Class And Breeding Quotes

I felt the need to clarify we were there for the self defense class, in case he also taught about dog breeding or riding the high seas.

It is one of history's ironies that Communism, advertised as a classless society, tended to breed a privileged class of feudal proportions.

If you find a footnote, ” a library-science prof once told a class of which I was a part, “step on its head and kill it before it can breed.

We all have a sense of level. It may not be based on class exactly anymore, but we still have a sense of what we're entitled to. People pick partners who are nearly their equal in looks. The pretty marry the pretty, the ugly the ugly. To the detriment of the breed.

a positive outlook breeds success, just as a negative outlook breeds failure.

If you find a footnote,” a library-science prof once told a class of which I was a part, “step on its head and kill it before it can breed.

The prison population consists of heterogeneous elements; but, taking only those who are usually described as 'the criminals' proper, and of whom we have heard so much lately from Lombroso and his followers, what struck me most as regards them was that the prisons, which are considered as preventive of anti-social deeds, are exactly the institutions for breeding them. Every one knows that absence of education, dislike of regular work, physical incapability of sustained effort, misdirected love of adventure, gambling propensities, absence of energy, an untrained will, and carelessness about the happiness of others are the causes which bring this class of people before the courts. Now I was deeply impressed during my imprisonment by the fact that it is exactly these defects of human nature--each one of them--which the prison breeds in its inmates; and it is bound to breed them because it is a prison, and will breed them so long as it exists.

No one wanted to serve anymore. Not when, under our new government, any man, whether a gentleman or a scoundrel, could say whatever he pleased and print whatever libels he wished without consequence. And the ignorant populists, spewing tobacco juice as they ranted, took full advantage. As if the notion that all men were created equal somehow meant that one need not aspire to knowledge and ability—all distinctions of class, breeding, or merit discarded, all notions of civility deserted.

The great experiment. In democracy. The equality of rabble. In not much more than a generation they have come back to CLASS. As the French have done. What a tragic thing, that Revolution. Bloody George was a bloody fool. But no matter. The experiment doesn't work. Give them fifty years, and all that equality rot is gone. Here they have the same love of the land and of tradition, of the right form, of breeding, in their horses, their women. Of course slavery is a bit embarrassing, but that, of course, will go. But the point is they do it all exactly as we do in Europe. And the North does not. THAT'S what the war is really about. The North has those huge bloody cities and a thousand religions, and the only aristocracy is the aristocracy of wealth. The Northerner doesn't give a damn for tradition, or breeding, or the Old Country. He hates the Old Country. Odd. You very rarely hear a Southerner refer to "the Old Country". In that painted way a German does. Or an Italian. Well, of course, the South IS the Old Country. They haven't left Europe. They've merely transplanted it. And THAT'S what the war is about.

We are indeed a house divided. But the division between race and race, class and class, will not be dissolved by massive infusions of brotherly sentiment. The division is not the result of bad sentiment, and therefore will not be healed by rhetoric. Rather the division and the bad sentiments are both reflections of vast and growing inequalities in our socioeconomic system--inequalities of wealth, of status, of education, of access to political power. Talk of brotherhood and "tolerance" (are we merely to "tolerate" one another?) might once have had a cooling effect, but increasingly it grates on the nerves. It evokes contempt not because the values of brotherhood are wrong--they are more important than ever--but because it just does not correspond to the reality we see around us. And such talk does nothing to eliminate the inequalities that breed resentment and deep discontent.

Take a little thought experiment. Imagine all the rampage school shooters in Littleton, Colorado; Pearl, Mississippi; Paducah, Kentucky; Springfield, Oregon; and Jonesboro, Arkansas; now imagine they were black girls from poor families who lived instead in Chicago, New Haven, Newark, Philadelphia, or Providence. Can you picture the national debate, the headlines, the hand-wringing? There is no doubt we’d be having a national debate about inner-city poor black girls. The entire focus would be on race, class, and gender. The media would doubtless invent a new term for their behavior, as with wilding two decades ago. We’d hear about the culture of poverty, about how living in the city breeds crime and violence. We’d hear some pundits proclaim some putative natural tendency among blacks toward violence. Someone would likely even blame feminism for causing girls to become violent in a vain imitation of boys. Yet the obvious fact that virtually all the rampage school shooters were middle-class white boys barely broke a ripple in the torrent of public discussion. This uniformity cut across all other differences among the shooters: some came from intact families, others from single-parent homes; some boys had acted violently in the past, and others were quiet and unassuming; some boys also expressed rage at their parents (two killed their parents the same morning), and others seemed to live in happy families.

To signify class, good taste, the kind of breeding that cannot be bought.

Poshlust,” or in a better transliteration poshlost, has many nuances, and evidently I have not described them clearly enough in my little book on Gogol, if you think one can ask anybody if he is tempted by poshlost. Corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic, and dishonest pseudo-literature—these are obvious examples. Now, if we want to pin down poshlost in contemporary writing, we must look for it in Freudian symbolism, moth-eaten mythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, overconcern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know. Poshlost speaks in such concepts as “America is no better than Russia” or “We all share in Germany’s guilt.” The flowers of poshlost bloom in such phrases and terms as “the moment of truth,” “charisma,” “existential” (used seriously), “dialogue” (as applied to political talks between nations), and “vocabulary” (as applied to a dauber). Listing in one breath Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Vietnam is seditious poshlost. Belonging to a very select club (which sports one Jewish name—that of the treasurer) is genteel poshlost. Hack reviews are frequently poshlost, but it also lurks in certain highbrow essays. Poshlost calls Mr. Blank a great poet and Mr. Bluff a great novelist. One of poshlost’s favorite breeding places has always been the Art Exhibition; there it is produced by so-called sculptors working with the tools of wreckers, building crankshaft cretins of stainless steel, Zen stereos, polystyrene stinkbirds, objects trouvés in latrines, cannonballs, canned balls. There we admire the gabinetti wall patterns of so-called abstract artists, Freudian surrealism, roric smudges, and Rorschach blots—all of it as corny in its own right as the academic “September Morns” and “Florentine Flowergirls” of half a century ago. The list is long, and, of course, everybody has his bête noire, his black pet, in the series. Mine is that airline ad: the snack served by an obsequious wench to a young couple—she eyeing ecstatically the cucumber canapé, he admiring wistfully the hostess. And, of course, Death in Venice. You see the range.

We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress…. The people are demoralized; The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled, public opinion silenced, business prostrated, homes covered with mortgages, labor impoverished…. The fruits of the toil of millions are badly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind; and the possessors of these, in turn, despise the Republic and endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes—tramps and millionaires.

Americanism in all its forms seemed to be trashy and wasteful and crude, even brutal. There was a metaphor ready to hand in my native Hampshire. Until some time after the war, the squirrels of England had been red. I can still vaguely remember these sweet Beatrix Potter–type creatures, smaller and prettier and more agile and lacking the rat-like features that disclose themselves when you get close to a gray squirrel. These latter riffraff, once imported from America by some kind of regrettable accident, had escaped from captivity and gradually massacred and driven out the more demure and refined English breed. It was said that the gray squirrels didn't fight fair and would with a raking motion of their back paws castrate the luckless red ones. Whatever the truth of that, the sighting of a native English squirrel was soon to be a rarity, confined to the north of Scotland and the Isle of Wight, and this seemed to be emblematic, for the anxious lower middle class, of a more general massification and de-gentrification and, well, Americanization of everything.

It is common knowledge that a well-bred man should as far as possible have no face. That is to say, not so much be completely without one, but rather, should have a face and yet at the same time appear faceless. It should not stand out, just as a shirt made by a good tailor does not stand out. Needless to say, the face of a well-bred man should be exactly like that of other (well-bred) men and of course in no circumstances whatsoever should it alter. Naturally houses, trees, streets, sky and everything else in the world must satisfy the same conditions to have honor of being known as respectable and well-bred.

They're trying to breed a nation of techno-peasants. Educated just enough to keep things going, but not enough to ask tough questions. They encourage any meme that downplays thoughtful analysis or encourages docility or self indulgence or uniformity. In what other society do people use "smart" and "wise" as insults? We tell people "don't get smart." Those who try, those who really like to learn, we call "nerds." Look at television or the press or the trivia that passes for political debate. When a candidate DOES try to talk about the issues, the newspapers talk about his sex life. Look at Saturday morning cartoon shows. Peasants, whether they're tilling fields or stuffing circuit boards, are easier to manipulate. Don't question; just believe. Turn off your computer and Trust the Force. Or turn your computer on and treat it like the Oracle of Delphi. That's right. They've made education superficial and specialized. Science classes for art majors? Forget it! And how many business or engineering students get a really good grounding in the humanities? When did universities become little more than white collar vocational schools?

