“
The rat, huddled in the hollow of her palms, squeaked glumly. Delighted, she hugged him to her chest. "Oh poor baby," she crooned, almost as if he really were a pet. "Poor Simon, it'll be fine, I promise-"
"I wouldn't feel too sorry for him," Jace said. "That's probably the closest he's ever gotten to second base."
"Shut up!" Clary glared at Jace furiously, but she did loosen her grip on the rat.
”
”
Cassandra Clare (City of Bones (The Mortal Instruments, #1))
“
There will always be those who want to tell you who you are based on your name or the blood in your veins. Do not let other people decide who you are. Decide for yourself.
”
”
Cassandra Clare (City of Heavenly Fire (The Mortal Instruments, #6))
“
Stripping the protection wards off the ship was bad enough—it's a strong, strong enchantment, demon-based—but when you fell, I had to put a fast spell on the truck so it wouldn't sink when I lost consciousness. And I will lose consciousness, Alec.
”
”
Cassandra Clare (City of Ashes (The Mortal Instruments, #2))
“
Maybe I can climb one of those," Simon said, eyeing the fat white pillars that held up the slanted roof of the Hall. Runes were carved on them in overlapping patterns, but otherwise there were no visible handholds. "Work off steam that way."
"Oh, come on," Clary said. "You're a vampire, not Spider-Man."
Simon's only response was to jog lightly up the steps to the base of a pillar. He eyed it thoughtfully for a moment before putting his hands to it and starting to climb. Clary watched him, open-mouthed, as his fingertips and feet found impossible holds on the ridged stone. "You are Spider-Man!" she exclaimed.
”
”
Cassandra Clare (City of Glass (The Mortal Instruments, #3))
“
The Christian idea of marriage is based on Christ's words that a man and wife are to be regarded as a single organism - for that is what the words 'one flesh' would be in modern English. And the Christians believe that when He said this He was not expressing a sentiment but stating a fact - just as one is stating a fact when one says that a lock and its key are one mechanism, or that a violin and a bow are one musical instrument.
”
”
C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)
“
Mundane humans create distinctions between themselves, distinctions that seem ridiculous to any Shadowhunter. Their distinctions are based on race, religion, national identity, any of a dozen minor and irrelevant markers. ~ Valentine
”
”
Cassandra Clare (City of Ashes (The Mortal Instruments, #2))
“
He pointed at Brother Jeremiah, who had come to a halt in front of a statue just slightly taller than he was, its base overgrown with moss. The statue was of an angel. The marble of the statue was so smooth it was almost translucent. The face of the angel was fierce and beautiful and sad. In long white hands the angel held a cup, its rim studded with marble jewels. Something about the statue tickled Clary’s memory with an uneasy familiarity. There was a date inscribed on the base, 1234, and words inscribed around it: NEPHILIM: FACILIS DESCENSUS AVERNI.
“Is that meant to be the Mortal Cup?” she asked.
Jace nodded. “And that’s the motto of the Nephilim—the Shadowhunters—there on the base.”
“What does it mean?”
Jace’s grin was a white flash in the darkness. “It means ‘Shadowhunters: Looking Better in Black Than the Widows of our Enemies Since 1234.’”
“Jace—”
It means, said Jeremiah, The descent into Hell is easy.
”
”
Cassandra Clare (City of Bones (The Mortal Instruments, #1))
“
What is it that makes you want to write songs? In a way you want to stretch yourself into other people’s hearts. You want to plant yourself there, or at least get a resonance, where other people become a bigger instrument than the one you’re playing. It becomes almost an obsession to touch other people. To write a song that is remembered and taken to heart is a connection, a touching of bases. A thread that runs through all of us. A stab to the heart. Sometimes I think songwriting is about tightening the heartstrings as much as possible without bringing on a heart attack.
”
”
Keith Richards (Life)
“
His response to them [women] as sexual beings was one of frenzied worship and idolatry. They were lovely, satisfying, maddening manifestations of the miraculous, instruments of pleasure too powerful to be measured, too keen to be endured, and too exquisite to be intended for employment by base, unworthy man.
”
”
Joseph Heller (Catch-22)
“
His response to them as sexual beings was one of frenzied worship and idolatry. They were lovely, satisfying, maddening manifestations of the miraculous, instruments of pleasure too powerful to be measured, too keen to be endured, and too exquisite to be intended for employment by base, unworthy man. He could interpret their naked presence in his hands only as a cosmic oversight destined to be rectified speedily, and he was driven always to make what carnal use of them he could in the fleeting moment of two he felt he had before Someone caught wise and whisked them away.
”
”
Joseph Heller (Catch-22)
“
There have been, of course, many other insatiable polymaths, and even the Renaissance produced other Renaissance Men. But none painted the Mona Lisa, much less did so at the same time as producing unsurpassed anatomy drawings based on multiple dissections, coming up with schemes to divert rivers, explaining the reflection of light from the earth to the moon, opening the still-beating heart of a butchered pig to show how ventricles work, designing musical instruments, choreographing pageants, using fossils to dispute the biblical account of the deluge, and then drawing the deluge. Leonardo was a genius, but more: he was the epitome of the universal mind, one who sought to understand all of creation, including how we fit into it.
”
”
Walter Isaacson (Leonardo Da Vinci)
“
Instead, he was mapping a social contract based on “unremitting coercive bargaining” in which individuals treated one another as instruments toward their own ends, not fellow beings of intrinsic value.
”
”
Nancy MacLean (Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America)
“
It is easier to allow a few women to occupy positions of authority and dominance than to question whether social life should be organized around principles of hierarchy, control, and dominance at all, to allow a few women to reach the heights of the corporate hierarchy rather than question whether people's needs should depend on an economic system based on dominance, control, and competition. It is easier to allow women to practice law than to question adversarial conflict as a model for resolving disputes and achieving justice. It has even been easier to admit women to military combat roles than to question the acceptability of warfare and its attendant images of patriarchal masculine power and heroism as instruments of national policy. And it has been easier to elevate and applaud a few women than to confront the cultural misogyny that is never far off, waiting in the wings and available for anyone who wants to use it to bring women down and put them in their place.
”
”
Allan G. Johnson (The Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Pariarchal Legacy)
“
They’re based in fact, even if mundanes think they’re myth. Shadowhunters have a saying: all the stories are true.
”
”
Cassandra Clare (City of Bones (The Mortal Instruments, #1))
“
No government exclusively based on the means of violence has ever existed. Even the totalitarian ruler, whose chief instrument of rule is torture, needs a power basis—the secret police and its net of informers.
”
”
Hannah Arendt (On Violence)
“
Art is a kind of magic. Creativity is mysterious, even to artists, who might be able to name their inspiration but can't always explain how their influences and experiences came together to create this new thing- this painting, this story, this song. If you break art down to its base elements, there's nothing miraculous about the letters of the alphabet or a drop of paint. But an artist can put those elements together to create something powerful, something that moves us and withstands the test of time. A work that no one but that artist could have imagined, let alone created.
”
”
Sarah Cross (Shadowhunters and Downworlders: A Mortal Instruments Reader)
“
For white Americans of every ideological stripe—from radical southern racists to northern progressives—African American criminality became one of the most widely accepted bases for justifying prejudicial thinking, discriminatory treatment, and/or acceptance of racial violence as an instrument of public safety.
”
”
Khalil Gibran Muhammad (The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America)
“
There was a date inscribed on the base, 1234, and words inscribed around it: NEPHILIM: FACILIS DESCENSUS AVERNI.
“Is that meant to be the Mortal Cup?” she asked.
Jace nodded. “And that’s the motto of the Nephilim—the Shadowhunters—there on the base.”
“What does it mean?”
Jace’s grin was a white flash in the darkness. “It means ‘Shadowhunters: Looking Better in Black Than the Widows of our Enemies Since 1234.’”
“Jace—”
It means, said Jeremiah, The descent into Hell is easy.
”
”
Cassandra Clare (City of Bones (The Mortal Instruments, #1))
“
Había una fecha grabada en la base, 1234, y unas palabras alrededor de ella: NEPHILIM: FACILIS DESCENSOS AVERNI.
—¿Se supone que eso es la Copa Mortal? —preguntó.
Jace asintió.
—Y ése es el lema de los nefilim, de los cazadores de sombras, ahí en la base.
—¿Qué significa?
La amplia sonrisa de Jace fue un destello blanco en la oscuridad.
—Significa: Cazadores de sombras. Les sienta mejor el negro que a las viudas de nuestros
enemigos desde 1234.
—Jace…
«Significa —dijo Jeremiah—: El descenso al infierno es fácil.»
”
”
Cassandra Clare (City of Bones (The Mortal Instruments, #1))
“
When the lyrical content is based on the word of God it becomes covenanted.
”
”
Temi Peters (Instruments of Praise & Acts of Worship)
“
began to be aware of the tremble of insects as they played their instruments underneath the stems, down at the very base of the heat.
”
”
Saul Bellow (Henderson the Rain King)
“
Just as it was not necessary for Beethoven to know the science of the physical manufacture of the instruments in his orchestra in order for him to compose, it is not necessary for you to understand vortex based mathematics, fractal field theory, dodecahedrons, geometric solids, calculus, Fibonacci series, centripetal force, and quantum physics in order to become enlightened.
”
”
Laurence Galian (666: Connection with Crowley)
“
Modern civilisation has based its specific foundation on the principle of liberty which states that man is not a mere instrument to be used by others but rather a main autonomous living being.
”
”
Altiero Spinelli (Il manifesto di Ventotene)
“
There was a date inscribed on the base, 1234, and words inscribed around it: NEPHILIM: FACILIS DESCENSUS AVERNI. “Is that meant to be the Mortal Cup?” she asked. Jace nodded. “And that’s the motto of the Nephilim—the Shadowhunters—there on the base.” “What does it mean?” Jace’s grin was a white flash in the darkness. “It means ‘Shadowhunters: Looking Better in Black Than the Widows of our Enemies Since 1234.
”
”
Cassandra Clare (City of Bones (The Mortal Instruments, #1))
“
I’ve never seen him arrive or leave, because I always walk past him, drop a dollar bill in his case, and keep moving. Then, covertly from the platform, I look over—as do many of us—to where he sits on his stool near the base of the stairs, his fingers flying up and down the neck of the instrument. His left hand pulls out the notes as if it’s as simple as breathing.
Breathing. As an aspiring writer, it’s my least favorite cliché, but it’s the only one that suits. I’ve never seen someone’s fingers move like that, as if he doesn’t even have to think about it. In some ways, it seems like he gives the guitar an actual human voice.
He looks up as I drop a bill into his case, squinting at me, and gives me a quiet “Thanks very much.”
He’s never done that before—looked up when someone dropped money in his case—and I’m caught completely off guard when our eyes meet.
Green, his are green. And he doesn’t immediately look away. The hold of his gaze is mesmerizing.
”
”
Christina Lauren (Roomies)
“
The tendencies we have mentioned are something new for America. They arose when, under the influence of the two World Wars and the consequent concentration of all forces on a military goal, a predominantly military mentality developed, which with the almost sudden victory became even more accentuated. The characteristic feature of this mentality is that people place the importance of what Bertrand Russell so tellingly terms “naked power” far above all other factors which affect the relations between peoples. The Germans, misled by Bismarck’s successes in particular, underwent just such a transformation of their mentality—in consequence of which they were entirely ruined in less than a hundred years. I must frankly confess that the foreign policy of the United States since the termination of hostilities has reminded me, sometimes irresistibly, of the attitude of Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II, and I know that, independent of me, this analogy has most painfully occurred to others as well. It is characteristic of the military mentality that non-human factors (atom bombs, strategic bases, weapons of all sorts, the possession of raw materials, etc.) are held essential, while the human being, his desires and thoughts—in short, the psychological factors—are considered as unimportant and secondary. Herein lies a certain resemblance to Marxism, at least insofar as its theoretical side alone is kept in view. The individual is degraded to a mere instrument; he becomes “human materiel.” The normal ends of human aspiration vanish with such a viewpoint. Instead, the military mentality raises “naked power” as a goal in itself—one of the strangest illusions to which men can succumb.
