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Cuinchy bred rats. They came up from the canal, fed on the plentiful corpses, and multiplied exceedingly. While I stayed here with the Welsh, a new officer joined the company... When he turned in that night, he heard a scuffling, shone his torch on the bed, and found two rats on his blanket tussling for the possession of a severed hand.
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Robert Graves (Goodbye to All That)
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Stanley Hauerwas explains his love for praying “other people’s prayers”: “Evangelicalism,” he says, “is constantly under the burden of re-inventing the wheel and you just get tired.” He calls himself an advocate for practicing prayer offices because, We don’t have to make it up. We know we’re going to say these prayers. We know we’re going to join in reading of the psalm. We’re going to have these Scripture readings. . . . There’s much to be said for Christianity as repetition and I think evangelicalism doesn’t have enough repetition in a way that will form Christians to survive in a world that constantly tempts us to always think we have to do something new.
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Tish Harrison Warren (Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep)
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corruption is defined in narrow terms to nail the poor deluded fool who slips a £20 note inside the cover of their passport before handing it to the Border Force officer who is checking travel documents with a CCTV camera looking over her shoulder. There’s nothing corrupt about the government minister who announces new and impossible performance targets for a hitherto just-about-coping agency that manages transport infrastructure, drives it into a smoking hole in the ground, and three years later retires and joins the board of the corporation that subsequently took over responsibility for maintaining all the bridges on behalf of the state—for a tidy annual fee, of course. After all, the minister is a demonstrable expert on the ownership and management of bridges, and there’s no provable link between their having set up the agency for failure and their subsequently being granted a nonexecutive directorship that gets them their share of the rental income from the privatized bridge, is there?
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Charles Stross (The Delirium Brief (Laundry Files, #8))
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He privately remarked that Boothby ‘should join a bomb disposal squad as the best way of rehabilitating himself in the eyes of his fellow men. After all, the bombs might not go off.’133 It sounded cruel, but that is much what he himself had done in 1915, when the six-week average life-expectancy for new officers on the Western Front was not dissimilar to that of bomb-disposal squads in the Second World War.
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Andrew Roberts (Churchill: Walking with Destiny)
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There was a great effort to make sure we had the same number of people they had, the same number of lines," says Shirrel Rhoades, who joined Marvel in 1996 as publisher. "I took the page to [president] David Schreff, and I said, 'Here we have Paul Levitz on DC's side. What title should I have?' Basically Schreff said, 'You can have whatever title Levitz has.'"
So Rhoades walked out of the office a new executive vice president.
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Reed Tucker (Slugfest: Inside the Epic, 50-year Battle between Marvel and DC)
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McGuire and Raleigh also studied 48 students in a university fraternity, including officers and regular members. They discovered that the officers’ serotonin levels were 25 percent higher than those of the regular members. In an amusing small-sample test, the researchers then analyzed their own serotonin levels and found that McGuire (the lab director) had 50 percent more serotonin than Raleigh (the research assistant). In sum, the neurotransmitter serotonin joins T as one of the brain chemicals responsible for mediating one’s position in the status hierarchy.
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David M. Buss (Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind)
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The fears of militarization Holbrooke had expressed in his final, desperate memos, had come to pass on a scale he could have never anticipated. President Trump had concentrated ever more power in the Pentagon, granting it nearly unilateral authority in areas of policy once orchestrated across multiple agencies, including the State Department. In Iraq and Syria, the White House quietly delegated more decisions on troop deployments to the military. In Yemen and Somalia, field commanders were given authority to launch raids without White House approval. In Afghanistan, Trump granted the secretary of defense, General James Mattis, sweeping authority to set troop levels. In public statements, the White House downplayed the move, saying the Pentagon still had to adhere to the broad strokes of policies set by the White House. But in practice, the fate of thousands of troops in a diplomatic tinderbox of a conflict had, for the first time in recent history, been placed solely in military hands. Diplomats were no longer losing the argument on Afghanistan: they weren’t in it. In early 2018, the military began publicly rolling out a new surge: in the following months, up to a thousand new troops would join the fourteen thousand already in place. Back home, the White House itself was crowded with military voices. A few months into the Trump administration, at least ten of twenty-five senior leadership positions on the president’s National Security Council were held by current or retired military officials. As the churn of firings and hirings continued, that number grew to include the White House chief of staff, a position given to former general John Kelly. At the same time, the White House ended the practice of “detailing” State Department officers to the National Security Council. There would now be fewer diplomatic voices in the policy process, by design.
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Ronan Farrow (War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence)
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Rumania ceded large parts of its territory to Hungary, King Carol abdicated, real power was transferred to Antonescu and the Iron Guard was given free rein and organised one bloody pogrom after another. In June 1941, Rumania committed itself completely by joining Germany’s foray into the Soviet Union. In 1940, however, the country was still neutral, and in June all of Europe was sitting side by side in the lobby of the Athene Palace, as though nothing untoward was going on: the old Rumanian dignitaries, the leaders of the new radical right-wing government, the American journalists and diplomats, the despondent French ambassador. The ‘elegantly bored’ British – diplomats, oil men, journalists and intelligence officers – had their own table, the young Rumanian nobility sat at the bar,
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Geert Mak (In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century)
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Did those “new gays” spinning about like giddy tops in discos care to know that dancing with someone of the same sex was punishable as “lewd conduct” then? Still, a club in Topanga Canyon boasted a system of warning lights. When they flashed, lesbians and gay men shifted—what a grand adventure!—and danced with each other, laughing at the officers’ disappointed faces! How much pleasure—and camaraderie, yes, real kinship—had managed to exist in exile. Did those arrogant young people know that, only years ago, you could be sentenced to life in prison for consensual sex with another man? A friend of his destroyed by shock therapy decreed by the courts. Another friend sobbing on the telephone before he slashed his wrists— Thomas's hands on his steering wheel had clenched in anger, anger he had felt then, anger he felt now. And all those pressures attempted to deplete you, and disallow— “—the yearnings of the heart,” he said aloud. Yet he and others of his generation had lived through those barbaric times—and survived—those who had survived—with style. Faced with those same outrages, what would these “new gays” have done? “Exactly as we did,” he answered himself. The wind had resurged, sweeping sheaths of dust across the City, pitching tumbleweeds from the desert into the streets, where they shattered, splintering into fragments that joined others and swept away. Now, they said, everything was fine, no more battles to fight. Oh, really? What about arrests that continued, muggings, bashings, murder, and hatred still spewing from pulpits, political platforms, and nightly from the mouths of so-called comedians? Didn't the “new gays” know—care!—that entrenched “sodomy” laws still existed, dormant, ready to spring on them, send them to prison? How could they think they had escaped the tensions when those pressures were part of the legacy of being gay? Didn't they see that they remained—as his generation and generations before his had been—the most openly despised? And where, today, was the kinship of exile?
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John Rechy (The Coming of the Night (Rechy, John))
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Fire the Boss. “Big Al, when you join our business, here is what happens. Six months from now you walk into your boss’ office. You sit down in the chair, you put your feet up on his desk and you leave little scuff marks with your heels. “Then you put your hands behind your head and you calmly tell the boss that you can’t fit him into your schedule any longer. You’ve enjoyed working there, but if they have any problems after you leave, they can call you any Tuesday morning at 11:00 a.m. at your normal consulting rate. “Then you get up from the boss’ office, walk out to the main office desk, pick up your personal belongings, wave good-bye to all your fellow workers who said it couldn’t be done, hop into your brand-new bonus car, drive down to the drive-in teller window, deposit this month’s bonus check, and say to the bank teller: “‘Oh, I don’t know. Put this bonus check in savings or checking. It really doesn’t matter. I get these checks every month.’ “And then you drive home and relax, and have a nice glass of your favorite beverage.
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Tom Schreiter (How To Prospect, Sell and Build Your Network Marketing Business With Stories)
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What is a “pyramid?” I grew up in real estate my entire life. My father built one of the largest real estate brokerage companies on the East Coast in the 1970s, before selling it to Merrill Lynch. When my brother and I graduated from college, we both joined him in building a new real estate company. I went into sales and into opening a few offices, while my older brother went into management of the company. In sales, I was able to create a six-figure income. I worked 60+ hours a week in such pursuit. My brother worked hard too, but not in the same fashion. He focused on opening offices and recruiting others to become agents to sell houses for him. My brother never listed and sold a single house in his career, yet he out-earned me 10-to-1. He made millions because he earned a cut of every commission from all the houses his 1,000+ agents sold. He worked smarter, while I worked harder. I guess he was at the top of the “pyramid.” Is this legal? Should he be allowed to earn more than any of the agents who worked so hard selling homes? I imagine everyone will agree that being a real estate broker is totally legal. Those who are smart, willing to take the financial risk of overhead, and up for the challenge of recruiting good agents, are the ones who get to live a life benefitting from leveraged Income. So how is Network Marketing any different? I submit to you that I found it to be a step better. One day, a friend shared with me how he was earning the same income I was, but that he was doing so from home without the overhead, employees, insurance, stress, and being subject to market conditions. He was doing so in a network marketing business. At first I refuted him by denouncements that he was in a pyramid scheme. He asked me to explain why. I shared that he was earning money off the backs of others he recruited into his downline, not from his own efforts. He replied, “Do you mean like your family earns money off the backs of the real estate agents in your company?” I froze, and anyone who knows me knows how quick-witted I normally am. Then he said, “Who is working smarter, you or your dad and brother?” Now I was mad. Not at him, but at myself. That was my light bulb moment. I had been closed-minded and it was costing me. That was the birth of my enlightenment, and I began to enter and study this network marketing profession. Let me explain why I found it to be a step better. My research led me to learn why this business model made so much sense for a company that wanted a cost-effective way to bring a product to market. Instead of spending millions in traditional media ad buys, which has a declining effectiveness, companies are opting to employ the network marketing model. In doing so, the company only incurs marketing cost if and when a sale is made. They get an army of word-of-mouth salespeople using the most effective way of influencing buying decisions, who only get paid for performance. No salaries, only commissions. But what is also employed is a high sense of motivation, wherein these salespeople can be building a business of their own and not just be salespeople. If they choose to recruit others and teach them how to sell the product or service, they can earn override income just like the broker in a real estate company does. So now they see life through a different lens, as a business owner waking up each day excited about the future they are building for themselves. They are not salespeople; they are business owners.
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Brian Carruthers (Building an Empire:The Most Complete Blueprint to Building a Massive Network Marketing Business)
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Ultimately, more than eighty arms control specialists signed a letter defending the Iran deal as a “net plus for international nuclear nonproliferation efforts” and warning that “unilateral action by the United States, especially on the basis of unsupported contentions of Iranian cheating, would isolate the United States.” But that message didn’t penetrate the Trump administration, which continued to publicly excoriate Iran. The time of specialists playing a formative role in foreign policy, some career officials feared, may have passed too. Just days after assuming power, the new administration had, of course, fired its top in-house expert on nonproliferation. SO IT WAS THAT, on a cold Sunday in January 2017, Tom Countryman found himself clearing out his office at the State Department. It was the end of thirty-five years of service, but he was unsentimental. “There was so much to do,” he said with a shrug. “I’m not sure I pondered it.” On most Sundays, the Department was eerily empty. But on this one, Countryman wasn’t alone. Under Secretary Patrick Kennedy, after forty-four years in the Foreign Service, was cleaning out his desk as well. The two graying diplomats took a break from their boxes of paperwork and family photos to reminisce. Kennedy had been in the thick of the Iraq War as chief of staff for the Coalition Provisional Authority. Countryman had been in Egypt as that country joined the Gulf War. It was an improbably quiet end to a pair of high-stakes careers: memories and empty desks, as the State Department stood still.
