“
In the English language, it all comes down to this: Twenty-six letters, when combined correctly, can create magic. Twenty -six letters form the foundation of a free, informed society.
”
”
John Grogan (Bad Dogs Have More Fun: Selected Writings on Family, Animals, and Life from The Philadelphia Inquirer)
“
When I go around and speak on campuses,
I still don't get young men standing up and saying,
How can I combine career and family?
”
”
Gertrude Stein
“
A woman or man of value doesn’t love you because of what he or she wants you to be or do for them. He or she loves you because your combined souls understand one another, complements each other, and make sense above any other person in this world. You each share a part of their soul's mirror and see each other’s light reflected in it clearly. You can easily speak from the heart and feel safe doing so. Both of you have been traveling a parallel road your entire life. Without each other's presence, you feel like an old friend or family member was lost. It bothers you, not because you have given it too much meaning, but because God did. This is the type of person you don't have to fight for because you can't get rid of them and your heart doesn't want them to leave anyways.
”
”
Shannon L. Alder
“
We might not know we are seeking people who best enrich our lives, but somehow on a deep subconscious level we absolutely are. Whether the bond is temporary or permanent, whether it succeeds or fails, fate is simply a configuration of choices that combine with others to shape the relationships that surround us. We cannot choose our family, but we can choose our friends, and we sometimes, before we even meet them.
”
”
Simon Pegg (Nerd Do Well)
“
Saving the world requires saving democracy. That requires well-informed citizens. Conservation, environment, poverty, community, education, family, health, economy- these combine to make one quest: liberty and justice for all. Whether one's special emphasis is global warming or child welfare, the cause is the same cause. And justice comes from the same place being human comes from: compassion.
”
”
Carl Safina (The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World)
“
I may now add that civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind.
”
”
Sigmund Freud (Civilization and Its Discontents)
“
Fine. We can make it a combination Christmas and birthday present. You decide. I'll leave it up to you".
If it were up to him, he would give him everything: sun and moon, eternal happiness, serene and uncomplicated.
”
”
Judith Guest (Ordinary People)
“
She was the oddest combination of contradictions he'd ever met -innocence and sensuality, candour and diplomacy, anxiety and utter fearlessness. He hadn't even begun to figure out how her mind worked. But she was damn well going to live long enough for him to try.
”
”
Karen Chance (A Family Affair (Cassandra Palmer, #4.1))
“
It is love that is sacred," she said." Listen, child, to an old woman who has seen three generations, and who has had a long experience of men and women. Marriage and love have nothing in common. We marry to found a family, and we form families in order to constitute society. Society cannot dispense with marriage. If society is a chain, each family is a link in that chain. In order to weld those links, we always seek metals of the same order. When we marry, we must bring together suitable conditions; we must combine fortunes, unite similiar races and aim at the common interest, which is riches and children. We marry only once, my child, because the world requires us to do so, but we love twenty times in one lifetime because nature has made us like this. Marriage, you see, is law and love is an instinct which impels us, sometimes along a straight, and sometimes along a devious path. The world has made laws to combat our instincts- it was necessary to make them; but our instincts are always stronger, and we ought not to resist them too much, because they come from God; while laws come from men. If we did not perfume life with love, as much love as possible,darling, as we put sugar into drugs for children, nobody would care to take it just as it is.
”
”
Guy de Maupassant
“
Gareth sucked in a breath. Hyacinth’s brother wasn’t going to make this easy on him. But that didn’t matter. He had vowed to do this right, and he would not be cowed.
He looked up, meeting the viscount’s dark eyes with steady purpose. “I would like to marry Hyacinth,” he said. And then, because the viscount did not say anything, because he didn’t even move, Gareth added, “Er, if she’ll have me.”
And then about eight things happened at once. Or perhaps there were merely two or three, and it just seemed like eight, because it was all so unexpected.
First, the viscount exhaled, although that did seem to understate the case. It was more of a sigh, actually—a huge, tired, heartfelt sigh that made the man positively deflate in front of Gareth. Which was astonishing. Gareth had seen the viscount on many occasions and was quite familiar with his reputation. This was not a man who sagged or groaned.
His lips seemed to move through the whole thing, too, and if Gareth were a more suspicious man, he would have thought that the viscount had said, “Thank you, Lord.”
Combined with the heavenward tilt of the viscount’s eyes, it did seem the most likely translation.
And then, just as Gareth was taking all of this in, Lord Bridgerton let the palms of his hands fall against the desk with surprising force, and he looked Gareth squarely in the eye as he said, “Oh, she’ll have you. She will definitely have you.”
It wasn’t quite what Gareth had expected. “I beg your pardon,” he said, since truly, he could think of nothing else.
“I need a drink,” the viscount said, rising to his feet. “A celebration is in order, don’t you think?”
“Er…yes?”
Lord Bridgerton crossed the room to a recessed bookcase and plucked a cut-glass decanter off one of the shelves. “No,” he said to himself, putting it haphazardly back into place, “the good stuff, I think.” He turned to Gareth, his eyes taking on a strange, almost giddy light. “The good stuff, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Ehhhh…” Gareth wasn’t quite sure what to make of this.
“The good stuff,” the viscount said firmly. He moved some books to the side and reached behind to pull out what looked to be a very old bottle of cognac. “Have to keep it hidden,” he explained, pouring it liberally into two glasses.
“Servants?” Gareth asked.
“Brothers.” He handed Gareth a glass. “Welcome to the family.
”
”
Julia Quinn (It's in His Kiss (Bridgertons, #7))
“
Only marriage combines all three forms of companionship - spouse is family, best friend, and permanent companion. This is why it is widely held that while the death of a child is the most painful loss, the death of a spouse is the most disorienting one.
”
”
Dennis Prager (Happiness Is a Serious Problem: A Human Nature Repair Manual)
“
He walked straight out of college into the waiting arms of the Navy.
They gave him an intelligence test. The first question on the math part had to do with boats on a river: Port Smith is 100 miles upstream of Port Jones. The river flows at 5 miles per hour. The boat goes through water at 10 miles per hour. How long does it take to go from Port Smith to Port Jones? How long to come back?
Lawrence immediately saw that it was a trick question. You would have to be some kind of idiot to make the facile assumption that the current would add or subtract 5 miles per hour to or from the speed of the boat. Clearly, 5 miles per hour was nothing more than the average speed. The current would be faster in the middle of the river and slower at the banks. More complicated variations could be expected at bends in the river. Basically it was a question of hydrodynamics, which could be tackled using certain well-known systems of differential equations. Lawrence dove into the problem, rapidly (or so he thought) covering both sides of ten sheets of paper with calculations. Along the way, he realized that one of his assumptions, in combination with the simplified Navier Stokes equations, had led him into an exploration of a particularly interesting family of partial differential equations. Before he knew it, he had proved a new theorem. If that didn't prove his intelligence, what would?
Then the time bell rang and the papers were collected. Lawrence managed to hang onto his scratch paper. He took it back to his dorm, typed it up, and mailed it to one of the more approachable math professors at Princeton, who promptly arranged for it to be published in a Parisian mathematics journal.
Lawrence received two free, freshly printed copies of the journal a few months later, in San Diego, California, during mail call on board a large ship called the U.S.S. Nevada. The ship had a band, and the Navy had given Lawrence the job of playing the glockenspiel in it, because their testing procedures had proven that he was not intelligent enough to do anything else.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon)
“
If it were not my purpose to combine barbarian things with things Hellenic, to traverse and civilize every continent, to search out the uttermost parts of land and sea, to push the bounds of Macedonia to the farthest Ocean, and to disseminate and shower the blessings of the Hellenic justice and peace over every nation, I should not be content to sit quietly in the luxury of idle power, but I should emulate the frugality of Diogenes. But as things are, forgive me Diogenes, that I imitate Herakles, and emulate Perseus, and follow in the footsteps of Dionysos, the divine author and progenitor of my family, and desire that victorious Hellenes should dance again in India and revive the memory of the Bacchic revels among the savage mountain tribes beyond the Kaukasos…
”
”
Alexander the Great
“
There’s a bed, a little fold-out table, and cabinets made of actual wood. These in combination with the photographs of family and friends give it a cozy, domestic flavor which is, however, completely ruined by the framed picture of Adolf Hitler on the wall. Waterhouse finds this to be shockingly poor taste until he remembers it’s a German boat.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon)
“
If you have supportive family and friends combined with a strong will; there is no limit to what you can achieve.
”
”
S.J. Hailey
“
John: What is the point of being alive?
Hank: You taught me this: There isn't one unless you decide on one. And sometimes you don't know you're deciding and you're deciding anyway.
John: And what did I decide?
Hank: I think it's a combination of making stupid podcasts with your brother, writing lovely things, and taking care of your family. And also educating people.
John: Alright. Yeah, that works. I think I can live with that.
”
”
John Green
“
She is opinionated, as most of us are, but you won’t find yourself impaled on her arguments; she doesn’t charge at you as some people do. What [she] does is walk slowly and steadily into a conversational battle, somehow managing to deflect all incoming targets until she is standing in your corner with her flag dug firmly into the ground. I think it comes from the deep-seated confidence she possesses in her core. I think it is the powerful combination of encouraged individualism and a strong family unit.
”
”
Carrie Adams (The Godmother)
“
Noatalgia Nalan believed there were two families in this world:relatives formed blood family;and friends,the water family.If your blood family happened to be nice and caring,you could count your lucky stars and make the most of it; and if not,there was still hope; things could take a turn for the better once you are old enough to leave your home sour home.
As for the water family, this was formed much later in life and was,to a large extent,of your own making. While it was true that nothing could take the place of a loving, happy blood family, in the absence of one, a good water family could wash away the hurt and pain collected inside like black soot.It is therefore possible for your friends to have a treasured place in your heart, and occupy a bigger space than all your kin combined.But those who had never experienced what it felt like to be spurned by their own relatives would not understand this truth in a million years.They would never know that there were times when water ran thicker than blood.
”
”
Elif Shafak (10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World)
“
There are many ties that bind, and as many walls that divide. Music and madness. Love and unending time. Race and war. Strum weaves together each element into a larger human tapestry of light and shadow, where a combination of fate and decision can define a family's legacy.
”
”
Nancy Young (Strum)
“
Many people are born into their religion. For them it is mostly a matter of legacy and convenience. Their belief is based on faith, not just in the teachings of the religion but also in the acceptance of that religion from their family and culture. For the person who converts, it is a matter of fierce conviction and defiance. Our belief is based on a combination of faith and logic because we need a powerful reason to abandon the traditions of our families and community to embrace beliefs foreign to both. Conversion is a risky business because it can result in losing family, friends and community support.
”
”
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
“
Her parents took her very seriously; she had trained them, with a combination of treats and punishments, to allow her to do as she pleased and express herself, and to pay attention to her opinions. Thanks
”
”
Jane Smiley (Golden Age (Last Hundred Years: a Family Saga))
“
The slumber party took place in what the Methodists called a family room, the Catholics used as an extra bedroom, and the neighborhood's only Jews had turned into a combination darkroom and fallout shelter.
”
”
David Sedaris (Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim)
“
Even a moment's reflection will help you see that the problem of using your time well is not a problem of the mind but of the heart. It will only yield to a change in the very way we feel about time. The value of time must change for us. And then the way we think about it will change, naturally and wisely.
That change in feeling and in thinking is combined in the words of a prophet of God in this dispensation. It was Brigham Young, and the year was 1877, and he was speaking at April general conference. He wasn't talking about time or schedules or frustrations with too many demands upon us. Rather, he was trying to teach the members of the Church how to unite themselves in what was called the united order. The Saints were grappling with the question of how property should be distributed if they were to live the celestial law. In his usual direct style, he taught the people that they were having trouble finding solutions because they misunderstood the problem. Particularly, he told them they didn't understand either property or the distribution of wealth. Here is what he said:
With regard to our property, as I have told you many times, the property which we inherit from our Heavenly Father is our time, and the power to choose in the disposition of the same. This is the real capital that is bequeathed unto us by our Heavenly Father; all the rest is what he may be pleased to add unto us. To direct, to counsel and to advise in the disposition of our time, pertains to our calling as God's servants, according to the wisdom which he has given and will continue to give unto us as we seek it. [JD 18:354]
Time is the property we inherit from God, along with the power to choose what we will do with it. President Young calls the gift of life, which is time and the power to dispose of it, so great an inheritance that we should feel it is our capital. The early Yankee families in America taught their children and grandchildren some rules about an inheritance. They were always to invest the capital they inherited and live only on part of the earnings. One rule was "Never spend your capital." And those families had confidence the rule would be followed because of an attitude of responsibility toward those who would follow in later generations. It didn't always work, but the hope was that inherited wealth would be felt a trust so important that no descendent would put pleasure ahead of obligation to those who would follow. Now, I can see and hear Brigham Young, who was as flinty a New Englander as the Adams or the Cabots ever hoped to be, as if he were leaning over this pulpit tonight. He would say something like this, with a directness and power I wish I could approach: "Your inheritance is time. It is capital far more precious than any lands or stocks or houses you will ever get. Spend it foolishly, and you will bankrupt yourself and cheapen the inheritance of those that follow you. Invest it wisely, and you will bless generations to come.
“A Child of Promise”, BYU Speeches, 4 May 1986
”
”
Henry B. Eyring
“
Indie authors who are successful are very successful. They can do everything to conceive, write, market, and bring to fruition the life of a book. Whereas a traditionally published author relies on their publisher for most of the publishing chain. When a traditional author tries to become indie, they are not as successful as an indie. This shows the strength is in the individual author itself. An indie author can bring much more to the table because of their indie spirit. And when you combine the drive for success and survival as a business for indies who have a family to support with their book sales, an indie author who is successful and driven by their need to survive (like me), they are UNSTOPPABLE! - Strong by Kailin Gow
”
”
Kailin Gow
“
I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch – hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into – some fearful, devastating scourge, I know – and, before I had glanced half down the list of “premonitory symptoms,” it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.
I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever – read the symptoms – discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it – wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus’s Dance – found, as I expected, that I had that too, – began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically – read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright’s disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid’s knee.
...
I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.
I went to my medical man. He is an old chum of mine, and feels my pulse, and looks at my tongue, and talks about the weather, all for nothing, when I fancy I’m ill; so I thought I would do him a good turn by going to him now. “What a doctor wants,” I said, “is practice. He shall have me. He will get more practice out of me than out of seventeen hundred of your ordinary, commonplace patients, with only one or two diseases each.” So I went straight up and saw him, and he said:
“Well, what’s the matter with you?”
I said:
“I will not take up your time, dear boy, with telling you what is the matter with me. Life is brief, and you might pass away before I had finished. But I will tell you what is NOT the matter with me. I have not got housemaid’s knee. Why I have not got housemaid’s knee, I cannot tell you; but the fact remains that I have not got it. Everything else, however, I HAVE got.”
And I told him how I came to discover it all.
Then he opened me and looked down me, and clutched hold of my wrist, and then he hit me over the chest when I wasn’t expecting it – a cowardly thing to do, I call it – and immediately afterwards butted me with the side of his head. After that, he sat down and wrote out a prescription, and folded it up and gave it me, and I put it in my pocket and went out.
I did not open it. I took it to the nearest chemist’s, and handed it in. The man read it, and then handed it back.
He said he didn’t keep it.
I said:
“You are a chemist?”
He said:
“I am a chemist. If I was a co-operative stores and family hotel combined, I might be able to oblige you. Being only a chemist hampers me.”
I read the prescription. It ran:
“1 lb. beefsteak, with
1 pt. bitter beer
every 6 hours.
1 ten-mile walk every morning.
1 bed at 11 sharp every night.
And don’t stuff up your head with things you don’t understand.”
I followed the directions, with the happy result – speaking for myself – that my life was preserved, and is still going on.
”
”
Jerome K. Jerome (Three Men in a Boat (Three Men, #1))
“
The mister days that letters are the key, but even when you know the whole family, there's so many combinations you can make. And they break their word.
”
”
Gregory Maguire (Out of Oz (The Wicked Years, #4))
“
We have the money. We’ve just made choices about how to spend it. Over the years, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have restricted housing aid to the poor but expanded it to the affluent in the form of tax benefits for homeowners. 57 Today, housing-related tax expenditures far outpace those for housing assistance. In 2008, the year Arleen was evicted from Thirteenth Street, federal expenditures for direct housing assistance totaled less than $40.2 billion, but homeowner tax benefits exceeded $171 billion. That number, $171 billion, was equivalent to the 2008 budgets for the Department of Education, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Agriculture combined. 58 Each year, we spend three times what a universal housing voucher program is estimated to cost (in total ) on homeowner benefits, like the mortgage-interest deduction and the capital-gains exclusion.
Most federal housing subsidies benefit families with six-figure incomes. 59 If we are going to spend the bulk of our public dollars on the affluent—at least when it comes to housing—we should own up to that decision and stop repeating the politicians’ canard about one of the richest countries on the planet being unable to afford doing more. If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources.
”
”
Matthew Desmond (Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City)
“
Hi there, cutie."
Ash turned his head to find an extremely attractive college student by his side. With black curly hair, she was dressed in jeans and a tight green top that displayed her curves to perfection. "Hi."
"You want to go inside for a drink? It's on me."
Ash paused as he saw her past, present, and future simultaneously in his mind. Her name was Tracy Phillips. A political science major, she was going to end up at Harvard Med School and then be one of the leading researchers to help isolate a mutated genome that the human race didn't even know existed yet.
The discovery of that genome would save the life of her youngest daughter and cause her daughter to go on to medical school herself. That daughter, with the help and guidance of her mother, would one day lobby for medical reforms that would change the way the medical world and governments treated health care. The two of them would shape generations of doctors and save thousands of lives by allowing people to have groundbreaking medical treatments that they wouldn't have otherwise been able to afford.
And right now, all Tracy could think about was how cute his ass was in leather pants, and how much she'd like to peel them off him.
In a few seconds, she'd head into the coffee shop and meet a waitress named Gina Torres. Gina's dream was to go to college herself to be a doctor and save the lives of the working poor who couldn't afford health care, but because of family problems she wasn't able to take classes this year. Still Gina would tell Tracy how she planned to go next year on a scholarship.
Late tonight, after most of the college students were headed off, the two of them would be chatting about Gina's plans and dreams.
And a month from now, Gina would be dead from a freak car accident that Tracy would see on the news. That one tragic event combined with the happenstance meeting tonight would lead Tracy to her destiny. In one instant, she'd realize how shallow her life had been, and she'd seek to change that and be more aware of the people around her and of their needs. Her youngest daughter would be named Gina Tory in honor of the Gina who was currently busy wiping down tables while she imagined a better life for everyone.
So in effect, Gina would achieve her dream. By dying she'd save thousands of lives and she'd bring health care to those who couldn't afford it...
The human race was an amazing thing. So few people ever realized just how many lives they inadvertently touched. How the right or wrong word spoken casually could empower or destroy another's life.
If Ash were to accept Tracy's invitation for coffee, her destiny would be changed and she would end up working as a well-paid bank officer. She'd decide that marriage wasn't for her and go on to live her life with a partner and never have children.
Everything would change. All the lives that would have been saved would be lost.
And knowing the nuance of every word spoken and every gesture made was the heaviest of all the burdens Ash carried.
Smiling gently, he shook his head. "Thanks for asking, but I have to head off. You have a good night."
She gave him a hot once-over. "Okay, but if you change your mind, I'll be in here studying for the next few hours."
Ash watched as she left him and entered the shop. She set her backpack down at a table and started unpacking her books. Sighing from exhaustion, Gina grabbed a glass of water and made her way over to her...
And as he observed them through the painted glass, the two women struck up a conversation and set their destined futures into motion.
His heart heavy, he glanced in the direction Cael had vanished and hated the future that awaited his friend. But it was Cael's destiny.
His fate...
"Imora thea mi savur," Ash whispered under his breath in Atlantean. God save me from love.
”
”
Sherrilyn Kenyon (Dark Side of the Moon (Dark-Hunter, #9; Were-Hunter, #3))
“
There are many forms of poverty: economic poverty, physical poverty, emotional poverty, mental poverty, and spiritual poverty. As long as we relate primarily to each other's wealth, health, stability, intelligence, and soul strength, we cannot develop true community. Community is not a talent show in which we dazzle the world with our combined gifts. Community is the place where our poverty is acknowledged and accepted, not as something we have to learn to cope with as best as we can but as a true source of new life.
Living community in whatever form - family, parish, twelve-step program, or intentional community - challenges us to come together at the place of our poverty, believing that there we can reveal our richness.
”
”
Henri J.M. Nouwen (Bread for the Journey: A Daybook of Wisdom and Faith)
“
Perhaps this is what a state actually is: a combination of exceptional violence and the creation of a complex social machine, all ostensibly devoted to acts of care and devotion.
There is obviously a paradox here. Caring labour is in a way the very opposite of mechanical labour: it is about recognizing and understanding the unique qualities, needs and peculiarities of the cared-for – whether child, adult, animal or plant – in order to provide what they require to flourish. Caring labour is distinguished by its particularity. If those institutions we today refer to as ‘states’ really do have any common features, one must certainly be a tendency to displace this caring impulse on to abstractions; today this is usually ‘the nation’, however broadly or narrowly defined. Perhaps this is why it’s so easy for us to see ancient Egypt as a prototype for the modern state: here too, popular devotion was diverted on to grand abstractions, in this case the ruler and the elite dead. This process is what made it possible for the whole arrangement to be imagined, simultaneously, as a family and as a machine, in which everyone (except of course the king) was ultimately interchangeable. From the seasonal work of tomb-building to the daily servicing of the ruler’s body (recall again how the first royal inscriptions are found on combs and make-up palettes), most of human activity was directed upwards, either towards tending rulers (living and dead) or assisting them with their own task of feeding and caring for the gods.
”
”
David Graeber (The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity)
“
I figure heaven will be a scratch-and-sniff sort of place, and one of my first requests will be the Driftwood in its prime, while it was filled with our life. And later I will ask for the smell of my dad's truck, which was a combination of basic truck (nearly universal), plus his cologne (Old Spice), unfiltered Lucky Strikes, and when I was very lucky, leaded gasoline. If I could have gotten my nose close enough I would have inhaled leaded gasoline until I was retarded. The tendency seemed to run in my family; as a boy my uncle Crandall had an ongoing relationship with a gas can he kept in the barn. Later he married and divorced the same woman four times, sometimes marrying other women in between, including one whose name was, honestly, Squirrelly.
”
”
Haven Kimmel (A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland, Indiana)
“
How, then, do we know when a patient is giving up “too early” when we feel that a little fight on his part combined with the help of the medical profession could give him a chance to live longer? How can we differentiate this from the stage of acceptance, when our wish to prolong his life often contradicts his wish to rest and die in peace? If we are unable to differentiate these two stages we do more harm than good to our patients, we will be frustrated in our efforts, and will make his dying a painful last experience.
”
”
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (On Death and Dying: What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy and Their Own Families)
“
Morgan then formed the U.S. Steel Corporation, combining Carnegie’s corporation with others. He sold stocks and bonds for $1,300,000,000 (about 400 million more than the combined worth of the companies) and took a fee of 150 million for arranging the consolidation. How could dividends be paid to all those stockholders and bondholders? By making sure Congress passed tariffs keeping out foreign steel; by closing off competition and maintaining the price at $28 a ton; and by working 200,000 men twelve hours a day for wages that barely kept their families alive. And so it went, in industry after industry—shrewd, efficient businessmen building empires, choking out competition, maintaining high prices, keeping wages low, using government subsidies. These industries were the first beneficiaries of the “welfare state.
”
”
Howard Zinn (A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present)
“
My father has the proper degrees and framed pictures on the walls, though they're mostly taped over with photos of children, family and friends. Images from the past and present and trips and experiences combined with files on the floor – it's a happening or collage in progress.
”
”
Alex McKeithen (The Seventh Angel: A Memoir)
“
Black males between the ages of 14 and 17 die from shootings at more than six times the rate of white and Hispanic male teens combined, thanks to a ten times higher rate of homicide committed by black teens. Until the black family is reconstituted, the best protection that the law-abiding residents of urban neighborhoods have is the police. They are the government agency most committed to the proposition that “black lives matter.” The relentless effort to demonize the police for enforcing the law can only leave poor communities more vulnerable to anarchy. 5
”
”
Heather Mac Donald (The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe)
“
Much has been written about what makes families work. The consensus is that families that support the emotional well-being and growth of their members combine two almost opposite traits. They combine discipline with spontaneity, rules with freedom, high expectations with unstinting love.
