Launch Food Quotes

To the rocket scientist, you are a problem. You are the most irritating piece of machinery he or she will ever have to deal with. You and your fluctuating metabolism, your puny memory, your frame that comes in a million different configurations. You are unpredictable. You're inconstant. You take weeks to fix. The engineer must worry about the water and oxygen and food you'll need in space, about how much extra fuel it will take to launch your shrimp cocktail and irradiated beef tacos. A solar cell or a thruster nozzle is stable and undemanding. It does not excrete or panic or fall in love with the mission commander. It has no ego. Its structural elements don't start to break down without gravity, and it works just fine without sleep. To me, you are the best thing to happen to rocket science. The human being is the machine that makes the whole endeavor so endlessly intriguing.

I noticed then that the red-haired woman was buying the food you eat when you live alone: a box of cereal, a few apples, a plastic container of plain yogurt....With an abrupt clarity, I saw how I had been launched into another category. I had been the red-haired woman; for a decade of my adult life, I had bought cereal and yogurt, I'd stood near couples and watched them nuzzle, and now I was part of such a couple. And I would not be launched back, I was certain. But I recognized her life, I knew it so well! I wanted to clasp her freckled hand, to say to her--surely we understood some shared code (or surely not, surely she'd have thought me preposterous)--It's good on the other side, but it's good on your side too. Enjoy it there. The loneliness is harder and the loneliness is the biggest part; but some things are easier.

I’ve been eating potatoes for weeks. Theoretically, with my three-quarter ration plan, I should still be eating food packs. But three-quarter ration is hard to maintain, so now I’m eating potatoes. I have enough to last till launch, so I won’t starve. But I’m pretty damn sick of potatoes. Also, they have a lot of fiber, so…let’s just say it’s good I’m the only guy on this planet.

After Jesus' fast, he began healing, rescuing, redeeming. The Spirit filled up the emptiness Jesus created, launching him into ministry. In some supernatural way the abstinence from food was the catalyst for Jesus' unveiling; the real fireworks were next.

Occasionally, especially at celebratory times, the whole gang of us would launch into a spontaneous mental game. For example, my mother used to send me to the back porch (a room containing no furniture but a simply incredible mass of Stuff) to get flour for holiday cakes or pies. I often returned to the kitchen, cringing with disgust, to announce that the flour was full of worms. No matter how sick this made me, I knew it wuoldn't bother my mother. She always just sifted the worms out, saying that even if she missed a few and they got into the food, they would simply be an excellent source of protein. Just as we were all beginning to feel thoroughly downtrodden, my father would save the day. "Everyone come up with a literary reference about worms!" he would shout.

The story of Whole Foods Market provides dramatic evidence of the power of macro trends to create opportunities that savvy entrepreneurs can capitalize on. Such trends – in this case, sociocultural ones – create groups of customers having needs not served well by incumbent companies. The trend towards health and nutrition that began in the 1980s is still going strong,

Jimmy Hoffa’s first notoriety in union work was as the leader of a successful strike by the “Strawberry Boys.” He became identified with it. In 1932 the nineteen-year-old Jimmy Hoffa was working as a truck loader and unloader of fresh fruits and vegetables on the platform dock of the Kroger Food Company in Detroit for 32¢ an hour. Twenty cents of that pay was in credit redeemable for groceries at Kroger food stores. But the men only got that 32¢ when there was work to do. They had to report at 4:30 P.M. for a twelve-hour shift and weren’t permitted to leave the platform. When there were no trucks to load or unload, the workers sat around without pay. On one immortal hot spring afternoon, a load of fresh strawberries arrived from Florida, and the career of the most famous labor leader in American history was launched. Hoffa gave a signal, and the men who would come to be known as the Strawberry Boys refused to move the Florida strawberries into refrigerator cars until their union was recognized and their demands for better working conditions were met.

The last time I’d been unwell, suicidally depressed, whatever you want to call it, the reactions of my friends and family had fallen into several different camps: The Let’s Laugh It Off merchants: Claire was the leading light. They hoped that joking about my state of mind would reduce it to a manageable size. Most likely to say, ‘Feeling any mad urges to fling yourself into the sea?’ The Depression Deniers: they were the ones who took the position that since there was no such thing as depression, nothing could be wrong with me. Once upon a time I’d have belonged in that category myself. A subset of the Deniers was The Tough Love people. Most likely to say, ‘What have you got to be depressed about?’ The It’s All About Me bunch: they were the ones who wailed that I couldn’t kill myself because they’d miss me so much. More often than not, I’d end up comforting them. My sister Anna and her boyfriend, Angelo, flew three thousand miles from New York just so I could dry their tears. Most likely to say, ‘Have you any idea how many people love you?’ The Runaways: lots and lots of people just stopped ringing me. Most of them I didn’t care about, but one or two were important to me. Their absence was down to fear; they were terrified that whatever I had, it was catching. Most likely to say, ‘I feel so helpless … God, is that the time?’ Bronagh – though it hurt me too much at the time to really acknowledge it – was the number one offender. The Woo-Woo crew: i.e. those purveying alternative cures. And actually there were hundreds of them – urging me to do reiki, yoga, homeopathy, bible study, sufi dance, cold showers, meditation, EFT, hypnotherapy, hydrotherapy, silent retreats, sweat lodges, felting, fasting, angel channelling or eating only blue food. Everyone had a story about something that had cured their auntie/boss/boyfriend/next-door neighbour. But my sister Rachel was the worst – she had me plagued. Not a day passed that she didn’t send me a link to some swizzer. Followed by a phone call ten minutes later to make sure I’d made an appointment. (And I was so desperate that I even gave plenty of them a go.) Most likely to say, ‘This man’s a miracle worker.’ Followed by: ‘That’s why he’s so expensive. Miracles don’t come cheap.’ There was often cross-pollination between the different groupings. Sometimes the Let’s Laugh It Off merchants teamed up with the Tough Love people to tell me that recovering from depression is ‘simply mind over matter’. You just decide you’re better. (The way you would if you had emphysema.) Or an All About Me would ring a member of the Woo-Woo crew and sob and sob about how selfish I was being and the Woo-Woo crew person would agree because I had refused to cough up two grand for a sweat lodge in Wicklow. Or one of the Runaways would tiptoe back for a sneaky look at me, then commandeer a Denier into launching a two-pronged attack, telling me how well I seemed. And actually that was the worst thing anyone could have done to me, because you can only sound like a self-pitying malingerer if you protest, ‘But I don’t feel well. I feel wretched beyond description.’ Not one person who loved me understood how I’d felt. They hadn’t a clue and I didn’t blame them, because, until it had happened to me, I hadn’t a clue either.

