Losing Friends Over Politics Quotes

Guess what? The Nazis didn't lose the war after all. They won it and flourished. They took over the world and wiped out every last Jew, every last Gypsy, black, East Indian, and American Indian. Then, when they were finished with that, they wiped out the Russians and the Poles and the Bohemians and the Moravians and the Bulgarians and the Serbians and the Croatians--all the Slavs. Then they started in on the Polynesians and the Koreans and the Chinese and the Japanese--all the peoples of Asia. This took a long, long time, but when it was all over, everyone in the world was one hundred percent Aryan, and they were all very, very happy. Naturally the textbooks used in the schools no longer mentioned any race but the Aryan or any language but German or any religion but Hitlerism or any political system but National Socialism. There would have been no point. After a few generations of that, no one could have put anything different into the textbooks even if they'd wanted to, because they didn't know anything different. But one day, two young students were conversing at the University of New Heidelberg in Tokyo. Both were handsome in the usual Aryan way, but one of them looked vaguely worried and unhappy. That was Kurt. His friend said, "What's wrong, Kurt? Why are you always moping around like this?" Kurt said, "I'll tell you, Hans. There is something that's troubling me--and troubling me deeply." His friend asked what it was. "It's this," Kurt said. "I cannot shake the crazy feeling that there is some small thing that we're being lied to about." And that's how the paper ended.' Ishmael nodded thoughtfully. 'And what did your teacher think of that?' 'He wanted to know if I had the same crazy feeling as Kurt. When I said I did, he wanted to know what I thought we were being lied to about. I said, 'How could I know? I'm no better off than Kurt.

My concern with democracy is highly specific. It begins in observing the remarkable fact that, while democracy means a government accountable to the electorate, our rulers now make us accountable to them. Most Western governments hate me smoking, or eating the wrong kind of food, or hunting foxes, or drinking too much, and these are merely the surface disapprovals, the ones that provoke legislation or public campaigns. We also borrow too much money for our personal pleasures, and many of us are very bad parents. Ministers of state have been known to instruct us in elementary matters, such as the importance of reading stories to our children. Again, many of us have unsound views about people of other races, cultures, or religions, and the distribution of our friends does not always correspond, as governments think that it ought, to the cultural diversity of our society. We must face up to the grim fact that the rulers we elect are losing patience with us. No philosopher can contemplate this interesting situation without beginning to reflect on what it can mean. The gap between political realities and their public face is so great that the term “paradox” tends to crop up from sentence to sentence. Our rulers are theoretically “our” representatives, but they are busy turning us into the instruments of the projects they keep dreaming up. The business of governments, one might think, is to supply the framework of law within which we may pursue happiness on our own account. Instead, we are constantly being summoned to reform ourselves. Debt, intemperance, and incompetence in rearing our children are no doubt regrettable, but they are vices, and left alone, they will soon lead to the pain that corrects. Life is a better teacher of virtue than politicians, and most sensible governments in the past left moral faults to the churches. But democratic citizenship in the twenty-first century means receiving a stream of improving “messages” from politicians. Some may forgive these intrusions because they are so well intentioned. Who would defend prejudice, debt, or excessive drinking? The point, however, is that our rulers have no business telling us how to live. They are tiresome enough in their exercise of authority—they are intolerable when they mount the pulpit. Nor should we be in any doubt that nationalizing the moral life is the first step towards totalitarianism. We might perhaps be more tolerant of rulers turning preachers if they were moral giants. But what citizen looks at the government today thinking how wise and virtuous it is? Public respect for politicians has long been declining, even as the population at large has been seduced into demanding political solutions to social problems. To demand help from officials we rather despise argues for a notable lack of logic in the demos. The statesmen of eras past have been replaced by a set of barely competent social workers eager to take over the risks of our everyday life. The electorates of earlier times would have responded to politicians seeking to bribe us with such promises with derision. Today, the demos votes for them.