Privileged groups routinely assume that all deserving Americans live in decent housing, attend safe schools with caring teachers, and will be rewarded for their hard work with college opportunities and good jobs. They believe that undeserving Blacks and Latinos who remain locked up in deteriorating inner cities get what they deserve and do not merit social programs that will show them a future. This closing door of opportunity associated with hyper-segregation creates a situation of shrinking opportunities and neglect. This is the exact climate that breeds a culture of violence that is a growing component of "street culture" in working-class and poor Black neighborhoods.

The innocuous-sounding term “fertility treatment” enables the wealthy to breed their own kind, buying sperm and eggs at “baby centers” around the country. Abortion and birth control, meanwhile, are for evangelical conservatives a violation of God’s will that all people should be fruitful and multiply, and yet this same fear of unnatural methods of reproduction does not engender opposition to fertility clinics. Antiabortion activists, like eugenicists, think that the state has the right to intervene in the breeding habits of poor single women. Poor

Well than try giving it some thought, why don’t you? Apply that finely tutored mind of yours to all those bullshit hero-with-a-high-destiny legends you people are so fucking fond of telling one another. You really think, in a mudball slaughterhouse of a world like this, where war and privation harden whole populations to inhuman brutality and ignorance, where the ruling classes dedicate their sons to learning the science of killing men the way they consign their daughters to breeding till they crack--you really think the gods of a world like that have got no better thing to do with their time than take some random piece of lowborn trash and spend long years carving him into shape for a cat’s-paw?

You are a special breed that has never been. You are the highest stratum of the society. You belong to a class that is beyond compare. You are full of superiority that gives especial worth which is meritoriously near the standard or model and eminently good of its kind. You are an expression of distinction, the perfection of superbness and effulgence of class. You are meant for the highest crown of success, created for affecting lives, configured for goodness, packaged to be set apart and set great store by, and ordained to be widely known and honored for greater achievement. You are a rare breed with divine and inherent ability to reign, rule, dominate and prosper in every way of life.

No wonder the zombies were crazy. They thought they were supposed to practice breeding before they learned how to do their own laundry. They talked about it, thought about it, maybe did it, all while going through the motions of attending class and learning stuff so that they could go forth and become productive adults. Whatever that was supposed to mean.

An older woman encountering his glance — it was like being stared at by a violet — might have summed him up: "Untrustworthy to a degree. But worth it.

The ceremonial differentiation of the dietary is best seen in the use of intoxicating beverages and narcotics. If these articles of consumption are costly, they are felt to be noble and honorific. Therefore the base classes, primarily the women, practice an enforced continence with respect to these stimulants, except in countries where they are obtainable at a very low cost. From archaic times down through all the length of the patriarchal regime it has been the office of the women to prepare and administer these luxuries, and it has been the perquisite of the men of gentle birth and breeding to consume them. Drunkenness and the other pathological consequences of the free use of stimulants therefore tend in their turn to become honorific, as being a mark, at the second remove, of the superior status of those who are able to afford the indulgence. Infirmities induced by over-indulgence are among some peoples freely recognised as manly attributes. It has even happened that the name for certain diseased conditions of the body arising from such an origin has passed into everyday speech as a synonym for "noble" or "gentle". It is only at a relatively early stage of culture that the symptoms of expensive vice are conventionally accepted as marks of a superior status, and so tend to become virtues and command the deference of the community; but the reputability that attaches to certain expensive vices long retains so much of its force as to appreciably lesson the disapprobation visited upon the men of the wealthy or noble class for any excessive indulgence. The same invidious distinction adds force to the current disapproval of any indulgence of this kind on the part of women, minors, and inferiors. This invidious traditional distinction has not lost its force even among the more advanced peoples of today. Where the example set by the leisure class retains its imperative force in the regulation of the conventionalities, it is observable that the women still in great measure practise the same traditional continence with regard to stimulants.

It was a basic tenet of faith with men of Ranulf’s class that a knight, trained in the ways of war since boyhood, could easily vanquish lesser foes, as much a belief in the superiority of blood and breeding as in the benefits of battle lore and killing competence. Ranulf had accepted this comforting conviction, too, but no one seemed to have told his assailants that they were inferior adversaries.

We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot box, the legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench. The people are demoralized. . . . The newspapers are subsidized or muzzled; public opinion silenced; business prostrate, our homes covered with mortgages, labor impoverished, and the land concentrating in the hands of capitalists. The urban workmen are denied the right of organization for self-protection; imported pauperized labor beats down their wages; a hireling standing army . . . established to shoot them down. . . . The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes. . . . From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed two classes—paupers and millionaires. . . .

When I compared them to Naomi, I sensed an unmistakable difference in refinement between those who are born to the higher classes of society and those who aren't... there's no concealing bad birth and breeding.

The average person wastes his life. He has a great deal of energy but he wastes it. The life of an average person seems at the end utterly meaningless…without significance. When he looks back…what has he done? MIND The mind creates routine for its own safety and convenience. Tradition becomes our security. But when the mind is secure it is in decay. We all want to be famous people…and the moment we want to be something…we are no longer free. Intelligence is the capacity to perceive the essential…the what is. It is only when the mind is free from the old that it meets everything new…and in that there’s joy. To awaken this capacity in oneself and in others is real education. SOCIETY It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. Nature is busy creating absolutely unique individuals…whereas culture has invented a single mold to which we must conform. A consistent thinker is a thoughtless person because he conforms to a pattern. He repeats phrases and thinks in a groove. What happens to your heart and your mind when you are merely imitative, naturally they wither, do they not? The great enemy of mankind is superstition and belief which is the same thing. When you separate yourself by belief tradition by nationally it breeds violence. Despots are only the spokesmen for the attitude of domination and craving for power which is in the heart of almost everyone. Until the source is cleared there will be confusion and classes…hate and wars. A man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country to any religion to any political party. He is concerned with the understanding of mankind. FEAR You have religion. Yet the constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear. You can only be afraid of what you think you know. One is never afraid of the unknown…one is afraid of the known coming to an end. A man who is not afraid is not aggressive. A man who has no sense of fear of any kind is really a free and peaceful mind. You want to be loved because you do not love…but the moment you really love, it is finished. You are no longer inquiring whether someone loves you or not. MEDITATION The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence. In meditation you will discover the whisperings of your own prejudices…your own noises…the monkey mind. You have to be your own teacher…truth is a pathless land. The beauty of meditation is that you never know where you are…where you are going…what the end is. Down deep we all understand that it is truth that liberates…not your effort to be free. The idea of ourselves…our real selves…is your escape from the fact of what you really are. Here we are talking of something entirely different….not of self improvement…but the cessation of self. ADVICE Take a break with the past and see what happens. Release attachment to outcomes…inside you will feel good no matter what. Eventually you will find that you don’t mind what happens. That is the essence of inner freedom…it is timeless spiritual truth. If you can really understand the problem the answer will come out of it. The answer is not separate from the problem. Suffer and understand…for all of that is part of life. Understanding and detachment…this is the secret. DEATH There is hope in people…not in societies not in systems but only in you and me. The man who lives without conflict…who lives with beauty and love…is not frightened by death…because to love is to die.

As it happens, the first souvenir I bought was a dried llama fetus. Revolting as it may sound, my poor stillborn llama is actually rather cute. Frozen in the fetal position and dried stiff like beef jerky, it has the gentle, smiling face of a camel and plenty of soft, if slightly formaldehyde-scented, fur. I bought the llama fetus partly because it horrified me, but also for educational purposes, so that my eight-year-old daughter Sophia could show it to her class. (She refused.) Bolivians buy llama fetuses to ward off evil in its many guises. Bolivian miners—who, with a life expectancy of forty-five years, basically live their entire adult lives dying—look to llama fetuses for protection against dynamite explosions and the lung-destroying silicon particulates they inhale all day. Downing high-proof alcohol also helps. “The purer the alcohol, the purer the minerals I find,” one miner told me wryly.

So these two classes, rising professionals and sinking workers, which a couple of generations ago were close in income and not so far apart in mores, no longer believe they belong to the same country. But they can’t escape each other, and their coexistence breeds condescension, resentment, and shame.

Take a little thought experiment. Imagine all the rampage school shooters in Littleton, Colorado; Pearl, Mississippi; Paducah, Kentucky; Springfield, Oregon; and Jonesboro, Arkansas; now imagine they were black girls from poor families who lived instead in Chicago, New Haven, Newark, Philadelphia, or Providence. Can you picture the national debate, the headlines, the hand-wringing? There is no doubt we’d be having a national debate about inner-city poor black girls. The entire focus would be on race, class, and gender. The media would doubtless invent a new term for their behavior, as with wilding two decades ago. We’d hear about the culture of poverty, about how living in the city breeds crime and violence. We’d hear some pundits proclaim some putative natural tendency among blacks toward violence. Someone would likely even blame feminism for causing girls to become violent in a vain imitation of boys.

