smartass is someone who can listen to an expert propose a 'new idea' and cite you the sources where it was stolen from.

Here and throughout the Gospels, Jesus does not simply cite Scripture as though it were a self-evident, self-interpreting source of authority. He rereads it, drawing out new, often highly provocative meanings, "fulfilling" it in a way that gives it new form for a new day. What would Jesus do? Reread. The Bible tells me so.

Lucia Robson's facts can be trusted if, say, you're a teacher assigning her novels as supplemental reading in a history class. “Researching as meticulously as a historian is not an obligation but a necessity,” she tells me. “But I research differently from most historians. I'm looking for details of daily life of the period that might not be important to someone tightly focused on certain events and individuals. Novelists do take conscious liberties by depicting not only what people did but trying to explain why they did it.” She adds, “I depend on the academic research of others when gathering material for my books, but I don't think that my novels should be considered on par with the work of accredited historians. I wouldn't recommend that historians cite historical novels as sources.” And they sure don't. They wouldn't risk the scorn of their colleagues by citing novels. But, Lucia adds: “I think historical fiction and nonfiction work well together. … I'd bet that historical novels lead more readers to check out nonfiction on the subject rather than the other way around,” she says, and then notes: One of the wonderful ironies of writing about history is that making stuff up doesn't mean it's not true. And obversely, declaring something to be true doesn't guarantee that it is. In writing about events that happened a century or more ago, no one knows what historical ‘truth’ is, because no one living today was there. That's right. Weren't there. But will be, once a good historical novelist puts us there.

The political atmosphere has been polluted by what Steven Colbert referred to as “Truthiness.” To that, I would add the term “factitious.” Lies that travel in via statistics, and cited by people who are confident that the public isn’t smart enough to question a statement that’s got a few numbers in it. Unless someone in the conversation knows enough to debunk the claim on the spot, it goes forth as truth. That’s why many GOP spokespersons enter TV debates armed with two or three factitious statements, often citing some genuine-sounding patriotic source like The Heritage Foundation, The American Enterprise Institute, FreedomWorks, American Crossroads, Americans for Prosperity, The Cato Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy, or Judicial Watch.

You should only cite a paper... • To support one of your arguments • To provide extra information • As sources of reliable data • To provide context or comparison for your work

The report, which did not cite sources, said VW, the world's No. 2 automaker, was interested in acquiring Chrysler to help it improve its struggling footing in the United States, and specified that Fiat's Ferrari subsidiary would be excluded from any deal. Fiat said no merger talks had taken place, a position that was repeated by its majority shareholder in a separate statement issued at the request of Italy's market watchdog.

Some years ago, a man who regularly listened to my preaching made a shrewd observation. He said, “When you are well prepared for your sermon, you cite a great variety of sources, but when you aren’t well prepared, you just quote C. S. Lewis.

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.

Do not assume that a source agrees with a writer when the source summarizes that writer’s line of reasoning. Quote only what a source believes, not its account of someone else’s beliefs, unless that account is relevant. 2.  Record why sources agree, because why they agree can be as important as why they don’t. Two psychologists might agree that teenage drinking is caused by social influences, but one might cite family background, the other peer pressure. 3.  Record the context of a quotation. When you note an important conclusion, record the author’s line of reasoning: Not Bartolli (p. 123): The war was caused … by Z. But    Bartolli: The war was caused by Y and Z (p. 123), but the most important was Z (p. 123), for two reasons: First,… (pp. 124–26); Second,… (p. 126) Even if you care only about a conclusion, you’ll use it more accurately if you record how a writer reached it. 4.  Record the scope and confidence of each statement. Do not make a source seem more certain or expansive than it is. The second sentence below doesn’t report the first fairly or accurately. One study on the perception of risk (Wilson 1988) suggests a correlation between high-stakes gambling and single-parent families. Wilson (1988) says single-parent families cause high-stakes gambling. 5.  Record how a source uses a statement. Note whether it’s an important claim, a minor point, a qualification or concession, and so on. Such distinctions help you avoid mistakes like this: Original by Jones: We cannot conclude that one event causes another because the second follows the first. Nor can statistical correlation prove causation. But no one who has studied the data doubts that smoking is a causal factor in lung cancer. Misleading report: Jones claims “we cannot conclude that one event causes another because the second follows the first. Nor can statistical correlation prove causation.” Therefore, statistical evidence is not a reliable indicator that smoking causes lung cancer.

