“
So please, oh please, we beg, we pray,
Go throw your TV set away,
And in its place you can install
A lovely bookshelf on the wall.
Then fill the shelves with lots of books.
”
”
Roald Dahl (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Charlie Bucket, #1))
“
It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm – this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the “why” arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.
”
”
Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus)
“
I’ve been returned to my factory settings as a human being, rather than a human doing.
”
”
Alice Feeney (Sometimes I Lie)
“
Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled cold echoing building of dark red brick sootbleakened by more chimneys than its own, set in a grassless cinderstrewnpacked compound surrounded by smoking factory purlieus and enclosed by ten food steel-and-wire fence like a penitentiary or a zoo, where in random erratic surges, with sparrowlike childtrebling, orphans in identical and uniform blue denim in and out of remembering but in knowing constant in the bleak walls, the bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting chimneys streaked like black tears.
”
”
William Faulkner (Light in August)
“
Oh, books, what books they used to know, Those children living long ago! So please, oh please, we beg, we pray, Go throw your TV set away, And in its place you can install A lovely bookshelf on the wall.
”
”
Roald Dahl (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory)
“
Ruby, what does the future look like?” Nico asked. “I can’t picture it. I try all the time, but I can’t imagine it. Jude said it looked like an open road just after a rainstorm.”
I turned back toward the board, eyes tracing those eight letters, trying to take their power away; change them from a place, a name, to just another word. Certain memories trap you; you relive their thousand tiny details. The damp, cool spring air, swinging between snow flurries and light rain. The hum of the electric fence. The way Sam used to let out a small sigh each morning we left the cabin. I remembered the path to the Factory the way you never forgot the story behind a scar. The black mud would splatter over my shoes, momentarily hiding the numbers written there. 3285. Not a name.
You learned to look up, craning your neck back to gaze over the razor wire curled around the top of the fence. Otherwise, it was too easy to forget that there was a world beyond the rusting metal pen they’d thrown all of us animals into.
“I see it in colors,” I said. “A deep blue, fading into golds and reds—like fire on a horizon. Afterlight. It’s a sky that wants you to guess if the sun is about to rise or set.”
Nico shook his head. “I think I like Jude’s better.”
“Me too,” I said softly. “Me too.
”
”
Alexandra Bracken (In the Afterlight (The Darkest Minds, #3))
“
He presses his thumbs hard against his eyebrows, as if he hopes they're two buttons and if he keeps them pressed at the same time for ten seconds he'll be able to restore life to its factory settings.
”
”
Fredrik Backman (Anxious People)
“
This, then, is the ultimate, that is only, consolation: simply that someone shares some of your own feelings and has made of these a work of art which you have the insight, sensitivity, and — like it or not — peculiar set of experiences to appreciate. Amazing thing to say, the consolation of horror in art is that it actually intensifies our panic, loudens it on the sounding-board of our horror-hollowed hearts, turns terror up full blast, all the while reaching for that perfect and deafening amplitude at which we may dance to the bizarre music of our own misery.
”
”
Thomas Ligotti (The Nightmare Factory)
“
The most important thing we've learned,
So far as children are concerned,
Is never, NEVER, NEVER let
Them near your television set --
Or better still, just don't install
The idiotic thing at all.
In almost every house we've been,
We've watched them gaping at the screen.
They loll and slop and lounge about,
And stare until their eyes pop out.
(Last week in someone's place we saw
A dozen eyeballs on the floor.)
They sit and stare and stare and sit
Until they're hypnotised by it,
Until they're absolutely drunk
With all that shocking ghastly junk.
Oh yes, we know it keeps them still,
They don't climb out the window sill,
They never fight or kick or punch,
They leave you free to cook the lunch
And wash the dishes in the sink --
But did you ever stop to think,
To wonder just exactly what
This does to your beloved tot?
IT ROTS THE SENSE IN THE HEAD!
IT KILLS IMAGINATION DEAD!
IT CLOGS AND CLUTTERS UP THE MIND!
IT MAKES A CHILD SO DULL AND BLIND
HE CAN NO LONGER UNDERSTAND
A FANTASY, A FAIRYLAND!
HIS BRAIN BECOMES AS SOFT AS CHEESE!
HIS POWERS OF THINKING RUST AND FREEZE!
HE CANNOT THINK -- HE ONLY SEES!
'All right!' you'll cry. 'All right!' you'll say,
'But if we take the set away,
What shall we do to entertain
Our darling children? Please explain!'
We'll answer this by asking you,
'What used the darling ones to do?
'How used they keep themselves contented
Before this monster was invented?'
Have you forgotten? Don't you know?
We'll say it very loud and slow:
THEY ... USED ... TO ... READ! They'd READ and READ,
AND READ and READ, and then proceed
To READ some more. Great Scott! Gadzooks!
One half their lives was reading books!
The nursery shelves held books galore!
Books cluttered up the nursery floor!
And in the bedroom, by the bed,
More books were waiting to be read!
Such wondrous, fine, fantastic tales
Of dragons, gypsies, queens, and whales
And treasure isles, and distant shores
Where smugglers rowed with muffled oars,
And pirates wearing purple pants,
And sailing ships and elephants,
And cannibals crouching 'round the pot,
Stirring away at something hot.
(It smells so good, what can it be?
Good gracious, it's Penelope.)
The younger ones had Beatrix Potter
With Mr. Tod, the dirty rotter,
And Squirrel Nutkin, Pigling Bland,
And Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle and-
Just How The Camel Got His Hump,
And How the Monkey Lost His Rump,
And Mr. Toad, and bless my soul,
There's Mr. Rat and Mr. Mole-
Oh, books, what books they used to know,
Those children living long ago!
So please, oh please, we beg, we pray,
Go throw your TV set away,
And in its place you can install
A lovely bookshelf on the wall.
Then fill the shelves with lots of books,
Ignoring all the dirty looks,
The screams and yells, the bites and kicks,
And children hitting you with sticks-
Fear not, because we promise you
That, in about a week or two
Of having nothing else to do,
They'll now begin to feel the need
Of having something to read.
And once they start -- oh boy, oh boy!
You watch the slowly growing joy
That fills their hearts. They'll grow so keen
They'll wonder what they'd ever seen
In that ridiculous machine,
That nauseating, foul, unclean,
Repulsive television screen!
And later, each and every kid
Will love you more for what you did.
”
”
Roald Dahl (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Charlie Bucket, #1))
“
Factory settings—a contemporary synonym for fate.
”
”
Ian McEwan (Machines Like Me)
“
Public schools were not only created in the interests of industrialism—they were created in the image of industrialism. In many ways, they reflect the factory culture they were designed to support. This is especially true in high schools, where school systems base education on the principles of the assembly line and the efficient division of labor. Schools divide the curriculum into specialist segments: some teachers install math in the students, and others install history. They arrange the day into standard units of time, marked out by the ringing of bells, much like a factory announcing the beginning of the workday and the end of breaks. Students are educated in batches, according to age, as if the most important thing they have in common is their date of manufacture. They are given standardized tests at set points and compared with each other before being sent out onto the market. I realize this isn’t an exact analogy and that it ignores many of the subtleties of the system, but it is close enough.
”
”
Ken Robinson (The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything)
“
I’d been secretly fantasising about you waking up fully restored back to factory settings.
”
”
Lisa Jewell (I Found You)
“
Go throw your TV set away, And in its place you can install A lovely bookshelf on the wall.
”
”
Roald Dahl (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory)
“
I’M SORRY
I am developing a new board game. It’s called “I’m Sorry.” It’s also a form of “Self-Help Psychological Therapy!”
You take turns moving around the board like Monopoly. But if you land on a Yellow or Green “I’m Sorry Space”… you have to make a Phone call. Both green and yellow cards are labeled- the same with things like: Your Ex, Parental figure, friend, co-worker, boss, children, etc. You get the point…
If you land on the yellow space, the game stops, everyone gets quiet and you have to call that person up – on speakerphone. You apologize for something you’ve done in your past. Come on you know you are not perfect and you probably screwed up, hurt or disappointed everyone in your past at one time or another. So you call and you apologize. You explain what you did to them wrong if they forgive you, you move forward 10 places and everyone cheers! No forgiveness back- you move back to the beginning.
If you land on the green space- it’s similar. But you call the person up and you try to explain to them how, in someway, they hurt you in the past. If they apologize… cheers and you move forward 10 spaces. No apology… move backward ten spaces. They curse at you- game over.
In the original packaging of the yellow and green cards, are mixed in a set of “I’m Sorry Cards.” If you are lucky enough to get to pick up an “I’m Sorry Card,” it’s like a Get Out of Jail Free Card, and you don’t have to make the call.
The only catch is that the cards come hermetically sealed. After opening up the package, and the cards are exposed to air, all of the “I’m Sorry Cards,” magically turn into “Deal With it Cards!” And so, you really never get a free ride. In reality, every time you pick up a yellow or green card, you have to- Deal with It!
Of course you can always order a new factory set of sealed of “I’m Sorry Cards.” But they only last about 30 minutes and are very expensive, so you’ll have to play fast. Cute Game? Hey, don’t steal my idea!!!
”
”
José N. Harris (Mi Vida)
“
The race of prophets is extinct. Europe is becoming set in its ways, slowly embalming itself beneath the wrappings of its borders, its factories, its law-courts and its universities. The frozen Mind cracks between the mineral staves which close upon it. The fault lies with your mouldy systems, your logic of 2 + 2 = 4. The fault lies with you, Chancellors, caught in the net of syllogisms. You manufacture engineers, magistrates, doctors, who know nothing of the true mysteries of the body or the cosmic laws of existence. False scholars blind outside this world, philosophers who pretend to reconstruct the mind. The least act of spontaneous creation is a more complex and revealing world than any metaphysics.
”
”
Antonin Artaud
“
Nobody needed to get all that educated for being a miner, so they let the schools go to rot. And they made sure no mills or factories got in the door. Coal only. To this day, you have to cross a lot of ground to find other work. Not an accident, Mr. Armstrong said, and for once we believed him, because down in the dark mess of our little skull closets some puzzle pieces were clicking together and our world made some terrible kind of sense. The dads at home drinking beer in their underwear, the moms at the grocery with their SNAP coupons. The army recruiters in shiny gold buttons come to harvest their jackpot of hopeless futures. Goddamn. The trouble with learning the backgrounds is that you end up wanting to deck somebody, possibly Bettina Cook and the horse she rode in on. (Not happening. Her dad being head of the football boosters and major donor.) Once upon a time we had our honest living that was God and country. Then the world turns and there’s no God anymore, no country, but it’s still in your blood that coal is God’s gift and you want to believe. Because otherwise it was one more scam in the fuck-train that’s railroaded over these mountains since George Washington rode in and set his crew to cutting down our trees. Everything that could be taken is gone. Mountains left with their heads blown off, rivers running black. My people are dead of trying, or headed that way, addicted as we are to keeping ourselves alive. There’s no more blood here to give, just war wounds. Madness. A world of pain, looking to be killed.
”
”
Barbara Kingsolver (Demon Copperhead)
“
So long as we have wage slavery," answered Schliemann, "it matters not in the least how debasing and repulsive a task may be, it is easy to find people to perform it. But just as soon as labor is set free, then the price of such work will begin to rise. So one by one the old, dingy, and unsanitary factories will come down— it will be cheaper to build new; and so the steamships will be provided with stoking machinery , and so the dangerous trades will be made safe, or substitutes will be found for their products. In exactly the same way, as the citizens of our Industrial Republic become refined, year by year the cost of slaughterhouse products will increase; until eventually those who want to eat meat will have to do their own killing— and how long do you think the custom would survive then?— To go on to another item— one of the necessary accompaniments of capitalism in a democracy is political corruption; and one of the consequences of civic administration by ignorant and vicious politicians, is that preventable diseases kill off half our population. And even if science were allowed to try, it could do little, because the majority of human beings are not yet human beings at all, but simply machines for the creating of wealth for others. They are penned up in filthy houses and left to rot and stew in misery, and the conditions of their life make them ill faster than all the doctors in the world could heal them; and so, of course, they remain as centers of contagion , poisoning the lives of all of us, and making happiness impossible for even the most selfish. For this reason I would seriously maintain that all the medical and surgical discoveries that science can make in the future will be of less importance than the application of the knowledge we already possess, when the disinherited of the earth have established their right to a human existence.
”
”
Upton Sinclair (The Jungle)
“
What happens
to the leaves after
they turn red and golden and fall
away? What happens
to the singing birds
when they can’t sing
any longer? What happens
to their quick wings?
Do you think there is any
personal heaven
for any of us?
Do you think anyone,
the other side of that darkness,
will call to us, meaning us?
