Events Farm Quotes

When you grow up in middle America you are inculcated from the earliest age with the belief - no, the understanding - that America is the richest and most powerful nation on earth because God likes us best. It has the most perfect form of government, the most exciting sporting events, the tastiest food and amplest portions, the largest cars, the cheapest gasoline, the most abundant natural resources, the most productive farms, the most devastating nuclear arsenal and the friendliest, most decent and most patriotic folks on Earth. Countries just don't come any better. So why anyone would want to live anywhere else is practically incomprehensible. In a foreigner it is puzzling; in a native it is seditious. I used to feel this way myself.

[Y]our agricultural revolution is not an event like the Trojan War, isolated in the distant past and without relevance to your lives today. The work begun by those neolithic farmers in the Near East has been carried forward from one generation to the next without a single break, right into the present moment. It's the foundation of your vast civilization today in exactly the same way that it was the foundation of the very first farming village.

In between bites of banana, Mr. Remora would tell stories, and the children would write the stories down in notebooks, and every so often there would be a test. The stories were very short, and there were a whole lot of them on every conceivable subject. "One day I went to the store to purchase a carton of milk," Mr. Remora would say, chewing on a banana. "When I got home, I poured the milk into a glass and drank it. Then I watched television. The end." Or: "One afternoon a man named Edward got into a green truck and drove to a farm. The farm had geese and cows. The end." Mr. Ramora would tell story after story, and eat banana after banana, and it would get more and more difficult for Violet to pay attention.

THE AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION IS ONE the of the most controversial events in history. Some partisans proclaim that it set humankind on the road to prosperity and progress. Others insist that it led to perdition.

Citizens, the nineteenth century is great, but the twentieth century will be happy. Then, there will be nothing more like the history of old, we shall no longer, as to-day, have to fear a conquest, an invasion, a usurpation, a rivalry of nations, arms in hand, an interruption of civilization depending on a marriage of kings, on a birth in hereditary tyrannies, a partition of peoples by a congress, a dismemberment because of the failure of a dynasty, a combat of two religions meeting face to face, like two bucks in the dark, on the bridge of the infinite; we shall no longer have to fear famine, farming out, prostitution arising from distress, misery from the failure of work and the scaffold and the sword, and battles and the ruffianism of chance in the forest of events. One might almost say: There will be no more events. We shall be happy. The human race will accomplish its law, as the terrestrial globe accomplishes its law; harmony will be re-established between the soul and the star; the soul will gravitate around the truth, as the planet around the light. Friends, the present hour in which I am addressing you, is a gloomy hour; but these are terrible purchases of the future. A revolution is a toll. Oh! the human race will be delivered, raised up, consoled! We affirm it on this barrier. Whence should proceed that cry of love, if not from the heights of sacrifice? Oh my brothers, this is the point of junction, of those who think and of those who suffer; this barricade is not made of paving-stones, nor of joists, nor of bits of iron; it is made of two heaps, a heap of ideas, and a heap of woes. Here misery meets the ideal. The day embraces the night, and says to it: 'I am about to die, and thou shalt be born again with me.' From the embrace of all desolations faith leaps forth. Sufferings bring hither their agony and ideas their immortality. This agony and this immortality are about to join and constitute our death. Brothers, he who dies here dies in the radiance of the future, and we are entering a tomb all flooded with the dawn.

All the episodes from my stories and novels are not about food only, but about meals. You can eat food by yourself. A meal, according to my understanding anyhow, is a communal event, bringing together family members, neighbors, even strangers. At its most ordinary, it involves hospitality, giving, receiving, and gratitude.

Stop by my duck farm this Friday night for a birdfest event. Live music will be eaten, food will be heard, and there will be FREE refills on FREEDOM—in bald-eagle format.

As Candide went back to his farm, he reflected deeply on the Turk's remarks. He said to Pangloss and Martin: "That good old man seems to me to have made himself a life far preferable to that of the six Kings with whom we had the honor of having supper." "Great eminence," said Pangloss, " is very dangerous, according to the report of all philosophers. For after all, Eglon, King of the Moabites, was assassinated by Ehud; Absolom was hanged by his hair and pierced with three darts; King Naab son of Jeroboam was killed by Baasha..." "I also know", said Candide, "that we must cultivate our garden." "You are right," said Pangloss, "for when man was put in the Garden of Eden, he was put there ut operaretur eum, to work; which proves that man was not born to rest." "Let us work without reasoning," said Martin, "it is the only way to make life endurable." All the little society entered into this laudable plan; each one began to exercise his talents. The little piece of land produced much. True, Cunégonde was very ugly; but she became and excellent pastry cook; Paquette embroidered; the old woman took care of the linen. No one, not even Friar Giroflée, failed to perform some service; he was a very good carpenter, and even became an honorable man; and Pangloss sometimes said to Candide: "All events are linked together in the best of all possible worlds. for after all, if you had not been expelled from a fine castle with great kicks in the backside for love of Mademoiselle Cunégonde, if you had not been subjected to the Inquisition, if you had not traveled about America on foot, if you had not given the Baron a great blow with your sword, if you had not lost all your sheep from the good country of Eldorado, you would not be here eating candied citrons and pistachios." "That is well said," replied Candide, "but we must cultivate our garden.

It's funny how, when you look back on the big things that have happened in your life, you realize that there were small things you might have done which would completely have changed the course of events.

It used to be thought that time travel was impossible. But that was in the past, before the future went back and made its predecessor come after, rearranging The Order and causing all animals on earth to be confused except for the ducks, who predicted this event in the year 2244.

Otherwise, my life passed in a blur, that blessing of urban routine. The sense of distinct events that is so inescapable on a farm, where every rainstorm is thick with odor and color, and usefulness and timing, where omens of prosperity or ruin to come are sought in every change, where any of the world’s details may contain the one thing that above all else you will regret not knowing, this sense lifted off me. Maybe another way of saying it is that I forgot I was still alive.

Hallie didn't believe she was invulnerable. She was never one of those daredevil types; she knew she could get hurt. What I think she meant was that she was lucky to be on her way to Nicaragua. It was the slowest thing to sink into my head, how happy she was. Happy to be leaving. We'd had one time of perfect togetherness in our adult lives, the year when we were both in college in Tucson-her first year, my last-and living together for the first time away from Doc Homer. That winter I'd wanted to fail a subject just so I could hang back, stay there with her, the two of us walking around the drafty house in sweatshirts and wool socks and understanding each other precisely. Bringing each other cups of tea without having to ask. So I stayed on in Tucson for medical school, instead of going to Boston as I'd planned, and met Carlo in Parasitology. Hallie, around the same time, befriended some people who ran a safehouse for Central American refugees. After that we'd have strangers in our kitchen every time of night, kids scared senseless, people with all kinds of damage. Our life was never again idyllic. I should have seen it coming. Once she and I had gone to see a documentary on the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which was these Americans who volunteered without our government's blessing to fight against Franco and Hitler in the Spanish Civil War. At that point in U.S. history fascism was only maybe wrong, whereas communism was definitely. When we came home from the movie Hallie cried. Not because of the people who gave up life and limb only to lose Spain to Franco, and not for the ones who came back and were harassed for the rest of their lives for being Reds. The tragedy for Hallie was that there might never be a cause worth risking everything for in our lifetime. She was nineteen years old then, and as she lay blowing her nose and sobbing on my bed she told me this. That there were no real causes left. Now she had one-she was off to Nicaragua, a revolution of co-op farms and literacy crusades-and so I guess she was lucky. Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can't even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain. Almost no one really gets the chance to alter the course of human events on purpose, in the exact way they wish for it to be altered.

