Involved Famous Quotes

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Fool!" cried the hunchback. "You fell victim to one of the classic blunders. The most famous is 'Never get involved in a land war in Asia,' but only slightly less well known is this: 'Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line.
William Goldman (The Princess Bride)
Nearly every guy I've dated believed they should already be famous, believed that greatness was their destiny and they were already behind schedule. An early moment of intimacy often involved a confession of this sort: a childhood vision, teacher's prophecy, a genius IQ. At first, with my boyfriend in college, I believed it, too. Later, I thought I was just choosing delusional men. Now I understand it's how boys are raised to think, how they are lured into adulthood. I've met ambitious women, driven women, but no woman has ever told me that greatness was her destiny.
Lily King (Writers & Lovers)
Aristotle was famous for knowing everything. He taught that the brain exists merely to cool the blood and is not involved in the process of thinking. This is true only of certain persons.
Will Cuppy
You never live an inch without involvement and hurting people and fucking yourself everlastingly.
James Agee (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men)
And I became fixated, too, upon Katharine Hepburn’s famous Fred and Ginger theory: He gives her class, she gives him sex. Was this a general rule? Did all friendships—all relations—involve this discreet and mysterious exchange of qualities, this exchange of power?
Zadie Smith (Swing Time)
You fell victim to one of the classic blunders. The most famous is 'Never get involved in a land war in Asia.
William Goldman
there are three kinds of men: those who make it their aim, as they say, to live their lives, eat, drink, make love, grow rich, and famous; then come those who make it their aim not to live their own lives but to concern themselves with the lives of all men – they feel that all men are one and they try to enlighten them, to love them as much as they can and do good to them; finally there are those who aim at living the life of the entire universe – everything, men, animals, trees, stars, we are all one, we are all one substance involved in the same terrible struggle. What struggle?…Turning matter into spirit.
Nikos Kazantzakis (Zorba the Greek)
It is a well-known established fact throughout the many-dimensional worlds of the multiverse that most really great discoveries are owed to one brief moment of inspiration. There's a lot of spadework first, of course, but what clinches the whole thing is the sight of, say, a falling apple or a boiling kettle or the water slipping over the edge of the bath. Something goes click inside the observer's head and then everything falls into place. The shape of DNA, it is popularly said, owes its discovery to the chance sight of a spiral staircase when the scientist‘s mind was just at the right receptive temperature. Had he used the elevator, the whole science of genetics might have been a good deal different. This is thought of as somehow wonderful. It isn't. It is tragic. Little particles of inspiration sleet through the universe all the time traveling through the densest matter in the same way that a neutrino passes through a candyfloss haystack, and most of them miss. Even worse, most of the ones that hit the exact cerebral target, hit the wrong one. For example, the weird dream about a lead doughnut on a mile-high gantry, which in the right mind would have been the catalyst for the invention of repressed-gravitational electricity generation (a cheap and inexhaustible and totally non-polluting form of power which the world in question had been seeking for centuries, and for the lack of which it was plunged into a terrible and pointless war) was in fact had by a small and bewildered duck. By another stroke of bad luck, the sight of a herd of wild horses galloping through a field of wild hyacinths would have led a struggling composer to write the famous Flying God Suite, bringing succor and balm to the souls of millions, had he not been at home in bed with shingles. The inspiration thereby fell to a nearby frog, who was not in much of a position to make a startling contributing to the field of tone poetry. Many civilizations have recognized this shocking waste and tried various methods to prevent it, most of them involving enjoyable but illegal attempts to tune the mind into the right wavelength by the use of exotic herbage or yeast products. It never works properly.
Terry Pratchett (Sourcery (Discworld, #5; Rincewind, #3))
The mistake we all make is in assuming anybody remembers anydamnthing from one day to the next. If that were true, we'd stop getting involved with approximately the same kind of wrong lover each time, we'd learn the lessons of history, the death penalty would discourage those plotting murder, and George Santayana's famous quote would be about as popular as "the bee's knees." But few of us keep accurate records of what we've learned as we hobble through life barking our shins in the dark on experiences we've already had....
Harlan Ellison (Slippage: Previously Precariously Poised, Uncollected Stories)
That's the famous vampire Helgarson you're riding with, isn't it? Is he fond of lattes?" "I don't know." I looked over at Leif, who was grinning-he was hearing both sides of the conversation, of course-and said, "Malina wants to know if you like lattes, and I want to know if you're famous." "No to both," he said, as we screamed onto the 202 on-ramp. "Sorry, Malina," I said to the phone. "He's not famous." "Perhaps it would be better to call infamous. It is irrelevant at this point. What is relevant is that my sisters and I are not great warriors. Were the odds even and they did not cheat with modern weapons, I would say, yes, we could walk in and win a magical battle against most opponents. But we are outnumbered more than three to one." "How many are there?" "Twenty-two. Some of them have firearms, but they are not great warriors either. And while they may be expecting you, Mr. O'Sullivan, they will not be expecting Mr. Helgarson to get involved. I imagine the two of you together will be quite formidable." "She's complimenting our martial prowess, Leif," I said to him. "I feel more manly already," He said. The short distance on the 202 was already covered and we were merging onto the southbound 101. "Hey, Malina, tell me how much you want to see us play with our swords.
Kevin Hearne (Hexed (The Iron Druid Chronicles, #2))
There is a famous study from the 1930s involving a group of orphanage babies who, at mealtimes, were presented with a smorgasbord of thirty-four whole, healthy foods. Nothing was processed or prepared beyond mincing or mashing. Among the more standard offerings—fresh fruits and vegetables, eggs, milk, chicken, beef—the researcher, Clara Davis, included liver, kidney, brains, sweetbreads, and bone marrow. The babies shunned liver and kidney (as well as all ten vegetables, haddock, and pineapple), but brains and sweetbreads did not turn up among the low-preference foods she listed. And the most popular item of all? Bone marrow.
Mary Roach (Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal)
His most famous (and possibly apocryphal) mishap involved an operation during which he worked so rapidly that he took off three of his assistant's fingers and, while switching blades, slashed a spectator's coat. Both the assistant and the patient died later of gangrene, and the unfortunate bystander expired on the spot from fright. It is the only surgery in history said to have had a 300 percent fatality rate.
Lindsey Fitzharris
His most famous (and possibly apocryphal) mishap involved an operation during which he worked so rapidly that he took off three of his assistant’s fingers and, while switching blades, slashed a spectator’s coat. Both the assistant and the patient died later of gangrene, and the unfortunate bystander expired on the spot from fright. It is the only surgery in history said to have had a 300 percent fatality rate.
Lindsey Fitzharris (The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine)
Men often have grievances against prominent and powerful persons. Historically, the grievances of the powerless against the powerful have furnished the steam for the engines of revolutions. My point is that in many of the famous medicolegal cases involving the issue of insanity, persons of relatively low social rank openly attacked their superiors. Perhaps their grievances were real and justified, and were vented on the contemporary social symbols of authority, the King and the Queen. Whether or not these grievances justified homicide is not our problem here. I merely wish to suggest that the issue of insanity may have been raised in these trials to obscure the social problems which the crimes intended to dramatize.
Thomas Szasz (Law, Liberty and Psychiatry)
What is more, the whole apparatus of life has become so complex and the processes of production, distribution, and consumption have become so specialized and subdivided, that the individual person loses confidence in his own unaided capacities: he is increasingly subject to commands he does not understand, at the mercy of forces over which he exercises no effective control, moving to a destination he has not chosen. Unlike the taboo-ridden savage, who is often childishly over-confident in the powers of his shaman or magician to control formidable natural forces, however inimical, the machine-conditioned individual feels lost and helpless as day by day he metaphorically punches his time-card, takes his place on the assembly line, and at the end draws a pay check that proves worthless for obtaining any of the genuine goods of life. This lack of close personal involvement in the daily routine brings a general loss of contact with reality: instead of continuous interplay between the inner and the outer world, with constant feedback or readjustment and with stimulus to fresh creativity, only the outer world-and mainly the collectively organized outer world of the power system-exercises authority: even private dreams must be channeled through television, film, and disc, in order to become acceptable. With this feeling of alienation goes the typical psychological problem of our time, characterized in classic terms by Erik Erikson as the 'Identity Crisis.' In a world of transitory family nurture, transitory human contacts, transitory jobs and places of residence, transitory sexual and family relations, the basic conditions for maintaining continuity and establishing personal equilibrium disappear. The individual suddenly awakens, as Tolstoi did in a famous crisis in his own life at Arzamas, to find himself in a strange, dark room, far from home, threatened by obscure hostile forces, unable to discover where he is or who he is, appalled by the prospect of a meaningless death at the end of a meaningless life.
Lewis Mumford (The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2))
Paul Broca, for example, was a famous French craniologist in the nineteenth century whose name is given to Broca’s area, the part of the frontal lobe involved in the generation of speech (which is wiped out in many stroke victims). Among his other interests, Broca used to measure brains, and he was always rather perturbed by the fact that the German brains came out a hundred grams heavier than French brains. So he decided that other factors, such as overall body weight, should also be taken into account when measuring brain size: this explained the larger Germanic brains to his satisfaction. But for his prominent work on how men have larger brains than women, he didn’t make any such adjustments. Whether by accident or by design, it’s a kludge.
Ben Goldacre (Bad Science)
Harold Laswell's famous definition of politics as a social process determining "who gets what, when, and how," there can be little doubt that chimpanzees engage in it. Since in both humans and their closest relatives the process involves bluff, coalitions, and isolation tactics, a common terminology is warranted.
Frans de Waal (Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes)
A worthy life means showing up when showing up is the only thing to do. Goodness bears itself out in millions of ordinary ways across the globe, for the rich and poor, the famous and unknown, in enormous measures and tiny, holy moments. It may involve a career and it may not. It may include traditional components and it may not.
Jen Hatmaker
Gene patents are the point of greatest concern in the debate over ownership of human biological materials, and how that ownership might interfere with science. As of 2005—the most recent year figures were available—the U.S. government had issued patents relating to the use of about 20 percent of known human genes, including genes for Alzheimer’s, asthma, colon cancer, and, most famously, breast cancer. This means pharmaceutical companies, scientists, and universities control what research can be done on those genes, and how much resulting therapies and diagnostic tests will cost. And some enforce their patents aggressively: Myriad Genetics, which holds the patents on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes responsible for most cases of hereditary breast and ovarian cancer, charges $3,000 to test for the genes. Myriad has been accused of creating a monopoly, since no one else can offer the test, and researchers can’t develop cheaper tests or new therapies without getting permission from Myriad and paying steep licensing fees. Scientists who’ve gone ahead with research involving the breast-cancer genes without Myriad’s permission have found themselves on the receiving end of cease-and-desist letters and threats of litigation.
Rebecca Skloot
Eating,” he famously says, “is an agricultural act.”20 We are all involved in agriculture and our food choices affect how land is treated.21
David M. Kaplan (The Philosophy of Food (California Studies in Food and Culture Book 39))
Seeing the name Hillary in a headline last week—a headline about a life that had involved real achievement—I felt a mouse stirring in the attic of my memory. Eventually, I was able to recall how the two Hillarys had once been mentionable in the same breath. On a first-lady goodwill tour of Asia in April 1995—the kind of banal trip that she now claims as part of her foreign-policy 'experience'—Mrs. Clinton had been in Nepal and been briefly introduced to the late Sir Edmund Hillary, conqueror of Mount Everest. Ever ready to milk the moment, she announced that her mother had actually named her for this famous and intrepid explorer. The claim 'worked' well enough to be repeated at other stops and even showed up in Bill Clinton's memoirs almost a decade later, as one more instance of the gutsy tradition that undergirds the junior senator from New York. Sen. Clinton was born in 1947, and Sir Edmund Hillary and his partner Tenzing Norgay did not ascend Mount Everest until 1953, so the story was self-evidently untrue and eventually yielded to fact-checking. Indeed, a spokeswoman for Sen. Clinton named Jennifer Hanley phrased it like this in a statement in October 2006, conceding that the tale was untrue but nonetheless charming: 'It was a sweet family story her mother shared to inspire greatness in her daughter, to great results I might add.' Perfect. It worked, in other words, having been coined long after Sir Edmund became a bankable celebrity, but now its usefulness is exhausted and its untruth can safely be blamed on Mummy.
