Help Without Publicity Quotes

Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your ass or publicizing it: keep cool, but care.

I comma square bracket recruit's name square bracket comma do solemnly swear by square bracket recruit's deity of choice square bracket to uphold the Laws and Ordinances of the City of Ankh-Morpork comma serve the public truƒt comma and defend the ƒubjects of his ƒtroke her bracket delete whichever is inappropriate bracket Majeƒty bracket name of reigning monarch bracket without fear comma favour comma or thought of perƒonal ƒafety semi-colon to purƒue evildoers and protect the innocent comma comma laying down my life if neceƒsary in the cauƒe of said duty comma so help me bracket aforeƒaid deity bracket full stop Gods Save the King stroke Queen bracket delete whichever is inappropriate bracket full stop.

Since every country stands in numerous and various relations with the other countries of the world, and many, our own among the number, exercise actual authority over some of these, a knowledge of the established rules of international morality is essential to the duty of every nation, and therefore of every person in it who helps to make up the nation, and whose voice and feeling form a part of what is called public opinion. Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject. It depends on the habit of attending to and looking into public transactions, and on the degree of information and solid judgment respecting them that exists in the community, whether the conduct of the nation as a nation, both within itself and towards others, shall be selfish, corrupt, and tyrannical, or rational and enlightened, just and noble.

service can have no meaning unless one takes pleasure in it. When it is done for show or for fear of public opinion, it stunts the man and crushes his spirit. Service which is rendered without joy helps neither the servant nor the served.

The Public - a thing I cannot help looking upon as an enemy, and which I cannot address without feelings of hostility.

the only way clear of the cool/crazy flipflop was obviously slow, frustrating and hard work. Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your ass or publicizing it: keep cool, but care. He might have known, if he'd used any common sense. It didn't come as a revelation, only something he'd as soon not've admitted.

Because, my dear friends, these twelve children have lived their entire lives without a public library. As a result, they have no idea how extraordinarily useful, helpful, and funful - a word I recently invented - a library can be. This is their chance to discover that a library is more than a collection of dusty old books. It is a place to learn, explore, and grow!" -Mr. Lemoncello

One has to forget about being sweet, pleasant, and helpful; one has to give oneself permission to publicly dominate the other. One has to manage without the other's approval.

What am I going to do?" asked Ce'Nedra. "First you ought to go wash your face," Polgara told her. "Some girls can cry without making themselves ugly, but you don't have the right coloring for it. You're an absolute fright. I'd advise you never to cry in public if you can help it.

Thanks' is a huge mind-shift, from thinking that God wants our happy chatter and a public demonstration and is deeply interested in our opinions of the people we hate, to feeling quiet gratitude, humbly and amazingly, without shame at having been so blessed.

Two years ago," she says, "I was afraid of spiders, suffocation, walls that inch slowly inward and trap you between them,getting thrown out of Dauntless, uncontrollable bleeding, getting run over by a train, my father's death,public humiliation, and kidnapping by men without faces." Everyone stares blankly at her. "Most of you will have anywhere from ten to fifteen years in your fear landscapes. That is the average number," she says. "What's the lowest number someone has gotten?" asks Lynn. "In recent years," says Lauren, "four." I have not looked at Tobias since we were in the cafeteria,but I can't help but look at him now. He keeps his eyes trained on the floor. I knew that four was a low number, low enough to merit a nickname,but I didn't know it was less than half the average. I glare at my feet.He's exceptional. And now he won't even look at me.

Every article and review and book that I have ever published has constituted an appeal to the person or persons to whom I should have talked before I dared to write it. I never launch any little essay without the hope—and the fear, because the encounter may also be embarrassing—that I shall draw a letter that begins, 'Dear Mr. Hitchens, it seems that you are unaware that…' It is in this sense that authorship is collaborative with 'the reader.' And there's no help for it: you only find out what you ought to have known by pretending to know at least some of it already. It doesn't matter how obscure or arcane or esoteric your place of publication may be: some sweet law ensures that the person who should be scrutinizing your work eventually does do so.

Survivors who try to get help to protect themselves and their children are often seen as “hysterical, crazy, and unstable.” This is because the covert nature of hidden abuse is very difficult to put into words. Without the correct language, survivors often sound obsessed. Those of us in the recovery community know that is not the issue at all. The general public still has much to learn about hidden psychological abuse.   In

Surveys have shown that ranking very close to the fear of death is the fear of public speaking. Why would someone feel profound fear, deep in his or her stomach, about public speaking, which is so far from death? Because it isn’t so far from death when we link it. Those who fear public speaking actually fear the loss of identity that attaches to performing badly, and that is firmly rooted in our survival needs. For all social animals, from ants to antelopes, identity is the pass card to inclusion, and inclusion is the key to survival. If a baby loses its identity as the child of his or her parents, a possible outcome is abandonment. For a human infant, that means death. As adults, without our identity as a member of the tribe or village, community or culture, a likely outcome is banishment and death. So the fear of getting up and addressing five hundred people at the annual convention of professionals in your field is not just the fear of embarrassment—it is linked to the fear of being perceived as incompetent, which is linked to the fear of loss of employment, loss of home, loss of family, your ability to contribute to society, your value, in short, your identity and your life. Linking an unwarranted fear to its ultimate terrible destination usually helps alleviate that fear. Though you may find that public speaking can link to death, you’ll see that it would be a long and unlikely trip.

In the United States I saw how the market liberates the individual and allows people to be free to make personal choices. But the biggest drawback was that the market always pushes things to the side of the powerful. I thought the poor should be able to take advantage of the system in order to improve their lot. Grameen is a private-sector self-help bank, and as its members gain personal wealth they acquire water-pumps, latrines, housing, education, access to health care, and so on. Another way to achieve this is to let abusiness earn profit that is then txed by the government, and the tax can be used to provide services to the poor. But in practice it never works that way. In real life, taxes only pay for a government bureaucracy that collects the tax and provides little or nothing to the poor. And since most government bureaucracies are not profit motivated, they have little incentive to increase their efficiency. In fact, they have a disincentive: governments often cannot cut social services without a public outcry, so the behemoth continues, blind and inefficient, year after year.

Don’t strive to be a well-rounded leader. Instead, discover your zone and stay there. Then delegate everything else. Admitting a weakness is a sign of strength. Acknowledging weakness doesn’t make a leader less effective. Everybody in your organization benefits when you delegate responsibilities that fall outside your core competency. Thoughtful delegation will allow someone else in your organization to shine. Your weakness is someone’s opportunity. Leadership is not always about getting things done “right.” Leadership is about getting things done through other people. The people who follow us are exactly where we have led them. If there is no one to whom we can delegate, it is our own fault. As a leader, gifted by God to do a few things well, it is not right for you to attempt to do everything. Upgrade your performance by playing to your strengths and delegating your weaknesses. There are many things I can do, but I have to narrow it down to the one thing I must do. The secret of concentration is elimination. Devoting a little of yourself to everything means committing a great deal of yourself to nothing. My competence in these areas defines my success as a pastor. A sixty-hour workweek will not compensate for a poorly delivered sermon. People don’t show up on Sunday morning because I am a good pastor (leader, shepherd, counselor). In my world, it is my communication skills that make the difference. So that is where I focus my time. To develop a competent team, help the leaders in your organization discover their leadership competencies and delegate accordingly. Once you step outside your zone, don’t attempt to lead. Follow. The less you do, the more you will accomplish. Only those leaders who act boldly in times of crisis and change are willingly followed. Accepting the status quo is the equivalent of accepting a death sentence. Where there’s no progress, there’s no growth. If there’s no growth, there’s no life. Environments void of change are eventually void of life. So leaders find themselves in the precarious and often career-jeopardizing position of being the one to draw attention to the need for change. Consequently, courage is a nonnegotiable quality for the next generation leader. The leader is the one who has the courage to act on what he sees. A leader is someone who has the courage to say publicly what everybody else is whispering privately. It is not his insight that sets the leader apart from the crowd. It is his courage to act on what he sees, to speak up when everyone else is silent. Next generation leaders are those who would rather challenge what needs to change and pay the price than remain silent and die on the inside. The first person to step out in a new direction is viewed as the leader. And being the first to step out requires courage. In this way, courage establishes leadership. Leadership requires the courage to walk in the dark. The darkness is the uncertainty that always accompanies change. The mystery of whether or not a new enterprise will pan out. The reservation everyone initially feels when a new idea is introduced. The risk of being wrong. Many who lack the courage to forge ahead alone yearn for someone to take the first step, to go first, to show the way. It could be argued that the dark provides the optimal context for leadership. After all, if the pathway to the future were well lit, it would be crowded. Fear has kept many would-be leaders on the sidelines, while good opportunities paraded by. They didn’t lack insight. They lacked courage. Leaders are not always the first to see the need for change, but they are the first to act. Leadership is about moving boldly into the future in spite of uncertainty and risk. You can’t lead without taking risk. You won’t take risk without courage. Courage is essential to leadership.

Well, Espen, you're no drug addict, so why do you beg?" "Because it's my mission to be mirror for mankind so that they can see which actions are great and which are small." "And which are great?" Espen sighed in despair, as though weary of repeating the obvious. "Charity. Sharing and helping your neighbor. The Bible deals with nothing else. In fact, you have to search extremely hard to find anything about sex before marriage, abortion, homosexuality, or a woman's right to speak in public. But, of course, it is easier for Pharisees to talk aloud about subordinate clauses than to describe and perform the great actions the Bible leaves us in no doubt about: You have to give half of what you own to someone who has nothing. Thousands of people are dying every day without hearing the words of God because these Christians will not let go of their earthly goods. I'm giving them a chance to reflect.

Women, on the other hand, had to wield their intellects like a scythe, hacking away against the stubborn underbrush of low expectations. A woman who worked in the central computing pools was one step removed from the research, and the engineers’ assignments sometimes lacked the context to give the computer much knowledge about the afterlife of the numbers that bedeviled her days. She might spend weeks calculating a pressure distribution without knowing what kind of plane was being tested or whether the analysis that depended on her math had resulted in significant conclusions. The work of most of the women, like that of the Friden, Marchant, or Monroe computing machines they used, was anonymous. Even a woman who had worked closely with an engineer on the content of a research report was rarely rewarded by seeing her name alongside his on the final publication. Why would the computers have the same desire for recognition that they did? many engineers figured. They were women, after all. As

Such service can have no meaning unless one takes pleasure in it. When it is done for show or for fear of public opinion, it stunts the man and crushes his spirit. Service which is rendered without joy helps neither the servant nor the served. But all other pleasures and possessions pale into nothingness before service which is rendered in a spirit of joy.

By analyzing public data with the help of computers, people can uncover secrets without ever seeing a classified database.

The Active Life If an expert does not have some problem to vex him, he is unhappy! If a philosopher's teaching is never attacked, she pines away! If critics have no one on whom to exercise their spite, they are unhappy. All such people are prisoners in the world of objects. He who wants followers, seeks political power. She who wants reputation, holds an office. The strong man looks for weights to lift. The brave woman looks for an emergency in which she can show bravery. The swordsman wants a battle in which he can swing his sword. People past their prime prefer a dignified retirement, in which they may seem profound. People experienced in law seek difficult cases to extend the application of the laws. Liturgists and musicians like festivals in which they parade their ceremonious talents. The benevolent, the dutiful, are always looking for chances to display virtue. Where would the gardener be if there were no more weeds? What would become of business without a market of fools? Where would the masses be if there were no pretext for getting jammed together and making noise? What would become of labor if there were no superfluous objects to be made? Produce! Get results! Make money! Make friends! Make changes! Or you will die of despair! Those who are caught in the machinery of power take no joy except in activity and change--the whirring of the machine! Whenever an occasion for action presents itself, they are compelled to act; they cannot help themselves. They are inexorably moved, like the ma- chine of which they are a part. Prisoners in the world of objects, they have no choice but to submit to the demands of matter! They are pressed down and crushed by external forces, fashion, the mar- ket, events, public opinion. Never in a whole lifetime do they re- cover their right mind! The active life! What a pity!

Dan Berrigan wrote a "Meditation" at the time of the Catonsville incident: Our apologies good friends for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house. We could not, so help us God, do otherwise. . . . We say: killing is disorder, life and gentleness and community and unselfishness is the only order we recognize. for the sake of that order, we risk our liberty, our good name. The time is past when good men can remain silent, when obedience can segregate men form public risk, when the poor can die without defense.

Those I call Horace are absolutely convinced they’re some sort of social wit. Without a doubt they’re intelligent, and most likely very wealthy, although their wealth will come from a business they were set up in by others from their ‘school.’ They’ll have had no need to go to university. Rich people will have set them up in business, possibly Public Relations or something like that, they’ll have helped them write a business plan, loaned them money, and provided advice and guidance at every step of the way. Money would have been forthcoming from investors until the business was able to run itself. And then Horace will swan about as if he did it all himself.

My concern with democracy is highly specific. It begins in observing the remarkable fact that, while democracy means a government accountable to the electorate, our rulers now make us accountable to them. Most Western governments hate me smoking, or eating the wrong kind of food, or hunting foxes, or drinking too much, and these are merely the surface disapprovals, the ones that provoke legislation or public campaigns. We also borrow too much money for our personal pleasures, and many of us are very bad parents. Ministers of state have been known to instruct us in elementary matters, such as the importance of reading stories to our children. Again, many of us have unsound views about people of other races, cultures, or religions, and the distribution of our friends does not always correspond, as governments think that it ought, to the cultural diversity of our society. We must face up to the grim fact that the rulers we elect are losing patience with us. No philosopher can contemplate this interesting situation without beginning to reflect on what it can mean. The gap between political realities and their public face is so great that the term “paradox” tends to crop up from sentence to sentence. Our rulers are theoretically “our” representatives, but they are busy turning us into the instruments of the projects they keep dreaming up. The business of governments, one might think, is to supply the framework of law within which we may pursue happiness on our own account. Instead, we are constantly being summoned to reform ourselves. Debt, intemperance, and incompetence in rearing our children are no doubt regrettable, but they are vices, and left alone, they will soon lead to the pain that corrects. Life is a better teacher of virtue than politicians, and most sensible governments in the past left moral faults to the churches. But democratic citizenship in the twenty-first century means receiving a stream of improving “messages” from politicians. Some may forgive these intrusions because they are so well intentioned. Who would defend prejudice, debt, or excessive drinking? The point, however, is that our rulers have no business telling us how to live. They are tiresome enough in their exercise of authority—they are intolerable when they mount the pulpit. Nor should we be in any doubt that nationalizing the moral life is the first step towards totalitarianism. We might perhaps be more tolerant of rulers turning preachers if they were moral giants. But what citizen looks at the government today thinking how wise and virtuous it is? Public respect for politicians has long been declining, even as the population at large has been seduced into demanding political solutions to social problems. To demand help from officials we rather despise argues for a notable lack of logic in the demos. The statesmen of eras past have been replaced by a set of barely competent social workers eager to take over the risks of our everyday life. The electorates of earlier times would have responded to politicians seeking to bribe us with such promises with derision. Today, the demos votes for them.

