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Another problem with the official definitions of terror is that it follows from them that the US is a leading terrorist state.
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Noam Chomsky (Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance)
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China’s race to AI supremacy will have a profound impact on world order, disorder, and global AI geopolitics.
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Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation)
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Finally, consider your predicament a privilege in a world so shrunken that certain people refer to it as the 'global village.' The term 'explorer' has little meaning. But exploration is nothing more than a faray into the unknown, and a four-year old child, wandering about along in the department store, fits the definition as well as the snow-blind man wandering across the Khyber Pass. The explorer is the person who is lost.
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Tim Cahill (Jaguars Ripped My Flesh)
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This is the conservative problem: reality itself is radical, so we must not get too close to it. The Third World really is poor and oppressed; the U.S. often does side with Third-World plutocrats; our tax system really is regressive and favors the very richest; millions of Americans do live in poverty; the corporations do plunder and pollute the environment; real wages for blue-collar workers definitely have flattened and even declined; the superrich really are increasing their share of the pie; and global warming really is happening.
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Michael Parenti (Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader)
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Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our being as humans, and the catastrophe toward which this world is headed — be it ecological, social, demographic or a general breakdown of civilization — will be unavoidable. If we are no longer threatened by world war or by the danger that the absurd mountains of accumulated nuclear weapons might blow up the world, this does not mean that we have definitely won. We are still incapable of understanding that the only genuine backbone of all our actions, if they are to be moral, is responsibility.
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Václav Havel
“
All global ambitions are based on a definition of productivity and the good life so alienated from common human reality that I am convinced it is wrong and that most people would agree with me if they could perceive an alternative. We might be able to see that if we regained a hold on a philosophy that locates meaning where meaning is genuinely to be found — in families, in friends, in the passage of seasons, in nature, in simple ceremonies and rituals, in curiosity, generosity, compassion, and service to others, in a decent independence and privacy, in all the free and inexpensive things out of which real families, real friends, and real communities are built — then we would be so self-sufficient we would not even need the material “sufficiency” which our global “experts” are so insistent we be concerned about.
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John Taylor Gatto (Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling)
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Art is an attempt to capture the truths of the world as you see it in a medium you can share with others. It is about lending your voice, your perspective to local, national, and global conversations. And that is why, in the United States in particular, our definition of what is art and who is an artist must be as varied as our citizenry.
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Dan Rather (What Unites Us: Reflections on Patriotism)
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Father of the Constitution,” said: “The accumulation of all power – legislative, executive, and judiciary – in the same hands . . . may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.
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James Perloff (Truth Is a Lonely Warrior: Unmasking the Forces behind Global Destruction)
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Globalization is not just about changing relations between the ‘inside’ of the nation-state and the ‘outside’ of the international system. It cuts across received categories, creating myriad multilayered intersections, overlapping playing fields, and actors skilled at working across these boundaries. People are at once rooted and rootless, local producers and global consumers, threatened in their identities yet continually remaking those identities.
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Philip G. Cerny
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We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us. (227)
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College of St. Catherine Staff (The Global Search for Justice)
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Think before you write, while you write- and definitely after you have written.
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Sudakshina Bhattacharjee (Improve Your Global Business English: The Essential Toolkit for Writing and Communicating Across Borders)
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Clinging to politics is one way of avoiding the confrontation with the devouring logic of civilization, holding instead with the accepted assumptions and definitions. Leaving it all behind is the opposite: a truly qualitative change, a fundamental paradigm shift.
This change is not about:
• seeking "alternative" energy sources to power all the projects and systems that should never have been started up in the first place;
• being vaguely "post-Left", the disguise that some adopt while changing none of their (leftist) orientations;
• espousing an "anti-globalization" orientation that's anything but, given activists' near-universal embrace of the totalizing industrial world system;
• preserving the technological order, while ignoring the degradation of millions and the systematic destruction of the earth that undergird the existence of every part of the technoculture;
• claiming-as anarchists-to oppose the state, while ignoring the fact that this hypercomplex global setup couldn't function for a day without many levels of government.
The way is open for radical change. If complex society is itself the issue, if class society began with division of labor in the Neolithic, and if the Brave New World now moving forward was born with the shift to domesticated life, then all we've taken for granted is implicated. We are seeing more deeply, and the explorations must extend to include everyone. A daunting, but exciting opportunity!
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John Zerzan (Twilight of the Machines)
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for 99 percent of Americans, incomes increased by a mere 0.2 percent. Meanwhile, the incomes of the top 1 percent jumped by 11.6 percent. It was definitely a recovery—for the 1 percent.
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Chrystia Freeland (Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else)
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By definition, posthumanism (I call it ‘cyberhumanism’) is to replace transhumanism at the center stage circa 2035. By then, mind uploading could become a reality with gradual neuronal replacement, rapid advancements in Strong AI, massively parallel computing, and nanotechnology allowing us to directly connect our brains to the Cloud-based infrastructure of the Global Brain. Via interaction with our AI assistants, the GB will know us better than we know ourselves in all respects, so mind transfer, or rather 'mind migration,' for billions of enhanced humans would be seamless, sometime by mid-century.
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Alex M. Vikoulov (The Intelligence Supernova: Essays on Cybernetic Transhumanism, The Simulation Singularity & The Syntellect Emergence (The Science and Philosophy of Information))
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In the era of globalization, everything is interconnected. A problem in one part of the world will definitely impact on other parts of the globe. Such phenomenon is also valid for defense and security context. A conflict in a state will bring implications in its neighboring countries or other countries extended in the same region. Therefore, collaborative efforts in tackling common defense and security problems are essentially required.
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Agus Harimurti Yudhoyono
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Disciplines are by definition based on territorial epistemologies: studying the borders doesn’t lead necessarily to border thinking . . . unless scholars engage in epistemological disciplinary disobedience and bring to the fore the existential experience of dwelling in the border. By
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Walter D. Mignolo (Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History))
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THIS IS HOW AMERICA BECAME A HOTSPOT OF A GLOBAL PANDEMIC. Because my generation was raised to believe not just that safety is for dweebs but that it’s EVIL! Maverick is a full psycho and would definitely be at the “reopen America” protests because he wants the RIGHT to get his b-hole waxed even if he isn’t actually GOING to go get his b-hole waxed and even though he knows that many thousands more marginalized and high-risk people will die and many b-hole waxing businesses will ultimately fail because you cannot sustain an economy on a handful of slobbering fascists who feel the need, the need for a Jamba Juice. Goose alludes to some dark past involving Maverick’s dad, who was also a fighter pilot: “Every time we go up there, it’s like you’re flyin’ against a ghost.” And I’m sorry, but that is not an excuse! Go to therapy! You can be in a men’s group with Snape!
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Lindy West (Shit, Actually: The Definitive, 100% Objective Guide to Modern Cinema)
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Indeed, why even study history? The brief response is because our understandings of the past—who we are, where we came from, why we are here—inform our definitions of who we are in the present and have real implications and applicability for actions taken by us or in our name to shape the future.
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Robert B. Marks (The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Environmental Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-First Century (World Social Change))
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The most successful ruse of neoliberal dominance in both global and domestic affairs is the definition of economic policy as primarily a matter of neutral, technical expertise. This expertise is then presented as separate from politics and culture, and not properly subject to specifically political accountability or cultural critique. Opposition to material inequality is maligned as "class warfare," while race, gender or sexual inequalities are dismissed as merely cultural, private, or trivial. This rhetorical separation of the economic from the political and
cultural arenas disguises the upwardly redistributing goals of neoliberalism—its concerted efforts to concentrate power and resources in the hands of tiny elites. Once economics is understood as primarily a
technical realm, the trickle-upward effects of neoliberal policies can be framed as due to performance rather than design, reflecting the greater merit of those reaping larger rewards.
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Lisa Duggan (The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy)
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Virtuality is the cultural perception that material objects are interpenetrated by information patterns. The definition plays off the duality at the heart of the condition of virtuality—materiality on the one hand, information on the other. Normally virtuality is associated with computer simulations that put the body into a feedback loop with a computer-generated image. For example, in virtual Ping-Pong, one swings a paddle wired into a computer, which calculates from the paddle’s momentum and position where the ball would go. Instead of hitting a real ball, the player makes the appropriate motions with the paddle and watches the image of the ball on a computer monitor. Thus the game takes place partly in real life (RL) and partly in virtual reality (VR). Virtual reality technologies are fascinating because they make visually immediate the perception that a world of information exists parallel to the “real” world, the former intersecting the latter at many points and in many ways. Hence the definition’s strategic quality, strategic because it seeks to connect virtual technologies with the sense, pervasive in the late twentieth century, that all material objects are interpenetrated by flows of information, from DNA code to the global reach of the World Wide Web.