It is real learning, knowledge cultivated for its own sake—the Art of Knowledge, in short—which is followed there, not the Commercial learning of the past. Though perhaps you do not know that in the nineteenth century Oxford and its less interesting sister Cambridge became definitely commercial. They (and especially Oxford) were the breeding places of a peculiar class of parasites, who called themselves cultivated people; they were indeed cynical enough, as the so-called educated classes of the day generally were; but they affected an exaggeration of cynicism in order that they might be thought knowing and worldly-wise. The rich middle classes (they had no relation with the working classes) treated them with the kind of contemptuous toleration with which a mediaeval baron treated his jester; though it must be said that they were by no means so pleasant as the old jesters were, being, in fact, THE bores of society. They were laughed at, despised—and paid. Which last was what they aimed at.

In our society cultural analysts speak of the “politics of envy,” where politicians, for their own interests, stir up strife among people to create a kind of class warfare. The poor are set against the rich, employees against employers, women against men. Envy is the breeding ground for strife and even war. Envy is not restricted to the poor.

Especially for upwardly mobile young females, declaring one's enthusiasm for Austen (whose heroines almost always move up in social and economic status as a result of the sterling marital alliances they form) has been a classic means of indicating one's purported good taste, good breeding, and good sense: I am an especially adorable member of the ruling class.

Abortion and birth control, meanwhile, are for evangelical conservatives a violation of God’s will that all people should be fruitful and multiply, and yet this same fear of unnatural methods of reproduction does not engender opposition to fertility clinics. Antiabortion activists, like eugenicists, think that the state has the right to intervene in the breeding habits of poor single women. Poor

Female prophecy must be situated in the crisis of reproduction in the middle of the seventeenth century. This was the peak period for the criminalization of women in England and throughout Europe, as prosecutions for infanticide, abortion, and witchcraft reached their highest rate. It was also the period in which men began to wrest control of reproduction from women (male midwives appeared in 1625 and forceps soon thereafter); previously, "childbirth and the lying-in period were a kind of ritual collectively staged and controlled by women, from which men were usually excluded." Since the ruling class had begun to recognize its interest in increased fecundity, "attention was focussed on the 'population' as fundamental category for economic and political analysis." The simultaneous births of modern obstetrics and modern demography were responses to this crisis. Both, like the witchcraft prosecutions, sought to rationalize social reproduction in a capitalist context - that is, as the breeding of labor power. A recurring motif in the ruling-class imagination was intercourse between the English witch and the "black man" - a devil or imp. The terror was not limited to an imaginary chamber of horrors; it was an actuality of counterevolution.

Unpaid internships lock out millions of talented young people based on class alone. They send the message that work is not labor to be compensated with a living wage, but an act of charity to the powerful, who reward the unpaid worker with "exposure" and "experience." The promotion of unpaid labor has already eroded opportunity—and quality—in fields like journalism and politics. A false meritocracy breeds mediocrity.

Populated by what many dismissed as “useless lubbers” (conjuring the image of sleepy and oafish men lolling about doing nothing), North Carolina forged a lasting legacy as what we might call the first white trash colony. Despite being English, despite having claimed the rights of freeborn Britons, lazy lubbers of Poor Carolina stood out as a dangerous refuge of waste people, and the spawning ground of a degenerate breed of Americans.14

Of the thirty-three breeds represented in the sample, “pit bulls” (yet again classed as one “breed”) scored lower than average on all scales of human-directed aggression. On owner-directed aggression, they scored even lower than Labradors. Pit bulls scored slightly higher than average on aggression directed toward other dogs, but several other breeds, including dachshunds, equaled or surpassed them on that scale. The pit bulls were well within the range of normal.

Clovis straightened himself. He squared his shoulders. He tossed back his curls. Then slowly, with immense dignity, he climbed the cellar steps. “Unhand my servant, please,” he ordered the crows. “As you see, I am Finn Taverner.” The crows let go of the Indian. They stared at the golden-haired youth who had appeared at the top of the cellar steps. The boy’s breeding showed in every movement; he was an undoubted and true aristocrat. Here before them was The Blood which Sir Aubrey longed for, and they were filled with joy. The boy now addressed his servant. “You have served me well, Kumari,” he said--and every word was crystal clear; the words of a perfect English gentleman, speaking slowly to a foreigner. “Now I give you your freedom. And with it, this token of my thanks.” And out of the pocket of his tunic he took a watch on a long chain which he handed to the Indian. “But, sir,” said Mr. Trapwood, who had seen the glint of silver. “Should you--” “I am a Taverner,” said Clovis. “And no one shall say that I am not grateful to those who have served me. And now, gentlemen, I am ready. I take it you have reserved a first-class cabin for me?” “Well,” began Mr. Low. Mr. Trapwood kicked his shin. “It shall be arranged, sir,” he said. “Everything will be taken care of.” “Good. I should like to go on board immediately.” “Yes, sir, of course. If you’ll just come with us.” Clovis bowed to Miss Minton, then to Maia. His eyes were dry and his dignity was matchless. Then he followed the crows out of the museum.

GRASS, LIKE NEARLY EVERYTHING else in China, is subject to political interpretation. Historically, the Chinese have taken a dim view of grass. In Peking’s parks, the dirt is swept daily, since cleanliness is prized, but gardeners relentlessly uproot any tuft of grass. Grass breeds disease, generations of Chinese have been taught. Additionally, Communist doctrine teaches that grass is decadent, since it is usually associated with leisured classes and generates exploitation—one man hiring another to cut it.

Above all, we must stop declaring what is patently untrue, that Americans, through some rare good fortune, escaped the burden of class that prevailed in the mother country of England. Far more than we choose to acknowledge, our relentless class system evolved out of recurring agrarian notions regarding the character and potential of the land, the value of labor, and critical concepts of breeding. Embarrassing lower-class populations have always been numerous, and have always been seen on the North American continent as waste people.

The term bachelor girl was coined in 1895 to describe a specific breed of middle-class woman who chose to pursue the new educational and vocational opportunities opening up around her, which allowed her to live alone and support herself—so very unlike her sister the spinster, who was closely associated with the home, and the working-class women for whom work was an economic necessity. From roughly the 1870s to the 1910s, the marriage rate among educated women fell to 60 percent, 30 percent lower than the national average; clearly, for more than a few the single life was a deliberate choice.

Outside the study hall the next fall, the fall of our senior year, the Nabisco plant baked sweet white bread twice a week. If I sharpened a pencil at the back of the room I could smell the baking bread and the cedar shavings from the pencil.... Pretty soon all twenty of us - our class - would be leaving. A core of my classmates had been together since kindergarten. I'd been there eight years. We twenty knew by bored heart the very weave of each other's socks.... The poems I loved were in French, or translated from the Chinese, Portuguese, Arabic, Sanskrit, Greek. I murmured their heartbreaking sylllables. I knew almost nothing of the diverse and energetic city I lived in. The poems whispered in my ear the password phrase, and I memorized it behind enemy lines: There is a world. There is another world. I knew already that I would go to Hollins College in Virginia; our headmistress sent all her problems there, to her alma mater. "For the English department," she told me.... But, "To smooth off her rough edges," she had told my parents. They repeated the phrase to me, vividly. I had hopes for my rough edges. I wanted to use them as a can opener, to cut myself a hole in the world's surface, and exit through it. Would I be ground, instead, to a nub? Would they send me home, an ornament to my breed, in a jewelry bag?

Each woman was valued at 150 pounds of tobacco, which was the same price exacted from Jane Dickenson when she eventually purchased her freedom. Not surprisingly, then, with their value calculated in tobacco, women in Virginia were treated as fertile commodities. They came with testimonials to their moral character, impressing on “industrious Planters” that they were not being sold a bad bill of goods. One particular planter wrote that an earlier shipment of females was “corrupt,” and he expected a new crop that was guaranteed healthy and favorably disposed for breeding. Accompanying the female cargo were some two hundred head of cattle, a reminder that the Virginia husbandman needed both species of breeding stock to recover his English roots.37 Despite

The events of the last forty years have inflicted such a blow to the self confidence of Western civilization and to the belief in progress which was so strong during the nineteenth century, that men tend to go too far in the opposite direction: in fact the modern world is experiencing the same kind of danger which was so fatal to the ancient world--the crisis of which Gilbert Murray writes in his Four Stages of Greek Religion as "The Loss of Nerve.” There have been signs of this in Western literature for a long time past, and it has already had a serious effect on Western culture an education. This is the typical tragedy of the intelligentsia as shown in nineteenth century Russia and often in twentieth century Germany: the case of a society or class devoting enormous efforts to higher education and to the formation of an intellectual elite and then finding that the final result of the system is to breed a spirit of pessimism and nihilism and revolt. There was something seriously wrong about an educational system which cancelled itself out in this way, which picked out the ablest minds in a society and subjected them to an intensive process of competitive development which ended in a revolutionary or cynical reaction against the society that produced it. But behind these defects of an over-cerebralized and over-competitive method of education, there is the deeper cause in the loss of the common spiritual background which unifies education with social life. For the liberal faith in progress which inspired the nineteenth century was itself a substitute for the simpler and more positive religious faith which was the vital bond of the Western community. If we wish to understand our past and the inheritance of Western culture, we have to go behind the nineteenth century development and study the old spiritual community of Western Christendom as an objective historical reality.

