Eubank Quotes

If you don't know where you're going, all roads lead there.

When automated decision-making tools are not built to explicitly dismantle structural inequities, their speed and scale intensify them.

Making a movie is like building a watch because a watch is so small and you only can fit so many things inside it that all the pieces really do need to work together.

Plot is a primitive vulgarity in literature,” said Balph Eubank contemptuously.

We all live in the digital poorhouse. We have always lived in the world we built for the poor. We create a society that has no use for the disabled or the elderly, and then are cast aside when we are hurt or grow old. We measure human worth based only on the ability to earn a wage, and suffer in a world that undervalues care and community. We base our economy on exploiting the labor of racial and ethnic minorities, and watch lasting inequities snuff out human potential. We see the world as inevitably riven by bloody competition and are left unable to recognize the many ways we cooperate and lift each other up. But only the poor lived in the common dorms of the county poorhouse. Only the poor were put under the diagnostic microscope of scientific clarity. Today, we all live among the digital traps we have laid for the destitute.

Our national journey from the county poorhouse of the nineteenth century to the digital poorhouse today reveals a remarkably durable debate between those who wish to eliminate and alleviate poverty and those who blame, imprison, and punish the poor.

a happy child grows up to be a happy adult. When I was growing up, spoiling a child meant ruining a child. If something was spoiled, it either went down the drain or was tossed into the rubbish. These days, however, parents pat themselves on the back because their children want for nothing. Wanting is good. If you want for nothing, then you have no goals. And if you have no goals, you have no life, no drive, and no ambitions. Chances are, if today's children don't inherit a lot of money from their parents, they'll grow up and live off the welfare system.

Marginalized groups face higher levels of data collections when they access public benefits, walk through highly policed neighborhoods, enter the health-care system, or cross national borders. That data acts to reinforce their marginality when it is used to target them for suspicion and extra scrutiny. Those groups seen as undeserving are singled out for punitive public policy and more intense surveillance, and the cycle begins again. It is a kind of collective red-flagging, a feedback loop of injustice.

But its outwardly neutral classifications mask discriminatory outcomes that rob whole communities of wealth, compounding cumulative disadvantage.

Sometimes on late summer nights, when the sky is perfect and our parents are in a good enough mood to let us, we meet up to take a midnight walk through the field beyond our houses. It’s always peaceful and quiet, a perfect time to stargaze into the velvety black sky dotted with millions of crystals that make up the Milky Way. The warm summer night’s breeze ripples the tall grass and makes a small brushing sound that echoes throughout the valley. In the distance, the Appalachian Mountains loom like giant gray ghosts cast in the silvery glow of the midnight Moon. They wrap around our little valley like a scarf, and the hollers that seem close in the daytime seem like a lifetime away in the dark. We become engulfed by the thousands of fireflies that dance around in the steamy mist that radiates off of the ground because of the humidity. Those are the beautiful midsummer nights in Valia Springs that I will never forget.

The digital poorhouse is persistent. Once they scale up, digital systems can be remarkably hard to decommission. Think, for example, about what might happen if the world learned about a gross violation of trust at a large data company like Google.

America's poor and working-class people have long been subject to invasive surveillance, midnight raids, and punitive public policy that increase the stigma and hardship of poverty. During the nineteenth century, they were quarantined in county poorhouses. During the twentieth century, they were investigated by caseworkers, treated like criminals on trial. Today, we have forged what I call a digital poorhouse from databases, algorithms, and risk models. It promises to eclipse the reach and repercussions of everything that came before. Like earlier technological innovations in poverty management, digital tracking and automated decision-making hid poverty from the professional middle-class public and give the nation the ethical distance it needs to make inhuman choices: who gets food and who starves, who has housing and who remains homeless, and which families are broken up by the state. The digital poorhouse is part of a long American tradition. We manage the individual poor in order to escape our shared responsibility for eradicating poverty.

New high-tech tools allow for more precise measuring and tracking, better sharing of information, and increased visibility of targeted populations. In a system dedicated to supporting poor and working-class people's self-determination, such diligence would guarantee that they attain all the benefits they are entitled to by law. In that context, integrated data and modernized administration would not necessarily result in bad outcomes for poor communities. But automated decision-making in our current welfare system acts a lot like older, atavistic forms of punishment and containment. It filters and diverts. It is a gatekeeper, not a facilitator.

