“
In my next life I want to live my life backwards. You start out dead and get that out of the way. Then you wake up in an old people's home feeling better every day. You get kicked out for being too healthy, go collect your pension, and then when you start work, you get a gold watch and a party on your first day. You work for 40 years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. You party, drink alcohol, and are generally promiscuous, then you are ready for high school. You then go to primary school, you become a kid, you play. You have no responsibilities, you become a baby until you are born. And then you spend your last 9 months floating in luxurious spa-like conditions with central heating and room service on tap, larger quarters every day and then Voila! You finish off as an orgasm!
”
”
Woody Allen
“
Paine suffered then, as now he suffers not so much because of what he wrote as from the misinterpretations of others...
He disbelieved the ancient myths and miracles taught by established creeds. But the attacks on those creeds - or on persons devoted to them - have served to darken his memory, casting a shadow across the closing years of his life.
When Theodore Roosevelt termed Tom Paine a 'dirty little atheist' he surely spoke from lack of understanding. It was a stricture, an inaccurate charge of the sort that has dimmed the greatness of this eminent American. But the true measure of his stature will yet be appreciated. The torch which he handed on will not be extinguished. If Paine had ceased his writings with 'The Rights of Man' he would have been hailed today as one of the two or three outstanding figures of the Revolution. But 'The Age of Reason' cost him glory at the hands of his countrymen - a greater loss to them than to Tom Paine.
I was always interested in Paine the inventor. He conceived and designed the iron bridge and the hollow candle; the principle of the modern central draught burner. The man had a sort of universal genius. He was interested in a diversity of things; but his special creed, his first thought, was liberty.
Traducers have said that he spent his last days drinking in pothouses. They have pictured him as a wicked old man coming to a sorry end. But I am persuaded that Paine must have looked with magnanimity and sorrow on the attacks of his countrymen. That those attacks have continued down to our day, with scarcely any abatement, is an indication of how strong prejudice, when once aroused, may become. It has been a custom in some quarters to hold up Paine as an example of everything bad.
The memory of Tom Paine will outlive all this. No man who helped to lay the foundations of our liberty - who stepped forth as the champion of so difficult a cause - can be permanently obscured by such attacks. Tom Paine should be read by his countrymen. I commend his fame to their hands.
{The Philosophy of Paine, June 7, 1925}
”
”
Thomas A. Edison (Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison)
“
The United States imprisons a higher portion of its population than any country in the world. In 2017 we had 2.2 million people in prisons and jails, a 500 percent increase over the last forty years. We now have almost 5 percent of the world’s population and nearly a quarter of its prisoners.
”
”
Shane Bauer (American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment)
“
The span of his seventy-five years had acted as a magic bellows—the first quarter-century had blown him full with life, and the last had sucked it all back.
”
”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and Damned)
“
The stranger came early in February, one wintry day, through a biting wind and a driving snow, the last snowfall of the year, over the down, walking as it seemed from Bramblehurst railway station, and carrying a little black portmanteau in his thickly gloved hand. He was wrapped up from head to foot, and the brim of his soft felt hat hid every inch of his face but the shiny tip of his nose; the snow had piled itself against his shoulders and chest, and added a white crest to the burden he carried. He staggered into the Coarch and Horses, more dead than alive as it seemed, and flung his portmanteau down. "A fire," he cried, "in the name of human charity! A room and a fire!" He stamped and shook the snow from off himself in the bar, and followed Mrs. Hall into her guest parlour to strike his bargain. And with that much introduction, that and a ready acquiescence to terms and a couple of sovereigns flung upon the table, he took up his quarters in the inn.
”
”
H.G. Wells (The Invisible Man)
“
We look back on history, and what do we see? Empires rising and falling; revolutions and counter-revolutions succeeding one another; wealth accumulating and wealth dispersed; one nation dominant and then another. As Shakespeare’s King Lear puts it, “the rise and fall of great ones that ebb and flow with the moon.” In one lifetime I’ve seen my fellow countrymen ruling over a quarter of the world, and the great majority of them convinced – in the words of what is still a favorite song – that God has made them mighty and will make them mightier yet. I’ve heard a crazed Austrian announce the establishment of a German Reich that was to last for a thousand years; an Italian clown report that the calendar will begin again with his assumption of power; a murderous Georgian brigand in the Kremlin acclaimed by the intellectual elite as wiser than Solomon, more enlightened than Ashoka, more humane than Marcus Aurelius. I’ve seen America wealthier than all the rest of the world put together; and with the superiority of weaponry that would have enabled Americans, had they so wished, to outdo an Alexander or a Julius Caesar in the range and scale of conquest. All in one little lifetime – gone with the wind: England now part of an island off the coast of Europe, threatened with further dismemberment; Hitler and Mussolini seen as buffoons; Stalin a sinister name in the regime he helped to found and dominated totally for three decades; Americans haunted by fears of running out of the precious fluid that keeps their motorways roaring and the smog settling, by memories of a disastrous military campaign in Vietnam, and the windmills of Watergate. Can this really be what life is about – this worldwide soap opera going on from century to century, from era to era, as old discarded sets and props litter the earth? Surely not. Was it to provide a location for so repetitive and ribald a production as this that the universe was created and man, or homo sapiens as he likes to call himself – heaven knows why – came into existence? I can’t believe it. If this were all, then the cynics, the hedonists, and the suicides are right: the most we can hope for from life is amusement, gratification of our senses, and death. But it is not all.
”
”
Malcolm Muggeridge
“
How many years have slipped through our hands?
At least as many as the constellations we still can identify.
The quarter moon, like a light skiff,
floats out of the mist-remnants
Of last night’s hard rain.
It, too, will slip through our fingers
with no ripple, without us in it.
”
”
Charles Wright
“
Design is not limited to fancy new gadgets. Our family just bought a new washing machine and dryer. We didn’t have a very good one so we spent a little time looking at them. It turns out that the Americans make washers and dryers all wrong. The Europeans make them much better – but they take twice as long to do clothes! It turns out that they wash them with about a quarter as much water and your clothes end up with a lot less detergent on them. Most important, they don’t trash your clothes. They use a lot less soap, a lot less water, but they come out much cleaner, much softer, and they last a lot longer. We spent some time in our family talking about what’s the trade-off we want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table. We’d get around to that old washer-dryer discussion. And the talk was about design. We ended up opting for these Miele appliances, made in Germany. They’re too expensive, but that’s just because nobody buys them in this country. They are really wonderfully made and one of the few products we’ve bought over the last few years that we’re all really happy about. These guys really thought the process through. They did such a great job designing these washers and dryers. I got more thrill out of them than I have out of any piece of high tech in years.
”
”
Steve Jobs
“
On this perfect day, when everything is ripening and not only the grape turns brown, the eye of the sun just fell upon my life: I looked back, I looked forward, and never saw so many and such good things at once. It was not for nothing that I buried my forty-fourth year today; I had the right to bury it; whatever was life in it has been saved, is immortal. The first book of the Revaluation of All Values, the Songs of Zarathustra, the Twilight of the Idols, my attempt to philosophize with a hammer—all presents of this year, indeed of its last quarter! How could I fail to be grateful to my whole life?—and so I tell my life to myself.
”
”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“
The Everlasting Staircase"
Jeffrey McDaniel
When the call came, saying twenty-four hours to live,
my first thought was: can't she postpone her exit
from this planet for a week? I've got places to do,
people to be. Then grief hit between the ribs,
said disappear or reappear more fully. so I boarded
a red eyeball and shot across America,
hoping the nurses had enough quarters to keep
the jukebox of Grandma's heart playing. She grew up
poor in Appalachia. And while world war II
functioned like Prozac for the Great Depression,
she believed poverty was a double feature,
that the comfort of her adult years was merely
an intermission, that hunger would hobble back,
hurl its prosthetic leg through her window,
so she clipped, clipped, clipped -- became the Jacques
Cousteau of the bargain bin, her wetsuit
stuffed with coupons. And now --pupils fixed, chin
dangling like the boots of a hanged man --
I press my ear to her lampshade-thin chest
and listen to that little soldier march toward whatever
plateau, or simply exhaust his arsenal of beats.
I hate when people ask if she even knew I was there.
The point is I knew, holding the one-sided
conversation of her hand. Once I believed the heart
was like a bar of soap -- the more you use it,
the smaller it gets; care too much and it'll snap off
in your grasp. But when Grandma's last breath
waltzed from that room, my heart opened
wide like a parachute, and I realized she didn't die.
She simply found a silence she could call her own.
”
”
Jeffrey McDaniel
“
Hubris is an incurable American disease. As incurable as the military-industrial machine that keeps coming up with the armaments that make wars seem like slam dunks, but which last for decades; wars that are fought by a very small percentage of the population and, regular effusive acknowledgement of veterans notwithstanding, can be ignored for years.
”
”
Don Watson (Enemy Within: American Politics in the Time of Trump (Quarterly Essay #63))
“
In times of old when I was new
And Hogwarts barely started
The founders of our noble school
Thought never to be parted:
United by a common goal,
They had the selfsame yearning,
To make the world’s best magic school
And pass along their learning.
“Together we will build and teach!”
The four good friends decided
And never did they dream that they
Might someday be divided,
For were there such friends anywhere
As Slytherin and Gryffindor?
Unless it was the second pair
Of Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw?
So how could it have gone so wrong?
How could such friendships fail?
Why, I was there and so can tell
The whole sad, sorry tale.
Said Slytherin, “We’ll teach just those
Whose ancestry is purest.”
Said Ravenclaw, “We’ll teach those whose
Intelligence is surest.”
Said Gryffindor, “We’ll teach all those
With brave deeds to their name.”
Said Hufflepuff, “I’ll teach the lot,
And treat them just the same.”
These differences caused little strife
When first they came to light,
For each of the four founders had
A House in which they might
Take only those they wanted, so,
For instance, Slytherin
Took only pure-blood wizards
Of great cunning, just like him,
And only those of sharpest mind
Were taught by Ravenclaw
While the bravest and the boldest
Went to daring Gryffindor.
Good Hufflepuff, she took the rest,
And taught them all she knew,
Thus the Houses and their founders
Retained friendships firm and true.
So Hogwarts worked in harmony
For several happy years,
But then discord crept among us
Feeding on our faults and fears.
The Houses that, like pillars four,
Had once held up our school,
Now turned upon each other and,
Divided, sought to rule.
And for a while it seemed the school
Must meet an early end,
What with dueling and with fighting
And the clash of friend on friend
And at last there came a morning
When old Slytherin departed
And though the fighting then died out
He left us quite downhearted.
And never since the founders four
Were whittled down to three
Have the Houses been united
As they once were meant to be.
And now the Sorting Hat is here
And you all know the score:
I sort you into Houses
Because that is what I’m for,
But this year I’ll go further,
Listen closely to my song:
Though condemned I am to split you
Still I worry that it’s wrong,
Though I must fulfill my duty
And must quarter every year
Still I wonder whether
Sorting May not bring the end I fear.
Oh, know the perils, read the signs,
The warning history shows,
For our Hogwarts is in danger
From external, deadly foes
And we must unite inside her
Or we’ll crumble from within.
I have told you, I have warned you. . . .
Let the Sorting now begin.
The hat became motionless once more;
”
”
J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Harry Potter, #5))
“
Roughly three-quarters of jobs are now sedentary, and we’re sitting more every year. Over the last decade, the average American added another hour of daily sitting. Adults now sit for six and a half hours, while kids sit more than eight (the removal of recess hasn’t helped, either).
”
”
Michael Easter (The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort To Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self)
“
The first pacemaker was about the size of a pack of cigarettes. Today’s are no bigger than one American quarter and can last up to ten years.
”
”
Bill Bryson (The Body: A Guide for Occupants)
“
That’s a quarter of the number of children who did not die last year alone who would have died had they been born fifteen years earlier.
”
”
Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress)
“
Imagine the tragedy; then try to imagine it another million times. That’s a quarter of the number of children who did not die last year alone who would have died had they been born fifteen years earlier.
”
”
Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress)
“
This was the beginning of my various ambitions which have gradually consumed me during the last quarter of a century and virtually incapacitated me for supplying my quota of seven sons and six daughters to the state.
”
”
Gertrude Beasley (My First Thirty Years)
“
I wonder if you've ever considered how strange it is that the educational and character-shaping structures of our culture expose us but a single time in our lives to the ideas of Socrates, Plato, Euclid, Aristotle, Herodotus, Augustine, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Descartes, Rousseau, Newton, Racine, Darwin, Kant, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Schopenhauer, Goethe, Freud, Marx, Einstein, and dozens of others of the same rank, but expose us annually, monthly, weekly, and even daily to the ideas of persons like Jesus, Moses, Muhammad, and Buddha. Why is it, do you think, that we need quarterly lectures on charity, while a single lecture on the laws of thermodynamics is presumed to last us a lifetime? Why is the meaning of Christmas judged to be so difficult of comprehension that we must hear a dozen explications of it, not once in a lifetime, but every single year, year after year after year?
”
”
Daniel Quinn (The Story of B (Ishmael, #2))
“
A gentleman in those days consulted his heirs about tree planting. Should you plant a group of copper beeches against a group of white maples over against the ha-ha a quarter of a mile from the house so that the contrast seen from the ball-room windows should be agreeable—in thirty years’ time? In those days thought, in families, went in periods of thirty years, owner gravely consulting heir who should see that development of light and shade that the owner never would.
”
”
Ford Madox Ford (The Last Post)
“
The Thousand Year Reich did not last two decades; the Soviet Union lasted three quarters of a century; Idi Amin ruled for eight years; the Confederacy didn't make it to kindergarten; Argentina's Dirty War lasted six years; Pinochet dominated Chile for sixteen years; nothing lasts forever, even the worst things. Hitler killed himself; Stalin and Franco lasted too long but ultimately dropped dead and last year Franco's body was exhumed from its grand prison-labor-built monument and dumped in a municipal cemetery; Pol Pot died in prison; Mugabe had to step down; Putin is not immortal.
