Execute Immediate Quotes

And although I broke a lot of laws as a teenager, I straightened out immediately upon turning eighteen, when I realized the state had a legal right to execute me.

In psychiatry there is a certain condition known as delusion of reprieve. The condemned man, immediately before his execution, gets the illusion that he might be reprieved at the very last minute. No one could yet grasp the fact that everything would be taken away. all we possessed, literally, was our naked existence.

No cop was ever born who isn't a sucker for a finely-executed hi-speed Controlled Drift all the way around one of those clover-leaf freeway interchanges. Few people understand the psychology of dealing with a highway traffic cop. Your normal speeder will panic and immediately pull over to the side when he sees the big red light behind him... and then we will start apologizing begging for mercy. This is wrong. It arouses contempt in the cop-heart. The thing to dowhen you're running along about a hundred or so and you suddenly find a red-flashing CHP-tracker on your trail what you want to do then is accelerate.

Yet, with a weakness of mind not uncommon to great criminals, he shrank from the thoughts of his own baseness and cruelty, and endeavored to banish the feeling of dishonor from his mind, by devolving the immediate execution of his villainy upon his subordinate agents.

On the third play he dropped back to pass, and it was unadulterated chaos: The pocket was immediately collapsing, people were yelling, everything was happening at the same time, and it felt like he was trying to defuse a pipe bomb while learning to speak Cantonese." "He believed it was his destiny to kill faceless foreigners for complex reasons that were beyond his control, and to deeply question the meaning of those murders, and to kill despite those questions, and to eventually understand the meaning of his own life through the battlefield executions of total strangers." "Teaching history to eighth graders is like being a tour guide for people who hate their vacation." "There is no feeling that can match the emotive intensity of an attraction devoid of explanation.

The problem, that is to say, is educational. It is a problem of continuously moulding the consciousness both of the directing group and of the larger executive group that lies immediately below it. The consciousness of the masses needs only to be influenced in a negative way. Given

In psychiatry there is a certain condition known as “delusion of reprieve.” The condemned man, immediately before his execution, gets the illusion that he might be reprieved at the very last minute.

A genuine purpose always starts with an impulse. Obstruction of the immediate execution of an impulse converts it into a desire. Nevertheless neither impulse nor desire is itself a purpose. A purpose is an end-view. That is, it involves foresight of the consequences which will result from acting upon impulse.

When, in the immediate postwar era, someone at Chrysler had designed a smaller, low-slung car, K. T. Keller, the company’s top executive, had mocked it. “Chrysler builds cars to sit in,” he said, “not to piss over.

Effective immediately all fuel, whether in possession of a refinery, a fuel wholesaler, or even your local gas station, is property of the United States government and will only be available to first responders and the military. He stated that all fuel sales to the public would be halted immediately and anyone caught selling fuel in violation of this Executive Order would be arrested.

Believing in no ultimate Judge who will separate the sheep from the goats, they take it upon themselves to mete out perfect justice. They believe that every moral grievance must be immediately redressed until we have perfected society. The tens of millions of people starved to death, executed, imprisoned, and aborted under communism testify to the harsh reality of this kind of human judgment. Such utopian visions have no basis for grace or mercy. Despite the well-known track record of horrors produced by this kind of godless mindset, we are seeing it return in the form of a redefined “justice” that goes by the name “social justice.” As we will see, it isn’t just at all.

After a long and happy life, I find myself at the pearly gates (a sight of great joy; the word for “pearl” in Greek is, by the way, margarita). Standing there is St. Peter. This truly is heaven, for finally my academic questions will receive answers. I immediately begin the questions that have been plaguing me for half a century: “Can you speak Greek? Where did you go when you wandered off in the middle of Acts? How was the incident between you and Paul in Antioch resolved? What happened to your wife?” Peter looks at me with some bemusement and states, “Look, lady, I’ve got a whole line of saved people to process. Pick up your harp and slippers here, and get the wings and halo at the next table. We’ll talk after dinner.” As I float off, I hear, behind me, a man trying to gain Peter’s attention. He has located a “red letter Bible,” which is a text in which the words of Jesus are printed in red letters. This is heaven, and all sorts of sacred art and Scriptures, from the Bhagavad Gita to the Qur’an, are easily available (missing, however, was the Reader’s Digest Condensed Version). The fellow has his Bible open to John 14, and he is frenetically pointing at v. 6: “Jesus says here, in red letters, that he is the way. I’ve seen this woman on television (actually, she’s thinner in person). She’s not Christian; she’s not baptized - she shouldn’t be here!” “Oy,” says Peter, “another one - wait here.” He returns a few minutes later with a man about five foot three with dark hair and eyes. I notice immediately that he has holes in his wrists, for when the empire executes an individual, the circumstances of that death cannot be forgotten. “What is it, my son?” he asks. The man, obviously nonplussed, sputters, “I don’t mean to be rude, but didn’t you say that no one comes to the Father except through you?” “Well,” responds Jesus, “John does have me saying this.” (Waiting in line, a few other biblical scholars who overhear this conversation sigh at Jesus’s phrasing; a number of them remain convinced that Jesus said no such thing. They’ll have to make the inquiry on their own time.) “But if you flip back to the Gospel of Matthew, which does come first in the canon, you’ll notice in chapter 25, at the judgment of the sheep and the goats, that I am not interested in those who say ‘Lord, Lord,’ but in those who do their best to live a righteous life: feeding the hungry, visiting people in prison . . . ” Becoming almost apoplectic, the man interrupts, “But, but, that’s works righteousness. You’re saying she’s earned her way into heaven?” “No,” replies Jesus, “I am not saying that at all. I am saying that I am the way, not you, not your church, not your reading of John’s Gospel, and not the claim of any individual Christian or any particular congregation. I am making the determination, and it is by my grace that anyone gets in, including you. Do you want to argue?” The last thing I recall seeing, before picking up my heavenly accessories, is Jesus handing the poor man a Kleenex to help get the log out of his eye.

It is not even accurate to say that Christianity eventually broke away from Judaism. It is more accurate to say that, out of that matrix of biblical Judaism and that maelstrom of late Second-Temple Judaism, two great traditions eventually emerged: early Christianity and rabbinic Judaism. Each claimed exclusive continuity with the past, but in truth each was as great a leap and as valid a development from that common ancestry as was the other. They are not child and parent; they are two children of the same mother. So, of course, were Cain and Abel.

Takamasa Saegusa: 'Seigen, a mere member of the Toudouza, had the effrontery to sully the sacred dueling ground. For that reason, our lord had already decided to subject him to tu-uchi before long. Cut off his head immediately, and stick it on a pike!' Gennosuke could hardly believe his ears. Such an insult to Irako Seigen was unwarranted. It was pride. For Gennosuke, Irako Seigen was pride itself. Takamasa Saegusa: 'Fujiki Gennosuke! It is the way of the samurai to take the head of the defeated enemy on the battleground. Do not hesitate! If you are a samurai, you must carry out the duty of a samurai!' Samurai... Saegusa, Lord of Izu, continued shouting, but Gennosuke did not attend. That word 'samurai' alone reverberated through his body. If one aims at the juncture between the base of the skull and the spine, decapitation is not that difficult, but Gennosuke could muster no more strength than a baby. He grew pale and trembled with the strain. He could only hack with his sword as if he were sawing wood. He felt nauseated, as if his own cells one after another were being annihilated. But this... Lord Tokugawa Tadanaga: 'I approve.' Takamasa Saegusa: 'Fujiki Gennosuke, for this splendid action you have received words of thanks from our lord. As a sign of his exceptional approval, you shall be given employment at Sunpu Castle. This great debt will by no means be forgotten. From this day forward you must offer your life to our lord!' Prostrating himself, Gennosuke vomited.

In psychiatry there is a certain condition known as “delusion of reprieve.” The condemned man, immediately before his execution, gets the illusion that he might be re- prieved at the very last minute.

The principle of independent judgments (and decorrelated errors) has immediate applications for the conduct of meetings, an activity in which executives in organizations spend a great deal of their working days.

Good follow-up is just as important as the meeting itself. The great master of follow-up was Alfred Sloan, the most effective business executive I have ever known. Sloan, who headed General Motors from the 1920s until the 1950s, spent most of his six working days a week in meetings—three days a week in formal committee meetings with a set membership, the other three days in ad hoc meetings with individual GM executives or with a small group of executives. At the beginning of a formal meeting, Sloan announced the meeting’s purpose. He then listened. He never took notes and he rarely spoke except to clarify a confusing point. At the end he summed up, thanked the participants, and left. Then he immediately wrote a short memo addressed to one attendee of the meeting. In that note, he summarized the discussion and its conclusions and spelled out any work assignment decided upon in the meeting (including a decision to hold another meeting on the subject or to study an issue). He specified the deadline and the executive who was to be accountable for the assignment. He sent a copy of the memo to everyone who’d been present at the meeting. It was through these memos—each a small masterpiece—that Sloan made himself into an outstandingly effective executive.

These ideas can be made more concrete with a parable, which I borrow from John Fowles’s wonderful novel, The Magus. Conchis, the principle character in the novel, finds himself Mayor of his home town in Greece when the Nazi occupation begins. One day, three Communist partisans who recently killed some German soldiers are caught. The Nazi commandant gives Conchis, as Mayor, a choice — either Conchis will execute the three partisans himself to set an example of loyalty to the new regime, or the Nazis will execute every male in the town. Should Conchis act as a collaborator with the Nazis and take on himself the direct guilt of killing three men? Or should he refuse and, by default, be responsible for the killing of over 300 men? I often use this moral riddle to determine the degree to which people are hypnotized by Ideology. The totally hypnotized, of course, have an answer at once; they know beyond doubt what is correct, because they have memorized the Rule Book. It doesn’t matter whose Rule Book they rely on — Ayn Rand’s or Joan Baez’s or the Pope’s or Lenin’s or Elephant Doody Comix — the hypnosis is indicated by lack of pause for thought, feeling and evaluation. The response is immediate because it is because mechanical. Those who are not totally hypnotized—those who have some awareness of concrete events of sensory space-time, outside their heads— find the problem terrible and terrifying and admit they don’t know any 'correct' answer. I don’t know the 'correct' answer either, and I doubt that there is one. The universe may not contain 'right' and 'wrong' answers to everything just because Ideologists want to have 'right' and 'wrong' answers in all cases, anymore than it provides hot and cold running water before humans start tinkering with it. I feel sure that, for those awakened from hypnosis, every hour of every day presents choices that are just as puzzling (although fortunately not as monstrous) as this parable. That is why it appears a terrible burden to be aware of who you are, where you are, and what is going on around you, and why most people would prefer to retreat into Ideology, abstraction, myth and self-hypnosis. To come out of our heads, then, also means to come to our senses, literally—to live with awareness of the bottle of beer on the table and the bleeding body in the street. Without polemic intent, I think this involves waking from hypnosis in a very literal sense. Only one individual can do it at a time, and nobody else can do it for you. You have to do it all alone.

in the scramble to survive, founders often hire to solve immediate needs and simultaneously create long-term problems. This mistake is common enough that Bob Sutton wrote a book, The No-Asshole Rule, to help executives recognize the damage these hires cause to culture.5 No matter how many golden lectures a leader gives imploring people to “Be collaborative” or “Work as a team,” if the people hired have destructive habits, the lecture will lose.

Such is the lunacy and unfairness of the system. Huver’s witnesses, the ones testifying on behalf of the State, are cloaked with legitimacy, as if they’ve been sanctified by the authorities. Cops, experts, even snitches who’ve been washed and cleansed and spruced up in nice clothes, all take the stand and tell lies in a coordinated effort to have my client executed. But the witnesses who know the truth, and are telling it, are discounted immediately and made to look like fools.

