N Status Quotes

When people dis fantasy—mainstream readers and SF readers alike—they are almost always talking about one sub-genre of fantastic literature. They are talking about Tolkien, and Tolkien's innumerable heirs. Call it 'epic', or 'high', or 'genre' fantasy, this is what fantasy has come to mean. Which is misleading as well as unfortunate. Tolkien is the wen on the arse of fantasy literature. His oeuvre is massive and contagious—you can't ignore it, so don't even try. The best you can do is consciously try to lance the boil. And there's a lot to dislike—his cod-Wagnerian pomposity, his boys-own-adventure glorying in war, his small-minded and reactionary love for hierarchical status-quos, his belief in absolute morality that blurs moral and political complexity. Tolkien's clichés—elves 'n' dwarfs 'n' magic rings—have spread like viruses. He wrote that the function of fantasy was 'consolation', thereby making it an article of policy that a fantasy writer should mollycoddle the reader. That is a revolting idea, and one, thankfully, that plenty of fantasists have ignored. From the Surrealists through the pulps—via Mervyn Peake and Mikhael Bulgakov and Stefan Grabiński and Bruno Schulz and Michael Moorcock and M. John Harrison and I could go on—the best writers have used the fantastic aesthetic precisely to challenge, to alienate, to subvert and undermine expectations. Of course I'm not saying that any fan of Tolkien is no friend of mine—that would cut my social circle considerably. Nor would I claim that it's impossible to write a good fantasy book with elves and dwarfs in it—Michael Swanwick's superb Iron Dragon's Daughter gives the lie to that. But given that the pleasure of fantasy is supposed to be in its limitless creativity, why not try to come up with some different themes, as well as unconventional monsters? Why not use fantasy to challenge social and aesthetic lies? Thankfully, the alternative tradition of fantasy has never died. And it's getting stronger. Chris Wooding, Michael Swanwick, Mary Gentle, Paul di Filippo, Jeff VanderMeer, and many others, are all producing works based on fantasy's radicalism. Where traditional fantasy has been rural and bucolic, this is often urban, and frequently brutal. Characters are more than cardboard cutouts, and they're not defined by race or sex. Things are gritty and tricky, just as in real life. This is fantasy not as comfort-food, but as challenge. The critic Gabe Chouinard has said that we're entering a new period, a renaissance in the creative radicalism of fantasy that hasn't been seen since the New Wave of the sixties and seventies, and in echo of which he has christened the Next Wave. I don't know if he's right, but I'm excited. This is a radical literature. It's the literature we most deserve.

You can change any status quo, stand out, walk by faith and not by sight and things will definitely go well with you.

If the bulk of the public were really convinced of the illegitimacy of the State, if it were convinced that the State is nothing more nor less than a bandit gang writ large, then the State would soon collapse to take on no more status or breadth of existence than another Mafia gang.

Your status has changed. Your Name is changed! You are a new creation.

remember when God has answered you, it no longer matters who has been against you but for Him to answer you and change your story, you have to make up your mind to disobey the wrong order, change the status quo and BE DIFFERENT!

A matured woman is therefore a responsible woman irrespective of her age, status and qualification.

Anyaele Sam Chiyson Leadership Law of Advancement: Notable leaders chart the course of action that causes other leaders to progress toward reaching a goal and raising the status of power.

If you'd like to keep CHRIST in Christmas this year, I'd humbly suggest that instead of just posting about it as a status on Facebook, that perhaps you try to find a family in your neighborhood who could use a little help or pehaps donate to a local food bank anonomously. That's keeping CHRIST in Christmas!

Yes, all you need do is to change your orientation and have faith in the Lord Jesus Christ that He can make you whole, change your status, and add value to your destiny.

It is possible, it seems, to affirm everything the creed says—especially Jesus’s “divine” status and his bodily resurrection—but to know nothing of what the gospel writers were trying to say. Something is seriously wrong here.

While in the past people of rank or status were those and only those who took risks, who had the downside for their actions, and heroes were those who did so for the sake of others, today the exact reverse is taking place. We are witnessing the rise of a new class of inverse heroes, that is, bureaucrats, bankers, Davos-attending members of the I.A.N.D. (International Association of Name Droppers), and academics with too much power and no real downside and/or accountability. They game the system while citizens pay the price.

Some rules have existed since the creation of the Earth. They do not need to come out of my mouth. They have always existed. There has always been a rule against using a Slip n’ Slide indoors. There has always been a rule against lying down in the mouth of a dead relative.

It is the lies he's telling her - as he has been, Nassun understands suddenly, her whole life - that really break her heart. He's said that he loves her, after all, but that obviously isn't true. He cannot love an orogene, and that is what she is. He cannot be an orogene's father, and that is why he constantly demands she be something other than what she is.

A MAN WITH BOY, A MAN WITH GIRL, A MAN WITH MONEY, A MAN WITH STATUS ARE NOT BETTER THAN A MAN WITH FRIEND

Stripping the rich of their plumage is undiluted disgrace. The poor who were at their service are now opportune to smear their plummeted status.

It's not your status as an orogene that bothers them. It's that you haven't yet proven yourself. (It is surprising how refreshing this feels. Being judged by what you do, and not what you are.)

Note, though, something else of great significance about the whole Christian theology of resurrection, ascension, second coming, and hope. This theology was born out of confrontation with the political authorities, out of the conviction that Jesus was already the true Lord of the world who would one day be manifested as such. The rapture theology avoids this confrontation because it suggests that Christians will miraculously be removed from this wicked world. Perhaps that is why such theology is often Gnostic in its tendency towards a private dualistic spirituality and towards a political laissez-faire quietism. And perhaps that is partly why such theology with its dreams of Armageddon, has quietly supported the political status quo in a way that Paul would never have done.

What possible rationale demanded this many debased representations of the recently freed Black people produced in the final third of the nineteenth century? How many ways can one call a woman or a man a "n*****" or a "c***"? How many watermelons does a person have to devour, how many chickens does an individual have to steal, to make the point that Black people are manifestly, by nature, both gluttons and thieves? Why in the world was it necessary to produce tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of these separate and distinct racist images to demean the status of the newly freed slaves in a set of fixed types and motifs, which reached their perverse apex with the characterizations of Black people during Reconstruction in The Birth of a Nation, in the figures of deracinated Black elected officials and, of course, the black male as rapist? The explanation comes in three words: justifying Jim Crow, or, in three different words, disenfranchising Black voters

There is no gainsaying the fact that this suggested program will strike most people as impossibly “radical” and “unrealistic”; any suggestion for changing the status quo, no matter how slight, can always be considered by someone as too radical, so that the only thoroughgoing escape from the charge of impracticality is never to advocate any change whatever in existing conditions. But to take this approach is to abandon human reason, and to drift in animal- or plant-like manner with the tide of events.

