“
War, Nobby. Huh! What is it good for?" he said.
"Dunno, Sarge. Freeing slaves, maybe?"
"Absol—well, okay."
"Defending yourself against a totalitarian aggressor?"
"All right, I'll grant you that, but—"
"Saving civilization from a horde of—"
"It doesn't do any good in the long run is what I'm saying, Nobby, if you'd listen for five seconds together," said Fred Colon sharply.
"Yeah, but in the long run, what does, Sarge?
”
”
Terry Pratchett (Thud! (Discworld, #34; City Watch, #7))
“
Reading list (1972 edition)[edit]
1. Homer – Iliad, Odyssey
2. The Old Testament
3. Aeschylus – Tragedies
4. Sophocles – Tragedies
5. Herodotus – Histories
6. Euripides – Tragedies
7. Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War
8. Hippocrates – Medical Writings
9. Aristophanes – Comedies
10. Plato – Dialogues
11. Aristotle – Works
12. Epicurus – Letter to Herodotus; Letter to Menoecus
13. Euclid – Elements
14. Archimedes – Works
15. Apollonius of Perga – Conic Sections
16. Cicero – Works
17. Lucretius – On the Nature of Things
18. Virgil – Works
19. Horace – Works
20. Livy – History of Rome
21. Ovid – Works
22. Plutarch – Parallel Lives; Moralia
23. Tacitus – Histories; Annals; Agricola Germania
24. Nicomachus of Gerasa – Introduction to Arithmetic
25. Epictetus – Discourses; Encheiridion
26. Ptolemy – Almagest
27. Lucian – Works
28. Marcus Aurelius – Meditations
29. Galen – On the Natural Faculties
30. The New Testament
31. Plotinus – The Enneads
32. St. Augustine – On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine
33. The Song of Roland
34. The Nibelungenlied
35. The Saga of Burnt Njál
36. St. Thomas Aquinas – Summa Theologica
37. Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy;The New Life; On Monarchy
38. Geoffrey Chaucer – Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales
39. Leonardo da Vinci – Notebooks
40. Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy
41. Desiderius Erasmus – The Praise of Folly
42. Nicolaus Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
43. Thomas More – Utopia
44. Martin Luther – Table Talk; Three Treatises
45. François Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel
46. John Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion
47. Michel de Montaigne – Essays
48. William Gilbert – On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies
49. Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote
50. Edmund Spenser – Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene
51. Francis Bacon – Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, New Atlantis
52. William Shakespeare – Poetry and Plays
53. Galileo Galilei – Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences
54. Johannes Kepler – Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World
55. William Harvey – On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals
56. Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan
57. René Descartes – Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy
58. John Milton – Works
59. Molière – Comedies
60. Blaise Pascal – The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises
61. Christiaan Huygens – Treatise on Light
62. Benedict de Spinoza – Ethics
63. John Locke – Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding;Thoughts Concerning Education
64. Jean Baptiste Racine – Tragedies
65. Isaac Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics
66. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding;Monadology
67. Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe
68. Jonathan Swift – A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal
69. William Congreve – The Way of the World
70. George Berkeley – Principles of Human Knowledge
71. Alexander Pope – Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man
72. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws
73. Voltaire – Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary
74. Henry Fielding – Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones
75. Samuel Johnson – The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets
”
”
Mortimer J. Adler (How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading)
“
Civilized people must, I believe, satisfy the following criteria:
1) They respect human beings as individuals and are therefore always tolerant, gentle, courteous and amenable ... They do not create scenes over a hammer or a mislaid eraser; they do not make you feel they are conferring a great benefit on you when they live with you, and they don't make a scandal when they leave. (...)
2) They have compassion for other people besides beggars and cats. Their hearts suffer the pain of what is hidden to the naked eye. (...)
3) They respect other people's property, and therefore pay their debts.
4) They are not devious, and they fear lies as they fear fire. They don't tell lies even in the most trivial matters. To lie to someone is to insult them, and the liar is diminished in the eyes of the person he lies to. Civilized people don't put on airs; they behave in the street as they would at home, they don't show off to impress their juniors. (...)
5) They don't run themselves down in order to provoke the sympathy of others. They don't play on other people's heartstrings to be sighed over and cosseted ... that sort of thing is just cheap striving for effects, it's vulgar, old hat and false. (...)
6) They are not vain. They don't waste time with the fake jewellery of hobnobbing with celebrities, being permitted to shake the hand of a drunken [judicial orator], the exaggerated bonhomie of the first person they meet at the Salon, being the life and soul of the bar ... They regard prases like 'I am a representative of the Press!!' -- the sort of thing one only hears from [very minor journalists] -- as absurd. If they have done a brass farthing's work they don't pass it off as if it were 100 roubles' by swanking about with their portfolios, and they don't boast of being able to gain admission to places other people aren't allowed in (...) True talent always sits in the shade, mingles with the crowd, avoids the limelight ... As Krylov said, the empty barrel makes more noise than the full one. (...)
7) If they do possess talent, they value it ... They take pride in it ... they know they have a responsibility to exert a civilizing influence on [others] rather than aimlessly hanging out with them. And they are fastidious in their habits. (...)
8) They work at developing their aesthetic sensibility ... Civilized people don't simply obey their baser instincts ... they require mens sana in corpore sano.
And so on. That's what civilized people are like ... Reading Pickwick and learning a speech from Faust by heart is not enough if your aim is to become a truly civilized person and not to sink below the level of your surroundings.
[From a letter to Nikolay Chekhov, March 1886]
”
”
Anton Chekhov (A Life in Letters)
“
They've got something they do it with, I think it's called a mocracy, and it means everyone in the whole country can say who the new Tyrant is. One man ... one vet. ... Everyone has ... the vet. Except for women, of course. And children. And criminals. And slaves. And stupid people. And people of foreign extraction. And people disapproved of for, er, various reasons. And lots of other people. But everyone apart from them. It's a very enlightened civilization.
”
”
Terry Pratchett (Pyramids (Discworld, #7))
“
I told Caliane that trying to civilize me is like trying to civilize a jungle cat,” Naasir said with a shrug. “We pretend to like people until we get hungry and want fresh meat.” A glance around, a glint in his eye. “I honestly do like you all. I haven’t thought about eating you for at least two centuries.
”
”
Nalini Singh (Archangel's Shadows (Guild Hunter, #7))
“
Fear had a tendency to drive away the courtesy of civilization.
”
”
Elizabeth Hoyt (Darling Beast (Maiden Lane, #7))
“
His captors asked why he, a nonslaveholder, was fighting to uphold slavery. He replied: “I’m fighting because you’re down here.”7
”
”
James M. McPherson (Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era)
“
What is remarkable is that there are no traces of evolution from simple to sophisticated, and the same is true of mathematics, medicine, astronomy and architecture and of Egypt's amazingly rich and convoluted religio-mythological system (even the central content of such refined works as the Book of the Dead existed right at the start of the dynastic period). 7 The majority of Egyptologists will not consider the implications of Egypt's early sophistication. These implications are startling, according to a number of more daring thinkers. John Anthony West, an expert on the early dynastic period, asks: How does a complex civilization spring full-blown into being? Look at a 1905 automobile and compare it to a modern one. There is no mistaking the process of `development'. But in Egypt there are no parallels. Everything is right there at the start. The answer to the mystery is of course obvious but, because it is repellent to the prevailing cast of modern thinking, it is seldom considered. Egyptian civilization was not a `development', it was a legacy.
”
”
Graham Hancock (Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth's Lost Civilization)
“
Americans make more trash than anyone else on the planet, throwing away about 7.1 pounds per person per day, 365 days a year. Across a lifetime that rate means, on average, we are each on track to generate 102 tons of trash. Each of our bodies may occupy only one cemetery plot when we’re done with this world, but a single person’s 102-ton trash legacy will require the equivalent of 1,100 graves. Much of that refuse will outlast any grave marker, pharaoh’s pyramid or modern skyscraper: One of the few relics of our civilization guaranteed to be recognizable twenty thousand years from now is the potato chip bag.
”
”
Edward Humes (Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash)
“
The argument was this: a civilization shackled to the strictures of excessive control on its populace, from choice of religion through to the production of goods, will sap the will and the ingenuity of its people – for whom such qualities are no longer given sufficient incentive or reward. At face value, this is accurate enough. Trouble arrives when the opponents to such a system institute its extreme opposite, where individualism becomes godlike and sacrosanct, and no greater service to any other ideal (including community) is possible. In such a system rapacious greed thrives behind the guise of freedom, and the worst aspects of human nature come to the fore, a kind of intransigence as fierce and nonsensical as its maternalistic counterpart.
And so, in the clash of these two extreme systems, one is witness to brute stupidity and blood-splashed insensitivity; two belligerent faces glowering at each other across the unfathomed distance, and yet, in deed and in fanatic regard, they are but mirror reflections.
This would be amusing if it weren’t so pathetically idiotic…
”
”
Steven Erikson (Reaper's Gale (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #7))
“
a civilization shackled to the strictures of excessive control on its populace, from choice of religion through to the production of goods, will sap the will and the ingenuity of its people – for whom such qualities are no longer given sufficient incentive or reward. At face value, this is accurate enough. Trouble arrives when the opponents to such a system institute its extreme opposite, where individualism becomes godlike and sacrosanct, and no greater service to any other ideal (including community) is possible. In such a system rapacious greed thrives behind the guise of freedom, and the worst aspects of human nature come to the fore, a kind of intransigence as fierce and nonsensical as its maternalistic counterpart.
”
”
Steven Erikson (Reaper's Gale (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #7))
“
1. That reason is a gift of God and that we should believe in its ability to comprehend the world.
2. That they have been wrong who undermined confidence in reason by enumerating the forces that want to usurp it: class struggle, libido, will to power.
3. That we should be aware that our being is enclosed within the circle of its perceptions, but not reduce reality to dreams and the phantoms of the mind.
4. That truth is a proof of freedom and that the sign of slavery is the lie.
5. That the proper attitude toward being is respect and that we must, therefore, avoid the company of people who debase being with their sarcasm, and praise nothingness.
6. That, even if we are accused of arrogance, it is the case that in the life of the mind a strict hierarchy is necessary.
7. That intellectuals in the twentieth century were afflicted with the habit of baratin, i.e., irresponsible jabber.
8. That in the hierarchy of human activities the arts stand higher than philosophy, and yet bad philosophy can spoil art.
9. That the objective truth exists; namely, out of two contrary assertions, one is true, one false, except in strictly defined cases when maintaining contradiction is legitimate.
10. That quite independently of the fate of religious denominations we should preserve a "philosophical faith," i.e., a belief in transcendence as a measure of humanity.
11. That time excludes and sentences to oblivion only those works of our hands and minds which prove worthless in raising up, century after century, the huge edifice of civilization.
12. That in our lives we should not succumb to despair because of our errors and our sins, for the past is never closed down and receives the meaning we give it by our subsequent acts.
”
”
Czesław Miłosz (New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001)
“
Hard to believe that so nearby, just across the Channel, such atrocities could still occur in their supposedly civilized world, that one could wake up one morning and find oneself bereft of brothers, parents, friends, all with the slice of an ax.
”
”
Lauren Willig (The Mischief of the Mistletoe (Pink Carnation, #7))
“
What’s Ephebe like?” said Ptraci.
“I’ve never been there. Apparently it’s ruled by a Tyrant.”
“I hope we don’t meet him, then”
Teppic shook his head. “It’s not like that,” he said. “They have a new Tyrant every five years and they do something to him first.” He hesitated. “I think they ee-lect him.”
“Is that something like they do to tomcats and bulls and things?”
“Er.”
“You know. To make them stop fighting and be more peaceful.”
Teppic winced. “To be honest, I’m not sure,” he said. “But I don’t think so. They’ve got something they do it with, I think it’s called a mocracy, and it means everyone in the whole country can say who the new Tyrant is. One man, one—” He paused. The political history lesson seemed a very long while ago, and had introduced concepts never heard of in Djelibeybi or in Ankh-Morpork, for that matter. He had a stab at it anyway. “One man, one vet.”
“That’s for the eelecting, then?”
He shrugged. It might be, for all he knew. “The point is, though, that everyone can do it. They’re very proud of it. Everyone has—” he hesitated again, certain now that things were amiss—“the vet. Except for women, of course. And children. And criminals. And slaves. And stupid people. And people of foreign extractions. And people disapproved of for, er, various reasons. And lost of other people. But everyone apart from them. It’s a very enlightened civilization.
”
”
Terry Pratchett (Pyramids (Discworld, #7))
“
Take a Somalian toddler. She has a 20% probability of dying before reaching the age of five. Now compare: American frontline soldiers had a mortality rate of 6.7% in the Civil War, 1.8% in World War II, and 0.5% in the Vietnam War.30 Yet we won’t hesitate to send that Somalian toddler back if it turns out her mother isn’t a “real” refugee. Back to the Somalian child-mortality front.
”
”
Rutger Bregman (Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There – from the presenter of the 2025 BBC ‘Moral Revolution’ Reith lectures)
“
That’s what terrorism is, basically—pure theater. Nothing in particular is ever accomplished by it, other than to focus attention on a small group of people who seize absolute power by threatening everything that holds civilization together.
”
”
Dorothy Gilman (Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha (Mrs. Pollifax, #7))
“
More than 500 deluge legends are known around the world and, in a survey of 86 of these (20 Asiatic, 3 European, 7 African, 46 American and 10 from Australia and the Pacific), the specialist researcher Dr Richard Andree concluded that 62 were entirely independent of the Mesopotamian and Hebrew accounts.
”
”
Graham Hancock (Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth's Lost Civilization)
“
DESEGREGATE THE BUSES WITH THIS 7 POINT PROGRAM:
1. Pray for guidance.
2. Be courteous and friendly.
3. Be neat and clean.
4. Avoid loud talk.
5. Do not argue.
6. Report incidents immediately.
7. Overcome evil with good.
Sponsored by Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance
Rev. A. L. Davis, Pres.
Rev. J. E. Poindexter, Secretary
”
”
John Howard Griffin (Black Like Me)
“
More African American adults are under correctional control today—in prison or jail, on probation or parole—than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.7 The mass incarceration of people of color is a big part of the reason that a black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery.8 The absence of black fathers from families across America is not simply a function of laziness, immaturity, or too much time watching Sports Center. Thousands of black men have disappeared into prisons and jails, locked away for drug crimes that are largely ignored when committed by whites.
”
”
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
“
An Aryan civilization is a civilization advanced in spiritual knowledge – (SB 7.2.60, Purport) The difference between the Aryan and non-Aryan, the sura and asura, is in their standards of spiritual advancement – (SB 3.29.18, Purport) Aryans do not kill even a small plant unnecessarily, not to speak of cutting trees for sense gratification…Aryans do not distinguish between lower and higher grades of life. All life should be protected. All living beings have a right to live, even the trees and plants. This is the basic principle of an Aryan civilization – (SB 6.16.43, Purport)
”
”
Michael Tsarion (The Irish Origins of Civilization, Volume One: The Servants of Truth: Druidic Traditions & Influence Explored)
“
[Grant] himself had discovered the Army of the Potomac’s one weakness, the lack of springy formation, and audacious, self-reliant initiative.
”
”
Chris Mackowski (Hell Itself: The Battle of the Wilderness, May 5-7, 1864 (Emerging Civil War Series))
“
Joe Johnston would have retreated after two days of such punishment,” Ulysses S. Grant noted,
”
”
Chris Mackowski (Hell Itself: The Battle of the Wilderness, May 5-7, 1864 (Emerging Civil War Series))
“
Never in England were there so many gentlemen and so little gentleness.
”
”
C.J. Sansom (Tombland (Matthew Shardlake, #7))
“
Using the total energy consumption of the planet Earth, we find that we are currently a Type 0.7 civilization.
”
”
Michio Kaku (The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality, and Our Destiny BeyondEarth)
“
The argument was this: a civilization shackled to the strictures of excessive control on its populace, from choice of religion through to the production of goods, will sap the will and the ingenuity of its people – for whom such qualities are no longer given sufficient incentive or reward. At face value, this is accurate enough. Trouble arrives when the opponents to such a system institute its extreme opposite, where individualism becomes godlike and sacrosanct, and no greater service to any other ideal (including community) is possible. In such a system rapacious greed thrives behind the guise of freedom, and the worst aspects of human nature come to the fore, a kind of intransigence as fierce and nonsensical as its maternalistic counterpart. And so, in the clash of these two extreme systems, one is witness to brute stupidity and blood-splashed insensitivity; two belligerent faces glowering at each other across the unfathomed distance, and yet, in deed and in fanatic regard, they are but mirror reflections. This would be amusing if it weren’t so pathetically idiotic…
”
”
Steven Erikson (Reaper's Gale (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #7))
“
We’re painted savages, nothing more, in spite of what we like to think of as some thousands of years of civilization. Only our present paint’s called clothing and our caves called buildings
”
”
Gordon R. Dickson (The Final Encyclopedia (Childe Cycle, #7))
“
Since the dawn of time, several billion human (or humanlike) beings have lived, each contributing a little genetic variability to the total human stock. Out of this vast number, the whole of our understanding of human prehistory is based on the remains, often exceedingly fragmentary, of perhaps five thousand individuals. You could fit it all into the back of a pickup truck if you didn't mind how much you jumbled everything up, Ian Tattersall, the bearded and friendly curator of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, replied when I asked him the size of the total world archive of hominid and early human bones.
The shortage wouldn't be so bad if the bones were distributed evenly through time and space, but of course they are not. They appear randomly, often in the most tantalizing fashion. Homo erectus walked the Earth for well over a million years and inhabited territory from the Atlantic edge of Europe to the Pacific side of China, yet if you brought back to life every Homo erectus individual whose existence we can vouch for, they wouldn't fill a school bus. Homo habilis consists of even less: just two partial skeletons and a number of isolated limb bones. Something as short-lived as our own civilization would almost certainly not be known from the fossil record at all.
In Europe, Tattersall offers by way of illustration, you've got hominid skulls in Georgia dated to about 1.7 million years ago, but then you have a gap of almost a million years before the next remains turn up in Spain, right on the other side of the continent, and then you've got another 300,000-year gap before you get a Homo heidelbergensis in Germany and none of them looks terribly much like any of the others. He smiled. It's from these kinds of fragmentary pieces that you're trying to work out the histories of entire species. It's quite a tall order. We really have very little idea of the relationships between many ancient species which led to us and which were evolutionary dead ends. Some probably don't deserve to be regarded as separate species at all.
”
”
Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
“
In Federalist 51, Madison explained the essential balance between the civil society and governmental restraint: “But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections of human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”7
”
”
Mark R. Levin (Plunder and Deceit: Big Government's Exploitation of Young People and the Future)
“
A once-glorious civilization was now only a pretense, a mask allowing barbarians to commit ever greater cruelties in the name of virtues that a truly civilized world would have recognized as evils.
”
”
Dean Koontz (The Odd Thomas Series 7-Book Bundle: Odd Thomas, Forever Odd, Brother Odd, Odd Hours, Odd Interlude, Odd Apocalypse, Deeply Odd)
“
On the Soyuz, there’s simply not room to fly someone whose main contribution is expertise in a single area. The Russian rocket ship only carries three people, and between them they need to cover off a huge matrix of skills. Some are obvious: piloting the rocket, spacewalking, operating the robotic elements of the ISS like Canadarm2, being able to repair things that break on Station, conducting and monitoring the numerous scientific experiments on board. But since the crew is going to be away from civilization for many months, they also need to be able to do things like perform basic surgery and dentistry, program a computer and rewire an electrical panel, take professional-quality photographs and conduct a press conference—and get along harmoniously with colleagues, 24/7, in a confined space.
”
”
Chris Hadfield (An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth)
“
But a universal state is not a new beginning for a civilization, it’s the start of the death, and it has to follow the same course over and over through history, like a kind of slow but terminal sickness.
”
”
Poul Anderson (Flandry's Legacy (The Technic Civilization Saga Book 7))
“
So, how many generations of Indebted need to suffer – even as the civilized trappings multiply and abound on all sides, with an ever-increasing proportion of those material follies out of their financial reach? How many, before we all collectively stop and say, “Aaii! That’s enough! No more suffering, please! No more hunger, no more war, no more inequity!” Well, as far as I can see, there are never enough generations. We just scrabble on, and on, devouring all within reach, including our own kind, as if it was nothing more than the undeniable expression of some natural law, and as such subject to no moral context, no ethical constraint – despite the ubiquitous and disingenuous blathering over-invocation of those two grand notions.