Every day under these monstrosities was too long, and part of the horror of life under a corrupt and brutal regime is that it seems never-ending, but nothing lasts forever. And believing that something can end is often instrumental to working toward ending it; how the people in Eastern Europe dared to hope that their efforts might succeed I cannot imagine.
”
”
Rebecca Solnit
“
This afternoon, being on Fair Haven Hill, I heard the sound of a saw, and soon after from the Cliff saw two men sawing down a noble pine beneath, about forty rods off. I resolved to watch it till it fell, the last of a dozen or more which were left when the forest was cut and for fifteen years have waved in solitary majesty over the sprout-land. I saw them like beavers or insects gnawing at the trunk of this noble tree, the diminutive manikins with their cross-cut saw which could scarcely span it. It towered up a hundred feet as I afterward found by measurement, one of the tallest probably in the township and straight as an arrow, but slanting a little toward the hillside, its top seen against the frozen river and the hills of Conantum. I watch closely to see when it begins to move. Now the sawers stop, and with an axe open it a little on the side toward which it leans, that it may break the faster. And now their saw goes again. Now surely it is going; it is inclined one quarter of the quadrant, and, breathless, I expect its crashing fall. But no, I was mistaken; it has not moved an inch; it stands at the same angle as at first. It is fifteen minutes yet to its fall. Still its branches wave in the wind, as it were destined to stand for a century, and the wind soughs through its needles as of yore; it is still a forest tree, the most majestic tree that waves over Musketaquid. The silvery sheen of the sunlight is reflected from its needles; it still affords an inaccessible crotch for the squirrel’s nest; not a lichen has forsaken its mast-like stem, its raking mast,—the hill is the hulk. Now, now’s the moment! The manikins at its base are fleeing from their crime. They have dropped the guilty saw and axe. How slowly and majestic it starts! as it were only swayed by a summer breeze, and would return without a sigh to its location in the air. And now it fans the hillside with its fall, and it lies down to its bed in the valley, from which it is never to rise, as softly as a feather, folding its green mantle about it like a warrior, as if, tired of standing, it embraced the earth with silent joy, returning its elements to the dust again. But hark! there you only saw, but did not hear. There now comes up a deafening crash to these rocks , advertising you that even trees do not die without a groan. It rushes to embrace the earth, and mingle its elements with the dust. And now all is still once more and forever, both to eye and ear.
I went down and measured it. It was about four feet in diameter where it was sawed, about one hundred feet long. Before I had reached it the axemen had already divested it of its branches. Its gracefully spreading top was a perfect wreck on the hillside as if it had been made of glass, and the tender cones of one year’s growth upon its summit appealed in vain and too late to the mercy of the chopper. Already he has measured it with his axe, and marked off the mill-logs it will make. And the space it occupied in upper air is vacant for the next two centuries. It is lumber. He has laid waste the air. When the fish hawk in the spring revisits the banks of the Musketaquid, he will circle in vain to find his accustomed perch, and the hen-hawk will mourn for the pines lofty enough to protect her brood. A plant which it has taken two centuries to perfect, rising by slow stages into the heavens, has this afternoon ceased to exist. Its sapling top had expanded to this January thaw as the forerunner of summers to come. Why does not the village bell sound a knell? I hear no knell tolled. I see no procession of mourners in the streets, or the woodland aisles. The squirrel has leaped to another tree; the hawk has circled further off, and has now settled upon a new eyrie, but the woodman is preparing [to] lay his axe at the root of that also.
”
”
Henry David Thoreau (The Journal, 1837-1861)
“
Well,” said he, “what are you thinking of?” “I am thinking,” said I, “that I shall be past thinking, this evening.” “Oh, that’s it,” returned he. “Come, come, you are too sad. Mr. Castaing conversed on the day of his execution.” Then, after a pause, he continued: “I accompanied Mr. Papavoine on his last day. He wore his otter-skin cap, and smoked his cigar. As for the young men of La Rochelle, they only spoke among themselves, but still they spoke. As for you, I really think you are too pensive, young man.” “Young man?” I repeated. “I am older than you; every quarter of an hour which passes makes me a year older.” He turned round, looked at me some minutes with stupid astonishment, and then began to titter. “Come, you are joking; older than I am? why, I might be your grandfather.
”
”
Victor Hugo (Complete Works of Victor Hugo)
“
Really, Tichy. Don’t be so demonic. Ours is simply a world in which more than twenty billion people live. Did you read today’s Herald? The government of Pakistan claims that in this year’s famine only 970,000 perished, while the opposition gives a figure of six million. In such a world where are you going to find Chablis, pheasants, tenderloin with sauce béarnaise? The last pheasant died a quarter of a century ago. That bird is a corpse, only excellently preserved, for we have become masters of its mummification—or rather: we have learned how to hide its death.
”
”
Stanisław Lem (The Futurological Congress: From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy)
“
Hemorrhoids Go big or go home! That was my mental response to childbirth. You want me to push? Okay, awesome. I’m going to push so hard that I not only eject this baby from me, but I’m also going to turn my butthole inside out. When I explained the issue to my OB, she insisted hemorrhoids were totally normal, and if they didn’t go away, I could get a quick surgery to correct them, a suggestion that I met with a resounding “Nope!” I had already spent a month in elementary school sitting on a blowup pillow, and I’m not pulling my pants down as an adult to have surgery in my butt. So, here I am, five years out from my last birth and sitting in my chair a quarter of an inch taller.
”
”
Brittany Gibbons (Fat Girl Walking: Sex, Food, Love, and Being Comfortable in Your Skin...Every Inch of It)
“
A few years later, Jobs described to Wired the process that went into getting a new washing machine: It turns out that the Americans make washers and dryers all wrong. The Europeans make them much better—but they take twice as long to do clothes! It turns out that they wash them with about a quarter as much water and your clothes end up with a lot less detergent on them. Most important, they don’t trash your clothes. They use a lot less soap, a lot less water, but they come out much cleaner, much softer, and they last a lot longer. We spent some time in our family talking about what’s the trade-off we want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table. They ended up getting a Miele washer and dryer, made in Germany. “I got more thrill out of them than I have out of any piece of high tech in years,” Jobs said.
”
”
Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
“
The Winding Stair
My Soul. I summon to the winding ancient stair;
Set all your mind upon the steep ascent,
Upon the broken, crumbling battlement,
Upon the breathless starlit air,
'Upon the star that marks the hidden pole;
Fix every wandering thought upon
That quarter where all thought is done:
Who can distinguish darkness from the soul
My Self. The consecretes blade upon my knees
Is Sato's ancient blade, still as it was,
Still razor-keen, still like a looking-glass
Unspotted by the centuries;
That flowering, silken, old embroidery, torn
From some court-lady's dress and round
The wodden scabbard bound and wound
Can, tattered, still protect, faded adorn
My Soul. Why should the imagination of a man
Long past his prime remember things that are
Emblematical of love and war?
Think of ancestral night that can,
If but imagination scorn the earth
And intellect is wandering
To this and that and t'other thing,
Deliver from the crime of death and birth.
My Self. Montashigi, third of his family, fashioned it
Five hundred years ago, about it lie
Flowers from I know not what embroidery -
Heart's purple - and all these I set
For emblems of the day against the tower
Emblematical of the night,
And claim as by a soldier's right
A charter to commit the crime once more.
My Soul. Such fullness in that quarter overflows
And falls into the basin of the mind
That man is stricken deaf and dumb and blind,
For intellect no longer knows
Is from the Ought, or knower from the Known -
That is to say, ascends to Heaven;
Only the dead can be forgiven;
But when I think of that my tongue's a stone.
II
My Self. A living man is blind and drinks his drop.
What matter if the ditches are impure?
What matter if I live it all once more?
Endure that toil of growing up;
The ignominy of boyhood; the distress
Of boyhood changing into man;
The unfinished man and his pain
Brought face to face with his own clumsiness;
The finished man among his enemies? -
How in the name of Heaven can he escape
That defiling and disfigured shape
The mirror of malicious eyes
Casts upon his eyes until at last
He thinks that shape must be his shape?
And what's the good of an escape
If honour find him in the wintry blast?
I am content to live it all again
And yet again, if it be life to pitch
Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch,
A blind man battering blind men;
Or into that most fecund ditch of all,
The folly that man does
Or must suffer, if he woos
A proud woman not kindred of his soul.
I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest
”
”
W.B. Yeats
“
She was only twenty-three, not even a quarter of a century old.She had spent the last five years living exclusively in the human world. Now her wild nature was calling to her. Gregori was touching something untamed in her, something to which she had forbidden herself access. Something wild and unhibited and incredibly sensuous.
Savannah looked up at his dark, handsome face. It was so male. So carnal. So powerful. Gregori. The Dark One. Just looking at him made her go weak with need. One glance from his slashing silver eyes could bring a rush of liquid heat, fire racing through her.She became soft and pliant. She became his.
Gregori's palm cupped her face. "Whatever you are thinking is making you fear me,Savannah," he said softly. "Stop it."
"You're making me into something I'm not," she whispered.
"You are Carpathian, my lifemate. You are Savannah Dubrinsky. I cannot take any of those things from you. I do not want a puppet, or a different woman. I want you as you are." His voice was soft and compelling. He lifted her in his arms,carried her to his bed and tucked the covers around her.
The storm lashed at the windows and whistled against the walls. Gregori wove the safeguards in preparation for their sleep. Savannah as exhausted, her eyes already trying to close. Then he slipped into the bed and gathered her into his arms. "I would never change anything about you,ma patite, not even your nasty little temper."
She settled against his body as if she was made for it.He felt the brush of her lips against his chest and the last sigh of air as it escaped from her lungs.
Gregori lay awake for a long time, watching as the dawn crept forward, pushing away the night. One wave of his hand closed and locked the heavy shutters over the windows. Still he lay awake, holding Savannah close.
Because he had always known he was dangerous, he had feared for mortals and immortals alike at his hand. But somehow,perhaps naively, he had thought that once he was bound to his lifemate, he would become tamer, more domesticated. His fingers bunched in her hair. But Savannah made him wild. She made him far more dangerous than he had ever been. Before Savannah, he had had no emotions. He had killed when it necessary because it was necessary. He had feared nothing because he loved nothing and had nothing to lose. Now he had everything to lose.And so he was more dangerous.For no one, nothing, would ever threaten Savannah and live.
”
”
Christine Feehan (Dark Magic (Dark, #4))
“
In it {a film Peter saw} a sadistic sergeant broke the spirit of soldier in a military prison by beating him up at systematically random intervals, from more than a day down to a quarter of an hour, so that the victim never knew when the next attack was coming, never felt safe. Life with Muriel, it seemed to Peter, had over the last seven or eight years turned into a decreasingly bearable version of that.
”
”
Kingsley Amis (The Old Devils)
“
SOCIAL/GENERAL ICEBREAKERS
1. What do you think of the movie/restaurant/party?
2. Tell me about the best vacation you’ve ever taken.
3. What’s your favorite thing to do on a rainy day?
4. If you could replay any moment in your life, what would it be?
5. What one thing would you really like to own? Why?
6. Tell me about one of your favorite relatives.
7. What was it like in the town where you grew up?
8. What would you like to come back as in your next life?
9. Tell me about your kids.
10. What do you think is the perfect age? Why?
11. What is a typical day like for you?
12. Of all the places you’ve lived, tell me about the one you like the best.
13. What’s your favorite holiday? What do you enjoy about it?
14. What are some of your family traditions that you particularly enjoy?
15. Tell me about the first car you ever bought.
16. How has the Internet affected your life?
17. Who were your idols as a kid? Have they changed?
18. Describe a memorable teacher you had.
19. Tell me about a movie/book you’ve seen or read more than once.
20. What’s your favorite restaurant? Why?
21. Tell me why you were named ______. What is the origin of your last name?
22. Tell me about a place you’ve visited that you hope never to return to.
get over your mom’s good intentions.
23. What’s the best surprise you’ve ever received?
24. What’s the neatest surprise you’ve ever planned and pulled off for someone else?
25. Skiing here is always challenging. What are some of your favorite places to ski?
26. Who would star as you in a movie about your life?
Why that person?
27. Who is the most famous person you’ve met?
28. Tell me about some of your New Year’s resolutions.
29. What’s the most antiestablishment thing you’ve ever done?
30. Describe a costume that you wore to a party.
31. Tell me about a political position you’d like to hold.
32. What song reminds you of an incident in your life?
33. What’s the most memorable meal you’ve eaten?
34. What’s the most unforgettable coincidence you’ve experienced or heard about?
35. How are you able to tell if that melon is ripe?
36. What motion picture star would you like to interview? Why?
37. Tell me about your family.
38. What aroma brings forth a special memory?
39. Describe the scariest person you ever met.
40. What’s your favorite thing to do alone?
41. Tell me about a childhood friend who used to get you in trouble.
42. Tell me about a time when you had too much to eat or drink.
43. Describe your first away-from-home living quarters or experience.
44. Tell me about a time that you lost a job.
45. Share a memory of one of your grandparents.
46. Describe an embarrassing moment you’ve had.
47. Tell me something most people would never guess about you.
48. What would you do if you won a million dollars?
49. Describe your ideal weather and why.
50. How did you learn to ski/hang drywall/play piano?
”
”
Debra Fine (The Fine Art of Small Talk: How to Start a Conversation, Keep It Going, Build Networking Skills and Leave a Positive Impression!)
“
The ideal of quiet and of genteel retirement, in 1835, was found in Washington Square, where the Doctor built himself a handsome, modern, wide-fronted house, with a big balcony before the drawing-room windows, and a flight of marble steps ascending to a portal which was also faced with white marble. This structure, and many of its neighbours, which it exactly resembled, were supposed, forty years ago, to embody the last results of architectural science, and they remain to this day very solid and honourable dwellings. In front of them was the Square, containing a considerable quantity of inexpensive vegetation, enclosed by a wooden paling, which increased its rural and accessible appearance; and round the corner was the more august precinct of the Fifth Avenue, taking its origin at this point with a spacious and confident air which already marked it for high destinies. I know not whether it is owing to the tenderness of early associations, but this portion of New York appears to many persons the most delectable. It has a kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other quarters of the long, shrill city; it has a riper, richer, more honourable look than any of the upper ramifications of the great longitudinal thoroughfare—the look of having had something of a social history.