[Neurotic] pride is both so vulnerable and so precious that it also must be protected in the future. The neurotic may build an elaborate system of avoidances in the hope of circumventing future hurts. This too is a process that goes on automatically. He is not aware of wanting to avoid an activity because it might hurt his pride. He just avoids it, often without even being aware that he is. The process pertains to activities, to associations with people, and it may put a check on realistic strivings and efforts. If it is widespread it can actually cripple a person's life. He does not embark on any serious pursuits commensurate with his gifts lest he fail to be a brilliant success. He would like to write or to paint and does not dare to start. He does not dare to approach girls lest they reject him. [...] He withdraws from social contacts lest he be self-conscious. So, according to his economic status, he either does nothing worthwhile or sticks to a mediocre job and restricts his expenses rigidly. In more than one way he lives beneath his means. In the long run this makes it necessary for him to withdraw farther from others, because he cannot face the fact of lagging behind his age group and therefore shuns comparisons or questions from anybody about his work. In order to endure life he must now entrench himself more firmly in his private fantasy-world. But, since all these measures are more a camouflage than a remedy for his pride, he may start to cultivate his neuroses because the neurosis with a capital N then becomes a precious alibi for the lack of accomplishment.

Code for Humanity (The Sonnet) There is no such thing as ethical hacking, If it were ethical they wouldn't be teaching it. Because like it or not ethics is bad for business, They teach hacking so they could use it for profit. With the right sequence of zeros and ones we could, Equalize all bank accounts of planet earth tomorrow. Forget about what glass house gargoyles do with tech, How will you the human use tech to eliminate sorrow? In a world full of greedy edisons, be a humble Tesla, Time remembers no oligarch kindly no matter the status. Only innovators who get engraved in people's heart, Are the ones who innovate with a humane purpose. Innovate to bridge the gap, not exploit and cater to disparities. In a world run by algorithms of greed write a code that helps 'n heals.

It is already the fashion to diminish Eliot by calling him derivative, the mouthpiece of Pound, and so forth; and yet if one wanted to understand the apocalypse of early modernism in its true complexity it would be Eliot, I fancy, who would demand one's closest attention. He was ready to rewrite the history of all that interested him in order to have past and present conform; he was a poet of apocalypse, of the last days and the renovation, the destruction of the earthly city as a chastisement of human presumption, but also of empire. Tradition, a word we especially associate with this modernist, is for him the continuity of imperial deposits; hence the importance in his thought of Virgil and Dante. He saw his age as a long transition through which the elect must live, redeeming the time. He had his demonic host, too; the word 'Jew' remained in lower case through all the editions of the poems until the last of his lifetime, the seventy-fifth birthday edition of 1963. He had a persistent nostalgia for closed, immobile hierarchical societies. If tradition is, as he said in After Strange Gods--though the work was suppressed--'the habitual actions, habits and customs' which represent the kinship 'of the same people living in the same place' it is clear that Jews do not have it, but also that practically nobody now does. It is a fiction, a fiction cousin to a myth which had its effect in more practical politics. In extenuation it might be said that these writers felt, as Sartre felt later, that in a choice between Terror and Slavery one chooses Terror, 'not for its own sake, but because, in this era of flux, it upholds the exigencies proper to the aesthetics of Art.' The fictions of modernist literature were revolutionary, new, though affirming a relation of complementarity with the past. These fictions were, I think it is clear, related to others, which helped to shape the disastrous history of our time. Fictions, notably the fiction of apocalypse, turn easily into myths; people will live by that which was designed only to know by. Lawrence would be the writer to discuss here, if there were time; apocalypse works in Woman in Love, and perhaps even in Lady Chatterley's Lover, but not n Apocalypse, which is failed myth. It is hard to restore the fictive status of what has become mythical; that, I take it, is what Mr. Saul Bellow is talking about in his assaults on wastelandism, the cant of alienation. In speaking of the great men of early modernism we have to make very subtle distinctions between the work itself, in which the fictions are properly employed, and obiter dicta in which they are not, being either myths or dangerous pragmatic assertions. When the fictions are thus transformed there is not only danger but a leak, as it were, of reality; and what we feel about. all these men at times is perhaps that they retreated inso some paradigm, into a timeless and unreal vacuum from which all reality had been pumped. Joyce, who was a realist, was admired by Eliot because he modernized myth, and attacked by Lewis because he concerned himself with mess, the disorders of common perception. But Ulysses ,alone of these great works studies and develops the tension between paradigm and reality, asserts the resistance of fact to fiction, human freedom and unpredictability against plot. Joyce chooses a Day; it is a crisis ironically treated. The day is full of randomness. There are coincidences, meetings that have point, and coincidences which do not. We might ask whether one of the merits of the book is not its lack of mythologizing; compare Joyce on coincidence with the Jungians and their solemn concordmyth, the Principle of Synchronicity. From Joyce you cannot even extract a myth of Negative Concord; he shows us fiction fitting where it touches. And Joyce, who probably knew more about it than any of the others, was not at tracted by the intellectual opportunities or the formal elegance of fascism.

In the chapter entitled “You Can’t Pray a Lie” in Twain’s beloved novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck Finn has helped hide Miss Watson’s runaway slave, Jim. But Huck thought he was committing a sin in helping a runaway slave. Huck had learned in Sunday school “that people that acts as I’d been acting … goes to everlasting fire.” So in an act of repentance in order to save his soul, Huck wrote a note to Miss Watson and told her where she could find her runaway slave. Now Huck was ready to pray his “sinner’s prayer” and “get saved.” I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off but laid the paper down and set there thinking—thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, ‘stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had smallpox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world and the only he’s got now; and then I happened to look around and see the paper. It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up. It was awful thoughts and awful words but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming.1 Huck Finn had been shaped by the Christianity he’d found in his Missouri Sunday school—a Christianity focused on heaven in the afterlife while preserving the status quo of the here and now. Huck thought that helping Jim escape from slavery was a sin, because that’s what he had been taught. He knew he couldn’t ask God to forgive him until he was ready to “repent” and betray Jim. Huck didn’t want to go to hell; he wanted to be saved. But Huck loved his friend more, so he was willing to go to hell in order to save his friend from slavery.