”
”
Steven Erikson (Reaper's Gale (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #7))
“
About 4,400 years ago 8 people stepped off Noah’s ark. According to the United Nations Population Growth Statistics, the world’s population grows at about .47% per year. That is the growth rate for all civilizations who kept records. Suppose you put $8.00 in the bank 4,400 years ago and received .47% a year. How much money would you have? What a coincidence! It would be about $7,000,000,000. That’s kind of odd, because 4,400 years ago 8 people stepped off the ark and now we have about 7,000,000,000 people on planet earth. God’s math works!
Compound interest is something we teach to seventh-graders. You don’t have to be a professor to figure this out. A twelve-year-old can do the calculation. Ask any seventh-grader, the algebraic equation looks like this: A=P (1+r/n)t . . . where "A " is the ending amount (about 7,000,000,000 in this case), "P " is the beginning amount (8 in this case), "r " is the interest rate (.47% in this case), "n " is the number of compoundings a year (1 in this case), and "t " is the total number of years (4,400 in this case).
”
”
Michael Ben Zehabe (Unanswered Questions in the Sunday News)
“
That is the magical thing about books. You can listen to all the greatest people who have ever lived, anywhere in the world, in any civilization. You can see what is completely different about them, things you never imagined.
”
”
Anne Perry (Weighed in the Balance (William Monk, #7))
“
In general, democracy and individualism have advanced in spite of and often against specific economic interest. Both democracy and individualism have been based upon financial sacrifice, not gain. Even in Athens, a large part of the 7,000 citizens who participated regularly in assemblies were farmers who had to give up several days' work to go into town to talk and listen.
”
”
John Ralston Saul (The Unconscious Civilization)
“
The employment figures released by federal government agencies are fraudulent. Real unemployment in the United States is not under 7 percent; it’s closer to 37 percent, despite what the White House, the Fed, and the U.S. Treasury try to tell you. The Misery Index, a measure of how Americans feel about the economy, is over 14 percent, not at the 8 percent level the government claims.
”
”
Michael Savage (Stop the Coming Civil War: My Savage Truth)
“
The essence of this knowledge was the ability to `see all' and to `know all'. Was this not precisely the ability Adam and Eve acquired after eating the forbidden fruit, which grew on the branches of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil'? · Finally, just as Adam and Eve were driven out of the Garden, so were the four First Men of the Popol Vuh deprived of their ability to `see far'. Thereafter `their eyes were covered and they could only see what was close ...' Both the Popol Vuh and Genesis therefore tell the story of mankind's fall from grace. In both cases, this state of grace was closely associated with knowledge, and the reader is left in no doubt that the knowledge in question was so remarkable that it conferred godlike powers on those who possessed it. The Bible, adopting a dark and muttering tone of voice, calls it `the knowledge of good and evil' and has nothing further to add. The Popol Vuh is much more informative. It tells us that the knowledge of the First Men consisted of the ability to see `things hidden in the distance', that they were astronomers who `examined the four corners, the four points of the arch of the sky', and that they were geographers who succeeded in measuring `the round face of the earth'. 7 Geography is about maps. In Part I we saw evidence suggesting that the cartographers of an as yet unidentified civilization might have mapped the planet with great thoroughness at an early date. Could the Popol Vuh be transmitting some garbled memory of that same civilization when it speaks nostalgically of the First Men and of the miraculous geographical knowledge they possessed? Geography is about maps, and astronomy is about stars. Very often the two disciplines go hand in hand because stars are essential for navigation on long sea-going voyages of discovery (and long sea-going voyages of discovery are essential for the production of accurate maps). Is it accidental that the First Men of the Popol Vuh were remembered not only for studying `the round face of the earth' but for their contemplation of `the arch of heaven'?
”
”
Graham Hancock (Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth's Lost Civilization)
“
Have you noticed how the Holocaust deniers only ever quibble over the number of Jewish deaths? Now why is that? The answer is very simple: Because they are anti-Semitic. It really is that simple. Anti-Semitism is one of the most aggressive forces on the planet, and has been since Biblical times. Had the Holocaust been a purge of any other race or group of people, everyone would most likely accept the facts. Who, for example, disputes that at least 800,000 Rwandans died in the genocide that occurred during the Rwandan civil war? Or that around 1.7 million Cambodians died in the Cambodian killing fields?
”
”
James Morcan (Debunking Holocaust Denial Theories)
“
Speaking truth to bullshit and practicing civility start with knowing ourselves and knowing the behaviors and issues that both push into our own BS or get in the way of being civil. If we go back to BRAVING and our trust checklist, these situations require a keen eye on: 1. Boundaries. What’s okay in a discussion and what’s not? How do you set a boundary when you realize you’re knee-deep in BS? 2. Reliability. Bullshitting is the abandonment of reliability. It’s hard to trust or be trusted when we BS too often. 3. Accountability. How do we hold ourself and others accountable for less BS and more honest debate? Less off-loading of emotion and more civility? 4. Vault. Civility honors confidentiality. BS ignores truth and opens the door to violations of confidentiality. 5. Integrity. How do we stay in our integrity when confronted with BS, and how do we stop in the midst of our own emotional moment to say, “You know what, I’m not sure this conversation is productive” or “I need to learn more about this issue”? 6. Nonjudgment. How do we stay out of judgment toward ourselves when the right thing to do is say, “I actually don’t know much about this. Tell me what you know and why it’s important to you.” How do we not go into “winner/loser” mode and instead see an opportunity for connection when someone says to us, “I don’t know anything about that issue”? 7. Generosity. What’s the most generous assumption we can make about the people around us? What boundaries have to be in place for us to be kinder and more tolerant? I know that the practice of speaking truth to bullshit while being civil feels like a paradox, but both are profoundly important parts of true belonging.
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Brené Brown (Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone)
“
It is easy to calculate how much sunlight falls on a square foot of land on Earth. Multiplying this by the surface area of the Earth illuminated by the sun and one immediately calculates the approximate energy of an average Type I civilization. (We find that a Type I civilization harnesses the power of 7 x 1017 watts,
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Michio Kaku (The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality, and Our Destiny BeyondEarth)
“
Apollo straddled the prone dandy and leaned down into his face, intimidating him as he’d dared to do to Lily. “Don’t come… back until… you can talk… to her with a civil tongue.
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Elizabeth Hoyt (Darling Beast (Maiden Lane, #7))
“
Lincoln believed he had finally found a general who understood the grim math of war and who possessed the resolve to do what needed to be done, as unpleasant as it would be.
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Chris Mackowski (Hell Itself: The Battle of the Wilderness, May 5-7, 1864 (Emerging Civil War Series))
“
I don’t think I’d have wanted to be around during a dark age. It’s odd, though. They had interstellar flight. And data retrieval and everything.” Gabe nodded. “None of it matters if you have an unstable society and tin-pot dictators. They had several hundred years of economic collapse. Widespread poverty. A few people at the top had all the money and influence. They had terrible overpopulation, struggles over water and resources. Civil wars. And widespread illiteracy.” The thirty-second to the thirty-ninth century. “It’s a wonder we survived.
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Jack McDevitt (Coming Home (Alex Benedict, #7))
“
I wonder,' Trull said as he watched the momentary stand-off, 'if this is how domestication first began. Not banding together in a hunt for prey, but in an elimination of rival predators.
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Steven Erikson (Reaper's Gale (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #7))
“
What kind of civilization is this my friend, where people have to be reminded of their humanhood? Why the heck is it so damn hard for humans to act like humans? Why the heck do the man-made sects get preference over humans? How can a smart species like us be so dumb at the same time? Why can’t we join hands and celebrate our differences instead of turning them into cause of conflict! Why? Why can’t we my friend?
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Abhijit Naskar (7 Billion Gods: Humans Above All)
“
The primitive mentality does not invent myths, it experiences them. Myths are original revelations of the preconscious psyche, involuntary statements about unconscious psychic happenings, and anything but allegories of physical processes.7 Such allegories would be an idle amusement for an unscientific intellect. Myths, on the contrary, have a vital meaning. Not merely do they represent, they are the psychic life of the primitive tribe, which immediately falls to pieces and decays when it loses its mythological heritage, like a man who has lost his soul. A tribe’s mythology is its living religion “whose loss is always and everywhere, even among the civilized, a moral catastrophe. But religion is a vital link with psychic processes independent of and beyond consciousness, in the dark hinterland of the psyche. Many of these unconscious processes may be indirectly occasioned by consciousness, but never by conscious choice. Others appear to arise spontaneously, that is to say, from no discernible or demonstrable conscious cause
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C.G. Jung (The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Collected Works 9i))
“
Why were only our heroes nonviolent? I speak not of the morality of nonviolence, but of the sense that blacks are in especial need of this morality. Back then all I could do was measure these freedom-lovers by what I knew. Which is to say, I measured them against children pulling out in the 7-Eleven parking lot, against parents wielding extension cords, and "Yeah, nigger, what's up now?" I judged them against the country I knew, which had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under slavery, against the country whose armies fanned out across the world to extend their dominion. The world, the real one, was civilization secured and ruled by savage means. How could the schools valorize men and women whose values society actively scorned? How could they send us out into the streets of Baltimore, knowing all that they were, and then speak of nonviolence?
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Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me)
“
[Mr. Bates comments on the description of Robespierre in History of the French Revolution by M. J. L. Adolphe Thiers]
He was a living proof that[,] in civil troubles, obstinate mediocrity is more powerful than the irregularity of genius. It is not only in civil troubles but in all the affairs of life, that obstinate mediocrity triumphs over irregular genius, and enjoys the fruits of victory.
The Diary of Edward Bates, Entry for March 7, 1865, Edited by Howard K. Beale
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Edward Bates
“
In Strauss’ view, neither Oppenheimer nor his lawyer had any of the “rights” afforded to a defendant in a court of law; this was an AEC Personnel Security Board Hearing, not a civil trial, and Strauss was going to be the arbiter of the rules.
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Kai Bird (American Prometheus: THE INSPIRATION FOR 'OPPENHEIMER', WINNER OF 7 OSCARS, INCLUDING BEST PICTURE, BEST DIRECTOR AND BEST ACTOR)
“
For, according to Françoise’s code, as it is illustrated in the carvings of Saint-André-des-Champs, to wish for the death of an enemy, even to inflict it is not forbidden, but it is a horrible sin not to do what is expected of you, not to return a civility,
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Marcel Proust (In Search Of Lost Time (All 7 Volumes) (ShandonPress))
“
اسرائیل آینهی تمامنمای جهان معاصر است. وقتی انقلاب فلسطین این موجود را پس میزند، بر خلاف دیگر انقلابها، در حال پس زدن دلایل و عوامل ایجاد اسرائیل است. این پس زدن به معنای پس زدن عقلانیت رایج در جهان است که مدیریت آن را نیز بر عهده دارد و همچنین پس زدن این منطق سیاسی سلطهجو و ابعاد تمدنی آن.
پس این انقلاب، تولد تمدنی تازه و طلیعههای جهانی دیگر است که تعاملات آن هیچگاه موجب تولد چنین رژیمی نخواهد بود. تمدن تازهای که تمدن ارزشهاست و نه منافع شخصی؛ تمدن عدالت است نه غلبه و تمدن واقعیت است نه رسانههای فریبکار.
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موسى الصدر (يوميات ووثائق 1976 (مسيرة الإمام السيد موسى الصدر, #7))
“
For all the attention lavished on other sources of greenhouse gases such as aviation or deforestation, the production of cement generates more CO2 than those two sectors combined. Cement production accounts for a staggering 7–8 per cent of all carbon emissions.
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Ed Conway (Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization)
“
But the history of Hopkins Hospital certainly isn’t pristine when it comes to black patients. In 1969, a Hopkins researcher used blood samples from more than 7,000 neighborhood children—most of them from poor black families—to look for a genetic predisposition to criminal behavior. The researcher didn’t get consent. The American Civil Liberties Union filed suit claiming the study violated the boys’ civil rights and breached confidentiality of doctor-patient relationships by releasing results to state and juvenile courts. The study was halted, then resumed a few months later using consent forms. And in the late nineties, two women sued Hopkins, claiming that its researchers had knowingly exposed their children to lead, and hadn’t promptly informed them when blood tests revealed that their children had elevated lead levels—even when one developed lead poisoning. The research was part of a study examining lead abatement methods, and all families involved were black. The researchers had treated several homes to varying degrees, then encouraged landlords to rent those homes to families with children so they could then monitor the children’s lead levels. Initially, the case was dismissed. On appeal, one judge compared the study to Southam’s HeLa injections, the Tuskegee study, and Nazi research, and the case eventually settled out of court. The Department of Health and Human Services launched an investigation and concluded that the study’s consent forms “failed to provide an adequate description” of the different levels of lead abatement in the homes.
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Rebecca Skloot (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks)
“
Everything he’s learned about the Civil Service tells him that having tea poured for you is one of the ferociously guarded signifiers of rank, like the grade of paintings from the Government Art Collection hung on your office wall, or the quality of your carpet.
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Charles Stross (The Nightmare Stacks (Laundry Files, #7))
“
Married people mustn’t forget that the secret of married happiness lies in everyday things, not in daydreams. It lies in finding the hidden joy of coming home in the evening; in affectionate relations with their children; in everyday work in which the whole family co-operates; in good humour in the face of difficulties that should be met with a sporting spirit; in making the best use of all the advances that civilization offers to help us bring up children; it lies in making the house pleasant and life more simple.[504]
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Francisco Fernández-Carvajal (In Conversation with God – Volume 3 Part 2: Weeks 7 - 12 in Ordinary Time)
“
Nothing but stars, scattered across the blackness as though the Creator had smashed the windscreen of his car and hadn’t bothered to stop to sweep up the pieces. This is the gulf between universes, the chill deeps of space that contain nothing but the occasional random molecule, a few lost comets and… …but a circle of blackness shifts slightly, the eye reconsiders perspective, and what was apparently the awesome distance of interstellar wossname becomes a world under darkness, its stars the lights of what will charitably be called civilization.
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Terry Pratchett (Pyramids (Discworld, #7))
“
But the worst came from the Mongol Tamerlane, a dedicated Muslim who conducted furious jihad campaigns against the Nestorians and devastated their cities and churches. It was full-blown war against the Assyrian Christians: Tamerlane offered them conversion to Islam, dhimmitude, or death. By 1400, the vast Nestorian domains were no more; Christianity had almost completely died out in Persia, Central Asia, and China.7 After this, virtually all Nestorians lived as dhimmis under Muslim rule. And like the Zoroastrians, their community dwindled down to a tiny remnant under the relentless weight of this institutionalized injustice. If the Christians in Europe had been subjected to the same fate, it is distinctly possible that the world might never have known the works of Dante Alighieri, or Michelangelo, or Leonardo da Vinci, or Mozart, or Bach. It is likely that there would never have been an El Greco, or a Giotto, or an Olivier Messaien. A community that must expend all its energy just to survive does not easily pursue art and music. The Crusades may have made the full flowering of European civilization possible.
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Robert Spencer (The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades))
“
Mental and physical illness proliferates. The majority lives for bread and circuses; worships celebrities instead of divinities; takes its bearings from below rather than above; throws off social and moral restraints, especially on sexuality; shirks duties but insists on entitlements; and so forth.7
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William Ophuls (Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail)
“
A 2013 study by the New York Civil Liberties Union found that while black and Latino males between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four made up only 4.7 percent of the city’s population, they accounted for 40.6 percent of the stop-and-frisk checks by police. More than 90 percent of those stopped were innocent.
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Cathy O'Neil (Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy)
“
The Kingdom of God is Within You —Tolstoy 2. What is Art? —Tolstoy 3. The Slavery of Our Times —Tolstoy 4. The First Step —Tolstoy 5. How Shall We Escape? —Tolstoy 6. Letter to a Hindoo —Tolstoy 7. The White Slaves of England —Sherard 8. Civilization, Its Cause and Cure —Carpenter 9. The Fallacy of Speed — Taylor 10. A New Crusade —Blount 11. One the Duty of Civil Disobedience —Thoreau 12. Life Without Principle —Thoreau 13. Unto This Last —Ruskin 14. A Joy for Ever —Ruskin 15. Duties of Man —Mazzini 16. Defence and Death of Socrates —From Plato 17. Paradoxes of Civilization —Max Nordau 18. Poverty and Un–British Rule in India —Naoroji
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Mahatma Gandhi (Hind Swaraj (Hindi))
“
At times I have discovered a new lowness of spirit, a new need to revolt, to kick against the constraints that a civilized life tries to impose.” He stopped and regarded her. “Because what is civilized life but an imposition of unreal standards upon flawed and defective human beings by other human beings no less flawed and defective?
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Winston Graham (The Angry Tide (Poldark, #7))
“
The utility of moral and political philosophy is to be estimated, not so much by the commodities we have be knowing these sciences, as by the calamities we receive by not knowing them. Now all such calamities as may be avoided by human industry arise from war, but chiefly from civil war, for from this proceed slaughter, solitude, and the want of all things.
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Thomas Hobbes (The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, Vol. 7 (Classic Reprint))
“
Within five years, the effects of the civil rights revolution were undeniable. Between 1964 and 1969, the percentage of African American adults registered to vote in the South soared. In Alabama the rate leaped from 19.3 percent to 61.3 percent; in Georgia, 27.4 percent to 60.4 percent; in Louisiana, 31.6 percent to 60.8 percent; and in Mississippi, 6.7 percent to 66.5 percent.33
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Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
“
We want out. In the end, it’s that simple. We want out, where the law is, where you prosper or you fail according to your own merits as a person. Is that so damned much? I don’t want white friends. I don’t want to socialize. You know how white people look to me? The way albinos look to you. I hope never to find myself in a white man’s bed. I don’t want to integrate. I just don’t want to feel segregated. We’re after our share of the power structure of this civilization, Mr. McGee, because, when we get it, a crime will merit the same punishment whether the victim is black or white, and hoods will get the same share of municipal services, based on zoning, not color. And a good man will be thought a credit to the human race. Sorry. End of lecture. The housemaid has spoken.
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John D. MacDonald (Darker Than Amber (Travis McGee, #7))
“
In Uprooting Racism, Paul Kivel makes a useful comparison between the rhetoric abusive men employ to justify beating up their girlfriends, wives, or children and the publicly traded justifications for widespread racism. He writes: During the first few years that I worked with men who are violent I was continually perplexed by their inability to see the effects of their actions and their ability to deny the violence they had done to their partners or children. I only slowly became aware of the complex set of tactics that men use to make violence against women invisible and to avoid taking responsibility for their actions. These tactics are listed below in the rough order that men employ them.… (1) Denial: “I didn’t hit her.” (2) Minimization: “It was only a slap.” (3) Blame: “She asked for it.” (4) Redefinition: “It was mutual combat.” (5) Unintentionality: “Things got out of hand.” (6) It’s over now: “I’ll never do it again.” (7) It’s only a few men: “Most men wouldn’t hurt a woman.” (8) Counterattack: “She controls everything.” (9) Competing victimization: “Everybody is against men.” Kivel goes on to detail the ways these nine tactics are used to excuse (or deny) institutionalized racism. Each of these tactics also has its police analogy, both as applied to individual cases and in regard to the general issue of police brutality. Here are a few examples: (1) Denial. “The professionalism and restraint … was nothing short of outstanding.” “America does not have a human-rights problem.” (2) Minimization. Injuries were “of a minor nature.” “Police use force infrequently.” (3) Blame. “This guy isn’t Mr. Innocent Citizen, either. Not by a long shot.” “They died because they were criminals.” (4) Redefinition. It was “mutual combat.” “Resisting arrest.” “The use of force is necessary to protect yourself.” (5) Unintentionality. “[O]fficers have no choice but to use deadly force against an assailant who is deliberately trying to kill them.…” (6) It’s over now. “We’re making changes.” “We will change our training; we will do everything in our power to make sure it never happens again.” (7) It’s only a few men. “A small proportion of officers are disproportionately involved in use-of-force incidents.” “Even if we determine that the officers were out of line … it is an aberration.” (8) Counterattack. “The only thing they understand is physical force and pain.” “People make complaints to get out of trouble.” (9) Competing victimization. The police are “in constant danger.” “[L]iberals are prejudiced against police, much as many white police are biased against Negroes.” The police are “the most downtrodden, oppressed, dislocated minority in America.” Another commonly invoked rationale for justifying police violence is: (10) The Hero Defense. “These guys are heroes.” “The police routinely do what the rest of us don’t: They risk their lives to keep the peace. For that selfless bravery, they deserve glory, laud and honor.” “[W]ithout the police … anarchy would be rife in this country, and the civilization now existing on this hemisphere would perish.” “[T]hey alone stand guard at the upstairs door of Hell.
