Omaha Quotes

You can park your snark at the gate, Omaha.

each man must realize that it can all disappear very quickly: the cat, the woman, the job, the front tire, the bed, the walls, the room; all our necessities including love, rest on foundations of sand — and any given cause, no matter how unrelated: the death of a boy in Hong Kong or a blizzard in Omaha . . . can serve as your undoing. all your chinaware crashing to the kitchen floor, your girl will enter and you'll be standing, drunk, in the center of it and she'll ask: my god, what's the matter? and you'll answer: I don't know, I don't know . . . — PULL A STRING, A PUPPET MOVES . . .

You work three jobs? Uniquely American, isn't it? I mean, that is fantastic that you're doing that." To a divorced mother of three, Omaha, Nebraska, Feb. 4, 2005

When a man died, there had to be blame. Jimmy Cross understood this. You could blame the war, You could blame the idiots who made the war. You could blame Kiowa for going to it. You could blame the rain. You could blame the river. You could blame the field, the mud, the climate. You could blame the enemy. You could blame the mortar rounds. You could blame people who were too lazy to read a newspaper, who were bored by the daily body counts, who switched channels at the mention of politics. You could blame whole nations. You could blame God. You could blame the munitions makers or Karl Marx or a trick of fate of an old man in Omaha who forgot to vote.

We're in Des Moines, Iowa today, were in Omaha, Nebraska yesterday and Boise, Idaho the day before. When we landed at the airport in Boise, from Portland, Oregon this lady from our plane came up from behind as we walked down the terminal. She approached me and said "Taylor, I just love your song and want to wish you great things in you career." I looked and her and said "Well, THANK YOU!" and then said " who did you talk to?". (and then pointed to my Mom and the Label rep we were traveling with) I was convinced that one of them had talked to the lady on the plane and told her about me and my song. The lady said "neither one" and then I said "Well, how did you know who I was?" and the lady said "because I listen to radio and I watched your video". This was the first time someone had actually KNOWN who I was and MY NAME. wow. I just walked over and hugged her, and said ...."You're the first person who's ever done that, thankyou." It was an amazing moment to remember, and I always will.

Alas, all that sound and fury disguised the fact that on Omaha Beach at least, the bombs fell too long, the rockets fell too short, and the naval gunfire was too brief.

A girl is a girl whether she lives in West Omaha or Sweet Valley. Books are often far more than just books.

Is it weird being in Omaha?” Simini asked her. “Now that everybody’s left?” “It’s like walking through the mall after it closes,” Mags said.

Her eyes grew wide. "You've been undressing me with your eyes for all those months?" He offered a mischievous grin. "Oh, you have no idea what I've been doing with you in my mind.

Omaha is no place for anybody.

Omaha, Nebraska. Sac City, Iowa. Alexandria, Indiana. Darwin, Minnesota. Hollywood, California. Alliance, Nebraska.

When, as my friend suggested, I stand before Zeus (whether I die naturally, or under sentence of History)I will repeat all this that I have written as my defense.Many people spend their entire lives collecting stamps or old coins, or growing tulips. I am sure that Zius will be merciful toward people who have given themselves entirely to these hobbies, even though they are only amusing and pointless diversions. I shall say to him : "It is not my fault that you made me a poet, and that you gave me the gift of seeing simultaneously what was happening in Omaha and Prague, in the Baltic states and on the shores of the Arctic Ocean.I felt that if I did not use that gift my poetry would be tasteless to me and fame detestable. Forgive me." And perhaps Zeus, who does not call stamp-collectors and tulip-growers silly, will forgive.

Were there atheists in foxholes during World War II? Of course, as can be verified by my dogtags . . . A veteran of Omaha Beach in 1944, I insisted upon including ‘None’ instead of P, C, or J as my religious affiliation.

Somewhere between Omaha and Colorado I’d fallen truly, madly, fucking ridiculously hard for Bailey Mitchell. She was all I could think about, all the time, and sometimes it felt like I’d do anything—anything—just to make sure she was happy.

At Field Elementary School in Omaha, I'd been the only one in my class to flunk kindergarten; I don't remember why,

In Omaha, we were part of the largest African American extended family in Nebraska. In Pleasanton, we would be the chocolate chip in the cookie.

I can recall quite clearly the journey from Omaha to San Francisco which I made with the opera troupe; God had created the world in less time than it took us to travel across America.

We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress…. The people are demoralized; The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled, public opinion silenced, business prostrated, homes covered with mortgages, labor impoverished…. The fruits of the toil of millions are badly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind; and the possessors of these, in turn, despise the Republic and endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes—tramps and millionaires.

I really enjoyed hearing the likesand dislikesof my readers at book clubs as well as meeting new fans at the book signing at The Bookworm in Omaha " he said. "The book clubs have overwhelmingly asked me to hurry up on writing the sequel.

Fiction means never letting the pure truth get in the way of a good story.

These people who link us up with the world, who bridge Omaha and Sharon, who introduce us to our social circles—these people on whom we rely more heavily than we realize—are Connectors, people with a special gift for bringing the world together.

She had so painfully reared three sons to be Christian gentlemen that one of them had become an Omaha bartender, one a professor of Greek, and one, Cyrus N. Bogart, a boy of fourteen who was still at home, the most brazen member of the toughest gang in Boytown.

Remember that high school boy in Omaha who got 30 million for his cross-media-e-commerce-integration-thingamajig? It was plastered all over the news and on CNN. We could have come up with that, we all agreed, but we were too busy living our lives for such things. So now he’s richer than Midas, and we’re reading about his fortune in the Huffington Post and thinking he should spend some of it on zit cream.