Christopher Hitchens
If I start doing more things with my hands, whether that's woodworking or gardening or knitting or baking cookies, I might fall into the condition made famous by the psychologist with the impossible name: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. That condition is "flow." It means becoming completely involved in an activity not for the sake of the outcome but for the sheer joy of it. It means feeling alive when we are fully in the groove of doing something. According to Csikszentmihalyi, the path to greatest happiness lies not with mindless consuming but with challenging ourselves to experience or produce something new, becoming in the process more engaged, connected and alive.
Catherine Friend (Sheepish: Two Women, Fifty Sheep, and Enough Wool to Save the Planet)
While passive parents often enjoy their children, have fun with them, and make them feel special, the children sense that their parents aren’t really there for them in any essential way. In fact, these parents are famous for turning a blind eye to family situations that are harmful to their children, leaving their kids to fend for themselves. When the mother is the passive parent, she may stay with a partner who demeans or abuses her children because she doesn’t have an independent income. Such mothers often numb themselves to what’s going on around them. For example, one mother later referred to her husband’s violent attacks on their children with the mild statement “Daddy could be tough sometimes.
Lindsay C. Gibson (Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents)
On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” Now let’s look at how Einstein articulated all of this in the famous paper that the Annalen der Physik received on June 30, 1905. For all its momentous import, it may be one of the most spunky and enjoyable papers in all of science. Most of its insights are conveyed in words and vivid thought experiments, rather than in complex equations. There is some math involved, but it is mainly what a good high school senior could comprehend. “The whole paper is a testament to the power of simple language to convey deep and powerfully disturbing ideas,” says the science writer Dennis Overbye.
Walter Isaacson (Einstein: His Life and Universe)
One of the greatest Roman poets was Ovid, an older contemporary of Jesus (his dates: 43 BCE–17 CE). His most famous work is his fifteen-volume Metamorphoses, which celebrates changes or transformations described in ancient mythology. Sometimes these changes involve gods who take on human form in order to interact, for a time, with mortals.
Bart D. Ehrman (How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee)
In the New Testament the basic command of old covenant life, 'Be holy as I am holy', now means, 'Become like Jesus.' God involves himself in this work as the triune Lord: the Father commands it; the Son has died to provide the resources for it; the Spirit indwells us in order to effect it in our lives. As Augustine famously prayed, God commands what he wills and gives what he commands.
Sinclair B. Ferguson (Devoted to God: Blueprints for Sanctification)
A famous case involved U2 guitarist “The Edge,” who purchased 156 acres of wild chaparral but wanted to build five mansions on it. Needless to say there was going to be a significant disruption of the fragile habitat, and his building plans were rejected. The executive director of the Coastal Commission called it “one of the three worst projects that I’ve seen in terms of environmental devastation.
Greg Graffin (Population Wars: A New Perspective on Competition and Coexistence)
It is his bottomless interest in other people, famous and unfamous, his loving immersion in their pasts, in what their mothers said to them when they were children, and what their childhood bedrooms looked like, that distinguishes him from the run-of-the-mill journalist. For him the story is not over when the book is sent off to the publishers. He stays in touch with many of his sources for years, for decades, still interested in what happens to them, still gathering information, still involved.
Gay Talese (Thy Neighbor's Wife)
A worthy life involves loving as loved folks do, sharing the ridiculous mercy God spoiled us with first. (It really is ridiculous.) It means restoring people, in ordinary conversations and regular encounters. A worthy life means showing up when showing up is the only thing to do. Goodness bears itself out in millions of ordinary ways across the globe, for the rich and poor, the famous and unknown, in enormous measures and tiny, holy moments. It may involve a career and it may not. It may include traditional components and it may not.
Jen Hatmaker (For the Love: Fighting for Grace in a World of Impossible Standards)
Liston’s speed was both a gift and a curse. Once, he accidentally sliced off a patient’s testicle along with the leg he was amputating. His most famous (and possibly apocryphal) mishap involved an operation during which he worked so rapidly that he took off three of his assistant’s fingers and, while switching blades, slashed a spectator’s coat. Both the assistant and the patient died later of gangrene, and the unfortunate bystander expired on the spot from fright. It is the only surgery in history said to have had a 300 percent fatality rate.
Lindsey Fitzharris (The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine)
Actress Winona Ryder, who starred in Beetlejuice, Mermaids, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Little Women thought she had it all. She was famous, making lots of money, and was romantically involved with actor Johnny Depp. But it wasn’t enough. She shared in an interview in October 2000, “When I was 18, I was driving around at two in the morning, completely crying and alone and scared. I drove by this magazine stand that has this Rolling Stone that I was on the cover of, and it said, ‘Winona Ryder: The Luckiest Girl in the World.’ And there I was feeling more alone than I ever had.
Dan Schaeffer (A Better Country: Preparing for Heaven)
Eliot's understanding of poetic epistemology is a version of Bradley's theory, outlined in our second chapter, that knowing involves immediate, relational, and transcendent stages or levels. The poetic mind, like the ordinary mind, has at least two types of experience: The first consists largely of feeling (falling in love, smelling the cooking, hearing the noise of the typewriter), the second largely of thought (reading Spinoza). The first type of experience is sensuous, and it is also to a great extent monistic or immediate, for it does not require mediation through the mind; it exists before intellectual analysis, before the falling apart of experience into experiencer and experienced. The second type of experience, in contrast, is intellectual (to be known at all, it must be mediated through the mind) and sharply dualistic, in that it involves a breaking down of experience into subject and object. In the mind of the ordinary person, these two types of experience are and remain disparate. In the mind of the poet, these disparate experiences are somehow transcended and amalgamated into a new whole, a whole beyond and yet including subject and object, mind and matter. Eliot illustrates his explanation of poetic epistemology by saying that John Donne did not simply feel his feelings and think his thoughts; he felt his thoughts and thought his feelings. He was able to "feel his thought as immediately as the odour of a rose." Immediately" in this famous simile is a technical term in philosophy, used with precision; it means unmediated through mind, unshattered into subject and object. Falling in love and reading Spinoza typify Eliot's own experiences in the years in which he was writing The Waste Land. These were the exciting and exhausting years in which he met Vivien Haigh-Wood and consummated a disastrous marriage, the years in which he was deeply involved in reading F. H. Bradley, the years in which he was torn between the professions of philosophy and poetry and in which he was in close and frequent contact with such brilliant and stimulating figures as Bertrand Russell and Ezra Pound, the years of the break from his family and homeland, the years in which in every area of his life he seemed to be between broken worlds. The experiences of these years constitute the material of The Waste Land. The relevant biographical details need not be reviewed here, for they are presented in the introduction to The Waste Land Facsimile. For our purposes, it is only necessary to acknowledge what Eliot himself acknowledged: the material of art is always actual life. At the same time, it should also be noted that material in itself is not art. As Eliot argued in his review of Ulysses, "in creation you are responsible for what you can do with material which you must simply accept." For Eliot, the given material included relations with and observations of women, in particular, of his bright but seemingly incurably ill wife Vivien(ne).
Jewel Spears Brooker (Reading the Waste Land: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation)
The member of the Nazi hierarchy most gifted at solving problems of conscience was Himmler. He coined slogans, like the famous watchword of the S.S., taken from a Hitler speech before the S.S. in 1931, “My Honor is my Loyalty”—catch phrases which Eichmann called “winged words” and the judges “empty talk”—and issued them, as Eichmann recalled, “around the turn of the year,” presumably along with a Christmas bonus. Eichmann remembered only one of them and kept repeating it: “These are battles which future generations will not have to fight again,” alluding to the “battles” against women, children, old people, and other “useless mouths.” Other such phrases, taken from speeches Himmler made to the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen and the Higher S.S. and Police Leaders, were: “To have stuck it out and, apart from exceptions caused by human weakness, to have remained decent, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written.” Or: “The order to solve the Jewish question, this was the most frightening order an organization could ever receive.” Or: We realize that what we are expecting from you is “superhuman,” to be “superhumanly inhuman.” All one can say is that their expectations were not disappointed. It is noteworthy, however, that Himmler hardly ever attempted to justify in ideological terms, and if he did, it was apparently quickly forgotten. What stuck in the minds of these men who had become murderers was simply the notion of being involved in something historic, grandiose, unique (“a great task that occurs once in two thousand years”), which must therefore be difficult to bear. This was important, because the murderers were not sadists or killers by nature; on the contrary, a systematic effort was made to weed out all those who derived physical pleasure from what they did. The troops of the Einsatzgruppen had been drafted
Hannah Arendt (Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil)
He says this episode will be about grief. About helping other people to mourn. He says that my family's involvement could really help other people in similar situations. All those viewers who thought they lost a family member to a famous serial killer, then are told 36 years later that DNA from the crime scene matches both that of a retired nurse and a man who was four years old at the time and grew up to murder his mother, I think. With less graciousness than I'd hoped to display, I ask if there's a reason why stories about the bizarre, violent deaths of young, good-looking, middle- to upper-class white girls help people mourn better than other stories.
Maggie Nelson
There is a famous passage in Science and Health which has been spoken of as Mary Baker’s “immortal thesis,” and an alleged distortion of which was the theme of one of the numerous lawsuits in which the founder and the apostles of Christian Science have been involved. In set terms it is here declared that there is neither life, nor truth, nor intelligence, nor substance, in matter. Everything is infinite mind and its everlasting revelation, for God is all in all. Mind is immortal truth, whereas matter is mortal error. Mind is the real and the eternal, whereas matter is the unreal and the temporal. Mind is God and man is his image, wherefore man is not material but mental. Can the reader understand this farrago? If not, all the better.
Stefan Zweig (Mental Healers: Franz Anton Mesmer, Mary Baker Eddy, Sigmund Freud)
One day, Harry Anslinger was told that there were also white women, just as famous as Billie, who had drug problems—but he responded to them rather differently. He called Judy Garland, another heroin addict, in to see him. They had a friendly chat, in which he advised her to take longer vacations between pictures, and he wrote to her studio, assuring them she didn’t have a drug problem at all. When he discovered that a Washington society hostess he knew—“a beautiful, gracious lady,” he noted—had an illegal drug addiction, he explained he couldn’t possibly arrest her because “it would destroy . . . the unblemished reputation of one of the nation’s most honored families.” He helped her to wean herself off her addiction slowly, without the law becoming involved.