Having judged, condemned, abandoned his cultural forms, his language, his food habits, his sexual behavior, his way of sitting down, of resting, of laughing, of enjoying himself, the oppressed flings himself upon the imposed culture with the desperation of a drowning man. Developing his technical knowledge in contact with more and more perfected machines, entering into the dynamic circuit of industrial production, meeting men from remote regions in the framework of the concentration of capital, that is to say, on the job, discovering the assembly line, the team, production �time,� in other words yield per hour, the oppressed is shocked to find that he continues to be the object of racism and contempt. It is at this level that racism is treated as a question of persons. �There are a few hopeless racists, but you must admit that on the whole the population likes….� �With time all this will disappear.� �This is the country where there is the least amount of race prejudice.� �At the United Nations there is a commission to fight race prejudice.� Films on race prejudice, poems on race prejudice, messages on race prejudice. Spectacular and futile condemnations of race prejudice. In reality, a colonial country is a racist country. If in England, in Belgium, or in France, despite the democratic principles affirmed by these respective nations, there are still racists, it is these racists who, in their opposition to the country as a whole, are logically consistent. It is not possible to enslave men without logically making them inferior through and through. And racism is only the emotional, affective, sometimes intellectual explanation of this inferiorization. The racist in a culture with racism is therefore normal. He has achieved a perfect harmony of economic relations and ideology. The idea that one forms of man, to be sure, is never totally dependent on economic relations, in other words—and this must not be forgotten—on relations existing historically and geographically among men and groups. An ever greater number of members belonging to racist societies are taking a position. They are dedicating themselves to a world in which racism would be impossible. But everyone is not up to this kind of objectivity, this abstraction, this solemn commitment. One cannot with impunity require of a man that he be against �the prejudices of his group.� And, we repeat, every colonialist group is racist. �Acculturized� and deculturized at one and the same time, the oppressed continues to come up against racism. He finds this sequel illogical, what be has left behind him inexplicable, without motive, incorrect. His knowledge, the appropriation of precise and complicated techniques, sometimes his intellectual superiority as compared to a great number of racists, lead him to qualify the racist world as passion-charged. He perceives that the racist atmosphere impregnates all the elements of the social life. The sense of an overwhelming injustice is correspondingly very strong. Forgetting racism as a consequence, one concentrates on racism as cause. Campaigns of deintoxication are launched. Appeal is made to the sense of humanity, to love, to respect for the supreme values.

Steps scuffed down the hall. A warning. From someone who knew how to remain silent. ... Cassian had just finished setting himself to rights when Azriel strode in. 'Good evening,' his brother said with a grating level of calm, striding toward the table. 'Az.' Cassian wasn't able to keep the bite out of his tone. He met his brother's too-aware stare and silently conveyed every bit of annoyance he felt at his timing. Azriel only shrugged, surveying the food the House had brought him. As if he knew exactly what he'd interrupted and took his chaperone duties very seriously. Nesta was watching them, but as soon as Cassian turned to her, she launched into movement, pushing off the table and aiming for the door. 'Good night.' She didn't wait for him to respond before she was gone. Cassian levelled a glare at Az. 'Thanks for that.' 'I don't know what you're talking about,' Az said, even as he smiled down at his food. 'Asshole.' Az chuckled. 'Don't show your hand all at once, Cass.' 'What's that supposed to mean?' Az nodded toward the doorway. 'Save something for later.' 'Busybody.

mailbox decorated with both an eagle and a lily, to signify that the youngest scouts risked their lives delivering its letters. When news of the Uprising reached Hitler, he ordered Himmler to send in his harshest troops, kill every Pole, and pulverize the whole city block by block, bomb, torch, and bulldoze it beyond repair as a warning to the rest of occupied Europe. For the job, Himmler chose the most savage units in the SS, composed of criminals, policemen, and former prisoners of war. On the Uprising’s fifth day, which came to be known as “Black Saturday,” Himmler’s battle-hardened SS and Wehrmacht soldiers stormed in, slaughtering 30,000 men, women, and children. The following day, while packs of Stukas dive-bombed the city—in archival films, one hears them whining like megaton mosquitoes—ill-equipped and mainly untrained Poles fought fiercely, radioed London to air-drop food and supplies, and begged the Russians to launch an immediate attack. Antonina wrote in her diary that two SS men opened the door, guns drawn, yelling: “Alles rrraus!!” Terrified, she and the others left the house and waited in the garden, not knowing what to expect but fearing the worst. “Hands

Once I've coated the parsnips in a honey-saffron glaze, Rachel helps me plate them alongside the brisket, stuffed cabbage, and sweet potato tzimmes, and we carry the plates out to the dining room together. "Let me explain a little about tonight's dinner," I say, addressing the softly lit faces around the table, which is covered with flickering votives and tapered candles. I launch into a description of the Jewish New Year and the symbolism behind all of the food: how the honey represents the hope of a sweet new year, how the challah is round instead of braided to represent the circle of life, how my grandmother used to make stuffed cabbage on every possible occasion because it reminded her of her Hungarian mother. I tell them lots things- about food, about my bubbe, about me- and to my surprise, they actually pay attention. They hang on my every word and ask intelligent questions and make thought-provoking points of their own. And I realize, hey, these are people who get it, people who love to eat and talk about food and culture as much as I do. Most of them aren't Jewish, but that doesn't matter. Every family has its traditions. Every family has a story to share. That's the point of this dinner- to swap stories and histories and see how food can bring people together.

The words of Nils Hellstrom. There is another respect in which we must guard against becoming too much like the insects upon whom we pattern our design for human survival. The insect has been called a walking digestive tract. This is not without reason. To support his own life, an insect will consume as much as a hundred times his own weight each day—which to each of us would be like eating an entire cow, a herd of thirty each month. And as the insect population grows, each individual naturally needs more. To those who have witnessed the insect’s profligate display of appetite, the outcome is clear. If allowed to continue on his reproductive rampage, the insect would defoliate the earth. Thus, with our lesson from the insect, comes a clear warning. If the race for food is to be the deciding conflict, let no one say it came without this warning. From the beginning of time, wild humans have stood helpless, watching the very soil they nurtured give birth to a competitor that could outeat them. Just as we must not let our teacher the insect consume what we require for survival, we must not launch a similar rampage of our own. The pace of our planet’s growing cycle cannot be denied. It is possible for insects or for man to destroy in a single week what could have fed millions for an entire year.

The Hungryalist or the hungry generation movement was a literary movement in Bengali that was launched in 1961, by a group of young Bengali poets. It was spearheaded by the famous Hungryalist quartet — Malay Roychoudhury, Samir Roychoudhury, Shakti Chattopadhyay and Debi Roy. They had coined Hungryalism from the word ‘Hungry’ used by Geoffrey Chaucer in his poetic line “in the sowre hungry tyme”. The central theme of the movement was Oswald Spengler’s idea of History, that an ailing culture feeds on cultural elements brought from outside. These writers felt that Bengali culture had reached its zenith and was now living on alien food. . . . The movement was joined by other young poets like Utpal Kumar Basu, Binoy Majumdar, Sandipan Chattopadhyay, Basudeb Dasgupta, Falguni Roy, Tridib Mitra and many more. Their poetry spoke the displaced people and also contained huge resentment towards the government as well as profanity. … On September 2, 1964, arrest warrants were issued against 11 of the Hungry poets. The charges included obscenity in literature and subversive conspiracy against the state. The court case went on for years, which drew attention worldwide. Poets like Octavio Paz, Ernesto Cardenal and Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg visited Malay Roychoudhury. The Hungryalist movement also influenced Hindi, Marathi, Assamese, Telugu & Urdu literature.