Home? What is home? Home is where a house is that you come back to when the rainy season is about to begin, to wait until the next dry season comes around. Home is where your woman is, that you come back to in the intervals between a greater love - the only real love - the lust for riches buried in the earth, that are your own if you can find them. Perhaps you do not call it home, even to yourself. Perhaps you call them 'my house,' 'my woman,' What if there was another 'my house,' 'my woman,' before this one? It makes no difference. This woman is enough for now. Perhaps the guns sounded too loud at Anzio or at Omaha Beach, at Guadalcanal or at Okinawa. Perhaps when they stilled again some kind of strength had been blasted from you that other men still have. And then again perhaps it was some kind of weakness that other men still have. What is strength, what is weakness, what is loyalty, what is perfidy? The guns taught only one thing, but they taught it well: of what consequence is life? Of what consequence is a man? And, therefore, of what consequence if he tramples love in one place and goes to find it in the next? The little moment that he has, let him be at peace, far from the guns and all that remind him of them. So the man who once was Bill Taylor has come back to his house, in the dusk, in the mountains, in Anahuac. ("The Moon Of Montezuma")

Edmonton is Canada’s answer to Omaha. Solid, unassuming, and surrounded by a whole lot of nothing. It’s a place that makes you think of sensible shoes.

I wonder if Hell can be worse than the City of Omaha.

Strategic Air Command in Omaha

drive west out of Omaha on Interstate 80

The haute décor of the San Diego Homicide Division offices could have been lifted straight out of any insurance ajusters' pied-a-terre in Omaha.

Seth, it's seven o'clock." Nine in Omaha. Or maybe 1998 in Omaha.

No se había dado cuenta de Omaha fuera un sitio tan bonito. (Mentalmente, le atribuía el mérito a Park. El mundo se reconstruía a su alrededor para convertirse en un lugar mejor.)

had just come back from a predawn breakfast at the Omaha Toddle House with Jack Nicholson,

Mishmar. Your father’s hellish prison he cobbled together from the remains of office buildings from Omaha, which he destroyed. The Mishmar that’s stuffed to the brink with mutated vampires. That Mishmar.” “Yes.” “You

How could the human heart hold within its chambers at the same moment such grand measures of nobility and baseness? He wrote in his notebook: Indians at Omaha station: I am ashamed for this thing we call civilization.

Hickock whistled and rolled his eyes. "Wow!" he said, and then, summoning his talent for something very like total recall, he began an account of the long ride--the approximately ten thousand miles he and Smith had covered in the past six weeks. He talked for an hour and twenty-five minutes--from two-fifty to four-fifteen--and told, while Nye attempted to list them, of highways and hotels, motels, rivers, towns, and cities, a chorus of entwining names: Apache, El Paso, Corpus Christi, Santillo, San Luis Potosi, Acapulco, San Diego, Dallas, Omaha, Sweetwater, Stillwater, Tenville Junction, Tallahassee, Needles, Miami, Hotel Nuevo Waldorf, Somerset Hotel, Hotel Simone, Arrowhead Motel, Cherokee Motel, and many, many more. He gave them the name of the man in Mexico to whom he'd sold his own 1940 Chevrolet, and confessed that he had stolen a newer model in Iowa.

Stripped to its essence, combat is a series of quick decisions and rather precise actions carried out in concert with ten or twelve other men. In that sense it’s much more like football than, say, like a gang fight. The unit that choreographs their actions best usually wins. They might take casualties, but they win. That choreography—you lay down fire while I run forward, then I cover you while you move your team up—is so powerful that it can overcome enormous tactical deficits. There is choreography for storming Omaha Beach, for taking out a pillbox bunker, and for surviving an L-shaped ambush at night on the Gatigal. The choreography always requires that each man make decisions based not on what’s best for him, but on what’s best for the group. If everyone does that, most of the group survives. If no one does, most of the group dies. That, in essence, is combat.

He has a really consistent routine. He comes in in the morning at around 8:30. He reads five newspapers. He reads The Financial Times, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Omaha World Herald. Then he has a stack of reports on his desk from the companies Berkshire owns, and some trade press like American Banker or oil and gas journals, and through the rest of the day, he alternates between flipping through this stuff and then talking on the phone to people either who call him or who he calls. He never calls his managers; they can call him. He is really accessible, but he leaves them alone. Then he has CNBC on all day long with the crawl, with the sound muted and if he sees his name cross along the bottom and they are talking about him, he will turn the sound on to find out what they are saying. That is his day. He doesn't do meetings -- there are no meetings.

Another example, this one from the 2000 crash of the dot-com bubble, concerns a self-described introvert based in Omaha, Nebraska, where he’s well known for shutting himself inside his office for hours at a time. Warren Buffett, the legendary

An asteroid or comet traveling at cosmic velocities would enter the Earth’s atmosphere at such a speed that the air beneath it couldn’t get out of the way and would be compressed, as in a bicycle pump. As anyone who has used such a pump knows, compressed air grows swiftly hot, and the temperature below it would rise to some 60,000 Kelvin, or ten times the surface temperature of the Sun. In this instant of its arrival in our atmosphere, everything in the meteor’s path—people, houses, factories, cars—would crinkle and vanish like cellophane in a flame. One second after entering the atmosphere, the meteorite would slam into the Earth’s surface, where the people of Manson had a moment before been going about their business. The meteorite itself would vaporize instantly, but the blast would blow out a thousand cubic kilometers of rock, earth, and superheated gases. Every living thing within 150 miles that hadn’t been killed by the heat of entry would now be killed by the blast. Radiating outward at almost the speed of light would be the initial shock wave, sweeping everything before it. For those outside the zone of immediate devastation, the first inkling of catastrophe would be a flash of blinding light—the brightest ever seen by human eyes—followed an instant to a minute or two later by an apocalyptic sight of unimaginable grandeur: a roiling wall of darkness reaching high into the heavens, filling an entire field of view and traveling at thousands of miles an hour. Its approach would be eerily silent since it would be moving far beyond the speed of sound. Anyone in a tall building in Omaha or Des Moines, say, who chanced to look in the right direction would see a bewildering veil of turmoil followed by instantaneous oblivion. Within minutes, over an area stretching from Denver to Detroit and encompassing what had once been Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, the Twin Cities—the whole of the Midwest, in short—nearly every standing thing would be flattened or on fire, and nearly every living thing would be dead. People up to a thousand miles away would be knocked off their feet and sliced or clobbered by a blizzard of flying projectiles. Beyond a thousand miles the devastation from the blast would gradually diminish. But that’s just the initial shockwave. No one can do more than guess what the associated damage would be, other than that it would be brisk and global. The impact would almost certainly set off a chain of devastating earthquakes. Volcanoes across the globe would begin to rumble and spew. Tsunamis would rise up and head devastatingly for distant shores. Within an hour, a cloud of blackness would cover the planet, and burning rock and other debris would be pelting down everywhere, setting much of the planet ablaze. It has been estimated that at least a billion and a half people would be dead by the end of the first day. The massive disturbances to the ionosphere would knock out communications systems everywhere, so survivors would have no idea what was happening elsewhere or where to turn. It would hardly matter. As one commentator has put it, fleeing would mean “selecting a slow death over a quick one. The death toll would be very little affected by any plausible relocation effort, since Earth’s ability to support life would be universally diminished.

