Followed All The Trends Quotes

Don't try to follow trends. Create them.

All of us have access to a higher form of intelligence, one that can allow us to see more of the world, to anticipate trends, to respond with speed and accuracy to any circumstance. This intelligence is cultivated by deply immersing ourselves in a field of study and staying true to our inclinations, no matter how unconventional our approach might seem to other. Through such intense immersion over many years we come to internalize and gain an intuitive feel with the rational processes, we expand our minds to the outer limits of our potential and are able to see into the secret core of life itself. We then come to have powers that approximate the instinctive force and speed of animals, but with the added reach that our human consciousness brings us. This power is what our brains are designed to attain, and we will naturally led to this type of intelligence if we follow our inclinations to their ultimate ends.

Let's face it. We live in a command-based system, where we have been programmed since our earliest school years to become followers, not individuals. We have been conditioned to embrace teams, the herd, the masses, popular opinion -- and to reject what is different, eccentric or stands alone. We are so programmed that all it takes for any business or authority to condition our minds to follow or buy something is to simply repeat a statement more than three or four times until we repeat it ourselves and follow it as truth or the best trendiest thing. This is called "programming" -- the frequent repetition of words to condition us how to think, what to like or dislike, and who to follow.

The thing about fashion, my dears, is that you don’t need to follow it, no matter what they say. No fashion trend is compulsory, remember—and if you dress too much in the style of the moment, it makes you look like a nervous person. Paris is all well and good, but we can’t just follow Paris for the sake of Paris, now can we?

Just because all your friends are doing it, doesn't mean you have to follow suit. Don't be a blind follower, you don't know where you're going.

I think this is an alarming trend, Bethany, this whole 'passionate' thing. I'm guessing it started about four years ago, and it's driving me nuts. Let's be practical: Earth was not built for six billion people all running around and being passionate about things. The world was built for about twenty million people foraging for roots and grubs. [...] My hunch is that there was some self-help bestseller a few years back that told people to follow their passion. What a sucky expression. I can usually tell when people have recently read that book because they're a bit distracted, and maybe they've done their hair a new way, and they're always trying to discuss the Big Picture of life and failing miserably. And then, when you bump into them again six months later, they appear haggard and bitter, the joy drained from them–and this means that the universe is back to normal and that they've given up searching for a passion they're doomed to never find. Want a chocolate?

The more evil society becomes, the more it needs a few mavericks to shift the trend. Even if nine out of ten students in a school are extravagant, a frugal student can at least show the difference between extravagance and frugality; even if nine out of ten officials in an organization are corrupt, an upright official can at least show the difference between corruption and righteousness. Good and bad, right and wrong are all seen in contrast to each other. When a society becomes corrupt, everyone follows the others to the bad side, and no one resists the trend until the general public loses all sense of right and wrong, and there is no sense of guilt in the world anymore. Therefore, when the whole society is corrupt, if there is one good person, his significance and value are immeasurable.

The trend is for the following new coffee drinks: espresso, a shot of hot strong caffè served in a small cup with hot cream and sweetener; cappuccino, a blend of espresso and steamed and foamed hot milk; caffè latte, same ingredients as cappuccino but with more steamed and less foamed milk; and cafe mocha, mostly steamed milk with a shot of espresso and mocha syrup. All these coffees may have cinnamon, chocolate, plus additional flavors added.Δ

The changing trends reflected evolving user preferences, but they were also a reaction against the burnout-inducing standard of the peak influencer era. “We all know the jig is up,” said Matt Klein, a cultural strategist. “We’ve all participated in those staged photos. We all know the stress and anxiety it takes. And we can see through it. Culture is a pendulum and the pendulum is swaying. That’s not to say everyone is going to stop posting perfect photos. But the energy is shifting.” For the reigning influencers, the shift was disorienting and even catastrophic. “What worked for people before doesn’t work anymore,” said James Nord. In 2018, a creator could post a shot with manicured hands on a coffee cup and rake in the likes. By 2019, people would unfollow. According to Fohr, by the end of that year, 60 percent of influencers in his network with more than 100,000 followers were losing followers month over month. “It’s pretty staggering,” he said.

The late Francis Schaeffer, one of the wisest and most influential Christian thinkers of the twentieth century, warned of this exact trend just a few months before his death in 1984. In his book The Great Evangelical Disaster he included a section called “The Feminist Subversion,” in which he wrote: There is one final area that I would mention where evangelicals have, with tragic results, accommodated to the world spirit of this age. This has to do with the whole area of marriage, family, sexual morality, feminism, homosexuality, and divorce. . . . The key to understanding extreme feminism centers around the idea of total equality, or more properly the idea of equality without distinction. . . . the world spirit in our day would have us aspire to autonomous absolute freedom in the area of male and female relationships—to throw off all form and boundaries in these relationships and especially those boundaries taught in the Scriptures. . . . Some evangelical leaders, in fact, have changed their views about inerrancy as a direct consequence of trying to come to terms with feminism. There is no other word for this than accommodation. It is a direct and deliberate bending of the Bible to conform to the world spirit of our age at the point where the modern spirit conflicts with what the Bible teaches.2 My argument in the following pages demonstrates that what Schaeffer predicted so clearly twenty-two years ago is increasingly coming true in evangelicalism today. It is a deeply troubling trend.

Dryden was a highly prolific literary figure, a professional writer who was at the centre of all the greatest debates of his time: the end of the Commonwealth, the return of the monarch, the political and religious upheavals of the 1680s, and the specifically literary questions of neoclassicism opposed to more modern trends. He was Poet Laureate from 1668, but lost this position in 1688 on the overthrow of James II. Dryden had become Catholic in 1685, and his allegorical poem The Hind and the Panther (1687) discusses the complex issues of religion and politics in an attempt to reconcile bitterly opposed factions. This contains a well-known line which anticipates Wordsworth more than a century later: 'By education most have been misled … / And thus the child imposes on the man'. The poem shows an awareness of change as one grows older, and the impossibility of holding one view for a lifetime: My thoughtless youth was winged with vain desires, My manhood, long misled by wandering fires, Followed false lights… After 1688, Dryden returned to the theatre, which had given him many of his early successes in tragedy, tragi-comedy, and comedy, as well as with adaptations of Shakespeare. ...... Dryden was an innovator, leading the move from heroic couplets to blank verse in drama, and at the centre of the intellectual debates of the Augustan age. He experimented with verse forms throughout his writing life until Fables Ancient and Modern (1700), which brings together critical, translated, and original works, in a fitting conclusion to a varied career.

It's almost like he's trying to protect me. He hasn't done this since fifth grade, when the most popular, richest, and prettiest girl (seriously, where is the justice in the world?) in the year below us, Minami Vu, made fun of my overalls. "Those are so last year," she'd sneered, with her perfect button nose pointing up in the air. Her mother is a venture capitalist, and Minami always wears the latest styles before they even started trending on Instagram. I'd been proud of my green corduroy overalls. Hell, I didn't even know overalls had a year. But Jack loudly commented, "I like overalls. They look good on you, Ellie." Then he'd shifted in front of me, facing the girl, and she flushed all red. The following week, she wore the exact same green corduroy overalls to school. For some reason, he never complimented her on them.

The people we find truly anathema are the ones who reduce the past to caricature and distort it to fit their own bigoted stereotypes. We’ve gone to events that claimed to be historic fashion shows but turned out to be gaudy polyester parades with no shadow of reality behind them. As we heard our ancestors mocked and bigoted stereotypes presented as facts, we felt like we had gone to an event advertised as an NAACP convention only to discover it was actually a minstrel show featuring actors in blackface. Some so-called “living history” events really are that bigoted. When we object to history being degraded this way, the guilty parties shout that they are “just having fun.” What they are really doing is attacking a past that cannot defend itself. Perhaps they are having fun, but it is the sort of fun a schoolyard brute has at the expense of a child who goes home bruised and weeping. It’s time someone stood up for the past. I have always hated bullies. The instinct to attack difference can be seen in every social species, but if humans truly desire to rise above barbarism, then we must cease acting like beasts. The human race may have been born in mud and ignorance, but we are blessed with minds sufficiently powerful to shape our behavior. Personal choices form the lives of individuals; the sum of all interactions determine the nature of societies. At present, it is politically fashionable in America to tolerate limited diversity based around race, religion, and sexual orientation, yet following a trend does not equate with being truly open-minded. There are people who proudly proclaim they support women’s rights, yet have an appallingly limited definition of what those rights entail. (Currently, fashionable privileges are voting, working outside the home, and easy divorce; some people would be dumbfounded at the idea that creating beautiful things, working inside the home, and marriage are equally desirable rights for many women.) In the eighteenth century, Voltaire declared, “I disagree with what you say but I will fight to the death for your right to say it.”3 Many modern Americans seem to have perverted this to, “I will fight to the death for your right to agree with what I say.” When we stand up for history, we are in our way standing up for all true diversity. When we question stereotypes and fight ignorance about the past, we force people to question ignorance in general.