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Ronan Farrow (War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence)
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Here’s the four point battle plan, which we’ll return to at the end of the book: Disregard the Doomsayers: The misguided belief that “it’s too late” to act has been co-opted by fossil fuel interests and those advocating for them. It’s just another way of legitimizing business-as-usual and a continued reliance on fossil fuels. We must reject the overt doom and gloom that we increasingly encounter in today’s climate discourse. A Child Shall Lead Them: The youngest generation is fighting tooth and nail to save their planet, and there is a moral authority and clarity in their message that none but the most jaded ears can fail to hear. They are the game-changers that climate advocates have been waiting for. We should model our actions after theirs and learn from their methods and their idealism. Educate, Educate, Educate: Most hard-core climate-change deniers are unmovable. They view climate change through the prism of right-wing ideology and are impervious to facts. Don’t waste your time and effort trying to convince them. But there are many honest, confused folks out there who are caught in the crossfire, victims of the climate-change disinformation campaign. We must help them out. Then they will be in a position to join us in battle. Changing the System Requires Systemic Change: The fossil fuel disinformation machine wants to make it about the car you choose to drive, the food you choose to eat, and the lifestyle you choose to live rather than about the larger system and incentives. We need policies that will incentivize the needed shift away from fossil fuel burning toward a clean, green global economy. So-called leaders who resist the call for action must be removed from office.
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Michael E. Mann (The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet)
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A woman stood up, beaming. “Yes, hello, my name is Edna Flattistein and I’m from China Lake? I just want to say, I love the show, and I especially loved what you said about being grateful for food, and I just wondered if you have a favorite grace you recite before each meal, to thank our Lord and Savior for the bounty! I’d love to hear it! Thank you!” Elizabeth shielded her eyes as if to get a better look at Edna. “Hello, Edna,” she said, “and thanks for your question. The answer is no; I don’t have a favorite grace. In fact, I don’t say grace at all.” Standing in the office, both Walter and Harriet paled. “Please,” Walter whispered. “Don’t say it.” “Because I’m an atheist,” Elizabeth said matter-of-factly. “Thar she blows,” Harriet said. “In other words, I don’t believe in God,” added Elizabeth as the audience gasped. “Wait. Is that rare?” Madeline piped up. “Is not believing in God one of those rare things?” “But I do believe in the people who made the food possible,” Elizabeth continued. “The farmers, the pickers, the truckers, the grocery store shelf stockers. But most of all, I believe in you, Edna. Because you made the meal that nourishes your family. Because of you, a new generation flourishes. Because of you, others live.” She paused, checking the clock, then turned directly to the camera. “That’s all we have time for today. I hope you’ll join me tomorrow as we explore the fascinating world of temperature and how it affects flavor.” Then she cocked her head slightly to the left, almost as if she were considering whether she’d gone too far or not far enough. “Children, set the table,” she said with extra resolution. “Your mother needs a moment to herself.” And within a few seconds, Walter’s phone began to ring and did not stop.
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Bonnie Garmus (Lessons in Chemistry)
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*SNEAK PEAK*
An Excerpt from Grace Prevailing, to be released TOMORROW!!! :)
“Agabus.” Mary smiled warmly as she reached him, her luminous gray eyes twinkling with welcome and a hint of mirth. “How brave of you to join us this evening.”
Agabus’ dark eyes met hers, flickering in annoyance. So much for his clever disguise!
“I must ask you to lower your voice, please,” the young Pharisee hissed under his breath, wondering how many of her guests had overheard the use of his name.
“You needn’t fear, Agabus,” Mary assured him, lowering her dulcet tone to placate him. “None of us wish to give you away.”
“One careless slip of the tongue could very well prove ruinous,” Agabus told her, his glittering eyes sweeping cautiously about the room. “Possibly even deadly.”
“Not nearly so deadly as rejecting the Way Christ has clearly revealed to you.”
“He hasn’t revealed anything to me,” Agabus argued, though his tone was far from convincing. “At least, not personally.”
“No?” Mary prompted, her slender brow lifting in question. “Then why are you here? And why do you persist in your questions?”
“This is not about me,” Agabus insisted, his voice rising in frustration. When several believers glanced his way, he shifted uncomfortably, pulling his hooded shawl to further obscure his bearded face. “I must speak with you,” he finally concluded, his gaze shifting anxiously about the crowded room. “Alone.”
“If you wish to speak, then we may speak here.”
“For heaven’s sake, Mary,” Agabus breathed, his frustration mounting.
“Go on,” Mary prodded, appearing perfectly composed.
Maddeningly aware of the chatter and movement surrounding them, Agabus took a step closer, so close Mary could smell his spice-scented breath. “I come bearing ill tidings.”
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” Mary responded, smiling faintly. “What kind of ill tidings?”
“It’s about Saul of Tarsus.”
“I see,” Mary nodded, her expression sobering beneath her pale blue head covering. “What has he done now?”
“It’s what he is about to do,” Agabus warned her, his obsidian eyes growing serious. “At this moment, he is attempting to obtain permission to target churches beyond Jerusalem.”
“Preposterous,” Mary declared, her eyes flashing. “He hasn’t the jurisdiction to do so.”
“The high priest is seriously considering granting his request,” Agabus told her grimly. “Your sect endangers the very office he holds.”
“On what grounds will Saul make his arrests?”
“By order of the high priest,” Agabus sighed. “I imagine Jewish men and women will be dragged from other provinces by order of the Great Sanhedrin.”
“Women, too?” Mary asked, surprised.
“I’m afraid no one is safe,” Agabus replied grimly. “Once within the grasp of the high priest and the Sanhedrin here in Jerusalem, I imagine far more serious political charges will be fabricated against the prisoners, resulting in life in prison—possibly even the death penalty.”
Releasing a steadying sigh, Mary brushed cool fingertips across her smooth forehead, deep in thought.
“This isn’t good, Mary,” Agabus warned her, daring yet another step closer. “Up to this point, your friends have been safe beyond our borders. But now… if Saul has his way, they cannot run. They cannot hide. In time, they will be hunted down and exterminated one by one. And their cause shall perish with them.”
“Never,” Mary said firmly, her eyes flashing. “The gospel will reach the ends of the earth, Agabus. Mark my words.”
“There’s just no way,” Agabus countered, shaking his covered head.
“God has already made a Way,” Mary told him, her eyes alight with conviction. “And His name is Jesus. Jesus is the Way.
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Rachael C. Duncan (Grace Prevailing: A Christian Historical Romance (The Crowning Crescendo Book 7))
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Though Hoover conceded that some might deem him a “fanatic,” he reacted with fury to any violations of the rules. In the spring of 1925, when White was still based in Houston, Hoover expressed outrage to him that several agents in the San Francisco field office were drinking liquor. He immediately fired these agents and ordered White—who, unlike his brother Doc and many of the other Cowboys, wasn’t much of a drinker—to inform all of his personnel that they would meet a similar fate if caught using intoxicants. He told White, “I believe that when a man becomes a part of the forces of this Bureau he must so conduct himself as to remove the slightest possibility of causing criticism or attack upon the Bureau.” The new policies, which were collected into a thick manual, the bible of Hoover’s bureau, went beyond codes of conduct. They dictated how agents gathered and processed information. In the past, agents had filed reports by phone or telegram, or by briefing a superior in person. As a result, critical information, including entire case files, was often lost. Before joining the Justice Department, Hoover had been a clerk at the Library of Congress—“ I’m sure he would be the Chief Librarian if he’d stayed with us,” a co-worker said—and Hoover had mastered how to classify reams of data using its Dewey decimal–like system. Hoover adopted a similar model, with its classifications and numbered subdivisions, to organize the bureau’s Central Files and General Indices. (Hoover’s “Personal File,” which included information that could be used to blackmail politicians, would be stored separately, in his secretary’s office.) Agents were now expected to standardize the way they filed their case reports, on single sheets of paper. This cut down not only on paperwork—another statistical measurement of efficiency—but also on the time it took for a prosecutor to assess whether a case should be pursued.
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David Grann (Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI)
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SCULLEY. Pepsi executive recruited by Jobs in 1983 to be Apple’s CEO, clashed with and ousted Jobs in 1985. JOANNE SCHIEBLE JANDALI SIMPSON. Wisconsin-born biological mother of Steve Jobs, whom she put up for adoption, and Mona Simpson, whom she raised. MONA SIMPSON. Biological full sister of Jobs; they discovered their relationship in 1986 and became close. She wrote novels loosely based on her mother Joanne (Anywhere but Here), Jobs and his daughter Lisa (A Regular Guy), and her father Abdulfattah Jandali (The Lost Father). ALVY RAY SMITH. A cofounder of Pixar who clashed with Jobs. BURRELL SMITH. Brilliant, troubled hardware designer on the original Mac team, afflicted with schizophrenia in the 1990s. AVADIS “AVIE” TEVANIAN. Worked with Jobs and Rubinstein at NeXT, became chief software engineer at Apple in 1997. JAMES VINCENT. A music-loving Brit, the younger partner with Lee Clow and Duncan Milner at the ad agency Apple hired. RON WAYNE. Met Jobs at Atari, became first partner with Jobs and Wozniak at fledgling Apple, but unwisely decided to forgo his equity stake. STEPHEN WOZNIAK. The star electronics geek at Homestead High; Jobs figured out how to package and market his amazing circuit boards and became his partner in founding Apple. DEL YOCAM. Early Apple employee who became the General Manager of the Apple II Group and later Apple’s Chief Operating Officer. INTRODUCTION How This Book Came to Be In the early summer of 2004, I got a phone call from Steve Jobs. He had been scattershot friendly to me over the years, with occasional bursts of intensity, especially when he was launching a new product that he wanted on the cover of Time or featured on CNN, places where I’d worked. But now that I was no longer at either of those places, I hadn’t heard from him much. We talked a bit about the Aspen Institute, which I had recently joined, and I invited him to speak at our summer campus in Colorado. He’d be happy to come, he said, but not to be onstage. He wanted instead to take a walk so that we could talk. That seemed a bit odd. I didn’t yet
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Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
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Lila who has connected, is connecting, our personal knowledge of poverty and abuse to the armed struggle against the fascists, against the owners, against capital. I admit it here, openly, for the first time: in those September days I suspected that not only Pasquale—Pasquale driven by his history toward the necessity of taking up arms—not only Nadia, but Lila herself had spilled that blood. For a long time, while I cooked, while I took care of my daughters, I saw her, with the other two, shoot Gino, shoot Filippo, shoot Bruno Soccavo. And if I had trouble imagining Pasquale and Nadia in every detail—I considered him a good boy, something of a braggart, capable of fierce fighting but of murder no; she seemed to me a respectable girl who could wound at most with verbal treachery—about Lila I had never had doubts: she would know how to devise the most effective plan, she would reduce the risks to a minimum, she would keep fear under control, she would be able to give murderous intentions an abstract purity, she knew how to remove human substance from bodies and blood, she would have no scruples and no remorse, she would kill and feel that she was in the right. So there she was, clear and bright, along with the shadow of Pasquale, of Nadia, of who knows what others. They drove through the piazza in a car and, slowing down in front of the pharmacy, fired at Gino, at his thug’s body in the white smock. Or they drove along the dusty road to the Soccavo factory, garbage of every type piled up on either side. Pasquale went through the gate, shot Filippo’s legs, the blood spread through the guard booth, screams, terrified eyes. Lila, who knew the way well, crossed the courtyard, entered the factory, climbed the stairs, burst into Bruno’s office, and, just as he said cheerfully: Hi, what in the world are you doing around here, fired three shots at his chest and one at his face. Ah yes, militant anti-fascism, new resistance, proletarian justice, and other formulas to which she, who instinctively knew how to avoid rehashing clichés, was surely able to give depth. I imagined that those actions were necessary in order to join, I don’t know, the Red Brigades, Prima Linea, Nuclei Armati Proletari. Lila would disappear from the neighborhood as Pasquale had. Maybe that’s why she had tried to leave Gennaro with me, apparently for a month, in reality intending to give him to me forever. We would never see each other again. Or she would be arrested, like the leaders
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Elena Ferrante (Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (The Neapolitan Novels, #3))
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[Description of the behind-the-scenes situation of the Beer Hall Putsch]
The crowd began to grow so sullen that Goering felt it necessary to step to the rostrum and quiet them. “There is nothing to fear,” he cried. “We have the friendliest intentions. For that matter, you’ve no cause to grumble, you’ve got your beer!” And he informed them that in the next room a new government was being formed.