As long as they were talking, it was easy. And Levi was always talking. He told her about 4-H. "What do the H's stand for?" "Head, heart, hands, health. They don't have 4-H in South Omaha?" "They do, but it stands for hard, hip-hop, and Homey-don't-play-that.

Bradley, as well as Generals Gerow and Huebner, was completely ignorant of the decidedly positive news that by 9:00, the GIs had penetrated the German coastal defenses in at least seven places and had neutralized five of the enemy’s twelve coastal strongpoints.

He [Ray] was working in a tool-and-die factory in Brooklyn, but before that had drifted around, had been employed at the Studebaker plant in South Bend and also at an Omaha slaughterhouse on the kill floor. Once I asked him what that was like. "You ever heard of Auschwitz?

Yeah," he says. "We've been friends since kindergarten. Funniest guy I know," Matt says with a chuckle. "He's a great guitar player, too. He's in a band with some guys from Omaha South. He keeps trying to get me to join." "What do you play?" I ask. "Baseball," Matt jokes.

DOCTOR AIN WAS recognized on the Omaha-Chicago flight. A biologist colleague from Pasadena came out of the toilet and saw Ain in an aisle seat. Five years before, this man had been jealous of Ain's huge grants. Now he nodded coldly and was surprised at the intensity of Ain's response. He almost turned back to speak, but he felt too tired; like nearly everyone, he was fighting the flu. The stewardess handing out coats after they landed remembered Ain too: A tall thin nondescript man with rusty hair. He held up the line staring at her; since he already had his raincoat with him she decided it was some kooky kind of pass and waved him on. She saw Ain shamble off into the airport smog, apparently alone. Despite the big Civil Defense signs, O'Hare was late getting underground. No one noticed the woman. - 'The Last Flight of Doctor Ain

North Platte, Nebraska, is about as isolated as a small town can conceivably be. It’s in the middle of the middle of the country, alone out on the plains; it is hours by car even from the cities of Omaha and Lincoln. Few people venture there unless they live there, or have family there.

He "had business at Boys Town in Omaha, Nebraska" where the wayward boys were being traumatized and sexually abused in accordance with the Catholic involvement in Project Monarch. Survivor Paul Bonacci of the infamous Franklin Cover-up case has named Alex Houston as one of his abusers there in Boys Town.

Eventually, I headed to the bathroom, and I mention this only because I saw in that bathroom the most quintessentially American artifact I have ever encountered: a bright blue rubber mat resting in the bottom of the urinal emblazoned with the following legend: Epply World's Cleanest Airport Omaha, NE God bless our relentless idiotic optimism.

Another example, this one from the 2000 crash of the dot-com bubble, concerns a self-described introvert based in Omaha, Nebraska, where he’s well known for shutting himself inside his office for hours at a time. Warren Buffett, the legendary investor and one of the wealthiest men in the world, has used exactly the attributes we’ve explored in this chapter—

Categories No. 1 and No. 2: Rolled-up trips and three cards to a low straight flush.

Category No. 3: Two aces with a low card.

Categories No. 4 and No. 5: Three small cards to a straight and two small cards with an ace.

This section of Scripture reminds me of the rows of white crosses along the wind-swept hills of Normandy. We’re free today because, in June 1944, during the three-month battle of Normandy, nearly fifty-three thousand “nobodies” paid the ultimate price to defeat Nazi tyranny. No fewer than 9, 387 grave markers overlook Omaha Beach, many of them bearing the names of men who died during the first hours of the invasion called D-day. Beneath every white marker lies a person of significance because each one had an impact on the rest of history; each one made a difference. It’s a very moving place to be. Visitors to that patch of land near Colleville-sur Mer, France, frequently weep quietly because there the real heroes of the war are silently honored.

Warren Buffett, the “Sage of Omaha” whose shrewd investments have made him one of the world’s richest men, has a stake in the marijuana industry via Cubic Designs, a company that provides mezzanine floor-space for warehouses. Cubic Designs dropped flyers off at 1,000 marijuana dispensaries, urging them to “double your growing space,” with a picture of metal flooring loaded with cannabis plants. The Sage himself made no comment.

Who is going to influence whom in the new association? Warren may have entered the ocean in California, but I am sitting down in Virginia with Ben Graham’s beginner’s book and “How to Read a Financial Report” by someone called Merrill, Lynch, Pierce, Fenner and Smith. I am told I have to finish Ben Graham very soon because Warren is unwilling to pay the small fine involved in having the book out of the Omaha public library too long.