There is far more to the Islamic way of life than fasting and segregating women, of course. Praying five times a day, avoiding alcohol, the custom of eating with the right hand, leaving the left for ablutions and many health measures associated with Islam, such as ritual washing. Then there is the Qur’an itself and the sonorous power of the Arabic language, with an attractive system of ethics including a focus on alms-giving and the equality of believers. Putting all this together created a powerful religious technology which made its followers more aggressive, confident, united and with a higher birth rate than any competing civilization. [...] People in the West see the traditional culture of the Muslim Middle East as primitive and “backward,” and there are constant calls for modernization. In fact, as had been seen, Islamic culture is anything but backward. Civilization first arose in Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley in what is now Pakistan. It is no coincidence that these lands, with the longest experience of civilization, are now strongly and fervently Muslim. Long experience of civilization has bred a high-S genotype and culture which perfectly adapt people to survive and expand their numbers in dense agricultural and urban populations. Such countries tend to be poor (if we leave out the anomalous effects of oil wealth), since their peoples lack the temperament for industrialization. But wealth at that level is of no benefit in the long-term struggle for survival and success. To paraphrase Christian scripture, what does it benefit a civilization if it gains wealth but loses its strength and vigor? The advantages of Islam can be clearly seen in countries with mixed populations. Lebanon once had a Christian majority but is now 54% Muslim. In Communist Yugoslavia the provinces with Muslim populations grew much faster and received tax revenue from the wealthier Christian states. The population of Kosovo, the spiritual homeland of Christian Serbia, grew from 733,000 in 1948 to over two million in 1994, with the Muslim component surging from 68% to 90%, and lately going even higher. Meanwhile, Muslims are migrating into Europe where Christianity is in decline, the birth rate is far below replacement level, and people no longer have much faith in their own culture. Over the next few decades, as the next chapter will indicate, the native peoples of the West will become feebler and fewer. This means that on current trends Europe will become an Islamic continent in a century or so. The 1,400-year struggle between Islam and the West is coming to end. pp. 227 & 229-230

To my great distress, I sometimes hear people say, in their zeal for fervency and efficacy in prayer, that we should never qualify our prayer requests with the words "if it be Your will." Some will even say that to attach those words, those conditional terms, to our prayers is an act of unbelief. We are told today that in the boldness of faith we are to "name it and claim it." I suppose I should be more measured in my response to this trend, but I can't think of anything more foreign to the teaching of Christ. We come to the presence of God in boldness, but never in arrogance. Yes, we can name and claim those things God has clearly promised in Scripture. For instance, we can claim the certainty of forgiveness if we confess our sins before Him, because He promises that. But when it comes to getting a raise, purchasing a home, or finding healing from a disease, God hasn't made those kind of specific promises anywhere in Scripture, so we are not free to name and claim those things. As I mentioned earlier, when we come before God, we must remember two simple facts-who He is and who we are. We must remember that we're talking to the King, the Sovereign One, the Creator, but we are only creatures. If we will keep those facts in mind, we will pray politely. We will say, "By Your leave," "As You wish," "If You please," and so on. That's the way we go before God. To say that it is a manifestation of unbelief or a weakness of faith to say to God "if it be Your will" is to slander the very Lord of the Lord's Prayer. It was Jesus, after all, who, in His moment of greatest passion, prayed regarding the will of God. In his Gospel, Luke tells us that immediately following the Last Supper: Coming out, He went to the Mount of Olives, as He was accustomed, and His disciples also followed Him. When He came to the place, He said to them, "Pray that you may not enter into temptation." And He was withdrawn from them about a stone's throw, and He knelt down and prayed, saying, "Father, if it is Your will, take this cup away from Me; nevertheless not My will, but Yours, be done." Then an angel appeared to Him from heaven, strengthening Him. And being in agony, He prayed more earnestly. Then His sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground. (Luke 22:39-44) It is important to see what Jesus prays here. He says, "Not My will, but Yours, be done." Jesus was not saying, "I don't want to be obedient" or "I refuse to submit." Jesus was saying: "Father, if there's any other way, all things being equal, I would rather not have to do it this way. What You have set before Me is more ghastly than I can contemplate. I'm entering into My grand passion and I'm terrified, but if this is what You want, this is what I'll do. Not My will, but Your will, be done, because My will is to do Your will." I also want you to notice what happened after Jesus prayed. Luke tells us that an angel came to Him and strengthened Him. The angel was the messenger of God. He came from heaven with the Father's answer to Jesus' prayer. That answer was this: "You must drink the cup." This is what it means to pray that the will of God would be done. It is the highest expression of faith to submit to the sovereignty of God. The real prayer of faith is the prayer that trusts God no matter whether the answer is yes or no. It takes no faith to "claim," like a robber, something that is not ours to claim. We are to come to God and tell Him what we want, but we must trust Him to give the answer that is best for us. That is what Jesus did.

We have become so trusting of technology that we have lost faith in ourselves and our born instincts. There are still parts of life that we do not need to “better” with technology. It’s important to understand that you are smarter than your smartphone. To paraphrase, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your Google. Mistakes are a part of life and often the path to profound new insights—so why try to remove them completely? Getting lost while driving or visiting a new city used to be an adventure and a good story. Now we just follow the GPS. To “know thyself” is hard work. Harder still is to believe that you, with all your flaws, are enough—without checking in, tweeting an update, or sharing a photo as proof of your existence for the approval of your 719 followers. A healthy relationship with your devices is all about taking ownership of your time and making an investment in your life. I’m not calling for any radical, neo-Luddite movement here. Carving out time for yourself is as easy as doing one thing. Walk your dog. Stroll your baby. Go on a date—without your handheld holding your hand. Self-respect, priorities, manners, and good habits are not antiquated ideals to be traded for trends. Not everyone will be capable of shouldering this task of personal responsibility or of being a good example for their children. But the heroes of the next generation will be those who can calm the buzzing and jigging of outside distraction long enough to listen to the sound of their own hearts, those who will follow their own path until they learn to walk erect—not hunched over like a Neanderthal, palm-gazing. Into traffic. You have a choice in where to direct your attention. Choose wisely. The world will wait. And if it’s important, they’ll call back.

a young Goldman Sachs banker named Joseph Park was sitting in his apartment, frustrated at the effort required to get access to entertainment. Why should he trek all the way to Blockbuster to rent a movie? He should just be able to open a website, pick out a movie, and have it delivered to his door. Despite raising around $250 million, Kozmo, the company Park founded, went bankrupt in 2001. His biggest mistake was making a brash promise for one-hour delivery of virtually anything, and investing in building national operations to support growth that never happened. One study of over three thousand startups indicates that roughly three out of every four fail because of premature scaling—making investments that the market isn’t yet ready to support. Had Park proceeded more slowly, he might have noticed that with the current technology available, one-hour delivery was an impractical and low-margin business. There was, however, a tremendous demand for online movie rentals. Netflix was just then getting off the ground, and Kozmo might have been able to compete in the area of mail-order rentals and then online movie streaming. Later, he might have been able to capitalize on technological changes that made it possible for Instacart to build a logistics operation that made one-hour grocery delivery scalable and profitable. Since the market is more defined when settlers enter, they can focus on providing superior quality instead of deliberating about what to offer in the first place. “Wouldn’t you rather be second or third and see how the guy in first did, and then . . . improve it?” Malcolm Gladwell asked in an interview. “When ideas get really complicated, and when the world gets complicated, it’s foolish to think the person who’s first can work it all out,” Gladwell remarked. “Most good things, it takes a long time to figure them out.”* Second, there’s reason to believe that the kinds of people who choose to be late movers may be better suited to succeed. Risk seekers are drawn to being first, and they’re prone to making impulsive decisions. Meanwhile, more risk-averse entrepreneurs watch from the sidelines, waiting for the right opportunity and balancing their risk portfolios before entering. In a study of software startups, strategy researchers Elizabeth Pontikes and William Barnett find that when entrepreneurs rush to follow the crowd into hyped markets, their startups are less likely to survive and grow. When entrepreneurs wait for the market to cool down, they have higher odds of success: “Nonconformists . . . that buck the trend are most likely to stay in the market, receive funding, and ultimately go public.” Third, along with being less recklessly ambitious, settlers can improve upon competitors’ technology to make products better. When you’re the first to market, you have to make all the mistakes yourself. Meanwhile, settlers can watch and learn from your errors. “Moving first is a tactic, not a goal,” Peter Thiel writes in Zero to One; “being the first mover doesn’t do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you.” Fourth, whereas pioneers tend to get stuck in their early offerings, settlers can observe market changes and shifting consumer tastes and adjust accordingly. In a study of the U.S. automobile industry over nearly a century, pioneers had lower survival rates because they struggled to establish legitimacy, developed routines that didn’t fit the market, and became obsolete as consumer needs clarified. Settlers also have the luxury of waiting for the market to be ready. When Warby Parker launched, e-commerce companies had been thriving for more than a decade, though other companies had tried selling glasses online with little success. “There’s no way it would have worked before,” Neil Blumenthal tells me. “We had to wait for Amazon, Zappos, and Blue Nile to get people comfortable buying products they typically wouldn’t order online.

The Buddha was concerned with how to escape from just this kind of self-created suffering, with how to avoid the pitfalls of self-inflation or -debasement. It is here that the latter parts of the Second Noble Truth, the thirsts for existence and nonexistence, become relevant. Buddha, we must remember, did not teach a speculative psychology; he taught a practical one designed to liberate practitioners from dissatisfaction. “I do not teach theory,” he said, “I analyse.”2 He refused to answer questions that would feed either the tendency to cling to some kind of absolute romanticized ideal or that would enable nihilistic distancing, the two trends that are subsumed under the headings of existence and nonexistence and that become the basis for many powerful religious, psychological, and philosophical dogmas. There were, in fact, fourteen subjects that the Buddha repeatedly refused to discuss, all of them searching for absolute certainty:        1)  Whether the world is eternal, or not, or both, or neither.        2)  Whether the world is finite (in space), or infinite, or both, or neither.        3)  Whether an enlightened being exists after death, or does not, or both, or neither.        4)  Whether the soul is identical with the body or different from it. The Buddha taught that to attempt a definitive answer to these questions would give the wrong idea, that to do so would only feed the tendency to cling to an absolute or to nihilistically reject, neither of which he found useful. He never taught the existence of a true self, nor did he ever support the idea of a chaotic universe in which “nothing matters” and individual actions are of no importance. Rather, he encouraged a consistent doubting of all fixed assumptions about the nature of things. In a teaching that he gave to a skeptical follower named Malunkyaputta, he likened the asking of questions about the ultimate nature of things to a man wounded by an arrow refusing to have the arrow taken out until all of his questions about who the assassin was, where he came from, what he looked like, what kind of bow he was using, and what make of arrow had been shot had been addressed. “That man would die, Malunkyaputta,” emphasized the Buddha, “without ever having learnt this.”3