Citing “informed sources,” the newspaper reported that Hitler and Geli argued constantly over the half niece’s intention to move out of her uncle’s apartment and get engaged to a man in Vienna. According to the Post, on September 18 there was “once again a violent quarrel” between them, and the Nazi leader left the apartment. The Post said what provoked Geli to shoot herself was not known, but the newspaper insinuated a cover-up by Nazi officials. The “mysterious affair,” as the Post called it, triggered an avalanche of speculation.

As usual, Gish hadn’t done his homework or bothered to read more recent sources. The fact that he cited an out-of-context quotation from Weishampel et al. (1990) shows that he could apparently read a more authoritative source, but either he could not read well enough to also discover that the other transitional forms like Psittacosaurus are mentioned in the same chapter or his biases were so strong that he can only find short snippets that fit his prejudices.

They consistently cite the Holy Scriptures, the writings of the Church Fathers, the holy canons,8 and the decisions of the ecumenical councils. All of these are important aspects of Tradition and as such carry authority. This, in itself, creates our phronema. Since Orthodoxy does not routinely generate official and contemporary authoritative definitions and statements, Orthodox theologians turn again and again to the ancient sources.

Can politics be articulated in a way that’s structural, electric, instead of being dug up again, the boring bit at the bottom of the barrel? I think the clue to this is simultaneity, a sense of wonder at it: that the political can be a PARALLEL SOURCE OF INFORMATION, & more is more: adding an awareness of politics, how things happen, to the mix can just enhance our sense of how the present is exploding into Now Time. I’m thinking of the quote you cite from Levi-Strauss—“a universe of information where the laws of savage thought reign once more.” As if the instantaneous transmission of information can return us to the time-based, finite and deliberate magic of the medieval world. “The Middle Ages were built on seven centuries of ecstacy extending from the hierarchy of angels down into the muck” (Hugo Ball). So when you introduce political information to your texts, it shouldn’t be a matter of “And ye—” “But still—”, as if politics could be the final countervailing word. (I’m thinking of the essay on postmodern retro camp in your book ‘The Ministry Of Fear’.) Politics should be introduced: “And and.” Breathless, keeping it afloat—how much information about one subject can you juggle in two hands?

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

advantages to the Orthodox Church, citing it as the source of the nation’s spiritual strength and tradition,

The Small Arms Survey is the most commonly-cited source for data on gun ownership rates. It has given support to the claim that the United States has by far the highest level of gun ownership, with 88.8 guns per 100 people.

How could Hochschild go so wrong? He was highly motivated from the start to “find” a genocide because, as he notes, his project began by reading the American humorist Mark Twain’s claim that eight to ten million people had died in the EIC. But no scholar has ever made such a charge. His source was a chapter by the Belgian ethnographer Jan Vansina, citing his own work on population declines in the entirety of central Africa throughout the 19th century that included only what became the northern areas of the EIC. In any case, Vansina’s own source was a Harvard study of 1928 that quoted a 1919 Belgian claim that “in some areas” population had fallen by half, but quoted it in order to assert that it was almost certainly false.

