Hoffman David Quotes

How can you tell when a piece is finished?'I asked. 'You can't,' he said flatly. 'All you can tell is when you can't do any more to it. And then you need to stop because if you don't, you will spoil it.

This is a country that can’t even make toasters,” he said. “And while they can make missiles, they can’t feed their population.

The one thing that proved to me you were CIA and not KGB is when you gave me those medicines to test on my daughter. Because the KGB is heartless. They would have given me one pill and said, do it. I knew I was working with a humane organization when you gave me five medicines.

The United States cannot predict Soviet behavior because it has too little information about what goes on inside the Soviet Union; the Soviets cannot predict American behavior because they have too much information.

A case could be made that even the shift into R&D on information technologies and medicine was not so much a reorientation towards market-driven consumer imperatives, but part of an all-out effort to follow the technological humbling of the Soviet Union with total victory in the global class war: not only the imposition of absolute U.S. military dominance overseas, but the utter rout of social movements back home. The technologies that emerged were in almost every case the kind that proved most conducive to surveillance, work discipline, and social control. Computers have opened up certain spaces of freedom, as we’re constantly reminded, but instead of leading to the workless utopia Abbie Hoffman or Guy Debord imagined, they have been employed in such a way as to produce the opposite effect.

Soviet authorities had long feared copiers. At its most basic, the machine helped spread information, and strict control of information was central to the Communist Party’s grip on power. In most offices, photocopy machines were kept under lock and key.

Interrogate them,” said Ferris. “Send them to Gitmo. Send them to Hani. Whatever.” “Well, sure, interrogation,” said Hoffman. “That helps. But that’s not the real pop. Even if the guy we capture doesn’t say shit, the bad guys have to assume he has blabbed. So they’ll have to change their cell-phone numbers, and their Internet

And I said, 'Do I have leprosy?' And they said, 'You are a dangerous element.

the Jack-in-the-Box would spring erect, a pop-up that looked, in outline, like the head and torso of the case officer who had just jumped out.

He ordered a freeze on CIA operations in Moscow—a total stand-down. The Moscow station was told not to run any agents, not to carry out any operational acts.

Oh, don't get me started! I love fantasy, I read it for pleasure, even after all these years. Pat McKillip, Ursula Le Guin and John Crowley are probably my favorite writers in the field, in addition to all the writers in the Endicott Studio group - but there are many others I also admire. In children's fantasy, I'm particularly keen on Philip Pullman, Donna Jo Napoli, David Almond and Jane Yolen - though my favorite novels recently were Midori Snyder's Hannah's Garden, Holly Black's Tithe, and Neil Gaiman's Coraline. I read a lot of mainstream fiction as well - I particularly love Alice Hoffman, A.S. Byatt, Sara Maitland, Sarah Waters, Sebastian Faulks, and Elizabeth Knox. There's also a great deal of magical fiction by Native American authors being published these days - Louise Erdrich's Antelope Wife, Alfredo Vea Jr.'s Maravilla, Linda Hogan's Power, and Susan Power's Grass Dancer are a few recent favorites. I'm a big fan of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, and Anthony Trollope - I re-read Jane Austen's novels in particular every year.Other fantasists say they read Tolkien every year, but for me it's Austen. I adore biographies, particularly biographies of artists and writers (and particularly those written by Michael Holroyd). And I love books that explore the philosophical side of art, such as Lewis Hyde's The Gift, Carolyn Heilbrun's Writing a Woman's Life, or David Abram's Spell of the Sensuous. (from a 2002 interview)

For as long as I can recall, a small scrap of paper has been fastened to our refrigerator door with a proverb from Saint Augustine: “The world is a book, and those who do not travel, read only a page.” With her steadfast support and participation, the world is, once again, a book.

The Matterhorn has two different tracks and which one you ride is determined by which of the two lines you choose ti wait in. Seasoned park-goers know that the right line (next to Alice in Wonderland in Fantasyland) puts you on the slower track, where the ride lasts 30 seconds longer, while the left line (towards Tomorrowland) feeds into the faster track, which has one unexpected drop and tighter turns.