Beyond the trees
the foxes keep teaching their children
to live in the valley.
so they never seem to vanish, they are always there
in the blossom of light
that stands up every morning
in the dark sky.
And over one more set of hills,
along the sea,
the last roses have opened their factories of sweetness
and are giving it back to the world.
If I had another life
I would want to spend it all on some
unstinting happiness.
I would be a fox, or a tree
full of waving branches.
I wouldn’t mind being a rose
in a field full of roses.
Fear has not yet occurred to them, nor ambition.
Reason they have not yet thought of.
Neither do they ask how long they must be roses, and then what.
Or any other foolish question.
”
”
Mary Oliver (House of Light)
“
I said that I feel bad whenever I drive, because I’m adding to global warming. The Maori nodded agreement. So did Jeannette. Then she added fervently, “But you didn’t set up the system. Do what you can, but don’t identify with the problem. If you internalize what is not yours, you fight not only them but yourself as well. Take responsibility only for that which you’re responsible—your own thoughts and actions. You didn’t make the car culture, you didn’t set up factory farming. Do what you can to shut those things down.
”
”
Derrick Jensen (A Language Older Than Words)
“
I’ve been returned to my factory setting as a human being, rather than a human doing.
”
”
Alice Feeney (Sometimes I Lie)
“
I’d love to return my brain to factory settings.
”
”
Lily Bailey (Because We Are Bad: OCD and a Girl Lost in Thought)
“
When he has completed the task before him, he will enter a simple code that will return the phone to its factory setting,
”
”
Dean Koontz (Photographing the Dead (Nameless: Season One, #2))
“
Ironically, the very advances that represent all that is modern in the world—hand sanitizers, treated water, factory farming—have created their own set of diseases. For example, triclosan—an antibacterial chemical used in many soaps and hand sanitizers—has been shown to kill human cells,26 and even the FDA admits it acts as an endocrine disruptor in animals.27 When combined with chlorinated water, it produces chloroform28—a probable carcinogen according to the EPA.29
”
”
Joseph Mercola (Effortless Healing: 9 Simple Ways to Sidestep Illness, Shed Excess Weight, and Help Your Body Fix Itself)
“
They were delivered to mansions remodeled into country clubs, boarding schools, retreats for the insane, alcohol cures, health farms, wildlife sanctuaries, wallpaper factories, drafting rooms and places where the aged and the infirm waited sniffily for the angel of death in front of their television sets.
”
”
John Cheever (The Wapshot Chronicle)
“
Marx wrote about finance and industry all his life but he only knew two people connected with financial and industrial processes. One was his uncle in Holland, Lion Philips, a successful businessman who created what eventually became the vast Philips Electric Company. Uncle Philips' views on the whole capitalist process would have been well-informed and interesting, had Marx troubled to explore them. But he only once consulted him, on a technical matter of high finance, and though he visited Philips four times, these concerned purely personal mattes of family money. The other knowledgeable man was Engels himself. But Marx declined Engel's invitation to accompany him on a visit to a cotton mill, and so far as we know Marx never set foot in a mill, factory, mine or other industrial workplace in the whole of his life.
”
”
Paul Johnson
“
But I can't find anything beautiful here, not when the smoking, dark factories are only a few miles back. The contrast between the Silver city and the Red slum sets my teeth on edge. This is the world I'm trying to bring down, the world trying to kill me and everything I care about. Now I truly see what I'm fighting against and how difficult, how impossible, it will be to win. I've never felt smaller than I do now, with the great bridge looming above us. It looks ready to swallow me whole. But I have to try. If only for Gray Town, for the ones who have never seen the sun.
”
”
Victoria Aveyard (Red Queen (Red Queen, #1))
“
I’m riding a tram and, as is my habit, slowly absorbing every detail of the people around me. By ‘detail’ I mean things, voices, words. In the dress of the girl directly in front of me, for example, I see the material it’s made of, the work involved in making it – since it’s a dress and not just material – and I see in the delicate embroidery around the neck the silk thread with which it was embroidered and all the work that went into that. And immediately, as if in a primer on political economy, I see before me the factories and all the different jobs: the factory where the material was made; the factory that made the darker coloured
thread that ornaments with curlicues the neck of the dress’ and I see the different workshops in the factories, the machines, the workmen, the seamstresses. My eyes’ inward gaze even penetrates into the offices, where I see the managers trying to keep calm and the figures set out in the account books, but that’s not all: beyond that I see into the domestic lives of all those who spend their working hours in these factories and offices...A whole world unfolds before my eyes all because the regularly irregular dark green edging to a pale green dress worn by the girl in front of me of whom I see only her brown neck.
‘A whole way of life lies before me.
I sense the loves, the secrets, the souls of all those who worked just so that this woman in front of me on the tram should wear around her mortal neck the sinuous banality of a thread of dark green silk on a background of light green cloth.
I grow dizzy. The seats on the tram, of fine, strong cane, carry me to distant regions, divide into industries, workmen, houses, lives, realities, everything.
I leave the tram exhausted, like a sleepwalker, having lived a whole life.
”
”
Fernando Pessoa (The Book of Disquiet)
“
They despite and hate the government more and more, but they don't know how to set about changing it. The country is dying for some sort of lead, and so far all it is getting is a crowd of fresh professional leaders. Who never get anywhere. Who do not seem to be aiming anywhere. We are living in a world of jaded politics. Poverty increases, prices rise, unemployment spreads, mines, factories stagnate, and nothing is done.
”
”
H.G. Wells (The Holy Terror)
“
Looking back at the recent history of the world, I find it amazing how far civilization has retrogressed so quickly. As recently as World War I—granted the rules were violated at times—we had a set of rules of warfare in which armies didn’t make war against civilians: Soldiers fought soldiers. Then came World War II and Hitler’s philosophy of total war, which meant the bombing not only of soldiers but of factories that produced their rifles, and, if surrounding communities were also hit, that was to be accepted; then, as the war progressed, it became common for the combatants simply to attack civilians as part of military strategy. By the time the 1980s rolled around, we were placing our entire faith in a weapon whose fundamental target was the civilian population.
”
”
Ronald Reagan (An American Life: The Autobiography)
“
The development of the proletarian elite does not take place in an academic setting. Rather, it is brought about by battles in the factories and unions, by disciplinary punishments and some very dirty fights within the parties and outside of them, by jail sentences and illegality. Students do not flock in large numbers there as they do to the lecture halls and laboratories of the bourgeoisie. The career of a revolutionary does not consists of banquets and honarary titles, of interesting research projects and professional salaries; more likely, it will acquaint them with misery, dishonory and jail and, at the end, uncertainty. These conditions are made bearable only by a super-human faith. Understandably, this way of life will not be the choice of those who are nothing more than clever.
”
”
Max Horkheimer
“
bombs set by German agents exploded in two factories in New Jersey.
”
”
Arthur Herman (1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder)
“
there was nothing to believe but that one colored in the room is fine, two is twenty, and three means close up shop and everybody go home; all living the New York dream in the Cause Houses, within sight of the Statue of Liberty, a gigantic copper reminder that this city was a grinding factory that diced the poor man’s dreams worse than any cotton gin or sugarcane field from the old country. And now heroin was here to make their children slaves again, to a useless white powder. She looked them over, the friends of her life, staring at her. They saw what she saw, she realized. She read it in their faces. They would never win. The game was fixed. The villains would succeed. The heroes would die. The sight of Beanie’s mother howling at her son’s coffin would haunt them all in the next few days. Next week, or next month some time, some other mother would take her place, howling her grief. And another after that. They saw the future, too, she could tell. It would continue forever. It was all so very grim. But then, she thought, every once in a while there’s a glimmer of hope. Just a blip on the horizon, a whack on the nose of the giant that set him back on his heels or to the canvas,
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
Every man whose business it is to think knows that he must for part of the day create about himself a pool of silence. But in that helter-skelter which we flatter by the name of civilization, the citizen performs the perilous business of government under the worst possible conditions. A faint recognition of this truth inspires the movement for a shorter work day, for longer vacations, for light, air, order, sunlight and dignity in factories and offices. But if the intellectual quality of our life is to be improved that is only the merest beginning. So long as so many jobs are an endless and, for the worker, an aimless routine, a kind of automatism using one set of muscles in one monotonous pattern, his whole life will tend towards an automatism using one set of muscles in one monotonous pattern, his whole life will tend towards an automatism in which nothing is particularly to be distinguished from anything else unless it is announced with a thunderclap. So long as he is physically imprisoned in crowds by day and even by night his attention will flicker and relax.
It will not hold fast and define clearly where he is the victim of all sorts of pother, in a home which needs to be ventilated of its welter of drudgery, shrieking children, raucous assertions, indigestible food, bad air, and suffocating ornament.
Occasionally perhaps we enter a building which is composed and spacious; we go to a theatre where modern stagecraft has cut away distraction, or go to sea, or into a quiet place, and we remember how cluttered, how capricious, how superfluous and clamorous is the ordinary urban life of our time. We learn to understand why our addled minds seize so little with precision, why they are caught up and tossed about in a kind of tarantella by headlines and catch-words, why so often they cannot tell things apart or discern identity in apparent differences.
”
”
Walter Lippmann (Public Opinion)
“
Before the Civil War, the northern industrial economy was largely dependent on southern cotton. The slave economy of the South was a threat to northern capitalism. What if the slaveholders of the South decided to set up factories and process the cotton themselves? Northern capitalists could not possibly compete with slave labor, and their capitalist economy would be destroyed. To ensure that this didn’t happen, the North went to war.
”
”
Assata Shakur (Assata: An Autobiography)
“
Lift your heart and let it rest upon Jesus and you are instantly in a sanctuary though it be a Pullman berth or a factory or a kitchen. You can see God from anywhere if your mind is set to love and obey Him (pp. 94-95).
”
”
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
“
I can’t help but wonder why leaders are so often hesitant to lead. I guess it takes a lot of conviction and trusting your gut to get ahead of your peers, your staff and your employees while they are still squabbling about which path to take, and set an unhesitating, unequivocal course whose rightness or wrongness will not be known for years. Such a decision really tests the mettle of the leader. By contrast, it doesn’t take much self-confidence to downsize a company—after all, how can you go wrong by shuttering factories and laying people off if the benefits of such actions are going to show up in tomorrow’s bottom line and will be applauded by the financial community?
”
”
Andrew S. Grove (Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points that Challenge Every Company and Career)
“
More than any set of practices, factory farming is a mind-set: reduce production costs to the absolute minimum and systematically ignore or “externalize” such costs as environmental degradation, human disease, and animal suffering.
”
”
Jonathan Safran Foer (Eating Animals)
“
This dirty, damp patch of grass—was this really the setting of those years of my childhood, so radiant and winged in my memory? This waste, dreary square with the factory yonder—can this be that quiet corner of earth we called “Home” and which alone amid the waters of destruction out there meant hope to us and salvation from perishing in the flood? Or was it not rather a vision of some far other place than this grey street with its hideous houses that rose up there, over the shell holes, like some wild, sad dream in the grudging intervals between death and death? In my memory was it not far more shining and lovely, more spacious, and abounding with ten thousand things? Is that no longer true, then? Did my blood lie and my memory deceive me?
”
”
Erich Maria Remarque (The Road Back)
“
An asteroid or comet traveling at cosmic velocities would enter the Earth’s atmosphere at such a speed that the air beneath it couldn’t get out of the way and would be compressed, as in a bicycle pump. As anyone who has used such a pump knows, compressed air grows swiftly hot, and the temperature below it would rise to some 60,000 Kelvin, or ten times the surface temperature of the Sun. In this instant of its arrival in our atmosphere, everything in the meteor’s path—people, houses, factories, cars—would crinkle and vanish like cellophane in a flame. One second after entering the atmosphere, the meteorite would slam into the Earth’s surface, where the people of Manson had a moment before been going about their business. The meteorite itself would vaporize instantly, but the blast would blow out a thousand cubic kilometers of rock, earth, and superheated gases. Every living thing within 150 miles that hadn’t been killed by the heat of entry would now be killed by the blast. Radiating outward at almost the speed of light would be the initial shock wave, sweeping everything before it. For those outside the zone of immediate devastation, the first inkling of catastrophe would be a flash of blinding light—the brightest ever seen by human eyes—followed an instant to a minute or two later by an apocalyptic sight of unimaginable grandeur: a roiling wall of darkness reaching high into the heavens, filling an entire field of view and traveling at thousands of miles an hour. Its approach would be eerily silent since it would be moving far beyond the speed of sound. Anyone in a tall building in Omaha or Des Moines, say, who chanced to look in the right direction would see a bewildering veil of turmoil followed by instantaneous oblivion. Within minutes, over an area stretching from Denver to Detroit and encompassing what had once been Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, the Twin Cities—the whole of the Midwest, in short—nearly every standing thing would be flattened or on fire, and nearly every living thing would be dead. People up to a thousand miles away would be knocked off their feet and sliced or clobbered by a blizzard of flying projectiles. Beyond a thousand miles the devastation from the blast would gradually diminish. But that’s just the initial shockwave. No one can do more than guess what the associated damage would be, other than that it would be brisk and global. The impact would almost certainly set off a chain of devastating earthquakes. Volcanoes across the globe would begin to rumble and spew. Tsunamis would rise up and head devastatingly for distant shores. Within an hour, a cloud of blackness would cover the planet, and burning rock and other debris would be pelting down everywhere, setting much of the planet ablaze. It has been estimated that at least a billion and a half people would be dead by the end of the first day. The massive disturbances to the ionosphere would knock out communications systems everywhere, so survivors would have no idea what was happening elsewhere or where to turn. It would hardly matter. As one commentator has put it, fleeing would mean “selecting a slow death over a quick one. The death toll would be very little affected by any plausible relocation effort, since Earth’s ability to support life would be universally diminished.
