Marshall Plan Quotes

I don’t have an impressive life master plan. I often don’t know where I’m going fifteen minutes from now. I just try to understand right from wrong, and to follow what my mother, pastors, and coaches taught me.

Small deeds done are better than great deeds planned.

For Americans, Acts 16:9 is the high-fructose corn syrup of Bible verses--an all-purpose ingredient we'll stir into everything from the ink on the Marshall Plan to canisters of Agent Orange. Our greatest goodness and our worst impulses come out of this missionary zeal, contributing to our overbearing (yet not entirely unwarranted) sense of our country as an inherently helpful force in the world. And, as with the apostle Paul, the notion that strangers want our help is sometimes a delusion.

Slavery wasn’t a crisis for British and American elites until abolitionism turned it into one. Racial discrimination wasn’t a crisis until the civil rights movement turned it into one. Sex discrimination wasn’t a crisis until feminism turned it into one. Apartheid wasn’t a crisis until the anti-apartheid movement turned it into one. In the very same way, if enough of us stop looking away and decide that climate change is a crisis worthy of Marshall Plan levels of response, then it will become one, and the political class will have to respond, both by making resources available and by bending the free market rules that have proven so pliable when elite interests are in peril.

Arrogant, rude bastard had insulted me, creeped me out, pissed me off, and made me restless all weekend. Now he was fucking with my orgasms. ~Danny Marshal~

inside each of us are two separate personas. There’s the leader/planner/manager who plans to change his or her ways. And there’s the follower/doer/employee who must execute the plan.

The great bulk of Marshall Plan funds returned to the United States, or never left, being paid directly to American corporations to purchase American goods. The US Agency for International Development (AID) stated in 1999: ‘The principal beneficiary of America’s foreign assistance programs has always been the United States.

Mr. Carlisle became brisk. "Baby," he said, as Napoleon might have said to one of his Marshals when instructing him in his latest plan of campaign . . .

The Marshall Plan and NATO succeeded because a political tradition of government remained in Europe, even if impaired.

The Marshall Plan had stopped the Communists, had brought the European nations back from destruction and decay, had performed an economic miracle; and there was, given the can-do nature of Americans, a tendency on their part to take perhaps more credit than might be proper for the actual operation of the Marshall Plan, a belief that they had done it and controlled it, rather than an admission that it had been the proper prescription for an economically weakened Europe and that it was the Europeans themselves who had worked the wonders.

If we are to curb emissions in the next decade, we need a massive mobilization larger than any in history. We need a Marshall Plan for the Earth. This plan must mobilize financing and technology transfer on scales never seen before. It must get technology onto the ground in every country to ensure we reduce

The Marshall Plan was the ultimate weapon deployed on this economic front. After the war, the German economy was in crisis, threatening to bring down the rest of Western Europe. Meanwhile, so many Germans were drawn to socialism that the U.S. government opted to split Germany into two parts rather than risk losing it all, either to collapse or to the left. In West Germany, the U.S. government used the Marshall Plan to build a capitalist system that was not meant to create fast and easy new markets for Ford and Sears but, rather, to be so successful on its own terms that Europe’s market economy would thrive and socialism would be drained of its appeal.

You’ll keep your hands off me in that bed, too.” “As I was planning to.” He looked up from his writing, eyes mocking me. “Unless you change your mind of course”. “I’d rather fuck a cactus,” I informed him. “Interesting. Let me know how you like it.

Darmstadt is one of those German towns that, having been landscaped by Allied heavy bombers, rezoned by the Red Army, and rebuilt by the Marshall Plan, demonstrates perfectly that (a) sometimes it’s better to lose a war than to win one, and (b) some of the worst crimes against humanity are committed by architecture students.

The great bulk of Marshall Plan funds returned to the United States, or never left, being paid directly to American corporations to purchase American goods. The US Agency for International Development (AID) stated in 1999: ‘The principal beneficiary of America’s foreign assistance programs has always been the United States.’20

We need to avoid the caretaker," I said. "Good thinking. Overalls and the smell of bleach don't really do it for me." "Remind me to douse some overalls in bleach and wear them the next time I see you." "Planning out next date already? Steady. I want to take this slowly.

No plan survives contact with the enemy." —Field Marshal Helmuth Graf von Moltke

Stalin fell into the trap the Marshall Plan laid for him, which was to get him to build the wall that would divide Europe.

We need a Marshall Plan for the Earth.

New Rule: America must stop bragging it's the greatest country on earth, and start acting like it. I know this is uncomfortable for the "faith over facts" crowd, but the greatness of a country can, to a large degree, be measured. Here are some numbers. Infant mortality rate: America ranks forty-eighth in the world. Overall health: seventy-second. Freedom of the press: forty-fourth. Literacy: fifty-fifth. Do you realize there are twelve-year old kids in this country who can't spell the name of the teacher they're having sex with? America has done many great things. Making the New World democratic. The Marshall Plan. Curing polio. Beating Hitler. The deep-fried Twinkie. But what have we done for us lately? We're not the freest country. That would be Holland, where you can smoke hash in church and Janet Jackson's nipple is on their flag. And sadly, we're no longer a country that can get things done. Not big things. Like building a tunnel under Boston, or running a war with competence. We had six years to fix the voting machines; couldn't get that done. The FBI is just now getting e-mail. Prop 87 out here in California is about lessening our dependence on oil by using alternative fuels, and Bill Clinton comes on at the end of the ad and says, "If Brazil can do it, America can, too!" Since when did America have to buck itself up by saying we could catch up to Brazil? We invented the airplane and the lightbulb, they invented the bikini wax, and now they're ahead? In most of the industrialized world, nearly everyone has health care and hardly anyone doubts evolution--and yes, having to live amid so many superstitious dimwits is also something that affects quality of life. It's why America isn't gonna be the country that gets the inevitable patents in stem cell cures, because Jesus thinks it's too close to cloning. Oh, and did I mention we owe China a trillion dollars? We owe everybody money. America is a debtor nation to Mexico. We're not a bridge to the twenty-first century, we're on a bus to Atlantic City with a roll of quarters. And this is why it bugs me that so many people talk like it's 1955 and we're still number one in everything. We're not, and I take no glee in saying that, because I love my country, and I wish we were, but when you're number fifty-five in this category, and ninety-two in that one, you look a little silly waving the big foam "number one" finger. As long as we believe being "the greatest country in the world" is a birthright, we'll keep coasting on the achievements of earlier generations, and we'll keep losing the moral high ground. Because we may not be the biggest, or the healthiest, or the best educated, but we always did have one thing no other place did: We knew soccer was bullshit. And also we had the Bill of Rights. A great nation doesn't torture people or make them disappear without a trial. Bush keeps saying the terrorist "hate us for our freedom,"" and he's working damn hard to see that pretty soon that won't be a problem.

It was at this time that he formulated a basic principle for the conduct of the Battle of Britain: that it was better to spoil the aim of many German aircraft than to shoot down a few of them.

