“
Just because something isn't a lie does not mean that it isn't deceptive. A liar knows that he is a liar, but one who speaks mere portions of truth in order to deceive is a craftsman of destruction.
”
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Criss Jami
“
I drank a portion of her blood, just enough to keep the virus under control, but not enough to kill her. It was like drinking one of Ophelia’s cocktails. The alcohol in her bloodstream filled me with dizzy thoughts, while the blood filled the virus with more hunger.
”
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Eli Wilde (My Unbeating Heart)
“
Julian had heard stories-whispers really-of other Shadowhunter children who thought or felt differently. Who had trouble focusing. Who claimed letters rearranged themselves on the page when they tried to read them. Who fell prey to dark sadnesses that seemed to have no reason, or fits of energy they couldn't control.
Whispers were all there were, though, because the Clave hated to admit that Nephilim like that existed. They were disappeared into the 'dregs' portion of the Academy, trained to stay out of the way of other Shadowhunters. Sent to the far corners of the globe like shameful secrets to be hidden. There were no words to describe Shadowhunters whose minds were shaped differently, no real words to describe differences at all.
Because if there were words, Julian thought, there would have to be acknowledgement. And there were things the Clave refused to acknowledge.
”
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Cassandra Clare (Lady Midnight (The Dark Artifices, #1))
“
The moon is always jealous of the heat of the day, just as the sun always longs for something dark and deep.
They could see how love might control you, from your head to your toes, not to mention every single part of you in between.
A woman could want a man so much she might vomit in the kitchen sink or cry so fiercly blood would form in the corners of her eyes.
She put her hand to her throat as though someone were strangling her, but really she was choking on all that love she thought she’d needed so badly.
What had she thought, that love was a toy, something easy and sweet, just to play with? Real love was dangerous, it got you from inside and held on tight, and if you didn’t let go fast enough you might be willing to do anything for it’s sake.
She refused to believe in superstition, she wouldn’t; yet it was claiming her.
Some fates are guaranteed, no matter who tries to intervene.
After all I’ve done for you is lodged somewhere in her brain, and far worse, it’s in her heart as well.
She was bad luck, ill-fated and unfortunate as the plague.
She is not worth his devotion. She wishes he would evaporate into thin air. Maybe then she wouldn’t have this feeling deep inside, a feeling she can deny all she wants, but that won’t stop it from being desire.
Love is worth the sum of itself and nothing more.
But that’s what happens when you’re a liar, especially when you’re telling the worst of these lies to yourself.
He has stumbled into love, and now he’s stuck there. He’s fairly used to not getting what he wants, and he’s dealt with it, yet he can’t help but wonder if that’s only because he didn’t want anything so badly.
It’s music, it’s a sound that is absurdly beautiful in his mouth, but she won’t pay attention. She knows from the time she spent on the back stairs of the aunts’ house that most things men say are lies. Don’t listen, she tells herself. None if it’s true and none of it matters, because he’s whispering that he’s been looking for her forever. She can’t believe it. She can’t listen to anything he tells her and she certainly can’t think, because if she did she might just think she’d better stop.
What good would it do her to get involved with someone like him? She’d have to feel so much, and she’s not that kind.
The greatest portion of grief is the one you dish out for yourself.
She preferred cats to human beings and turned down every offer from the men who fell in love with her.
They told her how sticks and stones could break bones, but taunting and name-calling were only for fools.
— & now here she is, all used up.
Although she’d never believe it, those lines in *’s face are the most beautiful part about her. They reveal what she’s gone through and what she’s survived and who exactly she is, deep inside.
She’s gotten back some of what she’s lost. Attraction, she now understands, is a state of mind.
If there’s one thing * is now certain of, it’s house you can amaze yourself by the things you’re willing to do.
You really don’t know? That heart-attack thing you’ve been having? It’s love, that’s what it feels like.
She knows now that when you don’t lose yourself in the bargain, you find you have double the love you started with, and that’s one recipe that can’t be tampered with.
Always throw spilled salt over your left shoulder. Keep rosemary by your garden gate. Add pepper to your mashed potatoes. Plant roses and lavender, for luck. Fall in love whenever you can.
”
”
Alice Hoffman (Practical Magic (Practical Magic, #1))
“
When I am eating a meal, I have no sense of portion control. I am a completist. If the food is on my plate, I must finish it.
”
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Roxane Gay (Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body)
“
I feel to that the gap between my new life in New York and the situation at home in Africa is stretching into a gulf, as Zimbabwe spirals downwards into a violent dictatorship. My head bulges with the effort to contain both worlds. When I am back in New York, Africa immediately seems fantastical – a wildly plumaged bird, as exotic as it is unlikely.
Most of us struggle in life to maintain the illusion of control, but in Africa that illusion is almost impossible to maintain. I always have the sense there that there is no equilibrium, that everything perpetually teeters on the brink of some dramatic change, that society constantly stands poised for some spasm, some tsunami in which you can do nothing but hope to bob up to the surface and not be sucked out into a dark and hungry sea. The origin of my permanent sense of unease, my general foreboding, is probably the fact that I have lived through just such change, such a sudden and violent upending of value systems.
In my part of Africa, death is never far away. With more Zimbabweans dying in their early thirties now, mortality has a seat at every table. The urgent, tugging winds themselves seem to whisper the message, memento mori, you too shall die. In Africa, you do not view death from the auditorium of life, as a spectator, but from the edge of the stage, waiting only for your cue. You feel perishable, temporary, transient. You feel mortal.
Maybe that is why you seem to live more vividly in Africa. The drama of life there is amplified by its constant proximity to death. That’s what infuses it with tension. It is the essence of its tragedy too. People love harder there. Love is the way that life forgets that it is terminal. Love is life’s alibi in the face of death.
For me, the illusion of control is much easier to maintain in England or America. In this temperate world, I feel more secure, as if change will only happen incrementally, in manageable, finely calibrated, bite-sized portions. There is a sense of continuity threaded through it all: the anchor of history, the tangible presence of antiquity, of buildings, of institutions. You live in the expectation of reaching old age.
At least you used to.
But on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, those two states of mind converge. Suddenly it feels like I am back in Africa, where things can be taken away from you at random, in a single violent stroke, as quick as the whip of a snake’s head. Where tumult is raised with an abruptness that is as breathtaking as the violence itself.
”
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Peter Godwin (When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa)
“
What we can do now to bring about his kingdom of justice is to cooperate in the establishment of justice in that portion of his kingdom over which we have some immediate control: ourselves. Let us begin the pursuit of justice and peace by cleaning up our own lives and establishing peace within our own hearts.
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M. Basil Pennington (A Place Apart: Monastic Prayer and Practice for Everyone)
“
First came Jaws by Peter Benchley, a novel about a stressed-out great white shark suffering from portion control issues. It sank its teeth into the New York Times Best-Seller List and hung on for an astonishing forty-five weeks.
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Grady Hendrix (Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of '70s and '80s Horror Fiction)
“
I thought how money was like food. The smell, the way it came in portions, how badly you needed it. How hungry you got for it, that acidic longing which burned and sickened in your stomach. Firm muscular control was needed over food and money. Money could kill you, wanting and needing it and fighting its power.
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Helen Cross (My Summer Of Love)
“
By the time I visited those battlefields, I knew that they had been retrofitted as the staging ground for a great deception, and this was my only security, because they could no longer insult me by lying to me. I knew—and the most important thing I knew was that, somewhere deep with them, they knew too. I like to think that knowing might have kept me from endangering you, that having understood and acknowledged the anger, I could control it. I like to think that it could have allowed me to speak the needed words to the woman and then walk away. I like to think this, but I can’t promise it. The struggle is really all I have for you because it is the only portion of this world under your control.
”
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Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me)
“
The greatest portion of peace of mind is doing nothing wrong. Those who lack self-control live disoriented and disturbed lives.” —SENECA, MORAL LETTERS, 105.7
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Ryan Holiday (The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living)
“
Fear helps us survive. I've spent a larger portion of my life being afraid than I have being in control. But, here I am. Forget this escape idea, son. It won't help you or your family. Play the game. Find a tall tree somewhere. A tree that's survived all the coups and massacres of history. Go to that tree and dig a hole near its roots and bury your pride there.
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Colin Cotterill (Disco for the Departed (Dr. Siri Paiboun, #3))
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The brain stem is the portion of the brain that controls basic functions like breathing, sleeping, heart rate, consciousness, and pain sensitivity. Damage it and recovery is impossible. Miracles don’t happen after this area is injured.
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Rahul Jandial (Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance)
“
All physical action, therefore, begins in the form of a thought. To control physical action one has only to control thoughts. The presence of any thought in the mind has a tendency to set up an appropriate physical action in some portion of the body.
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Napoleon Hill (How to Own Your Own Mind (The Mental Dynamite Series))
“
Come in," he said gently. And inwardly raged at this portion of his being that rendered him helpless; that
he could not control; that lay coiled within him like a length of rope, always ready to fling itself unbidden
at the cry of someone else's need. It gave him -no peace. Not even in sleep. At the edge of his dreams,
there was often a sound like a faint, brief cry of someone in distress. It was almost inaudible in the
distance. Always the same. And for minutes after waking, he would feel the anxiety of some duty
unfulfilled.
”
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William Peter Blatty (The Exorcist)
“
From the perspective of a general human being – a non-scientist, the most valuable element of the human mental life, is Emotion – a tiny portion of our conscious mental world. We humans as a species crave for emotional stimulation. And in many cases, as it happens, we are actually slaves to our emotions.
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Abhijit Naskar (What is Mind?)
“
We know of ESB's potential for mind control largely through the work of Jose Delgado. One signal provoked a cat to lick its fur, then continue compulsively licking the floor and bars of its cage. A signal designed to stimulate a portion of a monkey's thalamus, a major midbrain center for integrating muscle movements, triggered a complex action: The monkey walked to one side of the cage, then the other, then climbed to the rear ceiling, then back down. The animal performed this same activity as many times as it was stimulated with the signal, up to sixty times an hour, but not blindly— the creature still was able to avoid obstacles and threats from the dominant male while carrying out the electrical imperative. Another type of signal has made monkeys turn their heads, or smile, no matter what else they were doing, up to twenty thousand times in two weeks. As Delgado concluded, "The animals looked like electronic toys."
Even instincts and emotions can be changed: In one test a mother giving continuous care to her baby suddenly pushed the infant away whenever the signal was given. Approach-avoidance conditioning can be achieved for any action simply by stimulating the pleasure and pain centers in an animal's or person's limbic system.
Eventual monitoring of evoked potentials from the EEG, combined with radio-frequency and microwave broadcasts designed to produce specific thoughts or moods, such as compliance and complacency, promises a method of mind control that poses immense danger to all societies —tyranny without terror.
”
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Robert O. Becker (The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life)
“
And inwardly raged at this portion of his being that so frequently rendered him helpless in the face of someone’s plea; that he could not control; that lay coiled within him like a length of rope, always ready to fling itself out to rescue at the call of someone else’s need. It gave him no peace. Not even in sleep.
”
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William Peter Blatty (The Exorcist)
“
Another State Department representative noted that the central government lacked legitimacy in the eyes of the Afghan public, the lowest in 10 years, according to polling done in the country. He observed that the illicit economy, opium and illegal mining, was the size of the regular economy, and a significant portion was under control of Taliban insurgents.
