“
Well, if you wake up intending to murder someone at two o'clock, you hardly think what you're going to feed the corpse for dinner.
”
”
Donna Tartt (Dr. Dean Ornish's Program for Reversing Heart Disease: The Only System Scientifically Proven to Reverse Heart Disease Without Drugs or Surgery)
“
Do you know what you sound like?' said Mrs. Oliver. 'A computer. You know. You're programming yourself. That's what they call it, isn't it? I mean you're feeding all these things into yourself all day and then you're going to see what comes out.
”
”
Agatha Christie (Hallowe'en Party (Hercule Poirot, #41))
“
The Matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games,' said the voice-over, 'in early graphics programs and military experimentation with cranial jacks.' On the Sony, a two-dimensional space war faded behind a forest of mathematically generated ferns, demonstrating the spatial possibilities of logarithmic spirals; cold blue military footage burned through, lab animals wired into test systems, helmets feeding into fire control circuits of tanks and war planes. 'Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...
”
”
William Gibson (Neuromancer (Sprawl, #1))
“
The red lipstick? It's supposed to signal fertility and readiness to mate. Just like the swollen red butt of a baboon. That tight-fitting little dress that shows off your curves? From the standpoint of evolutionary biology, big breasts represent a healthy mate who can feed a lot of offspring. That's why men are programmed to like big tits. When you show off your curves, what you're really doing is advertising to the whole world: "Look at me! I'm a healthy female! I'd be a perfect mate! Come mount me!
”
”
Oliver Markus (Why Men And Women Can't Be Friends)
“
Are you still an android?” Cinder said around a bite of toast. “Sometimes I forget.” “Me too.” Iko ducked her head. “When we saw the feed of you jumping off that ledge, I was so scared I thought my wiring was going to catch fire. And I thought, I will do anything to make sure she’s all right.” She kicked at a pile of stray screws on the carpet. “I guess some programming never goes away, no matter how evolved a personality chip gets.” Licking some jam from her fingertips, Cinder grinned. “That’s not programming, you wing nut. That’s friendship.” Iko’s eyes brightened.
”
”
Marissa Meyer (Winter (The Lunar Chronicles, #4))
“
IF YOU DON’T FEED YOUR MIND WITH SUCCESS. IT WILL ROT WITH MEDIOCRITY!
”
”
BLONDEL SEUMO
“
Oh, I say I have an ocelot and it’s a joke, but I’ve had so many news programs in this country say, 'So what’s it like, having an ocelot?” And I’ll say, “It’s marvelous just to see them run free. When feeding time comes and they’re mewling, it just warms your heart.' People will really believe anything. You may have noticed this. It’s not just me. Look around.
”
”
Greg Proops
“
When we read a magazine, we consume. When we watch a television program, we consume. Whatever we consume affects our body and mind. If we consume toxic magazine articles, movies, or video games, they will feed our craving, our anger, and our fear.
”
”
Thich Nhat Hanh (How to Love (Mindfulness Essentials, #3))
“
Do you know how much cheaper we could buy that feed if we’d get into the government program?” “The feed wouldn’t be cheaper. It’d just mean somebody else was helpin’ pay for it, is all.
”
”
Elmer Kelton (The Time It Never Rained)
“
The public education system did not promote the enlightenment of the individual, but rather suppressed critical thought and neurodiversity. It produced preformatted, standardized, and obedient worker-citizen consumers that are programmed to feed the system that holds them captured, exploited, and enslaved. Silently and collectively, they are sawing the branch of reason on which we are all sitting.
”
”
Rajinder Jhol (Shine)
“
She just wouldn’t stop reimplementing operating system features for her programming class. The only thing keeping her alive was a feeding tube the docs had managed to force up her nose while she was in restraints.
”
”
Annalee Newitz (Autonomous)
“
...a bad diet will eventually kill our dreams. It's essential that we constantly evaluate the nutritional value of what we are feeding ourselves. It may come down to how many hours of television we're viewing, the quality of the programs we're watching, what music we're listening to, the material we're reading, the conversations we're having, the movies we're seeing, the Web sites we're visiting, the video games we're playing, or the people with whom we're associating. As harmless as these may sometimes seem, excessive consumption of things that induce negative thinking, bad habits, and wrong behavior will thwart our potential.
A good litmus test is to ask yourself if you're giving more airtime to the media, educators, politicians, economists, pop stars, friends, or tradition than you are to God's Word. To see our dreams actualized, God's Word and His will must take precedence over everything else.
”
”
Christine Caine
“
Your brain grows and changes based on feedback. What you tell it, changes it. And while it’s rewiring itself, your brain then feeds those new programs, those new pictures of yourself, back to you. It’s a feedback “loop.” What you put in, you get back out, in a continuous “neural activity feedback loop.
”
”
Shad Helmstetter (The Power of Neuroplasticity)
“
The lack of divine love has created a parasitical environment in which humans feed on other humans for power, much like vampires seeking blood, although this feeding is energetic power. The lack of divine love frequency has resulted in an environment in which humanity is incapable to undergo the natural process of biological ascension without the help of divine intervention. And yet, divine intervention requires the individual to be conscious beyond the belief in news, government, corporate, and mask wearing programming to ask in commitment, benevolence, and dedication for this hyper vigilant assistance.
”
”
Deborah Bravandt
“
A Social Worker develops programs to help feed the poor,” she had said, “and makes sure there’s a chicken in every pot. A Counselor asks them how they feel about getting the chicken. And a Therapist diagnoses and treats them when they start hearing voices from the chicken telling them to cut their wrists.
”
”
Mark Matthews (Stray)
“
Keep those people close who support your efforts and do not try to sabotage you. Ask family and friends to stop giving you boxes of candy and cakes as gifts. Instead suggest flowers, a card, or a fruit basket. Tell your mother that if she really loves you she’ll feed you properly, forgoing her traditional beef stroganoff.
”
”
John A. McDougall (The Mcdougall Program for Maximum Weight Loss)
“
thoughts (ANTs) and talk back to them, you begin to take away their power and gain control over your moods. Kill the ANTs by feeding your emotional anteater. The “kill the ANTs/feed your anteater” exercise is for whenever you feel anxious, nervous, depressed, or frazzled. Here are some examples of ways to kill these ANTs:
”
”
Daniel G. Amen (Change Your Brain, Change Your Life: The Breakthrough Program for Conquering Anxiety, Depression, Obsessiveness, Anger, and Impulsiveness)
“
AI is a fantasy, nothing but a story we tell about our code. It is also a cover for sloppy engineering. Making a supposed AI program that customizes a feed is less work than creating a great user interface that allows users to probe and improve what they see on their own terms—and that is so because AI has no objective criteria for success.
”
”
Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
“
One of the greatest problems for systems programmers (the people who write compilers, interpreters, assemblers, and other programs to be used by many people) is to figure out how to write error-detecting routines in such a way that the messages which they feed to the user whose program has a "bug" provide high-level, rather than low-level, descriptions of the problem. it is an interesting reversal that when something goes wrong in a genetic "program" (e.g., a mutation), the "bug" is manifest only to people on a high level - namely on the phenotype level, not the genotype level. Actually, modern biology uses mutations as one of its principal windows onto genetic processes, because of their multilevel traceability.
”
”
Douglas R. Hofstadter
“
What was shocking were the rewards my father's cousins had gathered in the intervening couple of decades. They farmed now on thousands of acres, not hundreds. They drove fancy pickup trucks, owned lakefront property and second homes. A simple Internet search offered the truth of where their riches had come from: good ol' Uncle Sam. Recently I clicked again on a database of farm subsidy payments, and found that five of my father's first cousins had been paid, all told, $3 million between 1995 and 2005 - and that on top of whatever they'd earned outright for the sale of their corn and soybeans. They worked hard, certainly. They'd saved and scrimped through the lean years. They were good and honorable yeoman, and now they'd come through to their great reward: a prime place at the trough of the welfare state. All that corn syrup guzzled down the gullets of America's overweight children, all that beef inefficiently fattened on cheap feed, all that ethanol being distilled in heartland refineries: all of it underwritten by as wasteful a government program as now exists this side of the defense industry. In the last ten years, the federal government has paid $131 million in subsidies and disaster insurance in just the county [in Minnesota] where I grew up. Corn is subsidized to keep it cheap, and the subsidies encourage overproduction, which encourages a scramble for ever more ways to use corn, and thus bigger subsidies - the perfect feedback loop of government welfare.