It’s not so much the wars as the treaties that follow that truly alter the course of history. The Marshall Plan changed the world more expressly than World War II itself. Words are indeed the true weapons of mass destruction.

Keep going, one foot in front of the other, millions of times. Face forward and take the next step. Don’t flinch when the road or gets rough, you fall down, you miss a turn, or the bridge you planned to cross has collapsed. Do what you say you’ll do, and don’t let anything or anyone stop you. Deal with the obstacles as they come. Move on. Keep going, no matter what, one foot in front of the other, millions of times.

Beyond the speculative and often fraudulent froth that characterizes much of neoliberal financial manipulation, there lies a deeper process that entails the springing of ‘the debt trap’ as a primary means of accumulation by dispossession. Crisis creation, management, and manipulation on the world stage has evolved into the fine art of deliberative redistribution of wealth from poor countries to the rich. I documented the impact of Volcker’s interest rate increase on Mexico earlier. While proclaiming its role as a noble leader organizing ‘bail-outs’ to keep global capital accumulation on track, the US paved the way to pillage the Mexican economy. This was what the US Treasury–Wall Street–IMF complex became expert at doing everywhere. Greenspan at the Federal Reserve deployed the same Volcker tactic several times in the 1990s. Debt crises in individual countries, uncommon during the 1960s, became very frequent during the 1980s and 1990s. Hardly any developing country remained untouched, and in some cases, as in Latin America, such crises became endemic. These debt crises were orchestrated, managed, and controlled both to rationalize the system and to redistribute assets. Since 1980, it has been calculated, ‘over fifty Marshall Plans (over $4.6 trillion) have been sent by the peoples at the Periphery to their creditors in the Center’. ‘What a peculiar world’, sighs Stiglitz, ‘in which the poor countries are in effect subsidizing the richest.

How will this expanded role of governments manifest itself? A significant element of new “bigger” government is already in place with the vastly increased and quasi-immediate government control of the economy. As detailed in Chapter 1, public economic intervention has happened very quickly and on an unprecedented scale. In April 2020, just as the pandemic began to engulf the world, governments across the globe had announced stimulus programmes amounting to several trillion dollars, as if eight or nine Marshall Plans had been put into place almost simultaneously to support the basic needs of the poorest people, preserve jobs whenever possible and help businesses to survive.

advice to work hard, keep his mouth shut till he knew the ropes, and answer his mail.

Lincoln asked his cabinet’s advice on the Emancipation Proclamation everyone voted no, except for Lincoln, who voted “aye” and then announced, “The ayes have it.

God hasn't forgotten you. There's a plan. you just don't know it yet. But when you're ready to get back into the game, He'll tell you.

Frank Marshall Davis, the former Communist who was Obama’s mentor in Hawaii, was so radical that he opposed President Truman’s Marshall Plan as a “device” for maintaining “white imperialism.” Truman and Marshall, he wrote, were using “billions of U.S. dollars to bolster the tottering empires of England, France, Belgium, Holland and the other western exploiters of teeming millions.” Indeed the objective of America after World War II was “to re-enslave the yellow and brown and black peoples of the world.” While Davis spurned America he praised “Red Russia” as “my friend.”3 Young Obama—sitting in Davis’s hut in Hawaii week after week for several years—took it all in. This portrait of devoted young Obama imbibing the ravings of a pot-smoking former Communist is the progressive version of a Norman Rockwell painting.

The key lesson I want to extract from Marshall’s story is that management is about more than responsiveness. Indeed, as detailed earlier in this chapter, a dedication to responsiveness will likely degrade your ability to make smart decisions and plan for future challenges

After World War II, the United States, triumphant abroad and undamaged at home, saw a door wide open for world supremacy. Only the thing called ‘communism’ stood in the way, politically, militarily, economically, and ideologically. Thus it was that the entire US foreign policy establishment was mobilized to confront this ‘enemy’, and the Marshall Plan was an integral part of this campaign. How could it be otherwise? Anti-communism had been the principal pillar of US foreign policy from the Russian Revolution up to World War II, pausing for the war until the closing months of the Pacific campaign when Washington put challenging communism ahead of fighting the Japanese. Even the dropping of the atom bomb on Japan – when the Japanese had already been defeated – can be seen as more a warning to the Soviets than a military action against the Japanese.19 After the war, anti-communism continued as the leitmotif of American foreign policy as naturally as if World War II and the alliance with the Soviet Union had not happened. Along with the CIA, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the Council on Foreign Relations, certain corporations, and a few other private institutions, the Marshall Plan was one more arrow in the quiver of those striving to remake Europe to suit Washington’s desires: 1.    Spreading the capitalist gospel – to counter strong postwar tendencies toward socialism. 2.    Opening markets to provide new customers for US corporations – a major reason for helping to rebuild the European economies; e.g. a billion dollars (at twenty-first-century prices) of tobacco, spurred by US tobacco interests. 3.    Pushing for the creation of the Common Market (the future European Union) and NATO as integral parts of the West European bulwark against the alleged Soviet threat. 4.    Suppressing the left all over Western Europe, most notably sabotaging the Communist parties in France and Italy in their bids for legal, non-violent, electoral victory. Marshall Plan funds were secretly siphoned off to finance this endeavor, and the promise of aid to a country, or the threat of its cutoff, was used as a bullying club; indeed, France and Italy would certainly have been exempted from receiving aid if they had not gone along with the plots to exclude the Communists from any kind of influential role.

Odysseus has often done great things. He forms good plans and marshals troops for war. But now he has performed his greatest service for all of us—he silenced that rude windbag! Thersites will not come back here again, led by his strong proud heart to criticize the rulers with insulting words.

especially in the key task of translating broad strategic concepts into feasible operational orders. Marshall understood that Eisenhower had a talent for implementing strategy. And that job, Marshall believed, was more difficult than designing it. “There’s nothing so profound in the logic of the thing,” he said years later, discussing his own role in winning approval for the Marshall Plan. “But the execution of it, that’s another matter.” In other words, successful generalship involves first figuring out what to do, then getting people to do it. It has one foot in the intellectual realm of critical thinking and the other in the human world of management and leadership. It

While most American unions supported the Marshall Plan as an economic boon for their members and a necessary defense measure for the West, Al Bernstein’s union did not. Along with all the other Communist-controlled unions in America, Al Bernstein’s United Public Workers attacked the Marshall Plan as a Cold War plot and launched an all-out campaign against it. On the political front, Al Bernstein and his comrades bolted the Democratic Party and organized the Progressive Party candidacy of Henry Wallace in the hope of unseating Truman and ending his anti-Communist program. Their actions were in fact a Soviet-orchestrated plot to sabotage the defense of Europe against Soviet aggression.

Be patient and wait for God to direct your path. God loves you. He has a plan and a purpose for your life. The purpose of every Christian's life is to work out their salvation, but as God has lovingly created each of us with unique features and attributes, so He has uniquely created the perfect path for us to walk down to overcome what we need to overcome so that there is no separation between us and Him. If you feel frustrated or impatient or lonely or unloved, cry out to God for deliverance. If you are unsure about what you should be doing with your life or have a difficult decision to make, bring it to the Lord in prayer. Do not become impatient or desperate. Be patient. Wait for God to tell you what to do. Trust in Him, and He will direct your path.

