Key West Quotes

There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo.

I saw what a mess a lot of people could make of their lives when they're smitten. Some of them go temporarily insane. They find a person who they think holds the key to their happiness-the only key to their happiness... My work has always been my greatest happiness

I remember watching an episode of The West Wing about education in America, which the majority of people rightfully believe is the key to opportunity. In it, the fictional president debates whether he should push school vouchers (giving public money to schoolchildren so that they escape failing public schools) or instead focus exclusively on fixing those same failing schools. That debate is important, of course—for a long time, much of my failing school district qualified for vouchers—but it was striking that in an entire discussion about why poor kids struggled in school, the emphasis rested entirely on public institutions. As a teacher at my old high school told me recently, “They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves.

The plum-colored night sky was shifting to pink to make room for the day, which looked as though it might turn out “glorious and whimsical,” as the Key West Citizen had promised.

I’d love to try to sell a blank white canvas to an art dealer. And when he asks what it is, I’d tell him, “It’s a landscape painting of Key West, from the perspective of an optimistic blind man.

If you don't believe it, go down to your local karaoke bar on a busy night. Wait until the third hour, when the drunk frat boys and gastropub waitresses with headshots are all done with Backstreet Boys and Alicia Keys and locate the slightly older Asian businessman standing patiently in line for his turn, his face warmly rouged on Crown or Japanese lager, and when he steps up and starts slaying "Country Roads," try not to laugh, or wink knowingly or clap a little too hard, because by the time he gets to "West Virginia, mountain mama," you're going to be singing along, and by the time he's done, you might understand why a seventy-seven-year-old guy from a tiny island in the Taiwan Strait who's been in a foreign country for two-thirds of his life can nail a song, note perfect, about wanting to go home.

A fallow mind is a field of discontent.

I tucked the keys into my pocket so they wouldn’t jingle and rushed back outside. Once out, I picked up my pace to a run. I was not a runner. I did not like to run. But I ran like I meant it. Maybe I should’ve joined the cross-country team after all because I wasn’t half bad at this. For about one stretch of sidewalk. By the time I made it to the Science building, I had cursed not only the entire cross-country team, but the sport as a whole. I had a cramp that was sending a painful jolt up my side and I could barely breathe.

Okay, okay, already," I said, holding up both hands in an I-surrender sort of gesture. "I'll try it your way from now on. I'll do the touchy-feely stuff. Jeez. You West Coasters. It's all backrubs and avocado sandwiches with you guys, isn't it?

He Sat in the window thinking. Man has a tropism for order. Keys in one pocket, change in the other. Mandolins are tuned G D A E. The physical world has a tropism for disorder, entropy. Man against Nature...the battle of the centuries. Keys yearn to mix with change. Mandolins strive to get out of tune. Every order has within it the germ of destruction. All order is doomed, yet the battle is worth wile.

The key to having a good day is to eliminate everything from your life that causes you stress.

my family's going to eat as long as anybody eats. What they're trying to do is starve you Conchs out of here so they can burn down the shacks and put up apartments and make this a tourist town. That's what I hear. I hear they're buying up lots, and then after the poor people are starved out and gone somewhere else to starve some more they're going to come in and make it into a beauty spot for tourists.

People ask how you’re doing, but they don’t really want to know if you’re struggling or not; they want the answer that enables them to go about their day without feeling guilty.

Give me the keys.

Westereners often think that the East is one vast Buddhist temple, which is rather like thinking the West is one vast Carthusian monastery. If the [Western people who like Buddhism] were to visit the East, he'd certainly experience many new things, but he'd find first, that the food is under lock and key and second, that humans are considered to be a miserable, destructive, greedy lot, just as they are in the West.

The Idea of Order at Key West She sang beyond the genius of the sea. The water never formed to mind or voice, Like a body wholly body, fluttering Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry, That was not ours although we understood, Inhuman, of the veritable ocean. The sea was not a mask. No more was she. The song and water were not medleyed sound Even if what she sang was what she heard, Since what she sang was uttered word by word. It may be that in all her phrases stirred The grinding water and the gasping wind; But it was she and not the sea we heard. For she was the maker of the song she sang. The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea Was merely a place by which she walked to sing. Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew It was the spirit that we sought and knew That we should ask this often as she sang. If it was only the dark voice of the sea That rose, or even colored by many waves; If it was only the outer voice of sky And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled, However clear, it would have been deep air, The heaving speech of air, a summer sound Repeated in a summer without end And sound alone. But it was more than that, More even than her voice, and ours, among The meaningless plungings of water and the wind, Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres Of sky and sea. It was her voice that made The sky acutest at its vanishing. She measured to the hour its solitude. She was the single artificer of the world In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea, Whatever self it had, became the self That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we, As we beheld her striding there alone, Knew that there never was a world for her Except the one she sang and, singing, made. Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know, Why, when the singing ended and we turned Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights, The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there, As the night descended, tilting in the air, Mastered the night and portioned out the sea, Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles, Arranging, deepening, enchanting night. Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon, The maker's rage to order words of the sea, Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred, And of ourselves and of our origins, In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds

When they lived in Key West Justin thought the Everything lived in the ocean. Sometimes he thought the ocean was God. But if the Everything lives anywhere, it's in a river. Because the river moves along and touches every little thing on it's way. An he thinks the Everything would be quiet like a river. Event still sometimes. The ocean is always moving and noisy. The sky's always changing. But rivers are always there, even when the water has moved on. You've got to find the Everything wherever you are.

if there is any part of our lives that we haven’t turned over to Christ, the devil reminds him, ‘No, that one isn’t totally yours. I still have this patch of ground here.’ “Jesus is totally committed to us. And until we learn to be totally surrendered to him, we’ll never find the joy of what it means to fully belong to him. That is the key to every believer’s life — full ownership by Christ. Everything we are and want to be belong to him. “The Lord wants to have ownership of your life. If there is anything hindering this from happening, I invite you to come forward now and lay it before Christ.

You can live a fair share of adventures in other people’s stories.

For a man to find true freedom, he must free himself from the grip of his fears.

The imprisonment of impossible love is a comfort zone I have never mustered the courage to escape.

You can’t train a monkey to show character in times of peril, to be selfless, to be kind when there’s no percentage in it, or to exercise pride without haughtiness.

The day we stop fighting for others is the day we might as well pack it all up and go home.

Natives of the Florida Keys often refer to themselves as Conchs, and for good reason: They have been drinking.

At thirty-seven, in Key West, Ernest Hemingway badly marked up Wallace Stevens’ face in a never fully explained fistfight. Stevens was fifty-seven when it happened.

One of the things Key West teaches is that disappointment and contentment can go together more easily than you would probably imagine.

13 words: "Where the Hudson takes a hard right, West Point teaches the Harder Right." W. Bahr, USMA '69 © 2014 After the Hudson’s hard left, what happens next, "right" at Trophy Point?

When I pointed out this fallacy in her thought process, however, all she said was, “Just do it,” only not the way they say it in Nike ads. She said it the way the Wicked Witch of the West said it to the winged monkeys when she sent them out to kill Dorothy and her little dog, too.

I am still vaguely haunted by our hitchhiker’s remark about how he’d “never rode in a convertible before.” Here’s this poor geek living in a world of convertibles zipping past him on the highways all the time, and he’s never even ridden in one. It made me feel like King Farouk. I was tempted to have my attorney pull into the next airport and arrange some kind of simple, common-law contract whereby we could just give the car to this unfortunate bastard. Just say: “Here, sign this and the car’s yours.” Give him the keys and then use the credit card to zap off on a jet to some place like Miami and rent another huge fireapple-red convertible for a drug-addled, top-speed run across the water all the way out to the last stop in Key West … and then trade the car off for a boat. Keep moving. But this manic notion passed quickly. There was no point in getting this harmless kid locked up—and, besides, I had plans for this car. I was looking forward to flashing around Las Vegas in the bugger. Maybe do a bit of serious drag-racing on the Strip: Pull up to that big stoplight in front of the Flamingo and start screaming at the traffic: “Alright, you chickenshit wimps! You pansies! When this goddamn light flips green, I’m gonna stomp down on this thing and blow every one of you gutless punks off the road!” Right. Challenge the bastards on their own turf. Come screeching up to the crosswalk, bucking and skidding with a bottle of rum in one hand and jamming the horn to drown out the music … glazed eyes insanely dilated behind tiny black, gold-rimmed greaser shades, screaming gibberish … a genuinely dangerous drunk, reeking of ether and terminal psychosis. Revving the engine up to a terrible high-pitched chattering whine, waiting for the light to change … How often does a chance like that come around? To jangle the bastards right down to the core of their spleens. Old elephants limp off to the hills to die; old Americans go out to the highway and drive themselves to death with huge cars.

Truman, Acheson knew, was far more sentimental than generally known, or than he wished people to know, far more touched by gestures that to many might seem routine. On board his plane later in the year, bound again for Key West, he would write Acheson a brief longhand note marked and underscored “Personal.” It was good of you to see us off. You always do the right thing. I’m still a farm boy and when the Secretary of State of the greatest Republic comes to the airport to see me off on a vacation, I can’t help but swell up a little. “And then he was so fair,” Acheson would say. “He didn’t make different decisions with different people. He called everyone together. You were all heard and you all got the answer together. He was a square dealer all the way through.

In the new world order of the Wise Men of the West—the most powerful of the Genuine Globalists—the rights and freedoms of the individual would be based on positive law: that is, on laws passed by a majority of those who will be entitled to vote on the various levels of the new system of governmental administration and local organization. Ultimate rule, however, will be far removed from the ordinary individual.

Let Jordan take the West Bank, let Egypt take Gaza. Let them deal with it. Or sink trying. The Saudis are on the brink, Egyptians are on the brink, all scared to death of Persia . . . Yemen, Sinai, Libya . . . this thing is bad. . . . That’s why Russia is so key. . . . Is Russia that bad? They’re bad guys. But the world is full of bad guys.” Bannon offered all this with something like ebullience—a man remaking the world.

Man is a thinking reed,” D. T. Suzuki, one of the early popularizers of Buddhism in the West, once said, “but his great works are done when he is not calculating and thinking. ‘Childlikeness’ has to be restored with long years of training in the art of self-forgetfulness. When this is attained, man thinks yet he does not think.

philosophers in the West often trained in wrestling and boxing,

Cooks are dashing, improvisational, wayward, intuitive; bakers are measured, careful, rational, precise.” —Diana Abu-Jaber

People are a mystery, and the second you think you have them figured out, they surprise you.

hate to tell you, but there’s no such thing as a ‘right time’ in life. Things happen when they need to happen. The rest sort of falls into place.

Maybe a man loses his right to be called a husband when he raises his fists to someone he should be protecting.

Life happens whether you’re worrying about it or not, and it seems presumptuous to think we have much of a say in how things play out.

You have reached the home and workplace of Roberto Natchez. I do not often take calls. I make no promise to return them. I have much to do. You may leave a message if you wish.

The fucking you get ain't worth the fucking you get.

Seems to me it sailed out of Cartagena in one of the early 1700 fleets, but it was recorded as lost to piracy. Absolutely one of the significant lost treasures of that era.

Names are keys that open corridors no longer fresh in the mind, but nonetheless familiar in the heart.

We are defined by what we do for others, by our relationships, by what we have to offer.

In a world that has done all it can to erase or obscure the civilizational memory of the West, remembering becomes a moral obligation, and a key to recovering our sanity.

When a marriage works, it is in no small part because a woman and a man have come to recognize in precise measure when enough has been said.

Art happens when a person of talent is seized with nervous energy and discovers that he or she has nothing to do except create.

There's spring on the west coast of Florida, but it only stops for a cup of coffee before heading north to do the heavy work.

Trust your instincts, follow your bliss, make plans, work hard, learn to let things go. Don’t be late. Remember that fortune favors the brave. Live. If you need to run, try and run toward something. Study for tests. Laugh at silly cartoons. Be organized. If you fall seven times, get up eight. Always carry an extra pen. Believe you can do everything. Find your key.

There's a look that two people share when it is inevitable that they're becoming lovers; that they've become lovers, in spirit if not yet in deed. The look is the bond that sex confirms.

Judy Blume spent her childhood in Elizabeth, New Jersey, making up stories inside her head. She has spent her adult years in many places, doing the same thing, only now she writes her stories down on paper. Her twenty-seven books have won many awards, including the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Judy lives in Key West and New

The world has expectations of you, of how you shoulder your burdens with grace, of the role you play.... We are defined by what we do for others, by our relationships, by what we have to offer.

George Lucas, go fuck yourself. I hope you’re dead. I hope a fuckin‘ zombie busted in your house and knocked over your golden Yoda statue right onto your once creative head. These movies are terrible.” An

It’s strange how quickly everything can change. How your life can be on one path, and suddenly, you’re on a completely different one with little to no warning at all, ill-prepared for the challenges ahead.

The guy stood a yard inside the dark room and waited, blinking, letting his eyes adjust to the gloom after the hot whiteness of the Key West sun. It was June, dead-on four o’clock in the afternoon, the southernmost part of the United States. Way farther south than most of the Bahamas. A hot white sun and a fierce temperature. Reacher sat at his table in back and sipped water from a plastic bottle and waited.

Most symphonies, however, are wordless. They are built only of tones, nonlinguistic sounds vibrating in the air, and somehow, we take them to heart and feel that they speak to us more deeply than words ever could. Cultures make up certain rules for music that we learn without even recognizing them; for example, in the West, we have decided that music in minor keys tends to sound sad or anxious, while music in major keys conveys confidence, triumph. Other cultures have made other decisions.

