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It is the apathetic person that sees the cause while the charitable person sees the need.
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Shannon L. Alder (300 Questions to Ask Your Parents Before It's Too Late)
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They should just give him a cot and donate the money to worthy causes. Endangered whales. Psoriasis. Olive.
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Ali Hazelwood (The Love Hypothesis)
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Well, if they set you in the kissing booth, let me know, I am always willing to donate for a worthy cause.
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C.J. Duggan (The Boys of Summer (Summer, #1))
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One ought not to encourage beggars, and yes, you are right, it is far better to donate to charities that address the causes of poverty rather than to him, a creature who is merely its symptom.
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Mohsin Hamid
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Trump is missing the point when he says that Kaepernick should “find a country that works better for him.” Instead, Kaepernick believes so deeply in this country that he is willing to offer correction rather than abandon the nation—and to donate a million dollars in support of racial justice causes.
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Michael Eric Dyson (Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America)
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When we donate to a good cause, it “says” to our associates, “Look, I’m willing to spend my resources for the benefit of others. I’m playing a positive-sum, cooperative game with society.” This helps explain why generosity is so important for those who aspire to leadership. No one wants leaders who play zero-sum, competitive games with the rest of society. If their wins are our losses, why should we support them? Instead we want leaders with a prosocial orientation, people who will look out for us because we’re all in it together.
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Kevin Simler (The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life)
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I hate fucking pussies like that." Felix reached out and shook Hector's hand. "Good for you, man. I would've cracked him too." He turned and pointed at Abel. "Let me know if you need help with that. I'll donate to the cause. We'll call it 'Cracking Down on Future Fucking Douchebag Wife Beaters of the World.' Can't think of a better charity.
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Elizabeth Reyes (Gio (5th Street, #2))
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Akin to the idea that time is money is the concept, less spoken by as commonly assumed, that we may be adequately represented by money. The giving of money has thus become our characteristic virtue.
But to give is not to do. The money is given in lieu of action, thought, care, time. And it is no remedy for the fragmentation of character and consciousness that is the consequence of specialization. At the simplest, most practical level, it would be difficult for most of us to give enough in donations to good causes to compensate for, much less remedy, the damage done by the money that is taken from us and used destructively by various agencies of the government and by the corporations that hold us in captive dependence on their products. Most important, even if we could give enough to overbalance the official and corporate misuse of our money, we would still not solve the problem: the willingness to be represented by money involves a submission to the modern divisions of character and community. The remedy safeguards the disease.
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Wendell Berry (The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture)
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1. Myth: Without God, life has no meaning.
There are 1.2 billion Chinese who have no predominant religion, and 1 billion people in India who are predominantly Hindu. And 65% of Japan's 127 million people claim to be non-believers. It is laughable to suggest that none of these billions of people are leading meaningful lives.
2. Myth: Prayer works.
Studies have now shown that inter-cessionary prayer has no effect whatsoever of the health or well-being of the subject.
3. Myth: Atheists are immoral.
There are hundreds of millions of non-believers on the planet living normal, decent, moral lives. They love their children, care about others, obey laws, and try to keep from doing harm to others just like everyone else. In fact, in predominantly non-believing countries such as in northern Europe, measures of societal health such as life expectancy at birth, adult literacy, per capita income, education, homicide, suicide, gender equality, and political coercion are better than they are in believing societies.
4. Myth: Belief in God is compatible with science.
In the past, every supernatural or paranormal explanation of phenomena that humans believed turned out to be mistaken; science has always found a physical explanation that revealed that the supernatural view was a myth. Modern organisms evolved from lower life forms, they weren't created 6,000 years ago in the finished state. Fever is not caused by demon possession. Bad weather is not the wrath of angry gods. Miracle claims have turned out to be mistakes, frauds, or deceptions. We have every reason to conclude that science will continue to undermine the superstitious worldview of religion.
5. Myth: We have immortal souls that survive death.
We have mountains of evidence that makes it clear that our consciousness, our beliefs, our desires, our thoughts all depend upon the proper functioning of our brains our nervous systems to exist. So when the brain dies, all of these things that we identify with the soul also cease to exist. Despite the fact that billions of people have lived and died on this planet, we do not have a single credible case of someone's soul, or consciousness, or personality continuing to exist despite the demise of their bodies.
6. Myth: If there is no God, everything is permitted.
Consider the billions of people in China, India, and Japan above. If this claim was true, none of them would be decent moral people. So Ghandi, the Buddha, and Confucius, to name only a few were not moral people on this view.
7. Myth: Believing in God is not a cause of evil.
The examples of cases where it was someone's belief in God that was the justification for their evils on humankind are too numerous to mention.
8. Myth: God explains the origins of the universe.
All of the questions that allegedly plague non-God attempts to explain our origins still apply to the faux explanation of God. The suggestion that God created everything does not make it any clearer to us where it all came from, how he created it, why he created it, where it is all going. In fact, it raises even more difficult mysteries: how did God, operating outside the confines of space, time, and natural law 'create' or 'build' a universe that has physical laws? We have no precedent and maybe no hope of answering or understanding such a possibility. What does it mean to say that some disembodied, spiritual being who knows everything and has all power, 'loves' us, or has thoughts, or goals, or plans?
9. Myth: There's no harm in believing in God.
Religious views inform voting, how they raise their children, what they think is moral and immoral, what laws and legislation they pass, who they are friends and enemies with, what companies they invest in, where they donate to charities, who they approve and disapprove of, who they are willing to kill or tolerate, what crimes they are willing to commit, and which wars they are willing to fight.
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Matthew S. McCormick
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Catcallers offer a valuable service to the community, and I'm proud to say I donate my time and energy to such a charitable cause. If you need me I'll be whistling on the sidewalk.
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Jarod Kintz (Eggs, they’re not just for breakfast)
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At one meeting in Chicago an old woman who had been born a slave tried to donate her life savings to the cause of Congo reform; the
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Adam Hochschild (King Leopold's Ghost)
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To give money towards a good cause is not under our control. You can have the intent (of giving), but you may not be able to give; and you will get the result of that intent in the next life .
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Dada Bhagwan (Noble Use of Money)
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I watched Papa’s hands as he talked about his work, and I realized something: He cared about his at-risk youth just as much as Sahil’s mom and dad cared about the state of higher education in our country. The difference was, because of their education and fancy degrees, they could afford to pay money to contribute to their cause. Papa’s work had to be in person; his donation was his time, his family, and himself.
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Sandhya Menon (From Twinkle, with Love)
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Perhaps the biggest misconception some managers may run into is the belief that correlation proves causation. The fact that one variable is correlated to another does not necessarily mean that one variable causes the other. If church donations and liquor sales are correlated, it is not because of some collusion between clergy and the liquor industry. It is because both are affected by how well the economy is doing.
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Douglas W. Hubbard (How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business)
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There was a Dana Phelps with a son named Brandon, but they didn’t live on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The Phelpses resided in a rather tony section of Greenwich, Connecticut. Brandon’s father had been a big-time hedge fund manager. Beaucoup bucks. He died when he was forty-one. The obituary gave no cause of death. Kat looked for a charity—people often requested donations made to a heart disease or cancer or whatever cause—but there was nothing listed.
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Harlan Coben (Missing You)
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She knew that people, being like they are, sooner or later are going to draw back a ways from somebody who seems to be giving a little more than ordinary, from Santa Clauses and missionaries and men donating funds to worthy causes, and begin to wonder: What's in it for them? Grin out of the side of their mouths when the young lawyer, say, brings a sack of pecans to the kids in his district schools- just before nominations for state senate, the sly devil- and say to one another, He's nobody's fool.
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Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest)
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GiveWell.org reviews hundreds of charities and provides recommendations to donors about which organizations will save the most lives per dollar donated. The website EffectiveAnimalActivism.org was launched in 2012 to provide similar advice for donors wanting to support animal protection causes.