”
”
Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life)
“
She seemed to possess the unusual combination of backbone with a natural inclination to submit.
”
”
Jill Ramsower (Forever Lies (The Five Families #1))
“
He was a man who combined familial greatness with personal mediocrity.
”
”
Peter Ackroyd (Foundation: The History of England from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Tudors (History of England #1))
“
Adoption is the appropriate response to only one situation: the need of a child for a new family, combined with a family’s desire for a new child.
”
”
Melissa Fay Greene (No Biking in the House Without a Helmet: 9 Kids, 3 Continents, 2 Parents, 1 Family)
“
an accumulation of little blindnesses and small acts of cowardice that, when combined, created the necessary conditions for the worst state-orchestrated crimes known to humanity.
”
”
Géraldine Schwarz (Those Who Forget: My Family's Story in Nazi Europe – A Memoir, A History, A Warning)
“
Families are the Nurseries of all Societies: and the First combinations of mankind.
”
”
Alice Hoffman (The Rules of Magic)
“
Now Jet could hear his voice when the wind carried as he recited a quote from Cotton Mather. Families are the Nurseries of all Societies: and the First combinations of mankind.
”
”
Alice Hoffman (The Rules of Magic)
“
Raising The Kids ....Running the Family Is A Combined Effort of Both Dad & Mom!
”
”
Jaachynma N.E. Agu (Woman: You've Got ALL IT TAKES!)
“
She shakes her head to herself. “It’s funny. My family was one of the first to figure out that it isn’t news that sells. It’s headlines. Half the time, people don’t read a word past those big, splashy letters, and even if they do, the nuance isn’t what they’ll remember. It’s the simple version that sticks. Simple and salacious, that’s the winning combination.
”
”
Emily Henry (Great Big Beautiful Life)
“
The trouble is, we have up-close access to women who excel in each individual sphere. With social media and its carefully selected messaging, we see career women killing it, craft moms slaying it, chef moms nailing it, Christian leaders working it. We register their beautiful yards, homemade green chile enchiladas, themed birthday parties, eight-week Bible study series, chore charts, ab routines, “10 Tips for a Happy Marriage,” career best practices, volunteer work, and Family Fun Night ideas. We make note of their achievements, cataloging their successes and observing their talents. Then we combine the best of everything we see, every woman we admire in every genre, and conclude: I should be all of that. It is certifiably insane.
”
”
Jen Hatmaker (For the Love: Fighting for Grace in a World of Impossible Standards)
“
Liquor and loss were a desperate combination but particularly for my family, where the precipice between darkness and lightness was mired in the uncertainty of which side held salvation.
”
”
Angela Amman (Echoes in Darkness)
“
But marriage is more than just two people. Marriages are a combination of two people, their closest family members, and the nearest and dearest of friends that enter that circle of love.
”
”
Sandi Gamble
“
Taste is a peculiar thing," began Nagare, reaching for a Karatsu-ware teacup and filling it with green tea. "The taste of home, for example. It's different for everyone--- and I don't mean just the food. Every family has its own flavor too. The feeling of safety you get from being together, the way you look out for each other--- all that combines to create a unique sensation.
”
”
Jesse Kirkwood (The Restaurant of Lost Recipes (Kamogawa Food Detectives, #2))
“
She liked numbers and sums. She devised a game in which each number was a family member and the “answer” made a family grouping with a story to it. Naught was a babe in arms. He gave no trouble. Whenever he appeared you just “carried” him. The figure 1 was a pretty baby girl just learning to walk, and easy to handle; 2 was a baby boy who could walk and talk a little. He went into family life (into sums, etc.) with very little trouble. And 3 was an older boy in kindergarten, who had to be watched a little. Then there was 4, a girl of Francie’s age. She was almost as easy to “mind” as 2. The mother was 5, gentle and kind. In large sums, she came along and made everything easy the way a mother should. The father, 6, was harder than the others but very just. But 7 was mean. He was a crotchety old grandfather and not at all accountable for how he came out. The grandmother, 8, was hard too, but easier to understand than 7. Hardest of all was 9. He was company and what a hard time fitting him into family life! When Francie added a sum, she would fix a little story to go with the result. If the answer was 924, it meant that the little boy and girl were being minded by company while the rest of the family went out. When a number such as 1024 appeared, it meant that all the little children were playing together in the yard. The number 62 meant that papa was taking the little boy for a walk; 50 meant that mama had the baby out in the buggy for an airing and 78 meant grandfather and grandmother sitting home by the fire of a winter’s evening. Each single combination of numbers was a new set-up for the family and no two stories were ever the same. Francie took the game with her up into algebra. X was the boy’s sweetheart who came into the family life and complicated it. Y was the boy friend who caused trouble. So arithmetic was a warm and human thing to Francie and occupied many lonely hours of her time.
”
”
Betty Smith (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn)
“
Metaruptions drive systemic disruption: The term metaruptions is an abbreviation of disruption with the prefix “meta.” A metaruption is a multidimensional family of systemic disruptions, including shifts in the notion of disruption itself. Metaruptions are characterized by the dynamic interactions of subordinate drivers of change. Metaruptions cause widespread and self-perpetuating effects that extend beyond their initial disruptions. As initial changes spill over, these impacts combine to propagate and modify other elements within the system, ultimately disrupting the disruption itself.
”
”
Roger Spitz (Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World)
“
He does love prophesying a misfortune, does the average British ghost. Send him out to prognosticate trouble to somebody, and he is happy. Let him force his way into a peaceful home, and turn the whole house upside down by foretelling a funeral, or predicting a bankruptcy, or hinting at a coming disgrace, or some other terrible disaster, about which nobody in their senses would want to know sooner than they could possible help, and the prior knowledge of which can serve no useful purpose whatsoever, and he feels that he is combining duty with pleasure. He would never forgive himself if anybody in his family had a trouble and he had not been there for a couple of months beforehand, doing silly tricks on the lawn or balancing himself on somebody's bedrail.
("Introduction" to TOLD AFTER SUPPER)
”
”
Jerome K. Jerome (Gaslit Nightmares: Stories by Robert W. Chambers, Charles Dickens, Richard Marsh, and Others)
“
Love has been many things throughout history: the simple comfort of the familiar, having a person to know and being known by that person in return; a connection born of shared experiences, an irrational joy in another's presence; a particular calming influence that one member of the couple may exert on the other, or that they both provide to one another. A combination of all these and myriad other things can go into making one person wish to stay tied to another. Anyone who is not in the couple--that is, everyone else in the world--will not understand precisely how or why it works for two people.
”
”
Annette Gordon-Reed (The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family)
“
We might not know we are seeking out the people who best enrich our lives, but somewhere on a deep, subconscious level we absolutely are. Whether that bond is temporary or permanent, whether it succeeds or fails, fate is simply a conflagration of choices that combine with others to shape the relationships that surround us. We cannot choose our family but we can choose our friends, and we do, sometimes before we have even met them.
”
”
Simon Pegg (Nerd Do Well)
“
Here’s why an allowance is good for kids: Having a little of their own money, and deciding how to save or spend it, offers a measure of autonomy and teaches them to be responsible with cash. Here’s why household chores are good for kids: Chores show kids that families are built on mutual obligations and that family members need to help each other. Here’s why combining allowances with chores is not good for kids. By linking money to the completion of chores, parents turn an allowance into an “if-then” reward. This sends kids a clear (and clearly wrongheaded) message: In the absence of a payment, no self-respecting child would willingly set the table, empty the garbage, or make her own bed. It converts a moral and familial obligation into just another commercial transaction—and teaches that the only reason to do a less-than-desirable task for your family is in exchange for payment.
”
”
Daniel H. Pink (Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us)
“
I tried to turn my heart to the living, to the place I was, but putting seed in land not owned by me or my family seemed alien. The sandy, gray-white soil looked like dirty beach sand, not fit for growing anything. It smelled like dust. Yet weeds and trees and wildflowers grew along the roads. When we drove into town, we passed dense, impenetrable woods and fields of corn, peas, and peppers. Such new combinations of seemingly poor soil and happy flora puzzled me. Everywhere I went, I picked up the dirt, examining it for clues. Bringing anything out of such soil would require a whole new language on my part. I imagined there must be something richer and darker under the gray sand, or some trick the farmers all knew. Trick or no trick, what I had always been able to do well now seemed inaccessible. Still, I searched the yard around our house for the best spot to plant my fall garden.
”
”
Rhonda Riley (The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope)
“
Their conversations were almost all domestic now – about Zola, mostly; but also grocery shopping, home improvements, summer holiday plans, whether it was time to invite some or other combination of their families over for lunch.
”
”
Kamila Shamsie (Best of Friends)
“
Through much resistance on my part, you made it easy, and it was so different from basic relationships or familial love. I didn’t know what it was about you that made things so peculiar. You talk about your scent fetish, but as it turned out, I was also addicted to yours.
It wasn’t a game for me, and I felt it much deeper than I can probably even describe in words—the combining of souls. If you weren’t around, I found myself missing you; I found myself needing you. My body, my mind, and my spirit need you.
I am the world’s biggest fool, the biggest pain in the ass, but I’m stupidly, unapologetically, and whole-heartedly in love with you. I’ve waited so long to tell you that."-Tara
”
”
R.N.A. (Parasite (Para-Series #1))
“
Imagine, a First World country founded on egalitarian principles in which the top 20 per cent of households have 84 per cent of the wealth, while the bottom 40 per cent have 0.3 per cent; and one family, the Waltons, owns more than the bottom 40 per cent of US families combined; and the ratio of CEO salary to unskilled worker is 354 to 1 (fifty years ago it was 20 to 1). A minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, which is 34 per cent less than workers on the minimum were getting in 1968. More than 20 per cent of children in the United States live in poverty, more than twice the rate of any European country. With a quarter of totalitarian China’s population, democratic America has about the same number of people in jail.
”
”
Don Watson (Quarterly Essay 63 Enemy Within: American Politics in the Time of Trump)
“
You are the type of female who grows more lovely, not by false paints or creams, but by being a complete woman, a woman who knows intelligence, sympathy, forgiveness, generosity, and love of family. I cannot imagine a more perfect combination.
”
”
Regina Jeffers (Mr. Darcy's Bargain: A Pride and Prejudice Vagary)
“
So if you hear something in this book that sounds like advocacy of a particular political point of view, please reject the notion. My interest in issues is merely to point out how badly we’re doing, not to suggest a way we might do better.
Don’t confuse me with those who cling to hope. I enjoy describing how things are, I have no interest in how they ought to be. And I certainly have no interest in fixing them. I sincerely believe that if you think there’s a solution, you’re part of the problem.
My motto: Fuck Hope.
P.S. In case you’re wondering, personally I’m a joyful individual, I had a long happy marriage and a close and loving family, my career has turned out better than I ever dreamed, and it continues to expand. I’m a personal optimist, but a skeptic about all else. What may sound to some like anger, is really nothing more than sympathetic contempt. I view my species with a combination of wonder and pity, and I root for its destruction. And please don’t confuse my point of view with cynicism–the real cynics are the ones who tell you everything’s gonna be all right.
And P.P.S., by the way, if by some chance you folks do manage to straighten things out and make everything better, I still don’t wish to be included.
”
”
George Carlin (Brain Droppings)
“
You are a combination of all of the power held by the Elders who were still living when your mother got pregnant. You have the normal Elder power you should, but you also hold power from all five families. You are the only one to ever hold this power.
”
”
Stormy Smith (Bound by Duty (Bound, #1))
“
Women have complained, justly, about the behavior of “macho” men. But despite their he-man pretensions and their captivation by masculine heroes of sports, war, and the Old West, most men are now entirely accustomed to obeying and currying the favor of their bosses. Because of this, of course, they hate their jobs — they mutter, “Thank God it’s Friday” and “Pretty good for Monday”— but they do as they are told. They are more compliant than most housewives have been. Their characters combine feudal submissiveness with modern helplessness. They have accepted almost without protest, and often with relief, their dispossession of any usable property and, with that, their loss of economic independence and their consequent subordination to bosses. They have submitted to the destruction of the household economy and thus of the household, to the loss of home employment and self-employment, to the disintegration of their families and communities, to the desecration and pillage of their country, and they have continued abjectly to believe, obey, and vote for the people who have most eagerly abetted this ruin and who have most profited from it. These men, moreover, are helpless to do anything for themselves or anyone else without money, and so for money they do whatever they are told.
”
”
Wendell Berry (The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry)
“
Codependency is a learned set of behaviors, thought processes, and habits. When combined together, they fit a very loose definition. All people exhibit these traits to some degree, but some of us allow them to dictate our relationships with others and ourselves.
”
”
David Walton Earle
“
Rikki looked over at me.
“Why now?" she asked, looking back at Arly. “Why is this happening now?"
"Hard to say." Arly [therapist] replied. "DID usually gets diagnosed in adulthood. Something happens that triggers the alters to come out. When Cam's father died and he came in to help his brother run the family business he was in close contact with his mother again. Maybe it was seeing Kyle around the same age when some of the abuse happened. Cam was sick for a long time and finally got better. Maybe he wasn't strong enough until now to handle this. It's probably a combination of things. But it sure looks like some of the abuse Cam experienced involved his mother. And sexual abuse by the mother is considered to he one of the most traumatic forms of abuse. In some ways it's the ultimate betrayal.
”
”
Cameron West (First Person Plural: My Life as a Multiple)
“
After the New Deal, economists began referring to America’s retirement-finance model as a “three-legged stool.” This sturdy tripod was composed of Social Security, private pensions, and combined investments and savings. In recent years, of course, two of those legs have been kicked out. Many Americans saw their assets destroyed by the Great Recession; even before the economic collapse, many had been saving less and less. And since the 1980s, employers have been replacing defined-benefit pensions that are funded by employers and guarantee a monthly sum in perpetuity with 401(k) plans, which often rely on employee contributions and can run dry before death. Marketed as instruments of financial liberation that would allow workers to make their own investment choices, 401(k)s were part of a larger cultural drift in America away from shared responsibilities toward a more precarious individualism. Translation: 401(k)s are vastly cheaper for companies than pension plans. “Over the last generation, we have witnessed a massive transfer of economic risk from broad structures of insurance, including those sponsored by the corporate sector as well as by government, onto the fragile balance sheets of American families,” Yale political scientist Jacob S. Hacker writes in his book The Great Risk Shift. The overarching message: “You are on your own.
”
”
Jessica Bruder (Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century)
“
The word is dissociate. There is no 'a' before the 'ss'. People invariably say dis-a-ssociate, which, if you're suffering Disso-ciative Identity Disorder/Multiple Personality Disorder, can be irritating. People then want to know how many personalities I have and the answer is: I don't know. The first book about Multiple Personality Disorder to make an impact was Flora Rheta Schreiber's Sybil, published in 1973, which carries the subtitle: The True and Extraordinary Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Separate Personalities. Corbett H. Thigpen and Hervey M. Cleckley published the controversial The Three Faces of Eve much earlier in 1957, and Pete Townshend from The Who wrote the song 'Four Faces'. People seem to feel safe with numbers.
The truth is more complicated. The kids emerged over time. Billy, the boisterous five-year-old, was at first the most dominant. But he slowly stood aside for JJ, the self-confident ten-year-old who appears when Alice is under stress and handles complicated situations like travelling on the Underground and meeting new people. The first entity to visit was the external voice of the Professor. But he had a choir of accomplices without names. So, how many actual alter personalities are there? I would say more than fifteen and less than thirty, a combination of protectors, persecutors and friends - my own family tree.
”
”
Alice Jamieson (Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind)
“
I stop in exasperation and almost storm out of the Airstream, fed up with myself and with my sister, filled with that itchy combination of fatigue and anxiety that my entire family produces in me. An allergic reaction for which antihistamines can do nothing. I want a drink.
”
”
Caite Dolan-Leach (Dead Letters)
“
These in combination with the photographs of family and friends give it a cozy, domestic flavor which is, however, completely ruined by the framed picture of Adolf Hitler on the wall. Waterhouse finds this to be in shockingly poor taste until he remembers it’s a German boat.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon)
“
I was from everywhere and nowhere at once, a combination of ill-fitting parts, like a platypus or some imaginary beast, confined to a fragile habitat, unsure of where I belonged. And I sensed, without fully understanding why or how, that unless I could stitch my life together and situate myself along some firm axis, I might end up in some basic way living my life alone. I didn’t talk to anyone about this, certainly not my friends or family. I didn’t want to hurt their feelings or stand out more than I already did. But I did find refuge in books.
”
”
Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
“
The psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson devoted a chapter in his Pulitzer Prize—winning book, Childhood and Society, to his reflections on the American identity. “This dynamic country,” he wrote, “subjects its inhabitants to more extreme contrasts and abrupt changes during a generation than is normally
the case with other great nations.”
Such trends have only accelerated since Erikson made that observation in 1950. The effects of rapid social and economic shifts on the parenting environment are too well known to need detailing here. The erosion of community, the breakdown of the extended family, the pressures on marriage relationships, the harried lives of nuclear families still intact and the growing sense of insecurity even in the midst of relative wealth have all combined to create an emotional milieu in which calm, attuned parenting is becoming alarmingly difficult.
The result being successive generations of children in alienation, drug use and violence — what Robert Bly has astutely described as “the rage of the unparented.” Bly notes in The Sibling Society that “in 1935 the average working man had forty hours a week free, including Saturday. By 1990, it was down to seventeen hours. The twenty-three lost hours of free time a week since 1935 are the very hours in which the father could be a nurturing father, and find some center in himself, and the very hours in which the mother could feel she actually has a husband.”
These patterns characterize not only the earlyyears of parenting, but entire childhoods. “Family meals, talks, reading together no longer take place,” writes Bly. “What the young need — stability, presence, attention, advice, good psychic food, unpolluted stories — is exactly what the sibling society won’t give them.
”
”
Gabor Maté (Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It)
“
(Before the twentieth century was out that could be worded, “—most people can’t read.” One of the things I learned in studying the histories of my home planet and century on various time lines was that in the decline and fall that took place on every one of them there was one invariant: illiteracy. In addition to that scandalous flaw, on three time lines were both drug abuse and concurrent crime in the streets, plus a corrupt and spendthrift government. My own time line had endless psychotic fads followed by religious frenzy; time line seven had continuous wars; three time lines had collapse of family life and marriage—but every time line had loss of literacy…combined with—riddle me this—more money per student spent on education than ever before in each history. Never were so many paid so much for accomplishing so little. By 1980 the teachers themselves were only semiliterate.)
”
”
Robert A. Heinlein (To Sail Beyond the Sunset)
“
I was terrified my father and Laurene might tell me at some point how insignificant I was, what a disappointment I was, sloppy and repulsive, breaking things like a baby. They already had a baby. How little I fit into the picture of family. I could see it and they'd made a mistake in allowing me to live here; I was unsure of my position in the house, and this anxiety—combined with a feeling of immense gratitude so overwhelming I thought I might burst—caused me to talk too much, to compliment too much, to say yes to whatever they asked, hoping my servile quality would ignite compassion, pity, or love.
”
”
Lisa Brennan-Jobs (Small Fry: A Memoir)
“
My own choice of a single-variable measure for rapid and revealing comparisons of quality of life is infant mortality: the number of deaths during the first year of life that take place per 1,000 live births. Infant mortality is such a powerful indicator because low rates are impossible to achieve without having a combination of several critical conditions that define good quality of life—good healthcare in general, and appropriate prenatal, perinatal, and neonatal care in particular; proper maternal and infant nutrition; adequate and sanitary living conditions; and access to social support for disadvantaged families—and that are also predicated on relevant government and private spending, and on infrastructures and incomes that can maintain usage and access. A single variable thus captures a number of prerequisites for the near-universal survival of the most critical period of life: the first year.
”
”
Vaclav Smil (Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Things You Need to Know About the World)
“
Technically, anything that a ministry does for the family could be called family ministry but that's actually part of the problem. There is a difference between doing something FOR the family and doing something WITH the family. Family ministry should not be another program you add to your list of programs. It should develop the process that drives how both the church and the home combine their effort to influence the next generation in their faith and character. If you really believe that nothing is more important than someone's relationship with God, it makes sense to combine the influences of the home and church.
”
”
Reggie Joiner (Think Orange: Imagine the Impact When Church and Family Collide...)
“
Uncle Nick was very sick—so sick—and he was very sad. So he chose to end his life with a gun.” Once the trauma of the event passed, I made sure my son understood our family history and what options were available for those struggling with depression. Silence and mental illness are not a very effective combination.
”
”
Elizabeth Koehler-Pentacoff (The Missing Kennedy: Rosemary Kennedy and the Secret Bonds of Four Women)
“
Tea seeped in a silver pot embossed with the seal of the Philipse family, a lion emerging from a coronet, with its tongue sticking out of its mouth. A delicious hint of citrus combined with coconut emerged as his cup was filled three-quarters. The wisps of steam rose and curled in the sunlight coming through the window.
”
”
Mary Calvi (Dear George, Dear Mary: A Novel of George Washington's First Love)
“
Love is a mighty pretty thing; but like all other delicious things, it is cloying; and when the first transports of the passion begins to subside, which it assuredly will do, and yield—oftentimes too late—to more sober reflections, it serves to evince, that love is too dainty a food to live upon alone, and ought not to be considered farther, than as a necessary ingredient for that matrimonial happiness which results from a combination of causes; none of which are of greater importance, than that the object on whom it is placed, should possess good sense—good dispositions—and the means of supporting you in the way you have been brought up.
”
”
George Washington
“
The odd agglomeration of Warshaws, the product of a long and determined program of overseas adoptions, with its combination of Jews and Koreans, intellectuals, space cadets, and sharpies, no two of them related by blood, seemed to offer me the best chance yet to wire my wandering meteor to the armillary sphere of a family.
”
”
Michael Chabon (Wonder Boys)
“
You have to judge things by the result," Shirley continued. "And the result in which you can exult is that the very best was combined in you: grace, brains, creativity, beauty. Whatever alien, mechanical, outside element was in the story—it was a story of success. You have such a rich endowment. You have been so recompensed. You carry the heightened sensitivity, to be sure. You carry the pain and you also carry the reward."
Her voice—hoarse from speaking for hours—was a part of me. Her strong hands, her expressive forehead, her sweet smile—all a part of me, because she had always been a part of me. I had been so afraid that blood would be all that mattered.
”
”
Dani Shapiro (Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love)
“
When Leonardo was painting The Last Supper (fig. 74), spectators would visit and sit quietly just so they could watch him work. The creation of art, like the discussion of science, had become at times a public event. According to the account of a priest, Leonardo would “come here in the early hours of the morning and mount the scaffolding,” and then “remain there brush in hand from sunrise to sunset, forgetting to eat or drink, painting continually.” On other days, however, nothing would be painted. “He would remain in front of it for one or two hours and contemplate it in solitude, examining and criticizing to himself the figures he had created.” Then there were dramatic days that combined his obsessiveness and his penchant for procrastination. As if caught by whim or passion, he would arrive suddenly in the middle of the day, “climb the scaffolding, seize a brush, apply a brush stroke or two to one of the figures, and suddenly depart.”1 Leonardo’s quirky work habits may have fascinated the public, but they eventually began to worry Ludovico Sforza. Upon the death of his nephew, he had become the official Duke of Milan in early 1494, and he set about enhancing his stature in a time-honored way, through art patronage and public commissions. He also wanted to create a holy mausoleum for himself and his family, choosing a small but elegant church and monastery in the heart of Milan, Santa Maria delle Grazie, which he had Leonardo’s friend Donato Bramante reconstruct. For the north wall of the new dining hall, or refectory, he had commissioned Leonardo to paint a Last Supper, one of the most popular scenes in religious art. At first Leonardo’s procrastination led to amusing tales, such as the time the church prior became frustrated and complained to Ludovico. “He wanted him never to lay down his brush, as if he were a laborer hoeing the Prior’s garden,” Vasari wrote. When Leonardo was summoned by the duke, they ended up having a discussion of how creativity occurs. Sometimes it requires going slowly, pausing, even procrastinating. That allows ideas to marinate, Leonardo explained. Intuition needs nurturing. “Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least,” he told the duke, “for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.