When we reach a certain age we have opportunity to decide how we present ourselves to the world, and that age is getting ever younger. Even our young teenage generation is aware of fashion and we grow acutely more and more aware of how obsessed our society is with imagery and appearance. Or rather we become more aware that to get on in life we need to be brash and bright and sparkling all the time. That bright colours and big noises is what gets your through life, that any substance behind that is almost irrelevant to success. We only need look at who we proclaim as celebrities, who society rewards with wealth, that substance is not a prerequisite to success. Be bright, make a statement, choose a bold look, dye your hair, pierce your body, paint it with permanent ink, wear outlandish clothes and don't be afraid to say something crude or mean or controversial because that's the person you are. Or is it? Is it that when you've done with the all the additions to your body, the person you look at in the mirror is no longer the real you. It is a character, the one you think society wants you to be, that society has convinced you that you want to be, substance optional. One of the most beautiful moments of conversation on and offline I've had with some people is when they surprise me, a comment or opinion with substance and thought, something away fro their character, revealing the real individual in-between. So why hide that part of you. When did our society evolve into a place when people have to sell themselves as a larger than life character? When did being a little quiet, thoughtful, more subtly dressed stop being classy and become perceived as dull. When did people, intelligent people, start to realise that world didn't want them to be themselves and it was better to throw in some over the top extravagances, make claim to some extreme habits and tastes. These same people permanently seeking definition of the character they've become rather than friendship from real people who know it is purely superficial but go along with it anyway. You're not your unnaturally coloured hair or your mark applied to you by a skilled artist. You are not the label of clothes you wear nor the quirky colours you choose to represent yourself. Just be honest with yourself, attention seeking is an illness. Don't follow the trends like everyone else. Make your own. That's my objective, to unashamedly be myself, And that is probably why I always wear a lot of black. No tricks, no fancy colours, no parlour tricks to detract from who I am. I want people to see my subtance, not be clouded with smoke and mirrors and see a character that doesn't really exist.

When we reach a certain age we have opportunity to decide how we present ourselves to the world, and that age is getting ever younger. Even our young teenage generation is aware of fashion and we grow acutely more and more aware of how obsessed our society is with imagery and appearance. Or rather we become more aware that to get on in life we need to be brash and bright and sparkling all the time. That bright colours and big noises is what gets your through life, that any substance behind that is almost irrelevant to success. We only need look at who we proclaim as celebrities, who society rewards with wealth, that substance is not a prerequisite to success. Be bright, make a statement, choose a bold look, dye your hair, pierce your body, paint it with permanent ink, wear outlandish clothes and don't be afraid to say something crude or mean or controversial because that's the person you are. Or is it? Is it that when you've done with the all the additions to your body, the person you look at in the mirror is no longer the real you. It is a character, the one you think society wants you to be, that society has convinced you that you want to be, substance optional. One of the most beautiful moments of conversation on and offline I've had with some people is when they surprise me, a comment or opinion with substance and thought, something away fro their character, revealing the real individual in-between. So why hide that part of you. When did our society evolve into a place when people have to sell themselves as a larger than life character? When did being a little quiet, thoughtful, more subtly dressed stop being classy and become perceived as dull. When did people, intelligent people, start to realise that world didn't want them to be themselves and it was better to throw in some over the top extravagances, make claim to some extreme habits and tastes. These same people permanently seeking definition of the character they've become rather than friendship from real people who know it is purely superficial but go along with it anyway. You're not your unnaturally coloured hair or your mark applied to you by a skilled artist. You are not the label of clothes you wear nor the quirky colours you choose to represent yourself. Just be honest with yourself, attention seeking is an illness. Don't follow the trends like everyone else. Make your own. That's my objective, to unashamedly be myself, And that is probably why I always wear a lot of black. No tricks, no fancy colours, no parlour tricks to detract from who I am. I want people to see my subtance, not be clouded with smoke and mirrors and see a character that doesn't really exist.

From Life, Volume III, by Unspiek, Baron Bodissey: I am constantly startled and often amused by the diverse attitudes toward wealth to be found among the peoples of the Oikumene. Some societies equate affluence with criminal skill; for others wealth represents the gratitude of society for the performance of valuable services. My own concepts in this regard are easy and clear, and I am sure that the word ‘simplistic’ will be used by my critics. These folk are callow and turgid of intellect; I am reassured by their howls and yelps. For present purposes I exclude criminal wealth, the garnering of which needs no elaboration, and a gambler’s wealth which is tinsel. In regard, then, to wealth: Luxury and privilege are the perquisites of wealth. This would appear a notably bland remark, but is much larger than it seems. If one listens closely, he hears deep and far below the mournful chime of inevitability. To achieve wealth, one generally must thoroughly exploit at least three of the following five attributes: Luck. Toil, persistence, courage. Self-denial. Short-range intelligence: cunning, improvisational ability. Long-range intelligence: planning, the perception of trends. These attributes are common; anyone desiring privilege and luxury can gain the precursory wealth by making proper use of his native competence. In some societies poverty is considered a pathetic misfortune, or noble abnegation, hurriedly to be remedied by use of public funds. Other more stalwart societies think of poverty as a measure of the man himself. The critics respond: What an unutterable ass is this fellow Unspiek! I am reduced to making furious scratches and crotchets with my pen! — Lionel Wistofer, in The Monstrator I am poor; I admit it! Am I then a churl or a noddy? I deny it with all the vehemence of my soul! I take my bite of seed-cake and my sip of tea with the same relish as any paunchy plutocrat with bulging eyes and grease running from his mouth as he engulfs ortolans in brandy, Krokinole oysters, filet of Darango Five-Horn! My wealth is my shelf of books! My privileges are my dreams! — Sistie Fael, in The Outlook … He moves me to tooth-chattering wrath; he has inflicted upon me, personally, a barrage of sheer piffle, and maundering insult which cries out to the Heavens for atonement. I will thrust my fist down his loquacious maw; better, I will horsewhip him on the steps of his club. If he has no club, I hereby invite him to the broad and convenient steps of the Senior Quill-drivers, although I must say that the Inksters maintain a superior bar, and this shall be my choice since, after trouncing the old fool, I will undoubtedly ask him in for a drink. — McFarquhar Kenshaw, in The Gaean

The attachment voids experienced by immigrant children are profound. The hardworking parents are focused on supporting their families economically and, unfamiliar with the language and customs of their new society, they are not able to orient their children with authority or confidence. Peers are often the only people available for such children to latch on to. Thrust into a peer-oriented culture, immigrant families may quickly disintegrate. The gulf between child and parent can widen to the point that becomes unbridgeable. Parents of these children lose their dignity, their power, and their lead. Peers ultimately replace parents and gangs increasingly replace families. Again, immigration or the necessary relocation of people displaced by war or economic misery is not the problem. Transplanted to peer-driven North American society, traditional cultures succumb. We fail our immigrants because of our own societal failure to preserve the child-parent relationship. In some parts of the country one still sees families, often from Asia, join together in multigenerational groups for outings. Parents, grandparents, and even frail great-grandparents mingle, laugh, and socialize with their children and their children's offspring. Sadly, one sees this only among relatively recent immigrants. As youth become incorporated into North American society, their connections with their elders fade. They distance themselves from their families. Their icons become the artificially created and hypersexualized figures mass-marketed by Hollywood and the U.S. music industry. They rapidly become alienated from the cultures that have sustained their ancestors for generation after generation. As we observe the rapid dissolution of immigrant families under the influence of the peer-oriented society, we witness, as if on fast-forward video, the cultural meltdown we ourselves have suffered in the past half century. It would be encouraging to believe that other parts of the world will successfully resist the trend toward peer orientation. The opposite is likely to be the case as the global economy exerts its corrosive influences on traditional cultures on other continents. Problems of teenage alienation are now widely encountered in countries that have most closely followed upon the American model — Britain, Australia, and Japan. We may predict similar patterns elsewhere to result from economic changes and massive population shifts. For example, stress-related disorders are proliferating among Russian children. According to a report in the New York Times, since the collapse of the Soviet Union a little over a decade ago, nearly a third of Russia's estimated 143 million people — about 45 million — have changed residences. Peer orientation threatens to become one of the least welcome of all American cultural exports.

She tilts her head to the side after taking a sip of her tea, studying us. “You know, I can’t get over how beautiful you two are together. One of those couples you love to follow on Instagram, you know, the really cute ones that are so sickening in love that you can’t get enough of them.” Way to drop the love bomb, Mom. Jesus. Thankfully Emory doesn’t show any kind of hatred for the term but instead says, “Like Jennifer Lopez and A-Rod?” “Yes,” my mom answers with excitement. “Oh my gosh, I’m obsessed with watching their stories. The little videos they do together, I just can’t get enough of them. J-Rod,” my mom says dreamily. “Oh gosh, what would your couple name be?” She thinks about it for a second. “Emox . . . or Knemory. Oh I love Knemory. Sounds so poetic.” “Knemory does have a nice ring to it,” I add. “I don’t know, what about Emorox?” “Ohhh, that sounds like a name that belongs in The Game of Thrones.” Taking on a more masculine voice, my mom says, “Look out, Jon, Emorox is coming over the hill, with her fire-spitting dragons, Knemory and George.” “George?” Emory laughs out loud, covering her mouth. “Why George?” “Well, look at the names they have in that show? They’re all exotic names you’ve never heard before—Cersei, Gregor, Arya—and then in waltzes good old Jon Snow. It’s only fair that the dragons have a lemon in the bunch as well.” “Uh, Jon is anything but a lemon, Mom,” I defend. “He was raised from the dead.” My mom’s mouth drops, pure and utter shock in her face. “Jon Snow dies?” Shit. Emory elbows my stomach. “Where the hell is your GOT etiquette? You never talk about the facts of the show until the air is cleared about how far someone is in watching. You are one of those people who spoils everything for someone just catching up to the trend.” *Ahem* “I mean . . . uh . . . he doesn’t die.” “You just said he is raised from the dead,” my mom says. Feeling guilty, I reply, “Well, at least he’s still alive, right?” She slumps against the cushion of the couch and mutters, “Unbelievable.” “I’m sorry, Mrs. Gentry, that your son is a barbarian and broke your GOT trust.” Pressing her hand against her forehead, my mom says, “You know, I blame myself. I thought I taught him a shred of decorum, I guess not.” “Don’t blame yourself,” Emory coos. “You did everything right. It comes down to the hooligans he hangs out with. There’s only so much you can control after they leave the nest.” “You’re absolutely right,” my mom agrees and leans across the couch to smack me in the back of the head. “Hey,” I complain while rubbing the sore spot. I look between the two women in my life and I say, “I don’t like this ganging up on me shit.” “You wanted us to get along, right?” Emory asks. “Well, I happen to like your mom, especially since she complimented my bosom.” “Ah, I see.” I continue to look between the two of them. “You’re okay with my mom catching you with your shirt off now, moved past the embarrassment?” Emory’s eyes narrow. “With that kind of attitude, it might be the very last time you see me topless.” My mom raises her fist to the air, as if to say, “Girl Power.” And then she says, “You tell him, Emory. Don’t let him push you around.” “I wasn’t pushing her around—” “You keep that beautiful bosom under lock and key, and if you have a temptation to show anyone, just flash me.” “Mom, do you realize how wrong that is?” “Want to go to the bathroom right now, Mrs. Gentry?” “I would be delighted to.” They both stand but before they can make a move, I pull on Emory’s hand, bringing her back down to my lap. “No way in hell is that happening. Jesus, what is wrong with you?