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Bob Woodward (Fear: Trump in the White House)
“
For many generations, as long as the divine nature lasted in them, they were obedient to the laws, and well-affectioned towards the god, whose seed they were; for they possessed true and in every way great spirits, uniting gentleness with wisdom in the various chances of life, and in their intercourse with one another. They despised everything but virtue, caring little for their present state of life, and thinking lightly of the possession of gold and other property, which seemed only a burden to them; neither were they intoxicated by luxury; nor did wealth deprive them of their self-control; but they were sober, and saw clearly that all these goods are increased by virtue and friendship with one another, whereas by too great regard and respect for them, they are lost and friendship with them. By such reflections and by the continuance in them of a divine nature, the qualities which we have described grew and increased among them; but when the divine portion began to fade away, and became diluted too often and too much with the mortal admixture, and the human nature got the upper hand, they then, being unable to bear their fortune, behaved unseemly, and to him who had an eye to see grew visibly debased, for they were losing the fairest of their precious gifts; but to those who had no eye to see the true happiness, they appeared glorious and blessed at the very time when they were full of avarice and unrighteous power.
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Plato (Critias)
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Of the three primary instinctual defense systems, the immobility state is controlled by the most primitive of the physiological subsystems. This neural system (mediated by the unmyelinated portion of the vagus nerve) controls energy conservation and is triggered only when a person perceives that death is imminent—whether from outside, in the form of a mortal threat, or when the threat originates internally, as from illness or serious injury. Both of these challenges require that one hold still and conserve one’s vital energy. When this most archaic system dominates, one does not move; one barely breathes; one’s voice is choked off; and one is too scared to cry. One remains motionless in preparation for either death or cellular restitution.
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Peter A. Levine
“
Instead, we believe that the fault lies in ourselves. We feel we have failed. Some silently criticize us for not adhering to the diet. Others silently think we have no willpower and offer us meaningless platitudes. Sound familiar? The failing isn’t ours. The portion-control caloric-reduction diet is virtually guaranteed to fail. Eating less does not result in lasting weight loss.
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Jason Fung (The Obesity Code: Unlocking the Secrets of Weight Loss (Why Intermittent Fasting Is the Key to Controlling Your Weight))
“
The global centre of power shifted to Europe only between 1750 and 1850, when Europeans humiliated the Asian powers in a series of wars and conquered large parts of Asia. By 1900 Europeans firmly controlled the world’s economy and most of its territory. In 1950 western Europe and the United States together accounted for more than half of global production, whereas China’s portion had been reduced to 5 per cent.4
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
“
Not only could he share the memories, and control them, he could keep the link intact as their thoughts moved through time from the past to the present. The men of his clan enjoyed a richer, fuller ceremonial interrelationship than any other clan. But with the trained minds of the mog-urs, he could make the telepathic link from the beginning. Through him, all the mog-urs shared a union far closer and more satisfying than any physical one—it was a touching of spirits. The white liquid from Iza’s bowl that had heightened the perceptions and opened the minds of the magicians to The Mog-ur, had allowed his special ability to create a symbiosis with Ayla’s mind as well. The traumatic birth that damaged the brain of the disfigured man had impaired only a portion of his physical abilities, not the sensitive psychic overdevelopment that enabled his great power. But the crippled man was the ultimate end-product of his kind. Only in him had nature taken the course set for the Clan to its fullest extreme. There could be no further development without radical change, and their characteristics were no longer adaptable. Like the huge creature they venerated, and many others that shared their environment, they were incapable of surviving radical change. The race of men with social conscience enough to care for their weak and wounded, with spiritual awareness enough to bury their dead and venerate their great totem, the race of men with great brains but no frontal lobes, who made no great strides forward, who made almost no progress in nearly a hundred thousand years, was doomed to go the way of the woolly mammoth and the great cave bear. They didn’t know it, but their days on earth were numbered, they were doomed to extinction. In Creb, they had reached the end of their line. Ayla felt a sensation akin to the deep pulsing of a foreign bloodstream superimposed on her own. The powerful mind of the great magician was exploring her alien convolutions, trying to find a way to mesh. The fit was imperfect, but he found channels of similarity, and where none existed, he groped for alternatives and made connections where there were only tendencies. With startling clarity, she suddenly comprehended that it was he who had brought her out of the void; but more, he was keeping the other mog-urs, also linked with him, from knowing she was there. She could just barely sense his connection with them, but she could not sense them at all. They, too, knew he had made a connection with someone—or something—else, but never dreamed it was Ayla.
”
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Jean M. Auel (The Clan of the Cave Bear (Earth's Children, #1))
“
What is Democracy; this huge inevitable Product of the Destinies, which is everywhere the portion of our Europe in these latter days? There lies the question for us. Whence comes it, this universal big black Democracy; whither tends it; what is the meaning of it? A meaning it must have, or it would not be here. If we can find the right meaning of it, we may, wisely submitting or wisely resisting and controlling, still hope to live in the midst of it; if we cannot find the right meaning, if we find only the wrong or no meaning in it, to live will not be possible!—The whole social wisdom of the Present Time is summoned, in the name of the Giver of Wisdom, to make clear to itself, and lay deeply to heart with an eye to strenuous valiant practice and effort, what the meaning of this universal revolt of the European Populations, which calls itself Democracy, and decides to continue permanent, may be.
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Thomas Carlyle (Latter-Day Pamphlets)
“
The enlightened person has learned to observe their mind and control how it goes. They have cultivated consciousness about consciousness. It is doubtful whether any other creature on the planet is capable of this meta-awareness, since it appears to be a function of the recently evolved portions of the human brain that other animals do not have. Exercising these higher brain functions does not happen automatically in most people, it must be cultivated through right mindfulness.
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David Tuffley (The Essence of Buddhism)
“
I am in control of myself in every way—at all times and in all situations. Each time I sit down to eat, I reaffirm my determination to achieve my goal. By eating right, and never giving in, I am reaching the weight I want. Whether eating in or eating out, I really enjoy eating less. I never feel the need to finish the food in front of me. I eat only what I should—and never one bite more. One way to weight-loss that’s easy and works, is less food on my plate, and less on my fork! By ordering less when I eat out, and by serving myself smaller portions at home, I keep myself aware of the importance of staying with my goal—each and every day. “Less on my plate means less on my waist.” When I sit down to eat, at no time do I allow anyone else to influence, tempt, or discourage me in any negative way. What I eat, and the goals I reach, is up to me. And I give no one the right to hinder or control my success. Although others may benefit from my success, I am achieving my weight-loss goals for my own personal reasons—for myself, my life, my future, and my own personal well-being. I am never, at any time, tempted to take one bite more than I should. I am strong, I am capable of reaching my goal, and I am doing it! Being in situations which put a lot of food in front of me is not a problem to me now. I simply say “No!” to the food and “Yes!” to my success. I enjoy sitting down to eat. Each time I do I conquer my past, and I create a trimmer, happier, more self-confident future in front of me. When I sit down to eat, I do not need someone else to remind me of my goal, or to keep me from eating something I should not. I take full responsibility for myself, and no one else has to do it for me. Controlling my weight, and my appetite, is easy for me now. I enjoy smaller portions, smaller bites, and a slower, healthier, more relaxed way of eating. I have set my goal and I am staying with it. I have turned mealtime into “achievement time.
”
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Shad Helmstetter (What To Say When You Talk To Your Self)
“
You said everyone imagines they’re exceptions and they’ll surely arrange an early and merciful exit before submitting to the intolerable. And then they do submit to the intolerable. That’s because, in order to retain agency over your own end of life, you have to be willing to give up some small portion of it that’s not particularly rubbish. Otherwise, you go downhill, doctors and relatives take over, and you’re apt to lose the very part of yourself that make judgements and takes action. We have a narrow window in which to exercise control.
”
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Lionel Shriver (Should We Stay or Should We Go)
“
Monica nudged her husband’s shoulder. “On-time flights are easier when you’re behind the controls.” Trent Fairchild and his two brothers owned and operated Fairchild Charters. A private air charter company with a fleet of jets, big and small, not to mention more helicopters than one could count, which was why they were attending the conference of International Emergency Medicine . . . a conference where professionals worked to improve the emergency response to natural disasters all over the world. “Is Glen with you?” Glen was Trent’s brother and liaison to the fixed-wing portion of air travel for the sick and injured.
”
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Catherine Bybee (Not Quite Forever (Not Quite, #4))
“
The divorce of control, or power, from ownership has been due in large part to the growth of public corporations. So long as a single person, family or comparatively small group held a substantial portion of the common shares of a corporation, the legal “owner” could control its affairs. Even if they no longer actually conducted the business, the operating managers were functioning as their accountable agents. But when the enterprise became more vast in scope and at the same time, the stock certificates became spread in small bundles among thousands of persons, the managers were gradually released from subordination to the nominal owners. De facto control passed, for the most part, to non-owning management.
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James Burnham (The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World)
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He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties. He must use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision. And these qualities he requires and exercises exactly in proportion as the part of his conduct which he determines according to his own judgment and feelings is a large one. It is possible that he might be guided in some good path, and kept out of harm’s way, without any of these things. But what will be his comparative worth as a human being?
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John Stuart Mill (On Liberty)
“
For many years there have been rumours of mind control experiments. in the United States. In the early 1970s, the first of the declassified information was obtained by author John Marks for his pioneering work, The Search For the Manchurian Candidate. Over time retired or disillusioned CIA agents and contract employees have broken the oath of secrecy to reveal small portions of their clandestine work. In addition, some research work subcontracted to university researchers has been found to have been underwritten and directed by the CIA. There were 'terminal experiments' in Canada's McGill University and less dramatic but equally wayward programmes at the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Rochester, the University of Michigan and numerous other institutions. Many times the money went through foundations that were fronts or the CIA. In most instances, only the lead researcher was aware who his or her real benefactor was, though the individual was not always told the ultimate use for the information being gleaned. In 1991, when the United States finally signed the 1964 Helsinki Accords that forbids such practices, any of the programmes overseen by the intelligence community involving children were to come to an end. However, a source recently conveyed to us that such programmes continue today under the auspices of the CIA's Office of Research and Development. The children in the original experiments are now adults. Some have been able to go to college or technical schools, get jobs. get married, start families and become part of mainstream America. Some have never healed. The original men and women who devised the early experimental programmes are, at this point, usually retired or deceased. The laboratory assistants, often graduate and postdoctoral students, have gone on to other programmes, other research. Undoubtedly many of them never knew the breadth of the work of which they had been part. They also probably did not know of the controlled violence utilised in some tests and preparations. Many of the 'handlers' assigned to reinforce the separation of ego states have gone into other pursuits. But some have remained or have keen replaced. Some of the 'lab rats' whom they kept in in a climate of readiness, responding to the psychological triggers that would assure their continued involvement in whatever project the leaders desired, no longer have this constant reinforcement. Some of the minds have gradually stopped suppression of their past experiences. So it is with Cheryl, and now her sister Lynn.
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Cheryl Hersha (Secret Weapons: How Two Sisters Were Brainwashed to Kill for Their Country)
“
Tight control over the alchemy of official “Staliniana” has created false and doubly majestic images of Stalin and his accomplishments.39 These images outlive the man himself and have an appeal even in contemporary Russia. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the stresses of the transitional period, corruption, poverty, and glaring social inequality all feed the longing for a social utopia. A significant portion of Russian society seeks recipes for the present by looking to the Stalinist past. Popular images of the greatness of the Stalinist empire—of equality and the fight against corruption, of the joy and purity of this distant life undone by “enemies”—are exploited by unscrupulous commentators and politicians. How great is the danger that a blend of historical ignorance, bitterness, and social discontent will provide fertile ground for pro-Stalinist lies and distortions to take root?