He was the one, however, with whom no one wanted his or her picture taken, the one to whom no one wanted to introduce his son or daughter. Louis and Gage knew him; they had met him and faced him down in New England, some time ago. He was waiting to choke you on a marble, to smother you with a dry-cleaning bag, to sizzle you into eternity with a fast and lethal boggie of electricity—Available at Your Nearest Switchplate or Vacant Light Socket Right Now. There was death in a quarter bag of peanuts, an aspirated piece of steak, the next pack of cigarettes. He was around all the time, he monitored all the checkpoints between the mortal and the eternal. Dirty needles, poison beetles, downed live wires, forest fires. Whirling roller skates that shot nurdy little kids into busy intersections. When you got into the bathtub to take a shower, Oz got right in there too—Shower with a Friend. When you got on an airplane, Oz took your boarding pass. He was in the water you drank, the food you ate. Who’s out there? you howled into the dark when you were frightened and all alone, and it was his answer that came back: Don’t be afraid, it’s just me. Hi, howaya? You got cancer of the bowel, what a bummer, so solly, Cholly! Septicemia! Leukemia! Atherosclerosis! Coronary thrombosis! Encephalitis! Osteomyelitis! Hey-ho, let’s go! Junkie in a doorway with a knife. Phone call in the middle of the night. Blood cooking in battery acid on some exit ramp in North Carolina. Big handfuls of pills, munch em up. That peculiar blue cast of the fingernails following asphyxiation—in its final grim struggle to survive the brain takes all the oxygen that is left, even that in those living cells under the nails. Hi, folks, my name’s Oz the Gweat and Tewwible, but you can call me Oz if you want—hell, we’re old friends by now. Just stopped by to whop you with a little congestive heart failure or a cranial blood clot or something; can’t stay, got to see a woman about a breach birth, then I’ve got a little smoke-inhalation job to do in Omaha. And that thin voice is crying, “I love you, Tigger! I love you! I believe in you, Tigger! I will always love you and believe in you, and I will stay young, and the only Oz to ever live in my heart will be that gentle faker from Nebraska! I love you . . .” We cruise . . . my son and I . . . because the essence of it isn’t war or sex but only that sickening, noble, hopeless battle against Oz the Gweat and Tewwible. He and I, in our white van under this bright Florida sky, we cruise. And the red flasher is hooded, but it is there if we need it . . . and none need know but us because the soil of a man’s heart is stonier; a man grows what he can . . . and tends it.

That the GIs on Omaha Beach did indeed possess the essential fighting skills to save the day has become an elemental moral of American history. No one realized it at the time, particularly the unfortunate men who were subjected to the enemy’s relentless barrage of bullets and shells, but Omaha Beach would become one of those exceptional moments in history when Americans defined themselves by their actions as a people worthy of the principles upon which the nation was founded.

By the 1770s, the Teton Sioux had overrun the Arikara, or Ree, on the Missouri River and made it as far west as the Black Hills, where they quickly ousted the Kiowa and the Crows. Over the next hundred years the Sioux continued to expand their territory, eventually forcing the Crows to retreat all the way to the Bighorn River more than two hundred miles to the west, while also carrying on raids to the north and south against the Assiniboine, Shoshone, Pawnee, Gros Ventre, and Omaha.

There was death in a quarter bag of peanuts, an aspirated piece of steak, the next pack of cigarettes. He was around all the time, he monitored all the checkpoints between the mortal and the eternal. Dirty needles, poison beetles, downed live wires, forest fires. Whirling roller skates that shot nurdy little kids into busy intersections. When you got into the bathtub to take a shower, Oz got right in there too—Shower with a Friend. When you got on an airplane, Oz took your boarding pass. He was in the water you drank, the food you ate. Who’s out there? you howled into the dark when you were frightened and all alone, and it was his answer that came back: Don’t be afraid, it’s just me. Hi, howaya? You got cancer of the bowel, what a bummer, so solly, Cholly! Septicemia! Leukemia! Atherosclerosis! Coronary thrombosis! Encephalitis! Osteomyelitis! Hey-ho, let’ s go! Junkie in a doorway with a knife. Phone call in the middle of the night. Blood cooking in battery acid on some exit ramp in North Carolina. Big handfuls of pills, munch em up. That peculiar blue cast of the fingernails following asphyxiation—in its final grim struggle to survive the brain takes all the oxygen that is left, even that in those living cells under the nails. Hi, folks, my name’s Oz the Gweat and Tewwible, but you can call me Oz if you want— hell, we’re old friends by now. Just stopped by to whop you with a little congestive heart failure or a cranial blood clot or something; can’t stay, got to see a woman about a breach birth, then I’ve got a little smoke-inhalation job to do in Omaha.

In a revealing aside, Buffett admitted that years ago he was terrified of public speaking. He got physically ill at the thought. He said he even signed up for a $100 Dale Carnegie course but cancelled the check when he got home. Later, he did a communication course in Omaha. Doing it with others in the same boat helped him to “get outside of himself.” He’s very glad he did it, noting that effective communication is under taught, and recommended that many could benefit by forcing themselves to learn public speaking at an early age.

Many of your opponents will put a great deal of emphasis on three low cards to a straight. These hands are very strong and they do scoop a lot of pots. However, they do best in multiway pots when the cards needed to fill the open ends are very live and when these hands

The Stevens brothers had shared everything except women since they could remember: poker winnings, uniform, Red Cross parcels, news from home, and their most intimate fears and hopes. But in a few hours' time, after years of being inseparable, they would not share the same landing craft bound for the beaches of northern France. For the first time since they had joined the National Guard, a week apart in 1938, they would not be side by side. They would not face their greatest test together. They would arrive on Omaha Beach in different boats.

Salvation appeared to be rising from the sea off beaches Omaha and Gold, where a pair of gigantic “synthetic harbors” took shape after two years of planning under excruciating secrecy. In one of the most ambitious construction projects ever essayed in Britain, twenty thousand workers at a cost of $100 million had labored on the components; another ten thousand now bullied the pieces across the Channel and into position with huge tow bridles, hawsers, and 160 tugs. Each artificial harbor, Mulberry A and Mulberry B—American and British, respectively—would have the port capacity of Gibraltar or Dover.