Public business, my son, must always be done by somebody. It will be done by somebody or other. If wise men decline it, others will not; if honest men refuse it, others will not. A young man should weigh well his plans. Integrity should be preserved in all events, as essential to his happiness, through every stage of his existence. His first maxim then should be to place his honor out of reach of all men. In order to do this he must make it a rule never to become dependent on public employments for subsistence. Let him have a trade, a profession, a farm, a shop, something where he can honestly live, and then he may engage in public affairs, if invited, upon independent principles. My advice to my children is to maintain an independent character. O

The dominant literary mode of the twentieth century has been the fantastic. This may appear a surprising claim, which would not have seemed even remotely conceivable at the start of the century and which is bound to encounter fierce resistance even now. However, when the time comes to look back at the century, it seems very likely that future literary historians, detached from the squabbles of our present, will see as its most representative and distinctive works books like J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and also George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and The Inheritors, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle, Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot-49 and Gravity’s Rainbow. The list could readily be extended, back to the late nineteenth century with H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau and The War of the Worlds, and up to writers currently active like Stephen R. Donaldson and George R.R. Martin. It could take in authors as different, not to say opposed, as Kingsley and Martin Amis, Anthony Burgess, Stephen King, Terry Pratchett, Don DeLillo, and Julian Barnes. By the end of the century, even authors deeply committed to the realist novel have often found themselves unable to resist the gravitational pull of the fantastic as a literary mode. This is not the same, one should note, as fantasy as a literary genre – of the authors listed above, only four besides Tolkien would find their works regularly placed on the ‘fantasy’ shelves of bookshops, and ‘the fantastic’ includes many genres besides fantasy: allegory and parable, fairy-tale, horror and science fiction, modern ghost-story and medieval romance. Nevertheless, the point remains. Those authors of the twentieth century who have spoken most powerfully to and for their contemporaries have for some reason found it necessary to use the metaphoric mode of fantasy, to write about worlds and creatures which we know do not exist, whether Tolkien’s ‘Middle-earth’, Orwell’s ‘Ingsoc’, the remote islands of Golding and Wells, or the Martians and Tralfa-madorians who burst into peaceful English or American suburbia in Wells and Vonnegut. A ready explanation for this phenomenon is of course that it represents a kind of literary disease, whose sufferers – the millions of readers of fantasy – should be scorned, pitied, or rehabilitated back to correct and proper taste. Commonly the disease is said to be ‘escapism’: readers and writers of fantasy are fleeing from reality. The problem with this is that so many of the originators of the later twentieth-century fantastic mode, including all four of those first mentioned above (Tolkien, Orwell, Golding, Vonnegut) are combat veterans, present at or at least deeply involved in the most traumatically significant events of the century, such as the Battle of the Somme (Tolkien), the bombing of Dresden (Vonnegut), the rise and early victory of fascism (Orwell). Nor can anyone say that they turned their backs on these events. Rather, they had to find some way of communicating and commenting on them. It is strange that this had, for some reason, in so many cases to involve fantasy as well as realism, but that is what has happened.

Citizens, the nineteenth century is great, but the twentieth century will be happy. Then, there will be nothing more like the history of old, we shall no longer, as to-day, have to fear a conquest, an invasion, a usurpation, a rivalry of nations, arms in hand, an interruption of civilization depending on a marriage of kings, on a birth in hereditary tyrannies, a partition of peoples by a congress, a dismemberment because of the failure of a dynasty, a combat of two religions meeting face to face, like two bucks in the dark, on the bridge of the infinite; we shall no longer have to fear famine, farming out, prostitution arising from distress, misery from the failure of work and the scaffold and the sword, and battles and the ruffianism of chance in the forest of events. One might almost say: There will be no more events. We shall be happy. The human race will accomplish its law, as the terrestrial globe accomplishes its law; harmony will be re-established between the soul and the star; the soul will gravitate around the truth, as the planet around the light. Friends, the present hour in which I am addressing you, is a gloomy hour; but these are terrible purchases of the future. A revolution is a toll. Oh! the human race will be delivered, raised up, consoled!

Life as an Enron employee was good. Prestwood’s annual salary rose steadily to sixty-five thousand dollars, with additional retirement benefits paid in Enron stock. When Houston Natural and Internorth had merged, all of Prestwood’s investments were automatically converted to Enron stock. He continued to set aside money in the company’s retirement fund, buying even more stock. Internally, the company relentlessly promoted employee stock ownership. Newsletters touted Enron’s growth as “simply stunning,” and Lay, at company events, urged employees to buy more stock. To Prestwood, it didn’t seem like a problem that his future was tied directly to Enron’s. Enron had committed to him, and he was showing his gratitude. “To me, this is the American way, loyalty to your employer,” he says. Prestwood was loyal to the bitter end. When he retired in 2000, he had accumulated 13,500 shares of Enron stock, worth $1.3 million at their peak. Then, at age sixty-eight, Prestwood suddenly lost his entire Enron nest egg. He now survives on a previous employer’s pension of $521 a month and a Social Security check of $1,294. “There aint no such thing as a dream anymore,” he says. He lives on a three-acre farm north of Houston willed to him as a baby in 1938 after his mother died. “I hadn’t planned much for the retirement. Wanted to go fishing, hunting. I was gonna travel a little.

With regard to the price then of the men themselves, it is obvious that the public treasury is in a better position to provide funds than any private individuals. What can be easier than for the Council to invite by public proclamation all whom it may concern to bring their slaves, and to buy up those produced? Assuming the purchase to be effected, is it credible that people will hesitate to hire from the state rather than from the private owner, and actually on the same terms? People have at all events no hesitation at present in hiring consecrated grounds, sacred victims, houses, etc., or in purchasing the right of farming taxes from the state. To ensure the preservation of the purchased property, the treasury can take the same securities precisely from the lessee as it does from those who purchase the right of farming its taxes. Indeed, fraudulent dealing is easier on the part of the man who has purchased such a right than of the man who hires slaves. Since it is not easy to see how the exportation of public money is to be detected, when it differs in no way from private money. Whereas it will take a clever thief to make off with these slaves, marked as they will be with the public stamp, and in face of a heavy penalty attached at once to the sale and exportation of them. Up to this point then it would appear feasible enough for the state to acquire property in men and to keep a safe watch over them.

What is it like to be made vice-president? On one level, it's a nearly hallucinatory degree of success. I was barely forty years old, and a shaky, sixty-three-year-old heartbeat from the leadership of the entire Western world. It was also like throwing up in convention-hall bathrooms before giving speeches, and after. It was sitting through dinners with men and women with whom I had nothing in common. Spending an enormous amount of time on trains. Promising thins and agreeing to things as advised by people I had barely met, on very little sleep. Huge sums of money were changing hands and everything happening on the grandest scale imaginable while still in most moments remaining pointless and usually outright seedy. I pretended to learn to fly-fish; I watched sporting events. In Maine I was assaulted by a lobster; it seized my lapel in a threatening manner. I tasted local foods and admired factories,farms, department stores, hotels, and (unless I'm misremembering) several empty plots of land.... It was like being given what was almost the nation's highest honor by a man you held in infinite esteem and regarded with perhaps a certain amount of terrified suspicion, a man who disliked you and clearly wanted nothing to do with you, who would scowl and change the subject at the mention of your name. And then being given a very important and very nasty job by that person, and despised for it, almost as much as you despised yourself.