The fact is that the estimate of fatalities, in terms of what was calculable at that time—even before the discovery of nuclear winter—was a fantastic underestimate. More than forty years later, Dr. Lynn Eden, a scholar at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, revealed in Whole World on Fire71 the bizarre fact that the war planners of SAC and the Joint Chiefs—throughout the nuclear era to the present day—have deliberately omitted entirely from their estimates of the destructive effects of U.S. or Russian nuclear attacks the effects of fire. They have done so on the questionable grounds that these effects are harder to predict than the effects of blast or fallout, on which their estimates of fatalities are exclusively based, even though, as Eden found, experts including Hal Brode have disputed such conclusions for decades. (A better hypothesis for the tenacious lack of interest is that accounting for fire would reduce the number of USAF warheads and vehicles required to achieve the designated damage levels: which were themselves set high enough to preclude coverage by available Navy submarine-launched missiles.) Yet even in the sixties the firestorms caused by thermonuclear weapons were known to be predictably the largest producers of fatalities in a nuclear war. Given that for almost all strategic nuclear weapons, the damage radius of firestorms would be two to five times the radius destroyed by the blast, a more realistic estimate of the fatalities caused directly by the planned U.S. attacks on the Sino-Soviet bloc, even in 1961, would surely have been double the summary in the graph I held in my hand, for a total death toll of a billion or more: a third of the earth’s population, then three billion. Moreover, what no one would recognize for another twenty-two years were the indirect effects of our planned first strike that gravely threatened the other two thirds of humanity. These effects arose from another neglected consequence of our attacks on cities: smoke. In effect, in ignoring fire the Chiefs and their planners ignored that where there’s fire there’s smoke. But what is dangerous to our survival is not the smoke from ordinary fires, even very large ones—smoke that remained in the lower atmosphere and would soon be rained out—but smoke propelled into the upper atmosphere from the firestorms that our nuclear weapons were sure to create in the cities we targeted. (See chapter 16.) Ferocious updrafts from these multiple firestorms would loft millions of tons of smoke and soot into the stratosphere, where it would not be rained out and would quickly encircle the globe, forming a blanket blocking most sunlight around the earth for a decade or more. This would reduce sunlight and lower temperatures72 worldwide to a point that would eliminate all harvests and starve to death—not all but nearly all—humans (and other animals that depend on vegetation for food). The population of the southern hemisphere—spared nearly all direct effects from nuclear explosions, even from fallout—would be nearly annihilated, as would that of Eurasia (which the Joint Chiefs already foresaw, from direct effects), Africa, and North America. In a sense the Chiefs

This month saw the launch of Foodlogica, which aims to contribute to the localised food system by providing affordable zero-emissions transport and less traffic congestion. This urban delivery service uses solar-powered electric tricycles for the final link in the food distribution system, as well as aiming to shorten the chain between local food producers and sellers.

day, the trigger was an older woman with deep wrinkles. To this day, I cannot be certain about what caused her to react so strongly. Perhaps she had used up her patience simmering in the sun for hours at the back of the line. Perhaps she had some desperately hungry grandchildren who she needed to get back to. It is impossible to know exactly what happened. But after she received her allocation of wheat, she broke the established rules of the feeding site and moved toward Bubba. She looked up at him and unleashed a verbal attack. Bubba, as gentle as ever, simply smiled at her. The more he smiled, the angrier she got. I noticed the commotion when our Somali guards suddenly tensed and turned toward the disturbance. All I could see was Bubba, head and shoulders above a gathering crowd, seemingly unperturbed, and smiling down at someone. His patient response only fueled the woman’s rage. I heard her sound of fury long before I spotted the source when she launched a long stream of vile curses at Bubba. Thankfully, he didn’t understand a word that she was saying. It was now possible to understand her complaint. She was upset about the quality of the “animal feed” that was being distributed for human consumption. She was probably right in her assessment of the food. These were surplus agricultural products that United Nations contributing members didn’t want, couldn’t sell, and had no other use for. As this hulking American continued to smile, the woman realized that she was not communicating. Now, furious and frustrated, she bent down, set her plastic bag on the ground, grabbed two fistfuls of dirty, broken wheat, grain dust, dirt and chaff. She straightened to her full height and flung the filthy mixture as hard as she could into Bubba’s face. The crowd was deathly silent as I heard a series of loud metallic clicks that indicated that an entire squad of American soldiers had instinctively locked and loaded all weapons in readiness for whatever might happen next. Everything felt frozen in time as everyone waited and watched for Bubba’s reaction. A Somali man might have beaten the woman for such a public insult—and he would have considered his action and his anger entirely justified. I knew that Bubba had traveled half-way around the world at his own expense to spend three months of personal vacation time to help hurting people. And this was the thanks that he received? He was hot, sweaty, and drained beyond exhaustion—and he had just been publicly embarrassed. He had every reason to be absolutely livid. Instead, he raised one hand to rub the grit out of his eyes, and then he gave the woman one more big smile. At that point, he began to sing. And what he sang wasn’t just any song. She didn’t understand the words, of course. But she, and the entire crowd, stood in silent amazement as Bubba belted out the words to the 1950’s Elvis Presley rock-n-roll classic: You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog Cryin’ all the time You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog Cryin’ all the time Well, you ain’t never caught a rabbit And you ain’t no friend of mine. By the time he started singing the next verse, the old woman had turned and stomped off in frustration, angrily plowing a path through the now-smiling crowd of Somalis to make her escape. Watching her go, Bubba raised his voice to send her off with rousing rendition of the final verse: Well they said you was high-classed Well, that was just a lie Ya know they said you was high-classed Well, that was just a lie Well, you ain’t never caught a rabbit And you ain’t no friend of mine.

There is no logical reason to think that a tire company should be a food critic, but a hundred years ago, Michelin tires started reviewing rural restaurants to encourage people living in the cities to drive farther and wear their tires out more quickly. Guinness created the Guinness Book of World Records to reinforce its brand and give people something to talk about in the pubs. Similarly, I predict that one day a brand like Nike could put out its own sports programming and compete successfully against ESPN, or Amtrak could launch a publication that could stand up to Travel + Leisure.

The British public first fell in love with Jamie Oliver’s authentic, down-to-earth personality in the late ‘90s when he was featured in a documentary on the River Café. Jamie became a household name because of his energetic and infectious way of inspiring people to believe that anyone can cook and eat well. In his TV shows and cookery books and on his website, he made the concept of cooking good food practical and accessible to anyone. When Jamie Oliver opened a new restaurant in Perth, it naturally caused a bit of a buzz. High-profile personalities and big brands create an air of expectation. Brands like Jamie Oliver are talked about not just because of their fame and instant recognition, but because they have meaning attached to them. And people associate Jamie with simplicity, inclusiveness, energy, and creativity. If you’re one of the first people to have the experience of eating at the new Jamie’s Italian, then you’ve instantly got a story that you can share with your friends. The stories we tell to others (and to ourselves) are the reason that people were prepared to queue halfway down the street when Jamie’s Italian opened the doors to its Perth restaurant in March of 2013. As with pre-iPhone launch lines at the Apple store, the reaction of customers frames the scarcity of the experience. When you know there’s a three-month wait for a dinner booking (there is, although 50% of the restaurant is reserved for walk-ins), it feels like a win to be one of the few to have a booking. The reaction of other people makes the story better in the eyes of prospective diners. The hype and the scarcity just heighten the anticipation of the experience. People don’t go just for the food; they go for the story they can tell. Jamie told the UK press that 30,000 napkins are stolen from branches of his restaurant every month. Customers were also stealing expensive toilet flush handles until Jamie had them welded on. The loss of the linen and toilet fittings might impact Jamie’s profits, but it also helps to create the myth of the brand. QUESTIONS FOR YOU How would you like customers to react to your brand?

Thinking back, it wasn’t an easy step for Dabur India, an Ayurvedic company with almost no equity in foods, to embark on a bold and ambitious journey and launch what would later become the dominant brand of juices in the Indian market.

But how do you come ‘offline’ when so much of our daily lives is moving ‘online’? Every month new sites and online services are launched. If you need to check anything – about a new school for your children, medical treatment, tourist destination or recipe – you go online. Bill Gates put it so well when he called the Internet the ‘town square for the global village of tomorrow’. Could you spend a week or even a day without reading your emails, using social media or going online? Someone recently joked with me that having Internet access is more important than having food or water.

Virgin Food Orgy A rich friend of mine, Richard Branson, sent me an invitation to his book launch party. The invite read, 'Come to our Virgin Food Orgy. Treat yourself to our $100,000 buffet of exotic and erotic treats.' I came to the party, stuffed $1000 of caviar into a dozen condoms and swallowed them like a Colombian drug mule. Great fucking party!

