Good Commissioning Quotes

Do good works or commission an opera house or just take it out and gaze at it longingly when you think of the handsome prince you might have made your own. For the record, I favor the latter option, preferably paired with copious tears and the recitation of bad poetry.

CUSTOMER: Which was the first Harry Potter book? BOOKSELLER: The Philosopher’s Stone. CUSTOMER: And the second? BOOKSELLER: The Chamber of Secrets. CUSTOMER: I’l take The Chamber of Secrets. I don’t want The Philosopher’s Stone. BOOKSELLER: Have you already read that one? CUSTOMER: No, but with series of books I always find they take a while to really get going. I don’t want to waste my time with the useless introductory stuff at the beginning. BOOKSELLER: The story in Harry Potter actually starts right away. Personally, I do recommend that you start with the first book – and it’s very good. CUSTOMER: Are you working on commission? BOOKSELLER: No. CUSTOMER: Right. How many books are there in total? BOOKSELLER: Seven. CUSTOMER: Exactly. I’m not going to waste my money on the first book when there are so many others to buy. I’l take the second one. BOOKSELLER: . . . If you’re sure. (One week later, the customer returns) BOOKSELLER: Hi, did you want to buy a copy of The Prisoner of Azkaban? CUSTOMER: What’s that? BOOKSELLER: It’s the book after The Chamber of Secrets. CUSTOMER: Oh, no, definitely not. I found that book far too confusing. I ask you, how on earth are children supposed to understand it if I can’t? I mean, who the heck is that Voldemort guy anyway? No. I’m not going to bother with the rest. BOOKSELLER: . . .

All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him.

I remember a time when a cabbage could sell itself by being a cabbage. Nowadays it’s no good being a cabbage – unless you have an agent and pay him a commission. Nothing is free anymore to sell itself or give itself away. These days, Countess, every cabbage has its pimp.

Diana gave her a measured look and ducked down behind the counter. She came up a moment later with a sword about the length of Clary's forearm. "What do you think of this?" Clary stared at the weapon. It was undoubtedly beautiful. The cross-guard, grip and pommel were gold chased with obsidian, the blade a silver so dark it was nearly black. "It's a shortsword. You might want to look at the other side," said Diana, and she flipped the sword over. On the opposite side of the blade, down the center ridge, ran a pattern of black stars. "Oh." Clary's heart thumped painfully; she took a step away and nearly bumped into Jace, who had come up behind her, frowning. "That's a Morgenstern sword." "Yes, it is." The sword-seller's eyes were shrewd. "Long ago the Morgensterns commissioned two blades from Wayland the Smith-a matched set. You have doubtless seen the the larger sword already, for Valentine Morgenstern carried it, and now his son carries it after him." "You know who we are," Jace said. It wasn't a question. "Who Clary is." "The Shadowhunter world is small," said Diana, and she looked from one of them to the other. "I'm on the Council. I've seen you give testimony, Valentine's daughter." Clary looked doubtfully at the blade. "I've seen two men bear the larger version of that sword, and I hated them both. There are no Morgensterns in this world now who are dedicated to anything but evil." Jace said, "There's you." "I'll give it to you," said Diana. "You're right that people hate the Morgensterns; it's not the sort of item I could sell elsewhere. Or would necessarily want to. It should go to good hands." "I don't want it," Clary said. "If you flinch from it, you give it power over you," said Diana. "Take it, and cut your brother's throat with it, and reclaim the honor of your blood.

You have to have balls to golf. That’s why The Securities and Exchange Commission doesn’t play.

If God is good, and if He wants us to subdue this planet, and if He wants us to obey the Great Commission and conquer this world for Christ, and if He tells half the human race that they're in charge of tending the home, it follows from this that the home is actually one of the most strategic and important tools by which the world will be won.

God will save whomever He chooses to save. The Christian should proselytize not because he thinks he can change everybody; he should proselytize because the Gospel being shared is the ultimate act of love: because he thinks he can love everybody.

For this end, we must be knit together in this work as one man, we must entertain each other in brotherly affection, we must be willing to abridge our selves of our superfluities for the supply of others' necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other, make others' conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor, and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace, the Lord will be our God and delight to dwell among us, as His own people and will command a blessing upon us in all our ways, so that we shall see much more of His wisdom, power, goodness, and truth then formerly we have been acquainted with.

There is a good explanation for why Emotional Neglect has been so overlooked. It hides. It dwells in the sins of omission, rather than commission; it’s the white space in the family picture rather than the picture itself. It’s often what was NOT said or observed or remembered from childhood, rather than what WAS said.

Evangelism cant be our focus! We must not stop sharing the good news, but here’s the deal, here’s the wonderful thing, it gets done along the way as you do discipleship. Great commission is just about going to disciple the nations and you know what happens... as you disciple them evangelism takes place, because it’s done in the context of discipleship. Here’s the issue: We have to reframe evangelism within the context of discipleship

Hasar is cranky and cold. Sartaq is used to these conditions and doesn’t care. Kashin is trying to make the best of it, because he’s so damned nice, but they’re all just a little nervous that we’re marching on a hundred thousand soldiers, potentially more on the way, and that Erawan is not out of commission. Neither is Maeve. So they’re pissed. They like you, but they’re pissed.” “I’d gathered as much,” Aelin said drily, “when Hasar called me a stupid cow.” It had taken all of Elide’s restraint not to lunge for the princess. And from the growl that had come from the Fae males, even Lorcan, gods above, she knew it had been just as difficult for them. Aelin had only inclined her head to the princess and smiled. Just as she was smiling now. Borte waved off Aelin’s words. “Hasar calls everyone a stupid cow. You’re in good company.

Count your years and you'll be ashamed to be wanting and working for exactly the same things as you wanted when you were a boy. Of this one thing make sure against your dying day - that your faults die before you do. Have done with those unsettled pleasures, which cost one dear - they do one harm after they're past and gone, not merely when they're in prospect. Even when they're over, pleasures of a depraved nature are apt to carry feelings of dissatisfaction, in the same way as a criminal's anxiety doesn't end with the commission of the crime, even if it's undetected at the time. Such pleasures are insubstantial and unreliable; even if they don't do one any harm, they're fleeting in character. Look around for some enduring good instead. And nothing answers this description except what the spirit discovers for itself within itself. A good character is the only guarantee of everlasting, carefree happiness. Even if some obstacle to this comes on the scene, its appearance is only to be compared to that of clouds which drift in front of the sun without ever defeating its light.

Here's the problem: when every sin is seen as the same, we are less likely to fight any sins at all. Why should I stop sleeping with my girlfriend when there will still be lust in my heart? Why pursue holiness when even one sin in my life means I'm Osama bin Hitler in God's eyes? Again, it seems humble to act as if no sin is worse than another, but we lose the impetus for striving and the ability to hold each other accountable when we tumble down the slip-n-slide of moral equivalence. All of a sudden the elder who battles the temptation to take a second look at the racy section of the Lands End catalog shouldn't dare exercise church discipline ont he young man fornicating with reckless abandon. When we can no longer see the different gradations among sins and sinners and sinful nations, we have not succeeded in respecting our own badness; we've cheapened God's goodness.

They worried that widespread mail-in voting would lead to fraud. And they had good reason to worry. A 2005 bipartisan commission co-chaired by none other than Jimmy Carter found that absentee balloting was the largest source of potential fraud in American elections. Why should 2020 be any different? They worried that universal mail-in balloting would make ballots harder to track, as some states bombarded addresses with ballots for previous residents who had moved out but hadn’t been struck from the voter rolls. What would happen to all the excess ballots?

Extending the Airport Runway The good citizens of the commission cast their votes for more of everything. Very early in the morning I go out to the pale dunes, to look over the empty spaces of the wilderness. For something is there, something is there when nothing is there but itself, that is not there when anything else is. Alas, the good citizens of the commission have never seen it, whatever it is, formless, yet palpable. Very shining, very delicate. Very rare.

In many ways the effect of the crash on embezzlement was more significant than on suicide. To the economist embezzlement is the most interesting of crimes. Alone among the various forms of larceny it has a time parameter. Weeks, months, or years may elapse between the commission of the crime and its discovery. (This is a period, incidentally, when the embezzler has his gain and the man who has been embezzled, oddly enough, feels no loss. There is a net increase in psychic wealth.) At any given time there exists an inventory of undiscovered embezzlement in — or more precisely not in — the country’s businesses and banks. This inventory — it should perhaps be called the bezzle — amounts at any moment to many millions of dollars. It also varies in size with the business cycle. In good times people are relaxed, trusting, and money is plentiful. But even though money is plentiful, there are always many people who need more. Under these circumstances the rate of embezzlement grows, the rate of discovery falls off, and the bezzle increases rapidly. In depression all this is reversed. Money is watched with a narrow, suspicious eye. The man who handles it is assumed to be dishonest until he proves himself otherwise. Audits are penetrating and meticulous. Commercial morality is enormously improved. The bezzle shrinks. … Just as the boom accelerated the rate of growth, so the crash enormously advanced the rate of discovery. Within a few days, something close to a universal trust turned into something akin to universal suspicion. Audits were ordered. Strained or preoccupied behavior was noticed. Most important, the collapse in stock values made irredeemable the position of the employee who had embezzled to play the market. He now confessed.