”
”
Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
“
A mysterious and marvelous confectionary utopia, a colorful interior world filled with wonder and sweet marvel. Most of the actors hadn’t seen the Chocolate Room prior to filming, and even my brief peek didn’t prepare me for the sheer magnitude of this set.
”
”
Julie Dawn Cole (I Want it Now! A Memoir of Life on the Set of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory)
“
If I were going to give my life as a servant of the King, I had to know that King. What was he like? In what could I trust him? In the same way I could trust a set of impersonal laws? Or could I trust him as a living leader, as a very present commander in battle? The question was central. Because if he were a king in name only, I would rather go back to the chocolate factory. I would remain a Christian, but I would know that my religion was only a set of principles, excellent and to be followed, but hardly demanding devotion.
”
”
Brother Andrew
“
Are you falling asleep before midnight?" Cassie leaned over the edge of the couch to look at Jack. He was stretched out on the floor, his head resting against a pillow near the center of the couch, his eyes closed. She was now wide awake and headache free. He wasn't in so good a shape. "The new year is eighteen minutes away."
"Come kiss me awake in seventeen minutes."
She blinked at that lazy suggestion, gave a quick grin, and dropped Benji on his chest.
He opened one eye to look up at her as he settled his hand lightly on the kitten. "That's a no?"
She smiled. She was looking forward to dating him, but she was smart enough to know he'd value more what he had to work at.
He sighed. "That was a no. How much longer am I going to be on the fence with you?"
"Is that a rhetorical question or do you want an answer?" If this was the right relationship God had for her future, time taken now would improve it, not hurt it. She was ready to admit she was tired of being alone.
He scratched Benji under the chin and the kitten curled up on his chest and batted a paw at his hand. "Rhetorical. I'd hate to get my hopes up."
She leaned her chin against her hand, looking down at him. "I like you, Jack."
"You just figured that out?"
"I'll like you more when you catch my mouse."
"The only way we are going to catch T.J. is to turn this place into a cheese factory and help her get so fat and slow that she can no longer run and hide."
Or you could move your left hand about three inches to the right right and catch her."
Jack opened one eye and glanced toward his left. The white mouse was sitting motionless beside the plate he had set down earlier. "Let her have the cheeseburger. You put mustard on it."
"You're horrible."
He smiled. "I'm serious."
"So am I."
Jack leaned over, caught Cassie's foot, and tumbled her to the floor. "Oops."
"That wasn't fair. You scared my mouse."
Jack set the kitten on the floor. "Benji, go get her mouse."
The kitten took off after it.
"You're teaching her to be a mouser."
"Working on it. Come here. You owe me a kiss for the new year."
"Do I?" She reached over to the bowl of chocolates on the table and unwrapped a kiss. She popped the chocolate kiss into his mouth. "I called your bluff."
He smiled and rubbed his hand across her forearm braced against his chest. "That will last me until next year."
She glanced at the muted television. "That's two minutes away."
"Two minutes to put this year behind us." He slid one arm behind his head, adjusting the pillow.
She patted his chest with her hand. "That shouldn't take long." She felt him laugh. "It ended up being a very good year," she offered.
"Next year will be even better."
"Really? Promise?"
"Absolutely." He reached behind her ear and a gold coin reappeared. "What do you think? Heads you say yes when I ask you out, tails you say no?"
She grinned at the idea. "Are you cheating again?" She took the coin. "This one isn't edible," she realized, disappointed. And then she turned it over. "A real two-headed coin?"
"A rare find." He smiled. "Like you."
"That sounds like a bit of honey."
"I'm good at being mushy."
"Oh, really?"
He glanced over her shoulder. "Turn up the TV. There's the countdown."
She grabbed for the remote and hit the wrong button. The TV came on full volume just as the fireworks went off. Benji went racing past them spooked by the noise to dive under the collar of the jacket Jack had tossed on the floor. The white mouse scurried to run into the jacket sleeve.
"Tell me I didn't see what I think I just did."
"I won't tell you," Jack agreed, amused. He watched the jacket move and raised an eyebrow. "Am I supposed to rescue the kitten or the mouse?
”
”
Dee Henderson (The Protector (O'Malley, #4))
“
English minister David Clarkson preached one of the most comprehensive and searching sermons on counterfeit gods ever written.113 About idolatry he said, “Though few will own it, nothing is more common.” If we think of our soul as a house, he said, “idols are set up in every room, in every faculty.” We prefer our own wisdom to God’s wisdom, our own desires to God’s will, and our own reputation to God’s honor. Clarkson looked at human relationships and showed how we have a tendency to make them more influential and important to us than God. In fact, he showed that “many make even their enemies their god . . . when they are more troubled, disquieted, and perplexed at apprehensions of danger to their liberty, estates, and lives from men” than they are concerned about God’s displeasure.114 The human heart is indeed a factory that mass-produces idols.
”
”
Timothy J. Keller (Counterfeit Gods: When the Empty Promises of Love, Money and Power Let You Down)
“
Now burst above the city's cold twilight
The piercing whistles and the tower-clocks:
For day is done. Along the frozen docks
The workmen set their ragged shirts aright.
Thro' factory doors a stream of dingy light
Follows the scrimmage as it quickly flocks
To hut and home among the snow's gray blocks. --
I love you, human labourers. Good-night!
Good-night to all the blackened arms that ache!
Good-night to every sick and sweated brow,
To the poor girl that strength and love forsake,
To the poor boy who can no more! I vow
The victim soon shall shudder at the stake
And fall in blood: we bring him even now.
”
”
Trumbull Stickney
“
MEMORY believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled cold echoing building of dark red brick sootbleakened by more chimneys than its own, set in a grassless cinderstrewnpacked compound surrounded by smoking factory purlieus and enclosed by a ten foot steel-and-wire fence like a penitentiary or a zoo, where in random erratic surges, with sparrowlike childtrebling, orphans in identical and uniform blue denim in and out of remembering but in knowing constant as the bleak walls, the bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting chimneys streaked like black tears.
”
”
William Faulkner (Light in August)
“
By August the blitz had begun, and in one month there were suddenly 2,500 unexploded bombs to be dealt with. Roads were closed, factories deserted. By September the number of live bombs had reached 3,700. One hundred new bomb squads were set up, but there was still no understanding of how the bombs worked. Life expectancy in these units was ten weeks.
”
”
Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient)
“
The sky hangs like lead over the low shrubbery of the Luisenplatz, the trees are bare, a loose window is clashing in the wind, and amid the frowsy alder bushes in the garden of the square squats the November twilight, dank and cheerless. I peer over into it; and suddenly it is as if I saw it all today for the first time, so unfamiliar that I hardly know it again. This dirty, damp patch of grass—was this really the setting of those years of my childhood, so radiant and winged in my memory? This waste, dreary square with the factory yonder—can this be that quiet corner of earth we called “Home” and which alone amid the waters of destruction out there meant hope to us and salvation from perishing in the flood? Or was it not rather a vision of some far other place than this grey street with its hideous houses that rose up there, over the shell holes, like some wild, sad dream in the grudging intervals between death and death? In my memory was it not far more shining and lovely, more spacious, and abounding with ten thousand things? Is that no longer true, then? Did my blood lie and my memory deceive me? I
”
”
Erich Maria Remarque (The Road Back)
“
he took three potentially life-saving decisions. First, he eliminated rush hour by staggering the opening times of factories, shops and cinemas. Second, he established a clearing-house system under which 150 emergency health centres were set up across the city to coordinate the care and reporting of the sick. And third and most controversially, he kept the schools open.12
”
”
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
“
Creative activity at the grassroots is the basic factor of the new public life. Let the workers set up workers' control at their factories. Let them supply the villages with manufactures in exchange for grain […] Socialism cannot be decreed from above. Its spirit rejects the mechanical bureaucratic approach: living creative socialism is the product of the masses themselves.
”
”
Vladimir Lenin (Collected Works, Volume 26: September 1917-February 1918)
“
The cultural Left has contributed to the formation of this politically useless unconscious not only by adopting “power” as the name of an invisible, ubiquitous, and malevolent presence, but by adopting ideals which nobody is yet able to imagine being actualized.
Among these ideals are participatory democracy and the end of capitalism. Power will pass to the people, the Sixties Left believed only when decisions are made by all those who may be affected by the results. This means, for example, that economic decisions will be made by stakeholders rather than by shareholders, and that entrepreneurship and markets will cease to play their present role. When they do, capitalism as we know it will have ended, and something new will have taken its place.
[…] Sixties leftists skipped lightly over all the questions which had been raised by the experience of non market economies in the so-called socialist countries. They seemed to be suggesting that once we were rid of both bureaucrats and entrepreneurs, “the people” would know how to handle competition from steel mills or textile factories in the developing world, price hikes on imported oil, and so on. But they never told us how “the people” would learn how to do this.
The cultural Left still skips over such questions. Doing so is a consequence of its preference for talking about “the system” rather than about specific social practices and specific changes in those practices. The rhetoric of this Left remains revolutionary rather than reformist and pragmatic. Its insouciant use of terms like “late capitalism” suggests that we can just wait for capitalism to collapse, rather than figuring out what, in the absence of markets, will set prices and regulate distribution. The voting public, the public which must be won over if the Left is to emerge from the academy into the public square, sensibly wants to be told the details. It wants to know how things are going to work after markets are put behind us. It wants to know how participatory democracy is supposed to function.
The cultural Left offers no answers to such demands for further information, but until it confronts them it will not be able to be a political Left. The public, sensibly, has no interest in getting rid of capitalism until it is offered details about the alternatives. Nor should it be interested in participatory democracy –– the liberation of the people from the power of technocrats –– until it is told how deliberative assemblies will acquire the same know-how which only the technocrats presently possess. […]
The cultural Left has a vision of an America in which the white patriarchs have stopped voting and have left all the voting to be done by members of previously victimized groups, people who have somehow come into possession of more foresight and imagination than the selfish suburbanites. These formerly oppressed and newly powerful people are expected to be as angelic as the straight white males were diabolical. If I shared this expectation, I too would want to live under this new dispensation. Since I see no reason to share it, I think that the left should get back into the business of piecemeal reform within the framework of a market economy. This was the business the American Left was in during the first two-thirds of the century.
Someday, perhaps, cumulative piecemeal reforms will be found to have brought about revolutionary change. Such reforms might someday produce a presently unimaginable non market economy, and much more widely distributed powers of decision making. […] But in the meantime, we should not let the abstractly described best be the enemy of the better. We should not let speculation about a totally changed system, and a totally different way of thinking about human life and affairs, replace step-by-step reform of the system we presently have.
”
”
Richard Rorty (Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America)
“
right arm got wrecked in a fireworks calamity, of all things. He was setting some off for a big display and part of the metal rig that they were resting on had a loose bolt or something, and the whole thing came down and crushed his arm. He can’t use it much and it looks a bit weird, kind of twisted to one side. He got some money from the insurance company, and he stopped working at the factory.
”
”
Ross Welford (Time Travelling with a Hamster)
“
America experienced its first oil shock. Within days of the cutoff, oil prices rose from $2.90 to $11.65 a barrel; gasoline prices soared from 20 cents to $1.20 a gallon, an all-time high. Across America, fuel shortages forced factories to close early and airlines to cancel flights. Filling stations posted signs: 'Sorry, No Gas Today.' If a station did have gasoline, motorists lined up before sunrise to buy a few gallons; owners limited the amount sold to each customer. Motorists grew impatient. Fistfights broke out, and occasionally, gunfire. President Nixon called for America to end its dependence on foreign oil. 'Let us set as our national goal. . . that by the end of this decade we will have developed the potential to meet our own energy needs without depending on any foreign energy source,' he said. We have still not met this goal.
