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I have found that those who try to shield us from the truth, regardless of the reason, end up doing the greatest harm. Truth alone sets you free, not lies and omissions.
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Jessica Dotta (Born of Persuasion (Price of Privilege, #1))
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Human affairs are not governed ultimately by historical events, fate, or chance, but by God...Divine purpose moving steadily from beginning to end.
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Eugenia Price
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In the face of all his handicaps, Jurgis was obliged to make the price of a lodging, and of a drink every hour or two, under penalty of freezing to death.
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Upton Sinclair (The Jungle)
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A beautiful woman is worth her weight always in gold; but if she loves in addition, she has simply no price.
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Henryk Sienkiewicz (Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero – Henryk Sienkiewicz's Historical Epic)
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We are never prepared for so many to die. So you understand? No one is. We expect some chosen few. We expect an occasional empty chair, a toast to dear departed comrades. Victory celebrations for most of us, a hallowed death for a few. But the war goes on. And men die. The price gets ever higher. Some officers can pay no longer. We are prepared to lose some of us, but never all of us. But that is the trap. You can hold nothing back when you attack. You must commit yourself totally. And yet, if they all die, a man must ask himself, will it have been worth it?
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Michael Shaara (The Killer Angels (The Civil War Trilogy, #2))
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Ruth wiped her eyes. Successful at a price? Forgiven but damaged? She wished so much more for her baby sister.
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Sarah Sundin (A Memory Between Us (Wings of Glory, #2))
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Psychology’s service to U.S. national security has produced a variant of what the psychiatrist Robert Lifton has called, in his study of Nazi doctors, a “Faustian bargain.” In this case, the price paid has been the American Psychological Association’s collective silence, ethical “numbing,” and, over time, historical amnesia. 3 Indeed, Lifton emphasizes that “the Nazis were not the only ones to involve doctors in evil”; in defense of this argument, he cites the Cold War “role of …American physicians and psychologists employed by the Central Intelligence Agency…for unethical medical and psychological experiments involving drugs and mind manipulation.” 4
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Alfred W. McCoy (Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation)
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They rode for a while in silence, a tiny island in the smoky stream of marching men. Then Lee said slowly, in a strange, soft, slow tone of voice, "Soldiering has one great trap."
Longstreet turned to see his face. Lee was riding slowly ahead, without expression. He spoke in that same slow voice. "To be a good soldier you must love the army. But to be a good officer you must be willing to order the death of the thing you love. This is...a very hard thing to do. No other profession requires it. That is one reason why there are so very few good officers. Although there are many good men."
Lee rarely lectured. Longstreet sensed a message beyond it. He waited. Lee said, "We don't fear our own deaths, you and I." He smiled slightly, then glanced away. "We protect ourselves out of military necessity, not do not protect yourself enough and must give thought to it. I need you. But the point is, we are afraid to die. We are prepared for our own deaths, and for the deaths of comrades. We learn that at the Point. But I have seen this happen: we are not prepared for as many deaths as we have to face, inevitably as the war goes on. There comes a time..."
He paused. He had been gazing straight ahead, away from Longstreet. Now, black-eyed, he turned back, glanced once quickly into Longstreet's eyes, then looked away.
"We are never prepared for so many to die. So you understand? No one is. We expect some chosen few. We expect an occasional empty chair, a toast to dear departed comrades. Victory celebrations for most of us, a hallowed death for a few. But the war goes on. And the men die. The price gets ever higher. Some officers...can pay no longer. We are prepared to lose some of us." He paused again. "But never ALL of us. Surely not all of us. But...that is the trap. You can hold nothing back when you attack. You must commit yourself totally. And yet ,if they all die, a man must ask himself, will it have been worth it?
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Michael Shaara (The Killer Angels (The Civil War Trilogy, #2))
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Unity, unless it is based on agreement regarding the content of the gospel, would not be worth the price.
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Erwin W. Lutzer (The Doctrines That Divide: A Fresh Look at the Historic Doctrines That Separate Christians)
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There is a sense in which this viewpoint is looking through the wrong end of the historical telescope, defining (and often judging) a people solely by the consequences of their actions rather than the motivations behind them.
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Neil Price (Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings)
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My point is, however, that churches do promote beliefs that would more appropriately find a place in a context of intellectual debate. They wind up cheerleading for highly dubious opinions on historical, scientific, and metaphysical matters, simply on the bases of emotional preference and the inertia of tradition. They demand conformity to these beliefs, and if you cannot swim with the current, then, well partner, maybe you'd be happier in another pool, another lake in fact, the one ablaze with burning sulfur.
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Robert M. Price
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You are entitled to feel all the bitterness and hatred you were taught. You are entitled to carry with you the pain and sorrow, the longing and disappointment. They will happily accompany you through life. Claim them if you will, but remember they are greedy, and their demands are many. You must be ready to pay the price they require.'
'The price?'
Nasnana sobered and nodded. 'Yes. There is always a price. Little by little these companions will steal away your joy, your peace of mind, your contentment. They will take your very heart and turn it to stone.
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Tracie Peterson (All Things Hidden)
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I caught him as if he were the love of my young life, and unwound the wool from around the artery where I would feed.
He begged me to stop, to name my price. How still my Master looked, watching only me, as the man begged and I ignored him, merely feeling for this large-pulsing irresistible vein.
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Anne Rice (The Vampire Armand (The Vampire Chronicles, #6))
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Historically one of the main defects of constitutional government has been the failure to insure the fair value of political liberty. The necessary corrective steps have not been taken, indeed, they never seem to have been seriously entertained. Disparities in the distribution of property and wealth that far exceed what is compatible with political equality have generally been tolerated by the legal system. Public resources have not been devoted to maintaining the institutions required for the fair value of political liberty. Essentially the fault lies in the fact that the democratic political process is at best regulated rivalry; it does not even in theory have the desirable properties that price theory ascribes to truly competitive markets. Moreover, the effects of injustices in the political system are much more grave and long lasting than market imperfections. Political power rapidly accumulates and becomes unequal; and making use of the coercive apparatus of the state and its law, those who gain the advantage can often assure themselves of a favored position. Thus inequities in the economic and social system may soon undermine whatever political equality might have existed under fortunate historical conditions. Universal suffrage is an insufficient counterpoise; for when parties and elections are financed not by public funds but by private contributions, the political forum is so constrained by the wishes of the dominant interests that the basic measures needed to establish just constitutional rule are seldom properly presented. These questions, however, belong to political sociology. 116 I mention them here as a way of emphasizing that our discussion is part of the theory of justice and must not be mistaken for a theory of the political system. We are in the way of describing an ideal arrangement, comparison with which defines a standard for judging actual institutions, and indicates what must be maintained to justify departures from it.
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John Rawls (A Theory of Justice)
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Investors look at economic fundamentals; traders look at each other; ‘quants’ look at the data. Dealing on the basis of historic price series was once described as technical analysis, or chartism (and there are chartists still). These savants identify visual patterns in charts of price data, often favouring them with arresting names such as ‘head and shoulders’ or ‘double bottoms’. This is pseudo-scientific bunk, the financial equivalent of astrology. But more sophisticated quantitative methods have since proved profitable for some since the 1970s’ creation of derivative markets and the related mathematics. Profitable
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John Kay (Other People's Money: The Real Business of Finance)
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the International Monetary Fund basically acted as the world’s debt enforcers—“You might say, the high-finance equivalent of the guys who come to break your legs.” I launched into historical background, explaining how, during the ’70s oil crisis, OPEC countries ended up pouring so much of their newfound riches into Western banks that the banks couldn’t figure out where to invest the money; how Citibank and Chase therefore began sending agents around the world trying to convince Third World dictators and politicians to take out loans (at the time, this was called “go-go banking”); how they started out at extremely low rates of interest that almost immediately skyrocketed to 20 percent or so due to tight U.S. money policies in the early ’80s; how, during the ’80s and ’90s, this led to the Third World debt crisis; how the IMF then stepped in to insist that, in order to obtain refinancing, poor countries would be obliged to abandon price supports on
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David Graeber (Debt: The First 5,000 Years)
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The Price of Neglect A PUBLIC THAT’S illiterate about the conflicts of the past can easily find itself confused during wartime. Without standards of historical comparison, people prove ill-equipped to make informed judgments when the dogs of war are unleashed. Neither U.S. politicians nor most citizens seem to recall the incompetence and terrible decisions that, in December 1777, December 1941, and November 1950, led to massive American casualties and, for a time, public despair.
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Victor Davis Hanson (The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern)
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Goodspeed noticed that Christian writings dating before circa 90 CE betrayed no evidence of familiarity with Paul’s letters or influence by him.
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Robert M. Price (The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul)
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The price of wealth, historically, has been blood, annihilation, death, and despair.
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Toni Morrison (The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations)
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Their goal remained the same: scrutinize historic price information to discover sequences that might repeat, under the assumption that investors will exhibit similar behavior in the future.
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Gregory Zuckerman (The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution)
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This false appearance distinguishes wages labour from other historical forms of labour. On the basis of the wages system even the unpaid labour seems to be paid labour. With the slave, on the contrary, even that part of his labour which is paid appears to be unpaid. Of course, in order to work the slave must live, and one part of his working day goes to replace the value of his own maintenance. But since no bargain is struck between him and his master, and no acts of selling and buying are going on between the two parties, all his labour seems to be given away for nothing.
