Garrett Community Quotes

The interaction between God and man in Scripture has always been of great interest to me. I find the Bible’s depictions of these dynamic encounters of mutual influence striking in their refusal to cohere with our neat theological systems.

The District outranks the neighboring states of Maryland and Virginia as a place suitable for aging in place, while Montgomery County edged its suburban counterparts, according to a new online rating tool that ranks nearly every neighborhood in the United States. The AARP Livability Index, which went live on Monday, uses factors such as safety, security, ease of getting around, access to health care, housing affordability and the prevalence of WiFi, farmers markets and public policies that promote successful aging. Users punch in their Zip code or street address, and the Web site crunches data to show how a community stacks up against others. Ratings come on a scale of zero to 100. Users can also rejigger the weight placed on certain factors to suit themselves. For an older person on Raleigh Avenue in Garrett Park, Md., the livability

In 1994, the FBI discovered its agent Robert Hanssen—a longtime spy for the Soviet Union—had on August 7, 1989, placed in a dead drop in Eakin Community Park in Fairfax, Virginia, five rolls of film that depicted a highly restricted classified analysis of government COG procedures, perhaps the biggest intelligence coup for the Soviet Union of his lengthy spying career. By the time Hanssen was arrested in 1994, most of those COG secrets were obsolete anyway. X

The balance you strike between the obligations of work, family, and community will also be important.

The Institute of Medicine report hit the public health community like buckets of ice water, waking it up but leaving it shivering in its impoverished, unheated facilities, unable to muster the energy to tackle the problem.

A final form of intra-societal violence that is very significant is the collective killing of one male by the other males of the group. The rationale for such killings seems to be that the male singled out for killing has become so violent and dangerous that he must be eliminated in order to protect the group from further episodes of unnecessary intra-group violence or dominating behaviour. As far as one can tell, such individuals are typically very good warriors. They seem to authenticate their value to the community by displaying their fighting ability. They bully and injure or kill other males in the group, they likely access other men’s women (although that is likely played down in the accounts of such incidents to the recorders), and their behaviour is so intolerable that they become more dangerous to the community than their value as a good warrior warrants. Because they are dangerous, killing them needs to be done carefully. Moreover, if not done properly, their relatives may feel it was unjust and seek revenge. In some cases, the community instructs the individual’s close relatives to kill him in order to eliminate any basis for revenge. In others, it is a community act. There is one account given to me directly by a Yanomamo tribesman visiting the United States of a Yanomamo dangerous warrior who, it is decided, must be killed. He is tricked into climbing a tree, and by necessity leaves his weapons behind. As he climbs down, weaponless, he is beset by all the males and killed." (Steven Leblanc)

Case #6 Sandy and Bob Bob is a successful dentist in his community. In the 15 years since he established his own practice, he has established a reliable base of patients and has built a thriving business in a great location. A couple years ago, he brought his wife, Sandy, a business expert with an MBA, on board to help him oversee the business end of the dental practice. She had recently left her job at a financial services firm, and Bob knew that Sandy’s business acumen would be helpful in getting his administrative house in order. She brought on new employees, developed effective new processes, and enhanced the office’s marketing efforts. Within a few months, Sandy’s improvements had managed to make the dental practice a well-oiled machine. Now she could turn her attention to their real estate portfolio. Bob and Sandy owned three small apartment buildings around town, as well as one small commercial center that was home to a nail salon, a chiropractor’s office, a coffee house and a wine shop. Fortunately, Bob’s dental practice was a success and their investments earned a nice passive income for them. Unfortunately, because Bob earned on average $250,000 per year, the couple couldn’t use passive loss, which in their case came to about $100,000, from their investments to offset his high earned income. Eventually, they would be earning sheltered profits—when the mortgages on their properties were paid off and the rentals made pure profit, or if they were to sell a property. When those things eventually happened, they could use their losses to shelter those profits. But until that time, the losses were going unused. Sandy made an appointment with their CPA to discuss the situation and see how they might improve their tax situation. The CPA asked, “What about becoming a real estate professional?” He explained to Sandy that if she spent 750 hours per year, or about 15 hours a week, on the couple’s real estate investments, she would be considered a real estate professional by the IRS. This would enable the couple to write off 100 percent of their passive losses against Bob’s high income, which would bring his taxable income down to $100,000. This $100,000 deduction brought Bob and Sandy into a lower tax bracket, saving them roughly $31,000 in taxes. Sandy already devoted a large percentage of her time to overseeing their investments, and when she saw the tax advantages, her decision became clear: She would file the Section 469(c)(7) and become a real estate professional.

What allows humans to be loving and caring towards themselves is a loving and caring connection to others–love not just for family, but also for friends, community, and even country.

What allows humans to be loving and care toward themselves is a loving and caring connection to others; to loving and being loved-love not just for family, but also for friends, community, and even country.

Garrett Hongo gives an eloquent account of the personal essay as one means for a community to come to know itself, to reject both external and internal stereotyping, to hear “stories that are somehow forbidden and tagged as aberrational, as militant, as depraved.” For a writer, as you live in this kind of silence, in this kind of misery, not knowing quite what it is that the world is not giving you, .. . that your work cannot address as yet, you are at the beginning of a critique of culture and society. It is the moment when powerful personal alienation slips into critical thinking;—the origin of imagination. It is this initial step of intellection that enables the emergence of new, transformative, even revolutionary creativity. It occurs at the juncture between the production of art and the exercise of deep critical thought.

As with water, so with petroleum. The surface of the earth belonged to those who held title, but the oil under the surface belonged to no one until it was found and taken, and whoever took it first made it his property. This common-law principle, called the rule of capture, establishes a condition that the biologist Garrett Hardin, in a historic 1968 paper in the journal Science, called “The Tragedy of the Commons.”33 The tragedy of the commons—of any resource held in common by a community—is that each user is motivated to use as much of the resource as possible without regard for its depletion or despoiling. With petroleum, the tragedy of the commons meant that each well owner was motivated to pump as much oil as possible as quickly as possible, before other wells drained away the common supply. “Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush,” Hardin warned, “each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.