Personal development • Fitness • Food • Budgeting or personal finance • Fashion/Beauty • Lifestyle – Home decor – Organization – Travel – Outdoor/Survival

The positive feelings take a variety of forms: the affair, the addiction, the attachment to promotions, awards, or positive results, the next acquisition, the next big product launch, accolades from others. Food, sex, drugs, . . . a new Ferrari. It’s all an attempt to soothe the soul. The problem is that painkillers do not really cure the disease. They just ease the pain, temporarily and superficially making one feel better.

John Deco became the basis of our marketing campaign. We decided to throw John Deco a homecoming party as our launch event. We invited a lot of brokers for food and drinks, and gave out fancy gifts from Tiffany & Co. and Hermès, making sure everyone knew that both of those stores were located right in the area. See what a great neighborhood this is!? Now people were talking about the building. Suddenly, instead of calling the building 99 John, brokers started referring to it as “the John Deco building.” It was no longer just a bunch of units being converted into condos—now everyone knew about the building’s rich history because we had created a story to showcase it to potential buyers. We got our first three offers the next day.

The rest of the world, meanwhile, was watching everything in real-time. Information didn't spread from one place to another. It was put online, and then it was everywhere. One day, a rumor spread that grocery store up the street might close. The next evening, when Tom drove by, he found the building completely empty. Every ounce of food had been taken, and every window had been smashed. And he realized the feedback loop was complete. It no longer mattered what the truth was. It only mattered what people thought it was. The media fought disinformation the only way it knew how: with ideology. When the president launched a plan to suspend habeas corpus and began requisitioning private property, the media began its push to pass it. When that failed, academics and psychologists took to the airwaves to explain how, under duress, people become overcome by cognitive bias and bigotry. Studies emerged noting the correlation between obsession over keeping one's property and authoritarian political thought. When the government began confiscating weapons, other studies appeared showing the scientific link between private gun ownership and racist fear of minorities. Then a report came out that federal employees has been seizing food from packaging centers in New York and Pennsylvania. They were shipping it out of starving communities. Everyone realized something then. Despite its claims otherwise, their government wasn't saving them. It was competing with them.

Schlitz Sunshine Vitamin D Beer was launched in 1936 with the tagline “Beer is good for you . . . but SCHLITZ, with Sunshine Vitamin D, is extra good for you.

We are so enamoured of our high intelligence that we assume that when it comes to cerebral power, more must be better. But if that were the case, the feline family would also have produced cats who could do calculus, and frogs would by now have launched their own space programme. Why are giant brains so rare in the animal kingdom? The fact is that a jumbo brain is a jumbo drain on the body. It’s not easy to carry around, especially when encased inside a massive skull. It’s even harder to fuel. In Homo sapiens, the brain accounts for about 2–3 per cent of total body weight, but it consumes 25 per cent of the body’s energy when the body is at rest. By comparison, the brains of other apes require only 8 per cent of rest-time energy. Archaic humans paid for their large brains in two ways. Firstly, they spent more time in search of food. Secondly, their muscles atrophied. Like a government diverting money from defence to education, humans diverted energy from biceps to neurons. It’s hardly a foregone conclusion that this is a good strategy for survival on the savannah. A chimpanzee can’t win an argument with a Homo sapiens, but the ape can rip the man apart like a rag doll. Today

Brand Category Year of launch Schweppes Soft drinks 1783 Cadbury Chocolate 1831 Budweiser Beer 1876 Coca-Cola Soft drinks 1886 Heineken Beer 1886 Kodak Photo 1888 Lipton Tea 1890 Wrigley Chewing gum 1892 Colgate Toothpaste 1896 Campbell’s Soup 1898 Marlboro Tobacco 1902 Pepsi Soft drinks 1903 Gillette Shaving products 1908 Camel Tobacco 1913 Danone Yogurt 1919 Kellogg’s Cereal 1922 Duracell Batteries 1930 Nescafé Coffee 1938 Fanta Soft drinks 1940 Tropicana Juices 1952 Friskies Pet food 1956 Pampers Nappies (diapers) 1961 Sprite Soft drinks 1961 Huggies Nappies (diapers) 1978 Red Bull Energy drink 1987

First consider the human systems and mission objectives when planning human space exploration. Understand what the mission is trying to accomplish and the duration. Design from the inside-out! Select the suits, cockpit/seats, EVA equipment and rovers, airlock, crew survival equipment, ECLSS, non-toxic fluids/gases/materials, crew quarters/hygiene systems, exercise equipment, water/air/waste recycling, quantity of food/water/oxygen, radiation protection, power source; then back out the spacecraft and launch vehicle that fit the items with +15% mass margin +10% volume margin. Dominant minds have prevailed in past space exploration architectures where a launch vehicle and spacecraft were proudly chosen prematurely, then when reality sets in; the same minds complain too much mass, too little volume, too high cost, and too long a schedule exist to fit their vehicles!

Almost two hundred years ago, during the War of 2062, back when the world was inhabited exclusively by humans, a war between North American Countries and Middle Eastern countries arose.  It began over religious reasons, though I have no idea what the word religious even means just that whatever was inherent in their opposing beliefs led to the Middle Eastern people creating powerful weapons that no one had ever seen or heard of at the time.  Biological weapons they were called, and they were unleashed on North America.  The name of the weapon was evictium.  It warped the mind as well as the body and drove everyone mad.  The North Americans retaliated by launching nuclear weapons, which destroyed the rest of the world.  The only survivors were those who had something called money.  Back then, money was equated to power and value.  The more one had, the more value he held in society and the more power he had.  Those who had money were able to flee to large underground shelters that had been built.  Hundreds of underground shelters existed around North America that held hundreds of people with enough supplies to last twenty years.  When the supplies ran out, those who lived below ground feared that radiation, an after effect of the nuclear blast that made living things ill and caused death over time, would affect them and had affected any source of food above ground.  They soon learned radiation was the least of their concerns.  What waited for them at the surface was far, far worse.  Those who’d been exposed to evictium survived the nuclear blast.  However, the radiation that remained in the atmosphere and contaminated the food supply reacted with the evictium.  It created monstrous, demented beings, bloodthirsty and filled with rage.  When the inhabitants of the underground shelters returned to the world above, they were met by what we now know as Urthmen.  The Urthmen slaughtered them.  Very few managed to escape.  They fled to the forest and hid deep within it.  They were our ancestors.  Almost two hundred years later, the offspring of those warped creatures that waited at the surface are the ones that rule the Urth today.  They’ve evolved, however.  They’re no longer as demented and wild as their predecessors.  But they are far from civilized, and they no longer retain a shred of humanity.  They hate us in a way that is as much as part of them as breathing.  It’s instinctive.  And these creatures rule the only inhabitable section of the planet we know of: North America.

develop strategies for bundling products or partnering with companies in other industries. For example, when I was a child, my mom gave me cheese and crackers as a snack. This involved her cutting up the cheese and putting it in some type of container with some crackers. Someone at a food company noticed children—the customer— eating the company’s cheese with crackers. So the company launched an entire line of prepackaged, single-serving snack kits with cheese and crackers in a disposable container. This product has sold well because many moms buy it instead of a big block of cheese, which they have to cut into small pieces.

