“
Along with the standard computer warranty agreement which said that if the machine 1) didn't work, 2) didn't do what the expensive advertisements said, 3) electrocuted the immediate neighborhood, 4) and in fact failed entirely to be inside the expensive box when you opened it, this was expressly, absolutely, implicitly and in no event the fault or responsibility of the manufacturer, that the purchaser should consider himself lucky to be allowed to give his money to the manufacturer, and that any attempt to treat what had just been paid for as the purchaser's own property would result in the attentions of serious men with menacing briefcases and very thin watches. Crowley had been extremely impressed with the warranties offered by the computer industry, and had in fact sent a bundle Below to the department that drew up the Immortal Soul agreements, with a yellow memo form attached just saying: 'Learn, guys...
”
”
Neil Gaiman (Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch)
“
Every last minute of my life has been preordained and I'm sick and tired of it.
How this feels is I'm just another task in God's daily planner: the Italian Renaissance penciled in for right after the Dark Ages.
...
The Information Age is scheduled immediately after the Industrial Revolution. Then the Postmodern Era, then the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Famine. Check. Pestilence. Check. War. Check. Death. Check. And between the big events, the earthquakes and the tidal waves, God's got me squeezed in for a cameo appearance. Then maybe in thirty years, or maybe next year, God's daily planner has me finished.
”
”
Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor)
“
Colonialism hardly ever exploits the whole of a country. It contents itself with bringing to light the natural resources, which it extracts, and exports to meet the needs of the mother country's industries, thereby allowing certain sectors of the colony to become relatively rich. But the rest of the colony follows its path of under-development and poverty, or at all events sinks into it more deeply.
”
”
Frantz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth)
“
At its best fashion is a game. But for women it's a compulsory game, like net ball, and you can't get out of it by faking your period. I know I have tried. And so for a woman every outfit is a hopeful spell, cast to influence the outcome of the day. An act of trying to predict your fate, like looking at your horoscope. No wonder there are so many fashion magazines. No wonder the fashion industry is worth an estimated 900 billion dollars a year. No wonder every woman's first thought is, for nearly every event in her life, be it work, snow or birth. The semi-despairing cry of "but what will I wear?" Because when a woman says I have nothing to wear, what she really means is there is nothing here for who I am supposed to be today.
”
”
Caitlin Moran (How to Be a Woman)
“
CARL SAGAN SAID that if you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. When he says “from scratch,” he means from
nothing. He means from a time before the world even existed. If you want to make an apple pie from nothing at all, you have to start with the Big Bang and expanding universes, neutrons, ions, atoms, black holes, suns, moons, ocean tides, the Milky Way, Earth, evolution, dinosaurs, extinction- level events, platypuses,
Homo erectus, Cro- Magnon man, etc. You have to start at the beginning. You must invent fire. You need water and fertile soil and seeds. You need cows and people to milk them and more people to churn that milk into butter. You need wheat and sugar cane and apple trees. You need chemistry and biology. For a really good apple pie, you need the arts. For an apple pie that can last for generations, you need the printing press and the Industrial Revolution and maybe even a poem.To make a thing as simple as an apple pie, you have to create the whole wide world.
”
”
Nicola Yoon (The Sun Is Also a Star)
“
We cultivate refinement without extravagance and knowledge without effeminacy; wealth we employ more for use than for show, and place the real disgrace of poverty not in owning to the fact but in declining the struggle against it. Our public men have, besides politics, their private affairs to attend to, and our ordinary citizens, though occupied with the pursuits of industry, are still fair judges of public matters; for, unlike any other nation, regarding him who takes no part in these duties not as unambitious but as useless, we Athenians are able to judge at all events if we cannot originate, and instead of looking on discussion as a stumbling-block in the way of action, we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all.
”
”
Pericles
“
When you realize that the Volkswagen sign-and-drive “event” is code for “we’re making the experience of buying a car slightly less miserable than usual,” you’ll start to appreciate just how low the automotive industry has sunk.
”
”
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: Inventing the Future)
“
The Necrotelicomnicon was written by a Klatchian necromancer known to the world as Achmed the Mad, although he preferred to be called Achmed the I Just Get These Headaches. It is said that the book was written in one day after Achmed drank too much of the strange thick Klatchian coffee which doesn't just sober you up, but takes you through sobriety and out the other side, so that you glimpse the real universe beyond the clouds of warm self-delusion that sapient life usually generates around itself to stop it turning into a nutcake. Little is known about his life prior to this event, because the page headed 'About The Author' spontaneously combusted shortly after his death. However, a section headed 'Other Books By the Same Author' indicates that his previous published work was Achmed the I Just Get These Headaches's Book of Humorous Cat Stories, which might explain a lot.
”
”
Terry Pratchett (Moving Pictures (Discworld, #10; Industrial Revolution, #1))
“
The decay of the family in quite recent times is undoubtedly to be attributed in the main to the industrial revolution, but it had already begun before that event, and its beginnings were inspired by individualistic theory. Young
”
”
Bertrand Russell (Marriage and Morals (Routledge Classics))
“
The more competitors perceive the prospect of dogged, bitter retaliation to the point of severely hurting everyone’s profits, the less likely they are of initiating the chain of events in the first place. This is analogous to the situation in which the robber says, “stick ’em up, I want your money,” and the deranged-looking victim says “If you take it, I will explode this bomb and kill us both!
”
”
Michael E. Porter (Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors)
“
Eric Harris wanted a prom date. Eric was a senior, about to leave Columbine High School forever. He was not about to be left out of the prime social event of his life. He really wanted a date. Dates were not generally a problem. Eric was a brain, but an uncommon subcategory: cool brain. He smoked, he drank, he dated. He got invited to parties. He got high. He worked his look hard: military chic hair— short and spiked with plenty of product—plus black T-shirts and baggy cargo pants. He blasted hard-core German industrial rock from his Honda. He enjoyed firing off bottle rockets and road-tripping to Wyoming to replenish the stash. He broke the rules, tagged himself with the nickname Reb, but did his homework and earned himself a slew of A’s. He shot cool videos and got them airplay on the closed-circuit system at school. And he got chicks. Lots and lots of chicks. On the ultimate high school scorecard, Eric outscored much of the football team. He was a little charmer. He walked right up to hotties at the mall. He won them over with quick wit, dazzling dimples, and a disarming smile.
”
”
Dave Cullen (Columbine)
“
There is a saturation of books on Amazon due to a sudden get-rich-quick surge in "everyone can be authors" seminars similar to the house flipping ones in the early 2000s which led to the housing bubble and an economic slowdown in the U.S. To distinguish quality books from those get-rich-quick ones, look at the author's track record - worldwide recognition as books that garnered credible awards, authors who speak at book industry events, authors who speak at schools, authors whose books are reference materials and reading sources at school and libraries. Get-rich books have a system to get over 500 reviews quickly, manipulates the Kindle Unlimited algorithm, and encourage collusion in the marketplace to knock out rivals. Be wary of trolls who are utilized to knock down the rankings of rival's books too. Once people have heard there is money to be made as a self-published author, just like house flipping, a cottage industry has risen to take advantage of it and turn book publishing into a get rich scheme, which is a shame for all the book publishers and authors, like me, who had published for the love of books, to write to help society, and for the love of literature. Kailin Gow, Parents and Books
”
”
Kailin Gow
“
We are sleepwalking into a mass extinction event – the sixth in our planet’s history, and the first to be caused by human economic activity. The rate of extinction is now 1,000 times faster than before the Industrial Revolution.
”
”
Jason Hickel (Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World)
“
I was tired of working in the lumber industry,” Phil said. “I was sure I could find a better job, and look at me now—cook on a dilapidated submarine. Life keeps on getting better and better.” “You always were an optimist,” Klaus said.
”
”
Lemony Snicket (The Grim Grotto (A Series of Unfortunate Events, #11))
“
Until now, I've been writing about "now" as if it were literally an instant of time, but of course human faculties are not infinitely precise. It is simplistic to suppose that physical events and mental events march along exactly in step, with the stream of "actual moments" in the outside world and the stream of conscious awareness of them perfectly synchronized. The cinema industry depends on the phenomenon that what seems to us a movie is really a succession of still pictures, running at twenty-five [sic] frames per second. We don't notice the joins. Evidently the "now" of our conscious awareness stretches over at least 1/25 of a second.
In fact, psychologists are convinced it can last a lot longer than that. Take he familiar "tick-tock" of the clock. Well, the clock doesn't go "tick-tock" at all; it goes "tick-tick," every tick producing the same sound. It's just that our consciousness runs two successive ticks into a singe "tick-tock" experience—but only if the duration between ticks is less than about three seconds. A really bug pendulum clock just goes "tock . . . tock . . . tock," whereas a bedside clock chatters away: "ticktockticktock..." Two to three seconds seems to be the duration over which our minds integrate sense data into a unitary experience, a fact reflected in the structure of human music and poetry.
”
”
Paul C.W. Davies (About Time: Einstein's Unfinished Revolution)
“
Your work isn’t simply your job description, title, or industry. It’s when you wake up, what you wear, and your first 30 minutes in the office. It’s what your office is or is not, the five people you are physically closest to, and whether you can get up and walk or have to sit all day. It’s whether you fear for your job due to changing laws or innovation each day. It’s how it fits with your family and all the people and events that matter most. It’s the person you are when you come home.
”
”
Evan Thomsen (Don’t Chase The Dream Job, Build It: The unconventional guide to inventing your career and getting any job you want)
“
The minute you begin to feel yourself ‘working hard’ as opposed to ‘playing a challenging game’ it’s time to take a break or get around some new people. Disappear for a week, get some sun, read up on your favourite role models, explore fresh ideas and spend time with people who are ‘in their zone’. Attend a new event, read a new book and have a few new conversations.
”
”
Daniel Priestley (Key Person of Influence (Revised Edition): The Five-Step Method to become one of the most highly valued and highly paid people in your industry)
“
In a fascinating study, Barrett (1999) demonstrated that children as young as three
years of age have a sophisticated cognitive understanding of predator-prey encounters. Children from both an industrialized culture and a traditional hunter-horticulturalist culture were
able to spontaneously describe the flow of events in a predator-prey encounter in an ecologically accurate way. Moreover, they understood that after a lion kills a prey, the prey is no longer alive, can no longer eat, and can no longer run and that the dead state is permanent.
This sophisticated understanding of death from encounters with predators appears to be developed by age three to four.
”
”
David M. Buss (Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind)
“
The emergence of China is the most dramatic event in economic history. We are living in an age of convergence no less dramatic than the age of divergence brought about by European colonialism and the Industrial Revolution. The downward pressure on the incomes of the West’s middle classes in the coming years will be relentless.
”
”
Edward Luce (The Retreat of Western Liberalism)
“
The gambling industry actually generates more income than the music, sports, and movie industries combined.
”
”
William D. Willis (American History: US History: An Overview of the Most Important People & Events. The History of United States: From Indians, to "Contemporary" History ... Native Americans, Indians, New York Book 1))
“
Humanity will one day solemnly recall the events that initiated the dismantlement of the industrial society.
”
”
Nicolás Gómez Dávila
“
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))
“
We think of and talk about the Industrial Revolution as a singular event, but in reality, it spanned decades. It wasn’t really a revolution but a gradual evolution with revolutionary implications.
”
”
Alex Moazed (Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy)
“
If a determined, disciplined gang of statists were to make an assault on the crumbling remnants of a mixed economy, boldly and explicitly proclaiming the collectivist tenets which the country had accepted by tacit default—what resistance would they encounter? The dispirited, demoralized, embittered majority would remain lethargically indifferent to any public event. And many would support the gang, at first, moved by a desperate, incoherent frustration, by a need to protest, not knowing fully against what, by a blind desire to strike out somehow at the suffocating hopelessness of the status quo.