There followed, however, the devastating experience of the Communist Party’s purge of the anarchists on Stalin’s orders. Thousands of Orwell’s comrades were simply murdered or thrown into prison, tortured and executed. He himself was lucky to escape with his life. Almost as illuminating, to him, was the difficulty he found, on his return to England, in getting his account of these terrible events published. Neither Victor Gollancz, in the Left Book Club, nor Kingsley Martin, in the New Statesman – the two principal institutions whereby progressive opinion in Britain was kept informed – would allow him to tell the truth. He was forced to turn elsewhere. Orwell had always put experience before theory, and these events proved how right he had been. Theory taught that the left, when exercising power, would behave justly and respect truth. Experience showed him that the left was capable of a degree of injustice and cruelty of a kind hitherto almost unknown, rivalled only by the monstrous crimes of the German Nazis, and that it would eagerly suppress truth in the cause of the higher truth it upheld. Experience, confirmed by what happened in the Second World War, where all values and loyalties became confused, also taught him that, in the event, human beings mattered more than abstract ideas; it was something he had always felt in his bones. Orwell never wholly abandoned his belief that a better society could be created by the force of ideas, and in this sense he remained an intellectual. But the axis of his attack shifted from existing, traditional and capitalist society to the fraudulent utopias with which intellectuals like Lenin had sought to replace it. His two greatest books, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), were essentially critiques of realized abstractions, of the totalitarian control over mind and body which an embodied utopia demanded, and (as he put it) ‘of the perversions to which a centralized economy is liable’.

I have only twenty acres," replied the Turk; "I cultivate them with my children; work keeps away the three great evils: boredom, vice, and need." As Candide went back to his farm, he reflected deeply on the Turk's remarks. He said to Pangloss and Martin: "That good old man seems to me to have made himself a life far preferable to that of the six Kings with whom we had the honor of having supper." "Great eminence," said Pangloss, " is very dangerous, according to the report of all philosophers. For after all, Eglon, King of the Moabites, was assassinated by Ehud; Absolom was hanged by his hair and pierced with three darts; King Naab son of Jeroboam was killed by Baasha..." "I also know", said Candide, "that we must cultivate our garden." "You are right," said Pangloss, "for when man was put in the Garden of Eden, he was put there ut operaretur eum, to work; which proves that man was not born to rest." "Let us work without reasoning," said Martin, "it is the only way to make life endurable." All the little society entered into this laudable plan; each one began to exercise his talents. The little piece of land produced much. True, Cunégonde was very ugly; but she became and excellent pastry cook; Paquette embroidered; the old woman took care of the linen. No one, not even Friar Giroflée, failed to perform some service; he was a very good carpenter, and even became an honorable man; and Pangloss sometimes said to Candide: "All events are linked together in the best of all possible worlds. for after all, if you had not been expelled from a fine castle with great kicks in the backside for love of Mademoiselle Cunégonde, if you had not been subjected to the Inquisition, if you had not traveled about America on foot, if you had not given the Baron a great blow with your sword, if you had not lost all your sheep from the good country of Eldorado, you would not be here eating candied citrons and pistachios." "That is well said," replied Candide, "but we must cultivate our garden.

What did you hope to get out of killing Win’s doctor?” “Enjoyment.” “No doubt you would have. Win didn’t seem to be enjoying it, however.” “Why is Harrow here?” Kev asked fiercely. “I can answer that one,” Leo said, leaning a shoulder against the wall with casual ease. “Harrow wants to become better acquainted with the Hathaways. Because he and my sister are … close.” Kev abruptly felt a sickening weight in his stomach, as if he’d swallowed a handful of river stones. “What do you mean?” he asked, even though he knew. No man could be exposed to Win and not fall in love with her. “Harrow is a widower,” Leo said. “A decent enough fellow. More attached to his clinic and patients than anything else. But he’s a sophisticated man, widely traveled, and wealthy as the devil. And he’s a collector of beautiful objects. A connoisseur of fine things.” Neither of the other men missed the implication. Win would indeed be an exquisite addition to a collection of fine things. It was difficult to ask the next question, but Kev forced himself to. “Does Win care for him?” “I don’t believe Win knows how much of what she feels for him is gratitude, and how much is true affection.” Leo gave Kev a pointed glance. “And there are still a few unresolved questions she has to answer for herself.” “I’ll talk to her.” “I wouldn’t, if I were you. Not until she cools a bit. She’s rather incensed with you.” “Why?” Kev asked, wondering if she had confided to her brother about the events of the previous night. “Why?” Leo’s mouth twisted. “There’s such a dazzling array of choices, I find myself in a quandary about which one to start with. Putting the subject of this morning aside, what about the fact that you never wrote to her?” “I did,” Kev said indignantly. “One letter,” Leo allowed. “The farm report. She showed it to me, actually. How could one forget the soaring prose you wrote about fertilizing the field near the east gate? I’ll tell you, the part about sheep dung nearly brought a tear to my eye, it was so sentimental and—” “What did she expect me to write about?” Kev demanded. “Don’t bother to explain, my lord,” Cam interceded as Leo opened his mouth. “It’s not the way of the Rom to put our private thoughts on paper.

July I watch eagerly a certain country graveyard that I pass in driving to and from my farm. It is time for a prairie birthday, and in one corner of this graveyard lives a surviving celebrant of that once important event. It is an ordinary graveyard, bordered by the usual spruces, and studded with the usual pink granite or white marble headstones, each with the usual Sunday bouquet of red or pink geraniums. It is extraordinary only in being triangular instead of square, and in harboring, within the sharp angle of its fence, a pin-point remnant of the native prairie on which the graveyard was established in the 1840’s. Heretofore unreachable by scythe or mower, this yard-square relic of original Wisconsin gives birth, each July, to a man-high stalk of compass plant or cutleaf Silphium, spangled with saucer-sized yellow blooms resembling sunflowers. It is the sole remnant of this plant along this highway, and perhaps the sole remnant in the western half of our county. What a thousand acres of Silphiums looked like when they tickled the bellies of the buffalo is a question never again to be answered, and perhaps not even asked. This year I found the Silphium in first bloom on 24 July, a week later than usual; during the last six years the average date was 15 July. When I passed the graveyard again on 3 August, the fence had been removed by a road crew, and the Silphium cut. It is easy now to predict the future; for a few years my Silphium will try in vain to rise above the mowing machine, and then it will die. With it will die the prairie epoch. The Highway Department says that 100,000 cars pass yearly over this route during the three summer months when the Silphium is in bloom. In them must ride at least 100,000 people who have ‘taken’ what is called history, and perhaps 25,000 who have ‘taken’ what is called botany. Yet I doubt whether a dozen have seen the Silphium, and of these hardly one will notice its demise. If I were to tell a preacher of the adjoining church that the road crew has been burning history books in his cemetery, under the guise of mowing weeds, he would be amazed and uncomprehending. How could a weed be a book? This is one little episode in the funeral of the native flora, which in turn is one episode in the funeral of the floras of the world. Mechanized man, oblivious of floras, is proud of his progress in cleaning up the landscape on which, willy-nilly, he must live out his days. It might be wise to prohibit at once all teaching of real botany and real history, lest some future citizen suffer qualms about the floristic price of his good life. * * *

A rock concert at a farm in Bethel, New York, in 1969 attracted some 400,000 people who wallowed happily about in the rain, some in various stages of undress and drug-induced haze, for three days. Traffic jams and police barricades prevented many thousands more from attending. "Woodstock" was the culminating event of "countercultural

한국프로농구 Swlook.com 가입코드 : win24 「〃Swlook.cℴm〃가입코드: win24〃」 한국프로농구사설놀이터 Swing 입니다. 신규가입 첫충 10% / 매일충전 5% Event 진행중 네임드사다리 * 로하이 * 농구쿼터실시간 * 스타 * 롤 등등, 타 업체 대비 최고의 배당률 ?다양한 경기 지원! 안전한놀이터추천,스페셜보너스 등 다양한 이벤트를 통해 머니 지급! 까다로운 보안으로 여러분의 안전을 책임집니다.When Murlock built his cabin he was young, strong and full of hope. He began the hard work of creating a farm. He kept a gun--a rifle—for hunting to support himself.