Then if it is denied that the unity at that level is the interconnection of the plurality or dissimilarity of religions as of parts constituting a whole, rather that every one of the religions at the level of ordinary existence is not part of a whole, but is a whole in itself-then the 'unity' that is meant is 'oneness' or 'sameness' not really of religions, but of the God of religions at the level of transcendence (i.e. esoteric), implying thereby that at the level of ordinary existence (i.e. exoteric), and despite the plurality and diversity of religions, each religion is adequate and valid in its own limited way, each authentic and conveying limited though equal truth. The notion of a plurality of truth of equal validity in the plurality and diversity of religion is perhaps aligned to the statements and general conclusions of modern philosophy and science arising from the discovery of a pluraity and diversity of laws governing the universe having equal validity each in its own cosmological system. The trend to align modern scientific discovery concerning the systems of the universe with corresponding statements applied to human society, cultural traditions,and values is one of the characteristic features of modernity. The position of those who advocate the theory of the transcendent unity of religions is based upon the assumption that all religions, or the major religions of mankind, are revealed religions. They assume that the universality and transcendence of esotericism validates their theory, which they 'discovered' after having acquainted themselves with the metaphysics of Islam. In their understanding of this metaphysics of the transcendent unity of existence, they further assume that the transcendent unity of religions is already implied. There is grave error in all their assumptions, and the phrase 'transcendent unity of religions' is misleading and perhaps meant to be so for motives other than the truth. Their claim to belief in the transecendent unity of religions is something suggested to them inductively by the imagination and is derived from intellectual speculation and not from actual experience. If this is denied, and their claim is derived from the experience of others, then again we say that the sense of 'unity' experienced is not of religions, but of varying degrees of individual religious experience which does not of neccesity lead to the assumption that the religions of inviduals who experienced such 'unity', have truth of equal validity as revealed religions at the level of ordinary existence. Moreover, as already pointed out, the God of that experience is recognized as the rabb, not the ilah of revealed religion. And recognizing Him as the rabb does not necessarily mean that acknowledging Him in true submission follows from that recognition, for rebellion, arrogance, and falsehood have their origin in that very realm of transcendence. There is only one revealed religion. There is only one revealed religion. It was the religion conveyed by all the earlier Prophets, who were sent to preach the message of the revelation to their own people in accordance with the wisdom and justice of the Divine plan to prepare the peoples of the world for the reception of the religion in its ultimate and consummate form as a Universal Religion at the hands of the last Prophet, who was sent to convey the message of the revelation not only to his own people, but to mankind as a whole. The essential message of the revelation was always the same: to recognize and acknowledge and worship the One True and Real God (ilah) alone, without associating Him with any partner, rival, or equal, nor attributing a likeness to Him; and to confirm the truth preached by the earlier Prophets as well as to confirm the final truth brought by the last Prophet as it was confirmed by all the Prophets sent before him.

It appeared to be an airtight case that the more fat a country consumed, the more heart disease. In fact, the data Keys reported did follow this trend line, but only when he conveniently threw out all of the conflicting results!

The pastoral ministry cannot be employer-driven, trend-driven or task-driven. Pastoral ministry must be following Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ called me to this work, and following him must be integral to realizing his calling.

Dear all, Hello to everyone, now I am seated in ergonomic chair in my office, this blog is generally written for every single guy who has complaint against his divine, but has anyone ponder on it, why a person faces crisis in his life? some guys always blame on god for their pathetic condition, in reality they are behind their chaos, as far as I am concerned improper thinking and poor decision making downgrade a person to marsh, especially we can see its example in investment , number of guys spend their money but some of them succumb loss and pour their frustration on god or mentor, I would love to share it with everyone that lump some investment and unaware about ongoing market trends are two basic reasons that blocks the profit of a guy, so I have personal rede to every guy that before investment everyone should go through previous record of market and mull over their strategy of capital investment, if you have any problem for making your investment plan or totally perplexed to spend your hard earn, you should consult with investment consultant, before opting your mentor you should follow your brain not marketing gimmick, because marketing gimmick only tempts the crowd and after making fool to their target audience they skedaddle from market, so friends beware from show off, always use your brain. If you have any problem regarding to your investment strategy, feel free to log on forexnx.com It will your favor to give me chance to serve you in this dog eats dog market. Your satisfaction is our success Warm regards Pooja singh

In the succeeding two centuries, however, some countries evolved in a very different direction. Prussia, Denmark, the Netherlands, Britain, and other European countries followed France in the development of centralized bureaucracies organized along Weberian lines. The French Revolution had, moreover, unleashed not just demands for popular political participation but also a new form of identity by which a shared language and culture would be the central source of unity for the new democratic public. This phenomenon, known as nationalism, then prompted the redrawing of the political map of Europe as dynastic states linked by marriage and feudal obligations were replaced by ones based on a principle of ethnolinguistic solidarity. The levée en masse of the French Revolution represented the first coming together of all these trends: the revolutionary government in Paris was able to mobilize a significant part of the available able-bodied male population to defend France. Under Napoleon, this mobilized expression of state power went on to conquer much of the rest of Europe.

In the following pages, I attempt to show several things: (1) that liberal Protestant denominations were the pioneers of evangelical feminism, and that evangelical feminists today have adopted many of the arguments earlier used by theological liberals to advocate the ordination of women and to reject male headship in marriage (2) that many prominent evangelical feminist writers today advocate positions that deny or undermine the authority of Scripture, and many other egalitarian leaders endorse their books and take no public stance against those who deny the authority of Scripture (3) that recent trends now show that evangelical feminists are heading toward the denial of anything uniquely masculine, and some already endorse calling God “our Mother in heaven” (4) that the history of others who have adopted these positions shows that the next step is the endorsement of the moral legitimacy of homosexuality (5) that the common thread running through all of these trends is a rejection of the effective authority of Scripture in people’s lives, and that this is the bedrock principle of theological liberalism

Surprise Your Competition With These Carpet Cleaning Business In Oklahoma Ideas A strong carpet cleaning service business plan is a critical part of operating a successful business. You are risking everything you have put into your business by not doing your due diligence on a solid business plan. Your growing carpet cleaning service business will benefit from following our strategies. Regardless of whether you are an employee or the owner of the carpet cleaning service business, you are the face of the carpet cleaning company and need to project a positive image at all times when interacting with the public. You will want all customers who come into your business to feel at home and valued. It is essential that employee training includes skills on how to interact with the public and customer relations. Happy customers who'll spread the word through word of mouth are instrumental when it's about expanding your business. It does not mean you have achieved success just because you have reached certain carpet cleaning service business goals. You need to continue to set new goals if you want your business to continue to grow. You'll find that two great approaches to expand the business are by keeping up with new trends in your industry and by remaining strong-minded. If you continually try best to improve your business and follow market trends, you will certainly see your carpet cleaning service business grow. It requires constant dedication, day, and night, to operate a carpet cleaning service business. You should be ready to put in focus, persistence and a lot of time to make it work. Do not expect to be in a position to multitask in the beginning. Knowing when you are overwhelmed and being in a position to hand over some of your responsibilities to others can assist you in becoming a smart business owner. Each time a customer receives superb customer service, he'll most likely return for subsequent purchases. You must be consistent with your efforts to continually please your customers or they might be tempted to take their carpet cleaning service business elsewhere. It is just by setting and adhering to high standards for customer service that your customers will stay with you. The majority of your customers that are lost to your rivals turn towards them because they have a higher standard of customer service. To protect your carpet cleaning service business from legal issues, make it a point to turn in all appropriate legal forms on time and acquire a full understanding of the laws pertaining to your business. We recommend that you consult a lawyer who specializes in business law, even when you already have a basic understanding of business law. The most prosperous carpet cleaning service business can be impacted, or even closed, by an expensive trial. Establishing a working relationship with a lawyer who specializes in business law might be very helpful if you ever find yourself in a legal quandary.

KF: Why is type 2 diabetes suddenly so prevalent? NB: Diets are changing, not just in the U.S., but worldwide. Diabetes seems to follow the spread of meaty, high-fat, high-calorie diets. In Japan, for example, the traditional rice-based diet kept the population generally healthy and thin for many centuries. Up until 1980, only 1 to 5 percent of Japanese adults over age forty had diabetes. Starting around that time, however, the rapid westernization of the diet meant that meat, milk, cheese, and sodas became fashionable. Waistlines expanded, and, by 1990, diabetes prevalence in Japan had climbed to 11 to 12 percent. The same sort of trend has occurred in the U.S. Over the last century, per capita meat consumption increased from about 125 pounds per year (which was already very high compared with other countries) in the early 1900s to over 200 pounds today. In other words, the average American now eats 75 pounds more meat every year than the average American of a century ago. In the same interval, cheese intake soared from less than 4 pounds per person per year to about 33 pounds today. Sugar intake has gone up, too, by about 30 pounds per person per year. Where are we putting all that extra meat, cheese, and sugar? It contributes to body fat, of course, and diabetes follows. Today, about 13 percent of the U.S. adult population has type 2 diabetes, although many of them are not yet aware they have it.