Johann Hari (Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs)
Groupies and hangers-on somehow fancy themselves entitled to the narcissist’s favour and largesse, his time, attention, and other resources. They convince themselves that they are exempt from the narcissist’s rage and wrath and immune to his vagaries andabuse . This self-imputed and self-conferred status irritates the narcissist no end as it challenges and encroaches on his standing as the only source of preferential treatment and the sole decision-maker when it comes to the allocation of his precious and cosmically significant wherewithal. The narcissist is the guru at the centre of a cult. Like other gurus, he demands complete obedience from his flock: his spouse, his offspring, other family  members, friends, and colleagues. He feels entitled to adulation and special treatment by his followers. He punishes the wayward and the straying lambs. He enforces discipline, adherence to his teachings, and common goals. The less accomplished he is in reality – the more stringent his mastery and the more pervasive the brainwashing. Cult leaders are narcissists who failed in their mission to "be someone", to become famous, and to impress the world with their uniqueness, talents, traits, and skills. Such disgruntled narcissists withdraw into a "zone of comfort" (known as the "Pathological Narcissistic Space") that assumes the hallmarks of a cult. The – often involuntary – members of the narcissist's mini-cult inhabit a twilight zone of his own construction. He imposes on them an exclusionary or inclusionary shared psychosis, replete with persecutory delusions, "enemies", mythical-grandiose narratives, and apocalyptic scenarios if he is flouted. Exclusionary shared psychosis involves the physical and emotional isolation of the narcissist and his “flock” (spouse, children, fans, friends) from the outside world in order to better shield them from imminent threats and hostile intentions. Inclusionary shared psychosis revolves around attempts to spread the narcissist’s message in a missionary fashion among friends, colleagues, co-workers, fans, churchgoers, and anyone else who comes across the mini-cult. The narcissist's control is based on ambiguity, unpredictability, fuzziness, and ambientabuse . His ever-shifting whims exclusively define right versus wrong, desirable and unwanted, what is to be pursued and what to be avoided. He alone determines the rights and obligations of his disciples and alters them at will.
Sam Vaknin
The leftist is always a statist. He has all sorts of grievances and animosities against personal initiative and private enterprise. The notion of the state doing everything (until, finally, it replaces all private existence) is the Great Leftist Dream. Thus it is a leftist tendency to have city or state schools—or to have a ministry of education controlling all aspects of education. For example, there is the famous story of the French Minister of Education who pulls out his watch and, glancing at its face, says to his visitor, “At this moment in 5,431 public elementary schools they are writing an essay on the joys of winter.” Church schools, parochial schools, private schools, or personal tutors are not at all in keeping with leftist sentiments. The reasons for this attitude are manifold. Here not only is the delight in statism involved, but the idea of uniformity and equality is also decisive; i.e., the notion that social differences in education should be eliminated and all pupils should be given a chance to acquire the same knowledge, the same type of information in the same fashion and to the same degree. This should help them to think in identical or at least in similar ways. It is only natural that this should be especially true of countries where “democratism” as an ism is being pushed. There efforts will be made to ignore the differences in IQs and in personal efforts. Sometimes marks and report cards will be eliminated and promotion from one grade to the next be made automatic. It is obvious that from a scholastic viewpoint this has disastrous results, but to a true ideologist this hardly matters. When informed that the facts did not tally with his ideas, Hegel once severely replied, “Um so schlimmer für die Tatsachen”—all the worse for the facts. Leftism does not like religion for a variety of causes. Its ideologies, its omnipotent, all-permeating state wants undivided allegiance. With religion at least one other allegiance (to God), if not also allegiance to a Church, is interposed. In dealing with organized religion, leftism knows of two widely divergent procedures. One is a form of separation of Church and State which eliminates religion from the marketplace and tries to atrophy it by not permitting it to exist anywhere outside the sacred precincts. The other is the transformation of the Church into a fully state-controlled establishment. Under these circumstances the Church is asphyxiated, not starved to death. The Nazis and the Soviets used the former method; Czechoslovakia still employs the latter.
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
The central figure of Buddhism is not a god but a human being, Siddhartha Gautama. According to Buddhist tradition, Gautama was heir to a small Himalayan kingdom, sometime around 500 BC. The young prince was deeply affected by the suffering evident all around him. He saw that men and women, children and old people, all suffer not just from occasional calamities such as war and plague, but also from anxiety, frustration and discontent, all of which seem to be an inseparable part of the human condition. People pursue wealth and power, acquire knowledge and possessions, beget sons and daughters, and build houses and palaces. Yet no matter what they achieve, they are never content. Those who live in poverty dream of riches. Those who have a million want two million. Those who have two million want 10 million. Even the rich and famous are rarely satisfied. They too are haunted by ceaseless cares and worries, until sickness, old age and death put a bitter end to them. Everything that one has accumulated vanishes like smoke. Life is a pointless rat race. But how to escape it? At the age of twenty-nine Gautama slipped away from his palace in the middle of the night, leaving behind his family and possessions. He travelled as a homeless vagabond throughout northern India, searching for a way out of suffering. He visited ashrams and sat at the feet of gurus but nothing liberated him entirely – some dissatisfaction always remained. He did not despair. He resolved to investigate suffering on his own until he found a method for complete liberation. He spent six years meditating on the essence, causes and cures for human anguish. In the end he came to the realisation that suffering is not caused by ill fortune, by social injustice, or by divine whims. Rather, suffering is caused by the behaviour patterns of one’s own mind. Gautama’s insight was that no matter what the mind experiences, it usually reacts with craving, and craving always involves dissatisfaction. When the mind experiences something distasteful it craves to be rid of the irritation. When the mind experiences something pleasant, it craves that the pleasure will remain and will intensify. Therefore, the mind is always dissatisfied and restless. This is very clear when we experience unpleasant things, such as pain. As long as the pain continues, we are dissatisfied and do all we can to avoid it. Yet even when we experience pleasant things we are never content. We either fear that the pleasure might disappear, or we hope that it will intensify. People dream for years about finding love but are rarely satisfied when they find it. Some become anxious that their partner will leave; others feel that they have settled cheaply, and could have found someone better. And we all know people who manage to do both.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
Heisenberg’s more famous and disruptive contribution came two years later, in 1927. It is, to the general public, one of the best known and most baffling aspects of quantum physics: the uncertainty principle. It is impossible to know, Heisenberg declared, the precise position of a particle, such as a moving electron, and its precise momentum (its velocity times its mass) at the same instant. The more precisely the position of the particle is measured, the less precisely it is possible to measure its momentum. And the formula that describes the trade-off involves (no surprise) Planck’s constant. The very act of observing something—of allowing photons or electrons or any other particles or waves of energy to strike the object—affects the observation. But Heisenberg’s theory went beyond that. An electron does not have a definite position or path until we observe it. This is a feature of our universe, he said, not merely some defect in our observing or measuring abilities.
Walter Isaacson (Einstein: His Life and Universe)
The demographic ageing of Europe and other leading industrial countries is multiplied by the economic burden of immigration. For the time being, we can still hold out, but this will not last. The lack of active workers, the burden of retirees and the expenses of healthcare will end, from 2005-2010, with burdening European economies with debt. Gains in productivity and technological advances (the famous ‘primitive accumulation of fixed capital’, the economists’ magic cure) will never be able to match the external demographic costs. Lastly, far from compensating for the losses of the working-age native-born population, the colonising immigration Europe is experiencing involves first of all welfare recipients and unskilled workers. In addition, this immigration represents a growing expense (insecurity, the criminal economy, urban policies, etc.). An economic collapse of Europe, the world’s leading commercial power, would drag down with it the United States and the entire Western economy.
Guillaume Faye (Convergence of Catastrophes)
And in fact the jealous lover is, like contemporaries, too close to the events, he can know nothing of them, and it is for the uninvolved that a series of adulteries takes on the precision of history, expanding into lists, quite dispassionate in themselves and saddening only for another jealous lover such as I was, who cannot avoid comparing his own case to the one he is hearing about, and wondering whether, for the woman he doubts, there does not exist another equally famous list. But he will never know, it is as if there is a general conspiracy, a joke of which he is the victim, in which everyone cruelly participates and which involves, while the woman he loves flits from one man to another, holding a blindfold over his eyes which he constantly tries to tear off, but without success, for everyone keeps him in the dark, poor soul, kind people out of kindness, unkind out of unkindness, vulgar people from a taste for low jokes, well-brought-up people from politeness and good manners, and everyone in observance of one of those conventions which the world calls principles.
Marcel Proust (The Prisoner: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 5 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition))
Virtually every version of CBT for anxiety disorders involves working through what’s called an exposure hierarchy. The concept is simple. You make a list of all the situations and behaviors you avoid due to anxiety. You then assign a number to each item on your list based on how anxiety provoking you expect doing the avoided behavior would be. Use numbers from 0 (= not anxiety provoking at all) to 100 (= you would fear having an instant panic attack). For example, attempting to talk to a famous person in your field at a conference might be an 80 on the 0-100 scale. Sort your list in order, from least to most anxiety provoking. Aim to construct a list that has several avoided actions in each 10-point range. For example, several that fall between 20 and 30, between 30 and 40, and so on, on your anxiety scale. That way, you won’t have any jumps that are too big. Omit things that are anxiety-provoking but wouldn’t actually benefit you (such as eating a fried insect). Make a plan for how you can work through your hierarchy, starting at the bottom of the list. Where possible, repeat an avoided behavior several times before you move up to the next level. For example, if one of your items is talking to a colleague you find intimidating, do this several times (with the same or different colleagues) before moving on. When you start doing things you’d usually avoid that are low on your hierarchy, you’ll gain the confidence you need to do the things that are higher up on your list. It’s important you don’t use what are called safety behaviors. Safety behaviors are things people do as an anxiety crutch—for example, wearing their lucky undies when they approach that famous person or excessively rehearsing what they plan to say. There is a general consensus within psychology that exposure techniques like the one just described are among the most effective ways to reduce problems with anxiety. In clinical settings, people who do exposures get the most out of treatment. Some studies have even shown that just doing exposure can be as effective as therapies that also include extensive work on thoughts. If you want to turbocharge your results, try exposure. If you find it too difficult to do alone, consider working with a therapist.
Alice Boyes (The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points)
It was said of Liston by his colleagues that when he amputated, “the gleam of his knife was followed so instantaneously by the sound of sawing as to make the two actions appear almost simultaneous.” His left arm was reportedly so strong that he could use it as a tourniquet, while he wielded the knife in his right hand. This was a feat that required immense strength and dexterity, given that patients often struggled against the fear and agony of the surgeon’s assault. Liston could remove a leg in less than thirty seconds, and in order to keep both hands free, he often clasped the bloody knife between his teeth while working. Liston’s speed was both a gift and a curse. Once, he accidentally sliced off a patient’s testicle along with the leg he was amputating. His most famous (and possibly apocryphal) mishap involved an operation during which he worked so rapidly that he took off three of his assistant’s fingers and, while switching blades, slashed a spectator’s coat. Both the assistant and the patient died later of gangrene, and the unfortunate bystander expired on the spot from fright. It is the only surgery in history said to have had a 300 percent fatality rate.
Lindsey Fitzharris (The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine)
Which meant, if somehow GameStop did start to go up, the people who had shorted the company would begin to feel pressure to buy; the more the stock went up, the heavier that pressure became. As the shorts began to cover, buying shares to return them to their lenders, the stock would rise even higher. In financial parlance, this was something called a 'short squeeze.' It didn't happen often, but when it did, it could be spectacular. Most famously, in 2008, a surprise takeover attempt of the German automaker Volkswagen by rival Porsche drove Volkswagen's stock price up by a factor of 5 — briefly making it the most valuable company in the world — in two quick days of trading, as short selling funds struggled to cover their positions. Similarly, a battle between two hedge fund titans — Bill Ackman, of Pershing Square Capital Management, and Carl Icahn — led to a squeeze involving supplement maker — and alleged pyramid marketer — Herbalife, which cost Ackman a reported $1 billion. And perhaps the first widely reported short squeeze dated back a century, to 1923, when grocery magnate Clarence Saunders successfully decimated short sellers who had targeted his nascent chain of Piggly Wiggly grocery stores.