”
”
Ayn Rand (The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution)
“
if you have ever wondered why horse-drawn carriages and dogsleds are far more common modes of travel than sheep-dragged sleighs, it is because sheep are not well-suited for employment in the transportation industry.
”
”
Lemony Snicket (The End (A Series of Unfortunate Events, #13))
“
Johannes Gutenberg’s invention in 1440 made information available to the masses, and the explosion of ideas it produced had unintended consequences and unpredictable effects. It was a spark for the Industrial Revolution in 1775,1 a tipping point in which civilization suddenly went from having made almost no scientific or economic progress for most of its existence to the exponential rates of growth and change that are familiar to us today. It set in motion the events that would produce the European Enlightenment and the founding of the American Republic. But the printing press would first produce something else: hundreds of years of holy war. As mankind came to believe it could predict its fate and choose its destiny, the bloodiest epoch in human history followed.2
”
”
Nate Silver (The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't)
“
SINCE the start of the industrial revolution, humans have burned through enough fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—to add some 365 billion metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere. Deforestation has contributed another 180 billion tons. Each year, we throw up another nine billion tons or so, an amount that’s been increasing by as much as six percent annually. As a result of all this, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air today—a little over four hundred parts per million—is higher than at any other point in the last eight hundred thousand years. Quite probably it is higher than at any point in the last several million years. If current trends continue, CO2 concentrations will top five hundred parts per million, roughly double the levels they were in preindustrial days, by 2050. It is expected that such an increase will produce an eventual average global temperature rise of between three and a half and seven degrees Fahrenheit, and this will, in turn, trigger a variety of world-altering events, including the disappearance of most remaining glaciers, the inundation of low-lying islands and coastal cities, and the melting of the Arctic ice cap. But this is only half the story.
”
”
Elizabeth Kolbert (The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History)
“
In the 1970s, when Norman Sunshine won an Emmy for the graphics and title design he had created for one of Alan Shayne’s television productions, “Alan and I agreed it was not a good idea for us to be seen together at an industry event,” he remembers. “Alan, after all, was one of the very few homosexuals who had such a powerful, high profile job, and who lived openly with a man. Homophobia had its adherents and some ruthless climber up the executive ladder would certainly love an opportunity to use it… 'Better to be seen with a woman,’ we were advised by a very trusted friend, ‘Makes everyone more comfortable.
”
”
Alan Shayne (Double Life: The Story of a Fifty Year Marriage)
“
The African Robotics Network (AFRON) offers a good model. A community of individuals and institutions, AFRON hosts events and projects to boost robotics-related education, research, and industry on the continent. Through initiatives like its 10 Dollar Robot Challenge, AFRON encourages the development of extremely low-cost robotics education.
”
”
Alec J. Ross (The Industries of the Future)
“
Napoleon represented the last battle of revolutionary terror against the bourgeois society which had been proclaimed by this same Revolution, and against its policy. Napoleon, of course, already discerned the essence of the modern state; he understood that it is based on the unhampered development of bourgeois society, on the free movement of private interest, etc. He decided to recognise and protect this basis. He was no terrorist with his head in the clouds. Yet at the same time he still regarded the state as an end in itself and civil life only as a treasurer and his subordinate which must have no will of its own. He perfected the Terror by substituting permanent war for permanent revolution. He fed the egoism of the French nation to complete satiety but demanded also the sacrifice of bourgeois business, enjoyments, wealth, etc., whenever this was required by the political aim of conquest. If he despotically suppressed the liberalism of bourgeois society — the political idealism of its daily practice — he showed no more consideration for its essential material interests, trade and industry, whenever they conflicted with his political interests. His scorn of industrial hommes d'affaires was the complement to his scorn of ideologists. In his home policy, too, he combated bourgeois society as the opponent of the state which in his own person he still held to be an absolute aim in itself. Thus he declared in the State Council that he would not suffer the owner of extensive estates to cultivate them or not as he pleased. Thus, too, he conceived the plan of subordinating trade to the state by appropriation of roulage [road haulage]. French businessmen took steps to anticipate the event that first shook Napoleon’s power. Paris exchange- brokers forced him by means of an artificially created famine to delay the opening of the Russian campaign by nearly two months and thus to launch it too late in the year.
”
”
Karl Marx (The Holy Family)
“
Before you arrive at any networking event, read the industry trade news beforehand Better still, read the trades on a regular basis, Be prepared to discuss the news or ask a question about what you've read. If you're meeting with a specific person, be sure to have checked their Twitter, LinkedIn, and blogs beforehand. This kind of preparation will give you confidence going into a meeting.
”
”
Fran Hauser (The Myth of the Nice Girl: Achieving a Career You Love Without Becoming a Person You Hate)
“
Today, reading his reactions to events in the war and the immediate years after the war, my first thought is: '0 how I wish Orwell were still alive, so that I could read his comments on contemporary events.' For example, last year, our mutual friend, Geoffrey Gorer, sent out a questionnaire, asking people to identify their social class—I think he gave them about five options. Almost all his respondents, he tells me, identified themselves correctly. What would he say to that? What would he say about hippie communes, student demonstrations, drugs, trades unions? Would he still be as hopeful about the social benefits of nationalised industries? Would he still call for a higher birth-rate? What he would say, I have no idea : I am only certain that he would be worth listening to.
”
”
W.H. Auden
“
What human language captures the dislocation, the acute insufficiency of being in the presence of the superorganism, the sinking, shrinking feeling at this display of industrial steel and light and might? It was as if nothing I’d ever done in my life prior to this counted. As if my past life was revealed to be a waste, a gesture in slow motion, because what I considered scarce and precious was in fact plentiful and cheap, and what I counted as rapid progress turned out to be glacially slow. The observer, that old record keeper, the chronicler of events, made his appearance in that taxi. The hands of my clock turned elastic while I imprinted these feelings in memory. You must remember this. It was all I had, all I’ve ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive. Memory.
”
”
Abraham Verghese (Cutting for Stone)
“
O how I wish Orwell were still alive, so that I could read his comments on contemporary events. [...] What would he say about hippie communes, student demonstrations, drugs, trades unions? Would he still be as hopeful about the social benefits of nationalised industries? Would he still call for a higher birth-rate? What he would say, I have no idea: I am only certain that he would be worth listening to.
”
”
W.H. Auden
“
The main asset of a modern CEO is speed. Today, all industries move and change with the speed of a racing car. This is not only due to the development of technologies but to geopolitical events as well. Right now, the economic situation in the country is similar to that of a movie that is played in fast-forward mode. In conditions of transformation of global and internal markets, the management approach itself changes.
”
”
Vladislav Soloviev (blogger)
“
by an active participant in political campaigns against the excesses of the mining industry, rather than by a neutral observer. Instead of jeopardizing access to key informants and events, engagement with these issues has provided me with an insider perspective on the interactions between corporations and their critics. It has offered new sites for ethnographic observation, new questions for research, and new perspectives on the corporation.
”
”
Stuart Kirsch (Mining Capitalism: The Relationship between Corporations and Their Critics)
“
while a man should attend closely to life, he should not attend too closely to the clock. A student of both the Stoics and Montaigne, the Count’s father believed that our Creator had set aside the morning hours for industry. That is, if a man woke no later than six, engaged in a light repast, and then applied himself without interruption, by the hour of noon he should have accomplished a full day’s labor. Thus, in his father’s view, the toll of twelve was a moment of reckoning. When the noon bell sounded, the diligent man could take pride in having made good use of the morning and sit down to his lunch with a clear conscience. But when it sounded for the frivolous man—the man who had squandered his morning in bed, or on breakfast with three papers, or on idle chatter in the sitting room—he had no choice but to ask for his Lord’s forgiveness. In the afternoon, the Count’s father believed that a man should take care not to live by the watch in his waistcoat—marking the minutes as if the events of one’s life were stations on a railway line. Rather, having been suitably industrious before lunch, he should spend his afternoon in wise liberty. That is, he should walk among the willows, read a timeless text, converse with a friend beneath the pergola, or reflect before the fire—engaging in those endeavors that have no appointed hour, and that dictate their own beginnings and ends.
”
”
Amor Towles (A Gentleman in Moscow)
“
With a little industry and application, anyone who is willing to extricate himself from the system of shared ideology and propaganda will readily see through the modes of distortion developed by substantial segments of the intelligentsia. Everybody is capable of doing that. If such analysis is often carried out poorly, that is because, quite commonly, social and political analysis is produced to defend special interests rather than to account for the actual events.
”
”
Noam Chomsky (On Language: Chomsky's Classic Works Language and Responsibility and Reflections on Language in One Volume)
“
prevailing event today is the loss of individuation qua pauperization (cognitive impoverishment) and the growth of information to the detriment of knowledge. It is what has been analyzed, for example, as “cognitive overflow syndrome,” which, rather than facilitating decision-making (the synthesis that must follow from the analytic acquisition of knowledge), paralyzes it: information is not transformed into knowledge or savoir-faire but into an accumulation of hard data.
”
”
Bernard Stiegler (The Re-Enchantment of the World: The Value of Spirit Against Industrial Populism (Philosophy, Aesthetics and Cultural Theory))
“
that the power of technology will keep increasing, while the price for this power will keep decreasing. With Moore’s Law proving to be a reality, it is easier to understand the recent price increases of stocks in the technology sector. Tacking onto this price increase is the realization that perhaps never before have we had this confluence of events: a technological revolution that is industrial revolution sized, and a new type of stock market to trade the stocks, which is the Nasdaq market. This is a major story. This book covers
”
”
Max Isaacman (The Nasdaq Investor)
“
Edison pressed on and designed a range of concrete furnishings—bureaus, cupboards, chairs, even a concrete piano—to go with his concrete houses. He promised that soon he would offer, for just $5, a double bed that would never wear out. The entire range was to be unveiled at a cement industry show in New York in 1912. In the event, when the show opened, the Edison stand was bare. No one from the Edison company ever offered an explanation. It was the last anyone ever heard of concrete furniture. As far as is known, Edison never discussed the matter. A
”
”
Bill Bryson (At Home: A Short History of Private Life)
“
The World is currently facing a confluence of mounting shortages in three commodities essential to the continuance of human life on this planet: water, energy, and food. Those three elements combine into something much greater than the sum of its parts, a looming global disaster by 2030. By 2030 the demand for water will increase by 30 percent, while demands for both energy and food will shoot up 50 percent. All this will be driven by a global population increase to about 8 billion people, placing tremendous stress on our highly industrialized global food system.
”
”
John L. Casti (X-Events: The Collapse of Everything)
“
SUSAN’S STORY OF cascading loss and downward mobility has been replicated millions of times across the American landscape due to the financial industry’s actions in the 2000s. While the country’s GDP and employment numbers rebounded before the pandemic struck another blow, the damage at the household level has been permanent. Of families who lost their houses through dire events such as job loss or foreclosure, over two-thirds will probably never own a home again. Because of our globally interconnected economy, the Great Recession altered lives in every country in the world. And all of it was preventable, if only we had paid attention earlier to the financial fires burning through Black and brown communities across the nation. Instead, the predatory practices were allowed to continue until the disaster had engulfed white communities, too—and only then, far too late, was it recognized as an emergency. There is no question that the financial crisis hurt people of color first and worst. And yet the majority of the people it damaged were white. This is the dynamic we’ve seen over and over again throughout our country’s history,
”
”
Heather McGhee (The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (One World Essentials))
“
Ever since I was in Amherst College I have remembered how Garman told his class in philosophy that if they would go along with events and have the courage and industry to hold to the main stream, without being washed ashore by the immaterial cross currents, they would someday be men of power. He meant that we should try to guide ourselves by general principles and not get lost in particulars. That may sound like mysticism, but it is only the mysticism that envelopes every great truth. One of the greatest mysteries in the world is the success that lies in conscientious work.