Quant à l’oeuvre, les problèmes qu’elle soulève sont plus difficiles encore. En apparence pourtant, quoi de plus simple ? Une somme de textes qui peuvent être dénotés par le signe d’un nom propre. Or cette dénotation (même si on laisse de côté les problèmes de l’attribution) n’est pas une fonction homogène : le nom d’un auteur dénote-t-il de la même façon un texte qu’il a lui-même publié sous son nom, un texte qu’il a présenté sous un pseudonyme, un autre qu’on aura retrouvé après sa mort à l’état d’ébauche, un autre encore qui n’est qu’un griffonnage, un carnet de notes, un « papier » ? La constitution d’une oeuvre complète ou d’un opus suppose un certain nombre de choix qu’il n’est pas facile de justifier ni même de formuler : suffit-il d’ajouter aux textes publiés par l’auteur ceux qu’il projetait de donner à l’impression, et qui ne sont restés inachevés quer par le fait de la mort ? Faut-il intégrer aussi tout ce qui est brouillon, fait de la mort ? Faut-il intégrer aussi tout ce qui est brouillon, premier dessein, corrections et ratures des livres ? Faut-il ajouter les esquisses abandonnées? Et quel status donner aux lettres, aux notes, aux conversations rapportées, aux propos transcrits par les auditeurs, bref à cet immense fourmillement de traces verbales qu’un individu laisse autour de lui au moment de mourir, et qui parlent dans un entrecroisement indéfini tant de langages différents ? En tout cas le nom « Mallarmé » ne se réfère pas de la même façon aux thèmes anglais, aux trauctions d’Edgar Poe, aux poèmes, ou aux réponses à des enquêtes ; de même, ce n’est pas le même rapport qui existe entre le nom de Nietzsche d’une part et d’autre par les autobiographies de jeunesse, les dissertations scolaires, les articles philologiques, Zarathoustra, Ecce Homo, les lettres, les dernières cartes postales signées par « Dionysos » ou « Kaiser Nietzsche », les innombrables carnets où s’enchevêtrent les notes de blanchisserie et les projets d’aphorismes. En fait, si on parle si volontiers et sans s’interroger davantage de l’« oeuvre » d’un auteur, c’est qu’on la suppose définie par une certaine fonction d’expression. On admet qu’il doit y avoir un niveau (aussi profond qu’il est nécessaire de l’imaginer) auquel l’oeuvre se révèle, en tous ses fragments, même les plus minuscules et les plus inessentiels, comme l’expression de la pensée, ou de l’expérience, ou de l’imagination, ou de l’inconscient de l’auteur, ou encore des déterminations historiques dans lesquelles il était pris. Mais on voit aussitôt qu’une pareille unité, loin d’être donné immédiatement, est constituée par une opération ; que cette opération est interprétative (puisqu’elle déchiffre, dans le texte, la transcription de quelque chose qu’il cache et qu’il manifeste à la fois); qu’enfin l’opération qui détermine l’opus, en son unité, et par conséquent l’oeuvre elle-même ne sera pas la même s’il s’agit de l’auteur du Théâtre et son double ou de l’auteur du Tractatus et donc, qu’ici et là ce n’est pas dans le même sens qu’on parlera d’une « oeuvre ». L’oeuvre ne peut être considérée ni comme unité immédiate, ni comme une unité certaine, ni comme une unité homogène.

Paul’s strong, clear teaching at exactly this point both on the new status of the believer as having died and risen with Jesus Christ and on the new gift of God to the believer, the gift which Paul calls the holy spirit. It is astonishing to see how much of the debate has been conducted without the help of these two categories, as though the ‘doctrine of justification’ had to proceed with minimalist theological tools in order to be pure. You might as well try to play Wagner on a tin whistle.

Anglos dominated the prisoner population in 1977 and did not lose their plurality until 1988. Meanwhile, absolute numbers grew across the board—with the total number of those incarcerated approximately doubling during each interval. African American prisoners surpassed all other groups in 1988, but by 1995, they had been overtaken by Latinos; however, Black people have the highest rate of incarceration of any racial/ethnic grouping in California, or, for that matter, in the United States (see also Bonczar and Beck 1997). TABLE 4 CDC PRISONER POPULATION BY RACE/ETHNICITY The structure of new laws, intersecting with the structure of the burgeoning relative surplus population, and the state’s concentrated use of criminal laws in the Southland, produced a remarkable racial and ethnic shift in the prison population. Los Angeles is the primary county of commitment. Most prisoners are modestly educated men in the prime of life: 88 percent are between 19 and 44 years old. Less than 45 percent graduated from high school or read at the ninth-grade level; one in four is functionally illiterate. And, finally, the percentage of prisoners who worked six months or longer for the same employer immediately before being taken into custody has declined, from 54.5 percent in 1982 to 44 percent in 2000 (CDC, Characteristics of Population, various years). TABLE 5 CDC COMMITMENTS BY CONTROLLING OFFENSE (%) At the bottom of the first and subsequent waves of new criminal legislation lurked a key contradiction. On the one hand, the political rhetoric, produced and reproduced in the media, concentrated on the need for laws and prisons to control violence. “Crime” and “violence” seemed to be identical. However, as table 5 shows, there was a significant shift in the controlling (or most serious) offenses for those committed to the CDC, from a preponderance of violent offenses in 1980 to nonviolent crimes in 1995. More to the point, the controlling offenses for more than half of 1995’s commitments were nonviolent crimes of illness or of illegal income producing activity: drug use, drug sales, burglary, motor vehicle theft. The outcome of the first two years of California’s broadly written “three strikes” law presents a similar picture: in the period March 1994–January 1996, 15 percent of controlling offenses were violent crimes, 31 percent were drug offenses, and 41 percent were crimes against property (N = 15,839) (Christoper Davis et al. 1996). The relative surplus population comes into focus in these numbers. In 1996, 43 percent of third-strike prisoners were Black, 32.4 percent Latino, and 24.6 percent Anglo. The deliberate intensification of surveillance and arrest in certain areas, combined with novel crimes of status, drops the weight of these numbers into particular places. The chair of the State Task Force on Youth Gang Violence expressed the overlap between presumptions of violence and the exigencies of everyday reproduction when he wrote: “We are talking about well-organized, drug-dealing, dangerously armed and profit-motivated young hoodlums who are engaged in the vicious crimes of murder, rape, robbery, extortion and kidnapping as a means of making a living” (Philibosian 1986: ix; emphasis added).