”
”
Albert Marrin
“
We should reinforce modern machining facilities with high performance in line with the global trend of machine industry development, press the production of products, high-speed drawings, and unmanned automation," he said. "We should set up test sites for comprehensive measurement in the factory and allow various load, interlock tests and impact tests depending on the characteristics of the products."
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정품구입문의하는곳~☎위커메신저:PP444☎라인:PPPK44↔☎텔레:ppt89[☎?카톡↔rrs9]
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On the first day, Kim conducted field guidance on plants in Jagang Province, including the Kanggye Tracker General Factory, the Kanggye Precision Machinery General Factory, the Jangja Steel Manufacturing Machinery Plant and the February 8 Machine Complex. All of these factories are North Korea's leading munitions factories with decades of history.
Defense ministers of South Korea, the U.S. and Japan gathered together to discuss ways to cooperate on the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and strengthen defense cooperation among the three countries.
South Korean Defense Minister Chung Kyung-doo was acting U.S. Defense Secretary Patrick Shannahan and Japanese Defense Minister Takeshi Iwaya at the Shangri-La Hotel in Singapore, where the 18th Asia Security Conference was held from 9 a.m. on Sunday.
”
”
떨 판매매,떨판매,떨 판매.☎위커메신저:PP444,대마초판매사이트
“
No, plenty for all is not a dream – though it was a dream indeed in those days when man, for all his pains, could hardly win a few bushels of wheat from an acre of land, and had to fashion by hand all the implements he used in agriculture and industry. Now it is no longer a dream, because man has invented a motor which, with a little iron and a few sacks of coal, gives him the mastery of a creature strong and docile as a horse, and capable of setting the most complicated machinery in motion.
But, if plenty for all is to become a reality, this immense capital – cities, houses, pastures, arable lands, factories, highways, education – must cease to be regarded as private property, for the monopolist to dispose of at his pleasure.
This rich endowment, painfully won, builded, fashioned, or invented by our ancestors, must become common property, so that the collective interests of men may gain from it the greatest good for all.
”
”
Pyotr Kropotkin (The Conquest of Bread (Working Classics))
“
agricultural economy based upon farming, to an industrial economy based upon factories,” Charles told me. “Factory workers must possess very specific skills. They must be educated to a basic minimum standard of literacy and numeracy, and they must be reliable, nondisruptive, and good at following instructions. Most importantly, they must do exactly what they are told, when they are told to do it. Industrialising countries lacked such workers, therefore institutions were set up to produce them. Replaceable parts for a machine.” I
”
”
Benedict Jacka (An Inheritance of Magic (Inheritance of Magic #1))
“
It is often said that a strategy is a choice or a decision. The words “choice” and “decision” evoke an image of someone considering a list of alternatives and then selecting one of them. There is, in fact, a formal theory of decisions that specifies exactly how to make a choice by identifying alternative actions, valuing outcomes, and appraising probabilities of events. The problem with this view, and the reason it barely lightens a leader’s burden, is that you are rarely handed a clear set of alternatives. In the case at hand, Hannibal was certainly not briefed by a staff presenting four options arranged on a PowerPoint slide. Rather, he faced a challenge and he designed a novel response. Today, as then, many effective strategies are more designs than decisions—are more constructed than chosen. In these cases, doing strategy is more like designing a high-performance aircraft than deciding which forklift truck to buy or how large to build a new factory. When someone says “Managers are decision makers,” they are not talking about master strategists, for a master strategist is a designer.
”
”
Richard P. Rumelt (Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters)
“
Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources cousist of two joints of marijuana millions of
genitals an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400
miles an hour and twentyfive-thousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underprivileged
who live in my flowerpots under the light of five hundred
suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next
to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.
America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as
his automobiles more so they're all different sexes.
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your
old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & V anzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell
meetings they sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket
a ticket costs a nickel and the speeches were free
everybody was angelic and sentimental about the workers
it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing
the party was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man
a real mensch Mother Bloor made me cry I once saw
Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have been a spy.
America you don't really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them
Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She
wants to take our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Readers' Digest.
Her wants our auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy
running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read. Him need
big black niggers. Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours
a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television
set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision
parts factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.
”
”
Allen Ginsberg (Howl: And Other Poems)
“
The impossible class. — Poor, happy and independent! — these things can go together; poor, happy and a slave! — these things can also go together — and I can think of no better news I could give to our factory slaves: provided, that is, they do not feel it to be in general a disgrace to be thus used, and used up, as a part of a machine and as it were a stopgap to fill a hole in human inventiveness!
To the devil with the belief that higher payment could lift from them the essence of their miserable condition I mean their impersonal enslavement!
To the devil with the idea of being persuaded that an enhancement of this impersonality within the mechanical operation of a new society could transform the disgrace of slavery into a virtue!
To the devil with setting a price on oneself in exchange for which one ceases to be a person and becomes a part of a machine!
Are you accomplices in the current folly of the nations the folly of wanting above all to produce as much as possible and to become as rich as possible? What you ought to do, rather, is to hold up to them the counter-reckoning: how great a sum of inner value is thrown away in pursuit of this external goal!
But where is your inner value if you no longer know what it is to breathe freely? if you no longer possess the slightest power over yourselves? if you all too often grow weary of yourselves like a drink that has been left too long standing? if you pay heed to the newspapers and look askance at your wealthy neighbour, made covetous by the rapid rise and fall of power, money and opinions? if you no longer believe in philosophy that wears rags, in the free-heartedness of him without needs? if voluntary poverty and freedom from profession and marriage, such as would very well suit the more spiritual among you, have become to you things to laugh at? If, on the other hand, you have always in your ears the flutings of the Socialist pied-pipers whose design is to enflame you with wild hopes? which bid you to be prepared and nothing further, prepared day upon day, so that you wait and wait for something to happen from outside and in all other respects go on living as you have always lived until this waiting turns to hunger and thirst and fever and madness, and at last the day of the bestia triumphans dawns in all its glory?
In contrast to all this, everyone ought to say to himself: ‘better to go abroad, to seek to become master in new and savage regions of the world and above all master over myself; to keep moving from place to place for just as long as any sign of slavery seems to threaten me; to shun neither adventure nor war and, if the worst should come to the worst, to be prepared for death: all this rather than further to endure this indecent servitude, rather than to go on becoming soured and malicious and conspiratorial!
”
”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“
So it was that the Red Tower put into production its terrible and perplexing line of unique novelty items. Among the objects and constructions now manufactured were several of an almost innocent nature. These included tiny, delicate cameos that were heavier than their size would suggest, far heavier, and lockets whose shiny outer surface flipped open to reveal a black reverberant abyss inside, a deep blackness roaring with echoes. Along the same lines was a series of lifelike replicas of internal organs and physiological structures, many of them evidencing an advanced stage of disease and all of them displeasingly warm and soft to the touch. There was a fake disembodied hand on which fingernails would grow several inches overnight, every night like clockwork. Numerous natural objects, mostly bulbous gourds, were designed to produce a long deafening scream whenever they were picked up or otherwise disturbed in their vegetable stillness. Less scrutable were such things as hardened globs of lava into whose rough igneous forms were set a pair of rheumy eyes that perpetually shifted their gaze from side to side like a relentless pendulum. And there was also a humble piece of cement, a fragment broken away from any street or sidewalk, that left a most intractable stain, greasy and green, on whatever surface it was placed. But such fairly simple items were eventually followed, and ultimately replaced, by more articulated objects and constructions. One example of this complex type of novelty item was an ornate music box that, when opened, emitted a brief gurgling or sucking sound in emulation of a dying individual's death rattle. Another product manufactured in great quantity at the Red Tower was a pocket watch in gold casing which opened to reveal a curious timepiece whose numerals were represented by tiny quivering insects while the circling "hands" were reptilian tongues, slender and pink. But these examples hardly begin to hint at the range of goods that came from the factory during its novelty phase of production. I should at least mention the exotic carpets woven with intricate abstract patterns that, when focused upon for a certain length of time, composed themselves into fleeting phantasmagoric scenes of the kind which might pass through a fever-stricken or even permanently damaged brain.
”
”
Thomas Ligotti (The Nightmare Factory)
“
In a conceptual sense, every virus is a professional gene carrier. Viruses have a simple structure: they are often no more than a set of genes wrapped inside a coat—a “piece of bad news wrapped in a protein coat,” as Peter Medawar, the immunologist, had described them. When a virus enters a cell, it sheds its coat, and begins to use the cell as a factory to copy its genes, and manufacture new coats, resulting in millions of new viruses budding out of the cell. Viruses have thus distilled their life cycle to its bare essentials. They live to infect and reproduce; they infect and reproduce to live.
”
”
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Gene: An Intimate History)
“
Death appears as the harsh victory of the law of our ancestors of the dimension of our becoming. It is a fact that, as productivity increases, each succeeding generation becomes smaller in stature. The defeat of our fathers is revisited upon us as the limits of our world. Yes, structure is human, it is the monumentalization of congealed sweat, sweat squeezed from old exploitation and represented as nature, the world we inhabit, the objective ground. We do not, in our insect-like comings and going, make the immediate world in which we live, we do not make a contribution, on the contrary we are set in motion by it; a generation will pass before what we have done, as an exploited class, will seep through as an effect of objectivity. (Our wealth is laid down in heaven.) The structure of the world has been built by the dead, they were paid in wages, and when the wages were spent and they were in the ground, what they had made continued to exist, these cities, roads and factories are their calcified bones. They had nothing but their wages to show for what they had done, who they were and what they did has been cancelled out. But what they made has continued into our present, their burial and decay is our present. This is the definition of class hatred. We are no closer now to rest, to freedom, to communism than they were, their sacrifice has brought us nothing, what they did counted for nothing, we have inherited nothing, but they did produce value, they did make the world in which we now live, the world that now oppresses us is constructed from the wealth they made, wealth that was taken from them as soon as they were paid a wage, taken and owned by someone else, owned and used to define the nature of class domination. We too must work, and the value we produce leaks away from us, from each only a trickle but in all a sea of it and that, for the next generation, will thicken into wealth for others to own and as a congealed structure it will be used to frame new enterprises in different directions. The violence of what they produced becomes the structure that dominates our existence. Our lives begin amidst the desecration of our ancestors, millions of people who went to their graves as failures, and forever denied experiences of a full human existence, their simply being canceled out; as our parents die, we can say truly that their lives were for nothing, that the black earth that is thrown down onto them blacks out our sky.
”
”
frére dupont
“
But Proportion has a sister, less smiling, more formidable, a Goddess even now engaged--in the heat and sands of India, the mud and swamp of Africa, the purlieus of London, wherever in short the climate or the devil tempts men to fall from the true belief which is her own--is even now engaged in dashing down shrines, smashing idols, and setting up in their place her own stern countenance. Conversion is her name and she feasts on the wills of the weakly, loving to impress, to impose, adoring her own features stamped on the face of the populace. At Hyde Park Corner on a tub she stands preaching; shrouds herself in white and walks penitentially disguised as brotherly love through factories and parliaments; offers help, but desires power; smites out of her way roughly the dissentient, or dissatisfied; bestows her blessing on those who, looking upward, catch submissively from her eyes the light of their own. [She] had her dwelling in [his] heart, though concealed, as she mostly is, under some plausible disguise; some venerable name; love, duty, self sacrifice. How he would work--how toil to raise funds, propagate reforms, initiate institutions! But conversion, fastidious Goddess, loves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human will.
”
”
Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway)
“
It was a remarkable undertaking. The United States and its agents used explosives, arson, short-circuiting, and other methods to damage power stations, shipyards, canals, docks, public buildings, gas stations, public transportation, bridges, and so on; they derailed freight trains, seriously injuring workers; burned twelve cars of a freight train and destroyed air pressure hoses of others; used acids to damage vital factory machinery; put sand in the turbine of a factory, bringing it to a standstill; set fire to a tile-producing factory; promoted work slowdowns in factories; killed by poisoning 7,000 cows of a co-operative dairy;
”
”
William Blum (America's Deadliest Export: Democracy The Truth about US Foreign Policy and Everything Else)
“
If you want to build a factory, or fix a motorcycle, or set a nation right without getting stuck, then classical, structured, dualistic subject-object knowledge, although necessary, isn't enough. You have to have some feeling for the quality of the work. You have to have a sense of what's good. That is what carries you forward. This sense isn't just something you're born with, although you are born with it. It's also something you can develop. It's not just "intuition,'' not just unexplainable "skill'' or "talent.'' It's the direct result of contact with basic reality, Quality, which dualistic reason has in the past tended to conceal.