True believers must realize that the state of our society is the result of the righteous judgment of God. God has not commissioned His people to reconstruct society. We are not called to expend our energies for moral reform. We are salt—a preservative for a decaying generation (Matt. 5:13). And we are lights designed to shine in a way that enables people who see our good works to glorify our heavenly Father (vv. 14–16). In other words, our primary task is to preach the truth of God’s Word, live in obedience to that truth, and to keep ourselves unstained by the world (Jas. 1:27). Our influence on society must be the fruit of that kind of living, not the product of fleshly energy or political clout.

Suppose you did get a job as a saleswoman? What would you get for it? No matter how they figure it up, when you’re selling goods you get paid on commission, because it stands to reason if you weren’t making commission they wouldn’t pay you. But who’s buying any goods? You’d have just stood around some store, all day long, waiting for the chance to make a living, and not making it. People eat, though, even now. You’ll have something coming in.

Right now, scientists are in exactly the same position as Renaissance painters, commissioned to make the portrait the patron wants done. And if they are smart, they’ll make sure their work subtly flatters the patron. Not overtly. Subtly. This is not a good system for research into those areas of science that affect policy. Even worse, the system works against problem solving. Because if you solve a problem, your funding ends. All that’s got to change.

In these times, when so wide a gulf has opened between the rich and the poor, which, instead of narrowing, as all good men would have it, grows broader daily; it is most important that all ranks and degrees of people should understand whose hands are stretched out to separate these two great divisions of society each of whom, for its strength and happiness, and the future existence of this country, as a great and powerful nation, is dependent on the other.

What the gods are supposed to be, what the priests are commissioned to say, is not a sensational secret like what those running messengers of the Gospel had to say. Nobody else except those messengers has any Gospel; nobody else has any good news; for the simple reason that nobody else has any news. Those runners gather impetus as they run. Ages afterwards they still speak as if something had just happened. They have not lost the speed and momentum of messengers; they have hardly lost, as it were, the wild eyes of witnesses. In the Catholic Church, which is the cohort of the message, there are still those headlong acts of holiness that speak of something rapid and recent; a self-sacrifice that startles the world like a suicide. But it is not a suicide; it is not pessimistic; it is still as optimistic as St. Francis of the flowers and birds. It is newer in spirit than the newest schools of thought; and it is almost certainly on the eve of new triumphs. For these men serve a mother who seems to grow more beautiful as new generations rise up and call her blessed. We might sometimes fancy that the Church grows younger as the world grows old.

Ethical transgressions are generally divided into two categories: the bad things we do (acts of commission) and the good things we fail to do (acts of omission). We tend to judge the former far more harshly. The origin of this imbalance remains a mystery, but it surely relates to the value we place on a person’s energy and intent.

What is the age of the soul of man? As she hath the virtue of the chameleon to change her hue at every new approach, to be gay with the merry and mournful with the downcast, so too is her age changeable as her mood. No longer is Leopold, as he sits there, ruminating, chewing the cud of reminiscence, that staid agent of publicity and holder of a modest substance in the funds. He is young Leopold, as in a retrospective arrangement, a mirror within a mirror (hey, presto!), he beholdeth himself. That young figure of then is seen, precociously manly, walking on a nipping morning from the old house in Clambrassil street to the high school, his booksatchel on him bandolierwise, and in it a goodly hunk of wheaten loaf, a mother's thought. Or it is the same figure, a year or so gone over, in his first hard hat (ah, that was a day!), already on the road, a fullfledged traveller for the family firm, equipped with an orderbook, a scented handkerchief (not for show only), his case of bright trinketware (alas, a thing now of the past!), and a quiverful of compliant smiles for this or that halfwon housewife reckoning it out upon her fingertips or for a budding virgin shyly acknowledging (but the heart? tell me!) his studied baisemoins. The scent, the smile but more than these, the dark eyes and oleaginous address brought home at duskfall many a commission to the head of the firm seated with Jacob's pipe after like labours in the paternal ingle (a meal of noodles, you may be sure, is aheating), reading through round horned spectacles some paper from the Europe of a month before. But hey, presto, the mirror is breathed on and the young knighterrant recedes, shrivels, to a tiny speck within the mist. Now he is himself paternal and these about him might be his sons. Who can say? The wise father knows his own child. He thinks of a drizzling night in Hatch street, hard by the bonded stores there, the first. Together (she is a poor waif, a child of shame, yours and mine and of all for a bare shilling and her luckpenny), together they hear the heavy tread of the watch as two raincaped shadows pass the new royal university. Bridie! Bridie Kelly! He will never forget the name, ever remember the night, first night, the bridenight. They are entwined in nethermost darkness, the willer and the willed, and in an instant (fiat!) light shall flood the world. Did heart leap to heart? Nay, fair reader. In a breath 'twas done but - hold! Back! It must not be! In terror the poor girl flees away through the murk. She is the bride of darkness, a daughter of night. She dare not bear the sunnygolden babe of day. No, Leopold! Name and memory solace thee not. That youthful illusion of thy strength was taken from thee and in vain. No son of thy loins is by thee. There is none to be for Leopold, what Leopold was for Rudolph.

One such middleman is a South African security researcher based in Thailand who is known in the security community by his hacker handle “The Grugq.” The Grugq brokers exploit sales between his hacker friends and government contacts, pocketing a 15 percent commission per transaction. He only launched his business in 2011, but by 2012 sales were so good, he told a reporter he expected to make $1 million in commissions.

The fantastical idea of virtue and the public good being a sufficient security to the state against the commission of crimes...was never mine. It is only the sanguinary hue of our penal laws which I meant to object to. Punishments I know are necessary, and I would provide them strict and inflexible, but proportioned to the crime. Death might be inflicted for murder and perhaps for treason, [but I] would take out of the description of treason all crimes which are not such in their nature. Rape, buggery, etc., punish by castration. All other crimes by working on high roads, rivers, gallies, etc., a certain time proportioned to the offence... Laws thus proportionate and mild should never be dispensed with. Let mercy be the character of the lawgiver, but let the judge be a mere machine. The mercies of the law will be dispensed equally and impartially to every description of men; those of the judge or of the executive power will be the eccentric impulses of whimsical, capricious designing man.

The bottom line is that, much as in rich countries, we have no accepted recipe for how to make growth happen in poor countries. Even the experts seem to have accepted this. In 2006, the World Bank asked the Nobel laureate Michael Spence to lead the Commission on Growth and Development (informally known as the Growth Commission). Spence initially refused, but convinced by the enthusiasm of his would-be fellow panelists, a highly distinguished group that included Robert Solow, he finally agreed. But their report ultimately recognized that there are no general principles, and no two growth episodes seem alike. Bill Easterly, not very charitably perhaps, but quite accurately, described their conclusion: “After two years of work by the commission of 21 world leaders and experts, an 11-member working group, 300 academic experts, 12 workshops, 13 consultations, and a budget of $4m, the experts’ answer to the question of how to attain high growth was roughly: we do not know, but trust experts to figure it out.

The charm of a city, now we come to it, is not unlike the charm of flowers. It partly depends on seeing time creep across it. Charm needs to be fleeting. Nothing could be less palatable than a museum-city propped up by prosthetic devices of concrete. Paris is not in danger of becoming a museum-city, thanks to the restlessness and greed of promoters. Yet their frenzy to demolish everything is less objectionable than their clumsy determination to raise housing projects that cannot function without the constant presence of an armed police force… All these banks, all these glass buildings, all these mirrored facades are the mark of a reflected image. You can no longer see what’s happening inside, you become afraid of the shadows. The city becomes abstract, reflecting only itself. People almost seem out of place in this landscape. Before the war, there were nooks and crannies everywhere. Now people are trying to eliminate shadows, straighten streets. You can’t even put up a shed without the personal authorization of the minister of culture. When I was growing up, my grandpa built a small house. Next door the youth club had some sheds, down the street the local painter stored his equipment under some stretched-out tarpaulin. Everybody added on. It was telescopic. A game. Life wasn’t so expensive — ordinary people would live and work in Paris. You’d see masons in blue overalls, painters in white ones, carpenters in corduroys. Nowadays, just look at Faubourg Sainte-Antoine — traditional craftsmen are being pushed out by advertising agencies and design galleries. Land is so expensive that only huge companies can build, and they have to build ‘huge’ in order to make it profitable. Cubes, squares, rectangles. Everything straight, everything even. Clutter has been outlawed. But a little disorder is a good thing. That’s where poetry lurks. We never needed promoters to provide us, in their generosity, with ‘leisure spaces.’ We invented our own. Today there’s no question of putting your own space together, the planning commission will shut it down. Spontaneity has been outlawed. People are afraid of life.

Indeed, in government, the worse a government agency performs, the more money it can claim from a legislature, city council, or county commission. If state-run schools fail to educate children, then obviously they need more money (even if government-run schools often already spend several times more per student than private schools do). If the welfare state fails to reduce, or actually increases, poverty then obviously, say the bureaucrats, we need to expand welfare programs even further. The Obama administration actually bragged about expanding food stamp rolls and claimed they were good for the economy.

He knew that the Soviets were not likely to “take this great plunge.” He had not given up hope that in the distant future international controls could be achieved. In the meantime, he had reluctantly decided that the United States had to arm itself. This had led him to conclude—with considerable melancholy—that the principal job of the Atomic Energy Commission would be to “provide atomic weapons and good atomic weapons and many atomic weapons.” Having preached the necessity of international control and openness in 1946, Oppenheimer by 1947 was beginning to accept the idea of a defense posture supported by a multitude of nuclear weapons.