”
”
Albert Einstein (Essays in Humanism)
“
Then, in 333 B.C., he turned south through the Cilician 'Gates' on the direct route towards Syria, where Darius III was concentrating to oppose him. Here, through the failure of his intelligence service and his own assumption that the Persians would await him in the plains, Alexander was strategically out-manoeuvred. While Alexander made a direct approach, Darius made an indirect-and, moving up the higher reaches of the Euphrates, came through the Amanic Gates onto Alexander's rear. He, who had been so careful to secure his chain of bases, now found himself cut off from them. But, turning back, he extricated himself at the battle of Issus by the superiority of his tactics as well as of his tactical instrument-no Great Captain applied this unexpectedness of indirectness more in his tactics.
”
”
B.H. Liddell Hart (Strategy)
“
The roots of the slasher movie stretch back to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), based on Robert Bloch’s book of the same name. While Bloch stated many times that his book was based on the real-life crimes of Ed Gein, far more clippings were found in his files regarding Wisconsin’s infamous children’s entertainer and serial poisoner, Floyd Scriltch. When Hitchcock purchased the rights to Bloch’s book, he also optioned the life rights from the sole survivor of Scriltch’s infamous “Easter Bunny Massacre,” Amanda Cohen. Cohen was instrumental in the detection and capture of Scriltch and paid a heavy price for her bravery. This book is dedicated to her memory.
”
”
Grady Hendrix (The Final Girl Support Group)
“
The hero of the following account, Homo immunologicus, who must give his life, with all its dangers and surfeits, a symbolic framework, is the human being that struggles with itself in concern for its form. We will characterize it more closely as the ethical human being, or rather Homo repetitious, Homo artista, the human in training. None of the circulating theories of behaviour or action is capable of grasping the practising human - on the contrary: we will understand why previous theories had to make it vanish systematically, regardless of whether they divided the field of observation into work and interaction, processes and communications, or active and contemplative life. With a concept of practice based on a broad anthropological foundation, we finally have the right instrument to overcome the gap, supposedly unbridgeable by methodological means, between biological and cultural phenomena of immunity - that is, between natural processes on the one hand and actions on the other.
”
”
Peter Sloterdijk (Du mußt dein Leben ändern)
“
The state university is supported by grants from the people of the state, voted by the state legislature. In theory, the degree of support which the university receives is dependent upon the degree of acceptance accorded it by the voters. The state university prospers according to the extent to which it can sell itself to the people of the state.
The state university is therefore in an unfortunate position unless its president happens to be a man of outstanding merit as a propagandist and a dramatizer of educational issues. Yet if this is the case--if the university shapes its whole policy toward gaining the support of the state legislature--its educational function may suffer. It may be tempted to base its whole appeal to the public on its public service, real or supposed, and permit the education of its individual students to take care of itself. It may attempt to educate the people of the state at the expense of its own pupils. This may generate a number of evils, to the extent of making the university a political instrument, a mere tool of the political group in power.
”
”
Edward L. Bernays (Propaganda)
“
People think that the destructive theories that nowadays go by the name “socialism” are of recent origin. This is a mistake: these theories were contemporaneous with the first Economists. While they employed the all-powerful government of their dreams as an instrument to change the forms of society, socialists imagined seizing the same power to undermine its base.
”
”
Alexis de Tocqueville (The Old Regime and the French Revolution)
“
As animals have no idea of the holy or the devil, they have no idea of the beautiful. The opinion held by some scientists that apes could paint, based on the 'paintings' apes had done, proved to be quite wrong. It has been confirmed that apes only imitate man. So- called 'ape art' surely does not exist. On the contrary, the cave men from Cromagnon onward knew how to paint and care. Their drawings have been found in caves of the Sahara, in Spain at Altamira, in Franc at Lascaux, and recently in Poland at Mashicka. Many of these pictures are thought to be more than 30,000 years old. Some time ago, a group of Soviet archeologists discovered a set of musical instruments, made 20,000 years ago, near the town of Chernigov in the Ukraine.
”
”
Alija Izetbegović
“
The charge that Anarchism is destructive, rather than constructive, and that, therefore, Anarchism is opposed to organization, is one of the many falsehoods spread by our opponents. They confound our present social institutions with organization; hence they fail to understand how we can oppose the former, and yet favor the latter. The fact, however, is that the two are not identical. “The State is commonly regarded as the highest form of organization. But is it in reality a true organization? Is it not rather an arbitrary institution, cunningly imposed upon the masses? “Industry, too, is called an organization; yet nothing is farther from the truth. Industry is the ceaseless piracy of the rich against the poor. “We are asked to believe that the Army is an organization, but a close investigation will show that it is nothing else than a cruel instrument of blind force. “The Public School! The colleges and other institutions of learning, are they not models of organization, offering the people fine opportunities for instruction? Far from it. The school, more than any other institution, is a veritable barrack, where the human mind is drilled and manipulated into submission to various social and moral spooks, and thus fitted to continue our system of exploitation and oppression. “Organization, as WE understand it, however, is a different thing. It is based, primarily, on freedom. It is a natural and voluntary grouping of energies to secure results beneficial to humanity. “It is the harmony of organic growth which produces variety of color and form, the complete whole we admire in the flower. Analogously will the organized activity of free human beings, imbued with the spirit of solidarity, result in the perfection of social harmony, which we call Anarchism. In fact, Anarchism alone makes non-authoritarian organization of common interests possible, since it abolishes the existing antagonism between individuals and classes. “Under present conditions the antagonism of economic and social interests results in relentless war among the social units, and creates an insurmountable obstacle in the way of a co-operative commonwealth. “There is a mistaken notion that organization does not foster individual freedom; that, on the contrary, it means the decay of individuality. In reality, however, the true function of organization is to aid the development and growth of personality. “Just as the animal cells, by mutual co-operation, express their latent powers in formation of the complete organism, so does the individual, by co-operative effort with other individuals, attain his highest form of development. “An organization, in the true sense, cannot result from the combination of mere nonentities. It must be composed of self-conscious, intelligent individualities. Indeed, the total of the possibilities and activities of an organization is represented in the expression of individual energies. “It therefore logically follows that the greater the number of strong, self-conscious personalities in an organization, the less danger of stagnation, and the more intense its life element. “Anarchism asserts the possibility of an organization without discipline, fear, or punishment, and without the pressure of poverty: a new social organism which will make an end to the terrible struggle for the means of existence,—the savage struggle which undermines the finest qualities in man, and ever widens the social abyss. In short, Anarchism strives towards a social organization which will establish well-being for all. “The germ of such an organization can be found in that form of trades unionism which has done away with centralization, bureaucracy, and discipline, and which favors independent and direct action on the part of its members.
”
”
Emma Goldman (Anarchism and Other Essays)
“
Language could be used as an instrument of control, a way of establishing hierarchies that suggest one set of people is better or more special than another. Through language, one automatically identifies one's place within a social and cultural hierarchy and we all carry with us illogical attitudes about the bearers of particular language, based on our own cultural background and continued exposure to local political ideals.
”
”
David Crow (Left to Right: The Cultural Shift from Words to Pictures)
“
Not only the media of mass communication, one of the most important instruments by which the managerial elite disciplines and control the mass population, but also all other mass organizations that disseminate, restrict, or invent information, ideas and values advertising, publishing, journalism, film and broadcasting, entertainment, religion, education, and institutions for research and development. Indeed, the mass organizations of culture and communication, which generally lack the coercive disciplines of the mass corporation and the mass state, are able to provide disciplines and control for the mass population primarily through their use of the devices and techniques of mass communication. All the mass cultural organizations, then, function as part of the media of mass communication, and they constitute a necessary element in the power base of the managerial elite.
”
”
Samuel T. Francis (Leviathan and Its Enemies: Mass Organization and Managerial Power in Twentieth-Century America)
“
Finally, there was the formidable difficulty of navigation. Making extraordinarily complex spherical trigonometry calculations based on figures taken from a crowd of instruments, navigators groped over thousands of miles of featureless ocean toward targets or destination islands that were blacked out at night, often only yards wide, and flat to the horizon. Even with all the instruments, the procedures could be comically primitive. “Each time I made a sextant calibration,” wrote navigator John Weller, “I would open the escape hatch on the flight deck and stand on my navigation desk and the radio operator’s desk while [the radioman] held on to my legs so I would not be sucked out of the plane.” At night, navigators sometimes resorted to following the stars, guiding their crews over the Pacific by means not so different from those used by ancient Polynesian mariners. In a storm or clouds, even that was impossible.
”
”
Laura Hillenbrand (Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption)
“
The master propagandist, like the advertising expert, avoids obvious emotional appeals and strives for a tone that is consistent with the prosaic quality of modern life—a dry, bland matter-of-factness. Nor does the propagandist circulate "intentionally biased" information. He knows that partial truths serve as more effective instruments of deception than lies. Thus he tries to impress the public with statistics of economic growth that neglect to give the base year from which growth is calculated, with accurate but meaningless facts about the standard of living—with raw and uninterpreted data, in other words, from which the audience is invited to draw the inescapable conclusion that things are getting better and the present régime therefore deserves the people's confidence, or on the other hand that things are getting worse so rapidly that the present régime should be given emergency powers to deal with the developing crisis.
”
”
Christopher Lasch (The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations)
“
Scripture also makes clear that our faith is not a work. Our new status is based wholly on the merits of Christ and not on anything about us. While a paintbrush may be the instrumental cause of a work of art, the real and efficient cause is, of course, the painter. In the same way, while faith may be the instrumental cause of our union with Christ - that which brings about salvation - the real or efficient cause - that which is finally responsible for salvation - is God.
”
”
Robert M. Norris
“
Yet the Leatherstocking’s positive twist on genocidal colonialism was based on the reality of invasion, squatting, attacking, and colonizing of the Indigenous nations. Neither Filson nor Cooper created that reality. Rather, they created the narratives that captured the experience and imagination of the Anglo-American settler, stories that were surely instrumental in nullifying guilt related to genocide and set the pattern of narrative for future US writers, poets, and historians.
”
”
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (ReVisioning American History, #3))
“
Ideologically mindfulness serves very well the neoliberal-capitalist’s construction of reality which softly dictates that one must deny the roots of personal and social issues. We are manipulated into the self-repair mode, but what is actually broken is the system. Therein, the problem we face is our own selves and not a world based on oppressive values which leave us feeling oppressed and powerless. You must be meditation 24/7 for the rest of your life to deny that meditation alone won’t house the homeless, will not end contemporary social and physical apartheid. It will not provide free health care to all in the community and it will end social exclusion. Said that, yes, you might feel that you are feeling less anxious, but only because you are being ‘drugged’ and you are being denied your full humanity. We need to feel more, sympathise more and act moved by our love for humanity – those who are outside of ourselves. Here’s something that you will not find in a self-help book that might help you: the problem is the oppressive system and not you. It is the system that violates us by imposing since birth to us that there is one way to be and feel human. And it involves heavily looking good, competing against others and to compete against your own self – the system says that we must be functional machines to fulfil the system’s need. Our body is controlled and our minds, our being controlled via instruments of normalisation such as self-help books and mindfulness meditation.