”
”
Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (Phaedrus, #1))
“
By the early twenty-second century, the technology for self-replicating robots should be perfected, and we may be able to entrust machines with the task of constructing solar arrays and laser batteries on the moon, Mars, and beyond. We would ship over an initial team of automatons, some of which would mine the regolith and others of which would build a factory. Another set of robots would oversee the sorting, milling, and smelting of raw materials in the factory to separate and obtain various metals. These purified metals could then be used to assemble laser launch stations—and a new batch of self-replicating robots. We might eventually have a bustling network of relay stations throughout the solar system, perhaps stretching from the moon all the way to the Oort Cloud. Because the comets in the Oort Cloud extend roughly halfway to Alpha Centauri and are largely stationary, they may be ideal locations for laser banks that could provide an extra boost to nanoships on their journey to our neighboring star system. As each nanoship passed by one of these relay stations, its lasers would fire automatically and give the ship an added push to the stars. Self-replicating robots could build these distant outposts by using fusion instead of sunlight as the basic source of energy.
”
”
Michio Kaku (The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality, and Our Destiny BeyondEarth)
“
It happens that the stage-sets collapse. Rising, tram, four hours in the office or factory, meal, tram, four hours of work, mean, sleep and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, according to the same rhythm—this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the ‘why’ arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement. ‘Begins’—this is important. Weariness comes at the end of the acts of a mechanical life, but at the same time it inaugurates the impulse of consciousness. It awakens consciousness and provokes what follows. What follows is the gradual return into the chain or it is the definitive awakening. At the end of the awakening comes, in time, the consequence: suicide or recovery.
”
”
Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
“
Why don't you make everybody an Alpha Double Plus while you're about it?"
Mustapha Mond laughed. "Because we have no wish to have our throats cut," he answered. "We believe in happiness and stability. A society of Alphas couldn't fail to be unstable and miserable. Imagine a factory staffed by Alphas–that is to say by separate and unrelated individuals of good heredity and conditioned so as to be capable (within limits) of making a free choice and assuming responsibilities. Imagine it!" he repeated.
The Savage tried to imagine it, not very successfully.
"It's an absurdity. An Alpha-decanted, Alpha-conditioned man would go mad if he had to do Epsilon Semi-Moron work–go mad, or start smashing things up. Alphas can be completely socialized–but only on condition that you make them do Alpha work. Only an Epsilon can be expected to make Epsilon sacrifices, for the good reason that for him they aren't sacrifices; they're the line of least resistance. His conditioning has laid down rails along which he's got to run. He can't help himself; he's foredoomed. Even after decanting, he's still inside a bottle–an invisible bottle of infantile and embryonic fixations. Each one of us, of course," the Controller meditatively continued, "goes through life inside a bottle. But if we happen to be Alphas, our bottles are, relatively speaking, enormous. We should suffer acutely if we were confined in a narrower space. You cannot pour upper-caste champagne-surrogate into lower-caste bottles. It's obvious theoretically. But it has also been proved in actual practice. The result of the Cyprus experiment was convincing."
"What was that?" asked the Savage.
Mustapha Mond smiled. "Well, you can call it an experiment in rebottling if you like. It began in A.F. 473. The Controllers had the island of Cyprus cleared of all its existing inhabitants and re-colonized with a specially prepared batch of twenty-two thousand Alphas. All agricultural and industrial equipment was handed over to them and they were left to manage their own affairs. The result exactly fulfilled all the theoretical predictions. The land wasn't properly worked; there were strikes in all the factories; the laws were set at naught, orders disobeyed; all the people detailed for a spell of low-grade work were perpetually intriguing for high-grade jobs, and all the people with high-grade jobs were counter-intriguing at all costs to stay where they were. Within six years they were having a first-class civil war. When nineteen out of the twenty-two thousand had been killed, the survivors unanimously petitioned the World Controllers to resume the government of the island. Which they did. And that was the end of the only society of Alphas that the world has ever seen."
The Savage sighed, profoundly.
"The optimum population," said Mustapha Mond, "is modelled on the iceberg–eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above."
"And they're happy below the water line?"
"Happier than above it.
”
”
Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)
“
Abundance and scarcity In a society where value is created by the manufacture of goods or the allocation of limited resources, it’s not a surprise that organizations seek scarcity. We hesitate to share, because if I give you this, then I don’t have it any more. We erect barriers and create rules to make it difficult for some people to have access to these limited resources. While we don’t set out to become miserly, it’s an economic instinct, because what’s yours is no long mine. Even though we give lip service to sharing when kids show up for kindergarten classes, most of school is organized around the same ideas. We rank students, we cut players from the roster, we grade on a curve. Success, we teach, is scarce. Our new economy, though, is based on abundance, the abundance that comes from ideas and access. If I benefit when everyone knows my idea, then the more people I give the idea to, the better we all do. If I benefit when I earn a reputation leading, connecting and creating positive change, then I’ll benefit if I can offer these insights to anyone who can benefit from them. With an abundance mindset, we intentionally create goods that can be shared. It’s not based on our traditional factory-based economy, but it works now (in fact, it’s just about all that works)… engaging with the mesh, building communities that benefit from sharing resources instead of destroying them is a strategy that scales. With an abundance mindset, we create ideas and services that do better when people share.
”
”
Seth Godin (Graceful)
“
Suppose you were given a choice between the following two vacation packages: Stone Age package: On day one we will hike for ten hours in a pristine forest, setting camp for the night in a clearing by a river. On day two we will canoe down the river for ten hours, camping on the shores of a small lake. On day three we will learn from the native people how to fish in the lake and how to find mushrooms in the nearby woods. Modern proletarian package: On day one we will work for ten hours in a polluted textile factory, passing the night in a cramped apartment block. On day two we will work for ten hours as cashiers in the local department store, going back to sleep in the same apartment block. On day three we will learn from the native people how to open a bank account and fill out mortgage forms.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
“
To wonder just exactly what This does to your beloved tot? IT ROTS THE SENSES IN THE HEAD! IT KILLS IMAGINATION DEAD! IT CLOGS AND CLUTTERS UP THE MIND! IT MAKES A CHILD SO DULL AND BLIND HE CAN NO LONGER UNDERSTAND A FANTASY, A FAIRYLAND! HIS BRAIN BECOMES AS SOFT AS CHEESE! HIS POWERS OF THINKING RUST AND FREEZE! HE CANNOT THINK – HE ONLY SEES! “All right!” you’ll cry. “All right!” you’ll say, “But if we take the set away, What shall we do to entertain Our darling children! Please explain!” We’ll answer this by asking you, “What used the darling ones to do? How used they keep themselves contented Before this monster was invented?” Have you forgotten? Don’t you know? We’ll say it very loud and slow: THEY … USED … TO … READ! They’d READ and READ, AND READ and READ, and then proceed TO READ some more.
”
”
Roald Dahl (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Charlie Bucket, #1))
“
free copy of Donald Duck that fell through the letter box one autumn day, featuring a lottery with a thousand wristwatches (a thousand iPads in today’s youth economy) to give away. Not to mention the content. Donald Duck as a teacher. The nephews squash an ice cream onto their weary uncle’s forehead. Wasting a whole ice cream without a second thought! At some point, from that same America, packets of green-and-white powder arrived that a housewife could instantly transform into a pan of soup. ‘California’, the concoction was called. ‘California,’ we whispered. California. In the provincial town where I grew up, we lugged the cabbage, lettuce and potatoes we’d grown on our allotment past several new factories on the Marshallweg, a road named after a general who, as I understood it, had paid to set up all
”
”
Geert Mak (In America: Travels with John Steinbeck)
“
These examinations and certificates and so on--what did they matter? And all this efficiency and up-to-dateness--what did that matter, either? Ralston was trying to run Brookfield like a factory--a factory for turning out a snob culture based on money and machines. The old gentlemanly traditions of family and broad acres were changing, as doubtless they were bound to; but instead of widening them to form a genuine inclusive democracy of duke and dustman, Ralston was narrowing them upon the single issue of a fat banking account. There never had been so many rich men's sons at Brookfield. The Speech Day Garden Party was like Ascot. Ralston met these wealthy fellows in London clubs and persuaded them that Brookfield was the coming school, and, since they couldn't buy their way into Eton or Harrow, they greedily swallowed the bait. Awful fellows, some of them--though others were decent enough. Financiers, company promoters, pill manufacturers. One of them gave his son five pounds a week pocket money. Vulgar . . . ostentatious . . . all the hectic rotten-ripeness of the age. . . . And once Chips had got into trouble because of some joke he had made about the name and ancestry of a boy named Isaacstein. The boy wrote home about it, and Isaacstein père sent an angry letter to Ralston. Touchy, no sense of humor, no sense of proportion--that was the matter with them, these new fellows. . . . No sense of proportion. And it was a sense of proportion, above all things, that Brookfield ought to teach--not so much Latin or Greek or Chemistry or Mechanics. And you couldn't expect to test that sense of proportion by setting papers and granting certificates...
”
”
James Hilton (Good-Bye, Mr. Chips)
“
Suppose you were given a choice between the following two vacation packages: Stone Age package: On day one we will hike for ten hours in a pristine forest, setting camp for the night in a clearing by a river. On day two we will canoe down the river for ten hours, camping on the shores of a small lake. On day three we will learn from the native people how to fish in the lake and how to find mushrooms in the nearby woods. Modern proletarian package: On day one we will work for ten hours in a polluted textile factory, passing the night in a cramped apartment block. On day two we will work for ten hours as cashiers in the local department store, going back to sleep in the same apartment block. On day three we will learn from the native people how to open a bank account and fill out mortgage forms. Which package would you choose?
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow)
“
Within half a century after Butler sent Charles Mallory away from Fortress Monroe empty-handed, the children of white Union and Confederate soldiers united against African-American political and civil equality. This compact of white supremacy enabled southern whites to impose Jim Crow segregation on public space, disfranchise African-American citizens by barring them from the polls, and use the lynch-mob noose to enforce black compliance. White Americans imposed increased white supremacy outside the South, too. In non-Confederate states, many restaurants wouldn’t serve black customers. Stores and factories refused to hire African Americans. Hundreds of midwestern communities forcibly evicted African-American residents and became “sundown towns” (“Don’t let the sun set on you in this town”). Most whites, meanwhile, believed that
”
”
Edward E. Baptist (The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism)
“
Suppose you were given a choice between the following two vacation packages:
Stone Age package: On day one we will hike for ten hours in a pristine forest, setting camp for the night in a clearing by a river. On day two we will canoe down the river for ten hours, camping on the shores of a small lake. On day three we will learn from the native people how to fish in the lake and how to find mushrooms in the nearby woods.
Modern proletarian package: On day one we will work for ten hours in a polluted textile factory, passing the night in a cramped apartment block. On day two we will work for ten hours as cashiers in the local department store, going back to sleep in the same apartment block. On day three we will learn from the native people how to open a bank account and fill out mortgage forms.
Which package would you choose? (p.205)
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
“
While they sorted us out for transportation I had a chance to look around. In the light of the dying sun the image glimpsed earlier through the crack in the box car seemed to have changed, grown more eery and menacing. One object immediately caught my eye: an immense square chimney, built of red bricks, tapering towards the summit. It towered above a two-story building and looked like a strange factory chimney. I was especially struck by the enormous tongues of flame rising between the lightning rods, which were set at angles on the square tops of the chimney. I tried to imagine what hellish cooking would require such a tremendous fire. Suddenly I realized that we were in Germany, the land of the crematory ovens. I had spent ten years in this country, first as a student, later as a doctor, and knew that even the smallest city had its crematorium.
”
”
Miklós Nyiszli (Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account)
“
They sit and stare and stare and sit
Until they're hypnoti[z]ed by it,
Until they're absolutely drunk
With all that shocking ghastly junk.
Oh yes, we know it keep them still,
They don't climb out the window sill,
They never fight or kick or punch,
They leave you free to cook the lunch
And wash the dishes in the sink-
But did you ever stop to think,
To wonder just exactly what
This does to your beloved tot?
It rots the senses in the head!
It kills imagination dead!
It clogs and clutters up the mind!
It makes a child so dull and blind
He can no longer understand
A fantasy, a fairyland!
His brain becomes as soft as cheese!
His powers of thinking rust and freeze!
He cannot think-he only sees!
'All right' you'll cry. 'All right' you'll say,
'But if we take the set away,
What shall we do to entertain
Our darling children? Please explain!'
We'll answer this by asking you,
'How used they keep themselves contented
Before this monster was invented?'
Have you forgotten? Don't you know?
We'll say it very loud and slow:
They... used ... to... read! They'd read and read,
And read and read, and then proceed
To read some more, Great Scott! Gadzooks!
One half their lives was reading books!...
Oh books, what books they used to know,
Those children living long ago!
So please, oh please, we beg, we pray,
Go throw your TV set away,
And in its place you can install
A lovely bookshelf on the wall...
