“
She'd seen a documentary once, on cult leaders, and the traits that made them so effective. One of the most important features was a commanding presence. Too many people thought that meant being loud, but in truth, it meant someone who didn't need to be loud. Someone who could command an audience without ever raising their voice.
”
”
Victoria E. Schwab (This Savage Song (Monsters of Verity, #1))
“
Another glorious feature of many modern science museums is a movie theater showing IMAX or OMNIMAX films. In some cases the screen is ten stories tall and wraps around you. The Smithsonian's National Air & Space Museu, the popular museum on Earth, has premiered in its Langley Theater some of the best of these films. 'To Fly' brings a catch to my throat even after five or six viewings. I've seen religious leaders of many denominations witness 'Blue Planet' and be converted on the spot to the need to protect the Earth's environment
”
”
Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
“
There’s barely a product or service on the market today that customers can’t buy from someone else for about the same price, about the same quality, about the same level of service and about the same features. If you truly have a first-mover’s advantage, it’s probably lost in a matter of months. If you offer something truly novel, someone else will soon come up with something similar and maybe even better. But if you ask most businesses why their customers are their customers, most will tell you it’s because of superior quality, features, price or service. In other words, most companies have no clue why their customers are their customers. This is a fascinating realization.
”
”
Simon Sinek (Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action)
“
The fascism of the 1920s and 1930s, Ilyin’s era, had three core features: it celebrated will and violence over reason and law; it proposed a leader with a mystical connection to his people; and it characterized globalization as a conspiracy rather than as a set of problems. Revived today in conditions of inequality as a politics of eternity, fascism serves oligarchs as a catalyst for transitions away from public discussion and towards political fiction; away from meaningful voting and towards fake democracy; away from the rule of law and towards personalist regimes.
”
”
Timothy Snyder (The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America)
“
BDS is a modern, grassroots nonviolent movement inspired by a 2005 call from a long and diverse list of Palestinian civil society organizations. Despite being ignored by world leaders and global media, BDS has been an integral feature of the Palestinian national movement.
”
”
Marc Lamont Hill (Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics)
“
Society reaps what it sows in the way it nurtures its children, because stress sculpts the brain to exhibit several antisocial behaviors. Stress can set off a ripple of hormonal changes that permanently wire a child's brain to cope with a malevolent world. Through this chain of events, violence and abuse pass from generation to generation as well as from one society to the next. Many world leaders who have been disciplined through anger and cruelty go in to treat their own people abominably, or to bully other nations. As long as we continue to discipline children like this, we will continue to have terrible wars on both the family and the world stage. One very powerful study illustrates the point. Researchers tracked down Germans who, in World War II, risked their own lives by hiding a Jewish person in their house. When interviewed, the researchers found one common feature of all these people. They had all been socialized in ways that respected their personal dignity.
”
”
Margot Sunderland (The Science of Parenting)
“
...while hiding in plain sight in Belgrade, undercover as a New Age mountebank, Karadžić frequented a bar called Mad House - Luda kuća. Mad House offered weekly gusle-accompanied performances of Serbian epic poetry; wartime pictures of him and General Ratko Mladić, the Bosnian Serbs' military leader (now on trial in The Hague), proudly hung on the walls. A local newspaper claimed that, on at least one occasion, Karadžić performed an epic poem in which he himself featured as the main hero, undertaking feats of extermination. Consider the horrible postmodernism of the situation: an undercover war criminal narrating his own crimes in decasyllabic verse, erasing his personality so that he could assert it more forcefully and heroically.
”
”
Aleksandar Hemon (The Book of My Lives)
“
Products with a clear sense of WHY give people a way to tell the outside world who they are and what they believe. Remember, people don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it. If a company does not have a clear sense of WHY then it is impossible for the outside world to perceive anything more than WHAT the company does. And when that happens, manipulations that rely on pushing price, features, service or quality become the primary currency of differentiation.
”
”
Simon Sinek (Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action)
“
Farmers were given a plot of land in exchange for overthrowing their leaders. Violence was an indispensable feature of land distribution, implicating a majority in the murder of a carefully designated minority.
”
”
Frank Dikötter (The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957)
“
most of the portraits of Niyazov all over Turkmenistan showed him smiling, though he never looked less reliable, or less amused, than when he was smiling. His smile – and this may be true of all political leaders – was his most sinister feature.
”
”
Paul Theroux (Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar)
“
the course of time, all of Apple’s competitors lost their WHY. Now all those companies define themselves by WHAT they do: we make computers. They turned from companies with a cause into companies that sold products. And when that happens, price, quality, service and features become the primary currency to motivate a purchase decision. At that point a company and its products have ostensibly become commodities. As any company forced to compete on price, quality, service or features alone can attest, it is very hard to differentiate for any period of time or build loyalty on those factors alone.
”
”
Simon Sinek (Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action)
“
Facing a deteriorating economy and a weakening hold over the populace, the Iraqi state under Saddam Hussein opted to revitalize tribal leaders and conservative practices as a means of stabilizing state power; those conservative practices were not an inherent feature of a predominantly Muslim country.
”
”
Nadje Al-Ali (What Kind of Liberation?: Women and the Occupation of Iraq)
“
Now think about how we do business. We’re always competing against someone else. We’re always trying to be better than someone else. Better quality. More features. Better service. We’re always comparing ourselves to others. And no one wants to help us. What if we showed up to work every day simply to be better than ourselves?
”
”
Simon Sinek (Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action)
“
I would choose you." The words were out before he thought better of them, and there was no way to pull them back.
Silence stretched between them. Perhaps the floor will open and I'll plummet to my death, he thought hopefully.
"As your general?" Her voice careful. She was offering him a chance to right the ship, to take them back to familiar waters.
And a fine general you are.
There could be no better leader.
You may be prickly, but that what Ravka needs.
So many easy replies.
Instead he said, "As my queen."
He couldn't read her expression. Was she pleased? Embarrassed? Angry? Every cell in his body screamed for him to crack a joke, to free both of them from the peril of the moment. But he wouldn't. He was still a privateer, and he'd come too far.
"Because I'm a dependable soldier," she said, but she didn't sound sure. It was the same cautious, tentative voice, the voice of someone waiting for a punch line, or maybe a blow. "Because I know all of your secrets."
"I do trust you more than myself sometimes- and I think very highly of myself."
Hadn't she said there was no one else she'd choose to have her back in a fight?
But that isn't the whole truth, is it, you great cowardly lump. To hell with it. They might all die soon enough. They were safe here in the dark, surrounded by the hum of engines.
"I would make you my queen because I want you. I want you all the time."
She rolled on to her side, resting her head on her folded arm. A small movement, but he could feel her breath now. His heart was racing. "As your general, I should tell you that would be a terrible decision."
He turned on to his side. They were facing each other now. "As your king, I should tell you that no one could dissuade me. No prince and no power could make me stop wanting you."
Nikolai felt drunk. Maybe unleashing the demon had loosed something in his brain. She was going to laugh at him. She would knock him senseless and tell him he had no right. But he couldn't seem to stop.
"I would give you a crown if I could," he said. "I would show you the world from the prow of a ship. I would choose you, Zoya. As my general, as my friend, as my bride. I would give you a sapphire the size of an acorn." He reached in to his pocket. "And all I would ask in return is that you wear this damnable ribbon in your hair on our wedding day."
She reached out, her fingers hovering over the coil of blue velvet ribbon resting in his palm.
Then she pulled back her hand, cradling her fingers as if they'd been singed.
"You will wed a Taban sister who craves a crown," she said. "Or a wealthy Kerch girl, or maybe a Fjerdan royal. You will have heirs and a future. I'm not the queen Ravka needs."
"And if you're the queen I want?"
...
She sat up, drew her knees in, wrapped her arms around them as if she would make a shelter of her own body. He wanted to pull her back down beside him and press his mouth to hers. He wanted her to look at him again with possibility in her eyes. "But that's not who I am. Whatever is inside me is sharp and gray as the thorn wood." She rose and dusted off her kefta. "I wasn't born to be a bride. I was made to be a weapon."
Nikolai forced himself to smile. It wasn't as if he'd offered her a real proposal. They both knew such a thing was impossible. And yet her refusal smarted just as badly as if he'd gotten on his knee and offered her his hand like some kind of besotted fool. It stung. All saints, it stung.
"Well," he said cheerfully, pushing up on his elbows and looking up at her with all the wry humour he could muster. "Weapons are good to have around too. Far more useful than brides and less likely to mope about the palace. But if you won't rule Ravka by my side, what does the future hold, General?"
Zoya opened the door to the Cargo hold. Light flooded in gilding her features when she looked back at him. "I'll fight on beside you. As your general. As your friend. Because whatever my failings, I know this. You are the king Ravka needs.
”
”
Leigh Bardugo (Rule of Wolves (King of Scars, #2))
“
As the war went on, opposition grew. The American Peace Society printed a newspaper, the Advocate of Peace, which published poems, speeches, petitions, sermons against the war, and eyewitness accounts of the degradation of army life and the horrors of battle. The abolitionists, speaking through William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator, denounced the war as one “of aggression, of invasion, of conquest, and rapine—marked by ruffianism, perfidy, and every other feature of national depravity . . . ” Considering the strenuous efforts of the nation’s leaders to build patriotic support, the amount of open dissent and criticism was remarkable. Antiwar meetings took place in spite of attacks by patriotic mobs.
”
”
Howard Zinn (A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present)
“
Define the outcomes you want from your team and its members, and then look for each person’s strength signs to figure out how each person can reach those outcomes most efficiently, most amazingly, most creatively, and most joyfully. The moment you realize you’re in the outcomes business is the moment you turn each person’s uniqueness from a bug into a feature.
”
”
Marcus Buckingham (Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World)
“
Before settling in to work, we noticed a large travel case on the mantelpiece. I unsnapped the latches and lifted the top. On one side there was a large desert scene on a marble base featuring miniature gold figurines, as well as a glass clock powered by changes in temperature. On the other side, set in a velvet case, was a necklace half the length of a bicycle chain, encrusted with what appeared to be hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of rubies and diamonds—along with a matching ring and earrings. I looked up at Ben and Denis. “A little something for the missus,” Denis said. He explained that others in the delegation had found cases with expensive watches waiting for them in their rooms. “Apparently, nobody told the Saudis about our prohibition on gifts.” Lifting the heavy jewels, I wondered how many times gifts like this had been discreetly left for other leaders during official visits to the kingdom—leaders whose countries didn’t have rules against taking gifts, or at least not ones that were enforced. I thought again about the Somali pirates I had ordered killed, Muslims all, and the many young men like them across the nearby borders of Yemen and Iraq, and in Egypt, Jordan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, whose earnings in a lifetime would probably never touch the cost of that necklace in my hands. Radicalize just 1 percent of those young men and you had yourself an army of half a million, ready to die for eternal glory—or maybe just a taste of something better. I set the necklace down and closed the case. “All right,” I said. “Let’s work.
”
”
Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
“
Like most of the left’s leaders, I was a Marxist and a socialist. I believed in the “dialectic” of history and therefore, even though I knew that the societies calling themselves Marxist were ruled by ruthless dictatorships, I believed they would soon evolve into socialist democracies. I attributed their negative features to under-development and to the capitalist pasts from which they had emerged.
”
”
David Horowitz (The Black Book of the American Left: The Collected Conservative Writings of David Horowitz (My Life and Times 1))
“
Liberation does not bring unadulterated joy. When a tyrant falls, when an occupying army is ousted, when an oppressive regime gives way to a free and democratic order, a new day does not dawn. Triumphant speeches by new leaders may distract attention from the problems facing the liberated country; victory parades or spontaneous celebrations in the streets for a time may obscure deep divisions within the newly free society. But any occupation leaves scars on a nation’s psyche. The complicity of some with the former rulers, the persecution of others at the hands of their fellow citizens, courageous acts of resistance offset by the passivity of the majority of the population—only by facing these shameful features of its subjugation can the liberated nation achieve harmony, heal its wounds, and regain legitimacy in the eyes of the outside world.