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N. Katherine Hayles (How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics)
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So ecological duress can increase or decrease aggression. This raises the key issue of what global warming will do to our best and worst behaviors. There will definitely be some upsides. Some regions will have longer growing seasons, increasing the food supply and reducing tensions. Some people will eschew conflict, being preoccupied with saving their homes from the encroaching ocean or growing pineapples in the Arctic. But amid squabbling about the details in predictive models, the consensus is that global warming won’t do good things to global conflict. For starters, warmer temperatures rile people up—in cities during the summers, for every three degree increase in temperature, there was a 4 percent increase in interpersonal violence and 14 percent in group violence. But global warming’s bad news is more global—desertification, loss of arable land due to rising seas, more droughts. One influential meta-analysis projected 16 percent and 50 percent increases in interpersonal and group violence, respectively, in some regions by 2050.
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Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
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For the global skill of drawing, the basic component skills, as I have defined them, are: The perception of edges (seeing where one thing ends and another starts) The perception of spaces (seeing what lies beside and beyond) The perception of relationships (seeing in perspective and in proportion) The perception of lights and shadows (seeing things in degrees of values) The perception of the gestalt (seeing the whole and its parts)
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Betty Edwards (Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain: A Course in Enhancing Creativity and Artistic Confidence: The Definitive 4th Edition)
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Therapy entails the application of conceptual machinery to ensure that actual or potential deviants stay within the institutionalized definitions of reality, or, in other words, to prevent the “inhabitants” of a given universe from “emigrating.” It does this by applying the legitimating apparatus to individual “cases.” Since, as we have seen, every society faces the danger of individual deviance, we may assume that therapy in one form or another is a global social phenomenon. Its specific institutional arrangements, from exorcism to psychoanalysis, from pastoral care to personnel counseling programs, belong, of course, under the category of social control. What interests us here, however, is the conceptual aspect of therapy. Since therapy must concern itself with deviations from the “official” definitions of reality, it must develop a conceptual machinery to account for such deviations and to maintain the realities thus challenged. This requires a body of knowledge that includes a theory of deviance, a diagnostic apparatus, and a conceptual system for the “cure of souls.
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Peter L. Berger (The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge)
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The smartest person to ever walk this Earth in all probability lived and died herding goats on a mountain somewhere, with no way to disseminate their work globally even if they had realised they were super smart and had the means to do something with their abilities.
I am not keen on 'who are the smartest' lists and websites because, as Scott Barry Kaufman points out, the concept of genius privileges the few who had the opportunity to see through and promote their life’s work, while excluding others who may have had equal or greater raw potential but lacked the practical and financial support, and the communication platform that famous names clearly had.
This is why I am keen to develop, through my research work, a definition of genius from a cognitive neuroscience and psychometric point of view, so that whatever we decide that is and how it should be measured, only focuses on clearly measurable factors within the individual’s mind, regardless of their external achievements, eminence, popularity, wealth, public platform etc. In my view this would be both more equitable and more scientific.
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Gwyneth Wesley Rolph
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we want to expand Chapell’s FCF to more explicitly account for the global contexts. This means that we must fit the FCF for unchurched and in-between cultural contexts as well. The expanded definition for this homiletic tool looks like this: The Fallen Condition Focus (FCF) is the mutual human condition that contemporary believers or nonbelievers share with those to or about whom the text was written that requires the grace of the passage for God’s people to glorify and enjoy him or for those who resist God to properly regard him and to be reconciled to him.
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Zack Eswine (Preaching to a Post-Everything World: Crafting Biblical Sermons That Connect with Our Culture)
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We are so crazy because of our brains (thoughts). Only we are want live extra ordinary lifestyle, only we necessary to know builder of universe, only we need the definition and mathematical theory of universe formation (reason of big bang), only we need peace and also, we need power for control the universe etc. Other way we think global warming, bad society, culture, crime, politics, bad relationship, unsafe life, not satisfaction etc. But other animals are also living life with joyful in same universe. Nothing or Everything cannot be created or destroy, why we think a lot? let’s go
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Jagannath Hembram
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think of climate change as slow, but it is unnervingly fast. We think of the technological change necessary to avert it as fast-arriving, but unfortunately it is deceptively slow—especially judged by just how soon we need it. This is what Bill McKibben means when he says that winning slowly is the same as losing: “If we don’t act quickly, and on a global scale, then the problem will literally become insoluble,” he writes. “The decisions we make in 2075 won’t matter.” Innovation, in many cases, is the easy part. This is what the novelist William Gibson meant when he said, “The future is already here, it just isn’t evenly distributed.” Gadgets like the iPhone, talismanic for technologists, give a false picture of the pace of adaptation. To a wealthy American or Swede or Japanese, the market penetration may seem total, but more than a decade after its introduction, the device is used by less than 10 percent of the world; for all smartphones, even the “cheap” ones, the number is somewhere between a quarter and a third. Define the technology in even more basic terms, as “cell phones” or “the internet,” and you get a timeline to global saturation of at least decades—of which we have two or three, in which to completely eliminate carbon emissions, planetwide. According to the IPCC, we have just twelve years to cut them in half. The longer we wait, the harder it will be. If we had started global decarbonization in 2000, when Al Gore narrowly lost election to the American presidency, we would have had to cut emissions by only about 3 percent per year to stay safely under two degrees of warming. If we start today, when global emissions are still growing, the necessary rate is 10 percent. If we delay another decade, it will require us to cut emissions by 30 percent each year. This is why U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres believes we have only one year to change course and get started. The scale of the technological transformation required dwarfs any achievement that has emerged from Silicon Valley—in fact dwarfs every technological revolution ever engineered in human history, including electricity and telecommunications and even the invention of agriculture ten thousand years ago. It dwarfs them by definition, because it contains all of them—every single one needs to be replaced at the root, since every single one breathes on carbon, like a ventilator.
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David Wallace-Wells (The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming)
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Complex operations, in which agencies assume complementary roles and operate in close proximity-often with similar missions but conflicting mandates-accentuate these tensions. The tensions are evident in the processes of analyzing complex environments, planning for complex interventions, and implementing complex operations. Many reports and analyses forecast that these complex operations are precisely those that will demand our attention most in the indefinite future.
As essayist Barton and O'Connell note, our intelligence and understanding of the root cause of conflict, multiplicity of motivations and grievances, and disposition of actors is often inadequate. Moreover, the problems that complex operations are intended and implemented to address are convoluted, and often inscrutable. They exhibit many if not all the characteristics of "wicked problems," as enumerated by Rittel and Webber in 1973: they defy definitive formulations; any proposed solution or intervention causes the problem to mutate, so there is no second chance at a solution; every situation is unique; each wicked problem can be considered a symptom of another problem. As a result, policy objectives are often compound and ambiguous. The requirements of stability, for example, in Afghanistan today, may conflict with the requirements for democratic governance. Efforts to establish an equitable social contract may well exacerbate inter-communal tensions that can lead to violence. The rule of law, as we understand it, may displace indigenous conflict management and stabilization systems. The law of unintended consequences may indeed be the only law of the land. The complexity of the challenges we face in the current global environment would suggest the obvious benefit of joint analysis - bringing to bear on any given problem the analytic tools of military, diplomatic and development analysts. Instead, efforts to analyze jointly are most often an afterthought, initiated long after a problem has escalated to a level of urgency that negates much of the utility of deliberate planning.
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Michael Miklaucic (Commanding Heights: Strategic Lessons from Complex Operations)
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The short answer to our question is that we are not entering a post-American world. It is not possible for this (or any) book to see “the future,” because there are so many possible futures dependent on unpredictable events and they play a larger role the further out one tries to look. Thus it is important to specify a time horizon. For example, if the “American century” began in 1941, will the United States still have primacy in power resources and play the central role in the global balance of power among states in 2041? My guess is “yes.” In that sense, the American century is not over, but because of transnational and non-state forces, it is definitely changing in important ways that are described below. But first, we must look at the charge that the United States is in decline.
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Joseph S. Nye Jr. (Is the American Century Over? (Global Futures))
“
Therapy entails the conceptual machinery to ensure that actual or potential deviants stay within the institutionalized definitions of reality, or, in other words, to prevent "inhabitants" of a given universe from "emigrating". It does this by applying the legitimating apparatus to individual "cases". Since ever society faces the danger of individual deviance, we may assume that therapy in one form or another is a global social phenomena. Its specific institutional arrangements, from exorcism to psycho-analysis, from pastoral care to personal counseling programmes, belong, of course, under the category of social control. [...] Since therapy must concern itself with deviations from the "official" definition of reality, it must develop a machinery to account for such deviations and to maintain the realities thus challenged. This requires a body of knowledge that include a theory of deviance, a diagnostic apparatus, and a conceptual system for the "cure of souls".