”
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Oleg V. Khlevniuk (Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator)
“
The global centre of power shifted to Europe only between 1750 and 1850, when Europeans humiliated the Asian powers in a series of wars and conquered large parts of Asia. By 1900 Europeans firmly controlled the world’s economy and most of its territory. In 1950 western Europe and the United States together accounted for more than half of global production, whereas China’s portion had been reduced to 5 per cent.5 Under the European aegis a new global order and global culture emerged. Today all humans are, to a much greater extent than they usually want to admit, European in dress, thought and taste. They may be fiercely anti-European in their rhetoric, but almost everyone on the planet views politics, medicine, war and economics through European eyes, and listens to music written in European modes with words in European languages. Even today’s burgeoning Chinese economy, which may soon regain its global primacy, is built on a European model of production and finance.
”
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
“
hold of people’s minds and actually control them. View a corporate stronghold like the giant squid that attacked Captain Nemo’s Nautilus in Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, waiting for people to swim near so it could wrap its tentacles about them. Whenever people begin to think in certain ways, principalities can maneuver appropriate corporate strongholds into position to clamp about them and actually rob them of the freedom to think. While individual strongholds serve as lodgings for local ruling demons, corporate strongholds offer a home to what Paul referred to: Put on the full armor of God, so that you will be able to stand firm against the schemes of the devil. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places. Ephesians 6:11–12, italics mine Corporate strongholds are wielded by principalities, rulers, demonic archangels that use them to imprison the minds and control the thoughts of entire peoples—nations, cities, denominations, local churches, political parties, even philanthropic groups. If you have ever asked, “How could principalities become world rulers of this present darkness?” the foremost answer lies here—by means of corporate strongholds. The function of a corporate stronghold is to imprison the minds of a people or group, to take away their freedom to think anything— including cold, hard facts and logic—contrary to the mindset of the stronghold. It hypnotizes whomever its spell overshadows, so that they cannot see portions of the Word of God (or even secular truths) that might set them free from its delusive grip. But their minds were hardened; for until this very day at the reading of the old covenant the same veil remains unlifted, because it is removed in Christ. But to this day whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their heart; but whenever a person turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. 2 Corinthians 3:14–16, italics mine That veil, to me, is a corporate stronghold of
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John Loren Sandford (Deliverance and Inner Healing)
“
Fruits of the Spirit
GOODNESS and KINDNESS live in the hearts of those who have suffered greatly, as the wounded tend to learn compassion through their misery. GENTLENESS is born out of the adversity that has challenged a believer, but who has then released all hopes for vindication to the power of God. PEACE is a fruit that grows from seeds of trust. LOVE matures as we learn to give up pieces of ourselves for the benefit of others, knowing full well that every piece we loose is replaced by an even more wondrous portion of Christ. JOY comes from knowing God and experiencing His strength during trials. PATIENCE is learned through experiences of long-suffering and allows the saint to move forward on his earthy journey, while always longing for his real home in heaven. FAITHFULNESS means commitment. It is a sold-out attitude and stance that resonates a belief in God’s unquestionable ability to do the impossible. Finally, the believer who suffers in the name of Christ for love’s sake grows in SELF-CONTROL. With this final fruit, the temptations of the devil lesson and loose their power. We gain strength by gaining self-control.
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Cheryl Zelenka
“
Government By The Industry, For The Industry Vice President George Bush sat in his chair across from four Monsanto executives. They had come to the White House with an unusual request. They wanted more regulation. They were venturing into a new technology, the genetic modification of food, and they were actually asking the government to oversee their emerging industry. But this was late 1986. Ronald Reagan was president and the administration was busily deregulating business. Bush needed convincing. “We bugged him for regulation,” said Leonard Guarraia, one of the executives at the meeting. “We told him that we have to be regulated.”[1] Monsanto was about to make a multibillion-dollar gamble. With this new technology, they could engineer and patent a whole new kind of food. Later, by buying up seed companies around the world, Monsanto could replace the natural seeds with their patented engineered seeds and control a hefty portion of the food supply. But there was fear among Monsanto’s ranks—fear of consumers’ and environmentalists’ reactions. Their fear was borne of experience. Years earlier, Monsanto had assured the public that their Agent Orange, the defoliant used during the Vietnam War, was safe for humans. It wasn’t. Thousands of veterans and tens of thousand of Vietnamese who suffered a wide range of maladies, including cancer, neurological disorders, and birth defects, blame Monsanto.
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Jeffrey M. Smith (Seeds of Deception)
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So, in summary: The market for Negro writers is very limited. Jobs as professional writers, editorial assistants, publisher's readers, etc., are almost non-existent. Hollywood insofar as Negroes are concerned, might just as well be controlled by Hitler. The common courtesies of decent travel, hotel and restaurant accommodations, politeness from doormen, elevatormen, and hired attendants in public places is practically everywhere in America denied Negroes, whether they be writers or not. Black authors, too, must ride in Jim Crow cars.
These are some of our problems. What can you who are writers do to help us solve them? What can you, our public, do to help us solve them? My problem, your problem. No, I'm wrong! It is not a matter of mine and yours. It is a matter of ours. We are all Americans. We want to create the American dream, a finer and more democratic America. I cannot do it without you. You cannot do it omitting me. Can we march together then?
But perhaps the word march is the wrong word—suggesting soldiers and armies. Can we not put our heads together and think and plan—not merely dream—the future America? And then create it with our hands? A land where even a Negro writer can make a living, if he is a good writer. And where, being a Negro, he need not be a secondary American.
We do not want any secondary Americans. We do not want a weak and imperfect democracy. We do not want poverty and hunger and prejudice and fear on the part of any portion of our population. We want America to really be America for everybody. Let us make it so!
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Langston Hughes (Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings)
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But the Hermetic Teachings go much further than do those of modern science. They teach that all manifestation of thought, emotion, reason, will or desire, or any mental state or condition, are accompanied by vibrations, a portion of which are thrown off and which tend to affect the minds of other persons by "induction." This is the principle which produces the phenomena of "telepathy"; mental influence, and other forms of the action and power of mind over mind, with which the general public is rapidly becoming acquainted, owing to the wide dissemination of occult knowledge by the various schools, cults and teachers along these lines at this time.
Every thought, emotion or mental state has its corresponding rate and mode of vibration. And by an effort of the will of the person, or of other persons, these mental states may be reproduced, just as a musical tone may be reproduced by causing an instrument to vibrate at a certain rate — just as color may be reproduced in the same way. By a knowledge of the Principle of Vibration, as applied to Mental Phenomena, one may polarize his mind at any degree he wishes, thus gaining a perfect control over his mental states, moods, etc. In the same way he may affect the minds of others, producing the desired mental states in them. In short, he may be able to produce on the Mental Plane that which science produces on the Physical Plane — namely, "Vibrations at Will." This power of course may be acquired only by the proper instruction, exercises, practice, etc., the science being that of Mental Transmutation, one of the branches of the Hermetic Art.
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Three Initiates (Kybalion: A Study of the Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece)
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We see the universal harmony in the wondrous sky and on the wondrous earth; how elements essentially opposed to each other are all woven together in an ineffable union to serve one common end, each contributing its particular force to maintain the whole; how the unmingling and mutually repellent do not fly apart from each other by virtue of their peculiarities, any more than they are destroyed, when compounded, by such contrariety; how those elements which are naturally buoyant move downwards, the heat of the sun, for instance, descending in the rays, while the bodies which possess weight are lifted by becoming rarefied in vapour, so that water contrary to its nature ascends, being conveyed through the air to the upper regions; how too that fire of the firmament so penetrates the earth that even its abysses feel the heat; how the moisture of the rain infused into the soil generates, one though it be by nature, myriads of differing germs, and animates in due proportion each subject of its influence; how very swiftly the polar sphere revolves, how the orbits within it move the contrary way, with all the eclipses, and conjunctions, and measured intervals of the planets. We see all this with the piercing eyes of mind, nor can we fail to be taught by means of such a spectacle that a Divine power, working with skill and method, is manifesting itself in this actual world, and, penetrating each portion, combines those portions with the whole and completes the whole by the portions, and encompasses the universe with a single all-controlling force, self-centred and self-contained, never ceasing from its motion, yet never altering the position which it holds.
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Gregory of Nyssa (On the Soul and the Resurrection)
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Geopolitics is ultimately the study of the balance between options and limitations. A country's geography determines in large part what vulnerabilities it faces and what tools it holds.
"Countries with flat tracks of land -- think Poland or Russia -- find building infrastructure easier and so become rich faster, but also find themselves on the receiving end of invasions. This necessitates substantial standing armies, but the very act of attempting to gain a bit of security automatically triggers angst and paranoia in the neighbors.
"Countries with navigable rivers -- France and Argentina being premier examples -- start the game with some 'infrastructure' already baked in. Such ease of internal transport not only makes these countries socially unified, wealthy, and cosmopolitan, but also more than a touch self-important. They show a distressing habit of becoming overimpressed with themselves -- and so tend to overreach.
"Island nations enjoy security -- think the United Kingdom and Japan -- in part because of the physical separation from rivals, but also because they have no choice but to develop navies that help them keep others away from their shores. Armed with such tools, they find themselves actively meddling in the affairs of countries not just within arm's reach, but half a world away.
"In contrast, mountain countries -- Kyrgyzstan and Bolivia, to pick a pair -- are so capital-poor they find even securing the basics difficult, making them largely subject to the whims of their less-mountainous neighbors.
"It's the balance of these restrictions and empowerments that determine both possibilities and constraints, which from my point of view makes it straightforward to predict what most countries will do:
· The Philippines' archipelagic nature gives it the physical stand-off of islands without the navy, so in the face of a threat from a superior country it will prostrate itself before any naval power that might come to its aid.
· Chile's population center is in a single valley surrounded by mountains. Breaching those mountains is so difficult that the Chileans often find it easier to turn their back on the South American continent and interact economically with nations much further afield.
· The Netherlands benefits from a huge portion of European trade because it controls the mouth of the Rhine, so it will seek to unite the Continent economically to maximize its economic gain while bringing in an external security guarantor to minimize threats to its independence.
· Uzbekistan sits in the middle of a flat, arid pancake and so will try to expand like syrup until it reaches a barrier it cannot pass. The lack of local competition combined with regional water shortages adds a sharp, brutal aspect to its foreign policy.
· New Zealand is a temperate zone country with a huge maritime frontage beyond the edge of the world, making it both wealthy and secure -- how could the Kiwis not be in a good mood every day?
"But then there is the United States. It has the fiat lands of Australia with the climate and land quality of France, the riverine characteristics of Germany with the strategic exposure of New Zealand, and the island features of Japan but with oceanic moats -- and all on a scale that is quite literally continental. Such landscapes not only make it rich and secure beyond peer, but also enable its navy to be so powerful that America dominates the global oceans.
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Peter Zeihan (The Absent Superpower: The Shale Revolution and a World Without America)
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Sometimes, as in the case of the copper companies, the nationalizations were achieved through legislation that won overwhelming support. (By now, no one in Chile loved the American companies; even the head of Chile’s Roman Catholic bishops declared that nationalization was right and just.) At other times the methods skirted or even overstepped the bounds of legality. The government would simply approve the seizures of farms and factories, one of those “loopholes” Allende was relying on. Perhaps the most important—and pernicious—method was by squeezing the companies economically, as he tried to do with El Mercurio. The government had the authority to approve price hikes and wage increases. Companies that were targets for takeovers were prohibited from raising their prices but were forced to raise their workers’ pay. Moreover, as the government extended its control of the banks, credit for distressed companies dried up. Forced bankruptcies were a favorite tool of Allende’s Socialists. And who was there to run these companies once they were taken over? Ambassador Davis reports: “Government-appointed managers were usually named on the basis of a political patronage system that would have put Tammany Hall to shame.” Many formerly profitable companies were soon incurring heavy losses. In the countryside, where peasants—often illiterate—were seizing control of the estates, there was resistance even to the simplest methods of accounting and cost calculation. As Allende told Debray, “We shall have real power when copper and steel are under our control, when saltpeter is genuinely under our control, when we have put far-reaching land reform measures into effect, when we control imports and exports through the state, when we have collectivized a major portion of our national production.” But it wasn’t just the economy that Allende was trying to control. He was also taking steps to centralize the government and restrict political freedom. He saw his most important political reform as replacing the bicameral legislature with a single chamber in order to strengthen the presidency and weaken congress’s ability to block his objectives. It would also have the power to override judicial decisions. He called the proposed new body the “People’s Assembly,” but he never gained sufficient support from the “people” to call a plebiscite on the question.