It was, at the point of Adolf Hitler’s revolver. Once he had herded his prisoners into the adjoining room, Hitler told them, “No one leaves this room alive without my permission.” He then informed them they would all have key jobs either in the Bavarian government or in the Reich government which he was forming with Ludendorff. With Ludendorff? Earlier in the evening Hitler had dispatched “Scheubner-Richter to Lud-wigshoehe to fetch the renowned General, who knew nothing of the Nazi conspiracy, to the beerhouse at once.
The three prisoners at first refused even to speak to Hitler. He continued to harangue them. Each of them must join him in proclaiming the revolution and the new governments; each must take the post he, Hitler, assigned them, or “he has no right to exist.” Kahr was to be the Regent of Bavaria; Lossow, Minister of the National Army; Seisser, Minister of the Reich Police. None of the three was impressed at the prospect of such high office. They did not answer.
Their continued silence unnerved Hitler. Finally he waved his gun at them. “I have four shots in my pistol! Three for my collaborators, if they abandon me. The last bullet for myself!” Pointing the weapon to his forehead, he cried, “If I am not victorious by tomorrow afternoon, I shall be a dead man!”
(...) Not one of the three men who held the power of the Bavarian state in their hands agreed to join him, even at pistol point. The putsch wasn’t going according to plan. Then Hitler acted on a sudden impulse. Without a further word, he dashed back into the hall, mounted the tribune, faced the sullen crowd and announced that the members of the triumvirate in the next room had joined him in forming a new national government.
“The Bavarian Ministry,” he shouted, “is removed…. The government of the November criminals and the Reich President are declared to be removed. A new national government will be named this very day here in Munich.
Not for the first time and certainly not for the last, Hitler had told a masterful lie, and it worked. When the gathering heard that Kahr, General von Lossow and Police Chief von Seisser had joined Hitler its mood abruptly changed. There were loud cheers, and the sound of them impressed the three men still locked up in the little side room.
(...) He led the others back to the platform, where each made a brief speech and swore loyalty to each other and to the new regime. The crowd leaped on chairs and tables in a delirium of enthusiasm. Hitler beamed with joy.
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William L. Shirer (The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich)
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Many other inhabitants of the city were similarly afflicted. Every day, more and more people took to saving time, and the more they did so, the more they were copied by others - even by those who had no real desire to join in but felt obligated to. Radio, television, and newspapers daily advertised and extolled the merits of new, time saving gadgets that would one day leave people free to live the 'right' kind of life. Walls and billboards were plastered with posters depicting scenes of happiness and prosperity. The real picture, however, was very different. Admittedly, timesavers were better dressed than the people who lived near the old amphitheater. They earned more money and had more to spend, but they looked tired, disgruntled and sour, and there was an unfriendly light in their eyes. They'd never heard the phrase, "Why not go and see Momo?' nor did they have anyone to listen to them in a way that would make them reasonable or conciliatory, let alone happy. Even had they known such a person, they would have been highly unlikely to pay him or her a visit unless the whole affair could be dealt with in five minutes flat, or they would have considered it a waste of time. In their view, even leisure time had to be used to the full, so as to extract the maximum of entertainment and relaxation with the minimum amount of delay. Whatever the occasion, whether solemn or joyous, timesavers could no longer celebrate it properly. Daydreaming they regarded almost as a criminal offense. What they could endure least of all, however, was silence, for when silence fell they became terrified by the realization of what was happening to their lives. And so, whenever silence threatened to descend, they made a noise. It wasn't a happy sound, of course, like the hubbub in a children's playground, but an angry ill tempered din that grew louder every day. It had ceased to matter that people should enjoy their work and take pride in it; on the contrary, enjoyment merely slowed them down. All that mattered was to get through as much work as possible in the shortest possible time, so notices to the effect were prominently displayed in every factory and office building. They read: TIME IS PRECIOUS - DON'T WASTE IT! or: TIME IS MONEY - SAVE IT! Last but not least, the appearance of the city itself changed more and more. Old buildings were pulled down and replaced with modern ones devoid of all the things that were now through superfluous. No architect troubled to design houses that suited the people who were to live in them, because that would have meant building a whole range of different houses. It was far cheaper, and above all, more time saving to make them identical. Huge modern housing developments sprang up on the city's outskirts - endless rows of multi-storied tenements as indistinguishable as peas in a pod. And because all the buildings looked alike, so of course, did the streets. [.....] People never seemed to notice that, by saving time, they were losing something else. No one cared to admit that life was becoming even poorer, bleaker, and more monotonous. The ones who felt this most keenly were the children, because no one had time for them any more. But time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart. And the more people saved, the less they had.
”
”
Michael Ende, Momo
“
तु और तेरी दोस्ती
मेरी नज़र में मेरी दोस्त बहुत 'माईने' रखती है, जो हर वक़्त मेरे साथ होने का एहसास दिलाती है । लोग कहते है ज़िन्दगी हमें बहुत खूबसूरत दोस्त देती है । लेकिन पर मैं कहती हूँ, अच्छे दोस्त हमें खूबसूरत ज़िन्दगी देते है ।
किसी ने सच ही कहा है :-
मिलना बिछड़ना सब किस्मत का खेल है.
कभी नफ़रत तो कभी एक दुसरे का मेल है.
दुनिया में बिक जाते है हर रिश्ते,
सिर्फ दोस्ती ही यहाँ नॉट फॉर सेल होती है.
आइए अपने शब्दों अपने दोस्त के लिए कुछ कहना चाहती हूँ अगर आपकी भी कोई ऐसा दोस्त हो जिस के बिना आपको आपकी ज़िन्दगी आपकी दोस्त के बिना बेरंग लगती है उनको ये कविता भेज सकते है……….
एहसान नहीं एहसास है तेरी दोस्ती,
ज़िन्दगी का भार नहीं, खूबसूरत एहसास है तेरी दोस्ती
जिंदगी की मुश्किल नहीं, मुश्किलों का हल है तेरी दोस्ती,
मेरे सपनो की उड़ान और प्यारी सी मुस्कान है तेरी दोस्ती,
जान देना कोई बड़ी बात नहीं, उम्र भर साथ देना है तेरी दोस्ती,
गुलाब के फूल और उसकी महकती हुए खुशबू का राज है तेरी दोस्ती,
Negi तुम नहीं जानती तुम और तेरी दोस्ती दोनों कितनी प्यारी है…
उन दिनों की बात है जब वो Interview देने Aishwarya Group आई थी, तब First Introduction हुआ था तो उसकी मासूमियत उसके चेहरे पे झलक रही थी । उसका धीरे -2 से बोलना बहुत प्यारा सा लगा दिल को छू रहा था ।
Interview के कुछ दिनों के बाद 29/11/2017 को Aishwarya Health Care में New joining थी । सारे Employee की तरह Negi का Introduction सब (General Manager, HOD All Employee) से करवाया……
मुझे नहीं पता वो मेरे बारे में क्या सोचती थी मेरे प्रति उसके क्या विचार थी । मेरी ओर से दिन- प्रतिदिन थोड़ी -2 Attachment उसके लिए बढ़ रही थी । मुझे उसकी बातें और हरकतें मुझे बहुत अच्छी लगती थी । एक तो वो कुछ बोलती नहीं थी और जब भी बोलती थी बहुत तेजी से बोलती, कभी -2 वो मेरा नाम ले लेती थी जब मेरा नाम लेती मुझे बहुत अच्छा लगता है पर मैंने उसको कभी एहसास नहीं होने दिया जब वो मेरा नाम लेती है तो मुझे कितना अच्छा लगता है एक अपनापन सा feel होता है कुछ लोग उसके बारे में बहुत गलत बोलते थे पर मैंने उन लोगो की बातों को Ignore कर देती थी ।
(कुछ दिनो के बाद)
वक्त के साथ-साथ हमारा ये रिश्ता और मजबूत बनता गया और अजनबी से बहुत अच्छे दोस्त बन गए । Office से Rental House और Rental House से Office एक साथ आना - जाना शुरू हो गया । उसका Rental House मेरे Rental House से 2 km की दुरी पे था । हम दोनों का एक बस में आना जाना रहता था, हम दोनों एक साथ एक ही Prem बस में Office आते थे और एक साथ एक ही Rental House Friends बस में जाते थे । हम दोनों का सफर बहुत अच्छा था, बहुत अच्छा था वो बीता कल ।
Negi का पूरा नाम Hemlata है । मैं उसको प्यार से Negi बोलती हूँ, मेरी पहाड़ों की रानी, Negi उत्तराखंड की रहने वाली है, वो बहुत अच्छी लड़की है बस उसकी एक ही कमी है, वो बहुत कम बोलती है सारे उसका मजाक उड़ाते रहते थे जो मुझे पसंद नहीं आता ।
मानती हूँ कम बोलना सबसे अच्छी बात मानी जाती है और यह एक सच्चे और सभ्य इंसान की पहचान भी होती है। इस दुनिया मे कई तरह के लोग हैं जिनके सोचने का तरीका अलग अलग है। कुछ लोग कम बोलने वाले को पसन्द करते हैं तो कुछ लोग अधिक बोलने वाले को ।
अधिक बोलने वाले का तो कुछ भी नुकसान नही होता लेकिन कम बोलने वाले कभी कभी मुसीबत में पड़ जाते हैं । Negi के साथ भी कुछ ऐसा हो रहा था धीरे -2 समय बढ़ता गया ।
कुछ लोग Negi की ज्यादा खिल्ली उड़ाते हैं और ये खिल्ली उड़ाने वाले लोग वे ही होते हैं जो खुद किसी काम के नही होते । Negi ना ही अपने हक ले लिए किसी से लड़ नही पाती थी ।
जिसके वजह से कभी कभी वह खुद का हक भी गवां बैठती है। इसलिए हर रोज उसको समझना ये जरूरी था कि हर जगह कम न बोला जाए ।
जहां इसकी जैसी जरूरत है वैसा ही करने में भलाई है। अक्सर देखा गया है Negi की कम बोलने की आदत लोगो को ज्यादा बिगाड़ा दिया था जिसके चलते दूसरे लोग उसको सुना देते है
लेकिन वो जवाब नही दे पाती।
कोई भी कभी भी कुछ भी कह देता है क्योंकि लोग ये जान चुके थे
कि Negi जवाब में कुछ नही कह पायेगी । इसलिए यह जरूरी है कि Negi इतना भी कम नही बोलो की सामने वाला कुछ भी कह के निकल जाए । कम बोलना बहुत ही अच्छी बात है लेकिन Negi कम बोलने की वजह से खुद ही परेशान हो जाती थी ।
सब से अच्छी बात ये है जरूरत के अनुसार Negi ने खुद को Change कर लिया ।
कब कहां कितना बोलना सब सीख गई है अब हमारी Negi बड़ी हो गई है
अब वो कभी कभी मुझे भी समझती है जब मै परेशान हो जाती हूँ ।
”
”
Anu mehta
“
On August 18, 1941, Officer John Gillespie Magee, Jr. of the Royal Canadian Air Force took a new airplane, the Spitfire Mk I, on a test flight.
Magee had received his wings as a pilot only two months earlier. As he flew the Spitfire up to new heights of 33,000 feet, he felt inspired to write a poem that has now become the official poem of both the Royal Canadian Air Force and the British Royal Air Force. Short films have been created with this poem as a basis. In its entirety or in part, the poem can be found in songs, on headstones, in presidential addresses, in museums, and in eulogies. Some have even used it as a prayer.