”
”
Walter Isaacson (Leonardo Da Vinci)
“
The oyakodan is delicious. It's perfectly representative of the subtler side of Japanese food, not the guts side. I dipped my spoon through the omelet and pulled up a scrag of egg, a cube of chicken, and a clump of rice. It was one of those predestined combinations, like shrimp and grits, rounded out perfectly by the hint of soy sauce.
”
”
Matthew Amster-Burton (Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo)
“
A strong back is a big help but not even the strongest back was built for that treatment, and there combine not just at the kidneys, ad rill down the thighs and up the spine and athwart the shoulders, the ticklish weakness of gruel or water, and an aching that increases in geometric progression, and at length, in the small of the spine, a literal sensation of yielding, buckling, splintering, and breakage: and all of this, even though the mercy of nature has strengthened and hardened your flesh and anesthetized your nerves and your powers of reflection and imagination, reaches in time the brain and the more mirrorlike nerves, and thereby makes itself much worse than before.
”
”
James Agee (Cotton Tenants: Three Families)
“
A Wrong Planet Chef always take an interest in the origins of the food he cooks. A particular dish of vegetables, herbs and spices could, for instance, have begun life 5000 years ago on the Indian subcontinent, perhaps in Central India where vegetarian Hindi food is considered as God (Brahman) as it sustains the entire physical, mental, emotional and sensual aspects of the human being. The dish may then have migrated to the Punjab region of the Indian-Pakistan border - The Land of Five Waters - around 250 BC, and from here could have moved on to Western Asia or North Africa as soldiers and merchants moved west with their families into the Eastern parts of the Roman empire, where the cooks would have experimented with new combinations of food, adding fruits, shellfish or poultry to the exotic dish. The dish could then have travelled in any direction heading North through Germany or Sweden to Britain or maybe migrating through Persia or North Africa to Spain and Portugal, creating two very distinct and separate menus but meeting once again in France
”
”
Karl Wiggins (Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe)
“
It was possibly a combination of these feelings that led Gerald to join the army in the summer of 1918. There was really no necessity for him to do so. He was forty-five, with a family and responsibilities, and, whatever his private thoughts about the stage as a career, he held a prominent position in public life. He was hopelessly unfitted for a soldier’s duties.
”
”
Daphne du Maurier (Gerald: A Portrait)
“
Their combined ages were two hundred and sixty-three years. None of them had ever been out of England, fought in a war, been in prison, ridden a horse, travelled in an aeroplane, got married, or given birth to a child. There seemed no reason why they should not continue in the same style until they died. Year in, year out, nothing ever happened in the Comstock family.
”
”
George Orwell (Keep the Aspidistra Flying)
“
We have good news and bad news. The good news is that the dismal vision of human sexuality reflected in the standard narrative is mistaken. Men have not evolved to be deceitful cads, nor have millions of years shaped women into lying, two-timing gold-diggers. But the bad news is that the amoral agencies of evolution have created in us a species with a secret it just can’t keep. Homo sapiens evolved to be shamelessly, undeniably, inescapably sexual. Lusty libertines. Rakes, rogues, and roués. Tomcats and sex kittens. Horndogs. Bitches in heat.1 True, some of us manage to rise above this aspect of our nature (or to sink below it). But these preconscious impulses remain our biological baseline, our reference point, the zero in our own personal number system. Our evolved tendencies are considered “normal” by the body each of us occupies. Willpower fortified with plenty of guilt, fear, shame, and mutilation of body and soul may provide some control over these urges and impulses. Sometimes. Occasionally. Once in a blue moon. But even when controlled, they refuse to be ignored. As German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer pointed out, Mensch kann tun was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will. (One can choose what to do, but not what to want.) Acknowledged or not, these evolved yearnings persist and clamor for our attention. And there are costs involved in denying one’s evolved sexual nature, costs paid by individuals, couples, families, and societies every day and every night. They are paid in what E. O. Wilson called “the less tangible currency of human happiness that must be spent to circumvent our natural predispositions.”2 Whether or not our society’s investment in sexual repression is a net gain or loss is a question for another time. For now, we’ll just suggest that trying to rise above nature is always a risky, exhausting endeavor, often resulting in spectacular collapse. Any attempt to understand who we are, how we got to be this way, and what to do about it must begin by facing up to our evolved human sexual predispositions. Why do so many forces resist our sustained fulfillment? Why is conventional marriage so much damned work? How has the incessant, grinding campaign of socio-scientific insistence upon the naturalness of sexual monogamy combined with a couple thousand years of fire and brimstone failed to rid even the priests, preachers, politicians, and professors of their prohibited desires? To see ourselves as we are, we must begin by acknowledging that of all Earth’s creatures, none is as urgently, creatively, and constantly sexual as Homo sapiens.
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Christopher Ryan (Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships)
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Go on from here, Ada, please. (She). Billions of boys. Take one fairly decent decade. A billion of Bills, good, gifted, tender and passionate, not only spiritually but physically well-meaning Billions, have bared the jillions of their no less tender and brilliant Jills during that decade, at stations and under conditions that have to be controlled and specified by the worker, lest the entire report be choked up by the weeds of statistics and waist-high generalizations. No point would there be, if we left out, for example, the little matter of prodigious individual awareness and young genius, which makes, in some cases, of this or that particular gasp an unprecedented and unrepeatable event in the continuum of life or at least a thematic anthemia of such events in a work of art, or a denouncer’s article. The details that shine through or shade through: the local leaf through the hyaline skin, the green sun in the brown humid eye, tout ceci, vsyo eto, in tit and toto, must be taken into account, now prepare to take over (no, Ada, go on, ya zaslushalsya: I’m all enchantment and ears), if we wish to convey the fact, the fact, the fact—that among those billions of brilliant couples in one cross section of what you will allow me to call spacetime (for the convenience of reasoning), one couple is a unique super-imperial couple, sverhimperator-skaya cheta, in consequence of which (to be inquired into, to be painted, to be denounced, to be put to music, or to the question and death, if the decade has a scorpion tail after all), the particularities of their love-making influence in a special unique way two long lives and a few readers, those pensive reeds, and their pens and mental paintbrushes. Natural history indeed! Unnatural history—because that precision of senses and sense must seem unpleasantly peculiar to peasants, and because the detail is all: The song of a Tuscan Firecrest or a Sitka Kinglet in a cemetery cypress; a minty whiff of Summer Savory or Yerba Buena on a coastal slope; the dancing flitter of a Holly Blue or an Echo Azure—combined with other birds, flowers and butterflies: that has to be heard, smelled and seen through the transparency of death and ardent beauty. And the most difficult: beauty itself as perceived through the there and then. The males of the firefly (now it’s really your turn, Van).
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Vladimir Nabokov (Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (Vintage International))
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In a medium mixing bowl, combine all the ingredients except the meatballs and pour into a labeled 1-gallon freezer bag. Tape this bag to the meatball package and freeze. To serve, thaw the ingredients of both bags. Pour the soup ingredients into a large saucepan. Bring to boil, reduce the heat, and simmer 30 minutes. Add the meatballs and simmer for 10 to 15 minutes, stirring occasionally.
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Mary Beth Lagerborg (Once-a-Month Cooking Family Favorites: More Great Recipes That Save You Time and Money from the Inventors of the Ultimate Do-Ahead Dinnertime Method)
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I began my life as I shall no doubt end it: among books. In my grandfather's study, they were everywhere; it was forbidden to dust them except once a year, before the October term. Even before I could read, I already revered these raised stones; upright or leaning, wedged together like bricks on the library shelves or nobly placed like avenues of dolmens, I felt that our family prosperity depended on them. They were all alike, and I was romping about in a tiny sanctuary, surrounded by squat, ancient monuments which had witnessed my birth, which would witness my death and whose permanence guaranteed me a future as calm as my past. I used to touch them in secret to honour my hands with their dust but I did not have much idea what to do with them and each day I was present at ceremonies whose meaning escaped me: my grandfather - so clumy, normally, that my grandmother buttoned his gloves for him - handled these cultural objects with the dexterity of an officiating priest. Hundreds of times I saw him get up absent-mindedly, walk round the table, cross the room in two strides, unhesitatingly pick out a volume without allowing himself time for choice, run through it as he went back to his armchair, with a combined movement of his thumb and right forefinger, and, almost before he sat down, open it with a flick "at the right page," making it creak like a shoe. I sometimes got close enough to observe these boxes which opened like oysters and I discovered the nakedness of their internal organs, pale, dank, slightly blistering pages, covered with small black veins, which drank ink and smelt of mildew.
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Jean-Paul Sartre (The Words: The Autobiography of Jean-Paul Sartre)
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Simply, singing may be the one human activity that most perfectly combines heart, mind, soul, and strength. Almost everything else we do requires at least one of these fundamental human faculties: the heart, the seat of the emotion and the will; the mind, with which we explore and explain the world; the soul, the heart of human dignity and personhood; and strength, our bodies’ ability to bring about change in the world. But singing (and maybe only singing) combines them all. When we sing in worship, our minds are engaged with the text and what it says about us and God, our hearts are moved and express a range of emotions, our bodily strength is required, and—if we sing with “soul”—we reach down into the depths of our beings to do justice to the joy and heartbreak of human life. To sing well—not in the sense of singing in perfect tune or like a professional, but in this sense of bringing heart, mind, soul, and strength to our singing—is to touch the deepest truths about the world. It is to know wisdom. And it’s also to develop the courage and character to declare that God is this good, that we are this in need of him, that we are this thankful, that we are this committed to be part of his story.
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Andy Crouch (The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place)
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Berlin, moreover, was not yet the supercharged outpost it would become within the year. There existed at this time a widespread perception that Hitler’s government could not possibly endure. Germany’s military power was limited—its army, the Reichswehr, had only one hundred thousand men, no match for the military forces of neighboring France, let alone the combined might of France, England, Poland, and the Soviet Union.
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Erik Larson (In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin)
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Over the past few decades, we have developed euphemisms to help us forget how we, as a nation, have segregated African American citizens. We have become embarrassed about saying ghetto, a word that accurately describes a neighborhood where government has not only concentrated a minority but established barriers to its exit. We don’t hesitate to acknowledge that Jews in Eastern Europe were forced to live in ghettos where opportunity was limited and leaving was difficult or impossible. Yet when we encounter similar neighborhoods in this country, we now delicately refer to them as the inner city, yet everyone knows what we mean. (When affluent whites gentrify the same geographic areas, we don’t characterize those whites as inner city families.) Before we became ashamed to admit that the country had circumscribed African Americans in ghettos, analysts of race relations, both African American and white, consistently and accurately used ghetto to describe low-income African American neighborhoods, created by public policy, with a shortage of opportunity, and with barriers to exit. No other term succinctly describes this combination of characteristics, so I use the term as well.† We’ve developed other euphemisms, too, so that polite company doesn’t have to confront our history of racial exclusion. When we consider problems that arise when African Americans are absent in significant numbers from schools that whites attend, we say we seek diversity, not racial integration. When we wish to pretend that the nation did not single out African Americans in a system of segregation specifically aimed at them, we diffuse them as just another people of color. I try to avoid such phrases.
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Richard Rothstein (The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America)
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Look at the First Emperor of China’s successor…his son. Qin Shi Huang was a huge success because he had skills that he combined with hard work and ambition to unify all the separate kingdoms of China into one. However, sadly, his heir to the throne did not have the same drive and work ethic. Within a few years, Qin Shi Huang’s kingdom fell and was replaced by a new family.”- Amazon Lee Adventures by Kira G. and Kailin Gow
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Kira G, Kailin Gow
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The world of the almanac was a queer one. In the real world, families branched like trees, blood mixed by marriage passed from one generation to the next, making an ever-wider net of connections. Titles, on the other hand, passed from one man to one man, and it was this narrow, linear progression that the almanac liked to highlight. On each side of the title line were a few younger brothers, nephews, cousins, who came close enough to fall within the span of the almanac’s illumination. The men who might have been lord or baronet. And, though it was not said, the men who still might, if the right string of tragedies were to occur. But after a certain number of branchings in the family tree, the names fell out of the margins and into the ether. No combination of shipwreck, plague and earthquake would be powerful enough to restore these third cousins to prominence. The almanac had its limits.
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Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale)
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Winfree came from a family in which no one had gone to college. He got started, he would say, by not having proper education. His father, rising from the bottom of the life insurance business to the level of vice president, moved family almost yearly up and down the East Coast, and Winfree attended than a dozen schools before finishing high school. He developed a feeling that the interesting things in the world had to do with biology and mathematics and a companion feeling that no standard combination of the two subjects did justice to what was interesting. So he decided not to take a standard approach. He took a five-year course in engineering physics at Cornell University, learning applied mathematics and a full range of hands-on laboratory styles. Prepared to be hired into military-industrial complex, he got a doctorate in biology, striving to combine experiment with theory in new ways.
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James Gleick (Chaos: Making a New Science)
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Biden’s victory was a relief for the rest of the world, but only a brief one. Trump wasn’t the problem. He was a symptom of the cancer that exists deep within America. A willfully uneducated population combined with deep-rooted race problems, fear of the outside world, and an inability to accept criticism, means that the next Trump is going to be worse. I don’t know what the cure is. I don’t know how to fix America. Happily, that’s not my job. My job is to make fun of it all and puncture the hypocrisy. Yeah, I know the mantra is “We all must join together, jerk each other off, and heal as a nation,” but how do you heal something that was never truly together? How do you fix something that won’t admit it’s broken? How do you stop the most powerful nation in the world from tearing itself apart from the inside because they’ve become so scared that they now wish death on their fellow Americans?
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Daniel Sloss (Everyone You Hate Is Going to Die: And Other Comforting Thoughts on Family, Friends, Sex, Love, and More Things That Ruin Your Life)
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Toland was the first modern pantheist to combine a religious reverence for the Universe, with respect for science, and a belief that everything is made of matter. A pantheist, he wrote to the German philosopher Leibniz, was one of those persons "who believe in no other eternal being but the universe." When asked for a brief statement of his credo, Toland replied, "The sun is my father, the earth my mother, the world is my country and all men are my family.
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Paul Harrison (Elements of Pantheism; A Spirituality of Nature and the Universe)
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tear. Short and nebbishy, he had a charmingly awkward persona that concealed a big ambition: to establish Condé Nast as the most prestigious magazine company in the world. Within a year of his father’s death in 1979, Si, in rapid succession, bought the most important publishing house in America, Random House, whose imprints included Alfred A. Knopf, the prestige literary house; oversaw the successful start-up of a pioneering health and fitness magazine, Self; and bought and revamped Gentleman’s Quarterly, better known as GQ. And he was always on the lookout for more. Si was the aesthete in the Newhouse family. He combined an eye for business opportunity with a passion for art, design, and high gloss. Intellectually insecure, he relied on the self-confident baron of taste and flair he had inherited from his father’s circle: Alexander Liberman, Condé Nast’s editorial director. Liberman—Russian-born, like Alexey Brodovitch, his
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Tina Brown (The Vanity Fair Diaries: Power, Wealth, Celebrity, and Dreams: My Years at the Magazine That Defined a Decade)
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They wanted you to grow up into some helpless combination of old person and infant. They wanted you to have a house and a family and a refrigerator and a TV, and not know how any of it worked. They wanted you to spend your life working on something that was never concrete, never anything you could see or hold in your hands, and if you didn't do that they wanted to put you in jail. Cutting down forests, poisoning the earth - it was a country driven by stupid, blind impulse. It was a country where nobody knew where their food came from or where their garbage went, they just flushed the bowl, kept eating it and throwing it away, building bombs and computers, cars and TVs, sending people off to Vietnam so they could set it on fire. It was a country that had turned against everyone he knew, cast them out like garbage, and all they could do was smile to themselves at all they'd learned and wait patiently for the fires to start here at home.
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Zachary Lazar (Sway)
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The central fact of biblical history, the birth of the Messiah, more than any other, presupposes the design of Providence in the selecting and uniting of successive producers, and the real, paramount interest of the biblical narratives is concentrated on the various and wondrous fates, by which are arranged the births and combinations of the 'fathers of God.' But in all this complicated system of means, having determined in the order of historical phenomena the birth of the Messiah, there was no room for love in the proper meaning of the word. Love is, of course, encountered in the Bible, but only as an independent fact and not as an instrument in the process of the genealogy of Christ. The sacred book does not say that Abram took Sarai to wife by force of an ardent love, and in any case Providence must have waited until this love had grown completely cool for the centenarian progenitors to produce a child of faith, not of love. Isaac married Rebekah not for love but in accordance with an earlier formed resolution and the design of his father. Jacob loved Rachel, but this love turned out to be unnecessary for the origin of the Messiah. He was indeed to be born of a son of Jacob - Judah - but the latter was the offspring, not of Rachel but of the unloved wife, Leah. For the production in the given generation of the ancestor of the Messiah, what was necessary was the union of Jacob precisely with Leah; but to attain this union Providence did not awaken in Jacob any powerful passion of love for the future mother of the 'father of God' - Judah. Not infringing the liberty of Jacob's heartfelt feeling, the higher power permitted him to love Rachel, but for his necessary union with Leah it made use of means of quite a different kind: the mercenary cunning of a third person - devoted to his own domestic and economic interests - Laban. Judah himself, for the production of the remote ancestors of the Messiah, besides his legitimate posterity, had in his old age to marry his daughter-in-law Tamar. Seeing that such a union was not at all in the natural order of things, and indeed could not take place under ordinary conditions, that end was attained by means of an extremely strange occurrence very seductive to superficial readers of the Bible. Nor in such an occurrence could there be any talk of love. It was not love which combined the priestly harlot Rahab with the Hebrew stranger; she yielded herself to him at first in the course of her profession, and afterwards the casual bond was strengthened by her faith in the power of the new God and in the desire for his patronage for herself and her family. It was not love which united David's great-grandfather, the aged Boaz, with the youthful Moabitess Ruth, and Solomon was begotten not from genuine, profound love, but only from the casual, sinful caprice of a sovereign who was growing old.
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Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov (The Meaning of Love)
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I was born because a scientist managed to hook up my mother's eggs and my father's sperm to create a specific combination of precious genetic material. In fact, when Jesse told me how babies get made and I, the great disbeliever, decided to ask my parents the truth, I got more than I bargained for. They sat me down and told me all the
usual stuff, of course--but they also explained that they chose little embryonic me, specifically, because I could save my sister, Kate. "We loved you even more," my mother made sure to say, "because we knew what exactly we were getting."
It made me wonder, though, what would have happened if Kate had been healthy. Chances are, I'd still be floating up in Heaven or wherever, waiting to be attached to a body to spend some time on Earth. Certainly I would not be part of this family. See, unlike the rest of the free world, I didn't get here by accident. And if your parents have you for a reason, then that reason better exist. Because
once it's gone, so are you.
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Jodi Picoult (My Sister's Keeper)
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Traditionally, Afghanistan has been less a state in the conventional sense than a geographic expression for an area never brought under the consistent administration of any single authority. Unification of Afghanistan has been achieved by foreigners only unintentionally, when the tribes and sects coalesce in opposition to an invader. Thus what American and NATO forces met in the early twenty-first century was not radically different from the scene encountered by a young Winston Churchill in 1897: Except at harvest-time, when self-preservation enjoins a temporary truce, the Pathan [Pashtun] tribes are always engaged in private or public war. Every man is a warrior, a politician, and a theologian. Every large house is a real feudal fortress ... Every village has its defence. Every family cultivates its vendetta; every clan, its feud. The numerous tribes and combinations of tribes all have their accounts to settle with one another. Nothing is ever forgotten, and very few debts are left unpaid.
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Henry Kissinger (World Order)
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Andrographis (Andrographis paniculata), an herb commonly used in traditional Indian medicine (Ayurveda), has been shown to reduce symptoms both alone and when combined with another herb, eleuthero (Eleutherococcus senticosus). Astragalus (Astragalus membranaceus), obtained from the root of a plant in the pea family, has been used for centuries in China to ward off respiratory infections. I recommend it preventively throughout cold and flu season, especially for people who tend to catch “everything going around.
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Andrew Weil (Mind Over Meds: Know When Drugs Are Necessary, When Alternatives Are Better and When to Let Your Body Heal on Its Own)
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Imagine you live on a planet where the dominant species is far more intellectually sophisticated than human beings but often keeps humans as companion animals. They are called the Gorns. They communicate with each other via a complex combination of telepathy, eye movements & high-pitched squeaks, all completely unintelligible & unlearnable by humans, whose brains are prepared for verbal language acquisition only.
Humans sometimes learn the meaning of individual sounds by repeated association with things of relevance to them. The Gorns & humans bond strongly but there are many Gorn rules that humans must try to assimilate with limited information & usually high stakes. You are one of the lucky humans who lives with the Gorns in their dwelling. Many other humans are chained to small cabanas in the yard or kept in outdoor pens of varying size. They are so socially starved they cannot control their emotions when a Gorn goes near them. The Gorns agree that they could never be House-Humans.
The dwelling you share with your Gorn family is filled with water-filled porcelain bowls.Every time you try to urinate in one,nearby Gorn attack you. You learn to only use the toilet when there are no Gorns present. Sometimes they come home & stuff your head down the toilet for no apparent reason. You hate this & start sucking up to the Gorns when they come home to try & stave this off but they view this as evidence of your guilt. You are also punished for watching videos, reading books, talking to other human beings, eating pizza or cheesecake, & writing letters. These are all considered behavior problems by the Gorns.
To avoid going crazy, once again you wait until they are not around to try doing anything you wish to do. While they are around, you sit quietly, staring straight ahead. Because they witness this good behavior you are so obviously capable of, they attribute to “spite” the video watching & other transgressions that occur when you are alone. Obviously you resent being left alone, they figure. You are walked several times a day and left crossword puzzle books to do. You have never used them because you hate crosswords; the Gorns think you’re ignoring them out of revenge. Worst of all, you like them. They are, after all, often nice to you. But when you smile at them, they punish you, likewise for shaking hands. If you apologize they punish you again.
You have not seen another human since you were a small child. When you see one you are curious, excited & afraid. You really don’t know how to act. So, the Gorn you live with keeps you away from other humans. Your social skills never develop.
Finally, you are brought to “training” school. A large part of the training consists of having your air briefly cut off by a metal chain around your neck. They are sure you understand every squeak & telepathic communication they make because sometimes you get it right. You are guessing & hate the training. You feel pretty stressed out a lot of the time. One day, you see a Gorn approaching with the training collar in hand. You have PMS, a sore neck & you just don’t feel up to the baffling coercion about to ensue. You tell them in your sternest voice to please leave you alone & go away. The Gorns are shocked by this unprovoked aggressive behavior. They thought you had a good temperament.
They put you in one of their vehicles & take you for a drive. You watch the attractive planetary landscape going by & wonder where you are going. You are led into a building filled with the smell of human sweat & excrement. Humans are everywhere in small cages. Some are nervous, some depressed, most watch the goings on on from their prisons. Your Gorns, with whom you have lived your entire life, hand you over to strangers who drag you to a small room. You are terrified & yell for your Gorn family to help you. They turn & walk away.You are held down & given a lethal injection. It is, after all, the humane way to do it.
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Jean Donaldson (The Culture Clash)
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Synergy refers to the interaction of elements that when combined produce a total effect that is greater than the sum of the individual elements. In the context of your business, consider how a team can put forth a collaborative effort that exceeds an individual’s output. Now on task, you may begin to share the key parts of your plan with the pillars of your business or family. Embrace the opportunity and be enthusiastic as you are assigning responsibilities. Everyone needs to have a “paddle in the canoe” and work in synchronicity to achieve the desired outcome.
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Tony Carlton (Evolve: Your Path. Your Time. Your Shine. (The Power of Evolving))
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In Denmark, people frustrated by the available housing options developed cohousing: a housing type that redefined the concept of neighborhood to fit contemporary lifestyles. Tired of the isolation and the impracticalities of traditional single-family houses and apartment units, they built housing that combines the autonomy of private dwellings with the advantages of community living. Each household has a private residence, but also shares extensive common facilities with the larger group, including kitchen and dining areas, workshops, laundry facilities, guest rooms, and more.
