Event Announcement Quotes

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weren’t you always distracted by expectation, as if every event announced a beloved? (Where can you find a place to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you going and coming and often staying all night.)…
Rainer Maria Rilke (Duino Elegies)
No one expects the rug to be yanked out from underneath them; life-changing events usually don’t announce themselves. While instinct and intuition can help provide some warning signs, they can do little to prepare you for the feeling of rootlessness that follows when fate flips your world upside down. Anger, confusion, sadness, and frustration are shaken up together inside you like a snow globe. It takes years for the emotional dust to settle as you do your best to see through the storm.
Slash (Slash)
Here's how it works: the president makes decisions. He's the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. The greatest thing about this man is he's steady. You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday. Events can change; this man's beliefs never will.
Stephen Colbert
Monster” is derived from the Latin noun monstrum, “divine portent,” itself formed on the root of the verb monere, “to warn.” It came to refer to living things of anomalous shape or structure, or to fabulous creatures like the sphinx who were composed of strikingly incongruous parts, because the ancients considered the appearance of such beings to be a sign of some impending supernatural event. Monsters, like angels, functioned as messengers and heralds of the extraordinary. They served to announce impending revelation, saying, in effect, “Pay attention; something of profound importance is happening.
Susan Stryker
The Times 2 July 1952 WAS BRITISH BARONESS WORKING FOR THE NAZIS IN PARIS? By Philip Bing-Wallace It was alleged that Baroness Freya Saumures (who claimed to be of Swedish descent but is a British subject) was one of the many women that entertained the Gestapo and SS during the occupation of Paris, a jury was told. At the baroness’s trial today, the Old Bailey heard Daniel Merrick-James QC, prosecuting council, astonish the jury by revealing that Baroness Freya Saumures allegedly worked with the Nazis throughout the Nazi occupation of Paris. There was a photograph of a woman in a headscarf and dark glasses, alongside a tall dark-haired man who had a protective arm around her, his face shielded by his hand. A description beneath the image read: Baroness Saumures with her husband, Baron Ferdinand Saumures, outside the Old Bailey after her acquittal. Alec could not see her face fully, but the picture of the baron, even partially obscured, certainly looked very like the man lying dead in the Battersea Park Road crypt. Alec read on. When Mr Merrick-James sat, a clerk of the court handed the judge, Justice Henry Folks, a note. The judge then asked the court to be cleared. Twenty minutes later, the court was reconvened. Justice Folks announced to the jury that the prosecution had dropped all charges and that Lady Saumures was acquitted. There was no explanation for the acquittal. The jury was dismissed with thanks. Neither Baron nor Baroness Saumures had any comment. Baron and Baroness Saumures live in West Sussex and are well known to a select group for their musical evenings and events. They are also well known for protecting their privacy. Alec rummaged on. It was getting close to lunchtime and his head was beginning to ache.
Hugo Woolley (The Wasp Trap (The Charlotte's War Trilogy Book 3))
There is no greater torture than being forced to watch as your love, your reason for living, breathing, and existing, sinks into oblivion. Your heart stops no matter how you try to get to her, she just gets farther and farther away." ~Fane from 'Beyond the Vail' "Attention shoppers, just a brief announcement, crazy ass werewolf on isle three. Those with abundance of testosterone, don't touch their lady merchandise and you might walk out of here intact." ~Jen from 'Fate and Fury'. "In the event of some sort of gathering, if one of the bossy, overbearing, possessive fur balls has not flipped his switch and attacked some poor young pup in some misguided attempt to protect his woman's virtue, then the night is not over.
Quinn Loftis (Beyond the Veil (The Grey Wolves, #5))
Children understood at a very young age that doing nothing was an expression of power. Doing nothing was a choice swollen with omnipotence. It was, in fact, godly. And this, she now realized, was the reason why the gods did nothing. Proof of their omniscience. After all, to act was to announce awful limitations, for it revealed that chance acted first, the accidents were just that--events beyond the will of the gods--and all they could do in answer was to attempt to remedy the consequences, to alter natural ends. To act, then, was an admission of fallibility.
Steven Erikson
There are days when everything I see seems to me charged with meaning: messages it would be difficult for me to communicate to others, define, translate into words, but which for this very reason appear to me decisive. They are announcements or presages that concern me and the world at once: for my part, not only the external events of my existence but also what happens inside, in the depths of me; and for the world, not some particular event but the general way of being of all things.
Italo Calvino (If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler)
So a war begins. Into a peace-time life, comes an announcement, a threat. A bomb drops somewhere, potential traitors are whisked off quietly to prison. And for some time, days, months, a year perhaps, life has a peace-time quality, into which war-like events intrude. But when a war has been going on for a long time, life is all war, every event has the quality of war, nothing of peace remains. Events and the life in which they are embedded have the same quality. But since it is not possible that events are not part of the life they occur in -- it is not possible that a bomb should explode into a texture of life foreign to it -- all that means is that one has not understood, one has not been watching.
Doris Lessing
Now, Reverend Father Abbot asked me to make the following announcements: "First, for the next three days we shall sing the Little Office of Our Lady before Matins, asking her intercession for peace. "Second, general instructions for civil defense in the event of a space-strike or missile-attack alert are available on the table by the entrance. Everybody take one.
Walter M. Miller Jr. (A Canticle for Leibowitz (St. Leibowitz, #1))
The big event that rips through the heart of things and changes life for everyone, the unforgettable moment when something ends and something else begins. Was that what this was, he asked himself, a moment similar to the outbreak of war? No, not quite. War announces the beginning of a new reality, but nothing had begun today, a reality had ended, that was all, something had been subtracted from the world, and now there was a hole, a nothing where there had once been a something, as if every tree in the world had vanished, as if the very concept of tree or mountain had been erased from the human mind.
Paul Auster (4 3 2 1)
Digby feels the first stirrings of hunger. By such subtle signs, like an orchestra tuning up, the daily event that is central to life on the Coromandel Coast announces itself: the evening breeze.
Abraham Verghese (The Covenant of Water)
It's not the concept of marriage I have a problem with. I'd like to get married too. A couple times. It's the actual wedding that pisses me off. The problem is that everyone who gets married seems to think that they are the first person in the entire universe to do it, and that the year leading up to the event revolves entirely around them. You have to throw them showers, bachelorette weekends, buy a bridesmaid dress, and then buy a ticket to some godforsaken town wherever they decide to drag you. If you're really unlucky, they'll ask you to recite a poem at their wedding. That's just what I want to do- monitor my drinking until I'm done with my public service announcement. And what do we get out of it, you ask? A dry piece of chicken and a roll in the hay with their hillbilly cousin. I could get that at home, thanks. Then they have the audacity to go shopping and pick out their own gifts. I want to know who the first person was who said this was okay. After spending all that money on a bachelorette weekend, a shower, and often a flight across the country, they expect you to go to Williams Sonoma or Pottery Barn and do research? Then they send you a thank-you note applauding you for such a thoughtful gift. They're the one who picked it out! I always want to remind the person that absolutely no thought went into typing in a name and having a salad bowl come up.
Chelsea Handler (My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands)
The idolizers of "facts" never realize that their idols shine only in a borrowed light. They are indeed not supposed to realize that, for it would immediately make them perplexed and, accordingly, useless. But idolizers and idols are used only when the gods are absconding and so are announcing their nearness.
Martin Heidegger (Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event) (Studies in Continental Thought))
The commercialization of molecular biology is the most stunning ethical event in the history of science, and it has happened with astonishing speed. For four hundred years since Galileo, science has always proceeded as a free and open inquiry into the workings of nature. Scientists have always ignored national boundaries, holding themselves above the transitory concerns of politics and even wars. Scientists have always rebelled against secrecy in research, and have even frowned on the idea of patenting their discoveries, seeing themselves as working to the benefit of all mankind. And for many generations, the discoveries of scientists did indeed have a peculiarly selfless quality... Suddenly it seemed as if everyone wanted to become rich. New companies were announced almost weekly, and scientists flocked to exploit genetic research... It is necessary to emphasize how significant this shift in attitude actually was. In the past, pure scientists took a snobbish view of business. They saw the pursuit of money as intellectually uninteresting, suited only to shopkeepers. And to do research for industry, even at the prestigious Bell or IBM labs, was only for those who couldn't get a university appointment. Thus the attitude of pure scientists was fundamentally critical toward the work of applied scientists, and to industry in general. Their long-standing antagonism kept university scientists free of contaminating industry ties, and whenever debate arose about technological matters, disinterested scientists were available to discuss the issues at the highest levels. But that is no longer true. There are very few molecular biologists and very few research institutions without commercial affiliations. The old days are gone. Genetic research continues, at a more furious pace than ever. But it is done in secret, and in haste, and for profit.
Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park (Jurassic Park, #1))
Reconfirm scheduled events before they happen. Announce changes to scheduled or committed dates as soon as they change. Intimacy
David H. Maister (The Trusted Advisor)
The thing about perspective-changing events is that they usually don't announce themselves as such.
Andrea Goeglein
When The Matrix debuted in 1999, it was a huge box-office success. It was also well received by critics, most of whom focused on one of two qualities—the technological (it mainstreamed the digital technique of three-dimensional “bullet time,” where the on-screen action would freeze while the camera continued to revolve around the participants) or the philosophical (it served as a trippy entry point for the notion that we already live in a simulated world, directly quoting philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 reality-rejecting book Simulacra and Simulation). If you talk about The Matrix right now, these are still the two things you likely discuss. But what will still be interesting about this film once the technology becomes ancient and the philosophy becomes standard? I suspect it might be this: The Matrix was written and directed by “the Wachowski siblings.” In 1999, this designation meant two brothers; as I write today, it means two sisters. In the years following the release of The Matrix, the older Wachowski (Larry, now Lana) completed her transition from male to female. The younger Wachowski (Andy, now Lilly) publicly announced her transition in the spring of 2016. These events occurred during a period when the social view of transgender issues radically evolved, more rapidly than any other component of modern society. In 1999, it was almost impossible to find any example of a trans person within any realm of popular culture; by 2014, a TV series devoted exclusively to the notion won the Golden Globe for Best Television Series. In the fifteen-year window from 1999 to 2014, no aspect of interpersonal civilization changed more, to the point where Caitlyn (formerly Bruce) Jenner attracted more Twitter followers than the president (and the importance of this shift will amplify as the decades pass—soon, the notion of a transgender US president will not seem remotely implausible). So think how this might alter the memory of The Matrix: In some protracted reality, film historians will reinvestigate an extremely commercial action movie made by people who (unbeknownst to the audience) would eventually transition from male to female. Suddenly, the symbolic meaning of a universe with two worlds—one false and constructed, the other genuine and hidden—takes on an entirely new meaning. The idea of a character choosing between swallowing a blue pill that allows him to remain a false placeholder and a red pill that forces him to confront who he truly is becomes a much different metaphor. Considered from this speculative vantage point, The Matrix may seem like a breakthrough of a far different kind. It would feel more reflective than entertaining, which is precisely why certain things get remembered while certain others get lost.
