Hundred Days Offensive Quotes

As I was editing this chapter, a survey of more than thirty-five hundred Australian surgeons revealed a culture rife with bullying, discrimination, and sexual harassment, against women especially (although men weren’t untouched either). To give you a flavor of professional life as a woman in this field, female trainees and junior surgeons “reported feeling obliged to give their supervisors sexual favours to keep their jobs”; endured flagrantly illegal hostility toward the notion of combining career with motherhood; contended with “boys’ clubs”; and experienced entrenched sexism at all levels and “a culture of fear and reprisal, with known bullies in senior positions seen as untouchable.”68 I came back to this chapter on the very day that news broke in the state of Victoria, Australia, where I live, of a Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission report revealing that sexual discrimination and harassment is also shockingly prevalent in the Victorian Police, which unlawfully failed to provide an equal and safe working environment.69 I understand that attempts to identify the psychological factors that underlie sex inequalities in the workplace are well-meaning. And, of course, we shouldn’t shy away from naming (supposedly) politically unpalatable causes of those inequalities. But when you consider the women who enter and persist in highly competitive and risky occupations like surgery and policing—despite the odds stacked against them by largely unfettered sex discrimination and harassment—casual scholarly suggestions that women are relatively few in number, particularly in the higher echelons, because they’re less geared to compete in the workplace, start to seem almost offensive. Testosterone

The rapt pupil will be forgive for assuming the Tsar of Death to be wicked and the Tsar of Life to be visrtuous. Let the truth be told: There is no virtue anywhere. Life is sly and unscrupulous, a blackguard, wolfish, severe. In service to itself, it wil commit any offense. So, too, is Death possessed of infinite strategies and a gaunt nature-but also mercy, also grace and tenderness. In his own country, Death can be kind. But of an end to their argument, we shall have none, not ever, until the end of all. So where is the country of the Tsar of Death? Where is the nation of the Tsar of Life? They are not so easy to find, yet each day you step upon both one hundred times or more. Every portion of Eath is infinitely divided between them, to the smallest unit of measure, and smaller yet. Even the specks of soil war with one another. Even the atoms strangle each other in their sleep. To reach the country of the Tsar of Life, which is both impossibly near and hopelessly far, you must not wish to arrive there, but approach is stealthily, sideways. It is best to be ill, in a fever, a delirium. In the riot of sickness, when the threatened flesh rouses itself, all redness and fluid and heat, it is easiest to topple over into the country you seek. Of course, it is just as easy, in this manner to reach the country of the Tsar of Death. Travel is never without risk.

This harkens back to the eighteenth-century philosopher and reformer Cesare Beccaria, whose 1764 work On Crimes and Punishments—a high-water mark of the Italian Enlightenment—launched the movement to apply rational principles to criminal reform, such as adjusting the punishments to fit the crimes (proportionality) instead of, as was the custom of the day, the death penalty for such offenses as poaching, counterfeiting, theft, sodomy, bestiality, adultery, horse theft, being in the company of Gypsies, and two hundred other crimes and misdemeanors.

At the end of the process a decisive defeat in war may bring a final blow, or barbarian invasion from without may combine with barbarism from within to bring the civilization to a close. Is this a depressing picture? Not quite. Life has no inherent claim to eternity, whether in individuals or in states. Death is natural, and if it comes in due time it is forgivable and useful, and the mature mind will take no offense from its coming. But do civilizations die? Again, not quite. Greek civilization is not really dead; only its frame is gone and its habitat has changed and spread; it survives in the memory of the race, and in such abundance that no one life, however full and long, could absorb it all. Homer has more readers now than in his own day and land. The Greek poets and philosophers are in every library and college; at this moment Plato is being studied by a hundred thousand discoverers of the "dear delight" of philosophy overspreading life with understanding thought. This selective survival of creative minds is the most real and beneficent of immortalities.