You sometimes hear people say, with a certain pride in their clerical resistance to the myth, that the nineteenth century really ended not in 1900 but in 1914. But there are different ways of measuring an epoch. 1914 has obvious qualifications; but if you wanted to defend the neater, more mythical date, you could do very well. In 1900 Nietzsche died; Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams; 1900 was the date of Husserl Logic, and of Russell's Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz. With an exquisite sense of timing Planck published his quantum hypothesis in the very last days of the century, December 1900. Thus, within a few months, were published works which transformed or transvalued spirituality, the relation of language to knowing, and the very locus of human uncertainty, henceforth to be thought of not as an imperfection of the human apparatus but part of the nature of things, a condition of what we may know. 1900, like 1400 and 1600 and 1000, has the look of a year that ends a saeculum. The mood of fin de siècle is confronted by a harsh historical finis saeculi. There is something satisfying about it, some confirmation of the rightness of the patterns we impose. But as Focillon observed, the anxiety reflected by the fin de siècle is perpetual, and people don't wait for centuries to end before they express it. Any date can be justified on some calculation or other. And of course we have it now, the sense of an ending. It has not diminished, and is as endemic to what we call modernism as apocalyptic utopianism is to political revolution. When we live in the mood of end-dominated crisis, certain now-familiar patterns of assumption become evident. Yeats will help me to illustrate them. For Yeats, an age would end in 1927; the year passed without apocalypse, as end-years do; but this is hardly material. 'When I was writing A Vision,' he said, 'I had constantly the word "terror" impressed upon me, and once the old Stoic prophecy of earthquake, fire and flood at the end of an age, but this I did not take literally.' Yeats is certainly an apocalyptic poet, but he does not take it literally, and this, I think, is characteristic of the attitude not only of modern poets but of the modern literary public to the apocalyptic elements. All the same, like us, he believed them in some fashion, and associated apocalypse with war. At the turning point of time he filled his poems with images of decadence, and praised war because he saw in it, ignorantly we may think, the means of renewal. 'The danger is that there will be no war.... Love war because of its horror, that belief may be changed, civilization renewed.' He saw his time as a time of transition, the last moment before a new annunciation, a new gyre. There was horror to come: 'thunder of feet, tumult of images.' But out of a desolate reality would come renewal. In short, we can find in Yeats all the elements of the apocalyptic paradigm that concern us.

In 90% of cases, you can start with one of the two most effective ways to open a speech: ask a question or start with a story. Our brain doesn’t remember what we hear. It remembers only what we “see” or imagine while we listen. You can remember stories. Everything else is quickly forgotten. Smell is the most powerful sense out of 4 to immerse audience members into a scene. Every sentence either helps to drive your point home, or it detracts from clarity. There is no middle point. If you don’t have a foundational phrase in your speech, it means that your message is not clear enough to you, and if it’s not clear to you, there is no way it will be clear to your audience. Share your failures first. Show your audience members that you are not any better, smarter or more talented than they are. You are not an actor, you are a speaker. The main skill of an actor is to play a role; to be someone else. Your main skill as a speaker is to be yourself. People will forgive you for anything except for being boring. Speaking without passion is boring. If you are not excited about what you are talking about, how can you expect your audience to be excited? Never hide behind a lectern or a table. Your audience needs to see 100% of your body. Speak slowly and people will consider you to be a thoughtful and clever person. Leaders don’t talk much, but each word holds a lot of meaning and value. You always speak to only one person. Have a conversation directly with one person, look him or her in the eye. After you have logically completed one idea, which usually is 10-20 seconds, scan the audience and then stop your eyes on another person. Repeat this process again. Cover the entire room with eye contact. When you scan the audience and pick people for eye contact, pick positive people more often. When you pause, your audience thinks about your message and reflects. Pausing builds an audiences’ confidence. If you don’t pause, your audience doesn’t have time to digest what you've told them and hence, they will not remember a word of what you've said. Pause before and after you make an important point and stand still. During this pause, people think about your words and your message sinks in. After you make an important point and stand still. During this pause, people think about your words and your message sinks in. Speakers use filler words when they don’t know what to say, but they feel uncomfortable with silence. Have you ever seen a speaker who went on stage with a piece of paper and notes? Have you ever been one of these speakers? When people see you with paper in your hands, they instantly think, “This speaker is not sincere. He has a script and will talk according to the script.” The best speeches are not written, they are rewritten. Bad speakers create a 10 minutes speech and deliver it in 7 minutes. Great speakers create a 5 minute speech and deliver it in 7 minutes. Explain your ideas in a simple manner, so that the average 12-year-old child can understand the concept. Good speakers and experts can always explain the most complex ideas with very simple words. Stories evoke emotions. Factual information conveys logic. Emotions are far more important in a speech than logic. If you're considering whether to use statistics or a story, use a story. PowerPoint is for pictures not for words. Use as few words on the slide as possible. Never learn your speech word for word. Just rehearse it enough times to internalize the flow. If you watch a video of your speech, you can triple the pace of your development as a speaker. Make videos a habit. Meaningless words and clichés neither convey value nor information. Avoid them. Never apologize on stage. If people need to put in a lot of effort to understand you they simply won’t listen. On the other hand if you use very simple language you will connect with the audience and your speech will be remembered.

The complexities of national deficits, trade failures, budget gaps, negotiations to end the nuclear arms race, the crises of the Middle East, all these cannot be understood by giving the facts alone. The public needs appropriate historical background and clarification. People who are not taught much geography, history, economics, and physics simply cannot reach reasonable conclusions without help from specialists. This is not elitism, it is something far more important; it is called education.

The inn was an old stone-built rambling comfortable sort of place. There was a terrace above the river, where peacocks (one called Norman and the other called Barry) stalked among the drinkers, helping themselves to snacks without the slightest hesitation and occasionally lifting their heads to utter ferocious and meaningless screams. There was a saloon bar where the gentry, if college scholars count as gentry, took their ale and smoked their pipes; there was a public bar where watermen and farm labourers sat by the fire or played darts, or stood at the bar gossiping, or arguing, or simply getting quietly drunk; there was a kitchen where the landlord’s wife cooked a great joint every day, with a complicated arrangement of wheels and chains turning a spit over an open fire; and there was a potboy called Malcolm Polstead.

❝Washington — perhaps as many global powers have done in the past — uses what I might call the “immaculate conception” theory of crises abroad. That is, we believe we are essentially out there, just minding our own business, trying to help make the world right, only to be endlessly faced with a series of spontaneous, nasty challenges from abroad to which we must react. There is not the slightest consideration that perhaps US policies themselves may have at least contributed to a series of unfolding events. This presents a huge paradox: how can America on the one hand pride itself on being the world’s sole global superpower, with over seven hundred military bases abroad and the Pentagon’s huge global footprint, and yet, on the other hand, be oblivious to and unacknowledging of the magnitude of its own role — for better or for worse — as the dominant force charting the course of world events? This Alice-in-Wonderland delusion affects not just policy makers, but even the glut of think tanks that abound in Washington. In what may otherwise often be intelligent analysis of a foreign situation, the focus of each study is invariably the other country, the other culture, the negative intentions of other players; the impact of US actions and perceptions are quite absent from the equation. It is hard to point to serious analysis from mainstream publications or think tanks that address the role of the United States itself in helping create current problems or crises, through policies of omission or commission. We’re not even talking about blame here; we’re addressing the logical and self-evident fact that the actions of the world’s sole global superpower have huge consequences in the unfolding of international politics. They require examination.

There's not much to say about loneliness, for it's not a broad subject. Any child, alone in her room, can journey across its entire breadth, from border to border, in an hour. Though not broad, our subject is deep. Loneliness is deeper than the ocean. But here, too, there is no mystery. Our intrepid child is liable to fall quickly to the very bottom without even trying. And since the depths of loneliness cannot sustain human life, the child will swim to the surface again in short order, no worse for wear. Some of us, though, can bring breathing aids down with us for longer stays: imaginary friends, drugs and alcohol, mind-numbing entertainment, hobbies, ironclad routine, and pets. (Pets are some of the best enablers of loneliness, your own cuddlesome Murphy notwithstanding.) With the help of these aids, a poor sap can survive the airless depths of loneliness long enough to experience its true horror -- duration. Did you know, Myren Vole, that when presented with the same odor (even my own) for a duration of only several minutes, the olfactory nerves become habituated -- as my daughter used to say -- to it and cease transmitting its signal to the brain? Likewise, most pain loses its edge in time. Time heals all -- as they say. Even the loss of a loved one, perhaps life's most wrenching pain, is blunted in time. It recedes into the background where it can be borne with lesser pains. Not so our friend loneliness, which grows only more keen and insistent with each passing hour. Loneliness is as needle sharp now as it was an hour ago, or last week. But if loneliness is the wound, what's so secret about it? I submit to you, Myren Vole, that the most painful death of all is suffocation by loneliness. And by the time I started on my portrait of Jean, I was ten years into it (with another five to go). It is from that vantage point that I tell you that loneliness itself is the secret. It's a secret you cannot tell anyone. Why? Because to confess your loneliness is to confess your failure as a human being. To confess would only cause others to pity and avoid you, afraid that what you have is catching. Your condition is caused by a lack of human relationship, and yet to admit to it only drives your possible rescuers farther away (while attracting cats). So you attempt to hide your loneliness in public, to behave, in fact, as though you have too many friends already, and thus you hope to attract people who will unwittingly save you. But it never works that way. Your condition is written all over your face, in the hunch of your shoulders, in the hollowness of your laugh. You fool no one. Believe me in this; I've tried all the tricks of the lonely man.

If you can not call out bigotry, corruption, racism, sexism, xenophobia, islamophobia, ageism, agnosticism, imperialism, antiblackism, antisemitism, authoritarianism, terrorism, egoism, and totalitarianism; then you are encouraging it to grow. There is no retreat from all the "isms" conflicts with which we must cope. The most fecund killer of innocent in all of human history is not a disease or natural catastrophe. It is rooted in a sick way of thinking in which we have been programmed. Avoiding the quandary isn't helpful. A public discussion of these challenges could open up a new dialogue of approach. Without, this is the reality that the next generation would have to live with.

The plan was simple. We had three weeks to get from the bottom of England to the top of Scotland – by foot or by bike – without spending a single penny. Setting off in just a pair of Union Jack boxer shorts, we hoped to rely on the generosity of the British public to help us with everything from accommodation to food, clothes to shoes, and bikes to beer.

What’s the best way to manage rock stars, the people whom you can count on to deliver great results year after year? You need to recognize them to keep them happy. For too many bosses, “recognition” means “promotion.” But in most cases, this is a big mistake. Promotion often puts these people in roles they are not as well-suited for or don’t want. The key is to recognize their contribution in other ways. It may be a bonus or a raise. Or, if they like public speaking, get them to present at your all-hands meetings or other big events. If they like teaching, get them to help new people learn their roles faster. Or if they are shy, make sure that you and others on the team thank them privately for the work they do.

I'd told him what it had been like, living on thew streets. How the police were to be avoided at all costs, how they never helped you if you were homeless or busking. How they pushed you around and made you leave public spaces. How they let other people treat you like garbage without intervening. Cops would never support someone like me. Never.' - Eyes Like Mine

I spend a lot of time with young people now, bright, public-spirited kids from across the political spectrum who give me hope for the future...They want to have an impact, but they're not sure that politics is a viable path on which to do that. Congress is going to meet with you or without you, I tell them. Don't turn away in disgust and leave those decisions to someone else. You don't like politics today? Grab the wheel of history and steer us to a better place. Run for office. Be a strategist or policy aide. Work for a government agency or a non-profit. Become a thoughtful, probing journalist. Get in the arena. Help shape the world in which you're going to live. At a minimum, be the engaged citizen a healthy democracy demands.

The Jesus Prayer Having had my fill of listening, without acquiring any understanding of how to pray unceasingly, I gave up on such sermons that were geared to the general public. I then resolved, with the help of God, to seek an experienced and knowledgeable guide who would explain unceasing prayer to me, for I now found myself so irresistibly drawn to learning about it.38 —Anonymous, The Way of a Pilgrim

In certain young people today…I notice what I find increasingly troubling: a cold-blooded grasping, a hunger to take and take and take, but never give; a massive sense of entitlement; an inability to show gratitude; an ease with dishonesty and pretension and selfishness that is couched in the language of self-care; an expectation always to be helped and rewarded no matter whether deserving or not; language that is slick and sleek but with little emotional intelligence; an astonishing level of self-absorption; an unrealistic expectation of puritanism from others; an over-inflated sense of ability, or of talent where there is any at all; an inability to apologize, truly and fully, without justifications; a passionate performance of virtue that is well mexecuted in the public space of Twitter but not in the intimate space of friendship. I find it obscene. People who ask you to ‘educate’ yourself while not having actually read any books themselves, while not being able to intelligently defend their own ideological positions, because by ‘educate,’ they actually mean ‘parrot what I say, flatten all nuance, wish away complexity.’ People who wield the words ‘violence’ and ‘weaponize’ like tarnished pitchforks. People who depend on obfuscation, who have no compassion for anybody genuinely curious or confused. Ask them a question and you are told that the answer is to repeat a mantra. Ask again for clarity and be accused of violence. And so we have a generation of young people on social media so terrified of having the wrong opinions that they have robbed themselves of the opportunity to think and to learn and to grow.