He was raising his hand to knock when the door suddenly opened, revealing Mr. Kenton, Abigail’s elderly butler. Unfortunately, given that Mr. Kenton seemed to be holding some type of bat in his hands, a bat he was now raising at Everett rather threateningly, Everett got the immediate impression the man might not exactly be happy to see him. “Good evening, Mr. Kenton,” Everett finally said when the butler remained mute, something Everett was fairly sure went against every proper bone in the man’s body. “I was, ah, well, I was wondering if I might speak with Miss Longfellow.” “She doesn’t want to speak with you.” Before Everett could get another word past his lips, Mr. Kenton stepped back and shut the door in Everett’s face. Squaring his shoulders, Everett moved forward and knocked rather determinedly on that door. The sound of the lock clicking into place was the only response. He knocked again. A minute passed, the door remained stubbornly shut against him, so . . . he knocked once more. This, to his annoyance, became a trend. He’d knock, a minute would pass, and he’d knock again. Finally, when his knuckles began burning, he turned and stalked down the steps. Just as Millie had done at the Reading Room, he began to peek in all the windows, hoping to find one that might be unlocked. Unfortunately, Mr. Kenton had apparently already thought of the whole unlocked-window business, because Everett heard windows ahead of him being slammed shut. Pushing through the shrubbery he’d been forced to climb behind, he jumped when a flock of peacocks suddenly flew out at him, screeching in a manner he was far too familiar with, right as the sound of barking puppies could be heard from inside the house. Knowing full well those puppies would be with Millie, who couldn’t refuse cuteness if she tried, Everett followed the sound as the peacocks began trailing after him. Stopping at the back of the house, he pushed his way through yet another shrub, peered through the window, and smiled. Millie was standing by a roaring fire with a book in her hand, something he would never tire of seeing.

I once had a foreign exchange trader who worked for me who was an unabashed chartist. He truly believed that all the information you needed was reflected in the past history of a currency. Now it's true there can be less to consider in trading currencies than individual equities, since at least for developed country currencies it's typically not necessary to pore over their financial statements every quarter. And in my experience, currencies do exhibit sustainable trends more reliably than, say, bonds or commodities. Imbalances caused by, for example, interest rate differentials that favor one currency over another (by making it more profitable to invest in the higher-yielding one) can persist for years. Of course, another appeal of charting can be that it provides a convenient excuse to avoid having to analyze financial statements or other fundamental data. Technical analysts take their work seriously and apply themselves to it diligently, but it's also possible for a part-time technician to do his market analysis in ten minutes over coffee and a bagel. This can create the false illusion of being a very efficient worker. The FX trader I mentioned was quite happy to engage in an experiment whereby he did the trades recommended by our in-house market technician. Both shared the same commitment to charts as an under-appreciated path to market success, a belief clearly at odds with the in-house technician's avoidance of trading any actual positions so as to provide empirical proof of his insights with trading profits. When challenged, he invariably countered that managing trading positions would challenge his objectivity, as if holding a losing position would induce him to continue recommending it in spite of the chart's contrary insight. But then, why hold a losing position if it's not what the chart said? I always found debating such tortured logic a brief but entertaining use of time when lining up to get lunch in the trader's cafeteria. To the surprise of my FX trader if not to me, the technical analysis trading account was unprofitable. In explaining the result, my Kool-Aid drinking trader even accepted partial responsibility for at times misinterpreting the very information he was analyzing. It was along the lines of that he ought to have recognized the type of pattern that was evolving but stupidly interpreted the wrong shape. It was almost as if the results were not the result of the faulty religion but of the less than completely faithful practice of one of its adherents. So what use to a profit-oriented trading room is a fully committed chartist who can't be trusted even to follow the charts? At this stage I must confess that we had found ourselves in this position as a last-ditch effort on my part to salvage some profitability out of a trader I'd hired who had to this point been consistently losing money. His own market views expressed in the form of trading positions had been singularly unprofitable, so all that remained was to see how he did with somebody else's views. The experiment wasn't just intended to provide a “live ammunition” record of our in-house technician's market insights, it was my last best effort to prove that my recent hiring decision hadn't been a bad one. Sadly, his failure confirmed my earlier one and I had to fire him. All was not lost though, because he was able to transfer his unsuccessful experience as a proprietary trader into a new business advising clients on their hedge fund investments.

reached its second or third or final stage.”10 (Indeed, on November 2, 1947, writer Thomas Mann, a German émigré, said precisely that: “I am painfully familiar with certain political trends, spiritual intolerance, political inquisitions, and declining legal security, and all this in the name of an alleged ‘state of emergency’ … that is how it started in Germany. What followed was fascism and what followed fascism was war.”)11

Thomas Mann, a German émigré, said precisely that: “I am painfully familiar with certain political trends, spiritual intolerance, political inquisitions, and declining legal security, and all this in the name of an alleged ‘state of emergency’ … that is how it started in Germany. What followed was fascism and what followed fascism was war.”)

At the end of the day, It's based on data. Try to upload as many videos as possible because, at the end of the say, it's all based on data. If you know a certain trend is working for you, then repeat it.

On the other hand, a generous capital market is usually associated with the following: fear of missing out on profitable opportunities reduced risk aversion and skepticism (and, accordingly, reduced due diligence) too much money chasing too few deals willingness to buy securities in increased quantity willingness to buy securities of reduced quality high asset prices, low prospective returns, high risk and skimpy risk premiums It’s clear from this list of elements that excessive generosity in the capital markets stems from a shortage of prudence and thus should give investors one of the clearest red flags. The wide-open capital market arises when the news is good, asset prices are rising, optimism is riding high, and all things seem possible. But it invariably brings the issuance of unsound and overpriced securities, and the incurrence of debt levels that ultimately will result in ruin. The point about the quality of new issue securities in a wide-open capital market deserves particular attention. A decrease in risk aversion and skepticism—and increased focus on making sure opportunities aren’t missed rather than on avoiding losses—makes investors open to a greater quantity of issuance. The same factors make investors willing to buy issues of lower quality. When the credit cycle is in its expansion phase, the statistics on new issuance make clear that investors are buying new issues in greater amounts. But the acceptance of securities of lower quality is a bit more subtle. While there are credit ratings and covenants to look at, it can take effort and inference to understand the significance of these things. In feeding frenzies caused by excess availability of funds, recognizing and resisting this trend seems to be beyond the ability of the majority of market participants. This is one of the many reasons why the aftermath of an overly generous capital market includes losses, economic contraction, and a subsequent unwillingness to lend. The bottom line of all of the above is that generous credit markets usually are associated with elevated asset prices and subsequent losses, while credit crunches produce bargain-basement prices and great profit opportunities. (“Open and Shut”)

Since The Great Recession, the global financial crash of 2008-09, the debt-fuelled post-recession recovery has been the weakest in the post-war era (since the end of World War Two). Whereas total outstanding credit in the US after the Wall Street Crash grew from 160% to 260% of GDP between 1929 and 1932, the figure rose from 365% in 2008 to 540% in 2010. (And this does not include derivatives, whose nominal outstanding value is at least four times GDP).[34] A long depression and rising right-wing populism have followed, including the stunning ascendency of property tycoon and TV celebrity demagogue Donald Trump as the President of the US in 2016.[35] The British public’s vote in June 2016 to leave the EU delivered another shock of global significance. A chronic drift towards trade wars and protectionism is accelerating and in January 2018, US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis said that “great power competition, not terrorism, is now the primary focus of US national security”, putting Russia, China and – yes – Europe in the crosshairs of the world’s long-time dominant economic and military power. Adding to this age of anxiety is the accelerating automation revolution. What should be an emancipatory and utopian development only generates insecurity at the prospect of unprecedented mass unemployment. It can be no coincidence that all these crises are converging at exactly the same time. They cannot be explained away by cynical and shallow generalisations about ‘human nature’. In the course of this investigation we will see that in fact all of these crises have a common root cause: the decaying nature of capitalism and its tendency towards breakdown. Indeed, average Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rates in the world’s richest countries have fallen in every decade since the 1960s and are clearly closing in on zero. Rates of profit, manufacturing costs and commodity prices are also trending towards zero. Drawing on Henryk Grossman’s vital clarification of Karl Marx’s methodology, we shall see that capitalism is heading inexorably towards a final, insurmountable breakdown that is destined to strike much earlier than a zero rate of profit. Indeed, we shall also see that the next, imminent economic crash will result in worldwide hyperinflation. We will also show that the economic crisis is intensifying competition between nation-states, forcing them into a situation which threatens the most destructive world war to date.

Tweets? In 2013, the Pew Research Center, which conducts polls about issues, attitudes, and trends, released the results of its annual survey about Internet use—including Twitter and other social media websites—by the American public. They found that in 2012, 16 percent of adults who used the Internet used Twitter, second only to Facebook, which 67 percent used. The survey revealed that Twitter is most appealing to adults between the ages of 18 and 29, African Americans, and people who live in urban areas. Women were slightly more likely than men to use Twitter. According to similar research by Ignite Social Media, not even half of all Twitter users in 2012 lived in the U.S. Of the cities worldwide with the largest bases of Twitter users, only two—New York and Los An- geles—were in the U.S. Caracas, Venezuela, had the most users, followed by Jakarta, Indonesia, and Sao Paulo, Brazil.

The trend went from fathers teaching children to be independent to the academy teaching children to become dependent. As we can see, when God is not central, all peripheral pursuits are quickly elevated to new idolatrous heights. The religion of modern education can be called the gateway to socialism and the rest of the new “isms”. For there is no other pursuit in which parents abandon everything they have ever stood for, in order to have their child peruse it. When it comes to career, progressivism is a mixed up with the idea that children are liberated when they follow their professors and held back when they follow their fathers.

Do you like it? You may keep it." "Gee, thanks!" said Celia, parading around Edna's room, searching for a mirror. "I can't think why I ever bought that scarf in the first place, girls. I suppose I bought it during a year when yellow scarves were in fashion. And let that be a lesson to you! The thing about fashion, my dears, is that you don't need to follow it, no matter what they say. No fashion trend is compulsory, remember - and if you dress too much in the style of the moment, it makes you look like a nervous person. Paris is all well and good, but we can't just follow Paris for the sake of Paris, now can we?