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Barry Gewen (The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World)
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Then I’ll sing, though that will likely have the child holding his ears and you running from the room.” This, incongruously, had her lips quirking up. “My father isn’t very musical. You hold the baby, I’ll sing.” She took the rocking chair by the hearth. Vim settled the child in his arms and started blowing out candles as he paced the room. “He shall feed his flock, like a shepherd…” More Handel, the lilting, lyrical contralto portion of the aria, a sweet, comforting melody if ever one had been written. And the baby was comforted, sighing in Vim’s arms and going still. Not deathly still, just exhausted still. Sophie sang on, her voice unbearably lovely. “And He shall gather the lambs in his arm… and gently lead those that are with young.” Vim liked music, he enjoyed it a great deal in fact—he just wasn’t any good at making it. Sophie was damned good. She had superb control, managing to sing quietly even as she shifted to the soprano verse, her voice lifting gently into the higher register. By the second time through, Vim’s eyes were heavy and his steps lagging. “He’s asleep,” he whispered as the last notes died away. “And my God, you can sing, Sophie Windham.” “I had good teachers.” She’d sung some of the tension and worry out too, if her more peaceful expression was any guide. “If you want to go back to your room, I can take him now.” He didn’t want to leave. He didn’t want to leave her alone with the fussy baby; he didn’t want to go back to his big, cold bed down the dark, cold hallway. “Go to bed, Sophie. I’ll stay for a while.” She frowned then went to the window and parted the curtain slightly. “I think it’s stopped snowing, but there is such a wind it’s hard to tell.” He didn’t dare join her at the window for fear a chilly draft might wake the child. “Come away from there, Sophie, and why haven’t you any socks or slippers on your feet?” She glanced down at her bare feet and wiggled long, elegant toes. “I forgot. Kit started crying, and I was out of bed before I quite woke up.” They shared a look, one likely common to parents of infants the world over. “My Lord Baby has a loyal and devoted court,” Vim said. “Get into bed before your toes freeze off.” She gave him a particularly unreadable perusal but climbed into her bed and did not draw the curtains. “Vim?” “Hmm?” He took the rocker, the lyrical triple meter of the aria still in his head. “Thank you.” He
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Grace Burrowes (Lady Sophie's Christmas Wish (The Duke's Daughters, #1; Windham, #4))
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The Inner Critic really wants you to be okay. It really wants you to make it in the world, to have a good job, to make enough money. It really wants you to be loved, to be successful, to be accepted, to have a family. It developed in your early years to protect your vulnerability by helping you to adapt to the world around you and to meet its requirements, whatever they might be. In order to do its job properly, it needed to curb your natural inclinations and to make you acceptable to others by criticizing and correcting your behavior before other people could criticize or reject you. In this way, it reasoned, it could earn love and protection for you as well as save you much shame and hurt. However, the Inner Critic often does not know when to stop. It does not know when enough is enough. It has a tendency to grow until it is out of control and begins to undermine us and to do real damage. Its original intent gets lost in the sands of time. Like a well-trained CIA agent, the Inner Critic has learned how to infiltrate every portion of your life, checking you out in minute detail for weakness and imperfections. Since its main job is to protect you from being too vulnerable in the world, it must know everything about you that might be open to attack from the outside. But, like a renegade CIA agent, at some point the Critic oversteps its bounds, takes matters into its own hands, and begins to operate on its own agenda. The information, which was originally supposed to be for your overall defense and to promote your general well-being, is now being used against you, the very person it was meant to protect. With the Critic’s original aims and purposes forgotten, all that is left for it is the excitement of the chase and the wonderfully triumphant feeling of conquest, as it operates secretly and independently of any outside control. When the Critic starts to outgrow its initial usefulness in this way, there is real trouble. At this point, the Inner Critic makes you feel dreadful about yourself. With your Inner Critic watching your every move, you become self-conscious, awkward, and ever more fearful about making a mistake. You may even stop trying because the Critic tells you that you are going about things all wrong and will undoubtedly fail. Although, underneath all of this, the Critic may want you to be so perfect that you will not fail, its effect is to block any attempts you might make. The Inner Critic kills your creativity. How can you possibly try anything new or different when you know that you will do something wrong?
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Hal Stone (Embracing Your Inner Critic: Turning Self-Criticism into a Creative Asset)
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WHY ADDICTION IS NOT A DISEASE In its present-day form, the disease model of addiction asserts that addiction is a chronic, relapsing brain disease. This disease is evidenced by changes in the brain, especially alterations in the striatum, brought about by the repeated uptake of dopamine in response to drugs and other substances. But it’s also shown by changes in the prefrontal cortex, where regions responsible for cognitive control become partially disconnected from the striatum and sometimes lose a portion of their synapses as the addiction progresses. These are big changes. They can’t be brushed aside. And the disease model is the only coherent model of addiction that actually pays attention to the brain changes reported by hundreds of labs in thousands of scientific articles. It certainly explains the neurobiology of addiction better than the “choice” model and other contenders. It may also have some real clinical utility. It makes sense of the helplessness addicts feel and encourages them to expiate their guilt and shame, by validating their belief that they are unable to get better by themselves. And it seems to account for the incredible persistence of addiction, its proneness to relapse. It even demonstrates why “choice” cannot be the whole answer, because choice is governed by motivation, which is governed by dopamine, and the dopamine system is presumably diseased. Then why should we reject the disease model? The main reason is this: Every experience that is repeated enough times because of its motivational appeal will change the wiring of the striatum (and related regions) while adjusting the flow and uptake of dopamine. Yet we wouldn’t want to call the excitement we feel when visiting Paris, meeting a lover, or cheering for our favourite team a disease. Each rewarding experience builds its own network of synapses in and around the striatum (and OFC), and those networks continue to draw dopamine from its reservoir in the midbrain. That’s true of Paris, romance, football, and heroin. As we anticipate and live through these experiences, each network of synapses is strengthened and refined, so the uptake of dopamine gets more selective as rewards are identified and habits established. Prefrontal control is not usually studied when it comes to travel arrangements and football, but we know from the laboratory and from real life that attractive goals frequently override self-restraint. We know that ego fatigue and now appeal, both natural processes, reduce coordination between prefrontal control systems and the motivational core of the brain (as I’ve called it). So even though addictive habits can be more deeply entrenched than many other habits, there is no clear dividing line between addiction and the repeated pursuit of other attractive goals, either in experience or in brain function. London just doesn’t do it for you anymore. It’s got to be Paris. Good food, sex, music . . . they no longer turn your crank. But cocaine sure does.
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Marc Lewis (The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease)
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Well, let me just end with one last point to do with your question. One of the issues which has devastated a substantial portion of the left in recent years, and caused enormous triumphalism elsewhere, is the alleged fact that there's been this great battle between socialism and capitalism in the twentieth century, and in the end capitalism won and socialism lost―and the reason we know that socialism lost is because the Soviet Union disintegrated. So you have big cover stories in The Nation about "The End of Socialism," and you have socialists who all their lives considered themselves anti-Stalinist saying, "Yes, it's true, socialism has lost because Russia failed." I mean, even to raise questions about this is something you're not supposed to do in our culture, but let's try it. Suppose you ask a simple question: namely, why do people like the editors at The Nation say that "socialism" failed, why don't they say that "democracy" failed?―and the proof that "democracy" failed is, look what happened to Eastern Europe. After all, those countries also called themselves "democratic"―in fact, they called themselves "People's Democracies," real advanced forms of democracy. So why don't we conclude that "democracy" failed, not just that "socialism" failed? Well, I haven't seen any articles anywhere saying, "Look, democracy failed, let's forget about democracy." And it's obvious why: the fact that they called themselves democratic doesn't mean that they were democratic. Pretty obvious, right?
Okay, then in what sense did socialism fail? I mean, it's true that the Soviet Union and its satellites in Eastern Europe called themselves "socialist" ―but they also called themselves "democratic." Were they socialist? Well, you can argue about what socialism is, but there are some ideas that are sort of at the core of it, like workers' control over production, elimination of wage labor, things like that. Did those countries have any of those things? They weren't even a thought there. Again, in the pre-Bolshevik part of the Russian Revolution, there were socialist initiatives―but they were crushed instantly after the Bolsheviks took power, like within months. In fact, just as the moves towards democracy in Russia were instantly destroyed, the moves towards socialism were equally instantly destroyed. The Bolshevik takeover was a coup―and that was perfectly well understood at the time, in fact. So if you look in the mainstream of the Marxist movement, Lenin's takeover was regarded as counter-revolutionary; if you look at independent leftists like Bertrand Russell, it was instantly obvious to them; to the libertarian left, it was a truism.
But that truism has been driven out of people's heads over the years, as part of a whole prolonged effort to discredit the very idea of socialism by associating it with Soviet totalitarianism. And obviously that effort has been extremely successful―that's why people can tell themselves that socialism failed when they look at what happened to the Soviet Union, and not even see the slightest thing odd about it. And that's been a very valuable propaganda triumph for elites in the West―because it's made it very easy to undercut moves towards real changes in the social system here by saying, "Well, that's socialism―and look what it leads to."
Okay, hopefully with the fall of the Soviet Union we can at least begin to get past that barrier, and start recovering an understanding of what socialism could really stand for.
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Noam Chomsky (Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky)
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What the science was showing was that our levels of well-being, resilience, and impulse control were not simply God-given traits, our portion of which we had to accept as a fait accompli. The brain, the organ of experience, through which our entire lives are led, can be trained. Happiness is a skill.
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Dan Harris (10% Happier)
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Trying to fight against DUI private value, it may be impossible for the layman is that much of the Berufsrecht did. DUI lawyer can be a file with the management consultants can be used or deny the accuracy of the successful management of blood or urine witnesses. Almost always one day, you can not help learning tool. If there is a case where the amount, solid, is the legal adviser to shock and other consultants witnesses are willing to cut portions and finds out she has some tire testing and influence. Being part of the time, problems with eating problems and more experience DUI attorney in looks secrets and created.