”
”
Philip Connors
“
In these lands we are not experiencing the primitive infancy of capitalism but its vicious senility. Underdevelopment isn't a stage of development, but its consequence. Latin America's underdevelopment arises from external development, and continues to feed it. A system made impotent by its function of international servitude, and moribund since birth, has feet of clay. It pretends to be destiny and would like to be thought eternal. All memory is subversive, because it is different, and likewise any program for the future. The zombie is made to eat without salt: salt is dangerous, it could awaken him. The system has its paradigm in the immutable society of ants. For that reason it accords ill with the history of humankind, because that is always changing. And because in the history of humankind every act of destruction meets its response, sooner or later, in an act of creation.
”
”
Eduardo Galeano (Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent)
“
Iko ducked her head. "When we saw the feed of you jumping off that ledge, I was so scared I thought my wiring was going to catch fire. And I thought, I will do anything to make sure she's all right." She kicked at a pile of stray screws on the carpet. "I guess some programming never goes away, no matter how evolved a personality chip gets>"
Licking some jam from her fingertips, Cinder grinned. "That's not programming, you wing nut. That's friendship."
Iko's eyes brightened. "Maybe you're right.
”
”
Marissa Meyer (Winter (The Lunar Chronicles, #4))
“
The instant you catch yourself in the middle of a negative thought or self-defeating question, interrupt it! Slam on the brakes like a car heading for a cliff and stop that train of thought! Mentally imagine a big rubber stamp that says “CANCEL” and stamp it out. Bob Proctor, a master success coach and creator of the Goal Achiever program, suggests saying “NEXT” or “SWITCH” the instant you notice a negative thought, then immediately replacing it with a positive thought, affirmation, or question. Soon you’ll find that your mind switches polarity and the negative thoughts pop up less.
”
”
Tom Venuto (Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle: Transform Your Body Forever Using the Secrets of the Leanest People in the World)
“
share the same bad traits: They drink too much, or cheat on you. Maybe you have been trying to improve your health by going on a diet and exercise program. Except that you’ve started and stopped this same exercise and diet program about eleven times. You can stay on the diet for about six days and then you go on a feeding frenzy! And you wake up at 6 A.M. for three days and go for a run but on day four it’s raining and you never make it to the park again. Until the twelfth time you start the program. Or perhaps you’ve been meaning to get along better with your mother. You love her and
”
”
Carmen Harra (Everyday Karma: A Psychologist and Renowned Metaphysical Intuitive Shows You How to Change Your Life by Changing Your Karma)
“
Our Difficulty in Believing in Providence The first obstacle is that, as long as we have not experienced concretely the fidelity of Divine Providence to provide for our essential needs, we have difficulty believing in it and we abandon it. We have hard heads, the words of Jesus do not suffice for us, we want to see at least a little in order to believe! Well, we do not see it operating around us in a clear manner. How, then, are we to experience it? It is important to know one thing: We cannot experience this support from God unless we leave Him the necessary space in which He can express Himself. I would like to make a comparison. As long as a person who must jump with a parachute does not jump out into the void, he cannot feel that the cords of the parachute will support him, because the parachute has not yet had the chance to open. One must first jump and it is only later that one feels carried. And so it is in spiritual life: “God gives in the measure that we expect of Him,” says Saint John of the Cross. And Saint Francis de Sales says: “The measure of Divine Providence acting on us is the degree of confidence that we have in it.” This is where the problem lies. Many do not believe in Providence because they’ve never experienced it, but they’ve never experienced it because they’ve never jumped into the void and taken the leap of faith. They never give it the possibility to intervene. They calculate everything, anticipate everything, they seek to resolve everything by counting on themselves, instead of counting on God. The founders of religious orders proceed with the audacity of this spirit of faith. They buy houses without having a penny, they receive the poor although they have nothing with which to feed them. Then, God performs miracles for them. The checks arrive and the granaries are filled. But, too often, generations later, everything is planned, calculated. One doesn’t incur an expense without being sure in advance to have enough to cover it. How can Providence manifest itself? And the same is true in the spiritual life. If a priest drafts all his sermons and his talks, down to the least comma, in order to be sure that he does not find himself wanting before his audience, and never has the audacity to begin preaching with a prayer and confidence in God as his only preparation, how can he have this beautiful experience of the Holy Spirit, Who speaks through his mouth? Does the Gospel not say, …do not worry about how to speak or what you should say; for what you are to say will be given to you when the time comes; because it will not be you who will be speaking, but the Spirit of your Father will be speaking in you (Matthew 10:19)? Let us be very clear. Obviously we do not want to say that it is a bad thing to be able to anticipate things, to develop a budget or prepare one’s homilies. Our natural abilities are also instruments in the hands of Providence! But everything depends on the spirit in which we do things. We must clearly understand that there is an enormous difference in attitude of heart between one, who in fear of finding himself wanting because he does not believe in the intervention of God on behalf of those who lean on Him, programs everything in advance to the smallest detail and does not undertake anything except in the exact measure of its actual possibilities, and one who certainly undertakes legitimate things, but who abandons himself with confidence in God to provide all that is asked of him and who thus surpasses his own possibilities. And that which God demands of us always goes beyond our natural human possibilities!
”
”
Jacques Philippe (Searching for and Maintaining Peace)
“
Tarantulas have also received a lot of
bad press in the movies. Many movies
and television programs starring such
noted actors as Sean Connery, The
Three Stooges, Harrison Ford, and
William Shatner, have featured tarantulas
as dangerous to humans or menaces to
civilization. The Tarantula That Ate Tokyo
is a long-standing joke among horrormovie buffs. The fact is that these
movies play with the ignorance and fears
passed on for generations by unenlightened people. Nobody would pay to see
the movie The Beagle That Ate Boston
since everybody knows what a beagle
really is. Few know tarantulas as well.
”
”
Stanley A. Schultz (The Tarantula Keeper's Guide: Comprehensive Information on Care, Housing, and Feeding)
“
Lost In The World"
(feat. Justin Vernon of Bon Iver)
[Sample From "Woods": Justin Vernon]
I'm up in the woods, I'm down on my mind
I'm building a still to slow down the time
I'm up in the woods, I'm down on my mind
I'm building a still to slow down the time
I'm up in the woods, I'm down on my mind
I'm building a still to slow down the time
[Chorus 2x:]
I'm lost in the world, I'm down on my mind
I'm new in the city, and I'm down for the night
Down for the night
Said she's down for the night
[Kanye West:]
You're my devil, you're my angel
You're my heaven, you're my hell
You're my now, you're my forever
You're my freedom, you're my jail
You're my lies, you're my truth
You're my war, you're my truce
You're my questions, you're my proof
You're my stress and you're my masseuse
Mama-say mama-say ma-ma-coo-sah
Lost in this plastic life,
Let's break out of this fake ass party
Turn this into a classic night
If we die in each other's arms we still get laid in the afterlife
If we die in each other's arms we still get laid
[Chorus:]
(I'm lost in the world)
Run from the lights, run from the night,
(I'm down on my mind)
Run for your life,
I'm new in the city, and I'm down for the night
Down for the night
Down for the night
I'm lost in the world, been down for my whole life,
I'm new in the city but I'm down for the night
Down for the night
Down for the night
Who will survive in America?
Who will survive in America?
Who will survive in America?
[Chorus:]
I'm lost in the world, I'm down on my mind
I'm new in the city, and I'm down for the night
Down for the night
Said she's down for the night
I'm lost in the world, I'm down on my mind
I'm new in the city and I'm goin' for a ride
Goin' for a ride
I'm lost in the world, been down for my whole life
I'm new in the city but I'm down the for the night
Down for a night, down for a good time
[Gil-Scott Heron:]
Us living as we do upside down.
And the new word to have is revolution.
