“
He wears jeans, untucked shirts, and a Glock 19, and he has a big shaggy dog named Bob.
”
”
Janet Evanovich (Notorious Nineteen (Stephanie Plum, #19))
“
I wike your big muscles,” Stella whispers as she stares at Bates’ bulging bicep in awe. Jesus, I like his big muscles, too. In fact, I’d like to trace them with my tongue.
”
”
Hayley Faiman (Rough and Raw (Notorious Devils MC, #2))
“
Griffin took one step toward the big desk and swiped his arms across the entire top. Pens, papers, books, a small marbel bust, and an ink well all crashed to the floor.
Griffin leaned across the desk, his arms braced on the now-clear top, and stared into Wakefield's outraged eyes. "We seem to be under a confusion of communication. I did not come here to ask for your sisters hand. I came to tell you I will marry Hero, with or without your permission Your Grace. She has lain with me more than once. She may very well be carrying my child. And if you think I'll give up her or our babe, you have not done nearly enough research into my character or history."
Griffin pushed himself off the desk before the other man could utter a word and storde out the door.
”
”
Elizabeth Hoyt (Notorious Pleasures (Maiden Lane, #2))
“
I understood then why rock stars have such big egos: from the stage, the world is just one faceless, shirtless, obedient mass, as far as the eye can see.
”
”
Tommy Lee (The Dirt: Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band)
“
Get my daughter this college grant so she don't need no man
”
”
The Notorious B.I.G
“
My shame is as big as the earth…I once thought that I was the only man that persevered to be the friend of the white man, but it is hard for me to believe the white man anymore.” – Black Kettle
”
”
Charles River Editors (The Sand Creek Massacre: The History and Legacy of One of the Indian Wars’ Most Notorious Events)
“
Sarah Wise’s The Blackest Streets: The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum; The Coffee Trader by David Liss; Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most Liberal City by Russell Shorto; Criminal Slang: The Vernacular of the Underworld Lingo by Vincent J. Monteleone; David Maurer’s The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man; and Stealing Rembrandts: The Untold Stories of Notorious Art Heists by Anthony M. Amore and Tom Mashberg.
”
”
Leigh Bardugo (Six of Crows (Six of Crows, #1))
“
It's actually a very old archetype that trans girl stories get put into: this sort of tragic, plucky-little-orphan character who is just supposed to suffer through everything and wait, and if you're good and brave and patient (and white and rich) enough, then you get the big reward...which is that you get to be just like everybody else who is white and rich and boring. And then you marry the prince or the football player and live boringly ever after.
”
”
Kai Cheng Thom (Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars)
“
And Jesus said unto the Pharoses ‘You’ll die slow but calm. Recognize my face, so there won’t be no mistake.’” “I don’t believe Jesus said that.” I shrug. “It may have been Notorious B.I.G. I get them confused sometimes.” “Your
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”
Brock E. Deskins (Blood Conspiracy (Brooklyn Shadows, #2))
“
The room contains a few dozen living human bodies, each one a big sack of guts and fluids so highly compressed that it will squirt for a few yards when pierced. Each one is built around an armature of 206 bones connected to each other by notoriously fault-prone joints that are given to obnoxious creaking, grinding, and popping noises when they are in other than pristine condition. This structure is draped with throbbing steak, inflated with clenching air sacks, and pierced by a Gordian sewer filled with burbling acid and compressed gas and asquirt with vile enzymes and solvents produced by the many dark, gamy nuggets of genetically programmed meat strung along its length. Slugs of dissolving food are forced down this sloppy labyrinth by serialized convulsions, decaying into gas, liquid, and solid matter which must all be regularly vented to the outside world lest the owner go toxic and drop dead. Spherical, gel-packed cameras swivel in mucus-greased ball joints. Infinite phalanxes of cilia beat back invading particles, encapsulate them in goo for later disposal. In each body a centrally located muscle flails away at an eternal, circulating torrent of pressurized gravy. And yet, despite all of this, not one of these bodies makes a single sound at any time during the sultan’s speech.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon)
“
The conversation drifted to Puffy aka Sean aka P. Diddy, who had recently left Uptown Records, where he’d started as an intern, eventually becoming head of A&R. Now he already had his own record label, Bad Boy, and his star artist, the Notorious B.I.G., was all over the radio and beginning to spread all over a generation.
”
”
Mariah Carey (The Meaning of Mariah Carey)
“
Anney makes the best gravy in the county, the sweetest biscuits, and puts just enough vinegar in those greens. Glenn nodded, though the truth was he’d never had much of a taste for greens, and his well-educated mama had always told him that gravy was bad for the heart. So he was not ready for the moment when Mama pushed her short blond hair back and set that big plate of hot food down in front of his open hands. Glenn took a bite of gristly meat and gravy, and it melted between his teeth. The greens were salt sweet and fat rich. His tongue sang to his throat; his neck went loose, and his hair fell across his face. It was like sex, that food, too good to waste on the middle of the day and a roomful of men too tired to taste. He chewed, swallowed began to come alive himself. He began to feel for the first time like one of the boys, a grown man accepted by the notorious and dangerous Earle Boatwright, staring across the counter at one of the prettiest woman he’d ever seen. His face went hot, and he took a big drink of ice tea to cool himself.
”
”
Dorothy Allison (Bastard Out of Carolina)
“
Listening to the radio, I heard the story behind rocker David Lee Roth’s notorious insistence that Van Halen’s contracts with concert promoters contain a clause specifying that a bowl of M&M’s has to be provided backstage, but with every single brown candy removed, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation to the band. And at least once, Van Halen followed through, peremptorily canceling a show in Colorado when Roth found some brown M&M’s in his dressing room. This turned out to be, however, not another example of the insane demands of power-mad celebrities but an ingenious ruse. As Roth explained in his memoir, Crazy from the Heat, “Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We’d pull up with nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors—whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through. The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function.” So just as a little test, buried somewhere in the middle of the rider, would be article 126, the no-brown-M&M’s clause. “When I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl,” he wrote, “well, we’d line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error.… Guaranteed you’d run into a problem.” These weren’t trifles, the radio story pointed out. The mistakes could be life-threatening. In Colorado, the band found the local promoters had failed to read the weight requirements and the staging would have fallen through the arena floor.
”
”
Atul Gawande (The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right)
“
A 2010 HHS study of the government’s notoriously dysfunctional VAERS concluded that VAERS detects “fewer than 1 percent of vaccine injuries.
”
”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
“
My eyes slide down the frame of the notorious Dracula. He is one imposing beast. Unusually tall, with the broad shoulders of a warrior who’s worn heavy armor and spun shields in many battles. He has the face of a cruel man, with cleanly cut, angular features, but his eyes could mesmerize anyone. Big like almonds and yet shaped like an Asian’s, they exude cunning and impenetrable depth.
”
”
Ana Calin (Prince of Midnight (Dracula’s Bloodline #1))
“
Now a married woman at the age of 25, Sharon was much more than a “scatterbrain.” Like most people her age, she was very interested in politics and was a big fan of Bobby Kennedy. On the evening of June 3, 1968, during what proved to be his final fundraising tour, she attended a dinner in his honor at the home of director John Frankenheimer. That evening, she had the thrill of getting to speak to Kennedy and his wife, Ethel, just two days before he was assassinated.
”
”
Charles River Editors (Roman Polanski & Sharon Tate: The Controversial Life of the Director and Notorious Death of the Actress)
“
After a few Republicans on the Houston city council supported the Democratic majority's proposal that stalled cars be towed immediately off the city's notoriously clotted freeways, local Republican officials promised retribution. 'We're not looking for council members who are going to go along and get along,' said Jared Woodfill, chairman of the Harris County Republican Party. 'We're looking for council members who are going to stand up for conservative values.' Surely, political ideology has teetered over some high cliff when towing can be described as a 'value.' What's next, a doctrine of potholes, the water pressure credo?
