How To Effectively Integrate Quotes

There are only two ways to influence human behavior: you can manipulate it or you can inspire it. Very few people or companies can clearly articulate WHY they do WHAT they do. By WHY I mean your purpose, cause or belief - WHY does your company exist? WHY do you get out of bed every morning? And WHY should anyone care? People don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it. We are drawn to leaders and organizations that are good at communicating what they believe. Their ability to make us feel like we belong, to make us feel special, safe and not alone is part of what gives them the ability to inspire us. For values or guiding principles to be truly effective they have to be verbs. It’s not “integrity,” it’s “always do the right thing.” It’s not “innovation,” it’s “look at the problem from a different angle.” Articulating our values as verbs gives us a clear idea - we have a clear idea of how to act in any situation. Happy employees ensure happy customers. And happy customers ensure happy shareholders—in that order. Leading is not the same as being the leader. Being the leader means you hold the highest rank, either by earning it, good fortune or navigating internal politics. Leading, however, means that others willingly follow you—not because they have to, not because they are paid to, but because they want to. You don’t hire for skills, you hire for attitude. You can always teach skills. Great companies don’t hire skilled people and motivate them, they hire already motivated people and inspire them. People are either motivated or they are not. Unless you give motivated people something to believe in, something bigger than their job to work toward, they will motivate themselves to find a new job and you’ll be stuck with whoever’s left. Trust is maintained when values and beliefs are actively managed. If companies do not actively work to keep clarity, discipline and consistency in balance, then trust starts to break down. All organizations start with WHY, but only the great ones keep their WHY clear year after year.

BETRAYAL No failure in Life, whether of love or money, is ever really that simple; it usually involves a type of a shadowy betrayal, buried in a secret, mass grave of shared hopes and dreams. That universal mass grave exists in a private cemetery that most... both those suffering from the loss, but especially those committing the betrayal, refuse to acknowledge its existence. When you realize you've been deeply betrayed, fear really hits you. That's what you feel first. And then it's anger and frustration. Then disspointment and disilussionment. Part of the problem is how little we understand about the ultimate effects and consequences of betrayal on our hearts and spirits; and on trust and respect for our fellow brothers and sisters. In writing, there are only really a few good stories to tell, and in the end, and betrayal and the failure of love is one of the most powerful stories to tell. Tragedy in life normally comes with betrayal and compromise- by trading in our integrity and failing to treat life and others in our life, with respect and dignity. That's really where the truest and the most tragic failures comes from... they come making the choice to betray another soul, and in turn, giving up a peice of your own.

Working an integral or performing a linear regression is something a computer can do quite effectively. Understanding whether the result makes sense—or deciding whether the method is the right one to use in the first place—requires a guiding human hand. When we teach mathematics we are supposed to be explaining how to be that guide. A math course that fails to do so is essentially training the student to be a very slow, buggy version of Microsoft Excel.

I remember clearly the deaths of three men. One was the richest man of the century, who, having clawed his way to wealth through the souls and bodies of men, spent many years trying to buy back the love he had forfeited and by that process performed great service to the world and, perhaps, had much more than balanced the evils of his rise. I was on a ship when he died. The news was posted on the bulletin board, and nearly everyone recieved the news with pleasure. Several said, "Thank God that son of a bitch is dead." Then there was a man, smart as Satan, who, lacking some perception of human dignity and knowing all too well every aspect of human weakness and wickedness, used his special knowledge to warp men, to buy men, to bribe and threaten and seduce until he found himself in a position of great power. He clothed his motives in the names of virtue, and I have wondered whether he ever knew that no gift will ever buy back a man's love when you have removed his self-love. A bribed man can only hate his briber. When this man died the nation rang with praise... There was a third man, who perhaps made many errors in performance but whose effective life was devoted to making men brave and dignified and good in a time when they were poor and frightened and when ugly forces were loose in the world to utilize their fears. This man was hated by few. When he died the people burst into tears in the streets and their minds wailed, "What can we do now?" How can we go on without him?" In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, mo matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror....we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.

For values or guiding principles to be truly effective they have to be verbs. It’s not “integrity,” it’s “always do the right thing.” It’s not “innovation,” it’s “look at the problem from a different angle.” Articulating our values as verbs gives us a clear idea … we

The act of making music, clothes, art, or even food has a very different, and possibly more beneficial effect on us than simply consuming those things. And yet for a very long time, the attitude of the state toward teaching and funding the arts has been in direct opposition to fostering creativity among the general population. It can often seem that those in power don’t want us to enjoy making things for ourselves—they’d prefer to establish a cultural hierarchy that devalues our amateur efforts and encourages consumption rather than creation. This might sound like I believe there is some vast conspiracy at work, which I don’t, but the situation we find ourselves in is effectively the same as if there were one. The way we are taught about music, and the way it’s socially and economically positioned, affect whether it’s integrated (or not) into our lives, and even what kind of music might come into existence in the future. Capitalism tends toward the creation of passive consumers, and in many ways this tendency is counterproductive.

Heroism can be defined as having four key features: (a) it must be engaged in voluntarily; (b) it must involve a risk or potential sacrifice, such as the threat of death, an immediate threat to physical integrity, a long-term threat to health, or the potential for serious degradation of one’s quality of life; (c) it must be conducted in service to one or more other people or the community as a whole; and(d) it must be without secondary, extrinsic gain anticipated at the time of the act. Heroism in service of a noble idea is usually not as dramatic as

But while illness is about how things break down — both in function and in description — health is about integration. No matter what the condition, the goal is to move toward making the brain more whole.

He was perfectly astonished with the historical account gave him of our affairs during the last century; protesting “it was only a heap of conspiracies, rebellions, murders, massacres, revolutions, banishments, the very worst effects that avarice, faction, hypocrisy, perfidiousness, cruelty, rage, madness, hatred, envy, lust, malice, and ambition, could produce.” His majesty, in another audience, was at the pains to recapitulate the sum of all I had spoken; compared the questions he made with the answers I had given; then taking me into his hands, and stroking me gently, delivered himself in these words, which I shall never forget, nor the manner he spoke them in: “My little friend Grildrig, you have made a most admirable panegyric upon your country; you have clearly proved, that ignorance, idleness, and vice, are the proper ingredients for qualifying a legislator; that laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied, by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them. I observe among you some lines of an institution, which, in its original, might have been tolerable, but these half erased, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by corruptions. It does not appear, from all you have said, how any one perfection is required toward the procurement of any one station among you; much less, that men are ennobled on account of their virtue; that priests are advanced for their piety or learning; soldiers, for their conduct or valour; judges, for their integrity; senators, for the love of their country; or counsellors for their wisdom. As for yourself,” continued the king, “who have spent the greatest part of your life in travelling, I am well disposed to hope you may hitherto have escaped many vices of your country. But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.

In Hebrew, the Lord’s language, the word for time is ZeMaN, which is linked to the word for invitation. This serves to remind us that the passage of time is an invitation to make the most of it, to manage it effectively, and to integrate our understanding of how the world works with a true and accurate perception of the reality of time.

As the Big Shift takes hold, companies are no longer places that exist to drive down costs by getting increasingly bigger. They’re places that support and organize talented individuals to get better faster by working with others. The rationale of the firm shifts from scalable efficiency to scalable learning—the ability to improve performance more rapidly and learn faster by effectively integrating more and more participants distributed across traditional institutional boundaries.

I'd forgotten, I said to him, how relieving the anonymity of city life could be. People weren't forever having to explain themselves here: a city was a decipherable interface, a sort of lexicon of human behaviour that did half the work of decoding the mystery of self, so you could effectively communicate through a kind of shorthand. Where I had lived before, in the countryside, each individual was the unique, often illegible representation of their own acts and aims. So much got lost or mistaken, I said, in the process of self-explanation; so many words failed to maintain an integral meaning.

The Adult Whose Needs Were Mostly Met in Childhood… • Is satisfied with reasonable dividends of need-fulfillment in relationships. • Knows how to love unconditionally and yet tolerates no abuse or stuckness in relationships. • Changes the locus of trust from others to himself so that he receives loyalty when others show it and handles disappointment when others betray. The Adult Whose Needs Were Mostly Not Met in Childhood… • Exaggerates the needs so that they become insatiable or addictive. • Creates situations that reenact the original hurts and rejections, seek relationships that stimulate and maintain self-defeating beliefs rather than relationships that confront and dispel them, • Refuses to notice how abused or unhappy she is and uses the pretext of hoping for change or of coping with what is unchanging. • Lets her feelings go underground. “If the only safe thing for me was to let my feelings disappear, how can I now permit the self-exposure and vulnerability it takes to be loved?” • Repeats the childhood error of equating negative attention with love or neurotic anxiousness with solicitude. • Is afraid to receive the true love, self-disclosure, or generosity of others. In effect: cannot receive now what was not received originally.

We make up hidden stories that tell us who is against us and who is with us. Whom we can trust and who is not to be trusted. Conspiracy thinking is all about fear-based self-protection and our intolerance for uncertainty. When we depend on self-protecting narratives often enough, they become our default stories. And we must not forget that storytelling is a powerful integration tool. We start weaving these hidden, false stories into our lives and they eventually distort who we are and how we relate to others. When unconscious storytelling becomes our default, we often keep tripping over the same issue, staying down when we fall, and having different versions of the same problem in our relationships—we’ve got the story on repeat. Burton explains that our brains like predictable storytelling. He writes, “In effect, well-oiled patterns of observation encourage our brains to compose a story that we expect to hear.” The men and women who have cultivated rising strong practices in their lives became aware of the traps in these first stories, whereas the participants who continued to struggle the most appeared to have gotten stuck in those stories. The good news is that people aren’t born with an exceptional understanding of the stories they make up, nor does it just dawn on them one day. They practiced. Sometimes for years. They set out with the intention to become aware and they tried until it worked. They captured their conspiracies and confabulations. Capturing

AI won’t replace humans, but people who can use it will.” This sounds reassuring, but it oversimplifies the complex future of work and AI integration. Experts predict a surge in opportunities, but the intricate interplay between cognification, mass automation, and how we work remains uncharted. The net effect of AI on employment is unknown - we have no data on the future.

The bigger the picture, the more unique the potential human contribution. Our greatest strength is the exact opposite of narrow specialization. It is the ability to integrate broadly. According to Gary Marcus, a psychology and neuroscience professor, who sold his machine learning company to Uber, "In narrow enough worlds, humans may not have much to contribute much longer.

The realization that every act, every word, every thought of ours not only influences our environment but for some mysterious reason forms an integral and important part of the Universe, fits into it as if by necessity so to say, in the very moment we do, or say, or think it – is an overwhelming and even shattering experience. The tremendous responsibility of it is terrifying. If all of us only knew that the smallest act of ours, or a tiny thought, has such far-reaching effects as to set in motion forces which perhaps could shatter a galaxy…If we know it deeply and absolutely, if this realization becomes engraved permanently on our hearts, on our minds, how careful we would act and speak and think. How precious life would become in its integral oneness.

In order to assimilate the culture of the oppressor and venture into his fold, the colonized subject has to pawn some of his own intellectual possessions. For instance, one of the things he has had to assimilate is the way the colonialist bourgeoisie thinks. This is apparent in the colonized intellectual's inaptitude to engage in dialogue. For he is unable to make himself inessential when confronted with a purpose or idea. On the other hand, when he operates among the people he is constantly awestruck. He is literally disarmed by their good faith and integrity. He is then constantly at risk of becoming a demagogue. He turns into a kind of mimic man who nods his assent to every word by the people, transformed by him into an arbiter of truth. But the fellah, the unemployed and the starving do not lay claim to truth. They do not say they represent the truth because they are the truth in their very being. During this period the intellectual behaves objectively like a vulgar opportunist. His maneuvering, in fact, is still at work. The people would never think of rejecting him or cutting the ground from under his feet. What the people want is for everything to be pooled together. The colonized intellectual's insertion into this human tide will find itself on hold because of his curious obsession with detail. It is not that the people are opposed to analysis. They appreciate clarification, understand the reasoning behind an argument, and like to see where they are going. But at the start of his cohabitation with the people the colonized intellectual gives priority to detail and tends to forget the very purpose of the struggle - the defeat of colonialism. Swept along by the many facets of the struggle, he tends to concentrate on local tasks, undertaken zealously but almost always too pedantically. He does not always see the overall picture. He introduces the notion of disciplines, specialized areas and fields into that awesome mixer and grinder called a people's revolution. Committed to certain frontline issues he tends to lose sight of the unity of the movement and in the event of failure at the local level he succumbs to doubt, even despair. The people, on the other hand, take a global stance from the very start. "Bread and land: how do we go about getting bread and land?" And this stubborn, apparently limited, narrow-minded aspect of the people is finally the most rewarding and effective model.

Liber Novus thus presents a series of active imaginations together with Jung's attempt to understand their significance. This work of understanding encompasses a number of interlinked threads: an attempt to understand himself and to integrate and develop the various components of his personality; an attempt to understand the structure of the human personality in general; an attempt to understand the relation of the individual to present-day society and to the community of the dead; an attempt to understand the psychological and historical effects of Christianity; and an attempt to grasp the future religious development of the West. Jung discusses many other themes in the work, including the nature of self-knowledge; the nature of the soul; the relations of thinking and feeling and the psychological types; the relation of inner and outer masculinity and femininity; the uniting of opposites; solitude; the value of scholarship and learning; the status of science; the significance of symbols and how they are to be understood; the meaning of the war; madness, divine madness, and psychiatry; how the Imitation of Christ is to be understood today; the death of God; the historical significance of Nietzsche; and the relation of magic and reason.

the fact is, our relationships to these corporations are not unambiguous. some memebers of negativland genuinely liked pepsi products. mca grew up loving star wars and didn't mind having his work sent all over the united states to all the "cool, underground magazines" they were marketing to--why would he? sam gould had a spiritual moment in the shower listening to a cd created, according to sophie wong, so that he would talk about tylenol with his independent artist friends--and he did. many of my friends' daughters will be getting american girl dolls and books as gifts well into the foreseeable future. some skateboarders in washington, dc, were asked to create an ad campaign for the east coast summer tour, and they all love minor threat--why not use its famous album cover? how about shilling for converse? i would have been happy to ten years ago. so what's really changed? the answer is that two important things have changed: who is ultimately accountable for veiled corporate campaigns that occasionally strive to obsfucate their sponsorship and who is requesting our participation in such campaigns. behind converse and nike sb is nike, a company that uses shit-poor labor policies and predatory marketing that effectively glosses over their shit-poor labor policies, even to an audience that used to know better. behind team ouch! was an underground-savvy brainreservist on the payroll of big pharma; behind the recent wave of street art in hip urban areas near you was omd worldwide on behalf of sony; behind your cool hand-stenciled vader shirt was lucasfilm; and behind a recent cool crafting event was toyota. no matter how you participated in these events, whether as a contributor, cultural producer, viewer, or even critic, these are the companies that profited from your attention.