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DWI Lawyer
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The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking (Edward B. Burger;Michael Starbird) - Your Highlight on page 17 | location 251-270 | Added on Monday, 6 April 2015 03:03:56 Understand simple things deeply The most fundamental ideas in any subject can be understood with ever-increasing depth. Professional tennis players watch the ball; mathematicians understand a nuanced notion of number; successful students continue to improve their mastery of the concepts from previous chapters and courses as they move toward the more advanced material on the horizon; successful people regularly focus on the core purpose of their profession or life. True experts continually deepen their mastery of the basics. Trumpeting understanding through a note-worthy lesson. Tony Plog is an internationally acclaimed trumpet virtuoso, composer, and teacher. A few years ago we had the opportunity to observe him conducting a master class for accomplished soloists. During the class, each student played a portion of his or her selected virtuosic piece. They played wonderfully. Tony listened politely and always started his comments, “Very good, very good. That is a challenging piece, isn’t it?” As expected, he proceeded to give the students advice about how the piece could be played more beautifully, offering suggestions about physical technique and musicality. No surprise. But then he shifted gears. He asked the students to play a very easy warm-up exercise that any beginning trumpet player might be given. They played the handful of simple notes, which sounded childish compared to the dramatically fast, high notes from the earlier, more sophisticated pieces. After they played the simple phrase, Tony, for the first time during the lesson, picked up the trumpet. He played that same phrase, but when he played it, it was not childish. It was exquisite. Each note was a rich, delightful sound. He gave the small phrase a delicate shape, revealing a flowing sense of dynamics that enabled us to hear meaning in those simple notes. The students’ attempts did not come close—the contrast was astounding. The fundamental difference between the true master and the talented students clearly occurred at a far more basic level than in the intricacies of complex pieces. Tony explained that mastering an efficient, nuanced performance of simple pieces allows one to play spectacularly difficult pieces with greater control and artistry. The lesson was simple. The master teacher suggested that the advanced students focus more of their time on practicing simple pieces intensely—learning to perform them with technical efficiency and beautiful elegance. Deep work on simple, basic ideas helps to build true virtuosity—not just in music but in everything. ==========
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Anonymous
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The global centre of power shifted to Europe only between 1750 and 1850, when Europeans humiliated the Asian powers in a series of wars and conquered large parts of Asia. By 1900 Europeans firmly controlled the world’s economy and most of its territory. In 1950 western Europe and the United States together accounted for more than half of global production, whereas China’s portion had been reduced to 5 per cent.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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Viridithol,” I said, my blood running cold as I pieced the story together. “You reckless, dumb sons of bitches. You put samples of plant life from another fucking dimension in a drug and fed it to pregnant women. And you were, what, surprised when the kids came out looking like that?” “It was a tiny sample,” he said, shaking his head. “Just…just the tiniest fraction, given to a small portion of the test group. We thought we had it under control. We were trying to help people.” “Well, I guess that makes up for everything then.” Bob stared into his coffee. “We never should have called it Eden. That was hubris. It made us think we were dealing with something benign, something positive, when the truth was right in front of our faces. Whatever the Garden had once been, now it was seething with corruption. Abundant life. It makes me laugh, in retrospect. Mr. Faust, did you know that there’s a medical term for abundant life? For cellular life bursting out of control and running wild.
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Craig Schaefer (The Living End (Daniel Faust, #3))
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The fact is that, right up to our own time, language has surpassed any other form of tool or machine as a technical instrument: in its ideal structure and its daily performance, it still stands as a model, though an unnoticed one, for all other kinds of effective prefabrication, standardization, and mass consumption.
This is not so absurd a claim as it may at first seem. Language, to begin with, is the most transportable and storable, the most easily diffusible, of all social artifacts: the most ethereal of cultural agents, and for that reason the only one capable of indefinite multiplication and storage of meanings without overcrowding the living spaces of the planet. Once well started, the production of words introduced the first real economy of abundance, which provided for continuous production, replacement, and ceaseless invention, yet incorporated built-in controls that prevented the present-day malpractices of automatic expansion, reckless inflation, and premature obsolescence. Language is the great container of culture. Because of the stability of every language, each generation has been able to carry over and pass on a significant portion of previous history, even when it has not been otherwise recorded. And no matter how much the outer scene changes, through language man retains an inner scene where he is at home with his own mind, among his own kind.
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Lewis Mumford (Technics and Human Development (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 1))
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You will begin the process of being a brand spanking new parent while at the same time, your child’s case winds its way through the red tape and bureaucracy of state government. Suffice it to say, if the home study portion of the process is the one most in your control, this phase, where you work through the legal process of your state to finalize your adoption is often the part where you’re least in control.
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William Gregory (Adopting Through Foster Care: Lessons & Reflections From our Journey Through the Maze)
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Do the Tao Now At your next meal, practice portion control by asking yourself after several bites if you’re still famished. If not, just stop and wait. If no hunger appears, call it complete. At this one meal, you’ll have practiced the last sentence of the 9th verse of the Tao Te Ching: “Retire when the [eating] is done; this is the way of heaven.
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Wayne W. Dyer (Change Your Thoughts - Change Your Life: Living the Wisdom of the Tao)
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Once she turned fifty, her metabolism slowed and she shed all inhibitions about portion control.
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Orest Stelmach (The Boy Who Stole from the Dead (Nadia Tesla, #2))
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If you’re angry, channel that energy into change. Can you stop China from pumping so many carbon emissions into the atmosphere? Directly? By yourself? Today? No. But you can make a point to buy American products. You can adopt a small portion of highway and orchestrate the cleanup efforts. You can start a recycling program in your office. You can begin to chip away; you can control what you do.
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Jen Lancaster (Welcome to the United States of Anxiety: Observations from a Reforming Neurotic)
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Page 207
In the inner cities of all the major metropolitan areas across the United States, ethnic Koreans represent an increasingly glaring market-dominant minority vis-à-vis the relatively economically depressed African-American majorities around them. In New York City, Koreans, less than .1 percent of the city’s population, own 85 percent of produce stands, 70 percent of grocery stores, 80 percent of nail salons, and 60 percent of dry cleaners. In portions of downtown Los Angeles, Koreans own 40 percent of the real estate but constitute only 10 percent of the residents. Korean-American businesses in Los Angeles County number roughly 25,000, with gross sales of $4.5 billion. Nationwide, Korean entrepreneurs have in the last decade come to control 80 percent of the $2.5 billion African-American beauty business, which—“like preaching and burying people”—historically was always a “black” business and a source of pride, income, and jobs for African-Americans. “They’ve come in and taken away a market that’s not rightfully theirs,” is the common, angry view among inner-city blacks.
Page 208
At a December 31, 1994, rally, Norman “Grand Dad” Reide, vice president of Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, accused Koreans of “reaping a financial harvest at the expense of black people” and recommended that “we boycott the bloodsucking Koreans.” More recently, in November 2000, African-Americans firebombed a Korean-owned grocery store in northeast Washington, D.C. The spray-painted message on the charred walls: “Burn them down, Shut them down, Black Power!
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Amy Chua (World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability)
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If the infected organism survived, it sometimes retained a portion of the viral material in its own genome. The legacy of ancient infections might be found in as much as 8 percent of the human genome, including the genes that controlled memory formation, the immune system, and cognitive development.
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Lawrence Wright (The End of October)
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An infection or inflammation of the larynx is known as laryngitis (lar-in-JI .-tis). It commonly affects the vibrational qualities of the vocal folds. Hoarseness is the most familiar result. Mild cases are temporary and seldom serious. However, bacterial or viral infections of the epiglottis can be very dangerous. The resulting swelling may close the glottis and cause suffocation. This condition, acute epiglottitis (ep-ih-glot-TI .-tis), can develop rapidly after a bacterial infection of the throat. Young children are most likely to be affected. The Trachea The trachea (TRA .-ke.-uh), or windpipe, is a tough, flexible tube with a diameter of about 2.5 cm (1 in.) and a length of about 11 cm (4.33 in.) (Figure 23–6). The trachea begins anterior to vertebra C6 in a ligamentous attachment to the cricoid cartilage. It ends in the mediastinum, at the level of vertebra T5, where it branches to form the right and left main bronchi. The epithelium of the trachea is continuous with that of the larynx. The mucosa of the trachea resembles that of the nasal cavity and nasopharynx (look back at Figure 23–2a). The submucosa (sub-mu.-KO .-suh), a thick layer of connective tissue, surrounds the mucosa. The submucosa contains tracheal glands whose mucous secretions reach the tracheal lumen through a number of short ducts. The trachea contains 15–20 tracheal cartilages that stiffen the tracheal walls and protect the airway (see Figure 23–6a). They also prevent it from collapsing or overexpanding as pressure changes in the respiratory system. Each tracheal cartilage is C-shaped. The closed portion of the C protects the anterior and lateral surfaces of the trachea. The open portion of the C faces posteriorly, toward the esophagus (see Figure 23–6b). Because these cartilages are not continuous, the posterior tracheal wall can easily distort when you swallow, allowing large masses of food to pass through the esophagus. An elastic anular ligament and the trachealis, a band of smooth muscle, connect the ends of each tracheal cartilage (see Figure 23–6b). Contraction of the trachealis reduces the diameter of the trachea. This narrowing increases the tube’s resistance to airflow. The normal diameter of the trachea changes from moment to moment, primarily under the control of the sympathetic division of the ANS. Sympathetic stimulation increases the diameter of the trachea and makes it easier to move large volumes of air along the respiratory passageways.
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Frederic H. Martini (Fundamentals of Anatomy & Physiology)
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Americans prize individualism—an outlook that stresses the moral worth and capabilities of each person, as opposed to systems that put faith in centralized, socialistic control. Ralph Waldo Emerson summed up this way of thinking in his essay Self-Reliance: There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.
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William J. Bennett (The American Patriot's Almanac: Daily Readings on America)
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Alcohol is a far greater killer than all opiates. You can buy alcohol on any street corner throughout the world. It gets your brain, your liver. It destroys your morals, destroys your vitality, kills the sexual potential, and you become sluggish. It was a great pity that Prohibition failed. The experiment was too radical. Instead of barring it altogether, the dispensation of alcohol should have been under prescription, or some other control. Prohibition was one of the worthiest attempts of a group to impose their will upon the rest of the people. But of course if you prohibit something you deprive people of an essential liberty; when you deny the right of choice you oppose the greatest gift in the world. People will not stand for it. Alcohol makes man mad, leads to such strange behaviourism. Yet beer and liquor ads maintain newspapers, television, some huge portion of the national and the world economy. Drinker that I am, I think essentially I am the victim of an addiction that is here in the world, revealed to all, exposed to all. It is there. We who are weak take to it and are destroyed by it, but is essentially a weakness of governments everywhere to allow this poison to circulate like a river through the bloodstream of the human race. As one of the heartiest drinkers in the world, I speak with a voice of authority.
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Errol Flynn (My Wicked, Wicked Ways)
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Reign of Vellus (Epic), level 25! As if descended from Vellus itself, you command a greater portion of its true power. Greatly-increased power, control, and precision with Skill Level, moderately increased distance with Skill Level. Skill Level is retained.
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Nicoli Gonnella (Dissonance (Unbound #1))
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In recent years, scientists have come to understand that consciously controlling your breath can have huge benefits on your overall system, primarily with regard to the regulation of your nervous system in relation to anxiety, depression, and restlessness. The vagal response is the stimulation of the vagus nerve, which runs down along the anterior portion of your spine from your brain to your internal organs. When the vagus nerve is stimulated, a signal is sent to the brain to reduce your blood pressure and calm your body and mind, reducing stress and helping to manage chronic illness, as healing can happen only in a more relaxed state of being. For example, if your amygdala, the nerve center at the lower-central part of your brain, is agitated, it triggers your sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and your fight-or-flight response. You may become anxious, fearful, reactive, or frozen. Once triggered, this response lasts at least 20 minutes, but you can often find yourself stuck in this state for much longer. According to Dr. Mladen Golubic, an internist at Cleveland Clinic’s Center for Integrative Medicine, when in this state, you take shallow chest breaths, sometimes halting the breath completely, extending the effects of your SNS response. By taking deeper and fuller breaths, especially by allowing the abdomen to relax and expand, the vagus nerve is stimulated, and calm can quickly be restored. This calming and stress-reducing response is called the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) response, or vagal response. When your SNS is calmed, you have more access to the prefrontal cortex of your brain, boosting your ability to think clearly and rationalize. Dr. Golubic goes on to say, “The vagal response reduces stress. It reduces our heart rate and blood pressure.” This regulation of the nervous system is one of the primary benefits of a consistent pranayama practice.
