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Pick a leader who will make their citizens proud. One who will stir the hearts of the people, so that the sons and daughters of a given nation strive to emulate their leader's greatness. Only then will a nation be truly great, when a leader inspires and produces citizens worthy of becoming future leaders, honorable decision makers and peacemakers. And in these times, a great leader must be extremely brave. Their leadership must be steered only by their conscience, not a bribe.
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Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
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Pick a leader who will keep jobs in your country by offering companies incentives to hire only within their borders, not one who allows corporations to outsource jobs for cheaper labor when there is a national employment crisis. Choose a leader who will invest in building bridges, not walls. Books, not weapons. Morality, not corruption. Intellectualism and wisdom, not ignorance. Stability, not fear and terror. Peace, not chaos. Love, not hate. Convergence, not segregation. Tolerance, not discrimination. Fairness, not hypocrisy. Substance, not superficiality. Character, not immaturity. Transparency, not secrecy. Justice, not lawlessness. Environmental improvement and preservation, not destruction. Truth, not lies.
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Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
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A NATION'S GREATNESS DEPENDS ON ITS LEADER
To vastly improve your country and truly make it great again, start by choosing a better leader. Do not let the media or the establishment make you pick from the people they choose, but instead choose from those they do not pick. Pick a leader from among the people who is heart-driven, one who identifies with the common man on the street and understands what the country needs on every level. Do not pick a leader who is only money-driven and does not understand or identify with the common man, but only what corporations need on every level.
Pick a peacemaker. One who unites, not divides. A cultured leader who supports the arts and true freedom of speech, not censorship. Pick a leader who will not only bail out banks and airlines, but also families from losing their homes -- or jobs due to their companies moving to other countries. Pick a leader who will fund schools, not limit spending on education and allow libraries to close. Pick a leader who chooses diplomacy over war. An honest broker in foreign relations. A leader with integrity, one who says what they mean, keeps their word and does not lie to their people. Pick a leader who is strong and confident, yet humble. Intelligent, but not sly. A leader who encourages diversity, not racism. One who understands the needs of the farmer, the teacher, the doctor, and the environmentalist -- not only the banker, the oil tycoon, the weapons developer, or the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyist.
Pick a leader who will keep jobs in your country by offering companies incentives to hire only within their borders, not one who allows corporations to outsource jobs for cheaper labor when there is a national employment crisis. Choose a leader who will invest in building bridges, not walls. Books, not weapons. Morality, not corruption. Intellectualism and wisdom, not ignorance. Stability, not fear and terror. Peace, not chaos. Love, not hate. Convergence, not segregation. Tolerance, not discrimination. Fairness, not hypocrisy. Substance, not superficiality. Character, not immaturity. Transparency, not secrecy. Justice, not lawlessness. Environmental improvement and preservation, not destruction. Truth, not lies.
Most importantly, a great leader must serve the best interests of the people first, not those of multinational corporations. Human life should never be sacrificed for monetary profit. There are no exceptions. In addition, a leader should always be open to criticism, not silencing dissent. Any leader who does not tolerate criticism from the public is afraid of their dirty hands to be revealed under heavy light. And such a leader is dangerous, because they only feel secure in the darkness. Only a leader who is free from corruption welcomes scrutiny; for scrutiny allows a good leader to be an even greater leader.
And lastly, pick a leader who will make their citizens proud. One who will stir the hearts of the people, so that the sons and daughters of a given nation strive to emulate their leader's greatness. Only then will a nation be truly great, when a leader inspires and produces citizens worthy of becoming future leaders, honorable decision makers and peacemakers. And in these times, a great leader must be extremely brave. Their leadership must be steered only by their conscience, not a bribe.
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Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
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Pick a leader who will not only bail out banks and airlines, but also families from losing their homes -- or jobs due to their companies moving to other countries. Pick a leader who will fund schools, not limit spending on education and allow libraries to close. Pick a leader who chooses diplomacy over war. An honest broker in foreign relations. A leader with integrity, one who says what they mean, keeps their word and does not lie to their people. Pick a leader who is strong and confident, yet humble. Intelligent, but not sly. A leader who encourages diversity, not racism. One who understands the needs of the farmer, the teacher, the doctor, and the environmentalist -- not only the banker, the oil tycoon, the weapons developer, or the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyist.
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Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
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This has always been a fatal flaw in U.S. real estate: the volume of development has been related to the availability of funds, not to demand.
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Sam Zell (Am I Being Too Subtle?: Straight Talk From a Business Rebel)
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Structural factors are those such as ownership and control, dependence on other major funding sources (notably, advertisers), and mutual interests and relationships between the media and those who make the news and have the power to define it and explain what it means. The propaganda model also incorporates other closely related factors such as the ability to complain about the media’s treatment of news (that is, produce “flak”), to provide “experts” to confirm the official slant on the news, and to fix the basic principles and ideologies that are taken for granted by media personnel and the elite, but are often resisted by the general population.1 In our view, the same underlying power sources that own the media and fund them as advertisers, that serve as primary definers of the news, and that produce flak and proper-thinking experts, also play a key role in fixing basic principles and the dominant ideologies. We believe that what journalists do, what they see as newsworthy, and what they take for granted as premises of their work are frequently well explained by the incentives, pressures, and constraints incorporated into such a structural analysis. These structural factors that dominate media operations are not allcontrolling and do not always produce simple and homogeneous results.
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Noam Chomsky (Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media)
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Pick a leader who will fund schools, not limit spending on education and allow libraries to close. Pick a leader who chooses diplomacy over war. An honest broker in foreign relations. A leader with integrity, one who says what they mean, keeps their word and does not lie to their people. Pick a leader who is strong and confident, yet humble. Intelligent, but not sly. A leader who encourages diversity, not racism. One who understands the needs of the farmer, the teacher, the doctor, and the environmentalist -- not only the banker, the oil tycoon, the weapons developer, or the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyist.
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Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
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State philosophy reposes on a double identity: of the thinking subject, and of the concepts it creates and to which it lends its own presumed attributes of sameness and constancy. The subjects, its concepts, and also the objects in the world to which the concepts are applied have a shared, internal essence: the self-resemblance at the basis of identity. Representational thought is analogical; its concern is to establish a correspondence between these symmetrically structured domains. The faculty of judgment is the policeman of analogy, assuring that each of these terms is honestly itself, and that the proper correspondences obtain. In thought its end is truth, in action justice. The weapons it wields in their pursuit are limitive distribution (the determination of the exclusive set of properties possessed by each term in contradistinction to the others: logos, law) and hierarchical ranking (the measurement of the degree of perfection of a term’s self-resemblance in relation to a supreme standard, man, god, or gold: value, morality). The modus operandi is negation: x = x = not y. Identity, resemblance, truth, justice, and negation. The rational foundation for order. The established order, of course: philosophers have traditionally been employees of the State. The collusion between philosophy and the State was most explicitly enacted in the first decade of the nineteenth century with the foundation of the University of Berlin, which was to become the model of higher learning throughout Europe and in the United States. The goal laid out for it by Wilhelm von Humboldt (based on proposals by Fichte and Schleiermacher) was the ‘spiritual and moral training of the nation,’ to be achieved by ‘deriving everything from an original principle’ (truth), by ‘relating everything to an ideal’ (justice), and by ‘unifying this principle and this ideal to a single Idea’ (the State). The end product would be ‘a fully legitimated subject of knowledge and society’ – each mind an analogously organized mini-State morally unified in the supermind of the State. More insidious than the well-known practical cooperation between university and government (the burgeoning military funding of research) is its philosophical role in the propagation of the form of representational thinking itself, that ‘properly spiritual absolute State’ endlessly reproduced and disseminated at every level of the social fabric.
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Gilles Deleuze (A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia)
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after the war, historian Marilyn Young warned: The U.S. can destroy Iraq’s highways, but not build its own; create the conditions for epidemic in Iraq, but not offer health care to millions of Americans. It can excoriate Iraqi treatment of the Kurdish minority, but not deal with domestic race relations; create homelessness abroad but not solve it here; keep a half million troops drug free as part of a war, but refuse to fund the treatment of millions of drug addicts at home. . . . We shall lose the war after we have won it.
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Howard Zinn (A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present)
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Children and adolescents, being relatively new to life, are naturally creative because they haven't been brainwashed, so to speak, by the conventional attitudes of society. Consequently, students are always coming up with novel images, words, and actions that my delight, enlighten, or inspire adults....Creativity has not been the subject of intense focus, extensive research, or high levels of funding in American education.
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Thomas Armstrong (Awakening Genius in the Classroom)
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Where once universities, corporations, movie studios, and the like had been governed by a combination of relatively simple chains of command and informal patronage networks, we now have a world of funding proposals, strategic vision documents, and development team pitches—allowing for the endless elaborations of new and ever more pointless levels of managerial hierarchy, staffed by men and women with elaborate titles, fluent in corporate jargon, but who either have no firsthand experience of what it's like to do the work they are supposed to be managing, or who have done everything in their power to forget it.
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David Graeber (Bullshit Jobs: A Theory)
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a young woman in desperate financial straits, with no visible relations and no nest egg or trust fund or fallback. People would shake their heads — a shame but what could you do, and at least she had something of marketable value, namely her young ass, and therefore she wouldn’t starve to death, and nobody had to feel guilty.
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Margaret Atwood
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Cash Cows: Businesses with high relative share in low-growth markets will produce healthy cash flow, which can be used to fund other, developing businesses.
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Michael E. Porter (Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors)
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..."extreme capitalism": the obsessive, uncritical penetration of the concept of the market into every aspect of American life, and the attempt to drive out every other institution, including law, art, culture, public education, Social Security, unions, community, you name it. It is the conflation of markets with populism, with democracy, with diversity, with liberty, and with choice---and so the denial of any form of choice that imposes limits on the market. More than that, it is the elimination of these separate concepts from our political discourse, so that we find ourselves looking to the stock market to fund retirement, college education, health care, and having forgotten that in other wealthy and developed societies these are rights, not the contingent outcomes of speculative games.
James K. Galbraith, Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations and Professor of Government, University of Texas.
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James K. Galbraith
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When I was growing up, my parents had created for my brother and me the perfect upper middle-class lifestyle. We had everything we needed, and most things we wanted. We took piano lessons. We went to summer camp. We swam at the local country club. We had college funds. And while what I should have learned from living a relatively privileged childhood was the value of hard work and frugality, what I learned instead was that money was not something with which I needed to be overly concerned. If and when I needed it, it would magically appear. Like a genie.
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Jennifer McGaha (Flat Broke with Two Goats)
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But the idea of a peace dividend could not be stifled so long as Americans were in need. Shortly after the war, historian Marilyn Young warned:
The U.S. can destroy Iraq's highways, but not build its own; create the conditions for epidemic in Iraq, but not offer health care to millions of Americans. It can excoriate Iraqi treatment of the Kurdish minority, but not deal with domestic race relations; create homelessness abroad but not solve it here; keep a half million troops drug free as part of a war, but refuse to fund the treatment of millions of drug addicts at home. . . . . We shall lose the war after we have won it.
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Howard Zinn (A People’s History of the United States: 1492 - Present)
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Smoke a bowl and you can do this for hours,” one of the guys says. “Just kidding. No drugs in the major leagues.” As we cut the clay, there are no bowls to smoke—though according to one sod farm worker, weed goes well with anything turf-related: “You can’t be a grass man and not be a grass man,” he says—but there is an easy intimacy among the crew, a kind of in-this-together camaraderie, and for a few minutes I feel like one of them, too.
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Rafi Kohan (The Arena: Inside the Tailgating, Ticket-Scalping, Mascot-Racing, Dubiously Funded, and Possibly Haunted Monuments of American Sport)
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The sum of productive forces, capital funds and social forms of intercourse, which every individual and generation finds in existence as something given, is the real basis of what the philosophers have conceived as "substance" and "essence of man," and what they have deified and attacked: a real basis which is not in the least disturbed, in its effect and influence on the development of men, by the fact that these philosophers revolt against it as "self-consciousness" and the "Unique.
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Karl Marx (The German Ideology / Theses on Feuerbach / Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy)
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foundations have a corrosive influence on a democratic society; they represent relatively unregulated and unaccountable concentrations of power and wealth which buy talent, promote causes, and in effect, establish an agenda of what merits society’s attention. They serve as “cooling-out” agencies, delaying and preventing more radical, structural change. They help maintain an economic and political order, international in scope, which benefits the ruling-class interests of philanthropists.
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Incite! Women of Color Against Violence (The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex)
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My monk had to be a man of wide worldly experience and an inexhaustible fund of resigned tolerance for the human condition. His crusading and seafaring past, with all its enthusiasms and disillusionments, was referred to from the beginning. Only later did readers begin to wonder and ask about his former roving life, and how and why he became a monk. For reasons of continuity I did not wish to go back in time and write a book about his crusading days. Whatever else may be true of it, the entire sequence of novels proceeds steadily season by season, year by year, in a progressive tension which I did not want to break. But when I had the opportunity to cast a glance behind by way of a short story, to shed light on his vocation, I was glad to use it. So here he is, not a convert, for this is not a conversion. In an age of relatively uncomplicated faith, not yet obsessed and tormented by cantankerous schisms, sects and politicians, Cadfael has always been an unquestioning believer. What happens to him on the road to Woodstock is simply the acceptance of a revelation from within that the life he has lived to date, active, mobile and often violent, has reached its natural end, and he is confronted by a new need and a different challenge.
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Ellis Peters (A Rare Benedictine: The Advent of Brother Cadfael (Chronicles of Brother Cadfael, #0.5))
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Facebook, Oliver. You’d know what I’m talking about if you logged in more than once. All you’ve posted is an off-centered picture of a blurry raccoon.” “I’m still getting acclimated to the camera feature.” “You also only have two friends, and they’re both fake accounts.” “They told me I had funds available in a deceased relative’s account that they would help me retrieve. It sounded promising.” A sharp laugh hits me. “You didn’t even accept my friend request.” “You weren’t offering me two-million dollars.” Another laugh that prompts my own.
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Jennifer Hartmann (Lotus)
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I know the South claims that it has spent millions for the education of the blacks, and that it has of its own free will shouldered this awful burden. It seems to be forgetful of the fact that these millions have been taken from the public tax funds for education, and that the law of political economy which recognizes the land owner as the one who really pays the taxes is not tenable. It would be just as reasonable for the relatively few land owners of Manhattan to complain that they had to stand the financial burden of the education of the thousands and thousands of children whose parents pay rent for tenements and flats. Let the millions of producing and consuming Negroes be taken out of the South, and it would be quickly seen how much less of public funds there would be to appropriate for education or any other purpose.
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James Weldon Johnson (The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man)
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Pushed by relatively small numbers of radical-right billionaires and millionaires who have become profoundly hostile to America’s modern system of government, an apparatus decades in the making, funded by those same billionaires and millionaires, has been working to undermine the normal governance of our democracy.
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Nancy MacLean (Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America)
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What Hunter Biden, the son of America’s vice president, and Christopher Heinz, the stepson of the chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations (later to be secretary of state) were creating was an international private equity firm. It was anchored by the Heinz family alternative investment fund, Rosemont Capital.
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Peter Schweizer (Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends)
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Parts of the book describe work carried out in my own laboratory, and these studies have been made possible by funding from the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Science Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, the Klingenstein Fund, the Alzheimer’s Association, and the Adler Foundation.
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Robert M. Sapolsky (Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping)
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Most of the institutions that come in to offer help after disaster don't have the resources to provide concrete help. . . . Donor communities invest billions funding peace talks and disarmament. Then they stop. The most important part of postwar help is missing: providing basic social services to people. Not having those resources might have been a reason men went to war in the first place; they crossed a border and joined an armed group because they didn't have jobs. In Liberia right now, there are hundreds of thousands of unemployed young people, and they're ready-made mercenaries for wars in West Africa. You'd think the international community would be sensible enough to know they should work to change this. But they aren't.
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Leymah Gbowee (Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War)
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By the end of the twentieth century Interpol was ranking art crime as one of the world’s most profitable criminal activities, second only to drug smuggling and weapons dealing. The three activities were related: Drug pushers were moving stolen and smuggled art down the same pipelines they used for narcotics, and terrorists were using looted antiquities to fund their activities. This latter trend began in 1974, when the IRA stole $32 million worth of paintings by Rubens, Goya, and Vermeer. In 2001, the Taliban looted the Kabul museum and “washed” the stolen works in Switzerland. Stolen art was much more easily transportable than drugs or arms. A customs canine, after all, could hardly be expected to tell the difference between a crap Kandinksy and a credible one.
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Laney Salisbury (Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art)
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Nothing is more demoralizing than to be wronged and then to be told that one’s injury is an illusion. To be betrayed by the central pillars of society—government, employer, university—leaves a lasting bitterness and alienation. Furthermore, unlike nonwhites, who have well-funded organizations that spring to the defense of alleged victims, the disappearance of white solidarity means that a white man is entirely on his own.870*
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Jared Taylor (Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America)
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The final way to respond to the difficulty of lending against intangibles is the most radical. It is for businesses to change their finance mix: specifically, to rely more on equity and less on debt. Should a business fail, equity owners have no recourse - they get nothing - so can afford to be relatively insouciant about the liquidation value of a business's assets. This makes equity a better way of funding businesses with few tangible assets.
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Jonathan Haskel (Capitalism without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy)
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Love is not coercion, and the state is only an agent of coercion. It has no other function and can work no other way. Its job is to be the last resort in society: the coercion of criminals through punishment. Its nature and its funding are coercion. Any solution it offers will inescapably be coercive. When we make it the primary agent of healing, we fundamentally alter the nature of society. We ought to have a society in which the power of love drives us to break down all social, class, and political barriers, and to effect healing through private means, private associations, private institutions, counselors, networks, schools, hospitals, charities, businesses, etc. It ought to be driven by giving. Love is giving; selfishness is taking. When we make the state the mover, we make the primary solution one of taking rather than giving. This inverts God's designed order for all human relations, including race relations and racial healing.
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Joel McDurmon (The Problem of Slavery in Christian America)
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Carolyn Pitts, a black, was the affirmative action officer of the State Insurance Fund of New York. In 1987 she wrote a training manual on affirmative action that explained how racism works: “In the United States at present, only whites can be racists since whites dominate and control the institutions that create and enforce American cultural values.” She went on to conclude that “all white individuals in our society are racist,” whether or not they are conscious of it.1002
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Jared Taylor (Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America)
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In Panama, I knew Noriega himself was the object of controversy. The "arms deal" was the final stage of Operation Carrier Pigeon where the planes were to wait in Saudi Arabia until all bank transactions were cleared and the load was ready for disbursement. Saudi Arabian King Fahd would then fund the Contras via Noriega for Reagan after all evidences had been properly covered up -- just as he had done in Afghanistan. After the shipment, there would be no further deals through Noriega involving Fahd, because Noriega could no longer be trusted. Besides, Fahd had increased diplomatic relations with Mexico for covert operations, and Iran-Contra was just beginning to heat up. Noriega did not seem to be upset by the news of losing Saudi Arabian business, although he was somber and took some time to respond. His translator was working over some complex computer equipment after I delivered the message. I left Noriega's yacht with John and a brief message for Dick Cheney at the Pentagon.
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Cathy O'Brien (TRANCE Formation of America: True life story of a mind control slave)
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There is an uncomfortable willingness among privacy campaigners to discriminate against mass surveillance conducted by the state to the exclusion of similar surveillance conducted for profit by large corporations. Partially, this is a vestigial ethic from the Californian libertarian origins of online pro-privacy campaigning. Partially, it is a symptom of the superior public relations enjoyed by Silicon Valley technology corporations, and the fact that those corporations also provide the bulk of private funding for the flagship digital privacy advocacy groups, leading to a conflict of interest.
At the individual level, many of even the most committed privacy campaigners have an unacknowledged addiction to easy-to-use, privacy-destroying amenities like Gmail, Facebook, and Apple products. As a result, privacy campaigners frequently overlook corporate surveillance abuses. When they do address the abuses of companies like Google, campaigners tend to appeal to the logic of the market, urging companies to make small concessions to user privacy in order to repair their approval ratings. There is the false assumption that market forces ensure that Silicon Valley is a natural government antagonist, and that it wants to be on the public’s side—that profit-driven multinational corporations partake more of the spirit of democracy than government agencies.
Many privacy advocates justify a predominant focus on abuses by the state on the basis that the state enjoys a monopoly on coercive force. For example, Edward Snowden was reported to have said that tech companies do not “put warheads on foreheads.” This view downplays the fact that powerful corporations are part of the nexus of power around the state, and that they enjoy the ability to deploy its coercive power, just as the state often exerts its influence through the agency of powerful corporations. The movement to abolish privacy is twin-horned. Privacy advocates who focus exclusively on one of those horns will find themselves gored on the other.
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Julian Assange (When Google Met Wikileaks)
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We have commoditized wellness & creativity, and so gay men are up against these much larger contexts that aren't particularly conducive to the strongest, healthiest, most holistic approaches. Access to basic healthcare, and a healthcare system that is not homophobic and that is responsive to the needs of gay men, would radically change the pressures and therefore the opoprtunities for those of us who work primarily within the HIV/AIDS sector of healthcare, whether in research, programming and cultural production, or advocacy.