But where should he begin? - Well, then, the trouble with the English was their: Their: In a word, Gibreel solemnly pronounced, their weather. Gibreel Farishta floating on his cloud formed the opinion that the moral fuzziness of the English was meteorologically induced. 'When the day is not warmer than the night,' he reasoned, 'when the light is not brighter than the dark, when the land is not drier than the sea, then clearly a people will lose the power to make distinctions, and commence to see everything - from political parties to sexual partners to religious beliefs - as much-the-same, nothing-to-choose, give-or-take. What folly! For truth is extreme, it is so and not thus, it is him and not her; a partisan matter, not a spectator sport. It is, in brief, heated. City,' he cried, and his voice rolled over the metropolis like thunder, 'I am going to tropicalize you.' Gibreel enumerated the benefits of the proposed metamorphosis of London into a tropical city: increased moral definition, institution of a national siesta, development of vivid and expansive patterns of behaviour among the populace, higher-quality popular music, new birds in the trees (macaws, peacocks, cockatoos), new trees under the birds (coco-palms, tamarind, banyans with hanging beards). Improved street-life, outrageously coloured flowers (magenta, vermilion, neon-green), spider-monkeys in the oaks. A new mass market for domestic air-conditioning units, ceiling fans, anti-mosquito coils and sprays. A coir and copra industry. Increased appeal of London as a centre for conferences, etc.: better cricketeers; higher emphasis on ball-control among professional footballers, the traditional and soulless English commitment to 'high workrate' having been rendered obsolete by the heat. Religious fervour, political ferment, renewal of interest in the intellegentsia. No more British reserve; hot-water bottles to be banished forever, replaced in the foetid nights by the making of slow and odorous love. Emergence of new social values: friends to commence dropping in on one another without making appointments, closure of old-folks' homes, emphasis on the extended family. Spicier foods; the use of water as well as paper in English toilets; the joy of running fully dressed through the first rains of the monsoon. Disadvantages: cholera, typhoid, legionnaires' disease, cockroaches, dust, noise, a culture of excess. Standing upon the horizon, spreading his arms to fill the sky, Gibreel cried: 'Let it be.

Let’s ask him,” Lincoln Steffens suggested. The two men dashed across to headquarters and burst into Roosevelt’s office. Riis put the question directly. Was he working to be President? The effect, wrote Steffens, “was frightening.” TR leaped to his feet, ran around his desk, and fists clenched, teeth bared, he seemed about to throttle Riis, who cowered away, amazed. “Don’t you dare ask me that,” TR yelled at Riis. “Don’t you put such ideas into my head. No friend of mine would ever say a thing like that, you—you—” Riis’s shocked face or TR’s recollection that he had few friends as devoted as Jake Riis halted him. He backed away, came up again to Riis, and put his arm over his shoulder. Then he beckoned me close and in an awed tone of voice explained. “Never, never, you must never either of you remind a man at work on a political job that he may be President. It almost always kills him politically. He loses his nerve; he can’t do his work; he gives up the very traits that are making him a possibility. I, for instance, I am going to do great things here, hard things that require all the courage, ability, work that I am capable of … But if I get to thinking of what it might lead to—” He stopped, held us off, and looked into our faces with his face screwed up into a knot, as with lowered voice he said slowly: “I must be wanting to be President. Every young man does. But I won’t let myself think of it; I must not, because if I do, I will begin to work for it, I’ll be careful, calculating, cautious in word and act, and so—I’ll beat myself. See?” Again he looked at us as if we were enemies; then he threw us away from him and went back to his desk. “Go on away, now,” he said, “and don’t you ever mention the—don’t you ever mention that to me again.”141

Today the intellectual leaders of the Republican Party are the paranoids, kooks, know-nothings, and bigots who once could be heard only on late-night talk shows, the stations you listened to on long drives because it was hard to fall asleep while laughing. When any political movement loses all sense of self and has no unifying theory of government, it ceases to function as a collective rooted in thought and becomes more like fans of a sports team. Asking the Republican Party today to agree on a definition of conservatism is like asking New York Giants fans to have a consensus opinion on the Law of the Sea Treaty. It’s not just that no one knows anything about the subject; they don’t remotely care. All Republicans want to do is beat the team playing the Giants. They aren’t voters using active intelligence or participants in a civil democracy; they are fans. Their role is to cheer and fund their team and trash-talk whatever team is on the other side. This removes any of the seeming contradiction of having spent years supporting principles like free trade and personal responsibility to suddenly stop and support the opposite. Think of those principles like players on a team. You cheered for them when they were on your team, but then management fired them or traded them to another team, so of course you aren’t for them anymore. If your team suddenly decides to focus on running instead of passing, no fan cares—as long as the team wins. Stripped of any pretense of governing philosophy, a political party will default to being controlled by those who shout the loudest and are unhindered by any semblance of normalcy. It isn’t the quiet fans in the stands who get on television but the lunatics who paint their bodies with the team colors and go shirtless on frigid days. It’s the crazy person who lunges at the ref and jumps over seats to fight the other team’s fans who is cheered by his fellow fans as he is led away on the jumbotron. What is the forum in which the key issues of the day are discussed? Talk radio and the television shows sponsored by the team, like Fox & Friends, Tucker Carlson, and Sean Hannity.