At every step of the way, to give her the contrast she needed, Thatcher marked out an opponent: the socialists, the wets, the Argentineans. These enemies helped to define her image as determined, powerful, self-sacrificing. Thatcher was not seduced by popularity, which is ephemeral and superficial. Pundits might obsess over popularity numbers, but in the mind of the voter—which, for a politician, is the field of battle—a dominating presence has more pull than does likability. Let some of the public hate you; you cannot please everyone. Your enemies, those you stand sharply against, will help you to forge a support base that will not desert you. Do not crowd into the center, where everyone else is; there is no room to fight in a crowd. Polarize people, drive some of them away, and create a space for battle. Everything in life conspires to push you into the center, and not just politically. The center is the realm of compromise. Getting along with other people is an important skill to have, but it comes with a danger: by always seeking the path of least resistance, the path of conciliation, you forget who you are, and you sink into the center with everyone else. Instead see yourself as a fighter, an outsider surrounded by enemies. Constant battle will keep you strong and alert. It will help to define what you believe in, both for yourself and for others. Do not worry about antagonizing people; without antagonism there is no battle, and without battle, there is no chance of victory. Do not be lured by the need to be liked: better to be respected, even feared. Victory over your enemies will bring you a more lasting popularity.

Judging Pius by what he did not say, one could only damn him. With images of piles of skeletal corpses before his eyes; with women and young children compelled, by torture, to kill each other; with millions of innocents caged like criminals, butchered like cattle, and burned like trash—he should have spoken out. He had this duty, not only as pontiff, but as a person. After his first encyclical, he did reissue general distinctions between race-hatred and Christian love. Yet with the ethical coin of the Church, Pius proved frugal; toward what he privately termed “Satanic forces,” he showed public moderation; where no conscience could stay neutral, the Church seemed to be. During the world’s greatest moral crisis, its greatest moral leader seemed at a loss for words. But the Vatican did not work by words alone. By 20 October, when Pius put his name to Summi Pontficatus, he was enmeshed in a war behind the war. Those who later explored the maze of his policies, without a clue to his secret actions, wondered why he seemed so hostile toward Nazism, and then fell so silent. But when his secret acts are mapped, and made to overlay his public words, a stark correlation emerges. The last day during the war when Pius publicly said the word “Jew” is also, in fact, the first day history can document his choice to help kill Adolf Hitler.

The group we all illegally went to help this morning?” Fitz asked, grinning at her when she was forced to nod. “Just making sure. Carry on.” Sophie rolled her eyes. “Not only will I be going to live with the group the Council has basically made their Public Enemy Number One, but I’ll be doing it without the circlet they ordered me to wear—” “You mean the circlet I illegally helped you remove and then threw into the Everblaze to destroy?” Dex asked.

animal suicide accounts gave scientists, natural historians, and the general public a means of reflecting on the concept of human self-destruction as well as ideas about humanity’s relationship to nature without always having to talk about people. Writing and thinking about animal suicides, just as we saw with the cases of animal heartbreak and homesickness, gave people a way to ponder their own afflictions, even if they were doing it unconciously.

You want to give it a look, Xeno is printing all the stuff the Prophet’s ignoring, not a single mention of Crumple-Horned Snorkacks in the last issue. How long they’ll let him get away with it, mind, I don’t know. But Xeno says, front page of every issue, that any wizard who’s against You-Know-Who ought to make helping Harry Potter their number-one priority.” “Hard to help a boy who’s vanished off the face of the earth,” said Dirk. “Listen, the fact that they haven’t caught him yet’s one hell of an achievement,” said Ted. “I’d take tips from him gladly; it’s what we’re trying to do, stay free, isn’t it?” “Yeah, well, you’ve got a point there,” said Dirk heavily. “With the whole of the Ministry and all their informers looking for him I’d have expected him to be caught by now. Mind, who’s to say they haven’t already caught and killed him without publicizing it?” “Ah, don’t say that, Dirk,” murmured Ted.

He further demonstrated, with specificity, how HCQ’s critics—largely funded by Bill Gates and Dr. Tony Fauci31—had misinterpreted, misstated, and misreported negative results by employing faulty protocols, most of which showed HCQ efficacy administered without zinc and Zithromax which were known to be helpful. But their main trick for ensuring the protocols failed was to wait until late in the disease process before administering HCQ—when it is known to be ineffective.

Though he went about the task with a will, he clearly did not share the ideological conviction that the jobless were better off without help from the public service. Abbott’s default position is that governments are there to act, to solve problems, not to withdraw and leave things to the cut and thrust of market forces. He was clearly not one of those conservatives who loved the market. His loyalty was to government and what government could achieve through intervention.

Sadly, not all veterans had equal access to an education, even under the GI Bill’s amendments. Although no provision prevented African American and female veterans from securing an education under the bill, these veterans returned to a nation that still endorsed segregated schools and largely believed a woman’s place was in the home. For African American veterans, educational opportunities were limited. In the words of historian Christopher P. Loss, “Legalized segregation denied most black veterans admission into the nation’s elite, overwhelmingly white universities, and insufficient capacity at the all-black schools they could attend failed to match black veterans’ demand.” The number of African American students at U.S. colleges and universities tripled between 1940 and 1950, but many prospective students were turned away because of their race. For those African Americans who did earn a degree under the GI Bill, employment discrimination prevented them from gaining positions commensurate with their education. Many African American college graduates were offered low-level jobs that they could have secured without any education. Almost a decade elapsed between V-J Day and the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down segregated schools. It would take another decade after Brown for the civil rights movement to fully develop and for public schools to make significant strides in integrating.

At finding ourselves, and without having committed any crime, thus introduced into one of the legal fortresses of a country celebrated throughout the world for the freedom, equality, and magnanimity of its laws, I could not help reflecting on the strange ideas of right and justice that seemed to have usurped a place in public opinion, since the mere accident of birth, and what persons were the lease capable of changing or modifying was made a reason for punishing and imprisoning them.

Among the people to whom he belonged, nothing was written or talked about at that time except the Serbian war. Everything that the idle crowd usually does to kill time, it now did for the benefit of the Slavs: balls, concerts, dinners, speeches, ladies' dresses, beer, restaurants—all bore witness to our sympathy with the Slavs. With much that was spoken and written on the subject Konyshev did not agree in detail. He saw that the Slav question had become one of those fashionable diversions which, ever succeeding one another, serve to occupy Society; he saw that too many people took up the question from interested motives. He admitted that the papers published much that was unnecessary and exaggerated with the sole aim of drawing attention to themselves, each outcrying the other. He saw that amid this general elation in Society those who were unsuccessful or discontented leapt to the front and shouted louder than anyone else: Commanders-in-Chief without armies, Ministers without portfolios, journalists without papers, and party leaders without followers. He saw that there was much that was frivolous and ridiculous; but he also saw and admitted the unquestionable and ever-growing enthusiasm which was uniting all classes of society, and with which one could not help sympathizing. The massacre of our coreligionists and brother Slavs evoked sympathy for the sufferers and indignation against their oppressors. And the heroism of the Serbs and Montenegrins, fighting for a great cause, aroused in the whole nation a desire to help their brothers not only with words but by deeds. Also there was an accompanying fact that pleased Koznyshev. It was the manifestation of public opinion. The nation had definitely expressed its wishes. As Koznyshev put it, ' the soul of the nation had become articulate.' The more he went into this question, the clearer it seemed to him that it was a matter which would attain enormous proportions and become epoch-making.

Saving democracy is not an overblown call to action—we are in trouble. The changing demography of America speaks to more than whether Democrats or Republicans control political decisions. Young people will be financially responsible for the largest population of elderly Americans in our history, but without the resources necessary to provide for them. The increased frequency of extreme climate events costs billions of dollars that will not be spent on education or infrastructure. The past fifty years of public policy toward communities of color have consequences. For decades, black and brown children have had higher dropout rates, higher incarceration rates, and lower earning power. This very same population continues to grow in size and political might, but America has largely abandoned our tradition of civic education to help guide their decisions. And international crises will demand American attention, but without a cogent and consensus-driven electorate, we will likely be paralyzed by inaction or stupid decision making. We

And in spite of the relative obscurity in which these women lived, I came to realize how much they influenced men, their husbands and especially their sons, and even-indirectly, by silent example (as did the teachers)-men they never saw or met. Not only did the women influence, but in many cases they helped to determine events: whom their sons would marry, whom their daughters would marry, whether or not a child would go on to school and university. And they did this without coercion, without publicity, and above all without reproach.

It always helps to have the referees on your side. Modern states possess various agencies with the authority to investigate and punish wrongdoing by both public officials and private citizens. These include the judicial system, law enforcement bodies, and intelligence, tax, and regulatory agencies. In democracies, such institutions are designed to serve as neutral arbiters. For would-be authoritarians, therefore, judicial and law enforcement agencies pose both a challenge and an opportunity. If they remain independent, they might expose and punish government abuse. It is a referee’s job, after all, to prevent cheating. But if these agencies are controlled by loyalists, they could serve a would-be dictator’s aims, shielding the government from investigation and criminal prosecutions that could lead to its removal from power. The president may break the law, threaten citizens’ rights, and even violate the constitution without having to worry that such abuse will be investigated or censured. With the courts packed and law enforcement authorities brought to heel, governments can act with impunity.

That is why I can’t in any way approve of those MEDDLESOME and RESTLESS characters who, without being called by BIRTH or by FORTUNE to the management of public affairs, are yet forever thinking up some new reform! If I thought this present work contained the SLIGHTEST ground for suspecting me of such FOLLY, I would SHRINK from allowing it to be published! My plan has NEVER gone beyond trying to reform my own thoughts and to build on a foundation that is ALL MY OWN. If I’m pleased enough with my work to present you with this sketch of it, it’s not because I would advise anyone to imitate it. Those on whom GOD has bestowed more of his favours than he has on me will PERHAPS have higher aims; but I’m afraid that this project of mine may be too bold for many people! The mere decision to rid myself all the opinions I have hitherto accepted isn’t an example that everyone ought to follow! The world is mostly made up of two types of minds for whom it is QUITE unsuitable. (1) There are those who, believing themselves cleverer than they are, can’t help rushing to judgment and can’t muster the patience to direct all their thoughts in an ORDERLY manner. So that if they ONCE took the liberty of doubting the principles they have accepted and leaving the common path, they would NEVER be able to stay on the straighter path that they ought to take, AND would REMAIN lost ALL their LIVES. (2) And there are those who are reasonable enough, or modest enough, to THINK that they can’t distinguish true from false as well as some other people by whom they can be taught. THESE should be content to follow the opinions of those others rather than to seek better opinions themselves.

When people discuss the drug war, they are usually referring to the one that began in the 1970s, without realizing that this was, at least, our third drug war in the twentieth century. I found David F. Musto’s The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control to be extremely helpful on the subject. It was depressing to see that drug wars, in this country, are almost never launched purely out of concern for public health. In almost every instance that Musto looks at there is some fear of an outsider—blacks and cocaine, Mexican Americans and marijuana, Chinese Americans and opium.

Let me confess that we two must be twain,   Although our undivided loves are one:   So shall those blots that do with me remain,   Without thy help, by me be borne alone.   In our two loves there is but one respect,   Though in our lives a separable spite,   Which though it alter not love's sole effect,   Yet doth it steal sweet hours from love's delight.   I may not evermore acknowledge thee,   Lest my bewailed guilt should do thee shame,   Nor thou with public kindness honour me,   Unless thou take that honour from thy name:     But do not so, I love thee in such sort,     As thou being mine, mine is thy good report.

Through the fall, the president’s anger seemed difficult to contain. He threatened North Korea with “fire and fury,” then followed up with a threat to “totally destroy” the country. When neo-Nazis and white supremacists held a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and one of them killed a protester and injured a score of others, he made a brutally offensive statement condemning violence “on many sides … on many sides”—as if there was moral equivalence between those who were fomenting racial hatred and violence and those who were opposing it. He retweeted anti-Muslim propaganda that had been posted by a convicted criminal leader of a British far-right organization. Then as now, the president’s heedless bullying and intolerance of variance—intolerance of any perception not his own—has been nurturing a strain of insanity in public dialogue that has been long in development, a pathology that became only more virulent when it migrated to the internet. A person such as the president can on impulse and with minimal effort inject any sort of falsehood into public conversation through digital media and call his own lie a correction of “fake news.” There are so many news outlets now, and the competition for clicks is so intense, that any sufficiently outrageous statement made online by anyone with even the faintest patina of authority, and sometimes even without it, will be talked about, shared, and reported on, regardless of whether it has a basis in fact. How do you progress as a culture if you set out to destroy any common agreement as to what constitutes a fact? You can’t have conversations. You can’t have debates. You can’t come to conclusions. At the same time, calling out the transgressor has a way of giving more oxygen to the lie. Now it’s a news story, and the lie is being mentioned not just in some website that publishes unattributable gossip but in every reputable newspaper in the country. I have not been looking to start a personal fight with the president. When somebody insults your wife, your instinctive reaction is to want to lash out in response. When you are the acting director, or deputy director, of the FBI, and the person doing the insulting is the chief executive of the United States, your options have guardrails. I read the president’s tweets, but I had an organization to run. A country to help protect. I had to remain independent, neutral, professional, positive, on target. I had to compartmentalize my emotions. Crises taught me how to compartmentalize. Example: the Boston Marathon bombing—watching the video evidence, reviewing videos again and again of people dying, people being mutilated and maimed. I had the primal human response that anyone would have. But I know how to build walls around that response and had to build them then in order to stay focused on finding the bombers. Compared to experiences like that one, getting tweeted about by Donald Trump does not count as a crisis. I do not even know how to think about the fact that the person with time on his hands to tweet about me and my wife is the president of the United States.