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Peter L. Berger
“
For realists, the state is the main actor and sovereignty is its distinguishing trait. The meaning of the sovereign state is inextricably bound up with the use of force. In terms of its internal dimension, to illustrate this relationship between violence and the state we need to look no further than Max Weber’s famous definition of the state as ‘the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’(M. J. Smith 1986: 23).3 Within this territorial space, sovereignty means that the state has supreme authority to make and enforce laws. This is the basis of the unwritten contract between individuals and the state. According to Hobbes, for example, we trade our liberty in return for a guarantee of security. Once security has been established, civil society can begin. But in the absence of security, there can be no art, no culture, no society. The first move, then, for the realist is to organize power domestically. Only after power has been organized, can community begin.
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John Baylis (The Globalization of World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations)
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Everything that capitalism and fascism and the rest were designed to balance or manage—supply, demand, production, capital, labor, debt, scarcity, logistics—isn’t so much contorting as evolving into forms we have literally never experienced as a species. We are entering a period of extreme transformation, with our strategic, political, economic, technological, demographic, and cultural norms all in flux at the same time. Of course we will shift to a different management system. Second, the process will be the very definition of traumatic. The concept of more has been our guiding light as a species for centuries. From a certain point of view, the past seventy years of globalization have simply been “more” on steroids, a sharp uptake on our long-cherished economic understandings. Between the demographic inversion and the end of globalization, we are not simply ending our long experience with more, or even beginning a terrifying new world of less; we face economic free fall as everything that has underpinned humanity’s economic existence since the Renaissance unwinds all at once.
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Peter Zeihan (The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization)
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I want to give credit to Bill Mollison and David Holmgren for creating the 12 Permaculture Design Principles, and to Adam Smith for being the father of Capitalism. The foundations they laid has benefitted billions of people across generations.
Respectfully, I have gone beyond the work of these men – far beyond. And I have done that by standing on their shoulders, so to speak. What I have done that’s new and novel is pair permaculture design principles with capitalism as opposed to viewing the two as mutually exclusive. I have also infused my own observations and insights about natural phenomena into the Permaculture Economics framework. Furthermore, I’ve created a definite framework – a set of well thought out principles for policymakers, based on all of this. What I have created is not simply the economics of permaculture, or economics viewed through a permaculture lens, or permaculture plus capitalism. No, I have created an entirely new principles-based system that was inspired by but not exclusively dependent on Permaculture and Capitalism. It is new and novel, and it has a life of its own, and it will one day be the standard of a one global society. Permaculture Economics is unique- greater than the sum of its parts. The implementation of this system, globally, is essential to bringing about a new order of the world.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Principles of a Permaculture Economy)
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It is possible that we are already living through the twilight of democracy; that our civilization may already be heading for anarchy or tyranny, as the ancient philosophers and America's founders once feared; that a new generation of clercs, the advocates of illiberal or authoritarian ideas, will come to power in the twenty-first century, just as they did in the twentieth; that their visions of the world, born of resentment, anger, or deep, messianic dreams, could triumph. Maybe new information technology will continue to undermine consensus, divide people further, and increase polarization until only violence can determine who rules. Maybe fear of disease will create fear of freedom.
Or maybe the coronavirus will inspire a new sense of global solidarity. Maybe we will renew and modernize our institutions. Maybe international cooperation will expand after the entire world has had the same set of experiences at the same time: lockdown, quarantine, fear of infection, fear of death. Maybe scientists around the world will find new ways to collaborate, above and beyond politics. Maybe the reality of illness and death will teach people to be suspicious of hucksters, liars, and purveyors of disinformation.
Maddeningly, we have to accept that both futures are possible. No political victory is ever permanent, no definition of "the nation" is guaranteed to last, and no elite of any kind, whether so-called "populist" or so-called "liberal" or so called "aristocratic," rules forever.
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Anne Applebaum (Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism)
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Charles is difficult to pigeonhole politically. Tony Blair wrote that he considered him a “curious mixture of the traditional and the radical (at one level he was quite New Labour, at another definitely not) and of the princely and insecure.” He is certainly conservative in his old-fashioned dress and manners, his advocacy of traditional education in the arts and humanities, his reverence for classical architecture and the seventeenth-century Book of Common Prayer. But his forays into mysticism and his jeremiads against scientific progress, industrial development, and globalization give him an eccentric air. “One of the main purposes of the monarchy is to unite the country and not divide it,” said Kenneth Rose. When the Queen took the throne at age twenty-five, she was a blank slate, which gave her a great advantage in maintaining the neutrality necessary to preserve that unity. It was a gentler time, and she could develop her leadership style quietly. But it has also taken vigilance and discipline for her to keep her views private over so many decades. Charles has the disadvantage of a substantial public record of strong and sometimes contentious opinions, not to mention the private correspondence with government ministers protected by exemptions in the Freedom of Information Act that could come back to haunt him if any of it is made public. One letter that did leak was written in 1997 to a group of friends after a visit to Hong Kong and described the country’s leaders as “appalling old waxworks.
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Sally Bedell Smith (Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch)
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The work of PME-ART is highly collaborative and is also very much about collaboration, about people working together, trying to negotiate what is meaningful to them, where and how they disagree, and how such agreements and disagreements might be evocatively conveyed. Collaboration is definitely not easy. As a teenager in Toronto I would see many one-person shows and think the reason there is only one person onstage has little to do with art and much to do with economics. I would see many shows where the people onstage felt like employees primarily doing what they had been told. Instead I wanted to see people onstage doing what they wanted to do, and felt that this wanting should include active, alive ways of working together.
However, looking back over the past twenty years, I also have to admit that I’m not completely sure collaboration is the place for me. It seems I am temperamentally ill-suited for it. Twenty years of doing something I’m ill-suited for and justifying it to myself through compelling artistic results. (This book is in many ways the story of this struggle.) Because though collaboration has never felt good, I still believe in it. Perhaps I believe in it even more because I find it so difficult. Perhaps I believe in it too much. We are all here on this planet, in our various societies and communities, and like it or not we must find ways to work together. The fact that it is often not easy makes it all that much more necessary.
I sometimes wonder if over the years I have over-relied on the metaphor of the collaborative process as microcosm for various global-political realities. It must be a way for me to feel that what I’m doing is more important than it actually is. I think this might be true of all art. Art is a place where the artist feels what they are doing is more important than it actually is. I sincerely wonder if we’ll make it another twenty years.
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Jacob Wren (Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART)
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We usually think of empires as violent undertakings. As Frantz Fanon observed in the 1960s, the process of conquering and governing a colony is, by definition, violent. But in the context of global capitalism, empire has a more expansive meaning. Capitalist empires are not simply the states capable of winning the most wars; they are the command centers of the capitalist world system. Their corporations are the largest and most powerful multinationals, extracting profits from all corners of the globe and sucking them back to the imperial core. Their financial institutions are some of the most important nodes in the networks of global finance. The priorities of their governments are forcefully communicated to -and sometimes enforced upon- less powerful states.
In fact, at the global level it is much easier to see the equivalence between economic and political power than it is domestically. The power of US businesses abroad is maintained through an international order that prioritizes the interests of US capital, promulgated by the US government and its allies. The power of US finance rests on the central role played by the dollar as the global reserve currency, which is it self a function of American military, political, and economic might. American military power, meanwhile, stems from and helps to reinforce the power of a web of military contractors, weapons manufacturers, and research hubs that provide the expertise and equipment needed to maintain its supremacy. In certain parts of the world, as in Iraq after its invasion, the US government has rules through private corporations like Halliburton.
Empire is, then, about more than formal colonization -it refers to all the processes through which the world's most powerful capitalist institutions plan who gets what at the level of the world economy. Throughout history, this imperial power has often been exercised through horrendous acts of violence that have warped the development of entire societies for decades. But today, it is often exerted in far more covert ways, such as through the secretive system of international courts or international financial institutions imposing rigid conditions on countries trying to access emergency lending.
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Grace Blakeley
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Sadhguru: See, it’s not that the other person is totally bereft of understanding. With your understanding you can create situations where the other person would be able to understand you better. If you’re expecting the other to understand and comply with you all the time while you don’t understand the limitations, the possibilities, the needs and the capabilities of that person, then conflict is all that will happen; it is bound to happen. Unfortunately, the closest relationships in the world have more conflict going on than there is between India and Pakistan. India and Pakistan have fought only four battles. In your relationships, you have fought many more battles than this and are still fighting, isn’t it so? This is because your line of understanding and theirs is different. If you cross this L.O.C., this Line of Control, they will get mad. If they cross it, you will get mad. If you move your understanding beyond theirs, their understanding also becomes a part of your understanding. You will be able to embrace their limitations and capabilities. In everyone, there are some positive things and some negative things. If you embrace all this in your understanding, you can make the relationship the way you want it. If you leave it to their understanding, it will become accidental. If they are very magnanimous, things will happen well for you; if not, the relationship will break up. All I am asking is: do you want to be the one who decides what happens to your life? Whether they are close relationships, professional, political, global or whatever, don’t you want to be the person who decides what happens in your life? If you do, you better include everything and everybody into your understanding. You should enhance your understanding to such a point that you can look beyond people’s madness also. There are very wonderful people around you, but once in a while they like to go crazy for a few minutes. If you don’t understand that, you will lose them. If you don’t understand their madness, you will definitely lose them. If you do, then you know how to handle them. Life is not always a straight line; you have to do many things to keep it going. If you forsake your understanding, your capability will be lost. Whether it’s a question of personal relationships or professional management, in both places you need understanding; otherwise, you won’t have fruitful relationships.