...They'll now begin to feel the need
Of having something good to read.
And once they start-oh boy, oh boy!
You watch the slowly growing joy
That fills their hearts. They'll grow so keen
They'll wonder what they'd ever seen
In that ridiculous machine,
That nauseating, foul, unclean,
Repulsive television screen!
And later, each and every kid
Will love you more for what you did...
”
”
Roald Dahl (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Charlie Bucket, #1))
“
And the truth is not in gudgeons, I’ve already declared as much! Father monks, why do you fast? Why do you expect a heavenly reward for that? For such a reward, I’ll go and start fasting, too! No, holy monk, try being virtuous in life, be useful to society without shutting yourself up in a monastery on other people’s bread, and without expecting any reward up there—that’s a little more difficult. I, too, can talk sensibly, Father Superior. What have we got here?” He went up to the table. “Old port wine from Factori’s, Médoc bottled by Eliseyev Brothers!8 A far cry from gudgeons, eh, fathers ? Look at all these bottles the fathers have set out—heh, heh, heh! And who has provided it all? The Russian peasant, the laborer, bringing you the pittance earned by his callused hands, taking it from his family, from the needs of the state! You, holy fathers, are sucking the people’s blood!
”
”
Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in Four Parts With Epilogue)
“
It’s an old term, “white trash,” older than the United States of America itself. Its roots lie in the seventeenth century, when “lubbers” and “crackers,” these formerly indentured and escaped white servants, formed their own communities on the outskirts of the Chesapeake tidewater region. These whites flouted the colonists’ nascent cultural mold, disrespected their ideas of property, color, and labor. The mass of men thought them boondock curios, except during political and economic crises, when they considered them criminal savages. “White trash” nowadays is a contemptuous term. It implies that one had all the privileges of whiteness but squandered them; one’s poverty is one’s own fault. It’s a shocking term, because it suggests that even without unions and factories, class in America is real, and it cuts across racial lines. But mostly it’s a useful term, because it has no set definition. It’s protean. It’s for when the majority of white people want to delineate what they are by saying, “What we are not is them.
”
”
Kent Russell (I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son)
“
The houses in the better part of San Francisco, in those days, were all alike and all so ugly it was a wonder even their owners did not know it. (My father called it the better part of the city because he lived there.) Most of them were built on hillsides, with two or three of their corners standing on stilts. From the sidewalk you saw the doors a dozen feet above your head, the stairs leading up to them and a flat, bare expanse of pine sheathing enclosing the stilts. Each crowded against the next without an inch to spare, the houses themselves were narrow and looked taller than they actually were. If one of them had not occasionally been painted a dull brown instead of a dull green, or if a panel of brick had not been set here and there among the panels of wood, nobody could have told where his neighbor’s left off and his own began. All of them rose straight from the sidewalks; there were no lawns, and no trees. A few blocks away there were well-proportioned and attractive houses, but the builders of our street had searched farther for their model—in a box factory, from the evidence. We were moderately rich, and nothing was too bad for us.
”
”
George Albee (Young Robert: A Brief History)
“
unfairness can take many forms. It can take the form of the inheritance of property—bonds and stocks, houses, factories; it can also take the form of the inheritance of talent—musical ability, strength, mathematical genius. The inheritance of property can be interfered with more readily than the inheritance of talent. But from an ethical point of view, is there any difference between the two? Yet many people resent the inheritance of property but not the inheritance of talent. Look at the same issue from the point of view of the parent. If you want to assure your child a higher income in life, you can do so in various ways. You can buy him (or her) an education that will equip him to pursue an occupation yielding a high income; or you can set him up in a business that will yield a higher income than he could earn as a salaried employee; or you can leave him property, the income from which will enable him to live better. Is there any ethical difference among these three ways of using your property? Or again, if the state leaves you any money to spend over and above taxes, should the state permit you to spend it on riotous living but not to leave it to your children?
”
”
Milton Friedman (Free to Choose: A Personal Statement)
“
It doesn't take ten years of study, you don't need to go to the University, to find out that this is a damned good world gone wrong. Gone wrong, because it is being monkeyed with by people too greedy and mean and wrong-hearted altogether to do the right thing by our common world. They've grabbed it and they won't let go. They might lose their importance; they might lose their pull. Everywhere it's the same. Beware of the men you make your masters. Beware of the men you trust.
We've only got to be clear-headed to sing the same song and play the same game all over the world, we common men. We don't want Power monkeyed with, we don't want Work and Goods monkeyed with, and, above all, we don't want Money monkeyed with. That's the elements of politics everywhere. When these things go wrong, we go wrong. That's how people begin to feel it and see it in America. That's how we feel it here -- when we look into our minds. That's what common people feel everywhere. That's
what our brother whites -- "poor whites" they call them -- in those towns in South Carolina are fighting for now. Fighting our battle. Why aren't we with them? We speak the same language; we share the same blood. Who has been keeping us apart from them for a hundred and fifty-odd years? Ruling classes. Politicians. Dear old flag and all that stuff!
Our school-books never tell us a word about the American common man; and his school-books never tell him a word about us. They flutter flags between us to keep us apart. Split us up for a century and a half because of some fuss about taxing tea. And what are our wonderful Labour and Socialist and Communist leaders doing to change that? What are they doing to unite us English-speaking common men together and give us our plain desire? Are they doing anything more for us than the land barons and the
factory barons and the money barons? Not a bit of it! These labour leaders of to-day mean to be lords to-morrow. They are just a fresh set of dishonest trustees. Look at these twenty-odd platforms here! Mark their needless contradictions! Their marvellous differences on minor issues. 'Manoeuvres!' 'Intrigue.' 'Personalities.' 'Monkeying.' 'Don't trust him, trust me!' All of them at it. Mark how we common men are distracted, how we are set hunting first after one red herring and then after another, for the want of simple, honest interpretation...
”
”
H.G. Wells (The Holy Terror)
“
He was sitting at his desk. He had to get some relief from seeing what he did not want to see. The factory was empty. There was only the night watchman who’d come on duty with his dogs. He was down in the parking lot, patrolling the perimeter of the double-thick chain-link fence, a fence topped off, after the riots, with supplemental scrolls of razor ribbon that were to admonish the boss each and every morning he pulled in and parked his car, “Leave! Leave! Leave!” He was sitting alone in the last factory left in the worst city in the world. And it was worse even than sitting there during the riots, Springfield Avenue in flames, South Orange Avenue in flames, Bergen Street under attack, sirens going off, weapons firing, snipers from rooftops blasting the street lights, looting crowds crazed in the street, kids carrying off radios and lamps and television sets, men toting armfuls of clothing, women pushing baby carriages heavily loaded with cartons of liquor and cases of beer, people pushing pieces of new furniture right down the center of the street, stealing sofas, cribs, kitchen tables, stealing washers and dryers and ovens—stealing not in the shadows but out in the open. Their strength is tremendous, their teamwork is flawless. The shattering of glass windows is thrilling. The not paying for things is intoxicating. The American appetite for ownership is dazzling to behold. This is shoplifting. Everything free that everyone craves, a wonton free-for-all free of charge, everyone uncontrollable with thinking, Here it is! Let it come! In Newark’s burning Mardi Gras streets, a force is released that feels redemptive, something purifying is happening, something spiritual and revolutionary perceptible to all. The surreal vision of household appliances out under the stars and agleam in the glow of the flames incinerating the Central Ward promises the liberation of all mankind. Yes, here it is, let it come, yes, the magnificent opportunity, one of human history’s rare transmogrifying moments: the old ways of suffering are burning blessedly away in the flames, never again to be resurrected, instead to be superseded, within only hours, by suffering that will be so gruesome, so monstrous, so unrelenting and abundant, that its abatement will take the next five hundred years. The fire this time—and next? After the fire? Nothing. Nothing in Newark ever again.
”
”
Philip Roth (American Pastoral)
“
Starting from Descartes’ commitment to a few absolutely certain innate ideas and reason’s ability to determine some facts about reality a priori, Leibniz ended up making all ideas innate and deducing how God must have set up the universe. On the other side, Hume continued Locke’s emptying out of the mind until there was no longer a there there, that is, not even a substantial mind to be emptied. Far from being rationally justifiable, Hume demonstrated that most of our beliefs are determined by an arational reflex, a process that has roughly the epistemological status of digestion. Perhaps Kant’s greatest accomplishment was reconciling these deeply heterogeneous schools, weaving a seamless system out of ideas taken from both sides. The linchpin of this synthesis was what he called his Copernican Revolution: the epoch-making claim that the mind actively processes or organizes experience in constructing knowledge, rather than passively reflecting an independent reality. To speak metaphorically, the mind is more like a factory than a mirror or soft wax. It is this idea that enabled Kant to incorporate the empiricist dependence on experience into the rationalist ideal of universal and necessary knowledge.
”
”
Lee Braver (A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism (Topics In Historical Philosophy))
“
Despite all the immense achievements of the Chinese dynasties, the Muslim empires and the European kingdoms, even in ad 1850 the life of the average person was not better – and might actually have been worse – than the lives of archaic hunter-gatherers. In 1850 a Chinese peasant or a Manchester factory hand worked longer hours than their hunter-gatherer ancestors; their jobs were physically harder and mentally less fulfilling; their diet was less balanced; hygiene conditions were incomparably worse; and infectious diseases were far more common. Suppose you were given a choice between the following two vacation packages: Stone Age package: On day one we will hike for ten hours in a pristine forest, setting camp for the night in a clearing by a river. On day two we will canoe down the river for ten hours, camping on the shores of a small lake. On day three we will learn from the native people how to fish in the lake and how to find mushrooms in the nearby woods. Modern proletarian package: On day one we will work for ten hours in a polluted textile factory, passing the night in a cramped apartment block. On day two we will work for ten hours as cashiers in the local department store, going back to sleep in the same apartment block. On day three we will learn from the native people how to open a bank account and fill out mortgage forms. Which package would you choose?
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow)
“
For attractive lips, speak words of kindness.
For lovely eyes, seek out the good in people.
For a slim figure, share your food with the hungry.
For beautiful hair, let a child run his fingers through it once a day.
For poise, walk with the knowledge you’ll never walk alone.
...카톡【ACD5】텔레【KKD55】
We leave you a tradition with a future.
The tender loving care of human beings will never become obsolete.
People even more than things have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed and redeemed and redeemed and redeemed.
Never throw out anybody.
♥물뽕 구입♥물뽕 구매♥물뽕 판매♥물뽕 구입방법♥물뽕 구매방법♥물뽕 파는곳♥물뽕 가격♥물뽕 파는곳♥물뽕 정품구입♥물뽕 정품구매♥물뽕 정품판매♥물뽕 가격♥물뽕 복용법♥물뽕 부작용♥
Remember, if you ever need a helping hand, you’ll find one at the end of your arm.
As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands: one for helping yourself, the other for helping others.
Your “good old days” are still ahead of you, may you have many of them
수면제,액상수면제,낙태약,여성최음제,ghb물뽕,여성흥분제,남성발기부전치유제,비아,시알,88정,드래곤,바오메이,정력제,남성성기확대제,카마그라젤,비닉스,센돔,,꽃물,남성조루제,네노마정,러쉬파퍼,엑스터시,신의눈물,lsd,아이스,캔디,대마초,떨,마리화나,프로포폴,에토미데이트,해피벌륜 등많은제품판매하고있습니다
원하시는제품있으시면 추천상으로 더좋은제품으로 모시겠습니다
It is a five-member boy group of YG Entertainment who debuted in 2006. It is a group that has had a great influence on young fashion trends, the idol group that has been pouring since then, and the Korean music industry from the mid to late 2000s.
Since the mid-2000s, he has released a lot of hit songs. He has played an important role in all aspects of music, fashion, and trends enjoyed by Korea's generations. In 2010, the concept of emphasizing exposure, The number of idols on the line as if they were filmed in the factory instead of the "singer", the big bang musicality got more attention, and the ALIVE of 2012, the great success of the MADE album from 2015 to 2016, It showed musical performance, performance, and stage control, which made it possible to recognize not only the public in their twenties and thirties but also men and women, both young and old, as true artists with national talents. Even today, it is in a unique position in terms of musical performance, influence, and trend setting, and it is the idol who keeps the longest working and longest position.
We have made the popularity of big bang by combining various factors such as exquisite talent of all members, sophisticated music, trendy style, various arts and performances in broadcasting, lovecalls and collaboration of global brands, and global popularity. The big bang was also different from the existing idols. It is considered to be a popular idol, a idol, because it has a unique musicality, debut as a talented person in a countless idol that has become a singer as a representative, not a talent. In addition, the male group is almost the only counterpart to the unchanging proposition that there is not a lot of male fans, and as mentioned several times, it has been loved by gender regardless of gender.