Mr. and Mrs. Johnson in Omaha or San Francisco or Manhattan will watch the films and weep and decide once and for all that war is inhumane and terrible, and they will tell their friends at church and their family this, but Corporal Johnson at Camp Pendleton and Sergeant Johnson at Travis Air Force Base and Seaman Johnson at Coronado Naval Station and Spec 4 Johnson at Fort Bragg and Lance Corporal Swofford at Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Base watch the same films and are excited by them, because the magic brutality of the films celebrates the terrible and despicable beauty of their fighting skills. Fight, rape, war, pillage, burn. Filmic images of death and carnage are pornography for the military man; with film you are stroking his cock, tickling his balls with the pink feather of history, getting him ready for his real First Fuck.

Our “It’s your life” message produced one particularly interesting outcome: none of our three children completed college, though each certainly had the intellect to do so. Neither Susie Sr. nor I were at all bothered by this. Besides, as I often joke, if the three combine their college credits, they would be entitled to one degree that they could rotate among themselves. I don’t believe that leaving college early has hindered the three in any way. They, like every Omaha Buffett from my grandfather to my great-grandchildren, attended public grammar and high schools. In fact, almost all of these family members, including our three children, went to the same inner-city, long-integrated high school, where they mixed daily with classmates from every economic and social background. In those years, they may have learned more about the world they live in than have many individuals with postgrad educations.

I begin this chapter with President Ronald Reagan’s Farewell Speech on January 11, 1989. President Reagan encouraged the rising generation to “let ’em know and nail ’em on it”—that is, to push back against teachers, professors, journalists, politicians, and others in the governing generation who manipulate and deceive them: An informed patriotism is what we want. And are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world? Those of us who are over 35 or so years of age grew up in a different America. We were taught, very directly, what it means to be an American. And we absorbed, almost in the air, a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions. If you didn’t get these things from your family, you got them from the neighborhood, from the father down the street who fought in Korea or the family who lost someone at Anzio. Or you could get a sense of patriotism from school. And if all else failed, you could get a sense of patriotism from the popular culture. The movies celebrated democratic values and implicitly reinforced the idea that America was special. TV was like that, too, through the mid-sixties. But now, we’re about to enter the nineties, and some things have changed. Younger parents aren’t sure that an unambivalent appreciation of America is the right thing to teach modern children. And as for those who create the popular culture, well-grounded patriotism is no longer the style. Our spirit is back, but we haven’t reinstitutionalized it. We’ve got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise. And freedom is special and rare. It’s fragile; it needs [protection]. So, we’ve got to teach history based not on what’s in fashion but what’s important—why the Pilgrims came here, who Jimmy Doolittle was, and what those 30 seconds over Tokyo meant. You know, 4 years ago on the 40th anniversary of D-Day, I read a letter from a young woman writing to her late father, who’d fought on Omaha Beach. Her name was Lisa Zanatta Henn, and she said, “We will always remember, we will never forget what the boys of Normandy did.” Well, let’s help her keep her word. If we forget what we did, we won’t know who we are. I’m warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit. Let’s start with some basics: more attention to American history and a greater emphasis on civic ritual. And let me offer lesson number one about America: All great change in America begins at the dinner table. So, tomorrow night in the kitchen, I hope the talking begins. And children, if your parents haven’t been teaching you what it means to be an American, let ’em know and nail ’em on it. That would be a very American thing to do.1

Buffett was asked why he hadn't bought more Costco shares, considering that Munger owns shares and is on the board of directors. "Yeah, you hit on a good one here," Buffett replied. "We should've owned more Costco, and probably if Charlie had been sitting in Omaha, we would've owned more Costco. Charlie was constantly telling me about this terrific method of distribution, and after 10 years or so I started catching on to what he was saying, and we bought a little of Costco at Berkshire. "We actually negotiated to buy more. I made the most common mistake that I make . . . We started buying it, and the price went up, and instead of following it up and continuing to buy more. . . . If Costco had stayed at $15 a share or so, where we were buying it, we would've bought a lot more. But instead it went to 15⅛ and who could pay 15⅛ when they'd been paying $15—it wasn't quite that bad. But I have made that mistake a lot of times, and it's very irritating."23

La muerte podía estar en una bolsa de cacahuetes, en un trozo de carne que se te atravesara, en el siguiente paquete de cigarrillos. Siempre te andaba rondando, de guardia en todas las estaciones de control entre lo mortal y lo eterno. Agujas infectadas, insectos venenosos, cables mal aislados, incendios forestales. Patines que lanzaban a intrépidos chiquillos a cruces muy transitados. Cada vez que te metes en la bañera para darte una ducha, Oz te acompaña: ducha para dos. Cada vez que subes a un avión, Oz lleva tu misma tarjeta de embarque. Está en el agua que bebes y en la comida que comes. «¿Quién anda ahí?», gritas en la oscuridad cuando estás solo y asustado, y es él quien te responde: Tranquilo, soy yo. Eh, ¿cómo va eso? Tienes un cáncer en el vientre, qué lata, chico, sí que lo siento. ¡Cólera! ¡Septicemia! ¡Leucemia! ¡Arteriosclerosis! ¡Trombosis coronaria! ¡Encefalitis! ¡Osteomielitis! ¡Ajajá, vamos allá! Un chorizo en un portal, con una navaja en la mano. Una llamada telefónica a medianoche. Sangre que hierve con ácido de la batería en una rampa de salida de una autopista de Carolina del Norte. Puñados de píldoras: anda, traga. Ese tono azulado de las uñas que sigue a la muerte por asfixia; en su último esfuerzo por aferrarse a la vida, el cerebro absorbe todo el oxígeno que queda en el cuerpo, incluso el de las células vivas que están debajo de las uñas. Hola, chicos, me llamo Oz el Ggande y Teggible, pero podéis llamarme Oz a secas. Al fin y al cabo, somos viejos amigos. Pasaba por aquí y he entrado un momento para traerte este pequeño infarto, este derrame cerebral, etcétera; lo siento, no puedo quedarme, tengo un parto con hemorragia y, luego, inhalación de humo tóxico en Omaha. Y la vocecita sigue gritando: «¡Te quiero, Tigger, te quiero! ¡Creo en ti, Tigger! ¡Siempre te querré y creeré en ti, y seguiré siendo niña, y el único Oz que habitará en mi corazón será ese simpático impostor de Nebraska! Te quiero…». Vamos patrullando, mi hijo y yo…, porque lo que importa no es el sexo ni la guerra, sino la noble y terrible batalla sin esperanza contra Oz, el Ggande y Teggible.