Most people think the Lego corporation assembled a crack team of world-class experts to engineer Mini-Florida on a computer, but I’m not buying it.” “You aren’t?” asked Coleman. “It’s way too good.” Serge pointed at a two-story building in Key West. “Examine the meticulous green shutters on Hemingway’s house. No, my money is on a lone-wolf manic type like the famous Latvian Edward Leedskalnin, who single-handedly built the Coral Castle back in the twenties. He operated in secret, moving multi-ton hewn boulders south of Miami, and nobody knows how he did it. Probably happened here as well: The Lego people conducting an exhaustive nationwide search among the obsessive-compulsive community. But they had to be selective and stay away from the ones whose entire houses are filled to the ceiling with garbage bags of their own hair. Then they most likely found some cult guru living in a remote Lego ashram south of Pueblo with nineteen wives, offered him unlimited plastic blocks and said, ‘Knock yourself out.

The West is and will remain for years to come the most powerful civilization. Yet its power relative to that of other civilizations is declining. As the West attempts to assert its values and to protect its interests, non-Western societies confront a choice. Some attempt to emulate the West and to join or to "bandwagon" with the West. Other Confucian and Islamic societies attempt to expand their own economic and military power to resist and to "balance" against the West. A central axis of post--Cold War world politics is thus the interaction of Western power and culture with the power and culture of non-Western civilizations. In sum, the post--Cold War world is a world of seven or eight major civilizations. Cultural commonalities and differences shape the interests, antagonisms, and associations of states. The most important countries in the world come overwhelmingly from different civilizations. The local conflicts most likely to escalate into broader wars are those between groups and states from different civilizations. The predominant patterns of political and economic development differ from civilization to civilization. The key issues on the international agenda involve differences among civilizations. Power is shifting from the long predominant West to non-Western civilizations. Global politics has become multipolar and multicivilizational.

have a war memorial of my own at Greenway. In the library, which was their mess-room, an artist has done a fresco round the top of the walls. It depicts all the places where that flotilla went, starting at Key West, Bermuda, Nassau, Morocco, and so on, finally ending with a slightly glorified exaggeration of the woods of Greenway and the white house showing through the trees. Beyond that again is an exquisite nymph, not quite finished–a pin-up girl in the nude–which I have always supposed to represent the hopes of houris at journey’s end when the

As to the time factor involved, those of us who are under seventy will see at least the basic structures of the new world government installed. Those of us under forty will surely live under its legislative, executive and judiciary authority and control. Indeed, the three rivals themselves—and many more besides as time goes on—speak about this new world order not as something around a distant corner of time, but as something that is imminent. As a system that will be introduced and installed in our midst by the end of this final decade of the second millennium.

Arin undid the ring, slipped off two keys, and set them in Kestrel’s hand. “These are for your suite. Keep them.” She gazed at the dull metal on her palm. She recognized one key. The other…“Is this one for the garden door?” “Yes, but”--Arin looked away--“you wouldn’t want to use it.” Kestrel had guessed that Arin lived in the west wing suite, and that it had been his father’s as hers had been his mother’s. But it wasn’t until then that she understood what the two gardens were for: a way for husband and wife to visit each other without the entire household knowing.

At the end of 2006, people concerned with the “Cat” article could not agree on whether a human with a cat is its “owner,” “caregiver,” or “human companion.” Over a three-week period, the argument extended to the length of a small book. There were edit wars over commas and edit wars over gods, futile wars over spelling and pronunciation and geopolitical disputes. Other edit wars exposed the malleability of words. Was the Conch Republic (Key West, Florida) a “micronation”? Was a particular photograph of a young polar bear “cute”? Experts differed, and everyone was an expert.

It made me feel like King Farouk. I was tempted to have my attorney pull into the next airport and arrange some kind of simple, common-law contract whereby we could just give the car to this unfortunate bastard. Just say: “Here, sign this and the car’s yours.” Give him the keys and then use the credit card to zap off on a jet to some place like Miami and rent another huge fireapple-red convertible for a drug-addled, top-speed run across the water all the way out to the last stop in Key West … and then trade the car off for a boat. Keep moving. But this manic notion passed quickly.

The Soviet Constitution provides a key to the understanding of Soviet psychiatry. In the West, our tradition of human rights pits the citizen against the State. Very occasionally, a politician will, like John Kennedy, ask us to think what we can do for our country. But, in general, we have rights without any major duties other than the duty to obey the law. If I wish to live as a tramp or to devote my life to a study of butterflies, it’s my business and my right to do so as long as I hurt no one else. The Soviet constitution proclaims a rather different relationship. The citizen is meant to be a productive member of the socialist community. If I choose to be a tramp or butterfly-maniac, I am hurting others because I am depriving the State of my labour. This is not necessarily bad, just odd given Western traditions. But being a ‘parasite’ is an actual crime much like being a vagrant was in Tudor England.

For my friend Fong,” he says, and begins singing John Denver. If you didn’t know it already, now you do: old dudes from rural Taiwan are comfortable with their karaoke and when they do karaoke for some reason they love no one like they love John Denver. Maybe it’s the dream of the open highway. The romantic myth of the West. A reminder that these funny little Orientals have actually been Americans longer than you have. Know something about this country that you haven’t yet figured out. If you don’t believe it, go down to your local karaoke bar on a busy night. Wait until the third hour, when the drunk frat boys and gastropub waitresses with headshots are all done with Backstreet Boys and Alicia Keys and locate the slightly older Asian businessman standing patiently in line for his turn, his face warmly rouged on Crown or Japanese lager, and when he steps up and starts slaying “Country Roads,” try not to laugh, or wink knowingly or clap a little too hard, because by the time he gets to “West Virginia, mountain mama,” you’re going to be singing along, and by the time he’s done, you might understand why a seventy-seven-year-old guy from a tiny island in the Taiwan Strait who’s been in a foreign country for two-thirds of his life can nail a song, note perfect, about wanting to go home.

Fear is a strange thing. There are several kinds, from mild trepidation and sweaty armpits, to shaky hands and stuttering, but the worst is the cold fear of uncertainty, the specter in the darkness — the one you can’t exactly see, the one that drives your imagination wild, crawls into your intestines, and digs at you with tiny, mean claws.

young people at Western schools and universities have been given the idea of a liberal education, without the substance of historical knowledge. They have been taught isolated ‘modules’, not narratives, much less chronologies. They have been trained in the formulaic analysis of document excerpts, not in the key skill of reading widely and fast.

It seems crazy, but it isn’t. “Man is a thinking reed,” D. T. Suzuki, one of the early popularizers of Buddhism in the West, once said, “but his great works are done when he is not calculating and thinking. ‘Childlikeness’ has to be restored with long years of training in the art of self-forgetfulness. When this is attained, man thinks yet he does not think.

None of the Asian countries that have moved closer to the developed countries of the West in recent years has benefited from large foreign investments, whether it be Japan, South Korea, or Taiwan and more recently China. In essence, all of these countries themselves financed the necessary investments in physical capital and, even more, in human capital, which the latest research holds to be the key to long-term growth.35 Conversely, countries owned by other countries, whether in the colonial period or in Africa today, have been less successful, most notably because they have tended to specialize in areas without much prospect of future development and because they have been subject to chronic political instability.

Trust your instincts, follow your bliss, make plans, work hard, learn to let things go. Don’t be late. Remember that fortune favors the brave. Live. If you need to run, try and run toward something. Study for tests. Laugh at silly cartoons. Be organized. If you fall seven times, get up eight. Always carry an extra pen. Believe you can do everything. Find your key.

remember watching an episode of The West Wing about education in America, which the majority of people rightfully believe is the key to opportunity. In it, the fictional president debates whether he should push school vouchers (giving public money to schoolchildren so that they escape failing public schools) or instead focus exclusively on fixing those same failing schools. That debate is important, of course—for a long time, much of my failing school district qualified for vouchers—but it was striking that in an entire discussion about why poor kids struggled in school, the emphasis rested entirely on public institutions. As a teacher at my old high school told me recently, “They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves.

None of the Asian countries that have moved closer to the developed countries of the West in recent years has benefited from large foreign investments, whether it be Japan, South Korea, or Taiwan and more recently China. In essence, all of these countries themselves financed the necessary investments in physical capital and, even more, in human capital, which the latest research holds to be the key to long-term growth.

am not making any predictions, but the Bible seems to indicate that instead of the Palestinians taking over the West Bank, the Israelis will in due course establish some kind of governmental control over the East Bank. You may say, “That is not what the experts anticipate.” Frankly, that does not disturb me! There is no situation in modern history about which the “experts” have been so consistently wrong as the reestablishment of Israel.

Glancing around the entrance hall, she realized the crate was no longer in the corner. The twins must have raced downstairs the moment it had been mentioned. Clutching it on either side, they lugged it furtively toward the receiving room. "Girls," Kathleen said sharply, "bring that back here at once!" But it was too late. The receiving room's double doors closed, accompanied by the click of a key turning in the lock. Kathleen stopped short, her jaw slackening. West and Helen staggered together, overcome with hilarity. "I'll have you know," Mrs. Church said in amazement, "it took our two stoutest footmen to bring that crate into the house. How did two young ladies manage to carry it away so quickly?" "Sh-sheer determination," Helen wheezed. "All I want in this life," West told Kathleen, "is to see you try to pry that crate away from those two." "I wouldn't dare," she replied, giving up. "They would do me bodily harm.

... you know what was really messing me up when I got down there to Pittsburgh? Was how young he seemed. He kept asking me things like what did I think of Kanye West's music, and did I think he should hold on to Kevin Garnett in this fantasy basketball league he was in or trade him. And how he wasn't just in this league; he was commissioner of it. Like that was some big mark of distinction: commissioner of make-believe. And I wanted to slam him, one-handed, against the wall, the way he used to do to me, and scream in his face, 'Stop it! Act your age!' ... I didn't do it, though. I wanted to, but I couldn't. 'Honor thy father,' you know what I'm saying? So instead, I grabbed my car keys, got out of there, and took off. It was messing with my head, you know? You get out of there alive, more or less, wait for your father to come see you at the hospital you're stuck at, and when you finally go to see him, he's younger than you are.

because, once the competition has been decided, the world and all that’s in it—our way of life as individuals and as citizens of the nations; our families and our jobs; our trade and commerce and money; our educational systems and our religions and our cultures; even the badges of our national identity, which most of us have always taken for granted—all will have been powerfully and radically altered forever. No one can be exempted from its effects. No sector of our lives will remain untouched.

We take the stairs down to the first level of the parking garage and I lead us toward the area reserved for doctors. She makes her way toward a black Audi, turns, and waits for me to join her. I smirk. “That’s not my car.” She nods. “Right, of course. I see it now.” She goes to a bright yellow Ferrari that belongs to one of the plastic surgeons. The vanity license plate reads: SXY DOC88. “Here we are.” “Not even close.” “Oh, okay. I get it. You aren’t flashy. Maybe that gray Range Rover over there?” I press the unlock button on my key fob and my rear lights flash. There she is, the car I’ve driven since I was in medical school. “You’re kidding. A Prius?! Satan himself drives a Prius?!” She turns around as if hoping to find someone else she can share this moment with. All she’s got is me. I shrug. “It gets good gas mileage.” She blinks exaggeratedly. “I couldn’t be more shocked if you’d hitched a horse to a buggy.” I chuckle and open the back door to toss in her backpack. “Get in. Traffic is going to be hell.” We buckle up in silence, back up and leave the parking garage in silence, pull out into traffic in silence. Finally, I ask, “Where do you live?” “On the west side. Right across from Franklin Park.” “Good. I have an errand I need to run that’s right by there. Mind if I do that before I drop you off?” “Well seeing as how you stole my backpack and forced me into your car, I don’t really think it matters what I want.” I see. She’s still pouting. That’s fine. “Good. Glad we’re on the same page.” She doesn’t think I’m funny.

For roughly thirty years, young people at Western schools and universities have been given the idea of a liberal education, without the substance of historical knowledge. They have been taught isolated ‘modules’, not narratives, much less chronologies. They have been trained in the formulaic analysis of document excerpts, not in the key skill of reading widely and fast. They have been encouraged to feel empathy with imagined Roman centurions or Holocaust victims, not to write essays about why and how their predicaments arose.

On thick-built men like Joe Mulvane, they tend to bind around the thighs, the back seam has an annoying tendency to crawl between the buttocks. When such men sit and lean forward, say, against a bar, the waistband of their trousers binds them in the belly, while at the base of their spines an unattractive gap appears and seems to tug their shirttails out as well as to create a natural channel for sweat to pour. A belt doesn't close the trench in back; it only presents a retaining wall that bites into the flesh below the navel.

The key stone of Westem civilization is the sphere of spontaneous action it secures to the individual. There have always been attempts to curb the individuais initiative, but the power of the persecutors and inquisitors has not been absolute. It could not prevent the rise of Greek philosophy and its Roman offshoot or the development of modem science and philosophy. Driven by their inborn genius, pioneers have accomplished their work in spite of ali hostility and opposition. The innovator did not have to wait for invitation or order from anybody. He could step forward of his own accord and defy traditional teachings. In the orbit of ideas the West has by and large always enjoyed the blessings of freedom. Then came the emancipation of the individual in the field of business, an achievement of that new branch of philosophy, economics. A free hand was given to the enterprising man who knew how to enrich his fellows by improving the methods of production. A horn of plenty was poured upon the common men by the capitalistic business principie of mass production for the satisfaction of the needs of the masses.