Joy is not the satisfied contemplation of an accomplished result, the emotion of victory, the satisfaction of having succeeded. It is the sign of an energy that is deftly deployed, it is a free affirmation: everything comes easy. Joy is an activity: executing with ease something difficult that has taken time to master, asserting the faculties of the mind and the body. Joys of thought when it finds and discovers, joys of the body when it achieves without effort. That is why joy, unlike pleasure, increases with repetition, and is enriched. When you are walking, joy is a basso continuo. Locally, of course, you may run into effort and difficulty. You will also find immediate moments of contentment: a proud gaze backwards to contemplate the long steep plunge of the slope behind you. Those satisfactions, though, too often present an opportunity to reintroduce quantities, scores, figures (which track? how long? what altitude?). And walking becomes a competition. That is why expeditions in high mountain country (conquering peaks, each one a challenge) are always slightly impure: because they give rise to narcissistic gratification. What dominates in walking, away from ostentation and showing off, is the simple joy of feeling your body in the most primitively natural activity.

Everything, which we invent, discover and in a higher sense name, is the meaningful execution and proof of the existence of an original sense of truth, which quietly long formed, leads immediately, with lightning speed, to a fruitful insight. It is a revelation, which develops from the interior according to the exterior and allows humans to glimpse their similarity with god. It is a synthesis of the world and of spirit-mind (Geist), which conveys the most soulful reassurance of the eternal harmony of existence.

As for the problem of overproduction, which has been latent in our society since the development of the machine technique, it is solved by the device of continuous warfare, which is also useful in keying up public morale to the necessary pitch. ... The problem, that is to say, is educational. It is a problem of continuously molding the consciousness both of the directing group and of the larger executive group that lies immediately below it. The consciousness of the masses needs only to be influenced in a negative way.

You should evaluate your organizational design on a regular basis and gather the information that you need to decide without tipping people off to what you plan to do. Once you decide, you should immediately execute the reorg: Don’t leave time for leaks and lobbying.

The advantages of a hereditary Monarchy are self-evident. Without some such method of prescriptive, immediate and automatic succession, an interregnum intervenes, rival claimants arise, continuity is interrupted and the magic lost. Even when Parliament had secured control of taxation and therefore of government; even when the menace of dynastic conflicts had receded in to the coloured past; even when kingship had ceased to be transcendental and had become one of many alternative institutional forms; the principle of hereditary Monarchy continued to furnish the State with certain specific and inimitable advantages. Apart from the imponderable, but deeply important, sentiments and affections which congregate around an ancient and legitimate Royal Family, a hereditary Monarch acquires sovereignty by processes which are wholly different from those by which a dictator seizes, or a President is granted, the headship of the State. The King personifies both the past history and the present identity of the Nation as a whole. Consecrated as he is to the service of his peoples, he possesses a religious sanction and is regarded as someone set apart from ordinary mortals. In an epoch of change, he remains the symbol of continuity; in a phase of disintegration, the element of cohesion; in times of mutability, the emblem of permanence. Governments come and go, politicians rise and fall: the Crown is always there. A legitimate Monarch moreover has no need to justify his existence, since he is there by natural right. He is not impelled as usurpers and dictators are impelled, either to mesmerise his people by a succession of dramatic triumphs, or to secure their acquiescence by internal terrorism or by the invention of external dangers. The appeal of hereditary Monarchy is to stability rather than to change, to continuity rather than to experiment, to custom rather than to novelty, to safety rather than to adventure. The Monarch, above all, is neutral. Whatever may be his personal prejudices or affections, he is bound to remain detached from all political parties and to preserve in his own person the equilibrium of the realm. An elected President – whether, as under some constitutions, he be no more than a representative functionary, or whether, as under other constitutions, he be the chief executive – can never inspire the same sense of absolute neutrality. However impartial he may strive to become, he must always remain the prisoner of his own partisan past; he is accompanied by friends and supporters whom he may seek to reward, or faced by former antagonists who will regard him with distrust. He cannot, to an equal extent, serve as the fly-wheel of the State.

In psychiatry there is a certain condition known as “delusion of reprieve.” The condemned man, immediately before his execution, gets the illusion that he might be reprieved at the very last minute. We, too, clung to shreds of hope and believed to the last moment that it would not be so bad.

An aggressive mind-set should be the default setting of any leader. Default: Aggressive. This means that the best leaders, the best teams, don’t wait to act. Instead, understanding the strategic vision (or commander’s intent), they aggressively execute to overcome obstacles, capitalize on immediate opportunities, accomplish the mission, and win.

The principle of independent judgments (and decorrelated errors) has immediate applications for the conduct of meetings, an activity in which executives in organizations spend a great deal of their working days. A simple rule can help: before an issue is discussed, all members of the committee should be asked to write a very brief summary of their position.

psychiatry there is a certain condition known as “delusion of reprieve.” The condemned man, immediately before his execution, gets the illusion that he might be reprieved at the very last minute. We, too, clung to shreds of hope and believed to the last moment that it would not be so bad. Just the sight of the red cheeks and round faces of those prisoners was a great encouragement.

Fifty years ago A Charlie Brown Christmas was first broadcast on American television. Some network executives thought it would be ignored, while others worried that quoting the Bible would offend viewers. Some wanted its creator, Charles Schulz, to omit the Christmas story, but Schulz insisted it stay in. The program was an immediate success and has been rebroadcast every year since 1965.

If the ongoing importance of a manager is measured by how many people he has working under him, the immediate material manifestation of that manager's power and prestige is the visual quality of his presentations and reports. The meetings in which such emblems are displayed might be considered the high rituals of the corporate world. And just as the retinues of a feudal lord might include servants whose only role was to polish his horses' armor or tweeze his mustache before tournaments or pageants, so many present-day executives keep employees whose sole purpose is to prepare their PowerPoint presentations or craft the maps, cartoons, photographs, or illustrations that accompany their reports. Many of these reports are nothing more than props in a Kabuki-like corporate theater—no one actually reads them all the way through.

About five miles back I had a brush with the CHP. Not stopped or pulled over: nothing routine. I always drive properly. A bit fast, perhaps, but always with consummate skill and a natural feel for the road that even cops recognize. No cop was ever born who isn't a sucker for a finely-executed hi-speed Controlled Drift all the way around one of those cloverleaf freeway interchanges. Few people understand the psychology of dealing with a highway traffic cop. Your normal speeder will panic and immediately pull over to the side when he sees the big red light behind him ... and then he will start apologizing, begging for mercy. This is wrong. It arouses contempt in the cop-heart. The thing to do – when you're running along about 100 or so and you suddenly find a red-flashing CHP-tracker on your tail – what you want to do then is accelerate. Never pull over with the first siren-howl. Mash it down and make the bastard chase you at speeds up to 120 all the way to the next exit. He will follow. But he won't know what to make of your blinker-signal that says you're about to turn right. This is to let him know you're looking for a proper place to pull off and talk ... keep signaling and hope for an off-ramp, one of those uphill side-loops with a sign saying "Max Speed 25" ... and the trick, at this point, is to suddenly leave the freeway and take him into the chute at no less than 100 miles an hour. He will lock his brakes about the same time you lock yours, but it will take him a moment to realize that he's about to make a 180-degree turn at this speed ... but you will be ready for it, braced for the Gs and the fast heel-toe work, and with any luck at all you will have come to a complete stop off the road at the top of the turn and be standing beside your automobile by the time he catches up. He will not be reasonable at first ... but no matter. Let him calm down. He will want the first word. Let him have it. His brain will be in a turmoil: he may begin jabbering, or even pull his gun. Let him unwind; keep smiling. The idea is to show him that you were always in total control of yourself and your vehicle – while he lost control of everything.

I thought it wasn’t worth it, I thought no war is worth all this, this misery and this horror. Perhaps no war is, not even that first desperate war against fascism to which the Spanish people were abandoned by the democracies and by the Soviet Union as well, so that of Spain’s 24 million souls, fully half a million died directly, or from hunger and disease, or immediately afterward in Franco’s hundred thousand vindictive executions.

Could the Supreme Court have been relied upon as answering this description? It is much to be doubted, whether the members of that tribunal would at all times be endowed with so eminent a portion of fortitude, as would be called for in the execution of so difficult a task; and it is still more to be doubted, whether they would possess the degree of credit and authority, which might, on certain occasions, be indispensable towards reconciling the people to a decision that should happen to clash with an accusation brought by their immediate representatives. A deficiency in the first, would be fatal to the accused; in the last, dangerous to the public tranquillity. The hazard in both these respects, could only be avoided, if at all, by rendering that tribunal more numerous than would consist with a reasonable attention to economy. The necessity of a numerous court for the trial of impeachments, is equally dictated by the nature of the proceeding. This can never be tied down by such strict rules, either in the delineation of the offense by the prosecutors, or in the construction of it by the judges, as in common cases serve to limit the discretion of courts in favor of personal security. There will be no jury to stand between the judges who are to pronounce the sentence of the law, and the party who is to receive or suffer it. The awful discretion which a court of impeachments must necessarily have, to doom to honor or to infamy the most confidential and the most distinguished characters of the community, forbids the commitment of the trust to a small number of persons. These considerations seem alone sufficient to authorize a conclusion, that the Supreme Court would have been an improper substitute for the Senate, as a court of impeachments.

Power controlled or abridged is almost always the rival and enemy of that power by which it is controlled or abridged. This simple proposition will teach us how little reason there is to expect, that the persons intrusted with the administration of the affairs of the particular members of a confederacy will at all times be ready, with perfect good-humor, and an unbiased regard to the public weal, to execute the resolutions or decrees of the general authority. The reverse of this results from the constitution of human nature. If, therefore, the measures of the Confederacy cannot be executed without the intervention of the particular administrations, there will be little prospect of their being executed at all. The rulers of the respective members, whether they have a constitutional right to do it or not, will undertake to judge of the propriety of the measures themselves. They will consider the conformity of the thing proposed or required to their immediate interests or aims; the momentary conveniences or inconveniences that would attend its adoption. All this will be done; and in a spirit of interested and suspicious scrutiny, without that knowledge of national circumstances and reasons of state, which is essential to a right judgment, and with that strong predilection in favor of local objects, which can hardly fail to mislead the decision.

The panic was blamed on many factors—tight money, Roosevelt’s Gridiron Club speech attacking the “malefactors of great wealth,” and excessive speculation in copper, mining, and railroad stocks. The immediate weakness arose from the recklessness of the trust companies. In the early 1900s, national and most state-chartered banks couldn’t take trust accounts (wills, estates, and so on) but directed customers to trusts. Traditionally, these had been synonymous with safe investment. By 1907, however, they had exploited enough legal loopholes to become highly speculative. To draw money for risky ventures, they paid exorbitant interest rates, and trust executives operated like stock market plungers. They loaned out so much against stocks and bonds that by October 1907 as much as half the bank loans in New York were backed by securities as collateral—an extremely shaky base for the system. The trusts also didn’t keep the high cash reserves of commercial banks and were vulnerable to sudden runs.

Recall that epic heroes were judged by their actions, not by the results. No matter how sophisticated our choices, how good we are at dominating the odds, randomness will have the last word. We are left only with dignity as a solution—dignity defined as the execution of a protocol of behavior that does not depend on the immediate circumstance. It may not be the optimal one, but it certainly is the one that makes us feel best. Grace under pressure, for example. Or in deciding not to toady up to someone, whatever

Don't try to inspire people with fear. It doesn't work well, and it doesn't last long. When you scare someone, you activate that person's amygdala, the emotional center of the brain. The reaction is swift and hot, as one would have when confronted with a threat. The problem is that an action that starts in the emotional centers of the brain bypasses the judgment and executive function areas of the brain as well. As a result, the reaction may be intense and immediate, but it is also often uncoordinated and transient.