Conrad spent six months working for a cargo company in the EIC in 1890, three weeks of it aboard a steamship traveling up river to today’s Kisangani. There is no mention of rubber in the novel because Conrad was there five years before rubber cultivation began. Kurtz is an ivory trader. So whatever sources Conrad was using when he began work on Heart of Darkness in 1898, his personal experiences would at most have added some color and context. Hochschild will have none of it, insisting that Conrad “saw the beginnings of the frenzy of plunder and death” which he then “recorded” in Heart of Darkness. The brutalities by whites in the 1979 film Apocalypse Now were inspired by the novel, Hochschild avers, because Conrad “had seen it all, a century earlier, in the Congo.” In another example of creative chronology, Hochschild cites a quotation that he believes was the inspiration for Kurtz’s famous scrawl, “Exterminate all the brutes!” The quotation was made public for the first time during a Belgian legislative debate in 1906. Whatever its authenticity, it could not be a source for a book published in 1902.

the midst of that fog of confusion and misdirection, a leak to The Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima cut through with an unequivocal statement. Her headline: “Russian Spies Hacked the Olympics and Tried to Make It Look Like North Korea Did It, U.S. Officials Say.” Again, the Post cited anonymous U.S. intelligence sources—two of them—who claimed that the GRU’s Main Center for Special Technology was behind the attack, the same hackers responsible for NotPetya. Olympic Destroyer, it seemed to follow, was the work of Sandworm, or at least its colleagues at the same agency.

In fact, in the whole category of Gospels, Acts, and Epistles, forgery was the normal mode of Christian production. So why on earth would we trust any Gospel as our only real source for the historicity of Jesus? Much less an anonymous Gospel, written a lifetime later, in a land and a language quite foreign to Jesus, citing no sources, and corroborated by no one?

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.

Most centrally, how did approximately 10,000 people killed in skirmishes between the EIC police and natives in a small portion of the territory over a 20-year period mushroom into 10 million dead, “mass murder on a vast scale” and “a forgotten Holocaust”? Rather than climb down from this ludicrous claim, which the doyen of Congo studies, Jean Stengers, called “absurd” and “polemical,” Hochschild repeats it. His source? The same Jan Vansina whose work, I noted, was based on an erroneous reading of an earlier report (a Harvard study that rejected the report of the Permanent Committee for the Protection of the Natives of 1919 that Hochschild cites in his letter) and whose own work was based on nothing more than “oral traditions.

Imagine such a historian citing a book by Frederick Douglass or another abolitionist, twisting the words around so that they became arguments for slavery. But that is exactly what Zinn did with the words of Douglas Pike: Pike accused the Viet Cong of genocide, but Zinn used selective quotations of Pike’s work to make them the heroes of the Vietnamese people. Zinn, as we have seen, violated over and over the rules on which the American Historical Association prides itself and by which Richard Evans and his team showed Irving to be a historian of disrepute. Zinn did everything—misrepresented sources, omitted critical information, falsified evidence, and plagiarized. His rhetorical strategies included leading questions, logical fallacies, and ad hominem attacks.

According to an idea that was wide-spread among the Germans and Celts, all wisdom dwelled in the lower world, which is often cited as the source of knowledge and art. This notion goes hand in hand with another idea that maintains that death precedes life. Because death is identical to night and life is identical to day, these peoples counted time in nights rather than days. We can compare this to Scandinavian cosmology: The giant Ymir is the originator of creation. In Nordic mythology, the giants are the keepers of the science of runes, and one of them, Sutting, is the keeper of poetic knowledge. As the world's first inhabitants, they [the giants] knew all its secrets. They thus maintained many close ties with death and the otherworld with, for instance, dwarves and elves.

Many of the twenty stories cited by the Pulitzer committee were sourced to leaks of classified information. Thus the print press had bestowed its highest honor on rogue FBI and DOJ officials who’d coordinated with media operatives in a plot to topple the president.

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.

Michael Ignatieff, the Canadian writer, is a leading proponent of the increasingly popular notion of "civic nationalism." He defines a civic nation as "a community of equal, rights-bearing citizens, united in patriotic attachment to a shared set of political practices and values." … Defenders of this myth often cite 19th-century French historian Ernest Renan's famous description of the nation as "a daily plebiscite," a phrase that suggests that consent is indeed the source of national identity. But they rarely note that this phrase represents only one half of Renan's own definition of the nation. "Two things," Renan insists, constitute the nation: "One lies in the past, the other in the present. One is the possession of in common of a rich legacy of memories, the other is present-day consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form.

