“
Being intelligent—being good with numbers, or being well educated, or even winning a Nobel Prize—is not a shortcut to global factual knowledge. Experts are experts only within their field.
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Hans Rosling (Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think)
“
We have to grasp, as Marx and Adam Smith did, that corporations are not concerned with the common good. They exploit, pollute, impoverish, repress, kill, and lie to make money. They throw poor people out of homes, let the uninsured die, wage useless wars for profit, poison and pollute the ecosystem, slash social assistance programs, gut public education, trash the global economy, plunder the U.S. Treasury and crush all popular movements that seek justice for working men and women. They worship money and power.
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”
Chris Hedges (Death of the Liberal Class)
“
I believe that sanitizing this aspect of the modern and ancient world is at the root of our troubles as a culture now. We're bred to be smug about how peaceful we are, so we can watch television and feel safely distant from violence, when it is part of our makeup. That smugness means we don't feel we have to do anything about the violence we see, because it's obviously committed by people who aren't as educated or civilized as we are. By holding ourselves aloof from global and historical violence, we allow it to continue. If we are ever to survive as a species, we need to admit we are violent and find ways to ease the plight of the victims of violence worldwide. (No, invading a violent country and bombing it will not inspire its people to give violence up. Go figure.) We must face who we are and what creates violence: helplessness, envy, rage, even the drive to grab the good things of the world that are flaunted in the faces of the poor. We must take responsibility and protect each other from violence.
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Tamora Pierce
“
Any serious social, political, and economic change must include veganism.
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”
Gary L. Francione
“
The Kielburgers are extremely accomplished and educated people who have demonstrated that they know how to build an organization, sell a vision, and court powerful people. If they had wanted to make loads of money and eat caviar on a private yacht, they could have taken lucrative private-sector jobs and done just that. It is absurd to think that they instead decided to work sixteen-hour days for twenty-five years, spend hundreds of days per year apart from their families, and invest everything they had in building a global charity—all as a means to funnel money back to themselves.
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”
Tawfiq S. Rangwala (What WE Lost: Inside the Attack on Canada’s Largest Children’s Charity)
“
To really change the world, we have to help people change the way they see things. Global betterment is a mental process, not one that requires huge sums of money or a high level of authority. Change has to be psychological. So if you want to see real change, stay persistent in educating humanity on how similar we all are than different. Don't only strive to be the change you want to see in the world, but also help all those around you see the world through commonalities of the heart so that they would want to change with you. This is how humanity will evolve to become better. This is how you can change the world. The language of the heart is mankind's main common language.
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Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
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Saving the world requires saving democracy. That requires well-informed citizens. Conservation, environment, poverty, community, education, family, health, economy- these combine to make one quest: liberty and justice for all. Whether one's special emphasis is global warming or child welfare, the cause is the same cause. And justice comes from the same place being human comes from: compassion.
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Carl Safina (The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World)
“
5 Ways To Build Your Brand on Social Media:
1 Post content that add value
2 Spread positivity
3 Create steady stream of info
4 Make an impact
5 Be yourself
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Germany Kent
“
Your mission statement says Galer Street is based on global "connectitude." (You people don't just think outside the box, you think outside the dictionary!)
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Maria Semple (Where'd You Go, Bernadette)
“
We should always be clear that animal exploitation is wrong because it involves speciesism. And speciesism is wrong because, like racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-semitism, classism, and all other forms of human discrimination, speciesism involves violence inflicted on members of the moral community where that infliction of violence cannot be morally justified. But that means that those of us who oppose speciesism necessarily oppose discrimination against humans. It makes no sense to say that speciesism is wrong because it is like racism (or any other form of discrimination) but that we do not have a position about racism. We do. We should be opposed to it and we should always be clear about that.
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Gary L. Francione
“
In societies where incomes and educational levels are low, it is often far easier to get supporters to the polls based on a promise of an individual benefit rather than a broad programmatic agenda.
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Francis Fukuyama (Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy)
“
All it takes for generosity to flow is awareness. By actively pursuing awareness and knowledge, we can make choices that cause less harm and greater good to others in the global community of our shared earth.
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Zoe Weil (Most Good, Least Harm: A Simple Principle for a Better World and Meaningful Life)
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. . . to deny someone an education is not just a crime but a sin, because you are denying that person the opportunity to realize who he or she is meant to be.
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Firoozeh Dumas (Laughing Without an Accent: Adventures of a Global Citizen)
“
The routine expression of hatred for others is so common in the Arab world that it barely draws comment other than from the region’s often Western-educated liberal minority who have limited access to the platform of mass media.
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Tim Marshall (Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics)
“
I am opposed to animal welfare campaigns for two reasons. First, if animal use cannot be morally justified, then we ought to be clear about that, and advocate for no use. Although rape and child molestation are ubiquitous, we do not have campaigns for “humane” rape or “humane” child molestation. We condemn it all. We should do the same with respect to animal exploitation.
Second, animal welfare reform does not provide significant protection for animal interests. Animals are chattel property; they are economic commodities. Given this status and the reality of markets, the level of protection provided by animal welfare will generally be limited to what promotes efficient exploitation. That is, we will protect animal interests to the extent that it provides an economic benefit.
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Gary L. Francione
“
So it is always preferable to discuss the matter of veganism in a non-judgemental way. Remember that to most people, eating flesh or dairy and using animal products such as leather, wool, and silk, is as normal as breathing air or drinking water. A person who consumes dairy or uses animal products is not necessarily or usually what a recent and unpopular American president labelled an "evil doer.
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Gary L. Francione
“
We should never present flesh as somehow morally distinguishable from dairy. To the extent it is morally wrong to eat flesh, it is as morally wrong — and possibly more morally wrong — to consume dairy
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Gary L. Francione
“
...by tragic historical coincidence a period of abysmal under-educating in literacy has coincided with this unexpected explosion of global self-publishing. Thus people who don't know their apostrophe from their elbow are positively invited to disseminate their writings to anyone on the planet stupid enough to double-click and scroll.
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Lynne Truss (Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation)
“
Even if you think you are thinking and acting globally, there is always more to learn and know!
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Oscar Auliq-Ice
“
WONDERLAND
It is a person's unquenchable thirst for wonder
That sets them on their initial quest for truth.
The more doors you open, the smaller you become.
The more places you see and the more people you meet,
The greater your curiosity grows.
The greater your curiosity, the more you will wander.
The more you wander, the greater the wonder.
The more you quench your thirst for wonder,
The more you drink from the cup of life.
The more you see and experience, the closer to truth you become.
The more languages you learn, the more truths you can unravel.
And the more countries you travel, the greater your understanding.
And the greater your understanding, the less you see differences.
And the more knowledge you gain, the wider your perspective,
And the wider your perspective, the lesser your ignorance.
Hence, the more wisdom you gain, the smaller you feel.
And the smaller you feel, the greater you become.
The more you see, the more you love --
The more you love, the less walls you see.
The more doors you are willing to open,
The less close-minded you will be.
The more open-minded you are,
The more open your heart.
And the more open your heart,
The more you will be able to
Send and receive --
Truth and TRUE
Unconditional
LOVE.
”
”
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
“
A combination of unrealistic goals, unnecessarily pessimistic expectations, and the wrong incentives for teachers contributes to ensure that education systems in developing countries fail their two main tasks: giving everyone a sound basic set of skills, and identifying talent.
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Abhijit V. Banerjee (Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty)
“
Our world is now so complex, our technology and science so powerful, and our problems so global and interconnected that we have come to the limits of individual human intelligence and individual expertise.
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”
James Paul Gee (The Anti-Education Era: Creating Smarter Students through Digital Learning)
“
Millions of people work in global settings while viewing everything from their own cultural perspectives and assuming that all differences, controversy, and misunderstanding are rooted in personality. This is not due to laziness. Many well-intentioned people don’t educate themselves about cultural differences because they believe that if they focus on individual differences, that will be enough.
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Erin Meyer (The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business)
“
While some American education experts may say that all learning should be 'fun,' I personally believe that the word "fun' is the wrong word to use. Learning should be challenging, meaningful, rigorous, engrossing, interesting, and satisfying.
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Maya Thiagarajan (Beyond the Tiger Mom: East-West Parenting for the Global Age)
“
I argued earlier that clientelism is an early form of democracy: in societies with masses of poor and poorly educated voters, the easiest form of electoral mobilization is often the provision of individual benefits such as public-sector jobs, handouts, or political favors. This suggests that clientelism will start to decline as voters become wealthier. Not only does it cost more for politicians to bribe them, but the voters see their interests tied up with broader public policies rather than individual benefits.
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”
Francis Fukuyama (Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy)
“
We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements—transportation, communications, and all other industries; agriculture, medicine, education, entertainment, protecting the environment; and even the key democratic institution of voting—profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
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”
Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
“
What is your hands to make a difference in the world?
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”
Artika R. Tyner (The Lawyer as Leader: How to Plant People and Grow Justice)
“
For the mass prevention of disease, mass education is a key weapon.
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”
T.R. Reid (The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care)
“
Get healthy, get strong, get educated and informed, and start contributing to your own governance.
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”
Heather Marsh (Binding Chaos: Mass Collaboration on a Global Scale)
“
According to Project Drawdown, four of the most effective strategies for mitigating global warming are reducing food waste, educating girls, providing family planning and reproductive healthcare, and collectively shifting to a plant-rich diet. The benefits of these advancements extend far beyond the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, and their primary cost is our collective effort.
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”
Jonathan Safran Foer (We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast)
“
Limiting the power of government, in order to liberate the individual, was the great American revolutionary insight. Too much cooperation, avoiding conflict from ordinary people, these things aren’t acceptable in America although they may suit China, Indonesia, Britain, or Germany just fine. In America the absence of conflict is a sign of regression toward a global mean, hardly progress by our lights if you’ve seen much of the governance of the rest of the world where common people are crushed like annoying insects if they argue.
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”
John Taylor Gatto (The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling)
“
Scientists hope to dispel wrong views by better science education, and pundits hope to sway public opinion on issues such as Obamacare or global warming by presenting the public with accurate facts and expert reports
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
“
In the two years after No Logo came out, I went to dozens of teach-ins and conferences, some of them attended by thousands of people (tens of thousands in the case of the World Social Forum), that were exclusively devoted to popular education about the inner workings of global finance and trade. No topic was too arcane: the science of genetically modified foods, trade-related intellectual property rights, the fine print of bilateral trade deals, the patenting of seeds, the truth about certain carbon sinks. I sensed in these rooms a hunger for knowledge that I have never witnessed in any university class. It was as if people understood, all at once, that gathering this knowledge was crucial to the survival not just of democracy but of the planet. Yes, this was complicated, but we embraced that complexity because we were finally looking at systems, not just symbols.
”
”
Naomi Klein (No Logo)
“
Thus the chief purpose of art education for life is to help students understand something about themselves and others through art and thereby contribute to personal growth, social progress, and a sense of global community.
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Tom Anderson (Art for Life: Authentic Instruction in Art)
“
The notion that we should promote “happy” or “humane” exploitation as “baby steps” ignores that welfare reforms do not result in providing significantly greater protection for animal interests; in fact, most of the time, animal welfare reforms do nothing more than make animal exploitation more economically productive by focusing on practices, such as gestation crates, the electrical stunning of chickens, or veal crates, that are economically inefficient in any event. Welfare reforms make animal exploitation more profitable by eliminating practices that are economically vulnerable. For the most part, those changes would happen anyway and in the absence of animal welfare campaigns precisely because they do rectify inefficiencies in the production process. And welfare reforms make the public more comfortable about animal exploitation. The “happy” meat/animal products movement is clear proof of that.
We would never advocate for “humane” or "happy” human slavery, rape, genocide, etc. So, if we believe that animals matter morally and that they have an interest not only in not suffering but in continuing to exist, we should not be putting our time and energy into advocating for “humane” or “happy” animal exploitation.
”
”
Gary L. Francione
“
Yet like many other human traits that made sense in past ages but cause trouble in the modern age, the knowledge illusion has its downside. The world is becoming ever more complex, and people fail to realise just how ignorant they are of what’s going on. Consequently some who know next to nothing about meteorology or biology nevertheless propose policies regarding climate change and genetically modified crops, while others hold extremely strong views about what should be done in Iraq or Ukraine without being able to locate these countries on a map. People rarely appreciate their ignorance, because they lock themselves inside an echo chamber of like-minded friends and self-confirming newsfeeds, where their beliefs are constantly reinforced and seldom challenged.
Providing people with more and better information is unlikely to improve matters. Scientists hope to dispel wrong views by better science education, and pundits hope to sway public opinion on issues such as Obamacare or global warming by presenting the public with accurate facts and expert reports. Such hopes are grounded in a misunderstanding of how humans actually think. Most of our views are shaped by communal groupthink rather than individual rationality, and we hold on to these views out of group loyalty. Bombarding people with facts and exposing their individual ignorance is likely to backfire. Most people don’t like too many facts, and they certainly don’t like to feel stupid. Don’t be so sure that you can convince Tea Party supporters of the truth of global warming by presenting them with sheets of statistical data.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
“
Nowadays, being “connected” means 24/7 availability. Emailing, texting, Twittering, calling, keeping one’s website and Facebook status current seem essential to being and remaining relevant in the world. In addition to the positive impact of globally interconnecting humanity, the information era is also contributing to the creation of a high-tech, low-touch society. It is impacting language, the publishing world, education, and social revolts. Neurologists and other pundits, including Nicholas Carr in his Atlantic article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, point out the paradoxical downsides of not setting healthy boundaries or applying discipline to how we engage technology. Some have gone so far as to suggest that it is making us “spiritually stupid” by keeping us too distracted to participate in spiritual practices. But how about this: can using technology with mindfulness lead to beneficial social and spiritual connection?
”
”
Michael Bernard Beckwith (Life Visioning: A Transformative Process for Activating Your Unique Gifts and Highest Potential)
“
Wealth had made rigor optional in America. But everything had changed. In an automated, global economy, kids needed to be driven; then need to know how to adapt, since they would be doing it all their lives. They needed a culture of rigor.
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Amanda Ripley (The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way)
“
If we are ever going to see a paradigm shift, we have to be clear about how we want the present paradigm to shift.
We must be clear that veganism is the unequivocal baseline of anything that deserves to be called an “animal rights” movement. If “animal rights” means anything, it means that we cannot morally justify any animal exploitation; we cannot justify creating animals as human resources, however “humane” that treatment may be.
We must stop thinking that people will find veganism “daunting” and that we have to promote something less than veganism. If we explain the moral ideas and the arguments in favor of veganism clearly, people will understand. They may not all go vegan immediately; in fact, most won’t. But we should always be clear about the moral baseline. If someone wants to do less as an incremental matter, let that be her/his decision, and not something that we advise to do. The baseline should always be clear. We should never be promoting “happy” or “humane” exploitation as morally acceptable.
”
”
Gary L. Francione
“
Things are highly interdependent. The very concepts of “we” and “they” are becoming irrelevant. War is out of date because our neighbors are part of ourselves. We see this in economic, educational and environmental issues. Although we may have some ideological differences or other conflicts with our neighbor, economically and environmentally we share essentially the same country, and destroying our neighbor is destroying ourselves. It’s foolish.
”
”
Dalai Lama XIV (Illuminating the Path to Enlightenment: A Commentary on Atisha Dipamkara Shrijnana's A Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment and Lama Je Tsong Khapa's Lines of Experience)
“
The world of conspiracy theories is one where stupid people dismiss the expertise of highly qualified people, and attribute to these experts a wicked desire to lie to and gull the masses. In other words, they portray experts as sinister enemies of the people. Conspiracy theories reflect the increasingly prevalent notion that the average, uneducated person is always right – can always see the real truth of a situation – while the educated experts are always wrong because they are deliberately lying to the people to further a conspiracy by the elite against the people. It is increasingly being perceived as a “sin”, a crime, to be smart, to be an expert. Average people do not like smart people, do not trust them, and are happy to regard them as nefarious conspirators. They are constructing a fantasy world where the idiot is always right and honest, and anyone who opposes the idiot always wrong and dishonest. A global Confederacy of Dunces is being established, whose cretinous values are transmitted by bizarre memes that crisscross the internet at a dizzying speed, and which are always accepted uncritically as the finest nuggets of truth. Woe betide anyone who challenges the Confederacy. They will be immediately trolled.