Chuck Klosterman (But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking about the Present as If It Were the Past)
Once the war was over, they reorganized the Democratic Party and announced in their 1865 platform, “We hold this to be a Government of white people, made and to be perpetuated for the exclusive benefit of the white race, and … that people of African descent cannot be considered as citizens of the United States, and that there can, in no event, nor under any circumstances, be any equality between white and other races.
Charles Lane (The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction)
By such subtle signs, like an orchestra tuning up, the daily event that is central to life on the Coromandel Coast announces itself: the evening breeze. The Madras evening breeze has a body to it, its atomic constituents knitted together to create a thing of substance that strokes and cools the skin in the manner of a long, icy drink or a plunge into a mountain spring. It pushes through on a broad front, up and down the coast; unhurried, reliable, with no slack until after midnight, by which time it will have lulled them into beautiful sleep. It doesn’t know caste or privilege as it soothes the expatriates in their pocket mansions, the shirtless clerk sitting with his wife on the rooftop of his one-room house, and the pavement dwellers in their roadside squats. Digby has seen the cheery Muthu become distracted, his conversation clipped and morose, as he waits for the relief that comes from the direction of Sumatra and Malaya, gathering itself over the Bay of Bengal, carrying scents of orchids and salt, an airborne opiate that unclenches, unknots, and finally lets one forget the brutal heat of the day. “Yes, yes, you are having your Taj Mahal, your Golden Temple, your Eiffel Tower,” an educated Madrasi will say, “but can anything match our Madras evening breeze?
Abraham Verghese (The Covenant of Water)
Right after the announcement event, Gates wrote a parody email to his staff. “All reality has been completely suspended,” it began. Looking back at it, Gates laughs that it may have been “the best email I ever wrote.
Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
Adornment, exoticism, affectation are all willed decadent strategies meant to pervert the texts they made. Decadent texts often live in their descriptive excursions, in their evocation of dreams, mysterious places and states of mind, in their excess of words, not events. The surface of the texts, the sound of the words, point to themselves as manufactured, as illusion. The decadents attempted to create texts that announced themselves as artifice.
Asti Hustvedt (The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siècle France)
Sophia Alby,” he announced, “I wore this suit for you. I came to this event tonight for you.” His chest moved quickly, and his eyes were shockingly intense as he stared at me. “I get up every morning and I keep breathing . . . for you.
Nikki Sloane (The Redemption (Filthy Rich Americans, #4))
Soon the mercilessly even drumbeat fill'd the Day, replacing the accustom'd rhythms of country People with the controlling Pulse of military Clock-Time, announcing that all events would now occur at the army's Pleasure, upon the army's schedule.
Thomas Pynchon (Mason & Dixon)
Really, I have no gifts—no gifts at all—except perhaps a certain knowledge of human nature. People, I find, are apt to be far too trustful. I'm afraid that I have a tendency always to believe the worst. Not a nice trait. But so often justified by subsequent events.
Agatha Christie (A Murder Is Announced (Miss Marple, #4))
April 12: Venus at Large, a comedy by Henry Denker featuring characters based on Marilyn and Arthur Miller, opens on Broadway and receives negative reviews. Marilyn announces her intention to consult with Lee Strasberg before Something’s Got to Give starts shooting.
Carl Rollyson (Marilyn Monroe Day by Day: A Timeline of People, Places, and Events)
When I first went to Rwanda, I was reading a book called Civil War, which had been receiving great critical acclaim. Writing from an immediate post-Cold War perspective, the author, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, a German, observed, “The most obvious sign of the end of the bipolar world order are the thirty or forty civil wars being waged openly around the globe,” and he set out to inquire what they were all about. This seemed promising until I realized that Enzensberger wasn’t interested in the details of those wars. He treated them all as a single phenomenon and, after a few pages, announced: “What gives today’s civil wars a new and terrifying slant is the fact that they are waged without stakes on either side, that they are wars about nothing at all.” In the old days, according to Enzensberger—in Spain in the 1930s or the United States in the 1860s—people used to kill and die for ideas, but now “violence has separated itself from ideology,” and people who wage civil wars just kill and die in an anarchic scramble for power. In these wars, he asserted, there is no notion of the future; nihilism rules; “all political thought, from Aristotle and Machiavelli to Marx and Weber, is turned upside down,” and “all that remains is the Hobbesian ur-myth of the war of everyone against everyone else.” That such a view of distant civil wars offers a convenient reason to ignore them may explain its enormous popularity in our times. It would be nice, we may say, if the natives out there settled down, but if they’re just fighting for the hell of it, it’s not my problem. But it is our problem. By denying the particularity of the peoples who are making history, and the possibility that they might have politics, Enzensberger mistakes his failure to recognize what is at stake in events for the nature of those events. So he sees chaos—what is given off, not what’s giving it off—and his analysis begs the question: when, in fact, there are ideological differences between two warring parties, how are we to judge them? In the case of Rwanda, to embrace the idea that the civil war was a free-for-all—in which everyone is at once equally legitimate and equally illegitimate—is to ally oneself with Hutu Power’s ideology of genocide as self-defense.
Philip Gourevitch (We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families)
This terrible event clothed the archangel with added influence; because his credulous disciples believed that he had specifically fore-announced it, instead of only making a general prophecy, which any one might have done, and so have chanced to hit one of many marks in the wide margin allowed.
Herman Melville (Moby Dick: or, the White Whale)
The papers were always talking about the debt owed to society. According to them, it had to be paid . But that doesn't speak to the imagination. What really counted was the possibility of escape, a leap to freedom, out of the implacable ritual, a wild run for it that would give whatever chance for hope there was. .. Despite my willingness to understand, I just couldn't accept such arrogant certainty. Because, after all, there really was something ridiculously out of proportion between the verdict such certainty was based on and the imperturbable march of events from the moment the verdict was announced. .. How had I not seen that there was nothing more important than an execution, and that when you come right down to it, it was the only thing a man could truly be interested in? If I ever got out of this prison I would go and watch every execution there was. But I think it was a mistake even to consider the possibility. .. But I wasn't being reasonable. It was a mistake to let myself get carried away by such imaginings, because the next minute I would get so cold that I would curl up into a ball under my blanket and my teeth would be chattering and I couldn't make them stop. .. So the thing that bothered me most was that the condemned man had to hope the machine would work the first time. And I say that’s wrong . And in a way I was right. But in another way I was forced to admit that that was the whole secret of good organization. In other words, the condemned man was forced into a kind of moral collaboration. It was in his interest that everything go off without a hitch.
Albert Camus (The Stranger)
This terrible event clothed the archangel with added influence; because his credulous disciples believed that he had specifically fore- announced it, instead of only making a general prophecy, which any one might have done, and so have chanced to hit one of many marks in the wide margin allowed. He became a nameless terror to the ship.
Herman Melville (Moby-Dick or, The Whale)
While white mob violence against African Americans was an obsession in the South, it was not limited to that region. White supremacy was and is an American reality. Whites lynched blacks in nearly every state, including New York, Minnesota, and California. Wherever blacks were present in significant numbers, the threat of being lynched was always real. Blacks had to “watch their step,” no matter where they were in America. A black man could be walking down the road, minding his business, and his life could suddenly change by meeting a white man or a group of white men or boys who on a whim decided to have some fun with a Negro; and this could happen in Mississippi or New York, Arkansas, or Illinois. By the 1890s, lynching fever gripped the South, spreading like cholera, as white communities made blacks their primary target, and torture their focus. Burning the black victim slowly for hours was the chief method of torture. Lynching became a white media spectacle, in which prominent newspapers, like the Atlanta Constitution, announced to the public the place, date, and time of the expected hanging and burning of black victims. Often as many as ten to twenty thousand men, women, and children attended the event. It was a family affair, a ritual celebration of white supremacy, where women and children were often given the first opportunity to torture black victims—burning black flesh and cutting off genitals, fingers, toes, and ears as souvenirs. Postcards were made from the photographs taken of black victims with white lynchers and onlookers smiling as they struck a pose for the camera. They were sold for ten to twenty-five cents to members of the crowd, who then mailed them to relatives and friends, often with a note saying something like this: “This is the barbeque we had last night.”[17]
James H. Cone (The Cross and the Lynching Tree)
The gospel, centered profoundly for Jesus in the announcement that the reign of God is at hand, is eschatological in character. It pulls back the veil on the coming reign of God, thereby revealing the horizon of the world’s future. The gospel portrays the coming of Jesus, and particularly his death and resurrection, as the decisive, truly eschatological event in the world’s history.
Darrell L. Guder (Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America (The Gospel and Our Culture Series (GOCS)))
From this time forth I make you hear new things, hidden things which you have not known. They are created now... Before today you have never heard of them." (48:6-7) Notice the most radical announcement here. "Before today you have never heard of the things that God will do. They are not accessible to human imagination. "They are created now." They are "hidden things which you have not known." This feature of Second Isaiah is what has led interpreters to call this prophet the first apocalyptic theologian - meaning, the first to show in an unmistakable way that God will interrupt the normal progression of things by arriving in - indeed, invading - the midst of human events from a sphere of power capable of calling into existence the things that do not exist (as Paul says in Romans 4:17).
Fleming Rutledge (And God Spoke to Abraham: Preaching from the Old Testament)
And this, she now realized, was the reason why the gods did nothing. Proof of their omniscience. After all, to act was to announce awful limitations, for it revealed that chance acted first, the accidents were just that—events beyond the will of the gods—and all they could do in answer was to attempt to remedy the consequences, to alter natural ends. To act, then, was an admission of fallibility.
Steven Erikson (Dust of Dreams (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #9))
In the spring of 1990 I flew to Aspen, Colorado, to cover a summit meeting between Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President George Herbert Walker Bush. This fairly routine political event took on sudden significance when, on the evening before the talks were scheduled to begin, Saddam Hussein announced that the independent state of Kuwait had, by virtue of a massive deployment of military force, become a part of Iraq. We were not to know that this act—and the name Saddam Hussein—would dominate international politics for the next decade and more, but it was still possible to witness something extraordinary: the sight of Mrs. Thatcher publicly inserting quantities of lead into George Bush’s pencil. The spattering quill of a Ralph Steadman would be necessary to do justice to such a macabre yet impressive scene.
Christopher Hitchens (Ancient Gonzo Wisdom: Interviews with Hunter S. Thompson)
Though I work in New York City, in an office about a mile from the World Trade Center, I was not in New York City when the planes struck. I was on a plane above the Atlantic Ocean, heading back to New York from a family reunion and celebration in Europe. I had said good-bye to my husband in London; he was staying for a wedding of a business friend. I couldn’t wait to see my kids and my parents, who would be waiting for me at a Little League game in our town, about thirty-five miles from New York City. An hour and a half into the flight, I suddenly had the feeling that the plane was making a slow turn. Nobody else seemed to notice. I sat nervously, hoping I was imagining it. But then a stewardess made an announcement. “There has been a catastrophic event affecting all of North American airspace,” she said. “We are returning
Lauren Tarshis (I Survived the Attacks of September 11th, 2001)
Nor is this a proof that they are living for a long time that the day often seems long to them, or that they complain that the hours pass slowly until the time fixed for dinner arrives. For as soon as their preoccupations fail them, they are restless with nothing to do, not knowing how to dispose of their leisure or make the time pass. And so they are anxious for something else to do, and all the intervening time is wearisome: really, it is just as when a gladiatorial show has been announced, or they are looking forward to the appointed time of some other exhibition or amusement – they want to leap over the days in between. Any deferment of the longed-for event is tedious to them. Yet the time of the actual enjoyment is short and swift, and made much shorter through their own fault. For they dash from one pleasure to another and cannot stay steady in one desire.