JEFF, WHAT DOES Day 2 look like?” That’s a question I just got at our most recent all-hands meeting. I’ve been reminding people that it’s Day 1 for a couple of decades. I work in an Amazon building named Day 1, and when I moved buildings, I took the name with me. I spend time thinking about this topic. “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.” To be sure, this kind of decline would happen in extreme slow motion. An established company might harvest Day 2 for decades, but the final result would still come. I’m interested in the question “How do you fend off Day 2?” What are the techniques and tactics? How do you keep the vitality of Day 1, even inside a large organization? Such a question can’t have a simple answer. There will be many elements, multiple paths, and many traps. I don’t know the whole answer, but I may know bits of it. Here’s a starter pack of essentials for Day 1 defense: customer obsession, a skeptical view of proxies, the eager adoption of external trends, and high-velocity decision making.

A little consideration will show anyone that there is in reality no such thing as pure Chance. Webster defines the word "Chance" as follows: "A supposed agent or mode of activity other than a force, law or purpose; the operation or activity of such agent; the supposed effect of such an agent; a happening; fortuity; casualty, etc." But a little consideration will show you that there can be no such agent as "Chance," in the sense of something outside of Law — something outside of Cause and Effect. How could there be a something acting in the phenomenal universe, independent of the laws, order, and continuity of the latter? Such a something would be entirely independent of the orderly trend of the universe, and therefore superior to it. We can imagine nothing outside of THE ALL being outside of the Law, and that only because THE ALL is the LAW in itself. There is no room in the universe for a something outside of and independent of Law. The existence of such a Something would render all Natural Laws ineffective, and would plunge the universe into chaotic disorder and lawlessness.

was surprised by how quickly I was forgotten, how calm the waters were, as soon as I paddled out of the center of the evangelical right-wing whitewater. From one day to the next, I went from daily calls to be on some TV show, or be on the radio, or to be a participant in this or that symposium, march, seminar, or publishing venture, to blessed silence. It was a relief. It also confirmed what I already knew: that evangelicalism is not so much a religion as a series of fast-moving personality cults. As soon as a leader steps aside, or is shoved aside, or stumbles, the crowd looks for the next man or woman to briefly follow. There is always a bigger show down the street, another even better Bible-study leader or congregation to try, another hot author/guru to read, another trend, from speaking in tongues to giving homeschooling a try. And most evangelicals spend a good portion of their time wandering from church to church, from leader to leader, even from one radio and TV personality to another, in the same way that when I was a teen I’d switch my loyalty from one rock band to another. It’s all about who is “hot.” In

Build Emotional Connection With Your Fans | Brand Loyalty The way influencers communicate with fans is continuously evolving. we discuss few ways so that you can keep on top of trends to grow the fanbase, keep fans engaged and engender loyalty in Velvetrope. 1. Offer something interactive to get fans engaged : quizzes, polls, and competitions are great ways to engage fans. There are many ways to build fan engagement such as asking followers for feedback, creating quizzes, polls, and competitions. Velvetrope is the best for this. 2. Create unique video content that appeals to your fans: The next generation of fans is growing up surrounded by digital and social content. Therefore, Influencer needs to work harder to ensure their content is unique, engaging, and stands out amongst the rest. Video content might take the shape of exercise tutorials, “top 10” countdowns, “best moment” sizzles, workout tip videos, player interviews, product and service videos, live streams, fan testimonials, competition announcements, and more. Velvetrope is a CRM application that lets you perform all of the above, as well as publish fresh information and make announcements. You can connect with your Fans easily. Velvetrope makes it easy for you to share your most recent blogs, videos, podcasts, and other special content with your followers. Begin sharing your unique content with your VIPs as soon as possible. Share exclusive content with your fans. Post, Stream, and Share: Everybody Makes Money via Velvetrope. You can create a referral program for your VIPs to share with their friends and VIPs. For your referral program, you can use our AI recommendations or create your own rewards. #engagementwithaudience #fanengagementapp

The theme of music making the dancer dance turns up everywhere in Astaire’s work. It is his most fundamental creative impulse. Following this theme also helps connect Astaire to trends in popular music and jazz, highlighting his desire to meet the changing tastes of his audience. His comic partner dance with Marjorie Reynolds to the Irving Berlin song “I Can’t Tell a Lie” in Holiday Inn (1942) provides a revealing example. Performed in eighteenth-century costumes and wigs for a Washington’s birthday–themed floor show, the dance is built around abrupt musical shifts between the light classical sound of flute, strings, and harpsichord and four contrasting popular music styles played on the soundtrack by Bob Crosby and His Orchestra, a popular dance band. Moderate swing, a bluesy trumpet shuffle, hot flag-waving swing, and the Conga take turns interrupting what would have been a graceful, if effete, gavotte. The script supervisor heard these contrasts on the set during filming to playback. In her notes, she used commonplace musical terms to describe the action: “going through routine to La Conga music, then music changing back and forth from minuet to jazz—cutting as he holds her hand and she whirls doing minuet.”13 Astaire and Reynolds play professional dancers who are expected to respond correctly and instantaneously to the musical cues being given by the band. In an era when variety was a hallmark of popular music, different dance rhythms and tempos cued different dances. Competency on the dance floor meant a working knowledge of different dance styles and the ability to match these moves to the shifting musical program of the bands that played in ballrooms large and small. The constant stylistic shifts in “I Can’t Tell a Lie” are all to the popular music point. The joke isn’t only that the classical-sounding music that matches the couple’s costumes keeps being interrupted by pop sounds; it’s that the interruptions reference real varieties of popular music heard everywhere outside the movie theaters where Holiday Inn first played to capacity audiences. The routine runs through a veritable catalog of popular dance music circa 1942. The brief bit of Conga was a particularly poignant joke at the time. A huge hit in the late 1930s, the Conga during the war became an invitation to controlled mayhem, a crazy release of energy in a time of crisis when the dance floor was an important place of escape. A regular feature at servicemen’s canteens, the Conga was an old novelty dance everybody knew, so its intrusion into “I Can’t Tell a Lie” can perhaps be imagined as something like hearing the mid-1990s hit “Macarena” after the 2001 terrorist attacks—old party music echoing from a less complicated time.14 If today we miss these finer points, in 1942 audiences—who flocked to this movie—certainly got them all. “I Can’t Tell a Lie” was funnier then, and for specifically musical reasons that had everything to do with the larger world of popular music and dance. As subsequent chapters will demonstrate, many such musical jokes or references can be recovered by listening to Astaire’s films in the context of the popular music marketplace.

Ultimately, attachment theory helps one understand the ways in which people function on an individual level and while interacting with one another. Although attachment theory has a variety of applications, it tends to be especially useful in couples’ therapy. Since each attachment style has generalized trends, understanding your or your partner’s coping mechanisms, subconscious beliefs, and perceptions can relieve substantial communication issues. For example, in a relationship, the Dismissive-Avoidant may be withdrawn, autonomous, and seemingly independent. To the Dismissive-Avoidant, they are functioning as they always have—on their own. To an Anxious Attachment, however, it may feel as though their partner is on the verge of abandoning them and may cause serious emotional distress. However, the Dismissive-Avoidant’s coping mechanisms don’t necessarily mean they are detaching from the relationship—they are actually just detaching from their own emotions. Now, although none of these behaviors are necessarily healthy in a relationship, understanding why they occur is the first step. Once partners understand each other’s coping mechanisms and vulnerabilities, they can begin to supply their partner with the things that they do need. For example, the Dismissive-Avoidant needs continuous and unwavering emotional support and validation. Since they were emotionally neglected as a child, they need to slowly learn that they can consistently and predictably rely on others. The Anxious Attachment individual needs reassurance and affection to understand that they are good enough and that they won’t be rejected. The simple knowledge of the pain points of your partner and the pain points that lie within yourself opens up a whole stream of communication that you previously were unable to tap into—because your conscious mind didn’t even know it was there. Moreover, your attachment style also interacts with what Dr. Gary Chapman describes as your “Love Language.” Just as there are different spoken languages, and different dialects present within the spoken languages, Love Languages are different ways that people express and receive love or gratitude when they interact with others, whether with a romantic partner or with friends and family. According to Dr. Chapman’s book, they consist of five different kinds of expressions: 1. Words of affirmation 2. Acts of service 3. Giving and receiving gifts 4. Quality time 5. Physical touch Given the attachment style of each partner in a relationship, certain expressions may be better received. Attachment theory applies to a variety of circumstances and works well paired with other theories to make couples therapy a more holistic experience. The following chapters will dive into what your attachment style is, what it means, and how it functions in all aspects of your life—from your romantic relationships to your friendships with coworkers.

Who are we, the people who have ADHD? We are the problem kid who drives his parents crazy by being totally disorganized, unable to follow through on anything, incapable of cleaning up a room, or washing dishes, or performing just about any assigned task; the one who is forever interrupting, making excuses for work not done, and generally functioning far below potential in most areas. We are the kid who gets daily lectures on how we’re squandering our talent, wasting the golden opportunity that our innate ability gives us to do well, and failing to make good use of all that our parents have provided. We are also sometimes the talented executive who keeps falling short due to missed deadlines, forgotten obligations, social faux pas, and blown opportunities. Too often we are the addicts, the misfits, the unemployed, and the criminals who are just one diagnosis and treatment plan away from turning it all around. We are the people Marlon Brando spoke for in the classic 1954 film On the Waterfront when he said, “I coulda been a contender.” So many of us coulda been contenders, and shoulda been for sure. But then, we can also make good. Can we ever! We are the seemingly tuned-out meeting participant who comes out of nowhere to provide the fresh idea that saves the day. Frequently, we are the “underachieving” child whose talent blooms with the right kind of help and finds incredible success after a checkered educational record. We are the contenders and the winners. We are also imaginative and dynamic teachers, preachers, circus clowns, and stand-up comics, Navy SEALs or Army Rangers, inventors, tinkerers, and trend setters. Among us there are self-made millionaires and billionaires; Pulitzer and Nobel prize winners; Academy, Tony, Emmy, and Grammy award winners; topflight trial attorneys, brain surgeons, traders on the commodities exchange, and investment bankers. And we are often entrepreneurs. We are entrepreneurs ourselves, and the great majority of the adult patients we see for ADHD are or aspire to be entrepreneurs too. The owner and operator of an entrepreneurial support company called Strategic Coach, a man named Dan Sullivan (who also has ADHD!), estimates that at least 50 percent of his clients have ADHD as well.