”
”
Joe Dixon (Dumbocalypse Now: The First Dunning-Kruger President)
“
Finally, and even more seriously, I fear a return to the international climate that prevailed in the 1920s and '30s, when the United States withdrew from the global stage and countries everywhere pursued what they perceived to be their own interests without regard to larger and more enduring goals. When arguing that every age has its own Fascism, the Italian writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi added that the critical point can be reached “not just through the terror of police intimidation, but by denying and distorting information, by undermining systems of justice, by paralyzing the education system, and by spreading in a myriad subtle ways nostalgia for a world where order reigned.” If he is right (and I think he is), we have reason to be concerned by the gathering array of political and social currents buffeting us today—currents propelled by the dark underside of the technological revolution, the corroding effects of power, the American president’s disrespect for truth, and the widening acceptance of dehumanizing insults, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism as being within the bounds of normal public debate. We are not there yet, but these feel like signposts on the road back to an era when Fascism found nourishment and individual tragedies were multiplied millions-fold.
”
”
Madeleine K. Albright (Fascism: A Warning)
“
As we're told that 10 percent of all high school education will be computer-based by 2014 and rise to 50 percent by 2019, and as the PowerPoint throws up aphoristic bromides by the corporate heroes of the digitally driven 'global economy' -- the implication being that 'great companies' know what they're doing, while most schools don't -- and as we're goaded mercilessly to the conclusion that everything we are, know, and do is bound for the dustbin of history, I want to ask what kind of schooling Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had. Wasn't it at bottom the very sort of book-based, content-driven education that we declare obsolete in the name of their achievements?
”
”
Garret Keizer (Getting Schooled: The Reeducation of an American Teacher)
“
There is a different way forward. Artificial intelligence doesn’t have to be what it is today. We don’t need to accept the logic of unprecedented scale and consumption to achieve advancement and progress. So much of what our society actually needs—better health care and education, clean air and clean water, a faster transition away from fossil fuels—can be assisted and advanced with, and sometimes even necessitates, significantly smaller AI models and a diversity of other approaches. AI alone won’t be enough, either: We’ll also need more social cohesion and global cooperation, some of the very things being challenged by the existing vision of AI development.
”
”
Karen Hao (Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI)
“
Democracy, religion, education and terrorism have all become practicable norms all over the world – thanks to globalization
”
”
Tony Osborg (Can Nigeria Bake Her Own Bread?)
“
Von Köckritz’s entire higher education was free. She considers that perfectly normal—and in Europe, it is.
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”
T.R. Reid (The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care)
“
education tends to move individuals toward a more extreme version of the dominant cultural tendency.
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”
Erin Meyer (The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business)
“
Let history handle empires. Learn a thousand words and handle the conversation.
”
”
Angelika Regossi (In English as in Russian: 1000 words with explanations - ПО-АНГЛИЙСКИ КАК ПО-РУССКИ: 1000 слов с пояснениями)
“
Girls’ education, it turns out, has a dramatic bearing on global warming. Women with more years of education have fewer, healthier children and actively manage their reproductive health.
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”
Paul Hawken (Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming)
“
The issues the Panthers organized around fifty years ago are still with us. Our justice system is unjust. Police conduct in nonwhite neighborhoods generates systematic abuses. The middle class is shrinking. Our education system not only continues to fail poor children, it often propels them to prison. In addition to these continuing issues, there are new wrinkles. The spectacular rise in economic inequality—“99 percent of all new income today goes to the wealthiest 1 percent”12—has caused the barons at Davos, Switzerland, to note that the immense political power the 1 percent wield because of their control of resources is skewing society and creating instability. Scientists warn us our planet is in jeopardy due to global warming. The future is uncertain.
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”
Bobby Seale (Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers)
“
College costs money- a lot. Yet education in itself is not of much value. For example, we can look to the general public's almost complete disregard for anything that educated people have to say about global warming, shrinking oil reserves, pollution, or the threat of nuclear annihilation. But if all this is true, why does something as worthless as a college diploma cost so much money?
”
”
Bobby Henderson (The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster)
“
The tyranny of merit arises from more than the rhetoric of rising. It consists in a cluster of attitudes and circumstances that, taken together, have made meritocracy toxic. First, under conditions of rampant inequality and stalled mobility, reiterating the message that we are responsible for our fate and deserve what we get erodes solidarity and demoralizes those left behind by globalization. Second, insisting that a college degree is the primary route to a respectable job and a decent life creates a credentialist prejudice that undermines the dignity of work and demeans those who have not been to college; and third, insisting that social and political problems are best solved by highly educated, value-neutral experts is a technocratic conceit that corrupts democracy and disempowers ordinary
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”
Michael J. Sandel (The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?)
“
I saw the figure of 178 Billion wasted/stolen from the people of a country by its corrupt and inept government. Such a figure could truly transform the entire country; education, health, roads, schooling, entrepreneurial environment... of millions of people, rather than be secreted away as a few more 0000's in global bank accounts for the greeders.
We need to Rethink Public Service, Values, Ethics and Leadership.
”
”
Tony Dovale
“
This first generation of corporate barons left a lasting, if dubious, legacy: they made America more hierarchical, with new divisions between management and labor, between a professional class and everyday workers. They made the economy more centralized, consolidating power into a few mega-companies and their owners; they made it more globalized, keyed to international capital and trade. They diminished the voice of the ordinary citizen in society and politics in favor of educated, professionalized elites. In short, they gave America an entirely new political economy, what some historians have called corporate liberalism.
”
”
Josh Hawley
“
Beijing’s response has been to incarcerate huge numbers of Ui-ghurs in ‘re-education camps’. How many people are being held is known only to the Chinese authorities, but estimates range from 150,000 to 1 million.
”
”
Tim Marshall (Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics)
“
Psychologists at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, found that the better educated and wealthier a nation is, the less likely its population is to believe in a higher being. The Global Index of Religion and Atheism also assessed that poverty was a key indicator of a society’s tendency towards religion – so that poorer countries tend to be the most religious. The one exception to the rule? America. But in the strongly religious USA, despite the country’s wealth, there’s no universal healthcare, little job security, and a flimsy social welfare safety net. This means that the USA has a lot more in common with developing countries than she might like to think. Researchers from the University of British Columbia suggest that people are less likely to need the comfort of a god if they’re living somewhere stable, safe and prosperous.
”
”
Helen Russell (The Year of Living Danishly: Uncovering the Secrets of the World's Happiest Country)
“
You mean, let our most excellent Congress deal with this situation in the same way it has handled our other pressing national problems, such as global warming, terrorism, education, and our crumbling infrastructure?
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”
Douglas Preston (Beyond the Ice Limit (Gideon Crew, #4; Ice Limit #2))
“
Discrimination may occur out of a prejudice that is related to an individual's personal race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, political, belief system, educational or lack therein, culture, employment, or intellect.
”
”
Asa Don Brown
“
All these so-called bread-and-butter provisions (for job security, health care, child care, education, and housing) are fundamentally about creating a context in which the rampant economic insecurity of our age is addressed at the source. And that has everything to do with our capacity to cope with climate disruption, because the more secure people feel, knowing that their families will not want for food, medicine, and shelter, the less vulnerable they will be to the forces of racist demagoguery that will prey on the fears that invariably accompany times of great change. Put another way, this is how we are going to address the crisis of empathy in a warming world.
”
”
Naomi Klein (On Fire: The Case for the Green New Deal)
“
As it happens, the first souvenir I bought was a dried llama fetus. Revolting as it may sound, my poor stillborn llama is actually rather cute. Frozen in the fetal position and dried stiff like beef jerky, it has the gentle, smiling face of a camel and plenty of soft, if slightly formaldehyde-scented, fur. I bought the llama fetus partly because it horrified me, but also for educational purposes, so that my eight-year-old daughter Sophia could show it to her class. (She refused.)
Bolivians buy llama fetuses to ward off evil in its many guises. Bolivian miners—who, with a life expectancy of forty-five years, basically live their entire adult lives dying—look to llama fetuses for protection against dynamite explosions and the lung-destroying silicon particulates they inhale all day. Downing high-proof alcohol also helps. “The purer the alcohol, the purer the minerals I find,” one miner told me wryly.
”
”
Amy Chua (World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability)
“
Debt leveraging is a major reason why the United States and Britain have lost their industrial advantage. Debt-inflated costs for housing, education and other basic needs have priced their labor out of markets abroad and at home.
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”
Michael Hudson (Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy)
“
That day was an education for me. I'll never forget it. Standing in teh doorway, watching the reaction of the men and women gathered there, I witnessed the poewrful effect of unwavering, uncomplaining, uncompromising leadership. It changed me. It was one of those moments when you say to yourself, [in italics] That's what I want to be when I grow up. and you know you've grown up a little already, simply because you recognize it.
Norman called Ducky-Bob's party supply and ordered chairs while I wheeled the second bed out to the hallway. Mommy, Margaret Valentine, and I rushed around, getting everything we needed to cater the cramped but memorable even, and on Tuesday morning, about three dozen top members of the Chili's team jammed into Norman's room at Presbyterian Hospital. Norman didn't what his people to see him lying down, so I'd helped him get into a jogging suit and robe, and propped him up on one of those rolling carts they use to distribute meals. He was in unthinkable pain, but he spoke to them from his heart about how much he appreciated them, how committed he was to the success of the organization, and how far they could all go together.
”
”
Nancy G. Brinker (Promise Me: How a Sister's Love Launched the Global Movement to End Breast Cancer)
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you weren’t that unhappy. “Contrast him with the Air Corps man of the same education and longevity,” Stouffer wrote. His chance of getting promoted to officer was greater than 50 percent. “If he had earned a [promotion], so had the majority of his fellows in the branch, and his achievement was less conspicuous than in the MP’s. If he had failed to earn a rating while the majority had succeeded, he had more reason to feel a sense of personal frustration, which could be expressed as criticism of the promotion system.” Stouffer’s point is that we form our impressions not globally, by placing ourselves in the broadest possible context, but locally—by comparing ourselves to people “in the same boat as ourselves.” Our sense of how deprived we are is relative. This is one of those observations that is both obvious and (upon exploration) deeply profound, and it explains all kinds of otherwise puzzling observations. Which do you
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Malcolm Gladwell (David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants)
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Education also equips women to face the most dramatic climatic changes. A 2013 study found that educating girls “is the single most important social and economic factor associated with a reduction in vulnerability to natural disasters.
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Paul Hawken (Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming)
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HOW TO CHANGE THE WORLD
To really change the world, we have to help people change the way they see things. Global betterment is a mental process, not one that requires huge sums of money or a high level of authority. Change has to be psychological.
So if you want to see real change, stay persistent in educating humanity on how similar we all are than different. Don't only strive to be the change you want to see in the world, but also help all those around you see the world through commonalities of the heart so that they would want to change with you.
This is how humanity will evolve to become better. This is how you can change the world. The language of the heart is mankind's main common language.
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Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
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The election of Obama was a profoundly unserious act by an unserious nation, and, if you were Putin, the ChiComs, or the ayatollahs, you would have to be awfully virtuous not to take advantage of it....He's WEIRD in the sense of those students in the behavioral studies: Western Educated Idle Rich Deadbeat. He's not, even in Democrat terms, a political figure--as Bill Clinton or Joe Biden are. Instead, he's a creature of the broader culture: there are millions of people like Barack Obama, the eternal students of an unbounded lethargic transnational campus for whom global compassion and the multicultural pose are merely the modish gloss on a cult of radical grandiose narcissism. Even as he denies American exceptionalism, he gets turned on by his own.
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Mark Steyn (After America: Get Ready for Armageddon)
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At Newsweek, I get paid to meet amazing people and write about subjects that fascinate me: fusion energy, education reform, supercomputing, artificial intelligence, robotics, the rising competitiveness of China, the global threat of state-sponsored hacking.
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Dan Lyons (Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble)
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The brutally relentless tactics of stall and defy, then stall and undermine—tactics that went on for at least four decades—left the United States with millions of citizens who lacked the education needed to be competitive in a global, technology-driven economy.
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Carol Anderson (White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide)
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In a war as huge as this, there will be many, many, leaders, in every location and aspect of the war. This is not a war for followers. It is the responsibility of each person to become as educated, informed and healthy as possible if you are to make a contribution.
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Heather Marsh (Binding Chaos: Mass Collaboration on a Global Scale)
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Many people in the West who stereotype all Muslims as terrorists don’t know about the side of Islam that reflects love and mercy. It cares for the poor, widows, and orphans. It facilitates education and welfare. It unites and strengthens. This is the side of Islam that motivated those early leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood. Of course, there is also the other side, the one that calls all Muslims to jihad, to struggle and contend with the world until they establish a global caliphate, led by one holy man who rules and speaks for Allah.
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Mosab Hassan Yousef (Son of Hamas: A Gripping Account of Terror, Betrayal, Political Intrigue, and Unthinkable Choices)
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...education is not the way out of the poverty trap. A high education level is no guarantee of high productivity. The truth of the matter is that regardless of institutional education level, workers around the world can be adequately trained on the job for high productivity.
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William W. Lewis (The Power of Productivity: Wealth, Poverty, and the Threat to Global Stability)
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To be globally competitive, developed countries must offer something qualitatively different, that is, something that cannot be obtained at a lower cost in developing countries. And that something is certainly not great test scores in a few subjects or the so-called basic skills.”4
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Ken Robinson (Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That's Transforming Education)
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The shift of the RSS’s urban membership core from the lower middle class (including small-scale traders) to educated professionals has moderated its once implacable opposition to globalization as well as encouraged its greater openness on a wide range of social and economic issues.
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Walter K. Andersen (The RSS: A View to the Inside)
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Populist voters are older, more religious, more rural, less educated, and more likely to be male and members of the ethnic majority. They embrace authoritarian values, place themselves on the right of the political spectrum, and dislike immigration and global and national governance.
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Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress)
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While there's nothing new about financial panics, the role of AI/GPT is new and makes matters exponentially worse. That's not a criticism of AI which works as intended. It's a criticism of humans who don't understand the tool, over-rely on it, and allow it far too much autonomy in the trading process.
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James Rickards (MoneyGPT: AI and the Threat to the Global Economy)
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This world is simply ablaze with bad ideas. There are still places where people are put to death for imaginary crimes - like blasphemy - and where the totality of a child's education consists of his learning to recite from an ancient book of religious fiction. There are countries where women are denied almost every human liberty, except the liberty to breed. And yet, these same societies are quickly acquiring terrifying arsenals of advanced weaponry. If we cannot inspire the developing world, and the Muslim world in particular, to pursue ends that are compatible with a global civilization, then a dark future awaits all of us.
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Sam Harris (The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason)
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This is the generation that thinks of itself as global citizens but knows little about the world and acts locally. It is the most diverse generation in collegiate history with the strongest relationships between races but they have limited interest in talking about race or reaching across political or generational divides.
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Arthur Levine
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For those who need data to be convinced, in global surveys of values in which every variable that social scientists like to measure is thrown into the pot (including income, education, and dependence on oil revenues), Islam itself predicts an extra dose of patriarchal and other illiberal values across countries and individuals.