High Flight
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth Of sun-split clouds—and done a hundred things You have not done—wheeled and soared and swung High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there, I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung My eager craft through footless halls of air. Up, up the long, delirious blue I’ve topped the windswept heights with easy grace Where never lark, or even eagle flew. And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod The high, untrespassed sanctity of space, Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
”
”
Ryan W. Quinn
“
the autonomous-driving side of things, Alphabet (formerly Google), which has logged several million self-driving-car test miles, continues to lead the pack. At the end of 2016, it created a new business division, called Waymo, for its autonomous driving technology. In May 2017, Waymo and Lyft announced that they would work together on developing the technology, and later in the year, Alphabet invested $1 billion in the start-up. Others, like Cruise Automation (which GM acquired for $1 billion) and Comma.ai, which offers open-source autonomous driving technology in the same vein as Google’s Android mobile operating system, are chasing hard. Baidu, China’s leading Internet search company, has an autonomous-driving research center in Sunnyvale. Byton—backed by China’s Tencent, Foxconn, and the China Harmony New Energy auto retailer group—has an office in Mountain View, as does Didi Chuxing, the Chinese ride-sharing company in which Apple invested $1 billion. Many of these companies have taken not just inspiration but also talent from Tesla. Part of the value of an innovation cluster like Silicon Valley lies in the dispersal of intellectual labor from one node to the next. For instance, PayPal is well known in the Valley for producing a number of high performers who left the company to start, join, or invest in others. The so-called PayPal Mafia includes Reid Hoffman, who founded LinkedIn; Max Levchin, whose most recent of several start-ups is the financial services company Affirm; Peter Thiel, a Facebook board member and President Trump–supporting venture capitalist who cofounded “big data” company Palantir; Jeremy Stoppelman, who started reviews site Yelp; Keith Rabois, who was chief operating officer at Square and then joined Khosla Ventures; David Sacks, who sold Yammer to Microsoft for $1.2 billion and later became CEO at Zenefits; Jawed Karim, who cofounded YouTube; and one Elon Musk.
”
”
Hamish McKenzie (Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil)
“
On another occasion, Alinsky was working in his home base of Chicago to force Chicago’s department stores to give jobs to black activists who were Alinsky’s cronies. On this issue of course Alinsky was competing—or working in tandem, however we choose to view it—with Chicago’s number one racial shakedown man, Jesse Jackson. Jackson mastered a simple strategy of converting race into a protection racket. He would offer to “protect” Chicago businesses from accusations of racism—accusations that the businesses knew were actually fomented by Jackson himself. The businesses would then pay Jackson to make the trouble go away, and also to chase away other potential troublemakers. In return for his efforts, Jackson would typically receive hundreds of thousands in annual donations from the company, plus jobs and minority contracts that would go through his network, and finally other goodies such as free flights on the corporate airplane, supposedly for his “charitable work.” Later Jackson would go national with this blackmail approach. In New York, for example, Jackson opened an office on Wall Street where he extracted millions of dollars in money and patronage from several leading investment houses including Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, First Boston, Morgan Stanley, Paine Webber, and Prudential Securities. On the national stage, another race hustler, Al Sharpton, joined Jackson. For two decades these shakedown men in clerical garb successfully prosecuted their hustles. Jackson was the leader at first, but eventually Sharpton proved more successful than Jackson. While Jackson’s star has faded, Sharpton became President Obama’s chief advisor on race issues.
”
”
Dinesh D'Souza (Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party)
“
Before the 1940’s, if one woman in an audience stood up and shrieked at the top of her lungs throughout an entire show she’d have been carted off to an asylum. By the mid-forties, however, entire audiences behaved like that, screaming, tearing at their clothes and hair, leaving their seats to board the stage. On December 30th, 1942, while Frank Sinatra sang at the Paramount Theater in New York, the behavior of the audience changed, and a part of our relationship to well-known people changed forever. Psychiatrists and psychologists of the day struggled to explain the phenomenon. They recalled medieval dance crazes, spoke of “mass frustrated love” and “mass hypnosis.” The media age did bring a type of mass hypnosis into American life. It affects all of us to some degree, and some of us to a great degree. Before the advent of mass-media, a young girl might have admired a performer from afar, and it would have been acceptable to have a passing crush. It would not have been acceptable if she pursued the performer to his home, or if she had to be restrained by police. It would not have been acceptable to skip school in order to wait for hours outside a hotel and then try to tear pieces of clothing from the passing star. Yet that unhealthy behavior became “normal” in the Sinatra days. In fact, audience behavior that surprised everyone in 1942 was expected two years later when Sinatra appeared again at the Paramount Theater. This time, the 30,000 screaming, bobby-soxed fans were joined by a troop of reporters. The media were learning to manipulate this new behavior to their advantage. Having predicted a commotion, 450 police officers were assigned to that one theater, and it appeared that society had learned to deal with this phenomenon. It had not. During the engagement, an 18-year old named Alexander Ivanovich Dorogokupetz stood up in the theater and threw an egg that hit Sinatra in the face. The show stopped, and for a moment, a brief moment, Sinatra was not the star. Now it was Dorogokupetz mobbed by audience members and Dorogokupetz who had to be escorted out by police. Society had not learned to deal with this, and still hasn’t. Dorogokupetz told police: “I vowed to put an end to this monotony of two years of consecutive swooning. It felt good.” Saddled with the least American of names, he had tried to make one for himself in the most American way, and but for his choice of a weapon, he would probably be as famous today as Frank Sinatra. Elements in society were pioneering the skills of manipulating emotion and behavior in ways that had never been possible before: electronic ways. The media were institutionalizing idolatry. Around
”
”
Gavin de Becker (The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence)
“
Before the 1940’s, if one woman in an audience stood up and shrieked at the top of her lungs throughout an entire show she’d have been carted off to an asylum. By the mid-forties, however, entire audiences behaved like that, screaming, tearing at their clothes and hair, leaving their seats to board the stage. On December 30th, 1942, while Frank Sinatra sang at the Paramount Theater in New York, the behavior of the audience changed, and a part of our relationship to well-known people changed forever. Psychiatrists and psychologists of the day struggled to explain the phenomenon. They recalled medieval dance crazes, spoke of “mass frustrated love” and “mass hypnosis.” The media age did bring a type of mass hypnosis into American life. It affects all of us to some degree, and some of us to a great degree. Before the advent of mass-media, a young girl might have admired a performer from afar, and it would have been acceptable to have a passing crush. It would not have been acceptable if she pursued the performer to his home, or if she had to be restrained by police. It would not have been acceptable to skip school in order to wait for hours outside a hotel and then try to tear pieces of clothing from the passing star. Yet that unhealthy behavior became “normal” in the Sinatra days. In fact, audience behavior that surprised everyone in 1942 was expected two years later when Sinatra appeared again at the Paramount Theater. This time, the 30,000 screaming, bobby-soxed fans were joined by a troop of reporters. The media were learning to manipulate this new behavior to their advantage. Having predicted a commotion, 450 police officers were assigned to that one theater, and it appeared that society had learned to deal with this phenomenon. It had not. During the engagement, an 18-year old named Alexander Ivanovich Dorogokupetz stood up in the theater and threw an egg that hit Sinatra in the face. The show stopped, and for a moment, a brief moment, Sinatra was not the star. Now it was Dorogokupetz mobbed by audience members and Dorogokupetz who had to be escorted out by police. Society had not learned to deal with this, and still hasn’t. Dorogokupetz told police: “I vowed to put an end to this monotony of two years of consecutive swooning. It felt good.” Saddled with the least American of names, he had tried to make one for himself in the most American way, and but for his choice of a weapon, he would probably be as famous today as Frank Sinatra. Elements in society were pioneering the skills of manipulating emotion and behavior in ways that had never been possible before: electronic ways. The media were institutionalizing idolatry.
”
”
Gavin de Becker (The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence)
“
Foster children are much more likely than other children with similar problems to be prescribed multiple medications that will have no impact on their symptoms. These medications, particularly the so-called atypical antipsychotics (medications like Risperdal, Abilify, and Seroquel) can shorten life and have severe side effects, like weight gain great enough to increase risk for diabetes. The over prescribing and inappropriate prescribing of such medications to children in foster care has been so dramatic that the Government Accountability Office has issued a special report condemning it. Both the federal government and several states have sued Big Pharma for targeting foster care children, resulting in multi-million-dollar settlements. In the last few years, attention to these issues by legal groups, such as the National Center for Youth Law in Oakland, the press (an excellent example can be seen in the online series from the Mercury News by Karen de Sa), and advocacy groups such as Foster Youth in Action, has increased awareness of this problem. These investigations and advocacy are leading to some positive changes. For example, California passed legislation to monitor prescribing to children in foster care. But sadly, rather than joining in or even leading efforts to improve the quality of care for foster and adopted youth, most medical and psychiatric groups have resisted or even openly opposed these efforts. Change is hard, and it is hardest for those with the most to lose. As Annette Jackson and I wrote in 2014, “the academic or interest group most threatened by the innovations which challenge their existing frame of reference or perspective, will be the most vocal and hostile to the new ideas.
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Bruce D. Perry (The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook)
“
The balance sheet told a different story. Selling for $13.38 per share at the end of 1954—an $18.8 million market capitalization—P&R traded close to its net current asset value of $9.16 per share, a figure that included significant excess inventory. While this alone was not enough to make the stock cheap, P&R also had an off-balance-sheet asset known as culm banks, a waste material accumulated from anthracite mining which was thought to have value as a fuel source. Buffett believed this asset could be worth around $8 per share.150 The net current asset value and the culm banks combined were worth $17 a share, enough to give Buffett confidence that the stock was cheap. But, as Table 2 shows, the company also had substantial property, plant, and equipment. These fixed assets were almost certainly worth less than their carrying value, as the industry had deteriorated since the company last valued them when it emerged from bankruptcy in 1945. While it wasn’t clear what they were worth, they were certainly worth something. Finally, and ultimately most importantly, Ben Graham was on P&R’s board of directors, becoming a member after purchasing the stock in 1952. Buffett, who had discovered the stock on his own, would join Graham’s firm in 1954. While Graham had not taken any significant action as a board member by then, Buffett sensed that his professor, mentor, and now boss would eventually make something happen. As he later stated, “I was just a peon sitting in the outer office… I was not in the inner circle, but I was terribly interested, knowing something was going on.
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Brett Gardner (Buffett's Early Investments: A new investigation into the decades when Warren Buffett earned his best returns)
“
As the 1970s drew to a close, and Commodore, Tandy, Altair, and Apple began to emerge from the sidelines, PARC director Bert Sutherland asked Larry Tesler to assess what some analysts were already predicting to be the coming era of “hobby and personal computers.” “I think that the era of the personal computer is here,” Tesler countered; “PARC has kept involved in the world of academic computing, but we have largely neglected the world of personal computing which we helped to found.”41 His warning went largely unheeded. Xerox Corporation’s parochial belief that computers need only talk to printers and filing cabinets and not to each other meant that the “office of the future” remained an unfulfilled promise, and in the years between 1978 and 1982 PARC experienced a dispersal of core talent that rivals the flight of Greek scholars during the declining years of Byzantium: Charles Simonyi brought the Alto’s Bravo text editing program to Redmond, Washington, where it was rebooted as Microsoft Word; Robert Metcalf used the Ethernet protocol he had invented at PARC to found the networking giant, 3Com; John Warnock and Charles Geschke, tiring of an unresponsive bureaucracy, took their InterPress page description language and founded Adobe Systems; Tesler himself brought the icon-based, object-oriented Smalltalk programming language with him when he joined the Lisa engineering team at Apple, and Tim Mott, his codeveloper of the Gypsy desktop interface, became one of the founders of Electronic Arts—five startups that would ultimately pay off the mortgages and student loans of many hundreds of industrial, graphic, and interaction designers, and provide the tools of the trade for untold thousands of others.