Seneca (On the Shortness of Life)
Cronkite would flip-flop on the question over whether he was in any way responsible for LBJ’s surprise March announcement. His most succinct answer occurred in a Q&A with Richard Snow of American Heritage. “I don’t feel that a journalist’s influence is so great that you can change the course of human events by a single broadcast,” he said. “Whether it’s a president’s decision to act or not act, it doesn’t work that way. It’s just one more straw.
Douglas Brinkley (Cronkite)
When Kevin Rudd announced that Australia would bid for a non-permanent seat on the Security Council Tony Abbott announced his immediate opposition. The bid would be abandoned in the event of a Coalition victory at the 2010 election, he pledged. The total cost was then estimated at perhaps $40 million, though ended up at around $25 million.16 For perspective, the Victorian Government spent $56.7 million to subsidise the Grand Prix in 2012 alone.17
Peter Hartcher (The Adolescent Country: A Lowy Institute Paper: Penguin Special)
The best argument I know for the highly questionable existence of Jesus is this. His illiterate living disciples left us no record and in any event could not have been “Christians,” since they were never to read those later books in which Christians must affirm belief, and in any case had no idea that anyone would ever found a church on their master’s announcements. (There is scarcely a word in any of the later-assembled Gospels to suggest that Jesus wanted to be the founder of a church, either.)
Christopher Hitchens (God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything)
The best argument I know for the highly questionable existence of Jesus is this. His illiterate living disciples left us no record and in any event could not have been "Christians", since they were never to read those later books in which Christians must affirm belief, and in any case had no idea that anyone would ever found a church on their master's announcements. (There is scarcely a word in any of the later-assembled Gospels to suggest that Jesus wanted to be the founder of a church, either.)
Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything)
In 1932 he and other leading eugenicists attended the Third Inter-national Congress of Eugenics, which was held in New York City. The exhibits were intended to show that eugenics was a “pure and applied science.” Major Leonard Darwin, the son of Charles Darwin, also presented his views at the meeting. The New York Times reported on the event. Eugenists from all over the world will attend the Third International Congress of Eugenics today and tomorrow at the American Museum of Natural History. At general and sectional meetings they will discuss advances in the study for the physical and mental improvement of the human race… It [the exhibit] will seek to emphasize the fact that eugenics is concerned primarily with racial and family-stock, quality in the turn-over of population from generation to generation. “As a pure science,” the announcement says, “eugenics tries to understand the forces which govern this turn-over, while as an applied science it strives to use these forces in the improvement of family-stocks and races.
Suzanne Humphries (Dissolving Illusions)
Children understood at a very young age that doing nothing was an expression of power. Doing nothing was a choice swollen with omnipotence. It was, in fact, godly. And this, she now realized, was the reason why the gods did nothing. Proof of their omniscience. After all, to act was to announce awful limitations, for it revealed that chance acted first, the accidents were just that—events beyond the will of the gods—and all they could do in answer was to attempt to remedy the consequences, to alter natural ends. To act, then, was an admission of fallibility
Steven Erikson (Dust of Dreams (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #9))
A defining feature of the present world is built-in disaster, now announcing itself on a daily basis. But the crisis facing the biosphere is arguably less noticeable and compelling, in the First World at least, than everyday alienation, despair, and entrapment in a routinized, meaningless control grid. Influence over even the smallest event or circumstance drains steadily away, as global systems of production and exchange destroy local particularity, distinctiveness, and custom. Gone is an earlier pre-eminence of place, increasingly replaced by "airport culture"—rootless, urban, homogenized, identical.
John Zerzan (A People's History of Civilization)
Because, after all, there really was something ridiculously out of proportion between the verdict such certainty was based on and the imperturbable march of events from the moment the verdict was announced. The fact that the sentence had been read at eight o’clock at night and not at five o’clock, the fact that it could have been an entirely different one, the fact that it had been decided by men who change their underwear, the fact that it had been handed down in the name of some vague notion called the French (or German, or Chinese) people—all of it seemed to detract from the seriousness of the decision.
Albert Camus (The Stranger)
Birthday parties and events will be thrown for the child to elicit admiration and attention from others.  However, the child will be punished, berated and humiliated in the middle of the party in front of an audience if they behave against the expectations of the self-absorbed mother.  The party only serves to generate additional narcissistic supply for the mother, not a pleasurable event for the child.  Events are scheduled, changed, and cancelled in order to exert and announce control over the child.  They make it very apparent to the child that the mother can both give pleasure and take pleasure away by these means. 
J.B. Snow (88 Tell-Tale Signs of Narcissistic Mothers and Toxic Mothers: Overt and Covert Narcissistic Abuse (Transcend Mediocrity Book 64))
As if somehow irony,” she recaps for Maxine, “as practiced by a giggling mincing fifth column, actually brought on the events of 11 September, by keeping the country insufficiently serious — weakening its grip on ‘reality.’ So all kinds of make-believe—forget the delusional state the country’s in already—must suffer as well. Everything has to be literal now.” “Yeah, the kids are even getting it at school.” Ms. Cheung, an English teacher who if Kugelblitz were a town would be the neighborhood scold, has announced that there shall be no more fictional reading assignments. Otis is terrified, Ziggy less so. Maxine will walk in on them watching Rugrats or reruns of Rocko’s Modern Life, and they holler by reflex, “Don’t tell Ms. Cheung!” “You notice,” Heidi continues, “how ‘reality’ programming is suddenly all over the cable, like dog shit? Of course, it’s so producers shouldn’t have to pay real actors scale. But wait! There’s more! Somebody needs this nation of starers believing they’re all wised up at last, hardened and hip to the human condition, freed from the fictions that led them so astray, as if paying attention to made-up lives was some form of evil drug abuse that the collapse of the towers cured by scaring everybody straight again.
Thomas Pynchon (Bleeding Edge)
The various aspects of illusion described so far refer to a single function, a single structure, a single failure. The function is to protect from the real; the structure does not involve refusing to perceive the real but, rather, splitting it in two; the failure lies in recognizing the protective double too late as the very reality from which one thought one had found protection. This is the curse of evasion: by way of a phantasmatic duplication, it sends us back to the undesirable starting point, the real. We can see now why evasion is always a mistake: it is always inoperative, because the real is always right. We may, admittedly, try to protect ourselves from a future event, if that happens to be possible; we shall never protect ourselves from a past or present event or one that is 'certain to come to pass,' as in the oracular symbolics which announces in advance an ineluctable necessity that already has all the characteristics of a present necessity. And the act by which one attempts to slough off that necessity will never be able to 'do any better' than literally reproduce the feared even or, even more exactly, constitute that event. This is what happens to Oedipus, as it happens to everyone at odds with himself - that is to say, to everyone at some point or other of his existence.
Clément Rosset (Le réel et son double (essai sur l'illusion))
Catastrophic event? The plane was silent as people tried to grasp what this could possibly mean. Earthquake? Bomb? One man actually thought a meteor could have hit somewhere in America. And then, moments later, the stewardess made another announcement. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she said. “I will now tell you what has occurred….” And for reasons I will never understand, she told our planeload of terrified people exactly what was happening: that planes had been hijacked by terrorists and flown into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. There could be other planes involved, she said. The disaster was still unfolding. An hour and a half later, we landed in London. Police escorted us into the chaotic airport. Somehow, I tracked down my husband. It wasn’t until late that night that we were able to get a
Lauren Tarshis (I Survived the Attacks of September 11th, 2001)
The lair needs to know.” “Yeah, I know that, but I would have preferred it if we didn’t have to make a big thing out of it. It would have been easier to just ask you and the other sentinels to pass on the news.” “You’re their Prime, and there are certain expectations that come with that position. Making public announcements about key information is one of them. Celebrating important events is another. Your pregnancy is both of those things.” “Yes, but have you not seen how people respond to a pregnant woman?” By the way his brow furrowed, no, he hadn’t. “Everyone’s suddenly an expert on babies and they’re all full of advice and nosy-ass questions. I’m glad my stomach’s not that big – people are a hell of a lot worse if there’s a bump. They try rubbing it like it’s a damn genie-infested lamp.” “Genie-infested?” he chuckled. “You get my point.
Suzanne Wright (Ashes (Dark in You, #3))
So much of the most important personal news I'd received in the last several years had come to me by smartphone while I was abroad in the city that I could plot on a map, could represent spatially the events, such as they were, of my early thirties. Place a thumbtack on the wall or drop a flag on Google Maps at Lincoln Center, where, beside the fountain, I took a call from Jon informing me that, for whatever complex of reasons, a friend had shot himself; mark the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, where I read the message ("Apologies for the mass e-mail...") a close cousin sent out describing the dire condition of her newborn; waiting in line at the post office on Atlantic, the adhan issuing from the adjacent mosque, I received your wedding announcement and was shocked to be shocked, crushed, and started a frightening multi week descent, worse for being so embarrassingly cliched; while in the bathroom at the SoHo Crate and Barrel--the finest semipublic restroom in lower Manhattan--I learned I'd been awarded a grant that would take me overseas for a summer, and so came to associate the corner of Broadway and Houston with all that transpired in Morocco; at Zucotti Park I heard my then-girlfriend was not--as she'd been convinced--pregnant; while buying discounted dress socks at the Century 21 department store across from Ground Zero, I was informed by text that a friend in Oakland had been hospitalized after the police had broken his ribs. And so on: each of these experiences of reception remained, as it were, in situ, so that whenever I returned to a zone where significant news had been received, I discovered that the news and an echo of its attendant affect still awaited me like a curtain of beads.
Ben Lerner (10:04)
The bass drum thumped loudly and the chairman of the dance committee, Jeff Garwin, rose to speak. “Your attention, please!” he said over the microphone. “I have an important announcement to make. The next event on our program is the presentation of a pantomime produced by members of the Emerson College Dramatic Club. “As you all know, it is our custom each year to select an attractive young lady to preside over the event. She will wear the Festival Robe and Crown. After careful consideration by a committee of faculty and students, a choice has been made.” A hush fell over the audience as the announcer paused a long moment. “Will Miss Nancy Drew please come to the stage,” he said, smiling down at the girl. The students clapped and whistled. Though startled, Nancy responded with poise and mounted the improvised stage. She donned a white robe, a golden paper crown, and accepted the seat of honor.