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Karl Marx (Wage-Labour and Capital & Value, Price and Profit)
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Ed Lim’s daughter, Monique, was a junior now, but as she’d grown up, he and his wife had noted with dismay that there were no dolls that looked like her. At ten, Monique had begun poring over a mail-order doll catalog as if it were a book–expensive dolls, with n ames and stories and historical outfits, absurdly detailed and even more absurdly expensive.
‘Jenny Cohen has this one,’ she’d told them, her finger tracing the outline of a blond doll that did indeed resemble Jenny Cohen: sweet faced with heavy bangs, slightly stocky. 'And they just made a new one with red hair. Her mom’s getting it for her sister Sarah for Hannukkah.’ Sarah Cohen had flaming red hair, the color of a penny in the summer sun. But there was no doll with black hair, let alone a face that looked anything like Monique’s. Ed Lim had gone to four different toy stores searching for a Chinese doll; he would have bought it for his daughter, whatever the price, but no such thing existed.
He’d gone so far as to write to Mattel, asking them if there was a Chinese Barbie doll, and they’d replied that yes, they offered 'Oriental Barbie’ and sent him a pamphlet. He had looked at that pamphlet for a long time, at the Barbie’s strange mishmash of a costume, all red and gold satin and like nothing he’d ever seen on a Chinese or Japanese or Korean woman, at her waist-length black hair and slanted eyes. I am from Hong Kong, the pamphlet ran. It is in the Orient, or Far East. Throughout the Orient, people shop at outdoor marketplaces where goods such as fish, vegetables, silk, and spices are openly displayed. The year before, he and his wife and Monique had gone on a trip to Hong Kong, which struck him, mostly, as a pincushion of gleaming skyscrapers. In a giant, glassed-in shopping mall, he’d bought a dove-gray cashmere sweater that he wore under his suit jacket on chilly days. Come visit the Orient. I know you will find it exotic and interesting.
In the end he’d thrown the pamphlet away. He’d heard, from friends with younger children, that the expensive doll line now had one Asian doll for sale – and a few black ones, too – but he’d never seen it. Monique was seventeen now, and had long outgrown dolls.
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Celeste Ng (Little Fires Everywhere)
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This book is an essay in what is derogatorily called "literary economics," as opposed to mathematical economics, econometrics, or (embracing them both) the "new economic history." A man does what he can, and in the more elegant - one is tempted to say "fancier" - techniques I am, as one who received his formation in the 1930s, untutored. A colleague has offered to provide a mathematical model to decorate the work. It might be useful to some readers, but not to me. Catastrophe mathematics, dealing with such events as falling off a height, is a new branch of the discipline, I am told, which has yet to demonstrate its rigor or usefulness. I had better wait. Econometricians among my friends tell me that rare events such as panics cannot be dealt with by the normal techniques of regression, but have to be introduced exogenously as "dummy variables." The real choice open to me was whether to follow relatively simple statistical procedures, with an abundance of charts and tables, or not. In the event, I decided against it. For those who yearn for numbers, standard series on bank reserves, foreign trade, commodity prices, money supply, security prices, rate of interest, and the like are fairly readily available in the historical statistics.
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Charles P. Kindleberger (Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises)
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The simple measure of sanity in housing prices, Zelman argued, was the ratio of median home price to income. Historically, in the United States, it ran around 3:1; by late 2004, it had risen nationally, to 4:1. “All these people were saying it was nearly as high in some other countries,” says Zelman. “But the problem wasn’t just that it was four to one. In Los Angeles it was ten to one and in Miami, eight-point-five to one.
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Michael Lewis (The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine)
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In “The Cost of Discipleship” Dietrich Bonhoeffer makes it clear that grace is free, but it is not cheap. The grace of God is unearned and unearnable, but if we ever expect to grow in grace, we must pay the price of a consciously chosen course of action which involves both individual and group life. Spiritual growth is the purpose of the Disciplines.
It might be helpful to visualize what we have been discussing. Picture a long, narrow ridge with a sheer drop-off on either side. The chasm to the right is the way of moral bankruptcy through human strivings for righteousness. Historically this has been called the heresy of moralism. The chasm to the left is moral bankruptcy through the absence of human strivings. This has been called the heresy of antinomianism. On the ridge there is a path, the Disciplines of the spiritual life. This path leads to the inner transformation and healing for which we seek. We must never veer off to the right or to the left, but stay on the path. The path is fraught with severe difficulties, but also with incredible joys. As we travel on this path the blessing of God will come upon us and reconstruct us into the image of Jesus Christ. We must always remember that the path does not produce the change; it only places us where the change can occur.
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Richard J. Foster (Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth)
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By the time the Franks could respond by sending troops, the Danes had already left (to add to the disappointment, the emperor's pet elephant suddenly died at the same time----one of those useless bits of historical information that tell us that the past was real.)
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Neil Price (Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings)
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History proves that great civilizations collapse when the gap between the haves and have-nots is too great. Sadly, America is on that same course because we haven’t learned from history. We only memorize historical dates and names, not the lesson.” “Aren’t prices supposed to go up?
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Robert T. Kiyosaki (Rich Dad Poor Dad: What The Rich Teach Their Kids About Money - That The Poor And Middle Class Do Not!)
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Any animal can fuck. But only humans can experience sexual passion, something wholly different from the biological urge to mate. And sexual passion’s endured for millennia as a vital psychic force in human life — not despite impediments but because of them. Plain old coitus becomes erotically charged and spiritually potent at just those points where impediments, conflicts, taboos, and consequences lend it a double-edged character — meaningful sex is both an overcoming and a succumbing, a transcendence and a transgression, triumphant and terrible and ecstatic and sad. Turtles and gnats can mate, but only the human will can defy, transgress, overcome, love: choose.
History-wise, both nature and culture have been ingenious at erecting impediments that give the choice of passion its price and value: religious proscriptions; penalties for adultery and divorce; chivalric chastity and courtly decorum; the stigma of illegitimate birth; chaperonage; madonna/whore complexes; syphilis; back-alley abortions; a set of “moral” codes that put sensuality on a taboo-level with defecation and apostasy… from the Victorians’ dread of the body to early TV’s one-foot-on-the-floor-at-all-times rule; from the automatic ruin of “fallen” women to back-seat tussles in which girlfriends struggled to deny boyfriends what they begged for in order to preserve their respect. Granted, from 1996’s perspective, most of the old sexual dragons look stupid and cruel. But we need to realize that they had something big in their favor: as long as the dragons reigned, sex wasn’t casual, not ever. Historically, human sexuality has been a deadly serious business — and the fiercer its dragons, the seriouser sex got; and the higher the price of choice, the higher the erotic voltage surrounding what people chose."
-from "Back in New Fire
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David Foster Wallace (Both Flesh and Not: Essays)
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Universities today loudly proclaim their commitment to diversity. But in the meantime, democratization through public investment has been replaced by democratization through consumer credit, effectively transferring the costs of diversity back to the individual student and her family. The beauty of securitized credit is that it excludes no one a priori. By abstracting from class stratification in the present, it can accommodate all differences preemptively simply by pricing them at variable rates and deferring repayment to some barely imaginable point in the future. In principle, we all have access to a college education, no matter how much we or our parents earn. Yet, private credit does not merely obscure the effects of class; it also actively exacerbates inequality by forcing those without income or collateral to pay higher rates for the same service. When the long-term costs of credit begin to materialize and accumulate, students are once again confronted with the intractable resistances of class, race, and gender stratification. The divisions of family wealth reassert themselves with all their historical force.
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Melinda Cooper (Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (Near Future Series))
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But having developed productive forces to a tremendous extent, capitalism has become enmeshed in contradictions which it is unable to solve. By producing larger and larger quantities of commodities, and reducing their prices, capitalism intensifies competition, ruins the mass of small and medium private owners, converts them into proletarians and reduces their purchasing power, with the result that it becomes impossible to dispose of the commodities produced. On the other hand, by expanding production and concentrating millions of workers in huge mills and factories, capitalism lends the process of production a social character and thus undermines its own foundation, inasmuch as the social character of the process of production demands the social ownership of the means of production; yet the means of production remain private capitalist property, which is incompatible with the social character of the process of production. These irreconcilable contradictions between the character of the productive forces and the relations of production make themselves felt in periodical crises of overproduction, when the capitalists, finding no effective demand for their goods owing to the ruin of the mass of the population which they themselves have brought about, are compelled to burn products, destroy manufactured goods, suspend production, and destroy productive forces at a time when millions of people are forced to suffer unemployment and starvation, not because there are not enough goods, but because there is an overproduction of goods.
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Joseph Stalin (Dialectical and Historical Materialism)
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Bart joins most scholars in accepting the verdict of David Friedrich Strauss11 and Albert Schweitzer12 that the Gospel of John is an almost purely literary work. It may be free creation, or it may have been a thorough rewrite of the Synoptics (sometimes critiquing them). For our purposes it doesn’t really matter which theory is correct. Either way, it is exceedingly dubious to appeal to John for historical information about Jesus, as Bart sometimes does.
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Robert M. Price (Bart Ehrman Interpreted: How One Radical New Testament Scholar Understands Another)
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An American home has not, historically speaking, been a lucrative investment. In fact, according to an index developed by Robert Shiller and his colleague Karl Case, the market price of an American home has barely increased at all over the long run. After adjusting for inflation, a $10,000 investment made in a home in 1896 would be worth just $10,600 in 1996. The rate of return had been less in a century than the stock market typically produces in a single year.