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Kristian Williams (Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America)
“
we tend to explain the persecutions as a religious fanaticism led by perverted inquisitors. Yet, the Inquisition, which was above all concerned with heretics, made very little attempt to discover witches; the vast majority of condemnations for witchcraft took place in the civil courts. The secular court judges revealed themselves to be “more cruel and more fanatical than Rome”7 when it came to witchcraft.
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Mona Chollet (In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial)
“
Yet, if the phrase “separation of church and state” appears in no official founding document, then what is the source of that phrase? And how did it become so closely associated with the First Amendment? On October 7, 1801, the Danbury Baptist Association of Danbury, Connecticut, sent a letter to President Thomas Jefferson expressing their concern that protection for religion had been written into the laws and constitutions. Believing strongly that freedom of religion was an inalienable right given by God, the fact that it appeared in civil documents suggested that the government viewed it as a government-granted rather than a God-granted right. Apprehensive that the government might someday wrongly believe that it did have the power to regulate public religious activities, the Danbury Baptists communicated their anxiety to President Jefferson.36 On January 1, 1802, Jefferson responded to their letter. He understood their concerns and agreed with them that man accounted only to God and not to government for his faith and religious practice. Jefferson emphasized to the Danbury Baptists that none of man’s natural (i.e., inalienable) rights – including the right to exercise one’s faith publicly – would ever place him in a situation where the government would interfere with his religious expressions.37 He assured them that because of the wall of separation, they need not fear government interference with religious expressions: Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, . . . I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.38 In his letter, Jefferson made clear that the “wall of separation” was erected not to limit public religious expressions but rather to provide security against governmental interference with those expressions, whether private or public.
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David Barton (Separation of Church and State: What the Founders Meant)
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Collapse is the constant state of humanity, she tells herself; the story of the flood and the great ark that saved the creatures two by two is only the first refrain of a song that is to be sung over and over, the earth’s gradual and repeated diminishment, civilization after civilization foundering to dust, until the final death of the children of Eve with the apocalypse, the seven seals, the seven trumpets, the seven angels, the seven bowls. In the end, the earth will crack and the wicked will be cast into the lake of fire. Marie suspects this fiery end would be the stone and the soil and the waters of the earth itself, through human folly and greed made too hot for it to be willing to bear any more life upon its back. So it will go, and so it would be; and Marie cannot stop it, even if she had the force of will any longer to do so. 7.
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Lauren Groff (Matrix)
“
Harry had read that the word deadline originated from the battlefields of the American Civil War, when, for lack of anything material to lock prisoners behind, the captors gathered together the prisoners and a line was drawn around them in the dirt. Which became known as the “dead line,” and anyone who strayed beyond it was shot. And that was precisely what they were, the news warriors down there in the foyer: prisoners of war restrained by a deadline.
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Jo Nesbø (The Snowman (Harry Hole, #7))
“
You listen to me, Elle. He's the one who needs to be afraid, not you. You're not locked in by his psychic energy field. He doesn't have you trapped. You're strong and you're lethal. Your sisters are as well. Don't you dare sell any of them short. Hell, baby, your house makes people disappear. And we're not going to talk about me, but if that son of a bitch thinks he can take you from me, let him come and try. You're down, but you're not out. Do you understand me? Do you, Elle? Look at me. Don't turn away from me and pay lip service to what I'm saying. I'll kill the bastard for you right now. Say the word and I leave and go to work. It's what I'm best at anyway. There's nowhere he'll be safe and if you think I don't want to, you're very wrong. I dream about it, I think about it, day and night and none of what I do to him is pleasant or civilized. If you want to be scared of someone, you're scared of the wrong fucking man.
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Christine Feehan (Hidden Currents (Drake Sisters, #7))
“
His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.
“You appear to be astonished,” he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. “Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.”
“To forget it!”
“You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”
“But the Solar System!” I protested.
“What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently; “you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”
I was on the point of asking him what that work might be, but something in his manner showed me that the question would be an unwelcome one. I pondered over our short conversation, however, and endeavoured to draw my deductions from it. He said that he would acquire no knowledge which did not bear upon his object. Therefore all the knowledge which he possessed was such as would be useful to him. I enumerated in my own mind all the various points upon which he had shown me that he was exceptionally well-informed. I even took a pencil and jotted them down. I could not help smiling at the document when I had completed it. It ran in this way—
SHERLOCK HOLMES—his limits.
1. Knowledge of Literature.—Nil.
2. Philosophy.—Nil.
3. Astronomy.—Nil.
4. Politics.—Feeble.
5. Botany.—Variable. Well up in belladonna,
opium, and poisons generally.
Knows nothing of practical gardening.
6. Geology.—Practical, but limited.
Tells at a glance different soils
from each other. After walks has
shown me splashes upon his trousers,
and told me by their colour and
consistence in what part of London
he had received them.
7. Chemistry.—Profound.
8. Anatomy.—Accurate, but unsystematic.
9. Sensational Literature.—Immense. He appears
to know every detail of every horror
perpetrated in the century.
10. Plays the violin well.
11. Is an expert singlestick player, boxer, and swordsman.
12. Has a good practical knowledge of British law.
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Arthur Conan Doyle (A Study in Scarlet (Sherlock Holmes, #1))
“
WHY PARADIGMS MATTER
Ideas drive results. People's beliefs drive their actions.
Actions that stem from a simple, complete and accurate paradigm result in personal fulfillment, harmonious relationships, and economic prosperity.
Actions based on false, incomplete and inaccurate paradigms, however well intended or passionately defended, are the cause of widespread misery, suffering and deprivation.
As detailed in Rethinking Survival: Getting to the Positive Paradigm of Change, a fatal information deficit explains the worldwide leadership deficit and related budget deficits.
In a dangerous world where psychological and economic warfare compete with religious extremism and terrorism to undo thousands of years of incremental human progress, a healing balance is urgently needed.
Restoring a simple, complete and accurate paradigm of leadership and relationships now could make the difference between human survival on the one hand, and the extinction of the human race (or the end of civilization as we know it), on the other. p. 7.
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Patricia E. West (The Positive Paradigm Handbook: Make Yourself Whole Using the Wheel of Change)
“
Patrick Henry said ‘give me liberty or give me death.’ I think his famous quote makes it crystal clear that the Constitutional framework of this country values liberty as an essential element of life, worth dying for. If something is worth such a sacrifice, how can the loss of it be justified for the argument that it will make us safer to give up our liberty and our civil rights? Are we to tell the mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers of all the soldiers lost in foreign wars that it was all a big lie? That they died for nothing?
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Kenneth Eade (The Spy Files (Brent Marks Legal Thrillers #7))
“
Primeiro, a atual população mundial corresponde a aproximadamente 7% de todos os seres humanos que já viveram. Há muito mais mortos que vivos, em outras palavras, 14 para 1, e ignoramos a experiência acumulada de uma enorme maioria da humanidade por nossa conta e risco. Segundo, o passado é, com efeito, nossa única fonte de conhecimento confiável sobre o presente efêmero e os vários futuros à nossa frente, só um dos quais irá de fato acontecer. A história não é apenas como estudamos o passado; é também como estudamos nosso próprio tempo.
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Niall Ferguson (Civilization: The West and the Rest)
“
Matthew Choptuik, a postdoctoral student at the University of Texas, carried out a simulation on a supercomputer that he hoped would reveal new, unexpected features of the laws of physics; and he hit the jackpot. What he simulated was the implosion of a gravitational wave.47 When the imploding wave was weak, it imploded and then disbursed. When it was strong, the wave imploded and formed a black hole. When its strength was very precisely “tuned” to an intermediate strength, the wave created a sort of boiling in the shapes of space and time. The boiling produced outgoing gravitational waves with shorter and shorter wavelengths. It also left behind, at the end, an infinitesimally tiny naked singularity (Figure 26.7). Fig. 26.6. Our bet about naked singularities. Fig. 26.7. Left: Matthew Choptuik. Middle: An imploding gravitational wave. Right: The boiling produced by the wave, and the naked singularity at the center of the magnifying glass. Now, such a singularity can never occur in nature. The required tuning is not a natural thing. But an exceedingly advanced civilization could produce such a singularity artificially by precisely tuning a wave’s implosion, and then could try to extract the laws of quantum gravity from the singularity’s behavior.
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Kip S. Thorne (The Science of Interstellar)
“
The usual way in which the media and politicians talk about race discrimination in the job market is to compare the percentage of Africans or Latins in a given occupation with the percentage of Europeans. This makes the situation look bad. The 2014–2018 American Community Survey found that Africans, at 13 percent of the population, accounted for only 3.6 percent of CEOs, 3.7 percent of physical scientists, 4.4 percent of civil engineers, 5.1 percent of physicians, and 5.2 percent of lawyers. Latin percentages in those prestigious occupations ranged from 5.3 to 7.6 percent, but Latins are almost 18 percent of the population, so their underrepresentation was nearly the same.
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Charles Murray (Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America)
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When Jim found a bone that had been part of somebody’s hand, I understood that this wasn’t just Carole Lombard’s story. It was the pilot’s story and the co-pilot’s and the stewardess’s. It was the story of 15 Army Air Corps personnel who perished, men as young as 19 and as “old” as 28, and it was the story of three other civilians, all of whom died right there, on the spot where I stood shivering in the fading October sunshine at 7,700 feet. I started writing on the plane ride home and haven’t stopped since. I have had extreme good fortune in my research, accessing the complete Civil Aeronautics Board investigation, including the exhibits and testimony. I have examined the U.S. House of Representatives
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Robert Matzen (Fireball: Carole Lombard and the Mystery of Flight 3)
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Tenets of a viable 21st century conservatism
1. The fundamental assumptions of Western civilization are valid.
2. Peaceful social being is preferable to isolation and to war. In consequence, it justly and rightly demands some sacrifice of individual impulse and idiosyncrasy.
3. Hierarchies of competence are desirable and should be promoted.
4. Borders are reasonable. Likewise, limits on immigration are reasonable. Furthermore, it should not be assumed that citizens of societies that have not evolved functional individual-rights predicated polities will hold values in keeping with such polities.
5. People should be paid so that they are able and willing to perform socially useful and desirable duties.
6. Citizens have the inalienable right to benefit from the result of their own honest labor.
7. It is more noble to teach young people about responsibilities than about rights.
8. It is better to do what everyone has always done, unless you have some extraordinarily valid reason to do otherwise.
9. Radical change should be viewed with suspicion, particularly in a time of radical change.
10. The government, local and distal, should leave people to their own devices as much as possible.
11. Intact heterosexual two-parent families constitute the necessary bedrock for a stable polity.
12. We should judge our political system in comparison to other actual political systems and not to hypothetical utopias.
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Jordan B. Peterson
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Waterloo station is one of the things which no fellow can understand. Thousands come to it, thousands go from it. Porters grow gray-headed beneath its roof. Buns, once fresh and tender, become hard and misanthropic in its refreshment rooms, and look as if they had seen the littleness of existence and were disillusioned. But there the station stands, year after year, wrapped in a discreet gloom, always the same, always baffling and inscrutable. Not even the porters understand it. "I couldn't say, sir," is the civil but unsatisfying reply with which research is met. Now and then one, more gifted than his colleagues, will inform the traveler that his train starts from "No. 3 or No. 7," but a moment's reflection and he hedges with No. 12.
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P.G. Wodehouse (Love Among the Chickens (Ukridge, #1))
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On February 7, President Johnson met at the White House with five black leaders, including Frederick Douglass, who came to lobby for a civil rights bill. The black leaders were treated in a tasteless, abusive manner. After they shook hands with the president, their spokesman, George T. Downing, said they hoped he would support voting rights for blacks, which elicited a bizarre, rambling monologue from Johnson. He admitted to having owned slaves, but boasted of never having sold one, as if that would somehow ingratiate him with his visitors. He presented himself as a kindly master who had been “their slave instead of their being mine.” To promote civil rights, Johnson went on, would “result in the extermination of one [race] or the other.
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Ron Chernow (Grant)
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Their degeneration was even more rapid than their rise. Astyages, who succeeded his father Cyaxares, proved again that monarchy is a gamble, in whose royal succession great wits and madness are near allied. He inherited the kingdom with equanimity, and settled down to enjoy it. Under his example the nation forgot its stern morals and stoic ways; wealth had come too suddenly to be wisely used. The upper classes became the slaves of fashion and luxury, the men wore embroidered trousers, the women covered themselves with cosmetics and jewelry, the very horses were often caparisoned in gold.7 These once simple and pastoral people, who had been glad to be carried in rude wagons with wheels cut roughly out of the trunks of trees,8 now rode in expensive chariots from feast to feast.
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Will Durant (Story of Civilization)
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Reading Group Discussion Questions 1.Discuss Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd’s work as a newspaper reader. What does he bring to his audience, and what does he gain from his work besides financial compensation? 2.Why does Kidd accept the difficult job of returning Johanna home? What drives him to complete the job despite the danger and obstacles? 3.Why do you think Johanna wants to stay with her Kiowa family? What do you think she remembers of her life before she was taken? 4.What connects Kidd to Johanna? Why does she seem to trust him so easily? 5.What does Kidd worry may become of Johanna once she’s returned to her family? What does he know of the fate of other “returned captives”? 6.Doris Dillion says that Johanna is “carried away on the flood of the world,” and is “not real and not not-real.” She describes her as having “been through two creations” and “forever falling.” Do you agree with her assessment? Does Johanna remain this way through the course of the novel? 7.Discuss the various tensions in the novel: Indians and whites, soldiers and civilizations, and America’s recent past and its unsure future. In what ways do these tensions underlie the story of Kidd and Johanna? 8.Imagine the perspective of Johanna’s Kiowa family. Why, do you think, they would’ve taken her in and raised her? Why would they give her up? How do you think they felt when they let her go? 9.Partway through his journey with Johanna, Kidd feels as though he was “drawn back into the stream of being because there was once again a life in his hands.” What do you think this means? What
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Paulette Jiles (News of the World)
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WE’RE ALL IN RECOVERY FROM WESTERN CIVILIZATION Sooner or later, we each must address the paramount addiction in the Western and Westernized worlds: our psychological dependence on the world-view and lifestyle of Western civilization itself.6 The Western worldview says, in essence, that technological progress is the highest value, and that we were born to consume, to endlessly use and discard natural resources, other species, techno-gadgets, toys, and, often, other people, especially if they’re poor or from the global South. It’s a world of commodities, not entities; of consumers, not human beings; and economic expansion is the primary measure of progress. Profits are valued over people, money over meaning, our national entitlement over global peace and justice, “us” over “them.” This addiction to Western civilization — especially now that the Chinese, too, are hooked — is by far the most dangerous one in the world because of how rapidly and extensively it’s undermining the natural systems of Earth. Addiction to Western civilization protects us from seeing and feeling the staggering price all Earthly life pays for our consumer habit. And it protects us from having to make any radical changes in lifestyle,7 or from having to grow up, leave the “home” of our adolescent comforts, and embark upon the hazardous journey of initiation that leads to an existence that’s life enhancing, meaningful, and fulfilling. The more we live in a materialistic flatland, the more we need it in order to keep from experiencing the agony of our alienation. Each of us has the opportunity to carefully examine our lives, uncover the ways in which our addiction to Western civilization operates, and make the biggest, most courageous changes we’re capable of.
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Bill Plotkin (Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche)
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What the turbulent months of the campaign and the election revealed most of all, I think, was that the American people were voicing a profound demand for change. On the one hand, the Humphrey people were demanding a Marshall Plan for our diseased cities and an economic solution to our social problems. The Nixon and Wallace supporters, on the other hand, were making their own limited demands for change. They wanted more "law and order," to be achieved not through federal spending but through police, Mace, and the National Guard. We must recognize and accept the demand for change, but now we must struggle to give it a progressive direction.
For the immediate agenda, I would make four proposals. First, the Electoral College should be eliminated. It is archaic, undemocratic, and potentially very dangerous. Had Nixon not achieved a majority of the electoral votes, Wallace might have been in the position to choose and influence our next President. A shift of only 46,000 votes in the states of Alaska, Delaware, New Jersey, and Missouri would have brought us to that impasse. We should do away with this system, which can give a minority and reactionary candidate so much power and replace it with one that provides for the popular election of the President. It is to be hoped that a reform bill to this effect will emerge from the hearings that will soon be conducted by Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana.
Second, a simplified national registration law should be passed that provides for universal permanent registration and an end to residence requirements. Our present system discriminates against the poor who are always underregistered, often because they must frequently relocate their residence, either in search of better employment and living conditions or as a result of such poorly planned programs as urban renewal (which has been called Negro removal).
Third, the cost of the presidential campaigns should come from the public treasury and not from private individuals. Nixon, who had the backing of wealthy corporate executives, spent $21 million on his campaign. Humphrey's expenditures totaled only $9.7 million. A system so heavily biased in favor of the rich cannot rightly be called democratic.
And finally, we must maintain order in our public meetings. It was disgraceful that each candidate, for both the presidency and the vice-presidency, had to be surrounded by cordons of police in order to address an audience. And even then, hecklers were able to drown him out. There is no possibility for rational discourse, a prerequisite for democracy, under such conditions. If we are to have civility in our civil life, we must not permit a minority to disrupt our public gatherings.
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Bayard Rustin (Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin)
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As a commissioner (delegate) to the Old School Presbyterian General Assembly in 1845, Thornwell wrote to his wife, “I have no doubts but that the Assembly, by a very large majority, will declare slavery not to be sinful, will assert that it is sanctioned by the word of God, that it is purely a civil relation with which the Church, as such, has no right to interfere, and that abolitionism is essentially wicked, disorganizing, and ruinous.”7 In an 1850 sermon Thornwell painted a clear picture that Christians supported slavery and atheists opposed it: “The parties in this conflict are not merely Abolitionists and Slaveholders; they are Atheists, Socialists, Communists, Red Republicans, Jacobins on the one side, and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other. In one word, the world is the battleground—Christianity and atheism the combatants; and the progress of humanity the stake.”8
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Jack Rogers (Jesus, the Bible, and Homosexuality, Revised and Expanded Edition: Explode the Myths, Heal the Church)
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Speaking truth to bullshit and practicing civility start with knowing ourselves and knowing the behaviors and issues that both push into our own BS or get in the way of being civil. If we go back to BRAVING and our trust checklist, these situations require a keen eye on: 1. Boundaries. What’s okay in a discussion and what’s not? How do you set a boundary when you realize you’re knee-deep in BS? 2. Reliability. Bullshitting is the abandonment of reliability. It’s hard to trust or be trusted when we BS too often. 3. Accountability. How do we hold ourself and others accountable for less BS and more honest debate? Less off-loading of emotion and more civility? 4. Vault. Civility honors confidentiality. BS ignores truth and opens the door to violations of confidentiality. 5. Integrity. How do we stay in our integrity when confronted with BS, and how do we stop in the midst of our own emotional moment to say, “You know what, I’m not sure this conversation is productive” or “I need to learn more about this issue”? 6. Nonjudgment. How do we stay out of judgment toward ourselves when the right thing to do is say, “I actually don’t know much about this. Tell me what you know and why it’s important to you.” How do we not go into “winner/loser” mode and instead see an opportunity for connection when someone says to us, “I don’t know anything about that issue”? 7. Generosity. What’s the most generous assumption we can make about the people around us? What boundaries have to be in place for us to be kinder and more tolerant? I know that the practice of speaking truth to bullshit while being civil feels like a paradox, but both are profoundly important parts of true belonging. Carl Jung wrote, “Only the paradox comes anywhere near to comprehending the fullness of life.” We are complex beings who wake up every day and fight against being labeled and diminished with stereotypes and characterizations that don’t reflect our fullness. Yet when we don’t risk standing on our own and speaking out, when the options laid before us force us into the very categories we resist, we perpetuate our own disconnection and loneliness. When we are willing to risk venturing into the wilderness, and even becoming our own wilderness, we feel the deepest connection to our true self and to what matters the most.