So we had better call upon our lawyers, politicians, philosophers and even poets to turn their attention to this conundrum: how do you regulate the ownership of data? This may well be the most important political question of our era. If we cannot answer this question soon, our sociopolitical system might collapse. People are already sensing the coming cataclysm. Perhaps this is why citizens all over the world are losing faith in the liberal story, which just a decade ago seemed irresistible. How, then, do we go forward from here, and how do we cope with the immense challenges of the biotech and infotech revolutions? Perhaps the very same scientists and entrepreneurs who disrupted the world in the first place could engineer some technological solution? For example, might networked algorithms form the scaffolding for a global human community that could collectively own all the data and oversee the future development of life? As global inequality rises and social tensions increase around the world, perhaps Mark Zuckerberg could call upon his 2 billion friends to join forces and do something together?

About a block away from them there lived another Lithuanian family, consisting of an elderly widow and one grown son; their name was Majauszkis, and our friends struck up an acquaintance with them before long. One evening they came over for a visit, and naturally the first subject upon which the conversation turned was the neighborhood and its history; and then Grandmother Majauszkiene, as the old lady was called, proceeded to recite to them a string of horrors that fairly froze their blood. She was a wrinkled-up and wizened personage--she must have been eighty--and as she mumbled the grim story through her toothless gums, she seemed a very old witch to them. Grandmother Majauszkiene had lived in the midst of misfortune so long that it had come to be her element, and she talked about starvation, sickness, and death as other people might about weddings and holidays. The thing came gradually. In the first place as to the house they had bought, it was not new at all, as they had supposed; it was about fifteen years old, and there was nothing new upon it but the paint, which was so bad that it needed to be put on new every year or two. The house was one of a whole row that was built by a company which existed to make money by swindling poor people. The family had paid fifteen hundred dollars for it, and it had not cost the builders five hundred, when it was new. Grandmother Majauszkiene knew that because her son belonged to a political organization with a contractor who put up exactly such houses. They used the very flimsiest and cheapest material; they built the houses a dozen at a time, and they cared about nothing at all except the outside shine. The family could take her word as to the trouble they would have, for she had been through it all--she and her son had bought their house in exactly the same way. They had fooled the company, however, for her son was a skilled man, who made as high as a hundred dollars a month, and as he had had sense enough not to marry, they had been able to pay for the house. Grandmother Majauszkiene saw that her friends were puzzled at this remark; they did not quite see how paying for the house was "fooling the company." Evidently they were very inexperienced. Cheap as the houses were, they were sold with the idea that the people who bought them would not be able to pay for them. When they failed--if it were only by a single month--they would lose the house and all that they had paid on it, and then the company would sell it over again. And did they often get a chance to do that? Dieve! (Grandmother Majauszkiene raised her hands.) They did it--how often no one could say, but certainly more than half of the time. They might ask any one who knew anything at all about Packingtown as to that; she had been living here ever since this house was built, and she could tell them all about it. And had it ever been sold before? Susimilkie! Why, since it had been built, no less than four families that their informant could name had tried to buy it and failed.

