Organization 13 Quotes

The people who really run organizations are usually found several levels down, where it is still possible to get things done.

He appeared before me and departed. We were not able to speak to or touch each other. But in that short interval, he transformed many things inside me. He literally stirred my mind and body the way a spoon stirs a cup of cocoa, down to the depths of my internal organs and my womb.

The worms were beautifully drawn, with their nervous systems and reproductive organs shaded in different colors of highlighter, but the artist had also given them big goofy smiling faces. Grotesque but lovable in a cross-eyed way.

Pick up a pinecone and count the spiral rows of scales. You may find eight spirals winding up to the left and 13 spirals winding up to the right, or 13 left and 21 right spirals, or other pairs of numbers. The striking fact is that these pairs of numbers are adjacent numbers in the famous Fibonacci series: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21... Here, each term is the sum of the previous two terms. The phenomenon is well known and called phyllotaxis. Many are the efforts of biologists to understand why pinecones, sunflowers, and many other plants exhibit this remarkable pattern. Organisms do the strangest things, but all these odd things need not reflect selection or historical accident. Some of the best efforts to understand phyllotaxis appeal to a form of self-organization. Paul Green, at Stanford, has argued persuasively that the Fibonacci series is just what one would expects as the simplest self-repeating pattern that can be generated by the particular growth processes in the growing tips of the tissues that form sunflowers, pinecones, and so forth. Like a snowflake and its sixfold symmetry, the pinecone and its phyllotaxis may be part of order for free

the Vatican is an organization that excommunicates women for attempting to become priests13 but does not excommunicate male priests for raping children.14 It excommunicates doctors who perform abortions to save a mother’s life—even if the mother is a nine-year-old girl raped by her stepfather and pregnant with twins15—but it did not excommunicate a single member of the Third Reich for committing genocide.

In the early Middle Ages the dominant form of political organization in Western Europe was the Germanic kingdom, and the German kingdom was in some ways the complete antithesis of the modern state. (p. 13)

The gravitational waves of the first detection were generated by a collision of black holes in a galaxy 1.3 billion light-years away, and at a time when Earth was teeming with simple, single-celled organisms. While the ripple moved through space in all directions, Earth would, after another 800 million years, evolve complex life, including flowers and dinosaurs and flying creatures, as well as a branch of vertebrates called mammals. Among the mammals, a sub-branch would evolve frontal lobes and complex thought to accompany them. We call them primates. A single branch of these primates would develop a genetic mutation that allowed speech, and that branch—Homo Sapiens—would invent agriculture and civilization and philosophy and art and science. All in the last ten thousand years. Ultimately, one of its twentieth-century scientists would invent relativity out of his head, and predict the existence of gravitational waves. A century later, technology capable of seeing these waves would finally catch up with the prediction, just days before that gravity wave, which had been traveling for 1.3 billion years, washed over Earth and was detected. Yes, Einstein was a badass.

She could not help but feel that paying money to take ownership of a living organism was inappropriate.

She hadn’t spent as much time with Dockson as she had with Kelsier and Sazed—or even Ham and Breeze. He seemed like a kind man, however. Very stable, and very clever. While most of the others contributed some kind of Allomantic power to the crew, Dockson was valuable because of his simple ability to organize.

SELFHOOD AND DISSOCIATION The patient with DID or dissociative disorder not otherwise specified (DDNOS) has used their capacity to psychologically remove themselves from repetitive and inescapable traumas in order to survive that which could easily lead to suicide or psychosis, and in order to eke some growth in what is an unsafe, frequently contradictory and emotionally barren environment. For a child dependent on a caregiver who also abuses her, the only way to maintain the attachment is to block information about the abuse from the mental mechanisms that control attachment and attachment behaviour.10 Thus, childhood abuse is more likely to be forgotten or otherwise made inaccessible if the abuse is perpetuated by a parent or other trusted caregiver. In the dissociative individual, ‘there is no uniting self which can remember to forget’. Rather than use repression to avoid traumatizing memories, he/she resorts to alterations in the self ‘as a central and coherent organization of experience. . . DID involves not just an alteration in content but, crucially, a change in the very structure of consciousness and the self’ (p. 187).29 There may be multiple representations of the self and of others. Middleton, Warwick. "Owning the past, claiming the present: perspectives on the treatment of dissociative patients." Australasian Psychiatry 13.1 (2005): 40-49.

These people...I've never come across anyone like them. You want the truth? They make Scorpia look like a vicar's tea party.

They found that 13 percent of people say they are “engaged“ in their jobs—which means they are “enthusiastic about, and committed to their work and contribute to their organization in a positive manner.

Asilomar’s lack of focus on ethical issues bothered many religious leaders. That prompted a letter to President Jimmy Carter signed by the heads of three major religious organizations: the National Council of Churches, the Synagogue Council of America, and the U.S. Catholic Conference. “We are rapidly moving into a new era of fundamental danger triggered by the rapid growth of genetic engineering,” they wrote. “Who shall determine how human good is best served when new life forms are being engineered?”13 These decisions should not be left to scientists, the trio argued. “There will always be those who believe it appropriate to ‘correct’ our mental and social structures by genetic means. This becomes more dangerous when the basic tools to do so are finally at hand. Those who would play God will be tempted as never before.

Such situations are often referred to as incidents of ‘peer pressure’, as ‘peer’ is a word or someone with whom you are associating and ‘pressure’ is a word for the influence such people often have. If you are a braeman or a braewoman – a term for someone who lives all alone on a hill – then peer pressure is fairly easy to avoid, as you have no peers except for the occasional wild sheep who may wander near your cave and try to pressure you into growing woolly coat. But if you live among people, whether they are people in your family, in your school, or in your secret organization, then every moment of your life is an incident of peer pressure, and you cannot avoid it any more than a boat at sea can avoid a surrounding storm. If you wake up in the morning at a particular time, when you would rather hide your head under your pillow until you are too hungry to stand it any longer, then you are succumbing to the peer pressure of your warden or morning butler. (…) and if you try to avoid every instance of peer pressure you will end up without any peers whatsoever, (…)

Only 12 managers have lasted more than three years with the Indians, and only three of those who did last longer than three years managed to do so without a winning record. The Indians have made strides in many areas the last three years and the shifts and changes amongst the coaching staff resulted in a highly respected group that was anxious and ready to guide the Tribe back to the postseason, but unfortunately it never materialized. Turns out the three-year threshold is a pretty solid limit for how patient an organization is when it comes to managers, and the gains made in 2011 were completely lost and then some in 2012. Acta’s tenure with the club came to an end with six games left on the 2012 schedule. He ranks 13th in franchise history for games managed, but any optimisim regarding the Tribe in 2013 will rest squarely with new hire Terry Francona.

He also got visited by some of the most powerful men in the Church's hierarchy. Not, of course, the six Archpriests or the Cenobiarch himself. They weren't that important. They were merely at the top. The people who really run organizations are usually found several levels down, where it is still possible to get things done.

Christians recognize that all social organizations exist as parodies of eschatological hope. And so it is that the city is a poor imitation of heavenly community;13 the modern state, a deformed version of the ecclesia;14 the market, a distortion of consummation; modern entertainment, a caricature of joy; schooling, a misrepresentation of true formation; liberalism, a crass simulacrum of freedom; and the sovereignty we accord to the self, a parody of God himself. As these institutions and ideals become ends in themselves, they become the objects of idolatry. The shalom of God—which is to say, the presence of God himself—is the antithesis to all such imitations.

DONNA: Why do traditional organizing solutions and tools not work for them?

2-Make eye contact. When someone is speaking, keep your eyes on him or her at all times. If someone makes a comment, turn and face that person. 3-During discussions, respect other students’ comments, opinions, and ideas. When possible, make statements like, “I agree with John, and I also feel that…” or “I disagree with Sarah. She made a good point I feel that…” or “I think Victor made an excellent observation, and it made me realize…” 4-If you win or do well at something, do not brag. If you lose, do not show anger. Instead, say something like, “I really enjoyed the competition, and I look forward to playing you again,” or “good game,” or don’t say anything at all. To show anger or sarcasm, such as “I wasn’t playing hard anyway” or “You really aren’t that good,” shows weakness. 5-“When you cough or sneeze or burp, it is appropriate to turn your head away from others and cover your mouth with the full part of your hand. Using a fist is not acceptable. Afterward, you should say, “Excuse me.” 6- “Do not smack your lips, tsk, roll your eyes, or show disrespect with gestures.” 7-“Always say thank you when I give you something. 8-“Surprise others by performing random acts of kindness. Go our of your way to do something surprisingly kind and generous for someone at least once a month.” 9-“You will make every effort to be as organized as possible.” 10-"Quickly learn the name of other teachers in the school and greet them by saying things like, "Good morning Mrs. Graham," or "Good afternoon Ms. Ortiz. 11-"When we go on field trips, we will meet different people. When I introduce you to people, make sure that you remember their names. Then, when we are leaving, make sure to shake their hands and thank them, mentioning their names as you do so." 12-“If you approach a door and someone is following you, hold the door. If the door opens by pulling, pull it open, stand to the side, and allow the other person 13-to pass through it first, then you can walk through. If the door opens by pushing, hold the door open after you push through." "Be positive and enjoy life. Some things just aren't worth getting upset over. Keep everything in perspective and focus on the good in your life.

Like all limestones, the famous White Cliffs of Dover, on England’s south coast, are made from numberless trillions of tiny marine organisms compressed over time into stone, and exist now as huge reservoirs of carbon. (credit 17.13)  

This clarification of the nature of intelligence predicts that there will be no relationship at all between personality and intelligence, but research in the last decade has shown that this is not quite true. There are no very strong relationships between personality and intelligence, but some relationships there are, though debate about their nature and significance goes on. Most strikingly, though, in a couple of studies where relationships between Conscientiousness and intelligence have been found, they are not, as you might imagine, positive, but weakly negative. The smarter people are, the less conscientious they are.13 The most likely explanation for this is that people who are very sharp soon learn that they can get away with not preparing things too much in advance, not being overly disciplined with their time, and so on, since their quick abilities will get them through whatever academic and professional challenges they meet. Conversely, people who are not quite so quick have to use organization and discipline to achieve what some others might achieve carelessly. Thus, a behavioural style is developed that compensates for the level of intelligence, and so ends up inversely related to it. This means that there is no intrinsic genetic connection between low Conscientiousness and high intelligence. Rather, the weak negative correlation is something that emerges through development.

The Sunday service alone seldom leads people on deeper or even real journeys; we must begin to be honest about this. All that organized religion can do is to hold you inside the boxing ring long enough so you can begin to ask good questions and expect bigger answers. But it seldom teaches you how to really box with the mystery itself. Organized religion does not tend to cook you! It just keeps you on a low, half-cold simmer. It doesn’t teach you how to expect the mystery to show itself at any profound level. It tends, and I don’t mean to be unkind, to make you codependent upon its own ministry, instead of leading you to know something for yourself, which is really the whole point. It’s like we keep saying, “keep coming back, keep coming back” and you’ll eventually get it. But you don’t because the whole thing is oriented toward something you attend or watch and not to something you can participate in 24/7, even without the ministrations of priest and ministers and formal sacraments. Again, I mean no disrespect. If God-experience depends on formal sacramental ministry from ordained clergy, than 99.9 percent of creation has had no chance to know or love God. That can’t be true. And if the clergy themselves have not gone on a further journey, they don’t know how to send you there or guide you there because they have not gone there themselves yet (see Matthew 23:13). Nemo dat quod not hat, we said in Latin: “You cannot give away what you do not have yourself.

it is often government that organizes the conquest, and religion that justifies it. While nomads and tribespeople occasionally defeat organized governments and religions, the trend over the past 13,000 years has been for the nomads and tribespeople to lose.