Carolyn Keene (The Quest of the Missing Map (Nancy Drew, #19))
It was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five. Spiritual revelations were conceded to England at that favoured period, as at this. Mrs. Southcott had recently attained her five-and-twentieth blessed birthday, of whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards had heralded the sublime appearance by announcing that arrangements were made for the swallowing up of London and Westminster. Even the Cock-lane ghost had been laid only a round dozen of years, after rapping out its messages, as the spirits of this very year last past (supernaturally deficient in originality) rapped out theirs. Mere messages in the earthly order of events had lately come to the English Crown and People, from a congress of British subjects in America: which, strange to relate, have proved more important to the human race than any communications yet received through any of the chickens of the Cock-lane brood.
Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities)
SYNCHRONICITY 'The earth is alive, and it feels with you. It follows your footsteps, your search, with equal anxiety, because it will be transfigured in your triumph. The end of Kaliyuga and the entry into a new Golden Age depend on the results of your war. The earth by itself cannot finish the work that Nature leaves incomplete. Today the earth has joined forces with man in his destructive passion. The great catastrophe will occur in the first years of the Age of Aquarius. But if you can find the entrance to the Invisible Double of this earth, fulfilling the mystery of 'loveless A-Mor', the volcanoes will become calm, the earthquake will cease and the catastrophe will be avoided. 'There is an essential 'synchronicity' between the soul and the landscape. What you achieve in yourself will have repercussions in even the remotest corner of the universe, like the ringing of a bell which announces a triumph or a defeat, producing irreversible effects in a secret centre where Destiny acts. The Archetype is indivisible and, if you once confront it in an essential manner, the effects are universal and valid for all eternity. The old Chinese saying expresses it well: 'If a man, sitting in his room, thinks the right thoughts, he will be heard thousands of leagues away.' And the alchemical saying, too: 'It doesn't matter how alone you are. If you do true work, unknown friends will come to your aid.' 'What I have called "synchronicity', Nietzsche called 'lucky occurrences filled with meaning'. It becomes a poetic dialogue, a concerto for two violins, between the man-magician and Nature. The world presents you with a 'lucky occurrence filled with meaning', it hands you a subtle, almost secret message, something which happens without apparent reason, a-causal, but which you feel is full of meaning. This being exactly what the world is looking for, that you should extract that meaning from it, which you alone are capable of seeing, because it 'synchronises', it fully coincides with your immediate state of mind, with an event in your life, so that it is able to transform itself, with your assistance, into legend and destiny. A lucky occurrence which transformed itself into Destiny. And once you have achieved this, everything will appear to become the same as before, as if nothing had happened. Nevertheless, everything has changed fundamentally and for all time, although the only ones to know it will be you and the earth — which is now your earth, your world, since it has given itself up to you so that you can make it fruitful. 'The earth has made itself invisible inside you', as Rilke would say, it has become an individualised universe inside you. And although perhaps nothing may have changed, 'it might seem as if it were so, it might seem as if it were so', to use your own words. And you will be a creative God of the world; because you have conceived a Non-Existent Flower. You have given a meaning to your flower.
Miguel Serrano (Nos, Book of the Resurrection)
Social networks including Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest took a step closer to offering ecommerce on their own platforms this week, as the battle to win over retailers hots up. Facebook announced on Thursday it is trialling a “buy” button to allow people to purchase a product without ever leaving the social network’s app. The initial test, with a handful of small and medium-sized businesses in the US, could lead to more ecommerce companies buying adverts on the network. It could also allow Facebook to compile payment information and encourage people to make more transactions via the platform as it would save them typing in card numbers on smartphones. But the social network said no credit or debit card details will be shared with other advertisers. Twitter acquired CardSpring, a payments infrastructure company, this week for an undisclosed price as part of plans to feature more ecommerce around live events or, as it puts it, “in-the-moment commerce experiences”. CardSpring connects payment details with loyalty cards and coupons for transactions online and in stores. The home of the 140-character message hired Nathan Hubbard, former chief executive of Ticketmaster, last year to work on creating an ecommerce product. It has since worked with Amazon, to allow people to add things to their online basket by tweeting, and with Starbucks to encourage people to tweet to buy a coffee for a friend.
Anonymous
It is announced that the United States of Africa have built a reservation for ethnologists in the heart of Africa, where they are protected and maintained in ideal ecological survival conditions and fed at set times of day as is the custom in their countries of origin. The reservation is off-limits to Africans, whether their intentions be philanthropic, scientific or cannibalistic, for fear of damaging the natural equilibrium of the tribe or endangering its chances of breeding, though matters in this regard are already very precarious. The African states assure us that all possible measures will be taken to save this disappearing race: the crucial thing is that it should be completely isolated from the outside world. The first experiment along these lines had already been attempted years ago by the people of Chad, whom the French government had paid a great deal to carry on holding a certain Mme Claustre, an anthropologist, and whom they had thereby saved from the clutches of the Whites who wished to turn her over to scientific prostitution. This almost accidental event soon resulted in all the West’s anthropologists rushing off to African reservations, where they could at last devote themselves to the observation of the only ethnic group worthy of the name—their own. By contrast, upon their approach, all the beasts of the savannahs ran off to take refuge in urban zoos, and the Africans themselves withdrew into their missions, for fear of being devoured by ethnologists who had very rapidly reverted to cannibalism.
Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories)
A more complex way to understand this is the method used by Hermann Minkowski, Einstein’s former math teacher at the Zurich Polytechnic. Reflecting on Einstein’s work, Minkowski uttered the expression of amazement that every beleaguered student wants to elicit someday from condescending professors. “It came as a tremendous surprise, for in his student days Einstein had been a lazy dog,” Minkowski told physicist Max Born. “He never bothered about mathematics at all.”63 Minkowski decided to give a formal mathematical structure to the theory. His approach was the same one suggested by the time traveler on the first page of H. G. Wells’s great novel The Time Machine, published in 1895: “There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time.” Minkowski turned all events into mathematical coordinates in four dimensions, with time as the fourth dimension. This permitted transformations to occur, but the mathematical relationships between the events remained invariant. Minkowski dramatically announced his new mathematical approach in a lecture in 1908. “The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength,” he said. “They are radical. Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.”64 Einstein, who was still not yet enamored of math, at one point described Minkowski’s work as “superfluous learnedness” and joked, “Since the mathematicians have grabbed hold of the theory of relativity, I myself no longer understand it.” But he in fact came to admire Minkowski’s handiwork and wrote a section about it in his popular 1916 book on relativity.
Walter Isaacson (Einstein: His Life and Universe)
In Uganda, I wrote a questionaire that I had my research assistants give; on it, I asked about the embalasassa, a speckled lizard said to be poisonous and to have been sent by Prime minsister Milton Obote to kill Baganda in the late 1960s. It is not poisonous and was no more common in the 1960s than it had been in previous decades, as Makerere University science professors announced on the radio and stated in print… I wrote the question, What is the difference between basimamoto and embalasassa? Anyone who knows anything about the Bantu language—myself included—would know the answer was contained in the question: humans and reptiles are different living things and belong to different noun classes… A few of my informants corrected my ignorance… but many, many more ignored the translation in my question and moved beyond it to address the history of the constructs of firemen and poisonous lizards without the slightest hesitation. They disregarded language to engage in a discussion of events… My point is not about the truth of the embalasassa story… but rather that the labeling of one thing as ‘true’ and the other as ‘fictive’ or ‘metaphorical’—all the usual polite academic terms for false—may eclipse all the intricate ways in which people use social truths to talk about the past. Moreover, chronological contradictions may foreground the fuzziness of certain ideas and policies, and that fuzziness may be more accurate than any exact historical reconstruction… Whether the story of the poisionous embalasassa was real was hardly the issue; there was a real, harmless lizard and there was a real time when people in and around Kampala feared the embalasassa. They feared it in part because of beliefs about lizards, but mainly what frightened people was their fear of their government and the lengths to which it would go to harm them. The confusions and the misunderstandings show what is important; knowledge about the actual lizard would not.
Luise White (Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Studies on the History of Society and Culture) (Volume 37))
The Israeli border police guarding the central region near the Jordanian border had been told to take all measures necessary to keep order that evening. The local colonel, Issachar Shadmi, decided that this meant setting a curfew for Palestinian Arab villages, from five p.m. to six a.m. The news of the curfew was broadcast over the radio the same day it went into force. The border police unit commanders in the region were informed of the order by their commanding officer, Major Shmuel Malinki. Malinki implied that, in the event of anyone breaking the curfew, the police could shoot to kill. Several platoons were charged with informing villagers in person. At the village of Kfar Kassem (or Kafr Qasim), close to the border with the Jordanian-controlled West Bank, a platoon arrived to announce the news—but too late in the day. They were told that many of the village’s agricultural workers were already out at work, mostly picking olives. After five p.m., the villagers returned as expected: a mixed crowd of men and women, boys and girls, riding on bicycles, wagons, and trucks. Even though he knew these civilians would not have heard about the curfew through no fault of their own, the unit commander Lieutenant Gabriel Dahan determined that they were in violation of it and therefore should be shot. Out of all the unit commanders given this order, Dahan was the only one to enforce it.16 As each small group of villagers arrived, the border police opened fire. Forty-three civilians were killed and thirteen injured. The dead were mostly children aged between eight and seventeen: twenty-three of them, plus fourteen men and six women. It was said that one nine-year-old girl was shot twenty-eight times. Another little girl watched as her eleven-year-old cousin was shot. He was dragged indoors and died in his grandfather’s arms, blood pouring from the bullet wound in his chest. Laborers were ordered off their trucks in small groups, lined up, and executed. There were clashes between Arabs and border police that evening in which six more Arabs were killed. The order to kill had not come from the top. It was traced back conclusively only as far as Major Malinki. When Ben-Gurion heard about the massacre, he was furious, telling his cabinet that the officers who had shot civilians should be hanged in Kfar Kassem’s town square.17 Yet the Israeli government covered the incident up with a press blackout lasting two months.
Alex von Tunzelmann (Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary, and Eisenhower's Campaign for Peace)
Washington University found that adding a single extra gene dramatically boosted a mouse’s memory and ability. These “smart mice” could navigate mazes faster, remember events better, and outperform other mice in a wide variety of tests. They were dubbed “Doogie mice,” after the precocious character on the TV show Doogie Howser, M.D. Dr. Tsien began by analyzing the gene NR2B, which acts like a switch controlling the brain’s ability to associate one event with another. (Scientists know this because when the gene is silenced or rendered inactive, mice lose this ability.) All learning depends on NR2B, because it controls the communication between memory cells of the hippocampus. First Dr. Tsien created a strain of mice that lacked NR2B, and they showed impaired memory and learning disabilities. Then he created a strain of mice that had more copies of NR2B than normal, and found that the new mice had superior mental capabilities. Placed in a shallow pan of water and forced to swim, normal mice would swim randomly about. They had forgotten from just a few days before that there was a hidden underwater platform. The smart mice, however, went straight to the hidden platform on the first try. Since then, researchers have been able to confirm these results in other labs and create even smarter strains of mice. In 2009, Dr. Tsien published a paper announcing yet another strain of smart mice, dubbed “Hobbie-J” (named after a character in Chinese cartoons). Hobbie-J was able to remember novel facts (such as the location of toys) three times longer than the genetically modified strain of mouse previously thought to be the smartest. “This adds to the notion that NR2B is a universal switch for memory formation,” remarked Dr. Tsien. “It’s like taking Michael Jordon and making him a super Michael Jordan,” said graduate student Deheng Wang. There are limits, however, even to this new mice strain. When these mice were given a choice to take a left or right turn to get a chocolate reward, Hobbie-J was able to remember the correct path for much longer than the normal mice, but after five minutes he, too, forgot. “We can never turn it into a mathematician. They are rats, after all,” says Dr. Tsien. It should also be pointed out that some of the strains of smart mice were exceptionally timid compared to normal mice. Some suspect that, if your memory becomes too great, you also remember all the failures and hurts as well, perhaps making you hesitant. So there is also a potential downside to remembering too much.