”
”
Jean-Paul Sartre (Paris Under the Occupation)
“
The themes of Jesus' teaching are important, but of course he was more than a teacher. All the Gospels put the end of his life at the dramatic center of his story. Here all the hopes of Israel come together—he is the king of the Jews, the greatest of all the suffering prophets. Yet Jesus transformed those expectations. He did not lead Israel to victory over Rome. Indeed, one of the remarkable features of the narratives of his last days is that his increasing isolation makes it impossible to identify him with any one 'side' or cause. The Roman governor sentenced him as a Jewish rebel, but the leaders of Judaism also turned against him. He attacked the powerful on behalf of the poor, but in the end the mob too called for his blood. His own disciples ran away; Peter denied him. He did not go to his death agony as a representative of Jews, or of the poor, or of Christians, but alone, and thus, according to Christian faith, as a representative of all.
”
”
William C. Placher (A History of Christian Theology)
“
There’s barely a product or service on the market today that customers can’t buy from someone else for about the same price, about the same quality, about the same level of service and about the same features. If you truly have a first-mover’s advantage, it’s probably lost in a matter of months. If you offer something truly novel, someone else will soon come up with something similar and maybe even better. But if you ask most businesses why their customers are their customers, most will tell you it’s because of superior quality, features, price or service. In other words, most companies have no clue why their customers are their customers.
”
”
Simon Sinek (Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action)
“
The Reagan formula featured a president with little comprehension of, indeed little interest in, most of the major issues of the day but with an actor’s skill in assuming a symbolic role, that of quasi-monarch. That same formula also aimed at replacing the idea of an engaged and informed citizenry with that of an audience which, fearful of nuclear war and Soviet aggression, welcomed a leader who could be trusted to protect and reassure them of their virtue by retelling familiar myths about national greatness, piety, and generosity. It was demagoguery adapted to the cinematic age: he played the leader while “we the people” relapsed into a predemotic state.
”
”
Sheldon S. Wolin (Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism - New Edition)
“
There was no escape: The entire Elliott 503 Mark II software project had to be abandoned, and with it, over thirty man-years of programming effort, equivalent to nearly one man’s active working life, and I was responsible, both as designer and as manager, for wasting it. ...
How did we recover from the catastrophe? First, we classified our 503 customers into groups, according to the nature and size of the hardware configurations which they had bought ... We assigned to each group of customers a small team of programmers and told the team leader to visit the customers to find out what they wanted; to select the easiest request to fulfill, and to make plans (but no promises) to implement it. In no case would we consider a request for a feature that would take more than three months to implement and deliver. The project leader would then have to convince me that the customers’ request was reasonable, that the design of the new feature was appropriate, and that the plans and schedules for implementation were realistic. Above all, I did not allow anything to be done which I did not myself understand. It worked! The software requested began to be delivered on the promised dates. With an increase in our confidence and that of our customers, we were able to undertake fulfilling slightly more ambitious requests. Within a year we had recovered from the disaster. Within two years, we even had some moderately satisfied customers.
”
”
C.A.R. Hoare
“
Bessie was News, Leaders, and Gossip; Enid was Features, Make-up and general Sub. Whenever they were at a loss for copy they would mercilessly pillage ancient copies of Punch or Home Chat. An occasional hole in the copy was filled with a ghoulish smudge - local block-making had clearly indicated that somewhere a poker-work fanatic had gone quietly out of his mind. In this way the Central Balkan Herald was made up every morning and then delivered to the composition room where the chain-gang quickly reduced it to gibberish. MINISTER FINED FOR KISSING IN PUBIC. WEDDING BULLS RING OUT FOR PRINCESS. QUEEN OF HOLLAND GIVES PANTY FOR EX-SERVICE MEN. MORE DOGS HAVE BABIES THIS SUMMER IN BELGRADE. BRITAINS NEW FLYING-GOAT.
”
”
Lawrence Durrell (Esprit De Corps)
“
My father told me, ‘You always want to be in the middle,’ ” he said. “I didn’t want to be up with the high-level people like Steve. My dad was an engineer, and that’s what I wanted to be. I was way too shy ever to be a business leader like Steve.” By fourth grade Wozniak became, as he put it, one of the “electronics kids.” He had an easier time making eye contact with a transistor than with a girl, and he developed the chunky and stooped look of a guy who spends most of his time hunched over circuit boards. At the same age when Jobs was puzzling over a carbon microphone that his dad couldn’t explain, Wozniak was using transistors to build an intercom system featuring amplifiers, relays, lights, and buzzers that connected the kids’ bedrooms of six houses in the neighborhood. And at an age when Jobs was
”
”
Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
“
Some people compared the Trumpian response to COVID-19 to the Soviet government’s response to the catastrophic accident at the Chernobyl power plant in 1986. For once, such a comparison was not far-fetched. The people most at risk were denied necessary, potentially lifesaving information, and this was the government’s failure; there was rumor and fear on the one hand and dangerous oblivion on the other. And, of course, there was unconscionable, preventable tragedy. To be sure, Americans in 2020 had vastly more access to information than did Soviet citizens in 1986. But the Trump administration shared two key features with the Soviet government: utter disregard for human life and a monomaniacal focus on pleasing the leader, to make him appear unerring and all-powerful. These are the features of autocratic leadership.
”
”
Masha Gessen (Surviving Autocracy)
“
But wherever they emerge from, middle class, working class, or underclass—if they are humble, it means they have already reached a certain level of moral maturity. Why? Because humility means two things. One, a capacity for self-criticism. And this is something that we do not have enough of in the Black community, and especially among Black leaders. The second feature is allowing others to shine, affirming others, empowering and enabling others. Those who lack humility are dogmatic and egotistical. And that masks a deep sense of insecurity. They feel the success of others is at the expense of their own fame and glory. If criticism is put forward, they are not able to respond to it. And this produces, of course, an authoritarian sensibility. This is part of our problem in terms of Black leadership, and humility requires maturity.
”
”
bell hooks (Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life)
“
European statesmen of the First World War era did—to some extent—recognize the problem and its significance. As soon as they began to plan their annexation of the Middle East, Allied leaders recognized that Islam’s hold on the region was the main feature of the political landscape with which they would have to contend. Lord Kitchener, it will be remembered, initiated in 1914 a policy designed to bring the Moslem faith under Britain’s sway. When it looked as though that might not work—for the Sherif Hussein’s call to the Faithful in 1916 fell on deaf ears—Kitchener’s associates proposed instead to sponsor other loyalties (to a federation of Arabic-speaking peoples, or to the family of King Hussein, or to about-to-be-created countries such as Iraq) as a rival to pan-Islam. Indeed they framed the postwar Middle East settlement with that object (among others) in view.
”
”
David Fromkin (A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East)
“
I imagine you not telling me to whisper. I imagine you not saying oh don't say this literally. You want me to evoke as opposed to mere describing. You want me to be an invisible scribe that an octoepoose was hiding. I'm not sure if my facial features are an autograph that your Picasso smile is signing. Infamous for the mirror I shook when my sock puppets were pining? I am not just a fish that you gave wings to! I don't simply flop in the air whenever you brush some mannequinn's hair. There is a reason for the bad timing. Exquisite imbalances. A child enjoying the pink sky. I won't say that is my clue! Playing The Beatles on a kazoo is beautiful oooh ooooh
Your laughter is a woman with alot of eyeballs on her stomach that pretends that she doesn't see the colors of all them songs. In the pre dawn hours we dance with delusions and illusions. The eternal seamstress does not care for Frakenstein's dress(she still loves our unique caress ) She loves and laughs despite some so-called scientist. Where is that emperor and his nakedness! Darling, our atoms need never split. We compliment in so many ways that all our night's and days have become one swirling sunrise/sunset that only true lovers can scoff at(those who shhhhh) The flower is not passive or apologetic. It blooms through the fractured net. Floating magnetic(eep eeep)
You are not just some seductress. You are the leader of an elite group of intergalactic seductress impersonators who reveal corruption but then choose to love.
We embrace conclusions that make the puddle heart awake with ethereal drum beat gongs. You think of a heroic poodle in the dark. We both know that the trapeze artist that followed us was not a cliche. He smelled differently. He had never met a floating lady that showed him how to appreciate a symphony without taking away his love for a good rock n roll melody. I am not sure I can only whisper of such realities. I am not sure I can only whisper of such realities.-
”
”
Junipurr- Sometimes Trudy
“
I would choose you." The words were out before he thought better of them, and there was no way to pull them back.
Silence stretched between them. Perhaps the floor will open and I'll plummet to my death, he thought hopefully.
"As your general?" Her voice careful. She was offering him a chance to right the ship, to take them back to familiar waters.
And a fine general you are.
There could be no better leader.
You may be prickly, but that's what Ravka needs.
So many easy replies.
Instead he said, "As my queen."
He couldn't read her expression. Was she pleased? Embarrassed? Angry? Every cell in his body screamed for him to crack a joke, to free both of them from the peril of the moment. But he wouldn't. He was still a privateer, and he'd come too far.
"Because I'm a dependable soldier," she said, but she didn't sound sure. It was the same cautious, tentative voice, the voice of someone waiting for a punch line, or maybe a blow. "Because I know all of your secrets."
"I do trust you more than myself sometimes- and I think very highly of myself."
Hadn't she said there was no one else she'd choose to have her back in a fight?
But that isn't the whole truth, is it, you great cowardly lump. To hell with it. They might all die soon enough. They were safe here in the dark, surrounded by the hum of engines.
"I would make you my queen because I want you. I want you all the time."
She rolled on to her side, resting her head on her folded arm. A small movement, but he could feel her breath now. His heart was racing. "As your general, I should tell you that would be a terrible decision."
He turned on to his side. They were facing each other now. "As your king, I should tell you that no one could dissuade me. No prince and no power could make me stop wanting you."
Nikolai felt drunk. Maybe unleashing the demon had loosed something in his brain. She was going to laugh at him. She would knock him senseless and tell him he had no right. But he couldn't seem to stop.
"I would give you a crown if I could," he said. "I would show you the world from the prow of a ship. I would choose you, Zoya. As my general, as my friend, as my bride. I would give you a sapphire the size of an acorn." He reached in to his pocket. "And all I would ask in return is that you wear this damnable ribbon in your hair on our wedding day."
She reached out, her fingers hovering over the coil of blue velvet ribbon resting in his palm.
Then she pulled back her hand, cradling her fingers as if they'd been singed.
"You will wed a Taban sister who craves a crown," she said. "Or a wealthy Kerch girl, or maybe a Fjerdan royal. You will have heirs and a future. I'm not the queen Ravka needs."
"And if you're the queen I want?"...
She sat up, drew her knees in, wrapped her arms around them as if she would make a shelter of her own body. He wanted to pull her back down beside him and press his mouth to hers. He wanted her to look at him again with possibility in her eyes. "But that's not who I am. Whatever is inside me is sharp and gray as the thorn wood." She rose and dusted off her kefta. "I wasn't born to be a bride. I was made to be a weapon."
Nikolai forced himself to smile. It wasn't as if he'd offered her a real proposal. They both knew such a thing was impossible. And yet her refusal smarted just as badly as if he'd gotten on his knee and offered her his hand like some kind of besotted fool. It stung. All saints, it stung.
"Well," he said cheerfully, pushing up on his elbows and looking up at her with all the wry humour he could muster. "Weapons are good to have around too. Far more useful than brides and less likely to mope about the palace. But if you won't rule Ravka by my side, what does the future hold, General?"
Zoya opened the door to the Cargo hold.Light flooded in gilding her features when she looked back at him. "I'll fight on beside you. As your general. As your friend. Because whatever my failings, I know this. You are the king Ravka needs.