People don't even want to hear the preacher spill or spiel because God's whole card has been thoroughly piqued.
And America is now blood and tears instead of milk and honey.
The youngsters who were programmed to continue fucking up woke up one night digging Paul Revere and Nat Turner as the good guys.
America stripped for bed and we had not all yet closed our eyes.
The signs of truth were tattooed across our open ended vagina.
We learned to our amazement the untold tale of scandal.
Two long centuries buried in the musty vault, hosed down daily with a gagging perfume.
America was a bastard, the illegitimate daughter of the mother country whose legs were then spread around the world and a rapist known as freedom, free doom.
Democracy, liberty, and justice were revolutionary code names that preceded the bubbling bubbling bubbling bubbling bubbling in the mother country's crotch
What does Webster say about soul?
All I want is a good home and a wife
And our children and some food to feed them every night.
After all is said and done build a new route to China if they'll have you.
Who will survive in America?
Who will survive in America?
Who will survive in America?
Who will survive in America?
”
”
Kanye West
“
John F. Kennedy was outraged in 1962 when the CIA used chemical toxins to contaminate the sugar crop sent from Cuba to the USSR. He said, “This could be the beginning of chemical espionage.” Controls over CIA activities died with John Kennedy. More sophisticated chemicals have been developed since then. At the time the “feed the poor” program was underway in California, it was revealed that five major chicken farmers in Mississippi had 22 million poisoned birds. The chickens had been fed chicken feed contaminated “mysteriously” with Dieldrin, a deadly insecticide that can cause cancer. Some of those poisoned chickens were sent to school lunch programs for needy children in Detroit and Chicago.
”
”
Mae Brussell (The Essential Mae Brussell: Investigations of Fascism in America)
“
The pro-life movement has not won the public argument-and, arguably, it hasn't really tried. The message of abortion as a moral evil, as an affront to the loving God who made humanity in His own image, has proven curiously ineffective. Why?
For one thing, that message seems wildly inconsistent with the politics otherwise practiced by those who claim the "pro-life" mantle If one is driven to electoral advocacy by the conviction that mankind bears the image of God, why stop at opposing abortion? What about the shunning of refugees? What about the forced separation of babies from their mothers? What about the hollowing out of programs that feed hungry kids? What about the lifelong incarceration of nonviolent offenders and the wrongful execution of the innocent?
”
”
Tim Alberta (The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism)
“
This situation is similar to edema, a condition in which fluid leaks out of the blood vessels and accumulates elsewhere in the body (for example, in the legs), causing swelling. Despite having too much water in the body, people with edema may experience unquenchable thirst, because there’s not enough water in the blood, where it’s needed. Telling people with edema to drink less is no more effective than food restriction for weight loss, because it ignores the underlying cause. Insulin (and other influences, as we’ll discuss later) has programmed fat cells into calorie-storage overdrive. People chronically overeat because they’re trying to keep enough calories in the blood to feed the brain, compensating for those being siphoned off by overstimulated fat cells.
”
”
David Ludwig (Always Hungry?: Conquer cravings, retrain your fat cells and lose weight permanently)
“
Since our civilization is irreversibly dependent on electronics, abolition of EMR is out of the question. However, as a first step toward averting disaster, we must halt the introduction of new sources of electromagnetic energy while we investigate the biohazards of those we already have with a completeness and honesty that have so far been in short supply. New sources must be allowed only after their risks have been evaluated on the basis of the knowledge acquired in such a moratorium.
With an adequately funded research program, the moratorium need last no more than five years, and the ensuing changes could almost certainly be performed without major economic trauma. It seems possible that a different power frequency—say 400 hertz instead of 60—might prove much safer. Burying power lines and providing them with grounded shields would reduce the electric fields around them, and magnetic shielding is also feasible.
A major part of the safety changes would consist of energy-efficiency reforms that would benefit the economy in the long run. These new directions would have been taken years ago but for the opposition of power companies concerned with their short-term profits, and a government unwilling to challenge them. It is possible to redesign many appliances and communications devices so they use far less energy. The entire power supply could be decentralized by feeding electricity from renewable sources (wind, flowing water, sunlight, georhermal and ocean thermal energy conversion, and so forth) into local distribution nets. This would greatly decrease hazards by reducing the voltages and amperages required. Ultimately, most EMR hazards could be eliminated by the development of efficient photoelectric converters to be used as the primary power source at each point of consumption. The changeover would even pay for itself, as the loss factors of long-distance power transmission—not to mention the astronomical costs of building and decommissioning short-lived nuclear power plants—were eliminated. Safety need not imply giving up our beneficial machines.
Obviously, given the present technomilitary control of society in most parts of the world, such sane efficiency will be immensely difficult to achieve. Nevertheless, we must try. Electromagnetic energy presents us with the same imperative as nuclear energy: Our survival depends on the ability of upright scientists and other people of goodwill to break the military-industrial death grip on our policy-making institutions.
”
”
Robert O. Becker (The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life)
“
If government had declined to build racially separate public housing in cities where segregation hadn’t previously taken root, and instead had scattered integrated developments throughout the community, those cities might have developed in a less racially toxic fashion, with fewer desperate ghettos and more diverse suburbs. If the federal government had not urged suburbs to adopt exclusionary zoning laws, white flight would have been minimized because there would have been fewer racially exclusive suburbs to which frightened homeowners could flee. If the government had told developers that they could have FHA guarantees only if the homes they built were open to all, integrated working-class suburbs would likely have matured with both African Americans and whites sharing the benefits. If state courts had not blessed private discrimination by ordering the eviction of African American homeowners in neighborhoods where association rules and restrictive covenants barred their residence, middle-class African Americans would have been able gradually to integrate previously white communities as they developed the financial means to do so. If churches, universities, and hospitals had faced loss of tax-exempt status for their promotion of restrictive covenants, they most likely would have refrained from such activity. If police had arrested, rather than encouraged, leaders of mob violence when African Americans moved into previously white neighborhoods, racial transitions would have been smoother. If state real estate commissions had denied licenses to brokers who claimed an “ethical” obligation to impose segregation, those brokers might have guided the evolution of interracial neighborhoods. If school boards had not placed schools and drawn attendance boundaries to ensure the separation of black and white pupils, families might not have had to relocate to have access to education for their children. If federal and state highway planners had not used urban interstates to demolish African American neighborhoods and force their residents deeper into urban ghettos, black impoverishment would have lessened, and some displaced families might have accumulated the resources to improve their housing and its location. If government had given African Americans the same labor-market rights that other citizens enjoyed, African American working-class families would not have been trapped in lower-income minority communities, from lack of funds to live elsewhere. If the federal government had not exploited the racial boundaries it had created in metropolitan areas, by spending billions on tax breaks for single-family suburban homeowners, while failing to spend adequate funds on transportation networks that could bring African Americans to job opportunities, the inequality on which segregation feeds would have diminished. If federal programs were not, even to this day, reinforcing racial isolation by disproportionately directing low-income African Americans who receive housing assistance into the segregated neighborhoods that government had previously established, we might see many more inclusive communities. Undoing the effects of de jure segregation will be incomparably difficult. To make a start, we will first have to contemplate what we have collectively done and, on behalf of our government, accept responsibility.
”
”
Richard Rothstein (The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America)
“
But there was one occasion when we went down to a village to set up our feeding kitchens and I noticed there was another relief operation there that had the same American supplies that we had who were doing something quite different. They were organizing food-for-work programs so that the people in the village would actually work and be paid in food. And the work they were doing were things that would help the whole village…..building a road or a school…..building a dam to catch the water when the rains came again…..building tube wells to tap deep into the aquifer. So the villagers were given the dignity of work at the same time they were providing something for the infrastructure of the village.
I said: “That’s really smart. Who are these people?” Gandhians. They were members of the Sarvodaya Movement….the Gandhian Movement. And I said: “That’s what I want to do.