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Sadhguru (Mystic’s Musings)
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In the future that globalists and feminists have imagined, for most of us there will only be more clerkdom and masturbation. There will only be more apologizing, more submission, more asking for permission to be men. There will only be more examinations, more certifications, mandatory prerequisites, screening processes, background checks, personality tests, and politicized diagnoses. There will only be more medication. There will be more presenting the secretary with a cup of your own warm urine. There will be mandatory morning stretches and video safety presentations and sign-off sheets for your file. There will be more helmets and goggles and harnesses and bright orange vests with reflective tape. There can only be more counseling and sensitivity training. There will be more administrative hoops to jump through to start your own business and keep it running. There will be more mandatory insurance policies. There will definitely be more taxes. There will probably be more Byzantine sexual harassment laws and corporate policies and more ways for women and protected identity groups to accuse you of misconduct. There will be more micro-managed living, pettier regulations, heavier fines, and harsher penalties. There will be more ways to run afoul of the law and more ways for society to maintain its pleasant illusions by sweeping you under the rug. In 2009 there were almost five times more men either on parole or serving prison terms in the United States than were actively serving in all of the armed forces.[64] If you’re a good boy and you follow the rules, if you learn how to speak passively and inoffensively, if you can convince some other poor sleepwalking sap that you are possessed with an almost unhealthy desire to provide outstanding customer service or increase operational efficiency through the improvement of internal processes and effective organizational communication, if you can say stupid shit like that without laughing, if your record checks out and your pee smells right—you can get yourself a J-O-B. Maybe you can be the guy who administers the test or authorizes the insurance policy. Maybe you can be the guy who helps make some soulless global corporation a little more money. Maybe you can get a pat on the head for coming up with the bright idea to put a bunch of other guys out of work and outsource their boring jobs to guys in some other place who are willing to work longer hours for less money. Whatever you do, no matter what people say, no matter how many team-building activities you attend or how many birthday cards you get from someone’s secretary, you will know that you are a completely replaceable unit of labor in the big scheme of things.
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Jack Donovan (The Way of Men)
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Eight months [after 9/11], after the most intensive international investigation in history, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation informed the press that they still didn't know who did it. He said they had suspicions. The suspicions were that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan but implemented in Germany and the United Arab Emirates, and, of course, in the United States.
After 9/11, Bush II essentially ordered the Taliban to hand over Osama bin Laden, and they temporized. They might have handed him over, actually. They asked for evidence that he was involved in the attacks of 9/11. And, of course, the government, first of all, couldn't given them any evidence because they didn't have any. But secondly, they reacted with total contempt. How can you ask us for evidence if we want you to hand somebody over? What lèse-majesté is this? So Bush simply informed the people of Afghanistan that we're going to bomb you until the Taliban hand over Osama bin Laden. He said nothing about overthrowing the Taliban. That came three weeks later, when British admiral Michael Boyce, the head of the British Defense Staff, announced to the Afghans that we're going to continue bombing you until you overthrow your government. This fits the definition of terrorism exactly, but it's much worse. It's aggression.
How did the Afghans feel about it? We actually don't know. There were leading Afghan anti-Taliban activists who were bitterly opposed to the bombing. In fact, a couple of weeks after the bombing started, the U.S. favorite, Abdul Haq, considered a great martyr in Afghanistan, was interviewed about this. He said that the Americans are carrying out the bombing only because they want to show their muscle. They're undermining our efforts to overthrow the Taliban from within, which we can do. If, instead of killing innocent Afghans, they help us, that's what will happen. Soon after that, there was a meeting in Peshawar in Pakistan of a thousand tribal leaders, some from Afghanistan who trekked across the border, some from Pakistan. They disagreed on a lot of things, but they were unanimous on one thing: stop the bombing. That was after about a month. Could the Taliban have been overthrown from within? It's very likely. There were strong anti-Taliban forces. But the United States didn't want that. It wanted to invade and conquer Afghanistan and impose its own rule.
...There are geostrategic reasons. They're not small. How dominant they are in the thinking of planners we can only speculate. But there is a reason why everybody has been invading Afghanistan since Alexander the Great. The country is in a highly strategic position relative to Central Asian, South Asia, and the Middle East. There are specific reasons in the present case having to do with pipeline projects, which are in the background. We don't know how important these considerations are, but since the 1990s the United States has been trying hard to establish the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline (TAPI)from Turkmenistan, which has a huge amount of natural gas, to India. It has to go through Kandahar, in fact. So Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India are all involved.
The United States wants the pipeline for two reasons. One reason is to try to prevent Russia from having control of natural gas. That's the new "great game": Who controls Central Asian resources? The other reason has to do with isolating Iran. The natural way to get the energy resources India needs is from Iran, a pipeline right from Iran to Pakistan to India. The United States wants to block this from happening in the worst way. It's a complicated business. Pakistan has just agreed to let the pipeline run from Iran to Pakistan. The question is whether India will try to join in. The TAPI pipeline would be a good weapon to try to undercut that.
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Noam Chomsky (Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire (American Empire Project))
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Although definitive numbers are difficult to find, the Global Slavery Index estimates that at least a hundred and forty thousand people are enslaved in Mauritania, out of a population of 3.8 million.
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Anonymous
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As the commission tartly noted, no two religious divines could agree on the definition of a Muslim. If the members of the commission tried imposing a definition of their own, the ulema would unanimously declare them to have gone outside the pale of Islam. Adopting the definition of any one religious scholar entailed becoming an infidel in the eyes of all the others.
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Ayesha Jalal (The Struggle for Pakistan: A Muslim Homeland and Global Politics)
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The ocean floor had identifiable formations such as the continental shelf near the continents' landmass. Here it is generally thought of as that part of the continent that is underwater. Perhaps it could be better thought of as that part that corresponds to the area of the mainland between the beach and the point where the continent falls off into the abyss. Other terms include the seabed, seafloor, sea floor, or ocean floor which is the bottom of the ocean. If this area were to be dry it would include many of the same features found on land, such as mountain ranges and flat plains. Some of these mountains penetrate the surface to become islands. The Hawaiian and Caribbean islands are examples of this. In the Atlantic Ocean the mid-Atlantic riff also has many examples such as Iceland, the Azores Madeira, Ascension Island and Saint Helena. These islands follow a seismic crack or fault line between adjacent tectonic plates. It runs 24,855 miles, mostly underwater, from the Polar Regions in both the northern and southern hemispheres. There is a concern that as more ice melts due to global warming some of the lands near the ocean, including entire islands, will relatively soon become flooded, Coastal Florida is definitely an area of concern, however politicians have not yet noticed!
Usually a seabed describes the Seafloor and its characteristics such as the type of sediment, sand or stones covering it. Some scientists differentiate the Ocean floor from the Sea bottom, by the water over it such as that of an Ocean a Gulf or a Sea. Although it can be made to sound complicated these nouns are basically synonymous and in most cases can be used interchangeably.
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Hank Bracker
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Poverty and starvation are closely related to each other, without quite being mutually reinforcing. Although the poor may lack everything else, the last thing left to them is enough food to keep body and soul together. Not all poor people go hungry, and not all starving people are poor. Poverty as a concept embraces more. Societies have their own definitions of “the poor”; people who are not poor engage in discourse about those who are and make them recipients of their charity. In comparison with developed industrial societies, all premodern societies, whatever their cultural characteristics, were poor. But modern economies have not ended poverty—which is one reason why the achievements of “modernity” should not be celebrated too smugly.
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Jürgen Osterhammel (The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (America in the World Book 20))
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It is my argument that American liberalism is a totalitarian political religion, but not necessarily an Orwellian one. It is nice, not brutal. Nannying, not bullying. But it is definitely totalitarian--or "holistic", if you prefer--in that liberalism today sees no realm of human life that is beyond political significance, from what you eat to what you smoke to what you say. Sex is political. Food is political. Sports, entertainment, your inner motives and outer appearance, all have political salience for liberal fascists. Liberals place their faith in priestly experts who know better, who plan, exhort, badger, and scold. They try to use science to discredit traditional notions of religion and faith, but they speak the language of pluralism and spirituality to defend "nontraditional" beliefs. Just as with classical fascism, liberal fascists speak of a "Third Way" between right and left where all good things go together and all hard choices are "false choices".