These assurances were taken by the PLO to constitute binding commitments, and it was on their basis that it agreed to leave Beirut. On August 12, after epic negotiations, final terms were reached for the PLO’s departure. The talks were conducted while Israel carried out a second day of the most intense bombardment and ground attacks of the entire siege. The air and artillery assault on that day alone—over a month after the PLO had agreed in principle to leave Beirut—caused more than five hundred casualties. It was so unrelenting that even Ronald Reagan was moved to demand that Begin halt the carnage.37 Reagan’s diary relates that he called the Israeli prime minister during the ferocious offensive, adding, “I was angry—I told him it had to stop or our entire future relationship was endangered. I used the word holocaust deliberately & said the symbol of his war was becoming a picture of a 7 month old baby with its arms blown off.”38 This sharp phone call impelled Begin’s government to halt its rain of fire almost immediately, but Israel refused to budge on the crucial issue of international protection for the Palestinian civilian population as a quid pro quo for the PLO’s evacuation.

Patrick Vlaskovits, who was part of the initial conversation that the term “growth hacker” came out of, put it well: “The more innovative your product is, the more likely you will have to find new and novel ways to get at your customers.”12 For example: 1. You can create the aura of exclusivity with an invite-only feature (as Mailbox did). 2. You can create hundreds of fake profiles to make your service look more popular and active than it actually is—nothing draws a crowd like a crowd (as reddit did in its early days). 3. You can target a single service or platform and cater to it exclusively—essentially piggybacking off or even stealing someone else’s growth (as PayPal did with eBay). 4. You can launch for just a small group of people, own that market, and then move from host to host until your product spreads like a virus (which is what Facebook did by starting in colleges—first at Harvard—before taking on the rest of the population). 5. You can host cool events and drive your first users through the system manually (as Myspace, Yelp, and Udemy all did). 6. You can absolutely dominate the App Store because your product provides totally new features that everyone is dying for (which is what Instagram did—twenty-five thousand downloads on its first day—and later Snapchat). 7. You can bring on influential advisors and investors for their valuable audience and fame rather than their money (as About.me and Trippy did—a move that many start-ups have emulated). 8. You can set up a special sub-domain on your e-commerce site where a percentage of every purchase users make goes to a charity of their choice (which is what Amazon did with Smile.Amazon.com this year to great success, proving that even a successful company can find little growth hacks). 9. You can try to name a Planned Parenthood clinic after your client or pay D-list celebrities to say offensive things about themselves to get all sorts of publicity that promotes your book (OK, those stunts were mine).

THE INSTRUCTION OF PTAHHOTEP Epilogue Part II The fool who does not hear, He can do nothing at all; He sees knowledge in ignorance, Usefulness in harmfulness. He does all that one detests And is blamed for it each day; He lives on that by which one dies. His food is distortion of speech. His sort is known to the officials, Who say: "A living death each day.” One passes over his doings, Because of his many daily troubles. A son who hears is a follower of Horus, It goes well with him when he has heard. When he is old has reached veneration. He will speak likewise to his children, Renewing the teaching of his father. Every man teaches as he acts, He will speak to the children, So that they will speak to their children: Set an example, don’t give offense, If justice stands firm your children will live. As to the first who gets into trouble, When they see (it) people will say: “That is just like him.” And will say to what they hear: "That’s just like him too.” To see everyone is to satisfy the many, Riches are useless without them. Don’t take a word and then bring it back, Don’t put one thing in place of another. Beware of loosening the cords in you, Lest a wise man say: “Listen, if you want to endure in the mouth of the hearers. Speak after you have mastered the craft!” If you speak to good purpose. All your affairs will be in place. Conceal your heart, control your mouth. Then you will be known among the officials; Be quite exact before your lord. Act so that one will say to him: "He’s the son of that one.” And those who hear it will say: “Blessed is he to whom he was born!” Be deliberate when you speak, So as to say things that count; Then the officials who listen will say: “How good is what comes from his mouth!” Act so that your lord will say of you: “How good is he whom his father taught; When he came forth from his body. He told him all that was in (his) mind, And he does even more than he was told,” Lo, the good son, the gift of god, Exceeds what is told him by his lord, He will do right when his heart is straight. As you succeed me, sound in your body. The king content with all that was done. May you obtain (many) years of life! Not small is what I did on earth, I had one hundred and ten years of life As gift of the king, Honors exceeding those of the ancestors, By doing justice for the king. Until the state of veneration!