”
”
Mark Juergensmeyer
“
of refugees? What about the forced separation of babies from their mothers? What about the hollowing out of programs that feed hungry kids? What about the lifelong incarceration of nonviolent offenders and the wrongful execution of the innocent? What about the Darwinist health-care system that prices out sick people and denies treatment to poor people and produces the developed world’s highest maternal mortality rate? What about the fact that, in 2020, guns had become the number one cause of death for children in the United States? Surely even the most devoted anti-abortion advocate could spot the problem when Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the former Trump press secretary who was running for governor of Arkansas, declared, “We will make sure that when a kid is in the womb, they’re as safe as they are in a classroom.” Indeed, America set another new record for school shootings in 2022, and the evangelical movement was silent.
”
”
Tim Alberta (The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism)
“
Odd Fellows Chamber Music for 2013 will be in October this year
To Participants in the Odd Fellows Youth Chamber Music Project:
Because an elevator is being installed at the Lodge, probably during August, we have to change the date:
Instead of the two-week August program, we will be holding a weekend Baroque Festival in October, with an emphasis on Bach. There will be groups of all sizes and levels.
The Program will take place on October 19th and 20th, 2013. We will rehearse from 9:30 AM to 12 Noon, and from 1 PM to 5PM, on Saturday. We’ll be feeding you during the lunch break.
The performance will be at 3 PM on Sunday October 20th. Reception after.
We’ll still be keeping one person on each part, and without Conductors.
We will be sending out applications soon. Probably the deadline will be July 1st. Hope you all can make it.
If you know of anyone who has played in the past who hasn’t gotten this invitation, please have them contact us. We’re trying not leave anyone out.
Cathy O’Connor
Ted Seitz
Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
”
”
Stephen Co
“
Not long ago, Malthusian thinking was revived with a vengeance. In 1967 William and Paul Paddock wrote Famine 1975!, and in 1968 the biologist Paul R. Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb, in which he proclaimed that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over” and predicted that by the 1980s sixty-five million Americans and four billion other people would starve to death. New York Times Magazine readers were introduced to the battlefield term triage (the emergency practice of separating wounded soldiers into the savable and the doomed) and to philosophy-seminar arguments about whether it is morally permissible to throw someone overboard from a crowded lifeboat to prevent it from capsizing and drowning everyone.10 Ehrlich and other environmentalists argued for cutting off food aid to countries they deemed basket cases.11 Robert McNamara, president of the World Bank from 1968 to 1981, discouraged financing of health care “unless it was very strictly related to population control, because usually health facilities contributed to the decline of the death rate, and thereby to the population explosion.” Population-control programs in India and China (especially under China’s one-child policy) coerced women into sterilizations, abortions, and being implanted with painful and septic IUDs.12
”
”
Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress)
“
A living being like you or me usually has two elements: a set of instructions that tell the system how to keep going and how to reproduce itself, and a mechanism to carry out the instructions. In biology, these two parts are called genes and metabolism. But it is worth emphasising that there need be nothing bio-logical about them. For example, a computer virus is a program that will make copies of itself in the memory of a computer, and will transfer itself to other computers. Thus it fits the definition of a living system that I have given. Like a biological virus, it is a rather degenerate form, because it contains only instructions or genes, and doesn’t have any metabolism of its own. Instead, it reprograms the metabolism of the host computer, or cell. Some people have questioned whether viruses should count as life, because they are parasites, and cannot exist independently of their hosts. But then most forms of life, ourselves included, are parasites, in that they feed off and depend for their survival on other forms of life. I think computer viruses should count as life. Maybe it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. Talk about creating life in our own image. I shall return to electronic forms of life later on.
”
”
Stephen Hawking (Brief Answers to the Big Questions)
“
Everything in Nature ran according to its own nature; the running of grass was in its growing, the running of rivers their flowing, granite bubbled up, cooled, compressed and crumbled, birds lived, flew, sang and died, everything did what it needed to do, each simultaneously running its own race, each by living according to its own nature together, never leaving any other part of the universe behind. The world’s Holy things raced constantly together, not to win anything over the next, but to keep the entire surging diverse motion of the living world from grinding to a halt, which is why there is no end to that race; no finish line. That would be oblivion to all.
For the Indigenous Souls of all people who can still remember how to be real cultures, life is a race to be elegantly run, not a race to be competitively won. It cannot be won; it is the gift of the world’s diverse beautiful motion that must be maintained. Because human life has been give the gift of our elegant motion, whether we limp, roll, crawl, stroll, or fly, it is an obligation to engender that elegance of motion in our daily lives in service of maintaining life by moving and living as beautifully as we can. All else has, to me, the familiar taste of that domineering warlike harshness that daily tries to cover its tracks in order to camouflage the deep ruts of some old, sick, grinding, ungainly need to flee away from the elegance of our original Indigenous human souls. Our attempt to avariciously conquer or win a place where there are no problems, whether it be Heaven or a “New Democracy,” never mind if it is spiritually ugly and immorally “won” and taken from someone who is already there, has made a citifying world of people who, unconscious of it, have become our own ogreish problem to ourselves, our future, and the world. This is a problem that we cannot continue to attempt to competitively outrun by more and more effectively designed technological approaches to speed away from the past, for the specter of our own earth-wasting reality runs grinning competitively right alongside us. By developing even more effective and entertaining methods of escape that only burn up the earth, the air, animals, plants, and the deeper substance of what it should mean to be human, by competing to get ahead, we have created a brakeless competition that has outrun our innate beauty and marked out a very definite and imminent “finish” line.
Living in and on a sphere, we cannot really outrun ourselves anyway. Therefore, I say, the entire devastating and hideous state of the world and its constant wounding and wrecking of the wild, beautiful, natural, viable and small, only to keep alive an untenable cultural proceedance is truly a spiritual sickness, one that will not be cured by the efficient use of the same thinking that maintains the sickness. Nor can this overly expensive, highly funded illness be symptomatically kept at bay any longer by yet more political, environmental, or social programs.
We must as individuals and communities take the time necessary to learn how to indigenously remember what a sane, original existence for a viable people might look like.
Though there are marvellous things and amazing people doing them, both seen and unseen, these do not resemble in any way the general trend of what is going on now.
To begin remembering our Indigenous belonging on the Earth back to life we must metabolize as individuals the grief of recognition of our lost directions, digest it into a valuable spiritual compost that allows us to learn to stay put without outrunning our strange past, and get small, unarmed, brave, and beautiful.
By trying to feed the Holy in Nature the fruit of beauty from the tree of memory of our Indigenous Souls, grown in the composted failures of our past need to conquer, watered by the tears of cultural grief, we might become ancestors worth descending from and possibly grow a place of hope for a time beyond our own.
”
”
Martin Prechtel (The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic: The Parallel Lives of People as Plants: Keeping the Seeds Alive)
“
Emergency food has become very useful indeed, and to a very large assortment of people and institutions. The United States Department of Agriculture uses it to reduce the accumulation of embarrassing agricultural surpluses. Business uses it to dispose of nonstandard or unwanted product, to protect employee morale and avoid dump fees, and, of course, to accrue tax savings. Celebrities use it for exposure. Universities and hospitals, as well as caterers and restaurants, use it to absorb leftovers. Private schools use it to teach ethics, and public schools use it to instill a sense of civic responsibility. Churches use it to express their concern for the least of their brethren, and synagogues use it to be faithful to the tradition of including the poor at the table. Courts use it to avoid incarcerating people arrested for Driving While Intoxicated and a host of other offense. Environmentalists use it to reduce the solid waste stream. Penal institutions use it to create constructive outlets for the energies of their inmates, and youth-serving agencies of all sorts use it to provide service opportunities for young people. Both profit-making and nonprofit organizations use it to absorb unneeded kitchen and office equipment. A wide array of groups, organizations, and institutions benefits from the halo effect of 'feeding the hungry,' and this list does not even include the many functions for ordinary individuals--companionship, exercise, meaning, and purpose. . .If we didn't have hunger, we'd have to invent it.
”
”
Janet Poppendieck (Sweet Charity?: Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement)
“
Most of the mortgaged farmers.
Most of the white-collar workers who had been unemployed these three years and four and five.
Most of the people on relief rolls who wanted more relief.
Most of the suburbanites who could not meet the installment payments on the electric washing machine.
Such large sections of the American Legion as believed that only Senator Windrip would secure for them, and perhaps increase, the bonus.