”
”
Leigh Bardugo
“
MARK TWAIN Some months after invading Iraq, President George W. Bush said he had taken the war to liberate the Philippines as his model. Both wars were inspired from heaven. Bush disclosed that God had ordered him to act as he did. And a century beforehand, President William McKinley also heard the voice from the Great Beyond: “God told me that we could not leave the Filipinos to themselves. They were unfit for self-government. There was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate them, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.” Thus the Philippines were liberated from the Filipino threat, and along the way the United States also saved Cuba, Puerto Rico, Honduras, Colombia, Panama, Dominican Republic, Hawaii, Guam, Samoa . . . At the time, writer Ambrose Bierce revealed: “War is God’s way of teaching us geography.” And his colleague Mark Twain, leader of the Anti-Imperialist League, designed a new flag for the nation, featuring little skulls in place of stars. General Frederick Funston suggested Twain ought to be hanged for treason. Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn defended their father.
”
”
Eduardo Galeano (Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone)
“
As they formed into ranks, each man dropping silently into his place, Sir Nigel ran a questioning eye over them, and a smile of pleasure played over his face. Tall and sinewy, and brown, clear-eyed, hard-featured, with the stern and prompt bearing of experienced soldiers, it would be hard indeed for a leader to seek for a choicer following. Here and there in the ranks were old soldiers of the French wars, grizzled and lean, with fierce, puckered features and shaggy, bristling brows. The most, however, were young and dandy archers, with fresh English faces, their beards combed out, their hair curling from under their close steel hufkens, with gold or jewelled earrings gleaming in their ears, while their gold-spangled baldrics, their silken belts, and the chains which many of them wore round their thick brown necks, all spoke of the brave times which they had had as free companions. Each had a yew or hazel stave slung over his shoulder, plain and serviceable with the older men, but gaudily painted and carved at either end with the others. Steel caps, mail brigandines, white surcoats with the red lion of St. George, and sword or battle-axe swinging from their belts, completed this equipment, while in some cases the murderous maule or five-foot mallet was hung across the bowstave, being fastened to their leathern shoulder-belt by a hook in the centre of the handle. Sir Nigel's heart beat high as he looked upon their free bearing and fearless faces.
”
”
Arthur Conan Doyle (The White Company)
“
Even if one were to agree with progressive Christians that racial inequities should be the Church’s greatest concern, no other race-based injustice can compare to what is being done under the auspices of “reproductive rights,” something Professor Carl Trueman ably highlighted in First Things. “Police actions in 2018 accounted for the deaths of fewer than three hundred African Americans, while in the same year abortions of African-American babies accounted for more than 117,000 of the same,” he pointed out. “One would think this extreme difference (390 to one) would make abortion the centerpiece of Christian critiques of racism.”67 The only reason it wouldn’t is if those drawing such equivalencies do not, deep down, see those 117,000 babies as equally human as the 300 adults. Prior, French, Keller, and both Moores have taken to the pages of the most elite media outlets in the world to incessantly disparage average Christians who felt it was worth voting for Donald Trump for a chance to dismantle the most wicked practice this nation has ever known. Let’s be clear, no one cast a ballot for Trump because he committed adultery or because he bragged in 2005 about grabbing women’s private parts. Nor was the legal protection of adultery or lechery a feature of the Trump campaign’s platform. In contrast, Clinton and Biden did promise voters that electing them would allow the butchery to continue. They did make it a part of their platforms, and a significant number of voters cast ballots for them based on those promises. Given this, which vote is more morally compromising for the Christian—the one that places power in the hands of those who promise to allow the innocent to be put to death or the one that vests power in those who promise to make a way to rescue the innocent? Which group of Christians do these celebrated evangelical leaders accuse of defaming the name of Christ with an untoward interest in political power, and which do they excuse and even promote?
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Megan Basham (Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda)
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There is no question that the Deep South seceded and fought the civil war to defend slavery. And its leaders made no secret of this motive. Slavery they argued Ad nauseam was the foundation for a virtuous biblically sanctioned social system superior to that of the free states. When 19th century deep southerners spoke of defending their “traditions”, “heritage”, and way of life they proudly identified the enslavement of others as the center piece of all three. Indeed, many of their leaders even argued that all lower class people should be enslaved regardless of race for their own good.
In response to Yankee and midland abolitionist the Deep South’s leaders developed an elaborate defense for human bondage. James Henry Hammond, former governor of South Carolina, published a seminal book arguing that enslaved laborers where happier, fitter and better looked after than their free counter parts in Brittan and the North, who were ruthlessly exploited by industrial capitalists. Free societies were therefore unstable as there was always a danger that the exploited would rise up creating a fearful crisis in republican institutions. Salves by contrast were kept in their place by violent means and denied the right to vote, resist or testify, ensuring the foundation of every well designed and durable republic.
Enslavement of the white working class would be in his words a most glorious act of emancipation. Jefferson’s notion all men are created equal, he wrote, was ridiculously absurd. In the deep southern tradition, Hammond’s republic was modeled on those of ancient Greece and Rome. Featuring rights and democracy for the elite, slavery and submission for inferiors. It was sanctioned by the Christian god whose son never denounced the practice in his documented teachings. It was a perfect aristocratic republic, one that should be a model for the world.
George Fitzhugh endorsed and expanded upon Hammond’s argument to enslave all poor people. Aristocrats, he explained, were really the nations Magna Carta because they owned so much and had the affection which all men feel for what belongs to them. Which naturally lead them to protect and provide for wives, children and slaves. Fitzhugh, whose books were enormously popular declared he was quite as intent on abolishing free society as you northerners are on abolishing slavery.
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Colin Woodard (American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America)
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Now, who and what is this minstrel in reality? Where does he come from? In what respects does he differ from his predecessors? He has been described as a cross between the early medieval court-singer and the ancient mime of classical times. The mime had never ceased to flourish since the days of classical antiquity; when even the last traces of classical culture disappeared, the descendants of the old mimes still continued to travel about the Empire, entertaining the masses with their unpretentious, unsophisticated and unliterary art. The Germanic countries were flooded out with mimes in the early Middle Ages; but until the ninth century the poets and singers at the courts kept themselves strictly apart from them. Not until they lost their cultured audience, as a result of the Carolingian Renaissance and the clericalism of the following generation, and came up against the competition of the mimes in the lower classes, did they have, to a certain extent, to become mimes themselves in order to be able to compete with their rivals. Thus both singers and comedians now move in the same circles, intermingle and influence each other so much that they soon become indistinguishable from one another. The mime and the scop both become the minstrel. The most striking characteristic of the minstrel is his versatility. The place of the cultured, highly specialized heroic ballad poet is now taken by the Jack of all trades, who is no longer merely a poet and singer, but also a musician and dancer, dramatist and actor, clown and acrobat, juggler and bear-leader, in a word, the universal jester and maître de plaisir of the age. Specialization, distinction and solemn dignity are now finished with; the court poet has become everybody’s fool and his social degradation has such a revolutionary and shattering effect on himself that he never entirely recovers from the shock. From now on he is one of the déclassés, in the same class as tramps and prostitutes, runaway clerics and sent-down students, charlatans and beggars. He has been called the ‘journalist of the age’, but he really goes in for entertainment of every kind: the dancing song as well as the satirical song, the fairy story as well as the mime, the legend of saints as well as the heroic epic. In this context, however, the epic takes on quite new features: it acquires in places a more pointed character with a new straining after effect, which was absolutely foreign to the spirit of the old heroic ballad. The minstrel no longer strikes the gloomy, solemn, tragi-heroic note of the ‘Hildebrandslied’, for he wants to make even the epic sound entertaining; he tries to provide sensations, effective climaxes and lively epigrams. Compared with the monuments of the older heroic poetry, the ‘Chanson de Roland’ never fails to reveal this popular minstrel taste for the piquant.
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Arnold Hauser (The Social History of Art, Volume 1: From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages)
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American DEWAR FAMILY Cameron Dewar Ursula “Beep” Dewar, his sister Woody Dewar, his father Bella Dewar, his mother PESHKOV-JAKES FAMILY George Jakes Jacky Jakes, his mother Greg Peshkov, his father Lev Peshkov, his grandfather Marga, his grandmother MARQUAND FAMILY Verena Marquand Percy Marquand, her father Babe Lee, her mother CIA Florence Geary Tony Savino Tim Tedder, semiretired Keith Dorset OTHERS Maria Summers Joseph Hugo, FBI Larry Mawhinney, Pentagon Nelly Fordham, old flame of Greg Peshkov Dennis Wilson, aide to Bobby Kennedy Skip Dickerson, aide to Lyndon Johnson Leopold “Lee” Montgomery, reporter Herb Gould, television journalist on This Day Suzy Cannon, gossip reporter Frank Lindeman, television network owner REAL HISTORICAL CHARACTERS John F. Kennedy, thirty-fifth U.S. president Jackie, his wife Bobby Kennedy, his brother Dave Powers, assistant to President Kennedy Pierre Salinger, President Kennedy’s press officer Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Lyndon B. Johnson, thirty-sixth U.S. president Richard Nixon, thirty-seventh U.S. president Jimmy Carter, thirty-ninth U.S. president Ronald Reagan, fortieth U.S. president George H. W. Bush, forty-first U.S. president British LECKWITH-WILLIAMS FAMILY Dave Williams Evie Williams, his sister Daisy Williams, his mother Lloyd Williams, M.P., his father Eth Leckwith, Dave’s grandmother MURRAY FAMILY Jasper Murray Anna Murray, his sister Eva Murray, his mother MUSICIANS IN THE GUARDSMEN AND PLUM NELLIE Lenny, Dave Williams’s cousin Lew, drummer Buzz, bass player Geoffrey, lead guitarist OTHERS Earl Fitzherbert, called Fitz Sam Cakebread, friend of Jasper Murray Byron Chesterfield (real name Brian Chesnowitz), music agent Hank Remington (real name Harry Riley), pop star Eric Chapman, record company executive German FRANCK FAMILY Rebecca Hoffmann Carla Franck, Rebecca’s adoptive mother Werner Franck, Rebecca’s adoptive father Walli Franck, son of Carla Lili Franck, daughter of Werner and Carla Maud von Ulrich, née Fitzherbert, Carla’s mother Hans Hoffmann, Rebecca’s husband OTHERS Bernd Held, schoolteacher Karolin Koontz, folksinger Odo Vossler, clergyman REAL HISTORICAL PEOPLE Walter Ulbricht, first secretary of the Socialist Unity Party (Communist) Erich Honecker, Ulbricht’s successor Egon Krenz, successor to Honecker Polish Stanislaw “Staz” Pawlak, army officer Lidka, girlfriend of Cam Dewar Danuta Gorski, Solidarity activist REAL HISTORICAL PEOPLE Anna Walentynowicz, crane driver Lech Wałesa, leader of the trade union Solidarity General Jaruzelski, prime minister Russian DVORKIN-PESHKOV FAMILY Tanya Dvorkin, journalist Dimka Dvorkin, Kremlin aide, Tanya’s twin brother Anya Dvorkin, their mother Grigori Peshkov, their grandfather Katerina Peshkov, their grandmother Vladimir, always called Volodya, their uncle Zoya, Volodya’s wife Nina, Dimka’s girlfriend OTHERS Daniil Antonov, features editor at TASS Pyotr Opotkin, features editor in chief Vasili Yenkov, dissident Natalya Smotrov, official in the Foreign Ministry
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Ken Follett (Edge of Eternity (The Century Trilogy, #3))
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Throughout these centuries, those who should, by their birth, training, and position, have been the conscience of the world, accepted the delusion and promoted it. Such men not only appealed to the emotions of religion, but perverted the entire structure of logic and reason. Everything was sacrificed to a preconceived prejudice. The logic of the Demonologists, all highly educated men, leaders in their own disciplines, is the most terrifying feature of witchcraft. Because of their turning rational thinking on its head--far more than the most foul act of a torturer or witch judge--the centuries of the witchcraft mania may be called the centuries of uncivilization.