Similarly with the arts: if we had sufficient and adequate funding for community-based arts programming--of all kinds, not just related to gay men and HIV--then it wouldn't seem so shocking and misappropriated to allocate some of those funds for gay men to tell their stories. So it's in this larger, structural context that we gt forced into very painful conversations about prioritizing of funding, or what's most important, and it's always a reductive conversation because of limited resources. --Patrick "Pato" Hebert
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Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform)
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For years, I observed and experienced the SEC protecting large perpetrators of abuse at the expense of the investors whom the SEC is supposed to protect. The SEC has been very tough, and usually appropriately so, on small-time cons, promoters, insider traders, and, yes, hedge funds. But when it comes to large corporations and institutionalized Wall Street, the SEC uses kid gloves, imposes meaningless nondeterring fines, and emphasizes relatively unimportant things like record keeping rather than the substance of important things—like investors being swindled.
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Harry Markopolos (No One Would Listen)
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Despite the growing clinical and research interest in dissociative symptoms and disorders, it is also true that the substantial prevalence rates for dissociative disorders are still disproportional to the number of studies addressing these conditions.
For example, schizophrenia has a reported rate of 0.55% to 1% of the normal population (Goldner, Hus, Waraich, & Somers, more or less similar to the prevalence of DID. Yet a PubMed search generated 25,421 papers on research related to schizophrenia, whereas only 73 publications were found for DID-related research.
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Paul H. Blaney (Oxford Textbook of Psychopathology)
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John Passmore writes in his book Science and Its Critics, The Spanish Inquisition sought to avoid direct responsibility for the burning of heretics by handing them over to the secular arm; to burn them itself, it piously explained, would be wholly inconsistent with its Christian principles. Few of us would allow the Inquisition thus easily to wipe its hands clean of bloodshed; it knew quite well what would happen. Equally, where the technological application of scientific discoveries is clear and obvious—as when a scientist works on nerve gases—he cannot properly claim that such applications are “none of his business,” merely on the ground that it is the military forces, not scientists, who use the gases to disable or kill. This is even more obvious when the scientist deliberately offers help to governments, in exchange for funds. If a scientist, or a philosopher, accepts funds from some such body as an office of naval research, then he is cheating if he knows his work will be useless to them and must take some responsibility for the outcome if he knows that it will be useful. He is subject, properly subject, to praise or blame in relation to any innovations which flow from his work.
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Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
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It's always useful to make lists, ranked by either occurence or severity, single out each, one by one, trace the pathways of each fallen 'domino', and make active efforts to make sure each preceding domino stay upright. It is unfair to smash the last domino, just because we can't clearly see how they fell to begin with.
With regards to crime, those who have enough food, acceptable shelter, and ability to acquire basic status and recognition within immediate groups - may be less prone to violence and crime. Though there are other reasons for crime to occur, it is often related [in one way or another] to physical, mental, social or economical wellbeing.
Crime is desperation, actions of distress. Violent criminals may not be angels, but reality is, their state of mind very likely gradually became less and less empathic due to their subjective experience of society's inability to recognize the real need for greater stability within certain communities.
It may be easier said than done, but small efforts to raise the poverty line, projects and development - showing that society truly cares, may be the only viable solution. Employing good rolemodels [in the right places] may be especially effective.
Effort, great, small.
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Qwertikw
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Addicts should not be coerced into treatment, since in the long term coercion creates more problems than it solves. On the other hand, for those addicts who opt for treatment, there must be a system of publicly funded recovery facilities with clean rooms, nutritious food, and access to outdoors and nature. Well-trained professional staff need to provide medical care, counseling, skills training, and emotional support.
Our current nonsystem is utterly inadequate, with its patchwork of recovery homes run on private contracts and, here and there, a few upscale addiction treatment spas for the wealthy. No matter how committed their staff and how helpful their services may be, they are a drop in comparison to the ocean of vast need. In the absence of a coordinated rehabilitation system, the efforts of individual recovery homes are limited and occur in a vacuum, with no follow-up.
It may be thought that the cost of such a drug rehabilitation and treatment system would be exorbitant. No doubt the financial expenses would be great — but surely less than the funds now freely squandered on the War on Drugs, to say nothing of the savings from the cessation of drug-related criminal activity and the diminished burden on the health care system.
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Gabor Maté (In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction)
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On the day Chicago police murdered Laquan McDonald, a seventeen-year-old Black teenager, in 2014, Chicago cops had six full-time public relations employees. As the city fought in court to keep evidence of the child's murder secret and then later to control the uproar when a judge ordered it to release a video of the shooting, Chicago increased its police budget to pay for twenty-five full-time positions devoted to manipulating public information. The 2024 budget funded fifty-five.
Chicago is not alone. Cities across the country spend enormous amounts on police PR, and even elected officials are often kept in the dark about it.
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Alec Karakatsanis (Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News)
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Palestinians make up 20 percent of Israel’s population, and despite the fact that they live in their own homeland, Israel relegates them to second- or even third-class status. One of my classmates had discovered that more than fifty laws discriminated against the Palestinian citizens of Israel based solely on their ethnicity. Another discussed how government resources were disproportionately directed to Jews, leaving the Palestinians to suffer the worst living standards in Israeli society, with Palestinian children’s schools receiving only a fraction of the government spending given to Jewish schools. They also talked about how difficult it was for Palestinians to obtain land for a home, business, or agriculture because over 90 percent of the land in Israel was owned either by the state or by quasigovernmental agencies (like the Jewish National Fund) that discriminated against Palestinians. And they lamented the fact that if they or any of their relatives chose to marry a Palestinian from the West Bank or Gaza, they couldn’t pass on their Israeli citizenship to their spouse, thanks to the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law. Their spouse wouldn’t even be able to gain residency status to live with them inside Israel. This meant they’d be forced to leave Israel and separate from their family in order to live with their spouse.
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Ahed Tamimi (They Called Me a Lioness: A Palestinian Girl's Fight for Freedom)
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Using an example of how this would work in a more relatable scenario. If you were to imagine a hacker accessing the computer system of your bank and transferring all your funds from your own account into his and deleting all evidence of the transaction, existing technology would not be able to pick this up and you would likely be out of pocket. In the case of a blockchain currency like Bitcoin, having one server hacked with a false transaction being inserted into the database would not be consistent with the same record across the other copies of the database. The blockchain would identify the transaction as being illegitimate and would ultimately reject it meaning the money in your account would be kept safe.
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Chris Lambert (Cryptocurrency: How I Turned $400 into $100,000 by Trading Cryptocurrency for 6 months (Crypto Trading Secrets Book 1))
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After World War II, the United States, triumphant abroad and undamaged at home, saw a door wide open for world supremacy. Only the thing called ‘communism’ stood in the way, politically, militarily, economically, and ideologically. Thus it was that the entire US foreign policy establishment was mobilized to confront this ‘enemy’, and the Marshall Plan was an integral part of this campaign. How could it be otherwise? Anti-communism had been the principal pillar of US foreign policy from the Russian Revolution up to World War II, pausing for the war until the closing months of the Pacific campaign when Washington put challenging communism ahead of fighting the Japanese. Even the dropping of the atom bomb on Japan – when the Japanese had already been defeated – can be seen as more a warning to the Soviets than a military action against the Japanese.19 After the war, anti-communism continued as the leitmotif of American foreign policy as naturally as if World War II and the alliance with the Soviet Union had not happened. Along with the CIA, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the Council on Foreign Relations, certain corporations, and a few other private institutions, the Marshall Plan was one more arrow in the quiver of those striving to remake Europe to suit Washington’s desires: 1. Spreading the capitalist gospel – to counter strong postwar tendencies toward socialism. 2. Opening markets to provide new customers for US corporations – a major reason for helping to rebuild the European economies; e.g. a billion dollars (at twenty-first-century prices) of tobacco, spurred by US tobacco interests. 3. Pushing for the creation of the Common Market (the future European Union) and NATO as integral parts of the West European bulwark against the alleged Soviet threat. 4. Suppressing the left all over Western Europe, most notably sabotaging the Communist parties in France and Italy in their bids for legal, non-violent, electoral victory. Marshall Plan funds were secretly siphoned off to finance this endeavor, and the promise of aid to a country, or the threat of its cutoff, was used as a bullying club; indeed, France and Italy would certainly have been exempted from receiving aid if they had not gone along with the plots to exclude the Communists from any kind of influential role.
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William Blum (America's Deadliest Export: Democracy The Truth about US Foreign Policy and Everything Else)
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Although in general Gary applauded the modern trend toward individual self-management of retirement funds and long-distance calling plans and private-schooling options, he was less than thrilled to be given responsibility for his own personal brain chemistry, especially when certain people in his life, notably his father, refused to take any such responsibility. But Gary was nothing if not conscientious. As he entered the darkroom, he estimated that his levels of Neurofactor 3(i.e., serotonin: a very, very important factor) were posting seven-day or even thirty-day highs, that his Factor 2 and Factor 7 levels were likewise outperforming expectations, and that his Factor 1 had rebounded from an early-morning slump related to the glass of Armagnac he’d drunk at bedtime.
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Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
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It is also a message to Congress and the presidency—slowly the American people may be realizing that after almost four decades of the war on drugs, dependency levels and usage are higher than ever before; that the prices of all major recreational drugs have been declining resolutely over that period; and that the state has wasted hundreds of billions of dollars in a criminal justice system that delivers a lot of crime but very little justice. The funds used to sustain bureaucracies such as the DEA that prosecute the war on drugs are a drop in the ocean when compared with the gazillions that organized crime syndicates have earned because Washington is determined to drive the market underground. The social and criminal problems related to drug abuse will never go away until the state can exercise control over the industry as a whole.
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Misha Glenny (McMafia)
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the late 1990s, average tuition in the United States had more than doubled from when I went to school, while the value of the top Pell award dropped 25 percent. When President Bill Clinton touted his Hope Scholarship and related tuition tax credits as a doubling of federal funding for financial aid, it was a sleight of hand, catering solely to middle-class students who were already going to college. That same decade, Clinton oversaw the country’s catastrophic entry into NAFTA in 1994 and paved the way for China’s admission into the World Trade Organization in 2001. He predicted that offshoring would eventually prove to be a “win-win” for American workers. Our country still suffers the fallout of those disastrous decisions, which were cheered by business schools and Nobel Prize–winning economists, including several who have since recanted their pro-offshoring views.[
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Beth Macy (Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America)
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So much of what my generation had been promised disintegrated at our touch. Consider the friend, a painter of seascapes, who dreamed of affording waterfront property. On the day the levees broke, the Gulf flooded her studio and painted her walls with costly oils. Consider the friend who worked for six years at a company he hated on the promise of a sabbatical, only to be let go. The friend who complained about family reunions and lost every relative over the age of fifty to a virus. The friend who saved up to invest in a fund and saw her money dissolve like sugar on the tongues of bankers who barely got a scolding from the SEC. The life we'd been promised was a scam, the world a scam, the whole goddamn play a scam and there seemed nothing to do but burn it down as rioters did in Paris, New York, Nairobi—and then creep back through the embers because what other choice did we have?
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C Pam Zhang (Land of Milk and Honey)
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In the past, the Bush administration has shown undue respect for U.S.-based stealth jihadist organizations, feting them, currying favor with them, and listening closely to their advice on Islam-related issues. One would have thought that President Bush’s embarrassment at posing for a photograph in 2000 with Sami Al-Arian, who cofounded the World Islamic Study Enterprise and other jihadist front organizations and was later imprisoned for his activities in support of the terror organization Palestinian Islamic Jihad, would have been enough to dissuade the administration from maintaining connections with such groups. If not that, surely federal prosecutors’ naming of CAIR, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), and the North American Islamic Trust as unindicted co-conspirators in a terrorism funding trial should have done the trick. But no, somehow CAIR and Co.’s advice keeps finding its way into official U.S. policies.
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Robert Spencer (Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam Is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs)
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Warren Weaver is not a household name, but he may be the most influential scientist you’ve never heard of, actively shaping three of the most important scientific revolutions of the last century—life sciences, information technology, and agriculture. In 1932 Weaver joined the Rockefeller Foundation to lead the division charged with supporting scientific research. Funding was scarce during the Great Depression, and the Rockefeller Foundation, with an endowment nearly twice the size of Harvard’s at the time, was one of the most important patrons of scientific research in the world. Over his three decades at the Rockefeller Foundation, Weaver acted as a banker, talent scout, and kingmaker to support the nascent field of molecular biology, a term he himself coined. Weaver had an uncanny knack for picking future all-stars. Eighteen scientists won Nobel Prizes for research related to molecular biology in the middle of the century, and Weaver had funded all but three of them.
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Donald Sull (Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World)
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I acknowledge readily that the Grant Study is not the only great prospective longitudinal lifetime study. There are others, three of which are better known than ours. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses. The Berkeley and Oakland Growth Studies (1930–2009) from the University of California at Berkeley include both sexes and began when the participants were younger; they provide more sophisticated childhood psychosocial data but little medical information.5 These cohorts have been very intensively studied, but they are smaller and have suffered greater attrition than ours. The Framingham Study (1946 to the present) and the Nurses Study at the Harvard School of Public Health (1976 to the present) boast better physical health coverage, but they lack psychosocial data.6 These are wonderful world-class studies, invaluable in their own ways, and more frequently cited than the Grant Study. But even in this august company the Grant Study is unmistakable and unique. It has been funded continuously for more than seventy years; it has had the highest number of contacts with its members and the lowest attrition rate of all; it has interviewed three generations of relatives; and, most
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George E. Vaillant (Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study)
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I feel obliged to withhold my approval of the plan, as proposed by this bill, to indulge a benevolent and charitable sentiment through the appropriation of public funds for that purpose. I can find no warrant for that kind of appropriation in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit. A prevalent tendency to disregard the limited mission of this power and duty should, I think, be steadfastly resisted, to the end that the lesson should be constantly enforced that though the people support the Government, the Government should not support the people. The friendliness and charity of our countrymen can always be relied upon to relieve their fellow-citizens in misfortune. This has been repeatedly and quite lately demonstrated. Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the Government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character, while it prevents the indulgence among our people of that kindly sentiment and conduct which strengthens the bonds of a common brotherhood.
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Grover Cleveland
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For the longest time, the crucial importance to health of just moving around was hardly appreciated. But in the late 1940s a doctor at Britain’s Medical Research Council, Jeremy Morris, became convinced that the increasing occurrence of heart attacks and coronary disease was related to levels of activity, and not just to age or chronic stress, as was almost universally thought at the time. Because Britain was still recovering from the war, research funding was tight, so Morris had to think of a low-cost way to conduct an effective large-scale study. While traveling to work one day, it occurred to him that every double-decker bus in London was a perfect laboratory for his purposes because each had a driver who spent his entire working life sitting and a conductor who was on his feet constantly. In addition to moving about laterally, conductors climbed an average of six hundred steps per shift. Morris could hardly have invented two more ideal groups to compare. He followed thirty-five thousand drivers and conductors for two years and found that after he adjusted for all other variables, the drivers—no matter how healthy—were twice as likely to have a heart attack as the conductors. It was the first time that anyone had demonstrated a direct and measurable link between exercise and health.
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Bill Bryson (The Body: A Guide for Occupants)
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In the wake of the Cognitive Revolution, gossip helped Homo sapiens to form larger and more stable bands. But even gossip has its limits. Sociological research has shown that the maximum ‘natural’ size of a group bonded by gossip is about 150 individuals. Most people can neither intimately know, nor gossip effectively about, more than 150 human beings. Even today, a critical threshold in human organisations falls somewhere around this magic number. Below this threshold, communities, businesses, social networks and military units can maintain themselves based mainly on intimate acquaintance and rumour-mongering. There is no need for formal ranks, titles and law books to keep order. 3A platoon of thirty soldiers or even a company of a hundred soldiers can function well on the basis of intimate relations, with a minimum of formal discipline. A well-respected sergeant can become ‘king of the company’ and exercise authority even over commissioned officers. A small family business can survive and flourish without a board of directors, a CEO or an accounting department. But once the threshold of 150 individuals is crossed, things can no longer work that way. You cannot run a division with thousands of soldiers the same way you run a platoon. Successful family businesses usually face a crisis when they grow larger and hire more personnel. If they cannot reinvent themselves, they go bust. How did Homo sapiens manage to cross this critical threshold, eventually founding cities comprising tens of thousands of inhabitants and empires ruling hundreds of millions? The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination. Churches are rooted in common religious myths. Two Catholics who have never met can nevertheless go together on crusade or pool funds to build a hospital because they both believe that God was incarnated in human flesh and allowed Himself to be crucified to redeem our sins. States are rooted in common national myths. Two Serbs who have never met might risk their lives to save one another because both believe in the existence of the Serbian nation, the Serbian homeland and the Serbian flag. Judicial systems are rooted in common legal myths. Two lawyers who have never met can nevertheless combine efforts to defend a complete stranger because they both believe in the existence of laws, justice, human rights – and the money paid out in fees.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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The evidence for the cognitive interpretation of the above-average effect is that when people are asked about a task they find difficult (for many of us this could be “Are you better than average in starting conversations with strangers?”), they readily rate themselves as below average. The upshot is that people tend to be overly optimistic about their relative standing on any activity in which they do moderately well. I have had several occasions to ask founders and participants in innovative start-ups a question: To what extent will the outcome of your effort depend on what you do in your firm? This is evidently an easy question; the answer comes quickly and in my small sample it has never been less than 80%. Even when they are not sure they will succeed, these bold people think their fate is almost entirely in their own hands. They are surely wrong: the outcome of a start-up depends as much on the achievements of its competitors and on changes in the market as on its own efforts. However, WYSIATI plays its part, and entrepreneurs naturally focus on what they know best—their plans and actions and the most immediate threats and opportunities, such as the availability of funding. They know less about their competitors and therefore find it natural to imagine a future in which the competition plays little part.
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Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
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Daily work in the field of online advertising, as Jack Goldenberg sees it, is still significantly different from what the trends are propagated by online promotions.
Defining online budget
According to Jack Goldenberg a vast majority of the budget for online advertising does not exceed $2,000 on a monthly basis, depending on the perception of the company as they can bring effects "online adventure", established budgets for online advertising move in value from $200 to $2,000 per month (with highest proportion of $200-$500). This does not mean that a number of companies gives less advertising - but even then it can not be called "creating the campaign." Goldenberg believes that in order to create an online advertising campaign there should be a budget of at least $500 for the use of different types of online advertising.
Goldenberg explains this as: In an environment of such budget is not simply distribute the money "wisely" and that since it has obvious benefits through a variety of online advertising systems.
Jack Goldenberg found out how most companies in the world and USA are oriented towards effects in relation to the funds that are made for advertising. In this type of company, regardless of what everyone knows to be used types of brand advertising (advertising through banners - display advertising) to create recognizable firms in certain target groups, the effects of such advertising are not directly comparable with respect to the effects of (price per click - CPC - Cost per click) with contextual advertising, which for years has given much more efficient (measurable) results in relation to advertising banners, concludes Mr. Goldenberg.
According to Yoel Goldenberg it is good when there is an understanding in companies that brand advertising has a different type of effects in relation to the PPC (contextual) advertising, and that would be it "documented" in a certain way, it is necessary to constantly explore and find those web sites that deliver the best effects for optimum need of assets.
The process of creating an online advertising campaigns, explained by Goldenberg, usually starts (or should start) finding individual Web sites on which to advertise a company could, possibly longer term.
Unfortunately, says Goldenberg, in our country is not in all sectors (industries) simply find diverse Web sites from which to choose "pretenders" for online advertising. An even greater problem is the fact that long-term advertising on a Web site does not bring the desired effect, unless it is constantly not working to the content of advertising often changes with an emphasis on meeting the needs of potential clients.
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Jack Goldenberg (My Secret List of Sites that Pay: Websites that pay you from home (Quick Easy Money))
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Let’s assume for a moment that we are starting to write a novel using Fred’s goal of wanting desperately to be first to climb the mountain. The reader now forms his story question. But the story has to start someplace, and it has to show dynamic forward movement. Let’s further assume, then, that Fred comes up with a game plan for his quest. He decides that his first step must be to borrow sufficient money to equip his expedition. So he walks into the Ninth District Bank of Cincinnati, sits down with Mr. Greenback, the loan officer, and boldly states his goal, thus: “Mr. Greenback, I want to be first to climb the mountain. But I must have capital to fund my expedition. Therefore I am here to convince you that you should lend me $75,000.” At this point, the reader sees clearly that this short-term goal relates importantly to the long-term story goal and the story question. So just as he formed a story question, the reader now forms a scene question, which again is a rewording of the goal statement: “Will Fred get the loan?” Here is a note so important that I want to set it off typographically: The scene question cannot be some vague, philosophical one such as, “Are bankers nice?” or “What motivates people like Fred?” The question is specific, relates to a definite, immediate goal, and can be answered with a simple yes or no.
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Jack M. Bickham (Elements of Fiction Writing - Scene & Structure)
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Einstein’s first public collision with this anti-Semitism came in the summer of 1920. A shady German nationalist named Paul Weyland, an engineer by training, had turned himself into a polemicist with political aspirations. He was an active member of a right-wing nationalistic political party that pledged, in its 1920 official program, to “diminish the dominant Jewish influence showing up increasingly in government and in public.”9 Weyland realized that Einstein, as a highly publicized Jew, had engendered resentment and jealousy. Likewise, his relativity theory was easy to turn into a target, because many people, including some scientists, were unnerved by the way it seemed to undermine absolutes and be built on abstract hypotheses rather than grounded in solid experiment. So Weyland published articles denouncing relativity as “a big hoax” and formed a ragtag (but mysteriously well-funded) organization grandly dubbed the Study Group of German Scientists for the Preservation of a Pure Science. Joining with Weyland was an experimental physicist of modest reputation named Ernst Gehrcke, who for years had been assailing relativity with more vehemence than comprehension. Their group lobbed a few personal attacks at Einstein and the “Jewish nature” of relativity theory, then called a series of meetings around Germany, including a large rally at Berlin’s Philharmonic Hall on August 24.