”
”
Bruno De Oliveira
“
In my view, the West is not a concept to be explored, analyzed, or enlarged through a study of the history and great ideals that created it; it has always been an instrument. It is when we use it as instrument that does not exist in our own history and culture because we see it in Europe, and we legitimize our demands with Europe's prestige. In our own country, the concept of Europe justifies the use of force, radical political change, the ruthless severing of tradition. From improvement of women's rights to violation of human rights, from democracy to military dictatorship, many things are justified by an idea of the West that stresses this concept of Europe and reflects a positivist utilitarianism. Throughout my life I've heard all our daily habits, from table manners to sexual ethics, criticized and changed because "that's how they do it in Europe." It is something I have heard over and over: on the radio, on television, from my mother. It is not an argument based on reason and indeed precludes reason.
”
”
Orhan Pamuk (Other Colours)
“
The United States believes it has the right to prosecute any company that has concluded a contract in US dollars, or even if emails – considered as international trade instruments – have simply been exchanged, stored (or transited) via servers based in the United States (such as Gmail or Hotmail). With this law, the Americans have succeeded in pulling off a neat sleight of hand. They have transformed a law that could have weakened their own industry into a formidable instrument of underground economic warfare and intervention.
”
”
Frédéric Pierucci (The American Trap: My battle to expose America's secret economic war against the rest of the world)
“
Certainly the concept that human CO2 causes warming and climate change was based on unproven theory used by people with an ideology. They used instruments of state to dominate the science. They also attacked and abused anyone who dared to pursue proper science. The small group who controlled the IPCC were unlikely to change their tune. A pattern that was borne out by the release of IPCC Report AR5 in September 2013, which denied the fact that for 17 years global temperature declined slightly while CO2 levels continued to increase.
”
”
Tim Ball (The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science)
“
Without being aware of it, Carlos was making a distinction in relationships that Aristotle had made more than two thousand years earlier in his Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle wrote that there is a kind of a friendship ladder, from lowest to highest. At the bottom—where emotional bonds are weakest and the benefits are lowest—are friendships based on utility: deal friends, to use Carlos’s coinage. You are friends in an instrumental way, one that helps each of you achieve something else you want, such as professional success. Higher up are friends based on pleasure. You are friends because of something you like and admire about the other person. They are entertaining, or funny, or beautiful, or smart, for example. In other words, you like an inherent quality, which makes it more elevated than a friendship of utility, but it is still basically instrumental. At the highest level is Aristotle’s “perfect friendship,” which is based on willing each other’s well-being and a shared love for something good and virtuous that is outside either of you. This might be a friendship forged around religious beliefs or passion for a social cause. What it isn’t is utilitarian. The other person shares in your passion, which is intrinsic, not instrumental. Of
”
”
Arthur C. Brooks (From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life)
“
From Bourcet he learnt the principle of calculated dispersion to induce the enemy to disperse their own concentration preparatory to the swift reuniting of his own forces. Also, the value of a 'plan with several branches', and of operating in a line which threatened alternative objectives. Moreover, the very plan which Napoleon executed in his first campaign was based on one that Bourcet had designed half a century earlier.
Form Guibert he acquired an idea of the supreme value of mobility and fluidity of force, and of the potentialities inherent in the new distribution of an army in self-contained divisions. Guibert had defined the Napoleonic method when he wrote, a generation earlier: 'The art is to extend forces without exposing them, to embrace the enemy without being disunited, to link up the moves or the attacks to take the enemy in flank without exposing one's own flank.' And Guibert's prescription for the rear attack, as the means of upsetting the enemy's balance, became Napoleon's practice. To the same source can be traced Napoleon's method of concentrating his mobile artillery to shatter, and make a breach at, a key point in the enemy's front. Moreover, it was the practical reforms achieved by Guibert in the French army shortly before the Revolution which fashioned the instrument that Napoleon applied. Above all, it was Guibert's vision of a coming revolution in warfare, carried out by a man who would arise from a revolutionary state, that kindled the youthful Napoleon's imagination and ambition.
While Napoleon added little to the ideas he had imbibed, he gave them fulfilment. Without his dynamic application the new mobility might have remained merely a theory. Because his education coincided with his instincts, and because these in turn were given scope by his circumstances, he was able to exploit the full possibilities of the new 'divisional' system. In developing the wider range of strategic combinations thus possible Napoleon made his chief contribution to strategy.
”
”
B.H. Liddell Hart (Strategy)
“
The Party's Object...' The establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interests of the whole community'......was precise and legalistic. Correctness of definition and theory was all-important: in the minds of the men of new party, the failures of the existing organisations were simply the fruits of false theories. For the same reason, the Object did not mention the means of exchange. It was held that socialism, with free access to everything, there would be no exchange of goods; hence, to talk of the common ownership of the means of exchange was to show misunderstanding from the start.
”
”
Robert Barltrop
“
If the introduction and increase of machinery means the displacement of millions of manual by a few machine-workers, improvement in machinery means the displacement of more and more of the machine-workers themselves. It means, in the last instance, the production of a number of available wage-workers in excess of the average needs of capital, the formation of a complete industrial reserve army, as I called it in 1845, available at the times when industry is working at high pressure, to be cast out upon the street when the inevitable crash comes, a constant dead-weight upon the limbs of the working class in its struggle for existence with capital, a regulator for the keeping of wages down to the low level that suits the interests of capital. Thus it comes about, to quote Marx, that machinery becomes the most powerful weapon in the war of capital against the working class; that the instruments of labour constantly tear the means of subsistence out of the hands of the labourer; that the very product of the worker is turned into an instrument for his subjugation. Thus it comes about that the evolutioni of the instruments of labour becomes at the same time, from the outset, the most reckless waste of labour-power, and robbery based upon the normal conditions under which labour functions; that machinery, the most powerful instrument for shortening labour-time, becomes the most unfailing means for placing every moment of the labourer’s time and that of his family at the disposal of the capitalist for the purpose of expanding the value of his capital.
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”
Friedrich Engels (The Friedrich Engels Collection: 9 Classic Works)
“
The communists believe that they have found the path to deliverance from our evils. According to them, man is wholly good and is well-disposed to his neighbour; but the institution of private property has corrupted his nature. The ownership of private wealth gives the individual power, and with it the temptation to ill-treat his neighbour; while the man who is excluded from possession is bound to rebel in hostility against his oppressor. If private property were abolished, all wealth held in common, and everyone allowed to share in the enjoyment of it, ill-will and hostility would disappear among men. Since everyone’s needs would be satisfied, no one would have any reason to regard another as his enemy; all would willingly undertake the work that was necessary.I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communist system; I cannot enquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous. But I am able to recognize that the psychological premisses on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments, certainly a strong one, though certainly not the strongest; but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness, nor have we altered anything in its nature. Aggressiveness was not created by property. It reigned almost without limit in primitive times, when property was still very scanty, and it already shows itself in the nursery almost before property has given up its primal, anal form; it forms the basis of every relation of affection and love among people (with the single exception, perhaps, of the mother’s relation to her male child). If we do away with personal rights over material wealth, there still remains prerogative in the field of sexual relationships, which is bound to become the source of the strongest dislike and the most violent hostility among men who in other respects are on an equal footing. If we were to remove this factor, too, by allowing complete freedom of sexual life and thus abolishing the family, the germ-cell of civilization, we cannot, it is true, easily foresee what new paths the development of civilization could take; but one thing we can expect, and that is that this indestructible feature of human nature, will follow it there.
”
”
Sigmund Freud (Civilization and Its Discontents)
“
Gervex's painting had a lurid and well-known literary source: it was based on Alfred de Musset's poem "Rolla," published in 1833 and 1840. The poem, a paradigm of July Monarchy romanticism, chronicles the disgrace that befalls Jacques Rolla, a son of the bourgeoisie, in the big city. The narrative of his decline — he squandered his fortune and committed suicide — is interleaved with lamentations over the moral and spiritual decadence of contemporary life. Thenineteen-year-old Rolla becomes the "most debauched man" in Paris, "where vice is the cheapest, the oldest and the most fertile in the world."
The poem tells a second story as well, that of Marie (or Maria or Marion), a pure young girl who becomes a degraded urban prostitute. Her story amplifies the poet's theme — a world in moral disarray - and provides the instrument of, and a sympathetic companion for, Rolla's climactic self-destruction. Musset is clear about his young prostitute's status: she was forced into a prostitution de la misère by economic circumstances ("what had debased her was, alas, poverty /And not love of gold"), and he frequently distinguishes her situation from that of the venal women of the courtesan rank ("Your loves are golden, lively and poetic; . . . you are not for sale at all"). He is also insistent about the tawdry circumstances in which the young woman had to practice her miserable profession ("the shameful curtains of that foul retreat," "in a hovel," "the walls of this gloomy and ramshackle room").
The segments of the poem from which Gervex drew his story — and which were published in press reviews of the painting — are these:
With a melancholy eye Rolla gazed on
The beautiful Marion asleep in her wide bed;
In spite of himself, an unnameable and diabolical horror
Made him tremble to the bone.
Marion had cost dearly. — To pay for his night
He had spent his last coins.
His friends knew it. And he, on arriving,
Had taken their hand and given his word that
In the morning no one would see him alive.
When Rolla saw the sun appear on the roofs,
He went and leaned out the window.
Rolla turned to look at Marie.
She felt exhausted, and had fallen asleep.
And thus both fled the cruelties of fate,
The child in sleep, and the man in death!
It was a moment of inaction, then, that Gervex chose to paint - that of weary repose for her and melancholic contemplation for Rolla, following the night of paid sex and just prior to his suicide.
”
”
Hollis Clayson (Painted Love: Prostitution and French Art of the Impressionist Era)
“
Once a competitor’s move has occurred, the denial of an adequate base for the competitor to meet its goals, coupled with the expectation that this state of affairs will continue, can cause the competitor to withdraw. New entrants, for example, usually have some targets for growth, market share, and ROI, and some time horizon for achieving them. If a new entrant is denied its targets and becomes convinced that it will be a long time before they are met, then it may withdraw or deescalate. Tactics for denying a base include strong price competition, heavy expenditures on research, and so on. Attacking new products in the test-market phase can be an effective way to foretell a firm’s future willingness to fight and can be less expensive than waiting for the introduction to actually occur. Another tactic is using special deals to load customers up with inventory, thereby removing the market for the product and raising the short-run cost of entry. It can be worth paying a substantial short-run price to deny a base if a firm’s market position is threatened. Essential to such a strategy, however, is a good hypothesis about what a competitor’s performance targets and time horizon are. An example of such a situation may be Gillette’s withdrawal from digital watches. Although claiming it had won significant market shares in test markets, Gillette bowed out, citing the substantial investments required to develop technology and margins lower than those available in other areas of its business. Texas Instruments’ strategy of aggressive pricing and rapid technological development in digital watches probably had a substantial impact on this decision.
”
”
Michael E. Porter (Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors)
“
You think of me that way because you look at me and at what I do through the lens of your mundane understanding of the world. Mundane humans create distinctions between themselves, distinctions that seem ridiculous to any Shadowhunter. Their distinctions are based on race, religion, nation identity, any of a dozen more irrelevant markers, To mundanes they seem logical, for though mundanes connote see, understand, or acknowledge the demon worlds, still somewhere found buried in their ancient memories, they know that there are those that walk this earth and are other. That do not belong, that mean only harm and destruction. Since the demon threat is invisible to mundanes, they must assign the threat to others of their own kind. They place the face of their enemy onto the face of their neighbor, and thus are generations of misery assured.