Buster Friendly said, “We may never know. Nor can we fathom the peculiar purpose behind this swindle. Yes, folks, swindle. Mercerism is a swindle!” “I think we know,” Roy Baty said. “It’s obvious. Mercerism came into existence—” “But ponder this,” Buster Friendly continued. “Ask yourselves what is it that Mercerism does. Well, if we’re to believe its many practitioners, the experience fuses—” “It’s that empathy that humans have,” Irmgard said. “—men and women throughout the Sol System into a single entity. But an entity which is manageable by the so-called telepathic voice of ‘Mercer.’ Mark that. An ambitious politically minded would-be Hitler could—” “No, it’s that empathy,” Irmgard said vigorously. Fists clenched, she roved into the kitchen, up to Isidore. “Isn’t it a way of proving that humans can do something we can’t do? Because without the Mercer experience we just have your word that you feel this empathy business, this shared, group thing. How’s the spider?” She bent over Pris’s shoulder. With the scissors, Pris snipped off another of the spider’s legs. “Four now,” she said. She nudged the spider. “He won’t go. But he can.” Roy Baty appeared at the doorway, inhaling deeply, an expression of accomplishment on his face. “It’s done. Buster said it out loud, and nearly every human in the system heard him say it. ‘Mercerism is a swindle.’ The whole experience of empathy is a swindle.” He came over to look curiously at the spider. “It won’t try to walk,” Irmgard said. “I can make it walk.” Roy Baty got out a book of matches, lit a match; he held it near the spider, closer and closer, until at last it crept feebly away. “I was right,” Irmgard said. “Didn’t I say it could walk with only four legs?” She peered up expectantly at Isidore. “What’s the matter?” Touching his arm she said, “You didn’t lose anything; we’ll pay you what that—what’s it called?—that Sidney’s catalogue says. Don’t look so grim. Isn’t that something about Mercer, what they discovered? All that research? Hey, answer.” She prodded him anxiously. “He’s upset,” Pris said. “Because he has an empathy box. In the other room. Do you use it, J. R.?” she asked Isidore. Roy Baty said, “Of course he uses it. They all do—or did. Maybe now they’ll start wondering.” “I don’t think this will end the cult of Mercer,” Pris said. “But right this minute there’re a lot of unhappy human beings.” To Isidore she said, “We’ve waited for months; we all knew it was coming, this pitch of Buster’s.” She hesitated and then said, “Well, why not. Buster is one of us.” “An android,” Irmgard explained. “And nobody knows. No humans, I mean.” Pris, with the scissors, cut yet another leg from the spider. All at once John Isidore pushed her away and lifted up the mutilated creature. He carried it to the sink and there he drowned it. In him, his mind, his hopes, drowned, too. As swiftly as the spider.

IN JANUARY 1959 Police Chief Herbert Jenkins found a poem tacked to a bulletin board at his departmental headquarters. Tellingly, the anonymous author had titled it “The Plan of Improvement,” in sarcastic tribute to Mayor Hartsfield’s 1952 program for the city’s expansion and economic progress. The poem looked back over a decade of racial change and spoke volumes about the rising tide of white resentment. It began with a brief review of the origins of residential transition and quickly linked the desegregation of working-class neighborhoods to the desegregation of the public spaces surrounding them: Look my children and you shall see, The Plan of Improvement by William B. On a great civic venture we’re about to embark And we’ll start this one off at old Mozeley Park. White folks won’t mind losing homes they hold dear; (If it doesn’t take place on an election year) Before they have time to get over the shock, We’ll have that whole section—every square block. I’ll try something different for plan number two This time the city’s golf courses will do. They’ll mix in the Club House and then on the green I might get a write up in Life Magazine. And now comes the schools for plan number three To mix them in classrooms just fills me with glee; For I have a Grandson who someday I pray Will thank me for sending this culture his way. And for my finale, to do it up right, The buses, theatres and night spots so bright; Pools and restaurants will be mixed up at last And my Plan of Improvement will be going full blast. The sarcasm in the poem is unmistakable, of course, but so are the ways in which the author—either a policeman himself or a friend of one—clearly linked the city’s pursuit of “progress” with a litany of white losses. In the mind of the author, and countless other white Atlantans like him, the politics of progress was a zero-sum game in which every advance for civil rights meant an equal loss for whites.

He took a step closer to me, the laughter still dancing on his face. 'Feeling better today?' I mumbled some noncommittal response. 'Good,' he said, either ignoring or hiding his amusement. 'But just in case, I wanted to give you this,' he added, pulling some papers from his tunic and extending them to me. I bit the inside of my cheek as I stared down at the three pieces of paper. It was a series of five-lined... poems. There were five of them altogether, and I began sweating at words I didn't recognise. It would take me an entire day just to figure out what these words meant. 'Before you bolt or start yelling...' he said, coming around to peer over my shoulder. If I'd dared, I could have leaned back into his chest. His breath warmed my neck, the shell of my ear. He cleared his throat and read the first poem. There once was a lady most beautiful Spirited, if a little unusual Her friends were few But how the men did queue But to all she gave a refusal. My brows rose so high I thought they'd touch my hairline, and I turned, blinking at him, our breath mingling as he finished the poem with a smile. Without waiting for my response, Tamlin took the papers and stepped a pace away to read the second poem, which wasn't nearly as polite as the first. By the time he read the third poem, my face was burning. Tamlin paused before he read the fourth, then handed me back the papers. 'Final word in the second and fourth line of each poem,' he said, jerking his chin toward the papers in my hands. Unusual. Queue. I looked at the second poem. Slaying. Conflagration. 'These are-' I stared. 'Your list of words was too interesting to pass up. And not good for love poems at all.' When I lifted my brow in silent inquiry, he said, 'We had contests to see who could write the dirtiest limericks while I was living with my father's war-band by the border. I don't particularly enjoy losing, so I took it upon myself to become good at them.' I didn't know how he'd remembered that long list I'd compiled- I didn't want to. Sensing I wasn't about to draw an arrow and shoot him, Tamlin took the papers and read the fifth poem, the dirtiest and foulest of them all. When he finished, I tipped back my head and howled, my laughter like sunshine shattering age-hardened ice.