Ben Mezrich (The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees)
Everett's approach, which he described as "objectively deterministic" with probability "reappearing at the subjective level," resonated with this strategy. And he was thrilled by the direction. As he noted in the 1956 draft of his dissertation, the framework offered to bridge the position of Einstein (who famously believed that a fundamental theory of physics should not involve probability) and the position of Bohr (who was perfectly happy with a fundamental theory that did). According to Everett, the Many Worlds approach accommodated both positions, the difference between them merely being one of perspective. Einstein's perspective is the mathematical one in which the grand probability wave of all particles relentlessly evolves by the Schrodinger equation, with chance playing absolutely no role. I like to picture Einstein soaring high above the many worlds of Many Worlds, watching as Schrodinger's equation fully dictates how the entire panorama unfolds, and happily concluding that even though quantum mechanics is correct, God doesn't play dice. Bohr's perspective is that of an inhabitant in one of the worlds, also happy, using probabilities to explain, with stupendous precision, those observations to which his limited perspective gives him access.
Brian Greene (The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos)
As I was completing this book, I saw news reports quoting NASA chief Charles Bolden announcing that from now on the primary mission of America’s space agency would be to improve relations with the Muslim world. Come again? Bolden said he got the word directly from the president. “He wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science and math and engineering.” Bolden added that the International Space Station was a kind of model for NASA’s future, since it was not just a U.S. operation but included the Russians and the Chinese. Bolden, who made these remarks in an interview with Al-Jazeera, timed them to coincide with the one-year anniversary of Obama’s own Cairo address to the Muslim world.3 Bolden’s remarks provoked consternation not only among conservatives but also among famous former astronauts Neil Armstrong and John Glenn and others involved in America’s space programs. No surprise: most people think of NASA’s job as one of landing on the moon and Mars and exploring other faraway destinations. Even some of Obama’s supporters expressed puzzlement. Sure, we are all for Islamic self-esteem, and seven or eight hundred years ago the Muslims did make a couple of important discoveries, but what on earth was Obama up to here?
Dinesh D'Souza (The Roots of Obama's Rage)
Nartok shows me an example of Arctic “greens”: cutout number 13, Caribou Stomach Contents. Moss and lichen are tough to digest, unless, like caribou, you have a multichambered stomach in which to ferment them. So the Inuit let the caribou have a go at it first. I thought of Pat Moeller and what he’d said about wild dogs and other predators eating the stomachs and stomach contents of their prey first. “And wouldn’t we all,” he’d said, “be better off.” If we could strip away the influences of modern Western culture and media and the high-fructose, high-salt temptations of the junk-food sellers, would we all be eating like Inuit elders, instinctively gravitating to the most healthful, nutrient-diverse foods? Perhaps. It’s hard to say. There is a famous study from the 1930s involving a group of orphanage babies who, at mealtimes, were presented with a smorgasbord of thirty-four whole, healthy foods. Nothing was processed or prepared beyond mincing or mashing. Among the more standard offerings—fresh fruits and vegetables, eggs, milk, chicken, beef—the researcher, Clara Davis, included liver, kidney, brains, sweetbreads, and bone marrow. The babies shunned liver and kidney (as well as all ten vegetables, haddock, and pineapple), but brains and sweetbreads did not turn up among the low-preference foods she listed. And the most popular item of all? Bone marrow.
Mary Roach (Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal)
If anything, the LAPD had long and famously been guilty of overreaction, as they had shown, for example, during the infamous 1988 raid on two small, adjacent apartment buildings on South Central’s Dalton Avenue. There, eighty LAPD officers had stormed the buildings looking for drugs on a bullshit tip. After handcuffing the terrorized residents—including small children and their grandparents—they then spent the next several hours tearing all the toilets from the floors; smashing in walls, stairwells, bedroom sets, and televisions with sledgehammers; slashing open furniture; and then sending it all crashing through windows into the front yard and arresting anyone who happened by to watch. As they were leaving, the officers spray-painted a large board located down the street with some graffiti. “LAPD Rules,” read one message; “Rolling 30s Die” read another. So completely uninhabitable were the apartments rendered that the Red Cross had to provide the occupants with temporary shelter, as if some kind of natural disaster had occurred. No gang members lived there, no charges were ever filed. In the end, the city paid $3.8 million to the victims of the destruction. A report later written by LAPD assistant chief Robert Vernon called it “a poorly planned and executed field operation [that] involved . . . an improperly focused and supervised aggressive attitude of police officers, supervisors and managers toward being ‘at war’ with gang members.” The
Joe Domanick (Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing)
THE DEFENDANT: Thank you, your Honor. I stand before your Honor humbly and painfully aware that we are here today for one reason: Because of my actions that I pled guilty to on August 21, and as well on November 29. I take full responsibility for each act that I pled guilty to, the personal ones to me and those involving the President of the United States of America. Viktor Frankl in his book, "Man's Search for Meaning," he wrote, "There are forces beyond your control that can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation." Your Honor, this may seem hard to believe, but today is one of the most meaningful days of my life. The irony is today is the day I am getting my freedom back as you sit at the bench and you contemplate my fate. I have been living in a personal and mental incarceration ever since the fateful day that I accepted the offer to work for a famous real estate mogul whose business acumen I truly admired. In fact, I now know that there is little to be admired. I want to be clear. I blame myself for the conduct which has brought me here today, and it was my own weakness, and a blind loyalty to this man that led me to choose a path of darkness over light. It is for these reasons I chose to participate in the elicit act of the President rather than to listen to my own inner voice which should have warned me that the campaign finance violations that I later pled guilty to were insidious.
Michael Cohen
I quickly learned that the congressional delegation from Alaska was deeply committed to the oil industry and other commercial interests, and senatorial courtesy prevented other members from disputing with Senators Ted Stevens (Republican) and Mike Gravel (Democrat) over a matter involving their home state. Former Idaho governor Cecil Andrus, my secretary of interior, and I began to study the history of the controversy and maps of the disputed areas, and I flew over some of them a few times. Environmental groups and most indigenous natives were my allies, but professional hunters, loggers, fishers, and the Chambers of Commerce were aligned with the oil companies. All the odds were against us until Cecil discovered an ancient law, the Antiquities Act of 1906, which permitted a president to set aside an area for “the protection of objects of historic and scientific interest,” such as Indian burial grounds, artifacts, or perhaps an ancient church building or the site of a famous battle. We decided to use this authority to set aside for preservation large areas of Alaska as national monuments, and eventually we had included more than 56 million acres (larger than the state of Minnesota). This gave me the bargaining chip I needed, and I was able to prevail in the subsequent debates. My efforts were extremely unpopular in Alaska, and I had to have extra security on my visits. I remember that there was a state fair where people threw baseballs at two targets to plunge a clown into a tank of water. My face was on one target and Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini’s on the other, and few people threw at the Ayatollah’s.
Jimmy Carter (A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety)
As part of his long-winded bullshit, Baby fell into a genre trope that he had avoided in his first two novels. He started inventing new words. This was a common habit amongst Science Fiction writers. They couldn’t help themselves. They were always inventing new words. Perhaps the most famous example of a Science Fiction writer inventing a new word occurs in Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. Part of Heinlein’s vision of horny decentralized alien sex involves the Martian word grok. To grok something is to comprehend that something with effortless and infinite intuition. When you grok something, that something becomes a part of you and you become a part of that something without any troublesome Earthling attempts at knowing. A good example of groking something is the way that members of the social construct of the White race had groked their own piglet pink. They’d groked their skin color so much that it became invisible. It had become part of them and they had become part of it. That was groking. People in the San Francisco Bay Area, especially those who worked in technology like Erik Willems, loved to talk about groking. With time, their overusage stripped away the original meaning and grok became synonymous with simple knowledge of a thing. In a weird way, people in the Bay Area who used the word grok did not grok the word grok. Baby had always been popular with people on the Internet, which was a wonderful place to deny climate change, willfully misinterpret the Bible, and denounce Darwin’s theory of evolution. Now that Baby had coined nonsense neologisms, he had become more than popular. He had become quotable.
Jarett Kobek (I Hate the Internet)
One day Billy’s kindergarten teacher phoned me at work. In a grave tone of voice she informed me Billy had been involved in a serious incident at school. She refused to elaborate but insisted I come to the school for a disciplinary meeting. My mind raced as I drove to the school. I wondered what type of behavior could possibly land a five-year-old in such hot water. When I arrived at the school, the teacher ushered me into a private office. Billy sat next to me—he looked scared. We both faced the grim faced teacher. She reminded me of the woman in the famous painting, “American Gothic.” She sat rigidly behind her desk, her eyes unblinking. The atmosphere was reminiscent of a criminal court proceeding. “Maybe Billy had accidentally killed someone.” I thought. There was a moment of uncomfortable silence. The teacher’s face was stiff and emotionless. Finally, her lips moved and she intoned, “Billy, tell your father what you did.” Under the disapproving gaze of his teacher, Billy began his confession. “Well, I was eating lunch next to Suzy. We had green Jell-O. It was jiggling around. Suzy bent down to look at her Jell-O real close, and I … pushed her face into it.” I barely choked off a belly laugh and quickly looked away, struggling for control. Somehow I sensed that Billy’s straitlaced teacher would frown upon me laughing uncontrollably about this issue. With Zenlike concentration, I mastered my emotions and turned to face my son. My expression was serious, my tone was stern, my acting was impeccable, “Billy, how do you think that made Suzy feel?” “Bad.” said Billy. “That’s right.” I said. “I don’t want you to ever do such a thing again. Do you understand?” “Yes.” Billy meekly replied. I looked at the teacher. She seemed disappointed I hadn’t tortured my son with hot irons. Reluctantly, the she allowed us to leave. This incident was representative of many child-rearing situations I dealt with over the years.
William F. Sine (Guardian Angel: Life and Death Adventures with Pararescue, the World's Most Powerful Commando Rescue Force)
The dispersion of the daimonic by means of impersonality has serious and destructive effects. In New York City, it is not regarded as strange that the anonymous human beings secluded in single-room occupancies are so often connected with violent crime and drug addiction. Not that the anonymous individual in New York is alone: he sees thousands of other people every day, and he knows all the famous personalities as they come, via TV, into his single room. He knows their names, their smiles, their idiosyncrasies; they bandy about in a “we're-all-friends-together” mood on the screen which invites him to join them and subtly assumes that he does join them. He knows them all. But he himself is never known. His smile is unseen; his idiosyncrasies are important to no-body; his name is unknown. He remains a foreigner pushed on and off the subway by tens of thousands of other anonymous foreigners. There is a deeply depersonalizing tragedy involved in this. The most severe punishment Yahweh could inflict on his people was to blot out their name. “Their names,” Yahweh proclaims, “shall be wiped out of the book of the living.” This anonymous man's never being known, this aloneness, is transformed into loneliness, which may then become daimonic possession. For his self-doubts—“I don't really exist since I can't affect anyone” —eat away at his innards; he lives and breathes and walks in a loneliness which is subtle and insidious. It is not surprising that he gets a gun and trains it on some passer-by—also anonymous to him. And it is not surprising that the young men in the streets, who are only anonymous digits in their society, should gang together in violent attacks to make sure their assertion is felt. Loneliness and its stepchild, alienation, can become forms of demon possession. Surrendering ourselves to the impersonal daimonic pushes us into an anonymity which is also impersonal; we serve nature’s gross purposes on the lowest common denominator, which often means with violence.