”
”
Calvin Coolidge (Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge)
“
In the 1970s, when Norman Sunshine won an Emmy for the graphics and title design he had created for one of Alan Shayne’s television productions, “Alan and I agreed it was not a good idea for us to be seen together at an industry event,” he remembers. “Alan, after all, was one of the very few homosexuals who had such a powerful, high profile job, and who lived openly with a man. Homophobia had its adherents and some ruthless climber up the executive ladder would certainly love an opportunity to use it… 'Better to be seen with a woman,’ we were advised by a very trusted friend, ‘Makes everyone more comfortable.
”
”
Norman Sunshine (Double Life: The Story of a Fifty Year Marriage)
“
Rebecca,” she says coolly, grasping my hand. “You’re on Successful Saving, aren’t you?” “That’s right,” I say, equally coolly. “It’s very good of you to come today,” says Alicia. “I know you journalists are terribly busy.” “No problem,” I say. “We like to attend as many press conferences as we can. Keep up with industry events.” I feel pleased with my response. I’m almost fooling myself. Alicia nods seriously, as though everything I say is incredibly important to her. “So, tell me, Rebecca. What do you think about today’s news?” She gestures to the FT under my arm. “Quite a surprise, didn’t you think?” Oh God. What’s she talking about? “It’s certainly interesting,” I say, still smiling, playing for time. I glance around the room for a clue, but there’s nothing. What’s she talking about? Have interest rates gone up or something? “I have to say, I think it’s bad news for the industry,” says Alicia earnestly. “But of course, you must have your own views.” She’s looking at me, waiting for an answer. I can feel my cheeks flaming bright red. How can I get out of this? After this, I promise myself, I’m going to read the papers every day. I’m never going to be caught out like this again. “I agree with you,” I say eventually. “I think it’s very bad news.” My voice feels strangled. I take a quick swig of champagne and pray for an earthquake.
”
”
Sophie Kinsella (Confessions of a Shopaholic (Shopaholic, #1))
“
- Family
Tell me about your family.
Does everyone live in the area?
What do you like best about being a father/mother/son/aunt, etc.?
-Occupation
What got you into your current job?
How did you come up with that idea?
What are some of the toughest challenges in your job?
If you could change one thing about your job, what would it be?
How has the Internet impacted your business/industry?
- Recreation
What do you do for fitness?
What kinds of things does your family do for fun?
How do you spend your leisure time?
What’s been your favorite vacation?
- Miscellaneous
Have you seen any good movies lately?
What do you think about ————— [news event]?
Are you reading anything you really enjoy?
”
”
Debra Fine (The Fine Art of Small Talk: How to Start a Conversation, Keep It Going, Build Networking Skills and Leave a Positive Impression!)
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This is not a healthy outlook for America. We are also facing the same combination of destabilizing events that took place in Imperial Russia before the Bolshevik Revolution, such as: 1. A crisis in government policies to improve deteriorating industry and transportation. (Yes ) 2. Difficulty in providing basic provisions to the citizenry. (Not yet) 3. A 36% decrease in gross industrial production. (Yes) 4. 50% of enterprises closing major industrial centers of manufacturing. (Almost there) 5. Sharp increase in the cost of living. (Yes) 6. Real wages fell 50% in the past 4 years. (Yes) 7. National debt rose 400%. (Yes) 8. Debt to foreign governments (like China and Saudi Arabia) exceeds 20%. (Yes) 9. Actual history becomes illegal. (Almost there)
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Arturo Raymond (President Zero: Obama's Ineptopia)
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Two years later, DeepMind engineers used what they had learned from game playing to solve an economic problem of vital interest: How should Google optimize the management of its computer servers? The artificial neural network remained similar; the only things that changed were the inputs (date, time, weather, international events, search requests, number of people connected to each server, etc.), the outputs (turn on or off this or that server on various continents), and the reward function (consume less energy). The result was an instant drop in power consumption. Google reduced its energy bill by up to 40 percent and saved tens of millions of dollars—even after myriad specialized engineers had already tried to optimize those very servers. Artificial intelligence has truly reached levels of success that can turn whole industries upside down.
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Stanislas Dehaene (How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine . . . for Now)
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The Proposal The diamond industry has pulled a fast one over on us. It has convinced us that there is no way to make public a lifetime commitment to another person without a very large, sparkly rock on a very slim band. This is, of course, nonsense. Often wedding books have engagement chapters that read like diamond-buying guides. But the truth is, the way to get engaged is for the two of you to decide that you want to get married. So the next time someone tries to imply that you are not engaged because you don’t have a dramatic enough engagement story or a ring, firmly say, “You know, I like to think of my partner as my rock,” and slowly raise your eyebrow. The modern wedding industry—along with a fair share of romantic comedies—has set a pretty high bar for proposals. We think they need to be elaborate and surprising. But they don’t. A proposal should be: • A decision to get married • Romantic (because you decide to spend the rest of your lives together, not necessarily because of its elaborate nature) • Possibly mutual • Possibly discussed in advance • Possibly instigated by you • Not used to judge the state of your relationship • An event that may be followed by the not-at-all-romantic kind of sobbing, because you realize your life is changing forever It’s exciting to decide to get married. And scary. But the moment of proposal is just that: a moment. It moves you to the next step of the process; it’s not the be-all, end-all. So maybe you have a fancy candlelight dinner followed by parachutists delivering you a pear-shaped, seven-carat diamond. Or maybe you decide to get married one Sunday morning over the newspaper and a cup of coffee. Either way is fine. The point is that you decided to spend your life with someone you love.
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Meg Keene (A Practical Wedding: Creative Ideas for Planning a Beautiful, Affordable, and Meaningful Celebration)
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As events developed, the debate about jobs and energy extraction in general became more divisive. Those at one extreme embraced the industry as an expression of old-fashioned free enterprise. It offered work that built character and brought deserving rewards for those with initiative, whether they be roughnecks working twelve-hour shifts, investors staking their capital, or researchers staking their reputation on the next big discovery. At the other end of the spectrum were those who saw the industry as a relic of grandfather clauses and cronyism that dated to a period of predatory exploitation, when fantastical deals were pitched by door-to-door peddlers, manufacturing waste was buried in lagoons on private property, and unions were nonexistent. The middle ground was occupied by an untold number of consumers used to cheap plentiful energy, and property owners, who had their worries but also were able to calculate how much a mineral rights lease might be worth.
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Tom Wilber (Under the Surface: Fracking, Fortunes, and the Fate of the Marcellus Shale)
“
But just then, as if to avoid a certain awkwardness, Seaman began to talk not about Newell but about Newell’s mother, Anne Jordan Newell. He described her appearance (pleasing), her work (she had a job at a factory that made irrigation systems), her faith (she went to church every Sunday), her industriousness (she kept the house as neat as a pin), her kindness (she always had a smile for everyone), her common sense (she gave good advice, wise advice, without forcing it on anyone). A mother is a precious thing, concluded Seaman. Marius and I founded the Panthers. We worked whatever jobs we could get and we bought shotguns and handguns for the people’s self-defense. But a mother is worth more than the Black Revolution. That I can promise you. In my long and eventful life, I’ve seen many things. I was in Algeria and I was in China and in several prisons in the United States. A mother is a precious thing. This I say here and I’ll say anywhere, anytime, he said in a hoarse voice.
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Roberto Bolaño (2666)
“
Yet, we are not Skinner's rats. Even Skinner's rats were not Skinner's rats: the patterns of addictive behavior displayed by rats in the Skinner Box were only displayed by rats in isolation, outside of their normal sociable habitat. For human beings, addictions have subjective meanings, as does depression. Marcus Gilroy-Ware's study of social media suggests that what we encounter in our feeds is hedonic stimulation, various moods and sources of arousal- from outrage porn to food porn to porn- which enable us to manage our emotions. In addition that, however, it's also true that we can become attached to the miseries of online life, a state of perpetual outrage and antagonism. There is a sense in which our online avatar resembles a 'virtual tooth' in the sense described by the German surrealist artist Hans Bellmer. In the grip of a toothache, a common reflex is to make a fist so tight that the fingernails bite into the skin. This 'confuses' and 'bisects' the pain by creating a 'virtual center of excitation,' a virtual tooth that seems to draw blood and nervous energy away from the real center of pain.
If we are in pain, this suggests, self-harming can be a way of displacing it so that it appears lessened- event though the pain hasn't really been reduced, and we still have a toothache. So if we get hooked on a machine that purports to tell us, among other things, how other people see us- or a version of ourselves, a delegated online image- that suggests something has already gone wrong in our relationships with others. The global rise in depression- currently the world's most widespread illness, having risen some 18 per cent since 2005- is worsened for many people by the social industry. There is a particularly strong correlation between depression and the use of Instagram among young people. But social industry platforms didn't invent depression; they exploited it. And to loosen their grip, one would have to explore what has gone wrong elsewhere.
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Richard Seymour (The Twittering Machine)
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Dr. Kary Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for inventing PCR, stated publicly numerous times that his invention should never be used for the diagnosis of infectious diseases. In July of 1997, during an event called Corporate Greed and AIDS in Santa Monica CA, Dr. Mullis explained on video, “With PCR you can find almost anything in anybody. It starts making you believe in the sort of Buddhist notion that everything is contained in everything else, right? I mean, because if you can model amplify one single molecule up to something that you can really measure, which PCR can do, then there’s just very few molecules that you don’t have at least one single one of them in your body. Okay? So that could be thought of as a misuse of it, just to claim that it’s meaningful.” Mikki explained, “The major issue with PCR is that it’s easily manipulated. It functions through a cyclical process whereby each revolution amplifies magnification. On a molecular level, most of us already have trace amounts of genetic fragments similar to coronavirus within us. By simply over-cycling the process, a negative result can be flipped to a positive. Governing bodies such as the CDC and the WHO can control the number of cases by simply advising the medical industry to increase or decrease the cycle threshold (CT).” In August of 2020, the New York Times reported that “a CT beyond 34 revolutions very rarely detect live virus, but most often, dead nucleotides that are not even contagious. In compliance with guidance from the CDC and the WHO, many top US labs have been conducting tests at cycle thresholds of 40 or more. NYT examined data from Massachusetts, New York, and Nevada and determined that up to 90 percent of the individuals who tested positive carried barely any virus.”17 90 percent! In May of 2021, CDC changed the PCR cycle threshold from 40 to 28 or lower for those who have been vaccinated. This one adjustment of the numbers allowed the vaccine pushers to praise the vaccines as a big success.
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Mikki Willis (Plandemic: Fear Is the Virus. Truth Is the Cure.)