He settled for writing a letter, in a quiet corner, while Temeraire dictated his own: "Gentlemen, I am very happy to accept your commission, and we should like to be the eighty-first regiment, if that number is not presently taken. We do not need any rifles, and we have got plenty of powder and shot for our cannons,” Laurence wrote with a vivid awareness of the reactions this should produce, “but we are always in need of more cows and pigs and sheep, and goats would also do, if a good deal easier to come by. Lloyd and our herdsmen have done very well, and I should to commend them to your attention, but there are a lot of us, and some more herdsmen would be very useful.” “Pepper, put in pepper,” another dragon said, craning her head over; she was a middle-weight, yellowish striped with gray, some kind of cross-breed. “And canvas, we must have a lot of canvas—“ “Oh, very well, pepper,” Temeraire said, and continuing his list of requests added, “I should very much like Keynes to come here, and also Gong Su, and Emily Roland, who has my talon-sheaths, and the rest of my crew; and also we need some surgeons for the wounded me. Dorset had better come, too, and some of the other dragon-surgeons. You had all better not stay where you are at present—“ “Temeraire, you cannot write so to your superior officers,” Laurence said, breaking off.

The actual consumers of knowledge are the children—who can’t pay, can’t vote, can’t sit on the committees. Their parents care for them, but don’t sit in the classes themselves; they can only hold politicians responsible according to surface images of “tough on education.” Politicians are too busy being re-elected to study all the data themselves; they have to rely on surface images of bureaucrats being busy and commissioning studies—it may not work to help any children, but it works to let politicians appear caring. Bureaucrats don’t expect to use textbooks themselves, so they don’t care if the textbooks are hideous to read, so long as the process by which they are purchased looks good on the surface. The textbook publishers have no motive to produce bad textbooks, but they know that the textbook purchasing committee will be comparing textbooks based on how many different subjects they cover, and that the fourth-grade purchasing committee isn’t coordinated with the third-grade purchasing committee, so they cram as many subjects into one textbook as possible. Teachers won’t get through a fourth of the textbook before the end of the year, and then the next year’s teacher will start over. Teachers might complain, but they aren’t the decision-makers, and ultimately, it’s not their future on the line, which puts sharp bounds on how much effort they’ll spend on unpaid altruism . . .

We Americans have come to feel that it is our mission to make the world free. We believe that we are always the good guys, everywhere-in Vietnam, in Latin America, wherever we go. We believe we are the good guys at home, too. When the Kemer Commission told white Amerca what black America had always known, that prejudice and hatred built the nation's slums, maintain them and profit by them, white America would not believe it. But it is true. Unless we start to fight and defeat the enemies of poverty and racism in our own country and make our talk of equality and opportunity ring true, we are exposed as hypocrites in the eyes of the world when we talk about making other people free. (From Voices of Multicultural America)

On 23 August 1572, French Catholics who stressed the importance of good deeds attacked communities of French Protestants who highlighted God’s love for humankind. In this attack, the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, between 5,000 and 10,000 Protestants were slaughtered in less than twenty-four hours. When the pope in Rome heard the news from France, he was so overcome by joy that he organised festive prayers to celebrate the occasion and commissioned Giorgio Vasari to decorate one of the Vatican’s rooms with a fresco of the massacre (the room is currently off-limits to visitors).2 More Christians were killed by fellow Christians in those twenty-four hours than by the polytheistic Roman Empire throughout its entire existence.

Poor old Nixon, even his own commissions beat on him. What the hell can he do? He can’t go into every ghetto and fix the plumbing himself. He can’t give every copped-out junkie a million dollars and a Ph.D. Nixon, who’s Nixon? He’s just a typical flatfooted Chamber of Commerce type who lucked his way into the hot seat and is so dumb he thinks it’s good luck. Let the poor bastard alone, he’s trying to bore us to death so we won’t commit suicide.

West couldn't simply leave the man like this, he didn't have it in him. "Goodman Heath," he said as he approached, and the peasant looked up at him, surprised. He fumbled for his hat and made to rise, muttering apologies. "No, please, don't get up." West sat down on the bench. He stared at his feet, unable to look the man in the eye. There was an awkward silence. "I have a friend who sits on the Commission for Land and Agriculture. There might be something he can do for you…" He trailed off, embarrassed, squinting up the corridor. The farmer gave a sad smile. "I'd be right grateful for anything you could do." "Yes, yes, of course, I'll do what I can." It would do no good whatsoever, and they both knew it. West grimaced and bit his lip. "You'd better take this," and he pressed his purse into the peasant's limp, calloused fingers. Heath looked at him, mouth slightly open. West gave a quick, awkward smile then got to his feet. He was very keen to be off. "Sir!" called Goodman Heath after him, but West was already hurrying down the corridor, and he didn't look back.

Not only did Jesus save Mary; He gave her a job to do. Everyone whom the Lord cleans He commissions. After Isaiah had his lips cleaned with a coal from God’s altar, the Lord commissioned him to go and preach (Isa. 6:1-9). Basically, Jesus said to Mary, “Don’t just cling to Me; go and tell others.” If we love Jesus as Mary loved Jesus, we are compelled to tell others. We can’t keep Him to ourselves. The man from whom Jesus purged an army of demons wanted to just stay at His side. “Now the man from whom the demons had departed begged Him that he might be with Him. But Jesus sent him away, saying, ‘Return to your own house, and tell what great things God has done for you’ ” (Luke 8:38, 39). Like Mary and this man, the church is saved for the purpose of telling others. Salvation involves coming and going. We come to Jesus at His great invitation, then we go for Jesus -181- with the Great Commission. “Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28). “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations” (Matt. 28:19). “Now therefore come, that we may go and tell the king’s household” (2 Kings 7:9, KJV). We should not go for Jesus until we first come to Jesus. God uses people to reach people. He could preach the gospel much more efficiently through angels. However, witnessing is part of our sanctification process. Mary is never identified as having an exceptional gift of communication, but the Lord chose her to communicate the good news of His resurrection. This should encourage each of us to come to Jesus that we might go for Jesus and become witnesses of His resurrection.

My Dear Mrs Winter. (I had half a mind when I dipped my pen in the ink, to address you by your old natural Christian name.) The snow lies so deep on the Northern Railway, and the Posts have been so interrupted in consequence, that your charming note arrived here only this morning... I get the heartache again when I read your commission, written in the hand which I find now to be not in the least changed, and yet it is a great pleasure to be entrusted with it, and to have that share in your gentler remembrances which I cannot find it still my privilege to have, without a stirring of the old fancies. ... I am very very sorry you mistrusted me in not writing before your little girl was born; but I hope now you know me better you will teach her, one day, to tell her children, in times to come when they have some interest in wondering about it, that I loved her mother with the most extraordinary earnestness when I was a boy. I have always believed since, and always shall to the last, that there never was such a faithful and devoted poor fellow as I was. Whatever of fancy, romance, energy, passion, aspiration and determination belong to me, I never have separated and never shall separate from the hard hearted little woman - you - whom it is nothing to say I would have died for, with the greatest alacrity! I never can think, and I never seem to observe, that other young people are in such desperate earnest, or set so much, so long, upon one absorbing hope. It is a matter of perfect certainty to me that I began to fight my way out of poverty and obscurity, with one perpetual idea of you. This is so fixed in my knowledge that to the hour when I opened your letter last Friday night, I have never heard anybody addressed by your name or spoken of by your name, without a start. The sound of it has always filled me with a kind of pity and respect for the deep truth that I had, in my silly hobbledehoyhood, to bestow upon one creature who represented the whole world to me. I have never been so good a man since, as I was when you made me wretchedly happy. I shall never be half so good a fellow any more. This is all so strange now, both to think of, and to say, after every change that has come about; but I think, when you ask me to write to you, you are not unprepared for what it is so natural to me to recall, and will not be displeased to read it. I fancy, - though you may not have thought in the old time how manfully I loved you - that you may have seen in one of my books a faithful reflection of the passion I had for you, and may have thought that it was something to have been loved so well, and may have seen in little bits of "Dora" touches of your old self sometimes, and a grace here and there that may be revived in your little girls, years hence, for the bewilderment of some other young lover - though he will never be as terribly in earnest as I and David Copperfield were. People used to say to me how pretty all that was, and how fanciful it was, and how elevated it was above the little foolish loves of very young men and women. But they little thought what reason I had to know it was true and nothing more nor less. These are things that I have locked up in my own breast, and that I never thought to bring out any more. But when I find myself writing to you again "all to your self", how can I forbear to let as much light in upon them as will shew you that they are there still! If the most innocent, the most ardent, and the most disinterested days of my life had you for their Sun - as indeed they had - and if I know that the Dream I lived in did me good, refined my heart, and made me patient and persevering, and if the Dream were all of you - as God knows it was - how can I receive a confidence from you, and return it, and make a feint of blotting all this out! ...