일본야구분석 Swlook.com 가입코드 : win24 「〃Swlook.cℴm〃가입코드: win24〃」 일본야구분석사설놀이터 Swing 입니다. 신규가입 첫충 10% / 매일충전 5% Event 진행중 네임드사다리 * 로하이 * 농구쿼터실시간 * 스타 * 롤 등등, 타 업체 대비 최고의 배당률 ?다양한 경기 지원! 안전한놀이터추천,스페셜보너스 등 다양한 이벤트를 통해 머니 지급! 까다로운 보안으로 여러분의 안전을 책임집니다. But there is an earlier part to this story supplied by my grandfather. When Murlock built his cabin he was young, strong and full of hope. He began the hard work of creating a farm.

안전한사설놀이터 Swlook.com 가입코드 : win24 「〃Swlook.cℴm〃가입코드: win24〃」 단폴제제없는 메이저 사설놀이터 Swing 입니다. 신규가입 첫충 10% / 매일충전 5% Event 진행중 네임드사다리 로하이 농구쿼터실시간 스타 롤 등등, 타 업체 대비 최고의 배당률 & 다양한 경기 지원! 다폴더보너스,스페셜보너스 등 다양한 이벤트를 통해 머니 지급! 까다로운 보안으로 여러분의 안전을 책임집니다.A group of soldiers is hanging a southern farm owner for trying to stop northern military movements across the Owl Creek Bridge.

The events we suffer through act like a polishing cloth or a chisel. It’s your choice of which one, but it’s one or the other.

pyramid searches,” an idea pioneered by MIT’s Eric von Hippel and others. To conduct a pyramid search, begin by identifying people who are well-informed about the topic you’re interested in and asking them who in their field has even more expertise than they do—in other words, who is at the top of the subject-area “pyramid.” Often those at the peak are the kinds of highly curious, knowledgeable people who can refer you to experts in analogous fields. Then work your way to the top of the next knowledge pyramid and so on, ultimately assembling a panel of insightful people from diverse fields. Poetz and colleagues used the pyramid method to find analogous expertise for a forklift maker that needed a better way to mount and unmount forklifts from trucks. They brainstormed starting points, identifying a logistics-firm owner who was a heavy user of truck-mounted forklifts. That led them to a maker of machinery-mounting systems for farm tractors and eventually to someone in the entertainment-events industry with extensive experience quickly mounting stage equipment at concert venues. It turned out that the concert expert’s insights were directly applicable to the forklift problem and provided an innovative solution.

Every morning and evening at Lakefield, the fruit bats would come and go from the trees near our campsite. During the day, you could hear them in the distance as they squabbled over territory. Each fruit bat wanted to jockey for the best position on a branch. But when evening came, as if by silent agreement, all the bats knew to fly off at the same time. Steve grabbed me and the kids one evening just at dusk, and we went out into the river to watch the bats. I would rank that night as one of the most incredible experiences of my life, right up there with catching crocs and swimming with manatees. Sitting at dusk with the kids in the boat, all of a sudden the trees came alive. The bats took flight, skimming over the water to delicately dip for a drink, flying directly over our heads. It was as if we had gone back in time and pterodactyls flew once again. It was such an awe-inspiring event that we all fell quiet, the children included. The water was absolutely still, like an inky mirror, almost like oil. Not a single fish jumped, not a croc moved. All we heard were the wings of these ancient mammals in the darkening sky. We lay quietly in the bottom of the boat, floating in the middle of this paradise. We knew that we were completely and totally safe. We were in a small dinghy in the middle of some of the most prolifically populated crocodile water, yet we were absolutely comfortable knowing that Steve was there with us. “One day, babe,” Steve said softly to me, “we’ll look back on wildlife harvesting projects and things like croc farming the same way we look back on slavery and cannibalism. It will be simply an unbelievable part of human history. We’ll get so beyond it that it will be something we will never, ever return to.” “We aren’t there yet,” I said. He sighed. “No, we aren’t.” I thought of the sign Steve had over his desk back home. It bore the word “warrior” and its definition: “One who is engaged in battle.” And it was a battle. It was a battle to protect fragile ecosystems like Lakefield from the wildlife perpetrators, from people who sought to kill anything that could turn a profit. These same people were out collecting croc eggs and safari-hunting crocodiles. They were working to legalize a whole host of illicit and destructive activities. They were lobbying to farm or export everything that moved, from these beautiful fruit bats we were watching, to magpie geese, turtles, and even whales.

Golden Egg Pets · Golden Dragon · Golden Griffin · Golden Unicorn Diamond Egg Pets · Diamond Dragon · Diamond Griffin · Diamond Unicorn Common Pets · Bandicoot (Aussie Egg) · Buffalo (Cracked Egg or Pet Egg) · Cat (Starter Egg, Cracked Egg, or Pet Egg) · Chicken (Farm Egg) · Dog (Starter Egg, Cracked Egg, or Pet Egg) · Otter (Cracked Egg or Pet Egg) · Robin (Christmas Egg) Uncommon Pets · Black Panther (Jungle Egg) · Blue Dog (Blue Egg) · Capybara (Jungle Egg) · Chocolate Labrador (Cracked Egg, Pet Egg, or Royal Egg) · Dingo (Aussie Egg) · Drake (Farm Egg) · Fennec Fox (Cracked Egg, Pet Egg, or Royal Egg) · Meerkat (Safari Egg) · Pink Cat (Pink Egg) · Puma (Cracked Egg, Pet Egg, or Royal Egg) · Silly Duck (Farm Egg) · Snow Cat (Cracked Egg, Pet Egg, or Royal Egg) · Wild Boar (Safari Egg) · Wolf (Christmas Egg) Rare Pets · Australian Kelpie (Aussie Egg) · Beaver (Cracked Egg, Pet Egg, or Royal Egg) · Brown Bear (Jungle Egg) · Bunny (Cracked Egg, Pet Egg, or Royal Egg) · Cow (Farm Egg) · Elephant (Safari Egg) · Elf Shrew (Christmas Event: 23,000 Gingerbread) · Emu (Aussie Egg) · Hyena (Safari Egg) · Pig (Farm Egg) · Polar Bear (Christmas Egg) · Rabbit (Cracked Egg, Pet Egg, or Royal Egg) · Rat (Lunar New Year Event 2020 - Rat Box - 14 in 15 Chance) · Reindeer (Christmas Egg) · Rhino (Jungle Egg) · Snow Puma (Cracked Egg, Pet Egg, or Royal Egg) · Swan (Christmas Egg) Ultra-Rare Pets · Arctic Fox (Christmas Egg) · Bee (Coffee Shop - Honey: 199 Robux - 35 in 40 Chance) · Crocodile (Jungle Egg) · Elf Hedgehog (Christmas Event: eighty,500 Gingerbread) · Flamingo (Safari Egg) · Frog (Aussie Egg) · Horse (Pet Shop: 300 Robux) · Koala (Aussie Egg) · Lion (Safari Egg) · Llama (Farm Egg) · Panda (Lunar New Year Event - Game Pass: 249 Robux) · Penguin (Throw a Golden Goldfish (225 Robux) to a Penguin on the Ice Cream Parlor) · Platypus (Jungle Egg) · Red Panda (Cracked Egg, Pet Egg, or Royal Egg) · Santa Dog (Christmas Event: 250 Robux) · Shiba Inu (Cracked Egg, Pet Egg, or Royal Egg) · Sloth (Pet Shop: 199 Robux) · Turkey (Farm Egg) · Zombie Buffalo (Halloween Event) Legendary Pets · Arctic Reindeer (Christmas Egg) · Bat Dragon (Halloween Event 2019: a hundred and eighty,000 Candies) · Crow (Farm Egg) · Dragon (Cracked Egg, Pet Egg, or Royal Egg) · Evil Unicorn (Halloween Event 2019: 108,000 Candies) · Frost Dragon (Christmas Event 2019: 1,000 Robux) · Giraffe (Safari Egg) · Golden Penguin (Throw a Golden Goldfish (225 Robux) to a Penguin at the Ice Cream Parlor) · Golden Rat (Lunar New Year Event 2020 - Rat Box - 1 in 15 Chance) · Griffin (Gamepass or six hundred Robux) · Kangaroo (Aussie Egg) · King Bee (Coffee Shop - Honey: 199 Robux - 4 in 40 Chance) · Owl (Farm Egg) · Parrot (Jungle Egg) · Queen Bee (Coffee Shop - Honey: 199 Robux - 1 in 40 Chance) · Shadow Dragon (Halloween Event 2019: 1,000 Robux) · Turtle (Aussie Egg) · Unicorn (Cracked Egg, Pet Egg, or Royal Egg)