The emphasis was on “soft.” No matter what else happened, the wranglers were to stay soft while riding the horses. Soft hands, soft seat, and soft legs. There was to be absolutely no hitting, kicking, slapping, or yelling at any time for any reason. The penalty for doing such things was to be placed on a two-day suspension. A second offense would lead to termination. Neither penalty was ever needed. At times it wasn’t easy to stay quiet with the horses because so many of them had been “used up” over the years, dulled to any form of cue. However, we remained consistent in our focus and the horses responded. The wranglers were instructed to ride the horses with the softest cues possible, often using nothing more than a light squeeze to get forward movement and a shift of weight in the saddle, along with light pressure on the reins, for a stop. They were also instructed to look for, find, and then release their cues at the slightest try from the horse—something they all became very adept at doing. With everyone riding in the same manner from one day to the next, all the horses began to respond within a few weeks. Before we knew it, all of our horses, including the very old ones that had been in the program for years and years, became responsive to the lightest of cues. We’d taught our horses to be responsive to these light cues, but a question remained. How could we keep them that way, particularly with the hundreds of different people who would be riding each horse over the summer? The answer was simple. Everyone needed to remain consistent. So, instead of expecting our horses to respond to the conflicting cues that each new rider was bound to give, we taught each rider how to communicate with our horses. Each week when a new batch of guests arrived at the ranch, we held an orientation in the riding arena. During this orientation, we explained how our horses were trained and what was expected of them as a rider of one of our horses. We gave them a demonstration in the saddle of proper seat and hand position, so they could keep their balance. We showed them the cues for walk, stop, trot, lope, and turn, using a horse right out of the string. Once we had demonstrated how our horses worked, we got everyone on horseback in the arena and helped them to practice giving the cues, allowing the horse to respond, and releasing the cues so that the horse would remain responsive. Of note is the fact that after

The good news was that the smoke, whatever its source, was not getting closer to us. The bad news was that it was moving towards Oban. We wasted no time rowing across the loch. The group we’d already sent over remained visible and clearly busy, though doing what was anybody’s guess from our vantage point in the birlinn. It was getting on past noon, and I hated the idea of leaving the birlinn behind. Crafting it had been a singularly powerful experience, one that I wasn’t sure was repeatable. The birlinn we’d made was unique. In the end, though, it was a boat. It wasn’t alive like the three hundred people we were trying to keep breathing. Not to mention the thousands in Oban who could die. I’d planned to take one of the oars to give a rower a break, but I must have looked haggard. When I’d gone to offer, the bloke with the oar had taken one look at me and said, “Naw, mate.” Sitting on a thwart next to Eilidh, I fervently wished for something to distract me from the radiating warmth on my left. Rowing would at least give me something to do that wasn’t thinking about that heat or second guessing all the decisions we’d made in the past few days. We could have taken the strongest of us and returned to Oban, leaving the other three hundred to take the slower route around the loch. Sure, that was a possibility. But if we’d done that, we’d have left them vulnerable, including the children. That wasn’t acceptable to me or to anyone else. Oban had the advantage of numbers and at least some preparation at this point; the people with us did not. There were any number of things we could be questioning, but if we sat here picking apart the instincts we’d followed, all we’d do was pick up an ulcer. We were still alive. That was all that mattered. I tuned back in to the birlinn to hear a couple of the rowers talking, both of them darting glances at me and Eilidh in the process. “. . . wrecked all of Sackington’s guns and stole his grenades,” one of them said, not really trying to be quiet. Eilidh zeroed in on him like a bloodhound catching a whiff of the quarry. “Yes. We did.” “Erm, he wasn’t saying it was a bad thing!” one of the rowers blurted out. “Yes, I was! We could have used those instead of hitting things with sticks, for fuck’s sake,” the other one said. “No offense.” “Mate, they don’t even work anymore,” I said, and when I could almost see his thoughts pivot to but there’s magic now, I sighed. “We happened to be present when someone figured out how to use their magic to fire a rifle at one of Bawbag’s simulacra. Not only did the bullet literally bounce right back, but it killed his daughter when it ricocheted, and his next shot was dead on. Can you guess what happened then?” “He died,” said the guy who had tried to reassure me they weren’t questioning that decision. He had sandy brown hair that was a mess of waves half stuck to his head with sweat from the exertion, and his muscles were bulging out of his shirt—guess he was getting those Strength increases. “Did he die?” the other bloke asked. “Aye, he might as well have just shot himself in the heart. Even swords bounced right off that damn thing—piercing it with the point seems to be the only thing even marginally successful, and that might be imbuing it with Purifire more than the actual poke.” “I know how to shoot a gun,” Eilidh said bluntly. “And amateurs with firearms tend to hurt much more than they help, let alone in a state of active combat. This isn’t the fucking Wild West.” She sounded Done with a capital D, and I didn’t blame her. To his credit, the bloke seemed to mull that over for a bit before nodding as if ceding the point. Whatever the Ascended Alliance knew about friendly fire of an arcane nature, that did not extend to human-made explosives. If