Others may not notice it, because an angry Toraf is truly a rare thing to behold, but Galen can practically feel the animosity emanating from his friend. Which is why he casually bumps into him, taking care to be overly apologetic. “Oh, sorry about that, minnow. I didn’t even see you there.” Galen mimics Toraf’s demeanor, crossing his arms and staring ahead of them. What they’re supposed to be staring at, he’s not sure. His effort is rewarded with a slight upward curve of his friend’s mouth. “Oh, don’t think twice about it, tadpole. I know it must be difficult to swim straight with a whale’s tail.” Galen scowls, taking care not to glance down at his fin. Ever since they went to retrieve Grom, he’s been sore all below the waist, but he’d just attributed it to tension from finding Nalia, and then the whole tribunal mess-not to mention, hovering in place for hours at a time. Still, he did examine his fin the evening before, hoping to massage out any knots he found, but was a bit shocked to see that his fin span seemed to have widened. He decided that he was letting his imagination get the better of him. Now he’s not so sure. “What do you mean?” he says lightly. Toraf nods down toward the sand. “You know what I mean. Looks like you have the red fever.” “The red fever bloats you all over, idiot. Right before it kills you. It doesn’t make your fin grow wider. Besides, the red tide hasn’t been bad for years now.” But Toraf already knows what the red fever looks like. Not long after he first became a Tracker, Toraf was commissioned to find an older Syrena who had gone off on his own to die after he’d been caught in what the humans call the red tide. Toraf was forced to tie seaweed around the old one’s fin and pull his body to the Cave of Memories. No, he doesn’t think I have the red fever. Toraf allows himself a long look at Galen’s fin. If it were anyone else, Galen would consider it rude. “Does it hurt?” “It’s sore.” “Have you asked anyone about it?” “I’ve had other things on my mind.” Which is the truth. Galen really hadn’t given it much thought until right now. Now that it has been noticed by someone else. Toraf pulls his own fin around and after a few seconds of twisting and bending, he’s able to measure it against his torso. It spans from his neck to where his waist turns into velvety tail. He nods to Galen to do the same. Galen is horrified to find that his fin now spans from the top of his head to well below his waist. It really does look like a whale tail. “I don’t know how I feel about that,” Toraf says, thoughtful. “I’ve gotten used to having the most impressive fin out of the two of us.” Galen grins, letting his tail fall. “For a minute there I thought you really cared.” Toraf shrugs. “Being self-conscious doesn’t suit you.” Galen follows his gaze back out into the sea ahead of them. “So what do you think about yesterday’s tribunal?” “I think I know where Nalia and Emma get their temper.” Galen laughs. “I thought Jagen was going to pass out when Antonis grabbed him.” “He’s not very good at interacting with others anymore, is he?” “I wonder if he ever was. I told you how crazy Nalia always acted. Could be a family trait.” It looks like Toraf might actually smile but instead his gaze jerks back out to sea, a new scowl on his face. “Oh, no,” Galen groans. “What is it?” Please don’t say Emma. Please don’t say Emma. “Rayna,” Toraf says through clenched teeth. “She’s heading straight for us.” That’s almost as bad.

Can there be true equality in the classroom and the boardroom if there isn’t in the bedroom? Back in 1995 the National Commission on Adolescent Sexual Health declared healthy sexual development a basic human right. Teen intimacy, it said, ought to be “consensual, non-exploitative, honest, pleasurable, and protected against unintended pregnancy and STDs.” How is it, over two decades later, that we are so shamefully short of that goal? Sara McClelland, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, writes about sexuality as a matter of “intimate justice,” touching on fundamental issues of gender inequality, economic disparity, violence, bodily integrity, physical and mental health, self-efficacy, and power dynamics in our most personal relationships. She asks us to consider: Who has the right to engage in sexual behavior? Who has the right to enjoy it? Who is the primary beneficiary of the experience? Who feels deserving? How does each partner define “good enough?” Those are thorny questions when looking at female sexuality at any age, but particularly when considering girls’ early, formative experience. Nonetheless, I was determined to ask them.

The twice-tolling clock, the Count explained, had been commissioned by his father from the venerable firm of Breguet. Establishing their shop in Paris in 1775, the Breguets were quickly known the world over not only for the precision of their chronometers (that is, the accuracy of their clocks), but for the elaborate means by which their clocks could signal the passage of time. They had clocks that played a few measures of Mozart at the end of the hour. They had clocks that chimed not only at the hour but at the half and the quarter. They had clocks that displayed the phases of the moon, the progress of the seasons, and the cycle of the tides. But when the Count’s father visited their shop in 1882, he posed a very different sort of challenge for the firm: a clock that tolled only twice a day. “Why would he do so?” asked the Count (in anticipation of his young listener’s favorite interrogative). Quite simply, the Count’s father had believed that while a man should attend closely to life, he should not attend too closely to the clock. A student of both the Stoics and Montaigne, the Count’s father believed that our Creator had set aside the morning hours for industry. That is, if a man woke no later than six, engaged in a light repast, and then applied himself without interruption, by the hour of noon he should have accomplished a full day’s labor. Thus, in his father’s view, the toll of twelve was a moment of reckoning. When the noon bell sounded, the diligent man could take pride in having made good use of the morning and sit down to his lunch with a clear conscience. But when it sounded for the frivolous man—the man who had squandered his morning in bed, or on breakfast with three papers, or on idle chatter in the sitting room—he had no choice but to ask for his Lord’s forgiveness.

I had all kinds of answers ready for the commissions that called me in and asked me what had made me become a Communist, but what had attracted me to the movement more than anything, dazzled me, was the feeling (real or apparent) of standing near the wheel of history. For in those days we actually did decide the fate of men and events, especially at the universities; in those early years there were very few Communists on the faculty, and the Communists in the student body ran the universities almost single-handed, making decisions on academic staffing, teaching reform, and the curriculum. The intoxication we experienced is commonly known as the intoxication of power, but (with a bit of good will) I could choose less severe words: we were bewitched by history; we were drunk with the thought of jumping on its back and feeling it beneath us; admittedly, in most cases the result was an ugly lust for power, but (as all human affairs are ambiguous) there was still (and especially, perhaps, in us, the young), an altogether idealistic illusion that we were inaugurating a human era in which man (all men) would be neither outside history, nor under the heel of history, but would create and direct it.

Ostap Bender lay in the dvornik's room, which was warm to the point of reeking, and mentally put the finishing touches on two possible career plans. He could become a polygamist and move peacefully from town to town, dragging behind him a new suitcase full of valuable items he'd picked up from the latest wife. Or he could go the very next day to the Stargorod Children's Commission and offer them the chance to distribute the as-yet unpainted but brilliantly conceived canvas The Bolsheviks Writing a Letter to Chamberlain, based on the artist Repin's popular painting The Zaporozhian Cossacks Writing a Letter to the Turkish Sultan. If it worked out, this option could bring in something along the line of four hundred rubles. Ostap had thought up both options during his last stay in Moscow. The polygamy option had been born under the influence of the court report from the evening papers, where it was clearly indicated that some polygamist had only gotten two years without strict isolation. Option number two had taken shape in Bender's mind when he was going through the AARR exhibit on a free ticket. However, both options had their downsides. It was impossible to begin a career as a polygamist without a wondrous, dapple-gray suit. In addition, he needed at least ten rubles for hospitality expenses and seduction. Of course, he could get married in his green campaign uniform as well, because Bender's masculine power and attraction were absolutely irresistible to provincial, marriage-ready Margaritas; but that would be, as Bender liked to say, "Poor-quality goods. Not clean work." It wasn't all smooth sailing for the painting, either. Purely technical difficulties could arise. Would it be proper to paint Comrade Kalinin in a papakha and a white burka, or Comrade Chicherin naked to the waist?

During those years his writers were Kerouac, Hesse and Camus. From among the living, Lowell, Moorcock, Ballard and Burroughs. Ballard had been to King’s, Cambridge but Roland forgave him that, as he would have forgiven him anything. He had a romantic view of writers. They should be, if not barefoot bums, light-footed, unrooted, free, living a vagabond life on the edge, gazing into the abyss and telling the world what was down there. Not knighthoods or pearls, for sure. Decades later he was more generous. Less stupid. A tweed jacket never stopped anyone from writing well. He believed it was extremely difficult to write a very good novel and to get halfway there was also an achievement. He deplored the way literary editors commissioned novelists rather than critics to review each other’s work. He thought it was a grisly spectacle, insecure writers condemning the fiction of their colleagues to make elbow room for themselves. His ignorant twenty-seven-year-old self would have sneered at Roland’s favourites now. He was reading through a domestic canon that lay just beyond the great encampments of literary modernism. Henry Green, Antonia White, Barbara Pym, Ford Madox Ford, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Patrick Hamilton. Some had

When an official report in the UK was commissioned to examine the mathematics needed in the workplace, the investigator found that estimation was the most useful mathematical activity. Yet when children who have experienced traditional math classes are asked to estimate, they are often completely flummoxed and try to work out exact answers, then round them off to look like an estimate. This is because they have not developed a good feel for numbers, which would allow them to estimate instead of calculate, and also because they have learned, wrongly, that mathematics is all about precision, not about making estimates or guesses. Yet both are at the heart of mathematical problem solving.