Never think that your purpose will arise from what you want for yourself. People make this mistake every day. They think, “Well, my purpose? Let’s see, what do I want?” as if they were choosing from a great wish list. Purpose has to do with what the world needs from you and what you are able to give to the world, which may or may not conform to your personal goals, plans and ambitions.

Noting these developments, George Marshall, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and now secretary of state, had undertaken a fact-finding tour of Europe—and he didn’t like the facts he’d found. He told President Truman that if something wasn’t done to put the prostrated nations of Europe back on their feet, international trade would be crippled and some, if not most, of these countries would fall to Communist proselytizing and intrigue. What became known as the Marshall Plan was a multibillion-dollar American self-help handout in which war-torn nations could apply for direct aid from the United States after submitting a recovery plan. (The package was worth more than a trillion in today’s dollars and up to 15 percent of the U.S. federal budget.) Stalin stupidly forbade the Soviet Union or any of the countries it occupied in central and eastern Europe

Any man who had foretold such disasters this day last year would have been treated as a madman or a traitor. He would've been told that ere seven months have gone by, the American flag would have been swept from the ocean, the American navy destroyed, and the maritime arsenals reduced to ashes. Yet not one of the American frigates has struck her colors... Nothing chases them, nothing intercepts them, nothing engages them, except to yield…

It’s been a fairly unremarkable day up until now. Henry is at Sam’s tonight, so I’ve put in a long day working on some initial plans for a client who wants everything from walls to carpets and sofas in varying shades of beige and taupe, but at the same time doesn’t want the house to look boring. When I saw I had an email, I was glad of the distraction, hopeful of a personal message rather than yet another company trying to sell me something

What the turbulent months of the campaign and the election revealed most of all, I think, was that the American people were voicing a profound demand for change. On the one hand, the Humphrey people were demanding a Marshall Plan for our diseased cities and an economic solution to our social problems. The Nixon and Wallace supporters, on the other hand, were making their own limited demands for change. They wanted more "law and order," to be achieved not through federal spending but through police, Mace, and the National Guard. We must recognize and accept the demand for change, but now we must struggle to give it a progressive direction. For the immediate agenda, I would make four proposals. First, the Electoral College should be eliminated. It is archaic, undemocratic, and potentially very dangerous. Had Nixon not achieved a majority of the electoral votes, Wallace might have been in the position to choose and influence our next President. A shift of only 46,000 votes in the states of Alaska, Delaware, New Jersey, and Missouri would have brought us to that impasse. We should do away with this system, which can give a minority and reactionary candidate so much power and replace it with one that provides for the popular election of the President. It is to be hoped that a reform bill to this effect will emerge from the hearings that will soon be conducted by Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana. Second, a simplified national registration law should be passed that provides for universal permanent registration and an end to residence requirements. Our present system discriminates against the poor who are always underregistered, often because they must frequently relocate their residence, either in search of better employment and living conditions or as a result of such poorly planned programs as urban renewal (which has been called Negro removal). Third, the cost of the presidential campaigns should come from the public treasury and not from private individuals. Nixon, who had the backing of wealthy corporate executives, spent $21 million on his campaign. Humphrey's expenditures totaled only $9.7 million. A system so heavily biased in favor of the rich cannot rightly be called democratic. And finally, we must maintain order in our public meetings. It was disgraceful that each candidate, for both the presidency and the vice-presidency, had to be surrounded by cordons of police in order to address an audience. And even then, hecklers were able to drown him out. There is no possibility for rational discourse, a prerequisite for democracy, under such conditions. If we are to have civility in our civil life, we must not permit a minority to disrupt our public gatherings.

China’s state-owned China Road and Bridge Corporation is building a $14 billion rail project to connect Mombasa to the capital city of Nairobi. Analysts say the time taken for goods to travel between the two cities will be reduced from thirty-six hours to eight hours, with a corresponding cut of 60 per cent in transport costs. There are even plans to link Nairobi up to South Sudan, and across to Uganda and Rwanda. Kenya intends, with Chinese help, to be the economic powerhouse of the eastern seaboard.

That Russia would become such a power in the world had been foreseen as long ago as the 1830s by Alexis de Tocqueville, who said, in a famous passage from Democracy in America, that even then, “There are on earth today two great peoples, who, from different points of departure, seem to be advancing toward the same end. They are the Anglo-Americans and the Russians. . . . All the other peoples appear to have attained approximately their natural limits, and to have nothing left but to conserve their positions; but these two are growing. . . . To attain his end, the first depends on the interest of the individual person, and allows the force and intelligence of individuals to act freely, without directing them. The second in some way concentrates all the power of society in one man. The one has liberty as the chief way of doing things; the other servitude. Their points of departure are divergent; nevertheless, each seems summoned by a secret design of providence to hold in his hands, some day, the destinies of half the world.

He holds his hands up. ‘OK, OK. I was only asking. I do still care about you, you know. I know things haven’t worked out the way we planned.’ I raise my eyebrows at this, the understatement of the year, but he ignores me and carries on: ‘But I’ll always care about you, whether you want me to or not.’ I hear Polly’s voice in my head, snorting: care about you? He had a funny way of showing it. How long would I have gone on pretending everything was OK, if I hadn’t found the text message from Catherine on his phone that forced his hand

As America’s diplomats face budget cuts, China’s coffers are more flush with each passing year. Beijing has poured money into development projects, including a $1.4-trillion slate of infrastructure initiatives around the world that would dwarf the Marshall Plan, adjusted for inflation. Its spending on foreign assistance is still a fraction of the United States’, but the trend line is striking, with funding growing by an average of more than 20 percent annually since 2005. The rising superpower is making sure the world knows it. In one recent year, the US State Department spent $666 million on public diplomacy, aimed at winning hearts and minds abroad. While it’s difficult to know exactly what China spends on equivalent programs, one analysis put the value of its “external propaganda” programs at about $10 billion a year. In international organizations, Beijing looms large behind a retreating Washington, DC. As the US proposes cuts to its UN spending, China has become the second-largest funder of UN peacekeeping missions. It now has more peacekeepers in conflicts around the world than the four other permanent Security Council members combined. The move is pragmatic: Beijing gets more influence, and plum appointments in the United Nations’ governing bodies.

Every day we are surrounded with numerous opportunities to act dishonestly. The Lord did not intend for us to live in a world where temptation didn’t exist; it was Satan’s plan to rob us of our free agency. The Lord’s plan was to ‘prove them herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them.’ (Abr. 3:25.) Even though we cannot always control our trials and temptations, we can control how we react to them. No matter how strong the motivation or how tempting the opportunity, we can still behave honestly… As we develop a Christlike character, we, too, can learn to make honest choices no matter how great the pressures and opportunity.