”
”
Cassandra Clare (City of Ashes (The Mortal Instruments, #2))
“
TRUST IN ONE’S ORGANISM A second characteristic of the persons who emerge from therapy is difficult to describe. It seems that the person increasingly discovers that his own organism is trustworthy, that it is a suitable instrument for discovering the most satisfying behavior in each immediate situation. If this seems strange, let me try to state it more fully. Perhaps it will help to understand my description if you think of the individual as faced with some existential choice: “Shall I go home to my family during vacation, or strike out on my own?” “Shall I drink this third cocktail which is being offered?” “Is this the person whom I would like to have as my partner in love and in life?” Thinking of such situations, what seems to be true of the person who emerges from the therapeutic process? To the extent that this person is open to all of his experience, he has access to all of the available data in the situation, on which to base his behavior. He has knowledge of his own feelings and impulses, which are often complex and contradictory. He is freely able to sense the social demands, from the relatively rigid social “laws” to the desires of friends and family. He has access to his memories of similar situations, and the consequences of different behaviors in those situations. He has a relatively accurate perception of this external situation in all of its complexity. He is better able to permit his total organism, his conscious thought participating, to consider, weigh and balance each stimulus, need, and demand, and its relative weight and intensity. Out of this complex weighing and balancing he is able to discover that course of action which seems to come closest to satisfying all his needs in the situation, long-range as well as immediate needs.
”
”
Carl R. Rogers (On Becoming a Person)
“
In Europe, on the other hand, Muslims find themselves in the opposite position: they are the minority, but they are offered the equality of citizens. The acceptance of reason-based knowledge by Muslims would for them smooth the way to secular democracy, human rights, peace among democratic nations and above all cultural-religious pluralism. If Muslim migrants embrace these values and the related rules, it matters little whether Muslims constitute a minority or a majority. Some leaders of the Islamic diaspora are not favorable to this embracing and make the accusation of Islamophobia every time the shari’a is rejected. This accusation becomes an instrument for deterring any call for change and for incriminating any rational criticism. A call for an embracing of cultural modernity as a platform of peace between civilizations becomes in this perception an expression of Islamophobia.
”
”
Bassam Tibi (Political Islam, World Politics and Europe: From Jihadist to Institutional Islamism)
“
His response to them as sexual beings was one of frenzied worship and idolatry. They were lovely, satisfying, maddening manifestations of the miraculous, instruments of pleasure too powerful to be measured, too keen to be endured, and too exquisite to be intended for employment by base, unworthy man. He could interpret their naked presence in his hands only as a cosmic oversight destined to be rectified speedily, and he was driven always to make what carnal use of them he could in the fleeting moment or two he felt he had before Someone caught wise and whisked them away. He could never decide whether to furgle them or photograph them, for he had found it impossible to do both simultaneously. In fact, he was finding it almost impossible to do either, so scrambled were his powers of performance by the compulsive need for haste that invariably possessed him. The pictures never came out, and Hungry Joe never got in.
”
”
Joseph Heller (Catch-22)
“
Women killed Hungry Joe. His response to them as sexual beings was one of frenzied worship and idolatry. They were lovely, satisfying, maddening manifestations of the miraculous, instruments of pleasure too powerful to be measured, too keen to be endured, and too exquisite to be intended for employment by base, unworthy man. He could interpret their naked presence in his hands only as a cosmic oversight destined to be rectified speedily, and he was driven always to make what carnal use of them he could in the fleeting moment or two he felt he had before Someone caught wise and whisked them away. He could never decide whether to furgle them or photograph them, for he had found it impossible to do both simultaneously. In fact, he was finding it almost impossible to do either, so scrambled were his powers of performance by the compulsive need for haste that invariably possessed him. The pictures never came out, and Hungry Joe never got in.
”
”
Joseph Heller (Catch-22)
“
But should we garner the courage and moral will to reject once and for all the fallacy of racial difference for the ideological conceit that it is, what will be the premise of our new national history, our new national story? Where will the frontiers of the new Malaysia be? And what will the new Malaysia look like?
None of us can answer these questions for certain, for any national narrative is forever a work in progress. Nations are constructs, based on the collective imagination and imaginary of their citizens. But as a nation in the making and under construction, we should at least have the courage to admit that some of our earlier premises were wrong (if not dangerous) and that the time has come to reinvent ourselves with some degree of hindsight and collective wisdom. One of the first steps that has to be taken is to recognise and accept that much of what we have been told as the first generation of postcolonial Malaysians was false, and that these instrumental fictions were tools to mentally bind us.
”
”
Farish A. Noor (What Your Teacher Didn't Tell You: The Annexe Lectures (Vol. 1))
“
Markopolos first heard about Madoff in the late 1980s. The hedge fund he worked for had noticed Madoff’s spectacular returns, and they wanted Markopolos to copy Madoff’s strategy. Markopolos tried. But he couldn’t figure out what Madoff’s strategy was. Madoff claimed to be making his money based on heavy trading of a financial instrument known as a derivative. But there was simply no trace of Madoff in those markets. “I was trading huge amounts of derivatives every year, and so I had relationships with the largest investment banks that traded derivatives,” Markopolos remembers. So I called the people that I knew on the trading desks: “Are you trading with Madoff?” They all said no. Well, if you are trading derivatives, you pretty much have to go to the largest five banks to trade the size that he was trading. If the largest five banks don’t know your trades and are not seeing your business, then you have to be a Ponzi scheme. It’s that easy. It was not a hard case. All I had to do was pick up the phone, really.
”
”
Malcolm Gladwell (Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know)
“
Few women anywhere could resist such wily cajolery, and prostitutes would spring to their feet eagerly and hurl themselves into whatever fantastic poses he requested for them. Women killed Hungry Joe. His response to them as sexual beings one of frenzied worship and idolatry. They were lovely, satisfying, maddening manifestations of the miraculous instruments of pleasure too powerful to be measured, to keen to be endured, and too exquisite to be intended for employment by base, unworthy man. He could interpret their naked presence in his hands only as a cosmic oversight destined to be rectified speedily, and he was driven always to make what carnal use of them he could in the fleeting moment or two he felt he head before someone caught wise and whisked them away. He could never decide whether to furgle them or photograph them, for he had found it impossible do both simultaneously. In fact, he was finding it almost impossible to do either, so scrambled were his powers of performance by the compulsive need for haste that invariably possessed him. The pictures never came out, and Hungry Joe never got in.
”
”
Joseph Heller (Catch-22)
“
The Armonica: Among the most amusing of his inventions was a musical instrument he called the armonica. It was based on the common practice of bored dinner guests, and some musicians, of producing a resonant tone by moving a wet finger around the rim of a glass. Franklin attended a concert in England of music performed on wineglasses, and in 1761 he perfected the idea by taking thirty-seven glass bowls of different sizes and attaching them to a spindle. He rigged up a foot pedal and flywheel to spin the contraption, which allowed him to produce various tones by pressing on the glass pieces with his wet fingers. In a letter to an Italian electrician, Franklin described the new instrument in minute detail. “It is an instrument,” he said, “that seems peculiarly adapted to Italian music, especially that of the soft and plaintive kind.” Franklin’s armonica was quite a rage for a while. Marie Antoinette took lessons on it, Mozart and Beethoven wrote pieces for it, and its haunting tones became popular at weddings. But it tended to produce melancholia, perhaps from lead poisoning, and it eventually went out of fashion.19
”
”
Walter Isaacson (Benjamin Franklin: An American Life)
“
the psychological
premisses on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing
private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its
instruments, certainly a strong one, though certainly not the strongest; but we
have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused
by aggressiveness, nor have we altered anything in its nature. Aggressiveness
was not created by property. It reigned almost without limit in primitive times,
when property was still very scanty, and it already shows itself in the nursery
almost before property has given up its primal, anal form; it forms the basis of
every relation of affection and love among people (with the single exception,
perhaps, of the mother’s relation to her male child). If we do away with personal
rights over material wealth, there still remains prerogative in the field of sexual
relationships, which is bound to become the source of the strongest dislike and
the most violent hostility among men who in other respects are on an equal
footing. If we were to remove this factor, too, by allowing complete freedom of
sexual life and thus abolishing the family, the germ-cell of civilization, we
cannot, it is true, easily foresee what new paths the development of civilization
could take; but one thing we can expect, and that is that this indestructible
feature of human nature, will follow it there.
”
”
Sigmund Freud
“
Under the direction of General Westmoreland, significantly himself a graduate of the Harvard Business School in which McNamara had at one time taught, the computers zestfully went to work. Fed on forms that had to be filled in by the troops, they digested data on everything from the amount of rice brought to local markets to the number of incidents that had taken place in a given region in a given period of time. They then spewed forth a mighty stream of tables and graphs which purported to measure “progress” week by week and day by day. So long as the tables looked neat, few people bothered to question the accuracy, let alone the relevance, of the data on which they were based. So long as they looked neat, too, the illusion of having a grip on the war helped prevent people from attempting to gain a real understanding of its nature.
This is not to say that the Vietnam War was lost simply because the American defense establishment’s management of the conflict depended heavily on computers. Rather, it proves that there is, in war and presumably in peace as well, no field so esoteric or so intangible as to be completely beyond the reach of technology. The technology in use helps condition tactics, strategy, organization, logistics, intelligence, command, control, and communication. Now, however, we are faced with an additional reality. Not only the conduct of war, but the very framework our brains employ in order to think about it, are partly conditioned by the technical instruments at our disposal.