Katayev’s notes show that the military-industrial complex was indeed as large as Gorbachev feared. In 1985, Katayev estimated, defense took up 20 percent of the Soviet economy.16 Of the 135 million adults working in the Soviet Union, Katayev said, 10.4 million worked directly in the military-industrial complex at 1,770 enterprises. Nine ministries served the military, although in a clumsy effort to mask its purpose, the nuclear ministry was given the name “Ministry of Medium Machine Building,” and others were similarly disguised. More than fifty cities were almost totally engaged in the defense effort, and hundreds less so. Defense factories were called upon to make the more advanced civilian products, too, including 100 percent of all Soviet televisions, tape recorders, movie and still cameras and sewing machines.17

Hoffman had finally gotten a satisfying answer to this at a dinner with Wences and David Marcus and a few other Valley power players late in 2013. Wences agreed with Hoffman that Bitcoin was unlikely to catch on as a payment method anytime soon. But for now, Wences believed that Bitcoin would first gain popularity as a globally available asset, similar to gold. Like gold, which was also not used in everyday transactions, Bitcoin’s value was as a digital asset where people could store wealth.

Of the many wonderful tales Moor told me, the most wonderful, the most delightful one, was “Hans Röckle.” It went on for months; it was a whole series of stories... Hans Röckle himself was a Hoffman-like magician, who kept a toyshop, and who was always “hard up.” His shop was full of the most wonderful things—of wooden men and women, giants and dwarfs, kings and queens, workmen and masters, animals and birds as numerous as Noah got into the Ark, tables and chairs, carriages, boxes of all sorts and sizes. And though he was a magician, Hans could never meet his obligations either to the devil or to the butcher, and was therefore—much against the grain—constantly obliged to sell his toys to the devil. These then went through wonderful adventures—always ending in a return to Hans Röckle’s shop. —Eleanor Marx, on her father Karl’s bedtime stories (in Stallybrass 1998:198)

He met with CIA officers twenty-one times over six years on the streets of Moscow, a city swarming with KGB surveillance, and was never detected.

The CIA was born out of the disaster at Pearl Harbor. Despite warning signals, Japan achieved complete and overwhelming surprise in the December 7, 1941, attack that took the lives of more than twenty-four hundred Americans, sunk or damaged twenty-one ships in the U.S. Pacific Fleet, and thrust the United States into war.

The creation of the CIA in 1947 reflected more than anything else the determination of Congress and President Truman that Pearl Harbor should never happen again.

Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom.

Consider the case of two very similar companies, Twitter and Tumblr. Both had brilliant, product-oriented founders in Evan “Ev” Williams and David Karp. Both were hot social media start-ups. Both grew at a remarkable rate after establishing product/ market fit. Both had a major impact on popular culture. Yet Twitter went public and achieved a market capitalization that peaked at nearly $ 37 billion, while Tumblr was acquired by Yahoo!—another start-up that used blitzscaling to become a scale-up, only to decline and fade away—for “only” $ 1 billion. Was this dumb luck on Twitter’s side? Perhaps. Luck always plays a larger role than founders, investors, and the media would like to admit. But a major difference was that Twitter could draw on numerous networks for advice and help that Tumblr could not. For example, Twitter was able to bring in Dick Costolo, a savvy executive with prior scaling experience at Google. In contrast, even though Tumblr was arguably the most prominent start-up in its New York City ecosystem, it couldn’t easily draw upon a pool of local talent who had experience dealing with rapid growth. According to Greylock’s John Lilly, for every executive role that Tumblr needed to fill, there were less than a handful of candidates in all of New York City.

The David Dao incident is a classic example of how a poor articulation of company values can weaken the culture. The employees on the ground believed they needed to bump passengers from the flight so that United could get another flight crew to their plane (i.e., “flying right”) and that meeting metrics such as on-time departures and flight cancellations was more important than treating customers with “respect and dignity” (which most of us would agree does not include breaking their noses and knocking out their teeth). In contrast, Southwest Airlines is not only clear about its company values but makes them the emphasis of hiring and management. The mentality isn’t: “We’ll know it when we see it.” Instead, it is: “Does this person already live the way we do?” The company uses behavioral interview questions to determine whether candidates are a cultural fit. For example, to determine someone’s ability to be a selfless team player, they might ask her to describe a time when she went above and beyond to help a coworker succeed. The airline acknowledges that certain positions call for specific skill sets. As Southwest puts it, “We’re not going to hire a pilot who has a great attitude but can’t fly a plane!” But, when it comes down to two equally qualified candidates, the one who lives Southwest’s values receives the offer. And, even when Southwest finds a qualified candidate who doesn’t have the right values, it will keep looking until it finds someone who does—no matter how long the job has gone unfilled.