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Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress)
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Global warming, environmental degradation, global flows of economic speculation and risk taking, overpopulation, global debt, new viruses, terrorism and warfare, and political polarization are killing us. Dealing with big questions takes a long-term view, cooperation, delayed gratification, and deep learning that crosses traditional silos of knowledge production. All of these are in short supply today. In the United States and much of the developed world, decisions are based on short-term interests and gain (e.g., stock prices or election cycles), as well as pandering to ignorance. Such decisions make the world worse, not better, and bring Armageddon ever closer.
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James Paul Gee (The Anti-Education Era: Creating Smarter Students through Digital Learning)
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What makes majorities try, so ubiquitously, to denigrate or stigmatize minorities? Whatever these forces are, it is ultimately against them that true education for responsible national and global citizenship must fight. And it must fight using whatever resources the human personality contains that help democracy prevail against hierarchy.
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Martha C. Nussbaum (Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities)
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With the dizzying rate of change in technology and increasing competition driven by the globalization of markets and technology, we must not only be educated, we must constantly re-educate and reinvent ourselves. We must develop our minds and continually sharpen and invest in the development of our competencies to avoid becoming obsolete.
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Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change)
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Education may not have much influence on what happens because many rich societies are already near the upper limit in terms of quantity of education (measured by the number of years of schooling) and possibly even in terms of quality of schooling that can be offered; in addition, many of those employed in service jobs are already overqualified for what they do.
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Branko Milanović (Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization)
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The fact that, during the most miraculous decline of extreme poverty in human history, contributed to by ultra-cost-effective energy from fossil fuels, college-educated adults can think the rate of extreme poverty is getting worse due to fossil fuels shows just how completely our knowledge system trivializes the benefits of fossil fuels and of cost-effective energy as such.
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Alex Epstein (Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less)
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Not since the days of the Hitler Youth have young people been subjected to more propaganda on more politically correct issues. At one time, educators boasted that their role was not to teach students what to think but how to think. Today, their role is far too often to teach students what to think on everything from immigration to global warming to the new sacred trinity of 'race, class and gender.
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Thomas Sowell
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Sift through threats for hidden possibilities. Every threat carries with it the potential for innovation. The problem of obesity contains the possibility of new kinds of nutrition. The problem of global pollution contains the possibility of new energy sources. The problem of high unemployment contains the possibility of new educational models. The list is endless, if you can learn to see what’s not there.
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Marty Neumeier (The 46 Rules of Genius: An Innovator's Guide to Creativity (Voices That Matter))
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I am your mother. Whatever I do, I do for your own good. I do everything in the world for you, and you need to be a good son/ daughter and listen to me. You need to be a good son/daughter and respect your mother. No back-chat. Get to work.” Or, “You are only a child. You don’t understand how important your education is and what you need to do to be successful. I am much older, I know the importance of these skills.
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Maya Thiagarajan (Beyond the Tiger Mom: East-West Parenting for the Global Age)
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The age-old trick of transfer pricing
Taking advantage of the fact that they operate in countries with different tax rates, TNCs [transnational corporations] have their subsidiaries over-charge or under-charge each other – sometimes grossly – so that profits are highest in those subsidiaries operating in countries with the lowest corporate tax rates. In this way, their global post-tax profit is maximized.
A 2005 report by Christian Aid, the development charity, documents cases of under-priced exports like TV antennas from China at $0.40 apiece, rocket launchers from Bolivia at $40 and US bulldozers at $528 and over-priced imports such as German hacksaw blades at $5,485 each, Japanese tweezers at $4,896 and French wrenches at $1,089. The Starbucks and Google cases were different from those examples only in that they mainly involved ‘intangible assets’, such as brand licensing fees, patent royalties, interest charges on loans and in-house consultancy (e.g., coffee quality testing, store design), but the principle involved was the same.
When TNCs evade taxes through transfer pricing, they use but do not pay for the collective productive inputs financed by tax revenue, such as infrastructure, education and R&D. This means that the host economy is effectively subsidizing TNCs.
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Ha-Joon Chang (Economics: The User's Guide)
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It might thus be convenient to recall what Ivan Ilich, author of the influential 1971 Deschooling Society, self-critically wrote in retrospect when he called for 'the reversal of those trends that make of education a pressing need rather than a gift of gratuitous leisure.' Drug-like addiction to education, Ilich bemoaned, would make 'the world into a universal classroom, a global schoolhouse.' Something surely to be avoided, at all cost.
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Tom Holert
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Education 2000 was designed to increase our children's learning capacity while destroying their ability to critically think for themselves. You can learn more about Education 2000, also referred to as America 2000 and Global 2000, through reading: Educating for the New World Order by B.K. Eakman, published by Halcyon House ISBN # 0-89420-278-2-3441000, and A Critique of America 2000: An Educational Strategy by Kathi Simonds, published by Citizens for Excellence in Education.
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Cathy O'Brien (TRANCE Formation of America: True life story of a mind control slave)
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[from an excerpt by her daughter Camille] Living on the land that has grown my food gives me a sense of security I'm lucky to have. Feeling safe isn't so easy for people my age, who face odious threats like global warming, overpopulation, and chemical warfare in our future. But even as the world runs out of fuel and the ice caps melt, I will know the real sources of my sustenance. My college education may or may not land me a good job down the road, but my farm education will serve me.
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Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life)
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The Chinese government assigns capital to everything. Infrastructure development. Industrial plant buildout. Transport systems. Educational systems. Health systems. Everything and anything that puts people in jobs. Excruciatingly little of it would qualify as “wise capital allocation.” The goal isn’t efficiency or profitability, but instead achieving the singular political goal of overcoming regional, geographic, climatic, demographic, ethnic, and millennia of historical barriers to unity. No price is too high.
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Peter Zeihan (The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization―Irreverent Predictions from a Geopolitical Strategist)
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I knew how to make noise for a cause. It was natural, I understood, for Americans to feel disconnected from the struggles of people in faraway countries, so I tried to bring it home, calling up celebrities like Stephen Colbert to lend their star power at events and on social media. I'd enlist the help of Janelle Monae, Zendraya, Kelly Clarkson and other talents to release a catchy pop song written by Diane Warren called "This is for my Girls" the proceeds of which would go towards funding girls' education globally.
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Michelle Obama (Becoming)
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The accelerated deindustrialization of North America, Europe, and Japan, and the shift of manufacturing to Asia in general and to China in particular, has been the leading reason for this reappraisal.[93] This manufacturing switch has brought changes ranging from risible to tragic. In the first category are such grotesque transactions as Canada, the country with per capita forest resources greater than in any other affluent nation, importing toothpicks and toilet paper from China, a country whose wood stocks amount to a small fraction of Canada’s enormous boreal forest patrimony.[94] But the switch has also contributed to tragedies, such as the rising midlife mortality among America’s white non-university-educated men. There can be no doubt that America’s post-2000 loss of some 7 million (formerly well-paying) manufacturing jobs—with most of that loss attributable to globalization, as most of that production moved to China—has been the principal reason of these deaths of despair, largely attributable to suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol-induced liver disease.
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Vaclav Smil (How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going)
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By most measures—most notably in education, wealth, and health—globalization has been great, but it was never going to last. What you and your parents (and in some cases, grandparents) assumed as the normal, good, and right way of living—that is, the past seven decades or so—is a historic anomaly for the human condition both in strategic and demographic terms. The period of 1980–2015 in particular has simply been a unique, isolated, blessed moment in time. A moment that has ended. A moment that will certainly not come again in our lifetimes.
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Peter Zeihan (The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization―Irreverent Predictions from a Geopolitical Strategist)
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World-ending and world-making can occur, are occurring, have always occurred, simultaneously. Given that racial and ecological violence are interwoven and inextricable from one another, more now than ever, Black and Indigenous communities—who are globally positioned as “first to die” within the climate crisis—are also on the front lines of world-making practices that threaten to overthrow the current (death-making) order of things. Put otherwise, our communities, quite literally the post-apocalyptic survivors of world-endings already, are best positioned to imagine what this may be.[41]
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Eve L. Ewing (Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism)
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Contrary to popular belief, the term “deep state” never implied a secret cabal. Much less does it now convey any notion of official membership. Rather, it is a natural and loose alliance of those who see themselves as permanent custodians of US power, morality, and influence. The hierarchy is an anointed class, self-defined by its members’ educations, résumés, incestuousness, and contacts. All too often they exude disdain and condescension for what they see as transitory, mostly clueless elected officials who come and go in Washington—and the ill-informed citizens who put them in office.
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Victor Davis Hanson (The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America)
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Make school affordable. For example, provide family stipends for keeping girls in school. Help girls overcome health barriers.
For example, offer deworming treatments. Reduce the time and distance to get to school.
For example, provide girls with bikes. Make schools more girl-friendly.
For example, offer child-care programs for
young mothers. Improve school quality.
For example, invest in more and better teachers. Increase community engagement.
For example, train community education activists. Sustain girls’ education during emergencies.
For example, establish schools in refugee camps. Today,
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Paul Hawken (Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming)
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Population growth accounts for much of the impact as cities have gobbled up farmland and forest land, as roads and highways have paved over more land, and as Third World farmers have cleared forest lands to eke out a living. However, during the late twentieth century it became apparent that rates of population growth were slowing throughout the world as urbanization, increasing education, and improved services simultaneously reduced the pressure to have large families and raised their cost. At present, it seems likely that global populations will level out at 9 to 10 billion toward the end of the twenty-first century.
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David Christian (This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity)
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As women gain rights, families flourish, and so do societies. That connection is built on a simple truth: Whenever you include a group that’s been excluded, you benefit everyone. And when you’re working globally to include women and girls, who are half of every population, you’re working to benefit all members of every community. Gender equity lifts everyone.
From high rates of education, employment, and economic growth to low rates of teen births, domestic violence, and crime—the inclusion and elevation of women correlate with the signs of a healthy society. Women’s rights and society’s health and wealth rise together. Countries that are dominated by men suffer not only because they don’t use the talent of their women but because they are run by men who have a need to exclude. Until they change their leadership or the views of their leaders, those countries will not flourish.
Understanding this link between women’s empowerment and the wealth and health of societies is crucial for humanity. As much as any insight we’ve gained in our work over the past twenty years, this was our huge missed idea. My huge missed idea. If you want to lift up humanity, empower women. It is the most comprehensive, pervasive, high-leverage investment you can make in human beings.
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Melinda French Gates (The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World)
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We cannot pick and choose whom among the oppressed it is convenient to support. We must stand with all the oppressed or none of the oppressed. This is a global fight for life against corporate tyranny. We will win only when we see the struggle of working people in Greece, Spain, and Egypt as our own struggle. This will mean a huge reordering of our world, one that turns away from the primacy of profit to full employment and unionized workplaces, inexpensive and modernized mass transit, especially in impoverished communities, universal single-payer health care and a banning of for-profit health care corporations. The minimum wage must be at least $15 an hour and a weekly income of $500 provided to the unemployed, the disabled, stay-at-home parents, the elderly, and those unable to work. Anti-union laws, like the Taft-Hartley Act, and trade agreements such as NAFTA, will be abolished. All Americans will be granted a pension in old age. A parent will receive two years of paid maternity leave, as well as shorter work weeks with no loss in pay and benefits. The Patriot Act and Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, which permits the military to be used to crush domestic unrest, as well as government spying on citizens, will end. Mass incarceration will be dismantled. Global warming will become a national and global emergency. We will divert our energy and resources to saving the planet through public investment in renewable energy and end our reliance on fossil fuels. Public utilities, including the railroads, energy companies, the arms industry, and banks, will be nationalized. Government funding for the arts, education, and public broadcasting will create places where creativity, self-expression, and voices of dissent can be heard and seen. We will terminate our nuclear weapons programs and build a nuclear-free world. We will demilitarize our police, meaning that police will no longer carry weapons when they patrol our streets but instead, as in Great Britain, rely on specialized armed units that have to be authorized case by case to use lethal force. There will be training and rehabilitation programs for the poor and those in our prisons, along with the abolition of the death penalty. We will grant full citizenship to undocumented workers. There will be a moratorium on foreclosures and bank repossessions. Education will be free from day care to university. All student debt will be forgiven. Mental health care, especially for those now caged in our prisons, will be available. Our empire will be dismantled. Our soldiers and marines will come home.
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Chris Hedges (America: The Farewell Tour)
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...Analyses of globalization may also include statistics on poverty and human development indicators such as health, life expectancy, education, and infant mortality. While such statistics are important and can provide powerful statements about reality, perspectives based mainly or exclusively on aggredate data remove us from the lives of real, embodied human beings. A shortcoming of these kinds of distant analyses is that they often miss or gloss over how peopple experience capitalist globalization in and on their bodies, and how embodied subjects in marginalized communities, both in the Global North and South, have challenged and resisted such powerful social forces (38).
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Barbara Sutton (Bodies in Crisis: Culture, Violence, and Women's Resistance in Neoliberal Argentina)
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Psychologists at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, found that the better educated and wealthier a nation is, the less likely its population is to believe in a higher being. The Global Index of Religion and Atheism also assessed that poverty was a key indicator of a society's tendency towards religion - so that poorer countries tend to be the most religious. The one exception to the rule? America. But in the strongly religious USA, despite the country's wealth, there's no universal healthcare, little job security, and a flimsy social welfare safety net. This means that the USA has a lot more in common with developing countries than she might like to think.
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Helen Russell (The Year of Living Danishly: Uncovering the Secrets of the World's Happiest Country)
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If Theory of Mind psychology is correct in saying that minds operating at the higher levels of intentionality have the greatest capacity to be discerning and empathetic, and if it is wise to take seriously the idea that global climate disturbance, ocean acidification, and other planetary environmental problems cannot be successfully addressed without the highest level of international cooperation, what are we to do in our time about ultranationalists and xenophobes in positions of power and authority? Or more important, if the best minds are not at the table—because of prejudices about race, ethnicity, gender, formal education, urbanity, and material wealth—what is the process that
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Barry Lopez (Horizon)
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Instead of educating college students for jobs that are about to disappear under the rising tide of technology, twenty-first-century universities should liberate them from outdated career models and give them ownership of their own futures. They should equip them with the literacies and skills they need to thrive in this new economy defined by technology, as well as continue providing them with access to the learning they need to face the challenges of life in a diverse, global environment. Higher education needs a new model and a new orientation away from its dual focus on undergraduate and graduate students. Universities must broaden their reach to become engines for lifelong learning.
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Joseph E. Aoun (Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (The MIT Press))
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To really change the world, we have to help people change the way they see things. Global betterment is a mental process, not one that requires huge sums of money or a high level of authority. Change has to be psychological. So if you want to see real change, stay persistent in educating humanity on how similar we all are than different. Don't only strive to be the change you want to see in the world, but also help all those around you see the world through commonalities of the heart so that they would want to change with you. This is how humanity will evolve to become better. This is how you can change the world. The language of the heart is mankind's main common language. -- Suzy Kassem
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Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
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This shift away from patriotism is masked by Americans’ sense that, since our country dominates the world, to be an American citizen is to be a global citizen. But we should not be deceived. As we continue “coming apart,” the most powerful and successful Americans increasingly see that their interests lie with a global future, not a national one. A Fortune 500 CEO has more in common with other Davos worthies than with the son of an unemployed steel worker in Youngstown, Ohio. Educated at institutions steeped in multicultural ideology, the elite rise above local loyalties, serving as richly rewarded functionaries in a global empire that has no place for patriotism because it has no patria.
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R.R. Reno (Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society)
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It’s easy to raise graduation rates, for example, by lowering standards. Many students struggle with math and science prerequisites and foreign languages. Water down those requirements, and more students will graduate. But if one goal of our educational system is to produce more scientists and technologists for a global economy, how smart is that? It would also be a cinch to pump up the income numbers for graduates. All colleges would have to do is shrink their liberal arts programs, and get rid of education departments and social work departments while they’re at it, since teachers and social workers make less money than engineers, chemists, and computer scientists. But they’re no less valuable to society.