Rollo May (Love and Will)
what makes life worth living when we are old and frail and unable to care for ourselves? In 1943, the psychologist Abraham Maslow published his hugely influential paper “A Theory of Human Motivation,” which famously described people as having a hierarchy of needs. It is often depicted as a pyramid. At the bottom are our basic needs—the essentials of physiological survival (such as food, water, and air) and of safety (such as law, order, and stability). Up one level are the need for love and for belonging. Above that is our desire for growth—the opportunity to attain personal goals, to master knowledge and skills, and to be recognized and rewarded for our achievements. Finally, at the top is the desire for what Maslow termed “self-actualization”—self-fulfillment through pursuit of moral ideals and creativity for their own sake. Maslow argued that safety and survival remain our primary and foundational goals in life, not least when our options and capacities become limited. If true, the fact that public policy and concern about old age homes focus on health and safety is just a recognition and manifestation of those goals. They are assumed to be everyone’s first priorities. Reality is more complex, though. People readily demonstrate a willingness to sacrifice their safety and survival for the sake of something beyond themselves, such as family, country, or justice. And this is regardless of age. What’s more, our driving motivations in life, instead of remaining constant, change hugely over time and in ways that don’t quite fit Maslow’s classic hierarchy. In young adulthood, people seek a life of growth and self-fulfillment, just as Maslow suggested. Growing up involves opening outward. We search out new experiences, wider social connections, and ways of putting our stamp on the world. When people reach the latter half of adulthood, however, their priorities change markedly. Most reduce the amount of time and effort they spend pursuing achievement and social networks. They narrow in. Given the choice, young people prefer meeting new people to spending time with, say, a sibling; old people prefer the opposite. Studies find that as people grow older they interact with fewer people and concentrate more on spending time with family and established friends. They focus on being rather than doing and on the present more than the future.
Atul Gawande (Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End)
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It has to be said: there are too many great men in the world. There are too many legislators, organizers, founders of society, leaders of peoples, fathers of nations, etc., etc. Too many people put themselves above humanity in order to rule it and too many people think their job is to become involved with it. People will say to me: you yourself are becoming involved, you who talk about it. That is true. But they will agree that it is for a very different reason and from a very different point of view, and while I am taking on those who wish to reform, it is solely to make them abandon their effort. I am becoming involved with it not like Vaucanson with his automaton but like a physiologist with the human organism, in order to examine it and admire it. I am becoming involved with it in the same spirit as that of a famous traveler. He arrived among a savage tribe. A child had just been born and a host of fortune-tellers, warlocks, and quacks were crowding around it, armed with rings, hooks, and ties. One said, “This child will never smell the aroma of a pipe if I do not lengthen his nostrils.” Another said, “He will be deprived of the sense of hearing if I do not make his ears reach down to his shoulders.” A third said, “He will never see the light of the sun unless I make his eyes slant obliquely.” A fourth said, “He will never stand upright if I do not make his legs curve.” A fifth said, “He will never be able to think if I do not squeeze his brain.” “Away with you,” said the traveler. “God does His work well. Do not claim to know more than He does and, since He has given organs to this frail creature, leave those organs to develop and grow strong through exercise, experimentation, experience, and freedom.” [print edition page 146] God has also provided humanity with all that is necessary for it to accomplish its destiny. There is a providential social physiology just as there is a providential human physiology. The social organs are also constituted so as to develop harmoniously in the fresh air of freedom. Away with you, therefore, you quacks and organizers! Away with your rings, chains, hooks, and pincers! Away with your artificial means! Away with your social workshop, your phalanstery, your governmentalism, your centralization, your tariffs, your universities, your state religion, your free credit or monopolistic banks, your constraints, your restrictions, your moralizing, or your equalizing through taxes! And since the social body has had inflicted on it so many theoretical systems to no avail, let us finish where we should have started; let us reject these and at last put freedom to the test, freedom, which is an act of faith in God and in His work.
Frédéric Bastiat (The Law, The State, and Other Political Writings, 1843–1850)
Reed was involved in some of our most famous duck hunts; he even has a blind named after him. It’s called the Reed Robertson Hole. One year, we were having a really bad duck season. It was hot and there always seemed to be southwest winds, which aren’t ideal conditions on Phil’s property. One Sunday, the forecast called for more southwest winds, so nobody wanted to go hunting. I wasn’t going to pass up a morning in the duck blind, so I decided to take Reed with me. My expectations were so low that I was really only taking him to see the sunrise. I was convinced we wouldn’t see a single duck. Well, it got to be daylight and nothing happened. But we were still spending quality time together, and I was talking to him about God and the outdoors. I looked up and saw two birds. I literally thought it was two crows flying overhead. But then I realized it was two mallard drakes. I called them and they made two passes over our blind before backpedaling right in front of us. They seemed to stop in motion about ten feet in front of us. “Shoot!” I said. Reed raised his gun and shot three times in less than three seconds. Apparently, he still believed his shotgun was an AK-47. He went boom! Boom! Boom! By the time Reed was gone, I raised my gun and shot both of them. He looked at me and was like, “What happened?” He looked at his gun and thought something was wrong with it. “Son, you got excited and fired too quickly,” I said. “You’ve got to get on the duck.” As soon as I looked up, I saw ten teals circling toward us. They came right into our decoys. I decided to give Reed the first shot again. “Cut ‘em,” I said. Reed raised his gun and fired again. Boom! Boom! Boom! He shot one and then I shot another one. “Hey, you’re on the board,” I said. A while later, about seventy-five teals made three passes over us. I was going to let them light so Reed could get a good shot. About half of them lit and the other half came right toward us. “Cut ’em,” I said. I raised my gun and shot two of them. I heard Reed fire three times but didn’t see anything on the water. “I think I got three of them that time,” he said. “Son, don’t be making up stories,” I told him. I was looking right where he shot and didn’t see anything. But then I looked to the right and realized he’d actually shot four. He hit three on one side and a stray pellet hit one in the back. “Son, you have arrived,” I said. We wound up killing our limit that day, when I didn’t expect us to see any ducks at all. Phil and everybody else made a big deal about it because we hadn’t seen many ducks in days. It was the most ducks we’d ever shot out of that blind, and we’ve never mauled them like that again there. Because I shared the experience with my son, it was one of my most special and memorable hunts. I learned a valuable lesson that day: you never know when the ducks are going to show up. That is why I go every day the season is open.
Jase Robertson (Good Call: Reflections on Faith, Family, and Fowl)
Dear KDP Author, Just ahead of World War II, there was a radical invention that shook the foundations of book publishing. It was the paperback book. This was a time when movie tickets cost 10 or 20 cents, and books cost $2.50. The new paperback cost 25 cents – it was ten times cheaper. Readers loved the paperback and millions of copies were sold in just the first year. With it being so inexpensive and with so many more people able to afford to buy and read books, you would think the literary establishment of the day would have celebrated the invention of the paperback, yes? Nope. Instead, they dug in and circled the wagons. They believed low cost paperbacks would destroy literary culture and harm the industry (not to mention their own bank accounts). Many bookstores refused to stock them, and the early paperback publishers had to use unconventional methods of distribution – places like newsstands and drugstores. The famous author George Orwell came out publicly and said about the new paperback format, if “publishers had any sense, they would combine against them and suppress them.” Yes, George Orwell was suggesting collusion. Well… history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Fast forward to today, and it’s the e-book’s turn to be opposed by the literary establishment. Amazon and Hachette – a big US publisher and part of a $10 billion media conglomerate – are in the middle of a business dispute about e-books. We want lower e-book prices. Hachette does not. Many e-books are being released at $14.99 and even $19.99. That is unjustifiably high for an e-book. With an e-book, there’s no printing, no over-printing, no need to forecast, no returns, no lost sales due to out of stock, no warehousing costs, no transportation costs, and there is no secondary market – e-books cannot be resold as used books. E-books can and should be less expensive. Perhaps channeling Orwell’s decades old suggestion, Hachette has already been caught illegally colluding with its competitors to raise e-book prices. So far those parties have paid $166 million in penalties and restitution. Colluding with its competitors to raise prices wasn’t only illegal, it was also highly disrespectful to Hachette’s readers. The fact is many established incumbents in the industry have taken the position that lower e-book prices will “devalue books” and hurt “Arts and Letters.” They’re wrong. Just as paperbacks did not destroy book culture despite being ten times cheaper, neither will e-books. On the contrary, paperbacks ended up rejuvenating the book industry and making it stronger. The same will happen with e-books. Many inside the echo-chamber of the industry often draw the box too small. They think books only compete against books. But in reality, books compete against mobile games, television, movies, Facebook, blogs, free news sites and more. If we want a healthy reading culture, we have to work hard to be sure books actually are competitive against these other media types, and a big part of that is working hard to make books less expensive. Moreover, e-books are highly price elastic. This means that when the price goes down, customers buy much more. We've quantified the price elasticity of e-books from repeated measurements across many titles. For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99. So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000. The important thing to note here is that the lower price is good for all parties involved: the customer is paying 33% less and the author is getting a royalty check 16% larger and being read by an audience that’s 74% larger. The pie is simply bigger.
Amazon Kdp
Anna Chapman was born Anna Vasil’yevna Kushchyenko, in Volgograd, formally Stalingrad, Russia, an important Russian industrial city. During the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II, the city became famous for its resistance against the German Army. As a matter of personal history, I had an uncle, by marriage that was killed in this battle. Many historians consider the battle of Stalingrad the largest and bloodiest battle in the history of warfare. Anna earned her master's degree in economics in Moscow. Her father at the time was employed by the Soviet embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, where he allegedly was a senior KGB agent. After her marriage to Alex Chapman, Anna became a British subject and held a British passport. For a time Alex and Anna lived in London where among other places, she worked for Barclays Bank. In 2009 Anna Chapman left her husband and London, and moved to New York City, living at 20 Exchange Place, in the Wall Street area of downtown Manhattan. In 2009, after a slow start, she enlarged her real-estate business, having as many as 50 employees. Chapman, using her real name worked in the Russian “Illegals Program,” a group of sleeper agents, when an undercover FBI agent, in a New York coffee shop, offered to get her a fake passport, which she accepted. On her father’s advice she handed the passport over to the NYPD, however it still led to her arrest. Ten Russian agents including Anna Chapman were arrested, after having been observed for years, on charges which included money laundering and suspicion of spying for Russia. This led to the largest prisoner swap between the United States and Russia since 1986. On July 8, 2010 the swap was completed at the Vienna International Airport. Five days later the British Home Office revoked Anna’s citizenship preventing her return to England. In December of 2010 Anna Chapman reappeared when she was appointed to the public council of the Young Guard of United Russia, where she was involved in the education of young people. The following month Chapman began hosting a weekly TV show in Russia called Secrets of the World and in June of 2011 she was appointed as editor of Venture Business News magazine. In 2012, the FBI released information that Anna Chapman attempted to snare a senior member of President Barack Obama's cabinet, in what was termed a “Honey Trap.” After the 2008 financial meltdown, sources suggest that Anna may have targeted the dapper Peter Orzag, who was divorced in 2006 and served as Special Assistant to the President, for Economic Policy. Between 2007 and 2010 he was involved in the drafting of the federal budget for the Obama Administration and may have been an appealing target to the FSB, the Russian Intelligence Agency. During Orzag’s time as a federal employee, he frequently came to New York City, where associating with Anna could have been a natural fit, considering her financial and economics background. Coincidently, Orzag resigned from his federal position the same month that Chapman was arrested. Following this, Orzag took a job at Citigroup as Vice President of Global Banking. In 2009, he fathered a child with his former girlfriend, Claire Milonas, the daughter of Greek shipping executive, Spiros Milonas, chairman and President of Ionian Management Inc. In September of 2010, Orzag married Bianna Golodryga, the popular news and finance anchor at Yahoo and a contributor to MSNBC's Morning Joe. She also had co-anchored the weekend edition of ABC's Good Morning America. Not surprisingly Bianna was born in in Moldova, Soviet Union, and in 1980, her family moved to Houston, Texas. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, with a degree in Russian/East European & Eurasian studies and has a minor in economics. They have two children. Yes, she is fluent in Russian! Presently Orszag is a banker and economist, and a Vice Chairman of investment banking and Managing Director at Lazard.