Culture is critical because it influences how people act in the absence of specific directives and rules, or when those rules reach their breaking point. In a notorious example from 2017, acting at the request of United Airlines, Chicago Department of Aviation employees forcibly dragged passenger David Dao off an overbooked flight, breaking his nose, knocking out two of his teeth, and giving him a significant concussion in the process. The next morning, United CEO Oscar Munoz sent a rather perplexing e-mail to United Airlines employees.

the autonomous-driving side of things, Alphabet (formerly Google), which has logged several million self-driving-car test miles, continues to lead the pack. At the end of 2016, it created a new business division, called Waymo, for its autonomous driving technology. In May 2017, Waymo and Lyft announced that they would work together on developing the technology, and later in the year, Alphabet invested $1 billion in the start-up. Others, like Cruise Automation (which GM acquired for $1 billion) and Comma.ai, which offers open-source autonomous driving technology in the same vein as Google’s Android mobile operating system, are chasing hard. Baidu, China’s leading Internet search company, has an autonomous-driving research center in Sunnyvale. Byton—backed by China’s Tencent, Foxconn, and the China Harmony New Energy auto retailer group—has an office in Mountain View, as does Didi Chuxing, the Chinese ride-sharing company in which Apple invested $1 billion. Many of these companies have taken not just inspiration but also talent from Tesla. Part of the value of an innovation cluster like Silicon Valley lies in the dispersal of intellectual labor from one node to the next. For instance, PayPal is well known in the Valley for producing a number of high performers who left the company to start, join, or invest in others. The so-called PayPal Mafia includes Reid Hoffman, who founded LinkedIn; Max Levchin, whose most recent of several start-ups is the financial services company Affirm; Peter Thiel, a Facebook board member and President Trump–supporting venture capitalist who cofounded “big data” company Palantir; Jeremy Stoppelman, who started reviews site Yelp; Keith Rabois, who was chief operating officer at Square and then joined Khosla Ventures; David Sacks, who sold Yammer to Microsoft for $1.2 billion and later became CEO at Zenefits; Jawed Karim, who cofounded YouTube; and one Elon Musk.

The structures of collective and personal life in Polish shtetls were so exactly defined as to be infinitely replicable — as the structure of a honeycomb is replicable throughout a beehive. Each shtetl was a self-contained world, and each was utterly recognizable as an instance of its kind. This consistency, the patterned predictability of life, was undoubtedly part of the shtetl's strength. But it also meant that the shtetl was a deeply conservative organism, resistant to innovation, individuality, or rebellion. It is hard to think of any analogues to the early shtetl society, for its character was part untouchable and part Brahmin, simultaneously ancient and pioneering, both pragmatically materialistic and sternly religious. It was a peculiar, idiosyncratic form of a rural, populist theocracy.

To encourage guests to buy sweatshirts and warm clothing, the Disney Clothiers, Ltd store is kept several degrees cooler than the other shops on Main Street.

There is a sizeable colony of feral cats in and around Disneyland, although park-goers do not usually see them due to their nocturnal nature. The grounds crews leave them alone, primarily because (and how ironic is this?) they help keep the rodent population in check.

To avoid the lines at any popular attraction that does not offer a Fastpass, instead of heading there first, save it for last. It is park practice that unless an attraction plans to shut down early (cast members on the attraction will know if this is the case) anyone in line at the time of closing will be able to remain in line until they are able to board and ride.

The Enchanted Tiki Room is the only attraction in the park with its own restrooms. This is because it was initially planned as a restaurant with a dinner show, but the Audio-Animatronic part turned out to be so spectacular and well-received that the dining concept was scrapped before opening.

Since November 2005, it has become tradition that the turkey "pardoned" by the president of the United States on Thanksgiving Day is sent to Disneyland to live on the grounds of Big Thunder Ranch.

Anyone, not just cast members, can wake up Jose the Macaw in the Enchanted Tiki Room. Simply ask a cast member as you enter, while the audience is being seated.