Such popular Myrtle Boulevard or Elm Avenue preachers as, spurred by the examples of Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin, believed they could get useful publicity out of supporting a slightly queer program that promised prosperity without anyone's having to work for it.
The remnants of the Kuklux Klan, and such leaders of the American Federation of Labor as felt they had been inadequately courted and bepromised by the old-line politicians, and the non-unionized common laborers who felt they had been inadequately courted by the same A.F. of L.
Back-street and over-the-garage lawyers who had never yet wangled governmental jobs.
The Lost Legion of the Anti-Saloon League—since it was known that, though he drank a lot, Senator Windrip also praised teetotalism a lot, while his rival, Walt Trowbridge, though he drank but little, said nothing at all in support of the Messiahs of Prohibition. These messiahs had not found professional morality profitable of late, with the Rockefellers and Wanamakers no longer praying with them nor paying.
Besides these necessitous petitioners, a goodish number of burghers who, while they were millionaires, yet maintained that their prosperity had been sorely checked by the fiendishness of the bankers in limiting their credit.
These were the supporters who looked to Berzelius Windrip to play the divine raven and feed them handsomely when he should become President, and from such came most of the fervid elocutionists who campaigned for him through September and October.
”
”
Sinclair Lewis (It Can't Happen Here)
“
Step 6. Ensure That Your Environment Supports Your Goals Some people subscribe to the philosophy that if the cure doesn’t hurt, it can’t be working. When it comes to permanent changes in diet and lifestyle, the opposite philosophy is the best: The less painful the program, the more likely it is to succeed. Take steps to make your new life easier. Modify your daily behavior so that your surroundings work for you, not against you. Have the right pots, pans, and utensils to cook with; have the right spices, herbs, and seasonings to make your meals delicious; have your cookbooks handy and review them often to make your dishes lively and appealing. Make sure you give yourself the time to shop for food and cook your meals. Change your life to support your health. Don’t sacrifice your health for worthless conveniences. Avoid temptation. Very few people could quit smoking without ridding their house of cigarettes. Alcoholics avoid bars to stop drinking. Protect yourself by protecting your environment. Decrease the time when you are exposed to rich foods to avoid testing your “willpower.” One of the best ways to do this is to throw all the rich foods out of the house. Just as important is to replace harmful foods with those used in the McDougall Program for Maximum Weight Loss. If many of your meals are eaten away from home, make the situations meet your needs. Go to restaurants that offer at least one delicious, nutritious item. Ask the waiter to remove the butter and olive oil from the table. Accept invitations to dinner from friends who eat and live healthfully. Bring healthful foods with you whenever possible. Keep those people close who support your efforts and do not try to sabotage you. Ask family and friends to stop giving you boxes of candy and cakes as gifts. Instead suggest flowers, a card, or a fruit basket. Tell your mother that if she really loves you she’ll feed you properly, forgoing her traditional beef stroganoff.
”
”
John A. McDougall (The Mcdougall Program for Maximum Weight Loss)
“
Nope. Look. The Raft is a media event. But in a much more profound, general
sense than you can possibly imagine."
"Huh?"
"It's created by the media in that without the media, people wouldn't know it
was here, Refus wouldn't come out and glom onto it the way they do. And it
sustains the media. It creates a lot of information flow-movies, news reports -
- you know."
"So you're creating your own news event to make money off the information flow
that it creates?" says the journalist, desperately trying to follow. His tone
of voice says that this is all a waste of videotape. His weary attitude
suggests that this is not the first time Rife has flown off on a bizarre
tangent.
"Partly. But that's only a very crude explanation. It really goes a lot deeper
than that. You've probably heard the expression that the Industry feeds off of
biomass, like a whale straining krill from the ocean."
"I've heard the expression, yes."
"That's my expression. I made it up. An expression like that is just like a
virus, you know -- it's a piece of information -- data -- that spreads from one
person to the next. Well, the function of the Raft is to bring more biomass.
To renew America. Most countries are static, all they need to do is keep having
babies. But America's like this big old clanking, smoking machine that just
lumbers across the landscape scooping up and eating everything in sight. Leaves
behind a trail of garbage a mile wide. Always needs more fuel...
"Now I have a different perspective on it. America must look, to those poor
little buggers down there, about the same as Crete looked to those poor Greek
suckers. Except that there's no coercion involved. Those people down there
give up their children willingly. Send them into the labyrinth by the millions
to be eaten up. The Industry feeds on them and spits back images, sends out
movies and TV programs, over my networks, images of wealth and exotic things
beyond their wildest dreams, back to those people, and it gives them something
to dream about, something to aspire to. And that is the function of the Raft.
It's just a big old krill carrier."
Finally the journalist gives up on being a journalist, just starts to slag L.
Bob Rife openly. He's had it with this guy. "That's disgusting. I can't
believe you can think about people that way."
"Shit, boy, get down off your high horse. Nobody really gets eaten. It's just
a figure of speech. They come here, they get decent jobs, find Christ, buy a
Weber grill, and live happily ever after. What's wrong with that?
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
See especially academia, which has effectively become a hope labor industrial complex. Within that system, tenured professors—ostensibly proof positive that you can, indeed, think about your subject of choice for the rest of your life, complete with job security, if you just work hard enough—encourage their most motivated students to apply for grad school. The grad schools depend on money from full-pay students and/or cheap labor from those students, so they accept far more master’s students than there are spots in PhD programs, and far more PhD students than there are tenure-track positions. Through it all, grad students are told that work will, in essence, save them: If they publish more, if they go to more conferences to present their work, if they get a book contract before graduating, their chances on the job market will go up. For a very limited few, this proves true. But it is no guarantee—and with ever-diminished funding for public universities, many students take on the costs of conference travel themselves (often through student loans), scrambling to make ends meet over the summer while they apply for the already-scarce number of academic jobs available, many of them in remote locations, with little promise of long-term stability. Some academics exhaust their hope labor supply during grad school. For others, it takes years on the market, often while adjuncting for little pay in demeaning and demanding work conditions, before the dream starts to splinter. But the system itself is set up to feed itself as long as possible. Most humanities PhD programs still offer little or nothing in terms of training for jobs outside of academia, creating a sort of mandatory tunnel from grad school to tenure-track aspirant. In the humanities, especially, to obtain a PhD—to become a doctor in your field of knowledge—is to adopt the refrain “I don’t have any marketable skills.” Many academics have no choice but to keep teaching—the only thing they feel equipped to do—even without fair pay or job security. Academic institutions are incentivized to keep adjuncts “doing what they love”—but there’s additional pressure from peers and mentors who’ve become deeply invested in the continued viability of the institution. Many senior academics with little experience of the realities of the contemporary market explicitly and implicitly advise their students that the only good job is a tenure-track academic job. When I failed to get an academic job in 2011, I felt soft but unsubtle dismay from various professors upon telling them that I had chosen to take a high school teaching job to make ends meet. It
”
”
Anne Helen Petersen (Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation)
“
I don’t know what to do with you,” he said, his voice growing curt with anger again. “Deceitful little minx. I’m of half a mind to put you to work, milking the goats. But that’s out of the question with these hands, now isn’t it?” He curled and uncurled her fingers a few times, testing the bandage. “I’ll tell Stubb to change this twice a day. Can’t risk the wound going septic. And don’t use your hands for a few days, at least.”
“Don’t use my hands? I suppose you’re going to spoon-feed me, then? Dress me? Bathe me?”
He inhaled slowly and closed his eyes. “Don’t use your hands much.” His eyes snapped open. “None of that sketching, for instance.”
She jerked her hands out of his grip. “You could slice off my hands and toss them to the sharks, and I wouldn’t stop sketching. I’d hold the pencil with my teeth if I had to. I’m an artist.”
“Really. I thought you were a governess.”
“Well, yes. I’m that, too.”
He packed up the medical kit, jamming items back in the box with barely controlled fury. “Then start behaving like one. A governess knows her place. Speaks when spoken to. Stays out of the damn way.”