Unemployment is not merely a matter of not having a job. Most people can get a job of sorts, even at the worst of times. The trouble was that by about 1930 there was no activity, except perhaps scientific research, the arts and left-wing politics, that a thinking person could believe in. The debunking of Western civilisation had reached its climax and “disillusionment” was immensely widespread. Who now could take it for granted to go through life in the ordinary middle-class way, as a soldier, a clergyman, a stockbroker, an Indian Civil Servant or what-not? And how many of the values by which our grandfathers lived could now be taken seriously? Patriotism, religion, the Empire, the family, the sanctity of marriage, the Old School Tie, birth, breeding, honour, discipline—anyone of ordinary education could turn the whole lot of them inside out in three minutes. But what do you achieve, after all, by getting rid of such primal things as patriotism and religion? You have not necessarily got rid of the need for something to believe in.

Pedigree was the centerpiece of Supreme Court chief justice Roger B. Taney’s majority opinion in the Dred Scott decision (1857). Though this case assessed whether a slave taken into a free state or federal territory should be set free, its conclusions were far more expansive. Addressing slavery in the territories, the proslavery Marylander dismissed Jefferson’s prohibition of slavery in the Northwest Ordinance as having no constitutional standing. He constructed his own version of the original social contract at the time of the Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitutional Convention: only the free white children of the founding generation were heirs to the original agreement; only pedigree could determine who inherited American citizenship and whose racial lineage warranted entitlement and the designation “freeman.” Taney’s opinion mattered because it literally made pedigree into a constitutional principle. In this controversial decision, Taney demonstrably rejected any notion of democracy and based the right of citizenship on bloodlines and racial stock. The chief justice ruled that the founders’ original intent was to classify members of society in terms of recognizable breeds.

Marriages in the bourgeois sense of the word, and I mean in the most respectable sense of the word 'marriage', haven't the least to do with love no kind of institution can be made from love - and just as little with money; but rather with the social permission given to two people to satisfy their sexual desires with each other, of course under certain conditions, but such conditions as have the interests of society in view. It's clear that the prerequisites for such a contract must include some degree of liking between the parties concerned and very much goodwill - the will to be patient, conciliatory, to care for one another - but the word love should not be misused to describe it! For two lovers in the whole and strong sense of the word, sexual satisfaction is not the essential thing and really just a symbol: for one party, as has been said, a symbol of unconditional submission, for the other a symbol of assent to this, a sign of taking possession.- Marriage in the aristocratic sense, the old nobility's sense of the word, is about breeding a race (is there still a nobility today?) Quaeritur, in other words about maintaining a fixed, particular type of ruling men: man and woman were sacrificed to this viewpoint. Obviously, the primary requirement here was not love, on the contrary! - and not even that measure of mutual goodwill on which the good bourgeois marriage is based. The decisive thing was first the interest of the dynasty, and above that the class. Faced with the coldness, severity and calculating clarity of this noble concept of marriage, which has ruled in every healthy aristocracy, in ancient Athens as in eighteenth-century Europe, we would shiver a little, we warm-blooded animals with our ticklish hearts, we 'moderns'! And this is precisely why love as passion, in the grand understanding of the word, was invented for the aristocratic world and within it―where coercion and privation were greatest...

the scientific rulers will provide one kind of education for ordinary men and women, and another for those who are to become holders of scientific power. Ordinary men and women will be expected to be docile, industrious, punctual, thoughtless, and contented. Of these qualities, probably contentment will be considered the most important. In order to produce it, all the researches of psycho-analysis, behaviourism, and biochemistry will be brought into play…. All the boys and girls will learn from an early age to be what is called “co-operative”, i.e., to do exactly what everybody is doing. Initiative will be discouraged in these children, and insubordination, without being punished, will be scientifically trained out of them…. Except for the one matter of loyalty to the world State and to their own order, members of the governing class will be encouraged to be adventurous and full of initiative. It will be recognized that it is their business to improve scientific technique, and to keep the manual workers contented by means of continual new amusements…. In normal cases, children of sufficient heredity will be admitted to the governing class from the moment of conception. I start with this moment rather than birth since it is from this moment and not merely the moment of birth that the treatment of the two classes will be different. If, however, by the time the child reaches the age of three it is fairly clear that he does not attain the required standard, he will be degraded at that point. [T]here would be a very strong tendency for the governing classes to become hereditary, and that after a few generations not many children would be moved from either class into the other. This is especially likely to be the case if embryological methods of improving the breed are applied to the governing class, but not to the others. In this way the gulf between the two classes as regards native intelligence will become continually wider and wider…. Assuming that both kinds of breeding are scientifically carried out, there will come to be an increasing divergence between the two types, making them in the end almost different species. (pp. 181–188, emphasis added)

We could call Christianity, in particular, a huge treasure house of the most elegant forms of consolation — there are so many pleasant, soothing, narcotizing things piled up in it, and for this purpose it takes so many of the most dangerous and most audacious chances. It shows such sophistication, such southern refinement, especially when it guesses what kind of emotional stimulant can overcome, at least for a while, the deep depression, leaden exhaustion, and black sorrow of the physiologically impaired. For, generally speaking, with all great religions, the main issue concerns the fight against a certain endemic exhaustion and heaviness. We can from the outset assume as probable that from time to time, in particular places on the earth, a feeling of physiological inhibition must necessarily become master over wide masses of people, but, because of a lack of knowledge about physiology, it does not enter people’s consciousness as something physiological, so they look for and attempt to find its “cause” and remedy only in psychology and morality (—this, in fact, is my most general formula for whatever is commonly called a “religion”). Such a feeling of inhibition can have a varied ancestry; for instance, it can be the result of cross-breeding between different races (or between classes — for classes also always express differences in origin and race: European “Weltschmerz” [pain at the state of the world] and nineteenth-century “pessimism” are essentially the consequence of an irrational, sudden mixing of the classes), or it can be caused by incorrect emigration — a race caught in a climate for which its powers of adaptation are not sufficient (the case of the Indians in India); or by the influence of the age and exhaustion of the race (Parisian pessimism from 1850 on); or by an incorrect diet (the alcoholism of the Middle Ages, the inanity of vegetarians, who, of course, have on their side the authority of Squire Christopher in Shakespeare); or by degeneration in the blood, malaria, syphilis and things like that (German depression after the Thirty Years’ War, which spread bad diseases in an epidemic through half of Germany and thus prepared the ground for German servility, German timidity).

Successful con men are treated with considerable respect in the South. A good slice of the settler population of that region were men who’d been given a choice between being shipped off to the New World in leg-irons and spending the rest of their lives in English prisons. The Crown saw no point in feeding them year after year, and they were far too dangerous to be turned loose on the streets of London—so, rather than overload the public hanging schedule, the King’s Minister of Gaol decided to put this scum to work on the other side of the Atlantic, in The Colonies, where cheap labor was much in demand. Most of these poor bastards wound up in what is now the Deep South because of the wretched climate. No settler with good sense and a few dollars in his pocket would venture south of Richmond. There was plenty of opportunity around Boston, New York, and Philadelphia—and by British standards the climate in places like South Carolina and Georgia was close to Hell on Earth: swamps, alligators, mosquitoes, tropical disease... all this plus a boiling sun all day long and no way to make money unless you had a land grant from the King... So the South was sparsely settled at first, and the shortage of skilled labor was a serious problem to the scattered aristocracy of would-be cotton barons who’d been granted huge tracts of good land that would make them all rich if they could only get people to work it. The slave-trade was one answer, but Africa in 1699 was not a fertile breeding ground for middle-management types... and the planters said it was damn near impossible for one white man to establish any kind of control over a boatload of black primitives. The bastards couldn’t even speak English. How could a man get the crop in, with brutes like that for help? There would have to be managers, keepers, overseers: white men who spoke the language, and had a sense of purpose in life. But where would they come from? There was no middle class in the South: only masters and slaves... and all that rich land lying fallow. The King was quick to grasp the financial implications of the problem: The crops must be planted and harvested, in order to sell them for gold—and if all those lazy bastards needed was a few thousand half-bright English-speaking lackeys in order to bring the crops in... hell, that was easy: Clean out the jails, cut back on the Crown’s grocery bill, jolt the liberals off balance by announcing a new “Progressive Amnesty” program for hardened criminals.... Wonderful. Dispatch royal messengers to spread the good word in every corner of the kingdom; and after that send out professional pollsters to record an amazing 66 percent jump in the King’s popularity... then wait a few weeks before announcing the new 10 percent sales tax on ale. That’s how the South got settled. Not the whole story, perhaps, but it goes a long way toward explaining why George Wallace is the Governor of Alabama. He has the same smile as his great-grandfather—a thrice-convicted pig thief from somewhere near Nottingham, who made a small reputation, they say, as a jailhouse lawyer, before he got shipped out. With a bit of imagination you can almost hear the cranky little bastard haranguing his fellow prisoners in London jail, urging them on to revolt: “Lissen here, you poor fools! There’s not much time! Even now—up there in the tower—they’re cookin up some kind of cruel new punishment for us! How much longer will we stand for it? And now they want to ship us across the ocean to work like slaves in a swamp with a bunch of goddamn Hottentots! “We won’t go! It’s asinine! We’ll tear this place apart before we’ll let that thieving old faggot of a king send us off to work next to Africans! “How much more of this misery can we stand, boys? I know you’re fed right up to here with it. I can see it in your eyes— pure misery! And I’m tellin’ you, we don’t have to stand for it!...