”
”
Martin van Creveld (Technology and War: From 2000 B.C. to the Present)
“
Ultimately, the World Top Incomes Database (WTID), which is based on the joint work of some thirty researchers around the world, is the largest historical database available concerning the evolution of income inequality; it is the primary source of data for this book.24 The book’s second most important source of data, on which I will actually draw first, concerns wealth, including both the distribution of wealth and its relation to income. Wealth also generates income and is therefore important on the income study side of things as well. Indeed, income consists of two components: income from labor (wages, salaries, bonuses, earnings from nonwage labor, and other remuneration statutorily classified as labor related) and income from capital (rent, dividends, interest, profits, capital gains, royalties, and other income derived from the mere fact of owning capital in the form of land, real estate, financial instruments, industrial equipment, etc., again regardless of its precise legal classification). The WTID contains a great deal of information about the evolution of income from capital over the course of the twentieth century. It is nevertheless essential to complete this information by looking at sources directly concerned with wealth. Here I rely on three distinct types of historical data and methodology, each of which is complementary to the others.25 In the first place, just as income tax returns allow us to study changes in income inequality, estate tax returns enable us to study changes in the inequality of wealth.26 This
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”
Thomas Piketty (Capital in the Twenty-First Century)
“
Corruption as the expression of the fact that within the instincts anarchy is threatening and that the foundation of the affects, what we call “life,” has been shaken: according to the living structure in which it appears, corruption is something fundamentally different. When, for example, an aristocracy, like France's at the start of the Revolution, throws away its privileges with a sublime disgust and sacrifices itself to a dissipation of its moral feelings, this is corruption: — essentially it was only the final act in that centuries-long corruption, thanks to which step-by-step it gave up its ruling authority and reduced itself to a function of the monarchy (finally even to the monarch's finery and display pieces). The essential thing in a good and healthy aristocracy, however, is that it feels itself not as a function (whether of a monarchy or of a community) but as its significance and highest justification — that it therefore with good conscience accepts the sacrifice of an enormous number of people, who for its sake must be oppressed and reduced to incomplete men, slaves, and instruments of work. Its fundamental belief must, in fact, be that the society should exist, not for the sake of the society, but only as a base and framework on which an exceptional kind of nature can raise itself to its higher function and, in general, to a higher form of being, comparable to those heliotropic climbing plants on Java — people call them Sipo Matador — whose branches clutch an oak tree so much and for so long until finally, high over the tree but supported by it, they can unfold their crowns in the open light and make a display of their happiness.—
”
”
Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)
“
Promises, schedules, and estimates are necessary and important instruments in a well-ordered business. Many fail to realize this, or habitually try to dodge the responsibility for making commitments. You must make promises based upon your own estimates for the part of the job for which you are responsible, together with estimates obtained from contributing departments for their parts. No one should be allowed to avoid the issue by the old formula, “I can’t give a promise because it depends upon so many uncertain factors.” Consider the “uncertain factors” confronting a department head who must make up a budget for an entire department a year in advance! Even the most uncertain case can be narrowed down by first asking, “Will it be done in a matter of a few hours or a few months, a few days or a few weeks?” If it cannot be done in less than three weeks and surely will not require more than five, you’d better say four weeks. This allows one week for contingencies and sets you a reasonable miss under the comfortable figure of five weeks. Both extremes are bad; good businesspeople set schedules that they can meet with energetic effort at a pace commensurate with the significance of the job. As a corollary of the foregoing, you have a right to insist upon having estimates from responsible representatives of other departments. But in accepting promises, or statements of facts, it is frequently important to make sure that you are dealing with a properly qualified representative. Also bear in mind that when you ignore or discount other promises you dismiss their responsibility and incur the extra liability yourself. Of course this is sometimes necessary, but be sure that you do it advisedly. Ideally, other people’s promises should be reliable instruments in compiling estimates.
”
”
James Skakoon (The Unwritten Laws of Business)
“
Good luck. For most of my generation, it would just go to student debt and cocktails. If anything came to me (an impossibility), I would dump it into a poorly managed career in edgy luxury items. You can’t make opera money on perfume that smells like cunts and gasoline. At any rate, I didn’t usually make an appearance beyond the gala. Or, I hadn’t until recently. But Joseph Eisner had promised me a fortune, and now he wouldn’t take my calls. He did, however, like his chamber music. It had been an acquired taste for me. In my distant undergraduate past, when circumstance sat me in front of an ensemble, I spent the first five minutes of each concert deciding which musician I would fuck if I had the chance, and the rest shifting minutely in my seat. I still couldn’t stand Chanel. And while I had learned to appreciate—indeed, enjoy—chamber ensembles, orchestras, and on occasion even the opera, I retained my former habit as a dirty amusement to add some private savor to the proceedings. Tonight, it was the violist, weaving and bobbing his way through Dvořák’s Terzetto in C Major like a sinuous dancer. I prefer the romantics—fewer hair-raising harmonies than modern fare, and certainly more engaging than funereal baroque. The intriguing arrangement of the terzetto kept me engaged, in that slightly detached and floating manner engendered by instrumental performance. Moreover, the woman to my left, one row ahead, was wearing Salome by Papillon. The simple fact of anyone wearing such a scent in public pleased me. So few people dared wear anything at all these days, and when they did, it was inevitably staid: an inoffensive classic or antiseptic citrus-and-powder. But this perfume was one I might have worn myself. Jasmine, yes, but more indolic than your average floral. People sometimes say it smells like dirty panties. As the trio wrapped up for intermission, I took a steadying breath of musk and straightened my lapels. The music was only a means to an end, after all.
”
”
Lara Elena Donnelly (Base Notes)
“
The other important aspect of the “interoceptive inference” view is that the purpose of perceiving the body from within has little to do with figuring out what’s there. My brain couldn’t care less that my internal organs are objects with particular locations within my body. The only thing that’s important about my internal physiology is that it works, that it keeps me alive. The brain cares primarily about control and regulation of the body’s internal state. So perceptual predictions for the body’s interior are of a very different kind: they’re instrumental, they’re control-oriented, they’re not epistemic, they’re not to do with “finding out.” For me, this is suggestive of why our experiences of being a body have this nonobject-based phenomenological character, compared to our experiences of the outside world. More speculatively, there is the idea that all forms of perception, conscious and unconscious, derive from this fundamental imperative for physiological regulation. If we understand that the original (evolutionary) purpose of predictive perception was to control and regulate the internal state of the body, and that all the other kinds of perceptual prediction are built on that evolutionary imperative, then ultimately the way we perceive the outside world is predicated on these mechanisms that have their primary objective in the regulation of an internal bodily state.
This idea is really important for me, because it gets away from pretheoretical associations of consciousness and perception with cognition, with language, and maybe also with social interaction—all “higher order” properties of cognition. Instead, it grounds consciousness and perception much more strongly in the basic mechanisms of life. It might not just be that life provides a nice analogy with consciousness in terms of hard problems and mysteries, but that there are actually deep obligate connections between mechanisms of life and the way we perceive, consciously and unconsciously, ourselves and the world.
”
”
Sam Harris (Making Sense)
“
She has a genius,” distinguished Simon Iff. “Her dancing is a species of angelic possession, if I may coin a phrase. She comes off the stage from an interpretation of the subtlest and most spiritual music of Chopin or Tschaikowsky; and forthwith proceeds to scold, to wheedle, or to blackmail. Can you explain that reasonably by talking of ‘two sides to her character’? It is nonsense to do so. The only analogy is that of noble thinker and his stupid, dishonest, and immoral secretary. The dictation is taken down correctly, and given to the world. The last person to be enlightened by it is the secretary himself! So, I take it, is the case with all genius; only in many cases the man is in more or less conscious harmony with his genius, and strives eternally to make himself a worthier instrument for his master’s touch. The clever man, so-called, the man of talent, shuts out his genius by setting up his conscious will as a positive entity. The true man of genius deliberately subordinates himself, reduces himself to a negative, and allows his genius to play through him as It will. We all know how stupid we are when we try to do things. Seek to make any other muscle work as consistently as your heart does without your silly interference—you cannot keep it up for forty-eight hours. All this, which is truth ascertained and certain, lies at the base of the Taoistic doctrine of non-action; the plan of doing everything by seeming to do nothing. Yield yourself utterly to the Will of Heaven, and you become the omnipotent instrument of that Will. Most systems of mysticism have a similar doctrine; but that it is true in action is only properly expressed by the Chinese. Nothing that any man can do will improve that genius; but the genius needs his mind, and he can broaden that mind, fertilize it with knowledge of all kinds, improve its powers of expression; supply the genius, in short, with an orchestra instead of a tin whistle. All our little great men, our one-poem poets, our one-picture painters, have merely failed to perfect themselves as instruments.
”
”
Aleister Crowley
“
Business leadership is based on two elements: vision and technical competence. Top people in a given industry always embody at least one of those two elements. Sometimes, but rarely, they embody both of them. Simply put, vision is the ability to see what other people don’t. It’s a Ford executive named Lee Iacocca realizing that a market existed for an automobile that was both a racing car and a street vehicle—and coming up with the Mustang. It’s Steven Jobs realizing that computers needed to be sold in a single box, like a television sets, instead of piece by piece. About one hundred years ago, Walter Chrysler was a plant manager for a locomotive company. Then he decided to go into the car business, which was a hot new industry at the time. The trouble was, Walter Chrysler didn’t know a lot about cars, except that they were beginning to outnumber horses on the public roadways. To remedy this problem, Chrysler bought one of the Model T Fords that were becoming so popular. To learn how it worked, he took it apart and put it back together. Then, just to be sure he understood everything, he repeated this. Then, to be absolutely certain he knew what made a car work, he took it apart and put it together forty-eight more times, for a grand total of fifty. By the time he was finished, Chrysler not only had a vision of thousands of cars on American highways, he also had the mechanical details of those cars engraved in his consciousness. Perhaps you’ve seen the play called The Music Man. It’s about a fast-talking man who arrives in a small town with the intention of hugely upgrading a marching band. However, he can’t play any instruments, doesn’t know how to lead a band, and doesn’t really have any musical skills whatsoever. The Music Man is a comedy, but it’s not totally unrealistic. Some managers in the computer industry don’t know how to format a document. Some automobile executives could not change a tire. There was once even a vice president who couldn’t spell potato. It’s not a good idea to lack the fundamental technical skills of your industry, and it’s really not a good idea to get caught lacking them. So let’s see what you can do to avoid those problems.
”
”
Dale Carnegie (Make Yourself Unforgettable: How to Become the Person Everyone Remembers and No One Can Resist (Dale Carnegie Books))
“
Spellbinders are characterized by pathological egotism. Such a person is forced by some internal causes to make an early choice between two possibilities: the first is forcing other people to think and experience things in a manner similar to his own; the second is a feeling of being lonely and different, a pathological misfit in social life. Sometimes the choice is either snake-charming or suicide.
Triumphant repression of selfcritical or unpleasant concepts from the field of consciousness gradually gives rise to the phenomena of conversive thinking (twisted thinking), or paralogistics (twisted logic), paramoralisms (twisted morality), and the use of reversion blockades (Big Lies). They stream so profusely from the mind and mouth of the spellbinder that they flood the average person’s mind. Everything becomes subordinated to the spellbinder’s over-compensatory conviction that they are exceptional, sometimes even messianic. An ideology emerges from this conviction, true in part, whose value is supposedly superior. However, if we analyze the exact functions of such an ideology in the spellbinder’s personality, we perceive that it is nothing other than a means of self-charming, useful for repressing those tormenting selfcritical associations into the subconscious. The ideology’s instrumental role in influencing other people also serves the spellbinder’s needs.
The spellbinder believes that he will always find converts to his ideology, and most often, they are right. However, they feel shock (or even paramoral indignation) when it turns out that their influence extends to only a limited minority, while most people’s attitude to their activities remains critical, pained and disturbed. The spellbinder is thus confronted with a choice: either withdraw back into his void or strengthen his position by improving the ef ectiveness of his activities.
The spellbinder places on a high moral plane anyone who has succumbed to his influence and incorporated the experiential method he imposes. He showers such people with attention and property, if possible. Critics are met with “moral” outrage. It can even be proclaimed that the compliant minority is in fact the moral majority, since it professes the best ideology and honors a leader whose qualities are above average.
Such activity is always necessarily characterized by the inability to foresee its final results, something obvious from the psychological point of view because its substratum contains pathological phenomena, and both spellbinding and self-charming make it impossible to perceive reality accurately enough to foresee results logically. However, spellbinders nurture great optimism and harbor visions of future triumphs similar to those they enjoyed over their own crippled souls. It is also possible for optimism to be a pathological symptom.
In a healthy society, the activities of spellbinders meet with criticism effective enough to stifle them quickly. However, when they are preceded by conditions operating destructively upon common sense and social order; such as social injustice, cultural backwardness, or intellectually limited rulers sometimes manifesting pathological traits, spellbinders’ activities have led entire societies into large-scale human tragedy.
Such an individual fishes an environment or society for people amenable to his influence, deepening their psychological weaknesses until they finally join together in a ponerogenic union. On the other hand, people who have maintained their healthy critical faculties intact, based upon their own common sense and moral criteria, attempt to counteract the spellbinders’ activities and their results. In the resulting polarization of social attitudes, each side justifies itself by means of moral categories. That is why such commonsense resistance is always accompanied by some feeling of helplessness and deficiency of criteria.