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Nick Cooney (Veganomics: The Surprising Science on What Motivates Vegetarians, from the Breakfast Table to the Bedroom)
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One of their first decisions was to donate Robin’s body to Memorial Sloan Kettering. The doctors told them that they could learn from studying her disease, and my parents hoped that Robin’s death might lead to some benefit for other suffering children. Childhood cancer research became a lifelong cause for them.
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George W. Bush (41: A Portrait of My Father)
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Philanthropists and donors traditionally haven't been sufficiently interested in women's rights abroad, giving money instead to higher brow causes such as the ballet or art museums. There could be a powerful international women's rights movement if only philanthropists would donate as much to real women as to paintings and sculptures of women.
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Nicholas D. Kristof
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Instead of passionlessly donating money to a faraway charity with millions of people on their mailing list or getting involved in a national political cause with a large and vocal following online, we can do something local, something that contributes... in a tangible – even if tiny – way to a real place and to real people, rather than to an anonymous website.
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Seth D. Kaplan (Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time)
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I don’t need your money and never have,” Ilmari counters, seeming almost bored with the whole conversation. “I donated it all to a local charity. Your generous gift is now preserving sea turtle habitats.” I fight my smile, hiding it behind my wine glass. Mars and his sea turtles. “Good,” Halla murmurs. “The money was yours to do with as you wished. I’m glad you made use of it for such a noble cause.
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Emily Rath (Pucking Around (Jacksonville Rays, #1))
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Perhaps the hellfire preachers are right, and I will perish in some terrible pit in hell. Perhaps I should donate large sums of money to their causes to save me from my Faustian fate. Nonetheless, if I am to go to the sulphurous pit, I'm likely to meet some interesting people in this netherworld, including perhaps Homer, Socrates, Gandhi, Mohammed, Einstein, and other non-Christians. I may even see Jesus there, for he was a Jew not a Christian. Unfortunately, many Christians have--and still do--abuse the
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Craig Hamilton-Parker (What to Do When You Are Dead: Life After Death, Heaven and the Afterlife)
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First, if you participate in Movember, fuck you. Second, if you want to raise money for prostate cancer (a noble cause), do it the old-fashioned way, by either begging for it or exerting yourself physically for donations. Sitting on your ass and letting nature take its course above your upper lip is not the same thing as running a 10K at a local high school or breaking out the set of power tools your dad gave you as a housewarming present collecting dust in your garage and using them to go out and build a habitat for humanity.
Maybe I can raise money for rectal cancer by getting people to pledge a dollar every time I take a shit.
And third no one wants to see that horrific seventies pornstache growing like a caterpillar with cerebral palsy zigzagging across your face; you look like you're about to go door to door informing people that you're a registered sex offender who's just moved in next door and would their kids like to come out and was your windowless van for a dollar?
Fuck Movember. And November.
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Ari Gold (The Gold Standard: Rules to Rule By)
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In this age of consumer activism, pinpoint marketing, and unlimited and immediate information, we want the impossible: products and producers that will assure us that we are fashionable, and that don’t pollute, harm animals, or contain weird chemicals, that run on alternative energy, pay their workers good salaries, recycle their scraps, use natural ingredients, buy from local suppliers, donate generously to charity, donate in particular to their neighborhoods, and don’t throw their weight around by lobbying. (Or maybe they should lobby for the right causes?)
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Fran Hawthorne (Ethical Chic: The Inside Story of the Companies We Think We Love)
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People here talked about the pre-1967 borders.
To tell you the truth this is astonishing.
Whatever happened to the (Palestinian) cause we had before 1967?
Were we lying to ourselves or to the world?
Thousands of martyrs fell before 1967. What for?
How can you say that Palestine was occupied only in 1967, and that (Israel) must return to the pre-1967 borders?
Does Palestine consist of only the West Bank and the Gaza Strip?
If so, it means that the Israelis did not occupy it in 1948.
They left it to you for twenty years, so why didn't you establish a Palestinian state?
Wasn't the Gaza strip part of Egypt, and the West Bank part of Jordan?
The Jews left them to you for twenty years - from 1948 to 1967.
If that is Palestine, why didn't you establish a state there?
What is the justification for all the wars, the sacrifices, and the economic embargo on Israel before 1967?
The Israelis can sue the Arabs now, and demand billions or even trillions in compensation for the damage caused them in 1948-1967.
You Arabs admitted that the (Palestinian) cause began after 1967.
So the Israelis can ask:
"Why did you fight us before that?"
They will demand Arab compensation for the so-called embargo on Israel, and for the economic damage caused to the Israelis.
If the Israelis sue you, they will win.
They will say:
We suffered an injustice.
We are like an innocent lamb surrounded by wolves.
We've been saying this since 1948.
Now the Arabs themselves have admitted that Palestine was occupied in 1967.
Now they demand that Israel return to the pre-1967 borders, saying this will resolve the problem, and they will recognise Israel.
Why didn't you recognise Israel before 1967?
There is no God but Allah.
By Allah, this is unacceptable.
It doesn't make sense.
You say that you will recognise Israel within the pre-1967 borders?!
Maybe Israel will occupy more Arab land in, say, 2008, and a few years later, you will demand that it return to the pre-2008 borders, in exchange for recognizing Israel.
This is exactly what's going on now.
We gave negotiations a serious try.
The Jews used to say:
"Meet with us only once for direct negotiations, and we will resolve this issue."
This is what they used to say in the 1950s and 1960s.
They used to say: "Please, Arabs, sit down with us just one time, and our problem will be over."
But you saw what happened.
We met with them a thousand times - from the stables of (camp) David to Annapolis.
We've been through all these negotiations - the stables of (camp) David, the Oslo negotiations of our brother Abu Mazen...
He was, of course, the hero of Oslo - just like Sadat was the hero of the stables of (camp) David.
When Algeria was fighting, donations and volunteers were coming in broad daylight - from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf.
From here, from Syria, Dr. IIbrahim Makhous came with a group of volunteers, and fought alongside the Algerian Liberation Front.
They were not considered terrorists, and no measures were taken against Syria.
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Muammar Gaddafi
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The country, it seemed, was on the verge of a second civil war, this one over industrial slavery. But Frick was a gambler who cared little what the world thought of him. He was already a villain in the public’s eye, thanks to a disaster of epic proportions three years earlier. Frick and a band of wealthy friends had established the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club on land near an unused reservoir high in the hills above the small Pennsylvania city of Johnstown, 70 miles east of Pittsburgh. The club beautified the grounds around the dam but paid little attention to the dam itself, which held back the Conemaugh River and was in poor condition from years of neglect. On May 31, 1889, after heavy rainfall, the dam gave way, releasing nearly 5 billion gallons of water from Lake Conemaugh into Johnstown and killing 2,209 people. What became known as the Johnstown Flood caused $17 million in damages. Frick’s carefully crafted corporate structure for the club made it impossible for victims to pursue the financial assets of its members. Although he personally donated several thousands of dollars to relief efforts, Frick remained to many a scoundrel, the prototype of the uncaring robber baron of the Gilded Age.
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James McGrath Morris (Revolution By Murder: Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and the Plot to Kill Henry Clay Frick (Kindle Single))
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In the course of her letter writing, she’d learned a few things about the subtle peculiarities of the South’s power brokers. The Mississippi Sovereigns, like most other rebel groups, preferred to be addressed as Brothers; letters to Mr. Sharif, the director of Camp Patience, were exclusively read and acted upon by his secretary, but could never be addressed to his secretary; the Free Southern State government in Atlanta had a perfect record of responding to every letter, but no sooner than two years after the fact. She learned which methods of attack worked and which didn’t. Any familial relation between appellant and recipient, no matter how tenuous, was to be ruthlessly exploited; pictures of dead relatives or horrific war wounds never did any good, although the refugees in possession of such images invariably demanded they be sent anyway; a direct offer of bribery was more likely than not to elicit an insulted response, but an offer to make a donation to a cause of the recipient’s choosing got the same message across more tactfully. It was, in the end, hopeless work, the letters almost always doomed to fail. But for the refugees who paid or begged Martina to write these pleadings on their behalf, hopelessness was no impediment to hope.