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Walter Isaacson (Einstein: His Life and Universe)
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Hamilton argued that the security of liberty and property were inseparable and that governments should honor their debts because contracts formed the basis of public and private morality: “States, like individuals, who observe their engagements are respected and trusted, while the reverse is the fate of those who pursue an opposite conduct.”The proper handling of government debt would permit America to borrow at affordable interest rates and would also act as a tonic to the economy. Used as loan collateral, government bonds could function as money—and it was the scarcity of money, Hamilton observed, that had crippled the economy and resulted in severe deflation in the value of land. America was a young country rich in opportunity. It lacked only liquid capital, and government debt could supply that gaping deficiency. The secret of managing government debt was to fund it properly by setting aside revenues at regular intervals to service interest and pay off principal. Hamilton refuted charges that his funding scheme would feed speculation. Quite the contrary: if investors knew for sure that government bonds would be paid off, the prices would not fluctuate wildly, depriving speculators of opportunities to exploit. What mattered was that people trusted the government to make good on repayment: “In nothing are appearances of greater moment than in whatever regards credit. Opinion is the soul of it and this is affected by appearances as well as realities.” Hamilton intuited that public relations and confidence building were to be the special burdens of every future treasury secretary.
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Ron Chernow (Alexander Hamilton)
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Equity financing, on the other hand, is unappealing to cooperators because it may mean relinquishing control to outside investors, which is a distinctly capitalist practice. Investors are not likely to buy non-voting shares; they will probably require representation on the board of directors because otherwise their money could potentially be expropriated. “For example, if the directors of the firm were workers, they might embezzle equity funds, refrain from paying dividends in order to raise wages, or dissipate resources on projects of dubious value.”105 In any case, the very idea of even partial outside ownership is contrary to the cooperative ethos. A general reason for traditional institutions’ reluctance to lend to cooperatives, and indeed for the rarity of cooperatives whether related to the difficulty of securing capital or not, is simply that a society’s history, culture, and ideologies might be hostile to the “co-op” idea. Needless to say, this is the case in most industrialized countries, especially the United States. The very notion of a workers’ cooperative might be viscerally unappealing and mysterious to bank officials, as it is to people of many walks of life. Stereotypes about inefficiency, unprofitability, inexperience, incompetence, and anti-capitalism might dispose officials to reject out of hand appeals for financial assistance from co-ops. Similarly, such cultural preconceptions may be an element in the widespread reluctance on the part of working people to try to start a cooperative. They simply have a “visceral aversion” to, and unfamiliarity with, the idea—which is also surely a function of the rarity of co-ops itself. Their rarity reinforces itself, in that it fosters a general ignorance of co-ops and the perception that they’re risky endeavors. Additionally, insofar as an anti-democratic passivity, a civic fragmentedness, a half-conscious sense of collective disempowerment, and a diffuse interpersonal alienation saturate society, this militates against initiating cooperative projects. It is simply taken for granted among many people that such things cannot be done. And they are assumed to require sophisticated entrepreneurial instincts. In most places, the cooperative idea is not even in the public consciousness; it has barely been heard of. Business propaganda has done its job well.106 But propaganda can be fought with propaganda. In fact, this is one of the most important things that activists can do, this elevation of cooperativism into the public consciousness. The more that people hear about it, know about it, learn of its successes and potentials, the more they’ll be open to it rather than instinctively thinking it’s “foreign,” “socialist,” “idealistic,” or “hippyish.” If successful cooperatives advertise their business form, that in itself performs a useful service for the movement. It cannot be overemphasized that the most important thing is to create a climate in which it is considered normal to try to form a co-op, in which that is seen as a perfectly legitimate and predictable option for a group of intelligent and capable unemployed workers. Lenders themselves will become less skeptical of the business form as it seeps into the culture’s consciousness.
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Chris Wright (Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States)
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For me, that translated into fund-raising. I knew that I could and I would raise any amount of money to get that job done. Fund-raising to end hunger wasn’t just a job or a fad or a political statement for me. It was an expression of my own soulful commitment, and as such, I could only do it in a way that would call on people to reconnect with their own higher calling, or soulful longing, to be the kind of people they wanted to be, the kind of difference they wanted to make, and see how they could express that with their money. So rather than feeling that fund-raising was a matter of twisting arms for a donation or playing on emotions to manipulate money from contributors, it became for me an arena in which I was able to create an opportunity for people to engage in their greatness. It was in this soul-searching dimension of fund-raising, in these intimate conversations, that I discovered deep wounds and conflicts in the way people related to their money. Many people felt they had sold out and become someone they didn’t like anymore. Some were forcing themselves to do work that wasn’t meaningful. Many felt enslaved by their experience of being overtaxed by their government, or felt beaten down by their boss or by the burden of running a family business or employing others. Their relationship with money was dead—or, more accurately, dread—and there was hurt there. There was resentment. There were painful compromises, a kind of rawness. People were bruised and battered there. Not everyone, but many people were very unsettled and uncomfortable and just not their best selves in their relationship with money. They felt little or no freedom with money, no matter how much they had. This lackluster relationship with money wasn’t for lack of expert advice or practical tips. Money-management strategies were plentiful, but the concept of personal transformation was a stranger there. What became clear was that when people were able to align their money with their deepest, most soulful interests and commitments, their relationship with money became a place where profound and lasting transformation could occur.
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Lynne Twist (The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life)
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CAN WE TRUST ANYTHING THE NEW YORK TIMES SAYS ABOUT IMMIGRATION? In 2008, the world’s richest man, Carlos Slim Helu, saved the Times from bankruptcy. When that guy saves your company, you dance to his tune. So it’s worth mentioning that Slim’s fortune depends on tens of millions of Mexicans living in the United States, preferably illegally. That is, unless the Times is some bizarre exception to the normal pattern of corruption—which you can read about at this very minute in the Times. If a tobacco company owned Fox News, would we believe their reports on the dangers of smoking? (Guess what else Slim owns? A tobacco company!) The Times impugns David and Charles Koch for funneling “secret cash” into a “right-wing political zeppelin.”1 The Kochs’ funding of Americans for Prosperity is hardly “secret.” What most people think of as “secret cash” is more like Carlos Slim’s purchase of favorable editorial opinion in the Newspaper of Record. It would be fun to have a “Sugar Daddy–Off” with the New York Times: Whose Sugar Daddy Is More Loathsome? The Koch Brothers? The Olin Foundation? Monsanto? Halliburton? Every time, Carlos Slim would win by a landslide. Normally, Slim is the kind of businessman the Times—along with every other sentient human being—would find repugnant. Frequently listed as the richest man in the world, Slim acquired his fortune through a corrupt inside deal giving him a monopoly on telecommunications services in Mexico. But in order to make money from his monopoly, Slim needs lots of Mexicans living in the United States, sending money to their relatives back in Oaxaca. Otherwise, Mexicans couldn’t pay him—and they wouldn’t have much need for phone service, either—other than to call in ransom demands. Back in 2004—before the Times became Slim’s pimp—a Times article stated: “Clearly . . . the nation’s southern border is under siege.”2 But that was before Carlos Slim saved the Times from bankruptcy. Ten years later, with a border crisis even worse than in 2004, and Latin Americans pouring across the border, the Times indignantly demanded that Obama “go big” on immigration and give “millions of immigrants permission to stay.”3
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Ann Coulter (¡Adios, America!: The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole)
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In the 1860s, during its civil war, the US suspended gold convertibility and printed paper money (known as “greenbacks”) to help monetize war debts. Around the time the US returned to its gold peg in the mid-1870s, a number of other countries joined the gold standard; most currencies remained fixed against it until World War I. Major exceptions were Japan (which was on a silver-linked standard until the 1890s, which led its exchange rate to devalue against gold as silver prices fell during this period) and Spain, which frequently suspended convertibility to support large fiscal deficits. During World War I, warring countries ran enormous deficits that were funded by central banks’ printing and lending of money. Gold served as money in foreign transactions, as international trust (and hence credit) was lacking. When the war ended, a new monetary order was created with gold and the winning countries’ currencies, which were tied to gold. Still, between 1919 and 1922 several European countries, especially those that lost the war, were forced to print and devalue their currencies. The German mark and German mark debt sank between 1920 and 1923. Some of the winners of the war also had debts that had to be devalued to create a new start. With debt, domestic political, and international geopolitical restructurings done, the 1920s boomed, particularly in the US, inflating a debt bubble. The debt bubble burst in 1929, requiring central banks to print money and devalue it throughout the 1930s. More money printing and more money devaluations were required during World War II to fund military spending. In 1944–45, as the war ended, a new monetary system that linked the dollar to gold and other currencies to the dollar was created. The currencies and debts of Germany, Japan, and Italy, as well as those of China and a number of other countries, were quickly and totally destroyed, while those of most winners of the war were slowly but still substantially depreciated. This monetary system stayed in place until the late 1960s. In 1968–73 (most importantly in 1971), excessive spending and debt creation (especially by the US) required breaking the dollar’s link to gold because the claims on gold that were being turned in were far greater than the amount of gold available to redeem them. That led to a dollar-based fiat monetary system, which allowed the big increase in dollar-denominated money and credit that fueled the inflation of the 1970s and led to the debt crisis of the 1980s. Since 2000, the value of money has fallen in relation to the value of gold due to money and credit creation and because interest rates have been low in relation to inflation rates. Because the monetary system has been free-floating, it hasn’t experienced the abrupt breaks it did in the past; the devaluation has been more gradual and continuous. Low, and in some cases negative, interest rates have not provided compensation for the increasing amount of money and credit and the resulting (albeit low) inflation.
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Ray Dalio (Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail)
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Glenn Eichler
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gave up on the idea of creating “socialist men and women” who would work without monetary incentives. In a famous speech he criticized “equality mongering,” and thereafter not only did different jobs get paid different wages but also a bonus system was introduced. It is instructive to understand how this worked. Typically a firm under central planning had to meet an output target set under the plan, though such plans were often renegotiated and changed. From the 1930s, workers were paid bonuses if the output levels were attained. These could be quite high—for instance, as much as 37 percent of the wage for management or senior engineers. But paying such bonuses created all sorts of disincentives to technological change. For one thing, innovation, which took resources away from current production, risked the output targets not being met and the bonuses not being paid. For another, output targets were usually based on previous production levels. This created a huge incentive never to expand output, since this only meant having to produce more in the future, since future targets would be “ratcheted up.” Underachievement was always the best way to meet targets and get the bonus. The fact that bonuses were paid monthly also kept everyone focused on the present, while innovation is about making sacrifices today in order to have more tomorrow. Even when bonuses and incentives were effective in changing behavior, they often created other problems. Central planning was just not good at replacing what the great eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith called the “invisible hand” of the market. When the plan was formulated in tons of steel sheet, the sheet was made too heavy. When it was formulated in terms of area of steel sheet, the sheet was made too thin. When the plan for chandeliers was made in tons, they were so heavy, they could hardly hang from ceilings. By the 1940s, the leaders of the Soviet Union, even if not their admirers in the West, were well aware of these perverse incentives. The Soviet leaders acted as if they were due to technical problems, which could be fixed. For example, they moved away from paying bonuses based on output targets to allowing firms to set aside portions of profits to pay bonuses. But a “profit motive” was no more encouraging to innovation than one based on output targets. The system of prices used to calculate profits was almost completely unconnected to the value of new innovations or technology. Unlike in a market economy, prices in the Soviet Union were set by the government, and thus bore little relation to value. To more specifically create incentives for innovation, the Soviet Union introduced explicit innovation bonuses in 1946. As early as 1918, the principle had been recognized that an innovator should receive monetary rewards for his innovation, but the rewards set were small and unrelated to the value of the new technology. This changed only in 1956, when it was stipulated that the bonus should be proportional to the productivity of the innovation. However, since productivity was calculated in terms of economic benefits measured using the existing system of prices, this was again not much of an incentive to innovate. One could fill many pages with examples of the perverse incentives these schemes generated. For example, because the size of the innovation bonus fund was limited by the wage bill of a firm, this immediately reduced the incentive to produce or adopt any innovation that might have economized on labor.
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Daron Acemoğlu (Why Nations Fail: FROM THE WINNERS OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN ECONOMICS: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty)
“
The Western medical model — and I don't mean the science of it, I mean the practice of it, because the science is completely at odds with the practice — makes two devastating separations. First of all we separate the mind from the body, we separate the emotions from the physiology. So we don't see how the physiology of people reflects their lifelong emotional experience. So we separate the mind from the body, which is not something that traditional medicine has done, I mean, Ayuverdic or Chinese medicine or shamanic tribal cultures and medicinal practices throughout the world have always recognized that mind and body are inseparable. They intuitively knew it. Many Western practitioners have known this and even taught it, but in practice we ignore it.
And then we separate the individual from the environment. The studies are clear, for example, that when people are emotionally isolated they tend to get sick more quickly and they succumb more rapidly to their disease. Why? Because people's physiology is completely related to their psychological, social environment and when people are isolated and alone their stress levels are much higher because there's nothing there to help them moderate their stress. And physiologically it is straightforward, you know, it takes a five-year-old kid to understand it.
However because in practice we separate them... when somebody shows up with an inflamed joint, all we do is we give them an anti-inflammatory or because the immune system is hyperactive and is attacking them we give them a medication to suppress their immune system or we give them a stress hormone like cortisol or one of its analogues, to suppress the inflammation. But we never ask: "What does this manifest about your life?", "What does this say about your relationships?", "How stressful is your job?", "To what extent do you lack control in your life?", "Where are you not authentic?", "How are you trying to work so hard to meet your attachment needs by suppressing yourself?" (because that is what you learn to do as a kid).
Then we do all this research that has to do with cell biology, so we keep looking for the cause of cancer in the cell. Now there's a wonderful quote in the New York Times a couple of years ago they did a series on cancer and somebody said: "Looking for the cause of cancer inside the individual cell is like trying to understand a traffic jam by studying the internal combustion engine." We will never understand it, but we spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year looking for the cause of cancer inside the cell, not recognizing that the cell exists in interaction with the environment and that the genes are modulated by the environment, they are turned on and off by the environment.
So the impact of not understanding the unity of emotions and physiology on one hand and in the other hand the relationship between the individual and the environment.. in other words.. having a strictly biological model as opposed to what has been called a bio-psycho-social, that recognizes that the biology is important, but it also reflects our psychological and social relationships. And therefore trying to understand the biology in isolation from the psychological and social environment is futile. The result is that we are treating people purely through pharmaceuticals or physical interventions, greatly to the profit of companies that manufacture pharmaceuticals and which fund the research, but it leaves us very much in the dark about a) the causes and b) the treatment, the holistic treatment of most conditions.
So that for all our amazing interventions and technological marvels, we are still far short of doing what we could do, were we more mindful of that unity. So the consequences are devastating economically, they are devastating emotionally, they are devastating medically.
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Gabor Maté
“
The Global Financial Crisis shows the credit cycle at the greatest extreme since the Great Depression. Debt markets historically had been marked by general conservatism, meaning excesses on the upside were limited and most bubbles took place in the equity market. Certainly it was the site of the Great Crash of 1929. But the creation of the high yield bond market in the late 1970s kicked off a liberalization of debt investing, and the generally positive economic environment of the subsequent three decades provided those who ventured in with a favorable overall experience. This combination led to a strong trend toward acceptance of low-rated and non-traditional debt instruments. There were periods of weakness in debt in 1990–91 (related to widespread bankruptcies among the highly levered buyouts of the 1980s) and in 2002 (stemming from excessive borrowing to fund overbuilding in the telecom industry, which led to prominent downgrades that coincided with several high-profile corporate accounting scandals). But the effects of these were limited because of the isolated nature of their causes. It wasn’t until 2007–08 that the financial markets witnessed the first widespread, debt-induced panic, with ramifications for the entire economy. Thus the GFC provided the ultimate example of the credit cycle’s full effect.
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Howard Marks (Mastering The Market Cycle: Getting the Odds on Your Side)
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(1) Selecting winning equity funds over the long term offers all the potential success of finding a needle in a haystack. (2) Selecting winning funds based on their performance over relatively short-term periods in the past is all too likely to lead, if not to disaster, at least to disappointment.
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John C. Bogle (The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns (Little Books. Big Profits))
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in 1767—just 40 years after Newton’s death—when the Scottish lawyer James Steuart first proposed the concept of ‘political economy’, he defined it no longer as an art but as ‘the science of domestic policy in free nations’. But naming it as a science still didn’t stop him from spelling out its purpose: The principal object of this science is to secure a certain fund of subsistence for all the inhabitants, to obviate every circumstance which may render it precarious; to provide every thing necessary for supplying the wants of the society, and to employ the inhabitants (supposing them to be free-men) in such a manner as naturally to create reciprocal relations and dependencies between them, so as to make their several interests lead them to supply one another with their reciprocal wants.
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Kate Raworth (Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist)
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The needs of the black community for adequate jobs, housing, and education can be met only by developing a political strategy that will attract a majority of Americans to a program for social change. There are whites who are unemployed and white workers whose real income is steadily decreasing as the cost of living rises. Both these groups share with blacks the desire for increased and upgraded employment opportunities. Let us build a movement with them. there are whites living in substandard housing and paying exorbitant rents. Their children attend schools that are overcrowded and understaffed. They share with blacks the desire for massively funded programs of housing and education. Let us build a movement with them also. And there are those more affluent whites of liberal persuasion who sincerely desire social justice. They too should be our allies.
These are positive points around which a political majority can be built. Such a strategy is the only means by which black people will achieve social and economic equality within the context of contemporary American society.
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Bayard Rustin (Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin)
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I did not, and could not, know when writing this book that our nation would soon awaken violently from its brief colorblind slumber. In the final chapter, I did predict that uprisings were in our future, and I wondered aloud what the fire would look like this time. What actually occurred in the years that followed was, to paraphrase James Baldwin, more terrible and more beautiful than I could have imagined. We now have white nationalist movements operating openly online and in many of our communities; they’re celebrating mass killings and recruiting thousands into their ranks. We have a president who routinely unleashes hostile tirades against black and brown people—calling Mexican migrants “murderers,” “rapists,” and “bad people,” referring to developing African nations as “shithole countries,” and smearing the majority-black city of Baltimore as a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.” Millions of Americans are cheering, or at least tolerating, these racial hostilities. And yet, in the midst of all of this, we also have vibrant racial justice movements led by new generations of activists who are working courageously at the intersections of our systems of control, as well as growing movements against criminal injustice led by those who are directly impacted by mass incarceration. Many of these movements aim to redefine the meaning of justice in America. A decade ago, much of this progress seemed nearly unimaginable. When this book was first released, there was relatively little racial justice organizing, and “mass incarceration” was not a widely used term. Back then, the Congressional Black Caucus, as well as most civil rights organizations, did not include criminal justice issues among its top priorities. Little funding could be found for work challenging the enormous punishment bureaucracy
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Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
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The size of the disbursements was linked to the number of city or county drug arrests. Each arrest, in theory, would net a given city or county about $153 in state and federal funding. Non-drug-related policing brought no federal dollars, even for violent crime. As a result, when Jackson County, Wisconsin, quadrupled its drug arrests between 1999 and 2000, the county’s federal subsidy quadrupled too.46
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Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
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Today the bribes may no longer be necessary. Now that the SWAT teams, the multiagency drug task forces, and the drug enforcement agenda have become a regular part of federal, state, and local law enforcement, it appears the drug war is here to stay. Funding for the Byrne-sponsored drug task forces had begun to dwindle during President Bush’s tenure, but Barack Obama, as a presidential candidate, promised to revive the Byrne grant program, claiming that it is “critical to creating the anti-drug task forces our communities need.”61 Obama honored his word following the election, drastically increasing funding for the Byrne grant program despite its abysmal track record. The Economic Recovery Act of 2009 included more than $2 billion in new Byrne funding and an additional $600 million to increase state and local law enforcement across the country.62 Relatively little organized opposition to the drug war currently exists, and any dramatic effort to scale back the war may be publicly condemned as “soft” on crime. The war has become institutionalized. It is no longer a special program or politicized project; it is simply the way things are done.
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Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
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Grant-making bodies have long channeled funds along racial lines. Many black and Hispanic organizations receive crucial funding from the Ford and Rockefeller foundations. A large number of arts councils give both public and private money to ethnic dance, theater, and other arts groups. The National Endowment for the Arts has begun to penalize grantees that do not show enough minority representation.580 The Rockefeller and Ford foundations reportedly plan to phase out their support for traditional European art forms altogether so as to concentrate on non-Western arts.581 Entirely typical of race-based grant-making was the 1990 announcement of a series of gifts by the Boston Foundation. It released $200,000, to be divided among fifteen Boston-area social service organizations for the sole purpose of hiring nonwhite employees.582 The foundation also makes grants for the arts, but only for projects that show “cultural diversity.”583
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Jared Taylor (Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America)
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Whites cannot, by law, set up all-white schools. As it is, they are criticized if they take their children out of integrated public schools and send them to private schools that are largely white. None of these schools teaches a deliberate racial consciousness the way many black private schools do. Blacks, on the other hand, are increasingly demanding that publicly funded schools teach black racialism—with only a murmur of criticism from whites.