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Andrew Lobabczewski
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Speech to the German Folk
January 30, 1944
Without January 30, 1933, and without the National Socialist revolution, without the tremendous domestic cleansing and construction efforts, there would be no factor today that could oppose the Bolshevik colossus. After all, Germany was itself so ill at the time, so weakened by the spreading Jewish infection, that it could hardly think of overcoming the Bolshevik danger at home, not to mention abroad. The economic ruin brought about by the Jews as in other countries, the unemployment of millions of Germans, the destruction of peasantry, trade, and industry only prepared the way for the planned internal collapse. This was furthered by support for the continued existence of a senseless state of classes, which could only serve to transform the reason of the masses into hatred in order to make them the willing instrument of the Bolshevik revolution. By mobilizing the proletarian slaves, the Jews hoped that, following the destruction of the national intelligentsia, they could all the more reduce them for good to coolies. But even if this process of the Bolshevik revolt in the interior of Germany had not led to complete success, the state with its democratic Weimar constitution would have been reduced to something ridiculously helpless in view of the great tasks of current world politics. In order to be armed for this confrontation, not only the problems of political power but also the social and economic problems had to be resolved.
When National Socialism undertook the realization of its program eleven years ago, it managed just in time to build up a state that did not only have the strength at home but also the power abroad to fulfill the same European mission which first Greece fulfilled in antiquity by opposing the Persians, then Rome [by opposing] the Carthaginians, and the Occident in later centuries by opposing the invasions from the east.
Therefore, in the year 1933, we set ourselves four great tasks among many others. On their resolution depended not only the future of the Reich but also the rescue of Europe, perhaps even of the entire human civilization:
1. The Reich had to regain the internal social peace that it had lost by resolving the social questions. That meant that the elements of a division into classes bourgeoisie and proletariat-had to be eliminated in their various manifestations and be replaced by a Volksgemeinschaft. The appeal to reason had to be supplemented by the merciless eradication of the base elements of resistance in all camps.
2. The social and political unification of the nation had to be supplemented by a national, political one. This meant that the body of the Reich, which was not only politically, but also governmentally divided, had to be replaced by a unified National Socialist state, the construction and leadership of which were suited to oppose and withstand even the heaviest attacks and severest tests of the future.
3. The nationally and politically coherent centralized state had the mission of immediately creating a Wehrmacht, whose ideology, moral attitude, numerical strength, and material equipment could serve as an instrument of self-assertion. After the outside world had rejected all German offers for a limitation of armament, the Reich had to fashion its own armament accordingly.
4. In order to secure its continued existence in Europe with the prospect of actual success, it was necessary to integrate all those countries which were inhabited by Germans, or were areas which had belonged to the German Reich for over a thousand years and which, in terms of their national substance and economy, were indispensable to the preservation of the Reich, that is, for its political and military defense.
Only the resolution of all these tasks could result in the creation of that state which was capable, at home and abroad, of waging the fight for its defense and for the preservation of the European family of nations.
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Adolf Hitler
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A Republican seizure of power based not on the strength of the party's ideas but on massive disfranchisement denies citizens not only their rights, but also the "talisman" of humanity that voting represents. The lie of voter fraud breaks a World War II veteran down into a simple, horrifying statement: "I wasn't a citizen no more." It forces a man, a retired engineer who was instrumental in building this nation, into facing a bitter truth: "I am not wanted in this state." It eviscerates the key sense of self-worthy in a disabled man who has to pen the painful words "My constitutional rights have been stripped from me." It maligns thousands of African Americans who resiliently weathered the Missouri cold and hours of bureaucratic runarounds as nothing but criminals and frauds. It leaves a woman suffering from lung cancer absolutely "distraught" and convinced that "they prevented us from voting," because none of her IDs could penetrate Wisconsin's law. It shatters the dying wish of a woman who, in her last moments on earth, wanted to cast a vote for possibly the first woman president of the United States. But an expired driver's license meant none of that was to be.
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Carol Anderson (One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy)
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There’s a way of triumphant accomplishment that comes from lowering dead or unwanted trees. (Not to say the joys of yelling, But that feeling fades pretty quickly once you look down and see unsightly—and very stubborn—Stump milling.
If you hire a landscaper or arborist to chop down the trees, they typically leave the stumps behind, unless you pay a further fee. Stump-removal prices vary widely across the country and are supported by the diameter of the stump, but it typically costs between $100 and $200 to get rid of a stump that’s 24 inches in diameter or smaller. And that’s a good price if you’ve only got one stump to get rid of . But, if you've got two or more stumps, you'll save a substantial amount of cash by renting a stump grinder.
A gas-powered stump grinder rents for about $100 per day, counting on the dimensions of the machine. And if you share the rental expense with one or two stump-plagued neighbors, renting is certainly the more economical thanks to going. you will need a vehicle with a trailer hitch to tow the machine, which weighs about 1,000 pounds. Or, for a nominal fee, most rental dealers will drop off and devour the grinder.
To remove the 30-in.-dia. scarlet maple stump, I rented a Vermeer Model SC252 stump grinder. it's a strong 25-hp engine and 16-in.-dia. cutting wheel that's studded with 16 forged-steel teeth. this is often a loud, powerful machine with a classy mechanism , but it's surprisingly simple to work . But, before you crank up the motor and begin grinding away, it’s important to prep the world for the stumpectomy.
Start by ensuring all kids and pets are indoors, or if they’re outdoors, keep them well faraway from the world and under constant adult supervision. Then, use a round-point shovel or garden mattock to get rid of any rocks from round the base of the stump [1]. this is often important because if the spinning cutting wheel hits a rock, it can shoot out sort of a missile and cause serious injury. Plus, rocks can dull or damage the teeth on the cutting wheel, which are expensive to exchange.
Next, check the peak of the stump. If it’s protruding out of the bottom quite 6 inches approximately, use a sequence saw to trim it as on the brink of the bottom as possible [2]. While this step isn’t absolutely necessary, it'll prevent quite little bit of time because removing 6 inches of the Stump grinding with a chainsaw is far quicker than using the grinder.
After donning the acceptable safety gear, start the grinder and drive it to within 3 feet of the stump. Use the hydraulic lever to boost the cutting wheel until it’s a couple of inches above the stump. Slowly drive the machine forward to position the wheel directly over the stump's front edge [3]. Engage the facility lever to start out the wheel spinning, then slowly lower it about 3 in. in to the stump grinding.
Next, use the hydraulic lever to slowly swing the wheel from side to side to filter out all the wood within the cutting range. Then, raise the wheel, advance the machine forward a couple of inches, and repeat the method. While operating the machine, always stand at the instrument panel, which is found near the rear of the machine and well faraway from the cutting wheel.
Little by little, continue grinding and advancing your way through to the opposite side of the stump. Raise the cutting wheel, shift into reverse, and return to the starting spot. Repeat the grinding process until the surface of the Stump removal is a minimum of 4 in. below the extent of the encompassing ground. At now, you'll drive the grinder off to at least one side, far away from the excavated hole.
Now, discover all the wood chips and fill the crater with screened topsoil [4]. (The wood chips are often used as mulch in flowerbeds and around trees and shrubs.) Lightly rake the soil, opened up a good layer of grass seed, then rake the seeds into the soil [5]. Water the world and canopy the seeds with mulch hay.
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Stump Grinding
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But if conceptual knowledge is fallible, what other instrument shall we use in order to grasp reality? According to Buddhism, one can only reach reality through direct experience. Study and speculation are based on concepts. In conceptualizing we cut up reality into small pieces which seem to be independent of one another. This manner of conceiving things is called imaginative and discriminative knowledge (vikalpa) in the Vijnanavada Mahayanist sect. The faculty which, on the contrary, directly experiences reality without passing through concepts is called non-discriminative and non-imaginative Wisdom (nirvikalpajnana). This Wisdom is the fruit of meditation. It is a direct and perfect knowledge of reality, a form of knowledge in which one does not distinguish subject and object, a form of Inowledge that cannot be conceived by the intellect and expressed by language.
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Thich Nhat Hanh (Zen Keys: A Guide to Zen Practice)
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Finance capital subordinates the Canadian State more and more directly to its interests and control. State-monopoly capitalism — the integration or merging of the interests of finance capital with the state — is a new stage in the extension of corporate control to all sectors of economic and political life. The government, while seemingly independent of specific corporate interests, has become predominantly the political instrument of a small group comprising the top monopoly capitalists for exercising control over the rest of society. Finance capital uses the state to provide orders, capital and subsidies, and to secure foreign markets and investments. Monopoly capital supports the expansion of the state sector — both services and enterprises — when that serves its interests, and at other times it uses the state to cut back and privatize. The state is also used to redistribute income and wealth in favour of monopoly interests through the tax system, and through legislation to drive down wages and weaken the trade union movement. State-monopoly capitalism undermines the basis of traditional bourgeois democracy. The subordination of the state to the interests of finance capital erodes the already limited role of elected government bodies, federal, provincial and local. Big business openly intervenes in the electoral process on its own behalf, and also indirectly through a network of pro-corporate institutes and think tanks. It uses its control of mass media to influence the ideas and attitudes of the people, and to blatantly influence election results. It corrupts the democratic process through the buying of politicians and officials. It tramples on the political right of the Canadian people to exercise any meaningful choice, thereby promoting widespread public alienation and cynicism about the electoral process.
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The Communist Party Of Canada (Canada's Future Is Socialism Program of the Communist Party of Canada)
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A good exercise is to practice using only one song. Dance to it focusing only on the rhythmic basis or musical pulsation. Gradually add dynamic changes based on the other instruments and their highlights during the song, one instrument at a time. This creates the possibility of advanced improvisation in
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Dimitris Bronowski (Tango Tips by the Maestros: When more than 40 maestros decide to help you improve your tango)
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Retroviruses as Carcinogens and Pathogens: Expectations and Reality.18 Duesberg’s article was a tour de force from the reigning father of retrovirology, calling for sobriety in the booming field that he saw spinning out of control. A young generation of virologists, armed with electron microscopes and other novel instruments and seeking wealth and career advancement, were pinning retroviruses as the culprits for every malignancy, with meager functional or empirical proof, or rigorous evidence-based science to explain the mechanism by which they caused disease.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
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Huygens, best known as the first great horologist, swore he arrived at the idea for the pendulum clock independently of Galileo. And indeed he evinced a deeper understanding of the physics of pendulum swings—and the problem of keeping them going at a constant rate—when he built his first pendulum-regulated clock in 1656. Two years later Huygens published a treatise on its principles, called the Horologium, in which he declared his clock a fit instrument for establishing longitude at sea. By 1660, Huygens had completed not one but two marine timekeepers based on his principles.