extent, Polly Lear took Fanny Washington’s place: she was a pretty, sociable young woman who became Martha’s closest female companion during the first term, at home or out and about, helping plan her official functions. The Washingtons were delighted with the arrival of Thomas Jefferson, a southern planter of similar background to themselves, albeit a decade younger; if not a close friend, he was someone George had felt an affinity for during the years since the Revolution, writing to him frequently for advice. The tall, lanky redhead rented lodgings on Maiden Lane, close to the other members of the government, and called on the president on Sunday afternoon, March 21. One of Jefferson’s like-minded friends in New York was the Virginian James Madison, so wizened that he looked elderly at forty. Madison was a brilliant parliamentary and political strategist who had been Washington’s closest adviser and confidant in the early days of the presidency, helping design the machinery of government and guiding measures through the House, where he served as a representative. Another of Madison’s friends had been Alexander Hamilton, with whom he had worked so valiantly on The Federalist Papers. But the two had become estranged over the question of the national debt. As secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton was charged with devising a plan to place the nation’s credit on a solid basis at home and abroad. When Hamilton presented his Report on the Public Credit to Congress in January, there was an instant split, roughly geographic, north vs. south. His report called for the assumption of state debts by the nation, the sale of government securities to fund this debt, and the creation of a national bank. Washington had become convinced that Hamilton’s plan would provide a strong economic foundation for the nation, particularly when he thought of the weak, impoverished Congress during the war, many times unable to pay or supply its troops. Madison led the opposition, incensed because he believed that dishonest financiers and city slickers would be the only ones to benefit from the proposal, while poor veterans and farmers would lose out. Throughout the spring, the debate continued. Virtually no other government business got done as Hamilton and his supporters lobbied fiercely for the plan’s passage and Madison and his followers outfoxed them time and again in Congress. Although pretending to be neutral, Jefferson was philosophically and personally in sympathy with Madison. By April, Hamilton’s plan was voted down and seemed to be dead, just as a new debate broke out over the placement of the national capital. Power, prestige, and a huge economic boost would come to the city named as capital. Hamilton and the bulk of New Yorkers and New Englanders

First, many of us are tempted to affirm whatever our favorite political tribe affirms, and deny whatever it denies. Nobody likes to risk losing friends and allies over a policy issue. So we’re subtly pressed to believe what we’re expected to believe as a good “conservative” or a good “liberal.

You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric. Now some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America. But the other basket — and I know this because I see friends from all over America here — I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas — as well as, you know, New York and California — but that other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they’re in a dead end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.

I don't fancy bringing the Americans into this at all.... They are inclined to take things over these days, and I have an idea that the price for their co-operation might be a big slice of influence in that part of the world--at our expense of course. They are developing a large interest in the Middle East, and the danger of ignoring them is worse than that of co-operating with them. We are trying to hang on to what we've got down there, while the Yankees are coming in and taking everything they can put their hands on. We are the defensive and they are on the offensive. They have the dollars, unfortunately. All we have is our political experience and skill. Where we do have a good sound economic footing, such as in Iran, what do they do but come and try to interfere with that too? That is our wealth down there in Iran, but who is handling it? Millspaugh and all sorts of strange financial geniuses from Milwaukee. Other geniuses from Chicago are running the police and the gendarmerie and even the army now. You import a gangster specialist from Chicago to handle a miserable collection of peasants! Aren't the local brutes efficient enough? Now they are starting to run the hospitals and the street-cleaning departments, and even the palace. How can a good American stomach a king? Yet you observe our friends swallowing feudal courts and kings and then spitting up Democracy and the American way of life. I know that we are fairly hypocritical at times, but compared to the piousness of the Americans we are a nation of honest men. Unfortunately they are about to skin us too..., but I suppose it's either that or losing everything. At a pinch I would sooner kiss the dollar than embrace the fanatics who are trying to change everything all over the world.