The idea that there are no hard choices--that is, choices between competing goods--is religious and totalitarian because it assumes that all good things are fundamentally compatible. The conservatives or classical liberal vision understands that life is unfair, that man is flawed, and that the only perfect society, the only real utopia, waits for us in the next life.
Liberal fascism differs from classical fascism in many ways. I don't deny this. Indeed, it is central to my point. Fascisms differ from each other because they grow out of different soil. What unites them are their emotional or instinctual impulses, such as the quest for community, the urge to "get beyond" politics, a faith in the perfectibility of man and the authority of experts, and an obsession with the aesthetics of youth, the cult of action, and the need for an all powerful state to coordinate society at the national or global level. Most of all, they share the belief--what I call the totalitarian temptation--that with the right amount of tinkering we can realize the utopian dream of "creating a better world".
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Jonah Goldberg (Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning)
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...offshore is, almost by definition, the equivalent of the smoke-filled room, where business always gets done outside of, and indeed in opposition to, the democratic process. They operate according to the Golden Rule: whoever has the gold, makes the rules.
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Nicholas Shaxson (The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer)
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The argument for a lower tax rate on capital income—an argument supported by many economists—runs as follows: (1) economies need capital investment to grow and create new jobs; (2) capital investment by definition is risky (you could lose it all); and (3) therefore, a lower rate of tax on potential gains is necessary to encourage people to make those essential, but risky, investments.
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T.R. Reid (A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System)
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The widest definition of “wealthy” is in India, where a 1% wealth tax kicks in for anybody whose net worth is more than 3 million rupees, which comes to about $45,000. (In India, that still means a small percentage of the population.)
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T.R. Reid (A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System)
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U-turn for climate change, not possible; right turn, with or by right drivers, definitely is.
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Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (Climate Flip - Climate Risk Reporting In Banks)
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We could add privilege theory to Žižek’s long list of fake left ist “radicals” who bombard the existing system. As with “ Médecins sans frontières , Greenpeace, feminist and anti-racist campaigns,” privilege theory runs the risk of falling prey to what Žižek names “interpassivity”: the risk of “doing things not in order to achieve something, but to prevent something from really happening, really changing. All this frenetic humanitarian, Politically Correct, etc. activity fi ts the formula of ‘Let’s go on changing something all the time so that, globally, things will remain the same!’ ” The problem with privilege theory—especially as vulgarized in liberal universities—is that it ends up becoming “an empty gesture which obliges no one to do anything definite.” White liberal multiculturalists put on display their “progressive” leanings by calling for inclusivity and tolerance, parading their own self-critique—in a pleasure-ridden act of virtue signaling—as a model for others to follow. Whiteness or white privilege is treated as a reified thing that could be singled out and denounced, and not as “a set of power relations,” as Charles W. Mills insightfully puts it.
Privilege-checking does not necessarily translate into campus radicalism. It remains utopian and impotent when it fails to confront capitalism itself: “The true utopia is the belief that the existing global system can reproduce itself indefinitely; the only way to be truly ‘realistic’ is to think what, within the coordinates of this system, cannot but appear as impossible.” The advocates of privilege theory are today’s “true utopians.” They muzzle ideology critique, believing that gradualist reform is the key to social transformation. But privilege theory’s antiracist insights are diluted, never really touching the reality of domination and exploitation, never “demanding ‘impossible’ changes of the system itself.
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Zahi Zalloua (Žižek on Race: Toward an Anti-Racist Future)
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Every technological development that has brought us to our industrialized, urbanized present must be reevaluated to make today’s greentech work. But by far the biggest challenge is the very existence of cities themselves. All are by definition densely populated, while greentech by definition is not dense.
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Peter Zeihan (The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization)
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As the doubly vaccinated overwhelmed Israeli hospitals, the government announced in August a new plan for coping with its “Pandemic of the Vaccinated.” Israel said it will “update” its definition of “full vaccination” to require three, or even four, injections. “We are updating what it means to be vaccinated,” said Israel’s COVID czar, Salman Zarka.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
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WGRQHNKJOZ
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How Lithuanian we all felt,” Gitanas said, “when we could point to the Soviets and say: No, we’re not like that. But to say, No, we are not free-market, no, we are not globalized—this doesn’t make me feel Lithuanian. This makes me feel stupid and Stone Age. So how do I be a patriot now? What positive thing do I stand for? What is the positive definition of my country?
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Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
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In retrospect, his ambition to become an actual global dictator definitely should have been a red flag.
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Naomi Kritzer (Catfishing on CatNet (CatNet, #1))
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Anthropology should be required for citizenship
for people who are native-born because it helps them
to understand the world we live in, the country we live
in, the histories we have. People really don’t know much
about their own culture, their own country. For instance,
people really don’t know to what extent the United
States has mistreated its own native peoples. In my home
state of California, we had veritable genocide that lasted
from the period of the gold rush to the first decade of the
twentieth century. We have never really confronted and
acknowledged that. To move forward, we have to face our
complicated history with indigenous genocide, slavery,
and eugenics applied to immigrants in the 1920s as well.
Our history is not all negative, of course. I love to travel
across the country by car every few years to meet with
and talk with Americans from different parts of the country. There is also a lot to be proud of in being an American. But we do have to understand how our nation came
into its present form. We’re no different from any other
country. All nations are born in violence. But our role is
to make them less violent, make them more viable, make
them more equitable. That’s where anthropology comes
in. I think anthropology helps us to look and question
what Virginia Woolf called “unreal loyalties” — loyalties
to a particular definition of an ethnic group or an origin
story. Instead, anthropology helps us to understand and
engage the richness, complexity, and conflict involved in
making the United States. In this way anthropology can
help us become better Americans.
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Kenneth J. Guest (Cultural Anthropology: A Toolkit for a Global Age)
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The truest definition of civilization—a civilized society with a civilized government—is a world without war, for it has become unified by global democracy; not at the hands of a calculating minority, but by will of the People for a more perfect union, drawn together by ideas like those in the Declaration of Independence. The promise of civilization is the escape from the primal hunt, and the development of a society beyond, not against primal nature.” ~Definition of a Civilized Society
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Matthew Holbert (Economy of The Planetary Organism: A New Economic Paradigm)
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Smee worked both in theory and in the laboratory to explain the electrochemical basis of vision, sensation, memory, logic, and the origination and recombination of ideas. He believed that the mental powers of animals, human beings, and mechanisms were different not in kind but in degree. His definition of consciousness has seen scant improvement in 150 years. “When an image is produced by an action upon the external senses, the actions on the organs of sense concur with the actions in the brain; and the image is then a Reality. When an image occurs to the mind without a corresponding simultaneous action of the body, it is called a Thought. The power to distinguish between a thought and a reality is called Consciousness,” he wrote in his Principles of the Human Mind deduced from Physical Laws, published in 1849.
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George Dyson (Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence (Helix Books))
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Because I am a professor, I will later give dry, dense, detailed defini-tions for globalization and media. But for now, a perfectly good definition of globalization is anytime anyone does anything anywhere across borders. And a perfectly good definition of media is anything people use to communicate. Those definitions work because they emphasize people and human action.
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Jack Lule (Globalization and Media: Global Village of Babel)
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Question: Do the machines depicted in the economy of The Matrix produce value? The answer, of course, depends on what value means and how it differs from price. One definition of value is the price towards which the actual price tends under normal market conditions. Another derives from the idea that the value of things reflects the true costs of producing them. One thing is certain: just like love, poetry, porn and beauty, one knows value when one sees it, even if one finds it impossible to define it analytically.
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Yanis Varoufakis (The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy (Economic Controversies))
“
The emergence of life and intelligence from less-alive and less-intelligent components has happened at least once. Emergent behavior is that which cannot be predicted through analysis at any level simpler than that of the system as a whole. Explanations of emergence, like simplifications of complexity, are inherently illusory and can only be achieved by sleight of hand. This does not mean that emergence is not real. Emergent behavior, by definition, is what’s left after everything else has been explained. “Emergence offers a way to believe in physical causality while simultaneously maintaining the impossibility of a reductionist explanation of thought,” wrote W. Daniel Hillis, a computer architect who believes that architecture and programming can only go so far, after which intelligence has to be allowed to evolve on its own. “For those who fear mechanistic explanations of the human mind, our ignorance of how local interactions produce emergent behavior offers a reassuring fog in which to hide the soul.”33 Although individual computers and individual computer programs are developing the elements of artificial intelligence, it is in the larger networks (or the network at large) that we are developing a more likely medium for the emergence of the Leviathan of artificial mind.