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Dava Sobel (Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of his Time)
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Neither nature nor history can tell us what we ought to do. Facts, whether those of nature or those of history, cannot make the decision for us, they cannot determine the ends we are going to choose. It is we who introduce purpose and meaning into nature and into history. Men are not equal; but we can decide to fight for equality. Human institutions such as the state are not rational, but we can decide to fight to make them more rational. We ourselves and our ordinary language are, on the whole, emotional rather than rational; but we can try to become a little more rational, and we can train ourselves to use our language as an instrument not of self-expression (as our romantic educationists would say) but of rational communication. History itself I mean the history of power politics, of course, not the non-existent story of the development of mankind has no end nor meaning, but we can decide to give it both. We can make it our fight for the open society and against its antagonists (who, when in a corner, always protest their humanitarian sentiments, in accordance with Pareto's advice) and we can interpret it accordingly. Ultimately, we may say the same about the 'meaning of life'. It is up to us to decide what shall be our purpose in life, to determine our ends. This dualism of facts and decisions is, I believe, fundamental. Facts as such have no meaning; they can gain it only through our decisions. Historicism is only one of many attempts to get over this dualism; it is born of fear, for it shrinks from realizing that we bear the ultimate responsibility even for the standards we choose. But such an attempt seems to me to represent precisely what is usually described as superstition. For it assumes that we can reap where we have not sown; it tries to persuade us that if we merely fall into step with history everything will and must go right, and that no fundamental decision on our part is required; it tries to shift our responsibility on to history, and thereby on to the play of demoniac powers beyond ourselves; it tries to base our actions upon the hidden intentions of these powers, which can be revealed to us only in mystical inspirations and intuitions; and it thus puts these actions and decisions on the moral level of one who, inspired by horoscopes and dreams, chooses his lucky number in a lottery.
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Karl Popper (The Open society & its enemies: Vol 2 Hegel & Marx)
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top research company in Myanmar scene is powerful and different, with a few driving organizations offering thorough types of assistance to organizations looking to comprehend and enter the neighborhood market. Here are a portion of the top exploration firms in Myanmar:
Myanmar Study Exploration (MSR):
Laid out as the main free exploration organization in Myanmar, MSR brags north of 25 years experience. The organization offers an expansive scope of administrations including quantitative and subjective exploration, web-based entertainment research, and CATI (PC Helped Phone Talking) research. MSR is known for its profound comprehension of the nearby market and its capacity to convey experiences across different areas like farming, medical care, and customer products (Statistical surveying Organizations) .
STP Exploration Myanmar:
STP Exploration Myanmar (Single Touch Point Co., Ltd.) works in both market and social examination. With a rich history of leading north of 150 examination projects, STP has shown skill in areas like wellbeing, farming, schooling, and monetary effect evaluations. Their accomplished group offers subjective and quantitative examination administrations, custom fitted to meet the particular necessities and spending plans of their clients (STP Myanmar) .
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ARM gives a far reaching set-up of statistical surveying administrations including brand following, client experience, secret shopping, and B2B research. ARM is especially noted for its imaginative methodology and the utilization of a delegate portable exploration board of more than 85,000 shoppers spread across Myanmar. This permits them to catch continuous bits of knowledge and convey significant outcomes to their clients (ARM) .
Statistical surveying Myanmar by YCP Solidiance:
Under the umbrella of YCP Solidiance, Statistical surveying Myanmar assists organizations with growing in the Burmese market by giving proof based statistical surveying and methodology suggestions. Their administrations incorporate market section and development technique, cutthroat benchmarking, channel model distinguishing proof, and M&A warning. They have major areas of strength for a record of helping global organizations in exploring the neighborhood monetary scene and recognizing manageable learning experiences (Exploration in Myanmar) .
Xavey Exploration Arrangements:
1. Xavey Exploration Arrangements is known for its tech-driven statistical surveying arrangements. They have practical experience in catching "in-the-occasion" bits of knowledge through portable and advanced stages, which is essential for grasping powerful purchaser ways of behaving in Myanmar. Their inventive methodology considers proficient information assortment and examination, settling on them a favored decision for educated clients seeking influence computerized instruments for top research company in Myanmar
2. These organizations feature the top research company in Myanmar
, offering a scope of administrations that take care of different business needs from top to bottom area examinations to constant shopper bits of knowledge. Each firm brings its exceptional assets and procedures, guaranteeing that organizations can track down the right accomplice to assist them with prevailing in the Burmese market. Whether it's through customary subjective techniques or high level advanced procedures, these organizations are exceptional to give the experiences important to informed direction and key preparation.
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top research company in Myanmar
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They say, 'No private property', and immediately after strive to maintain private property in its daily manifestations. 'You shall be a commune as far as regards production: fields, tools, machinery, all that has been invented up till now - factories, railways, harbours, mines, etc., all are yours. Not the slightest distinction will be made concerning the share of each in this collective property.
'But from tomorrow you will minutely debate the share you are going to take in the creation of new machinery, in the digging of new mines. You will carefully weigh what part of the new produce belongs to you. You will count your minutes of work, and you will take care that a minute of your neighbours should not buy more than yours.
'And as an hour measures nothing, as in some factories a worker can see to six power-looms at a time, while in another he only tends two, you will weigh the muscular force, the brain energy, and the nervous energy you have expended. You will accurately calculate the years of apprenticeship in order to appraise the amount each will contribute to future production. And this - after having declared that you do not take into account his share in past production.'
Well, for us it is evident that a society cannot be based on two absolutely opposed principles, two principles that contradict one another continually. And a nation or a commune which would have such an organization would be compelled to revert to private property in the instruments of production, or to transform itself into a communist society.
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Pyotr Kropotkin (The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings)
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Jesus’ passion was the cross—an ancient form of capital punishment. The cross—back then—was similar to our electric chair today. It would be quite odd for us to describe a prisoner’s passion for an electric chair. At first glance, it’s also odd to think that Jesus’ passion was the very instrument that would kill him. However, a deeper look reveals the mystery. The ancients defined passion as: how much you were willing to suffer for something. In other words: the level of passion is based upon the level of chosen suffering. Of course, Jesus’ passion wasn’t a wooden cross. Rather, it bridged the gap between the sin of the world and the love of his Father. His priceless wasn’t the wood, it was the world.
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Tom Ryan (Chosen Suffering: Becoming Elite In Life And Leadership)
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From now henceforward there will be such favourable first conditions for greater ruling powers as have never yet been found on earth. And this is by no means the most important point. The establishment has been made possible of international race unions which will set themselves the task of rearing a ruling race, the future "lords of the earth" — a new, vast aristocracy based upon the most severe self-discipline, in which the will of philosophical men of power and artist-tyrants will be stamped upon thousands of years: a higher species of men which, thanks to their preponderance of will, knowledge, riches, and influence, will avail themselves of democratic Europe as the most suitable and supple instrument they can have for taking the fate of the earth into their own hands, and working as artists upon man himself. Enough! The time is coming for us to transform all our views on politics.
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Friedrich Nietzsche
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Good teams engage directly with end users and customers every week, to better understand their customers, and to see the customer's response to their latest ideas. Bad teams think they are the customer. Good teams know that many of their favorite ideas won't end up working for customers, and even the ones that could will need several iterations to get to the point where they provide the desired outcome. Bad teams just build what's on the roadmap, and are satisfied with meeting dates and ensuring quality. Good teams understand the need for speed and how rapid iteration is the key to innovation, and they understand this speed comes from the right techniques and not forced labor. Bad teams complain they are slow because their colleagues are not working hard enough. Good teams make high‐integrity commitments after they've evaluated the request and ensured they have a viable solution that will work for the customer and the business. Bad teams complain about being a sales‐driven company. Good teams instrument their work so they can immediately understand how their product is being used and make adjustments based on the data. Bad teams consider analytics and reporting a nice to have.
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Marty Cagan (Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love (Silicon Valley Product Group))
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The ETX-90 sells for about $400 and comes with an Autostar computerized controller and a tripod. This instrument automatically points at almost any object you specify if that object is in view from your location at that time. The Autostar can even find moving objects, such as planets, based on stored information, and it’s equipped to give you a “tour” of the best sights in the sky, selected with no input from you. A good competing telescope for the ETX-90 is the Celestron SkyProdigy 90. It’s comparably sized and equipped and has the capability to automatically align itself on the sky, after which it points to almost any celestial object that you select. It goes for about $600. You definitely don’t want to spend this much money on a telescope until you see the same model in action at an astronomy club observing meeting or a star party (see Chapter 2). But the price is no more than you pay for a fine camera and an accessory lens or two. You can find larger telescopes for less money — check the ads in current issues of astronomy magazines — but you have to invest much more effort in learning to use them effectively. Some brand-name telescopes are sold through authorized dealers that tend to have expert knowledge. But take their advice with just a wee bit of salt. Here are some key websites to browse for telescope product information:
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Stephen Maran (Astronomy For Dummies)
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For a person to be self-reliant in any community, a level of competence is required that enables the accomplishment of tasks beyond those of basic self-care (which are referred to as physical self-maintenance). For this reason, M. Powell Lawton identified the use of the telephone, food preparation, housekeeping, laundry, shopping, money management, driving or use of transportation, and medication management as important daily activities and proposed the term instrumental activities of daily living (ADL) to describe them35 (see Chapters 14, 21, 22, 23, and 28).
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Glen Gillen (Stroke Rehabilitation - E-Book: A Function-Based Approach)
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Volume 9 | ISSN: 1523-4320 Figure 1.Students’ Confidence at the Start of the Assignment It is clear that most students did not feel confident about writing the assignment, with the majority of students stating that they were not sure if they could write a good assignment. Only one student was very confident and stated that this was “Because I play the instrument I used. ” Students who were quite confident based this confidence on aspects, such as the amount of information they had or had access to, with such comments as “Because I had enough notes to write with and a whole load of information at home” and “In our research I felt I had gathered enough information to write quite a good assignment”; and their familiarity with the subject with comments such as “I felt confident because I was familiar with dolphins and their habitat and background info” and “I felt like this because I play an instrument that is in the same family and so I knew some information. ” Students who were not sure if they could write a good assignment identified aspects such as unfamiliarity with the subject with comments such as “Because I didn’t know anything about dolphins so that I wasn’t quite confident” and “Because I didn’t know anything about the trumpet whatsoever”; the size of the assignment with comments such as “I didn’t think I could write 800 words about a guitar” and “I thought 800 words was a bit much but in the end I wrote over 800 words”; and concern about the subject with such comments as “I can write essays and things. I’m just not good at the subject of physics” and “I’m not very good at physics and thought I wouldn’t understand. ” Students who indicated that they did not think that they could write a good assignment displayed a lack of confidence in themselves with such comments as “Because I am not a very confident person” and “I wasn’t confident and didn’t want to do it. ” These findings reflect those of Kuhlthau (2004) whose research identified that students often exhibited feelings of anxiety or lack of confidence at the beginning of the assignment process. There are alternative ways of examining the implications of these findings. It may be natural that students, faced with an assignment on a subject which is unfamiliar to them, will inevitably show lack of confidence and that the information literacy guidance provided will dilute this lack of confidence as students become familiar with their subject. It may also be
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Anonymous
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Oh, no,” Valentine said. “I’m anything but that.” He moved a little closer to her, and she stepped in front of the Sword, blocking it from his view. “You think of me that way because you look at me and at what I do through the lens of your mundane understanding of the world. Mundane humans create distinctions between themselves, distinctions that seem ridiculous to any Shadowhunter. Their distinctions are based on race, religion, national identity, any of a dozen minor and irrelevant markers. To mundanes these seem logical, for though mundanes cannot see, understand, or acknowledge the demon worlds, still somewhere buried in their ancient memories, they know that there are those that walk this earth that are other. That do not belong, that mean only harm and destruction. Since the demon threat is invisible to mundanes, they must assign the threat to others of their own kind. They place the face of their enemy onto the face of their neighbor, and thus are generations of misery assured.” He took another step toward her, and Clary instinctively moved backward; she was pressed up against the footlocker now. “I’m not like that,” he went on. “I can see the truth of it. Mundanes see as through a glass, darkly, but Shadowhunters—we see face-to-face. We know the truth of evil, and know that while it walks among us, it is not of us. What does not belong to our world must not be allowed to take root here, to grow like a poisonous flower and extinguish all life.