”
”
Henry James (Washington Square (Signet Classics))
“
He paid this boy minimum wage, and Mrs. Harold tutored him in Christian precepts for free from her seat at the cash register. Harold usually hired three of these boys a year. Four months was their average tenure, after which some were lured away by Mammon, in the form of a quarter-an-hour raise. Others just cleaned out the till and bolted. The last had left Mrs. Harold a note in the big bill slot of the cash register that said: “Jesus was a stupid fuck. And so are you.
”
”
Richard Russo (Nobody's Fool (Sully #1))
“
Quiet people avoid the question of the Presidency, for there will be a new election in three years and a half, and party feeling runs very high: the great constitutional feature of this institution being, that directly the acrimony of the last election is over, the acrimony of the next one begins; which is an unspeakable comfort to all strong politicians and true lovers of their country: that is to say, to ninety-nine men and boys out of every ninety-nine and a quarter.
”
”
Charles Dickens (American Notes for General Circulation)
“
The span of his seventy-five years had acted as a magic bellows—the first quarter-century had blown him full with life, and the last had sucked it all back. It had sucked in the cheeks and the chest and the girth of arm and leg. It had tyrannously demanded his teeth, one by one, suspended his small eyes in dark-bluish sacks, tweeked out his hairs, changed him from gray to white in some places, from pink to yellow in others—callously transposing his colors like a child trying over a paintbox. Then through his body and his soul it had attacked his brain. It had sent him night-sweats and tears and unfounded dreads. It had split his intense normality into credulity and suspicion. Out of the coarse material of his enthusiasm it had cut dozens of meek but petulant obsessions; his energy was shrunk to the bad temper of a spoiled child, and for his will to power was substituted a fatuous puerile desire for a land of harps and canticles on earth.
”
”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
“
The only public memorials ever raised to the two most tragically linked of this saga’s protagonists are miserable, niggardly affairs. William Minor has just a simple little gravestone in a New Haven cemetery, hemmed in between litter and slums. George Merrett has for years had nothing at all, except for a patch of grayish grass in a sprawling graveyard in South London. Minor does, however, have the advantage of the great dictionary, which some might say acts as his most lasting remembrance. But nothing else remains to suggest that the man he killed was ever worthy of any memory at all. George Merrett has become an absolutely unsung man. Which is why it now seems fitting, more than a century and a quarter on, that this modest account begins with the dedication that it does. And why this book is offered as a small testament to the late George Merrett of Wiltshire and Lambeth, without whose untimely death these events would never have unfolded, and this tale could never have been told.
”
”
Simon Winchester (The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary)
“
She had three days to ponder what that truth might be.Three days during which Dragon scarcely let her out of his sight. He went so far as to try to accompany her to the queen's solar, only to be shooed away by Ealhswith even as she smiled and took pains to reassure him.
"I promise you, my lord,the Lady Rycca will be as safe here as a babe in arms. Believe me, the quarters of the queen are not entered into by miscreants."
"That is all well and fine, majesty, but-"
"Should you not be aware,my lord, we had an incident here last year when the Lady Krysta was taken from Winchester by stealth. Since then, my lord husband has spared no effort to assure nothing of the sort can ever happen again." She gestured toward the grim-faced guards on watch in the corridor. "You will find the same beneath my windows, Lord of Landsende,and even above us on the roof. Not even an errant bird can enter here."
Even as she spoke, through the open door where she stood Dragon saw a raven alight on the sill of one of the solar's windows. Rather oddly, he thought, Krysta walked over and began talking to it.
"There are four new books in the scriptorium, my lord," the queen said, unaware of what was going on behind her, "and a young priest-a friend of Father Desmond, who is now at Hawkforte-who is responsible for one of them. By the way,he has a yen to travel."
That said,she shut the door not quite in his face but as close to it as that gently lady could ever come. Dragon hesitated. He eyed the guards,who eyed him back,reminded himself that he was in the house of the king,and finally decided to go look at the new books. While he was at it,he just might have a word with the priest.
”
”
Josie Litton (Come Back to Me (Viking & Saxon, #3))
“
Already it is twilight down in the Laredito. Bats fly forth from their roostings in courthouse and tower and circle the quarter. The air is full of the smell of burning charcoal. Children and dogs squat by the mud stoops and gamecocks flap and settle in the branches of the fruit trees. They go afoot, these comrades, down along a bare adobe wall. Band music carries dimly from the square. They pass a watercart in the street and they pass a hole in the wall where by the light of a small forgefire an old man beats out shapes of metal. They pass in a doorway a young girl whose beauty becomes the flowers about.
They arrive at last before a wooden door. It is hinged into a larger door or gate and all must step over the foot-high sill where a thousand boots have scuffled away the wood, where fools in their hundreds have tripped or fallen or tottered drunkenly into the street. They pass along a ramada in a courtyard by an old grape arbor where small fowl nod in the dusk among the gnarled and barren vines and they enter a cantina where the lamps are lit and they cross stooping under a low beam to a bar and belly up one two three.
There is an old disordered Mennonite in this place and he turns to study them. A thin man in a leather weskit, a black and straightbrim hat set square on his head, a thin rim of whiskers. The recruits order glasses of whiskey and drink them down and order more. There are monte games at tables by the wall and there are whores at another table who look the recruits over. The recruits stand sideways along the bar with their thumbs in their belts and watch the room. They talk among themselves of the expedition in loud voices and the old Mennonite shakes a rueful head and sips his drink and mutters.
They'll stop you at the river, he says.
The second corporal looks past his comrades. Are you talking to me?
At the river. Be told. They'll jail you to a man.
Who will?
The United States Army. General Worth.
They hell they will.
Pray that they will.
He looks at his comrades. He leans toward the Mennonite. What does that mean, old man?
Do ye cross that river with yon filibuster armed ye'll not cross it back.
Don't aim to cross it back. We goin to Sonora.
What's it to you, old man?
The Mennonite watches the enshadowed dark before them as it is reflected to him in the mirror over the bar. He turns to them. His eyes are wet, he speaks slowly. The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have power to wake it. Hell aint half full. Hear me. Ye carry war of a madman's making into a foreign land. Ye'll wake more than the dogs.
But they berated the old man and swore at him until he moved off down the bar muttering, and how else could it be?
How these things end. In confusion and curses and blood. They drank on and the wind blew in the streets and the stars that had been overhead lay low in the west and these young men fell afoul of others and words were said that could not be put right again and in the dawn the kid and the second corporal knelt over the boy from Missouri who had been named Earl and they spoke his name but he never spoke back. He lay on his side in the dust of the courtyard. The men were gone, the whores were gone. An old man swept the clay floor within the cantina. The boy lay with his skull broken in a pool of blood, none knew by whom. A third one came to be with them in the courtyard. It was the Mennonite. A warm wind was blowing and the east held a gray light. The fowls roosting among the grapevines had begun to stir and call.
There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto, said the Mennonite. He had been holding his hat in his hands and now he set it upon his head again and turned and went out the gate.
”
”
Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West)
“
In prosecuting the anti-slavery enterprise, we have been asked to spare the church, to spare the ministry; but how, we ask, could such a thing be done? We are met on the threshold of our efforts for the redemption of the slave, by the church and ministry of the country, in battle arrayed against us; and we are compelled to fight or flee. From what quarter, I beg to know, has proceeded a fire so deadly upon our ranks, during the last two years, as from the Northern pulpit? As the champions of oppressors, the chosen men of American theology have appeared-men, honored for their so-called piety, and their real learning. The LORDS of Buffalo, the SPRINGS of New York, the LATHROPS of Auburn, the COXES and SPENCERS of Brooklyn, the GANNETS and SHARPS of Boston, the DEWEYS of Washington, and other great religious lights of the land, have, in utter denial of the authority of Him, by whom they professed to be called to the ministry, deliberately taught us, against the example or the Hebrews and against the remonstrance of the Apostles they teach, "that we ought to obey man’s law before the law of God."
My spirit wearies of such blasphemy; and how such men can be supported, as the "standing types and representatives of Jesus Christ," is a mystery which I leave others to penetrate.
”
”
Frederick Douglass (What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?)
“
One thing it tells us is simply that the justice system is a large part of our lives. The US houses one-quarter of all inmates in the world, even though we’re only 5 percent of the global population.28 We incarcerate more people per capita than any other country; currently, nearly 2.3 million people are being held within our criminal justice system.29 This system has also become more a part of our lives in recent years. The number of people in US prisons and jails has increased 500 percent over the last four decades. In fact, today the number of people in prison for drug offenses alone exceeds the total number of people who were locked away for any crime in 1980.
”
”
Danielle J. Lindemann (True Story: What Reality TV Says about Us)
“
This must be the 26th February 23rd I have
lived through: over a quarter of a century of Februaries, and would I could
cut a slice of recollection back through them all & trace the spiraling stair
of my ascent adultward - or is it a descent? I feel I have lived enough to last
my life in musings, tracings of crossings & re-crossings with people, mad
and sane, stupid and brilliant, beautiful and grotesque, infant and antique,
cold and hot, pragmatic and dream-ridden, dead and alive. My house of
days and masks is rich enough so that I might and must spend years fishing,
hauling up the pearl-eyed, horny, scaled and sea-bearded monsters sunk
long, long in the sargasso of my imagination
”
”
Sylvia Plath (The Journals of Sylvia Plath)
“
The great festival of Lughnasa was held at Carmun once every three years. The site of Carmun was eerie. In a land of wild forest and bog, it was an open grassy space that stretched, green and empty, halfway to the horizon. Lying some distance west of the point where, if you were following it upstream, the Liffey’s course began to retreat eastwards on the way to its source in the Wicklow Mountains, the place was absolutely flat, except for some mounds in which ancestral chiefs were buried. The festival lasted a week. There were areas reserved for food and livestock markets, and another where fine clothes were sold; but the most important quarter was where a large racetrack was laid out on the bare turf.
”
”
Edward Rutherfurd (The Princes of Ireland (The Dublin Saga, #1))
“
With such a tower of strength to back both his arguments and his conscience, it may be imagined that Mr Harding has never felt any compunction as to receiving his quarterly sum of two hundred pounds. Indeed, the subject has never presented itself to his mind in that shape. He has talked not unfrequently, and heard very much about the wills of old founders and the incomes arising from their estates, during the last year or two; he did even, at one moment, feel a doubt (since expelled by his son-in-law’s logic) as to whether Lord Guildford was clearly entitled to receive so enormous an income as he does from the revenues of St Cross; but that he himself was overpaid with his modest eight hundred pounds, — he who, out of that, voluntarily gave up sixty-two pounds eleven shillings and fourpence a year to his twelve old neighbours,
”
”
Anthony Trollope (Complete Works of Anthony Trollope)
“
The Sarcophagus needed the strength to withstand Ukrainian weather for an estimated 20 years - time to develop a more permanent solution - and contain the astronomical levels of radiation within. Erecting the enclosure involved a quarter of a million workers, all of whom reached their lifetime maximum dose. In order for the Sarcophagus to be built, the radioactive graphite and reactor fuel first had to be cleared up and buried, so remote control bulldozers were brought in from West Germany, Japan and Russia to dig up the earth. Workers had originally piled up rubble at the base of Unit 4 and poured concrete straight onto it, intending to seal in the radiation, but that didn’t last long. “Geysers are starting to shoot up from the wet concrete. When the liquid falls on the fuel in the pile, there is an atomic excursion or simply a disruption of heat exchange and a rise in temperature. The radiation situation deteriorates sharply”, reported Vasiliy Kizima, chief of the construction project at the time.229
”
”
Andrew Leatherbarrow (Chernobyl 01:23:40: The Incredible True Story of the World's Worst Nuclear Disaster)
“
Infinite Jest (V?). Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. 'Madame Psychosis' ; no other definitive data. Thorny problem for archivists. Incandenza's last film, Incandenza's death occurring during its post-production. Most archival authorities list as unfinished, unseen. Some list as completion of Infinite Jest (IV), for which Incandenza also used 'Psychosis,' thus list the film under Incandenza's output for Y.T.M.P. Though no scholarly synopsis or report of viewing exists, two short essays in different issues of Cartridge Quarterly East refer to to film as 'extraordinary' and 'far away [James O. Incandenza's] most entertaining and compelling work.' West Coast archivists list the film's gauge as '16...78... n mm.,' basing the gauge on critical allusions to 'radical experiments in viewers' optical perspective and context' as IJ (V?)'s distinctive feature. Though Canadian archivist Tete-Beche lists the film as completed and privately distributed by P.Y.E.U. through posthumous provisions in the filmmaker's will, all other comprehensive filmographies have the film either unfinished or UNRELEASED, its Master cartridge either destroyed or vaulted sui testator.