One of the other chaperones organized a game of dodge ball and the evening took a sudden turn for the better. I mean, where else can a young adult man throw a rubber ball as hard as he can against the stomach of a bratty thirteen-year-old middle school boy and get cheered for doing it?

Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls,'" he's saying, bending over to gaze down into the deli case. His breath is fogging the glass. I'm watching it suddenly. Watching him. "'He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart-'" "'Liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes,'" I say, and I'm sure I sound a little stunned. I'm not used to boys coming into the deli to quote some of my favorite modernist literature. Even I can't resist that. A boy like him, who, from the first moment, seems to love the things I love.

You were meant to bring forth much fruit. You can be effective. Powerfully used. I’m talking to you. Not your preacher or Bible study teacher. Your legacy can still have an impact in a dozen generations if Christ tarries. You don’t have to look a certain way, receive a certain gift, attend a certain denominational church, practice a certain kind of ministry, or establish a nonprofit organization! All you need to be mighty in your generation is a shield of faith and the sword of the Spirit (the Word of God, Eph. 6:16–17). Through Christ you can absolutely, unequivocally do anything God places before you (Phil. 4:13).

The third dream was hard to put into words. It was a rambling, incoherent dream without any setting. All that was there was a feeling of being in motion. Aomame was ceaselessly moving through time and space It didn't matter when or where this was All that mattered was this movement. Everything was fluid, and a specific meaning was born of that fluidity. But as she gave herself up to it, she found her body growing transparent. She could see through her hands to the other side. Her bones, organs, and womb became visible. At this rate she might very well no longer exist. After she could no longer see herself, Aomame wondered what could possibly come then. She had no answer.

Chapter Nine SOCIAL ENCOUNTERS: THE STAGING OF THE SELF-ESTEEM ERVING GOFFMAN (1959, p. 13) “Society is organized on the principle that any individual who possesses certain social characteristics has a moral right to expect that others will value and treat him in a correspondingly appropriate way … he automatically exerts a moral demand upon others, obliging them to value him.

Fresno Bulldogs: This gang is one of the few California Hispanic gangs not to claim allegiance to the Surenos or Nortenos. Latin Kings: This Chicago-based group consists of more than 160 cliques in 30 states and has as many as 35,000 members. Mara Salvatrucha (or M.S. 13): This violent Hispanic organization has origins in El Salvador. It has roughly 8,000 members in the United States and another 20,000 outside the United States. Bloods: With its roots in Los Angeles, this African American street gang exists in 123 cities and 33 states. Crips: Also founded in Los Angeles, this African American gang exists in 40 states and has 30,000 to 35,000 members. Gangster Disciples: This Chicago-based African American gang is active in at least 31 states and has more than 25,000 members. Vice Lord Nation: This Chicago-based African American gang has around 30,000 members in 28 states.

They are not disease organisms bent on our destruction. They are something else entirely, the foundation of all life on this planet. As Margulis makes plain, “Bacteria are not really individuals so much as part of a single global superorganism.”13 And that superorganism is in actuality an incredibly large community of highly intelligent interactive subparts, just as our white blood cells are of us (or as we, as individuals, are of the human communities in which we live).

These waves, predicted by Einstein, are ripples moving at the speed of light across the fabric of space-time, and are generated by severe gravitational disturbances, such as the collision of two black holes. And that’s exactly what was observed. The gravitational waves of the first detection were generated by a collision of black holes in a galaxy 1.3 billion light-years away, and at a time when Earth was teeming with simple, single-celled organisms. While the ripple moved through space in all directions, Earth would, after another 800 million years, evolve complex life, including flowers and dinosaurs and flying creatures, as well as a branch of vertebrates called mammals. Among the mammals, a sub-branch would evolve frontal lobes and complex thought to accompany them. We call them primates. A single branch of these primates would develop a genetic mutation that allowed speech, and that branch—Homo sapiens—would invent agriculture and civilization and philosophy and art and science. All in the last ten thousand years. Ultimately, one of its twentieth-century scientists would invent relativity out of his head, and predict the existence of gravitational waves. A century later, technology capable of seeing these waves would finally catch up with the prediction, just days before that gravity wave, which had been traveling for 1.3 billion years, washed over Earth and was detected. Yes, Einstein was a badass.

History determines your hiring policy. Why are tech companies being lectured by media corporations on “diversity”? Is it because those media corporations that are 20-30 points whiter than tech companies actually deeply care about this? Or is it because after the 2009-era collapse of print media revenue, media corporations struggled for a business model, found that certain words drove traffic, and then doubled down on that - boosting their stock price and bashing their competitors in the process?12 After all, if you know a bit more history, you’ll know that the New York Times Company (which originates so many of these jeremiads) is an organization where the controlling Ochs-Sulzberger family literally profited from slavery, blocked women from being publishers, excluded gays from the newsroom for decades, ran a succession process featuring only three cis straight white male cousins, and ended up with a publisher who just happened to be the son of the previous guy.13

the bottom 60 percent of America not only doesn’t have any financial wealth; they are, on average, in debt. But 2016 is now ancient history. By 2017, a new study on inequality showed that just three people—Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett—“have more wealth than the bottom half of the country combined.” Bezos’s wealth increases by $13 million per hour. In 2018, half of all people in the world experienced an 11 percent drop in their wealth; the billionaire class increased their riches by $2.5 billion each day.

By 2030, says the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, fish farming will dominate fish supplies. Given how wrong the FAO has been in the past--saying catches were going up when, in fact, they were going down--this statement is worth examining carefully. When you do, you find it to be an observation of previous trends, not a reflection of what could happen or what people might want--in the same way as Red Delicious was once far and away the most popular apple in the United States because it was basically the only apple you could get. The FAO is simply observing that fish farming is the fastest growing form of food production in the world--growing at 9 percent a year and by 12-13 percent in the United States. Nobody is asking us whether we want this. It is just happening. The continued destruction of mangrove swamps in poor countries to provide shrimp for people living in rich countries is simply the market operating in a vacuum untroubled by ethics. It is a reflection of what will go on happening if we do not find ways of exercising any choice in the matter.

I stick to the road out of habit, but it’s a bad choice, because it’s full of the remains of those who tried to flee. Some were incinerated entirely. But others, probably overcome with smoke, escaped the worst of the flames and now lie reeking in various states of decomposition, carrion for scavengers, blanketed by flies. I killed you, I think as I pass a pile. And you. And you. Because I did. It was my arrow, aimed at the chink in the force field surrounding the arena, that brought on this firestorm of retribution. That sent the whole country of Panem into chaos. In my head I hear President Snow’s words, spoken the morning I was to begin the Victory Tour. “Katniss Everdeen, the girl who was on fire, you have provided a spark that, left unattended, may grow to an inferno that destroys Panem.” It turns out he wasn’t exaggerating or simply trying to scare me. He was, perhaps, genuinely attempting to enlist my help. But I had already set something in motion that I had no ability to control. Burning. Still burning, I think numbly. The fires at the coal mines belch black smoke in the distance. There’s no one left to care, though. More than ninety percent of the district’s population is dead. The remaining eight hundred or so are refugees in District 13 — which, as far as I’m concerned, is the same thing as being homeless forever. I know I shouldn’t think that; I know I should be grateful for the way we have been welcomed. Sick, wounded, starving, and empty-handed. Still, I can never get around the fact that District 13 was instrumental in 12’s destruction. This doesn’t absolve me of blame — there’s plenty of blame to go around. But without them, I would not have been part of a larger plot to overthrow the Capitol or had the wherewithal to do it. The citizens of District 12 had no organized resistance movement of their own. No say in any of this. They only had the misfortune to have me. Some survivors think it’s good luck, though, to be free of District 12 at last. To have escaped the endless hunger and oppression, the perilous mines, the lash of our final Head Peacekeeper, Romulus Thread. To have a new home at all is seen as a wonder since, up until a short time ago, we hadn’t even known that District 13 still existed.

Genevieve’s “I Love You” Birthday Cake 2 ¾ cups sifted cake flour (unbleached) 4 tsps. baking powder ¾ tsp. salt 4 egg whites (organic) 1 ½ cups white sugar ¾ cup butter (do NOT substitute) 1 cup milk (organic) 1 tsp. PURE vanilla extract 1 tsp. almond extract Measure sifted cake flour, baking powder, and salt; sift together three times. In a mixing bowl, beat egg whites until foamy. Add ½ cup of sugar gradually, and continue beating only until meringue will hold up in soft peaks. In a separate bowl, beat butter until smooth. Gradually add remaining 1 cup of sugar, and cream together until light and fluffy. Add sifted ingredients alternately with milk a small amount at a time, beating each addition until smooth. Mix in flavorings. Add meringue, and mix thoroughly into batter. Spread batter in a 15x10x1 inch pan which has been lined on the bottom with parchment paper. Bake at 350 degrees F for 30 to 35 minutes. Cool cake in pan 10 minutes, then remove from pan and transfer to a wire rack to finish cooling. You can also bake this cake in two 9 inch round pans for 30 to 35 minutes, or in three 8 inch round pans for 25 to 30 minutes.

Fuchsia took three paces forward in the first of the attics and then paused a moment to re-tie a string above her knee. Over her head vague rafters loomed and while she straightened her-self she noticed them and unconsciously loved them. This was the lumber room. Though very long and lofty it looked relatively smaller than it was, for the fantastic piles of every imaginable kind of thing, from the great organ to the lost and painted head of a broken toy lion that must one day have been the plaything of one of Fuchsia's ancestors, spread from every wall until only an avenue was left to the adjacent room. This high, narrow avenue wound down the centre of the first attic before suddenly turning at a sharp angle to the right. The fact that this room was filled with lumber did not mean that she ignored it and used it only as a place of transit. Oh no, for it was here that many long afternoons had been spent as she crawled deep into the recesses and found for herself many a strange cavern among the incongruous relics of the past. She knew of ways through the centre of what appeared to be hills of furniture, boxes, musical instruments and toys, kites, pictures, bamboo armour and helmets, flags and relics of every kind, as an Indian knows his green and secret trail. Within reach of her hand the hide and head of a skinned baboon hung dustily over a broken drum that rose above the dim ranges of this attic medley. Huge and impregnable they looked in the warm still half-light, but Fuchsia, had she wished to, could have disappeared awkwardly but very suddenly into these fantastic mountains, reached their centre and lain down upon an ancient couch with a picture book at her elbow and been entirely lost to view within a few moments.

Well, my lord,” Noorden said. “Imagine that you hear a tapping sound somewhere outside your tent. If it repeats occasionally, with no exact set pattern, then it might be the wind blowing a loose flap against a pole. However, if it repeats with exact regularity, you know that it must be a person, beating against a pole. You’d be able to make the distinction immediately, because you’ve learned that nature can be repetitive in a case like that, but not exact. These numbers are the same, my lord. They’re just too organized, too repetitive, to be natural. They had to have been crafted by somebody.