Oath of Non-Harm for an Age of Big Data I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability, the following covenant: I will respect all people for their integrity and wisdom, understanding that they are experts in their own lives, and will gladly share with them all the benefits of my knowledge. I will use my skills and resources to create bridges for human potential, not barriers. I will create tools that remove obstacles between resources and the people who need them. I will not use my technical knowledge to compound the disadvantage created by historic patterns of racism, classism, able-ism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, transphobia, religious intolerance, and other forms of oppression. I will design with history in mind. To ignore a four-century-long pattern of punishing the poor is to be complicit in the “unintended” but terribly predictable consequences that arise when equity and good intentions are assumed as initial conditions. I will integrate systems for the needs of people, not data. I will choose system integration as a mechanism to attain human needs, not to facilitate ubiquitous surveillance. I will not collect data for data’s sake, nor keep it just because I can. When informed consent and design convenience come into conflict, informed consent will always prevail. I will design no data-based system that overturns an established legal right of the poor. I will remember that the technologies I design are not aimed at data points, probabilities, or patterns, but at human beings.

While poorhouses have been physically demolished, their legacy remains alive and well in the automated decision-making systems that encage and entrap today's poor. For all their high-tech polish, our modern systems of poverty management - automated decision-making, data mining, and predictive analysis - retain a remarkable kinship with the poorhouses of the past. Our new digital tools spring from punitive, moralistic views of poverty and create a system of high-tech containment and investigation. The digital poorhouse deters the poor from accessing public resources; polices their labor, spending, sexuality, and parenting; tries to predict their future behavior; and punishes and criminalizes those who do not comply with its dictates. In the process, it creates ever-finer moral distinctions between the 'deserving' and 'undeserving' poor, categorizations that rationalize our national failure to care for one another.

The cheerleaders of the new data regime rarely acknowledge the impacts of digital decision-making on poor and working-class people. This myopia is not shared by those lower on the economic hierarchy, who often see themselves as targets rather than beneficiaries of these systems. For example, one day in early 2000, I sat talking to a young mother on welfare about her experiences with technology. When our conversation turned to EBT cards, Dorothy Allen said, “They’re great. Except [Social Services] uses them as a tracking device.” I must have looked shocked, because she explained that her caseworker routinely looked at her purchase records. Poor women are the test subjects for surveillance technology, Dorothy told me. Then she added, “You should pay attention to what happens to us. You’re next.” Dorothy’s insight was prescient. The kind of invasive electronic scrutiny she described has become commonplace across the class spectrum today. Digital tracking and decision-making systems have become routine in policing, political forecasting, marketing, credit reporting, criminal sentencing, business management, finance, and the administration of public programs. As these systems developed in sophistication and reach, I started to hear them described as forces for control, manipulation, and punishment

Chris Eubank, Nigel Benn, Michael Watson and Joe Calzaghe slugged it out in classic fights until they had nothing left to give. They are all here: heavyweight legends like Frank Bruno and Lennox Lewis, Joe Bugner and Tyson Fury, as well as less celebrated fighters such as Bunny Johnson and Dennis Andries, Maurice Hope and Pat Cowdell,

Across the country, poor and working-class people are targeted by new tools of digital poverty management and face life-threatening consequences as a result. Automated eligibility systems discourage them from claiming public resources that they need to survive and thrive. Complex integrated databases collect their most personal information, with few safeguards for privacy or data security, while offering almost nothing in return. Predictive models and algorithms tag them as risky investments and problematic parents. Vast complexes of social service, law enforcement, and neighborhood surveillance make their every move visible and offer up their behavior for government, commercial, and public scrutiny

Automated decision-making shatters the social safety net, criminalizes the poor, intensifies discrimination, and compromises our deepest national values. It reframes shared social decisions about who we are and who we want to be as systems engineering problems. And while the most sweeping digital decision-making tools are tested in what could be called “low rights environments” where there are few expectations of political accountability and transparency, systems first designed for the poor will eventually be used on everyone.