The continuing struggle to align word and action, our heartfelt desires with a workable plan—didn’t self-esteem finally depend on just this? It was that belief which had led me into organizing, and it was that belief which would lead me to conclude, perhaps for the final time, that notions of purity—of race or of culture—could no more serve as the basis for the typical black American’s self-esteem than it could for mine. Our sense of wholeness would have to arise from something more fine than the bloodlines we’d inherited. It would have to find root in Mrs. Crenshaw’s story and Mr. Marshall’s story, in Ruby’s story and Rafiq’s; in all the messy, contradictory details of our experience.

Nicaragua, is one of the most recent examples. So far this spring, fifty-nine American communities have been flattened by tornadoes. Nobody has helped. The Marshall Plan, the Truman Policy, all pumped billions upon billions of dollars into discouraged countries. And now, newspapers in those countries are writing about the decadent, war-mongering Americans. Now, I'd like to see just one of those countries that is gloating over the erosion of the United States dollar build its own airplanes. Come on now, you, let's hear it! Does any other country in the world have a plane to equal the Boeing Jumbo Jet, the Lockheed Tristar, or the Douglas 10? If so, why don't they fly them? Why do all international lines except Russia fly American planes? Why does no other land on earth even consider putting a man or a woman on the moon? You talk about Japanese technocracy and you get radios. You talk about German technocracy and you get automobiles. You talk about American technocracy and you find men on the moon, not once, but several times, and, safely home again. You talk about scandals and the Americans put theirs right in the store window for everyone to look at. Even the draft dodgers are not pursued and hounded. They're right here on our streets in Toronto. Most of them, unless they're breaking Canadian laws, are getting American dollars from Ma and Pa at home to spend up here. When the Americans get out of this bind -- as they will

pump,” Marshall added. Brooke had spotted a whimbrel, a yellow wagtail, and five small owls. He had also seen this American argument winging around Anfa many times by now. Out came the red leather folders. “The Germans have forty-four divisions in France,” he said in a monotone that implied exasperation. “That is sufficient strength to overwhelm us on the ground and perhaps hem us in with wire or concrete…. Since we cannot go into the Continent in force until Germany weakens, we should try to make the Germans disperse their forces as much as possible.” There it was, and there it remained. The Americans, whose delegation included but a single logistician frantically thumbing through three loose-leaf notebooks, tended toward observation and generality. British statements bulged with facts and statistics from Bulolo’s humming war room. The Americans had an inclination; the British had a plan.

In my generation we did a lot of pleasure chasing—we, the generation responsible for today’s twenty-year-olds and thirty-year-olds and forty-year-olds. Before they came into our lives, we were on a pleasure binge, and the need for immediate gratification passed through us to our children. When I got out of the Army in 1944, the guys who were being discharged with me were mostly between the ages of eighteen and thirty. We came home to a country that was in great shape in terms of industrial capacity. As the victors, we decided to spread the good fortune around, and we did all kinds of wonderful things—but it wasn’t out of selfless idealism, let me assure you. Take the Marshall Plan, which we implemented at that time. It rebuilt Europe, yes, but it also enabled those war ruined countries to buy from us. The incredible, explosive economic prosperity that resulted just went wild. It was during that period that the pleasure principle started feeding on itself. One generation later it was the sixties, and those twenty-eight-year-old guys from World War II were forty-eight. They had kids twenty years old, kids who had been so indulged for two decades that it caused a huge, first-time-in-history distortion in the curve of values. And, boy, did that curve bend and bend and bend. These postwar parents thought they were in nirvana if they had a color TV and two cars and could buy a Winnebago and a house on the lake. But the children they had raised on that pleasure principle of material goods were by then bored to death. They had overdosed on all that stuff. So that was the generation who decided, “Hey, guess where the real action is? Forget the Winnebago. Give me sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll.” Incredible mind-blowing experiences, head-banging, screw-your-brains-out experiences in service to immediate and transitory pleasures. But the one kind of gratification is simply an outgrowth of the other, a more extreme form of the same hedonism, the same need to indulge and consume. Some of those same sixties kids are now themselves forty-eight. Whatever genuine idealism they carried through those love-in days got swept up in the great yuppie gold rush of the eighties and the stock market nirvana of the nineties—and I’m afraid we are still miles away from the higher ground we seek.

I’m here to horrify you,” he said. And then, because he couldn’t bear it any longer, he reached out and pulled her to him. She was warm and soft in his arms, and she smelled so deliciously right. He could have inhaled her scent for hours. “Hugo—” He didn’t want to talk. He didn’t want to answer any questions. He didn’t know who he was or what he wanted or what dreams would come to fill his heart. He only knew that if he couldn’t have her, nothing would ever be right again. And so he kissed her. He tasted her, sweet and steady against him, put his hand in the small of her back and drew her toward him. She kissed him back. “I love you,” he said. The truth took root inside him. For the first time in years, the dark words of his past receded. “But, Hugo…” He set his fingers over her lips. “Let me do this,” he said. “I thought I had to prove myself with money and accomplishments. But those will always ring hollow. They will never be enough. I want to be somebody. Let me be your husband. Let me be the father of your child—of all your children. I got more satisfaction from striking Clermont than I did from any success I found in business.” She pulled back from him. “You struck Clermont?” “Twice. And—that reminds me—I blackmailed him into promising to send your child to Eton.” Hugo tightened his grip around her. “I’ve never pretended to be a good man, you know. It’s just that…I’m yours.” He leaned his head against hers. Her breath was warm against his face. “Did you hit him hard?” “I’m afraid I did.” “That’s my Hugo.” There was a grim satisfaction in her voice. “I love you, you know. If you hadn’t come, as soon as winter set in and the ground became too hard to work, I’d planned to come for you.” “Well, I’m glad I came to my senses,” Hugo said. “You shouldn’t have traveled, not in your condition. Yet curiosity impels me to inquire. What did you plan to do, once you arrived?” “Allow me to demonstrate.” She lifted her face to his, traced the line of his jaw with her fingers. “This.” She pressed a kiss to the corner of his mouth. “And this.” She kissed the other corner. “And…” She took his mouth full on, her lips soft against his, tasting of all the things he’d most wanted. “I’d do that,” she whispered, “until you were forced to admit you loved me.” “I love you.” “Well, that’s no fun.” She kissed him again. “Now what excuse do I have?” He drew in a shuddering breath and pulled her closer. “You could make me say it again,” he whispered. “Make me say it always. Make me say it so often that you never have cause to doubt. I love you.

One day, Methodist circuit rider Jesse Lee downtime self accosted by two lawyers: "You are a preacher, sir?" "Yes, I generally pass for one," replied Lee. "You preach very often, I suppose?" "Generally every day; frequently twice a day, or more." "How do you find time to study, when you preach so often?" "I study when writing," said Lee. "And read when resting," he added, maintaining a smile, though he could see now where they were heading. The first lawyer feigned incredulity. "But do you not write your sermons?" "No, not very often, at least." "Do you not often make mistakes preaching extemporaneously?" the second lawyer queried. Lee nodded. "I do, sometimes." "Well, do you correct them?" "That depends on the character of the mistake. I was preaching the other day, and I went to quote the text, 'All liars shall have their part in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone,' and by mistake I said, 'All lawyers shall have their part--'" The first lawyer interrupted him. "What did you do with that? Did you correct it?" "Oh, no, it was so nearly true I didn't bother." "Humph!" said one of the lawyers looking at the other, "I don't know whether you are more a knave than a fool!" Neither," replied Lee smiling, and looking at the one on his right and the one on his left, "I'd say I was just between the two.