The Capitalist Class knows that what brings on the increased supply is not immigration so much, but the improved and ever improving machinery, held as private property. For every immigrant by whom the labor market is overstocked, it is overstocked by ten workingmen in the country whom privately owned machinery displaces. The Capitalist Class is full well aware that if this fact be known the conclusion would leap to sight ; to wit, that the solution oi" the Labor Problem is simply the public ownership of the machine. If fifty men, working ten hours a day, can, with improved machinery, produce as much as one hundred did before without such improved machinery, the publicly owned machine would not, as the privately owned machine does, throw out fifty men; it would throw out five of the former ten hours of work. It is clear as day to the Capitalist Class that it must raise dust over this fact so as to conceal it; and no better means to this end is offered than the fomenting of the plausible delusion that the evil lies in immigration. Anti-immigration laws are the fruit of these two purpose. Such laws kill two flies with one slap ; they draw attention away from the nerve that aches, and simultaneously they help to set the workers of the land in racial and creed hostility against the newcomers, who, of course, the Capitalist Class itself sees to shall not be lacking. Obviously, it is in the interest of the Working Class that this brace of fatal delusions be dispelled from their minds. What does the Labor Leader do? He helps nurse both delusions.

hink it might have helped if I’d understood myself better back then. If you’re the parent of a would-be figure skater, help her to accept that she has heavy-duty jitters without giving her the idea that they’re fatal to success. What she’s most afraid of is failing publicly. She needs to desensitize herself to this fear by getting used to competing, and even to failing. Encourage her to enter low-stakes competitions far away from home, where she feels anonymous and no one will know if she falls. Make sure she has rehearsed thoroughly. If she’s planning to compete on an unfamiliar rink, try to have her practice there a few times first. Talk about what might go wrong and how to handle it: OK, so what if you do fall and come in last place, will life still go on? And help her visualize what it will feel like to perform her moves smoothly.

The German people have paid billions of dollars of reparations. To individuals. To Israel. But you know what? It’s been nearly seventy years and they’ve never held a public forum to apologize to Jews for the crimes of the Holocaust. It’s happened elsewhere—South Africa, for example. But the Germans? They had to be dragged by the Allies into the Nuremberg Trials. Officials who had helped build the Third Reich stayed on in government after the war, just by denying they were ever Nazis, and the German people accepted it. Young people today in Germany who are taught about the Holocaust brush it off, saying it’s ancient history. So, no, I don’t think you can forgive Josef Weber. I don’t think you can forgive anyone who was involved. I think you can only hold them accountable, and try to look their children and grandchildren in the eye without blaming them for what their ancestors did.

The problem for him in high school was that debate made you a nerd and poetry made you a pussy – even if both could help you get to the vaguely imagines East Coast city from which your experiences in Topeka would be recounted with great irony. The key was to narrate participation in debate as a form of linguistic combat; the key was to be a bully, quick and vicious and ready to spread an interlocutor with insults at the at the smallest provocation. Poetry could be excused if it upped your game, became cipher and flow, if it was part of why Amber was fucking you and not Reynolds et al. If linguistic prowess could do damage and get you laid, then it could be integrated into the adolescent social realm without entirely departing from the household values of intellect and expression. It was not a reconciliation, but a workable tension. His disastrous tonsorial compromise. The migraines. Fortunately for Adam, this shifting of aggression to the domain of language was sanctioned by one of the practices the types had appropriated: after several hours of drinking, if no fight or noise complain had broken up the party, you were likely to encounter freestyling. In many ways, this was the most shameful of all the poses, the clearest manifestation of a crisis in white masculinity and its representational regimes, a small group of privileged crackers often arrhythmically recycling the genre’s dominant and to them totally inapplicable clichés. But it was socially essential for him: the rap battle transmuted his prowess as a public speaker and aspiring poet into something cool. His luck was dizzying: that there was a rapid, ritualized poetic insult exchange bridging the gap between his Saturday afternoons in abandoned high schools and his Saturday nights in unsupervised houses, allowing him to transition from one contest to the other.

It was an old tradition: landlords barring children from their properties. In the competitive postwar housing market of the late 1940s, landlords regularly turned away families with children and evicted tenants who got pregnant.3 This was evident in letters mothers wrote when applying for public housing. “At present,” one wrote, “I am living in an unheated attic room with a one-year-old baby….Everywhere I go the landlords don’t want children. I also have a ten-year-old boy….I can’t keep him with me because the landlady objects to children. Is there any way that you can help me to get an unfurnished room, apartment, or even an old barn?…I can’t go on living like this because I am on the verge of doing something desperate.” Another mother wrote, “My children are now sick and losing weight….I have tried, begged, and pleaded for a place but [it’s] always ‘too late’ or ‘sorry, no children.’ ” Another wrote, “The lady where I am rooming put two of my children out about three weeks ago and don’t want me to let them come back….If I could get a garage I would take it.”4 When Congress passed the Fair Housing Act in 1968, it did not consider families with children a protected class, allowing landlords to continue openly turning them away or evicting them. Some placed costly restrictions on large families, charging “children-damage deposits” in addition to standard rental fees. One Washington, DC, development required tenants with no children to put down a $150 security deposit but charged families with children a $450 deposit plus a monthly surcharge of $50 per child.5 In 1980, HUD commissioned a nationwide study to assess the magnitude of the problem and found that only 1 in 4 rental units was available to families without restrictions.6 Eight years later, Congress finally outlawed housing discrimination against children and families, but as Pam found out, the practice remained widespread.7 Families with children were turned away in as many as 7 in 10 housing searches.8

For many citizens, libraries are the one place where the information they need to be engaged in civic life is truly available for free, requiring nothing more than the time to walk into a branch. The reading room of a public library is the place where a daily newspaper, a weekly newsmagazine, and a documentary film are all available for free. In many communities, the library's public lecture room is the only place to hear candidates for office comparing points of view or visiting professors explaining their work on climate change, immigration or job creation. That same room is often the only place where a child from a family without a lot of money can go to see a dramatic reading or a production of a Shakespeare play. (Another of these simple realities in most communities is that a big part of public librarians job is to figure out how to host the community's homeless in a safe and fair manner.) Democracies can work only if all citizens have access to information and culture that can help them make good choices, whether at the voting booth or in other aspects of public life.

I can’t help thinking,” she confided when he finished answering her questions about women in India who covered their faces and hair in public, “that it is grossly unfair that I was born a female and so must never know such adventures, or see but a few of those places. Even if I were to journey there, I’d only be allowed to go where everything was as civilized as-as London!” “There does seem to be a case of extreme disparity between the privileges accorded the sexes,” Ian agreed. “Still, we each have our duty to perform,” she informed him with sham solemnity. “And there’s said to be great satisfaction in that.” “How do you view your-er-duty?” he countered, responding to her teasing tone with a lazy white smile. “That’s easy. It is a female’s duty to be a wife who is an asset to her husband in every way. It is a male’s duty to do whatever he wishes, whenever he wishes, so long as he is prepared to defend his country should the occasion demand it in his lifetime-which it very likely won’t. Men,” she informed him, “gain honor by sacrificing themselves on the field of battle while we sacrifice ourselves on the altar of matrimony.” He laughed aloud then, and Elizabeth smiled back at him, enjoying herself hugely. “Which, when one considers it, only proves that our sacrifice is by far the greater and more noble.” “How is that?” he asked, still chuckling. “It’s perfectly obvious-battles last mere days or weeks, months at the very most. While matrimony lasts a lifetime! Which brings to mind something else I’ve often wondered about,” she continued gaily, giving full rein to her innermost thoughts. “And that is?” he prompted, grinning, watching her as if he never wanted to stop. “Why do you suppose, after all that, they call us the weaker sex?” Their laughing gazes held, and then Elizabeth realized how outrageous he must be finding some of her remarks. “I don’t usually go off on such tangents,” she said ruefully. “You must think I’m dreadfully ill-bred.” “I think,” he softly said, “that you are magnificent.” The husky sincerity in his deep voice snatched her breath away. She opened her mouth, thinking frantically for some light reply that could restore the easy camaraderie of a minute before, but instead of speaking she could only draw a long, shaky breath. “And,” he continued quietly, “I think you know it.” This was not, not the sort of foolish, flirtatious repartee she was accustomed to from her London beaux, and it terrified her as much as the sensual look in those golden eyes. Pressing imperceptibly back against the arm of the sofa, she told herself she was only overacting to what was nothing more than empty flattery. “I think,” she managed with a light laugh that stuck in her throat, “that you must find whatever female you’re with ‘magnificent.’” “Why would you say a thing like that?” Elizabeth shrugged. “Last night at supper, for one thing.” When he frowned at her as if she were speaking in a foreign language, she prodded, “You remember Lady Charise Dumont, our hostess, the same lovely brunette on whose every word you were hanging at supper last night?” His frown became a grin. “Jealous?” Elizabeth lifted her elegant little chin and shook her head. “No more than you were of Lord Howard.” She felt a small bit of satisfaction as his amusement vanished. “The fellow who couldn’t seem to talk to you without touching your arm?” he inquired in a silky-soft voice. “That Lord Howard? As a matter of fact, my love, I spent most of my meal trying to decide whether I wanted to shove his nose under his right ear or his left.” Startled, musical laughter erupted from her before she could stop it. “You did nothing of the sort,” she chuckled. “Besides, if you wouldn’t duel with Lord Everly when he called you a cheat, you certainly wouldn’t harm poor Lord Howard merely for touching my arm.” “Wouldn’t I?” he asked softly. “Those are two very different issues.

Dominic was rubbing his cheek against her head when his body stiffened. "What is that?" "What?" She was trying to wiggle her fingers in between his shirt buttons without anyone else seeing. She liked the feel of his chest hair beneath her skin. Although her onetime comment comparing it to petting Humphrey was a mistake she wouldn't repeat. "In the sugar bubble on the second tier." Dominic was dropping into his Operation Cake tone, which only made her want to open all the buttons. "What is that?" "Probably another dragon," she said airily, rubbing him and making a shiver run through his big body. "We agreed on including Caractacus." "Yes. We agreed on the dragon. We did not agree on other crea..." He couldn't seem to help running his fingers down her spine, but she felt the moment he realized what he was looking at. His words became dangerously even. "It has a horn." "You're seeing things." A soothing pet on his pec. "It has hooves." Unmistakable outrage. "I have no idea what you're talking about." In public, he was still usually a little more reserved, but he swung her around now, properly into his arms. His brows had lifted pointedly, but he was unable to fully repress that laugh she loved so much. His forehead came down to rest on hers. "God, you're lucky I adore you." Sylvie was smiling as she slipped her arms around his shoulders. "And despite your hopeless lack of imagination and tragic inclination toward minimalism, I love you madly.

Television’s greatest appeal is that it is engaging without being at all demanding. One can rest while undergoing stimulation. Receive without giving. It’s the same in all low art that has as goal continued attention and patronage: it’s appealing precisely because it’s at once fun and easy. And the entrenchment of a culture built on Appeal helps explain a dark and curious thing: at a time when there are more decent and good and very good serious fiction writers at work in America than ever before, an American public enjoying unprecedented literacy and disposable income spends the vast bulk of its reading time and book dollar on fiction that is, by any fair standard, trash. Trash fiction is, by design and appeal, most like televised narrative: engaging without being demanding. But trash, in terms of both quality and popularity, is a much more sinister phenomenon. For while television has from its beginnings been openly motivated by — has been about—considerations of mass appeal and L.C.D. and profit, our own history is chock-full of evidence that readers and societies may properly expect important, lasting contributions from a narrative art that understands itself as being about considerations more important than popularity and balance sheets. Entertainers can divert and engage and maybe even console; only artists can transfigure. Today’s trash writers are entertainers working artists’ turf. This in itself is nothing new. But television aesthetics, and television-like economics, have clearly made their unprecedented popularity and reward possible. And there seems to me to be a real danger that not only the forms but the norms of televised art will begin to supplant the standards of all narrative art. This would be a disaster. [...] Even the snottiest young artiste, of course, probably isn’t going to bear personal ill will toward writers of trash; just as, while everybody agrees that prostitution is a bad thing for everyone involved, few are apt to blame prostitutes themselves, or wish them harm. If this seems like a non sequitur, I’m going to claim the analogy is all too apt. A prostitute is someone who, in exchange for money, affords someone else the form and sensation of sexual intimacy without any of the complex emotions or responsibilities that make intimacy between two people a valuable or meaningful human enterprise. The prostitute “gives,” but — demanding nothing of comparable value in return — perverts the giving, helps render what is supposed to be a revelation a transaction. The writer of trash fiction, often with admirable craft, affords his customer a narrative structure and movement, and content that engages the reader — titillates, repulses, excites, transports him — without demanding of him any of the intellectual or spiritual or artistic responses that render verbal intercourse between writer and reader an important or even real activity." - from "Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young

So, in summary: The market for Negro writers is very limited. Jobs as professional writers, editorial assistants, publisher's readers, etc., are almost non-existent. Hollywood insofar as Negroes are concerned, might just as well be controlled by Hitler. The common courtesies of decent travel, hotel and restaurant accommodations, politeness from doormen, elevatormen, and hired attendants in public places is practically everywhere in America denied Negroes, whether they be writers or not. Black authors, too, must ride in Jim Crow cars. These are some of our problems. What can you who are writers do to help us solve them? What can you, our public, do to help us solve them? My problem, your problem. No, I'm wrong! It is not a matter of mine and yours. It is a matter of ours. We are all Americans. We want to create the American dream, a finer and more democratic America. I cannot do it without you. You cannot do it omitting me. Can we march together then? But perhaps the word march is the wrong word—suggesting soldiers and armies. Can we not put our heads together and think and plan—not merely dream—the future America? And then create it with our hands? A land where even a Negro writer can make a living, if he is a good writer. And where, being a Negro, he need not be a secondary American. We do not want any secondary Americans. We do not want a weak and imperfect democracy. We do not want poverty and hunger and prejudice and fear on the part of any portion of our population. We want America to really be America for everybody. Let us make it so!