Rising to his feet, he opened the drawer and threw the box back in. “From this point forward, you’re not to touch a sail, a pin, a rope, or so much as a damned splinter on this vessel. You’re not to speak to crewmen when they’re on watch. You’re forbidden to wander past the foremast, and you need to steer clear of the helm, as well.”
“So that leaves me doing what? Circling the quarterdeck?”
“Yes.” He slammed the drawer shut. “But only at designated times. Noon hour and the dogwatch. The rest of the day, you’ll remain in your cabin.”
Sophia leapt to her feet, incensed. She hadn’t fled one restrictive program of behavior, just to submit to another. “Who are you to dictate where I can go, when I can go there, what I’m permitted to do? You’re not the captain of this ship.”
“Who am I?” He stalked toward her, until they stood toe-to-toe. Until his radiant male heat brought her blood to a boil, and she had to grab the table edge to keep from swaying toward him. “I’ll tell you who I am,” he growled. “I’m a man who cares if you live or die, that’s who.”
Her knees melted. “Truly?”
“Truly. Because I may not be the captain, but I’m the investor. I’m the man you owe six pounds, eight. And now that I know you can’t pay your debts, I’m the man who knows he won’t see a bloody penny unless he delivers George Waltham a governess in one piece.”
Sophia glared at him. How did he keep doing this to her? Since the moment they’d met in that Gravesend tavern, there’d been an attraction between them unlike anything she’d ever known. She knew he had to feel it, too. But one minute, he was so tender and sensual; the next, so crass and calculating. Now he would reduce her life’s value to this cold, impersonal amount? At least back home, her worth had been measured in thousands of pounds not in shillings.
“I see,” she said. “This is about six pounds, eight shillings. That’s the reason you’ve been watching me-“
He made a dismissive snort. “I haven’t been watching you.”
“Staring at me, every moment of the day, so intently it makes my…my skin crawl and all you’re seeing is a handful of coins. You’d wrestle a shark for a purse of six pounds, eight. It all comes down to money for you.
”
”
Tessa Dare (Surrender of a Siren (The Wanton Dairymaid Trilogy, #2))
“
Like,” he repeats with distaste. “How about I tell you what I don’t like? I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be—basically, gimmicks of any kind. I find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful—nonfiction only, please. I do not like genre mash-ups à la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying. I do not like children’s books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and—I imagine this goes without saying—vampires. I rarely stock debuts, chick lit, poetry, or translations. I would prefer not to stock series, but the demands of my pocketbook require me to. For your part, you needn’t tell me about the ‘next big series’ until it is ensconced on the New York Times Best Sellers list. Above all, Ms. Loman, I find slim literary memoirs about little old men whose little old wives have died from cancer to be absolutely intolerable. No matter how well written the sales rep claims they are. No matter how many copies you promise I’ll sell on Mother’s Day.” Amelia blushes, though she is angry more than embarrassed. She agrees with some of what A.J. has said, but his manner is unnecessarily insulting. Knightley Press doesn’t even sell half of that stuff anyway. She studies him. He is older than Amelia but not by much, not by more than ten years. He is too young to like so little. “What do you like?” she asks. “Everything else,” he says. “I will also admit to an occasional weakness for short-story collections. Customers never want to buy them though.” There is only one short-story collection on Amelia’s list, a debut. Amelia hasn’t read the whole thing, and time dictates that she probably won’t, but she liked the first story. An American sixth-grade class and an Indian sixth-grade class participate in an international pen pal program. The narrator is an Indian kid in the American class who keeps feeding comical misinformation about Indian culture to the Americans. She clears her throat, which is still terribly dry. “The Year Bombay Became Mumbai. I think it will have special int—” “No,” he says. “I haven’t even told you what it’s about yet.” “Just no.” “But why?” “If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll admit that you’re only telling me about it because I’m partially Indian and you think this will be my special interest. Am I right?” Amelia imagines smashing the ancient computer over his head. “I’m telling you about this because you said you liked short stories! And it’s the only one on my list. And for the record”—here, she lies—“it’s completely wonderful from start to finish. Even if it is a debut. “And do you know what else? I love debuts. I love discovering something new. It’s part of the whole reason I do this job.” Amelia rises. Her head is pounding. Maybe she does drink too much? Her head is pounding and her heart is, too. “Do you want my opinion?” “Not particularly,” he says. “What are you, twenty-five?” “Mr. Fikry, this is a lovely store, but if you continue in this this this”—as a child, she stuttered and it occasionally returns when she is upset; she clears her throat—“this backward way of thinking, there won’t be an Island Books before too long.
”
”
Gabrielle Zevin (The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry)
“
Two kinds of development help explain how a readiness built up to kill all Jews, including women and children. One is a series of “dress rehearsals” that served to lower inhibitions and provided trained personnel hardened for anything. First came the euthanasia of incurably ill and insane Germans, begun on the day when World War II began. Nazi eugenics theory had long provided a racial justification for getting rid of “inferior” persons. War provided a broader justification for reducing the drain of “useless mouths” on scarce resources. The “T-4” program killed more than seventy thousand people between September 1939 and 1941, when, in response to protests from the victims’ families and Catholic clergy, the matter was left to local authorities.
Some of the experts trained in this program were subsequently transferred to the occupied east, where they applied their mass killing techniques to Jews. This time, there was less opposition.
The second “dress rehearsal” was the work of the Einsatzgruppen, the intervention squads specially charged with executing the political and cultural elite of invaded countries. In the Polish campaign of September 1939 they helped wipe out the Polish intelligentsia and high civil service, evoking some opposition within the military command. In the Soviet campaign the Einsatzgruppen received the notorious “Commissar Order” to kill all Communist Party cadres as well as the Jewish leadership (seen as identical in Nazi eyes), along with Gypsies. This time the army raised no objections. The Einsatzgruppen subsequently played a major role, though they were far from alone, in the mass killings of Jewish women and children that began in some occupied areas in fall 1941.
A third “dress rehearsal” was the intentional death of millions of Soviet prisoners of war. It was on six hundred of them that the Nazi occupation authorities first tested the mass killing potential of the commercial insecticide Zyklon-B at Auschwitz on September 3, 1941. Most Soviet prisoners of war, however, were simply worked or starved to death.
The second category of developments that helped prepare a “willingness to murder” consisted of blockages, emergencies, and crises that made the Jews become a seemingly unbearable burden to the administrators of conquered territories. A major blockage was the failure to capture Moscow that choked off the anticipated expulsion of all the Jews of conquered eastern Europe far into the Soviet interior. A major emergency was shortages of food supplies for the German invasion force. German military planners had chosen to feed the invasion force with the resources of the invaded areas, in full knowledge that this meant starvation for local populations. When local supplies fell below expectations, the search for “useless mouths” began. In the twisted mentality of the Nazi administrators, Jews and Gypsies also posed a security threat to German forces. Another emergency was created by the arrival of trainloads of ethnic Germans awaiting resettlement, for whom space had to be made available.
Faced with these accumulating problems, Nazi administrators developed a series of “intermediary solutions.” One was ghettos, but these proved to be incubators for disease (an obsession with the cleanly Nazis), and a drain on the budget. The attempt to make the ghettos work for German war production yielded little except another category of useless mouths: those incapable of work. Another “intermediary solution” was the stillborn plan, already mentioned, to settle European Jews en masse in some remote area such as Madagascar, East Africa, or the Russian hinterland. The failure of all the “intermediary solutions” helped open the way for a “final solution”: extermination.
”
”
Robert O. Paxton (The Anatomy of Fascism)
“
Successful con men are treated with considerable respect in the South. A good slice of the settler population of that region were men who’d been given a choice between being shipped off to the New World in leg-irons and spending the rest of their lives in English prisons. The Crown saw no point in feeding them year after year, and they were far too dangerous to be turned loose on the streets of London—so, rather than overload the public hanging schedule, the King’s Minister of Gaol decided to put this scum to work on the other side of the Atlantic, in The Colonies, where cheap labor was much in demand.
Most of these poor bastards wound up in what is now the Deep South because of the wretched climate. No settler with good sense and a few dollars in his pocket would venture south of Richmond. There was plenty of opportunity around Boston, New York, and Philadelphia—and by British standards the climate in places like South Carolina and Georgia was close to Hell on Earth: swamps, alligators, mosquitoes, tropical disease... all this plus a boiling sun all day long and no way to make money unless you had a land grant from the King...