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Omar El Akkad (American War)
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Make a List (or lists)
• Make a list of all the things that you can look at and think: Why did we even bother to move that the last time? Now will be your last and best chance to give or throw away unwanted items until your next move (5-7 years on average). Give unwanted clothes, furniture, kitchen items, etc. to a charity that allows you to use your donation as a tax write-off. Yard sales are another option.
• Make a list (and/or get one online) of household hazardous materials. These are common items in your home that are not or might not be safe to transport: flammables like propane tanks (even empty ones), gasoline or kerosene, aerosols or compressed gases (hair spray, spray paint), cleaning fluids in plastic containers (bleach, ammonia) and pesticides (bug spray) and herbicides (weed killer) and caustics like lye or pool acid.
There is more likely to be damage caused by leakage of cleaning fluids-- like bleach--than there is by damage caused by a violent explosion or fire in your truck. The problem lies in the fact that any leaking fluid is going to drip its way to the floor and spread out--even in the short time span of your move and more so if you are going up and down hills. Aerosols can explode in the summer heat as can propane BBQ tanks. Gasoline from lawnmowers and pesticide vapors expand in the heat and can permeate everything in the truck. Plastic containers that have been opened can expand and contract with a change in temperature and altitude and crack.
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Jerry G. West (The Self-Mover's Bible: A Comprehensive Illustrated Guide to DIY Moving Written by Professional Furniture Mover Jerry G. West)
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But why bother with guests at all? The virtual community is larger and less trouble than the relatives and friends upon whom self-fundraisers had been drawing. The pioneers in using the Internet to ask strangers for money patterned themselves on the causes of reputable charity—such as donating toward education or helping the ill—except for designating themselves the sole beneficiaries. A breakthrough was achieved when it was discovered that asking for money for luxuries also brought results. These practices are no less vulgar for having become commonplace. There is no polite way to tell people to give you money or objects, and no polite way to entertain people at their expense. Begging is the last resort of the desperate, not a social form requiring others to help people live beyond their means.
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Judith Martin (Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior)
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Free radicals and antioxidants. One of the theories to explain the underlying cause of cancer and atherosclerosis is that tissues are damaged by free radicals. Free radicals are highly reactive molecules that have an unpaired electron. When a radical collides with another molecule, it becomes stable by removing or donating a single electron, but in the process it generates a new radical. Radicals can cause damage to DNA, leading to possible mutations and the development of cancer; and to fats, leading to the development of atherosclerosis; as well as to proteins, leading to the development of auto-immune diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis. The radicals that cause the most damage are oxygen radicals, and compounds that provide protection against radical damage are generally referred to as antioxidants.
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David Bender (Nutrition: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
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major piece of financial regulation—the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act—moved toward passage. Wall Street money flowed to some of its fiercest critics in the 2010 election. That year, seven out of the ten top recipients of Goldman Sachs contributions, for example, were Democrats. Former Clinton secretary of labor Robert Reich declared that this was evidence that Wall Street was “bribing elected officials with their donations.”14 I would argue that Reich had the power equation wrong. It was the Permanent Political Class that threatened to cause severe damage to the financiers—not the other way around. As the late economics professor Peter H. Aranson puts it, “The real market for contributions is one of ‘extortion’ by those who hold a monopoly on the use of coercion—the officeholders.”15 The midterm election passed, and so did Dodd-Frank.
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Peter Schweizer (Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets)
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When I was in the seventh grade, in a health class, the teacher read an article. A mother learned that the neighbor children had chicken pox. She faced the probability that her children would have it as well, perhaps one at a time. She determined to get it all over with at once.
So she sent her children to the neighbor’s to play with their children to let them be exposed, and then she would be done with it. Imagine her horror when the doctor finally came and announced that it was not chicken pox the children had; it was smallpox.
The best thing to do then and what we must do now is to avoid places where there is danger of physical or spiritual contagion.
We have little concern that our grandchildren will get the measles. They have been immunized and can move freely without fear of that.
While in much of the world measles has virtually been eradicated, it is still the leading cause of vaccine-preventable death in children.
From money generously donated by Latter-day Saints, the Church recently donated a million dollars to a cooperative effort to immunize the children of Africa against measles. For one dollar, one child can be protected.
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Boyd K. Packer
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Is there a difference in the amount donated—based on the "suggested donation" you list? Desmet (1999 ["Asking for Less to Obtain More." Journal of Marketing Research, 29(4), 430–440.]) found it depends on which suggestions you manipulate. Suppose you have the following "suggested donations":
•$15
•$30
•$50
•$75
•$100
Desmet's research suggests that changing the $30, $50, or $75 will have little effect, but raising the top or the bottom number will have significant results.
In his research, raising the top number led to overall larger donations. Strangely, raising the bottom number led to significantly lower response rates. Why would raising the $15 cause fewer people to donate? The dropoff came from previous donors who had contributed a small amount. Desmet cites an "aversion to the extremes," whereby donors do not want to contribute the smallest or the largest amount on the list.
So adding a $125 choice would increase the number of people who donate $100. But if the lowest number shown becomes $30, then people who donated $30 before would now be donating the lowest amount listed—which they don't want to do. Instead, some of them may choose not to donate.
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Marlene Jensen (Setting Profitable Prices: A Step-By-Step Guide to Pricing Strategy Without Hiring a Consultant)
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You might wonder how this hurts taxpayers, especially if you’re a liberal and you think these nonprofits fight for worthy causes. So here’s the kicker: that $11 billion meant for consumer relief? Not only did a lot of it go to Democratic-favored nonprofits instead, but it ended up being much less than $11 billion. That’s because the DOJ offered banks a huge discount whenever they “donated” that money to those nonprofits. Most of the settlements gave banks double or triple credit toward their fine for every dollar they donated to these nonprofits—for instance, a Bank of America $1.15 million “donation” to the National Urban League counted as $2.6 million toward meeting its settlement obligation, and every $1.5 million to La Raza counted as $3.5 million of consumer relief. This is so mind-boggling that it’s worth summing up: after the financial crisis, the Obama DOJ slammed big banks with massive fines so it could trumpet that it was sending tons of relief to consumers. Then it told banks they could pay less than half that much if they donated the money to Obama’s favorite nonprofits instead. And being fond of money, the banks took the DOJ up on the offer. Now that’s a great quid pro quo—the DOJ gets to look good, the banks get to keep most of their money, and the liberal nonprofits get lots of funding.
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Vivek Ramaswamy (Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam)
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Yet the homogeneity of contemporary humanity is most apparent when it comes to our view of the natural world and of the human body. If you fell sick a thousand years ago, it mattered a great deal where you lived. In Europe, the resident priest would probably tell you that you had made God angry and that in order to regain your health you should donate something to the church, make a pilgrimage to a sacred site, and pray fervently for God’s forgiveness. Alternatively, the village witch might explain that a demon had possessed you and that she could cast it out using song, dance, and the blood of a black cockerel. In the Middle East, doctors brought up on classical traditions might explain that your four bodily humors were out of balance and that you should harmonize them with a proper diet and foul-smelling potions. In India, Ayurvedic experts would offer their own theories concerning the balance between the three bodily elements known as doshas and recommend a treatment of herbs, massages, and yoga postures. Chinese physicians, Siberian shamans, African witch doctors, Amerindian medicine men—every empire, kingdom, and tribe had its own traditions and experts, each espousing different views about the human body and the nature of sickness, and each offering their own cornucopia of rituals, concoctions, and cures. Some of them worked surprisingly well, whereas others were little short of a death sentence. The only thing that united European, Chinese, African, and American medical practices was that everywhere at least a third of all children died before reaching adulthood, and average life expectancy was far below fifty.14 Today, if you happen to be sick, it makes much less difference where you live. In Toronto, Tokyo, Tehran, or Tel Aviv, you will be taken to similar-looking hospitals, where you will meet doctors in white coats who learned the same scientific theories in the same medical colleges. They will follow identical protocols and use identical tests to reach very similar diagnoses. They will then dispense the same medicines produced by the same international drug companies. There are still some minor cultural differences, but Canadian, Japanese, Iranian, and Israeli physicians hold much the same views about the human body and human diseases. After the Islamic State captured Raqqa and Mosul, it did not tear down the local hospitals. Rather, it launched an appeal to Muslim doctors and nurses throughout the world to volunteer their services there.15 Presumably even Islamist doctors and nurses believe that the body is made of cells, that diseases are caused by pathogens, and that antibiotics kill bacteria.