Of all the war crimes which he claimed he had to commit on the orders of Hitler “the worst of all,” General Keitel said on the stand at Nuremberg, stemmed from the Nacht und Nebel Erlass—“Night and Fog Decree.” This grotesque order, reserved for the unfortunate inhabitants of the conquered territories in the West, was issued by Hitler himself on December 7, 1941. Its purpose, as the weird title indicates, was to seize persons “endangering German security” who were not to be immediately executed and make them vanish without a trace into the night and fog of the unknown in Germany. No information was to be given their families as to their fate even when, as invariably occurred, it was merely a question of the place of burial in the Reich. On December 12, 1941, Keitel issued a directive explaining the Fuehrer’s orders. “In principle,” he said, “the punishment for offenses committed against the German state is the death penalty.” But if these offenses are punished with imprisonment, even with hard labor for life, this will be looked upon as a sign of weakness. Efficient intimidation can only be achieved either by capital punishment or by measures by which the relatives of the criminal and the population do not know his fate.42 The following February Keitel enlarged on the Night and Fog Decree. In cases where the death penalty was not meted out within eight days of a person’s arrest, the prisoners are to be transported to Germany secretly… these measures will have a deterrent effect because (a) the prisoners will vanish without leaving a trace, (b) no information may be given as to their whereabouts or their fate.

In June 1940, immediately after France surrendered to the invading Nazis, Rieber and Westrick took part in a celebratory dinner in a private room at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where executives of Ford, General Motors, Eastman Kodak, and other companies talked about the prospects for American cooperation with the Nazi regime that seemed certain to dominate Europe for the foreseeable future. Germany would be a good credit risk for American loans, Westrick said, and there should definitely be no more of this nonsense of selling US arms to the British.

What are the common wages of labour, depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between those two parties, whose interests are by no means the same. The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little as possible. The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter in order to lower the wages of labour. It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorizes, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work; but many against combining to raise it. In all such disputes the masters can hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, a merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year without employment. In the long run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him; but the necessity is not so immediate. We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. To violate this combination is everywhere a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals. We seldom, indeed, hear of this combination, because it is the usual, and one may say, the natural state of things, which nobody ever hears of. Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate. These are always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy, till the moment of execution, and when the workmen yield, as they sometimes do, without resistance, though severely felt by them, they are never heard of by other people. Such combinations, however, are frequently resisted by a contrary defensive combination of the workmen; who sometimes too, without any provocation of this kind, combine of their own accord to raise the price of their labour. Their usual pretences are, sometimes the high price of provisions; sometimes the great profit which their masters make by their work. But whether their combinations be offensive or defensive, they are always abundantly heard of. In order to bring the point to a speedy decision, they have always recourse to the loudest clamour, and sometimes to the most shocking violence and outrage. They are desperate, and act with the folly and extravagance of desperate men, who must either starve, or frighten their masters into an immediate compliance with their demands. The masters upon these occasions are just as clamorous upon the other side, and never cease to call aloud for the assistance of the civil magistrate, and the rigorous execution of those laws which have been enacted with so much severity against the combinations of servants, labourers, and journeymen. The workmen, accordingly, very seldom derive any advantage from the violence of those tumultuous combinations, which, partly from the interposition of the civil magistrate, partly from the necessity superior steadiness of the masters, partly from the necessity which the greater part of the workmen are under of submitting for the sake of present subsistence, generally end in nothing, but the punishment or ruin of the ringleaders. But though in disputes with their workmen, masters must generally have the advantage, there is, however, a certain rate be.

I discovered that it was far more effective to focus their efforts not on the days to come or the far-distant finish line they couldn’t yet see, but instead on a physical goal immediately in front of them—the beach marker, landmark, or road sign a hundred yards ahead. If we could execute with a monumental effort just to reach an immediate goal that everyone could see, we could then continue to the next visually attainable goal and then the next. When pieced together, it meant our performance over time increased substantially and eventually we crossed the finish line at the head of the pack.

The principle of independent judgments (and decorrelated errors) has immediate applications for the conduct of meetings, an activity in which executives in organizations spend a great deal of their working days. A simple rule can help: before an issue is discussed, all members of the committee should be asked to write a very brief summary of their position. This procedure makes good use of the value of the diversity of knowledge and opinion in the group. The standard practice of open discussion gives too much weight to the opinions of those who speak early and assertively, causing others to line up behind them.

The principle of independent judgments (and decorrelated errors) has immediate applications for the conduct of meetings, an activity in which executives in organizations spend a great deal of their working days. A simple rule can help: before an issue is discussed, all members of the committee should be asked to write a very brief summary of their position. This procedure makes good use of the value of the diversity of knowledge and opinion in the group. The standard practice of open discussion gives too much weight to the opinions of those who speak early and assertively, causing others to line up behind them. What

This absence of intellectual mechanisms for questioning our own actions becomes clear when the expression of any unstructured doubt — for example, over the export of arms to potential enemies or the loss of shareholder power to managers or the loss of parliamentary power to the executive — is automatically categorized as naive or idealistic or bad for the economy or simply bad for jobs. And should we attempt to use sensible words to deal with these problems, they will be caught up immediately in the structures of the official arguments which accompany the official modern ideologies — arguments as sterile as the ideologies are irrelevant.

The savage “tyrant” was Christianity. From almost the very first years that a Christian emperor had ruled in Rome in AD 312, liberties had begun to be eroded. And then, in AD 529, a final blow had fallen. It was decreed that all those who labored “under the insanity of paganism”—in other words Damascius and his fellow philosophers—would no longer be allowed to teach. There was worse. It was also announced that anyone who had not yet been baptized was to come forward and make themselves known at the “holy churches” immediately, or face exile. And if anyone allowed themselves to be baptized, then slipped back into their old pagan ways, they would be executed.

The billionaire investor and former senior executive at Facebook, Chamath Palihapitiya, argues that we must rewire our brain to focus on the long term, which starts by removing social media apps from our phones. In his words, such apps, “wire your brain for super-fast feedback.” By receiving constant feedback, whether through likes, comments, or immediate replies to our messages, we condition ourselves to expect fast results with everything we do. And this feeling is certainly reinforced through ads for schemes to help us “get rich quick”, and through cognitive biases (i.e., we only hear about the richest and most successful YouTubers, not about the ones who fail).

The internet itself led him from one word to the next, giving links, pointing out. When it didn’t know something it tactfully kept quiet or stubbornly showed him the same pages, ad nauseam. Then Kunicki had the impression that he had just landed at the border of the known world, at the wall, at the membrane of the heavenly firmament. There wasn’t any way to break through it with his head and look through. The internet is a fraud. It promises so much—that it will execute your every command, that it will find you what you’re looking for; execution, fulfillment, reward. But in essence that promise is a kind of bait, because you immediately fall into a trance, into hypnosis. The paths quickly diverge, double and multiply, and you go down them, still chasing an aim that will now get blurry and undergo some transformations. You lose the ground beneath your feet, the place where you started from just gets forgotten, and your aim finally vanishes from sight, disappears in the passage of more and more pages, businesses that always promise more than they can give, shamelessly pretending that under the flat plane of the screen there is some cosmos. But nothing could be more deceptive, dear Kunicki. What are you, Kunicki, looking for? What are you aiming at? You feel like spreading out your arms and plunging into it, into that abyss, but there is nothing more deceptive: the landscape turns out to be a wallpaper, you can’t go any farther.

The experience of stress has three components. The first is the event, physical or emotional, that the organism interprets as threatening. This is the stress stimulus, also called the stressor. The second element is the processing system that experiences and interprets the meaning of the stressor. In the case of human beings, this processing system is the nervous system, in particular the brain. The final constituent is the stress response, which consists of the various physiological and behavioural adjustments made as a reaction to a perceived threat. We see immediately that the definition of a stressor depends on the processing system that assigns meaning to it. The shock of an earthquake is a direct threat to many organisms, though not to a bacterium. The loss of a job is more acutely stressful to a salaried employee whose family lives month to month than to an executive who receives a golden handshake. Equally important is the personality and current psychological state of the individual on whom the stressor is acting. The executive whose financial security is assured when he is terminated may still experience severe stress if his self-esteem and sense of purpose were completely bound up with his position in the company, compared with a colleague who finds greater value in family, social interests or spiritual pursuits. The loss of employment will be perceived as a major threat by the one, while the other may see it as an opportunity. There is no uniform and universal relationship between a stressor and the stress response. Each stress event is singular and is experienced in the present, but it also has its resonance from the past. The intensity of the stress experience and its long-term consequences depend on many factors unique to each individual. What defines stress for each of us is a matter of personal disposition and, even more, of personal history. Selye discovered that the biology of stress predominantly affected three types of tissues or organs in the body: in the hormonal system, visible changes occurred in the adrenal glands; in the immune system, stress affected the spleen, the thymus and the lymph glands; and the intestinal lining of the digestive system. Rats autopsied after stress had enlarged adrenals, shrunken lymph organs and ulcerated intestines.

Most Western managers believe that long-term success flows from a state of stability, harmony, predictability, discipline, and consensus-a state that I refer to as stable equilibrium. This belief leads them to demand general prescriptions that they can immediately convert into successful action. The most popular prescriptions are to formulate a vision of an organization's future state, to prepare long-term plans to realize that vision, to set strategic milestones and monitor achievements against those plans, to write mission statements and persuade people to share the same culture, to encourage widespread participation and consensus in decision making, and to install control systems that allow top executives to set the organization's direction and stay in command.

blackout one New York newspaper managed to appear: The New York Times. It had shifted its printing operations immediately across the Hudson to Newark, New Jersey, where the power plants were functioning and where a local paper, The Newark Evening News, had a substantial printing plant. But instead of the million copies the Times management had ordered, fewer than half this number actually reached the readers. Just as the Times went to press (so at least goes a widely told anecdote) the executive editor and three of his assistants started arguing how to hyphenate one word. This took them forty-eight minutes (so it is said)—or half of the available press time. The Times, the editor argued, sets a standard for written English in the United States and therefore cannot afford a grammatical mistake.

A shorthand quickly developed among them, almost their own language. Watching it happen thrilled Herb Sargent, who in all his years in the business had never seen anything like it. “It’s like musicians jamming,” he thought. “They can come from all over the country and immediately sit down and play together because the level of their art is in the same place.” Everyone always seemed to be laughing, and a rushing, manic sense of hilarity took over. There was a constant, competitive throwing out of lines, all of them showing what they had, looking for openings, and timing their licks. A giggling group from the show poured into a crowded NBC elevator one day, and as they rode down Chevy put his arm around a balding executive standing next to him, turned to the others, and asked, “Have you met my wife?

After further conferences that late spring the following plan was drawn up. Speidel, almost alone among the Army conspirators in the West, survived to describe it: An immediate armistice with the Western Allies but not unconditional surrender. German withdrawal in the West to Germany. Immediate suspension of the Allied bombing of Germany. Arrest of Hitler for trial before a German court. Overthrow of Nazi rule. Temporary assumption of executive power in Germany by the resistance forces of all classes under the leadership of General Beck, Goerdeler, and the trade-union representative, Leuschner. No military dictatorship. Preparation of a “constructive peace” within the framework of a United States of Europe. In the East, continuation of the war. Holding a shortened line between the mouth of the Danube, the Carpathian Mountains, the River Vistula and Memel.