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Barry M. Katz (Make It New: A History of Silicon Valley Design (The MIT Press))
“
Today, I grieve with the rest of America over the loss of President David Collins. He was a great man, someone who inspired us to do great things. Now, we must prove to him that Americans can do these great things. We will bring America forward, and if you join me, you too will be part of this great new chapter in American history. We have gotten our priorities wrong these past few years, and I will steer us onto the correct path. “Effective immediately, the United States military will be under the control of the United Nations. As we speak, security forces are rounding up officers who are a threat to the peace and security of this government. If you’re an enlisted person in the military, you’re welcome to re-enlist under the banner of the United Nations. Most administrative matters concerning the day-to-day operations of running the United States will fall to the administrative offices of the United Nations. My fellow Americans, we can become a great partner to the United Nations and join the world community as global citizens. We will go forward into the future.
”
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Cliff Ball (Times of Trial: Christian End Times Thriller (The End Times Saga Book 3))
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I was executive vice president of the discounters’ trade association, working in my New York office one day in 1967. My secretary said there was a man out front who wanted to join our group. I said I would give him ten minutes. So in comes this short, wiry man with a deep tan and a tennis racket under his arm. He introduced himself as Sam Walton from Arkansas. I didn’t know what to think. When he meets you, he looks at you—head cocked to one side, forehead slightly creased—and he proceeds to extract every piece of information in your possession. He always makes little notes. And he pushes on and on. After two and a half hours, he left, and I was totally drained. I wasn’t sure what I had just met, but I was sure we would hear more from him.” Looking
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Sam Walton (Sam Walton: Made In America)
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Vala Afshar, chief marketing officer of Extreme Networks, is an interesting case study.3 Trained as an electrical engineer, Afshar joined Extreme Networks in 1996 as a software developer/quality service engineer, eventually transitioning to run the services business, becoming the chief customer support officer. In this role, Afshar became very active on Salesforce's Chatter, a private social network for business, and by 2011 had built a large internal following. As the chief information officer took note of Afshar's intracompany influence, he signed Afshar up for Twitter and gave him the mandate to interact with networks outside of the company. As Afshar prototyped his ideas in real time, he gained an external following. A publisher approached him about writing a book; his presentations on Slide-Share gained more than one million views; and he was promoted to chief marketing officer. Vala Afshar has become a thought leader, epitomizing a new breed of chief marketing officer, both highly social and highly technical—and Extreme Networks has unusually high name recognition for a $500 million company. Afshar's ability to shrink the space, getting immediate and actionable feedback, was pivotal in expanding his space into a high-profile public role. Fast feedback is also useful when it comes to identifying your distinctive strengths. Karen May, VP for people development at Google, invented a method she calls "speedback." It works like this: "partway through a training session she will tell everyone to pair off and sit knee to knee, and give them three minutes to answer one simple question: 'What advice would you give me based on the experience you've had with me here?' Participants say that it's some of the best feedback they've ever gotten."4 When we are willing to impose constraints—in this particular, instance, time—we have a better chance of identifying what is working and what needs to be changed.
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Whitney Johnson (Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work)
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An accurate budget must be built on a base of thorough research. You must do research on your community to find out what it will cost to get a church off the ground. You need to solidly answer questions such as:, What will the cost of living in this community be?, What will my salary be? How about salaries for additional staff?, How much will it cost to rent space for the church to meet in?, How much will it cost to operate a business in this city (office rent, phones, computer equipment, copy equipment, and so on)?
Talk with other pastors in the community. Find out what their start-up costs were and what they are currently spending to maintain and operate the church. Other pastors can be a valuable resource for you on many levels.
The worst mistake you can make is to start the budget process by viewing economic realities through a rose-colored lens. If you speculate too much or cut corners in this area, you’ll end up paying dearly down the road. Remember, God never intended for you to go it alone. There are people and resources out there to help you prepare. Ask others for help.
God receives no glory when you are scraping the bottom to do His work. So don’t think too small.
Church planting is an all or nothing venture. You can’t just partially commit. You have to fully commit, and often that means with your wallet.
Don’t underestimate the importance of having a base of prayer partners. You need prayers as desperately as you need money.
You need prayers as desperately as you need money.
An unhealthy launch may occur when a new church begins as the result of a church split, when a planter is disobedient in following God, or when there is a lack of funding or solid strategy.
Finding the right teammates to help you on this journey is serious business. The people you bring on to your staff will either propel you down the road toward fulfilling the vision for your church or serve as speed bumps along the way.
You should never be afraid to ask potential staff members to join you—even if it means a salary cut, a drastic position change or a significant new challenge for them.
When you ask someone to join your staff, you are not asking that person to make a sacrifice. (If you have that mentality, you need to work to change it.) Instead, you are offering that person the opportunity of a lifetime.
There are three things that every new church must have before it can be a real church: (1) a lead pastor, (2) a start date, and (3) a worship leader.
Hire a person at the part-time level before bringing him or her on full time.
When hiring a new staff person, make sure he or she possesses the three C's: Character, Chemistry & Competency
Hiring staff precedes growth, not vice versa.
Hire slow, fire fast.
Never hire staff when you can find a volunteer.
Launch as publicly as possible, with as many people as possible.
There are two things you are looking for in a start date: (1) a date on which you have the potential to reach as many people as possible, and (2) a date that precedes a period of time in which people, in general, are unlikely to be traveling out of town.
You need steppingstones to get you from where you are to your launch date. Monthly services are real services that you begin holding three to six months prior to your launch date. They are the absolute best strategic precursor to your launch. Monthly services give you the invaluable opportunity to test-drive your systems, your staff and, to an extent, even your service style. At the same time, you are doing real ministry with the people in attendance. These services should mirror as closely as possible what your service will look like on the launch date.
Let your target demographic group be the strongest deciding factor in settling on a location: Hotel ballrooms, Movie theaters, Comedy clubs, Public-school auditoriums, Performing-arts theaters, Available church meeting spaces, College auditoriums, Corporate conference space.
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Nelson Searcy (Launch: Starting a New Church from Scratch)
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One of the most frustrating aspects of the Vietnam war from the Army's point of view is that as far as logistics and tactics were concerned we succeeded in everything we set out to do. At the height of the war the Army was able to move almost a million soldiers a year in and out of Vietnam, feed them, clothe them, house them, supply them with arms and ammunition, and generally sustain them better than any Army had ever been sustained in the field. To project an Army of that size halfway around the world was a logistics and management task of enormous magnitude, and we had been more that equal to the task. On the battlefield itself, the Army was unbeatable. In engagement after engagement the forces of the Viet Cong and that of the North Vietnamese Army were thrown back with terrible losses. Yet, in the end, it was North Vietnam, not the United States, that emerged victoriously. How could we have succeeded so well, yet failed so miserably?
At least part of the answer appears to be that we saw Vietnam as unique rather than in strategic context. This misperception grew out of neglect of military strategy in the post-World War II nuclear era. Almost all professional literature on military strategy was written by civilian analysts - political scientists from the academic world and systems analysts from the Defense community. In his book War and Politics, political scientist Bernard Brodie devoted an entire chapter to the lack of professional military strategic thought. The same criticism was made by systems analysts Alain C. Enthoven and K. Wayne Smith who commented: "Military professionals are among the most infrequent contributors to the basic literature on military strategy and defense policy. Most such contributors are civilians..." Even the Army's so-called "new" strategy of flexible response grew out of civilian, not military, thinking.
This is not to say that the civilian strategies were wrong. The political scientists provided a valuable service in tying war to its political ends. They provided a valuable service in tying war to its political ends. The provided answers to "why" the United States ought to wage war. In the manner the systems analyst provided answer on "what" means we would use. What was missing was the link that should have been provided by military strategists -"how" to take the systems analyst's means and use them to achieve the political scientist's ends.
But instead of providing professional military advice on how to fight the war, the military more and more joined with the systems analysts in determining material means we were to use. Indeed, the conventional wisdom among many Army officers was that "the Army doesn't make strategy, " and "there is no such thing as Army strategy." There was a general feeling that strategy was budget-driven and was primarily a function of resource allocation. The task of the Army, in their view, was to design and procure material, arms and equipment and to organize, train, and equip soldiers for the Defense Establishment.
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Harry Summers
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The game is a thread, microscopic in breadth, a hint of gossamer drawing unsuspecting souls together in simple competition to the exclusion of all else, from a mother and her infant playing peekaboo to two old men hunched over a chessboard and everything in between. The game unifies, joining father and son pitching baseballs at night after a long day at the office, pitches pounding the mitt or skipping past, one time even knocking the coffee cup handle clean off and the boy scampering off to retrieve a wild one as the dad sips and ponders. The game allows brothers to bond even when the age gap is too great for real competition, their mutual effort to fashion a bridge between disparate age and ability forming a bond of trust and respect. And finally, it is the game’s presence and past and its memory that inspires each of us to forgive time and aging and their inevitable accompanying attrition because the gray and hobbled old man before me was once lean and powerful and magnificent and some of what became of him was due to the investment he made in me and after all the batting practice he threw and grounders he hit, his shoulder aches and his knees need replacement. Even though youth masks it so you don't realize it all when you’re a kid, someday it happens to you and suddenly you realize you are him and you are left wishing you could go back and tell him what you now know and perhaps thank him for what he gave up. You imagine him back then receiving nothing in return except the knowledge that you would someday understand but he could not hasten that day or that revelation and he abided it all so graciously knowing that your realization might be too late for him. So you console yourself that in the absence of your gratitude he clung to hope and conviction and the future. Turn the page and you find yourself staring out at the new generation and you wince as his pitches bruise your palm and crack your thumb and realize that today the game is growth and achievement and tomorrow it will be love and memories. The game is a gift.
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Drew Rogers (Before the Spotlight)
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Ken Wharfe
In 1987, Ken Wharfe was appointed a personal protection officer to Diana. In charge of the Princess’s around-the-clock security at home and abroad, in public and in private, Ken Wharfe became a close friend and loyal confidant who shared her most private moments. After Diana’s death, Inspector Wharfe was honored by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace and made a Member of the Victorian Order, a personal gift of the sovereign for his loyal service to her family. His book, Diana: Closely Guarded Secret, is a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller. He is a regular contributor with the BBC, ITN, Sky News, NBC, CBS, and CNN, participating in numerous outside broadcasts and documentaries for BBC--Newsnight, Channel 4 News, Channel 5 News, News 24, and GMTV.
It was a strange sensation watching her walking away by herself, with no bodyguards following at a discreet distance. What were my responsibilities here? I kept thinking. Yet I knew this area well, and not once did I feel uneasy. I had made this decision--not one of my colleagues knew. Senior officers at Scotland Yard would most certainly have boycotted the idea had I been foolish enough to give them advance notice of what the Princess and I were up to.
Before Diana disappeared from sight, I called her on the radio. Her voice was bright and lively, and I knew instinctively that she was happy, and safe. I walked back to the car and drove slowly along the only road that runs adjacent to the bay, with heath land and then the sea to my left and the waters of Poole Harbour running up toward Wareham, a small market town, to my right. Within a matter of minutes, I was turning into the car park of the Bankes Arms, a fine old pub that overlooks the bay. I left the car and strolled down to the beach, where I sat on an old wall in the bright sunshine. The beach huts were locked, and there was no sign of life. To my right I could see the Old Harry Rocks--three tall pinnacles of chalk standing in the sea, all that remains, at the landward end, of a ridge that once ran due east to the Isle of Wight. Like the Princess, I, too, just wanted to carry on walking.
Suddenly, my radio crackled into life: “Ken, it’s me--can you hear me?” I fumbled in the large pockets of my old jacket, grabbed the radio, and said, “Yes. How is it going?”
“Ken, this is amazing, I can’t believe it,” she said, sounding truly happy. Genuinely pleased for her, I hesitated before replying, but before I could speak she called again, this time with that characteristic mischievous giggle in her voice. “You never told me about the nudist colony!” she yelled, and laughed raucously over the radio. I laughed, too--although what I actually thought was “Uh-oh!” But judging from her remarks, whatever she had seen had made her laugh.
At this point, I decided to walk toward her, after a few minutes seeing her distinctive figure walking along the water’s edge toward me. Two dogs had joined her and she was throwing sticks into the sea for them to retrieve; there were no crowd barriers, no servants, no police, apart from me, and no overattentive officials. Not a single person had recognized her. For once, everything for the Princess was “normal.” During the seven years I had worked for her, this was an extraordinary moment, one I shall never forget.