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Jared Taylor (Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America)
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Examples of real estate mutual funds include: • Fidelity Real Estate Investment Portfolio (FRESX), a managed fund (so expect a higher expense ratio) that selects REITs with high-quality properties (mainly commercial and industrial) • Cohen & Steers Realty Shares (CSRSX), a managed fund that holds a targeted portfolio of forty to sixty commercial REITs • Vanguard Real Estate Index Fund Admiral Shares (VGSLX), a low-cost index fund that tracks a key REIT benchmark index (called the MSCI US Investable Market Real Estate 25/50 Index) • Cohen & Steers Quality Income Realty Fund (RQI), a closed-end fund that holds a variety of high-income-producing commercial REITs and real estate–related stocks
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Michele Cagan (Real Estate Investing 101: From Finding Properties and Securing Mortgage Terms to REITs and Flipping Houses, an Essential Primer on How to Make Money with Real Estate (Adams 101 Series))
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Yet risk feels particularly complicated in the context of the stories of white firearm. Lessons seem hard to cull when the support groups are comprised only of grieving loved ones because the primary victims do not live long enough to tell you what was going through their minds. Knowledge about best practices is fleeting because Congress effectively blocks federally funded research on gun-related risk, leading to a knowledge vacuum unlike anything ever seen for every other leading cause of injury and death. Ultimately, risk is embodied not in the imagined intruder but in the person who already lives in the house. Risk then becomes at once prevalent and invisible. Risk is an ellipsis, an evanescent void.
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Jonathan M. Metzl
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Real Estate Investment Trusts, or REITs (pronounced “reets”), are companies that own and collect rent from commercial and residential properties.10 Bundled into real-estate mutual funds, REITs do a decent job of combating inflation. The best choice is Vanguard REIT Index Fund; other relatively low-cost choices include Cohen & Steers Realty Shares, Columbia Real Estate Equity Fund, and Fidelity Real Estate Investment Fund.11 While a REIT fund is unlikely to be a foolproof inflation-fighter, in the long run it should give you some defense against the erosion of purchasing power without hampering your overall returns.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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Western countries are rarely in budget surplus and thus end up building debt over the cycle.The increase of the debt-to-GDP ratio is a fundamentally negative development for the lower and middle classes. The debt acts as a transfer of wealth from average taxpayers to the better off. The mechanism of this wealth transfer is relatively simple, as the interest paid to finance payment to the bond holders is funded by the general budget. Thus, bondholders, by definition people with savings, receive payments financed by the tax collected from the general population. Effectively, the debt sucks in a percentage of income revenues and spits it back out to wealthy savers in the form of interest payments.
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Jean-Michel Paul (The Economics of Discontent: From Failing Elites to The Rise of Populism)
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The purpose of this chapter is to explain what it means for skillful investors to add value. To accomplish that, I’m going to introduce two terms from investment theory. One is beta, a measure of a portfolio’s relative sensitivity to market movements. The other is alpha, which I define as personal investment skill, or the ability to generate performance that is unrelated to movement of the market. As I mentioned earlier, it’s easy to achieve the market return. A passive index fund will produce just that result by holding every security in a given market index in proportion to its equity capitalization. Thus, it mirrors the characteristics—e.g., upside potential, downside risk, beta or volatility, growth, richness or cheapness, quality or lack of same—of the selected index and delivers its return. It epitomizes investing without value added. Let’s say, then, that all equity investors start not with a blank sheet of paper but rather with the possibility of simply emulating an index. They can go out and passively buy a market-weighted amount of each stock in the index, in which case their performance will be the same as that of the index. Or they can try for outperformance through active rather than passive investing.
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Howard Marks (The Most Important Thing: Uncommon Sense for the Thoughtful Investor (Columbia Business School Publishing))
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The perceived value of pets has been grossly exaggerated to stimulate demand and to create jobs and wealth. Although scarce for lack of public funding, the only decent research in the field has shown that the long-term benefits of pets are largely overrated, if not totally absent. The therapeutic value of zootherapy is of the same nature as that of gambling, binge-eating, and alcohol: it provides a transient, feel-good experience, but at a high cost to all involved.
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Charles Danten (Un vétérinaire en colère - Essai sur la condition animale)
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When you buy an airplane ticket, the airline charges your credit card immediately, even if you are not planning to fly for another three weeks. Accountants call such funds deferred revenue. Because of its name, deferred revenue sounds like something we should discuss in this chapter. Deferred revenue is indeed related to revenue—it will turn into revenue eventually—but it does not belong here. Remember the GAAP principle of conservatism? It says, in part, that revenue should be recognized when (and only when) it is actually earned. Deferred revenue is money that has come in but is as yet unearned. So it can’t go into the income statement. Instead, accountants put deferred revenue on the balance sheet as a liability—that is, an amount that the company owes to somebody else. In the example, the airline owes you a flight. We’ll discuss deferred revenue further in part 3
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Karen Berman (Financial Intelligence: A Manager's Guide to Knowing What the Numbers Really Mean)
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Miss Tonks had been brought up to believe that a lady never discussed money. But life in the hotel business had changed all that. She gave a little cough and asked tentatively, “Are you in funds?
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Marion Chesney (Colonel Sandhurst to the Rescue (Poor Relation #5))
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The truth of the matter is that the system is not designed to allow for upstart third parties. It can adjust to accommodate a patently bogus third party, and it can tolerate the occasional Republican or Democrat bolting his party to pose as an ‘Independent,’ but a real third party doesn’t stand a chance. That is why you won’t find anything but Republicans and Democrats in the White House and the US Senate. Even the House of Representatives, reputedly the branch of the federal government most responsive to the people, counts just one Independent among its 435 members.34 That’s because we all know that voting for a third-party candidate is just throwing your vote away. Which is, sadly, quite true. True because the American system of ‘democracy’ is a winner-take-all system. And a minor party candidate, lacking funding and media support, has exactly no chance of winning. If, however, America were based on a representational system, as are the European democracies, winning would be a relative concept, and third-party votes would not be thrown away. For in that type of system, congressional or parliamentary seats are awarded proportionally based on the election outcome. In other words, your party need not ‘win’ to gain representation. Every vote for your party gains greater representation, and no votes are thrown away. It is easy to see how this type of democracy could quickly erode the entrenched ‘two-party’ system.
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David McGowan (Understanding the F-Word: American Fascism and the Politics of Illusion)
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We ought to forget all this silliness about fund-raising and public relations and get back to what we do best. Educating the young.” As we watched Babson laugh and
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Neil S. Plakcy (The Kingdom of Dog (Golden Retriever Mysteries #2))
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in the strategy process, resource allocation is where the rubber meets the road. The resource allocation process determines which deliberate and emergent initiatives get funded and implemented, and which are denied resources. Everything related to strategy inside a company is only intent until it gets to the resource allocation stage. A company’s vision, plans, and opportunities—and all of its threats and problems—all want priority, vying against one another to become the actual strategy the company implements
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Clayton M. Christensen (How Will You Measure Your Life?)
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the Times reported that police departments had an extraordinary incentive to use their new equipment for drug enforcement: the extra federal funding the local police departments received was tied to antidrug policing. The size of the disbursements was linked to the number of city or county drug arrests. Each arrest, in theory, would net a given city or county about $153 in state and federal funding. Non-drug-related policing brought no federal dollars, even for violent crime.
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Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
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The 1938 CBS radio broadcast of Orson Welles’ dramatization of War of the Worlds, a novel written 40 years earlier by H. G. Wells, created panic across the United States as millions of people tuned in and believed that earth was experiencing a real invasion by the Martians.75 The broadcast was partially funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and guided by the Council on Foreign Relations, in what was later discovered to be a psychological operation (psyop, for short) to “test” panic and hysteria throughout the United States.76 Astonishingly, it was said to be heard by over
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Sheila Zilinsky (TECHNOGEDDON: The Coming Human Extinction)
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Hence, after this foreshortened discussion of the major considerations, we once again enunciate the same basic compromise policy for defensive investors—namely that at all times they have a significant part of their funds in bond-type holdings and a significant part also in equities. It is still true that they may choose between maintaining a simple 50–50 division between the two components or a ratio, dependent on their judgment, varying between a minimum of 25% and a maximum of 75% of either. We shall give our more detailed view of these alternative policies in a later chapter. Since at present the overall return envisaged from common stocks is nearly the same as that from bonds, the presently expectable return (including growth of stock values) for the investor would change little regardless of how he divides his fund between the two components. As calculated above, the aggregate return from both parts should be about 7.8% before taxes or 5.5% on a tax-free (or estimated tax-paid) basis. A return of this order is appreciably higher than that realized by the typical conservative investor over most of the long-term past. It may not seem attractive in relation to the 14%, or so, return shown by common stocks during the 20 years of the predominantly bull market after 1949. But it should be remembered that between 1949 and 1969 the price of the DJIA had advanced more than fivefold while its earnings and dividends had about doubled. Hence the greater part of the impressive market record for that period was based on a change in investors’ and speculators’ attitudes rather than in underlying corporate values. To that extent it might well be called a “bootstrap operation.” In
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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T20 World Cup Betting: A Quick Guide
The T20 World Cup is one of the most exciting events in the cricketing calendar, bringing together top teams from around the world for a fast-paced, action-packed tournament. For many fans, placing a bet can add even more excitement to the games. Here’s a brief guide to get you started with T20 World Cup betting.
What is T20 World Cup Betting?
T20 World Cup betting involves wagering on various outcomes related to the tournament. This can range from predicting the overall winner of the World Cup to specific match outcomes or player performances.
Types of Bets
Match Bets: Wager on the outcome of individual matches.
Outright Bets: Bet on which team will win the entire tournament.
Prop Bets: Bet on specific events, like the top run-scorer in a match.
How to Bet
Choose a Platform: Select a reputable betting site like Bet365 or Betway.
Create an Account: Sign up and verify your details.
Deposit Funds: Add money to your account using a secure payment method.
Place Bets: Choose your bets based on your research and predictions.
Tips for Successful Betting
Research: Study team form, player statistics, and match conditions.
Set a Budget: Only bet what you can afford to lose.
Stay Informed: Keep up with the latest news and updates.
Responsible Betting
Betting should always be fun and done responsibly. Set limits for yourself and seek help if betting becomes a problem.
Betting on the T20 World Cup can enhance your enjoyment of the game, but always remember to bet wisely and responsibly.
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96in
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YouTube also contains a treasure trove of lectures by nearly all of finance’s leading lights, strewn throughout its vast wasteland of misinformation. Tread carefully. A few wrong clicks and you’ll wind up with a QAnon conspiracist or a crypto bro. Of the names I’ve mentioned in this book, I’d search for John Bogle, Eugene Fama, Kenneth French, Jonathan Clements, Zvi Bodie, William Sharpe, Burton Malkiel, Charles Ellis, and Jason Zweig. Worthwhile finance podcasts abound. Start with the Economist’s weekly “Money Talks” and NPR’s Planet Money, although most of the latter’s superb coverage revolves around economics and relatively little around investing. Rick Ferri’s Boglehead podcast interviews cover mainly passive investing. Another financial podcast I highly recommend is Barry Ritholtz’s Masters in Business from Bloomberg. Podcasts are a rapidly evolving area. Lest you wear your ears out, you’ll need discretion to curate the burgeoning amount of high-quality audio. Research mutual funds. All the fund companies discussed in this book have sophisticated websites from which basic fund facts, such as fees and expenses, can be obtained, as well as annual and semiannual reports that list and tabulate holdings. If you’re researching a large number of funds, this gets cumbersome. The best way is to visit Morningstar.com. Use the site’s search function to locate the main page for the fund you’re interested in and click the “Expense” and “Portfolio” tabs to find the fund expense ratio and detailed data on the fund holdings. Click the “Performance” tab to see the fund’s return over periods ranging from a single day up to 15 years, and the “Chart” tab to compare the returns of multiple funds over a given interval. ***
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William J. Bernstein (The Four Pillars of Investing, Second Edition: Lessons for Building a Winning Portfolio)
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At least Japan had sufficient domestic savings to fund its escalating national debt and printed its own currency. Europe’s stricken periphery wasn’t so fortunate. Take Draghi’s homeland. In the fifteen years since the start of the euro project, Italy enjoyed no increase in income per capita and labour costs climbed relative to Germany’s, rendering Italian exports uncompetitive. Italy’s public debt trailed only Japan’s and Greece’s. Italian banks were loaded down with hundreds of billions of euros of bad debts. Many of its largest businesses were certified zombies. Political sclerosis accompanied the economic version. The IMF warned that ‘in the absence of deeper structural reforms, medium-term growth is projected to remain low.’30 Without adequate economic growth, Italy’s sovereign debt problems and the Eurozone’s existential crisis remained unresolved. As in Japan, easy money bought time, but time was wasted.fn6
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Edward Chancellor (The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest)
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A hedge fund, Hildene Capital Management, which had invested some of the family’s wealth, said that it was no longer comfortable doing business with the Sacklers. Brett Jefferson, the fund’s manager, revealed that someone close to the firm had suffered an “opioid-related tragedy,” and said, “My conscience led me to terminate the relationship.” Even Purdue’s banker, JPMorgan Chase, cut ties with the company.
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Patrick Radden Keefe (Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction)
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Raising from Series A/B firms for a seed Bringing a Series A/B firm in for a seed round is risky business. They’ll want to talk to you to get an early look and learn about what you’re up to. But don’t get too excited! In fact, I’d recommend avoiding those conversations entirely. Whatever capital they commit will be trivial relative to their total balance sheet. No Series A/B firm is serious unless they lead your A or B, and, if for some reason they decide not to do so, you’re screwed because that’s a red flag for other investors. This is called “signaling risk.” Basically, by investing in your seed, they intend to block out others from your next round. It’s a win-win for them because they either lead your next round from a privileged position or, they pass and you’re the one who’s screwed as a founder. So, your incentives are completely misaligned! You may have heard success stories, but that’s a sampling bias — you’ll rarely hear about the companies that do not get the follow-on term sheet. Note: A fund investing in your company at the seed stage is completely irrelevant to their willingness to write a check to lead your Series A or B. The only thing that determines their willingness to invest is your traction and momentum. Letting them in makes them no more willing to invest, and anyone who tries to convince you otherwise is deceiving you. There might be relationship benefits, but you can build on the relationship without letting them on your cap table!
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Ryan Breslow (Fundraising)
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You also only have two friends, and they’re both fake accounts.” “They told me I had funds available in a deceased relative’s account that they would help me retrieve. It sounded promising.” A sharp laugh hits me. “You didn’t even accept my friend request.” “You weren’t offering me two million dollars.
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Jennifer Hartmann (Lotus)
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There was an acute sense of betrayal at all levels of society, from the king downwards, and the political fallout from the war was impossible to contain. On 1 November parliament passed a resolution calling for the severance of diplomatic relations with France. Only the fear of bankruptcy deterred it from calling for a break in diplomatic relations with Britain too. On 20 November, however, parliament unanimously passed a resolution calling for the abrogation of the Anglo–Jordanian treaty and of an exchange of diplomatic representatives with Russia and China. The treaty was clearly doomed, but there was as yet no agreement on how to replace the subsidy it provided. Nabulsi wanted to delay the termination of the treaty until Arab funding could be secured. Hussein, on the other hand, wished to avoid dependence on Arab allies and made a determined bid to secure American financial support for Jordan. His aim was not Arab unity against the West but the replacement of one external patron and protector by another. The first, secret approach to the Americans was made not by the king himself but by his chief of staff. On 9 November, Abu Nuwar requested from the American military attaché in Amman American economic and military aid to Jordan in “sufficient volume” to compensate for the imminent loss of British aid. If America put up the money and arms, Abu Nuwar said, communism would be prevented from dominating Jordan; he would dissolve parliament and take over the government: “I and the people of Jordan will follow US policies.
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Avi Shlaim (Lion of Jordan)
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It’s Thanksgiving, and you’ve eaten with porcine abandon. Your bloodstream is teeming with amino acids, fatty acids, glucose. It’s far more than you need to power you over to the couch in a postprandial daze. What does your body do with the excess? This is crucial to understand because, basically, the process gets reversed when you’re later sprinting for your life. To answer this question, it’s time we talked finances, the works—savings accounts, change for a dollar, stocks and bonds, negative amortization of interest rates, shaking coins out of piggy banks—because the process of transporting energy through the body bears some striking similarities to the movement of money. It is rare today for the grotesquely wealthy to walk around with their fortunes in their pockets, or to hoard their wealth as cash stuffed inside mattresses. Instead, surplus wealth is stored elsewhere, in forms more complex than cash: mutual funds, tax-free government bonds, Swiss bank accounts. In the same way, surplus energy is not kept in the body’s form of cash—circulating amino acids, glucose, and fatty acids—but stored in more complex forms. Enzymes in fat cells can combine fatty acids and glycerol to form triglycerides (table). Accumulate enough of these in the fat cells and you grow plump. Meanwhile, your cells can stick series of glucose molecules together. These long chains, sometimes thousands of glucose molecules long, are called glycogen. Most glycogen formation occurs in your muscles and liver. Similarly, enzymes in cells throughout the body can combine long strings of amino acids, forming them into proteins. The hormone that stimulates the transport and storage of these building blocks into target cells is insulin. Insulin is this optimistic hormone that plans for your metabolic future. Eat
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Robert M. Sapolsky (Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping)
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It will be a matter of great regret if the friendly spirit which characterised the relations between the Jewish employer in the P.I.C.A. villages and his Arab employees, to which reference has already been made, were to disappear. Unless there is some change of spirit in the policy of the Zionist Organisation it seems inevitable that the General Federation of Jewish Labour, which dominates that policy, will succeed in extending its principles to all the Jewish colonies in Palestine.
The present position, precluding any employment of Arabs in the Zionist colonies, is undesirable, from the point of view both of justice and of the good government of the country. As long as these provisions exist in the Constitution of the Zionist Organisation, in the lease of the Keren-Kayemeth and in the agreement of the Keren-Hayesod it cannot be regarded as desirable that large areas of land should be transferred to the Jewish National Fund. It is impossible to view with equanimity the extension of an enclave in Palestine from which all Arabs are excluded. The Arab population already regards the transfer of lands to Zionist hands with dismay and alarm. These cannot be dismissed as baseless in the light of the Zionist policy which is described above.
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John Hope Simpson (Palestine. Report on immigration, land settlement and development)
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To simplify Markowitz’s model, Sharpe stipulated one fundamental underlying factor—the return of the overall stock market—and instead calculated the variation of individual securities relative to this, rather than each security relative to each other. In his formula, it was given the Greek letter beta. So if Coca-Cola’s shares rise by 0.8 percentage points for every 1 percent the broader stock market climbs, it has a beta of 0.8. If a racier stock gains 2 percent, it has a beta of 2. Higher-beta stocks are more volatile, and should therefore offer greater returns than steadier, lower-beta securities. And thus beta became the lingua franca for the returns of the stock market as a whole, while “alpha” later emerged as the term for the extra returns generated by a skilled investor.
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Robin Wigglesworth (Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever)
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Ross’s “arbitrage pricing theory” and Rosenberg’s “bionic betas” posited that the returns of any financial security are the result of several systematic factors. Although seemingly stating the obvious, this was a seminal moment in the move toward a more vibrant understanding of markets. The eclectic Rosenberg was even put on the cover of Institutional Investor in May 1978, the bald, mustachioed man depicted as a giant meditating guru with flowers in his hair, worshipped by a gathering of besuited portfolio managers. The headline was “Who Is Barr Rosenberg? And What the Hell Is He Talking About?”8 What he was talking about was how academics were beginning to classify stocks according to not just their industry or their geography, but their financial characteristics. And some of these characteristics might actually prove to deliver better long-term returns than the broader stock market. In 1973, Sanjoy Basu, a finance professor at McMaster University in Ontario, published a paper that indicated that companies with low stock prices relative to their earnings did better than the efficient-markets hypothesis would suggest. Essentially, he showed that the value investing principles espoused by Benjamin Graham in the 1930s—which revolved around buying cheap, out-of-favor stocks trading below their intrinsic worth—was a durable investment factor. By systematically buying all cheap stocks, investors could in theory beat the broader market over time. Then Banz showed the same for small caps, another big moment in the evolution of factor investing. Follow-up studies on smaller stocks in Japan and the UK showed similar results, so in 1986 DFA launched dedicated small-cap funds for those two markets as well. In the early 1990s, finance professors Narasimhan Jegadeesh and Sheridan Titman published a paper indicating that simply surfing market momentum—in practice buying stocks that were already bouncing and selling those that were sliding—could also produce market-beating returns.9 The reasons for these apparent anomalies divide academics. Efficient-markets disciples stipulate that they are the compensation investors receive for taking extra risks. Value stocks, for example, are often found in beaten-up, unpopular, and shunned companies, such as boring industrial conglomerates in the middle of the dotcom bubble. While they can underperform for long stretches, eventually their underlying worth shines through and rewards investors who kept the faith. Small stocks do well largely because small companies are more likely to fail than bigger ones. Behavioral economists, on the other hand, argue that factors tend to be the product of our irrational human biases. For example, just like how we buy pricey lottery tickets for the infinitesimal chance of big wins, investors tend to overpay for fast-growing, glamorous stocks, and unfairly shun duller, steadier ones. Smaller stocks do well because we are illogically drawn to names we know well. The momentum factor, on the other hand, works because investors initially underreact to news but overreact in the long run, or often sell winners too quickly and hang on to bad bets for far longer than is advisable.