To derive the most useful information from multiple sources of evidence, you should always try to make these sources independent of each other. This rule is part of good police procedure. When there are multiple witnesses to an event, they are not allowed to discuss it before giving their testimony. The goal is not only to prevent collusion by hostile witnesses, it is also to prevent unbiased witnesses from influencing each other. Witnesses who exchange their experiences will tend to make similar errors in their testimony, reducing the total value of the information they provide. Eliminating redundancy from your sources of information is always a good idea. The principle of independent judgments (and decorrelated errors) has immediate applications for the conduct of meetings, an activity in which executives in organizations spend a great deal of their working days.

What the turbulent months of the campaign and the election revealed most of all, I think, was that the American people were voicing a profound demand for change. On the one hand, the Humphrey people were demanding a Marshall Plan for our diseased cities and an economic solution to our social problems. The Nixon and Wallace supporters, on the other hand, were making their own limited demands for change. They wanted more "law and order," to be achieved not through federal spending but through police, Mace, and the National Guard. We must recognize and accept the demand for change, but now we must struggle to give it a progressive direction. For the immediate agenda, I would make four proposals. First, the Electoral College should be eliminated. It is archaic, undemocratic, and potentially very dangerous. Had Nixon not achieved a majority of the electoral votes, Wallace might have been in the position to choose and influence our next President. A shift of only 46,000 votes in the states of Alaska, Delaware, New Jersey, and Missouri would have brought us to that impasse. We should do away with this system, which can give a minority and reactionary candidate so much power and replace it with one that provides for the popular election of the President. It is to be hoped that a reform bill to this effect will emerge from the hearings that will soon be conducted by Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana. Second, a simplified national registration law should be passed that provides for universal permanent registration and an end to residence requirements. Our present system discriminates against the poor who are always underregistered, often because they must frequently relocate their residence, either in search of better employment and living conditions or as a result of such poorly planned programs as urban renewal (which has been called Negro removal). Third, the cost of the presidential campaigns should come from the public treasury and not from private individuals. Nixon, who had the backing of wealthy corporate executives, spent $21 million on his campaign. Humphrey's expenditures totaled only $9.7 million. A system so heavily biased in favor of the rich cannot rightly be called democratic. And finally, we must maintain order in our public meetings. It was disgraceful that each candidate, for both the presidency and the vice-presidency, had to be surrounded by cordons of police in order to address an audience. And even then, hecklers were able to drown him out. There is no possibility for rational discourse, a prerequisite for democracy, under such conditions. If we are to have civility in our civil life, we must not permit a minority to disrupt our public gatherings.

Constantius II ordered pagan temples closed and sacrificial practices stopped. We have already seen a law issued in 341 CE: “Superstition shall cease; the madness of sacrifices shall be abolished... [anyone]... who performs sacrifices . . . shall suffer the infliction of a suitable punishment and the effect of an immediate sentence” (Theodosian Code 16.10.2). In a law of 346 CE, the penalties are specified: Temples “in all places and in all cities” are to be “immediately closed” and “access to them forbidden.” No one may perform a sacrifice. Anyone who does “shall be struck down with the avenging sword” and his “property shall be confiscated.” Any governor who fails to avenge such crimes “shall be similarly punished” (Theodosian Code 16.10.4); And perhaps more drastically, later in Constantius’s reign, in 356: “Anyone who sacrifices or worships images shall be executed” (Theodosian Code 16.10.6).

We all go through periods of dryness in our prayers, don’t we? I doubt (but ask your directeur) whether they are necessarily a bad symptom. I sometimes suspect that what we feel to be our best prayers are really our worst; that what we are enjoying is the satisfaction of apparent success, as in executing a dance or reciting a poem. Do our prayers sometimes go wrong because we insist on trying to talk to God when He wants to talk to us? Joy tells me that once, years ago, she was haunted one morning by a feeling that God wanted something of her, a persistent pressure like the nag of a neglected duty. And till mid-morning she kept on wondering what it was. But the moment she stopped worrying, the answer came through as plain as a spoken voice. It was “I don’t want you to do anything. I want to give you something”; and immediately her heart was full of peace and delight. St. Augustine says “God gives where He finds empty hands”. A man whose hands are full of parcels can’t receive a gift. Perhaps these parcels are not always sins or earthly cares, but sometimes our own fussy attempts to worship Him in our way. Incidentally, what most often interrupts my own prayers is not great distractions but tiny ones—things one will have to do or avoid in the course of the next hour. . . . Yes—it is sometimes hard to obey St. Paul’s “Rejoice”. We must try to take life moment by moment. The actual present is usually pretty tolerable, I think, if only we refrain from adding to its burden that of the past and the future. How right Our Lord is about “sufficient to the day”. Do even pious people in their reverence for the more radiantly divine element in His sayings, sometimes attend too little to their sheer practical common-sense? . . . Let us by all means pray for one another: it is perhaps the only form of “work for re-union” which never does anything but good. God bless you.

As humans we spend our time seeking big, meaningful experiences. So the afterlife may surprise you when your body wears out. We expand back into what we really are—which is, by Earth standards, enormous. We stand ten thousand kilometers tall in each of nine dimensions and live with others like us in a celestial commune. When we reawaken in these, our true bodies, we immediately begin to notice that our gargantuan colleagues suffer a deep sense of angst. Our job is the maintenance and upholding of the cosmos. Universal collapse is imminent, and we engineer wormholes to act as structural support. We labor relentlessly on the edge of cosmic disaster. If we don’t execute our jobs flawlessly, the universe will re-collapse. Ours is complex, intricate, and important work. After three centuries of this toil, we have the option to take a vacation. We all choose the same destination: we project ourselves into lower-dimensional creatures. We project ourselves into the tiny, delicate, three-dimensional bodies that we call humans, and we are born onto the resort we call Earth. The idea, on such vacations, is to capture small experiences. On the Earth, we care only about our immediate surroundings. We watch comedy movies. We drink alcohol and enjoy music. We form relationships, fight, break up, and start again. When we’re in a human body, we don’t care about universal collapse—instead, we care only about a meeting of the eyes, a glimpse of bare flesh, the caressing tones of a loved voice, joy, love, light, the orientation of a house plant, the shade of a paint stroke, the arrangement of hair. Those are good vacations that we take on Earth, replete with our little dramas and fusses. The mental relaxation is unspeakably precious to us. And when we’re forced to leave by the wearing out of those delicate little bodies, it is not uncommon to see us lying prostrate in the breeze of the solar winds, tools in hand, looking out into the cosmos, wet-eyed, searching for meaninglessness.

Unwashed and undernourished, having spent over four days on five different trains and four military jeeps, Alexander got off at Molotov on Friday, June 19, 1942. He arrived at noon and then sat on a wooden bench near the station. Alexander couldn’t bring himself to walk to Lazarevo. He could not bear the thought of her dying in Kobona, getting out of the collapsed city and then dying so close to salvation. He could not face it. And worse—he knew that he could not face himself if he found out that she did not make it. He could not face returning—returning to what? Alexander actually thought of getting on the next train and going back immediately. The courage to move forward was much more than the courage he needed to stand behind a Katyusha rocket launcher or a Zenith antiaircraft gun on Lake Ladoga and know that any of the Luftwaffe planes flying overhead could instantly bring about his death. He was not afraid of his own death. He was afraid of hers. The specter of her death took away his courage. If Tatiana was dead, it meant God was dead, and Alexander knew he could not survive an instant during war in a universe governed by chaos, not purpose. He would not live any longer than poor, hapless Grinkov, who had been cut down by a stray bullet as he headed back to the rear. War was the ultimate chaos, a pounding, soul-destroying snarl, ending in blown-apart men lying unburied on the cold earth. There was nothing more cosmically chaotic than war. But Tatiana was order. She was finite matter in infinite space. Tatiana was the standard-bearer for the flag of grace and valor that she carried forward with bounty and perfection in herself, the flag Alexander had followed sixteen hundred kilometers east to the Kama River, to the Ural Mountains, to Lazarevo. For two hours Alexander sat on the bench in unpaved, provincial, oak-lined Molotov. To go back was impossible. To go forward was unthinkable. Yet he had nowhere else to go. He crossed himself and stood up, gathering his belongings. When Alexander finally walked in the direction of Lazarevo, not knowing whether Tatiana was alive or dead, he felt he was a man walking to his own execution.

Historically, chromosomes were not at all easy to study. They spend most of their existence balled up in an indistinguishable mass in the cell nucleus. The only way to count them was to get fresh samples from living cells at the moment of cell division, and that was a tall order. Cell biologists, according to one report, “literally waited at the foot of the gallows in order to fix the testis of an executed criminal immediately after death before the chromosomes could clump.” Even then the chromosomes tended to overlap and blur, making anything but a rough count difficult. But in 1921, a cytologist at the University of Texas named Theophilus Painter announced that he had secured good images and declared with reassuring confidence that he had counted twenty-four pairs of chromosomes. That number stuck, universally unquestioned, for thirty-five years until a closer examination in 1956 showed that in fact we have just twenty-three pairs—a fact that had been clearly evident in photographs for years (including in at least one popular textbook illustration) had anyone taken the trouble to count.

The legislative department derives a superiority in our governments from other circumstances. Its constitutional powers being at once more extensive, and less susceptible of precise limits, it can, with the greater facility, mask, under complicated and indirect measures, the encroachments which it makes on the co-ordinate departments. It is not unfrequently a question of real nicety in legislative bodies, whether the operation of a particular measure will, or will not, extend beyond the legislative sphere. On the other side, the executive power being restrained within a narrower compass, and being more simple in its nature, and the judiciary being described by landmarks still less uncertain, projects of usurpation by either of these departments would immediately betray and defeat themselves. Nor is this all: as the legislative department alone has access to the pockets of the people, and has in some constitutions full discretion, and in all a prevailing influence, over the pecuniary rewards of those who fill the other departments, a dependence is thus created in the latter, which gives still greater facility to encroachments of the former. I

I believe that social media, and the internet as a whole, have negatively impacted our ability to both think long-term and to focus deeply on the task in front of us. It is no surprise, therefore, that Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, prohibited his children from using phones or tablets—even though his business was to sell millions of them to his customers! The billionaire investor and former senior executive at Facebook, Chamath Palihapitiya, argues that we must rewire our brain to focus on the long term, which starts by removing social media apps from our phones. In his words, such apps, “wire your brain for super-fast feedback.” By receiving constant feedback, whether through likes, comments, or immediate replies to our messages, we condition ourselves to expect fast results with everything we do. And this feeling is certainly reinforced through ads for schemes to help us “get rich quick”, and through cognitive biases (i.e., we only hear about the richest and most successful YouTubers, not about the ones who fail). As we demand more and more stimulation, our focus is increasingly geared toward the short term and our vision of reality becomes distorted. This leads us to adopt inaccurate mental models such as: Success should come quickly and easily, or I don’t need to work hard to lose weight or make money. Ultimately, this erroneous concept distorts our vision of reality and our perception of time. We can feel jealous of people who seem to have achieved overnight success. We can even resent popular YouTubers. Even worse, we feel inadequate. It can lead us to think we are just not good enough, smart enough, or disciplined enough. Therefore, we feel the need to compensate by hustling harder. We have to hurry before we miss the opportunity. We have to find the secret that will help us become successful. And, in this frenetic race, we forget one of the most important values of all: patience. No, watching motivational videos all day long won’t help you reach your goals. But, performing daily consistent actions, sustained over a long period of time will. Staying calm and focusing on the one task in front of you every day will. The point is, to achieve long-term goals in your personal or professional life, you must regain control of your attention and rewire your brain to focus on the long term. To do so, you should start by staying away from highly stimulating activities.