Security was, though, an ongoing rock-paper-scissors match between technologies that all seemed to want different things. The lobby of the building, its elevators and stairwells, and its exterior belts of walkways and gardens had all been covered by security cameras from the very beginning of Zula and Csongor’s tenancy. In those days a security guard would sit all day behind a reception desk in the lobby, keeping an eye on the main entrance, glancing down from time to time at an array of flat-panel monitors that showed him the feeds from those cameras. But the desk had been torn out some years ago and replaced with a big saltwater aquarium. The building still employed a security firm. But those guards who were human, and who were actually on site, spent most of the day up on their feet, strolling about the property while keeping track of events in wearable devices. Some of the “guards” were just algorithms, analyzing video and audio feeds for suspicious behavior, recognizing faces and cross-checking them against a whitelist of residents, friends, and neighbors, and a blacklist of predators, stalkers, and ex-husbands. Anything ambiguous was forwarded to a Southeast Asian eyeball farm.

It was curious that the fact of having held it in his fingers seemed to him to make a difference even now, when the photograph itself, as well as the event it recorded, was only memory.

When they tried to cross the Choptank River near Denton, just 17 miles into their long journey, the bloodhounds from the Murphy farm caught up with them. Did I mention that Moses was a planner? He had fully prepared himself for this turn of events. For months back on the farm, he had secretly befriended those dogs with scraps of food and other bits of love and kindness. Now, at this moment of great danger, those dogs turned tail and headed back home when he ordered them to do so.

Ted, my husband, asked me to introduce his story because I am the one who heard it first. We had been married for two years when his “gift” was given to us. It was about 4:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning. We were both asleep in our home in Tonkawa, Oklahoma, when he sat up in bed and said, “I know how I died!” I awoke to those words, astonished as he began to tell the end of his life in a different-sounding voice and using words and a dialect I had not heard before. After a few moments of an intense outpouring of emotional facts, places, names, and events, I knew I had to write “his story” down on paper. I climbed out of bed in the dark, found a legal-size yellow pad and pencil and began writing as fast as I could. He did not slow down to help me catch up; the tale just kept flowing from his mouth. The hairs on my arms stood on end and chills continued as he told in detail events that happened over one hundred years ago. My fingers began to cramp as I kept trying to keep up with him. The descriptions were so vivid that I could visualize what he was saying like a movie playing before my eyes. Eventually we hurried to the living room after I found a small tape recorder in our dresser drawer. Ted continued to talk in this unusual voice, causing me to laugh and cry as this true-to-life saga of the 1870s began to unravel. He told me how he died at about the age of sixty. Then he went to the beginning, when Tom Summers, who was sixteen years old, left home to join the Union Army. He lied about his age and was able to join the army and fight in the Civil War. The journey takes you into the war, on into Indian Territory and westward. Every day for Tom was an adventure, and Ted will share it with you. Anyone who meets Ted is drawn to him instantly. His manner is one of confidence: of a very genuine, honest, loveable guy. He will win you over with his “Just one more story” or a big bear hug if you are not careful. We met at a teen hop in the 1950s, when I was fifteen and he was seventeen. We dated in rural America for about a year. He was then leaving the farm to go to Oklahoma State University, and he asked me to marry him. We both married other people and raised our children. Forty-one years later, we discovered each other again. This time, I said, “Yes.” Join us on our fascinating journey into the Old West as seen through Tom Summers’s “beautiful blue eyes.

Yeah, I heard that too," I said, not liking the way Luke had casually thrown around the term my old friends used to express the exclusivity of their little events. "It's like Animal Farm." "You mean Animal House," Luke corrected. "The movie about frat parties." I shook my head. "No, I mean Animal Farm. You know: Some animals are more equal than other animals.

Meeting and Greeting 1. Use eye contact and smiling as your first contact with others. In doing so, you can scout out the friendly, approachable strangers in the room and feel immediately more at ease. 2. Be the first to say hello. Stay calm if you are left alone to mingle—large parties, forgetful hosts, and friendly guests make this situation inevitable. 3. Introduce yourself to others. Offer your hand and say: “Hello. My name is . . .” 4. As you shake hands, repeat the person’s name. “Nice to meet you, Jack.” This will help imprint the name in your own mind. 5. Make an extra effort to remember names and use them in conversation: “Don’t you agree, Jim?” This makes people feel special. 6. Go out of your way to meet new people. They may feel as out of place as you do: “Hi, I don’t believe we’ve met yet, I’m . . . “ or “I don’t know a soul.” 7. Ask neutral questions that are easy to answer to convey the message that you’d like to get to know this person better. 8. Be prepared to say something interesting about what you do—but in small doses. No one wants to hear you talk exclusively about yourself. 9. Communicate a sense of enthusiasm about the event at hand or life in general. Focus on the positive. 10. Look for passing comments that could open up a whole topic of conversation. “The New York subways were a real experience for this country boy” could lead to a discussion of childhood on the farm, adjusting to city life, public transportation. . . . Clothes, jewelry, and accessories also make excellent conversation pieces. It’s up to you to take the conversational ball and run with it, but be sure to pass it back to your teammate from time to time.