”
”
Bill Bishop (The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart)
“
Hackie said, Reggie Wright Jr. told him (during a conversation at the Death Row studios in Tarzana) that the case against Snoop was destroyed when important evidence disappeared from the West Los Angeles Police Station. Wright seemed to imply that one of his friends on the LAPD had taken care of this for him, Hackie recalled.
”
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Randall Sullivan (LAbyrinth: A Detective Investigates the Murders of Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G., the Implications of Death Row Records' Suge Knight, and the Origins of the Los Angeles Police Scandal)
“
time. There’s a cosmic correlation that happens around the age of twenty-nine known to astrologers as the Saturn Return. The slow-moving planet Saturn takes twenty-nine and a half years to complete its orbit around the sun and return to the exact same spot in the sky as it was on the day you were born. The Saturn Return is notoriously disruptive—known for upheaval and thrusting things taken for granted into question. Whether or not you believe in those influences (and I take it all with a few grains of salt) it makes sense that whenever you hit that natural cusp between your extended younger years and adulthood, you can expect uncertainty and apprehension with the onrush of big change.
”
”
Leslie Odom Jr. (Failing Up: How to Take Risks, Aim Higher, and Never Stop Learning)
“
The bodyguard’s description of the shooting added a detail Poole had never heard before: That white Cadillac didn’t just pull up “alongside” the car Tupac and Suge were riding in, Alexander said, but was actually a little bit ahead of the BMW when the killer opened fire, allowing him to shoot at an angle that made it possible to avoid hitting Suge with a stray bullet.
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Randall Sullivan (LAbyrinth: A Detective Investigates the Murders of Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G., the Implications of Death Row Records' Suge Knight, and the Origins of the Los Angeles Police Scandal)
“
Ten years ago, when I was living in a small flat above an off-licence in SW1, I learned that the big house next door had been bought by the wife of the dictator of Nicaragua, Anastasio Somoza Debayle. The street was obviously going down in the world, what with the murder of the nanny Sandra Rivett by that nice Lord Lucan at number 44, and I moved out a few months later. I never met Hope Somoza, but her house became notorious in the street for a burglar alarm that went off with surprising frequency, and for the occasional parties that would cause the street to be jammed solid with Rolls—Royce, Mercedes-Benz and Jaguar limousines. Back in Managua, her husband 'Tacho' had taken a mistress, Dinorah, and Hope was no doubt trying to keep her spirits up.
”
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Salman Rushdie (The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey)
“
The lateness also became more apparent, and notorious, once I started to perform. Half of the time I was late arriving onstage. I was asked to be late. That’s a big secret about my lateness. It has to do with money. A lot of the time when people are waiting for me to appear, I am waiting myself backstage. The clubs want to make money on the booze, and because people leave as soon as I finish, they make me wait so they can sell more booze. They pay me the door money, so they need the money from the bar. That was in my contract. They wouldn’t let me go onstage even if I wanted to. In that case, I might as well turn up late, rather than hang around. And then people started to expect me to be late. It became a Grace Jones thing. There would be disappointment if everything ran smoothly.
”
”
Grace Jones (I'll Never Write My Memoirs)
“
Steve Jobs was famous for what observers called his “reality distortion field.” Part motivational tactic, part sheer drive and ambition, this field made him notoriously dismissive of phrases such as “It can’t be done” or “We need more time.” Having learned early in life that reality was falsely hemmed in by rules and compromises that people had been taught as children, Jobs had a much more aggressive idea of what was or wasn’t possible. To him, when you factored in vision and work ethic, much of life was malleable. For instance, in the design stages for a new mouse for an early Apple product, Jobs had high expectations. He wanted it to move fluidly in any direction—a new development for any mouse at that time—but a lead engineer was told by one of his designers that this would be commercially impossible. What Jobs wanted wasn’t realistic and wouldn’t work. The next day, the lead engineer arrived at work to find that Steve Jobs had fired the employee who’d said that. When the replacement came in, his first words were: “I can build the mouse.” This was Jobs’s view of reality at work. Malleable, adamant, self-confident. Not in the delusional sense, but for the purposes of accomplishing something. He knew that to aim low meant to accept mediocre accomplishment. But a high aim could, if things went right, create something extraordinary. He was Napoleon shouting to his soldiers: “There shall be no Alps!” For most of us, such confidence does not come easy. It’s understandable. So many people in our lives have preached the need to be realistic or conservative or worse—to not rock the boat. This is an enormous disadvantage when it comes to trying big things. Because though our doubts (and self-doubts) feel real, they have very little bearing on what is and isn’t possible. Our
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”
Ryan Holiday (The Obstacle is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Adversity to Advantage)
“
Sky's The Limit"
[Intro]
Good evening ladies and gentlemen
How's everybody doing tonight
I'd like to welcome to the stage, the lyrically acclaimed
I like this young man because when he came out
He came out with the phrase, he went from ashy to classy
I like that
So everybody in the house, give a warm round of applause
For the Notorious B.I.G
The Notorious B.I.G., ladies and gentlemen give it up for him y'all
[Verse 1]
A nigga never been as broke as me - I like that
When I was young I had two pair of Lees, besides that
The pin stripes and the gray
The one I wore on Mondays and Wednesdays
While niggas flirt I'm sewing tigers on my shirts, and alligators
You want to see the inside, I see you later
Here comes the drama, oh, that's that nigga with the fake, blaow
Why you punch me in my face, stay in your place
Play your position, here come my intuition
Go in this nigga pocket, rob him while his friends watching
And hoes clocking, here comes respect
His crew's your crew or they might be next
Look at they man eye, big man, they never try
So we rolled with them, stole with them
I mean loyalty, niggas bought me milks at lunch
The milks was chocolate, the cookies, butter crunch
88 Oshkosh and blue and white dunks, pass the blunts
[Hook: 112]
Sky is the limit and you know that you keep on
Just keep on pressing on
Sky is the limit and you know that you can have
What you want, be what you want
Sky is the limit and you know that you keep on
Just keep on pressing on
Sky is the limit and you know that you can have
What you want, be what you want, have what you want, be what you want
[Verse 2]
I was a shame, my crew was lame
I had enough heart for most of them
Long as I got stuff from most of them
It's on, even when I was wrong I got my point across
They depicted me the boss, of course
My orange box-cutter make the world go round
Plus I'm fucking bitches ain't my homegirls now
Start stacking, dabbled in crack, gun packing
Nickname Medina make the seniors tote my Niñas
From gym class, to English pass off a global
The only nigga with a mobile can't you see like Total
Getting larger in waists and tastes
Ain't no telling where this felon is heading, just in case
Keep a shell at the tip of your melon, clear the space
Your brain was a terrible thing to waste
88 on gates, snatch initial name plates
Smoking spliffs with niggas, real-life beginner killers
Praying God forgive us for being sinners, help us out
[Hook]
[Verse 3]
After realizing, to master enterprising
I ain't have to be in school by ten, I then
Began to encounter with my counterparts
On how to burn the block apart, break it down into sections
Drugs by the selections
Some use pipes, others use injections
Syringe sold separately Frank the Deputy
Quick to grab my Smith & Wesson like my dick was missing
To protect my position, my corner, my lair
While we out here, say the Hustlers Prayer
If the game shakes me or breaks me
I hope it makes me a better man
Take a better stand
Put money in my mom's hand
Get my daughter this college grant so she don't need no man
Stay far from timid
Only make moves when your heart's in it
And live the phrase sky's the limit
Motherfuckers
See you chumps on top
[Hook]
”
”
The Notorious B.I.G
“
Clearly, having money doesn’t mean you’re immune to money stress. Not for nothing did Notorious B.I.G. coin “Mo Money Mo Problems.