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Cathy O'Neil (Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy)
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It is feminist thinking that empowers me to engage in a constructive critique of [Paulo] Freire’s work (which I needed so that as a young reader of his work I did not passively absorb the worldview presented) and yet there are many other standpoints from which I approach his work that enable me to experience its value, that make it possible for that work to touch me at the very core of my being. In talking with academic feminists (usually white women) who feel they must either dismiss or devalue the work of Freire because of sexism, I see clearly how our different responses are shaped by the standpoint that we bring to the work. I came to Freire thirsty, dying of thirst (in that way that the colonized, marginalized subject who is still unsure of how to break the hold of the status quo, who longs for change, is needy, is thirsty), and I found in his work (and the work of Malcolm X, Fanon, etc.) a way to quench that thirst. To have work that promotes one’s liberation is such a powerful gift that it does not matter so much if the gift is flawed. Think of the work as water that contains some dirt. Because you are thirsty you are not too proud to extract the dirt and be nourished by the water. For me this is an experience that corresponds very much to the way individuals of privilege respond to the use of water in the First World context. When you are privileged, living in one of the richest countries in the world, you can waste resources. And you can especially justify your disposal of something that you consider impure. Look at what most people do with water in this country. Many people purchase special water because they consider tap water unclean—and of course this purchasing is a luxury. Even our ability to see the water that come through the tap as unclean is itself informed by an imperialist consumer per spective. It is an expression of luxury and not just simply a response to the condition of water. If we approach the drinking of water that comes from the tap from a global perspective we would have to talk about it differently. We would have to consider what the vast majority of the peo ple in the world who are thirsty must do to obtain water. Paulo’s work has been living water for me.
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bell hooks (Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom)
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The future of democracy in developed countries will depend on their ability to deal with the problem of a disappearing middle class. In the wake of the financial crisis there has been a rise of new populist groups from the Tea Party in the United States to various anti-EU, anti-immigrant parties in Europe. What unites all of them is the belief that elites in their countries have betrayed them. And in many ways they are correct: the elites who set the intellectual and cultural climate in the developed world have been largely buffered from the effects of middle-class decline. There has been a vacuum in new approaches to the problem, approaches that don’t involve simply returning to the welfare state solutions of the past. The proper approach to the problem of middle-class decline is not necessarily the present German system or any other specific set of measures. The only real long-term solution would be an educational system that succeeded in pushing the vast majority of citizens into higher levels of education and skills. The ability to help citizens flexibly adjust to the changing conditions of work requires state and private institutions that are similarly flexible. Yet one of the characteristics of modern developed democracies is that they have accumulated many rigidities over time that make institutional adaptation increasingly difficult. In fact, all political systems—past and present—are liable to decay. The fact that a system once was a successful and stable liberal democracy does not mean that it will
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Francis Fukuyama (Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy)
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There is one other extremely important aspect of synthetic thinking. The systems with which we deal are becoming increasingly complex. Think, for example, of the difference between a neighborhood grocery store and a global chain of retail stores like Wal-Mart or the difference between a tent or shack and a skyscraper. Scientists are searching for a way of dealing effectively with such complexity. Unfortunately, most of them are approaching the subject analytically. The result is identification of such a large number of variables and relationships between them that we are not able to handle them. However, if complexity is approached synthetically, by design, as in the design of a skyscraper or a city, there seems to be no limit to the complexity we can handle effectively.
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Russell L. Ackoff (Turning Learning Right Side Up: Putting Education Back on Track)
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According to Yale’s Cultural Cognition Project, for example, one’s “cultural worldview”—that would be political leanings or ideological outlook to the rest of us—explains “individuals’ beliefs about global warming more powerfully than any other individual characteristic.”16 More powerfully, that is, than age, ethnicity, education, or party affiliation. The Yale researchers explain that people with strong “egalitarian” and “communitarian” worldviews (marked by an inclination toward collective action and social justice, concern about inequality, and suspicion of corporate power) overwhelmingly accept the scientific consensus on climate change. Conversely, those with strong “hierarchical” and “individualistic” worldviews (marked by opposition to government assistance for the poor and minorities, strong support for industry, and a belief that we all pretty much get what we deserve) overwhelmingly reject the scientific consensus.17 The evidence is striking. Among the segment of the U.S. population that displays the strongest “hierarchical” views, only 11 percent rate climate change as a “high risk,” compared with 69 percent of the segment displaying the strongest “egalitarian” views.18 Yale law professor Dan Kahan, the lead author on this study, attributes the tight correlation between “worldview” and acceptance of climate science to “cultural cognition,” the process by which all of us—regardless of political leanings—filter new information in ways that will protect our “preferred vision of the good society.” If new information seems to confirm that vision, we welcome it and integrate it easily. If it poses a threat to our belief system, then our brain immediately gets to work producing intellectual antibodies designed to repel the unwelcome invasion.19 As Kahan explained in Nature, “People find it disconcerting to believe that behavior that they find noble is nevertheless detrimental to society, and behavior that they find base is beneficial to it. Because accepting such a claim could drive a wedge between them and their peers, they have a strong emotional predisposition to reject it.” In other words, it is always easier to deny reality than to allow our worldview to be shattered, a fact that was as true of die-hard Stalinists at the height of the purges as it is of libertarian climate change deniers today. Furthermore, leftists are equally capable of denying inconvenient scientific evidence. If conservatives are inherent system justifiers, and therefore bridle before facts that call the dominant economic system into question, then most leftists are inherent system questioners, and therefore prone to skepticism about facts that come from corporations and government. This can lapse into the kind of fact resistance we see among those who are convinced that multinational drug companies have covered up the link between childhood vaccines and autism. No matter what evidence is marshaled to disprove their theories, it doesn’t matter to these crusaders—it’s just the system covering up for itself.20 This kind of defensive reasoning helps explain the rise of emotional intensity that surrounds the climate issue today. As
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Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate)
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Human beings are responsible for art, science, medicine, education, the Sistine Chapel, Handel’s Messiah, New York City, space travel, the novel, photography, and Mexican food — I mean, who doesn’t love Mexican food? But we’re also responsible for a world with 27 million slaves, blatant racism, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the genocide in Rwanda, ISIS, the financial meltdown of 2008, pornography, global warming, the endangered-species list, and don’t even get me started on pop music. So we humans are a mixed bag. We have a great capacity — more than we know — to rule in a way that is life-giving for the people around us and the place we call home, or to rule in such a way that we exploit the earth itself and rob people of an environment where they can thrive. This was God’s risk. His venture. His experiment.
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John Mark Comer (Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human.)
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A regulator's greatest fear is the sequential collapse of hedge funds, banks, and brokerages. That process is hard to spot and even harder to stop.
...
There are two sides to every trade. In a crash there can be just as many winners as losers. The problem arises when the losers go out of business. At that point the winners can't collect so they become losers too. It's as if you were a big winner at roulette and went to the cashier to collect your winnings only to find the cashier window closed and the casino had just filed for bankruptcy. All you have left is a pocketful of worthless chips. At that point, even the market winners can fall into financial distress. Because of leverage, total losses can exceed the size of the market itself. It's like a minefield. Banks running from panic start stepping on mines.
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James Rickards (MoneyGPT: AI and the Threat to the Global Economy)
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Both studies in these respected publications relied on data from the Surgisphere Corporation, an obscure Illinois-based “medical education” company that claimed to somehow control an extraordinary global database boasting access to medical information from 96,000 patients in more than 600 hospitals.87 Founded in 2008, this sketchy enterprise had eleven employees, including a middling science fiction writer and a porn star/events hostess. Surgisphere claimed to have analyzed data from six continents and hundreds of hospitals that had treated patients with HCQ or CQ in real time. Someone persuaded the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine to publish two Surgisphere studies in separate articles on May 1 and 22. Like the other Gates-supported studies, the Lancet article portrayed HCQ as ineffective and dangerous.
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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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Two predominant strategies characterize reactions to the unfolding environmental and social breakdowns evident in climate change, political paralysis and corruption, spreading poverty, and the failures of mainstream institutions of education, health care, government, and business: “muddling through” and “fighting back.” Muddling through is the strategy that characterizes most of us in the rich northern countries. It embraces a combination of working to preserve the status quo combined with an almost hypnotic fascination with wondrous new technologies that, so the belief goes, will solve our problems. Fighting back, as is evident in the vocal protests of millions of people around the world opposed to the “Washington consensus” view of globalization, combines a longing for an earlier social and moral order with anger at having lost control over our future.
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C. Otto Scharmer (Theory U: Learning from the Future as It Emerges)
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American parents and educators are told to give children choices, to respect their desires, to ask them questions as opposed to issuing orders, to refrain from pressuring or coercing them to do work they don’t want to do, and to offer positive reinforcement all the time. Children are supposed to want to do the work—otherwise, they shouldn’t have to do it. In contrast, the scripts that Asian culture offers its parents include statements, not questions, and orders, not requests. Children are routinely told what to do, and particularly when it comes to academic work, parents and educators don’t spend much time asking them what they want or catering to those desires. Asian parents see these scripts as the natural order of the family and society; the elder has wisdom and a responsibility to teach and discipline the child, and the child needs to learn from those elders.
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Maya Thiagarajan (Beyond the Tiger Mom: East-West Parenting for the Global Age)
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Truman bluntly revealed the motivations behind this major shift when a group of American diplomats presciently warned him that an overtly pro-Zionist policy would harm US interests in the Arab world. “I am sorry, gentlemen,” he said, “but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.”48 Initially, the State Department, the Pentagon, and the CIA—what would become the permanent foreign-policy establishment of the new global American imperium—were opposed to Truman’s and his advisors’ determined partisanship for Zionism and the new state of Israel. Yet Truman, who did not come from a patrician background, had no higher education (he was the last US president without a college degree), and was inexperienced in foreign affairs, was not intimidated by the foreign policy establishment he had inherited.
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Rashid Khalidi (The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017)
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Take students today They are in some ways freer than they were 60 years ago in their attitudes and commitments and so on. On the other hand they are more disciplined. They are disciplined by debt. Part of the reasoning for arranging education so you come out with heavy debt is so you are disciplined. Take the last 20 years—the neo-liberal years roughly—a very striking part of what is called "globalization" is just aimed at discipline. It wants to eliminate freedom of choice and impose discipline. How do you do that? Well, if you're a couple in the U.S. now, each working 50 hours a week to put food on the table, you don't have time to think about how to become a libertarian socialist. When what you are worried about is "how can I get food on the table?" or "I've got kids to take care of, and when they are sick I've got to go to work and what's going to happen to them?" Those are very well-designed techniques of imposing discipline.
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Noam Chomsky (Chomsky On Anarchism)
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Beijing’s response has been to incarcerate huge numbers of Ui-ghurs in ‘re-education camps’. How many people are being held is known only to the Chinese authorities, but estimates range from 150,000 to 1 million. It is alleged that inmates are banned from pray-ing or growing beards as part of a policy designed to strip the Uighurs of their religious beliefs. In April 2019 China denied the allegations, called the camps ‘boarding schools’ and said it had arrested about 13,000 terrorists and ‘broken up hundreds of terrorist gangs’. In 2016, local government officials said that the de-radicalisation effort had ‘markedly weakened’ the nascent Islamist movement. However, given that the Turkish Army said it had arrested 324 suspected jihadists from Xinjiang en route to Syria in 2015, that seems unlikely. The routing of Islamic State in Iraq and parts of Syria in 2017 has also increased the dan-gers of foreign fighters returning home but not retiring.
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Tim Marshall (Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics)
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Mattis and Gary Cohn had several quiet conversations about The Big Problem: The president did not understand the importance of allies overseas, the value of diplomacy or the relationship between the military, the economy and intelligence partnerships with foreign governments. They met for lunch at the Pentagon to develop an action plan. One cause of the problem was the president’s fervent belief that annual trade deficits of about $500 billion harmed the American economy. He was on a crusade to impose tariffs and quotas despite Cohn’s best efforts to educate him about the benefits of free trade. How could they convince and, in their frank view, educate the president? Cohn and Mattis realized they were nowhere close to persuading him. The Groundhog Day–like meetings on trade continued and the acrimony only grew. “Let’s get him over here to the Tank,” Mattis proposed. The Tank is the Pentagon’s secure meeting room for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It might focus him. “Great idea,” Cohn said. “Let’s get him out of the White House.” No press; no TVs; no Madeleine Westerhout, Trump’s personal secretary, who worked within shouting distance of the Oval Office. There wouldn’t even be any looking out the window, because there were no windows in the Tank. Getting Trump out of his natural environment could do the trick. The idea was straight from the corporate playbook—a retreat or off-site meeting. They would get Trump to the Tank with his key national security and economic team to discuss worldwide strategic relations. Mattis and Cohn agreed. Together they would fight Trump on this. Trade wars or disruptions in the global markets could savage and undermine the precarious stability in the world. The threat could spill over to the military and intelligence community. Mattis couldn’t understand why the U.S. would want to pick a fight with allies, whether it was NATO, or friends in the Middle East, or Japan—or particularly with South Korea.
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Bob Woodward (Fear: Trump in the White House)
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Moderns maintain a peculiar relationship with rhetoric. We no longer teach it to our young, nor demand it of our wise. What since ancient Athens was considered an essential skill for a free citizen has now largely been consigned to hucksters and to the tarmacs of used car dealerships. The tragedy is that we abandoned the art on purpose. About the same time the Russians flung Sputnik into space, in the name of progress American, Canadian, and British educators tossed the old grammar and style books onto the intergalactic rubbish heap of history. The past was trashed. In a scientific age, so the reasoning went, questions of philosophy, of beauty, of sex, of God, could be set aside in favor of technological solutions. The science was settled. Just the same, the timing couldn’t have been worse. Who would’ve foreseen that at the same hour the West turned its back on its humanistic traditions, it would be called to police the global order, shore up markets, and shoot down terrorists?
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Ryan N.S. Topping (The Elements of Rhetoric -- How to Write and Speak Clearly and Persuasively: A Guide for Students, Teachers, Politicians & Preachers)
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It is evident that wealth is even more unevenly distributed than income and
that the gap is widening. Since 1976, wealth has increased by 63 percent for the
wealthiest 1 percent of the population and by 71 percent for the top 20 percent.
Wealth has decreased by 43 percent for the bottom 40 percent of the U.S. population (Economic Policy Institute 2011). The widening gap has multiple causes.
First, shifts in the U.S. tax code have lowered the top tax rate from 91 percent
in the years from 1950 to 1963, to 35 percent from 2003 to 2012, allowing the
wealthy to retain far more of their income (Tax Policy Center 2012). Second,
wages for most U.S. families have stagnated since the early 1970s. Moreover,
credit card, education, and mortgage debt have skyrocketed. Finally, the collapse
of the housing market beginning in 2007 dramatically affected many middleclass families who held a significant portion of their wealth in the value of their
home. By 2012, fully 31 percent of all homeowners owed more on their mortgages than their homes were worth (Zillow 2012).
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Kenneth J. Guest (Cultural Anthropology: A Toolkit for a Global Age)
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There are many reasons why the tech revolution will hit the emerging world much harder than it will hit Europe and the United States. In developed countries, children are more likely to grow up with digital technologies as toys and then to encounter them in school. Governments in these countries have money to invest in educational systems that prepare workers, both blue and white collar, for change. Their universities have much greater access to state-of-the-art technologies. Their companies produce the innovations that drive tech change in the first place. This creates a dynamic in which high-wage countries are more likely than low-wage ones to dominate the skill-intensive industries that will generate twenty-first-century growth, leaving behind large numbers of those billion-plus people who only recently emerged from age-old deprivation. The wealth in developed countries helps them maintain much stronger social safety nets than in poorer countries to help citizens who lose their jobs, fall ill, or need to care for sick children or aging parents. In short, wealthier countries are both more adaptable and more resilient than developing ones.