Herman and I have been doing a lot of talking about the cake the past couple of days, and we think we have a good plan for the three tiers. The bottom tier will be the chocolate tier and incorporate the dacquoise component, since that will all provide a good strong structural base. We are doing an homage to the Frango mint, that classic Chicago chocolate that was originally produced at the Marshall Field's department store downtown. We're going to make a deep rich chocolate cake, which will be soaked in fresh-mint simple syrup. The dacquoise will be cocoa based with ground almonds for structure, and will be sandwiched between two layers of a bittersweet chocolate mint ganache, and the whole tier will be enrobed in a mint buttercream. The second tier is an homage to Margie's Candies, an iconic local ice cream parlor famous for its massive sundaes, especially their banana splits. It will be one layer of vanilla cake and one of banana cake, smeared with a thin layer of caramelized pineapple jam and filled with fresh strawberry mousse. We'll cover it in chocolate ganache and then in sweet cream buttercream that will have chopped Luxardo cherries in it for the maraschino-cherry-on-top element. The final layer will be a nod to our own neighborhood, pulling from the traditional flavors that make up classical Jewish baking. The cake will be a walnut cake with hints of cinnamon, and we will do a soaking syrup infused with a little bit of sweet sherry. A thin layer of the thick poppy seed filling we use in our rugelach and hamantaschen, and then a layer of honey-roasted whole apricots and vanilla pastry cream. This will get covered in vanilla buttercream.

WWII interrupted the plans of many explorers, although a secret Nazi expedition in 1938–39, led by Alfred Ritscher, was dispatched to Antarctica by Field Marshal Hermann Göring. Göring was interested both in claiming territory and in protecting Germany’s growing whaling fleet. The expedition used seaplanes to overfly vast stretches of the ice sheet, dropping 1.5m darts inscribed with swastikas to establish sovereignty

Obama mentor Frank Marshall Davis is an unimaginably outrageous case in point—one that must be read to be appreciated. Davis's brutal demonization of, and vile accusations against, Democratic Party heroes like Truman, a man of true courage and character, ought to disgust modern Democrats. His accusations against Truman and his secretary of state, George Marshall—Davis dubbed the Marshall Plan “white imperialism” and “colonial slavery”—make Joe McCarthy's accusations look mild by comparison.

THE POWER OF FAITH Believe in the Lord your God, and you will be established; believe in His prophets, and you will succeed. 2 Chronicles 20:20 HCSB Every life—including yours—is a series of successes and failures, celebrations and disappointments, joys and sorrows. Every step of the way, through every triumph and tragedy, God will stand by your side and strengthen you . . . if you have faith in Him. Jesus taught His disciples that if they had faith, they could move mountains. You can too. When you place your faith, your trust, indeed your life in the hands of Christ Jesus, you’ll be amazed at the marvelous things He can do with you and through you. So strengthen your faith through praise, through worship, through Bible study, and through prayer. And trust God’s plans. With Him, all things are possible, and He stands ready to open a world of possibilities to you . . . if you have faith. Faith is an act of the will, a choice, based on the unbreakable Word of a God who cannot lie, and who showed what love and obedience and sacrifice mean, in the person of Jesus Christ. Elisabeth Elliot Faith is strengthened only when we ourselves exercise it. Catherine Marshall A TIMELY TIP If you don’t have faith, you’ll never move mountains. But if you do have faith, there’s no limit to the things that you and God, working together, can accomplish.

Trust His Perfect Plan You will show me the path of life; in Your presence is fullness of joy; at Your right hand are pleasures forevermore. Psalm 16:11 NKJV God has a plan for your life. He understands that plan as thoroughly and completely as He knows you. And, if you seek God’s will earnestly and prayerfully, He will make His plans known to you in His own time and in His own way. If you sincerely seek to live in accordance with God’s will for your life, you will live in accordance with His commandments. You will study God’s Word, and you will be watchful for His signs. Sometimes, God’s plans seem unmistakably clear to you. But other times, He may lead you through the wilderness before He directs you to the Promised Land. So be patient and keep seeking His will for your life. When you do, you’ll be amazed at the marvelous things that an all-powerful, all-knowing God can do. God in Christ is the author and finisher of my faith. He knows exactly what needs to happen in my life for my faith to grow. He designs the perfect program for me. Mary Morrison Suggs Obedience to God is our job. The results of that obedience are God’s. Elisabeth Elliot When the dream of our heart is one that God has planted there, a strange happiness flows into us. At that moment, all of the spiritual resources of the universe are released to help us. Our praying is then at one with the will of God and becomes a channel for the Creator’s purposes for us and our world. Catherine Marshall God has plans—not problems—for our lives. Before she died in the concentration camp in Ravensbruck, my sister Betsie said to me, “Corrie, your whole life has been a training for the work you are doing here in prison—and for the work you will do afterward.” Corrie ten Boom I’m convinced that there is nothing that can happen to me in this life that is not precisely designed by a sovereign Lord to give me the opportunity to learn to know Him. Elisabeth Elliot God has His reasons. He has His purposes. Ours is an intentional God, brimming over with motive and mission. He never does things capriciously or decides with the flip of a coin. Joni Eareckson Tada

Emma looked up at him, expectant, and he shot her a quick wink. McKenna seemed intent on looking anywhere but at him, which only increased his patience. And his hopes. Finally, McKenna scraped together what looked like the remnants of a smile and met his gaze. And he knew her answer. “I’m certain Marshal Caradon’s responsibilities keep him very busy, Emma.” She addressed the child, yet aimed the words at him. “He’s got an important job to do, and he has to get up very early in the morning to leave again. We don’t want to interfere with his plans.” In all his years of marshaling, he’d never been shot down so fast.

Solving the problems of the Middle East and the threat they pose to the world requires a fundamental change in the region’s economic profile.9 The international community would have to make a sizable investment—a Marshall Plan in scale—to bring about change of that magnitude. And that requires American leadership. Even if we cannot afford that right now, we still need a clear economic strategy for the region—a plan for using development aid, trade, and investment to help the region and also serve our interests.

God will not permit any troubles to come upon us, unless He has a specific plan by which great blessing can come out of the difficulty.

if enough of us stop looking away and decide that climate change is a crisis worthy of Marshall Plan levels of response, then it will become one, and the political class will have to respond, both by making resources available and by bending the free market rules that have proven so pliable when elite interests are in peril.