Not being perfect, we reject ourselves. And the level of self-rejection depends upon how effective the adults were in breaking our integrity. After domestication it is no longer about being good enough for anybody else. We are not good enough for ourselves because we don't fit with our own image of perfection. We cannot forgive ourselves for not being what we wish to be, or rather what we believe we should be. We cannot forgive ourselves for not being perfect.

Yann LeCun's strategy provides a good example of a much more general notion: the exploitation of innate knowledge. Convolutional neural networks learn better and faster than other types of neural networks because they do not learn everything. They incorporate, in their very architecture, a strong hypothesis: what I learn in one place can be generalized everywhere else. The main problem with image recognition is invariance: I have to recognize an object, whatever its position and size, even if it moves to the right or left, farther or closer. It is a challenge, but it is also a very strong constraint: I can expect the very same clues to help me recognize a face anywhere in space. By replicating the same algorithm everywhere, convolutional networks effectively exploit this constraint: they integrate it into their very structure. Innately, prior to any learning, the system already “knows” this key property of the visual world. It does not learn invariance, but assumes it a priori and uses it to reduce the learning space-clever indeed!

The most effective way to overcome both procrastination and reluctance and resistance to practicing is to just do it. Nothing works as quickly or effectively as diligence. The simple act of consistently sitting down and placing your attention on the meditation object, day after day, is the essential first step from which everything else in the Ten Stages flows. Then, once seated, you must train yourself, gently and without self-judgment, to actually meditate rather than engage in some more entertaining mental activity. Notice that I said “train yourself,” not “force” or “discipline yourself.” Force, guilt, and willpower won’t produce a sustainable practice, not least because of the negative emotions they stir up. Training yourself means working on your motivation and intentions until the simple acts of sitting down and meditating follow naturally. Then, you repeat those activities every day until they turn into habits. Once you start practicing regularly, you will be surprised by how quickly meditation becomes easier and more gratifying.

great. This is a good description of Rovio, which was around for six years and underwent layoffs before the “instant” success of the Angry Birds video game franchise. In the case of the Five Guys restaurant chain, the founders spent fifteen years tweaking their original handful of restaurants in Virginia, finding the right bun bakery, the right number of times to shake the french fries before serving, how best to assemble a burger, and where to source their potatoes before expanding nationwide. Most businesses require a complex network of relationships to function, and these relationships take time to build. In many instances you have to be around for a few years to receive consistent recognition. It takes time to develop connections with investors, suppliers, and vendors. And it takes time for staff and founders to gain effectiveness in their roles and become a strong team.* So, yes, the bar is high when you want to start a company. You’ll have the chance to work on something you own and care about from day to day. You’ll be 100 percent engaged and motivated, and doing something you believe in. You can lead an integrated life, as opposed to a compartmentalized one in which you play a role in an office and then try to forget about it when you get home. You can define an organization, not the other way around. But even if you quit your job, hunker down for years, work hard for uncertain reward, and ask everyone you know for help, there’s still a great chance that your new business will not succeed. Over 50 percent of companies fail within their first three years.2 There’s a quote I like from an unknown source: “Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t, so that you can spend the rest of your life like most people can’t.

The alienating effects of wealth and modernity on the human experience start virtually at birth and never let up. Infants in hunter-gatherer societies are carried by their mothers as much as 90 percent of the time, which roughly corresponds to carrying rates among other primates. One can get an idea of how important this kind of touch is to primates from an infamous experiment conducted in the 1950s by a primatologist and psychologist named Harry Harlow. Baby rhesus monkeys were separated from their mothers and presented with the choice of two kinds of surrogates: a cuddly mother made out of terry cloth or an uninviting mother made out of wire mesh. The wire mesh mother, however, had a nipple that dispensed warm milk. The babies took their nourishment as quickly as possible and then rushed back to cling to the terry cloth mother, which had enough softness to provide the illusion of affection. Clearly, touch and closeness are vital to the health of baby primates—including humans. In America during the 1970s, mothers maintained skin-to-skin contact with babies as little as 16 percent of the time, which is a level that traditional societies would probably consider a form of child abuse. Also unthinkable would be the modern practice of making young children sleep by themselves. In two American studies of middle-class families during the 1980s, 85 percent of young children slept alone in their own room—a figure that rose to 95 percent among families considered “well educated.” Northern European societies, including America, are the only ones in history to make very young children sleep alone in such numbers. The isolation is thought to make many children bond intensely with stuffed animals for reassurance. Only in Northern European societies do children go through the well-known developmental stage of bonding with stuffed animals; elsewhere, children get their sense of safety from the adults sleeping near them. The point of making children sleep alone, according to Western psychologists, is to make them “self-soothing,” but that clearly runs contrary to our evolution. Humans are primates—we share 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees—and primates almost never leave infants unattended, because they would be extremely vulnerable to predators. Infants seem to know this instinctively, so being left alone in a dark room is terrifying to them. Compare the self-soothing approach to that of a traditional Mayan community in Guatemala: “Infants and children simply fall asleep when sleepy, do not wear specific sleep clothes or use traditional transitional objects, room share and cosleep with parents or siblings, and nurse on demand during the night.” Another study notes about Bali: “Babies are encouraged to acquire quickly the capacity to sleep under any circumstances, including situations of high stimulation, musical performances, and other noisy observances which reflect their more complete integration into adult social activities.

From his point of view and at the level where he had chosen to do his dreadful work, Hitler was perfectly correct in his estimate of human nature. To those of us who look at men and women as individuals rather than as members of crowds, or of regimented collec­tives, he seems hideously wrong. In an age of accelerat­ing over-population, of accelerating over-organization and ever more efficient means of mass communication, how can we preserve the integrity and reassert the value of the human individual? This is a question that can still be asked and perhaps effectively answered. A generation from now it may be too late to find an answer and perhaps impossible, in the stifling collec­tive climate of that future time, even to ask the ques­tion.

If government had declined to build racially separate public housing in cities where segregation hadn’t previously taken root, and instead had scattered integrated developments throughout the community, those cities might have developed in a less racially toxic fashion, with fewer desperate ghettos and more diverse suburbs. If the federal government had not urged suburbs to adopt exclusionary zoning laws, white flight would have been minimized because there would have been fewer racially exclusive suburbs to which frightened homeowners could flee. If the government had told developers that they could have FHA guarantees only if the homes they built were open to all, integrated working-class suburbs would likely have matured with both African Americans and whites sharing the benefits. If state courts had not blessed private discrimination by ordering the eviction of African American homeowners in neighborhoods where association rules and restrictive covenants barred their residence, middle-class African Americans would have been able gradually to integrate previously white communities as they developed the financial means to do so. If churches, universities, and hospitals had faced loss of tax-exempt status for their promotion of restrictive covenants, they most likely would have refrained from such activity. If police had arrested, rather than encouraged, leaders of mob violence when African Americans moved into previously white neighborhoods, racial transitions would have been smoother. If state real estate commissions had denied licenses to brokers who claimed an “ethical” obligation to impose segregation, those brokers might have guided the evolution of interracial neighborhoods. If school boards had not placed schools and drawn attendance boundaries to ensure the separation of black and white pupils, families might not have had to relocate to have access to education for their children. If federal and state highway planners had not used urban interstates to demolish African American neighborhoods and force their residents deeper into urban ghettos, black impoverishment would have lessened, and some displaced families might have accumulated the resources to improve their housing and its location. If government had given African Americans the same labor-market rights that other citizens enjoyed, African American working-class families would not have been trapped in lower-income minority communities, from lack of funds to live elsewhere. If the federal government had not exploited the racial boundaries it had created in metropolitan areas, by spending billions on tax breaks for single-family suburban homeowners, while failing to spend adequate funds on transportation networks that could bring African Americans to job opportunities, the inequality on which segregation feeds would have diminished. If federal programs were not, even to this day, reinforcing racial isolation by disproportionately directing low-income African Americans who receive housing assistance into the segregated neighborhoods that government had previously established, we might see many more inclusive communities. Undoing the effects of de jure segregation will be incomparably difficult. To make a start, we will first have to contemplate what we have collectively done and, on behalf of our government, accept responsibility.

Security represents your sense of worth, your identity, your emotional anchorage, your self-esteem, your basic personal strength or lack of it. Guidance means your source of direction in life. Encompassed by your map, your internal frame of reference that interprets for you what is happening out there, are standards or principles or implicit criteria that govern moment by moment decision making and doing. *** Wisdom is your perspective on life, your sense of balance, your understanding of how the various parts and principles apply and relate to each other. It embraces judgment, discernment, comprehension. It is a gestalt or oneness, an integrated wholeness. Power is the faculty or capacity to act, the strength and potency to accomplish something. It is the vital energy to make choices and decisions. It also includes the capacity to overcome deeply embedded habits and to cultivate higher, more effective ones.

If the subjective consciousness prefers the ideas and opinions of collective consciousness and identifies with them, then the contents of the collective unconscious are repressed. The repression has typical consequences: the energy-charge of the repressed contents adds itself, in some measure,124 to that of the repressing factor, whose effectiveness is increased accordingly. The higher its charge mounts, the more the repressive attitude acquires a fanatical character and the nearer it comes to conversion into its opposite, i.e., an enantiodromia. And the more highly charged the collective consciousness, the more the ego forfeits its practical importance. It is, as it were, absorbed by the opinions and tendencies of collective consciousness, and the result of that is the mass man, the ever-ready victim of some wretched “ism.” The ego keeps its integrity only if it does not identify with one of the opposites, and if it understands how to hold the balance between them

Revelation. I understand the mechanism of my own thinking. I know precisely how I know, and my understanding is recursive. I understand the infinite regress of this self-knowing, not by proceeding step by step endlessly, but by apprehending the limit. The nature of recursive cognition is clear to me. A new meaning of the term ‘self-aware.’ Fiat logos. I know my mind in terms of a language more expressive than any I’d previously imagined. Like God creating order from chaos with an utterance, I make myself anew with this language. It is meta-self-descriptive and self-editing; not only can it describe thought, it can describe and modify its own operations as well, at all levels. What Gödel would have given to see this language, where modifying a statement causes the entire grammar to be adjusted. With this language, I can see how my mind is operating. I don’t pretend to see my own neurons firing; such claims belong to John Lilly and his LSD experiments of the sixties. What I can do is perceive the gestalts; I see the mental structures forming, interacting. I see myself thinking, and I see the equations that describe my thinking, and I see myself comprehending the equations, and I see how the equations describe their being comprehended. I know how they make up my thoughts. These thoughts. Initially I am overwhelmed by all this input, paralyzed with awareness of my self. It is hours before I can control the flood of self-describing information. I haven’t filtered it away, nor pushed it into the background. It’s become integrated into my mental processes, for use during my normal activities. It will be longer before I can take advantage of it, effortlessly and effectively, the way a dancer uses her kinesthetic knowledge. All that I once knew theoretically about my mind, I now see detailed explicitly. The undercurrents of sex, aggression, and self-preservation, translated by the conditioning of my childhood, clash with and are sometimes disguised as rational thought. I recognize all the causes of my every mood, the motives behind my every decision. What

The Seven Great Egyptian Hermetic Principles The Principle of Mentalism—“The all is mind: the universe is mental.” The Principle of Correspondence—“As above, so below; As below, so above.” The Principle of Vibration—“Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates.” The Principle of Polarity—“Everything is dual; everything has poles; everything has its pair of opposites; like and unlike are the same; opposites are identical in nature, but different in degree; extremes meet; all truths are but half-truths; all paradoxes may be reconciled.” The Principle of Rhythm—“Everything flows, out and in; everything has its tides; all things rise and fall; the pendulum swing manifests in everything; the measure of the swing to the right is the measure of the swing to the left; rhythm compensates.” The Principle of Cause and Effect—“Every cause has its effect; every effect has its cause; everything happens according to the law; chance is but a name for law not recognized; there are many planes of causation, but nothing escapes the law.” The Principle of Gender—“Gender is in everything; everything has its masculine and feminine principles; gender

Did you ever consider how ridiculous it would be to try to cram on a farm—to forget to plant in the spring, play all summer and then cram in the fall to bring in the harvest? The farm is a natural system. The price must be paid and the process followed. You always reap what you sow; there is no shortcut. This principle is also true, ultimately, in human behavior, in human relationships. They, too, are natural systems based on the law of the harvest. In the short run, in an artificial social system such as school, you may be able to get by if you learn how to manipulate the man-made rules, to “play the game.” In most one-shot or short-lived human interactions, you can use the Personality Ethic to get by and to make favorable impressions through charm and skill and pretending to be interested in other people’s hobbies. You can pick up quick, easy techniques that may work in short-term situations. But secondary traits alone have no permanent worth in long-term relationships. Eventually, if there isn’t deep integrity and fundamental character strength, the challenges of life will cause true motives to surface and human relationship failure will replace short-term success. Many people with secondary greatness—that is, social recognition for their talents—lack primary greatness or goodness in their character. Sooner or later, you’ll see this in every long-term relationship they have, whether it is with a business associate, a spouse, a friend, or a teenage child going through an identity crisis. It is character that communicates most eloquently. As Emerson once put it, “What you are shouts so loudly in my ears I cannot hear what you say.” There are, of course, situations where people have character strength but they lack communication skills, and that undoubtedly affects the quality of relationships as well. But the effects are still secondary. In the last analysis, what we are communicates far more eloquently than anything we say or do. We all know it. There are people we trust absolutely because we know their character. Whether they’re eloquent or not, whether they have the human relations techniques or not, we trust them, and we work successfully with them. In the words of William George Jordan, “Into the hands of every individual is given a marvelous power for good or evil—the silent, unconscious, unseen influence of his life. This is simply the constant radiation of what man really is, not what he pretends to be.