And that’s exactly what was observed. The gravitational waves of the first detection were generated by a collision of black holes in a galaxy 1.3 billion light-years away, and at a time when Earth was teeming with simple, single-celled organisms. While the ripple moved through space in all directions, Earth would, after another 800 million years, evolve complex life, including flowers and dinosaurs and flying creatures, as well as a branch of vertebrates called mammals. Among the mammals, a sub-branch would evolve frontal lobes and complex thought to accompany them. We call them primates. A single branch of these primates would develop a genetic mutation that allowed speech, and that branch—Homo sapiens—would invent agriculture and civilization and philosophy and art and science. All in the last ten thousand years. Ultimately, one of its twentieth-century scientists would invent relativity out of his head, and predict the existence of gravitational waves. A century later, technology capable of seeing these waves would finally catch up with the prediction, just days before that gravity wave, which had been traveling for 1.3 billion years, washed over Earth and was detected. Yes, Einstein was a badass.

the planned destruction of Iraq’s agriculture is not widely known. Modern Iraq is part of the ‘fertile crescent’ of Mesopotamia where man first domesticated wheat between 8,000 and 13,000 years ago, and home to several thousand varieties of local wheat. As soon as the US took over Iraq, it became clear its interests were not limited to oil. In 2004, Paul Bremer, the then military head of the Provisional Authority imposed as many as a hundred laws which made short work of Iraq’s sovereignty. The most crippling for the people and the economy of Iraq was Order 81 which deals, among other things, with plant varieties and patents. The goal was brutally clear-cut and sweeping — to wipe out Iraq’s traditional, sustainable agriculture and replace it with oil-chemical-genetically-modified-seed-based industrial agriculture. There was no public or parliamentary debate for the conquered people who never sought war. The conquerors made unilateral changes in Iraq’s 1970 patent law: henceforth, plant forms could be patented — which was never allowed before — while genetically-modified organisms were to be introduced. Farmers were strictly banned from saving their own seeds: this, in a country where, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, 97 per cent of Iraqi farmers planted only their own saved seeds. With a single stroke of the pen, Iraq’s agriculture was axed, while Order 81 facilitated the introduction and domination of imported, high-priced corporate seeds, mainly from the US — which neither reproduce, nor give yields without their prescribed chemical fertiliser and pesticide inputs. It meant that the majority of farmers who had never spent money on seed and inputs that came free from nature, would henceforth have to heavily invest in corporate inputs and equipment — or go into debt to obtain them, or accept lowered profits, or give up farming altogether.

Here’s a simple definition of ideology: “A set of beliefs about the proper order of society and how it can be achieved.”8 And here’s the most basic of all ideological questions: Preserve the present order, or change it? At the French Assembly of 1789, the delegates who favored preservation sat on the right side of the chamber, while those who favored change sat on the left. The terms right and left have stood for conservatism and liberalism ever since. Political theorists since Marx had long assumed that people chose ideologies to further their self-interest. The rich and powerful want to preserve and conserve; the peasants and workers want to change things (or at least they would if their consciousness could be raised and they could see their self-interest properly, said the Marxists). But even though social class may once have been a good predictor of ideology, that link has been largely broken in modern times, when the rich go both ways (industrialists mostly right, tech billionaires mostly left) and so do the poor (rural poor mostly right, urban poor mostly left). And when political scientists looked into it, they found that self-interest does a remarkably poor job of predicting political attitudes.9 So for most of the late twentieth century, political scientists embraced blank-slate theories in which people soaked up the ideology of their parents or the TV programs they watched.10 Some political scientists even said that most people were so confused about political issues that they had no real ideology at all.11 But then came the studies of twins. In the 1980s, when scientists began analyzing large databases that allowed them to compare identical twins (who share all of their genes, plus, usually, their prenatal and childhood environments) to same-sex fraternal twins (who share half of their genes, plus their prenatal and childhood environments), they found that the identical twins were more similar on just about everything.12 And what’s more, identical twins reared in separate households (because of adoption) usually turn out to be very similar, whereas unrelated children reared together (because of adoption) rarely turn out similar to each other, or to their adoptive parents; they tend to be more similar to their genetic parents. Genes contribute, somehow, to just about every aspect of our personalities.13 We’re not just talking about IQ, mental illness, and basic personality traits such as shyness. We’re talking about the degree to which you like jazz, spicy foods, and abstract art; your likelihood of getting a divorce or dying in a car crash; your degree of religiosity, and your political orientation as an adult. Whether you end up on the right or the left of the political spectrum turns out to be just as heritable as most other traits: genetics explains between a third and a half of the variability among people on their political attitudes.14 Being raised in a liberal or conservative household accounts for much less. How can that be? How can there be a genetic basis for attitudes about nuclear power, progressive taxation, and foreign aid when these issues only emerged in the last century or two? And how can there be a genetic basis for ideology when people sometimes change their political parties as adults? To answer these questions it helps to return to the definition of innate that I gave in chapter 7. Innate does not mean unmalleable; it means organized in advance of experience. The genes guide the construction of the brain in the uterus, but that’s only the first draft, so to speak. The draft gets revised by childhood experiences. To understand the origins of ideology you have to take a developmental perspective, starting with the genes and ending with an adult voting for a particular candidate or joining a political protest. There are three major steps in the process. Step

Each and every member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints bears a personal responsibility to learn and live the truths of the Savior's restored gospel and to receive by proper authority the ordinances of salvation. We should not expect the Church as an organization to teach or tell us all of the things we need to know and do to become devote disciples and endure valiantly to the end (see Doctrine and Covenants 121:29). Rather, our individual responsibility is to learn what we should learn, to live as we know we should live, and to become what the Master would have us become. . . . Our individual responsibility to learn truth, to love truth, and to live according to truth is increasingly important in a world that is "in commotion" (Doctrine and Covenants 45:26) and grows ever more confused and wicked. We cannot expect simply to attend Church meetings and to participate in programs and thereby receive all of the spiritual fortification and protection that will enable us to "withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand" (Ephesians 6:13). Certainly inspired leaders and activities help and support individual and family efforts to grow spiritually. But the ultimate responsibility for developing spiritual strength and stamina rests upon each and every member of the Church.

Each and every member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints bears a personal responsibility to learn and live the truths of the Savior's restored gospel and to receive by proper authority the ordinances of salvation. We should not expect the Church as an organization to teach or tell us all of the things we need to know and do to become devoted disciples and endure valiantly to the end (see Doctrine and Covenants 121:29). Rather, our individual responsibility is to learn what we should learn, to live as we know we should live, and to become what the Master would have us become. . . . Our individual responsibility to learn truth, to love truth, and to live according to truth is increasingly important in a world that is "in commotion" (Doctrine and Covenants 45:26) and grows ever more confused and wicked. We cannot expect simply to attend Church meetings and to participate in programs and thereby receive all of the spiritual fortification and protection that will enable us to "withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand" (Ephesians 6:13). Certainly inspired leaders and activities help and support individual and family efforts to grow spiritually. But the ultimate responsibility for developing spiritual strength and stamina rests upon each and every member of the Church.

On December 13, the tsarina suggests to the tsar: “Anything but this responsible ministry about which everybody has gone crazy. Everything is getting quiet and better, but people want to feel your hand. How long they have been saying to me, for whole years, the same thing: ‘Russia loves to feel the whip.’ That is their nature!” This orthodox Hessian, with a Windsor upbringing and a Byzantine crown on her head, not only “incarnates” the Russian soul, but also organically despises it. Their nature demands the whip—writes the Russian tsarina to the Russian tsar about the Russian people, just two months and a half before the monarchy tips over into the abyss. In

13. No good life is possible unless it is organized around a vocation. If you try to use your work to serve yourself, you’ll find your ambitions and expectations will forever run ahead and you’ll never be satisfied. If you try to serve the community, you’ll always wonder if people appreciate you enough. But if you serve work that is intrinsically compelling and focus just on being excellent at that, you will wind up serving yourself and the community obliquely. A vocation is not found by looking within and finding your passion. It is found by looking without and asking what life is asking of us. What problem is addressed by an activity you intrinsically enjoy?

Organic farming is environmentally friendlier to every acre of land. But it requires _more_ acres. The trade-off is a harsh one. Would we rather have pesticides on farmland and nitrogen runoffs from them? Or would we rather chop down more forest? How much more forest would we have to chop down? If we wanted to reduce pesticide use and nitrogen runoff by turning all of the world’s farmland to organic farming, we’d need about 50 percent more farmland than we have today. Nobel Prize winner Norman Borlaug, whose work helped triple crop yields over the last fifty years and arguably saved billions from starvation, estimates that the world would need an _additional_ 5 to 6 billion head of cattle to produce enough manure to fertilize that farmland. There are only an estimated 1.3 billion cattle on the planet today. Combined, we’d need to chop down roughly half of the world’s remaining forest to grow crops and to graze cattle that produce enough manure to fertilize those crops. Clearing that much land would produce around 500 billion tons of CO2, or almost as much as the total cumulative CO2 emissions of the world thus far. And the cattle needed to fertilize that land would produce far _more_ greenhouse gases, in the form of methane, than all of agriculture does today, possibly enough to equal all human greenhouse gases emitted from all sources today. That’s not a viable path.

This is nothing less than a whole new approach to economics. The randomistas don’t think in terms of models. They don’t believe humans are rational actors. Instead, they assume we are quixotic creatures, sometimes foolish and sometimes astute, and by turns afraid, altruistic, and self-centered. And this approach appears to yield considerably better results. So why did it take so long to figure this out? Well, several reasons. Doing randomized controlled trials in poverty-stricken countries is difficult, time consuming, and expensive. Often, local organizations are less than eager to cooperate, not least because they’re worried the findings will prove them ineffective. Take the case of microcredit. Development aid trends come and go, from “good governance” to “education” to the ill-fated “microcredit” at the start of this century. Microcredit’s reckoning came in the form of our old friend Esther Duflo, who set up a fatal RCT in Hyderabad, India, and demonstrated that, all the heartwarming anecdotes notwithstanding, there is no hard evidence that microcredit is effective at combating poverty and illness.13 Handing out cash works way better. As it happens, cash handouts may be the most extensively studied anti-poverty method around. RCTs across the globe have shown that over both the long and short term and on both a large and small scale, cash transfers are an extremely successful and efficient tool.14

Compare Chesterton’s view with Ratzinger’s: It is precisely woman who is paying the greatest price [for the sexual “revolution.”] … Woman, who is creative in the truest sense of the word by giving life, does not “produce,” however, in that technical sense which is the only one that is valued by a society more masculine than ever in its cult of efficiency. She is being convinced that the aim is to “liberate” her, “emancipate” her, by encouraging her to masculinize herself, thus bringing her into conformity with the culture of production and subjecting her to the control of the masculine society of technicians, of salesmen, of politicians who seek profit and power, organizing everything, marketing everything, instrumentalizing everything for their own ends.13