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Brené Brown (Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone)
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In November 1914, the British government issued the first war bond, aiming to raise £350 million from private investors at an interest rate of 4.1% and a maturity of ten years. Surprisingly, the bond issue was undersubscribed, and the British public purchased less than a third of the targeted sum. To avoid publicizing this failure, the Bank of England granted funds to its chief cashier and his deputy to purchase the bonds under their own names. The Financial Times, ever the bank’s faithful mouthpiece, published an article proclaiming the loan was oversubscribed. John Maynard Keynes worked at the Treasury at the time, and in a secret memo to the bank, he praised them for what he called their “masterly manipulation.” Keynes’s fondness for surreptitious monetary arrangements would go on to inspire thousands of economic textbooks published worldwide. The Bank of England had set the tone for a century of central bank and government collusion behind the public’s back. The Financial Times would only issue a correction 103 years later,7 when this matter was finally uncovered after some sleuthing in the bank’s archives by some enterprising staff members and published on the bank’s blog.8
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Saifedean Ammous (The Fiat Standard: The Debt Slavery Alternative to Human Civilization)
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The White Liners didn’t bother with any such pretense of civility or restraint. On October 7, John Milton Brown, the sheriff of Coahoma County, reported a “perfect state of terror” had seized his jurisdiction. “I have been driven from my county by an armed force. I am utterly powerless to enforce law or to restore order.” Disheartened by Grant’s refusal to rush troops to Mississippi, Ames sat brooding and besieged in the governor’s mansion in Jackson. He concluded that Reconstruction was a dead letter, white supremacists in his state having engineered a coup d’état. “Yes, a revolution has taken place—by force of arms—and a race are disfranchised—they are to be returned to a condition of serfdom—an era of second slavery,” he lamented to his wife. Sarcastically referring to Grant’s and Pierrepont’s words, he wrote, “The political death of the Negro will forever release the nation . . . from such ‘political outbreaks.’ You may think I exaggerate. Time will show you how accurate my statements are.” To head off threatened impeachment, he decided to resign after the election. His darkly prophetic letter previewed the nearly century-long Jim Crow system that would cast blacks back into a state of involuntary servitude to southern whites.
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Ron Chernow (Grant)
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The modern holiday of Mother's Day was first celebrated in 1908, when Anna Jarvis held a memorial for her mother at St Andrew's Methodist Church in Grafton, West Virginia.[9] St Andrew's Methodist Church now holds the International Mother's Day Shrine.[10] Her campaign to make Mother's Day a recognized holiday in the United States began in 1905, the year her mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, died. Ann Jarvis had been a peace activist who cared for wounded soldiers on both sides of the American Civil War, and created Mother's Day Work Clubs to address public health issues. She and another peace activist and suffragette Julia Ward Howe had been urging for the creation of a Mother’s Day dedicated to peace. 40 years before it became an official holiday, Ward Howe had made her Mother’s Day Proclamation in 1870, which called upon mothers of all nationalities to band together to promote the “amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.”[11] Anna Jarvis wanted to honor this and to set aside a day to honor all mothers because she believed a mother is "the person who has done more for you than anyone in the world"
Ghb구매,물뽕구입,Ghb 구입방법,물뽕가격,수면제판매,물뽕효능,물뽕구매방법,ghb가격,물뽕판매처,수면제팔아요
카톡【AKR331】라인【SPR331】위커【SPR705】텔레【GEM705】
첫거래하시는분들 실레지만 별로 반갑지않습니다 이유는 단하나 판매도 기본이지만 안전은 더중요하거든요
*물뽕이란 알고싶죠?
액체 상태로 주로 물이나 술 등에 타서 마시기 때문에 속칭 '물뽕'으로 불린다.
다량 복용시 필름이 끊기는 등의 증세가 나타나고 강한 흥분작용을 일으켜 미국에서는 젊은 청소년들속에서 주로 이용해 '데이트시 강간할 때 쓰는 약'이라는 뜻의 '데이트 레이프 드러그(date rape drug)'로 불리기도 한다.
미국 등 일부 국가에서는 GHB가 공식적으로 여성작업용으로 시중에서 밀거래 되고있다
미국에서는 2013년부터 미국FDA에서 발표한데의하면 법적으로 물뽕(GHB)약물을 사용금지하였다
이유는 이약물이 사람이 복용후 30분안에 약효가 발생하는데 6~7시간정도 지나면 바로 몸밖으로 오즘이나 혹은 땀으로 전부 빠져나간다는것이다
한번은 미국에서 어떤여성분이 강간을 당했다면서 미국 경찰청에 신고를 했다
2번의재판끝에 경찰당국과 여성분은 아무런 증거도 얻을수없었다
남성분이나 혹은 여성분이 복용할경우 30분이면 바로 기분이 좋아지면서 평소 남성의 터치나 남성의 시선까지 거부하던 여성분이그녀답지않은 스킨쉽으로 30분이 지나서 약발이 오르면 바로 작업을 걸어도 그대로 바로 빠져들게하는 마성의 약물이다
이러한 제품도 진품을살때만이 효과를 보는것이다.
더궁금한것이 있으시면 카톡【AKR331】라인【SPR331】위커【SPR705】텔레【GEM705】로 문의주세요.
In 1908, the U.S. Congress rejected a proposal to make Mother's Day an official holiday, joking that they would also have to proclaim a "Mother-in-law's Day". However, owing to the efforts of Anna Jarvis, by 1911 all U.S. states observed the holiday, with some of them officially recognizing Mother's Day as a local holiday (the first being West Virginia, Jarvis' home state, in 1910). In 1914, Woodrow Wilson signed a proclamation designating Mother's Day, held on the second Sunday in May, as a national holiday to honor mothers.
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마법의약물G,H,B정품판매처,카톡【AKR331】라인【SPR331】물,뽕정품으로 판매하고있어요
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Chapter 1, “Esoteric Antiquarianism,” situates Egyptian Oedipus in its most important literary contexts: Renaissance Egyptology, including philosophical and archeological traditions, and early modern scholarship on paganism and mythology. It argues that Kircher’s hieroglyphic studies are better understood as an antiquarian rather than philosophical enterprise, and it shows how much he shared with other seventeenth-century scholars who used symbolism and allegory to explain ancient imagery. The next two chapters chronicle the evolution of Kircher’s hieroglyphic studies, including his pioneering publications on Coptic. Chapter 2, “How to Get Ahead in the Republic of Letters,” treats the period from 1632 until 1637 and tells the story of young Kircher’s decisive encounter with the arch-antiquary Peiresc, which revolved around the study of Arabic and Coptic manuscripts. Chapter 3, “Oedipus in Rome,” continues the narrative until 1655, emphasizing the networks and institutions, especially in Rome, that were essential to Kircher’s enterprise. Using correspondence and archival documents, this pair of chapters reconstructs the social world in which Kircher’s studies were conceived, executed, and consumed, showing how he forged his career by establishing a reputation as an Oriental philologist.
The next four chapters examine Egyptian Oedipus and Pamphilian Obelisk through a series of thematic case studies. Chapter 4, “Ancient Theology and the Antiquarian,” shows in detail how Kircher turned Renaissance occult philosophy, especially the doctrine of the prisca theologia, into a historical framework for explaining antiquities. Chapter 5, “The Discovery of Oriental Antiquity,” looks at his use of Oriental sources, focusing on Arabic texts related to Egypt and Hebrew kabbalistic literature. It provides an in-depth look at the modus operandi behind Kircher’s imposing edifice of erudition, which combined bogus and genuine learning. Chapter 6, “Erudition and Censorship,” draws on archival evidence to document how the pressures of ecclesiastical censorship shaped Kircher’s hieroglyphic studies. Readers curious about how Kircher actually produced his astonishing translations of hieroglyphic inscriptions will find a detailed discussion in chapter 7, “Symbolic Wisdom in an Age of Criticism,” which also examines his desperate effort to defend their reliability. This chapter brings into sharp focus the central irony of Kircher’s project: his unyielding antiquarian passion to explain hieroglyphic inscriptions and discover new historical sources led him to disregard the critical standards that defined erudite scholarship at its best. The book’s final chapter, “Oedipus at Large,” examines the reception of Kircher’s hieroglyphic studies through the eighteenth century in relation to changing ideas about the history of civilization.
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Daniel Stolzenberg (Egyptian Oedipus: Athanasius Kircher and the Secrets of Antiquity)
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pp. 87-88:
The usual way in which the media and politicians talk about race discrimination in the job market is to compare the percentage of Africans or Latins in a given occupation with the percentage of Europeans. This makes the situation look bad. The 2014–2018 American Community Survey found that Africans, at 13 percent of the population, accounted for only 3.6 percent of CEOs, 3.7 percent of physical scientists, 4.4 percent of civil engineers, 5.1 percent of physicians, and 5.2 percent of lawyers. Latin percentages in those prestigious occupations ranged from 5.3 to 7.6 percent, but Latins are almost 18 percent of the population, so their underrepresentation was nearly the same. The picture flips when race differences in cognitive ability and job performance are taken into account. Africans and Latins get through the educational pipeline with preferential treatment in admissions to colleges and to professional programs. Their mean IQs in occupations across the range from unskilled to those requiring advanced degrees are substantially lower than the mean IQs for Europeans in the same occupations. Race differences in measures of on-the-job performance are commensurate with the differences in cognitive ability. I think it is fair to conclude that the American job market is indeed racially biased. A detached observer might even call it systemic racism. The American job market systemically discriminates in favor of racial minorities other than Asians.
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Charles Murray (Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America)
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At first glance the Bible appeared to be a collection of unrelated books of history, poetry, rituals, philosophy, biography, and prophecy held together only by a binder’s stitch and glue. But I only had to read Genesis 11 and 12 to realize that seemingly unrelated and different books of the Bible had a clear plot, a thread that tied together all the books, as well as the Old and the New Testaments. Sin had brought a curse upon all the nations of the earth. God called Abraham to follow him because he wanted to bless all the nations of the earth through Abraham’s descendants.6 It didn’t take long to realize that God’s desire to bless human beings begins in the very first chapter of Genesis and culminates in the last chapter of the last book with a grand vision of healing for all nations.7 The implication was obvious: The Bible was claiming that I should read it because it was written to bless my nation and me. The revelation that God wanted to bless my nation of India amazed me. I realized it was a prediction I could test. It would confirm or deny the Bible’s reliability. If the Bible is God’s word, then had he kept this word? Had he blessed “all the nations of the earth”? Had my country been blessed by the children of Abraham? If so, that would be a good reason for me, an Indian, to check out this book. My investigation of whether God had truly blessed India through the Bible yielded incredible discoveries: the university where I was studying, the municipality and democracy I lived in, the High Court behind my house and the legal system it represented, the modern Hindi that I spoke as my mother tongue, the secular newspaper for which I had begun to write, the army cantonment west of the road I lived on, the botanical garden to the east, the public library near our garden, the railway lines that intersected in my city, the medical system I depended on, the Agricultural Institute across town—all of these came to my city because some people took the Bible seriously.
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Vishal Mangalwadi (The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization)
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In 1995, the gray wolf was reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park after a seventy-year hiatus. Scientists expected an ecological ripple effect, but the size and scope of the trophic cascade took them by surprise.7 Wolves are predators that kill certain species of animals, but they indirectly give life to others. When the wolves reentered the ecological equation, it radically changed the behavioral patterns of other wildlife. As the wolves began killing coyotes, the rabbit and mouse populations increased, thereby attracting more hawks, weasels, foxes, and badgers. In the absence of predators, deer had overpopulated the park and overgrazed parts of Yellowstone. Their new traffic patterns, however, allowed the flora and fauna to regenerate. The berries on those regenerated shrubs caused a spike in the bear population. In six years’ time, the trees in overgrazed parts of the park had quintupled in height. Bare valleys were reforested with aspen, willow, and cottonwood trees. And as soon as that happened, songbirds started nesting in the trees. Then beavers started chewing them down. Beavers are ecosystem engineers, building dams that create natural habitats for otters, muskrats, and ducks, as well as fish, reptiles, and amphibians. One last ripple effect. The wolves even changed the behavior of rivers—they meandered less because of less soil erosion. The channels narrowed and pools formed as the regenerated forests stabilized the riverbanks. My point? We need wolves! When you take the wolf out of the equation, there are unintended consequences. In the absence of danger, a sheep remains a sheep. And the same is true of men. The way we play the man is by overcoming overwhelming obstacles, by meeting daunting challenges. We may fear the wolf, but we also crave it. It’s what we want. It’s what we need. Picture a cage fight between a sheep and a wolf. The sheep doesn’t stand a chance, right? Unless there is a Shepherd. And I wonder if that’s why we play it safe instead of playing the man—we don’t trust the Shepherd. Playing the man starts there! Ecologists recently coined a wonderful new word. Invented in 2011, rewilding has a multiplicity of meanings. It’s resisting the urge to control nature. It’s the restoration of wilderness. It’s the reintroduction of animals back into their natural habitat. It’s an ecological term, but rewilding has spiritual implications. As I look at the Gospels, rewilding seems to be a subplot. The Pharisees were so civilized—too civilized. Their religion was nothing more than a stage play. They were wolves in sheep’s clothing.8 But Jesus taught a very different brand of spirituality. “Foxes have dens and birds have nests,” said Jesus, “but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”9 So Jesus spent the better part of three years camping, fishing, and hiking with His disciples. It seems to me Jesus was rewilding them. Jesus didn’t just teach them how to be fishers of men. Jesus taught them how to play the man! That was my goal with the Year of Discipleship,
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Mark Batterson (Play the Man: Becoming the Man God Created You to Be)
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For abolitionists, who advocated the immediate emancipation of all slaves, and free-soilers, who simply opposed the spread of slavery into the western territories, the existence of such a group proved the destructive effect of slavery on social morals and human industry and the inordinate economic power of the planter elite. It also served as an implicit warning of the disastrous consequences of the spread of slavery into nonslaveholding regions and its debilitating effect on the work ethic of otherwise stalwart white farmers. For slave-holders, particularly those at the apex of southern society, the idleness of rural working-class whites justified the “peculiar institution” and made clear the need for a planter-led economic and social hierarchy. Planter D. R. Hundley wrote, for example, that “poor whites” were “the laziest two-legged animals that walk erect on the face of the earth . . . [and exhibited] a natural stupidity or dullness of intellect that almost surpasses belief.” To abolitionists and proslavery ideologues alike, therefore, southern poor whites utterly lacked industry, intelligence, social propriety, and honor, the essential ingredients for political and social equality and thus should not be trusted with political decision-making.7 Northern and southern middle- to upper-class commentators perceived this class of people as so utterly degraded that they challenged their assertion of “whiteness,” the one claim southern working-class whites had to political equality, “normative” status, and social superiority to free and enslaved blacks. Like Byrd and the author of “The Carolina Sand-Hillers,” journalists and travel writers repeatedly compared “poor whites” unfavorably to other supposedly inferior people of color, be they enslaved blacks, Indians, or even Mexican peasants. Through a variety of arguments, including genetic inferiority, excessive interbreeding with “nonwhites,” and environmental factors, such as the destructive influences of the southern climate, rampant disease, and a woefully inadequate diet, these writers asserted that “poor whites” were neither truly “white” nor clearly “nonwhite” but instead, a separate “‘Cracker’ race” in all ways so debased that they had no capacity for social advancement. This attitude is clear in an 1866 article from the Boston Daily Advertiser that proclaimed that this social class had reached depths of “[s]uch filthy poverty, such foul ignorance, such idiotic imbecility” that they could never be truly civilized. “[T]ime and effort will lead the negro up to intelligent manhood,” the author concluded, “but I almost doubt if it will be possible to ever lift this ‘white trash’ into respectability.”8 Contempt for working-class whites was almost as strong among African Americans as among middle-class and elite whites. Enslaved African Americans invented derogatory terms containing explicit versions of “whiteness” such as “(poor) white trash” and “poor buckra” (a derivative form of the West African word for “white man”). Although relations between slaves and non-elite southern whites were complex, many slaves deeply resented the role of poor whites as overseers and patrol riders and adopted their owners’ view that elite southern planters were socially and morally superior. Many also believed that blacks, enslaved and free, formed a middle layer of social respectability between the planter aristocracy at the top of the social system and the “poor whites” at the bottom. The construction of a “poor white” and “white trash” social and cultural category thus allowed black slaves to carve out a space of social superiority, as well as permitted the white planter elite to justify enormous economic and social inequality among whites in a supposedly democratic society.9
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Anthony Harkins (Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon)
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THE ABRIDGED RULES OF CIVILITY NUMBER RULE 2 When in Company, put not your Hands to any Part of the Body, not usualy Discovered. 7 Put not off your Cloths in the presence of Others, nor go out your Chambers half Drest. 24 Do not laugh too loud or too much at any Publick [Spectacle]. 54 Play not the Peacock, looking every where about you, to See if you be well Deck’t, if your Shoes fit well if your Stockings sit neatly, and Cloths handsomely. 56 Associate yourself with Men of good Quality if you Esteem your own Reputation; for ’tis better to be alone than in bad Company. 73 Think before you Speak pronounce not imperfectly nor bring ou[t] your Words too hastily but orderly & distinctly. 82 Undertake not what you cannot Perform but be Carefull to keep your Promise. 90 Being Set at meal Scratch not neither Spit Cough or blow your Nose except there’s a Necessity for it. 92 Take no Salt or cut Bread with your Knife Greasy. 100 Cleanse not your teeth with the Table Cloth Napkin Fork or Knife but if Others do it let it be done wt. a Pick Tooth.
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Alexis Coe (You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington)
“
Using his observations of the different shadows cast by sundials along the same meridian and a little number crunching, Eratosthenes made a calculation of the earth’s diameter that was amazingly accurate: 7,850 miles, only about 60 off the actual mark.
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Arthur Herman (The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization)
“
To Boethius, Augustine’s “Christian liberty” grated against more ancient ideals of liberty. For one thing, it seemed to strip men of the power of free will.7 If we are going to be happy, we have to be free to act in the world, even if that means we make mistakes.
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Arthur Herman (The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization)
“
In this effort, those who like James Henry Thornwell defended the legitimacy of slavery in the Bible had the easiest task. The procedure, which by 1860 had been repeated countless times, was uncomplicated. First, open the Scriptures and read, at say, Leviticus 25:45, or, even better, at 1 Corinthians 7:20-21. Second, decide for yourself what these passages mean. Don't wait for a bishop or a king or a president or a meddling Yankee to tell you what the passage means, but decide for yourself. Third, if anyone tries to convince you that you are not interpreting those passages in the natural, commonsensical, ordinary meaning of the words, look hard at what such a one believes with respect to other biblical doctrines. If you find in what he or she says about such doctrines the least hint of unorthodoxy, as inevitably you will, then you may rest assured that you are being asked to give up not only the plain meaning of scripture, but also the entire trust in the Bible that made the country into such a great Christian civilization.
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Mark A. Noll
“
I compared the Panthers to the heroes given to me by the schools, men and women who struck me as ridiculous and contrary to everything I knew. Every February my classmates and I were herded into assemblies for a ritual review of the Civil Rights Movement. Our teachers urged us toward the example of freedom marchers, Freedom Riders, and Freedom Summers, and it seemed that the month could not pass without a series of films dedicated to the glories of being beaten on camera. The black people in these films seemed to love the worst things in life—love the dogs that rent their children apart, the tear gas that clawed at their lungs, the fire-hoses that tore off their clothes and tumbled them into the streets. They seemed to love the men who raped them, the women who cursed them, love the children who spat on them, the terrorists that bombed them. Why are they showing this to us? Why were only our heroes nonviolent? I speak not of the morality of nonviolence, but of the sense that blacks are in especial need of this morality. Back then all I could do was measure these freedom-lovers by what I knew. Which is to say, I measured them against children pulling out in the 7-Eleven parking lot, against parents wielding extension cords, and “Yeah, nigger, what’s up now?” I judged them against the country I knew, which had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under slavery, against the country whose armies fanned out across the world to extend their dominion. The world, the real one, was civilization secured and ruled by savage means. How could the schools valorize men and women whose values society actively scorned? How could they send us out into the streets of Baltimore, knowing all that they were, and then speak of nonviolence?
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Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me (One World Essentials))
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The point is, though, that everyone can do it. They’re very proud of it. Everyone has—” he hesitated again, certain now that things were amiss—“the vet. Except for women, of course. And children. And criminals. And slaves. And stupid people. And people of foreign extraction. And people disapproved of for, er, various reasons. And lots of other people. But everyone apart from them. It’s a very enlightened civilization.