”
”
David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest)
“
HUNGER AND OBESITY The change in diets around the world is also creating a global obesity epidemic—and in its wake a global diabetes epidemic—even as more than 900 million people in the world still suffer from chronic hunger. In the United States, where many global trends begin, the weight of the average American has increased by approximately twenty pounds in the last forty years. A recent study projects that half the adult population of the United States will be obese by 2030, with one quarter of them “severely obese.” At a time when hunger and malnutrition are continuing at still grossly unacceptable levels in poor countries around the world (and in some pockets within developed countries), few have missed the irony that simultaneously obesity is at record levels in developed countries and growing in many developing countries. How could this be? Well, first of all, it is encouraging to note that the world community has been slowly but steadily decreasing the number of people suffering from chronic hunger. Secondly, on a global basis, obesity has more than doubled in the last thirty years. According to the World Health Organization, almost 1.5 billion adults above the age of twenty are overweight, and more than a third of them are classified as obese. Two thirds of the world’s population now live in countries where more people die from conditions related to being obese and overweight than from conditions related to being underweight. Obesity represents a major risk factor for the world’s leading cause of death—cardiovascular diseases, principally heart disease and stroke—and is the major risk factor for diabetes, which has now become the first global pandemic involving a noncommunicable disease.* Adults with diabetes are two to four times more likely to suffer heart disease or a stroke, and approximately two thirds of those suffering from diabetes die from either stroke or heart disease.† The tragic increase in obesity among children is particularly troubling; almost 17 percent of U.S. children are obese today, as are almost 7 percent of all children in the world. One respected study indicates that 77 percent of obese children will suffer from obesity as adults. If there is any good news in the latest statistics, it is that the prevalence of obesity in the U.S. appears to be reaching a plateau, though the increases in childhood obesity ensure that the epidemic will continue to grow in the future, both in the U.S. and globally. The causes of this surge in obesity are both simple—in that people are eating too much and exercising
”
”
Al Gore (The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change)
“
As many as three characters were murdered in a single quarter-hour ILAM episode. People were killed in ghoulish, imaginative, and sometimes mystifying ways. Throats were ripped out by wolves; there were garrotings and poisonings and mysterious slashings. In the story Monster in the Mansion, a headless black cat was found in a lady’s bed, and a man had his arm amputated while he slept; in The Thing That Cries in the Night, a slasher was at work in an old mansion, and murder was done to the cry of a baby, while everyone insisted that there had been no baby in the house for twenty years. Temple of Vampires was considered so vivid in its Hollywood heyday that the Nicaraguan government lodged a protest. The show was framed with unforgettable signatures: the wail of a train, the sting of an organ, and the haunting Valse Triste, a shimmering theme suggesting death. The chime of a clock brought listeners back to the hour when last they left their heroes. The theme played under the ominous recap: Twelve midnight, high on the ledge above the floor of the Temple of Vampires, somewhere in the jungles of Central America. Jack and Doc Long are facing one of the strangest, most hair-raising moments in their experience. They’re out in the center of the temple, each clinging to separate ropes 50 feet in the air. There is only one chance for Jack and Doc.
”
”
John Dunning (On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio)
“
ALL POST-COMMUNIST SOCIETIES ARE uprooted ones because Communism uprooted traditions, so nothing fits with anything else,” explained the philosopher Patapievici. Fifteen years earlier, when I had last met him, he had cautioned: “The task for Romania is to acquire a public style based on impersonal rules, otherwise business and politics will be full of intrigue, and I am afraid that our Eastern Orthodox tradition is not helpful in this regard. Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia, Russia, Greece—all the Orthodox nations of Europe—are characterized by weak institutions. That is because Orthodoxy is flexible and contemplative, based more on the oral traditions of peasants than on texts. So there is this pattern of rumor, lack of information, and conspiracy….”11 Thus, in 1998, did Patapievici define Romanian politics as they were still being practiced a decade and a half later. Though in 2013, he added: “No one speaks of guilt over the past. The Church has made no progress despite the enormous chance of being separated from the state for almost a quarter century. The identification of religious faith with an ethnic-national group, I find, is a moral heresy.” Dressed now in generic business casual and wearing fashionable glasses, Patapievici appeared as a figure wholly of the West—more accurately of the global elite—someone you might meet at a fancy
”
”
Robert D. Kaplan (In Europe's Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond)
“
#1. No Escape and feature keys
Today’s Apple Event confirmed many of the rumors surrounding the lengthy-awaited refresh of the Macbook Pro line. The Escape and Function keys at the laptops had been deserted in choose of a hint bar that changed relying at the software that is getting used. The last the Macbook Pro got a chief update was a shocking 4 years in the past and many guides are celebrating the brand new design. However, the lack of bodily Escape and Function keys is a disaster for one major set of Apple’s customers — Developers.
Let’s test numbers:
There are ~ 19 million developers inside the global. And Apple has managed to promote ~19 million Macs over the past four quarters. What a twist of fate!
Yes, builders are drawn toward Apple products mainly for software program reasons: the Unix-like running gadget and the proprietary development atmosphere. But builders want to have a useful keyboard to make use of that software and now they don’t. Why Tim Cook, why?
This isn’t to say that the contact bar is an inherently awful concept. You should locate it on pinnacle of the Esc and feature keys as opposed to doing away with them completely! Something like this:
#2 Power. Almost no improvement for RAM and a processor
The 2016 MacBook Pro ships with RAM and processor specifications that are nearly equal to the 2010 model. Deja vu?
RAM:
At least it appears like that, because the MacBook Pro has had alternatives of as much as 16 GB of RAM in view that 2010. The best difference now's that you pay for the update.
Processors:
The MacBook Pro had options with 2.4 gigahertz twin-middle processors again in 2010. Anything new in 2016? Not absolutely, well… nope.
”
”
Marry Boyce (تاریخ زردشت / جلد دوم / هخامنشیان)
“
Putting it all together, fluctuations in attitudes and behavior combine to make the stock market the ultimate pendulum. In my 47 full calendar years in the investment business, starting with 1970, the annual returns on the S&P 500 have swung from plus 37% to minus 37%. Averaging out good years and bad years, the long-run return is usually stated as 10% or so. Everyone’s been happy with that typical performance and would love more of the same. But remember, a swinging pendulum may be at its midpoint “on average,” but it actually spends very little time there. The same is true of financial market performance. Here’s a fun question (and a good illustration): for how many of the 47 years from 1970 through 2016 was the annual return on the S&P 500 within 2% of “normal”—that is, between 8% and 12%? I expected the answer to be “not that often,” but I was surprised to learn that it had happened only three times! It also surprised me to learn that the return had been more than 20 percentage points away from “normal”—either up more than 30% or down more than 10%—more than one-quarter of the time: 13 out of the last 47 years. So one thing that can be said with total conviction about stock market performance is that the average certainly isn’t the norm. Market fluctuations of this magnitude aren’t nearly fully explained by the changing fortunes of companies, industries or economies. They’re largely attributable to the mood swings of investors. Lastly, the times when return is at the extremes aren’t randomly distributed over the years. Rather they’re clustered, due to the fact that investors’ psychological swings tend to persist for a while—to paraphrase Herb Stein, they tend to continue until they stop. Most of those 13 extreme up or down years were within a year or two of another year of similarly extreme performance in the same direction.
”
”
Howard Marks (Mastering The Market Cycle: Getting the Odds on Your Side)
“
Even if the press were dying to report on the Hmong gang-rape spree, the police won’t tell them about it. A year before the Hmong gang rape that reminded the Times of a rape in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, the police in St. Paul issued a warning about gang rapists using telephone chat lines to lure girls out of their homes. Although the warning was issued only in Hmong, St. Paul’s police department refused to confirm to the St. Paul Pioneer Press that the suspects were Hmong, finally coughing up only the information that they were “Asian.”20 And the gang rapes continue. The Star Tribune counted nearly one hundred Hmong males charged with rape or forced prostitution from 2000 to June 30, 2005. More than 80 percent of the victims were fifteen or younger. A quarter of their victims were not Hmong.21 The police say many more Hmong rapists have gone unpunished—they have no idea how many—because Hmong refuse to report rape. Reporters aren’t inclined to push the issue. The only rapes that interest the media are apocryphal gang rapes committed by white men. Was America short on Hmong? These backward hill people began pouring into the United States in the seventies as a reward for their help during the ill-fated Vietnam War. That war ended forty years ago! But the United States is still taking in thousands of Hmong “refugees” every year, so taxpayers can spend millions of dollars on English-language and cultural-assimilation classes, public housing, food stamps, healthcare, prosecutors, and prisons to accommodate all the child rapists.22 By now, there are an estimated 273,000 Hmong in the United States.23 Canada only has about eight hundred.24 Did America lose a bet? In the last few decades, America has taken in more Hmong than Czechs, Danes, French, Luxembourgers, New Zealanders, Norwegians, or Swiss. We have no room for them. We needed to make room for a culture where child rape is the norm.25 A foreign gang-rape culture that blames twelve-year-old girls for their own rapes may not be a good fit with American culture, especially now that political correctness prevents us from criticizing any “minority” group. At least when white males commit a gang rape the media never shut up about it. The Glen Ridge gang rape occurred more than a quarter century ago, and the Times still thinks the case hasn’t been adequately covered.
”
”
Ann Coulter (¡Adios, America!: The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole)
“
Wherever you go, Provincetown will always take you back, at whatever age and in whatever condition. Because time moves somewhat differently there, it is possible to return after ten years or more and run into an acquaintance, on Commercial or at the A&P, who will ask mildly, as if he’d seen you the day before yesterday, what you’ve been doing with yourself. The streets of Provincetown are not in any way threatening, at least not to those with an appetite for the full range of human passions. If you grow deaf and blind and lame in Provincetown, some younger person with a civic conscience will wheel you wherever you need to go; if you die there, the marshes and dunes are ready to receive your ashes. While you’re alive and healthy, for as long as it lasts, the golden hands of the clock tower at Town Hall will note each hour with an electric bell as we below, on our purchase of land, buy or sell, paint or write or fish for bass, or trade gossip on the post office steps. The old bayfront houses will go on dreaming, at least until the emptiness between their boards proves more durable than the boards themselves. The sands will continue their slow devouring of the forests that were the Pilgrims’ first sight of North America, where man, as Fitzgerald put it, “must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” The ghost of Dorothy Bradford will walk the ocean floor off Herring Cove, draped in seaweed, surrounded by the fleeting silver lights of fish, and the ghost of Guglielmo Marconi will tap out his messages to those even longer dead than he. The whales will breach and loll in their offshore world, dive deep into black canyons, and swim south when the time comes. Herons will browse the tidal pools; crabs with blue claws tipped in scarlet will scramble sideways over their own shadows. At sunset the dunes will take on their pink-orange light, and just after sunset the boats will go luminous in the harbor. Ashes of the dead, bits of their bones, will mingle with the sand in the salt marsh, and wind and water will further disperse the scraps of wood, shell, and rope I’ve used for Billy’s various memorials. After dark the raccoons and opossums will start on their rounds; the skunks will rouse from their burrows and head into town. In summer music will rise up. The old man with the portable organ will play for passing change in front of the public library. People in finery will sing the anthems of vanished goddesses; people who are still trying to live by fishing will pump quarters into jukeboxes that play the songs of their high school days. As night progresses, people in diminishing numbers will wander the streets (where whaling captains and their wives once promenaded, where O’Neill strode in drunken furies, where Radio Girl—who knows where she is now?—announced the news), hoping for surprises or just hoping for what the night can be counted on to provide, always, in any weather: the smell of water and its sound; the little houses standing square against immensities of ocean and sky; and the shapes of gulls gliding overhead, white as bone china, searching from their high silence for whatever they might be able to eat down there among the dunes and marshes, the black rooftops, the little lights tossing on the water as the tides move out or in.
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Michael Cunningham (Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown)
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Cedar Capital Group Tokyo Review of Stats Shows Decrease in Mortality Rate in Construction Sites
Cedar Capital Group in Tokyo Japan construction industry is one of the riskiest industries to work with. Not only do they have to deal with falling debris but workers also have to be aware of faulty wirings, defective equipment and weather warnings. Workers even sometimes have to lose their lives in the midst of construction. These circumstances are inevitable and precautions were already implemented even at the start of training.
Yet, it cannot be denied that construction is one of the most lucrative businesses in the world today. Everywhere we go, we see buildings being built and establishments being constructed. We see new structures in developed nations. New York, America, Tokyo, Japan, Beijing, China and Seoul, South Korea are some of the leading cities which feature new construction projects almost everyday.
Singapore is also not left behind. Considered as one of the most flourishing countries in the world, the little island-city has prided itself with new infrastructure projects and promise a thousand more to come. It came no surprise that the country’s journey towards urbanization was held liable for the deaths of hundreds of construction workers in the previous years.
Just recently, though, Singapore has declared their concern on the number of fatalities there are in a construction project. If not of deaths, accidents resulting to fractures and minor and major injuries are also experienced in other neighboring countries.
Cedar Capital Group in Tokyo Japan, one the distributor of heavy capital equipment in the country, reports to have dozens of death in the last 4 years of their operation. This, as they claim, is one of the reasons why there is a large scarcity in job application related to construction. Many companies are also faced with numerous complaints because of these deaths and injuries.
According to further review, approximately one-quarter of the deaths result from exposure to hazardous substances which cause such disabling illnesses as cancer and cardiovascular, respiratory and nervous-system disorders. Analysts even warn that work-related diseases are expected to double by the year 2020 and that if improvements are not implemented now, exposures today will kill people by the year 2020.
Surprisingly, though, while people are being troubled with the number of casualties in the construction sector, recent studies and statistics show fewer deaths in construction sector in the first half of the year.
Specifically in Singapore, Manpower Ministry has announced only 8 death reports compared to the 17 deaths in 2014. Although this is not a reason to celebrate since there are still fatalities, Singapore’s Contractual Association stated that this is an improvement as it shows the effectiveness of the recent awareness programs and training seminars conducted across the island-city. The country aims to clear all fatalities for the next succeeding years.
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Jackie Legaspi
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Carver was truculent: “What’s a good part of it?” “Quarter million, give or take, in cash,” Dannon said. “She’s not sure of the exact amount, but it started at a half million that she stacked up over the last six years, for the campaign. As it turned out, she only needed about half the cash. The good thing is, it’s all cold, in case we had to make some payoffs. Then there are two hundred gold Eagles, no serial numbers or anything else. Right now gold is selling for seventeen hundred an ounce, which is another three hundred and forty grand. That’s close to six hundred thousand that we can get our hands on tonight. The diamonds . . . She won’t give up the diamonds. They’ve all got sentimental value for her. She says that as soon as we get clear of the campaign, she’ll put another four hundred thousand on you, in Panama.