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Nate Silver (The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't)
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The Chinese government assigns capital to everything. Infrastructure development. Industrial plant buildout. Transport systems. Educational systems. Health systems. Everything and anything that puts people in jobs. Excruciatingly little of it would qualify as “wise capital allocation.” The goal isn’t efficiency or profitability, but instead achieving the singular political goal of overcoming regional, geographic, climatic, demographic, ethnic, and millennia of historical barriers to unity. No price is too high.
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Peter Zeihan (The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization)
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A century ago, historians of technology felt that individual inventors were the main actors that brought about the Industrial Revolution. Such heroic interpretations were discarded in favor of views that emphasized deeper economic and social factors such as institutions, incentives, demand, and factor prices. It seems, however, that the crucial elements were neither brilliant individuals nor the impersonal forces governing the masses, but a small group of at most a few thousand people who formed a creative community based on the exchange of knowledge. Engineers, mechanics, chemists, physicians, and natural philosophers formed circles in which access to knowledge was the primary objective. Paired with the appreciation that such knowledge could be the base of ever-expanding prosperity, these elite networks were indispensable, even if individual members were not. Theories that link education and human capital to technological progress need to stress the importance of these small creative communities jointly with wider phenomena such as literacy rates and universal schooling.
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Joel Mokyr (The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy)
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The tide of our national meanness rises incrementally, one brutalizing experience at a time, inside one person at a time in a chain of working-class Americans stretching back for decades. Back to the terror-filled nineteen-year-old girl from Weirton, West Virginia, who patrols the sweat-smelling halls of one of the empire's far-flung prisons at midnight. Back to my neighbor's eighty-year-old father, who remembers getting paid $2 apiece for literally cracking open the heads of union organizers at our textile and sewing mills during the days of Virginia's Byrd political machine. (It was the Depression and the old man needed the money to support his family.) The brutal way in which America's hardest-working folks historically were forced to internalize the values of a gangster capitalist class continues to elude the left, which, with few exceptions, understands not a thing about how this political and economic system has hammered the humanity of ordinary working people.
Much of the ongoing battle for America's soul is about healing the souls of these Americans and rousing them from the stupefying glut of commodity and spectacle. It is about making sure that they—and we—refuse to accept torture as the act of "heroes" and babies deformed by depleted uranium as the "price of freedom." Caught up in the great self-referential hologram of imperial America, force-fed goods and hubris like fattened steers, working people like World Championship Wrestling and Confederate flags and flat-screen televisions and the idea of an American empire. ("American Empire! I like the sound of that!" they think to themselves, without even the slightest idea what it means historically.)
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Joe Bageant (Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War)
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Here Bart and I find almost no common ground because he, with the huge majority of scholars, considers at least the “lucky seven” (Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon) to be authentically Pauline and thus earlier than the earliest gospel, while I think the whole lot of them are late-first, early-second-century patchworks of Paulinist (Marcionite and Gnostic) and Catholicizing fragments. Thus, in my eyes, the relation between the Pauline epistles and a historical Paul is exactly analogous to that obtaining between the gospels and a historical Jesus. The documents may be as
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Robert M. Price (Bart Ehrman Interpreted: How One Radical New Testament Scholar Understands Another)
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In his conception of science's method and role, then, Descartes openly followed the style of the Renascence despot; he preferred absolute government, with its Procrustean simplifications, to democratic government, with its divided powers, its tenacious traditions, its embarrassing historic contradictions, its confusion and compromises and obscurities. But the acceptance of the latter is in fact the necessary price for a method capable of embracing the complexities of life without leaving any function or purpose unrecognized, uncounted, or uncared for. By his penchant for political absolutism Descartes paved the way for the eventual militarization of both science and technics.
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Lewis Mumford (The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2))
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The argument that technology cannot create ongoing structural unemployment, rather than just temporary spells of joblessness during recessions, rests on two pillars: 1) economic theory and 2) two hundred years of historical evidence. But both of these are less solid than they first appear. First, the theory. There are three economic mechanisms that are candidates for explaining technological unemployment: inelastic demand, rapid change, and severe inequality. If technology leads to more efficient use of labor, then as the economists on the National Academy of Sciences panel pointed out, this does not automatically lead to reduced demand for labor. Lower costs may lead to lower prices for goods, and in turn, lower prices lead to greater demand for the goods, which can ultimately lead to an increase in demand for labor as well.
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Erik Brynjolfsson (The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies)
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As one might gather from a painting of him scowling in a tall stovepipe hat, Day saw himself as a businessman, not a journalist. ''He needed a newspaper not to reform, not to arouse, but to push the printing business of Benjamin H. Day.''
Day's idea was to try selling a paper for a penny - the going price for many everyday items, like soap or brushes. At that price, he felt sure he could capture a much larger audience than his 6-cent rivals. But what made the prospect risky, potentially even suicidal, was that Day would then be selling his paper at a loss. What day was contemplating was a break with the traditional strategy for making profit: selling at a price higher than the cost of production. He would instead rely on a different but historically significant business model: reselling the attention of his audience, or advertising. What Day understood-more firmly, more clearly than anyone before him-was that while his readers may have thought themselves his customers, they were in fact his product.
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Tim Wu (The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads)
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one result of Napoleon’s destruction was a great increase in British power. For a century after Waterloo Britain enjoyed global pre-eminence at a historically small price in blood and treasure. Russian pride and interests sometimes suffered from this, most obviously in the Crimean War. In the long run, too, British power meant the global hegemony of liberal-democratic principles fatal to any version of Russian empire. But this is to look way into the future: in 1815 Wellington and Castlereagh disliked democracy at least as much as Alexander I did. Under no circumstances could Russian policy in the Napoleonic era have stopped Britain’s Industrial Revolution, or its effects on British power. Moreover, in the century after 1815 Russia grew greatly in wealth and population, benefiting hugely from integration into the global capitalist economy whose main bulwark was Britain. In the nineteenth as in the twentieth century Russia had much less to fear from Britain than from land-powers intent on dominating the European continent.
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Dominic Lieven (Russia Against Napoleon: The Battle for Europe, 1807 to 1814)
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A display cake read JUNETEENTH! in red frosting, surrounded by red, white, and blue stars and fireworks. A flyer taped to the counter above it encouraged patrons to consider ordering a Juneteenth cake early: We all know about the Fourth of July! the flyer said. But why not start celebrating freedom a few weeks early and observe the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation! Say it with cake! One of the two young women behind the bakery counter was Black, but I could guess the bakery's owner wasn't. The neighborhood, the prices, the twee acoustic music drifting out of sleek speakers: I knew all of the song's words, but everything about the space said who it was for. My memories of celebrating Juneteenth in DC were my parents taking me to someone's backyard BBQ, eating banana pudding and peach cobbler and strawberry cake made with Jell-O mix; at not one of them had I seen a seventy-five-dollar bakery cake that could be carved into the shape of a designer handbag for an additional fee. The flyer's sales pitch--so much hanging on that We all know--was targeted not to the people who'd celebrated Juneteenth all along but to office managers who'd feel hectored into not missing a Black holiday or who just wanted an excuse for miscellaneous dessert.
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Danielle Evans (The Office of Historical Corrections)
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Later, on April 15, 1999, a crowd of protestors led by the Reverend Al Sharpton shut down half of the Brooklyn Bridge, capping ten weeks of demonstrations following the killing of a twenty-three-year-old West African immigrant, Amadou Diallo, by four white New York City police officers. The officers had sprayed forty-one bullets into Mr. Diallo's apartment building vestibule, striking him nineteen times. Mr. Diallo was unarmed and had no police record. New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a Republican, declined to criticize the police department whose tactics he had historically endorsed. As the crowd, estimated from fifteen to twenty-five thousand, gathered at Brooklyn's Cadman Plaza, jury selection proceeded next door in the trial of four different white New York City police officers accused of torturing Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant, in a Brooklyn police station in 1997. The demonstrations, growing larger and more multiracial, had begun to spread around the country in response to the horrific acts of police brutality. The canvas, stood back from, had a chilling Kafkaesque quality about it. Instrumentalities of the state had been used to spectacularly kill one completely innocent and defenseless man and brutally maim another. Mayor Giuliani appeared to accept this as a reasonable price of effective law enforcement.
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Randall Robinson (The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks)
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It contrives the acceptance of injustice, crime, and falsehood by the promise of a miracle. Still greater production, still more power, uninterrupted labor, incessant suffering, permanent war, and then a moment will come when universal bondage in the totalitarian empire will be miraculously changed into its opposite: free leisure in a universal republic. Pseudo-revolutionary mystification has now acquired a formula: all freedom must be crushed in order to conquer the empire, and one day the empire will be the equivalent of freedom. And so the way to unity passes through totality.[...]Totality is, in effect, nothing other than the ancient dream of unity common to both believers and rebels, but projected horizontally onto an earth deprived of God. To renounce every value, therefore, amounts to renouncing rebellion in order to accept the Empire and slavery. Criticism of formal values cannot pass over the concept of freedom. Once the impossibility has been recognized of creating, by means of the forces of rebellion alone, the free individual of whom the romantics dreamed, freedom itself has also been incorporated in the movement of history. It has become freedom fighting for existence, which, in order to exist, must create itself. Identified with the dynamism of history, it cannot play its proper role until history comes to a stop, in the realization of the Universal City. Until then, every one of its victories will lead to an antithesis that will render it pointless. The German nation frees itself from its oppressors, but at the price of the freedom of every German. The individuals under a totalitarian regime are not free, even though man in the collective sense is free. Finally, when the Empire delivers the entire human species, freedom will reign over herds of slaves, who at least will be free in relation to God and, in general, in relation to every kind of transcendence. The dialectic miracle, the transformation of quantity into quality, is explained here: it is the decision to call total servitude freedom. Moreover, as in all the examples cited by Hegel and Marx, there is no objective transformation, but only a subjective change of denomination. In other words, there is no miracle. If the only hope of nihilism lies in thinking that millions of slaves can one day constitute a humanity which will be freed forever, then history is nothing but a desperate dream. Historical thought was to deliver man from subjection to a divinity; but this liberation demanded of him the most absolute subjection to historical evolution. Then man takes refuge in the permanence of the party in the same way that he formerly prostrated himself before the altar. That is why the era which dares to claim that it is the most rebellious that has ever existed only offers a choice of various types of conformity. The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.