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Terry Pratchett (Pyramids (Discworld, #7))
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His belief in the experimental method led him, despite his Franciscan vow of poverty, to raise huge sums to buy scientific instruments, alchemical equipment, and to collect unusual natural specimens—creating in effect Europe’s first laboratory. Bacon could also be scathing about the complacent ignorance of his own day. He once declared that he wanted every Latin edition of Aristotle burned because the translations were so inadequate. Above all, he excoriated the failure of the Church and universities to embrace the wisdom of the past, including Greek science. “The whole clergy is given up to pride, luxury, and avarice,” he writes at one point. “Their quarrels, their contentions, their vices are a scandal to laymen.” In short, the English Franciscan managed to anticipate the spirit of the Reformation as well as the scientific revolution.7
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Arthur Herman (The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization)
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One: Mankind’s activities are causing the disintegration (a word chosen carefully) of natural ecosystems at a cataclysmic rate. We all know the rough outlines of that problem. By way of logging, road building, slash-and-burn agriculture, hunting and eating of wild animals (when Africans do that we call it “bushmeat” and impute a negative onus, though in America it’s merely “game”), clearing forest to create cattle pasture, mineral extraction, urban settlement, suburban sprawl, chemical pollution, nutrient runoff to the oceans, mining the oceans unsustainably for seafood, climate change, international marketing of the exported goods whose production requires any of the above, and other “civilizing” incursions upon natural landscape—by all such means, we are tearing ecosystems apart. This much isn’t new. Humans have been practicing most of those activities, using simple tools, for a very long time. But now, with 7 billion people alive and modern technology in their hands, the cumulative impacts are becoming critical. Tropical forests aren’t the only jeopardized ecosystems, but they’re the richest and most intricately structured. Within such ecosystems live millions of kinds of creatures, most of them unknown to science, unclassified into a species, or else barely identified and poorly understood.
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David Quammen (Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic)
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It had taken the Civil War to change “United States” from two words, an adjective and a noun, to a singular noun composed of two words.
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Olan Thorensen (A Dubious Peace (Destiny's Crucible, #7))
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The Sixteen Conclusions of Reverend Kirk
In the last half of the seventeenth century, a Scottish scholar gathered all the accounts he could find about the Sleagh Maith and, in 1691, wrote an amazing manuscript entitled The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies. It was the first systematic attempt to describe the methods and organization of the strange creatures that plagued the farmers of Scotland. The author, Reverend Kirk, of Aberfoyle, studied theology at St. Andrews and took his degree of professor at Edinburgh. Later he served as minister for the parishes of Balquedder and Aberfoyle and died in 1692.
Kirk invented the name "the Secret Commonwealth" to describe the organization of the elves. It is impossible to quote the entire text of his treatise, but we can summarize his findings about elves and other aerial creatures in the following way:
1. They have a nature that is intermediate between man and the angels.
2. Physically, they have very light and fluid bodies, which are comparable to a condensed cloud. They are particularly visible at dusk. They can appear and vanish at will.
3. Intellectually, they are intelligent and curious.
4. They have the power to carry away anything they like.
5. They live inside the earth in caves, which they can reach through any crevice or opening where air passes.
6. When men did not inhabit most of the world, the creatures used to live there and had their own agriculture. Their civilization has left traces on the high mountains; it was flourishing at a time when the whole countryside was nothing but woods and forests.
7. At the beginning of each three-month period, they change quarters because they are unable to stay in one place. Besides, they like to travel. It is then that men have terrible encounters with them, even on the great highways.
8. Their chameleon-like bodies allow them to swim through the air with all their household.
9. They are divided into tribes. Like us, they have children, nurses, marriages, burials, etc., unless they just do this to mock our own customsor to predict terrestrial events.
10. Their houses are said to be wonderfully large and beautiful, but under most circumstances they are invisible to human eyes. Kirk compares them to enchanted islands. The houses are equipped with lamps that burn forever and fires that need no fuel.
11. They speak very little. When they do talk among themselves, their language is a kind of whistling sound.
12. Their habits and their language when they talk to humans are similar to those of local people.
13. Their philosophical system is based on the following ideas: nothing dies; all things evolve cyclically in such a way that at every cycle they are renewed and improved. Motion is the universal law.
14. They are said to have a hierarchy of leaders, but they have no visible devotion to God, no religion.
15. They have many pleasant and light books, but also serious and complex books dealing with abstract matters.
16. They can be made to appear at will before us through magic.
The similarities between these observations and the story related by Facius Cardan, which antedates Kirk's manuscript by exactly two hundred years, are clear. Both Cardan and Paracelsus write, like Kirk, that a pact can be made with these creatures and that they can be made to appear and answer questions at will. Paracelsus did not care to reveal what that pact was "because of the ills that might befall those who would try it." Kirk is equally discreet on this point. And, of course, to go deeper into this matter would open the whole field of witchcraft and ceremonial magic, which is beyond my purpose in the present book.
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Jacques F. Vallée (Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact)
“
For organizational behavior expert Charles Handy, the S-curve is the essential form of how businesses, social organizations and political systems develop over time, “it is the line of all things human.”7 Tech analyst Paul Saffo advises to “look for the S-curve,” noting that the uptake of new technologies—from personal robots to driverless cars—is destined to follow its shape.8 Scholars have used the sigmoid curve to describe the rise and fall of ancient civilizations like the Roman Empire, but also to predict modern-day shifts, such as the decline of the United States as a global superpower.9 In the field of systems thinking, the authors of the Club of Rome’s 1972 report The Limits to Growth put the S-curve at the heart of their analysis.10 More recently, economist Kate Raworth has shown that mainstream economics assumes that GDP growth follows an “exponential curve left hanging in mid-air,” when the reality is that it is far more likely to level off into the shape of the S-curve.
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Roman Krznaric (The Good Ancestor: A Radical Prescription for Long-Term Thinking)
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she knew that the heart of God is love, movement in the most basic sense.6 Such love arises out of surrender, and equally out of strength, and yet still ultimately out of a place beyond surrender and strength. As Sally Belfrage says, “Mrs. Hamer was free. She represented a challenge that few could understand: how it was possible to arrive at a place past suffering, to a concern for her torturers as deep as that for her friends. Such people were rare. All of them began by refusing to hate or despise themselves.”7 Nonetheless, for Mrs. Hamer, the way beyond surrender and strength was not through resoluteness, habituation, or sheer will power, but through God. Love like this, love like Mrs. Hamer’s, cannot ground itself. “Take my hand, precious Lord, lead me on,” she testifies.
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Charles Marsh (God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights)
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So Newark had the highest percentage of substandard housing of any American city: 7,097 units had no flush toilets; 28,795, no heaters. Twenty-eight babies died in a diarrhea epidemic in 1965, eighteen of them at City Hospital, which was also infested by bats.
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Rick Perlstein (Nixonland: America's Second Civil War and the Divisive Legacy of Richard Nixon 1965-72)
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Almost three decades had passed since Paolo Cortazár and the breakaway fleet had passed through Laconia gate. Time enough to build a little civilization, a city, a culture. Time enough for him to confirm that alien engineers had designed the protomolecule as a bridge builder. They had thrown it into the stars like seeds to hijack whatever organic life it encountered and create ring gates into a pocket universe, a nexus between worlds. Until they died out, the slow zone and its rings had been the hub of an empire that defied human comprehension. And now, it would be again. A little bridge-building mechanism that overcame locality changed everything for all humanity
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James S.A. Corey (Persepolis Rising (The Expanse #7))
“
It is a reason why so many who seek holiness or spiritual improvement impose on themselves a strict austerity. And it is why schools and colleges used to emulate the ways of monasteries. The first Christian hermits and monastics who practiced extreme austerity in the desert saw themselves as emulating Jesus during his sojourn in the wilderness. Once monastic life became institutionalized, removing oneself from carnal temptation was a major reason why religiously minded individuals would choose to take vows. The Rule of St. Benedict, set down around the year 530, included commitments to poverty, humility, chastity, and obedience, and this became the paradigm for most Christian monastic orders. The vow of poverty generally involved renouncing all individual property, although the monastic community was allowed to hold property, and of course some monasteries eventually became quite wealthy. But the lifestyle of most monks in the Middle Ages was kept deliberately austere. Here is how Aelred of Rievaulx, writing in the twelfth century, describes it: Our food is scanty, our garments rough, our drink is from the streams and our sleep upon our book. Under our tired limbs there is a hard mat; when sleep is sweetest we must rise at a bell’s bidding. . . . self-will has no scope; there is no moment for idleness or dissipation.4 Strict precautions to eliminate the possibility of sexual encounters, regular searches of dormitories to ensure that no one was hoarding personal property, a rigid and arduous daily routine to occupy to the full one’s physical and mental energy: by means of this sort monasteries and convents did their best to provide a temptation-free environment. More than a trace of the same thinking lay behind the preference for isolated rural locations among those who sought to establish colleges in nineteenth-century America. Sometimes the argument might be conveyed subtly by a brochure picturing the college surrounded by nothing but fields, woods, and hills, an image that also appealed to the deeply rooted idea that the land was a source of virtue.5 But it was also put forward explicitly. The town of North Yarmouth sought to persuade the founders of Bowdoin College of its advantageous location by pointing out that it was “not so much exposed to many Temptations to Dissipation, Extravagance, Vanity and Various Vices as great seaport towns frequently are.”6 And the 1847 catalog of Tusculum College, Tennessee, noted that its rural situation “guards it from all the ensnaring and demoralizing influences of a town.”7 Needless to say, reassurances of this sort were directed more at the fee-paying parents than at the prospective students. One should also add that not everyone took such a positive view of the rural campus. Some complained that life far away from urban civilization fostered vulgarity, depravity, licentiousness, and hy
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Emrys Westacott (The Wisdom of Frugality: Why Less Is More - More or Less)
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Luke, who had picked up a sandwich and was in the process of wolfing it down, volunteered with his mouth half full, "Dr. Gibson said the memory loss may be temporary."
Nonplussed by her brother's oafish manners, Merritt said, "Dear, why don't you make yourself comfortable on the couch?"
Luke gave her an unrepentant glance. "Sis, I know you'd prefer me to sit and eat like a civilized person. But if you knew everything these trousers have been through tonight, you wouldn't want them on your furniture.
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Lisa Kleypas (Devil in Disguise (The Ravenels, #7))
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Feeling the heat, Governor Hatfield released Mother Jones on May 7. The next day she appeared in the Senate gallery and applauded when Senator Kern’s call for an investigation passed by a voice vote. Acting largely on her own, one woman had done more than the nation’s top union leaders to alert reformers to the suppression of civil liberties in industrial America.
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James R. Green (The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia's Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom)
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Perhaps. We were relentlessly hunted down on our own continent, and I know it doesn’t sound like anything to go on, but if a settlement of healing-inclined Fae did start a civilization here long ago … Why? Why leave Doranelle, why come so far, and leave so few traces, yet ensure that the healing legacy survived?
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Sarah J. Maas (Throne of Glass (Throne of Glass #0.1–0.5, 1–7))
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As President Reagan stated, “You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children’s children say of us that we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.”7 Let us do all that can be done. Let us be inspired by the example of our forefathers and their courage, strength, and wisdom. Let us be inspirited by the genius of the Constitution and its preservation of the individual and the civil society. Let us unleash an American renaissance in which liberty is celebrated and self-government is cherished. Let us, together—we, the people—restore the splendor of the American Republic.
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Mark R. Levin (The Liberty Amendments: Restoring the American Republic)
“
Whenever I attempt to understand the Pakistani military’s Inter-Services Intelligence and the civilian Intelligence Bureau, whose purpose is to collect crucial information on the security of the state, I am left with biting questions about their true roles in internal and external matters.
It is a fact that such countries as India and Pakistan have always suffered from a lack of limits on the role of their intelligence agencies and respect for international law and human rights, including the privacy of individuals within the concept and context of global peace and fundamental freedoms.
The ISI, driven by the Pakistan Armed Forces, ignores the supreme constitutional role and rule of a democratic head of state, under which even the Armed Forces themselves fall. This is not only a violation of the constitution but also a rejection of the civilian leadership. This can be interpreted as Pakistan is a country where the servant rules its leader and patron.
It is this bitter reality that leads toward the collapse of all systems of society, which the Pakistani nation has faced since the first introduction of martial law by General Ayub Khan in 1958, and such conduct has continued to exist ever since, whether visibly or invisibly.
One cannot ignore, avoid, or deny that Pakistan has maintained its physical independence for more than 7 decades. However, its real freedom as conceptualized upon the nation’s creation has been only a dream and abused by its so-called defenders and its power-mongers. Unfortunately, such figures control the ISI and lead it in the wrong direction, beyond the constitutional limits of its power.
Consequently, the ISI plays the role of a gang that disrupts the stability of the main political parties and promotes tiny, unpopular parties to gain power for itself. There is thus no doubt that the ISI has failed in its responsibility to support constitutional rule and to secure and defend the state and its people.
The failure of the democratic system in the country, directly or indirectly, reflects the harassment practiced by both intelligence agencies without proof or legal process, even interfering with other institutions. The consequences are the collapse of the justice system and the imposition of foreign policies that damage international relationships. The result is a lack of trust in these agencies and their isolation.
In a civilized century, it is a tragedy that one dares not express one’s feelings that may abuse God, prophets, or sacred figures. But more than that, one cannot speak a word against the wrongdoing of a handful of army generals or ISI officials. In Pakistan, veteran journalists, top judges, and other key figures draw breath under the spying eyes of the ISI; even higher and minister-level personalities are the victims of such conduct. One has to live in such surroundings.
Pakistan needs a major cleanup and reorganization of the present awkward role of the ISI for the sake of international relations, standards, and peace, including the privacy of individuals and respect for the notable figures of society, according to the law.
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Ehsan Sehgal
“
In general, the chakra system branched into two sections: the Vedic and the Tantric (now alive within Ayurvedic medicine and Tantric yoga, for example). The term tantra comes from two words: tanoti, or to expand; and trayati, or to liberate. Tantra therefore means “to extend knowledge that liberates.” Tantra is a life practice based on teachings about the chakras, kundalini, hatha yoga, astronomy, astrology, and the worship of many Hindu gods and goddesses. Tantric yoga originates in pre-Aryan India, around 3000 to 2500 BC. Many other varieties of Tantric yoga or spirituality have arisen from it, including Tantric Buddhism. Each system derived from Tantric yoga has a unique view on the chakras and their related gods, cosmology, and symbols. The history of chakras, as complex as it sounds so far, is even more complicated. The chakra system is intertwined with—and maybe even created by—several different cultures. Although usually associated with India, Tantric yoga was also practiced by the Dravidians, who originated from Ethiopia, as is revealed in the many similarities between predynastic Egyptian and African practices and ancient Indian Tantric beliefs.6 For example, numerous Hindu deities are rooted in “India’s black civilizations, which is why they are often depicted as black.”7 Some historians point out that early Egyptians were greatly affected by African beliefs,8 and in turn influenced Greek, Jewish, and, later, Islamic and Christian thought, in addition to the Indian Hindu.9 Other cultures also exchanged chakra ideas. Many practices of the early Essenes, a religio-spiritual community dwelling in Palestine in the second century BC through the second century AD, mirrored those of early India.10 The Sufis—Islamic mystics—also employed a system of energy centers, although it involved four centers.11 The Sufis also borrowed the kundalini process from Tantric yoga, as did certain Asian Indian and American Indian groups.12 As we shall see, the Maya Indians of Mexico, the Inca Indians of Peru, and the Cherokee Indians of North America each have their own chakra method. The Maya believe that they actually taught the Hindu the chakra system. The chakra system was brought to the West in yet another roundabout way. It was first thoroughly outlined in the text Sat-Chakra-Nirupana, written by an Indian yogi in the sixteenth century. Arthur Avalon then delivered chakra knowledge to Western culture in his book The Serpent Power, first published in 1919. Avalon drew heavily upon the Sat-Chakra-Nirupana as well as another text, Pakaka-Pancaka. His presentation was preceded by Theosophic Practica, a book written in 1696 by Johann Georg Gichtel, a student of Jakob Bohme, who refers to inner force centers that align with Eastern chakra doctrines.13 Today, many esoteric professionals rely on Anodea Judith's interpretation of Avalon’s work, to which she has added additional information about the psychological aspects of the chakras.
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Cyndi Dale (The Subtle Body: An Encyclopedia of Your Energetic Anatomy)
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One random Friday, the president announced that an asteroid was on a collision course for Earth. My world and everyone else’s—the entire planet—fell into chaos. Everything that was capable of collapsing eventually did. My grandfather showed up the next day as stores were being ransacked and riots were erupting in the streets. He begged us to run. Escape to his survival-adapted cabin in the middle of nowhere where he’d stored up years’ worth of food and provisions. My parents finally agreed, but they insisted on taking the time to pack all their favorite possessions while Grandpa and I waited impatiently in his old truck. The delay was a mistake. Large groups of violent looters were already hitting the wealthy neighborhoods in town, plundering houses and killing anyone who resisted. My mom and dad didn’t resist. Neither of them had ever thrown a punch or loaded a gun in their lives. But they were killed anyway, and Grandpa and I barely made it out of there alive. By then the interstates and highways were impossible, clogged with cars and roadblocked by aggressive militia groups whose day had finally arrived. Grandpa took us on smaller back roads, shooting at or running over anyone who tried to stop us, until we reached his remote cabin and left the remains of civilization behind. We stayed there—living off everything he’d stored up and using the self-sustaining energy and plumbing systems he’d installed—for more than eight years. A couple of years ago, as our supplies were running low, we realized we’d finally have to leave the safe isolation of our home long enough to scavenge for food and provisions. This region of the Ozarks was abandoned a long time ago as the protected forests and uncultivated wildland overtook the former pockets of residents, but there are still plenty of abandoned buildings remaining.
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Claire Kent (Homestead (Kindled, #7))
“
This is a wake up call. Don’t press the snooze alarm. The barbarians are at the gates, and, because they encourage breeding beyond the ability of the breeders to house, feed, and educate the breedees, violence and social disorganization continue. As the most Christian nation on earth watches its civilization dissolve like a Dove bar fallen off of that ark, attempts to enforce irrational superstitious solutions will accelerate. That Branch Davidian thing was a sample. Lots of other messiahs are waiting. Maybe we can have court-ordered Branch Davidian Social Services counseling for people who won’t share their wives with their god’s anointed. Maybe courts can acquit murderers if they believe a god’s finger was on their trigger. Maybe the barbarians will actually succeed in assuring that books, pictures, ideas, doctors, judges and military commanders share their vision. Then we will have a lot of interesting tribal warfare. One useful defense will be humanistic hermeneutics. Hermeneutics is a fancy word for biblical interpretation. When religious types want to make something simple sound holy and mysterious, they often give it an important sounding high falutin’ name. This practice contrasts sharply with the usage of secular humanists, who, in explaining their views, employ simple words, that fall trippingly from the tongue, like ‘eupraxophy.’ Hermeneutics can be an important weapon to use against religious fanatics in the coming ARCW. The hard core nut cases—those who would control every aspect of our lives by forcing us to accept their understanding of the will of their god—tend to share certain operational assumptions. These include the belief that: (1) Every word of the Bible is true. (2) The English translation of the Bible authorized by King James the First of England, completed in 1611, Common Era, is the only fully acceptable, authoritative, and inspired-by-god translation of holy scripture. This translation is accurate in every respect, including punctuation marks. (3) The Bible is the basis of all morality. Without it there can be no morality. (4) The United States of America was established, and should be governed, according to biblical principles. (5) The Bible is without error. (6) No part of the Bible is in conflict with, or contradictory to, any other part. (7) Hermeneutics can be used to clarify and explain those truths of god in the Bible that might appear, to finite minds, to be in conflict. The goal of hermeneutics is to reconcile all portions of the ‘Word of God’ (the Bible) into a seamless, complete, infallible, and final statement of all past and future history (the latter is called prophecy), of divine law, and of how humans should behave and understand morality. The Bible, properly interpreted, is the final word on everything.
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Edwin Kagin (Baubles of Blasphemy)
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it is typically progressives who have come to power with a comprehensive critique of existing society and a popular mandate (at least initially) to transform it. These progressives have wanted to use that power to bring about enormous changes in people’s habits, work, living patterns, moral conduct, and worldview.7 They have deployed what Václav Havel has called “the armory of holistic social engineering.”8 Utopian aspirations per se are not dangerous. As Oscar Wilde remarked, “A map of the world which does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.”9 Where the utopian vision goes wrong is when it is held by ruling elites with no commitment to democracy or civil rights and who are therefore likely to use unbridled state power for its achievement. Where it goes brutally wrong is when the society subjected to such utopian experiments lacks the capacity to mount a determined resistance.
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James C. Scott (Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Veritas Paperbacks))
“
Handcrafted Humanity Sonnet 7
Give, give and give again,
To give without reserve is living.
Fall, fall and fall again,
To fall without stopping is rising.
Break, break and break again,
To break without bending is integrity.
Lose, lose and lose again,
To lose without submitting is victory.
Love, love and love again,
To love despite being fooled is sanity.
Help, help and help again,
To help despite being deceived is humanity.
To give is to live, that is the civilized normal.
Kindness alone sets the human apart from animal.