Bezos had seemingly made up his mind that he was no longer going to indulge in financial maneuvering as a way to escape the rather large hole Amazon had dug for itself, and it wasn’t just through borrowing Sinegal’s business plan. At a two-day management and board offsite later that year, Amazon invited business thinker Jim Collins to present the findings from his soon-to-be-published book Good to Great. Collins had studied the company and led a series of intense discussions at the offsite. “You’ve got to decide what you’re great at,” he told the Amazon executives. Drawing on Collins’s concept of a flywheel, or self-reinforcing loop, Bezos and his lieutenants sketched their own virtuous cycle, which they believed powered their business. It went something like this: Lower prices led to more customer visits. More customers increased the volume of sales and attracted more commission-paying third-party sellers to the site. That allowed Amazon to get more out of fixed costs like the fulfillment centers and the servers needed to run the website. This greater efficiency then enabled it to lower prices further. Feed any part of this flywheel, they reasoned, and it should accelerate the loop. Amazon executives were elated; according to several members of the S Team at the time, they felt that, after five years, they finally understood their own business. But when Warren Jenson asked Bezos if he should put the flywheel in his presentations to analysts, Bezos asked him not to. For now, he considered it the secret sauce.

Please,' she says, her head bent. 'Please. You must try to break the curse. I know that you are the queen by right and that you may not want him back, but-' If anything could have increased my astonishment, it was that. 'You think that I'd-' 'I didn't know you, before,' she says, the anguish clear in her voice. There is a hitch in her breath that comes with weeping. 'I thought you were just some mortal.' I have to bite my tongue at that, but I don't interrupt her. 'When you became his seneschal, I told myself that he wanted you for your lying tongue. Or because you'd become biddable, although you never were before. I should have believed you when you told him he didn't know the least of what you could do. 'While you were in exile, I got more of the story out of him. I know you don't believe this, but Cardan and I were friends before we were lovers, before Locke. He was my first friend when I came here from the Undersea. And we were friends, even after everything. I hate that he loves you.' 'He hated it, too,' I say with a laugh that sounds more brittle than I'd like. Nicasia fixes me with a long look. 'No, he didn't.' To that, I can only be silent. 'He frightens the Folk, but he's not what you think he is,' Nicasia says. 'Do you remember the servants that Balekin had? The human servants?' I nod mutely. Of course I remember. I will never forget Sophie and her pockets full of stones. 'They'd go missing sometimes, and there were rumours that Cardan hurt them, but it wasn't true. He'd return them to the mortal world.' I admit, I'm surprised. 'Why?' She throws up a hand. 'I don't know! Perhaps to annoy his brother. But you're human, so I thought you'd like that he did it. And he sent you a gown. For the coronation.' I remember it- the ball gown in the colours of the night, with the stark outlines of trees stitched on it and the crystals for stars. A thousand times more beautiful than the dress I commissioned. I had thought perhaps it came from Prince Dain, since it was his coronation and I'd sworn to be his creature when I'd joined the Court of Shadows. 'He never told you, did he?' Nicasia says. 'So see? Those are two nice things about him you didn't know. And I saw the way you used to look at him when you didn't think anyone was watching you.' I bite the inside of my cheek, embarrassed despite the fact that we were lovers, and wed, and it should hardly be a secret that we like each other. 'So promise me,' she says. 'Promise me you'll help him.' I think of the golden bridle, about the future the stars predicted. 'I don't know how to break the curse,' I say, all the tears I haven't shed welling up in my eyes. 'If I could, do you think i would be at this stupid banquet? Tell me what I must slay, what I must steal, tell me the riddle I must solve or the hag I must trick. Only tell me the way, and I will do it, no matter the danger, no matter the hardship, no matter the cost.' My voice breaks. She gives me a steady look. Whatever else I might think of her, she really does care for Cardan. And as tears roll down my cheeks, to her astonishment, I think she realises I do, too. Much good it does him.

In early 2016, Amazon was given a license by the Federal Maritime Commission to implement ocean freight services as an Ocean Transportation Intermediary. So, Amazon can now ship others’ goods. This new service, dubbed Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), won’t do much directly for individual consumers. But it will allow Amazon’s Chinese partners to more easily and cost-effectively get their products across the Pacific in containers. Want to bet how long it will take Amazon to dominate the oceanic transport business? 67 The market to ship stuff (mostly) across the Pacific is a $ 350 billion business, but a low-margin one. Shippers charge $ 1,300 to ship a forty-foot container holding up to 10,000 units of product (13 cents per unit, or just under $ 10 to deliver a flatscreen TV). It’s a down-and-dirty business, unless you’re Amazon. The biggest component of that cost comes from labor: unloading and loading the ships and the paperwork. Amazon can deploy hardware (robotics) and software to reduce these costs. Combined with the company’s fledgling aircraft fleet, this could prove another huge business for Amazon. 68 Between drones, 757/ 767s, tractor trailers, trans-Pacific shipping, and retired military generals (no joke) who oversaw the world’s most complex logistics operations (try supplying submarines and aircraft carriers that don’t surface or dock more than once every six months), Amazon is building the most robust logistics infrastructure in history. If you’re like me, this can only leave you in awe: I can’t even make sure I have Gatorade in the fridge when I need it.

This is a political age. War, Fascism, concentration camps, rubber truncheons, atomic bombs, etc., are what we daily think about, and therefore to a great extent what we write about, even when we do not name them openly. We cannot help this. When you are on a sinking ship, your thoughts will be about sinking ships. But not only is our subject-matter narrowed, but our whole attitude towards literature is coloured by loyalties which we at least intermittently realise to be non-literary. I often have the feeling that even at the best of times literary criticism is fraudulent, since in the absence of any accepted standards whatever—any external reference which can give meaning to the statement that such and such a book is “good” or “bad”—every literary judgement consists in trumping up a set of rules to justify an instinctive preference. One’s real reaction to a book, when one has a reaction at all, is usually “I like this book” or “I don’t like it,” and what follows is a rationalisation. But “I like this book” is not, I think, a non-literary reaction; the non-literary reaction is “This book is on my side, and therefore I must discover merits in it.” Of course, when one praises a book for political reasons one may be emotionally sincere, in the sense that one does feel strong approval of it, but also it often happens that party solidarity demands a plain lie. Anyone used to reviewing books for political periodicals is well aware of this. In general, if you are writing for a paper that you are in agreement with, you sin by commission, and if for a paper of the opposite stamp, by omission.

A good list of questions to ask your advisor will include the following: Where will my money be held? Right answer: Somewhere else! Are you a broker? Right answer: No! Are you a dually registered advisor? Right answer: No! Do you or any affiliate have proprietary investments of any kind? Right answer: No! How are you compensated? Right answer: Total disclosure in writing and never make commissions on any investment product. What are the credentials of you and/or your team? Right answer: If planning is involved, a CFP is ideal to have on the team. What is your planning and investment management approach? Right answer: The firm should follow a coherent philosophy rather than a bunch of different strategies (unprincipled) and should follow an approach that does not involve market timing or active trading.

The church is a political body in that it is interested in the common good and not in the sense that it is a political party with members to represent. After evangelical flagship magazine Christianity Today published an op-ed by editor-in-chief Mark Galli supporting President Trump’s impeachment, the president tweeted that the magazine was looking for Democrats “to guard their religion” and that “no President has ever done what I have done for Evangelicals, or religion itself!”7 It not only revealed the president’s view of his relationship with evangelicals but highlighted the attitude many evangelicals share: Christians make political decisions based on what will protect them and their interests. But the church is commissioned to seek the flourishing of our communities, not special privileges for ourselves.

although they do not fear them to such an extent as to be drawn to the commission of like iniquities, nay, not by any threats or violence soever; yet those very deeds which they refuse to share in the commission of, they often decline to find fault with, when possibly they might by finding fault prevent their commission. They abstain from interference, because they fear that, if it fail of good effect, their own safety or reputation may be damaged or destroyed; not because they see that their preservation and good name are needful, that they may be able to influence those who need their instruction, but rather because they weakly relish the flattery and respect of men, and fear the judgments of the people, and the pain or death of the body; that is to say, their non-intervention is the result of selfishness, and not of love.

I Won’t Write Your Obituary You asked if you could call to say goodbye if you were ever really gonna kill yourself. Sure, but I won’t write your obituary. I’ll commission it from some dead-end journalist who will say things like: “At peace… Better place… Fought the good fight…” Maybe reference the loving embrace of Capital-G-God at least 4 times. Maybe quote Charles fucking Bukowski. And I won’t stop them because I won’t write your obituary. But if you call me, I will write you a new sky, one you can taste. I will write you a D-I-Y cloud maker so on days when you can’t do anything you can still make clouds in whatever shape you want them. I will write you letters, messages in bottles, in cages, in orange peels, in the distance between here and the moon, in forests and rivers and bird songs. I will write you songs. I can’t write music, but I’ll find Rihanna, and I’ll get her to write you music if it will make you want to dance a little longer. I will write you a body whose veins are electricity because outlets are easier to find than good shrinks, but we will find you a good shrink. I will write you 1-800-273-8255, that’s the suicide hotline; we can call it together. And yeah, you can call me, but I won’t tell you it’s okay, that I forgive you. I won’t say “goodbye” or “I love you” one last time. You won’t leave on good terms with me, Because I will not forgive you. I won’t read you your last rights, absolve you of sin, watch you sail away on a flaming viking ship, my hand glued to my forehead. I will not hold your hand steady around a gun. And after, I won’t come by to pick up the package of body parts you will have left specifically for me. I’ll get a call like “Ma’am, what would you have us do with them?” And I’ll say, “Burn them. Feed them to stray cats. Throw them at school children. Hurl them at the sea. I don’t care. I don’t want them.” I don’t want your heart. It’s not yours anymore, it’s just a heart now and I already have one. I don’t want your lungs, just deflated birthday party balloons that can’t breathe anymore. I don’t want a jar of your teeth as a memento. I don’t want your ripped off skin, a blanket to wrap myself in when I need to feel like your still here. You won’t be there. There’s no blood there, there’s no life there, there’s no you there. I want you. And I will write you so many fucking dead friend poems, that people will confuse my tongue with your tombstone and try to plant daisies in my throat before I ever write you an obituary while you’re still fucking here. So the answer to your question is “yes”. If you’re ever really gonna kill yourself, yes, please, call me.