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Islamophobia” as a weapon of jihad The charge of “Islamophobia” is routinely used to shift attention away from jihad terrorists. After a rise in jihadist militancy and the arrest of eight people in Switzerland on suspicion of aiding suicide bombers in Saudi Arabia, some Muslims in Switzerland were in no mood to clean house: “As far as we’re concerned,” said Nadia Karmous, leader of a Muslim women’s group in Switzerland, “there is no rise in Islamism, but rather an increase in Islamophobia.”5 This pattern has recurred in recent years all over the world as “Islamophobia” has passed into the larger lexicon and become a self-perpetuating industry. In Western countries, “Islamophobia” has taken a place beside “racism,” “sexism,” and “homophobia.” The absurdity of all this was well illustrated by a recent incident in Britain: While a crew was filming the harassment of a Muslim for a movie about “Islamophobia,” two passing Brits, who didn’t realize the cameras were rolling, stopped to defend the person being assaulted. Yet neither the filmmakers nor the reporters covering these events seemed to realize that this was evidence that the British were not as violent and xenophobic as the film they were creating suggested.6 Historian Victor Davis Hanson has ably explained the dangerous shift of focus that “Islamophobia” entails: There really isn’t a phenomenon like “Islamophobia”—at least no more than there was a “Germanophobia” in hating Hitler or “Russophobia” in detesting Stalinism. Any unfairness or rudeness that accrues from the “security profiling” of Middle Eastern young males is dwarfed by efforts of Islamic fascists themselves—here in the U.S., in the UK, the Netherlands, France, Turkey, and Israel—to murder Westerners and blow up civilians. The real danger to thousands of innocents is not an occasional evangelical zealot or uncouth politician spouting off about Islam, but the deliberately orchestrated and very sick anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism that floods the airways worldwide, emanating from Iran, Lebanon, and Syria, to be sure, but also from our erstwhile “allies” in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.7
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Robert Spencer (The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades))
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People, especially those in charge, rarely invite you into their offices and give freely of their time. Instead, you have to do something unique, compelling, even funny or a bit daring, to earn it. Even if you happen to be an exceptionally well-rounded person who possesses all of the scrappy qualities discussed so far, it’s still important to be prepared, dig deep, do the prep work, and think on your feet. Harry Gordon Selfridge, who founded the London-based department store Selfridges, knew the value of doing his homework. Selfridge, an American from Chicago, traveled to London in 1906 with the hope of building his “dream store.” He did just that in 1909, and more than a century later, his stores continue to serve customers in London, Manchester, and Birmingham. Selfridges’ success and staying power is rooted in the scrappy efforts of Harry Selfridge himself, a creative marketer who exhibited “a revolutionary understanding of publicity and the theatre of retail,” as he is described on the Selfridges’ Web site. His department store was known for creating events to attract special clientele, engaging shoppers in a way other retailers had never done before, catering to the holidays, adapting to cultural trends, and changing with the times and political movements such as the suffragists. Selfridge was noted to have said, “People will sit up and take notice of you if you will sit up and take notice of what makes them sit up and take notice.” How do you get people to take notice? How do you stand out in a positive way in order to make things happen? The curiosity and imagination Selfridge employed to successfully build his retail stores can be just as valuable for you to embrace in your circumstances. Perhaps you have landed a meeting, interview, or a quick coffee date with a key decision maker at a company that has sparked your interest. To maximize the impression you’re going to make, you have to know your audience. That means you must respectfully learn what you can about the person, their industry, or the culture of their organization. In fact, it pays to become familiar not only with the person’s current position but also their background, philosophies, triumphs, failures, and major breakthroughs. With that information in hand, you are less likely to waste the precious time you have and more likely to engage in genuine and meaningful conversation.
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Terri L. Sjodin (Scrappy: A Little Book About Choosing to Play Big)
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We already have eight hundred million people living in hunger—and population is growing by eighty million a year. Over a billion people are in poverty—and present industrial strategies are making them poorer, not richer. The percentage of old people will double by 2050—and already there aren’t enough young people to care for them. Cancer rates are projected to increase by seventy percent in the next fifteen years. Within two decades our oceans will contain more microplastics than fish. Fossil fuels will run out before the end of the century. Do you have an answer to those problems? Because I do. Robot farmers will increase food production twentyfold. Robot carers will give our seniors a dignified old age. Robot divers will clear up the mess humans have made of our seas. And so on, and so on—but every single step has to be costed and paid for by the profits of the last.” He paused for breath, then went on, “My vision is a society where autonomous, intelligent bots are as commonplace as computers are now. Think about that—how different our world could be. A world where disease, hunger, manufacturing, design, are all taken care of by AI. That’s the revolution we’re shooting for. The shopbots get us to the next level, that’s all. And you know what? This is not some binary choice between idealism or realism, because for some of us idealism is just long-range realism. This shit has to happen. And you need to ask yourself, do you want to be part of that change? Or do you want to stand on the sidelines and bitch about the details?” We had all heard this speech, or some version of it, either in our job interviews, or at company events, or in passionate late-night tirades. And on every single one of us it had had a deep and transformative effect. Most of us had come to Silicon Valley back in those heady days when it seemed a new generation finally had the tools and the intelligence to change the world. The hippies had tried and failed; the yuppies and bankers had had their turn. Now it was down to us techies. We were fired up, we were zealous, we felt the nobility of our calling…only to discover that the general public, and our backers along with them, were more interested in 140 characters, fitness trackers, and Grumpy Cat videos. The greatest, most powerful deep-learning computers in humanity’s existence were inside Google and Facebook—and all humanity had to show for it were adwords, sponsored links, and teenagers hooked on sending one another pictures of their genitals.
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J.P. Delaney (The Perfect Wife)
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Jesus himself remains an enigma. There have been interesting attempts to uncover the figure of the ‘historical’ Jesus, a project that has become something of a scholarly industry. But the fact remains that the only Jesus we really know is the Jesus described in the New Testament, which was not interested in scientifically objective history. There are no other contemporary accounts of his mission and death. We cannot even be certain why he was crucified. The gospel accounts indicate that he was thought to be the king of the Jews. He was said to have predicted the imminent arrival of the kingdom of heaven, but also made it clear that it was not of this world. In the literature of the Late Second Temple period, there had been hints that a few people were expecting a righteous king of the House of David to establish an eternal kingdom, and this idea seems to have become more popular during the tense years leading up to the war. Josephus, Tacitus and Suetonius all note the importance of revolutionary religiosity, both before and after the rebellion.2 There was now keen expectation in some circles of a meshiah (in Greek, christos), an ‘anointed’ king of the House of David, who would redeem Israel. We do not know whether Jesus claimed to be this messiah – the gospels are ambiguous on this point.3 Other people rather than Jesus himself may have made this claim on his behalf.4 But after his death some of his followers had seen him in visions that convinced them that he had been raised from the tomb – an event that heralded the general resurrection of all the righteous when God would inaugurate his rule on earth.5 Jesus and his disciples came from Galilee in northern Palestine. After his death they moved to Jerusalem, probably to be on hand when the kingdom arrived, since all the prophecies declared that the temple would be the pivot of the new world order.6 The leaders of their movement were known as ‘the Twelve’: in the kingdom, they would rule the twelve tribes of the reconstituted Israel.7 The members of the Jesus movement worshipped together every day in the temple,8 but they also met for communal meals, in which they affirmed their faith in the kingdom’s imminent arrival.9 They continued to live as devout, orthodox Jews. Like the Essenes, they had no private property, shared their goods equally, and dedicated their lives to the last days.10 It seems that Jesus had recommended voluntary poverty and special care for the poor; that loyalty to the group was to be valued more than family ties; and that evil should be met with non-violence and love.11 Christians should pay their taxes, respect the Roman authorities, and must not even contemplate armed struggle.12 Jesus’s followers continued to revere the Torah,13 keep the Sabbath,14 and the observance of the dietary laws was a matter of extreme importance to them.15 Like the great Pharisee Hillel, Jesus’s older contemporary, they taught a version of the Golden Rule, which they believed to be the bedrock of the Jewish faith: ‘So always treat others as you would like them to treat you; that is the message of the Law and the Prophets.
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Karen Armstrong (The Bible: A Biography (Books That Changed the World))
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La Societe D'elite
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some older people who need to sit down, Barb. We can’t put chairs out. I don’t want them to get too comfy or we’ll never get rid of them.’ ‘Oh, you’re being ridiculous.’ Henry is thinking that this is a fine time to call him ridiculous. He never wanted the stupid vigil. In bed last night they had another spit-whispered row about it. We could have it at the front of the house, Barbara had said when the vicar called by. Henry had quite explicitly said he would not support anything churchy – anything that would feel like a memorial service. But the vicar had said the idea of a vigil was exactly the opposite. That the community would like to show that they have not given up. That they continue to support the family. To pray for Anna’s safe return. Barbara was delighted and it was all agreed. A small event at the house. People would walk from the village, or park on the industrial estate and walk up the drive. ‘This was your idea, Barbara.’ ‘The vicar’s, actually. People just want to show support. That is what this is about.’ ‘This is ghoulish, Barb. That’s what this is.’ He moves the tractor across the yard again, depositing two more bales of straw alongside the others. ‘There. That should be enough.’ Henry looks across at his wife and is struck by the familiar contradiction. Wondering how on earth they got here. Not just since Anna disappeared, but across the twenty-two years of their marriage. He wonders if all marriages end up like this. Or if he is simply a bad man. For as Barbara sweeps her hair behind her ear and tilts up her chin, Henry can still see the full lips, perfect teeth and high cheekbones that once made him feel so very differently. It’s a pendulum that still confuses him, makes him wish he could rewind. To go back to the Young Farmers’ ball, when she smelled so divine and everything seemed so easy and hopeful. And he is wishing, yes, that he could go back and have another run. Make a better job of it. All of it. Then he closes his eyes. The echo again of Anna’s voice next to him in the car. You disgust me, Dad. He wants the voice to stop. To be quiet. Wants to rewind yet again. To when Anna was little and loved him, collected posies on Primrose Lane. To when he was her hero and she wanted to race him back to the house for tea. Barbara is now looking across the yard to the brazier. ‘You’re going to light a fire, Henry?’ ‘It will be cold. Yes.’ ‘Thank you. I’m doing soup in mugs, too.’ A pause then. ‘You really think this is a mistake, Henry? I didn’t realise it would upset you quite so much. I’m sorry.’ ‘It’s OK, Barbara. Let’s just make the best of it now.’ He slams the tractor into reverse and moves it out of the yard and back into its position inside the barn. There, in the semi-darkness, his heartbeat finally begins to settle and he sits very still on the tractor, needing the quiet, the stillness. It was their reserve position, to have the vigil under cover in this barn, if the weather was bad. But it has been a fine day. Cold but with a clear, bright sky, so they will stay out of doors. Yes. Henry rather hopes the cold will drive everyone home sooner, soup or no soup. And now he thinks he will sit here for a while longer, actually. Yes. It’s nice here alone in the barn. He finds
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Teresa Driscoll (I Am Watching You)
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My identity as Jewish cannot be reduced to a religious affiliation. Professor Said quoted Gramsci, an author that I’m familiar with, that, and I quote, ‘to know thyself is to understand that we are a product of the historical process to date which has deposited an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory’. Let’s apply this pithy observation to Jewish identity. While it is tempting to equate Judaism with Jewishness, I submit to you that my identity as someone who is Jewish is far more complex than my religious affiliation. The collective inventory of the Jewish people rests on my shoulders. This inventory shapes and defines my understanding of what it means to be Jewish. The narrative of my people is a story of extraordinary achievement as well as unimaginable horror.
For millennia, the Jewish people have left their fate in the hands of others. Our history is filled with extraordinary achievements as well as unimaginable violence. Our centuries-long Diaspora defined our existential identity in ways that cannot be reduced to simple labels. It was the portability of our religion that bound us together as a people, but it was our struggle to fit in; to be accepted that identified us as unique. Despite the fact that we excelled academically, professionally, industrially, we were never looked upon as anything other than Jewish. Professor Said in his book, Orientalism, examined how Europe looked upon the Orient as a dehumanized sea of amorphous otherness. If we accept this point of view, then my question is: How do you explain Western attitudes towards the Jews? We have always been a convenient object of hatred and violent retribution whenever it became convenient.