Still, there was hope of progress. In March 1865, Congress created an organization, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, commonly known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, which had a range of responsibilities including the reallocation of abandoned Southern land to the newly emancipated. The bureau’s charge was to lease forty-acre parcels that would provide economic self-sufficiency to a people who had endured hundreds of years of unpaid toil. Already, in January 1865, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman had issued Special Field Order No. 15, which, to take some of the pressure off his army as thousands of slaves eagerly fled their plantations and trailed behind his troops, “reserved coastal land in Georgia and South Carolina for black settlement.” Less than a year after he issued the order, forty thousand former slaves had begun to work four hundred thousand acres of this land.36 Then, in July of the same year, the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, General Oliver O. Howard, issued Circular 13, fully authorizing the lease of forty-acre plots from abandoned plantations to the newly freed families. “Howard was neither a great administrator nor a great man,” noted W.E.B. Du Bois, “but he was a good man. He was sympathetic and humane, and tried with endless application and desperate sacrifice to do a hard, thankless duty.”37 Howard made clear that whatever amnesty President Johnson may have bestowed on Southern rebels did not “extend to … abandoned or confiscated property.”38 Johnson, however, immediately rescinded Howard’s order,

A modern example of this stunning knowledge of nature that Einstein has gifted us, comes from 2016, when gravitational waves were discovered by a specially designed observatory tuned for just this purpose.† These waves, predicted by Einstein, are ripples moving at the speed of light across the fabric of space-time, and are generated by severe gravitational disturbances, such as the collision of two black holes. And that’s exactly what was observed. The gravitational waves of the first detection were generated by a collision of black holes in a galaxy 1.3 billion light-years away, and at a time when Earth was teeming with simple, single-celled organisms. While the ripple moved through space in all directions, Earth would, after another 800 million years, evolve complex life, including flowers and dinosaurs and flying creatures, as well as a branch of vertebrates called mammals. Among the mammals, a sub-branch would evolve frontal lobes and complex thought to accompany them. We call them primates. A single branch of these primates would develop a genetic mutation that allowed speech, and that branch—Homo sapiens—would invent agriculture and civilization and philosophy and art and science. All in the last ten thousand years. Ultimately, one of its twentieth-century scientists would invent relativity out of his head, and predict the existence of gravitational waves. A century later, technology capable of seeing these waves would finally catch up with the prediction, just days before that gravity wave, which had been traveling for 1.3 billion years, washed over Earth and was detected. Yes, Einstein was a badass.

About 13.5 billion years ago, matter, energy, time and space came into being in what is known as the Big Bang. The story of these fundamental features of our universe is called physics. About 300,000 years after their appearance, matter and energy started to coalesce into complex structures, called atoms, which then combined into molecules. The story of atoms, molecules and their interactions is called chemistry. About 3.8. billion years ago, on a planet called Earth, certain molecules combined to form particularly large and intricate structures called organisms. The story of organisms is called biology. About 70,000 years ago, organisms belonging to the species Homo sapiens started to form even more elaborate structures called cultures. The subsequent development of these human cultures is called history.

BEYOND THE GAME In 2007 some of the Colorado Rockies’ best action took place off the field. The Rocks certainly boasted some game-related highlights in ’07: There was rookie shortstop Troy Tulowitzki turning the major league’s thirteenth unassisted triple play on April 29, and the team as a whole made an amazing late-season push to reach the playoffs. Colorado won 13 of its final 14 games to force a one-game wild card tiebreaker with San Diego, winning that game 9–8 after scoring three runs in the bottom of the thirteenth inning. Marching into the postseason, the Rockies won their first-ever playoff series, steamrolling the Phillies three games to none. But away from the cheering crowds and television cameras, Rockies players turned in a classic performance just ahead of their National League Division Series sweep. They voted to include Amanda Coolbaugh and her two young sons in Colorado’s postseason financial take. Who was Amanda Coolbaugh? She was the widow of former big-leaguer Mike Coolbaugh, a coach in the Rockies’ minor league organization who was killed by a screaming line drive while coaching first base on July 22. Colorado players voted a full playoff share—potentially worth hundreds of thousands of dollars—to the grieving young family. Widows and orphans hold a special place in God’s heart, too. Several times in the Old Testament, God reminded the ancient Jews of His concern for the powerless—and urged His people to follow suit: “Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow” (Isaiah 1:17). Some things go way beyond the game of baseball. Will you?

Well, my lord,” Noorden said. “Imagine that you hear a tapping sound somewhere outside your tent. If it repeats occasionally, with no exact set pattern, then it might be the wind blowing a loose flap against a pole. However, if it repeats with exact regularity, you know that it must be a person, beating against a pole. You’d be able to make the distinction immediately, because you’ve learned that nature can be repetitive in a case like that, but not exact. These numbers are the same, my lord. They’re just too organized, too repetitive, to be natural. They had to have been crafted by somebody.” “You’re saying that a person made those soldiers sick?” Cett asked. “A person? . . . No, not a person, I’d guess,” Noorden said. “But something intelligent must have done it. That’s the only conclusion I can draw. Something with an agenda, something that cares to be precise.” The

Another secret organization that tries to influence world politics is the Bilderberg Group, founded in 1954 by Prince Bernhard van Lippe Biesterfeld and Joseph Retinger. This group consists of a number of permanent members that form a small core, and a number of changing members that are invited to take part in conferences. The members meet once a year behind closed doors. The Inner Circle, that is the Round Table, consists of nine members of the Bilderberg Group. Then there is a decision making forum that consists of thirteen members. Finally there are three more members that make up the Inner Circles. These consist of members of the black nobility and other exceptionally influential men. Despite the strict confidentiality and secrecy surrounding the Bilderberg Group, some of their objectives got out. The following objectives are strived for: An international economic Power Block. Founding an international Parliament. Creating an international “World Army” through the abolition of national armed forces. Restriction of the power of national governments in favor of a unique and coordinated World Government. Traditionally the international press never mentions anything about the content of the off-the-record discussions. Sometimes a conference where prominent members from the world of politics, business and society speak confidentially about international questions is mentioned briefly. It is always mentioned that the participants assist as private persons, not in their official occupations. However it is striking that the participants of every Bilderberg conference are flown in from all parts of the world with airplanes and helicopters belonging to different air forces. Also, the large police force used to prevent disturbances and protect the invited is paid for by the tax contributors.[48]

So much changes when you get an education! You unlearn dangerous superstitions, such as that leaders rule by divine right, or that people who don’t look like you are less than human. You learn that there are other cultures that are as tied to their ways of life as you are to yours, and for no better or worse reason. You learn that charismatic saviors have led their countries to disaster. You learn that your own convictions, no matter how heartfelt or popular, may be mistaken. You learn that there are better and worse ways to live, and that other people and other cultures may know things that you don’t. Not least, you learn that there are ways of resolving conflicts without violence. All these epiphanies militate against knuckling under the rule of an autocrat or joining a crusade to subdue and kill your neighbors. Of course, none of this wisdom is guaranteed, particularly when authorities promulgate their own dogmas, alternative facts, and conspiracy theories—and, in a backhanded compliment to the power of knowledge, stifle the people and ideas that might discredit them. Studies of the effects of education confirm that educated people really are more enlightened. They are less racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, and authoritarian.10 They place a higher value on imagination, independence, and free speech.11 They are more likely to vote, volunteer, express political views, and belong to civic associations such as unions, political parties, and religious and community organizations.12 They are also likelier to trust their fellow citizens—a prime ingredient of the precious elixir called social capital which gives people the confidence to contract, invest, and obey the law without fearing that they are chumps who will be shafted by everyone else.13 For all these reasons, the growth of education—and its first dividend, literacy—is a flagship of human progress.

Pleasure Principles What you pay attention to grows. This will be familiar to those who have read Emergent Strategy. Actually, all the emergent strategy principles also apply here! (Insert eggplant emoji). Tune into happiness, what satisfies you, what brings you joy. We become what we practice. I learned this through studying somatics! In his book The Leadership Dojo, Richard Strozzi-Heckler shares that “300 repetitions produce body memory … [and] 3,000 repetitions creates embodiment.”12 Yes is the way. When it was time to move to Detroit, when it was time to leave my last job, when it was time to pick up a meditation practice, time to swim, time to eat healthier, I knew because it gave me pleasure when I made and lived into the decision. Now I am letting that guide my choices for how I organize and for what I am aiming toward with my work—pleasure in the processes of my existence and states of my being. Yes is a future. When I feel pleasure, I know I am on the right track. Puerto Rican pleasure elder Idelisse Malave shared with me that her pleasure principle is “If it pleases me, I will.” When I am happy, it is good for the world.13 The deepest pleasure comes from riding the line between commitment and detachment.14 Commit yourself fully to the process, the journey, to bringing the best you can bring. Detach yourself from ego and outcomes. Make justice and liberation feel good. Your no makes the way for your yes. Boundaries create the container within which your yes is authentic. Being able to say no makes yes a choice. Moderation is key.15 The idea is not to be in a heady state of ecstasy at all times, but rather to learn how to sense when something is good for you, to be able to feel what enough is. Related: pleasure is not money. Pleasure is not even related to money, at least not in a positive way. Having resources to buy unlimited amounts of pleasure leads to excess, and excess totally destroys the spiritual experience of pleasure.

Still, there was hope of progress. In March 1865, Congress created an organization, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, commonly known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, which had a range of responsibilities including the reallocation of abandoned Southern land to the newly emancipated. The bureau’s charge was to lease forty-acre parcels that would provide economic self-sufficiency to a people who had endured hundreds of years of unpaid toil. Already, in January 1865, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman had issued Special Field Order No. 15, which, to take some of the pressure off his army as thousands of slaves eagerly fled their plantations and trailed behind his troops, “reserved coastal land in Georgia and South Carolina for black settlement.” Less than a year after he issued the order, forty thousand former slaves had begun to work four hundred thousand acres of this land.36 Then, in July of the same year, the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, General Oliver O. Howard, issued Circular 13, fully authorizing the lease of forty-acre plots from abandoned plantations to the newly freed families. “Howard was neither a great administrator nor a great man,” noted W.E.B. Du Bois, “but he was a good man. He was sympathetic and humane, and tried with endless application and desperate sacrifice to do a hard, thankless duty.”37 Howard made clear that whatever amnesty President Johnson may have bestowed on Southern rebels did not “extend to … abandoned or confiscated property.”38 Johnson, however, immediately rescinded Howard’s order, commanding the army to throw tens of thousands of freedpeople off the land and reinstall the plantation owners.39 While this could have come from a simple ideological aversion to land redistribution, that was not the case and, for Johnson, not the issue; who received it was. Beginning in 1843, when he was first elected to the U.S. Congress, and over the next nineteen years, Johnson had championed the Homestead Act,

The hard part, evolutionarily, was getting from prokaryotic cells to eukaryotic ones, then getting from single-celled organisms to multi cellar ones. Earth is around 4.5 billion years old, a timescale I simply cannot get my head around. Instead let’s imagine’s Earth’s history as a calendar year, with the formation of Earth being January 1 and today being December 31 at 11:59pm. The first life on Earth emerges around February 25. Photosynthetic organisms first appear in late March. Multicellular life doesn’t appear until August or September. The first dinosaurs like eoraptor show up about 230 million years ago, or December 13 in our calendar year. The meteor impact that heralds the end of the dinosaurs happens around December 26. Homo sapiens aren’t part of the story until December 31 at 11:48 pm. Agriculture and large human communities and the building of monolithic structures all occur within the last minute of this calendar year. The Industrial Revolution, two world wars, the invention of basketball, recorded music, the electric dishwasher, and vehicles that travel faster than horses all happen in the last couple of seconds. Put another way: It took Earth about three billion years to go from single-celled life to multicellular life. It took less than seventy million years to go from Tyrannosaurus rex to humans who can read and write and dig up fossils and approximate the timeline of life and worry about its ending. Unless we somehow manage to eliminate all multicellular life from the planet, Earth won’t have to start all over and it will be okay--- at least until the oceans evaporate and the planet gets consumed by the sun. I know the world will survive us – and in some ways it will be more alive. More birdsong. More creatures roaming around. More plants cracking through our pavement, rewilding the planet we terraformed. I imagine coyotes sleeping in the ruins of the homes we built. I imagine our plastic still washing up on beaches hundreds of years after the last of us is gone. I imagine moths, having no artificial lights toward which to fly, turning back to the moon.