But why did Rome fall? We have far too many answers. There is the intellectual answer: Montesquieu said that the Romans conquered the world with their republican principles, they changed their principles to fit an empire, and the new principles destroyed it. There is the moral answer: license, luxury, and sloth, a decline in character and in discipline. The Christian answer of Saint Augustine: Sinful Rome fell to prepare for the triumph of the City of God. The rationalist answer of eighteenth-century freethinkers: Christianity, teaching nonresistance, other-worldliness, disarmed the Romans in the face of the barbarians. The political answer: Caesarism, loss of public spirit, the failure of the civil power to control the army. The social answer or answers: the war of classes and the institution of slavery, which suppresses incentives toward change and progress. The economic answer: trade stagnation, low productivity, scarcity of gold and silver. The physical answer: soil depletion, deforestation, climatic change, drought. The pathological answer: plague and malaria, or even lead poisoning from cooking pots and water pipes. The genetic and racial answers: the dwindling of the old Roman stock through war and birth control and its mingling with Oriental and barbarian breeds. And the biological-cyclical-mystical answer: An empire is an organism, and like a living creature, it must pass through stages of growth, maturity, and decline, to death.

The Coast peoples were hunters and gatherers. The land and sea around them was so rich in food that they did not need to cultivate crops. Their only domesticated animals were dogs, used mainly for deer hunting or for fibers: one woolly breed of dogs was kept in pens and sheared twice a year. Anthropologists once considered cultures so heavily dependent upon naturally occurring products for their sustenance to be primitive in comparison to those based on agriculture, yet therein lay an anomaly. The environment yielded such a surplus of natural resources that Coast Indians had no trouble feeding themselves and finding enough leisure time to improve and elaborate their material culture and to conduct a lively trade. At the same time they developed a highly stratified and class-conscious social structure atypical of other North American maritime hunting and gathering groups.

Yet here amidst the litter-strewn streets, burnt-out cars and smashed, piss-stinking phone boxes, rather than poverty being an excuse for failure it nurtured resilience, resourcefulness and ingenuity – all characteristics needed in any walk of life to attain success, and certainly components in building a highly-skilled soldier. It’s of little wonder that the council estates of the working classes are the breeding grounds for the UK’s continuing military excellence.

In that heyday of American inequality, that golden age of Vanderbilt and Rockefeller, the Populists alone saw things clearly: The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind; and the possessors of these, in turn, despise the republic and endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes—tramps and millionaires.

From the foregoing survey of the growth of conspicuous leisure and consumption, it appears that the utility of both alike for the purposes of reputability lies in the element of waste that is common to both. In the one case it is a waste of time and effort, in the other it is a waste of goods. Both are methods of demonstrating the possession of wealth, and the two are conventionally accepted as equivalents. The choice between them is a question of advertising expediency simply, except so far as it may be affected by other standards of propriety, springing from a different source. On grounds of expediency the preference may be given to the one or the other at different stages of the economic development. The question is, which of the two methods will most effectively reach the persons whose convictions it is desired to affect. Usage has answered this question in different ways under different circumstances. So long as the community or social group is small enough and compact enough to be effectually reached by common notoriety alone,—that is to say, so long as the human environment to which the individual is required to adapt himself in respect of reputability is comprised within his sphere of personal acquaintance and neighborhood gossip,—so long the one method is about as effective as the other. Each will therefore serve about equally well during the earlier stages of social growth. But when the differentiation has gone farther and it becomes necessary to reach a wider human environment, consumption begins to hold over leisure as an ordinary means of decency. This is especially true during the later, peaceable economic stage. The means of communication and the mobility of the population now expose the individual to the observation of many persons who have no other means of judging of his reputability than the display of goods (and perhaps of breeding) which he is able to make while he is under their direct observation.

as the manager of the club explained, you didn’t have a dog and bark yourself. They brought in the punters – along with the named DJs, who were a breed apart already. Not that he was complaining, of course. And as he was now going to be one of the main drug suppliers, he knew that it would be like printing money. Clubs, drink, girls and drugs went hand in hand for this generation, and that suited him right down to the ground. He was meeting with Willy McCormack that evening. Angus knew him from the days when he used to come out here on holiday as a kid with his mum and dad. He had not known till recently that his mum had invested heavily out here and was considered one of the old guard by everyone. She was a shrewdie all right. If it had been left to his old man, he would have just treated this place as a massive piss-up. Angus knew that he had a lot of his father in him – he could be a flake. But he also knew that he had his mother in him too and he was determined to make sure that, as much as he liked to play, he got the work sorted first. He heard the bedroom door open and watched as a tall redhead with lightly tanned skin, wearing his soiled shirt, walked towards him. In the clear light of day she wasn’t as nifty as she had seemed the night before, but she was still what he would class a sort. She went into the small kitchen and started to make coffee. He assumed she had been here before, and that didn’t surprise him in the least.

RULE #1 An addiction to distraction is the end of your creative production. Empire-makers and history-creators take one hour for themselves before dawn, in the serenity that lies beyond the clutches of complexity, to prepare themselves for a world-class day. RULE #2 Excuses breed no genius. Just because you haven’t installed the early-rising habit before doesn’t mean you can’t do it now. Release your rationalizations and remember that small daily improvements, when done consistently over time, lead to stunning results. RULE #3 All change is hard at first, messy in the middle and gorgeous at the end. Everything you now find easy you first found difficult. With consistent practice, getting up with the sun will become your new normal. And automatic. RULE #4 To have the results The Top 5% of producers have, you must start doing what 95% of people are unwilling to do. As you start to live like this, the majority will call you crazy. Remember that being labeled a freak is the price of greatness. RULE #5 When you feel like surrendering, continue.Triumph loves the relentless.

On the one hand, and in contrast to ordinary goods, when elites buy extravagant education, they directly diminish the educations that everyone else has. When the rich buy expensive chocolate, this does not make the middle class’s cheap chocolate taste worse. But when the rich make exceptional investments in schooling, this does reduce the value of ordinary, middle-class training and degrees. The parents who buy test preparation for their children reduce everyone else’s chance of getting into Hunter High, and the intensive education that Hunter High provides to its students reduces everyone else’s chances of getting into Harvard. Every meritocratic success necessarily breeds a flip side of failure. On the other hand, educational competition within the elite removes an important brake on consumption that restrains demand for ordinary goods in the face of rising incomes. The rich become sated on chocolate, but they do not become sated on schooling. Instead, they invest more, and more, and more in educating their children, in an effort to outdo one another. The maximum is set only by physical and psychological constraints on the children’s capacity to absorb training—in the crassest limit, the fact that schools and the parents who pay for them can hire only one teacher to engage their students at a time and that children, for their part, can study only so many hours in a day. Meritocratic education inexorably engenders a wasteful and destructive educational arms race, which ultimately benefits no one, not even the victors.

Dorothy Day (1897–1980). She is a legendary figure among social justice Catholics, organizing the Catholic Worker Movement and advocating pacifism, economic equality, and civil rights from a Christian anarchist perspective.26 Arrested numerous times for her civil disobedience, Day often took Biblical teaching more seriously than the Church did. She was the kind of Christian who defers to the Sermon on the Mount rather than the prejudices of local priests and bishops, and as such has been long admired for her moral courage. Predictably, there have been attempts to sanitize her legacy and minimize her radicalism. The Catholic Crisis magazine has suggested she was a conservative, because she “lamented the encroachment of the state and the perils of the welfare system.”27 She did so, however, because she was an anarchist, not a conservative. It’s true that her economics were not purely socialistic, but her words made clear how she felt about capitalism: I am sure that God did not intend that there be so many poor. The class structure is of our making and our consent, not His. It is the way we have arranged it, and it is up to us to change it. So we are urging revolutionary change … We need to change the system. We need to overthrow, not the government, as the authorities are always accusing the Communists “of conspiring to teach [us] to do,” but this rotten, decadent, putrid industrial capitalist system which breeds such suffering in the whited sepulcher of New York.28

Gastro-intestinal issues Obesity Tooth disease Older hedgehog ailments Other issues Administering medicine Chapter 5: Breeding and showing Hedgehog shows Entering a show Preparing for a show Show classes Breeding hedgehogs Mating your hedgehogs The pregnancy Raising the hoglets Additional Resources Note from the author

Her life was living among people of her own class. Her measure of a man or of a woman was, Were they of her class? If they were, she gladly accepted them and appeared to find considerable pleasure in their society. Whether they had attractive qualities or unattractive qualities or no qualities at all did not affect her. The only quality that mattered was the quality of being well-bred. She called the classes beneath her own standard of breeding "the lower classes", and so long as they left her alone she was perfectly content to leave them alone.