Planning is everything. Plans are nothing." —Field Marshal Helmuth Graf von Moltke

Our church has a set of 8 books that each new elder is given, along with a monthly reading plan to use as a guide for meetings with a more experienced elder. There are many good resources out there, but a few of my most highly recommended are The Deliberate Church by Mark Dever and Paul Alexander, The Trellis and the Vine by Colin Marshall and Tony Payne, Instruments in the Redeemer’s Hands by Paul Tripp, the 9Marks volumes on Church Membership and Church Discipline by Jonathan Leeman, and The Reformed Pastor by Richard Baxter.

SEEKING HIS WILL Teach me to do Your will, for You are my God; Your Spirit is good. Lead me in the land of uprightness. Psalm 143:10 NKJV God has a plan for our world and our lives. God does not do things by accident; He is willful and intentional. Unfortunately for us, we cannot always understand the will of God. Why? Because we are mortal beings with limited understanding. Although we cannot fully comprehend the will of God, we should always trust the will of God. As this day unfolds, seek God’s will and obey His Word. When you entrust your life to Him without reservation, He will give you the courage to meet any challenge, the strength to endure any trial, and the wisdom to live in His righteousness and in His peace. The only safe place is in the center of God’s will. It is not only the safest place. It is also the most rewarding and the most satisfying place to be. Gigi Graham Tchividjian Jesus told us that only in God’s will would we have real freedom. Catherine Marshall A TIMELY TIP When you place yourself in the center of God’s will . . . He will provide for your needs and direct your path.

To do what is necessary, of course, will require a virtual Marshall Plan of federal resources, far in excess of anything contemplated between the nearly touching poles of conventional palliatives. But I see no evidence of any will to do anything much. In the areas of mathematics and reading, for example, a variety of pedagogical techniques have been developed that would work well enough if picked up and used broadly. No need to discuss them here. Their efficacy has been proved. That's not the problem. The problem is one of will–and consensus on course setting.

Development was, in other words, part of a policy mindset that linked international trade, military power and a programme of redistribution. What was to be redistributed was, it turned out, food. The Marshall Plan – the US aid programme to Europe in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War – had instigated, among other initiatives, the transfer of food to the hungry and possibly querulous European population in response to the post-war food shortages.

RBG’s image as a moderate was clinched in March 1993, in a speech she gave at New York University known as the Madison Lecture. Sweeping judicial opinions, she told the audience, packed with many of her old New York friends, were counterproductive. Popular movements and legislatures had to first spur social change, or else there would be a backlash to the courts stepping in. As case in point, RBG chose an opinion that was very personal to plenty of people listening: Roe v. Wade. The right had been aiming to overturn Roe for decades, and they’d gotten very close only months before the speech with Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Justices Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, and Sandra Day O’Connor had instead brokered a compromise, allowing states to put restrictions on abortion as long as they didn’t pose an “undue burden” on women—or ban it before viability. Neither side was thrilled, but Roe was safe, at least for the moment. Just as feminists had caught their breath, RBG declared that Roe itself was the problem. If only the court had acted more slowly, RBG said, and cut down one state law at a time the way she had gotten them to do with the jury and benefit cases. The justices could have been persuaded to build an architecture of women’s equality that could house reproductive freedom. She said the very boldness of Roe, striking down all abortion bans until viability, had “halted a political process that was moving in a reform direction and thereby, I believe, prolonged divisiveness and deferred stable settlement of the issue.” This analysis remains controversial among historians, who say the political process of abortion access had stalled before Roe. Meanwhile, the record shows that there was no overnight eruption after Roe. In 1975, two years after the decision, no senator asked Supreme Court nominee John Paul Stevens about abortion. But Republicans, some of whom had been pro-choice, soon learned that being the anti-abortion party promised gains. And even if the court had taken another path, women’s sexual liberation and autonomy might have still been profoundly unsettling. Still, RBG stuck to her guns, in the firm belief that lasting change is incremental. For the feminists and lawyers listening to her Madison Lecture, RBG’s argument felt like a betrayal. At dinner after the lecture, Burt Neuborne remembers, other feminists tore into their old friend. “They felt that Roe was so precarious, they were worried such an expression from Ruth would lead to it being overturned,” he recalls. Not long afterward, when New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan suggested to Clinton that RBG be elevated to the Supreme Court, the president responded, “The women are against her.” Ultimately, Erwin Griswold’s speech, with its comparison to Thurgood Marshall, helped convince Clinton otherwise. It was almost enough for RBG to forgive Griswold for everything else.

Marshall Plan’s

Truman knew, Republicans would duck responsibility and attack the White House for partisan gain.

This process of justifying expenditures as counters to Soviet expenditures conditioned U.S. actions on Soviet strengths, expressed as threats, not on Soviet weaknesses and constraints. We had a war strategy—a catastrophic spasm—but no plan about how to compete with the Soviet Union over the long term.” Soft-spoken, Marshall watched my eyes, checking that I understood the implications of his statements. He took out a document, a thin sheaf of paper, and began to explain its meaning: “This document reflects thoughts about how to actually use U.S. strengths to exploit Soviet weaknesses, a very different approach.

From the viewpoint of the vital interests of the United States, the principal issue in Europe today is whether or not it will be totalitarian. If the virus of totalitarianism spreads much farther, it will be almost impossible to prevent its engulfing all western Europe. This would mean communist totalitarianism almost everywhere on the continent with the iron curtain moving to the Atlantic. In the event of a totalitarian Europe, our foreign policy would have to be completely re-oriented and a great part of what we have fought for and accomplished in the past would be lost. The change in the power relationships involved would force us to adopt drastic domestic measures and would inevitably require great and burdensome sacrifices on the part of our citizens. The maintenance of a much larger military establishment would undoubtedly be required. The sacrifices would not be simply material. With a totalitarian Europe which would have no regard for individual freedom, our spiritual loss would be incalculable.

The Marshall Plan,” New York Times correspondent William White wrote, “appears to draw its greatest strength not from any special feeling that other peoples should be helped for their own sake, but only as a demonstration against the spread of communism.”67 Communist “overlords,” South Dakota Republican Karl Mundt said, were disrupting economic activity “so as to produce chaos and put an end to freedom.” We must, he said, “turn the Red tide.” Herter himself cited the danger posed by Communist-controlled labor unions in western Europe. Freshman California Republican Richard Nixon, assigned to tour Italy, wrote that “the great difficulty [here] is not so much the physical destruction of the war, but the fact that the Communists have chosen this country as the scene of one of their most clever and well-financed operations against the forces of democracy.” Alabama Democrat Pete Jarman, who traveled in eastern Europe, spoke of the “feeling of strangulation that one has behind the iron curtain.” We in the United States, he concluded, had to recognize “the absolute necessity of our doing whatever is necessary to prevent [communism’s] spread.

Grimes could not positively assume that the dueling colonel, unable to back down in issuing his challenge, had planned for his seconds to settle the matter, yet the whipsaw trick which the gun slicks had attempted did indicate that the turnkey’s account of Grimes’ dealing with the marshal had left its marks on the town.