Timeline of History Years Before the Present 13.5 billion Matter and energy appear. Beginning of physics. Atoms and molecules appear. Beginning of chemistry. 4.5 billion Formation of planet Earth. 3.8 billion Emergence of organisms. Beginning of biology. 6 million Last common grandmother of humans and chimpanzees. 2.5 million Evolution of the genus Homo in Africa. First stone tools. 2 million Humans spread from Africa to Eurasia. Evolution of different human species. 500,000 Neanderthals evolve in Europe and the Middle East. 300,000 Daily usage of fire. 200,000 Homo sapiens evolves in East Africa. 70,000 The Cognitive Revolution. Emergence of fictive language. Beginning of history. Sapiens spread out of Africa. 45,000 Sapiens settle Australia. Extinction of Australian megafauna. 30,000 Extinction of Neanderthals. 16,000 Sapiens settle America. Extinction of American megafauna. 13,000 Extinction of Homo floresiensis. Homo sapiens the only surviving human species. 12,000 The Agricultural Revolution. Domestication of plants and animals. Permanent settlements. 5,000 First kingdoms, script and money. Polytheistic religions. 4,250 First empire – the Akkadian Empire of Sargon. 2,500 Invention of coinage – a universal money. The Persian Empire – a universal political order ‘for the benefit of all humans’. Buddhism in India – a universal truth ‘to liberate all beings from suffering’. 2,000 Han Empire in China. Roman Empire in the Mediterranean. Christianity. 1,400 Islam. 500 The Scientific Revolution. Humankind admits its ignorance and begins to acquire unprecedented power. Europeans begin to conquer America and the oceans. The entire planet becomes a single historical arena. The rise of capitalism. 200 The Industrial Revolution. Family and community are replaced by state and market. Massive extinction of plants and animals. The Present Humans transcend the boundaries of planet Earth. Nuclear weapons threaten the survival of humankind. Organisms are increasingly shaped by intelligent design rather than natural selection. The Future Intelligent design becomes the basic principle of life? Homo sapiens is replaced by superhumans?

A unique part of the plant root, the root apex (or apices, which are the pointed ends of the root system) is a combination sensitive finger, perceiving sensory organ, and brain neuron. Each root hair, rootlet, and root section contains an apex; every root mass millions, even billions, of them. For example, a single rye plant has more than 13 million rootlets with a combined length of 680 miles. Each of the rootlets are covered with root hairs, over 14 billion of them, with a combined length of 6,600 miles. Every rootlet, every root hair, has at its end a root apex. Every root apex acts as a neuronal organ in the root system. In contrast, the human brain has approximately 86 billion neurons, about 16 billion of which are in the cerebral cortex. Plants with larger root systems, and more root hairs, can have considerably more brain neurons than the 14 billion contained in rye plants; they can even rival the human brain in the number of neurons. And when you look at the interconnected network of plant roots and micorrhizal mycelia in any discrete ecosystem, you are looking at a neural network much larger than any individual human has ever possessed.

The hard part, evolutionarily, was getting from prokaryotic cells to eukaryotic ones, then getting from single-celled organisms to multicellular ones. Earth is around 4.5 billion years old, a timescale I simply cannot get my head around. Instead let’s imagine’s Earth’s history as a calendar year, with the formation of Earth being January 1 and today being December 31 at 11:59pm. The first life on Earth emerges around February 25. Photosynthetic organisms first appear in late March. Multicellular life doesn’t appear until August or September. The first dinosaurs like eoraptor show up about 230 million years ago, or December 13 in our calendar year. The meteor impact that heralds the end of the dinosaurs happens around December 26. Homo sapiens aren’t part of the story until December 31 at 11:48 pm. Agriculture and large human communities and the building of monolithic structures all occur within the last minute of this calendar year. The Industrial Revolution, two world wars, the invention of basketball, recorded music, the electric dishwasher, and vehicles that travel faster than horses all happen in the last couple of seconds. Put another way: It took Earth about three billion years to go from single-celled life to multicellular life. It took less than seventy million years to go from Tyrannosaurus rex to humans who can read and write and dig up fossils and approximate the timeline of life and worry about its ending. Unless we somehow manage to eliminate all multicellular life from the planet, Earth won’t have to start all over and it will be okay--- at least until the oceans evaporate and the planet gets consumed by the sun. But we`ll be gone by then, as will our collective and collected memory. I think part of what scares me about the end of humanity is the end of those memories. I believe that if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, it does make a sound. But if no one is around to play Billie Holiday records, those songs won’t make a sound anymore. We’ve caused a lot of suffering, but we’ve also caused much else. I know the world will survive us – and in some ways it will be more alive. More birdsong. More creatures roaming around. More plants cracking through our pavement, rewilding the planet we terraformed. I imagine coyotes sleeping in the ruins of the homes we built. I imagine our plastic still washing up on beaches hundreds of years after the last of us is gone. I imagine moths, having no artificial lights toward which to fly, turning back to the moon.

out of informal learning communities if they fail to meet our needs; we enjoy no such mobility in our relations to formal education. Affinity spaces are also highly generative environments from which new aesthetic experiments and innovations emerge. A 2005 report on The Future of Independent Media argued that this kind of grassroots creativity was an important engine of cultural transformation: The media landscape will be reshaped by the bottom-up energy of media created by amateurs and hobbyists as a matter of course. This bottom-up energy will generate enormous creativity, but it will also tear apart some of the categories that organize the lives and work of media makers.... A new generation of media-makers and viewers are emerging which could lead to a sea change in how media is made and consumed.12 This report celebrates a world in which everyone has access to the means of creative expression and the networks supporting artistic distribution. The Pew study suggests something more: young people who create and circulate their own media are more likely to respect the intellectual property rights of others because they feel a greater stake in the cultural economy.13 Both reports suggest we are moving away from a world in which some produce and many consume media toward one in which everyone has a

The heart governs and reigns”, state the Macarian Homilies: it is the dominant element in our total human structure, the controlling power. It governs and reigns, more specifically, “over the whole bodily organism”: it is in the first place a corporeal organ, located in the chest, which acts as the physical center of the human being; when our heart stops beating, we die. Yet this is not all. The Homilies go on to say that the heart rules also over the “thoughts”, and that “there in the heart is the intellect”. The heart is not only the physical but the psychic and spiritual center. The Greek word used here for “intellect”, nous, signifies not only the reasoning brain but also, more fundamentally, a higher faculty of intuitive insight and mystical vision. Elsewhere in the Macarian Homilies it is stated that the nous within the heart is like the eye within the body; in other words, through the use of the intellect within the heart we do not merely reach conclusions by means of discursive argumentation, but the intellect enables us to see the truth in a direct and unmediated manner. The heart in which the intellect dwells is thus the faculty with which we think, both in a rational and a suprarational way. It is both the seat of reasoning intelligence and also, on a higher or deeper level, the place of wisdom and spiritual knowledge (gnosis). (p. 13)

„The heart governs and reigns”, state the Macarian Homilies: it is the dominant element in our total human structure, the controlling power. It governs and reigns, more specifically, “over the whole bodily organism”: it is in the first place a corporeal organ, located in the chest, which acts as the physical center of the human being; when our heart stops beating, we die. Yet this is not all. The Homilies go on to say that the heart rules also over the “thoughts”, and that “there in the heart is the intellect”. The heart is not only the physical but the psychic and spiritual center. The Greek word used here for “intellect”, nous, signifies not only the reasoning brain but also, more fundamentally, a higher faculty of intuitive insight and mystical vision. Elsewhere in the Macarian Homilies it is stated that the nous within the heart is like the eye within the body; in other words, through the use of the intellect within the heart we do not merely reach conclusions by means of discursive argumentation, but the intellect enables us to see the truth in a direct and unmediated manner. The heart in which the intellect dwells is thus the faculty with which we think, both in a rational and a suprarational way. It is both the seat of reasoning intelligence and also, on a higher or deeper level, the place of wisdom and spiritual knowledge (gnosis). (p. 13)

No surprise, pharmaceutical interests launched their multinational preemptive crusade to restrict and discredit HCQ starting way back in January 2020, months before the WHO declared a pandemic and even longer before President Trump’s controversial March 19 endorsement. On January 13, when rumors of Wuhan flu COVID-19 began to circulate, the French government took the bizarre, inexplicable, unprecedented, and highly suspicious step of reassigning HCQ from an over-the-counter to a prescription medicine. Without citing any studies, French health officials quietly changed the status of HCQ to “List II poisonous substance” and banned its over-the-counter sales. This absolutely remarkable coincidence repeated itself a few weeks later when Canadian health officials did the exact same thing, quietly removing the drug from pharmacy shelves. A physician from Zambia reported to Dr. Harvey Risch that in some villages and cities, organized groups of buyers emptied drugstores of HCQ and then burned the medication in bonfires outside the towns. South Africa destroyed two tons of life-saving hydroxychloroquine in late 2020, supposedly due to violation of an import regulation. The US government in 2021 ordered the destruction of more than a thousand pounds of HCQ, because it was improperly imported. “The Feds are insisting that all of it be destroyed, and not be used to save a single life anywhere in the world,” said a lawyer seeking to resist the senseless order.

The hard part, evolutionarily, was getting from prokaryotic cells to eukaryotic ones, then getting from single-celled organisms to multicellular ones. Earth is around 4.5 billion years old, a timescale I simply cannot get my head around. Instead let’s imagine’s Earth’s history as a calendar year, with the formation of Earth being January 1 and today being December 31 at 11:59pm. The first life on Earth emerges around February 25. Photosynthetic organisms first appear in late March. Multicellular life doesn’t appear until August or September. The first dinosaurs like eoraptor show up about 230 million years ago, or December 13 in our calendar year. The meteor impact that heralds the end of the dinosaurs happens around December 26. Homo sapiens aren’t part of the story until December 31 at 11:48 pm. Agriculture and large human communities and the building of monolithic structures all occur within the last minute of this calendar year. The Industrial Revolution, two world wars, the invention of basketball, recorded music, the electric dishwasher, and vehicles that travel faster than horses all happen in the last couple of seconds. Put another way: It took Earth about three billion years to go from single-celled life to multicellular life. It took less than seventy million years to go from Tyrannosaurus rex to humans who can read and write and dig up fossils and approximate the timeline of life and worry about its ending. Unless we somehow manage to eliminate all multicellular life from the planet, Earth won’t have to start all over and it will be okay--- at least until the oceans evaporate and the planet gets consumed by the sun. I know the world will survive us – and in some ways it will be more alive. More birdsong. More creatures roaming around. More plants cracking through our pavement, rewilding the planet we terraformed. I imagine coyotes sleeping in the ruins of the homes we built. I imagine our plastic still washing up on beaches hundreds of years after the last of us is gone. I imagine moths, having no artificial lights toward which to fly, turning back to the moon.