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Albert Camus (The Rebel)
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This kind of speculation reached a high point with the Pentagon's initiative of creating a 'futures market in events', a stock market of prices for terrorist attacks or catastrophes. You bet on the probable occurrence of such events against those who don't believe they'll happen.
This speculative market is intended to operate like the market in soya or sugar. You might speculate on the number of AIDS victims in Africa or on the probability that the San Andreas Fault will give way (the Pentagon's initiative is said to derive from the fact that they credit the free market in speculation with better forecasting powers than the secret services).
Of course it is merely a step from here to insider trading: betting on the event before you cause it is still the surest way (they say Bin Laden did this, speculating on TWA shares before 11 September). It's like taking out life insurance on your wife before you murder her.
There's a great difference between the event that happens (happened) in historical time and the event that happens in the real time of information.
To the pure management of flows and markets under the banner of planetary deregulation, there corresponds the 'global' event- or rather the globalized non-event: the French victory in the World Cup, the year 2000, the death of Diana, The Matrix, etc.
Whether or not these events are manufactured, they are orchestrated by the silent epidemic of the information networks. Fake events.
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Jean Baudrillard (The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact (Talking Images))
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A rogue who has been condemned to death by the
tribunal says he wants to resist oppression simply because he wants to resist the scaffold!" Saint-Just's
indignation is hard to understand in that, until his time, the scaffold was precisely nothing else but one of
the most obvious symbols of oppression. But at the heart of this logical delirium, at the logical conclusion
of this morality of virtue, the scaffold represents freedom. It assures rational unity, and harmony in the
ideal city. It purifies (the word is apt) the Republic and eliminates malpractices that arise to contradict the
general will and universal reason. "They question my right to the title of philanthropist," Marat exclaims,
in quite a different style. "Ah, what injustice! Who cannot see that I want to cut off a few heads to save a
great number?" A few—a faction? Naturally—and all historic actions are performed at this price. But
Marat, making his final calculations, claimed two hundred and seventy-three thousand heads. But he
compromised the therapeutic aspect of the operation by screaming during the massacre: "Brand them with
hot irons, cut off their thumbs, tear out their tongues." This philanthropist wrote day and night, in the
most monotonous vocabulary imaginable, of the necessity of killing in order to create. He wrote again, by
candlelight deep down in his cellar, during the September nights while his henchmen were installing
spectators' benches in prison
courtyards—men on the right, women on the left—to display to them, as a gracious example of
philanthropy, the spectacle of the aristocrats having their heads cut off.
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Albert Camus (The Rebel)
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It is not the development of material need which sets the modern vocabulary of aspiration apart from anything which has gone before, but rather the transformation of our spiritual needs. It is our spirits, not our clothes and houses and cars, that set us so radically apart from our own past and form much of the rest of the world. Imagine what we must be like to the primitive peoples who receive our attentions as anthropologists. We come upon them armed with our mastery of nature, and yet they can disarm us with the simplest metaphysical inquiry: what happen when people die? where do they go? what are the duties of the living to the dead? Their cultures are as rich in answers to these questions as our culture is rich in answers to the technical and scientific problems which baffle them.
It has always been a truism of the Western bad conscience that we have purchased our mastery of nature at the price of our spirits. The conservative and romantic critique of Western progress has always used the example of the savage - rich in cosmology, poor in goods - to argue for an inverse historical relationship between the development of material and spiritual needs. Certainly this view could draw upon the dark side of the Christian theology of need. While secular optimists have trust in the permanence of spiritual need, Augustinian Christians have fixed their gaze on the nightmare of the happy slave: the being so absorbed by the material that all spiritual needs have perished.
Yet human needing is historical, and who can predict what forms the needs of the spirit may take? There is a loss of nerve in the premature announcements of the death of the spirit, the easy condemnations of materialist aspiration in capitalist society. Western societies have continued the search for spiritual consolation in the only manner consistent with the freedom of the seeking subject: by making every person the judge of his own spiritual satisfaction. We have all been left to choose what we need, and we have pushed the search for private meaning to the limits of what a public language can contain if it is to continue to be a means of communication. We have Augustine's first freedom, and because we have it, we cannot have his second. We can no longer offer each other the possibility of metaphysical belonging: a shared place, sustained by faith, in a divine universe. All our belonging now is social.
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Michael Ignatieff (The Needs of Strangers)
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Needless to say, what whites now think and say about race has undergone a revolution. In fact, it would be hard to find other opinions broadly held by Americans that have changed so radically. What whites are now expected to think about race can be summarized as follows: Race is an insignificant matter and not a valid criterion for any purpose—except perhaps for redressing wrongs done to non-whites. The races are equal in every respect and are therefore interchangeable. It thus makes no difference if a neighborhood or nation becomes non-white or if white children marry outside their race. Whites have no valid group interests, so it is illegitimate for them to attempt to organize as whites. Given the past crimes of whites, any expression of racial pride is wrong. The displacement of whites by non-whites through immigration will strengthen the United States. These are matters on which there is little ground for disagreement; anyone who holds differing views is not merely mistaken but morally suspect.
By these standards, of course, most of the great men of America’s past are morally suspect, and many Americans are embarrassed to discover what our traditional heroes actually said. Some people deliberately conceal this part of our history. For example, the Jefferson Memorial has the following quotation from the third president inscribed on the marble interior: “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people [the Negroes] shall be free.” Jefferson did not end those words with a period, but with a semicolon, after which he wrote: “nor is it less certain that the two races equally free, cannot live under the same government.”
The Jefferson Memorial was completed in 1942. A more contemporary approach to the past is to bring out all the facts and then repudiate historical figures. This is what author Conor Cruise O’Brien did in a 1996 cover story for The Atlantic Monthly. After detailing Jefferson’s views, he concluded:
“It follows that there can be no room for a cult of Thomas Jefferson in the civil religion of an effectively multiracial America . . . . Once the facts are known, Jefferson is of necessity abhorrent to people who would not be in America at all if he could have had his way.”
Columnist Richard Grenier likened Jefferson to Nazi SS and Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler, and called for the demolition of the Jefferson Memorial “stone by stone.”
It is all very well to wax indignant over Jefferson’s views 170 years after his death, but if we expel Jefferson from the pantheon where do we stop? Clearly Lincoln must go, so his memorial must come down too. Washington owned slaves, so his monument is next. If we repudiate Jefferson, we do not just change the skyline of the nation’s capital, we repudiate practically our entire history.
This, in effect, is what some people wish to do. American colonists and Victorian Englishmen saw the expansion of their race as an inspiring triumph. Now it is cause for shame. “The white race is the cancer of human history,” wrote Susan Sontag.
The wealth of America used to be attributed to courage, hard work, and even divine providence. Now, it is common to describe it as stolen property. Robin Morgan, a former child actor and feminist, has written, “My white skin disgusts me. My passport disgusts me. They are the marks of an insufferable privilege bought at the price of others’ agony.
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Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
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The Antigua cruise port of Saint. Johns almost guarantees that site visitors will find a lot of beaches pertaining to swimming as well as sunbathing.
It isn't really an official promise. It's just that the island features 365 beaches or one for every day's the year.
Vacation cruise visitors will see that the cruise amsterdam shorelines are not correct by the docks as they might find within other locations such as Philipsburg, St. Maarten. Getting to the higher beaches will need transportation by means of pre-arranged excursion shuttle, taxi as well as car rental.
However, they will likely find that shorelines are peaceful, peaceful and uncrowded because there are a lot of them.
3 beaches in close proximity to St. Johns are Runaway These types of, Dickinson Beach and Miller's Beach (also called Fort These types of Beach).
Saint. Johns Antigua Visit
It is possible to look, dine as well as spend time at the actual beach after a cruise pay a visit to. Anyone who doesn't have interest in a seaside will find plenty of shopping right by the Barbados cruise fatal.
Heritage Quay is the main searching area. It's got many stalls filled with colorful things to acquire, some community and some not really. Negotiating over price is widespread and recognized.
Redcliffe Quay is close to Heritage and provides many further shopping and also dining chances. Walk somewhat farther and you'll find yourself upon well-maintained streets with more traditional searching.
U.Ersus. currency and a lot major charge cards are accepted everywhere. Tipping is common which has a recommended range of 10 to 15 per cent. English will be the official words.
Attractions
Similar to most Caribbean islands, Antigua provides strong beginnings in Yesteryear history. Your island's main traditional district and something of its most favored attractions can be English Harbor.
Antigua's historic section was created as a bottom for the United kingdom navy in the 1700s right up until its closure in 1889. It is now part of the 15 square mls of Nelson's Dockyard Countrywide Park.