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John Sandford (Silken Prey (Lucas Davenport #23))
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I once had a foreign exchange trader who worked for me who was an unabashed chartist. He truly believed that all the information you needed was reflected in the past history of a currency. Now it's true there can be less to consider in trading currencies than individual equities, since at least for developed country currencies it's typically not necessary to pore over their financial statements every quarter. And in my experience, currencies do exhibit sustainable trends more reliably than, say, bonds or commodities. Imbalances caused by, for example, interest rate differentials that favor one currency over another (by making it more profitable to invest in the higher-yielding one) can persist for years. Of course, another appeal of charting can be that it provides a convenient excuse to avoid having to analyze financial statements or other fundamental data. Technical analysts take their work seriously and apply themselves to it diligently, but it's also possible for a part-time technician to do his market analysis in ten minutes over coffee and a bagel. This can create the false illusion of being a very efficient worker. The FX trader I mentioned was quite happy to engage in an experiment whereby he did the trades recommended by our in-house market technician. Both shared the same commitment to charts as an under-appreciated path to market success, a belief clearly at odds with the in-house technician's avoidance of trading any actual positions so as to provide empirical proof of his insights with trading profits. When challenged, he invariably countered that managing trading positions would challenge his objectivity, as if holding a losing position would induce him to continue recommending it in spite of the chart's contrary insight. But then, why hold a losing position if it's not what the chart said? I always found debating such tortured logic a brief but entertaining use of time when lining up to get lunch in the trader's cafeteria. To the surprise of my FX trader if not to me, the technical analysis trading account was unprofitable. In explaining the result, my Kool-Aid drinking trader even accepted partial responsibility for at times misinterpreting the very information he was analyzing. It was along the lines of that he ought to have recognized the type of pattern that was evolving but stupidly interpreted the wrong shape. It was almost as if the results were not the result of the faulty religion but of the less than completely faithful practice of one of its adherents. So what use to a profit-oriented trading room is a fully committed chartist who can't be trusted even to follow the charts? At this stage I must confess that we had found ourselves in this position as a last-ditch effort on my part to salvage some profitability out of a trader I'd hired who had to this point been consistently losing money. His own market views expressed in the form of trading positions had been singularly unprofitable, so all that remained was to see how he did with somebody else's views. The experiment wasn't just intended to provide a “live ammunition” record of our in-house technician's market insights, it was my last best effort to prove that my recent hiring decision hadn't been a bad one. Sadly, his failure confirmed my earlier one and I had to fire him. All was not lost though, because he was able to transfer his unsuccessful experience as a proprietary trader into a new business advising clients on their hedge fund investments.
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Simon A. Lack (Wall Street Potholes: Insights from Top Money Managers on Avoiding Dangerous Products)
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Near-death experiences (NDEs), though a sensation in the last quarter of the twentieth century, have been with us in the literature of humanity for thousands of years.
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Devamrita Swami (Searching for Vedic India)
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[t]he American National Election Studies group has been asking Americans the same question roughly every two years since 1958: “Do you trust the government in Washington to do what is right, all or most of the time?” Until the mid-sixties, 75 percent of Americans answered yes. A slide then began and continued steeply downward for fifteen years, so that by 1980, only 25 percent said yes. In the interim, of course, were the Vietnam War, two assassinations, Watergate and the near-impeachment of the president and the Arab oil embargo. So there were plenty of reasons for people to feel estranged, even antagonistic. But what matters most is that the trust did not recover. For the last three decades, the approval level has bumped around in the region from 20 to 35 percent. The trust percentage fell below half in about 1972. This means that anyone under the age of forty has lived their entire life in a country the majority of whose citizens do not trust their own national government to do what they think is right. Through four long decades, none of the massive changes Americans have voted for in leadership and in ideology have changed that. Think what it means for the healthy functioning of a democracy that two-thirds to three-quarters of its people do not believe that their government does the right thing most of the time.33
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Moisés Naím (The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn't What It Used to Be)
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tiny seed of doubt sprouting inside her gut. Could this life-altering affair be nothing more than a one-sided mirage? She couldn’t keep her journalistic instincts from attempting to connect dots. She recalled every possible aversion of her lover’s eyes, each word of affirmation that may not have been as sincere and heartfelt as the previous. And now this. Karina released an audible breath and brought her hand to her head. She felt the sharp edge of her one-quarter-karat, pear-shaped diamond engagement ring, and thought about Reinaldo, her Brazilian husband of the last ten years. There had been some good times … moments she’d always remember. But as she recalled the hikes up Pikes Peak, the mountainous bike rides, and games of pool while drinking a few beers, she admitted that Reinaldo had been nothing more than a friend—a convenient friend at that. But one who had helped her produce two kids, two adorable little rug rats. Would they ever look at Mommy the same way, if they found out who the real Karina was? When they found out. Karina couldn’t let her insecurities question her new path in life—a path she’d ignored far too long. Determined to make this relationship work, her mind sharpened, and she leaned over the side of the bed and snatched her smartphone from the back pocket of her khakis. No sweet text messages. She licked her lips, then scrolled to her contacts and tapped the cell number. “Hi, Karina. Miss me already?” the voice on the other end asked. Karina couldn’t help but smile. “I just wanted to hear your voice again before I packed up my things and strolled back into my old life.” “I know what you mean,” Karina’s lover said. “You don’t have a spouse and two kids,” Karina said with a tone more harsh than she’d intended. “Oh, sorry.” “Not a problem. I get it. I really do.” A wave of emotion overcame Karina. A single tear bubbled out of the corner of her eye and she sniffled. “Are you okay, dear?” “I …” “You can tell me, Karina. We share everything.” “I just wanted our evening together to be special. You mean so much to me … how I see myself. How I see our future.” “I’m so sorry my work got in our way. Just know that you hold a special place in my heart.” Karina could hear sincerity, which warmed her heart. “I love you.” “I love you too, Karina.” Muffled sounds broke Karina’s concentration. Was that another person’s voice? “What was that noise? Where are you?” Tension rippled up her spine. “Oh, I just walked in my door. I’m exhausted, dear. Let’s make plans for early next week. We can both relax and have some fun at my new place. We can talk about our future.” The pressure in Karina’s head eased. They kissed into
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John W. Mefford (Fatal Greed (Greed, #1))
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IN BRAZIL, where the state collects a hefty 36% of GDP in taxes and offers mediocre public services in return, tax-dodging is a national sport. The latest scam unearthed by police, treasury and finance-ministry sleuths sets a record. On March 26th they revealed that over the past ten years the government had been cheated of at least 5.7 billion reais ($1.8 billion) in back taxes and fines from firms, and perhaps as much as 19 billion reais. That would be enough to pay three-quarters of the bill for last year’s football World Cup. It is nearly twice the suspicious payments in a separate corruption scheme involving Petrobras, a state-controlled oil company. Unlike the petrolão, the tax imbroglio does not implicate top politicians. It centres instead on the Administrative Council of Fiscal Resources (CARF), part of the finance ministry, which hears appeals by firms that feel wronged by the tax collectors. Some of its 216 councillors, who decide cases in teams of six, allegedly promised to slash companies’ bills for various taxes, including sales and industrial tax, or make them disappear altogether. In exchange they apparently received 1-10% of the value of the forgone revenue. The bribes were paid in the form of bogus consulting contracts with law firms. To deflect suspicion, the conspirators used firms that do not specialise in tax law. The identity of the suspects remains secret for now. But leaks published in the press suggest that some of Brazil’s biggest firms, in industries ranging from banking to manufacturing, are involved. So, apparently, are a handful of multinationals. There is also much speculation that the dimensions of the scandal will grow: CARF has 105,000 cases pending, with a total value of 520 billion reais.
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Anonymous
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Migration statistics offer a hint of the shift. More than 170,000 migrants and refugees arrived in Italy by sea last year; Syrians and Eritreans were the two largest groups among them, accounting for more than 76,000 people, according to Italy’s Interior Ministry. Gambians ranked a distant fifth. Yet during the first quarter of 2015, a relatively slow period with just 10,165 arrivals — Gambia was the leading country of origin, accounting for 1,413 of the migrants. The authorities have not published figures for April yet, but humanitarian and migration groups confirm that a majority of the arriving migrants came originally from sub-Saharan African countries — some directly, with Italy as a destination, but many end up here less deliberately.
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Anonymous
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Unlike our well-heeled brethren in the high-rises that surround us, the attorneys in my firm, Fernandez and Daley, occupy cramped quarters around the corner from the Transbay bus terminal and next door to the Lucky Corner Number 2 Chinese restaurant. Our office is located on the second floor of a 1920s walk-up building at 553 Mission Street, on the only block of San Francisco’s South of Market area that has not yet been gentrified by the sprawl of downtown. Although we haven’t started remodeling yet, we recently took over the space from a defunct martial arts studio and moved upstairs from the basement. Our files sit in what used to be the men’s locker room. Our firm has grown by a whopping fifty percent in the last two years. We’re up to three lawyers.
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Sheldon Siegel (Incriminating Evidence (Mike Daley/Rosie Fernandez Mystery, #2))
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Think for but a moment of what God has accomplished through his Christians in the United States. Christians have spent the last couple of hundred years going out as missionaries and bringing the gospel to the lost. There is no corner or place where the message has not been carried, and in some quarters it has been received with such great force that we now find those countries sending missionaries back to evangelize our country. It is well, when we criticize all the sins of the United States, that we also remember all those great Christians who gave their lives sharing the gospel. But no matter how sugar-coated it is made, the United States stands as far from the gospel as it has in decades. What can be done for an old heart like ours? I do believe the one lesson to be taken from this great awakening is that we must come together in prayer. We must wait upon God, but we wait in expectation, knowing that he loves this people of this world more than we ever could. We have the assurance through the Word, that when we pray God listens, and when we pray for something that he has already commanded us to pray for—that he send more laborers into the harvest field—we may be confident of his answer. Let us look, then, to the harvest fields and see what God might turn our hands toward. How blessed is the God who uses such earthen vessels of clay to proclaim his majesty!
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Patrick Davis (America's Awakenings: A Christian looks at our awakenings)
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That was how for years, all through that quarter of the continent, they had fought, fled, beckoned, resumed. . . . If you took a map and tried to follow them over it, zigzagging town to town, back and forth, it might not have been that easy to account for, even if you recalled how wild, how much better than "wild" it'd been not all that many years ago, out here, even with the workdays that had you longing for the comforts of territorial prison, yes hard as that, when whatever was going to become yours—your land, your stock, your family, your name, no matter, however much or little you had, you earned it, with never no second thoughts as to just killing somebody, if it even looked like they might want to take it. Maybe a dog catching their scent coming down the wind, or the way some trailhand might be wearing his waterproof, that could be enough—didn't matter, with everything brand new and the soldiering so hard, waking up each day never knowing how you'd end it, cashing 'em in being usually never too distant from your thoughts, when any ailment, or animal wild or broke, or a bullet from any direction might be enough to propel you into the beyond . . . why clearly every lick of work you could get in would have that same mortal fear invested into it—Karl Marx and them, well and good, but that's what folk had for Capital, back in early times out here—not tools on credit, nor seed money courtesy of some banker, just their own common fund of fear that came with no more than a look across the day arising. It put a shade onto things that parlor life would just never touch, so whenever she or Reef pulled up and got out, when it wasn't, mind, simple getting away in a hurry, it was that one of them had heard about a place, some place, one more next-to-last place, that hadn't been taken in yet, where you could go live for a time on the edge of that old day-to-day question, at least till the Saturday nights got quiet enough to hear the bell of the town clock ring you the hours before some Sunday it'd be too dreary to want to sober up for. . . . So in time you had this population of kind of roving ambassadors from places like that that were still free, who wherever they came to rest would be a little sovereign piece of that faraway territory, and they'd have sanctuary about the size of their shadow.
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Thomas Pynchon
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They were wary of each other at first, but in time formed a tight alliance that lasted twenty years until it came unstuck over the execution of Julia Gillard.
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David Marr (Faction Man: Bill Shorten's Path to Power (Quarterly Essay #59))
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An official government study18 found that before drug prohibition properly kicked in, three quarters of self-described addicts (not just users—addicts) had steady and respectable jobs. Some 22 percent of addicts were wealthy,19 while only 6 percent were poor. They were more sedate as a result of their addiction, and although it would have been better for them to stop, they were rarely out of control or criminal.20 But in 1914, the Harrison Act was passed, and then Anslinger arrived sixteen years later to rapidly ratchet it up.
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Johann Hari (Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs)
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For there is no God but God of God's creation of the heavens and the earth in order to create next and find its angels and making it khalifa in the earth and the expulsion of ablys rest in eternal peace and the creation of heaven and fire
For there is no God but God send alanbyaʾ and their role in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia for 950 years until Noah called to his words he said Noah is given on the ground of the unbelievers de ballara for there is no God but god awqdt fire must see do it For there is no God but God of Moses fled his country
For there is no God but God v is the Jews killed issa for there is no God but God patience aywb gold vision Jacob and enter yusuf into the prison he was in the belly of the shark and the slaughter of yahya and dissemination of zakaria
For there is no God but god awdhy alnby out of Muhammad-may peace be upon him and encouraged in the guard and hit on him and broke his quarters and flew daughters expelled from his country
For there is no God but God has made an abdomen hamza asd God
Hands and feet amputated jafar spare ras musab graphic killing
For there is no God but God before its abou bakr he called a friend and left Pharaoh wager right before God in the territories of Omar p called Al-Faruq and their refusal to qarwn unfortunately the trap God!
There is no God but God is the beginning and the end of the first and last it pride and greatness and complete it good word it happiness it high class it faith and peace
There is no God but God will satisfy the Lord and enter paradise and expel satan and argues the owner when his golo and they posted twjrwa there is no God but God Muhammad is the messenger of God.