A lesser-known spot from which to watch the nightly fireworks display is by the planters that surround King Arthur's Carousel. Not only does the edge of the planter provide a rare place to sit, but Tinkerbell's flight path takes her directly above you.

By request of the Anaheim Fire Department, Pirates of the Caribbean is equipped with a system that, in the event of an actual fire, automatically shuts down the authentic "burning town" effect found at the end of the ride, so that firefighters can pinpoint the real blaze and not waste time battling artificial flames.

Why Jewish Stars Have Six Points How happy I was that beautiful morning in May when the president of my student pulpit asked me for the story behind the six-pointed Star of David. Having just finished reading a scholarly monograph on that very subject, I launched a copious explanation of when Jews first started using the star, how they used it, and so on. I told her that Muslims had used it too, and called it the Star of Solomon; that Jews began putting it on their tombstones in the High Middle Ages; that it was taken over by mystics in the sixteenth century; and that in modern times, it was chiseled on synagogue walls, primarily because its straight-line design made it easy for stone masons to work with. Churches had crosses; synagogues had stars. The woman who asked the question was impatient with me and quickly shrugged off everything I had to say. “Rabbi,” she retorted, “the Star of David symbolizes the Jewish People. It has six points, you see, so no matter how you stand it up, it will always have two points on which to balance. From such a firm base, it cannot be toppled. Just so, we Jews are firmly entrenched, no matter what history brings us.

Edward Jay Epstein, contained

Then Turner was selected to work with the whiz kids under Robert McNamara in the 1960s, when systems analysis was all the rage. When Admiral Elmo Zumwalt became the new chief of naval operations in 1970, he put Turner in charge of new initiatives in his first sixty days. Through it all, Turner became convinced the military was hidebound and desperately needed new thinking. He once used systems analysis to study naval minesweeping and showed how it could be done better and faster from a helicopter than from a ship.

more than 1.8 million of them sent to prison camps. Now nearing the end of the standard eight-year term, the kulaks were soon to return; Stalin feared a wave of disgruntled and embittered people coming home. The hammer fell with a secret police order, No. 00447, in July 1937, which set the pattern for the mass killings of the following two years.

According to Conquest, two days after Sofia was executed, on December 12, 1937, Stalin and his premier, Vyacheslav Molotov, approved 3,167 death sentences—and then went to watch a movie. Not all the executions were approved at such a high level; on a day in October, the secret police chief, Nikolai Yezhov, and another official considered 551 names and sentenced every one of them to be shot.

So many people had been declared “enemies of the people” in those years that the orphanages were overflowing.

The whole time we were meeting, I wasn’t really sure whether you were actually CIA. The one thing that proved to me you were CIA and not KGB is when you gave me those medicines to test on my daughter. Because the KGB is heartless. They would have given me one pill and said, do it. I knew I was working with a humane organization when you gave me five medicines.

smuggle them across the border in a van, but a four-year-old girl? How to keep her quiet?

Rolph secured from the CIA five samples of sedatives suitable for a small child.

Stalin and his premier, Vyacheslav Molotov, approved 3,167 death sentences—and then went to watch a movie.

Much of it was simply letters from worker-correspondents, each known as a rabkor, who wrote short bits and pieces about mills and

a Pentax ME single-lens-reflex 35 mm camera and lens for copying documents, with a clamp to fasten it steady to a chair or table.

It is important to achieve a decisive breakthrough in the implementation of the plan!

KGB surveillance teams almost always followed a car from behind. They rarely pulled alongside.

possible for a car carrying a CIA officer to slip around a corner or two, momentarily out of view of the KGB.

given the distance from which the KGB followed cars in Moscow, it wasn’t necessary to have a three-dimensional dummy in the front seat, only a two-dimensional cutout.