Let’s say someone writes an academic paper quoting fifty people who have worked on the subject and provided background materials for his study; assume, for the sake of simplicity, that all fifty are of equal merit. Another researcher working on the exact same subject will randomly cite three of those fifty in his bibliography. Merton showed that many academics cite references without having read the original work; rather, they’ll read a paper and draw their own citations from among its sources. So a third researcher reading the second article selects three of the previously referenced authors for his citations. These three authors will receive cumulatively more and more attention as their names become associated more tightly with the subject at hand. The difference between the winning three and the other members of the original cohort is mostly luck: they were initially chosen not for their greater skill, but simply for the way their names appeared in the prior bibliography. Thanks to their reputations, these successful academics will go on writing papers and their work will be easily accepted for publication. Academic success is partly (but significantly) a lottery.fn2

It’s here that some might respond that their knowledge work job cannot possibly become such a source of meaning because their job’s subject is much too mundane. But this is flawed thinking that our consideration of traditional craftsmanship can help correct. In our current culture, we place a lot of emphasis on job description. Our obsession with the advice to “follow your passion” (the subject of my last book), for example, is motivated by the (flawed) idea that what matters most for your career satisfaction is the specifics of the job you choose. In this way of thinking, there are some rarified jobs that can be a source of satisfaction—perhaps working in a nonprofit or starting a software company—while all others are soulless and bland. The philosophy of Dreyfus and Kelly frees us from such traps. The craftsmen they cite don’t have rarified jobs. Throughout most of human history, to be a blacksmith or a wheelwright wasn’t glamorous. But this doesn’t matter, as the specifics of the work are irrelevant. The meaning uncovered by such efforts is due to the skill and appreciation inherent in craftsmanship—not the outcomes of their work. Put another way, a wooden wheel is not noble, but its shaping can be. The same applies to knowledge work. You don’t need a rarified job; you need instead a rarified approach to your work.

The world is supposed to make sense. We want and need the things that happen to us and to those around us to adhere to laws of order and justice and reason. We want to believe that if we live wisely and follow the rules, things will work out, more or less, for us and for those we love. Psychologists refer to this as the Just World Hypothesis, a theory first developed by the social psychologist Melvin Lerner. Lerner postulated that people have a powerful intuition that individuals get what they deserve. This intuition influences how we judge those who suffer. When a person is harmed, we instinctually look for a reason or a justification. Unfortunately, this instinct leads to victim-blaming. As Oliver Burkeman writes in The Guardian, “Faced with evidence of injustice, we’ll certainly try to alleviate it if we can—but, if we feel powerless to make things right, we’ll do the next best thing, psychologically speaking: we’ll convince ourselves that the world isn’t so unjust after all.” Burkeman cites as evidence a 2009 study finding that Holocaust memorials can increase anti-Semitism: “Confronted with an atrocity they otherwise can’t explain, people become slightly more likely, on average, to believe that the victims must have brought it on themselves.” So what happens when the victim is a child, a little boy walking to school, a little girl riding her bike, a baby in a car, victims impossible to blame? Whom can we hold accountable when a child is killed or injured or abused or forgotten? How can one take in this information, the horror of it, and keep on believing the world is just? In his history of childhood in America, the historian Steven Mintz defines a “moral panic” as the term used by sociologists to describe “the highly exaggerated and misplaced public fears that periodically arise within a society.” Mintz suggests that “eras of ethical conflict and confusion are especially prone to outbreaks of moral panic as particular incidents crystallize generalized anxieties and provoke moral crusades.” The late 1970s through the early 1990s was a period in American history rife with sources of ethical conflict and confusion.

Cite your sources.