In the end, even the other boys ddn't want it to be over - for two weeks they smoked, flirted, and drank, away from the eyes of their parents. And they learned how to do things. That country, with its chronic breakdowns and shortages, made resourceful improvisers out of the clumsiest hands. A quarter of a century later, at family gatherings in San Francisco and Omaha and Chicago and New Jersey and Brooklyn, we children had to marvel at the hands of our fathers: small, rough with work - sometimes cracked with it - the thumbs squat and broad. Whether molecular biologists, programmers, or taxi drivers, they could dismantle radios, singe potatoes in firepits, swim to the other side of the lake - oh, how these tense men untensed at the sight of a rural body of water - get a chandelier to hang from the ceiling, and strum a guitar. They still worse the mustaches and trimmed beards of their youth, and they were beyond the reach of American fashion. To us, their Americanized children, these men were rigid, frightened, and withdrawn. But you had to love their hands.

The only path McAuliffe saw to hard-money parity ran through cycles of prospecting new donors, in the mail and online. To accomplish that on the scale he believed crucial, Democrats needed the list of 100 million new names, sortable by party registration or voting behavior, that would fill a national voter file. McAuliffe proposed a deal to the state chairs, that the DNC would effectively borrow their files, help clean them up, add new data like donor information and commercially available phone numbers, and then return them for the state party’s use. At the same time, McAuliffe went to Vinod Gupta, a major Democratic fund-raiser and Clinton friend who was the founder and CEO of InfoUSA, one of the country’s large commercial data vendors. Like many of his rivals, Gupta had been trying for years to find customers in the political world, and offered McAuliffe a good deal for his product. McAuliffe agreed, and as the state files came in, the DNC would send them out to InfoUSA’s Omaha servers, where hundreds of pieces of new information were added to each voter’s profile. A new interface was built to navigate it all. It was called Demzilla.

The process is taking place before our eyes and is already far advanced.” Under present trends, “the number of Jews in Europe by the year 2000 would then be not much more than 1 million—the lowest figure since the last Middle Ages.” In 1900, there were 8 million. The story elsewhere is even more dispiriting. The rest of what was once the diaspora is now either a museum or a graveyard. Eastern Europe has been effectively emptied of its Jews. In 1939, Poland had 3.2 million Jews. Today it is home to 3,500. The story is much the same in the other capitals of Eastern Europe. The Islamic world, cradle to the great Sephardic Jewish tradition and home to one-third of world Jewry three centuries ago, is now practically Judenrein. Not a single country in the Islamic world is home to more than 20,000 Jews. After Turkey with 19,000 and Iran with 14,000, the country with the largest Jewish community in the entire Islamic world is Morocco with 6,100. There are more Jews in Omaha, Nebraska. These communities do not figure in projections. There is nothing to project. They are fit subjects not for counting but for remembering. Their very sound has vanished. Yiddish and Ladino, the distinctive languages of the European and Sephardic diasporas, like the communities that invented them, are nearly extinct.

Hickock whistled and rolled his eyes. "Wow!" he said, and then, summoning his talent for something very like total recall, he began an account of the long ride--the approximately ten thousand miles he and Smith had covered in the past six weeks. He talked for an hour and twenty-five minutes--from two-fifty to four-fifteen--and told, while Nye attempted to list them, of highways and hotels, motels, rivers, towns, and cities, a chorus of entwining names: Apache, El Paso, Corpus Christi, Santillo, San Luis Potosi, Acapulco, San Diego, Dallas, Omaha, Sweetwater, Stillwater, Tenville Junction, Tallahassee, Needles, Miami, Hotel Nuevo Waldorf, Somerset Hotel, Hotel Simone, Arrowhead Motel, Cherokee Motel, and many, many more. He gave them the name of the man in Mexico to whom he'd sold his own 1940 Chevrolet, and confessed that he had stolen a newer model in Iowa. He described persons he and his partner had met: a Mexican widow, rich and sexy; Otto, a German “millionaire”; a “swish” pair of Negro prizefighters driving a “swish” lavender Cadillac; the blind proprietor of a Florida rattlesnake farm; a dying old man and his grandson; and others. And when he had finished he sat with folded arms and a pleased smile, as though waiting to be commended for the humor, the clarity, and the candor of his traveler’s tale.

Partly at Rubel’s urging, Secretary of Defense McNamara later compelled the Minuteman developers, against great resistance, to install the equivalent of an electronic lock on the Minuteman, such that it couldn’t be fired without the receipt of a coded message from higher headquarters. Decades later, long after McNamara’s retirement, Bruce Blair, a former Minuteman launch control officer, informed the former secretary that the Air Force had ensured that the codes in the launch control centers were all set continuously at 00000000. According to Blair, McNamara responded, “I am shocked, absolutely shocked and outraged. Who the hell authorized that?” “What he had just learned from me,” Blair continues, was that the locks had been installed,52 but everyone knew the combination. The Strategic Air Command (SAC) in Omaha quietly decided to set the “locks” to all zeros in order to circumvent this safeguard. During the early to mid-1970s, during my stint as a Minuteman launch officer, they still had not been changed. Our launch checklist in fact instructed us, the firing crew, to double-check the locking panel in our underground launch bunker to ensure that no digits other than zero had been inadvertently dialed into the panel. SAC remained far less concerned about unauthorized launches than about the potential of these safeguards to interfere with the implementation of wartime launch orders. And so the “secret unlock code” during the height of the nuclear crises of the Cold War remained constant at 00000000.