Hank Bracker
The process of receiving teaching depends upon the student giving something in return; some kind of psychological surrender is necessary, a gift of some sort. This is why we must discuss surrendering, opening, giving up expectations, before we can speak of the relationship between teacher and student. It is essential to surrender, to open yourself, to present whatever you are to the guru, rather than trying to present yourself as a worthwhile student. It does not matter how much you are willing to pay, how correctly you behave, how clever you are at saying the right thing to your teacher. It is not like having an interview for a job or buying a new car. Whether or not you will get the job depends upon your credentials, how well you are dressed, how beautifully your shoes are polished, how well you speak, how good your manners are. If you are buying a car, it is a matter of how much money you have and how good your credit is. But when it comes to spirituality, something more is required. It is not a matter of applying for a job, of dressing up to impress our potential employer. Such deception does not apply to an interview with a guru, because he sees right through us. He is amused if we dress up especially for the interview. Making ingratiating gestures is not applicable in this situation; in fact it is futile. We must make a real commitment to being open with our teacher; we must be willing to give up all our preconceptions. Milarepa expected Marpa to be a great scholar and a saintly person, dressed in yogic costume with beads, reciting mantras, meditating. Instead he found Marpa working on his farm, directing the laborers and plowing his land. I am afraid the word guru is overused in the West. It would be better to speak of one’s “spiritual friend,” because the teachings emphasize a mutual meeting of two minds. It is a matter of mutual communication, rather than a master-servant relationship between a highly evolved being and a miserable, confused one. In the master-servant relationship the highly evolved being may appear not even to be sitting on his seat but may seem to be floating, levitating, looking down at us. His voice is penetrating, pervading space. Every word, every cough, every movement that he makes is a gesture of wisdom. But this is a dream. A guru should be a spiritual friend who communicates and presents his qualities to us, as Marpa did with Milarepa and Naropa with Marpa. Marpa presented his quality of being a farmer-yogi. He happened to have seven children and a wife, and he looked after his farm, cultivating the land and supporting himself and his family. But these activities were just an ordinary part of his life. He cared for his students as he cared for his crops and family. He was so thorough, paying attention to every detail of his life, that he was able to be a competent teacher as well as a competent father and farmer. There was no physical or spiritual materialism in Marpa’s lifestyle at all. He did not emphasize spirituality and ignore his family or his physical relationship to the earth. If you are not involved with materialism, either spiritually or physically, then there is no emphasis made on any extreme. Nor is it helpful to choose someone for your guru simply because he is famous, someone who is renowned for having published stacks of books and converted thousands or millions of people. Instead the guideline is whether or not you are able actually to communicate with the person, directly and thoroughly. How much self-deception are you involved in? If you really open yourself to your spiritual friend, then you are bound to work together. Are you able to talk to him thoroughly and properly? Does he know anything about you? Does he know anything about himself, for that matter? Is the guru really able to see through your masks, communicate with you properly, directly? In searching for a teacher, this seems to be the guideline rather than fame or wisdom.
Chögyam Trungpa (Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism)
More daring, though, was Jung’s uninhibited interest in spiritualism, which by this time had become a controversial topic on both sides of the Atlantic, ever since 1848, when the Fox sisters of Hydesville, New York, discovered they could communicate with the spirit of a dead man. Soon after this, mediums, table turning, floating tambourines, ectoplasmic limbs, and a variety of other otherworldly phenomena became the focus of an international craze; the flood of disincarnate appearances led one investigator to speak of an “invasion of the spirit people.”7 Colorful characters like the Russian medium and mystic Helena Petrovna Blavatsky were involved, but also scientists and philosophers like William James, Oliver Lodge, William Crookes, and Frederick Myers. It is difficult for us today to realize that at the time, many of the most famous men and women in the world were involved in spiritualism, to one degree or another. Thomas Edison, for example, who joined Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society, hoped to be able to record spirits on his “Spirit Phone.” Yet, for all this, the reductionist thought that dominates the academic world today was already securely in place, and Jung was risking his future career by openly advocating the unbiased study of the paranormal.
Gary Lachman (Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings)
The real work of planet-saving will be small, humble, and humbling, and (insofar as it involves love) pleasing and rewarding. Its jobs will be too many to count, too many to report, too many to be publicly noticed or rewarded, too small to make anyone rich or famous.
Wendell Berry
I guess Sakurai's father loved to talk. For a while, he talked my ear off about a lot of different things. He was a graduate of Tokyo University. He was involved in the student protest movement in the late sixties. He was a salaryman at a famous trading company. H really loved jazz. He called black people 'African Americans.' He called Indians 'Native Americans.' He hated Japan.
Kazuki Kaneshiro (Go)
John F. Kennedy famously said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” This is, of course, true. Quite tragically, Kennedy, who initiated the National Security Doctrine to violently prevent social change in Latin America and who led the United States’ deeper involvement into the effort to destroy Vietnam’s bid for independence, never heeded his own words. It is equally true, especially when talking about the Middle East, that those who make a secular, progressive revolution impossible will make a radical religious revolution inevitable. The United States and its partner Great Britain have made secular revolutions in the Middle East, and Iran in particular, impossible for many decades.
Dan Kovalik (The Plot to Attack Iran: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Iran)
A second famous person became involved with the Manson Family around the spring of 1968. Two of the Manson girls, Patricia and Ella Jo, were hitch-hiking on the Pacific Coast Highway when Beach Boy Dennis Wilson picked them up and invited them to his house. The girls complied, and after spending an afternoon with Dennis, they returned to Manson and told him about their famous new friend. Over subsequent days, Manson managed to worm his way into Dennis’ life, taking advantage of his extreme generosity to move his family into Dennis’ house. Manson also hoped that Dennis would be able to help him boost his music career, a dream Manson had never let go. But any opportunities Dennis threw Manson’s way, he squandered. It became clear to anyone with musical training that Manson could only play a few chords on his guitar and none of his songs were good enough to record. After a few months, Dennis was desperate to part ways with Manson and even moved out of his own home, leaving his landlord to deal with evicting the Manson Family.
Hourly History (Charles Manson: A Life From Beginning to End (Biographies of Criminals))
In his memoirs of the late 1940s and 50s, published after his death following the famous ‘umbrella assassination’ in London in 1978, the Bulgarian dissident writer Georgi Markov told a story that is emblematic of the postwar period – not only in his own country, but in Europe as a whole. It involved a conversation between one of his friends, who had been arrested for challenging a Communist official who had jumped the bread queue, and an officer of the Bulgarian Communist militia: ‘And now tell me who your enemies are?’ the militia chief demanded. K. thought for a while and replied: ‘I don’t really know, I don’t think I have any enemies.’ ‘No enemies!’ The chief raised his voice. ‘Do you mean to say that you hate nobody and nobody hates you?’ ‘As far as I know, nobody.’ ‘You are lying,’ shouted the Lieutenant-Colonel suddenly, rising from his chair. ‘What kind of a man are you not to have any enemies? You clearly do not belong to our youth, you cannot be one of our citizens, if you have no enemies! … And if you really do not know how to hate, we shall teach you! We shall teach you very quickly!’1 In a sense, the militia chief in this story is right – it was virtually impossible to emerge from the Second World War without enemies. There can hardly be a better demonstration than this of the moral and human legacy of the war. After the desolation of entire regions; after the butchery of over 35 million people; after countless massacres in the name of nationality, race, religion, class or personal prejudice, virtually every person on the continent had suffered some kind of loss or injustice. Even countries which had seen little direct fighting, such as Bulgaria, had been subject to political turmoil, violent squabbles with their neighbours, coercion from the Nazis and eventually invasion by one of the world’s new superpowers. Amidst all these events, to hate one’s rivals had become entirely natural. Indeed, the leaders and propagandists of all sides had spent six long years promoting hatred as an essential weapon in the quest for victory. By the time this Bulgarian militia chief was terrorizing young students at Sofia University, hatred was no longer a mere by-product of the war – in the Communist mindset it had been elevated to a duty.
Keith Lowe (Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II)
That, in a nutshell, is the meaning of ‘precession of the equinoxes’. And that is exactly what is involved in the notion of the ‘dawning of the Age of Aquarius’. The famous line from the musical Hair refers to the fact that every year, for the last 2000 years or so, the sun has risen in Pisces on the vernal equinox. The age of Pisces, however, is now approaching its end and the vernal sun will soon pass out of the sector of the Fish and begin to rise against the new background of Aquarius.
Graham Hancock (Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth's Lost Civilization)
The Historical Setting of Genesis Mesopotamia: Sumer Through Old Babylonia Sumerians. It is not possible at this time to put Ge 1–11 into a specific place in the historical record. Our history of the ancient Near East begins in earnest after writing has been invented, and the earliest civilization known to us in the historical record is that of the Sumerians. This culture dominated southern Mesopotamia for over 500 years during the first half of the third millennium BC (2900–2350 BC), known as the Early Dynastic Period. The Sumerians have become known through the excavation of several of their principal cities, which include Eridu, Uruk and Ur. The Sumerians are credited with many of the important developments in civilization, including the foundations of mathematics, astronomy, law and medicine. Urbanization is also first witnessed among the Sumerians. By the time of Abraham, the Sumerians no longer dominate the ancient Near East politically, but their culture continues to influence the region. Other cultures replace them in the political arena but benefit from the advances they made. Dynasty of Akkad. In the middle of the twenty-fourth century BC, the Sumerian culture was overrun by the formation of an empire under the kingship of Sargon I, who established his capital at Akkad. He ruled all of southern Mesopotamia and ranged eastward into Elam and northwest to the Mediterranean on campaigns of a military and economic nature. The empire lasted for almost 150 years before being apparently overthrown by the Gutians (a barbaric people from the Zagros Mountains east of the Tigris), though other factors, including internal dissent, may have contributed to the downfall. Ur III. Of the next century little is known as more than 20 Gutian kings succeeded one another. Just before 2100 BC, the city of Ur took control of southern Mesopotamia under the kingship of Ur-Nammu, and for the next century there was a Sumerian renaissance in what has been called the Ur III period. It is difficult to ascertain the limits of territorial control of the Ur III kings, though the territory does not seem to have been as extensive as that of the dynasty of Akkad. Under Ur-Nammu’s son Shulgi, the region enjoyed almost a half century of peace. Decline and fall came late in the twenty-first century BC through the infiltration of the Amorites and the increased aggression of the Elamites to the east. The Elamites finally overthrew the city. It is against this backdrop of history that the OT patriarchs emerge. Some have pictured Abraham as leaving the sophisticated Ur that was the center of the powerful Ur III period to settle in the unknown wilderness of Canaan, but that involves both chronological and geographic speculation. By the highest chronology (i.e., the earliest dates attributed to him), Abraham probably would have traveled from Ur to Harran during the reign of Ur-Nammu, but many scholars are inclined to place Abraham in the later Isin-Larsa period or even the Old Babylonian period. From a geographic standpoint it is difficult to be sure that the Ur mentioned in the Bible is the famous city in southern Mesopotamia (see note on 11:28). All this makes it impossible to give a precise background of Abraham. The Ur III period ended in southern Mesopotamia as the last king of Ur, Ibbi-Sin, lost the support of one city after another and was finally overthrown by the Elamites, who lived just east of the Tigris. In the ensuing two centuries (c. 2000–1800 BC), power was again returned to city-states that controlled more local areas. Isin, Larsa, Eshnunna, Lagash, Mari, Assur and Babylon all served as major political centers.
