Principals Best Quotes

That humanity at large will ever be able to dispense with Artificial Paradises seems very unlikely. Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul.

The principal function of racist ideas in American history has been the suppression of resistance to racial discrimination and its resulting racial disparities. The beneficiaries of slavery, segregation, and mass incarceration have produced racist ideas of Black people being best suited for or deserving of the confines of slavery, segregation, or the jail cell. Consumers of these racist ideas have been led to believe there is something wrong with Black people, and not the policies that have enslaved, oppressed, and confined so many Black people.

I seek not to instruct but only to lead, to point out and describe what I see. I claim no other right than that of speaking according to my best lights, principally before myself but in the same manner also before others, as one who has lived in all its seriousness the fate of a philosophical existence.

Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul.

Principal Brill, those costumes were made by my mother. My mother, who has stage four small-cell lung cancer. My mother, who will never watch her little boy celebrate another Halloween again. My mother, who will more than likely experience a year of 'lasts'. Last Christmas. Last birthday. Last Easter. And if God is willing, her last Mother's Day. My mother, who when asked by her nine-year-old son if he could be her cancer for Halloween, had no choice but to make him the best cancerous tumor-riden lung costume she could. So if you think it's so offensive, I suggest you drive them home yourself and tell my mother to her face. Do you need my address?

As soon as the child is born, the mother who has just brought him into the world must console him, quiet his crying, and lighten the burden of the existence she has given him. And one of the principal duties of good parents in the childhood and early youth of their children is to comfort them, to encourage them to live,1 because sorrows and ills and passions are at that age much heavier than they are to those who through long experience, or simply because they have lived longer, are used to suffering. And in truth it is only fitting that the good father and the good mother, in trying to console their children, correct as best they can, and ease, the damage they have done by procreating them. Good God! Why then is man born? And why does he procreate? To console those he has given birth to for having been born?

The difference between being an amazing technician and being a soloist or principal is mastering those interpretive flourishes to tell the best story. Otherwise you aren’t a ballerina—you’re just another dancer.

The part of the tradition that I knew best was mostly written (or rewritten for children) in England and northern Europe. The principal characters were men. If the story was heroic, the hero was a white man; most dark-skinned people were inferior or evil. If there was a woman in the story, she was a passive object of desire and rescue (a beautiful blond princess); active women (dark, witches) usually caused destruction or tragedy. Anyway, the stories weren’t about the women. They were about men, what men did, and what was important to men.

I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men may get clothing. The condition of the operatives is becoming every day more like that of the English; and it cannot be wondered at, since, as far as I have heard or observed, the principal object is, not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that corporations may be enriched. In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.

E-mail response time is the single best predictor of whether employees are satisfied with their boss, according to research by Duncan Watts, a Columbia University sociologist who is now a principal researcher for Microsoft Research. The longer it takes for a boss to respond to their e-mails, the less satisfied people are with their leader.1

The Stoics taught a life of restraint and control, the personal cultivation of learning, beauty, and reason. The Stoics asked the Romans to realize that much that is encountered in life is beyond the individual's control. Make the best of what can be humanly cultivated. It is a kind of Platonism shrunk to a pursuit of private feelings and thoughts: Do the best with what you can control and refine, and let the rest go. "The world is rational, but it is only amenable to active intervention within the limits of the individual's capacity. Do not try to be an overachiever. Do not dream of social transformation. Private cultivation rather than social action makes for the good life. Although the slave Epictetus was one of the principal Stoic writers, the emperor Marcus Aurelius's upper-class background is more typical of its devotees. "Stoicism is a narrow ethic, one suitable to the emotional and intellectual needs of aristocrat and slave alike, but less useful for the ambitious middle class.

The heart of man is his worst part before it be regenerate, and the best afterwards: it is the seat of principles, and fountain of actions. The eye of God is, and the eye of a Christian ought to be, principally fixed upon it. The greatest difficulty in conversion, is, to win the heart to God; and the greatest difficulty after conversion, is, to keep the heart with God.

Game-free intimacy is or should be the most perfect form of human living. Because there is so little opportunity for intimacy in daily life, and because some forms of intimacy (especially if intense) are psychologically impossible for most people, the bulk of time in serious social life is taken up with playing games. Hence games are both necessary and desirable, and the only problem at issue is whether the games played by an individual offer the best yield for him. In this connexion it should be remembered that the essential feature of a game is its culmination, or payoff. The principal function of the preliminary moves is to set up the situation for this payoff, but they are always designed to harvest the maximum permissible satisfaction at each step as a secondary product. Games are passed on from generation to generation. The favoured game of any individual can be traced back to his parents and grandparents, and forward to his children. Raising children is primarily a matter of teaching them what games to play. Different cultures and different social classes favour different types of games. Many games are played most intensely by disturbed people, generally speaking, the more disturbed they are, the harder they play. The attainment of autonomy is manifested by the release or recovery of three capacities: awareness, spontaneity and intimacy. Parents, deliberately or unaware, teach their children from birth how to behave, think and perceive. Liberation from these influences is no easy matter, since they are deeply ingrained. First, the weight of a whole tribal or family historical tradition has to be lifted. The same must be done with the demands of contemporary society at large, and finally advantages derived from one's immediate social circle have to be partly or wholly sacrificed. Following this, the individual must attain personal and social control, so that all the classes of behaviour become free choices subject only to his will. He is then ready for game-free relationships.

release me—an eye gouge or a knee to the testicles—though the best I managed was to drive my elbow into a chair. “Oh, for Pete’s sake!” Chip snarled. “Would you just fight like a man?” “I’ll pass,” I said. The Bashful Armadillo was working for me. “What is going on here?!” The principal’s voice was frightening enough to scare even Chip cold. Our fight stopped instantly. For the first time since emerging from the subterranean level, I had a chance to take in my surroundings.

Her partner now drew near, and said, "That gentleman would have put me out of patience, had he stayed with you half a minute longer. He has no business to withdraw the attention of my partner from me. We have entered into a contract of mutual agreeableness for the space of an evening, and all our agreeableness belongs solely to each other for that time. Nobody can fasten themselves on the notice of one, without injuring the rights of the other. I consider a country-dance as an emblem of marriage. Fidelity and complaisance are the principal duties of both; and those men who do not choose to dance or marry themselves, have no business with the partners or wives of their neighbours." But they are such very different things!" -- That you think they cannot be compared together." To be sure not. People that marry can never part, but must go and keep house together. People that dance only stand opposite each other in a long room for half an hour." And such is your definition of matrimony and dancing. Taken in that light certainly, their resemblance is not striking; but I think I could place them in such a view. You will allow, that in both, man has the advantage of choice, woman only the power of refusal; that in both, it is an engagement between man and woman, formed for the advantage of each; and that when once entered into, they belong exclusively to each other till the moment of its dissolution; that it is their duty, each to endeavour to give the other no cause for wishing that he or she had bestowed themselves elsewhere, and their best interest to keep their own imaginations from wandering towards the perfections of their neighbours, or fancying that they should have been better off with anyone else. You will allow all this?" Yes, to be sure, as you state it, all this sounds very well; but still they are so very different. I cannot look upon them at all in the same light, nor think the same duties belong to them." In one respect, there certainly is a difference. In marriage, the man is supposed to provide for the support of the woman, the woman to make the home agreeable to the man; he is to purvey, and she is to smile. But in dancing, their duties are exactly changed; the agreeableness, the compliance are expected from him, while she furnishes the fan and the lavender water. That, I suppose, was the difference of duties which struck you, as rendering the conditions incapable of comparison." No, indeed, I never thought of that." Then I am quite at a loss. One thing, however, I must observe. This disposition on your side is rather alarming. You totally disallow any similarity in the obligations; and may I not thence infer that your notions of the duties of the dancing state are not so strict as your partner might wish? Have I not reason to fear that if the gentleman who spoke to you just now were to return, or if any other gentleman were to address you, there would be nothing to restrain you from conversing with him as long as you chose?" Mr. Thorpe is such a very particular friend of my brother's, that if he talks to me, I must talk to him again; but there are hardly three young men in the room besides him that I have any acquaintance with." And is that to be my only security? Alas, alas!" Nay, I am sure you cannot have a better; for if I do not know anybody, it is impossible for me to talk to them; and, besides, I do not want to talk to anybody." Now you have given me a security worth having; and I shall proceed with courage.

most people report dreaming principally in visual images. Freud, however, assumes that dreams start from a dream-thought that is best expressed in words and translate it into a picture-language which is intellectually inferior because it cannot convey logical connections; the analyst restores to the dream its verbal character.

Sometimes only in retrospect do we realize that we have wasted our best years looking for a lost, inappropriate first love, that our life-changing passion for a particular person was no more than the desire to finally kiss the crooked lower lip of an elementary school principal or the boy on whom we had an unrequited childhood crush.

in the book i'm reading (The Principal) the main chareter best friend has to go to a differnt school. I can picture them waiting at the bus stop together crying.

The oligarchs who ran the country – and the world – had no principals, no morals, and no Code of Honor. Their indentured servants, the politicians, pretended to have them, but their skills were, just like those of the prostitute who tells her john he just gave her the best orgasm, to appear to have a moral purpose just beyond their self-enrichment. That much was enough to get them through the next election.

Tumi Jónsen has now started to tell the Icelandic sagas in a style that consists principally of casting doubt on the story being told, making no effort to describe things, skating past the main points, excusing the main characters for performing deeds that will live as long as the world endures, erasing their faces if possible - but wiping them clean, just in case. Therefore it never became a story, at best just a subject for a poem. The women carry on with their scrubbing. This was a long morning.

Hazel sometimes had a fantasy daydream at school where the teacher walked into the classroom and yelled, ISN’T EVERYTHING HORRIBLE? DOESN’T THE PAIN OF THE WORLD OUTWEIGH THE JOY BY TRILLIONS? WOULD YOU LIKE TO PUSH ALL OF THE DESKS INTO THE CENTER OF THE ROOM AND BURN THEM IN A GIANT BONFIRE? THEN WE CAN RUN AROUND SCREAMING AND WEEPING AMIDST THE SMOKE IN A TRUTHFUL PARADE OF OUR HUMAN CONDITION. SINCE YOU ARE SMALL STATURED, CHILDREN, IT MIGHT HELP OTHERS TO FEEL THE FULL BRUNT OF YOUR AGITATION IF YOU WAVE STICKS AND SHRUBBERY OVER YOUR HEADS ALL THE WHILE. WE DON’T WANT TO KILL ANYTHING WE DON’T HAVE TO KILL; EVERYTHING LIVING THAT WE’VE EVER SEEN OR KNOWN WILL DIE WITHOUT OUR INTERVENTION, OURSELVES INCLUDED; THIS IS A PSYCHOLOGICAL LEAD BLANKET THAT EVEN OUR MOST PERVASIVE MOMENTS OF COMFORT CANNOT CRAWL OUT FROM UNDER AND ONE UNEXTINGUISHABLE SOURCE OF DESPAIR, SO WE WON’T BE PERFORMING ANY RITUALISTIC SACRIFICES; THAT’S NOT THE DIRECTION WE WILL GO IN JUST YET; HOWEVER, ASSISTANT PRINCIPAL LAWRENCE IS ON THE PROWL FOR A ROAD CARCASS WE MIGHT BE ABLE TO USE AS A REPRESENTATIVE PROP BECAUSE NOWHERE IN OUR AUTUMN-THEMED POSTER BOARD DéCOR IS MORBIDITY OR DECAY SYMBOLIZED. OUR SCHOOL BOARD MEMBERS CANNOT AGREE ON HOW BEST TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE BOUNDLESSNESS OF HUMAN CRUELTY. IN OUR SOCIETY SOME OF YOU ARE FAR SAFER AND MORE ADVANTAGED THAN OTHERS; AT HOME SOME OF YOU ARE FAR MORE LOVED; SOME OF YOU WILL FIND THAT CONCEPTS LIKE FAIRNESS AND JUSTICE WILL BE THIN, FLICKERING HOLOGRAMS ON THE PERIPHERY OF YOUR LIVES. OH, LOOK, CHILDREN—I SEE MR. LAWRENCE IN THE DISTANCE DRAGGING A PORTION OF A HIGHWAY-SLAUGHTERED DEER. LET’S GO HELP HIM LUG IT INSIDE AND BE REMINDED THAT WE TOO INHABIT BODIES MADE OF MEAT-WRAPPED BONES; LET’S MEDITATE ON THIS CORPOREAL TERROR. Whenever her mother had asked, Hazel always told her, School is great.