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George Dyson (Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence (Helix Books))
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How can a radical scepticism about the state be squared with a religious dedication to the notion that market outcomes are, by definition, optimal?
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Yanis Varoufakis (The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy (Economic Controversies))
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This polarization has an unmistakably global dimension to it. Even in the small towns where folks bicker with one another about how to run the schools, the local issues and rivalries are overshadowed by a general feeling that all social orders—definitely including small-town America—are being drawn into something much larger.
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Walter Truett Anderson (Reality Isn't What It Used to Be: Theatrical Politics, Ready-to-Wear Religion, Global Myths, Primitive Chic, and Other Wonders of the Postmodern World)
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Since rarity is one of the most definitive qualities of luxury, brands can communicate this by not advertising a price. Often by stating “price on request” or “subject to availability” is indicative of rarity.
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Adriaan Brits (Luxury Brand Marketing: The globalization of luxury brand cults)
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In the competitive world of money management, performance is measured not by absolute returns but the returns relative to some benchmark. For stocks these benchmarks include the S&P 500 Index, the Wilshire 5000, global stock indexes, or the latest “style” indexes popular on Wall Street. But there is a crucially important difference about investing compared with virtually any other competitive activity: Most of us have no chance of being as good as the group of individuals who practice for hours to hone their skills. But anyone can be as good as the average investor in the stock market with no practice at all. The
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Jeremy J. Siegel (Stocks for the Long Run: The Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long-Term Investment Strategies)
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Finance is the circulatory system of any country, as well as of the global economy. A smoothly functioning system is central to national growth and prosperity, to international trade, international economic growth and development, and to fewer global crashes than otherwise would take place. But few financial systems can operate in a vacuum; given porous borders, they are always linked to, and influenced by, other national systems. Thus, they are truly borderless. They are therefore the very definition of globalization. The global financial system allows the world to grow faster because it channels savings—excess money—into places where the money is needed, to facilitate trade, for example, or to build roads, ports, bridges, or new companies. Global finance is also precarious because problems in one part of the world can spread like a contagious disease. Mayer Amschel Rothschild was one of the great pioneers of figuring out how to expand the possibilities of global finance and also how to deal with the consequences of the periodic crises that it spawns. The
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Jeffrey E. Garten (From Silk to Silicon: The Story of Globalization Through Ten Extraordinary Lives)
“
End June 2012 In response to Dr. Arius’ questions for his research, I wrote: Dr. A.S., As always it is a delight to receive your emails. I’ll be more than happy to answer your questions. I’ll respond to them one at a time. Please bear with me if my answers are lengthy at times. If I veer off into a tangent, please feel free to eliminate or edit my response. I’m eager to find out the results your research will yield when you are done with the survey. I’m ready to begin. Question one: * In “Initiation,” you said that as far as you can remember, even as a baby, you disliked your father. What was it that you didn’t like about the man? Did he have a certain smell that repelled you or something conscious or subconscious that blocked your connection towards him? Answers: Although I cannot provide you with definitive answers, I’ll do my best to remember how I felt when I was with my dad. a) Mr. S.S. Foong was a heavy smoker since the day I was born. I presume as a baby, the cigarette smell on his person repelled me. His aggressively loud booming voice did nothing to my gentle ears, either. Although he never shouted at me when I was a child, his stern demeanor deterred me from wanting to be near him. Moreover, his angry reprimands toward his subordinates when they had done nothing wrong challenged my respect for the man I called Father. b) Maybe unconsciously I was imbued with a glamorized portrayal of the “ideal” family from western magazines, movies, and periodicals of the mid-20th century. I wanted a father whom I could look up to: a strong, kind man who understands the needs of his family and children. But this was a Hollywood invention. It doesn’t exist, or it exists empirically in a small sector of the global population. c) Since my dad was seldom at home (he was with his mistress and their children), it was difficult to have a loving relationship with the man, especially when he roared and rebuked me for my effeminate behavior over which I had no control. I was simply being who I was. His negative criticisms damaged my ego badly. d) I could not relate to his air of superiority toward my mother. I resented that aspect of my father. I swore to myself that I would not grow up to be like my old man.
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Young (Unbridled (A Harem Boy's Saga, #2))
“
test3 defines the sin function as a keyword argument, with its default value being a reference to the sin function within the math module. While we still do need to find a reference to this function within the module, this is only necessary when the test3 function is first defined. After this, the reference to the sin function is stored within the function definition as a local variable in the form of a default keyword argument. As mentioned previously, local variables do not need a dictionary lookup to be found; they are stored in a very slim array that has very fast lookup times. Because of this, finding the function is quite fast! While these effects are an interesting result of the way namespaces in Python are managed, test3 is definitely not “Pythonic.” Luckily, these extra dictionary lookups only start to degrade performance when they are called a lot (i.e., in the innermost block of a very fast loop, such as in the Julia set example). With this in mind, a more readable solution would be to set a local variable with the global reference before the loop is started. We’ll still have to do the global lookup once whenever the function is called, but all the calls to that function in the loop will be made faster. This speaks to the fact that even minute slowdowns in code can be amplified if that code is being run millions of times. Even though a dictionary lookup may only take several hundred nanoseconds, if we are looping millions of times over this lookup it can quickly add up. In fact, looking at Example 4-10 we see a 9.4% speedup simply by making the sin function local to the tight loop that calls it.
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Micha Gorelick (High Performance Python: Practical Performant Programming for Humans)
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Many in China already believe that U.S. policy is, in fact, to weaken China from within and to constrain Beijing’s options abroad. Xi’s China has deep reservations about the long-term strategic intentions of the United States towards their country. Beijing does not believe the United States will happily surrender its current dominant position in the regional and global order and therefore concludes that Washington is actively pursuing a policy of containment to deny China international policy space. Chinese hardliners also conclude that this policy of containment abroad is matched by a parallel U.S. policy of undermining the legitimacy of the CCP at home. This deeply realist conclusion in Beijing about U.S. policy is matched by Washington’s conclusions about China’s operational strategy in the region and the world. The United States concludes that China is actively pursuing a policy based on Xi’s statement that the people of Asia should manage Asian security. Washington also concludes that this, by definition, is designed to exclude the United States and that the objective of Chinese operational strategy is to push the United States out of the security architecture of the region, to be replaced with a Chinese sphere of influence across East Asia.
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Anonymous
“
The proceedings of these ecumenical councils remind me of the experience of sitting down at a table before a large, thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle. Many of us know how frustrating it can be to keep trying piece after piece that looks like it should fit, but it doesn’t. I have even been guilty of trying to force a piece into the wrong space, even though I know only one will be a true fit. Eventually, I find the proper puzzle piece that provides an exact fit. Likewise, the delegates to the Council of Nicea and the Council of Chalcedon were seeking to be faithful to the hundreds of Christological “pieces” found in the texts of Scriptures. It was their unenviable task to put the whole “picture” of Christ together for the very first time in such a way as to find a perfect match for every piece. At times, various groups presented “pieces” they believed were a proper fit regarding the humanity or deity or natures or wills of Christ, but, in the end, each was declared to be improper fits. The proceedings of these councils did more to declare which pieces were not true pieces of the puzzle and should be discarded, than to provide a final, definitive statement of Christology that would silence all future discussions. We may know that the “Arius,” “Nestorius,” and “Eutyches” pieces do not fit the Christological puzzle, but this is not to say that a final and complete picture emerged.
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Timothy C. Tennent (Theology in the Context of World Christianity: How the Global Church Is Influencing the Way We Think about and Discuss Theology)
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By this definition we are in the middle of a revolution: something wider than a pure political overthrow and narrower than the classic social revolutions of the twentieth century. Out of the very values and practices of free-market capitalism—individualism, choice, respect for human rights, the network, the flattened hierarchy—the masses have developed a new collective practice. They can bypass and supersede the machinery of power via, as Gorz predicted, an ‘alternative network of relations’.
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Paul Mason (Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions)
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Nierenberg was a man of strong will and even stronger opinions—a good talker but not always a good listener. Some colleagues said that the old adage about famous physicists definitely applied to him: he was sometimes in error but never in doubt. And he was fiercely competitive, often debating until his adversaries simply gave up.