Furthermore, if we look at the historical record, it does not appear that capital mobility has been the primary factor promoting convergence of rich and poor nations. None of the Asian countries that have moved closer to the developed countries of the West in recent years has benefited from large foreign investments, whether it be Japan, South Korea, or Taiwan and more recently China. In essence, all of these countries themselves financed the necessary investments in physical capital and, even more, in human capital, which the latest research holds to be the key to long-term growth.

He moves through the white glare of a Key West afternoon in that curious, rolling, cantilevered, ball-of-the-foot, and just-off-kilter gait that suggests a kind of subtle menace. He’s on dense and narrow and aromatic streets bearing people’s first names—Olivia, Petronia, Thomas, Emma, Angela, Geraldine. He’s Tom Sawyer on a Saturday in Hannibal, tooting like a steamboat, rid now of Aunt Polly’s clutches, left to his own devices, not to show back home until the sun is slanting in long bars. He’s Jake Barnes on a spring morning in Paris, when the horse chestnut trees are in bloom in the Luxembourg gardens. Jake is expert at shortcutting down the Boul’Mich’ to the rue Soufflot, where he hops on the back platform of an S bus, and rides it to the Madeleine, and then jumps off and strolls along the boulevard des Capucines to l’Opéra, where he then turns in at his building and rides the elevator up to his office to read the mail and sit at the typewriter and prepare a few cables for his newspaper across the Atlantic. “There was the pleasant early-morning feel of a hot day,” is the way Jake’s creator, living in this different region of light, had said it at the start of chapter 5 of The Sun Also Rises.

WHODUNIT BY BRUCE TIERNEY | 838 words A slippery situation in the Gulf Black Horizon (Harper, $25.99, 384 pages, ISBN 9780062109880), the 11th book in James Grippando's popular series featuring Florida attorney Jack Swyteck, opens with the two most important words of the lawyer's life: "I do." (Ha, ha—you thought I was going to say, "Not guilty.") The beach wedding in scenic Key Largo goes wildly awry when an epic storm arises in the Gulf, launching manifold repercussions for Swyteck and his new bride. One of the victims of the storm is a young Cuban oil rig worker whose wife emigrated to the U.S. ahead of him. He had planned to follow, but the deadly combination of high winds and an explosive oil spill have put paid to those plans forever. Now his wife would like Swyteck to file a wrongful death suit against the Chinese/Russian/Venezuelan/Cuban consortium that owns the oil rig. This is no easy feat, since the rig is in Cuban waters, and the only tenuous tie to the U.S. legal system is the wife's residency in Key West. The situation is volatile; the adversaries are lethal; and the backdrop is a toxic oil slick poised to slime the Florida coast. Black Horizon is timely, relentlessly paced and a thrill ride of the first

In the long evenings in west Beirut, there was time enough to consider where the core of the tragedy lay. In the age of Assyrians, the Empire of Rome, in the 1860s perhaps? In the french mandate? In Auschwitz? In Palestine? In the rusting front-door keys now buried deep in the rubble of Chatila? In the 1978 Israeli invasion? In the 1982 invasion? Was there a point where one could have said: Stop, beyond this point there is no future? Did I witness the point of no return in 1976? That 12 year-old on the broken office chair in the ruins of the Beirut front line. Now he was in his mid-twenties - if he was still alive - a gunboy, no more. A gunman, no doubt...

Brian and Avis deliver their stacks and try to refuse dinner, but the waiters bring them glasses of burgundy, porcelain plates with thin, peppery steaks redolent of garlic, scoops of buttery grilled Brussels sprouts, and a salad of beets, walnuts, and Roquefort. They drag a couple of lawn chairs to a quiet spot on the street and they balance the plates on their laps. Some ingredient in the air reminds Avis of the rare delicious trips they used to make to the Keys. Ten years after they'd moved to Miami they'd left Stanley and Felice with family friends and Avis and Brian drove to Key West on a sort of second honeymoon. She remembers how the land dropped back into distance: wetlands, marsh, lazy-legged egrets flapping over the highway, tangled, sulfurous mangroves. And water. Steel-blue plains, celadon translucence. She and Brian had rented a vacation cottage in Old Town, ate small meals of fruit, cheese, olives, and crackers, swam in the warm, folding water. Each day stirring into the next, talking about nothing more complicated than the weather, spotting a shark off the pier, a mysterious constellation lowering in the west. Brian sheltered under a celery-green umbrella while Avis swam: the water formed pearls on the film of her sunscreen. They watched the night's rise, an immense black curtain from the ocean. Up and down the beach they hear the sounds of the outdoor bars, sandy patios switching on, distant strains of laughter, bursts of music. Someone played an instrument- quick runs of notes, arpeggios floating in soft ovals like soap bubbles over the darkening water.

I remember watching an episode of The West Wing about education in America, which the majority of people rightfully believe is the key to opportunity. In it, the fictional president debates whether he should push school vouchers (giving public money to schoolchildren so that they escape failing public schools) or instead focus exclusively on fixing those same failing schools. That debate is important, of course—for a long time, much of my failing school district qualified for vouchers—but it was striking that in an entire discussion about why poor kids struggled in school, the emphasis rested entirely on public institutions. As a teacher at my old high school told me recently, “They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves.” I don’t know what happened the day after

He pulled out a thick iron ring with dozens of keys. He turned it, staring as the keys slid and rang. Arin shut them up inside his fist. “My house,” he said thickly. He looked at Kestrel. “Keys can be copied.” His eyes pleaded with her. “I have no idea how many sets Irex’s family had. Cheat could have had this one, somehow, even before Firstwinter.” She saw how what he said might be true. She didn’t think anyone could fake the horror on Arin’s face when he first saw Kestrel on the floor. Or the way he looked now: as if what had happened to her was happening to him. “Believe me, Kestrel.” She did…and she didn’t. Arin undid the ring, slipped off two keys, and set them in Kestrel’s hand. “These are for your suite. Keep them.” She gazed at the dull metal on her palm. She recognized one key. The other…“Is this one for the garden door?” “Yes, but”--Arin looked away--“you wouldn’t want to use it.” Kestrel had guessed that Arin lived in the west wing suite, and that it had been his father’s as hers had been his mother’s. But it wasn’t until then that she understood what the two gardens were for: a way for husband and wife to visit each other without the entire household knowing. Kestrel stood, because Arin was standing and she had had enough of crouching on the floor. “Krestrel…” Arin’s question was something he clearly hated to ask. “How badly are you hurt?” “As you see.” Her eye was swelling shut, and the carpet had skinned her cheek raw. “My face. Nothing more.” “I could kill him a thousand times and still want to do it again.” She looked at Cheat’s slumped body as it soaked the carpet with blood. “Somebody had better clean that up. It won’t be me. I’m not your slave.” Quietly, he said, “You’re really not.” “I might believe you if you gave me the whole set of keys.” The corner of his mouth twitched. “Ah, but would you have any respect for my intelligence?

Professor Napier and his colleague Victor Clube, formerly dean of the Astrophysics Department at Oxford University, go so far as to describe the 'unique complex of debris' within the Taurid stream as 'the greatest collision hazard facing the earth at the present time.' Coordination of their findings with those of Allen West, Jim Kennett, and Richard Firestone, as led both teams--the geophysicists and the astronomers--to conclude that it was very likely objects from the then much younger Taurid meteor stream that hit the earth around 12,800 years ago and caused the onset of the Younger Dryas. These objects, orders of magnitude larger than the one that exploded over Tunguska, contained extraterrestrial platinum, and what the evidence from the Greenland ice cores seems to indicate is an epoch of 21 years in which the earth was hit every year, with the bombardments increasing annually in intensity until the fourteenth year, when they peaked and then began to decline before ceasing in the twenty-first year.

Alex Honnold, free solo climbing phenom: The Last of the Mohicans soundtrack Rolf Potts, author of Vagabonding and others: ambitones like The Zen Effect in the key of C for 30 minutes, made by Rolfe Kent, the composer of music for movies like Sideways, Wedding Crashers, and Legally Blonde Matt Mullenweg, lead developer of WordPress, CEO of Automattic: “Everyday” by A$AP Rocky and “One Dance” by Drake Amelia Boone, the world’s most successful female obstacle course racer: “Tonight Tonight” by the Smashing Pumpkins and “Keep Your Eyes Open” by NEEDTOBREATHE Chris Young, mathematician and experimental chef: Paul Oakenfold’s “Live at the Rojan in Shanghai,” Pete Tong’s Essential Mix Jason Silva, TV and YouTube philosopher: “Time” from the Inception soundtrack by Hans Zimmer Chris Sacca: “Harlem Shake” by Baauer and “Lift Off” by Jay Z and Kanye West, featuring Beyoncé. “I can bang through an amazing amount of email with the Harlem Shake going on in the background.” Tim Ferriss: Currently I’m listening to “Circulation” by Beats Antique and “Black Out the Sun” by Sevendust, depending on whether I need flow or a jumpstart.

But science, dominated by the spirit of religion is the key to progress and the hope of the future. For example, evolution's beautiful theory of the creation of the world offers many perplexing problems to the inquiring mind. Inevitably, a teacher who denies divine agency in creation, who insists there is no intelligent purpose in it, will infest the student with the thought that all may be chance. I say, that no youth should be so led without a counter balancing though. Even the skeptic teacher should be fair enough to see that even Charles Darwin, when he faced this great question of annihilation, that the creation is dominated only by chance wrote: "It is an intolerable thought than man and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long, continued slow progress." And another good authority, Raymond West, said, "Why this vast [expenditure] of time and pain and blood?" Why should man come so far if he's destined to go no farther? A creature that travels such distances and fought such battles and won such victories deserves what we are compelled to say, "To conquer death and rob the grave of its victory.

In May 1981, Yuri Andropov, chairman of the KGB, gathered his senior officers in a secret conclave to issue a startling announcement: America was planning to launch a nuclear first strike, and obliterate the Soviet Union. For more than twenty years, a nuclear war between East and West had been held at bay by the threat of mutually assured destruction, the promise that both sides would be annihilated in any such conflict, regardless of who started it. But by the end of the 1970s the West had begun to pull ahead in the nuclear arms race, and tense détente was giving way to a different sort of psychological confrontation, in which the Kremlin feared it could be destroyed and defeated by a preemptive nuclear attack. Early in 1981, the KGB carried out an analysis of the geopolitical situation, using a newly developed computer program, and concluded that “the correlation of world forces” was moving in favor of the West. Soviet intervention in Afghanistan was proving costly, Cuba was draining Soviet funds, the CIA was launching aggressive covert action against the USSR, and the US was undergoing a major military buildup: the Soviet Union seemed to be losing the Cold War, and, like a boxer exhausted by long years of sparring, the Kremlin feared that a single, brutal sucker punch could end the contest. The KGB chief’s conviction that the USSR was vulnerable to a surprise nuclear attack probably had more to do with Andropov’s personal experience than rational geopolitical analysis. As Soviet ambassador to Hungary in 1956, he had witnessed how quickly an apparently powerful regime might be toppled. He had played a key role in suppressing the Hungarian Uprising. A dozen years later, Andropov again urged “extreme measures” to put down the Prague Spring. The “Butcher of Budapest” was a firm believer in armed force and KGB repression. The head of the Romanian secret police described him as “the man who substituted the KGB for the Communist Party in governing the USSR.” The confident and bullish stance of the newly installed Reagan administration seemed to underscore the impending threat. And so, like every genuine paranoiac, Andropov set out to find the evidence to confirm his fears. Operation RYAN (an acronym for raketno-yadernoye napadeniye, Russian for “nuclear missile attack”) was the biggest peacetime Soviet intelligence operation ever launched.