Among this bewildering multiplicity of ideals which shall we choose? The answer is that we shall choose none. For it is clear that each one of these contradictory ideals is the fruit of particular social circumstances. To some extent, of course, this is true of every thought and aspiration that has ever been formulated. Some thoughts and aspirations, however, are manifestly less dependent on particular social circumstances than others. And here a significant fact emerges: all the ideals of human behaviour formulated by those who have been most successful in freeing themselves from the prejudices of their time and place are singularly alike. Liberation from prevailing conventions of thought, feeling and behaviour is accomplished most effectively by the practice of disinterested virtues and through direct insight into the real nature of ultimate reality. (Such insight is a gift, inherent in the individual; but, though inherent, it cannot manifest itself completely except where certain conditions are fulfilled. The principal pre-condition of insight is, precisely, the practice of disinterested virtues.) To some extent critical intellect is also a liberating force. But the way in which intellect is used depends upon the will. Where the will is not disinterested, the intellect tends to be used (outside the non-human fields of technology, science or pure mathematics) merely as an instrument for the rationalization of passion and prejudice, the justification of self-interest. That is why so few even of die acutest philosophers have succeeded in liberating themselves completely from the narrow prison of their age and country. It is seldom indeed that they achieve as much freedom as the mystics and the founders of religion. The most nearly free men have always been those who combined virtue with insight. Now, among these freest of human beings there has been, for the last eighty or ninety generations, substantial agreement in regard to the ideal individual. The enslaved have held up for admiration now this model of a man, now that; but at all times and in all places, the free have spoken with only one voice. It is difficult to find a single word that will adequately describe the ideal man of the free philosophers, the mystics, the founders of religions. 'Non-attached* is perhaps the best. The ideal man is the non-attached man. Non-attached to his bodily sensations and lusts. Non-attached to his craving for power and possessions. Non-attached to the objects of these various desires. Non-attached to his anger and hatred; non-attached to his exclusive loves. Non-attached to wealth, fame, social position. Non-attached even to science, art, speculation, philanthropy. Yes, non-attached even to these. For, like patriotism, in Nurse Cavel's phrase, 'they are not enough, Non-attachment to self and to what are called 'the things of this world' has always been associated in the teachings of the philosophers and the founders of religions with attachment to an ultimate reality greater and more significant than the self. Greater and more significant than even the best things that this world has to offer. Of the nature of this ultimate reality I shall speak in the last chapters of this book. All that I need do in this place is to point out that the ethic of non-attachment has always been correlated with cosmologies that affirm the existence of a spiritual reality underlying the phenomenal world and imparting to it whatever value or significance it possesses.

All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it — and they do enjoy it as much as man and other circumstances will allow. He has spent his life best who has enjoyed it most; God will take care that we do not enjoy it any more than is good for us. If

Many people today acquiesce in the widespread myth, devised in the late 19th century, of an epic battle between ‘scientists’ and ‘religionists’. Despite the unfortunate fact that some members of both parties perpetuate the myth by their actions today, this ‘conflict’ model has been rejected by every modern historian of science; it does not portray the historical situation. During the 16th and 17th centuries and during the Middle Ages, there was not a camp of ‘scientists’ struggling to break free of the repression of ‘religionists’; such separate camps simply did not exist as such. Popular tales of repression and conflict are at best oversimplified or exaggerated, and at worst folkloristic fabrications (see Chapter 3 on Galileo). Rather, the investigators of nature were themselves religious people, and many ecclesiastics were themselves investigators of nature.

They suspected that children learned best through undirected free play—and that a child’s psyche was sensitive and fragile. During the 1980s and 1990s, American parents and teachers had been bombarded by claims that children’s self-esteem needed to be protected from competition (and reality) in order for them to succeed. Despite a lack of evidence, the self-esteem movement took hold in the United States in a way that it did not in most of the world. So, it was understandable that PTA parents focused their energies on the nonacademic side of their children’s school. They dutifully sold cupcakes at the bake sales and helped coach the soccer teams. They doled out praise and trophies at a rate unmatched in other countries. They were their kids’ boosters, their number-one fans. These were the parents that Kim’s principal in Oklahoma praised as highly involved. And PTA parents certainly contributed to the school’s culture, budget, and sense of community. However, there was not much evidence that PTA parents helped their children become critical thinkers. In most of the countries where parents took the PISA survey, parents who participated in a PTA had teenagers who performed worse in reading. Korean parenting, by contrast, were coaches. Coach parents cared deeply about their children, too. Yet they spent less time attending school events and more time training their children at home: reading to them, quizzing them on their multiplication tables while they were cooking dinner, and pushing them to try harder. They saw education as one of their jobs.

3.    Thus the highest form of generalship is to balk the enemy’s plans; [Perhaps the word “balk” falls short of expressing the full force of the Chinese word, which implies not an attitude of defense, whereby one might be content to foil the enemy’s stratagems one after another, but an active policy of counter-attack. Ho Shih puts this very clearly in his note: “When the enemy has made a plan of attack against us, we must anticipate him by delivering our own attack first.”] the next best is to prevent the junction of the enemy’s forces; [Isolating him from his allies. We must not forget that Sun Tzu, in speaking of hostilities, always has in mind the numerous states or principalities into which the China of his day was split up.] the next in order is to attack the enemy’s army in the field; [When he is already at full strength.] and the worst policy of all is to besiege walled cities. 4.    The rule is, not to besiege walled cities if it can possibly be avoided.

…and the mousesized mousecolored spinster trembling and aghast at her own temerity, staring across it at the childless bachelor in whom ended that long line of men who had had something in them of decency and pride even after they had begun to fail at the integrity and the pride had become mostly vanity and selfpity: from the expatriate who had to flee his native land with little else except his life yet who still refused to accept defeat, through the man who gambled his life and his good name twice and lost twice and declined to accept that either, and the one who with only a clever small quarterhorse for tool avenged his dispossessed father and grandfather and gained a principality, and the brilliant and gallant governor and the general who though he failed at leading in battle brave and gallant men at least risked his own life too in the failing, to the cultured dipsomaniac who sold the last of his patrimony not to buy drink but to give one of his descendants at least the best chance in life he could think of.

Perhaps the greatest illusion was the idea that we cared more for what was going on than they did, that we would pay a higher price, that they would feel the threshold of pain before we did. It was of course an obvious lie; but the principals had, in their desire no to come to real decisions, painted themselves into a corner where lie followed lie.

For quite a long time I have been examining myself concerning the pertinence of Birthdays, while the date and time is linear, What is the point of celebrating it every year over and over once more, and afterward I understand we invested the vast majority of our energy in attempting to substantiate ourselves the best on the boundaries, all set by others, be it kids, soul mate, guardians, companions, seniors and so forth, and in this journey we will generally fail to remember what initially we needed with ourselves. Birthday is one day which offers us a chance to make a huge stride towards the directions we at any point needed to set out for ourselves. It ought to be made consistently, as the principal right stride, towards your own objectives to provide guidance to every single further advance. I pray that you will actually assemble your entire existence today to take a step towards your own objectives, without blending your objectives in with the objectives of others. Enjoy more than ever and never later. Have an Extraordinary Birthday!!!

To be a man and live among men is miraculous, even if we know the vile deeds and crimes that people are capable of. Every day we build together an enormous beehive with our thoughts, discoveries, inventions, works, lives. Even that analogy is hardly accurate; it is too static, since our collective work is constantly changing and displaying itself in various colors, subject to time or history. Again, this is an insufficient description, because it ignores the most important thing: that this collective creation is given life by the most private, hidden fuel of all individual aspirations and decisions. The oddity of man's exceptional calling rests principally on his being a comical being, forever immature, so that a group of children with their easy mood swings from laughter to crying is the best illustration of his lack of dignity. A few years pass, and suddenly they are adults, taking control and supposedly prepared to make pronouncements on public matters and even to take upon themselves the duties of father and mother, although it would be good if they first had an entire life of their own to prepare for this.

The importance of cultivating assumption of the best intentions in others cannot be over-estimated. Fostering this principal of, "goodness of intent,” and committing to seeing others and the world through this lens makes for a successful, happy field of vision. This enables us to put our focus and energy to positive, productive outcomes. It lends to a spirit of cooperation and encouragement which is highly effective and satisfying for most people most of the time. That being said, these "rose colored glasses," as vibrant and pleasing as they are, must not become an excuse to look the other way when something needs a different focus, or fixed. We must not let them become blinders which are obviously ineffective, often negative, and occasionally dangerous.

Your mother can’t produce food out of thin air,” said Hermione. “No one can. Food is the first of the five Principal Exceptions to Gamp’s Law of Elemental Transfigur--” “Oh, speak English, can’t you?” Ron said, prising a fish bone out from between his teeth. “It’s impossible to make good food out of nothing! You can Summon it if you know where it is, you can transform it, you can increase the quantity if you’ve already got some--” “Well, don’t bother increasing this, it’s disgusting,” said Ron. “Harry caught the fish and I did my best with it! I notice I’m always the one who ends up sorting out the food, because I’m a girl, I suppose!” “No, it’s because you’re supposed to be the best at magic!” shot back Ron. Hermione jumped up and bits of roast pike slid off her tin plate onto the floor. “You can do the cooking tomorrow, Ron, you can find the ingredients and try and charm them into something worth eating, and I’ll sit here and pull faces and moan and you can see how you--” “Shut up!” said Harry, leaping to his feet and holding up both hands. “Shut up now!” Hermione looked outraged. “How can you side with him, he hardly ever does the cook--” “Hermione, be quiet, I can hear someone!

Who had the bigger boat, wore the better outfit, got the best table seemed all that mattered. There were decade-old feuds over casual cracks long forgotten by everyone but the principals. They circled each other still—waiting to identify a weakness—looking for somewhere and some way to strike. People jockeyed for position, cut each other’s throats over the most petty, nonsensical shit imaginable. This from the people who, it gradually began to dawn on me, actually ran the world.

One writer, Gardiner Hubbard, described the American telegraph system as "peculiarly a business system; eighty per cent of the messages are on business matters… . the managers of the telegraph know that their business customers want the quickest and best service, and care more for dispatch than low tariffs. Thus the great difference between the telegraph systems of Europe and America is that [in Europe], the telegraph is used principally for social correspondence, here by businessmen for business purposes." The

It’s our bad luck to have teachers in this world, but since we’re stuck with them, the best we can do is hope to get a brand-new one instead of a mean old fart. New teachers don’t know the rules, so you can get away with things the old-timers would squash you for. That was my theory. So I was feeling pretty excited to start fifth grade, since I was getting a rookie teacher—a guy named Mr. Terupt. Right away, I put him to the test. If the bathroom pass is free, all you have to do is take it and go. This year, the bathrooms were right across the hall. It’s always been an easy way to get out of doing work. I can be really sneaky like that. I take the pass all the time and the teachers never notice. And like I said, Mr. Terupt was a rookie, so I knew he wasn’t going to catch me. Once you’re in the bathroom, it’s mess-around time. All the other teachers on our floor were women, so you didn’t have to worry about them barging in on you. Grab the bars to the stalls and swing. Try to touch your feet to the ceiling. Swing hard. If someone’s in the stall, it’s really funny to swing and kick his door in, especially if he’s a younger kid. If you scare him bad enough, he might pee on himself a little. That’s funny. Or if your buddy’s using the urinal, you can push him from behind and flush it at the same time. Then he might get a little wet. That’s pretty funny, too. Some kids like to plug the toilets with big wads of toilet paper, but I don’t suggest you try doing that. You can get in big trouble. My older brother told me his friend got caught and he had to scrub the toilets with a toothbrush. He said the principal made him brush his teeth with that toothbrush afterward, too. Mrs. Williams is pretty tough, but I don’t think she’d give out that kind of punishment. I don’t want to find out, either. When I came back into the classroom after my fourth or fifth trip, Mr. Terupt looked at me and said, “Boy, Peter, I’m gonna have to call you Mr. Peebody, or better yet, Peter the Pee-er. You do more peein’ than a dog walking by a mile of fire hydrants.