Most people, who choose or are coerced into only identifying with “positive” feelings, usually wind up in an emotionally lifeless middle ground – bland, deadened, and dissociated in an unemotional “no-man’s-land.” Moreover, when a person tries to hold onto a preferred feeling for longer than its actual tenure, she often appears as unnatural and phony as ersatz grass or plastic flowers. If instead, she learns to surrender willingly to the normal human experience that good feelings always ebb and flow, she will eventually be graced with a growing ability to renew herself in the vital waters of emotional flexibility. The repression of the so-called negative polarities of emotion causes much unnecessary pain, as well as the loss of many essential aspects of the feeling nature. In fact, much of the plethora of loneliness, alienation, and addictive distraction that plagues modern industrial societies is a result of people being taught and forced to reject, pathologize or punish so many of their own and others’ normal feeling states. Nowhere, not in the deepest recesses of the self, or in the presence of his closest friends, is the average person allowed to have and explore any number of normal emotional states. Anger, depression, envy, sadness, fear, distrust, etc., are all as normal a part of life as bread and flowers and streets. Yet, they have become ubiquitously avoided and shameful human experiences. How tragic this is, for all of these emotions have enormously important and healthy functions in a wholly integrated psyche. One dimension where this is most true is in the arena of healthy self-protection. For without access to our uncomfortable or painful feelings, we are deprived of the most fundamental part of our ability to notice when something is unfair, abusive, or neglectful in our environments. Those who cannot feel their sadness often do not know when they are being unfairly excluded, and those who cannot feel their normal angry or fearful responses to abuse, are often in danger of putting up with it without protest. Perhaps never before has humankind been so alienated from so many of its normal feeling states, as it is in the twenty-first century. Never before have so many human beings been so emotionally deadened and impoverished. The disease of emotional emaciation is epidemic. Its effects on health are often euphemistically labeled as stress, and like the emotions, stress is often treated like some unwanted waste that must be removed.

Nietzsche’s background makes sense of his convictions that the loss of faith in God is a calamitous cultural crisis. Although writing as one who has lost faith and who sees his own religious tradition as having many pernicious effects on its adherents, he experienced the loss of faith as a personal trauma. He was shocked that others seemed to throw off their religious backgrounds so casually, and he eventually concluded that many of his contemporaries had not really shed their religion but instead continued their old habits in disguised forms. Because he was convinced that the Christian worldview had harmful psychological effects, he endeavored to show how much damage continued to affect his contemporaries who maintained habits of the old worldview, even though they no longer endorsed it. We see Nietzsche not as the ‘atheist by instinct’ he claims to be in his autobiography but as a religious desperado. If one understands by ‘religious’ the effort to integrate one’s life with what is larger than oneself, Nietzsche rejects Christianity for religious reasons. His many complaints about the ideology that the Christian Church has foisted on its members express his conviction that it harms our ability to love and to be responsive to others in the world and to nature.

Launching “Buy It Now” was a large change that touched every transaction, but the eBay team also innovated across the experience for both sellers and buyers as well. With an initial success, we doubled down on innovation to drive growth. We introduced stores on eBay, which dramatically increased the amount of product offered for sale on the platform. We expanded the menu of optional features that sellers could purchase to better highlight their listings on the site. We improved the post-transaction experience on ebay.com by significantly improving the “checkout” flow, including the eventual seamless integration of PayPal on the eBay site. Each of these innovations supported the growth of the business and helped to keep that gravity at bay. Years later, Jeff became a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he would kick off the firm’s success in startups with network effects, investing in Airbnb, Instacart, Pinterest, and others. I’m lucky to work with him! He recounted in an essay on the a16z blog that his strategy was to grow eBay by adding layers and layers of new revenue—like “adding layers to the cake.” You can see it visually here: Figure 12: eBay’s growth layer cake As the core US business began to look more like a line than a hockey stick, international and payments were layered on top. Together, the aggregate business started to look like a hockey stick, but underneath it was actually many new lines of business.

The Blue Mind Rx Statement Our wild waters provide vast cognitive, emotional, physical, psychological, social, and spiritual values for people from birth, through adolescence, adulthood, older age, and in death; wild waters provide a useful, widely available, and affordable range of treatments healthcare practitioners can incorporate into treatment plans. The world ocean and all waterways, including lakes, rivers, and wetlands (collectively, blue space), cover over 71% of our planet. Keeping them healthy, clean, accessible, and biodiverse is critical to human health and well-being. In addition to fostering more widely documented ecological, economic, and cultural diversities, our mental well-being, emotional diversity, and resiliency also rely on the global ecological integrity of our waters. Blue space gives us half of our oxygen, provides billions of people with jobs and food, holds the majority of Earth's biodiversity including species and ecosystems, drives climate and weather, regulates temperature, and is the sole source of hydration and hygiene for humanity throughout history. Neuroscientists and psychologists add that the ocean and wild waterways are a wellspring of happiness and relaxation, sociality and romance, peace and freedom, play and creativity, learning and memory, innovation and insight, elation and nostalgia, confidence and solitude, wonder and awe, empathy and compassion, reverence and beauty — and help manage trauma, anxiety, sleep, autism, addiction, fitness, attention/focus, stress, grief, PTSD, build personal resilience, and much more. Chronic stress and anxiety cause or intensify a range of physical and mental afflictions, including depression, ulcers, colitis, heart disease, and more. Being on, in, and near water can be among the most cost-effective ways of reducing stress and anxiety. We encourage healthcare professionals and advocates for the ocean, seas, lakes, and rivers to go deeper and incorporate the latest findings, research, and insights into their treatment plans, communications, reports, mission statements, strategies, grant proposals, media, exhibits, keynotes, and educational programs and to consider the following simple talking points: •Water is the essence of life: The ocean, healthy rivers, lakes, and wetlands are good for our minds and bodies. •Research shows that nature is therapeutic, promotes general health and well-being, and blue space in both urban and rural settings further enhances and broadens cognitive, emotional, psychological, social, physical, and spiritual benefits. •All people should have safe access to salubrious, wild, biodiverse waters for well-being, healing, and therapy. •Aquatic biodiversity has been directly correlated with the therapeutic potency of blue space. Immersive human interactions with healthy aquatic ecosystems can benefit both. •Wild waters can serve as medicine for caregivers, patient families, and all who are part of patients’ circles of support. •Realization of the full range and potential magnitude of ecological, economic, physical, intrinsic, and emotional values of wild places requires us to understand, appreciate, maintain, and improve the integrity and purity of one of our most vital of medicines — water.

John Adams was keenly aware of the relationship between secrecy and corruption in government and the preservation of liberty. Many of the Founding Fathers understood the importance of transparency in a nation’s rulers. James Madison wrote that “A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy, or perhaps both.” Thomas Jefferson said that “If we are to guard against ignorance and remain free, it is the responsibility of every American to be informed.” Judicial Watch has always believed that knowing the “characters and conduct” of the individuals who serve in the government and ensuring that the public is “informed” about what its government is doing is crucial to preserving our great republic. That is why for over twenty-two years we have been the most active user of the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to promote transparency, accountability, and integrity in government, politics, and the law. We are the nation’s largest and most effective government watchdog group that works to advance the public interest. Transparency is all about self-governance. If we don’t know what the government is doing, how is that self-governance? How is that even a republic? When we were founded in 1994, we used the FOIA open records law to root out corruption in the Clinton administration. During the Bush administration, we used it to combat that administration’s penchant for improper secrecy. But the Bush administration pales in comparison to the Obama administration. Today, our government is bigger than ever, and also the most secretive in recent memory.

I sought to accomplish whatever was to be accomplished for anyone in such a manner that the advantage attained for anyone would never be served at the cost of another or others.” This speaks to the integrity of Bucky’s intentions and his desire to put principle before self-gain. “I sought to cope with all humanly unfavorable conditions, customs and afflictions by searching for the family of relevant physical principles involved, and therewith through invention and technological development to solve all problems by physical data and devices that were so much more effective as to be spontaneously adopted by humans and thereby to result in producing more desirable life-styles and thus emancipate humans from the previously unfavorable circumstances. I must always ‘reduce’ my inventions to physically working models and must never talk about the inventions until physically proven— or disproven. The new favorable-to-humans environment constituted by the technological inventions and information must demonstrate that new inanimate technology could now accomplish what heretofore could not be accomplished by social reforms. I sought to reform the environment, not the humans. I determined never to try to persuade humanity to alter its customs and viewpoints.” In this declaration, we find Bucky’s thought that one way to help and change people for the better is not to try to change their thinking, but to change their environment for the better. The change will do the work of allowing others to find their own betterment of thought. He was suggesting that social reform does not always help people because their physical environment is so unimproved.

The moral here is that nature and nurture should not be opposed. Pure learning, in the absence of any innate constraints, simply does not exist. Any learning algorithm contains, in one way or another, a set of assumptions about the domain to be learned. Rather than trying to learn everything from scratch, it is much more effective to rely on prior assumptions that clearly delineate the basic laws of the domain that must be explored, and integrate these laws into the very architecture of the system. The more innate assumptions there are, the faster learning is (provided, of course, that these assumptions are correct!). This is universally true. It would be wrong, for example, to think that the AlphaGo Zero software, which trained itself in Go by playing against itself, started from nothing: its initial representation included, among other things, knowledge of the topography and symmetries of the game, which divided the search space by a factor of eight. Our brain too is molded with assumptions of all kinds. Shortly, we will see that, at birth, babies' brains are already organized and knowledgeable. They know, implicitly, that the world is made of things that move only when pushed, without ever interpenetrating each other (solid objects)—and also that it contains much stranger entities that speak and move by themselves (people). No need to learn these laws: since they are true everywhere humans live, our genome hardwires them into the brain, thus constraining and speeding up learning. Babies do not have to learn everything about the world: their brains are full of innate constraints, and only the specific parameters that vary unpredictably (such as face shape, eye color, tone of voice, and individual tastes of the people around them) remain to be acquired.

Inmates would overwhelmingly welcome segregation. As Lexy Good, a white prisoner in San Quentin State Prison explained, “I’d rather hang out with white people, and blacks would rather hang out with people of their own race.” He said it was the same outside of prison: “Look at suburbia. . . . People in society self-segregate.” Another white man, using the pen name John Doe, wrote that jail time in Texas had turned him against blacks: '[B]ecause of my prison experiences, I cannot stand being in the presence of blacks. I can’t even listen to my old, favorite Motown music anymore. The barbarous and/or retarded blacks in prison have ruined it for me. The black prison guards who comprise half the staff and who flaunt the dominance of African-American culture in prison and give favored treatment to their “brothers” have ruined it for me.' He went on: '[I]n the aftermath of the Byrd murder [the 1998 dragging death in Jasper, Texas] I read one commentator’s opinion in which he expressed disappointment that ex-cons could come out of prison with unresolved racial problems “despite the racial integration of the prisons.” Despite? Buddy, do I have news for you! How about because of racial integration?' (emphasis in the original) A man who served four years in a California prison wrote an article for the Los Angeles Times called “Why Prisons Can’t Integrate.” “California prisons separate blacks, whites, Latinos and ‘others’ because the truth is that mixing races and ethnic groups in cells would be extremely dangerous for inmates,” he wrote. He added that segregation “is looked on by no one—of any race—as oppressive or as a way of promoting racism.” He offered “Rule No. 1” for survival: “The various races and ethnic groups stick together.” There were no other rules. He added that racial taboos are so complex that only a person of the same race can be an effective guide.

You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set forever. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity. Wherever you have turned, James, in your short time on this earth, you have been told where you could go and what you could do (and how you could do it) and where you could live and whom you could marry. I know your countrymen do not agree with me about this, and I hear them saying, “You exaggerate.” They do not know Harlem, and I do. So do you. Take no one’s word for anything, including mine—but trust your experience. Know whence you came. If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go. The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear. Please try to be clear, dear James, through the storm which rages about your youthful head today, about the reality which lies behind the words acceptance and integration. There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.

Creating “Correct” Children in the Classroom One of the most popular discipline programs in American schools is called Assertive Discipline. It teaches teachers to inflict the old “obey or suffer” method of control on students. Here you disguise the threat of punishment by calling it a choice the child is making. As in, “You have a choice, you can either finish your homework or miss the outing this weekend.” Then when the child chooses to try to protect his dignity against this form of terrorism, by refusing to do his homework, you tell him he has chosen his logical, natural consequence of being excluded from the outing. Putting it this way helps the parent or teacher mitigate against the bad feelings and guilt that would otherwise arise to tell the adult that they are operating outside the principles of compassionate relating. This insidious method is even worse than outand-out punishing, where you can at least rebel against your punisher. The use of this mind game teaches the child the false, crazy-making belief that they wanted something bad or painful to happen to them. These programs also have the stated intention of getting the child to be angry with himself for making a poor choice. In this smoke and mirrors game, the children are “causing” everything to happen and the teachers are the puppets of the children’s choices. The only ones who are not taking responsibility for their actions are the adults. Another popular coercive strategy is to use “peer pressure” to create compliance. For instance, a teacher tells her class that if anyone misbehaves then they all won’t get their pizza party. What a great way to turn children against each other. All this is done to help (translation: compel) children to behave themselves. But of course they are not behaving themselves: they are being “behaved” by the adults. Well-meaning teachers and parents try to teach children to be motivated (translation: do boring or aversive stuff without questioning why), responsible (translation: thoughtless conformity to the house rules) people. When surveys are conducted in which fourth-graders are asked what being good means, over 90% answer “being quiet.” And when teachers are asked what happens in a successful classroom, the answer is, “the teacher is able to keep the students on task” (translation: in line, doing what they are told). Consulting firms measuring teacher competence consider this a major criterion of teacher effectiveness. In other words if the students are quietly doing what they were told the teacher is evaluated as good. However my understanding of ‘real learning’ with twenty to forty children is that it is quite naturally a bit noisy and messy. Otherwise children are just playing a nice game of school, based on indoctrination and little integrated retained education. Both punishments and rewards foster a preoccupation with a narrow egocentric self-interest that undermines good values. All little Johnny is thinking about is “How much will you give me if I do X? How can I avoid getting punished if I do Y? What do they want me to do and what happens to me if I don’t do it?” Instead we could teach him to ask, “What kind of person do I want to be and what kind of community do I want to help make?” And Mom is thinking “You didn’t do what I wanted, so now I’m going to make something unpleasant happen to you, for your own good to help you fit into our (dominance/submission based) society.” This contributes to a culture of coercion and prevents a community of compassion. And as we are learning on the global level with our war on terrorism, as you use your energy and resources to punish people you run out of energy and resources to protect people. And even if children look well-behaved, they are not behaving themselves They are being behaved by controlling parents and teachers.

