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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.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
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.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
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.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
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.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
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.
Sam Zell (Am I Being Too Subtle?: Straight Talk From a Business Rebel)
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.
Noam Chomsky (Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media)
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.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
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.
Gilles Deleuze (A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia)
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.
Howard Zinn (A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present)
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.
Thomas Armstrong (Awakening Genius in the Classroom)
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.
David Graeber (Bullshit Jobs: A Theory)
— 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.
Margaret Atwood (The Year of the Flood (MaddAddam, #2))
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.
Michael E. Porter (Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors)
..."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.
James K. Galbraith
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.
Jennifer McGaha (Flat Broke with Two Goats)
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.
Howard Zinn (A People’s History of the United States: 1492 - Present)
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.
Rafi Kohan (The Arena: Inside the Tailgating, Ticket-Scalping, Mascot-Racing, Dubiously Funded, and Possibly Haunted Monuments of American Sport)
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.
Karl Marx (The German Ideology / Theses on Feuerbach / Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy)
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.
Incite! Women of Color Against Violence (The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex)
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.
Jennifer Hartmann (Lotus)
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.
James Weldon Johnson (The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man)
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.
Ellis Peters (A Rare Benedictine: The Advent of Brother Cadfael (Chronicles of Brother Cadfael, #0.5))
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.
Nancy MacLean (Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America)
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.
Peter Schweizer (Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends)
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.
Robert M. Sapolsky (Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping)
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.
Leymah Gbowee (Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War)
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.
Laney Salisbury (Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art)
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*
Jared Taylor (Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America)
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.
Jonathan Haskel (Capitalism without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy)
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.
Joel McDurmon (The Problem of Slavery in Christian America)
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
Jared Taylor (Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America)
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.
Cathy O'Brien (TRANCE Formation of America: True life story of a mind control slave)
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.
Julian Assange (When Google Met Wikileaks)
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
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform)
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.
Harry Markopolos (No One Would Listen)
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.
Paul H. Blaney (Oxford Textbook of Psychopathology)
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.
William Blum (America's Deadliest Export: Democracy The Truth about US Foreign Policy and Everything Else)
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.
Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
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.
Chris Lambert (Cryptocurrency: How I Turned $400 into $100,000 by Trading Cryptocurrency for 6 months (Crypto Trading Secrets Book 1))
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.
Misha Glenny (McMafia)
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?
C Pam Zhang (Land of Milk and Honey)
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.
Donald Sull (Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World)
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
George E. Vaillant (Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study)
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.
Grover Cleveland
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.
Qwertikw
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.
Gabor Maté (In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction)
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.
Bill Bryson (The Body: A Guide for Occupants)
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.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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.
Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
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.
Jack Goldenberg (My Secret List of Sites that Pay: Websites that pay you from home (Quick Easy Money))
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.
Jack M. Bickham (Elements of Fiction Writing - Scene & Structure)
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.
Ahed Tamimi (They Called Me a Lioness: A Palestinian Girl's Fight for Freedom)
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.
Walter Isaacson (Einstein: His Life and Universe)
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.
Ron Chernow (Alexander Hamilton)
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.
Chris Wright (Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States)
When should you be skeptical? Any time you see a report that a single food, beverage, supplement, food product, or ingredient causes or reduces the risk for obesity, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, or cancer, it is a good idea to envision a red warning flag flying high in the air. The studies may have identified associations between the food factor and the disease, but associations can be due to any number of other causes. Dietary patterns, not single factors, are what matter to health. Look out for words like “miracle” or “breakthrough.” Science tends to proceed in small increments and rarely works that way. And please be especially skeptical of “everything you thought you knew about nutrition is wrong.” Science does not work that way, either. Whenever you see “may” or “might”—as in “may reduce the risk of heart disease” or “might improve cognition in the elderly”—recognize that these also mean “may not” or “might not.” Overall, it is always a good idea to ask whether study results seem plausible in the light of everything else you know. As an eater, you should be wary of media hype about whether fat or sugar is a more important cause of health problems. This question ignores basic principles of nutrition: we eat foods, not nutrients, and how much we eat is often just as important as what we eat. Diets of enormous variety, from Asian diets traditionally based on rice (carbohydrates that convert to sugar in the body) to Mediterranean diets rich in olive oil (fat), can all promote long and healthy lives. The basic principles of eating healthfully have remained remarkably constant over the years: eat a wide variety of relatively unprocessed foods in reasonable amounts. Note that these same dietary principles apply to prevention of the entire range of diet-related chronic diseases. If an industry-funded study claims miraculous benefits from the sponsor’s products, think, “Advertising.
Marion Nestle (Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat)
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.
Lynne Twist (The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life)
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
Ann Coulter (¡Adios, America!: The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole)
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Glenn Eichler
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.
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.
Gabor Maté
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.
Michael Frost (The Faith of Leap: Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure & Courage)
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.
John R. Nofsinger (The Psychology of Investing)
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.
Annette Wise
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.