In a physician's office in Kearny Street three men sat about a table, drinking punch and smoking. It was late in the evening, almost midnight, indeed, and there had been no lack of punch. The gravest of the three, Dr. Helberson, was the host—it was in his rooms they sat. He was about thirty years of age; the others were even younger; all were physicians. "The superstitious awe with which the living regard the dead," said Dr. Helberson, "is hereditary and incurable. One needs no more be ashamed of it than of the fact that he inherits, for example, an incapacity for mathematics, or a tendency to lie." The others laughed. "Oughtn't a man to be ashamed to lie?" asked the youngest of the three, who was in fact a medical student not yet graduated. "My dear Harper, I said nothing about that. The tendency to lie is one thing; lying is another." "But do you think," said the third man, "that this superstitious feeling, this fear of the dead, reasonless as we know it to be, is universal? I am myself not conscious of it." "Oh, but it is 'in your system' for all that," replied Helberson; "it needs only the right conditions—what Shakespeare calls the 'confederate season'—to manifest itself in some very disagreeable way that will open your eyes. Physicians and soldiers are of course more nearly free from it than others." "Physicians and soldiers!—why don't you add hangmen and headsmen? Let us have in all the assassin classes." "No, my dear Mancher; the juries will not let the public executioners acquire sufficient familiarity with death to be altogether unmoved by it." Young Harper, who had been helping himself to a fresh cigar at the sideboard, resumed his seat. "What would you consider conditions under which any man of woman born would become insupportably conscious of his share of our common weakness in this regard?" he asked, rather verbosely. "Well, I should say that if a man were locked up all night with a corpse—alone—in a dark room—of a vacant house—with no bed covers to pull over his head—and lived through it without going altogether mad, he might justly boast himself not of woman born, nor yet, like Macduff, a product of Cæsarean section." "I thought you never would finish piling up conditions," said Harper, "but I know a man who is neither a physician nor a soldier who will accept them all, for any stake you like to name." "Who is he?" "His name is Jarette—a stranger here; comes from my town in New York. I have no money to back him, but he will back himself with loads of it." "How do you know that?" "He would rather bet than eat. As for fear—I dare say he thinks it some cutaneous disorder, or possibly a particular kind of religious heresy." "What does he look like?" Helberson was evidently becoming interested. "Like Mancher, here—might be his twin brother." "I accept the challenge," said Helberson, promptly. "Awfully obliged to you for the compliment, I'm sure," drawled Mancher, who was growing sleepy. "Can't I get into this?" "Not against me," Helberson said. "I don't want your money." "All right," said Mancher; "I'll be the corpse." The others laughed. The outcome of this crazy conversation we have seen.

The United States over the last thirty years has seen a growing gap - indeed, a deepening gulf - between rich and poor. The gap is significantly greater than in any other developed nation. Moreover, the growing gulf between rich and poor is the result of social and economic policy, not because some classes of people worked harder and others slacked off over the last thirty years (all of us, according to most studies, are working harder). The differences among countries generate the same conclusion: social policy, not simply individual effort, is responsible for the distribution of wealth. Our recent social policy may not have been intended to produce this result, but it has. The consequence is increased suffering and desperation among the poor and potentially grave consequences for the society as a whole. Moreover, many people in the middle, who are most often struggling financially, support the individualistic ideology underlying our social policy - namely, the notions that we each have worked hard for what we have and ought to be able to keep all of it, that government is bad (or at least inefficient and wasteful - and hungry for our tax dollars), and that things will be better for all of us if we let the wealthiest people in our country make and keep as much money as possible. Many of us seem not to realize that the people who benefit the most from our politics and economics of individualism are the wealthiest 10 percent, especially the top 1 percent. People will support a tax cut that saves them $300 a year, without considering that the same tax cut will save the very wealthy tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands a year, with significant damage to the social fabric, including not only decreased help for the poor and disadvantaged but also cuts in services such as public schools, road repairs, parks, libraries, and so forth.

The two works I allude to, sir, will in particular give a noble rule and example of self-education. School and other education constantly proceed upon false principles, and show a clumsy apparatus pointed at a false mark; but your apparatus is simple, and the mark a true one; and while parents and young persons are left destitute of other just means of estimating and becoming prepared for a reasonable course in life, your discovery that the thing is in many a man's private power, will be invaluable! Influence upon the private character, late in life, is not only an influence late in life, but a weak influence. It is in youth that we plant our chief habits and prejudices; it is in youth that we take our party as to profession, pursuits and matrimony. In youth, therefore, the turn is given; in youth the education even of the next generation is given; in youth the private and public character is determined; and the term of life extending but from youth to age, life ought to begin well from youth, and more especially before we take our party as to our principal objects. But your biography will not merely teach self-education, but the education of a wise man; and the wisest man will receive lights and improve his progress, by seeing detailed the conduct of another wise man. And why are weaker men to be deprived of such helps, when we see our race has been blundering on in the dark, almost without a guide in this particular, from the farthest trace of time? Show then, sir, how much is to be done, both to sons and fathers; and invite all wise men to become like yourself, and other men to become wise. When we see how cruel statesmen and warriors can be to the human race, and how absurd distinguished men can be to their acquaintance, it will be instructive to observe the instances multiply of pacific, acquiescing manners; and to find how compatible it is to be great and domestic, enviable and yet good-humored.

We need more baskets,” Pandora said triumphantly, entering the hall. The twins, who were clearly having a splendid time, had adorned themselves outlandishly. Cassandra was dressed in a green opera cloak with a jeweled feather ornament affixed to her hair. Pandora had tucked a light blue lace parasol beneath one arm, and a pair of lawn tennis rackets beneath the other, and was wearing a flowery diadem headdress that had slipped partially over one eye. “From the looks of it,” Kathleen said, “you’ve done enough shopping already.” Cassandra looked concerned. “Oh, no, we still have at least eighty departments to visit.” Kathleen couldn’t help glancing at Devon, who was trying, without success, to stifle a grin. It was the first time she had seen him truly smile in days. Enthusiastically the girls lugged the baskets to her and began to set objects on the counter in an unwieldy pile…perfumed soaps, powders, pomades, stockings, books, new corset laces and racks of hairpins, artificial flowers, tins of biscuits, licorice pastilles and barley sweets, a metal mesh tea infuser, hosiery tucked in little netted bags, a set of drawing pencils, and a tiny glass bottle filled with bright red liquid. “What is this?” Kathleen asked, picking up the bottle and viewing it suspiciously. “It’s a beautifier,” Pandora said. “Bloom of Rose,” Cassandra chimed in. Kathleen gasped as she realized what it was. “It’s rouge.” She had never even held a container of rouge before. Setting it on the counter, she said firmly, “No.” “But Kathleen--” “No to rouge,” she said, “now and for all time.” “We need to enhance our complexions,” Pandora protested. “It won’t do any harm,” Cassandra chimed in. “The bottle says that Bloom of Rose is ‘delicate and inoffensive’…It’s written right there, you see?” “The comments you would receive if you wore rouge in public would assuredly not be delicate or inoffensive. People would assume you were a fallen woman. Or worse, an actress.” Pandora turned to Devon. “Lord Trenear, what do you think?” “This is one of those times when it’s best for a man to avoid thinking altogether,” he said hastily.

I saw Clinton again during the signing of the peace treaty with Jordan in Israel’s Arava Valley in 1995. That year, I also sent him my third book on terrorism, Fighting Terrorism, and he sent me back a cordial letter. Notwithstanding his civility, I knew his administration would do anything to defeat me. In fact they did. Totally committed to the idea of a fully independent Palestine, they were not aware that Rabin himself had been opposed to such a state. Clinton sent his number one campaign strategist, James Carville, his pollster Stan Greenberg and his top team of experts to Israel to help tip the scales in Peres’s favor. Special envoy Dennis Ross would later say, “We did everything we could to help Peres,” and Clinton’s national security advisor, Sandy Berger, would also later admit, “If there was ever a time that we tried to influence an Israeli election, it was Peres vs. Netanyahu.”23 Normally such an outrageous and systemic interference in another democracy’s elections would elicit outcries of protest from the press in America and Israel alike. No such protests were heard. Totally supportive of Peres, the press in both Israel and the United States was silent. Though the odds were stacked against us, we weren’t fazed. “About Carville,” Arthur said, “we can beat him.” Clinton and Peres organized an international peace conference in Sharm el-Sheikh a few weeks before the elections. Peres, Clinton, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, King Hussein of Jordan, and Arafat all showed up and danced the dance. Yet a few months earlier, soon after Peres was installed without an election as replacement prime minister following Rabin’s assassination, King Hussein had sent me a message through his brother Crown Prince Hassan, asking: Would I meet Hassan secretly in London? In a London flat the crown prince and I hit it off immediately. I liked Hassan. Straightforward, with a humorous streak, he didn’t even attempt to hide his concern about a Peres victory. Though they wouldn’t admit it publicly, he and many Jordanian officials I met over the years were concerned that an armed Palestinian state could destroy the Hashemite regime and take over Jordan.

These four changes—in the nature of work, education, social values, and communication technology—make it harder for dictators to dominate citizens in the old way. Harsh laws and bureaucratic regulations provoke furious responses from previously docile groups. These groups have new skills and networks that help them resist. At the same time, violent repression and comprehensive censorship destroy the innovation now central to progress. Eventually, the expansion of the highly educated, creative class, with its demands for self-expression and participation, makes it difficult to resist a move to some form of democracy. But so long as this class is not too large and the leader has the resources to co-opt or censor its members, an alternative is spin dictatorship. At least for a while, the ruler can buy off the informed with government contracts and privileges. So long as they stay loyal, he can tolerate their niche magazines, websites, and international networking events. He can even hire the creative types to design an alternative reality for the masses. This strategy will not work against a Sakharov. But Sakharovs are rare. With a modern, centrally controlled mass media, they pose little threat. Co-opting the informed takes resources. When these run low, spin dictators turn to censorship, which is often cheaper. They need not censor everything. All that really matters is to stop opposition media reaching a mass audience. And here the uneven dynamics of cultural change help. Early in the postindustrial era, most people still have industrial-era values. They are conformist and risk averse. The less educated are alienated from the creative types by resentment, economic anxiety, and attachment to tradition. Spin dictators can exploit these sentiments, rallying the remaining workers against the “counterculture” while branding the intellectuals as disloyal, sacrilegious, or sexually deviant. Such smears inoculate the leader’s base against opposition revelations. As long as the informed are not too strong, manipulation works well. Dictators can resist political demands without destroying the creative economy or revealing their own brutality to the public.

When you contribute to a safer world for the truth, contribute to help stop violence and help end impunity: be vigilant, be alert, stay safe, protect your emotions and health from aggressive troublemakers and manipulators, and have a strong, diplomatic, clear and firm boundaries. Be honest, be factual, and have an indestructible firm coping mechanism ways while you could experience waves of digital aggression as they would like to silence you, discredit you, and they try to ruin your integrity, persona, reputation and credibility. The deceptive, evil manipulators plant lies and create intrigues, polemics mongering, gossip-mongering, and calumny committed by abusive political harridans, bitches and assholes who can shame you privately and publicly. Group cyber lynching, group cyberbullying, defamatory libellous slander is committed by these cyber aggressors who are also financial-political abusive parasites, pathological liar cyberbullies toxic manipulators, and repetitive abusers. Usually when the stakes are high, these manipulative, deceptive, dishonest, unscrupulous aggressive and vindictive, abusive toxic people would resort to any forms of aggression/abuse: digital or cyber aggression, verbal abuse, emotional abuse, and psychological abuse, financial/economic abuse, and/or physical aggression. When a group of habitual, deceptive, toxic netizens, digital aggressors send you threats, disturb your family member with their concocted destructive lies, and they took hold a copy of your passport or ID - change it immediately. Document the threats, the libellous slander, done by these aggressive and abusive people who took advantage of you, used you, and abused you, and do not hesitate to report them to the right authorities. You have to learn how to handle these scammers, habitual offensive abusive offenders/perpetrators, manipulators, bullies, digital aggressors/aggression, cyber lynchers, coward, pathological liars, opportunistic users, economic/financial abusers, emotional, psychological and verbal abusers, and repetitive abusers without breaking the law. Even if they dehumanised you, shamed you and abused you for several years, do not and never dehumanise them. Always remember the three Rs of life: 1. Respect for self 2. Respect for others 3. Responsibility for all your actions ~ Angelica Hopes, an excerpt from The S. Trilogy

In April, Dr. Vladimir (Zev) Zelenko, M.D., an upstate New York physician and early HCQ adopter, reproduced Dr. Didier Raoult’s “startling successes” by dramatically reducing expected mortalities among 800 patients Zelenko treated with the HCQ cocktail.29 By late April of 2020, US doctors were widely prescribing HCQ to patients and family members, reporting outstanding results, and taking it themselves prophylactically. In May 2020, Dr. Harvey Risch, M.D., Ph.D. published the most comprehensive study, to date, on HCQ’s efficacy against COVID. Risch is Yale University’s super-eminent Professor of Epidemiology, an illustrious world authority on the analysis of aggregate clinical data. Dr. Risch concluded that evidence is unequivocal for early and safe use of the HCQ cocktail. Dr. Risch published his work—a meta-analysis reviewing five outpatient studies—in affiliation with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the American Journal of Epidemiology, under the urgent title, “Early Outpatient Treatment of Symptomatic, High-Risk COVID-19 Patients that Should be Ramped-Up Immediately as Key to Pandemic Crisis.”30 He further demonstrated, with specificity, how HCQ’s critics—largely funded by Bill Gates and Dr. Tony Fauci31—had misinterpreted, misstated, and misreported negative results by employing faulty protocols, most of which showed HCQ efficacy administered without zinc and Zithromax which were known to be helpful. But their main trick for ensuring the protocols failed was to wait until late in the disease process before administering HCQ—when it is known to be ineffective. Dr. Risch noted that evidence against HCQ used late in the course of the disease is irrelevant. While acknowledging that Dr. Didier Raoult’s powerful French studies favoring HCQ efficacy were not randomized, Risch argued that the results were, nevertheless, so stunning as to far outweigh that deficit: “The first study of HCQ + AZ [ . . . ] showed a 50-fold benefit of HCQ + AZ vs. standard of care . . . This is such an enormous difference that it cannot be ignored despite lack of randomization.”32 Risch has pointed out that the supposed need for randomized placebo-controlled trials is a shibboleth. In 2014 the Cochrane Collaboration proved in a landmark meta-analysis of 10,000 studies, that observational studies of the kind produced by Didier Raoult are equal