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Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
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Making a difference by extending a helping hand for a social cause is like prestidigitating the magic of highest prestige.
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Prashant Bhushan Tyagi
“
How Much Money Can We Afford To Give To Charity? Knowing how much money you can safely give to charity is challenging for everyone. Who doesn’t want to give more to make the world a better place? On the other hand, no one wants to become a charity case as a result of giving too much to charity. On average, Americans who itemize their deductions donate about three or four percent of their income to charity. About 20% give more than 10% of their income to charity. Here are some tips to help you find the right level of donations for your family: You can probably give more than you think. Focus on one, two or maybe three causes rather than scattering money here and there. Volunteer your time toward your cause, too. The money you give shouldn’t be the money you’d save for college or retirement. You can organize your personal finances to empower you to give more. Eliminating debt will enable you to give much more. The interest you may be paying is eating into every good and noble thing you’d like to do. You can cut expenses significantly over time by driving your cars for a longer period of time; buying cars—the transaction itself—is expensive. Stay in your home longer. By staying in your home for a very long time, your mortgage payment will slowly shrink (in economic terms)with inflation, allowing you more flexibility over time to donate to charity. Make your donations a priority. If you only give what is left, you won’t be giving much. Make your donations first, then contribute to savings and, finally, spend what is left. Set a goal for contributing to charity, perhaps as a percentage of your income. Measure your financial progress in all areas, including giving to charity. Leverage your contributions by motivating others to give. Get the whole family involved in your cause. Let the kids donate their time and money, too. Get your extended family involved. Get the neighbors involved. You will have setbacks. Don’t be discouraged by setbacks. Think long term. Everything counts. One can of soup donated to a food bank may feed a hungry family. Little things add up. One can of soup every week for years will feed many hungry families. Don’t be ashamed to give a little. Everyone can do something. When you can’t give money, give time. Be patient. You are making a difference. Don’t give up on feeding hungry people because there will always be hungry people; the ones you feed will be glad you didn’t give up. Set your ego aside. You can do more when you’re not worried about who gets the credit. Giving money to charity is a deeply personal thing that brings joy both to the families who give and to the families who receive. Everyone has a chance to do both in life. There Are Opportunities To Volunteer Everywhere If you and your family would like to find ways to volunteer but aren’t sure where and how, the answer is just a Google search away. There may be no better family activity than serving others together. When you can’t volunteer as a team, remember you set an example for your children whenever you serve. Leverage your skills, talents and training to do the most good. Here are some ideas to get you started either as a family or individually: Teach seniors, the disabled, or children about your favorite family hobbies.
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Devin D. Thorpe (925 Ideas to Help You Save Money, Get Out of Debt and Retire a Millionaire So You Can Leave Your Mark on the World!)
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Held tight as it seems to you in the finite, committed to the perpetual rhythmic changes, the unceasing flux of "natural" life— compelled to pass on from state to state, to grow, to age, to die— there is yet, as you discovered in the first exercise of recollection, something in you which endures through and therefore transcends this world of change. This inhabitant, this mobile spirit, can spread and merge in the general consciousness, and gather itself again to one intense point of personality. It has too an innate knowledge of— an instinct for— another, greater rhythm, another order of Reality, as yet outside its conscious field; or as we say, a capacity for the Infinite. This capacity, this unfulfilled craving, which the cunning mind of the practical man suppresses and disguises as best it can, is the source of all your unrest. More, it is the true origin of all your best loves and enthusiasms, the inspiring cause of your heroisms and achievements; which are but oblique and tentative efforts to still that strange hunger for some final object of devotion, some completing and elucidating vision, some total self-donation, some great and perfect Act within which your little activity can be merged.
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Evelyn Underhill (Practical Mysticism)
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In March 1942, the Office of the Surgeon General noted a growing incidence of jaundice (yellowing of the skin caused by liver disease) among US Army personnel stationed in California, England, Hawaii, Iceland, and Louisiana. All of those jaundiced had recently received a yellow fever vaccine, which, in addition to containing yellow fever vaccine virus, contained human serum as a stabilizing agent. On April 15, 1942, the surgeon general ordered that yellow fever vaccination be discontinued and that all existing lots be recalled and destroyed. Shortly thereafter, manufacturers made a yellow fever vaccine with water instead of serum, but it was too late. The serum used to stabilize the yellow fever vaccine had been obtained from nurses, medical students, and interns at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, several of whom had a history of jaundice and one of whom was actively infected at the time of the donation. By June 1942, fifty thousand US servicemen had been hospitalized with severe liver disease, and 150 had died from what would later be known as hepatitis B. Of the 141 lots of yellow fever vaccine provided to the army, seven were definitely contaminated. Among those who received one of those seven lots, 78 percent became infected. When the dust settled, 330,000 servicemen had been infected and one thousand had died. This was then and remains today one of the worst single-source outbreaks of a fatal infection ever recorded.
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Paul A. Offit (You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation)
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If you think you can coerce me into a goddamned marriage by holding my reputation hostage, Spencer, you are far stupider than I thought. This is Colombo, remember; this is my town. Would it cause a scandal? Sure. But a few months and a few large donations to various charities, and maybe a huge party, is all I need to make everyone forget. No. This bullshit ends now. I want you gone by tomorrow.
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Amanda Jayatissa (You're Invited)
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Why bother? After all, even if all the money does go through to the organization as promised, you’ve handed all the good parts of giving to the company that sold you the product. They get the credit and attention and “good feels” for your donation. You’d make a bigger difference, and feel better about it, if you gave money directly to the cause yourself.
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Lucy Bernholz (How We Give Now: A Philanthropic Guide for the Rest of Us)
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This wasn’t, of course, something exclusive to ARMY when it came to fandom in K-pop. The K-pop fandoms that came before them were also proactive in their donating for all kinds of causes. But when BTS reached worldwide fame, other K-pop fandoms around the world began to echo this tendency. Through the particular form of unity that K-pop fandoms have, fans would express their identities and also speak out on various political and social issues outside of K-pop. And today, it has become the norm for any K-pop fandom to express their positions on not only the issues of the countries they live in but issues the world has in common.
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BTS (Beyond The Story: 10-Year Record of BTS)
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This wasn’t, of course, something exclusive to ARMY when it came to fandom in K-pop. The K-pop fandoms that came before them were also proactive in their donating for all kinds of causes. But when BTS reached worldwide fame, other K-pop fandoms around the world began to echo this tendency. Through the particular form of unity that K-pop fandoms have, fans would express their identities and also speak out on various political and social issues outside of K-pop.
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BTS (Beyond The Story: 10-Year Record of BTS)
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The paramedic moved away, giving me a line of sight into the crowd and my gaze latched onto Darcy. I was so starved, I moved before I was even aware of making the decision, colliding with her and driving my fangs into her neck.
She squealed in fright and I growled deeply as I drank the sweet nectar of her blood, shutting my eyes and enjoying every second of it. She felt connected to me by it, her spiking pulse seeming to thump within my own body and I relished the feeling of having her power in my grasp. I lost all sense of everything as I fell into the needs of my Order and the desire to devour this girl’s magic. I wanted every last drop. I needed more of her. Everything.