For no god but Allah create the heavens and the earth and created the creation of Adam and the angels worship him and make it a successor in the land and the expulsion of the devil from his mercy and the creation of heaven and hell
For no god but God sent prophets and messengers led by Noah 950 years until called on his people and said Noah Lord, do not destroy everything on the floor of the unbelievers Diarra for no god but God lit the fire to Abraham for no god but God, Moses fled his country
For no god but God Tamr Jews killed Jesus for no god but God, the patience of Job, went sight of Jacob and Joseph to enter the prison and was Younis in the belly of the whale slaughter and Yahya Zakaria deployment
For no god but God traumatized Prophet Muhammad Allah bless him and encouraged him in the head and beaten on his shoulder and broke Rbaith and divorced daughters and was expelled from his country
For no god but God made their belly Hamzah Asadullah
And amputated the hand of Jafar and beheaded and killed Musab Sumih
For no god but God accepted Abu Bakr was called the friend of God and left Pharaoh Vagrgah in the sea and before that was called Omar al-Faruq and its refusal to Karun Fajsv God to the earth
No God but God is the beginning, first and last, and finally, a pride and greatness and perfection, a kind word, a happiness which is a high degree of faith and Islam
No God but God, and accept the Lord into heaven and expel the devil and the owner argued with his Lord and Anscheroha Coloha rewarded is no god but God and Mohammed is the Messenger of Allah
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Qu'ran
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George and Barbara Bush were never invited to the Reagans’ private quarters during the eight years spent in the White House.104
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Craig Shirley (Last Act: The Final Years and Emerging Legacy of Ronald Reagan)
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Ice Age 2,588 million years ago, at the start of the Pleistocene, the Earth entered an Ice Age. It followed 50 million years of climatic downturn, and was the first full-blown ice age for a quarter of a billion years. Cooler, arid conditions alternated with warm, wet conditions as ice sheets ebbed and flowed in higher latitudes. The ice sheets alternately locked up vast amounts of fresh water, then released it again as temperatures rose. This alternation between a cooler and a warmer climate has continued right up to the present day. The cold spells are often referred to as ‘ice ages’. In particular the end of the most recent glacial period 11,600 years ago, is popularly known as the end of the last Ice Age. In fact the warm spells – interglacial periods – are no more than breaks in an on-going ice age. The current Holocene epoch, that followed the last glacial period, is such a break. In theory, glacial conditions will one day return, though the effects of anthropogenic (human caused) global warming make this uncertain. Glacial periods are not necessarily periods of unremitting cold, but alternate between colder and warmer intervals known respectively as stadials and interstadials. The idea that there were periods when glaciers extended beyond their present-day limits gradually emerged during the first half of the nineteenth century. Geologists sought to explain such phenomena as rock scouring and scratching, the cutting of valleys, the existence of whale-shaped hills known as drumlins and the presence of erratic boulders and ridges of rocky debris known as moraines. The term Eiszeit (‘ice age’) was coined in 1837 by the German botanist Karl Friedrich Schimper.
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Christopher Seddon (Humans: from the beginning: From the first apes to the first cities)
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According to the temperature records kept by the UK Met Office (and other series are much the same), over the past 150 years (that is, from the very beginnings of the Industrial Revolution), mean global temperature has increased by a little under a degree centigrade—according to the Met Office, 0.8°C. This has happened in fits and starts, which are not fully understood. To begin with, to the extent that anyone noticed it, it was seen as a welcome and natural recovery from the rigours of the Little Ice Age. But the great bulk of it—0.5°C out of the 0.8°C—occurred during the last quarter of the twentieth century. It was then that global warming alarmism was born. But since then, and wholly contrary to the expectations of the overwhelming majority of climate scientists, who confidently predicted that global warming would not merely continue but would accelerate, given the unprecedented growth of global carbon dioxide emissions, as China’s coalbased economy has grown by leaps and bounds, there has been no further warming at all. To be precise, the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a deeply flawed body whose nonscientist chairman is a committed climate alarmist, reckons that global warming has latterly been occurring at the rate of—wait for it—0.05°Cs per decade, plus or minus 0.1°C. Their figures, not mine. In other words, the observed rate of warming is less than the margin of error. And that margin of error, it must be said, is implausibly small. After all, calculating mean global temperature from the records of weather stations and maritime observations around the world, of varying quality, is a pretty heroic task in the first place. Not to mention the fact that there is a considerable difference between daytime and night-time temperatures. In any event, to produce a figure accurate to hundredths of a degree is palpably absurd.
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Alan Moran (Climate Change: The Facts)
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[t]he American National Election Studies group has been asking Americans the same question roughly every two years since 1958: “Do you trust the government in Washington to do what is right, all or most of the time?” Until the mid-sixties, 75 percent of Americans answered yes. A slide then began and continued steeply downward for fifteen years, so that by 1980, only 25 percent said yes. In the interim, of course, were the Vietnam War, two assassinations, Watergate and the near-impeachment of the president and the Arab oil embargo. So there were plenty of reasons for people to feel estranged, even antagonistic. But what matters most is that the trust did not recover. For the last three decades, the approval level has bumped around in the region from 20 to 35 percent. The trust percentage fell below half in about 1972. This means that anyone under the age of forty has lived their entire life in a country the majority of whose citizens do not trust their own national government to do what they think is right. Through four long decades, none of the massive changes Americans have voted for in leadership and in ideology have changed that. Think what it means for the healthy functioning of a democracy that two-thirds to three-quarters of its people do not believe that their government does the right thing most of the time.
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Moisés Naím (The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn't What It Used to Be)
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Meanwhile, student-loan debt balances rose $77 billion just last year. Nearly $30 billion in student loans were newly delinquent last quarter, up from $27 billion in the second quarter.
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Anonymous
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What's your economic forecast for 2015? The world's improving. The U.S. economy is going to grow a little faster than last year, though probably a little weaker in the first quarter. Europe's going to be incrementally better, because they've fixed their banking crisis. They've benefited from a very weakened euro. And then you have economies like India, which was stagnating at around 5-ish percent GDP growth a year ago, and now they're going to receive the benefit of lower oil prices. That's going to add at least 1 percent to India's GDP. Prime Minister Narendra Modi's reforms will probably add 1 or 2 percent more growth to overcome all the weakness in China.
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Anonymous
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A fuller picture of the year-end trends emerged Tuesday when the Commerce Department, in separate reports, said the U.S. economy expanded at a 5% seasonally adjusted annual rate in the third quarter, its strongest pace in 11 years, and reported that consumer spending accelerated last month amid rising incomes and falling gasoline prices.
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Anonymous
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I unbuttoned the top of my shirt as I looked at the Tongue & Buckle. I wasn’t used to button-up shirts. I only owned two. The one I had on was new, a gift from my sister. Just thinking about her made my fingers worry nervously at the next button. The shirt was black, short-sleeved with tiny little skulls on the pocket. On the back, a Day of the Dead style Virgin Mary. Haley has a wicked sense of humor.
James didn’t insist on much, but he did insist on dressing up for meetings. Ridiculous, since one of the members had a hard time wearing pants. Wait, what was I thinking? James insisted on tons of things. I undid another button.
“You’re one away from a nice seventies look.” Sean put his feet up on the dash.
“I’d need chest hair for that. And gold chains.”
“True.” He leaned farther back into the passenger seat, if that was even possible. Sean, at least, never bitched about my Subaru. “You know, you’re going to have to go in eventually. And the longer you wait, the longer you’re in those clothes.”
I flicked a piece of lint off the black slacks James had dug up for me. He’d grunted at inspection. That grunt probably meant he’d be taking me shopping soon. Or it might have been directed at my Cons. You never knew. He needed to cut me some slack. My last job had been flipping burgers. You didn’t buy dress shoes for a job like that. With a job like that, you couldn’t even afford dress shoes. Or clothes. You couldn’t afford anything, really.
Sean looked over at the pub. “What did Groucho Marx say about being aware of any job that requires new clothes?”
“The quote is that we should ‘beware of all enterprises that require new clothes,’ and it’s Thoreau, not Groucho Marx.”
“Oooh, listen to you. ‘It’s Thoreau.’ Well, we didn’t all go to college for a quarter.”
“I went for a year, not a quarter, and shut up.
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Lish McBride (Necromancing the Stone (Necromancer, #2))
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There have been three major slave revolts in human history. The first, led by the Thracian gladiator Spartacus against the Romans, occurred in 73 BC. The third was in the 1790s when the great black revolutionary Touissant L'Ouverture and his slave army wrested control of Santo Domingo from the French, only to be defeated by Napoleon in 1802. But the second fell halfway between these two, in the middle of the 9th century AD, and is less documented than either. We do know that the insurgents were black; that the Muslim 'Abbasid caliphs of Iraq had brought them from East Africa to work, in the thousands, in the salt marshes of the delta of the Tigris. These black rebels beat back the Arabs for nearly ten years. Like the escaped maroons in Brazil centuries later, they set up their own strongholds in the marshland. They seemed unconquerable and they were not, in fact, crushed by the Muslims until 883. They were known as the Zanj, and they bequeathed their name to the island of Zanzibar in the East Africa - which, by no coincidence, would become and remain the market center for slaves in the Arab world until the last quarter of the 19th century.
The revolt of the Zanj eleven hundred years ago should remind us of the utter falsity of the now fashionable line of argument which tries to suggest that the enslavement of African blacks was the invention of European whites. It is true that slavery had been written into the basis of the classical world; Periclean Athens was a slave state, and so was Augustan Rome. Most of their slaves were Caucasian whites, and "In antiquity, bondage had nothing to do with physiognomy or skin color". The word "slave" meant a person of Slavic origin. By the 13th century it spread to other Caucasian peoples subjugated by armies from central Asia: Russians, Georgians, Circassians, Albanians, Armenians, all of whom found ready buyers from Venice to Sicily to Barcelona, and throughout the Muslim world.
But the African slave trade as such, the black traffic, was a Muslim invention, developed by Arab traders with the enthusiastic collaboration of black African ones, institutionalized with the most unrelenting brutality centuries before the white man appeared on the African continent, and continuing long after the slave market in North America was finally crushed.
Historically, this traffic between the Mediterranean and sub-Saharan Africa begins with the very civilization that Afrocentrists are so anxious to claim as black - ancient Egypt. African slavery was well in force long before that: but by the first millennium BC Pharaoh Rameses II boasts of providing the temples with more than 100,000 slaves, and indeed it is inconceivable that the monumental culture of Egypt could have been raised outside a slave economy. For the next two thousand years the basic economies of sub-Saharan Africa would be tied into the catching, use and sale of slaves. The sculptures of medieval life show slaves bound and gagged for sacrifice, and the first Portuguese explorers of Africa around 1480 found a large slave trade set up from the Congo to Benin. There were large slave plantations in the Mali empire in the 13th-14th centuries and every abuse and cruelty visited on slaves in the antebellum South, including the practice of breeding children for sale like cattle, was practised by the black rulers of those towns which the Afrocentrists now hold up as sanitized examples of high civilization, such as Timbuktu and Songhay.
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Robert Hughes (Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (American Lectures))
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Where the cutting has been wholesale, and has lasted, is in Congress—Congress: the first branch of government, closest to the people; Congress, which on our behalf keeps an eye on all those unelected bureaucrats. Congressmen and -women have sabotaged their own institution’s ability to do that for us. They have smashed the tools it possessed to help fashion laws in the public interest. They have crippled their own capacity to come to independent conclusions as to the nature of the problems such laws would address. Congress has been disabled from inside. Most of this happened in one of those revisions of the House of Representatives’ internal rules when an election flipped the majority party. It was January 1995, and a last-minute geyser of campaign cash had delivered an upset Republican victory two months before. Newt Gingrich held the gavel. The very first provision of the new rules he hammered through on January 5 reads: “In the One Hundred Fourth Congress, the total number of staff of House committees shall be at least one-third less than the corresponding total in the One Hundred Third Congress.” Congressional staffers are the citizens’ subject matter experts. Over years, these scientists and auditors and lawyers and military veterans build up historical knowledge on the complex issues that jostle for House and Senate attention. They help members, who have to be generalists, drill down into specifics. Cut staffs, and members lose the bandwidth to craft wise legislation, the expertise to ask telling questions in hearings—the ability to hold oversight hearings at all. The Congressional Research Service, the Government Accountability Office, the Congressional Budget Office all suffered the cuts. The Office of Technology Assessment was abolished—because, in 1995, what new technology could possibly be poised on the horizon? Democrats, when they regained control of the House, did not repair the damage. Today, the number of staff fielding thousands of corporate lobbyists or fact-checking their jive remains lower than it was a quarter century ago.
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Sarah Chayes (On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake)
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Over the last decade, entire neighbourhoods have lost their identity to the ever-growing clothing retail market. Since my first visit to the Marais quarter of Paris in 2003, I have seen the area shift from a charming, off-beat district featuring a mix of up-and-coming designers, traditional ateliers, bookstores and boulangeries to what amounts to an open-air shopping mall dominated by international brands. In the last five years, an antique shop has been replaced by a chic clothing store and the last neighbourhood supermarket transformed into a threestorey flagship of one of the clothing giants. The old quarter is now only faintly visible, like writing on a medieval palimpsest: overhanging the gleaming sign of a sleek clothes shop, on a faded ceramic fascia board, is written ‘BOULANGERIE’. In economically developed countries, people’s motivations for spending money have long since shifted from needs to desires. There’s no denying we need places to live in, food to nourish us and clothes to dress ourselves in, and, while we’re at it, we might as well do these things with a certain degree of refinement to help make life as pleasurable as possible. But when did the clothing industry turn into little more than a cash machine whose main purpose seems to be its own never-ending growth? Just as clothing retail shops are sucking the identity out of entire neighbourhoods, so that the architecture becomes little more than a backdrop for their products, the production of the garments they sell is eating away at the Earth’s resources and the life of the workers who are producing them. Fashion has become the second most polluting industry in the world. And with what result? Our wardrobes are cluttered with so many clothes that the mere sight of them becomes overwhelming, yet at the same time we feel a constant craving for the next purchase that will transform our look.
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Alois Guinut (Why French Women Wear Vintage: and other secrets of sustainable style (MITCHELL BEAZLE))
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quarter that has followed his death, his birthdate has been commemorated as January 11, 1815—as in the joyous celebratory dinner staged each year in Kingston, Ontario, for example, and in the inscriptions on all the plaques and statues that honour him. But this particular day may be a mistake. The January 11 date is taken from the entry for his birth made by his father, Hugh Macdonald, in his memorandum book. The entry recorded in the General Register Office in Edinburgh, though, is January 10.*1 Similarly, precision about where specifically Macdonald was born, while a matter of lesser consequence, is as difficult to determine. The delivery may have taken place at 29 Ingram Street in Glasgow or, not far away, at 18 Brunswick Street, both on the south side of the Clyde River, because the family moved between these locations around the time of his birth. To pick at a last unknowable nit, Macdonald’s father recorded the moment of birth as 4:15, without specifying afternoon or early morning.