Michio Kaku (The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind)
But there were problems. After the movie came out I couldn’t go to a tournament without being surrounded by fans asking for autographs. Instead of focusing on chess positions, I was pulled into the image of myself as a celebrity. Since childhood I had treasured the sublime study of chess, the swim through ever-deepening layers of complexity. I could spend hours at a chessboard and stand up from the experience on fire with insight about chess, basketball, the ocean, psychology, love, art. The game was exhilarating and also spiritually calming. It centered me. Chess was my friend. Then, suddenly, the game became alien and disquieting. I recall one tournament in Las Vegas: I was a young International Master in a field of a thousand competitors including twenty-six strong Grandmasters from around the world. As an up-and-coming player, I had huge respect for the great sages around me. I had studied their masterpieces for hundreds of hours and was awed by the artistry of these men. Before first-round play began I was seated at my board, deep in thought about my opening preparation, when the public address system announced that the subject of Searching for Bobby Fischer was at the event. A tournament director placed a poster of the movie next to my table, and immediately a sea of fans surged around the ropes separating the top boards from the audience. As the games progressed, when I rose to clear my mind young girls gave me their phone numbers and asked me to autograph their stomachs or legs. This might sound like a dream for a seventeen-year-old boy, and I won’t deny enjoying the attention, but professionally it was a nightmare. My game began to unravel. I caught myself thinking about how I looked thinking instead of losing myself in thought. The Grandmasters, my elders, were ignored and scowled at me. Some of them treated me like a pariah. I had won eight national championships and had more fans, public support and recognition than I could dream of, but none of this was helping my search for excellence, let alone for happiness. At a young age I came to know that there is something profoundly hollow about the nature of fame. I had spent my life devoted to artistic growth and was used to the sweaty-palmed sense of contentment one gets after many hours of intense reflection. This peaceful feeling had nothing to do with external adulation, and I yearned for a return to that innocent, fertile time. I missed just being a student of the game, but there was no escaping the spotlight. I found myself dreading chess, miserable before leaving for tournaments. I played without inspiration and was invited to appear on television shows. I smiled.
Josh Waitzkin (The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance)
The Syrian civil war was raging at this time. When we faced the press in the prime minister’s residence, Obama was asked point-blank about reports that the Syrian government had possibly used chemical weapons against opponents of Assad’s regime a day earlier. “Is this a red line for you?” a journalist asked. “I have made clear that the use of chemical weapons is a game changer,”1 he said, a reaffirmed threat heard round the world. He had first drawn a red line on this issue a few months earlier in a White House statement. Would he make good on it if it were proven that chemical weapons were actually used in Syria? Time would tell. And it did. Five months later, Assad’s forces carried out a horrific chemical attack that killed 1,500 civilians. Obama called it “the worst chemical weapons attack of the twenty-first century.”2 The entire world was shocked by the footage of little children suffocating to death. All eyes were on Obama. He was scheduled to make a dramatic announcement. Minutes before going on-air, he called me. “Bibi,” he said, “I’ve decided to take action but I need to go to Congress first.” I was astonished. American law did not require such an appeal. Syria was not about to go to war with the United States but Congress was unlikely to approve military action anyway. I hid my disappointment and rebounded with an idea that Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz had raised earlier with Ron Dermer and me in the event that Obama wouldn’t attack. The Russian military was in Syria to shore up the Assad regime and protect Russian assets in Syria, such as the strategic Russian naval base in Latakia. That was a fact we could do little to change. But Putin shared with us and the United States a desire to prevent chemical weapons from falling into the hands of Islamic terrorists who posed a threat to Russia, too. “Why don’t you get the Russians with your approval to take out the chemical stockpiles from Syria?” I suggested to the president. “We would back that decision.” This is in fact what transpired in the coming months, though some materials for chemical weapons were still left in Syria. Yet, despite these positive results, the lingering effect of Obama’s last-minute turn to Congress was the impression that red lines can be crossed with impunity and that Obama would not employ America’s massive airpower even when the situation warranted it. I should have expected this. The second important and telling exchange between Obama and me during his visit to Israel happened in private, and gave me a heads-up on how he viewed the use of American power. The day after the intimate dinner at the prime minister’s residence we met at a King David Hotel suite overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem.
Benjamin Netanyahu (Bibi: My Story)
While David runs the financial end of the Rockefeller dynasty, Nelson runs the political. Nelson would like to be President of the United States. But, unfortunately for him, he is unacceptable to the vast majority of the grass roots of his own party. The next best thing to being President is controlling a President. Nelson Rockefeller and Richard Nixon are supposed to be bitter political competitors. In a sense they are, but that still does not preclude Rockefeller from asserting dominion over Mr. Nixon. When Mr. Nixon and Mr. Rockefeller competed for the Republican nomination in 1968, Rockefeller naturally would have preferred to win the prize, but regardless of who won, he would control the highest office in the land. You will recall that right in the middle of drawing up the Republican platform in 1960, Mr. Nixon suddenly left Chicago and flew to New York to meet with Nelson Rockefeller in what Barry Goldwater described as the "Munich of the Republican Party." There was no political reason why Mr. Nixon needed to crawl to Mr. Rockefeller. He had the convention all sewed up. The Chicago Tribune cracked that it was like Grant surrendering to Lee. In The Making of the President, 1960, Theodore White noted that Nixon accepted all the Rockefeller terms for this meeting, including provisions "that Nixon telephone Rockefeller personally with his request for a meeting; that they meet at the Rockefeller apartment…that their meeting be secret and later be announced in a press release from the Governor, not Nixon; that the meeting be clearly announced as taking place at the Vice President's request; that the statement of policy issuing from it be long, detailed, inclusive, not a summary communiqué." The meeting produced the infamous "Compact of Fifth Avenue" in which the Republican Platform was scrapped and replaced by Rockefeller's socialist plans. The Wall Street Journal of July 25, 1960, commented: "…a little band of conservatives within the party…are shoved to the sidelines… [T]he fourteen points are very liberal indeed; they comprise a platform akin in many ways to the Democratic platform and they are a far cry from the things that conservative men think the Republican Party ought to stand for…" As Theodore White put it: "Never had the quadrennial liberal swoop of the regulars been more nakedly dramatized than by the open compact of Fifth Avenue. Whatever honor they might have been able to carry from their services on the platform committee had been wiped out. A single night's meeting of the two men in a millionaire's triplex apartment in Babylon-by-the-Hudson, eight hundred and thirty miles away, was about to overrule them; they were exposed as clowns for all the world to see." The whole story behind what happened in Rockefeller's apartment will doubtless never be known. We can only make an educated guess in light of subsequent events. But it is obvious that since that time Mr. Nixon has been in the Rockefeller orbit.
Gary Allen (None Dare Call It Conspiracy)
Meanwhile, scientists are studying certain drugs that may erase traumatic memories that continue to haunt and disturb us. In 2009, Dutch scientists, led by Dr. Merel Kindt, announced that they had found new uses for an old drug called propranolol, which could act like a “miracle” drug to ease the pain associated with traumatic memories. The drug did not induce amnesia that begins at a specific point in time, but it did make the pain more manageable—and in just three days, the study claimed. The discovery caused a flurry of headlines, in light of the thousands of victims who suffer from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). Everyone from war veterans to victims of sexual abuse and horrific accidents could apparently find relief from their symptoms. But it also seemed to fly in the face of brain research, which shows that long-term memories are encoded not electrically, but at the level of protein molecules. Recent experiments, however, suggest that recalling memories requires both the retrieval and then the reassembly of the memory, so that the protein structure might actually be rearranged in the process. In other words, recalling a memory actually changes it. This may be the reason why the drug works: propranolol is known to interfere with adrenaline absorption, a key in creating the long-lasting, vivid memories that often result from traumatic events. “Propranolol sits on that nerve cell and blocks it. So adrenaline can be present, but it can’t do its job,” says Dr. James McGaugh of the University of California at Irvine. In other words, without adrenaline, the memory fades. Controlled tests done on individuals with traumatic memories showed very promising results. But the drug hit a brick wall when it came to the ethics of erasing memory. Some ethicists did not dispute its effectiveness, but they frowned on the very idea of a forgetfulness drug, since memories are there for a purpose: to teach us the lessons of life. Even unpleasant memories, they said, serve some larger purpose. The drug got a thumbs-down from the President’s Council on Bioethics. Its report concluded that “dulling our memory of terrible things [would] make us too comfortable with the world, unmoved by suffering, wrongdoing, or cruelty.… Can we become numb to life’s sharpest sorrows without also becoming numb to its greatest joys?” Dr. David Magus of Stanford University’s Center for Biomedical Ethics says, “Our breakups, our relationships, as painful as they are, we learn from some of those painful experiences. They make us better people.” Others disagree. Dr. Roger Pitman of Harvard University says that if a doctor encounters an accident victim who is in intense pain, “should we deprive them of morphine because we might be taking away the full emotional experience? Who would ever argue with that? Why should psychiatry be different? I think that somehow behind this argument lurks the notion that mental disorders are not the same as physical disorders.
Michio Kaku (The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind)
But it’s equally significant to note that while cycles occur in a variety of areas due to these serial events, cyclical developments in one area also influence cycles in others. Thus the economic cycle influences the profit cycle. Corporate announcements determined by the profit cycle influence investor attitudes. Investor attitudes influence markets. And developments in markets influence the cycle in the availability of credit . . . which influences economies, companies and markets.