Anonymous (NIV, Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible: Bringing to Life the Ancient World of Scripture)
The famous Dutch tulip bubble largely involved the frenzied trading of options to buy or sell the bulbs—a precursor to modern-day stock options—rather than transactions involving the actual flowers.
David Enrich (The Spider Network: How a Math Genius and a Gang of Scheming Bankers Pulled Off One of the Greatest Scams in History)
The relationship among faith, knowledge, and belief is suggested by a story involving the famous depth psychologist Carl Jung. In the last year of his life, he was interviewed for a BBC television documentary. The interviewer asked him, "Dr. Jung, do you believe in God?" Jung said, "Believe? I do not believe in God - I know." The point: the more one knows God, the less faith as belief is involved. But faith as belief still has a role: it can provide a basis for responding even when one does not know for sure, and it can also get one through periods of time in which firsthand experiences of God are lacking.
Marcus J. Borg (The God We Never Knew: Beyond Dogmatic Religion to a More Authentic Contemporary Faith)
As with Lawrence, these other competitors in the field tended to be young, wholly untrained for the missions they were given, and largely unsupervised. And just as with their more famous British counterpart, to capitalize on their extraordinary freedom of action, these men drew upon a very particular set of personality traits—cleverness, bravery, a talent for treachery—to both forge their own destiny and alter the course of history. Among them was a fallen American aristocrat in his twenties who, as the only American field intelligence officer in the Middle East during World War I, would strongly influence his nation’s postwar policy in the region, even as he remained on the payroll of Standard Oil of New York. There was the young German scholar who, donning the camouflage of Arab robes, would seek to foment an Islamic jihad against the Western colonial powers, and who would carry his “war by revolution” ideas into the Nazi era. Along with them was a Jewish scientist who, under the cover of working for the Ottoman government, would establish an elaborate anti-Ottoman spy ring and play a crucial role in creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine. If little remembered today, these men shared something else with their British counterpart. Like Lawrence, they were not the senior generals who charted battlefield campaigns in the Middle East, nor the elder statesmen who drew lines on maps in the war’s aftermath. Instead, their roles were perhaps even more profound: it was they who created the conditions on the ground that brought those campaigns to fruition, who made those postwar policies and boundaries possible. History is always a collaborative effort, and in the case of World War I an effort that involved literally millions of players, but to a surprising degree, the subterranean and complex game these four men played, their hidden loyalties and personal duels, helped create the modern Middle East and, by inevitable extension, the world we live in today.
Scott Anderson (Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East)
Though too young to be involved in the testing, it was Gary’s youngest daughter Cindy, who when hearing all of the prototype names for the then unnamed Fantasy Game, famously said “Oh, Daddy, I like Dungeons and Dragons best!”6 Gary
Michael Witwer (Empire of Imagination: Gary Gygax and the Birth of Dungeons & Dragons)
The scientific method is famous for requiring objectivity and emotional detachment on the part of the investigator. Scientific experimentation also involves extensive manipulation of conditions. When dealing with nature, this is fine, but with people it becomes problematic. “Being objective” can easily be taken to mean “treating people as objects,” emotional detachment can translate into indifference to human suffering, and manipulation can take the form of dominance and control.
Joseph Heath (Enlightenment 2.0)
Capone once famously said, “All I do is to supply a public demand…somebody had to throw some liquor on that thirst. Why not me?”  He brilliantly coordinated the importation of liquor from all across America while in charge of the operation of hundreds of distilleries. To do so, he had his own distribution system, which involved hiring delivery drivers, salespeople, and of course, armed bodyguards—his own “miniature army” riding beside his bullet-proof limousine—to protect his investments. Capone ingeniously bought immunity by paying off politicians, law enforcement agents, and even the Mayor of Chicago, William H. Thompson, whom he helped with thousands of dollars and votes enough to win the seat.
Charles River Editors (The Prohibition Era in the United States: The History and Legacy of America’s Ban on Alcohol and Its Repeal)
On March 23, 1919, one of the most famous socialists in Italy founded a new party, the Fasci di Combattimento, a term that means “fascist combat squad.” This was the first official fascist party and thus its founding represents the true birth of fascism. By the same token, this man was the first fascist. The term “fascism” can be traced back to 1914, when he founded the Fasci Rivoluzionari d’Azione Internazionalista, a political movement whose members called themselves fascisti or fascists. In 1914, this founding father of fascism was, together with Vladimir Lenin of Russia, Rosa Luxemburg of Germany, and Antonio Gramsci of Italy, one of the best known Marxists in the world. His fellow Marxists and socialists recognized him as a great leader of socialism. His decision to become a fascist was controversial, yet he received congratulations from Lenin who continued to regard him as a faithful revolutionary socialist. And this is how he saw himself. That same year, because of his support for Italian involvement in World War I, he would be expelled from the Italian Socialist Party for “heresy,” but this does not mean he ceased to be a socialist. It was common practice for socialist parties to expel dissenting fellow socialists for breaking on some fine point with the party line. This party reject insisted that he had been kicked out for making “a revision of socialism from the revolutionary point of view.”2 For the rest of his life—right until his lifeless body was displayed in a town square in Milan—he upheld the central tenets of socialism which he saw as best reflected in fascism. Who, then, was this man? He was the future leader of fascist Italy, the one whom Italians called Il Duce, Benito Mussolini.
Dinesh D'Souza (The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left)
Remember our story. You’re going to visit a cousin who has just started to farm in North Carolina. You’re taking gifts.” “Even though we’re bankrupt.” “Virginians are famous for being generous when they can’t afford it.” Lizzie nodded. “I’ll make sure Colonel Thumson and Suzy Delahaye hear of my plans.” “Tell them that your mother-in-law disapproves and she may try to make trouble for you.” “Good idea. The sheriff won’t want to get involved in a family quarrel.” She paused. The look on her
Ken Follett (A Place Called Freedom)
Experiments published in 1983 clearly showed that subjects could choose not to perform a movement that was on the cusp of occurring (that is, that their brain was preparing to make) and that was preceded by a large readiness potential. In this view, although the physical sensation of an urge to move is initiated unconsciously, will can still control the outcome by vetoing the action. Later researchers, in fact, reported readiness potentials that precede a planned foot movement not by mere milliseconds but by almost two full seconds, leaving free won’t an even larger window of opportunity. “Conscious will could thus affect the outcome of the volitional process even though the latter was initiated by unconscious cerebral processes,” Libet says. “Conscious will might block or veto the process, so that no act occurs.” Everyone, Libet continues, has had the experience of “vetoing a spontaneous urge to perform some act. This often occurs when the urge to act involves some socially unacceptable consequence, like an urge to shout some obscenity at the professor.” Volunteers report something quite consistent with this view of the will as wielding veto power. Sometimes, they told Libet, a conscious urge to move seemed to bubble up from somewhere, but they suppressed it. Although the possibility of moving gets under way some 350 milliseconds before the subject experiences the will to move, that sense of will nevertheless kicks in 150 to 200 milliseconds before the muscle moves—and with it the power to call a halt to the proceedings. Libet’s findings suggest that free will operates not to initiate a voluntary act but to allow or suppress it. “We may view the unconscious initiatives for voluntary actions as ‘bubbling up’ in the brain,” he explains. “The conscious will then selects which of these initiatives may go forward to an action or which ones to veto and abort…. This kind of role for free will is actually in accord with religious and ethical strictures. These commonly advocate that you ‘control yourself.’ Most of the Ten Commandments are ‘do not’ orders.” And all five of the basic moral precepts of Buddhism are restraints: refraining from killing, from lying, from stealing, from sexual misconduct, from intoxicants. In the Buddha’s famous dictum, “Restraint everywhere is excellent.
Jeffrey M. Schwartz (The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force)
Head of a Young Woman This portrait was completed by 1667 and is now housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Because of its almost identical size and its proximity in tone and composition, it is often considered to be either a variant or counterpart to the famous Girl with a Pearl Earring. The subjects of both paintings wear pearl earrings, have scarves draped over their shoulders, and are shown in front of a plain black background. In addition, it is likely that the creation of both works involved the use of a camera obscura.
Johannes Vermeer (Masters of Art: Johannes Vermeer)
At its core, town government is the closest government to the people and, accordingly, you truly get a flavor for the residents of the town by watching their best-and-brightest elected leaders reviewing rezoning applications peacefully during one meeting and cussing one another out at the next. Oftentimes, members conduct themselves just as professionally mundane as in any other form of government, but when they do flare up, it’s the sort of rocket launch that occasionally gets the cops and/or the courts involved, as I covered multiple times in Haymarket. (My favorite, of course, involved a town council member being found guilty of “using abusive language” following a dispute about what synonym for testicle he told the mayor to suck during a parade.) After all, nothing exemplifies former U.S. House Speaker Tip O’Neill’s famous observation that “All politics is local” like town government, especially with the more modern take that “All politics is personal.
Danica Roem (Burn the Page: A True Story of Torching Doubts, Blazing Trails, and Igniting Change)
Lenin had created the conditions for the rise of Stalin, but like Dr Frankenstein the monster outgrew him. He suffered a cerebral haemorrhage on 24 May 1922 and from this time forward his involvement in political affairs was sporadic. Too late he realised, on 25 December 1922, that Stalin represented a real threat to the stability of the Party. He penned a postscript to his famous “Testament”. This called for the removal of Stalin as General Secretary but significantly not from the Politburo. Despite Lenin’s request, the “Testament” was only discussed in the Central Committee, and Stalin’s offer to resign as General Secretary was rejected by Zinoviev and Kamenev. They had now formed a triumvirate with him, and during Lenin’s illness Zinoviev had assumed nominal leadership of the Party. Fearing that any demotion of Stalin would lead to the elevation of Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev not only supported him, but hushed up the letters of Lenin.
Jock Dominie (Russia: Revolution and Counter-Revolution, 1905-1924. A View from the Communist Left)
That famous verse (10.45), drawing together Isaiah 53 and Daniel 7, is not, as so often imagined, a detached statement of atonement-theology, but rather the clinching point in this devastatingly counter-imperial statement about power. That does not mean that it is not about (what we have come to call) ‘atonement’. Rather, it is an invitation to understand atonement itself – God’s dealing on the cross with the sin of the world – as involving God’s victory not so much over the world and its powers (as though God were simply another cheerful 1960s anarchist) but over the worldly ways of power, the ways in which the powers that were created in, through and for Jesus Christ have rebelled and now themselves need to be led, beaten and bedraggled, in his triumphal procession, in order eventually to be reconciled.
N.T. Wright (Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics (Collected Essays of N. T. Wright Book 1))
Children wisely know not to expect or ask for much help from these parents. While passive parents often enjoy their children, have fun with them, and make them feel special, the children sense that their parents aren’t really there for them in any essential way. In fact, these parents are famous for turning a blind eye to family situations that are harmful to their children, leaving their kids to fend for themselves.
Lindsay C. Gibson (Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents)
One final possibility should be mentioned from the perspective of military activity on the Utah ranch. Recent allegations have surfaced that the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) engaged in several deception and disinformation operations in the 1970s, the 1980s and (presumably) in the 1990s. Many of these operations involved the simulation of “UFOs,” the manufacture of bogus evidence indicative of “extraterrestrial visitation” designed to conceal classified military technology or simply to lead investigators astray. In 2005, retired AFOSI special agent Richard Doty broke his silence to publicly acknowledge being involved in several of these “alien visitation” operations, the most famous being the disinformation campaign to persuade Albuquerque physicist Paul Bennewitz that an alien base existed in Dulce, New Mexico. The operation is described in detail in Greg Bishop’s book Project Beta: The Story of Paul Bennewitz, National Security, and the Creation of a Modern UFO Myth.