Shawn Lawrence Otto (the war on Science)
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
Jigar Patel (NRI Investments and Taxation: A Small Guide for Big Gains)
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
Dinesh D'Souza (Stealing America: What My Experience with Criminal Gangs Taught Me about Obama, Hillary, and the Democratic Party)
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.
Gary J. Byrne (Crisis of Character: A White House Secret Service Officer Discloses His Firsthand Experience with Hillary, Bill, and How They Operate)
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.
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
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.
Brad Feld (Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist)
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.
Frank Wayman (Resort to War: 1816 - 2007 (Correlates of War))
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
Shawn Stevenson (Eat Smarter: Use the Power of Food to Reboot Your Metabolism, Upgrade Your Brain, and Transform Your Life)
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.
Daniel Estulin (Tavistock Institute: Social Engineering the Masses)
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
Tom Wheelwright (Tax-Free Wealth: How to Build Massive Wealth by Permanently Lowering Your Taxes)
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.
Robert N. Proctor (Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition)
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.
Charles Danten (Un vétérinaire en colère - Essai sur la condition animale)
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.
Howard Marks (The Most Important Thing: Uncommon Sense for the Thoughtful Investor (Columbia Business School Publishing))
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.
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)
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.
Vicky Osterweil (In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action)
In any case, the funds rate, by itself, is relatively unimportant.
Ben S. Bernanke (The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath)
In general, outside of the auction cycle, 2 Year Notes accumulate the most shorts when the market expects the Fed to raise rates or there are a lot of yield curve flattening trades. “Flatteners” mean the Street is expecting short-term rates to rise relative to long-term rates. Proprietary trading groups will short-sell the 2 Year Note and buy the 10 Year Note against it. Given that the duration of the 10 Year Note is about five times greater than the 2 Year Note, it means that they are short-selling about five times as many 2 Year Notes as 10 Year Notes to be correctly risk weighted. When big hedge funds are in this trade, the 2 Year Note can get extremely Special.
Scott E.D. Skyrm (The Repo Market, Shorts, Shortages, and Squeezes)
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.
Avi Shlaim (Lion of Jordan)
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.
Robin Wigglesworth (Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever)
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.
Robin Wigglesworth (Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever)
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.
Robin Wigglesworth (Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever)
I didn’t have access to the type of funds someone in Filip’s business might have had. I lost my parents when I was young, so I was taken in by relatives who never had much money.
Jill Ramsower (Absolute Silence (The Five Families, #5))
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.
John Hope Simpson (Palestine. Report on immigration, land settlement and development)
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.
Nicole Bedera (On the Wrong Side: How Universities Protect Perpetrators and Betray Survivors of Sexual Violence)
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In his 1961 letter to partners, Buffett laid out three broad categories of investments: generals, workouts, and controls. Generals were undervalued securities where Buffett had no say in corporate policies, nor a timetable for when the stock might reflect its intrinsic value. Buffett pointed out that the generals would behave like the Dow in the short term but outperform the index over the long term. Buffett expected to have five or six positions in this category that were 5% to 10% of total assets each, with smaller positions in another ten to fifteen. Later on, in his 1964 letter, Buffett would break generals into two categories: private owner basis and relatively undervalued. Private owner generals were generally cheap stocks with no immediate catalyst, while relatively undervalued securities were cheap compared to those of a similar quality. Relatively undervalued securities were generally larger companies where Buffett did not think a private owner valuation was relevant.173 Workouts were securities whose performance depended on corporate actions, such as mergers, liquidations, reorganizations, and spin-offs. Buffett expected to have ten to fifteen of these in the portfolio and thought this category would be a reasonably stable source of earnings for the fund, outperforming the Dow when the market had a bad year and underperforming in a strong year. He anticipated these investments would earn him 10% to 20%, excluding any leverage. Buffett would take on debt, up to 25% of the partnership’s net worth, to fund this category. While he didn’t disclose his allocation every year, he put around 15% of the partnership in workouts in 1966 but increased that to a quarter of the portfolio in 1967 and 1968, when he was having trouble finding bargains.174 The final category was controls, where the partnership took a significant position to change corporate policy. Buffett said these investments might take several years to play out and would, like workouts, have minimal correlation to the Dow’s gyrations. Buffett pointed out that generals could become controls if the stock price remained depressed.
Brett Gardner (Buffett's Early Investments: A new investigation into the decades when Warren Buffett earned his best returns)
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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.
V.N. Khanna (International Relations, 5th Edition)
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.
Jeff Wilkerson
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.
Charles Duhigg (The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do and How to Change)
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.
Robert Spencer (Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam Is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs)
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
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)
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.
Ian Hutson (NGLND XPX)
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.
International Monetary Fund (Financial Intelligence Units: An Overview)
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.
Steven M. Bragg (Cost Reduction Analysis: Tools and Strategies (Wiley Corporate F&A Book 7))
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.
Howard Nemerov (Four Hundred Years of Gun Control: Why Isn't It Working?)