”
”
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any rea
“
But there was a lacuna in Nehru’s concept of science: he saw it exclusively in terms of laboratory science, not field science; physics and molecular biology, not ecology, botany, or agronomy. He understood that India’s farmers were poor in part because they were unproductive—they harvested much less grain per acre than farmers elsewhere in the world. But unlike Borlaug, Nehru and his ministers believed that the poor harvests were due not to lack of technology—artificial fertilizer, irrigated water, and high-yield seeds—but to social factors like inefficient management, misallocation of land, lack of education, rigid application of the caste system, and financial speculation (large property owners were supposedly hoarding their wheat and rice until they could get better prices). This was not crazy: more than one out of five families in rural India owned no land at all, and about two out of five owned less than 2.5 acres, not enough land to feed themselves. Meanwhile, a tiny proportion of absentee landowners controlled huge swathes of terrain. The solution to rural poverty, Nehru therefore believed, was less new technology than new policies: give land from big landowners to ordinary farmers, free the latter from the burdens of caste, and then gather the liberated smallholders into more-efficient, technician-advised cooperatives. This set of ideas had the side benefit of fitting nicely into Nehru’s industrial policy: enacting them would cost next to nothing, reserving more money for building factories.
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Charles C. Mann (The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World)
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Or maybe just his desire to escape the darkness, which in some way reminded him of his childhood and adolescence. At some point in between childhood and adolescence, he thought, he had dreamed of this landscape or one like it, less dark, less desertlike. He was in a bus with his mother and one of his mother’s sisters and they were taking a short trip, from New York to a town near New York. He was next to the window and the view never changed, just buildings and highways, until suddenly they were in the country. At that exact moment, or maybe earlier, the sun had begun to set and he watched the trees, a small wood, though in his eyes it looked bigger. And then he thought he saw a man walking along the edge of the little wood. In great strides, as if he didn’t want night to overtake him. He wondered who the man was. The only way he could tell it was a man and not a shadow was because he wore a shirt and swung his arms as he walked. The man’s loneliness was so great, Fate remembered, that he wanted to look away and cling to his mother, but instead he kept his eyes open until the bus was out of the woods, and buildings, factories, and warehouses once again lined the sides of the road. The valley he was crossing was lonelier now, and darker. He saw himself striding along the roadside. He shivered. Then he remembered the urn holding his mother’s ashes and the neighbor’s cup that he hadn’t returned, the coffee infinitely cold now, and his mother’s videotapes that no one would ever watch again. He thought about stopping the car and waiting until the sun came up.
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Roberto Bolaño (2666)
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What used the darling ones to do? ‘How used they keep themselves contented Before this monster was invented?’ Have you forgotten? Don’t you know? We’ll say it very loud and slow: They . . . used . . . to . . . read! They’d read and read, And read and read, and then proceed To read some more. Great Scott! Gadzooks! One half their lives was reading books! The nursery shelves held books galore! Books cluttered up the nursery floor! And in the bedroom, by the bed, More books were waiting to be read! Such wondrous, fine, fantastic tales Of dragons, gypsies, queens, and whales And treasure isles, and distant shores Where smugglers rowed with muffled oars, And pirates wearing purple pants, And sailing ships and elephants, And cannibals crouching ’round the pot, Stirring away at something hot. (It smells so good, what can it be! Good gracious, it’s Penelope.) The younger ones had Beatrix Potter With Mr. Tod, the dirty rotter, And Squirrel Nutkin, Pigling Bland, And Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle and— Just How The Camel Got His Hump, And How The Monkey Lost His Rump, And Mr. Toad, and bless my soul, There’s Mr. Rat and Mr. Mole— Oh, books, what books they used to know, Those children living long ago! So please, oh please, we beg, we pray, Go throw your TV set away, And in its place you can install A lovely bookshelf on the wall. Then fill the shelves with lots of books, Ignoring all the dirty looks, The screams and yells, the bites and kicks, And children hitting you with sticks— Fear not, because we promise you That, in about a week or two Of having nothing else to do, They’ll now begin to feel the need Of having something good to read. And once they start—oh boy, oh boy! You watch the slowly growing joy
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Roald Dahl (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory)
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SOMETIMES A KIND OF GLORY lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then—the glory—so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man’s importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men. I don’t know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking.
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John Steinbeck (East of Eden)
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Ah, Lina Cerullo, you are beyond correction. Why did you make that list? You don’t want to be exploited? You want to improve your condition and the condition of these people? You’re convinced that you, and they, starting from here, from what you are now, will join the victorious march of the proletariat of the whole world? No way. March to become what? Now and forever workers? Workers who slave from morning to night but are empowered? Nonsense. Hot air to sweeten the pill of toil. You know that it’s a terrible condition, it shouldn’t be improved but eliminated, you’ve known it since you were a child. Improve, improve yourself? You, for example, are you improved, have you become like Nadia or Isabella? Is your brother improved, has he become like Armando? And your son, is he like Marco? No, we remain us and they are they. So why don’t you resign yourself? Blame the mind that can’t settle down, that is constantly seeking a way to function. Designing shoes. Getting busy setting up a shoe factory. Rewriting Nino’s articles, tormenting him until he did as you said. Using for your own purposes the installments from Zurich, with Enzo. And now demonstrating to Nadia that if she is making the revolution, you are even more. The mind, ah yes, the evil is there, it’s the mind’s discontent that causes the body to get sick. I’ve had it with myself, with everything. I’ve even had it with Gennaro: his fate, if all goes well, is to end up in a place like this, crawling to some boss for another five lire. So? So, Cerullo, take up your responsibilities and do what you have always had in mind: frighten Soccavo, eliminate his habit of fucking the workers in the drying room. Show the student with the wolf face what you’ve prepared...
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Elena Ferrante (Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (Neapolitan Novels, #3))
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In about 1951, a quality approach called Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) came on the Japanese scene. Its focus is on maintenance rather than on production. One of the major pillars of TPM is the set of so-called 5S principles. 5S is a set of disciplines—and here I use the term “discipline” instructively. These 5S principles are in fact at the foundations of Lean—another buzzword on the Western scene, and an increasingly prominent buzzword in software circles. These principles are not an option. As Uncle Bob relates in his front matter, good software practice requires such discipline: focus, presence of mind, and thinking. It is not always just about doing, about pushing the factory equipment to produce at the optimal velocity. The 5S philosophy comprises these concepts: • Seiri, or organization (think “sort” in English). Knowing where things are—using approaches such as suitable naming—is crucial. You think naming identifiers isn’t important? Read on in the following chapters. • Seiton, or tidiness (think “systematize” in English). There is an old American saying: A place for everything, and everything in its place. A piece of code should be where you expect to find it—and, if not, you should re-factor to get it there. • Seiso, or cleaning (think “shine” in English): Keep the workplace free of hanging wires, grease, scraps, and waste. What do the authors here say about littering your code with comments and commented-out code lines that capture history or wishes for the future? Get rid of them. • Seiketsu, or standardization: The group agrees about how to keep the workplace clean. Do you think this book says anything about having a consistent coding style and set of practices within the group? Where do those standards come from? Read on. • Shutsuke, or discipline (self-discipline). This means having the discipline to follow the practices and to frequently reflect on one’s work and be willing to change.
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Robert C. Martin (Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship (Robert C. Martin Series))
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There were two sets of similar people arriving in Chicago and other industrial cities of the North at around the same time in the early decades of the twentieth century—blacks pouring in from the South and immigrants arriving from eastern and southern Europe in a slowing but continuous stream from across the Atlantic, a pilgrimage that had begun in the latter part of the nineteenth century. On the face of it, they were sociologically alike, mostly landless rural people, put upon by the landed upper classes or harsh autocratic regimes, seeking freedom and autonomy in the northern factory cities of the United States.
But as they made their way into the economies of Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and other receiving cities, their fortunes diverged. Both groups found themselves ridiculed for their folk ways and accents and suffered backward assumptions about their abilities and intelligence. But with the stroke of a pen, many eastern and southern Europeans and their children could wipe away their ethnicities—and those limiting assumptions—by adopting Anglo-Saxon surnames and melting into the world of the more privileged native-born whites. In this way, generations of immigrant children could take their places without the burdens of an outsider ethnicity in a less enlightened era. Doris von Kappelhoff could become Doris Day, and Issur Danielovitch, the son of immigrants from Belarus, could become Kirk Douglas, meaning that his son could live life and pursue stardom as Michael Douglas instead of as Michael Danielovitch.
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Ultimately, according to the Harvard immigration scholar Stanley Lieberson, a major difference between the acceptance and thus life outcomes of black migrants from the South and their white immigrant counterparts was this: white immigrants and their descendants could escape the disadvantages of their station if they chose to, while that option did not hold for the vast majority of black migrants and their children. The ethnicity of the descendants of white immigrants “was more a matter of choice, because, with some effort, it could be changed,” Lieberson wrote, and, out in public, might not easily be determined at all.
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Isabel Wilkerson (The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration)
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Something must be wrong then in art, or the happiness of life is sickening in the house of civilization. What has caused the sickness? Machine-labour will you say? Well, I have seen quoted a passage from one of the ancient Sicilian poets rejoicing in the fashioning of a water-mill, and exulting in labour being set free from the toil of the hand-quern in consequence; and that surely would be a type of man's natural hope when foreseeing the invention of labour-saving machinery as 'tis called; natural surely, since though I have said that the labour of which art can form a part should be accompanied by pleasure, so one could deny that there is some necessary labour even which is not pleasant in itself, and plenty of unnecessary labour which is merely painful. If machinery had been used for minimizing such labour, the utmost ingenuity would scarcely have been wasted on it; but is that the case in any way? Look round the world, and you must agree with John Stuart Mill in his doubt whether all the machinery of modern times has lightened the daily work of one labourer. And why have our natural hopes been so disappointed? Surely because in these latter days, in which as a matter of fact machinery has been invented, it was by no means invented with the aim of saving the pain of labour. The phrase labour-saving machinery is elliptical, and means machinery which saves the cost of labour, not the labour itself, which will be expended when saved on tending other machines. For a doctrine which, as I have said, began to be accepted under the workshop-system, is now universally received, even though we are yet short of the complete development of the system of the Factory. Briefly, the doctrine is this, that the essential aim of manufacture is making a profit; that it is frivolous to consider whether the wares when made will be of more or less use to the world so long as any one can be found to buy them at a price which, when the workman engaged in making them has received of necessaries and comforts as little as he can be got to take, will leave something over as a reward to the capitalist who has employed him. This doctrine of the sole aim of manufacture (or indeed of life) being the profit of the capitalist and the occupation of the workman, is held, I say, by almost every one; its corollary is, that labour is necessarily unlimited, and that to attempt to limit it is not so much foolish as wicked, whatever misery may be caused to the community by the manufacture and sale of the wares made.
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William Morris (Art Under Plutocracy: Exploring the Corrosive Influence of Wealth on Art in the 19th Century)
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If one looks at modern society, it is obvious that in order to live, the great majority of people are forced to sell their labour power. All the physical and intellectual capacities existing in human beings, in their personalities, which must be set in motion to produce useful things, can only be used if they are sold in exchange for wages. Labour power is usually perceived as a commodity bought and sold nearly like all others. The existence of exchange and wage-labour seems normal, inevitable. Yet the introduction of wage-labour involved conflict, resistance, and bloodshed. The separation of the worker from the means of production, now an accepted fact of life, took a long time and was accomplished by force.
In England, in the Netherlands, in France, from the sixteenth century on, economic and political violence expropriated craftsmen and peasants, repressed indigence and vagrancy, imposed wage-labour on the poor. Between 1930 and 1950, Russia decreed a labour code which included capital punishment in order to organise the transition of millions of peasants to industrial wage-labour in less than a few decades. Seemingly normal facts: that an individual has nothing but his labour power, that he must sell it to a business unit to be able to live, that everything is a commodity, that social relations revolve around market exchange… such facts now taken for granted result from a long, brutal process.
By means of its school system and its ideological and political life, contemporary society hides the past and present violence on which this situation rests. It conceals both its origin and the mechanism which enables it to function. Everything appears as a free contract in which the individual, as a seller of labour power, encounters the factory, the shop or the office. The existence of the commodity seems to be an obvious and natural phenomenon, and the periodic major and minor disasters it causes are often regarded as quasi-natural calamities. Goods are destroyed to maintain their prices, existing capacities are left to rot, while elementary needs remain unfulfilled. Yet the main thing that the system hides is not the existence of exploitation or class (that is not too hard to see), nor its horrors (modern society is quite good at turning them into media show). It is not even that the wage labour/capital relationship causes unrest and rebellion (that also is fairly plain to see). The main thing it conceals is that insubordination and revolt could be large and deep enough to do away with this relationship and make another world possible.