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Antigua Cruise Port Claims Plenty of Shorelines
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In the past decade, the historically consistent division in the United States between the share of total national income going to labor and that going to physical capital seems to have changed significantly. As the economists Susan Fleck, John Glaser, and Shawn Sprague noted in the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Monthly Labor Review in 2011, “Labor share averaged 64.3 percent from 1947 to 2000. Labor share has declined over the past decade, falling to its lowest point in the third quarter of 2010, 57.8 percent.” Recent moves to “re-shore” production from overseas, including Apple’s decision to produce its new Mac Pro computer in Texas, will do little to reverse this trend. For in order to be economically viable, these new domestic manufacturing facilities will need to be highly automated. Other countries are witnessing similar trends. The economists Loukas Karabarbounis and Brent Neiman have documented significant declines in labor’s share of GDP in 42 of the 59 countries they studied, including China, India, and Mexico. In describing their findings, Karabarbounis and Neiman are explicit that progress in digital technologies is an important driver of this phenomenon: “The decrease in the relative price of investment goods, often attributed to advances in information technology and the computer age, induced firms to shift away from labor and toward capital. The lower price of investment goods explains roughly half of the observed decline in the labor share.
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Anonymous
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Lamb & Flag 33 Rose St, Covent Garden, WC2E 9EB Lamb & Flag is an old London pub with a long history dating back to 1623. It was frequented by Charles Dickens, a loyal client, as well as other personalities of his times. Not only is the food delicious, but the portions are also surprisingly large for a pub menu. Plenty of fresh ales can be found here, and if you prefer whisky, you can order from a long list with all kinds of whiskies. Lamb & Flag is a historic pub with a warm ambiance and prompt service – all at competitive prices.
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Elizabeth Westwood (How to Visit London if You Are... Secret and Not)
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roots of historical Babylon are given to us in Genesis 10 where we learn that one of Noah’s sons, Ham, had a son, Cush, who bore a son named Nimrod. Nimrod, who was the founder of the kingdom of Babylon, is described in scripture as evil, his name meaning ‘rebel against God.
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John Price (The End of America: The Role of Islam in the End Times and Biblical Warnings to Flee America)
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roots of historical Babylon are given to us in Genesis 10 where we learn that one of Noah’s sons, Ham, had a son, Cush, who bore a son named Nimrod. Nimrod, who was the founder of the kingdom of Babylon, is described in scripture as evil, his name meaning ‘rebel against God.’ Sorcery and witchcraft are historically traced back as commencing with Nimrod, who decided to build a tower to reach up to God (Genesis 11:4). He is the world’s first recorded empire builder, as Genesis 10:10 tells us that “the beginning of his kingdom was Babel…” God quickly dispensed with Nimrod’s rebellion by causing families and tribes to speak different languages, which led most of them to be scattered upon the face of the earth (Genesis 11:9).
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John Price (The End of America: The Role of Islam in the End Times and Biblical Warnings to Flee America)
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a PhD dissertation at the University of California, Davis.11 After carefully weighing the contrasting arguments of Taggart and Bush, I determined that Bush made by far the more convincing case—specifically his central thesis that the priesthood ban resulted from socio-economic prejudices endemic in American society at large. Such anti-black attitudes as embraced by Brigham Young were incorporated as policy, which evolved into doctrine—all of which occurred following the death of Joseph Smith.12 Striking was the breadth of Bush’s historical narrative tracing the evolution of Mormon anti-black attitudes and related practices from the 1830s to the 1970s. Impressive was the array of primary documents Bush marshaled in support of his arguments. By contrast, Taggart’s relatively limited work proved wanting in its overly simplistic “Missouri Thesis” that Joseph Smith had impulsively implemented the priesthood ban in a futile effort to alleviate Mormon difficulties in that slave state. The thoroughness of Bush’s findings notwithstanding, I determined that Bush had not adequately dealt with the origins of the ban as it involved Joseph Smith. Specifically, I became convinced that Smith himself held certain racist, anti-black attitudes which, in turn, were given scriptural legitimacy through his canonical writings, specifically the Book of Mormon and the Pearl of Great Price. Bush, moreover, failed to acknowledge the crucial role played by the emergence of Mormon ethnic whiteness affirming the Saints’ self-perceived status as a divinely favored race. Conversely, Mormons viewed blacks as a marginalized race, the accursed descendants of Cain, Ham, and Caanan. Further validating African-American’s accursed status was their dark skin.
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Newell G. Bringhurst (Saints, Slaves, and Blacks: The Changing Place of Black People Within Mormonism, 2nd ed.)
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Optimizations like this work well in industries with large amounts of structured data on meaningful business outcomes. In this case, “structured” refers to data that has been categorized, labeled, and made searchable. Prime examples of well-structured corporate data sets include historic stock prices, credit-card usage, and mortgage defaults.
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Kai-Fu Lee (AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order)
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The separation between the Man of Labour and the Instruments of Labout once established, such a state of things will maintain itself and reproduce itself upon a constantly increasing scale, until a new and fundamental revolution in the mode of production should again overturn it, and restore the original union in a new historical form.
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Karl Marx (Wage-Labour and Capital & Value, Price and Profit)
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A hand moved gracefully over the canvas, releasing the first colorful dot onto a sea of white. Her mind traveled to a different realm, and she joined in spirit with every human being whomever dared to take that first stroke, and she
knew the risks; she was willing to pay the price, because wasn’t that what the heart longed for? Whether it be by writing, painting, or music—one only needs to find the strength of courage to walk along the creative path, to search for one’s higher self, and maybe, for just a moment, to gaze into the eyes of God."
― AnneMarie Dapp, Autumn Lady
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AnneMarie Dapp
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Chasing tax cheats using normal procedures was not an option. It would take decades just to identify anything like the majority of them and centuries to prosecute them successfully; the more we caught, the more clogged up the judicial system would become. We needed a different approach. Once Danis was on board a couple of days later, together we thought of one: we would extract historical and real-time data from the banks on all transfers taking place within Greece as well as in and out of the country and commission software to compare the money flows associated with each tax file number with the tax returns of that same file number. The algorithm would be designed to flag up any instance where declared income seemed to be substantially lower than actual income. Having identified the most likely offenders in this way, we would make them an offer they could not refuse. The plan was to convene a press conference at which I would make it clear that anyone caught by the new system would be subject to 45 per cent tax, large penalties on 100 per cent of their undeclared income and criminal prosecution. But as our government sought to establish a new relationship of trust between state and citizenry, there would be an opportunity to make amends anonymously and at minimum cost. I would announce that for the next fortnight a new portal would be open on the ministry’s website on which anyone could register any previously undeclared income for the period 2000–14. Only 15 per cent of this sum would be required in tax arrears, payable via web banking or debit card. In return for payment, the taxpayer would receive an electronic receipt guaranteeing immunity from prosecution for previous non-disclosure.17 Alongside this I resolved to propose a simple deal to the finance minister of Switzerland, where so many of Greece’s tax cheats kept their untaxed money.18 In a rare example of the raw power of the European Union being used as a force for good, Switzerland had recently been forced to disclose all banking information pertaining to EU citizens by 2017. Naturally, the Swiss feared that large EU-domiciled depositors who did not want their bank balances to be reported to their country’s tax authorities might shift their money before the revelation deadline to some other jurisdiction, such as the Cayman Islands, Singapore or Panama. My proposals were thus very much in the Swiss finance minister’s interests: a 15 per cent tax rate was a relatively small price to pay for legalizing a stash and allowing it to remain in safe, conveniently located Switzerland. I would pass a law through Greece’s parliament that would allow for the taxation of money in Swiss bank accounts at this exceptionally low rate, and in return the Swiss finance minister would require all his country’s banks to send their Greek customers a friendly letter informing them that, unless they produced the electronic receipt and immunity certificate provided by my ministry’s web page, their bank account would be closed within weeks. To my great surprise and delight, my Swiss counterpart agreed to the proposal.19
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Yanis Varoufakis (Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe's Deep Establishment)
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Those who support the concept of a direct interface network don’t take into account the price they would have to pay for it, in privacy and safety and a thousand other areas of concern. Do you really want a machine to know where you are every minute of the day? Do you really trust the people who design these things, and program them, enough to let their work directly into your head? Don’t you realize that every time you let this creature come in contact with your brain, you are leaving your mark upon it as clearly as fingerprints upon glass, which any clever programmer can decipher? MAXWELL ONEGIN; Think Again! (Historical Archives, Hellsgate Station)
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C.S. Friedman (This Alien Shore (The Outworlds series Book 1))
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Best Budget Travel Destinations Ever
Are you looking for a cheap flight this year? Travel + Leisure received a list of the most affordable locations this year from one of the top travel search engines in the world, Kayak.
Kayak then considered the top 100 locations with the most affordable average flight prices, excluding outliers due to things like travel restrictions and security issues.
To save a lot of money, go against the grain.
Mexico
Unsurprisingly, Mexico is at the top of the list of the cheapest places to travel in 2022. The United States has long been seen as an accessible and affordable vacation destination; low-cost direct flights are common.
San José del Cabo (in Baja California Sur), Puerto Vallarta, and Cancun are the three destinations within Mexico with the least expensive flights, with January being the most economical month to visit each. Fortunately, January is a glorious month in each of these beachside locales, with warm, balmy weather and an abundance of vibrant hues, textures, and flavors to chase away the winter blues.
Looking for a city vacation rather than a beach vacation? Mexico City, which boasts a diverse collection of museums and a rich Aztec heritage, is another accessible option in the country. May is the cheapest month to travel there.