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Rossell Hope Robbins (The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft & Demonology)
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Because we are Systems That Master, humans have no trouble with this. A System That Masters is an intelligent agent capable of constructing abstract concepts and strategic plans from sparse data. By creating modular, conceptual representations of the world around us, we are able to transfer knowledge from one domain to another, a key feature of general intelligence.
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Mariya Yao (Applied Artificial Intelligence: An Introduction For Business Leaders)
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We who are in this race for riches, should be encouraged to know that this changed world in which we live is demanding new ideas, new ways of doing things, new leaders, new inventions, new methods of teaching, new methods of marketing, new books, new literature, new features for the radio, new ideas for moving pictures.
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Napoleon Hill (Think And Grow Rich)
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Cooper, a host of works by American nature writers, and I’ve never in reading a single one of those pages felt one tenth of the emotion that fills me before these shores. And yet I’ll keep on reading, and writing. Two or three times an hour, a sharp crack breaks up my thoughts. The lake is shattering along a fault line. Like surf, birdsong, or the roar of waterfalls, the crumpling of an ice mass won’t keep us awake. A motor running, or someone snoring, or water dripping off a roof, on the other hand, is unbearable. I can’t help thinking of the dead. The thousands of Russians swallowed up by the lake.5 Do the souls of the drowned struggle to the surface? Can they get past the ice? Do they find the hole that opens up to the sky? Now there’s a touchy subject to raise with Christian fundamentalists. It took me five hours to reach Elohin. Volodya welcomed me with a hug and a “Hello, neighbor.” Now there are seven or eight of us around the wooden table dunking cookies in our tea: some fishermen passing through, myself, and our hosts. We talk about our lives and I’m exhausted already. Intoxicated by the potluck company, the fishermen argue, constantly correcting one another with grand gestures of disgust and jumping down one another’s throats. Cabins are prisons. Friendship doesn’t survive anything, not even togetherness. Outside the window, the wind keeps up its nonsense. Clouds of snow rush by with the regularity of phantom trains. I think about the titmouse. I miss it already. It’s crazy how quickly one becomes attached to creatures. I’m seized with pity for these struggling things. The titmice stay in the forest in the icy cold; they’re not snobs like swallows, which spend the winter in Egypt. After twenty minutes, we fall silent, and Volodya looks outside. He spends hours sitting in front of the window pane, his face half in shadow, half bathed in the light off the lake. The light gives him the craggy features of some heroic foot soldier. Time wields over skin the power water has over the earth. It digs deep as it passes. Evening, supper. A heated conversation with one of the fishermen, in which I learn that Jews run the world (but in France it’s the Arabs); Stalin, now there was a real leader; the Russians are invincible (that pipsqueak Hitler bit off more than he could chew); communism is a top-notch system; the Haitian earthquake was triggered by the shockwave from an American bomb; September 11 was a Yankee plot; gulag historians are unpatriotic; and the French are homosexuals. I think I’m going to space out my visits. FEBRUARY 26 Volodya and Irina live like tightrope walkers. They have no contact with the inhabitants on the other side of Baikal. No one crosses the lake. The opposite shore is another world, the one where the sun rises. Fishermen and inspectors living north or south of this station sometimes visit my hosts, who rarely venture into the mountains of their
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Sylvain Tesson (The Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin on the Siberian Taiga)
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Any attempt to promote the Internet as a means of developing intelligence, forgets that, at most, the Internet, like the education system in general, serves only to promote effective slaves, not critical thinkers, creative artists, or altruistic leaders. At most, the internet promotes selfishness and isolation, both features increasingly visible in today's society.
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Robin Sacredfire
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A year later, I see this successful tactic rolled out nationally against U.S. senator John Kerry, also a Vietnam War hero, who is running for president. Television ads feature veterans who deny his heroism as a Swift boat captain. Though the charges are later disproved, they contribute to Kerry's defeat. "Swiftboating" enters the English language as a verb that means attacking a strength instead of a weakness. In feminist and other social justice contexts, this has long been called "trashing," attacking leaders for daring to write, speak, or lead at all. Taking away the good is even more lethal than pointing out the bad.
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Gloria Steinem (My Life on the Road)
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Neither the religious leaders nor Matthew alter the meaning of the OT prophecies, but emphasize certain features that had relevance for their situation. This is typical of OT exegesis in Second Temple Judaism.
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Michael Wilkins (The Gospels and Acts (The Holman Apologetics Commentary on the Bible Book 1))
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Hardie Boys- Exterior Millwork That Provides Value Over Time
The outdoor areas on your property and the features on it, become the perfect backdrop for your home’s structure. They are also one of the first things that visitors to your property notice. The manner in which these features are designed and the finishing that’s used in them, go a long way in enhancing the overall appeal and value of your property. And so it follows that you ensure resilient materials are used in the work and hire expert technicians for the installation.
When you start researching products and materials for outdoor installations, you will find that wood; iron, aluminum, plaster, brick and foam are commonly used in exterior construction. And this may lead you to believe that they are the best option for these applications. It’s also natural for you to be unsure about using new materials such as the specialized cellular PVC materials we use in our millwork.
Some comparisons
But the fact is that there has been a significant advancement in the manufacture of exterior-grade, manmade materials and cellular PVC is one of them. However, the higher upfront cost can sometimes become the other deterrent for property owners, to opt for this innovative material. Take a look at how the cellular PVC material that we at Hardie Boys, Inc. use stands up against other traditionally-used materials:
1. Weather impact
Materials such as hardwood and metal are strong and durable, but need a significant amount of treatments before they can be used in exterior applications. For instance, untreated and unfinished wood features get affected by moisture and the sun’s rays and eventually crack and crumble.
They can also develop rot or moss; and if these conditions are very severe, extensive repairs or complete replacement of the feature is the only option you are left with. Metal too gets affected by moisture and exposure to rain and frost; and rusts and corrodes over time. In comparison the unique PVC cellular material that we use in our millwork is moisture and heat-resistant and doesn’t corrode over time.
2. Termite damage
Termites are extremely destructive creatures and they can bore through wooden features and cause extensive damage to them. In most cases, replacement is the only option you are left with, which represents a significant expense. Concrete surfaces get affected by the freeze and thaw cycles and crack over a period of time, and you end up spending considerable amounts on repair and replacements. On the other hand, cellular PVC doesn’t get impacted by termites or weather fluctuations at all.
3. Maintenance
While choosing materials for exterior applications, most property owners fail to factor the maintenance costs into the overall cost of the installation. For instance, wood, plaster, foam, brick and concrete require annual mold prevention maintenance as well as sanding and polishing or painting. Metal surfaces have to be sanded, and painted regularly too. In comparison, our cellular PVC material features require only basic cleaning and they won’t warp, crack, fade, corrode, develop rot or mold. In short, this is an extremely low-maintenance option that is worth every penny you spend on initial costs.
We at Hardie Boys, Inc. are the leaders in this space and provide excellent, customized, cellular PVC millwork solutions for residential and commercial settings. For any more information about our exterior millwork,
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Hardie Boys
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How do you build a history based on ceaseless self-slaughter and betrayal? Do you deny it? Forget it? But then you are left orphaned. So history is rewritten to suit the present. As the President looks for a way to validate his own authoritarianism, Stalin is praised as a great leader who won the Soviet Union the war. On TV the first attempts to explore the past, the well-made dramas about Stalin’s Terror of the 1930s, are taken off screen and replaced with celebrations of World War II. (But while Stalin’s victory is celebrated publicly and loudly, invoking him also silently resurrects old fears: Stalin is back! Be very afraid!) The architecture reflects these agonies. The city writhes as twentyfirst-century Russia searches, runs away, returns, denies, and reinvents itself. “Moscow is the only city where old buildings are knocked down,” says Mozhayev, “and then rebuilt again as replicas of themselves with straight lines, Perspex, double glazing.” The Moskva Hotel opposite the Kremlin, a grim Stalin gravestone of a building, is first deconstructed, then after much debate about what should replace it, is eventually rebuilt as a slightly brighter-colored version of itself. And this will be the fate of Gnezdnikovsky, demolished and then rebuilt to house restaurants in the faux tsarist style, where waiters speak pre-revolutionary Russian, the menu features pelmeni with brains, and tourists are delighted at encountering the “real Russia.” And
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Peter Pomerantsev (Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia)
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Liberals including James Tobin, Paul Samuelson, and John Kenneth Galbraith and conservatives like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek have all advocated income guarantees in one form or another, and in 1968 more than 1,200 economists signed a letter in support of the concept addressed to the U.S. Congress.4 The president elected that year, Republican Richard Nixon, tried throughout his first term in office to enact it into law. In a 1969 speech he proposed a Family Assistance Plan that had many features of a basic income program. The plan had support across the ideological spectrum, but it also faced a large and diverse group of opponents.5 Caseworkers and other administrators of existing welfare programs feared that their jobs would be eliminated under the new regime; some labor leaders thought that it would erode support for minimum wage legislation; and many working Americans didn’t like the idea of their tax dollars going to people who could work, but chose not to. By the time of his 1972 reelection campaign, Nixon had abandoned the Family Assistance Plan, and universal income guarantee programs have not been seriously discussed by federal elected officials and policymakers since then.* Avoiding
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Erik Brynjolfsson (The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies)
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Everywhere there is the same pyramidal structure, the same worship of semi-divine leader, the same economy existing by and for continuous warfare. It follows that the three superstates not only cannot conquer one another, but would gain no advantage by doing so. On the contrary, so long as they remain in conflict they prop one another up, like three sheaves of corn. And, as usual, the ruling groups of all three powers are simultaneously aware and unaware of what they are doing. Their lives are dedicated to world conquest, but they also know that it is necessary that the war should continue everlastingly and without victory. Meanwhile the fact that there is no danger of conquest makes possible the denial of reality which is the special feature of Ingsoc and its rival systems of thought. Here it is necessary to repeat what has been said earlier, that by becoming continuous war has fundamentally changed its character.
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George Orwell (1984)
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Not to be confused with Der Flügel, which is an earlier form of the baby grand piano, the Flugelhorn is a wind instrument akin to the trumpet, but has a wider, conical bore. It is actually a descendant of the valved bugle, which had been developed from a hunting horn known in eighteenth-century Germany as a Flügelhorn. This valved instrument is similar to the B♭pitch of many trumpets and cornets and was actually inspired by the eighteenth-century saxhorn on which the flugelhorn is modeled. The German word Flügel means wing and in the early part of the 18th century Germany the leader or Führer of the hunt was known as a Flügelmeister who issued his orders of the hunt with, you guessed it, a Flügelhorn.
Some modern flugelhorns feature a fourth valve that adds a lower range and extends the instrument's abilities, however some players use the fourth valve in place of the first and third valve combination making the instrument somewhat sharper and more confusing. The tone range is "fatter" and usually regarded as more “mellow” and “darker” than the trumpet or cornet. The sound of the flugelhorn has been described as halfway between a trumpet and a French horn and is a standard member of the British-style brass band. Joe Bishop an American jazz musician and composer, not to be confused with Joey Bishop of the Rat Pack, was a member of the Woody Herman band and was one of the earliest jazz musicians to use the flugelhorn.
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Hank Bracker
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Some hold the position that education is serious, but games are not; therefore games have no place in education. But an examination of our educational system shows that it is a game! Students (players) are given a series of assignments (goals) that must be handed in (accomplished) by certain due dates (time limits). They receive grades (scores) as feedback repeatedly as assignments (challenges) get harder and harder, until the end of the course when they are faced with a final exam (boss monster), which they can only pass (defeat) if they have mastered all the skills in the course (game). Students (players) who perform particularly well are listed on the honor roll (leader board).
Traditional educational methods often feature a real lack of surprises, a lack of projection, a lack of pleasures, a lack of community, and a bad interest curve.