”
”
Abhijit Naskar (Handcrafted Humanity: 100 Sonnets For A Blunderful World)
“
Two years later, the Israeli government announced that it had formalized a collaboration with Facebook’s Tel Aviv office, which—according to Palestinian activists who have regular contact with the company—has jurisdiction over both Israel and the Palestinian territories. They were thus replicating, in virtual space, the occupation of Palestinian land. In a statement about the partnership, Facebook said that “online extremism can only be tackled with a strong partnership between policymakers, civil society, academia and companies, and this is true in Israel and around the world.”27 Facebook’s actions, however, speak louder than its words. When it comes to Palestinian speech, it is only Israelis who have a real say—no matter whether the Israelis involved even believe that Palestinians should have rights. Ayelet Shaked, who served as Israeli justice minister at the time the agreement was formed and was directly involved in dealings with Facebook, has herself engaged in hate speech on the platform. Of Palestinian mothers, she once wrote: “They have to die and their houses should be demolished so that they cannot bear any more terrorists.”28 A paper published by the Haifa-based Palestinian digital rights group 7amleh documented the disparities in how hate speech from Israelis and Palestinians is treated, noting that “Facebook is the main source of violence and incitement online” stemming from Israel.29
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Jillian York (Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism)
“
To the Anglo-Saxons themselves, the cities established by the Romans were places of mystery, wondrous but useless, the haunted relics of a vanished civilization. The phrase used in more than one Old English poem to describe their massive ruins was enta geweorc – ‘the work of the giants’.7
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Marc Morris (The Anglo-Saxons A History of the Beginnings of England: 400–1066)
“
As long as we remain a planet of 7-plus billion, close-packed and widely traveled, with a love for meat, eggs, and milk, infections will be a force in our lives.
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Charles Kenny (The Plague Cycle: The Unending War Between Humanity and Infectious Disease)
“
I think somebody white is burning those houses to start up a second civil war down here. And what I’ve come here today to beg you not to do—is fall into their trap. It’s an old trap, brothers and sisters! They want to stir you up and make you do something they can use to prove to the world you’re everything they claim you are. They want to make you loot a store, or flip a police car, set a convenience store on fire. They want to point at you and say, ‘Look at those animals! They’ve got no respect for property. They don’t value human life the way we do.’ Folks, I know you’re too smart to let yourselves be used like that.
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Greg Iles (Southern Man (Penn Cage #7))
“
with an average net worth of over one hundred thousand dollars, equivalent to $3.7 million in twenty-first-century dollars. The majority owned at least one slave; twenty-seven owned one hundred or more; one delegate owned more than five hundred. Forty percent were graduates of the same school, South Carolina College.
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Erik Larson (The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War)
“
Allow me to introduce my friends. Lord Gavriel, of Doranelle. My uncle, of sorts,” Aelin added with a smirk at Gavriel. At Chaol’s narrowed brows, she explained, “He’s Aedion’s father.”
“Well, that explains a few things,” Nesryn muttered.
“Lorcan Salvaterre, formerly of Doranelle, and now a blood-sworn member of my court.” As if that weren’t a shock enough, Aelin winked at the imposing male. Lorcan scowled. “We’re still in the adjustment period,” she loudly whispered, and Yrene chuckled.
She straightened her shoulders, and another golden-haired male came forward. “Fenrys… You know, I don’t actually know your family name.”
Fenrys thew a roguish wink at the queen. “Moonbeam.”
“It is not,” Aelin hissed, choking on a laugh.
Fenrys laid a hand on his heart. “I am blood-sworn to you. Would I lie?”
But it was to the small, delicate woman that Aelin now gestured. “And the only civilized member of my court, Lady Elide Lochan of Perranth.
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”
Sarah J. Maas (Kingdom of Ash (Throne of Glass, #7))
“
More critically for Truman, Black voters turned out for him in the right places. They gave Truman 70,000 votes in California, which he won by 18,000; 85,000 votes in Illinois, which he won by 33,000; and 130,000 in Ohio, which he won by only 7,000.12 Cumulatively, those three states provided Truman with 78 electoral votes, the decisive bloc.
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Samuel G. Freedman (Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights (PIVOTAL MOMENTS IN AMERICAN HISTORY))
“
He then questioned the peaceful transfer of power, a hallmark of American democracy, and attempted to overturn the results of the election. This led to America’s polity score dropping from a + 7 to a + 5, the lowest score since 1800. The United States became an anocracy for the first time in more than two hundred years. Let that sink in. We are no longer the world’s oldest continuous democracy. That honor is now held by Switzerland, followed by New Zealand, and then Canada. We are no longer a peer to nations like Canada, Costa Rica, and Japan, which are all rated a + 10 on the polity index.
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Barbara F. Walter (How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them)
“
While Britain’s civil servants initially forecast that 13,000 people would arrive, the number soon soared into the hundreds of thousands and eventually reached 3.7 million.
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Matthew Goodwin (Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics)
“
Here lies the union," one banner proclaimed. "Born 4th July, 1776. Died 7th November, 1860."
"The clouds are threatening," Anderson wrote in his report to Washington. "And the storm may break upon us at any moment." In fact, the clouds had been gathering for decades.
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Erik Larson (The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War)
“
Meanwhile, angered by white violence in the South and inspired by the gigantic June 23 march in Detroit, grassroots people on the streets all over the country had begun talking about marching on Washington. “It scared the white power structure in Washington, D.C. to death,” as Malcolm put it in his “Message to the Grassroots” and in his Autobiography.6 So the White House called in the Big Six national Negro leaders and arranged for them to be given the money to control the march. The result was what Malcolm called the “Farce on Washington” on August 28, 1963. John Lewis, then chairman of SNCC and fresh from the battlefields of Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama where hundreds of blacks and their white student allies were being beaten and murdered simply for trying to register blacks to vote, was forced to delete references to the revolution and power from his speech and, specifically, to take out the sentence, “We will not wait for the President, the Justice Department nor Congress, but we will take matters into our own hands and create a source of power, outside of any national structure, that could and would assure us a victory.” Marchers were instructed to carry only official signs and to sing only one song, “We Shall Overcome.” As a result, many rank-and-file SNCC militants refused to participate.7 Meanwhile, conscious of the tensions that were developing around preparations for the march on Washington and in order to provide a national rallying point for the independent black movement, Conrad Lynn and William Worthy, veterans in the struggle and old friends of ours, issued a call on the day of the march for an all-black Freedom Now Party. Lynn, a militant civil rights and civil liberties lawyer, had participated in the first Freedom Ride from Richmond, Virginia, to Memphis, Tennessee, in 1947 and was one of Robert Williams’s attorneys.8 Worthy, a Baltimore Afro-American reporter and a 1936–37 Nieman Fellow, had distinguished himself by his courageous actions in defense of freedom of the press, including spending forty-one days in the Peoples Republic of China in 1957 in defiance of the U.S. travel ban (for which his passport was lifted) and traveling to Cuba without a passport following the Bay of Pigs invasion in order to help produce a documentary. The prospect of a black independent party terrified the Democratic Party. Following the call for the Freedom Now Party, Kennedy twice told the press that a political division between whites and blacks would be “fatal.
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Grace Lee Boggs (Living for Change: An Autobiography)
“
From the early 7th century BCE until the middle of the 6th century BCE, the Lydians played an important role in the history of the eastern Mediterranean region as they took on the role of middleman between the empires of the Near East and the emerging Hellenic civilization in Greece.
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Charles River Editors (The Hittites and Lydians: The History and Legacy of Ancient Anatolia’s Most Influential Civilizations)
“
However, while the neo-Hittites may have been relegated to an inferior political position in the first millennium BCE, another passage from 2 Kings reveals that they may not have lost their zeal for warfare. The passage states, “And they rose up in the twilight, to go unto the camp of the Syrians: and when they were come to the uttermost part of the camp of Syria, behold, there was no man there. For the lord had made the host of the Syrians to hear a noise of chariots, and a noise of horses, even the noise of a great host: and they said one to another, lo, the king of Israel hath hired against us the kings of the Hittites, and the kings of the Egyptians, to come upon us.” (2 Kings 7:5-6). Ultimately,
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Charles River Editors (The Hittites and Lydians: The History and Legacy of Ancient Anatolia’s Most Influential Civilizations)
“
I’ve had a note from Louisa. She and Kesmore will be calling on us soon, and then I suppose the floodgates will open.” “Must they?” He liked her family, liked them a great deal, but he’d loved these weeks to get to know his wife and her smiles. He was developing some sense of her silences too, though, so he settled his arm around Eve’s shoulders. “Tell me, Wife.” “I should not resent it when my sisters observe the civilities, but, Deene, I do. I am jealous of my time with you.” “How gratifying to know.” She punched him in the ribs. “Rotten man. You’re supposed to say you feel the same way.” Of
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Grace Burrowes (Lady Eve's Indiscretion (The Duke's Daughters, #4; Windham, #7))
“
An old man who plants a tree whose shade he will never use is the primary component of civilization.
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Vaughn Heppner (The Lost Earth (Lost Starship #7))
“
Supposedly, there was a civil war going on and my brother was part of it. Welcome to the struggle.
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James Cox (A Few Bad Men (Outlaw MC #7))
“
you’ve got to learn to think like a state if you work in the Civil Service. Organizations are not human beings and they don’t obey the same priorities. They’re hives.
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Charles Stross (The Nightmare Stacks (Laundry Files, #7))
“
In Die Welt von Gestern, Stefan Zweig attributed the decline of civil order in Europe to the myth of progress.7 In all the ideologies of his day – communism, socialism, Nazism, fascism – Zweig saw the same pernicious attempt to rewrite the principles of social order in terms of a linear progression from past to future. The
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Roger Scruton (How to Be a Conservative)
“
Every February, my classmates and I were herded into assemblies for a ritual review of the Civil Rights Movement. Our teachers urged us toward the example of freedom marchers, Freedom Riders, and Freedom Summers, and it seemed that the month could not pass without a series of films dedicated to the glories of being beaten on camera. The black people in these films seemed to love the worst things in life - love the dogs that rent their children apart, the tear gas that clawed at their lungs, the firehoses that tore off their clothes and tumbled them into the streets. They seemed to love the men who raped them, the women who cursed them, love the children who spat on them, the terrorists that bombed them. Why are they showing this to us? Why were only our heroes nonviolent? I speak not of the morality of nonviolence, but of the sense that blacks are in especial need of this morality. Back then all I could do was measure these freedom-lovers by what I knew. Which is to say, I measured them against children pulling out in the 7-Eleven parking lot, against parents wielding extension cords, and "Yeah, nigger, what's up now?" I judged them against the country I knew, which had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under slavery, against the country whose armies fanned out across the world to extend their dominion. The world, the real one, was civilization secured and ruled by savage means. How could the schools valorize men and women whose values society actively scorned? How could they send us out into the streets of Baltimore, knowing all that they were, and then speak of nonviolence?
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Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me)
“
Within five years, the effects of the civil rights revolution were undeniable. Between 1964 and 1969, the percentage of African American adults registered to vote in the South soared. In Alabama the rate leaped from 19.3 percent to 61.3 percent; in Georgia, 27.4 percent to 60.4 percent; in Louisiana, 31.6 percent to 60.8 percent; and in Mississippi, 6.7 percent to 66.5 percent. Suddenly black children could shop in department stores, eat at restaurants, drink from water fountains, and go to amusement parks that were once off-limits. Miscegenation laws were declared unconstitutional, and the rate of interracial marriage climbed.
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Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
“
In one of Mary’s apparitions to Bernadette, Our Lady asked her to dig in the dirt. As she dug, a spring trickled through the dirt. The water from the spring proved itself to be miraculous, healing those who bathed in it. Even today, six million visitors come to Lourdes annually. The humble Bernadette and the healing waters of Lourdes confounded both the medical community and the enlightened philosophes, such as Émile Zola, who had poisoned the minds of millions with atheism and an uncritical worship of science. Zola even made a visit to Lourdes in the hopes of discrediting it, only to witness the miraculous healing of a woman suffering from three incurable diseases. Upon seeing her restored to wellness, he puffed, “To me she is still ugly,” and dismissed the miraculous event. He dug his heels in even deeper, saying, “Were I to see all the sick at Lourdes cured, I would not believe in a miracle.”7
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Carrie Gress (The Marian Option: God’s Solution to a Civilization in Crisis)
“
J’ai déjà dit que la Communauté juive s’était chargée de recruter les travailleurs pour le service obligatoire afin d’épargner à la population la terreur des rafles. Chaque jour, les autorités allemandes lui communiquaient les instructions concernant le nombre d’hommes à fournir et le lieux où ceux-ci devaient se rendre. La Communauté envoyait des convocations aux personnes désignées. Ces billets indiquaient la date de la prestation et portaient l’avertissement suivant : les requis qui ne se présenteraient pas seraient signalés immédiatement à la police et sévèrement punis. Les rassemblements se faisaient à six heures du matin devant l’immeuble de la Communauté ou place Grzybow. Des chefs d’équipe permanents inscrivaient les ouvriers et les accompagnaient sur les chantiers sous la garde de soldats allemands.
En décembre 1939, une nouvelle ordonnance obligea tous les Juifs de sexe masculin, âgés de douze à soixante ans, à se faire procéder à leur enregistrement. Tout homme inscrit reçut une carte portant sa photographie et mentionnant son identité, sa profession, ses occupations. Chaque mois, il lui fallait faire timbrer cette carte au bureau de la Communauté. Celui qui exerçait un travail régulier devait, en outre, verser au moins 20 zlotys à chaque vérification de sa fiche. Grâce à cette taxe, il était plus ou moins assuré de travailler à l’intérieur de la ville. Les Juifs sans emploi étaient portés sur la liste des « bataillons de travailleurs » envoyés, en général, dans des camps, à l’extérieur de la ville ; ils subissaient là l’enfer de l’esclavage, des souffrances morales et physiques ainsi que les pires humiliations. Ces bataillons de travailleurs étaient habituellement chargés de la construction des routes, de l’élargissement et de la consolidation des berges de la Vistule. Ils travaillaient comme de véritables bagnards. Des milliers d’entre eux ne revinrent jamais.
Lorsqu’un requis n’obéissait pas à la convocation, la police arrêtait une personne de son entourage - souvent un malade ou un vieillard.
Le ghetto faisait partie intégrante du mécanisme économique de l’appareil de guerre nazi. Des Allemands, comme Tebenz, mirent sur pied dans le ghetto même de gigantesques fabriques où l’on confectionna des vêtements militaires et civils dans les étoffes d’excellente qualité volées par les Allemands dans toute la Pologne. Un Allemand de Dantzig, Shulz, qui avant la guerre traitait des affaires avec des Juifs polonais, ouvrit rue Nowolipie plusieurs ateliers où l’on travailla le cuir et la fourrure. Leszczinsky, un Polonais, monta rue Ogrodowa de vastes ateliers d’habillement. Une société commerciale composée d’Allemands, de Volksdeutschen, de Polonais et de Juifs entreprit la fabrication d’articles de brosserie. La matière première fut fournie par les autorités allemandes. La production était utilisée généralement pour les besoins militaires et, peut-être, en partie, pour satisfaire la demande de milieux privés ayant quelque attache avec l’armée. Dans ces usines ne travaillèrent que des Juifs du ghetto. Leur nombre atteignit plusieurs dizaines de milliers. Chez Tebenz les effectifs, au début de 1943, dépassèrent quinze mille ouvriers. Leur salaire était infime. Chaque ouvrier avait droit à deux litres de soupe par jour au prix de 60 à 70 groschen ; sa condition était celle d’un esclave.
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Bernard Goldstein (Five Years in the Warsaw Ghetto: The Stars Bear Witness (Nabat Series, Vol. 7))
“
Because what is civilized life but an imposition of unreal standards upon flawed and defective human beings by other human beings no less flawed and defective?
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Winston Graham (The Angry Tide (Poldark Book 7))
“
Almost two hundred years ago, during the War of 2062, back when the world was inhabited exclusively by humans, a war between North American Countries and Middle Eastern countries arose. It began over religious reasons, though I have no idea what the word religious even means just that whatever was inherent in their opposing beliefs led to the Middle Eastern people creating powerful weapons that no one had ever seen or heard of at the time. Biological weapons they were called, and they were unleashed on North America. The name of the weapon was evictium. It warped the mind as well as the body and drove everyone mad. The North Americans retaliated by launching nuclear weapons, which destroyed the rest of the world. The only survivors were those who had something called money. Back then, money was equated to power and value. The more one had, the more value he held in society and the more power he had. Those who had money were able to flee to large underground shelters that had been built. Hundreds of underground shelters existed around North America that held hundreds of people with enough supplies to last twenty years. When the supplies ran out, those who lived below ground feared that radiation, an after effect of the nuclear blast that made living things ill and caused death over time, would affect them and had affected any source of food above ground. They soon learned radiation was the least of their concerns. What waited for them at the surface was far, far worse. Those who’d been exposed to evictium survived the nuclear blast. However, the radiation that remained in the atmosphere and contaminated the food supply reacted with the evictium. It created monstrous, demented beings, bloodthirsty and filled with rage. When the inhabitants of the underground shelters returned to the world above, they were met by what we now know as Urthmen. The Urthmen slaughtered them. Very few managed to escape. They fled to the forest and hid deep within it. They were our ancestors. Almost two hundred years later, the offspring of those warped creatures that waited at the surface are the ones that rule the Urth today. They’ve evolved, however. They’re no longer as demented and wild as their predecessors. But they are far from civilized, and they no longer retain a shred of humanity. They hate us in a way that is as much as part of them as breathing. It’s instinctive. And these creatures rule the only inhabitable section of the planet we know of: North America.
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Jennifer Martucci (Remains of Urth: The Arena (Planet Urth, #7))
“
Briefly, the Long Count consists of a tabulation of days elapsed since the supposed inception of the calendar, the total being expressed as so many cycles of differing magnitudes. The largest of these cycles is the baktun, containing 144,000 days; next, the katun, 7,200 days; then the tun, with 360 days; the uinal, with 20; and the smallest of all, always at the bottom of the column, the kin of one day. Each of these in the days of Maya ascendancy was shown with its own hieroglyph, while to its left stood the coefficient by which it was to be multiplied.
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Michael D. Coe (America's First Civilization)
“
cancer was essentially unheard of in populations eating their traditional diets. Even the mid-Victorian English did not suffer greatly from cancer (Figure 16.7 on page 324). That is why cancer is considered to be a disease of ‘civilization’.
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Tim Noakes (Lore of Nutrition: Challenging conventional dietary beliefs)
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6th Sleep not when others Speak, Sit not when others stand, Speak not when you Should hold your Peace, walk not on when others Stop. 7th
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Amor Towles (Rules of Civility)
“
The great majority of men and women who have given civilization a great uplift started poor, and for many dark years saw no hope of accomplishing their ambition; but they kept on working and believing that somehow a way would be opened.
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Orison Swett Marden (7 Books on Prosperity & Success)
“
Autarchies had been shattered, hermit kingdoms destroyed. Almost a billion had died in war, plague, starvation, and madness. But worse was yet to come, as what passed for civilization on this world guttered and faded beneath the penumbra of a darkness deeper than eternal night.
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Charles Stross (The Nightmare Stacks (Laundry Files, #7))
“
Drama!" said Mr. Hitchens.
Robin Shrugged. "That's what terrorism is, basically--pure theater. Nothing in particular is ever accomplished by it, other than to focus attention on a small group of people who seize absolute power by threatening everything that holds civilization together."
"Absolute power," mused Mrs. Pollifax. "Like monstrous children thumbing their noses at adults who live by codes and laws and scruples."
Robin said in a hard voice, "In my line of work I've tangled with narcotic dealers and suppliers--that's Interpol's job--and I can say of them that at least they give value for their money. If what they sell destroys human lives their victims cooperate by choice in their own destruction, and if drug dealers bend and break every law in the book they at least know the laws.
"But terrorists--" He shook his head. "They're the parasites of the century. They want to make a statement, they simply toss a bomb or round up innocent people to hold hostage, or kill without compunction, remorse or compassion. If they need money, they simply rob a bank. I have to admit not only my contempt for them," he added, "but my fear, too, because their only passion is to mock and to destroy, and that really is frightening.
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Dorothy Gilman (Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha (Mrs. Pollifax, #7))
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Mr. Kilt, editor of the Ottawa Citizen, in October of last year. Listen to this. ‘What hope is there for a society with such extremes of wealth and poverty as our civilization shows? At the bottom rotting, corroding want and squalor; at the top, enervating luxury, reckless extravagance, useless purposeless lives.