Chicago, Illinois
Who wants to go to Chicago in the winter? Once you learn about all the things to do in this Midwest winter wonderland and the savings you can get in January, you'll be convinced. At Maggie Daley Park, spend the afternoon ice skating before warming up with some deep-dish pizza.
Colombia
Colombia's fascinating history, vibrant culture, and mouthwatering cuisine make it a popular travel destination. It is also inexpensive compared to what many Americans are used to paying for items like a fresh arepa and a cup of Colombian coffee.
The cheapest month of the year to fly to Bogotá, the capital city, is February. The Bogota Botanical Garden, founded in 1955 and home to almost 20,000 plants, is meticulously maintained, and despite the region's chilly climate, strolling through it is not difficult. The entrance fee is just over $1 USD.
In January, travel to the port city of Cartagena on the country's Caribbean coast. The majority of visitors discover that exploring the charming streets on foot is sufficient to make their stay enjoyable.
Tennessee's Music City
There's a reason why bachelorette parties and reunions of all kinds are so popular in Music City: it's easy to have fun without spending a fortune. There is no fee to visit a mural, hot chicken costs only a few dollars, and Honky Tonk Highway is lined with free live music venues. The cheapest month to book is January.
New York City, New York
Even though New York City isn't known for being a cheap vacation destination, you'll find the best deals if you go in January. Even though the city never sleeps, the cold winter months are the best time for you to visit and take advantage of the lower demand for flights and hotel rooms. In addition, New York City offers a wide variety of free activities.
Canada
Not only does our neighbor Mexico provide excellent deals, but the majority of Americans can easily fly to Canada for an affordable getaway.
In Montréal, Quebec, you must try the steamé, which is the city's interpretation of a hot dog and is served steamed in a side-loading bun (which is also steamed). It's the perfect meal to eat in the middle of February when travel costs are at their lowest. Best of all, hot dogs are inexpensive and delicious as well as filling.
The most affordable month to visit Toronto, Ontario is February. Even though the weather may make you wary, the annual Toronto Light Festival, which is completely free, is held in February in the charming and historic Distillery District. Another excellent choice at this time is the $5 Bentway Skate Trail under the Gardiner Expressway overpass.
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Ovva
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Considering what his grandfather had been through a generation before during the infamous witch hunt for Communist sympathizers, Price saw bitter historical parallels.
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Brad Stone (Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire)
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Historically, manipulating positive news to increase the demand for a stock has been a way to drive up the price before selling it at an inflated figure. The illegal tactic, better known as ‘pump and dump’, is prohibited because markets need our trust to function. Yet soon the crypto surge appeared to be the result of just such a ploy. Writing in Vox, William Harris, the former CEO of PayPal, called Bitcoin ‘a colossal pump and dump scheme, the likes of which the world has never seen’ in an article headlined ‘Bitcoin is the greatest scam in history’.
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Symeon Brown (Get Rich or Lie Trying: Ambition and Deceit in the New Influencer Economy)
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adjust the historical prices by a multiplier instead of subtracting $d so that the historical daily returns will remain the same pre- and post-adjustment. This is the way Yahoo! Finance adjusts its historical data, and is the most common way.
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Ernest P. Chan (Quantitative Trading: How to Build Your Own Algorithmic Trading Business (Wiley Trading))
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Both suppliers and buyers tend to be powerful if: They are large and concentrated relative to a fragmented industry (think Goliath versus many Davids). What percentage of an industry’s purchases/sales does a supplier/buyer represent? Look at the data and map out how it is trending. How painful would it be to lose that supplier or that customer? Industries with high fixed costs (e.g., telecommunications equipment and offshore drilling) are especially vulnerable to large buyers. The industry needs them more than they need the industry. In some cases, there may be no alternative suppliers, at least in the short term. Doctors and airline pilots, to cite two examples, have historically exercised tremendous bargaining power because their skills have been both essential and in short supply. China produces 95 percent of the world’s supply of neodymium, a rare earth metal needed by Toyota and other automakers for electric motors. Neodymium prices quadrupled in just one year (2010), as the Chinese restricted supply. Toyota is working hard to develop a new motor that will end its dependence on rare earth metals. Switching costs work in their favor. This occurs for a supplier when an industry is tied to it, as for example, the PC industry has been to Microsoft, its dominant supplier of operating systems and software. Switching costs work in the buyer’s favor when the buyer can easily drop one vendor for another. The ease with which customers can switch from one airline to another on popular routes makes it hard for airlines to raise prices or cut service levels. Frequent flyer programs were intended to raise switching costs, but they have not been effective. Differentiation works in their favor.
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Joan Magretta (Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy)
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A once-and-for-all increase in prices due to low-end workers finally seeing their wages catch up to historical productivity increases is a desired policy outcome, not something to be avoided. Thereafter, the goal would be for wages to stay roughly par with productivity, thereby creating price stability.
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John T. Harvey (Modern Monetary Theory: Key Insights, Leading Thinkers (The Gower Initiative for Modern Money Studies))
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Some of the best beach vacations are those that bring together many parts of your life. Whether you’re escaping city life and reconnecting with nature, or dipping your toes in the sea for the first time, there are few places better than Honduras. Travel to the beautiful and magical land of Honduras, home to a diverse culture and wonderful people with low-cost flights to the capital city San Pedro Sula. Enjoy leisurely walks through historical San Pedro Sula, take in a nearby mountain overlooking the city, or just relax on your own private island and enjoy your vacation. With our low-cost flights to Honduras, you can enjoy the beauty of this Central American country at an affordable price. Book your vacation today and call us at +1-800-683-0266.
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Airowings
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That historic takeover of rural England is emblematic of the centuries-long global trend of both the state and the market encroaching on common land, at first through colonisation, then through corporate expansion. It is on the rise again today, with renewed international investor interest triggered by the 2007–8 global food price crisis. Since 2000, foreign investors have made over 1,200 large-scale land deals in low- and middle-income countries, acquiring more than 43 million hectares of land—an area bigger than Japan.40 In the majority of cases, those deals were land grabs: signed without the free, prior and informed consent of the indigenous and local communities that had inhabited and collectively stewarded that land for generations. In case after case, investors’ promises to create new jobs, enrich community infrastructure and skill-up local farmers have come to nothing: instead many communities have found themselves dispossessed, dispersed and impoverished.
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Kate Raworth (Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist)
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This is a venerable historical office. You don’t realize this, but it is. Usually inherited, a patrimony. El judío de corte, der Hofjude, the Court Jew. The protected Jew. The useful Jew to keep in your pocket, as a consultant on your taxes. Sometimes an intermediary, sometimes an intercessor. Always balancing competing interests. The Elder of the Judenrat who when the Gestapo says, we need to kill one thousand Jews, he’s the one who picks which one thousand. The shtadlan who when the emperor summons him and says, we need more money for our treasury, he tries to bargain down the price while averting a massacre. A tenuous duty, susceptible to all corruptions. Powerful, but never the most powerful, and only partially trusted by both sides, belonging entirely to neither.
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Joshua Cohen (The Netanyahus)
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A major culprit is the valuation and financing of real estate. Banks are lending for real estate on the basis of the real estate’s value. They typically lend, according to where we stand in the real estate cycle, between 80% to 100% of the value. This is because real estate is allegedly a “safe” asset. This is by itself extraordinary. First, the historic volatility of real estate prices and the history of economic cycles reveal that real estate is not a safe, but a risky asset. Its physical nature does not guarantee its value. This over-lending to real estate buyers comes at the expense of lending to small business, which necessarily captures a smaller share of lending.
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Jean-Michel Paul (The Economics of Discontent: From Failing Elites to The Rise of Populism)
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The idea of the project was to study how the historical returns of securities were related to various characteristics, or indicators. Among the scores of fundamental and technical measures we considered were the ratio of earnings per share to price per share, known as the earnings yield, the liquidation or “book” value of the company compared with its market price, and the total market value of the company (its “size”).
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Edward O. Thorp (A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market)
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Woolworth’s and similar chains such as S. S. Kresge Company and W. T. Grant focused on offering the absolutely lowest price even if it meant things would need replacing a lot sooner than they once did. This pushed hard against the American tradition of frugality, where price was only one consideration. Historically, Americans sought durable long-lasting goods that they could pass among themselves and down to their children. Shoes were reheeled, socks darned, and hems let out to fit generations of brothers and sisters. Discounters gave the common man and woman the opportunity to eschew the cobbler and the darning needle, to break in a brand-new pair of shoes or socks when their toes poked through the old ones. Discounters made ordinary folks feel rich by putting a wide selection of goods within easy reach of all but the most meager budgets. Someone had to pay, of course, but that someone need not be the customer.
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Ellen Ruppel Shell (Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture)
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People have realised that, in light of historical statistics, they have been too fearful of stocks. Armed with this new knowledge, investors have now bid stock prices up to a higher level.
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Robert J. Shiller (Irrational Exuberance)
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anomalous patterns in historic pricing data; make sure the anomalies were statistically significant, consistent over time, and nonrandom; and see if the identified pricing behavior could be explained in a reasonable way.
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Gregory Zuckerman (The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution)
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Kannada Books Purchase
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value at risk, a technique used to estimate the probability of portfolio losses based on the statistical analysis of historical price trends and volatilities. It measures the worst expected loss under normal market conditions over a specific time interval at a given confidence level. Which means it measures both fear and optimism.