Horseman is the haunting sequel to the 1820 novel The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving and takes place two decades after the events that unfolded in the original. We are introduced to 14-year-old trans boy Bente “Ben” Van Brunt, who has been raised by his idiosyncratic grandparents - lively Brom “Bones” Van Brunt and prim Kristina Van Tassel - in the small town of Sleepy Hollow, New York, where gossip and rumour run rife and people are exceedingly closed-minded. He has lived with them on their farm ever since he was orphaned when his parents, Bendix and Fenna, died in suspicious and enigmatic circumstances. Ben and his only friend, Sander, head into the woodland one Autumn day to play a game known as Sleepy Hollow Boys, but they are both a little startled when they witness a group of men they recognise from the village discussing the headless, handless body of a local boy that has just been found. But this isn't the end; it is only the beginning. From that moment on, Ben feels an otherworldly presence following him wherever he ventures, and one day while scanning his grandfather’s fields he catches a fleeting glimpse of a weird creature seemingly sucking blood from a victim. An evil of an altogether different nature. But Ben knows this is not the elusive Horseman who has been the primary focus of folkloric tales in the area for many years because he can both feel and hear his presence. However, unlike others who fear the Headless Horseman, Ben can hear whispers in the woods at the end of a forbidden path, and he has visions of the Horseman who says he is there to protect him. Ben soon discovers connections between the recent murders and the death of his parents and realises he has been shaded from the truth about them his whole life. Thus begins a journey to unravel the mystery and establish his identity in the process. This is an enthralling and compulsively readable piece of horror fiction building on Irvings’ solid ground. Evoking such feelings as horror, terror, dread and claustrophobic oppressiveness, this tale invites you to immerse yourself in its sinister, creepy and disturbing narrative. The staggering beauty of the remote village location is juxtaposed with the darkness of the demons and devilish spirits that lurk there, and the village residents aren't exactly welcoming to outsiders or accepting of anyone different from their norm. What I love the most is that it is subtle and full of nuance, instead of the usual cheap thrills with which the genre is often pervaded, meaning the feeling of sheer panic creeps up on you when you least expect, and you come to the sudden realisation that the story has managed to get under your skin, into your psyche and even into your dreams (or should that be nightmares?) Published at a time when the nights are closing in and the light diminishes ever more rapidly, not to mention with Halloween around the corner, this is the perfect autumnal read for the spooky season full of both supernatural and real-world horrors. It begins innocuously enough to lull you into a false sense of security but soon becomes bleak and hauntingly atmospheric as well as frightening before descending into true nightmare-inducing territory. A chilling and eerie romp, and a story full of superstition, secrets, folklore and old wives’ tales and with messages about love, loss, belonging, family, grief, being unapologetically you and becoming more accepting and tolerant of those who are different. Highly recommended.

My two weeks here are filled with activities. Private lessons in Japanese history, language, and arts. Tours of shrines, temples, and tombs. A visit to the imperial stock farm and wild duck preserves. Assorted banquets. Outings with my father---a baseball game, public art exhibit opening.

The insatiable need for more processing power -- ideally, located as close as possible to the user but, at the very least, in nearby indus­trial server farms -- invariably leads to a third option: decentralized computing. With so many powerful and often inactive devices in the homes and hands of consumers, near other homes and hands, it feels inevitable that we'd develop systems to share in their mostly idle pro­cessing power. "Culturally, at least, the idea of collectively shared but privately owned infrastructure is already well understood. Anyone who installs solar panels at their home can sell excess power to their local grid (and, indirectly, to their neighbor). Elon Musk touts a future in which your Tesla earns you rent as a self-driving car when you're not using it yourself -- better than just being parked in your garage for 99% of its life. "As early as the 1990s programs emerged for distributed computing using everyday consumer hardware. One of the most famous exam­ples is the University of California, Berkeley's SETl@HOME, wherein consumers would volunteer use of their home computers to power the search for alien life. Sweeney has highlighted that one of the items on his 'to-do list' for the first-person shooter Unreal Tournament 1, which shipped in 1998, was 'to enable game servers to talk to each other so we can just have an unbounded number of players in a single game session.' Nearly 20 years later, however, Sweeney admitted that goal 'seems to still be on our wish list.' "Although the technology to split GPUs and share non-data cen­ter CPUs is nascent, some believe that blockchains provide both the technological mechanism for decentralized computing as well as its economic model. The idea is that owners of underutilized CPUs and GPUs would be 'paid' in some cryptocurrency for the use of their processing capabilities. There might even be a live auction for access to these resources, either those with 'jobs' bidding for access or those with capacity bidding on jobs. "Could such a marketplace provide some of the massive amounts of processing capacity that will be required by the Metaverse? Imagine, as you navigate immersive spaces, your account continuously bidding out the necessary computing tasks to mobile devices held but unused by people near you, perhaps people walking down the street next to you, to render or animate the experiences you encounter. Later, when you’re not using your own devices, you would be earning tokens as they return the favor. Proponents of this crypto-exchange concept see it as an inevitable feature of all future microchips. Every computer, no matter how small, would be designed to be auctioning off any spare cycles at all times. Billions of dynamically arrayed processors will power the deep compute cycles of event the largest industrial customers and provide the ultimate and infinite computing mesh that enables the Metaverse.

The historical nature of the Desoto Solar Farm dictates that true events are documented in American historical records.

The commoners, as expected, were poor and uneducated and farmed the land for a living.

I’m amazed at how this has snowballed into such a media event. It began last week when I saw a national news report by Tom Brokaw about this adorable little lady from Georgia, Mrs. Hill, who was trying to save her farm from being foreclosed. Her sixty-seven-year-old husband had committed suicide a few weeks earlier, hoping his life insurance would save the farm, which had been in the family for generations. But the insurance proceeds weren’t nearly enough. It was a very sad situation, and I was moved. Here were people who’d worked very hard and honestly all their lives, only to see it all crumble before them. To me, it just seemed wrong. Through NBC I was put in touch with a wonderful guy from Georgia named Frank Argenbright, who’d become very involved in trying to help Mrs. Hill. Frank directed me to the bank that held Mrs. Hill’s mortgage. The next morning, I called and got some vice president on the line. I explained that I was a businessman from New York, and that I was interested in helping Mrs. Hill. He told me he was sorry, but that it was too late. They were going to auction off the farm, he said, and “nothing or no one is going to stop it.” That really got me going. I said to the guy: “You listen to me. If you do foreclose, I’ll personally bring a lawsuit for murder against you and your bank, on the grounds that you harassed Mrs. Hill’s husband to his death.” All of a sudden the bank officer sounded very nervous and said he’d get right back to me. Sometimes it pays to be a little wild. An hour later I got a call back from the banker, and he said, “Don’t worry, we’re going to work it out, Mr. Tramp.” Mrs. Hill and Frank Argenbright told the media, and the next thing I knew, it was the lead story on the network news. By the end of the week, we’d raised $40,000. Imus alone raised almost $20,000 by appealing to his listeners. As a Christmas present to Mrs. Hill and her family, we’ve scheduled a mortgage-burning ceremony for Christmas Eve in the atrium of Trump Tower. By then, I’m confident, we’ll have raised all the money. I’ve promised Mrs. Hill that if we haven’t, I’ll make up any difference. I tell Imus he’s the greatest, and I invite him to be my guest one day next week at the tennis matches at the U.S. Open. I have a courtside box and I used to go myself almost every day. Now I’m so busy I mostly just send my friends.

My name is Joe Ward, from Gunnocks, Clonee, in County Meath. I have been asked to put down my recollections of the last two generations of the Ward family and the people who worked with them. . . . I have no qualifications for writing, other than a good memory. I will write these articles the same way as I talk: short, factual and to the point. Most of the events of which I will speak took place before the year I was born, 1909.

There are too many oddities, Jack. Too many arbitrary events. Usually by this stage, one or two strands are beginning to make sense, but not this time. It seems as though anything might happen at any time. It's making me feel unsafe

In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.