If Europe reduced the Orient to an essentialist other, to borrow Professor Said’s eloquent language, then how do we explain the dehumanizing treatment of Jews who lived in the heart of Europe? We did not live in a distant, exotic land where the West had discursive power over us. We thought of ourselves as assimilated. We studied Western philosophy, literature, music, and internalized the same culture as our dominant Christian brethren. Despite our contribution to every conceivable field of human endeavor, we were never fully accepted as equals. On the contrary, we were always the first to be blamed for the ills of Western Europe. Two hundred thousand Jews were forcibly removed from Spain in 1492 and thousands more were forcibly converted to Christianity in Portugal four years later.
By the time we get to the Holocaust, our worst fears were realized. Jewish history and consciousness will be dominated by the traumatic memories of this unspeakable event. No people in history have undergone an experience of such violence and depth. Israel’s obsession with physical security; the sharp Jewish reaction to movements of discrimination and prejudice; an intoxicated awareness of life, not as something to be taken for granted but as a treasure to be fostered and nourished with eager vitality, a residual distrust of what lies beyond the Jewish wall, a mystical belief in the undying forces of Jewish history, which ensure survival when all appears lost; all these, together with the intimacy of more personal pains and agonies, are the legacy which the Holocaust transmits to the generation of Jews who have grown up under its shadow.
-Fictional debate between Edward Said and Abba Eban.
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R.F. Georgy (Absolution: A Palestinian Israeli Love Story)
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The Times
Exclusive Reveal of Windermere Six
Thanks to an anonymous source, the Times is pleased to share an exclusive list of the six children who were transported yesterday evening to Hollingsworth Hall, the magnificent and secluded home of Camilla Lenore DeMoss, the Countess of Windermere. They are, in no particular order:
Oliver Appleby: Heir to the Appleby Jewelry fortune. This young chap is known to be an excellent student who also excels at rowing and cricket.
Viola Dale: The Dales are well known throughout London for their dedication to social reform and relief for those in distress. Young Viola has been a presence on the charitable event circuit since the age of two.
Frances Wellington: Miss Wellington's parents are internationally known art collectors who have an impeccable eye for up-and-coming talent in sculpture and painting. They also delve into gems of historical value. Frances is privately tutored, and her deliciously expensive introduction to London society is already being buzzed about.
Barnaby Trundle: Young Barnaby attends school in South London. His father works in the textile industry. One of his teachers says Barnaby is "occasionally quick-tempered with other boys in his form."
Edward Herringbone: The Herringbones are close acquaintances with the aforementioned Dales, their own admirable interests lying mainly in reducing poverty by increasing educational opportunities. Edward has been called "an indubitable library of a boy" by one of his teaching masters at St. Stephen's.
Tabitha Crum: Miss Crum's father is employed by the Wilting Bank of South London. A neighbor of the family says that the lucky child "talks to herself" and calls the Crums "socially famished.
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Jessica Lawson (Nooks & Crannies)
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the device had the property of transresistance and should have a name similar to devices such as the thermistor and varistor, Pierce proposed transistor. Exclaimed Brattain, “That’s it!” The naming process still had to go through a formal poll of all the other engineers, but transistor easily won the election over five other options.35 On June 30, 1948, the press gathered in the auditorium of Bell Labs’ old building on West Street in Manhattan. The event featured Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain as a group, and it was moderated by the director of research, Ralph Bown, dressed in a somber suit and colorful bow tie. He emphasized that the invention sprang from a combination of collaborative teamwork and individual brilliance: “Scientific research is coming more and more to be recognized as a group or teamwork job. . . . What we have for you today represents a fine example of teamwork, of brilliant individual contributions, and of the value of basic research in an industrial framework.”36 That precisely described the mix that had become the formula for innovation in the digital age. The New York Times buried the story on page 46 as the last item in its “News of Radio” column, after a note about an upcoming broadcast of an organ concert. But Time made it the lead story of its science section, with the headline “Little Brain Cell.” Bell Labs enforced the rule that Shockley be in every publicity photo along with Bardeen and Brattain. The most famous one shows the three of them in Brattain’s lab. Just as it was about to be taken, Shockley sat down in Brattain’s chair, as if it were his desk and microscope, and became the focal point of the photo. Years later Bardeen would describe Brattain’s lingering dismay and his resentment of Shockley: “Boy, Walter hates this picture. . . . That’s Walter’s equipment and our experiment,
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Walter Isaacson (The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)
“
Thakur’s findings were not news to Ranbaxy’s top executives. Just ten months earlier, in October 2003, outside auditors started investigating Ranbaxy facilities worldwide. In this case, the audits had been ordered up by Ranbaxy itself. This was a common industry practice: drug companies often hired consultants to audit their facilities as a dry run to see how visible their problems were. If the consultants could find it, they reasoned, then most likely regulators could too. The fact-finding mission by Lachman Consultant Services left Ranbaxy officials under no illusion as to the extent of the company’s failings. At Ranbaxy’s Princeton, New Jersey, facility, auditors found that the company’s Patient Safety Department barely functioned and training was essentially “non-existent.” The staff had no written protocols for investigating patient complaints, which piled up in boxes, uncategorized and unreported. They had no clerical help for basic tasks like mailing out the patients’ samples for testing. “I don’t think there’s the same medicine in this medicine,” was a common refrain from patients. Even when there were investigations, they were so perfunctory and half-hearted that expiration dates were listed as “unknown,” even when they could easily have been found from a product’s lot number. An audit of Ranbaxy’s main U.S. manufacturing plant, Ohm Laboratories in New Jersey, found that the company, though required to report adverse events to the FDA, rarely did so. There was no system to capture patient complaints after hours, and no global medical officer to ensure that any potential negative consequences for patients were being monitored. The consultants from Lachman urged Ranbaxy to address these problems globally. Ranbaxy’s initial reaction to the findings was to question the number of hours, and the resulting invoice, that Lachman had sent for its work.
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Katherine Eban (Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom)
“
Undoubtedly, my dear Dick. Just note the progress of events: consider the migrations of races, and you will arrive at the same conclusion assuredly. Asia was the first nurse of the world, was she not? For about four thousand years she travailed, she grew pregnant, she produced, and then, when stones began to cover the soil where the golden harvests sung by Homer had flourished, her children abandoned her exhausted and barren bosom. You next see them precipitating themselves upon young and vigorous Europe, which has nourished them for the last two thousand years. But already her fertility is beginning to die out; her productive powers are diminishing every day. Those new diseases that annually attack the products of the soil, those defective crops, those insufficient resources, are all signs of a vitality that is rapidly wearing out and of an approaching exhaustion. Thus, we already see the millions rushing to the luxuriant bosom of America, as a source of help, not inexhaustible indeed, but not yet exhausted. In its turn, that new continent will grow old; its virgin forests will fall before the axe of industry, and its soil will become weak through having too fully produced what had been demanded of it. Where two harvests bloomed every year, hardly one will be gathered from a soil completely drained of its strength. Then, Africa will be there to offer to new races the treasures that for centuries have been accumulating in her breast. Those climates now so fatal to strangers will be purified by cultivation and by drainage of the soil, and those scattered water supplies will be gathered into one common bed to form an artery of navigation. Then this country over which we are now passing, more fertile, richer, and fuller of vitality than the rest, will become some grand realm where more astonishing discoveries than steam and electricity will be brought to light.
”
”
Jules Verne (Jules Verne: The Extraordinary Voyages Collection (The Greatest Writers of All Time Book 42))
“
Read the following chain of events and see whether a similar pattern might apply to other toxic products that were reported in the news during your lifetime:
1. Workers were told that the paint was nontoxic, although there was no factual basis for this declaration. The employers discounted scientists. The workers believed their superiors.
2. Health complaints were made in ever-increasing frequency. It became obvious that something was seriously wrong.
3. U.S. Radium and other watch-dial companies began a campaign of disinformation and bogus medical tests - some of which involved X-rays and may even have made the condition worse.
4. Doctors, dentists, and researchers complied with U.S. Radium's and other companies' requests and refused to release their data to the public.
5. Medical professionals also aided the companies by attributing worker deaths to other causes. Syphilis was often cited as the diagnosis, which had the added benefit to management of being a smear on the victims' reputations.
6. One worker, Grace Fryer, decided to sue U.S. Radium. It took Fryer two years to find a lawyer who was willing to take on U.S. Radium. Only four other workers joined her suit; they became known as the "Radium Girls."
7. In 1928, the case was settled in the middle of the trial before it went to the jury for deliberation. The settlement for each of the five "Radium Girls" was $10,000 (the equivalent of $124,000 in 2009 dollars), plus $600 a year while the victim lived and all medical expenses.
Remember the general outline of this scenario because you will see it over and over again: The company denies everything while the doctors and researchers (and even the industrial hygienists) in the company's employ support the company's distorted version of the facts. Perhaps one worker in a hundred will finally pursue justice, one lawyer out of the hundreds of thousands in the United States will finally step up to the plate, and the case will be settled for chump change.
”
”
Monona Rossol
“
These four changes—in the nature of work, education, social values, and communication technology—make it harder for dictators to dominate citizens in the old way. Harsh laws and bureaucratic regulations provoke furious responses from previously docile groups. These groups have new skills and networks that help them resist. At the same time, violent repression and comprehensive censorship destroy the innovation now central to progress. Eventually, the expansion of the highly educated, creative class, with its demands for self-expression and participation, makes it difficult to resist a move to some form of democracy. But so long as this class is not too large and the leader has the resources to co-opt or censor its members, an alternative is spin dictatorship. At least for a while, the ruler can buy off the informed with government contracts and privileges. So long as they stay loyal, he can tolerate their niche magazines, websites, and international networking events. He can even hire the creative types to design an alternative reality for the masses. This strategy will not work against a Sakharov. But Sakharovs are rare. With a modern, centrally controlled mass media, they pose little threat. Co-opting the informed takes resources. When these run low, spin dictators turn to censorship, which is often cheaper. They need not censor everything. All that really matters is to stop opposition media reaching a mass audience. And here the uneven dynamics of cultural change help. Early in the postindustrial era, most people still have industrial-era values. They are conformist and risk averse. The less educated are alienated from the creative types by resentment, economic anxiety, and attachment to tradition. Spin dictators can exploit these sentiments, rallying the remaining workers against the “counterculture” while branding the intellectuals as disloyal, sacrilegious, or sexually deviant. Such smears inoculate the leader’s base against opposition revelations. As long as the informed are not too strong, manipulation works well. Dictators can resist political demands without destroying the creative economy or revealing their own brutality to the public.
”
”
Sergei Guriev (Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century)
“
Nope. Look. The Raft is a media event. But in a much more profound, general
sense than you can possibly imagine."
"Huh?"
"It's created by the media in that without the media, people wouldn't know it
was here, Refus wouldn't come out and glom onto it the way they do. And it
sustains the media. It creates a lot of information flow-movies, news reports -
- you know."
"So you're creating your own news event to make money off the information flow
that it creates?" says the journalist, desperately trying to follow. His tone
of voice says that this is all a waste of videotape. His weary attitude
suggests that this is not the first time Rife has flown off on a bizarre
tangent.
"Partly. But that's only a very crude explanation. It really goes a lot deeper
than that. You've probably heard the expression that the Industry feeds off of
biomass, like a whale straining krill from the ocean."
"I've heard the expression, yes."