The Addams dwelling at 25 West Fifty-fourth Street was directly behind the Museum of Modern Art, at the top of the building. It was reached by an ancient elevator, which rumbled up to the twelfth floor. From there, one climbed through a red-painted stairwell where a real mounted crossbow hovered. The Addams door was marked by a "big black number 13," and a knocker in the shape of a vampire. ...Inside, one entered a little kingdom that fulfilled every fantasy one might have entertained about its inhabitant. On a pedestal in the corner of the bookcase stood a rare "Maximilian" suit of armor, which Addams had bought at a good price ("a bargain at $700")... It was joined by a half-suit, a North Italian Morion of "Spanish" form, circa 1570-80, and a collection of warrior helmets, perched on long stalks like decapitated heads... There were enough arms and armaments to defend the Addams fortress against the most persistent invader: wheel-lock guns; an Italian prod; two maces; three swords. Above a sofa bed, a spectacular array of medieval crossbows rose like birds in flight. "Don't worry, they've only fallen down once," Addams once told an overnight guest. ... Everywhere one looked in the apartment, something caught the eye. A rare papier-mache and polychrome anatomical study figure, nineteenth century, with removable organs and body parts captioned in French, protected by a glass bell. ("It's not exactly another human heart beating in the house, but it's close enough." said Addams.) A set of engraved aquatint plates from an antique book on armor. A lamp in the shape of a miniature suit of armor, topped by a black shade. There were various snakes; biopsy scissors ("It reaches inside, and nips a little piece of flesh," explained Addams); and a shiny human thighbone - a Christmas present from one wife. There was a sewing basket fashioned from an armadillo, a gift from another. In front of the couch stood a most unusual coffee table - "a drying out table," the man at the wonderfully named antiques shop, the Gettysburg Sutler, had called it. ("What was dried on it?" a reporter had asked. "Bodies," said Addams.)...

1. Do you recall anyone drinking or taking drugs or being involved in some other behavior that you now believe could be dysfunctional? 2. Did you avoid bringing friends to your home because of drinking or some other dysfunctional behavior in the home? 3. Did one of your parents make excuses for the other parent’s drinking or other behaviors? 4. Did your parents focus on each other so much that they seemed to ignore you? 5. Did your parents or relatives argue constantly? 6. Were you drawn into arguments or disagreements and asked to choose sides with one parent or relative against another? 7. Did you try to protect your brothers or sisters against drinking or other behavior in the family? 8. As an adult, do you feel immature? Do you feel like you are a child inside? 9. As an adult, do you believe you are treated like a child when you interact with your parents? Are you continuing to live out a childhood role with the parents? 10. Do you believe that it is your responsibility to take care of your parents’ feelings or worries? Do other relatives look to you to solve their problems? 11. Do you fear authority figures and angry people? 12. Do you constantly seek approval or praise but have difficulty accepting a compliment when one comes your way? 13. Do you see most forms of criticism as a personal attack? 14. Do you over commit yourself and then feel angry when others do not appreciate what you do? 15. Do you think you are responsible for the way another person feels or behaves? 16. Do you have difficulty identifying feelings? 17. Do you focus outside yourself for love or security? 18. Do you involve yourself in the problems of others? Do you feel more alive when there is a crisis? 19. Do you equate sex with intimacy? 20. Do you confuse love and pity? 21. Have you found yourself in a relationship with a compulsive or dangerous person and wonder how you got there? 22. Do you judge yourself without mercy and guess at what is normal? 23. Do you behave one way in public and another way at home? 24. Do you think your parents had a problem with drinking or taking drugs? 25. Do you think you were affected by the drinking or other dysfunctional behavior of your parents or family? If you answered yes to three or more of these questions, you may be suffering from the effects of growing up in an alcoholic or other dysfunctional family. As The Laundry List states, you can be affected even if you did not take a drink. Please read Chapter Two to learn more about these effects.

I think we all collectively have gone a little crazy. We worry about the wrong things. I have an acquaintance, Christy, whose twelve–year–old son managed to get into a very violent PG–13 movie. I don’t know how many machine–gunnings, explosions, and killings this boy wound up witnessing. As I recall, the boy had nightmares for a week afterward. That disturbed his mother—but not as much as if her son had stumbled into a different kind of movie. “At least there wasn’t any sex,” she said with dead–serious concern. “No,” I said, “probably not a single bare breast.” I didn’t add that most societies do not regard the adult female breast as being primarily an object of sexual desire. After all, it’s just a big gland that makes milk in order to feed hungry babies. “You know what I’m talking about,” she snapped. “I mean graphic sex.” We were sitting in a café drinking tea. She cut off the volume of her speech at the end of her sentence, whispering and exaggerating the consonants of S–E–X as if she needed me to read her lips—as if giving voice to this word might disturb our neighbors and brand her as a deviant. “I don’t think children should see that kind of thing,” she added. “What should children see?” I asked her. I am not arguing that we should let our children buy tickets to raunchy movies. I never let my daughters bring home steamy videos or surf the Internet for porn. But something is wrong when sex becomes a dirty word that we don’t even want our children to hear. Why must we regard almost anything sexual as tantamount to obscene? I think many of us are like Christy. We wouldn’t want our children—even our very sexual teenagers—to see certain kinds of movies, even if they happened to be erotic masterpieces, true works of art. It wouldn’t matter if a movie gave us a wonderful scene of a wife and a husband very lovingly making love with the conscious intention of engendering new life. It wouldn’t matter that sex is life, and therefore must be regarded as sacred as anything could possibly be. It wouldn’t even matter that not one of us could have come into the world but for the sexual union of our fathers and our mothers. If a movie portrayed a man and woman in the ecstatic dance of love—actually showed naked bellies and breasts, burning lips and adoring eyes and the glistening, impassioned organs of sex—most people I know would rather their children watch the vile action movie. They would rather their “innocent” sons and daughters behold the images of bloody, blasted bodies, torture, murder, and death.

Speed is the thing.13 We prefer a team that has a relative speed advantage over other virtues.

Not convinced? Research organizations like the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, LifeWay Research, Time magazine, and UCLA now say that most Protestant teens are leaving the faith after high school. Why? Fifty-one percent said they left their childhood religion because their spiritual needs were not being met.12 Today, there are 31 percent fewer young people who are regular churchgoers than in the heat of the cultural revolution of the 1970s.13

I’m getting a few “special blonds” as well, Judith. So, we know that your primary area of expertise is working with individuals who are challenged by chronic disorganization. Can you tell us more about how you got into this business?

has encouraged administrative changes by providing information on a total of 217 cases of complaint analysis for public organizations through the Voices of the People Weekly, of which 106 cases were used for policies, including 52 cases for institutional improvement and 13 cases for strengthening PR and education

For general purposes, the dilution rate for essential oils is generally 2%-3%. For instance, if you use 2-3 drops of pure essential oil, you will dilute by adding about a teaspoon of carrier oil. This should be cut in half for children and senior citizens. For women who are pregnant, the general rule is a 1% dilution for oils that are safe to use. For a 3.5 ounce bottle (100 ml) carrier oil, add 25 drops essential oil and for 1/3 ounce carrier oil (10 ml or 2 teaspoons), add 2 drops of essential oil.

ahead of ICAO audit By Tarun Shukla | 527 words New Delhi: India's civil aviation regulator has decided to restructure its safety board and hire airline safety professionals ahead of an audit by the UN's aviation watchdog ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization). The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) announced its intent, and advertised the positions on its website. ICAO told the Indian regulator recently that it would come down to India to conduct an audit, its third in just over a decade, Mint reported on 12 February. Previous ICAO audits had highlighted the paucity of safety inspectors in DGCA. After its 2006 and 2012 audits, ICAO had placed the country in its list of 13 worst-performing nations. US regulator Federal Aviation Authority followed ICAO's 2012 audit with its own and downgraded India, effectively barring new flights to the US by Indian airlines. FAA is expected to visit India in the summer to review its downgrade. The result of the ICAO and FAA audits will have a bearing on the ability of existing Indian airlines to operate more flights to the US and some international destinations and on new airlines' ability to start flights to these destinations. The regulator plans to hire three directors of safety on short-term contracts to be part of the accident investigation board, according to the information on DGCA's website. This is first time the DGCA is hiring external staff for this board, which is critical to ascertain the reasoning for any crashes, misses or other safety related events in the country. These officers, the DGCA said on its website, must have at least 12 years of experience in aviation, specifically on the technical aspects, and have a degree in aeronautical engineering. DGCA has been asked by international regulators to hire at least 75 flight inspectors. It has only 51. India's private airlines offer better pay and perks to inspectors compared with DGCA. The aviation ministry told DGCA in January to speed up the recruitment and do whatever was necessary to get more inspectors on board, a government official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. DGCA has also announced it will hire flight operations inspectors as consultants on a short-term basis for a period of one year with a fixed remuneration of `1.25 lakh per month. "There will be a review after six months and subsequent continuation will be decided on the basis of outcome of the review," DGCA said in its advertisement. The remuneration of `1.25 lakh is higher than the salary of many existing DGCA officers. In its 2006 audit, ICAO said it found that "a number of final reports of accident and serious incident investigations carried out by the DGCA were not sent to the (member) states concerned or to ICAO when it was applicable". DGCA had also "not established a voluntary incident reporting system to facilitate the collection of safety information that may not otherwise be captured by the state's mandatory incident reporting system". In response, DGCA "submitted a corrective action plan which was never implemented", said Mohan Ranganthan, an aviation safety analyst and former member of government appointed safety council, said of DGCA. He added that the regulator will be caught out this time. Restructuring DGCA is the key to better air safety, said former director general of civil aviation M.R. Sivaraman. Hotel industry growth is expected to strengthen to 9-11% in 2015-16: Icra By P.R. Sanjai | 304 words Mumbai: Rating agency Icra Ltd on Monday said Indian hotel industry revenue growth is expected to strengthen to 9-11% in 2015-16, driven by a modest increase in occupancy and small increase in rates. "Industry wide revenues are expected to grow by 5-8% in 2014-15. Over the next 12 months, Icra expects RevPAR (revenue per available room) to improve by 7-8% driven by up to 5% pickup in occupancies and 2-3% growth in average room rates (ARR)," Icra said. Further, margins are expected to remain largely flat for 2014-15 while

Recent research shows that organizations that excel at project management meet their original goals two and a half times more often and waste about 13 times less money than organizations that are poor at project management.