Howard Marks (Mastering The Market Cycle: Getting the Odds on Your Side)
Six Steps to Getting Started Right Now As we saw from the stories in Chapter 1, you don’t need a lot of money or special training to operate a business. You just need a product or service, a group of people who want to buy it, and a way to get paid. We’ll look at each of these things in more detail throughout the book, but you don’t have to wait to get started. Here are the six steps you need to take: 1. Decide on your product or service. 2. Set up a website, even a very basic one (you can get a free one from WordPress.org). 3. Develop an offer (an offer is distinct from a product or service; see Chapter 7 for help). 4. Ensure you have a way to get paid (get a free PayPal account to start). 5. Announce your offer to the world (see Chapter 9 for more on this). 6. Learn from steps 1 through 5, then repeat. Almost all microbusiness building follows this sequence of events. Of course, we’ll be discussing specifics as we go along, but it’s always better to start from where you are than to wait for everything to be perfect. If you have an existing business and are thinking about how to apply the concepts from this book, focus on either getting money in the bank or developing new products or services. These are the most important tasks of your business-not administration, maintenance, or anything else that takes time without creating wealth or value. If you’re not sure what to do, think about any of these ideas: Can you contact your customer list with a special offer or incentive? Can you introduce a new product or service to complement your existing portfolio? If you’re a coach or consultant, can you offer a special deal for clients who prepay? Is there a new way you can attract subscribers, clients, or customers? But one way or another . . . just do something.
Chris Guillebeau (The $100 Startup: Fire Your Boss, Do What You Love and Work Better To Live More)
The most cited experiment in this field was conducted a quarter-century ago. Researcher Benjamin Libet asked subjects to choose a random moment to perform a hand motion while hooked up to an electroencephalograph (EEG) monitor in which the so-called “readiness potential” of the brain was being monitored. Naturally, electrical signals always precede actual physical actions, but Libet wanted to know whether they also preceded a subject’s subjective feeling of intention to act. In short, is there some subjective “self ” who consciously decides things, thereby setting in motion the brain’s electrical activities that ultimately lead to the action? Or is it the other way ’round? Subjects were therefore asked to note the position of a clock’s second hand when they first felt the initial intention to move their hand. Libet’s findings were consistent, and perhaps not surprising: unconscious, unfelt, brain electrical activity occurred a full half second before there was any conscious sense of decision-making by the subject. More recent experiments by Libet, announced in 2008, analyzing separate, higher-order brain functions, have allowed his research team to predict up to ten seconds in advance which hand a subject is about to decide to raise. Ten seconds is nearly an eternity when it comes to cognitive decisions, and yet a person’s eventual decision could be seen on brain scans that long before the subject was even remotely aware of having made any decision. This and other experiments prove that the brain makes its own decisions on a subconscious level, and people only later feel that “they” have performed a conscious decision. It means that we go through life thinking that, unlike the blessedly autonomous operations of the heart and kidneys, a lever-pulling “me” is in charge of the brain’s workings. Libet concluded that the sense of personal free will arises solely from a habitual retrospective perspective of the ongoing flow of brain events.
Robert Lanza (Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe)
The phrase American Dream has a ring of truth to it as a statement of American values. The United States is a proud country that has no aristocracy, allows no titles or royalty, announces in its Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal,” and allows free enterprise to proceed with little government interference. However, it is also a country that permitted slavery until 1863.
Robert J. Shiller (Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events)
Throughout the sixteenth century the wedding ceremony changed in detail.17 In the Reformed Church the marriage was performed inside the church, whatever the social degree of the couple. During the early Tudor era most marriages took place at the church door. Only high status weddings were held inside. Whilst a knight married within the door, an earl’s child might marry at the choir door. The dowry was announced in public at the church door and the couple were asked if they were willing to be married. Later, the groom laid the ring with an offering of money on a book or in a dish. The priest blessed it, sprinkled it with holy water and placed it on the bride’s finger. Gifts were given to wedding guests. They often were gloves and ribbons. Wedding presents such as plate or jewellery were presented to the couple, usually cast into a basin on a table within the church.18 For poorer weddings bride ales (festivals) became commonplace. These were held prior to the wedding to raise money for the cost of the wedding through the sale of food and drink. A wedding had to be consummated for the marriage to be legal and this was the reason for a ceremonial bedding ceremony after the wedding feast. For ordinary people the event could become extremely boisterous. The wedding party played games as the couple were put to bed. Brides-men traditionally would pull off the bride’s garters and
Carol McGrath (Sex and Sexuality in Tudor England)
These are, of course, sensitive issues, Miss Quinlan. Ones that, were they publicly announced, would result in a great deal of trouble for all involved.” For you. We will destroy you. “All the witnesses to both events have been notified of the potential fallout.” “Okay,” Bryce whispered. “And as for the unfortunate destruction of Lunathion, we do accept full responsibility. We were informed by Sandriel that the city had been evacuated, and sent the Asterian Guard to wipe away the demon infestation. The brimstone missiles were a last resort, intended to save us all. It was incredibly fortunate that you found a solution.” Liar. Ancient, awful liar. He’d picked the perfect scapegoat: a dead one. The rage that flickered over Hunt’s face told her he shared her opinion. “I was truly lucky,” Bryce managed to say. “Yes, perhaps because of the power in your veins. Such a gift can have tremendous consequences, if not handled wisely.” A pause, as if he were smiling. “I trust you shall learn to wield both your unexpected strength and the light within you with … discretion.” Stay in your lane.
Sarah J. Maas (House of Earth and Blood (Crescent City, #1))
And now the reader will ask what became of the three penguins' eggs for which three human lives had been risked three hundred times a day, and three human frames strained to the utmost extremity of human endurance. Let us leave the Antarctic for a moment and conceive ourselves in the year 1913 in the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. I had written to say that I would bring the eggs at this time. Present, myself, C.-G., the sole survivor of the three, with First or Doorstep Custodian of the Sacred Eggs. I did not take a verbatim report of his welcome; but the spirit of it may be dramatized as follows: First Custodian. Who are you? What do you want? This ain't an egg-shop. What call have you to come meddling with our eggs? Do you want me to put the police on to you? Is it the crocodile's egg you're after? I don't know nothing about 'no eggs. You'd best speak to Mr. Brown: it's him that varnishes the eggs. I resort to Mr. Brown, who ushers me into the presence of the Chief Custodian, a man of scientific aspect, with two manners: one, affably courteous, for a Person of Importance (I guess a Naturalist Rothschild at least) with whom he is conversing, and the other, extraordinarily offensive even for an official man of science, for myself. I announce myself with becoming modesty as the bearer of the penguins' eggs, and proffer them. The Chief Custodian takes them into custody without a word of thanks, and turns to the Person of Importance to discuss them. I wait. The temperature of my blood rises. The conversation proceeds for what seems to me a considerable period. Suddenly the Chief Custodian notices my presence and seems to resent it. Chief Custodian. You needn't wait. Heroic Explorer. I should like to have a receipt for the eggs, if you please. Chief Custodian. It is not necessary: it is all right. You needn't wait. Heroic Explorer. I should like to have a receipt. But by this time the Chief Custodian's attention is again devoted wholly to the Person of Importance. Feeling that to persist in overhearing their conversation would be an indelicacy, the Heroic Explorer politely leaves the room, and establishes himself on a chair in a gloomy passage outside, where he wiles away the time by rehearsing in his imagination how he will tell off the Chief Custodian when the Person of Importance retires. But this the Person of Importance shows no sign of doing, and the Explorer's thoughts and intentions become darker and darker. As the day wears on, minor officials, passing to and from the Presence, look at him doubtfully and ask his business. The reply is always the same, "I am waiting for a receipt for some penguins' eggs." At last it becomes clear from the Explorer's expression that what he is really waiting for is not to take a receipt but to commit murder. Presumably this is reported to the destined victim: at all events the receipt finally comes; and the Explorer goes his way with it, feeling that he has behaved like a perfect gentleman, but so very dissatisfied with that vapid consolation that for hours he continues his imaginary rehearsals of what he would have liked to have done to that Custodian (mostly with his boots) by way of teaching him manners.
Apsley Cherry-Garrard (The Worst Journey in the World)
There are people who make a hobby of "alternative history," imagining how history would be different if small, chance events had gone another way One of my favorite examples is a story I first heard from the physicist Murray Gell-Mann. In the late 1800s, "Buffalo Bill" Cody created a show called Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, which toured the United States, putting on exhibitions of gun fighting, horsemanship, and other cowboy skills. One of the show's most popular acts was a woman named Phoebe Moses, nicknamed Annie Oakley. Annie was reputed to have been able to shoot the head off of a running quail by age twelve, and in Buffalo Bill's show, she put on a demonstration of marksmanship that included shooting flames off candles, and corks out of bottles. For her grand finale, Annie would announce that she would shoot the end off a lit cigarette held in a man's mouth, and ask for a brave volunteer from the audience. Since no one was ever courageous enough to come forward, Annie hid her husband, Frank, in the audience. He would "volunteer," and they would complete the trick together. In 1890, when the Wild West Show was touring Europe, a young crown prince (and later, kaiser), Wilhelm, was in the audience. When the grand finale came, much to Annie's surprise, the macho crown prince stood up and volunteered. The future German kaiser strode into the ring, placed the cigarette in his mouth, and stood ready. Annie, who had been up late the night before in the local beer garden, was unnerved by this unexpected development. She lined the cigarette up in her sights, squeezed...and hit it right on target. Many people have speculated that if at that moment, there had been a slight tremor in Annie's hand, then World War I might never have happened. If World War I had not happened, 8.5 million soldiers and 13 million civilian lives would have been saved. Furthermore, if Annie's hand had trembled and World War I had not happened, Hitler would not have risen from the ashes of a defeated Germany, and Lenin would not have overthrown a demoralized Russian government. The entire course of twentieth-century history might have been changed by the merest quiver of a hand at a critical moment. Yet, at the time, there was no way anyone could have known the momentous nature of the event.
Eric D. Beinhocker (The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics)
We learn about prophesying by watching Peter do it. His interpretation of the day’s events in light of Joel’s words offers an example of prophecy. More follows later in the chapter when he will explain to the crowd that the Holy Spirit comes from Jesus, the same One who was crucified, resurrected, and exalted. The coming of the Spirit announces Jesus’s ongoing presence within his followers, in their speech and activity. Peter’s brand of prophecy is truth telling. It is interpretation: naming the ways and places where God’s salvation is realized, where God’s presence and influence can be encountered. It is insisting that humanity’s existence and the life of God do not exist in separate planes; rather, they are intertwined, each a part of the other.
Matthew L. Skinner (Intrusive God, Disruptive Gospel: Encountering the Divine in the Book of Acts)
home had no idea of the outcome in the battle’s immediate aftermath. They had to wait anxiously to get some word of what had happened. But today, in most cases, we don’t have to wait very long for updates on significant events. We live in a world where news travels very rapidly, with sophisticated technology to announce what is going on around the globe in a matter of moments. In the ancient world, though, it was not like that. A battle of strategic importance for
R.C. Sproul (What Is the Great Commission? (Crucial Questions))
As you all have seen,” Zeryth said, “Sesri declared the Arch Commandant — me — to be the rightful heir to the Crown in the event of her death. But as one might expect, many of Sesri’s cousins are not especially eager to accept the truth of the matter. Particularly Atrick Aviness. I came north shortly after the announcement to solidify my position with the Ryvenai nobles and gather loyal troops.” His gaze flicked to me. “We all know that Korvius, of course, is the military center of the north. Your Aunt Lysara was all too willing to host the new king, especially once she learned that you’re an ally.