Find the loyal. Punish the wicked. I had a standard way of approaching the topic. I'd tell a joke about the king, something a little bawdy. Having to do with the rumors that the firstprince was sired by the king's sister and not the reverendmother. Those who go along with the humor reveal themselves to be unknowingly awaiting eventual execution. Your father actually didn't laugh, much to his credit. Instead he objected forcefully. He screamed at me for my rudeness on his land. He did not like the content or context and asked me to immediately apologize for the blasphemy and walk away from the home of his family. And I stood there looking at this small man, this farmer of rocks. Screaming at me about his service to the king and my betrayal of our sacred nation. Him making demands of me. knowing nothing of my life! my sacrifices for my king, my duty served so often. I wasn't on that field anymore. Instead I saw him in my mind's eye, years after this, bending down day after day, clearing the fields of their hard seeds. And all the while imagining himself my better. Because he didn't like a joke I told. I was lost in this vision, and when I found my way out, my sword was in his gut.

To derive the most useful information from multiple sources of evidence, you should always try to make these sources independent of each other. This rule is part of good police procedure. When there are multiple witnesses to an event, they are not allowed to discuss it before giving their testimony. The goal is not only to prevent collusion by hostile witnesses, it is also to prevent unbiased witnesses from influencing each other. Witnesses who exchange their experiences will tend to make similar errors in their testimony, reducing the total value of the information they provide. Eliminating redundancy from your sources of information is always a good idea. The principle of independent judgments (and decorrelated errors) has immediate applications for the conduct of meetings, an activity in which executives in organizations spend a great deal of their working days. A simple rule can help: before an issue is discussed, all members of the committee should be asked to write a very brief summary of their position. This procedure makes good use of the value of the diversity of knowledge and opinion in the group. The standard practice of open discussion gives too much weight to the opinions of those who speak early and assertively, causing others to line up behind them.

Since my prior requests for office time are routinely ignored, I am now resorting to this: I need officetime everyday! I need officetime everyday! I need office time everyday! I need office time everyday! I need office time everyday! I need officetime everyday! I need officetime everyday! I need officetime everyday! I need officetime everyday! I need office time everyday! I need office time everyday! I need office time everyday! I need officetime everyday! I need officetime everyday! I need officetime everyday! I need officetime everyday! Not just once a week or some days, everyday! Not just once a week or some days, everyday! Not just once a week or some days, everyday! Not just once a week or some days, everyday! Not just once a week or some days, everyday! Not just once a week or some days, everyday! Not just once a week or some days, everyday! Not just once a week or some days, everyday! Not just once a week or some days, everyday! Not just once a week or some days, everyday! Breaks or transition times between meetings are not office time. Breaks or transition times between meetings are not office time. Breaks or transition times between meetings are not office time. Breaks or transition times between meetings are not office time. Breaks or transition times between meetings are not office time. Breaks or transition times between meetings are not office time. Breaksor transition times between meetings are not officetime. If this doesn't change immediately, I will just start unilaterally cancelling things every day. If this doesn't change immediately, I will just start unilaterally cancelling things every day. If this doesn't change immediately, I will just start unilaterally cancelling things every day. If this doesn't change immediately, I will just start unilaterally cancelling things every day. If this doesn't change immediately, I will just start unilaterally cancelling things every day. Have I made myself clear, finally?! Have I made myself clear, finally?! Have I made myself clear, finally?! Have I made myself clear, finally?! Have I made myself clear, finally?! Have I made myself clear, finally?! Have I made myself clear, finally?! Have I made myself clear, finally?! Have I made myself clear, finally?! Have I made myself clear, finally?! Have I made myself clear, finally?! Have I made myself clear, finally?! Have I made myself clear, finally?! Have I made myself clear, finally?! Have I made myself clear, finally?! Have I made myself clear, finally?! Have I made myself clear, finally?! Have I made myself clear, finally?!

For the first time after the Great Purge, Stalin had a great number of high and highest officials executed, and we know for certain that this was planned as the beginning of another nationwide purge. This would have been touched off by the “Doctors’ plot” had Stalin’s death not intervened. A group of mostly Jewish physicians were accused of having plotted “to wipe out the leading cadres of the USSR.”30 Everything that went on in Russia between 1948 and January 1953, when the “Doctors’ plot” was being “discovered,” bore a striking and ominous similarity to the preparations of the Great Purge during the thirties: the death of Zhdanov and the Leningrad purge corresponded to Kirov’s no less mysterious death in 1934 which was immediately followed by a kind of preparatory purge “of all former oppositionists who remained in the Party.”31 Moreover, the very content of the absurd accusation against the physicians, that they would kill off people in leading positions all over the country, must have filled with fearful forebodings all those who were acquainted with Stalin’s method of accusing a fictitious enemy of the crime he himself was about to commit. (The best known example is of course his accusation that Tukhachevski conspired with Germany at the very moment when Stalin was contemplating an alliance with the Nazis.)

You may not recognize the name Steven Schussler, CEO of Schussler Creative Inc., but you are probably familiar with his very popular theme restaurant Rainforest Café. Steve is one of the scrappiest people I know, with countless scrappy stories. He is open and honest about his wins and losses. This story about how he launched Rainforest Café is one of my favorites: Steve first envisioned a tropical-themed family restaurant back in the 1980s, but unfortunately, he couldn’t persuade anyone else to buy into the idea at the time. Not willing to give up easily, he decided to get scrappy and be “all in.” To sell his vision, he transformed his own split-level suburban home into a living, mist-enshrouded rain forest to convince potential investors that the concept was viable. Yes, you read that correctly—he converted his own house into a jungle dwelling complete with rock outcroppings, waterfalls, rivers, and layers of fog and mist that rose from the ground. The jungle included a life-size replica of an elephant near the front door, forty tropical birds in cages, and a live baby baboon named Charlie. Steve shared the following details: Every room, every closet, every hallway of my house was set up as a three-dimensional vignette: an attempt to present my idea of what a rain forest restaurant would look like in actual operation. . . . [I]t took me three years and almost $400,000 to get the house developed to the point where I felt comfortable showing it to potential investors. . . . [S]everal of my neighbors weren’t exactly thrilled to be living near a jungle habitat. . . . On one occasion, Steve received a visit from the Drug Enforcement Administration. They wanted to search the premises for drugs, presuming he may have had an illegal drug lab in his home because of his huge residential electric bill. I imagine they were astonished when they discovered the tropical rain forest filled with jungle creatures. Steve’s plan was beautiful, creative, fun, and scrappy, but the results weren’t coming as quickly as he would have liked. It took all of his resources, and he was running out of time and money to make something happen. (It’s important to note that your scrappy efforts may not generate results immediately.) I asked Steve if he ever thought about quitting, how tight was the money really, and if there was a time factor, and he said, “Yes to all three! Of course I thought about quitting. I was running out of money and time.” Ultimately, Steve’s plan succeeded. After many visits and more than two years later, gaming executive and venture capitalist Lyle Berman bought into the concept and raised the funds necessary to get the Rainforest Café up and running. The Rainforest Café chain became one of the most successful themed restaurants ever created, and continues that way under Landry’s Restaurants and Tilman Fertitta’s leadership. Today, Steve creates restaurant concepts in fantastic warehouses far from his residential neighborhood!

From another perspective, free will is not illusory at all. So long as we have relatively undamaged brains and relatively normal upbringings, each of us has a very real capacity to execute and to inhibit voluntary action, thanks to our brain’s ability to control our many degrees of freedom. This kind of freedom is both a freedom from and a freedom to. It is a freedom from immediate causes in the world or in the body, and from coercion by authorities, hypnotists and mesmerists, or social-media pushers. It is not, however, freedom from the laws of nature or from the causal fabric of the universe. It is a freedom to act according to our beliefs, values, and goals, to do as we wish to do, and to make choices according to who we are. The reality of this kind of free will is underlined by the fact that it cannot be taken for granted. Brain injuries, or unlucky draws from the lotteries of our genes and our environments, can undermine our ability to exercise voluntary behaviour. People with anarchic hand syndrome make voluntary actions which they do not experience as being theirs, while those with akinetic mutism are unable to make any voluntary actions at all. An awkwardly located brain tumour can transform an engineering student into a mass school shooter, as happened in the case of Charles Whitman, the ‘Texas Tower Sniper’, or engender in a previously blameless teacher a rampant paedophilia – a tendency which disappeared when the tumour was removed, and returned when it grew back.

During the war, my son Alfred [Cochrane] went up [to Bsharre, in Lebanon] to see some friends. On the road, he was stopped by the Marada militia. They put a gun to his head and tied him to a tree. When Alfred was at Eton he quickly learned how to get out of beatings, and his experience came in very handy on this occasion. They said they were going to execute him. He kept telling them he was great friends with the Franjiehs – the ex-President’s family who commanded the militia – and said that he was going to spend the weekend with them. Of course he had no such plans, but the lie eventually did the trick. Most of the militia men did not believe him, but Alfred kept going on about his important Maronite friends and eventually one of them got cold feet. The others were saying, ‘Let’s just shoot him first and ask questions afterwards,’ but the one with the cold feet said, ‘No we must telephone the Franjiehs and check what he’s saying.’ So they did.” “Luckily they got the former President, Suleiman Franjieh. He was a little surprised to hear Alfred thought he had been invited over the weekend, but he told the militiamen to release Alfred immediately nonetheless. The next day Robert Franjieh, the President’s son, rang up here. He and Alfred had known each other since they were in playpens together: it’s a very small world here in Lebanon. Robert said: ‘I’m so sorry, Alfred. Rotten luck. Won’t you come to lunch?’” “And what was Alfred’s reply?” “He said, ‘Thanks a lot Robert, but not today. I’m afraid I’m a little busy.

In this world, a subordinate owes fealty principally to his immediate boss. This means that a subordinate must not overcommit his boss, lest his boss “get on the hook” for promises that cannot be kept. He must keep his boss from making mistakes, particularly public ones; he must keep his boss informed, lest his boss get “blindsided.” If one has a mistake-prone boss, there is, of course, always the temptation to let him make a fool of himself, but the wise subordinate knows that this carries two dangers—he himself may get done in by his boss’s errors, and, perhaps more important, other managers will view with the gravest sus- picion a subordinate who withholds crucial information from his boss even if they think the boss is a nincompoop. A subordinate must also not circumvent his boss nor ever give the appearance of doing so. He must never contradict his boss’s judgment in public. To violate the last admonition is thought to constitute a kind of death wish in business, and one who does so should practice what one executive calls “flexibility drills,” an exercise “where you put your head between your legs and kiss your ass good-bye.” The subordinate must extend to the boss a certain ritual deference. For instance, he must follow the boss’s lead in conversation, must not speak out of turn at meetings, must laugh at his boss’s jokes while not making jokes of his own that upstage his boss, must not rib the boss for his foibles. The shrewd subordinate learns to efface himself, so that his boss’s face might shine more clearly.

On the evening of Wednesday, June 22, 1955, there was an official re-election ceremony being held on the open porch behind the Executive Mansion. As usual it was hot and steamy in Monrovia and without air-conditioning the country’s President and several members of his administration were taking in the cooler, but still damp, night air. Without warning, several shots were fired in the direction of the President. In the dark all that could be seen were the bright flashes from a pistol. Two men, William Hutchins, a guard, and Daniel Derrick, a member of the national legislature, fell wounded, but fortunately President Tubman had escaped harm and was hurried back into the building. In the dark no one was certain, but Paul Dunbar was apparently seen by someone in the garden behind the mansion. James Bestman, a presidential security agent, subdued and apprehended the alleged shooter in the Executive Pavilion, best known for its concrete painted animals. It was said that Bestman had used his .38 caliber “Smith and Wesson,” revolver. Members of the opposition party were accused of participating in the assassination plot and a dragnet was immediately cast to round up the alleged perpetrators. It didn’t take long before the son of former President William Coleman, Samuel David Coleman, was indicted, as was his son John. The following day, warrants for the arrest of Former President Barclay, and others in opposition to Tubman, were also issued for allegedly being accomplices. Coleman and his son fled to Clay-Ashland, a township 15 miles north of Monrovia in the St. Paul River District of Montserrado County. Photo Caption: The (former) Liberian Executive Mansion.