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Gilles Dauvé
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The impossible class. Poor, happy and independent! — these things can go together; poor, happy and a slave! — these things can also go together — and I can think of no better news I could give to our factory slaves: provided, that is, they do not feel it to be in general a disgrace to be thus used, and used up, as a part of a machine and as it were a stopgap to fill a hole in human inventiveness!
To the devil with the belief that higher payment could lift from them the essence of their miserable condition I mean their impersonal enslavement!
To the devil with the idea of being persuaded that an enhancement of this impersonality within the mechanical operation of a new society could transform the disgrace of slavery into a virtue!
To the devil with setting a price on oneself in exchange for which one ceases to be a person and becomes a part of a machine!
Are you accomplices in the current folly of the nations the folly of wanting above all to produce as much as possible and to become as rich as possible? What you ought to do, rather, is to hold up to them the counter-reckoning: how great a sum of inner value is thrown away in pursuit of this external goal!
But where is your inner value if you no longer know what it is to breathe freely? if you no longer possess the slightest power over yourselves? if you all too often grow weary of yourselves like a drink that has been left too long standing? if you pay heed to the newspapers and look askance at your wealthy neighbour, made covetous by the rapid rise and fall of power, money and opinions? if you no longer believe in philosophy that wears rags, in the free-heartedness of him without needs?
if voluntary poverty and freedom from profession and marriage, such as would very well suit the more spiritual among you, have become to you things to laugh at? If, on the other hand, you have always in your ears the flutings of the Socialist pied-pipers whose design is to enflame you with wild hopes? which bid you to be prepared and nothing further, prepared day upon day, so that you wait and wait for something to happen from outside and in all other respects go on living as you have always lived until this waiting turns to hunger and thirst and fever and madness, and at last the day of the bestia triumphans dawns in all its glory?
In contrast to all this, everyone ought to say to himself: ‘better to go abroad, to seek to become master in new and savage regions of the world and above all master over myself; to keep moving from place to place for just as long as any sign of slavery seems to threaten me; to shun neither adventure nor war and, if the worst should come to the worst, to be prepared for death: all this rather than further to endure this indecent servitude, rather than to go on becoming soured and malicious and conspiratorial!
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Friedrich Nietzsche (Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality)
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propose that we consider our farmers on a spectrum, let’s say, of agrarianism. On one end of the spectrum we have farmers like James, interested in producing the finest foodstuffs that they can, given the soil, the climate, the water, the budget, and their talent. They observe how efficacious or not their efforts are proving, and they adapt accordingly. Variety is one of the keys to this technique, eschewing the corporate monocultures for a revolving set of plants and animals, again, to mimic what was already happening on the land before we showed up with our earth-shaving machinery. It’s tough as hell, and in many cases impossible, to farm this way and earn enough profit to keep your bills paid and your family fed, but these farmers do exist. On the other end of the spectrum is full-speed-ahead robo-farming, in which the farmer is following the instructions of the corporation to produce not food but commodities in such a way that the corporation sits poised to make the maximum financial profit. Now, this is the part that has always fascinated me about us as a population: This kind of farmer is doing all they can to make their factory quota for the company, of grain, or meat, or what have you, despite their soil, climate, water, budget, or talent. It only stands to reason that this methodology is the very definition of unsustainable. Clearly, this is an oversimplification of an issue that requires as much of my refrain (nuance!) as any other human endeavor, but the broad strokes are hard to refute. The first farmer is doing their best to work with nature. The second farmer is doing their best despite nature. In order for the second farmer to prosper, they must defeat nature. A great example of this is the factory farming of beef/pork/chicken/eggs/turkey/salmon/etc. The manufacturers of these products have done everything they can to take the process out of nature entirely and hide it in a shed, where every step of the production has been engineered to make a profit; to excel at quantity. I know you’re a little bit ahead of me here, but I’ll go ahead and ask the obvious question: What of quality? If you’re willing to degrade these many lives with impunity—the lives of the animals themselves, the workers “growing” them, the neighbors having to suffer the voluminous poisons being pumped into the ecosystem/watershed, and the humans consuming your products—then what are you about? Can that even be considered farming? Again, I’m asking this of us. Of you and me, because what I have just described is the way a lot of our food is produced right now, in the system that we all support with our dollars. How did we get here, in both the US and the UK? How can we change our national stance toward agriculture to accommodate more middle-size farmers and less factory farms? How would Aldo Leopold feel about it?
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Nick Offerman (Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside)
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The Ten Ways to Evaluate a Market provide a back-of-the-napkin method you can use to identify the attractiveness of any potential market. Rate each of the ten factors below on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is terrible and 10 fantastic. When in doubt, be conservative in your estimate: Urgency. How badly do people want or need this right now? (Renting an old movie is low urgency; seeing the first showing of a new movie on opening night is high urgency, since it only happens once.) Market Size. How many people are purchasing things like this? (The market for underwater basket-weaving courses is very small; the market for cancer cures is massive.) Pricing Potential. What is the highest price a typical purchaser would be willing to spend for a solution? (Lollipops sell for $0.05; aircraft carriers sell for billions.) Cost of Customer Acquisition. How easy is it to acquire a new customer? On average, how much will it cost to generate a sale, in both money and effort? (Restaurants built on high-traffic interstate highways spend little to bring in new customers. Government contractors can spend millions landing major procurement deals.) Cost of Value Delivery. How much will it cost to create and deliver the value offered, in both money and effort? (Delivering files via the internet is almost free; inventing a product and building a factory costs millions.) Uniqueness of Offer. How unique is your offer versus competing offerings in the market, and how easy is it for potential competitors to copy you? (There are many hair salons but very few companies that offer private space travel.) Speed to Market. How soon can you create something to sell? (You can offer to mow a neighbor’s lawn in minutes; opening a bank can take years.) Up-front Investment. How much will you have to invest before you’re ready to sell? (To be a housekeeper, all you need is a set of inexpensive cleaning products. To mine for gold, you need millions to purchase land and excavating equipment.) Upsell Potential. Are there related secondary offers that you could also present to purchasing customers? (Customers who purchase razors need shaving cream and extra blades as well; buy a Frisbee and you won’t need another unless you lose it.) Evergreen Potential. Once the initial offer has been created, how much additional work will you have to put in in order to continue selling? (Business consulting requires ongoing work to get paid; a book can be produced once and then sold over and over as is.) When you’re done with your assessment, add up the score. If the score is 50 or below, move on to another idea—there are better places to invest your energy and resources. If the score is 75 or above, you have a very promising idea—full speed ahead. Anything between 50 and 75 has the potential to pay the bills but won’t be a home run without a huge investment of energy and resources.
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Josh Kaufman (The Personal MBA)
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Este posibil ca în încercarea mea de descriere psihologică și psihopatologică a particularităților prizonierului de lagăr să fi lăsat impresia că ființa umană este complet și inevitabil influențată de mediu (în cazul acesta mediul fiind structura vieții de lagăr care-l forțează pe prizonier să-și adapteze conduita unui set specific de reguli). Dar cum rămâne cu libertatea umană? Omul nu-și păstrează libertatea spirituală de conduită și reacție la mediu? Să fie adevărată teoria conform căreia omul este doar produsul multor factori de mediu și al condiționărilor - fie ele biologice, psihologice sau sociologice? Omul este doar produsul accidental al acestora? Și, mai important, reacțiile prizonierilor în universul unic al lagărului de concentrare reprezintă o dovadă că omul nu poate scăpa de influența mediului? Că nu avem libertatea unor opțiuni când ne aflăm în situații de tipul acesta?
Acestor întrebări le putem răspunde atât din experiență, cât și din principiu. Experiența din lagăr demonstrează că omul are capacitate de decizie asupra conduitei sale. Există suficiente exemple, adesea de natură eroică, care arată că apatia poate fi depăsită și iritabilitatea, suprimată. Omul își poate conserva o urmă de libertate spirituală, de independență a minții, chiar și în condiții de stres psihic și fizic teribil.
Noi, cei care am trecut prin lagăre, ne amintim de cei care mergeau din baracă în baracă ca să-i consoleze pe ceilalți, oferindu-le și ultimul lor colț de pâine. Poate că nu au fost numeroși, dar existența lor atestă faptul că un om poate să piardă orice, în afară de un singur lucru: ultima dintre libertățile umane - alegerea răspunsului în orice situație, alegerea felului propriu de a reacționa.
Iar de decizii ne loveam mereu. Orice zi și orice oră din zi ne punea în fața unei decizii, decizia de a ne conforma sau nu forțelor care amenințau să ne vitregească de sentimentul individualității și al libertății interioare, care determinau dacă suntem sau nu doar o jucărie a circumstanțelor, decizia de a renunța la libertate și demnitate pentru a fi modelați în forma tipică a deținutului.
Privind din perspectiva asta, reacțiile mentale ale prizonierilor din lagărele de concentrare nu pot fi reduse la expresia condițiilor fizice și sociale. Deși lipsa somnului, a hranei și diferitele surse de stres mental ar putea sugera că prizonierii erau înclinați spre anumite tipuri de răspuns, la o analiză finală devine limpede că prizonierul se transforma pe sine mai degrabă pornind de la o decizie interioară, nu doar din pricina influenței condițiilor de viață din prizonierat. Prin urmare, și în aceste condiții, orice om este liber să decidă ce vrea să devină - mental și spiritual. Dostoievski a spus cândva, „Un singur lucru mă înspăimântă: să nu mă ridic la înălțimea suferințelor mele.” Mi-am amintit de multe ori cuvintele sale când i-am întâlnit pe martirii lagărelor, pe cei al căror comportament, suferință și moarte stau mărturie că omul nu poate fi jefuit de libertatea lui interioară. Despre aceștia putem spune că s-au ridicat la înălțimea suferinței lor; că felul în care și-au dus crucea a fost cu adevărat o victorie interioară. Tocmai această libertate interioară - ce nu-i poate fi luată niciunui om - conferă sens și rost vieții.
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Viktor E. Frankl
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The most interesting aspects of the story lie between the two extremes of coercion and popularity. It might be instructive to consider fascist regimes’ management of workers, who were surely the most recalcitrant part of the population. It is clear that both Fascism and Nazism enjoyed some success in this domain. According to Tim Mason, the ultimate authority on German workers under Nazism, the Third Reich “contained” German workers by four means: terror, division, some concessions, and integration devices such as the famous Strength Through Joy (Kraft durch Freude) leisure-time organization.
Let there be no doubt that terror awaited workers who resisted directly. It was the cadres of the German Socialist and Communist parties who filled the first concentration camps in 1933, before the Jews. Since socialists and communists were already divided, it was not hard for the Nazis to create another division between those workers who continued to resist and those who decided to try to live normal lives. The suppression of autonomous worker organizations allowed fascist regimes to address workers individually rather than collectively. Soon, demoralized by the defeat of their unions and parties, workers were atomized, deprived of their usual places of sociability, and afraid to confide in anyone.
Both regimes made some concessions to workers—Mason’s third device for worker “containment.” They did not simply silence them, as in traditional dictatorships. After power, official unions enjoyed a monopoly of labor representation. The Nazi Labor Front had to preserve its credibility by actually paying some attention to working conditions. Mindful of the 1918 revolution, the Third Reich was willing to do absolutely anything to avoid unemployment or food shortages. As the German economy heated up in rearmament, there was even some wage creep. Later in the war, the arrival of slave labor, which promoted many German workers to the status of masters, provided additional satisfactions.
Mussolini was particularly proud of how workers would fare under his corporatist constitution. The Labor Charter (1927) promised that workers and employers would sit down together in a “corporation” for each branch of the economy, and submerge class struggle in the discovery of their common interests. It looked very imposing by 1939 when a Chamber of Corporations replaced parliament. In practice, however, the corporative bodies were run by businessmen, while the workers’ sections were set apart and excluded from the factory floor.
Mason’s fourth form of “containment”—integrative devices—was a specialty of fascist regimes. Fascists were past masters at manipulating group dynamics: the youth group, the leisure-time association, party rallies. Peer pressure was particularly powerful in small groups. There the patriotic majority shamed or intimidated nonconformists into at least keeping their mouths shut. Sebastian Haffner recalled how his group of apprentice magistrates was sent in summer 1933 on a retreat, where these highly educated young men, mostly non-Nazis, were bonded into a group by marching, singing, uniforms, and drill. To resist seemed pointless, certain to lead nowhere but to prison and an end to the dreamed-of career. Finally, with astonishment, he observed himself raising his arm, fitted with a swastika armband, in the Nazi salute.
These various techniques of social control were successful.
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Robert O. Paxton (The Anatomy of Fascism)