Carissa Broadbent (Children of Fallen Gods (The War of Lost Hearts, #2))
Dr. Ferris leaned toward Dr. Stadler—through the staccato hoof-beats of the announcer’s voice galloping across the continent with a description of the new invention—and said in the tone of a casual remark, “It is vitally important that there be no criticism of the Project in the country at this precarious time,” then added semi-accidentally, as a semi-joke, “that there be no criticism of anything at any time.” “—and the nation’s political, cultural, intellectual and moral leaders,” the announcer was yelling into the microphone, “who have witnessed this great event, as your representatives and in your name, will now tell you their views of it in person!
Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)
Without naming names, he, Lefebvre, is aware of a certain contemporary vedette who committed to appearing at a certain testimonial game. The event was publicized accordingly. At the last minute, the vedette announced his withdrawal, citing a trivial reason. When it was indicated to him that he had promised to attend, what was the vedette’s response? He said, I am not a slave to my words.
Joseph O'Neill (Godwin: A Novel)
The magazines demonstrate how the convergence of sexual minorities in urban centers is affective in nature: advertisements and articles gesture to the joy of meeting friends at a community event, the laughter precipitated by nightlife entertainment, the wet heat of sticky bodies on a dance floor. The magazines announce guest DJs and television screening parties alongside discounted drinks, free food, dancing, giveaways, and similar entertainments. As a result, they underscore how the publics comprised of sexual minorities that form in urban centers are enabled and shaped by the circulation of bodies in public space.
F. Hollis Griffin (Feeling Normal: Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age)
The electronics effort faced even greater challenges. To launch that category, David Risher tapped a Dartmouth alum named Chris Payne who had previously worked on Amazon’s DVD store. Like Miller, Payne had to plead with suppliers—in this case, Asian consumer-electronics companies like Sony, Toshiba, and Samsung. He quickly hit a wall. The Japanese electronics giants viewed Internet sellers like Amazon as sketchy discounters. They also had big-box stores like Best Buy and Circuit City whispering in their ears and asking them to take a pass on Amazon. There were middlemen distributors, like Ingram Electronics, but they offered a limited selection. Bezos deployed Doerr to talk to Howard Stringer at Sony America, but he got nowhere. So Payne had to turn to the secondary distributors—jobbers that exist in an unsanctioned, though not illegal, gray market. Randy Miller, a retail finance director who came to Amazon from Eddie Bauer, equates it to buying from the trunk of someone’s car in a dark alley. “It was not a sustainable inventory model, but if you are desperate to have particular products on your site or in your store, you do what you need to do,” he says. Buying through these murky middlemen got Payne and his fledgling electronics team part of the way toward stocking Amazon’s virtual shelves. But Bezos was unimpressed with the selection and grumpily compared it to shopping in a Russian supermarket during the years of Communist rule. It would take Amazon years to generate enough sales to sway the big Asian brands. For now, the electronics store was sparely furnished. Bezos had asked to see $100 million in electronics sales for the 1999 holiday season; Payne and his crew got about two-thirds of the way there. Amazon officially announced the new toy and electronics stores that summer, and in September, the company held a press event at the Sheraton in midtown Manhattan to promote the new categories. Someone had the idea that the tables in the conference room at the Sheraton should have piles of merchandise representing all the new categories, to reinforce the idea of broad selection. Bezos loved it, but when he walked into the room the night before the event, he threw a tantrum: he didn’t think the piles were large enough. “Do you want to hand this business to our competitors?” he barked into his cell phone at his underlings. “This is pathetic!” Harrison Miller, Chris Payne, and their colleagues fanned out that night across Manhattan to various stores, splurging on random products and stuffing them in the trunks of taxicabs. Miller spent a thousand dollars alone at a Toys “R” Us in Herald Square. Payne maxed out his personal credit card and had to call his wife in Seattle to tell her not to use the card for a few days. The piles of products were eventually large enough to satisfy Bezos, but the episode was an early warning. To satisfy customers and their own demanding boss during the upcoming holiday, Amazon executives were going to have to substitute artifice and improvisation for truly comprehensive selection.
Brad Stone (The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon)
As a result, anecdotes abound in the tech world about scientists, entrepreneurs, and inventors who study and train here but move to Silicon Valley or Austin or North Carolina, lured by climate and lifestyle and a more freewheeling atmosphere. Technology companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have branch offices in Cambridge, but are headquartered on the West Coast. To compete on a global scale, Bostonians need to claim their place in the global conversation. Friday marks a step in that direction. At a press conference at the Ragon Institute, The Boston Globe will join Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and MGH in announcing HUBweek, a week-long festival of discussions and creative problem-solving scheduled for Oct. 3 to 10 of next year. It’s a collaborative effort to bring big ideas out from behind institutional walls. To draw participants from all over the nation, and the world, all four co-hosts are creating programming that will focus on game-changing science, technology, engineering, and art. The week will feature some central events, kicking off with a master class at Fenway Park.
Anonymous
THE NEXT day, the President and I announced a new small business lending initiative in the East Room. After I laid out the details in my usual colorless fashion, the President said he wanted to take a moment to discuss his outrage about the AIG bonuses. “I’ve asked Secretary Geithner to use [our] leverage and pursue every single legal avenue to block these bonuses and make the American taxpayers whole,” he said. “I want everybody to be clear that Secretary Geithner has been on the case.” I read a draft of those remarks the morning of the event, and I wasn’t pleased. We didn’t think we could claw back the bonuses that had already been obligated, and even if we could modestly reduce future payouts, raising public expectations seemed unwise. I thought the President should stay as far away from the issue as possible. I didn’t see the need to remind everyone that I was “on the case,” either. But the country
Timothy F. Geithner (Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises)
On Friday, 3 December1993, at a charity luncheon in aid of the Headway National Head Injuries Association, the Princess announced her withdrawal from public life. In a sometimes quavering, yet defiant, voice she appealed for ‘time and space’ after more than a decade in the spotlight. During her five-minute speech she made a particular point of the unrelenting media exposure: ‘When I started my public life 12 years ago, I understood that the media might be interested in what I did. I realized then that their attention would inevitably focus on both our private and public lives. But I was not aware of how overwhelming that attention would become; nor the extent to which it would affect both my public duties and my personal life, in a manner that has been hard to bear.’ As she later said: ‘The pressure was intolerable then, and my job, my work was being affected. I wanted to give 110 per cent to my work, and I could only give 50…I owed it to the public to say “Thank you, I’m disappearing for a bit, but I’ll come back.”’ Indicating that she would continue to support a small number of charities while she set about rebuilding her private life, the Princess emphasized: ‘My first priority will continue to be our children, William and Harry, who deserve as much love, care and attention as I am able to give, as well as an appreciation of the tradition into which they were born.’ While she singled out the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh for their ‘kindness and support’, Diana never once mentioned her estranged husband. In private, she was unequivocal about where the blame lay for her departure from the stage. ‘My husband’s side have made my life hell for the last year,’ she told a friend. When she reached the relative sanctuary of Kensington Palace that afternoon, Diana was relieved, saddened but quietly elated. Her retirement would give her a much-needed chance to reflect and refocus. If the separation had brought her the hope of a new life, her withdrawal from royal duties would give her the opportunity to translate that hope into a vibrant new career, one that would employ to the full her undoubted gifts of compassion and caring on a wider, international stage. A few months later, at a reception at the Serpentine Gallery, of which she was patron, the Princess was in fine form. She was relaxed, witty and happy among friends. The events of 1993 seemed a dim and dismal memory. As she chatted to the movie star Jeremy Irons he told her: ‘I’ve taken a year off acting.’ Diana smiled and replied: ‘So have I.
Andrew Morton (Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words)
During NASA’s first fifty years the agency’s accomplishments were admired globally. Democratic and Republican leaders were generally bipartisan on the future of American spaceflight. The blueprint for the twenty-first century called for sustaining the International Space Station and its fifteen-nation partnership until at least 2020, and for building the space shuttle’s heavy-lift rocket and deep spacecraft successor to enable astronauts to fly beyond the friendly confines of low earth orbit for the first time since Apollo. That deep space ship would fly them again around the moon, then farther out to our solar system’s LaGrange points, and then deeper into space for rendezvous with asteroids and comets, learning how to deal with radiation and other deep space hazards before reaching for Mars or landings on Saturn’s moons. It was the clearest, most reasonable and best cost-achievable goal that NASA had been given since President John F. Kennedy’s historic decision to land astronauts on the lunar surface. Then Barack Obama was elected president. The promising new chief executive gave NASA short shrift, turning the agency’s future over to middle-level bureaucrats with no dreams or vision, bent on slashing existing human spaceflight plans that had their genesis in the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush White Houses. From the starting gate, Mr. Obama’s uncaring space team rolled the dice. First they set up a presidential commission designed to find without question we couldn’t afford the already-established spaceflight plans. Thirty to sixty thousand highly skilled jobs went on the chopping block with space towns coast to coast facing 12 percent unemployment. $9.4 billion already spent on heavy-lift rockets and deep space ships was unashamedly flushed down America’s toilet. The fifty-year dream of new frontiers was replaced with the shortsighted obligations of party politics. As 2011 dawned, NASA, one of America’s great science agencies, was effectively defunct. While Congress has so far prohibited the total cancellation of the space agency’s plans to once again fly astronauts beyond low earth orbit, Obama space operatives have systematically used bureaucratic tricks to slow roll them to a crawl. Congress holds the purse strings and spent most of 2010 saying, “Wait just a minute.” Thousands of highly skilled jobs across the economic spectrum have been lost while hundreds of billions in “stimulus” have been spent. As of this writing only Congress can stop the NASA killing. Florida’s senior U.S. Senator Bill Nelson, a Democrat, a former spaceflyer himself, is leading the fight to keep Obama space advisors from walking away from fifty years of national investment, from throwing the final spade of dirt on the memory of some of America’s most admired heroes. Congressional committees have heard from expert after expert that Mr. Obama’s proposal would be devastating. Placing America’s future in space in the hands of the Russians and inexperienced commercial operatives is foolhardy. Space legend John Glenn, a retired Democratic Senator from Ohio, told president Obama that “Retiring the space shuttles before the country has another space ship is folly. It could leave Americans stranded on the International Space Station with only a Russian spacecraft, if working, to get them off.” And Neil Armstrong testified before the Senate’s Commerce, Science & Transportation Committee that “With regard to President Obama’s 2010 plan, I have yet to find a person in NASA, the Defense Department, the Air Force, the National Academies, industry, or academia that had any knowledge of the plan prior to its announcement. Rumors abound that neither the NASA Administrator nor the President’s Science and Technology Advisor were knowledgeable about the plan. Lack of review normally guarantees that there will be overlooked requirements and unwelcome consequences. How could such a chain of events happen?