POEM – MY AMAZING TRAVELS [My composition in my book Travel Memoirs with Pictures] My very first trip I still cannot believe Was planned and executed with such great ease. My father, an Inspector of Schools, was such a strict man, He gave in to my wishes when I told him of the plan. I got my first long vacation while working as a banker One of my co-workers wanted a travelling partner. She visited my father and discussed the matter Arrangements were made without any flutter. We travelled to New York, Toronto, London, and Germany, In each of those places, there was somebody, To guide and protect us and to take us wonderful places, It was a dream come true at our young ages. We even visited Holland, which was across the Border. To drive across from Germany was quite in order. Memories of great times continue to linger, I thank God for an understanding father. That trip in 1968 was the beginning of much more, I visited many countries afterward I am still in awe. Barbados, Tobago, St. Maarten, and Buffalo, Cirencester in the United Kingdom, Miami, and Orlando. I was accompanied by my husband on many trips. Sisters, nieces, children, grandchildren, and friends, travelled with me a bit. Puerto Rico, Los Angeles, New York, and Hialeah, Curacao, Caracas, Margarita, Virginia, and Anguilla. We sailed aboard the Creole Queen On the Mississippi in New Orleans We traversed the Rockies in Colorado And walked the streets in Cozumel, Mexico. We were thrilled to visit the Vatican in Rome, The Trevi Fountain and the Colosseum. To explore the countryside in Florence, And to sail on a Gondola in Venice. My fridge is decorated with magnets Souvenirs of all my visits London, Madrid, Bahamas, Coco Cay, Barcelona. And the Leaning Tower of Pisa How can I forget the Spanish Steps in Rome? Stratford upon Avon, where Shakespeare was born. CN Tower in Toronto so very high I thought the elevator would take me to the sky. Then there was El Poble and Toledo Noted for Spanish Gold We travelled on the Euro star. The scenery was beautiful to behold! I must not omit Cartagena in Columbia, Anaheim, Las Vegas, and Catalina, Key West, Tampa, Fort Lauderdale, and Pembroke Pines, Places I love to lime. Of course, I would like to make special mention, Of two exciting cruises with Royal Caribbean. Majesty of the Seas and Liberty of the Seas Two ships which grace the Seas. Last but not least and best of all We visited Paris in the fall. Cologne, Dusseldorf, and Berlin Amazing places, which made my head, spin. Copyright@BrendaMohammed

One might say that, until now, the social, cultural, and political framework for knowledge of the Gulag has not been in place. I first became aware of this problem several years ago, when walking across the Charles Bridge, a major tourist attraction in what was then newly democratic Prague. There were buskers and hustlers along the bridge, and, every fifteen feet or so someone was selling precisely what one would expect to find for sale in such a postcard-perfect spot. Paintings of appropriately pretty streets were on display, along with bargain jewelry and 'Prague' key chains. Among the bric-a-brac, one could buy Soviet military paraphernalia: caps, badges, belt buckles, and little pins, the tin Lenin and Brezhnev images that Soviet schoolchildren once pinned to their uniforms. The sight struck me as odd. Most of the people buying the Soviet paraphernalia were Americans and West Europeans. All would be sickened by the thought of wearing a swastika. None objected, however, to wearing the hammer and sickle on a T-shirt or a hat. It was a minor observation, but sometimes, it is through just such minor observations that a cultural mood is best observed. For here, the lesson could not have been clearer: while the symbol of one mass murder fills us with horror, the symbol of another mass murder makes us laugh.

During this time my father was in a labor camp, for the crime of wanting to leave the country, and my mother struggled to care for us, alone and with few provisions. One day she went out to the back patio to do the wash and saw a cute little frog sitting by the door to the kitchen. My mother has always liked frogs, and this frog by the kitchen door gave her an idea. She began to spin wonderful stories about a crazy, adventurous frog named Antonica who would overcome great odds with her daring and creativity. Antonica helped us dream of freedom and possibilities. These exciting tales were reserved for mealtime. We ate until our bowls were empty, distracted from the bland food by the flavor of Antonica’s world. Mamina knew her children were well nourished, comforted, and prepared for the challenges and adventures to come. In 2007, I was preparing to host a TV show on a local station and was struggling with self-doubt. With encouragement and coaching from a friend, I finally realized that I had been preparing for this opportunity most of my life. All I needed was confidence in myself, the kind of confidence Antonica had taught me about, way back in Cuba. Through this process of self-discovery, the idea came to me to start cooking with my mother. We all loved my Mamina’s cooking, but I had never been interested in learning to cook like her. I began to write down her recipes and take pictures of her delicious food. I also started to write down the stories I had heard from my parents, of our lives in Cuba and coming to the United States. At some point I realized I had ninety recipes. This is a significant number to Cuban exiles, as there are ninety miles between Cuba and Key West, Florida. A relatively short distance, but oh, so far! My effort to grow closer to my mother through cooking became another dream waiting to be fulfilled, through a book called 90 Miles 90 Recipes: My Journey to Understanding. My mother now seemed as significant as our journey to the United States. While learning how she orchestrated these flavors, I began to understand my mother as a woman with many gifts. Through cooking together, my appreciation for her has grown. I’ve come to realize why feeding everyone was so important to her. Nourishing the body is part of nurturing the soul. My mother is doing very poorly now. Most of my time in the last few months has been dedicated to caring for her. Though our book has not yet been published, it has already proven valuable. It has taught me about dreams from a different perspective—helping me recognize that the lives my sisters and I enjoy are the realization of my parents’ dream of freedom and opportunity for them, and especially for us.

And by the end of March one of them had already begun his journey. Twenty-two years old, an A.B. and LL.B. of Harvard, Francis Parkman was back from a winter trip to scenes in Pennsylvania and Ohio that would figure in his book and now he started with his cousin, Quincy Adams Shaw, for St. Louis. He was prepared to find it quite as alien to Beacon Hill as the Dakota lands beyond it, whither he was going. He was already an author (a poet and romancer), had already designed the great edifice his books were to build, and already suffered from the mysterious, composite illness that was to make his life a long torture. He hoped, in fact, that a summer on the prairies might relieve or even cure the malady that had impaired his eyes and, he feared, his heart and brain as well. He had done his best to cure it by systematic exercise, hard living in the White Mountains, and a regimen self-imposed in the code of his Puritan ancestors which would excuse no weakness. But more specifically Parkman was going west to study the Indians. He intended to write the history of the conflict between imperial Britain and imperial France, which was in great part a story of Indians. The Conspiracy of Pontiac had already taken shape in his mind; beyond it stretched out the aisles and transepts of what remains the most considerable achievement by an American historian. So he needed to see some uncorrupted Indians in their native state. It was Parkman’s fortune to witness and take part in one of the greatest national experiences, at the moment and site of its occurrence. It is our misfortune that he did not understand the smallest part of it. No other historian, not even Xenophon, has ever had so magnificent an opportunity: Parkman did not even know that it was there, and if his trip to the prairies produced one of the exuberant masterpieces of American literature, it ought instead to have produced a key work of American history. But the other half of his inheritance forbade. It was the Puritan virtues that held him to the ideal of labor and achievement and kept him faithful to his goal in spite of suffering all but unparalleled in literary history. And likewise it was the narrowness, prejudice, and mere snobbery of the Brahmins that insulated him from the coarse, crude folk who were the movement he traveled with, turned him shuddering away from them to rejoice in the ineffabilities of Beacon Hill, and denied our culture a study of the American empire at the moment of its birth. Much may rightly be regretted, therefore. But set it down also that, though the Brahmin was indifferent to Manifest Destiny, the Puritan took with him a quiet valor which has not been outmatched among literary folk or in the history of the West.

By the middle of the 17th century in Japan the concept of focus had evolved to a high level of sophistication and had taken on the psychological overtones that we will examine later in this chapter. In his classic on strategy, A Book of Five Rings (1645), the samurai who is best known in the West, Miyamoto Musashi, removed the concept from the physical world entirely by designating the spirit of the opponent as the focus: Do not even consider risking a decision by cold steel until you have defeated the enemy’s will to fight.59 This is a revealing statement by a man reported to have won some sixty bouts, virtually all of which ended in the death of his opponent (not surprising, when you consider that the samurai long sword, the tachi, was a four foot blade of steel, sharp as a modern razor, and strong enough to chop cleanly through a water pipe.) Once you accept Musashi’s dictum as a strategic principle, then you might ask how to carry it out, how to actually defeat the opponent’s spirit. Musashi was no mystic, and he grounded all his methods in real actions his students could take. We will encounter him and his techniques many times in this book. The ability to rapidly shift the focus of one’s efforts is a key element in how a smaller force defeats a larger, since it enables the smaller force to create and exploit opportunities before the larger force can marshal reinforcements.

Kung Fu's process of individualization similarly takes part in this backlash as the representation of the social ills experienced by racial minorities is routinely disciplined and rechanneled to make the show palatable for mass consumption. Under this rubric, it is assumed that changing the hearts of individuals will automatically lead to changing society. To a post-1960s liberal audience who obviously felt sympathy toward the plight of racial minorities but who nevertheless were wary of certain measures taken by these groups toward self-determination and weary from extended conflict, this simple adage proved seductive. Indeed, for a great many Americans, post-Civil Rights race relations has transformed the United States into an unruly site with different groups vying for cultural, economic, and political resources. In this way, Kung Fu's Wild West setting—the uneven hand of justice, the social free-for-all, the generally inhospitable natural landscape—seemed to reflect the audience's view of their contemporary social environment. It also mirrored the overall impotence that Americans felt toward ameliorating the situation. Given such a scenario, individualizing racial oppression and other social inequities may have seemed like a final alternative. While this process of individualization is key in deciphering the show's political stance, the types of identifications the series forged between character and audience more substantively reveal its ideological commitments. Although Kung Fu's psychospiritualized vision was available to all of its audience members, one could argue that it was primarily framed as a commentary toward racial minorities and women who sought social change through means other than or in addition to inner transformation. It achieved this through a formulaic pattern of identifications.

As I noted in Chapter 14, “The Earthquake,” there was a supermarket in Jerusalem where I shopped for fruits and vegetables almost every day. It was owned by an Iraqi Jewish family who had immigrated to Israel from Baghdad in the early 1940s. The patriarch of the family, Sasson, was an elderly curmudgeon in his sixties. Sasson’s whole life had left him with the conviction that the Arabs would never willingly accept a Jewish state in their midst and that any concessions to the Palestinians would eventually be used to liquidate the Jewish state. Whenever Sasson heard Israeli doves saying that the Palestinians really wanted to live in peace with the Jews, but that they just couldn’t always come out and declare it, it sounded ludicrous to him. It simply ran counter to everything life in Iraq and Jerusalem had taught him, and neither the Camp David treaty with Egypt nor declarations by Yasir Arafat—nor the Palestinian uprising itself—had convinced him otherwise. As I said, as far as Sasson was concerned, the problem between himself and the Palestinians was not that they didn’t understand each other, but that they did—all too well. Sasson, I should add, did not appear to be ideologically committed to Israel’s holding the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He was a grocer, and ideology did not trip easily off his tongue. I am sure he rarely, if ever, went to the occupied territories. Like a majority of Israelis, he viewed the Israeli presence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip primarily in terms of security. I believe that Sasson is the key to a Palestinian–Israeli peace settlement—not him personally, but his world view. He is the Israeli silent majority. He is the Israeli two-thirds. You don’t hear much from the Sassons of Israel. They don’t talk much. They are not as interesting to interview as wild-eyed messianic West Bank settlers, or as articulate as Peace Now professors who speak with an American accent. But they are the foundation of Israel, the gravity that holds the country in place. And, more important, years of reporting from Israel have taught me that there is a little bit of Sasson’s almost primitive earthiness in every Israeli—not only all those in the Likud Party on the right side of the political spectrum, but a majority of those in the Labor Party as well; not only those Israelis born in Arab countries, but those born in Israel as well. Indeed, the Israeli public is not divided fifty-fifty on the question of peace with the Palestinians. The truth is, the Israeli public is divided in three. One segment, on the far left—maybe 5 percent of the population—is ready to allow a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza tomorrow, and sincerely believes the Palestinians are ready to live in peace with the Jews. Another segment, on the far right—maybe 20 percent of the population—will never be prepared, for ideological reasons, to allow a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. They are committed to holding forever all the Land of Israel, out of either nationalist or messianic sentiments. In between these two extremes you have the Sassons, who make up probably 75 percent of the population. The more liberal Sassons side with the Labor Party, the more hard-line Sassons side with the Likud, but they all share a gut feeling that they are locked in an all-or-nothing communal struggle with the Palestinians. Today the

We believe the key point here is education, and that’s why we give money for education in various aspects – teaching kids how to use the internet, establishing contacts between young people in the UK, the US and Russia, training young journalists etc. The aim is very simple. Twenty years have passed. Another twenty or thirty years and we might become a normal country.

Part of this struggle involves an unrelenting critique of liberal multicultural “tolerance” (in the West as much as the rest), which despite all pretenses, prioritizes dominant white European culture (or in such countries as India, dominant Hindu culture), while patronizingly “tolerating” others (see Iqtidar and Sarkar 2018). Here, Muslim culture is fixed and stereotyped, most often reduced to a religious category, thereby ignoring the dynamic, diverse, and indeed secular mix that makes up the “Muslim world” (both outside and inside the “West”). What is most often missing is a properly politicized view of Muslim culture (or indeed culture writ large), in which political-economic antagonisms play a key role: thus, violence against women is not the result of some pathological religious practice, but most often imbricated with unequal state property/inheritance laws (and their lack of enforcement) and/or male domination in the advancing cash economy (Visweswaran 1994, 510; Salhi 2013). A universal politics worthy of its name cannot, as a result, engage in a purely “cultural politics” that avoids the key question of the politicization of the economy; this would merely play into the hands of postpolitical global capitalism, which, as underlined already, seeks to keep culture and economy apart. Linking the two spheres is precisely what enables universality: seeing the antagonisms of culture/identity (struggles of representation, violence against women, queer rights, racialization) as intimately linked to the antagonisms of global capitalism (socioeconomic and spatial inequality, environmental catastrophe) is what opens the door to shared struggle. It helps establish bonds of solidarity between those who struggle for justice in the West and those who participate in the same struggle in the “Muslim world” (and elsewhere). Perhaps those of us Westerners engaging in universalizing struggles can learn from the political vitality and truculence of the “Muslim world”: at a time when engagement, energy, and commitment to change the system are often so fickle in the West, the Islamic resurgence, despite often being misdirected, can teach us something about a refusal to be so easily co-opted and seduced by Western hegemony. The challenge, though, is to channel such “rage” to the right target, that is, to make it anti-systemic rather than anti-symptomatic.

As I sat in Mallory Square the next morning, waiting for Iliza, the pale yellow light of the sun reflected off the water as if to parody the jaundice of the island’s locals.