Not that I didn’t want to fully Hulk out at least ten times a day; I was a woman and a lawyer and I was on Twitter, I felt like flipping tables daily, but whenever those hot flashes sparked into life, I always tried to remind myself of something my dad told me when I started my training at Abbott & Howe: no one likes an angry woman. It was sexist, offensive and at least in my office, one hundred per cent true. For years, I’d done my level best to be professional, hardworking, calm and likeable, but now my rage felt like a can of Pringles, I had been popped and I could not stop.

Hundreds of inmates, all in prison whites, are killing time as guards look down from a tower. Young and black, almost all of them. According to the numbers, they’re in for nonviolent drug offenses. The average sentence is seven years. Upon release, 60 percent will be back here within three years. And why not? What’s on the outside to prevent their return? They are now convicted felons, a branding they will never be able to shake. The odds were stacked against them to begin with, and now that they’re tagged as felons, life in the free world is somehow supposed to improve? These are the real casualties of our wars. The war on drugs. The war on crime. Unintended victims of tough laws passed by tough politicians over the past forty years. One million young black men now warehoused in decaying prisons, idling away the days at taxpayer expense. Our prisons are packed. Our streets are filled with drugs. Who’s winning the war? We’ve lost our minds.

And now the reader will ask what became of the three penguins' eggs for which three human lives had been risked three hundred times a day, and three human frames strained to the utmost extremity of human endurance. Let us leave the Antarctic for a moment and conceive ourselves in the year 1913 in the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. I had written to say that I would bring the eggs at this time. Present, myself, C.-G., the sole survivor of the three, with First or Doorstep Custodian of the Sacred Eggs. I did not take a verbatim report of his welcome; but the spirit of it may be dramatized as follows: First Custodian. Who are you? What do you want? This ain't an egg-shop. What call have you to come meddling with our eggs? Do you want me to put the police on to you? Is it the crocodile's egg you're after? I don't know nothing about 'no eggs. You'd best speak to Mr. Brown: it's him that varnishes the eggs. I resort to Mr. Brown, who ushers me into the presence of the Chief Custodian, a man of scientific aspect, with two manners: one, affably courteous, for a Person of Importance (I guess a Naturalist Rothschild at least) with whom he is conversing, and the other, extraordinarily offensive even for an official man of science, for myself. I announce myself with becoming modesty as the bearer of the penguins' eggs, and proffer them. The Chief Custodian takes them into custody without a word of thanks, and turns to the Person of Importance to discuss them. I wait. The temperature of my blood rises. The conversation proceeds for what seems to me a considerable period. Suddenly the Chief Custodian notices my presence and seems to resent it. Chief Custodian. You needn't wait. Heroic Explorer. I should like to have a receipt for the eggs, if you please. Chief Custodian. It is not necessary: it is all right. You needn't wait. Heroic Explorer. I should like to have a receipt. But by this time the Chief Custodian's attention is again devoted wholly to the Person of Importance. Feeling that to persist in overhearing their conversation would be an indelicacy, the Heroic Explorer politely leaves the room, and establishes himself on a chair in a gloomy passage