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Lawrence G. McDonald (A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers)
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These calls to flee are highly relevant because the Jewish population today in America is only exceeded by the nation of Israel itself. The estimate of the Jewish population of the world is 13.2 million. The American Jewish population is 5.275 million, with 5.700 million living in Israel and 483,000 in France. How many Jewish residents live in Iraq, historical Babylon? On June 1, 2008 the New York Times reported that the Jewish population in Iraq in 1936 was 120,000; that 100,000 moved out of Iraq between 1949 to 1952, most moving to the newly formed State of Israel; and that the Jewish population in Iraq currently is almost zero, estimated by the Jewish Agency of Israel at only seven persons.
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John Price (The End of America: The Role of Islam in the End Times and Biblical Warnings to Flee America)
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Vintage kisses," Finlay said. "If only they could be bottled, you would have an elixir beyond price.
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Marguerite Kaye (The Soldier's Rebel Lover (Comrades in Arms, #2))
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Finding a historical correlation between gold and silver prices is no more convincing than finding a historical correlation between marriage and beer consumption. All it demonstrates is that we looked long enough to find a correlation.
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Gary Smith (Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie with Statistics)
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THE FINAL WORLD WAR WILL INCLUDE ALL NATIONS There is no mystery about which nations will be involved in the world’s final war. The final battle of human history, which John referred to in Revelation 16:16, will take place at Armageddon. Zechariah tells us in 12:3 that “On that day, when all the nations of the earth are gathered against her, I will make Jerusalem an immovable rock for all the nations. All who try to move it will injure themselves.” Look again at that prophecy. The final world war against Israel will involve not some of the nations of the world, but all the nations of the world. If that battle were today, that would include the United States of America, Israel’s historically closest ally.
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John Price (The End of America: The Role of Islam in the End Times and Biblical Warnings to Flee America)
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IDENTITY CLUE 17: HISTORICAL BABYLON IS GONE AND WON’T BE BACK The roots of historical Babylon are given to us in Genesis 10, where we learn that one of Noah’s sons, Ham, had a son, Cush, who bore a son named Nimrod. Nimrod, who was the founder of the kingdom of Babylon, is described in scripture as evil, his name meaning ‘rebel against God.’ Sorcery and witchcraft are historically traced back as commencing with Nimrod, who decided to build a tower to reach up to God (Genesis 11:4). He is the world’s first recorded empire builder, as Genesis 10:10 tells us that “the beginning of his kingdom was Babel…” God quickly dispensed with Nimrod’s rebellion by causing families and tribes to speak different languages, which led most of them then, to be scattered upon the face of the earth (Genesis 11:9).
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John Price (The End of America: The Role of Islam in the End Times and Biblical Warnings to Flee America)
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For many centuries, Babylon lay in three mounds of rubble, named by the Arabs as the Babil, the Kasr, and the Amran. The city was eventually overgrown and some questioned if it ever existed. In 1914 German archeologist Robert Koldewey excavated the ruins, confirming its historicity. While alive and in power, Iraq’s despot Saddam Hussein initiated efforts, in 1985, to re-build some of the mounds of rubble at the location of ancient Babylon into a tourist center, with buildings designed to resemble some of those of ancient Babylon. Hussein built one of his numerous palaces overlooking the site, some 55 miles south of Baghdad.
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John Price (The End of America: The Role of Islam in the End Times and Biblical Warnings to Flee America)
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Backtesting against historical data, all indications whispered confident promises for what this thing could do once set in motion. As John puts it, “A slight pattern emerged from the overwhelming noise; we had stumbled across a persistent pricing inefficiency in a corner of the market, a small edge over the average investor, which appeared repeatable.” Inefficiencies are what traders live for. A perfectly efficient market can’t be played, but if you can identify the right imperfection, it’s payday.
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Eric Siegel (Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die)
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Here then is a critical connection between an Old Testament prophet and the Prophet John in the New Testament. Both described the Daughter of Babylon with the same noun – ‘a queen’.’ This is relevant because historical Babylon had long faded into history by the time John wrote his words under the power of the Holy Spirit. The prophecies concerning the coming Daughter of Babylon were exactly that–prophecies about a future nation, not a nation that no longer existed. These verses tie together the several verses in Isaiah, Jeremiah, Joel, and Zechariah with the prophecies of John, seven centuries later, and all of them about a future nation called the “queen of kingdoms.” Is there any nation in our world, in our time, that this title fits more
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John Price (The End of America: The Role of Islam in the End Times and Biblical Warnings to Flee America)
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Housing prices had never before fallen as far and as fast as they did beginning in 2007. But that’s what happened. Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan explained to a congressional committee after the fact, “The whole intellectual edifice, however, collapsed in the summer of [2007] because the data input into the risk management models generally covered only the past two decades, a period of euphoria. Had instead the models been fitted more appropriately to historic periods of stress, capital requirements would have been much higher and the financial world would be in far better shape, in my judgment.”3
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Charles Wheelan (Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data)
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To walk in a deep and consistent level of the anointing requires a price of personal sacrifice—spending more time with God than with people, fasting, and separating yourself in prayer and study of the Word. The anointing activates the presence of God, mixing it with a person’s faith, and brings deliverance to the body, mind, and spirit.
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Perry Stone (The Code of the Holy Spirit: Uncovering the Hebraic Roots and Historic Presence of the Holy Spirit)
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IDENTITY CLUE 1: IS THE DAUGHTER THE SAME AS THE MOTHER? It may seem obvious, but no, the daughter is not the same as the mother. If the Lord intended these ‘Daughter of Babylon’ verses to be understood as synonymous with Babylon, he could have easily omitted the modifying phrase “Daughter of” and just given us ‘Babylon’, instead. Clearly, we are meant to understand that the Daughter of Babylon has many characteristics of ancient Babylon, but is not, in fact, the same as historical Babylon, nor, for that matter, modern day Iraq, which contains the rubble of ancient Babylon, as we shall see in some detail as we look at the detailed descriptions of this end times prophesied nation.
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John Price (The End of America: The Role of Islam in the End Times and Biblical Warnings to Flee America)
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The name of Nebuchadnezzar is used by Jeremiah in Chapter 50 (50:17) and in Chapter 51 (51:34). The use of the name might cause some to initially think Jeremiah’s use of the ancient name in these two end times chapters may mean they are really about the Babylon in the future. Like a good mystery, though, both references to Nebuchadnezzar are included in statements about how Israel had been attacked in the past. Historically true.
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John Price (The End of America: The Role of Islam in the End Times and Biblical Warnings to Flee America)
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DUIness
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the United Nations replaced it after WWII ended in 1945. On April 25, 1945, the UN Conference on International Organization began in San Francisco. The UN came into existence on October 24. Fifty one countries were signatories. Today, one hundred and ninety one nations are members of the United Nations. The United Nations Headquarters were constructed in New York City in 1949 and 1950 beside the East River, in an area historically called ‘Turtle Bay,’ on seventeen acres of land, the purchase of which was arranged by Nelson Rockefeller. The purchase was funded by his father, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who donated the site to the City of New York for the UN headquarters.
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John Price (The End of America: The Role of Islam in the End Times and Biblical Warnings to Flee America)
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In response to current events, people often reach for historical analogies, and this occasion was no exception. The trick is to choose the right analogy. In August 2007, the analogies that came to mind—both inside and outside the Fed—were October 1987, when the Dow Jones industrial average had plummeted nearly 23 percent in a single day, and August 1998, when the Dow had fallen 11.5 percent over three days after Russia defaulted on its foreign debts. With help from the Fed, markets had rebounded each time with little evident damage to the economy. Not everyone viewed these interventions as successful, though. In fact, some viewed the Fed’s actions in the fall of 1998—three quarter-point reductions in the federal funds rate—as an overreaction that helped fuel the growing dot-com bubble. Others derided what they perceived to be a tendency of the Fed to respond too strongly to price declines in stocks and other financial assets, which they dubbed the “Greenspan put.” (A put is an options contract that protects the buyer against loss if the price of a stock or other security declines.) Newspaper opinion columns in August 2007 were rife with speculation that Helicopter Ben would provide a similar put soon. In arguing against Fed intervention, many commentators asserted that investors had grown complacent and needed to be taught a lesson. The cure to the current mess, this line of thinking went, was a repricing of risk, meaning a painful reduction in asset prices—from stocks to bonds to mortgage-linked securities. “Credit panics are never pretty, but their virtue is that they restore some fear and humility to the marketplace,” the Wall Street Journal had editorialized, in arguing for no rate cut at the August 7 FOMC meeting.
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Ben S. Bernanke (The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath)
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A recent George Barna poll revealed that only 1% of Christians interviewed in his poll subscribed to all thirteen listed basic doctrinal principles of our Christian faith. Only one percent. Colson notes that in most churches today, “Biblical illiteracy is rampant.” As I detailed in America at the Crossroads (Tyndale House, 1979), cultures historically have only improved when God’s people get serious and experience spiritual revival. America has not witnessed a nationwide revival since early in the 20th century, over one hundred years ago. Americans really shouldn’t be too surprised that our culture continues to spiral downward. If we are “blind” to our true spiritual condition as an end times Church, our prayer should be that we see our true spiritual condition, as God sees it. The literal translation of the word “sin” is missing the mark. Are we blind to how far we are from ‘hitting the mark’? Since current polls and demographic studies show that Christians living in America are divorcing, abusing, over-indulging, bankrupting or adultering at rates that don’t differ from non-Christians, we have to admit our blindness.