Dating on this island is like fishing in the Hudson River. There's a real strong chance that anything you catch is either toxic, diseased, or dead inside.

No matter how much I loved the idea of a book set in Key West, the reality of it never did anything but disappoint me. Maybe alexithymia was to blame. Maybe it was the writer’s lack of talent. Maybe it was the inebriant nature or ephemeral essence of Key West living. Maybe it was all of those things. Maybe it was none of them. It didn’t matter. It was my opinion that no story set in Key West has ever, or will ever, do the island justice.

Your children are always a part of you. And you will always feel some responsibility for how they turn out, no matter if they are babies or you are eighty-something.

Gilder G, 1996. The Moral Sources of Capitalism. In: Gerson M (ed.), The Essential Neo-Conservative Reader. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., pp. 151-159 Quoting page 154: The next step above potlatching was the use of real money. The invention of money enabled the pattern of giving to be extended as far as the reach of faith and trust from the mumi’s tribe to the world economy. Among the most important transitional devices was the Chinese Hui. This became the key mode of capital formation for the overseas Chinese in their phenomenal success as tradesmen and retailers everywhere they went, from San Francisco to Singapore. A more sophisticated and purposeful development of the potlatching principle, the Hui began when the organizer needed money for an investment. He would raise it from a group of kin and friends and commit himself to give a series of ten feasts for them. At each feast a similar amount of money would be convivially raised and given by lot or by secret bidding to one of the other members. The rotating distribution would continue until every member had won a collection. Similar systems, called the Ko or Tanamoshi, created saving for the Japanese; and the West African Susu device of the Yoruba, when transplanted to the West Indies, provided the capital base for Caribbean retailing. This mode of capital formation also emerged prosperously among West Indians when they migrated to American cities. All these arrangements required entrusting money or property to others and awaiting returns in the uncertain future.

I own an island, Constance—a private island in the Florida Keys. It’s west of No Name Key and northeast of Key West. It’s not a big island, but it’s a jewel. It is called Halcyon. I have a house there; a breezy mansion furnished with books and instruments and paintings; it offers both sunrise and sunset views; and it has been stocked with all the rare wines, champagnes, and delicacies you could ever wish for. I’ve been preparing this idyll over the years with painstaking, excessive care. It was to be a bastion; my last and final retreat from the world. But—as I was recovering in that hut in Ginostra—I realized that such a place, no matter how ideal, would be unbearably lonely without another person—the one, the perfect person—with whom to share it.” He paused. “Need I name that person?

What finger-shaped Florida lacks in breadth it makes up for in length; Tallahassee is 480 miles from Miami (farther than New York City is from Cleveland).

English arrived, they bastardized the name to Key West.

THE NINTH KEY The Ninth Enochian Key warns of the use of substances, devices or pharmaceuticals which might lead to the delusion and subsequent enslavement of the master. A protection against false values. ... THE NINTH KEY (English) A mighty guard of fire with two-edged swords flaming (which contain the vials of delusion, whose whings are of wormwood of the marrow of salt), have set their feet in the West, and are measured with their ministers. These gather up the moss of the Earth, as the rich man doth his treasure. Cursed are they whose iniquities they are! In their eyes are millstones greater than the Earth, and from their mouths run seas of blood. Their brains are covered with diamonds, and upon their heads are marble stones. Happy is he on whom they frown not. For Why? The Lord of Righteousness rejoiceth in them! Come away, and leave your vials, for the time is such as reqireth comfort!

Alas! For impropriety, The guillotine of piety. To remedy society Indulge not to satiety In mirth and shameless gaiety. Choose sobering sobriety. Behave as if the deity Approaches in its mystery, And greet it with sonority. Let your especial history Be built upon sorority Whose Virtues do examplify, And Social Good thus multiply. Animals should be seen and not heard. Again, there was mumbling, but it was of a different nature now, a meaner key. Doctor Dillamond harrumphed and beat a cloven hoof against the floor, and was heard to say, "Well that's not poetry, that's propaganda, and it's not even good propaganda at that." Elphaba sidled over to Galinda's side with her chair under her arm, and plunked it down between Galinda and Shenshen. She put her bony behind on its slatted seat and leaned to Galinda and asked, "What do you make of this?" It was the first time Galinda had ever been addressed by Elphaba in public. Mortification bloomed. "I don't know," she said faintly, looking in the other direction. "It's cleverness, isn't it?" said Elphaba. "I mean that last line, you couldn't tell by that fancy accent whether it was meant to be Animals or animals. No wonder Dillamond's furious.

As I recall, the story goes something like this. I was lying on an inflatable alligator in the small pool behind a large rented house on Key West. A pair of high-fidelity, high-priced speakers mounted on the outside wall of the pool house was playing a mix of Tom Petty, Will Kimbrough, and Zac Brown,

and his men operated offline from the military, living in safe houses in German neighborhoods. He was a key figure, working with the West German police in processing the thousands of refugees pouring into West Berlin.

Every time we have the opportunity to sit down and practice, . . . take three seconds only. Three seconds. . . . Look up and say, “Thank God.” . . . Because you’re so grateful, you’re so glad, that instead of doing something else you’re about to start practicing, which you have to take as a gift from God, because you don’t have the necessity to be breaking stones in the mine, or driving a truck from Oklahoma to Key West, or something like that. You’re sitting down with your beloved instrument—practicing!

Ultimately, faith isn’t much more than something like a child’s old blanket or the distinct smell of home — the fact that we know it’s there is all that’s necessary. In the end, it’s perfectly okay to find your own peace

Married to Leonard Woolf in 1912 in a partnership that continued until her death in 1941, Virginia Woolf had intense and enduring relationships with a number of women friends, including Violet Trefusis, the writer Vita Sackville-West and the composer Ethel Smyth, as well as a lifelong bond with her elder sister, the artist Vanessa Bell

Andrew Lonergan is a successful classroom teacher and father of two. He loves visiting Key West and Mackinaw Island on school breaks.

There were ottomans and framed photographs and curio cabinets full of souvenirs, their very frivolousness reassuring. You did not bring home a carved seashell from Key West or a miniature of the CN Tower or a finger-sized bottle of sand from Martha's Vineyard unless you intended to stay. Mrs. Richardson's family, in fact, had lived in Shaker for three generations now - almost, Pearl learned, since the city had been founded. To have such a deep taproot in a single place, to be immersed in it so thoroughly that it had steeped into every fiber of your being: she couldn't imagine it.

A key weapon in this tug-of-war was liquor. West Indies rum flowed freely

Apart from Cherokee freedpeople, Cherokee citizens also spoke out against the present of African Americans from the United States. In 1894, the editor of the Cherokee Advocate incited his fellow tribesmen to resist both Black and white migration, telling them to ‘Be men, and fight off the barnacles that now infest our country in the shape of non-citizens, free Arkansas ni—ers, and traitors.’ Anti-Black sentiment like this encouraged Native peoples to ignore Indian freedpeople’s shared histories with their nations and to inaccurately associate them with Black interlopers from the United States. Indian freedpeople fought this attitude by attempting to differentiate themselves. When Mary Grayson was interviewed in 1937 as part of the Works Progress Administration Slave Narrative project, she illustrated this dichotomy, saying ‘I am what we colored people call a ‘native.’ That means I didn’t come into the Indian country from somewhere in the Old South, after the War, like so many Negroes did, but I was born here in the Old Creek Nation and my master was a Creek Indian. Mary felt that her experiences of enslavement were better than those of Black Americans, arguing that ‘I have had people who were slaves of white folks tell me that they had to work awfully hard and their masters were cruel to them, but all the Negroes I knew who belonged to Creeks always had plenty of clothes and lots to eat and we all lived in good log cabins we built.’ Mary clearly demarcated her history and circumstances from those of African Americans from the United States. Mary’s assertion of her identity as a ‘native’ rather than a newcomer (like other Blacks in the West) is reflective of a key component of the settler colonial process—strategic differentiation.

—Have you ever seen the sunrise here? and as though she'd answered she hadn't, as though she'd answered at all —especially in winter. You'll see it in winter, it's moved south where the river's its widest and it comes up so fast, it's as if it just wanted to prove the day, get it established so it can loiter through the rest of it, spend the first damned half of your life complicating things in that eagerness to take on everything and straighten all of it out and the second half cleaning up the mess you've made of the first, that's what they won't understand. Finally realize you can't leave things better than you found them the best you can do is try not to leave them any worse but they won't forgive you, get toward the end of the day like the sun going down in Key West if you've ever seen that? They're all down there for the sunset, watching it drop like a bucket of blood and clapping and cheering the instant it disappears, cheer you out the door and damned glad to see the last of you.

The top 1 percent now own around half of the world’s wealth, up from 42.5 percent at the height of the Great Recession in 2008. The world’s 3.5 billion poorest adults, comprising 70 percent of the world’s working-age population, own 2.7 percent of global wealth. Most of these poor adults live in non-White countries that were subjected to centuries of slave trading and colonizing and resource dispossessing, which created the modern wealth of the West. The wealth extraction continues today via foreign companies that own or control key natural resources in the global south, taken through force with the threat of “economic sanctions” or granted by “elected” politicians. Racial capitalism makes countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo one of the richest countries in the world belowground and one of the poorest countries in the world aboveground.

People are what circumstances make them.

décolletage

This theme of the rise of populism around the West is crucial. Are you concerned that we’re seeing the rise of the kind of demagogues the Founders feared? RBG: Yes. JR: Social media is part of that? RBG: Yes, and an important part is the discontent seen among people who feel that our institutions of government pay no attention to them, as illustrated by J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. JR: Fixing democracy is a task bigger than any of us. But what are some things that could be done? RBG: One key thing is to teach children about democracy. They don’t learn about it in school as they did in civics classes when I was young. By the way, did you see the show What the Constitution Means to Me? JR: Not yet, but I know you did see it. What did you think? RBG: I loved it. At the end of the second act, a teenager comes on stage to take part in the conversation about the Constitution. Two young women alternate in that role. The older one, age eighteen, played the role the night I attended. She just graduated from high school, and I will stay in touch with her. I was uplifted by those young women. JR: What is uplifting about them? What’s the message of the play? RBG: The play begins with a young woman who wins American Legion competitions, by spouting rosy things about the Constitution. Then, she questions whether the Constitution is as protective as she portrayed it in her youth. At the end, she puts the question to the audience: Should we keep it or should we do it over? Our audience voted overwhelmingly to keep it, and it’s been overwhelmingly that way for most audiences. JR: Why are people moved to keep it? And why should we keep it? RBG: What reason is there to think we would do better if we started over from scratch?

Cuban refugees to Key West found a relatively easy pathway to the ballot box via “declarant alien voting,” which was passed by Florida’s Reconstruction legislature in 1868 (“declarant aliens” were resident aliens who declared their intent to naturalize).62 According to Article 14 of the 1868 Florida constitution, a man who swore to defend the laws of the land and to eventually become a citizen could vote.

In my experience, lots of people say lots of stupid things. Fear and panic make them search for scapegoats.

The man whom the Renaissance later presented as a monster of cruelty and perversion was a mass of contradictions. He was astute, brave, and highly impulsive – capable of deep deception, tyrannical cruelty, and acts of sudden kindness. He was moody and unpredictable, a bisexual who shunned close relationships, never forgave an insult, but who came to be loved for his pious foundations. The key traits of his mature character were already in place: the later tyrant who was also a scholar; the obsessive military strategist who loved Persian poetry and gardening; the expert at logistics and practical planning who was so superstitious that he relied on the court astrologer to confirm military decisions; the Islamic warrior who could be generous to his non-Muslim subjects and enjoyed the company of foreigners and unorthodox religious thinkers.

I like talking to people, learning about their lives. You can live a fair share of adventures in other people's stories.

It was the German powerhouse Deutsche Bank AG, not my fictitious RhineBank, that financed the construction of the extermination camp at Auschwitz and the nearby factory that manufactured Zyklon B pellets. And it was Deutsche Bank that earned millions of Nazi reichsmarks through the Aryanization of Jewish-owned businesses. Deutsche Bank also incurred massive multibillion-dollar fines for helping rogue nations such as Iran and Syria evade US economic sanctions; for manipulating the London interbank lending rate; for selling toxic mortgage-backed securities to unwitting investors; and for laundering untold billions’ worth of tainted Russian assets through its so-called Russian Laundromat. In 2007 and 2008, Deutsche Bank extended an unsecured $1 billion line of credit to VTB Bank, a Kremlin-controlled lender that financed the Russian intelligence services and granted cover jobs to Russian intelligence officers operating abroad. Which meant that Germany’s biggest lender, knowingly or unknowingly, was a silent partner in Vladimir Putin’s war against the West and liberal democracy. Increasingly, that war is being waged by Putin’s wealthy cronies and by privately owned companies like the Wagner Group and the Internet Research Agency, the St. Petersburg troll factory that allegedly meddled in the 2016 US presidential election. The IRA was one of three Russian companies named in a sprawling indictment handed down by the Justice Department in February 2018 that detailed the scope and sophistication of the Russian interference. According to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, the Russian cyber operatives stole the identities of American citizens, posed as political and religious activists on social media, and used divisive issues such as race and immigration to inflame an already divided electorate—all in support of their preferred candidate, the reality television star and real estate developer Donald Trump. Russian operatives even traveled to the United States to gather intelligence. They focused their efforts on key battleground states and, remarkably, covertly coordinated with members of the Trump campaign in August 2016 to organize rallies in Florida. The Russian interference also included a hack of the Democratic National Committee that resulted in a politically devastating leak of thousands of emails that threw the Democratic convention in Philadelphia into turmoil. In his final report, released in redacted form in April 2019, Robert Mueller said that Moscow’s efforts were part of a “sweeping and systematic” campaign to assist Donald Trump and weaken his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. Mueller was unable to establish a chargeable criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, though the report noted that key witnesses used encrypted communications, engaged in obstructive behavior, gave false or misleading testimony, or chose not to testify at all. Perhaps most damning was the special counsel’s conclusion that the Trump campaign “expected it would benefit electorally from the information stolen and released through Russian efforts.