”
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Alexa Von Tobel (Financially Fearless: The LearnVest Program for Taking Control of Your Money)
“
Gentile’s office in downtown Las Vegas, I got on the elevator and turned around and there was a TV camera. It was just the two of us in the little box, me and the man with the big machine on his shoulder. He was filming me as I stood there silent. “Turn the camera off,” I said. He didn’t. I tried to move away from him in the elevator, and somehow in the maneuvering he bumped my chin with the black plastic end of his machine and I snapped. I slugged him, or actually I slugged the camera. He turned it off. The maids case was like a county fair compared with the Silverman disappearance, which had happened in the media capital of the world. It had happened within blocks of the studios of the three major networks and the New York Times. The tabloids reveled in the rich narrative of the case, and Mom and Kenny became notorious throughout the Western Hemisphere. Most crimes are pedestrian and tawdry. Though each perpetrator has his own rap sheet and motivation and banged-up psyche, the crime blotter is very repetitive. A wife beater kills his wife. A crack addict uses a gun to get money for his habit. Liquor-store holdups, domestic abuse, drug dealer shoot-outs, DWIs, and so on. This one had a story line you could reduce to a movie pitch. Mother/Son Grifters Held in Millionaire’s Disappearance! My mother’s over-the-top persona, Kenny’s shady polish, and the ridiculous rumors of mother-son incest gave the media a narrative it couldn’t resist. Mom and Kenny were the smart, interesting, evil criminals with the elaborate, diabolical plan who exist in fiction and rarely in real life. The media landed on my life with elephant feet. I was under siege as soon as I returned to my office after my family’s excursion to Newport Beach. The deluge started at 10 A.M. on July 8, 1998. I kept a list in a drawer of the media outlets that called or dropped by our little one-story L-shaped office building on Decatur. It was a tabloid clusterfuck. Every network, newspaper, local news station, and wire service sent troops. Dateline and 20/20 competed to see who could get a Kimes segment on-air first. Dateline did two shows about Mom and Kenny. I developed a strategy for dealing with reporters. My unusual training in the media arts as the son of Sante, and as a de facto paralegal in the maids case, meant that I had a better idea of how to deal with reporters than my staff did. They might find it exciting that someone wanted to talk to them, and forget to stop at “No comment.” I knew better. So I hid from the camera crews in a back room, so there’d be no pictures, and I handled the calls myself. I told my secretary not to bother asking who was on the line and to transfer all comers back to me. I would get the name and affiliation of the reporter, write down the info on my roster, and
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”
Kent Walker (Son of a Grifter: The Twisted Tale of Sante and Kenny Kimes, the Most Notorious Con Artists in America (True Crime (Avon Books)))
“
What does your worship look like? Anxiety, despair, shopping, primping, acting like someone you aren’t, acting stupid when you are smart, or acting like you don’t care when you do? Why do you do it? You are hoping that, if you worship it correctly, the idol will give you what you want. But idols are notoriously slow in responding.
”
”
Edward T. Welch (What Do You Think of Me? Why Do I Care?: Answers to the Big Questions of Life)
“
In reference to four of the most notorious death camps, Snyder notes, “The 1.6 million or so Jews killed at Treblinka, Chelmni, Belzec and Sobibor were asphyxiated by carbon monoxide.” At Auschwitz, the Nazis used Zyklon B hydrogen cyanide gas to kill an additional one million Jews.
”
”
Dinesh D'Souza (The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left)
“
Taking quick looks behind him on the trail, Lew Basnight was apt to see things that weren’t necessarily there. Mounted figure in a black duster and hat, always still, turned sidewise in the hard, sunlit distance, horse bent to the barren ground. No real beam of attention, if anything a withdrawal into its own lopsided star-shaped silhouette, as if that were all it had ever aspired to. It did not take long to convince himself that the presence behind him now, always just out of eyeball range, belonged to one and the same subject, the notorious dynamiter of the San Juans known as the Kieselguhr Kid. The Kid happened to be of prime interest to White City Investigations. Just around the time Lew was stepping off the train at the Union Station in Denver, and the troubles up in the Coeur d’Alene were starting to bleed over everywhere in the mining country, where already hardly a day passed without an unscheduled dynamite blast in it someplace, the philosophy among larger, city-based detective agencies like Pinkerton’s and Thiel’s began to change, being as they now found themselves with far too much work on their hands. On the theory that they could look at their unsolved cases the way a banker might at instruments of debt, they began selling off to less-established and accordingly hungrier outfits like White City their higher-risk tickets, including that of the long-sought Kieselguhr Kid. It was the only name anybody seemed to know him by, “Kieselguhr” being a kind of fine clay, used to soak up nitroglycerine and stabilize it into dynamite. The Kid’s family had supposedly come over as refugees from Germany shortly after the reaction of 1849, settling at first near San Antonio, which the Kid-to-be, having developed a restlessness for higher ground, soon left, and then after a spell in the Sangre de Cristos, so it went, heading west again, the San Juans his dream, though not for the silver-mine money, nor the trouble he could get into, both of those, he was old enough by then to appreciate, easy enough to come by. No, it was for something else. Different tellers of the tale had different thoughts on what. “Don’t carry pistols, don’t own a shotgun nor a rifle—no, his trade-mark, what you’ll find him packing in those tooled holsters, is always these twin sticks of dynamite, with a dozen more—” “Couple dozen, in big bandoliers across his chest.” “Easy fellow to recognize, then.” “You’d think so, but no two eyewitnesses have ever agreed. It’s like all that blasting rattles it loose from everybody’s memory.” “But say, couldn’t even a slow hand just gun him before he could get a fuse lit?” “Wouldn’t bet on it. Got this clever wind-proof kind of striker rig on to each holster, like a safety match, so all’s he has to do’s draw, and the ‘sucker’s all lit and ready to throw.” “Fast fuses, too. Some boys down the Uncompahgre found out about that just last August, nothin left to bury but spurs and belt buckles. Even old Butch Cassidy and them’ll begin to coo like a barn full of pigeons whenever the Kid’s in the county.” Of course, nobody ever’d been sure about who was in Butch Cassidy’s gang either. No shortage of legendary deeds up here, but eyewitnesses could never swear beyond a doubt who in each case, exactly, had done which, and, more than fear of retaliation—it was as if physical appearance actually shifted, causing not only aliases to be inconsistently assigned but identity itself to change. Did something, something essential, happen to human personality above a certain removal from sea level? Many quoted Dr. Lombroso’s observation about how lowland folks tended to be placid and law-abiding while mountain country bred revolutionaries and outlaws. That was over in Italy, of course. Theorizers about the recently discovered subconscious mind, reluctant to leave out any variable that might seem helpful, couldn’t avoid the altitude, and the barometric pressure that went with it. This was spirit, after all.
”
”
Thomas Pynchon (Against the Day)
“
Economics is a notoriously complicated subject. To make things easier, let’s imagine a simple example.
Samuel Greedy, a shrewd financier, founds a bank in El Dorado, California.
A. A. Stone, an up-and-coming contractor in El Dorado, finishes his first big job, receiving payment in cash to the tune of $1 million. He deposits this sum in Mr Greedy’s bank. The bank now has $1 million in capital.