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Maureen Jennings (The Complete Murdoch Mysteries Collection: Except the Dying / Under the Dragon's Tail / Poor Tom Is Cold / Let Loose the Dogs / Night's Child / Vices of My Blood / Journeyman to Grief (Detective Murdoch, #1-7))
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Social capital is a capability that arises from the prevalence of trust in a society or in certain parts of it. It can be embodied in the smallest and most basic social group, the family, as well as the largest of all groups, the nation, and in all the other groups in between. Social capital differs from other forms of human capital insofar as it is usually created and transmitted through cultural mechanisms like religion, tradition, or historical habit. Economists typically argue that the formation of social groups can be explained as the result of voluntary contract between individuals who have made the rational calculation that cooperation is in their long-term self-interest. By this account, trust is not necessary for cooperation: enlightened self-interest, together with legal mechanisms like contracts, can compensate for an absence of trust and allow strangers jointly to create an organization that will work for a common purpose. Groups can be formed at any time based on self-interest, and group formation is not culture-dependent. But while contract and self-interest are important sources of association, the most effective organizations are based on communities of shared ethical values. These communities do not require extensive contract and legal regulation of their relations because prior moral consensus gives members of the group a basis for mutual trust. The social capital needed to create this kind of moral community cannot be acquired, as in the case of other forms of human capital, through a rational investment decision. That is, an individual can decide to “invest” in conventional human capital like a college education, or training to become a machinist or computer programmer, simply by going to the appropriate school. Acquisition of social capital, by contrast, requires habituation to the moral norms of a community and, in its context, the acquisition of virtues like loyalty, honesty, and dependability. The group, moreover, has to adopt common norms as a whole before trust can become generalized among its members. In other words, social capital cannot be acquired simply by individuals acting on their own. It is based on the prevalence of social, rather than individual virtues. The proclivity for sociability is much harder to acquire than other forms of human capital, but because it is based on ethical habit, it is also harder to modify or destroy. Another term that I will use widely throughout this book is spontaneous sociability, which constitutes a subset of social capital. In any modern society, organizations are being constantly created, destroyed, and modified. The most useful kind of social capital is often not the ability to work under the authority of a traditional community or group, but the capacity to form new associations and to cooperate within the terms of reference they establish. This type of group, spawned by industrial society’s complex division of labor and yet based on shared values rather than contract, falls under the general rubric of what Durkheim labeled “organic solidarity.”7 Spontaneous sociability, moreover, refers to that wide range of intermediate communities distinct from the family or those deliberately established by governments. Governments often have to step in to promote community when there is a deficit of spontaneous sociability. But state intervention poses distinct risks, since it can all too easily undermine the spontaneous communities established in civil society.
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Francis Fukuyama (Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity)
“
q) Consultation with CVC or UPSC where necessary (r) Forward the inquiry report to the delinquent employee together with the reasons for disagreement, if any and the recommendations of the CVC where applicable - Rule 15(2) (s) Considering the response of the delinquent employee to the inquiry report and the reasons for disagreement and taking a view on the quantum of penalty or closure of the case. Rule 15(2)A (t) Pass final order in the matter – Rule 15(3) (u) On receipt of copy of the appeal from the penalized employee, prepare comments on the Appeal and forward the same to the Appellate Authority together with relevant records. - Rule 26(3) 9. What happens if any of the functions of the Disciplinary Authority has been performed by an authority subordinate to the disciplinary authority? Where a statutory function has been performed by an authority who has not been empowered to perfrom it, such action without jurisdiction would be rendered null and void. The Hon’ble Supreme Court in its Judgment dated 5 th September 2013, in Civil Appeal No. 7761 of 2013 (Union of India & Ors.Vsd. B V Gopinathan) has held that the statutory power under Rule 14(3) of the CCA rule has necessarily to be performed by the Disciplinary Authority. as under: “49. Although number of collateral issues had been raised by the learned counsel for the appellants as well the respondents, we deem it appropriate not to opine on the same in view of the conclusion that the charge sheet/charge memo having not been approved by the disciplinary authority was non est in the eye of law. ” 10. What knowledge is required for the efficient discharge of the duties in conducting disciplinary proceedings? Disciplinary Authority is required to be conversant with the following: � Constitutional provisions under Part III (Fundamental Rights) and Part XIV (Services Under the Union and the States) � Principles of Natural Justice 7
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Anonymous
“
The church is not authorized to speak to matters to which Christ has not authorized her in the Word of God to speak. The church, for instance, has no authority to endorse a particular candidate for public office in civil government. Rather, she declares the principles of civil government set forth in such passages as Romans 13:1–7 and 1 Peter 2:13–17. The church may not endorse a particular bill pending before a civil legislative body, for instance, a bill concerning abortion. The church, rather, must declare that abortion is a violation of the sixth commandment of God, and do so without reference to endorsing this or any other piece of legislation.
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Guy Prentiss Waters (How Jesus Runs the Church)
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Moreover, upon revelations that the Internal Revenue Service, under the president and his subordinates, had invidiously targeted conservative organizations for harassment and disparate treatment in the awarding of tax-exempt status (as further described in Article VII, below), the president’s subordinates at the Justice Department handpicked to run the investigation a prosecutor from the Civil Rights Division who is a partisan Democrat and a donor to both the president’s political campaigns and the Democratic National Committee.7
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Andrew McCarthy (Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama s Impeachment)
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7 The Jews answered him, We have a law, and by our law He ought to die (spoke of the Jewish Sanhedrin, the Ruling Body of Israel, both Civil and Religious),
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Jimmy Swaggart (The Expositor's Study Bible)
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If the first decade of the 21st century can be summarized in one scene, It will definitely be the collision of the two planes into the twin towers of the World Trade Center (New York) September 11, 2001, the scene represents the collision of the «mentality of the 7th century» that uses the «products of modernity» to attack modernity itself, in the 21st century within the heart of the city that is the capital of the modern world.
لو ممكن تلخيص العقد الأول من القرن الحادي و العشرين في مشهد واحد، هيبقى بكل تأكيد مشهد اصطدام الطائرتين ببرجي مركز التجارة العالمي في (نيويورك) 11 سبتمبر 2001، مشهد يمثل تصادم عقلية القرن السابع التي تستخدم منتجات الحداثة للهجوم عليها مع القرن الحادي و العشرين في قلب مدينة هي عاصمة العالم المعاصر.
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Mustafa Badr
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Heights plummeted because of a little disaster called civilization. "Heights go way down when we go into state society," says Bogin. "When Egypt conquered the Nile area, the height of peasants fell dramatically. They moved from having access to a wide variety of foods to growing what the Egyptian state demanded. Their bones show lots of deficiencies in minerals and iron." The same stunting happened repeatedly throughout history. As late as the 1800s, male Cheyenne Indians, who hunted bison and collected berries, averaged a whopping 5'10", towering above even today's Americans, not to mention General Custer's cavalry, which averaged 5'7", and the period's wealthy European monarchies.
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Arianne Cohen (The Tall Book: A Celebration of Life from on High)
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Even on those rare occasions when we must follow the exception principle regarding civil obedience, we should do so respectfully, prepared to suffer the consequences or penalties that may result. In those instances, we must heed Peter’s instruction that “it is better, if it is the will of God, to suffer for doing good than for doing evil” (1 Peter 3:17).
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John F. MacArthur Jr. (Why Government Can't Save You: An Alternative to Political Activism (Bible for Life Book 7))
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It is the task of the First Order to remove the disorder from our own existence, so that civilization may be returned to the stability that promotes progress. A stability that existed under the Empire, was reduced to anarchy by the Rebellion, was inherited in turn by the so-called Republic, and will be restored by us. Future historians will look upon this as the time when a strong hand brought the rule of law back to civilization.” Mitaka
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Alan Dean Foster (The Force Awakens (Star Wars: Novelizations #7))
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Good-bye, Richard.” So much for civil discourse. So much for modern men discussing a modern problem in an enlightened manner. I was thinking that it might be fun to beat him to death.
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Robert Crais (Indigo Slam (Elvis Cole, #7))
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JUDGES—NOTE ON 4:4–5 Deborah is called a prophetess, one of five such women in the OT (cf. Miriam [Ex. 15:20]; Huldah [2 Kings 22:14]; Isaiah’s wife [Isa. 8:3]; and Noadiah [a false prophetess; Neh. 6:14]). Deborah functioned as a civil leader (Judg. 4:6–10; 5:7) and as a judge who decided cases (4:4–5). She lived in southern Ephraim, near Judah.
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Anonymous (ESV Study Bible)
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I looked at him sitting there at my desk, in my chair, drinking from my mug, and I discovered that I did not want to have a pleasant chat with someone who was working so hard to become me. But what I really wanted to do with him required a little more privacy than we had here in the heart of police headquarters, as well as a long stretch of uninterrupted time and a few rolls of duct tape. But of course, someone at the network might miss Robert sooner or later, and so the realities of civilized discourse left me no choice except to play the game properly. So I reached across the desk—my desk—and grabbed a pastelito from the box.
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Jeff Lindsay (Dexter's Final Cut (Dexter, #7))
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Temple. Jesus’ attitude toward the temple (Mark 11:15–19; John 2:18–22) was finally the most ominous threat because there he spoke directly about the destruction. In so doing he of course voiced the intent of the enemies of the church and of the state. Moreover, in his speech about the temple he quotes from the temple sermon of Jeremiah (Jer 7:11), thereby mobilizing that painful memory of dismantling criticism and in fact radically replicating it here.9 In critiquing the temple, Jesus struck at the center of the doctrine of election, which can be traced in the Zion tradition at least as far back as Isaiah and which assumed a guaranteed historical existence for this special people gathered around this special shrine. Thus Jesus advances the critical tradition of Jeremiah against the royal tradition reflected in Isaiah.10 All these actions, together with Jesus’ other violations of social convention, are a heavy criticism of the “righteousness of the law.” The law had become in his day a way for the managers of society, religious even more than civil, to effectively control not only morality but the political-economic valuing that lay behind the morality. Thus his criticism of the “law” is not to be dismissed as an attack on “legalism” in any moralistic sense, as is sometimes done in reductionist Pauline interpretation. Rather, his critique concerns the fundamental social valuing of his society. In practice Jesus has seen, as Marx later made clear, that the law can be a social convention to protect the current distribution of economic and political power.11 Jesus, in the tradition of Jeremiah, dared to articulate the end of a consciousness that could not keep its promises but that in fact denied the very humanness it purported to give. As is always the case, it is a close call to determine if in fact Jesus caused the dismantling or if he voiced what was indeed about to happen in any case. But Jesus, along with the other prophets, is regularly treated as though giving voice is causing the dismantling. And indeed, in such a consciousness that may be the reality. We may note in passing that in the temple-cleansing narrative as well as in the Matthean birth narrative it is the Jeremiah tradition that is mentioned. Moreover, in the Matthean version of eating with sinners (Matt 9:10–13), as well as in working on the Sabbath (Matt 12:5–6), the appeal is to Hos 6:6. It is certainly important that appeal is made precisely to the most radical and anguished prophets of the dismantling.
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Walter Brueggemann (Prophetic Imagination)
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When the case was appealed to the state supreme court, three of the seven justices voted to affirm the lower court’s ruling. In dissent, they argued that ‘‘[n]either the court nor the Legislature can constitutionally give preference or priority to a so-called ‘right’ of cohabitation over the . . . guarantees of the free exercise of religion.’’7
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David E. Berstein (You Can't Say That!: The Growing Threat to Civil Liberties from Antidiscrimination Laws)
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Focus on Generating Revenue The City budgets for sizeable increases in municipal fines and fees each year, exhorts police and court staff to deliver those revenue increases, and closely monitors whether those increases are achieved. City officials routinely urge Chief Jackson to generate more revenue through enforcement. In March 2010, for instance, the City Finance Director wrote to Chief Jackson that “unless ticket writing ramps up significantly before the end of the year, it will be hard to significantly raise collections next year. . . . Given that we are looking at a substantial sales tax shortfall, it’s not an insignificant issue.” Similarly, in March 2013, the Finance Director wrote to the City Manager: “Court fees are anticipated to rise about 7.5%. I did ask the Chief if he thought the PD could deliver 10% increase. He indicated they could try.” The importance of focusing on revenue generation is communicated to FPD officers. Ferguson police officers from all ranks told us that revenue generation is stressed heavily within the police department, and that the message comes from City leadership. The evidence we reviewed supports this perception.
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U.S. Department of Justice (The Ferguson Report: Department of Justice Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department)
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What’s in it for me?” Our culture teaches us that if we want something in life, we have to “look out for number one.” It says, “Life is a game, a race, a competition, and you better win it.” Schoolmates, work colleagues, even family members are seen as competitors—the more they win, the less there is for you. Of course we try to appear generous and cheer for others’ successes, but inwardly, privately, so many of us are eating our hearts out when others achieve. Many of the great things in the history of our civilization have been achieved by the independent will of a determined soul.
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Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change)
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Many of the great things in the history of our civilization have been achieved by the independent will of a determined soul. But the greatest opportunities and boundless accomplishments of the Knowledge Worker Age are reserved for those who master the art of “we.” True greatness will be achieved through the abundant mind that works selflessly—with mutual respect, for mutual benefit.
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Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change)
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America has the highest gun homicide rate, the highest number of guns per capita,” recites Charles Blow of the New York Times.3 In another story, the New York Times quotes researcher David Hemenway as saying: “Generally, if you live in a civilized society, more guns mean more death.”4 Bloomberg’s Businessweek also makes similar claims.5 Like most international comparisons of gun ownership rates, all of these claims make use of something called the 2007 Small Arms Survey, a group that receives funding from and often works closely with George Soros’s Open Society Institute.6 The UN provides homicide data for 192 countries, but the Small Arms Survey only lists gun ownership and homicide data for 116. All of the countries that are missing are countries that have homicide rates higher than the U.S. rate. The Small Arms Survey makes it look as though there are only twenty-five countries with higher homicide rates than the U.S. In fact, there are 101 countries with higher rates. So how do homicide rates compare across all 192 countries for which the UN provides data?7 For 2008, the U.S. rate was slightly less than 5.4 homicides per 100,000 people. The worldwide rate was 10.5 (about twice the U.S. rate), and the median was six per 100,000. Yet there is one important caveat to realize when looking at these numbers—they are provided by the countries themselves, and you can’t always trust their numbers. Politicians and dictators like to give the impression that they are doing a better job than they actually are. This is a problem in some United States jurisdictions such as Chicago, where what look like murders are reclassified as “noncriminal death investigations.”8
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John R. Lott Jr. (The War on Guns: Arming Yourself Against Gun Control Lies)
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My sense, although I don’t remember discussing it with anyone, was that with the fall of France to the Nazis in June 1940, European civilization had collapsed. I also recalled that although both George Herbert Mead and John Dewey had been born in New England, they developed their distinctively American philosophy of pragmatism in Chicago. So thinking of my own New England roots, I decided to go to Chicago, which, seen through Carl Sandburg’s eyes, was the opposite of European decadence: Hog Butcher for the World, Tool maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler, Stormy, husky, brawling. City of the Big Shoulders.7
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Grace Lee Boggs (Living for Change: An Autobiography)
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Islam means “submission.”1 The faith teaches that Muslims must submit to the will of Allah2 and prepare themselves for the final judgment in order to be able to enter paradise.3 Muslims believe that Allah revealed his will through Sharia, which literally means “path” but is generally translated as “Islamic law.”4 Unlike the traditional Western legal system, which is limited to basic civil and criminal elements, Sharia covers everything from religious rituals and private hygiene to principles of conducting business, criminal punishments, and more. Sharia prescribes, for example, how many times a Muslim must pray, how husbands should treat their wives, and what punishments are to be given for different crimes. It mandates flogging for consuming alcohol,5 stoning adulterers to death,6 cutting off a thief’s limbs,7 and executing apostates and blasphemers.8 Many Muslims around the world do not adhere to the jihadist ideology of terrorists. Most Muslims are moderate, peaceful people who, while following their religious traditions and rituals—attending mosques for worship, fasting, witnessing to others—reasonably coexist with followers of other religions. They do not impose their beliefs on others. They have non-Muslim friends, neighbors, and coworkers with whom they socialize on a daily basis. To these Muslims, Islam is a religion of peace. A small but increasingly significant segment of Muslims (some estimate its size as between 10 and 20 percent),9 however, believe in the supremacy of Islam and Sharia law over any other religion or law and feel obligated to force such beliefs on everybody. This
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Jay Sekulow (Unholy Alliance: The Agenda Iran, Russia, and Jihadists Share for Conquering the World)
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ahead of ICAO audit By Tarun Shukla | 527 words New Delhi: India's civil aviation regulator has decided to restructure its safety board and hire airline safety professionals ahead of an audit by the UN's aviation watchdog ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization). The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) announced its intent, and advertised the positions on its website. ICAO told the Indian regulator recently that it would come down to India to conduct an audit, its third in just over a decade, Mint reported on 12 February. Previous ICAO audits had highlighted the paucity of safety inspectors in DGCA. After its 2006 and 2012 audits, ICAO had placed the country in its list of 13 worst-performing nations. US regulator Federal Aviation Authority followed ICAO's 2012 audit with its own and downgraded India, effectively barring new flights to the US by Indian airlines. FAA is expected to visit India in the summer to review its downgrade. The result of the ICAO and FAA audits will have a bearing on the ability of existing Indian airlines to operate more flights to the US and some international destinations and on new airlines' ability to start flights to these destinations. The regulator plans to hire three directors of safety on short-term contracts to be part of the accident investigation board, according to the information on DGCA's website. This is first time the DGCA is hiring external staff for this board, which is critical to ascertain the reasoning for any crashes, misses or other safety related events in the country. These officers, the DGCA said on its website, must have at least 12 years of experience in aviation, specifically on the technical aspects, and have a degree in aeronautical engineering. DGCA has been asked by international regulators to hire at least 75 flight inspectors. It has only 51. India's private airlines offer better pay and perks to inspectors compared with DGCA. The aviation ministry told DGCA in January to speed up the recruitment and do whatever was necessary to get more inspectors on board, a government official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. DGCA has also announced it will hire flight operations inspectors as consultants on a short-term basis for a period of one year with a fixed remuneration of `1.25 lakh per month. "There will be a review after six months and subsequent continuation will be decided on the basis of outcome of the review," DGCA said in its advertisement. The remuneration of `1.25 lakh is higher than the salary of many existing DGCA officers. In its 2006 audit, ICAO said it found that "a number of final reports of accident and serious incident investigations carried out by the DGCA were not sent to the (member) states concerned or to ICAO when it was applicable". DGCA had also "not established a voluntary incident reporting system to facilitate the collection of safety information that may not otherwise be captured by the state's mandatory incident reporting system". In response, DGCA "submitted a corrective action plan which was never implemented", said Mohan Ranganthan, an aviation safety analyst and former member of government appointed safety council, said of DGCA. He added that the regulator will be caught out this time. Restructuring DGCA is the key to better air safety, said former director general of civil aviation M.R. Sivaraman. Hotel industry growth is expected to strengthen to 9-11% in 2015-16: Icra By P.R. Sanjai | 304 words Mumbai: Rating agency Icra Ltd on Monday said Indian hotel industry revenue growth is expected to strengthen to 9-11% in 2015-16, driven by a modest increase in occupancy and small increase in rates. "Industry wide revenues are expected to grow by 5-8% in 2014-15. Over the next 12 months, Icra expects RevPAR (revenue per available room) to improve by 7-8% driven by up to 5% pickup in occupancies and 2-3% growth in average room rates (ARR)," Icra said. Further, margins are expected to remain largely flat for 2014-15 while
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Anonymous
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BIG FEET, BIGGER HEART If anyone is poor among your fellow Israelites in any of the towns of the land the Lord your God is giving you, do not be hardhearted or tightfisted toward them. Rather, be openhanded and freely lend them whatever they need. Deuteronomy 15:7–8 Former NBA star Dikembe Mutombo is seven feet two and has size 22 feet. “I’ve no control over that. The Almighty has plans for us to make a place so we can go on and make a difference,” he said. “It all has to do with my faith; I am deeply religious. It goes back to my roots, to my mom and my dad.” Some estimate that he earned more than $100 million while playing with the Denver Nuggets and the Philadelphia 76ers. He didn’t blow the dough on fast cars and bling. Instead, he put the money in the bank and decided to give back. (He must know that the fastest way to double your money is to fold it in half and put it back in your wallet.) He created the Dikembe Mutombo Foundation and built a hospital and research center in the Congo, named after his mom, Biamba. In 1999, his mother had a stroke, just a couple of hours after talking to her son on the phone. Because she couldn’t get to a hospital, she died in her living room. He couldn’t even attend her funeral because of that nation’s civil war. Mutombo donated millions of his own money to create the hospital in honor of his mother and her faith. “I come from a large family, but I was not raised with a fortune,” he said. “Something more was left me, and that was family values.” SWEET FREEDOM IN Action Today, don’t listen to liberals when they mock “family values” like they’re some relic of an ancient past. Rather, pass them on to your kids and watch what God does to change the world.