1.1M    ./scripts 58M     ./cloud9 74M     . You can also use tee to write the output to several files at the same time, as shown in this example: root@beaglebone:/opt# du ‐d1 ‐h | tee /tmp/1.txt /tmp/2.txt /tmp/3.txt Filter Commands (from sort to xargs) There are filtering commands, each of which provides a useful function: sort: This command has several options, including (‐r) sorts in reverse; (‐f) ignores case; (‐d) uses dictionary sorting, ignoring punctuation; (‐n) numeric sort; (‐b) ignores blank space; (‐i) ignores control characters; (‐u) displays duplicate lines only once; and (‐m) merges multiple inputs into a single output. wc (word count): This can be used to calculate the number of words, lines, or characters in a stream. For example: root@beaglebone:/tmp# wc < animals.txt  4  4 18 This has returned that there are 4 lines, 4 words, and 18 characters. You can select the values independently by using (‐l) for line count; (‐w) for word count; (‐m) for character count; and (‐c) for the byte count (which would also be 18 in this case). head: Displays the first lines of the input. This is useful if you have a very long file or stream of information and you want to examine only the first few lines. By default it will display the first 10 lines. You can specify the number of lines using the ‐n option. For example, to get the first five lines of output of the dmesg command (display message or driver message), which displays the message buffer of the kernel, you can use the following: root@beaglebone:/tmp# dmesg | head ‐n5   [    0.000000] Booting Linux on physical CPU 0x0   [    0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpuset   [    0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpu   [    0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpuacct   [    0.000000] Linux version 3.13.4-bone5(root@imx6q-sabrelite-1gb-0) tail: This is just like head except that it displays the last lines of a file or stream. Using it in combination with dmesg provides useful output, as shown here: root@beaglebone:/tmp# dmesg | tail ‐n2   [   36.123251] libphy: 4a101000.mdio:00 - Link is Up - 100/Full   [   36.123421] IPv6:ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): eth0:link becomes ready grep: A very powerful filter command that can parse lines using text and regular expressions. You can use this command to filter output with options, including (‐i) ignore case; (‐m 5) stop after five matches; (‐q) silent, will exit with return status 0 if any matches are found; (‐e) specify a pattern; (‐c) print a count of matches; (‐o) print only the matching text; and (‐l) list the filename of the file containing the match. For example, the following examines the dmesg output for the first three occurrences of the string “usb,” using ‐i to ignore case: root@beaglebone:/tmp# dmesg |grep ‐i ‐m3 usb   [    1.948582] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbfs   [    1.948637] usbcore: registered new interface driver hub   [    1.948795] usbcore: registered new device driver usb You can combine pipes together. For example, you get the exact same output by using head and displaying only the first three lines of the grep output: root@beaglebone:/tmp# dmesg |grep ‐i usb |head ‐n3   [    1.948582] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbfs   [    1.948637] usbcore: registered new interface driver hub   [    1.948795] usbcore: registered new device driver usb xargs: This is a very powerful filter command that enables you to construct an argument list that you use to call another command or tool. In the following example, a text file args.txt that contains three strings is used to create three new files. The output of cat is piped to xargs, where it passes the three strings as arguments to the touch command, creating three new files a.txt, b.txt,

Writing about half a century ago, Palmer and Perkins had opined, 'Although international relations has emerged from its earlier status as a poor relation of political science and history, it is still far from being a well organized discipline.' This position has certainly changed over the last 50 years.

The Flying Saucers Are Real. New York, N.Y.: Fawcett Publication, Inc., 1950.

copied it because just after that, they established G.E.P.A.N. under the gendarmerie. One French army source, it was recently confirmed, who knew about Assessment, was

They have just concluded their business in the latest town, where Itempas nearly drowned trying to help a fishing boat haul in its catch with old fraying nets and a captain who did not heed the dire weather reports. Because other mortals’ lives were at stake, Itempas could use magic to save them, translocating everyone from the boat to the shore just as the mast sank beneath the waves. As a crowd gathers ’round to exclaim over the miracle of survivors, and to shout at the captain who sits ashamed nearby, Glee goes to her father, who stands watching all of this with a sterner-than-usual set to his face. There is more to it than the captain’s negligence, Glee understands. The boat’s nets were frayed because the captain could barely afford to keep his business afloat. His business was in danger because the price of fish is being artificially controlled by the Nobles’ Consortium in order to please several of the wealthier islander merchants, who run large fish distribution enterprises. The same people who curse the captain now have happily bought the cheap fish that made him so desperate for just one more catch. Now the man has lost his livelihood altogether, as have his crew members—but the price of fish will stay low, driving other captains into other storms and causing other wrecks from which there will be no magical rescue. It is painfully clear even to Glee, who has less of a jaded eye toward human foibles, that these people will never believe themselves complicit in the lives lost. They accept that this is the way the world works, in part because it is all they know and in part because it is all they wish to know. They are Itempans, probably, all of them. Comfortable with the status quo.

Princeton Tries to Explain a Drop in Jewish Enrollment; or "What is Communism?" by Yggdrasil The sine-qua-non of inner party power is a multi-cultural elite alienated from its tribal and racial kinsmen. It is the native elites - the indigenous leaders who might resist the inner party's drive for power that are always the target. ... For the reform version of communism developed by the Frankfurt School that now dominates the ‘liberal democracies" and the NWO, the masses of the nations are important as consumers ... What remains relevant to the inner party are the inner party's potential competitors, the native national elites with community ties to their brethren. In the Soviet Union, the inner party elites (using Lenin and Stalin as their cover) resorted to murder and forced resettlement to remove the native national elites, a fast, direct and brutal form of decapitation. In the "liberal democracies" the inner party uses a slower and less visibly brutal method of decapitation. Thus, in the liberal democracies of today we have "affirmative action" - a set of laws that places tremendous pressure on private businesses to displace native elites at the top with minorities who will be less plausible targets of discrimination lawsuits. These laws exist everywhere in the European world, and with the exception of the U.S. were enacted long before any significant minority constituencies (other than the inner party itself) existed to lobby for their passage. The entire program of displacement and decapitation within the liberal democracies was carefully drawn up and explained in "The Authoritarian Personality" by Theodor Adorno, et. al.(1947). It is a prescription for identifying any person who displays any bond of obligation to his own kind and the will to resist those who threaten the interests of his kind. Such "authoritarian personalities" are to be denied university admission and consigned to low status occupations, which is precisely what the laws of affirmative action and social rules of political correctness accomplish. Indeed, as I read the tables from the 1939 Soviet census published in Sanning's work [The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry by Walter N. Sanning] I recalled my own research showing that the inner party, representing 2.4% of the U.S. population comprises 28% of the student body at Harvard, while the descendants of European Christendom comprising 70% of the population supply only 18% of the students. The American Majority has been effectively displaced at Harvard. Relative to their share of the Population, they have 2.4 times fewer students than do the inner party's Afro-American coalition partners. ... The United States Department of Labor has maintained a tracking study of 12,000 young people who were between the ages of 14 and 22 in 1979 known as the National Longitudinal study of Youth ("NLSY"). The CD Roms with all the data can be purchased from Ohio State University. These data show that at each given level of IQ (all participants were tested) the income and educational attainment of the descendants of European Christendom is much lower than for Blacks, Hispanics and Inner party members of the same IQ. In what will surely be a surprise to most middle and upper middle-income Euro-Americans, the effects are most pronounced at the highest IQ levels. In other words, it is the majority elite that suffers the widest disparity in income and education when compared with Blacks, Hispanics and Inner Party members within the same IQ range. When the effects are broken down by sex, we find that among males the disparity is most pronounced in the highest IQ ranges and disappears entirely by the time you descend to the 50% mark. The widest disparity exists among the top 2% of the population (those with IQs above 130).