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Robin Wigglesworth (Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever)
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At one point Booth was cornered by the assistant treasurer of one big customer, who angrily grabbed his arm and snarled, “I want you to know you’re the worst performing manager we have in any asset class. Do you still believe that small-cap stocks have higher expected returns?” Booth stuck to the DFA script and replied, “We believe small-cap stocks are riskier than big-cap stocks and risk and return are related. Which part of the argument are you no longer comfortable with?”14 DFA eventually did make it through the lean years, but not without casualties.
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Robin Wigglesworth (Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever)
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Most schools fulfill this legal obligation by providing services that won’t involve a perpetrator, such as academic accommodations or healing resources. At Western University, victim advocates would broker agreements between survivors and their professors to get extensions on assignments or excused absences. They would also help survivors submit paperwork to receive refunds for classes they dropped or failed due to the strains of their traumatic symptoms. To improve survivors’ mental health, the Counseling Center hosted group therapy for sexual assault survivors and offered one-on-one counseling at a cheaper rate than the insurance co-pay at most private practices. Advocates also had a small fund available to cover survivors’ trauma-related expenses. Overwhelmingly, survivors who received these resources benefited from them. Some called them life-changing. However, few survivors felt comfortable actually using them. Especially more than once.
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Nicole Bedera (On the Wrong Side: How Universities Protect Perpetrators and Betray Survivors of Sexual Violence)
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Solidarity with local communities lies at the heart of culture-centered public relations because it seeks to co-create local narratives that have otherwise been erased from the mainstream public spheres (de Sousa Santos, Nunes, and Meneses, 2008). Local voices offer entry points for co-creating narratives that have otherwise been erased. It is through the re-appropriation of the community as a site of resistance as opposed to a site of neoliberal governance that new meaning structures are articulated (Beverly, 2004a,b; Spivak, 1988a,b; Tihuwai Smith, 2006). It is through these new meanings narrated at local community levels that the scientific modernist discourses of neoliberalism are disrupted. For instance, to the large-scale funding of the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) with the goal of mapping
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Krishnamurthy Sriramesh (Culture and Public Relations)
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Actual estate is a form of funding
Real estate is a form of funding and is shortly being adopted by many individuals. The advantages of real property investments are many as mentioned here.There's a widespread adage that says don't put all your eggs in a single basket. That is the place actual property steps in to provide diversification. Diversification means spreading the danger of your cash. Real estate gives one other way of investing money relatively than investing it multi function place.
One other advantage of real estate investment is that it ensures one a supply five on shenton of income for a very long time. It's because actual estate will at all times have shoppers who need to purchase or lease homes or premises for residential or enterprise functions respectively. This form of funding serves as a further income other than the normal wage one receives. Better still while you retire it is going to nonetheless be your revenue source. The other benefit is that one doesn't should be bodily present to get the revenue.
Thirdly, you get to have leverage over all OPMS. It's easy for an individual who is in actual property to get a house and pay it off over a long time period. Generally the deal is so good that some brokers get as many as 30 years to pay off their mortgages! It's also a way of leaving one’s legacy behind that will probably be remembered for a few years to come even after one’s demise. Regardless of the very fact of the massive sum of money required to begin, the benefits of real estate investments that you're going to get are simply many.
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Corey Feldman
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Issues related to the establishment, management and operation of broadcasting and
communications funds
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소라넷주소
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Introducing the No More Tears Slicer, which lets you slice your prep time in half! With the No More Tears Onion Slicer, you can slice your way through onions, dice vegetables, and slice cheese in minutes! This is one kitchen tool you don't want to do without! Order this time-saving instrument NOW for the TV-price of only $19.99! The University of Portlandia is seeking a research fellow to work on the Multilingual Metrolingualism (MM) project, a new five-year NSF-funded project led by Dr Hannelore Holmes. We are seeking a highly motivated and committed researcher to work on all aspects of the MM Project, but in particular on developing a coding system suitable for urban youth language use. Applicants should have a PhD in a relevant area of sociolinguistics or a closely related field. Proficiency in at least one of the following languages is essential: French, Swahili, Mandarin, or Tok Pisin. Candidates must also have good knowledge and understanding of discourse analysis, semiotics, and grammatical analysis. Applicants should demonstrate enthusiasm for independent research and commitment to developing their research career. The post is fixed-term for five years due to funding. The post is available from April 1 or as soon as possible thereafter. Job sharers welcome. The University of Portlandia is an Equal Opportunity
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Ronald Wardhaugh (An Introduction to Sociolinguistics (Blackwell Textbooks in Linguistics))
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Vote on changes proposed to the 'Broadcasting Development Fund Contribution
Rates for Terrestrial Broadcasting Networks'
Voting Vote on issues related to the appointment of members of the Media Diversity
Committee
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카톡PCASH
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When the bishop's collection for the college had reached £1,500, a decision was made. Rather than start construction with too little, it was resolved to send fifty "tenants-at-halves" to work on the land. Half of their income would go to the college project and half to themselves. Profits, it was expected, would augment the building and maintenance fund and help to support tutors and students. In the meanwhile, friendly relations with the Indians were important to make possible the willing education of their children.
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Charles E. Hatch (The First Seventeen Years: Virginia, 1607-1624)
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the whole idea wasn't nearly as stupid as it appears now, in the light of failure… (In the light of failure everything appears stupid!) By means of that stupid action I hoped to put myself in a position of independence, to take the first step, to obtain funds, and then the whole thing would have been wiped out by the measureless benefits (relatively speaking) that would have been achieved
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Fyodor Dostoevsky (Crimen y castigo (Spanish Edition))
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Liberals dominate most of the leading opinion-making areas of American life-- journalism, the movie and television industries, academia, the publishing industry, the legal profession, the mainline churches, and the arts. Conservatives dominate talk radio, evangelical churches, and have Fox News, but that hardly evens things out.
By contrast with liberal dominance in the opinion-making elite, the playing field is more or less level with regard to spending on political campaigns-- on average, Democrats and Republicans spend approximately the same amount. Nether party has the massive, structural advantages when it comes to campaign spending that the Democrats have in the broader political and ideological arena. Without the relatively level playing field of campaign spending, left-leaning opinion-makers would be able to virtually monopolize American political discourse.
So the Obama administration's and leading Democratic politicians' over-the-top reaction to Citizens United was not because they suddenly became Boy Scouts interested in improving the American political system by reducing the relevance of money-- indeed, in 2008 Obama, breaking a campaign promise, became the first major-party candidate to decline federal campaign funds and the spending limits that come with those funds. His campaign wound up outspending McCain's by the largest margin in history. Rather, the Democrats understand that reducing the funds available to all candidates will disproportionately harm the Republicans, because Republicans have fewer "free" ways to get their message out.
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David E. Bernstein
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Well, it depends which planned economies you mean. There are lots of planned economies―the United States is a planned economy, for example. I mean, we talk about ourselves as a "free market," but that's baloney. The only parts of the U.S. economy that are internationally competitive are the planned parts, the state-subsidized parts―like capital-intensive agriculture (which has a state-guaranteed market as a cushion in case there are excesses); or high-technology industry (which is dependent on the Pentagon system); or pharmaceuticals (which is massively subsidized by publicly-funded research). Those are the parts of the U.S. economy that are functioning well.
And if you go to the East Asian countries that are supposed to be the big economic successes―you know, what everybody talks about as a triumph of free-market democracy—they don't even have the most remote relation to free-market democracy: formally speaking they're fascist, they're state-organized economies run in cooperation with big conglomerates. That's precisely fascism, it's not the free market.
Now, that kind of planned economy "works," in a way―it produces at least. Other kinds of command economies don't work, or work differently: for example, the Eastern European planned economies in the Soviet era were highly centralized, over-bureaucratized, and they worked very inefficiently, although they did provide a kind of minimal safety-net for people. But all of these systems have been very anti-democratic―like, in the Soviet Union, there were virtually no peasants or workers involved in any decision-making process.
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Noam Chomsky (Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky)
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The paper cited 101 sources and so appeared to be scientific. Willie Soon had authored other discredited, industry-funded climate-denial papers in the past, including with Legates. He is not a climate scientist or a polar-bear expert. He is an aerospace engineer, and was one of the “new faces” the GCSCP public-relations plan had identified would be strategic in a disinformation campaign that created “uncertainties” about climate science.
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Shawn Lawrence Otto (the war on Science)
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Recently, the International Monetary Fund published a report which revealed that too much inequality even inhibits economic growth.22 Perhaps the most fascinating finding, however, is that even rich people suffer when inequality becomes too great. They, too, become more prone to depression, suspicion, and myriad other social difficulties.23 “Income inequality,” say two leading scientists who have studied twenty-four developed countries, “makes us all less happy with our lives, even if we’re relatively well-off.
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Rutger Bregman (Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There – from the presenter of the 2025 BBC ‘Moral Revolution’ Reith lectures)
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The Economics of Property-Casualty Insurance With the acquisition of General Re — and with GEICO’s business mushrooming — it becomes more important than ever that you understand how to evaluate an insurance company. The key determinants are: (1) the amount of float that the business generates; (2) its cost; and (3) most important of all, the long-term outlook for both of these factors. To begin with, float is money we hold but don't own. In an insurance operation, float arises because premiums are received before losses are paid, an interval that sometimes extends over many years. During that time, the insurer invests the money. Typically, this pleasant activity carries with it a downside: The premiums that an insurer takes in usually do not cover the losses and expenses it eventually must pay. That leaves it running an "underwriting loss," which is the cost of float. An insurance business has value if its cost of float over time is less than the cost the company would otherwise incur to obtain funds. But the business is a lemon if its cost of float is higher than market rates for money. A caution is appropriate here: Because loss costs must be estimated, insurers have enormous latitude in figuring their underwriting results, and that makes it very difficult for investors to calculate a company's true cost of float. Errors of estimation, usually innocent but sometimes not, can be huge. The consequences of these miscalculations flow directly into earnings. An experienced observer can usually detect large-scale errors in reserving, but the general public can typically do no more than accept what's presented, and at times I have been amazed by the numbers that big-name auditors have implicitly blessed. As for Berkshire, Charlie and I attempt to be conservative in presenting its underwriting results to you, because we have found that virtually all surprises in insurance are unpleasant ones. The table that follows shows the float generated by Berkshire’s insurance operations since we entered the business 32 years ago. The data are for every fifth year and also the last, which includes General Re’s huge float. For the table we have calculated our float — which we generate in large amounts relative to our premium volume — by adding net loss reserves, loss adjustment reserves, funds held under reinsurance assumed and unearned premium reserves, and then subtracting agents balances, prepaid acquisition costs, prepaid taxes and deferred charges applicable to assumed reinsurance. (Got that?)
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Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway Letters to Shareholders: 1965-2024)
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Compared to females from a same-sex twin, the study concludes that female twins from an opposite-sex pair: allocates more of her financial assets to equity; invests in a higher-risk portfolio, as measured by return volatility; and allots a higher proportion to individual stocks relative to mutual funds.
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John R. Nofsinger (The Psychology of Investing)
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Allegation of corruption of a local
government related to attracting private
funds
- Alleged report: Public officials, including mayor A,
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강남풀살롱 초희넷
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America today is not the same nation as when you were born. Depending on your age, if you were born in America, your home nation was a significantly different land than it is today: · America didn’t allow aborting babies in the womb; · Same sex marriage was not only illegal, no one ever talked about it, or even seriously considered the possibility; (“The speed and breadth of change (in the gay movement) has just been breathtaking.”, New York Times, June 21, 2009) · Mass media was clean and non-offensive. Think of The I Love Lucy Show or The Walton Family, compared with what is aired today; · The United States government did not take $500 million dollars every year from the taxpayers and give it to Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider. · Videogames that glorify violence, cop killing and allow gamesters who have bought millions of copies, to have virtual sex with women before killing them, did not exist. · Americans’ tax dollars did not fund Title X grants to Planned Parenthood who fund a website which features videos that show a “creepy guidance counselor who gives advice to teens on how to have (safe) sex and depict teens engaged in sex.” · Americans didn’t owe $483,000 per household for unfunded retirement and health care obligations (Peter G. Peterson Foundation). · The phrase “sound as a dollar” meant something. · The Federal government’s debt was manageable. American Christian missionaries who have been abroad for relatively short times say they find it hard to believe how far this nation has declined morally since they were last in the country. In just a two week period, not long ago, these events all occurred: the Iowa Supreme Court declared that same sex marriage was legal in the State; the President on a foreign tour declared that “we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation…” and a day later bowed before the King of the nation that supplied most of the 9/11 terrorists; Vermont became the first State to authorize same sex marriage by legislative action, as opposed to judicial dictate; the CEO of General Motors was fired by the federal government; an American ship was boarded and its crew captured by pirates for the first time in over 200 years; and a major Christian leader/author apologized on Larry King Live for supporting California’s Proposition 8 in defense of traditional marriage, reversing his earlier position. The pace of societal change is rapidly accelerating.
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John Price (The End of America: The Role of Islam in the End Times and Biblical Warnings to Flee America)
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Health related emergency can occur in any one’s life without giving any prior notifications. It is quite tough for some of us to deal with their unexpected health troubles as they are not having sufficient amount of income or saving. To assist such unprivileged people in emergency healthcare loans are planned. With the assistance of this loan service borrowers can easily gain the desired amount of funds to deal with their unexpected health related emergency.
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Sundy Bryan
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The first trailblazer was Ivy Lee. He is often considered the founder of modern public relations and the originator of corporate crisis communications.* In 1914 he went to work for the Rockefeller interests after coal miners striking at one of the mines they controlled in Ludlow, Colorado, were massacred by the National Guard. Between nineteen and twenty-five people were killed, including two women and eleven children. Lee’s press releases claimed that their deaths were the result of an overturned camp stove. Ivy Lee was one of the first members of the Council on Foreign Relations when it was founded just after World War I; he was thus co-opted into America’s foreign policy establishment. Shortly before he died in 1934, Congress began investigating his public relations work on behalf of the notorious German chemical monopoly I.G. Farben, which helped fund Hitler’s rise to power and would later develop the poison gas used in the Nazi death camps.
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Anonymous
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In February 2000, hedge-fund manager James J. Cramer proclaimed that Internet-related companies “are the only ones worth owning right now.” These “winners of the new world,” as he called them, “are the only ones that are going higher consistently in good days and bad.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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It was the missionaries who became the brave storm troopers of Christianity, slashing their way through jungles, going where no one had gone before. Mission was now reserved for work among the unreached nations and no longer simply happened next door or around the corner. But the churches that had outsourced their missionary activity to the mission societies tended to drift languidly into the role of fund-raiser for the mission societies. This dilemma was seriously exacerbated when, after World War II, a number of parachurch societies, mainly aimed at reaching young people, were formed. These included Youth for Christ, the Navigators, Campus Crusade for Christ, and so on, and were aimed at reaching students and teens right under the noses of existing churches. Once again, mission was outsourced to specialist agencies, leaving the local church focused primarily around pastoral issues and Sunday worship. Not only did this create the great stepchild, the parachurch, it crippled the church’s witness beyond the Sunday gathering. And again, given the significant cultural effect of the postwar baby boom, we understand the historical reasons why such specialization of local mission occurred. But it only deepened the cleft between missionary activity and church activity. Again, long before all this happened, Roland Allen was deeply concerned. We may compare the relation of the societies to the Church with the institution of divorce in relation to marriage. Just as divorce was permitted for the hardness of men’s hearts because they were unable to observe the divine institution of marriage in its original perfection, so the organization of missionary societies was permitted for the hardness of our hearts, because we had lost the power to appreciate and to use the divine organization of the Church in its simplicity for the purpose for which it was first created.[155] In the end Allen himself despondently capitulated to this great divorce, concluding that “the divine perfection of the Church as a missionary society cannot be recovered simply by abolishing the missionary societies, and saying, let the Church be her own missionary society.”[156] Maybe not in 1926, but today there is an increasing unease with this “divorce” between mission and church. Allen was ahead of his time. He forecast the situation we now find ourselves in—with missionless churches and churchless missions, and neither one being all it should be. We contend that the whole missional church conversation was one that the church has been building toward for over a century. And now is the time to have it. A new generation of young Christians is desperate for the adventure of mission. They were raised in the hermetically sealed environment of missionless church, and those who have emerged with their faith still intact are hungry for the risk and ordeal that only true missional activity can offer.
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Michael Frost (The Faith of Leap: Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure & Courage)
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Tripp somehow manipulated Monica into giving her the infamous blue dress. Nel and I hadn’t cleaned up everything. The president had “deposited” somewhere besides White House towels. The biggest security leak in history was the one that Monica wore into the White House and then strutted out with—right past us. There was no way to spin it. Either the president had mysteriously gone around the White House ejaculating on people’s clothing, or he and Monica had a taxpayer-funded affair for which he committed perjury. It also proved what I damn well knew, that Monica was easily manipulated, either by the likes of a higher-up like President Clinton or a lower-down like Linda Tripp. She had no business playing in a high-stakes environment within arm’s reach of intelligence of the CIA, the FBI, the State Department, and the Department of Defense. I mean, the spook shit that moved and was approved through the White House was the most sensitive intel in existence. Actionable intel is power. How could anyone in the Secret Service be expected to do his or her job if the Americans allowed people like the Clintons to assume national leadership? People still think the Lewinsky affair was one political party making a big deal over a little extra pie on the side; it wasn’t. What Starr proved was that the president had engaged in inappropriate sexually related workplace conduct with an intern/employee, as he had with other women. Some women, such as Juanita Broaddrick, even alleged he had assaulted them. He had zero integrity in this area, and that made everything he did suspect and untrustworthy. It revealed his real character. The president of the United States believed that he was above the law. He perjured himself and convinced others to perjure themselves to try to save his carefully crafted image. He created a spirit of corruption that infected the White House, the Secret Service, the whole government. Bill Clinton endangered us all by serving himself.
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Gary J. Byrne (Crisis of Character: A White House Secret Service Officer Discloses His Firsthand Experience with Hillary, Bill, and How They Operate)
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So how do my election law offenses compare to those of leading progressives? Well, let’s see. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid took $31,000 in late 2013 from his campaign funds to buy jewelry for his granddaughter Ryan Elisabeth Reid’s wedding. In his campaign year-end report, Reid tried to hide his granddaughter’s relationship to him by simply listing the transaction as a “holiday gift” to one “Ryan Elisabeth.” The impression Reid sought to convey was that he was buying gifts for his supporters. When it came to light that Reid had funneled campaign money to his granddaughter, Reid agreed to repay the money, but waxed indignant at continuing questions from reporters. “As a grandparent,” he fumed, “I say enough is enough.” Although Reid’s case involves obvious corruption, the Obama administration has neither investigated nor prosecuted a case against this stalwart Obama ally.6 Bill Clinton, you may recall, had his own campaign finance controversy. Following the 1996 election, the Democratic National Committee was forced to return $2.8 million in illegal and improper donations, most of it from foreign sources. Most of that money was raised by a shady Clinton fundraiser named John Huang. Huang, who used to work for the Lippo Group, an Indonesian conglomerate, set up a fundraising scheme for foreign businessmen seeking special favors from the U.S. government to meet with Clinton, in exchange for large sums of money. A South Korean businessman had dinner with President Clinton in return for a $250,000 donation. Yogesh Gandhi, an Indian businessman who claimed to be related to Mahatma Gandhi, arranged to meet Clinton in the White House and be photographed receiving an award in exchange for a $325,000 contribution. Both donations were returned, but again, no official investigation, no prosecutions.7
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Dinesh D'Souza (Stealing America: What My Experience with Criminal Gangs Taught Me about Obama, Hillary, and the Democratic Party)
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Loans NRIs can give loans to resident Indians on a repatriable or non-repatriable basis. NRIs can also receive loans from residents. Loan from NRIs in foreign currency or on a repatriable basis A resident Indian can borrow up to US dollars 250,000 from NRI close relatives on a repatriation basis i.e. on repayment, the NRI can credit the funds in an NRE account and take this money back without any restrictions. The NRI should be a close relative of the borrower. Please check ‘Who is your relative’ for details. The amount of loan should be received by an inward remittance or by debit to the NRE/FCNR account. The loan should be a minimum of 1 year and without any interest. The funds cannot be used for agricultural/plantation/real estate business or for relending. Income: As the loan should be interest-free, no income can be generated. Taxability: As there is no income, there is no tax. Loan from NRIs in Indian rupees or on a non-repatriable basis A resident, not being a company incorporated in India, may borrow in rupees from an NRI on a non- repatriation basis. The period of loan should be 3 years or less and the rate of interest should not exceed 2% over the prevailing bank rate at the time of the loan. The loan has to be utilized for meeting the borrower’s personal requirement or for his business purposes. The funds cannot be used for agricultural/plantation/real estate business or for relending or for investment in shares, securities or immovable property. For example, Ms. Isumati has given an unsecured loan to her father’s firm earning 15% interest. If she goes to the UK for further studies and becomes an NRI, while she may continue with the loan, RBI rules would apply. The funds cannot be used for real estate business and if the bank rate is 10%, she cannot be paid more than 12% interest on her loan. Her father would also need to deduct TDS @ 30.9% on the interest. Income: Income from loans given to residents is interest. Taxability: The interest income on loans given is taxable for NRIs. Loans to NRIs NRIs are allowed to borrow from a bank/authorized
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Jigar Patel (NRI Investments and Taxation: A Small Guide for Big Gains)
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Mutual Fund Investments are not transparent: In India, SEBI regulates MFs. The money market MFs are regulated by RBI. There are restrictions as to the sponsor, board of trustees, asset management company, custodian, registrar, dealing with brokers, etc. The investment objective, fund manager, entry and exit loads, AUM, expense ratio and other terms and conditions are already known and provided in the SAI. Also, every MF scheme is required to publish a fact sheet on a quarterly/monthly basis that includes all the important facts that an investor would need to know about the scheme including portfolio holdings, past returns, performance ratios and dividends. Also, information relating to what’s in (bought) and what’s out (sold) by mutual funds is also available.