For Dylan, this electric assault threatened to suck the air out of everything else, only there was too much radio oxygen to suck. “Like a Rolling Stone” was the giant, all-consuming anthem of the new “generation gap” disguised as a dandy’s riddle, a dealer’s come-on. As a two-sided single, it dwarfed all comers, disarmed and rejuvenated listeners at each hearing, and created vast new imaginative spaces for groups to explore both sonically and conceptually. It came out just after Dylan’s final acoustic tour of Britain, where his lyrical profusion made him a bard, whose tabloid accolade took the form of political epithet: “anarchist.” As caught on film by D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary Don’t Look Back, the young folkie had already graduated to rock star in everything but instrumentation. “Satisfaction” held Dylan back at number two during its four-week July hold on Billboard’s summit, giving way to Herman’s Hermits’ “I’m Henry the Eighth, I Am” and Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe” come August, novelty capstones to Dylan’s unending riddle. (In Britain, Dylan stalled at number four.) The ratio of classics to typical pop schlock, like Freddie and the Dreamers’ “I’m Telling You Now” or Tom Jones’s “It’s Not Unusual,” suddenly got inverted. For cosmic perspective, yesterday’s fireball, Elvis Presley, sang “Do the Clam.” Most critics have noted the Dylan influence on Lennon’s narratives. Less space gets devoted to Lennon’s effect on Dylan, which was overt: think of how Dylan rewires Chuck Berry (“Subterranean Homesick Blues”) or revels in inanity (“Rainy Day Women #12 & 35”). Even more telling, Lennon’s keening vocal harmonies in “Nowhere Man,” “And Your Bird Can Sing,” and “Dr. Robert” owed as much to the Byrds and the Beach Boys, high-production turf Dylan simply abjured. Lennon also had more stylistic stretch, both in his Beatle context and within his own sensibility, as in the pagan balalaikas in “Girl” or the deliberate amplifier feedback tripping “I Feel Fine.” Where Dylan skewed R&B to suit his psychological bent, Lennon pursued radical feats of integration wearing a hipster’s arty façade, the moptop teaching the quiet con. Building up toward Rubber Soul throughout 1965, Beatle gravity exerted subtle yet inexorable force in all directions.

This administration has not been content simply to reduce the Congress to subservience. By closely guarding information about their own behavior, they are dismantling a fundamental element of our system of checks and balances. A government for the people and by the people should be transparent to the people. Yet the Bush administration seems to prefer making policy in secret, based on information that is not available to the public and in a process that is insulated from any meaningful participation by Congress or the American people. When Congress’s approval is required under our current Constitution, it is to be given without meaningful debate. As Bush said to one Republican senator in a meeting, “Look, I want your vote—I’m not going to debate it with you.” When reason and logic are removed from the process of democracy—when there is no longer any purpose in debating or discussing the choices we have to make—then all the questions before us are reduced to a simple equation: Who can exercise the most raw power? The system of checks and balances that has protected the integrity of our American system for more than two centuries has been dangerously eroded in recent decades, and especially in the last six years. In order to reestablish the needed balance, and to check the dangerous expansion of an all-powerful executive branch, we must first of all work to restore the checks and balances that our Founders knew were essential to ensure that reason could play its proper role in American democracy. And we must then concentrate on reempowering the people of the United States with the ability and the inclination to fully and vigorously participate in the national conversation of democracy. I am convinced this can be done and that the American people can once again become a “well-informed citizenry.” In the following chapter I outline how. CHAPTER NINE A Well-Connected Citizenry As a young lawyer giving his first significant public speech at the age of twenty-eight, Abraham Lincoln warned that a persistent period of dysfunction and unresponsiveness by government could alienate the American people and that “the strongest bulwark of any government, and particularly of those constituted like ours, may effectively be broken down and destroyed—I mean the attachment of the people.” Many

Blissfully unaware of all that, Elizabeth continued to love him without reservation or guile, and as she grew more certain of his love, she became more confident and more enchanting to Ian. On those occasions when she saw his expression become inexplicably grim, she teased him or kissed him, and, if those ploys failed, she presented him with little gifts-a flower arrangement from Havenhurst’s gardens, a single rose that she stuck behind his ear, or left upon his pillow. “Shall I have to resort to buying you a jewel to make you smile, my lord?” she joked one day three months after they were married. “I understand that is how it is done when a lover begins to act distracted.” To Elizabeth’s surprise, her remark made him snatch her into his arms in a suffocating embrace. “I am not losing interest in you, if that’s what you’re suggesting,” he told her. Elizabeth leaned back in his arms, surprised by the unwarranted force of his declaration, and continued to tease. “You’re quite certain?” “Positive.” “You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?” she asked in a voice of mock severity. “I would never lie to you,” Ian said gravely, but then he realized that by withholding the truth from her, he was, in effect, deceiving her, which in turn, amounted to little less than lying outright. Elizabeth knew something was bothering him, and that as time passed, it was bothering him with increasing frequency, but she never dreamed she was even remotely the cause of his silences or preoccupation. She thought of Robert often, but not since the day of her marriage had she permitted herself to think of Mr. Wordsworth’s accusations, not even for an instant. In the first place, she couldn’t bear it; in the second, she no longer believed there was the slightest possibility he was right. “I have to go to Havenhurst tomorrow,” she said reluctantly when Ian finally let her go. “The masons have started on the house and bridge, and the irrigation work has begun. If I spend the night, though, I shouldn’t have to go back for at least a fornight.” “I’ll miss you,” he said quietly, but there was no trace of resentment in his voice, nor did he attempt to persuade her to postpone the trip. He was keeping to his bargain with the integrity that Elizabeth particularly admired in him. “Not,” she whispered, kissing the side of his mouth, “as much as I’ll miss you.

Our political system today does not engage the best minds in our country to help us get the answers and deploy the resources we need to move into the future. Bringing these people in—with their networks of influence, their knowledge, and their resources—is the key to creating the capacity for shared intelligence that we need to solve the problems we face, before it’s too late. Our goal must be to find a new way of unleashing our collective intelligence in the same way that markets have unleashed our collective productivity. “We the people” must reclaim and revitalize the ability we once had to play an integral role in saving our Constitution. The traditional progressive solution to problems that involve a lack of participation by citizens in civic and democratic processes is to redouble their emphasis on education. And education is, in fact, an extremely valuable strategy for solving many of society’s ills. In an age where information has more economic value than ever before, it is obvious that education should have a higher national priority. It is also clear that democracies are more likely to succeed when there is widespread access to high-quality education. Education alone, however, is necessary but insufficient. A well-educated citizenry is more likely to be a well-informed citizenry, but the two concepts are entirely different, one from the other. It is possible to be extremely well educated and, at the same time, ill informed or misinformed. In the 1930s and 1940s, many members of the Nazi Party in Germany were extremely well educated—but their knowledge of literature, music, mathematics, and philosophy simply empowered them to be more effective Nazis. No matter how educated they were, no matter how well they had cultivated their intellect, they were still trapped in a web of totalitarian propaganda that mobilized them for evil purposes. The Enlightenment, for all of its liberating qualities—especially its empowerment of individuals with the ability to use reason as a source of influence and power—has also had a dark side that thoughtful people worried about from its beginning. Abstract thought, when organized into clever, self-contained, logical formulations, can sometimes have its own quasi-hypnotic effect and so completely capture the human mind as to shut out the leavening influences of everyday experience. Time and again, passionate believers in tightly organized philosophies and ideologies have closed their minds to the cries of human suffering that they inflict on others who have not yet pledged their allegiance and surrendered their minds to the same ideology. The freedoms embodied in our First Amendment represented the hard-won wisdom of the eighteenth century: that individuals must be able to fully participate in challenging, questioning, and thereby breathing human values constantly into the prevailing ideologies of their time and sharing with others the wisdom of their own experience.

The alienating effects of wealth and modernity on the human experience start virtually at birth and never let up. Infants in hunter-gatherer societies are carried by their mothers as much as 90 percent of the time, which roughly corresponds to carrying rates among other primates. One can get an idea of how important this kind of touch is to primates from an infamous experiment conducted in the 1950s by a primatologist and psychologist named Harry Harlow. Baby rhesus monkeys were separated from their mothers and presented with the choice of two kinds of surrogates: a cuddly mother made out of terry cloth or an uninviting mother made out of wire mesh. The wire mesh mother, however, had a nipple that dispensed warm milk. The babies took their nourishment as quickly as possible and then rushed back to cling to the terry cloth mother, which had enough softness to provide the illusion of affection. Clearly, touch and closeness are vital to the health of baby primates—including humans. In America during the 1970s, mothers maintained skin-to-skin contact with babies as little as 16 percent of the time, which is a level that traditional societies would probably consider a form of child abuse. Also unthinkable would be the modern practice of making young children sleep by themselves. In two American studies of middle-class families during the 1980s, 85 percent of young children slept alone in their own room—a figure that rose to 95 percent among families considered “well educated.” Northern European societies, including America, are the only ones in history to make very young children sleep alone in such numbers. The isolation is thought to make many children bond intensely with stuffed animals for reassurance. Only in Northern European societies do children go through the well-known developmental stage of bonding with stuffed animals; elsewhere, children get their sense of safety from the adults sleeping near them. The point of making children sleep alone, according to Western psychologists, is to make them “self-soothing,” but that clearly runs contrary to our evolution. Humans are primates—we share 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees—and primates almost never leave infants unattended, because they would be extremely vulnerable to predators. Infants seem to know this instinctively, so being left alone in a dark room is terrifying to them. Compare the self-soothing approach to that of a traditional Mayan community in Guatemala: “Infants and children simply fall asleep when sleepy, do not wear specific sleep clothes or use traditional transitional objects, room share and cosleep with parents or siblings, and nurse on demand during the night.” Another study notes about Bali: “Babies are encouraged to acquire quickly the capacity to sleep under any circumstances, including situations of high stimulation, musical performances, and other noisy observances which reflect their more complete integration into adult social activities

Empathy and integration permit effective cultural intelligence, which is to say, becoming able to understand how the society works. In Fourth Generation war, virtually all useful intelligence is human intelligence (HUMINT). Often, such HUMINT must both be gathered and acted on with stealth techniques, where the state’s actions remain invisible to the local population. As in Third Generation war (maneuver warfare), the tactical level in Fourth Generation conflicts is reconnaissance-driven, not intelligence-driven. The information state militaries need will almost always come from below, not from higher-level headquarters.

We believe that it is an injustice to the integrity of our teachers and students to simply advocate that educators focus on the use of rewards to control behavior rather than grapple with the deeper issues of (a) why many students are not interested in learning within our educational system and (b) how intrinsic motivation and self-regulation can be promoted among these students. (p. 50)

For values or guiding principles to be truly effective they have to be verbs. It’s not “integrity,” it’s “always do the right thing.” It’s not “innovation,” it’s “look at the problem from a different angle.” Articulating our values as verbs gives us a clear idea … we have a clear idea of how to act in any situation.

MODEL 2: Multiple Stakeholder Sustainability, Fons Trompenaars and Peter Woolliams (2010) PROBLEM STATEMENT How can I assess the most significant organizational dilemmas resulting from conflicting stakeholder demands and also assess organizational priorities to create sustainable performance? ESSENCE Organizational sustainability is not limited to the fashionable environmental factors such as emissions, green energy, saving scarce resources, corporate social responsibility, and so on. The future strength of an organization depends on the way leadership and management deal with the tensions between the five major entities facing any organization: efficiency of business processes, people, clients, shareholders and society. The manner in which these tensions are addressed and resolved determines the future strength and opportunities of an organization. This model proposes that sustainability can be defined as the degree to which an organization is capable of creating long-term wealth by reconciling its most important (‘golden’) dilemmas, created between these five components. From this, professors and consultants Fons Trompenaars and Peter Woolliams have identified ten dimensions consisting of dilemmas formed from these five components, because each one competes with the other four. HOW TO USE THE MODEL: The authors have developed a sustainability scan to use when making a diagnosis. This scan reveals: The major dilemmas and how people perceive the organization’s position in relation to these dilemmas; The corporate culture of an organization and their openness to the reconciliation of the major dilemmas; The competence of its leadership to reconcile these dilemmas. After the diagnosis, the organization can move on to reconciling the major dilemmas that lead to sustainable performance. To this end, the authors developed a dilemma reconciliation process. RESULTS To achieve sustainable success, organizations need to integrate the competing demands of their key stakeholders: operational processes, employees, clients, shareholders and society. By diagnosing and connecting different viewpoints and values, their research and consulting practice results in a better understanding of: The key challenges the organization faces with its various stakeholders and how to prioritize them; The extent to which leadership and management are capable of addressing the organizational dilemmas; The personal values of employees and their alignment with organizational values. These results help an organization define a corporate strategy in which crucial dilemmas are reconciled, and ensure that the company’s leadership is capable of executing the strategy sustainably. It does so while specifically addressing the company’s wealth-creating processes before the results show up in financial reports. It attempts to anticipate what the corporate financial performance will be some six months to three years in the future, as the financial effects of dilemma reconciliation are budgeted.

In terms of your emotional diet, the process is very similar to what I have been discussing above. If you are listening to the radio in the car, be more joyously vigilant over the kind of songs and lyrics you allow yourself to listen to. Whenever we are in a receptive state we are in hypnosis, and the lyrics and the feeling tones will program your subconscious mind without you even realizing it. At all times, we must strive to be the cause of our reality and not the effect.