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Charles Durrett (The Senior Cohousing Handbook: A Community Approach to Independent Living)
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The Frankfurt School’s studies combined Marxist analysis with Freudian psychoanalysis to form the basis of what became known as “Critical Theory” – the destructive criticism of Western culture, including Christianity, capitalism, authority, the family, patriarchy, morality, tradition, sexual restraint, loyalty, patriotism, nationalism, ethno-centrism and conservatism. Critical Theory repeats over and over a mantra of alleged Western evils: racism, sexism, colonialism, nationalism, homophobia, fascism, xenophobia, imperialism and, of course, religious bigotry (only applied to Christianity).
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Kenneth Schultz (The Decline and Imminent Fall of the West: How the West can be Saved)
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It was time to take the best bits from them all and build something delicious: the spirituality of the Hindus, the community spirit and family ties of the Muslims, the ancient wisdom of the Chinese, the love of freedom and equality of the Afro-Caribbeans, the work ethic of the Jews, the bloody-mindedness and wry humour of the Australians, the blarney of the Irish, the passion of the Scots, the unorthodoxy of the Welsh, combined with our own English love of justice, fair play and democracy. Put them all together and you had a vision for the future, a direction, which Bokononism could exploit.
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Bernard Hare (Urban Grimshaw and The Shed Crew)
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The Arab world has done nothing to help the Palestinian refugees they created when they attacked Israel in 1948. It’s called the ‘Palestinian refugee problem.’ This is one of the best tricks that the Arabs have played on the world, and they have used it to their great advantage when fighting Israel in the forum of public opinion. This lie was pulled off masterfully, and everyone has been falling for it ever since. First you tell people to leave their homes and villages because you are going to come in and kick out the Jews the day after the UN grants Israel its nationhood. You fail in your military objective, the Jews are still alive and have more land now than before, and you have thousands of upset, displaced refugees living in your country because they believed in you. So you and the UN build refugee camps that are designed to last only five years and crowd the people in, instead of integrating them into your society and giving them citizenship.
After a few years of overcrowding and deteriorating living conditions, you get the media to visit and publish a lot of pictures of these poor people living in the hopeless, wretched squalor you have left them in. In 1967 you get all your cronies together with their guns and tanks and planes and start beating the war drums. Again the same old story: you really are going to kill all the Jews this time or drive them into the sea, and everyone will be able to go back home, take over what the Jews have developed, and live in a Jew-free Middle East. Again you fail and now there are even more refugees living in your countries, and Israel is even larger, with Jerusalem as its capital. Time for more pictures of more camps and suffering children. What is to be done about these poor refugees (that not even the Arabs want)? Then start Middle Eastern student organizations on U.S. college campuses and find some young, idealistic American college kids who have no idea of what has been described here so far, and have them take up the cause. Now enter some power-hungry type like Yasser Arafat who begins to blackmail you and your Arab friends, who created the mess, for guns and bombs and money to fight the Israelis. Then Arafat creates hell for the world starting in the 1970s with his terrorism, and the “Palestinian refugee problem” becomes a worldwide issue and galvanizes all your citizens and the world against Israel. Along come the suicide bombers, so to keep the pot boiling you finance the show by paying every bomber’s family twenty-five thousand dollars. This encourages more crazies to go blow themselves up, killing civilians and children riding buses to school. Saudi Arabia held telethons to raise thousands of dollars to the families of suicide bombers. What a perfect way to turn years of military failure into a public-opinion-campaign success. The perpetuation of lies and uncritical thinking, combined with repetitious anti-Jewish and anti-American diatribes, has produced a generation of Arab youth incapable of thinking in a civilized manner. This government-nurtured rage toward the West and the infidels continues today, perpetuating their economic failure and deflecting frustration away from the dictators and regimes that oppress them. This refusal by the Arab regimes to take an honest look at themselves has created a culture of scapegoating that blames western civilization for misery and failure in every aspect of Arab life. So far it seems that Arab leaders don’t mind their people lagging behind, save for King Abdullah’s recent evidence of concern. (The depth of his sincerity remains to be seen.)
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Brigitte Gabriel (Because They Hate)
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Word from the outside, whether it arrived in a mail sack or a news report, seldom overshadowed the facts of our lives. We talked in facts -- work and weather, the logistics of this fence, that field -- but stories were how we spoke. A good story rose to the surface of a conversation like heavy cream, a thing to be savored and served artfully. Stored in dry wit, wrapped in dark humor, tied together with strings of anecdote, these stories told the chronology of a family, the history of a piece of land, the hardships of a certain year or a span of years, a series of events that led without pause to the present. If the stories were recent, they filtered through the door to my room late at night, voices hushed around the kitchen table as they sorted out this day and held it against others, their laughter sharp and sad and slow to come. Time was the key. Remember the time...and something in the air caught like a whisper. Back when. Back before a summer too fresh and real to talk about, a year's work stripped in a twenty-minute hailstorm; a man's right hand mangled in the belts of a combine, first day of harvest; an only son buried alive in a grain bin, suffocated in a red avalanche of wheat.
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Judy Blunt (Breaking Clean)
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We have known for some time that the poor and ignored were the nonvoters, alienated from a political system they felt didn’t care about them, and about which they could do little. Now alienation has spread upward into families above the poverty line. These are white workers, neither rich nor poor, but angry over economic insecurity, unhappy with their work, worried about their neighborhoods, hostile to government—combining elements of racism with elements of class consciousness, contempt for the lower classes along with distrust for the elite, and thus open to solutions from any direction, right or left.
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Howard Zinn (A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present)
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Theories of reincarnation overlap nicely with theories of eternal recurrence, an idea championed by both Friedrich Nietzsche and the Pythagoreans. Broadly understood, eternal recurrence argues that the events of the universe are fated—or doomed—to repeat themselves over and over again, for there is a finite amount of energy and material in an infinite universe, over an infinite amount of time, and the combinations with which they can interact are finite as well. The eternal hourglass of existence, so to speak, turns over time and time again. We are reborn to flow with the sand. Unfortunately, scholarly consensus only goes this far. Tartarologists disagree wildly over how reincarnation works. How long must one wait before rebirth? Is rebirth familial—does your dead grandmother become your daughter? Do karmic goodness and badness accrue over time, so that the virtuous live better and better lives? Can one ever escape the cycle of reincarnation, as the Buddhists hope? Can human souls be reborn into animal bodies? For that matter, do animals have souls at all? We know memories are washed clean between lives, for there is no record of anyone credibly remembering a past life. We know very little else for certain. Most baffling of all is the question of punishment. What purpose does it serve? Is it rehabilitative—must we only suffer until we’ve learned our lessons? Is it retributive—must we balance the karmic scales, lose an eye for an eye, and suffer as much as the suffering we wrought? How many hours in pits of boiling water balance out a murder? Is punishment a form of contrapasso, as Dante describes, wherein punishments arise from the nature of the sin itself and represent wrongdoing’s poetic opposite? Does punishment entail the universalization of broken maxims, as Kant theorized? Is Hell one great metaphysical manifestation of the Golden Rule?
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R.F. Kuang (Katabasis)
“
Even though we had such different families, Keri and I were a good pair, both freckled and Irish with a strong belief in justice. We would go out for recess and spend the whole time walking and talking. This is something I still love to do today. I call it "walking the beat." I often call my friends and tell them to meet me on a New York corner at a certain time. The physical act of walking combined with the opportunity to look out at the world while you are sharing your thoughts and feelings is very comforting to me. You are in charge of the route and the amount of eye contact. I guess those days with Keri were when this started.
”
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Amy Poehler (Yes Please)
“
In her book Woven into the Earth, Else Østergård discusses how much wool was needed each year to provide a family with their clothing and blankets. Possibly 5 kilogrammes of wool per person, which would allow for the durability of wool garments. But then there are all the additional requirements for wool, including wool tents and wadmal cloth being used as currency in the Nordic region, Scotland and Ireland. This all adds up to a lot of sheep. It has been calculated that in order to produce the required annual crop of wool to supply all the needs of the population, the combined Viking flocks would have needed to total two million sheep.
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Jane Cooper (The Lost Flock: Rare Wool, Wild Isles and One Woman's Journey to Save Scotland's Original Sheep)
“
I knew that the whole stupid family were in a combination to do my business for me. I told thee that they were all working for me, like so many underground moles; and still more blind than the moles are said to be, unknowing that they did so. I myself, the director of their principal motions; which falling in with the malice of their little hearts, they took to be all their own. Did I say my joy was perfect?-Oh no- It receives some abatement from my disgusted pride. For how can I endure to think that I owe more to her relation's persecutions than to her favour for me? -Or even, as far as I know, to her preference of me to another man?
But let me not indulge this thought. Were I to do so, it might cost my charmer dear- Let me rejoice that she has passed the Rubicon: that she cannot return: that, as I have ordered it, the flight will appear to the implacables to be altogether with her own consent: and that if I doubt her love, I can put her to trials as mortifying to her niceness, as glorious to my pride- For, let me tell thee, dearly as I love her, if I thought there was but the shadow of a doubt in her mind whether she preferred me to any man living, I would show her no mercy. Take care!- Take care, oh beloved of my soul: for jealous is the heart in which love has erected a temple to thee.
”
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Samuel Richardson (Clarissa, or, The History of a Young Lady)
“
Secular Israelis often complain bitterly that the ultra-Orthodox don’t contribute enough to society and live off other people’s hard work. Secular Israelis also tend to argue that the ultra-Orthodox way of life is unsustainable, especially as ultra-Orthodox families have seven children on average.32 Sooner or later, the state will not be able to support so many unemployed people, and the ultra-Orthodox will have to go to work. Yet it might be just the reverse. As robots and AI push humans out of the job market, the ultra-Orthodox Jews may come to be seen as the model for the future rather than as a fossil from the past. Not that everyone will become Orthodox Jews and go to yeshivas to study the Talmud. But in the lives of all people, the quest for meaning and community might eclipse the quest for a job. If we manage to combine a universal economic safety net with strong communities and meaningful pursuits, losing our jobs to algorithms might actually turn out to be a blessing. Losing control over our lives, however, is a much scarier scenario. Notwithstanding the danger of mass unemployment, what we should worry about even more is the shift in authority from humans to algorithms, which might destroy any remaining faith in the liberal story and open the way to the rise of digital dictatorships.
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Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
“
As a nation, our people are pampering themselves and living for their own pleasures. They won't take the trouble or endure the pain required to bear and to rear children; and the day is rolling toward us, with every turn of the planet one day closer, when we are going to be outnumbered by a combination of peoples who can take our own tricks and beat us with them. We must pass along the good word that the one thing America needs above every other thing on earth is HOMES AND HEARTS BIG ENOUGH FOR CHILDREN, as were the homes of our grandfathers, when no joy in life equaled the joy of a new child in the family, and if you didn't have a dozen you weren't doing your manifest duty.
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Gene Stratton-Porter (Her Father's Daughter)
“
Both Granny and Pa smoked all the time, and I think it affected Granny’s taste buds because she liked to snack on some very strange things—many a time I saw her eat a whole, raw Vidalia onion, just like you’d eat an apple, and straight up drink a glass of chunky buttermilk to go with it.
Maybe the buttermilk-onion combination was the culprit for one of her signature moves—every time she got up off the couch, she’d hold her stomach and then fart. Loud. She never laughed or cracked a smile, but it always made me laugh, and I pictured her using intestinal gas like a turbocharged engine to propel her off the couch. Maybe that combo helps you live until you’re ninety-six, like Granny!
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Jep Robertson (The Good, the Bad, and the Grace of God: What Honesty and Pain Taught Us About Faith, Family, and Forgiveness)
“
Through much resistance on my part, you made it easy, and it was so different from basic relationships or familial love. I didn’t know what it was about you that made things so peculiar. You talk about your scent fetish, but as it turned out, I was also addicted to yours.
It wasn’t a game for me, and I felt it much deeper than I can probably even describe in words—the combining of souls. If you weren’t around, I found myself missing you; I found myself needing you. My body, my mind, and my spirit need you.
I am the world’s biggest fool, the biggest pain in the ass, but I’m stupidly, unapologetically, and whole-heartedly in love with you. I’ve waited so long to tell you that."
-Tara
”
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R.N.A. (Parasite (Para-Series #1))
“
Where one might expect to find the greatest equality— among children born to the same parents and raised in the same home— there are nevertheless striking inequalities, not only in the United States but also in countries on the other side of the Atlantic, as shown by studies going back as far as the nineteenth century.2 A specific example of a general pattern was shown by a study of National Merit Scholarship finalists. More than half the finalists were the first-born child in their family, whether in two child, three-child, four-child or five-child families. Even in five-child families, the first-born was the National Merit Scholarship finalist more often than the four other siblings combined.3
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Thomas Sowell (Charter Schools and Their Enemies)
“
The proper balance of sugar and salt was the key to perfect barbecue sauce. Of course, when it came to barbecue sauce, everybody had an opinion about the combination of acid, aromatics, fruit, and flavorings---the ineffable umami---that made each bite so satisfying.
But Margot Salton knew with utter certainty that it all started with sugar and salt. She'd even named her signature product after it: sugar+salt. This sauce was her superpower. Her secret. Her stock-in-trade. When she'd had nothing---no home, no education, no family, no means of support---she had created the powerful alchemy of flavors that made grown men moan with pleasure, cautious women ignore their diets, and skeptical foodies beg for more.
”
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Susan Wiggs (Sugar and Salt (Bella Vista Chronicles, #4))
“
Orange is what red and yellow can do when they combine efforts. If you paint only with red, you will get what only red can do. If you paint only with yellow, you will get what only yellow can do. But when you paint with red and yellow, you will get new possibilities, fresh solutions, vibrant outcomes. When you think orange, you see how two combined influences make a greater impact than just two influences. As long as churches do only what churches are doing, they will get only the results they are presently getting. and as long as families do only what families are doing, they will produce only the outcomes they are presently producing. The church can be represented with yellow ("bright lights") and families with red ("warm hearts").
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Reggie Joiner
“
Several wealthy and benevolent individuals in the county subscribed largely for the erection of a more convenient building in a better situation; new regulations were made; improvements in diet and clothing introduced; the funds of the school were intrusted to the management of a committee. Mr. Brocklehurst, who, from his wealth and family connections, could not be overlooked, still retained the post of treasurer; but he was aided in the discharge of his duties by gentlemen of rather more enlarged and sympathising minds: his office of inspector, too, was shared by those who knew how to combine reason with strictness, comfort with economy, compassion with uprightness. The school, thus improved, became in time a truly useful and noble institution.
”
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Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre: The Original 1847 Unabridged and Complete Edition (Charlotte Brontë Classics))
“
Outside The Museum (The Sonnet)
Enough with, patria o muerte*!
Enough with, god save the queen!
Enough with, heil hitler!
Enough with, o say can you see!
Bronze age beings yell about national glory,
Stone age beings yell about religious glory.
Electric beings got no time for such make-believe,
On their shoulders walks the present of humanity.
There is no earth till all roots combine,
Till we crave for each other all roots are chains.
Museums add perspective on the direction of life,
But to spend a life in museum is life lost in vain.
Enough with vande mataram**,
it's time for vasudhaiva kutumbakam***.
To hell with nation, culture and tradition,
civilization awaits outside the museum.
(*homeland or death, *hail the motherland, ***world is family)
”
”
Abhijit Naskar (Amantes Assemble: 100 Sonnets of Servant Sultans)
“
The heart of the issue is not simply that a group that gets a large portion of its budget from the Walton family fortune is unlikely to be highly critical of Walmart. The 1990s was the key decade when the contours of the climate battle were being drawn—when a collective strategy for rising to the challenge was developed and when the first wave of supposed solutions was presented to the public.
It was also the period when Big Green became most enthusiastically pro-corporate, most committed to a low-friction model of social change in which everything had to be ‘win- win.’ And in the same period many of the corporate partners of groups like the EDF and the Nature Conservancy—Walmart, FedEx, GM—were pushing hard for the global deregulatory framework that has done so much to send emissions soaring.
This alignment of economic interests—combined with the ever powerful desire to be seen as ‘serious’ in circles where seriousness is equated with toeing the pro-market line —fundamentally shaped how these green groups conceived of the climate challenge from the start. Global warming was not defined as a crisis being fueled by overconsumption, or by high emissions industrial agriculture, or by car culture, or by a trade system that insists that vast geographical distances do not matter—root causes that would have demanded changes in how we live, work, eat, and shop. Instead, climate change was presented as a narrow technical problem with no end of profitable solutions within the market system, many of which were available for sale at Walmart.
”
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Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate)
“
In comparing Dutch and American families' attitudes toward teen sexuality, for instance, sociologist Amy Schalet found that parents in the Netherlands considered boys to be both capable and desirous of emotional connection; US parents by contrast, dismissed young men as 'driven by hormones' and only interested in sex. Perhaps not surprisingly, although teen boys in both countries overwhelmingly said they wanted to combine lust with love, only the Dutch saw that as normal: American boys each thought his perspective was a personal quirk, unusual among his peers. Yet, a large-scale survey of high school students found our boys were as emotionally invested in their relationships as girls; perhaps having had less practice or support in sustaining intimacy, though, they were less confident in navigating them.
”
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Peggy Orenstein (Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity)
“
At birth, they’d been charged by God with the responsibility of growing into total fuckups. Had they chosen this? Was it their fault, as they tumbled out of the womb? Had they aspired, covered in placental blood, to grow into harmers, dark forces, life enders? In that first holy instant of breath/awareness (tiny hands clutching and unclutching), had it been their fondest hope to render (via gun, knife, or brick) some innocent family bereft? No; and yet their crooked destinies had lain dormant within them, seeds awaiting water and light to bring forth the most violent, life-poisoning flowers, said water/light actually being the requisite combination of neurological tendency and environmental activation that would transform them (transform us!) into earth’s offal, murderers, and foul us with the ultimate, unwashable transgression.
”
”
George Saunders (Tenth of December)
“
America’s student-loan debt machine is now larger than Americans’ combined credit-card debt.[11] Think about how many college graduates have amassed five- and six-figure student-loan debts, and yet a third still earn less than half the nation’s median wage.[12] While economists argue that a four-year degree is still the best long-term path forward,[13] only half of Americans participate in any form of higher ed at all. When they pulled the ladder of upward mobility away from low-wage families, they took away the thing that soothes misery and distress; they took away their hope. What the free-market boosters failed to account for is that, without the potential for advancement and the general sense that fairness and justice will prevail, our social compact is screwed. The more divided our education levels, the more divided our nation.
”
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Beth Macy (Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America)
“
The overall definition of someone with a narcissistic personality disorder is characterized by a combination of severe limitations in understanding other people and their feelings, as well as an excessive pursuit of what are called narcissistic supplies, such as admiration, attention, status, understanding, support, money, power, control, or perfection in some form. While all of us need these supplies in adequate amounts to feel a sense of well being, the narcissist pursues them with an unrelenting desperation and a keen ability to manipulate others. Meanwhile the outer persona of the NPD individual is generally one of confidence and control, alongside a smooth or charming demeanor. As your involvement with the narcissist develops you will notice that the relationship increasingly becomes one-way with you in the primary giving position.
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Eleanor D. Payson (The Wizard of Oz and Other Narcissists: Coping with the One-Way Relationship in Work, Love, and Family)
“
Situated in the center of family values debates is an imagined traditional family ideal. Formed through a combination of marital and blood ties, "normal" families should consist of heterosexual, racially homogeneous couples who produce their own biological children. Such families should have a specific authority structure, namely, a father-head earning an adequate family wage, a stay-at-home wife and mother, and children. Idealizing the traditional family as a private haven from a public world, family is seen as being held together through primary emotional bonds of love and caring. assuming a relatively fixed sexual division of labor, wherein women's roles are defined as primarily in the home with men's in the public world of work, the traditional family ideal also assumes the separation of work and family. Defined as a natural or biological arrangement based on heterosexual attraction, instead this monolithic family type is actually supported by government policy. It is organized not around a biological core, but a state-sanctioned, heterosexual marriage that confers legitimacy not only on the family structure itself but on children born in this family. In general, everything the imagined traditional family ideal is thought to be, African-American families are not.
Two elements of the traditional family ideal are especially problematic for African-American women. First, the assumed split between the "public" sphere of paid employment and the "private" sphere of unpaid family responsibilities has never worked for U.S. Black women. Under slavery, U.S. Black women worked without pay in the allegedly public sphere of Southern agriculture and had their family privacy routinely violated. Second, the public/private binary separating the family households from the paid labor market is fundamental in explaining U.S. gender ideology. If one assumes that real men work and real women take care of families, then African-Americans suffer from deficient ideas concerning gender. in particular, Black women become less "feminine," because they work outside the home, work for pay and thus compete with men, and their work takes them away from their children.
Framed through this prism of an imagined traditional family ideal, U.S. Black women's experiences and those of other women of color are typically deemed deficient. Rather than trying to explain why Black women's work and family patterns deviate from the seeming normality of the traditional family ideal, a more fruitful approach lies in challenging the very constructs of work and family themselves. Understandings of work, like understandings of family, vary greatly depending on who controls the definitions.
”
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Patricia Hill Collins (Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment)
“
Walter’s escape had been built on his initial conviction that facts could save lives, that information would be the weapon with which he would thwart the Nazi plan to eliminate the Jews. Witnessing the fate of the Czech family camp, and its residents’ immovable faith, despite the evidence all around them, that they would somehow be spared, had led him to understand a more complicated truth: that information is necessary, to be sure, but it is never sufficient. Information must also be believed, especially when it comes to mortal threats. On this, if nothing else, he and Yehuda Bauer might eventually have found common ground: only when information is combined with belief does it become knowledge. And only knowledge leads to action. The French-Jewish philosopher Raymond Aron would say, when asked about the Holocaust, ‘I knew, but I didn’t believe it. And because I didn’t believe it, I didn’t know.
”
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Jonathan Freedland (The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World)
“
Our “It’s your life” message produced one particularly interesting outcome: none of our three children completed college, though each certainly had the intellect to do so. Neither Susie Sr. nor I were at all bothered by this. Besides, as I often joke, if the three combine their college credits, they would be entitled to one degree that they could rotate among themselves. I don’t believe that leaving college early has hindered the three in any way. They, like every Omaha Buffett from my grandfather to my great-grandchildren, attended public grammar and high schools. In fact, almost all of these family members, including our three children, went to the same inner-city, long-integrated high school, where they mixed daily with classmates from every economic and social background. In those years, they may have learned more about the world they live in than have many individuals with postgrad educations.
”
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Howard G. Buffett (40 Chances: Finding Hope in a Hungry World)
“
What works instead is thinking about the world as a network of events. Simple events, and more complex events that can be disassembled into combinations of simpler ones. A few examples: a war is not a thing, it’s a sequence of events. A storm is not a thing, it’s a collection of occurrences. A cloud above a mountain is not a thing, it is the condensation of humidity in the air that the wind blows over the mountain. A wave is not a thing, it is a movement of water, and the water that forms it is always different. A family is not a thing, it is a collection of relations, occurrences, feelings. And a human being? Of course it’s not a thing; like the cloud above the mountain, it’s a complex process, where food, information, light, words, and so on enter and exit. . . . A knot of knots in a network of social relations, in a network of chemical processes, in a network of emotions exchanged with its own kind.
”
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Carlo Rovelli (The Order of Time)
“
I needed a focus. A purpose in life. I’d assumed I’d go to college because I was a high achiever, but none of it truly interested me. How could I decide on a life path when nothing fit? The only time I felt perfectly at ease was sitting at my piano. When my fingers danced across the keys, the world around me melted away until all that was left was the comforting embrace of a haunting melody. Some people wrote in a journal or talked to a therapist. My coping mechanism was the piano. Every emotion under the sun was there to be drawn forth with the right combination of ebony and ivory. A lively Chopin mazurka for bright sunny Saturdays. Beethoven or Rachmaninoff when my emotions were dragging me under. Music was everything to me. But if I didn’t want to play for others, how could I ever take my music further? Being a music teacher was one thing, but being at a university would require performances. Just the thought terrified me.