This,” said Slartibartfast, “is where we make most of our planets, you see.” “You mean,” said Arthur, trying to form the words, “you mean you’re starting it all up again now?” “No no, good heavens, no,” exclaimed the old man, “no, the Galaxy isn’t nearly rich enough to support us yet. No, we’ve been awakened to perform just one extraordinary commission for very … special clients from another dimension. It may interest you … there in the distance in front of us.” Arthur followed the old man’s finger till he was able to pick out the floating structure he was pointing out. It was indeed the only one of the many structures that betrayed any sign of activity about it, though this was more a subliminal impression than anything one could put one’s finger on. At that moment, however, a flash of light arced through the structure and revealed in stark relief the patterns that were formed on the dark sphere within. Patterns that Arthur knew, rough blobby shapes that were as familiar to him as the shapes of words, part of the furniture of his mind. For a few seconds he sat in stunned silence as the images rushed around his mind and tried to find somewhere to settle down and make sense. Part of his brain told him that he knew perfectly well what he was looking at and what the shapes represented while another quite sensibly refused to countenance the idea and abdicated responsibility for any further thinking in that direction. The flash came again, and this time there could be no doubt. “The Earth …” whispered Arthur. “Well, the Earth Mark Two in fact,” said Slartibartfast cheerfully. “We’re making a copy from our original blueprints.” There was a pause. “Are you trying to tell me,” said Arthur, slowly and with control, “that you originally … made the Earth?

The good performed by some of United Nations institutions, such as the World Health Organization and UNICEF, has been outweighed by the amount of bad the UN has either abetted or allowed. It has enabled genocide in Rwanda, done little or nothing to stop genocide in the Congo and Sudan, given a respectable forum to tyrannies, convened conferences (the Durban Conferences on racism) that simply became forums for anti-Semitism, and been preoccupied with vilifying one of its relatively few humane states, Israel. Its moral failings were further exemplified by its placing Qaddafi’s Libya on its Human Rights Commission, Iran on its Commission on the Status of Women, and North Korea on the Nuclear Disarmament Commission. It is not that the people who run the United Nations are bad people; it is that the United Nations is run by a majority of the world’s governments, and they are run by bad people. Without America in the Security Council, the bad would nearly always prevail.

Holder had already commissioned a second report on the allegedly racist Ferguson police force to counter his own agency’s expected demolition of the martyr narrative. But for good measure, a few days before the Brown report was to be released, Holder provided the press with another mechanism for sidelining its findings. Holder wanted to lower the standard of proof in civil rights cases, he told Politico. The subtext of this announcement: the decision not to pursue civil rights charges against Wilson was forced on the Justice Department by an overly stringent evidentiary standard; under a more realistic standard, Wilson would have been prosecuted. Voilà! The media had their angle. “The Justice Department announced on Wednesday that its investigation did not support federal civil rights charges against Darren Wilson,” the New York Times acknowledged morosely in an editorial, before immediately turning to the good news: “Still, the department found overwhelming evidence of entrenched racism in Ferguson’s police force.

The church is a people called out of the world to embody a social alternative that the world cannot know on its own terms. We are not simply asking the government to be what God has commissioned the church to be. After all, even the best government can’t legislate love. We can build hundreds of units of affordable housing (a good thing by the way) and people still might not have homes. We can provide universal health care and keep folks breathing longer (another nice move), but people can be breathing and still not truly be alive. We can create laws to enforce good behavior, but no law has ever changed a human heart or reconciled a broken relationship. The church is not simply suggesting political alternatives. The church is embodying one. The idea that the church is to be the body of Christ is not just something to read about in theology books and leave for the scholars to pontificate about. We are literally to be the body of Jesus in the world. Christians are to be little Christs—people who put flesh on Jesus in the world today.

When you are having trouble getting your thinking straight, consider an extreme or simple case. This will often give you the insight you need to move forward. More generally, make a problem as simple as possible without losing its essence – but no simpler. The world is full of uncertainty, much more than you think. Almost every important decision you make will be in the face of uncertainty. Therefore, learning to think probabilistically (assessing subjective probabilities of various scenarios and updating these probabilities with new information) is a critical life skill. Because of uncertainty, some good decisions will result in poor outcomes. In fact, for some decisions there are no good outcomes. Your job will be to choose the option likely to lead to the least bad outcome. Also, resist the tendency to dislike more the errors resulting from your actions (errors of commission) than the errors resulting from your inactions (errors of omission). These two types of errors are equally bad; what matters is their consequences, not their source.

God Commissions Joshua JOSHUA 1 After the death of Moses the servant of the LORD, the LORD said to Joshua the son of Nun, Moses’ assistant, 2“Moses my servant is dead. Now therefore arise, go over this Jordan, you and all this people, into the land that I am giving to them, to the people of Israel. 3Every place that the sole of your foot will tread upon I have given to you, just as I promised to Moses. 4From the wilderness and this Lebanon as far as the great river, the river Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites to the Great Sea toward the going down of the sun shall be your territory. 5No man shall be able to stand before you all the days of your life. Just as I was with Moses, so I will be with you. I will not leave you or forsake you. 6Be strong and courageous, for you shall cause this people to inherit the land that I swore to their fathers to give them. 7Only be strong and very courageous, being careful to do according to all the law that Moses my servant commanded you. Do not turn from it to the right hand or to the left, that you may have good success [1] wherever you go. 8This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth,

What is a “pyramid?” I grew up in real estate my entire life. My father built one of the largest real estate brokerage companies on the East Coast in the 1970s, before selling it to Merrill Lynch. When my brother and I graduated from college, we both joined him in building a new real estate company. I went into sales and into opening a few offices, while my older brother went into management of the company. In sales, I was able to create a six-figure income. I worked 60+ hours a week in such pursuit. My brother worked hard too, but not in the same fashion. He focused on opening offices and recruiting others to become agents to sell houses for him. My brother never listed and sold a single house in his career, yet he out-earned me 10-to-1. He made millions because he earned a cut of every commission from all the houses his 1,000+ agents sold. He worked smarter, while I worked harder. I guess he was at the top of the “pyramid.” Is this legal? Should he be allowed to earn more than any of the agents who worked so hard selling homes? I imagine everyone will agree that being a real estate broker is totally legal. Those who are smart, willing to take the financial risk of overhead, and up for the challenge of recruiting good agents, are the ones who get to live a life benefitting from leveraged Income. So how is Network Marketing any different? I submit to you that I found it to be a step better. One day, a friend shared with me how he was earning the same income I was, but that he was doing so from home without the overhead, employees, insurance, stress, and being subject to market conditions. He was doing so in a network marketing business. At first I refuted him by denouncements that he was in a pyramid scheme. He asked me to explain why. I shared that he was earning money off the backs of others he recruited into his downline, not from his own efforts. He replied, “Do you mean like your family earns money off the backs of the real estate agents in your company?” I froze, and anyone who knows me knows how quick-witted I normally am. Then he said, “Who is working smarter, you or your dad and brother?” Now I was mad. Not at him, but at myself. That was my light bulb moment. I had been closed-minded and it was costing me. That was the birth of my enlightenment, and I began to enter and study this network marketing profession. Let me explain why I found it to be a step better. My research led me to learn why this business model made so much sense for a company that wanted a cost-effective way to bring a product to market. Instead of spending millions in traditional media ad buys, which has a declining effectiveness, companies are opting to employ the network marketing model. In doing so, the company only incurs marketing cost if and when a sale is made. They get an army of word-of-mouth salespeople using the most effective way of influencing buying decisions, who only get paid for performance. No salaries, only commissions. But what is also employed is a high sense of motivation, wherein these salespeople can be building a business of their own and not just be salespeople. If they choose to recruit others and teach them how to sell the product or service, they can earn override income just like the broker in a real estate company does. So now they see life through a different lens, as a business owner waking up each day excited about the future they are building for themselves. They are not salespeople; they are business owners.