In the meantime, Jane McDoughnut, an experienced but impecunious El Dorado chef, thinks she sees a business opportunity – there’s no really good bakery in her part of town. But she doesn’t have enough money of her own to buy a proper facility complete with industrial ovens, sinks, knives and pots. She goes to the bank, presents her business plan to Greedy, and persuades him that it’s a worthwhile investment. He issues her a $1 million loan, by crediting her account in the bank with that sum.
McDoughnut now hires Stone, the contractor, to build and furnish her bakery. His price is $1,000,000.
When she pays him, with a cheque drawn on her account, Stone deposits it in his account in the Greedy bank.
So how much money does Stone have in his bank account? Right, $2 million.
How much money, cash, is actually located in the bank’s safe? Yes, $1 million.
It doesn’t stop there. As contractors are wont to do, two months into the job Stone informs McDoughnut that, due to unforeseen problems and expenses, the bill for constructing the bakery will actually be $2 million. Mrs McDoughnut is not pleased, but she can hardly stop the job in the middle. So she pays another visit to the bank, convinces Mr Greedy to give her an additional loan, and he puts another $1 million in her account. She transfers the money to the contractor’s account.
How much money does Stone have in his account now? He’s got $3 million.
But how much money is actually sitting in the bank? Still just $1 million. In fact, the same $1 million that’s been in the bank all along.
Current US banking law permits the bank to repeat this exercise seven more times. The contractor would eventually have $10 million in his account, even though the bank still has but $1 million in its vaults. Banks are allowed to loan $10 for every dollar they actually possess, which means that 90 per cent of all the money in our bank accounts is not covered by actual coins and notes.2 If all of the account holders at Barclays Bank suddenly demand their money, Barclays will promptly collapse (unless the government steps in to save it). The same is true of Lloyds, Deutsche Bank, Citibank, and all other banks in the world.
It sounds like a giant Ponzi scheme, doesn’t it? But if it’s a fraud, then the entire modern economy is a fraud. The fact is, it’s not a deception, but rather a tribute to the amazing abilities of the human imagination. What enables banks – and the entire economy – to survive and flourish is our trust in the future. This trust is the sole backing for most of the money in the world.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
“
But the fact was Millat didn’t need to go back home: he stood schizophrenic, one foot in Bengal and one in Willesden. In his mind he was as much there as he was here. He did not require a passport to live in two places at once, he needed no visa to live his brother’s life and his own (he was a twin, after all). Alsana was the first to spot it. She confided to Clara: By God, they’re tied together like a cat’s cradle, connected like a see-saw, push one end, other goes up, whatever Millat sees, Magid saw and vice versa! And Alsana only knew the incidentals: similar illnesses, simultaneous accidents, pets dying continents apart. She did not know that while Magid watched the 1985 cyclone shake things from high places, Millat was pushing his luck along the towering wall of the cemetery in Fortune Green; that on February 10, 1988, as Magid worked his way through the violent crowds of Dhaka, ducking the random blows of those busy settling an election with knives and fists, Millat held his own against three sotted, furious, quick-footed Irishmen outside Biddy Mulligan’s notorious Kilburn public house. Ah, but you are not convinced by coincidence? You want fact fact fact? You want brushes with the Big Man with black hood and scythe? OK: on April 28, 1989, a tornado whisked the Chittagong kitchen up into the sky, taking everything with it except Magid, left miraculously curled up in a ball on the floor. Now, segue to Millat, five thousand miles away, lowering himself down upon legendary sixth-former Natalia Cavendish (whose body is keeping a dark secret from her); the condoms are unopened in a box in his back pocket; but somehow he will not catch it; even though he is moving rhythmically now, up and in, deeper and sideways, dancing with death
”
”
Zadie Smith
“
Seven months after the notorious Nazi book burning in 1933, Columbia University invited the German ambassador to speak on campus where
”
”
Dinesh D'Souza (The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left)
“
C-4 to your door, no beef no more, nigg*
Song: Warning
By: The Notorious B.I.G.
”
”
The Notorious B.I.G.
“
Dr. Fauci’s refusal to fix the HHS’s notoriously dysfunctional vaccine injury surveillance system (VAERS) constituted inexcusable negligence. HHS’s own studies indicate that VAERS may be understating vaccine injuries by OVER 99 percent.29
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
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Evolution is the sadistic headmaster of the Succeed-or-Die School of Invention, motto: Disce aut consumere!—“learn or get eaten!” It is sad and sometimes ugly when a species fails in this school, especially ugly if the change they are confronted with is caused by human thoughtlessness. Sometimes the two happen in tandem and ugliness can create unexpected beauty. New railway lines are notorious for the havoc and destruction they can bring to a landscape, impacting both natural and artificial environments. However, the need to keep general human traffic away from the iron dragons that pass along these new lines has created a new habitat and led to a renaissance in rare wildflowers in some areas. But perhaps the most surreal and ironic example of this is the fact that many naturalists now support the military’s habit of firing big explosive shells at landscapes. Exploding ordnance falling from the sky has the dependable effect of keeping humans away and, consequently, firing ranges have accidentally created some of the most healthy ecosystems in Britain. Naturalists and the military are now working more closely, and this unlikely partnership is becoming less accidental and more deliberate.
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Tristan Gooley (How to Read Nature: Awaken Your Senses to the Outdoors You've Never Noticed (Natural Navigation))
“
Rise and Fall of the Cleveland Mafia—
Corn Sugar and Blood
(Barricade Books, 1995) This is the author's first book, which was conceived out of curiosity about the Prohibition-era killings of his grandfather and three uncles, Mafia leaders who fought the powerful Lonardo family for control of corn sugar, a lucrative bootleg ingredient. Angelo "Big Ange" Lonardo avenges
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Rick Porrello (Bombs, Bullets, and Bribes: the true story of notorious Jewish mobster Alex Shondor Birns)
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Representative Tom Moore Jr. once submitted legislation to the Texas legislature in favor of honoring notorious murderer Albert DeSalvo "for his work in "population control"" as an April Fool's Day joke. Without paying any attention to it, it was unanimously passed.
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Jake Jacobs (The Giant Book Of Strange Facts (The Big Book Of Facts 15))
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The “institutional no” is a big reason why Amazon could have made an error of omission in this case. Jeff and other Amazon leaders often talk about the “institutional no” and its counterpart, the “institutional yes.” The institutional no refers to the tendency for well-meaning people within large organizations to say no to new ideas. The errors caused by the institutional no are typically errors of omission, that is, something a company doesn’t do versus something it does. Staying the current course offers managers comfort and certainty—even if the price of that short-term certainty is instability and value destruction later on. Moreover, the errors of omission caused by the institutional no can be notoriously tricky to spot. Most businesses don’t have the tools to evaluate the cost of not doing something. And when the cost is high, they only realize when it’s too late to change.
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Colin Bryar (Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon)
“
Having hit on this “theory,” I began to recognize checklists in odd corners everywhere—in the hands of professional football coordinators, say, or on stage sets. Listening to the radio, I heard the story behind rocker David Lee Roth’s notorious insistence that Van Halen’s contracts with concert promoters contain a clause specifying that a bowl of M&M’s has to be provided backstage, but with every single brown candy removed, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation to the band. And at least once, Van Halen followed through, peremptorily canceling a show in Colorado when Roth found some brown M&M’s in his dressing room. This turned out to be, however, not another example of the insane demands of power-mad celebrities but an ingenious ruse. As Roth explained in his memoir, Crazy from the Heat, “Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We’d pull up with nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors—whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through. The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function.” So just as a little test, buried somewhere in the middle of the rider, would be article 126, the no-brown-M&M’s clause. “When I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl,” he wrote, “well, we’d line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error.… Guaranteed you’d run into a problem.” These weren’t trifles, the radio story pointed out. The mistakes could be life-threatening. In Colorado, the band found the local promoters had failed to read the weight requirements and the staging would have fallen through the arena floor. “David Lee Roth had a checklist!” I yelled at the radio.