"That's my expression. I made it up. An expression like that is just like a
virus, you know -- it's a piece of information -- data -- that spreads from one
person to the next. Well, the function of the Raft is to bring more biomass.
To renew America. Most countries are static, all they need to do is keep having
babies. But America's like this big old clanking, smoking machine that just
lumbers across the landscape scooping up and eating everything in sight. Leaves
behind a trail of garbage a mile wide. Always needs more fuel...
"Now I have a different perspective on it. America must look, to those poor
little buggers down there, about the same as Crete looked to those poor Greek
suckers. Except that there's no coercion involved. Those people down there
give up their children willingly. Send them into the labyrinth by the millions
to be eaten up. The Industry feeds on them and spits back images, sends out
movies and TV programs, over my networks, images of wealth and exotic things
beyond their wildest dreams, back to those people, and it gives them something
to dream about, something to aspire to. And that is the function of the Raft.
It's just a big old krill carrier."
Finally the journalist gives up on being a journalist, just starts to slag L.
Bob Rife openly. He's had it with this guy. "That's disgusting. I can't
believe you can think about people that way."
"Shit, boy, get down off your high horse. Nobody really gets eaten. It's just
a figure of speech. They come here, they get decent jobs, find Christ, buy a
Weber grill, and live happily ever after. What's wrong with that?
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
Most obviously, they agreed, an autocatalytic set was a web of transformations among molecules in precisely the same way that an economy is a web of transformations among goods and services. In a very real sense, in fact, an autocatalytic set was an economy-a submicroscopic economy that extracted raw materials (the primordial "food" molecules) and converted them into useful products (more molecules in the set).
Moreover an autocatalytic set can bootstrap its own evolution in precisely the same way that an economy can, by growing more and more complex over time. This was a point that fascinated Kauffman. If innovations result from new combinations of old technologies, then the number of possible innovations would go up very rapidly as more and more technologies became available. In fact, he argued, once you get beyond a certain threshold of complexity you can expect a kind of phase transition analogous to the ones he had found in his autocatalytic sets. Below that level of complexity you would find countries dependent upon just a few major industries, and their economies would tend to be fragile and stagnant. In that case, it wouldn't matter how much investment got poured into the country. "If all you do is produce bananas, nothing will happen except that you produce more bananas." But if a country ever managed to diversify and increase its complexity above the critical point, then you would expect it to undergo an explosive increase in growth and innovation-what some economists have called an "economic takeoff."
The existence of that phase transition would also help explain why trade is so important to prosperity, Kauffman told Arthur. Suppose you have two different countries, each one of which is subcritical by itself. Their economies are going nowhere. But now suppose they start trading, so that their economies become interlinked into one large economy with a higher complexity. "I expect that trade between such systems will allow the joint system to become supercritical and explode outward."
Finally, an autocatalytic set can undergo exactly the same kinds of evolutionary booms and crashes that an economy does. Injecting one new kind of molecule into the soup could often transform the set utterly, in much the same way that the economy transformed when the horse was replaced by the automobile. This was part of autocatalysis that really captivated Arthur. It had the same qualities that had so fascinated him when he first read about molecular biology: upheaval and change and enormous consequences flowing from trivial-seeming events-and yet with deep law hidden beneath.
”
”
M. Mitchell Waldrop (Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos)
“
me to be honest about his failings as well as his strengths. She is one of the smartest and most grounded people I have ever met. “There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that’s the truth,” she told me early on. “You shouldn’t whitewash it. He’s good at spin, but he also has a remarkable story, and I’d like to see that it’s all told truthfully.” I leave it to the reader to assess whether I have succeeded in this mission. I’m sure there are players in this drama who will remember some of the events differently or think that I sometimes got trapped in Jobs’s distortion field. As happened when I wrote a book about Henry Kissinger, which in some ways was good preparation for this project, I found that people had such strong positive and negative emotions about Jobs that the Rashomon effect was often evident. But I’ve done the best I can to balance conflicting accounts fairly and be transparent about the sources I used. This is a book about the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. You might even add a seventh, retail stores, which Jobs did not quite revolutionize but did reimagine. In addition, he opened the way for a new market for digital content based on apps rather than just websites. Along the way he produced not only transforming products but also, on his second try, a lasting company, endowed with his DNA, that is filled with creative designers and daredevil engineers who could carry forward his vision. In August 2011, right before he stepped down as CEO, the enterprise he started in his parents’ garage became the world’s most valuable company. This is also, I hope, a book about innovation. At a time when the United States is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build creative digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness, imagination, and sustained innovation. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology, so he built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering. He and his colleagues at Apple were able to think differently: They developed not merely modest product advances based on focus groups, but whole new devices and services that consumers did not yet know they needed. He was not a model boss or human being, tidily packaged for emulation. Driven by demons, he could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and passions and products were all interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is thus both instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values.
”
”
Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
“
So the Formula One driver has a dual status: he is both an automatic terminal of the most refined technical machinery, a technical operator, and he is the symbolic operator of crowd passions and the risk of death. The paradox is the same for the motor companies, caught as they are between investment and potlatch. Is all this a calculated — and hence rational — investment (marketing and advertising)? Have we here a mighty commercial operation, or is the company spending inordinate sums, far beyond what is commercially viable, to assuage a passion for prestige and charisma (there is also a manufacturers' world championship)? In this confrontation between manufacturers, isn't there an excessive upping of the stakes, a dizzying passion, a delirium? This is certainly the aspect which appeals, in the first instance, to the millions of viewers. In the end, the average TV viewer has doubtless never been aware that McLaren is a flagship for Honda. And I am not sure he or she is tempted to play the Formula One driver in ordinary life. The impact of Formula One lies, then, in the exceptional and mythic character of the event of the race and the figure of the driver, and not in the technical or commercial spin-offs. It is not clear why speed would be both severely limited and morally condemned in the public domain and, at the same time, celebrated in Formula One as never before, unless there is an effect of sublime compensation going on here. Formula One certainly serves to popularize the cult of the car and its use, but it does much more to maintain the passion for absolute difference — a fundamental illusion for all, and one which justifies all the excesses.
In the end, however, hasn't it gone about as far as it can? Isn't it close to a final state, a final perfection, in which all the cars and drivers, given the colossal resources deployed, would, in a repetitive scenario, achieve the same maximum performance and produce the same pattern in each race? If Formula One were merely a rational, industrial performance, a test-bed for technical possibilities, we should have to predict that it would simply burn itself out. On the other hand, if Formula One is a spectacle, a collective, passionate (thoug h perfectly artificial) event, embracing the multiple screens of technological research, the living prosthesis of the driver, and the television screens into which the viewers project themselves, then it certainly has a very fine future.
In a word, Formula One is a monster. Such a concentration of technology, money, ambition and prestige is a monster (as is the world of haute couture, which is equally abstract, and as far removed from real clothing as Formula One is from road traffic). Now, monsters are doomed to disappear, and we are afraid they might be disappearing. But we are not keen, either, to see them survive in a domesticated, routinized form. In an era of daily insignificance — including the insignificance of the car and all its constraints — we want at least to save the passion of a pure event, and exceptional beings who are permitted to do absolutely anything.
”
”
Jean Baudrillard (Screened Out)
“
My typical day began at five o'clock in the morning when I would finish reading scripts by the side of Rebecca's bed until she woke up at seven. It was thrilling to find a script that I loved, something I desperately wanted to make. And when I found one, my day was made by seven A.M.
If I didn't have a script to finish, I had notes to make on those I had read. And if I'd finished my notes, I went downstairs to exercise.
After mornings with Rebecca, I'd arrive at the office at nine-thirty. The phone calls had started long before I got there. By ten o'clock I was in a staff meeting, and depending on the day of the week, it was either a production, marketing/distribution or business-affairs meeting.
By eleven-thirty, I might be in a meeting with an executive about a particular movie or problem. By twelve, I was meeting with a director I was trying to seduce back to the studio.
By twelve forty-five, I'd get in my car and drive across town to a lunch meeting with an agent, a producer, a writer or a movie star. While driving, I'd start to return the phone calls that had started before I ever arrived at my office.
At two-thirty, I was back in the car, returning more phone calls, the calls from early morning, from mid-morning, plus East Coast and Europe calls that came in during lunch.
At two forty-five, I was back in the office. Inevitably, there were people waiting to see me, executives with personal problems, political problems, and/or production problems. In between, I returned and made more phone calls.
At three-thirty, there could be a meeting with someone I was trying to bring to the studio. At four-thirty, there was a script meeting with an executive, writer, producer and/or director. At five o'clock, there were selected dailies of the movies we were shooting. And if I hadn't finished watching them by six-thirty, the rest were put on tape for me to watch later at home.
At six-thirty, I'd jump into my car and return more phone calls on my drive home. The call sheet numbered one hundred to one hundred and fifty calls a day. And I always felt it was very important to return every call. The lesson here is people remember when you don't call them back.
I'd go home to be with Rebecca. If I didn't have a business dinner or a sneak preview of one of our movies, I had to go to a black-tie event. There was at least one of them a week, honoring someone from our industry. I went out of respect for the talent involved and my counterparts at the other studios. So Rebecca would keep me company while I washed off my makeup, put on new makeup, dressed in black tie, kissed her good-bye and shot out the door.
That's where men really have it good: they just put on a tux and go.
After I got home at ten-thirty, I would sit on the chair next to Rebecca's bed. Watching her sleep dissolved all the stress in my body.
Then I would get up, either finish watching the dailies, or read a script, wash my face and fall into bed at eleven-thirty.
But the part of my workday that made me the happiest was when I was closest to the actual making of a movie.
”
”
Dawn Steel (They Can Kill You..but They Can't Eat You)
“
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“
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Letisha malakooti
“
11
— I have explained where Wagner belongs—not in the history of music. What does he signify nevertheless in that history? The emergence of the actor in music: a capital event that invites thought, perhaps also fear. In a formula: "Wagner and Liszt."— Never yet has the integrity of musicians, their "authenticity," been put to the test so dangerously. One can grasp it with one's very hands: great success, success with the masses no longer sides with those who are authentic,—one has to be an actor to achieve that!— Victor Hugo and Richard Wagner—they both prove one and the same thing: that in declining civilizations, wherever the mob is allowed to decide, genuineness becomes superfluous, prejudicial, unfavorable. The actor, alone, can still kindle great enthusiasm.— And thus it is his golden age which is now dawning—his and that of all those who are in any way related to him. With drums and fifes, Wagner marches at the head of all artists in declamation, in display and virtuosity. He began by convincing the conductors of orchestras, the scene-shifters and stage-singers, not to forget the orchestra:—he "redeemed" them from monotony .... The movement that Wagner created has spread even to the land of knowledge: whole sciences pertaining to music are rising slowly, out of centuries of scholasticism. As an example of what I mean, let me point more particularly to Riemann's [Hugo Riemann (1849-1919): music theoretician] services to rhythmic; he was the first who called attention to the leading idea in punctuation—even for music (unfortunately he did so with a bad word; he called it "phrasing"). All these people, and I say it with gratitude, are the best, the most respectable among Wagner's admirers—they have a perfect right to honor Wagner. The same instinct unites them with one another; in him they recognize their highest type, and since he has inflamed them with his own ardor they feel themselves transformed into power, even into great power. In this quarter, if anywhere, Wagner's influence has really been beneficial. Never before has there been so much thinking, willing, and industry in this sphere. Wagner endowed all these artists with a new conscience: what they now exact and obtain from themselves, they had never extracted before Wagner's time—before then they had been too modest. Another spirit prevails on the stage since Wagner rules there: the most difficult things are expected, blame is severe, praise very scarce—the good and the excellent have become the rule. Taste is no longer necessary, nor even is a good voice. Wagner is sung only with ruined voices: this has a more "dramatic" effect. Even talent is out of the question. Expressiveness at all costs, which is what the Wagnerian ideal—the ideal of décadence—demands, is hardly compatible with talent. All that is required for this is virtue—that is to say, training, automatism, "self-denial." Neither taste, voices, nor gifts: Wagner's stage requires one thing only—Teutons! ... Definition of the Teuton: obedience and long legs ... It is full of profound significance that the arrival of Wagner coincides in time with the arrival of the "Reich": both actualities prove the very same thing: obedience and long legs.— Never has obedience been better, never has commanding. Wagnerian conductors in particular are worthy of an age that posterity will call one day, with awed respect, the classical age of war. Wagner understood how to command; in this, too, he was the great teacher. He commanded as the inexorable will to himself, as lifelong self-discipline: Wagner who furnishes perhaps the greatest example of self-violation in the history of art (—even Alfieri, who in other respects is his next-of-kin, is outdone by him. The note of a Torinese).