Thus, whether on the large scale – where Jesus as Messiah stands in for Israel, and hence (because of Israel’s representative status in God’s purposes) for the world – or on the small scale, with individual moments, the point is rammed home by all four gospels. It is not either ‘victory’ or ‘substitution’. The victory is won by Jesus dying the death of the unrighteous.

with art.” The woman wrinkles her nose a little, still grinning. “Is it parody, or serious? Maybe they meant to fight bigotry.” “Maybe so.” Bronca’s still smiling, too. Smile versus weaponized smile, in the arena of professional fuck-yous. “But our policy is based not on intentions, but outcomes.” Bronca shrugs. “There are ways to subvert stereotypes that don’t simultaneously reinforce them. Good art should be more layered than just thoughtless regurgitation of the status quo.

Financial status and popularity have no bearing on mental health. The richest person on the planet can have depression.

Word of Mouth: the Power of True Believers As everyone knows, word of mouth is the most effective advertising of all. Or, when in my cups, I have been known to say that there’s no better business to run than a cult. Trader Joe’s became a cult of the overeducated and underpaid, partly because we deliberately tried to make it a cult once we got a handle on what we were actually doing, and partly because we kept the implicit promises with our clientele. I used to work every Thanksgiving Day in one of the stores. They only let me bag, because I had lost all my checker skills. One Thanksgiving, a woman came in and asked for bourbon. I told her that we had none, because we had not been able to make the right kind of deal (this was after the end of Fair Trade, when we were deep in the Mac the Knife mode). “That’s all right,” she exclaimed. “I know what you’re trying to do for us!” Note the us. There aren’t many cult retailers who successfully retain their cult status over a long period of time. A couple in California are In ’n Out Burger and Fry’s Electronics. But across America, in every town, there’s a particular donut shop, pizza parlor, bakery, greengrocer, bar, etc., that has a cult following of True Believers. The old Petrini’s of the 1950s and 1960s had that status when it came to meat. Brooks Bros had that status until the 1970s. S. S. Pierce in Boston was another. But all of them failed to keep the faith. Beware of ever betraying the True Believers! The fury of a woman scorned is nothing compared with that of a betrayed cultee.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is a United Nations-created resolution adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 2015. That gave them

no progress was made on the tension arising from the U.S. dollar’s status as both the national currency of the United States and the global reserve currency, that is, the currency used for most international transactions, which required most countries to keep a store of it on hand. The U.S. Federal Reserve thus acted as both the country’s and the world’s central bank; the problem in the eyes of many resulted from the fact that the world had no oversight or control over the U.S. central bank or U.S. economic policy more broadly.

The Christian doctrine of the incarnation was never intended to be about the elevation of a human being to divine status. That’s what, according to some Romans, happened to the emperors after they died, or even before. The Christian doctrine is all about a different sort of God — a God who was so different to normal expectations that he could, completely appropriately, become human in, and as, the man Jesus of Nazareth. To say that Jesus is in some sense God is of course to make a startling statement about Jesus. It is also to make a stupendous claim about God.

The question is not whether China becomes the most powerful nation on earth, but rather, how long it will take her to achieve this status… (1958 n.n.) China… need not to fight to become the most powerful.

It’s somewhat flattering to think that despite her feral status, they actually want something of her infused into their breeding lines. Then she wonders why a part of her is trying to find value in degradation.

Future of Prepaid Instruments Merchants continue to have their closed loop wallets as an easy way for pushing refunds, a tactic for increasing customer stickiness. But with instant refund solutions, these wallets also may lose their charm. Only a few types of prepaid cards have some value: Gift Cards (because these are a lazy person’s gifting choice), Forex cards (Quintessential for overseas trips) and Specialised cards (Sodexo). But this status is changing with the growth of a particular sector – NBFC/LendingTech. As NBFC/LendingTech companies cannot issue credit cards so prepaid cards are used as instruments to lend the money (by doing just in time funding to the prepaid card). In Apr’21, RBI have issued new guidelines for prepaid cards/wallets: Balance limit is increased to Rs. 2,00,000 Interoperability among PPI instruments Cash withdrawal at ATM and POS PPI entities can set-up operations for NEFT/RTGS transfers With these new guidelines and boom in neo-banks & LendingTech companies, prepaid cards and wallets may get another shot at not just revival but a remarkable growth. Let’s wait and watch!

It was this gap between the truth of modern-day Russia and Putin’s insistence on its superpower status, I thought, that helped account for the country’s increasingly combative foreign relations. Much of the ire was directed at us: In public remarks, Putin became sharply critical of American policy. When U.S.-backed initiatives came before the U.N. Security Council, he made sure Russia blocked them or watered them down—particularly anything touching on human rights. More consequential were Putin’s escalating efforts to prevent former Soviet bloc countries, now independent, from breaking free of Russia’s orbit. Our diplomats routinely received complaints from Russia’s neighbors about instances of intimidation, economic pressure, misinformation campaigns, covert electioneering, contributions to pro-Russian political candidates, or outright bribery. In

AB-PINACA is a compound that was first identified as a component of synthetic cannabis products in Japan in 2012. It was originally developed by Pfizer in 2009 as an analgesic medication. AB-PINACA acts as a potent agonist for the CB1 receptor (Ki = 2.87 nM, EC50 = 1.2 nM) and CB2 receptor (Ki = 0.88 nM, EC50 = 2.5 nM) and fully substitutes for Δ9-THC in rat discrimination studies, while being 1.5x more potent. There have been a number of reported cases of deaths and hospitalizations in relation to this synthetic cannabinoid. Legal status: - AB-PINACA is an Anlage II controlled substance in Germany as of November 2014. - It is listed in the Fifth Schedule of the Misuse of Drugs Act and so is illegal in Singapore, as of May 2015. - It is a Schedule / controlled substance in the United States. - China: It is a controlled substance in China as of October 2015 aswell. - In France, It is a controlled substance as of March 2017.