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Jigar Patel (NRI Investments and Taxation: A Small Guide for Big Gains)
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Personally, even if with all my knowledge and experience in the finance and investment fields and previous success in investing directly in stocks, I believe in investing in mutual funds. This is because my expertise is providing holistic consulting to NRIs based on local and international rules related to investment and taxation to increase their risk adjusted after-tax return and not that of equity research and stock picking.
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Jigar Patel (NRI Investments and Taxation: A Small Guide for Big Gains)
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Mr. Arpit from UK has invested Rs. 100,000,000 in various equity mutual funds that generate 12% annual return, he could save Rs. 10,529,241 in 10 years and Rs. 43,231,465 in 20 years by selecting the direct plan. It would be better to pay an advisor that fee and invest directly than invest indirectly and pay the fee to a MF for marketing, selling and distribution expenses. For more information and which plan to select please refer to most important concepts related to Direct or Indirect option of investing in Mutual Fund.
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Jigar Patel (NRI Investments and Taxation: A Small Guide for Big Gains)
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In a market where multiple offers are raising prices, Teri Toombs, Principal Broker at Living Room Realty, says she discourages people from overpaying for homes. But some can’t resist. Some people don’t want to continue renting. And they don’t care what that costs. An in-house poll led by Toombs’ colleague Alyssa Isenstein Krueger, Living Room found more than a few first-time buyers with cash to throw around. The Living Room agents that responded said that of 148 first-time buyers served in 2014, 42 percent came to the table with funds from friends and relatives to help grab whatever edge they could leverage. The sums ranged from up to $470,000. It’s not scientific, but it suggests a hard new reality in the market. For those without cash? Those that can’t overpay? “It’s torture. And I try my best to prepare them for what they’re in for and I see them starting to glaze over like, ‘Why is this lady saying all this? Why can’t we just start looking at houses? Why is she bringing us down like this?’” said Toombs. “With determination and being really diligent about it, they can get into a house. But they have to realize that they’re going to be moving into emerging neighborhoods.
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Anonymous
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for several years starting in 2004, Bezos visited iRobot’s offices, participated in strategy sessions held at places like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , and became a mentor to iRobot chief executive Colin Angle, who cofounded the company in 1990. “He recognized early on that robots were a very disruptive game-changer,’’ Angle says of Bezos. “His curiosity about our space led to a very cool period of time where I could count upon him for a unique perspective.’’ Bezos is no longer actively advising the company, but his impact on the local tech scene has only grown larger. In 2008, Bezos’ investment firm provided initial funding for Rethink Robotics, a Boston company that makes simple-to-program manufacturing robots. Four years later, Amazon paid $775 million for North Reading-based Kiva, which makes robots that transport merchandise in warehouses. Also in 2012, Amazon opened a research and software development outpost in Cambridge that has done work on consumer electronics products like the Echo, a Wi-Fi-connected speaker that responds to voice commands. Rodney Brooks, an iRobot cofounder who is now chief technology officer of Rethink, says he met Bezos at the annual TED Conference. Bezos was aware of work that Brooks, a professor emeritus at MIT, had done on robot navigation and control strategies. Helen Greiner, the third cofounder of iRobot, says she met Bezos at a different technology conference, in 2004. Shortly after that, she recruited him as an adviser to iRobot. Bezos also made an investment in the company, which was privately held at the time. “He gave me a number of memorable insights,’’ Angle says. “He said, ‘Just because you won a bet doesn’t mean it was a good bet.’ Roomba might have been lucky. He was challenging us to think hard about where we were going and how to leverage our success.’’ On visits to iRobot, Greiner recalls, “he’d shake everyone’s hand and learn their names. He got them engaged.’’ She says one of the key pieces of advice Bezos supplied was about the value of open APIs — the application programming interfaces that allow other software developers to write software that talks to a product like the Roomba, expanding its functionality. The advice was followed. (Amazon also offers a range of APIs that help developers build things for its products.) By spending time with iRobot, Bezos gave employees a sense they were on the right track. “We were all believers that robotics would be huge,’’ says former iRobot exec Tom Ryden. “But when someone like that comes along and pays attention, it’s a big deal.’’ Angle says that Bezos was an adviser “in a very formative, important moment in our history,’’ and while they discussed “ideas about what practical robots could do, and what they could be,’’ Angle doesn’t want to speculate about what, exactly, Bezos gleaned from the affiliation. But Greiner says she believes “there was learning on both sides. We already had a successful consumer product with Roomba, and he had not yet launched the Kindle. He was learning from us about successful consumer products and robotics.’’ (Unfortunately, Bezos and Amazon’s public relations department would not comment.) The relationship trailed off around 2007 as Bezos got busier — right around when Amazon launched the Kindle, Greiner says. Since then, Bezos and Amazon have stayed mum about most of their activity in the state. His Bezos Expeditions investment team is still an investor in Rethink, which earlier this month announced its second product, a $29,000, one-armed robot called Sawyer that can do precise tasks, such as testing circuit boards. The warehouse-focused Kiva Systems group has been on a hiring tear, and now employs more than 500 people, according to LinkedIn. In December, Amazon said that it had 15,000 of the squat orange Kiva robots moving around racks of merchandise in 10 of its 50 distribution centers. Greiner left iRo
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Anonymous
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The federal government is partly at fault for the many state exemptions permitting the medical neglect of children. From 1974 to 1983, the states were required to enact such exemptions to qualify for federal funding related to children.109 This federal law was the result of Christian Scientists in positions of power in the Nixon Administration.
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Marci A. Hamilton (God vs. the Gavel: The Perils of Extreme Religious Liberty)
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And indeed today as it struggles with its financial crisis, the central issue in Greek politics remains resentment of the influence of Brussels, Germany, the International Monetary Fund, and other external actors, which are seen as pulling strings behind the back of a weak Greek government. Although there is considerable distrust of government in American political culture, by contrast, the basic legitimacy of democratic institutions runs very deep. Distrust of government is related to the Greek inability to collect taxes. Americans loudly proclaim their dislike of taxes, but when Congress mandates a tax, the government is energetic in enforcement. Moreover, international surveys suggest that levels of tax compliance are reasonably high in the United States; higher, certainly, than most European countries on the Mediterranean. Tax evasion in Greece is widespread, with restaurants requiring cash payments, doctors declaring poverty-line salaries, and unreported swimming pools owned by asset-hiding citizens dotting the Athenian landscape. By one account, Greece’s shadow economy—unreported income hidden from the tax authorities—constitutes 29.6 percent of total GDP.24 A second factor has to do with the late arrival of capitalism in Greece. The United States was an early industrializer; the private sector and entrepreneurship remained the main occupations of most Americans. Greece urbanized and took on other trappings of a modern society early on, but it failed to build a strong base of industrial employment. In the absence of entrepreneurial opportunities, Greeks sought jobs in the state sector, and politicians seeking to mobilize votes were happy to oblige. Moreover, the Greek pattern of urbanization in which whole villages moved from the countryside preserved intact rural patronage networks, networks that industry-based development tended to dissolve.
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Francis Fukuyama (Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy)
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It was also not until many years later, Baldwin related, that he discovered that the Communists used these fronts as recruiting grounds for the Party. If the treasurer happened to be a party member, funds would be siphoned off for party purposes. Eventually Baldwin recognized the futility of working with the Communists. “I recognized the lesson many others—but, unfortunately, not all liberals—learned: that no movement in which communists participate can successfully resist
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Guenter Lewy (The Cause That Failed: Communism in American Political Life)
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Mom?" I jerked around to see Gavril standing at the door to my study, as if I'd called him.
"Gav?" I sighed when I looked at his face. Something was wrong. Would he tell me what that was? Probably not. He and Gavin wore the same look on most days—as if they'd done something horrible and weren't ready to own up to it yet.
"Dad and I have talked. Several times."
"I know." I did. My son just hadn't bothered to talk to me. Until now.
"I didn't know, Mom. How was I to know she was related? Nobody knew that, except you."
"If you'd been a little nicer, she could have told you herself," I snapped.
"She knew?"
"The whole time. She saw it in your face. Saw it in my face, whenever she looked at a photograph. Nothing like getting mistreated by family, huh?" I lowered my eyes and pretended to scroll through figures on the comp-vid. "You had that asshole hit her in the face and break bones."
"That'll follow me until the end of time," Gavril muttered, ducking his head.
"Probably just like the fact that your father sired a vampire, and then did absolutely nothing in the sire department. He didn't teach her a single thing, starved her and worked her—with your help—day and night. I've been advised, you see." I still didn't look up from the comp-vid.
"Your assistants hired that dickhead Rathik Erwin, who stole from her and got her attacked by the other dickhead, Skel Hawer," Gavril attempted to deflect my wrath onto new targets.
"I've already had that discussion—with my assistants and with Norian," I snapped. "You, on the other hand, see fit to speak with your father several times, while I, having been gone for months, see you three weeks after I return—temporary death notwithstanding."
"Yeah. That's just, well, Mom, I'm sorry."
"If your aunt hadn't been here and decided, even after you and your father did your best to kill her, to save my ass anyway, where would we be right now? Answer that, will you?"
"Mom, you know I don't have any excuse. Sometimes I wish you'd just punch me and get it over with."
"Gavril Tybus Montegue, that's pure stupidity, so stop it now. You don't know what it's like to get punched in the face by someone who's supposed to be your parent. I do. Take your lumps. You fucked up. Admit it." I threw the comp-vid in my hand at the wall so hard it shattered. "Grant will just have to use the crown's funds to buy another one," I growled. "Gavril, go home. Come back when you're more sorry and I'm less pissed." He disappeared and I wiped away stubborn tears.
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Connie Suttle (Blood Trouble (God Wars, #2))
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In 2009 the staid British journal New Scientist published an article with the provocative title “Space Storm Alert: 90 Seconds from Catastrophe,” which opens with the following lines: It is midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power. A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation’s infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event—a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the Sun. It sounds ridiculous. Surely the Sun couldn’t create so profound a disaster on Earth. Yet an extraordinary report funded by NASA and issued by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) . . . claims it could do just that. (Brooks 2009; see also National Research Council 2008 for the NAS report that New Scientist is referring to) In fact, this scenario is not so ridiculous at all, as the New Scientist article goes on to relate (see also International Business Times 2011b; Lovett 2011; National Research Council 2008). Indeed, if things do not change, it may be inevitable.
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Robert M. Schoch (Forgotten Civilization: The Role of Solar Outbursts in Our Past and Future)
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Bold Prayers Joshua prayed to the LORD in front of all the people of Israel. He said, “Let the sun stand still over Gibeon.” JOSHUA 10:12 NLT Do you pray conservatively or audaciously? Joshua prayed audaciously—and the sun stood still. Hannah prayed audaciously—and God granted her a son. Daniel prayed audaciously—and the lions’ mouths stayed closed all night. (Whew—what a relief to him!) Jesus prayed audaciously—and Lazarus rose from the dead. What about you? Have you dared to pray a bold prayer, or are you content to ask God for easy things? Jennie, her husband, and two boys decided to pray audaciously that God would help them adopt a little girl from Haiti. They had no extra money, and the fee to adopt came to over $15,000. Still, they felt led to start filling out the required paperwork and making plans. About the time they had hoped to complete the process, the family was still woefully short on funds. But out of the blue, a distant relative called Jennie and said that her great-uncle (whom the family had only met once) had died and left an inheritance to Jennie. The next week, Jennie nearly fainted when she opened a certified mail envelope—and a check for $14,500 fell out. Pray audaciously. You never know what God will do. God, thank You for answering mightily when we pray with bold faith. Amen.
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Anonymous (Daily Wisdom for Women - 2014: 2014 Devotional Collection)
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The scientists in the room included neurologists, psychologists, geneticists, and a sociologist. For the past three years, with funding from the National Institutes of Health, they had poked and prodded Lisa and more than two dozen other former smokers, chronic over-eaters, problem drinkers, obsessive shoppers, and people with other destructive habits. All of the participants had one thing in common: They had remade their lives in relatively short periods of time. The researchers wanted to understand how.
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Charles Duhigg (The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do and How to Change)
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The tobacco settlement money went to lawyers and to governments, which effectively turned the money into a tax and then spent it on state bureaucracy. Regular folk did not receive any tax refund checks, nor did we see lower health insurance premiums, but we did pay more for everyday products not related to smoking. This means we are, in effect, paying billions of dollars in additional tax besides the billions in legal fees because of the tobacco settlement, as well as funding the next legal campaign to collect another large pay-day in contingency fees. It is very interesting to note during the tobacco suit that, while claiming various individuals were being victimized, or medical costs were mounting from misleading advertising or dishonest business practices, it was lawyers and governments, not the people nor their insurance companies, that collected all the loot. This the type of litigation did nothing to improve your life and it raised your cost of living.
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Howard Nemerov (Four Hundred Years of Gun Control: Why Isn't It Working?)
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I ran into similar, though less dramatic events after moving to Yale Law School, where I spent two years as a Senior Research Scholar. Hawaii’s two Democratic U.S. Senators once contacted the law school to complain about testimony that I gave before the Hawaii state legislature. They blamed me for somehow single-handedly scuttling the new gun registration laws that were being considered. The associate dean of the law school called me up about the complaints and grilled me about my testimony. I am certain that neither of these incidents would have occurred if I had been on the other side the gun debate. Over the years, many academics have told me that they would have studied gun control if not for fear of damage to their careers. They didn’t want to run the risk of coming out on the wrong side of the debate. From my experience, that is understandable. Eventually, I was forced out of academia. There is only an abundance of funding for those researchers who support gun control. There is a war on guns. Just like with any war there are real casualties. Police are probably the single most important factor in reducing crime, but police themselves understand that they almost always show up at the crime scene after the crime has been committed. When the police can’t be there, guns are by far the most effective way for people to protect themselves from criminals. And the most vulnerable people are the ones who benefit the most from being able to protect themselves: women and the elderly, people who are relatively weaker physically, as well as poor blacks who live in high crime urban areas—the most likely victims of violent crime. When gun control advocates can’t simply ban guns outright, they impose high fees and taxes on guns. When the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. territory, had their handgun ban struck down as unconstitutional by a federal judge in March 2016, they passed a $1,000 excise tax on guns—a tax they hoped would serve as a model for the rest of the U.S.8 I hope that this book provides the ammunition people need for some of the major battles ahead. We must fight to keep people safe.
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John R. Lott Jr. (The War on Guns: Arming Yourself Against Gun Control Lies)
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The Ultimate Guide to Student Loans by Bruce Mesnekoff
With the cost of college rising and governmental/private funding declining, it is no wonder that most Americans are concerned about their ability to finance a post-secondary education. Tuition prices are rising at Community Colleges, State Schools, Private and Technical colleges, leaving most Americans wondering how they are going to afford to pay for their education. This book educates parents, grandparents, young adults and students of all ages how to optimize the educational payment process.
The Ultimate Guide To Student Loans is the collaboration of two financial experts who guide you through the confusing maze of investing for education and the student loan world from beginning to end. Jordan Goodman, America’s Money Answers Man, personal finance expert and frequent guest on radio and TV shows, and Bruce Mesnekoff, CEO of The Student Loan Help Center, student loan management and consolidation expert, share their knowledge and simplify the complicated process and maze of government and private rules and regulations about student loans. They also guide you through all of your investment choices to finance college education. This book helps you understand student loans by explaining:
ways to invest so that you can avoid taking on student loans in the first place
the optimum ways to get the best student loans
paying off your loans as quickly as possible
The book provides extensive information and resources to help you no matter where you are in the student loan financing process. These resources include contact information and descriptions for:
federal regulatory organizations
educational associations
websites
loan repayment programs
The book also offers an appendix with abbreviations, acronyms and a glossary of student loan related terms. Also you can consult with The Student Loan Help Center for all kind of your consolidation problems.
Use this book to improve your entire educational financing experience!
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The Student Loan Help Center
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The four company presidents—as well as the CEOs of R. J. Reynolds and Brown and Williamson—had agreed to cooperate on a public relations program to defend their product.25 They would work together to convince the public that there was “no sound scientific basis for the charges,” and that the recent reports were simply “sensational accusations” made by publicity-seeking scientists hoping to attract more funds for their research.
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Naomi Oreskes (Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming)
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Welch became more confident that the press was reporting his words more accurately, but that worked against him because his discourses on the rise of the Illuminati or the Insiders made him sound strange to some, or worse. In September 1973, he sat for the Boston Globe and just purged. He told the reporter that it all began in Bavaria on May 1, 1776, when Baron Adam Weishaupt founded the Order of the Illuminati. It's all in a book by John Robinson, Welch explained. But the Illuminati were forced underground when Bavarian authorities raided their headquarters. The reporter's eyes probably widened. But by 1840, the Illuminati was strong and produced the Great Revolution of 1848 and the League of the Just Men, which hired Karl Marx to draft Das Kapital. The conspiracy was on the doorsteps of Russia by 1905, Welch continued, and in 1917, the agents of the Illuminati, Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky, threw over the czars, with funding from the Rotschilds. Welch was on fire now. The Insiders, he continued, went to Yale and Harvard, grew up with all the advantages, controlled American politics and international banking, and wanted to enslave everyone else. In 1912, the Insiders brought in Woodrow Wilson to drag the country into World War I. They convinced America to fight World War II with assistance from Insiders like President Roosevelt and George Marshall. They master-planned the civil rights revolution, and they work through the UN, the Council on Foreign Relations, and tax-free foundations. Perhaps the reporter nodded now and then, encouraging him on.
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Edward H. Miller (A Conspiratorial Life: Robert Welch, the John Birch Society, and the Revolution of American Conservatism)
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Strategy #10 – Saving for Your Child’s Education with Maximum Tax Benefits The challenge I have with government-sponsored educational savings plans is that the government is in control of your money, how you use it, when you use it, and how it’s taxed. For example, in a 529 plan (also called a Coverdell IRA), you can deduct money you contribute to the IRA and then when you use it tax-free for your child’s education. Sounds almost too good to be true, doesn’t it? What sort of limitations do you think the government places on these funds in order to control your money? First, they control how much you can contribute. Then, they control what you can do with the money in the plan, even controlling how you invest the money. Next, they control what expenses you can pay for with the fund. Only certain educational expenses qualify. Finally, if you don’t use the funds for education, you have only two choices. One choice is to transfer the money to a relative who can use it for their education. The other is to distribute it to yourself and pay taxes and penalties. So, if you make too much money from your investments in the plan, you pay a penalty for not using all of the money for education. What if you could have all of the tax benefits of a 529 plan without giving the government any control over your money? Wouldn’t that be a lot better? In tax strategy #5 we talked about paying your children to work in your business. When I teach this principle in my Tax and Asset Protection class, the question always comes up about what to do with the money you pay them. This is the perfect opportunity to have your children pay for their own education without having to rely on Section 529 plans or other tax-deferred, government controlled educational savings plans. Your children can contribute their money to an LLC, limited partnership, or S corporation that owns a business or investments. Like a 529 plan, you get a deduction when you pay your child a salary. Like a 529 plan, there is no tax to the child when received. Like the 529 plan, with good planning, especially in real estate, there is no tax on the cash flow from the investment. But unlike a 529 plan, you have full control over the investment. Unlike a 529 plan, you can take it out and use it for any expense for your child (except for support, like food and clothing), and you can take it out any time you like. Unlike a 529 plan, there are no penalties for distributing the money or accumulating a huge amount over a lifetime. Now isn’t that a much better plan than a government-controlled savings plan? Stop using government plans and make your own plan. You will have much more control and
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Tom Wheelwright (Tax-Free Wealth: How to Build Massive Wealth by Permanently Lowering Your Taxes)
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Jennifer Wolch’s notion of a “shadow state” crystallizes this symbiosis between the state and social change organizations, gesturing toward a broader conception of the state’s disciplinary power and surveillance capacities. According to Wolch, the structural and political interaction between the state and the non-profit industrial complex manifests as more than a relation of patronage, ideological repression, or institutional subordination. In excess of the expected organizational deference to state rules and regulations, social change groups are constituted by the operational paradigms of conventional state institutions, generating a reflection of state power in the same organizations that originally emerged to resist the very same state.
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Incite! Women of Color Against Violence (The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex)
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its market. Blitzscaling requires capital—whether from investors or from cash flow—to fund relatively inefficient growth. If investors are willing to act quickly and provide large amounts of capital, the risk that a competitor decides to blitzscale is higher.
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Reid Hoffman (Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies)
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Machiavelli said that a proper conspiracy moves through three distinct phases: the planning, the doing, and the aftermath. Each of these phases requires different skills—from organization to strategic thinking to recruiting, funding, aiming, secrecy, managing public relations, leadership, foresight, and ultimately, knowing when to stop. Most important, a conspiracy requires patience and fortitude, so much patience, as much as it relies on boldness or courage.