If the emotion of disgust is an evolved defense against disease, several predictions follow. One is that disgust should be evoked most strongly by disease-carrying substances. The second is that these disgust elicitors should be universal across cultures. Empirical research supports both predictions (Curtis & Biran, 2001). People from cultures ranging from the Netherlands to West Africa find foods potentially contaminated by parasites or unhygienic preparation to be exceptionally disgusting. Examples are rotting flesh, dirty food, bad-smelling food, food leftovers, moldy food, a dead insect in food, and witnessing food preparation by someone with dirty hands. Foods that have had contact with worms, cockroaches, or feces evoke especially strong disgust reactions. A third prediction is that the disgust should activate the immune system. One study found that showing people images of contaminated food actually elevated their body temperature—one of the key features of immune response to disease (Stevenson et al., 2012). A fourth prediction is that the people should show an especially good memory for objects that have been touched by sick or diseased individuals—a prediction supported in studies conducted in both Portugal and the United States (Fernandez, Pandeirada, Soares, & Nairne, 2017).

Madame Egloff, who stood, hands held out in front of her, expressing her admiration. ‘Please make the alterations, Madame, and have the gowns sent round to Brown’s Hotel by the weekend.’ Half an hour later, when they left Madame Egloff’s salon, Sophie had been dressed and pinned into each of the garments Matty had chosen, and promises had been made to deliver the clothes to the hotel by Saturday morning at the latest. * Monday morning saw them at Paddington Station being conducted to a private compartment on the train. Sophie had never travelled in such style before, being more used to the uncomfortable rowdiness of a third-class carriage, but Matty had insisted. ‘I always travel this way,’ she said. ‘The journey is quite tiring enough without being crammed in next to crying children and shrill women.’ Having directed the porter to place their luggage in the guard’s van, Matty had settled herself into their compartment with a copy of the new Murray’s Magazine, which she had bought from a news-stand at the station. Beside her on the seat was a hamper, provided by Brown’s, with the food and drink they would need for the journey. As the train drew out of the station and started its long journey west, Sophie felt keyed up with anxious anticipation and was grateful for the comforting presence of Hannah, ensconced on the other side of the compartment. Dressed in her new plaid travelling dress, with a matching hat perched on her head, Sophie knew she was a different person from the one who had sat at her dying mother’s bedside, holding her hand. No longer a young girl on the brink of adulthood... but who? There had been too much change in her life in the past weeks that she still had to come to terms with. Who am I? she wondered. I don’t feel like me! She looked across at Hannah, so familiar, so safe, huddled in a corner, her eyes shut as she dozed, and Sophie felt a wave of affection flood through her. Dear Hannah, she thought, I’m so glad you came too. When they had left Madame Egloff, Matty had taken Sophie for afternoon tea at Brown’s. Looking round the famous tea room, with its panelled walls, its alcoved fireplace and its windows giving onto Albemarle Street, Sophie

You listened so you would learn; you thought so that your answer would not return to humiliate or harm you, because, in Paulie's world, once something was said it could not be called back or explained away.

did not want. She noticed that he was wearing suspenders and a dress shirt, and she asked him: “What’s on your calendar today?” “A board meeting. Nothing too taxing. You?” “I have to make sure war doesn’t break out in North Africa. Nothing too taxing.” He laughed, and for a moment she felt close to him again. Then he folded the newspaper and stood up. “I’d better put on my tie.” “Enjoy your board meeting.” He kissed her forehead. “Good luck with North Africa.” He went out. Pauline returned to the West Wing but instead of going to the Oval Office she made her way to the press office. A dozen or so people, mostly quite young, sat at workstations, reading or keying. There were television screens around the walls, all showing different news shows. Copies of the morning’s papers were scattered everywhere. Sandip Chakraborty had a desk in the middle of the room, which he preferred to a private office: he liked to be in the thick of things. He stood up as soon as Pauline entered. He was wearing his trademark suit-and-sneakers. “The trouble in Chad,” she said to him. “Has that story had any traction?” “Until a few minutes ago, no, Madam President

We are defined by what we do for others, by our relationships, by what we have to offer. A

But the Russian engagement with Islam is older, deeper, more extensive, and more complex than Europe’s. One key reason is that the Russian Empire encountered Muslims as a result of contiguous overland expansion east and south, unlike the European imperialists who encountered Muslims only through distant voyages of conquest overseas. Russian forms of coexistence with Islam persist and always will, simply because they inhabit common space. Russia remains the sole state in the West that embraces a significant indigenous Muslim community among its citizenry.

Still, key Democratic interest groups—especially the big industrial unions—resisted any environmental measures that might threaten jobs for their members; and in polls we conducted at the start of my campaign, the average Democratic voter ranked climate change near the bottom of their list of concerns. Republican voters were even more skeptical. There’d been a time when the federal government’s role in protecting the environment enjoyed the support of both parties. Richard Nixon had worked with a Democratic Congress to create the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970. George H. W. Bush championed a strengthening of the Clean Air Act in 1990. But those times had passed. As the GOP’s electoral base had shifted to the South and the West, where conservation efforts had long rankled oil drillers, mining interests, developers, and ranchers, the party had turned environmental protection into another front in the partisan culture war.

Well, anyway,” Joey went on blithely, “few years ago this guy calls me up. ‘Joey,’ he says, ‘I got big problems. The vacation market is in the shits, I can’t pay my mortgage. What should I do?’ I say, ‘How about you put some fucking pants on and get a job?’ He says, ‘I have no pants.’ I say, ‘I’ll buy you some.’ ‘No,’ he says. ‘Fuck pants.

An old man's errors mattered both more and less than a young man's. More because there was less time to undo them; less because there was less time to endure their consequences.

With good advice from a friend of Frank Giannino’s, I decided to start a day early on July 31, 2018 at Anchor Point on the Kenai peninsula. Anchor Point is the furthest west you can travel on continuous US highways. If I was able to make it to Key West, I could say I did the furthest west to furthest south road trip you can do in America on foot.

citizens of Key West had passed a referendum limiting the number of passengers who could disembark a cruise ship at any given time to fifteen hundred.

My friend thinks he is so smart. He said onions are the only food that makes you cry. So I threw a coconut in his face.

It was the possibilities of this site – what it offered for trade, defense, and food – that made Constantinople the key to imperial destinies and brought so many armies to its gate. “The seat of the Roman Empire is Constantinople,” wrote George Trapezuntios, “and he who is and remains Emperor of the Romans is also the Emperor of the whole earth.

What gripes me the most is all the garbage they give us Cubans. All of that ‘Oh my God, we’re being overrun by rafters!’ Hell, we’ve worked hard to help build Key West and Tampa and Miami,” said Serge. “Forget the Marielitos. What about the Ohio-litos?!

The historical relativist is the one who adopts an eagle's-eye view on the past, lofty enough not to need to prefer one epoch to another. Warburg was no such relativist. For him the European Renaissance, Burckhardt's Renaissance, the fifteenth century, held the keys to the present. He was fully absorbed by the epic of Europe. The 'Orient' figured for Warburg only as a mystifying threat to Mediterranean reason, a passive source of fascination, coded as female. The non-Western here is the image of a hidden weakness within the West. America, meanwhile, sheltered the remnants of the archaic societies it destroyed and at the same time promised a telecommunicational future of 'instantaneous electric connection' where 'mythical and symbolic thinking.' which once formed 'spiritual bonds between humanity and the surrounding world, shaping distance into the space required for devotion and reflection,' would no longer be needed.

Hot April sunshine poured in through the open top of the old Caddy, shafts of it splattering into rainbows as they sliced through the facets of the spiderweb windshield.

She flushed a becoming pink during the ceremony; her green eyes moistened and shimmered like the calm and prosperous ocean.

NATIONAL ZOO over the FRANCIS SCOTT KEY BRIDGE. The traffic was getting thicker,

Almost immediately it was confirmed that Assistant Commissioner Ray McAndrew would review the allegations made by Mrs Farrell and, in particular, her claims in respect of the behaviour of key officers involved in the du Plantier investigation over the previous decade. The review would involve interviews with all key players involved. But, critically, there was no indication at the outset that the report would ever be published. Instead, the McAndrew Report would be submitted to the garda commissioner on its completion in 2007. It comprised interviews with almost 100 people, around 50 of whom were either serving or retired gardaí and detectives. The Minister for Justice would also be briefed on its findings and recommendations. But it wasn’t just the garda commissioner and Minister for Justice who examined the McAndrew Report. It was also submitted to the DPP’s office for consideration. To the surprise of no one, it subsequently emerged that no prosecutorial action was recommended on the basis of the report or its findings. That report has never been made available to the public–and has never been fully referenced in any of the court proceedings either in Ireland or France. The McAndrew Report was not even discussed in detail in the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission (GSOC) report, which would be painstakingly compiled over eight years following

Even though Mr Graham was a fascinating witness, the High Court hearing–just like the Cork Circuit Court libel action before it–suddenly began to revolve around Marie Farrell. The former west Cork shopkeeper, who had since relocated to her native Longford, was a core strategic element of Mr Bailey’s case. Her claims about making statements to the 2003 libel hearing under garda duress had been hugely damaging to An Garda Síochána. The High Court action would now hear precisely what she had seen on 23 December 1996 at Kealfadda Bridge–and why she had given evidence at Cork Circuit Court that she had later recanted. Mrs Farrell was called to offer evidence in December, just two weeks before the High Court suspended its hearings for the Christmas break. Her evidence was nothing short of extraordinary. She claimed a garda had exposed himself to her, that another garda had stripped naked in front of her and asked for sex, that gardaí had put her under unrelenting pressure to support an incriminating statement that undermined Mr Bailey’s key alibi–and had threatened her with arrest if she did not comply.

Schneider asked Ross to take Newton from Cozumel to Cuba in his trimaran, and Ross agreed. With Schneider’s money, Ross upgraded his boat, adding sonar, radar, and a diesel engine.101 But when he set out from Miami to Mexico, the boat snagged on a giant underwater statue of Jesus off Key West and sank.102 Ross barely made it back to shore.

Just half the value of their house, the small vacation house and big boat in Key West, and that’s it.

His father was not a man to make a habit of offering his upturned throat.

Many people, in both the East and the West, believe that shutting down the ego, and the thinking mind, is the ultimate purpose of meditation. The Dalai Lama, rather forcefully, always argues that this is a grave misunderstanding. Ego is at once our biggest obstacle and our greatest hope. We can be at its mercy or we can learn to mold it according to certain guiding principles. Intelligence is a key ally in this shaping process, something to be harnessed in the service of one’s progress.

I’ve come to a personal belief that a key ingredient in the West Point recipe is the idea that great leadership begins first with character—that leadership is primarily a function of who you are, for this is the foundation for everything you do.

I really believe that when we start talking ourselves back, we'll have more to offer the world." he [Woodenkinfe] said. "I don't want a gray world." "You mean taking back our cultures and where we come from." "Absolutely! You want to talk about the fabric of this country, that's it." "So rather than a melting pot, it would be a..." "A blanket of color, all sewn in the shape of the U.S.

The idea that the material is safe because it is encrypted is shockingly naïve: it is child's play for a sophisticated adversary to place malware on a computer, remotely and invisibly, which logs every key stroke, and records everything that appears on the screen. Such 'end-point vulnerabilities' render even the heaviest encryption pointless. They can be delivered via a mobile phone or through an internet connection (or by some other subtle and secret means). Snowden knows this. It is possible that someone with his technical skills could keep the stolen data secure on his own computers, at least for a time and if he does not switch them on. But that becomes ever less likely over time.

the Luxor attack (the latter widely reported in the West as a serious indication of a regime unable to assert its control over the country and contain the threat), the Egyptian security forces launched a comprehensive campaign against the key militant groups in (and outside) the country: infiltrating the most important, targeting their key leaders, taking control of thousands of mosques, squeezing their financial sources, draining the weapons sources (especially in Al-Saeed) and stepping up the internal pressure with a series of arrests. In a very intelligent move, the government diverted the payment of Islamic alms (zakat) from the local committees and charities that traditionally had allocated it to government-controlled banks, depleting one of their key sources of internal funding.

No, I don't work here, I'm taking pictures of messy bathrooms for a photo essay on the American West. But I'm always up for clean, so if you want to pitch in, I've got Pine Sol and a sponge in my car... It's that VW microbus parked next to the dumpster, and you don't need a key, just pull hard.

The United States’ alignment with Saudi Arabia fueled its power in the region and throughout the Islamic world—threatening Israel and the West—and left the United States on hostile terms with Iran and its key regional ally, Syria. In fact, the arsenals of the aforementioned Arab nations are now largely comprised of U.S.-manufactured armaments, which can often be found in the hands of Islamic terrorists whom we fight today.24

On the horizon Key West seemed small and insignificant.