Labor and employment firm Fisher & Phillips LLP opened a Seattle office by poaching partner Davis Bae from labor and employment competitor Jackson Lewis PC. Mr. Bea, an immigration specialist, will lead the office, which also includes new partners Nick Beermann and Catharine Morisset and one other lawyer. Fisher & Phillips has 31 offices around the country. Sara Randazzo LAW Cadwalader Hires New Partner as It Looks to Represent Activist Investors By Liz Hoffman and David Benoit | 698 words One of America’s oldest corporate law firms is diving into the business of representing activist investors, betting that these agitators are going mainstream—and offer a lucrative business opportunity for advisers. Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP has hired a new partner, Richard Brand, whose biggest clients include William Ackman’s Pershing Square Capital Management LP, among other activist investors. Mr. Brand, 35 years old, advised Pershing Square on its campaign at Allergan Inc. last year and a board coup at Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd. in 2012. He has also defended companies against activists and has worked on mergers-and-acquisitions deals. His hiring, from Kirkland & Ellis LLP, is a notable step by a major law firm to commit to representing activists, and to do so while still aiming to retain corporate clients. Founded in 1792, Cadwalader for decades has catered to big companies and banks, but going forward will also seek out work from hedge funds including Pershing Square and Sachem Head Capital Management LP, a Pershing Square spinout and another client of Mr. Brand’s. To date, few major law firms or Wall Street banks have tried to represent both corporations and activist investors, who generally take positions in companies and push for changes to drive up share prices. Most big law firms instead cater exclusively to companies, worried that lining up with activists will offend or scare off executives or create conflicts that could jeopardize future assignments. Some are dabbling in both camps. Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, for example, represented Trian Fund Management LP in its recent proxy fight at DuPont Co. and also is steering Time Warner Cable Inc.’s pending sale to Charter Communications Inc. Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP have done work for activist firm Third Point LLC. But most firms are more monogamous. Those on one end, most vocally Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, defend management, while a small band including Schulte Roth & Zabel LLP and Olshan Frome Wolosky LLP primarily represent activists. In embracing activist work, Cadwalader thinks it can serve both groups better, said Christopher Cox, chairman of the firm’s corporate group. “Traditional M&A and activism are becoming increasingly intertwined,” Mr. Cox said in an interview. “To be able to bring that perspective to the boardroom is a huge advantage. And when a threat does emerge, who’s better to defend a company than someone who’s seen it from the other side?” Mr. Cox said Cadwalader has been thinking about branching out into activism since late last year. The firm is also working with an activist fund launched earlier this year by Cadwalader’s former head of M&A, Jim Woolery, that hopes to take a friendlier stance toward companies. Mr. Cox also said he believes activism can be lucrative, pooh-poohing another reason some big law firms eschew such assignments—namely, that they don’t pay as well as, say, a large merger deal. “There is real money in activism today,” said Robert Jackson, a former lawyer at Wachtell and the U.S. Treasury Department who now teaches at Columbia University and who also notes that advising activists can generate regulatory work. “Law firms are businesses, and taking the stance that you’ll never, ever, ever represent an activist is a financial luxury that only a few firms have.” To be sure, the handful of law firms that work for both sides say they do so

known at the CIA as an L-pill. The L stood for “lethal.” The L-pill had been issued to Ogorodnik two years earlier, and he used it to commit suicide soon after his arrest. Guilsher realized that winning CIA headquarters’ approval for supplying one to Tolkachev was going to be very difficult. There were always fears at headquarters that an agent would panic and take the suicide pill unnecessarily or that it would be discovered and betray the spy. On May 1, headquarters cabled, “As we have on previous occasions, we would like to stall on this

asked the CIA for a lethal cyanide pill, to commit suicide in case he was discovered.

Saint Augustine: “The world is a book, and those who do not travel, read only a page.

The methods were important, but even more significant was the mind-set.

Knowing the KGB would be eager to learn every detail of his work with the CIA, he offered to write a confession.

They handed him his pen, and he bit down on the barrel with the cyanide capsule inside. He died on the spot, before the KGB could learn any more.

I got a response from the front office of the division, ‘Risky. Dangerous. Won’t work.

The KGB surveillance could be surprisingly unsophisticated.

John and Kissa more than once went to a closet to reach for an overcoat, only to find it was missing, apparently taken by the surveillance people to implant a microphone. The coat would mysteriously reappear later.