”
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Jill Ramsower (Perfect Enemies (The Five Families, #6))
“
Those of us who suffer from severe anxiety and PTSD, in my case due to inferiority complexes and repeated emotional, physical and religious trauma from a young age, know that the fear of being found out by family is terrifying. Combine that with the fear of God’s wrath (something I can never seem to shake off completely, despite becoming an atheist many years ago), the fear of being jailed in a country where being queer is illegal, and the fear that your partner will sooner or later realise that you’re this shaken shell of a human being and leave you because of it –it all creates this ultra-alert yet sad and anxious, broken robot. One with zero confidence and zero self-trust, and who is incapable of vulnerability or even allowing themselves to have wants and desires. I existed to please others, not myself. I existed to crave love so hungrily. I had a hole inside me that nobody’s love could fill because I never learned to love myself. I didn’t know how to.
”
”
Elias Jahshan (This Arab Is Queer: An Anthology by LGBTQ+ Arab Writers)
“
The way you see the change in a person you've been away from for a long time, where somebody who sees him every day, day in, day out, wouldn't notice because the change is gradual. All up the coast I could see the signs of what the Combine had accomplished since I was last through this country, things like, for example a train stopping at a station and laying a string of full-grown men in mirrored suits and
machined hats, laying them like a hatch of identical insects, half-life things coming pht-pht-pht out of the last car, then hooting its electric whistle and moving on down the spoiled land to deposit another hatch.
Or things like five thousand houses punched out identical by a machine and strung across the hills outside of town, so fresh from the factory theyre still linked together like sausages, a sign saying NEST IN THE WEST HOMES NO DWN. PAYMENT FOR VETS, a playground down the hill from the houses, behind a checker-wire fence and another sign that read ST. LUKE'S SCHOOL FOR BOYS there were five
thousand kids in green corduroy pants and white shirts under green pullover sweaters playing crack-the-whip across an acre of crushed gravel. The line popped and twisted and jerked like a snake, and every crack popped a little kid off the end, sent him rolling up against the fence like a tumbleweed. Every crack.
And it was always the same little kid, over and over.
All that five thousand kids lived in those five thousand houses, owned by those guys that got off the train. The houses looked so much alike that, time and time again, the kids went home by mistake to different houses and different families. Nobody ever noticed. They ate and went to bed. The only one they noticed was the little kid at the end of the whip. He'd always be so scuffed and bruised that he'd show up
out of place wherever he went. He wasn't able to open up and laugh either. It's a hard thing to laugh if you can feel the pressure of those beams coming from every new car that passes, or every new house you pass.
”
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Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest)
“
Each time he read the tribute, Travis was filled anew with wonder at Einstein's existence. What fantasy of children was more common than that their dogs were fully as perceptive and wise and clever as any adult? What gift from God would more delight a young mind than to have the family dog prove able to communicate on a human level and to share triumphs and tragedies with full understanding of their meaning and importance? What miracle could bring more joy, more respect for the mysteries of nature, more sheer exuberance over the unanticipated wonders of life? Somehow, in the very idea of a dog's personality and human intelligence combined in a single creature, one had a hope of a species at once as gifted as humankind but more noble and worthy . And what fantasy of adults was more common than that, one day, another intelligent species would be found to share the vast, cold universe and, by sharing it, would at last provide some relief from our race's unspeakable loneliness and sense of quiet desperation?
”
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Dean Koontz (Watchers)
“
Liberals stand up for victims of oppression and exclusion. They fight to break down arbitrary barriers (such as those based on race, and more recently on sexual orientation). But their zeal to help victims, combined with their low scores on the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations, often lead them to push for changes that weaken groups, traditions, institutions, and moral capital. For example, the urge to help the inner-city poor led to welfare programs in the 1960s that reduced the value of marriage, increased out-of-wedlock births, and weakened African American families.72 The urge to empower students by giving them the right to sue their teachers and schools in the 1970s has eroded authority and moral capital in schools, creating disorderly environments that harm the poor above all.73 The urge to help Hispanic immigrants in the 1980s led to multicultural education programs that emphasized the differences among Americans rather than their shared values and identity. Emphasizing differences makes many people more racist, not less.
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Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion)
“
By the end of this decade, permutations and combinations of genetic variants will be used to predict variations in human phenotype, illness, and destiny. Some diseases might never be amenable to such a genetic test, but perhaps the severest variants of schizophrenia or heart disease, or the most penetrant forms of familial cancer, say, will be predictable by the combined effect of a handful of mutations. And once an understanding of "process" has been built into predictive algorithms, the interactions between various gene variants could be used to compute ultimate effects on a whole host of physical and mental characteristics beyond disease alone. Computational algorithms could determine the probability of the development of heart disease or asthma or sexual orientation and assign a level of relative risk for various fates to each genome. The genome will thus be read not in absolutes, but in likelihoods-like a report card that does not contain grades but probabilities, or a resume that does not list past experiences but future propensities. It will become a manual for previvorship.
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Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Gene: An Intimate History)
“
Familial schizophrenia (like normal human features such as intelligence and temperament) is thus highly heritable but only moderately inheritable. In other words, genes-hereditary determinants-are crucially important to the future development of the disorder. If you possess a particular combination of genes, the chance of developing the illness is extremely high: hence the striking concordance among identical twins. On the other hand, the inheritance of the disorder across generations is complex. Since genes are mixed and matched in every generation, the chance that you will inherit that exact permutation of variants from your father or mother is dramatically lower. In some families, perhaps, there are fewer gene variants, but with more potent effects-thereby explaining the recurrence of the disorder across generations. In other families, the genes may have weaker effects and require deeper modifiers and triggers-thereby explaining the infrequent inheritance. In yet other families, a single, highly penetrant gene is accidentally mutated in sperm or egg cells before conception, leading to the observed cases of sporadic schizophrenia.
”
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Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Gene: An Intimate History)
“
I sailed right out through the roof.
And hovered above it, looking down. Here was Rogan, checking his neck in the mirror. Here was Keith, squat-thrusting in his underwear. Here was Ned Riley, here was B. Troper, here was Gail Orley, Stefan DeWitt, killers all, all bad, I guess, although, in that instant, I saw it differently. At birth, they’d been charged by God with the responsibility of growing into total fuck-ups. Had they chosen this? Was it their fault, as they tumbled out of the womb? Had they aspired, covered in placental blood, to grow into harmers, dark forces, life-enders? In that first holy instant of breath/awareness (tiny hands clutching and unclutching), had it been their fondest hope to render (via gun, knife, or brick) some innocent family bereft? No; and yet their crooked destinies had lain dormant within them, seeds awaiting water and light to bring forth the most violent, life-poisoning flowers, said water/light actually being the requisite combination of neurological tendency and environmental activation that would transform them (transform us!) into earth’s offal, murderers, and foul us with the ultimate, unwashable transgression.
”
”
George Saunders (Tenth of December)
“
From the Waverley Kitchen Journal Fig and Pepper Bread Mary’s Note: Sometimes the two most improbable things make the best combination. Ingredients: 2 cups whole grain spelt flour 2 ½ cups unbleached all purpose flour 1 ½ cups coarsely chopped figs 2 tsp coarse black pepper 2 tsp sea salt 2 tbsp olive oil 1 dry yeast packet 1 ½ cups of warm water Whisk flour, salt, pepper, and yeast until blended, by hand or with whisk attachment of mixer. Add olive oil and warm water. Knead for 10 minutes, or use dough hook attachment of mixer for 5 minutes, until dough is smooth and springy. Oil a large bowl, place dough inside, and cover bowl with a damp hand towel. Let sit in a warm place for approximately 1 hour, or until dough has doubled in size. Softly knead in the chopped figs and evenly distribute throughout the dough (lightly flouring your hands can make handling the dough easier), shape into an oval, then place on a baking sheet. Snip three shallow lines into top of the dough with scissors, then lightly dust the dough with flour. Let rise, uncovered, until dough swells a little more—10–15 mins, or longer if the kitchen isn’t warm. Place tray in 350° oven for 40–45 mins until crust is slightly brown and the loaf sounds hollow when tapped on the underside. Cool on a wire rack.
”
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Sarah Addison Allen (First Frost (Waverley Family, #2))
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Almost unconsciously, his gaze shifted across the immense ballroom to fasten on the girl, inexorably pulled to her like metal filings to a magnet. He could barely make her out since she was surrounded by her usual jostling court of ardent admirers, most of them titled, wealthy, and considerably handsomer than Nigel. If he was honest with himself, he’d have to admit that obsession would be the most accurate description of his feelings, and he hadn’t the slightest notion as to when or how that obsession had developed. However it had happened, over the last several months a ridiculous amount of space in his skull had been taken up by thoughts of lovely Amelia Easton. Fortunately, until now, none of his acquaintances had suspected that he—the most sensible man in the ton—had succumbed to such a maudlin, hopeless passion. A hopeless passion, since Amelia Easton would no sooner marry a man like Nigel than she would a butcher from Smithfield. After all, she was widely acknowledged as one of the great prizes on the matrimonial mart—beautiful, kind, good-natured, and disgustingly rich, or at least her father was. It was a most potent combination, and meant that the girl couldn’t step foot outside her family’s Mayfair townhouse without a pack of slavering bachelors in pursuit. “How
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Anna Campbell (A Grosvenor Square Christmas)
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Spoiled-dependent. The narcissist in your life might best be characterized as having been spoiled as well as dependent. In this case, not only will he act entitled and feel superior (not surprising given the family modeling of a “we’re better than others” attitude), he may also feel dependent and incompetent, as his parents were always waiting on him and rescuing him instead of helping him develop the necessary skills of self-reliance and functionally appropriate dependence. As an adult, he may show up as entitled and expect to be doted on and indulged. Or he may avoid taking initiative and making decisions because he has an underlying fear of shamefully exposing his limitations and failures when tackling the everyday decisions of life. Deprived-dependent. Another combination that might characterize your narcissist is being both a deprived type and a dependent type. In this case he will be easily offended as well as dependent, needing others to constantly reassure him that he is great and manage life for him. Discreetly, he seeks out others to protect him from a deeply felt sense of shame about his defective, lonely, and inadequate self. He may come across as needy and hypersensitive, rather than demanding and show-offish. He may show signs of being addicted to self-soothing behaviors,
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Wendy T. Behary (Disarming the Narcissist: Surviving and Thriving with the Self-Absorbed)
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Aidan," she said with a tiny shake of her head, very low. "I..."
Her jaw seemed to have locked in place- why, her entire body. She could say no more. She'd certainly lost the power to move.
And Aidan... she was heatedly aware of those sapphire eyes roving her features until she longed to scream.
"No need to say more," he said very quietly. "I see I am to take my leave now."
He released her hands. It came then, when she least expected it... perhaps when she should have most expected it.
His lips were rather cold from the frigid air outside.
His kiss was not.
And it was like nothing she'd ever imagined. She thought immediately of Raven and Rowan, for it was one thing to write about a kiss, having never truly experienced it...
And quite another to actually feel it.
And feel it she did, a kiss so heated and intense, it burned clear to the very bottom of her soul. The taste of him was like nothing she'd ever expected; the combination of warmth and cold turned to fire with blistering heat. His kiss sent heat blazing to every part of her.
His hands stole inside her cloak, closing around her waist and pulling her hard against him. She chafed at the burden of his greatcoat. She itched to rip it open, tear at his shirt until she could feel warm, masculine skin and truly know what it was to feel a man's flesh.
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Samantha James (The Seduction Of An Unknown Lady (McBride Family #2))
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In the wake of the Cognitive Revolution, gossip helped Homo sapiens to form larger and more stable bands. But even gossip has its limits. Sociological research has shown that the maximum ‘natural’ size of a group bonded by gossip is about 150 individuals. Most people can neither intimately know, nor gossip effectively about, more than 150 human beings. Even today, a critical threshold in human organisations falls somewhere around this magic number. Below this threshold, communities, businesses, social networks and military units can maintain themselves based mainly on intimate acquaintance and rumour-mongering. There is no need for formal ranks, titles and law books to keep order. 3A platoon of thirty soldiers or even a company of a hundred soldiers can function well on the basis of intimate relations, with a minimum of formal discipline. A well-respected sergeant can become ‘king of the company’ and exercise authority even over commissioned officers. A small family business can survive and flourish without a board of directors, a CEO or an accounting department. But once the threshold of 150 individuals is crossed, things can no longer work that way. You cannot run a division with thousands of soldiers the same way you run a platoon. Successful family businesses usually face a crisis when they grow larger and hire more personnel. If they cannot reinvent themselves, they go bust. How did Homo sapiens manage to cross this critical threshold, eventually founding cities comprising tens of thousands of inhabitants and empires ruling hundreds of millions? The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination. Churches are rooted in common religious myths. Two Catholics who have never met can nevertheless go together on crusade or pool funds to build a hospital because they both believe that God was incarnated in human flesh and allowed Himself to be crucified to redeem our sins. States are rooted in common national myths. Two Serbs who have never met might risk their lives to save one another because both believe in the existence of the Serbian nation, the Serbian homeland and the Serbian flag. Judicial systems are rooted in common legal myths. Two lawyers who have never met can nevertheless combine efforts to defend a complete stranger because they both believe in the existence of laws, justice, human rights – and the money paid out in fees.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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Liberals stand up for victims of oppression and exclusion. They fight to break down arbitrary barriers (such as those based on race, and more recently on sexual orientation). But their zeal to help victims, combined with their low scores on the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations, often lead them to push for changes that weaken groups, traditions, institutions, and moral capital. For example, the urge to help the inner-city poor led to welfare programs in the 1960s that reduced the value of marriage, increased out-of-wedlock births, and weakened African American families.72 The urge to empower students by giving them the right to sue their teachers and schools in the 1970s has eroded authority and moral capital in schools, creating disorderly environments that harm the poor above all.73 The urge to help Hispanic immigrants in the 1980s led to multicultural education programs that emphasized the differences among Americans rather than their shared values and identity. Emphasizing differences makes many people more racist, not less.74 On issue after issue, it’s as though liberals are trying to help a subset of bees (which really does need help) even if doing so damages the hive. Such “reforms” may lower the overall welfare of a society, and sometimes they even hurt the very victims liberals were trying to help.
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Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion)
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Like many dogs, young Sirius found human music quite excruciating. An isolated vocal or instrumental theme was torture enough to him; but when several voices or instruments combined, he seemed to lose control of himself completely. His fine auditory discrimination made even well-executed solos seem to him badly out of tune. Harmony and the combination of several themes resulted for him in hideous cacophony. Elizabeth and the children would sometimes sing rounds, for instance when they were coming downt he moor after a picnic. Sirius invariably had to give up his usual far-ranging course and draw into the party to howl. The indignant children would chase him away, but as soon as the singing began again he would return and once more give tongue. On one occasion Tamsy, who was the most seriously musical member of the family, cried imploringly, 'Sirius, do either keep quiet or keep away! Why cant't you let us enjoy ourselves?' He replied, 'But how can you like such a horrible jarring muddle of sweet noises? I have to come to you because they're so sweet, and I have to howl because it's a mess, and because-oh because it might be so lovely.' Once he said, 'If I were to paint a picture could you just keep away? Wouldn't you go crazy because of the all-wrongness of the colour? Well, sounds are far more exciting to me than your queer colour is to you.
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Olaf Stapledon
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I read Dickens and Shakespear without shame or stint; but their pregnant observations and demonstrations of life are not co-ordinated into any philosophy or religion: on the contrary, Dickens's sentimental assumptions are violently contradicted by his observations; and Shakespear's pessimism is only his wounded humanity. Both have the specific genius of the fictionist and the common sympathies of human feeling and thought in pre-eminent degree. They are often saner and shrewder than the philosophers just as Sancho-Panza was often saner and shrewder than Don Quixote. They clear away vast masses of oppressive gravity by their sense of the ridiculous, which is at bottom a combination of sound moral judgment with lighthearted good humor. But they are concerned with the diversities of the world instead of with its unities: they are so irreligious that they exploit popular religion for professional purposes without delicacy or scruple (for example, Sydney Carton and the ghost in Hamlet!): they are anarchical, and cannot balance their exposures of Angelo and Dogberry, Sir Leicester Dedlock and Mr Tite Barnacle, with any portrait of a prophet or a worthy leader: they have no constructive ideas: they regard those who have them as dangerous fanatics: in all their fictions there is no leading thought or inspiration for which any man could conceivably risk the spoiling of his hat in a shower, much less his life. Both are alike forced to borrow motives for the more strenuous actions of their personages from the common stockpot of melodramatic plots; so that Hamlet has to be stimulated by the prejudices of a policeman and Macbeth by the cupidities of a bushranger. Dickens, without the excuse of having to manufacture motives for Hamlets and Macbeths, superfluously punt his crew down the stream of his monthly parts by mechanical devices which I leave you to describe, my own memory being quite baffled by the simplest question as to Monks in Oliver Twist, or the long lost parentage of Smike, or the relations between the Dorrit and Clennam families so inopportunely discovered by Monsieur Rigaud Blandois. The truth is, the world was to Shakespear a great "stage of fools" on which he was utterly bewildered. He could see no sort of sense in living at all; and Dickens saved himself from the despair of the dream in The Chimes by taking the world for granted and busying himself with its details. Neither of them could do anything with a serious positive character: they could place a human figure before you with perfect verisimilitude; but when the moment came for making it live and move, they found, unless it made them laugh, that they had a puppet on their hands, and had to invent some artificial external stimulus to make it work.
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George Bernard Shaw (Man and Superman)
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I take a cue from the list I made on my first night here alone and make soup. I chop vegetables and boil pasta, pour a carton of chicken stock into a pot. Once I’ve combined all the ingredients and it’s time to wait while they cook, I turn to the second essay in the solitude book, but my mind is too full of different versions of the last summer’s story. There’s one where I fail him. Where I stop coming home so he stops making dinner, and I’m not around to see how much he needs me. And then there’s one where he fails me. Where I feel it—that he doesn’t want me there, that I’m in the way. So I stay away, for him and for me. So that I never face his rejection. So that I get to pretend I’m the most important thing to him, the way he is to me. Because if we have any sense of self-preservation, we do the best with what we’re given. I was given cakes and cookies and rides to school. I was given songs and dinners at a table with brass candlesticks. I was given a man with a sensitive heart and a devious sense of humor and enough skill at cards to win me a year of private college—tuition and room and board—and I took all of those good things and told myself they made us special. Told myself they meant we were a family the way Mabel and Ana and Javier were, told myself that we weren’t missing anything. We were masters of collusion, Gramps and I. In that, at least, we were together.
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Nina LaCour (We Are Okay)
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The truth about my family was that we disappointed one another. When I heard the word 'disappoint,' I tasted toast, slightly burned. But when I saw the word written, I thought of it first and foremost as the combining or the collapsing together of the words 'disappear' and 'point,' as in how something in us ceased to exist the moment someone let us down. Small children understood this better than adults, this irreparable diminution of the self that occurred at each instance, large and small, of someone forgetting a promise, arriving late, losing interest, leaving too soon, and otherwise making us feel like a fool. That was why children, in the face of disappointments, large and small, were so quick to cry and scream, often throwing their bodies to the ground as if their tiny limbs were on fire. That was a good instinct. We, the adults or the survivors of our youth, traded in instinct for a societal norm. We stayed calm. We swallowed the hurt. We forgave the infraction. We ignored that our skin was on fire. We became our own fools. Sometimes, when we were very successful, we forgot entirely the memory of the disappointment. The loss that resulted, of course, could not be undone. What was gone was gone. We just could no longer remember how we ended up with so much less of our selves. Why we expected nothing, why we deserved so little, and why we brought strangers into our lives to fill the void.
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Monique Truong (Bitter in the Mouth)
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So? When do you want to be turned?” “I didn’t agree to turn,” Valerie squawked with amazement. “You haven’t, but you will,” he said with a shrug. “What makes you think that?” she asked warily. “Because if you don’t, I’m going to have to wipe your memories and have you returned to your life and neither of us wants that,” he said simply. “Anders said I could have time to decide,” Valerie protested, and then frowned and added, “And what do you mean, neither of us wants that? Why would you care?” “You saved my wife and children, Valerie. And Leigh adores you. You’re family now.” “Oh.” She stared at him nonplussed, wondering if he meant that. “I mean it,” he said firmly. “Leigh has decided it’s so, so it’s so. She’d be disappointed if you didn’t become one of us and I won’t have her disappointed.” Valerie scowled slightly. The last part sounded like a threat. “As for Anders saying you could have time to decide,” Lucian continued. “What do you need time for? The nanos have paired you, you’re meant to be together.” “You make it sound so simple,” she said wearily. “It is simple. Don’t make it hard.” “Great, the nanos paired us. But what about love?” she asked. Lucian shifted impatiently. “Do you like him?” “Yes,” she admitted. “Respect him?” She nodded. “Trust him?” “Of course,” she said without hesitation. Lucian nodded and said dryly, “I don’t need to ask if you want him sexually.” Valerie flushed and raised her chin. “All those things combined make up love,” Lucian assured her. “Whether you realize it or not, you already do love him.” Valerie swallowed, knowing in her heart he was right. She bit her lip, and then blurted, “But does he love me?” “Ah.” Lucian nodded. “So that’s the holdup, is it? He hasn’t said it yet.” Valerie sighed and looked away, muttering, “When he asked me to be his life mate he went on about finding peace and being able to relax and be at peace. It was all peace, peace, peace,” she added with frustration and glanced to Lucian, eyes narrowing when she caught his lips twitching. If he laughed at her, she would— “Don’t you feel at peace with him?” he asked, and then added, “When you’re not hot and bothered, I mean.” “Well, yeah, but—” “But you want to hear that he loves you,” Lucian said and shrugged. “I guess you’ll have to ask him then.” “Ask him if he loves me?” she asked with dismay. Lucian sighed with exasperation. “You took on Igor and staked him, saving yourself and six other women in the process—” “Four,” she corrected unhappily. “Two died, remember.” “And then,” he continued heavily, ignoring her interruption. “You took on Ambrose and saved my wife and unborn twins by crashing the van you were all in and repeatedly bashing the man over the head until help got there. You are not a coward, Valerie, so stop acting like one. Ask him. And when he says yes he loves you, I will personally oversee the turning and pay for the wedding.
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Lynsay Sands (Immortal Ever After (Argeneau, #18))
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The Buddha famously said that life is suffering. I’m not a Buddhist, but I know what he meant and so do you. To exist in this world, we must contend with humiliation, broken dreams, sadness, and loss. That’s just nature. Each specific life comes with its own personalized portion of pain. It’s coming for you. You can’t stop it. And you know it. In response, most of us are programmed to seek comfort as a way to numb it all out and cushion the blows. We carve out safe spaces. We consume media that confirms our beliefs, we take up hobbies aligned with our talents, we try to spend as little time as possible doing the tasks we fucking loathe, and that makes us soft. We live a life defined by the limits we imagine and desire for ourselves because it’s comfortable as hell in that box. Not just for us, but for our closest family and friends. The limits we create and accept become the lens through which they see us. Through which they love and appreciate us. But for some, those limits start to feel like bondage, and when we least expect it, our imagination jumps those walls and hunts down dreams that in the immediate aftermath feel attainable. Because most dreams are. We are inspired to make changes little by little, and it hurts. Breaking the shackles and stretching beyond our own perceived limits takes hard fucking work—oftentimes physical work—and when you put yourself on the line, self doubt and pain will greet you with a stinging combination that will buckle your knees.