From the beginning, the poorhouse served irreconcilable purposes that led to terrible suffering and spiraling costs. On the one hand, the poorhouse was a semi-voluntary institution providing care for the elderly, the frail, the sick, the disabled, orphans, and the mentally ill. On the other, its harsh conditions were meant to discourage the working poor from seeking aid. The mandate to deter the poor drastically undercut the institution’s ability to provide care. Inmates were required to swear a pauper’s oath stripping them of whatever basic civil rights they enjoyed (if they were white and male). Inmates could not vote, marry, or hold office. Families were separated because reformers of the time believed that poor children could be redeemed through contact with wealthy families. Children were taken from their parents and bound out as apprentices or domestics, or sent away on orphan trains as free labor for pioneer farms. Poorhouses provided a multitude of opportunities for personal profit for those who ran them. Part of the keeper of the poorhouse’s pay was provided by unlimited use of the grounds and the labor of inmates.

Scientific charity workers advised in-depth investigation of applications for relief because they believed that there was a hereditary division between deserving and undeserving poor whites. Providing aid to the unworthy poor would simply allow them to survive and reproduce their genetically inferior stock. For middle-class reformers of the period, like scientific social worker Frederic Almy, social diagnosis was necessary because “weeds should not have the same culture as flowers.

In the Buck v. Bell case that legalized involuntary sterilization, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously wrote, “It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.”11 Though the practice fell out of favor in light of Nazi atrocities during World War II, eugenics resulted in more than 60,000 compulsory sterilizations of poor and working-class people in the United States.

New Deal legislation undoubtedly saved thousands of lives and prevented destitution for millions. New labor laws led to a flourishing of unions and built a strong white middle class. The Social Security Act of 1935 established the principle of cash payments in cases of unemployment, old age, or loss of a family breadwinner, and it did so as a matter of right, not on the basis of individual moral character. But the New Deal also created racial, gender, and class divisions that continue to produce inequities in our society today. Roosevelt’s administration capitulated to white supremacy in ways that still bear bitter fruit. The Civilian Conservation Corps capped Black participation in federally supported work relief at 10 percent of available jobs, though African Americans experienced 80 percent unemployment in northern cities. The National Housing Act of 1934 redoubled the burden on Black neighborhoods by promoting residential segregation and encouraging mortgage redlining. The Wagner Act granted workers the right to organize, but allowed segregated trade unions. Most importantly, in response to threats that southern states would not support the Social Security Act, both agricultural and domestic workers were explicitly excluded from its employment protections. The “southern compromise” left the great majority of African American workers—and a not-insignificant number of poor white tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and domestics—with no minimum wage, unemployment protection, old-age insurance, or right to collective bargaining.

As backlash against welfare rights grew, news coverage of poverty became increasingly critical. “As news stories about the poor became less sympathetic,” writes political scientist Martin Gilens, “the images of poor blacks in the news swelled.”17 Stories about welfare fraud and abuse were most likely to contain images of Black faces. African American poverty decreased dramatically during the 1960s and the African American share of AFDC caseloads declined. But the percentage of African Americans represented in news magazine stories about poverty jumped from 27 to 72 percent between 1964 and 1967.

A combination of restrictive new rules and high-tech tools reversed the gains of the welfare rights movement. In 1973, nearly half of the people living under the poverty line in the United States received AFDC. A decade later, after the new technologies of welfare administration were introduced, the proportion had dropped to 30 percent. Today, it is less than 10 percent.

Millions of copies of drivers’ licenses, social security cards, and other supporting documents were faxed to a centralized document processing center in Grant County; so many of them disappeared that advocates started calling it “the black hole in Marion.” Each month the number of verification documents that vanished—were not attached properly to digital case files in a process called “indexing”—rose exponentially. According to court documents, in December 2007 just over 11,000 documents were unindexed. By February 2009, nearly 283,000 documents had disappeared, an increase of 2,473 percent. The rise in technical errors far outpaced increased system use. The consequences are staggering if you consider that any single missing document could cause an applicant to be denied benefits.

Containment in the physical institution of a county poorhouse had the unintentional result of creating class solidarity across race, gender, and national origin. When we sit at a common table, we might see similarities in our experiences, even if we are forced to eat gruel. Surveillance and digital social sorting drive us apart as smaller and smaller microgroups are targeted for different kinds of aggression and control. When we inhabit an invisible poorhouse, we become more and more isolated, cut off from those around us, even if they share our suffering.