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Richard Gwyn (John A: The Man Who Made Us)
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What if the last seventy-five years has been the exception rather than the rule? What if the last three-quarters of a century has lulled us into believing that the next few decades will continue on the same path? What if we have forgotten the lessons of history from a century ago? In the first four decades of the twentieth century, we faced World War I, then the deadly Spanish flu of 1918–19, then deglobalization and bouts of hyperinflation, and then the Great Depression.
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Nouriel Roubini (Megathreats)
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When people arrive in San Francisco, they often discover there isn’t room in the shelters for them. “People come from all over the United States, thinking it’s some sort of spa here,” said a homeless man, “some sort of nirvana here. And they find out that it’s very expensive to live here.”26 The same was true in Los Angeles. “For the first time in 13 years, Los Angeles opened its housing voucher wait list last year,” said Dr. Margot Kushel. “The city drew 600,000 applicants for 20,000 slots, highlighting the enormous unmet need.”27 And more services attracted more people to Seattle. “I do think we have a magnet effect,” said Seattle’s former homelessness chief. Nearly one-quarter of the homeless in King County, in which Seattle is the biggest city, said they became homeless outside of Washington State.28 Mayor Breed said she opposed Proposition C because she feared that spending yet more on homelessness services, without any requirement that people get off the street, would backfire. “We are a magnet for people who are looking for help,” she said. “There are a lot of other cities that are not doing their part, and I find that larger cities end up with more than our fair share.”29 After San Francisco started offering free hotel rooms to the homeless during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, first responders reported that people had come from across the state. “People are coming from all over the place—Sacramento, Lake County, Bakersfield,” said the city’s fire chief. “We have also heard that people are getting released from jail in other counties and being told to go to San Francisco where you will get a tent and then you will get housing.
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Michael Shellenberger (San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities)
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Early in his life, Dostoevsky underwent a virtual resurrection. He had been arrested for belonging to a group judged treasonous by Tsar Nicholas I, who, to impress upon the young parlor radicals the gravity of their errors, sentenced them to death and staged a mock execution. A firing squad stood at the ready. Bareheaded, robed in white burial shrouds, hands bound tightly behind them, they were paraded through the snow before a gawking crowd. At the very last instant, as the order, “Ready, aim!” was heard and rifles were cocked and lifted, a horseman galloped up with a message from the tsar: he would mercifully commute their sentences to hard labor. Dostoevsky never recovered from this experience. He had peered into the maw of death, and from that moment life became for him precious beyond all calculation. “Now my life will change,” he said; “I shall be born again in a new form.” As he boarded the convict train toward Siberia, a devout woman handed him a New Testament, the only book allowed in prison. Believing that God had given him a second chance to fulfill his calling, Dostoevsky pored over that New Testament during his confinement. After ten years he emerged from exile with unshakable Christian convictions, as expressed in a letter to the woman who had given him the New Testament, “If anyone proved to me that Christ was outside the truth … then I would prefer to remain with Christ than with the truth.” Prison offered Dostoevsky another opportunity, which at first seemed a curse: it forced him to live at close quarters with thieves, murderers, and drunken peasants. His shared life with these prisoners later led to unmatched characterizations in his novels, such as that of the murderer Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. Dostoevsky’s liberal view of the inherent goodness in humanity could not account for the pure evil he found in his cell mates, and his theology had to adjust to this new reality. Over time, though, he also glimpsed the image of God in the lowest of prisoners. He came to believe that only through being loved is a human being capable of love.
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Philip Yancey (Grace Notes: Daily Readings with Philip Yancey)
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The Tiger King’s Gift Long ago, in the days of the ancient Pandya kings of South India, a father and his two sons lived in a village near Madura. The father was an astrologer, but he had never become famous, and so was very poor. The elder son was called Chellan; the younger Gangan. When the time came for the father to put off his earthly body, he gave his few fields to Chellan, and a palm leaf with some words scratched on it to Gangan. These were the words that Gangan read: ‘From birth, poverty; For ten years, captivity; On the seashore, death. For a little while happiness shall follow.’ ‘This must be my fortune,’ said Gangan to himself, ‘and it doesn’t seem to be much of a fortune. I must have done something terrible in a former birth. But I will go as a pilgrim to Papanasam and do penance. If I can expiate my sin, I may have better luck.’ His only possession was a water jar of hammered copper, which had belonged to his grandfather. He coiled a rope round the jar, in case he needed to draw water from a well. Then he put a little rice into a bundle, said farewell to his brother, and set out. As he journeyed, he had to pass through a great forest. Soon he had eaten all his food and drunk all the water in his jar. In the heat of the day he became very thirsty. At last he came to an old, disused well. As he looked down into it, he could see that a winding stairway had once gone round it down to the water’s edge, and that there had been four landing places at different heights down this stairway, so that those who wanted to fetch water might descend the stairway to the level of the water and fill their water pots with ease, regardless of whether the well was full, or three-quarters full, or half full or only one-quarter full. Now the well was nearly empty. The stairway had fallen away. Gangan could not go down to fill his water jar so he uncoiled his rope, tied his jar to it and slowly let it down. To his amazement, as it was going down past the first landing place, a huge striped paw shot out and caught it, and a growling voice called out: ‘Oh Lord of Charity, have mercy! The stair is fallen. I die unless you save me! Fear me not.
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Ruskin Bond (The Laughing Skull)
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We know that some early humans migrated into Asia and Europe within the last quarter of a million years, but their dominion outside of Africa was temporary, and they probably leave no descendants today. Around seventy thousand years ago another group of people drifted away from Africa, and the process of setting down new roots all over this planet began.
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Adam Rutherford (How to Argue With a Racist: What Our Genes Do (and Don't) Say About Human Difference)
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It is hard to meet a stranger. Even the greatest extravert meeting even the meekest stranger knows a certain dread, though he may not know he knows it. Will he make a fool of me wreck my image of myself invade me destroy me change me? Will he be different from me? Yes, that he will. There’s the terrible thing: the strangeness of the stranger. After two years on a dead planet, and the last half year isolated as a team of two, oneself and one other, after that it’s even harder to meet a stranger, however
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Ursula K. Le Guin (The Wind's Twelve Quarters)
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When in 1665, over the space of 18 months, the last bubonic plague had eradicated a quarter of London’s population, Daniel Defoe wrote in A Journal of the Plague Year[15] (published in 1722): “All trades being stopped, employment ceased: the labour, and by that the bread, of the poor were cut off; and at first indeed the cries of the poor were most lamentable to hear … thousands of them having stayed in London till nothing but desperation sent them away, death overtook them on the road, and they served for no better than the messengers of death.” Defoe’s book is full of anecdotes that resonate with today’s situation, telling us how the rich were escaping to the country, “taking death with them”, and observing how the poor were much more exposed to the outbreak, or describing how “quacks and mountebanks” sold false cures.[16
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Klaus Schwab (COVID-19: The Great Reset)
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Whatever profits are left over are added to your personal income. Your accountant should ask you to pay estimated tax quarterly, based on last year’s profits. Your accountant will send you invoices with an amount for state and federal tax, which you pay electronically.
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Joseph Anderson (The $20 SaaS Company: from Zero to Seven Figures without Venture Capital)
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Music is a universe of sound, constantly expanding and dividing. Compositions are carved into movements and passages. A half note branches off into quarter notes, sixteenth notes—the same tone, yet held for a different duration, a different effect. A harmony of multiple notes, a counterpoint of multiple melodies, an orchestra of multiple instruments: separate spheres, playing in parallel.
“A composer must make order out of this hopeless profusion of noise. To play every note at once—one big, all-encompassing dot—would produce chaos. To play none would produce silence. But to space them out artfully on a staff of time: that would produce a masterpiece.
“And so the composer splits the piece into measures and meter. The notes are held tight within bar lines, told when to ring out and when to die out, when to attack and when to decay. They are given finite boundaries. *You will last for eight breaths, and no more.* To them, time is fixed; to the composer, it is fluid. She could speed it up, slow it down, change duple meter to triple meter or a march to a waltz. She knows that the beauty lies not in how long the note lasts, but in the sound that it makes while it does.
“Maybe, the woman thinks, our composer has done the same with us. Lest eternity seem too long and infinity too loud, she imposes measures on our existence, divides it into years, generations, incarnations. We count beats and birthdays. We emerge from the silence, and we fade back into it. This is not a punishment or a curse, any more than it is to assign a time signature to a song. After all, if there is no beat, how can there be a dance?
“She does not do this to make us suffer. She does this to make us music.
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Amy Weiss (Crescendo)
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Michael Lipper of the fund-tracking company Lipper Analytical Services said that the warnings applied to mutual funds, too; 475 of 1,728 stock, bond, and balanced funds had invested billions in derivatives, yet such holdings “magically seem to disappear” the day funds have to file statements with shareholders. Although mutual funds are forbidden by government regulation from using leverage to buy securities with borrowed money, the Investment Company Institute, a Washington-based mutual fund trade group, announced that mutual funds not only held derivatives worth $7.5 billion (2.13 percent of total assets), they owned $1.5 billion of the special derivatives called structured notes, of which PERLS was one type. For example, Fidelity Investment’s $10 billion Asset Manager fund had $800 million invested in structured notes in the last quarter of 1993, including leveraged bets on Finnish, Swedish, and British interest rates. One note, based on Canadian rates and leveraged thirteen times, had gained 33 percent the previous year; in the first four months of 1994, that same note plunged 25 percent. What was worse, the mutual fund trade groups didn’t even seem to know about the purchases of PLUS Notes.
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Frank Partnoy (FIASCO: Blood in the Water on Wall Street)
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Carried further, was it possible that as Medicare budgets dried up—as the population aged and the oft-cited “gray tsunami” landed on American soil—Americans might start to consider rational suicide for the elderly as an act of social responsibility, carried out by older people who understand themselves to be drains on the system and inhibitors of opportunity for the young? Already, about a quarter of Medicare spending each year is directed to patients in their very last year of life.
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Katie Engelhart (The Inevitable: Dispatches on the Right to Die)
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Never doing performance reviews is a bad idea. However, doing them every quarter heavily taxes managers, and doesn’t give employees much time to show improvement from the last rating cycle. So, my recommendation: do it twice a year. One can be lightweight, oral, and just between the manager and employee; the other should be written and include a light 360-degree component.
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Kim Malone Scott (Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity)
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the chain-of-custody document to the back of the search warrant application and was ready to go. “I’m out of here,” she announced. “You ever want to get together after work, I’m here, Amy. At least until the late show starts.” “Thanks,” Dodd said, seeming to pick up on Ballard’s worry. “I might take you up on that.” Ballard took the elevator down and then crossed the front plaza toward her car. She checked the windshield and saw no ticket. She decided to double down on her luck and leave the car there. The courthouse was only a block away on Temple; if she was fast and Judge Thornton had not convened court, she could be back to the car in less than a half hour. She quickened her pace. Judge Billy Thornton was a well-regarded mainstay in the local criminal justice system. He had served both as a public defender and as a deputy district attorney in his early years, before being elected to the bench and holding the position in Department 107 of the Los Angeles Superior Court for more than a quarter century. He had a folksy manner in the courtroom that concealed a sharp legal mind—one reason the presiding judge assigned wiretap search warrants to him. His full name was Clarence William Thornton but he preferred Billy, and his bailiff called it out every time he entered the courtroom: “The Honorable Billy Thornton presiding.” Thanks to the inordinately long wait for an elevator in the fifty-year-old courthouse, Ballard did not get to Department 107 until ten minutes before ten a.m., and she saw that court was about to convene. A man in blue county jail scrubs was at the defense table with his suited attorney sitting next to him. A prosecutor Ballard recognized but could not remember by name was at the other table. They appeared ready to go and the only party missing was the judge on the bench. Ballard pulled back her jacket so the badge on her belt could be seen by the courtroom deputy and went through the gate. She moved around the attorney tables and went to the clerk’s station to the right of the judge’s bench. A man with a fraying shirt collar looked up at her. The nameplate on his desk said ADAM TRAINOR. “Hi,” Ballard whispered, feigning breathlessness so Trainor would think she had run up the nine flights of steps and take pity. “Is there any chance I can get in to see the judge about a wiretap warrant before he starts court?” “Oh, boy, we’re just waiting on the last juror to get here before starting,” Trainor said. “You might have to come back at the lunch break.” “Can you please just ask him? The warrant’s only seven pages and most of it’s boilerplate stuff he’s read a million times. It won’t take him long.” “Let me see. What’s your name and department?” “Renée Ballard, LAPD. I’m working a cold case homicide. And there is a time element on this.” Trainor picked up his phone, punched a button, and swiveled on his chair so his back was to Ballard and she would have difficulty hearing the phone call. It didn’t matter because it was over in twenty seconds and Ballard expected the answer was no as Trainor swiveled toward her. But she was wrong. “You can go back,” Trainor said. “He’s in his chambers. He’s got about ten minutes. The missing juror just called from the garage.” “Not with those elevators,” Ballard said. Trainor opened a half door in the cubicle that allowed Ballard access to the rear door of the courtroom. She walked through a file room and then into a hallway. She had been in judicial chambers on other cases before and knew that this hallway led to a line of offices assigned to the criminal-court judges. She didn’t know whether to go right or left until she heard a voice say, “Back here.” It was to the left. She found an open door and saw Judge Billy Thornton standing next to a desk, pulling on his black robe for court. “Come in,” he said. Ballard entered. His chambers were just like the others she had been
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Michael Connelly (The Night Fire (Renée Ballard, #3; Harry Bosch, #22; Harry Bosch Universe, #33))
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AND NOW AT LAST, HERE IT COMES, THAT DECEMBER WIND, SCREAMING down the narrow streets, stripping the year-end rags from the trees. December, beware; December, despair, as my mother always said. And once again, as the year draws in, it feels as if a page has turned. A page—a card—the wind, perhaps. And December was always a bad time for us. The last month; the dregs of the year; slouching toward Christmas with its skirt of tinsel dragging in the mud. The dead-end part of the year looms; the trees are stripped three-quarters bare; the light is like scorched newspaper; and all my ghosts come out to play like fireflies in the spectral sky— We came on the wind of the carnival. A wind of change, of promises. The merry wind, the magical wind, making March hares of everyone, tumbling blossoms and coattails and hats; rushing toward summer in a frenzy of exuberance.