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David Goggins (Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds)
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She reported that a member of Churchill’s inner circle, whom she did not identify, “has been to me and told me there is a danger of your being generally disliked by your colleagues & subordinates because of your rough sarcastic & overbearing manner.” She assured her husband that the source of this complaint was “a devoted friend,” with no ax to grind. Churchill’s private secretaries, she wrote, seemed to have resolved simply to take it and shrug it off. “Higher up, if an idea is suggested (say at a conference) you are supposed to be so contemptuous that presently no ideas, good or bad, will be forthcoming.” Hearing this shocked and hurt her, she said, “because in all these years I have been accustomed to all those who have worked with & under you, loving you.” Seeking to explain the degradation in Churchill’s behavior, the devoted friend had said, “No doubt it’s the strain.” But it was not just the friend’s observations that drove Clementine to write her letter. “My Darling Winston,” she began, “—I must confess that I have noticed a deterioration in your manner; & you are not so kind as you used to be.” She cautioned that in possessing the power to give orders and to “sack anyone & everyone,” he was obliged to maintain a high standard of behavior—to “combine urbanity, kindness and if possible Olympic calm.” She reminded him that in the past he had been fond of quoting a French maxim, “On ne règne sur les âmes que par le calme,” meaning, essentially, “One leads by calm.” She
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Erik Larson (The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz)
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FACT 3 – In 1969, the combined agencies of the CIA, Army and FBI were put into full operational use. The Sharon Tate-La Bianca murders were committed in August 1969. The Altamont violence occurred four months later. CIA The CIA prepared for defense against domestic unrest in 1965, coinciding with Camelot and Politica. The CIA joined forces with the FBI and the Army. By August 1967, a special operations group went after the youth. By July 1968, Operation Chaos, identical to the Chilean “Chaos,” clamped down on “restless youth.” This wasn’t a study. It was an attack. Mid-summer of 1969, one month before the Manson Family massacres, Operation Chaos entered a phase of tight security. From 1956-63, the Agency had produced enough LSD to incite every violent act associated with the chaos in Los Angeles or at Altamont. It was identical to handing out poison candy at Halloween. LSD was the moving force, the cause for the Sharon Tate-La Bianca slaughters. It was a steady diet at the Spahn ranch. LSD was the catalyst of the Altamont killing. Thousands of tablets were distributed to the Hell’s Angels, who then went totally berserk and started cracking skulls. FBI May 1964, after the JFK assassination, the FBI instituted COINTELPRO. July 1968, explicit orders went out to proceed, accompanied with instructions, to neutralize segments of American society, including those “restless youth.” By 1969, the Special Services Staff (SSS) of the FBI teamed up with the Justice Department and the CIA’s Operation Chaos.
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Mae Brussell (The Essential Mae Brussell: Investigations of Fascism in America)
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He had, he said, floated off from a very ordinary series of dream-pictures into a scene whose strangeness was related to nothing he had ever read. It was of this world, and yet not of it—a shadowy geometrical confusion in which could be seen elements of familiar things in most unfamiliar and perturbing combinations. There was a suggestion of queerly disordered pictures superimposed one upon another; an arrangement in which the essentials of time as well as of space seemed dissolved and mixed in the most illogical fashion. In this kaleidoscopic vortex of phantasmal images were occasional snapshots, if one might use the term, of singular clearness but unaccountable heterogeneity.
Once my uncle thought he lay in a carelessly dug open pit, with a crowd of angry faces framed by straggling locks and three-cornered hats frowning down on him. Again he seemed to be in the interior of a house—an old house, apparently—but the details and inhabitants were constantly changing, and he could never be certain of the faces or the furniture, or even of the room itself, since doors and windows seemed in just as great a state of flux as the more presumably mobile objects. It was queer—damnably queer—and my uncle spoke almost sheepishly, as if half expecting not to be believed, when he declared that of the strange faces many had unmistakably borne the features of the Harris family. And all the while there was a personal sensation of choking, as if some pervasive presence had spread itself through his body and sought to possess itself of his vital processes.
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H.P. Lovecraft (Sleep No More: Twenty Masterpieces of Horror for the Connoisseur)
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Recipe for a Perfect Wife, the Novel INGREDIENTS 3 cups editors extraordinaire: Maya Ziv, Lara Hinchberger, Helen Smith 2 cups agent-I-couldn’t-do-this-without: Carolyn Forde (and the Transatlantic Literary Agency) 1½ cup highly skilled publishing teams: Dutton US, Penguin Random House Canada (Viking) 1 cup PR and marketing wizards: Kathleen Carter (Kathleen Carter Communications), Ruta Liormonas, Elina Vaysbeyn, Maria Whelan, Claire Zaya 1 cup women of writing coven: Marissa Stapley, Jennifer Robson, Kate Hilton, Chantel Guertin, Kerry Clare, Liz Renzetti ½ cup author-friends-who-keep-me-sane: Mary Kubica, Taylor Jenkins Reid, Amy E. Reichert, Colleen Oakley, Rachel Goodman, Hannah Mary McKinnon, Rosey Lim ½ cup friends-with-talents-I-do-not-have: Dr. Kendra Newell, Claire Tansey ¼ cup original creators of the Karma Brown Fan Club: my family and friends, including my late grandmother Miriam Christie, who inspired Miriam Claussen; my mom, who is a spectacular cook and mother; and my dad, for being the wonderful feminist he is 1 tablespoon of the inner circle: Adam and Addison, the loves of my life ½ tablespoon book bloggers, bookstagrammers, authors, and readers: including Andrea Katz, Jenny O’Regan, Pamela Klinger-Horn, Melissa Amster, Susan Peterson, Kristy Barrett, Lisa Steinke, Liz Fenton 1 teaspoon vintage cookbooks: particularly the Purity Cookbook, for the spark of inspiration 1 teaspoon loyal Labradoodle: Fred Licorice Brown, furry writing companion Dash of Google: so I could visit the 1950s without a time machine METHOD: Combine all ingredients into a Scrivener file, making sure to hit Save after each addition.
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Karma Brown (Recipe for a Perfect Wife)
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However, Rothschild was easily the most scientific collector of his age, though also the most regrettably lethal, for in the 1890s he became interested in Hawaii, perhaps the most temptingly vulnerable environment Earth has yet produced. Millions of years of isolation had allowed Hawaii to evolve 8,800 unique species of animals and plants. Of particular interest to Rothschild were the islands’ colorful and distinctive birds, often consisting of very small populations inhabiting extremely specific ranges. The tragedy for many Hawaiian birds was that they were not only distinctive, desirable, and rare—a dangerous combination in the best of circumstances—but also often heartbreakingly easy to take. The greater koa finch, an innocuous member of the honeycreeper family, lurked shyly in the canopies of koa trees, but if someone imitated its song it would abandon its cover at once and fly down in a show of welcome. The last of the species vanished in 1896, killed by Rothschild’s ace collector Harry Palmer, five years after the disappearance of its cousin the lesser koa finch, a bird so sublimely rare that only one has ever been seen: the one shot for Rothschild’s collection. Altogether during the decade or so of Rothschild’s most intensive collecting, at least nine species of Hawaiian birds vanished, but it may have been more. Rothschild was by no means alone in his zeal to capture birds at more or less any cost. Others in fact were more ruthless. In 1907 when a well-known collector named Alanson Bryan realized that he had shot the last three specimens of black mamos, a species of forest bird that had only been discovered the previous decade, he noted that the news filled him with “joy.
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Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
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The combination of these things opened up the door for Linda, or someone like her, to come in. Dan was scared to death of growing up and turning forty. Peter Pan wanted to stay a young, carefree, party-boy forever, and maybe, too, he was finally cool enough to feel part of a fraternity, like the ones he hadn’t been a part of in College. Albeit his fraternity brothers were all middle-aged men with families of their own, but that’s just semantics. It’s the spirit, or in this case the spirits, of the thing that counts. We had four children and there I was, an ever-present figure expecting him to act his age and show responsibility, and I suppose from his point of view that was grinding. I’ve always said that Linda just filled the bar stool I didn’t want to sit in anymore. We weren’t twenty, and as far as I was concerned our days of hanging out at Henny’s over Irish coffees, just because, were long gone. I had piano lessons and soccer games and orthodontist appointments, and Linda didn’t have any of those. She was available after work to sit beside him in bars and laugh at his jokes and gaze at him like he was a superhero. As for me, I didn’t have the time or the inclination anymore to be that girl for him again. He was my husband and I was his wife, and we had children, and as wonderful as being young and drunk and free with it all before you is, I still thought that being grown up and part of a family with them all around you was even better. Dan obviously felt differently and Linda was right there to remind him that you don’t always have to be an adult, you don’t always have to do what’s right, and sometimes it’s okay to just do what you want. That was her sales pitch and Dan was a very interested buyer.
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Betty Broderick (Betty Broderick: Telling on myself)
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Depression: What depressed person doesn’t think of himself or herself as a miserable, unredeemable failure?
Anger: As in “STAY AWAY or you will see me, and what you see won’t be pretty.” Look for the paradoxical combination of self-loathing and arrogant judgment. Men are specialists at this.
Anorexia: The deep logic of anorexia is that you are unworthy and deserve nothing, so you give yourself nothing. If you give yourself nothing, perhaps you will disappear, or at least less of you will be seen.
Fear and withdrawal: You might as well avoid other people since you feel like you don’t belong with them. You don’t want to be seen.
Exhibitionism: The person who is the life of the party acts shameless in the hope that such a thing is possible.
Addiction: This will both cause shame and cure it, at least temporarily.
Cutting: This seems like the perfect treatment. It punishes you for being “bad,” and the blood makes you feel punished and therefore cleansed. Of course cutting silences shame for only an hour or so, but at least that’s something.
Fears of being exposed: Among the socially or financially successful can lurk a persistent sense that they are only one misstep from being found out and humiliated.
Suicide: Sadly, some people who expect to be exposed and humiliated feel as if they have no alternative but suicide. Many others who live with shame wish they could take their lives, but they are too afraid of what death might bring.
Doubts that God could ever love you: Who could love something so gross?
“I can’t forgive myself”: You might be saying, “I believe God has forgiven me, but something is still wrong. I still feel dirty.”
“I’m just a failure”: Who hasn’t thought that? Of course, families remain the hotbed for shame.
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Edward T. Welch
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For four hours, Andrew and I were presented with course after course of delightful creations, imaginative pairings, and, always, dramatic presentations. Little fillets of sturgeon arrived under a glass dome, after which it was lifted, applewood smoke billowed out across the table. Pretzel bread, cheese, and ale, meant to evoke a picnic in Central Park, was delivered in a picnic basket. But my favorite dish was the carrot tartare.
The idea came, along with many of the menu's other courses, while researching reflecting upon New York's classic restaurants. From 21 Club to Four Seasons, once upon a time, every establishment offered a signature steak tartare. "What's our tartare?" Will and Daniel wondered. They kept playing with formulas and recipes and coming close to something special, but it never quite had the wow factor they were looking for. One day after Daniel returned from Paffenroth Gardens, a farm in the Hudson Valley with the rich muck soil that yields incredibly flavorful root vegetables, they had a moment. In his perfect Swiss accent, he said, "What if we used carrots?" Will remembers. And so carrot tartare, a sublime ode to the humble vegetable, was added to the Eleven Madison Park tasting course.
"I love that moment when you clamp a meat grinder onto the table and people expect it to be meat, and it's not," Will gushes of the theatrical table side presentation. After the vibrant carrots are ground by the server, they're turned over to you along with a palette of ingredients with which to mix and play: pickled mustard seeds, quail egg yolk, pea mustard, smoked bluefish, spicy vinaigrette. It was one of the most enlightening yet simple dishes I've ever had. I didn't know exactly which combination of ingredients I mixed, adding a little of this and a little of that, but every bite I created was fresh, bright, and ringing with flavor. Carrots- who knew?
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Amy Thomas (Brooklyn in Love: A Delicious Memoir of Food, Family, and Finding Yourself (Mother's Day Gift for New Moms))
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Of course, he thought, if he ever thought about it at all, that he would be remembered for some of the many small works he wrote and published, mostly travel chronicles, though not necessarily travel chronicles in the modern sense, but little books that are still charming today and, how shall I say, highly perceptive, anyway as perceptive as they could be, little books that made it seem as if the ultimate purpose of each of his trips was to examine a particular garden, gardens sometimes forgotten, forsaken, abandoned to their fate, and whose beauty my distinguished forebear knew how to find amid the weeds and neglect. His little books, despite their, how shall I say, botanical trappings, are full of clever observations and from them one gets a rather decent idea of the Europe of his day, a Europe often in turmoil, whose storms on occasion reached the shores of the family castle, located near Gorlitz, as you’re likely aware. Of course, my forebear wasn’t oblivious to the storms, no more than he was oblivious to the vicissitudes of, how shall I say, the human condition. And so he wrote and published, and in his own way, humbly but in fine German prose, he raised his voice against injustice. I think he had little interest in knowing where the soul goes when the body dies, although he wrote about that too. He was interested in dignity and he was interested in plants. About happiness he said not a word, I suppose because he considered it something strictly private and perhaps, how shall I say, treacherous or elusive. He had a great sense of humor, although some passages of his books contradict me there. And since he wasn’t a saint or even a brave man, he probably did think about posterity. The bust, the equestrian statue, the folios preserved forever in a library. What he never imagined was that he would be remembered for lending his name to a combination of three flavors of ice cream.
”
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Roberto Bolaño (2666)
“
She liked numbers and sums. She devised a game in which each number was a family member and the “answer” made a family grouping with a story to it. Naught was a babe in arms. He gave no trouble. Whenever he appeared you just “carried” him. The figure 1 was a pretty baby girl just learning to walk, and easy to handle; 2 was a baby boy who could walk and talk a little. He went into family life (into sums, etc.) with very little trouble. And 3 was an older boy in kindergarten, who had to be watched a little. Then there was 4, a girl of Francie’s age. She was almost as easy to “mind” as 2. The mother was 5, gentle and kind. In large sums, she came along and made everything easy the way a mother should. The father, 6, was harder than the others but very just. But 7 was mean. He was a crotchety old grandfather and not at all accountable for how he came out. The grandmother, 8, was hard too, but easier to understand than 7. Hardest of all was 9. He was company and what a hard time fitting him into family life!
When Francie added a sum, she would fix a little story to go with the result. If the answer was 924, it meant that the little boy and girl were being minded by company while the rest of the family went out. When a number such as 1024 appeared, it meant that all the little children were playing together in the yard. The number 62 meant that papa was taking the little boy out for a walk; 50 meant that mama had the baby out in the buggy for an airing and 78 meant grandfather and grandmother sitting home by the fire of a winter’s evening. Each single combination of numbers was a new set-up for the family and no two stories were ever the same.
Francie took the game with her up into algebra. X was the boy’s sweetheart who came into the family life and complicated it. Y was the boy friend who caused trouble. So arithmetic was a warm and human thing to Francie and occupied many lonely hours of her time.
”
”
Betty Smith
“
This and Rothbard’s own life-long cultural conservatism notwithstanding, however, from its beginnings in the late 1960s and the founding of a libertarian party in 1971, the libertarian movement had great appeal to many of the counter-cultural left that had then grown up in the U.S. in opposition to the war in Vietnam. Did not the illegitimacy of the state and the non-aggression axiom imply that everyone was at liberty to choose his very own non-aggressive lifestyle, no matter what it was? Much of Rothbard’s later writings, with their increased emphasis on cultural matters, were designed to correct this development and to explain the error in the idea of a leftist multi-counter-cultural libertarianism, of libertarianism as a variant of libertinism. It was false—empirically as well as normatively—that libertarianism could or should be combined with egalitarian multiculturalism. Both were in fact sociologically incompatible, and libertarianism could and should be combined exclusively with traditional Western bourgeois culture; that is, the old-fashioned ideal of a family-based and hierarchically structured society of voluntarily acknowledged rank orders of social authority. Empirically, Rothbard did not tire to explain, the left-libertarians failed to recognize that the restoration of private-property rights and laissez-faire economics implied a sharp and drastic increase in social “discrimination.” Private property means the right to exclude. The modern social-democratic welfare state has increasingly stripped private-property owners of their right to exclude. In distinct contrast, a libertarian society where the right to exclude was fully restored to owners of private property would be profoundly unegalitarian. To be sure, private property also implies the owner’s right to include and to open and facilitate access to one’s property, and every private-property owner also faces an economic incentive of including (rather than excluding) so long as he expects this to increase the value of his property.
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Anonymous
“
Still, I think that one of the most fundamental problems is want of discipline. Homes that severely restrict viewing hours, insist on family reading, encourage debate on good books, talk about the quality and the morality of television programs they do see, rarely or never allow children to watch television without an adult being present (in other words, refusing to let the TV become an unpaid nanny), and generally develop a host of other interests, are not likely to be greatly contaminated by the medium, while still enjoying its numerous benefits. But what will produce such families, if not godly parents and the power of the Holy Spirit in and through biblical preaching, teaching, example, and witness? The sad fact is that unless families have a tremendously strong moral base, they will not perceive the dangers in the popular culture; or, if they perceive them, they will not have the stamina to oppose them. There is little point in preachers disgorging all the sad statistics about how many hours of television the average American watches per week, or how many murders a child has witnessed on television by the age of six, or how a teenager has failed to think linearly because of the twenty thousand hours of flickering images he or she has watched, unless the preacher, by the grace of God, is establishing a radically different lifestyle, and serving as a vehicle of grace to enable the people in his congregation to pursue it with determination, joy, and a sense of adventurous, God-pleasing freedom. Meanwhile, the harsh reality is that most Americans, including most of those in our churches, have been so shaped by the popular culture that no thoughtful preacher can afford to ignore the impact. The combination of music and visual presentation, often highly suggestive, is no longer novel. Casual sexual liaisons are everywhere, not least in many of our churches, often with little shame. “Get even” is a common dramatic theme. Strength is commonly confused with lawless brutality. Most advertising titillates our sin of covetousness. This is the air we breathe; this is our culture.
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D.A. Carson (The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism)
“
Slavery has a special interaction with the normal structures of being a human being.
So a human being is sort of a generalist creature with a capacity to have its software re-worked for different habitats. The reason that human beings are able to exploit every terrestrial habitat where plants grow is that they don't all have the software program that's the same, right? You can have a software program for hunting in the Calihari, you can have one for terracing the Andes to grow potatoes, you can have any one of a number of software programs.
Well, slavery took the software program that Africans who were brought into the slave trade had, and it did its best to erase that program – and to render that program non-functional. It rendered it non-functional by combining people from different places who didn't even necessarily speak a language so there was not one culture available. And it sort of forces the bootstrapping of a new culture, which was composed of various things but of course it was, you know, prohibition against teaching slaves to read and things like that, and so there was a systematic breaking of the original culture that Africans had during the New World, and a substituting of a version that was not a much of a threat to the slave-holding population, right?
And at the point that slavery comes to an end, it is not as if, frankly, even, you know, we didn't even have the tools to talk about these things in responsible terms. There wasn't enough known about how the mind works and what its relationship is to the body and all...so, the thing that makes the black population and the Indian population different, I would argue, is the systematic hobbling of the on-board, the inherited, evolved culture in the case of Indians by transporting them to reservations and by putting them in schools that disrupt the passage of normal culture and in the case of Africans, it was breaking apart of families, keeping people from being in contact with others they had the right language to talk to and all...so in any case, that carries through to the present: it creates a situation where there has not been access to the materials to fully update software.
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Bret Weinstein
“
A rich, thick mix of chicken and beef bouillon! Ground beef and onions sautéed in butter until savory and tender, their umami-filled juices soaking into the rice!
The creamy risotto melding into one with the soft, mildly sweet egg! "Mmm! It's practically a knockout punch!"
"The clincher appears to be this sauce.
Oyster sauce accented with a touch of honey, its mildly tart flavor is thick and heavy. Together with the curry risotto, it creates two different layers of flavor!"
"I see! While Hayama's dish was a bomb going from no aroma to powerful aroma...
... this dish is instead an induced explosion! The differing fragrances from the inner risotto and the outer sauce come at you in waves, tempting you into that next bite!"
But that's not all. How did he make the flavor this deep? The strong aroma and hint of bitterness means he used cumin and cardamom. The sting on the tongue comes from cloves. I can smell fragments of several spices, but those are all just surface things. Where is this full-bodied depth that ties it all together coming from?!
Wait, it's...
... mango.
"Mango chutney."
"Chutney?! Is that all it took to give this dish such a deep flavor?!"
CHUTNEY
Also spelled "Chatney" or "Chatni," chutney is a South Asian condiment. Spices and herbs are mixed with mashed fruit or vegetables and then simmered into a paste. A wide variety of combinations are possible, resulting in chutneys that can be sweet, spicy or even minty.
"I used my family's homemade mango chutney recipe! I mixed a dollop of this in with the rice when I steamed it.
The mango acts as an axle, running through and connecting the disparate flavors of all the spices and giving a deeper, full-bodied flavor to the overall dish. In a way, it's practical, applied spice tech!"In India where it originated, chutneys are always served on the side as condiments. It's only in Japan that chutney is added directly into a curry."
"Huh!"
"Oh, wow."
"It's unconventional to say the least, from the standpoint of original Indian curry. However, by using the chutney..."
"... he massively improved the flavor and richness of the overall dish...
... without resorting to using an excess of oils or animal products!
”
”
Yūto Tsukuda (食戟のソーマ 8 [Shokugeki no Souma 8] (Food Wars: Shokugeki no Soma, #8))
“
Your daughter is delightful!" Sejanus was saying to Aelia. I gripped the edge of the bench and bit my tongue as he spoke. "She is a living testament to the good looks that seem to follow the gens Aelia."
Aelia smiled. "Cousin, you flatter me."
Sejanus had set the tone for the evening with the clear slight against the Gavia clan. "It's only a shame I share the name through adoption- not blood- or who knows how much more attractive I might have been!" Nearby guests laughed at the joke but to me it seemed the true intent was to point out that Apicius had, at least at one time, found him attractive. Sejanus looked directly at Apicius directly as he spoke, a smile on his face.
Apicius gave away nothing. He waved a boy over with a tray. "Have you tried the fried hare livers, Sejanus?"
Apicata jumped up and down and smiled at her father. "May I? May I?"
Her father smiled. Apicata could always melt his heart. "Only one and don't share with Perseus!"
The serving boy lowered the tray so she could reach for the liver but not so low that the jumping puppy could steal treats for himself. She snatched a morsel and popped it into her mouth. I knew what she tasted, a sublime mixture of textures, the crispy breaded exterior and the smooth, sumptuous richness of the liver itself. The combination is unexpected. When I first introduced the recipe, it immediately became a family favorite.
Apicata turned to Sejanus. She did not appear to recognize him from the market. "Oh, you must try! These are my favorite!"
"If you say so, I must try!" Sejanus reached for the tray. He took a bite of the liver and surprise registered in his eyes.
Sejanus reached for another liver. "Where on earth did you find your cook?"
"Baiae." Aelia reached for her own sample. "Thrasius's cooking is always exceptional. Wait until you try the hyacinth bulbs!"
"Hyacinth bulbs are one of my favorites." Sejanus ran his fingers affectionately through Apicata's hair as he talked.
I stared, wondering what his intentions were. My right eye began to twitch.
Apicius nodded at Passia to come forward and collect Apicata and her puppy. The girl went begrudgingly and only after Sejanus had planted a kiss on her forehead and promised he would visit again soon.
”
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Crystal King (Feast of Sorrow)
“
[Aza Raskin] designed something that distinctly changed how the web works. It's called 'infinite scroll.' Older readers will remember that it used to be that the internet was divided into pages, and when you got to the bottom of one page, you had to decide to click a button to get to the next page. It was an active choice. It gave you a moment to pause and ask: Do I want to carry on looking at this? Aza designed the code that means you don't have to ask that question any more. ...It downloads a chunk of status updates for your to read through ...when you get to the bottom, it will automatically load another chunk for your to flick through.
...'At the outset, it looks like a really good invention,' he told me. He believed he was making life easier for everyone. He had been taught that increased speed and efficiency of access were always advances. his invention quickly spread all over the internet ...But then Aza watched as the people around him changed. They seemed to be unable to pull themselves away from their devices, flicking through and through and through, thanks in part to the code he had designed. He found himself infinitely scrolling through what he often realised afterwards was crap, and he wondered if he was making good use of his life.
...Aza sat down and did a calculation. At a conservative estimate, infinite scroll makes you spend 50 percent more of your time on sites like Twitter. (For many people, Aza believes, it's vastly more.) Sticking with this low-ball percentage, Aza wanted to know what it meant, in practice, if billions of people were spending 50 percent more time on a string of social media sites. When he was done, he stared at the sums. Every day, as a direct result of his invention, the combined total of 200,000 more total human lifetimes - every moment from birth to death - is now spent scrolling through a screen. These hours would otherwise have been spent on some other activity.
When he described this to me, he sounded a little stunned. That time is 'just completely gone. It's like their entire life - poof. That time, which could have been used for solving climate change, for spending time with their family, for strengthening social bonds. For whatever is it that makes their life well-lived. It's just...' He trailed off.
”
”
Johann Hari (Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention— and How to Think Deeply Again)
“
Bindi the Jungle Girl aired on July 18, 2007, on ABC (Channel 2) in Australia, and we were so proud. Bindi’s determination to carry on her father’s legacy was a testament to everything Steve believed in. He had perfectly combined his love for his family with his love for conservation and leaving the world a better place. Now this love was perfectly passed down to his kids.