Diagnosing this alleged antipathy of the Muslims, he elaborated: The Moslems in general and Indian Moslems in particular have not as yet grown out of the historical stage, of intense religiosity and the theological concept of state. Their theology and theocratical [sic] politics divide the human world into two groups only—The Moslem land and the enemy land. All lands which are either entirely inhabited by the Moslems or are ruled over by the Moslems are Moslem lands. All lands, which are mostly inhabited by non-Moslem power are enemy lands and no faithful Moslem is allowed to bear any loyalty to them and is called upon to do everything in his power by policy or force or fraud to convert the non-Moslem there to Moslem faith, to bring about its political conquest by a Moslem power. It is no good quoting sentences here or there from Moslem theological books to prove the contrary. Read the whole book to know its trend. And again it is not with books that we are concerned here but with the followers of the book and how they translate them in practice. You will then see that the whole Moslem history and their daily actions are framed on the design I have outlined above. Consequently, a territorial patriotism is a word unknown to the Moslem—nay is tabooed, unless in connection with a Moslem territory. Afghans can be patriots for Afghanisthan is a Moslem territory today. But an Indian Moslem if he is a real Moslem—and they are intensely religious as a people—cannot faithfully bear loyalty to India as a country, as a nation, as a State, because it is today ‘an Enemy Land’ and doubly lost; for non-Moslems are in a majority here and to boot it is not ruled by any Moslem power, Moslem sovereign. Add to this that of all non-Moslems the Hindus are looked upon as the most damned by Moslem theologians. For Christians and Jews are after all ‘Kitabis’, having the holy books partially in common. But the Hindus are totally ‘Kafirs’ as a consequence their land ‘Hindusthan’ is pre-eminently an ‘enemy’ and as long as it is not ruled by Moslems or all Hindus do not embrace Islam . . . What wonder then that the Muslim League should openly declare its intention to join hands with non-Indian alien Moslem countries rather than with Indian Hindus in forming a Moslem Federation? They could not be accused from their point of view of being traitors to Hindusthan. Their conscience was clear. They never looked upon our today’s ‘Hindusthan’ as their country, nation. It is to them already an alien land, and enemy land—‘a Dar-ul-Harb’ and not a ‘Dar-ul-Islam!!

Your approach becomes objective, moving as close as you can to rational. You have enough confidence in your own decision making that you never seek out investment recommendations. You’re content to wait patiently for the right opportunity. And you’re never too proud to buy a stock making new highs, even all-time highs. For you, investing opportunities are market breakouts. Conversely, when wrong, you exit immediately, no questions asked. You view loss as an opportunity to learn, move on, and save money to play another day. Obsessing on the past is pointless. You approach trading as a business, making note of what you buy or sell and why in the same matter-of-fact way you balance your checkbook. By not personalizing your trading decisions, your emotional indecision has the chance to decrease.

We can correct for the past observation bias against counting weak storms by looking only at storms in category EF1 and stronger (those most likely to cause destruction). This gives us the two graphs in Figure 6.6. The upper graph, an annual count of US tornadoes strength EF1 or greater, shows no trend over the past sixty years, although there is a hint of a forty-year cycle. The lower graph looks at only the strongest tornadoes (EF3 or above) and shows that their number decreased by about 40 percent during the sixty years following 1954. In other words, as human influences have grown since the middle of the twentieth century, the number of significant tornadoes hasn’t changed much at all, but the strongest storms have become less frequent.

CHANGING YOUR OUTLOOK This chapter will explore the ways in which Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) techniques can be applied to difficult situations to relieve emotional suffering. Moreover, by taking a more intensive approach than that traditionally outlined in CBT, you can look at the core subconscious beliefs that you are projecting onto a situation and which may be causing undue pain. This approach allows you to truly create long-lasting change in all areas of your life and helps you to truly address the underlying wounds that your attachment style may exhibit. The approach that I have created follows a series of steps that draw on fundamental aspects of CBT, as well as the trends I have seen in thousands of clients. It is as follows: • Begin by reflecting on the situation and identifying emotional patterns. • Ask yourself what meaning is being assigned to the situation and what core wound it activates. • Look for proof of the opposite and reflect.

Lots of French people take pride in NOT being influenced by trends. A few months ago I conducted a series of street interviews for a podcast asking random people about the latest trends. All the most stylish women I encountered insisted they had no idea what the current trends were and that they simply dressed to please themselves, despite the fact that they clearly were following these trends. I believe their response was a mixture of snobbery and truth: they follow such trends because they genuinely love them, not just because they are trends.

Love! How many legends were organized for it? It was said that it is the most mysterious human feeling that pushes us to do things we are not ready for and heedless of us. Despite the reality, and the difficulties, we do the impossible, and in the name of love, we do miracles. Just legends but the truth is that history did not mention that any miracle has happened thanks to love. Myths, of which there is no use but our consolation, and the justification of our blind rush behind unjustified, incomprehensible feelings, to do what we were not ready to do, and then we pay the price with a reassuring conscience, and with a comfortable mind, in the name of love. If we analyze these feelings, love, anger, hate, tranquility, fear, we will find that they are another face of pain, just chemical reactions inside our bodies, and hormones controlled by our mind, it decides when to kindle the fire of love in us, and when to make hate blind us. If you know how to motivate the mind to produce the hormone needed to produce the desired emotions, then you do not have to talk about anything anymore. It is all your emotions, which are yours. This inevitably makes human feelings subject to causation in the universe, unless our feelings are from another world, not causal. Therefore, the most magical words remain, those that come out of the mouth of a lover describing his love for his lover, “I love you without reason.” This is the impossibility desired, and in the subconscious, these words have charm and glamour, and the tongue of the lover says, “My love for you is not from this causal world, neither the color of your hair, nor your eyes, nor your body, nor your sweet voice, nor your way of speaking, nor anything that you possess is a reason why I love you, because my love for you is not causal, does not belong to this world.” A lie loved by the mind of the lovers, a legend among the millions which says, that nothing in this world can anticipate the feelings and moods of human beings before they occur, and more precisely, the private feelings and fluctuations, of an individual, to be precise, and not just of a large group of people, the more we try to customize it, the more difficult it becomes. And where the indicators of the collective mind, the demagogue, can give us an idea of the general direction and the future fluctuations of a society or group of people, not because of a weakness in the lines of defense of feelings, but rather because we know that the mob, the collective mind, and the herd, will force many to follow it, even if it violates what they feel, what they want at their core. The mind is designed for survival, and you know that survival’s chances are stronger with the stronger group, the more number, it will secrete all the necessary hormones, to force you to follow the herd. However, the feelings assigned to a particular person remain an impossible task, so many people are able to deceive each other by showing signs of expected trends and fluctuations that contradict the reality of what they feel. Humans and scientists have treated it as something unpredictable, coming from another world, a curse on science, as if it were a whiff of a magical spell cast on us from the immemorial. But in fact, emotions are causal, and every cause has a causative. Like everything else in this world, the laws of chaos and randomness apply to them. They can be accurately predicted, formulated into mathematical equations, and even manipulated. All it takes is to have something that contains all the cosmic events, a number we did not imagine, starting with the flutter of a butterfly, a breath of air, temperatures across the universe, a word a man says to his son, a donkey’s kick, a rabbit’s jump, and ending with the movement of stars and planets, and cosmic explosions, and beyond, and able to deal with them, and with the hierarchical possibilities of their occurrence.

Follow the money, all of it, and you can see how a trend toward private opulence and public squalor has come to define not simply a handful of communities, but the whole nation.

The logical next step after determining where a trend is on its trajectory is to follow with an “if this, then that” statement. Step five of our forecasting method is to use Kahn’s technique of storytelling and put the facts into a narrative context to develop possible scenarios for the future. Our goal isn’t to predict something that will definitely happen. Instead, we must envision all of the possible outcomes and use them to help us make an informed decision about strategy to employ in the present.

We believe that every large organization—and certainly those that are or aspire to be AI first—should designate smart people to follow AI technology trends, try out new technologies, and import them when they seem to fit the organization’s needs. These people don’t need to be fantastic data scientists or AI engineers, but they do need to understand the key technologies in AI and how they support use cases and business needs.

Authentic Self-Awareness You will become more and more conscious of who you really are as you learn the chakras and practice to align them. As an energetic being with unique gifts and wounds, you will notice yourself. You're going to look openly and courageously where you're close in life, where you're open and where you're stuck. You will be able to see in yourself these habits and decide to practice letting them go. You'll figure out where you need to loosen up when you discover your routines and trends. In other words, where you can loosen your energetic grip on ways of being that do not really serve you, you will learn. The easiest way is to start noticing where your thoughts often go, what you're focusing on, who and what makes you angry and upset, what makes you happy, what makes you tired, what gives you energy, what you want and what you're upset. You begin to recognize what your talents are as you figure out what stuff you show up in your life. And from there you can understand how you can better relate to the universe through your dharma. This is an authentic self-consciousness. Your Dharma It takes courage, confidence, and patience to be truly open to seeing your own gifts and innate love in life. It is possible to work on all these qualities through chakra healing. It takes courage to follow a path that may run counter to what your family told you, or you think you can't. It takes confidence that the universe will provide you with the support and abundance you need and want. Combining knowledge with intuition requires wisdom. It's likely that you might have illness because of it if you haven't followed your inner knowledge in relationships, work, or lifestyle. You may have some important life transitions ahead of you in order to heal the disease as you work to follow your inner knowledge. And, your dharma will be following that wisdom.