She clawed at my arm and I enjoyed the contact, holding her firmly against my hip as my cock began to throb. I was in the middle of a crowd of students and this was the wrong fucking time to get turned on for so many reasons. But hell she tasted so good. And it was more than that, I had her in my arms again and I didn’t want to let go. She was the summer sun after the longest winter of my life and all I wanted to do was bask in her glow. Especially after I’d seen Capella touching her. This girl didn’t belong to him. I’d staked my claim and maybe that should have only been about her blood, but it was becoming clear to me that it was far more than that. I didn’t want anyone but me getting this close to her. And I’d fight any rival I had to to keep it that way.
“Hey,” Tory snapped, shoving me roughly to try and force me off of her sister but I was in a frenzy and I couldn’t stop. “That’s enough!”
I released a growl in warning for her to back off, but then she shoved me with fire in her palms, the power behind the blast sending me staggering backwards and freeing Blue from my hold. My head was spinning with so much power I felt drunk and my breaths came heavily as I realised how much blood I’d just taken. Far too much.
There were two hand marks singed into my chest, my shirt smoking and my flesh reddened, and Tory looked ready to burn me alive if I took so much as a step closer to her sister again.
“You’ve had enough!” Tory snarled and I bared my fangs at the challenge in her voice.
“Maybe you want to donate to the cause then?” I snapped, but I was just trying to deflect from how much I wanted her sister, how every student close by had witnessed me go fully savage on Darcy Vega like I had no self control at all.
Caleb appeared, dropping an arm around Tory’s shoulders and releasing a deep growl in the back of his throat. “You might want to rethink that statement, Professor.”
I stared at them when I really wanted to be looking at Darcy, but I feared if I did, I’d lunge at her again. And I wasn’t sure I’d stop this time. Fuck. What’s wrong with me?
I shook my head to try and clear it, taking a breath as I realised my magic reserves were full and I didn’t need any more blood. This craving left in me wasn’t anything to do with my power reserves. It was purely about the girl I could see glaring at me in the corner of my eye. I couldn’t believe what I’d just done. I’d taken too much blood and it was wrong. It went against the Vampire Code.
I swallowed the lasting taste of her and finally glanced her way, finding so much hatred in her eyes it scolded me.(ORION POV)
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Caroline Peckham (The Awakening as Told by the Boys (Zodiac Academy, #1.5))
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What happens when you pray? God is all powerful in every realm. He can do things in a variety of ways, but one way in which He works is to "move" in the realm of men's minds. God can place an idea in a person's mind. He can cause someone to feel a strong "urge" or "conviction" to do something. So when we pray for a certain amount of money, God can cause one person to reach for a cheque-book and send that amount, or He can cause a dozen people to send odd fractions of that amount, causing the total to be exact. You may not believe that He does this, but I am simply saying that when I talk about praying for money, this is what I mean.
Yes, usually the result is that other human beings give "donations," but they have not been asked to, and they have not received an envelope to fill, and they have not had human pressure put on them to give. They give because they feel God has led them to give, and often their having been led gives them an exciting feeling of having been in communication with God, in the same way as it does when the "answer" comes to prayer, and you know God has heard and acted in space, and time, and history. You know then that your communication has not been an airy-fairy sort of psychological communication into the atmosphere, but that you have contacted a Person, who has replied.
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Edith Schaeffer (L'Abri)
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Secretly, Ray was a rotten celebrity. He never got used to it, never learned to take it for granted. The photos and adulation and program signing always made him uncomfortable, and after the theft he never ordered room service again. Every day, no matter where he was, he’d find a busker or someone on the street and leave money or help otherwise when he could. He was making a great deal of money and giving a lot of it away as quickly as he got it. He played charity concerts for several different organizations. He loved Kelly Hall-Tompkins’s Music Kitchen, a charity that organized musicians to serve food and play in soup kitchens, and he often volunteered—both to play and to serve the guests. Another charity bought instruments for students who couldn’t afford to buy their own: at the inaugural fundraising gala, he played for free, enlisted several musicians—Wynton Marsalis and Trombone Shorty—and donated a hundred thousand dollars to the cause.
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Brendan Slocumb (The Violin Conspiracy)
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Their names are on the root-level glass, those original twelve, in font no bigger than any other. So are the names of everyone who has ever given anything to the cause. Doesn’t matter if you’re a millionaire who kept our lights on every year or somebody who donated a spare tip to the cause a grand total of once. The amount a person can spare is relative; the value of generosity is not.
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Becky Chambers (To Be Taught, If Fortunate)
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There is some evidence that peer reports (Suzie’s friends’ ratings) predict people’s behavior better than their self-reports (Suzie’s own ratings). In one study, for example, college students were worse at predicting how nervous and talkative they would be when chatting with a new acquaintance than were peers who had just met them for the first time.21 Other studies have found that people are worse at making specific predictions about how they will behave than they are at predicting how other people will behave. When asked whether they would purchase a flower as part of a campus charity drive in the upcoming weeks, students made overly rosy predictions; 83 percent said they would, whereas in fact only 43 percent actually did. When asked how likely it was that other students would purchase a flower, people were more accurate; they predicted that 56 percent would, which was closer to the 43 percent figure. In another study, people predicted that they would donate an average of $2.44 of their earnings in an experiment to charity, whereas other people would donate only $1.83. Once again they were more accurate in their predictions about other people; the actual figure donated was $1.53. One reason people fail to predict their own behavior very accurately is that they believe that they are “holier than thou” and would be more likely than the average person to perform moral acts of kindness. Another is that people use different kinds of information when predicting their own versus other people’s behavior. When predicting other people’s actions, we rely mostly on our cumulative experience of how the average person would act, including our hunches about the kinds of situational constraints people will face (“Probably many people who intended to buy a flower will never walk past one of the people selling them”). When predicting our own actions, we rely more on our “inside information” about our own personalities (“I am a kind person who wants to help others”). This can be a problem for two reasons: relying only on inside information causes people to overlook situational constraints on their actions, such as the possibility that they, too, will fail to pass by someone selling the flowers; second, as we have seen, people’s inside information is not the full story about their personalities and might not be completely accurate.22
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Timothy D. Wilson (Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious)
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We are all starting life in commonplace. Their arrangement literally is divine, faithful, upright, and bravest with being revolutionized in this freshness nature of essence.
When the manifesto of all spirits crystallizes and istils inside the truth, sincere, and veracious, their contemplation donates provision of fundamental view and rights; they search for excellence and practical nature, not dishonesty and detriment.
At that point, their outside energy does not fade with faults. This vividness could not intimidate and abeyance someone because the devil will not stay in their hearts. In this planetary system, everyone competes and seeks prolific forces in the debacle of apathy; it is absolutely imposed on everyone.
If you follow honest, and serious ideals, at any cost, you will be received by your almighty; then there will be no requirement for brutality to be instilled, and questions of abet are not returned to one's physicality.
Dignified, veridical, and conscientious power and its answers are never the cause of the debacle, aberrant, and rampant, rather, they close and burn play foul, inauspiciousness, mischief, impairment, evil, disaster riots, and all the ill of mind.
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Viraaj Sisodiya
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It seemed strange to me that my first commission for information should require spying on a friendly power. A few years later it would have seemed quite ordinary. Allies are willing to donate both lives and wealth to the common cause; but the exchange, honestly, of truthful information is nearly impossible. I have noticed that intelligence executives become hoarders, so miserly and overcautious that they frequently render useless vital information which has been collected at great cost in money and men.