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Atul Gawande (The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right)
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So there was good reason that very powerful potentates of the medical cartel were already targeting HCQ long before President Trump began his infamous romance with the malaria remedy. President Trump’s endorsement of HCQ on March 19, 20207 hyper-politicized the debate and gave Dr. Fauci’s defamation campaign against HCQ a soft landing among Democrats and the media. Trump’s critics relegated any further claims of HCQ efficacy to the same anti-science waste bin as Trump’s notorious recommendation for bleach to cure COVID and his denial of climate change. But HCQ had a long history of safe medical use that got lost in the politics and propaganda.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
“
he had a big hairy wart on his bum, so big and hard that it felt like he was sitting on a sharp stone every time he sat down (which he did a lot, because pillagers are notoriously lazy creatures).
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Splendiferous Steve (Pete the Pirate Pillager 1: An Unofficial Minecraft Series)
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Stay far from timid, only make moves when your heart's in it, and live by the phrase, "The sky's the limit.
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Notorious BIG
“
The room contains a few dozen living human bodies, each one a big sack of guts and fluids so highly compressed that it will squirt for a few yards when pierced. Each one is built around an armature of 206 bones connected to each other by notoriously fault-prone joints that are given to obnoxious creaking, grinding, and popping noises when they are in other than pristine condition. This structure is draped with throbbing steak, inflated with clenching air sacks, and pierced by a Gordian sewer filled with burbling acid and compressed gas and asquirt with vile enzymes and solvents produced by the many dark, gamy nuggets of genetically programmed meat strung along its length. Slugs of dissolving food are forced down this sloppy labyrinth by serialized convulsions, decaying into gas, liquid, and solid matter which must all be regularly vented to the outside world lest the owner go toxic and drop dead. Spherical, gel-packed cameras swivel in mucus-greased ball joints. Infinite phalanxes of cilia beat back invading particles, encapsulate them in goo for later disposal. In each body a centrally located muscle flails away at an eternal, circulating torrent of pressurized gravy.
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Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon)
“
Danes don’t believe that buying more stuff brings you happiness,’ Christian told me. ‘A bigger car just brings you a bigger tax bill in Denmark. And a bigger house just takes longer to clean.’ In an approximation of the late, great Notorious B.I.G.’s profound precept, greater wealth means additional anxieties, or in Danish, according to my new favourite app, Google Translate, the somewhat less catchy ‘mere penge, mere problemer’.
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Helen Russell (The Year of Living Danishly: Uncovering the Secrets of the World's Happiest Country)
“
(Fuck all you hoes) Get a grip motherfucker.
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The Notorious BIG
“
Indian Bar’s reputation as a notorious bear enclave can be accounted for by the acres of blueberries surrounding the camp. While they draw the bears, the berries also assure backcountry campers that bears will look upon them as nuisances in the berrypatch rather than two hundred pounds of meat on the hoof. That is, if you arrive during berry season. Which I did not. A ranger had issued me a wilderness permit to pitch my tent among the bears outside the designated camp, but by the time I’d bushwhacked to the top of a ridge above the Ohanapecosh River, I’d begun to question the wisdom of my decision. Every tentsize clearing under every tree bore the wilderness equivalent of a coat on a theater seat: bear scat big as cowpies and puddingly fresh.
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Bruce Barcott (The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier)
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If you are determined to be an effective shield, start by working on yourself. Great bosses avoid burdening their people. They invent, borrow, and implement ways to reduce the mental and emotional load they heap on followers. In particular, meetings are notorious time and energy suckers. Yes, some are necessary, but too many bosses run them in ways that disrespect people’s time and dignity – especially self-absorbed bosses bent on self-glorification. If you want to grab power and don’t care much about your people, make sure you arrive a little late to most meetings. Plus, every now and then, show up very late, or – better yet – send word after everyone has gathered that, alas, you must cancel the meeting because something more pressing has come up. After all, if you are a very important person, the little people need to accept their inferior social standing. Sound familiar? Using arrival times to display and grab power is an ancient trick. This move was used by elders, or ‘Big Men’, in primitive tribes to gain and reinforce status. An ethnography of the Merina tribe in Madagascar found that jostling for status among elders meant that gatherings routinely started three or four hours late. Elders used young boys to spy on each other and played a waiting game that dragged on for hours. Each elder worked to maximize the impression that the moment he arrived, the meeting started. If he arrived early and the meeting didn’t start right away, it signaled that he wasn’t the alpha male. If he arrived late and the meeting had started without him, it also signaled that he wasn’t the most prestigious elder. I’ve seen similar power plays in academia. I was once on a committee led by a prestigious faculty member who always arrived at least ten minutes late, often twenty minutes. He also cancelled two meetings after the rest of the five-person committee had gathered. I tracked the time I wasted waiting for this jerk, which totaled over a half day during a six-month stretch.
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Robert I. Sutton (Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best... and Learn from the Worst)
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Orsini and one of his fellow conspirators were guillotined, and an accomplice called Carlo di Rudio was transported to Devil’s Island, the notorious French prison camp in French Guiana. He escaped and later fought alongside General Custer at Little Big Horn. True to form, he survived.
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Stephen Clarke (1000 Years of Annoying the French)
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John E. Osborne, a member of Sisco Lodge 259 in Westport, New York, was Wyoming's third governor and the first Democrat to occupy that office. After a mob lynched the notorious outlaw George "Big Nose" Parrott in 1881, Brother Osborne, also a physician, took possession of the body to perform an autopsy. Completing that, Brother Osborne sent Parrott's skin to a tannery, where it was made into a pair of shoes. Subsequently, in 1883, having been elected governor, Osborne wore those shoes to his inaugural ball.
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Steven L. Harrison (Freemasons: Tales From The Craft)
“
For those of you who think that I have my life altogether, I definitely do not. Every season brings new challenges. For example, since I had my fifth child, I am notoriously 5-10 minutes late everywhere no matter how hard I try to be on time. I would like to say that I am "fashionably" late, but that isn't the truth either. Running in a mad dash in a parking lot (all holding hands of course) to make it somewhere 5 minutes late (instead of 6 minutes cause that makes a big difference) while one child is missing shoes and my hair is going in every direction. Yep, that is my family.
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Tamara L. Chilver
“
For those of you who think that I have my life altogether, I definitely do not. Every season brings new challenges. For example, since I had my fifth child, I am notoriously 5-10 minutes late everywhere no matter how hard I try to be on time. I would like to say that I am 'fashionably' late, but that isn't the truth either. Running in a mad dash in a parking lot (all holding hands of course) to make it somewhere 5 minutes late (instead of 6 minutes cause that makes a big difference) while one child is missing shoes and my hair is going in every direction. Yep, that is my family.
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Tamara L. Chilver
“
I’d been on the Internet long enough to know that these things never lasted, that the outrage being poured onto, say, a New York Times columnist who’d overreacted to a mild insult could instantly be redirected toward a makeup company whose “skin tone” foundations only came in white-lady shades, before turning on a professional athlete who’d sent a tweet using the n-word when he was fifteen. The swarm was eternally in search of the next problematic artist or actor or fast-food brand, and nobody stayed notorious, or canceled, forever.