12
The insight that our actors are more deserving of admiration than ever does not imply that they are any less dangerous ... But who could still doubt what I want,—what are the three demands for which my my love of art has compelled me?
”
”
Nietszche
“
he was reveling in the possibilities inherent in selling a car that behaved like a fighter jet. “Yeah, it’s mad,” he continued, with a dimpled grin. And then he added, “In the option selection, you’ll be able to choose three settings: Normal, Sport, and Insane.” A ripple of laughter washed over the crowd. Then, as if to reassure himself as much as everyone else: “It will actually say ‘Insane.’” He hunched his shoulders forward and laughed. Videos posted by people who had experienced “Insane Mode” during test rides at the event appeared on YouTube the next day. Invariably, the accompanying commentary was littered with expletives and other delighted expressions of shock as the car’s spine-straightening acceleration took effect. In the weeks and months that followed, more reaction videos appeared and spread, with one especially spicy compilation coming to accrue more than ten million views. Insane Mode could be seen as more than just a product feature, more than just a marketing gimmick. It would be the mind-set required to fend off the short-sellers of Tesla’s stock, traditional automakers, political opponents, and an increasingly nervous oil industry. It represented the intensity of fervor needed to win the public over to electric cars. And it was a statement about the velocity of innovation required to transition the world to sustainable energy before the planet’s climate changes beyond repair. Even as a feature for a luxury motor vehicle, though, Insane Mode was audacious in both intent and implication.
”
”
Hamish McKenzie (Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil)
“
the failure of the established order of industrial society, and of the political classes who manage it, is becoming hard to ignore. Consider the way that the world’s leaders have reacted to the ongoing implosion of the global economy, or nearly any other recent crisis you care to name: in each case, it’s a broken-record sequence of understating the problem, trying to manage appearances, getting caught flatfooted by events, and struggling to load the blame for yet another round of failures onto anybody within reach. Rinse and repeat a few times, and even the most diehard supporters of the status quo start wishing that somebody, somewhere, would stand up and demonstrate some actual leadership.
”
”
John Michael Greer (The Blood of the Earth: An essay on magic and peak oil)
“
A great event manager makes even the host feel like a guest.
”
”
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
“
An event shouldn't be just an experiential thing, it should be an emotional thing.
”
”
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
“
On the day of an event, a good event manager is always the first to arrive and last to leave.
”
”
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
“
The purpose of event management is to create a client who creates other clients.
”
”
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
“
There were certainly multiple factors contributing to these men’s post-moonwalk slump, but the question What do you do after walking on the moon? became a gigantic speed bump. The trouble with moonwalkers and billionaires is when they arrive at the top, their momentum often stops. If they don’t manage to find something to parlay, they turn into the kid on the jungle gym who just hangs from the ring. Not coincidentally, this is the same reason that only one-third of Americans are happy at their jobs. When there’s no forward momentum in our careers, we get depressed, too. As Newton pointed out, an object at rest tends to stay at rest. So how does one avoid billionaire’s depression? Or regular person’s stuck-in-a-dead-end-job, lack-of-momentum-fueled depression? Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile took on the question in the mid-2000s in a research study of white-collar employees. She tasked 238 pencil pushers in various industries to keep daily work diaries. The workers answered open-ended questions about how they felt, what events in their days stood out. Amabile and her fellow researchers then dissected the 12,000 resulting entries, searching for patterns in what affects people’s “inner” work lives the most dramatically. The answer, it turned out, is simply progress. A sense of forward motion. Regardless how small. And that’s the interesting part. Amabile found that minor victories at work were nearly as psychologically powerful as major breakthroughs. To motivate stuck employees, as Amabile and her colleague Steven J. Kramer suggest in their book, The Progress Principle, businesses need to help their workers experience lots of tiny wins. (And as we learned from the bored BYU students in chapter 1, breaking up big challenges into tiny ones also speeds up progress.) This is helpful to know when motivating employees. But it also hints at what billionaires and astronauts can do to stave off the depression that follows the high of getting to the top. To get out of the funk, say Joan DiFuria and Stephen Goldbart, cofounders of the Money, Meaning & Choices Institute, depressed successes simply have to start the Olympic rings over. Some use their money to create new businesses. Others parlay sideways and get into philanthropy. And others simply pick up hobbies that take time to master. Even if the subsequent endeavors are smaller than their previous ones, the depression dissipates as they make progress.
”
”
Shane Snow (Smartcuts: The Breakthrough Power of Lateral Thinking)
“
He was bound to the soil. He could not leave the manor to seek for better conditions of life elsewhere. If he ran away, his lord could obtain an order from a court and have him brought back. When permission was obtained to remain away from the manor as an inhabitant of another vill or of a town, it was only upon payment of a periodical sum, frequently known as "chevage" or head money. He could not sell his cattle without paying the lord for permission. He had practically no standing in the courts of the country. In any suit against his lord the proof of his condition of villainage was sufficient to put him out of court, and his only recourse was the local court of the manor, where the lord himself or his representative presided. Finally, in the eyes of the law, the villain had no property of his own, all his possessions being, in the last resort, the property of his lord. This legal theory, however, apparently had but little application to real life; for in the ordinary course of events the customary tenant, if only by custom, not by law, yet held and bequeathed to his descendants his land and his chattels quite as if they were his own. Serfdom, as it existed in England in the thirteenth century, can hardly be defined in strict legal terms. It can be described most correctly as a condition in which the villain tenant of the manor was bound to the locality and to his services and payments there by a legal bond, instead of merely by an economic bond, as was the case with the small free tenant.
”
”
Edward Potts Cheyney (An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England)
“
Then I realized that the history of the world is largely a history of sustainable systems. Every so often a system comes along that completely changes the world. People never notice these systems until they're right there in their faces and all the alarm bells are going off. Agriculture. Christianity. Guns. The Industrial Age economy. P2P networks. Take any major event in history and I'll show you a system behind it. “Consider Bitcoin. Monetary revolution. A chance to break out of a rigged system. P2P and the pirate sites? Copyright, theft, yes, but they also moved American culture around the world without bottleneck of price or service availability. American movies, American TV shows now projected American dreams and nightmares onto the rest of the world. Every great system had a far more powerful effect hidden beneath this obvious layer of icing. “Just like agriculture for humans, all of these systems have repercussions far beyond the first few decades of their existence. The trick is that these systems have to be sustainable. There has to be enough incentive, on a human level, to keep them running. If there is - well, there you go: that's your history-maker right there.
”
”
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne (Numbercaste)
“
Great Sardaar"
An ornamental piece of work by the Punjabi industry.
Produced by Amritjit Singh Sran and Directed by Ranjeet Bal under the production house Apna Heritage &Sapphire Films presents to you "Great Sardaar" an Action/Drama film starring none other than the budding artist Dilpreet Dhillon and the multi talented Yograj Singh. This movie is an Action/Drama film in which the protagonist ends up with a series of challenges. The movie stars Dilpreet Dhillon as the lead along with Yograj singh who plays the role of (Dilpreet Dhillon) Gurjant's father. After watching the trailer one can surely say there's tasty substance beneath the froth, just enough to keep you hooked.
"GREAT SRADAAR" is based on the true events about Major Shaitan Singh, who was awarded the Param Vir Chakra posthumously for his 'C' company's dig-in at Rezang La pass during the Sino-India conflict of 1962. This motivational movie is a Tribute to Sikkhism. It's really healing to see movies that are based on true events. It builds so much more compassion.
Dilpreet Dhillon popularly known for his role in "once upon a time in Amritsar" has gained a great fan following. He is considered is one of the popular emerging male playback singer and actor in Punjabi music industry. And when it comes to Yograj Singh, he is not only a former Indian cricketer but also a boon to the Punjabi industry.
Since the release of the official trailer on 7th of June,2017 which shows that the movie is action-packed and will leave the audience spellbound and wanting for more, the audience is eagerly waiting for the release of the movie.The trailer rolls by effortlessly and the Director has done an impeccable job. Ranjeet Bal evidently knew what he was doing and has ensured that every minute detail was taken care of particularly considering the genre he was treading. The audience will surely be sitting on the edge of their seats. Visual Effects Director- VFx Star has once again proved that there is nothing that will leave India from evolving in the field of technology.
"Great Sardaar" which is set to be released on the 30th of June,2017 will be a very carefully structured story. The main question that will be raised is not what kind of world we live in, or what reality is like, rather what it has done to us.
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Great Sardar
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Once again, Hitler paused briefly. Then he straightened his shoulders and declared, louder than before:
“I cannot believe that the civilized nations of the world are so blind that they will lacerate each other to smooth the way for Bolshevism. The contrary is essential: coalition, by groups, into confederacies of states, into families of nations, perhaps even here and there into federal states…
“It is all the more important that we work at coalition. And on that point I will tell you over and over again: without England it is not possible! England has the necessary power. We bring along only the idea and the will. I cannot imagine that England will not decide to climb down from its pedestal of arrogance and imperialism, which has been made outmoded by history, and to extend its hand to a community of nations. England cannot ignore present-day events to such an extent! It cannot discard the world mission of the Aryan race in the world to such an extent! It must surely recognize the danger of international Communism, even if its island realm might be the last to fall into its hands.
“And it must notice that for the world… a new great adversary has arisen across the Atlantic — America. As a result of excessive industrialization, which received its latest impetus precisely during the Great War, America has no choice but to wage an imperial policy all over the world. For the moment, Roosevelt hopes only to achieve ‘prosperity.’ But if he cannot make it come into being by peaceful means — and in this he will fail — then it can be coerced only by a war — a war intended to permanently eliminate economic competition from Europe and possibly also from Japan, securing for America the international markets of the future: South America and China, perhaps Russia as well.
“Now England is simply part of Europe, even if it was unwilling to admit it before this. Its front is against Russia and against America. The struggle has already begun in the oil fields of Persia, it will continue in India and the Far East. And in the end it will encompass the whole Empire!
“…England and Germany are equally threatened. But they are also the backbone of the West, the old world, the cultural source of mankind. And a Europe that stretches from Gibraltar to the Caucasus includes all the spheres of interest of the countries that belong to it in other parts of the world, especially all of Africa, India, the Malayan archipelago, Australia, and New Zealand. Canada will also remain loyal to such a concentration of power, which would otherwise fall to America; and the Arabic family of nations will complete the circle of these United States of the old world.
“This is the prize we offer England! World peace would be assured for all eternity. No earthly power could sow discord into such a community, and no army or navy in the world could shake such power.