I replied, ‘Look, all this is risky and dangerous. But it will work.’ ” Forden later became the case officer for one of the CIA’s most productive and significant agents, Ryszard Kuklinski, a Polish army colonel who provided critical intelligence on the Warsaw Pact.34

Berlin was a cauldron of espionage on the front lines of the Cold War. The Berlin Operations Base, known as BOB, sat in the middle of the largest concentration of Soviet troops anywhere in the world. The CIA sought to recruit Soviets as agents or defectors,

the CIA knew that the Soviets routinely bombarded the U.S. embassy in Moscow with microwave signals. Turner brought this up constantly, saying he was worried about the “beams” at the embassy. Separately, after the fire, Turner wondered if the KGB could have deliberately caused the spark that started it, if

Soviet pilots had little autonomy. This was slow and clumsy.

The biggest hurdle for the exfiltration was Sheymov’s young daughter. Two adults could remain silent for the forty-five minutes or so it would take to

Studies show that during prime meal hours, when the self-serve food operations are at their busiest, the lines on the left side tend to be shorter.

I had several friends from law school who were very enterprising guys, much more so than the average law student. They each started businesses after practicing law at large firms for multiple years. What kind of businesses did they start? They started boutique law firms. This is completely unsurprising if you think about it. They’d spent years becoming good at delivering legal services. It was a field that they understood and could compete in. Their credentials translated too. People learn from what they’re doing and do it again on their own. It’s not just lawyers; the consulting firm Bain and Company was started by seven former partners and managers from the Boston Consulting Group. Myriad boutique investment banks and hedge funds have spun out of large financial organizations. You can see the same pattern in the startup world. After PayPal was acquired by eBay in 2002, its founders and employees went on to found or cofound LinkedIn (Reid Hoffman), YouTube (Steve Chen, Jawed Karim, and Chad Hurley), Yelp (Russel Simmons and Jeremy Stoppelman), Tesla Motors (Elon Musk), SpaceX (Musk again), Yammer (David Sacks), 500 Startups (Dave McClure), and many other companies. PayPal’s CEO, Peter Thiel, famously made a $500,000 investment in Facebook that grew to over $1 billion. In this sense, PayPal is one of the most prolific companies of recent times. But if you look at any successful growth company you’ll start to see their alumni show up doing parallel things. Former Apple employees founded or cofounded Android, Palm, Nest, and Handspring, companies that revolve around devices. Former Yahoo! employees founded Ycombinator, Cloudera, Hunch.com, AppNexus, Polyvore, and many other web-oriented companies. Organizations give rise to other organizations like themselves.

Petrov was the commander in charge when satellite data indicated there were five American ICBMs on their way to strike Moscow with nuclear weapons. For reasons having to do with human intuition, Petrov became suspicious of that attack information. Years later, he told Washington Post reporter David Hoffman what he was thinking at the time. “I had a funny feeling in my gut,” Petrov said, asking himself, Who starts a nuclear war against another superpower with just five ICBMs? In 1983, Petrov made the decision to interpret the early-warning signal as a “false alarm,” he said, thereby not sending a report up the chain of command. For his well-placed skepticism, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov famously became known as “the man who saved the world from nuclear war.

Isabel was waiting for Sophie in the lobby. “David Bloom,” she said with a smile. How lovely that something good had come of this difficult time, something unexpected and rare. “I was going to tell you,” Sophie vowed. “It’s just such lousy timing.” “There is no such thing,” Isabel said, utterly convinced that there was never a bad time to fall in love.

No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team. —Reid Hoffman, cofounder of LinkedIn

The stealing was so common and pervasive as to defy definition as criminal. “Here we are approaching the very core of socialism,” Luzhkov observed. “To a certain degree, everybody was involved, and everybody participated—and under socialism, this means nobody. That was the crucial point, the most corrupting effect of the ‘developed socialism.

Atlantic to France. Before long 150 ships, chartered and paid for by Hoffman’s ECA, were on the high seas carrying cargoes to harbors at Bordeaux, Liverpool, Rotterdam, and Genoa. The psychological effect of the first American ships arriving at ports on the continent, along with the promise of what was to come, cannot be overstated. For the Europeans and the British, the Marshall Plan revived hope for the future, a sense of confidence that economic and political recovery was indeed achievable. For the first time in years, wrote an Economist reporter, “it is fitting that the peoples of