And indeed, much of the evidence presented in this book so far would appear to confirm this. From the Boeing executives who built faulty planes, to the Goldman Sachs analysts who lied to their clients before being bailed out by the taxpayer, the capitalist class seems to provide the best evidence that society is made up of innately selfish individuals whose cooperative impulses extend, at best, to their immediate family and friends. But this view is highly one-sided. As we will see in this chapter, people are capable of amazing feats of ingenuity, compassion, and cooperation -even in a social order as brutal and competitive as our own. Capitalism, of course, rewards the opposite behavior: ruthlessness, competitiveness, and self-interest. No wonder these are the behaviors we see most prominently on display at the top of our society. And those at the top are precisely those who benefit from the belief that everyone is just like them. You don't have to look particularly hard to find the view of humanity as inherently selfish repeated by those in positions of authority. The managers at Lucas Aerospace certainly shared this view. And it is no coincidence that Golding was a schoolmaster -he was probably quite used to being disobeyed by his students, and likely saw this as an indication of man's inherent selfishness. But disobedience to authority is not an indication of selfishness; it's an assertion of an individual's autonomy. In fact, the willingness to disobey is precisely what separates genuinely civilized societies from barbarous ones. One only has to listen to the testimony at the Nuremberg trials to see what can happen when people unquestionably obey their superiors.

In their ongoing war against evil capitalists, some vengeful Democrats have their eyes on banks, which they blame for making millions of loans that resulted in foreclosures and the 2008 financial crisis. Never mind that it was progressives who forced the government to make these loans to low-income borrowers with poor credit ratings through the Community Reinvestment Act and anti-discrimination laws. They promoted minority home ownership without regard to the owners’ ability to repay, and the result was catastrophic. But being a leftist means never having to say you’re sorry—just pass a misguided policy and blame everyone else when it predictably fails. Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters, emboldened by Democrats recapturing control of the House, issued a stern warning to bankers before the 2019 session began. “I have not forgotten” that “you foreclosed on our houses,” she said, and “had us sign on the line for junk and for mess that we could not afford. I’m going to do to you what you did to us.”62 How’s that for good governance—using her newfound power as incoming chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee to punish bank executives for the disaster she and her fellow Democrats caused? Waters is also targeting corporations for allegedly excluding minorities and women from executive positions. Forming a new subcommittee on diversity and inclusion, she immediately held a hearing to discuss the importance of examining the systematic exclusion of women, people of color, persons with disabilities, gays, veterans, and other disadvantaged groups.63 Why concentrate on policies to stimulate economic growth and improve people’s standards of living when you can employ identity politics to demonize your opponents?

Once unbound from the shackles of truth, Fox’s power came from what it decided to cover—its chosen narratives—and what it decided to ignore. Trump’s immature, erratic, and immoral behavior? His sucking up to Putin? His mingling of presidential business and personal profit? Fox talk shows played dumb and targeted the “deep state” instead. Conservative media types were like spiders, spinning webs and trying to catch prey. They insisted the real story was an Obama-led plot against Trump to stop him from winning the election. One night Hannity irrationally exclaimed, “This makes Watergate look like stealing a Snickers bar from a drugstore!” Another night he upped the hysteria, insisting this scandal “will make Watergate look like a parking ticket.” The following night he screeched, “This is Watergate times a thousand.” He strung viewers along, invoking mysterious “sources” who were “telling us” that “this is just the tip of the iceberg.” There was always another “iceberg” ahead, always another twist coming, always another Democrat villain to attack after the commercial break. Hannity and Trump were so aligned that, on one weird night in 2018, Hannity had to deny that he was giving Trump a sneak peek at his monologues after the president tweeted out, twelve minutes before air, “Big show tonight on @SeanHannity! 9: 00 P.M. on @FoxNews.” Political reporters fumbled for their remotes and flipped over to Fox en masse. Hannity raved about the “Mueller crime family” and said the Russia investigation was “corrupt” and promoted a guest who said Mueller “surrounded himself with literally a bunch of legal terrorists,” whatever that meant. Some reporters who did not watch Fox regularly were shocked at how unhinged and extreme the content was. But this was just an ordinary night in the pro-Trump alternative universe. Night after night, Hannity said the Mueller probe needed to be stopped immediately, for the good of the country. Trump’s attempts at obstruction flowed directly from his “Executive Time.

When a middle school teacher in San Antonio, Texas, named Rick Riordan began thinking about the troublesome kids in his class, he was struck by a topsy-turvy idea. Maybe the wild ones weren’t hyperactive; maybe they were misplaced heroes. After all, in another era the same behavior that is now throttled with Ritalin and disciplinary rap sheets would have been the mark of greatness, the early blooming of a true champion. Riordan played with the idea, imagining the what-ifs. What if strong, assertive children were redirected rather than discouraged? What if there were a place for them, an outdoor training camp that felt like a playground, where they could cut loose with all those natural instincts to run, wrestle, climb, swim, and explore? You’d call it Camp Half-Blood, Riordan decided, because that’s what we really are—half animal and half higher-being, halfway between each and unsure how to keep them in balance. Riordan began writing, creating a troubled kid from a broken home named Percy Jackson who arrives at a camp in the woods and is transformed when the Olympian he has inside is revealed, honed, and guided. Riordan’s fantasy of a hero school actually does exist—in bits and pieces, scattered across the globe. The skills have been fragmented, but with a little hunting, you can find them all. In a public park in Brooklyn, a former ballerina darts into the bushes and returns with a shopping bag full of the same superfoods the ancient Greeks once relied on. In Brazil, a onetime beach huckster is reviving the lost art of natural movement. And in a lonely Arizona dust bowl called Oracle, a quiet genius disappeared into the desert after teaching a few great athletes—and, oddly, Johnny Cash and the Red Hot Chili Peppers—the ancient secret of using body fat as fuel. But the best learning lab of all was a cave on a mountain behind enemy lines—where, during World War II, a band of Greek shepherds and young British amateurs plotted to take on 100,000 German soldiers. They weren’t naturally strong, or professionally trained, or known for their courage. They were wanted men, marked for immediate execution. But on a starvation diet, they thrived. Hunted and hounded, they got stronger. They became such natural born heroes, they decided to follow the lead of the greatest hero of all, Odysseus, and

By now, though, it had been a steep learning curve, he was fairly well versed on the basics of how clearing worked: When a customer bought shares in a stock on Robinhood — say, GameStop — at a specific price, the order was first sent to Robinhood's in-house clearing brokerage, who in turn bundled the trade to a market maker for execution. The trade was then brought to a clearinghouse, who oversaw the trade all the way to the settlement. During this time period, the trade itself needed to be 'insured' against anything that might go wrong, such as some sort of systemic collapse or a default by either party — although in reality, in regulated markets, this seemed extremely unlikely. While the customer's money was temporarily put aside, essentially in an untouchable safe, for the two days it took for the clearing agency to verify that both parties were able to provide what they had agreed upon — the brokerage house, Robinhood — had to insure the deal with a deposit; money of its own, separate from the money that the customer had provided, that could be used to guarantee the value of the trade. In financial parlance, this 'collateral' was known as VAR — or value at risk. For a single trade of a simple asset, it would have been relatively easy to know how much the brokerage would need to deposit to insure the situation; the risk of something going wrong would be small, and the total value would be simple to calculate. If GME was trading at $400 a share and a customer wanted ten shares, there was $4000 at risk, plus or minus some nominal amount due to minute vagaries in market fluctuations during the two-day period before settlement. In such a simple situation, Robinhood might be asked to put up $4000 and change — in addition to the $4000 of the customer's buy order, which remained locked in the safe. The deposit requirement calculation grew more complicated as layers were added onto the trading situation. A single trade had low inherent risk; multiplied to millions of trades, the risk profile began to change. The more volatile the stock — in price and/or volume — the riskier a buy or sell became. Of course, the NSCC did not make these calculations by hand; they used sophisticated algorithms to digest the numerous inputs coming in from the trade — type of equity, volume, current volatility, where it fit into a brokerage's portfolio as a whole — and spit out a 'recommendation' of what sort of deposit would protect the trade. And this process was entirely automated; the brokerage house would continually run its trading activity through the federal clearing system and would receive its updated deposit requirements as often as every fifteen minutes while the market was open. Premarket during a trading week, that number would come in at 5:11 a.m. East Coast time, usually right as Jim, in Orlando, was finishing his morning coffee. Robinhood would then have until 10:00 a.m. to satisfy the deposit requirement for the upcoming day of trading — or risk being in default, which could lead to an immediate shutdown of all operations. Usually, the deposit requirement was tied closely to the actual dollars being 'spent' on the trades; a near equal number of buys and sells in a brokerage house's trading profile lowered its overall risk, and though volatility was common, especially in the past half-decade, even a two-day settlement period came with an acceptable level of confidence that nobody would fail to deliver on their trades.

Chapter One Vivek Ranadivé “IT WAS REALLY RANDOM. I MEAN, MY FATHER HAD NEVER PLAYED BASKETBALL BEFORE.” 1. When Vivek Ranadivé decided to coach his daughter Anjali’s basketball team, he settled on two principles. The first was that he would never raise his voice. This was National Junior Basketball—the Little League of basketball. The team was made up mostly of twelve-year-olds, and twelve-year-olds, he knew from experience, did not respond well to shouting. He would conduct business on the basketball court, he decided, the same way he conducted business at his software firm. He would speak calmly and softly, and he would persuade the girls of the wisdom of his approach with appeals to reason and common sense. The second principle was more important. Ranadivé was puzzled by the way Americans play basketball. He is from Mumbai. He grew up with cricket and soccer. He would never forget the first time he saw a basketball game. He thought it was mindless. Team A would score and then immediately retreat to its own end of the court. Team B would pass the ball in from the sidelines and dribble it into Team A’s end, where Team A was patiently waiting. Then the process would reverse itself. A regulation basketball court is ninety-four feet long. Most of the time, a team would defend only about twenty-four feet of that, conceding the other seventy feet. Occasionally teams played a full-court press—that is, they contested their opponent’s attempt to advance the ball up the court. But they did it for only a few minutes at a time. It was as if there were a kind of conspiracy in the basketball world about the way the game ought to be played, Ranadivé thought, and that conspiracy had the effect of widening the gap between good teams and weak teams. Good teams, after all, had players who were tall and could dribble and shoot well; they could crisply execute their carefully prepared plays in their opponent’s end. Why, then, did weak teams play in a way that made it easy for good teams to do the very things that they were so good at? Ranadivé looked at his girls. Morgan and Julia were serious basketball players. But Nicky, Angela, Dani, Holly, Annika, and his own daughter, Anjali, had never played the game before. They weren’t all that tall. They couldn’t shoot. They weren’t particularly adept at dribbling. They were not the sort who played pickup games at the playground every evening. Ranadivé lives in Menlo Park, in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley. His team was made up of, as Ranadivé put it, “little blond girls.” These were the daughters of nerds and computer programmers. They worked on science projects and read long and complicated books and dreamed about growing up to be marine biologists. Ranadivé knew that if they played the conventional way—if they let their opponents dribble the ball up the court without opposition—they would almost certainly lose to the girls for whom basketball was a passion. Ranadivé had come to America as a seventeen-year-old with fifty dollars in his pocket. He was not one to accept losing easily. His second principle, then, was that his team would play a real full-court press—every game, all the time. The team ended up at the national championships. “It was really random,” Anjali Ranadivé said. “I mean, my father had never played basketball before.” 2. Suppose you were to total up all the wars over the past two hundred years that occurred between very large and very small countries. Let’s say that one side has to be at least ten times larger in population and armed might