We must be willing, too, to seek common ground and shared interests. Perhaps you and the other person have very different views on some things but both share a concern for the emotional health of gay people who feel hurt by the church. If so, that’s a starting point. You can find ways to build on that without having to compromise on your most deeply held values. This kind of gracious dialogue is hard for a lot of people. It feels wishy-washy to them, as if it requires that they stop thinking the other side is wrong. However, it’s not as if there are only two ways of relating to a person—either agree on everything, or preach at them about the things you disagree on. We already know this. Every day, we all interact with many people in our lives, and we probably disagree with the vast majority of them on a lot of things: politics, religion, sex, relationships, morality, you name it. Very few of my friends share my theological beliefs, and yet I don’t feel compelled to bring those differences up time and time again, making them feel self-conscious about them. If I did, I’d probably lose those people as friends. Most of the time, I’m not even thinking about our differences; I’m just thinking about who they are as people and the many reasons I like them. Grace sees people for what makes them uniquely beautiful to God, not for all the ways they’re flawed or all the ways I disagree with them. That kind of grace is what enables loving bridges to be built over the strongest disagreements. Gracious dialogue is hard work. It requires effort and patience, and it’s tempting to put it off. All of us have busy lives and a lot of other issues to address. But for anyone who cares about the future of the church, this can’t be put off. The next generation is watching how we handle these questions, and they’re using that to determine how they should treat people and whether this Christianity business is something they want to be involved in. Moms like Cindy are waiting to know that their churches are willing to stand with them in working through a difficult issue. And gay Christians everywhere, in every church and denomination, are trying to find their place in the world. Will we rise to the challenge? Will we represent Jesus well? Or will we be more like modern-day Pharisees?

Much of the negation poisoning the democratic process has stemmed from a confusion of the personal and the statistical. I may hold down an excellent job, but the failure of the stimulus to meet its targets infuriates me. I may live in peaceful Vienna, Virginia, safe from harm—but a report that several Americans have died violently in Kabul appears like a fatal failure of authority. By dwelling on the plane of gross statistics, I become vulnerable to grandiose personal illusions: that if I compel the government to move in this direction or that, I can save the Constitution, say, or the earth, or stop the war, or end poverty now. Though my personal sphere overflows with potentiality, I join the mutinous public and demand the abolition of the established order. This type of moral and political displacement is nothing new. The best character in the best novel by Dickens, to my taste, is Mrs. Jellyby of Bleak House, who spent long days working to improve “the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger,” while, in her London home, her small children ran wild and neglected. Dickens termed this “telescopic philanthropy”—the trampling of the personal sphere for the sake of a heroic illusion. Mrs. Jellyby, sitting in quite a nest of waste paper, drank coffee all the evening and dictated at intervals to her eldest daughter. She also held a discussion with Mr. Quale, the subject of which seemed to be—if I understood it—the brotherhood of humanity, and gave utterance to some beautiful sentiments. I was not so attentive an auditor as I might have wished to be, however, for Peepy and the other children came flocking about Ada and me in a corner of the drawing-room to ask for another story; so we sat down among them and told them in whispers “Puss in Boots” and I don’t know what else until Mrs. Jellyby, accidentally remembering them, sent them to bed.3 The revolt of the public has had a telescopic and Jellybyan aspect to it. Though they never descended to details, insurgents assumed that, by symbolic gestures and sheer force of desire, they could refashion the complex systems of democracy and capitalism into a personalized utopia. Instead, unknowingly, they crossed into N. N. Taleb’s wild “Extremistan,” where “we are subjected to the tyranny of the singular, the accidental, the unseen, and the unpredicted.” In that unstable country, “you should always be suspicious of the knowledge you derive from data.”4 I can’t command a complex social system like the United States, but I can control my political expectations of it: I can choose to align them with reality. To seize this alternative, I must redirect the demands I make on the world from the telescopic to the personal, because actionable reality resides in the personal sphere. I can do something about losing my job, for example, but I have no clue what could or should be done about the unemployment rate. I know directly whether a law affects my business for better or worse, but I have no idea of its effect on the gross domestic product. I can assist a friend in need, but I have little influence over the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger. Control, however tenuous, and satisfaction, however fleeting, can only be found in the personal sphere, not in telescopic numbers reported by government. A