The official beginning of Bindi’s career was a fantastic day. All the time and effort, and joy and sorrow of the past year culminated in this wonderful series. Now everyone was invited to see Bindi’s journey, first filming with her dad, and then stepping up and filming with Robert and me. It was also a chance to experience one more time why Steve was so special and unique, to embrace him, to appreciate him, and to celebrate his life.
Bindi, Robert, and I would do our best to make sure that Steve’s light wasn’t hidden under a bushel. It would continue to sine as we worked together to protect all wildlife and all wild places.
After Bindi’s show launched, it seemed so appropriate that another project we had been working on for many months came to fruition. We found an area of 320,000 acres in Cape York Peninsula, bordered on one side by the Dulcie River and on the other side by the Wenlock River--some of the best crocodile country in the world. It was one of the top spots in Australia, and the most critically important habitat in the state of Queensland. Prime Minister John Howard, along with the Queensland government, dedicated $6.3 million to obtaining this land, in memory of Steve.
On July 22, 2007, the Steve Irwin Wildlife Reserve became official. This piece of land means so much to the Irwin family, and I know what it would have meant to Steve. Ultimately, it meant the protection of his crocodiles, the animals he loved so much.
What does the future hold for the Irwin family? Each and every day is filled with incredible triumphs and moments of terrible grief. And in between, life goes on. We are determined to continue to honor and appreciate Steve’s wonderful spirit. It lives on with all of us. Steve lived every day of his life doing what he loved, and he always said he would die defending wildlife. I reckon Bindi, Robert, and I will all do the same.
God bless you, Stevo. I love you, mate.
”
”
Terri Irwin (Steve & Me)
“
It was the combination of many factors," Dr. Hornicker said in his last report, written for no medical reason but just because he couldn't get the girls out of his head. "With most people," he said, "suicide is like Russian roulette. Only one chamber has a bullet. With the Lisbon girls, the gun was loaded. A bullet for family abuse. A bullet for genetic predisposition. A bullet for historical malaise. A bullet for inevitable momentum. The other two bullets are impossible to name, but that doesn't mean the chambers were empty." But this is all a chasing after the wind. The essence of the suicides consisted not of sadness or mystery but simple selfishness. The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind. What lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself. Her brain going dim to all else, but flaming up in precise points of pain, personal injury, lost dreams. Every other loved one receding as though across a vast ice floe, shrinking to black dots waving tiny arms, out of hearing. Then the rope thrown over the beam, the sleeping pill dropped in the palm with the long, lying lifeline, the window thrown open, the oven turned on, whatever. They made us participate in their own madness, because we couldn't help but retrace their steps, rethink their thoughts, and see that none of them led to us. We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm. And we had to smear our muzzles in their last traces, of mud marks on the floor, trunks kicked out from under them, we had to breathe forever the air of the rooms in which they killed themselves. It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.
”
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Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)
“
Neoliberal ideology has radically altered our working lives, leaving us isolated and exposed. The ‘freedom and independence’ of the gig economy it celebrates, in which regular jobs are replaced by an illusion of self-employment, often translates into no job security, no unions, no health benefits, no overtime compensation, no safety net and no sense of community. In 1987, Margaret Thatcher said the following in a magazine interview: I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand ‘I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it!’ or ‘I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!’, ‘I am homeless, the Government must house me!’ And so they are casting their problems on society, and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families, and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.8 As always, Thatcher was faithfully repeating the snake-oil remedies of neoliberalism. Precious few of the ideas attributed to her were her own. They were formulated by men like Hayek and Friedman, then spun by the think tanks and academic departments of the Neoliberal International. In this short quote, we see three of the ideology’s core tenets distilled: First, everyone is responsible for their own destiny, and if you fall through the cracks, the fault is yours and yours alone. Second, the state has no responsibility for those in economic distress, even those without a home. Third, there is no legitimate form of social organization beyond the individual and the family. There is genuine belief here. There is a long philosophical tradition, dating back to Thomas Hobbes,9 which sees humankind as engaged in a war of ‘every man against every man’. Hayek believed that this frantic competition delivered social benefits, generating the wealth which would eventually enrich us all. But there is also political calculation. Together we are powerful, alone we are powerless. As individual consumers, we can do almost nothing to change social or environmental outcomes. But as citizens, combining effectively with others to form political movements, there is almost nothing we cannot do. Those who govern on behalf of the rich have an incentive to persuade us we are alone in our struggle for survival, and that any attempts to solve our problems collectively – through trade unions, protest movements or even the mutual obligations of society – are illegitimate or even immoral. The strategy of political leaders such as Thatcher
”
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George Monbiot (The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism (& How It Came to Control Your Life))
“
[...]Many of those friends were self-declared socialists - Wester socialists, that is. They spoke about Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Salvador Allende or Ernesto 'Che' Guevara as secular saints. It occurred to me that they were like my father in this aspect: the only revolutionaries they considered worthy of admiration had been murdered.[...]ut they did not think that my stories from the eighties were in any way significant to their political beliefs. Sometimes, my appropriating the label of socialist to describe both my experiences and their commitments was considered a dangerous provocation. [...] 'What you had was not really socialism.' they would say, barely concealing their irritation.
My stories about socialism in Albania and references to all the other socialist countries against which our socialism had measured itself were, at best, tolerated as the embarrassing remarks of a foreigner still learning to integrate. The Soviet Union, China, the German Democratic Republic, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Cuba; there was nothing socialist about them either. They were seen as the deserving losers of a historical battle that the real, authentic bearers of that title had yet to join. My friends' socialism was clear, bright and in the future. Mine was messy, bloody and of the past.
And yet, the future that they sought, and that which socialist states had once embodied, found inspiration in the same books, the same critiques of society, the same historical characters. But to my surprise, they treated this as an unfortunate coincidence. Everything that went wrong on my side of the world could be explained by the cruelty of our leaders, or the uniquely backward nature of our institutions. They believed there was little for them to learn. There was no risk of repeating the same mistakes, no reason to ponder what had been achieved, and why it had been destroyed. Their socialism was characterized by the triumph of freedom and justice; mine by their failure. Their socialism would be brought about by the right people, with the right motives, under the right circumstances, with the right combination of theory and practice. There was only one thing to do about mine: forget it.
[...]But if there was one lesson to take away from he history of my family, and of my country, it was that people never make history under circumstances they choose. It is easy to say, 'What you had was not the real thing', applying that to socialism or liberalism, to any complex hybrid of ideas and reality. It releases us from the burden of responsability. We are no longer complicit in moral tragedies create din the name of great ideas, and we don't have to reflect, apologize and learn.
”
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Lea Ypi (Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History)
“
CUPPA’S ‘TO DIE FOR’ CINNAMON ROLLS Did the description of Cuppa’s amazing cinnamon rolls make your mouth water? Every time I described them in this book I thought about my family’s favorite recipe for cinnamon rolls, and I’ve included it here for you. I think Tory and Meg would approve. All measurements/temperatures are in US units. Makes 12 wonderfully large rolls Dough: 2 packages active dry yeast 1 cup warm water 2/3 cup plus 1 teaspoon granulated sugar, divided 1 cup warmed milk (I microwave this and then stir to be sure there are no hot spots) 2/3 cup softened butter 2 teaspoons salt 2 eggs, beaten 7 to 8 cups all-purpose flour Filling of Deliciousness: 1 cup melted butter, divided (that’s 2 sticks) 1-3/4 cups dark brown sugar, divided 3 Tablespoons ground cinnamon 1 teaspoon ground nutmeg (fresh, if possible) 1 to 2 cups chopped pecans (optional) 1-1/2 cups dark raisins (optional) Frosting: 1/2 cup melted butter 3 cups powdered sugar 1 and a half teaspoons real vanilla 5 to 8 Tablespoons hot water DIRECTIONS: To make dough combine yeast, warm water and 1 teaspoon sugar in a cup and stir. Set aside. In a large bowl mix warmed milk, remaining 2/3 cup sugar, butter, salt, and eggs. Stir well and add yeast mixture. Add half the flour and beat until smooth. Stir in enough of the remaining flour to make a slightly stiff dough. It’s okay for the dough to be sticky. Turn out onto a well-floured board and knead for 5 to 10 minutes. Place in a well-buttered glass bowl. Cover loosely and let rise in a warm draft-free place until doubled in bulk, about 1 to 1-1/2 hours. When doubled, punch down dough and let it rest for 5 minutes. Roll out onto floured surface into a 15 x 20-inch rectangle. Filling: Spread dough with ½ cup melted butter. Mix together 1/-1/2 cups brown sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Sprinkle over buttered dough. Sprinkle with pecans and raisins, if you want. Sometimes I go really crazy and add a cup of finely-chopped apples, too. Roll up jellyroll-fashion and pinch the edges together to seal. Cut into 12 slices. Coat bottom of a 13”’x 9” and a square 8” pan with the last ½ cup of melted butter, and sprinkle remaining ¼ cup of sugar mixture on top. Place slices close together in pans. Let rise in warm, draft-free place until doubled in bulk (about 45 minutes). Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes, until nicely browned. Let cool slightly and spread with frosting. Share with others, and be prepared to get marriage proposals ;) Frosting: Mix melted butter, powdered sugar, and vanilla. Add hot water a tablespoon at a time, mixing after each, until frosting is of desired consistency. Spread or drizzle over slightly-cooled rolls.
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Carolyn L. Dean (Bed, Breakfast, & Bones (Ravenwood Cove Mystery, #1))
“
SUPPLEMENT DAILY DOSAGE Vitamin A 10,000 IU or 6 mg beta-carotene (choose mixed carotenes if available) B-complex vitamins B1, B2, B3, B5: 50 mg B6: 50 mg, or 100 mg if nauseated (can be higher: if necessary up to 250 mg to prevent nausea) B12: 400 mcg Choline, Inositol, PABA: 25 mg Biotin: 200 mcg Folic acid: 500 mcg (increase this to 1000 mcg if you have suffered a previous miscarriage, if there is a history of neural tube defects in your family, or if you are over 40 years of age) Vitamin C 1–2 g (take the higher dose if you are exposed to toxicity or in contact with, or suffering from, infection) Bioflavonoids 500–1000 mg (helpful for preventing miscarriage and breakthrough bleeding) Vitamin D 200 IU Vitamin E 500 IU (increasing to 800 IU during last trimester) Calcium 800 mg (increasing to 1200 mg during middle trimester when your baby’s bones are forming, or if symptoms such as leg cramps indicate an increased need) Magnesium 400 mg (half the dose of calcium) Potassium 15 mg or as cell salt (potassium chloride, 3 tablets) Iron Supplement only if need is proven; dosage depends on serum ferritin levels (stored iron) If levels < 30 mcg per litre, take 30 mg If levels < 45 mcg per litre, take 20 mg If levels < 60 mcg per litre, take 10 mg This test for ferritin levels should be repeated at the end of each trimester, and we give further details in Chapter 11. Manganese 10 mg Zinc 20–60 mg, taken last thing at night on an empty stomach (dose level to depend on results of zinc taste test, which ideally should be performed at two monthly intervals during your pregnancy; see page 172–174 for details) Chromium 100–200 mcg (upper limit applies to those with sugar cravings or with proven need) Selenium 100–200 mcg (upper limit for those exposed to high levels of heavy metal or chemical pollution). Selenium is best taken away from vitamin C, but can be taken with zinc. Iodine 75 mcg (or take 150 mg of kelp instead) Acidophilus/Bifidus Half to one teaspoonful, one to three times daily (upper limits for those who suffer from thrush) Evening primrose oil 500–1000 mg two to three times daily MaxEPA (or deep sea fish oils) 500–1000 mg two to three times daily Garlic 2000–5000 mg (higher levels for those exposed to toxins) Silica 20 mg Copper 1–2 mg (but only if zinc levels are adequate) Hydrochloric acid and digestive enzymes For those with digestive problems. There are numerous proprietary preparations which contain an appropriate combination of active ingredients. Ask your health practitioner, pharmacist or health food shop for guidance, and take as directed on the label. Co-enzyme Q10 10 mg daily
”
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Francesca Naish (The Natural Way To A Better Pregnancy (Better babies))
“
First problem: To produce wealth.
Second problem: To share it.
The first problem contains the question of labor.
The second contains the question of salary.
In the first problem the employment of forces is in question.
In the second, the distribution of enjoyment.
From the proper employment of forces results public power.
From a good distribution of enjoyments results individual happiness.
By a good distribution, not an equal but an equitable distribution must be understood.
From these two things combined, the public power without, individual happiness within, results social prosperity.
Social prosperity means the man happy, the citizen free, the nation great.
England solves the first of these two problems. She creates wealth admirably, she divides it badly. This solution which is complete on one side only leads her fatally to two extremes: monstrous opulence, monstrous wretchedness. All enjoyments for some, all privations for the rest, that is to say, for the people; privilege, exception, monopoly, feudalism, born from toil itself. A false and dangerous situation, which sates public power or private misery, which sets the roots of the State in the sufferings of the individual. A badly constituted grandeur in which are combined all the material elements and into which no moral element enters.
Communism and agrarian law think that they solve the second problem. They are mistaken. Their division kills production. Equal partition abolishes emulation; and consequently labor. It is a partition made by the butcher, which kills that which it divides. It is therefore impossible to pause over these pretended solutions. Slaying wealth is not the same thing as dividing it.
The two problems require to be solved together, to be well solved. The two problems must be combined and made but one.
…Solve the two problems, encourage the wealthy, and protect the poor, suppress misery, put an end to the unjust farming out of the feeble by the strong, put a bridle on the iniquitous jealousy of the man who is making his way against the man who has reached the goal, adjust, mathematically and fraternally, salary to labor, mingle gratuitous and compulsory education with the growth of childhood, and make of science the base of manliness, develop minds while keeping arms busy, be at one and the same time a powerful people and a family of happy men, render property democratic, not by abolishing it, but by making it universal, so that every citizen, without exception, may be a proprietor, an easier matter than is generally supposed; in two words, learn how to produce wealth and how to distribute it, and you will have at once moral and material greatness; and you will be worthy to call yourself France.
”
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Hugo
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How to Reunite with Ex? Instant Consultation Call! 8219726731
Reuniting with an ex can feel like an emotional maze, but ancient practices like Vashikaran might offer a path forward. For personalized guidance, call +918219726731 to connect with trusted experts for a free consultation on ethical spiritual solutions tailored to your situation.
"You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams."
Why Relationships Break and How Vashikaran Helps
Breakups often stem from misunderstandings, third-party interference, or fading attraction. Vashikaran mantras, rooted in Vedic traditions, work by harmonizing energies between partners. For instance, a vashikaran mantra for love back can reignite lost feelings, while Mohini Vashikaran focuses on restoring attraction and emotional balance.
Steps to Reconnect with Your Ex Using Vashikaran
1. Identify the Core Issue
Was the breakup due to communication gaps, family pressure, or distrust? A love problem solution begins with pinpointing the root cause through self-reflection or astrological analysis.
2. Chant a Targeted Mantra
Mohini Vashikaran: Ideal for reigniting physical and emotional attraction.
Stri Vashikaran Mantra: Helps influence your ex’s subconscious mind positively.
Ladki Patane Ka Mantra: Specifically designed to attract women back into a relationship.
3. Perform Rituals with Precision
Light a red candle during mantra chanting or write your ex’s name on a bay leaf. Pair these with a vashikaran mantra for love back for faster results.
4. Seek Expert Guidance
Mispronouncing mantras or incorrect rituals can backfire. Certified practitioners (call +918219726731) ensure safe, ethical practices aligned with your goals.
Ethical Considerations
Respect Free Will: Ethical Vashikaran avoids manipulation. Focus on mutual well-being.
Holistic Approach: Combine mantras with efforts like honest communication or apologies.
Case Study: Rekindling a Lost Bond**
Riya (name changed) used a Stri Vashikaran Mantra under expert guidance to reconnect with her ex-boyfriend. Within a month, he reached out to reconcile, and they rebuilt trust.
Modern Solutions to Support Vashikaran
Astrological Remedies: Wear rose quartz for love or align rituals with planetary positions.
Therapy: Address unresolved issues through counseling.
Why Choose a Free Consultation?
A free consultation call (dial +918219726731) lets you:
Understand if Vashikaran suits your situation.
Get a customized love problem solution plan.
Clarify doubts about Mohini Vashikaran or other practices.
Final Thoughts
While Vashikaran mantras like ladki patane ka mantra or Stri Vashikaran Mantra can aid reconciliation, success depends on intent, ethics, and expert guidance. For urgent help, call +918219726731 today to start your journey toward reunion.
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Dr. Seuss
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Although I have suggested that American culture tends to favor the side of independence over the side of inclusion (and I would extend that to Western culture in general), it is not a generalization that seems to apply uniformly to men and women in our culture. Indeed, although I have no idea why it may be, it seems to me that men tend to have more difficulty acknowledging their need for inclusion, tend to me more oriented toward differentiation, and that women tend to have more difficulty acknowledging their need for distinctness, tend to be more oriented toward inclusion. Whether this is a function of social experience throughout the lifespan, the effects of parenting anatomical (even genital) density, or some combination, I do not know. Whatever the source of this distinction between men and women, I believe it is also the case that this very distinction is to be found within any one person as well. Whatever the source of this distinction between men and women, I believe it is also the case that this very distinction is to be found within any one person as well. In this respect constructive-developmental theory revives the Jungian notion that there is a man in every woman and a woman in every man; saying so is both a consequence of considering that all of life is animated by a fundamental evolutionary ambivalence, and that 'maleness'/'femaleness' is but one of its expressions. Similarly, I believe that while Western and Eastern cultures reflect one side or the other of this ambivalence, they project the other. Western cultures tend to value independence, self-assertion, aggrandizement, personal achievement, increasing independence from the family of origin; Eastern cultures (including the American Indian) value the other pole. Cheyenne Indians asked to talk about themselves typically begin, 'My grandfather...' (Strauss, 1981); many Eastern cultures use the word 'I' to refer to a collectivity of people of which one is a part (Marriott, 1981); the Hopi do not say, 'It's a nice day,' as if one could separate oneself from the day, but say something that would have to be translated more like, 'I am in a nice day,' or 'It's nice in front, and behind, and above" (Whorf, 1956). At the same time one cannot escape the enormous hunger for community, mystical merging, or intergenerational connection that continually reappears in American culture through communalism, quasi-Eastern religions, cult phenomena, drug experience, the search for one's 'roots,' the idealization of the child, or the romantic appeal of extended families. Similarly, it seems too glib to dismiss as 'mere Westernization' the repeated expression in Eastern cultures of individualism, intergenerational autonomy, or entrepreneurialism as if these were completely imposed from without and not in any way the expression of some side of Eastern culture itself.
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Robert Kegan (The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development)
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Stopping, calming and resting are preconditions for healing. If we cannot stop, we will continue on the course of destruction caused by unmindful consumption.
To attain well-being, we need to take care not only of our bodies but also of our minds. Mindfulness practice is central to seeing the interdependence of mind and body.
Learning to mindfully consume sensory impressions can help us reduce our craving, anger, fear, sadness and stress.
Desire is a kind of food that nourishes us and gives us energy. If we have a healthy desire, such as a wish to save or protect life, care for our environment or live a simple, balanced life with time to take care of ourselves and our loved ones, our desire will bring us happiness.
If we allow anger to come up in our mind consciousness and stay for a whole hour, for that whole hour we are eating anger. The more we eat anger, the more the seed of anger in our store consciousness grows. If you have a friend who understands you well and offers you words of comfort and kindness, the seed of loving-kindness will arise in your mind consciousness.
We must learn to nurture wholesome seeds and to tame unwholesome ones with mindfulness, because when they return to the store consciousness, they become stronger regardless of their nature.
When we water seeds of forgiveness, acceptance and happiness in the people we love, we are giving them very healthy food for their consciousness. But if we constantly water the seeds of hatred, craving and anger in our loved ones, we are poisoning them.
We must find the source of our desire to eat too much of the wrong foods. Perhaps we eat out of sadness; perhaps we eat out of our fears for the future. If we cut the sources of nutriment for our sadness and fear, sadness and fear will wither and weaken and with them the urge to overeat. The Buddha said that if we know how to look deeply into our suffering and recognize its source of food, we are already on the path of emancipation. The way out of our suffering if through mindfulness of consumption - all forms of consumption and not just edible foods and drinks.
When we pause with mindfulness, we recognize that our family member must be suffering somehow. If one is happy and peaceful, one would not behave with such anger. Mindfulness practice can help reveal this kind of insight.
We should avoid associating with individuals and groups of people who do not know how to recognize, embrace and transform their energy of hate, discrimination or anger.
In order to have the strength and energy to embrace painful feelings, we must nourish our positive feelings regularly.
We should learn to treat our unpleasant feelings as friends who can teach us a great deal. Just like a mindfulness bell, unpleasant feelings draw our attention to issues and situations in our lives that ar enot working and that need our care. Proceeding with mindful observation, we will gain insight and understanding into what needs to be changed and how to change it.
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Thich Nhat Hanh (Savor: Mindful Eating, Mindful Life)
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Charles Bean, the official historian of Australia’s part in World War I, was unusual in dealing closely with the deeds of the soldiers on the front line, and not just the plans and orders of their leaders. At the end of his account of the Gallipoli landing in the Official History, he asked what made the soldiers fight on. What motive sustained them? At the end of the second or third day of the Landing, when they had fought without sleep until the whole world seemed a dream, and they scarcely knew whether it was a world of reality or of delirium – and often, no doubt, it held something of both; when half of each battalion had been annihilated, and there seemed no prospect before any man except that of wounds or death in the most vile surroundings; when the dead lay three deep in the rifle-pits under the blue sky and the place was filled with stench and sickness, and reason had almost vanished – what was it then that carried each man on? It was not love of a fight. The Australian loved fighting better than most, but it is an occupation from which the glamour quickly wears. It was not hatred of the Turk. It is true that the men at this time hated their enemy for his supposed ill-treatment of the wounded – and the fact that, of the hundreds who lay out, only one wounded man survived in Turkish hands has justified their suspicions. But hatred was not the motive which inspired them. Nor was it purely patriotism, as it would have been had they fought on Australian soil. The love of country in Australians and New Zealanders was intense – how strong, they did not realise until they were far away from their home. Nor, in most cases was the motive their loyalty to the tie between Australia and Great Britain. Although, singly or combined, all these were powerful influences, they were not the chief. Nor was it the desire for fame that made them steer their course so straight in the hour of crucial trial. They knew too well the chance that their families, possibly even the men beside them, would never know how they died. Doubtless the weaker were swept on by the stronger. In every army which enters into battle there is a part which is dependent for its resolution upon the nearest strong man. If he endures, those around him will endure; if he turns, they turn; if he falls, they may become confused. But the Australian force contained more than its share of men who were masters of their own minds and decisions. What was the dominant motive that impelled them? It lay in the mettle of the men themselves. To be the sort of man who would give way when his mates were trusting to his firmness; to be the sort of man who would fail when the line, the whole force, and the allied cause required his endurance; to have made it necessary for another unit to do his own unit’s work; to live the rest of his life haunted by the knowledge that he had set his hand to a soldier’s task and had lacked the grit to carry it through – that was the prospect which these men could not face. Life was very dear, but life was not worth living unless they could be true to their idea of Australian manhood.
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John Hirst (The Australians: Insiders and Outsiders on the National Character since 1770)
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If I as Pekwa Nicholas Mohlala take my family, my brothers and sisters, myself, and our children, combined, we have all the resources, knowledge, skills, and capacity to run a successful, profitable, and sustainable small business.
If I take my extended family both maternal and partenal, my aunts and uncles and my cousins, myself, and our children, combined, we have all the resources, knowledge, skills, and capacity to run a successful, profitable, and sustainable medium business.
If I take Ba Ga Mohlala family in general, including aunts, uncles, and grandchildren, combined, we have all the resources, knowledge, skills, and capacity to run a successful, profitable, and sustainable Big Business business.
If I take Banareng clan including aunts, uncles, and grandchildren, combined, we have all the resources, knowledge, skills, and capacity to run a successful, profitable, and sustainable multinational business.