thepsychchic chips clips ii If you think of yourself instead as an almost-victor who thought correctly and did everything possible but was foiled by crap variance? No matter: you will have other opportunities, and if you keep thinking correctly, eventually it will even out. These are the seeds of resilience, of being able to overcome the bad beats that you can’t avoid and mentally position yourself to be prepared for the next time. People share things with you: if you’ve lost your job, your social network thinks of you when new jobs come up; if you’re recently divorced or separated or bereaved, and someone single who may be a good match pops up, you’re top of mind. This attitude is what I think of as a luck amplifier. … you will feel a whole lot happier … and your ready mindset will prepare you for the change in variance that will come … 134-135 W. H. Auden: “Choice of attention—to pay attention to this and ignore that—is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences.” Pay attention, or accept the consequences of your failure. 142 Attention is a powerful mitigator to overconfidence: it forces you to constantly reevaluate your knowledge and your game plan, lest you become too tied to a certain course of action. And if you lose? Well, it allows you to admit when it’s actually your fault and not a bad beat. 147 Following up on Phil Galfond’s suggestion to be both a detective and a storyteller and figure out “what your opponent’s actions mean, and sometimes what they don’t mean.” [Like the dog that didn’t bark in the Sherlock Holmes “Silver Blaze” story.] 159 You don’t have to have studied the description-experience gap to understand, if you’re truly expert at something, that you need experience to balance out the descriptions. Otherwise, you’re left with the illusion of knowledge—knowledge without substance. You’re an armchair philosopher who thinks that just because she read an article about something she is a sudden expert. (David Dunning, a psychologist at the University of Michigan most famous for being one half of the Dunning-Kruger effect—the more incompetent you are, the less you’re aware of your incompetence—has found that people go quickly from being circumspect beginners, who are perfectly aware of their limitations, to “unconscious incompetents,” people who no longer realize how much they don’t know and instead fancy themselves quite proficient.) 161-162 Erik: Generally, the people who cash the most are actually losing players (Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan strategy, jp). You can’t be a winning player by min cashing. 190 The more you learn, the harder it gets; the better you get, the worse you are—because the flaws that you wouldn’t even think of looking at before are now visible and need to be addressed. 191 An edge, even a tiny one, is an edge worth pursuing if you have the time and energy. 208 Blake Eastman: “Before each action, stop, think about what you want to do, and execute.” … Streamlined decisions, no immediate actions, or reactions. A standard process. 217 John Boyd’s OODA: Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. The way to outmaneuver your opponent is to get inside their OODA loop. 224 Here’s a free life lesson: seek out situations where you’re a favorite; avoid those where you’re an underdog. 237 [on folding] No matter how good your starting hand, you have to be willing to read the signs and let it go. One thing Erik has stressed, over and over, is to never feel committed to playing an event, ever. “See how you feel in the morning.” Tilt makes you revert to your worst self. 257 Jared Tindler, psychologist, “It all comes down to confidence, self-esteem, identity, what some people call ego.” 251 JT: “As far as hope in poker, f#¢k it. … You need to think in terms of preparation. Don’t worry about hoping. Just Do.” 252

A fool only watches the outward form; conversely, a wise one catches the inward aspect as well, which determines the reliable and authentic outcome. A creator always carries the significant knowledge of its invention that white and black, ups and downs, and left and right aspects. As in this context, a question stays knocking the thoughts in mind that, how China knew and realized the protective measures as the lockdown immediately after discovering and breaking the coronavirus; whereas, topmost scientists of the world couldn't find a solution so speedy as China managed. Indeed, this question's validity stands valid until the reliable and authentic answer surpasses and prevails that? The world and humans have become under the biological viruses as coronavirus risks since distinctive policies and unfair conduct by the world's major political characters. Execution of justice, respect, equal rights, and fair policies can overcome such evil-minded bio viruses warfare and build the bridge of peace.

The violence became extreme to the point that failing to wear tricolor ribbons showing support for the Revolution or even using the wrong form of address—the outdated Madame or Monsieur instead of the new title, "Citizen,"—when speaking was justification for immediate arrest and execution.

To Bring Acquisitions into the Fold . . . •​Put integration plans in place before the deal closes, covering management, metrics, and other relevant topics. •​Personally review and approve the plan. •​Tighten up the executional details. •​Put dedicated, full-time integration teams in place, and assemble these teams early. •​Make changes and communicate them immediately to shape the mind-set. •​Stay alert for processes in acquired companies that you like, and introduce them as innovations into your own company. •​Personally perform regular follow-up to ensure that the acquisition really is performing even better than predicted by the valuation model.

The immediate cause of the Civil War lay in the derangement of the nation’s two political systems—the constitutional system of the 1780s and the party system of the 1830s—and in their interaction with each other. Both these systems rested on an intricate set of balances: the constitutional, on a balance between federal and state power and among the three branches of the federal government; the party, on a competitive balance between party organizations at the national and state levels. The genius of this double system lay in its ability to morselize sectional and economic and other conflicts before they became flammable, and then through incremental adjustment and accommodations to keep the great mobiles of ideological, regional, and other political energies in balance until the next adjustment had to be made. This system worked well for decades, as the great compromises of 1820 and 1850 attested. The system was flexible too; when a measure of executive leadership was needed—to make great decisions about the West, as with Jefferson, or to adjust and overcome a tariff rebellion, as with Jackson—enough presidential authority could be exerted within the system to meet the need. But the essence of the system lay in balances, adjustment, compromise. Then, in the 1850s, this system crumbled. The centrifugal forces besetting it were so powerful that perhaps no polity could have overcome them; yet European and other political systems had encountered enormously divisive forces and survived. What happened in the United States was a fateful combination: a powerful ideology of states’ rights, defense of slavery, and “southern way of life” arose in the South, with South Carolina as the cutting edge; this was met by a counter-ideology in the urbanizing, industrializing, modernizing states, with Illinois as the cutting edge in the West.

Of all organizations, it was oddly enough Wal-Mart that best recognized the complex nature of the circumstances, according to a case study from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Briefed on what was developing, the giant discount retailer’s chief executive officer, Lee Scott, issued a simple edict. “This company will respond to the level of this disaster,” he was remembered to have said in a meeting with his upper management. “A lot of you are going to have to make decisions above your level. Make the best decision that you can with the information that’s available to you at the time, and, above all, do the right thing.” As one of the officers at the meeting later recalled, “That was it.” The edict was passed down to store managers and set the tone for how people were expected to react. On the most immediate level, Wal-Mart had 126 stores closed due to damage and power outages. Twenty thousand employees and their family members were displaced. The initial focus was on helping them. And within forty-eight hours, more than half of the damaged stores were up and running again. But according to one executive on the scene, as word of the disaster’s impact on the city’s population began filtering in from Wal-Mart employees on the ground, the priority shifted from reopening stores to “Oh, my God, what can we do to help these people?” Acting on their own authority, Wal-Mart’s store managers began distributing diapers, water, baby formula, and ice to residents. Where FEMA still hadn’t figured out how to requisition supplies, the managers fashioned crude paper-slip credit systems for first responders, providing them with food, sleeping bags, toiletries, and also, where available, rescue equipment like hatchets, ropes, and boots. The assistant manager of a Wal-Mart store engulfed by a thirty-foot storm surge ran a bulldozer through the store, loaded it with any items she could salvage, and gave them all away in the parking lot. When a local hospital told her it was running short of drugs, she went back in and broke into the store’s pharmacy—and was lauded by upper management for it.

Immediately, a codicillus, an order, was sent to Planasia to execute Agrippa Postumus.

When we learn about threats as children, and they are accompanied by strong emotions such as fear, they can remain embedded in the neural circuits of the hippocampus for life. Neuroscientists call these “deep emotional learnings.” Like the old posters, they may have no use in the present. They may even be triggering us to react to threats that are entirely imaginary. Yet once learned, and reinforced by conditioned behavior, they are hard to change. Like the dusty posters in the pubs, they may hang around long after they’ve outlived their usefulness. When the hippocampus isn’t sure what to make of a piece of information, it refers it to the brain’s prefrontal cortex (PFC). That’s the brain’s executive center, the seat of discrimination and knowledge. It takes incoming information from the hippocampus and determines whether the apparent threat is real. For instance, you hear a loud bang and are immediately alarmed. “Gunfire?” wonders the hippocampus. “No,” the PFC tells it. “That was a car backfiring.” The reassured hippocampus then does not pass the alarm to the amygdala. Or perhaps the PFC says, “That group of young men hanging out in the parking lot looks suspicious,” and the hippocampus then signals the amygdala, which puts the body on Code Red. Using that path from the emotional center of the brain to the executive center is crucial to regulating our emotions. Because it involves a feedback loop with information going first to the PFC and then back to the hippocampus from the PFC, it’s called the long path: hippocampus > PFC > hippocampus > amygdala > FFF. The long path is the default for people with effective emotional self-regulation. 3.8. The long path. 3.9. The short path. In people with poor emotional self-regulation, such as patients with PTSD, this circuit is impaired. They startle easily and overreact to innocuous stimuli. The hippocampus cuts out the PFC. Instead of referring incoming threats to the wise discrimination of the primate brain, where the bang can be categorized as “car backfiring,” the hippocampus treats even mild stimuli as though they are life-threatening disasters and activates the amygdala. This short-circuit of the long path creates a short path: hippocampus > amygdala > FFF. The short circuit improves reaction speed, but at the expense of accuracy.

What’s Slipping Under Your Radar? Word Count: 1096 Summary: Ben, a high-level leader in a multi-national firm, recently confessed that he felt like a bad father. That weekend he had messed up his Saturday daddy duties. When he took his son to soccer practice, Ben stayed for a while to support him. In the process, though, he forgot to take his daughter to her piano lesson. By the time they got to the piano teacher’s house, the next student was already playing. This extremely successful businessman felt like a failure. Keywords: Dr. Karen Otazo, Global Executive Coaching, Leadership Article Body: Ben, a high-level leader in a multi-national firm, recently confessed that he felt like a bad father. That weekend he had messed up his Saturday daddy duties. When he took his son to soccer practice, Ben stayed for a while to support him. In the process, though, he forgot to take his daughter to her piano lesson. By the time they got to the piano teacher’s house, the next student was already playing. This extremely successful businessman felt like a failure. At work, one of Ben’s greatest strengths is keeping his focus no matter what. As a strategic visionary, he keeps his eyes on the ongoing strategy, the high-profile projects and the high-level commitments of his group. Even on weekends Ben spends time on email, reading and writing so he can attend the many meetings in his busy work schedule. Since he is so good at multi-processing in his work environment, he assumed he could do that at home too. But when we talked, Ben was surprised to realize that he is missing a crucial skill: keeping people on his radar. Ben is great at holding tasks and strategies in the forefront of his mind, but he has trouble thinking of people and their priorities in the same way. To succeed at home, Ben needs to keep track of his family members’ needs in the same way he tracks key business commitments. He also needs to consider what’s on their radar screens. In my field of executive coaching, I keep every client on my radar screen by holding them in my thinking on a daily and weekly basis. That way, I can ask the right questions and remind them of what matters in their work lives. No matter what your field is, though, keeping people on your radar is essential. Consider Roger, who led a team of gung-ho sales people. His guys and gals loved working with him because his gut instincts were superb. He could look at most situations and immediately know how to make them work. His gut was great, almost a sixth sense. But when Sidney, one of his team of sales managers, wanted to move quickly to hire a new salesperson, Roger was busy. He was managing a new sales campaign and wrangling with marketing and headquarters bigwigs on how to position the company’s consumer products. Those projects were the only things on his radar screen. He didn’t realize that Sidney was counting on hiring someone fast. Roger reviewed the paperwork for the new hire. It was apparent to Roger that the prospective recruit didn’t have the right background for the role. He was too green in his experience with the senior people he’d be exposed to in the job. Roger saw that there would be political hassles down the road which would stymie someone without enough political savvy or experience with other parts of the organization. He wanted an insider or a seasoned outside hire with great political skills. To get the issue off his radar screen quickly, Roger told Human Resources to give the potential recruit a rejection letter. In his haste, he didn’t consult with Sidney first. It seemed obvious from the resume that this was the wrong person. Roger rushed off to deal with the top tasks on his radar screen. In the process, Sidney was hurt and became angry. Roger was taken by surprise since he thought he had done the right thing, but he could have seen this coming.