Unlike during the previous Gaza operation in 2012, the Iron Dome supply did not run out. After Operation Pillar of Defense I had instructed the army to accelerate production of Iron Dome projectiles and batteries. We accomplished this with our own funds and with generous American financial support. I now asked the Obama administration for an additional $225 million package to continue the production line after Protective Edge. He agreed, and with the help of Tony Blinken, the deputy national security advisor who later became Biden’s secretary of state, the funding provision sailed through both houses of Congress. I deeply appreciated this support and said so publicly. I was therefore very disappointed when the administration held back on the IDF’s request for additional Hellfire rockets for our attack helicopters. Without offensive weapons we could not bring the Gaza operation to a quick and decisive end. Furthermore, as the air war lingered, the administration issued increasingly critical statements against Israel, calling some of our actions “appalling”2 and thereby opening the moral floodgates against us. Hamas took note. As long as it believed that we couldn’t deliver more aggressive punches, and that international support was waning, it would continue to rocket our cities. Unfortunately, it was aided in this belief by an international tug-of-war. On one side: Israel and Egypt. On the other: Turkey and Qatar, which fully supported Hamas. I worked in close collaboration with Egypt’s new leader, el-Sisi, who had deposed the Islamist Morsi a few months earlier. Our common goal was to achieve an unconditional cease-fire. The last thing el-Sisi wanted was a Hamas success in Gaza that would embolden their Islamist allies in the Sinai and beyond. Hamas’s exiled leader, Khaled Mashal, who escaped the Mossad action in Jordan, was now in Qatar. Supported by his Qatari hosts and Erdogan and ensconced in his lavish villa in Doha, Mashal egged Hamas to keep on fighting. To my astonishment, Kerry urged me to accept Qatar and Turkey as mediators instead of the Egyptians, who were negotiating with Hamas representatives in Cairo for a possible cease-fire. Hamas drew much encouragement from this American position. El-Sisi and I agreed to keep the Americans out of the negotiating loop. In the meantime the IDF would have to further degrade Hamas’s fighting and crush their expectations of achieving anything in the cease-fire negotiations.

But there were problems. After the movie came out I couldn’t go to a tournament without being surrounded by fans asking for autographs. Instead of focusing on chess positions, I was pulled into the image of myself as a celebrity. Since childhood I had treasured the sublime study of chess, the swim through ever-deepening layers of complexity. I could spend hours at a chessboard and stand up from the experience on fire with insight about chess, basketball, the ocean, psychology, love, art. The game was exhilarating and also spiritually calming. It centered me. Chess was my friend. Then, suddenly, the game became alien and disquieting. I recall one tournament in Las Vegas: I was a young International Master in a field of a thousand competitors including twenty-six strong Grandmasters from around the world. As an up-and-coming player, I had huge respect for the great sages around me. I had studied their masterpieces for hundreds of hours and was awed by the artistry of these men. Before first-round play began I was seated at my board, deep in thought about my opening preparation, when the public address system announced that the subject of Searching for Bobby Fischer was at the event. A tournament director placed a poster of the movie next to my table, and immediately a sea of fans surged around the ropes separating the top boards from the audience. As the games progressed, when I rose to clear my mind young girls gave me their phone numbers and asked me to autograph their stomachs or legs. This might sound like a dream for a seventeen-year-old boy, and I won’t deny enjoying the attention, but professionally it was a nightmare. My game began to unravel. I caught myself thinking about how I looked thinking instead of losing myself in thought. The Grandmasters, my elders, were ignored and scowled at me. Some of them treated me like a pariah. I had won eight national championships and had more fans, public support and recognition than I could dream of, but none of this was helping my search for excellence, let alone for happiness. At a young age I came to know that there is something profoundly hollow about the nature of fame. I had spent my life devoted to artistic growth and was used to the sweaty-palmed sense of contentment one gets after many hours of intense reflection. This peaceful feeling had nothing to do with external adulation, and I yearned for a return to that innocent, fertile time. I missed just being a student of the game, but there was no escaping the spotlight. I found myself dreading chess, miserable before leaving for tournaments. I played without inspiration and was invited to appear on television shows. I smiled.

Punishment is not care, and poverty is not a crime. We need to create safe, supportive pathways for reentry into the community for all people and especially young people who are left out and act out. Interventions like decriminalizing youthful indiscretions for juvenile offenders and providing foster children and their families with targeted services and support would require significant investment and deliberate collaboration at the community, state, and federal levels, as well as a concerted commitment to dismantling our carceral state. These interventions happen automatically and privately for young offenders who are not poor, whose families can access treatment and hire help, and who have the privilege of living and making mistakes in neighborhoods that are not over-policed. We need to provide, not punish, and to foster belonging and self-sufficiency for our neighbors’ kids. More, funded YMCAs and community centers and summer jobs, for example, would help do this. These kinds of interventions would benefit all the Carloses, Wesleys, Haydens, Franks, and Leons, and would benefit our collective well-being. Only if we consider ourselves bound together can we reimagine our obligation to each other as community. When we consider ourselves bound together in community, the radically civil act of redistributing resources from tables with more to tables with less is not charity, it is responsibility; it is the beginning of reparation. Here is where I tell you that we can change this story, now. If we seek to repair systemic inequalities, we cannot do it with hope and prayers; we have to build beyond the systems and begin not with rehabilitation but prevention. We must reimagine our communities, redistribute our wealth, and give our neighbors access to what they need to live healthy, sustainable lives, too. This means more generous social benefits. This means access to affordable housing, well-resourced public schools, affordable healthcare, jobs, and a higher minimum wage, and, of course, plenty of good food. People ask me what educational policy reform I would suggest investing time and money in, if I had to pick only one. I am tempted to talk about curriculum and literacy, or teacher preparation and salary, to challenge whether police belong in schools, to push back on standardized testing, or maybe debate vocational education and reiterate that educational policy is housing policy and that we cannot consider one without the other. Instead, as a place to start, I say free breakfast and lunch. A singular reform that would benefit all students is the provision of good, free food at school. (Data show that this practice yields positive results; but do we need data to know this?) Imagine what would happen if, across our communities, people had enough to feel fed.

When you have an honest heart, you do not get engaged nor get involved with any smear campaigns nor black propaganda! When you have an honest heart, you do not malign nor take advantage of generous people who helped and trusted you! When you have an honest heart, you do not shit on people whom you used and abused for three years! Do not fall into a political naïvety and become a victim or a doormat nor have your generosity and honest heart be used and abused by unscrupulous political movers, abusive, aggressive political harridans who scam gullible generous hearts by asking donations, funds, services, foods, urgent favours, and after using you and abusing your generosity, trust, and kindness; whereby these unscrupulous and deceptive political movers, abusive, aggressive political harridans intentionally and maliciously create forged screenshots of evidence convincing their audience or political groups that you are a mentally ill person, a brain-damaged person as they even brand you as "Sisang Baliw," or crazy Sisa, a threat, a risk, a danger, they maliciously and destructively red-tag your friends as communists, and they resort to calumny, libel and slander against you, to shame you, defame you, discredit you, blame you, hurt you, make you suffer for having known the truth of their deceptive global Operandi, and for something you didn’t do through their mob lynching, calumny, polemics mongering, forgery, and cyberbullying efforts. Their character assassination through libel and slander aims to ruin your integrity, persona, trustworthiness, and credibility with their destructive fabricated calumny, lies, identity theft, forged screenshots of polemics mongering, and framing up. Amidst all their forgery, fraud, libel and slander they committed: you have a right to defy and stop their habitual abuse without breaking the law and fight for your rights against any forms of aggression, public lynching, bullies, threats, blackmail, and their repetitive maltreatment or abuse, identity theft, forgery, deceptions fraud, scams, cyber libel, libel, and slander. When you defend human rights, you fight against corruption and injustice, help end impunity: be sure that you are not part of any misinformation, disinformation, smear campaigns and black propaganda. Do not serve, finance, or cater directly or indirectly for those dirty politicians. Those who are engaged in abusively dishonest ways do not serve to justify their end. Deceiving and scamming other people shall always be your lifetime self-inflicted karmic loss. Be a law-abiding citizen. Be respectful. Be honest. Be factual. Be truthful. You can be an effective human rights defender when you have clean and pure intentions, lawful and morally upright, and have an honest heart." ~ Angelica Hopes, an excerpt from Calunniatopia Book 1, Stronzata Trilogy Genre: inspirational, political, literary novel © 2021 Ana Angelica Abaya van Doorn

Months later, Time magazine would run its now infamous article bragging about how it had been done. Without irony or shame, the magazine reported that “[t]here was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes” creating “an extraordinary shadow effort” by a “well-funded cabal of powerful people” to oppose Trump.112 Corporate CEOs, organized labor, left-wing activists, and Democrats all worked together in secret to secure a Biden victory. For Trump, these groups represented a powerful Washington and Democratic establishment that saw an unremarkable career politician like Biden as merely a vessel for protecting their self-interests. Accordingly, when Trump was asked whom he blames for the rigging of the 2020 election, he quickly responded, “Least of all Biden.” Time would, of course, disingenuously frame this effort as an attempt to “oppose Trump’s assault on democracy,” even as Time reporter Molly Ball noted this shadow campaign “touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding.” The funding enabled the country’s sudden rush to mail-in balloting, which Ball described as “a revolution in how people vote.”113 The funding from Democratic donors to public election administrators was revolutionary. The Democrats’ network of nonprofit activist groups embedded into the nation’s electoral structure through generous grants from Democratic donors. They helped accomplish the Democrats’ vote-by-mail strategy from the inside of the election process. It was as if the Dallas Cowboys were paying the National Football League’s referee staff and conducting all of their support operations. No one would feel confident in games won by the Cowboys in such a scenario. Ball also reported that this shadowy cabal “successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.” And yet, Time magazine made this characterization months after it was revealed that the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s corrupt deal-making with Chinese and other foreign officials—deals that alleged direct involvement from Joe Biden, resulting in the reporting’s being overtly censored by social media—was substantially true. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey would eventually tell Congress that censoring the New York Post and locking it out of its Twitter account over the story was “a mistake.” And the Hunter Biden story was hardly the only egregious mistake, to say nothing of the media’s willful dishonesty, in the 2020 election. Republicans read the Time article with horror and as an admission of guilt. It confirmed many voters’ suspicions that the election wasn’t entirely fair. Trump knew the article helped his case, calling it “the only good article I’ve read in Time magazine in a long time—that was actually just a piece of the truth because it was much deeper than that.

The tears gathered and stood without overflowing the red sockets. Ah! if I were rich still, if I had kept my money, if I had not given all to them, they would be with me now; they would fawn on me and cover my cheeks with their kisses! I should be living in a great mansion; I should have grand apartments and servants and a fire in my room; and they would be about me all in tears, and their husbands and their children. I should have had all that; now--I have nothing. Money brings everything to you; even your daughters. My money. Oh! where is my money? If I had plenty of money to leave behind me, they would nurse me and tend me; I should hear their voices, I should see their faces. Ah, God! who knows? They both of them have hearts of stone. I loved them too much; it was not likely that they should love me. A father ought always to be rich; he ought to keep his children well in hand, like unruly horses. I have gone down on my knees to them. Wretches! this is the crowning act that brings the last ten years to a proper close. If you but knew how much they made of me just after they were married. (Oh! this is cruel torture!) I had just given them each eight hundred thousand francs; they were bound to be civil to me after that, and their husbands too were civil. I used to go to their houses: it was 'My kind father' here, 'My dear father' there. There was always a place for me at their tables. I used to dine with their husbands now and then, and they were very respectful to me. I was still worth something, they thought. How should they know? I had not said anything about my affairs. It is worth while to be civil to a man who has given his daughters eight hundred thousand francs apiece; and they showed me every attention then--but it was all for my money. Grand people are not great. I found that out by experience! I went to the theatre with them in their carriage; I might stay as long as I cared to stay at their evening parties. In fact, they acknowledged me their father; publicly they owned that they were my daughters. But I was always a shrewd one, you see, and nothing was lost upon me. Everything went straight to the mark and pierced my heart. I saw quite well that it was all sham and pretence, but there is no help for such things as these. I felt less at my ease at their dinner-table than I did downstairs here. I had nothing to say for myself. So these grand folks would ask in my son-in-law's ear, 'Who may that gentleman be?'-- 'The father-in-law with the money bags; he is very rich.'--'The devil, he is!' they would say, and look again at me with the respect due to my money. Well, if I was in the way sometimes, I paid dearly for my mistakes. And besides, who is perfect? (My head is one sore!) Dear Monsieur Eugene, I am suffering so now, that a man might die of the pain; but it is nothing to be compared with the pain I endured when Anastasie made me feel, for the first time, that I had said something stupid. She looked at me, and that glance of hers opened all my veins. I used to want to know everything, to be learned; and one thing I did learn thoroughly --I knew that I was not wanted here on earth.