The digital poorhouse is hard to understand. The software, algorithms, and models that power it are complex and often secret. Sometimes they are protected business processes, as in the case of the IBM and ACS software that denied needy

The digital poorhouse is massively scalable. High-tech tools like automated decision-making systems, matching algorithms, and predictive risk models have the potential to spread very quickly.

Like earlier technological innovations in poverty management, digital tracking and automated decision-making hide poverty from the professional middle-class public and give the nation the ethical distance it needs to make inhuman choices: who gets food and who starves, who has housing and who remains homeless, and which families are broken up by the state. The digital poorhouse is part of a long American tradition. We manage the individual poor in order to escape our shared responsibility for eradicating poverty.

Expressing your human need for ongoing spiritual, mental,physical, and emotional nourishment starts in your home.

You'll never get organized if you don't have a vision for your life.

Organizing looks different to everyone because we all have different needs and so is our life's outcomes.

Pretty thoughts= Pretty actions

Grace is the best accessory that a woman can wear

How will the world know we are Christians? By our approach to relationships.

Like the Location Services on our phones that show us our bearings, the Enneagram has the ability to help us understand where we are in our relationships with other people and ourselves. It shows us the way other people experience us.

There are nine different personality types—each driven by a different desire. These desires are so powerful that they forge our personality and distinguish one personality type from another.

We must also understand that God’s presence and delight are essential to our healing. A child who has been forgiven and yet still feels abandoned and insecure is hardly a child who has experienced good news.

One of the marvels of Christian faith is the belief that God understands and shares our pain. We worship the God who empathizes.

Each of us has a relational style—our one way we approach doing relationships—and we apply it to everyone, even God. This is why Scripture tells us we can’t love God if we don’t love others and that when we love others we also love God. It’s why we’re told in Mark 12 to “love your neighbor as yourself”. How we relate is how we relate.

Every healthy relationship is built on the foundation of trust. Without trust, the relationship begins to fracture. In the Garden of Eden, we committed the original sin—mistrust.

We are guilty because of the sins we commit. We are wounded because of the sins committed against us. And sadly, we commit our greatest sins out of our deepest wounds.

God’s great desire is for you to love and be loved in relationships.

The world desperately needs people who are good at relationships. Why? Because the purpose of life is relationships. The world will know we are Christians by how we relate.

Understanding your personal Enneagram profile is only possible to the extent you understand your life story. We must understand the events we've experienced, the emotions we felt as we experienced those events, and the themes that developed as a result of our life story.

If you only know your Enneagram Type, you only have half of the equation.

What we find in the end is that the Enneagram asks existential questions it cannot answer.

The story of your childhood began to form a plot that continued to unfold as you grew, and it continues to shape who you are now.

To desire self-clarity is to risk seeing ourselves, not for who we want to be, but for who we really are. It’s easier to stay asleep to the truth. Self-clarity wakes us up.

Each of us has a relational style—our one way we approach doing relationships—and we apply it to everyone, even God. This is why Scripture tells us we can’t love God if we don’t love others and that when we love others we also love God. It’s why we’re told in Mark 12 to “love your neighbor as yourself”. How we relate is how we relate.

The Enneagram cannot save you. It has no magical powers and no relational interest in you. The Enneagram cannot love you into wholeness.

To feel loved, you must be known. To be known, you must share yourself. To share yourself, you must know yourself.

Focus on the motivations, not the behaviors. All types behave in universal ways at one time or another. It’s not about what you do but why you do it.

Don’t weaponize the Enneagram. Don’t use the Enneagram as an excuse for your bad behavior. Don’t use it to manipulate others or put them in a box.

Redemption of our True Selves happens in two primary ways: God heals our wounds and calls us to change the way we live. If we receive healing without repentance, we end up using God for our own gain—like the nine lepers who were healed by Jesus, never to return to him. If we repent without being healed, we become legalistic. We have simply directed our wounds down a new path.

Your story drives you. What you've experienced in life has nurtured specific desires, longings, perceptions and beliefs. You are not random. You are a character who has developed through plot twists and inciting incidents. These life turns shaped you.