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Jesse Schell (The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses)
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Poverty does not necessarily lead to extremism,’ I said. In my head, images of the proud Imams defending their traditions against the murderous corruptions; of the determined youth leader Tawane, risking his life to provide services for the refugees when the aid agencies withdrew for fear of being kidnapped; of Kheyro, working to educate the children of the camp for a pittance; of Professor White Eyes broadcasting his reports on the camp radio. How could I convey their towering dignity, their courage and independence of spirit when they only featured in the official mind as potential terrorists?
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Ben Rawlence (City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World's Largest Refugee Camp)
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We don’t do superstars in our Tough Mudder world—but if we were to, it would be hard to ignore the claims of Amelia Boone, an athlete who now features regularly on the cover of Runner’s World and who has been the women’s champion at World’s Toughest three times. An in-house lawyer for Apple in Silicon Valley, Amelia is among the only competitors to keep running for twenty-four hours in the desert without a rest. She keeps coming back not for the glory of “winning” but because, she says, “you will never find a race like World’s Toughest Mudder—where you are technically running against other people but where you will still see the leader out there stopping to help people up over walls or out of the water. It is just this unwritten rule; no one questions it, that is how it is.” Amelia studied social anthropology before she became a lawyer, with an interest in the way that social norms and gossip were used by indigenous tribes to create and maintain healthy and coherent cultures. Tough Mudder, she suggests, is the closest she has come to seeing that tribal spirit in action in the contemporary world. “If I am out for a run and I see someone wearing a Tough Mudder headband or T-Shirt, there is always a big smile and a nod of recognition between us,” she says, as if she is speaking of a pair of Yanomami natives coming across each other on a forest trail. It’s a nod, she suggests, that communicates a great many things—not only shared philosophies and kinship but also the recognition that “I may well have pushed your wet ass over a wall at some point last year.
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Will Dean (It Takes a Tribe: Building the Tough Mudder Movement)
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Attempting to define reality is a core feature of authoritarianism. This is what the Soviets did when they erased political dissidents from historical photos. This is what happens in George Orwell’s classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, when a torturer holds up four fingers and delivers electric shocks until his prisoner sees five fingers as ordered. The goal is to make you question logic and reason and to sow mistrust toward exactly the people we need to rely on: our leaders, the press, experts who seek to guide public policy based on evidence, ourselves. For Trump, as with so much he does, it’s about simple dominance.
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Hillary Rodham Clinton (What Happened)
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I had no plan, only a list of features. I
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Jurgen Appelo (Management 3.0: Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Cohn)))
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Simplicity is the key to good design of each feature, and after their implementation the usefulness of features is immediately verified by the customer.
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Jurgen Appelo (Management 3.0: Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Cohn)))
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A key insight from this work was that psychological safety is not a personality difference but rather a feature of the workplace that leaders can and must help create.
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Amy C. Edmondson (The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth)
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A pessimistic orientation does not seek accommodations with the system. We share the goal of the undercommons, which “is not to end the troubles but to end the world that created those particular troubles as the ones that must be opposed” (Halberstam 2013, 9). Moten and Harney don’t play the liberal game of reform; they are constantly reframing the problems at hand. What questions we ask are crucial—for bad questions yield worse answers, ones that compound the problem. On prison abolition, their intervention is decisive and reconfigures the coordinates of the debate: for them, it is “not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery” (Moten and Harney 2013, 42). How do you abolish a society? How do you fight state power? Is anti-statism, ethical (that is, nonviolent) anarchism, the only solution? Is it a solution? Or do you dare to seize power, as with the example of Morales? A universal politics takes these questions to heart. For this reason, its skeptical negativity is put into the service of a more virtuous end: locating antagonisms, rather than settling for conflicts or pseudo-struggles. Its challenge is to sustain the antagonistic logic of class struggle, and avoid the comfort of static oppositions. The cultural Left has its enemies (Trump, Putin, Le Pen, Erdoğan, Modi, Duterte, Netanyahu, Orbán, Bolsonaro, Suu Kyi, MBS, etc.)—and, conversely, notorious leaders blame liberal media, demonizing bad press with the “enemy of the people” charge—but nothing really changes; the basic features or coordinates of the current society remain the same. Worse, the liberal capitalist system is legitimized (only in a free democracy can you, as a citizen, criticize tyrants abroad and, more importantly, express your outrage at the president, politicians, or state power without the fear of retribution) and the cultural Left is tacitly compensated for playing by the rules—for practicing non-antagonistic politics, for forgoing class insurgency and not engaging in class war (Žižek 2020f)—rewarded with “libidinal profit” (Žižek 1997b, 47), with what Lacan calls a “surplus-enjoyment” (2007, 147), an enjoyment-in-sacrifice. That is to say, cultural leftists, with their “Beautiful Souls” intact, enjoy not being a racist, a misogynist, a transphobe, an ableist, and so on. Hating the haters, the morally repulsive, the fascists of the world, is indeed an endless source of libidinal satisfaction for “woke” liberals. But what changes does it actually produce?
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Zahi Zalloua (Universal Politics)
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It paid off in two immediate ways. First, Think Different started a process of bringing pride back to Apple’s employees. Billboards and posters went up across the Cupertino campus. Steve’s narrated version was featured in a video promoting the whole campaign inside the company, and later, after Apple won the Emmy Award for the best television ad campaign for 1998, the company gave a fifty-page commemorative book to all its employees. “Our audience was the employees as much as anyone else,” says Clow. Inspiring them was challenging, especially when Steve was shuttering divisions of the company and laying off thousands of workers. But Think Different gave the surviving employees a sense that they might see better days ahead, for the first time in years.
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Brent Schlender (Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader)
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sparse hair, stressed features – he looked as if he’d unexpectedly been made leader of the Conservative Party, and hadn’t yet found a way of passing the buck.
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Mick Herron (Down Cemetery Road (The Oxford Investigations, #1))
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What are the features of conspiracy theories that distinguish them from scientific theories? One, the conspiratorial theory is often vague about the motives of the behind-the-scenes leaders or assigns them implausible motivations. Two, it assumes that they are extremely clever and knowledgeable. Three, it places power in the hands of one strong leader or a tiny cabal. And, finally, it assumes that illegal plans can be kept secret for indefinitely long periods of time. A scientific theory, like the class-domination one, is very different.
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Peter Turchin (End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration)
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Found business pain creates opportunity. Quantified business pain drives higher price points. Implicated business pain drives urgency. Business pain and urgency finds business Champions. Business champions get you to the Economic Buyer. The Economic Buyer has access to major funds. You sell big deals based on value. The opposite is also true: No discovered pain means a small or no opportunity. No quantified business pain means no cost justification. No implicated business pain means no urgency to buy. No business Champion means no access to the Economic Buyer. No access to the Economic Buyer means no access to major funds. No access to major funds means either selling small deals based on product features or selling no deals.
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John McMahon (The Qualified Sales Leader: Proven Lessons from a Five Time CRO)
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In software development, engineers are often pressured to deliver features instead of fixing defects, addressing reliability issues, or working on internal improvement projects. As a result, so called “technical debt”§§ adds up, leading to more complex problems that are increasingly difficult to solve. Consequently, Marty Cagan, a product expert who has trained generations of product leaders on building software products that customers love, stresses the importance for product and engineering leaders to allocate at least 20% of engineering’s time to proactively fix issues before they snowball into catastrophic ones, such as having to “rewrite the entire codebase from scratch.
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Gene Kim (Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification)
“
Apple employees are spared such intrusions because they are “scared silent.” As Adam Lashinsky reports in Inside Apple, employees know that revealing company secrets will get them fired on the spot. This penchant for secrecy means the small teams that do most of the work at Apple are given only the slivers of information that executives believe they need. A few years ago, we talked to a senior Apple executive who speculated—but, of course, didn’t know—that CEO Tim Cook might be the only person who knew all the major features of the next iPhone.
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Robert I. Sutton (The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder)
“
BloodClan!” Princess echoed, and a shiver passed through her. “Firestar, you’re in danger, aren’t you?” Firestar nodded, suddenly unwilling to treat her like a soft kittypet who couldn’t cope with the truth. “Yes,” he replied. “BloodClan has given us three days to get out of the forest. We don’t intend to leave, so that means we have to fight them.” Princess went on giving him that long, thoughtful look. The tip of her tail swept around and touched a scar on his flank, an old wound from a battle so long ago that he had forgotten which one it was. Firestar had a sudden vision of how he must appear to her: gaunt and ragged in spite of his lean muscles, his battle-marked pelt a constant reminder of the harshness of his forest life. “I know you’ll do your best,” she mewed quietly. “The Clan couldn’t have a better leader.” “I hope you’re right,” Firestar meowed. “This is the worst threat to the Clan that we’ve ever had to face.” “And you’ll come through it; I know you will.” Princess rasped her tongue over his ear and pressed close against him. Firestar smelled her fear-scent, but she stayed calm, and her gentle features were unusually serious. “Come back safely, Firestar,” she whispered. “Please.
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Erin Hunter (The Darkest Hour)
“
The leader’s mood is quite literally contagious, spreading quickly and inexorably throughout the business…. The same holds true in the office, boardroom, or shop floor; group members inevitably “catch” feelings from one another.”26 When you step up to leadership, whether you like it or not, there’s no option to turn off the broadcast feature on whatever you’re feeling.
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Frances Frei (Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leader's Guide to Solving Hard Problems)
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Suraj solar and allied industries,
Wework galaxy, 43,
Residency Road,
Bangalore-560025.
Mobile number : +91 808 850 7979
Introduction to Solar Rooftop Systems
Understanding Solar Energy
Importance of Solar Rooftop Systems
Harnessing the power of the sun to generate clean and renewable energy has become increasingly essential in today's world. Solar rooftop systems offer a sustainable solution for both residential and commercial properties to reduce reliance on traditional grid electricity and lower carbon emissions. By understanding the fundamentals of solar energy and recognizing the significance of solar rooftop installations, individuals and businesses in Bangalore can pave the way towards a more environmentally conscious and cost-effective energy future.
# Solar Rooftop in Bangalore - Sunease Solar
## Introduction to Solar Rooftop Systems
### Understanding Solar Energy
Solar energy is like the coolest kid on the block when it comes to renewable energy sources. It's basically sunlight transformed into electricity, which is pretty neat if you ask me.
### Importance of Solar Rooftop Systems
Solar rooftop systems are like the superheroes of the energy world - they harness the power of the sun right from your rooftop. They not only help you save money but also reduce your carbon footprint. Win-win!
## Benefits of Solar Rooftop Installations
### Financial Savings
Imagine cutting down on those hefty electricity bills - that's what solar rooftop installations do. They help you save money in the long run while also increasing the value of your property . It resembles having your cake and eating it as well!
### Environmental Impact
By switching to solar energy, you're basically giving Mother Earth a virtual high-five. Solar rooftop installations reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help combat climate change. So, you're not just saving money, you're saving the planet. NBD.
### Energy Independence
Who doesn't want to be a little more independent, am I right?
Solar Rooftop in Bangaloreprovide you with a sense of self-sufficiency when it comes to energy. You're not at the mercy of fluctuating electricity prices anymore. It's like taking control of your energy destiny.
## Solar Rooftop Initiatives in Bangalore
### Government Policies and Incentives
Bangalore is all about that solar love. The government has rolled out various policies and incentives to promote solar rooftop installations. It resembles they're saying, "Here's something special to do your change to sun oriented considerably better."
### Community Programs and Awareness
Communities in Bangalore are coming together to spread the good word about solar energy. From awareness campaigns to collective installations, they're making sure everyone knows that solar is the way to go. It's like a solar revolution, but with a cool community twist.
## Sunease Solar: A Leader in Solar Rooftop Solutions
### Company Overview
Sunease Solar is basically the Gandalf of solar rooftop solutions - wise, reliable, and always there when you need them. They're experts in the field, making the switch to solar as easy as pie (solar-powered pie, of course).