So the South was sparsely settled at first, and the shortage of skilled labor was a serious problem to the scattered aristocracy of would-be cotton barons who’d been granted huge tracts of good land that would make them all rich if they could only get people to work it.
The slave-trade was one answer, but Africa in 1699 was not a fertile breeding ground for middle-management types... and the planters said it was damn near impossible for one white man to establish any kind of control over a boatload of black primitives. The bastards couldn’t even speak English. How could a man get the crop in, with brutes like that for help?
There would have to be managers, keepers, overseers: white men who spoke the language, and had a sense of purpose in life. But where would they come from? There was no middle class in the South: only masters and slaves... and all that rich land lying fallow.
The King was quick to grasp the financial implications of the problem: The crops must be planted and harvested, in order to sell them for gold—and if all those lazy bastards needed was a few thousand half-bright English-speaking lackeys in order to bring the crops in... hell, that was easy: Clean out the jails, cut back on the Crown’s grocery bill, jolt the liberals off balance by announcing a new “Progressive Amnesty” program for hardened criminals....
Wonderful. Dispatch royal messengers to spread the good word in every corner of the kingdom; and after that send out professional pollsters to record an amazing 66 percent jump in the King’s popularity... then wait a few weeks before announcing the new 10 percent sales tax on ale.
That’s how the South got settled. Not the whole story, perhaps, but it goes a long way toward explaining why George Wallace is the Governor of Alabama. He has the same smile as his great-grandfather—a thrice-convicted pig thief from somewhere near Nottingham, who made a small reputation, they say, as a jailhouse lawyer, before he got shipped out.
With a bit of imagination you can almost hear the cranky little bastard haranguing his fellow prisoners in London jail, urging them on to revolt:
“Lissen here, you poor fools! There’s not much time! Even now—up there in the tower—they’re cookin up some kind of cruel new punishment for us! How much longer will we stand for it? And now they want to ship us across the ocean to work like slaves in a swamp with a bunch of goddamn Hottentots!
“We won’t go! It’s asinine! We’ll tear this place apart before we’ll let that thieving old faggot of a king send us off to work next to Africans!
“How much more of this misery can we stand, boys? I know you’re fed right up to here with it. I can see it in your eyes— pure misery! And I’m tellin’ you, we don’t have to stand for it!...
”
”
Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72)
“
So he’d reach into the drawer for the tape with the FLIT debugger and feed that into the computer. The computer would then be a debugging machine, and he’d send the program back in.
”
”
Anonymous
“
That means that a BUMMER company can build a model of you in software— and control what you see in a manipulative feed— by running programs exclusively on their own computers. Those computers are placed in super-secure locations you’ll never visit. Their software is super-hyper secret. Every other kind of file has been breached by hackers, but not the search or feed algorithms of the big BUMMER companies. The secret code to manipulate you is guarded like crown jewels.
Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle1277-1280). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.
”
”
Lanier, Jaron
“
She is an applications programmer for the Feds. In the old days, she would have written computer programs for a living. Nowadays, she writes fragments of computer programs. These programs are designed by Marietta and Marietta’s superiors in massive week-long meetings on the top floor. Once they get the design down, they start breaking up the problem into tinier and tinier segments, assigning them to group managers, who break them down even more and feed little bits of work to the individual programmers. In order to keep the work done by the individual coders from colliding, it all has to be done according to a set of rules and regulations even bigger and more fluid than the Government procedure manual.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
Foliar (leaf) feeding is another way to supplement your roses’ fertilizing program. Use any water soluble fertilizer, mix it up in a tank sprayer or sprinkling can, and apply so that it just drips from the foliage. This form of fertilizing is seldom sufficient for all the nutrient needs of roses, but it’s a nice pick-me- up in addition to your regular fertilizing program. Fertilize early enough in the day so the water has time to evaporate — wet leaves can invite fungal disease.
”
”
Steven A. Frowine (Gardening Basics For Dummies)
“
Women loved their babies from the second they pushed them into the world; they were programmed to love them, feed them, and protect them, no matter what.
”
”
Martina Cole (The Life)
“
Bacon, of course, comes from the pig. The pig is an amazing animal. If you feed a pig an apple, that apple will be metabolized by the pig and eventually turn into bacon. The pig is converting a tasteless piece of fruit, essentially garbage, into one of the most delicious foods known to man. The pig has to be one of the most successful recycling programs ever. When you think about it, that is more impressive than anything Steve Jobs did. The pig is remarkable on so many fronts. Bacon, ham, and pork chops come from pigs. The pig should really have a better reputation. You’d think calling someone a pig would be a compliment. “You are such a pig.” “Well, thank you. I try.
”
”
Jim Gaffigan (Food: A Love Story)
“
I’ve got a big vision. We can reach a lot of people with an extra one hundred million. If you can accomplish your dreams in your own strength, talent, ability, and resources, then your dreams are too small. You don’t need God’s help with small dreams. Believe big. Your destiny is too great, your assignment too important, to have little goals, little dreams, little prayers.
Keep big things in front of you. A friend of mine feeds a million children a day. He and his wife support orphanages and feeding programs that touch a million kids every day. That’s what I keep in front of me. “God, You did it for them, You can do it for us. Let our family impact millions of children.”
In our kitchen at home, we have pictures of some of the children we sponsor through our partner World Vision. Every time we eat dinner, every time we pass by, we say, “God, let us make a bigger difference.”
We’re moving toward it. You may say, “Well, Joel, I can’t even imagine that happening to me. I can’t imagine me being that blessed.” Don’t worry--you won’t be. If you don’t have a vision for it, it’s not going to happen. Without a vision you won’t see God’s best. You won’t be the winner He wants you to be.
”
”
Joel Osteen (You Can You Will: 8 Undeniable Qualities of a Winner)
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PAUL: It was great at the beginning. I could speak the language almost fluently after a month and the people were fantastic. They’d come out and help us. Teach us songs. Man, we thought it was all going so well. But we got all the outhouses dug in six months and we had to stay there two years, that was the deal. And that’s when we began to realize that none of the Nglele were using these outhouses. We’d ask them why and they’d just shrug. So we started watching them very carefully and what we found out was the Nglele use their feces for fertilizer. It’s like gold to them. They thought we were all fucking crazy expecting them to waste their precious turds in our spiffy new outhouses. Turns out they’d been helping us because they misunderstood why we were there. They thought it was some kind of punishment and we’d be allowed to go home after we finished digging the latrines, that’s why they were helping us and then when we stayed on they figured we must be permanent outcasts or something and they just stopped talking to us altogether. Anyway, me and Jeff, the guy I told you about, we figured maybe we could salvage something from the fuckup so we got a doctor to make a list of all the medicines we’d need to start a kind of skeleton health program in Ngleleland and we ordered the medicine, pooled both our salaries for the two years to pay for it. Paid for it. Waited. Never came. So we went to the capital to trace it and found out this very funny thing. The Minister of Health had confiscated it at the dock, same man who got our team assigned to the Nglele Tribal Territories in the first place. We were furious, man, we stormed into his office and started yelling at him. Turned out to be a real nice guy. Educated in England, British accent and everything. Had this office lined with sets of Dickens and Thackeray all in leather bindings. Unbelievable. Anyway, he said he couldn’t help us about the medicine, he’d been acting on orders from higher up, which we knew was bullshit, then he said he really admired our enthusiasm and our desire to help his people but he wanted to know just out of curiosity, if we’d managed to start the medical program and save a thousand lives, let’s say, he wanted to know if we were prepared to feed and clothe those thousand people for the next ten years, twenty years, however long they lived. He made us feel so goddamned naive, so totally helpless and unprepared, powerless. We went out of there, got drunk, paid the first women we could find and spent the rest of the week fucking our brains out. And then for the next year and two months we just sat around in Ngleleland stoned out of our minds counting off the days we had left before we could go home. Anyway, since you asked, that’s what the Peace Corps was like.