Marx discovered the significance of economic power; and it is understandable that he exaggerated its status. He and the Marxists see economic power everywhere. Their argument runs: he who has the money has the power; for if necessary, he can buy guns and even gangsters. But this is a roundabout argument. In fact, it contains an admission that the man who has the gun has the power. And if he who has the gun becomes aware of this, then it may not be long until he has both the gun and the money. But under an unrestrained capitalism, Marx’s argument applies, to some extent; for a rule which develops institutions for the control of guns and gangsters but not of the power of money is liable to come under the influence of this power. In such a state, an uncontrolled gangsterism of wealth may rule. But Marx himself, I think, would have been the first to admit that this is not true of all states; that there have been times in history when, for example, all exploitation was looting, directly based upon the power of the mailed fist. And to-day there will be few to support the naïve view that the ‘progress of history’ has once and for all put an end to these more direct ways of exploiting men, and that, once formal freedom has been achieved, it is impossible for us to fall again under the sway of such primitive forms of exploitation. These considerations would be sufficient for refuting the dogmatic doctrine that economic power is more fundamental than physical power, or the power of the state. But there are other considerations as well. As has been rightly emphasized by various writers (among them Bertrand Russell and Walter Lippmann25), it is only the active intervention of the state—the protection of property by laws backed by physical sanctions—which makes of wealth a potential source of power; for without this intervention, a man would soon be without his wealth. Economic power is therefore entirely dependent on political and physical power. Russell gives historical examples which illustrate this dependence, and sometimes even helplessness, of wealth: ‘Economic power within the state,’ he writes26, ‘although ultimately derived from law and public opinion, easily acquires a certain independence. It can influence law by corruption and public opinion by propaganda. It can put politicians under obligations which interfere with their freedom. It can threaten to cause a financial crisis. But there are very definite limits to what it can achieve. Cæsar was helped to power by his creditors, who saw no hope of repayment except through his success; but when he had succeeded he was powerful enough to defy them. Charles V borrowed from the Fuggers the money required to buy the position of Emperor, but when he had become Emperor he snapped his fingers at them and they lost what they had lent.’ The dogma that economic power is at the root of all evil must be discarded. Its place must be taken by an understanding of the dangers of any form of uncontrolled power. Money as such is not particularly dangerous. It becomes dangerous only if it can buy power, either directly, or by enslaving the economically weak who must sell themselves in order to live.

By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. By feeling that one has some innate superiority it may be wealth, or rank, a straight nose, or the portrait of a grandfather by Romney - for there is no end to the pathetic devices of the human imagination over other people. Hence the enormous importance to a patriarch who has to conquer, who has to rule, of feeling that great numbers of people, half the human race indeed, are by nature inferior to himself. It must indeed be one of the chief sources of his power. But let me turn the light of this observation on to real life, I thought. Does it help to explain some of those psychological puzzles that one notes in the margin of daily life? Does it explain my astonishment the other day when Z, most humane, most modest of men, taking up some book by Rebecca West and reading a passage in it, exclaimed, 'The arrant feminist! She says that men are snobs!' The exclamation, to me so surprising for why was Miss West an arrant feminist for making a possibly true if uncomplimentary statement about the other sex? - was not merely the cry of wounded vanity; it was a protest against some infringement of his power to believe in himself. Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. Without that power probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle. The glories of all our wars would be unknown. We should still be scratching the outlines of deer on the remains of mutton bones and bartering flints for sheep skins or whatever simple ornament took our unsophisticated taste. Supermen and Fingers of Destiny would never have existed. The Tsar and the Kaiser would never have worn crowns or lost them. Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action. That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge. That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism; how impossible it is for her to say to them this book is bad, this picture is feeble, or whatever it may be, without giving far more pain and musing far more anger than a man would do who gave the same criticism. For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished. How is he to go on giving judgement, civilizing natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is? So I reflected, crumbling my bread and stirring my coffee and now and again looking at the people in the street. The looking-glass vision is of supreme importance because it charges the vitality; it stimulates the nervous system. Take it away and man may die, like the drug fiend deprived of his cocaine. Under the spell of that illusion, I thought, looking out of the window, half the people on the pavement are striding to work. They put on their hats and coats in the morning under its agreeable rays. They start the day confident, braced, believing themselves desired at Miss Smith's tea party; they say to themselves as they go into the room, I am the superior of half the people here, and it is thus that they speak with that self-confidence, that self-assurance, which have had such profound consequences in public life and lead to such curious notes in the margin of the private mind.

Recent studies of professionalization show that professionalism did not emerge, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in response to clearly defined social needs. Instead, the new professions themselves invented many of the needs they claimed to satisfy. They played on public fears of disorder and disease, adopted a deliberately mystifying jargon, ridiculed popular traditions of self-help as backward and unscientific, and in this way created or intensified (not without opposition) a demand for their own services.

Depression, sexual troubles, anxiety, loneliness, and guilt are the main problems that drive consumers into the recovery movement. Explaining such adult troubles as being caused by victimization during childhood does not accomplish much. Compare “wounded child” as an explanation to some of the other ways you might explain your problems: “depressive,” “anxiety-prone,” or “sexually dysfunctional.” “Wounded child” is a more permanent explanation; “depressive” is less permanent. As we saw in the first section of this book, depression, anxiety, and sexual dysfunction—unlike being a wounded child—are all eminently treatable. “Wounded child” is also more pervasive in its destructive effects: “Toxic” is the colorful word used to describe its pervasiveness. “Depression,” “anxiety,” and “sexually dysfunctional” are all narrower, less damning labels, and this, in fact, is part of the reason why treatment works. So “wounded child” (unless you believe in catharsis cures) leads to more helplessness, hopelessness, and passivity than the alternatives. But it is less personal—your parents did it to you—than “depressive,” “anxiety-prone,” and “sexually dysfunctional.” Impersonal explanations of bad events raise self-esteem more than personal ones. Therefore “wounded child” is better for raising your self-esteem and for lowering your guilt. Self-esteem has become very important to Americans in the last two decades. Our public schools are supposed to nurture the self-esteem of our children, our churches are supposed to minister to the self-esteem of their congregants, and the recovery movement is supposed to restore the self-esteem of victims. Attaining self-esteem, while undeniably important, is a goal that I have reservations about. I think it is an overinflated idea, and my opinion was formed by my work with depressed people. Depressed people, you will recall, have four kinds of problems: behavioral—they are passive, indecisive, and helpless; emotional—they are sad; bodily—their sleeping, eating, and sex are disrupted; cognitive—they think life is hopeless and that they are worthless. Only the second half of this last symptom amounts to low self-esteem. I have come to believe that lack of self-esteem is the least important of these woes. Once a depressed person becomes active and hopeful, self-esteem always improves. Bolstering self-esteem without changing hopelessness or passivity, however, accomplishes nothing. To put it exactly, I believe that low self-esteem is an epiphenomenon, a mere reflection that your commerce with the world is going badly. It has no power in itself. What needs improving is not self-esteem but your commerce with the world. So the one advantage of labeling yourself a victim—raised self-esteem—is minimal, particularly since victimhood raises self-esteem at the cost of greater hopelessness and passivity, and therefore worsens commerce with the world. This is indeed my main worry about the recovery movement. Young Americans right now are in an epidemic of depression. I have speculated on the causes in the last chapter of my book Learned Optimism, and I will not repeat my conjectures here. Young people are easy pickings for anything that makes them feel better—even temporarily. The recovery movement capitalizes on this epidemic. When it works, it raises self-esteem and lowers guilt, but at the expense of our blaming others for our troubles. Never mind the fact that those we blame did not in fact cause our troubles. Never mind the fact that thinking of ourselves as victims induces helplessness, hopelessness, and passivity. Never mind that there are more effective treatments available elsewhere.

Gurdjieff's ideas, like those of the Bible itself, are clearly mythic: they attempt to speak metaphorically of truths that do not lend themselves to ordinary language or thought. As for humanity serving as food for the moon or the moon turning to blood, the old esoteric maxim holds good: "Neither accept nor reject." There is an attitude of mind whereby one can entertain and contemplate ideas like these dispassionately and openmindedly without falling into the traps either of credulity or reactive skepticism. This is not an evasion or an attempt to deflect legitimate criticism: rather, it is meant to cultivate a certain freedom of thought that can go beyond the boundaries of dualistic yesses and nos. [...] Finally, there is John, the Gospel that is different. It does not talk about Jesus' birth, it does not show him speaking in parables, and it says little about his preaching in Galilee, which probably occupied the greatest part of his public career. The Gospel of John takes place mostly in Jerusalem, and this detail, while apparently inconsistent with the synoptics, offers an important key to what John is trying to accomplish. His Gospel does not speak to the three lowers aspects of our natures, as the others do; it address the highest part, the spirit, or "I", which unites and harmonizes these three; it rises above them, which is why it is symbolized by the eagle. In the Bible this part of the human makeup is symbolized by Zion or Jerusalem, the seat of the Temple, where Israel makes contact with the presence of the living God. John does not show Jesus speaking in parables because at this level analogies and stories are unnecessary and possibly unhelpful; what is disclosed in encrypted form by the synoptics is uttered openly here. There may be some value, then, in approaching the Gospels not as if they were newspaper articles giving contradictory accounts, but as sacred texts presenting the same truths in a manner that speaks to different types of individuals as well as to different levels of our own being. Such a perspective may help us to step beyod the apparent discrepancies that have dogged so many readers of these texts. If we can open the manifold aspects of our natures to the Gospels, they can disclose themselves to us in our fragmented state and help to integrate it.

Bearing in mind these lessons from success in Colombia, the next time an American president is urged to intervene in a Third World country’s internal conflict, stabilize the situation, or improve governance, he or she should ask these questions: Do we have a strong, competent, reasonably honest local leader committed to democracy and the rule of law with whom to partner? Are there existing indigenous institutions and capabilities on which to build? With our help, can the country’s military and police be strengthened sufficiently to carry the burden of the fight? Is the effort likely to be protracted, and if so, what is the prospect for long-term U.S. public and congressional support? Can we bring to bear a wide array of U.S. instruments of power in order to achieve our objectives without American forces being directly engaged in combat? Will we have the discipline to keep the number of U.S. military in-country small, forcing the locals to carry the burden of the fight?

A Wife of Noble Character 10[*]Who can find a virtuous and capable wife?        She is more precious than rubies. 11 Her husband can trust her,        and she will greatly enrich his life. 12 She brings him good, not harm,        all the days of her life. 13 She finds wool and flax        and busily spins it. 14 She is like a merchant’s ship,        bringing her food from afar. 15 She gets up before dawn to prepare breakfast for her household        and plan the day’s work for her servant girls. 16 She goes to inspect a field and buys it;        with her earnings she plants a vineyard. 17 She is energetic and strong,        a hard worker. 18 She makes sure her dealings are profitable;        her lamp burns late into the night. 19 Her hands are busy spinning thread,        her fingers twisting fiber. 20 She extends a helping hand to the poor        and opens her arms to the needy. 21 She has no fear of winter for her household,        for everyone has warm[*] clothes. 22 She makes her own bedspreads.        She dresses in fine linen and purple gowns. 23 Her husband is well known at the city gates,        where he sits with the other civic leaders. 24 She makes belted linen garments        and sashes to sell to the merchants. 25 She is clothed with strength and dignity,        and she laughs without fear of the future. 26 When she speaks, her words are wise,        and she gives instructions with kindness. 27 She carefully watches everything in her household        and suffers nothing from laziness. 28 Her children stand and bless her.        Her husband praises her: 29 “There are many virtuous and capable women in the world,        but you surpass them all!” 30 Charm is deceptive, and beauty does not last;        but a woman who fears the LORD will be greatly praised. 31 Reward her for all she has done.        Let her deeds publicly declare her praise. Ecclesiastes 1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10   11   12

They evaluated—and ultimately rejected—the idea of closing schools for the rest of the year, but worked with school districts, businesses, and state and local officials to make sure that everyone had the resources they needed to respond in the event of an outbreak. Although the United States did not escape unscathed—more than 12,000 Americans lost their lives—we were fortunate that this particular strain of H1N1 turned out to be less deadly than the experts had feared, and news that the pandemic had abated by mid-2010 didn’t generate headlines. Still, I took great pride in how well our team had performed. Without fanfare or fuss, not only had they helped keep the virus contained, but they’d strengthened our readiness for any future public health emergency—which would make all the difference several years later, when the Ebola outbreak in West Africa would trigger a full-blown panic.

Date: 27th of Feb, 2021 What is Love ? Is it something you feel, vibe or exhibit ? Or is it in caring, sharing or sacrifices L.O.V.E Love is in small details, everywhere around, the sun loves the sky amidst it colours, the sky loves the clouds inspite of its darkness, the darkness loves the light inspite of its own capabilities to lighten, Love is not something that can be talked or explained, but then what am i trying to do so?? Weird. Despite the running thoughts right now i have to share what i feel before that thought would never strike again (Ps: You are a constant thought that runs in my mind) For me what love really is ! For me, love is a gift, that feeling is magical, being in that feeling is lucky, Love is not something you fall for, how can u fall in love, when you feel embraced and butterflies, in your stomach you are actually lifted in love, you are actually strong when you love. You admire the person with all its possibilities to be with her and its goodness and makeup your mind about the righteous of the person and imagine and day dreaming of being with them. That's the first sip. Love is true, when you demand no change and when u accept her the way she is with all her negativity and positivity, with her moods and habits, accepting and going with her choices, supporting her beyond the support you expect from her, pushing yourself to make efforts to see her smile, taking her stand in public, respecting her thoughts despite having different opinions. love is not about being right every time about everything, its about making her feel right about things that are not, its about sacrificing your thoughts to hear hers, its about sacrificing your last bite to look her smile, its about starring into your partner eyes and talk without a word, holding hands until you go home, hold her mood until she's back, and being insecured about her safety until she's home This is the only feeling that makes me feel special, its the only feeling that helps me finds happiness in sacrificing too, That's the only feeling that lifts my mood by seeing her or motivating her when i m having a bad day, its tough though sometimes, love can make you think for possibilities and impossibilities that may never occur and give you a hard time, sometimes you push yourself and them away. But cannot really stay away, then why do we do that, Sharing of emotions will be the best part of the journey of love You don't shy accepting, being in love, coz not everybody is lucky to have it, You embrace it, You love being in Love ❤️ but then why do they not talk about love Its a complex simple feeling. 05:19 AM (the moon was still so pretty)

The Romantic movement encouraged respect for primitive and popular culture; it also gave rise to cultural nationalism. J.G. Herder, one of the more ardent followers of the late eighteenth-century enthusiasm for collecting folk songs, popularized the view that nations express themselves in ballads, folk-tales, customs, and traditions, and that every particular language embodied a unique spirit, without which the world would be impoverished. On a visit to Riga, he had formed the view that Latvian folklore might be drowned in the prevailing sea of German. Herder’s enthusiasm for conservation caught on to become an influential source of modern nationalism.[25] But there were others, including the work of enlightened educational reformers. Czechs benefiting from new educational opportunities learned German, for example, and were thus able to devour the classics of German Romanticism. The University of Buda Press, founded in 1777, not only printed the first good Hungarian grammars but soon began to publish in Serbian, Slovak and Romanian. A grammar was vital to the definition of a single, literary language on which a sense of linguistic nationhood could be based (a collection of contrasting dialects could form no such basis). Furthermore, publication in a variety of emerging literary languages was to help spread a consciousness of a linguistic identity.