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Ryan Holiday (Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue)
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The Mercantilism represented by the Hamilton-Clay tradition transcends the history of the American political economy in its significance. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, France stood out for state commitment to internal improvements: in 1666, Colbert had convinced Louis XIV to finance the Canal du Midi as one aspect of the generations-long campaign to establish centralized state authority over the still-feudal French nation. Since time immemorial however, the public credit of the state had been predominantly devoted to the financing of war, whether the state was in the hands of a feudal king, an absolute monarch, a republican city-state, or the conflation of royal power circumscribed by parliamentary representatives of the propertied classes and tempered by "the mob" that emerged in Britain from 1688. The game between the financial markets and the state was played out over the terms on which the owners of liquid capital would fund the state's armies relative to the problematic likelihood of their being repaid.
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BIll Janeway
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We today know that only too well: someone may carry, and transmit, the Covid-19 virus without knowing they have it. So the natural inclination of a Jesus-follower, to obey Jesus’ call to go and help at the place of danger, even at the risk of one’s own life, looks rather different when that apparently heroic action might easily make matters worse. The generous one-dimensional desire to be a hero, to ‘do the right thing’, needs to be rounded out with the equally generous willingness to restrain apparent heroism when it might itself bring disaster. Yet this cannot become an excuse for doing nothing. Out of lament must come fresh action. At the very least, clergy (properly trained, authorized and protectively clothed) must be allowed to attend the sick and dying. If, as sometimes seems to be the case, secular doctors suppose that such ministry is superfluous, this must be challenged at every level. As we thank God that in the last two or three centuries the long-term calling of the Church to bring healing and hope has been shared in the wider secular world, we must work with the medical profession, not least to ensure a fully rounded, fully human approach. This applies particularly when people are near the point of death; the hospice movement of the last fifty years has been largely a Christian innovation, privately funded, witnessing to a hope that secular medicine has sometimes ignored. The call to Jesus’ followers, then, as they confront their own doubts and those of the world through tears and from behind locked doors, is to be sign-producers for God’s kingdom. We are to set up signposts–actions, symbols, not just words–which speak, like Jesus’ signs, of new creation: of healing for the sick, of food for the hungry, and so on. This means things like running food banks, working in homeless shelters, volunteering to help those visiting relatives in prisons, and so on. These can be rewarding tasks but they, and all similar things, are also demanding. For them we will need, as Mary, Thomas and the disciples in the upper room needed, the living presence of Jesus, and the powerful breath of his Spirit. That is what we are promised.
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N.T. Wright (God and the Pandemic: A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and Its Aftermath)
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Throwing even more fuel on this fire was Alibaba’s record-breaking 2014 debut on the New York Stock Exchange. A group of Taobao sellers rang the opening bell for Alibaba’s initial public offering on September 19, just nine days after Premier Li’s speech. When the dust settled on a furious round of trading, Alibaba had claimed the title of the largest IPO in history, and Jack Ma was crowned the richest man in China. But it was about more than just the money. Ma had become a national hero, but a very relatable one. Blessed with a goofy charisma, he seems like the boy next door. He didn’t attend an elite university and never learned how to code. He loves to tell crowds that when KFC set up shop in his hometown, he was the only one out of twenty-five applicants to be rejected for a job there. China’s other early internet giants often held Ph.D.s or had Silicon Valley experience in the United States. But Ma’s ascent to rock-star status gave a new meaning to “mass entrepreneurship”—in other words, this was something that anyone from the Chinese masses had a shot at. The government endorsement and Ma’s example of internet entrepreneurship were particularly effective at winning over some of the toughest customers: Chinese mothers. In the traditional Chinese mentality, entrepreneurship was still something for people who couldn’t land a real job. The “iron rice bowl” of lifetime employment in a government job remained the ultimate ambition for older generations who had lived through famines. In fact, when I had started Sinovation Ventures in 2009, many young people wanted to join the startups we funded but felt they couldn’t do so because of the steadfast opposition of their parents or spouses. To win these families over, I tried everything I could think of, including taking the parents out to nice dinners, writing them long letters by hand, and even running financial projections of how a startup could pay off. Eventually we were able to build strong teams at Sinovation, but every new recruit in those days was an uphill battle. By 2015, these people were beating down our door—in one case, literally breaking Sinovation’s front door—for the chance to work with us. That group included scrappy high school dropouts, brilliant graduates of top universities, former Facebook engineers, and more than a few people in questionable mental states. While I was out of town, the Sinovation headquarters received a visit from one would-be entrepreneur who refused to leave until I met with him. When the staff told him that I wouldn’t be returning any time soon, the man lay on the ground and stripped naked, pledging to lie right there until Kai-Fu Lee listened to his idea.
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Kai-Fu Lee (AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order)
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What if we created a system where funds spent on imperialism in the form of defense and bank bailouts were redirected to heal the Earth by decolonizing the atmosphere and building a dignified future for our relatives in the Global South? This is not simply a question to ponder. It is a life-or-death program we must take seriously.
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The Red Nation
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In any case, the funds rate, by itself, is relatively unimportant.
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Ben S. Bernanke (The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath)
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Youssef Zohny began his journey in investment advising and wealth management as a quantitative analyst. From there, he gained expertise, skills, and grit relating to the industry that allows him to be the successful advisor he is today. He currently focuses on helping clients manage accounts and investments ranging from trust funds to family offices.
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Youssef Zohny
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The main mass-membership advocacy organizations of American Jewry — B’nai B’rith and its Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds, the National Conference of Jewish Federations, and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations (a kind of steering group for the major organizations), to mention only a few — are not religious organizations but ethnic ones. It is not necessary to have any Jewish religious affiliation to be a member in good standing in these organizations, and their leaderships are composed mainly of people who are not religious or Jewishly learned Jews.
We need not go into foundational texts and statements of purpose on the question of origins, for the answer is simple enough: organizations like B’nai B’rith and the American Jewish Committee were created to lobby for particular Jewish interests. … In time, these and most other Jewish organizations became explicitly or implicitly Zionist, and thereafter existed to one degree or another to support, first, a Jewish home in Palestine, and then, after 1948, the security and prosperity of the State of Israel. In other words, all these organizations have depended, and still depend, on the validity of their serving parochial Jewish ethnic interests that are simultaneously distinct from the broader American interest but not related directly to religion.
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Adam Garfinkle (Jewcentricity: Why the Jews Are Praised, Blamed, and Used to Explain Just About Everything)
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•Amnesty further notes that, as part of the right to life and other human rights, the responsibility of nations to prevent gun violence requires: (1) restricting access to firearms, especially on the part of those at an elevated risk of misusing them; and (2) implementing violence reduction measures where misuse of firearms persists. The human rights group asserts that nations “should establish robust regulatory systems,” including licensing, registration, restriction of certain weapon types, safe storage, research, and policy development. Nationally, the US has done little or nothing in relation to any of these policies for more than twenty-five years, and, due to the influence of the gun lobby, has seen Congress suppress funding for research on gun violence since 1996. Amnesty notes that countries not only have obligations to protect the lives of individuals from state agents but from actual or foreseeable threats at the hands of private individuals as well. Violence is especially foreseeable in low-income neighborhoods with persistently high levels of violence, poor public services, and policing that may not comply with international standards.
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Fred Guttenberg (American Carnage: Shattering the Myths That Fuel Gun Violence)
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In the decentralized hedge fund space, on the other hand, owner-operators have at least half of their net worth in the funds, making them relatively more exposed than any of their customers, and
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life (Incerto, #5))
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Our aversion to leverage has dampened our returns over the years. But Charlie and I sleep well. Both of us believe it is insane to risk what you have and need in order to obtain what you don’t need. We held this view 50 years ago when we each ran an investment partnership, funded by a few friends and relatives who trusted us. We also hold it today after a million or so “partners” have joined us at Berkshire.
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Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway Letters to Shareholders: 1965-2024)
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Like Wheeler, very few scientists would be happy about being associated in any way with the dreaded label “pseudoscience.” Besides incurring the fear and loathing of the mainstream, those conducting research on topics stamped “pseudoscience” may find that funding sources mysteriously dry up, journals refuse to publish their research, and opportunities for academic tenure vanish. The difficulty of getting scientists to attempt to replicate, or even pay attention to, psi experiments is related to what Thomas Gold of Cornell University has called the “herd effect.” This is the tendency for scientists (or any people, for that matter) to cluster together in groups where only certain ideas or techniques are acceptable. A scientific herd forms for essentially the same reason that sheep form a herd—to protect individuals. It is very risky for one’s career to stand apart from the herd, given the rapidly diminishing likelihood that one can continue to practice science outside the herd. Without exception, scientists who conduct psi research are high risk-takers, because the academic world lets them know very quickly that “we don’t take kindly to strangers in these here parts.” Psychological Factors It is well known that most scientists are “theory-driven” rather than “data-driven.” This means that scientists are uncomfortable with “facts” unless some theory can explain them. Parapsychological “facts” are uncomfortable because there are no well-accepted explanations for why the facts should exist. This does not mean that no scientific theories of psychic phenomena exist; actually, there are dozens. It is the adequacy of the theories that is in question. Being theory-driven also means that scientists fail to see data that contradict their theoretical expectations. This does not mean that they fail to understand the data, but rather that they have a strong tendency literally not to perceive the offending data. As discussed in some detail in chapter 14, a substantial body of conventional psychological research supports this strong consequence. Witnessing this effect in action is truly astonishing. It is like trying to get a dog to look at something that you know he will find interesting. “There it is! Look at the evidence there!” Where? I don’t see anything. “There I say. Look where I’m pointing, not at my hand!” Nope, I don’t see anything.
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Dean Radin (The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena)
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American families kept quiet as their loved ones grew addicted to the pills that funded those art-collecting adventures. They said nothing as their loved ones were ground into degradation in a marathon of torment that extinguished family savings, hope, and trust, until they wound up dead in a manner and place that no relative dared disclose in an obituary.
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Sam Quinones (The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth)
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Frederick Douglass spent some of his bondage working as a ship caulker in Baltimore and, like many others, deceived his enslaver about how much he was actually making, thus secreting funds for his escape. Many of these workers lived miles distant from their enslavers- indeed, it is precisely these urban communities of relatively independent Black people that would lead to the earliest development of police departments, as gangs of slave catchers evolved into formalized slave patrols designed to keep these "slave quarters" under surveillance and control.
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Vicky Osterweil (In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action)
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It is worth noting that Elon Musk enjoys certain privileges that may not be available to everyone. For instance, he is situated in the United States, which is a developed country with a large population of over 300 million people, and where funding opportunities are relatively more abundant. His previous entrepreneurial successes have also placed him in favourable positions to secure funding for his ambitious projects.
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Tiisetso Maloma (Innovate Like Elon Musk: Easily Participate in Innovation with Guidelines from Tesla and SpaceX: A Simple Understanding of First Principle Thinking and Vertical Integration)
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There was nothing illegal, for example, about naturalized American citizens like the Odessa-born billionaire oligarch Len Blavatnik and his businesses contributing millions to Mitch McConnell’s GOP Senate Leadership Fund and to the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, as he did in 2016.
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Craig Unger (American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery)
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pleasure isn’t based on an absolute level of dopamine in the brain, but rather on the relative level versus the expected level of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens. Relative, not absolute.
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Kristy Shen (Quit Like a Millionaire: No Gimmicks, Luck, or Trust Fund Required)
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It turns out that there was good reason to be skeptical. Thanks in large part to increased transparency, the financial services world is now unhealthily tied to an annual compensation cycle. The desire to be paid the most each and every year has created perverse incentives directly impacting almost every facet of the banking and investment world. As the focus on and opportunity for outsized compensation in the financial industry has shifted from investment banking to the investing world, the short-term compensation arms race has moved to the realms of private equity, hedge funds, and managers of public market securities. Given investment managers’ desire to boost their annual—and, in some cases, quarterly—compensation, they’re motivated to pursue strategies that maximize returns on an annual basis, rather than allowing for longer hold periods. As such, these annual compensation structures often lead to shorter-than-ideal investment horizons and lower relative returns, all at the expense of investors—and, arguably, at the expense of the long-term compensation of the investment managers themselves. This was not always the way things were done. Of course it happened, but much less when the investment strategy wasn’t so laser-focused on an annual bonus cycle.
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Christopher Varelas (How Money Became Dangerous: The Inside Story of Our Turbulent Relationship with Modern Finance)
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The total value of all goods shipped to Europe from 1947 through 1951 was about $13 billion, about $1 billion of which was tobacco. Nearly a third (!) of all “food-related” funding in the plan went for tobacco.
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Robert N. Proctor (Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition)
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In the midst of World War II, Quincy Wright, a leader in the quantitative study of war, noted that people view war from contrasting perspectives:
“To some it is a plague to be eliminated; to others, a crime which ought to be punished; to still others, it is an anachronism which no longer serves any purpose. On the other hand, there are some who take a more receptive attitude toward war, and regard it as an adventure which may be interesting, an instrument which may be legitimate and appropriate, or a condition of existence for which one must be prepared”
Despite the millions of people who died in that most deadly war, and despite widespread avowals for peace, war remains as a mechanism of conflict resolution.
Given the prevalence of war, the importance of war, and the enormous costs it entails, one would assume that substantial efforts would have been made to comprehensively study war. However, the systematic study of war is a relatively recent phenomenon. Generally, wars have been studied as historically unique events, which are generally utilized only as analogies or examples of failed or successful policies. There has been resistance to conceptualizing wars as events that can be studied in the aggregate in ways that might reveal patterns in war or its causes. For instance, in the United States there is no governmental department of peace with funding to scientifically study ways to prevent war, unlike the millions of dollars that the government allocates to the scientific study of disease prevention. This reluctance has even been common within the peace community, where it is more common to deplore war than to systematically figure out what to do to prevent it. Consequently, many government officials and citizens have supported decisions to go to war without having done their due diligence in studying war, without fully understanding its causes and consequences.
The COW Project has produced a number of interesting observations about wars. For instance, an important early finding concerned the process of starting wars. A country’s goal in going to war is usually to win. Conventional wisdom was that the probability of success could be increased by striking first. However, a study found that the rate of victory for initiators of inter-state wars (or wars between two countries) was declining: “Until 1910 about 80 percent of all interstate wars were won by the states that had initiated them. . . . In the wars from 1911 through 1965, however, only about 40 percent of the war initiators won.”
A recent update of this analysis found that “pre-1900, war initiators won 73% of wars. Since 1945 the win rate is 33%.”. In civil war the probability of success for the initiators is even lower. Most rebel groups, which are generally the initiators in these wars, lose. The government wins 57 percent of the civil wars that last less than a year and 78 percent of the civil wars lasting one to five years.
So, it would seem that those initiating civil and inter-state wars were not able to consistently anticipate victory. Instead, the decision to go to war frequently appears less than rational. Leaders have brought on great carnage with no guarantee of success, frequently with no clear goals, and often with no real appreciation of the war’s ultimate costs. This conclusion is not new. Studying the outbreak of the first carefully documented war, which occurred some 2,500 years ago in Greece, historian Donald Kagan concluded:
“The Peloponnesian War was not caused by impersonal forces, unless anger, fear, undue optimism, stubbornness, jealousy, bad judgment and lack of foresight are impersonal forces. It was caused by men who made bad decisions in difficult circumstances.”
Of course, wars may also serve leaders’ individual goals, such as gaining or retaining power. Nonetheless, the very government officials who start a war are sometimes not even sure how or why a war started.
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Frank Wayman (Resort to War: 1816 - 2007 (Correlates of War))
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Here are a few notable things that can spark inflammation and depress the function of your liver: Alcohol overload—This is relatively well-known. Your liver is largely responsible for metabolizing alcohol, and drinking too much liquid courage can send your liver running to cry in a corner somewhere. Carbohydrate bombardment—Starches and sugar have the fastest ability to drive up blood glucose, liver glycogen, and liver fat storage (compared to their protein and fat macronutrient counterparts). Bringing in too many carbs, too often, can elicit a wildfire of fat accumulation. In fact, one of the most effective treatments for reversing NAFLD is reducing the intake of carbohydrates. A recent study conducted at KTH Royal Institute of Technology and published in the journal Cell Metabolism had overweight test subjects with high levels of liver fat reduce their ratio of carbohydrate intake (without reducing calories!). After a short two-week study period the subjects showed “rapid and dramatic” reductions of liver fat and other cardiometabolic risk factors. Too many medications—Your liver is the top doc in charge of your body’s drug metabolism. When you hear about drug side effects on commercials, they are really a direct effect of how your liver is able to handle them. The goal is to work on your lifestyle factors so that you can be on as few medications as possible along with the help of your physician. Your liver will do its best to support you either way, but it will definitely feel happier without the additional burden. Too many supplements—There are several wonderful supplements that can be helpful for your health, but becoming an overzealous natural pill-popper might not be good for you either. In a program funded by the National Institutes of Health, it was found that liver injuries linked to supplement use jumped from 7 percent to 20 percent of all medication/supplement-induced injuries in just a ten-year time span. Again, this is not to say that the right supplements can’t be great for you. This merely points to the fact that your liver is also responsible for metabolism of all of the supplements you take as well. And popping a couple dozen different supplements each day can be a lot for your liver to handle. Plus, the supplement industry is largely unregulated, and the additives, fillers, and other questionable ingredients could add to the burden. Do your homework on where you get your supplements from, avoid taking too many, and focus on food first to meet your nutritional needs. Toxicants—According to researchers at the University of Louisville, more than 300 environmental chemicals, mostly pesticides, have been linked to fatty liver disease. Your liver is largely responsible for handling the weight of the toxicants (most of them newly invented) that we’re exposed to in our world today. Pesticides are inherently meant to be deadly, but just to small organisms (like pests), though it seems to be missed that you are actually made of small organisms, too (bacteria
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Shawn Stevenson (Eat Smarter: Use the Power of Food to Reboot Your Metabolism, Upgrade Your Brain, and Transform Your Life)
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The Rockefeller Foundation, which had been heavily funding Tavistock and Tavistock members since 1934, readily accepted, and the Tavistock Clinic was transformed into the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations.”69 The Institute developed national and international operations under the heading “operation research.
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Daniel Estulin (Tavistock Institute: Social Engineering the Masses)
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As related in the novel, Russia’s second-largest budget expenditure—after the military—is devoted to restoring the Russian Orthodox Church. It’s seen as a means to a spiritual renewal for the country, a way of instilling national pride. But there remain darker shades to this funding, one tied to the Tikhvin Icon, one of Russia’s most sacred treasures. The story of the icon’s history—vanishing from Constantinople and reappearing to Russian fishermen—is held as holy proof that Russia is destined to be the Third Rome, the future spiritual center of the world, with the Trinity Lavra as its new Vatican City. This belief is one of the main reasons that a vocal number of the Russian Orthodox Church, including its patriarch, sanction Russia’s military conquest of other countries. But that is not Russia’s only ambition.
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James Rollins (Arkangel (Sigma Force #18))
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In addition to direct investigation of physiological sex and social behaviour in human beings' closest relatives, Yerkes exercised, along with his peers, a tremendous influence on the overall direction of the scientific study of sex in this country. He was for twenty-five years chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation-funded National Research Council Committee for Research on Problems of Sex (CRPS). This committee, from 1922 until well after the Second World War when federal funding became massively available for science, provided the financial base for the transformation of human sex into a scientific problem.
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Donna J. Haraway (Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature)
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How to File a Claim with Expedia
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Ways to Reach Phantom Wallet Support for Assistance: Get the Help You Need!
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HOW TO SECURE AND RECOVER YOUR STOLEN CRYPTO // TRUST GEEKS HACK EXPERT
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Emissions of carbon dioxide reasonable commercial
For those who do not know each other with the phrase "carbon footprint" and its consequences or is questionable, which is headed "reasonable conversion" is a fast lens here.
Statements are described by the British coal climatic believe. "..The GC installed (fuel emissions) The issue has directly or indirectly affected by a company or work activities, products," only in relation to the application, especially to introduce a special procedure for the efforts of B. fight against carbon crank function
What is important?
Carbon dioxide ", uh, (on screen), the main fuel emissions" and the main result of global warming, improve a process that determines the atmosphere in the air in the heat as greenhouse gases greenhouse, carbon dioxide is reduced by the environment, methane, nitrous oxide and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs more typically classified as).
The consequences are disastrous in the sense of life on the planet.
The exchange is described at a reasonable price in Wikipedia as "...geared a social movement and market-based procedures, especially the objectives of the development of international guidelines and improve local sustainability." The activity is for the price "reasonable effort" as well as social and environmental criteria as part of the same in the direction of production. It focuses exclusively on exports under the auspices of the acquisition of the world's nations to coffee most international destinations, cocoa, sugar, tea, vegetables, wine, specially designed, refreshing fruits, bananas, chocolate and simple. In 2007 trade, the conversion of skilled gross sales serious enough alone suffered due the supermarket was in the direction of approximately US $ 3.62 billion to improve (2.39 million), rich environment and 47% within 12 months of the calendar year. Fair trade is often providing 1-20% of gross sales in their classification of medicines in Europe and North America, the United States. ..Properly Faith in the plan ... cursed interventions towards closing in failure "vice president Cato Industries, appointed to inquire into the meaning of fair trade Brink Lindsey 2003 '. "Sensible changes direction Lindsay inaccurate provides guidance to the market in a heart that continues to change a design style and price of the unit complies without success. It is based very difficult, and you must deliver or later although costs Rule implementation and reduces the cost if you have a little time in the mirror. You'll be able to afford the really wide range plan alternatives to products and expenditures price to pay here.