outside, where he wiles away the time by rehearsing in his imagination how he will tell off the Chief Custodian when the Person of Importance retires. But this the Person of Importance shows no sign of doing, and the Explorer's thoughts and intentions become darker and darker. As the day wears on, minor officials, passing to and from the Presence, look at him doubtfully and ask his business. The reply is always the same, "I am waiting for a receipt for some penguins' eggs." At last it becomes clear from the Explorer's expression that what he is really waiting for is not to take a receipt but to commit murder. Presumably this is reported to the destined victim: at all events the receipt finally comes; and the Explorer goes his way with it, feeling that he has behaved like a perfect gentleman, but so very dissatisfied with that vapid consolation that for hours he continues his imaginary rehearsals of what he would have liked to have done to that Custodian (mostly with his boots) by way of teaching him manners.

This is the central barrier to understanding evolution. We understand time through the experience of our own short lives. To truly imagine three and a half billion years is virtually impossible. Imagine yourself living to seventy-I mean really imagine seventy years: being born, a decade and a half of education, many more decades of employment, wars, elections, scientific discoveries, parents lost, middle age, old age-innumerable memories marked off by seventy birthdays and seventy summers and winters. Now try to imagine fifty million of those lifetimes-fifty million of them! Because that is how long life has been developing on earth. But how can you begin to conceive of such an expanse of time? Try this. If, at a modest clip-which I'd recommend, given what I'm proposing-it takes you a minute to count out loud to a hundred, it will take you almost a week of nonstop counting to reach a million. That is, counting without a single break and no sleep. If you could keep counting for twenty-four hours a day for 350 days, you'd reach fifty million. But these are not just meaningless numbers-each one of them represents a lifetime. But almost a year without sleep is inconceivable, so let's try and make it "doable", as Behe would say. Put in eight hours of counting a day, seven days a week. Take a two-week vacation each year. Under these still-harsh working conditions (no weekends off), it will now take you three years to count out these fifty million lifetimes. (You will reach, incidentally, the birth of Christ within the first half minute, and the oldest age of the earth, according to believers in a literal Genesis, within the first two minutes.) But to really comprehend this expanse of time, you would still have to be capable of imagining-as each of those numbers came tripping off your tongue, hour after hour, week after week, month after month, year after year, for three years-that each of those numbers signified a lifetime. Even if you chose to do this, and even if you were capable of the extraordinary effort of will and imagination needed to conceive of what you were actually doing, I suspect that at the end of it you would still be only a little closer to comprehending the vast amount of time involved. In all probability, you would give up long before you finished, overwhelmed by depression at your own insignificance. It is offensive to one's sense of self to imagine this huge expanse of time that came before you and within which you had no relevance. No, it is more than offensive; it is terrifying. How much easier-and how much more comforting-to just put in those first two minutes and imagine, in one way or another, a designer who placed you at the center of it all.