Thus began the Shire-reckoning, for the year of the crossing of the Brandywine (as the Hobbits turned the name) became Year One of the Shire, and all later dates were reckoned from it.* At once the western Hobbits fell in love with their new land, and they remained there, and soon passed once more out of the history of Men and of Elves. While there was still a king they were in name his subjects, but they were, in fact, ruled by their own chieftains and meddled not at all with events in the world outside. To the last battle at Fornost with the Witch-lord of Angmar they sent some bowmen to the aid of the king, or so they maintained, though no tales of Men record it. But in that war the North Kingdom ended; and then the Hobbits took the land for their own, and they chose from their own chiefs a Thain to hold the authority of the king that was gone. There for a thousand years they were little troubled by wars, and they prospered and multiplied after the Dark Plague (S.R. 37) until the disaster of the Long Winter and the famine that followed it. Many thousands then perished, but the Days of Dearth (1158–60) were at the time of this tale long past and the Hobbits had again become accustomed to plenty. The land was rich and kindly, and though it had long been deserted when they entered it, it had before been well tilled, and there the king had once had many farms, cornlands, vineyards, and woods.

I’ve always passionately believed in the power of the state to improve lives. Before my career in AI, I worked in government and the nonprofit sector. I helped start a charity telephone counseling service when I was nineteen, worked for the mayor of London, and co-founded a conflict resolution firm focused on multi-stakeholder negotiation. Working with public servants—people stretched thin and bone-tired, but forever in demand and doing heroic work for those who need it—was enough to show me what a disaster it would be if the state failed. However, my experience with local government, UN negotiations, and nonprofits also gave me invaluable firsthand knowledge of their limitations. They are often chronically mismanaged, bloated, and slow to act. One project I facilitated in 2009 at the Copenhagen climate negotiations involved convening hundreds of NGOs and scientific experts to align their negotiating positions. The idea was to present a coherent position to 192 squabbling countries at the main summit. Except we couldn’t get consensus on anything. For starters, no one could agree on the science, or the reality of what was happening on the ground. Priorities were scattered. There was no consensus on what would be effective, affordable, or even practical. Could you raise $10 billion to turn the Amazon into a national park to absorb CO2? How are you going to deal with the militias and bribes? Or maybe the answer was to reforest Norway, not Brazil, or was the solution to grow giant kelp farms instead? As soon as proposals were voiced, someone spoke up to poke holes in them. Every suggestion was a problem. We ended up with maximum divergence on all possible things. It was, in other words, politics as usual. And this involved people notionally on the “same team.” We hadn’t even gotten to the main event and the real horse-trading. At the Copenhagen summit a morass of states all had their own competing positions. Now pile on the raw emotion. Negotiators were trying to make decisions with hundreds of people in the room arguing and shouting and breaking off into groups, all while the clock was ticking, on both the summit and the planet. I was there trying to help facilitate the process, perhaps the most complex, high-stakes multiparty negotiation in human history, but from the start it looked almost impossible. Observing this, I realized we weren’t going to make sufficient progress fast enough. The timeline was too tight. The issues were too complex. Our institutions for addressing massive global problems were not fit for purpose.

I take in what I ran over, and my lungs lose breath again. Two wooden beams stick up from the snow, a piece of crushed wood barely hanging on between them. Directly beneath is a smattering of jagged splinters, a puzzle of red-painted words I piece together with what’s left of the sign: REED FAMILY TREE FARM, A FERN FALLS TRADITION! I crashed right into the Reeds’ sign. Rachel’s sign. I force myself to breathe through the panic and take in more of my surroundings.

The slaveholders had a special interest in maintaining the degradation of the free Negro. If the fugitive slave was the "Safety Valve of Slavery," the subduing of the free black population of the North was what kept the safety valve from turning into a massive tear which would allow all the power to escape from the chamber. The slaveholders were aware that the harsh conditions faced by free Negroes in the North helped keep their laborers down on the farm; hence they did their best to publicize the cold reception that awaited any slave so foolish as to run away from the security of the plantation. They did more than observe events in the North: because they had a strong interest in maintaining the free Negro there in a condition as much like slavery as possible, they sought an alliance with Northern white labor based on the defense of color caste.

Life as an Enron employee was good. Prestwood’s annual salary rose steadily to sixty-five thousand dollars, with additional retirement benefits paid in Enron stock. When Houston Natural and Internorth had merged, all of Prestwood’s investments were automatically converted to Enron stock. He continued to set aside money in the company’s retirement fund, buying even more stock. Internally, the company relentlessly promoted employee stock ownership. Newsletters touted Enron’s growth as “simply stunning,” and Lay, at company events, urged employees to buy more stock. To Prestwood, it didn’t seem like a problem that his future was tied directly to Enron’s. Enron had committed to him, and he was showing his gratitude. “To me, this is the American way, loyalty to your employer,” he says. Prestwood was loyal to the bitter end. When he retired in 2000, he had accumulated 13,500 shares of Enron stock, worth $1.3 million at their peak. Then, at age sixty-eight, Prestwood suddenly lost his entire Enron nest egg. He now survives on a previous employer’s pension of $521 a month and a Social Security check of $1,294. “There aint no such thing as a dream anymore,” he says. He lives on a three-acre farm north of Houston willed to him as a baby in 1938 after his mother died. “I hadn’t planned much for the retirement. Wanted to go fishing, hunting. I was gonna travel a little.” Now he’ll sell his family’s land. Has to, he says. He is still paying off his mortgage.7 In some respects, Prestwood’s case is not unusual. Often people do not diversify at all, and sometimes employees invest a lot of their money in their employer’s stock. Amazing but true: five million Americans have more than 60 percent of their retirement savings in company stock.8 This concentration is risky on two counts. First, a single security is much riskier than the portfolios offered by mutual funds. Second, as employees of Enron and WorldCom discovered the hard way, workers risk losing both their jobs and the bulk of their retirement savings all at once.

Church leaders often mistakenly think of church culture as primarily a combination between articulated beliefs and the expressions of those beliefs. By doing so, leaders fail to look deeper to the first layer of culture. They fail to grasp the actual beliefs and actual shared values beneath the surface. Too many church leaders are betting the farm that church culture is a simple matter of “what we say” plus “what we do.” The strategy for changing culture, if this was the case, is then quite simple: If we don’t like what people are doing, then we simply need to say something different. This tragic error assigns organizational culture (and changing it) to the power of positive thinking and some form of “name it and claim it” theology. For the observant, there is likely a nagging suspicion that church culture, and the way to change, is something more. Culture is much more than what we say and do. Culture is formed by what we truly believe and value over a sustained period of time. If the stated beliefs of a church are at odds with the actual beliefs, the actual beliefs win. The actual yet unstated beliefs speak louder than the stated ones, if the two are at odds. Some examples may be helpful. If the stated doctrine of the church is that all believers are priests and ministers because our great High Priest has made us priests through His death, yet the culture of the church values only “professional ministers”—the culture will trump the doctrinal confession. A pastor preaching Ephesians 4:11–12 one time will not automatically remove the unrealistic and unbiblical expectation that the pastor is the one who does the ministry. If a stated belief of the church is that no one has anything to offer to stand holy before God, yet the actual beliefs are that we somehow contribute to our standing with God by our religious goodness, the culture will be one that does not allow for openness and confession. And someone who admits a struggle will be unlikely to experience mercy expressed from another. A graceless culture overpowers a grace-filled confessional statement. If the stated doctrine of the church is that we are to live as missionaries because Jesus stepped into our culture to rescue us, but the culture of the church focuses almost exclusively on what programs and events the church offers, the culture will attempt to squelch and suffocate desires to serve the surrounding community. Time and time again a little digging reveals that the outcomes of the local church contradict the ambitious vision statements. Why is this so? Why don’t our campaigns, rebranding efforts, and endless streams of mission statements change our future?