What makes my Deadly Sin so deadly is that it doesn't feel like sin. Unlike the other sins that I can clearly see for the damage they do, my Deadly Sin feels needed, necessary and even good. It feels more like a friend than an enemy.

Jesus perceives the idols of the human heart with incredible clarity, and he strikes back at them. He refuses to share his throne with our lesser gods. He will give us life and nothing less.

It’s not God and it’s not Scripture. It’s a tool for self-clarity. Self-clarity is for communion with God. God transforms us, not the Enneagram.

If someone only empathizes with us, we find a listening ear but no proven path forward. If someone only models their authority, we find a solution but no love. When we believe someone understands our pain from firsthand experience and has demonstrated their authority about how to live life to the fullest, they will earn our trust and the right to guide us. (Empathy + Authority = Trust.)

Are you a sinner? Yes. However, many of you believe the deepest thing about you is that you are a sinner. That is not true. The deepest thing about you is that you are loved.

The problem is that many of us don't really know our story. We naively live as if we are somehow above, past, or outside of our story. We look at our life and don?t even see that there is a plot and consequences for the events that happened.

Jim,” she said once, after an evening spent among the men who were called the intellectual leaders of the country, “Dr. Simon Pritchett is a phony—a mean, scared old phony.” “Now, really,” he answered, “do you think you’re qualified to pass judgment on philosophers?” “I’m qualified to pass judgment on con men. I’ve seen enough of them to know one when I see him.” “Now this is why I say that you’ll never outgrow your background. If you had, you would have learned to appreciate Dr. Pritchett’s philosophy.” “What philosophy?” “If you don’t understand it, I can’t explain.” She would not let him end the conversation on that favorite formula of his. “Jim,” she said, “he’s a phony, he and Balph Eubank and that whole gang of theirs—and I think you’ve been taken in by them.” Instead of the anger she expected, she saw a brief flash of amusement in the lift of his eyelids. “That’s what you think,” he answered.

Jim,” she said once, after an evening spent among the men who were called the intellectual leaders of the country, “Dr. Simon Pritchett is a phony—a mean, scared old phony.” “Now, really,” he answered, “do you think you’re qualified to pass judgment on philosophers?” “I’m qualified to pass judgment on con men. I’ve seen enough of them to know one when I see him.” “Now this is why I say that you’ll never outgrow your background. If you had, you would have learned to appreciate Dr. Pritchett’s philosophy.” “What philosophy?” “If you don’t understand it, I can’t explain.” She would not let him end the conversation on that favorite formula of his. “Jim,” she said, “he’s a phony, he and Balph Eubank and that whole gang of theirs—and I think you’ve been taken in by them.” Instead of the anger she expected, she saw a brief flash of amusement in the lift of his eyelids. “That’s what you think,” he answered. She felt an instant of terror at the first touch of a concept she had not known to be possible: What if Jim was not taken in by them? She could understand the phoniness of Dr. Pritchett, she thought—it was a racket that gave him an undeserved income; she could even admit the possibility, by now, that Jim might be a phony in his own business; what she could not hold inside her mind was the concept of Jim as a phony in a racket from which he gained nothing, an unpaid phony, an unvenal phony; the phoniness of a cardsharp or a con man seemed innocently wholesome by comparison. She could not conceive of his motive; she felt only that the headlight moving upon her had grown larger. She could not remember by what steps, what accumulation of pain, first as small scratches of uneasiness, then as stabs of bewilderment, then as the chronic, nagging pull of fear, she had begun to doubt Jim’s position on the railroad. It was his sudden, angry “so you don’t trust me?” snapped in answer to her first, innocent questions that made her realize that she did not—when the doubt had not yet formed in her mind and she had fully expected that his answers would reassure her. She had learned, in the slums of her childhood, that honest people were never touchy about the matter of being trusted.

What do you want of me?—was the question that kept beating in her mind as a clue. What do you want of me?—she kept crying soundlessly, at dinner tables, in drawing rooms, on sleepless nights—crying it to Jim and those who seemed to share his secret, to Balph Eubank, to Dr. Simon Pritchett—what do you want of me? She did not ask it aloud; she knew that they would not answer. What do you want of me?—she asked, feeling as if she were running, but no way were open to escape. What do you want of me?—she asked, looking at the whole long torture of her marriage that had not lasted the full span of one year.