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Michael Weller (Five Plays)
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began taking their churches above ground. They rented buildings and started running services the way we do in America. It was great for a while, but these pastors became so discouraged. I wish I could convey the frustration and desperation in their voices. They talked about the good old days, when their people were risking their lives and radically sharing the gospel, making disciples. But now these pastors were lamenting the way their people attend services and expect the leaders to feed them and cater to them. They had seen this same transition in Korea and were terrified it would happen in their context as well. All anyone wanted was a Jesus and a church that served their needs and kept them comfortable. What started as a movement became a bunch of people sitting safely in services. My mind flashed back to five years prior when my daughter and I went to an underground gathering in China. Young people were praying so passionately, begging God to send them to the most dangerous places. They were actually hoping to die as martyrs! I had never seen anything like it. I still can’t get over the fearless passion for Jesus this church embodied. As they shared stories of persecution, I sat in amazement and asked for more stories. After a while, they asked why I was so intrigued. I told them the church in America was nothing like this. I can’t tell you how embarrassing it was to try to explain to them that people attend ninety-minute services once a week in buildings and that’s what we call “church.” I told them about how people switch churches if they find better teaching, more exciting music, or more robust programs for their kids. As I described church life in America, they began to laugh. Not just small chuckles; they were laughing hysterically. I felt like a stand-up comedian, but I was simply describing the American church as I’ve experienced it. They found it laughable that we could read the same Scriptures they were reading and then create something so incongruent.
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Francis Chan (We Are Church)
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If the government looks at data that points to moral decay, they recruit more police officers. But when the number of students learning under a tree is alarming, they start a feeding program in those schools. Then they invite the media to praise them.
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Don Santo
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The Bukharin pamphlet was published in the United States in 1920 by the Contemporary Publishing Association, one of the early underground publishing organizations of the Communist Party. It stated: All these considerations explain the program of the Communists with regard to their attitude to religion and to the church. Religion must be fought, if not by violence, at all events, by argument. The church must be separated from the state.… There is a poison called opium. When it is smoked sweet visions appear. You feel as if you were in paradise, but its action tells on the health of the smoker. His health is gradually ruined, and little by little he becomes a meek idiot. The same applies to religion. There are people who wish to smoke opium, but it would be absurd if the state maintained at its expense—that is to say, at the expense of the people—opium dens and special men to serve them. For this reason the church must be—and already is—treated in the same way. Priests, bishops, archbishops, patriarchs, abbots and the rest of the lot must be refused state maintenance. Let the believers, if they wish it, feed the holy fathers at their own expense on the fat of the land, a thing which they, the priests, greatly appreciate. To say this was a hard, distasteful, cynical view of religion would be an obvious understatement. Nonetheless, it was fully consistent with the long-accepted communist view of religion: Religion was a seductive drug, a poison, an opiate that when smoked produces sweet visions, hallucinations, turning the junkie into a “meek idiot.” The priests were like the dealers; they peddle the junk to hook the addicts who sit stupidly in the pews.
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Paul Kengor (The Devil and Karl Marx: Communism's Long March of Death, Deception, and Infiltration)
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A computer. You know, you're programming yourself. That's what they call it isn't it? I mean you're feeding all these things into yourself all day then you're going to see what comes out.
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Agatha Christie
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Scientists have linked this alarming decline in large part to habitat loss. Monarch Watch, the University of Kansas’s education, conservation, and research program, estimates that each day, 6000 acres of monarch breeding habitat in the United States are converted to something else: housing or commercial developments, farms, roads, and other human uses. Even farms, which once invited milkweed to thrive between crops and along farm edges, are changing tactics and destroying milkweed. The presence of milkweed in agricultural fields (between crops and on field edges) declined 97 percent from 1999 to 2009 in Iowa, and 94 percent in Illinois. Each year, the migrating monarchs have fewer places to feed on nectar and lay their eggs. They are losing their habitat, losing their homes. Eviction, extinction.
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Sara Dykman (Bicycling with Butterflies: My 10,201-Mile Journey Following the Monarch Migration)
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Doomscrolling is nothing new, people used to do the same with tv remote, switching channel after channel, rarely settling on any one program. And heads buried in social media news feed is nothing new either - before smartphone and internet heads used to be buried in actual physical newspapers. Only the means have changed, not the habit. This is not advancement, it's recurring derangement. I'll call it progress when you put down your phone or remote and actually listen to another person. Sure, phones can be a supplement to organic conversation, but never a replacement.
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Abhijit Naskar (Rowdy Scientist: Handbook of Humanitarian Science)
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Back in the 1960s, the federal government had created programs to ease the burden of the poor. It looked good on paper. In effect it destroyed the work ethic and ruined the pride of millions of people. Why work when the government (using the tax money from millions of hard-working citizens) would feed, clothe, and house those who didn’t choose to work? Like nearly every government program ever devised by those ninnies in Washington, it swelled out of control and those in power didn’t have the courage to stop it.
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William W. Johnstone (Vengeance in the Ashes (Ashes, #16))
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Next, be sure to limit indulgence and over-petting. It’s tough to train a dog using food rewards if the dog gets unlimited free-feeding all day. Similarly, constant affection can lower a dog’s motivation to interact during the training process. Try to reserve some of your praise and enthusiastic attention for training sessions, as it will mean even more to your dog when it’s earned.
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Jennifer Hack (Service Dog Training Guide: A Step-by-Step Training Program for You and Your Dog)
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In her office, there was a picture of her, knee deep in water, dressed as a giant crane. The summer before, she had gone to Texas and worked for a program that bred captive whooping cranes. All the workers dressed as birds so that the cranes would know how to feed their own babies when they were set free. My mother took the costume with her when she left and sometimes she put on the feathered head and talked through the beak to me.
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Jenny Offill (Last Things)
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Convert Text Files from Windows Format to Linux Format and Vice-Versa $ dos2unix $ unix2dos Sooner or later you're going to be sent a file or download one that uses a pair of CR (carriage return) and LF (line feed) characters to terminate lines in the file. Those type of files are Windows/DOS formatted. Unix-like operating systems simply use the LF character to terminate a line. Sometimes this can cause issues. To convert the file to a unix-like format, use dos2unix. To examine the line termination characters use "cat -A" or the "file" command. $
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Jason Cannon (Command Line Kung Fu: Bash Scripting Tricks, Linux Shell Programming Tips, and Bash One-liners)
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The socialbot program is so sophisticated that it can spoon-feed people information tailored to their moods, biases, idiosyncrasies, grievances, and soft spots. And it raises a very disturbing question: If you make a decision that was almost a foregone conclusion because of the stream of information you’ve been fed, have you really exercised free will?
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Scott Allan Morrison (Terms of Use)
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Make a deliberate effort to feed your conscious and subconscious mind to achieve a well programmed mind frame, ready to succeed. Read the right material, watch the right material and listen to the right material. Practice and expose yourself to the right material so that you can form positive attitudes, positive feelings and positive habits. For each person, the right material is defined from their unique vision, mission, beliefs and values.
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Archibald Marwizi (Making Success Deliberate)
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I believe the diet we currently feed our children is the reason we are seeing so many frequent infections and such high levels of allergies, autoimmune disease, and cancer in this country. Unfortunately, what we eat early in life has a more powerful effect on our eventual health (or ill health) than what we eat later in life. I have four children and understand the difficulties of trying to raise healthy children in today’s insane world. It seems we are in an environment in which parents are enthusiastically and purposely breeding a nation of sickly and diseased adults.
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Joel Fuhrman (Eat to Live: The Amazing Nutrient-Rich Program for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss)
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George W. Bush began a program referred to as the Faith-Based Initiative, an effort to get more grants and contracts to religious providers of secular services, from mentoring to feeding the hungry, based on the largely mythological claim—akin to the existence of “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq—that there was widespread discrimination in giving government funds to religious groups. At the time, Catholic Charities alone appeared to be getting over five hundred million dollars in aid and the Salvation Army, literally a Christian denomination with strong homophobic tendencies, was getting eighty-nine million dollars for work in New York alone.
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Barry W. Lynn (God and Government: Twenty-Five Years of Fighting for Equality, Secularism, and Freedom Of Conscience)