“It cannot be that England does not recognize and understand this. In any case, I am prepared, even at the risk of failing to persuade England, to take this road, and I will never betray Europe to Bolshevism and Jewry.
Hitler raised his voice for the final words…
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Otto Wagener (Hitler: Memoirs Of A Confidant)
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In our research for Great by Choice, Morten Hansen and I systematically analyzed why some start-ups become the 10x winners in highly turbulent, chaotic, and disruptive industries, and why others don’t. One of our key findings is that the winners exercise prodigious amounts of productive paranoia. Our research showed that they carried a much higher cash-to-assets ratio than less successful companies as a disciplined habit from early in their development. (Think of a conservative balance sheet as one element of the twenty-five squadrons.) They worried obsessively about unexpected events that could destroy them, and they built buffers so they could survive external shocks. They also shunned uncalibrated risks that could leave them exposed to calamity.
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Jim Collins (BE 2.0 (Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0): Turning Your Business into an Enduring Great Company)
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If you look around the room you are in right now, you will observe a great diversity of items, shapes, sizes, textures, colors, and functions, with all their associated nuances and subtleties. Every career, hobby, occupation, sport, industry, philosophy, plant, animal, object, event, and sensory experience–visual and otherwise–corresponds to a specific language. Language, in a word, is all-encompassing, and there are numerous registers, dialects, idioms, metaphors, and synonyms that express the same idea in multiple ways. “Mastering” one’s native language is a lifelong pursuit. Mastering a foreign language is an even taller order.
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Benjamin Batarseh (The Art of Learning a Foreign Language: 25 Things I Wish They Told Me)
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Journalism will increasingly play a key role in informing the world's population about the causes and consequences of global warming: analysing the reports of scientists, including the alarmists and sceptics among them; investigating the influence of oil and coal industries on government policies; exploring the measures needed to save future generations from the looming disasters of extreme weather and world food shortages; and above all, as in any war, going to the "conflict zones" to carry out one of the basic tasks of journalism - reporting the impact of great events, in this case climate change, on ordinary people's lives. It will mean chronicling a gigantic struggle with nature, and a force that threatens to destabilise societies across the world in decades to come.
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Conor O'Clery (May You Live In Interesting Times)
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My romantic rejections of industry veterans have severely hurt my career—saying no to the wrong man has led to exclusion from professional events, lost contract gigs, my name's removal from my own work, and worse.
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Zoe Quinn (Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate)
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You cannot continue to have ONLY TWO gender specific categories in any field anymore. We need to open up the spaces and recognise other genders too. In your SHOWS, have Trans categories. Have Gay categories. Have men categories. Have Women categories. And so on. INCLUDE EVERYBODY.
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Mitta Xinindlu
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By seeing how our lives depend on a web of non-visible relationships, we enter a relationship with that broader frame, or web. We see ourselves as part of the unfolding of events and act accordingly.
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Ann Armbrecht (The Business of Botanicals: Exploring the Healing Promise of Plant Medicines in a Global Industry)
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Democracy was surrendered without a fight. This was most notably the case in the collapse of the grand coalition in 1930. It was again the case – however vain the opposition might have proved – in the lack of resistance to the Papen coup against Prussia in July 1932. Both events revealed the flimsiness of democracy’s base. This was not least because powerful groups had never reconciled themselves to democracy, and were by this time actively seeking to bring it down. During the Depression, democracy was less surrendered than deliberately undermined by élite groups serving their own ends. These were no pre-industrial leftovers, but – however reactionary their political aims – modern lobbies working to further their vested interests in an authoritarian system.255 In the final drama, the agrarians and the army were more influential than big business in engineering Hitler’s takeover.256 But big business, also, politically myopic and self-serving, had significantly contributed to the undermining of democracy which was the necessary prelude to Hitler’s success. The masses, too, had played their part in democracy’s downfall. Never had circumstances been less propitious for the establishment of successful democracy than they were in Germany after the First World War. Already by 1920, the parties most supportive of democracy held only a minority of the vote. Democracy narrowly survived its early travails, though great swathes of the electorate opposed it root and branch. Who is to say that, had not the great Depression blown it completely off course, democracy might not have settled down and consolidated itself? But democracy was in a far from healthy state when the Depression struck Germany. And in the course of the Depression, the masses deserted democracy in their droves. By 1932, the only supporters of democracy were the weakened Social Democrats (and even many of these were by this time lukewarm), some sections of the Zentrum (which had itself moved sharply to the Right), and a handful of liberals. The Republic was dead. Still open was what sort of authoritarian system would replace it.
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Ian Kershaw (Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris: 1889-1936: Hubris)
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In a world so influenced by media, with a populace addicted to cheap entertainment and omnipresent pop culture, celebrities have their own place of prominence at the apex of society. Every branch of showbiz - music, television, cinema, and even braindance - has its own stars whose works shape trends, opinions, and tastes. Their live concerts and releases of new content are worldwide events, observed and celebrated by tens of millions of fans all around the globe. Most of them, like Us Cracks, are products of the entertainment industry - devised and created to feed current fashions. Some of them are natural-born talents, discovered and promoted by some manager who recognized their potential and helped them to unpack it. Regardless of their origins, they will shine brightly for a period of time until some new star outshines them, or they're cast aside by their fans' ever-changing tastes. Until then, they will be admired and worshiped, living filthy-rich lives in fabulous estates and villas, whimsically coasting about in limos, private jets, and luxury boats - the embodiment of the public's dreams and desires. Demigods among mere mortals.
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CD Projekt Red (The Art Of Cyberpunk 2077: Digital Book)
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The racial template which got placed over ethnic conflict in Detroit and other industrial cities of the North would obscure the real dynamics of the struggle, which was ethnic and religious rather than racial. Black in-migrants, as a result, were thrown into direct competition, not with the WASP elite which was orchestrating events, but rather the ethnics — specifically the Poles and to a lesser extent, the Italians — who lived in the neighborhoods immediately adjacent to the black ghettoes that were now filled to the bursting point with people hoping to benefit from the new employment opportunities the war economy provided. This led to some tragic misunderstandings, as blacks possessing their own nativist prejudices started accusing Poles of racism. The Poles who had been born in Europe were generally oblivious to racial concerns. Their children, the Poles who had been born in America, thought that the adoption of racial attitudes was part of the Americanization process. Poles in general wanted to know why they were being singled out as responsible for a situation which antedated their arrival in this country by hundreds of years, and blacks, facing Poles in direct competition for jobs and housing, wanted to know why “too many blacks had been fired to make jobs for other racial groups, some of whom can hardly speak our language and owe no allegiance to our flag.
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E. Michael Jones (The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing)
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the NPSF rolled ahead. Patient safety was beginning to be talked about widely. In the report of the President’s Advisory Commission on Consumer Protection and Quality in the Health Care Industry , led by Don Berwick , head of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) , reduction of error was one of six recommended national aims, and NPSF was cited. JCAHO revised their sentinel event policy to make reporting voluntary, and the Agency for Healthcare Policy and Research (AHCPR) (later renamed the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) identified patient safety as a priority.
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Lucian L. Leape (Making Healthcare Safe: The Story of the Patient Safety Movement)
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The “technology is taking over our lives” narrative is the most recent incarnation of a labor-saving-machinery narrative that has scared people since the Industrial Revolution.
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Robert J. Shiller (Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events)
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Without knowing this, without having been to the future, there would be no way to situate this vision among the other items in my memory. And since most of our thoughts are as evanescent and hard to remember as dreams, I will be unlikely to remember this vision or notice how it corresponded to an actual event in my life some time afterward. It has often been suggested that déjà vu experiences may reflect this kind of “memory of a premonition,” although neural signals of familiarity may misfire for more mundane reasons, so it would be hard to substantiate such a claim in many, or most, cases. It is the same difficulty that J. B. Priestley identified in the context of his future-influencing-present effect: How often will it occur to people to (a) record their passing thoughts and moods in detail and (b) compare those recorded thoughts and moods to later events? Almost never. Yet as we will see later, when people’s lives, thoughts, and feelings are recorded for some other purpose, such as in psychotherapy, it sometimes does—quite by accident—reveal suggestive evidence for something like the existence of a perturbing influence of future events on prior behavior. “The brain is an illusion factory,” as neurobiologist Dean Buonomano puts it.52 Humans’ ability to vividly and realistically imagine things that haven’t happened (or haven’t happened yet) poses a huge challenge to studying anomalous experiences and ESP phenomena. One of the million functions of the Swiss Army Knife in our skulls is to serve as a powerful all-purpose imaging device, a special effects studio that would put Industrial Light and Magic to shame. It is able to create from scratch, instantly, vivid images to dramatize any piece of information or idea, real or fictitious, as well as translate complex thoughts instantly into pictures. It does this not only in dreams but also in the hypnagogic and hypnopompic states on the edge of sleep, and even in waking reality when we “mentally time travel” or daydream or imagine possible scenarios.
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Eric Wargo (Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious)
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The story has been told innumerable times: how the expansion of markets, the presence of coal and iron as well as a humid climate favorable to the cotton industry, the multitude of people dispossessed by the new eighteenth century enclosures, the existence of free institutions, the invention of the machines, and other causes interacted in such a manner as to bring about the Industrial Revolution. It has been shown conclusively that no one single cause deserves to be lifted out of the chain and set apart as the cause of that sudden and unexpected event.
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Karl Polanyi (The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time)
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Mark, at dinner, said he’d been re-reading “Anna Karenina”. Found it good, as novels go. But complained of the profound untruthfulness of even the best imaginative literature. And he began to catalogue its omissions. Almost total neglect of those small physiological events that decide whether day-to-day living shall have a pleasant or unpleasant tone. Excretion, for example, with its power to make or mar the day. Digestion. And, for the heroines of novel and drama, menstruation. Then the small illnesses—catarrh, rheumatism, headache, eyestrain. The chronic physical disabilities—ramifying out (as in the case of deformity or impotence) into luxuriant insanities. And conversely the sudden accessions, from unknown visceral and muscular sources, of more than ordinary health. No mention, next, of the part played by mere sensations in producing happiness. Hot bath, for example, taste of bacon, feel of fur, smell of freesias. In life, an empty cigarette-case may cause more distress than the absence of a lover; never in books. Almost equally complete omission of the small distractions that fill the greater part of human lives. Reading the papers; looking into shops; exchanging gossip; with all the varieties of day-dreaming, from lying in bed, imagining what one would do if one had the right lover, income, face, social position, to sitting at the picture palace passively accepting ready-made day-dreams from Hollywood
Lying by omission turns inevitably into positive lying. The implications of literature are that human beings are controlled, if not by reason, at least by comprehensible, well-organized, avowable sentiments. Whereas the facts are quite different. Sometimes the sentiments come in, sometimes they don’t. All for love, or the world well lost; but love may be the title of nobility given to an inordinate liking for a particular person’s smell or texture, a lunatic desire for the repetition of a sensation produced by some particular dexterity. Or consider those cases (seldom published, but how numerous, as anyone in a position to know can tell!), those cases of the eminent statesmen, churchmen, lawyers, captains of industry—seemingly so sane, demonstrably so intelligent, publicly so high-principled; but, in private, under irresistible compulsion towards brandy, towards young men, towards little girls in trains, towards exhibitionism, towards gambling or hoarding, towards bullying, towards being whipped, towards all the innumerable, crazy perversions of the lust for money and power and position on the one hand, for sexual pleasure on the other. Mere tics and tropisms, lunatic and unavowable cravings—these play as much part in human life as the organized and recognized sentiments. And imaginative literature suppresses the fact. Propagates an enormous lie about the nature of men and women.
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Aldous Huxley (Eyeless in Gaza)