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Jennifer Weiner (Big Summer)
“
LINKLETTER: Another big difference between alcohol and marijuana is that when people smoke marijuana, they smoke it to get high. When most people drink, they drink to be sociable. NIXON: A person does not drink to get drunk. LINKLETTER: That’s right. NIXON: A person drinks to have fun. This being Nixon, the conversation soon turned racist, with Linkletter in parrot mode: NIXON: Asia, the Middle East, portions of Latin America . . . I’ve seen what drugs have done to those countries. Everybody knows what it’s done to the Chinese. The Indians are hopeless anyway. The Burmese— LINKLETTER: That’s right. NIXON: Why are the Communists so hard on drugs? It’s because they love to booze. I mean, the Russians, they drink pretty good. LINKLETTER: That’s right. NIXON: The Swedes drink too much, the Finns drink too, the British have always been heavy boozers, and the Irish, of course, the most, but on the other hand, they survive as strong races. LINKLETTER: That’s right. NIXON: At least with liquor, I don’t lose motivation.
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Rick Emerson (Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World's Most Notorious Diaries)
“
I like the life I live cause I went from negative to positive.
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The Notorious B.I.G
“
The bureaucracy of a big company like Citi often led to bad policies. Such a large firm is basically forced to make decisions for a whole organization that don’t necessarily apply well to the individual business units. Is it better, one wonders, to have uniformity of authority in decision making at the expense of flexibility? It was a demonstration of the challenges of size, the difficulty of managing a large business with hundreds of disparate units. In the mid-2000s, for example, the firm developed new rules for air travel, insisting that employees reach their destinations on the cheapest fares available, even if that meant multiple connections to get to smaller cities. Saving money was not a bad inclination in an industry notorious for profligacy, but there was no flexibility in the rule, and so my assistant, Angela Murray, was engaged in frequent battles to make sure I could arrive at out-of-town meetings on time. If I had a ten o’clock morning meeting in Omaha to discuss a deal with a potential $6 million fee, Citi still insisted on saving a few hundred bucks by booking me on a flight that arrived in the afternoon, which meant I would miss the meeting unless I traveled the day before. And because those cheaper flights often required an overnight stay, more work hours were wasted as well as any potential savings, since the firm would have to pay for a hotel and meals. I knew for a fact that the policy was revenue-negative.
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Christopher Varelas (How Money Became Dangerous: The Inside Story of Our Turbulent Relationship with Modern Finance)
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These linguistic structural factors explain the notorious inability of even genius to translate a poem from one language to another, except very approximately. They may also explain some of the great conflicts in the history of philosophy — Prof. Hugh Kenner has wittily argued that Descartes, thinking in a French even more latinate than today's, would perceive un pomme grosse et rouge and conclude that the mind starts from general ideas and then discovers particulars, whereas Locke, thinking in English, would perceive the same sort of space-time event as a big red apple and decide that the mind starts from particulars and then assembles general ideas.
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Robert Anton Wilson (The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science)
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He wrapped me up in his big arms with his coarse hands, tucked my face into his neck so I could feel his strong pulse against my cheek, his marble slab torso protecting my fragile heart and trembling core like an impenetrable shield.
He held me.
Not an MC princess of a notorious motorcycle club.
Not a slightly trashy but rockin’-it university student with a juvie record.
Not a murderer.
Not even Harleigh Rose as anyone else knew her.
Just Rosie, stripped of her thorns and even of her petals, just a seed of self.
And he held her preciously, protectively and patiently as if he would do it forever and never fade or fail.
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Giana Darling (Good Gone Bad (The Fallen Men, #3))
“
The closing record from Jay Z’s Black Album is called “My 1st Song.” He starts the song with an audio clip from Notorious B.I.G. saying that, “The key to staying on top of things is treat everything like it's your first project.
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Shaan Patel (Self-Made Success: 48 Secret Strategies To Live Happier, Healthier, And Wealthier)
“
The room contains a few dozen living human bodies, each one a big sack of guts and fluids so highly compressed that it will squirt for a few yards when pierced. Each one is built around an armature of 206 bones connected to each other by notoriously fault-prone joints that are given to obnoxious creaking, grinding, and popping noises when they are in other than pristine condition. This structure is draped with throbbing steak, inflated with clenching air sacks, and pierced by a Gordian sewer filled with burbling acid and compressed gas and asquirt with vile enzymes and solvents produced by the many dark, gamy nuggets of genetically programmed meat strung along its length. Slugs of dissolving food are forced down this sloppy labyrinth by serialized convulsions, decaying into gas, liquid, and solid matter which must all be regularly vented to the outside world lest the owner go toxic and drop dead. Spherical, gel-packed cameras swivel in mucus-greased ball joints. Infinite phalanxes of cilia beat back invading particles, encapsulate them in goo for later disposal. In each body a centrally located muscle flails away at an eternal, circulating torrent of pressurized gravy. And yet, despite all of this, not one of these bodies makes a single sound at any time during the sultan’s speech. It is a marvel that can only be explained by the power of brain over body, and, in turn, by the power of cultural conditioning over the brain.
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Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon)
“
I showed her the Mobb Deep song “Shook Ones Part II” in the first days or weeks when we got together. Now, all of a sudden, she was excited, showing me a video of some pool party where the crowd was puzzled when the DJ played a little childlike tune with very few notes and sounds. Until they recognized the sampled song being played with the original piano tune of Herbie Hancock underneath, called “Jessica”, she was acting like she was teaching me something or something I didn't know beforehand. She was acting like she was smarter than me, or as if I didn't know anything about music, hip hop, or rap.
It was very odd. Who could have shown her that track, that video, and Herbie Hancock? I wondered.
So, I played the next song myself - Bob Marley's “Forever Loving Jah”.
Then, she played Jonathan Richmann's “Something about Mary”.
So, I played the song “Jah is One” from Mosh Ben Ari and certain members of Shotei Hanevua to see her reaction to Israeli reggae music.
So she played Notorious BIG and the Junior Mafia’s song: “Get money.” She was singing the chorus shaking her boot.
Then I played Tupac Shakur's “Hit 'Em Up.”
She played Notorious BIG’s song “Juicy.”
So I played his song called “Somebody Gotta Die.”
She then played the Moldy Peaches, „We are not those kids, sitting on the couch”
So I played Mad Child's “Night Vision” to see if she knew it.
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Tomas Adam Nyapi (BARCELONA MARIJUANA MAFIA)
“
Ivan Law’s name was added to the homicide file by LAPD who will be solely responsible for solving the murders of Tupac Shakur and Christopher Wallace (Notorious B.I.G.)1. According to a source, LAPD robbery homicide detective Lieutenant Thompson said "I am Adding your name Ivan Law to the Biggie Homicide file. I have Dr Dre’s address I’m going to interview him for the murders of Biggie,"2 which suggests that Dr. Dre is being investigated for the murder of Christopher Wallace.
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LAPD robbery homicide detective Lieutenant Thompson
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The Investigation of the Tupac Amaru Shakur and Christopher Notorious BIG Wallace murders has taken a decisive turn with the addition of Ivan Law's name to the homicide file by LAPD. From now onwards, Ivan the Great will be solely responsible for solving the murders that were considered to be unsolvable for more than two decades.
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Ivan Law Sr
“
Ivan Law’s name was added to the homicide file by LAPD who will be solely responsible for solving the murders of Tupac Shakur and Christopher Wallace (Notorious B.I.G.)1. According to a source, LAPD robbery homicide detective Lieutenant Thompson said "I am Adding your name Ivan Law to the Biggie Homicide file. I have Dr Dre’s address I’m going to interview him for the murders of Biggie,"2 which suggests that Dr. Dre is being investigated for the murder of Christopher Wallace.