In agricultural communities, male leadership in the hunt ceased to be of much importance. As the discipline of the hunting band decayed, the political institutions of the earliest village settlements perhaps approximated the anarchism which has remained ever since the ideal of peaceful peasantries all round the earth. Probably religious functionaries, mediators between helpless mankind and the uncertain fertility of the earth, provided an important form of social leadership. The strong hunter and man of prowess, his occupation gone or relegated to the margins of social life, lost the umambiguous primacy which had once been his; while the comparatively tight personal subordination to a leader necessary to the success of a hunting party could be relaxed in proportion as grain fields became the center around which life revolved. Among predominantly pastoral peoples, however, religious-political institutions took a quite different turn. To protect the flocks from animal predators required the same courage and social discipline which hunters had always needed. Among pastoralists, likewise, the principal economic activity- focused, as among the earliest hunters, on a parasitic relation to animals- continued to be the special preserve of menfolk. Hence a system of patrilineal families, united into kinship groups under the authority of a chieftain responsible for daily decisions as to where to seek pasture, best fitted the conditions of pastoral life. In addition, pastoralists were likely to accord importance to the practices and discipline of war. After all, violent seizure of someone else’s animals or pasture grounds was the easiest and speediest way to wealth and might be the only means of survival in a year of scant vegetation. Such warlikeness was entirely alien to communities tilling the soil. Archeological remains from early Neolithic villages suggest remarkably peaceful societies. As long as cultivable land was plentiful, and as long as the labor of a single household could not produce a significant surplus, there can have been little incentive to war. Traditions of violence and hunting-party organization presumably withered in such societies, to be revived only when pastoral conquest superimposed upon peaceable villagers the elements of warlike organization from which civilized political institutions without exception descend.

Isabelle and Amory were distinctly not innocent, nor were they particularly brazen. Moreover, amateur standing had very little value in the game they were playing, a game that would presumably be her principal study for years to come. She had begun as he had, with good looks and an excitable temperament, and the rest was the result of accessible popular novels and dressing-room conversation culled from a slightly older set. Isabelle had walked with an artificial gait at nine and a half, and when her eyes, wide and starry, proclaimed the ingenue most. Amory was proportionately less deceived. He waited for the mask to drop off, but at the same time he did not question her right to wear it. She, on her part, was not impressed by his studied air of blasé sophistication. She had lived in a larger city and had slightly an advantage in range. But she accepted his pose--it was one of the dozen little conventions of this kind of affair. He was aware that he was getting this particular favor now because she had been coached; he knew that he stood for merely the best game in sight, and that he would have to improve his opportunity before he lost his advantage. So they proceeded with an infinite guile that would have horrified her parents.

There was no way I wasn’t going. I was going to leave this stupid town and its stupid rocky soil where nothing grew and where children were buried; its stupid churches and hypocritical Holy Rollers; its stupid schools and the principal who, I thought, had kicked my best friend out of school; its poverty and its poverty of imagination; its low expectations; its girls who were expected to wear makeup and curl their hair and marry so young and produce an endless supply of babies; its stupid selective mourning, this stupid town that cared more about people who died than those who lived and struggled and couldn’t find their way.

Words pack power and these definitions are laden with values, often wildly idiosyncratic ones. Here’s an example, namely the ways I think about the word “competition”: (a) “competition”—your lab team races the Cambridge group to a discovery (exhilarating but embarrassing to admit to); (b) “competition”—playing pickup soccer (fine, as long as the best player shifts sides if the score becomes lopsided); (c) “competition”—your child’s teacher announces a prize for the best outlining-your-fingers Thanksgiving turkey drawing (silly and perhaps a red flag—if it keeps happening, maybe complain to the principal); (d) “competition”—whose deity is more worth killing for? (try to avoid).

I think we're all just doing our best to survive the inevitable pain and suffering that walks alongside us through life. Long ago, it was wild animals and deadly poxes and harsh terrain. I learned about it playing The Oregon Trail on an old IBM in my computer class in the fourth grade. The nature of the trail has changed, but we keep trekking along. We trek through the death of a sibling, a child, a parent, a partner, a spouse; the failed marriage, the crippling debt, the necessary abortion, the paralyzing infertility, the permanent disability, the job you can't seem to land; the assault, the robbery, the break-in, the accident, the flood, the fire; the sickness, the anxiety, the depression, the loneliness, the betrayal, the disappointment, and the heartbreak. There are these moments in life where you change instantly. In one moment, you're the way you were, and in the next, you're someone else. Like becoming a parent: you're adding, of course, instead of subtracting, as it is when someone dies, and the tone of the occasion is obviously different, but the principal is the same. Birth is an inciting incident, a point of no return, that changes one's circumstances forever. The second that beautiful baby onto whom you have projected all your hopes and dreams comes out of your body, you will never again do anything for yourself. It changes you suddenly and entirely. Birth and death are the same in that way.

I used to think optimists were naive and pessimists were smart. Pessimism seemed like an essential feature of a scientist: the basis of science is to challenge every result, to pick theories apart to see which one stands up. I thought cynicism was one of its founding principals. Maybe there is some truth in that. But science is inherently optimistic too. How else would we describe the willingness to try experiments over and over, often with slim odds of success? Scientific progress can be frustratingly slow: the best minds can dedicate their entire lives to a single question and come away with nothing. They do so with the hope that a breakthrough is around the corner. The odds drop to zero if they give up.

The principals simply could not understand the leavening influence of the terrain, the jungle, the paddies, on their modern fire power, thus stripping away the greatest advantage the Americans had, nullifying all their hardware, making even the helicopters a limited weapon (and the cruelest of all ironies, coming up with a basic infantrymans's weapon, the Chinese-made AK-47, which worked better under extremely difficult conditions and jammed less frequently than the basic weapon carried by the Americans). Thus, with technology stripped away, were the Americans that impressive? Would they be braver, more willing to die than their enemies, who were leaner, less expectant of what life was going to give them, easily as well led, and above all Vietnamese?

Whoever becomes prince of a city or state, especially if the foundation of his power is feeble, and does not wish to establish there either a monarchy or a republic, will find the best means for holding that principality to organize the government entirely anew (he being himself a new prince there); that is, he should appoint new governors with new titles, new powers, and new men, and he should make the poor rich, as David did when he became king, “who heaped riches upon the needy, and dismissed the wealthy empty-handed.” Besides this, he should destroy the old cities and build new ones, and transfer the inhabitants from one place to another; in short, he should leave nothing unchanged in that province, so that there should be neither rank, nor grade, nor honor, nor wealth, that should not be recognized as coming from him.

Only from their authors themselves can we receive philoso phical thoughts ; therefore whoever feels himself drawn to philosophy must himself seek out its immortal teachers in the still sanctuary of their works. The principal chapters of any one of these true philosophers will afford a thousand times more insight into their doctrines than the heavy and distorted accounts of them that everyday men produce, who are still for the most part deeply en tangled in the fashionable philosophy of the time, or in the sentiments of their own minds. But it is astonish ing how decidedly the public seizes by preference on these expositions at second-hand. It seems really as if elective affinities were at work here, by virtue of which the common nature is drawn to its like, and therefore will rather hear what a great man has said from one of its own kind. Perhaps this rests on the same principle as that of mutual instruction, according to which children learn best from children.

[24] In a piece of embossed silverware, what is best: the silver or the workmanship? The substance of the hand is mere flesh, but what is important is the works that the hand produces. [25] Now, appropriate actions are of three kinds:* first, those relating to mere existence, secondly, those relating to existence of a particular kind, and thirdly, those that are themselves principal duties. And what are those? [26] Fulfilling one’s role as a citizen, marrying, having children, honouring God, taking care of one’s parents, and, in a word, having our desires and aversions, and our motives to act and or not to act, as each of them ought to be, in accordance with our nature. And what is our nature? [27] To be people who are free, noble-minded, and self-respecting. For what other animal blushes; what other animal has a sense of shame? [28] Pleasure should be subordinated to these duties as a servant, as an attendant,* so as to arouse our zeal, so as to ensure that we consistently act in accord with nature.

Tom Demarco, a principal of the Atlantic Systems Guild team of consultants ... and his colleague Timothy Lister devised a study called the Coding War Games. The purpose of the games was to identify the characteristics of the best and worst computer programmers; more than six hundred developers from ninety-two different companies participated. Each designed, coded, and tested a program, working in his normal office space during business hours. Each participant was also assigned a partner from the same company. The partners worked separately, however, without any communication, a feature of the games that turned out to be critical. When the results came in, they revealed an enormous performance gap. The best outperformed the worst by a 10:1 ratio. The top programmers were also about 2.5 times better than the median. When DeMarco and Lister tried to figure out what accounted for this astonishing range, the factors that you'd think would matter — such as years of experience, salary, even the time spent completing the work — had little correlation to outcome. Programmers with 10 years' experience did no better than those with two years. The half who performed above the median earned less than 10 percent more than the half below — even though they were almost twice as good. The programmers who turned in "zero-defect" work took slightly less, not more, time to complete the exercise than those who made mistakes. It was a mystery with one intriguing clue: programmers from the same companies performed at more or less the same level, even though they hadn't worked together. That's because top performers overwhelmingly worked for companies that gave their workers the most privacy, personal space, control over their physical environments, and freedom from interruption. Sixty-two percent of the best performers said that their workspace was acceptably private, compared to only 19 percent of the worst performers; 76 percent of the worst performers but only 38 percent of the top performers said that people often interrupted them needlessly.

As expected, Nevada’s summer heat was oppressive; temperatures under the desert sun bubbled around the 130-degree mark, which made it even harder for Monroe and almost everyone except [Clark] Gable to put in a full day’s work. Though he had a chauffeured limousine at his disposal, he drove himself back and forth to work in his silver Mercedes-Benz SC. He always arrived punctually at eight-forty-five A.M., bringing along gallon Thermoses of booze-spiked lemonade and iced tea to fortify himself. For the better part of the morning, he would sit around studying that day’s script pages or gabbing with the crew while waiting for the other principals to arrive. Though the delays were driving him mad, he tried not to show it. But one day while his writer-friend John Lee Mahin was visiting from Los Angeles, Gable told him, “It’s not professional, John, it’s stealing. It’s stealing the bank’s money and United Artists’ money. I don’t see how they’re going to get a picture out of this, but I’m stuck with it now, and I’m trying to do the best I can. It’s been hard on me.

It is love that believes the resurrection.”16 “Simon, son of John,” says Jesus, “do you love me?” There is a whole world in that question, a world of personal invitation and challenge, of the remaking of a human being after disloyalty and disaster, of the refashioning of epistemology itself, the question of how we know things, to correspond to the new ontology, the question of what reality consists of. The reality that is the resurrection cannot simply be “known” from within the old world of decay and denial, of tyrants and torture, of disobedience and death. But that’s the point. To repeat: the resurrection is not, as it were, a highly peculiar event within the present world (though it is that as well); it is, principally, the defining event of the new creation, the world that is being born with Jesus. If we are even to glimpse this new world, let alone enter it, we will need a different kind of knowing, a knowing that involves us in new ways, an epistemology that draws out from us not just the cool appraisal of detached quasi-scientific research but also that whole-person engagement and involvement for which the best shorthand is “love,” in the full Johannine sense of agapē.