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Jerry Givens (Essential Pranayama: Breathing Techniques for Balance, Healing, and Peace)
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rigorously controlled societies. In practice, as even the Russians have now learned, the only way of pillaging a defeated nation is to cart away any movables which are wanted, and to drive off a portion of its manhood as permanent or temporary slaves. But the profit gained from such processes bears no relation to the cost of the war. No one in great authority had the wit, ascendancy, or detachment from public folly to declare these fundamental, brutal facts to the electorates; nor would anyone have been believed if he had. The triumphant Allies continued to assert that they would squeeze Germany “till the pips squeaked.” All this had a potent bearing on the prosperity of the world and the mood of the German race.
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Winston S. Churchill (The Gathering Storm (Second World War))
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The key assumption of the theory that reducing caloric intake leads to weight loss is false, since decreased caloric intake inevitably leads to decreased caloric expenditure. This sequence has been proven time and again. We just keep hoping that this strategy will somehow, this time, work. It won’t. Face it. In our heart of hearts, we already know it to be true. Caloric reduction and portion-control strategies only make you tired and hungry. Worst of all... you regain all the weight you have lost. I know it. You know it.
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Jason Fung (The Obesity Code)
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This shift has led some economists to use the term “usership” rather than ownership to describe the kind of control we increasingly want over the products and services we need or want. In other words, we want to use a product, not necessarily own it. Consumers are interested in flexibility, not in long term commitment and fixed costs. And they are willing to pay for only the portion they use directly from its owner either on a case-by-case basis—such as taking an Uber or renting an Airbnb—or a recurrent one.
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Rohit Bhargava (Non Obvious Megatrends: How to See What Others Miss and Predict the Future (Non-Obvious Trends Series))
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He went to a doctor about his insomnia. The doctor gave Dahmer a prescription for Halcion, a sleeping pill. The drug, he said, worked dramatically. “It didn’t slowly put you to sleep; it knocked you out quickly.” He wondered what effect the drug might have on sexual partners, and brought crushed-up portions to the bathhouses. It worked like a charm. The drug rendered his partners unconscious, and Dahmer had his way with them. This satisfied his urge to dominate, as Dahmer now had complete control and did not have to reciprocate sexually in any way that he didn’t want. However, this solution was short lived because several of his pickups woke up with terrible headaches from the drug and complained. There was an episode where Dahmer gave a guy too much Halcion and he stopped breathing. Someone called an ambulance and the victim was revived, but after, management barred Dahmer from entering the bathhouse.
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Patrick Kennedy (GRILLING DAHMER: The Interrogation Of "The Milwaukee Cannibal")
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Stoicism suggests that one should try to maintain the following balance: an awareness that the things we are worried about could and very likely might happen – that life will contain moments of tragedy and sharp turns – and that we should be prepared for these moments, both mentally and practically, in any way we can. However, equally important is recognizing that many of these sorts of catastrophic moments, can’t be known nor controlled nor predicted and thus, after a point, worrying has none. Once one has done everything that is rationally and realistically preventative, they should work to revert their attention back to the present, leaving all additional concern about the future, for the future. Awareness and rational preparation have value to the future at low cost to the present. But worrying about what one cannot know nor control of the future has no value to either and comes at the cost of the present. Following the Stoic way of thinking to potentially help counter this unnecessary anxiety and bring our attention and enjoyment back to the present, we can remind ourselves that in the future, things might not be ok, but if they might not be, then they are now. Or at least better than the future version we are worried about. If we are worried that things will only get worse, then things are as good as they’ll ever be right now. And how foolish it would be to ruin what might be ok now out of concern of things potentially not being so later if one cannot know or do anything further to prevent it? And better yet, if one is wrong about what they’re fearful, then things will only get better. And there is even less reason to worry. Moreover, we tend to assume the worst. We tend to worry not only about things going wrong but the worst cases of things going wrong, paired with a sense that in the face of such cases, we would be broken and ruined, beyond repair. However, how often is this actually true? Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote, “We are more often frightened than hurt, and we suffer more from imagination than from reality.” Epictetus similarly wrote, “Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems.” In all likeliness, there is someone somewhere right now living some version of a seemingly worst-case scenario for many of us, living with no phone, computer, TV, and a great many other things, unaware of this video and perhaps a huge portion of the happenings of the world. And he or she is likely just as happy or unhappy as many of us right now. We are adaptable creatures, wired to adjust our worries to our circumstances, as well as our abilities to remain ok in the face of them. And it is perhaps of great use to consider and meditate on this idea frequently and with confidence. That even if some version of nearly worst-case, we would likely still be some form of ok. The ingredients of your being that have gotten you where you are, that have given you what you’ve experienced, will still remain. To paraphrase Roman statesman, and philosopher Cicero, while one still breathes, one still has hope. At least in some form.
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Robert Pantano
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Al-Wahhab allied with Muhammed bin Saud, the founder of the state of Saudi Arabia, and provided religious and ideological backing to the newly formed state. The Wahhabi Saudi troops took advantage of the chaos of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I to seize control over the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. It’s probably safe to say that the Shia will never forgive the Wahhabis for the zealotry they pursued upon taking the cities, which included obliterating centuries-old sacred Shia shrines and claiming that they were used to worship the Imams as gods and were therefore heretical. In the Cemetery of al-Baqi in Medina, they utterly destroyed the tombs of the Imams Hasan, Ali ibn Husayn, Muhammed ibn Ali, and Jafar, as well as the tomb of Fatima, the daughter of Muhammad. In Mecca, they destroyed the Cemetery of Mualla, where the ancestors of Muhammad and his first wife Khadija were buried. These prominent destructions were part of a pattern of violence that witnessed the Wahhabi Saudis smash buildings, tombs and mosques associated with the history of the Prophet and his family and which were venerated by Shia. In addition, they alienated Shia from governance and oppressed them throughout the kingdom[26]. This vandalism has been repeated time and time again by Wahhabis in other areas as well, including the much-publicized destruction of the Buddha statues of the Bamiyan Valley of Afghanistan by the Taliban in 2001[27] and the outbreak of violence in 2013 around the city of Timbuktu, where Wahhabi fundamentalists destroyed holy artifacts and burned a priceless library of manuscripts before fleeing the arrival of French troops[28]. While the establishment of the Wahhabi school of thought created an intellectual form of anti-Shia ideology, it is probable that this philosophy would have remained isolated in the political backwater of the Nejd Sultanate (the core of modern Saudi Arabia) if not for the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the final abolition of the Caliphate. The Ottomans had claimed to be Caliphs of the Muslim world since 1453, the same year that they conquered Constantinople (Istanbul) from the Byzantine Empire, and they ruled over a considerable portion of the world's Sunnis, as well as the shrine cities of Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem. After 1876, the Sultans had placed particular emphasis on their role as Caliphs in order to bolster their global position by asserting their Empire's "Muslim” character, and while this was never universally accepted by all Sunnis or Shias, Sunni Muslims everywhere at least could say that there was a government that claimed to represent the form of rule established by the Prophet and that provided legitimacy and continuity.
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Jesse Harasta (The History of the Sunni and Shia Split: Understanding the Divisions within Islam)
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Before a man can achieve anything, even in worldly things, he must lift his thoughts above slavish animal indulgence. He may not, in order to succeed, give up all animality and selfishness, by any means; but a portion of it must, at least, be sacrificed. A man whose first thought is bestial indulgence could neither think clearly nor plan methodically; he could not find and develop his latent resources, and would fail in any undertaking. Not having commenced to manfully control his thoughts, he is not in a position to control affairs and to adopt serious responsibilities. He is not fit to act independently and stand alone. But he is limited only by the thoughts, which he chooses.
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James Allen (As a Man Thinketh)
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The mind in itself is a simply vast system, an overwhelming system. In this limited physical world of ours we need, in order to contain and control the mind, to limit rather than expand its capacities. Far from producing the mind, the brain is drastically filtering the mind, so that only a tiny portion of its real power is ever expressed. The mind is too much for the spacetime universe of matter. “God” is too much for the universe. The Creator is different from and separate from his creation, and has awesomely more power.
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Zak Jones (The Adrenochrome Conspiracy: The Nazi Heritage of the Global Elite)
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Gun control proponents point to Australia’s 1996 gun ban as evidence that gun control does reduce firearm homicides. In Australia’s case, an initial look at the data appears compelling. Gun homicides fell from an average of 71 per year in the 7 years prior to the ban to 55 per year in the 7 years after the ban. That’s a 22 percent decline!
But a closer look reveals two concerning things. First, knife homicides in Australia appear to move in the opposite direction to gun homicides. This suggests that, at least in a portion of the cases, the gun ban didn’t reduce homicides but rather caused the perpetrators to switch weapons. In Australia, knife homicides outnumbered gun homicides by more than 2 to 1 prior to the gun ban, and more than 3 to 1 after. In Australia, knife and gun homicides, combined, fell only 8 percent in the seven-year period following the gun ban compared to the seven-year period preceding the ban. This is a much less impressive story than the reported 22 percent decline in gun homicides.
Second, if we compare the same two seven-year periods in the United States, we find that annual U.S. gun homicides fell from an average of 18,577 to an average of 12,780. That’s a 31 percent decline. The U.S., without a gun ban, experienced a larger relative decline in gun homicides than did Australia with the ban!
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Antony Davies (Cooperation and Coercion: How Busybodies Became Busybullies and What that Means for Economics and Politics)
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Like any fine artist, he controlled the tension of the audience’s longing. You desired, unwittingly, a certain kind of roll or climb, or a return to a certain portion of the air, and he fulfilled your hope slantingly, like a poet, or evaded it until you thought you would burst, and then fulfilled it surprisingly, so you gasped and cried out.
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Annie Dillard (The Writing Life)
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20 In 1932, Adolf A. Berle and Gardiner C. Means, lawyer and economics professor, respectively, published The Modern Corporation and Private Property, a highly influential study revealing that top executives of America’s giant companies were not even accountable to their own shareholders but operated the companies “in their own interest, and…divert[ed] a portion of the asset fund to their own uses.”21 The only solution, concluded Berle and Means, was to enlarge the power of all groups within the nation who were affected by the large corporation, including employees and consumers. They envisioned the corporate executive of the future as a professional administrator, dispassionately weighing the claims of investors, employees, consumers, and citizens, and allocating benefits accordingly. “[I]t seems almost essential if the corporate system is to survive—that the ‘control’ of the great corporations should develop into a purely neutral technocracy, balancing a variety of claims by various groups in the community and assigning each a portion of the income stream on the basis of public policy rather than private cupidity.
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Robert B. Reich (Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy and Everyday Life)
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When I start reading a text I never know, from the beginning, whether I am approaching it from the point of view of a suitable intention. My initiative starts to become exciting when I discover that my intention could meet the intention of that text.
How to prove a conjecture about the 'intentio operis'? The only way is to check it against the text as a coherent whole. […] any interpretation given of a certain portion of a text can be accepted if it is confirmed and must be rejected if it is challenged by another portion of the same text. In this sense the internal textual coherence controls the otherwise uncontrollable drives of the reader.
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Umberto Eco (The Limits of Interpretation (Advances in Semiotics))
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God will be present, but God will not be your possession. Any god you think you can possess or control is merely an idol. God is present, the Torah reminds us, but God is still God.