YET, we are not able to do that because of lack of unity, and the lack of unity is caused by selfishness and lack of trust.
At the moment what we have is majority of successful independent individuals running their individual successful, profitable and sustainable small businesses and successful individuals pursuing their own fulfilling careers.
If ever we want to succeed as families and one united clan, we need to start by addressing the issue of trust, and selfishness. Other than that, anything that we try to do to unite the family will fail.
And to succeed in addressing the issue of trust, and selfishness, we must first start by acknowledging that we are related. We must start by living and helping oneanother as relatives, we must first start by creating platforms that will overtime make us to reestablish our genetic bond, and also to build platforms where we can do that. So, let us grab the opportunity to use existing platforms and build new ones, to participate, contribute positively, and add our brothers and sisters, our cousins, and other extended family members to those platforms as a way towards building unity, unity of purpose, purpose of reclaiming our glory and building a legacy. Unity of empowering ourself and our communities. Unity of building a successful and sustainable socioeconomic livelihood for ourselves and our communities.
We will keep on preaching this gospel of being self sustainable as Ba Ga Mohlala and Banareng in general, until people start to stop and take notice, until people start listening and acting, we will keep on preaching this gospel of being self sustainable as Ba Ga Mohlala and Banareng in general, until people take it upon themselves and start organizing themselves around the issue of social and economic development as a family and as a clan, until people realize the importance of self sufficiency as a family and as a clan.
In times of election, the media always keep on talking about the election machinery of the ruling parties in refence to branches of the ruling parties which are the power base of those ruling parties.
Luckily as Ba Gs Mohlala, we also have Ba Ga Mohlala branches across the country as basic units in addition to family, and extended family units. So, let us use those structures as basic units and building blocks to build up Ba Ga Mohlala and Banareng to become successful forces which will play a role in socioeconomic sphere locally, regionally, provinvially, nationally, and internationally. To build Ba Ga Mohlala and Banareng to be a force to reckon with locally, provinvially, nationally, and internationally. The platforms are there, it is all up to us, the ball is in our court as a collective Ba Ga Mohlala and Banareng.
It must become a norn and a duty to serve the family and the clan, it must become a honour to selflessly serve the family and the clan without expecting anything in return.
ALUTA !!!!!!!!
"Struggle of selfsuffiency must continue
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Pekwa Nicholas Mohlala
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The twanging of life
Thirteenth part : The essence of the beauty is unity in variety
We are only able to contempt and treat people in a bad way, when we forget that the other person belongs to us and to the society as well as we too, when we only forget that in the form of doing the action, there is a strong relationship between the subject and the object so avarice, violence, egoism, sadness and looking at others as pawns of market's chess to get money arise from losing their unity, from forgetting their spirit of cooperation and collaboration and then starting perceiving others in terms of their individual differences.
A humanitarian action that isn't intended to be done can make a huge storm of humanity, a single word can give people the feeling of unity, just like every time when a person passes by you and you say for him "السلام عليكم" both of you start to feel like there is a candle within both of you turning into clemency, the more love, the more mercy and the more salaam you show on your face the more light is reflected form that candle, you should start thinking that, greeting the people is proclamations of peace, every time you say "السلام عليكم" to a stranger your heart admits over and over again that we are all united, what I am trying to say is, in your heart's deepest place where the onus of your ego are fallen to pieces and the enigma of your soul is infiltrated, you find the awareness isn't different in any way from what all others may find, the mutuality of Sudanese people is appeared as the sun in the morning but only when our own humanness is surpassed our own dishumanness by accepting that we are all one in the fact that we are all made of diversified differences.
We are all equal in the fact that our own society is made by different tribes, we are all the same in the fact that we will never have the same colour, life, thinking, dreams, feelings and luxury, we are united by the reality that Sudan is able to combine all colours, all cultures, all tribes and all of us in the fact that every one believes his tribe and culture are distinguished and individual, we are compatible in the reality that we are all recaptured to this country by the same history, the same conditions of living and the longest river in the world that all of them together give us a light to shine the darkness that covers the sky to allow for us to walk as one hand in the right direction, we don't share the colours but we share the blood, we aren't equal in existence of happiness but we drink River Nile's water that keeps us alive, we are different in existence of tribes but we share the same air that is blended by our breath, so I am you as much as I am me and you are me as much as I am you.
Finally swingeing internal ructions and overmuch narcissism of a society devastate the tissue of its unity, not the differences of that society, Lord Robin said that unity begins at home within family is the strength to survive and win the fight of life.
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Omer Mohamed
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Anno Domini 2017 In the year 2017, 9 million people died from environmental pollution. Over 20,000 researchers and scientists issued a sharp warning to humanity and explained that we’re heading for a climate and sustainability catastrophe; time is running out. In the year 2017, German researchers determined that 75–80 per cent of insects had disappeared. Not much later came the report that the bird population in France has ‘collapsed’, and that certain bird species have been reduced by up to 70 per cent because they have no insects to eat. In the year 2017, forty-two individuals had more money than half the world’s population combined and 82 per cent of the world’s total increase in wealth went to the richest 1 per cent. Sea ice and glaciers were melting at a record rate. 65 million people were displaced. Hurricanes and torrential rain claimed thousands of victims, drowned cities and smashed whole nations to bits. It was also the year when the emissions curve again turned upwards, at the same time as the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere increased at a velocity which, from a larger geologic perspective, can only be compared to pressing the warp button in a Star Trek movie.
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Malena Ernman (Our House Is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis)
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Maman’s Cheese Soufflé YIELD: 4 SERVINGS WHEN MY MOTHER got married, she was seventeen and my father was twenty-two. She did not know how to cook, except for a few simple dishes that she had learned from her mother. Yet she was willing and fearless. My father liked cheese soufflé, so my mother graciously obliged. She had never made a soufflé before, but a friend told her that it consisted of a white sauce (béchamel), grated cheese, and eggs—a cinch! To the béchamel, that staple of the French home cook, she added her grated Swiss cheese and then cracked and added one egg after another to the mixture, stirred it well, poured it into a gratin dish, and baked it in the oven. Voilà! No one had told her that the eggs should be separated, with the yolks added to the base sauce and the whites whipped to a firm consistency and then gently folded into the mixture. Ignorance is bliss, and in this case it was indeed: the soufflé rose to a golden height and became a family favorite. This is a great recipe; it can be assembled hours or even a day ahead, and although it is slightly less airy than a standard soufflé, it is delicious. 6 tablespoons (¾ stick) unsalted butter, plus more to butter a 6-cup gratin dish 6 tablespoons all-purpose flour 2 cups cold whole milk ½ teaspoon salt ½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper 5 extra-large eggs 2½ cups grated Swiss cheese, preferably Gruyère (about 6 ounces) 3 tablespoons minced fresh chives Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Butter a 6-cup gratin dish, and set it aside. Melt the butter in a saucepan, then add the flour, and mix it in well with a whisk. Cook for 10 seconds, add the milk in one stroke, and mix it in with a whisk. Keep stirring with the whisk until the mixture thickens and comes to a strong boil, which will take about 2 minutes. It should be thick and smooth. Remove from the heat, and stir in the salt and pepper. Allow about 10 minutes for the white sauce to cool. Meanwhile, break the eggs into a bowl, and beat well with a fork. Add the eggs, the cheese, and the chives to the cooled sauce, and mix well to combine. Pour into the buttered gratin dish and cook immediately, or set aside until ready to cook. Bake for 30 to 40 minutes, or until the soufflé is puffy and well browned on top. Although it will stay inflated for quite a while, it is best served immediately.
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Jacques Pépin (The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen)
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Have a good night.”
It certainly couldn’t get much worse.
All I wanted to do was go home and go to sleep. I drove across town without incident. No dogs or deer jumped into my path. I parked my car and made it into the house without any fuss. All I wanted to do was collapse on my bed. My father blocking my path as I tried to walk past the dining room was my first clue the shit-storm my life had become was not over.
“Where have you been?” he asked. “How could you leave Lucinda standing there like that? It was rude and irresponsible.”
“Do we have to do this now?” I didn’t have it in me to play nice and act respectful. “Can’t you wait and yell at me tomorrow morning?”
“No, this can’t wait. Explain yourself.”
“Fine, but I’m not going to stand in the hallway while I do it.” I pushed past him and headed for the kitchen where I grabbed a glass of water. After downing half of it, I sat at the island. He could join me if he wanted to. “I wasn’t rude to Lucinda. You were rude to Haley. You knew I was there with her, but you tried to set me up with one of your friend’s daughters, instead. Why did you do that?”
“Lucinda is a much better fit for you. You have far more in common. Now, you are going to call her and apologize and then we’ll all have brunch at the country club tomorrow.”
“No. I’m sure Lucinda is nice, but she isn’t who I want to date. I’m sorry if that doesn’t fit into your social plan. No matter who I date, you will never be at the top of the food chain at the country club. Nathan’s family has more money than half the other members combined. Deal with it and stop trying to use me to work your way up the ladder.”
“And why do you think you’re friends with Nathan?” What a stupid question. “Because I like him.”
“No. Since you were an infant I networked with his father, making sure you were involved in all the same activities so that when you grew up you’d be friends.”
Unbelievable. “Since I was born, you’ve used me to network with his family?”
“Yes. And it’s worked, which is why you need to listen to me and do as I say. Date Lucinda. Act like the perfect gentleman when you’re with her. I don’t care if you want to see this Haley in your spare time, but everyone needs to think you and Lucinda are the perfect couple.”
“You mean the way everyone thinks you have a perfect marriage, even though you’re screwing your secretary?”
His eyes narrowed.
A small part of me hoped he’d deny it, that there was some other explanation.
“What happens between your mother and I is not your concern. You will date Lucinda and you will do so with a smile on your face.”
“No. I won’t.” I set my glass down and headed up to bed.
Sleep wouldn’t come. I tossed and turned. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Haley, asking me to make a choice. And every time, I screwed it up.
”
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Chris Cannon (Blackmail Boyfriend (Boyfriend Chronicles, #1))
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Only a few generations earlier, Khubilai’s ancestors had used the hunt as the primary means of acquiring food. His great-grandfather Yesugei had been out hunting with his gyrfalcon when he saw the bride Hoelun, whom he seized to make his own wife. Khubilai’s grandfather Genghis Khan fed his family by hunting after his father’s death, and he had killed his half brother Begter in an argument ostensibly following a hunting quarrel about a bird and a fish. Later in life, Genghis Khan, with the aid of Subodei and other good hunters, adapted the extensive hunting strategies, techniques, and weapons to the task of warfare by treating his enemies as objects of prey to be trapped and stalked, and he thereby conquered his vast empire. The hunt combined a recreational pastime enjoyed by Khubilai with the imperial needs of ceremonial pomp and wasteful spectacle.
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Jack Weatherford (Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World)
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Using this technique, Baum et al constructed a forest that contained 1,000 decision trees and looked at 84 co-variates that may have been influencing patients' response or lack of response to the intensive lifestyle modifications program. These variables included a family history of diabetes, muscle cramps in legs and feet, a history of emphysema, kidney disease, amputation, dry skin, loud snoring, marital status, social functioning, hemoglobin A1c, self-reported health, and numerous other characteristics that researchers rarely if ever consider when doing a subgroup analysis. The random forest analysis also allowed the investigators to look at how numerous variables *interact* in multiple combinations to impact clinical outcomes. The Look AHEAD subgroup analyses looked at only 3 possible variables and only one at a time.
In the final analysis, Baum et al. discovered that intensive lifestyle modification averted cardiovascular events for two subgroups, patients with HbA1c 6.8% or higher (poorly managed diabetes) and patients with well-controlled diabetes (Hba1c < 6.8%) and good self-reported health. That finding applied to 85% of the entire patient population studied. On the other hand, the remaining 15% who had controlled diabetes but poor self-reported general health responded negatively to the lifestyle modification regimen. The negative and positive responders cancelled each other out in the initial statistical analysis, falsely concluding that lifestyle modification was useless. The Baum et al. re-analysis lends further support to the belief that a one-size-fits-all approach to medicine is inadequate to address all the individualistic responses that patients have to treatment.
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Paul Cerrato (Reinventing Clinical Decision Support: Data Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, and Diagnostic Reasoning (HIMSS Book Series))
“
Look. Is The Rock a perfect movie? No. But is it a perfect movie? Maybe! Just describing the plot of The Rock is a lush, lip-smacking thrill, like a piece of bacon that is all fatty rind, like a bowl of Lucky Charms that is all marshmallows—so many elements that could each, alone, be too much, here combined into one film that somehow works, one great, baroque cinnamon roll that is all the middle of the cinnamon roll, The Jetsons Meet the Flintstones, a duck-billed platypus, a place beyond decadence, foie gras on your burger, everything you want and nothing you don’t and then some more. Nicolas Cage, an unchained freak; Sean Connery, virtuosically hammy; Ed Harris, a haunted prince going down with his ship; antihero vs. antihero vs. antihero vs. the president; and gruesome chemical weapons and a heist and a mutiny and a double mutiny and family drama and Alcatraz and mine carts and fighter jets and flames and a rock, stalwart against the sea. All that, but with none of the septic irony, the relentless self-conscious hedging, that infects so much of our lives these days. The Rock does not take one single moment to look you in the eye and say, yes, we know this is a little silly, we are sorry, please know we are cool—there’s no need! The Rock believes in itself, it commits, it is happy to be fun. Coolness is a deadly neurotoxin. Inject The Rock into your heart.
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Lindy West (Shit, Actually: The Definitive, 100% Objective Guide to Modern Cinema)
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Fashion blogger Anna Estrin in her online magazine talks about women's happiness, the atmosphere of home comfort, traditions, holidays, decor and culinary recipes. Since all of her projects in one way or another are united by the theme of fashion, beauty, womanhood, family and home comfort, she shares the current trends, the secrets of combining different styles and putting together the perfect image not just of a woman but also around her. A surrounding of a woman plays a big role in building her happiness, Anna believes. She is convinced that any day can be turned into a real holiday with the help of creative ideas. Anna is an expert in making her home a cozy space that is festive for her family because she loves esthetics. For most people, their home is the most important place that their lives revolve around since that is where they and their loved ones live. We all want our homes to be not just comfortable but also beautiful. Adding small touches here and there can add a lot of beauty to a home and help the homeowner realize his or her home’s full potential. Making her family happy is the main key to Anna’s happiness and she is delighted to share her ideas with the readers.
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Annie Estrin
“
King Salman knew very well that his father had been in his mid-twenties when he captured Riyadh. Age and experience were not the qualities that had led to this success. What King Abdulaziz had, and what King Salman was looking for, was fire in the belly. Brought up in humiliating exile, King Abdulaziz had been fiercely determined to restore his family’s honor. He had combined exceptional ambition with a ruthless will to power. Such vigor and resolve would be needed again in order to manage a generational leadership transition and drive forward much needed, but contentious, economic and social reforms.
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David Rundell (Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads)
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Patients will come in to see me with various infections that do not respond to antibiotics and when they are also treated with ozone the antibiotics suddenly work much better. The reason is that antibiotics are one dimensional. They just kill germs. But ozone works differently. It activates the immune system, prevents the free radical damage that happens with acute infections, and at the same time helps the body detoxify from the toxins that infections release. So the combination of ozone therapy plus antibiotics is a real one-two punch for infections. One day this protocol will be common place in every hospital in the world.
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Frank Shallenberger (The Ozone Miracle: How you can harness the power of oxygen to keep you and your family healthy)
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With you and Ronak getting married, it hit me. I’d just be in the house with Dad. Or with Dad and some combination of his family. And that would be that. The idea of it made me feel trapped. Maybe I’d take the occasional break with some of the other aunties, but even they’ve become busy with grandchildren or traveling or whatever.
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Saumya Dave (Well-Behaved Indian Women)
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According to an article, Sibling Abuse and Bullying: The Hidden Epidemic on Psychology Today by Darlene Lancer, “Often labeled rivalry and ignored, sibling bullying and abuse cause real trauma. Sibling abuse is the most common, but least reported abuse in the family. Prevalence is higher than spousal or child abuse combined with consequences well into adulthood similar to parent-child abuse. Up to 80% of youth experience some form of sibling maltreatment; yet it’s been called the forgotten abuse.
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Dana Arcuri CTRC (Toxic Siblings: A Survival Guide to Rise Above Sibling Abuse & Heal Trauma)
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those made by his brother. It wasn’t as if Edward looked like Maria. That might have been painful but it would have been a start, something to work on . . . She thought: The thing about families is that if we’re lucky we all recognise certain things in one another and then we know how to react. Hal and Jolyon were like Johnny, with bits of Freddy jumbled in, and Kit was like herself, Prue, and Prue’s own mother; there was a certain instability combined with a reckless love of life which could be hazardous. Kit had turned to darling old Clarrie but there had been moments when Prue had feared that her daughter might go off the rails, especially after that terrible business with Jake. Now
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Marcia Willett (Winning Through (Chadwick Family #3))
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Step by Step…
Can you write out your ideal business step by step
Here is a business I am setting up for a client.
She wants to shipping start her own shipping company…
One she will need a US partner to collect and transfer packages to her in Jamaica.
She will also need one in China.
I have two contacts.
One has a warehouse in Florida
The other has two in China.
Chinese connect makes goods available within 3 weeks, she has to tell her customers four.
The US connect makes it within 3-5 days. She has to tell them within a week…
Next she will need a website where her customers can login and track their packages.
This will come with individual dashboards.
She will need an interface and warehouse management software and logistics APIs.
She will also need an automated email set up (journey) to send emails to her customers without her or her agents needing to do that.
Without this Saas she would have to hire someone to reply to messages and emails about , someone to call and track, use usps and FedEx tracking numbers to track and reply back to customers.
She also needs a beta ApI to allow her warehouse guy to update the CRM with information about her customers packages…
Key nodes such as - Intransit to destinations
Held at customs
Clearance
In transit to store
Pick up available etc…
These will come in as email notifications
Fully automated.
Everything will be connected using Webhooks… entire system.
Saas she might need to use a combination of GOhighlevel, Workiz and
To run this as a System as as Service.
Each platform can work together using webhooks.
Gohighlevel as a Saas is $500 a month
Workiz is $200 dollars
She can use Odoo which is open source alternative as a CRM
And Clickup as Management.
This is how a conversational business plan looks.
You can see it.
You can research it.
You can confirm that it’s plausible.
It doesn’t sound like pipedreams.
It sounds workable to credit companies /banks and investors.
It sounds doable to a BDO Client.
I also sound as if I know what I am doing.
Not a lot of technical language.
A confused prospective business investor or banker don’t want to use a dictionary to figure out everything…
They want to see the vision as clear as day.
You basically need to do to them what I did to you when you joined my programme. It must sound plausible.
All businesses is a game of wit.
Every deal that is signed benefits both party.
Whether initially or in the long term.
Those are the sub-tenets of business.
Every board meeting or meeting with regulatory boards, banks, credit facilities, municipalities is a game of convincing people to see your thing through…
Everyone does
Algorithm is simple. People want you to solve their problems with speed and efficiency.
Speed is very important and automation.
Progress, business and production are tied to ego… that’s why people love seh oh dem start a business or dem have dem online business and nah sell one rass thing.
Cause a lot of people think being successful and looking successful are one and the same thing until they meet someone like me or people who done the work…
Don’t rush it… you are young and you have time.
There are infact certain little nuances Weh yuh only ago learn through experience. Experience and reflection.
One of the drawbacks of wanting to run your business by yourself with you and your family members is that you guys will have to be reliant on yourself for feedback which is not alw
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Crystal Evans
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The hominin family has been aptly compared to a braided river, its streams overlapping, combining, and running dry until only one rivulet still runs—us.
[...The braided stream analogy was proposed by Xinzhi Wu (e.g., Athreya and Wu 2017).]
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Kyle Harper (Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History)
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6. Transfer the vegetable mixture to a large food processor. Add the cooked lentils, chickpeas, oats, parsley, basil, ½ teaspoon salt, and ¼ teaspoon pepper and pulse until combined (you want a coarse, not mushy, consistency), scraping down the sides of the bowl several times. Transfer the mixture to a large bowl and add the eggs, bread crumbs, and Parmesan cheese. Mix by hand until fully incorporated. Refrigerate the meatball mixture for 30 minutes.
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Tracy Pollan (Mostly Plants: 101 Delicious Flexitarian Recipes from the Pollan Family)
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In 2009, an American soldier named Bowe Bergdahl slipped through a gap in the concertina wire at his combat outpost in southern Afghanistan and walked off into the night. He was quickly captured by a Taliban patrol, and his absence triggered a massive search by the US military that put thousands of his fellow soldiers at risk. The level of betrayal felt by soldiers was so extreme that many called for Bergdahl to be tried for treason when he was repatriated five years later. Technically his crime was not treason, so the US military charged him with desertion of his post—a violation that still carries a maximum penalty of death. The collective outrage at Sergeant Bergdahl was based on very limited knowledge but provides a perfect example of the kind of tribal ethos that every group—or country—deploys in order to remain unified and committed to itself. If anything, though, the outrage in the United States may not be broad enough. Bergdahl put a huge number of people at risk and may have caused the deaths of up to six soldiers. But in purely objective terms, he caused his country far less harm than the financial collapse of 2008, when bankers gambled trillions of dollars of taxpayer money on blatantly fraudulent mortgages. These crimes were committed while hundreds of thousands of Americans were fighting and dying in wars overseas. Almost 9 million people lost their jobs during the financial crisis, 5 million families lost their homes, and the unemployment rate doubled to around 10 percent. For nearly a century, the national suicide rate has almost exactly mirrored the unemployment rate, and after the financial collapse, America’s suicide rate increased by nearly 5 percent. In an article published in 2012 in The Lancet, epidemiologists who study suicide estimated that the recession cost almost 5,000 additional American lives during the first two years—disproportionately among middle-aged white men. That is close to the nation’s losses in the Iraq and Afghan wars combined. If Sergeant Bergdahl betrayed his country—and that’s not a hard case to make—surely the bankers and traders who caused the financial collapse did as well. And yet they didn’t provoke nearly the kind of outcry that Bergdahl did. Not a single high-level CEO has even been charged in connection with the financial collapse, much less been convicted and sent to prison, and most of them went on to receive huge year-end bonuses. Joseph Cassano of AIG Financial Products—known as “Mr. Credit-Default Swap”—led a unit that required a $99 billion bailout while simultaneously distributing $1.5 billion in year-end bonuses to his employees—including $34 million to himself. Robert Rubin of Citibank received a $10 million bonus in 2008 while serving on the board of directors of a company that required $63 billion in federal funds to keep from failing. Lower down the pay scale, more than 5,000 Wall Street traders received bonuses of $1 million or more despite working for nine of the financial firms that received the most bailout money from the US goverment.
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Sebastian Junger (Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging)
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The first bell went off just as I got to my locker. After spinning the combination into the padlock, I yanked on the handle while pressing my shoulder into the door. It was my usual routine whenever I visited my locker so none of my stuff would fall out. Sure, we have a locker clean out every two weeks, but you know how life can get busy sometimes, right? That and I was pretty sure I was feeding a small family of rodents living at the bottom of it. I’m not sure I could live with myself if I did anything to take food off their table. Squeezing my fingers into the cold, dark, and somehow damp locker, I managed to scrape the top of my math book just enough so that it would tip into my hand. “Gotcha!” I exclaimed as I slid the book out slowly. After it was free from the locker, I slammed the door shut with my knee since that was the spot where it clicked shut. Suddenly, like she materialized out of thin air, Naomi was standing
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Marcus Emerson (Spirit Week Shenanigans (Diary of a 6th Grade Ninja, #8))
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The first bell went off just as I got to my locker. After spinning the combination into the padlock, I yanked on the handle while pressing my shoulder into the door. It was my usual routine whenever I visited my locker so none of my stuff would fall out. Sure, we have a locker clean out every two weeks, but you know how life can get busy sometimes, right? That and I was pretty sure I was feeding a small family of rodents living at the bottom of it. I’m not sure I could live with myself if I did anything to take food off their table. Squeezing my fingers into the cold, dark, and somehow damp locker, I managed to scrape the top of my math book just enough so that it would tip into my hand. “Gotcha!
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Marcus Emerson (Spirit Week Shenanigans (Diary of a 6th Grade Ninja, #8))