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APD robbery homicide detective Lieutenant Thompson
“
Virtually all of the scenario planning for pandemics employ technical assumptions and strategies familiar to anyone who has read the CIA’s notorious psychological warfare manuals for shattering indigenous societies, obliterating traditional economics and social bonds, for using imposed isolation and the demolition of traditional economies to crush resistance, to foster chaos, demoralization, dependence and fear, and for imposing centralized and autocratic governance.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
“
Quite early the “first takes” were joined by other interpretations. The obviously obsessive character of some fascists cried out for psychoanalysis. Mussolini seemed only too ordinary, with his vain posturing, his notorious womanizing, his addiction to detailed work, his skill at short-term maneuvering, and his eventual loss of the big picture. Hitler was another matter. Were his Teppichfresser (“carpet eater”) scenes calculated bluffs or signs of madness? His secretiveness, hypochondria, narcissism, vengefulness, and megalomania were counterbalanced by a quick, retentive mind, a capacity to charm if he wanted to, and outstanding tactical cleverness. All efforts to psychoanalyze him have suffered from the inaccessibility of their subject, as well as from the unanswered question of why, if some fascist leaders were insane, their publics adored them and they functioned effectively for so long. In any event, the latest and most authoritative biographer of Hitler concludes rightly that one must dwell less on the Führer’s eccentricities than on the role the German public projected upon him and which he succeeded in filling until nearly the end.
Perhaps it is the fascist publics rather than their leaders who need psychoanalysis. Already in 1933 the dissident Freudian Wilhelm Reich concluded that the violent masculine fraternity characteristic of early fascism was the product of sexual repression. This theory is easy to undermine, however, by observing that sexual repression was probably no more severe in Germany and in Italy than in, say, Great Britain during the generation in which the fascist leaders and their followers came of age. This objection also applies to other psycho-historical explanations for fascism.
Explanations of fascism as psychotic appear in another form in films that cater to a prurient fascination with supposed fascist sexual perversion. These box-office successes make it even harder to grasp that fascist regimes functioned because great numbers of ordinary people accommodated to them in the ordinary business of daily life.
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Robert O. Paxton (The Anatomy of Fascism)
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The sociologist Talcott Parsons suggested already in 1942 that fascism emerged out of uprooting and tensions produced by uneven economic and social development—an early form of the fascism/modernization problem. In countries that industrialized rapidly and late, like Germany and Italy, Parsons argued, class tensions were particularly acute and compromise was blocked by surviving pre-industrial elites. This interpretation had the merit of treating fascism as a system and as the product of a history, as did the Marxist interpretation, without Marxism’s determinism,
narrowness, and shaky empirical foundations.
The philosopher Ernst Bloch, a Marxist made unorthodox by an interest in the irrational and in religion, arrived in his own way at another theory of “noncontemporaneity” (Ungleichzeitigkeit). Contemplating Nazi success with archaic and violent “red dreams” of blood, soil, and a precapitalist paradise, utterly incompatible with what he considered the party’s true fealty to big business, he understood that vestigial values flourished long after they had lost any correspondence with economic and social reality. “Not all people exist in the same Now.” Orthodox Marxists, he thought, had missed the boat by “cordoning off the soul.” Uneven development continues to arouse interest as an ingredient of prefascist crises, but the case for it is weakened by France’s notoriously “dual” economy, in which a powerful peasant/artisan sector coexisted with modern industry without fascism reaching power except under Nazi occupation.
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Robert O. Paxton (The Anatomy of Fascism)
“
Because the general prospects of the enterprise carry major weight in the establishment of market prices, it is natural for the security analyst to devote a great deal of attention to the economic position of the industry and of the individual company in its industry. Studies of this kind can go into unlimited detail. They are sometimes productive of valuable insights into important factors that will be operative in the future and are insufficiently appreciated by the current market. Where a conclusion of that kind can be drawn with a fair degree of confidence, it affords a sound basis for investment decisions. Our own observation, however, leads us to minimize somewhat the practical value of most of the industry studies that are made available to investors. The material developed is ordinarily of a kind with which the public is already fairly familiar and that has already exerted considerable influence on market quotations. Rarely does one find a brokerage-house study that points out, with a convincing array of facts, that a popular industry is heading for a fall or that an unpopular one is due to prosper. Wall Street’s view of the longer future is notoriously fallible, and this necessarily applies to that important part of its investigations which is directed toward the forecasting of the course of profits in various industries. We must recognize, however, that the rapid and pervasive growth of technology in recent years is not without major effect on the attitude and the labors of the security analyst. More so than in the past, the progress or retrogression of the typical company in the coming decade may depend on its relation to new products and new processes, which the analyst may have a chance to study and evaluate in advance. Thus there is doubtless a promising area for effective work by the analyst, based on field trips, interviews with research men, and on intensive technological investigation on his own. There are hazards connected with investment conclusions derived chiefly from such glimpses into the future, and not supported by presently demonstrable value. Yet there are perhaps equal hazards in sticking closely to the limits of value set by sober calculations resting on actual results. The investor cannot have it both ways. He can be imaginative and play for the big profits that are the reward for vision proved sound by the event; but then he must run a substantial risk of major or minor miscalculation. Or he can be conservative, and refuse to pay more than a minor premium for possibilities as yet unproved; but in that case he must be prepared for the later contemplation of golden opportunities foregone.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
“
It has also been tempting to interpret fascism by its social composition. The sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset systematized in 1963 the widely held view that fascism is an expression of lower-middle-class resentments. In Lipset’s formulation, fascism is an “extremism of the center” based on the rage of once-independent shopkeepers, artisans, peasants, and other members of the “old” middle classes now squeezed between better organized industrial workers and big businessmen, and losing out in rapid social and economic change. Recent empirical research, however, casts doubt on the localization of fascist recruitment in any one social stratum. It shows the multiplicity of fascism’s social supports and its relative success in creating a composite movement that cut across all classes. His eyes glued on the early stages, Lipset also overlooked the establishment’s role in the fascist acquisition and exercise of power.
The notorious instability of fascist membership further undermines any simple interpretation by social composition. Party rosters altered rapidly before power, as successive waves of heterogeneous malcontents responded to the parties’ changing fortunes and messages. After power, membership “bandwagoned” to include just about everyone who wanted to enjoy the fruits of fascist success—not to forget the problem of where to situate the many fascist recruits who were young, unemployed, socially uprooted, or otherwise “between classes.” No coherent social explanation of fascism can be constructed out of such fluctuating material.
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Robert O. Paxton (The Anatomy of Fascism)
“
stay far from timid
only make moves when your hearts in it
”
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The Notorious B.I.G
“
Easton Van Buren … once a simple waiter in my father’s restaurant with big dreams, he’s now a notorious business mogul who opens clubs all around the world. We first met at my father’s second wedding when we were still kids, and now we meet again … at what seems to be mine.
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Clarissa Wild (A Debt Owed (The Debt Duet, #1))
“
People wondered what it was about California that produced so many serial killers. It had the inauspicious distinction of having more serial kills than any other state, and also some of the most notorious killers. Maybe it was just a numbers thing—California was a big state and had the highest population. Or maybe earthquake tremors and fault lines had people subconsciously on edge. It was especially perplexing considering how much sunlight the state got; it was sold and embraced as the land of happy
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Anne Frasier (Find Me (Inland Empire, #1))
“
KATHRYN CRAVENS, the first female radio commentator, whose series News Through a Woman’s Eyes ran on CBS for Pontiac from Oct. 19, 1936, until April 8, 1938. Cravens began her career at KMOX, the CBS affiliate in St. Louis. She had been an actress, and now, on radio, she told stories, sang, and did Negro dialect by memory of her mammy in Texas. She had no news background and paid little attention to the tenets of reporting. As she told Radio Guide, the “five w’s” were less important in her stories than the big question, “how does it feel?” … “how does it feel to be the mother of a murdered boy, of one to be executed that night? … how does it feel to survive flood and misery? … to be America’s most notorious shoplifter? … to be mayor of a great city, a congressional lobbyist, a famous playwright, a war-torn cripple, a flophouse bum?” This was her scope.