### Product Offerings
From sleek solar panels to cutting-edge inverters, Sunease Solar has it all. They offer top-notch products that are not only efficient but also look pretty darn good on your rooftop. It's like having the Ferraris of solar installations.
### Customer Success Stories
Customers love Sunease Solar, and for good reason. Their success stories speak volumes about the quality of service and satisfaction they provide. It's like a feel-good movie, but with solar panels instead of actors.
5. Key Features of Solar Rooftop Systems
Panel Efficiency and Durability
When it comes to Solar Rooftop in Bangalore, panel efficiency and durability are key factors to consider.
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Solar Rooftop in Bangalore
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Global Talent Visa programs around the world: Opportunities similar to Australia's Global Talent Visa
Many countries have created programs like Australia's Global Talent Visa as they compete for the best talent to drive economic growth and innovation. These initiatives seek to attract highly skilled workers from a range of industries and provide them with opportunities to live and work in a foreign country. This blog will explore a number of nations with comparable visa policies and highlight their distinctive features, benefits and application procedures if you are considering opportunities outside of Australia.
1. United Kingdom: Global Talent Visa
People who have been recognized as leaders or have the potential to be leaders in disciplines like science, engineering, the humanities, medicine, digital technology, and the arts are eligible for the UK Global Talent Visa. Compared to other visa categories, this one has less limits on the successful applicant's ability to live and work in the UK.
Key Features:
Endorsement required: Applicants must secure endorsement from a recognized body in their field such as UK Research and Innovation or the Royal Society.
Flexible work options: Visa holders can work for themselves, start a business or work for any employer in the UK.
Processing Path: After three years (or two years for exceptional talent), visa holders can apply for indefinite leave to remain leading to permanent residence.
Application process:
Get support: Gather evidence of your achievements and submit your application to the approving body.
Submitting your visa application: Once confirmed, complete your visa application online and provide the necessary documentation.
2. Canada: Global Talent Stream
The Global Talent Stream is part of Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker Program, which aims to attract highly skilled talent in specific occupations. This program is especially beneficial for technology companies that want to hire specialized workers quickly.
Key Features:
Two categories:
Category A: For employers who have been referred by a Designated Partner and are hiring unique talent.
Category B: For employers looking to fill positions in high-demand occupations on Canada's Global Talent Occupations List.
Expedited processing: Applications are processed within two weeks, making it an attractive option for businesses.
Application process:
Employer application: Employers must apply for a labor market benefits plan and demonstrate that they need a foreign worker.
Worker Application: Once approved, the foreign worker can apply for a work permit.
3. United States of America: Employment-Based Immigration (EB-2 and EB-1 Visas)
In the US, the EB-2 and EB-1 visas are for highly skilled individuals. The EB-1 visa is for individuals with exceptional ability, while the EB-2 is for individuals with advanced education or exceptional ability.
Key Features:
EB-1 Visa: Does not require a job offer, allows self-petition for individuals with exceptional ability in their field.
EB-2 Visa: Requires a job offer, but individuals with exceptional ability can apply for a National Interest Waiver (NIW), which allows them to submit their own application.
Permanent Residency: Both types of visas provide a pathway to permanent residence in the US.
Application process:
Eligibility Determination: Assess which visa category you are eligible for based on your qualifications and achievements.
File Petition: Submit Form I-140 for EB-1 or EB-2, including supporting documentation.
Apply for adjustment of status: If you are already in the US, you can apply for adjustment of status to become a permanent resident.
4. Germany: EU Blue Card
The German EU Blue Card is designed to attract highly skilled workers from countries outside the European Union. This program aims to fill labor shortages in specific sectors and provides an attractive option for professionals who want to work in Germany.
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global talent visa australia
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The door to the captain’s office was open, the room vacant but for the memories it held, and I staggered forward to sink into a chair. I closed my eyes, filled with a dreadful, yearning sorrow. Cannan had been such a powerful presence in the palace--in our lives--for so many years that it felt as though the heart of our kingdom had been taken from us. He had been Captain of the Guard for thirty years, and had not failed once in his duties; he had saved more lives than he had ever taken in war; and he had raised Steldor to be the man he was today--a bold, brave, sacrificing man. The son was his father in many, many ways.
I was startled out of my thoughts by a knock, and turned to see Steldor standing in the doorway. He glanced around the office, his expression composed, and yet it held a deep and immutable sorrow.
“I was told I would find you here,” he said.
“How are you?” I asked, nervously twining my hands.
“As good as can be expected, I suppose.”
“And Galen?”
“He has Tiersia.”
I nodded, averting my gaze. I knew his answer had been an honest one, and had not been meant to hurt me, but sadness filled me. I wanted him to have someone--he deserved to have someone. Only that someone could not be me.
“Let’s go to my drawing room,” I suggested, for Cannan’s office was not a place that would allow us to talk about the future, and that was what we needed to do. Steldor stepped aside, allowing me to exit first. He spent one last moment absorbing the look and feel of his father’s office, then respectfully closed the door.
When we reached the Queen’s Drawing Room at the front of the palace, we walked over to the bay window that granted a view of the Eastern Courtyard to talk, much as we had when he had told me of his plan to annul our marriage. But this time, I was the one who needed to speak. I slipped my hand into his, and he glanced at me in mild surprise.
“I’m sorry about your father’s passing. I know how close you were to him. His strength and guidance will be missed by all. Despite our kingdom’s glory, Hytanica is less without him.”
Steldor did not respond, but gazed stoically out the window. Then he nodded twice and took a deep breath, reining in his emotions. Even now, with me, he was proud, not knowing that I wanted to hold him and let him cry, and that if he did, I would not, even for an instant, find him weak. He ran a hand through his dark hair and turned to face me, silently begging me to change the subject, and I obliged.
“”And how is the rest of your family?”
“Amid our losses, there is also some good news. Shaselle has a suitor.”
“Do you approve of her choice? After all, you are the man of the family now.”
“There’s no accounting for taste.” He smirked, seeming thankful for my attempt at normalcy. “Actually, Lord Grayden is a good man--a man who met my father’s approval and, I believe, would have met Baelic’s. When the time is right, I expect a betrothal.” Again a smile played across his features. “Now I just have to worry about the other three girls in the family.”
I laughed, lacing my fingers through his when I felt he might pull away. I did not know how he would react to my coming proposal--and whether he would admit it or not, he needed some comfort now.
“Steldor,” I said, my tone and demeanor once more serious, “when I see Galen, I will reinstate him as Sergeant at Arms.”
“An excellent decision.”
I nodded, then continued. “But our military needs to be reformed. It needs a strong and passionate leader, someone who will do Cannan and all of his work justice. I cannot think of anyone more suited to taking over the position of Captain of the Guard than you.”
He did not immediately reply, but his eyes went to our hands, and he raised mine to his lips as he had so often done before.
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Cayla Kluver (Sacrifice (Legacy, #3))
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Now the leaders of the Nazi Third Reich regarded war as the natural state of human society and extermination as a desirable way of establishing the dominance of their national organization and their ideology over rival systems. The enslavement or extermination of inferior groups or nations thus became the appointed duty of those who accepted their doctrine of 'Aryan' superiority. Only in the atmosphere of constant war could totalitarian leaders command the absolute obedience and unqualified loyalty necessary for the smooth operation of such a megamachine.
In conformity with these aberrations, systematic violence, brutality, torture, and sexual corruption were treated as normal, even desirable accompaniments of the 'new order.' And though all these features were openly present from the beginning, many otherwise decent people, in other countries besides Germany, openly hailed this regime as 'The Wave of the Future,' though when one examines either its doctrines or its acts, one can find in Nazism only the sewage-laden backwash of the past.
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Lewis Mumford (The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2))
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independent of the normal planning and budgeting processes, to allow bottom-up ideas to flourish. “No one has ever before brought together such a global and diverse set of business thought leaders on this scale to discuss the most pressing issues and opportunities of our age,” says Nick Donofrio, IBM’s executive vice president of innovation and technology. “We have companies literally knocking at the door and saying, ‘Give us your best and brightest ideas, and let’s work together to make them a reality.’ It’s a golden opportunity to create entirely new markets and partnerships.
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Harvard Business Publishing (HBR's 10 Must Reads on Innovation (with featured article "The Discipline of Innovation," by Peter F. Drucker))
“
This is the basis for the false assumption that price or features matter more than they do. Those things matter, they provide us the tangible things we can point to to rationalize our decision-making, but they don't set the course and they don't inspire behavior.
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Simon Sinek (Start With Why..? Reprint edition: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action !)
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He had pudgy, boyish features, thin hair that was so blond it was almost white, and he was full of weird, chipper energy, like an overcaffeinated Cub Scout leader.
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Ransom Riggs (Hollow City (Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, # 2))
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On the seventh days she underwent repairs. A machine longs to be used, but it hates to be mishandled. The strain of extreme anal fisting, pony shows and nosecocking tested the limits of her robot durability. But Dr. Hugo Sploogeworthy, flush with renewed funding for Project Ultrafuck, addressed her injuries with a series of upgrades: a harder, more sensitive skin; removable and interchangeable modular genitals in both genders and a variety of pubic hairstyles; a breakaway stunt nose. He also tested other new features requested specifically by the NAFTA military: nipple tasers, supersensitive fingercams, an anal jetpack. The NAFTA leaders dreamed of a robot that could do double duty, killing and copulating, simultaneously if possible. They wanted mass-produced Slutbots, giant-breasted and strong, ten feet tall, armed with cannons, able to double as crowd-control systems when not producing porn or fellating members of Congress. They wanted Slutbots that could mint money and mine coal, fulfill erotic fantasies and survive a nuclear winter. As society crumbled in their fists, the leaders grew paranoid. Sex and power were their simple needs, and in the golden age of robotics they expected Slutbot and her kin to take care of all the messy details.
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Mykle Hansen (I, Slutbot)
“
Skills Mistakes: Leadership Too Weak, Communication Too Poor Undervaluing and underinvesting in the human side of innovation is another common mistake. Top managers frequently put the best technical people in charge, not the best leaders. These technically oriented managers, in turn, mistakenly assume that ideas will speak for themselves if they are any good, so they neglect external communication. Or they emphasize tasks over relationships, missing opportunities to enhance the team chemistry necessary to turn undeveloped concepts into useful innovations. Groups that are convened without attention to interpersonal skills find it difficult to embrace collective goals, take advantage of the different strengths various members bring, or communicate well enough to share the tacit knowledge that is still unformed and hard to document while an innovation is under development. It takes time to build the trust and interplay among team members that will spark great ideas. MIT researchers have found that for R&D team members to be truly productive, they have to have been on board for at least two years. At one point, Pillsbury realized that the average length of time the company took to go from new product idea to successful commercialization was 24 to 26 months, but the average length of time people spent on product teams was 18 months. No wonder the company was falling behind in innovation.
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Harvard Business Publishing (HBR's 10 Must Reads on Innovation (with featured article "The Discipline of Innovation," by Peter F. Drucker))
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set up an innovative unit called First Community Bank (FCB), the first comprehensive banking initiative to focus on inner-city markets. FCB struggled to convince mainstream managers in Bank of Boston’s retail-banking group that the usual performance metrics, such as transaction time and profitability per customer, were not appropriate for this market—which required customer education, among other things—or for a new venture that still needed investment. Mainstream managers argued that “underperforming” branches should be closed. In order to save the innovation, FCB leaders had to invent their own metrics, based on customer satisfaction and loyalty, and find creative ways to show results by clusters of branches. The venture later proved both profitable and important to the parent bank as it embarked on a series of acquisitions.
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Harvard Business Publishing (HBR's 10 Must Reads on Innovation (with featured article "The Discipline of Innovation," by Peter F. Drucker))
“
Product leaders create product plans, but those product plans often (usually!) lack the most important component: What is the technical insight upon which those new features, products, or platforms will be built? A technical insight is a new way of applying technology or design that either drives down the cost or increases the functions and usability of the product by a significant factor.