A true leader has the confidence to stand alone, the courage to make tough decisions, and the compassion to listen to the needs of others. He does not set out to be a leader, but becomes one by the equality of his actions and the integrity of his intent” - Douglas McArthur

On a professional basis, when I’m asked what I want to be known for, my answer is simple: My work with children. I believe that every child is a leader and should be seen as such. When it comes to children, don’t define them by their behaviors. Visualize and affirm them as leaders. Leadership is affirming people’s worth and potential so clearly that they are inspired to see it in themselves. We can raise a generation of leaders by teaching the children their innate worth and goodness, by helping them see within themselves the great power and potential they have. I am so pleased to see that thousands of schools around the world are now teaching the 7 Habits to children, teaching them who they really are and what they are capable of. We’re teaching them integrity, resourcefulness, self-discipline, the win-win way of life. We’re teaching them to welcome instead of distrust people who are different from them. We’re teaching them how to “sharpen the saw,” to never stop growing and improving and learning. This is being done through our The Leader in Me program that is being implemented in thousands of schools around the world. In these schools they learn that everyone is a leader, not just a few popular ones. They learn the difference between primary success that comes from real, honest achievement and secondary success—worldly recognition—and they learn to value primary success. They learn that they have this marvelous gift of choice, that they don’t have to be discouraged victims or cogs in a machine. Imagine the future if children grow up deeply connected to these principles, banishing victimism and dependency, suspicion and defensiveness—as fully responsible citizens who take very seriously their obligations to others. That future is possible. That’s what I want to be remembered for.

Harken: I begin with nothingness. Nothingness is the same as fullness. In infinity full is no better than empty. Nothingness is both empty and full. This nothingness or fullness we name the PLEROMA. CREATURA is not in the pleroma, but in itself. What is changeable, however, is creatura. Therefore [it is] the one thing which is fixed and certain.... 36 The question ariseth: How did creatura originate? ... The pleroma hath all, distinctiveness and non-distinctiveness. Distinctiveness is creatura. If we do not distinguish, we get beyond our own nature, away from creatura. We fall into indistinctiveness, which is the other quality of the pleroma. We fall into the pleroma itself and cease to be creatures. We are given over to dissolution in the nothingness. This is the death of the creature. Therefore we die in such measure as we do not distinguish. Hence the natural stirring of the creature goeth towards distinctiveness, fighteth against primeval, perilous sameness. This is called the PRINCIPIUM INDIVIDUATIONIS. This principle is the essence of the creature. We must, therefore, distinguish the qualities of the pleroma. The qualities are PAIRS OF OPPOSITES, such as— The Effective and the Ineffective. Fullness and Emptiness. Living and Dead. Difference and Sameness. Light and Darkness. The Hot and the Cold. Force and Matter. Time and Space. Good and Evil. Beauty and Ugliness. The One and the Many. [Etc.] As we are pleroma itself, we also have all these qualities in us.... When, however, we remain true to our own nature, which is distinctiveness, we distinguish ourselves from the good and the beautiful, and, therefore, at the same time from the evil and ugly: And thus we fall not into the pleroma, namely into nothingness and dissolution.37 Therefore not after difference, as ye think it, must ye strive; but after YOUR OWN BEING. At bottom, therefore, there is only one striving, namely, the striving after your own being. 38

Outsourcing requires a tight integration of suppliers, making sure that all pieces arrive just in time. Therefore, when some suppliers were unable to deliver certain basic components like capacitors and flash memory, Compaq's network was paralyzed. The company was looking at 600,000 to 700,000 unfilled orders in handheld devices. The $499 Pocket PCs were selling for $700 to $800 at auctions on eBay and Amazon.com. Cisco experienced a different but equally damaging problem: When orders dried up, Cisco neglected to turn off its supply chain, resulting in a 300 percent ballooning of its raw materials inventory. The final numbers are frightening: The aggregate market value loss between March 2000 and March 2001 of the twelve major companies that adopted outsourcing-Cisco, Dell, Compaq, Gateway, Apple, IBM, Lucent, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Ericsson, Nokia, and Nortel-exceeded $1.2 trillion. The painful experience of these companies and their investors is a vivid demonstration of the consequences of ignoring network effects. A me attitude, where the company's immediate financial balance is the only factor, limits network thinking. Not understanding how the actions of one node affect other nodes easily cripples whole segments of the network. Experts agree that such rippling losses are not an inevitable downside of the network economy. Rather, these companies failed because they outsourced their manufacturing without fully understanding the changes required in their business models. Hierarchical thinking does not fit a network economy. In traditional organizations, rapid shifts can be made within the organization, with any resulting losses being offset by gains in other parts of the hierarchy. In a network economy each node must be profitable. Failing to understand this, the big players of the network game exposed themselves to the risks of connectedness without benefiting from its advantages. When problems arose, they failed to make the right, tough decisions, such as shutting down the supply line in Cisco's case, and got into even bigger trouble. At both the macro- and the microeconomic level, the network economy is here to stay. Despite some high-profile losses, outsourcing will be increasingly common. Financial interdependencies, ignoring national and continental boundaries, will only be strengthened with globalization. A revolution in management is in the making. It will take a new, network-oriented view of the economy and an understanding of the consequences of interconnectedness to smooth the way.

Now we begin to answer the question on how to use the OODA loop, more specifically, how to develop our cops to use it effectively in their every day missions. But using the OODA loop, like John Boyd himself, is about developing Strength of Character. Strength of Character denotes honesty and integrity. Strength of Character means doing what’s right based on our beliefs and a belief system set forth by society. Strength of Character is doing what is right when no one is looking, when there is possibility of receiving no credit or reward. Strength of Character is seeking responsibility and taking joy in making and standing by decisions.

And while it makes sense to blind patients in a drug trial, in order to separate the chemical action of the drug from any psychological effects, it misses the point when testing therapies such as hypnosis, when patients’ beliefs and expectations are integral to how they work.

These “undocumented workers” from south of the border may have come here illegally, but they have long ago integrated themselves into their communities. Once here, they obey the laws. They pay taxes. Many of their sons and daughters serve in the military. They make up the majority of the workforce in several key industries: agricultural workers, child care, kitchen help in restaurants, housecleaning, maid service in hotels, and more. I’ve seen the great contribution they’ve made to their communities in California. Like generations of immigrants before them, they have become American citizens by choice, not by birth. They are, in effect, already citizens in every respect but one. It’s now important to make it official, as Ronald Reagan did, and grant them citizenship—or at least a path to citizenship—in order to save families from the fear of being torn apart by federal agents. Of

Simply stated, Community Policing can be viewed as a philosophy that governs how citizen expectations and demands for police services are integrated into the actions of the police to identify and address those conditions that have an adverse effect on the safety and welfare of neighborhood life. To that end, the very essence of Community Policing can be viewed from two important perspectives: 1.   A realization that every community consists of neighborhoods that place different service demands on a police agency. The uniqueness of these demands requires police managers to devise “customized” service responses. Therefore, the term community is viewed from the perspective of “geographical locations.” Given the diversity associated with these different locations, it becomes the department’s responsibility to properly allocate, deploy and manage its resources so that services are adequately and consistently rendered from one location to the next. 2.   Acknowledging the importance of knowing when to form interactive partnerships between the police and the public in order to identify and resolve neighborhood problems of crime and disorder. This perspective defines Community Policing in terms of citizen involvement. It becomes the responsibility of the department to determine when, where and how citizens can work with police officials.

Life expectancy rose only modestly between the Neolithic era of 8500 to 3500 BC and the Victorian era of 1850 to 1900.13 An American born in the late nineteenth century had an average life expectancy of around forty-five years, with a large share never making it past their first birthdays.14 Then something remarkable happened. In countries on the frontier of economic development, human health began to improve rapidly, education levels shot up, and standards of living began to grow and grow. Within a century, life expectancies had increased by two-thirds, average years of schooling had gone from single to double digits, and the productivity of workers and the pay they took home had doubled and doubled and then doubled again. With the United States leading the way, the rich world crossed a Great Divide—a divide separating centuries of slow growth, poor health, and anemic technical progress from one of hitherto undreamed-of material comfort and seemingly limitless economic potential. For the first time, rich countries experienced economic development that was both broad and deep, reaching all major segments of society and producing not just greater material comfort but also fundamental transformations in the health and life horizons of those it touched. As the French economist Thomas Piketty points out in his magisterial study of inequality, “It was not until the twentieth century that economic growth became a tangible, unmistakable reality for everyone.”15 The mixed economy was at the heart of this success—in the United States no less than in other Western nations. Capitalism played an essential role. But capitalism was not the new entrant on the economic stage. Effective governance was. Public health measures made cities engines of innovation rather than incubators of illness.16 The meteoric expansion of public education increased not only individual opportunity but also the economic potential of entire societies. Investments in science, higher education, and defense spearheaded breakthroughs in medicine, transportation, infrastructure, and technology. Overarching rules and institutions tamed and transformed unstable financial markets and turned boom-bust cycles into more manageable ups and downs. Protections against excessive insecurity and abject destitution encouraged the forward-looking investments and social integration that sustained growth required. At every level of society, the gains in health, education, income, and capacity were breathtaking. The mixed economy was a spectacularly positive-sum bargain: It redistributed power and resources, but as its impacts broadened and diffused, virtually everyone was made massively better off.

The Twelve Behaviors 1.​Focus on customers and growth (serve customers well and aggressively pursue growth). 2.​Lead impactfully (think like a leader and serve as a role model). 3.​Get results (consistently meet any commitments that you make). 4.​Make people better (encourage excellence in peers, subordinates, and/or managers). 5.​Champion change (drive continuous improvement in our operations). 6.​Foster teamwork and diversity (define success in terms of the entire team). 7.​Adopt a global mind-set (view the business from all relevant perspectives, and see the world in terms of integrated value chains). 8.​Take risks intelligently (recognize that we must take greater but smarter risks to generate better returns). 9.​Be self-aware (recognize your behavior and how it affects those around you). 10.​Communicate effectively (provide information to others in a timely, concise, and thoughtful way). 11.​Think in an integrative fashion (make more holistic decisions beyond your own bailiwick by applying intuition, experience, and judgment to the available data). 12.​Develop technical or functional excellence (be capable and effective in your particular area of expertise).

Managers handle parallel projects all the time. They juggle with people, work tasks, and goals to ensure the success of every project process. However, managing projects, by design, is not an easy task. Since there are plenty of moving parts, it can easily become disorganized and chaotic. It is vital to use an efficient project management system to stay organized at work while designing and executing projects. Project Management Online Master's Programs From XLRI offers unique insights into project management software tools and make teams more efficient in meeting deadlines. How can project management software help you? Project management tools are equipped with core features that streamline different processes including managing available resources, responding to problems, and keeping all the stakeholders involved. Having the best project management software can make a significant influence on the operational and strategic aspects of the company. Here is a list of 5 key benefits to project professionals and organizations in using project management software: 1. Enhanced planning and scheduling Project planning and scheduling is an important component of project management. With project management systems, the previous performance of the team relevant to the present project can be accessed easily. Project managers can enroll in an online project management course to develop a consistent management plan and prioritize tasks. Critical tasks like resource allocation, identification of dependencies, and project deliverables can be completed comfortably using project management software. 2. Better collaboration Project teams sometimes have to handle cross-functional projects along with their day to day responsibilities. Communication between different team members is critical to avoid expensive delays and precludes the waste of precious resources. A key upside of project management software is that it makes effectual collaboration extremely simple. All project communication is stored in a universally accessible place. The project management online master's program offers unique insights to project managers on timeline and status updates which leads to a synergy between the team’s functions and project outcomes. 3. Effective task delegation Assigning tasks to team members in a fair way is a challenging proposition for most project managers. With a project management program, the delegation of project tasks can be easily done. In most instances, these programs send out automatic reminders when deadlines are approaching to ensure a smooth and efficient project workflow. 4. Easier File access and sharing Important documents should be safely accessed and shared among team members. Project management tools provide cloud-based storage which enables users to make changes, leave feedback and annotate easily. PM software logs any user changes to ensure project transparency within the team. 5. Easier integration of new members Project managers are responsible to get new members up to speed on the important project parameters within a short time. Project management online master's programs from XLRI Jamshedpuroffer vital learning to management professionals in maintaining a project log and in simplistically visualizing the complete project. Takeaway Choosing the perfect PM software for your organization helps you to effectively collaborate to achieve project success. Simple and intuitive PM tools are useful to enhance productivity in remote-working employees.

Often in our culture, there's the message that if you do the healthy thing, you'll find happiness, pure and simple. I think that the truth is more complicated and that even the healthiest decision may bring sorrow, grief, and fear. But if we face our fears and choose wisely, we may be grateful for the decision that preserved our integrity.

Brave applies a two-pronged strategy to this problem. It has created a new browser designed to work seamlessly with its tokens. The browser blocks all ads by default and, with sophisticated analytics, collates and anonymizes data from users that indicate how much time they spend looking at certain content. That way it can come up with a useful record of the amount of time we all spend at Internet sites without identifying us. As a user of the Brave browser, you are offered the potential to earn BATs for selectively turning off the ad blocker to view ads; tokens are delivered to an integrated wallet that you uniquely control. You can in turn use those tokens to reward publishers of content that you appreciate—in effect, tipping them with donations. Meanwhile, to place ads with publishers of content on the system, advertisers must first acquire BATs and then pay those tokens to publishers, with the price for those ads dictated by the attention metrics associated with the latter’s content.

However, it appears that medicine in the Western world, which was once an integration of both science and art, has shifted to an emphasis on science at the expense of art.