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Joanne Harris (The Girl with No Shadow (Chocolat, #2))
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When he first hung out his shingle as a professional writer, in 1981, after several years running a small jazz club in Tokyo, he discovered that the sedentary lifestyle caused him to gain weight rapidly; he was also smoking as many as sixty cigarettes a day. He soon resolved to change his habits completely, moving with his wife to a rural area, quitting smoking, drinking less, and eating a diet of mostly vegetables and fish. He also started running daily, a habit he has kept up for more than a quarter century.
The one drawback to this self-made schedule, Murakami admitted in a 2008 essay, is that it doesn’t allow for much of a social life. “People are offended when you repeatedly turn down their invitations,” he wrote. But he decided that the indispensable relationship in his life was with his readers. “My readers would welcome whatever life style I chose, as long as I made sure each new work was an improvement over the last. And shouldn’t that be my duty–and my top priority–as a novelist?
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Mason Currey (Daily Rituals by Mason Currey (2014-09-11))
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Putting his umbrella away, and ignoring the fine Seattle mist, he opened his wallet and took out a small white envelope. On the front was the Chinese character for Lee-Ethel's last name for the last thirty seven-plus years. Inside had been a piece of hard candy and a quarter. The small envelopes were passed out as he left the Bonney-Watson Funeral Home, where Ethel's memorial service had been held. The candy was so that everyone leaving would taste sweetness-not bitter. The quarter was for buying more candy on the way home- a traditional token of lasting life and enduring happiness.
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Jamie Ford
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What’s there that’s so great? Internet? Television? Department stores? Fast food?” Richard leaned forward and began counting on his fingers. “Medicine, clean water, sanitation, midwifery, roads, transport, everything that pulled this world out of the dark ages and took the nasty, brutish, and short out of life.” He rabbit-eared his fingers. “You think that ‘going back to nature’ is going to make your life more enjoyable? You’re a fantasist, Ed, and a selfish one. What about your kids and your wife? You think they’d be all right? You think you could really support them and protect them? You probably couldn’t even keep a cactus alive, let alone feed your family from a vegetable patch.” “And what’s that supposed to mean?” I said. “I’m saying society has evolved, Ed. It’s not what it used to be for one very good reason: it was shit and people weren’t very good at staying alive. We got sick and died daily. Childbirth usually ended in death for the child, the mother, or both. Pain, filth, famine, and war were everywhere, and you were lucky to reach thirty without being stabbed, shot, tortured, decapitated, hung, drawn and quartered, burned at the stake, or thrown in a dungeon to rot. People didn’t live in some blissful utopia where everyone had an allotment and looked after one another. We killed each other because we were starving and terrified most of the time. The last two hundred years have seen us grow, understand, build systems and infrastructures that keep us healthy and happy. We can dive to the bottom of the ocean, fly around the world, go to the moon, Mars, beyond. And all you want to do is go live in a cave. We’re not supposed to live in the fucking dirt, Ed. We’re not.
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Adrian J. Walker (The End of the World Running Club)
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The last decade has filled so many of us with a growing sense of unreality. We seem trapped in a grind of constant change without ever getting the chance to integrate it. Those rolling news cycles, the chatter on social media, the way that our families have split along partisan lines: it feels as though we've undergone a halving, then a quartering, and now we are some kind of social rubble.
If there were a spirit of this age, it would look a lot like fear. For years now we've been running like rabbits. We glimpse a flas hof white tail, read the danger signal, and run, flashing our own white tail behind us. It's a chain reaction, a river of terror surging incoherently onwards, gathering up other wild, alert bodies who in turn signal their own danger. There is no one predator from which to escape; there are many. We are in the business of running now. It is all so urgent. Every year, it seems we must run harder. There is no other solution. We can only run, and panic, and chatter out our fears to others, who will mirror them back to us.
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Katherine May (Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age)
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But his sister Ivy was worse. She really did not care for material wealth. The alms she got was no bigger than ours, and she went about in scuffed, flat-heeled shoes and shirtwaists—just to show how selfless she was. She was our Director of Distribution. She was the lady in charge of our needs. She was the one who held us by the throat. Of course, distribution was supposed to be decided by voting—by the voice of the people. But when the people are six thousand howling voices, trying to decide without yardstick, rhyme or reason, when there are no rules to the game and each can demand anything, but has a right to nothing, when everybody holds power over everybody’s life except his own—then it turns out, as it did, that the voice of the people is Ivy Starnes. By the end of the second year, we dropped the pretense of the ‘family meetings’—in the name of ‘production efficiency and time economy,’ one meeting used to take ten days—and all the petitions of need were simply sent to Miss Starnes’ office. No, not sent. They had to be recited to her in person by every petitioner. Then she made up a distribution list, which she read to us for our vote of approval at a meeting that lasted three-quarters of an hour. We voted approval. There was a ten-minute period on the agenda for discussion and objections. We made no objections. We knew better by that time. Nobody can divide a factory’s income among thousands of people, without some sort of a gauge to measure people’s value. Her gauge was bootlicking. Selfless? In her father’s time, all of his money wouldn’t have given him a chance to speak to his lousiest wiper and get away with it, as she spoke to our best skilled workers and their wives. She had pale eyes that looked fishy, cold and dead. And if you ever want to see pure evil, you should have seen the way her eyes glinted when she watched some man who’d talked back to her once and who’d just heard his name on the list of those getting nothing above basic pittance. And when you saw it, you saw the real motive of any person who’s ever preached the slogan: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
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Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)
“
As to life in a prison, of course there may be two opinions, said the prince. I once heard the story of a man who lived twelve years in a prison-I heard it from the man himself. He was one of the persons under treatment with my professor; he had fits, and attacks of melancholy, then he would weep, and once he tried to commit suicide. His life in prison was sad enough; his only acquaintances were spiders and a tree that grew outside his grating-but I think I had better tell you of another man I met last year. There was a very strange feature in this case, strange because of its extremely rare occurrence. This man had once been brought to the scaffold in company with several others, and had had the sentence of death by shooting passed upon him for some political crime. Twenty minutes later he had been reprieved and some other punishment substituted; but the interval between the two sentences, twenty minutes, or at least a quarter of an hour, had been passed in the certainty that within a few minutes he must die. I was very anxious to hear him speak of his impressions during that dreadful time, and I several times inquired of him as to what he thought and felt. He remembered everything with the most accurate and extraordinary distinctness, and declared that he would never forget a single iota of the experience.
About twenty paces from the scaffold, where he had stood to hear the sentence, were three posts, fixed in the ground, to which to fasten the criminals. The first three criminals were taken to the posts, dressed in long white tunics, with white caps drawn over their faces, so that they could not see the rifles pointed at them. Then a group of soldiers took their stand opposite to each post. My friend was the eighth on the list, and therefore he would have been among the third lot to go up. A priest went about among them with a cross: and there was about five minutes of time left for him to live.
He said that those five minutes seemed to him to be a most interminable period, an enormous wealth of time; he seemed to be living, in these minutes, so many lives that there was no need as yet to think of that last moment, so that he made several arrangements, dividing up the time into portions--one for saying farewell to his companions, two minutes for that; then a couple more for thinking over his own life and career and all about himself; and another minute for a last look around. He remembered having divided his time like this quite well. While saying good- bye to his friends he recollected asking one of them some very usual everyday question, and being much interested in the answer. Then having bade farewell, he embarked upon those two minutes which he had allotted to looking into himself; he knew beforehand what he was going to think about. He wished to put it to himself as quickly and clearly as possible, that here was he, a living, thinking man, and that in three minutes he would be nobody; or if somebody or something, then what and where? He thought he would decide this question once for all in these last three minutes. A little way off there stood a church, and its gilded spire glittered in the sun. He remembered staring stubbornly at this spire, and at the rays of light sparkling from it. He could not tear his eyes from these rays of light; he got the idea that these rays were his new nature, and that in three minutes he would become one of them, amalgamated somehow with them.
The repugnance to what must ensue almost immediately, and the uncertainty, were dreadful, but worst of all was the idea, 'What should I do if I were not to die now? What if I were to return to life again? What an eternity of days, and all mine! How I should grudge and count up every minute of it, so as to waste not a single instant!' He said that this thought weighed so upon him and became such a terrible burden upon his brain that he could not bear it, and wished they would shoot him quickly and have done with it!
”
”
Fyodor Dostoevsky
“
Things go wrong when you fish, and those chances increase when you’re in a boat. Often this has to do with what’s known as human error. This is the preferred term because it doesn’t name the human who made the error, especially when that human is me. Once, Dave and I were in his canoe on the last quarter mile of a long day on the water. We were around a bend from the takeout. Beyond one final rapids we would pull over and load up his van. The only thing standing in our way was a large rock. The current picked up and moved us faster, but it would be easy to avoid the rock. It would almost be harder to hit it than to miss it. I was in the bow, Dave was in the stern. Without question he was the captain, I’m not sure a fifteen-foot canoe has a captain, but Dave would be the captain of anything from a kayak to a steamer. “Go to the left of the rock,” he bellowed. This could not have been clearer and took on some urgency as the rock got nearer. Yet we rowed at cross-purposes and continued to head straight toward it. In search of clarity I shouted: “Our left or the rock’s left?” The metaphysical nature of this question has remained with me over the years. If it appeared in a Basho haiku, it might be considered cryptically wise or at least a noble mistranslation. Canoe in summer Floats slowly down the river Past the large rock’s left Not this time. The last thing I remember hearing, which echoed in my ears underwater as we turned over, was Dave saying emphatically, “The rock doesn’t have a left!” My tendency to overanalyze simple situations was captured in this question, though I’m embarrassed to admit in private moments it still makes sense to me that a rock can have a left. Hitting a rock with a canoe may have many reasons but one result. The canoe tipped at once, decisively, and Dave’s only concern was the fate of his tackle box, which occupied a place in his spiritual landscape like the Gutenberg Bible. Thankfully, the river wasn’t deep there, just a few feet. Once the tackle box was salvaged—which he always kept tightly shut in case of this exact sort of catastrophe—Dave was in a fairly agreeable mood. He didn’t care about getting wet or even mention it. He had the grin of a teenager who’s just talked his way out of a speeding ticket. This was not the first canoe he’d tipped out of. He was seventy-five years old.
”
”
David Coggins (The Optimist: A Case for the Fly Fishing Life)
“
I'm all strung-out, my money's spent
Can't really tell ya' where last year went
But I've given up paying my bills for Lent
My landlord, he says he wants his rent
Fuck 'em!
Hey, now, the women they come, the women they go
The hens start to cackle when the cock starts to crow
Hell, I take 'em in when the warm winds blow
But I boot 'em in the ass once it starts to snow
'Cause fuck them!
Yeah, got a letter from my folks, and they say they're in debt
They say that things are as bad as they can possibly get
You know, I haven't answered that letter yet
I might use it to light my cigarette
'Cause fuck them!
What'd they ever do for me anyway? Threw me outta the house when I was twenty-nine years old and cut off my allowance
Fuck 'em!
Hey, a woman come around and handed me a line
About a lot of little orphan kids sufferin' and dyin'
Shit, I give her a quarter, cause one of 'em might be mine
The rest of those bastards can keep right on cryin'
I mean, fuck kids!
Throw up on your shoulder, piss in your lap, Never give you nothing
Fuck 'em!
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Ariana Grande
I had a fight last night with a big lumberjack
I spent most of the fight laying flat on my back
You know he beat me up fair, and that's a fact
But I busted his head as soon as he turned his back
'Cause fuck fair fighting!
Yeah
You know, my junkie buddy got the shakes again
He give me five bucks and sent me out in the rain
I'm supposed to bring back something to kill his pain, oh
Shit, I took the bread and I jumped on a train
Cause fuck junkies!
”
”
Shel Silverstein
“
As America suffered from the Depression, Kansas City soared, thanks to the Ten-Year Plan. “In Kansas City,” said Conrad Mann, the president of the chamber of commerce, “we are building the greatest inland city the world has ever seen.” New skyscrapers sprouted from the ground every year, and jazz clubs rollicked into the morning, at a time when, as one agent put it, the rest of the country “couldn’t afford three dollars a night for a musician.” Pendergast liked to think generosity was at the core of his power. When a British parliamentarian named Marjorie Graves visited his Main Street office in 1933, he told her he helped “the poor through our organizations.” It was true that Tom’s Town was built on undervalued workers—immigrants, Black labor, the poor. “The Boss” hosted a fancy dinner for the needy every Christmas and kept quarters in his pockets for the homeless. By the early 1930s, with police brutality against the Black community on the rise, Pendergast seized control of the Kansas City Police Department, taking it back from the state of Missouri, which had assumed leadership in the Civil War era. Pendergast assigned staffing oversight to “Brother John” Lazia, the leader of the Fifth Democratic Ward and a charismatic crime boss, and when dozens more loyal Pendergast supporters were appointed to the force, The Kansas City Call reported that police brutality had declined. But Pendergast’s Ten-Year Plan funds rarely made it to Black communities, and the occasional gifts from his patronage system masked the need for lasting racial reforms.
”
”
Mark Dent (Kingdom Quarterback: Patrick Mahomes, the Kansas City Chiefs, and How a Once Swingin' Cow Town Chased the Ultimate Comeback)
“
The stranger came early in February, one wintry day, through a biting wind and a driving snow, the last snowfall of the year, over the down, walking from Bramblehurst railway station, and carrying a little black portmanteau in his thickly gloved hand. He was wrapped up from head to foot, and the brim of his soft felt hat hid every inch of his face but the shiny tip of his nose; the snow had piled itself against his shoulders and chest, and added a white crest to the burden he carried. He staggered into the “Coach and Horses” more dead than alive, and flung his portmanteau down. “A fire,” he cried, “in the name of human charity! A room and a fire!” He stamped and shook the snow from off himself in the bar, and followed Mrs. Hall into her guest parlour to strike his bargain. And with that much introduction, that and a couple of sovereigns flung upon the table, he took up his quarters in the inn.
”
”
H.G. Wells (The Invisible Man)