Alan Shepard (Moon Shot: The Inside Story of America's Race to the Moon)
Watching either, one knew that the world would never again be the same; the risks everywhere, to which life was heir, had been changed on the morning of a new unclouded day. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki announced that the United States was henceforth the supreme armed power in the world. The attack of 11 September announced that this power was no longer guaranteed invulnerability on its home ground. The two events mark the beginning and end of a certain historical period. Concerning
John Berger (Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance (The Essential John Berger))
After a few more minutes, Josh guzzled back the rest of his beer. “Gotta head out. Elizabeth is making me go to a cake-tasting party tonight. Since when did everything about weddings turn into a damn event? I’ve had to go to a food tasting, a band showcase, and a floral-presentation party. Vegas is sounding better and better.” “Just wait.” Chase stood. “Anna had a bridal shower, a pregnancy-announcement party, and a gender-reveal party. You’re just getting started, buddy.” “What the hell is a gender-reveal party?” The parents-to-be give a sealed envelope that contains the sex of the baby to a bakery, and the baker puts pink frosting inside the cupcakes if it’s a girl and blue if it’s a boy. Then they have a party, and everyone finds out at the same time, including the parents-to-be. Pure. Fucking. Torture. Whatever happened to the kid popping out and the doctor giving it a smack and yelling it’s a boy over the thing crying?
Vi Keeland (Bossman)
On Thursday, February 19, 2015, two months after the United States and Cuba announced a willingness to re-establish normal diplomacy, after over 5 decades of hostile relations, the United States House Minority leader and eight fellow Democratic Party lawmakers went to Havana to meet with the Cuban Vice President Miguel Díaz-Canel. On February 27th, Cuban Foreign Ministry Director for North America, Josefina Vidal, and her delegation met at the State Department in Washington, D.C. Although most Cubans and many Americans have a positive view towards improving diplomatic relations, there are conservative legislators in both the U.S. House and Senate that have not joined in the promotion and necessary détente and good will in easing the normalization of relations between the two countries. On May 29, 2015, by Executive Order, President Obama took a first step by removing Cuba from the list of “State Sponsors of Terrorism.” Since then President Trump has been determined to overturn most of what has been passed by the former administration. On June 16, 2017 President Trump moved to reverse many of President Obama’s policies towards Cuba. According to the CATO Institute the alleged justification for this reversal is that it will pressure the Cuban government to make concessions on human rights and political policies towards the Island Nation. Apparently Trump’s new restrictions will impose limits on travel and how U.S. Companies will be able to do business in Cuba. Although the final say regarding the normalization between the two countries is in the hands of politicians representing their various constituencies. The United States has long worked and traded with other Communist nations. Recently additional pressure has been applied by corporations that, quite frankly, are fed up with the slowness of the process. The idea that everything hinges on the fact Cuba is a Communist country, run by a dictatorship, does not take into account the plight of the individual Cuban citizens. The United States may wish for a different government; however it is up to Cuba to decide what form of government they will eventually have.
Hank Bracker
On Saturday evening, August 5, 2017, FAPA announced and presented awards to the 2017 medalists at the FAPA President’s Book Awards Banquet that was held in the Hilton Hotel at Disney World in Orlando, Florida. Captain Hank Backer’s book “Suppressed I Rise” is the true story of Adeline Perry and her daughters’ saga in Nazi Germany. Evading evil forces that almost proved to be overwhelming, it begins when she left South Africa, her native country, and accompanied her German husband to a strange, foreboding and foreign country. Adapted from Adeline Perry’s original notes and manuscripts and her daughters’ reflections, Captain Hank Bracker, originally from Germany, reveals how the young mother survived through bombings and dangerous situations with her two children. “Suppressed I Rise” was recognized with three awards at the FAPA Banquet: a Bronze Medal for “Nonfiction for Young Adults,” a Silver Medal for “Political/Current Events” and the coveted Gold Medal for “Biography.
Hank Bracker
Tenebrae is Latin for ‘darkness’, so it is a service of darkness. Tenebrae services are held on the night of Good Friday, and its purpose is to recreate the emotional aspects of the passion story. Specifically, Tenebrae is a Christian service with no benefits of Christ’s resurrection. There is no sermon, no prayer in Jesus’ name, no offering as there is no Christian work, and no benediction. There are no announcements, and there is no coffee hour. There is no chat before or after the service. It recreates the betrayal, abandonment and agony of the events of Christ’s death, and it is left unfinished, because the service isn’t over until Easter Day, making it technically the longest service of the Christian calendar.
Peter Rollins (How (Not) to Speak of God: Marks of the Emerging Church)
It wasn’t just sports announcers and political pundits who radically revised their narratives, or shifted focus, so that their stories seemed to fit whatever had just happened in a game or an election. Historians imposed false order upon random events, too, probably without even realizing what they were doing. Amos had a phrase for this. “Creeping determinism,” he called it—and jotted in his notes one of its many costs: “He who sees the past as surprise-free is bound to have a future full of surprises.
Michael Lewis (The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds)
It’s complacency,” says an agent who was on Obama’s detail. “They say we can make do with less.” Shutting down magnetometers as an event is about to start is shocking enough. But when Vice President Biden threw the opening pitch at the first Baltimore Orioles game of the season at Camden Yards on April 6, 2009, the Secret Service had not screened with magnetometers any of the more than forty thousand fans. Moreover, even though Biden’s scheduled attendance at the game had been announced beforehand, the vice president was not wearing a bulletproof vest under his navy sport shirt as he stood on the pitcher’s mound. According
Ronald Kessler (The First Family Detail: Secret Service Agents Reveal the Hidden Lives of the Presidents)
a Cell match for the main event at the pay-per-view. Later in the week on Smackdown, on the Miz TV segment between Ambrose and Cena, the match was revealed to be a No Holds Barred Contract On A Pole Match. On the October 13 episode of Raw, Ambrose and Cena had their match that night instead in which Ambrose won and will face Seth Rollins in a Hell in a Cell match at the Hell in a Cell pay-per-view. At Hell in a Cell, Ambrose lost to Rollins after Bray Wyatt attacked Ambrose at the end of the main event match. The next few weeks saw Ambrose and Wyatt taunting and attacking each other in both backstage and in-ring segments, with Wyatt claiming that he could "fix" Ambrose, leading to a match at Survivor Series. Ambrose lost the match by disqualification after hitting Wyatt with a steel chair and then hit Wyatt through a table in which Wyatt would be buried under tables and chairs as Ambrose stood on a ladder. This would then soon after announce another match between the two in a tables, ladders and chairs match on the TLC pay-perview next month. During the match, a television monitor blew up in Ambrose's face, allowing Wyatt to win the match. Ambrose managed to beat Wyatt in a Boot Camp match yet again was defeated by Wyatt in a "Miracle on 34th Street Fight". The feud concluded when Wyatt beat Ambrose in the first Ambulance match held on Raw. At the Royal Rumble, Ambrose participated in the Royal Rumble match, but was eliminated by Kane and Big Show. On the January 19 episode of Raw, Ambrose defeated Intercontinental Champion Bad News Barrett. The following weeks, Ambrose demanded a match for Barrett's title, but Barrett declined, leading to Ambrose attacking him, tying his hands around the ring post, and forcing him to sign a contract
Marlow Martin (Dean Ambrose)
There are three locations in the vicinity of Bethlehem that have been claimed to be the location where these events took place. The old town of Beit Sahour, located a short distance east of Bethlehem, is said to be the location where an angel announced to the shepherds that Jesus had been born.
Charles River Editors (Bethlehem: The History and Legacy of the Birthplace of Jesus)
Kanjorski claims to be repeating an account of events given to him by US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke: On Thursday [18 September], at 11 a.m. the Federal Reserve noticed a tremendous draw-down of money-market accounts in the US; [money] to the tune of $550 billion was being drawn out in the matter of an hour or two. The Treasury opened up its window to help and pumped a $105 billion in the system and quickly realized that they could not stem the tide. We were having an electronic run on the banks. They decided to close the operation, close down the money accounts and announce a guarantee of $250,000 per account so there wouldn’t be further panic out there. If they had not done that, their estimation is that by 2 p.m. that afternoon $5.5 trillion would have been drawn out of the money-market system of the US; [this] would have collapsed the entire economy of the US, and within 24 hours the world economy would have collapsed. It would have been the end of our economic system and our political system as we know it.10
Robert Skidelsky (Keynes: The Return of the Master)
after two years of sitting through philosophy classes he announced that philosophy was a dry well. “I remember his words,” recalled Amnon. “He said, ‘There is nothing we can do in philosophy. Plato solved too many of the problems. We can’t have any impact in this area. There are too many smart guys and too few problems left, and the problems have no solutions.’” The mind-body problem was a good example. How are our various mental events—what you believe, what you think—related to our physical states? What is the relationship between our bodies and our minds?
Michael Lewis (The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds)
and offered them little in any event. There was even talk of pressuring North Korea to demilitarize significantly. The Chinese wished for peace, not conflict, in the region and James Marshall was the president’s man to make it happen. Lifelong friends, they had both excelled in their fields, President Jack King in the military and James Marshall in business. When James had announced his retirement on his fifty-fifth birthday, President King had pounced; Marshall was perfect to obtain the treaties that would secure the Far East. Jack loved and trusted him like a brother. With over four hundred million dollars in the bank, all James Marshall had wanted was to enjoy life but he’d never let Jack down and he’d certainly never
Murray McDonald (America's Trust)
The sequence of events described in the gospel is the work of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is hardly my own discovery. Consider this statement from the Martyrdom of Polycarp 22.1: “We wish you well, brothers and sisters, while you walk according to the doctrine of the gospel of Jesus Christ; with whom be glory to God the Father and the Holy Spirit, for the salvation of His holy elect.” The early church recognized that the saving event announced in the gospel was the combined and unified effort of all three members of the Godhead. The Father chooses, the Son redeems, and the Spirit sanctifies.
Michael F. Bird (Evangelical Theology: A Biblical and Systematic Introduction)
Someone once said that the spiritual significance of something is in inverse proportion to the publicity surrounding it. A publicized event, like a parade, is more spectacular than it is significant. And that is true even if the parade is a religious one. “When you give to the needy,” Jesus said, “do not announce it with trumpets as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.
Ken Gire (Windows of the Soul: Hearing God in the Everyday Moments of Your Life)
What is the gospel? It is not a message about how to get saved. The gospel is the announcement of a new kingdom, a new way of life, and a new way of peace that carried good news to all people of every religion.
Tim LaHaye (Are We Living in the End Times?: Curretn Events Foretold in Scripture... and What They Mean)
On July 5 in the late 1980s, a man walked into a convenience store at 6:30 in the morning. Holding his finger in his pocket to simulate a gun, he demanded that the cashier give him the contents of the cash register. Having collected about five dollars in change, the man returned to his car, where he remained until the police arrived. When the police arrived, the young man got out of his car and, with his finger again in his pocket, announced that he had a gun and that everyone should stay away from him. Luckily for him, he was taken into custody without being shot. At the police station, the officer who looked up the man’s record discovered that he had committed six other so-called “armed robberies” over the past fifteen years, all of them at 6:30 in the morning on July 5! Upon learning that the man was a Vietnam veteran, the police surmised that this event was more than mere coincidence.
Peter A. Levine
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Bobby Buka, MD