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John Price (The End of America: The Role of Islam in the End Times and Biblical Warnings to Flee America)
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Poppies in Afghanistan: The Taliban
and the Heroin Trade
Harvesting opium in Afghanistan
Ghaffar Baig/ Reuters/Corbis
Most Americans knew little about Afghanistan or
the Taliban prior to September 11, 2001, but those
who follow the heroin trade have focused on
Afghanistan for decades. Afghanistan has long been
a major area of opium production, but the “golden
triangle” of Southeast Asia (Burma, Laos, and
Thailand) historically dominated opium production.
By 1999, though, Afghanistan had become the
undisputed world leader in opium production
despite being an Islamic state ruled by the Taliban,
which publicly opposed opium use. In 1999, the
Taliban representative to the United States, Abdul
Hakeem Mujahid, said, “We are against poppy
cultivation, narcotics production and drugs, but we
cannot fight our own people” (Bartolet & Levine,
2001, p. 85). Even before 9/11, the United States
accused the Taliban of profiting from opium and
heroin production, and using those profits to fund
terrorist activities. Under pressure from the United
Nations, the Taliban announced bans on poppy
cultivation in 1997, 1998, and 2000, but there was
little evidence of any decreased production. In 2001,
though, a ban was put into place that apparently
really did reduce poppy production. Cynics have
pointed out that the Taliban was simply trying to
increase prices by temporarily cutting the supply;
whatever the reason, when the Taliban lost control
of Afghanistan, the poppy made a comeback. In this
war-ravaged and economically depressed nation,
growing opium is one of the few ways that farmers
can make a living. Afghan President Hamid Karzai
has urged his people to declare jihad (holy war) on
drug production, but opium farming still accounts
for nearly half of the domestic economy, and
Afghanistan supplies nearly 80% of the world’s
heroin (Office of National Drug Control Policy,
2013). In recent years, opium production has
declined in Afghanistan, but a close relationship
between heroin traffickers and the insurgency
continues to create difficulties for that country’s
reconstruction process (Office of National Drug
Control Policy, 2013).
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Stephen A. Maisto (Drug Use and Abuse)
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It is impossible to make predictions—to say if the Islamic Republic will collapse or if it will survive in its current form. Certainly its current form isn’t the one it took in the immediate wake of the revolution. Although Khamenei has been committed to safeguarding the revolution, he has also created a new theocracy—one that relies on the greed of the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij instead of the loyalty of its founding fathers. Khamenei has banished nearly all the clerics who held power when Ayatollah Khomeini was alive. Despite falling oil prices and economic sanctions, Khamenei had enough petro-dollar to satisfy his military base of support: the Guards and the Basij.
The oil revenue has been the biggest deterrent to democracy in Iran, even though the windfall has transformed the fabric of Iranian society. The Iranian middle class, more than two-thirds of the population, relies on the revenue instead of contributing to economic growth, and thus has been less likely to fulfill a historic mission to create institutional reform. It has been incapable of placing “demands on Iranian leadership for political reform because of its small role in producing wealth, as in other developing countries.
The regime is still an autocracy, to be sure, but democracy has been spreading at the grassroots level, even among members of the Basij and the children of Iran’s rulers. The desire for moderation goes beyond a special class. As I am writing these lines, Khamenei’s followers are shifting alliances and building new coalitions. Civil society, despite the repression it has long endured, has turned into a dynamic force. Khamenei still has the final word in Iranian politics, but the country’s political culture is not monolithic. Like Ayatollah Khomeini, who claimed he had to drink the cup of poison in order to end the war with Iraq, Khamenei has been forced to compromise. The fact that he signed off on Rohani’s historic effort to improve ties with the United States signals that the regime is moving in a different direction, and that further compromises are possible.
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Nazila Fathi (The Lonely War)
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and others all agreed that Acts was pretty much an historical novel, much like the so-called Apocryphal Acts, and that it was written in the second century. There is virtually no historical value to it, but it is rich in edifying propaganda, its author having extensively rewritten sources that seem to include Homer, Virgil, Euripides, Josephus, and the Septuagint, creating a revisionist version of early Christianity in the golden age of its origin.
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Robert M. Price (The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul)
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Blaming Satan can absolve oppressors quicker than God's grace. I really am not that bad - so the logic goes - it is Satan, since the Garden of Eden, who has been leading humanity astray. I am really a good person, but I do wrestle with my secret demons. When I participate in the pain of others (not just physical but also caused by society and economics) of others, it is the devil that made me do it. Thankfully, Jesus took our place on the cross so that we do not need to pay the price for our sins. The devil made me do it, and Jesus cleaned up my mess. As a new creature in Christ "I" can move on without really addressing the consequences of or restitution for those sins the devil made me do. Hence, Nazi concentration guards can torture all week long and still attended worship ship services on Sunday mornings. Politicians can lead armies to war under false pretenses without addressing the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, who are killed or maimed because, after all, our intentions were pure - it was the enemy who was really evil. Repentance from Wall Street greed that tanked the U.S. economy and swindled thousands out of their life savings in 2008 can occur without having to deal with issues of public accountability and restitution to individual investors.
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Miguel A. de la Torre (The Quest for the Historical Satan)
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1. Is the Daughter the Same as the Mother? 2. The Hammer of the Whole Earth 3. A Latter Day Nation 4. A Nation of Wealth and Luxury 5. A Multi-Nation ‘Melting Pot’ of a Nation 6. You Who Live on Many Waters 7. Center of World Commerce 8. The Great Voice 9. They Are Mad Upon Their Idols 10. The Daughter of Babylon Mounts Up to the Heavens 11. Where the Nations Gather 12. She Has Been Proud Against the Lord 13. Large Jewish Population 14. Deep Water Port Nation 15. The Kings of the Medes Won’t Destroy Themselves 16. A Land of Entertainment 17. Historical Babylon is Gone and Won’t be Back 18. Who sits on the Seven Continents of the Earth? 19. Ancient Babylon has already been Punished 20. Past Use by God of the Daughter of Babylon 21. Which Nations are sworn to Defend Israel? Scott allowed a minute for everyone to look over the list and then said, “Who’ll be first? Which one of these twenty-clues identifying Mystery Babylon jumps out at you as clearly applying to America?
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John Price (THE WARNING A Novel of America in the Last Days (The End of America Series Book 2))
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What have you to trade for my silence?" ...
He opened his mouth to beckon the men, but Eleri moved like lightning. With her right arm restrained, she couldn't cut him. However, her weapon of choice caught him completely off-guard.
Her lips sealed to his, cutting off his voice in a hard kiss...
Bracing his back against the gnarled tree branches, he relaxed for more, but the kiss ended as briskly as it had begun....
Blood surging through his body, Warren grinned and lowered his face over hers. "Not the price I had in mind, but...um, shall we see what else you have to offer?
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Sandra Jones (His Captive Princess)
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My country is being led by a thief, or at the very least led by a man surrounded by thieves, obviously with his willing consent and direction. He had learned in his American history classes that in 1960 John Kennedy’s supporters in Cook County, Illinois had held out voting results until they knew how many votes were needed to put their candidate in the lead in the final state needed to win the White House. That was an historical embarrassment, but nothing like what just happened in states across the country. This was an organized, orchestrated and overt stolen election.
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John Price (THE WARNING A Novel of America in the Last Days (The End of America Series Book 2))
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The part of national income that is available to families, after taxes have been paid and any transfers received, is personal disposable income, which is the second line from the top. It is a good deal smaller than GDP, but the historical picture of growth and fluctuation is very similar. Much the same is true if we look, not at what people get, but at what they spend. This is consumers’ expenditure, the third line. The difference between personal disposable income and consumers’ expenditure is the amount that people save, and the figure shows that the fraction of their income that Americans save has been falling, especially over the past thirty years. We don’t know exactly why this has happened, and there are several possible explanations: it is easier to borrow than it used to be; it is no longer as necessary as it once was to save up to make the deposit on a house, a car, or a dishwasher; Social Security has perhaps reduced the need to save for retirement; and the average American benefited from increases in the stock market and in house prices—at least until the Great Recession.
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Angus Deaton (The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality)
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Existentialism is commonly associated with Left-Bank Parisian cafes and the ‘family’ of philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir who gathered there in the years immediately following the liberation of Paris at the end of World War II. One imagines offbeat, avant-garde intellectuals, attached to their cigarettes, listening to jazz as they hotly debate the implications of their new-found political and artistic liberty. The mood is one of enthusiasm, creativity, anguished self-analysis, and freedom – always freedom.
Though this reflects the image projected by the media of the day and doubtless captures the spirit of the time, it glosses over the philosophical significance of existentialist thought, packaging it as a cultural phenomenon of a certain historical period. That is perhaps the price paid by a manner of thinking so bent on doing philosophy concretely rather than in some abstract and timeless manner. The existentialists’ urge for contemporary relevance fired their social and political commitment. But it also linked them with the problems of their day and invited subsequent generations to view them as having the currency of yesterday’s news.
Such is the misreading of existentialist thought that I hope to correct in this short volume. If it bears the marks of its post-war appearance, existentialism as a manner of doing philosophy and a way of addressing the issues that matter in people’s lives is at least as old as philosophy itself. It is as current as the human condition which it examines.
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Thomas R. Flynn (Existentialism: A Very Short Introduction)
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much better thought of as nothing more than Karma, pure and simple—the old “what goes around comes around” dictum; those people who are abusers and evil in nature in one life, pay the price in the next. So all of those people who boarded the charter bus are going back, but not to their old lives—those bodies are dead. They will be
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A. Robert Allen (Failed Moments (Historical Fiction): The Slavery and Beyond Series)