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Larry King (The People's Princess: Cherished Memories of Diana, Princess of Wales, From Those Who Knew Her Best)
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Ingenious and original as Fibonacci’s exercises were, if the book had dealt only with theory it would probably not have attracted much attention beyond a small circle of mathematical cognoscenti. It commanded an enthusiastic following, however, because Fibonacci filled it with practical applications. For example, he described and illustrated many innovations that the new numbers made possible in commercial bookkeeping, such as figuring profit margins, money-changing, conversions of weights and measures, and—though usury was still prohibited in many places—he even included calculations of interest payments. Liber Abaci provided just the kind of stimulation that a man as brilliant and creative as the Emperor Frederick would be sure to enjoy. Though Frederick, who ruled from 1211 to 1250, exhibited cruelty and an obsession with earthly power, he was genuinely interested in science, the arts, and the philosophy of government. In Sicily, he destroyed all the private garrisons and feudal castles, taxed the clergy, and banned them from civil office. He also set up an expert bureaucracy, abolished internal tolls, removed all regulations inhibiting imports, and shut down the state monopolies. Frederick tolerated no rivals. Unlike his grandfather, Frederick Barbarossa, who was humbled by the Pope at the Battle of Legnano in 1176, this Frederick reveled in his endless battles with the papacy. His intransigence brought him not just one excommunication, but two. On the second occasion, Pope Gregory IX called for Frederick to be deposed, characterizing him as a heretic, rake, and anti-Christ. Frederick responded with a savage attack on papal territory; meanwhile his fleet captured a large delegation of prelates on their way to Rome to join the synod that had been called to remove him from power.
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Peter L. Bernstein (Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk)
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COL Nicholas Young Retires from the United States Army after More than Thirty -Six Years of Distinguished Service to our Nation
2 September 2020
The United States Army War College is pleased to announce the retirement of United States Army War College on September 1, 2020. COL Young’s recent officer evaluation calls him “one of the finest Colonel’s in the United States Army who should be promoted to Brigadier General. COL Young has had a long and distinguished career in the United States Army, culminating in a final assignment as a faculty member at the United States Army War College since 2015. COL Young served until his mandatory retirement date set by federal statue. His long career encompassed just shy of seven years enlisted time before serving for thirty years as a commissioned officer.He first joined the military in 1984, serving as an enlisted soldier in the New Hampshire National Guard before completing a tour of active duty in the U.S, Army Infantry as a non-commissioned officer with the 101st Airborne (Air Assault). He graduated from Officer Candidate School in 1990, was commissioned in the Infantry, and then served as a platoon leader and executive officer in the Massachusetts Army National Guard before assuming as assignment as the executive officer of HHD, 3/18th Infantry in the U.S. Army Reserves. He made a branch transfer to the Medical Service Corps in 1996. COL Young has since served as a health services officer, company executive officer, hospital medical operations officer, hospital adjutant, Commander of the 287th Medical Company (DS), Commander of the 455th Area Support Dental, Chief of Staff of the 804th Medical Brigade, Hospital Commander of the 405th Combat Support Hospital and Hospital Commander of the 399th Combat Support Hospital. He was activated to the 94th Regional Support Command in support of the New York City terrorist attacks in 2001. COL Young is currently a faculty instructor at the U.S. Army War College. He is a graduate of basic training, advanced individual infantry training, Air Assault School, the primary leadership development course, the infantry officer basic course, the medical officer basic course, the advanced medical officer course, the joint medical officer planning course, the company commander leadership course, the battalion/brigade commander leadership course, the U.S. Air War College (with academic honors), the U.S. Army War College and the U.S. Naval War College (with academic distinction).
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nicholasyoungMAPhD
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Nasser’s new order appeared to be on the way when military officers, pledging “loyalty” to him, seized power in a coup in Syria. This led, in 1958, to a “merger” of Egypt and Syria into what was supposed to be a single country, the United Arab Republic. But then in 1961 other officers seized power in Damascus and promptly withdrew Syria from the new “state.” The following year, Nasser sent troops to intervene in the civil war in Yemen, expecting a quick victory that would expand his reach. Instead it turned into a long battle against royalist guerrillas and a proxy war between Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Iran joined with Saudi Arabia to support the guerrillas in resisting the Egyptian forces, one result of which was the establishment of an Iran-Arab Friendship Society, with offices both in Tehran and Riyadh. Nasser would end up calling Yemen his “Vietnam,” a political quagmire that added to the economic woes of the grossly mismanaged Egyptian economy.
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Daniel Yergin (The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations)
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Prince Serge Obolensky, had escaped Soviet Russia after a year of hiding and became a much-married New York society figure whose wives included Alice Astor. His brother-in-law Vincent Astor was secretly asked by FDR in 1940 to set up civilian espionage offices in Manhattan at Rockefeller Center. Astor was soon joined in this effort by Allen Dulles.
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Russ Baker (Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put it in the White House & What Their Influence Means for America)
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Ivar joined Durant on road shows, and interest grew as Ivar repeated his speech throughout 1923. By the fall Durant believed he finally had found enough investors, and Ivar and Lee Higginson began preparing to close a deal. They followed the same procedure as anyone seeking money. First, they created a new firm, called International Match Corporation, and incorporated it in Delaware. During the late nineteenth century, states had begun competing for corporate charters, the formative documents that corporations are required to file when they are created. Delaware had recently surpassed New Jersey as the incorporation state of choice, and increasingly companies chose to file in Delaware, even if their operations were in another state. Delaware judges took a hands-off approach to business, and would be unlikely to second-guess Ivar’s decisions. By incorporating International Match in Delaware, Lee Higginson would give Ivar and themselves maximum flexibility. Next, Durant and Ivar chose the initial shareholders and directors of International Match. The two original shareholders would be Swedish Match and a syndicate of Swedish banks; they would contribute start-up capital of 30 million dollars and receive the company’s shares, in equal amounts. As shareholders, Swedish Match and the bank syndicate would vote for the company’s board of directors, as well as other major business decisions. The shareholders would elect five directors to oversee International Match’s business: Ivar; Krister Littorin, Ivar’s engineering classmate from Stockholm; Donald Durant; Frederic Allen, Lee Higginson’s senior statesman and head of the firm’s New York office; and Percy A. Rockefeller, a nephew of John D. Rockefeller. Percy Rockefeller owned the World Match Company of Walker-ville, Ontario, and recently had met Ivar while negotiating the sale of a Canadian match manufacturing plant to Swedish Match.29 The two men had impressed each other, and Ivar saw that Rockefeller, who then served on more than sixty other boards, would be the ideal director of International Match: he was well connected, wealthy, generally familiar with the match industry, and far too busy to care about any details. Ivar had idolized the Rockefellers since he was a boy in Kalmar; now, a member of that family would serve on his board.
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Frank Partnoy (The Match King: Ivar Kreuger and the Financial Scandal of the Century)
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In the course of history, kings have welcomed more and more people to their courts, which became more and more brilliant. Is it not obvious that these courtiers and the "officers" were stolen from the feudal lords, who just lost at one fell swoop, their retinues and their administrators? The modern state nourishes a vast bureaucracy. Is not the corresponding decline in the staff of the employer patent to all?
Putting the mass of the people to productive work makes possible at any given moment of technical advance the existence of a given number of non-producers. These non-producers will either be dispersed in a number of packets or concentrated in one immense body, according as the profits of productive work accrue to the social or to the political authorities. The requirement of Power, its tendency and its raison d'etre, is to concentrate them in its own service. To this task, it brings us so much ardour, instinctive rather than designed that in course of time it does to a natural death the social order which gave it birth.
This tendency is due not to the form taken by any particular state but to the inner essence of Power, which is the inevitable assailant of the social authorities and sucks the very lifeblood. And the more vigorous a particular power is a more virile it is to the role of vampire. When it falls to weak hand, which gives aristocratic resistance a chance to organize itself, the state's revolutionary nature becomes for the time being effaced.
This happens either because the forces of aristocracy opposed to the now enfeebled statocratic onslaught a barrier capable of checking it, or, more frequently, because they put a guard on their assailant, by laying hands on the apparatus which endangers them; they guarantee their own survival by installing themselves in the seat of government. This is exactly what did happen to the two epochs when the ideas of Montesquieu and Marx took shape.
The counter-offensive of the social authorities cannot be understood unless it is realized that the process of destroying aristocracy goes hand in hand with a tendency in the opposite sense. The mighty are put down - if they are independent of the state; but simultaneously, a statocrcy is exalted, and the new statocrats do more than lay a collective hand on the social forces - they laid them on the lay them each his own hand; in this way, they divert them from Power and restore them again to society, in which thereafter the statocrats join forces, by reason of the similarity of their situations and interests, with the ancient aristocracies in retreat.
Moreover, the statocratic acids, in so far as they break down the aristocratic molecules, do not make away with all the forces which they liberate. Part of them stays unappropriated, and furnishes new captains of society with the personnel necessary to the construction of new principates. In this way, the fission of the feudal cell at the height of the Middle Ages released the labour on which the merchant-drapers rose to wealth and political importance.
So also in England, with a greed of Henry VIII had fallen on the ecclesiastical authorities to get from their wealth, the wherewithal to carry out his policies, the greater part of the monastic spoils, stuck to the fingers of hands, which had been held out to receive them. These spoils founded the fortunes of the nascent English capitalism.
In this way, new hives are forever being built, in which lie hidden a new sort of energies; these will in time inspire the state to fresh orgies of covetousness. That is why the statocratic aggression seemed never to reach its logical conclusion - the complete atomization of society, which should contain henceforward nothing but isolated individuals whom the state alone rules and exploits.
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Bertrand de Jouvenel (ON POWER: The Natural History of Its Growth)
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There’s a reason why the term used for viral growth is to “land and expand”—to build new networks as well as increasing the density of existing networks. By “landing,” viral growth can start new atomic networks, as a Dropbox invite from an ad agency to their client brings a new company into the collaboration network. Or, when a WhatsApp group chat invite brings onboard a new set of friends who hadn’t previously used the service. But then the product “expands”—increasing the density of a network as all the coworkers in an office ultimately join Dropbox. It’s for this reason that networks built through viral growth are healthier and more engaged than those that are launched in the typical “Big Bang” fashion, as Google+ did years back. Big Bang Launches can be great at landing, but often fail at expanding—and as we discussed, many networks with low density and low engagement will fail. The result of increasing density and engagement isn’t just easier new user acquisition, but also stronger Engagement and Economic network effects. That’s because these network effects are ultimately derived by the density and size of the network, and as more users join, they naturally become stronger.
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Andrew Chen (The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects)
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After nightfall, when most of the American planes had been taken aboard, a new formation of planes arrived over the task force. First, the drone of their engines could be heard above the cloud cover; then they slipped into view, at about the height of the Lexington’s masts. “These planes were in very good formation,” recalled Lieutenant Commander Stroop. They had their navigation lights on, indicating that they intended to land. But many observers on both carriers and several of the screening vessels noted that something was awry. Captain Sherman of the Lexington counted nine planes, more than could be accounted for among the American planes that were still aloft. They were flying down the Yorktown’s port side, a counterclockwise approach, the reverse of the American landing routine. They were flashing their blinker lights, but none of the Americans could decipher the signal. Electrician’s mate Peter Newberg, stationed on the Yorktown’s flight deck, noticed that the aircraft exhausts were a strange shape and color, and Stroop noted that the running lights were a peculiar shade of red and blue. The TBS (short-range radio circuit) came alive with chatter. One of the nearby destroyers asked, “Have any of our planes got rounded wingtips?” Another voice said, “Damned if those are our planes.” When the first of the strangers made his final turn, he was too low, and the Yorktown’s landing signal officer frantically signaled him to throttle up. “In the last few seconds,” Newberg recalled, “when the pilot was about to plow into the stern under the flight deck, he poured the coal to his engine and pulled up and off to port. The signal light flicked briefly on red circles painted on his wings.” One of the screening destroyers opened fire, and red tracers reached up toward the leading plane. A voice on the Lexington radioed to all ships in the task force, ordering them to hold fire, but the captain of the destroyer replied, “I know Japanese planes when I see them.” Antiaircraft gunners on ships throughout the task force opened fire, and suddenly the night sky lit up as if it was the Fourth of July. But there were friendly planes in the air as well; one of the Yorktown fighter pilots complained: “What are you shooting at me for? What have I done now?” On the Yorktown, SBD pilot Harold Buell scrambled out to the port-side catwalk to see what was happening. “In the frenzy of the moment, with gunners firing at both friend and foe, some of us got caught up in the excitement and drew our .45 Colt automatics to join in, blasting away at the red meatballs as they flew past the ship—an offensive gesture about as effective as throwing rocks.” The intruders and the Americans all doused their lights and zoomed back into the cloud cover; none was shot down. It was not the last time in the war that confused Japanese pilots would attempt to land on an American carrier.