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Ian Bremmer (Us vs. Them: The Failure of Globalism)
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The only word these corporations know is more,” wrote Chris Hedges, former correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, and the New York Times. They are disemboweling every last social service program funded by the taxpayers, from education to Social Security, because they want that money themselves. Let the sick die. Let the poor go hungry. Let families be tossed in the street. Let the unemployed rot. Let children in the inner city or rural wastelands learn nothing and live in misery and fear. Let the students finish school with no jobs and no prospects of jobs. Let the prison system, the largest in the industrial world, expand to swallow up all potential dissenters. Let torture continue. Let teachers, police, firefighters, postal employees and social workers join the ranks of the unemployed. Let the roads, bridges, dams, levees, power grids, rail lines, subways, bus services, schools and libraries crumble or close. Let the rising temperatures of the planet, the freak weather patterns, the hurricanes, the droughts, the flooding, the tornadoes, the melting polar ice caps, the poisoned water systems, the polluted air increase until the species dies. There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave. To be declared innocent in a country where the rule of law means nothing, where we have undergone a corporate coup, where the poor and working men and women are reduced to joblessness and hunger, where war, financial speculation and internal surveillance are the only real business of the state, where even habeas corpus no longer exists, where you, as a citizen, are nothing more than a commodity to corporate systems of power, one to be used and discarded, is to be complicit in this radical evil. To stand on the sidelines and say “I am innocent” is to bear the mark of Cain; it is to do nothing to reach out and help the weak, the oppressed and the suffering, to save the planet. To be innocent in times like these is to be a criminal.
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Jim Marrs (Our Occulted History: Do the Global Elite Conceal Ancient Aliens?)
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In early 2014, the global economy’s top five companies’ gross cash holdings—those of Apple, Google, Microsoft, as well as the US telecom giant Verizon and the Korean electronics conglomerate Samsung—came to $387 billion, the equivalent of the 2013 GDP of the United Arab Emirates.78 This capital imbalance puts the fate of the world economy in the hands of the few cash hoarders like Apple and Google, whose profits are mostly kept offshore to avoid paying US tax. “Apple, Google and Facebook are latter-day scrooges,” worries the Financial Times columnist John Plender about a corporate miserliness that is undermining the growth of the world economy.79 “So what does it all mean?” Michael Moritz rhetorically asks about a data factory economy that is immensely profitable for a tiny handful of Silicon Valley companies. What does the personal revolution mean for everyone else, to those who aren’t part of what he calls the “extreme minority” inside the Silicon Valley bubble? “It means that life is very tough for almost everyone in America,” the chairman of Sequoia Capital, whom even Tom Perkins couldn’t accuse of being a progressive radical, says. “It means life is very tough if you’re poor. It means life is very tough if you’re middle class. It means you have to have the right education to go and work at Google or Apple.
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Andrew Keen (The Internet Is Not the Answer)
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The state, too, is in decline, though perhaps less obviously than the idea of the national community. The reason is simply that the global community of capitalists will not let the Western state reverse its post-1970s policies of retrenchment, which is the only way for it to adequately address all the crises that are currently ripping society apart. If any state—unimaginably—made truly substantive moves to restore and expand programs of social welfare, or to vastly expand and improve public education, or to initiate programs like Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration or Tennessee Valley Authority (but on a necessarily broader scale than in the 1930s), or to restore organized labor to its power in the 1960s and thereby raise effective demand, or to promulgate any other such anti-capitalist measure, investors would flee it and its sources of funds would dry up. It couldn’t carry out such policies anyway, given the massive resistance they would provoke among all sectors and levels of the business community. Fiscal austerity is, on the whole, good for profits (in the short term), since it squeezes the population and diverts money to the ruling class. In large part because of capital’s high mobility and consequent wealth and power over both states and populations, the West’s contemporary political paradigm of austerity and government retrenchment is effectively irreversible for the foreseeable future.
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Chris Wright (Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States)
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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 failure of Communism was consecrated in the fall of the Soviet Union. The remarkable thing is that, as in most cases when prophecy fails, the faith never faltered. Indeed, an alternative version had long been maturing, though cast into the shadows for a time by enthusiasm for the quick fix of revolution. It had, however, been maturing for at least a century and already had a notable repertoire of institutions available. We may call it Olympianism, because it is the project of an intellectual elite that believes that it enjoys superior enlightenment and that its business is to spread this benefit to those living on the lower slopes of human achievement. And just as Communism had been a political project passing itself off as the ultimate in scientific understanding, so Olympianism burrowed like a parasite into the most powerful institution of the emerging knowledge economy--the universities.
We may define Olympianism as a vision of human betterment to be achieved on a global scale by forging the peoples of the world into a single community based on the universal enjoyment of appropriate human rights. Olympianism is the cast of mind dedicated to this end, which is believed to correspond to the triumph of reason and community over superstition and hatred. It is a politico-moral package in which the modern distinction between morals and politics disappears into the aspiration for a shared mode of life in which the communal transcends individual life. To be a moral agent is in these terms to affirm a faith in a multicultural humanity whose social and economic conditions will be free from the causes of current misery. Olympianism is thus a complex long-term vision, and contemporary Western Olympians partake of different fragments of it.
To be an Olympian is to be entangled in a complex dialectic involving elitism and egalitarianism. The foundational elitism of the Olympian lies in self-ascribed rationality, generally picked up on an academic campus. Egalitarianism involves a formal adherence to democracy as a rejection of all forms of traditional authority, but with no commitment to taking any serious notice of what the people actually think. Olympians instruct mortals, they do not obey them. Ideally, Olympianism spreads by rational persuasion, as prejudice gives way to enlightenment. Equally ideally, democracy is the only tolerable mode of social coordination, but until the majority of people have become enlightened, it must be constrained within a framework of rights, to which Olympian legislation is constantly adding. Without these constraints, progress would be in danger from reactionary populism appealing to prejudice. The overriding passion of the Olympian is thus to educate the ignorant and everything is treated in educational terms. Laws for example are enacted not only to shape the conduct of the people, but also to send messages to them. A belief in the power of role models, public relations campaigns, and above all fierce restrictions on raising sensitive questions devant le peuple are all part of pedagogic Olympianism.
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Kenneth Minogue
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among the young, a portent of the world’s future. Hate crimes, violence against women, and the victimization of children are all in long-term decline, as is the exploitation of children for their labor. As people are getting healthier, richer, safer, and freer, they are also becoming more literate, knowledgeable, and smarter. Early in the 19th century, 12 percent of the world could read and write; today 83 percent can. Literacy and the education it enables will soon be universal, for girls as well as boys. The schooling, together with health and wealth, are literally making us smarter—by thirty IQ points, or two standard deviations above our ancestors. People are putting their longer, healthier, safer, freer, richer, and wiser lives to good use. Americans work 22 fewer hours a week than they used to, have three weeks of paid vacation, lose 43 fewer hours to housework, and spend just a third of their paycheck on necessities rather than five-eighths. They are using their leisure and disposable income to travel, spend time with their children, connect with loved ones, and sample the world’s cuisine, knowledge, and culture. As a result of these gifts, people worldwide have become happier. Even Americans, who take their good fortune for granted, are “pretty happy” or happier, and the younger generations are becoming less unhappy, lonely, depressed, drug-addicted, and suicidal. As societies have become healthier, wealthier, freer, happier, and better educated, they have set their sights on the most pressing global challenges. They have emitted fewer pollutants, cleared fewer forests, spilled less oil,
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Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress)
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The Blue Mind Rx Statement
Our wild waters provide vast cognitive, emotional, physical, psychological, social, and spiritual values for people from birth, through adolescence, adulthood, older age, and in death; wild waters provide a useful, widely available, and affordable range of treatments healthcare practitioners can incorporate into treatment plans.
The world ocean and all waterways, including lakes, rivers, and wetlands (collectively, blue space), cover over 71% of our planet. Keeping them healthy, clean, accessible, and biodiverse is critical to human health and well-being.
In addition to fostering more widely documented ecological, economic, and cultural diversities, our mental well-being, emotional diversity, and resiliency also rely on the global ecological integrity of our waters.
Blue space gives us half of our oxygen, provides billions of people with jobs and food, holds the majority of Earth's biodiversity including species and ecosystems, drives climate and weather, regulates temperature, and is the sole source of hydration and hygiene for humanity throughout history.
Neuroscientists and psychologists add that the ocean and wild waterways are a wellspring of happiness and relaxation, sociality and romance, peace and freedom, play and creativity, learning and memory, innovation and insight, elation and nostalgia, confidence and solitude, wonder and awe, empathy and compassion, reverence and beauty — and help manage trauma, anxiety, sleep, autism, addiction, fitness, attention/focus, stress, grief, PTSD, build personal resilience, and much more.
Chronic stress and anxiety cause or intensify a range of physical and mental afflictions, including depression, ulcers, colitis, heart disease, and more. Being on, in, and near water can be among the most cost-effective ways of reducing stress and anxiety.
We encourage healthcare professionals and advocates for the ocean, seas, lakes, and rivers to go deeper and incorporate the latest findings, research, and insights into their treatment plans, communications, reports, mission statements, strategies, grant proposals, media, exhibits, keynotes, and educational programs and to consider the following simple talking points:
•Water is the essence of life: The ocean, healthy rivers, lakes, and wetlands are good for our minds and bodies.
•Research shows that nature is therapeutic, promotes general health and well-being, and blue space in both urban and rural settings further enhances and broadens cognitive, emotional, psychological, social, physical, and spiritual benefits.
•All people should have safe access to salubrious, wild, biodiverse waters for well-being, healing, and therapy.
•Aquatic biodiversity has been directly correlated with the therapeutic potency of blue space. Immersive human interactions with healthy aquatic ecosystems can benefit both.
•Wild waters can serve as medicine for caregivers, patient families, and all who are part of patients’ circles of support.
•Realization of the full range and potential magnitude of ecological, economic, physical, intrinsic, and emotional values of wild places requires us to understand, appreciate, maintain, and improve the integrity and purity of one of our most vital of medicines — water.
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Wallace J. Nichols (Blue Mind: The Surprising Science That Shows How Being Near, In, On, or Under Water Can Make You Happier, Healthier, More Connected, and Better at What You Do)
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Here’s the four point battle plan, which we’ll return to at the end of the book: Disregard the Doomsayers: The misguided belief that “it’s too late” to act has been co-opted by fossil fuel interests and those advocating for them. It’s just another way of legitimizing business-as-usual and a continued reliance on fossil fuels. We must reject the overt doom and gloom that we increasingly encounter in today’s climate discourse. A Child Shall Lead Them: The youngest generation is fighting tooth and nail to save their planet, and there is a moral authority and clarity in their message that none but the most jaded ears can fail to hear. They are the game-changers that climate advocates have been waiting for. We should model our actions after theirs and learn from their methods and their idealism. Educate, Educate, Educate: Most hard-core climate-change deniers are unmovable. They view climate change through the prism of right-wing ideology and are impervious to facts. Don’t waste your time and effort trying to convince them. But there are many honest, confused folks out there who are caught in the crossfire, victims of the climate-change disinformation campaign. We must help them out. Then they will be in a position to join us in battle. Changing the System Requires Systemic Change: The fossil fuel disinformation machine wants to make it about the car you choose to drive, the food you choose to eat, and the lifestyle you choose to live rather than about the larger system and incentives. We need policies that will incentivize the needed shift away from fossil fuel burning toward a clean, green global economy. So-called leaders who resist the call for action must be removed from office.
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Michael E. Mann (The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet)
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CYBERPOWER is now a fundamental fact of global life. In political, economic, and military affairs, information and information technology provide and support crucial elements of operational activities. U.S. national security efforts have begun to incorporate cyber into strategic calculations. Those efforts, however, are only a beginning. The critical conclusion...is that the United States must create an effective national and international strategic framework for the development and use of cyber as part of an overall national security strategy.
Such a strategic framework will have both structural and geopolitical elements. Structural activities will focus on those parts of cyber that enhance capabilities for use in general. Those categories include heightened security, expanded development of research and human capital, improved governance, and more effective organization. Geopolitical activities will focus on more traditional national security and defense efforts. Included in this group are sophisticated development of network-centric operations; appropriate integrated planning of computer network attack capabilities; establishment of deterrence doctrine that incorporates cyber; expansion of effective cyber influence capabilities; carefully planned incorporation of cyber into military planning (particularly stability operations); establishment of appropriate doctrine, education, and training regarding cyber by the Services and nonmilitary elements so that cyber can be used effectively in a joint and/or multinational context; and generation of all those efforts at an international level, since cyber is inherently international and cannot be most effectively accomplished without international partners.
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Franklin D. Kramer (Cyberpower and National Security)
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After turning their backs on working-class issues, traditionally one of the core concerns of left parties, Democrats stood by while right-wing demagoguery took root and thrived. Then, after the people absorbed a fifty-year blizzard of fake populist propaganda, Democrats turned against the idea of “the people” altogether.17 America was founded with the phrase “We the People,” but William Galston, co-inventor of the concept of the Learning Class, urges us to get over our obsession with popular sovereignty. As he writes in Anti-Pluralism, his 2018 attack on populism, “We should set aside this narrow and complacent conviction; there are viable alternatives to the people as sources of legitimacy.”18 There certainly are. In the pages of this book, we have seen anti-populists explain that they deserve to rule because they are better educated, or wealthier, or more rational, or harder working. The contemporary culture of constant moral scolding is in perfect accordance with this way of thinking; it is a new iteration of the old elitist fantasy. The liberal establishment I am describing in this chapter is anti-populist not merely because it dislikes Donald Trump—who is in no way a genuine populist—but because it is populism’s opposite in nearly every particular. Its political ambition for the people is not to bring them together in a reform movement but to scold them, to shame them, and to teach them to defer to their superiors. It doesn’t seek to punish Wall Street or Silicon Valley; indeed, the same bunch that now rebukes and cancels and blacklists could not find a way to punish elite bankers after the global financial crisis back in 2009. This liberalism desires to merge with these institutions of private privilege, to enlist their power for what it imagines to be “good.
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Thomas Frank (The People, No: The War on Populism and the Fight for Democracy)
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Creating “Correct” Children in the Classroom One of the most popular discipline programs in American schools is called Assertive Discipline. It teaches teachers to inflict the old “obey or suffer” method of control on students. Here you disguise the threat of punishment by calling it a choice the child is making. As in, “You have a choice, you can either finish your homework or miss the outing this weekend.” Then when the child chooses to try to protect his dignity against this form of terrorism, by refusing to do his homework, you tell him he has chosen his logical, natural consequence of being excluded from the outing. Putting it this way helps the parent or teacher mitigate against the bad feelings and guilt that would otherwise arise to tell the adult that they are operating outside the principles of compassionate relating. This insidious method is even worse than outand-out punishing, where you can at least rebel against your punisher. The use of this mind game teaches the child the false, crazy-making belief that they wanted something bad or painful to happen to them. These programs also have the stated intention of getting the child to be angry with himself for making a poor choice. In this smoke and mirrors game, the children are “causing” everything to happen and the teachers are the puppets of the children’s choices. The only ones who are not taking responsibility for their actions are the adults. Another popular coercive strategy is to use “peer pressure” to create compliance. For instance, a teacher tells her class that if anyone misbehaves then they all won’t get their pizza party. What a great way to turn children against each other. All this is done to help (translation: compel) children to behave themselves. But of course they are not behaving themselves: they are being “behaved” by the adults. Well-meaning teachers and parents try to teach children to be motivated (translation: do boring or aversive stuff without questioning why), responsible (translation: thoughtless conformity to the house rules) people. When surveys are conducted in which fourth-graders are asked what being good means, over 90% answer “being quiet.” And when teachers are asked what happens in a successful classroom, the answer is, “the teacher is able to keep the students on task” (translation: in line, doing what they are told). Consulting firms measuring teacher competence consider this a major criterion of teacher effectiveness. In other words if the students are quietly doing what they were told the teacher is evaluated as good. However my understanding of ‘real learning’ with twenty to forty children is that it is quite naturally a bit noisy and messy. Otherwise children are just playing a nice game of school, based on indoctrination and little integrated retained education. Both punishments and rewards foster a preoccupation with a narrow egocentric self-interest that undermines good values. All little Johnny is thinking about is “How much will you give me if I do X? How can I avoid getting punished if I do Y? What do they want me to do and what happens to me if I don’t do it?” Instead we could teach him to ask, “What kind of person do I want to be and what kind of community do I want to help make?” And Mom is thinking “You didn’t do what I wanted, so now I’m going to make something unpleasant happen to you, for your own good to help you fit into our (dominance/submission based) society.” This contributes to a culture of coercion and prevents a community of compassion. And as we are learning on the global level with our war on terrorism, as you use your energy and resources to punish people you run out of energy and resources to protect people. And even if children look well-behaved, they are not behaving themselves They are being behaved by controlling parents and teachers.