Antiabortion activists, like eugenicists, think that the state has the right to intervene in the breeding habits of poor single women.

Within the U.S. military, members of Special Ops were considered a breed apart, an elite warrior class that carried out the most difficult missions under the most dangerous circumstances—the guys in the movies rappelling from helicopters into enemy territory or making amphibious landings under cover of darkness.

Populist and Marxist rhetoric sometimes coincided. The Populist platform of 1892 contained the ringing declaration: “The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind; and the possessors of these, in turn, despise the republic and endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes—tramps and millionaires.” Some historians have concluded from this rhetorical coincidence that the Populist critique of capitalism, though arrived at independently, was essentially the same as the Socialist critique. (Norman Pollack: The Populist Response to Industrial America [Cambridge: Harvard University Press; 1962.]) This conclusion, as I have argued in the Pacific Historical Review (February 1964, pp. 69–73), rests almost entirely on verbal correspondences; it is arrived at by piecing together a series of quotations abstracted from their context and treated with equal weight, without regard for speaker or occasion, so as to form a wholly synthetic system which is then attributed to the Populists themselves. In his Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (New York: Pantheon Books; 1968), Staughton Lynd, using a similar technique that is open to the same objections, tries to show that the populist tradition of Thoreau and other American radicals complemented and was consistent with Marxism.

But India cannot live for Lancashire or any other country before she is able to live for herself. And she can live for herself only if she produces and is helped to produce everything for her requirements within her own borders. She need not be, she ought not to be, drawn into the vertex of mad and ruinous competition which breeds fratricide, jealousy and many other evils. But who is to stop her great millionaires from entering into the world competition?

Our late modern world prides itself on recognising, for the first time in history, the basic equality of all humans, yet it might be poised to create the most unequal of all societies. Throughout history, the upper classes always claimed to be smarter, stronger and generally better than the underclass. They were usually deluding themselves. A baby born to a poor peasant family was likely to be as intelligent as the crown prince. With the help of new medical capabilities, the pretensions of the upper classes might soon become an objective reality. This is not science fiction. Most science-fiction plots describe a world in which Sapiens – identical to us – enjoy superior technology such as light-speed spaceships and laser guns. The ethical and political dilemmas central to these plots are taken from our own world, and they merely recreate our emotional and social tensions against a futuristic backdrop. Yet the real potential of future technologies is to change Homo sapiens itself, including our emotions and desires, and not merely our vehicles and weapons. What is a spaceship compared to an eternally young cyborg who does not breed and has no sexuality, who can share thoughts directly with other beings, whose abilities to focus and remember are a thousand times greater than our own, and who is never angry or sad, but has emotions and desires that we cannot begin to imagine?

He was no coward but he was no fool, either, and Ruaidri knew they would meet again. But not, he hoped, until Saturday, the day after next. When the exchange would take place. When he would get the explosive and high-tail it back to Boston as he’d been sent here to do. Where he would say goodbye to little miss Sea Nymph, his nimfeach mara beag, and never see her again. He should be feeling a sense of triumph, of accomplishment, at the thought. Instead, it brought him only a desperate ache. I don’t want her to go. He wished he could marry her. It was impossible, of course—too much separated them when it came to culture and class. The very idea was ludicrous, though not so much that his mind didn’t keep flitting back to the idea despite his best efforts to direct it elsewhere. She was a gently-bred noblewoman who should never have been put into a position of being alone with a man. When he’d scooped her up off that London floor, he hadn’t thought that far ahead—an opportunity had presented itself and he had grabbed it. Now, he realized just how much he had taken from her and her family with that one impulsive action. The scandal would be tremendous, outrageous, forever damning. The world, the society papers, the people amongst whom she lived and breathed… all would think she’d been compromised. She could never be expected to make a decent match after this. She would be forced to live out her life as either a spinster or wife to a man who would not love her any more than that wanker Perry had, who would forever view her as damaged goods. He could offer for her, but she would surely refuse him and he wouldn’t blame her one bit. And yet… he could love her. He was already half in love with her, and to fall the rest of the way wouldn’t take much. He sensed a free and wayward spirit beneath the trappings of breeding and convention that complemented his own, and he had seen her kindness in her concern over McGuire when he’d gone overboard, the careful way she treated the blushing Cranton, the gentleness in her manner, her thoughts, her very soul. He had ruined her—and he owed her, no doubt about it.

The Bantam Class includes the miniature breeds of the domestic duck clan. These birds weigh between 18 and 40 ounces.

And it has these qualities: • It is reasonably short and parsimonious. • It is specific. • It states what the company does and why it matters in a way that anyone can summarize without having to quote it literally. • It avoids jargon, such as “best of breed,” “best in class,” or vague words such as superior, expert, and empowered. • It is affirming, but not grandiose or self-important. • People easily recognize that it’s you.

YouTube: "Jordan Peterson | The Most Terrifying IQ Statistic" JORDAN PETERSON: One of the most terrifying statistics I ever came across was one detailing out the rationale of the United States Armed Forces for not allowing the induct … you can't induct anyone into the Armed Forces into the Armed Forces in the U.S. if they have an IQ of less than 83. Okay, so let's just take that apart for a minute, because it's a horrifying thing. So, the U.S. Armed Forces have been in the forefront of intelligence research since World War I because they were onboard early with the idea that, especially during war time when you are ramping up quickly that you need to sort people effectively and essentially without prejudice so that you can build up the officer corps so you don't lose the damned war, okay. So, there is real motivation to get it right, because it's a life-and-death issue, so they used IQ. They did a lot of the early psychometric work on IQ. Okay, so that's the first thing, they are motivated to find an accurate predictor, so they settled on IQ. The second thing was, the United States Armed Forces is also really motivated to get people into the Armed Forces, peacetime or wartime. Wartime, well, for obvious reasons. Peacetime, because, well, first of all you've got to keep the Armed Forces going and second you can use the Armed Forces during peacetime as a way of taking people out of the underclass and moving them up into the working class or the middle class, right. You can use it as a training mechanism, and so left and right can agree on that, you know. It's a reasonable way of promoting social mobility. So again, the Armed Forces even in peacetime is very motivated to get as many people in as they possibly can. And it's difficult as well. It's not that easy to recruit people, so you don't want to throw people out if you don't have to. So, what's the upshot of all that? Well, after one hundred years, essentially, of careful statistical analysis, the Armed Forces concluded that if you had an IQ of 83 or less there wasn't anything you could possibly be trained to do in the military at any level of the organization that wasn't positively counterproductive. Okay, you think, well, so what, 83, okay. Yeah, one in ten! One in ten! That's one in ten people! And what that really means, as far as I can tell, is if you imagine that the military is approximately as complex as the broader society, which I think is a reasonable proposition, then there is no place in our cognitively complex society for one in ten people. So what are we going to do about that? The answer is, no one knows. You say, "well, shovel money down the hierarchy." It's like, the problem isn't lack of money. I mean sometimes that's the problem, but the problem is rarely absolute poverty. It's rarely that. It is sometimes, but rarely. It's not that easy to move money down the hierarchy. So, first of all, it's not that easy to manage money. So, it's a vicious problem, man. And so... INTERVIEWER: It's hard to train people to become creative, adaptive problem solvers. PETERSON: It's impossible! You can't do it! You can't do it! You can interfere with their cognitive ability, but you can't do that! The training doesn't work. INTERVIEWER: It's not going to work in six months, but it could have worked in six years. PETERSON: No, it doesn't work. Sorry, it doesn't work. The data on that is crystal clear. [note that “one in ten” applies to a breeding group with an average IQ of 100]

The earlier and cruder method of advertisement held its ground so long as the public to which the exhibitor had to appeal comprised large portions of the community who were not trained to detect delicate variations in the evidences of wealth and leisure. The method of advertisement undergoes refinement when a sufficiently large wealthy class has developed, who have the leisure for acquiring skill in interpreting the subtler signs of expenditure. 'Loud' dress becomes offensive to people of taste, as evincing an undue desire to reach and impress the untrained sensibilities of the vulgar. To the individual of high breeding it is only the more honorific esteem accorded by the cultivated sense of the members of his own high class that is of material consequence. Since the wealthy leisure class has grown so large, or the contact of the leisure-class individual with members of his own class has grown so wide, as to constitute a human environment sufficient for the honorific purpose, there arises a tendency to exclude the baser elements of the population from the scheme even as spectators whose applause or mortification should be sought. The result of all this is a refinement of methods, a resort to subtler contrivances, and a spiritualisation of the scheme of symbolism in dress. And as this upper leisure class sets the pace in all matters of decency, the result for the rest of society also is a gradual amelioration of the scheme of dress. As the community advances in wealth and culture, the ability to pay is put in evidence by means which require a progressively nicer discrimination in the beholder. This nicer discrimination between advertising media is in fact a very large element of the higher pecuniary culture.