It is a Woman's right to limit her man's options.

The whole purpose behind falling in love is to find someone to share growing old with.

I always cringe when I hear people say something like “I know such-and-such through science or reason, but the rest I’ll have to take on faith.” This statement suggests that faith is not about evidence—after all of the evidence is gathered and found wanting, then a person turns reluctantly to something called “faith” to patch the holes. Elder Neil L. Andersen explained that faith “is not something ethereal, floating loosely in the air.” Instead, our scriptures teach “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1; emphasis added). Joseph Smith changed the word “substance” to “assurance” in his inspired translation, and the underlying Greek word, hypostasis, may also be translated as “confidence.” “Assurance comes in ways that aren’t always easy to analyze,” Sharon Eubank observed, “but there is light in our darkness.” Thus, faith is not the absence of certitude, positive thinking, or a weak foundation of flimsy evidence. To have faith, Alma taught, means to “hope for things which are not seen, which are true” (Alma 32:21). Anne C. Pingree described it as a “spiritual ability to be persuaded of promises that are seen ‘afar off.’”6 Faith develops through our relationship with God our Father, by His communications with us through the Holy Ghost. Faith is a type of evidence that can be strengthened by observations, reports, and inferences, but it also exists independent of them.

It is a great honor to become a mother. Eckhart Tolle says that parenting is the perfect place to reach enlightenment. Queen Afua says that Motherhood will make you over if you let it. Yes. She says it will create spiritual, emotional, mental and physical muscle and teach you how to master your own life. It is all of these things and more. It is the deepest nirvana ache and the pinnacle of ecstasy. Listen, this is true: It is the most magnificent fight. It is scratches and balmy tears and milk. It is beautiful, it is bubbly and sweet and defies gravity. It is music: it is jazz and rock and roll, it is old soul and symphony. It is color and sound and light. Welcome, Sweet Mother Woman. God bless your new journey, always.

Parents in Allegheny County helped me articulate an inchoate idea that had been echoing in my head since I started my research. In Indiana, Los Angeles, and Allegheny County, technologists and administrators explained to me that new high-tech tools in public services increase transparency and decrease discrimination. They claimed that there is no way to know what is going on in the head of a welfare caseworker, a homeless service provider, or an intake call screener without using big data to identify patterns in their decision-making. I find the philosophy that sees human beings as unknowable black boxes and machines as transparent deeply troubling. It seems to me a worldview that surrenders any attempt at empathy and forecloses the possibility of ethical development. The presumption that human decision-making is opaque and inaccessible is an admission that we have abandoned a social commitment to try to understand each other. Poor and working-class people in Allegheny County want and deserve more: a recognition of their humanity, an understanding of their context, and the potential for connection and community.

Chris Eubank [Talking while signing the contract]: I don’t hate the man, I just want his WBO middleweight title. I pray that I have enough dignity not to hate the man. Hate doesn’t come into it for me. Hate destroys the game and makes it look brutal and that’s why a lot of people don’t take to it. I don’t hate the man, I want to take the man’s title. I intend to prove I am a better fighter than the man, which I am. Nigel Benn: I personally do hate him. I personally do hate him.

In my most pessimistic moments, I fear that we are winning the fight against mass incarceration at just the historical moment when the digital poorhouse makes the physical institution of prison less necessary. Corporations already anticipate the immense cost savings of building a digital prison state without walls.

Poverty is denied by the media and political commentators, who portray the poor as a pathologically dependent minority dangerous to professional middle-class society. This is true from both conservative and liberal perspectives: voices from the Right tend to decry the poor as parasitic while voices from the Left paternalistically hand-wring about the poor’s inability to exert agency in their own lives.

There is no greater landscape than a book and an open mind....

While most puppies will need to have a fenced off area, Chihuahuas can get by in a space the size of – or in an actual – playpen. As Jeanne Eubanks of Uey’s Chihuahuas puts it, “A fenced in playpen with everything they need in the playpen is perfect.

When expectations overwhelm us, we can step back and ask Heavenly Father what to let go of.