Some become antifragile at the expense of others by getting the upside (or gains) from volatility, variations, and disorder and exposing others to the downside risks of losses or harm. And such antifragility-at-the-cost-of-fragility-of-others is hidden—given the blindness to antifragility by the Soviet-Harvard intellectual circles, this asymmetry is rarely identified and (so far) never taught. Further, as we discovered during the financial crisis that started in 2008, these blowup risks-to-others are easily concealed owing to the growing complexity of modern institutions and political affairs. While in the past people of rank or status were those and only those who took risks, who had the downside for their actions, and heroes were those who did so for the sake of others, today the exact reverse is taking place. We are witnessing the rise of a new class of inverse heroes, that is, bureaucrats, bankers, Davos-attending members of the I.A.N.D. (International Association of Name Droppers), and academics with too much power and no real downside and/or accountability. They game the system

The word he hated most in the world was “justice.” Which wasn’t to say he didn’t know the difference between good and evil—but he understood that rather than simplistic morality, most conflict in the world arose from differences of opinion, with both sides raising the flag of justice and claiming to be on the side of reason. This allowed them to justify the most underhanded means as “a necessary evil” to defeat the other side—the law of the jungle, essentially. N had a deep understanding of this. He had money, status, power, and talent, so he could do pretty much whatever he wanted and other people would see him as an avatar of “justice”—but he knew that keeping others down in the name of justice is another form of bullying.

My status as an untouchable feels so terrible that something deep inside me finally lets go of it, of all identity, of all attempts to prove or please or control anyone at all. At that moment, I rediscover the stillness in my own heart of hearts. Then I feel its connection to the Stillness all around me, the gorgeous, blissful Stillness that holds every heart, every mind, every tree and rock in its infinitely loving embrace. I am here. Always. I am always right here.

As we have seen, the establishment of the early state and the beginning of archaic society destroyed the uneasy egalitarianism of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years of hominin evolution, but in so doing made possible much larger and more complex societies. A dramatic symbolism that combined with social power, enacted in entirely new forms of ritual, involving, centrally, sacrifice -even human sacrifice- as a concrete expression of radical status difference.

A man’s status in both business and social life depends mainly upon what he has done to develop his brain. As a chemical product, a man is said to be worth about four shillings. That is all that Sir Isaac Newton was worth. Or, Shakespeare. Or, Kelvin. As a body, a man may be worth about £3 a week or possibly £5. That is the value of muscle and bone. But as a brain, a man may be worth millions of pounds. If he wants to put his price up, he must make a better use of his head.

Undercover cops, bodies in lakes, and paying off the police was indictment list status. This

It is precisely because the principle of the transcendence of the object is completely independent of the existential status of the objects themselves and, thus, independent of the question whether they are produced by us or subsist on their own―whether they are fictions or real beings―that the fact of the consciousness of transcendence is not even remotely qualified to solve the problem of reality. This has been misunderstood equally by W. Freytag, Edith Landmann, P. Linke, and even by Husserl himself. Indeed, people have wanted to speak of an intentional realism (E. Landmann) in contrast to Critical Realism and to all other forms of realism. N. Hartmann was quite correct in emphasizing, in opposition to this, that the projection [*Hinausragen*] of the intentional object beyond the content of consciousness and its act cannot make the least contribution to solving the problem of realism. If something is an intentional object, we cannot recognize from this fact alone, whether it is real or not. If the perceived cherry, the conceived triangle, a friend’s visit anticipated in a dream, Little Red Riding Hood, a freely planned project, or a felt value, have entirely different characteristics and predicates than do the mental processes and the actual contents in which these objects appear, then the distinction between intentional and mental holds equally of both the real and the irreal. *Thus, the problem of what is real is not touched by the fact of the transcendence of the object*, and *percipi est esse*, in Berkeley’s psychologistic sense, is laid to rest. This also frustrates attempts, such as Hume’s in his *Treatise*, to derive being-an-object in general―an object as distinguished from an idea―from a psychogenetic process in which the very ideas through which this psychogenetic process is supposed to be accomplished are themselves reified [*verdinglicht*]." ―from_Idealism and Realism_

What is gained by the transcendence of the object is the identifiability of the object in a plurality of acts and the identifiability of what is thought by several individuals. This identifiability is not restricted to ideal objects, which are generated according to a definite operational law and are therefore producible by everyone out of the same material of intuition which is given prior to any particular sense-experience. The identifiability obtains in precisely the same way for objects of myth and folklore, of belief and artistic fantasy. Goethe’s Faust, Apollo, and Little Red Riding Hood can be identified by several individuals and are the objects of common, universally valid statements. Indeed, exact identity of the nature of the object in question and evidential knowledge of this identity can occur *only* in the case of ideal objects. Our certainty that we all think the same number 3 in the strictest identity of its nature is much more evident than that we all think the same real object, a tree, for instance. In the case of real objects we can actually prove that it is impossible for the momentary content in which the object is represented and thought to be exactly the same in a plurality of acts and for many individuals. The only other contribution made by the fact of the consciousness of transcendence, so long overlooked in recent philosophy, to the problem of reality is this: the acts in which this consciousness is present can bring the givenness of reality, of which we shall speak later, into “objective” form, and can therefore elevate that which is given in this way as real to the status of a real “object.” But with this, the contribution of the consciousness of transcendence to the problem of reality is at an end. Although N. Hartmann made the same point with respect to Paul Linke’s otherwise shrewd and pertinent comments on his doctrine of reality, still we should emphasize that the transcendence of the object does not *exclude* the reality of the object, not even of the *same* object in the strict sense of “same.” ―from_Idealism and Realism_

[I]n the realm of emotional freedom and conscious decision making a penniless hermit may enjoy much more latitude than a status-addicted millionaire who, still compensating for unconscious childhood hurts, is driven by an insatiable need to be feared or admired.

others met (if at all) only virtually, whose institutional status

There is still slavery in Africa to this day. “[A]n estimated 9.2 million” Africans “live in servitude without the choice to do so” at “the highest rate. . . . in the world,” according to the 2018 Global Slavery Index. Slavery is “especially prevalent” in Eritrea and Mauritania, countries noted for the collusion of the government in the practice. In Eritrea, the “one-party state of president Isaias Afwerki has overseen a notorious national conscription service” for forced labor. In Mauritania, “the world’s last country to abolish slavery,” “the situation is more acute,” with the “black Haratin group” inheriting its slave status.51