Permanent construction of the sort Flagler was referring to would not come cheaply, however. Early in 1910, Flagler wrote to John Carrere, designer of the Ponce de Leon Hotel in St. Augustine, that repairing the damage caused by the hurricane had actually cost him $1 million, and reiterated that it had taught him a valuable lesson about upgrading the quality of the work. He estimated that it would require at least another $9 million to push the track to Key West, a figure that did not include the costs of a terminal and docking facilities.

The winter was not really winter at all, and therein may lie Key West's greatest charm. If one does not have to brood upon the coming of winter and the shortening of the days and the fading of the light, then perhaps one does not have to brood upon the coming of death. When the season is gentle and untreatening and seems to renew itself daily, we come to believe that spring and the long days of summer may be eternal after all. When we see the light trapped high in the sky on a summer evening, is it possible we are looking through an aperture at our future rather than at a seasonal phenomenon? Is it possible that the big party is just beginning?

BEHIND THE WALL The Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989, twenty-five years ago this month, but the first attempts to breach it came immediately after it went up, just past midnight on August 13, 1961. The East German regime had been secretly stockpiling barbed wire and wooden sawhorses, which the police, who learned of their mission only that night, hastily assembled into a barrier. For many Berliners, the first sign that a historic turn had been taken was when the U-Bahn, the city’s subway, stopped running on certain routes, leaving late-night passengers to walk home through streets that were suddenly filled with soldiers. As realization set in, so did a sense of panic. By noon the next day, as Ann Tusa recounts in “The Last Division,” people were trying to pull down the barbed wire with their hands. Some succeeded, in scattered places, and a car drove through a section of the Wall to the other side. In the following weeks, the authorities began reinforcing it. Within a year, the Wall was nearly eight feet high, with patrols and the beginnings of a no man’s land. But it still wasn’t too tall for a person to scale, and on August 17, 1962, Peter Fechter, who was eighteen years old, and his friend Helmut Kulbeik decided to try. They picked a spot on Zimmerstrasse, near the American Checkpoint Charlie, and just after two o’clock in the afternoon they made a run for it. Kulbeik got over, but Fechter was shot by a guard, and fell to the ground. He was easily visible from the West; there are photographs of him, taken as he lay calling for help. Hundreds of people gathered on the Western side, shouting for someone to save him. The East German police didn’t want to, and the Americans had been told that if they crossed the border they might start a war. Someone tossed a first-aid kit over the Wall, but Fechter was too weak to pick it up. After an hour, he bled to death. Riots broke out in West Berlin, and many asked angrily why the Americans had let Fechter die. He was hardly more than a child, and he wanted to be a free man. It’s a fair question, though one can imagine actions taken that day which could have led to a broader confrontation. It was not a moment to risk grand gestures; Fechter died two months before the Cuban missile crisis. (When the Wall went up, John F. Kennedy told his aides that it was “not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”) And there was something off key about Germans, so soon after the end of the Second World War, railing about others being craven bystanders. Some observers came to see the Wall as the necessary scaffolding on which to secure a postwar peace. That’s easy to say, though, when one is on the side with the department stores, and without the secret police. Technically, West Berlin was the city being walled in, a quasi-metropolis detached from the rest of West Germany. The Allied victors—America, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union—had divided Germany into four parts, and, since Berlin was in the Soviet sector, they divided the city into four parts, too. In 1948, the Soviets cut off most road and rail access to the city’s three western sectors, in an effort to assert their authority. The Americans responded with the Berlin Airlift, sending in planes carrying food and coal, and so much salt that their engines began to corrode. By the time the Wall went up, it wasn’t the West Berliners who were hungry. West Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder , or economic miracle, was under way, while life in the East involved interminable shortages. West Berliners were surrounded by Soviet military encampments, but they were free and they could leave—and so could anyone who could get to their part of the city. The East Berliners were the prisoners. In the weeks before the Wall went up, more than a thousand managed to cross the border each day; the Wall was built to keep them from leaving. But people never stopped trying to tear it down.

I was also reminded that most people seem to carry an inherent affinity for a certain region, certainly not always where they’re born. Some deny that in themselves, simply locking to a spot like an oyster to a rock, never looking over the horizon, just accepting — refusing to dream. A few of these folks act contented, but most are just fearful of vision and chance. Some of us are searchers, and we need more. We want to find that place that warms the heart — that strikes such a note at the core of our being we simply stand there enthralled, soothed, and a voice inside says, I’m home. We want to choose the points for our joys and sorrows before we experience them.

Jenson is a better storm tracker than any of those fancy scientists down in Key West. He can feel a big one coming, just by the wind and the waves and his barometer. If he’s worried, you should be too. For that matter, all of us should.

Can a non-Western power really hope to benefit from downloading Western scientific knowledge, if it continues to reject that other key part of the West’s winning formula: the third institutional innovation of private property rights, the rule of law and truly representative government?

It’s a universal law that if you unscrew or unbolt more than 10 parts from any machine that there is only a 3% chance that it will ever go back together again and work. 

Turning the “dumb mob” into the ”smart mob” is one of the key challenges of good governance in the age of social media. Bringing deliberative processes to cyberspace, augmenting the ability of ad hoc groups to gather information, analyze it, organize proposals and arguments, model outcomes, compare alternative approaches, and negotiate hybrid “positive sum” solutions –- all of these together might help forge the smart mob (millions of them) out of the dumb mobs that we’ve known until now.

He remembered a story he had once heard, about a god who had three sons—Whiteman, Blackman, and Gorilla. Blackman and Gorilla sinned against their father, and so the god took his favored son Whiteman to the west, along with all of his wealth, which Whiteman inherited. Gorilla and his kin went to live in the forests. Blackman remained where he was born, but was impoverished, yearning for the wealth inherited by Whiteman.

But he lacked a sense of urgency at key periods, and lacked a firm hand when one was sometimes called for. His greatest strength may have proved his greatest flaw—one that finally sunk John Jacob Astor’s West Coast empire. Wilson Price Hunt vastly preferred cooperation to confrontation.

They exchanged slow, sweet kisses. And he said, “Stay.” She blinked up at him. “What?” “Don’t go back, Carrie. Stay.” He felt her sigh almost before he heard it. “But I have a life there. A business. I’ve worked hard to build my business.” “So start a new business here.” Carrie was at once amazed, touched, and frightened by what Chris was suggesting. She knew she’d fallen in love with him, and she knew they’d just had the sexual liaison of a lifetime, but she’d only known him a week. She had no idea how many girls he might have gotten this involved with, how many times he might have made such a request. Of course, deep inside, she knew this wasn’t an everyday thing for him, just as it wasn’t for her. In fact, she was forced to recall his story about the one girl he’d loved who hadn’t loved him back, and he wondered if maybe it was possible he felt exactly as she did now—but even so, there was so much at stake.

Analysis of Variance (ANOVA)   CHAPTER OBJECTIVES After reading this chapter, you should be able to Use one-way ANOVA when the dependent variable is continuous and the independent variable is nominal or ordinal with two or more categories Understand the assumptions of ANOVA and how to test for them Use post-hoc tests Understand some extensions of one-way ANOVA This chapter provides an essential introduction to analysis of variance (ANOVA). ANOVA is a family of statistical techniques, the most basic of which is the one-way ANOVA, which provides an essential expansion of the t-test discussed in Chapter 12. One-way ANOVA allows analysts to test the effect of a continuous variable on an ordinal or nominal variable with two or more categories, rather than only two categories as is the case with the t-test. Thus, one-way ANOVA enables analysts to deal with problems such as whether the variable “region” (north, south, east, west) or “race” (Caucasian, African American, Hispanic, Asian, etc.) affects policy outcomes or any other matter that is measured on a continuous scale. One-way ANOVA also allows analysts to quickly determine subsets of categories with similar levels of the dependent variable. This chapter also addresses some extensions of one-way ANOVA and a nonparametric alternative. ANALYSIS OF VARIANCE Whereas the t-test is used for testing differences between two groups on a continuous variable (Chapter 12), one-way ANOVA is used for testing the means of a continuous variable across more than two groups. For example, we may wish to test whether income levels differ among three or more ethnic groups, or whether the counts of fish vary across three or more lakes. Applications of ANOVA often arise in medical and agricultural research, in which treatments are given to different groups of patients, animals, or crops. The F-test statistic compares the variances within each group against those that exist between each group and the overall mean: Key Point ANOVA extends the t-test; it is used when the independent variable is

The key to the conquest strategy is to coerce the West into accepting a Muslim right to resist assimilation, to regard sharia as superseding Western law and custom when the two conflict.

the sign of a completely healthy mind is the ability to tell a truly sick joke or make a sick comment and laugh at it yourself.

Pivoting from Trump himself, Bannon plunged on with the Trump agenda. “Day one we’re moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. Netanyahu’s all in. Sheldon”—Sheldon Adelson, the casino billionaire, far-right Israel defender, and Trump supporter—“is all in. We know where we’re heading on this.” “Does Donald know?” asked a skeptical Ailes. Bannon smiled—as though almost with a wink—and continued: “Let Jordan take the West Bank, let Egypt take Gaza. Let them deal with it. Or sink trying. The Saudis are on the brink, Egyptians are on the brink, all scared to death of Persia … Yemen, Sinai, Libya … this thing is bad.… That’s why Russia is so key.… Is Russia that bad? They’re bad guys. But the world is full of bad guys.

An old man's errors mattered both more and less than a young man's. More because there was less time to undo them; less because there was less time to endure their consequences. "You coulda done plenty, Joey. I never gave you a chance.

In light of their views on the organization of society and political economy, Westerners, especially Americans, can be separated into two basic groups. One camp believes in the necessity, and the virtue, of government. People in this category tend to see governments, in whatever country, as essentially devoted to the common good—staffed by public servants, in the full sense of the term. Of course there are lapses; of course some officials are venal; but such cases are seen as exceptions. For this group of Westerners, the notion that an entire government might be transformed into what amounts to a criminal organization, that it might have entirely repurposed the mechanisms of state to serve its ends, is almost too conceptually challenging to contemplate. The other camp is characterized by suspicion of government. For people in this category, many of society’s problems can be blamed on an excess of government interference and regulation. Lack of development overseas is the inevitable result of a collectivist approach, including planned economies and state-run enterprises. Privatization and deregulation, in the view of this group, are key elements of the cure. For if left alone, freedom and the market will function to the greater good of all. The overwhelming evidence that the market liberalization, privatization, and structural adjustment programs the West imposed on developing countries in the 1990s have often helped catalyze kleptocratic networks—and may have actually exacerbated corruption, not reduced it—conflicts with this group’s orthodoxy, and so is hard to process. For most Westerners, in other words, seriously examining the nature and implications of acute corruption would imply a profound overhaul of their own founding mythologies.

He would be the kind of friend he wished he had, and so perhaps become worthy of having such a friend himself.

Agustín Parlá Orduña was among the early Cuban aviation aces. He was born in Key West, Florida, on October 10, 1887, and received his early education there. After Cuba was liberated from Spain, the family returned to Havana, where he continued his education. On April 20, 1912, he received his pilot’s license at the Curtiss School of Aviation in Miami. On July 5, 1913, when the Cuban Army Air Corps was formed, Agustín Parlá was commissioned as a captain in the Cuban Armed Forces. On May 17, 1913, Domingo Rosillo and Agustín Parlá attempted the first international flights to Latin America, by trying to fly their airplanes from Key West to Havana. At 5:10 a.m., Rosillo departed from Key West and flew for 2 hours, 30 minutes and 40 seconds before running out of gas. He had planned to land at the airfield at Camp Columbia in Havana, but instead managed to squeak in at the shooting range, thereby still satisfactorily completing the flight. Parlá left Key West at 5:57 in the morning. Just four minutes later, at 6:01 a.m., he had to carefully turn back to the airstrip he had just left, since the aircraft didn’t properly respond to his controls. Parlá said, “It would not let me compensate for the wind that blew.” When he returned to Key West, he discovered that two of the tension wires to the elevator were broken. On May 19, 1913, Parlá tried again and left Key West, carrying the Cuban Flag his father had received from José Martí. This time he fell short and had to land at sea off the Cuban coast near Mariel, where sailors rescued him from his seaplane.

I thought Beauty and the Beast were two people, not one.

She tried to shriek for help, to cry out against the blinding agony, but her mouth wouldn’t open. The scream stalled in her throat and she gagged. Oh my God. She couldn’t move her lips. She couldn’t say one word.

Character determines fate.

The Shelly he knew had tried too hard to be sexy. This woman didn’t bother with make-up or fixing her hair. Yet she was damn near irresistible. For a second he imagined this babe chasing him around like Shelly had… and letting her catch him. He’d have that sundress off her in no time.

The ocean was a molten gold. A drum roll sent the crowd into a frenzied cheering which reached a fevered pitch when the ocean swallowed the sun in a kinetic bolt of color representing the entire spectrum of light. Matt studied Shelly as she watched awed. The child-like delight on her face was captivating.

Hey Shelly, you’re looking at me like I’m from another planet. What’s wrong?” “Nothing’s wrong. Bubbles sold me alien abduction insurance. I haven’t got a care in the world.

She never asked for too much. She just wanted to be ordinary.

Audubon considered it a bad day if he didn’t shoot a hundred birds. “It’s amazing that his name has become synonymous with conservation.

walked to his second-floor office.