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Eric Schmidt (How Google Works)
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American DEWAR FAMILY Cameron Dewar Ursula “Beep” Dewar, his sister Woody Dewar, his father Bella Dewar, his mother PESHKOV-JAKES FAMILY George Jakes Jacky Jakes, his mother Greg Peshkov, his father Lev Peshkov, his grandfather Marga, his grandmother MARQUAND FAMILY Verena Marquand Percy Marquand, her father Babe Lee, her mother CIA Florence Geary Tony Savino Tim Tedder, semiretired Keith Dorset OTHERS Maria Summers Joseph Hugo, FBI Larry Mawhinney, Pentagon Nelly Fordham, old flame of Greg Peshkov Dennis Wilson, aide to Bobby Kennedy Skip Dickerson, aide to Lyndon Johnson Leopold “Lee” Montgomery, reporter Herb Gould, television journalist on This Day Suzy Cannon, gossip reporter Frank Lindeman, television network owner REAL HISTORICAL CHARACTERS John F. Kennedy, thirty-fifth U.S. president Jackie, his wife Bobby Kennedy, his brother Dave Powers, assistant to President Kennedy Pierre Salinger, President Kennedy’s press officer Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Lyndon B. Johnson, thirty-sixth U.S. president Richard Nixon, thirty-seventh U.S. president Jimmy Carter, thirty-ninth U.S. president Ronald Reagan, fortieth U.S. president George H. W. Bush, forty-first U.S. president British LECKWITH-WILLIAMS FAMILY Dave Williams Evie Williams, his sister Daisy Williams, his mother Lloyd Williams, M.P., his father Eth Leckwith, Dave’s grandmother MURRAY FAMILY Jasper Murray Anna Murray, his sister Eva Murray, his mother MUSICIANS IN THE GUARDSMEN AND PLUM NELLIE Lenny, Dave Williams’s cousin Lew, drummer Buzz, bass player Geoffrey, lead guitarist OTHERS Earl Fitzherbert, called Fitz Sam Cakebread, friend of Jasper Murray Byron Chesterfield (real name Brian Chesnowitz), music agent Hank Remington (real name Harry Riley), pop star Eric Chapman, record company executive German FRANCK FAMILY Rebecca Hoffmann Carla Franck, Rebecca’s adoptive mother Werner Franck, Rebecca’s adoptive father Walli Franck, son of Carla Lili Franck, daughter of Werner and Carla Maud von Ulrich, née Fitzherbert, Carla’s mother Hans Hoffmann, Rebecca’s husband OTHERS Bernd Held, schoolteacher Karolin Koontz, folksinger Odo Vossler, clergyman REAL HISTORICAL PEOPLE Walter Ulbricht, first secretary of the Socialist Unity Party (Communist) Erich Honecker, Ulbricht’s successor Egon Krenz, successor to Honecker Polish Stanislaw “Staz” Pawlak, army officer Lidka, girlfriend of Cam Dewar Danuta Gorski, Solidarity activist REAL HISTORICAL PEOPLE Anna Walentynowicz, crane driver Lech Wałesa, leader of the trade union Solidarity General Jaruzelski, prime minister Russian DVORKIN-PESHKOV FAMILY Tanya Dvorkin, journalist Dimka Dvorkin, Kremlin aide, Tanya’s twin brother Anya Dvorkin, their mother Grigori Peshkov, their grandfather Katerina Peshkov, their grandmother Vladimir, always called Volodya, their uncle Zoya, Volodya’s wife Nina, Dimka’s girlfriend OTHERS Daniil Antonov, features editor at TASS Pyotr Opotkin, features editor in chief Vasili Yenkov, dissident Natalya Smotrov, official in the Foreign Ministry Nik Smotrov, Natalya’s husband Yevgeny Filipov, aide to Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky Vera Pletner, Dimka’s secretary Valentin, Dimka’s friend Marshal Mikhail Pushnoy REAL HISTORICAL CHARACTERS Nikita Sergeyevitch Khrushchev, first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Andrei Gromyko, foreign minister under Khrushchev Rodion Malinovsky, defense minister under Khrushchev Alexei Kosygin, chairman of the Council of Ministers Leonid Brezhnev, Khrushchev’s successor Yuri Andropov, successor to Brezhnev Konstantin Chernenko, successor to Andropov Mikhail Gorbachev, successor to Chernenko Other Nations Paz Oliva, Cuban general Frederik Bíró, Hungarian politician Enok Andersen, Danish accountant
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Ken Follett (Edge of Eternity Deluxe (The Century Trilogy #3))
“
Luxo Jr. was the breakthrough,” Steve told me many years later. If Steve ever was starstruck, it was by Lasseter, whose artistry seemed to be irrefutable evidence of what Steve believed to be the most important attribute of computers: that they were tools that could unleash and enhance human creativity. Despite his boyish ways (his office is stuffed with so many toys it could double as a Pixar museum, and his wardrobe consists exclusively of blue jeans and hundreds of loud, Hawaiian-style print shirts), Lasseter was a confident grown-up, and not persnickety in any way. While he never looked to Steve for creative advice on his short features, he calmly listened to his boss’s opinions, before going ahead with his own plans anyway. But he made compromises when needed, too, rather than insisting on perfection: when he couldn’t prepare a polished version of a short called Tin Toy in time for SIGGRAPH, he simply showed what he could and filled in the rest with line drawings. Lasseter
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Brent Schlender (Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader)
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The intruders spoke no words as they rushed in. Five boys carrying baseball bats and tire irons. They wore an assortment of Halloween masks and stocking masks.
But Derek knew who they were.
“No! No!” he cried.
All five boys wore bulky shooter’s earmuffs. They couldn’t hear him. But more importantly, they couldn’t hear Jill.
One of the boys stayed in the doorway. He was in charge. A runty kid named Hank. The stocking pulled down over his face smashed his features into Play-Doh, but it could only be Hank.
One of the boys, fat but fast-moving and wearing an Easter Bunny mask, stepped to Derek and hit him in the stomach with his aluminum baseball bat.
Derek dropped to his knees.
Another boy grabbed Jill. He put his hand over her mouth. Someone produced a roll of duct tape.
Jill screamed. Derek tried to stand, but the blow to his stomach had winded him. He tried to stand up, but the fat boy pushed him back down.
“Don’t be stupid, Derek. We’re not after you.”
The duct tape went around and around Jill’s mouth. They worked by flashlight. Derek could see Jill’s eyes, wild with terror. Pleading silently with her big brother to save her.
When her mouth was sealed, the thugs pulled off their shooter’s earmuffs.
Hank stepped forward. “Derek, Derek, Derek,” Hank said, shaking his head slowly, regretfully. “You know better than this.”
“Leave her alone,” Derek managed to gasp, clutching his stomach, fighting the urge to vomit.
“She’s a freak,” Hank said.
“She’s my little sister. This is our home.”
“She’s a freak,” Hank said. “And this house is east of First Avenue. This is a no-freak zone.”
“Man, come on,” Derek pleaded. “She’s not hurting anyone.”
“It’s not about that,” a boy named Turk said. He had a weak leg, a limp that made it impossible not to recognize him. “Freaks with freaks, normals with normals. That’s the way it has to be.”
“All she does is—”
Hank’s slap stung. “Shut up. Traitor. A normal who stands up for a freak gets treated like a freak. Is that what you want?”
“Besides,” the fat boy said with a giggle, “we’re taking it easy on her. We were going to fix her so she could never sing again. Or talk. If you know what I mean.”
He pulled a knife from a sheath in the small of his back. “Do you, Derek? Do you understand?”
Derek’s resistance died.
“The Leader showed mercy,” Turk said. “But the Leader isn’t weak. So this freak either goes west, over the border right now. Or…” He let the threat hang there.
Jill’s tears flowed freely. She could barely breathe because her nose was running. Derek could see that by the way she sucked tape into her mouth, trying for air. She would suffocate if they didn’t let her go soon.
“Let me at least get her doll.
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Michael Grant (Lies (Gone, #3))
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As any company forced to compete on price, quality, service or features alone can attest, it is very hard to differentiate for any period of time or build loyalty on those factors alone. Plus it costs money and is stressful waking up every day trying to compete on that level alone. Knowing WHY is essential for lasting success and the ability to avoid being lumped in with others. Any
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Simon Sinek (Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action)
“
The fullest account we have of Oannes is found in surviving fragments of the works of a Babylonian priest called Berossos who wrote in the third century BC. [...] Oannes did not do his work alone but was supposedly the leader of a group of beings known as the Seven Apkallu--the "Seven Sages"--who were said to have lived "before the flood" (a cataclysmic global deluge features prominently in many Mesopotamian traditions, including those of Sumer, Akkad, Assyria and Babylon). Alongside Oannes, these sages are portrayed as bringers of civilization who, in the most ancient past, gave humanity a moral code, arts, crafts and agriculture and taught them architectural, building and engineering skills.
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Graham Hancock (Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization)
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America today is not the same nation as when you were born. Depending on your age, if you were born in America, your home nation was a significantly different land than it is today: · America didn’t allow aborting babies in the womb; · Same sex marriage was not only illegal, no one ever talked about it, or even seriously considered the possibility; (“The speed and breadth of change (in the gay movement) has just been breathtaking.”, New York Times, June 21, 2009) · Mass media was clean and non-offensive. Think of The I Love Lucy Show or The Walton Family, compared with what is aired today; · The United States government did not take $500 million dollars every year from the taxpayers and give it to Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider. · Videogames that glorify violence, cop killing and allow gamesters who have bought millions of copies, to have virtual sex with women before killing them, did not exist. · Americans’ tax dollars did not fund Title X grants to Planned Parenthood who fund a website which features videos that show a “creepy guidance counselor who gives advice to teens on how to have (safe) sex and depict teens engaged in sex.” · Americans didn’t owe $483,000 per household for unfunded retirement and health care obligations (Peter G. Peterson Foundation). · The phrase “sound as a dollar” meant something. · The Federal government’s debt was manageable. American Christian missionaries who have been abroad for relatively short times say they find it hard to believe how far this nation has declined morally since they were last in the country. In just a two week period, not long ago, these events all occurred: the Iowa Supreme Court declared that same sex marriage was legal in the State; the President on a foreign tour declared that “we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation…” and a day later bowed before the King of the nation that supplied most of the 9/11 terrorists; Vermont became the first State to authorize same sex marriage by legislative action, as opposed to judicial dictate; the CEO of General Motors was fired by the federal government; an American ship was boarded and its crew captured by pirates for the first time in over 200 years; and a major Christian leader/author apologized on Larry King Live for supporting California’s Proposition 8 in defense of traditional marriage, reversing his earlier position. The pace of societal change is rapidly accelerating.
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John Price (The End of America: The Role of Islam in the End Times and Biblical Warnings to Flee America)
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Lenin’s and Stalin’s form of communism is gone, yet its trappings have been expropriated by mega-corporations. We have companies featuring central planning by troikas, mission statements crafted by apparatchiks, five-year plans, no right to choose leaders in companies, no democracy in the workplace, a clear distinction between intelligentsia and peasants (top CEOs make 152 times the median salary and enjoy company dachas, jets, and limos), and state monitoring (time clocks, dress codes, drug screening, “employee assistance” plans, e-mail monitoring, no smoking, and other personal conduct rules, as well as family-life audits).
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Ricardo Semler (The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works)
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Real innovation changes the course of industries or even society. The light bulb, the microwave oven, the fax machine, iTunes. These are true innovations that changed how we conduct business, altered how we live our lives, and, in the case of iTunes, challenged an industry to completely reevaluate its business model. Adding a camera to a mobile phone, for example, is not an innovation—a great feature, for sure, but not industry-altering.