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Donald Downes (The Scarlet Thread: Adventures in Wartime Espionage)
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Statistics Canada, the national statistical agency of that country, has pointed out that churchgoing Christians in Canada are generally much more likely than the majority of non-Christian Canadians to donate significantly to charities and to volunteer. According to their recent study, 62 percent of Canadians who regularly attend Christian services volunteered their time to various causes compared with only 43 percent of other Canadians. Surprisingly to some at least, these Christians did not limit their giving to churches. Almost 60 percent of their volunteer time went to secular causes from health care to youth sports to various social and environmental organizations. Doug Todd, religion writer for the Vancouver Sun newspaper, summarizes the situation as revealed by Statistics Canada and his broader research this way: Christians are on the front lines, locally and around the globe, helping those who can not fend for themselves. They are supporting Canadian aboriginals, providing micro-loans in the Dominican Republic, handing out soup in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, providing clean water in Ghana, ministering to people with AIDS and supporting environmental projects in Asia. . . . They’ve also led social justice movements: To free slaves, oppose wars, fight for civil rights or protect wilderness.[161]
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Paul Chamberlain (Why People Don't Believe: Confronting Seven Challenges to Christian Faith)
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All that work: his generous patronage of the arts, the vast sums of money he had donated to worthy causes, setting up charitable organizations . . . for what? In the end, none of those good works had redeemed him in the eyes of others. People think that men like me give money away to buy forgiveness for a sin or out of vanity, when it's the winner's pathetic tribute to the loser. Look at me, we seem to be begging, I need you too. I need you to accept me, to admire me, to love me.
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Carmen Posadas (Little Indiscretions)
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The cosmic joke to this project is that all of the groups donating DNA secretly programmed sequences to cause their genetic strand to be predominant. This set the precedent for eternal conflict. Humanity was doomed to fight and be controlled. No one group would ever be in charge. The project was doomed for failure before it even began!
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Stewart A. Swerdlow (Blue Blood, True Blood: Conflict & Creation)
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She remembers in 1940 when the city’s population had been called upon to donate all the metal objects they could spare. Married women were asked for their wedding rings. Florence’s piazzas were thus heaped with enormous piles of tarnished rusting metal objects. There was something almost touching about the slapdash poverty of the contribution. Candelabras, door handles, pipes, bits of engines, tools. It later occurred to her that these bits of waste metal would in all probability be melted down and fashioned into weapons, ammunition maybe. That the candelabra she was looking at might end up lodged in someone’s chest in the form of a bullet, someone who would never know that a household ornament of mysterious provenance would cause his death.
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Glenn Haybittle (The Way Back to Florence)
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Through the book, I want to give something back to the community from which it sprang. My royalties for this book in Norway are being donated in full to the ‘En av oss’ (One of Us) foundation. The foundation’s statutes allow for the money to be distributed to a wide range of causes nationally and internationally, in the areas of development, education, sport, culture and the environment. I have chosen to let those who contributed most to the book decide which causes will receive support. I think that would be in the spirit of their children.
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Åsne Seierstad (One of Us: The Story of a Massacre in Norway—and Its Aftermath)
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Attitudosis cannot survive a strong, steady dose of uplifting literature or a regular donation of your time to a good cause. Make eye contact with someone who doesn't expect it and then give her your best smile. When you are willing to improve your attitude and you take action to do so, you'll enjoy life even more.
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Zig Ziglar (Zig Ziglar's Life Lifters)
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PARTNERS IN CRIME HOW THE CLINTONS WENT FROM DEAD BROKE TO FILTHY RICH And the money kept rolling in from every side. —Song from the musical Evita The quotation above refers to the Juan and Evita Peron Foundation, established in 1948 by Evita Peron for the purpose of helping Argentina’s poor. Evita professed to be a champion of the campesinos—the wretched workers who lived in shanties on the outskirts of Buenos Aires—and they trusted Evita. She had, after all, risen up herself from poverty and obscurity. Her fame was the result of her marriage to the general who became the military leader of the country, Juan Peron. Long before the Clintons, Argentina had its own power couple that claimed to do good and ended up doing very well for themselves. There are, obviously, differences between the Clintons and the Perons. Despite her personal popularity, Evita remained an appendage of her husband, seeking but never obtaining political office. At one point, Evita had her eye on an official position, but the political establishment vigorously opposed her, and her husband never supported her in this effort. Hillary, by contrast, was elected senator and now, having deployed her husband on the campaign trail, seeks election to the nation’s highest office previously held by him. The Perons also had a foundation that took in millions of pesos—the equivalent of $200 million—from multiple foreign sources, Argentine businesses, as well as contributions from various individuals and civic groups. With its 14,000 employees, the foundation was better equipped and more influential than many agencies within the Argentinian government. Evita and her cronies were experts at shaking down anyone who wanted something from the government; donations became a kind of tax that opened up access to the Peron administration. Trade unions sent large contributions because they saw Evita and her husband as champions of their cause. In 1950, the government arranged that a portion of all lottery, movie, and casino revenues should go to the foundation. While the foundation made symbolic, highly publicized gestures of helping the poor, in reality only a fraction of the money went to the underprivileged. Most of it seems to have ended up in foreign bank accounts controlled by the Perons, who became hugely wealthy through their public office profiteering. When Evita died in 1954 and the foundation was shut down, Argentines discovered stashes of undistributed food and clothing. No one from the foundation had bothered to give it away, so it sat unused for years. Helping the poor, after all, wasn’t the real reason Evita set up her foundation. No, she had a different set of priorities. Like so many Third World potentates, the Perons used social justice and provision for the poor as a pretext to amass vast wealth for themselves. The Clintons have done the same thing in America; indeed, Hillary may be America’s version of Evita Peron.
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Dinesh D'Souza (Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party)
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Another student adds, “I looked it up, actually. That stupid lizard insurance company, as I call it, spends over 1.1 billion dollars a year on advertising. Even if they cut that figure in half, it would still be a ridiculous amount and they could pass five hundred million dollars-worth of savings to their customers or donate the money to a good cause or eliminate deductibles. Anything would be better than over-advertising to the tune of a billion dollars a year. It’s insane. “I
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Johnny Moscato (The Project (The Project Series Book 1))
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Generally, I’ve observed, we seek changes that fall into the “Essential Seven.” People—including me—most want to foster the habits that will allow them to: 1. Eat and drink more healthfully (give up sugar, eat more vegetables, drink less alcohol) 2. Exercise regularly 3. Save, spend, and earn wisely (save regularly, pay down debt, donate to worthy causes, stick to a budget) 4. Rest, relax, and enjoy (stop watching TV in bed, turn off a cell phone, spend time in nature, cultivate silence, get enough sleep, spend less time in the car) 5. Accomplish more, stop procrastinating (practice an instrument, work without interruption, learn a language, maintain a blog) 6. Simplify, clear, clean, and organize (make the bed, file regularly, put keys away in the same place, recycle) 7. Engage more deeply in relationships—with other people, with God, with the world (call friends, volunteer, have more sex, spend more time with family, attend religious services)
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Gretchen Rubin (Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives)
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After all, one assumes that fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist materialists alike are aware that Christians believe God is the creator of every person; but presumably none of them would be so foolish as to imagine that this means each person is not also the product of a spermatozoon and ovum; surely they grasp that here God’s act of creation is understood as the whole event of nature and existence, not as a distinct causal agency that in some way rivals the natural process of conception. Somehow, though, even in the minds of some Christians, God has come to be understood not as the truly transcendent source and end of all contingent reality, who creates through “donating” being to a natural order that is complete in itself, but only as a kind of supreme mechanical cause located somewhere within the continuum of nature. Which is only to say that, here at the far end of modernity, the concept of God is often just as obscure to those who want to believe as to those who want not to. Ours is in many ways a particularly unsubtle age.
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David Bentley Hart (The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss)
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An individual can donate money to help support a cause, but an ambitious company can actually cause a shift in the global conversation.
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Blake J. Harris (Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation)
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70 percent of Americans said they’re more likely to make a donation to a cause if an employee at the store at which they’re shopping recommends it.
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Joe Waters (Cause Marketing For Dummies)
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Giving a donation is an effect (prarabdha – effect of past lives deeds), and the (illusory) self effort (cause for next life) is the inner intent that prevailed while making the donation.
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Dada Bhagwan (Simple & Effective Science for Self Realization)
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Donating blood, giving money to the Red Cross or volunteering with a relief organization would all be far more beneficial than praying to the same hypothetical deity who ostensibly caused the disaster in the first place.