The U.S. Treasury Department has issued at least four licenses to companies that want to establish ferry service to Cuba from Key West, Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Tampa. Baleària, a Spanish company, presently owns the Baleària Bahamas Express ferry service from Fort Lauderdale to Freeport, Grand Bahamas, and is now considering a ferry to operate between Florida and Cuba. United Caribbean and Havana Partners have expressed an interest in a service from Tampa to Havana and Mexico. Baja Ferries USA wants to open routes between the Port of Miami and Port Everglades to Cuba. Some of the ferries will offer duty-free shopping, restaurants, bars and even swimming pools. The details regarding feasibility depends on government restrictions and tariffs placed on them by the countries, as well as the ports involved. Tampa would be a straight run 331 miles due south, but some of the other ports would be closer. In the end it will come down to money, availability of cargo and logistics. As of the summer of 2016, perspective ferry operators are awaiting final approval and licensing from the Cuban government. Because of this the ferry companies are on hold and are still waiting to begin operations. Tampa and The Port of Tampa have expressed their enthusiasm to become fully involved in these new ventures. Bob Rohrlack, President of the Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce, has been to Cuba several times, taking corporate delegates in preparation for improved, open relations with Cuba.

Hardie Boys- Exterior Millwork Exterior spaces on your property are largely exposed to the elements and that means they have to endure considerable wear and tear. This is why it becomes important to make sure that the structures, features and elements are manufactured by specialists that use high-quality, weather-resistant materials and products. We at Hardie Boys, Inc. are a leading manufacturer of various type of exterior architectural work. Since our inception in 1997, we have moved from strength to strength and created a niche for ourselves in this space. Today, when property owners across the region want any exterior millwork done, the first company they think of is us. Not only do we design, manufacture & install a variety of columns, soffit systems, brackets and louvers and a number of other similar products, but use very unique materials and techniques in making these features. Take a look at how our products differ from standard ones used in these applications: • Longevity- Traditionally, these features are made using materials such as foam, wood, concrete, plaster, brick, aluminum, iron etc. While most of these materials are quite hardy they aren’t always able to withstand the elements well. Wood can rot, while metal can rust and corrode over time; concrete tends to develop cracks when exposed to temperature fluctuations and plaster loses its resilience over time. All our products are made with a unique cellular PVC material which is extremely resilient and lasts for a number of years without any trouble. • Minimal maintenance- When you have exterior structures made of wood, they require specialized treatment and have to be polished or painted with regularity. Metal features have to be sanded and painted regularly as well and concrete needs to be resurfaced when it develops cracks. In comparison, the cellular PVC material we use is low-maintenance and only requires basic cleaning. • Aesthetics- As mentioned earlier, the material we use in exterior millwork is weather-resistant and doesn’t fade or deteriorate as much as traditionally-used materials do. This means the features and installations on your property continue to look attractive and add to the aesthetics and value of your property. • Fast and simple installation-The installation of the features made of cellular PVC is easy and quick. This means the project can be completed within a shorter timeframe and with the least amount of disruption to the daily activities on your property. • Versatility- This material is extremely versatile and can be used in the manufacture of various features and installation. We are also very creative and innovative in our approach and keep adding new products to our existing line of premium products. We are a customer-centric company that focuses on customization; and work very closely with our customers and provide beautifully-designed custom exterior millwork installations that are resilient and durable. While the British West Indies style is what we are more inclined towards, our products complement architectural styles including Dutch West Indies, Florida Vernacular, Coastal, Key West and more. For any more information about our custom designed cellular PVC, exterior millwork, contact Hardie Boys, Inc. on this number- 954-784-8216.

Consequently, when Muslims today say they revere Jesus and even that they recognize Christianity as a legitimate faith, they are being disingenuous. For the Christianity that the Koran recognizes is not Christianity as millions practice it around the world today. This is a key source of much of the enduring suspicion and mistrust between Muslims and Christians. The Saudi Sheikh Abd Al-Muhsin Al-Qadhi expatiated on the Koranic view of mainstream Christianity in a recent sermon, in which he also elaborated a contemptuous view of Christian charity:            Today we will talk about one of the distorted religions, about a faith that deviates from the path of righteousness . . . about Christianity, this false faith, and about the people whom Allah described in his book as deviating from the path of righteousness. We will examine their faith, and we will review their history, full of hate, abomination, and wars against Islam and the Muslims. In this distorted and deformed religion, to which many of the inhabitants of the earth belong, we can see how the Christians deviate greatly from the path of righteousness by talking about the concept of the Trinity. As far as they are concerned, God is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost: three who are one.                   . . . They see Jesus, peace be upon him, as the son of Allah. . . . It is the Christians who believe Jesus was crucified. According to them, he was hanged on the cross with nails pounded through his hands, and he cried, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” According to them, this was so that he would atone for the sins of mankind. . . . Regardless of all these deviations from the path of righteousness, it is possible to see many Muslims . . . who know about Christianity only what the Christians claim about love, tolerance, devoting life to serving the needy, and other distorted slogans. . . . After all this, we still find people who promote the idea of bringing our religion and theirs closer, as if the differences were miniscule and could be eliminated by arranging all those [interfaith] conferences, whose goal is political.18 The idea that Christianity is a “distorted, deformed religion” created by people who were bent on rejecting the prophet Muhammad fuels a great deal of Muslim hatred for Christianity, Christians, and the West to this day.

Well, it's true that the anarchist vision in just about all its varieties has looked forward to dismantling state power―and personally I share that vision. But right now it runs directly counter to my goals: my immediate goals have been, and now very much are, to defend and even strengthen certain elements of state authority that are now under severe attack. And I don't think there's any contradiction there―none at all, really. For example, take the so-called "welfare state." What's called the "welfare state" is essentially a recognition that every child has a right to have food, and to have health care and so on―and as I've been saying, those programs were set up in the nation-state system after a century of very hard struggle, by the labor movement, and the socialist movement, and so on. Well, according to the new spirit of the age, in the case of a fourteen-year-old girl who got raped and has a child, her child has to learn "personal responsibility" by not accepting state welfare handouts, meaning, by not having enough to eat. Alright, I don't agree with that at any level. In fact, I think it's grotesque at any level. I think those children should be saved. And in today's world, that's going to have to involve working through the state system; it's not the only case. So despite the anarchist "vision," I think aspects of the state system, like the one that makes sure children eat, have to be defended―in fact, defended very vigorously. And given the accelerating effort that's being made these days to roll back the victories for justice and human rights which have been won through long and often extremely bitter struggles in the West, in my opinion the immediate goal of even committed anarchists should be to defend some state institutions, while helping to pry them open to more meaningful public participation, and ultimately to dismantle them in a much more free society. There are practical problems of tomorrow on which people's lives very much depend, and while defending these kinds of programs is by no means the ultimate end we should be pursuing, in my view we still have to face the problems that are right on the horizon, and which seriously affect human lives. I don't think those things can simply be forgotten because they might not fit within some radical slogan that reflects a deeper vision of a future society. The deeper visions should be maintained, they're important―but dismantling the state system is a goal that's a lot farther away, and you want to deal first with what's at hand and nearby, I think. And in any realistic perspective, the political system, with all its flaws, does have opportunities for participation by the general population which other existing institutions, such as corporations, don't have. In fact, that's exactly why the far right wants to weaken governmental structures―because if you can make sure that all the key decisions are in the hands of Microsoft and General Electric and Raytheon, then you don't have to worry anymore about the threat of popular involvement in policy-making.

Home ownership is equated with the American dream—but what do we do? What we are encouraged to do by family, friends, banks, and politicians? We are encouraged to take out a mortgage for 30 years. This isn’t home ownership, but rather voluntary servitude that imprisons us in a job or occupation.

Each time we show up on this spinning ball of dirt and water, it’s a roll of the dice, but generally what we get is a combination of that which we need, and exactly what we deserve.

His book For Whom the Bell Tolls was an instant success in the summer of 1940, and afforded him the means to live in style at his villa outside of Havana with his new wife Mary Welsh, whom he married in 1946. It was during this period that he started getting headaches and gaining weight, frequently becoming depressed. Being able to shake off his problems, he wrote a series of books on the Land, Air and Sea, and later wrote The Old Man and the Sea for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in May 1954. Hemingway on a trip to Africa where he barely survived two successive airplane crashes. Returning to Cuba, Ernest worked reshaping the recovered work and wrote his memoir, A Moveable Feast. He also finished True at First Light and The Garden of Eden. Being security conscious, he stored his works in a safe deposit box at a bank in Havana. His home Finca Vigía had become a hub for friends and even visiting tourists. It was reliably disclosed to me that he frequently enjoyed swinger’s parties and orgies at his Cuban home. In Spain after divorcing Frank Sinatra Hemingway introduced Ava Gardner to many of the bullfighters he knew and in a free for all, she seduced many of hotter ones. After Ava Gardner’s affair with the famous Spanish bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguín crashed, she came to Cuba and stayed at Finca Vigía, where she had what was termed to be a poignant relationship with Ernest. Ava Gardner swam nude in the pool, located down the slope from the Hemingway house, after which he told his staff that the water was not to be emptied. An intimate friendship grew between Hemingway’s forth and second wife, Mary and Pauline. Pauline often came to Finca Vigia, in the early 1950s, and likewise Mary made the crossing of the Florida Straits, back to Key West several times. The ex-wife and the current wife enjoyed gossiping about their prior husbands and lovers and had choice words regarding Ernest. In 1959, Hemingway was in Cuba during the revolution, and was delighted that Batista, who owned the nearby property, that later became the location of the dismal Pan Americana Housing Development, was overthrown. He shared the love of fishing with Fidel Castro and remained on good terms with him. Reading the tea leaves, he decided to leave Cuba after hearing that Fidel wanted to nationalize the properties owned by Americans and other foreign nationals. In the summer of 1960, while working on a manuscript for Life magazine, Hemingway developed dementia becoming disorganized and confused. His eyesight had been failing and he became despondent and depressed. On July 25, 1960, he and his wife Mary left Cuba for the last time. He never retrieved his books or the manuscripts that he left in the bank vault. Following the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Cuban government took ownership of his home and the works he left behind, including an estimated 5,000 books from his personal library. After years of neglect, his home, which was designed by the Spanish architect Miguel Pascual y Baguer in 1886, has now been largely restored as the Hemingway Museum. The museum, overlooking San Francisco de Paula, as well as the Straits of Florida in the distance, houses much of his work as well as his boat housed near his pool.

During the “Bay of Pigs Invasion” One Douglas “B-26” airplane with counterfeit Cuban markings was fired on and crashed into the sea about 30 miles north of the island. Another of these aircraft, which was also damaged but still air worthy, continued north and landed at Boca Chica Key Naval Air Station near Key West, Florida. The following day the crew was quickly flown to exile in Nicaragua. The United States government announced that the downed aircraft belonged to the Cuban air force and was manned by Cuban dissidents. In reply to this, Castro appeared on Cuban State television and denounced these claims. He put his military on high alert and directed defensive operations from the Cuban Military Headquarters, which had just been bombed by two of the masquerading airplanes. Fidel issued orders to detain anyone who was suspected of conspiracy or treason. Lists of these people had previously been prepared and were used to round up suspected dissenters. Within days, his overzealous police force and army incarcerated about 20,000 Cuban citizens, using whatever means were available, including a sports stadium. In a speech to the people, Fidel finally admitted to the public that his Movement was Socialistic. The Cuban Foreign Minister Raúl Roa García, successfully presented evidence at the United Nations, proving that the attacks were foreign in origin. Adlai Stevenson, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, replied that the United States had not participated in any action against Cuba. Ambassador Stevenson, knowing better, insisted that the aircraft that had landed in Miami had Cuban markings and therefore must have been of Cuban origin. Stevenson’s comments sounded contrived since the aircraft had Plexiglas noses, normally used as the bombardier’s station, whereas the actual Cuban B-26’s had solid noses with armament. It was obvious to the General Assembly that the United States Ambassador had been perpetrating an outright lie or, in diplomatic double talk, an untruth! It was an embarrassing moment that left the United States’ veracity open to ridicule

Five minutes ago is gone, never to be seen again. Five minutes from now, isn't here yet....What are you going to do with it?

I knew that I would never be able to voluntarily walk back into the corporate American lifestyle. Once a person escapes from prison, they don’t just voluntarily return.

On February 17, 1898, Captain William T. Sampson, USN was the President of the Board of Inquiry, investigating the explosion that sank the USS Maine. On March 26, 1898, he was given command of the Navy’s North Atlantic Squadron, with the temporary rank of Rear Admiral. Aboard the flagship USS New York, he sailed to Havana from Key West where he bombarded the city for several days, resulting in minor damage to the city. As part of his duties, he sealed Havana harbor and supervised the blockade of Cuba. At the time it was erroneously believed that the USS Maine was sunk by Spain. It was only recently that continuing investigation determined that the sinking was really caused by a bunker fire smoldering in the bituminous coal used for fuel. The fire heated the bulkhead separating the engine room from a magazine containing the powder bags used to fire the 10” guns. It was the resulting explosion, rather than Spanish mine that sank the USS Maine, killing 261 officers and crew out of the 355 men that manned the ship. It took over ten years before the USS Maine was refloated and towed out to sea, clearing the harbor. She was again sunk at a location, where she now rests 3,600 feet below the surface.

All great truths begin as blasphemies.                                           — George Bernard Shaw