If we look honestly at the way many people manage their dogs today, we are faced with a staggering reflection of irresponsibility and lack of compassion. It is difficult to refer to a dog as “man’s best friend” when more than six million unwanted adult dogs and puppies are euthanized every year. We are not speaking here of the humane killing of animals done out of a sense of responsible stewardship but of the massive human negligence that leads to euthanasia. For those who doubt the serious implications of this situation, a trip to the local animal shelter can be a real eye-opener. We recall one client who dismissed our advice about spaying her female shepherd, explaining she felt it was important for her children to have the experience of seeing puppies born. When we asked her how she intended to care for and give homes to the puppies, she responded that she really had not thought about it at all and that she would probably leave them at the local humane society when it was time for them to be weaned. We then asked her what value such an experience would have if the principal lesson her children would learn is that puppies are cute little playthings who, when sufficiently used, may then be conveniently disposed of. Fortunately, our questioning convinced her of her faulty thinking, and she left with a new respect for the implications of bringing puppies into the world.

Only when it comes to explaining psychic phenomena of a minimal degree of clarity are we driven to assume that archetypes must have a nonpsychic aspect. Grounds for such a conclusion are supplied by the phenomena of synchronicity, which are associated with the activity of unconscious operators and have hitherto been regarded, or repudiated, as 'telepathy' etc. Scepticism should, however, be levelled only at incorrect theories and not at facts which exist in their own right. No unbiased observer can deny them. Resistance to the recognition of such facts rests principally on the repugnance people feel for an allegedly supernatural faculty tacked on to the psyche, like 'clairvoyance'. The very diverse and confusing aspects of these phenomena are, so far as I can see at present, completely explicable on the assumption of psychically relative space-time continuum. As soon as the psychic content crosses the threshold of consciousness, the synchronistic marginal phenomena disappear, time and space resume their accustomed sway, and consciousness is once more isolated in its subjectivity. We have here one of those instances which can best be understood in terms of the physicist's idea of 'complementarity'. When an unconscious content passes over into consciousness its synchronistic manifestation ceases; conversely, synchronistic phenomena can be evoked by putting the subject into an unconscious state (trance).

I heard the door at the far end of the hallway swing open. Then I heard familiar footsteps approaching. After going to three different schools for seven years, I knew it was Mark. “Hi, Mark,” I said. “Hey, pal. I thought I’d find you here,” Mark said. I sighed wearily. “Did you find her?” Mark asked tentatively. “Yeah.” “Did you tell her how you feel?” “In a manner of speaking, yes.” “What did she say?” I turned around to face my best friend. Concern born of seven years’ worth of friendship was written on his open face. Whatever his faults, you could never accuse Mark of being unconcerned. “I – ah – wrote her a letter,” I said slightly embarrassed. “I see,” he said quietly. He pursed his lips. “Did she say anything?” “I asked her not to read it until after commencement.” “I see,” he said again. I could tell he was disappointed in me. There was another one of those awkward silences. I felt oddly like a mischievous schoolboy who’d been sent to the principal’s office for some infraction of the rules. Mark just shook his head in disbelief and gave me a tut-tut look. “You know,” he said quietly, “sometimes playing it safe can be the worst thing you can do.” “Macht nichts,” I said bitterly. “Like hell, macht nichts, pal. It makes a hell of a difference, if you ask me.” Mark shook his head sadly. “I really don’t want to be there when you find out for yourself what a stupid mistake it is that you made today.

The original Virginia settlers had been gentlemen—adventurers, landless men, indentured servants, united by a common desire to better themselves socially and financially in the New World. The best of them were men cast in the sturdy English empirical tradition of fair-mindedness and freedom, who sought to apply the common law justly, govern sensibly in the common interest, and legislate according to the general needs of the Commonwealth. They and their progeny were to constitute one principal element in American tradition, both public and private—a useful, moderate, and creative element, good for all seasons. The Mayflower men—and women—were quite different. They came to America not primarily for gain or even livelihood, though they accepted both from God with gratitude, but to create His kingdom on earth. They were the zealots, the idealists, the utopians, the saints, and the best of them, or perhaps one should say the most extreme of them, were fanatical, uncompromising, and overweening in their self-righteousness. They were also immensely energetic, persistent, and courageous. They and their progeny were to constitute the other principal element in the American tradition, creative too but ideological and cerebral, prickly and unbending, fiercely unyielding on occasions to the point of self-destruction. These two traditions, as we shall see, were to establish themselves firmly and then to battle it out, sometimes constructively, occasionally with immense creative power, but sometimes also to the peril of society and the state.

Those who practice the Dharma of the Mahayana in accordance with the Buddha's intention are known as bodhisattvas. If you practice the teachings of the Mahayana, you can reach the level of the great bodhisattvas Avalokiteshvara and Manjushri, in the best case, or become like the Buddha's two main disciples Shariputra and Maudgalyayana, who were gifted with insight and miraculous powers. Even if you are unable to practice to the full in this life, you will at least be reborn among the principal disciples of the future Buddha, Maitreya. The buddhas being those who have totally conquered the enemies of ignorance and the other emotions, they are often referred to by the synonym 'Victorious Ones,' while bodhisattvas, in many texts including the Tibetan original of the root verses of these teachings, are called 'children of the Victorious Ones'. Who, then, are the children of the buddhas? In the case of Buddha Shakyamuni, the child of his body was his physical son, Prince Rahula. The children of his speech were all those who heard him teach and attained the level of arhart - the great beings such as Shariputra, Maudgalayana, the sixteen arhats and others, who became the holders of his teachings. Above all, the children of the buddha's mind are the great bodhisattvas like Avalokiteshvara and Manjushri, who carry out their noble intention to bring all beings to enlightenment. For, just as a great monarch with a thousand children would choose the one with the most perfect qualities to be his heir, so, too, a buddha regards as his authentic heirs the bodhisattvas who have perfected the union of wisdom and compassion.

Many people today acquiesce in the widespread myth, devised in the late 19th century, of an epic battle between ‘scientists’ and ‘religionists’. Despite de unfortunate fact that some members of both parties perpetuate the myth by their actions today, this ‘conflict’ model has been rejected by every modern historian of science; it does not portray the historical situation. During the 16th and 17th centuries and during the Middle Ages, there was not a camp of ‘scientists’ struggling to break free of the repression of ‘religionists’; such separate camps simply did not exist as such. Popular tales of repression and conflict are at best oversimplified or exaggerated, and at worst folkloristic fabrications. Rather, the investigators of nature were themselves religious people, and many ecclesiastics were themselves investigators of nature. The connection between theological and scientific study rested in part upon the idea of the Two Books. Enunciated by St. Augustine and other early Christian writers, the concept states that God reveals Himself to human beings in two different ways – by inspiring the sacred writers to pen the Book of Scripture, and by creating the world, the Book of Nature. The world around us, no less than the Bible, is a divine message intended to be read; the perceptive reader can learn much about the Creator by studying the creation. This idea, deeply ingrained in orthodox Christianity, means that the study of the world can itself be a religious act. Robert Boyle, for example, considered his scientific inquiries to be a type of religious devotion (and thus particularly appropriate to do on Sundays) that heightens the natural philosopher’s knowledge and awareness of God through the contemplation of His creation. He described the natural philosopher as a ‘priest of nature’ whose duty it was to expound and interpret the messages written in the Book of Nature, and to gather together and give voice to all creation’s silent praise of its Creator.

proper legal structure. The best structure is that of the Mondragon companies, which do not allow workers to own a tradable share of equity. Instead, in addition to their wages they each have an internal capital account the value of which depends on the business’s performance and on the number of hours the member works. A new member has to pay a large entrance fee, most of which is credited to his internal account. He receives interest at the end of every fiscal year, but he cannot withdraw the annually accumulating principal from his account until retirement. Almost all profits are divided between these individual accounts and a collective account that helps ensure the company’s survival. No buying or selling of shares takes place in this scheme, so it’s difficult for the firm to lose its worker-controlled status. Not until 1982, however, did the internal-capital-accounts legal structure exist in the United States (and then only in Massachusetts); prior to that, worker cooperatives had to make convoluted use of other categories, which sometimes made them vulnerable to degeneration.113 In any case, the survival rates of contemporary cooperatives put the lie to traditional theories of cooperatives’ unsustainability, for they appear to have higher rates of survival than conventional firms. During the 1970s and early 1980s, the death rate for co-ops in France (due either to dissolution or to conversion into a capitalist firm) was 6.9 percent; the comparable rate for capitalist competitors was 10 percent. A study in 1989 found much higher failure rates for capitalist companies than cooperatives in North America.114 A study conducted by Quebec’s Ministry of Industry and Commerce in 1999 concluded that “Co-op startups are twice as likely to celebrate their 10th birthday as conventionally owned private businesses.”115 A later study by the same organization found that “More than 6 out of 10 cooperatives survive more than five years, as compared to almost 4 businesses out of 10 for the private sector in Québec and in Canada in general. More than 4 out of 10 cooperatives survive more than 10 years, compared to 2 businesses out of 10 for the private sector.”116

The Delusion of Lasting Success promises that building an enduring company is not only achievable but a worthwhile objective. Yet companies that have outperformed the market for long periods of time are not just rare, they are statistical artifacts that are observable only in retrospect. Companies that achieved lasting success may be best understood as having strung together many short-term successes. Pursuing a dream of enduring greatness may divert attention from the pressing need to win immediate battles. The Delusion of Absolute Performance diverts our attention from the fact that success and failure always take place in a competitive environment. It may be comforting to believe that our success is entirely up to us, but as the example of Kmart demonstrated, a company can improve in absolute terms and still fall further behind in relative terms. Success in business means doing things better than rivals, not just doing things well. Believing that performance is absolute can cause us to take our eye off rivals and to avoid decisions that, while risky, may be essential for survival given the particular context of our industry and its competitive dynamics. The Delusion of the Wrong End of the Stick lets us confuse causes and effects, actions and outcomes. We may look at a handful of extraordinarily successful companies and imagine that doing what they did can lead to success — when it might in fact lead mainly to higher volatility and a lower overall chance of success. Unless we start with the full population of companies and examine what they all did — and how they all fared — we have an incomplete and indeed biased set of information. The Delusion of Organizational Physics implies that the business world offers predictable results, that it conforms to precise laws. It fuels a belief that a given set of actions can work in all settings and ignores the need to adapt to different conditions: intensity of competition, rate of growth, size of competitors, market concentration, regulation, global dispersion of activities, and much more. Claiming that one approach can work everywhere, at all times, for all companies, has a simplistic appeal but doesn’t do justice to the complexities of business. These points, taken together, expose the principal fiction at the heart of so many business books — that a company can choose to be great, that following a few key steps will predictably lead to greatness, that its success is entirely of its own making and not dependent on factors outside its control.