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Atheist Republic (Your God Is Too Small: 50 Essays on Life, Love & Liberty Without Religion)
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how people spend their money may be at least as important as how much money they earn. In particular, spending money on other people (buying flowers for your spouse rather than a bauble for yourself) or on a cause (donating to a religious institution rather than going for an expensive haircut) can actually increase our subjective well-being.
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Daniel H. Pink (Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us)
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Another can do the activity for you; even enjoyment itself can be outsourced. The common example given by Žižek is the laugh track that occurs in most comedic sit-coms (now, sadly a dying form of entertainment with streaming services superseding network television), but the idea is that the television show is fully equipped with a canned laughter which then laughs at the point in the show when the actors make a funny remark. The point is not that the audience laughs along with the canned laughter, but that after a long day at work when you are tired, the canned laughter does the laughing for you. You are relieved of the need to act, and you imagine that there is a real person somewhere laughing at the joke in your place. Ideology functions in this gap, because the reality is that canned laughter is just a machine recording of laughter and there are no real people who are actually laughing. Žižek’s thesis is that this creates a “subject supposed to believe'' that there is someone out there doing the work that we are not doing. In instances when we give to charities we want to believe that the money is going to a good cause and that the problem of say, hunger in Africa, is being resolved by our donation. Not by the person donating the money, but by someone else who will allegedly act on our behalf and put in the work necessary for consumerism to continue unabated. Consumers can remain docile, or even active in their own hedonistic desires. Interpassivity implies that a decentered subject has emerged, where even the innermost desires of the subject can be externalized.
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Bradley Kaye
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there are today three types of PACs: The first is “separate segregated funds” (SSFs) that are attached to corporations and unions, and which may solicit contributions only from employees, stockholders, owners, or members. Major corporations such as Ebay and Microsoft, as well as large unions like the AFL-CIO typically have SSFs. The second is “non-connected” PACs that are not affiliated with a corporate or labor interest, and that solicit contributions from the public at large in support of a common value. For example, EMILY’s List, whose name is an acronym for “Early Money Is Like Yeast,” helps women candidates “rise” by providing them with funding to jumpstart their campaigns. EMILY’s List may accept contributions from anyone willing to donate to the cause. Finally, “leadership PACs” are established by federal officeholders to help other candidates get elected. When members of Congress do not face a strong challenge in their own reelection campaigns, for instance, they can channel part of their war chest to other candidates via a Leadership PAC.
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Conor M. Dowling (Super PAC!: Money, Elections, and Voters after Citizens United (Routledge Research in American Politics and Governance))
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And if I am in a position to help this organization, should I not help them? I have the money, I’m willing to part with it, and I’m intrigued by the cause. Should I not donate?
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Emily Rath (Pucking Around (Jacksonville Rays, #1))
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Whatever accumulated wealth is in surplus of their needs, good people donate it for good causes; Karna, Bali, Vikramaditya, these kings are even remembered today due to their charity; the honey-bees store up honey, and then some honey-collector takes all the accumulated honey away; neither did the honey-bees themselves enjoy their stored up honey, nor did they give it in charity; all they do now is rub both their legs in regret.
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Rajen Jani (Old Chanakya Strategy: Aphorisms)
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Zemurray donated lavishly to Central American causes, schools, and philanthropic ventures; he played a significant role in the founding of Israel; he endowed a female professorship at Harvard, which
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Douglas Preston (The Lost City of the Monkey God)
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First, the total amount of money that goes to charity from these branded products (both from the percentage of the purchase and any company match) is less than if people just gave directly to the charity. Second, many people who buy products branded to help out a cause overestimate the good they’ve done, confusing the full cost of the product with the percentage that is actually donated. And third, people who buy cause-branded products may feel like they’ve done their good deed for the day and don’t need to do anything else.
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Lucy Bernholz (How We Give Now: A Philanthropic Guide for the Rest of Us)
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America has a great philanthropic tradition. Since Warren Buffett and Bill and Belinda Gates created the Giving Pledge, hundreds of the world's wealthiest individuals have pledged to donate at least half of their wealth to charitable causes, adding up to hundreds of billions of dollars. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Annual charitable donations from all Americans reached 410 billion dollars in 2017 - and that doesn't count the time and energy Americans volunteered to countless causes tackling a wide array of social challenges. But as substantial and heartwarming as philanthropy is, it's a pittance compared with federal and state government spending. Together they spent nearly the same amount - roughly $405 billion - every 4 weeks during the 2017 fiscal year. Philanthropy is no substitute for effective government.
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Katherine M. Gehl (The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy)
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It is our responsibility to stand for the conservation of the vegetation that influences our lives personally. By ignoring or destroying it we are only causing harm to ourselves...
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Shriram Sharma Acharya (Donation of Time - The Supreme Charity)
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They shared elaborate fantasies about raping and murdering me, discussing the pros and cons of each. They talked about how to break into all of my accounts to try to find more ways to invade my privacy. They bragged about victories like flooding my game's page with hatred and nude photos of me and went so far as to create guides to share tactics on how best to ruin my life. They even orchestrated plans to donate to various charities specifically to make themselves look like concerned citizens and not a mob of people trying to get me killed. They build friendships and bonded with each other by reinforcing their dedication to the righteous cause of taking me down, reminding themselves at every turn but they were the good guys.
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Zoe Quinn (Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate)
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To defuse tensions and spread economic benefits more widely, he argued that the rich should donate large sums to worthy causes during their lifetimes,
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Ron Chernow (Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.)
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For instance, engagement fundraisers use exit surveys to capture vital information about why people abandon the donating process and bounce from their donation pages without making a gift. They also use survey platforms immediately after the donation process is completed online. By doing so, they do much more than just supply their supporters with a tax receipt. They give their supporters a chance to provide feedback, tell why they care about the cause, describe their interests, and answer valuable donor profile questions like whether they have already made a legacy gift (for instance).
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Greg Warner (Engagement Fundraising: How to raise more money for less in the 21st century)
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It seemed even more surprising that Charles Koch could keep all of these political operations straight in his own head. The contours of Koch’s political machine were intentionally obscured and complex. Outside analysts would spend years trying to piece together all of its various pieces. The political machine consisted of at least dozens of shell groups funded by anonymous donors, some of them staffed by current and former employees of Koch Industries. The network included the main lobbying office in Washington, DC; all of the contract lobbyists it hired; a relatively obscure activist group called Americans for Prosperity with chapters in several states; at least several private political consultancies; the Koch Industries corporate PAC; various think tanks; academic programs and fellowships; and a consortium of wealthy donors that Charles and David Koch convened twice a year to pool large donations for Koch’s chosen causes. And these elements were just the most visible pieces of the Koch political machine. The entirety of the political apparatus could only be viewed from the top, by a handful of people with the authority to see the entire operation. These people were Charles Koch, David Koch, and their top political operative, Richard Fink. Of the three of them, Charles Koch unquestionably had the most authority.
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Christopher Leonard (Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America)
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A well-placed donation to a cause and a back-room deal with lawyers. That’s all it took to make Samantha mine. She knows we’re not related, but she thinks I was friends with her father.
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Skye Warren (Overture (North Security, #1))
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But Larry always said enemies and anger help everyone—either through higher ratings or donations for a cause or campaign.
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Christina Estes (Off the Air)
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Between the sixth and ninth centuries, the practice of public or ecclesial penance began to be replaced by a system of private penance that Celtic monks introduced throughout western Europe. Reconciliation back into the ranks of 'the faithful' had previously been granted only after completion of a public penance lasting many years. By contrast, in the system of private penance, after a penitent's confession (whereby the priest made a judgment and assigned an appropriate penance for the sins committed), reconciliation or absolution was given on the subsequent Holy Thursday or, by the year 1000, immediately. Harsh but shorter private penances, as listed in the penitential books (for example, a considerable repetition of prayers, interspersed with genuflections and long periods of kneeling with hands outstretched in imitation of Jesus on the cross), were now offered as substitutes for the earlier public penances that had taken years to complete. The commutation of penances lasting decades into penances of shorter duration ultimately generated a concern about dying without having fully 'satisfied for' the 'temporal punishment due to sin' in this life, and thereby the fear of being consigned to 'purgatory.' As a result, the offering of Masses for the dead, for a stipend, increased and the granting of indulgences expanded.