10:12; 14:17). ‹‹    DAY 5    ›› II. The purpose of God’s calling is fully revealed in the New Testament: A. God’s calling is according to His predestination (Eph. 1:4-5), His purpose (2 Tim. 1:9; Rom. 8:28), and His grace (2 Tim. 1:9-10). B. God’s calling is in Christ (1 Pet. 5:10) and through the gospel (2 Thes. 2:14). C. The New Testament reveals various aspects of the purpose of God’s calling: 1. God has called us out of darkness into His marvelous light (1 Pet. 2:9): a. Darkness is a sign of sin and death; it is the expression and sphere of Satan in death. b. When God calls us, He opens our eyes and turns us from darkness to light and from the authority of Satan to Himself; to be turned to God means to be turned to the authority of God, which is God’s kingdom of light (Acts 26:18). 2. God’s calling is that His chosen ones may be separated and made holy unto God, to be the holy ones, the saints (Rom. 1:7; 1 Cor. 1:2). ‹‹    DAY 6    ›› 3. God has called us so that we may enter into the fellowship of His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, to partake of and enjoy His all-inclusive riches (vv. 9, 30). 4. God has called us into the sufferings of Christ (1 Pet. 2:20-21). 5. For the Body of Christ, God has called us into the peace of Christ (Col. 3:15). 6. God has called us for the purpose of obtaining the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ; He has called His chosen ones unto salvation in sanctification of the Spirit and belief of the truth so that they might obtain the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ (2 Thes. 2:13-14). 7. God’s calling is by His own glory and with the goal of our entering into the eternal glory of God (2 Pet. 1:3; 1 Pet. 5:10): a. God has called us not only by His glory but also to His glory. b. In order that we might enter into His eternal glory, the God of all grace is ministering to us the riches of the bountiful supply of the divine life in many aspects and in many steps of the divine operation on and in us in God’s economy (v. 10; 2 Pet. 1:3). 8. God has called us into His kingdom (1 Thes. 2:12): a. The kingdom of God is an organism constituted with God’s life as a realm of life for His ruling, in which He reigns by the divine life and expresses Himself in the divine life (John 3:3, 5-6; Matt. 6:10, 13). b. Today we, the called ones, should live in the church as the kingdom of God so that we may grow and develop in the life of God unto full maturity; through this growth and development, the entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ will be richly supplied to us (Rom. 14:17; 2 Pet. 1:5-11).

Stay Interview Questions 1. What about your job makes you jump out of bed in the morning? 2. What makes you hit the snooze button? 3. If you were to win the lottery and resign, what would you miss the most about your job? 4. What one change in your current role would make you consider leaving this job? 5. If you had a magic wand, what would be the one thing you would change about this department, team, organization? 6. As your manager, what could I do a little more of or a little less of? 7. If you had to go back to a position in your past and stay for an extended period of time, which one would it be and why? 8. What do you need to learn to work at your best? 9. What makes for a great day? 10. What can we do to make your job more satisfying? 11. What can we do to support your career goals? 12. Do you get enough recognition? How do you like to be recognized? 13. What do you want to learn this year?

In the hallway Bosch switched on the air conditioning in the interview room and set it at sixty-four. It would soon cool off in the room and instead of sweating, Mitford would start to get cold, though - coming from Canada - maybe not. After he chilled for a while Bosch would take another run at him and see if anything new came out. He checked his watch. It was almost five a.m. and the case meeting the feds were organizing was not for another four hours. There was a lot to do but he still had some time to work with Mitford. The first round had been productive. There was no reason for him to think there was nothing more to be gained by a second go at it.

The psalmist said to God, “With my lips I recount all the laws that come from your mouth” (Psalm 119:13). He declared to others what God was teaching him. Through this exercise, he not only edified others but also strengthened his own understanding of God’s truth. There is an old adage that says, “Words disentangle themselves when passing over the lips or through the pencil tips.” As we share our thoughts with others, we learn because we are forced to organize and develop our ideas.

We therefore have irrefutable evidence that hominins started to consume meat by at least 2.6 million years ago. How much meat they ate is conjecture, but meat constitutes approximately one-third of the diet among hunter-gatherers in the tropics (more fish and meat are consumed in temperate habitats).13 In addition, hunter-gatherers must have craved meat back then as much as chimps and humans still do today, and for good reason. Eating an antelope steak yields five times more energy than an equal mass of carrots, as well as essential proteins and fats. Other animal organs such as the liver, heart, marrow, and brain also provide vital nutrients, especially fat, but also salt, zinc, iron, and more. Meat is a rich food source. Meat has been an important component of the human diet ever since early Homo, but being a part-time carnivore is time-consuming, chancy, dangerous, and difficult for hunter-gatherers today, and it must have been even more challenging and risky at the dawn of the Paleolithic, long before projectile weapons were invented. Although

Carlton Church review – Why Tokyo is populated? How Tokyo became the largest city? Apparently Tokyo Japan has been one of the largest global cities for hundreds of years. One of the primary reasons for its growth is the fact that it has been a political hotspot since they Edo period. Many of the feudal lords of Japan needed to be in Edo for a significant part of the year and this has led to a situation where increasing numbers of the population was attracted to the city. There were many people with some power base throughout Japan but it became increasingly clear that those who have the real power were the ones who were residing in Edo. Eventually Tokyo Japan emerged as both the cultural and the political center for the entire Japan and this only contributed to its rapid growth which made it increasingly popular for all people living in Japan. After World War II substantial rebuilding of the city was necessary and it was especially after the war that extraordinary growth was seen and because major industries came especially to Tokyo and Osaka, these were the cities where the most growth took place. The fact remains that there are fewer opportunities for people who are living far from the cities of Japan and this is why any increasing number of people come to the city. There are many reasons why Japan is acknowledged as the greatest city The Japanese railways is widely acknowledged to be the most sophisticated railway system in the world. There is more than 100 surface routes which is operated by Japan’s railways as well as 13 subway lines and over the years Japanese railway engineers has accomplished some amazing feats which is unequalled in any other part of the world. Most places in the city of Tokyo Japan can be reached by train and a relatively short walk. Very few global cities can make this same boast. Crossing the street especially outside Shibuya station which is one of the busiest crossings on the planet with literally thousands of people crossing at the same time. However, this street crossing symbolizes one of the trademarks of Tokyo Japan and its major tourism attractions. It lies not so much in old buildings but rather in the masses of people who come together for some type of cultural celebration. There is also the religious centers in Japan such as Carlton Church and others. Tokyo Japan has also been chosen as the city that will host the Olympics in 2020 and for many reasons this is considered to be the best possible venue. A technological Metropolitan No other country exports more critical technologies then Japan and therefore it should come as no surprise that the neighborhood electronics store look more like theme parks than electronic stores. At quickly becomes clear when one looks at such a spectacle that the Japanese people are completely infatuated with technology and they make no effort to hide that infatuation. People planning to visit Japan should heed the warnings from travel organizations and also the many complaints which is lodged by travelers who have become victims of fraud. It is important to do extensive research regarding the available options and to read every possible review which is available regarding travel agencies. A safe option will always be to visit the website of Carlton Church and to make use of their services when travelling to and from Japan.

seems that modern society has devised other forms of dharma that help to keep violence at bay. Stefano Tomelleri, using Durkheim’s concept of social distance, sees the division of labour as a means of coping with mimetic rivalry through the creation of social distance.12 This is also reminiscent of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, which is a tool to control human behaviour, preventing any form of horizontal communication, meaning any mimetic activity, through an external source of control.13 In both cases the aim is the eradication of violence. How could you envisage a contemporary social order that, although acknowledging the constant presence of violence, tries to cope with it? The division of labour, unlike the caste system, leaves room for the individual, at least in principle. The market may force one to make some choices instead of others, but it is not proper to speak about capitalism, as the Marxists did, in terms of rigidity of social stratification. The division of labour has experienced important changes in the recent years, and I am not sure that I can give a definite explanation to account for this phenomenon. Certainly the organization of labour is particularly relevant for the stability of North American society. When people refer to the so-called ‘American dream’, they certainly exaggerate and overestimate its nature, but it is not entirely deceptive either. If one looks at the nouveaux riches of Silicon Valley, it is true that many of them are really self-made men, and a good percentage are immigrants, mostly from India or China. So, I am not sure I would agree completely that division of labour keeps mimetic rivalry under control, but at the same time it is a very complex subject. There is unquestionably more social mobility in the United States than in Europe. However, we live in a world in which social mobility, although experiencing phases of inhibition and local rigidity, is constantly increasing. Structural injustice, although still present, has been gradually ironed out by Christian ethics, and the market itself asks for a wider circulation of ‘human capital’.

These coupling certainly do not fit with the mainstream idea that genes, or at least organisms, are hell-bent on reproducing themselves. They do fit, however, with the idea of a social role for sex, and they fit with the idea that sexual reproduction is a spandrel, a by-product of some other phenomenon. If Roughgarden is on to something, she believes it could have cultural as well as scientific implications. The orthodoxy of biology has corroded our culture like battery acid, she says, In general, we play out the roles prescribed for us by that culture - aggressive male and coy female - because deviation from its "norm" results in emotional and physical violence, bigotry, personal guilt, and criminalized behaviors. If biology has been getting it wrong though, the new orthodoxy could trigger an infusion of tolerance; perhaps the anomalous prevalence of sexual reproduction will end up having deeper repercussions outside of science than within it.

The following 26 are the vital centres provided in the human body: 1. Soles 2, 2. Calves 2, 3. Thighs 2, 4. Genital Organ 1, 5. Navel 1, 6. Heart 1, 7. Lungs 2, 8. Shoulders 2, 9. Right palm, hand & shoulder 3, 10. Left palm, hand & shoulder 3, 11. Eyes 2, 12. Ears 2, 13. Mouth 1, 14. Nose 1, 15. Eyebrows 1. So the total is 26.

Cinnamon Pecan Quinoa Toasted pecans are placed on top of freshly cooked cinnamon quinoa and mixed with blackberries and agave nectar. Servings: 4 Ingredients: 1 c. water 1 c. milk (low fat, organic) 1 c. quinoa (organic) ½ tsp. cinnamon (ground) 2 c. blackberries (fresh) 4 tsp. agave nectar (organic) 1/3 c. pecans (toasted) Directions: 1. Add the water, milk, and quinoa to a medium-sized sauce pan. Set the heat to high and let it boil. Lower the heat to medium-low and cover. Let this sauté for about 15 minutes. Remove from the heat and let it sit for about 5 minutes. 2. Add in the cinnamon and blackberries. Stir and then divide the mixture up between 4 serving bowls. Sprinkle a little bit of the agave nectar on top of each bowl. 3. Add the pecans on top and enjoy!

I thought it might stand out because of the nature of the arrest.” “A vice sting?” “A Serbian sex ring. They worked for a Serb gang set.” “Ah. Okay, that sounds familiar. NoHo Vice took down thirteen or fourteen girls over by CBS Studio Center. A joint task force deal with OCTF.” Organized Crime Task Force. “That’s it.” “Serbians. Okay, sure. They had cribs all through those complexes. They had so many hookers around the pool over there it looked like the Playboy Mansion. Not that I’ve ever seen the mansion.” “That’s the one. I want to talk to them about events occurring on or about that time.” Sanchez said, “You mind if I ask what this is about?” “A gang pakhan named Michael Darko. Darko heads up the set that owned these particular girls.” Sanchez said, “Darko.” “Yeah. One of his lieutenants probably ran the operation, but Darko was the man. The pakhan. I have some questions about Darko these girls might be able to answer.” The silence from Sanchez was thoughtful.