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Shai Held (The Heart of Torah, Volume 1: Essays on the Weekly Torah Portion: Genesis and Exodus)
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Night after night he exposed plates on the big reflector. Day after day he studied the plates. The telescope drive turned the telescope on its polar axis to compensate for the rotation of the earth, but to make a successful plate, the observer had to track a guide star within the field of the exposure, using electrical hand controls to make tiny movements in the position of the telescope that would compensate for atmospheric effects, the flexure of the telescope tube and mount, and the slight quirks of the telescope-guiding mechanism. As the telescope slewed to different portions of the sky, Hubble had to contort his body on a precarious perch to keep the guide star in the crosshairs of the eyepiece. The winter nights were cold enough to freeze his tears to the eyepiece. The exposures were long enough to test his bladder control. By morning his body would be a bundle of cricks. Lack of sleep and hours staring at the glass plates gave him headaches.
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Ronald Florence (The Perfect Machine: Building the Palomar Telescope)
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the preamble of the National Sickle Cell Anemia Control Act, enacted in 1972 to foster sickle-cell research, screening, counseling, and education, is untrue: “Two million Americans suffer from sickle cell disease.” Actually, 2 million people were healthy carriers22 and fewer than 100,000 Americans suffered from sickle-cell anemia. The erroneous claim coupled with its constantly reinforced perception of sickle-cell disease as a black disorder left Americans with the mistaken impression that a good portion—one in twelve—of African Americans suffered from sickle-cell anemia.
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Harriet A. Washington (Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present)
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Richard Joseph’s seminal work on Nigerian governance—to which this book owes an intellectual debt—appeared in 1987 and a lively academic discussion of “prebendalism,” its core idea, continues right up to the present, though mostly in academic rather than policy circles.[5] Prebendalism and neopatrimonialism can exist anywhere; their essence is the privatization and exploitation of public resources by those who control the government and its bureaucracy.[6] By origin, “prebendal” refers to Anglican and Roman Catholic clergy assigned to cathedrals that were entitled to a share of the foundation’s income by virtue of their position—not as a return for the services they might or might not perform. The income itself is called a “prebend” and the recipient is called a “prebendary.” In the Nigerian context, prebendal describes the behavior of elites that access and share the government’s oil revenue, not because of their services to the state, but because they are entitled to do so. There is the expectation that prebendal beneficiaries will share their prebend with their patrons and their clients. This relationship, in which patrons distribute wealth to their clients, is often described as neopatrimonial.[7] Hence, prebendalism is intimately related to the neopatrimonial patronage-clientage organization of Nigerian society. Prebendal behavior is most salient among elites, but its spirit and that of neopatrimonialism extend throughout society. A policeman at a checkpoint is salaried. But because he controls the checkpoint, he is entitled to ask for a bribe, and does so: “What do you have for me today?” He is expected to share a portion of the bribe he receives with his boss or patron and with subordinates and family. The system is partly a product of poverty: the policeman at the checkpoint may not have received his salary for months, and, if he had, it is too small to support a family. So, his bribe collection is part of a system of work-arounds. This system of entitlements and sharing is unregulated except by various local customs and wide open to abuse.
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John Campbell (Nigeria and the Nation-State: Rethinking Diplomacy with the Postcolonial World (A Council on Foreign Relations Book))
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For example, Henry the Navigator, the brother of the head of the Portuguese royal family, sponsored some of the earliest voyages and established a trading empire in Africa and Asia. Spain followed suit, swiftly conquering and colonizing significant portions of the Western Hemisphere, including the precious-metal-rich Aztec and Incan empires. Though Portugal and Spain were rivals, the unexplored world was huge, and when they had disputes, they were successfully mediated. Spain’s integration into the Habsburg Empire and its control over highly profitable silver mines made it stronger than Portugal in the 1500s, and for a roughly 60-year period starting in the late 1500s the Habsburg king ruled Portugal as well. Both translated their wealth into golden ages of art and technology. The Spanish Empire grew so large it became known as “the empire on which the sun never sets”—an expression that would later be used to describe the British Empire.
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Ray Dalio (Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail)
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An army of demons is going to invade the Earth and take control of the planet, wiping out a good portion of humanity as they do it.
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Steve Higgs (Familiar Territory: A Wizard in Bremen part 3 (The Realm of False Gods Book 4))
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Saad Jalal - Mindful Lifestyle Choices
Healthy living is not solely about what you eat and how you exercise; it encompasses a holistic approach.
Saad Jalal Toronto Canada - Practicing mindfulness, managing stress, getting adequate sleep, and avoiding harmful habits like smoking and excessive alcohol consumption are equally important.
These choices are instrumental in promoting mental and emotional well-being and can significantly impact physical health.
Saad Jalal -In conclusion, healthy living and eating are interconnected aspects of a fulfilling life. A well-rounded diet, portion control, and moderation, along with regular physical activity, contribute to physical health, while mindful lifestyle choices support mental and emotional well-being.
By embracing these principles, individuals can embark on a journey to improve their overall quality of life, achieving a harmonious balance of body and mind.
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Saad Jalal Toronto Canada
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In late 2000, a group of IBP managers decided they wanted to take the company private by buying it from its public shareholders. The managers put together a bid with a private investment company and presented it to IBP’s board of directors. Smithfield heard about the deal and decided to make a bid of its own. IBP had become the nation’s second-biggest pork producer. If Smithfield bought IBP, it would be the indomitable leader of beef and pork production, boxing Tyson into the chicken business alone. It seemed inevitable that, one day, the company would buy Tyson as well. Only the biggest could survive. Johnny decided he wasn’t going to let that happen. Tyson Foods would buy IBP. The company would have to borrow billions to do it and it would need to pony up a huge portion of the company’s stock. Johnny would be mortgaging everything his father and his grandfather had built. It was the riskiest acquisition the company had ever contemplated. Everyone around him realized that when Johnny looked at IBP, he finally had his vision. Don Tyson thought the IBP acquisition was a bad idea. The company had been burned during the 1990s for straying outside the chicken industry and trying to buy its way into markets it couldn’t control and that didn’t fit with its primary strategy of vertical integration. Buying IBP would overshadow the chicken operations of Tyson Foods and saddle the company with cattle and pork businesses that Tyson executives poorly understood.
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Christopher Leonard (The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America's Food Business)
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Before a man can achieve anything, even in worldly things, he must lift his thoughts above slavish animal indulgence. He may not, in order to succeed, give up all animality and selfishness, by any means; but a portion of it must, at least, be sacrificed. A man whose first thought is bestial indulgence could neither think clearly nor plan methodically; he could not find and develop his latent resources, and would fail in any undertaking. Not having commenced to manfully control his thoughts, he is not in a position to control affairs and to adopt serious responsibilities. He is not fit to act independently and stand alone. But he is limited only by the thoughts which he chooses
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James Allen (As a Man Thinketh (AmazonClassics Edition))
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The Bush administration caught a break when the Supreme Court handed down a compromise on June 29. Ruling 5–4, the justices preserved key portions of the Pennsylvania law but also upheld Roe, striking down the portion of the Abortion Control Act that placed an “undue burden” on the mother’s efforts to seek an abortion, which was just the spousal notification requirement. The court also overturned the trimester standard governing abortion restrictions in favor of the looser concept of “viability.” Sandra Day O’Connor, writing the majority opinion, expressed a degree of exasperation with the Republican administration’s continued efforts to attack Roe: “Liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt. Yet 19 years after our holding that the Constitution protects a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy in its early stages, Roe v. Wade, 410 U. S. 113 (1973), that definition of liberty is still questioned. Joining the respondents as amicus curiae, the United States, as it has done in five other cases in the last decade, again asks us to overrule Roe.” Justice O’Connor’s opinion also included a good deal of concern for the institutional damage that would happen if the court were politically whipsawed to overturn the settled precedent of Roe: “A decision to overrule Roe’s essential holding under the existing circumstances would address error, if error there was, at the cost of both profound and unnecessary damage to the Court’s legitimacy, and to the nation’s commitment to the rule of law. It is therefore imperative to adhere to the essence of Roe’s original decision, and we do so today.” In his dissent, Chief Justice William Rehnquist complained that the court had rendered Roe a “facade” and replaced it with something “created largely out of whole cloth” and “not built to last.” “Roe v. Wade stands as a sort of Potemkin village,” Rehnquist wrote, “which may be pointed out to passers-by as a monument to the importance of adhering to precedent.
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John Ganz (When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s)
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a very strange and brilliant marine major named Earl “Pete” Ellis wrote a paper for the Marine Corps in which he said that Japan was the United States’ greatest enemy and the two would ultimately engage in war. He based his hypothesis on the tactical movements of Japan in the Pacific after World War I and on what he interpreted as its clear goals of expansion under the cloak of secrecy. He predicted with uncanny prescience that the initial strategy of a Japanese attack would be to destroy a great portion of the US fleet. He further predicted that the United States, in declaring war in retaliation, would adopt an island-hopping strategy across the Pacific, building up advance bases and airstrips until the Japanese homeland was close enough to be easily attacked. The only way to fend off the Japanese would be by adopting an amphibious assault doctrine as a new kind of military strategy. Ellis may have been the most brilliant marine in history and also the most tragic. Suspected to be bipolar and hospitalized several times for alcoholism, he never went above the rank of major because of his emotional instability. He died in 1923 at the age of forty-two on the Japanese-controlled island of Palau in the western Pacific while supposedly on a spy mission. No one knows quite how he died. But his amphibious assault theory, now considered one of the greatest
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Buzz Bissinger (The Mosquito Bowl: A Game of Life and Death in World War II)
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Muslims, whom he regarded as a people “alien to God.” The Christian soldiers, who would one day be known as Crusaders, breached the city’s defenses on the night of July 13, 1099, and slaughtered its inhabitants, including three thousand men, women, and children who had taken shelter inside the great al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount. It was Saladin, the son of a Kurdish soldier of fortune from Tikrit, who would return the favor. After humiliating the thirst-crazed Crusader force at the Battle of Hattin near Tiberias—Saladin personally sliced off the arm of Raynald of Châtillon—the Muslims reclaimed Jerusalem after a negotiated surrender. Saladin tore down the large cross that had been erected atop the Dome of the Rock, scrubbed its courts with Damascene rosewater to remove the last foul traces of the infidel, and sold thousands of Christians into slavery or the harem. Jerusalem would remain under Islamic control until 1917, when the British seized it from the Ottoman Turks. And when the Ottoman Empire collapsed in 1924, so, too, did the last Muslim caliphate. But now ISIS had declared a new caliphate. At present, it included only portions of western Iraq and eastern Syria, with Raqqa as its capital. Saladin, the new Saladin, was ISIS’s chief of external operations—or so believed Fareed Barakat and the Jordanian General Intelligence Department. Unfortunately, the GID knew almost nothing else about Saladin, including his real name. “Is he Iraqi?” “He might be. Or he might be a Tunisian or a Saudi or an Egyptian or an Englishman or one of the other lunatics who’ve rushed to Syria to live in this new Islamic paradise of theirs.” “Surely, the GID doesn’t believe that.” “We don’t,” Fareed conceded. “We think he’s probably a former Iraqi military officer. Who knows? Maybe he’s from Tikrit, just like Saladin.” “And Saddam.” “Ah, yes, let’s not forget Saddam.” Fareed exhaled a lungful of smoke toward the high ceiling of his office. “We had our problems with Saddam, but we warned the Americans they would rue the day they toppled him. They didn’t listen, of course. Nor did they listen when we asked them to do something about Syria. Not our problem, they said. We’re putting the Middle East in our rearview mirror. No more American wars in Muslim lands. And now look at the situation. A quarter of a million dead, hundreds of thousands more streaming into Europe, Russia and Iran working together to dominate the Middle East.” He shook his head slowly. “Have I left anything out?” “You forgot Saladin,” said Gabriel. “What do you want to do about him?” “I suppose we could do nothing and hope he goes away.” “Hope is how we ended up with him in the first place,” said Fareed. “Hope and hubris.” “So let’s put him out of business, sooner rather than later.