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Naomi Oreskes (Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming)
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Imagine what you can give in these areas of the Twelve Areas of Balance: 9.YOUR CAREER. What are your visions for your career? What level of competence do you want to achieve and why? How would you like to improve your workplace or company? What contribution to your field would you like to make? If your career does not currently seem to contribute anything meaningful to the world, take a closer look—is that because the work is truly meaningless or does it just not have meaning to you? What career would you like to get into? 10.YOUR CREATIVE LIFE. What creative activities do you love to do or what would you like to learn? It could be anything from cooking to singing to photography (my own passion) to painting to writing poetry to developing software. What are some ways you can share your creative self with the world? 11.YOUR FAMILY LIFE. Picture yourself being with your family not as you think you “should” be but in ways that fill you with happiness. What are you doing and saying? What wonderful experiences are you having together? What values do you want to embody and pass along? What can you contribute to your family that is unique to you? Keep in mind that your family doesn’t have to be a traditional family—ideas along those lines are often Brules. “Family” may be cohabiting partners, a same-sex partner, a marriage where you decided not to have children, or a single life where you consider a few close friends as family. Don’t fall into society’s definition of family. Instead, create a new model of reality and think of family as those whom you truly love and want to spend time with. 12.YOUR COMMUNITY LIFE. This could be your friends, your neighborhood, your city, state, nation, religious community, or the world community. How would you like to contribute to your community? Looking at all of your abilities, all of your ideas, all of the unique experiences you’ve had that make you the person you are, what is the mark you want to leave on the world that excites and deeply satisfies you? For me, it’s reforming global education for our children. What is it for you? This brings us to Law 8. Law 8: Create a vision for your future. Extraordinary minds create a vision for their future that is decidedly their own and free from expectations of the culturescape. Their vision is focused on end goals that strike a direct chord with their happiness.
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Vishen Lakhiani (The Code of the Extraordinary Mind: 10 Unconventional Laws to Redefine Your Life and Succeed On Your Own Terms)
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Possibly, the entire world has become a victim of chemical and biological warfare by the sadists and evil-minded ones. Indeed, such practices will definitely, and continuously, in its ways, now and after, destroy this planet and humanity ruthlessly.
Therefore, the world should forbid the medication of homeopathic medicines by homeopathic doctors, who give them in their practice offices, because it is the utmost danger to the patients as they remain unaware of the accuracy and authenticity of that. In such ways, victimization is possible by criminals and even international intelligence agencies to harm the health of their opponents in whatever ways and reasons.
All homeopathic medicines should be delivered through official and licensed pharmacies so patients can stay secure and safe from suspicious and disqualified subjects and figures. As a fact, the present method of medication carries severe risks, as it fails to provide information about its ingredients, legal name, and expiration date. Indeed, deliberately or not, homeopathy doctors may become life-threatening to those who have problems and are in conflict with dictatorships in several countries.
Homeopathy and other natural treatments are not controlled and observed sufficiently and accurately, which may result in grave consequences.
In this regard, I expressed concerns that I physically faced and suffered from. I believe that the authorities of the global states will understand and investigate the issue of biological warfare honestly on a wide scale to stop and eliminate the perpetrators against humanity for their evil purposes.
It is the core responsibility of all states in the world to take immediate action in this regard to save their people from life-threatening activities and realize the real concept and context of humanity, protecting the victims of biological weapons and warfare.
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Ehsan Sehgal
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One of the hegemonic contexts of blackmailing is also known as a Veto; surprisingly, the juristic ideology accepts and respects that; consequently, peace collapses and dies under that.
The veto is such a privilege that disregards and prevails the majority vote and consensus and all rules.
The exact definition of veto disregards the small and the developed states, and it is also a visible idiocy of the member states of the United Nations that they confer a veto right on those powers that are already superpowers of the world. Such states exercise their hegemony and devious interests to oppress and victimize weak states. Change is necessary to eliminate judicial bigotry and unfairness, global racism, and unjust international conduct for the sake of peace and prosperity in every society.
World peace stays a dream and is impossible until the veto power holders become unable to practice veto dragon since that causes injustice, wars, and destruction.
The UN Security Council is such a place or venue, where the veto dominant states and supremacists delineate, stipulate, and arbitrate the rules, with its motives, and penetrate or violate the rules of law and precepts, is not the infraction and duality, whereas, it is true!
A veto is a crime that is unpalatable because it ignores rules, fairness, consensus, and even global peace.
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Ehsan Sehgal
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As you move along the spectrum, the market-entry vehicles become more expensive, riskier, and require a greater time commitment
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Craig Maginness (Go Glocal: The Definitive Guide to Success in Entering International Markets)
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Everyone gets excited about making sales in a new market and loses sight of the real goal, which is to earn an acceptable return on the company’s investment.
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Craig Maginness (Go Glocal: The Definitive Guide to Success in Entering International Markets)
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The key to making money in this context, then, is understanding the financial structure of your business.
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Craig Maginness (Go Glocal: The Definitive Guide to Success in Entering International Markets)
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Measure twice, cut once applies as much to international strategy as it does to carpentry.
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Craig Maginness (Go Glocal: The Definitive Guide to Success in Entering International Markets)
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What really counts in a new market is not your past successes but your adaptability and learning capacity.
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Craig Maginness (Go Glocal: The Definitive Guide to Success in Entering International Markets)
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Joint ventures thrive not just on paper agreements but on shared visions and complementary strengths.
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Craig Maginness (Go Glocal: The Definitive Guide to Success in Entering International Markets)
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The spectrum of market-entry vehicles is vast, from short-term plays using domestic distributors to sell internationally, to long-term strategies like setting up foreign operations. Understanding the cost, risk, and time commitment involved as you move along this spectrum is crucial, as it determines not only the potential return on your investment but also the complexity of disengagement should you choose to exit the market.
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Craig Maginness (Go Glocal: The Definitive Guide to Success in Entering International Markets)
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I've learned about this need for communication and connection with different departments from personal experience; in fact, this is one of the areas in this book where my knowledge comes not from my success, but from my failure. Fairly early in my career, I had the credit manager of our company come into my office with his hair on fire, wanting to know why I had just agreed to a distribution deal that had 120-day terms. If I'd been thinking further ahead and discussed it with him beforehand, this wouldn’t have been an issue. Fortunately, we talked it through and made it work, but it took some begging, genuine understanding, and empathy to make sure I could repair that relationship.
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Craig Maginness (Go Glocal: The Definitive Guide to Success in Entering International Markets)
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The last great hope of humankind, I believe, lies not in governmental interventions or global treaties but in international business. It is here, in the web of personal and corporate relationships that crisscross borders and time zones, that we find our best chance for a peaceful and prosperous world. Every hand we shake, every deal we close, every bridge we build between cultures and economies holds more promise than a hundred resolutions passed in the halls of the United Nations.
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Craig Maginness (Go Glocal: The Definitive Guide to Success in Entering International Markets)
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The complexity of managing an international business can be likened to playing a game of chess on several boards at once. Each country represents a different game board, and each move you make has consequences not just on that board but potentially affects the others. The successful international manager must therefore be a master of strategy and an excellent multitasker, constantly aware of changes on multiple fronts.
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Craig Maginness (Go Glocal: The Definitive Guide to Success in Entering International Markets)
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As we explore the strategies for entering foreign markets, it becomes apparent that the differences in legal environments, cultural norms, and business practices require a high level of adaptability and foresight. For instance, what works in one country might be completely ineffective or even illegal in another, making the need for localized knowledge and expertise paramount.
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Craig Maginness (Go Glocal: The Definitive Guide to Success in Entering International Markets)
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Building relationships across cultures is much more than just a business necessity; it is an art form that demands sensitivity, patience, and an open mind. A true global leader sees beyond mere transactions to the building of long-term partnerships that respect and honor the diversity of practices and values.
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Craig Maginness (Go Glocal: The Definitive Guide to Success in Entering International Markets)
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Economic theories teach us about the efficiency of markets, but when it comes to international business, it's the inefficiencies that often create the greatest opportunities. Spotting these inefficiencies requires a keen eye for detail and an understanding of local consumer behaviors that only comes with experience.
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Craig Maginness (Go Glocal: The Definitive Guide to Success in Entering International Markets)
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There is also a risk in some markets of a significant devaluation of the local currency. For example, if the country experiences a financial crisis and devalues its currency to the point that your goods are no longer competitively priced, you can lose your market position overnight. There are no easy answers when it comes to getting paid for international sales but planning in advance beats learning hard lessons after the fact. Choose the solutions that work best for your company and prepare for the implications of those choices. The best strategy is to do the due diligence on your new customers.
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Craig Maginness (Go Glocal: The Definitive Guide to Success in Entering International Markets)
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Marketing in a new language presents another set of challenges when doing business abroad. Not only will marketing staff need to translate the company’s literature—brochures, manuals, and more—into the local language, they’ll also need to translate parts of your website or set up a new website entirely. When considering what to translate, keep in mind that a new set of customers may have different preferences for how they receive information.
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Craig Maginness (Go Glocal: The Definitive Guide to Success in Entering International Markets)
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If your business success depends in some way on patents or trademarks you hold, you’ll want to research intellectual property law in the market you’re considering. You’ll need to refile those trademarks and patents, but in some countries, being able to set up and protect your intellectual property can be maddeningly difficult. Even if you’re able to file the paperwork, the practical protection of your property is another matter.