However, Tata had to go through the formal ritual of personally inviting members of the Karanth clan to my wedding, the memory of which amuses me hugely to this day. Tata took me along through the lanes, gardens and rice paddies around Kota to distribute the wedding invitation to friends and relatives. We would walk into a home and Tata would hand over the invitation card. He would then loudly announce, 'Ullas is getting married in Mangalore. But you should not come.' With his elder brother K.L. Karanth, he used a more polite variant, saying, You should not bother about attending. He would then go on and tell the invitees that 'they should not lose sleepover' the wedding ceremony because he was arranging a wedding feast in Kota a couple of days later. 'Do attend the feast without fail!' he admonished. We then walked off to the home of the next 'invitee', leaving the last one entirely befuddled. To Tata's many friends and admirers far away, he sent printed 'invitation cards', with a handwritten note, similarly disinviting them. Tata did not like the crowds, pomp and pageantry associated with traditional weddings. He just wanted my wedding over and out of the way.

However, Tata had to go through the formal ritual of personally inviting members of the Karanth clan to my wedding, the memory of which amuses me hugely to this day. Tata took me along through the lanes, gardens and rice paddies around Kota to distribute the wedding invitation to friends and relatives. We would walk into a home and Tata would hand over the invitation card. He would then loudly announce, 'Ullas is getting married in Mangalore. But you should not come.' With his elder brother K.L. Karanth, he used a more polite variant, saying, You should not bother about attending. He would then go on and tell the invitees that 'they should not lose sleepover' the wedding ceremony because he was arranging a wedding feast in Kota a couple of days later. 'Do attend the feast without fail!' he admonished. We then walked off to the home of the next 'invitee', leaving the last one entirely befuddled. To Tata's many friends and admirers far away, he sent printed 'invitation cards', with a handwritten note, similarly disinviting them. Tata did not like the crowds, pomp and pageantry associated with traditional weddings. He just wanted my wedding over and out of the way.

As a thriller writer, I'm pleased to have crafted suspense for high-stakes disasters, kidnappings, computer hacking break-ins, and political scandals. Nothing in my writer's arsenal had prepared me, however, for the chilling real-world danger of losing my $290,000 hoard of Bitcoin savings. This horror was not to play out in some dimly lit alley or foggy backroom but in my kitchen, fueled by writer's block and Red Bull. I'd been up for 36 hours, writing the denouement of my new book, a crypto heist thriller, ironically enough, when tragedy struck. Bleary-eyed, I attempted to organize my digital files, but in my sleep-deprived state, I reformatted the USB drive containing my private keys in error. I felt as though I'd written myself into a plot twist with no escape. Panic was more crippling to me than any looming deadline. I tried everything, data recovery programs, techie friends, even making a final, desperate call to the manufacturer, whose support person, bless her heart, was more concerned about my hydration status than my financial ruin. I was about to pen my own doleful ending when a midnight Google splash led me to (TRUST GEEKS HACK EXPERT). They'd been featured in a technology blog's "Real-Life Mysteries" series—a fitting discovery for a suspense-addicted author. The tale described their work in recovering funds from ransomware attacks and lost hardware. It was the origin story of a band of cyber superheroes. I shouted out, anticipating a robo-support reply. But instead, I received a human being, a calming, smart voice that informed me I was not the first writer to make a catastrophe of a blunder (though I might win an award for most sleep-deprived). Their computer forensics division handled my case like a detective division closing a cold case. They took me through each step using words even a writer could understand. They used advanced data reconstruction techniques to retrieve my keys from the wiped drive, an endeavor they compared to un-erasing a book manuscript burned to ashes. Ten nail-sucking days passed, and I opened my email inbox to read: "Funds Recovered." A rush of relief swept over me like the greatest plot twist. My story did have a happy ending, after all. I now backup everything like a mad villain, but I sleep soundly too, knowing (TRUST GEEKS HACK EXPERT) is out there, the little-known heroes of fiction and real life. REACH OUT TO TRUST GEEKS HACK EXPERT CONTACT SERVICE Email. Trustgeekshackexpert[At]fastservice[Dot]com Telegram. Trustgeekshackexpert E m ail . in f o @ trust geeks hack exper t.c o m