Between 1978 and 1983, the entire basis of the agricultural economy was changed by the adoption of the “household responsibility system.” The origins of this shift lay in a village in Anhui province, where a group of farmers got together in secret and signed an agreement to dissolve their collective and divide up their farmland into individual plots. This innovation rapidly spread, and the province’s party secretary, Wan Li, realized he was facing a powerful popular revolt against an immiserating system. Rather than crush it, he decided to promote this land-to-the-tiller reform. The party secretary of Sichuan province, Zhao Ziyang, made a similar decision. At the national level, the December 1978 party plenum that launched the reform era raised agricultural prices and gave a blessing to rural collectives experimenting with different ways of management, but it still condemned private farming. By 1980, however, Zhao Ziyang had become premier and Wan Li was vice premier in charge of agriculture policy. Together they rammed through a national policy to disband the communes and return to family farming. By the end of 1982 virtually all agricultural collectives were gone, and family farmers had been assigned rights to cultivate individual plots of land. The effect on agricultural output and farm incomes was spectacular. By 1984 grain output was over 400 million tons, a third higher than it had been just six years before; production of oilseeds and cotton sustained annual growth rates of 15 percent; and meat production was growing by 10 percent a year. Rural per capita income more than doubled between 1979 and 1984. Per capita cash savings by rural families rose from essentially zero in 1979 to 300 renminbi (Rmb) by 1989. Rapid gains in agricultural output and incomes continued throughout the 1980s, as farmers continued to diversify their crops and apply new technologies that increased yields. Use of chemical fertilizer, which had risen gradually in the 1970s, tripled between 1978 and 1990. So did the use of farm machinery, notably pumps, small tractors, and food processing equipment.3

The burgeoning government sales not only provided profits for the chip makers but also conferred respectability. “From a marketing standpoint, Apollo and the Minuteman were ideal customers,” Kilby said. “When they decided that they could use these solid circuits, that had quite an impact on a lot of people who bought electronic equipment. Both of those projects were recognized as outstanding engineering operations, and if the integrated circuit was good enough for them, well, that meant it was good enough for a lot of other people.” One of the major pastimes among professional economists is an apparently endless debate as to whether military-funded research helps or hurts the civilian economy. As a general matter, there seem to be enough arguments on both sides to keep the debaters fruitfully occupied for years to come. In the specific case of the integrated circuit, however, there is no doubt that the Pentagon’s money produced real benefits for the civilian electronics business—and for civilian consumers. Unlike armored personnel carriers or nuclear cannon or zero-gravity food tubes, the electronic logic gates, radios, etc., that space and military programs use are fairly easily converted to earthbound civilian applications. The first chip sold for the commercial market—used in a Zenith hearing aid that went on sale in 1964—was the same integrated amplifier circuit used in the IMP satellite.

If a networked product can begin to win over a series of networks faster than its competition, then it develops an accumulating advantage. These advantages, naturally, manifest as increasing network effects across customer acquisition, engagement, and monetization. Smaller networks might unravel and lose their users, who might switch over. Naturally, it becomes important for every player to figure out how to compete in this type of high-stakes environment. But how does the competitive playbook work in a world with network effects? First, I’ll tell you what it’s not: it’s certainly not a contest to see who can ship more features. In fact, sometimes the products seem roughly the same—just think about food-delivery or messaging apps—and if not, they often become undifferentiated since the features are relatively easy to copy. Instead, it’s often the dynamics of the underlying network that make all the difference. Although the apps for DoorDash and Uber Eats look similar, the former’s focus on high-value, low-competition areas like suburbs and college towns made all the difference—today, DoorDash’s market share is 2x that of Uber Eats. Facebook built highly dense and engaged networks starting with college campuses versus Google+’s scattered launch that built weak, disconnected networks. Rarely in network-effects-driven categories does a product win based on features—instead, it’s a combination of harnessing network effects and building a product experience that reinforces those advantages. It’s also not about whose network is bigger, a counterpoint to jargon like “first mover advantage.” In reality, you see examples of startups disrupting the big guys all the time. There’s been a slew of players who have “unbundled” parts of Craigslist, cherry-picking the best subcategories and making them apps unto themselves. Airbnb, Zillow, Thumbtack, Indeed, and many others fall into this category. Facebook won in a world where MySpace was already huge. And more recently, collaboration tools like Notion and Zoom are succeeding in a world where Google Suite, WebEx, and Skype already have significant traction. Instead, the quality of the networks matters a lot—which makes it important for new entrants to figure out which networks to cherry-pick to get started, which I’ll discuss in its own chapter.

What happened in 1970 in Los Angeles was the worst economic episode I’ve ever had to fight through. Unlike the post–Cold War Recession, we did not have the waves of in-migration from Mexico, nor were drug sales as great. I believe the underground economy was a silent savior of Los Angeles during 1990–94. The Kent State Massacre and the Pentagon Papers scandal didn’t help the 1970 scene. Furthermore, things didn’t get better in the early 1970s. The sharp recession of 1970 was followed by a sudden inflation caused by Vietnam spending. Nixon “slammed the gold window shut.” From 1945 to 1971, the U.S., under the Bretton Woods Agreement, had agreed to back its currency to a limited extent with gold at $35 per ounce. Other nations’ central banks were withdrawing our gold so fast that Nixon had to renege on the promise. This was followed in 1973 by the end of fixed currency exchange rates. The dollar plummeted. Traveling to the wine country of France in the summer of 1973, I was unable to cash American Express dollar-denominated traveler’s checks. Inflation jumped with the 1973 Energy Crisis. Nixon imposed wage and price controls. Then Watergate, accompanied by the Dow Jones hitting bottom in 1974. Three Initiatives to Turn the Tide Against all this, Trader Joe’s mounted three initiatives. In chronological order: We launched the Fearless Flyer early in 1970. We broke the price of imported wines in late 1970 thanks to a loophole in the Fair Trade law. Most importantly, in 1971, we married the health food store to the Good Time Charley party store, which had been the 1967–70 version of Trader Joe’s. Together these three elements comprised the second version of Trader Joe’s, Whole Earth Harry.

The Fearless Flyer began life in 1969 during the Good Time Charley phase of Trader Joe’s as the Insider’s Wine Report, a sheet of gossip of “inside” information on the wine industry at a time where there weren’t any such gossip sheets, for the excellent reason that few people were interested in wine. As of the writing of this book, 11 percent of Americans drink 88 percent of the wine according to contemporary wine gossip magazine the Wine Spectator. In the Insider’s Wine Report we gave the results of the wine tastings that we were holding with increasing frequency, as we tried to gain product knowledge. This growing knowledge impressed me with how little we knew about food, so in 1969, we launched a parallel series of blind tastings of branded foods: mayonnaise, canned tuna, hot dogs, peanut butter, and so on. The plan was to select the winner, and sell it “at the lowest shelf price in town.” To report these results, I designed the Insider’s Food Report, which began publication in 1970. It deliberately copied the physical layout of Consumer Reports: the 8.5” x 11” size, the width of columns, and the typeface (later changed). Other elements of design are owed to David Ogilvy’s Confessions of an Advertising Man. The numbered paragraphs, the boxes drawn around the articles, are all Ogilvy’s ideas. I still think his books are the best on advertising that I’ve ever read and I recommend them. Another inspiration was Clay Felker, then editor of New York magazine, the best-edited publication of that era. New York’s motto was, “If you live in New York, you need all the help you can get!” The Insider’s Food Report borrowed this, as “The American housewife needs all the help she can get!” And in the background was the Cassandra-like presence of Ralph Nader, then at the peak of his influence. I felt, however, that all the consumer magazines, never mind Mr. Nader, were too paranoid, too humorless. To leaven the loaf, I inserted cartoons. The purpose of the cartoons was to counterpoint the rather serious, expository text; and, increasingly, to mock Trader Joe’s pretensions as an authority on anything.