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Kelly Bryson (Don't Be Nice, Be Real: Balancing Passion for Self with Compassion for Others)
“
The chorus of criticism culminated in a May 27 White House press conference that had me fielding tough questions on the oil spill for about an hour. I methodically listed everything we'd done since the Deepwater had exploded, and I described the technical intricacies of the various strategies being employed to cap the well. I acknowledged problems with MMS, as well as my own excessive confidence in the ability of companies like BP to safeguard against risk. I announced the formation of a national commission to review the disaster and figure out how such accidents could be prevented in the future, and I reemphasized the need for a long-term response that would make America less reliant on dirty fossil fuels.
Reading the transcript now, a decade later, I'm struck by how calm and cogent I sound. Maybe I'm surprised because the transcript doesn't register what I remember feeling at the time or come close to capturing what I really wanted to say before the assembled White House press corps:
That MMS wasn't fully equipped to do its job, in large part because for the past thirty years a big chunk of American voters had bought into the Republican idea that government was the problem and that business always knew better, and had elected leaders who made it their mission to gut environmental regulations, starve agency budgets, denigrate civil servants, and allow industrial polluters do whatever the hell they wanted to do.
That the government didn't have better technology than BP did to quickly plug the hole because it would be expensive to have such technology on hand, and we Americans didn't like paying higher taxes - especially when it was to prepare for problems that hadn't happened yet.
That it was hard to take seriously any criticism from a character like Bobby Jindal, who'd done Big Oil's bidding throughout his career and would go on to support an oil industry lawsuit trying to get a federal court to lift our temporary drilling moratorium; and that if he and other Gulf-elected officials were truly concerned about the well-being of their constituents, they'd be urging their party to stop denying the effects of climate change, since it was precisely the people of the Gulf who were the most likely to lose homes or jobs as a result of rising global temperatures.
And that the only way to truly guarantee that we didn't have another catastrophic oil spill in the future was to stop drilling entirely; but that wasn't going to happen because at the end of the day we Americans loved our cheap gas and big cars more than we cared about the environment, except when a complete disaster was staring us in the face; and in the absence of such a disaster, the media rarely covered efforts to shift America off fossil fuels or pass climate legislation, since actually educating the public on long-term energy policy would be boring and bad for ratings; and the one thing I could be certain of was that for all the outrage being expressed at the moment about wetlands and sea turtles and pelicans, what the majority of us were really interested in was having the problem go away, for me to clean up yet one more mess decades in the making with some quick and easy fix, so that we could all go back to our carbon-spewing, energy-wasting ways without having to feel guilty about it.
I didn't say any of that. Instead I somberly took responsibility and said it was my job to "get this fixed." Afterward, I scolded my press team, suggesting that if they'd done better work telling the story of everything we were doing to clean up the spill, I wouldn't have had to tap-dance for an hour while getting the crap kicked out of me. My press folks looked wounded. Sitting alone in the Treaty Room later that night, I felt bad about what I had said, knowing I'd misdirected my anger and frustration.
It was those damned plumes of oil that I really wanted to curse out.
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Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
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Finally, I would like to point out that now in the age of English, choosing a language policy is not the exclusive concern of non-English-speaking nations. It is also a concern for English-speaking nations, where, to realize the world’s diversity and gain the humility that is proper to any human being, people need to learn a foreign language as a matter of course. Acquiring a foreign language should be a universal requirement of compulsory education. Furthermore, English expressions used in international conferences should be regulated and standardized to some extent. Native English speakers need to know that to foreigners, Latinate vocabulary is easier to understand than what to the native speakers is easy, child-friendly language. At international conferences, telling jokes that none but native speakers can comprehend is inappropriate, even if fun. If native speakers of English – those who enjoy the privilege of having their mother tongue as the universal language – would not wait for others to protest but would take steps to regulate themselves, what respect they would earn from the rest of the world! If that is too much to ask, the rest of the world would appreciate it if they would at least be aware of their privileged position – and more important, be aware that the privilege is unwarranted. In this age of global communication, some language or other was bound to be come a universal language used in every corner of the world English became that language not because it is intrinsically more universal than other languages, but because through a series of historical coincidences it came to circulate ever more widely until it reached the tipping point. That’s all there is to it. English is an accidental universal language.
If more English native speakers walked through the doors of other languages, they would discover undreamed-of landscapes. Perhaps some of them might then begin to think that the truly blessed are not they themselves, but those who are eternally condemned to reflect on language, eternally condemned to marvel at the richness of the world.
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Minae Mizumura (The Fall of Language in the Age of English)
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Prisons are racism incarnate. As Michelle Alexander points out, they constitute the new Jim Crow. But also much more, as the lynchpins of the prison-industrial complex, they represent the increasing profitability of punishment. They represent the increasingly global strategy of dealing with populations of people of color and immigrant populations from the countries of the Global South as surplus populations, as disposable populations. Put them all in a vast garbage bin, add some sophisticated electronic technology to control them, and let them languish there. And in the meantime, create the ideological illusion that the surrounding society is safer and more free because the dangerous Black people and Latinos, and the Native Americans, and the dangerous Asians and the dangerous White people, and of course the dangerous Muslims, are locked up! And in the meantime, corporations profit and poor communities suffer! Public education suffers! Public education suffers because it is not profitable according to corporate measures. Public health care suffers. If punishment can be profitable, then certainly health care should be profitable, too. This is absolutely outrageous! It is outrageous. It is also outrageous that the state of Israel uses the carceral technologies developed in relation to US prisons not only to control the more than eight thousand Palestinian political prisoners in Israel but also to control the broader Palestinian population. These carceral technologies, for example, the separation wall, which reminds us of the US-Mexico border wall, and other carceral technologies are the material constructs of Israeli apartheid. G4S, the organization, the corporation G4S, which profits from the incarceration and the torturing of Palestinian prisoners, has a subsidiary called G4S Secure Solutions, which was formerly known as Wackenhut. And just recently a subsidiary of that just have one more page of notes corporation, GEO Group, which is a private prison company, attempted to claim naming rights at Florida Atlantic University by donating something like $6 million, right? And, the students rose up. They said that our football stadium will not bear the name of a private prison corporation! And the students won. The students won; the name came down from the marquee.
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Angela Y. Davis (Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement)
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The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens.
You want to talk contact patches? Your car's tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator's car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady's thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta.
Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a role model. This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it -- talking trade balances here -- once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here -- once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel -- once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity -- y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
* music
* movies
* microcode (software)
* high-speed pizza delivery
The Deliverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes. But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator's report card would say: "Hiro is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills."
So now he has this other job. No brightness or creativity involved -- but no cooperation either. Just a single principle: The Deliverator stands tall, your pie in thirty minutes or you can have it free, shoot the driver, take his car, file a class-action suit. The Deliverator has been working this job for six months, a rich and lengthy tenure by his standards, and has never delivered a pizza in more than twenty-one minutes.
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Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
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The culture generated by peer-orientation is sterile in the strict sense of that word: it is unable to reproduce itself or to transmit values that can serve future generations. There are very few third generation hippies. Whatever its nostalgic appeal, that culture did not have much staying power. Peer culture is momentary, transient, and created daily, a “culture du jour,” as it were. The content of peer culture resonates with the psychology of our peer-oriented children and adults who are arrested in their own development.
In one sense it is fortunate that peer culture cannot be passed on to future generations, since its only redeeming aspect is that it is fresh every decade. It does not edify or nurture or even remotely evoke the best in us or in our children. The peer culture, concerned only with what is fashionable at the moment, lacks any sense of tradition or history. As peer orientation rises, young people's appreciation of history wanes, even of recent history. For them, present and future exist in a vacuum with no connection to the past. The implications are alarming for the prospects of any informed political and social decision-making flowing from such ignorance.
A current example is South Africa today, where the end of apartheid has brought not only political freedom but, on the negative side, rapid and rampant Westernization and the advent of globalized peer culture. The tension between the generations is already intensifying. “Our parents are trying to educate us about the past,” one South African teenager told a Canadian newspaper reporter. “We're forced to hear about racists and politics…” For his part, Steve Mokwena, a thirty-six year-old historian and a veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle, is described by the journalist as being “from a different world than the young people he now works with.” “They're being force-fed on a diet of American pop trash. It's very worrying,” said Mokwena—in his mid-thirties hardly a hoary patriarch.on a diet of American pop trash. It's very worrying,” said Mokwena—in his mid-thirties hardly a hoary patriarch.
You might argue that peer orientation, perhaps, can bring us to the genuine globalization of culture, of a universal civilization that no longer divides the world into “us and them.” Didn't the MTV broadcaster brag that children all over television's world resembled one another more than their parents and grandparents? Could this not be the way to the future, a way to transcend the cultures that divide us and to establish a worldwide culture of connection and peace? We think not.
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Gabor Maté (Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers)
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As you know, the public conversation about the connection between Islamic ideology and Muslim intolerance and violence has been stifled by political correctness. In the West, there is now a large industry of apology and obfuscation designed, it would seem, to protect Muslims from having to grapple with the kinds of facts we’ve been talking about. The humanities and social science departments of every university are filled with scholars and pseudo-scholars—deemed to be experts in terrorism, religion, Islamic jurisprudence, anthropology, political science, and other fields—who claim that Muslim extremism is never what it seems. These experts insist that we can never take Islamists and jihadists at their word and that none of their declarations about God, paradise, martyrdom, and the evils of apostasy have anything to do with their real motivations. When one asks what the motivations of Islamists and jihadists actually are, one encounters a tsunami of liberal delusion. Needless to say, the West is to blame for all the mayhem we see in Muslim societies. After all, how would we feel if outside powers and their mapmakers had divided our lands and stolen our oil? These beleaguered people just want what everyone else wants out of life. They want economic and political security. They want good schools for their kids. They want to be free to flourish in ways that would be fully compatible with a global civil society. Liberals imagine that jihadists and Islamists are acting as anyone else would given a similar history of unhappy encounters with the West. And they totally discount the role that religious beliefs play in inspiring a group like the Islamic State—to the point where it would be impossible for a jihadist to prove that he was doing anything for religious reasons. Apparently, it’s not enough for an educated person with economic opportunities to devote himself to the most extreme and austere version of Islam, to articulate his religious reasons for doing so ad nauseam, and even to go so far as to confess his certainty about martyrdom on video before blowing himself up in a crowd. Such demonstrations of religious fanaticism are somehow considered rhetorically insufficient to prove that he really believed what he said he believed. Of course, if he said he did these things because he was filled with despair and felt nothing but revulsion for humanity, or because he was determined to sacrifice himself to rid his nation of tyranny, such a psychological or political motive would be accepted at face value. This double standard is guaranteed to exonerate religion every time. The game is rigged.
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Sam Harris (Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue)
“
As Dr. Fauci’s policies took hold globally, 300 million humans fell into dire poverty, food insecurity, and starvation. “Globally, the impact of lockdowns on health programs, food production, and supply chains plunged millions of people into severe hunger and malnutrition,” said Alex Gutentag in Tablet Magazine.27 According to the Associated Press (AP), during 2020, 10,000 children died each month due to virus-linked hunger from global lockdowns. In addition, 500,000 children per month experienced wasting and stunting from malnutrition—up 6.7 million from last year’s total of 47 million—which can “permanently damage children physically and mentally, transforming individual tragedies into a generational catastrophe.”28 In 2020, disruptions to health and nutrition services killed 228,000 children in South Asia.29 Deferred medical treatments for cancers, kidney failure, and diabetes killed hundreds of thousands of people and created epidemics of cardiovascular disease and undiagnosed cancer. Unemployment shock is expected to cause 890,000 additional deaths over the next 15 years.30,31 The lockdown disintegrated vital food chains, dramatically increased rates of child abuse, suicide, addiction, alcoholism, obesity, mental illness, as well as debilitating developmental delays, isolation, depression, and severe educational deficits in young children. One-third of teens and young adults reported worsening mental health during the pandemic. According to an Ohio State University study,32 suicide rates among children rose 50 percent.33 An August 11, 2021 study by Brown University found that infants born during the quarantine were short, on average, 22 IQ points as measured by Baylor scale tests.34 Some 93,000 Americans died of overdoses in 2020—a 30 percent rise over 2019.35 “Overdoses from synthetic opioids increased by 38.4 percent,36 and 11 percent of US adults considered suicide in June 2020.37 Three million children disappeared from public school systems, and ERs saw a 31 percent increase in adolescent mental health visits,”38,39 according to Gutentag. Record numbers of young children failed to reach crucial developmental milestones.40,41 Millions of hospital and nursing home patients died alone without comfort or a final goodbye from their families. Dr. Fauci admitted that he never assessed the costs of desolation, poverty, unhealthy isolation, and depression fostered by his countermeasures. “I don’t give advice about economic things,”42 Dr. Fauci explained. “I don’t give advice about anything other than public health,” he continued, even though he was so clearly among those responsible for the economic and social costs.
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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 US traded its manufacturing sector’s health for its entertainment industry, hoping that Police Academy sequels could take the place of the rustbelt. The US bet wrong.
But like a losing gambler who keeps on doubling down, the US doesn’t know when to quit. It keeps meeting with its entertainment giants, asking how US foreign and domestic policy can preserve its business-model. Criminalize 70 million American file-sharers? Check. Turn the world’s copyright laws upside down? Check. Cream the IT industry by criminalizing attempted infringement? Check. It’ll never work. It can never work. There will always be an entertainment industry, but not one based on excluding access to published digital works. Once it’s in the world, it’ll be copied. This is why I give away digital copies of my books and make money on the printed editions: I’m not going to stop people from copying the electronic editions, so I might as well treat them as an enticement to buy the printed objects.
But there is an information economy. You don’t even need a computer to participate. My barber, an avowed technophobe who rebuilds antique motorcycles and doesn’t own a PC, benefited from the information economy when I found him by googling for barbershops in my neighborhood.
Teachers benefit from the information economy when they share lesson plans with their colleagues around the world by email. Doctors benefit from the information economy when they move their patient files to efficient digital formats. Insurance companies benefit from the information economy through better access to fresh data used in the preparation of actuarial tables. Marinas benefit from the information economy when office-slaves look up the weekend’s weather online and decide to skip out on Friday for a weekend’s sailing. Families of migrant workers benefit from the information economy when their sons and daughters wire cash home from a convenience store Western Union terminal.
This stuff generates wealth for those who practice it. It enriches the country and improves our lives.
And it can peacefully co-exist with movies, music and microcode, but not if Hollywood gets to call the shots. Where IT managers are expected to police their networks and systems for unauthorized copying – no matter what that does to productivity – they cannot co-exist. Where our operating systems are rendered inoperable by “copy protection,” they cannot co-exist. Where our educational institutions are turned into conscript enforcers for the record industry, they cannot co-exist.
The information economy is all around us. The countries that embrace it will emerge as global economic superpowers. The countries that stubbornly hold to the simplistic idea that the information economy is about selling information will end up at the bottom of the pile.