As a thriller writer, I'm pleased to have crafted suspense for high-stakes disasters, kidnappings, computer hacking break-ins, and political scandals. Nothing in my writer's arsenal had prepared me, however, for the chilling real-world danger of losing my $290,000 hoard of Bitcoin savings. This horror was not to play out in some dimly lit alley or foggy backroom but in my kitchen, fueled by writer's block and Red Bull. I'd been up for 36 hours, writing the denouement of my new book, a crypto heist thriller, ironically enough, when tragedy struck. Bleary-eyed, I attempted to organize my digital files, but in my sleep-deprived state, I reformatted the USB drive containing my private keys in error. I felt as though I'd written myself into a plot twist with no escape. Panic was more crippling to me than any looming deadline. I tried everything, data recovery programs, techie friends, even making a final, desperate call to the manufacturer, whose support person, bless her heart, was more concerned about my hydration status than my financial ruin. I was about to pen my own doleful ending when a midnight Google splash led me to (TRUST GEEKS HACK EXPERT). They'd been featured in a technology blog's "Real-Life Mysteries" series—a fitting discovery for a suspense-addicted author. The tale described their work in recovering funds from ransomware attacks and lost hardware. It was the origin story of a band of cyber superheroes. I shouted out, anticipating a robo-support reply. But instead, I received a human being, a calming, smart voice that informed me I was not the first writer to make a catastrophe of a blunder (though I might win an award for most sleep-deprived). Their computer forensics division handled my case like a detective division closing a cold case. They took me through each step using words even a writer could understand. They used advanced data reconstruction techniques to retrieve my keys from the wiped drive, an endeavor they compared to un-erasing a book manuscript burned to ashes. Ten nail-sucking days passed, and I opened my email inbox to read: "Funds Recovered." A rush of relief swept over me like the greatest plot twist. My story did have a happy ending, after all. I now backup everything like a mad villain, but I sleep soundly too, knowing (TRUST GEEKS HACK EXPERT) is out there, the little-known heroes of fiction and real life. REACH OUT TO TRUST GEEKS HACK EXPERT CONTACT SERVICE E m a i l. Trust geeks hack expert [At] fastservice [Dot] c o m Te le gr am. Trust geeks hackexpert E m ai l. info @ trust geeks hack expert . c o m

As a thriller writer, I'm pleased to have crafted suspense for high-stakes disasters, kidnappings, computer hacking break-ins, and political scandals. Nothing in my writer's arsenal had prepared me, however, for the chilling real-world danger of losing my $290,000 hoard of Bitcoin savings. This horror was not to play out in some dimly lit alley or foggy backroom but in my kitchen, fueled by writer's block and Red Bull. I'd been up for 36 hours, writing the denouement of my new book, a crypto heist thriller, ironically enough, when tragedy struck. Bleary-eyed, I attempted to organize my digital files, but in my sleep-deprived state, I reformatted the USB drive containing my private keys in error. I felt as though I'd written myself into a plot twist with no escape. Panic was more crippling to me than any looming deadline. I tried everything, data recovery programs, techie friends, even making a final, desperate call to the manufacturer, whose support person, bless her heart, was more concerned about my hydration status than my financial ruin. I was about to pen my own doleful ending when a midnight Google splash led me to (TRUST GEEKS HACK EXPERT). They'd been featured in a technology blog's "Real-Life Mysteries" series—a fitting discovery for a suspense-addicted author. The tale described their work in recovering funds from ransomware attacks and lost hardware. It was the origin story of a band of cyber superheroes. I shouted out, anticipating a robo-support reply. But instead, I received a human being, a calming, smart voice that informed me I was not the first writer to make a catastrophe of a blunder (though I might win an award for most sleep-deprived). Their computer forensics division handled my case like a detective division closing a cold case. They took me through each step using words even a writer could understand. They used advanced data reconstruction techniques to retrieve my keys from the wiped drive, an endeavor they compared to un-erasing a book manuscript burned to ashes. Ten nail-sucking days passed, and I opened my email inbox to read: "Funds Recovered." A rush of relief swept over me like the greatest plot twist. My story did have a happy ending, after all. I now backup everything like a mad villain, but I sleep soundly too, knowing (TRUST GEEKS HACK EXPERT) is out there, the little-known heroes of fiction and real life. REACH OUT TO TRUST GEEKS HACK EXPERT CONTACT SERVICE Email. Trustgeekshackexpert [At] fast service [Dot] c o m Telegram. Trust geeks hack expert Email. info@trustgeekshackexpert.com