We should learn to trust science: it is only with the help of science that we can overcome our problems (caused, among other things, by science in the service of power). We should learn to trust public authority: only such an authority makes it possible to confront dangers such as pandemics and environmental catastrophes by way of imposing necessary measures. We should learn to trust the big Other, the shared space of basic values: without it, solidarity is not possible. We don’t need the freedom to be different, we need the freedom to choose how to be the same in a new way. And, perhaps most difficult, we should be ready to abandon many of the common-sense beliefs and practices that form our way of life. To be truly conservative today, to fight for what is worth saving in our traditions, means to engage in a radical change. The old conservative motto “some things have to change so that everything remains the same” has acquired a new weight today: many things will have to change radically for us to remain human.

We’ve organized a setup where we—me, Orren and a few friends—are going to control every industrial property south of the border.” “Whose property?” “Why . . . the people’s. This is not an old-fashioned grab for private profit. It’s a deal with a mission—a worthy, public-spirited mission—to manage the nationalized properties of the various People’s States of South America, to teach their workers our modern techniques of production, to help the underprivileged who’ve never had a chance, to—” He broke off abruptly, though she had merely sat looking at him without shifting her glance. “You know,” he said suddenly, with a cold little chuckle, “if you’re so damn anxious to hide that you came from the slums, you ought to be less indifferent to the philosophy of social welfare. It’s always the poor who lack humanitarian instincts. One has to be born to wealth in order to know the finer feelings of altruism.

We’ve organized a setup where we—me, Orren and a few friends—are going to control every industrial property south of the border.” “Whose property?” “Why . . . the people’s. This is not an old-fashioned grab for private profit. It’s a deal with a mission—a worthy, public-spirited mission—to manage the nationalized properties of the various People’s States of South America, to teach their workers our modern techniques of production, to help the underprivileged who’ve never had a chance, to—” He broke off abruptly, though she had merely sat looking at him without shifting her glance. “You know,” he said suddenly, with a cold little chuckle, “if you’re so damn anxious to hide that you came from the slums, you ought to be less indifferent to the philosophy of social welfare. It’s always the poor who lack humanitarian instincts. One has to be born to wealth in order to know the finer feelings of altruism.” “I’ve never tried to hide that I came from the slums,” she said in the simple, impersonal tone of a factual correction. “And I haven’t any sympathy for that welfare philosophy. I’ve seen enough of them to know what makes the kind of poor who want something for nothing.” He did not answer, and she added suddenly, her voice astonished, but firm, as if in final confirmation of a long-standing doubt, “Jim, you don’t care about it either. You don’t care about any of that welfare hogwash.” “Well, if money is all that you’re interested in,” he snapped, “let me tell you that that deal will bring me a fortune. That’s what you’ve always admired, isn’t it, wealth?

Sure,” said Rearden easily. “If it’s production that you want, then get out of the way, junk all of your damn regulations, let Orren Boyle go broke, let me buy the plant of Associated Steel—and it will be pouring a thousand tons a day from every one of its sixty furnaces.” “Oh, but . . . but we couldn’t!” gasped Mouch. “That would be monopoly!” Rearden chuckled. “Okay,” he said indifferently, “then let my mills superintendent buy it. He’ll do a better job than Boyle.” “Oh, but that would be letting the strong have an advantage over the weak! We couldn’t do that!” “Then don’t talk about saving the country’s economy.” “All we want is—” He stopped. “All you want is production without men who’re able to produce, isn’t it?” “That . . . that’s theory. That’s just a theoretical extreme. All we want is a temporary adjustment.” “You’ve been making those temporary adjustments for years. Don’t you see that you’ve run out of time?” “That’s just theo . . .” His voice trailed off and stopped. “Well, now, look here,” said Holloway cautiously, “it’s not as if Mr. Boyle were actually . . . weak. Mr. Boyle is an extremely able man. It’s just that he’s suffered some unfortunate reverses, quite beyond his control. He had invested large sums in a public-spirited project to assist the undeveloped peoples of South America, and that copper crash of theirs has dealt him a severe financial blow. So it’s only a matter of giving him a chance to recover, a helping hand to bridge the gap, a bit of temporary assistance, nothing more. All we have to do is just equalize the sacrifice—then everybody will recover and prosper.

Without Washington’s guidance or public responsibility, [Hamilton] had again revealed a blazing, ungovernable temper that was unworthy of him and rendered him less effective. He also revealed anew that the man who had helped to forge a new structure of law and justice for American society remained mired in the old-fashioned world of blood feuds. When it came to intensely personal conflicts, New York’s most famous lawyer still turned instinctively not to the courtroom, but to the dueling ground.

Although the United States did not escape unscathed—more than 12,000 Americans lost their lives—we were fortunate that this particular strain of H1N1 turned out to be less deadly than the experts had feared, and news that the pandemic had abated by mid-2010 didn’t generate headlines. Still, I took great pride in how well our team had performed. Without fanfare or fuss, not only had they helped keep the virus contained, but they’d strengthened our readiness for any future public health emergency—which would make all the difference several years later, when the Ebola outbreak in West Africa would trigger a full-blown panic.

While half of Russia was conquered, and the inhabitants of Moscow were fleeing to remote provinces, and one levy of militia after another was being raised for the defense of the country, we, not living at the time, cannot help imagining that all the people in Russia, great and small alike, were engaged in doing nothing else but making sacrifices, saving their country, or weeping over its downfall. The tales and descriptions of that period without exception tell us of nothing but the self-sacrifice, the patriotism, the despair, the grief, and the heroism of the Russians. In reality, it was not at all like that. It seems so to us, because we see out of the past only the general historical interest of that period, and we do not see all of the personal human interests of the men of that time. And yet in reality these personal interests of the immediate present are of so much greater importance than public interests, that they prevent the public interest from ever being felt - from being noticed at all, indeed. The majority of the people of that period took no heed of the general progress of public affairs, and were only influenced by their immediate personal interests. And those very people played the most useful part in the work of the time. Those who are striving to grasp the general course of events, and trying by self-sacrifice and heroism to take a hand in it, were the most useless members of society; ... In historical events we see more plainly than ever the law that forbids us to taste of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. It is only unself-conscious activity that bears fruit, and the man who plays a part in an historical drama never understands its significance. If he strives to comprehend it, he is stricken with barrenness.

In September 1942, a month after Gandhi was jailed, Winston Churchill wrote to the secretary of state for India, Leo Amery: ‘Please let me have a note on Mr.Gandhi’s intrigues with Japan and the documents the Government of India published, or any other they possessed before on this topic.’ Three days later, Amery sent Churchill the note he asked for, which began: ‘The India Office has no evidence to show, or suggest, that Gandhi has intrigued with Japan.’ The ‘only evidence of Japanese contacts [with Gandhi] during the war’, the note continued, ‘relates to the presence in Wardha of two Japanese Buddhist priests who lived for part of 1940 in Gandhi’s Ashram’. Before the Quit India movement had even begun, Churchill had convinced himself that Gandhi was intriguing with the Japanese. In February 1943, when Gandhi went on a fast in jail, Churchill convinced himself that Gandhi was secretly using energy supplements. On 13 February, Churchill wired Linlithgow: ‘I have heard that Gandhi usually has glucose in his water when doing his various fasting antics. Would it be possible to verify this.’ Two days later, the viceroy wired back: ‘This may be the case but those who have been in attendance on him doubt it, and present Surgeon-General Bombay (a European) says that on a previous fast G. was particularly careful to guard against possibility of glucose being used. I am told that his present medical attendants tried to persuade him to take glucose yesterday and again today, and that he refused absolutely.’ On 25 February, as the fast entered its third week, Churchill wired the viceroy: ‘Cannot help feeling very suspicious of bona fides of Gandhi’s fast. We were told fourth day would be the crisis and then well staged climax was set for eleventh day onwards. Now at fifteenth day bulletins look as if he might get through. Would be most valuable [if] fraud could be exposed. Surely with all those Congress Hindu doctors round him it is quite easy to slip glucose or other nourishment into his food.’ By this time, the viceroy was himself increasingly exasperated with Gandhi. But there was no evidence that the fasting man had actually taken any glucose. So, he now replied to Churchill in a manner that stoked both men’s prejudices. ‘I have long known Gandhi as the world’s most successful humbug,’ fumed Linlithgow, ‘and have not the least doubt that his physical condition and the bulletins reporting it from day to day have been deliberately cooked so as to produce the maximum effect on public opinion.’ Then, going against his own previous statement, the viceroy claimed that ‘there would be no difficulty in his entourage administering glucose or any other food without the knowledge of the Government doctors’ (this when the same government doctors had told him exactly the reverse). ‘If I can discover any firm of evidence of fraud I will let you hear,’ said Linlithgow to Churchill, adding, somewhat sadly, ‘but I am not hopeful of this.’ This prompted an equally disappointed reply from Churchill: ‘It now seems certain that the old rascal will emerge all the better from his so-called fast'.

18. The Political Left/Right Cycle. Capitalists (i.e., those of the right) and socialists (i.e., those of the left) don’t just have different self-interests—they have different deep-seated ideological beliefs that they are willing to fight for. The typical perspective of the rightist/capitalist is that self-sufficiency, hard work, productivity, limited government interference, allowing people to keep what they make, and individual choice are morally good and good for society. They also believe that the private sector works better than the public sector, that capitalism works best for most people, and that self-made billionaires are the biggest contributors to society. Capitalists are typically driven crazy by financial supports for people who lack productivity and profitability. To them, making money = being productive = getting what one deserves. They don’t pay much attention to whether the economic machine is producing opportunity and prosperity for most people. They can also overlook the fact that their form of profit making is suboptimal when it comes to achieving the goals of most people. For example, in a purely capitalist system, the provision of excellent public education—which is clearly a leading cause of higher productivity and greater wealth across a society—is not a high priority. The typical perspective of the leftist/socialist is that helping each other, having the government support people, and sharing wealth and opportunity are morally good and good for society. They believe that the private sector is by and large run by capitalists who are greedy, while common workers, such as teachers, firefighters, and laborers, contribute more to society. Socialists and communists tend to focus on dividing the pie well and typically aren’t very good at increasing its size. They favor more government intervention, believing those in government will be fairer than capitalists, who are simply trying to exploit people to make more money. I’ve had exposure to all kinds of economic systems all over the world and have seen why the ability to make money, save it, and put it into capital (i.e., capitalism) is an effective motivator of people and allocator of resources that raises people’s living standards. But capitalism is also a source of wealth and opportunity gaps that are unfair, can be counterproductive, are highly cyclical, and can be destabilizing. In my opinion, the greatest challenge for policy makers is to engineer a capitalist economic system that raises productivity and living standards without worsening inequities and instabilities. 21.

From Mencius ... "If, however, dogs and swine eat that food which should be eaten by human beings, without thought being taken to put a stop to this practice, if people starve to death on the public highways, without thought being taken as to how to help them, and if one still says, in the face of the extinction of the population, 'It is not I who am to blame for this, but the bad year'—this is just the same as if one stabs a person to death and says, 'It is not I who did this, but the sword.

Outbreaks forced empires to change course – like the Byzantine Empire when struck by the Plague of Justinian in 541-542 – and some even to disappear altogether – when Aztec and Inca emperors died with most of their subjects from European germs. Also, authoritative measures to attempt to contain them have always been part of the policy arsenal. Thus, there is nothing new about the confinement and lockdowns imposed upon much of the world to manage COVID-19. They have been common practice for centuries. The earliest forms of confinement came with the quarantines instituted in an effort to contain the Black Death that between 1347 and 1351 killed about a third of all Europeans. Coming from the word quaranta (which means “forty” in Italian), the idea of confining people for 40 days originated without the authorities really understanding what they wanted to contain, but the measures were one of the first forms of “institutionalized public health” that helped legitimatize the “accretion of power” by the modern state.[1] The period of 40 days has no medical foundation; it was chosen for symbolic and religious reasons: both the Old and New Testaments often refer to the number 40 in the context of purification – in particular the 40 days of Lent and the 40 days of flood in Genesis.

As I leave the DA's office building, the cold wind bring me wide awake. I trot down the steps through the shouting reporters without a word, turning left toward City Hall, which abuts the southeast face of the courthouse Just as I think I've cleared the feeding frenzy, someone catches hold of my arm. I whirl in anger, then find myself facing an elderly black woman huddling in a jacket. 'Yes, ma'am?' I say. 'How can I help you?' "Isobel Handley,' she says with a smile. 'I want to know when you're going to do something about the schools, Mayor. You got elected saying you were gonna fix 'em, but right now it's a crying shame how few children who go into the first grade make it through the twelfth for graduation. And you've been in office two whole years!' The reasons for this state of affairs are both simple and unimaginably complex, and I certainly don't have the resources to go through them on a cold sidewalk. Not today, anyway. But conversations like this one are the daily fare of a mayor. 'I'm talking about the PUBLIC schools,' the woman goes an. "Not the private white schools where the only black kids are football players.' 'Yes, ma'am," I say hopelessly. 'I'm working as hard as I can on the issue, I promise you.' 'If your little girl wasn't in a private school, you'd work harder.' 'Mrs. Handley, I-' 'You don't have to explain, baby, I understand. But you take a stick to them selectmen and supervisors, if you have to. That's what they need. Sometimes I think the schools were better before integration. At least we learned the fundamentals, and we graduated knowing how to read.' There's no point trying to explain that I have no authority over the county supervisors or the state board of education. 'Sometimes I wish I could do exactly what you suggested, Mrs. Handley. Now, you'd better get out of this cold. And Merry Christmas to you.' At last she smiles. 'You too, Mayor. God bless. And don't pay these reporters no mind.