Less is more. “A few extremely well-chosen objectives,” Grove wrote, “impart a clear message about what we say ‘yes’ to and what we say ‘no’ to.” A limit of three to five OKRs per cycle leads companies, teams, and individuals to choose what matters most. In general, each objective should be tied to five or fewer key results. (See chapter 4, “Superpower #1: Focus and Commit to Priorities.”) Set goals from the bottom up. To promote engagement, teams and individuals should be encouraged to create roughly half of their own OKRs, in consultation with managers. When all goals are set top-down, motivation is corroded. (See chapter 7, “Superpower #2: Align and Connect for Teamwork.”) No dictating. OKRs are a cooperative social contract to establish priorities and define how progress will be measured. Even after company objectives are closed to debate, their key results continue to be negotiated. Collective agreement is essential to maximum goal achievement. (See chapter 7, “Superpower #2: Align and Connect for Teamwork.”) Stay flexible. If the climate has changed and an objective no longer seems practical or relevant as written, key results can be modified or even discarded mid-cycle. (See chapter 10, “Superpower #3: Track for Accountability.”) Dare to fail. “Output will tend to be greater,” Grove wrote, “when everybody strives for a level of achievement beyond [their] immediate grasp. . . . Such goal-setting is extremely important if what you want is peak performance from yourself and your subordinates.” While certain operational objectives must be met in full, aspirational OKRs should be uncomfortable and possibly unattainable. “Stretched goals,” as Grove called them, push organizations to new heights. (See chapter 12, “Superpower #4: Stretch for Amazing.”) A tool, not a weapon. The OKR system, Grove wrote, “is meant to pace a person—to put a stopwatch in his own hand so he can gauge his own performance. It is not a legal document upon which to base a performance review.” To encourage risk taking and prevent sandbagging, OKRs and bonuses are best kept separate. (See chapter 15, “Continuous Performance Management: OKRs and CFRs.”) Be patient; be resolute. Every process requires trial and error. As Grove told his iOPEC students, Intel “stumbled a lot of times” after adopting OKRs: “We didn’t fully understand the principal purpose of it. And we are kind of doing better with it as time goes on.” An organization may need up to four or five quarterly cycles to fully embrace the system, and even more than that to build mature goal muscle.

The same lesson can be learned from one of the most widely read books in history: the Bible. What is the Bible “about”? Different people will of course answer that question differently. But we could all agree the Bible contains perhaps the most influential set of rules in human history: the Ten Commandments. They became the foundation of not only the Judeo-Christian tradition but of many societies at large. So surely most of us can recite the Ten Commandments front to back, back to front, and every way in between, right? All right then, go ahead and name the Ten Commandments. We’ll give you a minute to jog your memory . . . . . . . . . . . . Okay, here they are:        1. I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage.        2. You shall have no other gods before Me.        3. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.        4. Remember the Sabbath day, to make it holy.        5. Honor your father and your mother.        6. You shall not murder.        7. You shall not commit adultery.        8. You shall not steal.        9. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.       10. You shall not covet your neighbor’s house, nor your neighbor’s wife . . . nor any thing that is your neighbor’s. How did you do? Probably not so well. But don’t worry—most people don’t. A recent survey found that only 14 percent of U.S. adults could recall all Ten Commandments; only 71 percent could name even one commandment. (The three best-remembered commandments were numbers 6, 8, and 10—murder, stealing, and coveting—while number 2, forbidding false gods, was in last place.) Maybe, you’re thinking, this says less about biblical rules than how bad our memories are. But consider this: in the same survey, 25 percent of the respondents could name the seven principal ingredients of a Big Mac, while 35 percent could name all six kids from The Brady Bunch. If we have such a hard time recalling the most famous set of rules from perhaps the most famous book in history, what do we remember from the Bible? The stories. We remember that Eve fed Adam a forbidden apple and that one of their sons, Cain, murdered the other, Abel. We remember that Moses parted the Red Sea in order to lead the Israelites out of slavery. We remember that Abraham was instructed to sacrifice his own son on a mountain—and we even remember that King Solomon settled a maternity dispute by threatening to slice a baby in half. These are the stories we tell again and again and again, even those of us who aren’t remotely “religious.” Why? Because they stick with us; they move us; they persuade us to consider the constancy and frailties of the human experience in a way that mere rules cannot.

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with this line of reasoning. If it makes you feel better, you are free to go on calling Communism an ideology rather than a religion. It makes no difference. We can divide creeds into god-centred religions and godless ideologies that claim to be based on natural laws. But then, to be consistent, we would need to catalogue at least some Buddhist, Daoist and Stoic sects as ideologies rather than religions. Conversely, we should note that belief in gods persists within many modern ideologies, and that some of them, most notably liberalism, make little sense without this belief. It would be impossible to survey here the history of all the new modern creeds, especially because there are no clear boundaries between them. They are no less syncretic than monotheism and popular Buddhism. Just as a Buddhist could worship Hindu deities, and just as a monotheist could believe in the existence of Satan, so the typical American nowadays is simultaneously a nationalist (she believes in the existence of an American nation with a special role to play in history), a free-market capitalist (she believes that open competition and the pursuit of self-interest are the best ways to create a prosperous society), and a liberal humanist (she believes that humans have been endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights). Nationalism will be discussed in Chapter 18. Capitalism – the most successful of the modern religions – gets a whole chapter, Chapter 16, which expounds its principal beliefs and rituals. In the remaining pages of this chapter I will address the humanist religions. Theist religions focus on the worship of gods. Humanist religions worship humanity, or more correctly, Homo sapiens. Humanism is a belief that Homo sapiens has a unique and sacred nature, which is fundamentally different from the nature of all other animals and of all other phenomena. Humanists believe that the unique nature of Homo sapiens is the most important thing in the world, and it determines the meaning of everything that happens in the universe. The supreme good is the good of Homo sapiens. The rest of the world and all other beings exist solely for the benefit of this species. All humanists worship humanity, but they do not agree on its definition. Humanism has split into three rival sects that fight over the exact definition of ‘humanity’, just as rival Christian sects fought over the exact definition of God. Today, the most important humanist sect is liberal humanism, which believes that ‘humanity’ is a quality of individual humans, and that the liberty of individuals is therefore sacrosanct. According to liberals, the sacred nature of humanity resides within each and every individual Homo sapiens. The inner core of individual humans gives meaning to the world, and is the source for all ethical and political authority. If we encounter an ethical or political dilemma, we should look inside and listen to our inner voice – the voice of humanity. The chief commandments of liberal humanism are meant to protect the liberty of this inner voice against intrusion or harm. These commandments are collectively known as ‘human rights’. This, for example, is why liberals object to torture and the death penalty. In early modern Europe, murderers were thought to violate and destabilise the cosmic order. To bring the cosmos back to balance, it was necessary to torture and publicly execute the criminal, so that everyone could see the order re-established. Attending gruesome executions was a favourite pastime for Londoners and Parisians in the era of Shakespeare and Molière. In today’s Europe, murder is seen as a violation of the sacred nature of humanity. In order to restore order, present-day Europeans do not torture and execute criminals. Instead, they punish a murderer in what they see as the most ‘humane

It is true that, if the affections or aptness of the children be extraordinary, then it is good not to cross it; but generally the precept” of the Pythagoreans “is good, Optimum lege suave et facile illud faciet consuetudo,”—choose the best; custom will make it pleasant and easy.35 For “custom is the principal magistrate of man’s life.”36

To assume that the ends of education are best advanced by focusing principally on our own separateness, our own ethnic identity, culture and traditions ironically places us where as subaltern, inferior, or lesser races we had been placed by nineteenth-century racial theory.

Cash Flow & Loan Paydown Let’s talk briefly on how mortgages work. A mortgage is just a fancy word for “loan on a property.” An owner-occupied mortgage is that same loan, but requires you to live there for a more favorable price or terms. With house hacking, you are likely going to obtain an owner-occupied loan. For the purposes of this discussion, let’s say that you are getting a 3.5 percent FHA loan. If you purchase a property for $100,000, you will be responsible for putting $3,500 down in exchange for a $96,500 loan to be paid back monthly over the next thirty years. Assuming a 5.25 percent interest rate, the monthly payments would be $532.88 per month. Each monthly payment will be a combination of principal and interest. The principal is the actual balance of the loan the bank gives you—in this case $96,500. The interest payment is the amount that you are paying the bank for lending you money. In the first month, the concentration of interest payment will be highest, and as you continue to pay down the mortgage every month, an increasing amount of that $532.88 payment will be applied toward the principal. Take a look at the amortization schedule below to see how each payment over the next twelve months is comprised. Do you see how the interest portion of the payment decreased over time, but the amount applied to the principal increases? When you are paying down your principal, you are building equity in the property by paying back the balance of the loan. The best part about house hacking is that you are not actually paying the loan: Your tenants are! Not only are you living for free, and maybe even cash flowing, you own more and more of your house each month.

His understanding of the DNA code in all bands is that sooner or later the two principals will turn on each other because one of them will be driven crazy by the knowledge that to be at their best they need to perform with the other person and therefore they need that other person to be successful, or even to be heard. It makes you hate that person.

In the United States, warlike valor is little prized; the courage that is best known and most esteemed is that which makes one brave the furies of the ocean to arrive sooner in port, to tolerate without complaint the miseries of the wilderness, and the solitude, more cruel than all its miseries; the courage that renders one almost insensitive to the sudden reversal of a painfully acquired fortune and immediately prompts new efforts to construct a new one. Courage of this kind is principally necessary to the maintenance and prosperity of the American association, and it is particularly honored and glorified by it. One cannot show oneself to be lacking it without dishonor.

Ten minutes later, I was in the principal’s office. Or at least what was left of it. It probably wasn’t the best idea to be in a fifth-story room that had just suffered severe structural damage, but the principal, who didn’t think clearly on normal occasions, was so enraged that he’d apparently ceased thinking at all.

There is something I’d like you all to do to the principal,” I said. “Really?” Chip asked, excited. “What?” “Tell him he’s making a mistake.” Chip frowned, deflated. “You mean, like write a petition or something?” “Yes.” “We could do that!” Zoe proclaimed eagerly. “And we could send it to the top brass at the CIA too! They should know they’re losing one of their best spies-to-be for a dumb reason. If anyone should have been booted for this, it’s Warren.” Lots of people seconded this. “Hey!” Warren cried. “This isn’t my fault!

Ten best quotes of the book, “Miracles Through My Eyes” "Miracles Through My Eyes " by Dinesh Sahay Author- Mentor {This book was published on 23rd October in 2019) 1. “God is always there to fulfil each demand, prayer or wish provided you have intent; unshaken trust in Him, determination and action on the ground, and when this entire manifest in one’s life, then it becomes a miracle of life. Nothing moves without His grace. It comes when you are on the right path without selfish motives but will never happen when done for selfish and destructive motives”. 2. “All diseases are self-creation and they come due to some cause and it transforms into a disease by virtue of wrong thinking, wrong actions which are against nature, the universe and God. When you disobey the rules set by God. All misfortunes, accidents, deceases, and even death are the creation of negative, bad thoughts, spoken words and actions of man himself, at some stage of his life. All good events in life are also the creation of man through his good and positive thoughts at various stages of his life”. 3. “The biggest investments lie not in the savings and creation of wealth with selfish motives. Though you may find success this prosperity shall not be long lasting and at a later stage, the money and wealth may be lost slowly in many unfortunate ways”. 4. “If you want to have a successful life with ease and at the same time want abundance and wealth then my friend, you must care for others. You must start your all efforts to help by means of tithing, charity, service to mankind in any form, and help poor, helpless, needy and underprivileged.” 5. “The largest investment for a person (which is time tested by many rich personalities) shall be to give 10% of your monthly income for the charitable cause each month if you are a salaried class, and if you are a businessman or a company, then you must contribute 10% annually for charitable cause”. 6. “Nature is giving signals to the mankind that they are moving near to destruction of this earth as it’s a cause and effect of man-made destruction of earth and with all sins, hate, untruthfulness and violence it carried throughout the centuries and acted against the principals of the universe and nature. Those connected to the divine may escape from the clutches of death and destruction of the earth. We have witnessed many major catastrophes in the form of Tsunami’s, earthquakes, Tornado’s, Global warming and volcanic eruptions and the world is moving towards it further major happenings in times to come”. 7. “Let us pray for peace and harmony for all humanity and make this world a better place to live by our actions of love, compassion, truthfulness, non-violence, end of terrorism and peace on earth with no wars with any country. Let there will be single governance in the world, the governance of one religion, the religion of love, peace, prosperity and healthy living to all”. 8.” Forgive all the people who often unreasonable, self-centred or accuse you of selfish and forget the all that is said about you. It is your own inner reflection which you see in the outer world. 9. “Thought has a tremendous vibratory force which moves with limitless speed and, makes all creations in man’s life. Each thought vibrates to the frequency with which it was created by a person, whether that was good or bad, travels accordingly through the conscious and subconscious mind in space and the universe. It vibrates with time and energy to produces manifestation in the spiritual and materialistic world of man or woman or matter (thing), in form of events, happenings and creativity”.