Look more closely at these prosperous ideopolises and the picture becomes even more familiar. The symbolic embodiment of all this innovative postindustrial economic activity was none other than Frederick Dutton’s countercultural hero, hymned now as the very embodiment of the New Economy. Youth radicalism became the language in which the winners assured us that they cared about our individuality and that all their fine new digital products were designed strictly to liberate the world. Remember? “Burn down business-as-usual,” screamed a typical management text of the year 2000 called The Cluetrain Manifesto. Set up barricades. Cripple the tanks. Topple the statues of heroes too long dead into the street.… Sound familiar? You bet it does. And the message has been the same all along, from Paris in ’68 to the Berlin Wall, from Warsaw to Tiananmen Square: Let the kids rock and roll!3 The connection between counterculture and corporate power was a typical assertion of the New Economy era, and what it implied was that rebellion was not about overturning elites, it was about encouraging business enterprise. I myself mocked this idea in voluminous detail at the time. But it did not wane with the dot-com crash; indeed, it has never retreated at all. From Burning Man to Apple’s TV commercials, it is all over the place today. Think of the rock stars who showed up for Facebook billionaire Sean Parker’s wedding in Big Sur, or the rock ’n’ roll museum founded by Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen in Seattle, or the transformation of San Francisco, hometown of the counterculture, into an upscale suburb of Silicon Valley. Wherever you once found alternative and even adversarial culture, today you find people of merit and money and status. And, of course, you also find Democrats.

Here’s a culture war strategy conservative Christians should get behind: have more children and disciple them like crazy. Strongly consider having more children than you think you can handle. You don’t have to be a fertility maximalist to recognize that children are always lauded as a blessing in the Bible… [I]n the not-too-distant future, the only couples replacing themselves in America will be religious couples. Although there are many good reasons to have a baby, at the end of the day, as Jonathan Last maintains, “there’s only one good reason to go through the trouble a second time: Because you believe, in some sense, that God wants you to.” The basic reason countries stop having children is because they’ve come to see offspring as a liability rather than a source of hope. As Christians, we know better. Do you want to rebel against the status quo? Do you want people to ask you for a reason for the hope that is in you (1 Peter 3:15)? Tote your brood of children through Target. There is almost nothing more counter-cultural than having more children. And once we have those children, there is almost nothing more important than catechizing them in the faith, developing their moral framework, and preparing them to be deeply compassionate lovers of God and lovers of people and relentlessly biblical lovers of truth... I understand that many couples will be unable to have all the children they want to have. We have to allow for God to work in mysterious ways that we would not have planned. And yet, in so far as we are able, let us welcome new life... Presidents and Supreme Court justices will come and go. A child’s soul will last forever. The future belongs to the fecund. It’s time for happy warriors who seek to “renew the city” and “win the culture war” by investing in their local church, focusing on the family, and bringing the kingdom to bear on the world, one baby at a time.

White-supremacist-patriarchal-heteronormative-capitalism socializes us to aspire to “good Negro” status. It convince little Black girls from East Oakland to graduate from Howard—summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, to pledge the oldest Black sorority, to earn PhDs, to be in the “right” rooms…” - Melina Abdullah

We must not reach for a status that is only bestowed by a white supremacist system that really despises us. We must resist. To claim not only our alignment with n****s, but our identity as N****s ourselves is the greatest act of defiance; it is our sacred duty as descendants of enslaved people, freedom fighters, street corner hustlers, and our own grandparents. Ultimately N**** theory— and praxis— is what will get us free.” - Melina Abdullah

To embrace the ascension is to heave a sigh of relief, to give up the struggle to be God (and with it the inevitable despair at our constant failure), and to enjoy our status as creatures: image-bearing creatures, but creatures nonetheless.

Routine assessments of agricultural soils rarely extend beyond the top 10 to 15 centimeters and are generally limited to determining the status of a small number of elements, notably phosphorus (P) and nitrogen (N). Overemphasis on these nutrients has masked the myriad of microbial interactions that would normally take place in soil; interactions that are necessary for carbon sequestration, precursor to the formation of fertile topsoil.

Libertarians are not supposed to be egalitarians… And yet there it is: egalitarianism has become the unspoken but very real driving force in the current Official movement. Once group egalitarianism becomes the norm, other groups than blacks will clamor for the privileges of ‘victim status.’ Sure enough, that jostling for victim privilege is now the major hallmark of American politics. The Official libertarians have so far not displayed enormous affinity for Latino or disabled ‘rights,’ but they are highly enthusiastic about the ‘rights’ of women and feminism generally. And in particular, libertarians have displayed great fervor for gay ‘rights’ and stress the evils of ‘discrimination’ against gays. So ardently are libertarians devoted to gay rights that the word ‘libertarian’ in the public press has now become almost a code word for champion of gay rights. Only his pro-gay agenda accounts for the ardor of Republican libertarians toward Massachusetts Governor Weld, whom they embrace as, in the current slogan, ‘fiscally conservative but socially tolerant.’ (The ‘fiscally conservative’ refers to a one-time budget cut followed, the next time around, by a compensatory budget increase.) ’Socially tolerant,’ in the current atmosphere, means a devotion to the entire Left cultural agenda, from gay rights to compulsory multicultural propaganda and condomization in the public schools.

The first basic income pilot in a developing country was implemented in the small Namibian village of Otjivero-Omitara in 2008–9, covering about 1,000 people.40 The study was carried out by the Namibian Basic Income Grant Coalition, with money raised from foundations and individual donations. Everyone in the village, including children but excluding over-sixties already receiving a social pension, was given a very small basic income of N$100 a month (worth US$12 at the time or about a third of the poverty line), and the outcomes compared with the previous situation. The results included better nutrition, particularly among children, improved health and greater use of the local primary healthcare centre, higher school attendance, increased economic activity and enhanced women’s status.41 The methodology would not have satisfied those favouring randomized control trials that were coming into vogue at the time. No control village was chosen to allow for the effects of external factors, in the country or economy, because those directing the pilot felt it was immoral to impose demands, in the form of lengthy surveys, on people who were being denied the benefit of the basic income grants. However, there were no reported changes in policy or outside interventions during the period covered by the pilot, and confidence in the results is justified both by the observed behaviour, and by recipients’ opinions in successive surveys. School attendance went up sharply, though there was no pressure on parents to send their children to school. The dynamics were revealing. Although the primary school was a state school, parents were required to pay a small fee for each child. Before the pilot, registration and attendance were low, and the school had too little income from fees to pay for basics, which made the school unattractive and lowered teachers’ morale. Once the cash transfers started, parents had enough money to pay school fees, and teachers had money to buy paper, pens, books, posters, paints and brushes, making the school more attractive to parents and children and raising the morale and, probably, the capacity of its teachers. There was also a substantial fall in petty economic crime such as stealing vegetables and killing small livestock for food. This encouraged villagers to plant more vegetables, buy more fertilizer and rear more livestock. These dynamic community-wide economic effects are usually overlooked in conventional evaluations, and would not be spotted if cash was given only to a random selection of individuals or households and evaluated as a randomized control trial. Another outcome, unplanned and unanticipated, was that villagers voluntarily set up a Basic Income Advisory Committee, led by the local primary school teacher and the village nurse, to advise people on how to spend or save their basic income money. The universal basic income thus induced collective action, and there was no doubt that this community activism increased the effectiveness of the basic incomes.