1 – Thinking Straight Maxim 1 - When you are having trouble getting your thinking straight, go to an extreme case Maxim 2 - When you are having trouble getting your thinking straight, go to a simple case Maxim 3 – Don’t take refuge in complexity Maxim 4 - When trying to understand a complex real-world situation, think of an everyday analogue 2 – Tackling Uncertainty Maxim 5 - The world is much more uncertain than you think Maxim 6 - Think probabilistically about the world Maxim 7 - Uncertainty is the friend of the status quo 3 – Making Decisions Maxim 8 - Good decisions sometimes have poor outcomes Maxim 9 - Some good decisions have a high probability of a bad outcome Maxim 10 - Errors of commission should be weighted the same as errors of omission Maxim 11 - Don’t be limited by the options you have in front of you Maxim 12 - Information is only valuable if it can change your decision 4 – Understanding Policy Maxim 13 - Long division is the most important tool for policy analysis Maxim 14 - Elasticities are a powerful tool for understanding many important things in life Maxim 15 - Heterogeneity in the population explains many phenomena Maxim 16 - Capitalize on complementarities

In 2008, an Australian company commissioned a study to find out exactly how much people fear public speaking. The survey of more than one thousand people found that 23 percent feared public speaking more than death itself! As Jerry Seinfeld once said, most people attending a funeral would rather be in the casket than delivering the eulogy! I can relate to those people because I feared speaking in front of a class or group of people more than anything else when I was a kid. In fact, I dropped speech in high school because when I signed up for it I thought it was a grammar class for an English credit. When I found out it actually required giving an oral presentation, I didn’t want any part of it! After hearing the overview of the class on the first day, I got out of my seat and walked toward the door; the teacher asked me where I was going. We had a brief meeting in the hall, in which she informed me that nobody ever dropped her class. After a meeting with the principal, I dropped the class, but on the condition that I might be called upon in the near future to use my hunting and fishing skills. I thought the principal was joking--until I was called upon later that year during duck season to pick ducks during recess! I looked at it as a fair trade.

Rejecting failure and avoiding mistakes seem like high-minded goals, but they are fundamentally misguided. Take something like the Golden Fleece Awards, which were established in 1975 to call attention to government-funded projects that were particularly egregious wastes of money. (Among the winners were things like an $84,000 study on love commissioned by the National Science Foundation, and a $3,000 Department of Defense study that examined whether people in the military should carry umbrellas.) While such scrutiny may have seemed like a good idea at the time, it had a chilling effect on research. No one wanted to “win” a Golden Fleece Award because, under the guise of avoiding waste, its organizers had inadvertently made it dangerous and embarrassing for everyone to make mistakes. The truth is, if you fund thousands of research projects every year, some will have obvious, measurable, positive impacts, and others will go nowhere. We aren’t very good at predicting the future—that’s a given—and yet the Golden Fleece Awards tacitly implied that researchers should know before they do their research whether or not the results of that research would have value. Failure was being used as a weapon, rather than as an agent of learning. And that had fallout: The fact that failing could earn you a very public flogging distorted the way researchers chose projects. The politics of failure, then, impeded our progress. There’s a quick way to determine if your company has embraced the negative definition of failure. Ask yourself what happens when an error is discovered. Do people shut down and turn inward, instead of coming together to untangle the causes of problems that might be avoided going forward? Is the question being asked: Whose fault was this? If so, your culture is one that vilifies failure. Failure is difficult enough without it being compounded by the search for a scapegoat. In a fear-based, failure-averse culture, people will consciously or unconsciously avoid risk. They will seek instead to repeat something safe that’s been good enough in the past. Their work will be derivative, not innovative. But if you can foster a positive understanding of failure, the opposite will happen. How, then, do you make failure into something people can face without fear? Part of the answer is simple: If we as leaders can talk about our mistakes and our part in them, then we make it safe for others. You don’t run from it or pretend it doesn’t exist. That is why I make a point of being open about our meltdowns inside Pixar, because I believe they teach us something important: Being open about problems is the first step toward learning from them. My goal is not to drive fear out completely, because fear is inevitable in high-stakes situations. What I want to do is loosen its grip on us. While we don’t want too many failures, we must think of the cost of failure as an investment in the future.

As Allied forces moved into Hitler’s Fortress Europe, Roosevelt and his circle were confronted with new evidence of the Holocaust. In early 1942, he had been given information that Adolf Hitler was quietly fulfilling his threat to “annihilate the Jewish race.” Rabbi Stephen Wise asked the President that December 1942 to inform the world about “the most overwhelming disaster of Jewish history” and “try to stop it.” Although he was willing to warn the world about the impending catastrophe and insisted that there be war crimes commissions when the conflict was over, Roosevelt told Wise that punishment for such crimes would probably have to await the end of the fighting, so his own solution was to “win the war.” The problem with this approach was that by the time of an Allied victory, much of world Jewry might have been annihilated. By June 1944, the Germans had removed more than half of Hungary’s 750,000 Jews, and some Jewish leaders were asking the Allies to bomb railways from Hungary to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland. In response, Churchill told his Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, that the murder of the Jews was “probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world,” and ordered him to get “everything” he could out of the British Air Force. But the Prime Minister was told that American bombers were better positioned to do the job. At the Pentagon, Stimson consulted John McCloy, who later insisted, for decades, that he had “never talked” with Roosevelt about the option of bombing the railroad lines or death camps. But in 1986, McCloy changed his story during a taped conversation with Henry Morgenthau’s son, Henry III, who was researching a family history. The ninety-one-year-old McCloy insisted that he had indeed raised the idea with the President, and that Roosevelt became “irate” and “made it very clear” that bombing Auschwitz “wouldn’t have done any good.” By McCloy’s new account, Roosevelt “took it out of my hands” and warned that “if it’s successful, it’ll be more provocative” and “we’ll be accused of participating in this horrible business,” as well as “bombing innocent people.” McCloy went on, “I didn’t want to bomb Auschwitz,” adding that “it seemed to be a bunch of fanatic Jews who seemed to think that if you didn’t bomb, it was an indication of lack of venom against Hitler.” If McCloy’s memory was reliable, then, just as with the Japanese internment, Roosevelt had used the discreet younger man to discuss a decision for which he knew he might be criticized by history, and which might conceivably have become an issue in the 1944 campaign. This approach to the possible bombing of the camps would allow the President to explain, if it became necessary, that the issue had been resolved at a lower level by the military. In retrospect, the President should have considered the bombing proposal more seriously. Approving it might have required him to slightly revise his insistence that the Allies’ sole aim should be winning the war, as he did on at least a few other occasions. But such a decision might have saved lives and shown future generations that, like Churchill, he understood the importance of the Holocaust as a crime unparalleled in world history.*

THE INSTRUCTION OF PTAHHOTEP Part IV If you are mighty, gain respect through knowledge And through gentleness of speech. Don’t command except as is fitting, He who provokes gets into trouble. Don't be haughty, lest you be humbled, Don’t be mute, lest you be chided. When you answer one who is fuming, Avert your face, control yourself. The flame of the hot-heart sweeps across. He who steps gently, his path is paved. He who frets all day has no happy moment, He who’s gay all day can’t keep house. Don’t oppose a great man’s action. Don’t vex the heart of one who is burdened; If he gets angry at him who foils him, The ka will part from him who loves him. Yet he is the provider along with the god, What he wishes should be done for him. When he turns his face back to you after raging, There will be peace from his ka; As ill will comes from opposition,. So goodwill increases love. Teach the great what is useful to him, Be his aid before the people; If you Set his knowledge impress his lord, Your sustenance will come from his ka As the favorite's belly is filled. So your back will be clothed by it, And his help will be there sustain you. For your superior whom you love And who lives by it, He in turn will give you good support. Thus will love of you endure In the belly of those who love you, He is a ka who loves to listen. If you are a magistrate of standing. Commissioned to satisfy the many, Hew a straight line, When you speak don't lean to one side. Beware lest one complain: “Judges, he distorts the matter!” And your deed turns into a judgment (of you). If you are angered by misdeed. Lean toward a man account of his rightness; Pass it over, don’t recall it, Since he was silent to you the first day If you are great after having been humble, Have gained wealth after having been poor In the past, in a town which you know, Knowing your former condition. Do not put trust in your wealth, Which came to you as gift of god; So that you will not fall behind one like you, To whom the same has happened, Bend your back to your superior, Your overseer from the palace; Then your house will endure in its wealth. Your rewards in their right place. Wretched is he who opposes a superior, One lives as long as he is mild, Baring the arm does not hurt it Do not plunder a neighbor’s house, Do not steal the goods of one near you, Lest he denounce you before you are heard A quarreler is a mindless person, If he is known as an aggressor The hostile man will have trouble in the neighborhood. This maxim is an injunction against illicit sexual intercourse. It is very obscure and has been omitted here. If you probe the character of a friend, Don’t inquire, but approach him, Deal with him alone, So as not to suffer from his manner. Dispute with him after a time, Test his heart in conversation; If what he has seen escapes him, If he does a thing that annoys you, Be yet friendly with him, don’t attack; Be restrained, don’t let fly, Don’t answer with hostility, Neither part from him nor attack him; His time does not fail to come, One does not escape what is fated Be generous as long as you live, What leaves the storehouse does not return; It is the food to be shared which is coveted. One whose belly is empty is an accuser; One deprived becomes an opponent, Don’t have him for a neighbor. Kindness is a man’s memorial For the years after the function.

Faith’s like a goddess to the Marines, and she’s actually good at her job, especially given she’d just finished seventh grade. Which is an important job. She does really important shit. “Right now, you’re just getting your head together. Like the pamphlet says, maybe you decide to help out. We can use people who know how to get shit done. Not just as military. I only took the Lieutenancy they offered cause I have to work with the Navy and Marines to get my job done and it helps. But there’s lots of ways a guy with your background and work ethic and general get-it-done attitude could help. Problem being, even if you wanted to, right now the only reason the Marines haven’t gotten together to kick the crap out of you is that they’re too busy. When they get less busy or, for example, this evening when they break from killing zombies, I would not want to be in your shoes.” “So what is this?” Zumwald said. “A military dictatorship? Beatings for free?” “Yeah,” Isham said, looking at him as if he was nuts. “We’re on ships. And they are all officially US Navy vessels. Even most of the dinky little yachts. The commanders, including this one, are all Navy officers, even if the ink is still wet on the commissions. And even if they weren’t, captains of vessels at sea have a lot of legal control in any circumstances. By the way, I talked Captain Graham, boss of this boat, out of pressing charges against you for assault. Because you don’t get how badly you fucked up. I get that. He’s another Faith lover, but it’s also you don’t get to just grab any cookie and tell her you want another scotch. You don’t. This isn’t Hollywood, and, sorry, you’re not some big time movie executive anymore. You’re a fucking refugee in a squadron that spends half its time on the ragged edge. Still. You got no clue how tough it is to keep these vessels supplied.