The term bachelor girl was coined in 1895 to describe a specific breed of middle-class woman who chose to pursue the new educational and vocational opportunities opening up around her, which allowed her to live alone and support herself—so very unlike her sister the spinster, who was closely associated with the home, and the working-class women for whom work was an economic necessity.

Hate crime and violent crime is something reprehensible perpetrated by other people, a small deviant class, mainly men – this, at least, is the commonly held view. But Miles (2003) argues that we must reckon fully and realistically with our barbaric evolutionary heritage; and Buss (2006) uses case study research to suggest that fantasising harm and death to others is extremely common. Freud would have agreed with such assessments of human nature, acknowledging that unconsciously, ‘safely’ repressed, we sometimes harbour destructive and taboo-breaking wishes not only towards enemies but also towards loved-ones and ourselves. Today’s ascendant coalition of groups opposing racism, sexism, homophobia and anti-religious views, and championing equality and human rights, want to abolish not only outward physical violence and its verbal scaffolding but also vocal and mental hatred. This amounts to an unrealistic and dangerous totalitarian agenda for the fantasised good, the mechanism for which is suppression not understanding. That we all have a barbarous dark side that can be triggered in certain circumstances is a thesis denied or ignored by many but recognised by so-called misanthropes, anthropathologists and DRs. Ironically, opponents of the concept of (often dark) human nature unwittingly force a mental illness status upon those who notice weird and hateful thoughts in their own heads and conclude that they are uniquely perverse and unacceptable individuals. In other words, denial breeds another layer of depression in the same way that sin-focused puritanical religions have caused inauthentic behaviour and created neurotic minds.

Sometimes the effects of frugal simplicity may be the reverse of what is intended or expected. For instance, although frugality is said to foster humility, some of the ancients who practiced it took pride in their austere lifestyle and came to see themselves as superior to others. Diogenes is a case in point; no one ever accused him of humility. On one occasion at a banquet he supposedly trampled on Plato’s rich carpets, saying, “Thus do I trample on the empty pride of Plato,” to which Plato responded, “With quite as much pride yourself, O Diogenes.”23 Spartan austerity, monastic self-discipline, bucolic naturalness, and working-class frugality may carry positive associations, but other associations are also possible. Monasteries sometimes became rife with religious narcissism and intrigue. Peasants may live close to nature, but they have also enjoyed a long-standing reputation for being ignorant, greedy, and cunning. Struggling against economic adversity may foster virtues such as resilience, self-sufficiency, and solidarity with one’s community, whereas prosperous leafy suburbs may be hotbeds of smug, self-serving complacency; but poverty can also be a breeding ground for crime, alcoholism, drug addiction, child abuse, delinquency, and depression, while a privileged upbringing can sometimes instill moral integrity and an impressive sense of social obligation—the emperor-philosopher Marcus Aurelius being a case in point. The general point here is that the link between living frugally or simply and practicing the moral virtues is not a necessary connection. A frugal lifestyle is no guarantee of a virtuous character.

The idea that emerged from both the New Deal and World War II was that a state managed by experts dedicated to solutions without an ideology would do for the country what it did for the war: it would breed success. But of course, this became a principle, the principle became a belief, and the belief became an ideology. The ideology created a class who felt entitled to govern and who were believed to be suitable to govern. It

Portfolio presentation in school was always the worst. I’ve done the work, and you have eyes in your head. Why do I have to stand in front of a room and squirm and talk about each piece?” Lowell was laughing, his head tipped back slightly. “Exactly! The worst was when they would ask about the motivation for each piece. My motivation was to pass the class, sir. My motivation for this one was also to pass the class. And finally, my motivation for this last piece was, you may have already guessed, to pass this class. Just mark that you hate it and let me go home to die in peace.

Fertility played an equally significant role in defining women’s and men’s places in society. A woman’s breeding capacity was a calculable natural resource meant to be exploited and a commodity exchanged in marriage. For slave women, fertile capacity made the womb an article of commerce and slave children chattel—movable property, like cattle. (The word “chattel” comes from the same Latin root as “cattle.”) Slave children were actually listed in the wills of planters as “breedings,” and a slave woman’s potential to breed was denoted as “future increase,” a term that applied to livestock as well.

Colonizing schemes all drew on the language of breeding. Fertility had to be monitored, literally and figuratively, under the watchful supervision of household and town fathers. This was the case in disciplining unruly children, corralling servants, and dispensing religious membership privileges to the next generation (i.e., the offspring of the godly). Good breeding practices tamed otherwise unmanageable waste, whether it was wasteland or waste people; breeding sustained the pastoral tradition already associated with the Elizabethan age, which found its best literary expression in testaments to rustic beauty and cosmic harmony.

The small birth rate in the upper classes is to some extent offset by the care received by such children as are born and the better chance they have to become adult and breed in their turn. The large birth rate of the lower classes is under normal conditions offset by a heavy infant mortality, which eliminates the weaker children.

Where altruism, philanthropy or sentimentalism intervene with the noblest purpose and forbid nature to penalize the unfortunate victims of reckless breeding, the multiplication of inferior types is encouraged and fostered. Indiscriminate efforts to preserve babies among the lower classes often result in serious injury to the race.

our relentless class system evolved out of recurring agrarian notions regarding the character and potential of the land, the value of labor, and critical concepts of breeding. Embarrassing lower-class populations have always been numerous, and have always been seen on the North American continent as waste people.

Plato argued that you didn’t breed fierceness out of men, you trained it. Men of the warrior class, he argued, should be trained to neither be watchdogs who barked at everything – even innocent noises — nor watchdogs that only whimpered and rolled over when someone invaded the house. They were gentle with those they knew, and fierce with strangers of ill-intent. Their thumos was ready, if needed, to fight.

As the daughter of a train driver and a nurse who grew up constantly strapped for cash, I'm fascinated by- and a little bit suspicious of- people who have made loads of money. To me they're like another species altogether, a breed of sleek and dangerous cats.

Distant American colonies were presented as a cure. The poor could be purged. In 1622, the famous poet and clergyman John Donne wrote of Virginia in this fashion, describing the new colony as the nation’s spleen and liver, draining the “ill humours of the body . . . to breed good bloud.

These stunning global improvements have already been tested, vetted and proven effective: 1. To feed the world, easily. Yet grains waste in warehouses to ensure “Profitable Supply and Demand Ratios.” 2. To power the world endlessly, freely, without pollution or waste. Yet basic subsidies are given to polluting, exploiting, un-replenishable resources to ensure power remains in the hands of the controllers. 3. To end all armed conflict and usher in an era of global prosperity. Yet childish leaders propagate “The Demonic Other” to ensure they remain in power. 4. To improve global quality of life by a factor of 3x to 8x in under a decade. Yet it is suppressed to ensure that the elite remain an Elite and separate ruling class. 5. To end drug addictions and social inequality. Yet drugs are industriously pumped into ghettos to breed despair and ensure that ordinary people remain in conflict with each other. 6. To radically reduce crime worldwide. Yet again, suppressed to ensure the reign of an elite prison complex. 7. To reduce the work week by over 50%. Suppressed to occupy the masses with trifling banality. 8. To globally stabilize and secure the world’s clean drinking water supply, EASILY. Suppressed to retain control over the world’s most impoverished. All of these “Trigger Ready Solutions” are suppressed by humans to ensure their power and control over other Humans. They argue about currency manipulation while poisoning the collective air and water to a level where the oceans have little left to give. Absolving themselves of all crimes, preaching kindness and forgiveness, they race into battle against the OTHER while denouncing greed and indoctrinating youth to find it funny to say, “He who dies with the most toys wins.

From all that I can learn, the filthy promiscuity of these crowded houses and dirty streets have made the Sicilian rural villages breeding places of vices and crimes of a kind of which the rural Negro population in the United States, for example, probably never heard. There are some things, in connection with this ancient civilization, concerning which it is better the Negro should not know, because the knowledge of them means moral and physical degeneration, and at the present time, whatever else may be said about the condition of the Negro, he is not, in the rural districts at least, a degenerate. Even in those parts of the Southern States where he has been least touched by civilization, the Negro seems to me to be incomparably better off in his family life than is true of the agricultural classes in Sicily.

An addiction to distraction is the end of your creative production. Empire-makers and history-creators take one hour for themselves before dawn, in the serenity that lies beyond the clutches of complexity, to prepare themselves for a world-class day. RULE #2 Excuses breed no genius. Just because you haven’t installed the early-rising habit before doesn’t mean you can’t do it now. Release your rationalizations and remember that small daily improvements, when done consistently over time, lead to stunning results. RULE #3 All change is hard at first, messy in the middle and gorgeous at the end. Everything you now find easy you first found difficult. With consistent practice, getting up with the sun will become your new normal. And automatic. RULE #4 To have the results The Top 5% of producers have, you must start doing what 95% of people are unwilling to do. As you start to live like this, the majority will call you crazy. Remember that being labeled a freak is the price of greatness. RULE #5 When you feel like surrendering, continue.Triumph loves the relentless.