The second main argument to support the idea that simple living enhances our capacity for pleasure is that it encourages us to attend to and appreciate the inexhaustible wealth of interesting, beautiful, marvelous, and thought-provoking phenomena continually presented to us by the everyday world that is close at hand. As Emerson says: “Things near are not less beautiful and wondrous than things remote. . . . This perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries.”47 Here, as elsewhere, Emerson elegantly articulates the theory, but it is his friend Thoreau who really puts it into practice. Walden is, among other things, a celebration of the unexotic and a demonstration that the overlooked wonders of the commonplace can be a source of profound pleasure readily available to all. This idea is hardly unique to Emerson and Thoreau, of course, and, like most of the ideas we are considering, it goes back to ancient times. Marcus Aurelius reflects that “anyone with a feeling for nature—a deeper sensitivity—will find it all gives pleasure,” from the jaws of animals to the “distinct beauty of old age in men and women.”48 “Even Nature’s inadvertence has its own charms, its own attractiveness,” he observes, citing as an example the way loaves split open on top when baking.49 With respect to the natural world, celebrating the ordinary has been a staple of literature and art at least since the advent of Romanticism in the late eighteenth century. Wordsworth wrote three separate poems in praise of the lesser celandine, a common wildflower; painters like van Gogh discover whole worlds of beauty and significance in a pair of peasant boots; many of the finest poems crafted by poets like Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams, and Seamus Heaney take as their subject the most mundane objects, activities, or events and find in these something worth lingering over and commemorating in verse: a singing thrush, a snowy woods, a fish, some chilled plums, a patch of mint. Of course, artists have also celebrated the extraordinary, the exotic, and the magnificent. Homer gushes over the splendors of Menelaus’s palace; Gauguin left his home country to seek inspiration in the more exotic environment of Tahiti; Handel composed pieces to accompany momentous ceremonial occasions. Yet it is striking that a humble activity like picking blackberries—the subject of well-known poems by, among others, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney, and Richard Wilbur—appears to be more inspirational to modern poets, more charged with interest and significance, than, say, the construction of the world’s tallest building, the Oscar ceremonies, the space program, or the discovery of DNA’s molecular structure. One might even say that it has now become an established function of art to help us discover the remarkable in the commonplace

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.

As an author writing about software engineering, I am committed to providing the best grounding for any factual claims I make or support. To that end I will: only cite papers that I have in fact personally read refrain from indirect quotation (or other ‘telephone game’ variants) make it clear whenever I’m citing opinion or indirect quotation, as opposed to original research cite page and section numbers when available, and always when citing books whenever possible, cite papers freely available online in full text versions refrain from citing obscure or non peer-reviewed sources check that the data I’m citing actually supports the claim look for contradictory evidence as well as supporting, to avoid confirmation bias only make prudent claims, and present all plausible threats to validity.

Many others, including the Croatian study cited earlier, have found thyme to be very effective against mold, more so than many other oils tested. The Croatian study also found that an extract of thyme oil called thymol was even more effective than thyme oil itself, suggesting that other plants containing thymol are probably effective. Oregano is another source of thymol, so it is no surprise that oregano often tests strongly against mold. The tropical plants cinnamon, clove, and lemongrass also show up in study after study as being effective against a variety of molds. In fact, in a study from India17 testing 75 essential oils against Aspergillus niger, the researchers concluded that the most effective were cinnamon, cassia, clove, and lemongrass.

One of the central facts that must be faced in a ministry of reconciliation is that men are most frequently the source of the violence that rends families, communities, and nations apart. Some account for this by noting that males are more aggressive physically than are females, and that this goes back to our distant past when the man's strength was needed to defend women and children from harm. Whether aggression is in the genes or whether it is learned behavior remains a matter of debate. However, it always leaves human wreckage strewn in its wake. The other side of this fact is that it is often left to women to find ways of repairing the damage that men's violence and conflict have wrought. Sometimes they are the survivors; the men are no longer there. At other times women are the ones who are able to imagine alternatives that break the deadlock of a conflictive situation. The stories that could be cited are many.