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Daniel Silva (The Black Widow (Gabriel Allon, #16))
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This is a wake up call. Don’t press the snooze alarm. The barbarians are at the gates, and, because they encourage breeding beyond the ability of the breeders to house, feed, and educate the breedees, violence and social disorganization continue. As the most Christian nation on earth watches its civilization dissolve like a Dove bar fallen off of that ark, attempts to enforce irrational superstitious solutions will accelerate. That Branch Davidian thing was a sample. Lots of other messiahs are waiting. Maybe we can have court-ordered Branch Davidian Social Services counseling for people who won’t share their wives with their god’s anointed. Maybe courts can acquit murderers if they believe a god’s finger was on their trigger. Maybe the barbarians will actually succeed in assuring that books, pictures, ideas, doctors, judges and military commanders share their vision. Then we will have a lot of interesting tribal warfare. One useful defense will be humanistic hermeneutics. Hermeneutics is a fancy word for biblical interpretation. When religious types want to make something simple sound holy and mysterious, they often give it an important sounding high falutin’ name. This practice contrasts sharply with the usage of secular humanists, who, in explaining their views, employ simple words, that fall trippingly from the tongue, like ‘eupraxophy.’ Hermeneutics can be an important weapon to use against religious fanatics in the coming ARCW. The hard core nut cases—those who would control every aspect of our lives by forcing us to accept their understanding of the will of their god—tend to share certain operational assumptions. These include the belief that: (1) Every word of the Bible is true. (2) The English translation of the Bible authorized by King James the First of England, completed in 1611, Common Era, is the only fully acceptable, authoritative, and inspired-by-god translation of holy scripture. This translation is accurate in every respect, including punctuation marks. (3) The Bible is the basis of all morality. Without it there can be no morality. (4) The United States of America was established, and should be governed, according to biblical principles. (5) The Bible is without error. (6) No part of the Bible is in conflict with, or contradictory to, any other part. (7) Hermeneutics can be used to clarify and explain those truths of god in the Bible that might appear, to finite minds, to be in conflict. The goal of hermeneutics is to reconcile all portions of the ‘Word of God’ (the Bible) into a seamless, complete, infallible, and final statement of all past and future history (the latter is called prophecy), of divine law, and of how humans should behave and understand morality. The Bible, properly interpreted, is the final word on everything.
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Edwin Kagin (Baubles of Blasphemy)
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The global centre of power shifted to Europe only between 1750 and 1850, when Europeans humiliated the Asian powers in a series of wars and conquered large parts of Asia. By 1900 Europeans firmly controlled the world’s economy and most of its territory. In 1950 western Europe and the United States together accounted for more than half of global production, whereas China’s portion had been reduced to 5 per
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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The hard truth is that an enormous portion of the China-watching, human rights, journalism, and think tank community is controlled opposition to the CCP—financially restrained from reporting anything that might be too damaging to China.
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Michael P. Senger (Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World)
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By the middle of 1942, Germany ruled a larger portion of Europe than had ever been controlled by any nation in history;
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Michael H Hart (The 100: A Ranking Of The Most Influential Persons In History)
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Each and every person you look at is sorting themselves out. While they might appear confident and in control or carefree with a relaxed demeanor, everyone is working through some private personal issue. Issues like these often present themselves as things that other people seem to have already solved. These issues can include insecurities, fear, anger, compulsive lying, or impulsive behaviors, to name just a few. While there are many variations of these, the number and severity of them can vary depending on the individual. Yet, their common theme is one of shame and our desire to hide them. Regardless of your awareness of them, if you are human, you have them. They fuel a large portion of your motivations and identity with others. If it is not clear to you now, just answer this question: What would you not want people to know about you?
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Justin Quinton (Enlightened Enough: A Self Mastery Book To Stop Overthinking, Escape Self Sabotage, And Improve Your Mind And Emotions)
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By the end of the year 2000, Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza numbered 225,000. The best offer to the Palestinians—by Clinton, not Barak—had been to withdraw 20 percent of the settlers, leaving more than 180,000 in 209 settlements, covering about 10 percent of the occupied land, including land to be “leased” and portions of the Jordan River valley and East Jerusalem. The percentage figure is misleading, since it usually includes only the actual footprints of the settlements. There is a zone with a radius of about four hundred meters around each settlement within which Palestinians cannot enter. In addition, there are other large areas that would have been taken or earmarked to be used exclusively by Israel, roadways that connect the settlements to one another and to Jerusalem, and “life arteries” that provide the settlers with water, sewage, electricity, and communications. These range in width from five hundred to four thousand meters, and Palestinians cannot use or cross many of these connecting links. This honeycomb of settlements and their interconnecting conduits effectively divide the West Bank into at least two noncontiguous areas and multiple fragments, often uninhabitable or even unreachable, and control of the Jordan River valley denies Palestinians any direct access eastward into Jordan. About one hundred military checkpoints completely surround Palestine and block routes going into or between Palestinian communities, combined with an uncountable number of other roads that are permanently closed with large concrete cubes or mounds of earth and rocks. There was no possibility that any Palestinian leader could accept such terms and survive, but official statements from Washington and Jerusalem were successful in placing the entire onus for the failure on Yasir Arafat. Violence in the Holy Land continued.
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Jimmy Carter (Palestine Peace Not Apartheid)
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Saad Jalal -Healthy eating refers to the practice of consuming a balanced and nutritious diet that provides the body with the essential nutrients it needs to function optimally. It involves making food choices that promote overall health and well-being while reducing the risk of chronic diseases. Here are some key principles and aspects of healthy eating:
Balanced Diet: A healthy diet should include a variety of foods from all food groups. This typically includes fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean proteins (such as poultry, fish, beans, and tofu), and dairy or dairy alternatives. Balance is essential to ensure that your body receives a wide range of nutrients.
Portion Control: Eating the right portion sizes is crucial for maintaining a healthy weight. Overeating, even healthy foods, can lead to weight gain. Learning to recognize appropriate portion sizes can help control calorie intake.
Saad Jalal Toronto Canada - Limit Processed Foods: Processed and ultra-processed foods often contain high levels of added sugars, unhealthy fats, and sodium. Reducing the consumption of these foods can improve overall health. Opt for fresh, whole foods whenever possible.
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Saad Jalal Toronto Canada
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Saad Jalal Toronto Canada - The Science of Healthy Eating
Healthy eating is not just a trend; it's a science that holds the key to a longer, more vibrant life. The choices we make when it comes to food have a profound impact on our overall well-being, from our physical health to our mental clarity. Understanding the science behind healthy eating empowers us to make informed choices and lead healthier lives.
At its core, healthy eating is about nourishing our bodies with the right balance of nutrients. This means consuming a variety of foods rich in vitamins, minerals, fiber, proteins, and healthy fats. The science shows that such a diet can:
Saad Jalal Promote Physical Health: Nutrient-dense foods provide essential vitamins and minerals that support bodily functions. They can help prevent chronic diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and certain cancers.
Boost Mental Health: A well-balanced diet can positively impact mood and cognitive function. Nutrients like omega-3 fatty acids and antioxidants found in certain foods have been linked to improved mental well-being.
Sustain Energy: Healthy eating provides a steady supply of energy throughout the day, avoiding energy crashes and fatigue.
Saad Jalal Toronto Canada said Complex carbohydrates, lean proteins, and healthy fats are key players in this process.
Support Digestive Health: Foods rich in fiber promote healthy digestion and regular bowel movements. They maintain gut health and contribute to a strong immune system.
Maintain Healthy Weight: Portion control and balanced nutrition are fundamental to weight management. Eating mindfully and recognizing hunger cues can help control calorie intake.
The science of healthy eating is an evolving field, continually revealing new insights into the connection between diet and well-being. By staying informed and making conscientious choices, we can harness this knowledge to lead healthier, happier lives. So, let's embrace the science of healthy eating and make every meal a step towards a brighter, healthier future.
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Saad Jalal - Toronto Canada
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The root hap means “luck,” as in hapless or haphazard. What the science was showing was that our levels of well-being, resilience, and impulse control were not simply God-given traits, our portion of which we had to accept as a fait accompli. The brain, the organ of experience, through which our entire lives are led, can be trained. Happiness is a skill.
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Dan Harris (10% Happier)
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American eating habits are changing. An estimated 15,000 pounds of “bushmeat”—wild animals commonly eaten in Third-World countries—are smuggled into the country every month. Monkey, cane rat, and bat are the most common bushmeats, and according to the Centers for Disease Control, all can carry lethal diseases. Anyone who handles or eats the meat can get sick. Only a tiny portion of the trade—like the three charred monkeys found in an African’s baggage at Dulles International Airport in 2008292—is intercepted.293
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Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
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Real food needs no portion control. Your brain knows when its enough. Only junk food needs portion control.
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Yogesh Verma (Skinny Without Willpower: How eating more and exercising less will help you lose weight and keep it off)
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PARTNERS IN CRIME HOW THE CLINTONS WENT FROM DEAD BROKE TO FILTHY RICH And the money kept rolling in from every side. —Song from the musical Evita The quotation above refers to the Juan and Evita Peron Foundation, established in 1948 by Evita Peron for the purpose of helping Argentina’s poor. Evita professed to be a champion of the campesinos—the wretched workers who lived in shanties on the outskirts of Buenos Aires—and they trusted Evita. She had, after all, risen up herself from poverty and obscurity. Her fame was the result of her marriage to the general who became the military leader of the country, Juan Peron. Long before the Clintons, Argentina had its own power couple that claimed to do good and ended up doing very well for themselves. There are, obviously, differences between the Clintons and the Perons. Despite her personal popularity, Evita remained an appendage of her husband, seeking but never obtaining political office. At one point, Evita had her eye on an official position, but the political establishment vigorously opposed her, and her husband never supported her in this effort. Hillary, by contrast, was elected senator and now, having deployed her husband on the campaign trail, seeks election to the nation’s highest office previously held by him. The Perons also had a foundation that took in millions of pesos—the equivalent of $200 million—from multiple foreign sources, Argentine businesses, as well as contributions from various individuals and civic groups. With its 14,000 employees, the foundation was better equipped and more influential than many agencies within the Argentinian government. Evita and her cronies were experts at shaking down anyone who wanted something from the government; donations became a kind of tax that opened up access to the Peron administration. Trade unions sent large contributions because they saw Evita and her husband as champions of their cause. In 1950, the government arranged that a portion of all lottery, movie, and casino revenues should go to the foundation. While the foundation made symbolic, highly publicized gestures of helping the poor, in reality only a fraction of the money went to the underprivileged. Most of it seems to have ended up in foreign bank accounts controlled by the Perons, who became hugely wealthy through their public office profiteering. When Evita died in 1954 and the foundation was shut down, Argentines discovered stashes of undistributed food and clothing. No one from the foundation had bothered to give it away, so it sat unused for years. Helping the poor, after all, wasn’t the real reason Evita set up her foundation. No, she had a different set of priorities. Like so many Third World potentates, the Perons used social justice and provision for the poor as a pretext to amass vast wealth for themselves. The Clintons have done the same thing in America; indeed, Hillary may be America’s version of Evita Peron.
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Dinesh D'Souza (Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party)
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The circulation of money is like the sharing of cake. The one that holds the knife controls the portion you get.
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Oscar Bimpong