Colm A. Kelleher (Hunt for the Skinwalker: Science Confronts the Unexplained at a Remote Ranch in Utah)
Still, it was hard not to be impressed by the names who would be involved. Present in the room that day were William Pedersen, co-founder of the high-rise titans Kohn Pedersen Fox; David Childs, partner at the juggernaut Skidmore Owings and Merrill, who had designed Time Warner Center; Elizabeth Diller, from the “cerebral boutique” Diller Scofidio + Renfro, whose visions had informed the High Line; David Rockwell, a “virtuoso of showbiz and restaurant design”; Howard Elkus, from the high-end shopping-center specialists Elkus Manfredi; and landscape architect Thomas Woltz.
Adam Piore (The New Kings of New York: Renegades, Moguls, Gamblers and the Remaking of the World’s Most Famous Skyline)
Working at this elevated level of professional engagement entails managing lofty expectations and hypercritical judgments. The power dynamics involved with elite clientele are intense and draining, and the risk of being rejected by this group as an outsider, not worthy of entry into the inner sanctity of their power, is great. In spite of these challenges and potential obstacles, I’m drawn to the challenge of working with any population that is underserved and in desperate need of culturally competent and excellent clinical care. Doing so with success, however, demands I center myself in an artful calibration of confidence and humility.
Paul L. Hokemeyer (Fragile Power: Why Having Everything Is Never Enough; Lessons from Treating the Wealthy and Famous)
Take for instance a phenomenon called frustrated spontaneous emission. It sounds like an embarrassing sexual complaint that psychotherapy might help with. In fact, it involves the decay of radioactive particles, which ordinarily takes place at a predictably random rate. The exception, however, is when radioactive material is placed in an environment that cannot absorb the photons that are emitted by decay. In that case, decay ceases—the atoms become “frustrated.” How do these atoms “know” to stop decaying until conditions are suitable? According to Wharton, the unpredictable decay of radioactive particles may be determined in part by whatever receives their emitted photons in the future.20 Decay may not really be random at all, in other words. Another quantum mystery that arguably becomes less mysterious in a retrocausal world is the quantum Zeno effect. Usually, the results of measurements are unpredictable—again according to the famous uncertainty believed to govern the quantum kingdom—but there is a loophole. Persistent, rapid probing of reality by repeating the same measurement over and over produces repetition of the same “answer” from the physical world, almost as if it is “stopping time” in some sense (hence the name of the effect, which refers to Zeno’s paradoxes like an arrow that must first get halfway to its target, and then halfway from there, and so on, and thus is never able to reach the target at all).21 If the measurement itself is somehow influencing a particle retrocausally, then repeating the same measurement in the same conditions may effectively be influencing the measured particles the same way in their past, thereby producing the consistent behavior. Retrocausation may also be at the basis of a long-known but, again, hitherto unsatisfyingly explained quirk of light’s behavior: Fermat’s principle of least time. Light always takes the fastest possible path to its destination, which means taking the shortest available path through different media like water or glass. It is the rule that accounts for the refraction of light through lenses, and the reason why an object underwater appears displaced from its true location.22 It is yet another example of a creature in the quantum bestiary that makes little sense unless photons somehow “know” where they are going in order to take the most efficient possible route to get there. If the photon’s angle of deflection when entering a refractive medium is somehow determined by its destination, Fermat’s principle would make much more sense. (We will return to Fermat’s principle later in this book; it plays an important role in Ted Chiang’s short story, “Story of Your Life,” the basis for the wonderful precognition movie Arrival.) And retrocausation could also offer new ways of looking at the double-slit experiment and its myriad variants.
Eric Wargo (Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious)
For the time being, however, his bent was literary and religious rather than balletic. He loved, and what seventh grader doesn’t, the abstracter foxtrots and more metaphysical twists of a Dostoevsky, a Gide, a Mailer. He longed for the experience of some vivider pain than the mere daily hollowness knotted into his tight young belly, and no weekly stomp-and-holler of group therapy with other jejune eleven-year-olds was going to get him his stripes in the major leagues of suffering, crime, and resurrection. Only a bona-fide crime would do that, and of all the crimes available murder certainly carried the most prestige, as no less an authority than Loretta Couplard was ready to attest, Loretta Couplard being not only the director and co-owner of the Lowen School but the author, as well, of two nationally televised scripts, both about famous murders of the 20th Century. They’d even done a unit in social studies on the topic: A History of Crime in Urban America. The first of Loretta’s murders was a comedy involving Pauline Campbell, R.N., of Ann Arbor, Michigan, circa 1951, whose skull had been smashed by three drunken teenagers. They had meant to knock her unconscious so they could screw her, which was 1951 in a nutshell. The eighteen-year-olds, Bill Morey and Max Pell, got life; Dave Royal (Loretta’s hero) was a year younger and got off with twenty-two years. Her second murder was tragic in tone and consequently inspired more respect, though not among the critics, unfortunately. Possibly because her heroine, also a Pauline (Pauline Wichura), though more interesting and complicated had also been more famous in her own day and ever since. Which made the competition, one best-selling novel and a serious film biography, considerably stiffen Miss Wichura had been a welfare worker in Atlanta, Georgia, very much into environment and the population problem, this being the immediate pre-Regents period when anyone and everyone was legitimately starting to fret. Pauline decided to do something, viz., reduce the population herself and in the fairest way possible. So whenever any of the families she visited produced one child above the three she’d fixed, rather generously, as the upward limit, she found some unobtrusive way of thinning that family back to the preferred maximal size. Between 1989 and 1993 Pauline’s journals (Random House, 1994) record twenty-six murders, plus an additional fourteen failed attempts. In addition she had the highest welfare department record in the U.S. for abortions and sterilizations among the families whom she advised. “Which proves, I think,” Little Mister Kissy Lips had explained one day after school to his friend Jack, “that a murder doesn’t have to be of someone famous to be a form of idealism.” But of course idealism was only half the story: the other half was curiosity. And beyond idealism and curiosity there was probably even another half, the basic childhood need to grow up and kill someone.
Thomas M. Disch (334)
You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous of which is, 'never get involved in a land war in Asia,' but only slightly less well-known is this: 'Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line!
William Goldman (The Princess Bride)
I don't know what it was, but he came back a different man and I thought, at last, I'd have what I always wanted. ... He treated me with love and affection. But it was too late. That's what happens to the soul-crushing kind of love when there's too much hurt involved.
Terri-Lynne DeFino (The Bar Harbor Retirement Home for Famous Writers (And Their Muses))
Chatter about them consumes every moment of the entire Collective. And Emma knows why: to distract the public and keep them occupied with meaningless, contrived nonsense while the real crimes happened right under their noses. Captain Orion, the Commander of the League, the nation's most famous and revered hero captured on live video kidnapping and experimenting on meta-humans—that damning evidence should be enough to change the public's mind, but the League easily spun the story, making Orion out to be a villain with her own evil plot. With Lowell Kingston in power—and determined to keep the League under his thumb, keep the country involved in overseas conflict and the public eye away from his corruption—the Collective is a far cry from the egalitarian, peaceful society that it claims to be, the herald of a new age rising from war and disaster.
C.B. Lee (Not Your Backup (Sidekick Squad, #3))
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Kenya Tour Package From Bangalore
At a minimum it must involve renouncing any desire or ambition to become wealthy or famous; fostering vertical solidarity between rich and poor as well as horizontal solidarity between consumers and producers; rendering effective assistance to marginalized groups in society such as the poor and immigrants; a shared commitment to traditional values, particularly with respect to sex and marriage, as well as a recognition of the importance of families and children; opposition to abortion; an emphasis on environmental stewardship and caring for creation; and a commitment to nonviolence.
Solidarity Hall (Radically Catholic In the Age of Francis: An Anthology of Visions for the Future)
President Cleveland vetoed over 500 bills. It's safe to assume that most were vetoed because they involved spending or involved the federal government in an activity not enumerated by the Constitution. His most famous veto involved both.
Mark David Ledbetter (America's Forgotten History, Part Three: A Progressive Empire)
Wilson had a compelling reason for having recommended Herlihy: He had been involved in some of the biggest takeover battles in corporate America. Earlier in the year he had helped advise JP Morgan Chase in its acquisition of Bear Stearns. His firm—Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz—was synonymous with corporate warfare. One of its founding partners, Martin Lipton, had devised among the most famous of antitakeover defenses, the “poison pill.” If Treasury was planning a government-led hostile takeover—the first in history—then Herlihy was certainly the lawyer they wanted.
Andrew Ross Sorkin (Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System from Crisis — and Themselves)
As with Nazism, the conspiracy theory needed Jews. The Iranian interior minister said that Zionists had ‘direct involvement’ in publishing the book. The Iranian president said that ‘Zionist-controlled news agencies’ had made Rushdie famous. In Syria, the Ba’athist dictatorship said that the novel was part of a plot to distract the world’s attention from Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. In Pakistan, religious leaders talked of an ‘American Jewish conspiracy’. Across the planet, the drums shuddered to the same beat: ‘It’s the Jews, it’s the Jews, it’s the Jews.’ The demonstrations against Rushdie were not confined to the poor world. The faithful marched in Bradford and London as well as Tehran and Lahore. They inspired a fear in the West that went almost unnoticed during the elation the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe produced.
Nick Cohen (You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom)
When World War One broke out in 1914, planes were initially used for intelligence gathering. The machines, which moved faster than any man made device had ever, flew at approximately 80 miles per hour. No plane in WWI flew faster than 145mph, and that was at the very end of the war.               Of course, neither side wanted the other to spy on its troop movements, so within a very short period of time, pilots were trying to bring each other down. Initially, the first dogfights, strange as it may seem, were fought with grappling hooks hanging below the plane, grenades, and ramming. This was both highly inefficient and highly dangerous (for everyone involved). The first plane-to-plane combat was on the Eastern Front where a Russian pilot, who probably meant to graze his enemy, crashed his plane into an Austro-Hungarian machine. He and the two man crew of the Austrian plane were killed.               Soon, pilots began shooting at each other with pistols and the single shot rifles of the time. You can guess how effective this was.
Ryan Jenkins (World War 2 Air Battles: The Famous Air Combats that Defined WWII)
A famous case involved U2 guitarist “The Edge,” who purchased 156 acres of wild chaparral but wanted to build five mansions on it. Needless to say there was going to be a significant disruption of the fragile habitat, and his building plans were rejected. The executive director of the Coastal Commission called it “one of the three worst projects that I’ve seen in terms of environmental devastation.” Their refusal to rubber-stamp projects is proof that local government can indeed protect the habitats and species of ecologically fragile areas.
Greg Graffin (Population Wars: A New Perspective on Competition and Coexistence)
Barbie's new face, fashioned by doll sculptor Joyce Clark, was the face of disco. The doll appears in the 1977 catalogue against a black background, as if on the edge of a cavernous dance floor. Light glints off her glossy magenta boa, her burnished gold hair, her luminous diamondlike ring. Gone is the haughty smirk of her early years. Seemingly stupefied by the disco beat, SuperStar Barbie's mouth is set in a broad smile. The revamped Barbie changed the relationship between the doll and the little girl who owned it. Barbie could still function as an object onto which the child projected her future self; but because the doll had the trappings of celebrity, the girl's imagined future had to involve being rich and famous.
M.G. Lord (Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll)
Whether we admit to it or not, all of us savor scandals involving paramours. At the back of it could be our innate desire to be the lover of every desirable dame that is born. In order to savor the details, we convert these private affairs into public scandals. If the involved were to be rich and famous, then we have them in the tabloids. It’s as if we try to supplant the woman’s lover in our dreams.
B.S. Murthy