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Ian W. Toll (Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942)
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Chase Koch began a rotation of high-level jobs that exposed him to the strategic pillars of Koch Industries’ modern business. It was telling what Chase Koch did not learn. He was not sent to the oil refineries, or to a pipeline farm, or to a natural gas processing plant. Charles Koch didn’t necessarily want to teach his son about the energy industry. Instead, Charles Koch selected a series of jobs that reflected what Koch Industries had become over the last decade and how it planned to carry on into the future. The rotation of jobs was set forth, roughly, as follows: Class 1. Private equity acquisitions and mergers. Class 2. Accounting and taxes. Class 3. Market-Based Management training. Class 4. Trading. One of Chase’s first assignments was to Koch’s development group, the internal committee that looked for new companies to acquire. He joined a division called Koch Equity Development, which bought shares of publicly traded firms. Chase worked in this office when Koch’s acquisition spree was at its peak, shortly after the Invista and Koch Fertilizer deals and during the $21 billion purchase of Georgia-Pacific.
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Christopher Leonard (Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America)
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In B-3 section, Haffenden may have commanded over one hundred investigators from the New York District Attorney’s Office, FBI agents, and cops who had joined the war effort, but Haffenden himself was never a member of law enforcement of any kind. He had been a good-looking man in his youth, with a poise and cunning in his eyes, but now he wasn’t sleeping, and he wasn’t placing much emphasis on keeping himself in shape and healthy. He was now completely devoted to his job. His dark hair was mostly gone. His waistline was expanding, he had a double chin, and his only exercise was a weekly golf game. His face still lit up, as he always found energy in leadership. He gave off an infectious enthusiasm, and exuded confidence well beyond his abilities. He was also creative, and equipped with an imagination that was so extravagant that at times it had to be reined in by his superiors. At other times, it manifested into strokes of pure genius.
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Matthew Black (Operation Underworld: How the Mafia and U.S. Government Teamed Up to Win World War II)
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When it is a question of abuses in political institutions, it is necessary to take great care to judge of them only by their constant effects, and never by any of their causes, of whatever kind, which signify nothing still less by certain collateral inconveniences (if I may so express myself ) which men of limited views readily lay hold of, and are thus prevented from seeing the whole together. Indeed, the cause, according to the hypothesis which seems to be proved, not having any logical relation to the effect; and the inconveniences of an institution, good in itself, being only, as I have just said, an inevitable dissonance in the general key; how can we judge of institutions by their causes and inconveniences?—Voltaire, who spoke of every thing, during an age, without having so much as penetrated below the surface, has reasoned very humorously on the sale of the offices of the magistracy which occurred in France; and no instance, perhaps, could be more apposite to make us sensible of the truth of the theory which I am setting forth. That this sale is an abuse, says he, is proved by the fact, that it originated in another abuse. Voltaire does not mistake here as every man is liable to mistake. He shamefully mistakes. It is a total eclipse of common sense. Everything which springs from an abuse, an abuse! On the contrary; one of the most general and evident laws of this power, at once secret and striking, which acts and makes itself to be felt on every side, is, that the remedy of an abuse springs from an abuse, and that the evil, having reached a certain point, destroys itself, as it ought to do; for evil, which is only a negation, has, for measure of dimension and duration, that of the being to which it is joined, and which it destroys. It exists as an ulcer, which can only terminate in self-destruction. But then a new reality will necessarily occupy the place of that which has disappeared; for nature abhors a vacuum, and the Good. But I diverge too far from Voltaire.
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Joseph de Maistre (The Generative Principle of Political Constitutions)
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The Faith of Jimmy Carter
Carter grew up in the Southern Baptist Church that had dominated many parts of the South since the Civil War. As a child, he regularly attended Sunday school, worship services, and the Royal Ambassadors, an organization for young boys that focused on missions, at the Baptist church in Plains, Georgia. At age eleven, Carter publicly professed his faith in Jesus Christ as his personal Savior and Lord, was baptized, and joined the church. Thereafter, he participated faithfully in the Baptist Young People’s Union. Carter’s religious convictions and social attitudes were strongly shaped by his mother, Lillian. In 1958, Carter was ordained as a deacon, the governing office in Southern Baptist congregations, and he ushered, led public prayers, and preached lay sermons at his home church. His failure to win the Democratic nomination for governor in 1966 prompted Carter to reassess his faith. Challenged by a sermon entitled ‘‘If You Were Arrested for Being a Christian, Would There Be Enough Evidence to Convict You?’’ and conversations with his sister, evangelist Ruth Carter Stapleton, he vowed to make serving Christ and others his primary aim. During the 1966 governor’s race, he had spent sixteen to eighteen hours a day trying to convince Georgians to vote for him. ‘‘The comparison struck me,’’ Carter wrote, ‘‘300,000 visits for myself in three months, and 140 visits for God [to witness to others] in fourteen years!’’ Carter soon experienced a more intimate relationship with Christ and inner peace. He read the Bible ‘‘with new interest’’ and concluded that he had been a Pharisee. He went on witnessing missions, attended several religious conferences, and oversaw the showing of a Billy Graham film in Americus, Georgia.
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Gary Scott Smith (Faith and the Presidency From George Washington to George W. Bush)
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and she giggled as she walked against the current of bodies in the crosswalk. The subway was right there, but she didn’t want to take it yet—the beauty of New York City was walking, was serendipity and strangers, and it was still her birthday, and so she was just going to keep going. Alice turned and walked up Eighth, past the crummy tourist shops selling magnets and keychains and i ♥ ny T-shirts and foam fingers shaped like the Statue of Liberty. Alice had walked for almost ten blocks when she realized she had a destination. She and Sam and their friends had enjoyed many, many hours in bars as teenagers: they’d spent nights at the Dublin House, on 79th Street; at the Dive Bar, on Amsterdam and 96th Street, with the neon sign shaped like bubbles, though that one was a little too close to home to be safe; and some of the fratty bars farther down Amsterdam, the ones with the buckets of beers for twenty dollars and scratched pool tables. Sometimes they even went to some NYU bars downtown, on MacDougal Street, where they could dash across the street for falafel and then go back to the bar, like it was their office and they were running out for lunch. Their favorite bar, though, was Matryoshka, a Russian-themed bar in the 50th Street 1/9 subway station. Now it was just the 1 train, but back then, there was also the 9. Things were always changing, even when they didn’t feel like it. Alice wondered if no one ever felt as old as they were because it happened so slowly, and you were only ever one day slower and creakier, and the world changed so gradually that by the time cars had evolved from boxy to smooth, or green taxis had joined yellow ones, or MetroCards had replaced tokens, you were used to it. Everyone
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Emma Straub (This Time Tomorrow)
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There were still restrictions: Jews could not join craft guilds, engage in retail business, or hold political office. Neither could they marry Christians, employ them as servants, or have sexual relations with “the daughters of the land,” even prostitutes.
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Edward Kritzler (Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean: How a Generation of Swashbuckling Jews Carved Out an Empire in the New World in Their Quest for Treasure, Religious Freedom and Revenge)
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New CFO Whenever a new CFO joins a company, one critical step is evaluating the current reporting system. The reports should be able to inform you if you are meeting your targets or not. The reports should have a list of key performance indicators (KPI) that are being tracked. It is important to ensure that the KPIs are fully inclusive, in other words, there are no KPIs that are missing. The KPIs that do exist should be relevant and should be comprehensive. It is often the case that certain KPIs are missing and could sum up the situation better than other existing KPIs do. Hence, a review of KPIs are necessary from time to time. This review may not be required every quarter but there should be a review each year, at a minimum.
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Mark Gruner (The Definitive Chief Financial Officer: How They can Transform your Business)
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These days, I’ve come to mostly accept my body—I’ve turned my focus to my health and strength—and now, instead of what the scale shows, I record my 10K race times and the pounds I can deadlift. I glance around the coffee shop. A woman leans over her laptop, typing purposefully. A couple sits side by side, her leg draped over his, The New York Times splayed across their laps. A father and a young boy sporting matching Yankees caps wait at the counter for their order. Lately it seems like the stats are against me: I’m thirty-one years old, and I’m not dating anyone. When my boss called me into his office last month, I thought I was getting promoted. Instead, he told me I was being downsized. It’s like I’m caught in a slow spiral. I’m fighting as hard as I can to turn things around. First, a job. Then maybe I’ll join a dating site. There’s a void in my life Sean used to fill. Before he met Jody, we ordered in Chinese food at least once a week and binge-watched Netflix. He’s forever misplacing his keys; I instantly know from the way he calls “Shay?” when he needs help finding them. He waters the plant we named Fred, and I bring up the mail.
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Greer Hendricks (You Are Not Alone)
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was a child. When someone needed a ride and didn’t have a boat available, they called Dick. He charged twenty bucks, a twelve-pack of beer, or a fifth of vodka. Cate paid cash. His thirty-year-old son, Adam, accompanied him these days and stared at Cate in a way that gave her the creeps. She stared back, and Adam finally had the grace to look away. Cate decided she’d never ride with Adam when he took over for his father in the future. “I brought over Dr. Powers,” answered Dick. “He’s the one who said to call the FBI. Kurt Olson from the sheriff’s office and a new deputy, Bruce Taylor, were already there.” Dick glanced over his shoulder at Cate. “You met Bruce or Dr. Powers yet?” “No.” She only knew Kurt. He’d been a deputy on Widow’s Island forever. “Bruce is young. Only been here a few months. From southern Oregon. Haven’t made up my mind about him yet,” Dick said, pulling at his beard. “Dr. Powers is a good guy. We’ve needed a doctor on the island since Dr. Hardy died three years ago. Tessa Black from the sheriff’s department shared his ride. Didn’t you two run around together when you were young? You know she’s a county deputy now, right?” “Yes.” Tessa had been like a sister to Cate while growing up. After nearly ten years of being a Seattle police officer and detective, Tessa had returned to Widow’s Island about a year and a half ago and joined the sheriff’s office. Cate had been back on the island for five days and still hadn’t contacted her good friend. Her grandmother had repeatedly pushed her to call Tessa, but Cate had dragged her feet, stating she needed more rest, and had firmly ordered her grandmother to keep this visit to the island under her hat. Cate wasn’t ready to face people. But tonight’s discovery gave her no choice. Trespassing teenage lovebirds had found the bones. The coroner—the new Dr. Powers—believed they belonged to a teenage female. Two years ago the FBI had conducted an investigation of a missing local girl, Becca Conan, with no results. Fourteen-year-old Becca was the daughter of Rex Conan, sole resident and current owner of Ruby’s Island. Now the FBI—meaning
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Kendra Elliot (Close to the Bone (Widow's Island #1))
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On 14 September 1869, one hundred years after his birth, Alexander von Humboldt’s centennial was celebrated across the world. There were parties in Europe, Africa and Australia as well as the Americas. In Melbourne and Adelaide people came together to listen to speeches in honour of Humboldt, as did groups in Buenos Aires and Mexico City. There were festivities in Moscow where Humboldt was called the ‘Shakespeare of sciences’, and in Alexandria in Egypt where guests partied under a sky illuminated with fireworks. The greatest commemorations were in the United States, where from San Francisco to Philadelphia, and from Chicago to Charleston, the nation saw street parades, sumptuous dinners and concerts. In Cleveland some 8,000 people took to the streets and in Syracuse another 15,000 joined a march that was more than a mile long. President Ulysses Grant attended the Humboldt celebrations in Pittsburgh together with 10,000 revellers who brought the city to a standstill. In New York City the cobbled streets were lined with flags. City Hall was veiled in banners, and entire houses had vanished behind huge posters bearing Humboldt’s face. Even the ships sailing by, out on the Hudson River, were garlanded in colourful bunting. In the morning thousands of people followed ten music bands, marching from the Bowery and along Broadway to Central Park to honour a man ‘whose fame no nation can claim’ as the New York Times’s front page reported. By early afternoon, 25,000 onlookers had assembled in Central Park to listen to the speeches as a large bronze bust of Humboldt was unveiled. In the evening as darkness settled, a torchlight procession of 15,000 people set out along the streets, walking beneath colourful Chinese lanterns. Let us imagine him, one speaker said, ‘as standing on the Andes’ with his mind soaring above all. Every speech across the world emphasized that Humboldt had seen an ‘inner correlation’ between all aspects of nature. In Boston, Emerson told the city’s grandees that Humboldt was ‘one of those wonders of the world’. His fame, the Daily News in London reported, was ‘in some sort bound up with the universe itself’. In Germany there were festivities in Cologne, Hamburg, Dresden, Frankfurt and many other cities. The greatest German celebrations were in Berlin, Humboldt’s hometown, where despite torrential rain 80,000 people assembled. The authorities had ordered offices and all government agencies to close for the day. As the rain poured down and gusts chilled the air, the speeches and singing nonetheless continued for hours.