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Craig Maginness (Go Glocal: The Definitive Guide to Success in Entering International Markets)
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So they expanded the definition, and also they began giving the anti-HIV drugs to people who were in fact not even sick, but merely positive on the HIV test. And in that case, of course, when they finally became sick enough from the AIDS drugs they were called ‘AIDS patients
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
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WHO––in a sleazy switcheroo––changed the definition of Class 6 “pandemic” deleting the words and the requirement for “mass deaths around the globe.” “You could now have a pandemic with zero deaths,”66 explained Michael Fumento in Forbes magazine.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
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The PCR test could not identify active HIV infection. Mullis, who invented the tests, pointed out that the PCR was capable of finding HIV signals in large segments of the population who suffered no threat from HIV and had no live HIV virus in their bodies. Researchers naturally found harmless HIV DNA detritus in people with a constellation of other diseases. All those unrelated ailments soon became incorporated beneath the umbrella definition of AIDS.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
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Before the management of the company just described could become fast innovators, they had to develop and embrace a new philosophy of organizing around time. The new philosophy is embedded in these eleven key principles: Time is the key performance variable to be managed to attain improved cost and quality. Time benchmarks are set by the performance of competitors and, if faster, by what is technologically possible. The support functions necessary to advance the development process are actively managed to be “invisible.” Their need is to be anticipated; they are to be invested in and kept up-to-date. They are never to be allowed to slow the development process. Each program is to be managed and executed by a small, dedicated, decision-empowered, and experienced team. Team members have common goals and are measured and evaluated as part of a team. The development programs are to have four steps, and the company will organize itself around these steps: Planning and preparation Product definition Design development Manufacturing ramp-up Product improvement The objective of planning and preparation is to avoid having to invent in the middle of the development process—make unknowns be knowns. After definition, the product specification is frozen. The definition is committed to and not allowed to be changed. The improvement phase is to be used for costs and feature enhancements. Functional expertise resides in the development program. Manufacturing and design resources are full-time participants in the definition team. Manufacturing resources are full time participants in the design team. Team members are collocated. Senior management reviews are few. The role of senior management is to ensure that the program teams have the appropriate resources, incentives and environment to execute their tasks quickly. New programs are generated continuously, at regular market-driven intervals, and incorporate more incremental advances and fewer “great leaps forward.
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George Stalk Jr. (Competing Against Time: How Time-Based Competition is Reshaping Global Mar)
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Note: Whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump becomes president of the USA, there will be changes; nothing nor the world will be able to enjoy peace and human rights. However, one change will be definite if Kamala takes the black presidential oath in the White House atmosphere. A man of accusations, Trump should enjoy the retirement of life with beauties. An open letter, which Ehsan Sehgal wrote to him, is republished in Medium to realize his political character and role.
Dear President of the USA, Donald Trump
Your Excellency,
Equality, justice, harmony, and love, within the concept and context of security and respect, are for the entire humanity, not only for the USA and its people. Global peace lies in a step that pulls out your troops from the Muslim States and stops interfering with its systems and way of life; all terrorists will disappear, and peace shall prevail.
One should realize the atrocities of Israel against Palestinians’ determination and India against Kashmiris that the United Nations and its Security Council failed to resolve and solve those disputes under the umbrella of the USA. Consequently, each one of us faces the consequences.
You, as a leader of a great nation, ought to be great and noble. It is possible if you change your distinctive thoughts and policies, you may change human history, becoming the historical leader of the entire humanity that suffers from injustice, hunger, and death.
As far as I know, the Pakistan Armed Forces have devotedly and significantly sacrificed along with the Armed Forces of the USA for global peace, so never degrade your national pride by ignoring, denying, and forgetting the sacrifice of Pakistani men and women, which they are still paying. You should cooperate instead of becoming influenced by the opposing third party to accuse Pakistan. They are a peaceful nation and are determined to stand along with the US forces to eliminate all sorts of terrorists for world peace. God bless you.
Ehsan Sehgal
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Ehsan Sehgal
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The outcome of value-oriented implementation stages circles back and exerts influence over the problem definition stages. As a result, facts and values are intertwined within a research project even if that may not be obvious in silos.
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Marvin Cheung (5 Ideas from Global Diplomacy: System-wide Transformation Methods to Close the Compliance Gap and Advance the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals)
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The auditors reported a scene of pure chaos. “Drugs were given to the wrong babies, documents were altered, and there was infrequent follow-up, even though one third of the mothers were marked ‘abnormal’ in their charts at discharge. The infants who did receive follow-up care were, in many cases, small and alarmingly underweight. ‘It was thought to be likely that some, perhaps many, of these infants had serious health problems.’”16 When Westat chose a random sample of forty-three of those infants to examine, all of them had “adverse events” twelve months after the study terminated. Only eleven of them were HIV positive.17 When Westat confronted Dr. Jackson’s researchers with study discrepancies, they admitted that they routinely applied more lenient standards for their Black Ugandan subjects than FDA rules required for US safety studies.18 The PIs admitted to systematically downgrading standardized definitions of serious adverse events to adapt to “local standards.” Injuries that researchers would score as “serious” or “deadly” if they happened to white Americans became “minor” injuries when Black Africans were the victims. Under their relaxed rubric, clinical trials staff scored “life-threatening” injuries as “not serious.” When they reported them at all, NIAID classified mortalities among its African volunteers as “serious adverse events,” rather than “death.” NIAID’s Ugandan team had entirely neglected to report thousands of adverse events and at least fourteen deaths.19
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
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Then at a certain point, when really that sort of AIDS virtually ceased to exist, there came a new type of AIDS,” says John Lauritsen.106 “So they expanded the definition, and also they began giving the anti-HIV drugs to people who were in fact not even sick, but merely positive on the HIV test. And in that case, of course, when they finally became sick enough from the AIDS drugs they were called ‘AIDS patients.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
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IRCC Updates Guidance on Intra-Company Transferees Amid Canadian Immigration Changes: ESSE India Insights
On October 3, Immigration, Citizenship, and Refugees Canada (IRCC) introduced updated guidelines concerning Intra-Company Transferees (ICTs) under Canada's International Mobility Program. These updates are especially relevant for foreign nationals looking to transfer within multinational corporations to Canadian branches, as they clarify the criteria for eligibility and the assessment of specialized knowledge.
For individuals pursuing, including those engaging in work programs like the Global Talent Stream Canada, these changes have significant implications. These updates align with IRCC’s broader objective to decrease the proportion of temporary residents in Canada over the next three years. This is particularly important for those seeking assistance from Canada immigration consultants, especially those based in India, who are providing services for Canada PR consultancy.
Key Changes to the Intra-Company Transferee Program
The IRCC has refined the ICT program under section R205(a) of Canadian Interests – Significant Benefit. Transfers must now originate from an established foreign enterprise of a multinational corporation (MNC). The updates also clarify the definition of “specialized knowledge,” which is crucial for foreign workers applying for such roles. Furthermore, all ICT instructions have been consolidated onto a single page, streamlining the process for applicants and immigration consultants alike.
These changes don’t just affect ICT applicants but also extend to broader implications for those navigating the Canada PR process, including individuals using Canada immigration consultants in India or from other locations. Those applying through programs such as bcpnp, provincial nomination, or even looking to work and study in Canada for free should take these updates into consideration.
Free Trade Agreements and the International Mobility Program
The updates also encompass free trade agreements related to ICTs, including the Canada–United States–Mexico Agreement, Canada–Korea Free Trade Agreement, and Canada–European Union: Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement. These agreements simplify the Canada PR procedure for skilled workers, often allowing them to bypass the requirement for a Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA), which can be time-consuming. This simplification is beneficial for businesses and foreign nationals navigating the Canadian immigration system.
For those considering PR in Australia or Germany through the Global Talent Stream Australia or Global Talent Stream Germany, understanding the differences in immigration policies between countries is vital. As Canada refines its ICT program, both Australia PR and Germany PR processes have their own unique requirements, which can be managed with the help of Australia immigration consultants or Germany immigration consultants.
Impacts on Temporary Resident Programs and the Canadian Labour Market
In conjunction with the ICT updates, Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP), which involves LMIA-based work permits, is undergoing significant reforms. IRCC’s new measures aim to reduce temporary residents in Canada from 6.5% to 5% of the total population by 2026. These changes will be especially relevant for foreign nationals seeking permanent residency in Canada and for those applying for Canada Visa Consultancy Services, such as spouse visa consultants or tourist visa ETA applications.
Long-Term Outlook for Canadian Immigration
Looking ahead, IRCC’s reforms signify a strategic shift in Canada’s immigration framework. Key programs such as the Provincial Nominee Program (PNP), study permits, and post-graduation work permits (PGWPs) will be affected by these changes. For immigrants relying on Canada immigration consultants, staying informed about these updates is essential for making well-informed decisions.
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esse india