Fortunately, Marhsall found an eager audience in fellow intellectual Ikle, who recognized at once that ONA's analysis and prescriptions for the Cold War reinforced Reagan's intuitions. Together Ikle and Marshall pressed the military services to build budget plans around 'exploiting opportunities to impose disproportionate costs on the USSE over the long term.' This was Marshall's concept of 'Competitive strategies', which 'depended on identifying areas of comparative US advantage and using them to exploit areas of comparative Soviet weakness or disadvantage.

Moses beseeched Yahweh his God, and said, “Lord, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, who you have brought forth out of the land of Egypt with great power, and with a mighty hand? 32:11 Why let the Egyptians say, ‘With an evil plan he brought them out, to kill them in the mountains, and wipe them from the face of the earth’? Turn from your fierce wrath, and repent of this evil against your people.

Yet, in most of the world, US power was hegemonic more than coercive. The United States’ offer to serve as policeman of the world has been accepted by a majority of the world since 1945, and by almost the entire world after 1991. Many countries look to the US military’s command of the commons (the world’s airspace and seas as well as outer space) to ensure global order and to protect them from nearby regional powers that, in the absence of American military dominance, could dominate or invade their neighbors. Thus, communist Vietnam, after decades of fighting and millions of deaths to free itself from US domination, eagerly signed up for the Trans-Pacific Partnership and is considering allowing the United States to base warships at Cam Ranh Bay to deflect Chinese power—and of course each and every Eastern European country begged for admission to NATO and the EU, just as Western European governments positioned themselves after World War II within a geopolitical and economic structure designed and controlled by the United States in return for protection from the USSR. American aid through the Marshall Plan came after the recipient governments had already cast their lot with the United States.

The first real community problem came when it was learned that the entire supply of school study spools were lost in the crashed ships. There was talk among the colonists of sending a ship back to Earth at once for replacements, but Vidac stepped in and took over. He called a meeting with the three Space Cadets, Jeff Marshall, and Professor Sykes, and told them of his plan. "I want you to make new study spools on every subject you can remember," Vidac ordered. "Simple arithmetic, spelling, geography, celestial studies, physics, in fact, everything that you learned in prep school–and before that." "That may be all right for boys," grumbled Professor Sykes, still smarting under the refusal of his violent protest at being taken from his uranium studies and placed in charge of the school problem. "But what about the girls? There are quite a few of them and they need special consideration." "What kind of consideration?" asked Vidac. "Well, whatever it is a girl has to know. Sew, cook, keep house, take care of children and–and–" The professor sputtered, hesitated, and concluded lamely, "A–a lot of things!" Vidac smiled. "Very well. I'll speak to a few of the mothers and see if I can't get you some assistance. In the meantime, I want you, Corbett, Manning, Astro, and Marshall to do what you can about beginning the children's schooling." "All right," snorted Sykes, "but I can think of better ways to spend the next two or three weeks." "And one more thing, Professor," continued Vidac. "I want it clearly understood that you are responsible for the cadets. For what they do, or don't do!

The Five Power Disqualifiers® are: 1. Do they have the money? 2. Do they have a bleeding neck—an urgent problem that must be solved now? 3. Do they buy into your unique selling proposition? 4. Do they have the ability to say YES? 5. Does what you sell fit in with their overall plans?

I have met many military men in my life. I have known marshals, generals, commanders and governors, the victors of numerous campaigns and battles. I’ve listened to their stories and recollections. I’ve seen them poring over maps, drawing lines of various colours on them, making plans, thinking up strategies. In those paper wars everything worked, everything functioned, everything was clear and everything was in exemplary order. That’s how it has to be, explained the military men. The army represents discipline and order above all. The army cannot exist without discipline and order. So it is all the stranger that real wars–and I have seen several real wars–have as much in common with discipline and order as a whorehouse with a fire raging through it. Dandelion, Half a Century of Poetry

We worked from day to day, a hand to mouth existence with a policy based on opportunism. Every wind that blew swung us like a weathercock. As I was to find out, planned strategy was not Winston’s strong card. He preferred to work by intuition and impulse.

Not all of the New Dealers, it must be said, bought into the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. For instance, Henry Wallace, the former vice president and secretary of agriculture, who was fired by Truman for disagreeing with the Cold War’s imperatives, referred to the Marshall Plan as the ‘Martial Plan’. He warned against creating a rift with America’s wartime ally, the Soviet Union, and remarked that the conditions attached to the Soviet Union’s invitation to be part of the Marshall Plan were intentionally so designed that Stalin would be obliged to reject them (which, of course, he did). A number of academics of the New Deal generation, among them Paul Sweezy and John Kenneth Galbraith, also rejected Truman’s cold-warrior tactics. However, they were soon to be silenced by the witch-hunt orchestrated by Senator Joseph McCarthy and his House Committee on Un-American Activities.

No matter how deliberate your strategy, how measured your planning, or ability to marshal resources, never underestimate the power of luck. Luck’s place in history has created more winners and losers than strategy, planning, or resources by themselves ever have.

Being poor does not make people homeless, but being very poor where housing is unaffordable does. By expanding the amount of affordable housing in our community we address a central root cause of homelessness. Only when our community has the amount of affordable housing we need will we come close to ending homelessness.

SMALL DEEDS DONE---are Better than Great Deeds Planned.

Occidental que je suis dans l’âme, confortablement installé sur cinquante années de prospérité écoulées depuis la fin de la guerre (avec un généreux plan Marshall pour commencer), j’ai tendance à regarder ces bizarreries sans indulgence. Qu’attend-on pour réparer la chaussée, les routes, pour réparer en général ? (p. 32)

Today, much of our culture grows from the opposite of what motivated the Marshall Plan. It grows from the self-centered nucleus accumbens. That urge to always think we don’t have enough. Dopamine convinces us that happiness lies around the corner, just a little bit more, and this prevents us from enjoying serotonin’s contentment with what we already possess. I see connections to our national drug-addiction epidemic in the fact that every year dozens of Fortune 500 corporations pay no federal income taxes, while many American families worry about rent and food. I see the epidemic connected to the massive amount of US wealth diverted from the bottom and the middle to the top in the last forty years. Jobs that went overseas were just the free market at work—nothing to be done. I don’t think we should wonder why so many of our towns and neighborhoods are threadbare and drug addiction so widespread.

...Those who led us to indebtedness gambled as if in a casino. As long as they had gains, there was no debate. But now that they suffer losses, they demand repayment. And we talk about crisis. No, Mister President, they played, they lost, that’s the rule of the game, and life goes on. We cannot repay because we don’t have any means to do so. We cannot pay because we are not responsible for this debt. We cannot repay but the others owe us what the greatest wealth could never repay, that is blood debt. Our blood had flowed. We hear about the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe’s economy. But we never hear about the African plan which allowed Europe to face Hitlerian hordes when their economies and their stability were at stake. Who saved Europe? Africa. It is rarely mentioned, to such a point that we cannot be the accomplices of that thankless silence. If others cannot sing our praises, at least we must say that our fathers had been courageous and that our troops had saved Europe and set the world free from Nazism.