The goal of flavor creation is to reach the seven-year-old inside the forty-seven-year-old," Brian explains of their instant connection with customers. While other ice cream start-ups in the city- and there have been plenty launches since Ample Hills, including Oddfellows (2013), Morgenstern's (2014), and Ice & Vice (2015), to name a few- have found their success in offbeat flavors like avocado, extra virgin olive oil, red bean, and chorizo caramel, they aren't made in the same spirit of evoking the fun and play of childhood that Brian finds essential. It's a different brand of creativity. Even though it inevitably meant waiting in a long line, I loved being the one to go to Ample Hills to pick up a pint because it also meant sampling the flavors. Each one is sweet and creamy, über-rich, and totally original. They're loaded with so many ingredients you never tire of taste testing them. There's Ooey Gooey Butter Cake, a full-flavor vanilla that's studded with chunks of rich, dense Saint Louis-style cake; The Munchies, a salty-sweet pretzel-infused ice cream chock-full of Ritz crackers, potato chips, M&M's, and more pretzels; Nonna D's Oatmeal Lace is brown-sugar-and-cinnamon ice cream chunked with homemade oatmeal cookies; and their signature flavor, Salted Crack Caramel, which involves caramelizing large amounts of sugar on the stove top until it's nearly burnt, giving it a bitterness that distinguishes their version from all the other salted caramels out there.

Prabhakar’s reputation was reinforced by the next idea he launched—food sold by weight.

Zego is a London based insurtech start-up that provides flexible motor, personal and commercial insurance. The company sells policies ranging in length from an hour to a year. Customers purchase these online, via phone and through Zego’s app. Zego was founded by former Deliveroo employees Sten Saar and Harry Franks, alongside Stuart Kelly, former Head of Engineering at Hubble. The company originally began operating in the motor insurance market, selling policies by the hour to part-time fast food delivery drivers. In 2020 Zego started to offer private hire insurance policies. Since 2016, the company has expanded into other areas of insurance, including public liability insurance for self-employed professionals and employers’ liability cover for businesses. In September 2018, Zego launched overseas, making flexible motor insurance products available to delivery drivers in Ireland. In December 2018, Zego began offering motor insurance policies in Spain.

Entrepreneurs launched websites for selling pet food over the Net, or built giant warehouses for delivering groceries by van, before there was any inkling customers wanted to shop this way. And it turns out they didn’t. No one wanted to get their groceries delivered from Webvan’s automated warehouses. The Internet bubble burst, taking with it businesses that had developed solutions to problems that didn’t exist.

Taco Bell, which he launched in 1962 in the Los Angeles suburb of Downey.

But in June 2007, I decided instead to launch an experiment, undertaking on a trial basis what is generically known as a vegan, or whole-food plant-based diet. My program wasn’t devoid of just all animal products, but most processed foods as well. In the ten years since, I’ve tweaked and revised the regimen to maximize my athletic performance, stave off the onset of illness and disease, and ensure optimum long-term wellness for myself and my family. I’ve dubbed the regimen the Plantpower Diet.

There was a corresponding orbit of moods this obligatory food preparation induced in my mother: no-nonsense competence, spunky pride, and seething resentment. From my mother, I learned that you can make your family feel a wonderful sense of protected indulgence by cooking them something with jolly care. I also learned that you can launch a powerful campaign of resistance by mincing garlic like a martyr.

For as long as rogues become leaders, we shall spy. For as long as there are bullies and liars, and madmen in the world we shall spy. For as long as nations compete, and politicians deceive, and tyrants launch conquests, and consumers need resources, and the homeless look for land, and the hungry for food, and the rich for excess, your chosen profession is perfectly secure, I can assure you.

TalkBox made its first mistake a few months into launching. In 2011, most people were still relying on 2G in mainland China. The most popular data package in China was 30 megabytes for about 80 cents. The novice founders, thinking 3G would soon dawn upon the country, decided to opt for voice quality instead of speed. They were wrong; the faster network didn’t roll out fully until 2013, missing their estimate by a year. WeChat chose the reverse and soon started picking up momentum. A TalkBox message for one minute used up more than a tenth of one megabyte every time. With only thirty megabytes in their data packages, many users were reluctant to send voice messages using TalkBox. WeChat, on the other hand, only required a fifteenth of TalkBox’s. Herein lies an important lesson that wizened startup founders the world over swear by. Timing is everything – come up with an idea too late and you miss the wave, yet roll out something too early and people will deem your product useless. The same happened with food-delivery and restaurant group discounts during the desktop era. They never took off.

There are beings in the spiritual realms for whom anxiety and fear emanating from human beings offer welcome food. When humans have no anxiety and fear, then these creatures starve. People not yet sufficiently convinced of this statement could understand it to be meant comparatively only. But for those who are familiar with this phenomenon, it is a reality. If fear and anxiety radiate from people and they break out in panic, then these creatures find welcome nutrition and they become more and more powerful. These beings are hostile towards humanity. Everything that feeds on negative feelings, on anxiety, fear and superstition, despair or doubt, are in reality hostile forces in supersensible worlds, launching cruel attacks on human beings, while they are being fed. Therefore, it is above all necessary to begin with that the person who enters the spiritual world overcome fear, feelings of helplessness, despair and anxiety. But these are exactly the feelings that belong to contemporary culture and materialism; because it estranges people from the spiritual world, it is especially suited to evoke hopelessness and fear of the unknown in people, thereby calling up the above mentioned hostile forces against them.

Eventually I’ll launch my canoe out my window, when the flood gets up to 17, and make my way to my mother and father, taking no food, in order to get to them sooner—to return, to them, the last breath that each gave me out of their mouth—to return to them the alphabet they had entrusted to me.

To recover an intuitive sense of what will be in season throughout the year, picture a season of foods unfolding as if from one single plant. Take a minute to study this creation—an imaginary plant that bears over the course of one growing season a cornucopia of all the different vegetable products we can harvest. We’ll call it a vegetannual. Picture its life passing before your eyes like a time-lapse film: first, in the cool early spring, shoots poke up out of the ground. Small leaves appear, then bigger leaves. As the plant grows up into the sunshine and the days grow longer, flower buds will appear, followed by small green fruits. Under midsummer’s warm sun, the fruits grow larger, riper, and more colorful. As days shorten into the autumn, these mature into hard-shelled fruits with appreciable seeds inside. Finally, as the days grow cool, the vegetannual may hoard the sugars its leaves have made, pulling them down into a storage unit of some kind: a tuber, bulb, or root. So goes the year. First the leaves: spinach, kale, lettuce, and chard (here, that’s April and May). Then more mature heads of leaves and flower heads cabbage, romaine, broccoli, and cauliflower (May–June). Then tender young fruit-set: snow peas, baby squash, cucumbers (June), followed by green beans, green peppers, and small tomatoes (July). Then more mature, colorfully ripened fruits: beefsteak tomatoes, eggplants, red and yellow peppers (late July–August). Then the large, hard-shelled fruits with developed seeds inside: cantaloupes, honeydews, watermelons, pumpkins, winter squash (August–September). Last come the root crops, and so ends the produce parade. Plainly these don’t all come from the same plant, but each comes from a plant, that’s the point—a plant predestined to begin its life in the spring and die in the fall. (A few, like onions and carrots, are attempting to be biennials, but we’ll ignore that for now.) Each plant part we eat must come in its turn—leaves, buds, flowers, green fruits, ripe fruits, hard fruits—because that is the necessary order of things for an annual plant. For the life of them, they can’t do it differently. Some minor deviations and a bit of overlap are allowed, but in general, picturing an imaginary vegetannual plant is a pretty reliable guide to what will be in season, wherever you live. If you find yourself eating a watermelon in April, you can count back three months and imagine a place warm enough in January for this plant to have launched its destiny.