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Simon Sinek (Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action)
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most breakthrough products result from a long cycle of hit-and-miss prototypes, the steady accumulation of features, and a timely synthesis of existing technologies.
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Brent Schlender (Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader)
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LEADERSHIP | Intuit’s CEO on Building a Design-Driven Company Brad Smith | 222 words Although 46 similar products were on the market when Intuit launched Quicken, in 1983, it immediately became the market leader in personal finance software and has held that position for three decades. That’s because Quicken was so well designed that using it is intuitive. But by the time Smith became CEO, in 2008, the company had become overly focused on adding incremental features that delivered ease of use but not delight. What was missing was an emotional connection with customers. He and his team set out to integrate design thinking into every part of Intuit. They changed the layout of the office, reduced the number of cubes, and added more collaboration spaces and places for impromptu work. They increased the number of designers by nearly 600% and now hold quarterly design conferences. They bring in people who have created exceptionally designed products, such as the Nest thermostat and the Kayak travel website, to share insights with Intuit employees. The company acquired one start-up, called Mint, and collaborates with another, called ZenPayroll, to improve customer experience. Although most people don’t think of financial software as a category driven by emotion or design, Smith writes, Intuit’s D4D (“design for delight”) program has paid off. For example, its SnapTax app, inspired by consumers’ migration to smartphones, led one user to write, “I want this app to have my babies.
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Anonymous
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Drum compacting
SRS Engineering Corporation ® is a serious business. Hazardous materials storage to develop a plan for taking a disciplined approach to exposure can be devastating. Security storage approach to learn about your site begins with a consultation-and other factors that reduce the risk to go to all-not only prevention but prevention. Online or on-site-it with a consulting session with the experts begins. SRS Engineering Corporation storage-industry leader-evaluation, engineering, and drum compacting and SRS Engineering Corporation building that features; Will protect the, to install with your future team provides. Quality security store is a part of everyone's business. We have the same objective in mind, and that's a price, a great customer experience and quality products matched with your ultimate satisfaction every time, to distribute.
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SRS Engineering Corporation
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Responsibility and accountability create self-organizing teams that work. The Declaration of Interdependence contains the principle, "We boost performance through group accountability for results and shared responsibility for team effectiveness." When an individual commits to delivering a particular feature during an iteration he accepts accountability for that delivery. When the team commits to a set of features by the end of the milestone, all members of the team accept that accountability. The product manager agrees to be accountable for providing requirements information to the team. The project leader agrees to be accountable for resolving impediments to team progress. When a team member commits to provide some information to another the next day, he has agreed to be accountable for that action. When team members commit to each other, when the team commits to the customer, when the project leader commits to provide the team with a particular resource, they are all agreeing to be held accountable.
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Jim Highsmith (Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products)
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equivalent to an operating system (OS), such as iOS or Android. I am sure you want a quality OS and see it periodically upgraded and increasingly become more powerful and useful. Your skill set is equivalent to the useful apps that you can use on your devices. Likewise, I am certain you want your apps to be frequently updated, including bug fixes, reliability improvements, and feature enhancements—and that you add apps as needed or desired. Your strategic thinking is equivalent to the intelligence in your OS and apps (working together) that define the outcomes or results you want to
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Jason L. Ma (Young Leaders 3.0: Stories, Insights, and Tips for Next-Generation Achievers)
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good storyteller, build good relationships internally and externally with key ecosystem constituents, take calculated risks, be quickly adaptable and flexible, communicate humbly but firmly, recruit all the time, implement sound business processes, and execute-execute-execute pragmatically within your ecosystem with purpose! If not, success will be just a pipe dream or fleeting experience, as building a start-up successfully is quite difficult. And great ideas don’t just come to you. You must pursue them. Regardless of what your vision for the future is, find ways to keep strengthening your pragmatic combination of mind-set, skill set, direction, strategies, know-how, and execution! If the featured young
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Jason L. Ma (Young Leaders 3.0: Stories, Insights, and Tips for Next-Generation Achievers)
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Barack Obama seemed to suggest he was on the side of those who favored radical overhaul, but he has governed as a man who believes in reform at the margins. This is the heart of why his presidency has been so frustrating for so many: He campaigned as an insurrectionist and has governed as an institutionalist. And how could he do anything but? He is, after all, a product of the very institutions that are now in such manifest crisis. The central tragic irony of the presidency of Barack Obama is that his election marked the crowning achievement of the post-1960s meritocracy, just at the moment that the system was imploding on itself. Like all ruling orders, the meritocracy tends to cultivate within its most privileged members an abiding devotion. Many of the figures who feature most prominently in this era’s chronicle of woe, are, like Obama himself, products of the process of elite formation we call the meritocracy, the interlocking institutions that purport to select the brightest, most industrious, and most ambitious members of the society and cultivate them into leaders:
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Christopher L. Hayes (Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy)
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This story isn't over.' He pulled again at the loose thread, winding it around his thumb. The thread was long and silvery, like a thread of moonlight. Spider's skillful fingers teased and pulled on the delicate thread. And as they did so, the Daylight Folk gradually became aware of the cloud of butterflies and moths returning. Softly, they settled onto the stones and terracotta tiles of the roof. Softly, they settled onto the stones of the parapet where Spider sat. Softly, they clustered and blossomed and bloomed, hanging like grapes in the luminous air-- and soon the onlookers started to see a figure-- no, two figures-- taking shape among them. For a moment, it was impossible to see more than an outline. But as the shapes became clearer, the Daylight Folk were able to see a man and a woman, hand in hand. Their faces were almost familiar, and yet not quite the same as before: the woman small-featured and freckle-faced; the man dark-haired and soulful. Each of them was staring at the other in amazement.
'Tom?' said Charissa.
'Charissa?' said Tom.
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Joanne Harris (The Moonlight Market)
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Third, and finally, Clara designated certain team members to clean up messes, such as “fixing bugs in real time.” She assigned other engineers to focus on developing new features and other promising solutions.
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Robert I. Sutton (The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder)
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With a historian’s eye, Archibald Gracie attempted to separate truth from fantasy as he listened to the survivors’ stories, a potential book beginning to form in his mind. Second Officer Lightoller and Third Officer Pitman regularly stopped by the small cabin Gracie shared with Hugh Woolner to discuss various aspects of the disaster. All agreed that the explosions heard during the sinking could not have been the ship’s boilers blowing up. From the discovery of the severed wreck in 1985 we now know that the “explosions” were actually the sound of the ship being wrenched apart. But Gracie and Lightoller firmly believed that the ship had sunk intact—a view that would become the prevailing opinion for the next seventy-three years. Gracie thought that Norris Williams and Jack Thayer, “the two young men cited as authority … of the break-in-two theory,” had confused the falling funnel for the ship breaking apart. But both Williams and Thayer knew exactly what they had seen, as did some other eyewitnesses. On the Carpathia, Jack Thayer described the stages of the ship’s sinking and breaking apart to Lewis Skidmore, a Brooklyn art teacher, who drew sketches that were later featured in many newspapers. The inaccuracies in Skidmore’s drawings, however, only bolstered the belief that the ship had, in fact, sunk intact. And what of the most famous Titanic legend of all—that the band played “Nearer My God to Thee” as the ship neared its end? It’s often claimed that this was a myth that took hold among survivors on the Carpathia and captivated the public in the aftermath of the disaster. None of the musicians survived to confirm or deny the story, but Harold Bride noted that the last tune he heard being played as he left the wireless cabin was “Autumn.” For a time this was believed to be a hymn tune by that name, but Walter Lord proposed in The Night Lives On that Bride must have been referring to “Songe d’Automne,” a popular waltz by Archibald Joyce that is listed in White Star music booklets of the period. Historian George Behe, however, has carefully studied the survivor accounts regarding the music that was heard during the sinking and has found credible evidence that “Nearer My God to Thee” and perhaps other hymns were played toward the end. Behe also recounts that the orchestra’s leader, Wallace Hartley, was once asked by a friend what he would do if he ever found himself on a sinking ship. Hartley replied, “I don’t think I could do better than play ‘O God, Our Help in Ages Past’ or ‘Nearer My God to Thee.’ ” The legendary hymn may not have been the very last tune played on the Titanic but it seems possible that it was heard on the sloping deck that night.
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Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
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An even more modern marijuana cult, on traditional shamanistic lines, was shown on “CBS News” in 1970, featuring some American G.I.s in Vietnam. The soldiers used a shotgun – regarded religiously and named “Ralph” – to inhale large quantities of the weed and become thoroughly stoned. The squad leader, acting like a Stone Age shaman, ejected the shells from the shotgun, inserted the grass into the breach and then blew the smoke into the mouth of each of the men in turn. Professor Peter Furst, an anthropologist, has commented that such “spontaneous ritualization” almost seems to be innate in the use of psychedelic drugs (cf., the story immediately above, and the tradition of passing the joint in a magic circle among even the most casual smokers) and that the use of a weapon of death is strangely similar to the way in which some South American Indians use tubes similar to deadly blowguns in psychedelic religious rites.
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Robert Anton Wilson (Sex, Drugs & Magick – A Journey Beyond Limits)
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The increasingly open expression of unvarnished animus toward people of different race, religion, ethnicity, and even gender has become the staple of populist leaders throughout the world. From the United States to Hungary, from Italy to India, leaders who offer little more than racism and/or bigotry as their policy platform are becoming a defining feature of the political landscape, a ground force that shapes elections and policies
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Abhijit V. Banerjee (Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems)
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The increasingly open expression of unvarnished animus toward people of different race, religion, ethnicity, and even gender has become the staple of populist leaders throughout the world. From the United States to Hungary, from Italy to India, leaders who offer little more than racism and/or bigotry as their policy platform are becoming a defining feature of the political landscape, a ground force that shapes elections and policies.
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Abhijit V. Banerjee (Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems)
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Page 429:
The identifying characteristics of Marxist biology are numerous. Salient among these is the rejection of Malthusian doctrine. As Margaret Sanger admitted, "A remarkable feature of Marxian propaganda has been the almost complete unanimity with which the implications of the Malthusian doctrines have been derided, denounced, and repudiated. Any defense of the so-called 'Law of Population' was enough to stamp one, in the eyes of the orthodox Marxians, as a 'tool of the capitalistic class,' seeking to dampen the ardor of those who expressed the belief that men might create a better world for themselves. Malthus, they claimed, was actuated by selfish motives. He was not merely a hidebound aristocrat, but a pessimist who was trying to kill all hope of human progress. By Marx, Engels, Bebel, Kautsky and the celebrated leaders and interpreters of Marx's great 'Bible of the Working Class' ... birth control has been looked upon as a subtle Machiavelian sophistry created for the purpose of placing the blame for human misery elsewhere than at the door of the capitalistic class. Upon this point the orthodox Marxian mind has been universally and sternly uncompromising.
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Conway Zirkle (Evolution, Marxian biology and the social scene)
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My job as tech lead was to continue to write code, but with the added responsibilities of representing the group to management, vetting our plans for feature delivery, and dealing with a lot of the details of the project management process.
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Camille Fournier (The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change)
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the union of all people of German origin for the restoration of a great German Reich, whose distinctive feature would be the race of its inhabitants; the need for more living space for the German people, which implied territorial expansion towards the East; and instead of parliamentarism, which he saw as a degenerate and useless system, the need of a strong leader to whom absolute obedience ought to be sworn.
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Captivating History (Adolf Hitler: A Captivating Guide to the Life of the Führer of Nazi Germany (The Second World War))
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Our Journey Together' features unforgettable moments from our time in Washington: building the Southern Border Wall; cutting America’s taxes; confirming almost 300 federal judges and 3 Supreme Court justices; rebuilding our military; creating Space Force; dealing with Kim Jong-Un, President Xi, President Putin, and many other world leaders; and battling liberals on two Impeachment Witch Hunts, just to name a few.
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Donald J. Trump (Our Journey Together)