Still, if we combine all the victims of all these persecutions, it turns out that in these three centuries, the polytheistic Romans killed no more than a few thousand Christians.1 In contrast, over the course of the next 1,500 years, Christians slaughtered Christians by the millions to defend slightly different interpretations of the religion of love and compassion. The religious wars between Catholics and Protestants that swept Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are particularly notorious. All those involved accepted Christ’s divinity and His gospel of compassion and love. However, they disagreed about the nature of this love. Protestants believed that the divine love is so great that God was incarnated in flesh and allowed Himself to be tortured and crucified, thereby redeeming the original sin and opening the gates of heaven to all those who professed faith in Him. Catholics maintained that faith, while essential, was not enough. To enter heaven, believers had to participate in church rituals and do good deeds. Protestants refused to accept this, arguing that this quid pro quo belittles God’s greatness and love. Whoever thinks that entry to heaven depends upon his or her own good deeds magnifies his own importance, and implies that Christ’s suffering on the cross and God’s love for humankind are not enough. These theological disputes turned so violent that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Catholics and Protestants killed each other by the hundreds of thousands. On 23 August 1572, French Catholics who stressed the importance of good deeds attacked communities of French Protestants who highlighted God’s love for humankind. In this attack, the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, between 5,000 and 10,000 Protestants were slaughtered in less than twenty-four hours. When the pope in Rome heard the news from France, he was so overcome by joy that he organised festive prayers to celebrate the occasion and commissioned Giorgio Vasari to decorate one of the Vatican’s rooms with a fresco of the massacre (the room is currently off-limits to visitors).2 More Christians were killed by fellow Christians in those twenty-four hours than by the polytheistic Roman Empire throughout its entire existence. God

Tolkien, then, was a philologist before he was a mythologist, and a mythologist, at least in intention, before he ever became a writer of fantasy fiction. His beliefs about language and about mythology were sometimes original and sometimes extreme, but never irrational, and he was able to express them perfectly clearly. In the end he decided to express them not through abstract argument, but by demonstration, and the success of the demonstration has gone a long way to showing that he did often have a point: especially in his belief, which I share, that a taste for philology, for the history of language in all its forms, names and place-names included, is much more widespread in the population at large than educators and arbiters of taste like to think. In his 1959 ‘Valedictory Address to the University of Oxford’ (reprinted in Essays, pp. 224-40), Tolkien concluded that the problem lay not with the philologists nor with those they taught but with what he called ‘misologists’ – haters of the word. There would be no harm in them if they simply concluded language study was not for them, out of dullness or ignorance. But what he felt, Tolkien said, was: "grievance that certain professional persons should suppose their dullness and ignorance to be a human norm; and anger when they have sought to impose the limitation of their minds upon younger minds, dissuading those with philological curiosity from their bent, encouraging those without this interest to believe that their lack marked them as minds of a superior order." Behind this grievance and this anger was, of course, failure and defeat. It is now very hard to pursue a course of philology of the kind Tolkien would have approved in any British or American university. The misologists won, in the academic world; as did the realists, the modernists, the post-modernists, the despisers of fantasy. But they lost outside the academic world. It is not long since I heard the commissioning editor of a major publishing house say, ‘Only fantasy is mass-market. Everything else is cult-fiction.’ (Reflective pause.) ‘That includes main-stream.’ He was defending his own buying strategy, and doubtless exaggerating, but there is a good deal of hard evidence to support him. Tolkien cried out to be heard, and we have still to find out what he was saying. There should be no doubt, though, that he found listeners, and that they found whatever he was saying worth their while.

Noah smiled at her, then his smile froze. He looked her slowly up and down. And again. “What?” she demanded hotly, hands on her hips. “Nothing,” he said, turning away. “No. What? What’s the matter?” He turned back slowly, put his tools down on top of the ladder and approached her. “I don’t know how to say this. I think it would be in the best interests of both of us if you’d dress a little more…conservatively.” She looked down at herself. “More conservatively than overalls?” she asked. He felt a laugh escape in spite of himself. He shook his head. “Ellie, I’ve never seen anybody look that good in overalls before.” “And this is a bad thing?” she asked, crossing her arms over her chest. “It’s provocative,” he tried to explain. “Sexy. People who work around churches usually dress a little more… What’s the best way to put this…?” “Frumpy? Dumpy? Ugly?” “Without some of their bra showing, for one thing.” “Well now, Reverend, just where have you been? Because this happens to be in style. And I’ll do any work you give me, but you really shouldn’t be telling me what to wear. The last guy I was with tried to do me over. He liked me well enough when he was trying to get my attention, but the second I married him, he wanted to cover me up so no one would notice I had a body!” “The husband?” “The very same. It didn’t work for him and it’s not going to work for you. You didn’t say anything about a dress code. Maybe I’ll turn you in to the Better Business Bureau or something.” “I think you mean the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Or maybe you should go straight to the American Civil Liberties Union.” He stepped toward her. “Ellie,” he said, using his tender but firm minister voice. “I’m a single man. You’re a very beautiful young woman. I would like it if the good people of Virgin River assumed you were given this job solely because of your qualifications and not because you’re eye candy. Tomorrow, could you please wear something less distracting?” “I’ll do my best,” she said in a huff. “But this is what I have, and there’s not much I can do about that. Especially on what you’re paying me.” “Just think ‘baggy,’” he advised. “We’re going to have a problem there,” she said. “I don’t buy my clothes baggy. Or ugly. Or dumpy. And you can bet your sweet a…butt I left behind the clothes Arnie thought I should wear.” She just shook her head in disgust. “I don’t know what you’re complaining about. You know how many guys would rather have something nice to look at than a girl in a flour sack? Guess you didn’t get to Count Your Blessings 101.” She cocked her head and lifted her eyebrows. “I’m counting,” he said. But his eyes bore down on hers seriously. He was not giving an inch. “Just an ounce of discretion. Do what you can.” She took a deep breath. “Let’s just get to work. Tomorrow I’ll look as awful as possible. How’s that?” “Perfect.

Here we introduce the nation's first great communications monopolist, whose reign provides history's first lesson in the power and peril of concentrated control over the flow of information. Western Union's man was one Rutherford B. Hates, an obscure Ohio politician described by a contemporary journalist as "a third rate nonentity." But the firm and its partner newswire, the Associated Press, wanted Hayes in office, for several reasons. Hayes was a close friend of William Henry Smith, a former politician who was now the key political operator at the Associated Press. More generally, since the Civil War, the Republican Party and the telegraph industry had enjoyed a special relationship, in part because much of what were eventually Western Union's lines were built by the Union Army. So making Hayes president was the goal, but how was the telegram in Reid's hand key to achieving it? The media and communications industries are regularly accused of trying to influence politics, but what went on in the 1870s was of a wholly different order from anything we could imagine today. At the time, Western Union was the exclusive owner of the nationwide telegraph network, and the sizable Associated Press was the unique source for "instant" national or European news. (It's later competitor, the United Press, which would be founded on the U.S. Post Office's new telegraph lines, did not yet exist.) The Associated Press took advantage of its economies of scale to produce millions of lines of copy a year and, apart from local news, its product was the mainstay of many American newspapers. With the common law notion of "common carriage" deemed inapplicable, and the latter day concept of "net neutrality" not yet imagined, Western Union carried Associated Press reports exclusively. Working closely with the Republican Party and avowedly Republican papers like The New York Times (the ideal of an unbiased press would not be established for some time, and the minting of the Time's liberal bona fides would take longer still), they did what they could to throw the election to Hayes. It was easy: the AP ran story after story about what an honest man Hayes was, what a good governor he had been, or just whatever he happened to be doing that day. It omitted any scandals related to Hayes, and it declined to run positive stories about his rivals (James Blaine in the primary, Samuel Tilden in the general). But beyond routine favoritism, late that Election Day Western Union offered the Hayes campaign a secret weapon that would come to light only much later. Hayes, far from being the front-runner, had gained the Republican nomination only on the seventh ballot. But as the polls closed his persistence appeared a waste of time, for Tilden, the Democrat, held a clear advantage in the popular vote (by a margin of over 250,000) and seemed headed for victory according to most early returns; by some accounts Hayes privately conceded defeat. But late that night, Reid, the New York Times editor, alerted the Republican Party that the Democrats, despite extensive intimidation of Republican supporters, remained unsure of their victory in the South. The GOP sent some telegrams of its own to the Republican governors in the South with special instructions for manipulating state electoral commissions. As a result the Hayes campaign abruptly claimed victory, resulting in an electoral dispute that would make Bush v. Gore seem a garden party. After a few brutal months, the Democrats relented, allowing Hayes the presidency — in exchange, most historians believe, for the removal of federal troops from the South, effectively ending Reconstruction. The full history of the 1876 election is complex, and the power of th