As unions flagged, business interests sensed an opportunity. Corporate lobbyists made deep inroads in both parties, launching a public relations campaign that blamed labor for the slump and pressured policymakers to roll back worker protections.[16] A national litmus test arrived in 1981, when thirteen thousand unionized air traffic controllers left their posts after contract negotiations with the Federal Aviation Administration broke down. When workers refused to return to work, President Reagan fired all of them. The public’s response was muted, and corporate America learned that it could crush unions with minimal blowback. In 1985, Hormel Foods, of Spam and Dinty Moore beef stew fame, cut worker pay in its Austin, Minnesota, plant from $10.69 to $8.25 an hour and kneecapped the strike that followed by hiring replacements. “If the President of the United States can replace strikers, this must be socially acceptable,” remarked one observer at the time.[17] And so it went, in one industry after another. As global trade expanded and plants shuttered, unions collapsed, and corporate interests made sure they remained weak.

Mate, I’ve only been here for a few weeks, but I don’t think anyone even knows my name. I’ve already slipped three spots down the batting order. I’ve got no idea what the lyrics to the club song are. And every time I get a hit at training, I hear the faint sound of blokes whispering that one word under their breath: “Yuck.” What am I doing wrong?’ I began, nervously. Nuggsy paused, took a long swig of his Reschs schooner, and reclined languidly into his seat. He scratched his bald head for a moment, seemingly in deep thought, before embarking on the long-winded response that would indeed shape my cricketing future. ‘Listen, bud. You’re a grade cricketer now. And it’s time you learned a little bit about what that means. This isn’t club cricket, “Shires” cricket, or that stupid school shit that you wasted your time on for all those years. This is grade cricket: the highest level of amateur cricket in the world,’ he said with pride. Just for those who don’t already know, I should quickly provide a bit of background on the grade cricket competition. Grade cricket (or ‘Premier cricket’, as it is known in some states/territories) is the level directly below the state competition.  Despite this close proximity to the professional arena, it is nonetheless an amateur competition. Sure, one or two first graders might get paid a little bit under the table, but everyone else must pay a registration fee in order to play. Normally, each club has four to five grades — first grade being the strongest; fifth grade the weakest. Those in first grade enjoy a status that the fifth graders can only dream about. Being a first grader is like being a celebrity to 50 blokes whose names you’ll never know — or never even need to know — unless you end up playing with them after a severe run of poor form (or a serious disciplinary breach). The rest of the club — seconds, thirds, and fourth grade — is basically an assortment of talented youngsters and ageing desperates. The common denominator between the young and old brigade is that they were all once told they were ‘good enough to play for Australia’. In many cases, it was the first and last compliment they ever received — and the reason why they’re still playing. In all cases, it was the worst thing that could have ever happened to them. The ultimate grade cricketer, therefore, will possess the perfect balance of good and not good enough that will haunt them for all of their playing days. All this of course, is something that can only be learned with experience. At this early stage in my grade cricket career, I considered these young players to be ‘cool’ and the older players worthy of my respect. Nuggsy tilted his head to one side as he lit up a cigarette. He took a deep drag, holding it in for what seemed like hours, before launching his head back to expel a thick plume of smoke towards the ceiling. ‘Listen, great man,’ he began. ‘Success in grade cricket has nothing to do with skill, ability, or even results. It’s all about the social ladder, bud. You’ve got the big dogs up top, the peasants down the bottom, and everyone in between is just trying to stay relevant,’ he offered. In many ways, grade cricket social hierarchy bears great similarity to the feudal systems that first appeared in the Middle Ages in Europe — something I’d learned a bit about at high school. As I remembered, kings and monarchs sat at the top, enjoying their pick of the land, women and food. They were the ones who established the rules that everyone had to live under. The barons leased their land from the king; the knights leased their land from the barons; and the knights granted the lowly peasants their land.  The peasants were not allowed to marry, nor could they even leave the manor without permission. Basically, they were the fifth graders of the 8-12th Century.

Three billion of the people on the planet – approximately half – are destitute. They live in shocking poverty. There are 10 million children dying of easily preventable causes every year - things like starvation, thirst, cholera. Billions of people lack any form of health care. Billions of people lack access to basics like clean water, adequate food and safe housing. Environmentally, we are raping the planet in hundreds of ways. A mass extinction event is looming on the horizon, yet we appear unmotivated to do anything at all to prevent it. Humans are constantly at war, constantly killing one another somewhere in the world. Crime seems rampant. In the United states, over two million citizens are incarcerated. We have thousands of nuclear warheads, enough to kill all of humanity many times over, all loaded into rockets that we can launch at a moment's notice simply by pushing a few buttons. We have spent trillions of dollars building and stockpiling conventional weapons designed to kill fellow humans in a thousand different ways. We can shoot them, bomb them, grenade them, poison them, burn them, etc. Humans often seem intent on bringing misery to other humans: terrorism, dictatorships, warlords, slavery, torture, unjust imprisonment, sweatshops, corruption, murder, mayhem, crime, etc. can be found all over the planet. The concentration of wealth is extreme and seems unstoppable, so a very small percentage of the planet's population owns half of the planet's wealth, while billions of others have nothing. In many cases and at many different levels we seem unable to control ourselves or to stop ourselves even when we know we are wrong.

That evolution should select for larger brains may seem to us like, well, a no-brainer. We are so enamoured of our high intelligence that we assume that when it comes to cerebral power, more must be better. But if that were the case, the feline family would also have produced cats who could do calculus, and frogs would by now have launched their own space programme. Why are giant brains so rare in the animal kingdom? The fact is that a jumbo brain is a jumbo drain on the body. It’s not easy to carry around, especially when encased inside a massive skull. It’s even harder to fuel. In Homo sapiens, the brain accounts for about 2–3 per cent of total body weight, but it consumes 25 per cent of the body’s energy when the body is at rest. By comparison, the brains of other apes require only 8 per cent of rest-time energy. Archaic humans paid for their large brains in two ways. Firstly, they spent more time in search of food. Secondly, their muscles atrophied. Like a government diverting money from defence to education, humans diverted energy from biceps to neurons. It’s hardly a foregone conclusion that this is a good strategy for survival on the savannah. A chimpanzee can’t win an argument with a Homo sapiens, but the ape can rip the man apart like a rag doll.

Rahab could swim the waters above and below the firmament. It was all her territory. But her special domain was the Abyss. From there, she could access every body of water that ultimately connected to this underwater abode. Her birth waters were Lake Urimiya, where Elohim created her and held her at bay when he established the heavens and the earth. She was in the Lake again at that moment. She had returned to this sacred ground to give birth to her own spawn. The Nephilim paddled on the surface of the water. They were unaware of the nemesis below, a protective mother sea dragon and her very hungry newborn offspring, Leviathan. Leviathan was every bit the armored sea serpent as its parent. Even so young, it was already about half the size of Rahab. But it had something its progenitor did not: seven heads. Seven dragon heads on seven snakelike necks with seven times the predator’s snapping jaws, and seven times the rows of razor teeth. Leviathan’s strike zone was wide and it was more agile and speedier than Rahab. And it had seven times the fury. The Nephilim were oblivious to the shadowy forms approaching them from the darkness below. They filled the waters with their crafts The lead skiffs were only two thirds of the way across. The first casualties came at the front of the line. A huge explosion of water erupted. Pontoons snapped in two, throwing Nephilim into the water. Yahipan screamed, “RAHAB!!” The Nephilim stopped rowing and looked about the water. The huge serpentine armor broke the surface again, crushing a slew of the flatboats and dragging Nephilim into the depths. The spiny back cut through the water and disappeared. The Rephaim yelled orders. The Nephilim rowed for their lives. But it was an easy feast for the monsters of the deep. Rahab simply opened her mouth and scooped up dozens of Nephilim like so many minnows. Leviathan came next, with the seven dragon heads snapping up Nephilim faster than they could get out of the way. Leviathan might be a newborn and smaller than its mother, but already armor covered it. It was even able to launch small pillars of fire from its nostrils. Its youth and speed made up for its size as it darted and dodged around, all of its heads coordinated in a bloodbath of feeding. Inanna wondered where all that food went. Some Nephilim tried to fight back But it was futile and the smart ones made for the shoreline. They hoped they might get lucky and be overlooked by their serpentine predators. That was only the beginning. The sorry paddlers were no match for the worst of all Elohim’s creatures. Another creature came up from the depths. Its body could not be seen, only tentacles bursting from the water and crushing demigods in its grip. Yahipan and Thamaq were in the middle of the mayhem and counted eight of these snakelike appendages grabbing hapless soldiers.