This neighborhood was mine first. I walked each block twice: drunk, then sober. I lived every day with legs and headphones. It had snowed the night I ran down Lorimer and swore I’d stop at nothing. My love, he had died. What was I supposed to do? I regret nothing. Sometimes I feel washed up as paper. You’re three years away. But then I dance down Graham and the trees are the color of champagne and I remember— There are things I like about heartbreak, too, how it needs a good soundtrack. The way I catch a man’s gaze on the L and don’t look away first. Losing something is just revising it. After this love there will be more love. My body rising from a nest of sheets to pick up a stranger’s MetroCard. I regret nothing. Not the bar across the street from my apartment; I was still late. Not the shared bathroom in Barcelona, not the red-eyes, not the songs about black coats and Omaha. I lie about everything but not this. You were every streetlamp that winter. You held the crown of my head and for once I won’t show you what I’ve made. I regret nothing. Your mother and your Maine. Your wet hair in my lap after that first shower. The clinic and how I cried for a week afterwards. How we never chose the language we spoke. You wrote me a single poem and in it you were the dog and I the fire. Remember the courthouse? The anniversary song. Those goddamn Kmart towels. I loved them, when did we throw them away? Tomorrow I’ll write down everything we’ve done to each other and fill the bathtub with water. I’ll burn each piece of paper down to silt. And if it doesn’t work, I’ll do it again. And again and again and— — Hala Alyan, “Object Permanence

Roadies waren het podium aan het volzetten met instrumenten en microfoons, en Walter deed het verhaal van Conor Oberst: dat hij al op zijn twaalfde was begonnen muziek op te nemen, dat hij nog altijd in Omaha woonde, dat zijn band meer een familie of collectief was dan zomaar een rockgroep. Van alle kanten stroomden er weer jonkies de zaal binnen, stralend van verwachting, levende illustraties van de bandnaam Bright Eyes. (Wat een stuitende kutnaam, dacht Katz. Kijk ons eens jong en onbedorven zijn.) Zijn nu totaal bedorven stemming had niet zozeer met afgunst te maken, en zelfs niet met het gevoel dat hij zichzelf als rocker overleefd had. Het was meer een soort wanhoop over de versplinterdheid van de wereld. De natie vocht momenteel smerige grondoorlogen uit in twee verre landen, de planeet warmde sneller op dan een broodrooster, en hier in de 9:30 werd hij omringd door honderden kinderen à la de bananenbroodbakkende Sarah, overlopend van argeloze verwachting, verzekerd van hun onvervreemdbare recht op... ja, op wat? Op emotie.

went to the White House and got the President out of bed. Carey and President Harrison were said to be old Senate friends, and no one was present at this session to speak for Johnson County. Quickly convinced of the necessity for immediate action, Harrison ordered a telegram send to General John R. Brooke in Omaha shortly after 11:00 P.M.4 At 11:05 P.M. the president wired Governor Barber that “in compliance with your call for the aid of the United States forces to protect the state of Wyoming against domestic violence,” he had ordered the secretary of war to send troops.5 The president did not have his facts right — the state of Wyoming needed no saving from domestic violence — but Governor Barber made no effort to set the record straight. At 11:37 P.M. General Brooke telegrammed Governor Barber, informing him that the commanding officer at Fort McKinney had been ordered “to prevent violence and preserve peace.”6 This message was received in Buffalo at 12:05 P.M., and within two hours, troops rode out of Fort McKinney under orders from the post’s commanding officer, Colonel J. J. Van Horn.7

He meant to kill me...No, not kill me – make me forget. Forget everything. He said we'd live together in a house of pumpkin and gold – yes, once I couldn't remember why I'd come to Fairyland-Below, or recall Fairyland-Above, or even Omaha and Mother and Father and any reason not to live in Tain and feast every night! How could he? That's as bad as killing, to take away everything a person is.

I imagine Marlin Perkins narrating the scene on my favorite childhood television show, Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.

affinity for William F. Cody, who lived most of his adult life in Nebraska. My father, George W. Carter, could have seen Buffalo Bill's Wild West when it came to Omaha in August 1908.

Without the U.S. embargo, the Revolution couldn't have survived. It'd needed a common enemy to blame for its economic ills. In the end consumerism, not guns would destroy Socialism. Microwaves and computers, motorcycles, iPhones, Omaha Steaks.

There’s an unholy matrimony between thugs and thug enablers. However, Omaha’s inner-city quandary isn’t unique; this trend dominates America’s urban landscapes.

Many economists now openly praise monopolies as a more enlightened form of capitalism. Robert Atkinson and Michael Lind wrote a book titled Big Is Beautiful. They write, “In the abstract universe of Econ 101, monopolies and oligopolies are always bad because they distort prices… . In the real world, things are not so simple.” And to enlighten us, they continue, “Academic economics includes a well-developed literature about imperfect markets. But it is reserved for advanced students,” and these lessons are unavailable to the poor, benighted souls who don't have PhDs.15 It is ironic that the champions of monopolies are essentially aligning themselves with neo-Marxist economists who think that in capitalism the big inevitably eat the small. As the eminent Polish economist Michał Kalecki wrote, “Monopoly appears to be deeply rooted in the nature of the capitalist system: free competition, as an assumption, may be useful in the first stage of certain investigations, but as a description of the normal stage of capitalist economy it is merely a myth.”16 Kalecki would have felt at home in Omaha and Silicon Valley. Buffett and Thiel's views on competition capture the contradictions of capitalism. Thiel's idea that innovation comes only from large monopolies ignores his own personal history at PayPal. He was David creating a startup from nothing and competing against financial Goliaths.

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One sidelight for the fundamentalists in our group: B.P.L. owns 71.7% of Dempster acquired at a cost of $1,262,577.27. On June 30, 1963 Dempster had a small safe deposit box at the Omaha National Bank containing securities worth $2,028,415.25. Our 71.7% share of $2,028,415.25 amounts to $1,454,373.70. Thus, everything above ground (and part of it underground) is profit. My security analyst friends may find this a rather primitive method of accounting, but I must confess that I find a bit more substance in this fingers and toes method than in any prayerful reliance that someone will pay me 35 times next year’s earnings.