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Cassandra Clare (City of Ashes (The Mortal Instruments, #2))
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I thought it was interesting how fiction could have these two bases. In one way fiction can be beneficial for mankind. The great literary achievements in our history, in our civilization, have not only enriched mankind psychologically but also ethically; and they have encouraged progress in many ways. At the same time fiction has been a major instrument of suffering in history because it was behind all the dogmatic doctrines that have justified repression, censorship, massacres, and genocides. Why not, therefore, write a novel about these two faces, this reverse and obverse that fiction has? When I decided to do that , the story of Mayta, the story of this handful of revolutionaries, immediately came to mind. It was, in fact, ideal raw material for the invention of a novel in which this problem, these two faces, the night-and-day story of fiction, would materialize and be developed.
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Mario Vargas Llosa
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Motion-based sensor array for measuring human movement.This networked system of wearable, miniature inertial measurement units (IMUs) provides information about human movement in real-time.
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surreysensors
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Cognitive scientists recognize two types of rationality: instrumental and epistemic. The simplest definition of instrumental rationality-the one that emphasizes most that it is grounded in the practical world-is: Behaving in the world so that you get exactly what you most want, given the resources (physical and mental) available to you. Somewhat more technically, we could characterize instrumental rationality as the optimization of the individual's goal fulfillment. Economists and cognitive scientists have refined the notion of optimization of goal fulfillment into the technical notion of expected utility. The model of rational judgment used by decision scientists is one in which a person chooses options based on which option has the largest expected utility.' One discovery of modern decision science is that if people's preferences follow certain patterns (the so-called axioms of choice) then they are behaving as if they are maximizing utility-they are acting to get what they most want. This is what makes people's degrees of rationality measurable by the experimental methods of cognitive science. The deviation from the optimal choice pattern is an (inverse) measure of the degree of rationality.
The other aspect of rationality studied by cognitive scientists is termed epistemic rationality. This aspect of rationality concerns how well beliefs map onto the actual structure of the world.' The two types of rationality are related. Importantly, a critical aspect of beliefs that enter into instrumental calculations (that is, tacit calculations) is the probabilities of states of affairs in the world.
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Keith E. Stanovich (What Intelligence Tests Miss)
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banjo. A plucked, fretted lute where a thin skin diaphragm is stretched over a circular metal frame amplifying the sound of the strings. The instrument is believed to have evolved from various African and African-American prototypes. Four- and 5-stringed versions of the banjo are popular, each associated with specific music genres; the 5-stringed banjo, plucked and strummed with the fingers, is associated with Appalachian, old-time and bluegrass music, while the four-stringed versions (both the “plectrum” banjo, which is an identical 22-fret banjo, just like the 5-string instrument but without the fifth string and played with a plectrum, and the tenor banjo which has fewer frets [17 or 19], a shorter neck, is tuned in fifths and is played with a plectrum) is associated with vaudeville, Dixieland jazz, ragtime and swing, as well as Irish folk and traditional music. The first Irish banjo player to record commercially was James Wheeler, in the U.S. in 1916, for the Columbia label; as part of The Flanagan Brothers duo, Mick Flanagan recorded during the 1920s and 1930s as did others in the various dance bands popular in the U.S. at the time. Neil Nolan, a Boston-based banjo player originally from Prince Edward Island, recorded with Dan Sullivan’s Shamrock Band; the collaboration with Sullivan led to him also being included in the line-up for the Caledonia and Columbia Scotch Bands, alongside Cape Breton fiddlers; these were recorded for 78s in 1928. In the 1930s The Inverness Serenaders also included a banjo player (Paul Aucoin). While the instrument was not widely used in Cape Breton, a few notable players were Packie Haley and Nellie Coakley, who were involved in the Northside Irish tradition of the 1920s and 1930s; Ed MacGillivray played banjo with Tena Campbell; and the Iona area had some banjo players, such as the “Lighthouse” MacLeans. The banjo was well known in Cape Breton’s old-time tradition, especially in the 1960s, but was not really introduced to the Cape Breton fiddle scene until the 1970s when Paul Cranford, a 6-string banjo player, arrived from Toronto. He has since replaced the banjo with fiddle. A few fiddlers have dabbled with the instrument but it has had no major presence within the tradition.
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Liz Doherty (The Cape Breton Fiddle Companion)
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The maintenance of this equilibrium is reserved to the Warriors who will always make war an instrument of peace and not of pure and simple conquest. The unity of the empire avoids the unproductive diffusions of the active life concentrating its energies toward a single end where all disparities and partial imbalances are evened out, therefore if in the Warriors, as was said, inner asceticism is the necessary base for the development of their activity, this is even more strict in the Leader who must annul in himself any individuality whatsoever in order to make justice triumph and the rule secure the empire.
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Cologero Salvo
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And that’s the motto of the Nephilim – the Shadowhunters – there on the base.”
“What does it mean?”
Jace’s grin was a white flash in the darkness. “It means ‘Shadowhunters: Looking Better in Black than the Widows of Our Enemies Since 1234.
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Cassandra Clare (City of Bones (The Mortal Instruments, #1))
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For no one knows what lies under the sands of the world's great deserts. No one knows how many times poor Earth has reeled under blows from comets, has lost or captured moons, has changed its air, its very nature. No one knows what has existed and has vanished beyond recovery, evidence for the number of times man has understood and has forgotten again that his mind and flesh and life and movements are made of star stuff, sun stuff, planet stuff; that the sun's being is his, and what sort of events may be expected, because of the meshings of the planets - and how an intelligent husbanding of humanity's resources may be effected based on the most skilled and sensitive of forecasting, by those whose minds are instruments to record the celestial dance.
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Doris Lessing
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More elaborate toolkits are known for chimpanzees in Gabon hunting for honey. In yet another dangerous activity, these chimps raid bee nests using a five-piece toolkit, which includes a pounder (a heavy stick to break open the hive’s entrance), a perforator (a stick to perforate the ground to get to the honey chamber), an enlarger (to enlarge an opening through sideways action), a collector (a stick with a frayed end to dip into honey and slurp it off), and swabs (strips of bark to scoop up honey).21 This tool use is complicated since the tools are prepared and carried to the hive before most of the work begins, and they will need to be kept nearby until the chimp is forced to quit due to aggressive bees. Their use takes foresight and planning of sequential steps, exactly the sort of organization of activities often emphasized for our human ancestors. At one level chimpanzee tool use may seem primitive, as it is based on sticks and stones, but on another level it is extremely advanced.22 Sticks and stones are all they have in the forest, and we should keep in mind that also for the Bushmen the most ubiquitous instrument is the digging stick (a sharpened stick to break open anthills and dig up roots). The tool use of wild chimpanzees by far exceeds what was ever held possible. Chimpanzees use between fifteen
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Frans de Waal (Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?)
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We should be concerned about the thousands of hours of formal counseling that are not based on God’s Word. But we should also be concerned about the far greater amount of counseling that goes on every day between people who do not know what they are doing and people who do not know how much they are being influenced. If you are alive on this planet, you are a counselor! You are interpreting life, and sharing those interpretations with others. You are a person of influence, and you are also being influenced.
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Paul David Tripp (Instruments in the Redeemer's Hands: People in Need of Change Helping People in Need of Change)
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The modified Mozart used by Tomatis, Paul, iLs, and others over time in an individualized therapy must be distinguished from claims made in the media in the 1990s that mothers could raise the IQ of their children by having them briefly listen to unfiltered Mozart. This claim was based on a study not of mothers and babies but of college students who listened to Mozart ten minutes a day and improved IQ scores on spatial reasoning tests—an effect that lasted only ten to fifteen minutes! Hype aside, different studies by Gottfried Schlaug, Christo Pantev, Laurel Trainor, Sylvain Moreno, and Glenn Schellenberg have shown that sustained music training, such as learning to play an instrument, can lead to brain change, enhance verbal and math skills, and even modestly increase IQ.]
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Norman Doidge (The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity)
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In our view, when women fight for the wage for domestic work, they are also fighting against this work, as domestic work can continue as such so long as and when it is not paid. It is like slavery. The demand for a domestic wage denaturalized female slavery. Thus, the wage is not the ultimate goal, but an instrument, a strategy, to achieve a change in the power relations between women and capital. The aim of our struggle was to convert exploitative slave labor that was naturalized because of its unpaid character into socially recognized work; it was to subvert a sexual division of labor based on the power of the masculine wage to command the reproductive labor of women, which in Caliban and the Witch I call “the patriarchy of the wage.” At the same time, we proposed to move beyond all of the blame generated by the fact that it was always considered as a female obligation, as a female vocation.
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Anonymous
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Perhaps the most obvious difference between modern social and personality psychology is that the former is based almost exclusively on experiments, whereas the latter is usually based on correlational studies. […] In summary, over the past 50 years social psychology has concentrated on the perceptual and cognitive processes of person perceivers, with scant attention to the persons being perceived. Personality psychology has had the reverse orientation, closely examining self-reports of individuals for indications of their personality traits, but rarely examining how these people actually come off in social interaction. […] individuals trained in either social or personality psychology are often more ignorant of the other field than they should be. Personality psychologists sometimes reveal an imperfect understanding of the concerns and methods of their social psychological brethren, and they in particular fail to comprehend the way in which so much of the self-report data they gather fails to overcome the skepticism of those trained in other methods. For their part, social psychologists are often unfamiliar with basic findings and concepts of personality psychology, misunderstand common statistics such as correlation coefficients and other measures of effect size, and are sometimes breathtakingly ignorant of basic psychometric principles. This is revealed, for example, when social psychologists, assuring themselves that they would not deign to measure any entity so fictitious as a trait, proceed to construct their own self-report scales to measure individual difference constructs called schemas or strategies or construals (never a trait). But they often fail to perform the most elementary analyses to confirm the internal consistency or the convergent and discriminant validity of their new measures, probably because they do not know that they should. […] an astonishing number of research articles currently published in major journals demonstrate a complete innocence of psychometric principles. Social psychologists and cognitive behaviorists who overtly eschew any sympathy with the dreaded concept of ‘‘trait’’ freely report the use of self-report assessment instruments of completely unknown and unexamined reliability, convergent validity, or discriminant validity. It is almost as if they believe that as long as the individual difference construct is called a ‘‘strategy,’’ ‘‘schema,’’ or ‘‘implicit theory,’’ then none of these concepts is relevant. But I suspect the real cause of the omission is that many investigators are unfamiliar with these basic concepts, because through no fault of their own they were never taught them.
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David C. Funder (Personality Judgment: A Realistic Approach to Person Perception)
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Pre-modern forms of authority , based predominantly upon value-rationality and natural law, are here succeeded by legal-rational forms of domination and by the rule of instrumental reason. With this, religious beliefs and ultimate ideals gradually recede from (public) life as they are disenchanted by the claims of 'rational' science and are replaced increasingly by the idealized pursuit of secular, material ends. This leads to a world in which questions of meaning and value disappear from the public arena, and in which the scope for creative action and for the pursuit of ultimate values becomes increasingly restricted. And in this regard, the twin processes of cultural and social rationalization lead to the same end: to a condition of nihilism in which the highest 'ultimate' values are devalued, or devalue themselves, and hence, for the most part, are no longer able to guide social action, which itself becomes, in turn, increasingly routinized and mundane.
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Nicolas Gane