boots right off his feet. There were stories of men sucked down into the muck never to be seen again. Victor didn’t know if the stories were true, but he did think it possible. The mud was everywhere. In their hair under their helmets, flavoring their food, between their toes in their boots, layering their canteens, permeating their very souls. They couldn’t get away from the mud. They slept in it, fought in it, lived in it. Died in it. Sometimes after a hard downpour a new body part appeared out of the mud. Victor told himself it didn’t matter. Whoever he was, the man was dead, gone from his body to meet his Maker. What was left was just bone, sinew, and skin. And if Victor was ordered over the top and got hit by enemy fire to end up one of those bodies sunk down in the mud, what difference would it make if the soldiers lucky enough to still be breathing used his hand sticking out of the side of the trench to hold something up out of the mud. That’s how they were using Oscar’s. Nobody really knew the dead man’s name or even his nationality, but it only seemed right to name him, to make him part of their company when his hand emerged from the side of the trench. That’s how war was. A man had to survive as best he could. He couldn’t worry about what he’d left back home. He couldn’t worry about how long he was going to live. A man just had to follow orders and give all he had to win the war and save democracy. War wasn’t a thing like Victor had expected or maybe anything like anybody back in the States had expected. Back there, they’d taught them to march. Wasn’t much use for marching in the trenches. It was just hunkering down and hoping a sharpshooter didn’t spot your helmet if you forgot and lifted your head a few inches too high. Or that your gas mask would work when the Germans launched their mustard gas barrages. Or that you wouldn’t get the order to go over the top. Up

When ConAgra Foods launched the new pop-up bowl for their Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Popping Corn line, they used QR to direct shoppers to a short video that gave them more detail on the pop-up, trying to influence their buying decision at the point-of-purchase.

What is it about the Greek character that has allowed this complex culture to thrive for millennia? The Greek Isles are home to an enduring, persevering people with a strong work ethic. Proud, patriotic, devout, and insular, these hardy seafarers are the inheritors of working methods that are centuries old. On any given day, fishermen launch their bots at dawn in search of octopi, cuttlefish, sponges, and other gifts of the ocean. Widows clad in black dresses and veils shop the local produce markets and gather in groups of two and three to share stories. Artisans stich decorative embroidery to adorn traditional costumes. Glassblowers, goldsmiths, and potters continue the work of their ancient ancestors, ultimately displaying their wares in shops along the waterfronts. The Greeks’ dedication to time-honored occupations and hard work is harmoniously complemented by their love of dance, song, food, and games. Some of the earliest works of art from the Greek Isles--including Minoan paintings from the second millennium B.C.E.--depict the central, day-to-day role of dance, and music. Today, life is still lived in common, and the old ways often survive in a deep separation between the worlds of women and men. In the more rural areas, dancing and drinking are--officially at least--reserved for men, as the women watch from windows and doorways before returning to their tasks. At seaside tavernas throughout the Greek Isles, old men sip raki, a popular aniseed-flavored liqueur, while playing cards or backgammon under grape pergolas that in late summer are heavy with ripe fruit. Woven into this love of pleasure, however, are strands of superstition and circumspection. For centuries, Greek artisans have crafted the lovely blue and black glass “eyes” that many wear as amulets to ward off evil spirits. They are given as baby and housewarming gifts, and are thought to bring good luck and protect their wearers from the evil eye. Many Greeks carry loops of wooden or glass beads--so-called “worry beads”--for the same purpose. Elderly women take pride in their ability to tell fortunes from the black grounds left behind in a cup of coffee.

The inside of the tavern was well lit and filled with men and women in plain but sturdy clothes, most covered with some kind of fur, as though everyone worked with animals. They didn’t have the look of farmers. An odd stink rode under the scents of roasted meat and bread, but the food made his stomach grumble loudly. It was all he could do to keep from launching himself onto the nearest plate. Conversation died as everyone stopped what they were doing and turned to look at him. “Ah, hello.” He gathered his courage. This was just like reading poetry, but subtract poems and add people casually placing hunting knives and daggers on their tables. One of the women was filing her fingernails into sharp points, like claws. Just like reading poetry. G regathered his courage and strode to the far end of the room, toward the bar. He had to squeeze in between two burly men with tear-shaped scars on their faces. They all smelled vaguely like wet dog. A young man at the end of the bar leaned forward and smirked at him in a decidedly unpleasant manner. The bartender eyed him. “What do you want?” “I—” G had never needed to admit to not having money before. “I don’t suppose you have any work that needs doing around here?” “Work?” This fellow clearly had not so much brain as ear wax. “I could clean the tables or scrub the floor.” The bartender pointed to a haggard-looking serving wench, who scowled at him. “Nell here does that.” “Or I could peel potatoes. Or carrots. Or onions. Or any root vegetable, really.” G had never peeled anything before, but how hard could it be? “We have someone who does that, too,” the man said. “Why don’t you push off. This isn’t the place for you.” G would have suggested yet more menial tasks he’d never attempted, but at that moment, he put together the hints: the wet-dog smell; the fur on everyone’s clothes; the defensive/protective behavior when he, a stranger, entered. That, and they were eating beef. Cow. Possibly that village’s only cow. All at once, he knew. This was the Pack. “Er, yes, perhaps I should be pushing off, as you suggest—” he started to say. “Rat!” Someone near the door lurched from his chair, making it topple over behind him. “There’s a rat!” It couldn’t be Jane, he thought. He’d told her to stay put. “It’s not a rat, you daft idiot,” cried another. “It’s a squirrel!” “It’s some kind of weasel!” Bollocks. It was his wife. “It’s dinner, that’s what it is.” That was the man directly to G’s right. “And he’s a spy. Asking all those questions about vegetables.” “She’s clearly a ferret!” G yelled as he lunged toward the dear little creature dashing about on the floor. 

The New World Order promotes the welfare class by getting more and more people dependent on the government for things like healthcare, food stamps, housing, etc. etc. In fact a plan launched in the 1960s by a group of political activists , called the Cloward-Piven strategy, openly admitted that they aimed to overload the U.S. welfare system in order to cause a financial crisis which they hoped would usher in a massive socialist system to redistribute America’s wealth and hand out a “guaranteed annual income” to everyone. 126 Liberals overwhelmingly are atheists and particularly anti-Christian. They want the government to be seen as God and to be the ultimate authority and moral compass in society. They believe our rights come from the government, not from God, and since they believe basic liberties are granted by the government (instead of inherent in all humans endowed by our Creator like the Declaration of Independence says in its second sentence ) then they also claim they have the authority to take away those rights. The liberal establishment constantly

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