No matter Blood’s status, I have never had a chick be as bold as to call my phone or show up at my house. I

local 111.111.111.111 dev tun proto udp port 1194 ca /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/keys/ca.crt cert /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/keys/SERVERNAME.crt # TBD - Change SERVERNAME to your Server name key /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/keys/SERVERNAME.key # TBD - Change SERVERNAME to your Server name dh /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/keys/dh1024.pem    # TBD - Change if not using 2048 bit encryption server 10.8.0.0 255.255.255.0 ifconfig 10.8.0.1 10.8.0.2 push "route 10.8.0.1 255.255.255.255" push "route 10.8.0.0 255.255.255.0" push "route 111.111.111.111 255.255.255.0" push "dhcp-option DNS 222.222.222.222" push "redirect-gateway def1" client-to-client duplicate-cn keepalive 10 120 tls-auth /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/keys/ta.key 0 comp-lzo persist-key persist-tun user nobody group nogroup cipher AES-128-CBC log /var/log/openvpn.log status /var/log/openvpn-status.log 20 verb 1 Note: To paste in

The status meeting I’ve portrayed is not really a meeting at all; it’s a ceremony. At a real meeting, n people put their heads together to arrive at some conclusion or to take some new direction that requires the input and participation of all. Taking turns talking to the boss is not a meeting in this sense. It is, rather, a ritual that acknowledges and celebrates the bossness of the boss. There is need for ritual in business, I guess, but let’s at least understand that the weekly status meeting is not really a meeting.

Change The Status Quo In Your Family And In Your World....This Is What You're Called To Do!

Judaism, the most ritually liberal of the three main denominations (along with Orthodox and Conservative), accepted patrilineal descent as a criterion of Jewishness. This opened up new fissures with the state-sponsored Chief Rabbinate in Israel, which held fiercely to the standard of matrilineality. It also opened up broader divisions between American Jews and the State of Israel over whether those converted to Judaism by Reform—or, for that matter, Conservative—rabbis should be considered Jews under Israel’s “Law of Return,” which grants an expedited path to citizenship to Jews. Within Israel itself, debates have been vigorous about the status of hundreds of thousands of new immigrants over the past three decades or so—Ethiopians and Russians who moved to Israel but were not considered

Many investors believe that a law of finance dictates that policy allocation decisions dominate portfolio returns, relegating market timing and security selection actions to secondary status. In a 2000 study, Roger Ibbotson and Paul Kaplan survey a number of articles on the contribution of asset allocation to investment returns. The authors note that “[o]n average, policy accounted for a little more than all of total return,” implying that security selection and market timing make no material contribution to returns.1 In another nod to the centrality of the asset-allocation decision, Ibbotson and Kaplan conclude that “. . . approximately 90 percent of the variability of a fund’s return across time is explained by the variability of policy returns.”2

Waarom heb ik het over 'wit' in plaats van over de oude, bekendere term 'blank'? Simpel, de term 'blank' is tijdens de gehele koloniale geschiedenis door witte mensen gebruikt als het tegengestelde van mensen die werden aangesproken met het n-woord. Daar waar zwarte mensen een inferieure, niet-menselijke status hadden, was de 'blanke' persoon het toppunt van civilisatie. Daarom wil ik, en vele anderen met mij, afrekenen met zowel het n-woord als het woord 'blank'. Het zijn overblijfselen uit het Nederlandse koloniale verleden. Het idee dat 'blank' een neutrale term is, is dus allesbehalve waar. 

The unlettered does his utmost to distance a sign-post because most host almost a legion of inexplicable inscriptions. The illiterate is considerate of his deficiency and makes a deliberate effort commensurate with his status lest he is deemed obdurate.

Sin” is not just “doing things God has forbidden.” It is, as we saw, the failure to be fully functioning, God-reflecting human beings. That is what Paul sums up in 3:23: all sinned and fell short of God’s glory. He is referring to the glory that, as true humans, they should have possessed. This is the “glory” spoken of in Psalm 8: the status and responsibility of looking after God’s world on his behalf.

One central biblical term to refer both to the divine covenant faithfulness and to the status of the covenant member is tsedaqah, in Greek dikaiosynē, regularly (if potentially misleadingly) translated into English as “righteousness” or “justice.

But what then is this “righteousness of God”? In Israel’s scriptures, to which Paul explicitly appeals in 3:21b (“the law and the prophets bore witness to it”), God’s “righteousness” is not simply God’s status of being morally upright. It is, more specifically, God’s faithfulness to the covenant—the covenant not only with Abraham and Israel, but through Israel to the wider world.

Further, as we discovered during the financial crisis that started in 2008, these blowup risks-to-others are easily concealed owing to the growing complexity of modern institutions and political affairs. While in the past people of rank or status were those and only those who took risks, who had the downside for their actions, and heroes were those who did so for the sake of others, today the exact reverse is taking place. We are witnessing the rise of a new class of inverse heroes, that is, bureaucrats, bankers, Davos-attending members of the I.A.N.D. (International Association of Name Droppers), and academics with too much power and no real downside and/or accountability. They game the system while citizens pay the price. At no point in history have so many non-risk-takers, that is, those with no personal exposure, exerted so much control. The chief ethical rule is the following: Thou shalt not have antifragility at the expense of the fragility of others.

When an evil deed is recurrent, the initial repugnance diminishes to tolerance; the tolerance transforms to acceptance. The acceptance leads to expectance. For instance, the term necessary evil confers on it the status of benevolence, hence indispensable. This is how, the unbecoming becomes the becoming and the becoming becomes the unbecoming.