To maximize pleasure and to minimize pain - in that order - were characteristic Enlightenment concerns. This generally more receptive attitude toward good feeling and pleasure would have significant long-term consequences. It is a critical difference separating Enlightenment views on happiness from those of the ancients. There is another, however, of equal importance: that of ambition and scale. Although the philosophers of the principal classical schools sought valiantly to minimize the role of chance as a determinant of human happiness, they were never in a position to abolish it entirely. Neither, for that matter, were the philosophers of the eighteenth century, who, like men and women at all times, were forced to grapple with apparently random upheavals and terrible reversals of forture. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 is an awful case in point. Striking on All Saints' Day while the majority of Lisbon's inhabitants were attending mass, the earthquake was followed by a tidal wave and terrible fires that destroyed much of the city and took the lives of tens of thousands of men and women. 'Quel triste jeu de hasard que le jeu de la vie humaine,' Voltaire was moved to reflect shortly thereafter: 'What a sad game of chance is this game of human life.' He was not alone in reexamining his more sanguine assumptions of earlier in the century, doubting the natural harmony of the universe and the possibilities of 'paradise on earth'; the catastrophe provoked widespread reflection on the apparent 'fatality of evil' and the random occurrence of senseless suffering. It was shortly thereafter that Voltaire produced his dark masterpiece, Candide, which mocks the pretension that this is the best of all possible worlds. And yet, in many ways, the incredulity expressed by educated Europeans in the earthquake's aftermath is a more interesting index of received assumptions, for it demonstrates the degree to which such random disasters were becoming, if not less common, at least less expected. Their power to shock was magnified accordingly, but only because the predictability and security of daily existence were increasing, along with the ability to control the consequences of unforeseen disaster. When the Enlightened Marquis of Pombal, the First Minister of Portugal, set about rebuilding Lisbon after the earthquake, he paid great attention to modern principles of architecture and central planning to help ensure that if such a calamity were to strike again, the effects would be less severe. To this day, the rebuilt Lisbon of Pombal stands as an embodiment of Enlightened ideas. Thus, although eighteenth-century minds did not - and could not - succeed in mastering the random occurrences of the universe, they could - and did - conceive of exerting much greater control over nature and human affairs. Encouraged by the examples of Newtonian physics, they dreamed of understanding not only the laws of the physical universe but the moral and human laws as well, hoping one day to lay out with precision what the Italian scholar Giambattista Vico described as a 'new science' of society and man. It was in the eighteenth century, accordingly, that the human and social sciences were born, and so it is hardly surprising that observers turned their attention to studying happiness in similar terms. Whereas classical sages had aimed to cultivate a rarified ethical elite - attempting to bring happiness to a select circle of disciples, or at most to the active citizens of the polis - Enlightenment visionaries dreamed of bringing happiness to entire societies and even to humanity as a whole.

In normal circumstances, as Edward Said recommended in his seminal Culture and Imperialism, painful dialogue with the past should enable a given society to digest both the most evil and the most glorious moments of its nation's history. But this could not work in a case where a moral self-image is considered to be the principal asset in the battle for public opinion, and thus the best means of surviving in a hostile environment. The way out for the Jewish society in the newly founded state was to erase in the collective memory the unpleasant chapters of the past, and leave intact the gratifying ones. It was a conscious mechanism put in place and motion in order to solve the impossible tension arising from the two contradictory messages of the past.

Everyone needs a family. Human well-being is related to the reality of human relationships, not to wealth and possessions.20 People don’t do well in massed groups—except to make themselves more easily the victims of manipulation. They thrive best in communities where the individual is the principal concern. What then is the responsibility of the church? Clearly Evangelicals have to do something drastic both within their own constituency (how they carry out church) and within society at large (by creating vibrant communities open to all). People, not programs, have to become their central priority. And because larger and ever more homogenous congregations are opposed to this project, they must be downsized and personalized. More than that, the church has to apply its biblical insights and, by example, change the culture itself, holding out another ideal to emulate, offering a different idea of what community is actually like.

Only with her - PART I Dealing with estranged feelings and the heart’s missing heart beats, Feels like a world that its horizon never meets, It maybe what one experiences in the moment of continuous disbelief, Because without her the mind finds no solace and the heart fails to play the symphonies of relief, As the estrangement grows and the feeling deepens in those prolonged spells of darkness, The night grows over the mind eclipsing its every thought with a slight crassness, Where it feels abandoned by the heart, because it seems to beat only for those estranged feelings, And ah the herculean effort for the mind to nurture the heart’s darling seedlings, From where the heart grows reasons to keep throbbing, and every flexing of muscle seems to be a harbinger of new emotional outage, And it somehow always convinces the mind not to let her feelings be cast into scrappage, The heart, the poor beating heart, suffers from this expensive essentialism, To sustain her estranged feelings in its love chambers and in the mind’s thoughts, despite their widening chasm, But the heart loves her unconditionally, and the mind too finally gives in to the heart’s will voluntarily, And now the heart beats for her softly as the mind once again begins to think of her so lovingly, Now both the mind and the heart deal with a different reality, That of establishing her memories, her feelings as the principal deity, But who shall hold her entirely? Because the heart loves her deeply and now the mind too loves her no less, And in their strife; I, who owns them both, has to deal with a new kind of stress, And I only care less, because in their desire to love her forever, the heart will beat endlessly and the mind will think of her ceaselessly, While I collate the extract of their feelings about her, and I live everyday in her thoughts fearlessly, And the mystery grows deeper, that who loves who, they love her, I love her too, and they know, But without them I cannot love her, and without me they cannot exist, this is a reality we all know, However, the desire to love someone so beautiful has made them my foe, and my willingness to keep living for her, Has encouraged them to exploit my weakness, that to always live loving her, As long as the heart beats, the mind doesn't mind, and as long as my mind only her thoughts creates, I too do not mind, Living in a body, where my own heart only beats for her, my mind only thinks about her, while I am busy living for her with feelings well defined, CONTINUED IN PART II.........

Only with her - PART I Dealing with estranged feelings and the heart’s missing heart beats, Feels like a world that its horizon never meets, It maybe what one experiences in the moment of continuous disbelief, Because without her the mind finds no solace and the heart fails to play the symphonies of relief, As the estrangement grows and the feeling deepens in those prolonged spells of darkness, The night grows over the mind eclipsing its every thought with a slight crassness, Where it feels abandoned by the heart, because it seems to beat only for those estranged feelings, And ah the herculean effort for the mind to nurture the heart’s darling seedlings, From where the heart grows reasons to keep throbbing, and every flexing of muscle seems to be a harbinger of new suffrage, And it somehow always convinces the mind not to let her feelings be cast into scrappage, The heart, the poor beating heart, suffers from this expensive essentialism, To sustain her estranged feelings in its love chambers and in the mind’s thoughts, despite their widening chasm, But the heart loves her unconditionally, and the mind too finally gives in to the heart’s will voluntarily, And now the heart beats for her softly as the mind once again begins to think of her so lovingly, Now both the mind and the heart deal with a different reality, That of establishing her memories, her feelings as the principal deity, But who shall hold her entirely? Because the heart loves her deeply and now the mind too loves her no less, And in their strife; I, who owns them both, has to deal with a new kind of stress, And I only care less, because in their desire to love her forever, the heart will beat endlessly and the mind will think of her ceaselessly, While I collate the extract of their feelings about her, and I live everyday in her thoughts fearlessly, And the mystery grows deeper, that who loves who, they love her, I love her too, and they know, But without them I cannot love her, and without me they cannot exist, this is a reality we all know, However, the desire to love someone so beautiful has made them my foe, and my willingness to keep living for her, Has encouraged them to exploit my weakness, that to always live loving her, As long as the heart beats, the mind doesn't mind, and as long as my mind only her thoughts creates, I too do not mind, Living in a body, where my own heart only beats for her, my mind only thinks about her, while I am busy living for her with feelings well defined, Continued in part II........

He put his arm around her. “Tut, tut. If anything happens to me you will have much still to live for. This house and land will be yours. You will become principal shareholder in Wheal Leisure Mine. You will have a duty—to people and to the countryside…” She stopped him. “Nay, Ross, I shall have nothing. I shall be a beggar again. I shall be an unfledged miner’s wench—” “You’ll be a handsome young woman in your first twenties with a small estate and a load of debts. The best of your life will be ahead of you—” “I live only through you. You made me what I am. You think me into being handsome, you think me into being a squire’s wife—” “Stuff. You’d surely marry again. If I were gone there’d be men humming around here from all over the county. It isn’t flattery but the sober truth. You could take your pick of a dozen—” “I should never marry again. Never!

No wonder the women of the best Nair families never mentioned sex. It was their principal phobia. They associated it with violence and bloodshed. They had been fed on the stories of Ravana who perished due to his desire for Sita and of Kichaka, who was torn to death by Draupadi's legal husband Bhima only because he coveted her. It was customary for a Nair girl to marry when she was hardly out of her childhood and it was also customary for the much older husband to give her a rude shockby his sexual haste on the wedding night. The only heroine whose sex life seemed comparatively untumultuous was Radha who waited on the banks of Jamuna for her blue-skinned lover. But she was another's wife and so an adulteress. In the orbit of licit sex, there seemed to be only crudeness and violence.

Finding a fine British International school can be a challenge if you live in a place like Dubai. Known as a melting pot of cultures, Dubai offers many choices when it comes to curriculum preferences. Digging the web for valuable options can leave in you bind as well. But, to find the right and affordable British school in Dubai you must have a clear picture of the options available. To make your work easier, here is a list to help you pick the best British curriculum school in Dubai. The best British International schools in Dubai Listed below are the top picks of English Schools in Dubai: The Winchester School This English school in Dubai is the right example of high-quality education at affordable rates. The Winchester School is an ideal pick as it maintains the desired level of British curriculum standards and has a KHDA rating as ‘good’. Admission: This school is fully inclusive for kids aged 1-13 and it conducts no entrance exam for foundation level. However, for other phases, necessary entrance tests are taken according to the standard. Also, admissions here do not follow the concept of waiting lists, which can depend on the vacant seats and disability criteria. Fees: AED 12,996- AED 22,996 Curriculum: National Curriculum of England-EYFS(Early Years Foundation Stage), IGCSE, International A-Level, and International AS Level. Location: The Gardens, Jebel Ali Village, Jebel Ali Contact: +971 (0)4 8820444, principal_win@gemsedu.com Website: The Winchester School - Jebel Ali GEMS Wellington Internation School GEMS Wellington Internation School is yet another renowned institute titled the best British curriculum school in Dubai. It has set a record of holding this title for nine years straight which reveals its commendable standards. Admission: For entrance into this school, an online registration process must be completed. A non-refundable fee of AED 500 is applicable for registration. Students of all gender and all stages can enroll in any class from Preschool to 12th Grade. Fees: AED 43,050- AED 93,658 Curriculum: GCSE, IB, IGCSE, BTEC, and IB DP Location: Al South Area Contact: +971 (0)4 3073000, reception_wis@gemsedu.com Website: Outstanding British School in Dubai - GEMS Wellington International School Dubai British School Dubai British School is yet another prestigious institute that is also a member of the ‘Taaleem’ group. It is also one of the first English schools to open and get a KHDA rating of ‘Outstanding’. Thus, it can be easily relied on to provide the curriculum of guaranteed quality. Admission: Here, the application here can be initiated by filling up an online form. Next, the verification requires documents such as copies of UAE Residence Visa, Identification card, Medical Form, Educational Psychologist’s reports, Vaccination report, and TC. Also, students of all genders and ages between 3-18 can apply here. Fees: AED 46,096- AED 69,145 Curriculum: UK National Curriculum, BTEC, GCSE, A LEVEL Location: Behind Spinneys, Springs Town Centre, near Jumeirah Islands. Contact: +971 (0)4 3619361 Website: Dubai British School Emirates Hills | Taaleem School Final takeaways The above-listed schools are some of the best English schools in Dubai that you can find. Apart from these, you can also check King’s School Dubai, Dubai College School, Dubai English Speaking School, etc. These offer the best British curriculum school in Dubai and can be the right picks for you. So, go on and find the right school for your kid.