We need to take yet another step in reconsidering mourning: resurrecting and redefining, rather than discarding, the significance of detaching from the dead. Paradoxically, detachment is an integral part of the mature posthumous bond as an adult maintains with a parent. It helps us uncover the essence of the relationship beyond the noise of interaction. I believe that what we disconnect from if we are lucky and effective mourners, is not the relationship with deceased parents per se but rather the way we were embedded in that relationship when they were alive. This new stance permits us to reinterpret the past and expands our understanding of what our parents were in relation to them, enhancing recognition, compassion, and sympathy for all concerned. This type of detachment radically changed my life, and the lives of the people I interviewed, for the better. When we finally see with adult eyes, we can recover as well as discover our parents’ hidden strengths and discard their newly obvious weaknesses. Detachment, the perspective it affords, and the growth it makes possible, is the greatest death benefit of all, and the prerequisite for all the rest. 62 Acting responsibly may not be glamorous, but it matters in the end. 194 Your Prescription for Collecting Death Benefits Four Practices to Cultivate Death Benefits 1. Motivate 2. Anticipate 3. Meditate 4. Activate (includes the Three Steps below) Three Steps to Reap Death Benefits 1. Construct a narrative of your parent’s history 2. Conduct a Psychological Inventory of your parent’s character (Includes the Four Questions below) 3. Seek experiences and relationships to create necessary changes Four Questions for Conducting Your Psychological Inventory 1. What did you get from your parent that you want to keep? 2. What did your parent have that you regret not getting? 3. What did you get from your parent that you want to discard? 4. What did you need that your parent couldn’t provide? 215

We need to take yet another step in reconsidering mourning: resurrecting and redefining, rather than discarding, the significance of detaching from the dead. Paradoxically, detachment is an integral part of the mature posthumous bond as an adult maintains with a parent. It helps us uncover the essence of the relationship beyond the noise of interaction. I believe that what we disconnect from if we are lucky and effective mourners, is not the relationship with deceased parents per se but rather the way we were embedded in that relationship when they were alive. This new stance permits us to reinterpret the past and expands our understanding of what our parents were in relation to them, enhancing recognition, compassion, and sympathy for all concerned. This type of detachment radically changed my life, and the lives of the people I interviewed, for the better. When we finally see with adult eyes, we can recover as well as discover our parents’ hidden strengths and discard their newly obvious weaknesses. Detachment, the perspective it affords, and the growth it makes possible, is the greatest death benefit of all, and the prerequisite for all the rest. 62 Acting responsibly may not be glamorous, but it matters in the end. 194 Your Prescription for Collecting Death Benefits Four Practices to Cultivate Death Benefits Motivate Anticipate Meditate Activate (includes the Three Steps below) Three Steps to Reap Death Benefits Construct a narrative of your parent’s history Conduct a Psychological Inventory of your parent’s character (Includes the Four Questions below) Seek experiences and relationships to create necessary changes Four Questions for Conducting Your Psychological Inventory What did you get from your parent that you want to keep? What did your parent have that you regret not getting? What did you get from your parent that you want to discard? What did you need that your parent couldn’t provide? 215

We need to take yet another step in reconsidering mourning: resurrecting and redefining, rather than discarding, the significance of detaching from the dead. Paradoxically, detachment is an integral part of the mature posthumous bond as an adult maintains with a parent. It helps us uncover the essence of the relationship beyond the noise of interaction. I believe that what we disconnect from if we are lucky and effective mourners, is not the relationship with deceased parents per se but rather the way we were embedded in that relationship when they were alive. This new stance permits us to reinterpret the past and expands our understanding of what our parents were in relation to them, enhancing recognition, compassion, and sympathy for all concerned. This type of detachment radically changed my life, and the lives of the people I interviewed, for the better. When we finally see with adult eyes, we can recover as well as discover our parents’ hidden strengths and discard their newly obvious weaknesses. Detachment, the perspective it affords, and the growth it makes possible, is the greatest death benefit of all, and the prerequisite for all the rest. 62 Acting responsibly may not be glamorous, but it matters in the end. 194 Your Prescription for Collecting Death Benefits Four Practices to Cultivate Death Benefits Motivate Anticipate Meditate Activate (includes the Three Steps below ) Three Steps to Reap Death Benefits Construct a narrative of your parent’s history Conduct a Psychological Inventory of your parent’s character (Includes the Four Questions below) Seek experiences and relationships to create necessary changes Four Questions for Conducting Your Psychological Inventory What did you get from your parent that you want to keep? What did your parent have that you regret not getting? What did you get from your parent that you want to discard? What did you need that your parent couldn’t provide? 215

Pro-environmental behaviours...follow from an attitude from greater connectedness with nature... When our sense of self-identify is integrated with the natural world then harming that world becomes in effect equivalent to self-harm.

Real risk isn't always grandiose. The act of swallowing bravery is often so miniscule, it goes completely unrecognized by the outside world. In due time our psyches and souls are primed to adapt, integrate, and digest even the rustiest, clankiest, most bitterly jarring parts of life; to become more comfortable with the uncomfortable so much so that it becomes lifeforce. Microdoses help us build the fortitude to absorb, integrate, expand, contribute, and construct the new matrix of presence and inter-beingness. The cumulative effect of such actions cannot be overstated. Consistent microdoses of bravery have powerful, palpable effects. Vitality emerges through the nourishment of real droplets of risk, sustained over time; not impulsive grand gestures and binges disguised as noble and big.

dramatically INCREASED the amount of absentee and mail-in ballots in the battleground states [while] Prong Two dramatically DECREASED the level of scrutiny of such ballots—effectively taking the election “cops” off the beat. This pincer movement resulted in a FLOOD of illegal ballots into the battleground states which was more than sufficient to tip the scales from a decisive legal win by President Trump to a narrow and illegitimate alleged “victory” by Joe Biden.7 In a landmark Time magazine cover story by Molly Ball, the Democrats have all but confessed to this Grand Stuff the Ballot Box Strategy. And Molly Ball is neither a right-wing hack nor a Fourth Estate slouch; she was the 2019 winner of the Gerald R. Ford Journalism Prize for Distinguished Reporting on the Presidency. In her “kiss and tell” article, Ball highlighted a long list of operatives who have openly boasted about how they gamed America’s election system to overthrow a sitting president. That she portrayed these smug zealots as saviors of the election rather than as thieves is yet another Big Reveal—not just of Ball’s own Progressive ideology but also of the much deeper rot eating away at our election system and our broader Republic. In this Big Reveal, we bare stark witness to an “ends justify the means” mentality that has gripped far too many Americans on the left. As Corey Lewandowski once put it, these Machiavellian cadres apparently hate Donald Trump more than they love their country.8 Memo number one to Molly’s Merry Band of Democrat Thieves: Destroying the integrity of our election system to topple a sitting president you loathe is no Devil’s bargain. It’s national suicide.

The nutrition recommendations of the American Cancer Society (ACS) are formulated by registered dietitians trained in the food pyramid (read: Big Agriculture) model. Their corporate sponsors are the American Dairy Association, Abbott Nutrition (maker of seasonal vaccines and ibuprofen), and PepsiCo. The “quick and easy” snacks they recommend to people undergoing cancer treatment include angel food cake, cookies, doughnuts, ice cream, and microwavable snacks.16 (We are not kidding; visit their website and see for yourself.) These recommendations turn a blind eye to the many important studies (not to mention the suppressed work of Otto Warburg, PhD, MD, and Thomas Seyfried, PhD, in the field of the metabolic theory of cancer, which we detail in chapter 4; see “How Cancer Cells Gobble Glucose: The Warburg Effect”) that have proven that sugar causes—or, at the very least, can stimulate—cancer. Even a mainstream 2016 study from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center concluded that diets high in sugar are “a major risk factor” for certain types of cancers, especially breast cancer. We simply must reverse the dismissive attitude toward the role that diet and lifestyle play in cancer prevention or progression. Because it may very well be our only hope.

Page 7: (H)e (Darwin) supposed that man, before he even emerged from apedom, was already a social being, living in small scattered communities. Evolution in his eyes was carried out mainly as a struggle between communities - team against team, tribe against tribe. Inside each team or tribe, the 'ethical cosmos' [the dual code of Amity and Enmity] was at work, forging and strengthening the social bonds which made the members of such a team a co-operative whole. … Thus, in the early stages of human evolution we find competition and co-operation as constituent elements of the evolutionary process … Co-operation and unity give strength to a team or tribe; but why did neighboring tribes refuse so stubbornly to amalgamate? If united, they would have got rid of competition and struggle. Why do human tribes instinctively repel every thought of amalgamation, and prize above all things independence, the control of their destiny, their sovereignty? Here we have to look beneath the surface of things and formulate a theory to explain tribal behavior. How does a tribe fulfill an evolutionary purpose? A tribe is a 'corporate body,' which Nature has entrusted with an assortment of human seed or genes, the assortment differing in some degree from that entrusted to every other tribe. If the genes are to work out their evolutionary effects, then it is necessary that the tribe or corporation should maintain its integrity through an infinity of generations. If a tribe loses its integrity by a slackening of social bonds, or by disintegration of the parental instincts, or by lack of courage or of skill to defend itself from the aggression of neighboring tribes, or by free interbreeding with neighbors and thus scattering its genes, then that tribe as an evolutionary venture has come to an untimely end. For evolutionary purposes it has proved a failure. Page 25: Tribalism was Nature's method in bringing about the evolution of man. I have already explained what a tribe really is - a corporation of human beings entrusted with a certain capital of genes. The business of such a corporation is to nurse and develop its stock of genes - to bring them to an evolutionary fruition. To reach such an end a tribal corporation had to comply with two conditions: (1) it had to endure for a long age; (2) it had to remain intact and separate from all neighboring and competing tribes. Human nature was fashioned or evolved just to secure these two conditions - continuity through time and separation in space. Hence the duality of man's nature - the good, social, or virtuous traits serving intratribal economy; the evil, vicious, or antisocial qualities serving the intertribal economy and the policy of keeping its genes apart. Human nature is the basal part of the machinery used for the evolution of man. When you know the history of our basal mentality - one fitted for tribal life - do you wonder at the disorder and turmoil which now afflict the detribalized part of the world?

Blood glucose instability is a huge problem that affects the moods of millions of people. The brain accounts for only about 2 percent of body weight, but requires 25 percent of all blood pumped by the heart (up to 50 percent in kids). Therefore, low blood sugar hits the brain hard, causing depression, anxiety, and lassitude. If you often become uncomfortably hungry, you’ve got a serious problem and should solve it. Eat high-protein, nutrient-dense meals, and snack enough to keep your blood sugar up, but not with insulin-stimulating sweets or starches. Remember that hunger kills brain cells, just like getting drunk. Be careful of caffeine, which causes blood sugar swings, and never crash diet. Food sensitivities are common reactions that are not classic food allergies, so most conventional allergists underestimate the damage they do. They play a major role in mood disruption, much more frequently than most people realize. They cause chemical reactions in the body that destabilize blood sugar and wreak havoc upon hormonal and neurotransmitter balance. This can trigger depression, anxiety, impaired concentration, insomnia, and hyperactivity. The most common sensitivities, unfortunately, are to the foods people most often overconsume: wheat, milk, eggs, corn, soy, and peanuts. The average American gets about 75 percent of her calories from just 10 favorite foodstuffs, and this narrow range of eating disrupts the digestive process and causes abnormal reactions. If a particular food doesn’t agree with you and commonly causes heartburn, gas, bloating, water weight gain, a craving for more, or a burst of nervous energy, you’re probably reactive to it. There are several good books on the subject, and there are many labs that test for sensitivities. Ask a chiropractor, naturopath, or doctor of integrative medicine about them. Don’t expect much help from a conventional allergist. Exercise and Mood Dozens of studies indicate that exercise is often as effective for depression as medication, partly because it increases production of stimulating hormones, such as norepinephrine, and also because it increases oxygen flow to the brain. Exercise can, in addition, help relieve and prevent anxiety, creating a so-called tranquilizer effect that persists for about 4 hours after exercising. Exercise also decreases the biological stress response, which dampens the automatic fear reaction. It is also uniquely effective at causing secretion of Nerve Growth Factor, one of the limited number of substances that cause brain cells to grow. Another benefit of exercise is that it increases endorphin output by about 500 percent and decreases the incidence of major and minor illnesses. For mood, the ideal amount is 30 to 45 minutes of cardiovascular exercise daily. Studies show that exercising less than 30 minutes or more than 1 hour decreases mood benefits.

Security represents your sense of worth, your identity, your emotional anchorage, your self-esteem, your basic personal strength or lack of it. Guidance means your source of direction in life. Encompassed by your map, your internal frame of reference that interprets for you what is happening out there, are standards or principles or implicit criteria that govern moment by moment decision making and doing. Wisdom is your perspective on life, your sense of balance, your understanding of how the various parts and principles apply and relate to each other. It embraces judgment, discernment, comprehension. It is a gestalt or oneness, an integrated wholeness. Power is the faculty or capacity to act, the strength and potency to accomplish something. It is the vital energy to make choices and decisions. It also includes the capacity to overcome deeply embedded habits and to cultivate higher, more effective ones.

Stories abound... of governments' heavy reliance on focus groups and other forms of research to pre-test the likely political effect of policies. Not to test the integrity or efficacy of the polices; not to see whether it fits within a particular philosophical framework, merely to test its palatability or, to be brutally frank, its likely contribution to a government's prospects of re-election.

What is Qasil Powder? Qasil powder is a well-kept secret among Somali and East African nomadic communities. It's a potent green cleansing powder that's widely used as a face mask to boost the skin's natural beauty for Organic Qasil powder.. The leaves of the gob tree, which is endemic to Somalia, are used to make qasil powder. The leaves are collected, dried, thoroughly ground into the fine powder, which is then prepared and ready to use without any chemical additives. Properties of Qasil powder The capacity to wash and clean the skin is known as cleansing. Antibacterial properties have included the capacity to combat bacteria and prevent infections on the skin, such as acne. It used as amla powder. Vitamins have the capacity to protect the skin from UV damage. Anti-aging seems to have the ability to slow down the progression by preventing fine lines and wrinkles from appearing. Anti-inflammatory properties Neem Hair Powder help to reduce skin inflammation. Antifungals inhibit the growth of fungi and the spread of fungal infections. It has a brightening effect due to its high vitamin C content. The advantages of qasil powder. Qasil Powder Skin benefits. removes pollutants from the skin, giving it a deep cleanse. Purifies and regulates the skin's pH. Exfoliate the skin gently, leaving it soft and supple. Skin tone is evened out. It moisturises the skin reduces acne and pimples on the skin. It promotes radiant skin by giving the skin a healthy glow. It removes dark spots and hyperpigmentation. Sunburns are soothed. reduces wrinkles and fine lines. Qasil is a hair conditioner. How to use qasil powder on hair Some people in some parts of the world use qasil powder for both their skin and their hair. It has been used as a natural Qasil powder shampoo and conditioner for the hair since it takes down particulates and surplus fats from the skin and scalp even though it is termed a natural soap with excellent cleansing characteristics. It also hydrates the hair, making it look thicker and shinier. Qasil powders also help to get rid of dandruff. It's important to recognise that once qasil powder has been formed into a paste or moistened, this must be integrated momentarily rather than saved for another day. This is due to the fact that qasil powder is sold in its natural state, with no added preservatives. As a necessary consequence, only combine far more than is required at a time. And it comes to your mind. One question: where can I get Qasil powder? So you should buy original powder from Huda Organics, which is located in the United Kingdom, ST Westend, London, WC2H 9JQ. You can reach us at 7566209608 or via email at info@hudaorganics.com.