We cannot repay but the others owe us what the greatest wealth could never repay, that is blood debt. Our blood had flowed. We hear about the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe’s economy. But we never hear about the African plan which allowed Europe to face Hitlerian hordes when their economies and their stability were at stake. Who saved Europe? Africa. It is rarely mentioned, to such a point that we cannot be the accomplices of that thankless silence. If others cannot sing our praises, at least we must say that our fathers had been courageous and that our troops had saved Europe and set the world free from Nazism.

Always ask for the cash price. It might be a better deal than if you ran what you need through your insurance plan.

Welch became more confident that the press was reporting his words more accurately, but that worked against him because his discourses on the rise of the Illuminati or the Insiders made him sound strange to some, or worse. In September 1973, he sat for the Boston Globe and just purged. He told the reporter that it all began in Bavaria on May 1, 1776, when Baron Adam Weishaupt founded the Order of the Illuminati. It's all in a book by John Robinson, Welch explained. But the Illuminati were forced underground when Bavarian authorities raided their headquarters. The reporter's eyes probably widened. But by 1840, the Illuminati was strong and produced the Great Revolution of 1848 and the League of the Just Men, which hired Karl Marx to draft Das Kapital. The conspiracy was on the doorsteps of Russia by 1905, Welch continued, and in 1917, the agents of the Illuminati, Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky, threw over the czars, with funding from the Rotschilds. Welch was on fire now. The Insiders, he continued, went to Yale and Harvard, grew up with all the advantages, controlled American politics and international banking, and wanted to enslave everyone else. In 1912, the Insiders brought in Woodrow Wilson to drag the country into World War I. They convinced America to fight World War II with assistance from Insiders like President Roosevelt and George Marshall. They master-planned the civil rights revolution, and they work through the UN, the Council on Foreign Relations, and tax-free foundations. Perhaps the reporter nodded now and then, encouraging him on.

Now look here, colonel. Of course, I know you chaps have got your orders and all that sort of thing and that you're not supposed to mix with us in case we corrupt your Marxian souls with the impurities of our bourgeois conceptions; but you ought to know as well as I do that that's all tommy faddle. How the hell are we going to plan a peace if we don't attempt to understand one another? Of course, if you've got definite orders not to drink with me personally, then I quite understand; but let me tell you this one thing: that it doesn't prevent my liking you as a man and you can tell that to your general if you like.

Only eleven days after Truman signed the bill authorizing the Marshall Plan, the victory ship John H. Quick, named after a marine who won the Medal of Honor at Guantánamo Bay in the Spanish-American War, set sail from Galveston, Texas, loaded with grain. The Quick was the first in a fleet of five American ships owned by the Luckenbach Steamship Company to carry fifty-four thousand tons of grain, fertilizer, and a variety of other Marshall Plan necessities across the

Atlantic to France. Before long 150 ships, chartered and paid for by Hoffman’s ECA, were on the high seas carrying cargoes to harbors at Bordeaux, Liverpool, Rotterdam, and Genoa. The psychological effect of the first American ships arriving at ports on the continent, along with the promise of what was to come, cannot be overstated. For the Europeans and the British, the Marshall Plan revived hope for the future, a sense of confidence that economic and political recovery was indeed achievable. For the first time in years, wrote an Economist reporter, “it is fitting that the peoples of

Western Europe should attempt to renew their capacity for wonder.” For this reason, he wrote, the Marshall Plan “must be seen for what it is—an act without peer in history.”86

You have to learn to live life in the middle of the danger. And trust that there's a bigger plan.

HealthcareBluebook.com or FairHealthConsumer.org to see if the prices are fair. The Bluebook site gathers payment information from employers who fund their own health plans and publishes what it calls its fair price for a service or procedure. The Fair Health site does something similar, but its data comes from what insurers pay.

We do not have to know God’s plans to walk in peace. It should be enough to know him.”2 Rest in the fact that God has given you everything you need to persevere, even if you never have an answer to the why of your suffering.

France initially offered strong resistance to the inclusion of Germany in the Marshall Plan, but failed to deflect the US position. In the best French negotiating style, it managed to get a more substantial portion of the resources. This tactic later yielded much fruit in the negotiations for the European economic union, when it would sell dearly its lifting of vetoes to Community initiatives.

Potentially the weakest link in the long chain that led to Pearl Harbor was actually one of the strongest. This was the busy eyes of Ensign Yoshikawa, the ostensibly petty bureaucrat in the Honolulu consulate of Consul General Nagao Kita. Presenting himself as a Filipino, he washed dishes at the Pearl Harbor Officers Club listening for scuttlebutt. He played tourist on a glass bottom boat in Kaneohe Bay near the air station where most of the Navy’s PBYs were moored. He flew over the islands as a traveler. As a straight-out spy, he swam along the shore of the harbor itself ducking out of sight from time to time breathing through a reed. He was Yamamoto’s ears and eyes. The Achilles heel to the whole operation was J-19, the consular code he used to send his information back to Tokyo. And Tokyo used to give him his instructions. Rochefort, the code breaker in Hypo at Pearl Harbor, besides being fluent in Japanese could decipher eighty percent of J-19 messages in about twelve hours. The most tell-tale of all was message 83 sent to Honolulu September 24, 1941. It instructed Yoshikawa to divide Pearl Harbor into a grid so vessels moored in each square could be pinpointed. This so-called “bomb plot” message was relayed to Washington by Clipper in undeciphered form. The Pan American plane had been delayed by bad weather so 83 wasn’t decoded and translated until October 9 or 10. Washington had five times as many intercepts piling up for decoding from Manila than Honolulu because Manila was intercepting higher priority Purple. When he saw the decrypt of 83, Colonel Rufus Bratton, head of the Far Eastern Section of Army G-2 or intelligence, was brought up short. Never before had the Japanese asked for the location of ships in harbor. Bratton sent the message on to Brigadier General Leonard T. Gerow, chief of the Army’s War Plans Division with General Marshall and Secretary Stimson marked in.

When we ask someone "How old are you?" we are really asking them "What time are you?" We're trying to slap a frame of reference on the person by bringing the past into play. When I find out how old you are, I know what memories you are likely to have. Depending on your age, you may know all about the Marshall Plan, Jackie O., the first moon walk, dial phones, disco, or DOS. I can call this information up in a friendly way, singing old Beatles songs with you. I can bring it back in a hostile way, thinking that you're a fool to have gotten caught up in "flower power." In either case, I'm not seeing you exactly as you are now. I'm judging by what I see as the sum of your past experiences.

1/23/24 Wow. I placed those Charles Murray quotes in my quote library back in, like, 2012, now 12 years ago. Never would I have foretold, in 1,000 years, the meaning "White America" would come to have in this current day. Coming Apart: The State of White America, indeed Charles Murray, God rest your soul. But it is less White Americans who have lead to the demise -- though Charles' foresight was, indeed, chilling -- as it is the Democrat Party along with willing RINOs and both of their insidious plans to make anyone White become an object of hatred. They are creating the racism of today and most are too caught in the narrative to see what is happening.