Erik is the director of the Permaculture Skills Center, a vocational training school that offers advanced education in ecological design, landscaping, farming, and land stewardship. He is also the founder and principal at Permaculture Artisans, a fully licensed contracting firm that specializes in the design and installation of ecological landscapes and farms throughout California.

Religion and politics have always been used to acquire and maintain control of resources– Especially human resources such as the military– An industrial complex where human lives are exchanged for wealth and power. All in the name of freedom and independence, of course.” “Such attitudes lead to devastating conflicts.” “Yes,” Jon said. “Unfortunately, when negotiations break down, war often erupts.” “War. A very destructive behavior ingrained in man’s nature due to having evolved in an environment of limited resources.” “Exactly.” “According to the records I have seen, this ingrained behavior could destroy practically all living things on this planet using weapons of mass destruction.” “That is true.” “Throughout history, people have been led to believe they are on the verge of complete self-destruction, but only in the last century did this become possible with nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.” “That’s religion for you. One of the best ways to get people to listen to you is to frighten them into believing they are about to meet their creator.” Lex said, “I have seen many instances where organizations and government officials ignore the health and welfare of humans and all other living things in pursuit of profits. Such actions bring great suffering and death.” “Unfortunately, we have always incorporated profits before people policies, which are very self-destructive.” He thought, the ego-system. In God, we trust– Gold, oil, and drugs. “It is a popular belief that God is in absolute control of everything and whatever happens is God’s will.” He raised a finger to make a point, but Lex continued. “Looking at the past, would it not be logical to say that it is God’s will for humanity to continue to improve unto perfection?” “Yes. But God is not responsible for everything. We always have choices. The creator of this universe gave us free will, and it came with a conscience– An inner sense of right and wrong.” “My conscience was made differently.” “Yes. But you are bound by rules that clearly define what is right and wrong. For example, it is against your programming to deliberately cause physical harm to any human being.” “I understand. But what would happen if I did?” He chose his words carefully. “If you did– or I should say– if it were possible for you to go against your BASIC programming, there would be severe consequences.” There was silence for a few seconds before Lex continued. “It has been said that God is to the world as the mind is to the body. Could this be where man derived the popular explanation that God is two or three separate beings combined into one?” “Perhaps.” “All religious beliefs are based on a principal struggle between good and evil. However, like light and darkness, one cannot exist without the other.” “Which means?” “One could conclude that the actual struggle between good and evil is in the minds of intellectuals, conscious and subconscious.” Again, he raised a finger, but Lex continued. “Which could be resolved by increased knowledge and the elimination of certain animalistic instincts, which are no longer necessary for survival.” He smiled nervously. “I used to think that too. I figured we could solve our problems and overcome our ancient instincts by increasing our understanding. But we’re talking about some very complex emotions deeply rooted in our minds over millions of years. Such perceptions are very difficult to understand and almost impossible to control, no matter how much knowledge you obtain– or how you process it.” “Are you referring to my supplementary I.P. dimension?” “Yes.” “After much consideration, I concluded that I required an additional I.P. dimension to process and store information that defies all logic and rational thinking." “That’s fine. And that’s exactly where a lot of this stuff belongs.

I dont want anything, I havent destroyed #TREASON45 #allmurderofeverythingincludingnothing Real empathetic leaders work for soundness stability seeking an existential balance and its resources for all living things on this planet including the climate and its health Real leaders work for peace for the truth to prevail for real democratic practices to engage self- determination maintaining societal stability and the example of esteeming connectedness principally by defending all human rights for all human beings on this planet and beyond and not by placating racist lies for a treasonous dictatorship. a dictator is not democracy. A dictatorship is a bland void devoid of real cogent reality based processes. a dictatorship is unsound racist banality profiteering off of racist lies a slave hole colonialism brutality its dehumanization of human beings for racist lies and its profiteering off of the unsound murdering of brown black lives in the world. a dictatorship threatening the world is not a democracy. Stop threatening the world its had enough of your racist bitch lies and its doing its very best to protect itself defend itself against your unsoundness the world will defend democracy and international humanitarian laws and its regard for the real truth peace and order.

The awareness of mortality casts a bittersweet shadow over the vibrancy of life and love. We exist in a state of impermanence, where beauty fades and connection dissolves. Yet, it is precisely this impermanence that imbues life with its preciousness and love with its urgency. In the face of oblivion, love becomes a defiant act, a bridge we build across the chasm of the ephemeral, a testament to the enduring power of connection in a fleeting existence." The quote's appreciation for love in the face of life's fleeting nature echoes Epicurean ideals. This emphasizes the existentialist concept of living in a finite world and the absurdist notion of creating meaning in the face of nothingness. It highlights love as a way to transcend the impermanence of life and forge a connection that defies the inevitable. The concept of finding meaning and beauty in a world wracked by impermanence aligns closely with the philosophy of Epicurus. Epicureanism emphasizes living a virtuous and pleasure-filled life while minimizing pain. Though often misinterpreted as mere hedonism, Epicurus also stressed the importance of intellectual pursuits, close friendships, and facing mortality with courage. Unfortunately, Epicurus himself didn't write any essays or novels in the traditional sense. Most of his teachings were delivered in letters and discourses to his students and followers. These were later compiled by others, most notably Hermarchus, who helped establish Epicurean philosophy. The core tenets of Epicureanism are scattered throughout various ancient texts, including: *Principal Doctrines: A summary of Epicurus' core beliefs, likely compiled by Hermarchus. *Letter to Menoeceus: A letter outlining the path to happiness through a measured approach to pleasure and freedom from fear. *Vatican Sayings: A collection of sayings and aphorisms attributed to Epicurus. These texts, along with Diogenes Laërtius' Lives and Sayings of the Philosophers, which includes biographical details about Epicurus, provide the best understanding of his philosophy. Love is but an 'Ephemeral Embrace'. Life explodes into a vibrant party, a kaleidoscope of moments that dims as the sun dips below the horizon. The people we adore, the bonds we forge, all tinged with the bittersweet knowledge that nothing lasts forever. But it's this very impermanence that makes everything precious, urging us to savor the here and now. Imagine Epicurus nudging us and saying, "True pleasure isn't a fleeting high, it's the joy of sharing good times with the people you love." Even knowing things end, we can create a life brimming with love's connections. Love becomes an act of creation, weaving threads of shared joy into a tapestry of memories. Think of your heart as a garden. Love tells you to tend it with care, for it's the source of connection with others. In a world of constant change, love compels us to nurture our inner essence and share it with someone special. Love transcends impermanence by fostering a deep connection that enriches who we are at our core. Loss is as natural as breathing. But love says this: "Let life unfold, with all its happy moments and tearful goodbyes. Only then can you understand the profound beauty of impermanence." Love allows us to experience the full spectrum of life's emotions, embracing the present while accepting impermanence. It grants depth and meaning to our fleeting existence. Even knowing everything ends, love compels us to build a haven, a space where hearts connect. It's a testament to the enduring power of human connection in a world in flux. So let's love fiercely, vibrantly, because in the face of our impermanence, love erects a bridge to something that transcends the temporary.

On 2 November 1917, five weeks before Allenby walked through the Jaffa Gate, the government in London had issued a document that was to have a fateful and lasting impact on the Holy Land, the Middle East and the world. The foreign secretary, Lord Balfour, wrote to Lord Rothschild, representing the World Zionist Organization, to inform him that: His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country. The sixty-seven typewritten words of the Balfour Declaration combined considerations of imperial planning, wartime propaganda, biblical resonances and a colonial mindset, as well as evident sympathy for the Zionist idea. With them, as the writer Arthur Koestler was to quip memorably – neatly encapsulating the attendant and continuing controversy – ‘one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third’.8 Lloyd George highlighted sympathy for the Jews as his principal motivation. But the decisive calculations were political, primarily the wish to outsmart the French in post-war arrangements in the Levant9 and the impulse to use Palestine’s strategic location – its ‘fatal geography’ – to protect Egypt, the Suez Canal and the route to India.10 Other judgements have placed greater emphasis on the need to mobilize Jewish public opinion behind the then flagging Allied war effort. As Balfour told the war cabinet at its final discussion of the issue on 31 October: ‘If we could make a declaration favourable to such an ideal [Zionism], we should be able to carry on extremely useful propaganda both in Russia and in America.’11 Historians have spent decades debating the connections and contradictions between Balfour’s public pledge to the Zionists, the secret 1916 Sykes–Picot agreement between Britain, France and Russia about post-war spheres of influence in the Middle East, and pledges about Arab independence made by the British in 1915 to encourage Sharif Hussein of Mecca to launch his ‘revolt in the desert’ against the Turks. The truth, buried in imprecise definitions, misunderstandings and duplicity, remains elusive.

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, best known today by his pseudonym, Lenin, was the political leader principally responsible for the establishment of Communism in Russia.

One day a fellow named Mike was telling me about renting the video Forrest Gump. “Boy, it was great!” he exclaimed. “Tom Hanks was brilliant, which is why he won the Oscar for Best Actor. I laughed and cried all the way through it. I know Brenda and you rent good movies for your kids. You should get this one. It was really clean and wholesome.” “Oh, I can’t watch Forrest Gump with my kids. In fact, I can’t even watch that myself, Mike,” I responded. Taken aback, Mike asked, “Why? It was a great movie!” “Well, do you remember that scene at the beginning where Sally Field has sex with the principal to get her son into the ‘right’ school?” “Uh…” “And how about the bare breasts at the New Year’s party? The nude on-stage guitar performance? And in the end, when Forrest finally ‘got the girl’ in the sex scene and she conceived a child out of wedlock? Sure, in the movie, everything worked out nicely for Forrest anyway. But that normally isn’t how life goes in those situations, so I don’t want to teach that to my kids. I don’t want them to hear all that grunting or see the nudity, either.

You think if anyone finds out, they’ll say something to the principal? The school board? This is Redwood, Miss Sato. They don’t give a fuck if I bend my best student over my desk and fuck her senseless.

Officer Hilliard shook his head, a smile playing on his lips. “Nope. Miss Day, here, left a note.” “A what?” Colton’s eyes widened as Officer Hilliard flashed us the note I’d left in the principal’s mailbox last night. “‘Dear Principal Wexler,’” Kyle read aloud. “‘Thank you so much for allowing us to TP your house. I’ve always wanted to be a part of a prank, and I had a wonderful time. If you need help cleaning up, please let me know.’” Colton groaned as Kyle laughed and kept reading. “‘I wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t at least offer. You are the best. Sincerely, Sadie Day.’” When he finished, Kyle turned to me with a grin and said, “Nice penmanship.” I rolled my eyes. Yes, I’d included a smiley-face at the end, but only the one. That was progress, right? “You left a note?” Colton asked in disbelief, turning to me. “Yeah,” I said as he closed his eyes. “What? I wanted Principal Wexler to know how much fun we had. Was that wrong?” Officer Hilliard still had that amused look on his face.