Platform dependence can be disastrous if not managed well. If you integrate too closely with a preexisting network, allowing them to control your distribution, engagement, and business model, you become just a feature of their network. Had Airbnb been conceived as a tool to manage Craigslist listings and nothing else, it would have served at the leisure of its parent platform—grow too large, or make a wrong move, and it might be existential. Frequently the larger network will simply reach up and duplicate functionality if it gets too popular—a playbook that Microsoft executed in the 1990s with Office and Internet Explorer, among others. Or if the underlying network decides that it no longer wants to provide the same level of API access, as both Twitter and Facebook eventually did, any products dependent on this became worthless overnight. In the end, cherry picking is an enormously powerful move because it exposes the fundamental asymmetry between the David and Goliath dynamic of networks. A new product can decide where to compete, focus on a single point, and build an atomic network—whereas a larger one finds it tough to defend every inch of its product experience. It’s one of the reasons why, particularly in consumer markets, it’s been so hard for “winner take all” to really happen in a literal way. The largest networks can take a lot, in many networks, but they remain vulnerable to any new upstart that uses cherry picking as a core strategy.

Anti-Network Effects Hit the Google+ Launch A charismatic executive from one of the most powerful technology companies in the world introduces a new product at a conference. This time, it’s June 2011 at the Web 2.0 Summit, where Google vice president Vic Gundotra describes the future of social networking and launches Google+. This was Google’s ambitious strategy to counteract Facebook, which was nearing their IPO. To give their new networked product a leg up, as many companies do, it led with aggressive upsells from their core product. The Google.com homepage linked to Google+, and they also integrated it widely within YouTube, Photos, and the rest of the product ecosystem. This generated huge initial numbers—within months, the company announced it had signed up more than 90 million users. While this might superficially look like a large user base, it actually consisted of many weak networks that weren’t engaged, because most new users showed up and tried out the product as they read about it in the press, rather than hearing from their friends. The high churn in the product was covered up by the incredible fire hose of traffic that the rest of Google’s network generated. Even though it wasn’t working, the numbers kept going up. When unengaged users interact with a networked product that hasn’t yet gelled into a stable, atomic network, then they don’t end up pulling other users into the product. In a Wall Street Journal article by Amir Efrati, Google+ was described as a ghost town even while the executives touted large top-line numbers: To hear Google Inc. Chief Executive Larry Page tell it, Google+ has become a robust competitor in the social networking space, with 90 million users registering since its June launch. But those numbers mask what’s really going on at Google+. It turns out Google+ is a virtual ghost town compared with the site of rival Facebook Inc., which is preparing for a massive initial public offering. New data from research firm comScore Inc. shows that Google+ users are signing up—but then not doing much there. Visitors using personal computers spent an average of about three minutes a month on Google+ between September and January, versus six to seven hours on Facebook each month over the same period, according to comScore, which didn’t have data on mobile usage.86 The fate of Google+ was sealed in their go-to-market strategy. By launching big rather than focusing on small, atomic networks that could grow on their own, the teams fell victim to big vanity metrics. At its peak, Google+ claimed to have 300 million active users—by the top-line metrics, it was on its way to success. But network effects rely on the quality of the growth and not just its quantity

Over the years, Facebook has executed an effective playbook that does exactly this, at scale. Take Instagram as an example—in the early days, the core product tapped into Facebook’s network by making it easy to share photos from one product to the other. This creates a viral loop that drives new users, but engagement, too, when likes and comments appear on both services. Being able to sign up to Instagram using your Facebook account also increases conversion rate, which creates a frictionless experience while simultaneously setting up integrations later in the experience. A direct approach to tying together the networks relies on using the very established social graph of Facebook to create more engagement. Bangaly Kaba, formerly head of growth at Instagram, describes how Instagram built off the network of its larger parent: Tapping into Facebook’s social graph became very powerful when we realized that following your real friends and having an audience of real friends was the most important factor for long-term retention. Facebook has a very rich social graph with not only address books but also years of friend interaction data. Using that info supercharged our ability to recommend the most relevant, real-life friends within the Instagram app in a way we couldn’t before, which boosted retention in a big way. The previous theory had been that getting users to follow celebrities and influencers was the most impactful action, but this was much better—the influencers rarely followed back and engaged with a new user’s content. Your friends would do that, bringing you back to the app, and we wouldn’t have been able to create this feature without Facebook’s network. Rather than using Facebook only as a source of new users, Instagram was able to use its larger parent to build stronger, denser networks. This is the foundation for stronger network effects. Instagram is a great example of bundling done well, and why a networked product that launches another networked product is at a huge advantage. The goal is to compete not just on features or product, but to always be the “big guy” in a competitive situation—to bring your bigger network as a competitive weapon, which in turn unlocks benefits for acquisition, engagement, and monetization. Going back to Microsoft, part of their competitive magic came when they could bring their entire ecosystem—developers, customers, PC makers, and others—to compete at multiple levels, not just on building more features. And the most important part of this ecosystem was the developers.

Receptor neurons bundle together into cables called axons, feeding up through holes in a perforated bone just behind the eyeballs called the cribriform plate. (In a serious head injury, the skull can shift, and the lateral movement of the cribriform plate shears those axons like a knife through spaghetti. Snip! No more sense of smell.) Once through the plate, the axons connect to two projections from the brain called the olfactory bulbs. There, in blobs of neurons called glomeruli, is where the bulk of the computation gets done. Mice, known for their acute sense of smell, have just about 1,800 glomeruli—but 1,000 genes that code for olfactory receptors. That’s a lot of perceivable smells. Humans have a seemingly pathetic 370 genes for receptors, but we have 5,500 glomeruli per bulb. That’s a lot of processing power. It must be doing something. The part of the brain that integrates all this information, the olfactory cortex, also gets inputs from the limbic region and other areas that deal with emotion—the amygdala and hypothalamus, among others. Processing of smells in the brain, then, is tied to not only the chemical perception of a molecule but also how we feel about it, and how we feel in general. Every other sense in the body is, in a way, indirect. In vision, light impinges on the retina, a sheet of cells at the back of the eye that makes pigments and connects to the optic nerve. In hearing, sound (which is really just waves of changing air pressure) pushes the eardrum in and out at particular frequencies, which translate via a series of tiny bones to nerves. Touch and taste are the same. Some cell, built to do the hard work of reception, gets between the stimulus and the nerves that lead to the brain for processing. Some physical effect—air pressure, reflected photons, whatever—gets between the stimulus and the perception. It’s all a first-order derivative. Not smell, though. When we smell something, we are smelling tiny pieces of that thing that have broken off, wafted through the air, and then touched actual neurons wired to actual pieces of brain. Olfaction is direct, with nothing between the thing we’re smelling, the smell it has, and how we perceive that smell. It is our most intimate sense.

Kolb’s experiential learning cycle is a widely used explanation on how effective learning takes place (Kolb, 1983; Zull, 2002). Kolb’s cycle has four stages – namely, the concrete experience stage, reflective observation stage, abstract conceptualisation stage, and active experimentation stage. All four stages play important roles in accomplishing successful and effective learning. Kolb’s theory explains how different parts of the brain function together to affect effective learning; concrete experience is sensed through the sensory cortex; reflective observation is performed using the back integrative cortex; abstract conceptualisation is done using the frontal integrative cortex; and active experimentation is performed using motor cortex (Zull, 2002).

Motivate the Workforce. Have you identified each person’s “hot button” and focused on it? Do you work personal pride and shared purpose into most communications? Are you keeping your powder dry for those urgent moments when you may need it?   8. Embrace the Front Lines. Have you made your intent clear and empowered those around you to act? Do you regularly meet with those in direct contact with customers? Is everybody able to communicate their ideas and concerns to you?   9. Build Leadership in Others. Are all managers expected to build leadership among their subordinates? Does the company culture foster the effective exercise of leadership? Are leadership development opportunities available to most, if not all, managers? 10. Manage Relations. Is the hierarchy reduced to a minimum, and does bad news travel up? Are managers self-aware and empathetic? Are autocratic, egocentric, and irritable behaviors censured? 11. Identify Personal Implications. Do employees appreciate how the firm’s vision and strategy impact them individually? What private sacrifices will be necessary for achieving the common cause? How will the plan affect people’s personal livelihood and quality of work life? 12. Convey Your Character. Have you communicated your commitment to performance with integrity? Do those in the organization know you as a person, and do they appreciate your aspirations and your agendas? Have you been in the same room or at least on the same call with everybody who works with you during the past year? 13. Dampen Overoptimism and Excessive Pessimism. Have you prepared the organization for unlikely but extremely consequential events? Do you celebrate success but also guard against the by-products of excessive confidence? Have you paved the way not only for quarterly results but for long-term performance?

Leverage Integrations as a Service In a start-up, you always need to be on the lookout for shortcuts to save you time and money. Don’t corners that will have a negative effect—just look for ways to triple your productivity. No matter how fast I could build integrations, I could never build them all. But in 2012, a new company called Zapier was building a platform to integrate web services together. This was perfect for WebMerge, as I could essentially build an integration to every one of their connected apps, with one single integration. WebMerge was one of the first 100 apps on Zapier, and it instantly allowed WebMerge customers to integrate their documents with each of those 100 apps. Over the years, Zapier blew up and now has thousands of apps available. Zapier was by far our largest integration partner with over 50 percent of our revenue coming from customers using Zapier. Investing in this early platform was crucial and sped up our integration releases by many years. What’s your Zapier story? Is there a partner out there that can open your business to a whole new market—or just help you get your product in front of new customers years ahead of schedule?

For values or guiding principles to be truly effective they have to be verbs. It’s not “integrity,” it’s “always do the right thing.” It’s not “innovation,” it’s “look at the problem from a different angle.” Articulating our values as verbs gives us a clear idea—we have a clear idea of how to act in any situation.

For values or guiding principles to be truly effective they have to be verbs. It’s not “integrity,” it’s “always do the right thing.” It’s not “innovation,” it’s “look at the problem from a different angle.” Articulating our values as verbs gives us a clear idea - we have a clear idea of how to act in any situation.

Research conducted by Egyptian architect Dr. Ibrahim Karim over thirty years has demonstrated the amazing effects of geometrical shapes. One study, led by the Egyptian National Research Centre, showed that simple shapes could stop the replication of bacteria. Most frequently, he surrounded the subjects of his experiments with materials formed into various shapes, such as triangles, squares, or circles; he has also created an extensive index of thought-provoking shapes that integrate other shapes, such as spirals and lines, each of which promotes different changes, such as the healing of heart disease or the growth of new cells in the body.

Frank’s notion of success is transformed from creating work of artistic integrity that contains the potential to change the world (act 2, scene 5) to the kind of worldly success that is marked by money, possessions, and status (act 1, scene 1), a transformation that occurs gradually through his relationship with Gussie. Gussie represents the worldly idea of success, and she positions herself with men who she thinks can help her get it. She moves from being Joe’s secretary to being his wife so as to have a producer to cast her in shows. After five flops, she desperately needs a hit that will establish her as a star, and so she initiates her seduction of Frank. This begins a triangular tug-of-war with Frank in the middle: Mary (not the oblivious Beth) trying to pull Frank back from Gussie’s sexual seduction; and Charley trying to pull Frank back from her idea of worldly success. This tug-of-war plays out through many decisions, some big, some small, not all of them Frank’s: Frank and Charley’s decision to do Musical Husbands as a vehicle for Gussie and then to do one more fluff musical, Sweet Sorrow, for Joe; Beth’s decision to leave Frank with Gussie on the opening night of Musical Husbands; Charley and Mary’s miscalculated decision to encourage Frank to go on the cruise; Gussie’s decision to leave Joe; Frank’s decision, seemingly a small one, not to join Charley and Mary at the Downtown Club on the night he returns from the cruise. Where exactly Frank could have or should have said no so as to have changed his life story is not clear. Rather, the cumulative effect of his and others’ decisions is described by the ensemble in the title song: How does it start to go? Does it slip away slow, So you never even notice it’s happening? (F 383)

As the social sciences became increasingly central to the formulation of public policy, this doctrine reinforced the political and legal drive for school desegregation. So powerful was the presumption that when Congress in 1964 ordered a survey on “the lack of availability of equal educational opportunity for individuals by reason of race, color, religion or national origin,” James Coleman, the study’s director, could tell an interviewer even before the field work was done: “… the study will show the difference in the quality of schools that the average Negro child and the average white child are exposed to. You know yourself that the difference is going to be striking.” So Coleman and most of the academic establishment were startled and dismayed eight months later by just how little difference his survey detected. When the results were in from this, the second-largest social science research project in history, they produced conclusions sharply at variance with the reigning doctrine. Popular impressions to the contrary, Coleman’s investigators found little difference between physical facilities and curricula at black and white schools. Moreover, the differences they did recognize had little effect on black and white performance. Even racial integration had relatively little impact on student achievement, as measured by standardized tests. The significant variables lay, not in the schools at all, but in the homes from which the children came and the cultural and class influences surrounding those homes. If the Coleman Report—as it came to be known—was a thunderclap in the cloistered world of social science research, its implications for public policy were even more earthshaking. Science magazine called it “a spear pointed at the heart of the cherished American belief that equality of educational opportunity will increase the equality of educational achievements.” But its implications went even deeper than that. For if the family, not the school, made the difference; if the poor, the black, and the disenfranchised were less susceptible to educational influence than hitherto believed; if differences between Americans were rooted in the bedrock of class—then social progress would be far more difficult to achieve than most people of goodwill had assumed.