The breeder had pressured the new owners into showing the promising young puppy. After McDuff’s first blue ribbon in Puppy Class, they were hooked but for the wrong reasons. Most people are involved in with dogs because they had that one special dog in their past. That special dog had been a friend, a confidant and fellow warrior against life’s travails. They now searched for that special dog once again but the search was for a memory which, like dreams, is vapor and shadow. Alice and Arnold needed the status of owning an American Kennel Club Champion. The man, more than the woman, had no particular love for the breed or dogs in general. McDuff had, in fact been a big disappointment because of the legendary Airedale WILL. The Airedale WILL compares to the proverbial immovable object meeting the irresistible force.

From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed two classes—paupers and millionaires….

Every era breeds some rebellion with the past, and Queen Victoria was crowned in 1838 amid a backlash against an “age of debauchery,” when upper-class males routinely kept mistresses. In the Victorian era, the image of the happy family, chaste couples amid the “respectability” of polite society, was acclaimed. And by 1870, reformers were once again fighting crime, obscenity, debauchery, and prostitution as the post–Civil War period mocked much of the Victorian myth. Yet hypocrisy hadn’t faded. Despite fashion that paraded plumped-up breasts, women were supposed to be horrified at naked statues in art museums, legs were never to be seen, and the lower half of the body was called the “nether regions.

As if the notion that all men were *created* equal somehow meant that one need not aspire to knowledge and ability -- all distinctions of class, breeding, or merit discarded, all notions of civility deserted.

Maybe Sloan would agree to a deal. I’d talk to someone about some of my issues if she would agree to go to grief counseling. It wasn’t me giving in to Josh like she wanted, but Sloan knew how much I hated therapists, and she’d always wanted me to see someone. I was debating how to pitch this to her when I glanced into the living room and saw it—a single purple carnation on my coffee table. I looked around the kitchen like I might suddenly find someone in my house. But Stuntman was calm, plopped under my chair. I went in to investigate and saw that the flower sat on top of a binder with the words “just say okay” written on the outside in Josh’s writing. He’d been here? My heart began to pound. I looked again around the living room like I might see him, but it was just the binder. I sat on the sofa, my hands on my knees, staring at the binder for what felt like ages before I drew the courage to pull the book into my lap. I tucked my hair behind my ear and licked my lips, took a breath, and opened it up. The front page read “SoCal Fertility Specialists.” My breath stilled in my lungs. What? He’d had a consultation with Dr. Mason Montgomery from SoCal Fertility. A certified subspecialist in reproductive endocrinology and infertility with the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology. He’d talked to them about in vitro and surrogacy, and he’d had fertility testing done. I put a shaky hand to my mouth, and tears began to blur my eyes. I pored over his test results. Josh was a breeding machine. Strong swimmers and an impressive sperm count. He’d circled this and put a winking smiley face next to it and I snorted. He’d outlined the clinic’s high success rates—higher than the national average—and he had gotten signed personal testimonials from previous patients, women like me who used a surrogate. Letter after letter of encouragement, addressed to me. The next page was a complete breakdown on the cost of in vitro and information on Josh’s health insurance and what it covered. His insurance was good. It covered the first round of IVF at 100 percent. He even had a small business plan. He proposed selling doghouses that he would build. The extra income would raise enough money for the second round of in vitro in about three months. The next section was filled with printouts from the Department of International Adoptions. Notes scrawled in Josh’s handwriting said Brazil just opened up. He broke down the process, timeline, and costs right down to travel expenses and court fees. I flipped past a sleeve full of brochures to a page on getting licensed for foster care. He’d already gone through the background check, and he enclosed a form for me, along with a series of available dates for foster care orientation classes and in-home inspections. Was this what he’d been doing? This must have taken him weeks. My chin quivered. Somehow, seeing it all down on paper, knowing we’d be in it together, it didn’t feel so hopeless. It felt like something that we could do. Something that might actually work. Something possible. The last page had an envelope taped to it. I pried it open with trembling hands, my throat getting tight. I know what the journey will look like, Kristen. I’m ready to take this on. I love you and I can’t wait to tell you the best part…Just say okay. I dropped the letter and put my face into my hands and sobbed like I’d never sobbed in my life. He’d done all this for me. Josh looked infertility dead in the eye, and his choice was still me. He never gave up. All this time, no matter how hard I rejected him or how difficult I made it, he never walked away from me. He just changed strategies. And I knew if this one didn’t work he’d try another. And another. And another. He’d never stop trying until I gave in. And Sloan—she knew. She knew this was here, waiting for me. That’s why she’d made me leave. They’d conspired to do this.

For this is England, a happy country, a land of miracles, where stones underfoot are nuggets of gold and the brooks flow with claret. The Boleyns' white falcon hangs like a sorry sparrow on a fence, while the Seymour phoenix is rising. Gentlefolk of an ancient breed, foresters, masters of Wolf Hall, the king's new family now rank with the Howards, the Talbots, the Percys and the Courtenays. The Cromwells - father, son and nephew - are of an ancient breed too. Were we not all conceived in Eden? When Adam delved and Eve span/Who was then the gentleman? When the Cromwells stroll out this week, the gentlemen of England get out of their way.

Here then were two contradictory valuations of human behavior, two ethical standpoints and criteria: a Herren-Moral and a Herden-Moral—a morality of masters and a morality of the herd. The former was the accepted standard in classical antiquity, especially among the Romans; even for the ordinary Roman, virtue was virtus—manhood, courage, enterprise, bravery. But from Asia, and especially from the Jews in the days of their political subjection, came the other standard; subjection breeds humility, helplessness breeds altruism—which is an appeal for help. Under this herd-morality love of danger and power gave way to love of security and peace; strength was replaced by cunning, open by secret revenge, sternness by pity, initiative by imitation, the pride of honor by the whip of conscience. Honor is pagan, Roman, feudal, aristocratic; conscience is Jewish, Christian, bourgeois, democratic.345 It was the eloquence of the prophets, from Amos to Jesus, that made the view of a subject class an almost universal ethic; the “world” and the “flesh” became synonyms of evil, and poverty a proof of virtue. This valuation was brought to a peak by Jesus: with him every man was of equal worth, and had equal rights; out of his doctrine came democracy, utilitarianism, socialism; progress was now defined in terms of these plebeian philosophies, in terms of progressive equalization and vulgarization, in terms of decadence and descending life. The final stage in this decay is the exaltation of pity and self-sacrifice, the sentimental comforting of criminals, “the inability of a society to excrete.

As our bullying culture expanded and our human population grew out of control, we designed more powerful and intricate systems to control ourselves, just as we had developed enclosures and slaughterhouses for the use and control of other animals we were breeding. We developed the ideas of Kings & Queens, governments, armies, policing (and police dogs), different classes of humans, and dungeons & prisons for those who might challenge the bullies at the top or the entire system. We were fully domesticated and fully controlled. We were fully civilized. We had become both the bullies and the bullied.

In 1973, the Kenyan government banned elephant hunting and the club fell on hard times. Holden brought in two minority partners, Don Hunt and Julian McKeand. Together they created the Mount Kenya Game Ranch with captive breeding programs for thirty-seven African species, and an orphanage for rescued animals. There were fifty types of exotic birds, including sacred ibises, marabou storks, peacocks and Egyptian geese. One of the rarest species at the game ranch was the East African Bongo – a critically endangered red and white-striped antelope, which became the ranch’s mascot. Holden showed Powers the club’s first-class amenities. They visited the Arabian horse stables, and walked down a garden path to the guest cottages, dubbed Millionaire’s Row.

...White traders came to the Transkei, hot on the heels of the missionaries, to provide all the new needs that the missionaries demanded and to satisfy the new tastes that had been introduced... They were a hardy breed of men and women, these traders, isolated, lonely, and hard working. In order to survive in this sea of black people, they had to learn how to live with people. Very few of them slept with revolvers under their pillows or locked their doors. They knew they were safe among their neighbours. They had learnt who was who in the areas where they lived, ingratiated themselves with the most influential families, and kept friends with the majority of the people. They learnt the language of the people and made sure their children learnt it too. Some of them born in these parts knew Xhosa before they knew English. When Britain began replacing the civil service personnel in South Africa with locally born whites, most of their recruits came from this class of whites, who knew the Native and spoke his language. Recruits for missionary work too came from this class. Those of them who went on to universities became experts in the areas pertaining to Africans- Anthropology, African languages, Native Administration and Native Law. But though living among Africans, like all white SouthAfricans they never forgot that they were white.

Philosophy of Bread To Lenin and Iqbal: The East treats me as a second class citizen, the West as a third class citizen still, life is mired in fees, rents and unending bills. New century’s children keep on breeding, farms get smaller and farmers poorer, it’s the bankruptcy mills, bread lines get longer, the pestilence kills whilst the few eat money and honey, And God laughs at the future.