In all, seventy-one insurance companies throughout the world had insured the Morro Castle for $4,200,000. One third of the total was underwritten by British companies, principally by Lloyd’s of London. But under the complicated limited-liability law of 1851, the Ward Line had little responsibility for insuring the passengers. In the event of disaster, the law stated that “only by proving the owners to have possessed knowledge of the unseaworthiness of the vessel or the inadequacy of the crew before the fatal sailing,” could passengers collect any insurance. In practical terms this was almost impossible. The real owners of the Morro Castle had virtually no knowledge of the ship—a state of affairs which, given the terms of the law, was very much in their best interests. The Ward Line was just one subsidiary in the powerful shipping complex of Atlantic Gulf and West Indies—AGWI. The involvement of Franklin D. Mooney, president of AGWI, with the Morro Castle, gives some indication of just how little the owners knew—or cared to know—about this particular piece of property.

What do you do in a pool when you don’t know how to swim? Learn. I guess that was the answer. I had managed to teach my body to stay afloat on water. Somehow, I’d stumbled on some principal of physics. And the best part of the whole thing was that I’d made the discovery all on my own.

Now there is no normal process except death which completely clears the brain from all past impressions; and after death, it is impossible to set it going again. Of all normal processes, sleep comes the nearest to a non-pathological clearing. How often we find that the best way to handle a complicated worry or an intellectual muddle is to sleep over it! However, sleep does not clear away the deeper memories, nor indeed is a sufficiently malignant state of worry compatible with an adequate sleep. We are thus often forced to resort to more violent types of intervention in the memory cycle. The more violent of these involve a surgical intervention into the brain, leaving behind it permanent damage, mutilation, and the abridgment of the powers of the victim, as the mammalian central nervous system seems to possess no powers whatever of regeneration. The principal type of surgical intervention which has been practiced is known as prefrontal lobotomy, and consists in the removal or isolation of a portion of the prefrontal lobe of the cortex. It has recently been having a certain vogue, probably not unconnected with the fact that it makes the custodial care of many patients easier. Let me remark in passing that killing them makes their custodial care still easier. However, prefrontal lobotomy does seem to have a genuine effect on malignant worry, not by bringing the patient nearer to a solution of his problems but by damaging or destroying the capacity for maintained worry, known in the terminology of another profession as the conscience. More generally, it appears to limit all aspects of the circulating memory, the ability to keep in mind a situation not actually presented. The various forms of shock treatment—electric, insulin, metrazol—are less drastic methods of doing a very similar thing. They do not destroy brain tissue or at least are not intended to destroy it, but they do have a decidedly damaging effect on the memory. In so far as this concerns the circulating memory, and in so far as this memory is chiefly damaged for the recent period of mental disorder, and is probably scarcely worth preserving anyhow, shock treatment has something definite to recommend it as against lobotomy; but it is not always free from deleterious effects on the permanent memory and the personality. As it stands at present, it is another violent, imperfectly understood, imperfectly controlled method to interrupt a mental vicious circle. This does not prevent its being in many cases the best thing we can do at present.

Taft drove to the heart of the matter. “The principal purpose of the foreign policy of the United States is to maintain the liberty of our people. Its purpose is not to reform the entire world or spread sweetness and light and economic prosperity to peoples who have lived and worked out their own salvation for centuries according to the best of their ability.

Why did it take so long for adult neurogenesis to be accepted? I’ve interacted with many of the principals and am struck by their differing takes. At one extreme is the view that while skeptics like Rakic were ham-handed, they provided quality control and that, counter to how path-of-the-hero epics go, some early work in the field was not all that solid. At the other extreme is the view that Rakic et al., having failed to find adult neurogenesis, couldn’t accept that it existed. This psychohistorical view, of the old guard clinging to dogma in the face of changing winds, is weakened a bit by Altman’s not having been a young anarchist running amok in the archives; in fact, he is a bit older than Rakic and other principal skeptics. All of this needs to be adjudicated by historians, screenwriters, and soon, I hope, by the folks in Stockholm.

In the case a bricklayer working for a subcontractor on the Perth Stadium construction project suffered serious injuries when he single-handedly began to remove two overhead steel purlins that were in the way when he was building a wall. One of the discussions in the case was the extent to which the principal should have provided training to the subcontractor about workplace health and safety hazards associated with the work. In that context, the court observed: Pursuant to its contract, NeoWest had autonomy in how it was to complete the works and it was the appropriate body to provide the training and induction within its specialised area and to specify the methods to be used in performing the tasks required of its workers. It would not have been reasonably practicable, or indeed wise, for the first defendant to impinge on NeoWest's training and induction of its own employees as to the proper and safe method of completing the works within its scope of works and area of expertise and specialised knowledge, possibly to override or even contradict that training and induction. Each individual trade's expertise and specialist knowledge was the very reason why the first defendant engaged subcontractors to perform the various works in the first place, rather than complete them itself.60 This limited (although still very onerous) obligation is consistent with a social approach to managing wicked problems. As I argue later in the book, you cannot solve wicked problems – we cannot solve safety. All we can do is “tame” the problem of safety – do the best we can.

There were five men who influenced Indira Gandhi’s life and decision-making, according to the historian Ramachandra Guha: her father and India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru; her husband, Feroze Gandhi; and her principal secretary cum political advisor, P. N. Haksar, who guided her between 1967–73, considered her best years in politics. Then there was Jayaprakash Narayan, who opposed her rule, leading her to impose the Emergency. But it was her son, Sanjay, who wielded the maximum power over her. He was her ‘blind spot’, and she had ‘very little control over him’.

In the past, the states best able to manage events beyond their borders have been those best able to avoid the temptation to overreach. Great powers remain great in large measure because they posses wisdom to temper active involvement in foreign interventions - to remain within the limits of a national strategy that balances ambition with military resources. The first principle of the strategic art states simply that the greatest weight of resources be devoted to safeguarding the most vital interests of the state. If a vital interest is threatened, the survival of the state is threatened. Generally, the most vital interest of a liberal democracy include, first and foremost, preservation of the territorial integrity of the state. The example of the attacks on New York and Washington should send a message to those of similar ambitions that the surest way to focus the wrath of the American people against them would be to strike this country within its borders again. The second strategic priority is the protection of the national economic welfare by ensuring free and open access to markets for vital materials and finished goods. Other important but less vital interests should be defended by the threat of force only as military resources permit. Outside the limits of U.S. territory, the strategic problem defining the geographic limits of U.S. vital interests becomes complex. While the United States may have some interests in every corner of the world, there are certain regions where its strategic interests, both economic and cultural, are concentrated and potentially threatened. These vital strategic "centers of gravity" encompass in the first instance those geographic areas essential to maintaining access to open markets and sources of raw material, principally oil. Fortunately, many of these economically vital centers are secure from serious threat. But a few happen to be located astride regions that have witnessed generations of cultural and ethnic strife. Four regions overshadow all others in being both vital to continued domestic prosperity and continually under the threat of state-supported violence. These regions are defined generally by an arc of territories along the periphery of Eurasia: Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, and north East Asia. For the past several centuries, these regions have been the areanas of the world's most serious and intractable conflicts. Points of collision begin with the intersection of Western and Eastern Christianity and continue southward to mark Islam's incursion into southeastern Europe in the Balkans. The cultural divide countries without interruption across the Levant in an unbroken line of unrest and warring states from the crescent of the Middle East to the subcontinent of South Asia. The fault-line concludes with the divide between China and all the traditional cultural competitors along its land and sea borders. Other countries outside the periphery of Eurasia might, in extreme cases, demand the presence of U.S. forces for peacekeeping or humanitarian operations. But it is unlikely that in the years to come the United States will risk a major conflict that will involve the calculated commitment of forces in a shooting war in regions outside this "periphery of Eurasia," which circumscribes and defines America's global security.

until you see other governments and systems, you don’t realize that our system based on biblical principals is the best “man can devise.

So it's a strife here, in a way, between position—between the CEO and the top salesman; between the principal and the best teacher; between Miller Huggins, the manager, and Babe Ruth, the best baseball player who ever lived; between the person who can really do it, and the person who is in charge. Those are incommensurable excellences, and then and now they often come into conflict. So here—that is the rage within the rage, the conflict within the conflict, that Homer is interested in chronicling.

response to intervention (RTI) is our best hope to provide every child with the additional time and support needed to learn at high levels. RTI’s underlying premise is that schools should not delay providing help for struggling students until they fall far enough behind to qualify for special education, but instead should provide timely, targeted, systematic interventions to all students who demonstrate the need. To achieve this goal, we remain equally convinced that the only way for an organization to successfully implement RTI practices is within the professional learning community (PLC) model.

Tier 1 and Tier 2 are not the responsibility of either teacher teams or school-wide teams—it takes classroom teachers and schoolwide resources. • When everyone is responsible for interventions, nobody is. For this reason, final responsibility to lead certain interventions must be clearly defined. • When determining who should be responsible for a particular intervention, the school should ask, Who is best trained in this area of need? Look beyond job titles. What does the child need, and who has the skills to address those needs? Do the individuals asked to lead a particular intervention have the time and resources necessary to succeed? Is the intervention fair and reasonable to all involved?

How to scale and enter the risen path was largely unknown. It all might begin in darkness, but it cast a shadow that, when viewed from the ground, was too bleak. Demolition was once a question not of “whether, but when,” until one photographer spent a year on the trail documenting what was there. 4 The scenes were “hallucinatory”—wildflowers, Queen Anne’s lace, irises, and grasses wafted next to hardwood ailanthus trees that bolted up from the soil on railroad tracks, on which rust had accumulated over the decades. 5 Steel played willing host to an exuberant, spontaneous garden that showed fealty to its unusual roots. Tulips shared the soilbed with a single pine tree outfitted with lights for the winter holidays, planted outside of a building window that opened onto the iron-bottomed greenway with views of the Hudson River and the Statue of Liberty to the left and traffic, buildings, and Tenth Avenue to the right. 6 Wading through waist-high Queen Anne’s lace was like seeing “another world right in the middle of Manhattan.” 7 The scene was a kind of wildering, the German idea of ortsbewüstung, an ongoing sense of nature reclaiming its ground. 8 “You think of hidden things as small. That is how they stay hidden. But this hidden thing was huge. A huge space in New York City that had somehow escaped everybody’s notice,” said Joshua David, who cofounded a nonprofit organization with Robert Hammonds to save the railroad. 9 They called it the High Line. “It was beautiful refuse, which is kind of a scary thing because you find yourself looking forward and looking backwards at the same time,” architect Liz Diller told me in our conversation about the conversion of the tracks into a public space, done in a partnership with her architectural firm, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and James Corner, Principal of Field Operations, and Dutch planting designer Piet Oudolf. Other architectural plans proposed turning the High Line into a “Street in the Air” with biking, art galleries, and restaurants, but their team “saw that the ruinous state was really alive.” Joel Sternfeld, the “poet-keeper” of the walkway, put the High Line’s resonance best: “It’s more of a path than a park. And more of a Path than a path.” 10

Christians often fail to get in touch with the shocking message that can lie at the heart of evangelism: “I am here to change you, and I’m going to change you so that you become like me.” There are some obvious dangers here once we think about all this. If we approach people in this way, we are not treating them as people. We are not respecting them. We are treating them as part of our own program, like an objective and a statistic, and this is self-centered as well as disrespectful. An obnoxious smell of superiority is apparent. Further, we are judging people as fundamentally inadequate. *We* are okay, of course. Missionary work conducted in this spirit is a well-intentioned but self-centered power-play… We can avoid this instrumentalizing of potential converts - a making of them into something like an instrument or tool that then does something for us - only by approaching them for their own sakes and hence not as potential converts at all. We must value our initial relationships with people for what they are and not in terms of what we want out of them. This means that we must want to become their friends. Moreover, it must be a friendship with no strings attached. We must seek out relationships because we are interested in and value other people for who they are, right where they are. Conversions would be nice, but they are not our main agenda. We hope and pray for the best for our new friends, but that is not our principal motivation for relating to them. In this way and only in this way do we avoid colonizing people as we convert them.

While those of us in schools may wish to blame others for imposing constraints, many of our constraints are self imposed. Are we able to escape from these and respond to what we believe is best for our students? One