Parker Haas, crying Omaha, and his sleepless Rose.

At age forty-seven, Warren had already accomplished everything he had ever imagined he could want. He was worth $72 million. He ran a company that was worth $135 million.41 His newspaper had won the two highest prizes in journalism. He was one of the most important men in Omaha and increasingly prominent at a national level. He was serving on the boards of the largest local bank, the Washington Post, and a number of other companies. He had been CEO of three companies and had bought and sold successfully more stocks than most people could name in a lifetime. Most of his original partners were now enormously rich. All he wanted was to keep on making money for the thrill of it without changing anything else about his life. He

No, this architecture in Council Bluffs and Omaha, this whole deeply embedded psychology of the use of space, simply conveys that there is a lot of it. There is no need to make things smaller. That is the American condition, a source of its optimism and its unfriendliness to elites and aristocracies of all kinds, which requires constraints on space in order to increase the value of their land - which then affords them their social position. This was a crucial difference between the Old World and the New. Virtually unlimited space is the essence of the frontier mentality.

It is a central characteristic of the American political system that a wheelbarrow fetishist could be mayor of Omaha.

Write it so the milkman in Omaha can understand your story.

You’re doing it again,” he said. “Doing what? I’m answering your question honestly. What did I do wrong?” “I just asked you where you want to go and you just told me three places you don’t want to be: here, Omaha, and unemployed.

Omaha native Paul Stratman spent forty-four years in the electrical trade, laying wire, managing people, and eventually doing 3D modeling. Then he retired. Dissatisfaction soon set in. “My wife had a long list of things she wanted done around the house,” Paul said, “but that took me less than a year to complete. And I certainly didn’t want to just sit around the house doing nothing for the rest of my life. I wanted to help people.” About this time, he heard about a group of retired tradesmen in the Omaha area who call themselves the Geezers. Several times each week, for a half day at a time, a group of five to ten Geezers meets in North Omaha (a poorer part of town) to rebuild a house for later use by a nonprofit. “Currently, we’re rebuilding a home that will house six former inmates,” Paul told me. “We’re providing the home, and the nonprofit will provide the mentorship when the gentlemen move in.” The goal is to help formerly incarcerated people build better lives and stay out of jail. The rate of recidivism in the United States reaches as high as 83 percent.[12] “Our goal is zero percent among the men who will occupy this home when we are finished,” Paul said. On a previous occasion, after the devastating 2019 midwestern floods, Paul was working as a volunteer in the area to restore electricity to many of the homes when he received an urgent phone call concerning a couple in their fifties whose home had been destroyed in the flood. The couple were living in a camper with their teenage daughter and three grandkids (whose mother was unable to take care of them) while they tried to get enough money to fix their house. Six people in a tiny camper! The couple were worried because they had been informed that someone from Nebraska’s Division of Children and Family Services would be coming to inspect the living conditions for the three grandkids. The couple feared their grandkids were going to be taken from them. They were almost frantic to prevent that. Would Paul help? Paul went right to work. He completed the electrical wiring and safety renovations inside the flood-damaged home, free of charge, in time for it to pass inspection by CFS. The family stayed together. Reflecting on this experience, Paul said, “When you can help people that are so desperate, and can make a little difference in their lives—people who have put their lives on hold to care for the needs of someone else—it is moving. That was one of the most emotional experiences I’ve ever had and some of the most meaningful work I’ve ever accomplished.” Paul has retired from his job, but he hasn’t stopped working for others.

The book reminded me of the solace, escape, and quiet joy I found in Sweet Valley. Some experiences are universal. A girl is a girl whether she lives in West Omaha or Sweet Valley. Books are often far more than just books.

Brooklyn African-American Catholics asked for “the establishment of a church among us, and the defense and propagation of our holy faith within our race.”17 Some Euro-American clerics made parallel arguments. An Omaha pastor argued that “I do not say they are inferior—from man to man all are equal before God—but they feel oppressed, and so they prefer to have a church of their own . . . where they feel themselves on an equality with their fellow worshippers. . . . Have they not the same right to this privilege as Poles, Italians and others?

15 Million Dutch people against Black Face.

Theirs not to reason why/Theirs but to do and die,” even if the soldiers did not know the source. Those on Omaha Beach who had committed the poem to memory surely muttered to themselves, “Some one had blunder’d.”)

As a seasoned carpenter, plumber, and mechanic, Matthew McGowan has become a sought-after expert in the Omaha, NE area. In addition to his technical skills, he also possesses exceptional business management skills, which have enabled him to successfully run his own companies, Classic Contractors and Greenline Containers.

Risk a lot to save a lot,” Chase pointed out. It was an old motto for first responders. “The entire city of Omaha feels like it’s worth a lot of risk.

JoAnn Bechtold, a prominent businesswoman from Omaha, boasts an impressive track record in the software industry. With Newtek Accounting Systems, Inc. under her belt, she now excels in contract work, focusing on the Ag sector.

In that spring of 1925, a posse of hooded Klansmen on horseback rode up to the house of Earl Little in Omaha, Nebraska. He was a Baptist preacher who led the local chapter of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. The Nebraska Klan had swelled to an all-time high, 45,000 members, with a women’s brigade and a Ku Klux Kiddies as well. The marauders waved torches and smashed windows at the house. They demanded that the preacher come out and face the mob. His pregnant wife, Louise, with three small children at her side, said her husband was not home. Had he been in the house, he might have faced a lynching. The Klansmen told her that “good Christian white people” would not tolerate a troublemaker stirring things up among “the good negroes.” They smashed every window in the house before galloping off into the night. A few days later, the preacher’s wife gave birth to a son—the boy who would become Malcolm X.

JoAnn Bechtold, the seasoned accountant, effortlessly balances the books for various clients in the agricultural industry. With over 40 years of accounting expertise, she excels in implementing and supporting Microsoft Dynamics GP. She enjoys dancing to country music and exploring exotic destinations like Rome and Costa Rica when not crunching numbers.

Omaha,