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Sarah Palin (Sweet Freedom: A Devotional)
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Yet, the present dangers in the Middle East are a substantial result of the failures of recent American foreign policy. The Obama administration failed to negotiate a status of forces agreement (SOFA)5 with Iraq when U.S. forces withdrew from Iraq in 2011.6 Obama also refrained from engaging in significant military action in Iraq and Syria when such action had the chance of success. These omissions led to the removal of U.S. forces, leaving a power vacuum in the region.7 Iran, Russia, and ISIS have seized the opportunity, and all have grown stronger due to America’s withdrawal from the Middle East. The civil wars raging in Iraq and Syria—in which Iran, Russia, and ISIS are currently embroiled—illustrate the resulting power struggle. The instability in the Middle East has also led to a rise in refugees displaced from their homes, especially in Syria.
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Jay Sekulow (Unholy Alliance: The Agenda Iran, Russia, and Jihadists Share for Conquering the World)
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In Die Welt von Gestern, Stefan Zweig attributed the decline of civil order in Europe to the myth of progress.7 In all the ideologies of his day – communism, socialism, Nazism, fascism – Zweig saw the same pernicious attempt to rewrite the principles of social order in terms of a linear progression from past to future. The cult of the leader, of the ‘vanguard party’, of the ‘avant-garde’ – all supposed that society has a direction, in the way that businesses have a purpose and armies have a goal. And all licensed the increasing conscription of the citizen, and the steady absorption of the functions of society into the machinery of the state.
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Roger Scruton (How to Be a Conservative)
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So while our ever-evolving opposition movement made some progress in drawing attention to the undemocratic reality of Putin’s Russia, we were in a losing position from the start. The Kremlin’s domination of the mass media and ruthless persecution of all opposition in civil society made it impossible to build any lasting momentum. Our mission was also sabotaged by democratic leaders embracing Putin on the world stage, providing him with the leadership credentials he so badly needed in the absence of valid elections in Russia. It is difficult to promote democratic reform when every television channel and every newspaper shows image after image of the leaders of the world’s most powerful democracies accepting a dictator as part of their family. It sends the message that either he isn’t really a dictator at all or that democracy and individual freedom are nothing more than the bargaining chips Putin and his ilk always say they are. In the end, it took the invasion of Ukraine to finally get the G7 (I always refused to call it the G8) to expel Putin’s Russia from the elite club of industrial democracies.
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Garry Kasparov (Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped)
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House of Representative’s Bill - H.R 4900 – April 12th, 2016 The new legislation known as “PROMESA” says the following: The Oversight Board shall consist of 7 members appointed by the President who meet the qualifications described in subsection (e), except that the Oversight Board may take any action under this Act (or any amendments made by this Act) at any time after the President has appointed 3 of its members. The Oversight Board, its members, and its employees may not be liable for any obligation of or claim against the Oversight Board or its members or employees or the territorial government resulting from actions taken to carry out this Act. There shall be no jurisdiction in any United States district court to review challenges to the Oversight Board’s certification determinations under this Act. AUTOMATIC STAY UPON ENACTMENT. (No civil Lawsuits) For a Time to be Specified by the appointed Board. Even before this Bill was passed politician’s like Chuck Schumer, Elizabeth Warren, Richard Blumenthal and Harry Reed moved quickly to cash in. They were among the first to propose a ban on civil lawsuits relating to the Puerto Rico financial meltdown. If you follow the money, it paid off terrifically for all four of them but not so well for millions of honest Americans.
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Richard Lawless (Capitol Hill's Criminal Underground: The Most Thorough Exploration of Government Corruption Ever Put in Writing)
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We are civilized generation number 500 or so, counting from 10,000 years ago when we settled down. We are Homo sapiens generation number 7,500, counting from 150,000 years ago when our species presumably arose. And we are human generation number 125,000, counting from the earliest Homo species. Yet how can we see ourselves as only a short-term replacement cast for a long-running show, when a new batch of birds flies around singing, and new clouds move?
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Annie Dillard (For the Time Being: Essays)
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The act of crossing the border without authorization is unlawful, and the act of overstaying one’s visa is a civil (not criminal) violation of immigration law, but the passive act of being an unauthorized immigrant is not a crime.
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Lisa Marie Cacho (Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (Nation of Nations Book 7))
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Who is it who watches the birds and stars and changing seasons, who predicts eclipses and propounds theories about fire and water, and who tames horses and trains dogs but greets other men as creatures like himself? Socrates’s answer was astonishing. As far as we know, it was without precedent.7 It was that this “I” was a soul, something existing apart from my body, which was the true seat of normal waking intelligence and moral character: “my” fundamental identity, in fact. The word Socrates used for this soul, psyche, or “breath,” was a common one in Greek.
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Arthur Herman (The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization)
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Through much of her history she was ruled by an extreme form of autocracy, under which the tsar not only enjoyed unlimited legislative, judiciary, and executive powers but literally owned the country, in that he could, at will, exploit its human and material resources—the type of regime that the German sociologist Max Weber labeled “patrimonial.” The administration of the vast empire was entrusted to a bureaucracy that, along with the armed forces and police, maintained order without being accountable to the people. Until 1905, when civil disorders compelled the tsar to grant his subjects a constitution and civil rights, Russians could be arrested and exiled without trial for merely contemplating changes in the status quo.
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Richard Pipes (Communism: A History (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 7))
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These ambitious objectives provoked a crisis in the country, which was finally recovering from the turmoils of World War I, revolution, and civil war. But this did not trouble Stalin, because Communist regimes thrived on crises. Crisis alone permitted the authorities to demand—and obtain—total submission and all necessary sacrifices from its citizens. The system needed sacrifices and sacrificial victims for the good of the cause and the happiness of future generations. Crises enabled the system in this way to build a bridge from the fictional world of utopian programs to the world of reality.
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Richard Pipes (Communism: A History (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 7))
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I a worried! We are 7 miles from the border! I heard the Feds got 400,000 NATO and Climate soldiers in Springfield. I heard half of them are headed to Little Rock! Which means they are heading right towards us!". America's Last War
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Matthew Marcellus
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In 1977 GM’s Oldsmobile Toronado was the first production car with an electronic control unit (ECU) to govern spark timing. Four years later GM had about 50,000 lines of engine control software code in its domestic car line (Madden 2015). Now even inexpensive cars have up to 50 ECUs, and some premium brands (including the Mercedes-Benz S class) have up to 100 networked ECUs supported by software containing close to 100 million lines—compared to 5.7 million lines of software needed to operate the F-35, the U.S. Air Force’s joint Strike Fighter, or 6.5 million lines for the Boeing 787, the latest model of the company’s commercial jetliners (Charette 2009).
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Vaclav Smil (Energy and Civilization: A History)
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heard of the Loch Ness Monster?” Mrs. Hardesty asked. Several hands went up. “Here she goes again,” I whispered to DeWayne. He sat beside me in class. DeWayne rolled his eyes. “Always monsters.” “The other sixth-grade class is doing the Civil War,” I said. “All we talk about is monsters. How weird is that?
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R.L. Stine (My Friends Call Me Monster (Goosebumps HorrorLand, #7))
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This is essentially a people's contest. On the side of the Union it is a struggle for maintaining in the world that form and substance of government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men; to lift artificial weights from all shoulders; to clear the paths of laudable pursuits for all; to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life. Yielding to partial and temporary departures, from necessity, this is the leading object of the Government for whose existence we contend. I am most happy to believe that the plain people understand and appreciate this. It is worthy of note that while, in this the Government's hour of trial, large numbers of those in the army and navy who have been favored with the offices have resigned and proved false to the hand which
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Abraham Lincoln (LINCOLN – Complete 7 Volume Edition: Biographies, Speeches and Debates, Civil War Telegrams, Letters, Presidential Orders & Proclamations: Leader & Reformer)
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mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote, “Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.”7
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James Clear (Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones)
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The Norsemen, indeed the northern tribes back into the Paleolithic age, would laugh at the notion of the gods dictating what you may and may not eat. It would be absurd, incomprehensible! But to the Sumerians, and those who followed them through Abraham and Sarah, this micromanagement was essential to control. Here was the birth of the hive-mind, part and parcel of the birth of modern, urban civilization. Put people in clay cells, separate them from the land, from the natural cycles of the Earth, tell them what to eat, what to drink, what to think, and above all, what not to think. Here is temporal power!
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David Archer (Dead Man Talking (Alex Mason #7))
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At the root, the problem with charter schools and vouchers is not difficult to understand. I’ve written elsewhere that the theological case against such programs should actually be grounded in the prohibition against stealing.10 When the government taxes us in order to perform the duties assigned to the civil government by God, Christians clearly can have no consistent ethical objection (Rom. 13:1-7). But if the government adopts responsibilities that God never assigned and begins massive redistributions of wealth accordingly, this creates an ethical problem.
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Douglas Wilson (The Case for Classical Christian Education)
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ivory measuring scale discovered at a Harappan site had divisions which were 1.7 millimeters (0.07 inches) in length,
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Hourly History (Indus Valley Civilization: A History from Beginning to End)
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Practice & Ash 2. Scales of the Malefic Viper 3. Lucenti Plains 4. Pondering on Ponds 5. Introspection 6. Intermission 1 – Viridia (1/2) 7. Intermission 1 – The Malefic Viper (2/2) 8. Moment of Curiosity 9. Cleaning Up the Plains 10. The Great White Stag 11. No Rest for the Wicked 12. Loot & Healing 13. True Protagonist 14. Into the Dark 15. The Right Way 16. Dark Mana & Dark Tunnels 17. Many Rats! Handle it! 18. Dark Attunement 19. Nest Watcher 20. A Final Gift 21. Willful Ignorance 22. The Balance Broken 23. Beers & Exposition 24. Of Fate & Destiny 25. William & Jake 26. Spring Cleaning = Loot 3.0 27. Valley of Tusks 28. Going with the Flow 29. The Right Way Forward 30. Mana 101 31. A Thoughtful Touch 32. Pigs for Slaughter 33. Limit Break 34. Falling Rocks 35. Horde Leader 36. Next Target: King of the Forest 37. King 38. Eclipse 39. Fall 40. When the Curtains Fall 41. Tutorial Rewards: Titles & Math 42. Tutorial Rewards: Narrowing Down Options 43. Tutorial Rewards: Getting Stuff 44. Intermission 2 - Life after Death (Casper) 45. Records 46. A Godlike Getaway 47. Danger Bath 48. Second Part? 49. Embracing Power 50. Defiance & Gains 51. You know, I'm something of a sage myself 52. Homecoming 53. Intermission 3 - Carmen 54. Intermission 4 - Noboru Miyamoto 55. Intermission 5 - Eron 56. The Blue Marble 57. One Step Mile 58. Pylon of Civilization 59. Intermission 6 - Matteo (1/2) 60. Intermission 6 - Matteo (2/2) 61. The Times They Are A-Changin' 62. Monsters 63. Living with the Consequences 64. Points of View 65. Going Down 66. Two Kinds of People 67. Big Blue Mushroom 68. Delegating (avoiding) Responsibilities 69. Construction Plans 70. First World Problems 71. How to Train Your Dragon Wings 72. Freedom
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Zogarth (The Primal Hunter 2 (The Primal Hunter, #2))
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For the fact remains that without Arab help, western Europe would never have recovered its knowledge of Greek science and mathematics—still the foundations of modern science today—or understood how to interpret it.7 Arabs supplied Europe with a new scientific vocabulary, with words like algebra, zero, cipher, almanac, and alchemy; and a new system of recording numbers that we still call Arabic numerals.
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Arthur Herman (The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization)
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In 1962 a survey asking whether Democrats or Republicans were “more likely to see to it that Negroes get fair treatment in jobs and housing” showed Americans evenly split: 23 percent said Democrats, and 21 percent said Republicans, but a solid majority of 56 percent saw the two parties as basically the same. Just two years later, public opinion had shifted dramatically. In 1964, 60 percent said Democrats were likelier to back civil rights measures in employment, 33 percent said the parties were little different, and only 7 percent said Republicans had the edge. Likewise, on the question of which party was likelier to support school desegregation, 56 percent picked Democrats, 37 percent said neither had an edge, and, once again, only 7 percent said Republicans.80
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Kevin M. Kruse (Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past)
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Help with what? Just some civil engineering.
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Nicoli Gonnella (Abyss (Unbound #7))
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DINOSAURS BEFORE DARK #2: THE KNIGHT AT DAWN #3: MUMMIES IN THE MORNING #4: PIRATES PAST NOON #5: NIGHT OF THE NINJAS #6: AFTERNOON ON THE AMAZON #7: SUNSET OF THE SABERTOOTH #8: MIDNIGHT ON THE MOON #9: DOLPHINS AT DAYBREAK #10: GHOST TOWN AT SUNDOWN #11: LIONS AT LUNCHTIME #12: POLAR BEARS PAST BEDTIME #13: VACATION UNDER THE VOLCANO #14: DAY OF THE DRAGON KING #15: VIKING SHIPS AT SUNRISE #16: HOUR OF THE OLYMPICS #17: TONIGHT ON THE TITANIC #18: BUFFALO BEFORE BREAKFAST #19: TIGERS AT TWILIGHT #20: DINGOES AT DINNERTIME #21: CIVIL WAR ON SUNDAY
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Mary Pope Osborne (Mummies In The Morning (Magic Tree House #3))
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While the English aggressively turned outwards, laying the foundations of what can justly be called ‘Anglobalization’, the Japanese took the opposite path, with the Tokugawa shogunate’s policy of strict seclusion (sakoku) after 1640. All forms of contact with the outside world were proscribed. As a result, Japan missed out entirely on the benefits associated with a rapidly rising level of global trade and migration. The results were striking. By the late eighteenth century, more than 28 per cent of the English farmworker’s diet consisted of animal products; his Japanese counterpart lived on a monotonous intake, 95 per cent cereals, mostly rice. This nutritional divergence explains the marked gap in stature that developed after 1600. The average height of English convicts in the eighteenth century was 5 feet 7 inches. The average height of Japanese soldiers in the same period was just 5 feet 2½ inches.46 When East met West by that time, they could no longer look one another straight in the eye.
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Niall Ferguson (Civilization: The West and the Rest)
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The modern holiday of Mother's Day was first celebrated in 1908, when Anna Jarvis held a memorial for her mother at St Andrew's Methodist Church in Grafton, West Virginia.[9] St Andrew's Methodist Church now holds the International Mother's Day Shrine.[10] Her campaign to make Mother's Day a recognized holiday in the United States began in 1905, the year her mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, died. Ann Jarvis had been a peace activist who cared for wounded soldiers on both sides of the American Civil War, and created Mother's Day Work Clubs to address public health issues. She and another peace activist and suffragette Julia Ward Howe had been urging for the creation of a Mother’s Day dedicated to peace. 40 years before it became an official holiday, Ward Howe had made her Mother’s Day Proclamation in 1870, which called upon mothers of all nationalities to band together to promote the “amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.”[11] Anna Jarvis wanted to honor this and to set aside a day to honor all mothers because she believed a mother is "the person who has done more for you than anyone in the world"
Ghb구매,물뽕구입,Ghb 구입방법,물뽕가격,수면제판매,물뽕효능,물뽕구매방법,ghb가격,물뽕판매처,수면제팔아요
까톡【pak6】텔레:【JRJR331】텔레:【TTZZZ6】라인【TTZZ6】
첫거래하시는분들 실레지만 별로 반갑지않습니다 이유는 단하나 판매도 기본이지만 안전은 더중요하거든요
*물뽕이란 알고싶죠?
액체 상태로 주로 물이나 술 등에 타서 마시기 때문에 속칭 '물뽕'으로 불린다.
다량 복용시 필름이 끊기는 등의 증세가 나타나고 강한 흥분작용을 일으켜 미국에서는 젊은 청소년들속에서 주로 이용해 '데이트시 강간할 때 쓰는 약'이라는 뜻의 '데이트 레이프 드러그(date rape drug)'로 불리기도 한다.
미국 등 일부 국가에서는 GHB가 공식적으로 여성작업용으로 시중에서 밀거래 되고있다
미국에서는 2013년부터 미국FDA에서 발표한데의하면 법적으로 물뽕(GHB)약물을 사용금지하였다
이유는 이약물이 사람이 복용후 30분안에 약효가 발생하는데 6~7시간정도 지나면 바로 몸밖으로 오즘이나 혹은 땀으로 전부 빠져나간다는것이다
한번은 미국에서 어떤여성분이 강간을 당했다면서 미국 경찰청에 신고를 했다
2번의재판끝에 경찰당국과 여성분은 아무런 증거도 얻을수없었다
남성분이나 혹은 여성분이 복용할경우 30분이면 바로 기분이 좋아지면서 평소 남성의 터치나 남성의 시선까지 거부하던 여성분이그녀답지않은 스킨쉽으로 30분이 지나서 약발이 오르면 바로 작업을 걸어도 그대로 바로 빠져들게하는 마성의 약물이다
이러한 제품도 진품을살때만이 효과를 보는것이다.
더궁금한것이 있으시면 까톡【pak6】텔레:【JRJR331】텔레:【TTZZZ6】라인【TTZZ6】로 문의주세요.
In 1908, the U.S. Congress rejected a proposal to make Mother's Day an official holiday, joking that they would also have to proclaim a "Mother-in-law's Day". However, owing to the efforts of Anna Jarvis, by 1911 all U.S. states observed the holiday, with some of them officially recognizing Mother's Day as a local holiday (the first being West Virginia, Jarvis' home state, in 1910). In 1914, Woodrow Wilson signed a proclamation designating Mother's Day, held on the second Sunday in May, as a national holiday to honor mothers.
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물뽕구입
“
Civilized beings take responsibility for the conflicts of the world and actively work towards a future that needs no 24/7 military, rather than accepting the death of a soldier as the norm and celebrating it as a glorious occasion.
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Abhijit Naskar
“
Este ensayo surge de una discusión entre distintos pensadores alemanes sobre la política de refugiados de Angela Merkel, en la que intervinieron desde Navid Kermani hasta Udo di Fabio. Rüdiger Safranski y Peter Sloterdijk atacaron al Gobierno Federal. Safranski exigió en el Weltwoche suizo: “Hay que crear zonas en las cercanías de las áreas de la guerra civil, donde los refugiados estén a salvo hasta que termine la guerra. No se puede hacer nada más. Merkel simplemente no tiene el mandato democrático de cambiar un país así, como es el caso, si dentro de poco tiempo millones de inmigrantes islámicos están en el país”. Sloterdijk, por su lado, diagnosticó en la revista Cicero: “El gobierno alemán se dejó a la merced de la invasión en un acto de renuncia a la soberanía”. Y predijo: “La política de las fronteras abiertas no puede salir bien”. Así empezó la crítica a los “nuevos nacional-conservadores”, que “ya se habrían puesto el casco de acero”. El politólogo Herfried Münkler criticó en el Zeit (n° 7/16) a Safranski y Sloterdijk como “cerradores de fronteras entre los intelectuales”, cuyos “pensamientos en metáforas” les impiden “penetrar analíticamente lo que dicen”. [N. del E.]
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Peter Sloterdijk (Las epidemias políticas)
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She'd come to find civil administration more interesting than war. It's certainly more complicated.
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Joel Shepherd (Qalea Drop (The Spiral Wars, #7))
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Index: The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index9
Monitors: Civil liberties, pluralism, political culture and
participation, electoral process
Method: Global ranking
India 2014 ranking: 27
India 2020 ranking: 53
Result: India fell 26 places.
Reasons cited: Classifying India as a ‘flawed democracy’, the
report says ‘democratic norms have been under pressure since
2015. India’s score fell from a peak of 7.92 in 2014 to 6.61 in 2020’.
This was the ‘result of democratic backsliding under the leadership
of Narendra Modi’ and the ‘increasing influence of religion under
Modi, whose policies have fomented anti-Muslim feeling and
religious strife, has damaged the political fabric of the country’. Modi
had ‘introduced a religious element to the conceptualisation of Indian
citizenship, a step that many critics see as undermining the secular
basis of the Indian state’. In 2019, India was ranked 51st in the
Democracy Index, when the report said, ‘The primary cause of the
democratic regression was an erosion of civil liberties in the country.’
It fell two places again in 2020. ‘By contrast,’ The Economist
Intelligence Unit noted, ‘the scores for some of India’s regional
neighbours, such as Bangladesh, Bhutan and Pakistan, improved
marginally.
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”
Aakar Patel (Price of the Modi Years)