What country do you want to live in?
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Cory Doctorow (Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future)
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Anna Chapman was born Anna Vasil’yevna Kushchyenko, in Volgograd, formally Stalingrad, Russia, an important Russian industrial city. During the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II, the city became famous for its resistance against the German Army. As a matter of personal history, I had an uncle, by marriage that was killed in this battle. Many historians consider the battle of Stalingrad the largest and bloodiest battle in the history of warfare.
Anna earned her master's degree in economics in Moscow. Her father at the time was employed by the Soviet embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, where he allegedly was a senior KGB agent. After her marriage to Alex Chapman, Anna became a British subject and held a British passport. For a time Alex and Anna lived in London where among other places, she worked for Barclays Bank. In 2009 Anna Chapman left her husband and London, and moved to New York City, living at 20 Exchange Place, in the Wall Street area of downtown Manhattan. In 2009, after a slow start, she enlarged her real-estate business, having as many as 50 employees. Chapman, using her real name worked in the Russian “Illegals Program,” a group of sleeper agents, when an undercover FBI agent, in a New York coffee shop, offered to get her a fake passport, which she accepted. On her father’s advice she handed the passport over to the NYPD, however it still led to her arrest.
Ten Russian agents including Anna Chapman were arrested, after having been observed for years, on charges which included money laundering and suspicion of spying for Russia. This led to the largest prisoner swap between the United States and Russia since 1986. On July 8, 2010 the swap was completed at the Vienna International Airport. Five days later the British Home Office revoked Anna’s citizenship preventing her return to England. In December of 2010 Anna Chapman reappeared when she was appointed to the public council of the Young Guard of United Russia, where she was involved in the education of young people. The following month Chapman began hosting a weekly TV show in Russia called Secrets of the World and in June of 2011 she was appointed as editor of Venture Business News magazine.
In 2012, the FBI released information that Anna Chapman attempted to snare a senior member of President Barack Obama's cabinet, in what was termed a “Honey Trap.” After the 2008 financial meltdown, sources suggest that Anna may have targeted the dapper Peter Orzag, who was divorced in 2006 and served as Special Assistant to the President, for Economic Policy. Between 2007 and 2010 he was involved in the drafting of the federal budget for the Obama Administration and may have been an appealing target to the FSB, the Russian Intelligence Agency. During Orzag’s time as a federal employee, he frequently came to New York City, where associating with Anna could have been a natural fit, considering her financial and economics background. Coincidently, Orzag resigned from his federal position the same month that Chapman was arrested. Following this, Orzag took a job at Citigroup as Vice President of Global Banking. In 2009, he fathered a child with his former girlfriend, Claire Milonas, the daughter of Greek shipping executive, Spiros Milonas, chairman and President of Ionian Management Inc. In September of 2010, Orzag married Bianna Golodryga, the popular news and finance anchor at Yahoo and a contributor to MSNBC's Morning Joe. She also had co-anchored the weekend edition of ABC's Good Morning America. Not surprisingly Bianna was born in in Moldova, Soviet Union, and in 1980, her family moved to Houston, Texas. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, with a degree in Russian/East European & Eurasian studies and has a minor in economics. They have two children. Yes, she is fluent in Russian! Presently Orszag is a banker and economist, and a Vice Chairman of investment banking and Managing Director at Lazard.
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Hank Bracker
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Already, among the top 10 percent of wage-earners, we cannot identify differences in observable characteristics (education, experience) that could explain why salaries between the top 1 percent and the remaining 9 percent differ by a factor of ten or more (Piketty 2014, chap. 9).
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Branko Milanović (Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization)
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System knowledge alone tends to favor technocratic visions; transformation knowledge by itself may encourage blind activism; orientation knowledge without system and transformation knowledge is idle. But even the combination of these types of knowledge will be useless as long as they are not implemented within a suitable knowledge economy, comprising research, education, public discourse, and political action.
Much of the needed knowledge is unavailable - either because it is inaccessible, suppressed, or unimplemented, or because it does not yet exist or has been lost. Even in the face of global challenges, there will not be just one way into the future, but various modes of bringing together the richness and diversity of human experiences. New form of knowledge, as well as new forms of individual and social life ready to meet the challenges of the Anthropocene (including new strategies for knowledge production and energy provision, for dealing with social justice and the flow of materials, for health care en traffic, etc) will not simply follow from a radical 'paradigm shift'. They will rather result from exploration processes that may eventually form a matrix. thus giving birth to new insights and forms of life that we could not have anticipated.
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Jürgen Renn (The Evolution of Knowledge: Rethinking Science for the Anthropocene)
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The IoT market grows rapidly and it’s acceleration will continue in all major areas like Industrial Internet of Things; Digital Enterprise; Internet of Healthcare; Internet of Energy; Internet of Education; Digitalisation of global Supply Chains.
Security concerns add to the IoT complexity. Strategically, to assure the system’s reliability & data / knowledge engineering, it is important to insure data integrity, availability, traceability, and privacy. A complex problem of digital transformation globally.
The Internet of Things cybersecurity, therefore, is not a matter of device self-defence. What is needed is a systemic approach. Identify underlying patterns. Secure elements of a chain: from security of a device that creates, captures your data.. to the data storage.. to the back-end storage.. Create/ join IoT ecosystems, driven by protection with external monitoring, detection and reaction systems. It is a challenge - to secure systems.
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Ludmila Morozova-Buss
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By stripping King and Parks of the breadth of their politics—which interwove economic justice, desegregation, criminal justice, educational justice, and global justice—many of these national tributes render Parks and King meek and dreamy, not angry, intrepid, and relentless, and thus not relevant or, even worse, at odds with a new generation of young activists.
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Jeanne Theoharis (A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History)
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I was born a few days before the fall of the Berlin Wall. One might have thought at the time that after the assumed elimination of the Cold War paradigm, we were going to live in peace. Hmm . . . what we’ve seen, in fact, is a cosmic rise in inequality, the global empowerment of oligarchs, threats to public education and health care, plus a potentially fatal environmental crisis.
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Nadya Tolokonnikova (Read & Riot: A Pussy Riot Guide to Activism)
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Teachers! If the majority of your students are failing, then you are not adaptive-teaching. Adapt to global, auditory, tactile & visual learners.
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Nzondi (Oware Mosaic)
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Child of Earth (The Sonnet)
Walk, walk, walk ahead,
O brave child of earth.
Let no fear shackle your feet,
Selflessness paves all path.
Meditate on unity,
Dedicate to inclusion.
Educate your soul,
Be free from self-absorption.
Forget gender, religion and ideology,
Abolish all chains of tribalism.
Place people at your heart's altar,
One dream, one mission – universalism.
Shallow and separated we can stay no more.
We must break ourselves to let light outpour.
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Abhijit Naskar (The Shape of A Human: Our America Their America)
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Science can contribute toward assisting with techniques of stress reduction — and research already shows that our survival and sustainability depends on our global cooperation as interdependent beings — but by itself, science cannot provide the values for a moral, meaningful life.
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David Forbes (Mindfulness and Its Discontents: Education, Self, and Social Transformation)
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It may not be an accident that many of the winners of globalization were ex-communist countries that had invested heavily in the human capital of their populations in the communist years (China, Vietnam) or countries threatened with communism that had pursued similar policies for that reason (Taiwan, South Korea). The best bet, therefore, for a country like India is to attempt to do things that can make the quality of life better for its citizens with the resources it already has: improving education, health, and the functioning of the courts and the banks, and building better infrastructure (better roads and more livable cities, for example).
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Abhijit V. Banerjee (Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems)
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Today, more people die from overwork and stress than from wars. More than 75 percent of people are dissatisfied with their jobs, which they view as too tedious and repetitive. Countries are facing growing debts, a constant fear of a coming recession, and later retirement ages. The cost of human error and fraud is almost equivalent to the total amount of money allocated globally to education.
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Pascal Bornet (INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION: Learn how to harness Artificial Intelligence to boost business & make our world more human)
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Online College of Business and Finance is committed to providing affordable and globally recognized online education to students across the globe. Our team of talented educators have developed a suite of online courses to make quality education accessible to all. Students can avail our wide range of courses ranging from business and finance to IT and hospitality management, from the comfort of their own home.
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Sandy Micheal
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Traditionally, charisma was associated with religious and political leaders, not CEOs or school principals. This began to change in the mid-1980s. The tipping point was the appearance of two books in 1985: Warren Bennis and Bert Nanus’s Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge and Bernard Bass’s influential Transformational Leadership: Industrial, Military, and Educational Impact. These authors broke with tradition and argued that charismatic (now “transformational”) leadership can be learned and practiced in settings ranging from schools to corporations to art museums. The transformational leader, they argued, unlocks human energy by creating a vision of a different reality and connecting that vision to people’s values and needs. These works were followed by a raft of books and articles in a similar vein: The Leadership Challenge: How to Get Extraordinary Things Done in Organizations (1987), The Transformational Leader: The Key to Global Competitiveness
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Richard P. Rumelt (Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters)
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Let us explore the deep involvement of G4S in the global prison-industrial complex. I am not only referring to the fact that the company owns and operates private prisons all over the world, but that it is helping to blur the boundary between schools and jails. In the US schools in poor communities of color are thoroughly entangled with the security state, so much so that sometimes we have a hard time distinguishing between schools and jails. Schools look like jails; schools use the same technologies of detection as jails and they sometimes use the same law enforcement officials. In the US some elementary schools are actually patrolled by armed officers. As a matter of fact, a recent trend among school districts that cannot afford security companies like G4S has been to offer guns and target practice to teachers.
... it is actually a striking example of the extent to which security has found its way into the educational system, and thus also of the way education and incarceration have been linked under the sign of capitalist profit. This example also demonstrates that the reach of the prison-industrial complex is far beyond the prison.
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Angela Y. Davis (Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement)
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People said, ‘They must have known their homes were vulnerable.’ We were protected by our houses, and our educations, and our high street shopping centers. We had the habits of luck and power, and couldn’t understand that they were not our right. We saw that the situation was bad elsewhere, but surely things would work out. Because didn’t they always, for us?
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Jessie Greengrass (The High House)
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The tyranny of merit arises from more than the rhetoric of rising. It consists in a cluster of attitudes and circumstances that, taken together, have made meritocracy toxic. First, under conditions of rampant inequality and stalled mobility, reiterating the message that we are responsible for our fate and deserve what we get erodes solidarity and demoralizes those left behind by globalization. Second, insisting that a college degree is the primary route to a respectable job and a decent life creates a credentialist prejudice that undermines the dignity of work and demeans those who have not been to college; and third, insisting that social and political problems are best solved by highly educated, value-neutral experts is a technocratic conceit that corrupts democracy and disempowers ordinary citizens.
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Michael J. Sandel (The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?)
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Why do I say we’re in the gutter? Perhaps I should speak for myself. I am a Westerner, and I benefit from a global system of trade that keeps the majority of the world’s population in poverty. I am an educated white resident of one the world’s leading economic giants, and I benefit from a social system that privileges me and my dependents in almost every conceivable way, at the expense of other cultural and ethnic groups. Until recently I was living in a country that props up numerous tyrants abroad and whose militarism costs the lives of civilians around the world every day. I am a man, and participate in a gender system that has perennially denied women full flourishing and, in most cases, still does. I am a twenty-first century citizen of the developed world, and I take for granted that my country and my generation gets to consume up the vast majority of the world’s non-renewable resources even though it is other countries and other generations that will likely bear the consequences; and I cannot imagine things any other way.5
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Samuel Wells (A Nazareth Manifesto: Being with God)
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In the weeks following my arrest, many of my family members were rounded up by the military as a form of collective punishment for what I had done and for the global attention it had garnered. In a single night, six of my relatives were arrested in predawn raids. Israel’s notoriously racist far-right defense minister justified the arrests by saying, “Dealing with Tamimi and her family has to be severe, exhaust all legal measures and generate deterrence.” And so, the occupation forces continued to target and punish my relatives. It got so bad that some of the parents, with the help of local activists, organized teach-ins to prepare the youth in the village for arrest, blindfolding them to simulate the experience. They also carried out mock interrogations and educated them about their rights.
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Ahed Tamimi (They Called Me a Lioness: A Palestinian Girl's Fight for Freedom)
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Balancing the needs of human societies with the preservation of freshwater ecosystems requires a paradigm shift towards more sustainable water use. This involves reevaluating the environmental impact of large-scale water extraction projects, promoting water conservation practices, and investing in alternative water sources to alleviate pressure on natural habitats.
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Shivanshu K. Srivastava
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We need to engage in a comprehensive and collaborative effort on a global scale, driven by a shared commitment to preserve the delicate balance of our planet’s ecosystems. The cost of inaction is not merely the loss of biodiversity but the unravelling of the intricate web of life that sustains us all.
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Shivanshu K. Srivastava
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Resources should be the entitlement of all of us: health, education, housing, and the fair distribution of energy sources.
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Gordon Roddick
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Thus for those in developed countries to be globally competitive, they must offer something qualitatively different, that is, something that cannot be obtained at a lower cost in developing countries.
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Yong Zhao (World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students)
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Big Tech was the culmination of the corporate liberal ideology and the globalized economy it envisioned. This was an economy that by the early twenty-first century depended less and less on
producing anything tangible, or on producers themselves, for that matter, but lavished ever greater rewards on the rarified, highly educated, largely urban technologist class.
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Josh Hawley
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I would love to see more women in the area of digital transformation. If women have improved access to skills development in this area, I believe it will have a positive impact for many generations to come. The skills acquired in digital transformation are transferrable to other sectors as well. The skills are practical and can lead to scientific breakthroughs. Because of this I believe there can be a generational impact.
The generational impact is important because we live in an age of commoditized information. As a society, we are relatively new to this reality and while cyber threats are the root of information security challenges, information security challenges are increasingly becoming the root of global threats. There needs to be increased involvement of more international stakeholders with the goal of improving digital transformation skills for everyone.
These skills are powerful and for that reason I will continue to promote cyber knowledge-sharing and greater access to cybersecurity education. For more women to enjoy the digital world full of surprises and rewards!
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Ludmila Morozova-Buss
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In the late 1880s, he deployed it to argue for the profound reform of French education, and not just for the elites, but for the masses too. He certainly thought that the English model and its focus on team sports and ball games was preferable to the regimented gymnastics of the German Turnen tradition. Many in France had looked to Prussia, its traditions of nationalist gymnastics, drill and military success, and called for the transformation of French physical education and the armed forces on German lines. Coubertin, by contrast, argued, ‘It is citizens more than soldiers that France needs. It is not militarism that our education needs, but freedom.
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David Goldblatt (The Games: A Global History of the Olympics)
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The causes of this breathtaking increase in inequality during the past three to four decades are much debated—globalization, technological change and the consequent increase in “returns to education,” de-unionization, superstar compensation, changing social norms, and post-Reagan public policy—though the basic shift toward inequality occurred under both Republican and Democratic administrations.
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Robert D. Putnam (Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis)
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The Hinglish continuum, then, is an exit strategy. It is not a way of keeping one Indian language alive forever in parallel with English. The destination in India, for language, for the economy, and for politics, is the swift-flowing current taking us into the global arena. The only countries that have held off the decimation of their languages as they tread the neoliberal waters are those where all education has been firmly kept in a local language.
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Peggy Mohan (Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages)
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Extreme poverty isn’t just an African issue or an Asian issue or a South American issue. It is a global issue. Before flying overseas to help relieve poverty abroad, consider the poverty in your own backyard.
Every country on every continent has people impacted by poverty—whether it is relative or absolute. Bringing extreme poverty down to zero will take more trial and error, more methods, more innovation, and more communication. Most importantly, it will take more trust—the trust that people are aware of their problems and are creative enough to solve them when given the right resources. People need opportunities, connections, and education to learn more about life’s possibilities, not handouts, performative sympathy, and empty promises.