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John Dunning (On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio)
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Eric Turkheimer at the University of Virginia discovered a database of very poor twins. All the earlier twin studies involved middle-class children. It turns out that IQ is far more heritable for rich children than for poor children. In fact, for poor children the effect of genes on IQ almost disappears—there is little correlation between how smart parents are and how smart their children are, and identical twins’ IQ is no more similar than that of fraternal twins. So it seems that poor children’s IQ is less affected by their genes than rich children’s IQ. But how can that be? Surely poverty can’t change your DNA? The answer is that small variations in a poor child’s environment—going to a better or worse school, for example—make a big difference to their IQ. Those differences swamp any genetic differences. Rich children are generally already going to good schools, so the differences between them are more likely to reflect genetic variation. Notoriously, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein in their book The Bell Curve suggested that the heritability of IQ meant that programs such as Head Start were futile. But, in fact, the new heritability results lead to just the opposite conclusion: changing a poor child’s environment can have enormous effects.
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Alison Gopnik (The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life)
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Finally, the Pirahã language is notoriously difficult because it lacks things that many other languages have, especially in the way that it puts sentences together. For example, the language has no comparatives, so I couldn’t find expressions like this is big/that is bigger. I couldn’t find color words—no simple words for red, green, blue, and so on, only descriptive phrases, like that is like blood for red or that is not ripe yet for green.
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Daniel L. Everett (Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle (Vintage Departures))
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Xerox had an attractive financial model focused on leasing and servicing machines and selling toner, rather than big-ticket equipment sales. For Xerox and its salespeople, this meant steadier, more recurring income. With a large baseline of recurring revenues, budgets were more likely to be met, which allowed management to give accurate guidance to stock analysts. For customers, the cost of leasing a copier is accounted for as an operating expense, which doesn’t usually entail upper management approval as a capital purchase might. As a near-monopoly manufacturer of copiers, Xerox could reduce costs by building more of a few standard models. As owner of a fleet of potentially obsolete leased equipment, Xerox might prefer not to improve models too quickly. As Steve Jobs saw it, product people were driven out of Xerox, along with any sense of craftsmanship. Nonetheless, in 1969, Xerox launched one of the most remarkable research efforts ever, the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), without which Apple, the PC, and the Internet would not exist. The modern PC was invented at PARC, as was Ethernet networking, the graphical user interface and the mouse to control it, email, user-friendly word processing, desktop publishing, video conferencing, and much more. The invention that most clearly fit into Xerox’s vision of the “office of the future” was the laser printer, which Hewlett-Packard exploited more successfully than Xerox. (I’m watching to see how the modern parallel, Alphabet’s moonshot ventures, works out.) Xerox notoriously failed to turn these world-changing inventions into market dominance, or any market share at all—allowing Apple, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, and others to build behemoth enterprises around them. At a meeting where Steve Jobs accused Bill Gates of ripping off Apple’s ideas, Gates replied, “Well Steve, I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke in to steal his TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.
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Joel Tillinghast (Big Money Thinks Small: Biases, Blind Spots, and Smarter Investing (Columbia Business School Publishing))
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Paul Offit: Voting Himself Rich The notorious “Television Doctor” Paul Offit was the codeveloper of the rotavirus vaccine that ACIP approved in that 2006 session. Offit is one of Dr. Fauci’s most prominent PIs and an exemplar of the kind of power, influence, and lucre available to PIs whose entrepreneurial energies are unobstructed by scruples. Offit is the darling of both mainstream
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
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In Friedrichstrasse Chinese traders from the former German-leased territory of Tsingtao ran opium dens. Illegal nightclubs opened in the back rooms of the Mitte district. Smugglers distributed flyers at Anhalter Station, advertising illegal dance parties and “beauty evenings.” Big clubs like the famous Haus Vaterland, on Potsdamer Platz, and Ballhaus Resi, notorious for its extravagant promiscuity, on Blumenstrasse, attracted potential fun-lovers in droves, as did smaller establishments like the Kakadu Bar or the Weisse Maus, where masks were distributed on the way in to guarantee the anonymity of the guests. An early form of sex-and-drugs tourism from Western neighbors and the United States began, because everything in Berlin was as cheap as it was exciting.
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Norman Ohler (Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich)
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He had another close call a few days later. As Landwehr told me, Rader was at home writing a letter to his brother Paul, who was stationed over in “the big sandbox,” which was how Rader enjoyed describing Iraq. Paula happened to walk by and glance over her husband’s shoulder at the letter, reading the words he’d written. Suddenly, he heard her exclaim, “You know, you spell just like BTK.
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John E. Douglas (Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer)
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To hell with the fact that he’d just confessed to being the man who had killed ten people. Deep down, part of him always knew that one day he might be caught. That was practically a given in his business. What really bothered him, though, was how he’d been caught. It just didn’t seem . . . fair, Rader told my source. Over that past year, he’d begun to feel that he and Landwehr had formed a professional bond. And why wouldn’t he? Ken played the role of the no-nonsense super-cop just as I had envisioned it two decades earlier. For the past eleven months, Landwehr had appeared on the color TV set in Rader’s family room and spoken directly to Dennis, stroking his oversized ego, slowly convincing him that theirs was a relationship built on trust and respect. The way Dennis saw it, they needed each other—Rader played the role of the bad guy, and Ken played the cop. They had a good thing going, a rapport. “I need to ask you, how come you lied to me?” Rader said. “How come you lied to me?” Landwehr listened to the question, but he told me that he couldn’t quite believe what he’d just heard. Could Rader really be that dense? Was he so hopelessly deluded as to imagine that the past three decades had been nothing more than a big game? He bit his lip to keep from laughing. But Rader was serious. He sat there across the table, staring at Landwehr, not blinking, patiently waiting for an answer to his question. Finally, the tired homicide detective shook his head and muttered, “Because I was trying to catch you.
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John E. Douglas (Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer)
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Roughly twelve hours into his interrogation, Rader looked across the table at his inquisitors and said, “Could one of you guys do me a favor? Just shoot me in the head. Put me out of my misery. I know you would be in big trouble for that. But just shoot me like a mad dog. Just shoot me and be done with it. Sneak up behind me and shoot me. BOOM! I won’t know what hit me.” The detectives seated across from him would have been happy to oblige, but they didn’t. A bullet to the back of the head would be far too easy an out for Rader.
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John E. Douglas (Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer)
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So he left his car on the other side of the parking lot, walked across to where she parked, and waited. When she appeared, he pulled the hood of his parka down over his head, walked up to her, and grabbed her, which was how everyone seemed to do it in the pages of his detective magazines. But everything went wrong. The moment he lay his hands on her, she began screaming and punching at him. He couldn’t control her arms. She’d gone insane on him. He didn’t realize that a woman could be so strong. So he shoved her down onto the asphalt and ran like hell back toward his car. “That was a big mistake,” he muttered to himself while heading back home to Park City.
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John E. Douglas (Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer)
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These chatbots are also notoriously unregulated, despite regulations applying to the licensing of actual therapists, and may have significant data privacy implications. In the U.S., to date, unlike for drug treatments or medical devices, which require Food and Drug Administration approval, there are no such requirements76 for therapy chatbots.
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Emily M. Bender (The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want)