The Christianity of Paine's day is not the Christianity of our time. There has been a great improvement since then. One hundred and fifty years ago the foremost preachers of our time would have perished at the stake. A Universalist would have been torn in pieces in England, Scotland, and America. Unitarians would have found themselves in the stocks, pelted by the rabble with dead cats, after which their ears would have been cut off, their tongues bored, and their foreheads branded. Less than one hundred and fifty years ago the following law was in force in Maryland: "Be it enacted by the Right Honorable, the Lord Proprietor, by and with the advice and consent of his Lordship's governor, and the upper and lower houses of the Assembly, and the authority of the same: "That if any person shall hereafter, within this province, wittingly, maliciously, and advisedly, by writing or speaking, blaspheme or curse God, or deny our Saviour, Jesus Christ, to be the Son of God, or shall deny the Holy Trinity, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, or the Godhead of any of the three persons, or the unity of the Godhead, or shall utter any profane words concerning the Holy Trinity, or any of the persons thereof, and shall thereof be convict by verdict, shall, for the first offense, be bored through the tongue, and fined twenty pounds to be levied of his body. And for the second offense, the offender shall be stigmatized by burning in the forehead with the letter B, and fined forty pounds. And that for the third offense, the offender shall suffer death without the benefit of clergy." The strange thing about this law is, that it has never been repealed, and is still in force in the District of Columbia Laws like this were in force in most of the colonies, and in all countries where the Church had power.

Since the days of the Pilgrims, leaders of the new society that arose in the New World have embraced the core concept of a divinely determined destiny. For nearly four hundred years, Americans nourished the notion that God maintained an intimate, protective connection to their singular nation. Only recently, with the emphasis on guilt over gratitude in our teaching of history, has the public grown uncomfortable with the idea that fate favors American endeavors. Today, the merest suggestion that the Almighty plays favorites among the nations of the world strikes contemporary sensibilities as offensive, outrageous, or at least controversial.

On reaching their new dwelling places in Ottoman territory, the boys were “either persuaded or forced to be circumcised and made Muslim.” Nor were these merely symbolic or superficial acts: “The first thing they are made to learn is the Turks’ false religion, which they know so well as to put us to shame.”28 Having learned to submit, they were next subjected to a draconian training system not unlike the ancient Spartan agoge: “They make them drudge day and night, and they give them no bed to sleep on and very little food.” They were allowed to “speak to each other only when it is urgently necessary” and were made to “pray together without fail at four prescribed times every day.” As “for any little offense, they beat them cruelly with sticks, rarely hitting them less than a hundred times, and often as much as a thousand. After punishments the boys have to come to them and kiss their clothing and thank them for the cudgelings they have received. You can see, then,” concluded the Italian observer, “that moral degradation and humiliation are part of the training system.”29 Ironically, however—and as with other historically Muslim institutions that have been whitewashed¶—this abduction, forced conversion, and jihadi indoctrination of Christian children is portrayed by several leading academics “as the equivalent of sending a child away for a prestigious education and training for a lucrative career.

The offensive bloke hit the floor with a thud, and nearby couples hastily retreated from the arena of a threatened punch-up. Whatever ideas the bloke had about fighting his corner disappeared when he took in James’s tall, firm-bodied figure and the look on his face. He scrambled to his feet, mouthed the kind of language he hadn’t known during his brief time as an innocent child and lost himself in the crowd. Cathy’s eyes shone like those of a maiden delivered from evil by a white knight. Even in this day and age, many centuries distant from the heroics of King Arthur’s gallant band, a girl delivered from a lout could experience a moment of dreamlike fantasy. ‘James, oh, thanks,’ she said as he took her arm and led her to the refreshment bar where coffee and soft drinks could be bought. ‘Well, I couldn’t take you back to your Aunt Marie looking as if you’d lost a fight for the honour of your bodice,’ said James. ‘My what?’ said Cathy. ‘It happens a lot in modern novels,’ said James. ‘Old Aunt Victoria devours them, but says they shouldn’t be allowed.’ Cathy laughed, gave him an impulsive hug of gratitude for his act of delivery, and said, ‘Yes, they’re called bodice-rippers. Aunt Marie also enjoys them.’ ‘Good reading on a wet day, I should think,’ said James as the band swung into a new number and the dancing feet of a few hundred teenagers gave the floor another drumming. ‘Have a banana.’ ‘Banana?’ ‘I meant coffee or Coke.’ ‘Coffee,