During this psychological transformation, the ordinary anchors of everyday life fell away for many working Americans. Family, community, tradition, and certainty were shaken apart by the economic force of the new—urban, postindustrial, and corporate—brand of capitalism. The sense of a person's self, which had previously been socially defined, moved into the interior of each individual's life and mind. Gradually, another concept of the self emerged as capitalism moved into this new stage, and sales or leisured consumption replaced the older emphasis on production and honest, hard work. This transition marked a shift toward a new type of person, one “predicated on the effectiveness of sales technique or the attractiveness of the individual salesperson. Personal magnetism replaced craftsmanship; technique replaced moral integrity.”85 The pervasive anxiety of this era led Americans to look for leadership anywhere they could find it. Three new areas promised relief. First, a new, popular psychology of personality offered to teach Americans how to transform themselves into people with “an intensely private sense of well being.” Self-pleasure and self-satisfaction now became the purpose of individual existence rather than a by-product of a well-lived life, and this ideology conveniently dovetailed with the new consumerism.86 Not surprisingly, then, a second transformative force emerged as the emerging field of advertising co-opted psychology and drafted psychologists like John B. Watson, A. A. Brill, and Sigmund Freud's brilliant nephew Edward Bernays into its well-paying service. On the advice and example of these men, copywriters began to suggest to consumers that they could transform their position in the social and business hierarchy by buying and displaying the correct products and behaviors. The new generation of ads was highly motivational.

The Ticklish Subject shows how today, in spite of the decline of the paternal metaphor and the inefficacy of ethical-political principles, global capitalist relations of production actually structure an ever more prohibitive and homogenized social reality: The true horror lies not in the particular content hidden beneath the universality of global Capital but, rather, in the fact that Capital is effectively an anonymous global machine blindly running its course; that there is in fact no particular Secret Agent animating it. The horror is not the (particular living) ghost in the (dead universal) machine, but the (dead universal) machine in the very heart of each (particular living) ghost. The conclusion to be drawn is thus that the problematic of multiculturalism (the hybrid coexistence of diverse cultural life-worlds) which imposes itself today is the form of appearance of its opposite, of the massive presence of capitalism as global world system: it bears witness to the unprecedented homogenization of today’s world. (Ticklish, p. 218) Multiculturalism – as well as postmodern efforts to reduce truth to “narratives” or “solidarity of belief” – simply further the interests of global capital. Žižek notes wryly that liberal pseudo-leftists really know all of this, but the problem is that they want to maintain their relatively comfortable lifestyles (bought at the expense of suffering in the Third World), and meanwhile to maintain the pose of revolutionary “beautiful souls.” Postmodern “post-politics” replaces the recognition of global ideological divisions with an emphasis on the collaboration of enlightened experts, technocrats, and specialists who negotiate to reach compromises. Such pragmatic “administration of social matters” accepts in advance the very global capitalist framework that determines the profitability of the compromise (Ticklish, p. 199). This suspension of the space for authentic politics leads to what Žižek calls “postmodern racism,” which ignores the universal rights of the political subject, proliferates divisions along cultural lines, and prevents the working class from politicizing its predicament. Even more seriously, according to Žižek, post-politics no longer merely represses the political, but forecloses it. Thus instead of violence as the neurotic “return of the repressed,” we see signs of a new kind of irrational and excessive violence. This new manifestation of violence results from the (psychotic) foreclosure of the Name of the Father that leads to a “return in the Real.” This violence is thus akin to the psychotic passage a l’acte: “a cruelty whose manifestations range from ‘fundamentalist’ racist and/or religious slaughter to the ‘senseless’ outbursts of violence by adolescents and the homeless in our megalopolises, a violence one is tempted to call Id-Evil, a violence grounded in no utilitarian or ideological reason” (Ticklish, p. 198). Where then, is the power to combat such foreclosure? The Ticklish Subject shows that the subversive power of subjectivity arises only when the subject annuls himself as subject: the acknowledgment of the integral division or gap in subjectivity allows the move from subjection to subjective destitution. Insofar as the subject concedes to the inherent failure of symbolic practices, he no longer presupposes himself as a unified subject. He acknowledges the nonexistence of the symbolic big Other and the monstrosity of the Real. Such acceptance involves the full assertion – rather than the effacement – of the gap between the Real and its symbolization. In contrast to the artificial object character of the imaginary capitalist ego, The Ticklish Subject discloses the “empty place” of the subject as a purely structural function, and shows that this functioning emerges only as the withdrawal from one’s substantial identity, as the disintegration of the “self” that is situated and defined within a communal universe of meaning.

DEEPENING PRACTICES Here are practices you can do this week to integrate the information in this chapter into your life: Selective Attention Exercise 1: In what areas of your life do you focus on the negative rather than the positive? Write down three positive affirmations about that area of your life. Make 10 copies. Place one in your wallet. Tape others to your refrigerator, bathroom mirror, computer monitor, video screen, car dashboard, and other places you can’t avoid noticing them. Practice repeating the positive affirmations the second you catch yourself focusing on the negative. Journaling Exercise: Write down a list of personality flaws that you’d like to change. Create a reminder in your online calendar for 1 year from now, reminding you to check today’s date in your journal. Next year, you might be surprised to see how much some have shifted after a year of meditation. Emotional Contagion Practice: Put the power of emotional contagion to work for you. Make a list of the happiest people you know, and make a plan to get together with at least four of them in the coming month. Selective Attention Exercise 2: Whenever you hear a bad news story that upsets you, do a web search for contradictory evidence (e.g., “Good news about . . .”). This will put the bad news in context. Field Effects Exercise: Look at the Insight Timer app each day you meditate and notice how many other people are meditating worldwide. It’s usually hundreds of thousands. This reminds you that you are not alone.

The Human Genome Project, in effect, began with an elephant, while Apollo began with a conceptual system design. One succeeded through almost independent inquiry; the other demanded the tightest project integration that the world had ever seen.

Unlocking Beauty: Exploring Advanced Technologies in Aesthetic Treatments at myChway In today's dynamic world of beauty and aesthetics, the quest for non-invasive, effective treatments has never been more prevalent. Among the vast array of innovative technologies, myChway stands out as a pioneering hub, offering a comprehensive range of cutting-edge solutions, including Radio Frequency, Cryolipolysis, Pulsed Light Face, LED Masks, Lipocavitation, and more. Let's delve into the transformative power of these advancements and understand how they're revolutionizing the beauty industry. Radio Frequency (RF) myChway integrates Radio Frequency technology, known for its remarkable skin-tightening and collagen-boosting properties. This advanced treatment targets fine lines, wrinkles, and sagging skin, promoting a firmer, more youthful complexion. Through controlled heating, RF stimulates the body’s natural collagen production, resulting in long-term skin rejuvenation. Cryolipolysis The innovative Cryolipolysis treatment, a specialty at myChway, involves freezing and eliminating stubborn fat cells without invasive procedures. This technique, often referred to as "fat freezing," selectively targets and reduces fat pockets, reshaping the body without downtime or surgery. Pulsed Light Face Treatments myChway's Pulsed Light Face treatments harness the power of light energy to address various skin issues. This technology is versatile, effectively treating acne, pigmentation, and stimulating collagen production, promoting a clearer, more radiant complexion. LED Masks LED Masks have gained popularity for their ability to improve skin health. With various wavelengths of light, these masks can target specific skin concerns, such as acne or aging. At myChway, these masks are designed to cater to diverse skin needs, offering a relaxing and effective treatment. Lipocavitation and Lipolaser Lipocavitation and Lipolaser technologies at myChway are designed to break down stubborn fat deposits through ultrasound and laser energy, respectively. These non-invasive procedures provide contouring and slimming effects, reshaping the body safely and effectively. The Power of 7EN1, 8EN1, and 9EN1 Technologies At the forefront of myChway's offerings are their 7EN1, 8EN1, and 9EN1 technologies. These multifunctional devices combine various treatments into one, offering a holistic approach to beauty and body contouring. From cellulite reduction to skin tightening, these comprehensive systems cater to a wide range of aesthetic needs, providing an all-in-one solution. In conclusion, myChway's commitment to integrating the latest advancements in the beauty industry makes it a go-to destination for those seeking non-invasive, effective aesthetic treatments. With a focus on Radio Frequency, Cryolipolysis, Pulsed Light Face, LED Masks, Lipocavitation, and the advanced 7EN1, 8EN1, and 9EN1 technologies, myChway continues to redefine beauty standards, ensuring a safe, transformative experience for its clientele. Experience the future of beauty and aesthetics at myChway, where innovation meets transformation.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management Solutions Optimize your supply chain with Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. Our Microsoft expertise ensures efficient supply chain management. Introduction to Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management In today's fast-paced business environment, managing a supply chain efficiently is crucial for success. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management offers a comprehensive solution designed to streamline and enhance your supply chain operations. With our expertise in Microsoft technologies, we can help you achieve operational excellence and meet your business goals. Key Features of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management End-to-End Visibility: Gain complete visibility into your supply chain processes, from procurement to delivery. Real-Time Insights: Utilize advanced analytics and AI to make data-driven decisions. Seamless Integration: Integrate seamlessly with other Microsoft Dynamics 365 applications and third-party systems. Scalability: Easily scale your operations as your business grows. Enhanced Collaboration: Improve collaboration across departments with a unified platform. Benefits of Using Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management Increased Efficiency: Automate and optimize your supply chain processes to reduce manual efforts and errors. Cost Savings: Identify cost-saving opportunities through better inventory management and demand forecasting. Improved Customer Satisfaction: Ensure timely delivery and high-quality products to enhance customer satisfaction. Risk Management: Mitigate risks by monitoring and managing potential disruptions in real-time. Why Choose Us? With our extensive experience in Microsoft Dynamics 365, we are committed to providing top-notch supply chain management solutions tailored to your business needs. Our team of experts will work with you to implement and optimize Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, ensuring you get the most out of your investment. Get Started Today Transform your supply chain with Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you achieve a more efficient and effective supply chain.

One way to make yourself less vulnerable to copycats is to build a moat around your business. How Can I Build a Moat? As you scale your company, you need to think about how to proactively defend against competition. The more success you have, the more your competitors will grab their battering ram and start storming the castle. In medieval times, you’d dig a moat to keep enemy armies from getting anywhere near your castle. In business, you think about your economic moat. The idea of an economic moat was popularized by the business magnate and investor Warren Buffett. It refers to a company’s distinct advantage over its competitors, which allows it to protect its market share and profitability. This is hugely important in a competitive space because it’s easy to become commoditized if you don’t have some type of differentiation. In SaaS, I’ve seen four types of moats. Integrations (Network Effect) Network effect is when the value of a product or service increases because of the number of users in the network. A network of one telephone isn’t useful. Add a second telephone, and you can call each other. But add a hundred telephones, and the network is suddenly quite valuable. Network effects are fantastic moats. Think about eBay or Craigs-list, which have huge amounts of sellers and buyers already on their platforms. It’s difficult to compete with them because everyone’s already there. In SaaS—particularly in bootstrapped SaaS companies—the network effect moat comes not from users, but integrations. Zapier is the prototypical example of this. It’s a juggernaut, and not only because it’s integrated with over 3,000 apps. It has widened its moat with nonpublic API integrations, meaning that if you want to compete with it, you have to go to that other company and get their internal development team to build an API for you. That’s a huge hill to climb if you want to launch a Zapier competitor. Every integration a customer activates in your product, especially if it puts more of their data into your database, is another reason for them not to switch to a competitor. A Strong Brand When we talk about your brand, we’re not talking about your color scheme or logo. Your brand is your reputation—it’s what people say about your company when you’re not around.

Revelation. I understand the mechanism of my own thinking. I know precisely how I know, and my understanding is recursive. I understand the infinite regress of this self-knowing, not by proceeding step by step endlessly, but by apprehending the limit. The nature of recursive cognition is clear to me. A new meaning of the term "self-aware". Fiat logos I know my mind in terms of a language more expressive than any I'd previously imagined. Like God creating order from chaos with an utterance, I make myself anew with this language. It is meta-self-descriptive and self-editing; not only can it describe thought, it can describe and modify its own operations as well, at all levels. What Gödel would have given to see this language, where modifying a statement causes the entire grammar to be adjusted. With this language, I can see how my mind is operating. I don't pretend to see my own neurons firing; such claims belong to John Lilly and his LSD experiments of the sixties. What I can do is perceive the gestalts; I see the mental structures forming, interacting. I see myself thinking, and I see the equations that describe my thinking, and I see myself comprehending the equations, and I see how the equations describe their being comprehended. I know how they make up my thoughts. These thoughts. *** Initially I am overwhelmed by all this input, paralyzed with awareness of my self. It is hours before I can control the flood of self-describing information. I haven't filtered it away, nor pushed it to the background. It's become integrated into my mental processes, for use during my normal activities. It will be longer before I can take advantage of it, effortlessly and effectively, the way a dancer uses her kinesthetic knowledge. All that I once knew theoretically about my mind, I now see detailed explicitly. The undercurrents of sex, aggression, and self-preservation, translated by the conditioning of my childhood, clash with and are sometimes disguised as rational thought. I recognize all the causes of my every mood, the motives behind my every decision. What can I do with this knowledge? Much of what is conventionally described as "personality" is at my discretion; the higher-level aspects of my psyche define who I am now. I can send my mind into a variety of mental or emotional states, yet remain ever aware of the state and able to restore my original condition.

Waking Up by Getting Free of Childhood Issues Working through childhood emotional injuries is the most effective way of waking up from repeating the past. When I say “working through,” I mean the mental and emotional process of coming to grips with painful realities. Think of it as a process of breaking down something that’s initially too big to swallow: you chew on it until it can become a digestible part of your history. Research suggests that what has happened to people matters less than whether they’ve processed what happened to them. In a study of the characteristics of parents who raise securely attached children, researchers found that parents who created a secure attachment for their children were often characterized by a willingness to recall and talk about their own childhoods (Main, Kaplan, and Cassidy 1985). Even though some of these parents had lived through very difficult childhood experiences, their relationships with their own children were secure, since they had spent time thinking about and integrating their childhood experiences and were at ease with both the negative and positive aspects of their past. It’s easy to imagine why children with such parents showed secure attachment. These parents were not avoiding reality. Because they had addressed their own pasts, they were fully available to connect with their children and form a secure attachment.

Part III describes how to accelerate flow by building the foundations of our deployment pipeline: enabling fast and effective automated testing, continuous integration, continuous delivery, and architecting for low-risk releases.