one of the legends of Agrippa concerns a visit paid to his alchemical laboratory in Florence by the Wandering Jew himself. (In David Hoffman’s Chronicles of Cartaphilus, the Wandering Jew, the date is given as 1525.) Cartaphilus begged Agrippa to show him his childhood sweetheart in a magic mirror. Agrippa asked him to count off the decades since the girl died so that he could wave his wand for each decade; when the Jew reached 149, Agrippa began to feel dizzy; but the Jew went on numbering them until the mirror showed a scene 1,510 years earlier, in Palestine. The girl, Rebecca, appeared, and the Jew was so moved that he tried to speak to her—which Agrippa had strictly forbidden. The mirror immediately clouded over and the Jew fainted. On reviving, he identified himself as the Jew who struck Jesus when he was carrying the cross, and who has been condemned to walk the earth ever since.

In 1966, Angleton wrote that an “integrated and purposeful Socialist Bloc” had sought to spread false stories of “splits, evolution, power struggles, economic disasters [and] good and bad Communism” to a confused West. Once this program of strategic deception had succeeded, the Soviet Union would pick off the Western democracies, one by one.

Bank Stolichny, which would become the core of Smolensky’s business for the next decade, was registered on February 14, 1989, eight months before the Berlin Wall fell.

the late Soviet period, trading companies run by young hustlers and well-connected bureaucrats made quick fortunes this way. They bought oil cheap inside the country, paid bribes to get it across the border, sold it at world prices for hard currency, bought up personal computers from abroad, paid bribes to get the computers back inside the country, and sold them for fantastic profits, to

One line in the text, littlenoted until later, allowed the formation of financial or credit businesses as cooperatives; in other words, banks. Smolensky would eventually make a fortune from this small crack that had opened in decaying socialism. The cooperatives sprouted

I don’t know how it began, but I know how it ended. It occurred in the month of Av, the sign for which is Arieh, the lion. It is a month that signifies destruction for our people, a season when the stones in the desert are so hot you cannot touch them without burning your fingers, when fruit withers on the trees before it ripens and the seeds inside shake like a rattle, when the sky is white and rain will not fall. The first Temple had been destroyed in that month. Tools signified weapons and could not be used in constructing the holiest of holy places; therefore the great warrior king David had been prohibited from building the Temple because he had known the evils of war. Instead, the honor fell to his son King Solomon, who called upon the shamir, a worm who could cut through stone, thereby creating glory to God without the use of metal tools.

In the Universal Waite Card, focus is placed on gathering power and knowledge, as shown by the pentacle on the figure’s head. The pentacle on the figure’s heart indicates the importance of reserving emotional strength. Emotional and mental strength are extremely critical factors that determine whether an individual makes it through a rough point in time or not. Finally, the pentacles on the figure’s feet indicate the importance of a solid foundation. Before an individual can rise to success, his foundation must be rock-solid and reliable, if not, he will fall.

Being faithful to deserving people, to a cause, and to a dream are important to success.

The Tower card reminds us that when it is time to move forward in life onto bigger and greater things, it is important to first of all give up things that might hold us back first. Now what may be holding you back from progressing onto bigger things as a person might not be as serious as a building, it might be a habit or a person. Whatever it is holding you back, you have to let it go so you can spring forth and actually live up to your potentials.

The star also reminds us that it doesn’t matter what’s going on in our surroundings, we owe it to ourselves, and to the people who look up to us to be a beacon of hope and brilliance. It doesn’t matter how dark the night sky is, it doesn’t matter whether the moon is full, halved or absent, the stars continue shine with the best of their abilities, lighting up the night sky with their magical glows. Therefore, the star card reminds us to try out best to shine brilliantly regardless of our situations, and to never let depressing circumstances weigh us down. Come rain, come sunshine, we must always strive to bless the world with the amazing brilliance of our glow.

He projected a fresh, moralistic approach to government—“I’ll never tell a lie”—and a break with the sordid scandals in Washington

Food shortages were common, but Domaradsky was permitted to shop at the small elite “Ryabinka” grocery store for directors of a nearby physics institute. While Soviet citizens were in lines for the basics, the store carried such rare commodities as instant coffee and caviar, delivering them to his door and taking his order for the next delivery.

The home is a place to recover, heal, rejuvenate and celebrate, not a place to perpetually remain in. Some people may interpret the home as a symbol of boredom and complacency especially if they cherish danger and intense circumstances. The main point to note, however, is the integrity of the home must be preserved, but the home should not be a permanent hiding place. You still need to go out and fight your battles.