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Andrea Wulf (The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World)
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Adm. James Loy, commandant, U.S. Coast Guard: Maybe the fourth or fifth day, it dawned on me that the church at the end of Wall Street, Trinity Church, was within spitting distance of the Tower site and was part of the rest of the city that was deluged in debris. I sat in my office for a second and said, “Alexander Hamilton is buried in that cemetery.” He’s considered the founder of the modern-day Coast Guard because he established its predecessor, the Revenue Cutter Service. I couldn’t stand the notion that he and his headstone were probably inundated with debris. I called Master Chief Vince Patton into the office and I said, “Vince, I need you to get some senior enlisted folks from the captain of the Port of New York’s office. I know they’re up to their ass in alligators right now, but we’ve got to go fix that.” He got a senior chief in New York on the phone. They went and began the cleanup of the entire Trinity Church yard. The word got out to the Trade Center site, and people, after finishing their unbelievably difficult work for a 12-hour cycle, came over and joined with these Coast Guard people to finish the job. I was damned if I could go to sleep that night without doing something about it.
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Garrett M. Graff (The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11)
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Quoting page 85: The OCR [Office for Civil Rights] in the early 1970s in effect experienced an internal capture shift. The black agenda activists who had dominated the office between 1965 and 1970 were joined and to some extend displaced by a new cadre of Latino activists. Not content with the transitional model of bilingual education, which used native-language instruction as a bridge to English language proficiency, the Latino nationalists called for Spanish-based cultural maintenance programs of indefinite duration. La Raza Unida’s 1967 founding statement captured the Chicano spirit of cultural nationalism and linguistic ethnocentrism: “The time of subjugation, exploitation, and abuse of human rights of La Raza in the United States is hereby ended forever,” the manifesto proclaimed. “[We] affirm the magnificence of La Raza, the greatness of our heritage, our history, our language, our traditions, our contributions to humanity and culture.
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Hugh Davis Graham (Collision Course: The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America)
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Returning to New York City, Martí held a number of diplomatic positions for various Latin American countries and again wrote editorials for Spanish-language newspapers. Many considered Martí to be the greatest Latin American intellectual of the time. He published his newspaper Patria as the voice of Cuban Independence. While in the United States, he wrote several acclaimed volumes of poetry and along with other friends in exile, he spent time planning his return to Cuba. During the following year in 1892, he traveled throughout Central America, the Caribbean and the United States raising funds at various Cuban clubs. His first attempt to launch the revolution, with a few followers, was drastically underfunded and failed. However, the following year with more men and additional backing, he tried again. Although he admired and visited America in the interim, he feared that the United States would annex Cuba before his revolution could liberate the country from Spain.
With small skirmishes, the Cuban War of Independence started on February 24, 1895. Marti’s plan for a second attempt at freeing Cuba included convincing Major General Máximo Gómez y Báez and Major General Antonio de la Caridad Maceo y Grajales, as well as several other revolutionary heroes of the Ten Years’ War, to join him. Together they launched a three-pronged invasion in April of 1895. With bands of exiles, they landed separately, using small boats. The main assault was on the south coast of Oriente Province, where their objective was to take and hold the higher ground. During this maneuver Martí was directed by the commanding officer General Máximo Gómez to remain with the rearguard, since he would be much more useful to the revolution alive than dead. However Martí, exercising his usual exuberance, took the lead and was instantly killed during one of the first skirmishes. Thus, he met his death on May 19, 1895, fighting regular Spanish troops at the Battle of Dos Ríos just north of Santiago de Cuba, at the relatively young age of 42.”
José Martí remains revered as a hero by the people of Cuba regardless of politics!
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Hank Bracker
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Over the years, as it became my responsibility to evaluate and hire new people for my unit, I developed a profile of what I wanted in a profiler. At first, I went for strong academic credentials, figuring an understanding of psychology and organized criminology was most important. But I came to realize degrees and academic knowledge weren’t nearly as important as experience and certain subjective qualities. We have the facilities to fill in any educational gaps through fine programs at the University of Virginia and the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. What I started looking for was “right-brained,” creative-type thinkers. There are many positions within the FBI and law enforcement in general where engineering or accounting types do the best, but in profiling and investigative analysis, that kind of thinker would probably have some difficulty. Contrary to the impression given in such stories as The Silence of the Lambs, we don’t pluck candidates for the Investigative Support Unit right out of the Academy. Since our first book, Mindhunter was published, I’ve had many letters from young men and women who say they want to go into behavioral science in the FBI and join the profiling team at Quantico. It doesn’t work quite that way. First you get accepted by the Bureau, then you prove yourself in the field as a first-rate, creative investigator, then we recruit you for Quantico. And then you’re ready for two years of intensive, specialized training before you become a full-fledged member of the unit. A good profiler must first and foremost show imagination and creativity in investigation. He or she must be willing to take risks while still maintaining the respect and confidence of fellow agents and law enforcement officers. Our preferred candidates will show leadership, won’t wait for a consensus before offering an opinion, will be persuasive in a group setting but tactful in helping to put a flawed investigation back on track. For these reasons, they must be able to work both alone and in groups.
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John E. Douglas (Journey Into Darkness (Mindhunter #2))
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Raskob decided to enter the world of New York real estate and give his pal a job as the head of the undertaking. Raskob convinced some of his wealthy friends, including Pierre S. du Pont, to join him in a syndicate, and they negotiated with Chatham Phenix for the Waldorf-Astoria site. They were the mysterious prospective buyers whose interest in the site had been floated. By all accounts, they got the property for a song—$16 or $17 million. On August 29, 1929, the same day the city announced that Second Avenue would be the site for the next subway line, former governor Al Smith lived up to a promise made months before to newspaper reporters to announce his business plans. From his suite in the Hotel Biltmore, surrounded by trappings of his former office, Smith announced the creation of a company that would build a thousand-foot-high eighty-
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John Tauranac (The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark)
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He was walking over toward the West Side, aimlessly at first, and then at times with the longing to do something to save those mistaken men from themselves forming itself into a purpose. Was not that what she meant when she bewailed her woman's helplessness? She must have wished him to try if he, being a man, could not do something; or if she did not, still he would try, and if she heard of it she would recall what she had said and would be glad he had understood her so. Thinking of her pleasure in what he was going to do, he forgot almost what it was; but when he came to a street-car track he remembered it, and looked up and down to see if there were any turbulent gathering of men whom he might mingle with and help to keep from violence. He saw none anywhere; and then suddenly, as if at the same moment, for in his exalted mood all events had a dream-like simultaneity, he stood at the corner of an avenue, and in the middle of it, a little way off, was a street-car, and around the car a tumult of shouting, cursing, struggling men. The driver was lashing his horses forward, and a policeman was at their heads, with the conductor, pulling them; stones, clubs, brickbats hailed upon the car, the horses, the men trying to move them. The mob closed upon them in a body, and then a patrol-wagon whirled up from the other side, and a squad of policemen leaped out and began to club the rioters. Conrad could see how they struck them under the rims of their hats; the blows on their skulls sounded as if they had fallen on stone; the rioters ran in all directions.
One of the officers rushed up toward the corner where Conrad stood, and then he saw at his side a tall, old man, with a long, white beard, who was calling out at the policemen: "Ah, yes! Glup the strikerss—gif it to them! Why don't you co and glup the bresidents that insoalt your lawss, and gick your Boart of Arpidration out-of-toors? Glup the strikerss—they cot no friendts! They cot no money to pribe you, to dreat you!"
The officer lifted his club, and the old man threw his left arm up to shield his head. Conrad recognized Lindau, and now he saw the empty sleeve dangle in the air over the stump of his wrist. He heard a shot in that turmoil beside the car, and something seemed to strike him in the breast. He was going to say to the policeman: "Don't strike him! He's an old soldier! You see he has no hand!" but he could not speak, he could not move his tongue. The policeman stood there; he saw his face: it was not bad, not cruel; it was like the face of a statue, fixed, perdurable—a mere image of irresponsible and involuntary authority. Then Conrad fell forward, pierced through the heart by that shot fired from the car.
March heard the shot as he scrambled out of his car, and at the same moment he saw Lindau drop under the club of the policeman, who left him where he fell and joined the rest of the squad in pursuing the rioters. The fighting round the car in the avenue ceased; the driver whipped his horses into a gallop, and the place was left empty.
March would have liked to run; he thought how his wife had implored him to keep away from the rioting; but he could not have left Lindau lying there if he would. Something stronger than his will drew him to the spot, and there he saw Conrad, dead beside the old man.
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William Dean Howells (A Hazard of New Fortunes (Modern Library Classics))
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A day before the scheduled departure, Captains Kobzar and Zhuravin received another jolt. It was an even more drastic deviation from operational protocol than being rushed back into service ahead of schedule. The submarine’s crew roster had already been filled with replacements, and they had been introduced to the section officers they would serve. Since these replacements were from other submarines stationed at the base, they were quickly integrated into the regular crew. The new men were assigned to their duty sections, shifts, and bunk schedules. With the replacements, all work assignments were covered for the upcoming mission. Then, without explanation, eleven strangers, all in the uniforms of Soviet sailors, showed up at the pier where K-129 was berthed. They carried written orders to join the crew. The latecomers, including nine in the uniform of common seamen and one wearing the insignia of a seaman first class, were led by a chief petty officer. The chief produced orders assigning this squad to duty aboard Kobzar’s submarine as temporary replacements for his furloughed key senior enlisted men. These last-minute assignments were especially unusual, because their numbers raised the crew total to ninety-eight, fifteen over the normal complement of eighty-three men.
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Kenneth Sewell (Red Star Rogue: The Untold Story of a Soviet Submarine's Nuclear Strike Attempt on the U.S.)
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On the morning of the twelfth day, as we were approaching New York harbor, most of the passengers rushed to get a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty. The Lady meant different things to different people: leaving the violence of war behind, seeing loved ones, renewing old friendships, love of country, victory, patriotism, even a return to bigotry. But for a few minutes most of us were joined in tilting a small ship, without discord, in order to see a statue that meant we were home.
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Charity Adams Earley (One Woman's Army: A Black Officer Remembers the WAC (Texas A & M University Military History Series, #12))