State wants the alleged techniques, presumably.” “I’ve been wondering about that,” Norman said. “I wonder if we do want them.” “How do you mean?” “It’s a bit difficult to explain … Look, have you been following television at all since you came home?” “Occasionally, but since the Yatakang news broke I’ve been much too busy to catch more than an occasional news bulletin.” “So have I, but—well, I guess I’m more familiar with the way trends get started here nowadays, so I can extrapolate from the couple or three programmes I have had time for.” Norman’s gaze moved over Elihu’s head to the far corner of the room. “Engrelay Satelserv blankets most of Africa, doesn’t it?” “The whole continent, I’d say. There are English-speaking people in every country on Earth nowadays, except possibly for China.” “So you’re acquainted with Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere?” “Yes, of course—these two who always appear in station identification slots, doing exotic and romantic things.” “Did you have a personalised set at any time, with your own identity matted into the Everywhere image?” “Lord, no! It costs—what? About five thousand bucks, isn’t it?” “About that. I haven’t got one either; the basic fee is for couple service, and being a bachelor I’ve never bothered. I just have the standard brownnose identity on my set.” He hesitated. “And—to be absolutely frank—a Scandahoovian one for the shiggy half of the pair. But I’ve watched friends’ sets plenty of times where they had the full service, and I tell you it’s eerie. There’s something absolutely unique and indescribable about seeing your own face and hearing your own voice, matted into the basic signal. There you are wearing clothes you’ve never owned, doing things you’ve never done in places you’ve never been, and it has the immediacy of real life because nowadays television is the real world. You catch? We’re aware of the scale of the planet, so we don’t accept that our own circumscribed horizons constitute reality. Much more real is what’s relayed to us by the TV.” “I can well understand that,” Elihu nodded. “And of course I’ve seen this on other people’s sets too. Also I agree entirely about what we regard as real. But I thought we were talking about the Yatakangi claim?” “I still am,” Norman said. “Do you have a homimage attachment on your set? No, obviously not. I do. This does the same thing except with your environment; when they—let’s see … Ah yes! When they put up something like the splitscreen cuts they use to introduce SCANALYZER, one of the cuts is always what they call the ‘digging’ cut, and shows Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere sitting in your home wearing your faces watching the same programme you’re about to watch. You know this one?” “I don’t think they have this service in Africa yet,” Elihu said. “I know the bit you mean, but it always shows a sort of idealised dream-home full of luxy gadgetry.” “That used to be what they did here,” Norman said. “Only nowadays practically every American home is full of luxy gadgetry. You know Chad’s definition of the New Poor? People who are too far behind with time-payments on next year’s model to make the down-payment on the one for the year after?” Elihu chuckled, then grew grave. “That’s too nearly literal to be funny,” he said. “Prophet’s beard, it certainly is! I found time to look over some of Chad’s books after Guinevere’s party, and … Well, having met him I was inclined to think he was a conceited blowhard, but now I think he’s entitled to every scrap of vanity he likes to put on.

The basic math suggests everyone can be saved. Earth can carry about eleven billion humans in peace, prosperity, and harmony. The math looks like this: 1. Gaming affords a 20:1 increase in neural plasticity. 2. Immersive gaming ups that another 30:1. 3. Social Rewards systems another 10:1. 4. Roblux has already passed Twitter in popularity and time on the platform. 5. The trends all indicate Immersive Gaming will overtake Social Media in persons under 60 within ten years as the preferred communication vehicle. 6. Companion Ai affords marked improvements in new pattern uptake rates. 7. 99.9% of people are followers.

How to Get on Google Maps- The process We all know that marketing trends keep on changing and the new wave is pointing towards the Google maps marketing. Everyone is able to see the importance of this strategy and they are pretty impressed with the results too. However, the next big question is how to get on the Google Maps? What process do they need to follow? Do they have to hire someone for the deed? Here you can get the answer for all these questions. Initially you don’t have to hire anyone to do the deed but eventually maybe you have to. The initial process of getting on the maps is quite easy and is divided into few steps only. Here is the list of steps one needs to follow in order to get on the Google maps and start their journey of Google Maps marketing. How to Get on Google Maps • Business Listing: The very first step to start the process is through getting yourself listed on the Google Maps. Fill the details of your business accurately on Google My Business listing. Mention all the details asked there without skipping any field. Claim your listing first, this step will be the stepping stone to mark your company’s presence on Google Maps. • Address: Here we are talking about Maps so hopefully you understand that it is very important to share the exact address of the business to get a right one on the maps. Before completing the listing, make sure that the address is 100% correct without any discrepancies, be it on Goggle or other platforms. • Verification of the listing: The last step is to verify your listing which can be done through several ways. Some people believe that postcard submissions are the most dependable ones. This step can take few days or weeks to complete. In this step every option will offer you a 4- digit PIN which you have to submit at Google’s site.

The American experiment was based on the emergence in the second half of the eighteenth century of a fresh new possibility in human affairs: that the rule of reason could be sovereign. You could say that the age of print begat the Age of Reason which begat the age of democracy. The eighteenth century witnessed more and more ordinary citizens able to use knowledge as a source of power to mediate between wealth and privilege. The democratic logic inherent in these new trends was blunted and forestalled by the legacy structures of power in Europe. But the intrepid migrants who ventured across the Atlantic -- many of them motivated by a desire to escape the constraints of class and creed -- carried the potent seeds of the Enlightenment and planted them in the fertile soil of the New World. Our Founders understood this better than any others; they realized that a "well-informed citizenry" could govern itself and secure liberty for individuals by substituting reason for brute force. They decisively rejected the three-thousand-year-old superstitious belief in the divine right of kings to rule absolutely and arbitrarily. They reawakened the ancient Greek and Roman traditions of debating the wisest courses of action by exchanging information and opinions in new ways. Whether it is called a public forum or a public sphere or a marketplace of ideas, the reality of open and free public discussion and debate was considered central to the operation of our democracy in America's earliest decades. Our first self-expression as a nation -- "We the People" -- made it clear where the ultimate source of authority lay. It was universally understood that the ultimate check and balance for American government was its accountability to the people. And the public forum was the place where the people held the government accountable. That is why it was so important the marketplace for ideas operated independent from and beyond the authority of government. The three most important characteristics of this marketplace of ideas were the following: 1. It was open to every individual, with no barriers to entry save the necessity of literacy. This access, it is crucial to add, applied not only to the receipt of information but also the ability to contribute information directly into the flow of ideas that was available to all. 2. The fate of ideas contributed by individuals depended, for the most part, on an emergent meritocracy of ideas. Those judged by the market to be good rose to the top, regardless of the wealth or class of the individual responsible for them. 3. The accepted rules of discourse presumed that the participants were all governed by an unspoken duty to search for general agreement. That is what a "conversation of democracy" is all about.

What is peer orientation? Orientation, the drive to get one's bearings and become acquainted with one's surroundings, is a fundamental human instinct and need. Dis-orientation is one of the least bearable of all psychological experiences. Attachment and orientation are inextricably intertwined. Humans and other creatures automatically orient themselves by seeking cues from those to whom they are attached. Children, like the young of any warm-blooded species, have an innate orienting instinct: they need to get their sense of direction from somebody. Just as a magnet turns automatically toward the North Pole, so children have an inborn need to find their bearings by turning toward a source of authority, contact, and warmth. Children cannot endure the lack of such a figure in their lives: they become disoriented. They cannot endure what I call an orientation void. The parent, or any adult acting as parent substitute, is the nature-intended pole of orientation for the child, just as adults are the orienting influences in the lives of all animals that rear their young. It so happens that this orienting instinct of humans is much like the imprinting instinct of a duckling. Hatched from the egg, the duckling immediately imprints on the mother duck — he will follow her around, heeding her example and her directions until he grows into mature independence. That is how nature would prefer it, of course. In the absence of the mother duck, however, the duckling will begin to follow the nearest moving object—a human being, a dog, or even a mechanical toy. Needless to say, neither the human, the dog, nor the toy are as well suited as the mother duck to raise that duckling to successful adult duckhood. Likewise, if no parenting adult is available, the human child will orient to whomever is near. Social, economic, and cultural trends in the past five or six decades have displaced the parent from his intended position as the orienting influence on the child. The peer group has moved into this orienting void, with deplorable results.

There is a second type of technical analysis that neither predicts or forecasts. This type is based on reacting to price action, as trend trader Martin Estlander notes: “We identify market trends, we do not predict them. Our models are kept reactive at all times.

The players who score the most runs are home run hitters, not those with consistent batting records. “It’s the same with trading. Consistency is something to strive for, but it’s not always optimal. Trading is a waiting game. You sit and wait and make a lot of money all at once. The profits tend to come in bunches. The secret is to go sideways between the home runs, not lose too much between them.”12

However, trend following strategies only work if price trends continue. But why should trends continue? If prices initially underreact to either good or bad news, trends tend to continue as prices slowly move to fully reflect changes in fundamental value. These trends have the potential to continue even further as investors herd (or chase trends). Herding can cause prices to overreact and move beyond fundamental value after the initial under-reaction. Naturally, all trends must eventually end, as deviation from fair value cannot continue infinitely.3

This lightening of the bone, a genetically based process, is seen in the fossil remains of species like pigs and cattle as they were domesticated from their wild forebears. In people this process, called gracilization, proceeded independently in each of the world’s populations, according to the physical anthropologist Marta Mirazón Lahr.12 All populations followed this trend save for two at the extremities of the human diaspora, the Fuegians at the tip of South America and the aborigines of Australia. Gracilization of the skull is most pronounced in sub-Saharan Africans and East Asians, with Europeans retaining considerable robustness.13

Then why are we following you?” Rami exclaimed. “We’re risking everything on the words of a charlatan.” Tykhan showed no offense. “A very ancient charlatan. I’ve been following variables and trends, going back millennia, pointing to the certainty of a war to come. With enough knowledge, I can predict likely outcomes. It’s allowed me to rule empires and bring down kingdoms, all leading to this moment. To ready the Crown as best I can for the tumult to come. If you follow history in all its telling detail, prophecy is simply inevitability.” Kanthe remembered Tykhan using similar words in describing Nyx’s vision.