With the efficient configuration package offered in the interpretation question fraction "which is a collaboration with the Carbon Fund worldwide, and acceptable substitute?"
In the statement, which tend to be small, and more? They allow you to search for carbon dioxide transport and delivery. All vehicles are responsible dioxide pollution, but they are the worst offenders?
Aviation.
Quota of the EU said that the greenhouse gas jet fuel greenhouse on the basis of 87% since 1990 years Boeing Company, Boeing said more than 5 747 liters of fuel burns kilometer. Paul Charles, spokesman for Virgin Atlantic, said flight CO² gas burned in different periods of rule. For example: (. The United Kingdom) Jorge Chavez airport to fly only in the vast world of Peru to London Heathrow with British Family Islands 6.314 miles (10162 km) works with about 31,570 liters of kerosene, which produces changes in only 358 for the incredible carbon.
Delivery.
John Vidal, Environment Editor parents argue that research on the oil company BP and researchers from the Department of Physics and the environment in Germany Wising said that about once a year before the transport height of 600 to 800 million tons. This is simply nothing more than twice in Colombia and more than all African nations spend together.
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PointHero
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The cost of defense, meanwhile, goes up and up and up, with little political resistance and barely any public discussion. By the fullest accounting, which is different from usual budget figures, the United States will spend more than $1 trillion on national security this year. That includes about $580 billion for the Pentagon’s baseline budget plus “overseas contingency” funds, $20 billion in the Department of Energy budget for nuclear weapons, nearly $200 billion for military pensions and Department of Veterans Affairs costs, and other expenses. But it doesn’t count more than $80 billion a year of interest on the military-related share of the national debt. After adjustments for inflation, the United States will spend about 50 percent more on the military this year than its average through the Cold War and Vietnam War. It will spend about as much as the next 10 nations combined—three to five times as much as China, depending on how you count, and seven to nine times as much as Russia. The world as a whole spends about 2 percent of its total income on its militaries; the United States, about 4 percent.
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Anonymous
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Taxation was raised again to fund the expanded Air Force required to keep the taxpayers who were expected to fund the required expanded Air Force in a position in which they could be required to pay the extra taxes that would keep them paying the taxes. Further taxes were required to fund the extra demands made upon the services of the Ministry of Justice in order to handle all of the extra cases of non-payment. Hearing cases in absentia was just as expensive, if not more so, than hearing them with the accused actually in the dock rather than naffing off at relativity-inducing speed to some distant star with grandma and grandma’s walking frame strapped onto the roof-rack to make room inside for the beer.
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Ian Hutson (NGLND XPX)
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The evidence demonstrates that an average worker who retired in 2011 would have paid $60,000 in Medicare-related taxes yet received $170,000 in benefits.18 This system cannot last forever, and it will not, given reality and mathematics. Indeed, in 2014, the trustees overseeing Medicare declared that the HI trust fund will run dry in 2030.
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Mark R. Levin (Plunder and Deceit: Big Government's Exploitation of Young People and the Future)
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I often point out to hedge fund proponents that their industry used to claim it was targeting absolute returns, with the promise that they'd make money over any reasonably long holding period and were uncorrelated with other major asset classes such as stocks or bonds. The 2008 crash showed how unattainable this was, and hedge fund proponents quietly adopted different descriptions of their objectives. These included generating attractive Relative Returns, and more recently when even this more modest objective proved to be beyond their collective ability the term Uncorrelated Returns gained favor. Since hedge funds have in recent years been worse than just about anything else it's been a good choice.
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Simon A. Lack (Wall Street Potholes: Insights from Top Money Managers on Avoiding Dangerous Products)
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Total Cost Analysis When the purchasing staff considers switching to a new supplier or consolidating its purchases with an existing one, it cannot evaluate the supplier based solely on its quoted price. Instead, it must also consider the total acquisition cost, which can in some cases exceed a product’s initial price. The total acquisition cost includes these items: • Material. The list price of the item being bought, less any rebates or discounts. • Freight. The cost of shipping from the supplier to the company. • Packaging. The company may specify special packaging, such as for quantities that differ from the supplier’s standards and for which the supplier charges an extra fee. • Tooling. If the supplier had to acquire special tooling in order to manufacture parts for the company, such as an injection mold, then it will charge through this cost, either as a lump sum or amortized over some predetermined unit volume. • Setup. If the setup for a production run is unusually lengthy or involves scrap, then the supplier may charge through the cost of the setup. • Warranty. If the product being purchased is to be retained by the company for a lengthy period of time, it may have to buy a warranty extension from the supplier. • Inventory. If there are long delays between when a company orders goods and when it receives them, then it must maintain a safety stock on hand to guard against stock-out conditions and support the cost of funds needed to maintain this stock. • Payment terms. If the supplier insists on rapid payment terms and the company’s own customers have longer payment terms, then the company must support the cost of funds for the period between when it pays the supplier and it is paid by its customers. • Currency used. If supplier payments are to be made in a different currency from the company’s home currency, then it must pay for a foreign exchange transaction and may also need to pay for a hedge, to guard against any unfavorable changes in the exchange rate prior to the scheduled payment date. These costs are only the ones directly associated with a product. In addition, there may be overhead costs related to dealing with a specific supplier (see “Sourcing Distance” later in the chapter), which can be allocated to all products purchased from that supplier.
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Steven M. Bragg (Cost Reduction Analysis: Tools and Strategies (Wiley Corporate F&A Book 7))
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The analytical process starts with the receipt of a report, continues with the collection of additional related information, goes through different forms of analysis, and ends with either a detailed file concerning a money-laundering (or financing of terrorism) case that is forwarded to the law-enforcement authorities or prosecutors or the reaching of a conclusion that no suspicious activity was found. After the analysis is performed, the primary report that triggered it may represent a small part of the file.
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International Monetary Fund (Financial Intelligence Units: An Overview)
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As wars have become less common, nuclear weapons have proved to be a major deterrent among major powers, and as regional conflicts and ethnic troubles bordering civil war have increased, the content of international relations has considerably changed. Besides, with the increasing role of trade and financial relations and of institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO), the study of international relations has become increasingly interdisciplinary, and politics and economy have become closely related inputs of our subject.
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V.N. Khanna (International Relations, 5th Edition)
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To fit into the Golden Straitjacket a country must either adopt, or be seen as moving toward, the following golden rules: making the private sector the primary engine of its economic growth, maintaining a low rate of inflation and price stability, shrinking the size of its state bureaucracy, maintaining as close to a balanced budget as possible, if not a surplus, eliminating and lowering tariffs on imported goods, removing restrictions on foreign investment, getting rid of quotas and domestic monopolies, increasing exports, privatizing state-owned industries and utilities, deregulating capital markets, making its currency convertible, opening its industries, stock and bond markets to direct foreign ownership and investment, deregulating its economy to promote as much domestic competition as possible, eliminating government corruption, subsidies and kickbacks as much as possible, opening its banking and telecommunications systems to private ownership and competition and allowing its citizens to choose from an array of competing pension options and foreign-run pension and mutual funds. When you stitch all of these pieces together you have the Golden Straitjacket. . . . As your country puts on the Golden Straitjacket, two things tend to happen: your economy grows and your politics shrinks. That is, on the economic front the Golden Straitjacket usually fosters more growth and higher average incomes—through more trade, foreign investment, privatization and more efficient use of resources under the pressure of global competition. But on the political front, the Golden Straitjacket narrows the political and economic policy choices of those in power to relatively tight parameters. . . . Governments—be they led by Democrats or Republicans, Conservatives or Labourites, Gaullists or Socialists, Christian Democrats or Social Democrats—that deviate too far from the core rules will see their investors stampede away, interest rates rise and stock market valuations fall.36
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Moisés Naím (The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn't What It Used to Be)
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The two branches of Freemasonry—the Templars and the Rosicrucians (Sionists)—were to play a major part in the American and French revolutions. In the end, the Priory of Sion would prove itself dominant over the Templars. They seemed to be better entrenched in the European power matrix as well as being better funded. The Templars—Sion’s partners-in-crime, so to speak—were behind the American Revolution and with regard to the French Revolution, both the Templar and Rosicrucian factions combined forces to avenge the death, four centuries earlier, of Jacques de Molay the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, who was burned at the stake by Philip IV of France in 1314. The French Bourbons were related to Philip so Louis XVI’s beheading, in 1792, was meant as penance for de Molay’s death. Chapter 10 - Sion's Army.
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Jeff Wilkerson
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In the dangerous kingdom of silence is our raft floating
hundreds of corpses are visible on the shoreline
burned in sunlight for long they are deformed
those whose life had vibrated till now
in happiness and grief electric current
whose life once while vibrating
from desire to desire
those lives had flown
In this dangerous kingdom of silence is our raft floating
burning sun overhead
on right is golden colour in the river
green carpet on sandy strip peeps
a naked man is seated on that strip all alone
seeing the raft he jumps in water
waves his hand while being washed away by tide
as is wants to say something
know one knows where he drowns in the heavy current
with half ton biscuit and a few saris
this small raft floats downstream
Dark hall-room
lavender fragrance touches nose
many men are running this way trampling corpses of relatives
jumps over for a fistful of food
fights for it with each other
dies
hundreds of incorporeal species in electric light
though goods for charity are not sufficient
terrible dearth of vehicles
and in order to reach the distressed area the administration
never finds a way out
in the absence of diggers between one to one & half thousand
were buried in one pit Sir
payment was Rupees two per day
news further says that four persons in Bhootnath's house
died when the house fell over them when they were sleeping
though his state of affairs was more or less same
happiness was not meagre in that tiny house
today beneath open sky small time truck driver Bhoothnath
stoops with his head between his knees
the Sub Divisional Officer said.
Twenty rupees more could not be given today from poverty alleviating fund
because the person who has the keys to the cupboard has not come.
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Basudeb Dasgupta (বাসুদেব দাশগুপ্ত রচনা সমগ্র)
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The Internet Research Agency (IRA) carried out the earliest Russian interference operations identified by the investigation—a social media campaign designed to provoke and amplify political and social discord in the United States. The IRA was based in St. Petersburg, Russia, and received funding from Russian oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin and companies he controlled. Prigozhin is widely reported to have ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, [+
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The Washington Post (The Mueller Report: Presented with Related Materials by The Washington Post)
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Now, comparing to public equity, private equity funds invest in general mostly in private companies. More often than not, private company is relatively less well established, has weaker governance, shorter operating and financial track record, less transparent and has limited funding channels. Most importantly, private companies’ shares can’t be traded freely. In other words, unlike public equity, an investor can choose to sell the shares of a public company on the stock exchange at any point of time, a private equity fund wouldn’t be able to do the same with the private company’s shares. They won’t be able to just press the sell button and get back their investment money.
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Sherman SET (Unveiling The Secrets of Private Equity: By an insider)
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Research and development conducted by private companies in the United States has grown enormously over the past four decades. We have substantially replaced the publicly funded science that drove our growth after World War II with private research efforts. Such private R&D has shown some impressive results, including high average returns for the corporate sector.
However, despite their enormous impact, these private R&D investments are much too small from a broader perspective. This is not a criticism of any individuals; rather, it is simply a feature of the system. Private companies do not capture the spillovers that their R&D efforts create for other corporations, so private sector executives in established firms underinvest in invention. The venture capital industry, which provides admirable support to some start-ups, is focused on fast-impact industries, such as information technology, and not generally on longer-run and capital-intensive investments like clean energy or new cell and gene therapies.
Leading entrepreneur-philanthropists get this. In recent years, there have been impressive investments in science funded by publicly minded individuals, including Eric Schmidt, Elon Musk, Paul Allen, Bill and Melinda Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Bloomberg, Jon Meade Huntsman Sr., Eli and Edythe Broad, David H. Koch, Laurene Powell Jobs, and others (including numerous private foundations). The good news is that these people, with a wide variety of political views on other matters, share the assessment that science—including basic research—is of fundamental importance for the future of the United States.
The less good news is that even the wealthiest people on the planet can barely move the needle relative to what the United States previously invested in science. America is, roughly speaking, a $20 trillion economy; 2 percent of our GDP is nearly $400 billion per year. Even the richest person in the world has a total stock of wealth of only around $100 billion—a mark broken in early 2018 by Jeff Bezos of Amazon, with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in close pursuit. If the richest Americans put much of their wealth immediately into science, it would have some impact for a few years, but over the longer run, this would hardly move the needle. Publicly funded investment in research and development is the only “approach that could potentially return us to the days when technology-led growth lifted all boats.
However, we should be careful. Private failure is not enough to justify government intervention. Just because the private sector is underinvesting does not necessarily imply that the government will make the right investments.
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Jonathan Gruber (Jump-Starting America: How Breakthrough Science Can Revive Economic Growth and the American Dream)
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In 1957, the venture capital industry was just being created. At the time, the investor community in the United States was uninterested in investing in computer companies, as the last wave of computer-related startups had performed poorly and even large companies were having difficulty making money in the computer business. We can envision the frustration of DEC’s cofounders, Ken Olson and Harlan Anderson, as the investors they talked to rejected them and their fledgling idea for a business. We can also imagine their joy when Georges Doriot, the founder of American Research and Development Corporation, offered to fund them. After a number of conversations and meetings, Doriot sent Olson and Anderson a letter expressing his interest in investing, along with his proposed terms. Today, this document is called the term sheet.
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Brad Feld (Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist)
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Milloy is well-known for his attacks on science related to all kinds of environmental issues, including global warming (which he calls a “swindle”), acid rain (which he notes helps slow global warming—although he doesn’t believe in global warming anyway), and the ozone hole (which he considers to be of no real significance).68 Milloy’s current project is junkscience.com, but, as we saw in chapter 5 “junk science” was a term invented by the tobacco industry to discredit science it didn’t like. Junkscience.com was originally established in a partnership with the Cato Institute, which, after Milloy’s continued tobacco funding came to light, severed its ties.
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Naomi Oreskes (Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming)
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The creation of this digital collection, which brings together the entire body of research materials related to William F Cody's personal and professional life, will enable a variety of audiences to consider the impact of William F. Cody the cultural entrepreneur on American life and provide contextualizing documents from other sources,
including audio-visual media that exist for the final years of his life.
It will allow more scholars to study the man within his times, will provide new resources to contextualize studies of other regional and national events and persons, and will encourage digital edition visitors to explore and learn more about these vital decades of American expansion and development. The digital edition of the Papers will differ significantly from the print edition by including manuscript materials, photographs, and film and sound recordings, and it will offer navigational and search options not possible in the print edition.
As Griffin's volume reveals, it took many people to make Buffalo Bill's Wild West happen. Likewise, there are many people whose combined efforts have made this documentary project a reality. All of the generous donors and talented scholars who have contributed to the success of this effort will be noted in due course. But in this, the first publication, it is appropriate to acknowledge that big ideas are carried to fruition only by sound and steady leadership. The McCracken Research Library was fortunate at the advent of the papers project that in its board chair it had such a leader. Maggie Scarlett was not only an early supporter of this documentary editing project but also its first true champion. It was through her connections (and tenacity) that the initial funds were raised to launch the project. Whether seeking support from private donors, the Wyoming State Legislature, federal granting agencies, or the United States Congress, Maggie led the charge and thereby secured the future of this worthy endeavor. Thus,
this reissue of Griffin's account is a legacy not only to William Cody but also to all of those who have made this effort and the larger undertaking possible. In that spirit, though these pages rightfully belong to Charles Eldridge Griffin and to Mr. Dixon, if this volume were mine to dedicate, it would be to Maggie.
Kurt Graham
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Charles Eldridge Griffin (Four Years in Europe with Buffalo Bill)
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The fund’s computers told the banks which stocks to place in the basket and how they should be traded. Brown himself helped create the code to make it all happen. All day, Medallion’s computers sent automated instructions to the banks, sometimes an order a minute or even a second. After a year or so, Medallion exercised its options, claiming whatever returns the shares generated, less some related costs.
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Gregory Zuckerman (The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution)
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REITs. Real Estate Investment Trusts, or REITs (pronounced “reets”), are companies that own and collect rent from commercial and residential properties.10 Bundled into real-estate mutual funds, REITs do a decent job of combating inflation. The best choice is Vanguard REIT Index Fund; other relatively low-cost choices include Cohen & Steers Realty Shares, Columbia Real Estate Equity Fund, and Fidelity Real Estate Investment Fund.11 While a REIT fund is unlikely to be a foolproof inflation-fighter, in the long run it should give you some defense against the erosion of purchasing power without hampering your overall returns. TIPS. Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities, or TIPS, are U.S. government bonds, first issued in 1997, that automatically go up in value when inflation rises. Because the full faith and credit of the United States
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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The big issue with newspapers is not with the smell, the touch, the feel, or any other sensations—or the lack thereof. If one has a news- paper fetish, they can easily keep several newspaper issues on their nightstand, or when the press finally truly goes extinct, they can have it here just for themselves so that they can smell it, touch it, and feel it as much as they like.
The big issue with newspapers is that there is no one to fund them anymore. Nobody can support them and bear the costs in the new environment of public communications revolutionized by online media and even further by social media.
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Maxim Behar (The Global PR Revolution: How Thought Leaders Succeed in the Transformed World of PR)
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Machiavelli said that a proper conspiracy moves through three distinct phases: the planning, the doing, and the aftermath. Each of these phases requires different skills—from organization to strategic thinking to recruiting, funding, aiming, secrecy, managing public relations, leadership, foresight, and ultimately, knowing when to stop. Most important, a conspiracy requires patience and fortitude, so much patience, as much as it relies on boldness or courage. The question that remains: What would a world without these skills look like? And would a world with more of them be a nightmare or something better? That’s for you to decide. In the meantime and for the record, I simply present what happened.
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Ryan Holiday (Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue)
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Tax-Deferred does not mean Tax-Free
It never ceases to amaze me when I meet with people who do not know that tax-deferred does not mean tax-free. You mean I have to pay taxes when I take this money!? This is not all mine!? These are common remarks I hear as we are looking at their most recent retirement account statement. Somehow this consideration was missed when they enrolled in the savings plan and each year when they postponed the tax when filing their tax return. I am not a tax professional but I can understand how an accountant or tax preparer wouldn’t think to make sure the client understands that they are postponing taxes and the tax calculation during their working years.
I met an accountant that expressed how difficult it is when he gets the client that believed they were ready to leave work only to find out that because of taxes they are coming up a little or a lot short. This happened to one of my relatives that worked at least 30 years as an x-ray technician and then supervisor at a very large hospital. While working, they always had the nice houses, the nice cars, and a nice upper-middle class lifestyle, nothing fancy. After he retired and even though his wife still worked as a school principal, he had to take a sales clerk job at a nearby liquor store so that his family could maintain their lifestyle. I will never forget other relatives joking and laughing about him miscalculating his retirement. I’m certain that his unsuccessful retirement and that of other relatives influenced my interest in retirement planning if for no one else but me.
With a limited amount of retirement income, most retirees would prefer to keep their dollars rather than give them to Uncle Sam. Even those with an unlimited source of funds don’t want to pay more taxes than necessary. Fortunately, there are some ways to decrease your tax burden once you’ve done the obvious work of ensuring you’ve taken all the deductions and credits to which you’re entitled when you file your taxes.
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Annette Wise
“
Between 1996 and 2002, Purdue funded more than twenty thousand pain-related educational programs, almost ten a day, seven days a week. During the same years, Purdue conducted
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John Temple (American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America's Deadliest Drug Epidemic)
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In sum, the investigation established that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election through the “active measures” social media campaign carried out by the IRA, an organization funded by Prigozhin and companies that he controlled
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The Washington Post (The Mueller Report: Presented with Related Materials by The Washington Post)
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Returning to New York City, Martí held a number of diplomatic positions for various Latin American countries and again wrote editorials for Spanish-language newspapers. Many considered Martí to be the greatest Latin American intellectual of the time. He published his newspaper Patria as the voice of Cuban Independence. While in the United States, he wrote several acclaimed volumes of poetry and along with other friends in exile, he spent time planning his return to Cuba. During the following year in 1892, he traveled throughout Central America, the Caribbean and the United States raising funds at various Cuban clubs. His first attempt to launch the revolution, with a few followers, was drastically underfunded and failed. However, the following year with more men and additional backing, he tried again. Although he admired and visited America in the interim, he feared that the United States would annex Cuba before his revolution could liberate the country from Spain.
With small skirmishes, the Cuban War of Independence started on February 24, 1895. Marti’s plan for a second attempt at freeing Cuba included convincing Major General Máximo Gómez y Báez and Major General Antonio de la Caridad Maceo y Grajales, as well as several other revolutionary heroes of the Ten Years’ War, to join him. Together they launched a three-pronged invasion in April of 1895. With bands of exiles, they landed separately, using small boats. The main assault was on the south coast of Oriente Province, where their objective was to take and hold the higher ground. During this maneuver Martí was directed by the commanding officer General Máximo Gómez to remain with the rearguard, since he would be much more useful to the revolution alive than dead. However Martí, exercising his usual exuberance, took the lead and was instantly killed during one of the first skirmishes. Thus, he met his death on May 19, 1895, fighting regular Spanish troops at the Battle of Dos Ríos just north of Santiago de Cuba, at the relatively young age of 42.”
José Martí remains revered as a hero by the people of Cuba regardless of politics!
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Hank Bracker