Indulgences came from the practice of commuting penances, wherein certain prayers or pious practices were substituted for a longer period of penance in one's lifetime. For example, Pope John the Twenty-Second (1316-34) granted ten thousand days of indulgence to those who recited the prayer Hail Holy Face (Salve sancta facies) while looking at the image of Christ's face on the 'relic' cloth in St. Peter's Basilica. Technically, that pious practice, which also presupposed a pilgrimage to Rome, substituted for twenty-eight years of penance. ... The fifteenth century especially gave rise to the practice of applying such indulgences, or remissions of temporal penances, to souls in purgatory, even though there is no measurement of time beyond death. Pope Sixtus IV (1471-84), who expanded the practice of indulgences, explained that a 'plenary remission' simply offered the suffrage or intercession of the official prayers of the Church for the relaxation of the 'punishments' of the soul in purgatory: 'We, to whom the fullness of power has been given from on high, from the treasury of the universal Church, which consists of the merits of Christ and his saints committed to us, offer help and intercession to the souls in purgatory.' Unfortunately, in the popular mind, and in the exaggerations of some who preached the indulgences offered for a donation to a cause, such plenary remissions were too often misinterpreted as guarantees that souls would be immediately liberated into heaven.
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Bernard Prusak
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A large company with branches around the country, or around the world, can do all kinds of good works; can be sensitive to the environment and scrupulous in its ethics; can donate tremendous amounts of money to worthy causes; can sponsor dozens of charitable events. What such a company can’t do—and, more important, what its people can’t do—is interact with a particular community on a level that defines them both and provides a uniquely gratifying experience all around.
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Bo Burlingham (Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big)
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But there’s a difference between donating to charity (something many companies do, almost by rote), and fully committing to a cause. “We started asking ourselves, What more can we do?” Shaich says. “I felt like, I want to put our bodies on the line.” What gradually became clear was that Panera could provide not just bread giveaways, but a more complete dining experience for those going hungry. That extra level of involvement—“putting bodies on the line,” to use Shaich’s words—made the effort bigger and more distinctive than a standard corporate charity program.
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Warren Berger (A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas)
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Bribing was a subtle and even gracious art. It was considered in better taste to bribe indirectly. For example, one could offer a generous donation to a 'charitable' cause, chaired by the official's wife; or sell him a piece of property at a fraction of its actual value; or buy something from him (e.g. a painting) for a sum far in excess of its value.
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Richard Pipes (Russia Under the Old Regime)
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I've seen the remains of wars. And the men never seem to remember the women running from the sword as they guided the army's packhorses to the frontline, and they always forget who bandaged the wounded through every skirmish. When the songs are sung about great battles. the women who helped sustain, feed, and build the army, who donated their husbands to the cause: they are always somehow forgotten. You forget that they are just as good at war as men. They fade in your memory only because they didn't share the glory of the front line, even though they often shared the losses and deaths.
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Paolo Bacigalupi (The Tangled Lands)
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Time, as our species has lived it on this planet, will cease to exist. No more dark/light binary. No more active red daytime, blue evening dissolving. No longer is sunshine the coagulant of consciousness, causing us to clot into personalities, to cohere once more on our pillows each morning.
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Karen Russell (Sleep Donation)
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our world, which is now dominated by social media, a new catchphrase has taken hold: slacktivist. Slacktivists post articles or rant online about issues, but when it comes down to it, they don’t practice what they preach. They complain about politics, but don’t vote. They post about a cause they believe in, but don’t donate or volunteer. It’s not cool to be a slacktivist.
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Jason Blake (10 Things I Learned Living On An Island)
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Most media coverage of philanthropy doesn’t make much distinction among charitable gifts—and nor does the IRS for that matter. You get the same tax deduction whether you donate to a genuine charitable cause, say a food bank, or donate to a think tank with an ideological agenda.
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David Callahan (The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age)
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Here’s a little thought experiment: Let’s take three radically disruptive technologies and mash them together. Bitcoin. Uber. Self-driving cars. What happens when you mash the three together? The self-owning car. A car that pays for its Toyota lease, its insurance, and its gas, by giving people rides. A car that is not owned by a corporation. A car that is a corporation. A car that is a shareholder and owner of its own corporation. A car that exists as an autonomous financial entity with no human ownership. This has never happened before, and that’s just the beginning. Audience member gasps: "Oh shit!" I can guarantee you that one of the first distributed autonomous corporations is going to be a fully autonomous, artificial-intelligence-based ransomware virus that will go out and rob people online of their bitcoin, and use that money to evolve itself to pay for better programming, to buy hosting, and to spread. That’s one vision of the future. Another vision of the future is a digital autonomous charity. Imagine a system that takes donations from people, and using those donations it monitors social media like Twitter and Facebook. When a certain threshold is reached and it sees 100,000 people talking about a natural disaster, like a typhoon in the Philippines, it can marshal the donations and automatically fund aid in that area, without a board of directors, without shareholders. One hundred percent of donations goes directly to charitable causes. Anyone can see the rules by which that autonomous altruistic charity works. We are beginning to approach things we have never seen before. This is not just a currency. Now, let’s look at how the bitcoin community is addressing this incredible potential with their design choices and metaphors. Oh boy, it’s a mess.
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Andreas M. Antonopoulos (The Internet of Money)
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Men Against Death followed the one-man campaign of writer Paul De Kruif against disease, hunger, and poverty. De Kruif burst on the scene with Microbe Hunters, which became a worldwide bestseller upon its publication in 1926. Other titles were Hunger Fighters, Why Keep Them Alive?, The Fight for Life, and Men Against Death. Though the latter book gave the series its name, the WPA writers selected liberally from all of De Kruif’s books, which the author donated without royalty to the cause. The lives of scientific trailblazers (Lister, Pasteur, etc.) were dramatized; an introductory broadcast June 30, 1938, was followed by the first drama on July
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John Dunning (On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio)
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which the club said they would donate to a “good cause.” The KNVB thought the punishment didn’t fit the crime and hence went about increasing Suarez’s suspension to seven league matches. Suarez was branded the “Cannibal of Ajax” by the Dutch daily newspaper De Telegraaf. In order to weather the storm, Suarez took to the popular social media platform Facebook to offer his apologies; he uploaded a remorseful video. Fortunately, the entire fiasco wasn’t a big deal in the international scene as the Dutch league isn’t quite as popular as the other leagues. Suarez still had opportunities to turn over a new leaf.
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Benjamin Southerland (Luis Suarez: A Biography of the Uruguayan Superstar)
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synonymous with controversies. He has had his fair share of negative media press in his career and rightly so. When in Ajax, he once faced suspension for a half-time altercation with teammate Albert Luque, over a free kick! Regrettably, Suarez has been involved in bigger controversies than just the half-time altercation. On November 20, 2010, Suarez did the unthinkable when he bit PSV Eindhoven’s Otman Bakkal on the shoulder during Ajax’s match with PSV. Understandably, Ajax suspended him for two games and fined him an undisclosed amount, which the club said they would donate to a “good cause.” The KNVB thought the punishment didn’t fit the crime and hence went about increasing Suarez’s suspension to seven league matches. Suarez was branded the “Cannibal of Ajax” by the Dutch daily newspaper De Telegraaf. In order to weather the storm, Suarez took to the popular social media platform Facebook to offer his apologies; he uploaded a remorseful video. Fortunately, the entire fiasco wasn’t a big deal in the international scene as the Dutch league isn’t quite as popular as the other leagues. Suarez still had opportunities to turn over a new leaf.
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Benjamin Southerland (Luis Suarez: A Biography of the Uruguayan Superstar)
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Midas has donated $5 of every $34.95 oil change purchased to Make-A-Wish.
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Joe Waters (Cause Marketing For Dummies)