In September 2009, the White House had fired a warning shot, cutting veteran reporter and Fox News Sunday anchor Chris Wallace out of a round of interviews with the president on healthcare reform. White House Communications Director Anita Dunn conceded that CNN, NBC, ABC, and CBS were included, but Fox was excluded because the administration did not like the way Fox covered the administration.12 Deputy White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer explained the snub to the New York Times: “We simply decided to stop abiding by the fiction, which is aided and abetted by the mainstream press, that Fox is a traditional news organization.”13

We can appreciate the thematic organization of this chapter best if we step back from the various issues related to particular terms and look at the structure of the chapter as a whole. The first verse (Gen. 1:1) functions as a general introductory statement. The second verse (v. 2) sets forth a problem that the rest of the chapter is going to solve. The problem is one with which ancient Near Eastern people would have been familiar: The world is engulfed in a primordial chaos. More specifically, the earth is enveloped in “darkness,” covered by “the deep,” and in a state that is “formless” and “void” (tohu wabohu). The author’s goal was to show how Yahweh solved each of these problems and thus succeeded in bringing order out of chaos. The creation week is divided into two groups of three days (days 1–3 and 4–6) with the seventh day acting as a capstone. Within each three-day grouping, four creative acts of God are identified by the phrase “Let there be . . .” Most significantly, the creative acts in the second group mirror the creative acts in the first group. That is, day four mirrors day one; day five mirrors day two; and day six mirrors day three. The first set of three days addresses the problems of the darkness, the deep, and the formlessness of the earth as spelled out in v. 2. God addresses these problems by creating spaces within which things may exist. The second set of three days addresses the voidness problem of v. 2. God solves this problem by creating things to fill the spaces he created in the first three days. More specifically, on day one God created light (which addressed the darkness problem) and separated it from the darkness (vv. 3–5). On day two God created the heavens (which addressed the watery abyss problem) and used it to separate the waters above from the waters below (vv. 6–8). On day three God created dry land and vegetation (addressing the formless earth problem) and separated the earth from the waters below (vv. 9–13). Thus, by the end of day three the first three problems had been addressed: darkness, water, formlessness. The second set of three days addresses the final problem of voidness— the lack of things to fill the spaces God has created. This is how the second set mirrors the first set of days. Day four fills the space created on day one. Day five fills the space created on day two. And day six fills the space created on day three. More

Kids’ Bedtime Excuses 1. There’s a fly in my room. 2. Well, what time are you going to bed? 3. There’s no ice in my water and I clearly stated that I wanted ice water. 4. This is the wrong cup for my water. 5. I think one of my knees is bigger than the other. 6. My lips are chapped. 7. The tag in my jammies is bothering me. 8. “I’m having a bad dream.” “But you haven’t fallen asleep yet.” “Touché.” 9. I think someone stole my blankie. 10. My feet itch. 11. I’m wondering when we can go to Disneyland again. 12. My hair feels funny. 13. I’m worried that kangaroos bite. 14. Am I allergic to anything? 15. Can I have dessert again? 16. I want to sleep in your room. 17. You forgot to tuck me in. 18. My brain is telling me funny jokes and I need to share them with you. 19. My lamp is too loud. 20. My socks are too tight. 21. There’s a penny in my bed. 22. I can’t figure out why pudding is so delicious. 23. I forgot what comes after twenty-nine. 24. It’s not dark enough outside. 25. My legs are hot.

The Illuminati use several umbrella organizations whose leaders usually don’t know that they are being manipulated and controlled. One of the Illuminati organizations working from behind the scenes of visible world politics is the Association of the Round Table. Just like the Order of the Illuminati this society is devoted to the destruction of national states, and they strive for a sort of international super-state: the prototype of the so-called New World Order! The Round Table was founded in 1891 by the politician Cecil Rhodes and is built in the same way as the Order of the Illuminati. In 1902 the Association of Helpers (a group of supporters from the outside from seven different countries) was created. This group created the Round Table Societies in different countries. The North American branch of the Round Table Group was initially called National Civic Federation, a name that was changed in 1921 by Colonel Mandell House into Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).[46] Today the organization claims approximately 2000 members. It is striking that almost all members of the CFR hold important positions in the government of the United States, the CIA and the American financial world. Aside from the enormous influence of the organization over the majority of American public life, it also exercises considerable pressure on the Congress and the government of the United States. At the moment the CFR is the most important component of the “World Government” operating behind the scenes.[47] The grandson of Franklin Roosevelt declared that the President completely depended on the CFR; every step he took was dictated by this institution. In 1975 retired Navy Admiral Chester Ward, former Judge Advocate General of the U.S. Navy and former CFR member, wrote in a critique that the goal of the CFR is the submergence of U.S. sovereignty and national independence into an all powerful One World government. In one of the first issues of Foreign Affairs (1922), the Council on Foreign Relations magazine, World Government is already endorsed:

Chocolate Peanut Butter Fudge Makes over 100 1inch x 1inch treats for $23 in 90 minutes   2 cups deep yellow, unpasteurized butter[92] from grass-fed cows – [$10] 1 cup creamy, organic peanut butter [$3] 1 1/2 cups raw, local honey [$6] 1 cup organic carob powder [$3] 1 teaspoon sea salt [pennies] 2 teaspoons organic vanilla extract [$0.20] 1 tablespoon organic chocolate extract [$0.50]   ●     Soften the raw butter to room temperature. ●     Mix all ingredients well in a large, glass bowl. ●     Spread parchment paper across a 13 x 9 pan that is 1-2 inches deep and spread fudge evenly so that it is about ½ inch in depth. ●     Put pan in freezer to set for about 1 hour.   Cut into squares and serve as a snack or even a very fast, healthy breakfast on the go!

Paul declares the “invisible things of him from the creation of the world” can help us understand “his eternal power and Godhead” (Romans 1:20). The truth that God is a “tri-unity” of two invisible persons (Father and Spirit) and one visible person (Jesus) is evident even in creation. The universe is composed of three structures: space, matter, and time. Of these three, only matter is visible. Space requires length, height, and width to constitute space. Each dimension is separate and distinct in itself, yet the three form space—if you remove height, you no longer have space. Time is also a tri-unity of past, present, and future. Two are invisible (past and future), and one visible (present). Each is separate and distinct, as well as essential for time to exist. Man is also a “tri-unity,” having physical, mental, and spiritual components. Again, two are invisible (mental and spiritual) and one visible (physical). Cells compose the fundamental structural unit of all living organisms. All organic life is made up from cells that consist of three primary parts: the outer wall, the cytoplasm, and the nucleus (like the shell, white, and yoke of an egg). If any one is removed, the cell dies. In each of these examples, the removal of any one component results in the demise of the whole. In like manner, the Godhead contains three distinct persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Each is God (Ephesians 4:6; Titus 2:13; Acts 5:3, 4), yet there is one God. The removal of one person destroys the unity of the whole. Even the gospel story illustrates the interdependency of threes. The sanctuary had three places: the Courtyard, the Holy Place, and the Most Holy Place. There are three stages of salvation: justification, sanctification, and glorification. In Isaiah 6:3, the angels around God’s throne cry “Holy, Holy, Holy” three times—once for the Father, once for the Son, and once for the Holy Spirit.

What were we, exactly? Atoms that on their own have no will, no purpose, nothing but constraints based on “laws” of physics (whatever those really are ultimately). Somehow, under the conditions of New Earth—temperature, radiation impact from the sun and cosmic rays, composition, pressure—these atomic entities can form organized structures that at one point obtained the power to replicate. Then the process of “survival of the stable” took over, and evolution produced increasingly complex molecules, cells, bodies—minds. That love and the ideals of beauty and wonder all come from the arbitrary dance of molecules like carbon chains and water is extremely strange when you really think about it. In fact, it makes no sense at all to me.

His heart hardened, the organ froze inside him and cracked.

February 13: Marilyn attends the premiere of Franco Zeffirelli’s production of Romeo and Juliet at Manhattan’s City Center. She attends a party afterward organized by Lee Strasberg. Marilyn arrives home at her 57th Street apartment at 2:30 a.m.

The Secrets of Skunk: Part Two At the Lockheed skunk works, Kelly Johnson ran a tight ship. He loved efficiency. He had a motto—“be quick, be quiet, and be on time”—and a set of rules.6 And while we are parsing the deep secrets of skunk, it’s to “Kelly’s rules” we must now turn. Wall the skunk works off from the rest of the corporate bureaucracy—that’s what you learn if you boil Johnson’s rules down to their essence. Out of his fourteen rules, four pertain solely to military projects and can thus be excluded from this discussion. Three are ways to increase rapid iteration (a topic we’ll come back to in a moment), but the remaining seven are all ways to enforce isolation. Rule 3, for example: “The number of people with any connection to the project should be restricted in an almost vicious manner.” Rule 13 is more of the same: “Access by outsiders to the project and its personnel must be strictly controlled by appropriate security measures.” Isolation, then, according to Johnson, is the most important key to success in a skunk works. The reasoning here is twofold. There’s the obvious need for military secrecy, but more important is the fact that isolation stimulates risk taking, encouraging ideas weird and wild and acting as a counterforce to organizational inertia. Organizational inertia is the notion that once any company achieves success, its desire to develop and champion radical new technologies and directions is often tempered by the much stronger desire not to disrupt existing markets and lose their paychecks. Organizational inertia is fear of failure writ large, the reason Kodak didn’t recognize the brilliance of the digital camera, IBM initially dismissed the personal computer, and America Online (AOL) is, well, barely online. But what is true for a corporation is also true for the entrepreneur. Just as the successful skunk works isolates the innovation team from the greater organization, successful entrepreneurs need a buffer between themselves and the rest of society. As Burt Rutan, winner of the Ansari XPRIZE, once taught me: “The day before something is truly a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea.” Trying out crazy ideas means bucking expert opinion and taking big risks. It means not being afraid to fail. Because you will fail. The road to bold is paved with failure, and this means having a strategy in place to handle risk and learn from mistakes is critical. In a talk given at re:Invent 2012, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos7 explains it like this: “Many people misperceive what good entrepreneurs do. Good entrepreneurs don’t like risk. They seek to reduce risk. Starting a company is already risky . . . [so] you systematically eliminate risk in those early days.

am gearing up to do the transport,” George said. “Have you looked out at the street lately?” Joanna hadn’t, but now she did—she turned and looked. To her amazement, on both sides of the street behind her stood two unbroken lines of officers, some in uniform, some not. The lines stretched from the house next door to the Beasleys’ and from the one across the street down the hill and all the way around the next curve, where they finally disappeared from sight. The officers close enough for Joanna to see were standing at ease. They had assembled throughout the night in solemn silence. Speaking in hushed tones, they had organized themselves at a distance that was far enough away from the crime scene so as not to interfere. Now, in the welcome cool before dawn, they simply stood and waited. “Who are they?” Joanna wanted to know. “Where did these people come from?” “I have no idea,” George answered, “but those guys didn’t come here to watch my van drive down the street. They came to pay their respects to a fellow fallen officer, and we’re going to let them do it.

Folding and organizing were for saps. I preferred hunting and rooting, the thrill of the never-ending treasure hunt for my personal belongings.

Interpol is an illegal entity operating within the borders of the United States, without the sanction and approval of the people in flagrant violation of the Constitution of the United States and the constitutions of the fifty states.42 Interpol is a private agency with a communications network stretching around the globe. In spite of the fact that “Interpol“ is a private organization, it was granted “observer status” by the United Nations in 1975, a