For Smolensky, the end of socialism began with printing Bibles.

I’m not authorizing anything that would require my authorization,” said Hoffman. “Got that?” Rogers said yes. “If that’s understood, then you have my authorization

The Americans were dumbstruck. A man with the keys to the kingdom, the ultrasecret codes to Soviet communications, was volunteering to defect.

Fifteen minutes had already passed, and Tolkachev had one more request. He handed Rolph a piece of paper. When Rolph looked down, he saw it was printed in English in block letters: 1. LED ZEPPELIN 2. PINK FLOYD 3. GENESIS 4. ALAN PARSONS PROJECT 5. EMERSON, LAKE AND PALMER 6. URIAH HEEP 7. THE WHO 8. THE BEATLES 9. THE YES 10. RICK WAKEMAN 11. NAZARETH 12. ALICE COOPER

Whereas Lenin’s formula was equality in poverty, “we are advocates of equality in the right to be rich.

At Woodland, in walked David Geffen, Anjelica Huston, maybe Dustin Hoffman, tennis shoes under his arm. “Did I miss the game?” Alain Delon … Mengers and Evans at the pool, drinking a bottle of white wine cellar–plucked for the occasion: “Now really, Sue … Do you get white wine at Columbia?” Giggling: “You and I have never agreed on any kind of material. And so far you’ve been right.” Now down to casting. “I think of De Niro.…

The laws made almost every businessman and taxpayer a lawbreaker—and thus a potential criminal and thus a willing supplicant to power and, finally, a briber.

The future threat won’t be neatly divisible into the categories we use today (state versus nonstate, domestic versus foreign, or war versus crime). As the Mumbai, Mogadishu, and Kingston examples illustrate, future threats will be hybrid: that is, they’ll include irregular actors and methods, but also state actors that use irregulars as their weapon of choice or adopt asymmetric methods to minimize detection and avoid retaliation. Neither the concept nor the reality of hybrid conflict is new—writers such as Frank Hoffman, T. X. Hammes, and Erin Simpson have all examined hybrid warfare in detail. At the same time, Pakistan’s use of the Taliban, LeT, and the Haqqani network, Iran’s use of Hezbollah and the Quds Force, or the sponsorship of insurgencies and terrorist groups by regimes such as Muammar Gadhafi’s Libya, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and the Soviet Union, go back over many decades.

The Nine of Pentacles signifies the product of discipline, hard work and dedication. The simple, yet hard truth is that in a society where a lot of people are settling for an average existence, striving to be spectacular can be immensely difficult. Therefore, trying harder than everybody to be excellent, and finally achieving success, is a truly remarkable feeling.

You have succeeded in creating a name that would not be tarnished, a name that will carry on for generations after you. You have constructed an empire. The card is about looking back at your accomplishments with pride and being appreciative of all you have achieved.

Success is never fully achieved; you keep working harder to attain even bigger levels of success. This card, therefore, symbolizes looking ahead into the future with supreme confidence and self-assurance. You have come this far, and you still have more to achieve.

Therefore, as individuals feeling trapped or in danger, the key to freedom and eventual success is not being nervous, afraid or angry – it is remaining calm while everyone around you is losing their heads, and finding a logical solution in the face of great danger.

The stars remind us never to forget the power in serenity and keeping calm even when everyone around us is losing themselves to the chaos. It is our responsibility to recognize the power in being cool, calm and collected even in the middle of madness, because it is only with our placidity that we can help to restore the order that has been lost. Starlight, therefore, brilliantly illustrates the relationship between calmness and enduring strength.

Do not just be contented with being average because settling for less is a habit that breeds mediocrity. Make excellence your watchword and pursue it relentlessly at all times.

Even though the daylight has gone, and darkness has replaced it, the stars remind us to always endeavor to find the light in the darkness; the hope in the despair.

When the problems of life come knocking and we feel desolate, lonely, and alone, we must always remember that our fears are characteristic of an individual being in the dark. We must, therefore, always keep in mind that darkness is just a temporary state of affairs, not the true representation of things. We must always keep in mind that the darkness will be lifted and good times will come again.