A rough plan executed immediately with maximum violence and intent wins over an elegant design hatched sometime next week.

Defense against Gunpoint from the Front with the Barrel Pushed into the Forehead From this position, you should hope your opponent will tell you to raise your hands up, since it takes longer to bring them from your waist to the opponent’s wrist. Do not complain if you are not asked to raise your hands up. Start your motion by violently tilting your neck away from the barrel. Never move both hands toward the barrel at once, since you are making your intentions obvious to your attacker, slowing down your motion and your ability to move your body away. 1. The attacker points a pistol at the defender’s forehead. 2. The defender violently tilts his neck towards his left shoulder. 3.     The defender raises his left hand and taps the attacker’s wrist. At the same time, the defender’s head leans to the left, followed by his body moving forward. (This is preferable and more comfortable than grabbing the barrel and having to lean backwards). 4.     The defender slides his left hand along the attacker’s wrist and forearm, moving his head with it. This will also ensure a less loud noise if a shot is dispensed. The defender is hooking the weapon with his right arm, by tapping the attacker's shoulder and then sliding his hand on the attacker's arm, until his wrist gets hooked to the defender's chest. Executing a simultaneous strike to the opponent’s groin is a matter of judgment in this scenario. You want to buy time and ensure he would not attack you with his free hand, but at the same time you want to immediately hook the weapon. 5. The defender executes a counterattack with his left hand. 6.     The defender’s left arm, fingers pointed down, hand turned clockwise reaches for the weapon’s barrel. The defender extracts the weapon by breaking the barrel down. 7.     The defender proceeds to strike the opponent’s temple with the barrel of the pistol.

Multiple randomized controlled trials have shown that kids do significantly better on executive function and memory performance tests (but not reading) in the hours immediately following the consumption of the equivalent of about one and a half cups of wild blueberries compared to placebo.

organizational health is relatively hard to measure, and even harder to achieve. It feels soft to executives who prefer more quantitative and reliable methods of steering their companies. It also entails a longer lead time to implementation than does a technical or marketing strategy, which yields more immediate results and gratification.

...the Queen brings Alice to the Gryphon, who leads her to the Mock Turtle. En route, the Gryphon explains to Alice that the Queen never actually executes anyone. Alice meets the Mock Turtle and immediately becomes concerned since he looks so sad. The Gryphon shows no sympathy for the Mock Turtle, explaining to Alice that he only fancies himself as being sad. Amid constant sobbing, the Mock Turtle begins his tale by explaining that he used to be a real turtle...

In 2012, we tried to put a stop to this with rules mitigating churn: infrastructure teams must do the work to move their internal users to new versions themselves or do the update in place, in backward-compatible fashion. This policy, which we’ve called the “Churn Rule,” scales better: dependent projects are no longer spending progressively greater effort just to keep up. We’ve also learned that having a dedicated group of experts execute the change scales better than asking for more maintenance effort from every user: experts spend some time learning the whole problem in depth and then apply that expertise to every subproblem. Forcing users to respond to churn means that every affected team does a worse job ramping up, solves their immediate problem, and then throws away that now-useless knowledge. Expertise scales better.

Then, when the State Chief Executive of Minnesota sent a request to Washington for the assistance of the Army against the riots he was unable to control—three directives burst forth within two hours, stopping all trains in the country, commandeering all cars to speed to Minnesota. An order signed by Wesley Mouch demanded the immediate release of the freight cars held in the service of Kip’s Ma. But by that time, it was too late. Ma’s freight cars were in California, where the soybeans had been sent to a progressive concern made up of sociologists preaching the cult of Oriental austerity, and of businessmen formerly in the numbers racket. In Minnesota, farmers were setting fire to their own farms, they were demolishing grain elevators and the homes of county officials, they were fighting along the track of the railroad, some to tear it up, some to defend it with their lives—and, with no goal to reach save violence, they were dying in the streets of gutted towns and in the silent gullies of a roadless night. Then there was only the acrid stench of grain rotting in half-smoldering piles—a few columns of smoke rising from the plains, standing still in the air over blackened ruins—and, in an office in Pennsylvania, Hank Rearden sitting at his desk, looking at a list of men who had gone bankrupt; they were the manufacturers of farm equipment, who could not be paid and would not be able to pay him. The harvest of soybeans did not reach the markets of the country: it had been reaped prematurely, it was moldy and unfit for consumption.

The verdict is immediate execution.

So Elizabeth behaved cautiously as usual and put Mary [Queen of Scots] in prison - nice prison, but she wasn't allowed out. And that's where she stayed for nineteen years. . . . She immediately became the focus of plots and rebellions. In 1569, there was a major Catholic rising in the north which aimed to free Mary, marry her to the Duke of Norfolk and put her on the throne. When it was defeated, Elizabeth had 600 rebels executed (so it wasn't just her sister who could be bloody).

I was one to one with a big nurse. Afraid to move and ask, ‘Whose blood is it so cold?’ … drop by drop … inside my small body. But the blood from the looks of these opposite men was not cold. It was hot, even very hot, pumping into my head. One man, another, and one more, some older than others, some even with temples of grey hair. But what united them all was the interest in a ten-year-old girl.” (-- Angelika Regossi, “Love in Communism. A Young Woman’s Adult Story”. Chapter 1: The Girl Felt a Woman) “We sat together, at the bottom of the trench, on the cold and dry ground. The sun slowly was going down, and the first signs of the cold September evening appeared. Tanya pulled out the matches and lit the cigarette butts, and we started to smoke; two small girls of seven and five. We thought that nobody was seeing us making the fumes. Suddenly, I saw Tanya’s sister go out to the balcony of their flat, looking around the yard. When she noticed the fumes from the trench, she screamed at the whole yard, ‘Tanya! Tanya! I see you. Come immediately home!’ ‘Why! Am I cold?’ shouted back Tanya, pressing the cigarette butt in the trench soil. ‘No! You want to eat!’ screamed her sister. They both imitated a joke about a caring mother. Tanya stood up, climbed out of the trench, and left. I remained sitting alone, and it was getting dark. I also wanted to go home, wash my hands and eat. When suddenly, I heard a soft man’s voice from the darkness, ‘Let me help you to get out of the trench, little girl.’” (-- Angelika Regossi, “Love in Communism. A Young Woman’s Adult Story”. Chapter 2: The Paedophile Play) “In the USSR, at schools, sometimes was carried a medical check-up for teenage girls from fourteen to seventeen years old, till the end of their school life. It was a very psychologically traumatic and humiliating experience because of the process itself, and because the results were reported to the school director, parents, and sometimes, even to the police. The girls were tested for virginity, but the boys were not.” (-- Angelika Regossi, “Love in Communism. A Young Woman’s Adult Story”. Chapter 3: Long Ten Years) “At that time, execution was allowed in the USSR, also for women. The maximum that prisoners could get was fifteen years. After that, capital punishment was the last measure. Mainly, the execution took place in the prison corridor by shooting the back of the inmate when he or she was taken to go somewhere, or in the prison yard. Executions were usually done by policemen.” (-- Angelika Regossi, “Love in Communism. A Young Woman’s Adult Story”. Chapter 4: Prison for Woman)

A roller coaster is all about fast thrills and wild, whiplashing movements. They can be a lot of fun, but they aren’t a good model for effective product management. Investors and executives like to see immediate results, and when those results don’t materialize right away, they can be tempted to pivot suddenly, resulting in whiplash for the product team. This problem comes from setting a time horizon that is too short. For startups, a lack of patience is often the result of having a very short runway. They have to get something up and running fast so they can raise the next round of funding, or they need to start producing revenue right away. Of course, everyone wants to make fast and efficient progress, but providing insufficient opportunity for success will result in false negatives that can lead product managers astray. When an otherwise healthy “fail-fast” mentality is taken to the extreme, it can stifle innovation. “We think this new feature is a good idea,” a product manager might say. “To avoid overinvesting, we’ll first launch a lackluster version of it. If it doesn’t get overwhelmingly positive results immediately, then we’ll know it’s not the right direction for our product.” Daisy-chained together, these false negatives result in a headache-inducing roller coaster ride for product development that ends up in exactly the same place it started.

It caught Ike in the solar plexus, and he felt a spasm ripple through his midsection like he’d been tased. He fell back against the truck. Light-Skinned had recovered somewhat and was advancing on him from the left. Acting purely on instinct honed from hundreds of throwdowns, inside and on the street, Ike grabbed the passenger door, opened it with deft fingers, and slammed it into Light-Skinned. The bottom of the door caught him in the shin, and he immediately dropped to one knee like he was about to propose. Mini-Afro caught Ike in the chin with a two-piece combo. Black stars twinkled in front of Ike’s eyes. Grunting, he launched himself at Mini-Afro. They collided like a pair of mountain goats. Ike hooked the other man’s leg with his own as he executed a tangled pirouette. They fell to the ground in a twisted conflagration of arms and legs and fists. Light-Skinned was back to his feet, and this time he was holding a collapsible baton. Ike ended up on top of Mini-Afro. Ike hit him with a right cross, then a right elbow strike. Mini-Afro’s nose flattened against his face like a jellyfish. Blood flowed unfettered from both his nostrils and into his mouth. Ike doubled up on him. Two fast brutal punches that closed the man’s left eye like a curtain. Then Ike’s world exploded in a nuclear flash of white light and searing pain so intense he thought he was going to vomit.

FOR c1 IN (SELECT OWNER,table_name, constraint_name FROM dba_constraints WHERE constraint_type = 'R' and owner=upper('&shema_name')) LOOP EXECUTE IMMEDIATE 'ALTER TABLE '||' "'||c1.owner||'"."'||c1.table_name||'" DROP CONSTRAINT ' || c1.constraint_name; END LOOP; FOR c1 IN (SELECT owner,object_name,object_type FROM dba_objects where owner=upper('&shema_name')) LOOP BEGIN IF c1.object_type = 'TYPE' THEN EXECUTE IMMEDIATE 'DROP '||c1.object_type||' "'||c1.owner||'"."'||c1.object_name||'" FORCE'; END IF; IF c1.object_type != 'DATABASE LINK' THEN EXECUTE IMMEDIATE 'DROP '||c1.object_type||' "'||c1.owner||'"."'||c1.object_name||'"'; END IF; EXCEPTION WHEN OTHERS THEN NULL; END;

The relationship you have with your immediate boss is one of the oddest you’ll have in life. You generally don’t choose this person, you generally don’t care for this person, yet you have to honor and obey this person.As you rise, that relationship only becomes odder and more slippery.