We can fly from New York to Los Angeles in a matter of hours, but we also mingle our energy fields with hundreds or even thousands of people who are strangers to us. Our physical senses report the airplane flight to us in all its details, but we receive no such report of the consequences of intermingling our energy fields with so many people. Only those few people with finely attuned spiritual senses are aware of the difficulty that such mingling may bring. In the old days we lived a quiet life. We seldom saw anyone outside the family structure. Many people lived an entire lifetime on a farm or in a small town. In 1900 many thought it was a great event to travel twice a year to a town twenty or fifty miles away in order to do the seasonal shopping. People were intimately familiar with their personal surroundings, and they kept them clean. There were few strangers among us. When strangers arrived, we knew how to cope with the energy field they brought with them. Every home had its protective charms, and every family had its household rituals.

The entire history of economic progress can be recapitulated in the four-stage evolution of the birthday cake. As a vestige of the agrarian economy, mothers made birthday cakes from scratch, mixing farm commodities (flour, sugar, butter, and eggs) that together cost mere dimes. As the goods-based industrial economy advanced, moms paid a dollar or two to Betty Crocker for premixed ingredients. Later, when the service economy took hold, busy parents ordered cakes from the bakery or grocery store, which, at $10 or $15, cost ten times as much as the packaged ingredients. Now, in the time-starved 1990s, parents neither make the birthday cake nor even throw the party. Instead, they spend $100 or more to “outsource” the entire event to Chuck E. Cheese’s, the Discovery Zone, the Mining Company, or some other business that stages a memorable event for the kids—and often throws in the cake for free. Welcome to the emerging experience economy.

STYLE & STRUCTURE LANGUAGE Simple, clear; effectively creates the atmosphere of a world that, on the surface, is down-to-earth and unsophisticated, but that on a deeper level is complex and contains many conflicting forces. NARRATOR Invisible, third-person narrator who emphasizes the thoughts, feelings, and actions of animals. FABLE (Short tale that teaches a moral lesson, with animals as characters.) The animals act in accordance with their animal nature, but their ideas and emotions are those of human beings: Benjamin is skeptical about the chances of improving his lot and feels just as disillusioned about their new society as a human would; Clover, the gentle, patient elderly mare, reacts to tragic events with the compassionate tears of a human being. It is obvious that Orwell sympathizes with the plight of the animals, whether they are ruled by Jones or Napoleon. His treatment of animals makes them believable as individuals, not just as types. IRONY (Use of words to express a meaning opposite to the literal meaning.) Orwell sees the animals’ flaws as well as their positive qualities; treats circumstances of their lives with persuasive irony: the Rebellion occurs not merely because of a bloodthirsty desire for revenge on the animals’ part, but also because Jones has forgotten to feed them and they are desperately hungry. STRUCTURE Ten chapters. Rising action: First five chapters tell of the animals’ Rebellion. Crisis (turning point): Napoleon launches the surprise attack that drives Snowball into exile, thus eliminating a rival for the position of power. The novel’s second half tells how Napoleon firmly establishes his power by making clever use of propaganda and terrorist tactics. Several unexplained events are cleared up as the story develops: why Napoleon took puppies (he raises them as a police force); what happened to the cows’ milk (it is reserved exclusively for the pigs’ use); the reason for the pigs’ moving into farmhouse (they are secretly learning to acquire human habits); the strange negotiations with Foxwood and Pinchfield Farms (Napoleon attempts to deal with humans on terms advantageous to him).

CRITICAL OVERVIEW POLITICAL MEANING The political message of Animal Farm is inspired by the events of the Russian (Bolshevik) Revolution (1917–21), when Russian peasants overthrew the monarchy in favor of socialism, a political system in which land, business, property, and capital are owned by the community as a whole. In Animal Farm, Orwell (a Socialist) shows the animals’ efforts to overthrow human dictatorship and to establish a socialist community in which everyone contributes to the common gain. During the course of the novel, Napoleon takes control, moves socialism in the direction of communism (Stalinism), a political system in which all economic and social activity is controlled by a “totalitarian” state (dictatorship) dominated by a single political group or party that keeps itself in power. Orwell’s intent in writing this fable was to destroy the Soviet (communist) myth of the perfect society and to restore genuine socialist principles. He wanted to show how the original intentions of revolution have all too often been corrupted and perverted by one person or group who, for selfish reasons, seizes power, exploits people, and eliminates all opposition.

The causes were complex - and distressingly simple - and the outcome was decisive. More than any other event in our nation's history, the Civil War set the direction for America's future. During the war almost 3 million Americans fought across battlefields that had been quiet farms, dusty roads, and country crossroads. In the four years of courage and despair, these battlefields earned somber distinction as hollowed ground.

Koch Agriculture first branched out into the beef business, and it did so in a way that gave it control from the ranch to the butcher’s counter. Koch bought cattle feedlots. Then it developed its own retail brand of beef called Spring Creek Ranch. Dean Watson oversaw a team that worked to develop a system of “identity preservation” that would allow the company to track each cow during its lifespan, allowing it over time to select which cattle had the best-tasting meat. Koch held blind taste tests of the beef it raised. Watson claimed to win nine out of ten times. Then Koch studied the grain and feed industries that supplied its feedlots. Watson worked with experts to study European farming methods because wheat farmers in Ukraine were far better at raising more grain on each acre of land than American farmers were. The Europeans had less acreage to work with, forcing them to be more efficient, and Koch learned how to replicate their methods. Koch bought a stake in a genetic engineering company to breed superyielding corn. Koch Agriculture extended into the milling and flour businesses as well. It experimented with building “micro” mills that would be nimbler than the giant mills operated by Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill. Koch worked with a start-up company that developed a “pixie dust” spray preservative that could be applied to pizza crusts, making crusts that did not need to be refrigerated. It experimented with making ethanol gasoline and corn oil. There were more abstract initiatives. Koch launched an effort to sell rain insurance to farmers who had no way to offset the risk of heavy rains. To do that, Koch hired a team of PhD statisticians to write formulas that correlated corn harvests with rain events, figuring out what a rain insurance policy should cost. At the same time, Koch’s commodity traders were buying contracts for corn and soybeans, learning more every day about those markets.

The Zhou Dynasty was the longest-lived in Chinese history, spanning eight hundred years. During the Zhou period, the importance of bronze was increased, causing this era to be considered the height of the Bronze Age in China. The Zhou were the first to give a name to the Mandate of Heaven, and in order to legitimize their own position, retroactively applied the term to the Xia and Shang. Under the Zhou, China entered a period of feudalism, which is a system of power and wealth based on land ownership. This period is analogous to the Middle Ages in Europe when a similar system was in use. It was during the Zhou Dynasty that some of China’s most influential thinkers lived, including Confucius, Lao tzu, and Sun tzu. The Zhou also standardized written language into a shape similar to its modern form. In addition, the Zhou began using reservoirs as a source of crop irrigation, meaning that farming could be moved inland from flowing water sources, helping to alleviate the problem of flooding. Historians consider the Zhou Dynasty to be the peak of classical Chinese civilization, thanks to contributions in so many fields.

During Norman and Plantagenet days the English kings did not have large standing armies. The country was divided into wide tracts held by the barons, who were expected to join the king with all their dependents, armed and ready, in the event of war. There would have been small advantage in having standing armies because of the bad roads and the scarcity of bridges. The Scots could come down over the border and create havoc in the north, or the Welsh could issue out from their mountains and harry the western counties, and vanish into thin air, before the king with his trained troops could get to the scene of action. It was necessary, therefore, to maintain forces in the exposed areas which would always be ready to repel attack. This was done by a system of “farming out” the defense of the north and the west to certain great families. Whole counties were turned over to them, on their guarantee to maintain the safety of the borders.