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Danielle Hawa Tarigha (Uplift and Empower: A Guide To Understanding Extreme Poverty and Poverty Alleviation)
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Frank’s mention of a “moral judgment handed down by the successful” touched on something important. Encouraging more people to go to college is a good thing. Making college more accessible to those of modest means is even better. But as a solution to inequality and the plight of workers who lost out in the decades of globalization, the single-minded focus on education had a damaging side effect: eroding the social esteem accorded those who had not gone to college.
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Michael J. Sandel (The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?)
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The current global health crisis has raised many challenges to the students in attempting their exams. But in the recent days, across the globe, the education system has turned to virtual learning introducing proctoring exams as a practical solution during the prevailing pandemic situation. The meaning of proctoring is not much complicated to understand. Proctored exams are regular exams by using the proctoring software which monitors your desktops or PC’s, webcam audio and video. The proctoring software records the data and transfers the same for review.
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Lmsmaster
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Dr. Trent Lovette is a retired superintendent, but that doesn't mean he isn't working. He's taken his leadership experience and interpersonal skills to the field of leadership coaching, mentoring, and motivational speaking as John Maxwell and Gallup CliftonStrengths Global coach. Additionally, Dr. Trent Lovette has joined together with a business partner to enter the real estate business with Summit Investment Properties.
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Dr Trent Lovette
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This is the most ridiculous and outrageous situation of our times, a historic mistake that is being committed by our generation on a global scale. The blame for this mistake is shared by all, and the price for this mistake will be paid by all. Why is this happening? How can we be so ignorant and non-innovative when it comes to the future of our children, the future of our world?
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Hezki Arieli (The Future of Education: How to Evolve 'Old Schools' to Exciting & Innovative Learning Hubs)
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she has caused the name of Greeks to be understood, not in terms of kinship any more, but of a way of thinking, and people to be called Greeks if they share our educational system, rather than a common ancestry. —Isocrates, Panegyricus (Athens, 380 BCE)
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Roderick Beaton (The Greeks: A Global History)
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At a Gates Foundation conference, former US president Barack Obama declared, “If you had to choose one moment in history in which to be born, and you didn’t know in advance whether you were going to be male or female, which country you were going to be from, what your status was, you’d choose right now.” He observes that the world has never been “healthier, or wealthier, or better educated, or in many ways more tolerant, or less violent, than it is today.” As a species, we’re moving far beyond the survival mentality of Caveman Brain. We’re leaving behind the standards of behavior that defined “normal” in the last century. A critical mass of people is using the human superpower—unique in evolutionary history—to reshape the tissue of their own brains. Bliss Brain is a wonderful-feeling state, but when practiced consistently, it leads to trait change, as neural pathways are repatterned in much healthier ways. This isn’t simply helping us feel better as individuals. It’s contributing to Jump Time in collective planetary evolution. Just as the Renaissance of the 1300s changed art, law, education, politics, religion, agriculture, science, and every other facet of human existence, the compassion produced by Bliss Brain transforms the material reality in which we live. This is the most exciting time in all of history to be alive. As we as a species jump to the next level of flourishing, we are unlocking creative potential the world has never known before. From changing our minds to changing our brains to changing our societies to solving global problems, we’re ushering in a completely different future for the planet.
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Dawson Church (Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy)
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What does the booming of the prison-industrial complex say about our society? The soaring numbers of people behind bars all over the world and the increasing profitability of the means of holding them captive is one of the most dramatic examples of the destructive tendencies of global capitalism. But the obscene profits obtained from mass incarceration are linked to profits from the health care industry and from education and other commodified human services that actually should be freely available to everyone.
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Angela Y. Davis (Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement)
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This moment of global inequality demands incompetent subjects. The status quo and ever-intensifying versions of it require incompetent consumers who will learn to want technological solutions to their political problems. Are you starving even though there is food? Here is an app to connect you with the charity that is filling that hole in our ragged social safety net. Are global profits being extracted by the financial class while driving down wages and quality of work, even for people with expensive college educations? Here is a website where you can purchase a credential that might help you get a new job, one where you will likely be in the same position again in eighteen months. Your structural incompetence generates ever more sophisticated consumption goods, goods that reinforce status games of who is deserving and who is not.
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Tressie McMillan Cottom (Thick: And Other Essays)
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When thoughts of Kazakshtan cross my mind, I recall the profound stillness, the extended pauses, and the arduous search for meaning in words that were foreign to me.
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Amelyn Laro (STREETS TO HORIZONS: A JOURNEY FROM STREET EDUCATION TO GLOBAL EDUCATION)
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Solitude can either be detrimental or something you learn to adapt to and find comfort in.
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Amelyn Laro (STREETS TO HORIZONS: A JOURNEY FROM STREET EDUCATION TO GLOBAL EDUCATION)
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Being in a new place initially brings excitement. The sights, sounds, and smells are all fresh and unknown, igniting a sense of curiosity.
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Amelyn Laro (STREETS TO HORIZONS: A JOURNEY FROM STREET EDUCATION TO GLOBAL EDUCATION)
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To better understand and listen to other people. I need to forget about myself and my own perspective.
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Amelyn Lanada Laro (STREETS TO HORIZONS: A JOURNEY FROM STREET EDUCATION TO GLOBAL EDUCATION)
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I will always remember the comment made by one of my Russian friends about my smile: "You smile like the sun.".
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Amelyn Lanada Laro (STREETS TO HORIZONS: A JOURNEY FROM STREET EDUCATION TO GLOBAL EDUCATION)
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I realized that the market, school, and streets are filled with similar individuals exhibiting similar behaviors, but in different contexts. The school had its written rules, while the streets and market had their unwritten rules. To this day, I continue to reflect on the extent of influence these places had on shaping my open-mindedness toward life and people. Living and surviving in different environments, just breathing and embracing what comes my way.
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Amelyn Laro (STREETS TO HORIZONS: A JOURNEY FROM STREET EDUCATION TO GLOBAL EDUCATION)
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Meeting girls and boys who had experienced broken homes and were surviving on solvent inhalation made me appreciate the blessings in my own life.
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Amelyn Laro (STREETS TO HORIZONS: A JOURNEY FROM STREET EDUCATION TO GLOBAL EDUCATION)
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I was there to listen, and often, their stories moved me to tears. I couldn't comprehend how these young children had endured physical abuse from their parents at such tender ages, or how they grew up without knowing their origins or their parents love. Their drawings became a compilation that served as a reminder of their courage, which sometimes made me question my own.
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Amelyn Laro (STREETS TO HORIZONS: A JOURNEY FROM STREET EDUCATION TO GLOBAL EDUCATION)
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I want to make it clear that I am not against marriage, but I am against abusive relationships. That is where I draw the line.
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Amelyn Laro (STREETS TO HORIZONS: A JOURNEY FROM STREET EDUCATION TO GLOBAL EDUCATION)
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When I think about Women's Day, I believe that the best place to celebrate it is in Kazakshtan.
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Amelyn Laro (STREETS TO HORIZONS: A JOURNEY FROM STREET EDUCATION TO GLOBAL EDUCATION)
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The notion that a woman can be an exceptional teacher, pursue personal goals and passions, and inspire others is not yet universally accepted.
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Amelyn Laro (STREETS TO HORIZONS: A JOURNEY FROM STREET EDUCATION TO GLOBAL EDUCATION)
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top research company in Myanmar scene is powerful and different, with a few driving organizations offering thorough types of assistance to organizations looking to comprehend and enter the neighborhood market. Here are a portion of the top exploration firms in Myanmar:
Myanmar Study Exploration (MSR):
Laid out as the main free exploration organization in Myanmar, MSR brags north of 25 years experience. The organization offers an expansive scope of administrations including quantitative and subjective exploration, web-based entertainment research, and CATI (PC Helped Phone Talking) research. MSR is known for its profound comprehension of the nearby market and its capacity to convey experiences across different areas like farming, medical care, and customer products (Statistical surveying Organizations) .
STP Exploration Myanmar:
STP Exploration Myanmar (Single Touch Point Co., Ltd.) works in both market and social examination. With a rich history of leading north of 150 examination projects, STP has shown skill in areas like wellbeing, farming, schooling, and monetary effect evaluations. Their accomplished group offers subjective and quantitative examination administrations, custom fitted to meet the particular necessities and spending plans of their clients (STP Myanmar) .
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ARM gives a far reaching set-up of statistical surveying administrations including brand following, client experience, secret shopping, and B2B research. ARM is especially noted for its imaginative methodology and the utilization of a delegate portable exploration board of more than 85,000 shoppers spread across Myanmar. This permits them to catch continuous bits of knowledge and convey significant outcomes to their clients (ARM) .
Statistical surveying Myanmar by YCP Solidiance:
Under the umbrella of YCP Solidiance, Statistical surveying Myanmar assists organizations with growing in the Burmese market by giving proof based statistical surveying and methodology suggestions. Their administrations incorporate market section and development technique, cutthroat benchmarking, channel model distinguishing proof, and M&A warning. They have major areas of strength for a record of helping global organizations in exploring the neighborhood monetary scene and recognizing manageable learning experiences (Exploration in Myanmar) .
Xavey Exploration Arrangements:
1. Xavey Exploration Arrangements is known for its tech-driven statistical surveying arrangements. They have practical experience in catching "in-the-occasion" bits of knowledge through portable and advanced stages, which is essential for grasping powerful purchaser ways of behaving in Myanmar. Their inventive methodology considers proficient information assortment and examination, settling on them a favored decision for educated clients seeking influence computerized instruments for top research company in Myanmar
2. These organizations feature the top research company in Myanmar
, offering a scope of administrations that take care of different business needs from top to bottom area examinations to constant shopper bits of knowledge. Each firm brings its exceptional assets and procedures, guaranteeing that organizations can track down the right accomplice to assist them with prevailing in the Burmese market. Whether it's through customary subjective techniques or high level advanced procedures, these organizations are exceptional to give the experiences important to informed direction and key preparation.
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top research company in Myanmar
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We should recognize that the main struggle may no longer develop between the two seemingly so logical antipoles of “Left” and “Right” (which, in themselves, are already outdated nineteenth-century designations) but between two divergent forces of the so-called “Right.” We should hberate oiuselves from accustomed ideological categories as we observe Europe in the last hundred years. The most outstanding figures have been men of the “Right”: a Bismarck, a Churchill, a Mussolini, a Hitler, perhaps an Adenauer, a De Gaulle; so were most of the outstanding thinkers, from Nietzsche to Ortega; artists, poets, writers, historians, from Wagner to Yeats, from Ibsen to Orwell, the great anxious talents moved steadily “rightward” during their lifetime; and for the first time since the Counter Reformation conversions have been flowing almost unilaterally toward Catholicism. Of course it is true that meanwhile the European aristocracies, and with them all class difiFerences, have gradually disappeared, that the practices of popular sovereignty, of universal suffrage, of universal education have become accepted everywhere as part and parcel of the modem welfare state; that, therefore, the structure of European society has become more and more social and democratic. But this structural development is not specifically European but global. What is specifically European within it is a spiritual movement to the “Right,” a movement which is, at its best, instinctively conservative and which, at its worst, has been shot through with disgust against the tiring regimen of Reason. It is within these divergences that the meaning of the European Revolution appears.
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John Lukacs (The European Revolution & Correspondence With Gobineau)
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One interesting quirk is that in high-context cultures, the more educated and sophisticated you are, the greater your ability to both speak and listen with an understanding of implicit, layered messages. By contrast, in low-context cultures, the most educated and sophisticated business people are those who communicate in a clear, explicit way. In this respect, education tends to move individuals toward a more extreme version of the dominant cultural tendency.
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Erin Meyer (The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business)
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One of the Top Universities in Australia and is consistently ranked in the top universities in the world for international students.
India's leading higher education consultants in India. we are offering abroad students study options globally & help educate overseas global.
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Top Universities in Australia
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If you actually want to tackle climate crisis, then instead of yelling at the politicians like a hysterical Karen and obstructing traffic, educate the masses on clean energy and get involved in startups working on affordable clean energy solutions.
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Abhijit Naskar (Şehit Sevda Society: Even in Death I Shall Live)
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I keep it global, every day of the week, I keep it global every time that I speak. I keep it global with the knowledge I seek. I keep it global, global global
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Aaron I. Bruce
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Global economics does not speak to the public need for meaningful work, affordable housing, fulfilling education, adequate medical care, a clean environment, honest and accountable government, social and cultural renewal, or simple justice. All global ambitions are based on a definition of productivity and the good life
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John Taylor Gatto (Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling)
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The Bible's message for women doesn't depend on ideal circumstances, but applies fully to those who live in the brutal outskirts of society where poverty engulfs, education is nonexistent, women's bodies are ravaged, and lives are in constant peril simply because they are female.
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Carolyn Custis James (Half the Church: Recapturing God's Global Vision for Women)
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THE STRATEGIC CONSEQUENCES OF CHINESE RACISM: A Strategic Asymmetry for the United States
Draft Report
Submitted 7 January 2013
Project Number: HQ006721370003000
Since our genus Homo first evolved in the Pliocene, humans have favored those who are biologically related. In general, the closer the relationship, the greater the preferential treatment. The vast majority of animals behave in this way, and humans are no different. In a world of scarce resources and many threats, the evolutionary process would select nepotism, thus promoting the survival of the next generation. However, this process is relative. Parents are more willing to provide for their own children than for the children of relatives, or rarely for those of strangers.
The essence of an inclusive fitness explanation of ethnocentrism, then, is that individuals generally should be more willing to support, privilege, and sacrifice for their own family, then their more distant kin, their ethnic group, and then others, such as a global community, in decreasing order of importance. ...
The in-group/out-group division is also important for explaining ethnocentrism and individual readiness to kill outsiders before in-group members. Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt draws on psychologist Erik Erikson’s concept of “cultural pseudo speciation,” and says that in almost all cultures humans form subgroups usually based on kinship; these “eventually distinguish themselves from others by dialect and other subgroup characteristics and go on to form new cultures.” ...
When an individual considers whether to support a larger group, several metrics are available. One of these ... is ethnocentrism, a continuation of one’s willingness to sacrifice for one’s family because of the notion of common kinship. As I discussed above, the ways humans determine their relations with unrelated individuals are complex, but the key factors are physical resemblance, as well as environmental causes like shared culture, history, and language. ...
I have shown that in-group/out-group distinctions like ethnocentrism and xenophobia are not quirks of human behavior in certain settings. Instead, they are systematic and consistent behavioral strategies, or traits. They apply to all humans... They are widespread because they increased survival and reproductive success and were thus favored by natural selection over evolutionary history. ...
Chinese racism ... is a strategic asset that makes a formidable adversary. ... The government educates the people to be proud of being Han and of China. In turn, the Chinese people are proud and fiercely patriotic as well as ethnocentric, racist, and xenophobic. This aids the government and permits them to maintain high levels of popular support. ...
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Anonymous
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The economic collapse of inner-city black communities could have inspired a national outpouring of compassion and support. A new War on Poverty could have been launched. Economic stimulus packages could have sailed through Congress to bail out those trapped in jobless ghettos through no fault of their own. Education, job training, public transportation, and relocation assistance could have been provided, so that youth of color would have been able to survive the rough transition to a new global economy and secure jobs in distant suburbs. Constructive interventions would have been good not only for African Americans trapped in ghettos, but also for blue-collar workers of all colors, many of whom were suffering too, if less severely. A wave of compassion and concern could have flooded poor and working-class communities in honor of the late Martin Luther King Jr. All of this could have happened, but it didn’t. Instead our nation declared a War on Drugs.
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Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
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Between 1967 and 1980, U.S. test scores fell by about 1.25 grade-level equivalents. The education researcher John Bishop called this decline “historically unprecedented,” arguing that it put a serious drag on national productivity that would continue well into the twenty-first century.
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Steven D. Levitt (SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance)